This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The element of the story you gloss over is the extensive but not-much-talked about cooperation between the Nazis and Zionists, which is a subject which was discussed in Ron Unz's new article on Israel and the Holocaust earlier this month. In addition to the extensive efforts of the Germans to transfer Jews to Palestine, there existed plans for a post-war Jewish state in multiple forms, including the Madagascar Plan (a plan which Joseph Goebbels still mentioned in his diaries when the Holocaust had supposedly already been decided and implemented). After the Madagascar Plan, there were various plans for resettlement in the Pale of Settlement, newly conquered Russian territory, the Lublin district of occupied Poland, etc.
This is why the gas chamber and alleged extermination program are such important claims in the story. Without those elements, this is a story of a country that brutally collapsed right in the middle of a mass resettlement. Like if Israel decided to concentrate and then resettle all Palestinians out of Israel into Egyptian territory, but then Israel was destroyed and conquered by Iran right as that was happening. And then the Iranians made a bunch of ridiculous claims about death factories using absurd methods of mass murder- i.e. the Israelis turned the Palestinians into bars of soap!
So, the Nazi plans all entailed the creation of a Jewish state after expulsion from the European sphere. Historians though claim that (for some reason) this long-standing policy was replaced with an extermination order (they can't say who, when, where or why such a radical change in policy was decided, and such an order has never been found) using primarily homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.
If you accept the Revisionist interpretation, that the plan was for resettlement East ahead of the post-war creation of a Jewish state, then these plans by the AfD are absolutely comparable to what the Nazis did. And in particular, if it turns out the Wannsee conference really was all about resettlement as a plain reading of the minutes show, and not codewords for an extermination policy, then the Wannsee Conference is comparable to secret conferences planning for mass resettlement of migrants to their homelands or to a separate colony of some sort.
The gas chamber legend and alleged extermination order are the only things that set them apart, which is why those claims are so important to the broader history.
Again, we have the extermination program in writing. You seem to have conveniently forgotten this, again, since our last 40-comments back-and-forth in which you tried to dodge the issue.
Of course they can. You know this, because we discussed this ad nauseam.
It won't
It wasn't
It clearly doesn't. The opposite is true. We've been over this. Stop lying.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link