site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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.

13
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

If someone like 2rafa is making a post that is inviting a discussion of this topic, i.e. trying to make an argument for reasons these situations are not comparable, I'm going to engage in the discussion with my viewpoint. You need to decide if you are going to ban me for doing this or not, I agree it's an annoying situation. It's up to you, I'm not going to avoid engaging in these discussions just because I'm afraid of these kinds of mods interventions. That defeats the point of this community for me...

What I will not do is not spam top-level threads to force topics like this every week, which I've never done. But if someone brings up a topic like this in a relevant CW discussion (especially with 2rafa trying to let Israel off the hook for policies that are indeed very similar to the Nazis), I'm going to participate, and if you're going to ban me for it then the ball's in your court I guess...

You are answering only those parts of @raggedy_anthem's post which you want to address, and ignoring the actual salient points. Which is, ironically, the same thing you do every time someone engages with you on your Holocaust revisionism: answer the points you have ready pat answers for, and ignore the points that you can't actually refute.

You are not being threatened with moderation because this is your pet topic, or because we hate Holocaust deniers, or because we're coopted by Jews, or because you answered someone else who (indirectly) brought it up. That is not the problem, since you have indeed cut back on the manifesto-posting after the last time we told you to give it a rest.

The problem is that, precisely as @raggedy_anthem described, you are not engaging in good faith. What that means is, for example, multiple people have walked through your claims that there is "no written evidence of an intent to exterminate Jews" or "the numbers don't add up," etc. etc. And while I'm sure you will disagree about whether your claims were effectively refuted, you cannot claim that people haven't given you very solid (and cited) responses, which at least deserve to be acknowledged and answered in turn.

Instead, what you do is disappear after someone does this. And then return, a week or two weeks later, making exactly the same claims as if no one ever responded to them before.

Understandably, the last person to go point by point with you probably doesn't feel like doing it again, only to be ghosted and ignored again and then see you weeble-wobble your way back into the same talking points after short-term memory of the discussion has faded. Other people see you do this, and also feel like it's not worth the trouble: you will just stick to your talking points, disappear when effectively challenged, and then come back with the same talking points. Repeating the cycle over and over again until you are effectively in command of the field because only the occasional newcomer encountering you for the first time wants to bother. Occasionally someone will be frustrated at this tactic and call you a liar and then we have to mod them because calling you a liar (even when you are being transparently dishonest) is not allowed.

This is not how debate is supposed to work here. We don't have rules requiring you to keep responding when someone challenges you. You don't have to answer anyone. We don't have rules requiring you to admit when you've been refuted. We don't have rules forbidding you from making the same argument you've made in the past, or requiring you to acknowledge that someone else made a counterargument you never answered. In other words, what you're doing, while obviously a very bad faith debating tactic, is as one mod put it, "finding a bespoke way of arguing like an asshole in a way that's hard to mod without singling him out."

What we would like you to do is actually engage in good faith. I don't think you can or will do that, so that puts us in the position where we can either let you keep exploiting our charity, or decide we've had enough. If your response continues to be "Well, I'm going to post what I post and you can mod me or not," fair enough, so be it.

What that means is, for example, multiple people have walked through your claims that there is "no written evidence of an intent to exterminate Jews"

Why avoid actually quoting the parts of my comments where you think I'm being dishonest?

I said, exactly:

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)

And nobody in the replies has challenged this claim at all or provided an explanation for this: the who, when, where, and why the long-standing policy of resettlement became "extermination." Even Historians don't have a consensus on this point either, and it's dishonest to pretend otherwise.

Can you Amadan please show me where this question has been answered for me, and I haven't responded to those answers, such that I have no right to again make this point where it is relevant?

This is a highly relevant point because if Revisionists are correct, that the Resettlement policy never actually changed to "extermination", and that accusation is a wartime propaganda fiction, then 2rafa's conclusions are wrong.

I promise I will engage in good faith, if you can just give me examples of something I have said here which is dishonest.

On the other hand, I think it's dishonest and bad-faith for Moderators to constantly put on their red hats when I am engaging in discussion. If you are going to accuse me of bad faith, then point to where in this thread specifically you think I'm engaging in bad faith or not responding to people who have replied to me. That would be more helpful than using your moderator status to accuse me of bad faith with vague generalities, and threatening to ban me for engaging in the discussion.

Why avoid actually quoting the parts of my comments where you think I'm being dishonest?

Because I'm not interested in getting into it with you myself. This entire response is you basically demanding that I engage with you on your hobby horse. No.

On the other hand, I think it's dishonest and bad-faith for Moderators to constantly put on their red hats when I am engaging in discussion.

You can think what you like. We're telling you that we see what you're doing, and no, we aren't going to get into a protracted legalistic debate about what "is" is.

If you accuse me of being bad-faith, and I ask you to point out where exactly in this conversation I have been bad-faith, and you reply like this then I think it's fair for me to complain about this moderator intervention here...

How about you just let this conversation happen without jumping in to accuse me of being bad faith, and then refusing to identify where in this conversation I have done what you are accusing me of?

If you accuse me of being bad-faith, and I ask you to point out where exactly in this conversation I have been bad-faith, and you reply like this then I think it's fair for me to complain about this moderator intervention here...

You can complain. Clearly you are complaining.

How about you just let this conversation happen

If by that you mean "How about you just let me continue to do the same thing," no.

There are two possibilities here:

  1. You genuinely believe you aren't doing what we described.
  2. You know you're doing what we described, but you think you can litigate it in such a way that we are forced to "acquit" you.

I personally believe it's 2, but if it's 1, you're just going to have to spend some time figuring out what you're doing wrong, because I am not willing to extend the necessary charity it would require for me to walk you through it (again).

If it's 2, well, short of persuading @ZorbaTHut to overrule us, no, there is no other avenue of appeals.

More comments