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Notes -
The Destruction of the Rafah Ghetto
There has been intense debate between US and Israel on an impending ground operation into Rafah. It appears the operation is starting to take form, and it's going to look a lot like the evacuations from the Warsaw Ghetto on a much larger scale.
This is not going to look like the assault on the Northern Gaza, since the Israelis have already concentrated the Gazans within Rafah. One of the primary points of disagreement between US and Israel seems to be on the timeline of the evacuations, with the US insisting that it's going to take months to evacuate and sift through the civilian population while Israel has proposed a much more aggressive timeline. Here's how it is going to unfold:
concentration camps"humanitarian islands", they are calling them, with military-aged males likely being segregated from the rest of the population, or at least highly likely to be detained based on other criteria.Historical comparisons are always messy, and you aren't going to see journalists in good-standing noting this, but I can't think of another historical operation that is closer to the impending evacuation of Rafah than the evacuation of the Warsaw Ghetto. The second battle of Fallujah and the evacuation of Phnom Penh provide other examples of civilians evacuating cities by force or military action, but neither of those approximates the circumstances or tactics which will be used in Rafah.
The Brutal Reality of Resettlement and Partisan Wars
There seems to be two camps: on the one hand, Israel is waging a Genocide, a secret desire to kill all the Palestinians. On the other hand, Israel is engaging in a fight for its very existence and doing everything it reasonably can to limit civilian casualties. But the truth lies in the middle, and can be summarized with two points:
The actions of Israel, including the impending evacuation of the Rafah ghetto, can be understood by accepting the above two points. It so happens that the above two points are identical to the position of Holocaust Revisionists, or Holocaust Deniers, regarding the Nazi policies with respect to the Jews. Those policies also resulted in the concentration and mass resettlement of the Jews, culminating most famously in the evacuations of the Warsaw Ghetto, those infamous deportation trains, which took place over many months.
In contrast with the Official Narrative- that the secret policy of the Germans was to kill all the Jews, Revisionists maintain the policy was to resettle the Jews to a territory in Russia, with a Jewish state likely being created after the war in Madagascar or Palestine. The Revisionist position is supported by documents, which all refer to "resettlement" as the policy objective of the deportations. But historians maintain that, in all these documents throughout the sprawling German bureaucracy, everyone was "in" on the conspiracy to use "resettlement" as a codeword for "extermination". Even in internal, top-secret communication which was intercepted or captured after the war. That's why, they say, there are no documents outlining the German policy with respect to the Jews as claimed by historians, but there are very many documents outlining the Resettlement policies as claimed by Revisionists.
Israel's insistence it cannot win the war without evacuating Rafah speaks to a similar motive claimed by Revisionists for the evacuations of the Jewish ghettos. We lionize partisan efforts against the Nazis, including the Underground Resistance operating out of Warsaw, but Israel's calculus provides some evidence for the Revisionist claim that, also, the evacuation of the Jewish ghettos was not motivated by a secret policy to exterminate them all within shower rooms in secret death factories.
A Year in Rafah
Despite the similarities described above, there is obviously one major claim in Mainstream Historiography regarding the evacuation of the Jewish ghettos that is an outlier in all respects, from anything else that has happened in human history. Whereas documents all describe these evacuations being motivated by economic and security concerns, and deportees were told that they were being evacuated to Humanitarian Islands where they would have work, this is what actually happened according to orthodox historians:
The Nazis set a quota for the evacuations of the Warsaw ghetto. Deportees were given food and told they would be resettled to camps where they would have work. The deportation trains brought the deportees to a small, secret camp called Treblinka that was set up as a fake train station, complete with a fake train platform and clock, fake ticket booth and posted train schedules. They were told that they were going to take a shower before being transited onwards. They were given soap and a towel and tricked into entering what they thought was a shower room. Then, the doors were locked and they were poisoned by carbon monoxide exhausted by a captured Soviet tank engine.
More than 5,000 people were said to be killed daily in this secret camp staffed by no more than several dozen German personnel, a larger Ukrainian auxiliary, and Jewish workforce. After being killed, all of the victims were buried onsite in huge mass graves. According to the Standard Work on the Treblinka extermination camp by former director of Yad Vashem, Yitzhak Arad, Himmler visited Treblinka in February or March 1943 and:
So the 700,000 victims of the evacuation of the Warsaw Ghetto and other deportees were unburied and then cremated over the course of 4 months along with newly-arrived victims. In total, Arad estimated 850,000 victims at Treblinka, meaning that about 6,000 - 7,000 corpses were cremated every single day in this camp during cremation operations. Treblinka was not constructed with any cremation facilities, and so these corpses were cremated on huge outdoor pyres using locally-gathered brushwood although there are no documents or contemporary reports at all describing this process. The cremations were said to take place immediately adjacent to a major civilian rail-line, and adjacent to several Polish villages, and in spite of this there are no wartime contemporaneous accounts of this enormous cremation operation.
Yitzhak Arad heavily relies on an alleged eyewitness called Yankel Wiernik, whose account is by far the most important in the historiography of the camp. Given the complete absence of documentary or physical evidence for any of this- a Soviet excavation of Treblinka in 1945 found no mass graves on the site, and no investigation since then has ever found a single mass grave at Treblinka, Wiernik's eyewitness account is the keystone to the entire Treblinka historical narrative:
You can read the witness account for yourself if you are inclined. In spite of the enormous historiographical importance of Wiernik's work, you cannot purchase it on Amazon in either print or digital form. I only learned about this work from Revisionists, it seems to be something of an embarrassment despite its extremely important position in the historiography of the camp. Excerpts from Wiernik were submitted as evidence by a Soviet Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trial, along with a ~15 minute examination of another Jewish witness, who claimed to have been deported to the camp from Warsaw. That's all the evidence that was presented at Nuremberg, for the murder of 900,000 people- a Soviet excavation of the site uncovered no mass graves and no physical evidence was submitted.
I interpret it as a tacit admission to the weakness of the source, that this work is not required reading in every school across America in contrast with, say, Elie Wiesel's Night or Anne Frank's Diary, both of which have important literary significance to the Holocaust narrative but no historiographical significance. Wiesel, for example, makes no mention of gas chambers in his account, instead opting for extermination by burning people alive, which is not claimed by mainstream historians today. Anne Frank's tragic story likewise provides no historiographical relevance to the "extermination camp" narrative and actually contradicts it. She was deported to an alleged extermination camp, Auschwitz, and then transferred to another camp where she died in a hospital of Typhus.
Needless to say, Revisionists regard A Year in Treblinka as literary fiction. This is supposedly a direct eyewitness to the murder of 850,000 people who organized a prisoner revolt in Treblinka (which also has no documentation whatsoever) and heroically killed a Ukrainian guard with an axe.
Wow! How have you never heard of this guy? If his account is true, this work must be so remarkable as to have nearly biblical significance. But you cannot purchase it on Amazon, and Holocaust Deniers are the only ones who actually talk about this guy, rather than historians who quietly use his account as the most important primary source in the historiography of the camp, but who otherwise do not attempt to attach any cultural significance to the man himself who witnessed these things. It is very suspicious, and it's likely because if you read his account yourself you would not find it believable.
Parallel Interpretations
In case the point of my post isn't clear:
Israel's motive and tactics for dealing with the Gazans generally, but especially the impending Rafah Aktion, mirror the Revisionist interpretation of the resettlement of Jews in Eastern Europe. The part of that history which has no parallel- the allegation that the Germans tricked millions of people into entering a shower room, gassed them with exhaust from a captured Soviet tank engine, buried them, then unburied them, cremated them on open-air pyres and reburied the remains, is the part which has no parallel and is also the part of the story which is contested by so-called Holocaust deniers.
In the several years in which I have studied Revisionism, I have only ever noticed Revisionists really talk about Revisionism. But this seems to be changing, on Twitter from a pretty broad array of Twitter accounts I am noticing people talk about Holocaust Revisionism who are not known for that. It might be going viral and become the next forbidden knowledge now that HBD is being digested by the Twitter intelligentsia. The fact that Israeli conflict with the Palestinians is presenting so many direct parallels: the brutal reality of partisan warfare, the mass resettlement of undesirable populations, the ease with which false propaganda becomes "news", are all contributing to what appears to be a growing skepticism among right-wing Twitter that I have never seen before outside of Revisionist circles.
The growth of Holocaust Denial will likely be another consequence of this war.
Edit: Forgot to mention, One Third of the Holocaust is the most well-known Revisionist video discussing these alleged secret extermination camps, although there are many technical studies done for each of the individual camps by Revisionist scholars.
calling that evacuation is a typical SS thing
and there is quite substantial difference, unless I missed something, Israel is not operating death camps.
(I am a bit curious are you also denying other genocides, genocides in general or are you specifically denying this specific one)
To wit, there are surviving Nazi documents where "shooting" or "execution" is literally crossed out in red pen and replaced with "resettlement" or "evacuation." Other documents say comical things like "the local Jews were resettled to a large pit outside of town."
I’ve never heard of that before, and Google isn’t helping me out. Do you happen to have a source handy? I’d be interested in learning more.
On the "resettlement pit"
Here on some others. Some of the links are dead, but I found the scans of the relevant documents:
1 2 3 4
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For some reason I was thinking about the OJ Simpson trial today, and it reminded me of your comment.
The most damning evidence in the OJ trial (barring DNA which was little understood by juries at the time) wasn’t the glove, or the record of Simpson’s movements, or the police interview. It was the fact that his defense could not provide any alternate account of what happened to Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman whatsoever. Two young white (well…) people killed in brutal fashion in a rich part of LA, somewhere that would have had witnesses to on-street commotion, and zero evidence (for any alternate explanation). They hinted or gestured at some kind of gang, or a drug deal, or something related to the restaurant where Goldman worked, but they had nothing, not one shred of evidence for even the most faintly plausible alternate theory of why these two people were murdered by someone other than OJ. This from an extraordinarily skilled legal team with unlimited budget to hire private investigators, research leads and come up with theories.
Holocaust revisionism functions in much the same way. Details about the process of execution, the precise methods, quibbles with testimony, calling the veracity of various accounts in question, all mirror OJ’s defense strategy. The glove don’t fit, the police officer who found the evidence was a virulent racist who had motivation to lie to convict a successful black man with a pretty blonde wife, and the whole trial was surely just another libel against a rich black guy and, especially after Rodney King, who would doubt the hostility of the cops toward black men etc…
But there was and is no alternate theory. The best revisionists can do is, as SecureSignals does, to gesture at possibilities. “Oh, maybe they all went to Russia, changed their names and lived happily ever after”, or “maybe the Austro-Hungarians randomly overcounted the Jewish population by 400% and there were actually far fewer Jews than anyone thought in Eastern Europe”. None of these are evidenced, they’re not supposed to be. They’re mere gestures, hints, seeds of doubt, held together by a narrative in which devious Jews are permanently hostile to white/aryan interests and therefore are probably lying anyway. There is, as @To_Mandalay has said, no real alternate hypothesis; some revisionists apparently argue that Himmler was supposed to kill all the Jews but then didn’t because he was actually a traitor to the cause, which conflicts with other revisionist theories, which conflict with others.
Revisionists avoid believing in strict alternate hypotheses (for example presenting multiple options in the same book or article and feigning ambivalence about which could be true) since doing so would pin them down and make very obvious the extreme dearth of evidence they’re built upon. But it is reasonable for historians to request that they provide and defend comprehensive and evidenced alternate theories for the disappearance of European Jewry.
Why was this a big problem? Because the bodies were discovered at the crime scene. Investigators scientifically studied the scene of the crime, documented evidence found at the scene, performed autopsies of the victims in order to scientifically prove the occurrence of a murder at a precise time and location, along with a cause of death.
The physical evidence found at the scene, and immediately investigated by authorities using standard-operating forensic practices, narrowed down the possibility space of "what happened to Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman" by 99.99% compared to the counterfactual of no bodies being found, no forensic investigation of the scene of the crime, no murder weapon, no witness reports during the occurrence of any crime.
In contrast, at Treblinka, we have no bodies, we have no murder weapon, we have no contemporary witnesses, we have no documentary evidence. There has not been a single excavation or forensic study of any mass grave at Treblinka- ever. It has not - even remotely - been proven that approximately 900,000 people were murdered at that site. In fact, there is no evidence at all that even 2% of that number of people were ever at that site at any point in time.
If there were no bodies, no murder weapon, no witnesses, no forensic investigation of any crime scene, then there would never have been a trial in the first place.
But it gets even more bizarre.
Let's say that in the Simpson case there were no bodies ever found or autopsied, or forensic evidence ever presented. Then let's say that some witnesses come forward and say, years or even decades after the fact, that they witnessed the murder and know the precise location where the victims were buried. Can you even fathom that there would be no attempt to excavate the remains of the victims in order to procure the evidence that was so crucial to the case in the first place - the evidence you just flatly take for granted in your comparison? It's beyond the pale to imagine that prosecutors would say "we aren't going to excavate the remains or provide autopsies, because that would be disrespectful to the victims."
Your comparison fails, because in contrast with the Simpson case with Treblinka we have:
In contrast with the case of Treblinka, in which the Mainstream claims that they know exactly where the mass graves of 900,000 are located but have never excavated or proven the existence of a single mass grave of any size at any point in time, there is another case of a mass execution in which sound forensic practices were utilized: the Katyn Forest massacre.
When the Germans discovered the mass graves of the Katyn Forest massacre they:
In spite of the lengths the Germans went to in order to scientifically investigate the scene of the crime, they were still accused of the Katyn Forest massacre by the Soviet Prosecution at Nuremberg, which produced witnesses to attest to the fact the Germans committed the crime. The authors of the Soviet investigation of the Katyn massacre, which falsely blamed the Germans for a crime that they had actually committed, submitted their report as evidence in the Nuremberg trial (USSR-54), and they were the same as the authors of the Soviet report on the investigation of Auschwitz (USSR-8), with the addition of Trofim Lysenko as a signatory to the Auschwitz report.
Soviet investigators denied access to Western observers during their own investigations of these alleged "extermination camps." As mentioned before, initially there were claims of "death factories" with gas chambers in both the camps liberated by the Western Allies and camps liberated by the Soviet Union. But Western observers investigated those claims and proved they were false. The Soviets denied any access to Western observers during their own investigations, and those are the only camps where those claims exist today.
I sincerely hope, at this point, you are genuinely wondering why there has never been a single excavation to even prove the mere existence of a single mass grave at Treblinka. The answer to that question is that Jewish authorities forbid any excavation of any mass graves. They use the exact same excuse as cited by the perpetrators of the Kamloops Mass Grave Hoax. Genocide deniers ask: Where are the bodies of the residential schoolchildren?:
This is the -exact- same reasoning used by Jewish authorities to forbid any scientific investigation of the alleged mass graves of Treblinka. If they excavated the site it would immediately disprove the hoax - in both cases, so they cite cultural sensitivity and denounce anyone who expects a bare minimum-standard of scientific investigation as a "genocide denier."
It's unfortunate I was banned and couldn't respond to you in a timely manner. But your example falls completely on its face for the simple fact that the Simpson case had a crime scene and bodies which were forensically investigated, and there has never been any attempt to forensically investigate any mass graves at Treblinka! There isn't even proof that the alleged victims were even at that location at any point in time. There are no bodies. There is no murder weapon. There are no contemporary witness reports. Jewish authorities forbid scientific investigation of the site using the exact same logic as the perpetrators of the Kamloops hoax, a legal maneuver which would be unconscionable if the reported location of Simpson and Goldman was concluded by prosecutors, but the prosecutors blocked any attempt to scientifically prove that the victims are buried where they are claiming.
You have no grounds to compare the two cases here, only to prove the importance of the body of physical evidence in the Simpson that does not even remotely exist in the Treblinka case.
Wow. There are no bodies?
Cremation couldn’t have been involved, perhaps?
How do you feel about the archeological efforts that have been done?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treblinka_extermination_camp
Like, it’s remarkable you bring up the apparently fake Canadian graves, when the same technique was used at Treblinka and they found stuff.
Is what they found made up? The reinterred remains faked? The confessions of Nazis like Stangl just irrelevant?
You’re not dealing with evidence cited on Wikipedia for Christssake. Your writing here seems to implicate you’re not even aware it exists as a claim—even if you think you can show it’s BS.
Try to at least be aware of evidence you claim doesn’t exist:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna66241
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unearthing-the-atrocities-of-nazi-death-camps/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna66241
It's a common misconception that performing a cremation burns the entire corpse to ash. Even a modern crematory furnace leaves behind thousands of identifiable bone fragments. For example, teeth do not cremate to ash, they calcinate and remain perfectly identifiable after a cremation. As Revisionists have pointed out:
And there would have been orders of magnitude more identifiable bone fragments for each victim than teeth for that matter. If what is claimed actually happened, even if all the victims were cremated, there would be metric tons of physical evidence which could be easily found within a single afternoon of digging.
Even in a murder case, when there is a suspected cremation of the victim involved, it's equally important for investigators to excavate the remains of a murder victim. In no case would investigators say "oh well witnesses say the victim was cremated and buried there, so I guess there's no point in doing a dig to prove that's actually what happened."
No mass graves have ever been excavated at Treblinka. You say "they found stuff", whatever that means, but no mass grave has ever been excavated from the site.
I am well aware of the studies by Caroline Sturdy-Colls, I've read through her papers. You should be aware of the evidence you are citing:
"The techniques respected the religious law" is referring to the "technique" of purely using GPR to identify a mass grave with no subsequent excavation to actually prove what the ground disturbance was. She did not find any mass graves, she did exactly what they did at the Kamloops site.
You can even see the clip on the TV special covering that investigation, where the Jewish Chief Rabbi of Poland (with a New York accent) forbids her from excavating any mass graves.
The methods used by Caroline Colls to identify the "possible mass graves" were the exact same as the Kamloops hoax: GPR results were used to call ground disturbances "mass graves" and then they were forbidden from excavating the ground disturbances based on claims of cultural sensitivity.
She did, though, excavate human remains about 1km from the site of the alleged Treblinka mass graves. She went to a marked Christian graveyard, found a few bones, and then cried on camera. No problem disturbing those graves!
The most dramatic piece of evidence uncovered at the Treblinka extermination camp was not any mass grave, it was a clay tile which Caroline Colls misidentifies as showing a Jewish Star of David whereas in reality it was the brand mark of a porcelain factory in Poland.
Imagine you bring in the TV cameras with an archaeological team to investigate a crime scene where 900,000 were murdered. You don't find any mass graves, but you find a terracotta tile and immediately jump to the conclusion that the tile featured a Star of David to lure Jews inside the gas chamber, whereas in reality it was a manufacturer's branding. But nobody watching the TV show is going to learn the truth about that tile, or wonder why they are making much ado about a terracotta tile instead of investigating the enormous amounts of physical evidence that would be right beneath them, if what is claimed actually happened.
The reality is Caroline Colls did the exact same thing as the Kamloops archaeologists: use GPR to claim to have found mass graves, but don't excavate any of the disturbances you are claiming contain mass graves. It should also be pointed out the GPR results themselves run completely contrary to witness testimony regarding the size, shape, and locations of the mass graves. The GPR results do not prove any mass graves at Treblinka, but they disprove witness testimony about them. If they actually did a scientific investigation of the site and excavated them, it would immediately disprove the story.
Like I said, there has never been a single excavation of a mass grave on this site because Jewish authorities forbid it using the exact same claims as the perpetrators of the Kamloops mass grave hoax.
Edit: Here's an update on the Kamloops situation, if anybody is wondering, from a couple of weeks ago:
It's literally the exact same script as the Treblinka case. Rely on "oral truth-telling" and refuse to excavate, claiming cultural sensitivity, because you know it would disprove the stories which have gained enormous cultural prominence based on extremely thin physical evidence.
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You assume a certain amount of jews and then assert they have to be accounted for.
You have no grounds to assert anything if the amount of estimated jews is lower than you need it to be. So we are basing our entire belief for the holocaust on the assumption that population estimates. We then grandstand on this premise whenever any specific issue is taken with the holocaust narrative.
The problem here is obvious. You can dismiss every single item of critique without engaging with it. Any attempt to bring a hammer and chisel on the ugly rock of lies that is modern belief in the holocaust gets thwarted away.
What's worse, we're pretending that we hold to a different position than the alleged revisionists. As no claims to a specific amount of jews are made. Instead we afford ourselves the luxury of believing that the number of 'missing' jews just so happens to coincide with the reigning holocaust narrative. If the narrative says numbers go down, our belief in a fixed amount of jews in need of accounting for also goes down. It's a completely onesided standard that leaves one in no place to cast any aspersions on the alleged 'seeds of doubt' being sown by 'revisionists'. Since our belief in the holocaust is completely circular. That is, we start of by believing the holocaust narrative, and then use that belief as proof that it happened.
Besides that, uncertainty is a very common thing in history, especially with regards to numbers and populations, and especially around WW2.
The early 20th century was well after the advent of modernity and modern statistics. There is no reason why estimates of the Jewish population of countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia would be off by a factor of three, five or more, which the most common revisionist theories require. It is the duty of revisionists to account for an alternate theory, either by claiming that the dead Jews never existed or, if they claim that they did exist but were not killed, by showing where they went and what happened to them. If they cannot then, on the basis of means, motive and opportunity and in the absence of an alternate explanation the default hypothesis should be that the Germans were responsible for their death.
I imagine this is an extremely fringe view even among Holocaust revisionists, but I know a few people who deny that the Germans ever intended to exterminate the Jews, because the Germans are just too civilized to commit such barbarism. When pressed about the large number of Jews who went missing during the war, they blame the Russians. Everyone knows they’re bloodthirsty and evil, and we know they committed genocides against other groups. Clearly they must be to blame.
I don’t really find it all that convincing, but it is a view I’ve encountered several times before.
But as Mandalay said, and as revisionists often gleefully claim, there were plenty of Jews in the Soviet military and broader leadership. Would they really have stood by and allowed the large scale extermination of millions of Jews on the basis of race without ever discussing it? That seems unlikely, especially if claims about Jewish solidarity and ethnic identity are true. Before Germany and the USSR turned on each other, Soviet Jews pleaded openly with Stalin to lobby Hitler for better treatment of Jews in the German half of Poland, for example.
Oh, I agree. Like I said, I don’t find it convincing, but it is a few I’ve encountered several times in the wild, always from Americans of German descent. I imagine there is a bit of motivated thinking as a result of their ancestors’ ethnic background.
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Alternative theory to what? The idea that there exists some supernatural synchronicity between a population estimate and the amount of jews killed in the holocaust? That's not a theory, that's just you employing circular reasoning to ignore revisionist arguments.
4 million people did not die at Auschwitz. No one needed to prove where they all went to correct that assessment. The fine folks at the holocaust museums did not need to consult a population estimate from the 1920's before they could say that, no, 1.9 million people did not die in Majdanek, contrary to what Soviet prosecutors maintained during the Nuremburg trials. It was more like 68k. No one knows where those guys went...
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Even this analogy is somewhat inapt; it would require for OJ Simpson to have been unrepentantly open about killing them, with the defence team meanwhile trying and failing to construct alternative scenarios regardless.
Like I've said many times everytime SS starts beating this drum, Holocaust deniers never seem to come up with a convincing way to get around the fact that the Nazis were quite happy to admit they had killed millions of Jews. At best they would feign that they had somehow been coerced, or threatened, or were just following orders.
There’s also this weird thing where so many holocaust deniers, particularly in the Middle East, essentially seem to be believe: “obviously the Nazis didn’t kill millions of Jews; wouldn’t it be cool if they had though?”
The vibe around here is more like: “obviously the Nazis didn’t kill millions of Jews; you can understand why someone might want to though.”
There are some issues where over time I’ve had to admit the hard right was more correct than I wanted them to be. On the “Jewish Question” though, well, there are just so many idiots and the tension with prominent right-wing Jewish intellectuals is funny/sad to watch. Antisemitism is Lindy but goddamn is it stupid and it’s incredible how much horseshoe theory applies with it.
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Did you kill him telepathically?
Must have since the news definitely came out after I posted this lol
He can rest in peace knowing his wife's killer is finally dead.
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The alternative theories are as follows:
Jews died of typhus and starvation en masse near the end of the war, in the same way that 200-400k Germans died of starvation in the final months of the war and the months that followed. We should expect very high starvation numbers in isolated concentration camps given that the Germans themselves were starving all over Germany, and they would feed themselves before feeding other nationalities. There’s even the question of, “these people are obviously going to starve to death, should we let them cannibalize themselves to the last man or take them out of their misery?” A lot of the infrastructure to supply concentration camps was bombed. The mainstream historical assertions about Jewish fatalities shows shockingly low typhus death rates which make no sense in light of the typhus death rates we see from the Civil War, WW1, Russians in WWII, and shipping voyage logs. Sometimes this question is answered by the fact that Germans really really cared about cleanliness in their camps, hence the delousing chambers, but this makes little sense in light of genocidal intent and the survivor testimony that confirms frequent typhus bouts.
Jewish population figures were actually accurate prior to WWII (holocaust historians claim that every figure of the Jewish population from before WWII undercounted areas of Russia by millions).
Many Jews after the war assimilated with a non-Jewish identity.
I don’t think holocaust proponents grasp how strong the motive would be to to cement a holocaust narrative. You effectively demoralize Germany, a rival nation that “caused” two wars and which historically created the upperclass of Europe. You effectively seal the moral superiority of America. If the Allied bombing campaign led to millions of starvation deaths among Jewish camp captives, this would be grounds for criticism, but instead the blame is solely laid on Germans. You bulwark against any European nationalism movement because this threatens American hegemony. You justify the creation of Israel and retcon the reputation of Jews as predatory moneylenders to “burnt offering” lambs (literally the word “holocaust”). And lastly you perfect all the neat psy-op techniques that you started in WW1, which also consisted of gas chambers and torturing people etc.
Well that’s the thing, in my opinion even the most virulent 20th century European racist would not gas family after family of downtrodden Jews. This is inexplicable when you consider (1) there were no camp whistleblowers, not even a friend or family member of a camp member who was confided in, which is improbable, (2) the elderly camp guards put on trial in Germany who have entered the “honest old people” phase of dementia more often than not assert that the holocaust didn’t happen. I don’t know, can you imagine hundreds or thousands of Russian soldiers putting family after family of innocent Ukrainians to death by gassing, women and children in all? None of them leaking or whistleblowing? And most of them, even when age has taken away their inhibitions, maintain that it didn’t happen? This is improbable to me.
400k Germans was like 0.5% of the German civilian population, "typhus" would have had to kill upwards of half the Jewish population of the region in a very short period for this explanation to make sense.
Then where are the bodies, if (as revisionists allege) mass cremations were not used? Is the argument that there were widespread crematoria but that they were only used for typus victims? Most damningly, gentile civilians in surrounding areas (subject to the same supply line collapses and bombed infrastructure) did not starve in any substantial numbers (relative). Again, it's merely gesturing at what 'could' have happened, it's not a serious or comprehensive alternative hypothesis.
On the other hand, large numbers of Nazi war criminals who would have been aware of the Holocaust and who were tried throughout the mid and late 20th century never claimed that it didn't happen, before or after trials (eg. even at times it didn't matter to their liberty) and in places where holocaust denial was not, at that time, illegal. One would expect more of them to protest their party's innocence, to claim libel.
Which exact figures, what's the number? As someone else said, Hitler himself discussed Vienna as having 200,000 Jews at 10% of the population in his youth. In 1939 Prague had 90,000 at 20% of the population, 390,000 in Warsaw at 30% of the population. Again, these figures track with the number of synagogues and Jewish schools considering religiosity and congregation size, and once extrapolated downward to smaller cities and towns with synagogues and other Jewish institutions they lead to the prewar estimate of the Eastern European Jewish population as at least 4m.
Perhaps ironically this extreme level of assimilation would be a strong argument against a lot of white nationalist arguments for antisemitism, but in any case it's an absurd hypothesis. It suggests that millions of people were separated from their families and friends, scattered all over the Eastern Bloc and then never attempted to contact eg. surviving family members in the West but also never got in touch with local Jewish communities that survived all across the region and which maintained meticulous pre and post-war records of brises, marriages, funerals and so on. Before the Iron Curtain fully solidifed in the late 40s and early 50s surviving Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Hungarian, Russian and Romanian rabbis and other figures in the community conducted extensive population surveys of the surviving population.
So this theory involves millions of Jews who were taken to camps or fled into Russia and, despite spending their entire lives in largely Jewish communities before, never got in touch with the local extant Russian-Jewish communities whatsoever, which persisted through the whole Soviet Union. If they had surviving relatives in America or England or France or Israel, they never attempted to get in touch with them (yes, Soviet citizens could send mail to the West). They also never told their kids they were Jewish at all or anything about their family history. Many would even have survived the fall of the USSR and seen the success of Israel, and all this time they never said anything.
Why did the US only suddenly start to do this in the late 1970s, though, long after successfully turning West Germany into a deferential modern Western country under US occupation without discussing it much and while rehabilitating all but a few of the most senior Nazis? It's more accurate to see Holocaust remembrance as something that happened because of pressure from within German society, largely from students, and efforts from some survivors and their children over many decades after the war. It wasn't top down.
That's when the US started getting close with Israel, so all the ADL, holocaust propaganda, and other shit was to help cement the budding alliance through public relations manipulation, perhaps. We've seen how claims of antisemitism were used most recently to try and stifle dissent towards America's support for the ongoing 'police action' in Gaza, and various projects like the opening of new holocaust remembrance museums and movies directed by Spielberg depicting the suffering of Jews keep getting announced ever since 10/6. This strongly suggests that all of the anti-antisemitism buzz is just for propaganda purposes, not for actually contesting antisemitism (which would be bizarre if it was).
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It can be breathtaking sometimes just how much things coming out of the further ends of the right directly match up with the way critical theory works.
There are valuable insights from both postmodernism and the saner parts of the critical theory ecosystem. Particularly for an environment of mutually hostile groups struggling over the gun of state power.
As Kendi says: "knowledge is only power if it is put to the struggle for power." And these "critical ways of knowing" are the ultimate tools in the struggle for power.
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This doesn't work. Most of the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust died in 1942 - '43, well before supply lines began to collapse and starvation set in. The Nazis recorded that by this time, the General Government had been cleared of Jews.
There is absolutely no grounds for assuming the governments of Eastern Europe overcounted Jewish population to the extent that would be necessary to explain the complete disappearance of eastern European Jewry post-1945. Revisionists can say that the numbers are "uncertain" or "unreliable" but it isn't true. These are not population estimates of some ill-recorded migration 2000 years ago, this is Europe in the 20th century. The degree of uncertainty required simply does not exist.
Says who? Do you doubt Bolshevik atrocities also?
This is not true. Rumors of what was going in the east were everywhere in Germany. There is a book called The German War by Nicholas Stargardt which has a long chapter going into depth on what the Germans knew about the Final Solution as it unfolded.
This is also not true. I've never heard of a old Nazi in Germany denying the Holocaust happened. Moreoever, plenty of Nazis admitted to it when they had no actual motive to admit to it. Adolf Eichmann spoke openly about the physical extermination of the Jews while he was a free man in Argentina. Why do you think he did that?
According to the modern scholarship which is in dispute, which has no primary documents or primary evidence of the deaths at this time, and which does no archaeology to determine deaths.
You misread what I wrote. If you find pre-WWII population estimates of Jewry in Europe, published pre-WWII, as for instance in a Jewish encyclopedia, the numbers are lower than today’s estimates of pre-WWII Jewry in Europe. IIRC, by millions.
If you told me Bolsheviks in quiet camp positions had a weekly routine of murdering women and children, then yes I would doubt it. If you told me that some shellshocked war-scarred Soviet soldiers committed an atrocity after experiencing months of trauma, no I would not doubt it. In any case, we did have whistleblowers of Soviet atrocities.
I wish you would quote something from it. From a review,
With hundreds of thousands of participants, we should certainly find letters which speak to the organized and systemic campaign of killing Jewish women and children. Can you find these letters for me?
We don’t generally consider confessions made under torture to be reliable, such as the Nuremberg testimony. Neither should we consider the coerced confessions of the leaders of a defeated country who faced the risk of total destruction (Morgenthau plan) particularly reliable.
Contemporary Nazi documentation records that Poland had been almost entirely cleared of Jews by the end of 1943. The destruction of the Jews in the USSR is also copiously recorded in contemporary documents. These are the Jews in question; Jews that died in Dachau or Buchenwald towards the end of the war are a tiny fraction of the total that must be explained.
This is not true. The Polish government recorded more than 3,000,000 Jews in Poland alone in the mid-1930s. At the end of the war, there were not even 100,000. No other population in Europe suffered in anywhere near a similar proportion. There are numerous revisionist excuses for this collapse (Polish overcounting, emigration to Israel and the United States, deportation into the USSR) but none of them work. We can go into further detail there if you want, but you have to be absurdly charitable to the revisionist case at every turn for the numbers to even begin to come out the way deniers want them to.
Within the actual 'death camps' (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, later Auschwitz) there was only a very small staff assigned to conduct the extermination at each camp, hundreds at the most, including Jewish prisoners forced to work as auxiliaries. It doesn't take that many armed men to murder unarmed civilians in the thousands.
Stuff still leaked though:
Here's one letter from the book (page number is from the epub; here's a link to a free download if you want to read it yourself.
Here's one, cited in Saul Friedländer's Years of Extermination (page 400):
A consul of neutral Sweden in Stettin, Karl Inge Vendel, learned about the exterminations in 1943 from his contacts with dissident figures in the German regime:
(Years of Extermination, page 460)
In 1942, OK Ostrow reported in its war diary that:
The mass shootings of Jewish civilians in the east, since they took place over a broad expanse of territory rather than in a few discrete locations, did directly involve thousands to tens of thousands of people, and thus produced many more letters and personal accounts:
(Years of Extermination, page 426)
The Italians knew what was going on:
Here's another:
I don't know if Franzl ever took any pictures, but
Some
Of
His
Comrades
Did
Then there are the Einsatzgruppen reports themselves, which helpfully catalogue the murdered by "men, women, and children."
This is mostly a meme. Few of the Nuremberg defendants were tortured. None of the defendants in later trials, such as Kurt Franz or Franz Stangl, commandants of Sobibor and Treblinka, were tortured. Nor did they have any incentive to lie, since they received the maximum penalty of life imprisonment under German law. None of this accounts for Nazis who admitted to the exterminations outside a courtroom setting.
I'll ask again:
You have posted a lot of information, so what I decided to do was pick one at random. I looked into your quote from Hosenfeld. This quote would be significant: it is perhaps the earliest admission by a Nazi officer of the conscious mass killing of Jews.
The provenance of the material is... questionable. Hosenfeld’s writings appear to be completely unknown to holocaust scholarship before the year 1999, appearing neither in a book nor in a scholarly article, not even in passing mention. The few book instances I could find on google scholar have the wrong publication date. It may appear, for instance, that page 905 of volume 9 part 1 of the sprawling “Germany and the Second World War” contains the oldest mention of Hosenfeld, but in fact this volume was published in 2012 and seems to be based on the material in the book version of the Pianist. On inspecting the book version of the Pianist, I find the following:
The book gives no account of how the letters and diary were ever obtained by the writer, but implies that they fell into the hands of a “Leon Warm”. He has no biographical details that can be found online. His full name is, allegedly, “Leon Warm-Warczynski”, and despite being integral to this story (and ironically a great amateur archivist) I can find no evidence that he ever lived. The book “the Pianist” was written by the 87 year old Władysław Szpilman, who died a year later. I am not sure if an historian has ever touched the documents, let alone examined and verified their authenticity.
We have been presented with documents that have no "authentic transmission", as the Muslims might say. So now I want to post some of the alleged writing of Hosenfeld. Knowing that the material appeared at first in a book which was an enormous commercial hit, we can consider whether they come off as authentic. Just from the writing itself. You know, does it pass the “smell test”. Here's an excerpt from our dear friend Wilm Hosenfeld:
What a focus on the commandments! We have denied God’s commandments and we will die as a result, “innocent and guilty” alike, and only have ourselves to blame for our punishment. You would think a Jew wrote this! Let me tell you why I giggled reading that excerpt. You see — and this was probably unknown to whoever actually wrote this stuff — Hosenfeld came from a family of devout Roman Catholics. His father was a Catholic schoolmaster and he attended Catholic school. His family held a strong family tradition of Catholicism. He was active in the catholic social movement “Catholic Action”. Hosenfeld was a pedigreed Christian Catholic, born when this was taken seriously (1895). The idea that a pedigreed Catholic like Hosenfeld would explain the evil of the world in terms of forgetting commandments is comically insane — that is a purely Jewish construct that isnt just missing from Christianity but repudiated. A Catholic like Hosenfeld would never see the evil of the world through this prism. If he were irreligious, which he is not given the “Christian teaching” mentioned (by the way, a Catholic would also never use the phrase "God and Christian teaching" lol), his education would have protected him from the error of thinking that following commandments earns salvation and protects against God's wrath.
We are lead to believe from this passage that Hosenfeld, the serious Catholic, saw the evil of the world primarily in terms of commandments. No early 20th century Christian would claim that the denial of commandments led God to inflict punishment on them. This line of thought could only come from a Jew. A Christian would say that a failure to follow Christ has led to sin and so forth. A failure to confess, a failure to repent, a failure to accept God's love, but never a failure to follow commandments. I can’t adequately describe how alien the thought process in this passage would be to anyone from a Catholic background born in the 19th century. “God is allowing evil to happen to show mankind” that we need God? Yet there’s no mention of Christ, of the Son, of salvation, of redemption? This Catholic believes the “innocent along with the guilty have themselves to blame for their punishment”? Nope. Sorry. This is a complete and utter forgery, I would stake my entire (completely irrelevant) reputation on the line here. This isn't the only thing that gives the gag away -- the other exerpts speak on humans "feeling the burden of our own evil and imperfections" with zero mention of Christ or forgiveness... we read phrases like "on a Sunday, when you can indulge in your own thoughts" with no mention of Mass... No.
This is an example of what we can call
gish"yiddish gallop". When there is a discussion on the holocaust, the mainstream narrative supporter can copy and paste some quotes he found within a few minutes on the first page of Google. He can just assume that they are “reliable”. The non-mainstream party has the onus to inspect the material, certainly. But this could take hours if it is even practical. Thankfully there are Russian ebook torrenting sites that permit me to illegally download such lofty and voluminous tomes as Germany and the Second World War Volume IX/I, and such triumphs of creative writing as the Pianist. Alas, I don't know if I can do more research after this one. I relent, believe your holocaust, I lack the strength.Here's Mit Brennender Sorge:
Also a Jewish forgery, no doubt.
I've read all the books I cited here, though naturally I had to go back to excerpt the precise quotes and page numbers since I don't have a photographic memory.
In short, this exchange has been:
"Provide some contemporaneous letters about the extermination of the Jews."
"Here are a few."
"Gish gallop. Also those are fake."
The very passage from which you selectively quoted two sentences begins with —
These word faith is absent from the alleged Hosenfeld writings, and replaced with a Jewish attempt at thinking like a Christian. From the encyclical:
Christ is mentioned something like 50 times, the Son 8 times, the Cross 4 times, yet commandments only 5 times in the encyclical. The encyclical does not address Hosenfeld’s topic:
This is not anything a Catholic hand would write. When Catholics are talking about why evil happens, and what happens to the innocent, they do not claim that the innocent are to blame for their punishment and “must die”. Again, there’s not a mention of redemption or salvation. In the encyclical you cite we read:
So yeah, as we should expect in the encyclical, things are understood through Christ/faith with “obeying commandments” having secondary or tertiary significance. Hosenfeld would not omit all reference to unique Christian thought when processing why countries become evil, and replace that with an exclusively legalistic dimension of obedience to rules.
This is the third time you’ve flat out misunderstood something. The first two times it was your desire to ignore and move the goalpost on pre-WWII population estimates of European Jewry. This time you are cherry picking two sentences from the encyclical which on the whole proves my point.
If you are intent on believing in this source, please show me an instance of an historian authenticating it. It appeared out of thin air in 1990 for a snappy new edition to the holocaust novel industry.
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You would be wrong to doubt it. Over 1.5 million died in the gulags, and over a twenty year period citizens were regularly snatched out of their beds, taken to the basement of the Lubyanka, and shot in the back of the head. At least 700,000 Russians were executed between 1936-1938 during Stalin's Great Purge.
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We have literally an orgy of evidence. We found the damn camps and even recorded it on video. Do you think that is fake? The Nazis also documented the shit out of their death camps.
Here yah go https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-camps
The facts are indisputable, even if you think it is jewish propaganda, it is all correct.
We also have photographic evidence of bigfoot along with eye witness testimony, for what that's worth. Point being, the conversation pertains to looking at the actual evidence.
A great example of this would be the alleged death camp in Dachau. It has every single element used to prove everything the article you cite uses to prove the holocaust. Except for the fact that an SS document detailed there was no 'gas chamber' ever built at the site. So hundreds of jews who testified to American detectives about the killings lied. All the images from the camp alleging it was a death camp were not from a death camp at all. History rewritten at the stroke of a pen. Reality altered forever. Or, well, for us at least. The people executed for their participation in guarding a death camp that never was could not benefit from the correction.
You cite as evidence an SS document saying no gas chamber was ever built, I cite as evidence a US Army investigative report from 1945 that not only says "yup, there's gas chambers here, we saw them ourselves" but includes photographic evidence. Not based on the testimony of "hundred of Jews" but based on the testimony of American soldiers of the Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment, Seventh Army, who were sent to the camp to investigate and report back. They have photos of the crematoria, the gas chamber buildings, and a detailed physical description of the gas chambers themselves.
I don't see how a single SS documents saying that no gas chamber was built at Dachau beats a comprehensive US report, with photographs, saying that there was a gas chamber there.
My mistake, when I said 'gas chamber' I meant 'homicidal gas chamber'. The camp had a 'gas chamber' but it was never used to kill anyone, as was later reported, it was for decontamination. Funny how that term 'gas chamber' just gets thrown around heh...
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No SS guard was ever accused, tried for, convicted, or executed for gassing people at Dachau. No SS guard ever admitted to having gassed anyone at Dachau, under duress or otherwise. Dachau was not presented as an extermination camp equipped with gas chambers at Nuremberg, revisionist mythology to the contrary aside. The only Dachau inmate to claim there had been a functioning gas chamber at Dachau at the time (there were two or three many decades later, and to my knowledge all were gentiles, like the Polish priest Father Alexis Lechanski or the Turkish journalist Nerin Gun) was Franz Blaha, a gentile Czech doctor who claimed at the trial of Commandant Martin Weiss not systematic gassing, but that a dozen prisoners had once been gassed 'experimentally,' under his supervision.
It's entirely incomparable to camps like Treblinka, Sobibor, or Auschwitz-Birkenau where all testimony, without exception, regardless of whether it came from guard or prisoner, or whether it was delivered in or outside of a courtroom, confirmed their function as extermination facilities.
From the 'Blue Series', the official record of the trial of the major civilian and military leaders of Nazi Germany who were accused of war crimes.
Sir Hartley Shawcross, Britain's chief prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials. Pay no heed to the other camps that are also not death camps anymore.
DOCUMENT 159-L ATROCITIES AND OTHER CONDITIONS IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS IN GERMANY
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So do you think the holocaust is a conspiracy? Faked?
I think there are a few elements of what we call the holocaust that are not up to scratch. But they are maintained through bad incentives.
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If this did happen this way - millions of Jews were killed by disease and starvation, the Germans would absolutely be culpable for all of these deaths beyond what might be calculated an expected amount of disease deaths in a non-locked-up population, since they had spefically closed the Jews (and others) in these camps and were thus liable for their general welfare. This would end up being simply another Holocaust narrative. Gulag camp deaths caused by starvation and typhus are generally counted as Gulag camp deaths just as much as the shooting deaths, indeed many of the most notorious cases involve starvation.
So basically we should expect camp guards with dementia to be truthful (despite having probably spent decades justifying and minimizing their crimes, at least in their own heads), but all these Jews would stridently hold on to their assimilated identities despite at least many of them being at some point eligible for Holocaust victim compensation and basically having a free pass to get the hell out of the collapsing post-Communist Eastern Europe by moving to Israel?
Some of the most popular "alternative theories" offered by denialists in past discussions have involved the Soviets conducting a genocide of deported Jews exactly like this - killing (perhaps not by gas but otherwise) hundreds of thousands of Jews in Central Asian camps with zero historical record, zero or close to zero camp guard memories of precisely this sort of an event happening (particularly risible since these guards would not be the most virulent 20th century European racists and indeed, as anti-Semites remind us, a number would have been Jews themselves) etc etc. Just vague gesturing that this must have happened since there has to be some, no matter how threadbare, explanation to the everpresent "Where did the Jews go" question, and we know it can't have been that they were killed in the Holocaust, and the Holocaust didn't happen.
The moral complaint against the Germans in such a scenario is nowhere near the moral complaint in the official holocaust scenario, even though they may still be ultimately culpable (full culpability and level of evilness are distinct things). Germans reasonably attempted to relocate Jews; any reasonable Germany would have to do something about the foreign nation living on their soil who have a history of revolution including in Germany, and who have compatriots in the rival Soviet Union, and who have never ever assimilated fully and unshackled themselves from ethnic solidarity. A Germany that didn’t place them in camps is a Germany that would likely have their munitions depots bombed. So they were placed in camps, like Japanese in America and like the Palestinians tomorrow. If you believe that Germany should have “evened out” their starvation so that if affected Germans and Jews equally, okay, maybe from the standard of moral perfection, but there is obviously less evilness here than purposefully taking lives which would not already be lost in a trolly problem sense.
Now if you mean, “America has no culpability because they are allowed to bomb a country to infinity”, okay, but this would have needed to be argued, and Jews might wonder why there was no attempt to negotiate their release in exchange for better terms of German surrender, or whether America even calculated their loss of life when they bombed railways.
Yes. You don’t just forget putting women and children to death in your 20s for years. Just like how the demented will at times confess infidelity (many such cases)
If they started families and have a new life, the isn’t an easy decision, and once old age hits that becomes harder. And do you expect the demented to fill out a complicated holocaust victim compensation plan? This isn’t a reasonable comparison. However, from my hypothesis we would see them remembering their Jewish adolescence and heritage, 100%. But I don’t know how we could measure or catalog such cases which occur in the armchair of an Eastern European home.
Right but you understand that both sides have this problem, because there has been no serious archaeological attempt at quantifying human remains or cremation remains around concentration camps. Which IMO strongly reinforces the revisionist side, because why on earth wouldn’t historians be interested in finding remains and quantifying numbers and so on?
According to Wikipedia, out of the 100,000+ Japanese interned during the Japanese internment, about 1 % died, which presumably is not that far off from the amount that would have died anyway. Even this is generally considered to be a black mark on American history and particularly on FDR's record; I can only imagine how it would be treated if it had been more like 80 % dead, even if the deaths weren't done directly. And it has been a popular argument that Gaza is a concentration camp/on the verge of megadeaths already before the current operation, if it turned out that 80 % of Gazans were dead (again, for any reason) after the operation is finished... well, it would at the very least create considerable troubles for Israel in the court of global opinion.
The whole idea that "well, the Germans just had to put the Jews in the camps" seems to be based on an assumption that Jews are some sort of a self-evident, ontological evil. The largely assimilated German Jews had not hindered the German WW1 effort in a material way, as far as I know (the revolutions that you refer to, which had both Jewish and gentile participants, happened after the Germans had already lost in the field of battle). Rather more importantly, the vast majority of Jews put to camps weren't German, they were Polish and Soviet Jews that Germans wouldn't have needed to bother one bit with if they hadn't decided to invade half of Europe. Hell, the Germans were specifically procuding Jews from other countries to put in the camps - they were actually temporarily importing Jews to their temporarily occupied territories!
When it comes specifically to immigration to Israel, they could bring their families along, and their children - who presumably would be privy to such memories from old-age people - would be the ones hearing such stories and being able to use them to justify immigration. Also, people who would have been, say, 12-18 years old around 1942-1944 would have been 58-66 in 1990, when the fall of the Soviet regime would have presumably allowed freer movement and claims application (was it possible for Soviet block citizens to apply for Holocaust compensation from West Germany anyway?) - hardly the age where most of them would have been demented.
American civilians faced no threat from Axis bombers, only a dozen or so died due to enemy action. Had any Japanese-American starved, it was either a hunger strike or a deliberate withholding of food. Meanwhile Japanese in Japan and Germans in Germany had their food supply distrupted by unrestricted bomber and submarine warfare. Even if Germans treated Jews as kindly as Americans did Japanese-Americans, a greater fraction would have died.
This argument reminds me of some who point out that diring the Pacific war a greater fraction of American soldiers captured by the Japanese died in captivity, than Japanese POWs in American custody. Sure, but while the American captors got delivered ice cream, Japanese captors were forced to eat belts and each other. To condemn Japanese for not giving more to Americans than even themselves got seems to be an isolated demand of charity.
As you point out, even the most righteous among the nations involved in WW2, the US, saw it fit to intern ethnic minority civilians. Minorities were everywhere looked at with suspicion.
This was after Japan had declared war on the US. Germany, by contrast, was not going to fight Israel, given that the latter didn't exist at the time. What threat did the various targeted minorities pose to the German people that the Germans did not invite unto themselves by invading the nations where those people lived?
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Wait, so if the Jews put all the Palestinians in camps, and then food became scarce, and almost all Palestinians civilians died but, say, only 10% of Jewish civilians died in the ensuing famine, you would say that didn’t count as probable genocide?
Letting prisoners of war starve to death is literally a war crime, a prison warden who cannot feed his prisoners has a duty to release them, and indeed Polish civilians who lived around the sites of many of the deaths had mortality rates of less than 10%, so we can ascribe the material difference to captivity.
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The Russian top-down propaganda, as well as most of the grassroots, fortunately, doesn't claim that all Ukrainians as a subspecies is a plague upon the face of earth - merely that the leadership is Nazis & American proxies.
Yet I can’t think of any case in European history where teams of thousands organized for the mass murder of women and children over a span of years. Men who were not made psychopaths from years of starving in war, but men who sat comfortably in camps. That didn’t happen when colonists invaded America. It didn’t happen in ancient history like after the siege of Melos. It is an enormous assertion to make that this occurred.
There are countless examples of women and children being massacred throughout history. The sack of Magdeburg, the sack of Baghdad, Nader Shah's sack of Delhi, the Sand Creek Massacre, or this massacre of Globular Amphora Culture women and children(they might have even been killed by proto-Germans). History is littered with stuff like this, human brutality isn't rare and it isn't exceptional.
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Ukrainians qua Ukranians maybe not, but what about Ukrainians as kulaks, counter-revolutionaries and fascist collaborators?
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Why is the obvious World War II comparison of Rafah to the Warsaw Ghetto? I can think of a number of other plausible comparisons that are probably worth considering. This is, admittedly, a rather hot take, but why not compare Rafah to Berlin in 1945? After the Third Reich invaded most of Eastern Europe, including rampant raping and pillaging across the countryside, and that entire campaign of deliberate ethnic cleansing and genocide, nobody looks at the Allied decision to demand complete, unconditional surrender as unreasonable, or that they kept fighting all the way to Berlin. Nobody argues that Stalin was deliberately unprepared at the start of the war to justify flattening Germany and running parts of it as a puppet state for Soviet gain. Nobody of import says "countless German civilians died because Roosevelt and Stalin were unwilling to enact a unilateral ceasefire at the Rhine and the Oder." Nobody serious mourns the Volkssturm civilians (frequently children) that were handed primitive weapons for futile resistance, without also recognizing the broader context of the tragedy of the entire war. And I'm not even going to even try to deny that the Red Army was infamous for its war crimes against civilians in the East, or the decades of subsequent political repression the Soviets brought to Eastern Europe during the Cold War.
The Axis powers entered the war in the late 1930s even though almost all modern historians consider their possibility of overall victory bleak. Maybe they could have bargained for an advantageous quick peace, but even Yamamoto has (possibly-apocryphal) quotes about expecting to lose a longer war. Hamas had even lower chances of winning in October. I'm not convinced that this merits assuming that either power, as the "underdog," merits obvious sympathy, although that seems to be in vogue these days in certain circles. Heck, if you look at ratios of civilian casualties -- as I've seen some argue makes Israel's actions unjustified -- America had almost none (generally counted as a few thousand if you include territories and civilian ship crews). The British claim 70,000. More civilians than that died in the Battle of Berlin alone, and Allied bombing campaigns killed hundreds of thousands. Not to mention the nuclear weapons.
I have trouble embracing the progressive worldview on Gaza because those same principles, applied to WWII, would have me side with the Axis powers. And I am quite certain that the world is a better place because the (Western) Allies won the day. Not that they are perfect (ha!), but I'll certainly stan them over the major Axis players.
Not that I'd wholly endorse Israel to hit Rafah like Zhukov hit Berlin: I don't think the situation really warrants it, or that the situations are immediately similar. Heck, I won't even try to argue that Israel hasn't committed atrocities in this situation. But on the other, it seems about as reasonable as comparing Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto, and I'd be pretty amused to see some Tankies argue that the Red Army was in the wrong.
A good article on this.
To quote myself:
If I'm reading this correctly, he means that in a conflict between a weaker party ("egg") and a stronger party ("high, solid wall"), he will always take the side of the weaker party, even if they're wrong and the stronger party is right. Which logically implies that, were Hamas ever to gain the upper hand, Freddie would immediately start supporting Israel. It likewise implies that he ought to have supported the Axis powers in the second world war.
The Axis powers were not the weaker party in WW2. They invaded and defeated various countries that were weaker than them.
The Soviets also did this against various countries not called Germany, so actually I disagree with even an analysis of WW2 that blames everything on Germany. Actually both national socialist Germany and the Soviet Union started the war in europe by invading various other countries and having the goal of hegemony in Europe and be inclined to attack each other too for such purpose. Add to that a quite mass murderous record, and not only modern analogies break down, but we ought not to take a pro USSR stance in WW2. You can have an anti-nazi position of course and I would agree. Both an anti-soviet, and anti-nazi position makes sense in relation to a pro human rights, national sovereigntiy, anti-invasion/attrocities/colonialism take. This isn't to say that taking a stance that "our atrocities are good and justifiable", is justifiable for the non Soviet allies, neither.
If you would like a good book to recommend that examines more the Soviet side and Stalin's machiavelian strategy, I would highly recommend Stalin's war for those interested.
They absolutely were. In territorial extent, in manpower, in resources, in number of factories.
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I think the main problem with the whole "punching up/down" or "egg vs wall" framework is that there's just no agreed-upon way to meaningfully determine which side is actually the stronger and the weaker side. In WW2, the Axis powers lost, so one could argue that, by definition, they are the weaker side, but then others could argue that merely losing to someone else isn't proof of being the weaker side, and we need to analyze the precise details of the situation. It's the same arguments that get brought up in playoffs or MMA fights of, "Did the better team/fighter actually win?" where there's seemingly no way for people to come to an agreement on what standard to choose for determining what "better" means; the very notion of "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" is the point of contention. And so people just twist the logic and evidence in whatever way needed to to make the "side I like" be the "weaker" side and vice versa (or "better team" in the case of sports). It's just naked bias with extra steps. Whenever I see talk about "punching up/down," I mentally replace "up" with "direction I want to punch" and "down" with "direction I don't want punches going in," and it's a more useful way of analyzing the situation every single time.
Oh my god.
“Criticizing Nazis is punching down” is incredible. I can’t wait to trot that out at some point.
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I disagree. Many of the people who say they are punching up, are actually punching down.
Because there is such thing as who are deemed acceptable targets by society. Which can be observed by the laws, popular narratives, regulations and common practices.
That it is cultural far leftists with the whipping hand and chauvinists for their coalition of identities matters in regards to who we ought to focus upon.
Now, some progressives might have argued the same for some of their favored groups applied in the past. But whatever merit or not such view had in the past, their movement overreached and now it is the stage that this overreach has already happened.
What it means to punch up can even change through time, even if the rhetoric remains similar. This isn't to say that some rhetoric isn't inherently for something unjust, even if it comes from a weaker party. So, there are limitations on "punching up" even if some group is unfairly mistreated.
I agree with the later claim.
With the Israeli and Palestinian issue, one could pretend that expansionist Islamists or Jewish supremacists who want the entire so called promised land to be Jewish, to be victimized party.
At some level, some focus on "underdog" is like you say, pointless, because the "underdog" group is too wide, and it is in service in an agenda that misleads.
I do think there is a value both in WW2 and in other events, to also look at who is committing atrocities against whom. Are worldwide Muslims the underdog? No. Are the Palestinians the underdog and the more mistreated party? Yes. Does this mean they are morally pure and we should desire a reversal of the situation? No. Indeed, we ought not to put on any group an anointed permanent victim status, and be more skeptical. So, when pressuring, we should act wisely, not with limitless commitment and lack of skepticism. But who does it make sense to pressure?
Ultimately, I do think as you say we need to look cases on their merits, but I want to push back at completely de-legitimizing caring about who is the underdog, because it comes as a self serving narrative to excuse taking the permanent side of certain groups even while they have the upper hand and mistreat others.
Or we can say, that who is the aggressive party and is actually committing the most atrocities against others, is ought to be something that matters.
I am actually in favor of trying to combine might with adherence to certain ethical principles and to enforce good rules, so don't misunderstand my position as being about reflexively favoring weakness over strength. Even if I do sympathize over weak but genuine victims over strong predators. At the end of the day if I get what I want, those favoring good rules would be the stronger party.
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It can simultaneously be true that Germany is stronger than Poland and that the USA is stronger than Germany.
I replied to you prior to your edit - I'm just about as aggressively anti-communist and anti-Soviet as they come.
Well, yes, but if you sympathize with the underdog, the German invasion of multiple other countries is going to matter a lot. I am not convinced such sympathies that would lead someone to sympathize with the Palestinians, would have let to them to sympathize with Germany. Following such logic in a non stupid manner might lead someone to oppose the mass rapes or mass murder of Germans while the winning Soviet army was marching, or oppose the mass murderous Morgenthau Plan. But would that be wrong? No it wouldn't. It was also good that the Japanese after WW2 were not subject to being punished in the same kind they planned to deal with China.
I do think that saying things like "No matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg.”", can lead to stupid conclusions though.
Trembling Mad calls this gerrymandering power. When comparing Germany and Poland, Germany is stronger, ergo Germany's the bad guy - boooo! When comparing Germany and the USA, the USA is stronger, ergo Germany's the good guy - yaaaaay! It entirely depends on how close you zoom in.
I think this illustrates that "sympathising with the underdog" is a fundamentally wrongheaded approach to take in assessing which of two more parties has the moral high ground - once we've established that the weaker party is morally superior, that incentivises bad actors to contrive a narrative in which they're the weak victimised party, Goodhart's law-style. But even in cases where everyone pretty much agrees on which of two parties is strongest and weakest - well, it's still possible to be both strong and morally upstanding, or weak and morally degenerate. Common, even.
A blind approach about anything is bad in general.
Sympathizing with the underdog has its merits, provided you try to think about the circumstances and aren't following a robotic logic and are very willing to update your logic. That right and wrong does matter, but certainly if you want to oppose the greater atrocities being committed, focusing on who is committing them matters. And having some flexibility in seeing what different civilian groups are more targeted, as different sides have the upper hand, is going to be helpful.
But you should have the foresight and know who you are dealing with, and ought not be a permanent ally of anyone.
A more wrongheaded approach is the one where certain groups, especially ethnic groups can do no right, and other groups can do no wrong. Which is ironically promoted by plenty of propaganda that tries to pull heartstrings of our sympathies of the underdog, or promote permanent victims by either distorting history, or cherry picking from issues that fit, but is misleading through the exclusion of other events from the dominant narrative.
So I do think there are limitations, in many approaches, including sympathizing with the underdog. But it does have some merit in a limited sense. For example, I blamed USSR but there are those who see them as the victimized party that can do no wrong, because of nazi attrocities and initial nazi victories. Not only that logic is wrong, but it also forgets the Soviet invasions and occupations of multiple weaker countries.
While that is possible, the discussion is about atrocities, invasions and ethnic cleansing so I don't think this analogy applies with the relevant examples. Israel is of course not morally upstanding and there is a worldwide backlash against them precisely because of their warcrimes against the Palestinians and also the rhetoric in those lines.
And that they are the stronger party is not irrelevant. Even if hypothetically both parties were immoral, the stronger one gets the backlash because they are the ones committing the atrocities. And it is the focus on the later that matters. It does make sense to focus on strong parties committing atrocities, but I certainly don't think we ought to be myopic about the dangers of weak, mistreated immoral parties, getting stronger of course.
It isn't as if much of the world that sees what Israel does far more negatively than you, are applying the robotic fallacious logic of siding with the underdog against morally upstanding stronger party, which is more of a strawman.
Well, if decolonization movement only opposed European colonization of their countries but didn't pretend colonizing European countries was decolonization, then that would make them a more ethical movement than it is. Who is making the aggressive action at others expense matters. And plenty of aggressive action comes from a stronger party towards a weaker one. Even if in some cases the party that is de facto weaker, is due to a lack of will. So, the "who is the aggressor/who is commiting attrocities" complicates things from a more simplistic underdog model, and there as explained previously even more things beside to add to ones model.
It does seem that the hostility towards the underdog model here is not in favor of a more accurate way that is more flexible to changing realities, but more to promote a more simplistic model that declares certain factions as "good guys", and excuse their actions in a manner that isn't really fitting. In fact, even in WW2, atrocities towards civilians committed by the allies, especially the Soviet Union, matter. Especially when one considers the murderous records of the Soviets against non Germans too. Not only is using WW2 as a card to excuse atrocities today, both morally and factually wrong, it usually comes along views that are incorrect about WW2 itself. Indeed, ironically even the non Soviet allies, if they followed even more along this logic of "can do no wrong" their record would be even closer to Nazi Germany and Soviet Union. Because there were people with such logic back then. That there is some difference, also relates to the existence of some backlash within their societies and the existence of people who didn't follow the logic of "can do no wrong". Like for example the backlash against Morgenthau's plan. And those who expressed such backlash sometimes got heat for it.
I find the use of the definite article here fascinating.
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The Germans and Japanese starving to death weren't POCs. It's that simple.
Decolonization means removing the colonialists. It's that simple.
Technically the Japanese were POC, but Asians have a weird place in the oppression stack.
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The Revisionists have spent decades trying to make the Holocaust look as tame as possible, emphasizing all the ways that Germany could have been doing it as a perfectly normal resettlement policy. Then when Israel does anything resembling resettlement, what do you know, suddenly that’s super evil and completely unjustified. Oh, how the tables have turned!
Is that really the best you’ve got?
Funny, I was thinking the same thing. You are remarkably consistent.
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Sigh. This post was entirely unobjectionable till you made it obvious that you clearly wanted to use a modestly interesting prelude about recent events to lead into yet another screed on how improbable the Holocaust was.
Despite having AAQCs, you've been warned repeatedly for single issue posting, and you were doing better on that front too, until, well, this.
While I'd have been inclined to just warn, for now, I'm going to send you to the cold, uncaring Outside for 48 hours, so you know that the warnings aren't just a rap on the wrist you can evade by being better for a bit, partially because this doozy is in your mod log:
Enjoy the timeout, and please for the love of Yahweh find something else to post about on more occasions.
The ban reason reads:
Did you really need the "...with a boner so hard that the fig leaf fell" part? This to me seems needlessly antagonistic... and in bad taste.
Errr.. I didn't actually realize that was publicly visible. I was trying to put that in the internal mod log, and levity is one way of handling that job, which can be thankless at times. It was more of a joke than anything else, I genuinely do not have a strong opinion on the matter.
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Idk, that is pretty funny. This isn't a court of law, we are all just freely associating people.
Terrible post. Terrible sentiment. Users get modded all the time for having fun the wrong way. Mods should do the bare minimum of being respectful in accordance with the rules. Though Amadan and friends long gave up on that when the topics of discussion happened to hit their personal sacred cows, it's worth pointing out when they are acting like a cringe reddit mods.
I feel so special to get my very own call-out. Read, reread, and read and read again the reasons explained with ever-so-much-more-patience than you deserved why people grinding their axes get modded. Tell yourself it's "our own personal sacred cows," despite ample visible evidence to the contrary, if that helps you cope, and then go about with your rules-abiding participation.
I read little more than what you write.
Glad to hear it. If you were under the impression that our rules of civility and discourse require anyone (including the mods) to be sympathetic to Nazis, you should have been disabused of that long ago. You are allowed to be a Nazi here. And people (including mods) are allowed to say they don't like Nazis. If you think that makes me a "cringe reddit mod," go try being a Nazi there.
What was said:
What Amadan reads:
I don't think your inability to grasp criticism makes you a 'cringe reddit mod'. The ban reason for SecureSignals is what was being referred to:
To contrast with an actual reason that's not snarky and antagonistic: 'Single issue posting'.
Yes, when mods do stuff like this instead of what's right they are acting like 'cringe reddit mods'
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How much of your ego is wrapped up in weird online spaces you have no power over? I recommend you unwrap as much as you can for your own mental health.
Don't do this, it is not polite, and it doesn't help.
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Not that I disagree, but don't you routinely complain about things not terribly different from that?
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Even courts of law have fun sometimes.
Typical high court nonsense, did they miss the first year info on dead hand control and perpetuities? Pretty funny! :) hahaha
No one in law thinks that the high courts are anything but political. It is just the rest of the world that clings to that fiction.
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Uhh, I don't think the single issue posting rule means he can't go back to posting about the topic he enjoys, as long as he posts about other things too, does it? I mean he's allowed to deny the holocaust here even if it's clearly stupid and wrong, and he did post about other things.
The main issue is that he was a single issue poster, and after being told to knock it off, he mostly does the very bare minimum to try and skirt it.
As we've said before, Holocaust denialism is not a verboten topic here. Far from it, I struggle to think of any viewpoint we censor, we've got open pedophiles here, and in most places on the internet they'd get banned the moment they even hinted at it.
But his behavior is clearly in bad faith, while at the time @somedude contested the ban, I was the only mod up and checking, I did talk to the others and we're in consensus that his behavior is unacceptable.
The issue is not that he is a single issue poster. Which everyone is to some extent. It's that he's a single issue poster with an issue the mod team and a lot of the sites users don't like. Users hit report, mods hit ban. It's all very easy when you don't like them much.
We can then go on to listen to a different single issue poster talk about their progressive liberal moralism and how the left has gone to far this time. Which is fine by me. I certainly didn't feel the need to report some guy shitting on Yudkowsky for the millionth time, even if I was starting to feel sorry for Yudkowsky to an extent.
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Not sure where else to put this so I'll put this here as an addition to what I have already said about Holocaust deniers elsewhere in this thread.
Holocaust deniers present a real challenge to free speech loving forums and, on such forums, largely create their own problems by turning people against them.
The challenge, at least for US-hosted websites, is not that Holocaust denial will bring the "Eye of Sauron" on the forum or anything similar. The Motte, for example, is in no danger because it hosts Holocaust deniers. 4chan is still merrily chugging along even though Holocaust denial is almost the norm there.
The actual challenge is that Holocaust deniers are a very highly motivated group of people who swarm to free speech forums because they are instantly banned in most other places. And the majority of them, whether they consciously realize this or not, are not really interested in having a real debate - they want to proselytize. And the majority of them have a poor understanding of history and/or poor critical thinking skills.
The combination of these things means that when a large enough group of them come to any given forum, they tend to mess up the place by derailing as much discussion as they possibly can into the service of their own interests while also not actually making particularly good arguments. In this, ironically, they are similar to the woke.
Free speech forum participants usually have an eclectic range of interests. Holocaust deniers, on the other hand, are usually highly passionate about Holocaust denial, not very interested in other topics, and their beliefs are highly coherent with the beliefs of other deniers, so once enough of them have come to a site one's experience there becomes similar to fighting against an army of bots.
Some might laugh at this, but I remember that 4chan's /his/ at one point a few years ago was actually a relatively decent (by 4chan standards) place to discuss history. Most of it was typical stupid 4chan-tier discussion, but there was also a decent number of intelligent participants. But the board kept getting constantly shit up by wave upon wave of Holocaust deniers. So the typical state of the board would be a bunch of small threads about eclectic stuff, and then a few 100-200 reply threads full of repetitive arguing between Holocaust deniers and other people. Almost all of the deniers were firmly unwavering in their beliefs and I doubt many a mind was ever changed. I have a theory that over time, the board got significantly worse at least in part because a lot of the intelligent posters got bored/tired of the deniers and stopped engaging as much.
Imagine that you are running a history forum and you are firmly devoted to the cause of free speech and "no topic is off limits". But imagine also that it so happens that the Internet has a strongly motivated, passionate, and fairly large contingent of people who are convinced that Napoleon never existed and was actually just a hoax. You want to allow people to discuss whatever they want with no restrictions on their speech - however, then you notice that now 20% of your board is made up of people who claim that Napoleon was a hoax, have a poor understanding of history, are impossible to persuade, and constantly accuse those who disagree with them of being part of a conspiracy to suppress the truth. The constant debates between the Napoleon deniers and their opponents are sucking all the air out of the room. What do you do?
Personally I am not in favor of banning Holocaust denial. I am pretty staunchly in favor of free speech!
So why did I write all this? It is to explain why, to some of us who have been discussing history online for a long time, Holocaust deniers are just so utterly tiresome. We have debated with them a hundred times on a dozen different forums. That is why when they show up, our response isn't to think "Oh goody, what an interesting new take on this historical matter!". Our response is "Ah man, it's these people again... Here come the same repetitive, pointless debates that I've already seen so many times before."
Containment thread? It worked pretty well for covid, when covid stuff was sucking all the air out of the room.
What determines if a topic gets such a thread?
I think an archipelago of single-topic threads is kind of at odds with our usual approach. Obviously we do megathreads, sometimes, but I’m not sure I could give a principled reason.
If it’s just a compromise, well…I feel like Covid has a much better case than Holocaust denial. Global impact, headline news, personally keeps people from doing stuff.
I think the guideline should be "the topic keeps coming up over and over again in the threads for separate weeks, and the conversation in the new week tends to reference the conversation in older weeks". Covid, when it was a thing, absolutely qualified as that. Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Palestine were somewhat less of this, since each week's thread tended to be about current events more than about continuing to hash out an ongoing disagreement. Trans stuff, I think, qualifies for this, as it does seem to be the same people having the same discussion over and over. Can't think of too many other examples.
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Covid interacts with everything. In 2020 YouTube was pushing those no opt-out "special feature" boxes with videos like "demanding racial equity in COVID-19 response." The BLM riots got a special public health exemption to people otherwise not allowed to leave their houses. You can't talk about those things in an isolated wuflu containment thread.
Whereas holocaust related things rarely happen IRL, at least at the moment.
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Eh, I don't know that making a dedicated space is wise, because it looks bad.
Don't pin it and I think it's fine. The people who want to have that discussion can subscribe to the thread. A second such containment thread for rationalist inner-circle social drama would also be nice. Maybe a third for trans stuff.
I think "topics that tend to suck all the air out of the room when they get brought up go to their own containment thread, anyone who cares to discuss that topic can subscribe to the thread, containment threads only get pinned if there's at least a quarter as much past-activity in them as in the typical CW thread" would probably be an improvement.
TBH if someone is put off by the fact that holocaust denial stuff gets put in a dedicated thread rather than banned I think they would probably be put off by the speech norms here anyway, best that they discover that early. I personally find the discussion tiresome and poorly argued, but I don't think there's a low-time-investment way to moderate on that basis, at least not yet. Maybe check back in 3 years and LLMs will be at that point, but for the time being.
All that said, I am not a mod, nor am I volunteering to spend the amount of time it would take to be a mod, so ultimately the decision should be made by the people who are putting in that time and effort.
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This is not the case for SS, who I see entering into cited discussions with critics who usually do not bring citations.
I think they are highly motivated because the holocaust is one of the central events of the 20th century which they believe has false historiography. If you go to a Christian forum you will see no shortage of debaters who only care about the Trinity or an Atonement theory because, being central elements of their topic of interest, they consider the correct interpretation to be important. I mean jeeze, “faith vs works” which be the whole forum posting history of a given online Christian debater. The typical holocaust denier has far less interest at stake than, say, the typical online Israeli or Zionist. One of them believes something is wrong, the other’s identity is at stake. I know that it’s popular wisdom that holocaust deniers are really, strongly motivated by hating Jews, but I think that is imputing on them a baseless and primitive psychology. “They hate them because they are more successful” — do you see Protestant whites online dedicating their online presence to hating Catholics or Chinese, Harvard grads, AP students, tall people? I personally do not subscribe to the “spontaneously generated hatred” theory of holocaust denial. It’s more like moon landing denial, the passion for which is motivated by clarifying a central narrative in the popular psyche. Are these people going to be a bit nuts? Yeah, probably every historical revisionist regardless of topic is a bit nuts. (If you want to see this in the wild, there’s a forum called EarlyWritings which focuses on early Christian historiography, and you see posters whose whole posting history centers on a conspiracy involving Marcion or Valentinus etc. And they are clearly not motivated by hatred.)
If we had really shitty and annoying holocaust posters I would say ban them all, but SS posts are IMO interesting, well-written, and novel. Actually, he may be the best of his kind on the whole internet! When was the last top-level post he made on this, like two months ago? However I agree with mod note that he needs to be more clear in the title about his intentions. But let him make a top level post like ever 2-3 months IMO.
I am completely against banning Holocaust deniers for being Holocaust deniers. I'm not even in favor of SecureSignals' temporary ban, despite the fact that his posts are pretty tiresome to me. My comment that you are replying to is in the nature of a vent about my experience with Holocaust deniers, and it is also my trying to say that, while I am staunchly in favor of free speech, this place would also probably degrade if let's say 30% of top-level posts were by Holocaust deniers. My solution to that is not to ban Holocaust denial. I 100% support Holocaust denial being allowed here. But I also personally find most Holocaust deniers to be ridiculous people. SecureSignals makes some good points but he is so utterly convinced that the Holocaust didn't happen, as opposed to being genuinely open-minded, that arguing with him is similar to arguing with a religious fanatic.
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I've not got a survey of all Holocaust deniers (or revisionists, if you must) on the internet, but at least in places like the Motte, I do seem to notice a correlation between Holocaust denial and a strong interest in Jews?
This conversation started out concerning SecureSignals, and the common theme in SecureSignals' posting history is not deep and pedantic historical analysis that leads him to question established wisdom on a wide range of issues, wherever he sees anything that seems off-kilter, of which the Holocaust is only a single example. The common theme in SecureSignals' posting is Jews.
He makes a lot of posts about Jews that do not involve the Holocaust. He does not make a lot of posts about historical population movements or statistics that do not involve the Holocaust. The theme is Jews.
So just as an explanation, I feel like "SecureSignals hates Jews" seems to fit the evidence better than "SecureSignals has an extremely high regard for historical rigour". Hell, I'll be gracious here - maybe he doesn't hate Jews. I don't know the inside of his heart. But he seems to really want to talk about Jews, in contexts that seem to me to portray them negatively.
You would expect this in all places which allow the topic, not just here, because a natural question as part of digging into the "Holocaust conspiracy" is why it exists. For that, the answer (Edit: given by revisionists) is Jews as well. At the very least, I know SS has talked about Elie Wiesel in the past, who is a Holocaust survivor. Wiesel is also an activist who has been tireless in promoting the Holocaust as an act unique in its depth of immorality. From Wikipedia:
Or, we can talk about the supposed 11 million killed in the Holocaust - that number is actually a fabrication by a Jewish Nazi hunter named Simon Wiesenthal. From the Jewish Virtual Library:
None of this would matter if Jews didn't disproportionately occupy positions of wealth, status, and power. None of this would matter if the Holocaust wasn't seared into our moral memory. But since both have happened, it should not surprise anyone that anyone interested in Holocaust denial is basically guaranteed to also talk about how Jews control non-Jews at the detriment of the latter.
Edit: To be clear, I don't agree with the revisionist position, I am only explaining why you would naturally see people go from revisionism to focused on the Jews.
This describes my anger about the cynical exploitation of the killings, and the conflation of genuine historical study with a politicized made for TV mythology.
I think that's the defensible stance, in the sense that it doesn't indicate anti-Semitic beliefs. But "Jews have assigned the Holocaust a unique position in Western history" is a far weaker stance to take, imo, that most revisionists don't seem to hold. If they just hated how the history was distorted, I think there would be fewer revisionists overall - there's simply less of an axe to grind.
I think SS and the revisionists do genuinely hate the Jews. Not in the childish sense of "look at this bitch breathing", but in the sense that they think it's acceptable to declare a heuristic like "Jew? Morally suspect, opinion discarded".
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I mean, it seems like mostly you just agree with him, do you think the holocaust happened as we know it?
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If I said that there were people who just hate white people, I think you would agree that such a motivation is entirely plausible, even if they say that they're just interested in questioning the mainstream narrative which casts white people in a fairly well-off light. Why can't the same hold for Holocaust deniers?
Those who hate white people are those who have been ideologically captured by a popular narrative; this would also account for some holocaust deniers, but their narrative isn’t popular except in small corners and it comes with no social benefit (actually negative social benefit). I don’t actually believe there are people who hate where people apart from ideological influence. I also don’t think you see amateur anti-white historical research online. Your typical anti-white twitter poster isn’t going through old books and articles and tomes to revise how some moment in white history was fabricated. I mean historians might do this, but that’s because they are in an institution that rewards status from it. Who is doing it anonymously of psuedonymously? I personally have not seen that, which makes holocaust denial unique.
Humans are largely interested in the status games they partake of, not the ones they don't. It doesn't matter if it's only popular in their small corners if they don't care about status outside it. Except to the extent they have to be a part of that broader society, of course.
The people on the fringe of society have to do more work to make their points palatable to the public, that doesn't mean they can't be motivated primarily or solely by hatred.
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Yet the typical online Zionist posts about other things than just Zionism.
SecureSignals posts about other things too. Sort his comments by top and on the first page you'll find plenty of highly upvoted comments and top-level posts having nothing to do with Jews. Sort by new, and you'll find... well, a lot of JQ debate (and he is hardly the only one on this forum with an interest in that topic), but not a whole lot of revisionism. A periodic return to the topic every few months, well-written, well-sourced (by the usual Motte standards) and with a new angle.
There are others here with a lopsided posting history. No one is going after @Stefferi for being a single-issue Suomiposter, and while perhaps you couldn't find an HBD enthusiast or trans skeptic with quite as much of an agenda as SS, I don't think he's nearly as much of an outlier as the comments about him usually suggest. And that's if you consider his agenda to be antisemitism, not the much narrower Holocaust revisionism.
The fact that he's treated differently than other posters on the single issue spectrum seems pretty clearly to be related to his choice of issue. Partly it's because it concerns events that happened almost a century ago and are only indirectly related to most current culture war happenings. Hence the bait-and-switch SS had to pull to work it in to a post seemingly about the Israel-Palestine conflict (which was obnoxious and may have deserved a mod warning). But the mods' and commentariat's contempt for revisionists, independent of how well they argue their case (or their number of AAQC nominations), also seems to be part of the reason he is thought of as a single-issue poster, and to that extent, this ban leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
If a poster is generally good but when they post on topic X they suck and to stop posting about X, then that is a good way to balance banning the poster and banning discussion of X.
SS was found to be obnoxious and failed to heed the warnings.
We don’t want the same characters clogging up the feed with the same tired topic. If SS had made the post he did about current events and say linked to a past expose on the holocaust, then he would have been able to get his message across without being quite so goddamn annoying such that he got modded.
I disagree that his revisionism posts suck. Whether you are sympathetic to his conclusions or not, they are more high-effort, more rigorous, arguably more original, and generate more high-quality*, spirited engagement than the majority of top-level posts. And I would hardly say that he single-handedly manages to "clog up the feed" with revisionist posts, the way other unpopular posters like Julius Bronson or Vintologi really did hijack almost every culture war thread while active. When was the last top-level post he wrote on Holocaust revisionism? It's been a while, and I'm sure several HBD and anti-trans threads have cropped up in the meantime.
So I think it's fair to say that, despite the mods' protests that no topic is outright banned and so they can't be accused of selective censorship, the reality is they (like other commenters) have less tolerance for some subjects than others, they allow that to affect their enforcement decisions, and it's probably due at least as much to what they consider to be objectionable as it is to how irrelevant or tendentious SS's posts "objectively" are. Which is perhaps best practice for managing a forum in general -- we don't want to drive good posters out of here by failing to cater to their interests (and prejudices) -- but a bit disappointing to see on themotte.
*And low-quality, to be fair -- but mostly from the chorus of drive-by detractors who add nothing to the conversation beyond signaling a distaste for the topic and for SS personally.
The issue is not that he posts a lot about it or only about it or anything like that, it's that there's a distinct feeling of a missionary attempting to convert the ignorant heathens. Same talking points over and over again in a somewhat different garb, strict keeping to apologetics considered favorable to one's cause and handwaving or ignoring of those who don't fit the narrative (such as there is), eventual fading away and restarting of the same cycle some time later. Lather, rinse, repeat.
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The HBD and trans stuff pops up regularly because it regularly is of direct, current relevance to a variety of political issues. Moreover, there is new evidence coming out on those questions.
Debating whether Eisenhower ever mentioned the holocaust doesn’t have the same relevance.
If we had a flat earther or moon landing skeptic in here who also made good posts they would still be pretty annoying when they posted about obvious nonsense to rehash tired debates.
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I post about a variety of other topics. Neither of my March AAQC's, for instance, were related to Finland.
I know. I mentioned you as a reductio ad absurdum of the idea that simply posting about a certain topic a lot (which you do) while also posting about other topics (which SS does, also with AAQCs to back it up) is or should be enough to put someone on the mods' radar for a potential banning, modulo the topic.
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At least some of it has to be to do with culture, doesn't it?
Comparison: why don't forums like this get tiresome New-Atheist-style religion-bashing any more? It's not because that particular type of obnoxious atheist doesn't exist any more. They're out there, and likely much more widely prevalent than Holocaust deniers. I think it's just culture. If you jump on that soapbox now, you don't get a sympathetic ear, or even that much real controversy. Everyone just rolls their eyes at you and calls you boring. Or why don't we get the opposite - devout fundamentalists here to proselytise? I've been on forums that had intelligent, well-spoken fundamentalists who signed up to do that, and did so articulately even in the face of tremendous criticism, and obviously that demographic is still out there.
If the dominant response to Holocaust denial and anti-semitism here was collective eye-rolling, of the sort that indicated that nobody is interested in hearing about it or even arguing with it, I think it would probably fade. But for better or for worse, people go where they think they might have audiences.
The Motte is currently in that sweet spot where 1) Holocaust denial is allowed, which is what most of the comments so far have been alluding to, and 2) Holocaust denial is listened to. It causes controversy. It appears that there is at least a chance that some posters are convinceable, or at least, are open to engage on the topic. The latter point concerns culture, and can't be reduced to rules or mod strategies.
It's telling that far and away the most active threads this week were this thread, and Kulak's post about Indians.
You are the forum. If you think we talk about race too much, then write more posts and comments that aren't about race.
I am conscious of the fact, actually, that I probably engage in too much meta-posting. I fear that's a consequence of spending most of my time reading the Motte, rather than writing new posts, which I usually only do when I feel like I have particular knowledge to contribute. I think my biggest contributions were on the Australian Voice to Parliament, which was an issue where I thought I had a lot to add. That's not always the case.
But I am probably guilty of being one of those posters who does spend more time talking about what I want to see in terms of curation than I do actually providing what I want to see. I should make an effort to work on improving the ratio, I guess.
Sorry, I was using the royal "you" there, I didn't mean to give the impression that I was singling out you in particular. It was a message for everybody.
Personally I enjoy meta-posting.
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The topic of this thread isn't "the evidence we have about the history of World War II", it's "internal discussion and navel gazing about what norms we want to have in this community", which is a topic of endless interest on this site. A similar thing happens on any thread that mentions Aella.
I meant SS's top level post and all its replies, most of which are directly related to Holocaust discussion, not just this particular sub-thread where we're discussing meta issues.
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Look, this forum doesn't ban content. Well, at least not officially, I'm sure if I posted furry porn and some ads I'd catch a ban for it. But we don't ban viewpoints. I'm OK with that, even if there's a few viewpoints I'd rather not have to deal with and would probably ban if I was dictator of the universe.
But the trouble is that there are a few viewpoints attracted to forums which don't ban viewpoints, which proceed to repetitively post the same thing in lengthy screeds over and over again. As you note, holocaust denial is one, pedophile apologia is another one, incel screeds are probably in that category these days, there's a few others I'm missing. And that just gets annoying, so at a certain point you have to have a rule against it. And one-issue posting is probably the best you can do in that regard; I can minimize a single 10,000 word comment supporting pedophilia but if it takes over the forum I would seek a new forum.
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Yes, this is why @SecureSignals annoys me. I agree with the revisionists that historians have become lax/afraid of critically examining anything to do with the Holocaust and that has resulted in pretty shoddy research and a lot of historical misconceptions. And yes, it has culture war impacts. All interesting things to discuss, and normally I'd welcome that. But the fact that @SecureSignals doesn't actually give a single solitary damn about truth or historical accuracy, but throws up walls of text about "history" to obscure his actual agenda is sleazy and dishonest. That and his habit (like another certain frequent hit-and-run poster) of dropping by just long enough to rile people up before disappearing when the counterarguments stack up.
And this is why he got banned this time. I know it looks like a topic ban for wrongthink. It's not. It's a ban for repeatedly trying to shit up the place after we told him to at least pretend he's here to engage in general discussion once in a while.
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Horseshit. Banned for posting badthink too cogently, using a rule that doesn't seem to actually exist and which I've never even heard of outside the context of this particular poster. Completely transparent.
You guys can't even invent a reason that this post breaks any actual listed rule, so you've concocted a rationale out of thin air where you can ban someone for not making other posts that you feel they should have.
Like what's the proportion of X to non-X posts someone is allowed to make? Does it matter how often they post? Does it matter how long the posts in each category are? You don't know because you're pulling this out of your ass.
Massive loss of respect. You'd look less ridiculous just banning him for being a wrongthinker.
It seems you haven't been here for very long. This forum had this problem a bunch of times and has banned multiple people over it, with different offending topics. Holocaust denial is certainly an all-time-favorite, but there's been a pedo who would constantly top-level-post about age of consent, another who invented a new "scientific" theory of power and would write multiple absurdly long, barely readable screeds about it, and Skookum was quite recent. It's a rule only a certain kind of obsessive tends to run into, but it's important imo.
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Skookum got banned for one issue posting, and I think we've had a pro-pedophile poster and the teen liberation guy banned under it as well. It's definitely not a common think to get banned for, but it's been used before.
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I also disagree, mod hat off, that his angle is particularly cogent. He’s quite thoroughly on record defending Nazi “resettlements,” but now that he can claim his favorite punching bags are doing the same?
And his evidence for the sameness gives way in favor of paragraphs and paragraphs of harping on eyewitness accounts. It’s the definition of a strawman.
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Agreed. I'm not sure I have the writing skills to make a top-level post, but if I did, I'd be lucky to have even a single issue on which I was both articulate and interesting enough to make multiple posts on the topic. I guess that would make me a single issue poster (which there is no discernible rule against).
I'm also highly antipathetic toward governance/justice/moderation being levied based on identity. Judgment, in this and in every case, should be on the merits of the argument, not because of who posted it. Either the ball was in bounds or out of bounds; making that call shouldn't depend on whether Tom Brady or Todd Marinovich threw it. If it does, then we're playing a rigged sport here.
But there is a rule against single issue posting. Which is not to say that SecureSignals necessarily got banned only and precisely because he broke that rule, but there is a rule against it.
The problem with ignoring identity in making mod decisions is that it would leave the site open to people just repeatedly posting minor variations on the same exact thing whether or not it withstood rational analysis, since if mods ignored identity they would be forced to respond to each new iteration as if it was the first ever.
I disagree. I think people would respond negatively to overly-repetitive topics to the degree warranted, regardless of the username posted in the corner above it.
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The rule definitely exists.
Look at the post history in question and tell me that SS posts about multiple subjects. I actually thought he was doing better than this. The most recent I found was a month back, and while it doesn’t mention Jews, I’d still put it firmly in the category of apologetics. Go back a couple further, and even his analysis of topical movies has to harp on their Jewishness. Tell me, on what else has he spilled any volume of ink?
I'm honestly impressed at how we can write rules that are so ridiculously lax that I would never expect anyone to run into them, and have people run into them anyway.
Just go post about something every week! Here's a nerd making goat noises! Here's some nerds comparing cards in a game they've never played! Here's another nerd taste-tasting AI-created cocktails! this is not hard
Note to @SecureSignals to make sure he posts a bunch of random bullshit he doesn't give a crap about in between real posts. Just go to the Friday Fun Thread and drop some funny cat videos or something and ignore any responses once you've hit your quota. Just make a complete mockery of this stupid ass non-rule until they reach back into their ass and decide that actually total wordcount per subject was the real metric all along.
2-day ban for egregious obnoxiousness.
Being a snarky asshole is as detrimental to the discourse here as dropping sneering boo-outgroups or sarcastic, condescending insults directed at other people. The mods have always been willing to listen to people complaining/venting about our moderation. But if you all you want to post is neener-neener sneers directed at us by way of expressing how much you think we suck, we don't actually have to put up with that. And your record of low-effort spiteful antagonism is bad enough that I am very comfortable telling you to knock it off or else.
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Now listen here, sir. This is the CW thread, and I expect you to be on your worst behavior. None of this light-hearted nonsense!
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There is a "Post on multiple subjects" rule in the sidebar.
I think they would look much more ridiculous if they banned him for being a "wrongthinker", given the stated goals of this site, as opposed if they banned him for violating some listed rule(s). But in this case there actually is a listed rule. And in any case, mods have given themselves the option of using the "metarule".
So the question then is, did SecureSignals just get banned because he is a Holocaust denier? I don't think so. I've been around here for a long time and I haven't seen anything to make me think that Holocaust denial, in itself, gets people banned.
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I understand your frustration, but we clearly have wildcard rules about how mod discretion ubër alles when we consider a comment made in bad faith or a user who is here solely to proselytize on a particular topic. We're not a constitutional court, the precedent exists, as discussed before.
No firm numbers exist, but his mod log is lengthy indeed and has an equal share of AAQCs and warnings for posting about Holocaust denialism.
The latter isn't against the rules, as far as I'm aware. It's not even what he's being banned for. Criticizing Israel and questioning the Holocaust are perfectly fine, but if it's not obvious to you, it's the general opinion of the mod team that he's largely here just for that purpose alone, and I'm sticking to the party line in this regard. You're welcome to disagree, but keep in mind that AAQCs aren't handed out based on user votes alone, but mod discretion, so we have no problems with him when he isn't soapboxing.
After all, SkookumTrees got handed a ban, and that was for Eeyore-posting, which isn't explicitly illegal. It just becomes a massive nuisance when it's all you do, or even most of what you do, and especially if you keep at it when we ask you not to do it.
I honestly don't particularly care myself, even if it's a bit tiresome, but the existing plan was to hit him with a ban when the warnings failed. If that's changed after discussion internally, no skin off my back.
But warnings are not meant to be ignored. And while good behavior earns you a great deal of leeway, he really ought to know better. It seems to me he only behaves enough to get back on his hobby horse, and it's groaning at the knees by now.
(For the record, I didn't ask any of the other mods before making this ruling, so you can lay your disapproval solely at my feet, though I'll ask for their input anyway, given that you make a cogent point, however as @netstack points out, we do have official rules against single-issue posting)
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I have debated the Holocaust many times with many deniers and have little interest in doing it yet again. Almost without exception, they have been devoutly committed to Holocaust denial and little short of a time machine would change their minds. In this, ironically, they are the simply the mirror image of the normies who learn about the Holocaust as kids and have been conditioned to react negatively to any doubts about it having happened.
I originally came into the whole topic a few years ago with an actually pretty open mind, and I was willing to be convinced by deniers. I didn't have any sort of ideological predisposition to need to believe that the Holocaust had happened, and my politics does not rest in any way on the Holocaust having happened. My attitude to Jews is neutral and my attitude to Israel is negative.
Yet after trying to engage many times in good faith with deniers' arguments, I came to the conclusion that they are almost certainly wrong.
Deniers' arguments largely rest on a few different points.
First, deniers tend to absurdly whitewash Nazis' attitudes towards the Jews and for some reason refuse to countenance the idea that the Nazis would actually try to kill all of them. This despite the fact that there is really nothing special about the Holocaust. Large-scale genocides are common in human history. What would perhaps be weirder than the Nazis trying to exterminate the Jews would be if the Nazis, despite their stated attitudes about the Jews and their glorification of political violence in general, didn't try to exterminate the Jews once they had every opportunity to do so. Keep in mind that the Holocaust as described by mainstream theories took only a very small fraction of the total German war effort in terms of manpower and raw materials, so the common denier argument of "why would the Germans have spent the resources on this in wartime?" makes no sense. Anyone can do the math themselves - the reality is that the total Holocaust effort was a drop in the bucket for the Germans and they got a lot of slave labor from it too.
Second, deniers poke holes in the mainstream narratives. For example, by calling into question the exact details of how many bodies could be burned in a given span of time, or pointing out absurdities in some supposed survivors' testimonies. What this ignores is that it is inevitably possible to poke holes in any comprehensive theory about any event of the scale of the Holocaust. Any event of such scale will involve things that are hard to explain, seeming contradictions, eyewitnesses who are either insane or lying, and so on. It is also possible to poke holes in all of the deniers' alternative theories. However, they generally do not present any specific comprehensive theories about what happened, instead just producing hand-wavy ideas about the Jews dying from diseases or starvation. Whenever they produce concrete, specific theories, it is just as easy or easier to poke holes in those theories as it is to poke holes in any of the mainstream theories. Deniers' theories do not explain why censuses show an enormous reduction of Europe's Jewish population between the immediate pre-war and immediate post-war periods. They also do not explain how it would have been possible for a hoax of the scale of the Holocaust to have been successfully carried out and kept secret by a combination of the US, its Cold War enemy the USSR, various European countries, and thousands of eyewitnesses.
Third, deniers claim that because Holocaust denial is legally forbidden in some places, it shows that the Holocaust did not happen. But this does not follow. Laws against Holocaust denial can be easily explained by a combination of European fear of far-right politics, Europe's un-American attitude towards free speech, German guilt, and Jews' disproportionate political power relative to their population size.
As a history buff, what bothers me about Holocaust denial isn't that I have any ideological commitment to the idea that the mainstream theories are right. I don't. On the contrary, it would excite me to find out that a historical theory that is so widely accepted is actually false. The idea of it stirs my rebellious blood and my love of intellectual upheaval!
What actually bothers me about Holocaust denial is that I have seriously tried to engage with many different deniers' arguments, and when I did so I saw that their thinking is mostly shoddy, their arguments are weak, and most of them are in reality closed-minded and firmly unwilling to alter their core beliefs about the Holocaust even when they act as if they are fearlessly open-minded seekers after truth.
In my opinion the easy solution to holocaust denial, or really any sufficiently eugh-ified topic, is to shut down discussion unless the person engaging in it is willing to put enough on the line and agree on judging criteria for how the discussion could be resolved.
I.e. It would not be beneficial to me to discuss the topic unless the person is willing to be 10k$< and agree beforehand on how could we reach an agreement.
I doubt any holocaust denier would be willing to accept any judging by reasonable people, so thats as far as that topic would ever go, as it should. If you are so diwconnected from the foundation of productive discussion, correct or not the value of talking to you is negative.
Something similar came up during the rootclaim discussion on ACX. See the “Aftermath: debate” section near the end.
I assume the concern is that (if the court system hadn’t stepped in), the Institute for Historical Review could have kept denying any evidence they were given, then kept taunting people with “We’ve offered $50,000 for proof that the Holocaust happened, nobody has ever won our money, so the proof must not exist”. Or Kirsch could keep saying “Nobody will bet me $500,000 on vaccines, guess they’re scared and think they don’t have evidence” (when in fact it’s just that most people don’t have the time, courage, and risk tolerance to do this, especially when there’s no guarantee the right person will win the debate). In order to deny these people this weapon (the argument goes) we need to make it common knowledge that this strategy isn’t legitimate.
So how do you make it clear that your offer is genuine, fair, and thus admissible as evidence? As opposed to all the bad-faith debaters asking why no one will take their rigged bets. If you can’t look credible to the opposition, you won’t get many takers. And if you can’t look credible to the audience, “no one wants to take my bet” remains unconvincing.
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Wouldn't a denier just say the "reasonable people" have too large an inferential distance from the denier as to make them more or less incapable of agreeing with the denier even if the latter were correct?
I am not opposed to the notion of having skin in the debate, but for topics like this, I think you would just get bogged down into meta discussion on the credibility of sources on either side.
We can discuss how should topics be evaluated rather than the which the person would derive significantly less biased to prolong. If a forum is full of people arguing what is the best way to evaluate the conclusion of a topic that would be an improvement imo.
But it's not going to go anywhere. No one is going to back down on the credibility of their sources, especially if the inferential distance is too large.
I am referring to the fact that as mentioned, people that for example are posting about holocaust denial are very biased in that they would post about it a lot, and would be happy to argue with you about it a lot, because they presumably are derive a lot of enjoyment out of doing so, and because any argument on it still gives it more exposure.
But if any time they want to discuss how the Holocaust didnt happen instead they get bogged down in arguing about to decide how could arguments be settled, which is technically an entirely different meta argument, the balance of the discussion wouldnt be as biased. They wont get "unfair" utility by spreading their opinion more than before, and the argument would be one where both sides arent particularly enjoying prolonging.
The problem is that we'd have to discuss the facts on the ground, and any anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers would inherently get to promote their view that they don't think Jews are by default as trustworthy as others. For some, their goal is just to spread doubt and get the talking points out, not to actually reconsider their views on the Jews or anything related.
Im suggesting you reject any discussion of facts and immediately redirect it to " ok what external criteria are you willing to accept as arbiter for a 10k bet on this argument. Any discussion on how to settle a bet shouldnt include the facts of the argument.
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I don't think your representation of the Revisionist case is very good, I would divide it into these categories:
Census data: Inconclusive, heavily relies on the accuracy and political integrity of very complex measurements, and doing some simple additions and subtractions from many different demographic studies conducted before, during, and after the war in the Russian empire, Poland, and Soviet Union. It heavily relies on a level of precision (how many Polish Jews became "Soviet Citizens" on paper after the war?), accuracy and honesty that simply does not exist. Inaccurate census data also causes problems in estimating the death toll in other atrocities like the Armenian genocide. Census data also does not tell us how many Jews died under Soviet occupation during or shortly after the war. Revisionists suspect a very large number of Jews were deported into and likely died in the Soviet Interior.
Physical evidence: Strongly favors the Revisionist side. Historians claim ~3 million were murdered in these extermination camps, but the remains of approximately 0% have been identified in scientific excavations. This also includes technical arguments around things like burial density or cremation capacity, fuel requirements, etc. Although these arguments are usually not influential to non-Revisionists because they just assume that Revisionists are using math deceptively or not representing the mainstream position accurately.
Documentary evidence: Strongly favors the Revisionist side, as the Revisionist case mostly takes the documents at face value whereas the mainstream narrative claims that there was systematic euphemism and coded language. For example, there are documents where both Himmler and Pohl, head of the concentration camp system, identify Sobibor as a transit camp (Durchgangslager). The Revisionist theory is this camp was what the document says it was, the mainstream theory is that in their own internal secret documents they used coded language to camouflage the extermination camp. There are some documents that Revisionists struggle to explain, which is to be expected given that there are millions and millions of them. There are documents that the mainstream struggles to explain.
But most important of all are the documents that should be there but which are not. For example, you are likely aware that the top-secret communications between Auschwitz and SS headquarters were intercepted and decoded during the height of the Holocaust. The average person has not heard of these decodes because there is no indication in those communications whatsoever of what the mainstream alleges. The communication and death tolls reported in fact corroborate the Revisionist position. If it happened, it would be easy to discern from the decodes, in hindsight. That's only one example of an extremely broad, systematic absence of evidence that ought to be there but which is not. Apparently the Auschwitz Decodes do not even warrant a Wikipedia page.
Witness testimonies: The most strong aspect of the Revisionist case in my opinion. Witnesses are by far the most important part of the body of evidence for the mainstream narrative, so the Revisionist critique of that body of evidence is devastating.
You say Revisionists "poke holes", but that complaint is myopic. Mainstream historians claim that around 900,000 Jews were murdered, cremated and buried in a precisely known location. This is an extremely unusual and extraordinary claim. The documentary and physical evidence for this claim, by my estimation, conclusively disproves it. The reliance on witness testimonies and census data to prove something which could have easily been proven at any point with a scientific investigation points to the correctness of the Revisionist position. The Revisionist criticisms of the alleged cremation operation at these camps is absolutely devastating, and the side representing the mainstream can only really complain about "poking holes" rather than provide a convincing rebuttal. Any time we are, in the news, confronted with the logistical problem of cremating large numbers of corpses, Skeptical Paulie shows up to "Ayy Tone" inquiring how the Germans were able to cremate 6,000 people on open-air pyres every single day in the Polish winter in a small area of a small camp. It's not poking holes, it's a glaring weakness in the mainstream narrative which indicates this could not have possibly happened as they are claiming, and there is no convincing rebuttal to that point.
Even corrupt and dysfunctional governments have a huge incentive to do accurate censuses for the purposes of taxation, conscription, and economic planning. In the case of census data about pre-war Jewish populations in Eastern Europe, we also know that this census data is corroborated by numerous literary sources, both fiction and non-fiction, which describe large Jewish populations in pre-war Eastern Europe.
Hitler himself, in Mein Kampf, wrote:
Consider what it means for the Jewish population of Eastern Europe, if Vienna alone had 200,000.
As for the details of the operation of the death camps, first let us be clear. You do not simply disbelieve that the death camps operated as mainstream Holocaust theories describe them operating. You disbelieve that there was ever any deliberate Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews at all. And you are using the argument of "if the mainstream theories get the operation of the camps wrong, it means that the mainstream theories are completely wrong and, in fact, there was no Holocaust at all".
But you have not advanced, at least not from what I have read of your posts, a comprehensive and specific alternative theory. You have the advantage of not presenting a comprehensive theory, but instead just criticizing the comprehensive theories of others. Much of your argumentation is on the hand-wavy level of "well, maybe the censuses were wrong".
But you have not presented a comprehensive theory that is more credible than the theory that the Nazis deliberately tried to exterminate the Jews.
The idea that the Holocaust is a gigantic hoax that the US, USSR, various European countries, and eyewitnesses all successfully collaborated on creating and perpetuating, even at the height of the Cold War when some of the participants in the alleged hoax were enemies, seems to me to be obviously even less probable than the idea that you can cremate a million people in a year at a small Polish camp or whatever.
The Nazis had means, motive, and opportunity. Given their ideology, why wouldn't they have tried to exterminate the Jews? The Holocaust is completely in alignment with Nazi ideology. This isn't a case of "the man who is being accused of murder is by all accounts a nice guy and it is debatable whether he was even in the vicinity when the victim died". This is a case of "the man who is being accused of murder openly told people numerous times that he hated the victim, he had a history of threatening the victim, he had a history of violence against both the victim and others, and he was there in the house with the victim on the day that the victim died".
I just want to register my irritation at phrasing it this way. These we German camps.
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There are also incentives for various players in government to fudge census figures for purposes of representational allotment, project funding, public relations, etc. Not saying it happened in any particular instance, but we can't just point to an incentive here; census accounts have to be researched and justified like any other historical record/document.
Yes, but I can't think of any reason why pre-war governments in Eastern Europe would have wanted to invent millions of Jews out of thin air for their censuses.
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It's important to realize that the holocaust wasn't a single, organized event, but a gradual process which changed over time. It started off with angry, poor people looking for a scapegoat, and engaging in random acts of violence against the market-dominant minority. As the war developed, resources were in short supplly, so it became very convenient for the regime to have a group of people that they could work to death and not worry about feeding. Or simply beat up and take their stuff. The famous death camps only arose near the end of the war, and were a minority of overall deaths- they were the result of a regime gone mad in the face of inevitable defeat, and trying to find some insane way to still cling to a fantasy of victory. But that's where the revionists some times manage to "score points"- they point out correctly that the death camps didn't actually kill 6 million people, while ignoring all the more mundane deaths that were also part of the holocaust.
Perhaps there was "a plan" to resettle the Jews elsewhere. The Nazis had grandiose plans for all sorts of things. But those plans were rarely fleshed out in detail. Barbarossa was famously ill-planned, with a certain amount of wishful thinking and "this will be easy, no need to bother planning." Any "plans" they might have made for resettlement were, at the least, negligent homicide, indulging in fantasies of peaceful resettlement when any sane person would have called it ethnic cleansing.
What Israel is doing seems... somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, yes, it's not too much of a logistical stretch to imagine pushing the Gazans over the border into Egypt. That would be a relatively short walk, and then they'd be in another Arabic nation. But it would still be a violent ethnic cleansing, and the only way it would realistically happen is with extreme violence. They may get away with it, but it's not in any way morally justified.
This is Holocaust Denial.
It is clearly established that everything was 100% planned from the outset, the Wansee Conference executive summary was 100% written in code and everyone in the german government knew it, and they 100% planned a total extermination of the Jews from the beginning, and there are millions of unmarked graves that can't be found because they were perfectly cremated with the fuel the Germans didn't have to run their tanks.
Seriously Watch a video summary of what the official version is and has never been admitted as false or retracted. This Was all Proven at Nuremberg and western governments stand by it, and you can be jailed decades for questioning it in Europe
Nothing was proven at Nuremberg. If you're going to be crushing the prisoners' balls to extract confessions absolutely NOTHING they say can be trusted.
Exactly because a government must use force to control ideas they must be rejected apriori.
What evidence do you have this happened, or was even threatened, at Nuremberg?
There are news articles of the time from the US, Britain, and France that say torture was done to nazi officers for a variety of reasons including to gain false confessions. Family members of these officers tried to alert others of the torture but it largely fell on deaf ears as Germany lost the war and there was not much sympathy for these officers. One of the biggest efforts during the torture process was to get signed documents "admitting" they had exterminated jews in camps. Some claims by the nazis is that their families were threatened, they were assaulted all over their bodies particularly in the genitals area, and other general torture methods. Just one famous site that the nazis were tortured in was the "London Cage". The allegations of torture to captured nazi soldiers are pretty extensive, but the losers of the war didn’t get to have their voices heard.
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This is just Motte and Bailey reasoning.
Revisionists don’t merely quibble with minor to moderate details of the official account, they claim (typically) that less than a million, certainly fewer than two million, Jews died altogether and that Nazi Germany had no deliberate plan to kill any large number of Jews in an organized way, and those who did die died solely of disease and (unintentional) famine.
Disputing individual accounts is easy. There were at least tens of thousands of people who survived, of course some lied. There are 9/11 survivors who lied about being on a higher floor so that their escape seemed ‘even luckier’ than it actually was. Exaggeration is hardly unusual. But no quibbling with details or individual stories can change the three core facts of the Holocaust:
At least 4 million (largely) CEE Jews vanished during WW2 never to appear again. They didn’t show up in Russia, in Israel, in the West or anywhere else, never contacted friends or family again and so on. The size of Jewish communities in the former Pale was well-documented by both Jewish and secular/Christian sources, eg. the governments of Austria-Hungary, Imperial Russia and so on, censuses, statisticians’ estimates and extrapolations from numbers of synagogues and Jewish schools etc.
The death rate for civilian Jews was universally much higher, by an order of magnitude in many countries, than the death rate for gentile civilians, both urban and rural. This means their treatment can’t be explained away by the generic depredations of war upon the peasantry. The fact that almost all the Jews in many affected regions died while the vast majority of gentiles likewise occupied by a hostile foreign power survived suggests ‘special’ treatment that resulted causally in their death.
The leadership of the Nazi government had spent twenty years blaming the Jews for the many severe problems they had with Germany, from hyperinflation and capitalist exploitation to the Bolshevik threat, social and cultural degeneracy and, worst of all, the Treaty of Versailles. They had openly promoted the removal of Jews from all territory under their control since before they achieved absolute power, which they had had for a decade by the point of Wannsee. The war and Allied blockades prevented any voluntary or forced mass deportation beyond Nazi-occupied Europe, which was (as ‘mainstream’ Holocaust historians plainly admit) the longstanding Nazi preference. The war was increasingly going poorly for Germany as of 1943.
None of these are conclusive proof of what exactly happened, but they suggest that 4+ million people under the occupation of an invading power for whom a central shibboleth was hostility towards their ethnic group (and a desire to cleanse their territory of them) died during that very occupation in great disproportion to any other civilian population under the same occupation. The guiding presumption, even without any additional evidence, is logically that the German occupiers killed them or facilitated their deaths in some way.
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The Wannsee conference was in 1942, long after the Holocaust had already started. It did start the single deadliest phase, but it was only one phase: up to 2 million Very weird to call my post "holocaust denial" when im just talking about the details of how it happened. Not everyone was Anne Frank in Auschwitz.
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No, it is simply the functionalism-intentionalism debate of the Holocaust, or the bottom-up approach of the Holocaust. It's been debated by historians for decades without, as far as I know, anyone being convicted of Holocaust denial charges simply for advancing a functionalist perspective.
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There isn't really any "official version". Historians debate various questions about the Holocaust all the time. This is why I talk about "mainstream theories", plural, rather than some monolithic one mainstream theory.
I mean, the very fact that there is almost certainly no European country where BahRamYou would face legal action for his post already kind of disproves the point that you are trying to make.
Men were executed based on the official version. There was a trial, and none have walked it back and Jurisprudence has not denounced it.
Human Soap and Executions of 20k jews at a time by NUCLEAR WARHEAD were Proven at Nuremberg with US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson acting as prosecutor.
To deny these things proven in open court by an alliance of the best jurists of the US, Brittain, and USSR would be to deny the very legitimacy of any findings of the the Nuremburg court or any judicial system touched by them. It'd be akin to saying that the Allies US, UK, and USSR were an alliance WITH the most brutal totalitarian and deceitful regime in world history, not an Alliance to defeat that regime.
[citation needed]
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Speak plainly and drop the sneering sarcasm.
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There was an official version at Nuremberg, but there is no official version these days. There isn't even a consistent set of laws about Holocaust denial, as you know. Here in the US there are no laws against it at all.
You sarcastically called @BahRamYou's post "Holocaust denial" in order to make mainstream Holocaust theories seem ludicrous.
But this makes no sense. In my opinion, BahRamYou's post deviates from mainstream Holocaust theories in some ways. According to mainstream theories, which I happen to agree with on these points, death camps actually started in around 1942 and they likely weren't a desperation move in response to losing the war, they were created because they were a natural consequence of Nazi ideology.
However, despite the fact that BahRamYou's post disagrees with mainstream Holocaust theories in some ways, very few people would consider it to actually be Holocaust denial, and I find it hard to believe that any country in the world would legally prosecute him for it.
IIRC there are some (at non-Federal levels) but they're pretty much symbolic as they are superseded by the first amendment, and some even have language such as 'except as protected by the First Amendment' etc.
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For what it's worth, I looked into it more after making my post, and I'll admit I was wrong about the date of the death camps. Seems like they started when things were going relatively well for the Nazis, and slowed down later. Perhaps a response to an increased need for forced labor as the war went on? Anyway I'm really not trying to do Holocaust denial, just trying to explore the actual details of how it happened.
Oh, well I at least don't have any moral issue with Holocaust denial. I'm not against Holocaust revisionism in principle, I'm just against Holocaust revisionism if it's badly argued.
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In my imo you're admitting that the revisionists were right, and then moving the goalposts. The established narrative taught in schools and illegal to question is that the 6 million were killed in an organized fashion by an apparatus dedicated to that singular goal. Either millions of people were were sent by the trainload directly into gas chambers and murdered (establishment narrative) or they weren't (revisionist narrative).
The schools are idiots teaching middle schoolers with Anne Frank and other popular media. Official estimates are roughly 2 million shot in invasions, another 2 million from forced labor/starvation, and the other 2 million in death camps
Edit: not to say that einsatzgruppen mass shooting and lavor camps dont count as "organized", its just different levels of organization.
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No mainstream Holocaust theory holds that the death camps killed 6 million people. Mainstream Holocaust theories hold that death camps killed a certain fraction of the 6 million, but the rest were killed in various other ways such as by Einsatzgruppen and other kinds of roving military units that carried out massacres, or by forced labor and poor conditions in labor camps, etc.
While it's true the Holocaust theory holds that the camps only killed about 3 million (half if you use 6 million, more than half if you use a lower death toll like some mainstream sources), he is correct that the mainstream claims that there was no plan to resettle the Jews, and that resettlement plan as stated in documents was only a euphemism for their actual, secret plan to kill them all. Let's be clear about what the mainstream alleges.
Btw, why do you Nazis care so much about the Jews in particular? Why don't you try to deny the deaths of the many millions of Slavs and minorities? Or deny the plans for the Slav territories where they would all be starved to death or enslaved?
I actually know a holocaust revisionist who is very insistent on arguing his point at all times (especially lately due to the Israel-Palestine thing). One time I asked him about whether the Belarussian village burnings and rampant killings in the western side of the USSR (as portrayed in this movie) were true, and he sort of offhandedly said that the Russians probably lied about it, since the Russians lied about a lot of stuff, and also this was a matter of rallying support among Russians for the Motherland.
This of course doesn't represent SecureSignals's views or any other Holocaust denier's views, but I don't think there is nearly as coherent a narrative about other World War II happenings among revisionists. I wonder what the prevailing view of Imperial Japan is among Holocaust revisionists.
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I was literally taught in a german school that resettlement was a serious option for awhile and that some Nazi officials probably indeed favored it. It's just that when they ran into even moderate difficulties they jumped to "let's just
kill them allsend them to camps where they mysteriously vanish, then". Which is in no way surprising, since the Nazis are very much on record even before the actual holocaust started how much they'd like to cleanse the world of jewry.More options
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As far as I know various mainstream Holocaust theories disagree on the degree to which the Holocaust was planned as a total extermination ahead of time as opposed to it just organically evolving over time, becoming more and more murderous. The idea that at one point there was a genuine Nazi plan to mass resettle the Jews is not outside of the mainstream Overton window. What is outside of the mainstream Overton window is the idea that the Nazis never at any point actually shifted into deliberate genocide mode.
What I was taught in school (in the 2000s) was that the original plan did include resettlement, which became extermination when the Nazis couldn't find anywhere to put them. This ship was discussed. The article (from the US Holocaust Museum, the source for the "official story" if ever there was one) says:
Obviously this has undertones of "they were just doing this to justify their eventual murder" but it doesn't seem excluded from their view that the "anti-Jewish goals and policies" at the time were something other than raw genocide.
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They "disagree" because there is no basis for any of their claims that this is something which actually happened. They all claim that "resettlement" secretly became "extermination" but they cannot say who, when, where, or why the change, or point to any documentary evidence that this is something which actually happened.
The lack of consensus is strong evidence for the Revisionist position that there was never such a change in policy. They can't even formulate a coherent position that they agree on because every position they take is contradicted by a bunch of documentary evidence.
This is untrue. There is evidence of various resettlement plans that were first considered. There is evidence some of the plans were found impossible or infeasible to implement (such as Madagascar plan), thus they were not implemented. Lublin plan was partially implemented. If you argue that every Polish Jew was resettled to Lublin, you should explain why (all) the Polish Jews could not be found in Lublin after the war.
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I mean, the narrative I was taught in school was that there were a lot of different ways that Nazis killed jews - rounded up and shot in the wake of Wehrmacht conquests, beaten/burned to death in pogroms, worked/starved to death in slave labor camps, and yes, gassed in extermination camps. All of which was tied together by the Nazi's fairly-consistent rhetoric that Jews were the ethnic enemy of Germans and should be killed. The idea that it's "6 million gassed" or complete denial/revision seems like a really bad strawman to me.
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I don't think that people really do this on a mass scale, and I've never seen an actual argument put forth for this thesis. It seems like one of those cached thoughts that just got repeated enough until everyone believed it.
Not to say that large social groups are always infallibly correct when it comes to political beliefs either. But generally, people don't just make shit up out of nothing. When progressives complain about straight white men, are they looking for a "scapegoat" for all their problems? I don't think that's accurate. Their complaints are grounded in actual facts, its just that there's disagreement over the cause and interpretation of those facts.
Very naive. And it depends what you consider "nothing". You can base huge lies on tiny amounts of real evidence. Repeat it often enough, with punishments for nonconformity, people will adopt them.
I misspoke. That was a poor way of phrasing it.
I agree that people do make things up sometimes, although I'd note that an intentional lie as an attack against a designated enemy is different from "scapegoating".
It's mainly in the context of inter-ethnic conflicts that I'm particularly suspicious of the idea of "scapegoating", because the contemporary intelligentsia is structurally incapable of acknowledging that such conflicts might be grounded in genuine concerns (unless it's the concerns of a party who has already been given a privileged position in the oppression stack). Sometimes, group A doesn't like group B because group B really just did something to piss them off. But acknowledging this, instead of blaming it on misrecognition, irrational fear, and the nebulous force of racism, opens the door to justifying racism, in their minds. So there's a tendency to engage in motivated reasoning on this issue.
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Do you actually really believe it?
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Humanity is a lot more unhinged than your intuitions are ready to admit. We make shit up to justify mass murder all the time.
There's countless historical examples, and both sides of both major ongoing wars are blood libeling each other right now. The reason people initially doubted rumors of the Holocaust wasn't an assumption of good character on the part of Germans, but rather that the Entente had so thoroughly lied about the vile Hun and his violent treachery that any similar claims were immediately suspect.
Go read anything about the Cultural Revolution. Documented stories of people getting shot over criticizing a mango and cannibalism of people rumored to be the children of landlords will quickly dispel any notion that people can't become murderous mobs out of essentially nothing but insane nonsense.
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Yes.
"Men punching random women in NYC: a desperate last gasp of the male rage fueling MAGA"
My favorite example from the last six hours of making shit up out of whole cloth to scapegoat the enemy, although I'm sure it'll be topped by tomorrow
Or how #StopAsianHate saw a meteoric rise when the implicit or explicit blame was cast upon white men, but then got memory-holed when too many inconvenient videos surfaced that those predominantly responsible for acts of Asian hatred were black.
A convincing case can be made that modern liberal movements have in fact tamed their rhetoric of 'universal maga supremacy' vs 2015 because of the overwhelming amount of video evidence showing blacks (and MENA for europe) committing the antisocial crimes being lambasted, with exceedingly little evidence of roving gangs of white supremacists committing supposedly white supremacist crimes.
The end goal is to castigate the proximate enemy, with the likely outcome being that the neutering of the group identity will leave state institutional capture possible by progressives. This is the reason jan 6 is endlessly repeated in liberal media (and to unearth the memory hole, Anders Brevik) , while George Floyd riots are aggressively forgotten or characterized as false flags. If at any point the Powers that be are RIGHT that black criminality is a real problem, then it invalidates the operational means being deployed to undermine said Powers.
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Ah, Amanda Marcotte. Thus demonstrating that a bad penny always turns up. She used to be rather commonly mentioned on Scott's "Things I Will Regret Writing" posts.
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Really? Its a pretty common theory. See eg: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4497288
"Scapegoat theory has long been relied upon to explain periods of intolerance and opression towards minority groups."
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Sometimes there are reasonable facts behind the complaints, but have you seen the litany of things "white supremacy" and "patriarchy" are casually blamed for?
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I think it's kind of true.
The Nazis, or European reactionaries in general, didn't just randomly pick Jews to hate which admittedly is the impression you get from the most dumbed-down version of pop history, but the Jews did become scapegoats for the sins of modernity. The case against the Jews; they are responsible for social revolution, the dissolution of pre-industrial community and the family, the victory of soulless commerce over blood and soil, atheism and the death of God, so on and on, is false. The Jews were latecomers to the European revolutionary movement, and all of the seeds of later bolshevism which were and are often put down to some inherently 'Jewish' character, were found in the very gentile French Revolution. Modern financial capitalism was likewise pioneered gentiles, as was the initial 17th - 18th century rationalist assault on established religion, etc. Jews did however become very prominent in all of those scenes for a variety of reasons, and therefore became the most obvious target for a violent reaction modernity in general, which is what Nazism and to a lesser extent other fascist movements were. It's like genocidal shadowboxing.
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I think pushing Gazans into Egypt can definitely be morally justified. This war has been going on for 80 years and shows no evidence it will ever end. It can be debated but one can certainly take a view that it’s continuance is primarily the responsibility of Palestinians themselves. A final solution to just end the war but forcible removal can be justified on those grounds. Israel has no moral obligation to continue to support people who are basically a death cult against Israel’s existence.
Any point before say 1000 of the common era forcible removal of people was fine if you just wanted their land. I still don’t think we live in a time where a stronger power can’t be justified in getting rid of a weaker power that consistently makes war with them. I personally have no moral qualms of Israel pursuing a final solution to the Palestinian question at this point (not including death camps/mass executions etc).
The international community is likely doing a disservice to Palestinians. They are providing hope that diplomatic victory of some sort is attainable if the Israeli’s go too far. If you removed that hope they would seem to need to accept they need to change. But instead I guess they have some hope Israel gets cut-off and something something they kick all the Jews out of Israel.
Would you be equally liable to support a similar solution of removal of Jews from Israel, if the Arabs were powerful enougt to do it?
Between 1948 and 1980 Arab nations such as Yeman, Iraq, Morroco, Lebenon, Syria, (and Iran, but they're Persian, not Arab) expelled around 800,000 Jews. Some left voluntarily, others were forced out by official policy, others by riots and pogroms. In 1948 there were around 800,000 Jews living in North Africa and the Middle East (excepting Israel): today there are about 3,500. A great many of those Jews had their land stolen from them and left with what they could carry away.
I can't say I support the policies that led to the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Arab world: but given that it happened, I certainly do not support Jews going to war against the Arab world until they get their land back! Similarly, I'm not sure if I support Israel conquering Gaza and the West Bank, but I certainly don't support the status quo of all these Palestinians refusing to live in peace until they have their land back. They're not realistically getting their land back. It is time to move on, and make a better life.
Sometimes people just need to take the L and move on. I guess that's much harder when the people who beat your people in several wars (while vastly outnumbered even) are supposed to be the heretical subhumans who get stomped out by your glorious true believers.
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If the sides were completely reversed in all ways then Yes.
But I am not going to say I would support Jewish removal just because Arabs were strong if the Jews were not repeatedly picking fights with their neighbors. If the Jews did 10/7 to Egypt and Egypt decided to deport them to Europe it would seem fair to me.
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I don't know, does he think that Israel is a death cult against Hamas's existence?
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Since you've posted it again, you may recall a couple months ago we had a long and boring argument over Himmler's October speeches which I'm pretty sure lasted like a week. You took the position that when Himmler talks about killing Jews at Sonthofen and Posen, he is referring exclusively to partisans, partisan reprisals, and collateral damage. I said that the clear and sensible interpretation of his speeches is that he is speaking about the physical extermination of the Jews in the German sphere.
Last year CODOH finally published its magnum opus "Holocaust Encyclopedia," which has an entry on Himmler's speeches. I found it pretty interesting that authors, who obviously have every incentive not to, apparently agree with my position, and don't even attempt to argue that Himmler meant anything but the killing of all Jews in Germany's power. They just say that he was...lying. To himself, I guess:
(Though it should be noted that, as usual, the CODOH gang is being a little dishonest when they put the claim into Himmler's mouth that "each and every single Jew in the German sphere of influence had been killed" when he doesn't actually say that, and in the excerpt reproduced in this very same entry he clarifies that the Jewish question "will be solved by the end of the year" and that "remainders of odd Jews who managed to find hiding places will be left over.")
What, he was making stump speeches for the Führeral election of 1948?
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The upcoming Rafah offensive has had me seriously reconsider my support for Israel. At the very least Israel, as the overlord and conquerer, has an obligation to resettle and provide new accommodation for the people of Gaza when it destroys their previous homes.
Much like how it supports the Jewish settlers in the West Bank I don't see why Israel can't support a resettlement project of the Gazans into the West Bank too. It'll cost billions sure, but that's still worth it if Israel annexes Gaza once it's done with its operation. Instead we don't really have any good plan for what will happen to the civilian Gazans after Israel razes their entire land to get at Hamas.
Israel has obligations towards the Palestinians, all the more so because it's destroying their lives at the moment. First moving them south so you can destroy North Gaza and then moving them north so you can destroy South Gaza is not meeting them.
The minimal obligation expected of an aid recipient is 'don't waste it'. International aid, such little as it may be, has consistently been:
No reconstruction plan can exist if the recipients actively reject such efforts, and prior events (Jordanian Black September, Kuwaiti ) shows that accommodations provided even by erstwhile allies is not appreciated, and limiting charity takes a backseat to expelling hostiles.
With the Palestinian population consistently displaying underappreciation, if not active hostility, towards aid providing entities, what recourse is there for Israel? Israel offered to return Gaza to Egypt and West Bank to Jordan, and both declined. Why must Israel bear the burden of enduring the incessant attacks of a hostile population, much less actively support said population.
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Hamas is at war with the different set of terrorists running the West Bank, too.
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They will allow international aid bodies, the EU, UN, the US in to build temporary housing and provide aid, then the Gulf Arab states will throw them a few billion because of their propaganda war with Iran on the issue, then slowly Gaza will be rebuilt. And in a few years Hamas (or some other Islamist organization) will again take control as soon as the first semblance of democracy is returned, and all the while the rocket attacks on Israel will continue.
This whole thing is pointless. The only permanent outcome (for Jews and Arabs) in this approach is exile or death. The Arabs lack the weaponry to kill or force the Jews into exile, at least for now. The Jews are hamstrung by their political relationships and by regional politics such that neither option is viable in treatment of the Arabs. If the Hamas attack had been repelled without large-scale Israeli hostage taking, without the Kibbutz massacres and without what happened at the Nova festival, the IDF would have bombed Gaza a little, engaged in a few light incursions and left.
But because the scale of the atrocities committed on October 7th was so widely publicized in Israel, the people demanded blood, and in such an unstable political situation domestically there was no choice but to enter and destroy Gaza even though it doesn't serve anyone. You can't destroy the impulse that gave rise to Hamas; even if Islamism receded as a force it would only be replaced with secular Palestinian ethnic nationalism (which was just as happy to attack and kill Israelis in the 70s and 80s).
The most likely outcome is that in 10 years the relationship between Israel and Gaza is almost exactly the same as it was on October 6th. The rest is just playing politics.
Israel doesn't want to annex Gaza. Maybe a few hardcore settlers do, but they want to annex the Sinai too (and indeed attempted to settle it while it was under Israeli control). Israel is also a small country, even with a high GDP/capita they can't afford to rule over that many Palestinians indefinitely and they don't want to. It's not really the same thing as other colonial or imperial relationships. Arabs will never accept being ruled by Jews, and the scale of violence required to change that isn't acceptable to America or to the anti-Iran Sunni world that Israel needs to stay on the right side of. Neither Gazans nor the regional Arab powers want [them] to be resettled in the West Bank either, Gaza is Palestine (or part of it) to them.
Israel is in some ways a great example of the failure of democracy amid rising populism.
The only 'smart' thing to do is to withdraw settlers from everywhere except some of East Jerusalem and a few other key locations, force a state upon the Palestinians and hand the 'Emirate of Palestine' (comprising Gaza and the WB) to the Saudis and Emiratis to manage. But in most of Israel, that would be seen as letting the Arabs win and rewarding them for raping and killing and terrorizing Israelis. Nobody who did it would get it past the Knesset, they and their movement would lose power and they might well be assassinated.
Nations do win wars though. The Confederacy was conquered after its armies were defeated and its cities razed. The kingdom of Hawaii is long gone though the spirit of aloha remains. The Comanche likewise are gone. The allies actually did conquer Nazi Germany and Japan. Their leadership was executed and their countries remade in the image of the US. Neither has waged war or even raised an army since.
At some point, a people lose the will to fight. Total war tends to be convincing to that end.
That Japan and Germany don't have an army will be news to their 300k servicemen.
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Israel cannot do this because they also want to annex the West Bank and moving more Palestinians there will make that harder.
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Even if a conquerer has such an obligation, they do not have it until they actually succeed in their conquest. No aid to Germany was provided until WWII was over, for instance.
It's worth mentioning the Dutch famine in the winter of '44-45, which was largely caused by the German occupation, and during which the Allies (and others) tried to get food into the area.
But that's really just an interesting relevant anecdote and doesn't really disprove your general point.
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Too many eye-witness accounts of the Holocaust to be fake. Too many of them don't seem like the type to exaggerate, even if some of them were unreliable. Not plausible that they could all be lying. Also too high a proportion of people died whose names we know and whose life history we can track with certainty to be an accident.
Eyewitness accounts are well-known to be among the least reliable sources of evidence. The evidentiary value of eyewitness accounts heavily depends on the quality of those accounts. If Yankel Wiernik is not a reliable witness- and the cultural relevance (or lack thereof) of his work speaks to a lack of reliability, it also calls into question other witnesses who recycled claims in his work. There are essentially no contemporaneous accounts, and the "earliest" accounts are extremely unreliable. The accounts made decades after the fact are the ones closest to what is claimed today.
The evidentiary value of witness accounts relies on them being independent and contemporaneous, Soviet Show-Trials and Witch Trials famously relied on eyewitness accounts in lieu of other forms of evidence.
Eyewitness accounts are about the most reliable sources of evidence you get when it comes to history. The more of them you have the better, since you can cross reference them. And there really seems to be too many eyewitness accounts to discount, particularly contemporaneous accounts. Like a letter President Truman sent Eisenhower in 1945 about the problem of finding housing for displaced civilians in Europe in which he writes "Apparently it is being taken for granted that all displaced persons, irrespective of their former persecution or the likelihood that their repatriation or resettlement will be delayed, must remain in camps--many of which are overcrowded and heavily guarded. Some of these camps are the very ones where these people were herded together, starved, tortured and made to witness the death of their fellow-inmates and friends and relatives" and quotes a report from another source (Earl Harrison, an American on the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees) who wrote "As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy." And that's just one random letter from Truman, we've got scads of accounts from US soldiers, survivors, and European citizens. Famously Eisenhower held a press conference in 1945 where he said "When I found the first camp like that I think I was never so angry in my life. The bestiality displayed there was not merely piled up bodies of people that had starved to death, but to follow out the road and see where they tried to evacuate them so they could still work, you could see where they sprawled on the road. You could go to their burial pits and see horrors that really I wouldn't even want to begin to describe. I think people ought to know about such things...It is something we have been trying desperately to find out, whether or not the German population as a whole knew about that. I can’t say. It does appear, from all the evidence we can find, that they were isolated areas and this one piece of evidence that the mayor being shown the thing and going home and hanging himself would indicate he didn’t know about it. On the other hand, what makes the story so thin with me is when we find these very high ranking Nazis denying knowledge of it. If they didn’t, they deliberately closed their eyes, that is all. As far as I’m concerned these people are just as guilty as anybody else – those high ranking Nazis – but I think it would be impossible to say, however, the German nation knew it as a whole. But a lot of them know it, because I told them to go out and give them a decent burial. We made a film an hour long and we have made many Germans look at it, and it is not pretty." To say that there are essentially no contemporaneous accounts is simply not true.
If you discount those accounts because they were by Americans, who were at war with the Germans, then you're holding an absurdly high bar for historical evidence. I doubt more than 10% of what we teach in history books could meet such a standard of evidence.
What about archaeological evidence?
Eyewitness evidence is waaaaaaaaaaay better than archeological evidence when it comes to history. Ask any historian what they would rather dig up: a clay tablet with a contemporary account of an event, or a bunch of pot shards. Better yet, ask them if they’d rather have an ancient Akkadian magically transported to the modern day to talk to, or to find a new pile of old foundations and grave goods from the same era. Eyewitness wins every time.
It's better in the sense that it gives you more context as to how people thought about something. Invaluable for a historian.
But that's not what you said. You said it was more reliable. Which is not true. And why people who care about reliability more than breadth of content (such as the judiciary) care more about material evidence than eye witness accounts.
Conflating breadth and reliability as quality is equivocation.
Consider an infamous historical case similar to the one that occupies us here: did Carthaginians really sacrifice children? Which one is going to be more reliable, eye witness accounts of people engaged in total war, or human remains?
I disagree. While you have to take the potential biases or other points of unreliability into account when dealing with eyewitness testimony, they are still more reliable for a historian than most other forms of evidence. All evidence has to be interpreted properly, whether it's eyewitness testimony or a pile of bones in the desert. Bones, for instance, can tell us many useful things: some of the injuries this human may have undergone, and whether they had a chance to heal or not, carbon dating information on provenance, gender, level of bone health, etc. If the historical question you are trying to answer is "How did Richard III die" then access to his bones may be very helpful indeed. But if the question is "What wars did Richard III wage, and against who, and why?" then written accounts will tell you far more, and far more reliably, then digging up bones will.
You didn't answer my question.
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A comparison is indeed apt, because just like we have many well-researched contemporary estimates of the Jewish population of Central and Eastern Europe before 1939 and after 1945, we have many well-researched contemporary estimates of the Arab population of Gaza in 2023 and will almost certainly have good estimates after the end of the current war given how international the Palestinian diaspora (much like the Jewish diaspora) now is, how many relatives people have abroad, how many people are aware of extended family members and so on.
We will therefore be able to find, to a likely high degree of accuracy, what percentage of the civilian population of the Gaza strip (2.3 million pre-war) under Israeli military authority has died in the war that is currently unfolding.
If the percentage is close to the figures for the proportion of Central and Eastern European Jewish civilians who vanished between 1941 and 1945 (over 80%) or even the proportion for European Jewry as a whole, including in countries never occupied by Axis forces like the UK and most of Russia (~65%), I will accept that the events are comparable in precisely the way you insist they are.
I think, however, that it is very unlikely that even 10% of the civilian population of the Gaza strip will die in this conflict. It is unlikely even 5% will (the current figure, doubling the official number and taking all casualties as civilian, is perhaps 2%). This is well within the bounds of modern conflict (for example, 15% of the Korean civilian population died in the Korean War; as a comment below reminds us, 10% of Afghans died in the Soviet war there). 80% is not, which is why revisionists must argue that most Holocaust victims never even existed, not that they just didn't die.
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Just wanted to comment I'm really keen for responses to this one.
Seeing made up atrocities arise as a way to score points in the propaganda war and then get debunked in realtime, as well as reading "Iron Curtain Over America" by Beatty really shook my belief in any of the stories of German atrocities. It seemed obvious to me that without the internet "40 beheaded babies" would have just become sacrosanct and in a few decades denial of it would have been criminalized in the west.
Once you see the exact same institutions that ran public opinion in the 40s doing it, it becomes very hard to imagine they weren't doing the exact same thing in the 40s when the brazenness of the propaganda was infamous and is even parodied by everyone down to children's movies today.
The story of the boy who cried wolf has two sides. It's not just a lesson for the boy not to lie, it's a lesson for the villagers too. Just because people who lie about wolves exist doesn't mean wolves don't exist.
Also most historians think the German atrocities in Belgium during the first world war did happen, even if they were exaggerated at the time.
What about Japanese war crimes? Did those never happen either? What about Unit 731? Why would the United States make up fake war crimes only to become complicit in them later by trading the data produced by the research in exchange for immunity?
Notably none of those examples needed laws to jail people for questioning them nor were placed at the center of the American civic religion.
Ask what is most sacred in a society, and thats the most likely place you'll find the big lie.
You don't need to worship Newton's laws of motions BECAUSE they are amongst the largest revelation of pure truth in history. They hold regardless of your belief.
Likewise we do not need to worship Alexander or Napoleon for them to be major main characters in our history, revered despite being basically glossed over in our schools.
When it comes to Christ however, suddenly your faith really matters, because unless you believe he rose from the dead he stops being the greatest man in history and instead becomes a Schizophrenic unfairly denied a lawyer who'd put forth an insanity plea.
Thus it's really telling that this historical event and this historical event alone, unique amongst even genocides, it is DEMANDED that schools teach it happened AS MORAL MATTER, that unbelief is the ultimate sin.
We don't treat Holomordor this way, nor the killing fields, nor the plight of the Armenians, Hell in America and Europe you can argue that the Native Americans actually didn't have it that bad, or that slavery was the equivalent of the Russian serfs or just having a job, without being imprisoned in Austria or Germany.
This doesn't really compute. Claims about Armenians or Native Americans or the slavery in the US never had been a politically important topic in Austria and Germany. After the war, the arguments to the effect "Nazis were actually good guys / or better than the other guys in charge now / and all claims of their wrongdoings are lies" were politically important.
The equivalent question in the US context would be, dunno, debates about teaching evolution and creationism in the schools? There have been substantial efforts to have only one of the two included in the curriculum by disagreeing partisans. Extremely partisan behavior can be observed: many an internet atheist argued that teaching evolution is the truth, thus it is moral imperative to teach it happened (and equally imperative not to teach creationism). If given the power, some people would mandate it by law. Despite their moral posturing, the scientific evidence from archeology through biology to genetics is overwhelmingly supportive of the evolution.
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The fact that dissent is suppressed is a piece of evidence, but not a conclusive one.
Edit to elaborate:
The question "why is saying this unpopular thing illegal when saying all those other unpopular things isn't illegal?" has more than one possible answer.
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Germany actually recently did criminalize denying genocides in general and has also recognized the Holodomor as a genocide.. Holodomor denial is, unsurprisingly, already directly criminal in Ukraine, and the general denial of Communist crimes is criminalized in several Eastern European countries. By your logic, this should make you equally, or almost equally likely, to question whether the said Communist crimes happened.
The new push(well, one of them) in American school curricula is the crimes of communism, too.
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Most of the modern understanding of the Holocaust emerged in the 1980s, not merely long after the war and long after Israel's founding and long after the Germans had agreed to reparations but even after Israel's major existential wars to date, the last of which ended in 1973. While the Holocaust certainly serves as one of the reasons some Zionists argue for Israeli statehood, it was never (and still is not) the primary argument embraced by Jewish or gentile Zionists.
Well, I would say that’s going a bit too far.
The Zionists believed and believe Jews need their own state because anything else leads to persecution. The Holocaust was the large cherry on top of a cake of centuries of persecution in Europe, so it’s the ultimate proof of the theory.
As counterfactual histories go, if the US had allowed Jewish immigrants at scale the way we do now (legal or not), I’d bet Israel never gets founded because so many of the founding generation would have made a different choice.
I mean yeah, the Yiddish Policemen’s Union is kind of about this scenario. There were already many settlers in Palestine in 1939 and the relationship between Zionism, the Arabs, Arab nationalism and decolonization would have been so different it’s hard to say. I think they would still have tried for a two-state solution but they might have been overrun.
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It's an interesting question why no seemingly no one was interested in it in the 1950s.
If anyone has an idea, let me know.
As I wrote in my other reply, the delay is quite common. As a comparative example of unrelated WW2-era atrocity, Wikipedia article about Korean comfort women suggests that the Korean-Japanese debate and activism about comfort women in particular (opposed to Korean forced laborers and compensation in general) gathered steam in the 1980s and 1990s.
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The vast majority of survivors wanted to move on with their lives and never discussed it, often even with their children. The popular memory of the war was about heroic national successes - the French resistance, the Battle of Britain, Iwo Jima and D-Day, tank battles in North Africa, daring prisoner escapes from German POW camps - not the camps. The vast majority of the camps and places of origin of the victims were behind the Iron Curtain.
The Cold War became a news priority. The moguls who ran postwar Hollywood didn’t think anyone would be interested in depressing stories about Jews and, where they were interested in inculcating philosemitism among the masses preferred stuff like Ben Hur. (The 1959 Anne Frank movie also bombed iirc.) The Allied powers were interested in rehabilitating much of the German right to ward against communism domestically, rehabilitating the great majority of former party members, SS officers and so on, while the East Germans avoided teaching it entirely to fit with the state’s narrative of a great people rescued from fascist Bavarian capitalists by the Soviet Union. The Israelis wanted quite explicitly a new identity that didn’t reflect on being weak and pogrom’d in Europe, the organized Jewish community was more concerned with helping Israel which was under great regular threat through this period, and in any case the Holocaust was of little immediate relevance to the streaming flows of Arab and North African Jews who flooded into Israel in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Things began to change in the late 1960s because part of the German ‘68 movement in that country was about confronting your parents about what they actually did in the war, which became a big thing in that generation and changed the way WW2 was taught in West Germany. Then in the 1970s and 1980s more American Jewish authors started writing about the holocaust, more children of survivors became interested, and over time media that became influential like Shoah increased awareness of it. The tireless publicity efforts of people like Simon Wiesenthal contributed. Over time as American Jewry secularized, it became an ever more central part of Jewish religious identity. In Israel, where there had been a lot of resentment toward survivors who moved to Israel without wealth or possessions (often even in the press) the narrative gradually shifted away from ‘this is something that happened to them’ and toward ‘this is something that happened to us’.
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The Holocaust barely even rated as wartime propaganda. The extermination of eastern European Jews was almost entirely absent from newspapers, films, and broadcasts in the Western Allied countries. The bombings of Rotterdam and London and the Lidice Massacre had a vastly greater presence in the minds of the Allied public than Treblinka or Majdanek or even Auschwitz, let alone the Einsatzgruppen shootings. If the Holocaust was spun by "the exact same institutions" to gin up war fever they did a pretty shitty job of it.
What exactly in Beatty's book made you think the Holocaust didn't happen? IIRC he barely even talks about this. It's mostly your standard issue Bircher stuff but with the anti-semitism made explicit.
Holocaust was a furtive, secretive policy of getting rid of millions of useless mouths deemed to be dangerous, and contain and destroy through labour fit adults of the same ethnic.
Rotterdam was obviously very public. It doesn't get more 'public' than flattening a major city. Lidice were a punitive measure meant to scare Czechs. If it had been kept secret, it'd not have worked.
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He was a US Intelligence Officer of the Rank of Lieutenant-Colonel during WW2, wrote the reports on Decrypted Germans Cyphers, briefed Generals...
And he wrote a book about Jewish involvement in Communism and their ties to the Soviet union... Full Putin-esque deep dive on the Germans back to the Tuetonic Knight and the Jews back the Khazaria 800bc- 1952... And he mentioned the holocaust once as an off-handed "And there are still some people who still believe this ridiculous wartime propaganda by jewish lobbyists"
And a half Dozen US Generals wrote glowing reviews saying it was the most important book of the 1950s and exactly captures the truth of the Second world war.
Likewise Eisenhower, Churchill, and De Gaulle make no mention of the holocaust or final solution in their thousands of pages of works on ww2.
You'd think if out of 80 million dead in ww2, 6 million were jews, you'd get like 5-8% of time dedicated to it... just proportionately?
Nope. Nothing. In the 1950s they didn't act as if the camps were opened and the revelation of the greatest crime in history had just been revealed. The Holocaust only entered public consciousness in 1967 after the 6 day when the US pivoted to Israel.
I know, I read the book a long time ago, but I didn't remember him saying much about the Holocaust, which you just confirmed for me.
There were thousands of US generals during the Second World War. Who cares if six of them signed off on Beatty's book?
Beyond the fact that this meme isn't even true (I don't know where it came from. I think the first time I saw it was in Ron Unz's "American Pravda." Did he make it up?), and Churchill at least does mention the mass killings of millions of Jews, so what?
Most people, even western Jews, did not actually care that much about the misfortunes of Jews in eastern Europe. Not even the Soviets particularly cared. I think most of Curtis Yarvin's stuff is stupid but he's right when he says that Hitler was the only person of note during the war itself who actually thought massacring millions of impoverished Polish and Belarusian shtetl Jews was some kind of epic world-historical battle between light and darkness rather than a mostly irrelevant sideshow.
Why? Did you painstakingly go through the works of Churchill, Eisenhower, and De Gaulle, find that every instance of mass death during the Second World War which you agree happened is mentioned in direct proportion to its share of the total 80 million dead, and note a glaring exception in the case of the Jews?
So what are you actually arguing? The Holocaust was made up in the 60s? That isn't even the "steelman" denier position, which acknowledges that the bulk of the evidence emerges during the war itself and soon afterwards, they just find increasingly creative ways to insist it's fake or otherwise doesn't matter.
Have you tried assess the evidence for the Holocaust, whether through reading historical books on the topic or denier literature, or preferably both? Or are you just kind of squinting and going "idk seems made up."
Your brand is "based right wing edgelord who makes leftists mad" so I fully expect that if you ever do get around to reading the Castle Hill, Mattogno, Graf, stuff you will be very eagerly and easily convinced by their arguments, but at least do that before going "Holocaust fake because Churchill didn't mention in this book."
You do realize it's actually fairly trivial to find the digital version Ctrl-F for every reference of "Jew" "final solution" "holocaust", Etc.
And I did. I checked Unz work.
Eisenhower does actually mention a holocaust in crusade in europe. Specifically a "Bomber's Holocaust", carried out by the allies against the germans. But nothing about a mass extermination of jews, only that when released from the work camps they and all the other prisoners were starving from lack of food, largely because German logistics had collapsed.
In a press conference Eisenhower gave in 1945 he said the following: "When I found the first camp like that I think I was never so angry in my life. The bestiality displayed there was not merely piled up bodies of people that had starved to death, but to follow out the road and see where they tried to evacuate them so they could still work, you could see where they sprawled on the road. You could go to their burial pits and see horrors that really I wouldn't even want to begin to describe. I think people ought to know about such things...It is something we have been trying desperately to find out, whether or not the German population as a whole knew about that. I can’t say. It does appear, from all the evidence we can find, that they were isolated areas and this one piece of evidence that the mayor being shown the thing and going home and hanging himself would indicate he didn’t know about it. On the other hand, what makes the story so thin with me is when we find these very high ranking Nazis denying knowledge of it. If they didn’t, they deliberately closed their eyes, that is all. As far as I’m concerned these people are just as guilty as anybody else – those high ranking Nazis – but I think it would be impossible to say, however, the German nation knew it as a whole. But a lot of them know it, because I told them to go out and give them a decent burial. We made a film an hour long and we have made many Germans look at it, and it is not pretty."
In a military cable to General Patton in 1945, Eisenhower wrote the following: "We continue to uncover German concentration camps for political prisoners in which conditions of indescribable horror prevail…I have visited one of these myself and I assure you that whatever has been printed on them to date has been understatement. If you would see any advantage in asking about a dozen leaders of congress and a dozen prominent editors to make a short visit to this theater in a couple of C-54s, I will arrange to have them conducted to one of these places where the evidence of bestiality and cruelty is so overpowering as to leave no doubt in their minds about the normal practices of the Germans in these camps.
And, of course, in his autobiography Crusade in Europe Eisenhower wrote the following (page 446):
"The same day I saw my first horror camp. It was near the town of Gotha. I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain, however, that I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock.
"I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that “the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda”. Some members of the visiting party were unable to go through the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton’s headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt."
In the same book, on page 480, he wrote the following while discussing displaced persons (DPs) after the war:
"Of all these DPs the Jews were in the most deplorable condition. For years they had been beaten, starved, and tortured. Even food, clothes, and decent treatment could not immediately enable them to shake off their hopelessness and apathy. They huddled together — they seemingly derived a feeling of safety out of crowding together in a single room —and there passively awaited whatever might befall. To secure for them adequate shelter, to establish a system of food distribution and medical service, to say nothing of providing decent sanitary facilities, heat, and light was a most difficult task. They were, in many instances, no longer capable of helping themselves; everything had to be done for them."
And again on page 481:
"Of all the distressing memories that will for ever live with American veterans of the war in Europe, none will be sharper or more enduring than those of the DPs and of the horror camps established by the Nazis."
As you can see, in his autobiography he does not blame the deplorable condition of the Jews in the camps as being the result of a breakdown of logistics but on "Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency" and as the result of years of being "beaten, starved, and tortured" in "horror camps".
Starvation and "beatings" prove nothing.
Those are the conditions that existed in the Gulags in peace time, the conditions that existed in the british concentration camps for the Boer, and the conditions that would have existed in the concentration camps for Japanese Americans if America had lost the war and had its supply chains and rail networks destroyed by bombing.
The Claim of "the holocaust" is that the Germans uniquely set out to kill every jew in Europe, did so on an industrialized scale and with an efficiency never seen before in human, history, and that it is in a category of horror beyond any other genocide to ever exist including the Great Leap forward, Hoomodor, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and CERTAINLY worse than the Soviet mass killing and expulsion of the German Diaspora post 1945.
Nothing in "Crusade in Europe", Churchhill's "Second World War", or De Gualle's "Memoires De Guerre" suggest anything of the sort.
Indeed all of them portray the Camps as workcamps for enemy aliens (like the camps for Japanese-Americans) that collapsed and lost life support function during the onslaught of war.
Reading this claim is weird given you are replying to the very quotes from Crusade in Europe that are not "nothing" after you first argued there would be no quotes like them in the book.
One doesn't need advanced degree of historiography to realize that Eisenhower and Churchill have all the reasons to not care too much about Holodomor or German victims of Soviet brutalities or Boer victims of British concentration camps. Naturally neither can't make comparisons to Cambodia or Great Leap Forward because they had not happened yet in 1948.
All of that "uniquely", "efficiency never seen before" stuff sounds something from History Channel and makes your argument is strawman-ish. Yes, unfortunately, some people have habit of talking about the historical events involving death with as dramatic words as possible while scary music loops in the background (see exhibit A, History Channel). However, gesturing at drivel and pointing out that it exists is evidence about the drivel, but not much else. The question being debated is not the uniqueness or the efficiency never seen before (mostly not the special status of the Holocaust in popular consciousness either): the question being debated is how many people died and how and when. If the overdramatic claims concerning the Holocaust inflate its relative scale compared to other mass deaths, the overinflated assessment of uniqueness and efficiency is not evidence people did not die.
Unrelated to any claims Eisenhower made or any reports he sent, according to the statistics and documentary evidence, the major portion of mass killing of Jews happened in the East. Places that are not Gotha. Eisenhower went to places like Gotha. However, the claims indicate that he wanted to report that he was horrified by things he did see,
In general, it is not particularly suspicious Eisenhower and Churchill and De Gaulle (I admit I have little idea what De Gaulle wrote) discuss atrocities targeting Jews in fewer than 5% printed words (1). People tend to ignore and forget and not learn in the first place about atrocities that are not personally relevant to them. The general pattern is that until the advent of modern electronic mass media, it took decades for any atrocities to became widely known and people to care about them. Nobody in the West cared about the Armenian genocide when it happened or soon afterwards. It became only known when Armenians managed to gain some international prominence with their complaints about the past genocide. When the Holodomor was happening, the West considered it a famine like other famines. People started talking about it until after the collapse of the USSR. Nobody outside Asia paid particular attention to Japanese atrocities in China and Korea, the legal cases about "comfort women" and like happened decades later.
The reason why it takes time for atrocities to become known in is natural: Soon after a genocidal mass murder, the survivors often were not in a position to advertise their plight. It takes some time to emigrate out from the immediate aftereffects of the atrocity, then it takes time build stable life, it takes time get interviewed and/or get organized and/or become the person collecting evidence, writing memoirs, books and reports. Only after the memoirs and books have been printed people start reading them. It takes some time for the books and reports to became widely read and gain staying power. (Like today, also yesterday people forgot most of the news, unless they were personally affected or specifically paying attention. Especially WW2 had lot of atrocities, unreliably reported, difficult to distinguish from propaganda.) Consider Belgium's king Leopold's atrocities in Congo: they were a cause celebre for a brief moment in ~1900, and then were mostly forgotten for nearly a century. Congo never became that prominent place, they did not organize successfully to publish their victimization in the West. Same goes for the British atrocities in Africa. The atrocities in Congo were "found again" only in the 1990s after it had became popular and important in the West to talk about all atrocities and colonial atrocities in particular. Today, with widespread instant electronic communication and cultural milieu where comparing preferred outgroup to Nazis is a powerful political weapon, the handling of atoricites in the media as they happend is different than it was in the past.
Also, as an aside, you making a big show of Ctrl-Fin "holocaust", which is a very puzzling point for you to make: I don't understand what you are intending to achieve by making it. Rudimentary search into the existing "official" source as Wikipedia reveals that yes, use of the word "Holocaust" started getting traction in the 1950s and became common in the "late 1960s". This is well attested and well documented. Not finding any records of usage of a word with its modern meaning in works published in 1948 is not surprising, it is expected given the other available documentation. Like the question of "efficiency never seen before", the evolution of terminology and popular consciousness of "the Holocaust" is not direct evidence about to what Germans did or did not.
(1 if we accept your claim, which I am reluctant to do, given that you first argued that Eisenhower didn't discuss the Holocaust, then as another Mottezen provided quotes where Eisenhower does discuss the camps related to German atrocities, you proceed to dismiss it as "nothing". What other claims are "nothing" in your reading but not in other people's reading?)
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The claim of the holocaust is that the Germans acted in a systematic fashion to kill millions of non-combatants, primarily Jews, during WWII. It is certainly not the claim that this is the worst thing that any society has ever done. I believe the standard holocaust "narrative" completely, but I would consider the Great Leap Forward, Holodomor, Killing Fields, the soviet Great Purge, just about everything Japan did to China, the Great Terror of the French revolution, the War in the Vendee, and a great many other historical events equal in kind to the holocaust, with a few greater in degree.
And the testimony of Eisenhower, in his autobiographies and public speaking, and the testimony of the US Army investigations into the camps, and the testimony of thousands of survivors, all seems to point to the fact that Germany killed millions of non-combatants, mostly Jews, on purpose. Primarily through starvation or being shot, but they also definitely killed people in gas chambers as well.
They certainly do not portray the camps as workcamps for enemy aliens. Eisenhower portrays them as "horror camps" where Germans showed "brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency" and whose residents experienced "conditions of indescribable horror". At no point does he blame the conditions in the camps or the starvation of the camp inmates as being the result of collapse, or a loss of life support function during the onslaught of war. Find me the quote where he refers to them as standard work camps, or puts the blame on a lack of supplies rather than the Nazi "bestiality".
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Some 40% of WWII dead were Chinese. Do Churchill, De Gaulle, and Eisenhower devote 40%. of their writing to Chinese war dead?
Then the answer is no, you haven't examined any of the evidence for the Holocaust one way or the other beyond memes.
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The term "Holocaust" didn't come into popular use until the late 1950s.
Here's a Churchill reference. Of course it doesn't use the term, but it's about the holocaust.
Churchill in this message was actually reusing some of the same words he had used in a message to Anthony Eden two days previously (in the context of learning about the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz):
Ironically enough he torpedoes two denialist claims in this short message. No wonder they pretend it doesn't exist.
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“The same day [April 12, 1945] I saw my first horror camp. It was near the town of Gotha. I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain, however that I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock.
“I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that `the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.’ Some members of the visiting party were unable to through the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton’s headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.”
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe: A Personal Account of World War II, pp. 488-489 (in the edition Google Books can search, anyway)
No, he didn't use the word "holocaust" or "final solution". But he sure mentioned it.
He didn't use "Holocaust" or "Final Solution" or describe gas chambers, and the camp he visited is acknowledged as a "normal" concentration camp by historians, which did not have a homicidal gas chamber. So the brutality he mentioned is simply the terrible conditions in the concentration camps as Germany was being bombed at all sides at the end of the war.
There is no mention of gas chambers or an extermination plan in any of those works. A passing reference to "Nazi brutality" at a concentration camp which nobody claims had gas chambers is the closest thing there is, and it's not even close.
If millions of people were exterminated within gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, this would without a doubt be the most unusual event to happen in WWII. It wouldn't escape mention in any of these memoirs unless they privately dismissed those claims as propaganda which would fall by the wayside like WWI propaganda about "corpse factories."
The word holocaust was not in use yet at the time he wrote that book.
While Eisenhower did not talk about it specifically in that book, he was aware of gas chambers and crematoria. In 1944 he received a report from Captain Yurka Galitzine on the Natzweiler concentration camp that specifically mentions mass executions (by firearm), experimental gas chambers, and crematoria.
Colonel William Quinn wrote a detailed report on Dachau that Eisenhower received in 1945 that described the gas chambers and crematoria in detail, with photographic evidence. The report also references a contemporaneous account, a diary of an internee who recorded his experiences.
The contemporaneous documented testimony and photographic evidence seems pretty overwhelming.
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Eisenhower didn’t capture any concentration camps with gas chambers, though.
It’s worth noting that the Auschwitz commander admitted to running a death camp before his execution, the Soviet didn’t make a particularly big deal out of it(after all, they did worse things), but they said it was a death camp, and the committee at Nuremberg said it was a death camp.
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This kinda went the other direction for me, back in the day. I remember watching Ryan "AlternativeHypothesis" Faulk videos in high school and thinking "wow, this guy sure seems smart." Then his more recent and embarrassing foray into WWII made me think "huh maybe his videos were this ridiculous and wrong the whole time and this is a Gell-Mann Amnesia situation."
On the other hand, I remember the furor over "race realism" and the 100% confidence in the mainstream that everybody in that camp was pseudoscientific kooks, but in spite of myself I was convinced by the case they presented.
What is interesting about it is that everyone seems to have an argument that make things "click" for them. You can critique Ryan's work, but his argument he always goes back to is a strong one: the Western Allies liberated concentration camps and lied about extermination factories and death showers in the West, and that massively increases the likelihood that the Soviets also lied about death showers in the East. For political reasons the former was abandoned while the latter lives on- for now.
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Tangentially connected: I recently tried to read Sean McMeekin's Stalin's War, since I had read some other earlier works of his and found them interesting, but he made several basic errors regarding Finnish history and I couldn't just Gell-Mann through the rest of the work after that.
I would be interested in what mistakes those are - I read and enjoyed "Stalin's War" but have very little outside knowledge of Finnish history.
I knew someone would ask so I just went through it to find them again. I will keep to the Winter War chapters since that's where I first spotted them.
p. 126. "The Russian Imperial Navy had once placed its headquarters in the Finnish port of Helsinki (then Helsingborg)." Helsinki was never known as Helsingborg. It's Swedish name is Helsingfors - both this and Helsinki are official names for the city. I think that McMeekin is confusing this with the fortress of Sveaborg/Viapori (now Suomenlinna) which is right next to Helsinki and did indeed serve as a Russian naval base during the Grand Duchy era, though I'm not sure if it can be described as "the headquarters".
p. 127. " Had Mannerheim’s connections with the Germans not been so strong, the British might have lent his Finnish guards more support in the critical days of fall 1919, when Petrograd nearly fell to the Whites." This makes hash of the post-Civil-War era events in the recently independent Finland. Mannerheim, who had been a general in the Czar's army, was actually one of the less pro-German White Finnish figures of the era. Though the English had doubts about the general pro-German tendencies of Finns in general, what really happened was that Mannerheim tried to convince the Finnish establishment to attack Petrograd in aid of the Whites, but the Finnish government (probably wisely) refused, believing that the Russian Whites might very well not recognize Finnish independence and considering that Soviets, if victorious, would never forgive Finns for getting Petrograd ransacked.
p. 130 "The Finnish Army had a few 1914-era water-cooled heavy machine guns, a few light machine guns (the twenty-three-pound Lahti/Saloranta), and handheld submachine guns or koonipistolit (machine pistols, known as the Suomi)." The Finnish word for machine pistols is "konepistoolit", it's like writing it "masheen pistols". "Konepistoolit" literally means machine pistols and "Suomi" (Finnish word for Finland) was the name of the well-known Finnish machine pistol brand, making this something of a dumb sentence anyhow.
p. 137 "The idea was that this new “Democratic Government of Finland,” headed by the fifty-eight-year-old Finnish politician Otto Kuusinen (a Stalin stooge and resident of Moscow since 1920), would invite in the Red Army in order to, as Molotov’s communiqué put it, “establish good relations between our countries and, with united forces, protect the security and inviolability of our nations." Minor points, but Kuusinen's government was called as "People's Government of Finland" (Suomen kansanhallitus), and Kuusinen had been secretly in Finland 1919-1921, so he couldn't have been a resident of Moscow since 1920.
p. 162 "Stalin did gain a bit more than he had demanded before the war. In addition to Petsamo, Hanko, and various Baltic ports, Stalin acquired the entire Karelian Isthmus, where the most bitter fighting had taken place, now styled the “Karelo-Finland SSR.” Soviet gains neutralized the Mannerheim Line and provided strategic depth for Leningrad, though, as one Soviet officer lamented, “we have won just about enough ground to bury our dead.” But Viipuri (Vyborg) and Helsinki were still Finnish, and there would be no Soviet military occupation." Probably the most egregious errors are found here. Finland dind't lose Petsamo (Pechenga) in Winter War but only after 1944. The Karelo-Finnish SSR (note the misspelling) didn't consist only of the Karelian Isthmus but was in fact the previous Karelian ASSR with the (now emptied) newly conquered territories attached. And saying that "Viipuri (Vyborg) was still Finnish" is not just erroneous - Viipuri was ceded after the Winter War - but also nonsensical, since Viipuri is on the Karelian Isthmus.
There were some minor points I considered including (like whether Enso, mentioned by McMeekin as a town bombed by Soviets in the early days of war, was actually a town at the era), but they're debatable. In general, McMeekin presents the thesis of Winter War ending due to Soviet fear of Allied invasion (and also throws in Turkey there since he's McMeekin) rather confidently, considering that it's still a major and not completely resolved debate in Finnish historiography.
Many thanks!
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I read the book but I didn't notice any major mistakes re: history, physics. Was very disappointed by a few technology and arms related idiocies. McMeekin clearly was never into weapons or has not even a layman's interest in nuclear energy etc.
Considered writing him an email, offering to at least proof-read his next book so that he avoids such embarrassment in the future.
Can't say whether the book is true, as I'm not a period historian, but given Stalin's personality as portrayed by respected historians, it all hangs together pretty well.
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Haven't read the rest of this post yet, but this part in particular is dead wrong. Reprisals might be effective in some circumstances, but are by no means required. A good example is the US pacification of Iraq. The following post is made from someone with first-hand experience in the matter:
I'm not sure this post proves what you want it to re: the utility/necessity of reprisals. As I read it, it claims that the insurgencies in Iraq were broken by:
(1) coopting moderate factions inside the (Sunni) insurgencies and relying on them to do the dirty work themselves (does anyone want to bet that those Sunni militias didn't target civilian supporters of the radical factions as well as combatants under arms?), or (2) allowing the (Shiite) insurgencies to more-or-less achieve their objectives, which included withdrawal of US troops and ethnic cleansing of enemy civilians from insurgent-controlled areas.
Neither of those are particularly happy outcomes, and neither would be acceptable in the Israeli/Palestinian context.
What do you think ‘acceptable’ means? I’m pretty sure that Israel will ethnically cleanse Gaza and get away with it in a way that west-of-hajnal populations couldn’t. Frankly I shed few tears for the plight of the poor Palestinians despite it being horrible what happens to them.
I apologize, I think I was not clear. What I meant was that the OIF comment @Ben___Garrison cited itself does not provide convincing examples of the proposition that a partisan war can be handled without reprisal against civilians, because the methods described both explicitly involved significant intracommunal violence up to and including actual ethnic cleansing.
Personally, I think physical relocation and/or separation can be, but isn't always, a solution to intracommunal violence. More important, to my mind, is that a situation be reached whereby all parties agree that one side has conclusively triumphed, the other has conclusively lost, and that further conflict is futile to change this result. That's the only way that both parties will settle down and start funneling resources into building their own prosperity rather than attempting to destroy/displace the other.
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Gaza is already ethnically spotless.
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Iraq is a good example for why this is true, in fact. The US retreated from the first battle of Fallujah due to civilian casualties. If it had done what Israel is doing: ghettoize the population into a very small number of population centers, demolish the rest, and then deport the population into concentration camps with special treatment/scrutiny of military-aged males, then you would have actually seen a pacification of Iraq. But that is not a partisan war the US actually won, ditto for Afghanistan.
The US absolutely won the 'partisan' war in Iraq, it successfully put the Shiites in power and granted the Kurds a largely self-determined homeland and both factions remain in power in their respective parts of the country to this day. Whether that's in the strategic interests of the United States is an interesting debate, but the Sunnis no longer rule Iraq.
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Fallujah 1 was a conventional urban battle, not an anti-partisan operation, so it's not really getting at what I posted above. And yes, the US did effectively pacify Iraq in the short-term without slaughtering huge masses of the population through reprisals. It certainly didn't get long-term pacification though as ISIS spread almost as soon as US troops left, but that's a separate issue. An issue that Israel is also likely to face unless it's willing to actually genocide the Palestinians
The only way to get long-term pacification is by a hearts-and-minds victory. One possibility is getting the locals to all think your government type is great which is what the US tried in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that's almost certainly always doomed to failure. The other possibility is delegitimizing violence by snuffing out all hopes of victory, like what happened with Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. Israel also won't be able to do this since Palestinians are gaining a long-term diplomatic edge by the current Israeli overreaction.
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If they had dropped more napalm on Iraq, it would have ended like Vietnam. The Soviets killed 10% of Afghanistan's population and did worse than the US. France put two million Algerians in prison camps in the 50s. Turning Iraq into a giant prison wouldn't be sustainable. There are 44.5 million Iraqis. Maintaining a police state for a population that large would be absurdly expensive and have no point. There wouldn't be an actual endgame as the regime would get toppled as soon as the vast police presence was pulled back.
There could be another endgame. Kill everyone. Every last one of them.
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