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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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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.

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

This Was all Proven at Nurember

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.

and western governments stand by it, and you can be jailed decades for questioning it in Europe

Exactly because a government must use force to control ideas they must be rejected apriori.

If you're going to be crushing the prisoners' balls to extract confessions absolutely NOTHING they say can be trusted.

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.

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[citation needed]

Speak plainly and drop the sneering sarcasm.

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.

Here in the US there are no laws against it at all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 all send 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.

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:

[T]he German government had sought to accelerate the pace of forced Jewish emigration. The German Foreign Office and the Propaganda Ministry also hoped to exploit the unwillingness of other nations to admit large numbers of Jewish refugees to justify the Nazi regime's anti-Jewish goals and policies both domestically in Germany and in the world at large.

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.

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... What is outside of the mainstream Overton window is the idea that the Nazis never at any point actually shifted into deliberate genocide mode.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It started off with angry, poor people looking for a scapegoat

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.

But generally, people don't just make shit up out of nothing.

Do you actually really believe it?

people don't just make shit up out of nothing

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.

When progressives complain about straight white men, are they looking for a "scapegoat" for all their problems?

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.

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.

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."

When progressives complain about straight white men, are they looking for a "scapegoat" for all their problems?

Sometimes there are reasonable facts behind the complaints, but have you seen the litany of things "white supremacy" and "patriarchy" are casually blamed for?

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.

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.

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.

I don't know, does he think that Israel is a death cult against Hamas's existence?