site banner
PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   24389 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The alternative theories are as follows:

  1. 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.

  2. 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).

  3. 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.

police officer who found the evidence was a virulent racist

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.

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.

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.

Jewish population figures were actually accurate prior to WWII

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.

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.

Says who? Do you doubt Bolshevik atrocities also?

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

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.

(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.

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?

Most of the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust died in 1942 - '43

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.

absolutely no grounds for assuming the governments of Eastern Europe overcounted Jewish population

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.

Bolshevik atrocities

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.

There is a book called The German War by Nicholas Stargardt

I wish you would quote something from it. From a review,

case that knowledge of what would be later known as the Holocaust was widespread within the home front by the summer and autumn of 1941. By that time, he argues, German atrocities on the eastern front involved hundreds of thousands of participants, eyewitnesses, and passersby. While some addressed these mass executions openly in letters, others either referred to them euphemistically or kept their thoughts private in diaries. Stargardt also demonstrates that many citizens were involved in the process of death and deportation, whether as executioners, witnesses, photographers (“execution tourists”), railway men, government bureaucrats, or other functionaries. The author’s case makes it difficult to believe that “ordinary Germans” did not know what was going on

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?

plenty of Nazis admitted to it

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.

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.

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.

Twelve million murders! Two thirds of the Jews in Europe exterminated, more than six million of them on the killers' own figures. Murder conducted like some mass production industry in the gas chambers and the ovens of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Majdanek, and Oranienburg.

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.

A distinguishing feature of the Dachau Camp was the gas chamber for the execution of prisoners and the somewhat elaborate facilities for execution by shooting. The gas chamber was located in the center of a large room in the crematory building. It was built of concrete. Its dimensions were about 20 feet by 20 feet, and the ceiling was some 10 feet in height! In two opposite walls of the chamber were air tight doors through which condemned prisoners could be taken into the chamber for execution and removed after execution. The supply of gas into the chamber was controlled by means of two valves on one of the outer walls, and beneath the valves was a small glass-covered peephole through which the operator could watch the victims die. The gas was let into the chamber through pipes terminating in perforated brass fixtures set into the ceiling. The chamber was of size sufficient to execute probably a hundred men at one time.

The room in which the gas chamber stood was flanked on both ends by warerooms in which the bodies were placed after execution to await cremation. The size of each room was approximately 30 by 50 feet. At the time we visited the camp these warerooms were piled high with dead bodies. In one of the rooms the bodies were thrown in an irregular heap. In the other room they were neatly stacked like cordwood. The irregular pile of bodies was perhaps 10 feet high, covering most of the floor space. All of them were naked.

DOCUMENT 159-L ATROCITIES AND OTHER CONDITIONS IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS IN GERMANY

When I said "Dachau was not presented as an extermination camp with gas chambers," I did not mean "no one or any document claimed gassings at Dachau," since I mentioned that at least one (Blaha) did. I meant that murder by gassings at Dachau were not part of any official charges against anyone, and no Dachau guard was ever accused of or executed for gassing prisoners, nor did any ever admit to it. Likewise, there were no "hundreds of jews who testified to American detectives about the killings," assuming that by 'killings' you mean 'gassings.' There was a single eyewitness who claimed one small-scale gassing at Dachau. It is not comparable to a place like Treblinka, where every single eyewitness, wither victim or perpetrator, was in accord that it was an extermination facility, and where every guard who ever spoke on the matter admitted to the fact.

I'd be inclined to say that the aforementioned quotes do show that Dachau was presented as an extermination camp with gas chambers by very relevant forces at the trial, so your assertion here would be wrong. I'd also argue that it was considered for at least a decade or two after the war to be a death camp. Which is why, for instance, Martin Broszat wrote specifically about it being problematic, and other publications, like the 7th Army OSS report, made great hay about gas chambers used for killing. So whilst there was no specific charge, there was certainly very clear belief that people in Dachau were killed by the use of 'gas chambers'.

Likewise, there were no "hundreds of jews who testified to American detectives about the killings," assuming that by 'killings' you mean 'gassings.'

That's true, I'm confusing it with another event.

More comments

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats