site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 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.

13
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Ethos is downstream from Mythos, it really is as simple as the boomer-internalization of the gas chamber mythos.

What's the party line today from your type, that the gas chambers weren't real, or that they were somehow exaggerated?

The Revisionist position is the same it has always been: the story that millions of people were tricked into entering gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower was wartime atrocity propaganda. This propaganda originally centered around the Western camps until those claims were proven false after Allied investigation.

The mainstream position admits the gas chamber story in the Western camps was a hoax, created by false testimony and confessions, but then they claim that the "extermination camps" conquered by the Soviet Union were all totally real. Revisionist scholars have spent decades proving that the gas chamber story was likewise a wartime atrocity propaganda hoax in the currently alleged Eastern 'extermination camps' like Majdanek.

So the Revisionist position is simply that the gas chamber story is as real in the Eastern camps as it was in the Western camps. The mainstream position is that it was a hoax in the West but totally real in the camps "investigated" by the Soviet Union, where they fabricated evidence and denied access to Western observers.

The mainstream position is that it was a hoax in the West

[citation needed] that it is mainstream position

The mainstream narrative says that the six alleged death camps were in the east. See: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/concentration-camps-1942-45-maps

Notice how all the camps in the west were not death camps. So in the context of the mainstream narrative, how do you explain contemporary newspaper articles from the time confidently claiming otherwise? Obviously they are understood to be propaganda. In other words, a “hoax.”

Can you link mainstream position confirming that camps on West were described as extermination camps?

(It was claimed upthread that "western extermination camps were hoaxes" and want to see confirmation of that)

(again: it would not make big difference to me whether they gassed people to death or starved them to death in Auschwitz, but I obviously prefer to have an accurate info)

At Nuremberg, the series of Eastern camps allegedly responsible for the majority of gassing victims were barely mentioned at all in the trials. What was filmed and submitted as evidence were allegations that the camps liberated by the Western allies were the centers of extermination. Here is the Nuremberg Concentration camp footage which was submitted as evidence and shown in the trial courtroom supposedly showing a gas chamber at the Dachau concentration camp, here's a short transcript of that part:

Hanging in orderly rows were the clothes of prisoners who had been suffocated in a lethal gas chamber. They had been persuaded to remove their clothing under the pretext of taking a shower for which towels and soap were provided...

Even mainstream historians admit today that the clothing hanging outside the delousing chambers was not from prisoners executed in gas chambers, but that these were real delousing chambers use to disinfest clothing to prevent epidemic typhus. Dachau was one of the camps mentioned in the document I cited earlier, admitting that this claim was a hoax created by false testimonies and confessions:

The Allied Commissions of Inquiry have so far established that no people were killed by poison gas in the following concentration camps: Bergen Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, ...

In those cases, it has been possible to prove that the confessions had been extracted by tortures and the testimonies were false.

This must be taken into account when conducting investigations and interrogations with respect to war crimes.

The result of this investigation should be brought to the cognizance of former concentration camp inmates, who at the time of the hearings testified on the murder of people, especially Jews, with poison gas in those concentration camps. Should they insist on their statements, charges are to be brought against them for making false statements.

The Mainstream position admits that this film submitted as evidence at the Nuremberg trial was a lie. But it insists that the identical claims made in the camps conquered by the Soviet Union, the camps where the Allied Commissions of Inquiry were not allowed access to investigate, are the only camps where those claims were actually real.

Revisionists though have shown that likewise these Eastern camps which are currently claimed to have been extermination camps are the exact same story as the Western camps: real delousing facilities and shower rooms which were fabricated as gas chambers by Soviet propagandists, tortured confessions, and false testimonies.

Fun fact, if you review the Wikipedia page of the Nazi Concentration Camps film submitted as evidence and screened at the Nuremberg trial, the "Contents" section omits Dachau entirely and makes no description of the falsely alleged gas chamber described in this film. This is part and parcel for Wikipedia treatment of the Holocaust topic as a whole.