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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28486 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Ok, admittedly I listed to this podcast in the background while crunching for work. So I may have missed something...

But, I never heard holocaust denial? Everyone is saying he denied the holocaust, or acted like the mass slaughter of jews was a logistical error. When I listen to the podcast, I thought he was only referring to slavic POW's captured during Operation Barbarossa? And this was consistent with everything I ever read about it. Analysis about how the German's themselves went in under provisioned, and found themselves freezing and starving when the offensive didn't take only 6 months. I believe the designer notes for A Victory Denied or No Retreat cover the topic similarly in what those game designers learned when researching the invasion of Soviet Russia. It was a shit show, and a lot of POWs died of starvation and exposure, right along with their German captors. Obviously the POWs got the worse end of it, obviously there was a level of "these aren't our people" fueled neglect or cruelty. And to a degree Darryl Cooper didn't linger on the same litany of horrors popularized in Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that we are so used to, instead playing the contrarian. Maybe this can be viewed as downplaying, or minimizing, but then again that flips back to his thesis that WW2 history is quasi-religious. The over reaction to his contrarian claims or attitude was profound. And the people just repeating "Holocaust denier!" was amazing.

[I'll caveat that this is just from a quick browse: I absolutely don't find Cooper interesting enough to read at length.]

If you trust this transcript:

Germany, look, they put themselves into a position, and Adolf Hitler is chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it, that when they went into the east in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners and so forth that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps, and millions of people ended up dead. There you have letters as early as July, August, 1941, from commandants of these makeshift camps that they're setting up for these millions of people who were surrendering or people they're rounding up. So its two months after, a month or two after Barbarossa was launched, and they're writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, we cant feed these people.

We don't have the food to feed these people. And one of them actually says, rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn't it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now? And so this is like two months into the invasion. Right? And my view on this, I argue with my zionist interlocutors about this all the time with regard to the current war in Gaza. Look, man, maybe you, as the Germans, you felt like you had to invade to the east. Maybe you thought that Stalin was such a threat or that if he launched a surprise attack and seized the oil fields in Romania, that you would now not have the fuel to actually respond and you'd be crippled and all of Europe would be under threat. And whatever it was, whatever it was, that, like, maybe you thought you had to do that, but at the end of the day, you launched that war with no plan to care for the millions and millions of civilians and prisoners of war that were going to come under your control, and millions of people died because of that. You can look at it and say, well, yeah.

I don't think it's a SecureSignals level thing -- he does recognize the whole 'and then the Germans started 'humanely killing' them' -- but it's definitely not limited to prisoners of war, and it's pretty heavily in contradiction with the Standard History Generalplan Ost where Einsatzgruppen were already a policy in Poland back when the USSR and Nazis were allies, and simply brought East.

And my view on this, I argue with my zionist interlocutors about this all the time with regard to the current war in Gaza. Look, man, maybe you, as the Germans, you felt like you had to invade to the east. Maybe you thought that Stalin was such a threat or that if he launched a surprise attack and seized the oil fields in Romania, that you would now not have the fuel to actually respond and you'd be crippled and all of Europe would be under threat. And whatever it was, whatever it was, that, like, maybe you thought you had to do that, but at the end of the day, you launched that war with no plan to care for the millions and millions of civilians and prisoners of war that were going to come under your control, and millions of people died because of that. You can look at it and say, well, yeah.

It's amazing to me that the Jewish/Pro-Israel public hasn't begun to cotton on to how dangerous a game Israel is playing in Gaza right now, in terms of burning decades of carefully built up Holocaust credibility for the Jewish people. What we're seeing online is the anti-semitic right, the bogeyman that the ADL has been fearing for decades, successfully gaining rhetorical clout and likely converts by denouncing the obvious atrocities in Gaza. I find myself agreeing with a lot more posts by JQ posters than I would have before 10/7. And while I doubt I'll convert, a lot of people will. Burning that decades long project is a material cost of the war in Gaza that isn't being calculated.

denouncing the obvious atrocities in Gaza.

Can you list a few of these?

This is not a "shOw mE yeR fActs!" post. I am quite simply looking for basic data here.

Main stream outlets call someone having a bad hair day in Gaza an "atrocity', so I am hopeful the Motte can deliver actual data.

https://www.reuters.com/graphics/ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS/GAZA-HUNGER/myvmakwxrvr/

Cooper's argument is that Israel has taken on the responsibility to feed these people by removing any infrastructure to feed them and actively murdering those trying to deliver food supplies.

One hell of a bad hair day, if you ask me.

Again, wasn't try to be bait or be combative. Just looking for facts - which you have provided. Thank you.

I didn't take your post as bait. I think it's fairly obvious that bad things are happening in Gaza, some of them to good people, or at least to more or less neutral people. One can still argue that Gaza, and Gazans, "deserve" it, or that it is necessary, or at least that it is productive.

(I happen to believe that it isn't necessary, or even productive)

But it is beyond debate that bad things are happening, and that as a result of those bad things happening people are upset with Israel. Israel, and Jews in America, need to grope with that reality when making policies. Because people who are upset with Israel are going to start agreeing with people who have always hated Jews when they make the same points.

What is the actual number of starvation deaths. We’ve seen large scale famine deaths before, mountains of bloated and distended corpses, and everyone in Gaza has a smartphone - the evidence just isn’t there that large numbers of civilians are starving to death.

As far as I know it is not the responsibility of a belligerent in wartime to feed enemy civilians not under their direct control.

How are they not under Israel's direct control? There is no other government which exists and exercises any territorial control or monopoly on violence. Nor is it at all clear under what circumstances a new government could be formed that would be allowed to govern Gaza. If any citizen's committee of Gazans formed to try to function as a government in Gaza, it is not clear the Israelis would accept it, or would instead murder the leaders.

There is no other government which exists and exercises any territorial control or monopoly on violence.

Yes, Hamas is not technically a government. This is sophistry.

What territorial area does Hamas currently exercise government control over, with a monopoly on violence?

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The whole "oh the Germans just didn't have any plans for all the prisoners they were going take" is something I might believe from someone who knows literally nothing about WWII, but if you have any sort of passing interest you know about things like the Commissar Order, the Einsatzgruppen, the Barbarossa Decree, Generalplan Ost etc. If you have slightly more interest you would know about army- or unit-specific examples like the Severity Order.

The Germans absolutely had a plan for the millions of captives they were going to take. That plan was death.

"The German planning staffs had reckoned on capturing and thus having to feed up to two million prisoners within the first eight weeks of the war."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan#Starvation_in_other_German-occupied_territories

Maybe. But like I said, I still don't see any holocaust denial in there.

I agree it’s not explicit. On the other hand, he ends the video (it’s in the last ten minutes, certainly) by mentioning earnestly to Tucker “all the other things [related to what he calls WW2 mythology and the subsequent global order] we can only discuss privately”, the latter sagely nodding, which I think makes it pretty implicitly true, since they discuss pretty much everything else.

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