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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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You know, this ‘the ADL uses Russian/Chinese influence concerns as a fig leaf to go after TikTok because it boosts anti Zionism’ is a well evidenced enough take that I didn’t realize where you were going with it until you got to Ion Antonescu, who regardless of his other merits as a leader was definitely a willing and enthusiastic participant in the Holocaust even when compared to other axis leaders like Horthy and Tiso who collaborated in such matters.

In Rumania even the S.S. were taken aback, and occasionally frightened, by the horrors of oldfashioned, spontaneous pogroms on a gigantic scale; they often intervened to save Jews from sheer butchery, so that the killing could be done in what, according to them, was a civilized way.

Things became so bad that the local Nazi representative, German noble Manfred von Killinger, intervened and asked them to stop and defer to the Third Reich’s own efforts. I feel like when a Nazi named “Baron von Killinger” is horrified by your brutality, it’s time to take a step back and evaluate whether you may have crossed a line.

(Slate Star Codex, Review of Eichmann In Jerusalem, January 2017.)

Not only that, but it's pretty odd to say "Calin Georgescu's "Holocaust Revisionism" amounts to praise for Romania's WWII wartime leader Ion Antonescu" when it's followed by a quote indicating that Georgescu also praised Corneliu Codreanu, whose antisemitism was absolutely under zero doubt by any standards.