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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   9773 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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Feels like this analysis is suffering from a lot of presentism. Or is including a lot in order to achieve it's political goal; singling out identity politics as a unique evil. I don't think this really holds up on closer examination though. The holocaust's identity aspects weren't unique to Nazi Germany. Jewish pogroms had already been common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Eastern Europe and weren't seen as especially noteworthy. It's true that ancient people didn't have the same justifications, but they lacked knowledge of genetics. Really Nazi Germany was just an evolution of the same feuds you cite, incorporating newer ideas about identity, namely genetics, along with industrial advances that led to a much larger scale war and much larger scale pogrom.

The concept of Nazi Germany as uniquely evil wasn't even really a thing during and shortly after ww2. After the war things were more pragmatic, we needed West Germany to oppose the USSR and we even recruited Nazis via Operation Paperclip. The Nazis as a unique evil was mostly spun due to it's utility not due to any morality. This happened later, around the 60s and 70s. That's when a lot of holocaust documentaries and the modern beliefs about the holocaust and Nazi Germany as the most evil of evils became more widespread.

The US was fully embracing its role as empire at this point and tabooing white identity politics served these interests. Also had the civil rights movement, Hart-Celler and all that garbage happen around the same time.

The holocaust's identity aspects weren't unique to Nazi Germany. Jewish pogroms had already been common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and weren't seen as especially noteworthy.

Few characteristics outside mathematics and the physical sciences are unique to anything, but the matters of frequency and severity are what set things apart. Can you give some examples of pogroms you think are comparable to the Holocaust in scope and severity?

  • It's true that ancient people didn't have the same justifications, but they lacked knowledge of genetics.

I don't think identity politics rests on a quantitative understanding of genetics. Everyone knows what tribes, races, and religions are.

The concept of Nazi Germany as uniquely evil wasn't even really a thing during and shortly after ww2

Can you support this, or any of the claims in the last two paragraphs?

Can you give some examples of pogroms you think are comparable to the Holocaust in scope and severity?

The one I've seen mentioned occasionally is the pogroms associated with the Khmelnytsky Uprising in the mid 17th century.

The accounts of contemporary Jewish chroniclers of the events tended to emphasize large casualty figures, but since the end of the 20th century they have been re-evaluated downwards. Early 20th-century estimates of Jewish deaths were based on the accounts of the Jewish chroniclers of the time, and tended to be high, ranging from 100,000 to 500,000 or more; in 1916 Simon Dubnow stated:

The losses inflicted on the Jews of Poland during the fatal decade 1648–1658 were appalling. In the reports of the chroniclers, the number of Jewish victims varies between one hundred thousand and five hundred thousand. But even if we accept the lower figure, the number of victims still remains colossal, even exceeding the catastrophes of the Crusades and the Black Death in Western Europe. Some seven hundred Jewish communities in Poland had suffered massacre and pillage. In the Ukrainian cities situated on the left banks of the Dnieper, the region populated by Cossacks ... the Jewish communities had disappeared almost completely. In the localities on the right shore of the Dnieper or in the Polish part of Ukraine as well as those of Volhynia and Podolia, wherever Cossacks had made their appearance, only about one tenth of the Jewish population survived.[35]

From the 1960s to the 1980s historians still considered 100,000 a reasonable estimate of the Jews killed and, according to Edward Flannery, many considered it "a minimum".[36] Max Dimont in Jews, God, and History, first published in 1962, writes "Perhaps as many as 100,000 Jews perished in the decade of this revolution."[37] Edward Flannery, writing in The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism, first published in 1965, also gives figures of 100,000 to 500,000, stating "Many historians consider the second figure exaggerated and the first a minimum."[36] Martin Gilbert in his Jewish History Atlas published in 1976 states, "Over 100,000 Jews were killed; many more were tortured or ill-treated, others fled ...."[38] Many other sources of the time give similar figures.[39]

Although many modern sources still give estimates of Jews killed in the uprising at 100,000[40] or more,[41] others put the numbers killed at between 40,000 and 100,000,[42] and recent academic studies have argued fatalities were even lower. Modern historiographic methods, particularly from the realm of historical demography, became more widely adopted and tended to result in lower fatality numbers.[25] Newer studies of the Jewish population of the affected areas of Ukraine in that period estimate it to be 50,000.

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