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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   33131 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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Holocaust Denial is receiving the most engagement at this moment than it ever has since it was formulated in the 1970s. By far. Yes it is going mainstream too.

Some of the keystone claims of the Holocaust narrative are plainly absurd and will be Revised as well. Many already have been Revised. It was claimed 4 million were killed in Auschwitz until the 1990s, when the death toll dropped to 1.1 million. It was claimed 2 million were killed in Majdanek at the Nuremberg Trial and the most recent estimates by the Majdanek Museum estimate the death toll from all prisoners from all causes was about 70,000. It was claimed 5 million Gentiles were killed in the Holocaust, but that has been Revised and acknowledged to have been a deceptive lie. The Holocaust has already been revised a lot and it has a long way to go.

One of the most infamous claims, that the Nazis manufactured bars of soap out of the fat of Jewish Holocaust victims, was Revised not too long ago and admitted to not have been true. The other salacious claim involving shower rooms stands today but it won't for that much longer. Holocaust Revisionism has entailed a steady stream of victories but it hasn't penetrated the public consciousness although it is clearly beginning to do so now.

It was claimed 4 million were killed in Auschwitz until the 1990s

This is mildly silly, in that the claimed total (based on the demographic impact of the Holocaust) was and is 6 million, and there were multiple camps, so the numbers wouldn't add up if Auschwitz was 4 million.

I can confirm that the number in the schoolbooks before the 1990's revision was 1.5-2 million because I learned history from the old books. (Technically the numbers are for the whole Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, including people worked to death in the work camps as well as people gassed deliberately in the extermination camps).

This article on the official Auschwitz museum website implies that the 4 million was always a blatant Soviet lie, the first serious estimate was about 1.5 million when western historians got access to the archives in the early 1980's, and revised further to 1.1 million based on better research done by the museum staff. As far as I can see the issue is that record-keeping was much worse at the outlying camps than at the main Auschwitz and Birkenau camps, so people kept using the Soviet numbers for longer for want of a better alternative.

I think when you're as fringe as Holocaust denial, even tiny increases in salience will be perceived, from the inside as significant. A jump from 0.01% to 0.02% is tiny, but still a doubling of interest.

Are we anywhere near the point where someone who isn't a conspiracy theorist or historical obsessive asks questions about the Holocaust? No. You mention a claim about the Nazis making soap out of victims - I've never heard of the idea that Nazis made soap from the bodies of murdered Jews, and I am, by normie standards, a WWII history nerd. (Simple test: I know what the Wannsee conference was. Most people do not.) I do not think that anyone near to what we might reasonably call the mainstream has heard of or cares about whether or not the bodies of Jews were turned into soap. As such, even if that's something widely believed and if there's been a change of mainstream academic opinion on it, I don't think it tells us anything about whether or not Holocaust denial is going mainstream.

I've never heard of the idea that Nazis made soap from the bodies of murdered Jews

I was taught this as fact in school and it was made clear before the Holocaust unit began that there was to be no back talk, no awkward questioning, no joking, or discipline would be escalated to upper administration immediately. I don’t know if I ever believed it, but I openly disagreed with the teacher on whether the renaissance was a good thing but uncritically repeated this claim.

Wait, really? They took us to one of the Holocaust museums as kids and the soap and lampshade stuff was front and center, right next to the pile o'shoes and gold fillings. It's 100% in "top ten things everyone knows about the Holocaust."

Looking at the wiki article, five years after our trip there were still published arguments going "we've gotta stop claiming this because it gives the denierists ammunition!", suggesting that team soap was still firmly in control in the early 00s.

The wider Holocaust exhibition at the Struthof concentration camp in Alsace (which, unlike the rest of France was actually annexed by the Reich in WW2) didn't mention soap when I visited c. 1993 - and it had a detailed breakdown of the financial value of a dead Holocaust victim based on actual camp accounts (I didn't cross-check the signs against the original documents in the glass case, but anyone bilingual in French and German could have done).

The various Holocaust museums in Berlin didn't mention soap when I was there c. 2015.

I suspect this is a US/Europe thing.

suspect this is a US/Europe thing.

In which direction? I l'm European and was bombarded with the soap / lampshade stories, and even Monty Python referenced the lampshades.

Can you point out where exactly the horror story touched you?

Sorry about the joke, but seriously, where exactly did you hear them or read about them? Do you remember?

I ask because I don't trust my own memories on this topic.

One time was from my history teacher (the soap / lampshade stuff).

I also remember being showed a film in one of the death camp museums, where the Nazis would throw people to get into an airtight van, and connect the exhaust to the passenger compartment. I don't know of this was officially deboonked, but since we're on the subject, it strikes me as an insanely inefficient method of execution.

Nope. I remember going to a Holocaust museum at primary school and that never came up. This is the first I've ever heard of anything involving lampshades either. The focus was much more on the history of intolerance, hostility, and repression that led up to the Nazis deciding to just kill all the Jews. The gruesome details of how they were killed at the camps were not gone into, I would guess partly because it's not child-appropriate and partly because it's not actually a useful thing to know in terms of what they were trying to teach us.

I don't have much experience talking to Holocaust deniers outside of the Motte, since, well, this is the only place I've ever met any, but one of the things that surprises me about them is their obsession with quibbling what seem to me like trifling details. I don't particularly care about the exact methods by which the Nazis murdered millions of Jews. I care that they murdered millions of Jews. That's the morally significant part.

Insofar as I find other questions about the Holocaust historically or philosophically interesting, I think for me it's mostly causal stuff? The intentionalist/functionalist debates, for instance, strike me as both interesting and instructive, in terms of how atrocities come to occur. But details about ovens or showers or what have you strike me as being mostly of niche academic interest.

I don't have much experience talking to Holocaust deniers outside of the Motte, since, well, this is the only place I've ever met any, but one of the things that surprises me about them is their obsession with quibbling what seem to me like trifling details.

As a non-holocaust denier, I find it hard to believe both that the focus on the story surprises you, or that you parse it as a "trifling detail". It shouldn't be hard to understand how being told a tall tale by authority figures, designed to make you hate and fear someone, back when you were too young to question it, only for it to turn out to be a fabrication.

I mean, I don't think I'd ever heard the word 'zyklon' in my life before I visited the Motte. I just wasn't told a specific story about how the Nazis murdered the Jews, beyond maybe a vague "they gassed them".

So I guess I'm completely unmoved by the idea that there might be a valid historical debate about the exact methods. Heck, the Nazis weren't the most scrupulously organised group in the world and the camps were mostly destroyed, so I would not be surprised if a range of techniques were used in different places. So I have no sense of there even being a tall tale.

What I remember from my childhood is that Hitler was bad, basically. I did units in school on the lead-up to WWI and then on the rise of fascism, but ironically I never actually did the wars. They weren't offered - we skipped from the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to the Treaty of Versailles, and then spent a semester on Weimar Germany and Hitler's rise to power, and then we skipped the war itself and came back the next year with the WWII peace settlement and the beginning of the Cold War. Presumably it was felt that there was no particular need for kids to understand all the military maneuvers; and interested kids (like me) would just go to the library and read all the military history books and pore over the maps (which I did).

I don't remember ever doing anything about Stalin, since he leaves the picture fairly early in the Cold War. There was a very common unit in Australian high school history about the Russian Revolution, though, which I didn't do (I had a different course), but presumably would have covered that. So most of what I got was that Hitler is bad and Nazis are bad, and they came to power in such-and-such way, and these are the sorts of things we should look out for in case it happens again, but the blow-by-blow of the war itself was not covered. That also meant that the logistics of the Holocaust were skipped entirely.

It's not as though we did nothing about the Nazis and the Jews - I read The Diary of Anne Frank, and I remember watching and writing about the film Au revoir les enfants, though those were in English class and French class respectively, not history per se. But the emphasis in works like that is much more about the breakdown in social trust and solidarity, people informing on their neighbours, and so on. I don't mind that particularly, because I think that is in fact the most important lesson to take from the Holocaust.

Anyway, I suppose it's possible that if you were taught very specific details about the death camps and sacralised those details, then learning that they might be incorrect or debatable would be challenging? But that sounds like a very different form of education to the one I received, and to be honest one that seems to me to have quite strange priorities.

Anyway, I suppose it's possible that if you were taught very specific details about the death camps and sacralised those details

Again, I'm having trouble believing that this is how you are parsing what was said in the conversation. No one is focused on, or sacrilises, the specific details about death camps, it's that people recognize they were told a story to elicit a very specific reaction, and are now reacting to being deceived in a particularly underhanded way.

You can claim that he details of what happened in the death camps don't matter, but that's refuted by the simple fact that if they didn't matter, they wouldn't be taught.

It's not as though we did nothing about the Nazis and the Jews - I read The Diary of Anne Frank.

That's a funny juxtaposition. I doubt I'd ever hear her name, if it wasn't for the exposure to American media.

But if nobody focuses on or sacralises specific details about the camps, then what is the deception? What is it that people recognise they were deceived about and then respond by questioning the entire event? The broad-strokes, big-picture narrative of the Holocaust (i.e. the Nazis, during WWII, deliberately attempted to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe, and transported them to death camps where they massacred them) is undoubtedly true, and if we agree that nobody outside a few niche obsessives particularly cares about the details of those camps' operation, what is the deception?

It's about the general levels of dehumanization and cruelty, not the specific ways they were implemented. The 20th century was full of totalitarian regimes that fell into genocidal insanity, but the Nazis are portrayed as a unique evil, and these sorts of stories are what props that portrayal up.

I think that there are two possible reactions to being found out something you were taught at school is incorrect:

  1. Everyone makes mistakes or embellishes a little. That doesn’t necessarily invalidate the basic thrust of events.
  2. If people I trusted told me (deliberately or accidentally) details that weren’t true, do I trust them to have got the big picture right?

Either is a legitimate reaction IMO and which one you lean towards is going to be influenced by your circumstances and world view.

I think the reason so many people are stroking their chins and hinting meaningfully at 2 is that on the one hand there is so much evidence of authorities lying about things (vivid masks, black deaths from police shootings, the hilariously biased history lessons I used to have about the founding of the British welfare state and women’s suffrage) and so much guilt tripping based directly or indirectly on the holocaust.

Politically, it would be very convenient for European conservatives if the Holocaust stopped being considered Europe’s Original Sin / evidence of the fundamental evil that lies underneath all nationalism. So it’s only natural for them to interpret ambiguities or historical exaggerations in that light. Of course, I’m a nationalist myself.

Yeah I'm not particularly Holocaust passionate and definitely was aware of the lampshade thing.

I was not aware that it was anything more than an urban myth.

When the Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated by the United States, the first unit on the scene was the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD/SCHAEF), which according to Wikipedia was tasked with "psychological warfare against German troops and recently liberated countries in Northwest Europe, during and after D-Day."

The PWD headed the "investigation" of Buchenwald, and that special unit was mostly Jewish. The most infamous propaganda from the PWD "investigation" of Buchenwald was a video of a forced march of the civilians of Weimar through the Buchenwald concentration camp, where they were shown a table that they were told contained a lampshade made of human skin at the request of the wife of the SS commandant, Ilse Koch, as well as two shrunken heads.

The artifacts on the table became a huge story reported by American media, although the human skin lampshade and shrunken heads end up "lost" before they are tested for authenticity. At the trial of Ilse Koch, during which she was in late-stage pregnancy after being raped in American detention, there was a different lampshade presented which was tested and shown not to be made of human skin. Ultimately those charges were dropped by prosecutors but she was sentenced to life in prison.

Thomas Dodd, American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trial, took a series of photographs posing with one of the "shrunken heads" allegedly made by the Nazis at Buchenwald and displayed on the table during the forced tour of Weimar. Dodd created a sensation by presenting the shrunken head at the opening of the trial. But ultimately that artifact like the others were "lost" before they were tested for authenticity and have never been found. Of course Revisionists claim the Buchenwald human skin lampshade and shrunken heads were atrocity propaganda planted by PWD. Mainstream historians have mostly dropped the claim of human-skin lampshades and shrunken heads at Buchenwald but at the time they were major news stories in American media.

They took us to one of the Holocaust museum as kids and the soap and lampshade stuff was front and center.

Where and when was this? That story has been outside the mainstream for many decades, and in fact some museums present it as a "myth". Are you sure it wasn't this?

I definitely remember lampshades made of human skin being presented as uncontroversial truth in the 1990s. And in the 2000s I remember it being presented as “this was something one psychopathic commandant at one camp was doing, but not a widespread official policy.” In fact, I remember it being listed as an uncontroversial fact on Karl Otto-Koch’s Wikipedia page in the early 2010s. Until I saw this thread today I didn’t realize it was now considered a myth.

Eastern Europe, 20-30 years ago which I suppose may confirm your claim of "for many decades" but leaves us with the uncomfortable conclusion that there are many, many, people who never got the memo and will have their mind blown when confronted with the updated version of history.

Yes, I'm 100% sure it wasn't taught as a myth. These sorts of claims were made by too many sources (museums, documentaries, teachers) for me to believe I misremembered them. The fact that there are non-SS posters here with essentially the same memories reinforces my belief further.

Okay, then drop some red pills on how many actually were killed. I've noticed people of your ilk never actually make any falsifiable claims. How many Jews were killed in the Holocaust? How many Gentiles? I can't take anything you say seriously until you post your own numbers and take a hard stand. Otherwise this debate is just full of moving goal posts.

No Jews were killed in any gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms. They didn't exist. It was one of two salacious rumors about shower rooms. One of those rumors was that the bars of soap given to the inmates were manufactured from the fat of murdered Jews. And the other rumor was that some of these shower rooms were fake shower rooms that were actually gas chambers in disguise.

Both of those rumors survived in the public consciousness long after the end of the war. In some cases bars of soap were given Jewish burial rites by some Synagogues. But now it is admitted that claim was never true. The other salacious shower-room rumor is still claimed to have been true.

The claims made by Holocaust Revisionists are:

  • There was no German policy/Hitler order to exterminate all the Jews as claimed.
  • There were no gas chambers disguised as shower rooms used to execute millions of people on the pretext of taking a shower.
  • The "Six Million" figure is a symbolic propaganda figure with no relation to the actual number of Jews killed in WWII.

The first point has essentially been conceded by the mainstream. Given that no such order has never been found, the prevailing theory focuses on "gradual radicalization" and mind-reading of lower-level officers "reading between the lines" and inferring what they were supposed to do without any written orders by their superiors. Yes it's as ridiculous as it sounds but given the lack of documentary evidence that's what they are stuck with. The reality is that there is no single historical consensus on that point because Revisionists are correct and they are wrong.

The mainstream is extremely defensive of the Gas Chamber story- if they conceded that the entire Holocaust narrative would unravel at the seams. But Revisionists have nonetheless proven their case at Majdanek and forced the mainstream to Revise the status of 5 out of 7 of the originally claimed "gas chambers disguised as shower rooms." So there's precedent for Revisionists making the falsifiable claim - "Hey you said this was a secret gas chamber used to kill Jews for decades but it was no such thing" and they were proven right.

The question of how many Jews died in WWII is a highly open question. Even mainstream historians like Gerald Reitlinger have put the figure as low as 4.2 million. Raul Hilberg himself put the figure at 5.1 million, well short of the vaunted "6 million." Revisionists vary significantly as well, estimates range from probably 300,000 to 2.5 million.

The Revisionist case hinges most notably on actually falsifiable claims at specific camps, such as the Revisionist claim it is false that 800,000 Jews were murdered, buried, unburied, cremated, and reburied at Treblinka. The mainstream could forever disprove Revisionism in the course of 48 hours if they wanted to by excavating these alleged mass graves, the location of which are precisely known. But excavation is strictly forbidden, echoing the exact same arguments currently being employed by the Tribe rejecting calls for excavation of the alleged Children's mass grave at the Kamloops Indian school. Not a single mass grave of the alleged 800,000 victims has been excavated on that site.

How many Jews do you think died in WWII? Of those, how many were murdered by axis powers?

I would estimate the higher range of Revisionist estimates, around 2 million. This wouldn't entail any Jews who may have died under Stalin during or after the war. None of those 2 million were murdered inside homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. They died mostly of disease like epidemic typhus, especially near the end of the war when the German infrastructure was collapsing from being bombed on all sides. The catastrophic wartime conditions led to a very high death toll in the concentration camps near the end of the war, and those images of the catastrophic conditions are those used most frequently to "sell" the idea to i.e. young students that the Germans had an official, secret policy to gas all the jews inside shower rooms.

Keep in mind that according to the official historical position there were no Jews killed by Stalin. Every single Jew who died in WWII, even if they were a partisan or part of the Red Army, or died under the custody of Stalin during or after the war, all are counted as Holocaust victims. It is not known how many Jews, especially those masses who were deported or evacuated deeper into the Soviet Union ahead of the German advance, died.

When it comes to more specific claims- such as concrete claims regarding the number of Jews killed in a certain time in a certain place, Auschwitz for example, the Revisionist position aligns with the prima facie camp records and top-secret decodes. It may surprise you to know that Britain had intercepted and decoded top-secret communications from Auschwitz to SS Command, including during the height of the Holocaust. Those intercepted decodes pertaining to top-secret communication contained detailed statistics regarding the number of prisoner arrivals, departures, and deaths and contained no reference whatsoever to any alleged extermination operation of millions of people.

The communications do show urgency regarding a high death toll caused by epidemic typhus, with SS command ordering the death toll to be reduced in order to maintain a productive workforce which was crucial for the war effort. The mainstream has no explanation whatsoever why these decodes would elide any reference, even in "innuendo form", to the ongoing alleged extermination program.

The concern over a high death rate caused by typhus led to the increased deliveries and consumption of Zyklon B which, according to camp records, were successful in reducing the rate of registered deaths. Zyklon B was important for delousing clothing and furniture to prevent the spread of Typhus. Of course the official narrative is that the insecticide Zyklon B was the murder weapon used to murder over a million Jews inside gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms.

This is to say, when it comes to specific questions over the numbers of deaths in a place like Auschwitz or Majdanek, the Revisionist position is based on official camp records which registered the number and cause of death of inmates, whereas the mainstream claims that the extermination operation was top-secret and so the people murdered were not registered at the camp and their deaths were never recorded, and they were all cremated so their remains can never be recovered... so they don't exist in camp records and the remains don't exist in any known location...

Essentially the Revisionist position says the camp records and top-secret decodes are accurate statistics of inmate deaths, and the mainstream position says that the camp records are not accurate because they do not include the million unregistered inmates secretly murdered inside gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.

From the Auschwitz Museum:

This data base uses the partially preserved Death Books (Sterbebücher) of Auschwitz Concentration Camp prisoners. The 46 volumes of political department (camp Gestapo) record the deaths of almost 69,000 prisoners who were registered in the camp and who died between July 29, 1941 and December 31, 1943. Their names have been entered in the data base.

When using the data base, please remember that the death certificates cover only registered prisoners who died in the period mentioned in the previous paragraph. The overwhelming majority of victims, mostly Jewish, perished in the gas chambers immediately after arrival, without being entered in the camp records, and without their deaths being noted in the German documents.

...

An analysis of the “denomination” item shows that the majority of the registered prisoners in the Death Books were Roman Catholic (31814 persons - 46,8%) and Jewish (“Mosaic”) (29125 persons - 42,8%). Others belonged to the following denominations: Greek Orthodox (3,6%), Evangelical-Lutheran (3,4%), and Greek Catholic (1,6%). This item is left blank on 1,275 (1,9%) death certificates.

The mainstream position is that the inmates did not exist in camp records, and their deaths did not exist in camp records, and the murder operation that killed them did not exist in camp records, and the murder operation was not referenced at all whatsoever in top-secret decodes, and the remains of those undocumented million inmates secretly killed inside gas chambers disguised as shower rooms with Zyklon B are nowhere to be found.... the Revisionists say that these records are reliable.

Ok, do you deny that axis forces carried out massacres of Jews and other ethnic undesirables?

Of course not, I laid out the claims quite clearly that are being contested. Reprisals clearly qualify as "massacres" and they were utilized in response to partisan warfare. Although the practice of reprisals against civilians was legal at the time it still constitutes a massacre. I wouldn't qualify inmates in a concentration camp dying of Typhus as a massacre. I also don't think concentrating a Jew in a camp to conduct labor is particularly more evil than conscripting a German, giving him a rifle, and forcing him to march on Stalingrad and being shot as a deserter if he doesn't comply.

Really the sacredness of the Holocaust comes to those three claims I clearly contested in my earlier post, what you are doing seems like a Motte and Bailey. We've gone from claims of top-secret plans to exterminate world Jewry in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, but you are asking me "do you deny massacres happened?" No I don't, neither do Revisionists.

So to be clear here, there were zero Jewish extermination camps? The Nazis did not purposely commit a genocide at all against Jews? They just died because of poor conditions in the war/camps? And why were the Jews in concentration camps to begin with then? Don't write a million paragraphs. Just give me straight answers.

There were zero extermination camps. There were concentration and labor camps and transit camps.

ALL of the alleged "Extermination Camps" were located in areas conquered by the Soviet Union.

In 1945 Allied propaganda claimed that all the concentration camps, particularly those in Germany itself were "death camps". The camps that initially figured most prominently were those in Germany such as Dachau, Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen... I'm sure most of us were shown horrific footage as children of the liberation of these camps, and it would have been those camps which had been liberated by the Western Allies.

But observers among the British and American occupation forces in Germany, while admitting that many inmates had died of disease and starvation in the last months of the war, had found no evidence at all of "gas chambers". So the eastern camps in the Russian zone of occupation like Auschwitz and Treblinka became the most prominent "Extermination camps" although Western observers were denied access to investigate those camps. All of the footage you would have been shown as a child are now acknowledged to have been concentration camps and not extermination camps.

Essentially, the "gas chamber" claim was alleged at the Western Camps but then disproven in every single camp the Western Allies investigated. Only in the camps where the Western Allies were denied access to investigate are those camps still alleged to have been "extermination camps."

Jews were concentrated into camps for the same reasons the Japanese were concentrated into camps in the United States.

Holocaust Denial is receiving the most engagement at this moment than it ever has since it was formulated in the 1970s. By far. Yes it is going mainstream too.

Mainstream? As in, I'll turn on CNN and see it?

Yes, the internet has allowed thousands of people who would otherwise never know one another to share stupid antisemitic memes, but that hardly counts as entering the mainstream.

It was claimed 4 million were killed in Auschwitz until the 1990s, when the death toll dropped to 1.1 million.

This was the Soviet claim, and it was not accepted by other historians. For instance, in Raul Hilberg's 'Destruction of the European Jews' (1961) , he estimated a much lower death count for Auschwitz (around or less than a million if I recall) and a total estimated death toll of about 5 million.

I don't know if you're ignorant or simply lying to advance an agenda.

I don't know if you're ignorant or simply lying to advance an agenda.

Holocaust denial is their hobby horse. They are very selectively well informed and pushing one particular agenda.

Yep. The way it always goes is the goal posts inevitably get moved so they can't get pinned down. They never make a single falsifiable claim. Just endless sources and gish gallops so that you can't go through everything they say. When you do catch them making a mistake, they never address it and just move onto something new. I asked him above how many were killed in the Holocaust. I bet I won't get a firm answer. They will just cast doubt on the official numbers and suggest they are a lie without explicitly saying so. It's incredibly annoying.

Mainstream? As in, I'll turn on CNN and see it?

When respected university press publishes book by Germar Rudolf, respected reviewers call it "stunning work" "scholarship of the highest calibre" "book that enduringly changes what we see" and the book is awarded many prestigious prizes, you could say that Holocaust revisionism had gone mainstream.

Mainstream? As in, I'll turn on CNN and see it?

Yes, the internet has allowed thousands of people who would otherwise never know one another to share stupid antisemitic memes, but that hardly counts as entering the mainstream.

Ah so we are at the "it's just a bunch of weird college kids nobody cares about in the Real Worldtm and it doesn't matter" step of the cycle we saw Woke messaging go through.

The vast and dishonest Zionist campaign in media and astroturfed across the internet to pretend that nothing was happening in Gaza and if it was happening it was a good thing was the best thing that happened to Holocaust Denial since, well, the Holocaust. Because suddenly a lot of people arguing on the internet, like me, found themselves agreeing with people like SecureSignals. Over and over. And a lot of them are probably going to look into things that SecureSignals says otherwise, and start to give them a chance they might not have before.

Wait, where was there a vast media conspiracy to say that nothing bad was happening in Gaza?

That sounds like the opposite of how I remember the last year and a half. On the contrary, it seems to me that the mainstream media has been obsessed with Gaza in a manner totally disproportionate to its actual importance. There has been a constant feed of events from Gaza, especially those critical of Israel - I remember a few weeks when the media could not stop talking about one specific hospital building that the IDF attacked.

If you compare coverage of Gaza to, say, coverage of Artsakh, which happened around the same time as October 7 and was much more unquestionably a genocide, the difference is stark. I suspect Gaza is that way because firstly there's more direct American involvement with Israel, secondly there's a large constituency in Western countries that cares about it (i.e. Jews, who are both wealthier and more influential than the Armenian diaspora), thirdly pro-Palestine activism has been a cause of the left for decades so there's a pre-existing infrastructure, and fourthly Gaza is just ambiguous enough to be spicy. A more obvious or unambiguous genocide doesn't mobilise the existing political coalitions, one to defend and one to attack. It has to be in the just-right zone, bad enough to mobilise people against it, but not so bad that people won't defend it. Gaza is in the zone - just ambiguous enough to be one movie and two screens, just enough for "Israel is committing a genocide!" and "Israel is defending itself from murderous fanatics!" to be both more-or-less defensible claims.

Artsakh wasn’t a genocide. The territory was captured and its inhabitants fled due to the (probably accurate)belief that they would be ethnically cleansed if they didn’t. Azerbaijan didn’t have to do anything, and nor did it.

I believe most definitions of genocide include occupying a territory and forcing all of its inhabitants to leave.

I think there was already a big debate on this forum a few months ago regarding how "genocide" (killing people of the wrong ethnicity) and "ethnic cleansing" (forcing people of the wrong ethnicity to evacuate) are not the same thing and should not be considered as having the same gravity.

United Nations page:

Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(1) Killing members of the group;

(2) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(3) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(4) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(5) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

As ethnic cleansing has not been recognized as an independent crime under international law, there is no precise definition of this concept or the exact acts to be qualified as ethnic cleansing. A United Nations Commission of Experts mandated to look into violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia defined ethnic cleansing in its interim report S/25274 as "rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area". In its final report S/1994/674, the same Commission described ethnic cleansing as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas”.

I think that the Artsakh situation (people of the wrong ethnicity evacuate voluntarily) meets neither of those definitions. On the other hand, though, this Reuters article does cite "several international experts" who say that the Artsakh situation does count as "ethnic cleansing", because "Azerbaijan's destruction of essential supplies" counts as intentionally forcing the Armenians to leave.

The territory was captured and its inhabitants fled due to the (probably accurate)belief that they would be ethnically cleansed if they didn’t.

We have a term for this. It's called "ethnic cleansing."

The vast and dishonest Zionist campaign in media and astroturfed across the internet to pretend that nothing was happening in Gaza

This is curious to me and could probably be the basis for a much longer post about how differently people perceive the form and content of "mainstream media".

Case in point: unlike you, it seemed like every time I turned on the news in the months following October 7, I was greeted with videos of bombs falling on Gaza and children crying out in terror; when I read the NYT, pictures of bombed out hospitals and more dead children were plastered over the front page; when I tuned into NPR on my way to work, I was treated to interviews like this on a daily basis:

"I've seen a lot, and I never compare conflicts, but that's got to be the most nightmarish thing I've ever seen. And the most, one of the most, inhumane and cruel things I'll ever see," Jilani says in a voice memo about an 11-year-old girl in the emergency room at al-Aqsa who was severely burned in an explosive blast.

The message was clear: something terrible, uniquely terrible, was happening in Gaza and Israel was responsible.

Was there a campaign by Israel to downplay what was happening? I have no doubt, but I, the everyday consumer of news, was inundated with what appeared to be atrocity after atrocity, as if every other conflict happening in the world had paused or was insignificant in comparison.

This was the Soviet claim, and it was not accepted by other historians.

It was etched into stone at the Auschwitz Museum for decades. It was the number of victims claimed at the Nuremberg Trials. It is a downward Revision of millions of deaths at that camp- of course Holocaust Revisionists maintain Auschwitz needs to be revised downward much lower even still. But Holocaust Revisionists, mathematically, can't revise the Auschwitz death-toll any more downward than mainstream Historians already have. The point being Revisionism is necessary and that has been proven in many cases like that one, and is necessary still in similar cases of wildly inflated death tolls at several other camps.

But "Revisionism" wasn't necessary, you just had to consult what mainstream historians, like Raul Hilberg, had been writing for decades.

If anything, this demonstrates that the mainstream historical account was always broadly accurate (Hilberg underestimated the death toll in 1961, we now know it was closer to 6 million).

The 4 million death toll was maintained by the Auschwitz Museum for decades. They literally had to go out and swap one memorial stone for a different one with a lower number. That is a Revision. Holocaust Historians are wildly variable in how many Jews they say were killed at various camps.

Deborah Lipstadt, our current United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism and mainstream historian, claimed that 1.2 million Jews were killed at Majdanek. The downward Revision of Majdanek from 2 million (the figure initially claimed by the Majdanek Museum) to 70,000 in the year 2003 is another case of a Revisionist victory that even flew in the face of claims made by mainstream historians like Lipstadt, and vindicated the findings of Holocaust Revisionists upon conducting their own archival research of the camp.

Holocaust Denial is receiving the most engagement at this moment than it ever has since it was formulated in the 1970s. By far. Yes it is going mainstream too.

Mainstream? As in, I'll turn on CNN and see it?

Yes, the internet has allowed thousands of people who would otherwise never know one another to share stupid antisemitic memes, but that hardly counts as entering the mainstream.

I think it's a little myopic. Millennials and Gen Z don't tune into CNN. If millions of them are talking about something on the most public and widely used platforms for news and political discussion it's becoming mainstream. I'm not saying it's mainstream yet because it isn't. But it is heading in that direction and has a bigger reach than it ever has before by far. But even if CNN doesn't touch it, and it goes ever more viral on X and being talked about by the likes of Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson, that is mainstream as far as I'm concerned.

The age in which CNN dictates what is mainstream by what it covers and how it covers it is so over.

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