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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   33077 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.

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.

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