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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   33158 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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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.

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