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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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The problem is his claims aren't concrete, but they take a much more time to debunk than they take him to spew out. They're classic conspiracy nonsense; if you were to listen to say, a charming and intelligent flat earther, he could spend all day telling you why this experiment or this photo or this piece of evidence is false in ways that seem eminently reasonable. He would also be completely unable to provide an alternative theory.

SS can come in here and say, "well, given that we lack a written order from Hitler, maybe there was no German attempt to kill European Jews?", but he can't and won't explain his idea of how ~5.7-5.9 million Jews just disappeared off the continent. They always argue by chipping away at the "narrative", never by providing one of their own.

SS, I think it's fair to assume, does not speak German. He doesn't speak Polish or Russian either. Those are the languages, at minimum, you need to be a historian of the Holocaust. Yiddish and some other eastern European languages help too, because the Holocaust was almost entirely an Eastern European phenomenon (somewhat at odds with its perception in the west). He has not done archival work, he has not done first person interviews, he has not grappled with primary sources in their original languages. He has done nothing himself except to read the biased and bigotry-poisoned works of other people who have also not done that work.

I'd be more interested in writing a post about the general logical failures of Holocaust denial than engage with him.