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Notes -
I have, actually, read the Sanning book, and found it, to put it mildly, underwhelming. It's essentially a series of it-just-so-happenses - it just so happens that the Polish demographical data on local Jewish population was vastly overcounted without either the Poles or the occupying Germans catching on to this, it just so happens that once this is established the same overcount can be expected to apply on other Eastern European nations as well, it just so happens that out of that population a larger-than-assumed share left for Soviet Union and the Soviets then deported/killed them (even though Soviet sources don't show such deportations and deaths - sure, such sources became available after the Sanning book was written, but that's no excuse for us to ignore them), it just so happens that there was a vast Jewish wave of emigration in the 30s to other countries not shown in official data etc.
And once you add all the it-just-so-happenses together, presto - the numbers advocated by the revisionists! Data massaging would be putting it lightly - and in many cases the data is essentially based on just the sort of testimonials, memoirs and what amounts to guesstimates by individual figures that revisionists don't generally consider to be valid (ie. the idea of Soviet deportations is justified by referring to several testimonies made in front of US House Select Committee on Communist Aggression) in establishing a Jewish genocide by Germans.
Beyond that, though, has there even been an attempt from the revisionist camp to make a similar demographic analysis post-Sanning, taking all the new data (methods of estimating populations in cases where demographic data is considered undertain, post-Soviet archives etc.) into account? If not, it speaks volumes that on this crucial field all that there seems to be is this one book from decades ago, while the general effort of the revisionist sphere seemingly concentrates on individual memoirs and technical camp details, and such.
Also, Karlin's predictive abilitites have not exactly shown their worth in 2022, regarding, well, most aspects of the Russian invasion and its presumed successes.
Karlin was wrong together with the whole world. Everyone from Putin to Biden, from CIA to OSINT twitter expected replay of 2014 Mosul or 2021 Kabul.
Russian maskirovka worked perfectly, everyone saw the manly recruitment videos full of brick smashing and bear wrestling stunts and believed in world's second super power.
Was there anyone notable who predicted that Russians will disastrously fail to defeat Ukraine?
Except our commenter Ilforte/ @DaseindustriesLtd ?
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/t0cnbx/ukraine_invasion_megathread/hyduv1l/
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/sxnftk/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_february_21/hy70oxd/
Sure, a lot of people (me included) expected Russia to do much better against Ukraine than it did. Karlin did out of his way, though, to predict that serious Ukrainian resistance would last a week and that of course Ukrainians wouldn't fight back in an insurgency because they're "hipsters in rainbow masks who use their cell phones every hour", which goes rather a bit farther than your usual Russian overestimation prediction.
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