This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
A few comments from the editor: first, sorry this is a little late, but you know--holidays and all. Furthermore, the number of quality contribution nominations seems to have grown a fair bit since moving to the new site. In fact, as I write this on January 5, there are already 37 distinct nominations in the hopper for January 2023. While we do occasionally get obviously insincere or "super upvote" nominations, the clear majority of these are all plausible AAQCs, and often quite a lot of text to sift through.
Second, this month we have special AAQC recognition for @drmanhattan16. This readthrough of Paul Gottfried’s Fascism: Career of a Concept began in the Old Country, and has continued to garner AAQC nominations here. It is a great example of the kind of effort and thoughtfulness we like to see. Also judging by reports and upvotes, a great many of us are junkies for good book reviews. The final analysis was actually posted in January, but it contains links to all the previous entries as well, so that's what I'll put here:
Now: on with the show!
Quality Contributions Outside the CW Thread
@Tollund_Man4:
Contributions for the week of December 5, 2022
@problem_redditor:
Sexulation
@problem_redditor:
Holocaustianity
Coloniazism
Contributions for the week of December 12, 2022
@Titus_1_16:
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"This is the sense in which, post-2010s, all marriages are gay marriages."
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"Oppression makes brutes of a people, and the oppressor ends up riding a tiger."
@YE_GUILTY:
Contributions for the week of December 19, 2022
@To_Mandalay:
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I've read the discussions on the Holocaust. Maybe I didn't pay enough attention, but it seems nobody anywhere mentioned the various Holocaust memoirs and the role they play in the entire narrative. I find that odd.
Does anyone happen to have a list of the “letters to the editor”, letters to loved ones, journalized speeches, recordings and books published by American Jewish holocaust survivors within two years of resettling in America? There’s gotta be tens of thousands of these in local papers or archives. It would be all I would talk about if it happened to me. This would disprove denialism considerably, because there’s no way so many survivors, who migrated to many different parts of America, would have all their ducks in a row.
Holocaust deniers go the other way with this one. They find an account written by a purported Holocaust survivor with a clearly fictional detail and use it as evidence that the Holocaust was fake.
They found a few really silly lies about the Holocaust. /pol/ has a laugh about them every now and then. They of course ignore all the other written statements by Holocaust survivors that aren't made up.
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One of the most memorable and influential works on the Soviet Gulag camp system is a literal "Gulag memoir" (well, partly, at least) - "The Gulag Archipelago" by Solzhenitzyn. While important as a literary work, it's not a scientific study, and the estimates within of total gulag deaths, for example, are generally considered by modern studies utilizing actual Soviet records to be vastly exagerrated. Solzhenitzyn's ex-wife said that "Solzhenitsyn’s descriptions of the camps that the information he received from prisoners and exiles “bore a folkloric and frequently a mythical character.”"
Nevertheless, people who refer to the unreliability of the Holocaust memoirs as an argument for Holocaust revisionism generally don't consider the claimed unreliability of undoubtedly the main Gulag camp narrative - still the main source of Gulag camps for many Westerners - to form a similar case for revisionism of Stalinist times. (Perhaps you might find people who are both Holocaust and Gulag revisionists in Russia?)
There are of course Gulag denialists in Russia, but they are not widely popular, for one crucial reason. Stalinists, who would be a natural audience for this, do not really think gulags were a bad thing. Surely, there were some excesses (перегибы), but in general it was a grandiose reform of the country, which always had and continues to have myriads of enemies, both outside and within - you can not do anything without somehow suppressing those enemies! Western inventions like freedom of speech, civil society with open political discussion, rule of law, etc. are not fit for Russia's special environment anyway, since Russia has its own destiny, and that destiny always included incarceration and/or otherwise removal of enemies of the people from the society. So there's nothing to deny really - except for rare instances of some particular person getting a bit over-zealous, but this is really small thing - there are criminals and bad cops everywhere, so are in Russia, nothing really to see there. It's not like USA doesn't have prisons - so Russia has prisons too, nothing special. So, nothing to deny.
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I have not seen Revisionists beleaguer the conditions in the Gulags based on witness testimony. The Gulags are used by Revisionists as a counterpart, an attempt to draw an equivalency, to the German concentration camps. If you take away the 4 or 5 alleged "extermination camps" with homicidal gas chambers in Poland, and are the left with the German concentration camp system as described in documents, then there is an easy comparison with the Gulags of the Soviets (who were an ally), and the American concentration camps to a lesser extent.
Gulag revisionists tend to be sympathetic to the Soviet Union in a similar way that Revisionists also tend to be sympathetic to Germany. But any Russian or Soviet sympathizers are going to rightfully be proud of probably the greatest accomplishment of the Soviet Union which earns it universal praise among the criticism- defeating Nazi Germany.
The Holocaust narrative adds a lot of moral weight and credibility to that accomplishment, and if you take it away, the "victory" and costs of that devastating conflict become a lot more ambiguous- particularly for the Western Allies. I think that's why I am not aware of any dual-Gulag/Holocaust Revisionists, and the conditions of the gulags is not something I have looked into so I cannot say.
Insofar as I've understood, the Soviet narrative was always concentrated on the crimes of Nazis against the Soviet people generally (now metastatized into Nazi crimes against Russia in the modern Russian patriotic narrative, with the obvious connection to the idea of Ukrainian Nazis continuing the same), not on the specific crimes against the Jews (ie. the Holocaust, as commonly understood).
Why not? Why attempt to revise only one genocide?
The Holocaust is truly a mishmash of myth and reality divided between the East and the West. On the one hand you have @johnfabian mentioning that the experience of Western Jews colors public perception of the Holocaust in the West, whereas the greatest parts of the Holocaust and gas chamber extermination actually happened in areas which were conquered and fell behind the Iron Curtain- where Western investigators were denied access to key evidence. And after the Nuremberg Trials, in which the Soviets provided most of the evidence and interrogations of witnesses that have informed the academic "Holocaust" narrative, the Holocaust did not become a part of Soviet culture in the way the Holocaust has become central to Western culture.
So you have a weird scenario where the East had the custody of most of the key evidence, but the Holocaust did not become part of cultural consciousness (where it actually happened (!)), but in the West, which did not have custody of most of the key evidence, the Holocaust became central to the culture. This was accomplished with the memoirs and Hollywood productions that @johnfabian accuses Revisionists of opportunistically using for their agenda. Just pause to appreciate the inversion of reality he is trying to pull, by accusing Revisionists of exploiting memoirs and Hollywood blockbusters which have formulated mass public perception of the Holocaust in the West.
Holocaust awareness has become a bigger part of the political narrative in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. It was the Great Patriotic War, and was therefore a Soviet accomplishment that could transition to being a Russian accomplishment. The Putin regime is leaning on the Holocaust narrative to justify aggression against Ukraine. Both Zelensky and Putin have used the Holocaust to frame the conflict and appeal to Israel. It would not be productive for Russian apologists or Soviet revisionists to entertain Holocaust denial.
Revisionists place special important on the Holocaust due to its influence in our culture and our foreign policy. The Revisionist film I linked earlier includes a section on the alleged atrocities of the Iraqis and Sadam Hussein in Kuwait, and how atrocity tales like babies being removed from incubators and killed were fabricated to manipulate public opinion towards war with Iraq. Not just that, but they were fabricated specifically by Congressman Tom Lantos, who was a Holocaust survivor and one of the 5 witnesses featured in Spielberg's film.
They place specific importance on this genocide because our culture does so. That doesn't mean Revisionists buy whole-cloth into all the witness testimony of all Soviet atrocities as implied in a different comment.
I don't think it requires some vast conspiracy to explain why communist eastern Europe did not place great cultural relevance upon the Holocaust, given that the Soviets very much wanted to downplay crimes specifically against Jews and place Russians and socialists as the chief victims of German aggression. Not to mention the rather... "awkward" issues that Ukrainian or Polish nationalists might run into when trying to shed more light on the Holocaust, these countries had more than their own fair share of murdered civilians to mourn and commemorate.
And public opinion is always formed more of pop culture than academic history. The popular image of the Eastern front in western popular culture was for decades based off the memoirs of German generals which, to put it very mildly, were very loose with the truth (especially with respect to their own culpability in committing war crimes). Some of the more famous "fighting soldier" memoirs are themselves either largely or fully inventions.
You say it "doesn't require a conspiracy" right before you propose a conspiracy for why this major event was not talked about or even widely known among the people the event is supposed to have actually happened to. That is the opposite of the way major historical catastrophes impact public consciousness, where they are most talked about in the immediate aftermath and then the saliency of that event in the cultural consciousness fades over time.
"The Holocaust" was virtually unknown in the public, including in the West, until Holocaust remembrance took off in the 1960s and probably peaked in the public consciousness in the 1990s.
No matter how you spin this, it's a very strange course of events. You would expect 1. The event to be most salient in public consciousness in the immediate aftermath, which did not happen, 2. The event to be most salient in the consciousness the people closest to the events, which also did not happen.
Nobody understands this better than Jews, who have done more than anyone to blur the line between pop culture and academic history on this issue.
The chief historical consultant for Spielberg's award-winning documentary The Last Days was Dr. Michael Berenbaum. He was the Deputy Director of the President's Commission on the Holocaust, Project Director of the USHMM, Director of the USHMM's Holocaust Research Institute, President and CEO of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, and currently a Professor of Jewish studies. Here he is storyboarding The Last Days.
Berenbaum is also an ordained Orthodox Rabbi.
This is from an interview of Rabbi Berenbaum:
This is the "conspiracy" that Revisionists accuse Jews like Berenbaum of admitting to here- producing Torah, creating a new chapter in the long history of Jewish religious myth. In the interpretation of Gentiles who lack the capacity to truly understand this impulse, if revealed, would just come across as shameless lying.
Berenbaum's role in The Last Days and as content designer for the US Holocaust Museum reveals the, frankly, dirty tricks that Revisionists have to contend with. The historical establishment colludes with Hollywood to produce utter tripe that manipulates the American public with shameless lies like The Last Days. Revisionists, often at great personal risk of political suppression and persecution, expose those lies.
After the Revisionists expose the pop culture manipulations as systematically featuring indefensible lies, people like you try to say "well The Last Days was just a pop culture sensation, its indefensible lies do not reflect on academic historians." I do not buy it.
The Last Days is absolutely a product of academic historians, and the quality of that work is undeniably a reflection of the quality and integrity of academic study of the Holocaust.
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A Soviet anecdote:
Make of that what you will.
Ukrainians:
Certainly in terms of raw numbers more Soviets than Jews perished, but there was a differing zeal to which the Germans pursued and killed Jews. Somewhat ironically they were aided in this by Soviet censorship of near-any information concerning their chief ideological enemies: most Soviet Jews were not aware the Nazis were anti-semitic. For example when the decision was made to liquidate all the Jews of Kiev, the German authorities were shocked at the turnout when they demanded Jews present themselves for "relocation"; ~33,000, more than double what they expected. It took 3 days to murder them all, with help for Ukrainian militias.
Ukrainians themselves were of course of various minds with respect to the Soviet authorities; especially many of the older generation were welcoming of the Germans, at least initially. Currently I'm reading Retribution: The Soviet Reconquest of Central Ukraine, 1943-44, and so far it has featured a lot of anecdotes from German soldiers about helpful Ukrainians. This was of course partly merely survival tactics. The German logic was brutal: the book quotes Erich Koch (Reichskommissar of Ukraine) as saying:
and further:
The Nazis were at least as willing as the Soviets, if not more, to work Ukrainians to death for their utopia; and that of course would only be the beginning.
Pro-Nazi propaganda lasted only two years before the war, propaganda line before was strongly anti fascist and anti-Nazi, and Nazi antisemitism was well publicized in Soviet Union. The problem was that all Soviet propaganda with its constant twists and turns was seen as not entirely reliable.
When you learn to disregard the boy who cries wolf all the time, you are out of luck when wolf really comes.
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But at this very moment, whether Stalin's atrocities were real or exagerrated has a very high importance vis-a-vis Western foreign policy, and it indeed has had for years, considering that West has focused in very concrete ways in opposing Russia, with comparisons of current Russian Federation to Soviet Union and Putin personally to Stalin playing a very large role in the said narrative. The vast intensification of the Ukrainian war of course contributes to it greatly, since it has given new visibility to the Holodomor - a subject that has seen great historical controversy throughout the years, with an obvious connection to the accusation that the Russians are committing genocide in Ukraine, like (in the current Western narrative, at least) the Soviets did in the 30s.
Now, I personally think it's good that the West opposes Russia and think that Furr etc. are gravely wrong in their diminution of Stalin's atrocities, but I can't help but notice that (Holocaust) revisionists still continue to hyperfocus on Holocaust, not on this other subject where their methodologies, supposing they are valid and workable, might also be applied to. Of course it's not exactly hard to figure out why that might be (ie. the connection of Holocaust revisionism to antisemitism, and also because antisemites have also liked to counterpose the "Judeo-Bolshevik slaughter of Christians in Russia" to their own subject of revision.)
And if there were a lot of overlap, it would not be hard to figure out its because the revisionists are far-rightists and so obviously carry water for Putin.
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That is a stretch, there is simply no comparison between the Soviet Atrocities and the Holocaust in the influence on American Culture and foreign policy. So far in this discussion I've touched on many bestselling and hugely influential Holocaust memoirs, academy-award winning films directed by Steven Spielberg, instances of Jews in our government invoking the Holocaust to manipulate the American public into supporting war in the Middle East with fabricated atrocity propaganda, Holocaust education in public schools, the Memorial Museums with hundreds of millions in funding, the weight of the "Nazi" epithet...
There simply is no similar cultural force that is based on the authenticity of Stalin's crimes or "Judeo-Bolshevism." I am not even aware of what the atrocity claims are beyond questions over the extent to which famine was planned versus unplanned. I don't think those questions have nearly the same saliency to Western culture and politics as questions surrounding the Holocaust.
Let's say the Holodomar was unplanned and not an intentional genocide. How much would that theoretical revelation impact the American public versus the revelation of the Holocaust- the extermination camps and gas chambers, not being real?
The former would somewhat weaken tired conservative talking points against socialism. I don't think it would at all change the American foreign policy apparatus posture against Russia. The latter would inspire a lot of controversy, introspection, and ideally scrutiny over our political, academic, and cultural institutions that aggressively perpetuated the falsehoods for so long.
This isn't just an American forum, though, and Holocaust revisionism is not just an American subject. I would argue Soviet atrocities loom larger than the Holocaust in Finnish consciousness, for instance. I am not quite sure whether the Holocaust has just the importance accorded to it by Holocaust revisionists in American consciousness, either, the explanations of American support for Israel that are just based on presumed Holocaust debt of guilt have always felt a little pat to me. Of course, not being an American, I can't feel this in my bones in the same way as an American presumably would.
Even beyond that, though, I'm not asking why Holocaust revisionists don't exert the exact same energy on Soviet crimes. I'm asking why they take it as given that (roughly) the mainstream narrative, or one more strident than the mainstream narrative, about the Soviet crimes is though even though they apply a vastly higher standard of skepticism on the mainstream narrative on the Holocaust, even though much of the popular understanding on Soviet crimes is similarly based on personal narratives and memoirs, Solzhenitzyn - still arguably one of the main sources on the Gulag camps, and Soviet crimes generally, on many - being an example of this.
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Well, maybe. I won’t speak for Holocaust revisionists, but their main argument regarding survivor memoirs does not appear to be that they’re just all unreliable/false and that’s that, it’s that even memoirs that contain more than obvious falsehoods, exaggerations etc. are given legitimacy and even get used as source material for TV series etc., and that the mainstream media is very reluctant to call their authors out, or even to discuss them.
But, now that you mentioned it, I’m reminded that yes, Gulag revisionists do exist, as should be pointed out here, although (as far as I know) almost all of them work in Russia, and their works are only rarely translated or even publicized in any way outside Russia. I’ve seen examples of their research, and most if it seems to be much more mundane stuff, like the following: someone claims their grandpa was arrested and baselessly charged with political crimes, and sent to the GULAG -> researcher goes to the archives and looks at the documents; it actually turns out that grandpa was arrested for robbery/burglary/theft/embezzlement etc.
There are other crucial differences, I’d say. With respect to the GULAG, one cannot claim that there are no written explicit orders or no clear evidence of death tolls, because undoubtedly there is, and it has been accessible for decades. Also, this whole issue has become completely politicized and interpreted in terms of Moskal imperialism and criminality, which hasn’t happened to the Holocaust in the same way.
I think it merits separating "revisionists" from "denialists"; revisionism is a legitimate practice in history. For example the claims of tens of millions of GULAG victims were inevitably going to see a revisionist movement once the Soviet Union collapsed and historians had access to the Soviet archives. Or Holocaust revisionism (like the functionalism-intentionalism debate, for example) is an ongoing process like it is in every other historical subject that sees active scholarship.
"Denialism" on the other hand is an ideologically-driven act aimed at specific goals, working outside the historical method and essentially in bad faith. They're lying liars who lie, to put it more bluntly.
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There are Western tankies who are generally revisionist about Stalin's era, like Grover Furr. Furr has concentrated more on issues like Trotsky and other purged Old Bolsheviks being actually guilty of the accused crimes or Katyn not being done by Soviets, but discusses the camps here.
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With a lot of historical subjects, historians often have to deal with the problem of "surviving accounts"; i.e., they get the perspectives of one group of people, but not the other. A classic example: almost all the written sources with respect to the period of Byzantine iconoclasm were written by the ultimately victorious iconophiles. Or take the Greco-Persian wars, of which we only have the perspective of the Greeks. This obviously creates problems with writing narrative histories: to what extent does the modern historian trust what sources survived when there is nothing to cross-reference their believability?
With the Holocaust this form of "survivor's history" is very literal: Eastern European Jews were killed in vastly larger numbers than Western Jews, and even among those who survived for the most part now lived under communist regimes with strict censorship. Media perceptions of the Holocaust are coloured by the disproportionate number of memoirs that came from western Jews; i.e. Jews that were much more likely to survive, live in a country with a free press, and write in a language other than Yiddish. The most famous Holocaust victim is Anne Frank, a German Jew, and likewise education about the lead-up to the Holocaust focuses largely on German Jews. Yet if you were order Holocaust victims by their nationality, German/Austrian Jews were only the sixth-most numerous victims (after Polish, Soviet, Hungarian, Romanian, and Czechoslovak Jews). You've almost certainly heard of Auschwitz, which had tens of thousands of survivors (mainly western Jews) due to housing a concentration camp and labour camp as well as its extermination facilities. But Belzec and Chelmno combined saw about as many deaths as Auschwitz but less than 70 survivors; how many Americans could name them? And roughly as many Jews died via mass executions as by gassing - not many of those machine-gunned by the Einsatzgruppen or beaten by a Slavic nationalist militia survived to tell their tale (though given any substantially large mass execution, there were always a few).
Memoirs themselves are often of dubious historical value. They are consciously meant to be read in a way by the public that a diary or correspondence is not, and that colours their usefulness. Holocaust deniers use them as a source of arguments because, naturally, they are a wellspring for exaggerations, misrememberings, and far-fetched anecdotes, and not infrequently outright invention. That's not to say they're worthless, but in terms of academic work historians prefer to use them as a supplement to other sources rather than rest an argument/narrative on them.
There is an incredible amount of first-hand testimony about the Holocaust, but what we have in abundance (namely accounts of western Jews, Germans, and German collaborators) is less revealing than the perspectives we're missing: the thoughts of those who died, and those of the higher-ranking Nazis who facilitated their deaths.
Btw, why don't we have any records from the Persians? I thought they were a pretty sophisticated empire.
Just too many armies sweeping through burning all the libraries for the next two thousand years?
You‘d have to narrow your question down. AFAIK archaeology has found mundane bureaucratic records from the Achaemenids.
Are you asking for historiography in particular?
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We have some records from the Persians, but they tend to be more archaeological rather than narrative histories (or plays, or essays, or other written works).
The long story short is that papyrus scrolls require careful handling, and even with that reproduction; i.e. the surviving Classical works from the Romans and Greeks were not the originals but copies of copies. Hellenistic scribes evidently were less interested in reproducing Persian texts than they were Greek ones. Presumably the Arab conquest and subsequent wars didn't help either, but even by the time of the Romans, written Persian sources were noticeably lacking.
Herodotus was evidently working with Persian sources when writing his histories, be they written or oral histories, as well as presumably interviewing Persians themselves. By contrast Plutarch's Parallel Lives (which is our first reasonably full accounting of the life of Alexander, despite being written about 400 years after Alexander), while drawing heavily from now-lost Greek sources that were written during or shortly after the time of Alexander, is near-completely silent about the Persian perspective.
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Yes we do.
Persepolis Fortification Tablets
https://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/persepolis-fortification-archive
More like: too much new construction and excavation in the last 50 years, with all archaeological remains of the past bulldozed away and built over.
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Holocaust memoirs are the ultimate double-edged sword in the Holocaust industry. They can become immensely popular, commercially succesful, have huge cultural influence, and greatly increase the public perception of the Holocaust, especially among children, but they are often riddled with historical inaccuracies, contradictions, exaggerations, and outright fabrications that can put historians in an uncomfortable position of contradicting the experiences of the survivors.
Many authors of Holocaust memoirs are those who remained silent for decades, but finally decided to come out and tell their story for the first time. An example is Irene Zisblatt, who decided to break her silence and tell her story in her memoir, The Fifth Diamond published in 2008. Among other things, Zisblatt claimed that she escaped from a gas chamber, had her Auschwitz prisoner tattoo surgically removed by Dr. Mengele, that Ilse Kolche had selected her to be turned into a lampshade, and that she constantly swallowed, defacated, and re-swallowed diamonds given to her by her mother during her internment in the camp.
This also just wasn't a one-off book, Irene Zisblatt is one of the most prominently-featured survivors in Steven Spielberg's film The Last Days, which won an Oscar. Revisionists had a field day with exposing the absurd lies that Hollywood honored as their best output. I was surprised to come across this recent Times of Israel article that, finally, indicates mainstream skepticism for her obvious lies and laments that the deniers are asking good questions.
There are many other instances of Holocaust memoirs, like The Painted Bird (1968) being exposed as literary fraud, and the author of that bestseller eventually committed suicide. There are a lot of exaggerated and false memoirs.
Elie Wiesel's Night (1958) is another example- he doesn't mention gas chambers in his famous memoirs but he describes truckloads of babies being burned alive, which is not claimed to have happened by mainstream historians today.
But Herman Rosenblat takes the cake for the most iconic memoir fraudster who, after a couple appearances on Oprah, a book deal, and movie deal, was exposed for being a fraud. In an interview he did with ABC News, he was asked why he lied to so many people, and his response was "it wasn't a lie, it was my imagination, and in my imagination it was true".
There's a lot of commercial incentive for survivors to "tell their stories", with all the problems that come with perverse incentives and "recovered memory" syndrome. This also presents a problem because "the case" for the Holocaust entirely relies on witness testimony, so embarassing displays of prominent witnesses lying weakens the most important body of evidence that historians rely upon in lieu of documentary and physical evidence. Holocaust historians almost never reference the authors of these memoirs.
With all that said, there is one memoir that is extremely important to Holocaust historigraphy, and that is Yankel Wiernik's A Year in Treblinka (1944). Wiernik's memoir was published by the Polish Underground in 1944, making it an extremely early purported eyewitness account to the alleged Treblinka atrocities. Owing to the lack of documentary and physical evidence, Wiernik's memoir is heavily relied on as a primary source by Holocaust historians. But I encourage anyone to read it and decide for themselves. It doesn't come across as very credible, which is why it hasn't become "required reading" so-to-speak.
The most famous "memoir" of sorts is Anne Frank's diary, which does not claim to witness gas chamber extermination. Anne was deported with her family to Auschwitz, but then transferred to Belsen where she died in a hospital of Typhus. So the diary, while famous, does not enter into discussions of the authenticity of gas chambers and extermination camps.
In short, for a memoir to enter into the discussion it has to: 1. be relevant to the extermination and gas chamber claims, and 2. be credible (i.e. early accounts). There are not very many memoirs that fit this criteria, Wiernik is really the best they can do on that front, and his credibility is seriously lacking.
This is a blatant lie, dear SS. Unless you claim that for example demographic statistics before (or after) war were falsified and demographics of Polish Jews were falsified before war and so on. To say nothing about Gypsies demographics that somehow for some reason cratered during WW II.
The post-war demographic data entirely comes from Soviet authorities, who had a track record of lying about census data and fudging the ethnic distribution their citizens before the war. They also had a motive to downplay the number of Jewish survivors under their control, particularly the large number of Jews who were deported deep into the Soviet interior and never came under German occupation. The work of Sanning in The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry suggests that the pre-war population of Jewish Poles was over-estimated due to underestimates of interwar emigration and overestimations of fertility of the Jewish population, which had declined in the interwar years.
But in any case, the "Holocaust" narrative as such absolutely preceded any demographic study of Jewish post-war populations. The Six Million number, the gas chamber, the narrative surrounding the "final solution", these were all established in the historical record before any demographic study.
The "six million" number was not derived from any demographic sources, it first emerged from Zionist sources in January 1944, more than a year and a half before the end of the war.
It's also worth mentioning that the number six has special significance in the Jewish religion, i.e. six-pointed star. It is also said that there were 600,000 Israelite men in the Exodus according to Jewish myth.
Ultimately, historians are claiming that millions of people were killed in specific time and place, with a specific motive and murder weapon. The fact that there are constant appeals to demographic numbers that had nothing to do with the creation of this historical narrative in the first place only shows how little evidence there is. i.e., you cannot say "look at this unambiguous documentary and physical proof for a million people being gassed at Auschwitz," so you have to say "look at this Soviet census data."
Jewish identity was also suppressed in the post-war period in the Soviet Union. A drop in self-identification would likely follow from restrictions on other forms of identification like speaking Yiddish. In the last US census we saw a precipitous decline in the number of white people in the country, and the leading theory is that white Americans are increasingly identifying as mixed due to cultural pressures.
Not entirely. There were some many Jewish Poles that to detect that they almost entirely disappeared does not require reliable statistics. Entire communities disappeared, to the point that it was noticeable even in Poland where around 16% of population was murdered.
You are again being misleading. Populations of Jews in Poland (before they were murdered by Germans) was readily noticeable, it is not like COVID/vaccines where you need to rely on statistics to establish effects.
And for some weird reason they basically disappeared and by pure coincidence that happened during time when Germans invaded. And Germans had rabid hate toward Jews, even greater then toward Poles/Ukrainians which were supposed to be subjugated and enslaved.
Even if Germans imprisoned Jews in concentrations camps and starved there them to death, and gas chambers were entirely fake then it does not strongly change anything at all. OK, it reduces my opinion about historians. But surely it will not improve my opinion about Nazis.
Or are you denying that Germans were rapidly antisemitic? Are you denying deportation to ghettos? Are you denying deportation to concentration camps? Are you also denying murder of millions via shooting and starvation? (also Poles, Gypsies, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians and so on, Jews were less than half of victims of Holocaust). Are you denying that people in concentration camps were horrifyingly mistreated?
Where did they go?
It seems that some of them were able to escape the horror and end up
in the impeachment hearings
in the Biden admin
providing much needed pain relief to the American people
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As I said elsewhere:
Like, even if you're going with "the Soviets lied about their numbers" narrative, why would NVKD lie about their internal numbers in their reports to the party? The NKVD's job, or one of them, was deporting people and putting them to camps. They're deliberately trying to diminish the job they're doing in internal party assessments?
If the refutation of the demographic question for revisionists continues to rely on one 50-year-old book relying largely on guesswork, anecdotes and guesses about information they didn't have access to (but later researchers do have access to), doesn't that at least somewhat indicate there's a problem here?
The main takeaway from Sanning is that it's an intractable problem. Demographic study is hard in the best of times, and the political circumstances combined with significant changes during the interwar period, massive population movements during the war (including the large scale deportation of Polish Jews to the Soviet interior), floods of refugees after the war, and the fact that the Soviet Union was waging a propaganda war about a German extermination policy, and so it had a motive to lie about these things- as it lied about many other things during its various investigations (i.e. the Katyn Massacre and a "factory of death" in Majdanek where the Germans murdered 2 million people), makes it an impossible problem to solve.
None of the "big-ticket" items of the Holocaust were based on demographic study. The earliest of such studies came well after the establishment of the main components of the narrative that Revisionists challenge. If historians are claiming that a million people were murdered and buried in a known location, then any reasonable person should scrutinize the evidence that was used to "prove" that claim.
Revisionists acknowledge the inherent interdependency of the evidence. By that I mean- the Soviets falsely claimed that the Germans murdered 2 million people at Majdanek, murdered 4 million people at Auschwitz, that Majdanek had 7 gas chambers and a special crematorium with a gas chamber... but none of this was true. Any reasonable person should update his priors on the reliability of Soviet investigation since it has been proven by hard evidence beyond doubt that their investigations have been systematically wrong in service to a campaign of propaganda warfare.
It demonstrates a weak case that you need to rely so heavily on the accuracy and integrity of the number of Jews the Soviet Union said it had after the war when there is an extremely long list of reasons for why these studies are confounded. It's ultimately an attempt to reverse the burden of proof. You want to claim that a million people were gassed and buried in a known location, but for some reason you cannot rely on the evidence for it, you have to demand that Revisionists solve the impossible problem of post-war demographic study behind the Iron Curtain.
Revisionists don't claim to be able to do that, they do claim to be able to show, with the evidence, that what is claimed did not happen.
Again, as I said, we're not talking about Soviet external claims. We're talking about Soviet internal numbers, ones that became available during the period of expectional openness that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. (Among other things, such numbers have been generally used to bring clarity to the extent of the Great Purge, the gulag system etc.) These numbers might, of course, contain mistakes, just like all demographic statistics, particularly in authoritarian countries. However, even in such cases, one would expect those numbers to rather exaggerate the effort of instances like NKVD to do whatever they've been tasked with doing, rather than diminishing them.
I've been interested in demographic numbers and questions for a long time, so it's natural to me to take this approach also to this issue. It speaks volumes to me if the crucial question of "well, what happened to the Jews then?" is treated by revisionists in such a cavalier manner.
Imagine we are standing in a field in Poland. It has grass, trees, flowers- otherwise it just looks like any other field. Now imagine that you tell me - "900,000 people were gassed, cremated, and buried directly underneath where we are standing."
And then I ask, "really? That sounds extremely unusual and unlikely, what's the evidence for that?"
And then imagine after an exchange debating the evidence for the claim, you ultimately force a "stalemate" by saying "if they weren't murdered, cremated, and buried right here then where did they go?"
It's not treated by revisionists in a cavalier manner, it's just acknowledged as an extraordinary attempt to reverse the burden of proof for an extraordinary claim that lacks evidence. It's also acknowledged as a "reversal" that would not be necessary if you had sufficient evidence to establish what you are claiming in the first place.
Now imagine it's the Revisionist who says, "ok, well if you insist this is what happened, let's excavate the area so we can better understand what happened," and then you say "no, you have to tell me where these 900,000 Jews went if they weren't murdered right on this spot. We can't excavate this area because it would disturb the souls of the 900,000 people who were murdered here."
This is the "state of the debate", and Revisionists have the far better case.
You are correct that "then where did they go?" is the best retort against Revisionist critique of mainstream historiography... but it proves how weak the evidence is that the "best counter-argument" consists of a blatant reversal of the burden of proof. You are the one claiming they were murdered and buried in a precisely known location...
It's a bit hard for me to see it that way, since, as said, insofar as I've been interested in the whole debate, it's been through the demographic question, dovetailing with my interest in various other demographic questions. The whole debate about door hole placement in Auschwitz or the specific details of victim testimonies has never held my interest, and I have little to say about it.
However, howevermuch one would want to say "reversal of the burden of proof", the question is still there, isn't it? It doesn't just go way by such a reference. While the Holocaust has been, of course, related to many criminal cases, in the sense of this forum debate we're not talking about a formal criminal case debated by a court - it's a historiographical debate, one with many different varying facets, one of which seemingly is one that revisionists wish to avoid (apart from saying "Look, Sanning!")
Furthermore, Sanning's book is not just about debunking standard claims about the Holocaust - he makes some quite far-reaching claims himself, including one about there being a genocidal murder of the Polish Jews, just one done by Soviets instead of the Nazis. This highly unusual claim comes with precious little proof of this happening, especially considering - as linked previously - that we can now peruse Soviet files on this era, and they do not show a transport/labor camp operation of the claimed sort. If one uses Sanning as reference, shouldn't there be at least a bit more effort to offer proof for his particular claims?
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I would be happy to discuss facts even with neonazis, as long are they reality adjacent.
If it turns out that someone is full-bore genocide denialists (or praises Mao or claims that Pol Pot was a good leader or that there was no internal paedophilia conspiracy of any kind in Catholic Church or that there is no biological difference between males and females) then I will find better way to procrastinate.
Are you also denying that Germans were rapidly antisemitic? Are you denying deportation to ghettos? Are you denying deportation to concentration camps? Are you also denying murder of millions via shooting and starvation? (also Poles, Gypsies, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians and so on, Jews were less than half of victims of Holocaust). Are you denying that people in concentration camps were horrifyingly mistreated?
Also, are you a neonazi dear SS? Is your username shortening to SS coincidence or deliberate?
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God damn it. Surely that entire wiki page was written by someone having a giggle, but all of them on the talk page take it dead seriously.
Why didn't she just use the infinity stones again?!
At the end, Chapter 14, Wiernik describes his daring escape:
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