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 -
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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