site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   6208 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for December 2022

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:

@naraburns:

@Bernd:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@RandomRanger:

@Iconochasm:

Contributions for the week of December 5, 2022

@zeke5123:

@ymeskhout:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@gattsuru:

@Southkraut:

@Bernd:

@problem_redditor:

@FCfromSSC:

@urquan:

@gemmaem:

Sexulation

@RococoBasilica:

@problem_redditor:

Holocaustianity

@johnfabian:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

@SecureSignals:

Coloniazism

@gaygroyper100pct:

@screye:

@urquan:

@georgioz:

Contributions for the week of December 12, 2022

@SecureSignals:

@Titus_1_16:

@Dean:

@cjet79:

@JarJarJedi:

@gattsuru:

@YE_GUILTY:

@aqouta:

@HlynkaCG:

Contributions for the week of December 19, 2022

@MathiasTRex:

@To_Mandalay:

Robophobia

@gattsuru:

@IGI-111:

@NexusGlow:

Contributions for the week of December 26, 2022

@FCfromSSC:

@gattsuru:

@LacklustreFriend:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

20
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

My point was that the case relies on the credibility of witness testimony, and your counterargument simply lists a few names of such testimony, without explaining why you find them to be credible or sufficient to establish the murder of a million people. You are even relying on scrolls which were allegedly written by eyewitnesses, buried, and discovered decades after the war (mostly not until the 1960s or 1970s). I think most people assume that the certainty for the Holocaust at Auschwitz is established beyond doubt by contemporary, hard documentary and physical evidence. They would be surprised to realize how important the testimony is of a few witnesses, or scrolls remarkably found buried in the ground in the 1970s.

Needless to say, Revisionists are aware of all the sources you have listed and have studied them all in great detail across many volumes of work and do not find them to be credible in lieu of contemporary documentary or physical evidence.

CTRL + F "Gabbai". Huh: apparently not aware enough to mention him or his brother there, presumably since most of his writings were later. The paper at least mentions Mandelbaum, except for some strange reason without a separate analysis or even mentioning much of his specific testimony -- and I note again that his testimony dates back to 1947.

What's the specific reason for a neutral observer to doubt the specific testimony from these accounts?

I'm willing to go over topics with a fine-tooth comb to evaluate far more trustworthy experts, but especially if your appeal even remotely touches on an assumption that the mainstream isn't trustworthy and you need to evaluate things yourself, telling me nothing more specific than your experts "do not find them to be credible" is a retreat.

To follow-up my comment below, and after now having read Mattogno's work on the topic, the problems with Mandelbaum's testimony are insurmountable. To answer your question:

What's the specific reason for a neutral observer to doubt the specific testimony from these accounts?

Mattogno analyzes pages and pages of contradictions, inaccuracies, and obvious exaggerations, but I'll cite the single most damaging aspect of Mandelbaum's testimonies, which comes from his 2003 interview with Igor Bartosik and Adam Willma:

Q. When working at the crematorium did you come across the corpses of children?

A. No.

Q. Mr. Mandelbaum, the records clearly indicate that there were children in the transports.

A. But I didn’t see it! You are speaking with a serious man, and I have lived through a great deal. I didn’t come here to lie to the two of you. If I don’t know something, I say I don’t know. I did not see children. Maybe there weren’t any on my shift.

Q. Or perhaps your memory has erased these painful images.

A. There were women. But children? After all, I would remember children going to the gas, how they are burned.” (pp. 49/45)

To justify this unique affirmation by Mandelbaum, the interviewers refer in a footnote to psychological studies of ex-inmates from which it appears that “in eyewitnesses, memory was highly selective” (pp. 49/45, Note 65).

Q. When you began working in the crematorium, the transports of Hungarian Jews were still arriving, and there were a lot of children among them.

A. When we were working three shifts, two other transports could arrive on the other shifts. And have you heard about the destruction of the Gypsies in Auschwitz?

Q. Of course.

A. So, a multitude of people were murdered, and I never saw a single Gypsy on the pyre. I only heard from the other guys that there was some kind of fighting with them. They were obviously burned on another shift. I repeat that, when I was working, there were only childless transports.” (pp. 50/48)

According to the official narrative, children, being unable to work, were automatically selected and among the most numerous victims of the gas chambers. Mandelbaum would have cremated hundreds of thousands of children, and his adamancy that he never saw or cremated children is completely irreconcilable with the historical narrative, which his why his interviewers press him so hard on this question and make a futile effort to "jog his memory".

"Selective memory" due to trauma is the best the interviewers can do. But this is demonstrative of how historians will selectively pick the details from these testimonies to piece together a somewhat-coherent broader narrative and handwave the major problems, but when you take a comprehensive view of a witness the credibility doesn't withstand basic scrutiny.

There are of course a lot of other problems that Mattogno describes, but this part of his testimony completely sinks his credibility as it is not reconcilable with the historical narrative without relying on dubious theories of selective memory.

The paper at least mentions Mandelbaum, except for some strange reason without a separate analysis or even mentioning much of his specific testimony

There is an entire trilogy solely dedicated to the various testimonies of the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz.

Here is a PDF of Sonderkommando Auschwitz I: Nine Eyewitness Testimonies Analyzed. Henryk Mandelbaum's various testimonies (including testimony unknown in mainstream historiography and translated by Mattogno) are presented and criticized in a 37-page section in Section 10, starting at page 179.

I am not even aware of Dario Gabbai testimony in the 1940s. AFAIK Gabbai entered the scene along with his brother and cousins, the Venezias, no earlier than 1987. The earliest reference I find on Dario's wikipedia page only goes to 1991.

But the Gabbai's and their cousins are featured along with the other "late testimony" witnesses in Sonderkommando Auschwitz III: They Wept Crocodile Tears. A Critical Analysis of Late Witness Testimonies:

Most of the main and secondary witnesses of the Sonderkommando that I have already analyzed, as many as 17, testified for the first time between 1945 and 1947, and this is perfectly understandable; some waited two or three decades: Paisikovic made his first statements in 1963, Rosenblum in 1970. Inexplicably, a small group of self-proclaimed Sonderkommando members, united by origin – they were all Jews deported to Auschwitz from Greece (Josef Sackar, Jaacov Gabai, Shaul Chasan and Leon Cohen) – decided to tell their stories only between 1987 and 1993, in the form of interviews conducted by Israeli historian Gideon Greif, who then published them in 1995 in German (Greif 1995), and ten years later also in an English translation titled We Wept without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz (Greif 2005). The statements of these late “eyewitnesses” constitute the main subject of this present study.

Since the beginning of the 1990s other Greek “survivors” of the Sonderkommando, who until then had remained silent, suddenly felt the imperative “duty to testify”: Daniel Bennahmias in 1993 (Camhi Fromer), and Leon Cohen, already interviewed by Gideon Greif, in 1996 (Cohen).

The crown of laggards, however, unquestionably belongs to Shlomo Venezia (my emphasis: Dario Gabai's (the actor's) cousin), a Jew with Italian citizenship who was deported to Auschwitz from Thessaloniki. After an insignificant media excursion in 1992, he officially entered the Auschwitz martyrology on 3 December 2000, thanks to three German scholars, Eric Friedler, Barbara Siebert and Andreas Kilian, who interviewed him. But it was only after the 2007 publication of his memoirs – in French and then in Italian – that he rose to a prestigious position in Holocaust memoiology as the last “eyewitness” of the “gas chambers” of Auschwitz. In practice, he waited 55 years to “testify,” if we start counting from the end of the Second World War.

Witness testimony is notoriously considered one of the weaker forms of evidence. This is why the Revisionists emphasize historical examples, like Congressman Tom Lantos procuring an "escapee direct eyewitness" to the Iraqi soldiers removing babies from incubators and killing them, direct eyewitnesses to mass graves of babies, and this story probably tipped the scales of public opinion for waging war on Iraq. Likewise, there were eyewitness testimony to gassings at Dachau and Buchenwald, which are no longer claimed to have happened... although the Dachau museum used to have a sign that bizarrely read GAS CHAMBER disguised as a "shower room" - never used as a gas chamber. That Dachau "gas chamber - never used as a gas chamber" was prominently featured in the Nuremberg Trials by the way.

There were also many eyewitnesses to mass homicidal gassings at Majdanek who testified in 1944 (before the liberation of Auschwitz), in facilities which have been revised to have been real hygienic facilities and shower rooms. Soviet investigators claimed in 1944 that Majdanek featured a crematorium with a built-in gas chamber, which was revised recently and admitted to have never been a gas chamber, before Auschwitz was even liberated.

The suspicious over-reliance on the testimony of witnesses also obscures the evidence of which there is too little, which is why I linked the other book. Most people probably do not know that the British intercepted and decoded the secret communication between Auschwitz and SS throughout the war and period of alleged extermination, but even historians admit "The decoded messages contain no references to gassings."

Likewise, the blueprints and construction documents discovered in the archives by Revisionists show non-homicidal functions for these structures. Revisionists, for example, showed that all the blueprints throughout multiple years of one of the Krematorium shows a swinging door connecting the alleged "gas chamber", which is identified as a morgue in the blueprints, with the ovens. The best Believers can do is just argue that the "swinging door" must have been an error in all the blueprints, because a gas chamber obviously would have required a sturdy air-tight door.

Relying so much on the witness testimony, which has its own major problems, ignores a lot of problems with the documentary and physical evidence, or lack thereof.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats