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 -
From the 1958 publication of “Opinion of the Institute for Contemporary History”:
This is a mainstream source. You can cite other sources but you are just affirming the uncertainty of the problem...
The heavily-urbanized Hungarian Jewish population also experienced considerable excess deaths over births after 1927, reaching 0.5% annual decrease in 1938 (Sanning p. 33). On the other hand, the Mainstream source extrapolates the excess births over deaths of Polish Jews from the 1931 census as a constant through 1939, despite the sharp demographic decline which was measured within these heavily urbanized Hungarian Jews during the same period. It would also be unusual to assume constant high-fertility during a period of high emigration due to the push factors described above. Sanning's estimation tracks with data in Hungary, whereas the Mainstream study assumes no decline at all in fertility during this period. Sanning's methodology is clearly superior on this front.
Finally, Sanning and Revisionsits do not claim that these numbers or the sources provided are definitive. The entire purpose is to demonstrate the variance and uncertainty, and Revisionists are able to do so using entirely mainstream sources.
It's also worth recognizing here the controversial 1939 Soviet census:
So the Soviets said that "officially" the 1937 population should have been 170-172 million, so the real 1937 census that showed a population of 162,000,000 was a conspiracy by "enemies of the people" which was squashed by the "brave NKVD" in the statistical bodies. Of course these adjustments are considered to be false and motivated by propaganda purposes.
This is proof of Soviet manipulation of population data. It's desperate that anyone would treat population numbers coming from the NKVD post-war, even internal numbers, as beyond reproach.
It is the only source I am aware of that gives a number anywhere near as high as 100,000 per year for Polish Jewish emigration. The other sources say lower, and much lower.
Again, Sanning cites Polish government data as stating that between 1934 and 1937, 75,527 Jews left Poland. It's reasonable to say that this (which would be about 18,882 per year) may be an underestimate. It's completely unreasonable to say that the real per year number was 100,000 (based again, on a single source), meaning the Polish government failed to notice 80% of Jewish emigrants. That's absurd. There is uncertainty, there is not remotely that level of uncertainty. The fact that Sanning doesn't even mention the extremely high rate of unregistered Jewish births (compared to gentiles) makes his fertility estimates worthless.
The manipulated results of the Soviet census were presented in public at the party congresses for propaganda purposes. There's no comparison to NKVD deportation data that was only unearthed in the 90s.
I had to read this a couple of times because... of course I agree that there is a clear motivation for hiding the toll of famine and repression. But if there was famine and repression experienced by the large numbers of Jews who fled Poland to the Soviet Union ahead of the German advance (very reasonable to assume and widely reported by mainstream sources), there would be a motivation to transfigure those people to be victims of Nazi gas chambers instead of dead in camps in Siberia. Particularly if numbers of those people were, as reported, forcefully deported.
Sanning doesn't rely on this assumption of NKVD data mainpulation, but he's proven motive and opportunity for the NKVD to lie (if you can't trust the NKVD, who can you trust?!). There was a motivation for NKVD to downplay the number of Jews deported to the Soviet Interior- foremast because they were claiming that the Germans murdered millions of Jews in "factories of death" in Majdanek and Auschwitz. Downplaying the number of Jews that fled to their custody would support those allegations and avert attention from the treatment of those Jews who fled to the Soviet Union.
The mainstream openly sidesteps this issue by saying, even if large numbers of Jews were deported to Siberia and died there, those should still count as Holocaust victims. You can make a moral argument for that, but it still hurts the case for the presumed extermination of 3 million Jews in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.
In internal NKVD documents that no one but Soviet officials were ever supposed to see? Your contention is essentially that the NKVD fudged these numbers so that fifty years later, after the fall of the Soviet Union they could be used to support the historicity of the Holocaust.
You're right, because this data wasn't available yet when Sanning wrote his book, and it shows the number of Jewish deportees into the Soviet interior to have been not much more than 100,000, and very likely less. This is a big problem for Sanning because he needs the number to be in the range of 600,000, but this is disproven by NKVD data, which was produced for the eyes of the NKVD (so not for the purpose of propagandizing anyone), and which there is subsequently little reason to distrust on this point.
But to stay on point, Sanning has 100,000 Jews leaving Poland every year between 1933 and 1939. The Polish government, as Sanning admits, says more like 19,000 (generously, actually a bit less). Marcus' book, drawing on the contemporary statistics of the Jewish Agency for Palestine and other sources, says about 17,000, which is in line with the estimates of the Polish government. Sanning's estimates are a massive outlier, though unfortunately I can't find his source online to see if he's even presenting it honestly, and also don't make any sense when you consider the extremely strict immigration policies of the United States (which would have been the second most popular destination for Polish Jews after Palestine).
The total emigration from Poland in total from 1931 to 1938 was about 500,000. Sanning would need every one of these to be Jews, but in fact most were gentile Poles working abroad. Jews were only 20% of this number, and this over several years. Polish Jewish emigration to other European countries per year was very low, and in no year after 1933 did it even rise above 1,000 people. The majority of Jews who left Poland in the 30s went to Palestine, and their numbers are well accounted for. About 68,000 between 1931 and 1939. Much less than that went elsewhere. France and the Benelux countries, the other main destinations for Polish Jews, were only receiving a few hundred Jews (Jews total, so not just Polish Jews) per year from 1931 to 1934. From '34 to 1939, this shrank to a few dozens per year. There is absolutely no room for 100,000 Jewish emigrants from Poland a year. The estimate of 3,000,000+ Polish Jews on the eve of the war remains well-founded, while Sanning's numbers are completely baseless.
The majority of the documents pertaining to Jewish transports are said to have been destroyed by the SS to hide their crimes, and only a few remain. So you accuse the SS of a coverup of deportation documentation right before you say the NKVD would never do such a thing. You are ultimately relying on data from the NKVD, and the fact is there is uncertainty that comes with relying so heavily on that source, especially given the fact that it's confirmed the NKVD was used in the manipulation of population data for propaganda purposes.
You are also assuming a "hard break" between the NKVD and Russian intelligence. Russia let go of the Katyn Forest lie, that doesn't mean they would let go of the Holocaust lie and air the dirty laundry of the NKVD on that front.
Sanning cites a different mainstream source with a higher estimate. There's variance and uncertainty, that's the entire point.
Mainstream historiography argues there was much secrecy about the Holocaust even within internal top-secret documents in the SS. Globocnik's direct, top-secret report to Himmler on Aktion Reinhardt makes no mention or allusion whatsoever to any extermination in the General Government, and only mentions resettlement.
If Germany won the war, and the SS archives were eventually opened up, would you take all the surviving documents at face value? Would you assume the SS would faithfully retain the documentation of their crimes? Particularly if they were involved in crimes they had successfully pinned on the Soviets? Historians refuse to take SS documents at face-value as-is, saying that they used "coded language" in their own top-secret communication to each other.
But there's a clear situational difference, isn't there? SS officers were facing a situation where the regime their served was imminently facing destruction, with the prospect being that the entire country would be occupied and they themselves, unless they died, would be captured by enemy troops and would face some sort of a reckoning. If you were a NKVD officer working outside the German-occupied zone then in all probability you wouldn't have faced this after 1942, and it's arguable whether you would have faced this before this, either, as there probably never was a prospect of the Germans literally and physically occupying the entire territory of the Soviet Union.
They could certainly be used for historical research without any requirement at taking them at face value. After all, we do that already (the Korherr report). We don't need to take NKVD records at a face value, either, they could contain errors (with potentials for both over- and undercounting the afflicted persons), as records are wont to do - but "not taking them at face value" is different from just declaring them altogether invalid as a source because "it's NKVD and of course they lie" and then declaring that the more valid source is, essentially, a secondary source based on guesswork and anecdotes.
To_Mandalay claims that "Operation Reinhardt" was the code-name for the German plan to exterminate the Jews in gas chambers. He claims Globocnik was put in charge of this operation by Himmler.
But Globocnik's top-secret report to Himmler on this initiative makes no reference or allusion to the extermination of the Jews. The report describes resettlement as claimed by Revisionists. So To_Mandalay is accusing the SS of deception in internal, top-secret documentation during a period when they were not expecting to lose the war.
Globocnik also suggested destroying the receipts of confiscated property, showing the obvious conclusion that the participants in secret operations will destroy the paper trail of their crimes after-the-fact. Historians claim this happened in spades within the SS, but the FSB releases from the NKVD must be taken at face value according to him - even though they have a track record and motive to lie about these very questions.
The Korherr report also describes an evacuation and resettlement and not an extermination. This is yet another case where the mainstream is alleging deception and camouflage in top-secret, internal reporting. The author of that report even wrote a letter to Der Spiegel in the 1970s saying that he sought clarification and understood the reporting to refer to evacuation/resettlement and not extermination, so To_Mandalay would have you believe that even the statistician who created the report was deceived! So much for the "no deception in internal communications" assumption he relies on so heavily to bolster his trust in NKVD sources.
Besides the fact that there is explicit evidence of 'resettlement' being used as code for 'murdered', use of 'code words' is significantly less problematic than the massive falsification of population statistics (by a factor of like six) in an internal report on the population of the Siberian GULag system.
At the very least you are no longer in any position to ding Holocaust historians for not taking Nazi claims of resettlement at face value.
There are many, many, many documents describing resettlement in the General Government, but you base so much assumption on the impossible-to-verify authenticity of handwritten modifications to a few documents that aren't even contextually related to the resettlement actions in the General Government.
In these trials (the IMT) the prosecution also claimed:
It is not reasonable to base your assertion - that resettlement mentioned in dozens and dozens of documents was code for extermination- on a few handwritten modifications to documents that were submitted to these trials, especially in which the context was not related to these resettlement actions in General Government.
But you have to reach, because the direct reading of those documents affirms the Revisionist claims.
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All Soviet deportations of nations are well documented in archives.
Modern organized bureaucratic state runs on paper, you simply cannot move millions of people without generating lots of paperwork.
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I think it's ridiculous to believe NKVD officers in charge of compiling deportation statistics would lie to their superiors about the number of people in their GULag system by a factor of six, causing all sorts of administrative problems, so that they could hoodwink 21st century Holocaust revisionists in a hypothetical future where the USSR collapsed. If you don't, then fine, we won't agree on that.
He cites one source which is flatly contradicted by every other source and also by common sense. There was no country on earth allowing hordes of illegal Polish shtetl Jews over its borders. It is known where the Jews of Poland went in the 30s, when they went anywhere. They went to Palestine, and they went to the Americas. A tiny number went to other European countries. The Jewish-Polish emigration of the 1930s is accounted for. There is 'uncertainty' in that, maybe 68,000 Jews went to Palestine, maybe it was 70,000, there is not uncertainty that maybe it was five times that number, and maybe hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews snuck into the US when no one was looking.
This is like saying, "there's uncertainty on whether Caesar was born in 100 or 101 BC, so maybe he was actually born in 200 BC." The uncertainty Sanning wants does not exist.
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