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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Thanks for all the info, looks like I've got a bunch of reading to do.

You switched from square to cubic meters halfway through there, but 2ha= 20000m^2, x15 gives us 300k, so the pit would have to be two and a third time's as deep as those in the UK. Seems within reason.

If there are chunks of bone just laying around, why is nobody digging these sites? We can reconstruct the details of massacres from ten thousand years ago, why is nobody trying to do the same here while evidence is still easy to gather?

The idea that it would be "disrespectful" is ridiculous if there are body parts laying on the surface unburied. Surely someone should be willing to fix that, right?

Recently a memorial was established in Russia at the site of the Kommunarka "firing range" (google translate seems to handle this okay, there were a few sources in English but most were sparser) where several thousand people were shot and buried during the purges in the late 30s. The locations and dimensions of the mass graves were established through ground radar, soil samples, topographical survey, and other non-invasive methods, without any actual excavation. Revisionist methodology would insist on doubt that anyone was ever shot or killed at Kommunarka since the bodies weren't dug up and counted (in fact these are pretty much the same methods used by Andrej Kola at Belzec in the 90s and by Caroline Sturdy-Colls at Treblinka a few years ago, and revisionists did immediately insist that the lack of full excavations was extremely suspicious).

In Cambodia, while some of the mass graves from the Pol Pot era have been dug up, most have not been, and when researchers decided to try and get a count of how many people had died during the Khmer Rouge genocide they mostly relied on witness testimonies and non-invasive surveys of the grave-sites rather than excavations.

I don't think it's really "standard protocol" so to speak to dig up all mass graves of a mass-killing event.

I don't really see the purpose of digging up places like Treblinka. It's naturally more sensitive than massacres from hundreds or tens of thousands of years ago. The only real purpose would be to placate Holocaust deniers and I don't blame the people in charge of these sites for not being prioritizing that.