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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34915 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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making the same arguments as the orthodox Holocaust believers on the question of excavating alleged mass graves

Can you give an example?

Researchers who believe the orthodox Holocaust story seem to be looking very hard for mass graves, in some cases successfully, in other cases explaining their absence by mass cremation.

Can you give an example?

Holocaust historiography claims that up to a million Jews were murdered in a gas chamber disguised as a bath house and buried in a small camp near Treblinka. Holocaust deniers don't believe that story. But despite the alleged graves containing this enormous amount of human remains existing in a precisely known location, no mass grave has ever been excavated from the site and it is in fact forbidden to do so because it would allegedly violate Jewish burial law.

The most extensive archaeological investigation of the area was only done very recently with non-invasive methods: most prominently consisting of (you guessed it) GPR results where various disruptions in the soil are speculated to be "probable mass graves" in her research, with no subsequent excavation. Holocaust deniers do not believe her assignment of various GPR results to mass graves are accurate as they do not reflect the size, shape, or location of the alleged graves, and only excavations can ascertain the truth of the matter. Holocaust believers claim that a convergence of evidence already proves that these GPR results are mass graves, and a call for excavations would only serve to placate deniers.

Of course the exact same line of argument is presented in the Kamloops story. There are long-standing rumors, cultural memory, hearsay, and eyewitness testimony to atrocities and burials of children in the area. There are now GPR results showing soil disruption in the area surrounding these atrocity rumors. To tie it all up, there is essentially a confession and apology from the Canadian government and Catholic Church. The Canadian government wouldn't confess to a crime it didn't commit, would it? It wouldn't admit the existence of mass graves the aren't real, right? There's a convergence of evidence, so at this point if you are demanding these graves be excavated you are just a racist denier.

Kamloops deniers make the exact same line of argument as Holocaust deniers: there is no "convergence of evidence", there is substantial evidence of atrocity rumors and "cultural memory" formulating a campaign of mass propaganda, and GPR results are not a substitute for excavations to scientifically study the truth of the controversy.

To give a more concrete example, you can compare this article denouncing Deniers for demanding excavations of the Kamloops graves:

Genocide deniers ask: Where are the bodies of the residential schoolchildren?

But. Where. Are. The. Bodies?

They are where they were buried — in those secret or official graves. At this point, nobody is going to be digging up those children to satisfy a bunch of white settlers’ points of view as to what we should be doing with our tragically deceased little ones.

Currently, we don’t have protocols in place yet (that I’m aware of) on how to sensitively deal with the graves. However, we are taking our cultural beliefs into consideration, which go against unsettling rest spaces. This call for bodies is nothing more than a racist rant bordering on genocide denial.

How far will a denier go? When no longer able to refute the absurdly massive physical evidence, Holocaust deniers started to appeal to more “scientific” data. For example, they claimed that the chemical analysis of hydrogen cyanide compounds showed the amounts were not sufficient enough to kill people in gas chambers. Posing as tourists, these “scientists” would gouge chunks of plaster from the walls of gas chambers to send them for analysis.

What happened in residential schools is not about the evidence. This kind of trolling is part of genocide, as are the actual crimes. Gregory H. Stanton, an expert on crimes against humanity, described 10 stages of genocide; extermination is not the final step. Rather, its final stage is denial that it happened — such as high-profile commentators’ demands to see bodies.

This can be compared to a recent conversation here where someone denounced the call for excavations of the alleged Holocaust graves for essentially the same reason:

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.

no mass grave has ever been excavated from the site and it is in fact forbidden to do so because it would allegedly violate Jewish burial law.

So Treblinka does seem to be an example where some people have made the argument you note, though this did not stop excavations:

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/archaeologists-delicately-dig-nazi-death-camp-secrets-treblinka-n66241

https://www.livescience.com/44443-treblinka-archaeological-excavation.html

Of course, whether that is evidence against "Holocaust denial" depends on what you mean by that term, since it covers many different possible positions. Not all "Holocaust deniers" actually deny that there were mass killings of Jews by the Nazis.

So Treblinka does seem to be an example where some people have made the argument you note, though this did not stop excavations:

I linked the documentary portraying her research where Poland's Chief Rabbi (with a New York accent) told her she has to stop excavating if she comes across a mass grave.

However, I am certain that she did dig trenches in search of mass graves, so she could have at least found one and stopped per the orders of the rabbi and that would have by far been the most important discovery of her research. But none of her trenches discovered any mass graves. She can say after the fact that she wasn't looking for them per orders, but I think she did dig trenches to try to find them and has a built-in plausible deniability for why she didn't find any.

But in any case, officially the excavations were not looking for mass graves and indeed she did not find any. The GPR results are what have been used to identify the alleged mass graves- not excavations. Any sane person who was actually dedicated to the scientific truth of the matter would of course follow up the GPR analysis with excavations, and in both cases when the parties refuse to do it that should be regarded as highly suspicious.

Holocaust deniers emphasize the sheer quantity that human remains that would have to exist in this small area at the scale alleged, for example:

And finally, we must note that the teeth of the supposed victims could not have been destroyed by the primitive methods attested to. Even if each of the alleged victims had only 20 of the usual 32 teeth left at the time he or she died, there would have been at least 17.5 million teeth to be disposed of at Treblinka. This means that we should still be able to find some 5 teeth per cubic foot of the 3.53 million cu.ft. of material excavated at the alleged site of the crime.

Her excavations didn't find any graves containing these huge quantities of remains, but she did find fossilized shark teeth from when Poland was covered by an ocean millions of years ago. The narrator concludes, "it appears here that the Nazi coverup was effective." So it goes.

Her excavations didn't find any graves containing these huge quantities of remains

Thank you for clarifying that you're talking about weak Holocaust denial (it happened, but not on the orthodox scale) rather than denying that there were mass killings of Jews, on a greater scale than, say, David Irving would argue.

Her excavations weren't on on a scale to find such quantities as you describe, so that's not an interesting result. However, insofar as they looked, they apparently found lots of remains:

Brick walls and foundations from the gas chambers remain, as do massive amounts of human bone, including fragments now eroding out on the forested ground surface.

"For me, that was quite shocking," said project leader Caroline Sturdy Colls, a forensic archaeologist who normally works with police to find modern murder victims. "These artifacts are there, and these human remains are on the surface, and they're not being recorded or recovered."

Indeed, when the archaeology team began digging to confirm the lidar results, they uncovered shoes, ammunition, and bones — including bones with cut marks indicating that the victims had been stabbed or otherwise assaulted.

The part of the Holocaust denial debates that you are describing doesn't seem parallel to the current state of the dialectic with respect to the Residential Schools mass graves, where the question is their existence rather than scale.

The part of the Holocaust denial debates that you are describing doesn't seem parallel to the current state of the dialectic with respect to the Residential Schools mass graves, where the question is their existence rather than scale.

I feel like there's also a substantial clouding with the fact that life on the Canadian frontier was genuinely tough with high youth mortality, and there's reasons why a residential school might have earnest reasons to have a mass grave nearby due to Tuberculosis outbreaks et al. People seem to reflexively frame this as though the region at that point in history was operating on 2020 healthcare norms.

True, although it's also the case that a lot of people were dying in Europe during WWII, though not on a scale that would explain all the missing Jews.

There is no aspect of Holocaust denial that claims Jews were not killed. It was a war where 50 million civilians were killed, including many Jews.

The Holocaust claim is that 750,000 - 1 million people were murdered and buried on the site. I strongly deny that, not just the scale being a little inflated. That is not the same as claiming Jews were not killed in the war, any more than denying the Kamloops graves is not "soft denial" if you acknowledge that children did indeed die of various causes at the time in question.

It is exactly the same. Mainstream historiography says "we identified the graves containing the remains of up to a million people with GPR, here they are, but we have not and will not excavate them." Holocaust deniers say they should be excavated, while mainstream authorities claim they do not need to be excavated to prove their existence. It's the same thing.

Her excavations weren't on on a scale to find such quantities as you describe, so that's not an interesting result.

The point is that the sheer scale of the crime in such a small, known location would make trivial to find huge quantities of remains. A small scale excavation ought to be able to find enormous quantities of remains extremely easily.

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