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Hitler said something like 'If the Jews start another war in Europe, it will be the end for them in Europe' which is a relatively vague euphemism. But then there's Goebbel's slipup in the Sportspalast speech where he almost says 'exterminated' as opposed to 'excluded'. Then there's more of that speech:
Goebbels quite clearly lays out that the Jews are behind Bolshevism (and run the Anglosphere from behind the shadows) and are waging an existential war against Western civilization. Jews are the demonic incarnation of evil, decay and chaos. It is a plague, it enslaves, it terrorizes. The most radical measures will be adopted, at the appropriate point.
Or take 'The Jew as World Parasite' from Rosenberg: https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/weltparasit.htm
We certainly know Kristallnacht happened. There was some significant violent trend against Jews even before the war, so during the war when emotions are running high (the fate of Western civilization was at stake, millions had died and the existence of whole nations was in question), why not take the most radical measures, as Goebbels explains and Rosenberg encourages?
I'm not persuaded that there even was an accounting error and total Jewish Holocaust deaths were significantly below 6 million. The fog of war and whatever covering-up operations hastily conducted by Germany at the end of the war are enough to cloud our vision to some level. Why would we expect indisputable proof?
This methodological standard for historical evidence is, to put it lightly, unsustainable. By the same logic you can look at any war propaganda and use it as proof of genocide. Not genocidal intent, but actual genocidal events.
Who killed 22 thousand Polish military officers in Katyn forest? How could you know? You don't look at physical evidence. But going by the war propaganda that you happen to know, which just so happens to be the propaganda the victors of history want you to know about, everyone knows just how much Hitler hated the Slavs and wanted to kill every single one of them. Everyone also knows, because it is so true of course, that Hitler thought Poles were Slavs, not Aryan. So going by our methodology it just makes sense that the Germans committed the Katyn forest massacre.
I want you to be self aware of your position here. Your claims of not being persuaded that there were even 'accounting errors' is completely meaningless. You have already represented yourself as someone who acquires belief in historical events not through evidence but inference from broader historical narratives. You have no basis to question these narratives. You have no knowledge of what even constitutes historical evidence or proof in the context of these events. All you have are inferences based on what sounds plausible to yourself as a person who doesn't question historical events or the broader historical narrative you were raised with.
This position is unassailable. I can't do anything. Because no matter the fraught nature of specific evidence for any specific event, you always have the broader narrative to fall back on. And because you fall back on the broader narrative to protect individual claims, no individual claim can be refuted and the narrative can never be called into question.
Do you think I lack material evidence? There's a tonne of websites which will provide anti-Holocaust revisionist arguments! People can produce mountains of evidence. Tens of thousands of eyewitnesses, plenty of documents. I could list a bunch of them but you surely know of them.
The Sportspalast Speech is not Allied war propaganda, it's German war propaganda. Almost nobody reads through these Web 1.0 text files from Calvin University.
These assumptions of knowledge aren't based on thin air - we know the Soviets and Germans disliked the Poles, they partitioned the country earlier. If I were in 1942 or whatever, I'd be uncertain whether Germany or Russia killed those Poles.
Well what choice do I have? Am I supposed to go to Auschwitz and use my expert-tier knowledge of gas chambers to determine whether they made up a fake chimney or whatever? Scrutinize thousands of photographs to see whether the execution squads were using Mausers or some other kind of rifle, geolocate battlegrounds from seventy years ago, work out whether they're fake or not? Read through all the Holocaust memoirs and find the logical absurdities like people being frozen into ice or whatever? Dig up all these mass graves? Go find Goebbels's diary to see if he really wrote:
The whole point of arguing from capability and motives is that we can bypass the masses of facts that clog everything up. We can adjust our base rates such that the absolute mountain of pro-Holocaust evidence and fairly considerable amount of anti-Holocaust or minimal-Holocaust evidence is balanced. We can then conclude that, notwithstanding the fact that there's some confusion, some exaggeration and some concealed information, the Holocaust really happened.
Did Hitler like Slavs? Not really. Was Hitler planning to exterminate them all? No, there were various plans to subjugate or relocate them if possible. He would've settled for working with them. A fair few Slavs were fighting for Germany as Hiwis. Hitler was allied with the Soviet Union for some time. Hitler at one point wanted to ally with Poland where they'd return German territory in exchange for getting bits of Soviet territory. There's nuance there. The primary school version I got that Hitler wanted to get rid of non-blondes and non-blue eyed people is childishly silly.
But when it comes to Jews, there was never any desire to work with them, they were implacable enemies of Nazism. And they still are today!
I think you are going in circles just like I described above. You keep circling back to the narrative being true. When I proposed an evidence based approach to specific claims you wanted to rely on a heuristic that's partly based on the narrative being true. When I call that heuristic into question you are now circling towards an evidence based approach that's based on the narrative being true. Like I said before, I can't do anything here. If you just presuppose that the holocaust happened then it always did regardless of anything else.
I didn't say it was allied war propaganda. And you're not the first person to quote Goebbels to prove how evil the nazis were in pursuit of proving claims made against them without having to propose any specific evidence for any specific events. The point being made is that you can quote war propaganda to produce sentiment of genocidal intent because war propaganda is generally about killing the enemy.
In 2003 the USA along with its NATO allies invaded Iraq because they hated Iraqis and wanted to genocide them all. Every single civilian death was part of a genocidal judeo-christian neo-conservative plot to exterminate Iraq. We know this because the USA invaded Iraq and toppled its government. In fact, public sentiment at the time included rhetoric about 'glassing' the region. Directly invoking and promoting a nuclear holocaust. This is proof of murderous intent for every single Iraqi casualty during the war and subsequent occupation.
I am not asking you to do primary research. You can simply stop believing in the holocaust or be compelled to defend it. Stop maintaining differential standards for historical methodology based on social factors. You don't believe in other historical events in the same way. If someone calls the mainstream narrative of the war in Burma into question you don't care. You don't feel the need to weave together some methodology that can sustain the narrative. Belief in the holocaust, for 99,99% of people is just ridiculous.
See the genocidal invasion of Iraq above. You are not bypassing anything except your own critical faculties. Why do you need to believe in the holocaust?
Not true. See the Haavara Agreement and the Madagascar plan.
My heuristic is that the narrative is plausible. Each side can produce mountains of evidence. I just don't see how unreasonable it is that Nazi Germany would kill Jews, their number 1 enemy! They killed a huge number of people - Yugoslavs, Soviet POWs... We should work out priors before consulting evidence so we can get a sense of the weights involved. And for the one who keeps privileging evidence, you haven't provided a single link. I read half of Irving's 'Hitler's War' but you can tell he had a kind of platonic love of Hitler, it bleeds through. Some bits of it are hilarious though, you can tell he is furious with the Italians for being clownish leeches on the German war effort.
That's ridiculous. The Judeo-Christian neo-conservative plot wasn't to exterminate Iraq, they could've done that in half an hour with a nuclear strike. George Bush or Dick Cheney or the Wolfowitz crowd never said that the Iraqis were subhuman vermin that needed to be dealt with via the most radical measures. The goal was to knock off an anti-Israeli and anti-American Middle Eastern state at low cost, convert it into a pro-Israeli, pro-American democracy. There was never any serious racial animus against Iraqis.
Even the Sportspalast speech isn't that anti-Russian. Goebbels suggests that the Russians were enslaved by their Judeo-Bolshevik masters, turned into robots.
Either way they were getting rid of Jews from Germany. Expelling people with various levels of forcefulness isn't the same as working with them.
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You circle between plausibility and belief. This is why I asked you about the Katyn massacre.
A link to what? To what end?
Using the rubric you supplied to me I wrote this paragraph for you to demonstrate just how ridiculous that rubric is. You said that because we knew the Germans did not "like" the Poles, and we know this because they invaded. Well, Neo-cons did not like Iraq. We know this because they invaded. From there all else follows and you can't do anything about that because you pretend to not look at specific evidence for specific claims prior to weighing whether it was possible for something to happen or not. You don't bother maintaining your heuristic and I'm not surprised.
Contrasted with what you said Hitler was doing with the Poles, which you mean to say is somehow significantly different from what he was doing with the jews:
I don't understand the distinction you are drawing on here.
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