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I have debated the Holocaust many times with many deniers and have little interest in doing it yet again. Almost without exception, they have been devoutly committed to Holocaust denial and little short of a time machine would change their minds. In this, ironically, they are the simply the mirror image of the normies who learn about the Holocaust as kids and have been conditioned to react negatively to any doubts about it having happened.
I originally came into the whole topic a few years ago with an actually pretty open mind, and I was willing to be convinced by deniers. I didn't have any sort of ideological predisposition to need to believe that the Holocaust had happened, and my politics does not rest in any way on the Holocaust having happened. My attitude to Jews is neutral and my attitude to Israel is negative.
Yet after trying to engage many times in good faith with deniers' arguments, I came to the conclusion that they are almost certainly wrong.
Deniers' arguments largely rest on a few different points.
First, deniers tend to absurdly whitewash Nazis' attitudes towards the Jews and for some reason refuse to countenance the idea that the Nazis would actually try to kill all of them. This despite the fact that there is really nothing special about the Holocaust. Large-scale genocides are common in human history. What would perhaps be weirder than the Nazis trying to exterminate the Jews would be if the Nazis, despite their stated attitudes about the Jews and their glorification of political violence in general, didn't try to exterminate the Jews once they had every opportunity to do so. Keep in mind that the Holocaust as described by mainstream theories took only a very small fraction of the total German war effort in terms of manpower and raw materials, so the common denier argument of "why would the Germans have spent the resources on this in wartime?" makes no sense. Anyone can do the math themselves - the reality is that the total Holocaust effort was a drop in the bucket for the Germans and they got a lot of slave labor from it too.
Second, deniers poke holes in the mainstream narratives. For example, by calling into question the exact details of how many bodies could be burned in a given span of time, or pointing out absurdities in some supposed survivors' testimonies. What this ignores is that it is inevitably possible to poke holes in any comprehensive theory about any event of the scale of the Holocaust. Any event of such scale will involve things that are hard to explain, seeming contradictions, eyewitnesses who are either insane or lying, and so on. It is also possible to poke holes in all of the deniers' alternative theories. However, they generally do not present any specific comprehensive theories about what happened, instead just producing hand-wavy ideas about the Jews dying from diseases or starvation. Whenever they produce concrete, specific theories, it is just as easy or easier to poke holes in those theories as it is to poke holes in any of the mainstream theories. Deniers' theories do not explain why censuses show an enormous reduction of Europe's Jewish population between the immediate pre-war and immediate post-war periods. They also do not explain how it would have been possible for a hoax of the scale of the Holocaust to have been successfully carried out and kept secret by a combination of the US, its Cold War enemy the USSR, various European countries, and thousands of eyewitnesses.
Third, deniers claim that because Holocaust denial is legally forbidden in some places, it shows that the Holocaust did not happen. But this does not follow. Laws against Holocaust denial can be easily explained by a combination of European fear of far-right politics, Europe's un-American attitude towards free speech, German guilt, and Jews' disproportionate political power relative to their population size.
As a history buff, what bothers me about Holocaust denial isn't that I have any ideological commitment to the idea that the mainstream theories are right. I don't. On the contrary, it would excite me to find out that a historical theory that is so widely accepted is actually false. The idea of it stirs my rebellious blood and my love of intellectual upheaval!
What actually bothers me about Holocaust denial is that I have seriously tried to engage with many different deniers' arguments, and when I did so I saw that their thinking is mostly shoddy, their arguments are weak, and most of them are in reality closed-minded and firmly unwilling to alter their core beliefs about the Holocaust even when they act as if they are fearlessly open-minded seekers after truth.
In my opinion the easy solution to holocaust denial, or really any sufficiently eugh-ified topic, is to shut down discussion unless the person engaging in it is willing to put enough on the line and agree on judging criteria for how the discussion could be resolved.
I.e. It would not be beneficial to me to discuss the topic unless the person is willing to be 10k$< and agree beforehand on how could we reach an agreement.
I doubt any holocaust denier would be willing to accept any judging by reasonable people, so thats as far as that topic would ever go, as it should. If you are so diwconnected from the foundation of productive discussion, correct or not the value of talking to you is negative.
Something similar came up during the rootclaim discussion on ACX. See the “Aftermath: debate” section near the end.
I assume the concern is that (if the court system hadn’t stepped in), the Institute for Historical Review could have kept denying any evidence they were given, then kept taunting people with “We’ve offered $50,000 for proof that the Holocaust happened, nobody has ever won our money, so the proof must not exist”. Or Kirsch could keep saying “Nobody will bet me $500,000 on vaccines, guess they’re scared and think they don’t have evidence” (when in fact it’s just that most people don’t have the time, courage, and risk tolerance to do this, especially when there’s no guarantee the right person will win the debate). In order to deny these people this weapon (the argument goes) we need to make it common knowledge that this strategy isn’t legitimate.
So how do you make it clear that your offer is genuine, fair, and thus admissible as evidence? As opposed to all the bad-faith debaters asking why no one will take their rigged bets. If you can’t look credible to the opposition, you won’t get many takers. And if you can’t look credible to the audience, “no one wants to take my bet” remains unconvincing.
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Wouldn't a denier just say the "reasonable people" have too large an inferential distance from the denier as to make them more or less incapable of agreeing with the denier even if the latter were correct?
I am not opposed to the notion of having skin in the debate, but for topics like this, I think you would just get bogged down into meta discussion on the credibility of sources on either side.
We can discuss how should topics be evaluated rather than the which the person would derive significantly less biased to prolong. If a forum is full of people arguing what is the best way to evaluate the conclusion of a topic that would be an improvement imo.
But it's not going to go anywhere. No one is going to back down on the credibility of their sources, especially if the inferential distance is too large.
I am referring to the fact that as mentioned, people that for example are posting about holocaust denial are very biased in that they would post about it a lot, and would be happy to argue with you about it a lot, because they presumably are derive a lot of enjoyment out of doing so, and because any argument on it still gives it more exposure.
But if any time they want to discuss how the Holocaust didnt happen instead they get bogged down in arguing about to decide how could arguments be settled, which is technically an entirely different meta argument, the balance of the discussion wouldnt be as biased. They wont get "unfair" utility by spreading their opinion more than before, and the argument would be one where both sides arent particularly enjoying prolonging.
The problem is that we'd have to discuss the facts on the ground, and any anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers would inherently get to promote their view that they don't think Jews are by default as trustworthy as others. For some, their goal is just to spread doubt and get the talking points out, not to actually reconsider their views on the Jews or anything related.
Im suggesting you reject any discussion of facts and immediately redirect it to " ok what external criteria are you willing to accept as arbiter for a 10k bet on this argument. Any discussion on how to settle a bet shouldnt include the facts of the argument.
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I don't think your representation of the Revisionist case is very good, I would divide it into these categories:
Census data: Inconclusive, heavily relies on the accuracy and political integrity of very complex measurements, and doing some simple additions and subtractions from many different demographic studies conducted before, during, and after the war in the Russian empire, Poland, and Soviet Union. It heavily relies on a level of precision (how many Polish Jews became "Soviet Citizens" on paper after the war?), accuracy and honesty that simply does not exist. Inaccurate census data also causes problems in estimating the death toll in other atrocities like the Armenian genocide. Census data also does not tell us how many Jews died under Soviet occupation during or shortly after the war. Revisionists suspect a very large number of Jews were deported into and likely died in the Soviet Interior.
Physical evidence: Strongly favors the Revisionist side. Historians claim ~3 million were murdered in these extermination camps, but the remains of approximately 0% have been identified in scientific excavations. This also includes technical arguments around things like burial density or cremation capacity, fuel requirements, etc. Although these arguments are usually not influential to non-Revisionists because they just assume that Revisionists are using math deceptively or not representing the mainstream position accurately.
Documentary evidence: Strongly favors the Revisionist side, as the Revisionist case mostly takes the documents at face value whereas the mainstream narrative claims that there was systematic euphemism and coded language. For example, there are documents where both Himmler and Pohl, head of the concentration camp system, identify Sobibor as a transit camp (Durchgangslager). The Revisionist theory is this camp was what the document says it was, the mainstream theory is that in their own internal secret documents they used coded language to camouflage the extermination camp. There are some documents that Revisionists struggle to explain, which is to be expected given that there are millions and millions of them. There are documents that the mainstream struggles to explain.
But most important of all are the documents that should be there but which are not. For example, you are likely aware that the top-secret communications between Auschwitz and SS headquarters were intercepted and decoded during the height of the Holocaust. The average person has not heard of these decodes because there is no indication in those communications whatsoever of what the mainstream alleges. The communication and death tolls reported in fact corroborate the Revisionist position. If it happened, it would be easy to discern from the decodes, in hindsight. That's only one example of an extremely broad, systematic absence of evidence that ought to be there but which is not. Apparently the Auschwitz Decodes do not even warrant a Wikipedia page.
Witness testimonies: The most strong aspect of the Revisionist case in my opinion. Witnesses are by far the most important part of the body of evidence for the mainstream narrative, so the Revisionist critique of that body of evidence is devastating.
You say Revisionists "poke holes", but that complaint is myopic. Mainstream historians claim that around 900,000 Jews were murdered, cremated and buried in a precisely known location. This is an extremely unusual and extraordinary claim. The documentary and physical evidence for this claim, by my estimation, conclusively disproves it. The reliance on witness testimonies and census data to prove something which could have easily been proven at any point with a scientific investigation points to the correctness of the Revisionist position. The Revisionist criticisms of the alleged cremation operation at these camps is absolutely devastating, and the side representing the mainstream can only really complain about "poking holes" rather than provide a convincing rebuttal. Any time we are, in the news, confronted with the logistical problem of cremating large numbers of corpses, Skeptical Paulie shows up to "Ayy Tone" inquiring how the Germans were able to cremate 6,000 people on open-air pyres every single day in the Polish winter in a small area of a small camp. It's not poking holes, it's a glaring weakness in the mainstream narrative which indicates this could not have possibly happened as they are claiming, and there is no convincing rebuttal to that point.
Even corrupt and dysfunctional governments have a huge incentive to do accurate censuses for the purposes of taxation, conscription, and economic planning. In the case of census data about pre-war Jewish populations in Eastern Europe, we also know that this census data is corroborated by numerous literary sources, both fiction and non-fiction, which describe large Jewish populations in pre-war Eastern Europe.
Hitler himself, in Mein Kampf, wrote:
Consider what it means for the Jewish population of Eastern Europe, if Vienna alone had 200,000.
As for the details of the operation of the death camps, first let us be clear. You do not simply disbelieve that the death camps operated as mainstream Holocaust theories describe them operating. You disbelieve that there was ever any deliberate Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews at all. And you are using the argument of "if the mainstream theories get the operation of the camps wrong, it means that the mainstream theories are completely wrong and, in fact, there was no Holocaust at all".
But you have not advanced, at least not from what I have read of your posts, a comprehensive and specific alternative theory. You have the advantage of not presenting a comprehensive theory, but instead just criticizing the comprehensive theories of others. Much of your argumentation is on the hand-wavy level of "well, maybe the censuses were wrong".
But you have not presented a comprehensive theory that is more credible than the theory that the Nazis deliberately tried to exterminate the Jews.
The idea that the Holocaust is a gigantic hoax that the US, USSR, various European countries, and eyewitnesses all successfully collaborated on creating and perpetuating, even at the height of the Cold War when some of the participants in the alleged hoax were enemies, seems to me to be obviously even less probable than the idea that you can cremate a million people in a year at a small Polish camp or whatever.
The Nazis had means, motive, and opportunity. Given their ideology, why wouldn't they have tried to exterminate the Jews? The Holocaust is completely in alignment with Nazi ideology. This isn't a case of "the man who is being accused of murder is by all accounts a nice guy and it is debatable whether he was even in the vicinity when the victim died". This is a case of "the man who is being accused of murder openly told people numerous times that he hated the victim, he had a history of threatening the victim, he had a history of violence against both the victim and others, and he was there in the house with the victim on the day that the victim died".
I just want to register my irritation at phrasing it this way. These we German camps.
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There are also incentives for various players in government to fudge census figures for purposes of representational allotment, project funding, public relations, etc. Not saying it happened in any particular instance, but we can't just point to an incentive here; census accounts have to be researched and justified like any other historical record/document.
Yes, but I can't think of any reason why pre-war governments in Eastern Europe would have wanted to invent millions of Jews out of thin air for their censuses.
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