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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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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:

Although Vienna then had about two hundred thousand Jews among its population of two millions, I did not notice them.

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".

Polish camp

I just want to register my irritation at phrasing it this way. These we German camps.

Even corrupt and dysfunctional governments have a huge incentive to do accurate censuses for the purposes of taxation, conscription, and economic planning.

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.