This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
In a press conference Eisenhower gave in 1945 he said the following: "When I found the first camp like that I think I was never so angry in my life. The bestiality displayed there was not merely piled up bodies of people that had starved to death, but to follow out the road and see where they tried to evacuate them so they could still work, you could see where they sprawled on the road. You could go to their burial pits and see horrors that really I wouldn't even want to begin to describe. I think people ought to know about such things...It is something we have been trying desperately to find out, whether or not the German population as a whole knew about that. I can’t say. It does appear, from all the evidence we can find, that they were isolated areas and this one piece of evidence that the mayor being shown the thing and going home and hanging himself would indicate he didn’t know about it. On the other hand, what makes the story so thin with me is when we find these very high ranking Nazis denying knowledge of it. If they didn’t, they deliberately closed their eyes, that is all. As far as I’m concerned these people are just as guilty as anybody else – those high ranking Nazis – but I think it would be impossible to say, however, the German nation knew it as a whole. But a lot of them know it, because I told them to go out and give them a decent burial. We made a film an hour long and we have made many Germans look at it, and it is not pretty."
In a military cable to General Patton in 1945, Eisenhower wrote the following: "We continue to uncover German concentration camps for political prisoners in which conditions of indescribable horror prevail…I have visited one of these myself and I assure you that whatever has been printed on them to date has been understatement. If you would see any advantage in asking about a dozen leaders of congress and a dozen prominent editors to make a short visit to this theater in a couple of C-54s, I will arrange to have them conducted to one of these places where the evidence of bestiality and cruelty is so overpowering as to leave no doubt in their minds about the normal practices of the Germans in these camps.
And, of course, in his autobiography Crusade in Europe Eisenhower wrote the following (page 446):
"The same day I saw my first horror camp. It was near the town of Gotha. I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain, however, that I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock.
"I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that “the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda”. Some members of the visiting party were unable to go through the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton’s headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt."
In the same book, on page 480, he wrote the following while discussing displaced persons (DPs) after the war:
"Of all these DPs the Jews were in the most deplorable condition. For years they had been beaten, starved, and tortured. Even food, clothes, and decent treatment could not immediately enable them to shake off their hopelessness and apathy. They huddled together — they seemingly derived a feeling of safety out of crowding together in a single room —and there passively awaited whatever might befall. To secure for them adequate shelter, to establish a system of food distribution and medical service, to say nothing of providing decent sanitary facilities, heat, and light was a most difficult task. They were, in many instances, no longer capable of helping themselves; everything had to be done for them."
And again on page 481:
"Of all the distressing memories that will for ever live with American veterans of the war in Europe, none will be sharper or more enduring than those of the DPs and of the horror camps established by the Nazis."
As you can see, in his autobiography he does not blame the deplorable condition of the Jews in the camps as being the result of a breakdown of logistics but on "Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency" and as the result of years of being "beaten, starved, and tortured" in "horror camps".
Starvation and "beatings" prove nothing.
Those are the conditions that existed in the Gulags in peace time, the conditions that existed in the british concentration camps for the Boer, and the conditions that would have existed in the concentration camps for Japanese Americans if America had lost the war and had its supply chains and rail networks destroyed by bombing.
The Claim of "the holocaust" is that the Germans uniquely set out to kill every jew in Europe, did so on an industrialized scale and with an efficiency never seen before in human, history, and that it is in a category of horror beyond any other genocide to ever exist including the Great Leap forward, Hoomodor, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and CERTAINLY worse than the Soviet mass killing and expulsion of the German Diaspora post 1945.
Nothing in "Crusade in Europe", Churchhill's "Second World War", or De Gualle's "Memoires De Guerre" suggest anything of the sort.
Indeed all of them portray the Camps as workcamps for enemy aliens (like the camps for Japanese-Americans) that collapsed and lost life support function during the onslaught of war.
Reading this claim is weird given you are replying to the very quotes from Crusade in Europe that are not "nothing" after you first argued there would be no quotes like them in the book.
One doesn't need advanced degree of historiography to realize that Eisenhower and Churchill have all the reasons to not care too much about Holodomor or German victims of Soviet brutalities or Boer victims of British concentration camps. Naturally neither can't make comparisons to Cambodia or Great Leap Forward because they had not happened yet in 1948.
All of that "uniquely", "efficiency never seen before" stuff sounds something from History Channel and makes your argument is strawman-ish. Yes, unfortunately, some people have habit of talking about the historical events involving death with as dramatic words as possible while scary music loops in the background (see exhibit A, History Channel). However, gesturing at drivel and pointing out that it exists is evidence about the drivel, but not much else. The question being debated is not the uniqueness or the efficiency never seen before (mostly not the special status of the Holocaust in popular consciousness either): the question being debated is how many people died and how and when. If the overdramatic claims concerning the Holocaust inflate its relative scale compared to other mass deaths, the overinflated assessment of uniqueness and efficiency is not evidence people did not die.
Unrelated to any claims Eisenhower made or any reports he sent, according to the statistics and documentary evidence, the major portion of mass killing of Jews happened in the East. Places that are not Gotha. Eisenhower went to places like Gotha. However, the claims indicate that he wanted to report that he was horrified by things he did see,
In general, it is not particularly suspicious Eisenhower and Churchill and De Gaulle (I admit I have little idea what De Gaulle wrote) discuss atrocities targeting Jews in fewer than 5% printed words (1). People tend to ignore and forget and not learn in the first place about atrocities that are not personally relevant to them. The general pattern is that until the advent of modern electronic mass media, it took decades for any atrocities to became widely known and people to care about them. Nobody in the West cared about the Armenian genocide when it happened or soon afterwards. It became only known when Armenians managed to gain some international prominence with their complaints about the past genocide. When the Holodomor was happening, the West considered it a famine like other famines. People started talking about it until after the collapse of the USSR. Nobody outside Asia paid particular attention to Japanese atrocities in China and Korea, the legal cases about "comfort women" and like happened decades later.
The reason why it takes time for atrocities to become known in is natural: Soon after a genocidal mass murder, the survivors often were not in a position to advertise their plight. It takes some time to emigrate out from the immediate aftereffects of the atrocity, then it takes time build stable life, it takes time get interviewed and/or get organized and/or become the person collecting evidence, writing memoirs, books and reports. Only after the memoirs and books have been printed people start reading them. It takes some time for the books and reports to became widely read and gain staying power. (Like today, also yesterday people forgot most of the news, unless they were personally affected or specifically paying attention. Especially WW2 had lot of atrocities, unreliably reported, difficult to distinguish from propaganda.) Consider Belgium's king Leopold's atrocities in Congo: they were a cause celebre for a brief moment in ~1900, and then were mostly forgotten for nearly a century. Congo never became that prominent place, they did not organize successfully to publish their victimization in the West. Same goes for the British atrocities in Africa. The atrocities in Congo were "found again" only in the 1990s after it had became popular and important in the West to talk about all atrocities and colonial atrocities in particular. Today, with widespread instant electronic communication and cultural milieu where comparing preferred outgroup to Nazis is a powerful political weapon, the handling of atoricites in the media as they happend is different than it was in the past.
Also, as an aside, you making a big show of Ctrl-Fin "holocaust", which is a very puzzling point for you to make: I don't understand what you are intending to achieve by making it. Rudimentary search into the existing "official" source as Wikipedia reveals that yes, use of the word "Holocaust" started getting traction in the 1950s and became common in the "late 1960s". This is well attested and well documented. Not finding any records of usage of a word with its modern meaning in works published in 1948 is not surprising, it is expected given the other available documentation. Like the question of "efficiency never seen before", the evolution of terminology and popular consciousness of "the Holocaust" is not direct evidence about to what Germans did or did not.
(1 if we accept your claim, which I am reluctant to do, given that you first argued that Eisenhower didn't discuss the Holocaust, then as another Mottezen provided quotes where Eisenhower does discuss the camps related to German atrocities, you proceed to dismiss it as "nothing". What other claims are "nothing" in your reading but not in other people's reading?)
More options
Context Copy link
The claim of the holocaust is that the Germans acted in a systematic fashion to kill millions of non-combatants, primarily Jews, during WWII. It is certainly not the claim that this is the worst thing that any society has ever done. I believe the standard holocaust "narrative" completely, but I would consider the Great Leap Forward, Holodomor, Killing Fields, the soviet Great Purge, just about everything Japan did to China, the Great Terror of the French revolution, the War in the Vendee, and a great many other historical events equal in kind to the holocaust, with a few greater in degree.
And the testimony of Eisenhower, in his autobiographies and public speaking, and the testimony of the US Army investigations into the camps, and the testimony of thousands of survivors, all seems to point to the fact that Germany killed millions of non-combatants, mostly Jews, on purpose. Primarily through starvation or being shot, but they also definitely killed people in gas chambers as well.
They certainly do not portray the camps as workcamps for enemy aliens. Eisenhower portrays them as "horror camps" where Germans showed "brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency" and whose residents experienced "conditions of indescribable horror". At no point does he blame the conditions in the camps or the starvation of the camp inmates as being the result of collapse, or a loss of life support function during the onslaught of war. Find me the quote where he refers to them as standard work camps, or puts the blame on a lack of supplies rather than the Nazi "bestiality".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link