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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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Jews died of typhus and starvation en masse near the end of the war, in the same way that 200-400k Germans died of starvation in the final months of the war and the months that followed.

400k Germans was like 0.5% of the German civilian population, "typhus" would have had to kill upwards of half the Jewish population of the region in a very short period for this explanation to make sense.

We should expect very high starvation numbers in isolated concentration camps given that the Germans themselves were starving all over Germany, and they would feed themselves before feeding other nationalities.

Then where are the bodies, if (as revisionists allege) mass cremations were not used? Is the argument that there were widespread crematoria but that they were only used for typus victims? Most damningly, gentile civilians in surrounding areas (subject to the same supply line collapses and bombed infrastructure) did not starve in any substantial numbers (relative). Again, it's merely gesturing at what 'could' have happened, it's not a serious or comprehensive alternative hypothesis.

the elderly camp guards put on trial in Germany who have entered the “honest old people” phase of dementia more often than not assert that the holocaust didn’t happen.

On the other hand, large numbers of Nazi war criminals who would have been aware of the Holocaust and who were tried throughout the mid and late 20th century never claimed that it didn't happen, before or after trials (eg. even at times it didn't matter to their liberty) and in places where holocaust denial was not, at that time, illegal. One would expect more of them to protest their party's innocence, to claim libel.

Jewish population figures were actually accurate prior to WWII (holocaust historians claim that every figure of the Jewish population from before WWII undercounted areas of Russia by millions).

Which exact figures, what's the number? As someone else said, Hitler himself discussed Vienna as having 200,000 Jews at 10% of the population in his youth. In 1939 Prague had 90,000 at 20% of the population, 390,000 in Warsaw at 30% of the population. Again, these figures track with the number of synagogues and Jewish schools considering religiosity and congregation size, and once extrapolated downward to smaller cities and towns with synagogues and other Jewish institutions they lead to the prewar estimate of the Eastern European Jewish population as at least 4m.

Many Jews after the war assimilated with a non-Jewish identity.

Perhaps ironically this extreme level of assimilation would be a strong argument against a lot of white nationalist arguments for antisemitism, but in any case it's an absurd hypothesis. It suggests that millions of people were separated from their families and friends, scattered all over the Eastern Bloc and then never attempted to contact eg. surviving family members in the West but also never got in touch with local Jewish communities that survived all across the region and which maintained meticulous pre and post-war records of brises, marriages, funerals and so on. Before the Iron Curtain fully solidifed in the late 40s and early 50s surviving Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Hungarian, Russian and Romanian rabbis and other figures in the community conducted extensive population surveys of the surviving population.

So this theory involves millions of Jews who were taken to camps or fled into Russia and, despite spending their entire lives in largely Jewish communities before, never got in touch with the local extant Russian-Jewish communities whatsoever, which persisted through the whole Soviet Union. If they had surviving relatives in America or England or France or Israel, they never attempted to get in touch with them (yes, Soviet citizens could send mail to the West). They also never told their kids they were Jewish at all or anything about their family history. Many would even have survived the fall of the USSR and seen the success of Israel, and all this time they never said anything.

I don’t think holocaust proponents grasp how strong the motive would be to to cement a holocaust narrative. You effectively demoralize Germany, a rival nation that “caused” two wars and which historically created the upperclass of Europe. You effectively seal the moral superiority of America.

Why did the US only suddenly start to do this in the late 1970s, though, long after successfully turning West Germany into a deferential modern Western country under US occupation without discussing it much and while rehabilitating all but a few of the most senior Nazis? It's more accurate to see Holocaust remembrance as something that happened because of pressure from within German society, largely from students, and efforts from some survivors and their children over many decades after the war. It wasn't top down.

Why did the US only suddenly start to do this in the late 1970s, though

That's when the US started getting close with Israel, so all the ADL, holocaust propaganda, and other shit was to help cement the budding alliance through public relations manipulation, perhaps. We've seen how claims of antisemitism were used most recently to try and stifle dissent towards America's support for the ongoing 'police action' in Gaza, and various projects like the opening of new holocaust remembrance museums and movies directed by Spielberg depicting the suffering of Jews keep getting announced ever since 10/6. This strongly suggests that all of the anti-antisemitism buzz is just for propaganda purposes, not for actually contesting antisemitism (which would be bizarre if it was).