One more for the road...
Problem is, you aren't coordinating all the facts, and you're not arguing with facts. You're arguing using your own interpretation of some facts and then wishing away all the other facts.
You asked me what it would mean if there were no mass graves at these "death camps." What are you asking for if you don't want my own interpretation of some fact?
What facts aren't I coordinating and with what am I arguing if not facts? What other facts am I 'wishing away?'
I think the above is one of the most silly pieces of nonsense I have read from you yet.
I assume the "silly nonsense" is not my statement about you being the most knowledgeable believer here but that other stuff.
The resistence to locating and investigating the mass graves is just one of those reasons why holocaust historians are held in contempt by real scholars. They study the holocaust, which is nothing if not a mass murder. They are positive they know where the remains of two million murder victims were buried before they disappeared. But they have no interest in investigating those mass graves. A few illiterate Pollacks who saw empty trains leave the camp and a couple of railroad manifests is all they need to reconstruct the greatest crime of the century.
That's silly nonsense. Having to explain how investigating a mass grave might provide meaningful information about a mass murder is silly nonsense. What conclusion are we suppose to draw except that holocaust scholars don't care about getting to the truth? The only other reason anybody would resist studying the mass graves is that they know there is nothing down there and revealing that would make life very difficult for people who earn a living promoting the holocaust.
If you're such a truthseeker, then why are you still fixated on mass graves at just a couple of sites?
It's more than a couple but it's because those are the camps where impossibly huge numbers of people were allegedly murdered and buried.
For starters, any argument about the graves has to examine them as a set in order to be coherent, because all of the other evidence points to them being a set and because it's simply plate-spinning to go from one site to the next and back again without evaluating them as a group.
What do you mean by "a set?" Each "death camp" is an independent entity. They're in different locations. The topography and geology of each camp are presumably somewhat different. Each mass grave within each death camp is an independent entity. You can't treat them as a single unit.
You want to talk about the holocaust as a "set" for the same reason a car salesman wants to negotiate the price of the new car, the value of your trade-in, and the finance terms all at the same time. It's easier to scam the customer by mixing up unrelated topics.
The key to a coherent meaningful discussion of the holocaust is to discuss one site, one aspect of that one site and stay on topic. Something the believers seem unable to do.
Any argument claiming that the graves couldn't have held enough bodies is totally incomplete and incoherent. The immediate, logical question is then where are they? Are they alive or dead? If you have no answer to this question, then you should return to your original interpretation and ask yourself whether you might be wrong.
OK, it sounds like you're countering my argument with my argument. If there's no evidence that there were ever any mass graves large enough to hold all the bodies then we know there's no evidence that there were mass graves large enough to hold all the bodies. Yes, our knowledge would be incomplete. No, it's not incoherent. Maybe it's puzzling or confusing but not incoherent. Yes, the next question is where are they? It's not unreasonable to assume they are all dead now although I suppose it's possible that some could still be alive.
But if they weren't buried in the camp, then their bodies had to have left the camp. Their bodies could have been alive or they could have been dead. Further investigation would be necessary. And yes, if these questions cannot be answered then it is necessary to return to your original interpretation and ask yourself if you might be wrong.
I don't need to do anything. Those figures were produced at a time before there was a systematic demography of civilian casualties and of population movements in WWII. The matter is self-evidently cleared up by a process of elimination in matching deportation statistics for Jews and non-Jews from all countries which experienced deportations.
I don't know what that last sentence means. When did we finally achieve a "systematic demography of civilians casualties and of population movements in WWII?" When were the numbers for Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec estimated? And weren't the estimates of six million made before there was systematic demography of civilian casualties and of population movements?
Your question, in effect, boils down to 'have you read Reitlinger and Hilberg?' because they cleared it up a very long time ago - fifty plus years ago. Or 'have you read Frumkin?' because there are plenty of studies of the demographic losses from WWII as a whole, starting in the 1940s. The answer is, yes I have read Frumkin, and many other such studies.
No, my question in effect boils down to 'can't you see how stupid it is to use my inability to locate X people who were never murdered as evidence they were murdered.' If the official death toll at Treblinka was lowered to 500, the officials don't need to tell us where the other 699,500 people went any more than they needed to explain where 2.5 million people went when the Auschwitz death toll was lowered from 4 to 1.5 million.
But they are missing, and you have not provided any evidence to the contrary. That's why it's nihilistic to focus only on mass graves, and in the current rhetorical slippage, only at Treblinka.
First of all, as I already explained, there's no need to explain where the missing people went if they're not missing. How is it nihilistic to focus on the mass graves? Let's assume there are all these missing people who are dead and presumably buried in these mass graves. If they're not buried in the mass graves, then they're not buried in the mass graves. That's the only thing that's definite. Haven't I said this? It doesn't have to mean the negation of the holocaust--although no bodies being buried in mass graves at the death camps would probably make the mythical status of the holocaust harder to sustain.
I stated that the evident indifference and lack of follow-through in this discussion, the refusal to try and explain what happened or to come up with a testable hypothesis, makes denial nihilistic.
That to my mind casts doubt on whether denier interpretations of mass grave evidence are plausible.
This isn't an ad hominem argument ('U R antisemits nur nur'), it's an observation on the apparent chain of deductions you are making, since the deductions don't go anywhere. All you say is 'no mass graves nur nur', and stop.
I don't see the point in speculating what it means to find no mass graves large enough to hold all the bodies before that is determined.
The problem you're having is that you have an overwhelming crush of documentary and eyewitness evidence that you believe leads to the inextricable conclusion that X number of people of murdered in these camps and then buried before being dug up and incinerated. Your theory works as long as those people were all actually buried at those camps.
But the numbers of people allegedly buried at those camps are bumping up against if not exceeding the realm of the physically possible. It's
your chain of deductions that leads us to that conclusion.
Mass graves as big as those that would exist if your chain of deductions is correct would leave physical evidence that would be impossible to erase. Rather than simply reject your interpretation of all the data because it isn't real evidence and it leads to a seriously implausible conclusion, I challenge you to prove that your seriously implausible conclusion is in fact possible.
If the evidence of mass graves is present, then we move on. If there is no evidence of mass graves, then your chain of deductions needs to be reevaluated.
Your claim was that no reports have been shown. As expected, this translated into 'shown to me personally by spoonfeeding'.
Asking for references isn't asking to be spoonfed the information. Saying that all this information is available but that you're not going to tell me where to find it tells me that either 1) you are an ******* or 2) this information isn't available and you're a liar.
I think you'd find that the actual reports have been discussed in quite a few books on the subject, both from mainstream historians and by deniers. They are excerpted online all over the place. There have been links given previously. The summaries you can read also online from German Crimes in Poland are accurate summaries of the 'protokoly' from 1945.
What part "not just excerpts or somebody's summary" sounds like I'm interested in excerpts or summaries?
I would ask you to parse the evidence previously posted in the following link
http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2010/05/mass-graves-at-nazi-extermination-camps.html
By parse I mean identify what reports are referred to and how much of them is recapitulated - by an amateur blogger who is not a professional historian. This is the obvious starting point for your 'shopping list'.
Well it sounds like there really haven't been many studies done on these camps. The 1947 report by the Polish Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland sounds interesting. The photographs that were linked from this blog might be valuable but I didn't find any link that wasn't dead.
The one study I am most interested in seeing is a write up of the Kola study at Belzec. There was a summary of some preliminary findings posted on the H-Holocaust Discussion board that were intriguing. The full report would be nice to have available.
In reality the obvious starting point for my shopping list is this: If you tell me there is a report that answers any of my questions, show me that report. If you can't show me that report, don't tell me my questions have been answered.
Then the issue is for you to trace the discussion of these reports from 1945 onwards, bearing in mind the Cold War, subsequent war crimes trials and in what countries they were held, the language barriers that might follow from this, and finally whether it's normal to see much discussion from historians/social scientists/journalists of mass graves for comparable events, like the many other genocides and crimes against humanity in the 20th Century.
See, you're telling me that this evidence is out there but I'm just too lazy to find it. The evidence for something like the holocaust shouldn't be so obscure that it takes that much work to find it. This is the best documented event in history, isn't it? Most people believe the standard historiography without having to track down obscure documentation.
As far as comparisons to other mass graves, an illustrative example is what the Germans did when they found Katyn. You can also try googling "mass grave discovered" and you'll find links to newspaper stories that provide more substantial evidence of a mass grave than has ever been offered in support of mass graves at AB, T, B, or S.
Holocaust denial isn't a very big phenomenon, and it is fairly easy to establish by reading what deniers have written that they will blindly deny evidence when it is put in front of them.
Here you say deniers will blindly deny evidence when it is put in front of them but earlier you chastising me for asking to be spoon fed information. Maybe if you stopped spoonfeeding us garbage and helped us locate these indepth studies of the death camps that you say will prove us wrong you could put a stop to this holocaust denial nonsense once and for all.
It may not be a very big phenomenon but holocaust denial is obviously taken quite seriously and is considered very dangerous.
As far as I can make out, deniers didn't give a flying monkeys' about mass graves until the late 1980s, which is several decades into the existence of the movement. That was after they were failing badly to explain away all the documents and witnesses. So the last refuge was the physical evidence.
That last line is hilarious! If our 'last refuge' is the physical evidence it's because the physical evidence hasn't been tapped by the believers when it is the first thing they should have looked at.
The physical evidence is the last refuge in that it is the evidence that trumps all other evidence. If a thousand eyewitnesses say there are 700,000 bodies buried in somebody's backyard and there aren't any bodies buried there, the eyewitnesses are wrong. If you have railroad manifests showing 700,000 people were sent to somebody's house and there are no records of these people leaving that house indicating that they were murdered there and buried in the backyard and there's no bodies buried in the backyard, the interpretation of those railroad manifests are wrong.
The holocaust rises and falls on the physical evidence.
Yet neo-Nazis are on record as saying revisionism is precisely about making Nazism acceptable again. It's not the fault of observers who notice these things if the neo-Nazis in question (or the German ultranationalists, the antisemites, the Israel haters, the contrarians, the trolls or the simply cognitively challenged) think they can wave a wand and intone 'no mass graves, no mass graves' and the world will be set to rights somehow.
The stupidity is in the denial itself.
You of course can tell me which neo-Nazi said revisionism is all about making Nazism acceptable? Please don't point me to the Nizkor homepage. The haters over there think they have uncovered the cynical truth but then say that they learned about this secret conspiracy from an obscure, extremist group. What a bunch of morons! If the group is 'extremist' it doesn't represent the mainstream. If it's obscure, it's not very popular. Since when does the unpopular fringe represent the majority? As I said, CT at it's finest!
You still haven't answered the main question of my post. What would it prove if the mass graves were smaller? You replied with a lot of waffle about 'wanting to know the truth'. That isn't a statement which involves proof, it simply postpones the issue into an apparently ever-receding future.
I'd like to see a coherent chain of reasoning from you before we get down to the nitpicking details.
I'm not going to speculate on what it would mean because there are too many variables. What do you think it would mean? If it were discovered that there were no mass graves at the Aktion Reinhard death camps, would anything about the holocaust need to be evaluated?
