'Lots of words' tend to be the norm in most serious discussions. Joined up thinking requires context and not cherrypicking issues. That's something denier chimps seem to have a problem with, of course.
Nicky Nicky Nicky. Didn't I tell you your polysyllabic obfuscation hurts my thinkbone?
You seem to have missed the extensive reporting about textbooks being censored in
states like Texas in order to placate the fundamentalist lobby. There are numerous studies showing that evolution is being subtly downplayed in many US schools, sometimes because the teachers themselves do not really believe in the theory, sometimes because they wish to avoid causing controversy. Here is one
from January this year.
The manner in which evolution is downplayed in classrooms is repeatedly discussed in much of the literature on the controversy.
OK, a few articles is evidence for sweeping generalizations. Check.
Like Saggy you are very fond of moving the goalposts. The subject of our discussion was whether there was a disconnect between the public understanding of the Holocaust and the scholarly understanding.
You were the one who brought up museums because you were dumb enough to think there wasn't a museum on the Mall which deals with evolution. I showed you were entirely wrong about that.
Moving goalposts? The subject of our discussion hasn't moved. We agree there is a disconnect between popular perception and scholarly understanding of the holocaust. You don't think that's a problem. I do.
I brought up museums because museums are a source of information for some people. There is a national holocaust museum in the United States that spouts out disinformation. There is no national evolution museum and you haven't shown me there is despite your claim that there is.
Actually the number of museums on any topic isn't really a meaningful metric.
Anyone can set up a museum, and they can solicit funding for it like everyone else by rattling tins. That is precisely what the American Jewish community did starting really in the 1970s or so, with a few earlier outliers. Most of the Holocaust museums in the US are pretty small and clearly private institutions. There are 25 according to a global list of Holocaust museums I linked to above. There are a further 20 Jewish museums of various kinds listed in the Wikipedia category. I will allow for the possibility that some smaller ones are missed, but as we will see most of these museums are diddy little things and thus hardly worth the bilious ire of an internet denier, unless they are actually just a troll.
From a global perspective these figures add up to virtually nothing. Israel only just barely has a larger Jewish population than the United States and it
clearly has way more than 45 museums.
One of the 25 "American Holocaust museums" listed is
simply part of a particular synagogue in New York with roots in the Greek Sephardic Jewish community. Another,
CANDLES, is in Terre Haute, Indiana, and is only open from 1-4pm in the afternoons five days a week. Another, the Holocaust Resource Center in Buffalo, NY boasts of having
"over 500 books" and doesn't even mention any exhibitions. Clearly none of these institutions are getting any significant public funding. This would also apply to most of the other diddy little museums
like the one in Naples, Florida which grew out of a high school classroom exhibit.
Funnily enough the locations of many of these museums correlates pretty closely with areas of the States where there are larger Jewish communities. It makes perfect sense that there are 5 museums in New York state and 4 in Florida, out of 25 listed. There are none listed for the overwhelming majority of US states.
Nice try with the attempt to compare with the number of black slavery museums BTW. There is actually a pretty extensive network of African American Museums in the United States with their own
association. Looking at their institutional members for many US states I would say there are more African American museums in the US than there are Jewish and Holocaust museums. And yet the African American community is infinitely poorer and less able to fund-raise than the American Jewish community.
There are also
lots of Native American museums in the States, despite the very small size of the Native American population. Of course they have their
direct representation on the Mall, moving an already existing museum collection from New York.
Blah blah blah. Thank you for missing and simultaneously proving my point. Yes, there are African American museums. They are more numerous than holocaust or even Jewish museums. So what? There are more African Americans in the US than there are Jews. There are native American museums as well.
How many museums are dedicated specifically to documenting the genocide of these peoples?
Nice try also with the dodge that the Holocaust didn't happen in the US. No, but about 200,000 survivors (in the broad definition) came to the States in three waves, one up to 1941, one immediately after the war (ie proper 'camp survivors' and people who had survived in hiding) and one when Russian Jews emigrated. The US is a nation of immigrant communities and it is unsurprising that these communities set up museums, just as communities who have been around longer have also done. All of them have done so more extensively since the end of the melting pot and the increased emphasis on ethnic heritage which is a major issue in post-1960s American society.
And you claim there simply aren't very many survivors available to talk to school children?
There simply isn't a huge plethora of Holocaust museums dominating the landscapes of every single city in the US, as deniers like to pretend. What there are, is a bunch of small community museums rooted where one would generally expect them to be, just the same as there are large numbers of museums dedicated to the experiences of other minority groups in American society, founded by those minority groups but invariably serving to market them to the wider society.
Nobody said there were a plethora of holocaust museums. But there are museums dedicated to what the Germans did to the Jews during WWII. There are not any museums of the size and quality supported by taxpayers dedicated to the ill treatment Africans or Native Americans suffered at the hands of European invaders.
The exception to all of this is USHMM. But if you're going to rant about USHMM then it's where you find the Americanization of the Holocaust at its height. And thus it reflects the cultural significance of the Holocaust as well as its linkage with civil rights, human rights, US achievements or lack thereof in WWII and subsequently, other genocides (USHMM was one of the most outspoken institutions on Darfur).
I mean, yeah, how terrible: USHMM gets founded as part of a tradeoff in the Camp David accords back at the end of the 70s and around the time the Khmer Rouge autogenocided Cambodia, and then ends up being built to coincide with Bosnia and Rwanda. Gosh, how utterly irrelevant the Holocaust museum must be.
Pardon my cynicism but the suffering of the Jews as a metaphor for the suffering of all humanity wouldn't be complete without a mention of the Palestinians.
No, it's not like asking how many heads the Hydra has. You simply do not provide any hard statistics of how many camp survivors might give lectures at schools or anywhere else. You just blithely assume, after conceding that the number is decreasing, that they are everywhere, and offer up idiotic remarks like:
Clearly, you haven't twigged that 10s of 1000s of camp survivors and Jews who had survived the war in hiding immigrated to the United States after 1945. You can easily search Google News Archive and find quite a lot of stories about the arrivals of these survivors. Search for 'Auschwitz' from 1947-49 or so and quite a lot of the stories relate to Czech and Hungarian Jews who survived deportation to Auschwitz in 1944 and then came to the US after sitting in Displaced Persons camps.
The majority of these camp survivors then rebuilt their lives, had families and careers, and unsurprisingly only started reflecting on the past when they reached retirement age, because that's what old people normally do. So then some of them started reminiscing about their experiences, and giving interviews to the Spielberg archive etc, and some of those then decided they would give talks to schools.
There were survivors of all ages at liberation. There have been survivors getting old ever since the end of the war. All the survivors alive today would have been children or early teenagers at the end of the war. Why didn't the middle aged survivors at the end of the war start thinking about their experiences when they reached old age in the 1960s? Or the young adults survivors in 1945 when they reached old age in the 1970s? Those were the people who might have had some perspective on the reality of the camps. Survivors today are telling stories based on a child's perception of what happened a long long time ago, which we all know is subject to misinterpretation.
An old lady remembers being scared when she was three years old. Was it the Gestapo machine gunning her entire family or was it the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz? People can easily be led to invent false memories, especially when it gets them attention and money.
Your explanation of old people reminiscing about their suffering as children or it's corollary of what these people suffered was so horrendous that they repressed it until now is a crock.
OK so let's look at who they have in Birmingham, Alabama in the Holocaust speakers bureau. They are in fact down to
five survivors and have three non-survivors who would talk about family or congregation members. Apparently there were a whopping 16 Holocaust survivors in one synagogue once upon a time. You have to
request these speakers, they aren't foisted on you.
Three non-survivors? Talking about family or congregation members? This group has the audacity to think that somebody who KNEW a survivor is qualified to talk about what it was like to experience the holocaust? I want my kids to learn about prejudice so how about finding me an African American who will tell me what it was like to be a slave based upon her recollection of the stories her grandmother told her?
So they get a number of calls on the old-fogey speaking circuit, which is waaay bigger than you think in most countries. Where I used to live, we had the Rotary Club, Women's Institute, Probus, University of the 3rd Age and god knows who else in one small town, and they had near-weekly meetings with speakers from the local area. So naturally they told each other a lot of war stories about their time in Burma and invited antiquarians who obsess over trains and flower arranging to babble about their obsessions. No Holocaust survivors, though. Not many around in the Cotswolds.
But I digress. So the five survivors all have familiar stories. One was deported to Transnistria by the Romanians, one was in the Warsaw ghetto and then was hidden in the Polish countryside, one was in hiding as a young teenager in the south of France, two were deported from Romanian territory annexed by Hungary to Auschwitz and were then selected for work, last seeing their families on thr ramp
The last guy generates
1,030 hits in Google for reports of his talks around Alabama. Max Steinmetz is pretty clearly one of the 25% of Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz from May to July 1944 who were selected for work. They numbered 110,000. Approximately 60% of those 110,000 survived the war, i.e. 65-70,000. The others died.
Newspaper articles on Max Steinmetz often state
he was never tattooed and give a number which is clearly a Dachau camp number (72041) which fits right in to the registration sequence known for Jews selected at Auschwitz, held in the Depot and sent to camps like Dachau.
Naturally,
some denier trolls have tried to pick on Max Steinmetz's story, reported from another newspaper account, but seem unable to land any serious blows, so of course he's not going to become a poster-boy for the chimps like those survivors who believe in the Jewish soap myth.
I mean yeah, by all means whine and complain about stories like Max Steinmetz's. He says quite accurately he last saw 3/5ths of his family being dragged off in one direction and he watched the only other relative from his family die of hunger. He has a very typical story for someone deported to Auschwitz in 1944 who survived.
There is certainly no shortage of other people telling the same story, over and over and over again, because that's what happens when you select 110,000 people out of 420,000 and "disappear" the other 310,000, all just because they were Jewish and the Nazis had invaded a supposed ally, Hungary, and then you put the 110,000 you want as workers through the camps as forced labourers, so 40% of them die and that's why you get not more than 70,000 survivors out of the 420,000.
So the 70,000 survivors decide to disperse all over the world, and if like Max Steinmetz they lived in Transylvania they decide it's better not to live under communism in Romania once Transylvania has been handed back from Hungary to Romania, and decide to emigrate, which is what most Romanian born Jews did. They move to Israel or they move to America.
Clearly, there is a massive army of Max Steinmetzes out there, haunting Dogzilla and spooking him because local libraries and schools want to hear about the experiences of an old guy who happened to travel in his life all the way from provincial Romania to Alabama, via Auschwitz. And they want to hear about his experienes before he dies, since humans are just that respectful of the elderly, even Americans.
Tell you what: why don't you and your denier chums do the properly scientific thing and devise a genuinely representative sample of Holocaust survivor-speakers, you know, one that would stand up to proper methodological scrutiny. Say, about 1000 of them. If you can find that many (which you probably can) then you might be onto something as a major phenomenon.
But, and here's the kicker, you then have to demonstrate that they're all nuts, or a significant proportion of them are nuts. You have to show that of the 1000 survivor-speakers, 12% still mention 'Jewish soap' when frightening the kiddies, or that 20% describe ******** out diamonds, or that 15% are completely confused about what camp they were held in and babble nonsense.
That's an interesting idea. You give me the budget and the staff and I'll do it.
Actually, no I wouldn't. A more interesting study would be looking at the direction of the lies they tell. That is, when they do tell lies. I personally have been going to listen to holocaust survivors speak whenever I can for about five years now. Since I live near a large Jewish population, there are plenty of opportunities for me to hear such speakers. Most of these people haven't said anything that I can prove to be untrue.
Some have. I don't know if they're lying or simply mistaken. If they are mistaken, you would expect the mistakes to go in both directions--sometimes they would make the Nazis sound really bad and sometimes they would make the Nazis sound not so bad.
I've never heard any survivor say something that makes the Nazis sound not so bad. Add in the survivor memoirs I've read and the ones that I've seen on TV or in movies like The Last Days and you see a pattern of consistently inflating the horror. You hear the scatological tales, you hear about Jews skinned for lampshades, you hear about them boiled into soap, you hear about drinking urine. You never hear a survivor say they had a hot meal and a nice down comforter to ward off the night chill while in Auschwitz.
And you have to then demonstrate that the percentages of wacko stories are higher than what one would reasonably expect from a cohort of pensioners who might be going slowly senile or otherwise regressing to a second childhood.
Oh well, if they're old and senile everybody knows we have to take what they say with a grain of salt. Before a survivor speaks to a group, does the person introducing him or her tell the audience that they shouldn't necessarily believe everything that's said?
Until you or your chums do that, then no amount of nitpicking on this or that lone survivor is going to matter a damn. Because it didn't take me more than a couple of minutes to find Max Steinmetz's story, which fits perfectly into the accepted historical record.
Including a face to face with Dr. Mengele. That man was EVERYWHERE!
And what disinformation would that be? You have twice now handwaved about USHMM being somehow dodgy without providing any examples.
And you have said there is an evolution museum without providing any details.
Somebody who visits the USHMM website might see Eisenhower’s quote about ‘witnessing these atrocities to give first hand evidence of these things..blah blah blah’ I understand this quote is actually carved into the wall at the Hall of Remembrance. I don't recall seeing it so I can't say for sure.
But it's a quote from Eisenhower and the USHMM promotes it as a holoquote.
Now, all of us ivory tower elite know that Eisenhower witnessed the conditions in the western camps. He didn’t tour the death camps in Soviet occupied territory. We know that nothing he saw with his own eyes is considered evidence of an intentional genocide against the Jews. He visited Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald, when he saw things that “beggar description…the visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering..” He wrote the letter to General Marshall containing that famous quote on April 15, 1945. That was the same day the psych ops brought German civilians from Weimar to the camp to see the atrocities that had been committed in their name. When Eisenhower was writing to Marshall about the horrorshow he’d witnessed, he wasn’t talking about what happened to the Jews. He was talking about Nazi brutality in a general sense and more specifically about treatment of Allied POWs. He wasn’t talking about gas chambers. He was talking about the parchment display and the shrunken heads.
So what is that quote doing at the holocaust museum? Why not carve “I shall return” in stone at the museum? It’s just as irrelevant as what Eisenhower said.
The ordinary man on the street is likely to think Eisenhower was talking about the holocaust. And even more dishonest are the monkeys who trot it out to show that Eisenhower somehow anticipated holocaust denial.
Why is Fred Schliefer a 'fraudulent bigot'? From what I can see his sin is to have fallen for the folk myth that the Nazis turned Jews into soap. This story is a "genuine myth" in the sense that the rumour mill worked overtime in the war, to the point where many survivors of the camps believed quite genuinely that the Nazis had done just that. Unless Fred Schliefer is claiming to have seen the Nazis make soap out of Jews, which I don't believe he does, then he is simply repeating hearsay and myth.
So somebody who believes that Jews bake matzoh from the blood of Christian babies, or claims he saw matzoh that had actually been baked with the blood of Christian children isn't a bigot, they're just a victim of a "genuine myth" that was and is actually believed by some people today?
I refer you back to the proper methodological study of what Holocaust survivor-speakers say. Until you demonstrate that there are 120 Fred Schliefers out of 1000 speakers (12%) who have been active in the 2000s then there is nothing more than
one Fred Schliefer out of an unspecified number of Holocaust speaker-survivors.
No, until you can find the number of survivors who minimize the holocaust is equal to the number of survivors who exaggerate it, my original premise that it doesn't matter if what you say about the holocaust is true as long as it sounds really bad.
This sounds all very pretty but where is the empirical evidence that all teaching of the Holocaust rests on emotive appeals and relies on Fred Schliefer to tell his urban myth about soap in every single school? This is a skeptics' forum, and you have just made a series of claims without substantiating them.
I never said that so I don't need to address your strawman.
You're certainly right that there are some schools where the Holocaust will be taught in an overly emotive manner.
That's a better summary of what I said. And I guess you agree.
But that fits with how education has evolved across the board. In the UK, the school-leaving certificate, GCSE, in history was not so long ago taught to 16 year olds by asking them to "empathise" with ordinary people in historical situations. "Imagine you are a soldier in the trenches during the First World War - what would you be feeling?". Or better still, "imagine you are Henry VIII - would you cut off Anne Boleyn's head?".
Such an approach was designed to get schoolkids to engage and identify with history by appealing to their emotions. There are similar approaches in US education in teaching slavery and god knows what else. Once again: unless you establish that the Holocaust is genuinely unique in how it is approached in schools, then you are doing little more than display your prejudices and bias.
It so happens that British A level students are not taught history using the 'empathy' approach, which seems to have subsided in this country somewhat since the 1990s. They are taught about the Holocaust in its proper historical context, usually as part of a curriculum about totalitarianism or about 20th Century Germany. They have to consider and confront a range of ideas which leave relatively little room for discussing the camps or 'Jewish soap'. In a year long curriculum they end up with a week or two on the Holocaust after considering the Weimar Republic, or Stalin. In such a course there's little time to emote and empathise when you are busy mastering facts and interpretations, just as you have for Stalin's atrocities a few weeks before.
Just from looking at the Facing History and Ourselves website I can see that there are similar 'hard' and 'historical' curricula available for American high schools which will teach about German history from Weimar to the Third Reich. Those poor schoolkids, they have to try to understand the Great Depression and the rise of the Nazis.
Simply saying that my other points have been shot down before is handwaving. Unless you actually demonstrate that I am wrong, then nobody needs to take you seriously when you claim that I am wrong.
You've proven my point yourself. There is the accepted scholarly story of the holocaust. This story does not include soap or lampshades. There are people who believe that the holocaust does include soap and lampshades. There are survivors who say there were soap and lampshades. Maybe they don't all say they saw soap or lampshades but some (like Fred) say they do. Nobody gets outraged when these atrocity myths are repeated as truths.
Show me a survivor memoir or even a newspaper report of a holocaust survivor who said there weren't any gas chambers.
How often do you respond to a comment made by myself or Saggy or any one of us "deniers" that you don't agree with or believe to be in error compared to the number of times you correct somebody on your side who says something that is wrong? To your credit, you do. But not every time.
How many people have been prosecuted for saying the holocaust was worse than it was compared to those who say it wasn't as bad as is claimed?
Until you can show an empirical study demonstrating that the falsehoods about the holocaust tend to exonerate the Nazis as much as exaggerate them, my point that truth isn't relevant with the holocaust as long as it's bad is proven.
