Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread

[MG1962]

Rabbit et al all - Why is it when mainstream say something is forged. Deniers demand proof

When deniers say something is forged. Mainstrean have the onus on them to prove it isn't

 

[little grey rabbit]

Rabbit et al all - Why is it when mainstream say something is forged. Deniers demand proof

When deniers say something is forged. Mainstrean have the onus on them to prove it isn't

LOL, I'll do you a deal. If you accept everything I say is forged is forged, I will accept everything you say is forged is forged.

If you want to prove the facismile has been altered with intent to deceive, all you have to do is stump up with whatever you think the genuine text for that passage is.

I won't even ask for a scan or photo or anything - just whatever you claim is the true text. Udo Walendy provided a quote and a reference and beyond that the onus is on others to demonstrate that his quote and reference is not accurate.

As I said, I have another pre July 1942 "Tremblinka B" reference, so I am quite confident Herr Walendy's quote is accurate.

 

[MG1962]

LOL, I'll do you a deal. If you accept everything I say is forged is forged, I will accept everything you say is forged is forged.

If you want to prove the facismile has been altered with intent to deceive, all you have to do is stump up with whatever you think the genuine text for that passage is.

I won't even ask for a scan or photo or anything - just whatever you claim is the true text. Udo Walendy provided a quote and a reference and beyond that the onus is on others to demonstrate that his quote and reference is not accurate.

As I said, I have another pre July 1942 "Tremblinka B" reference, so I am quite confident Herr Walendy's quote is accurate.

From your posr 1845

Traditionally it is stated that these large scale grills (obviously fictional) were only constructed after Himmler's visit in Feb 1942. Do you agree with that?

I rest my case

 

[Skeptic]

"The figures reveal that the total Jewish population of the world has decreased by one-third, from about 16.600.000 in 1939 to about 11,000,000 in 1946, as a result of the annihilation by the Nazis of more than five and a half million European Jews. In Europe only an estimated 3,642,000 remain of the total Jewish pre-war population of approximately 9,740,000"

Ah, yes, but, you see, all the 99% of information that points to annihilation is obviously all faked. Only the 1% of information that can be somehow reconstructed to vaguely support the idea of no holocaust is the truth(TM).

That's the way the holocaust denier's mind (such as it is) works.

 

[catsmate]

You'll have to give him time to work out why there can't be a square bomb crater.

Don't you mean time for him to search for some other Holocaust denier's attempt to explain it, and regurgitate that explanation here?

 

[dafydd]

Don't you mean time for him to search for some other Holocaust denier's attempt to explain it, and regurgitate that explanation here?

True.

 

[Clayton Moore]

Clayton Moore, in his haste to plead for Nick Terry to notice him, seems to have forgotten some posts which I made:



And he also is ignoring The Red Worm's answer to my question why Clayton Moore misrepresents what is posted:

Another Holocaustic phantom declaration that no one performed the labor required to kill 3 million Jewish children, women, and men, with gas chambers.

 

[dafydd]

Don't you mean time for him to search for some other Holocaust denier's attempt to explain it, and regurgitate that explanation here?

Well Saggy,what do your handlers tell you?

 

[Kevin.Silbstedt]

Yes but since we know the Polish Government in Exile was giving press conferences about mass murder with gas in "Tremblinka" on 9 July 1942, before it was supposed to have been opened, the thought arises that perhaps Durchgangslager Malkinia and Treblinka are one and the same.

I don't get this conclusion at all. What has this mistake (if what you say is true, which is always another story) of the Polish Government to do with the difference between Malkinia and Treblinka? No, really I don't get it.

So what is your proof, that Malkania and Treblinka are the same camp?

Millions survived but only a few, three to five, actually saw the gaschambers and the killing process.

Which -even if it were true- would still be three to five more than those who described the Aktion Reinhardt camps as transit camps.

Sorry, but 3 or 5 times zero is still zero.

 

[Tinfoil Hater]

The core philosophy of Hitler and his Nazi droogs was hatred of the Jews. Mein Kamf dripped with hatred for the Jews. The blueprint of the Nazi society was the elimination of the Jews. Nazi Germany was all about wiping out the Jews- so how can anyone with any level of sanity claim the Jews were not massacred?
The level of historical illiteracy of the Hitler apologists is just pathetic.

 

[Walter Ego]

The core philosophy of Hitler and his Nazi droogs was hatred of the Jews. Mein Kamf dripped with hatred for the Jews. The blueprint of the Nazi society was the elimination of the Jews. Nazi Germany was all about wiping out the Jews- so how can anyone with any level of sanity claim the Jews were not massacred?
The level of historical illiteracy of the Hitler apologists is just pathetic.

And it's not just historical illiteracy either.

And the point of using a computer without the internet?
Pong? Scrabble? CAD/CAM? Burglar alarm?

These aren't exactly mental giants you're dealing with on this thread.

 

[000063]

Not fair enough, the record shows you asked me the narrative of Treblinka. I gave it. You have decided that my not mentioning a number is important, no one else

Is there a name for that kind of cheap trick rhetorical technique? Asking for one piece of info, and then blaming your opponent for not coming up with one you never asked for?

 

[LemmyCaution]

But you are saying Danuta Czech was using the buried diary as her source, but we know that can't be true - and Dr Terry knows this too and is deliberately lying again - because not only does the diary not mention a transit camp....it doesnt mention Malkinia at all.

And the diary has nothing to say about transports on 12 December.

Nice try, Dr Terry

Nice try, rabbit. First Dr Terry is a liar and the Lewenthal diary proves the case. Then - whoopsie - the Lewenthal diary screws the bunny. I would like to ask members of this forum whether any is surprised that at this point the diary transmogrifies into the work of a forger. LOL.

In addition to citing sources not indicated by Czech, and lying about Dr Terry, bunny seems to have made up documents which he doesn't have in his possession. I strongly doubt whether there is any document which bunny has seen on this. The source for Malkinia may well be as Dr Terry indicates, the Lewenthal manuscript, and all that bunny has seen is Czech's gloss on it. His interpretation thus relies on Czech's interpretation. If I were a betting man.

And what of Malkinia? Malkinia was, as others have noted, not far from Treblinka; Malkinia had, of course, a railway station. Jewish sources noted that transports of the disappeared went in the direction of Malkinia and the like. Just for example Lewin in his Warsaw ghetto diary wrote on 7 August that "The number [of deportees from the Umschlagpatz] who have fallen victim is enormous. The giant crematorium near Malkinia and Sokolow." IIRC Frydrych met his informant in Malkinia. “Biuletyn Informacyny,” an underground newsletter of the AK, was to report on July 30 that, while the destination was unknown, “rumors suggest the region of Malkinia and Brzesc on the Bug" was where those taken from the Warsaw ghetto went.

You have nothing. But the show is good: we get to laugh at your usual confusion and conflation, we get to scoff at another one of your failed efforts to deceive.

 

[dafydd]

You have nothing. But the show is good: we get to laugh at your usual confusion and conflation, we get to scoff at another one of your failed efforts to deceive.

He must be confusing our mental capabilities with those of his fellow deniers.

 

[LemmyCaution]

whoops somehow an edit became a new post << deleted >>

 

[000063]

Rabbit et al all - Why is it when mainstream say something is forged. Deniers demand proof

When deniers say something is forged. Mainstrean have the onus on them to prove it isn't

I take it this question is entirely rhetorical.

 

[Nick Terry]

Nicky Nicky Nicky. Didn't I tell you your polysyllabic obfuscation hurts my thinkbone?

OK, a few articles is evidence for sweeping generalizations. Check.

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.

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?

And you claim there simply aren't very many survivors available to talk to school children?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

Including a face to face with Dr. Mengele. That man was EVERYWHERE!

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.

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?

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.

I never said that so I don't need to address your strawman.

That's a better summary of what I said. And I guess you agree.

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.

The executive summary of my reply to the above blether is that you are too dishonest and too obsessed with the Holocaust to be able to properly compare it to anything. Ultimately, you are using a double standard whereby aspects of how the Holocaust functions in US culture are held to be uniquely malign and yet they are nothing of the sort.

This discussion started with you claiming that there was a disconnect between how there was a "disconnect" between academic/university perceptions of the Holocaust and popular perceptions of the Holocaust. It was pointed out that there is a disconnect between academic and popular understanding of every subject. I don't see where you have refuted this point.

Now you try and claim that I don't see this as a problem. Damn right I don't, in comparison to other displays of public ignorance. That means, I do not think it is especially meaningful to harp on about popular misconceptions when such things abound with pretty much any subject under the sun one cares to name. All that this reveals is your own petty obsession with the Holocaust and your idiotic populism.

Needless to say, rather than refute the basic point, you twisted it and introduced a new line of blether about museums. Your initial gambit failed because you forgot about the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History. In this latest post you try to claim that I didn't name the 'evolution museum' when it is perfectly obvious that by discussing natural history museums I was doing just that. The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History is de facto the national evolution museum. Asking for a 'national evolution museum' in a narrow sense is like asking for a national museum of gravity. It's sheer speciousness and idiocy.

The derail about whether there is a trend towards avoiding teaching evolution is irrelevant. So what if the evidence I have seen is anecdotal, there is perfectly good survey/opinion poll data showing that 60% of Americans do not believe in the theory of evolution. And yet there is an extensive effort to educate the public formally and informally. This is quite aside from the many other forms of wilful ignorance which plague American (and British, and Chinese, and every single) society.

Further attempts to spin the museums line ensued from you. Just to remind you, back in post #1681 you spoke of a "proliferation of holocaust museums and memorials". I showed this to be grossly exaggerated as there are maybe 25 Holocaust museums in the US as a whole. So now you are backpedalling and claiming that "Nobody said there were a plethora of holocaust museums". OH RLY? Your own words contradict you.

Evidently you never thought to look up overall statistics. Surveys indicate there are somewhere 15,000 and 18,000 museums in the US. So even if we double the figure of 25 Holocaust museums to include low-profile high school cabinet displays we end up with and absurdly silly percentage being actual Holocaust museums, which you called a "proliferation", despite now lying through your teeth and claiming you never said such a thing.

Oh, but Dogzilla cries, the proper yardstick of comparison is how many genocide museums there are. No it isn't. This presumes that there are actually constituencies in American society that want other genocide museums. Museums are only established if somebody wants to establish them, not because some idiot on the internet thinks they have found a talking point. In actual fact there are museums dedicated to the Cambodian autogenocide, which like the Holocaust occurred elsewhere but which like the Holocaust resulted in the arrival of an immigrant community containing a number of genocide survivors. There are also several museums dedicated to the Armenian genocide, established by descendants of Armenian refugees who arrived in the US several generations ago.

You seem not to get that museums are generally privately funded on the initiatives of specific communities or by enthusiasts who share the same interests. Museums might be able to apply for grants but they are just as beholden to the market as any other institution in American society. If communities want museums, they found them and they fund them. And they found and fund the type of museums they want. Jewish Americans evidently wanted some museums about the Holocaust, so they have established a tiny number of Holocaust museums in states where they are more numerous. They have also established a number of other museums exhibiting and archiving Judaica of cultural or historical significance.

That's also why there are many African American and Native American museums but there are not necessarily museums solely dedicated to slavery or solely dedicated to the ethnocide suffered by Native American tribes after white settler colonisation. There are clearly a great many African American and Native American museums focusing on many different aspects of those communities' lives and pasts, and I am quite certain that many of them include exhibition rooms documenting slavery and ethnocide respectively.

It's also no accident that both Native American and African American constituencies have been able to persuade congressional lawmakers to pass acts authorising the construction of national museums dedicated to these two ethnic minorities, using federal funds and being built right on the Mall. They are just following in the footsteps of Jewish Americans who persuaded Jimmy Carter and then Congress to authorise the establishment of the USHMM (although we should point out that it was built using entirely private funds). I already said that it's perfectly clear USHMM was part of the trade-off involved in the Camp David accords, which it was. This is pretty well documented.

So now we have two museums on or near the Mall dedicated to specific ethnic themes and one currently under construction, whose costs are pretty considerable. They get federal funding to operate and there is a legitimate debate about whether they might get too much (USHMM) or too little (National Museum of the American Indian).

Here's the rub: they all represent something which is not only of specific ethnic interest, but speaks to American society more generally. That's pretty clear with African Americans and Native Americans and it's also clear with the Holocaust. USHMM represents the apotheosis of the Americanization of the Holocaust, which has given it resonance far beyond the Jewish community and universalised it to a very considerable degree. Whether you like this or not is somewhat irrelevant. African Americans gave the world soul music, among many other things, and I'm not a big fan of soul, but I'm not going to bitch if the African American museum includes a big display about Motown and there's no national museum representation for the Stooges.

Naturally, you cannot resist plunging on and trying to smear USHMM for supposedly spouting out "disinformation". I asked you what this might be and you replied with a dreary whine about the Eisenhower quote somehow being a misrepresentation. Unless you are claiming Eisenhower didn't say those words, then it's not a misrepresentation. The liberation of the camps in Germany by the Allies was very much part of the Holocaust, which is conventionally understood by all but denier loonies to include more than the gas chambers and mass graves which so obsess them.

You seem to forget that it's the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Earlier you whined about how the Holocaust didn't happen in the States, but forget that American forces liberated numerous concentration camps and that the US Army prosecuted hundreds of Nazi war criminals. Those are precisely the kinds of things that one would expect to see in an American Holocaust museum because they connect America to the events in question. There is a definite tendency in regional Holocaust commemoration to exalt the 'liberators' for the precise same reason. But as we have seen the self-same museums and survivor-speakers also talk about Auschwitz.

Eisenhower's words are precisely what one would expect to see carved on the wall by the back entrance to a place like USHMM. They'e certainly not "disinformation" or a flatly false claim, as you tried to pretend them to be.

Which brings me on to your continued hole-digging over survivors. I think I'll start with your typically pathetic attempts to reverse burden of proof and demands for money to do work that you should have done in the first place. Readers of this thread, as well as you, should be reminded that you made a series of claims about crazy Holocaust survivors, claims which you are now unable and unwilling to back up.

Readers of this thread, as well as you, also need to be alerted to another patented Dogzilla backpedal. Earlier on you claimed that "Holocaust education in this country isn’t concerned about factual accuracy. It’s about making an emotional impact." No qualifiers, no quantification, no evidence, nothing, just a bald assertion. Now you complain that I created a strawman. No, I used hyperbole to underline a point which you dodged. Here it is again

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.

And translated into sober speak: where is your empirical evidence that "Holocaust education in this country isn’t concerned about factual accuracy. It’s about making an emotional impact"?

Now you do have to address the point because I am quoting your direct words.

Evidence, please.

I guess you're just that dishonest you don't realise that claims must be substantiated, even claims made by a denialist. That's why you're the one who really does need to document and prove that Holocaust survivor-speakers utter a disproportionate number of untruths before you are justified in calling them frauds or worse. And you're the one who needs to demonstrate that it's really disproportionate by establishing a proper control group.

Once again, we observe your utter inability to construct proper comparisons or to subject the Holocaust to reasonable standards. You're the one who has made a series of sweeping generalisations based on nonexistent sampling techniques. You were the one who first posted about denier poster-boy Fred Schliefer. But you are unable to answer a simple question about how representative Fred Schliefer is of Holocaust survivors.

So naturally I took it on myself to provide some actual data and background in order that we could begin to construct such a comparison properly, and naturally you immediately misrepresent and misunderstand the data. Holocaust survivors who had experienced the concentration camps during the war arrived in the US in the 1940s and in a trickle thereafter. I pointed out that many of them opened up about their experiences when they reached old age. I observed that this is not an uncommon phenomenon among the elderly, some of whom also have a demonstrable and undeniable tendency to go senile and suffer other cognitive disorders including short-term memory loss and worse, while others retain the memories of their youths as clear as a bell.

Your response was to wonder why the middle aged survivors didn't speak out earlier. Well, duh, firstly there weren't very many middle aged survivors, and secondly the majority of Holocaust survivors who came to the US in the 1940s were actually very young. Some were orphans. Many were in their teens or very early twenties. A 20 year old in 1944 only retired in 1989. And it's not like there hasn't been an upward curve of discussion and interest in the Holocaust since the 1960s and 1970s, is it now.

But that's by the by. Yet another Dogzilla derail blows up in his face as he fails to think the facts through properly. So let's recap for a moment. Having failed to substantiate the claim that survivors are especially prone to babbling nonsense, you now switch tack and try to claim that if survivors are mistaken they should be mistaken both in 'favour' of the Nazis as well as 'against' them. This idea so enthralls you that you repeat it several times and riff on it until you're in a veritable frenzy of self-righteous idiocy.

No, Dogzilla, there are absolutely no rational grounds for thinking that people who had survived Nazi concentration camps might be mistaken 'in favour' of the Nazis. That's about the dumbest idea I've heard in a long time. Here it is again in all its glorious stupidity:

I've never heard any survivor say something that makes the Nazis sound not so bad.

Apparently, Dogzilla needs reminding that the people he never heard say anything bad were yanked from their homes, or forced to flee from their homes, purely on the basis of their religion or putative ethnicity as defined solely by the Nazis. They were deprived of their property barring a small amount of luggage and a few valuables, ordered into internment camps or ghettos and then transported against their will to concentration camps, whereupon they were typically separated from their families, never seeing any of these close nuclear-family relatives ever again. They were humiliated ritually by having their heads shaved and being degraded from human beings to mere numbers, and made to wear badges indicating at a glance that they were Jews and thus on a very low rung of the camp hierarchy. They were badly fed and put to work which if they were unlucky was extremely exhausting and strength robbing. If they were lucky and worked sitting down in a factory they were still badly fed. They were exposed to lice, poor sanitary conditions, subjected to a random and unpredictable amount of cruelty from German guards, including women guards if they were female, and often from other prisoners as well. They were shunted bewilderingly from camp to camp and often put on forced marches. They often watched relatives who had survived selection die in front of them.

And somehow Dogzilla thinks that the Nazis deserve to sound not so bad?




In any case, I don't believe Dogzilla. I bet he has heard stories about Jewish camp prisoners being selected for work and being put to work in factories which were 'not so bad', at least compared to Dora-Mittelbau, or the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz. I bet he has heard stories about 'good' guards who showed some small kindnesses to the prisoners. They certainly exist. But they're not mistakes. They're true stories.

That's the problem with Dogzilla's most spectacular apples and oranges comparison yet. There really aren't any mistakes which could make the Nazis sound 'not so bad'. Sometimes, the Nazis were genuinely 'not so bad', at least in comparison to the times when they were very bad indeed.

Dogzilla seems to have forgotten that when it comes to camp survival stories, Holocaust survivors do not have a monopoly on describing suffering. It might seem that way from his skewed perspective, but there are still some Gulag survivors, some survivors of Japanese POW camps, or Soviet POWs who survived German camps, lingering on. They don't live in America, though, so they don't tend to talk at schools. They are also not Jewish, so naturally Dogzilla ignores them.

But we don't have to stop there. We can include all the 'privileged' prisoners in POW camps and concentration camps who observed the maltreatment of less than privileged groups. A decade ago I sat and had a pint in a pub with a Chelsea Pensioner who described how appallingly the Nazis treated Soviet prisoners of war. He did not claim that he had been maltreated, he claimed that others had been maltreated, because he saw it with his own eyes. He added some vivid details which are not the kind of thing which find their way into the bald but utterly horrific statistics on Soviet POW mortality in Nazi camps.

It's pretty much a certainty that the sufferings of any group of camp prisoners are going to be mildly exaggerated by survivors or by people who observed their suffering. That's just how war stories are. And unless Dogzilla or his denier chums can demonstrate that Holocaust survivors exaggerate disproportionately, then there's nothing left to the attack. That's disproportionately in comparison to other prisoners' exaggerations, and in comparison to the absolute amount of suffering Jewish camp survivors would have experienced - the suffering that isn't supposedly even denied by deniers.

But we don't have to stop there, since Dogzilla is going to try and play the 'soap' card again. Dogzilla doesn't seem very aware of how certain exaggerations spread within cohorts and groups. He certainly isn't aware of how folk and urban myths and legends arise.

Let me make it very simple for you, Dogzilla: soap supposedly made from Jewish fat was already a legend in the ghettos. It was a folk myth from the get-go. Jews who survived the Holocaust then emigrated and took the myth with them. Not all of them bothered to read about the history they themselves had experienced. Their beliefs and myths were unmediated and unmediatable. They were like the oldtimers who tell each other tall tales about this or that fishing or hunting season. So it naturally follows that there have been quite a few Holocaust survivors who believed quite genuinely but utterly falsely that the Nazis turned Jews into soap, and some of them have gone on the record saying so.

But lo! Dogzilla plays the false equivalency card and brings up the blood libel, thereby demonstrating yet again how utterly incapable he is of constructing proper comparisons. It's actually not difficult to compare the 'soap' myth and the blood libel and realise how obnoxiously stupid this pseudo-equivalency is.

You know what? If you were speaking about medieval peasants who by word of mouth spread the blood libel among themselves, you'd have a point. I have exactly the same understanding for those peasants as I do for Holocaust survivors who emerged from their traumatic experiences believing the Nazis turned Jews into soap. As long as the peasants did not then form a mob and stage a pogrom. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I am unaware of any mob of Holocaust survivors staging a pogrom against German tourists or anything like that. Maybe some Polish Christians did that once under communism or beat up a German tourist after 1990 crying 'you turned my grandfather into soap!', but if so I've never heard about it. 'Cos of course, Dogzilla doesn't realise that Polish society is even more believing of the 'human soap' myth than Jewish Holocaust survivors are.

And the comparison just gets worse for you from there on in. The blood libel was resurrected in the late 19th Century by deliberately calculating antisemites. It had a certain resilience because it is rooted in the Bible, even though the specific myth of Jews abducting Christian children has absolutely no scriptural basis whatsoever. Still, I think it's fair to say that anyone bringing up the blood libel since about the mid-19th Century has swallowed deliberate antisemitic propaganda.

Alas for poor Dogzilla, he knows full well that 'Jewish soap' has been consistently dismissed by all historians for at least two generations. The survivors who believe in 'Jewish soap' will die out and there will be nobody claiming it in four centuries' time, unlike the way in which the blood libel resurfaced long after the medieval period.

I admit it, I find it hard to get sufficiently worked up to Dogzilla levels of outrage that there is an ever decreasing number of Jewish Holocaust survivors who repeat myths about the Nazis. 1) I would expect a certain amount of mythmaking over and above wie es eigentlich gewesen war, 2) oral tradition is incredibly resilient, 3) it's a bit difficult to work out the polite way to correct someone who did actually have a pretty horrendous experience in their youths, 4) there are actually examples where survivors have been corrected and taken down a peg for repeating made-up claims, eg the reactions Moshe Peer provoked in a horrified audience when he started babbling his nonsense. I can well imagine that many survivors have been taken to one side and gently chided about their belief in things like 'soap'.

Quite frankly, there are many better things to do with my time than go into a Dogzilla level of frenzy over the persistence of the 'Jewish soap' urban legend. I correct it whenever it comes up and it is corrected all over the internet, on Wikipedia, Jewish Virtual Library, and god knows where else.

And yet it persists in the popular imagination all the same. I really do fail to see how anything more could be done to correct this. It's like making doctors responsible for every single old wives' tale or something. Doctors can tell patients the correct diagnosis and treatment and websites can repeat the same data to millions of people and still there are countless morons out there who 'heard somewhere' that x did such-and-such a thing to y illness when it does nothing of the sort.


So let me ask you, Dogzilla: do you really think your populist gambit is doing anything other than make you come across as even more of an ignorant bigot than you already do?

 

[dafydd]

Do you really expect a denier to take all that in?

 

[Nick Terry]

Do you really expect a denier to take all that in?

I couldn't care less if they do or not. It's not like anything else has sunk in with them. But it helps to write things out at length and try to be more considered. I stopped "fisking" several posts ago, though Dogzilla is still trying to do just that. What I wrote might be long by forum standards but it's still only 3500 words.

 

[little grey rabbit]

Do you really expect a denier to take all that in?

I dare say you didnt bother reading it either. I skimmed, but it seemed rather short on specifics and mostly about Dr Terry asserting his academic superiority - which after all is his main motivation - that and not to do any research that might damage his career.

Still, since dogzilla is the only denier here not on ignore, he must be doing something right.