Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread

[Clayton Moore]

You didn't look to closely at that photo did you?

I really don't care if you're lonely, just spit it out.

 

[MG1962]

I really don't care if you're lonely, just spit it out.

LOL - dont give up your day job. The village of Fauls Greene want their idiot back

 

[Wroclaw]

Was I the only one?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoKeH7JYE48

 

[Matthew Ellard]

You didn't look to closely at that photo did you?

I'm looking at a bigger version of the photo from Wiki with the same narration. What am I missing? There is something wrong with the photo that I haven't picked up on? I think she is wearing civilian clothes but I'm not sure as it is late war and uniforms get a bit mixed up. Is it civilian clothes?

Just tell me. I'd rather look like an idiot once by asking a question rather than go on looking like an idiot.

 

[LemmyCaution]

I do not dishonestly hold the holocaust to an unreasonable standard of perfection. I do hold it and every element of it to the same epistemological standard. It is for that reason that I don't question the Einsatzgruppen. I don't deny deportation. I don't deny an antisemitic policy of Nazi Germany called the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. When you have physical and documentary evidence of an event, a few wild haired eyewitness descriptions of the event aren't problematic. When knowledge of an event is known almost exclusively through eyewitness testimony, however, it's important that the testimony be consistent and believable. Demanding that isn't dishonest.

Forgive me for not taking this statement at face value.

What about other events in history, say, Holodomor or Stalin's purges and other crimes, do you hold them to the same standard that you hold the gas chambers?

Further, in fact, expectation of absolutely consistent testimony for any event, even in criminal trials where witness testimony is key, is not realistic.

And, it must be noted, that "believable" is an interesting choice of a word, as your personal standards of belief may or may not be consistent, widely shared, subject to examination and discussion, or reasonable. Further, your understanding of how to treat the instances of exaggeration, fuzziness on details, point of view and perspective, and emotional factors entering into testimony almost inevitably is subject to similar vetting. (You yourself state that events for which physical evidence exists are accompanied by testimony that is problematic: why would events for which physical evidence does not exist, has been lost, or was destroyed be any different?)

What I have seen from deniers on these points is inconsistency, use of highly personal standards of credulity, misunderstanding of how to read subjective factors entering into testimony, etc. Put another way, the recent trend in denial demanding "real evidence," by which is meant a certain kind of forensic evidence, and the long-standing trend of ridicule of witnesses as "lie-witnesses," if applied consistently (rather than used against the Jews and the Holocaust), would render, to take an example other than the Holocaust, criminal proceedings in general almost impossible. Whole classes of crimes, such as child abuse, would be nearly thrown out the window. Another example: a survey of 115 rape cases in the early '90s found that "Physical evidence was present in only 23% of all cases that resulted in felony convictions. Felony convictions were obtained in 67 (79%) of 85 cases without physical evidence and in only 20 (67%) of 30 cases with physical evidence." By the way, I am not arguing that charges like those made against priests for child abuse are straightforward or easily resolved by testimony; what I am arguing is that your standard seems to make them impossible to resolve, which is not the case either.

 

[Nick Terry]

I'm not going to continue a fisking war here, except where it is necessary. But first, there are just a few points I want to make, petty ones first.

Proliferation and plethora both denote 'many' in a very broad sense. But they are in no way synonyms. If you want to say there is a great number of something, you could say there is a "proliferation" of that thing. But if you want to say that something is rapidly increasing, you would not say there is a "plethora" of it. You call it hilarious hairsplitting. I call it using the dictionary definitions of words to communicate clearly. Tomaeto Tomahto.

It's still hilarious hairsplitting because there simply aren't very many Holocaust museums in the US full stop, and they aren't rapidly increasing. Either way you're screwed.

Let's marvel at those figures again: 25 Holocaust museums, out of 15-18,000 museums in the US.

You did not point to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum the first time you mentioned the issue. You said my sarcastic comment about building a stand alone Evolution Museum on the national mall was pretty funny because there already is an Evolution Museum on the national mall. You didn't identify the museum at all. Because we were talking about a museum dedicated solely to evolution, the only way it would be obvious you were talking about the Smithsonian is to assume that you would try to mislead our fans by claiming something is that isn't.

Yeah I did, this was in post #1696, in direct response to your comment about how there isn't an evolution museum on the mall. Before then I'd simply mentioned ignorance about evolution to which you responded with a throwaway jibe about how there wasn't an evolution museum on the Mall. This prompted me to look up the Smithsonian's American Museum of Natural History, and I even posted stats on how many academics they host there.

I have grown weary of the museum discussion.

I'm not surprised, because your argument about museums has been pretty comprehensively shredded.

The facts is that there are no museums in the United States dedicated solely to the Native American genocide. There are none dedicated solely to American Black slavery (anymore). There are no museums dedicated to the Cambodian genocide nor are there any dedicated to the Armenian genocide. There are museums dedicated solely to each of these peoples (and many others) but there are no museums dedicated solely to the suffering of any other ethnic/religious/racial/whatever minority in the United States (excepting, perhaps, the Japanese American internment). There are museums dedicated to Jewish history and culture in the United States. And there is a museum dedicated solely to the inconveniences endured by European Jews during WWII. You have provided us all with a myriad reasons why the USHMM exists and why the others do not. I agree with your analysis for the most part.

Then you've conceded the point and need to rethink whether blethering on about museums is really very significant. It sounds like a great talking point, doesn't it, at first, until you look beneath the surface and consider museum politics and museum consumption in context.

I'm not so sure about the Camp David connection and I would never name Jewish money and political clout exerting influence over the US government as one of the reasons the USHMM was built as you did. But that's just one of those things I can't get away with saying that you can. But the reasons why the USHMM was built does not negate the relatively insignificant point that it is a symbolic representation of the importance of the holocaust in American culture. There's really nothing more to say about it.

What, other than your museums gambit was totally incoherent and eventually blew up in your face? I do like the doublespeak that you "can't get away with saying" that Jewish influence helped create the USHMM. It's freaking obvious that the Jewish community did just that. But so have other ethnic minorities achieved similar ambitions - note, not identical ambitions - and they've obviously done so because once American Jews won their spot on the Mall, then others could, too. This fits in completely with post-melting pot ethnic politics in the US.

The level of interest in contemporary American society and culture in the Holocaust is quite clearly a product of the post-melting pot era, coupled with its universalisation. The Holocaust is now as 'American' as bagels.

You do have a point about a transatlantic disconnect . I don't know how differently the holocaust is perceived in in the UK vs the USA but I know there is a difference. A program (or is it programme?) like Channel 4's "Battle for the Holocaust" broadcast back in 2001 would never be produced for American television. I don't know if it has even been shown over here. That tells me that the UK is open to examining the holocaust in a way Americans will not.

All of which doesn't help you very much in the ultimate goal and purpose of these discussions, since Europeans are no more inclined to 'revisionism' than are Americans. That shows that discussing tertiary issues about commemoration doesn't really help get at what did and didn't happen.

I do not dishonestly hold the holocaust to an unreasonable standard of perfection. I do hold it and every element of it to the same epistemological standard. It is for that reason that I don't question the Einsatzgruppen. I don't deny deportation. I don't deny an antisemitic policy of Nazi Germany called the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. When you have physical and documentary evidence of an event, a few wild haired eyewitness descriptions of the event aren't problematic. When knowledge of an event is known almost exclusively through eyewitness testimony, however, it's important that the testimony be consistent and believable. Demanding that isn't dishonest.

And yet, there are many events in human history which are known almost exclusively through eyewitness testimony or comparable accounts produced after the event. To be truly honest epistemologically, you have to apply the same standard to all events, and to compare events to know what is reasonable to expect. Mass slaughters and megadeaths don't usually leave name lists, for example. They don't always get investigated forensically. The Holocaust is actually one of the better investigated mass slaughters in forensic terms, certainly well ahead of most of the other slaughters in Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. That applies to the death camps as well as the bits you don't deny.

Contrary to your impression, there is documentary and physical evidence for the death camps and gassing, it didn't take much effort to point to documents you hadn't heard of which were entirely explicit about gassing. And the testimonial evidence is much, much more consistent than you seem to think.

But that wasn't why I criticised you for holding the Holocaust to an unreasonable standard of perfection, although you do just that regarding the historical evidence as well. I criticised you in the context of the discussion of crazy survivors which was being accompanied by your now withdrawn museums gambit.

The unreasonable standard of perfection is in your seemingly expecting literally no crazies, and/or in refusing to establish proper yardsticks. You now say "when you have physical and documentary evidence of an event", this means that "a few wild haired eyewitness descriptions aren't problematic".

But most eyewitness accounts cannot be corroborated by specific physical or documentary evidence. Soldiers' eyewitness accounts of what they experienced personally are rarely going to be written down at the time, because they're bone-tired and don't write diaries and because they're often describing things that did not make it into higher level reports. After-action interviewing only became quasi-standard in WWII.

The vast majority of knowledge about the face of battle comes from memoir sources. Since approximately WWI, the expansion of education and literacy meant that we began to see staggeringly large numbers of memoirs produced by veterans. And they vary immensely in quality and accuracy. One such veteran of the trenches, Jean Norton Cru, grew so impatient with the tall tales described by combatants that he sat down and analysed 300 of them in a study in the 1920s. Norton Cru poked holes in their accounts and ridiculed some of their implausibilities. And he concluded that 7% of the sample were utterly useless.

That's one measurement. Another is the percentage of mental illness in the population. I've yet to see any demonstration that Holocaust survivors' eyewitness accounts are measurably more deranged than these yardsticks. Your Zisblatts and whatnot are very clearly a tiny fraction of the total number of survivors.

Ditto with the fake survivors. There have been evidently many more fake Vietnam vets in the US than there have been fake Holocaust survivors worldwide. Frauds do exist, but you need to establish that they exist in disproportionate numbers. As it is, most observers would agree that there was a rash of Holocaust survivor frauds in the 1990s, at precisely the time when interest in the Holocaust was arguably at its highest.

Your responses in the discussion of crazy survivors have been almost entirely qualitative, as if somehow by finding the tallest tale, you can ignore the quantitative dimension. It doesn't actually matter whether that approach is dishonest, it's certainly not intellectually coherent. But the more you persist with it in the face of criticisms pointing out precisely these flaws, then the more dishonest it becomes.


I'm going to come back to Eisenhower in a separate post later on.

 

[BadBoy]

The Germans never denied the existence of V/2 rockets and their usage.
That´s all the evidence you can expect on this planet.

wrong, as usual.

British intelligence were photographing the launch sites, the records are in the National Archives in the UK.

Also on record is the bombing runs to eliminate the threat.

 

[MG1962]

I'm looking at a bigger version of the photo from Wiki with the same narration. What am I missing? There is something wrong with the photo that I haven't picked up on? I think she is wearing civilian clothes but I'm not sure as it is late war and uniforms get a bit mixed up. Is it civilian clothes?

Just tell me. I'd rather look like an idiot once by asking a question rather than go on looking like an idiot.

Rather than looking the idiot you noticed exactly what I did - the clothes. Many SS and Nazis tried that tactic as parts of Germany began to be overrun. So without context that photo rells us virtually nothinf eitherway beyond the caption

 

[Clayton Moore]

wrong, as usual.

British intelligence were photographing the launch sites, the records are in the National Archives in the UK.

Also on record is the bombing runs to eliminate the threat.

I'm sure the deportations to the EAST and the camps were photographed and monitored and communications transmissions were also monitored. I'm also sure if 2 plus million noncombatants were deported/moved EAST in 1942 their appearance and disappearance by the "mythical" gas chambers would be as noticeable as any major troop movements.

 

[Thunder]

if around 6 million Jews were shipped to "the East", what was their actual destination?

what was done with them after they got off the trains? where were they settled?

what process was taken to integrate them all?



...the allegation and claim is being made, that 6 million or so European Jews were shipped from one part of Europe to another part of Europe, and no mass-killing took place of this civilian population.

I'd like to see some evidence of this mass-movement and their current status.

 

[TSR]

I'm sure the deportations to the EAST and the camps were photographed and monitored and communications transmissions were also monitored. I'm also sure if 2 plus million noncombatants were deported/moved EAST in 1941 their appearance and disappearance by the "mythical" gas chambers would be as noticeable as any major troop movements.

.
But then, you're 'sure' of a lot of things whose relationship to reality is at most coincidental.

No one cares what you *believe*, what can you *prove*? Where are these photographs and transcripts? Where in the East were these people sent, and why did no one already there ever notice the influx of large groups of people who did not even speak the language?
.

 

[Clayton Moore]

if around 6 million Jews were shipped to "the East", what was their actual destination?

what was done with them after they got off the trains? where were they settled?

what process was taken to integrate them all?



...the allegation and claim is being made, that 6 million or so European Jews were shipped from one part of Europe to another part of Europe, and no mass-killing took place of this civilian population.

I'd like to see some evidence of this mass-movement and their current status.

My words were if 2 plus million noncombatants were deported/moved EAST in 1942 their appearance and disappearance by the "mythical" gas chambers would be as noticeable as any major troop movements.

Since no alarm was sounded by the allies that 2 million noncombatants went missing in 1942 then I obviously believe that nowhere near 2 million noncombatants were deported to the EAST.

 

[TSR]

Since no alarm was sounded by the allies that 2 million noncombatants went missing in 1942 then I obviously believe that nowhere near 2 million noncombatants were deported to the EAST.

.
Then how many, and how did you calculate that number?

Don't forget to cite your sources...
.

 

[Wroclaw]

I'm also sure if 2 plus million noncombatants were deported/moved EAST in 1942 their appearance and disappearance by the "mythical" gas chambers would be as noticeable as any major troop movements.

But that's precisely the point, and your inability to internalize that very simple idea is, to say the least, telling.

Let's try again: At least two million noncombatants were moved PUBLICLY by the Nazis during the war. They made no attempt to hide deportation. These people were sent "to the east" and then — poof! — we lose all trace of them.

In the places where the Nazis' own records tell us they were sent, i.e., camps in Poland, we have literally dozens of eyewitnesses — survivors as well as perpetrators — who have told us what went on in these places. We have, furthermore, scientific studies conducted at these places that have located mass graves and have identified cyanide deposits on the walls of at least one gas chamber, the levels of which are inconsistent with either the single disinfection the Nazis have on record for that room or the routine use of that room as a delousing chamber.

So what do we have, exactly? We have the Nazis' own record of millions of people being deported, often in broad daylight, to camps in Poland, where we then lose track of them. You CANNOT deny that the proposition thus far is true; to so do would render yourself RIDICULOUS.

So we know they were sent to Poland. No reasonable person disputes this. And once we lose track of them there (again, no "revisionist" has ever offered proof of anyone going from Poland further east, except to Minsk and Riga in limited numbers, where all the available evidence suggests they were shot — but let's stick to Poland for now).

So knowing they were sent to Poland and that we lose track of them there, we have eyewitnesses and forensic evidence that indicates they were gassed.

What more exactly do you people need regarding proof? You, Clayton, are willing to believe that "9/11 was an inside job" based on FAR LESS proof.

 

[Clayton Moore]

But that's precisely the point, and your inability to internalize that very simple idea is, to say the least, telling.

Let's try again: At least two million noncombatants were moved PUBLICLY by the Nazis during the war. They made no attempt to hide deportation. These people were sent "to the east" and then — poof! — we lose all trace of them.

In the places where the Nazis' own records tell us they were sent, i.e., camps in Poland, we have literally dozens of eyewitnesses — survivors as well as perpetrators — who have told us what went on in these places. We have, furthermore, scientific studies conducted at these places that have located mass graves and have identified cyanide deposits on the walls of at least one gas chamber, the levels of which are inconsistent with either the single disinfection the Nazis have on record for that room or the routine use of that room as a delousing chamber.

So what do we have, exactly? We have the Nazis' own record of millions of people being deported, often in broad daylight, to camps in Poland, where we then lose track of them. You CANNOT deny that the proposition thus far is true; to so do would render yourself RIDICULOUS.

So we know they were sent to Poland. No reasonable person disputes this. And once we lose track of them there (again, no "revisionist" has ever offered proof of anyone going from Poland further east, except to Minsk and Riga in limited numbers, where all the available evidence suggests they were shot — but let's stick to Poland for now).

So knowing they were sent to Poland and that we lose track of them there, we have eyewitnesses and forensic evidence that indicates they were gassed.

No you don't. You have lies from 15 to 20 Elie Wiesel type liars.

Did you see the pictures of Wiesel's nonexistent "A-7713"
tattoo?

 

[Clayton Moore]

.
Then how many, and how did you calculate that number?

Don't forget to cite your sources...
.

My point was made that disproved any number of deportees that would have been noticed to be missing by allied reconnaissance.

That along with the incessant lying. With one of the biggest lies being if you were too young to work, too old to work, or unable to work you were not registered and killed in Gas Chambers almost immediately upon arrival at the camps.

 

[ladmo]

I do not dishonestly hold the holocaust to an unreasonable standard of perfection. I do hold it and every element of it to the same epistemological standard. It is for that reason that I don't question the Einsatzgruppen. I don't deny deportation. I don't deny an antisemitic policy of Nazi Germany called the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. When you have physical and documentary evidence of an event, a few wild haired eyewitness descriptions of the event aren't problematic. When knowledge of an event is known almost exclusively through eyewitness testimony, however, it's important that the testimony be consistent and believable. Demanding that isn't dishonest.

It is intellectually dishonest to demand testimony to be consistent. Many illegal acts are purposefully carried out in public due to the likelihood that multiple versions of the same event will be generated.

 

[Wroclaw]

No you don't. You have lies from 15 to 20 Elie Wiesel type liars.

Oh, dear...

I want you to read this:

http://rodohforum.yuku.com/topic/2275/Veritas-Team-Opening-Statement-4-2-04

However, knowing that you're too lazy to do so, I'll give you the important quote here:

In total there are the depositions of forty SS-members sentenced in Poland in 1947, those of Höss and those of 19 SS-members sentenced or acquitted in the German Federal Republic between 1963 and 1965, the depositions of Baer and Dejaco and of a further seven SS-members testifying as witnesses who admitted to having seen the Auschwitz gas chambers with their own eyes. A total of 69 witnesses who had belonged to the SS.

They're all liars also?

By the way, those SS witnesses are all limited to Auschwitz. If you go to witnesses for the other five camps in Poland, you're in triple figures.

Did you see the pictures of Wiesel's nonexistent "A-7713" tattoo?

No, we're going to stay on topic here, or you're going to admit that you're either too stupid or too intellectually lazy to pursue this point like an adult. Or you can admit you're wrong. There is no fourth option.

 

[Wroclaw]

My point was made that disproved any number of deportees that would have been noticed to be missing by allied reconnaissance.

Oh, Christ...

You just don't get it, do you, you poor thing?

The front wasn't exactly near the death camps until 1944. So who would have been doing reconnaissance on any kind of regular basis and for what reason?

That along with the incessant lying. With one of the biggest lies being if you were too young to work, too old to work, or unable to work you were not registered and killed in Gas Chambers almost immediately upon arrival at the camps.

Depends on the camps, obviously, and the time at which one might have arrived at those camps. If you don't understand the nuance involved in such a proposition, then you're out of your depth.

 

[Clayton Moore]

Oh, Christ...

You just don't get it, do you, you poor thing?

The front wasn't exactly near the death camps until 1944. So who would have been doing reconnaissance on any kind of regular basis and for what reason?



Depends on the camps, obviously, and the time at which one might have arrived at those camps. If you don't understand the nuance involved in such a proposition, then you're out of your depth.

You're right, killing more than 3 million people by gas chamber, at times said to be 20,000 a day, just screams nuance.