You're forgetting the previous discussion, where you trotted out Defonseca (who IS a fraud), Zisblatt (who is at the very least delusional) and so on.
I do love your CT rhetoric here. Schliefler doesn't have "handlers". He might be connected to schools via a speakers' bureau as we previously discussed, who exist on very much a local level, in his case in Arizona. There is no national organisation coordinating these school talks.
Schiefler seems to have made one such talk mentioning soap, judging by the fact that there are only
381 hits for a targeted search for his name plus survivor and soap, and the overwhelming majority of those hits come from antisemitic and denier sites. There's no way of knowing whether he had been talking about soap to every single school before September 2009 when he became the latest poster boy for deniers.
There's also no way of knowing whether after the news story ran, someone from the local community pulled him to one side, or if they pointed out that deniers were kicking up a huge fuss because he mentioned soap. Or if he died three months later.
Except Schliefler isn't fabricating stories about
himself. If you can find me a videoed interview or transcript of a testimony at any time since 1945 that quotes him saying he saw Nazis make Jews into soap, then I will join you in calling him a liar. As it stands, Schliefler is at best repeating hearsay.
Then once again, until you prove that there is a measurable percentage of survivors who peddle myths or tell lies, you're cherrypicking and committing the fallacy of hasty generalisation.
And how many more Freds are there?
Yes it does. Germany is the #2 exporter in the world and about the third most successful economy in the world. It gets
133 million visitors a year and is ranked 7th on the world list of popular tourist destinations. It is a member of the EU, NATO and UN among many other international organisations.
Moreover, it is also widely admired as a country which has come to terms with its past. Very few people think that the Germany of today is anything like the Germany of the 1940s.
I quite clearly did explain this, you just don't like the explanation. I did not simply say 'it's a false equivalency', in the previous post I went on to give reasons why it was a false equivalency. The most you can assert legitimately is that my explanation is wrong, but please can the childish denial about what appears in my posts and what doesn't. This is the second time you have resorted to lying about my posts.
Everybody else did get it. Wroclaw replied to you in
#2093 on very much the same lines as I had.
Now you're just flat-out lying. Every single riot or case mentioned was triggered by a blood libel accusation.
Your blatant attempt to move goal posts is noted and rejected, for reasons explained in another post.
I think I'll frame your last sentence and repeat it back to you every time you make a bare-assertion in the future.
I was under the impression that this was an internet forum discussion and footnoting was not being enforced, and assumed, wrongly, that you would (a) know something about the blood libel and (b) realise that if I mentioned something then it wasn't going to be made up.
But no, I forgot that Dogzilla is stupid enough to think that there won't be very easily presented summaries of this particular aspect of the history of antisemitism. So he got insta-rebutted and is now whining about it.
No, I was arguing that the Christ-killer motif has influenced the content of subsequent antisemitic tropes like the blood libel. You may score a point for poor expression; I did not mean to argue that the killing of Christian children was a story that appeared in the Bible, but that it follows on from a root animosity stirred up by often-repeated interpretations of the Bible.
On the contrary, I don't. But having actually surveyed many thousands of survivor statements, testimonies and memoirs, I am very confident in saying that 'soap' appears in a vanishingly small minority of them. I don't think it's actually much different with stories in local newspapers or on local TV stations reporting on a survivor's talk to schools.
The truth has prevailed. The Nazis genocided more than 5 million of Europe's Jews using a variety of means. Those means did not include turning them into soap. In fact, "soap" is now on a par as a cognitive phenomenon with the denial of the genocide of European Jews by the Nazis, since both are false beliefs which can be studied soberly by academics and indeed, students.
We're now at the stage when the fundamental facts about the Holocaust are not going to change, since the initial confusions that inevitably accompany any historical event have been re-examined and revised.
That I go on to explain.
I have proven it several times over. Your statement is as stupid as saying that accusations of witchcraft never killed anyone because there aren't actually witches.
In another post I predicted you were going to bring up Nuremberg. And once again we observe your total and utter inability to properly formulate appropriate comparisons without asymmetries or incompatibilities.
You're also stupid enough to ignore the obvious objection to the comparison, which is that 'soap' nowhere appears in any of the judgements of individual defendants at Nuremberg, and plunge on regardless, in the delusory belief that there are not plenty of cases where blood libel accusations have gone to trial - exclusively focused on the charge of killing Christian children - and resulted in executions or deaths under torture.
The
Wiki page on blood libel summarises the tip of the iceberg of evidence on this subject, and it's not up to me to repeat the obvious when you're the one who has seemingly decided to commit intellectual suicide by wriggling and struggling against the facts.
Cremation wasn't introduced into the camp system as part of disease control. It was introduced because it was a convenient way of covering up the wounds inflicted on camp inmates by brutal SS guards, who arranged to have the bodies of their murder victims incinerated in local crematoria from virtually the get-go in the evolution of the Nazi camp system, at a time when there were no epidemics and when the number of deaths per year might be in single figures or the low tens per year. Cremation also went hand in hand with removing the registration of the death from civilian oversight by establishing specific registry offices inside the camps, and not as was initially the case, registering the dead in the local Standesamt.
For a while, cremation also served the purpose of terrorising target populations by presenting families with urns and no body. But mostly it served the purpose of providing a ready made excuse to Germans, Czechs, Poles and other nationalities about why they weren't going to get the bodies of their loved ones back for burial. Then they decided to forego cremating bodies one at a time and mixed up ashes, returning urns with the ashes of several prisoners to specific families. Then they stopped bothering to send out urns at all, and simply dumped the ashes in ponds and rivers, as at Auschwitz, or did god knows what with them. Most of the victims of Dachau and Buchenwald were Russians and Poles, and it wasn't like the SS were going to bother to send out urns of ashes to Kiev or Rovno in 1943 when an Ostarbeiter died.
That's not the argument. The point is an analogy. If the Nazis were capable of desecrating bodies in violation of the tenets of Judaism and Catholicism by cremating them, then the plausibility of a rumour that they were using the bodies for other purposes increases.
There is actually some evidence for the belief, which circulated quite widely at the time, that ashes from cremation victims in the eastern KZs were used as fertiliser as well as being thrown into rivers or buried. So this further increased the plausibility of believing in 'soap'. Not to mention the widely known and well documented fact that the SS recovered gold teeth from cremations. Thus some camp survivors acquired the belief that the Nazis were recycling the dead in a systematic way, and that meant that soap became believable.
Are you now trying to
justify the blood libel accusation? Wow. Then you'll of course present evidence that Christians in the middle ages through to the 19th century mentioned circumcision as one of the reasons they found blood libel accusations plausible.
I'm curious, though, how
Muslim circumcision fits in with this obsession of yours with Jewish penises. It's not like European Christians didn't have extensive contacts with and coexisted alongside Muslim populations in Spain, the Balkans and the Caucasus from the middle ages through to the 20th century.
What similarities? You're the one who now brings up Jewish penises.
For the benefit of the two readers we probably have left, both of whom think you're a moron by the way, you challenged me to think of another myth where someone could believe it without being labelled a bigot.
This is more or less a pointless endeavour for the simple reason that I haven't denied that belief in soap can go hand in hand with actual anti-German bigotry. The main objection was to Dogzilla characterising a particular survivor, Fred Schliefler, as a
fraudulent bigot for believing in something he knows/knew only by hearsay.
The entire point of the discussion is not, in fact, to get sidetracked onto Dogzilla's worrying fantasies about Jewish penises, but to address the facticity of the Holocaust and whether certain challenges to it are coherent - this being after all the 'general Holocaust denial discussion thread'.
You've been called on it so many times in this thread I don't know why you pretend otherwise, but hey, if you're learning not to conflate them then good on you.
Yeah. Great. So?
Mr Schliefer was discussing events in the past, in 1945. While he may also be a Wagner-hating Germanophobe and might also be preaching anti-German hatred, even the small children he was talking to are quite capable of distinguishing between Germans back then and Germans today.
Since the post to which you are ostensibly replying went into some detail about anti-German bigotry, how can you possibly say that I am not aware that some people don't distinguish between the two?
We end up, yet again, with another trademark assertion by insinuation from Dogzilla, because yet again, you haven't bothered to quantify or clarify the actual extent of the phenomenon.
Yet Goldhagen's book, as well as the commentaries he wrote after it appeared, distinguishes between the Germans of the 1940s and postwar Germans. And it sold by the truckload in mid-1990s reunified Germany, appealing greatly to a younger generation who wanted to find out what their grandparents' generation got up to, and confront the past.
What does this have to do with bigotry?
Even if this were so, where does this get you? How many Fred Schlieflers are there and do they form a disproportionate percentage of the sum total of survivors out there in the public sphere, giving talks and being reported on in newspapers?
It certainly doesn't get you anywhere with undermining the credibility of all survivor testimony.
No, Dogzilla. I actually said you are really lousy at argument by analogy. Full stop. That's a much more general claim than saying your soap myth vs blood libel is a bad analogy (which it is, as has been demonstrated repeatedly).
You are the king of bad analogies, exhibit A being this thread and your antics in this discussion. You do not know how to construct logical comparisons in such a way as they help you ram home what you really want to argue. Instead, we get blether about third order issues which are eminently disputable and which you don't seem to know very much. You open your mouth before doing simple searches and factchecks, and then splutter indignantly when others do the factchecking and show you to be wrong or misleading.
The main thing you need to stop doing is this sample of one nonsense. It's a transparent logical fallacy to try and argue a case based on one example. Simply rounding up a bunch of samples of one into a gish gallop, as you do above by spewing out stuff about Goldhagen (that is probably repetitious - haven't we discussed him before?), doesn't get you out of this hole.
It's not like we haven't heard most of your spiel before. You really, really need new material, and if this discussion has taught you anything, it's that you need to google properly, and not just fixate on whatever you are being spoonfed from the dubious websites who drone on about the Fred Schlieflers of this world.
What *was* your source for the Fred Schliefler story, btw? Seeing as how it's harped on about virtually exclusively on nutzi and antisemitic websites.
