Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread

[Clayton Moore]

Clayton, are you going to maintain that, on the issue of gas chambers, Elie Wiesel, who has never claimed to have seen a gas chamber, is a more important witness than 69 SS witnesses?

Yes.

 

[Wroclaw]

Yes.

Would you care to comment on whether you think those 69 SS witnesses were all also lying?

 

[dafydd]

I notice LGR and clayton are really good at not answering questions. Clayton, I notice, is exceptionally gifted at implying things without actually committing to a position.

This is the first holocaust thread I've ever wandered into. Gonna be my last.

Bye. I'll be in a space related thread if you need me.

These neo nazi geniuses never realize that participating in these these threads reveals their ignorance,stupidity and anti semitism for all to see.

 

[tsig]

You make me wanna puke with those obvious lies.

Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you sick.

 

[TSR]

Yes.

.
Because ... ?
.

 

[Clayton Moore]

.
Because ... ?
.

You have a question?

 

[LemmyCaution]

You have a question?

More to the point, do you have an answer? Specifically, in this case, one in a long list of dodges on your part, an answer for why you valorize on the subject of gas chambers the writing of a man who doesn't claim to have seen a gas chamber over Wroclaw's 69 witnesses to the extermination process? And whether you are now prepared to call these SS witnesses also liars?

 

[Clayton Moore]

More to the point, do you have an answer? Specifically, in this case, one in a long list of dodges on your part, an answer for why you valorize on the subject of gas chambers the writing of a man who doesn't claim to have seen a gas chamber over Wroclaw's 69 witnesses to the extermination process? And whether you are now prepared to call these SS witnesses also liars?

There were no gas chambers. There were no electrocutions. There was no throwing of live babies into a wall or into flames.

In case you haven't noticed every witness seems have 3 or 4 gruesome tales, Jason Voorhees level gruesome, about guards that always go unpunished. Every camp, every year, every every.

 

[LemmyCaution]

There were no gas chambers. There were no electrocutions. There was no throwing of live babies into a wall or into flames.

In case you haven't noticed every witness seems have 3 or 4 gruesome tales, Jason Voorhees level gruesome, about guards that always go unpunished. Every camp, every year, every every.

Another dodge.

Clayton Moore has got himself into a pickle. If he continues blethering a few inane and repetitious generalities, he is a laughingstock and, worse, continues to expose negationism as an empty suit.

But he doesn't seem to know the historical works or sources, which would enable him at least to muster a show of discussing specifics. So he can't reply to questions asked him without making a fool of himself. And this necessary reticence and obvious ignorance also continue to expose him and his "cause" as empty.

Damned if he does, and damned if he don't, is poor Clayton Moore.

 

[Dogzilla]

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.

You realize the definition of the words and their interchangeability have nothing to do with the number of museums?

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

That certainly puts it in perspective. When the United States opens a museum to commemorate and remember the genocide of the native Americans, the holocaust will have only twenty five times as many dedicated museums. Right now there's zero percent difference.

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.

So? Stats on the number of academics associated with a museum doesn't turn the name into the Evolution Museum. You might as well tell us how many fire escapes there are at the museum. You said there was an Evolution Museum. There isn't. You can dissemble and obfuscate til the cows come home. But you said what you said.

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

If by 'comprehensively shredded' you mean proven to be correct, then yes, it was 'comprehensively shredded'.' Remember Nick, you don't prove something is incorrect by explaining why it is correct.

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 haven't conceded the point. The point was never challenged and never overturned. Your talk about museum politics and museum consumption expanded on what I said. Some of what you wrote was accurate and some of it was the typical making up facts as you go along. But it merely explained why what I said was true.

Is it a great talking point? Why? I think the success of Hollycaust films from Schindler's List to Inglorious Bastards is a better barometer of how much Americans love six million Jews being exterminated than the number of museums. And more dangerous as well--as a source of disinformation, the mass media beats the USHMM hands down. Afterall, more people have learned about the holocaust from Steven Spielberg than from all twenty five holomuseums combined. But anyway, maybe I do need to rethink whether blethering on about museums is really very significant. I didn't think so but you're reaction makes me wonder.

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.

Oh sure, there you go! Blame it on the JOOS! It's all a JOO plot! Was your mother frightened by a JOO when you were in the womb? Why do you hate JOOS?

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.

Yes, in our pre-melting pot and melting pot era of ethnic politics, we were all part of one race--the human race--until the American Jews taught us that we're not so similar after all. We all just sitting here with our thumbs up our butts waiting for American Jewry to show us the light. Obviously. Sheesh!

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.

Stick with seminars on the blood libel. Clearly sociology isn't your cup of tea (served punctually at 4 pm).

And yet, there are many events in human history which are known almost exclusively through eyewitness testimony or comparable accounts produced after the event.

How many events from the twentieth century are known almost exclusively through eyewitness testimony? And what is a comparable account?

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.

Identical standards are impossible. Every event in history is unique and the mix of evidence we have for it is bound to be unique in some way as well. But if the standard for being truly honest epistemologically requires comparing events to know what is reasonable to expect, how can we know what to expect vis-a-vis the holocaust? What event in human history killed so many people in three or four very tiny well defined geographic regions in such a short period of time?

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.

If the holocaust is one of the better investigated mass slaughters forensically speaking, the lack of forensic evidence is even more disturbing.

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.

You have never pointed to documents which were entirely explicit about gassing. Since it didn't take much effort to not point me to explicit gassing documents, it should take even less of an effort to point me to them now. Be sure to look up the definition of 'explicit' before you go further with this.

And the testimonial evidence is much, much more consistent than you seem to think.

Are you talking about the testimonial evidence from hundreds of thousands of individual survivors who have left testimony or only the five or six survivor testimonies that holocaust scholars use?

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".

The importance of consistency in eyewitness descriptions rises as other forms of evidence fall by the wayside. Nobody expects no crazies at all. If all we knew about the Tunguska event was based on eyewitnesses, we would probably consider it as mass hysteria or something akin to the Phoenix Lights. Fortunately, with Tunguska we have irrefutable physical evidence of an enormous cataclysm. A few eyewitnesses who report seeing inconsistent colors streaking across the sky are not problematic here. We could probably reconstruct Tunguska without any eyewitnesses at all.

It's the lack of physical evidence where their should be some that makes the holocaust uniquely problematic. Perfectly consistent eyewitness testimony wouldn't overcome that hurdle. In this case, using the testimony of crazies such as Gerstein just makes the story even less tenable.

But most eyewitness accounts cannot be corroborated by specific physical or documentary evidence.

What?

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.

What is the 'face of battle'?

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.

You really can't compare WWI veterans to holocaust survivors. You can go to France today and see landscape still scarred by trench warfare that happened almost a hundred years ago. I bet in the 1920s it was even more obvious. There's video footage of airplanes shot down, men going over the top and getting mowed down, of poison gas attacks and tank battles. You could have a fifty percent totally useless rate among eyewitness accounts but still be able to piece together what happened based on other types of evidence. None of that other evidence exists for the holocaust.

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.

The studies of mental illness among the population of holocaust survivors have been inconclusive. To what would you compare holocaust survivor's testimony to arrive at a measure of 'derangement?' What is your yardstick? If you compared holocaust survivors to the general population and found that the survivors manifested more mental illness or the stories they told were more 'out there' than the general population, what would that tell us? That the holocaust had a traumatic effect on some people? Well, duh. If comparing holocaust survivors to, e.g., Armenian genocide survivors showed that holocaust survivors suffered greater derangement, it could also be dismissed as a foregone conclusion because the holocaust was so much more traumatic.

So that's one difficulty. But if we can agree on what we use for comparison, then you have the problem of quantifying "derangement" on a sliding scale. Is defecating and swallowing diamonds over and over again for months while in Auschwitz more or less deranged than living with wolves? Is watching a lorry load of infants being dumped into a flaming baby pit more deranged than being pushed out of the gas chamber by two buck-naked nubile preteen girls? Is being pushed out of the gas chamber by nubile little girls more deranged than giving them a haircut inside the gas chamber? Is giving them a haircut inside the gas chamber more deranged than looking up into their "lady parts" for hidden diamonds after they're dead?

Then how do you handle minor mistakes in the survivor testimony that may or may not represent derangement? Not every survivor claims to have seen flames and smoke billowing from the crematorium chimney in Auschwitz but some do. We know that none of them actually did. But how do we handle a survivor who saw smoke coming out of a chimney and thought it was the crematorium vs. the lunatic rantings of a Mrs. Schaechter?

Not everybody was personally selected by Mengele. But some were. Not every mother who says she threw her baby out of the train did so. But some did. Everybody wasn't told that the only way out of the camp was through the chimney. But some were. Anybody who says they had to drink urine to quench their thirst is lying. But somebody probably drank urine at one time or another. How do we handle those? Do we just assume they're all lying or all telling the truth? If, e.g., somebody believes he drank urine but didn't is he more or less deranged than somebody who knows he never drank urine but says he did?

Then how do we weigh the importance of individual testimony? It wouldn't be right if we found a completely lunatic testimony that had never been published anywhere and gave it equal weight to the testimony of somebody like Elie Wiesel.

Do we limit ourselves to oral testimony or only written testimony? When a survivor's story keeps changing, which version to we use?

Establishing a methodology for such a study wouldn't be easy but perhaps it would be valuable. Although I have already said that the uniqueness of the holocaust can get in the way of any comparison I think we need to assume comparison is possible and go from there. But before we setup the measurement instrument, we need to make sure there's something to compare holocaust survivor testimony against. I would propose we conduct a simple pretest to determine the viability of a full study. Let's gather published eyewitness accounts of non-holocaust related traumatic events. Preferably they would be events for which little physical evidence remains and which occurred within the last two hundred years or so. Let's limit ourselves to only written testimony from innocent civilians that has been published in English. (no need to introduce translation artifacts into an already onerous study).

Perhaps we could look at the testimony of non-Jewish holocaust survivors. There were plenty of non-Jews in the camps. Do any of them tell stories similar to surviving because some little girl came to the fence everyday and threw an apple over it for them? Did they miraculously meet again on a blind date and get married?

I've read quite a few accounts of white men women and children who were captured by Indians back in the frontier days of the United States. The experience some of those captives went through make the holocaust sound like a walk in the park. Maybe if we found a story of a captive who said something along the lines of having escaped from the Indians and lived with wolves we could use that for comparison?

Armenian genocide survivor testimony might be something to look into. I'm open to suggestions.

But that's gotta be the first step. We know there are more than a few bats**t crazy memoirs by holocaust survivors. Let's find some bats**t crazy memoirs by non-holocaust trauma survivors to help us figure out how to tackle this challenge. And if we can't find any bats**t crazy non-holocaust trauma survivor testimony, we'll have our answer and won't need to go any further.

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.

Evidence for those many more fake Vietnam vets? And what do you mean by "fake survivors?" Are you talking about the Mishas or the Zisblatts?

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.

What is the quantitative dimension? How do you quantify crazy between subjects and within subjects? Is your population the hundreds of thousands of holocaust survivors or only the three or four that are relied on in the literature?

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.

But you haven't leveled any coherent criticism. All you've really done is dismiss the problems with the eyewitness testimony by acknowledging the flaws in eyewitness testimony in general. You're ignoring that the problems with eyewitness testimony for the holocaust are exacerbated by the conditions under which much of this testimony was collected and by the fact that physical evidence doesn't exist to back it up.

 

[Thunder]

There were no gas chambers.

sure there were. the documented evidence is overwhelming.

 

[Dogzilla]

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.

Where did you come up with that statistic? You might be right but that would only prove that illegal acts carried out in pubic because of the likelihood of generating multiple versions of the same event are likely to result in multiple eyewitnesses to help the police catch the criminals.

Illegal acts conducted in a way to prevent any eyewitnesses are less likely to be caught.

 

[MG1962]

sure there were. the documented evidence is overwhelming.

Dont waste your breath Thunder. If Clayton says so. Then it is so. No need for pesky evidence or such, just shut up and accept it. You are Jewish, so by default you will be lying no matter what

 

[Clayton Moore]

sure there were. the documented evidence is overwhelming.

Tell me about the gas chamber in the woods, or the shower nozzles, or the cottage.

Show me an experiment with lab rats in a proportional sized enclosure and a proportional amount of Zyklon-B.

The 6 million Holocaust of WWII was just as impossible as the 6 million Holocaust of WWI.

 

[little grey rabbit]

Show me an experiment with lab rats in a proportional sized enclosure and a proportional amount of Zyklon-B.
.

Dear God, is this guy for real. LGR

Dear LGR, no of course not. God

 

[LemmyCaution]

Tell me about the gas chamber in the woods, or the shower nozzles, or the cottage.

Show me an experiment with lab rats in a proportional sized enclosure and a proportional amount of Zyklon-B.

Calling Fritz Berg: Can rats be trained to hold their breath?

 

[Clayton Moore]

Calling Fritz Berg: Can rats be trained to hold their breath?

That was brilliant. Okay rabbits or lemmings.

 

[TSR]

Show me an experiment with lab rats in a proportional sized enclosure and a proportional amount of Zyklon-B.

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Are you serious questioning the lethality of HCN for mammals?
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The 6 million Holocaust of WWII was just as impossible as the 6 million Holocaust of WWI.

.
Of course, there *was* no such "6 million Holocaust" of WWI...


Meanwhile, why do you pretend that one man who was not even there's statements trump 69 men who were?


And what happened to Guta and Abus Strawczynski if Treblinka was just a transit camp?
.

 

[Wroclaw]

Tell me about the gas chamber in the woods, or the shower nozzles, or the cottage.

Show me an experiment with lab rats in a proportional sized enclosure and a proportional amount of Zyklon-B.

The 6 million Holocaust of WWII was just as impossible as the 6 million Holocaust of WWI.

You can repeat yourself all you want. You've exposed yourself as not seriously willing to debate the issue. So why are you even here?

 

[dafydd]

Calling Fritz Berg: Can rats be trained to hold their breath?

Can Holocaust deniers be trained to think?