• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread

Status
Not open for further replies.
Nick Terry said:
I think the lurkers are perfectly capable of following the argument and are making note of the fact that your claim was profoundly bogus.

You were asked to show that your standards of evidence were the same for the Holocaust as for other historical events, and the first example you offer dates from somewhere between the 7th and 13th Century BC, over 9,000 years ago.
Click to expand...

No. That is not what I was asked to show. What I was asked to show was, how did he put it? Oh yeah!

c o n t e m p o r a r y .
m a s s .
m u r d e r .
f o r .
w h i c h .
s i m i l a r .
e v i d e n c e .
e x i s t s .
a n d .
s h o w .
h o w .
t h a t .
e v i d e n c e .
i s .
u s e d .
o n e .
w a y .
f o r .
t h e .
H o l o c a u s t .
a n d .
a n o t h e r .
f o r .
t h e .
m u r d e r s .
o f .
y o u r .
c h o i c e , .
o r .
h o w .
e v i d e n c e .
f o r .
t h e .
H o l o c a u s t .
i s .
a c c e p t e d .
b y .
a .
c o u r t .
o r .
h i s t o r i a n .
w h i c h .
i s .
n o t .
a c c e p t e d .
f o r .
y o u r .
m u r d e r s .
o r .
v i c e .
v e r s a ..

That challenge, of course, has nothing to do with my original statement. I'm ignoring it until TSR tells me which contemporary mass murder he wants me to use for comparison.

Your misunderstanding is due to a focus on only half of what I said. I said that I use the same standards of evidence for the holocaust as for any other historical event. It's the holocaust scholars and (as has been demonstrated in this thread) the holocaust amateurs who use a different standard for the holocaust than they do for any other historical event.

I gave an example of the second part where we see professional skeptic Michael Shermer telling us that the principle that 'absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence' is OK when we're talking about the holocaust but that 'we don't allow that form of reasoning in science' when we're talking about the Biblical story of Exodus.

As an example of me applying the same standard across the board, I would say that the lack of evidence can never be used as evidence that something is true. That applies to the holocaust as well as any other historical event. It applies even if doing so means you're calling Jews liars like Michael Shermer does with his Exodus denial.
 
Why here?

The holocaust happened. Those who question that it occurred need to be ignored, not given a forum for monomania.

Why is JREF a forum for this stuff?

I'm new here, but please note that I ask only one question and it's not rhetorical. I'm prepared to agree with the rationale, though I can't imagine what it might be.

Thanks.
 
Nick Terry said:
There were very good reasons to suspect Walendy of having produced a forgery. He has, in his time, manipulated numerous photos, most notoriously adding 'spaghetti legs' to the well known photo taken by the Auschwitz Sonderkommandos of the open-air cremations in '44 showing a pile of naked corpses.
Click to expand...
Since the exact same photo appears in many 1950s and 1960s Auschwitz museum publication, Dr Terry's 2nd forgery claim fails.

And as much as I dislike depriving revs of their toys, I am afraid that in the meantime between last asserting that the Walendy facsimile was forged and Kues's article, the context of the newspaper article has become much clearer to me. In an article on early news of the Holocaust from Poland, Dariusz Stola quotes a protocol of the selfsame Polish government in exile cabinet meeting on July 9, 1942 that resulted in the communique, which has Mikolajczyk - a man who would have been four, five or six steps removed from an original report in Poland - talking about deportations of Jews to "Belzec and Trawniki" ending in gassing. Who knows whether it was the government-in-exile press officer or the journalist that compounded the error. Or vice versa. Doesn't really matter. None of these sources from London are first-hand accounts.
Click to expand...


Talk about a stunning lack of graciousness. I was the first person who drew Dr Terry's attention to the fact the English language press had stated Trawniki. Boy, someone has undergone a complete personality collapse.

However unless it can be shown Darius is using actual Government in Exile papers and not newspaper articles, then the Polish Daily, being both Polish and the official mouthpiece of the Government, is far closer to the original source than the New York Times.

Leaving aside the fact we also have ghetto press releases from late May talking about Treblinka B and mass killings
 
Dogzilla said:
Your misunderstanding is due to a focus on only half of what I said. I said that I use the same standards of evidence for the holocaust as for any other historical event.
Click to expand...

Except you don't, because you never discuss any other historical events, except strawmen like Exodus. You don't have a genuinely comparative bone in your entire body.

It's the holocaust scholars and (as has been demonstrated in this thread) the holocaust amateurs who use a different standard for the holocaust than they do for any other historical event.
Click to expand...

Please compare Robert Conquest's 1968 edition of The Great Terror with Raul Hilberg's 1961 edition of The Destruction of European Jews. Pay especial attention to the sources used by both, describing the "mix" of sources.

I gave an example of the second part where we see professional skeptic Michael Shermer telling us that the principle that 'absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence' is OK when we're talking about the holocaust but that 'we don't allow that form of reasoning in science' when we're talking about the Biblical story of Exodus.
Click to expand...

Professional skeptic Michael Shermer isn't a historian of the Holocaust or a participant on this thread. However, I am fairly sure that absence of evidence on one particular micro-point is quite different from a blanket absence of evidence.

In the first case, we cannot conclude from the absence of an individual, specific piece of evidence that something did not happen, otherwise most of human history would be annihilated. Most historical evidence has been lost irrevocably.

In the second case, we can conclude from a blanket absence of evidence that something did not happen, since there is either no evidence whatsoever, or sufficiently little that it might as well be considered zero evidence.

As an example of me applying the same standard across the board, I would say that the lack of evidence can never be used as evidence that something is true. That applies to the holocaust as well as any other historical event. It applies even if doing so means you're calling Jews liars like Michael Shermer does with his Exodus denial.
Click to expand...

It's a good thing, then, that the Holocaust doesn't lack for evidence. Please stop confusing your specious definition of evidence with what is actually evidence.
 
Clayton Moore said:
For the record.
Click to expand...
.
Yeah, for the record, CM refuses to even acknowledge any of the lies on the denier side of the argument, personified by Rudolf, Zundel, Irving and zirself -- the first three being undeniably the leading lights (dim though they may be) of the denier chimp crowd.

Instead, zie chooses to pretend no one has seen zir own dishonest posts, and insist that the historicity of the Holocaust hinges on a non-historian writing a non-history book who has never been called as a witness in a trial nor cited by actual historians (whose work *is* the keystone of our understanding of the Holocaust).

Want more for your record, CM? Denier chimps, as a group, are liars.

Note that this reference to denier chimp is not directed at CM, I am simply stating that zie is apparently incapable of substantive (or even honest) discourse on the topic due to zir irrational hate of Jews, in the manner of a denier chimp.

I will continue to highlight that dishonesty and irrationality on CM's part, and continue to note the similarity between zir posts and those one might expect from a liar or denier chimp.

Did I mention that denier chimps tend to be liars, too?
.
 
Last edited:
Nick Terry said:
Except you don't, because you never discuss any other historical events, except strawmen like Exodus. You don't have a genuinely comparative bone in your entire body.
Click to expand...

"Strawmen like Exodus"??? Wow, you really are undergoing a complete personality collapse. Anyway, you say I never discuss any other historical events and then you say I don't have a genuinely comparative bone in my entire body. How can you know this if I've never discussed any other historical event?


Please compare Robert Conquest's 1968 edition of The Great Terror with Raul Hilberg's 1961 edition of The Destruction of European Jews. Pay especial attention to the sources used by both, describing the "mix" of sources.
Click to expand...


I have no interest in Robert Conquest's 1968 edition of The Great Terror so that comparison won't be happening. If I come across a copy at the library or a used book store I might take a look at the chapter notes to see how many references there are to trial transcripts but that's about as far as I'll go.

How about you present us with a summary of the sources used by both, describing the "mix" of sources and show how the same standards of evidence are used with both?


Professional skeptic Michael Shermer isn't a historian of the Holocaust or a participant on this thread. However, I am fairly sure that absence of evidence on one particular micro-point is quite different from a blanket absence of evidence.
Click to expand...

Lack of evidence can never be evidence of something on the micro-point level or on the blanket level. What's you're trying to say here is that absence of evidence when we're talking about the holocaust isn't the same as absence of evidence for any other historical event.


In the first case, we cannot conclude from the absence of an individual, specific piece of evidence that something did not happen, otherwise most of human history would be annihilated. Most historical evidence has been lost irrevocably.

In the second case, we can conclude from a blanket absence of evidence that something did not happen, since there is either no evidence whatsoever, or sufficiently little that it might as well be considered zero evidence.

It's a good thing, then, that the Holocaust doesn't lack for evidence. Please stop confusing your specious definition of evidence with what is actually evidence.
Click to expand...


You're going to make yourself dizzy if you keep spinning like that.
 
Dogzilla said:
Anyway, you say I never discuss any other historical events and then you say I don't have a genuinely comparative bone in my entire body. How can you know this if I've never discussed any other historical event?
Click to expand...
.
Oh, little things like the fact that you never discuss any other historical event, but when offered not one but two other historical events to compare the Holocaust to, you choose to either ignore it, hand wave it away as being been of no interest, or offer a non-historical event as if it was a valid point of comparison.

Quite simple, really.
.
Dogzilla said:
How about you present us with a summary of the sources used by both, describing the "mix" of sources and show how the same standards of evidence are used with both?
Click to expand...
.
No, it was *you* who made the affirmative claims regarding a double standard. How about *you* support these claims by offering a summary of the sources used by both, describing the mix of sources and show the same standards of evidence are *not* used with both.

Your previous "example" fails on the face of it, since there is no mix of sources used to support the story of the Exodus, there is *one* source -- the Bible, which demonstrably is unreliable as an historical source.
.
Dogzilla said:
Lack of evidence can never be evidence of something on the micro-point level or on the blanket level. What's you're trying to say here is that absence of evidence when we're talking about the holocaust isn't the same as absence of evidence for any other historical event.
Click to expand...
.
No, Nick is quite obviously saying
.
absence of evidence on one particular micro-point is quite different from a blanket absence of evidence.
Click to expand...
.
There is no absence of evidence for the Holocaust as a whole -- that's a figment of your imagination.

There *is* an absence of evidence for the Exodus as a whole, unless you have sources you have yet to offer.

The absence of evidence for microdetails in both exist, and are handled identically.
.
Dogzilla said:
You're going to make yourself dizzy if you keep spinning like that.
Click to expand...
.
So, the evidence for the Great Crime vs. the evidence for the Holocaust.

Go!

Or, if you want to make it harder on yourself, the evidence for any contemporary historical event vs the evidence for the Holocaust.

Or, if you insist that the Exodus was an historical event, where are, say, half a dozen non-Biblical sources converging to show that it happened? What is the provenance of the account in the Bible -- who witnessed these events and then wrote them down? Got any physical or Egyptian documentary evidence corroborating the Biblical account? Got the name of one, just one, of Amalek's soldiers?

The ball remains in your court.
.
 
Ignoring Dogzilla's pathetic bookend ad hominems....

Anyway, you say I never discuss any other historical events and then you say I don't have a genuinely comparative bone in my entire body. How can you know this if I've never discussed any other historical event?
Click to expand...

Precisely because you never discuss any other historical events. As TSR said, it's rather simple. If you had the ability to draw genuine comparisons between different historical events, then you'd have done so by now.

I have no interest in Robert Conquest's 1968 edition of The Great Terror so that comparison won't be happening. If I come across a copy at the library or a used book store I might take a look at the chapter notes to see how many references there are to trial transcripts but that's about as far as I'll go.
Click to expand...

Like I said, you don't have a genuinely comparative bone in your body.

How about you present us with a summary of the sources used by both, describing the "mix" of sources and show how the same standards of evidence are used with both?
Click to expand...

I'm not the one claiming that there is a different standard of evidence for the Holocaust, am I?

But it ought to be obvious from the geopolitical situation in 1968 what sources Conquest could not have accessed.

Lack of evidence can never be evidence of something on the micro-point level or on the blanket level.
Click to expand...

You don't see the difference? It is intuitively obvious. If there is absolutely no evidence of something, a blanket absence of evidence, then there are no grounds to infer anything whatsoever.

But if for example we do not have direct evidence of Genghis Khan's year of birth, this does not mean he wasn't born. We can infer the most probable dates of his birth from other sources. The date of Genghis Khan's birth is a micro-point.

What's you're trying to say here is that absence of evidence when we're talking about the holocaust isn't the same as absence of evidence for any other historical event.
Click to expand...

On the contrary, I'm saying that absence of certain types of evidence or the absence of evidence on certain points is absolutely typical for human history, and therefore the Holocaust is no different to other historical events. We don't know when Genghis Khan decided to invade Russia. We do not have the evidence for this micro-point. We do know when Hitler decided to invade Russia, because we have the written evidence which can be used to reconstruct his decision-making process in fairly considerable detail.

We don't know precisely when Hitler decided to exterminate the Jews of Europe, but we do know that he gave such an order, because other sources refer to this order retrospectively. We can also specify the date when Hitler's decision was conveyed to the senior political leadership of the Nazi regime, on December 12, 1941, because Goebbels wrote about it in his diary. This knowledge is absolutely no different to the knowledge which is available to political and diplomatic historians of many other periods in modern history, who similarly use diaries of key participants to reconstruct the course of decision-making processes. The absence of a written Hitler order is thus not evidence of the absence of a Hitler order full stop, because other sources enable us to infer its existence.

Moreover, we know that most of Hitler's papers were destroyed, that's why we have the stenographic protocols of only a tiny fraction of his situation conferences. However, other sources allow us to make the observation that Hitler probably didn't write down such an order anyway, and instead gave it orally.

None of the things mentioned above - the destruction of records, oral orders leaving no direct written traces, establishing decisions based on retrospective statements - are in any way, shape or form unique to the history of the Holocaust.
 
Dogzilla, if I may:

Nick suggested that you compare Hilberg's 1961 study of the Holocaust (1941-1945) with Conquest's 1968 study of the Great Purges (1935-1938), as they cover periods of history that were relatively close in time, and they were only written seven years apart, so presumably the methodology would be closer. (Further, though I don't know that this was relevant, they are both considered "conservatives," so the studies might have had some crossover there as well; I don't know as I have not read Conquest.)

Your comparison with the Exodus is invalid for several reasons, most of which can be identified above. E.g., the Exodus, dated using Biblical methodology, took place around 1250 BC. Thus, it is incomparable to the Holocaust by about 3,000 years. Further, there is little or no written evidence of the Exodus other than the Bible, which, needless to say, is a highly problematic text. I.e., there are no Egyptian government documents to help us out. Of course, there is also no eyewitness testimony, as any alleged witnesses to the Exodus are long dead.

If you don't see that it's not a clear comparison, then you're simply not trying.
 
.
Zie's trying, all right: zie is desperately trying not to compare the Holocaust with anything actually comparable, because then it will become obvious that the double standards zie whines about are of zir own choosing.

Let's turn DZ's example around and look at it from the other direction -- DZ has proclaimed the Exodus as an historical event, so the evidence must be compelling.

So if all we had was a single book, written down ages after the events it described, by (an) unknown author(s) whose work also includes things like a walking stick turning into a snake, voices from spontaneously combusting shrubbery and MREs which simply fall from the skies, this would demonstrate the historicity of the Holocaust equally well?



No?



Why the double standard on your part, DZ?


And good thing thing we have far more evidence for the historicity of the Holocaust, innit?
.
 
Last edited:
Wroclaw said:
Dogzilla, if I may:

Nick suggested that you compare Hilberg's 1961 study of the Holocaust (1941-1945) with Conquest's 1968 study of the Great Purges (1935-1938), as they cover periods of history that were relatively close in time, and they were only written seven years apart, so presumably the methodology would be closer. (Further, though I don't know that this was relevant, they are both considered "conservatives," so the studies might have had some crossover there as well; I don't know as I have not read Conquest.)
Click to expand...

One had documents and the other didn't. Can any denier work out which way round that was?
 
Nick Terry said:
Ignoring Dogzilla's pathetic bookend ad hominems....



Precisely because you never discuss any other historical events. As TSR said, it's rather simple. If you had the ability to draw genuine comparisons between different historical events, then you'd have done so by now.



Like I said, you don't have a genuinely comparative bone in your body.



I'm not the one claiming that there is a different standard of evidence for the Holocaust, am I?

But it ought to be obvious from the geopolitical situation in 1968 what sources Conquest could not have accessed.



You don't see the difference? It is intuitively obvious. If there is absolutely no evidence of something, a blanket absence of evidence, then there are no grounds to infer anything whatsoever.

But if for example we do not have direct evidence of Genghis Khan's year of birth, this does not mean he wasn't born. We can infer the most probable dates of his birth from other sources. The date of Genghis Khan's birth is a micro-point.



On the contrary, I'm saying that absence of certain types of evidence or the absence of evidence on certain points is absolutely typical for human history, and therefore the Holocaust is no different to other historical events. We don't know when Genghis Khan decided to invade Russia. We do not have the evidence for this micro-point. We do know when Hitler decided to invade Russia, because we have the written evidence which can be used to reconstruct his decision-making process in fairly considerable detail.

We don't know precisely when Hitler decided to exterminate the Jews of Europe, but we do know that he gave such an order, because other sources refer to this order retrospectively. We can also specify the date when Hitler's decision was conveyed to the senior political leadership of the Nazi regime, on December 12, 1941, because Goebbels wrote about it in his diary. This knowledge is absolutely no different to the knowledge which is available to political and diplomatic historians of many other periods in modern history, who similarly use diaries of key participants to reconstruct the course of decision-making processes. The absence of a written Hitler order is thus not evidence of the absence of a Hitler order full stop, because other sources enable us to infer its existence.

Moreover, we know that most of Hitler's papers were destroyed, that's why we have the stenographic protocols of only a tiny fraction of his situation conferences. However, other sources allow us to make the observation that Hitler probably didn't write down such an order anyway, and instead gave it orally.

None of the things mentioned above - the destruction of records, oral orders leaving no direct written traces, establishing decisions based on retrospective statements - are in any way, shape or form unique to the history of the Holocaust.
Click to expand...

To me as an admitted layman, the matter is really a lot simpler: five million or so Jews were last seen alive in Nazi custody; if the Nazis or their fanboys wish to claim that either they were not killed, or that their death was not the Nazis´ fault, the burden of proof is entirely on said Nazis or their fanboys.


But, in the interest of fairness, here´s my challenge to the Holocaust deniers: provide evidence, to exactly the same standards that you proclaim for the Holocaust, for any Allied atrocity during WW2.
Any photographic evidence that you provide, I can dismiss as a post-war forgery.
Any eyewitness account that you provide, I can dismiss as a degenerate lie.
Any confessions that you provide, I can dismiss as the product of torture.
Those are your own rules. So, go ahead. Prove any Allied atrocity to your own standards.
 
Mondial said:
How about arson against the Institute for Historical Review? Or physical attacks on David Cole and other holocaust revisionists? www.ihr.org/books/ztn.html
Click to expand...

I could just as easily cite the murder of radio host Alan Berg by The Order, Eric Hunt kidnapping Elie Wiesel and the armed assault on USHMM by von Brunn as evidence of neo-Nazi and revisionist persecution of Jews in America.
 
dance said:
Your posting of elements 1 through 5 of a proposed forensic anthropology research solution to the Jewish holocaust question under discussion seems to have been dropped like a hot potato since you introduced it last night. A scientific approach to the subject seems the most intelligent response to me and I did not find your post at all confusing. All of the other ranting, raving, intentional distortion and misrepresentation above is just so much noise to me.

Undisputed scientific evidence is key here. Fanatics will dispute anything and everything regardless of evidence or logic to the contrary, and will always find fault with any evidence or proof. (Even the most fundamentally accepted mathematical proofs will be challenged if tied to something that touches the fanatical nerve.)

So I say to the deniers, put your science where your mouth is. Put up or shut up.
Click to expand...
What about The Luftl Report www.ihr.org/jhr/v12/v12p391_Luftl.html and The Rudolf Report www.vho.org/GB/Books/trr/ ? Is their science satisfactory to you?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Back
Top Bottom