It was my claim that Shermer was talking about the micro detail level in one of the examples and the blanket level in another example? No. That wasn't my claim. I wouldn't use phrases like 'micro detail level' and 'blanket level' in the first place and the specificity of the topic wouldn't matter. You can't cite the lack of evidence for something as evidence for it.
The specificity of the topic certainly does matter. See Genghis Khan's birth year for an example.
True. But neitherdoes an absence of evidence regarding Genghis Khan's exact birth date allow us to say that it was July 7 at 4:38 pm because not having evidence it was isn't proof that it wasn't.
Missing the point. That Genghis Khan was born can be inferred from the fact that he was alive, which is proven from other sources. The precise details don't matter. Insisting it should be otherwise would be fallacious.
Now, you'd better specify the
exact context in which Shermer used the 'absence of evidence' quote when talking to David Cole.
You're confusing standards and types of evidence.
Nope, because standards of evidence inevitably go hand in hand with the
availability of evidence, which varies from epoch to epoch and also within epochs.
The crucial variable is always the availability of evidence, i.e. the total volume that survives, as well as the types of evidence that survive. Because most historical evidence doesn't survive. Roman emperors had records office just like modern governments, but their contents are mostly lost to us. Businesses kept records in the early modern period, but they rarely survive. African child-soldiers don't keep diaries. Et cetera.
Different historical events can be known through different types of evidence.
This is platitudinous, unless correlated to different epochs.
We can't gain any insight into Adolf Hitler's thoughts about homicidal gas chambers by reading the text messages on his iPhone. I'm reasonably certain Bletchley Park wasn't able to subpoena Hitler's cell phone carrier to see who he called and who called him on a certain day. Text messages and cell phone carrier records are types of evidence that aren't available for Adolf Hitler. But that type of evidence might be available when we're talking about Saddam Hussein.
It'd help if you offered a real-world analogy. Then you might actually be engaging in proper comparison. Perhaps you forgot, but Colin Powell played back or read out (forget which) US signal intercepts to the UN which were
interpreted as indicating that the Iraqis had WMDs. Saddam Hussein's hypothetical cell phone records might not have necessarily led us to any firmer conclusions than the actually existing radio intercepts. Especially since modern militaries and states
do use codes and do use jargon when communicating internally.
So, yes, of course, we're going to need to use different types of evidence to say that Hitler ordered the extermination of the Jews than we would use to prove that Saddam Hussein had WMDs.
It'd also help if you tried comparing
two events that are generally recognised to have occurred, otherwise you won't be calibrating your standards of evidence correctly. The comparison is deeply unflattering to your belief system, despite what you may think.
What we can't do is say that we know Saddam had WMDs because we're looked everywhere for them and haven't found any. But not having evidence that WMDs exist isn't proof that they don't.
This latest analogy of yours is proving especially dumb. Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq there was a widespread belief in the governments of the US and UK that Saddam had WMDs which were stockpiled but not currently being used, a belief shared not only by the politicians (Bush and Blair) but by other ministers and by part of the intelligence services. Other parts were skeptical but were overriden. Some critics and veterans of intelligence operations etc argued that they couldn't exist for various technical and evidentiary reasons. After the invasion, teams of US troops went looking for the WMDs and failed to find any. Therefore virtually everyone stopped believing in Hussein's WMDs. I think perhaps Bush and Cheney might still make the odd squeal about their existence, but that's about it.
Absence of evidence
is effectively evidence of absence if a really serious effort has been undertaken to find evidence of something and it fails. But this can always be defeated at any time if actual evidence is forthcoming. Until then, the safest thing to say is 'there is no evidence that x'. No evidence of live WMDs came to light after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. To the contrary, evidence emerged which suggested that they had been deactivated, i.e. the testimonies of senior Iraqi generals who said so. It's about the best that one could hope for by way of negative evidence. So for everyday purposes, the statement 'there were no WMDs in Hussein's arsenal in March 2003' is correct.
The contrast with Hitler's order for the extermination of the Jews is considerable. No written order signed by Hitler has survived which decrees 'from this day forth ye shall genocide the bastids'. But the Hitler order is like Genghis Khan's birth. We may not know the absolute precise day on which he decided to extend the ongoing program of mass murders of Soviet Jews to the whole of the European continent, but we do know from documents written before the end of the war that there was a Hitler order, because people like Himmler refer to one retrospectively - on numerous occasions. We also know the day when Hitler conveyed his decision to the senior political leadership, as I mentioned already to you in post #5749, December 12, 1941, because Goebbels wrote about it in his diary.
There is
not therefore an absence of evidence regarding the Hitler order. In fact there is quite a lot of evidence for this order, and certainly more than exists for many historical events. There's only an absence of the actual order, which may never have existed, due to Hitler's known predilections with incriminating paperwork, or if it did, was destroyed, again a highly probable conclusion. Absence of one
piece of evidence is absolutely never evidence of absence if other pieces of evidence exist. (Type would be a misnomer since the other pieces of evidence are written, like the "missing Hitler order".)
Viewed in comparison to the Iraqi WMDs, the differences are stark. Before 2003, the US and UK believed that Saddam had WMDs which he could use. They based this on intelligence from a small number of informants, one of whom then turned out to be a provocateur, and some dubiously interpreted signals intercepts.
Before 1945, the Allied powers as well as neutral states had received substantial numbers of intelligence reports concerning the mass extermination of the Jews. Some were not accurate, but the total volume of reports massively outweighed the intelligence available to the US and UK on Iraqi WMDs. It also included reports about when Hitler and Himmler had ordered the process to begin. Those reports were necessarily second-hand, but this is normal in intelligence.
By 1945, a lot of Nazi-controlled Europe had been liberated and there was already quite a lot of direct evidence of the extermination before a single major Nazi archive had been captured. Documents were captured, signals intercepts taken, prisoners interrogated - direct evidence was flying in all directions. And from 1943 onwards, as territory was liberated, you had the even more direct evidence of exhumed mass graves and captured killing sites starting in the Caucasus and trailing westwards all the way to Auschwitz.
The fact of extermination was confirmed a hundred times over before the first direct evidence of how it was decided upon was discovered (eg the Posen speech, which was known in 1945 and then used at Nuremberg). Evidence regarding the decision-making process - and regarding Hitler's role in it - continued to be discovered (or noticed and found significant) for many decades afterwards. Quite a lot came to light in the 1990s, and has now largely settled earlier debates.
The state of knowledge on this issue is thus considerably different today than it was in 1993 or 1982. And what was available in 1982 when Gerald Fleming wrote
Hitler and the Final Solution, which is still one of the more strikingly written history books ever produced, was very different to what was available in 1951 when Leon Poliakov wrote
Breviaire de la haine.
When events that are genuinely comparable to the holocaust are relevant to what we're discussing...which will be problematic because the holocaust was unique.
If you seriously believe that the Holocaust was unique, then your argument about different standards of evidence being used is utterly nonsensical. But your invocation of "uniqueness" flies in the face of the fact that there is widespread agreement that the Holocaust was
not unique and instead can be compared with other genocides, mass murders and megadeaths.
Sure, there are some unique
aspects to the Holocaust, but in case you forgot, the very non-unique aspects of mass shooting, starvation and deportation deaths cost two to three times the number of lives that were lost in the Armenian genocide, and three to four times the number of lives lost in the Rwandan genocide, which are the next two largest genocides in the 20th Century. The shootings carried out in the Holocaust were three times the size of the shootings carried out in the Great Terror of 1937-38 and about twice the size of the total number of known executions carried out under Stalin full stop.
These crimes left varying levels of evidence and varying possibilities for ascertaining their precise extent. The losses inflicted by the Pol Pot regime can still only be estimated:
Modern research has located thousands of mass graves from the Khmer Rouge era all over Cambodia, containing an
estimated 1.39 million bodies. Various studies have estimated the death toll at between 740,000 and 3,000,000, most commonly between 1.4 million and 2.2 million, with perhaps half of those deaths being due to executions, and the rest from starvation and disease.
[6]
The
United States Department of State and the State Department funded Yale Cambodian Genocide Project give estimates of the total death toll as 1.2 million and 1.7 million respectively.
Amnesty International estimates the total death toll as 1.4 million.
R. J. Rummel, an analyst of historical political killings, gives a figure of 2 million. Former Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot gave a figure of 800,000, and his deputy,
Khieu Samphan, said 1 million had been killed
That's nearly 35 years after the event. Given that skeletal remains have been found in Cambodia like this
then it's fairly certain that we will never know the absolute precise number. Piles of skulls and bones are one reason why despite digging up mass graves, the total number can only be estimated.
