So we have TSR on record as saying the "gas chamber" at Auschwitz today is exactly as the Russians found it in January 1945. Nick says Pressac in 1988 was the first historian to admit the Russians/Poles did a little remodeling after they took possession of the camp way back in 1945. I'm going to say that they still don't really admit the gas chamber is a tawdry fake better suited for Deathcampland at Disney World than the number one destination for holotourism. Anybody else have a guess?
Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread
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So we have TSR on record as saying the "gas chamber" at Auschwitz today is exactly as the Russians found it in January 1945. Nick says Pressac in 1988 was the first historian to admit the Russians/Poles did a little remodeling after they took possession of the camp way back in 1945. I'm going to say that they still don't really admit the gas chamber is a tawdry fake better suited for Deathcampland at Disney World than the number one destination for holotourism. Anybody else have a guess?
Blanket get out of jail for free card. You can't counter the argument? Call them shills, disregard what they say.
Your not a follower of Enid Blyton by chance.?
LemmyCaution
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Not sure what Dogzilla means by "discredit" here, but Hilberg has long been criticized on a variety of grounds - politics, methodology, specific conclusions.
Hilberg, of course, has his strong defenders and those who have extended and elaborated on his work. At the same time, as with the work of any academic who pioneers a major thesis, Hilberg's magnus opus is the site of extensive discourse on the nature of the Holocaust and its development and has been subjected to scrutiny, attack, and commentary. Hilberg relied on perpetrator documents, and has been criticized for this approach, which focused on the bureaucracy and how it functioned. (After all, he studied, not history but political science, with Franz Neumann at Columbia and worked in the War Documentation Project.) Intentionalists at the time did not like Hilberg's work and attacked it vehemently. Hilberg's position on the Jewish Councils provoked both strong public criticism and scholarly rebuttals. Hilberg also differed from some scholars on the role of antisemitism, arguing that vicious antisemitism alone is not a sufficient explanation for the implementation of the genocide - and that the most virulent antisemitism was found not in Germany but in eastern Europe. Yad Vashem IIRC did not provide Hilberg access to their archives.
Just this past year, Dan Michman's book on the emergence of ghettos, a very interesting linguistic and cultural study, can be read almost as an extended dialogue with Hilberg, critiquing the formulation that formation of Judenrate and implementation of ghettos were constituent steps of a linear destruction process.
All this said, very few of Hilberg's critics would agree that his work is "bad history" - in fact, even those who disagree with Hilberg on important points are in his debt, and acknowledge so. The Destruction of the European Jews remains a foundation piece for study of the Holocaust, often used as a point of reference and often used as a point of departure. The latest edition, in my opinion, is indispensable, with Hilberg's meticulous, careful use of sources in evidence throughout. Many of Hilberg's critics, then, have worked to strike a new balance or suggest additional complexities and nuances or argue a different interpretation on a specific conclusion. All of which is how sorting out and reconstructing the past is normally done - and none of which suggests that Hilberg's work is "bad."
It might improve the dialogue on this thread if Dogzilla, rather than brandishing "it's bad history," were to lay out a case against Hilberg, with arguments and citations.
To my mind, all this - Dogzilla's charge that Hilberg is a bad historian standing against Hilberg's stature among those who study the Holocaust - also brings us back to Nick Terry's question, which deniers are ignoring - one by going off on tangents - about the status of HD among academics.
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TSR
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No, that's not what TSR said, nor is it what Nick said.
What we *dp* have on record is DZ's posting of lies, such as the one about the NYT publishing articles at the behest of an organization which wouldn't exist for three decades, more or less. Or that Hilberg writes "bad history".
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LemmyCaution
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It would also be helpful for Dogzilla to point out where he sees TSR and Nick Terry writing what he concludes in this post.
This isn't surprising, another unsubstantiated claim put forward by a revisionist. For example, Dogzilla has gone silent on his attempt to pass off the mass extermination of Lithuanian Jews in summer and fall 1941 as 1) ethnic cleansing, 2) anti-partisan actions, and 3) rogue excesses.
Dogzilla claimed that "The Jaeger Report is evidence of anti-partisan actions"; he has yet to show how this is so. Or, Dogzilla also claimed of the Jaeger Report, "It's the type of language we see when the overall Jewish policy of the German government is an ethnic cleansing."
He still hasn't given any examples, let alone dealt with the points that rubbish his un-sourced, un-explained, empty claims.
What we have here is the continued tactic in which deniers make a claim - then refuse to provide a source or at best give evidence for their claim along the lines of "It's obvious to everyone" or simply fall silent and hope to change the subject.
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Nick Terry
Illuminator
Deniers are obsessed with Hilberg. So obsessed they have written two whole books attacking him in the past 15 years, one written shortly after Hilberg's death in 2007. Arthur Butz dedicated a very large amount of space to trying to hatchet-job Hilberg in the 1970s in his book. His name appears far more frequently on the VHO website or on CODOH forum than do terms like Einsatzgruppen or Chelmno. The reasoning, one presumes, is that Hilberg was a pioneer, therefore if the deniers attack the pioneer then the whole thing falls.
This reasoning is however disallowed if anyone tried to apply it to denial. Rassinier was the pioneer of denial and his work is unreadable gibberish which is howlingly wrong and totally inadequate for the intended purpose. Rassinier wrote most of his denier works shortly after Hilberg's book appeared in 1961, and like Butz also dedicates an inordinate amount of space to attacking Hilberg. Virtually no deniers cite Rassinier anymore.
But maybe it's Butz who is the Hilberg of revisionism? That is the role he aspired to, and yet anyone sane who tries to read The Hoax of the Twentieth Century will come away reeling from the dishonesty and incompetence of Butz, especially if they have already read, say, Hilberg. It is a measure of the poverty of revisionism that Butz's book is still regularly touted on this forum and elsewhere as a life-changing experience.
In reality, however, there is no 'Pope' of Holocaust history, however much deniers try to pretend that Hilberg is the sole doyen of the field. There were hundreds of authors before him and thousands after him. The literature on the Holocaust is like any other literature, a collective one.
The same applies to revisionism; the sum total of revisionist writings is the revisionist literature. The catch is that there are infinitely fewer revisionist works, they are massively repetitive and often simply plagiarised/copied from previous revisionist authors, very few of the authors have done any real research, and none of the books are actually written as histories; they are all polemics.
Of course, the ostensible flagwavers for the revisionist cause on here have read neither the denier literature nor the conventional literature. They've just picked up dribs and drabs from their internet surfing. Our resident coterie belong firmly to the post-literate society of contemporary America. Their contempt for knowledge is manifest; we see their know-nothingism in action day after day.
LemmyCaution
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In addition, and this puts our Internet revisionists in a doubly bad light, not only are these folks part of a trend away from reading and thought, they have for some reason, motivated by something other than a deep reading of the history and a debate with the collective literature, decided to negate, revise, deny what they do not know. Which locates their motivation outside what they claim it to be. Without engaging the history, they have already, beforehand, decided to object. What are those motivations that come from outside the history, as it were?
tsig
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Is fear the only motivation you understand?
tsig
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Depends upon the perspective.
tsig
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Catch 22, if you disagree with me that proves I'm right, if you don't disagree then that proves I'm right.
tsig
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The ZOG pays me $1900 a month to sit here and flog you, deep posting and keep me in a job.
:Clayton Moore
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Mr
How do you observe NAZI horrors for years, as Elie wrote that he did, and then decide to leave the camp with them?
Which means Elie didn't observe NAZI horrors for years and likely few if any Nazi horrors.
Which means, when he wrote about Nazi horrors, he couldn't ascertain what was improbable or, more likely, impossible.
How do you observe NAZI horrors for years, as Elie wrote that he did, and then decide to leave the camp with them?
Which means Elie didn't observe NAZI horrors for years and likely few if any Nazi horrors.
Which means, when he wrote about Nazi horrors, he couldn't ascertain what was improbable or, more likely, impossible.
A'isha
Miss Schoolteacher
You haven't actually read Night, have you?
Which event are you exactly referring to? That post is not very specific so to answer it is rather hard.
Apart from that:
You claim
a)"watching the nazis commit horrible acts precludes Wiesel from leaving the camp with them".
b)"He left the camp with them"
c)"Therefore he cannot have observed them committing horrible acts".
d)"Therefore he was unable to ascertain the probability of their horrible acts".
How sure are you about a)? Because the assumption inherent is that he had some choice in the matter. Which even for regular prison inmates today and even more back then seems rather unlikely.
Apart from that:
You claim
a)"watching the nazis commit horrible acts precludes Wiesel from leaving the camp with them".
b)"He left the camp with them"
c)"Therefore he cannot have observed them committing horrible acts".
d)"Therefore he was unable to ascertain the probability of their horrible acts".
How sure are you about a)? Because the assumption inherent is that he had some choice in the matter. Which even for regular prison inmates today and even more back then seems rather unlikely.
A'isha
Miss Schoolteacher
He's obviously cribbing from IHR's "leaflet" about Wiesel, written by Faurisson (and which Clayton said "hear, hear!" to over in this post).
The leaflet asserts, "When Elie Wiesel and his father, as Auschwitz prisoners, had the choice of either leaving with their retreating German "executioners," or remaining behind in the camp to await the Soviet "liberators," the two decided to leave with their German captors."
If this is all Clayton has read about Night, then his question about Wiesel leaving with the Germans rather than staying and waiting for Russian liberation makes sense. If, however, he's actually read Wiesel's book, then his question makes no sense at all.
And since Clayton apparently asked the question in all seriousness (even to the point where he thinks it's rhetorical)...
The leaflet asserts, "When Elie Wiesel and his father, as Auschwitz prisoners, had the choice of either leaving with their retreating German "executioners," or remaining behind in the camp to await the Soviet "liberators," the two decided to leave with their German captors."
If this is all Clayton has read about Night, then his question about Wiesel leaving with the Germans rather than staying and waiting for Russian liberation makes sense. If, however, he's actually read Wiesel's book, then his question makes no sense at all.
And since Clayton apparently asked the question in all seriousness (even to the point where he thinks it's rhetorical)...
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Clayton Moore
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Enough of the double talk. Spit it out. Why would Wiesel leave with the Heinous Nazis if, as he said, he had the opportunity not to?
A'isha
Miss Schoolteacher
If you bothered to read Wiesel's book for yourself, rather than relying on the lies your revisionist buddies tell about it, then you'd already know the answer to your question.
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Clayton Moore
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More gibberish.
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