It has been compared, but without taking revisionist arguments seriously.
Revisionism has only one subject, the Holocaust; by definition it cannot prove
any of its theories unless it engages in some form of systematic comparison.
That is why revisionists are the greatest proponents of the Holocaust uniqueness thesis: because it suits them as a strawman.
My basic and tentative thought was that if there were a common theory of human nature, which "genocide studies" or other inquiries might establish, this could be used to evaluate narratives to distinguish atrocity propaganda from factual description. If the theory takes the holocaust narrative as foundational, this process is necessarily vitiated (from a revisionist standpoint) as the dataset has been corrupted.
Well, sorry, but revisionists aren't in a position to demand squat on this one. There is a
massive data-set regarding the evidence for atrocities in the 20th Century alone: this shows that many factors which deniers frequently claim prove the 'corruption' of the Holocaust are in fact quite normal, and can be compensated for without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Your sneer quotes around genocide studies ignore the fact that I've been discussing other forms of mass violence
as well. We got onto this line of argument because you handwaved away the relevance of violence against POWs to the Holocaust.
Invoking 'atrocity propaganda' simply backfires on you, because revisionism has never studied other atrocities to be able to offer a coherent method of distinguishing false from real atrocities. The 'method' is entirely hypocritical and displays blatant double standards, since it is quite standard within revisionism to express total credulity towards Soviet or Allied atrocities, and to repeat proven past atrocity propaganda such as exaggerated Dresden death tolls, while simultaneously casting hyper-sceptical doubt on atrocities against Jews, and Jews alone. Meanwhile
all other atrocities are simply ignored, even if they're Nazi atrocities.
As a historical method, revisionism is accordingly completely useless.
More fool history students then, surely. History's first aim should be to establish and narrate individual facts.
Most historians would actually laugh at this hopelessly naive throwback to the era of positivism. Historians seek to establish particular narratives and explanations out of large numbers of individual facts, always aware that 'establishing facts' is entirely contingent on the quality of the evidence, and thus subject to change as more research is done.
Scholars who specialise in the ancient world or middle ages call themselves historians, yet they are confronted with colossal evidentiary problems even trying to find out the most basic pieces of data; the problems do not go away in early modern or even modern history.
Facts about individual intentions are most easily accessible.
Really? In fact
it's quite the opposite. Historical actors tend to be social groups. Discerning individual intentions may well be impossible, depending on available source evidence.
Generalisation and comparison and inferences as to the large-scale effects come afterwards and involve other social science disciplines and statistical or other extra-historical methods.
LOL you clearly have no idea of 20th century social science much less modern historiography.
This became popular in the 20th century once a basically biographical approach was supplemented by the history of nations and other groups and thereafter the stories of "ordinary people" were valorised as part of a process of democratisation and "identity politics".
Whoa there, why are you ignoring everything in between the nation and the ordinary individual?
Both history and social science have spent a quite unbelievable amount of time in the past 100-150 years examining the nature of social groups and institutions, starting of course with the history of socioeconomic classes for Marxists, but also examining the role of political parties, churches, bureaucracies, militaries, paramilitaries, police forces, and legal systems on the one hand, and social cohorts like gendered milieux, religious communities, social movements, workplaces, business communities, intelligentsias and subcultures on the other.
Those
subjects are seen as historical, social, economic and political actors in their own right as well as in relation to other such actors. Many of these actors behave in a corporate fashion, so that an immense amount of time is spent examining deviations from a supposed norm: the politician who breaks with their party, the general who disobeys orders, or the ordinary soldier who deserts.
Tracing texts back to the individuals who created or published them is Faurisson's speciality and strength.
I'm sorry, but Faurisson doesn't have any strengths. His 'method' is entirely useless from the perspective of a historian or social scientist, and is simply not practiced even by people in his own ostensible discipline of literary criticism.
Methods of historical source criticism have been developed over the past 150 years
which actually work because they can reconstruct past historical reality, and have been proven to do so even under extremely adverse evidentiary conditions. Faurisson has never reconstructed anything to do with the past, since all he's interested in as a professional antisemite is erasing the past as it concerns Jews.
I take the point that comparison and analogy establish both similarities and differences, but they do this with the purpose of discerning general patterns.
Not in history they don't. Creating typologies of revolutions is fine in political science, but historians love to find the exception to the rule; there are also serious arguments over how one contextualises specific historical events. That was your hamfisted point about Rwanda: the specific contexts for Rwanda differed considerably from the Holocaust. Yet the events in Rwanda in 1994 and the events of the Holocaust are both considered to belong to the descriptive class of events known as 'genocides'.
Historical comparison is about applying usually several comparisons to home in on what made a specific event or institution distinctive.Those comparisons rest on fairly loose typologies and on comparing data from similar eras and regions. One can apply social science models from psychology and sociology, but always keeping an eye out for the exceptions.
For example, the Holocaust belongs to other classes of events than just 'genocide', such as 'Nazi crimes against humanity' or 'mass violence in the era of high modernity'. The T4 euthanasia program was not a 'genocide', but it clearly belongs together with the Nazi genocide of European Jews as another example of Nazi criminality. An obvious point of similarity is both used gas as one of several killing methods. Every single major account of the Holocaust from Poliakov onwards has noted the fact that personnel from the T4 program were transferred to participate in the genocide of European Jews by serving in the Aktion Reinhard camps.
Another example of historical comparison is to note that the NKVD under Yezhov was fairly small, about 35,000 strong (it later grew), and was of a similar size to the various branches of the RSHA during WWII, which reached a strength of 50,000 by 1944. Both the NKVD and RSHA were secret police forces or state security forces, which makes them institutionally comparable. There are of course countless nationally specific differences, but the informed historian finds that both the NKVD and RSHA compiled mood reports on public opinion, tracked down political opposition to the respective one party states, and were also tasked with mass murder on a historically unprecedented scale. By the time the RSHA was given mass murder tasks, of course, the NKVD had already killed more than 700,000 people, and organised the deportation of millions.
There were so many points of comparison between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin that contemporaries were already using the term 'totalitarianism' before the outbreak of WWII. In the 1950s, political scientists as well as many historians developed the comparison into a full-scale typology. Then from the 1960s historians of both regimes challenged the premises of the totalitarianism model - but by the 1990s it was clear that they were challenging the premises in similar ways. By the 2000s, there was a new consensus that both regimes benefited from considerably more popular support than had been believed and that the ordinary citizens of both regimes did not live in quite as much fear of the Gestapo or NKVD as had been believed. This led to a series of comparative projects, conferences, special editions of journals (eg Accusatory Practices, a volume on denunciation in modern European history) and to parallel narrations, for example Richard Overy's The Dictators.
By now, it's also obvious, as I have mentioned, already that the two regimes ran amok over the same territories, which is why histories of modern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia etc will examine and compare what the Nazis did with what the Soviets did after 1944. Continuities and discontinuities are noted as relevant. That, too, is comparison. The aim is to increase the explanatory power of a particular narrative by introducing greater complexity.
To take an example from my own work, in studying Wehrmacht policies towards the Soviet civilian population in the combat zone, two things became clear to me, firstly the Wehrmacht resorted to techniques of occupation and population control that had already been practiced on the western front of WWI in Belgium and France, secondly that the reactions of Soviet civilians were conditioned by their prewar experiences under Soviet rule. Both these observations, which are empirically confirmed by the source evidence, are necessarily comparative.
This can be extended in many ways, eg comparing arrest rates during the Great Terror province by province with the depredations of Wehrmacht security forces and the extent to which Soviet civilians were deported or killed by the Nazis. The prior experience of Stalinist terror was not only a major factor in causing some Soviet civilians to collaborate with the Nazis, but it also conditioned their social behaviour, so that practices of denunciation displayed a remarkable continuity between the prewar years and the experience under occupation.
I've been around long enough to realise that revisionism is being thrown a bone here. The uniqueness thesis is to be discarded, but the factual narrative is to remain the same. The uniqueness argument is important for both German and Jewish studies and in my view would cast doubt on some of the holocaust narrative if it were accepted, but it is secondary to the purpose of this thread which is to discuss the arguments of revisionists/deniers.
No, sorry, revisionism wasn't being thrown a bone at all, it was being criticised as backward.
Uniqueness is like denial virtually an 80s retro thang. But even in the 1980s, as the Holocaust was moving into a more central position in western cultural and intellectual life, there was always a comparative dimension, which is why the journal of what became USHMM was entitled Holocaust
and Genocide Studies. The 80s were not that long after Cambodia had caused another round of Holocaust comparisons, and it was also around then that the Armenian genocide became more widely known as an earlier example of genocide before the Holocaust.
Nor is it true to say that the narrative remains the same except on a trivial level of historical chronology. Operation Barbarossa will forever be known as starting on June 22 1941 but the significance of Operation Barbarossa can be narrated and explained in vastly different ways. Perspective and hindsight matters enormously.
Helmut Walser Smith wrote about this extremely eloquently in his essay/book The Continuities of German History, observing that for the 1960s generation of West German historians, the 'vanishing point' of modern German history was 1933. By the 1990s, the 'vanishing point' had shifted to 1941 - the start of the epochal clash between rival dictatorships which not only led to unprecedented slaughter but also eventually led to the division of Europe between two power blocs during the Cold War.
Richard Evans likewise observed that the historiography of the Third Reich initially focused on the origins of the Nazi seizure of power, then on the 1933-39 period, then moved finally to looking at the war years in greater detail. Now there are many who think we should look much earlier to the 19th Century for the explanatory roots and causes of the Third Reich, yet they are not reviving the old Sonderweg argument in a literal sense. Many are after all emphasising the impact of imperialism and exercise of colonial violence not just by Wilhelmine Germany but other imperial powers, while others consider that the upheavals of 1914-1921 are more significant, since there are many more precedents to consider and many more 'breaks' which have come to light as that era has been researched in more detail.
Even on a middle range level, the narrative of the Holocaust has changed considerably over the decades, which is to be expected because no narrative ever stays exactly the same if research is being done and the subject is debated by academics.
The factual narrative may well remain broadly similar for most historical events, but it's remarkable how easy 'facts' are to revision of a proper kind. For decades it was believed and widely repeated that Prokrovorkha was a major tank battle during the larger battle of Kursk which saw hundreds of German tanks destroyed. Then someone actually looked at the archival evidence and found that the SS-Panzerkorps had in fact suffered relatively light losses in AFVs, while Rotmistrov's tank army was effectively gutted. "Kursk" remained a turning-point in the operational military history of the Eastern Front, but not for quite the same reasons as before. Tanks were still destroyed, the Nazi offensive was still blunted, in the end the Nazis still lost the war. But the 'facts' changed. Prokrovorkha still took place on the same days and the same forces were still involved, but the 'facts' changed.
I hate to break it to you, but the facts of the Holocaust are not going to change in any dramatic way - Auschwitz will forever more still be considered to have acquired new crematoria and gas chambers times four starting in March 1943, for example. The significance of that fact will change, and has already changed, since historians of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe are now well aware that at the same time as Kremas II-V were being constructed, over 100,000 Galician Jews were being mown down in mass shootings without the benefit of gas chambers.
The significance of Kremas II-V, which for decades were held up as the apotheosis of the Holocaust, has considerably receded when it is fairly obvious that they claimed less than 10% of the victims of the Holocaust. Accordingly, historians such as Tim Snyder and Wendy Lower complain of an "Auschwitz syndrome" which has to be overcome by highlighting the Shoah par balles. Neither Snyder, nor Lower, nor myself, nor any other historian of the Holocaust is going to disregard the fact of mass gassing at Auschwitz, but it simply doesn't seem to be quite the same big deal as was believed in the 1980s, when western European countries like France had debates which generalised the French Jewish experience onto the whole of the Holocaust.
That change of emphasis had next to nothing to do with negationism, and everything to do with the end of the Cold War and new research which put existing knowledge into better perspective. Reitlinger and Hilberg both mentioned eastern Galicia in 1943 cursorily in their accounts; once we had more detail and more knowledge, then it seems much more significant.
In the 1980s, a quite popular meta-interpretation saw the Holocaust as the product of modernity, and therefore emphasised bureaucracy as well as industrial killing. Today, there is much more emphasis on popular social participation in genocide, because Jedwabne looks more like Rwanda, and historians unsurprisingly write history influenced consciously or unconsciously by the events of their era. Historians of the Armenian genocide went back and found the same phenomenon of popular participation.
On similar lines, the autonomous agendas of the Hungarian state and society are much more emphasised in recent historiography, compared to older interpretations that revolved largely around Eichmann's organisational achievement in deporting 437,000 Hungarian Jews in a few months. There was popular participation in Hungarian society over the concentration, expropriation and deportation of Jews, as well as the extensive involvement of local governors, gendarmerie and other actors within the Hungarian state. The deportees were sent to Auschwitz, where 25% were selected for work - Wisliceny said as much in 1945 to the Nuremberg interrogators.
Documenting what happened to the 25% selected for work has absorbed the attentions of hundreds of historians in Germany examining every single sub-camp in the KZ system. This experience involved large numbers of ordinary Germans who were called in as camp guards, and then in the final phase of the war brought in other parts of German society as they reacted to the camp evacuations and death marches. The odyssey through the camp system also created numerous battered mini-communities of Hungarian Jewish men and women each with their own experiences.
Both sets of research have considerably transformed our understanding of the last year of the Holocaust; and they have also refined our understanding of the serial massacre of Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz during the early summer of 1944. Indeed, the Auschwitz death toll has to be marginally revised because it's clear and confirmed that slightly more prisoners were shipped out without being tattooed and registered than was thought by historians in the 1980s.
What won't change is the consensus that the majority of the Hungarian Jews deported by the Hungarians + Eichmann were exterminated in Auschwitz between May and July 1944. But the significance of that extermination action has changed considerably.
