TBH I object far more to your use of the term fraud, but actually I also object to bigotry, since Nazis != an ethnicity or religion.
I didn't understand you to mean that. I thought you objected to my characterization of Fred as someone stuck in their ways and beliefs and unwilling to change.
But you called him a fraudulent bigot. Someone who passes on myth as fact because they believe it might well be bigoted, but they cannot be a fraud if they are sincere, until they have been demonstrably corrected on the matter. As it stands there is simply no information on whether Fred Schliefer repeated this story in bad faith or whether he sincerely believed it. But the latter seems much more probable because there are many other cases of survivors repeating the story in all apparent sincerity.
I call him a fraud because he holds himself out as someone who experienced the camps and can provide a personal perspective on what happened. The story claims he survived eleven camps so he certainly had a variety of camp experiences. It's reasonable for the kids to believe he knows what he's talking about. So when he says Germans made soap out of Jews and rhetorically asks "So who were the Germans" or when he says the showerheads dispensed poison gas, they kids probably believe what he says is true.
Maybe he actually thinks he's telling the truth. But his handlers should know the truth and stop him from lying. If his handlers don't know the truth or don't care enough to watch this guy in action, one might get the idea that truth and accuracy just isn't all that relevant among the holocaust set.
No, it doesn't. It makes them no different to war veterans and other old folk who reminisce about their youths.
Where I come from, people don't suddenly start inflating or fabricating their life experiences when they get old. Some people inflate or fabricate stories about themselves but they've done so their whole life. We call those people liars.
Indeedy, we could call them bigots, but not because they believe in the soap myth. One would expect a certain proportion of Jewish survivors to come away so traumatised by their experiences that they would be ready to believe anything bad about the Germans, no matter whether they saw it themselves or not, precisely because of what they did see.
There's no shortage of evidence to indicate that many survivors and their descendants are deeply prejudiced against Germans, to the point of boycotting the country, boycotting German products, boycotting Wagner and other German culture, and hating Germans.
But there is no evidence suggesting all survivors are like that, just as there's no evidence suggesting that all survivors believe in the soap myth.
I didn't say that all survivors believe the soap myth.
Nor is it really very honest to generalise from someone saying the Nazis turned people into soap into proof of anti-German bigotry.
I'm sure you can find a few examples where some survivors spoke about 'the Germans' and displayed anti-German bigotry while also believing in the soap myth. But they would be a subset of a subset, or an overlapping subset, and not necessarily representative of the whole.
Fred didn't ask "So who were the Nazis?" He asked "So who were the Germans?" We're talking about Fred.
The whole world doesn't have this clear delineation between Nazis and Germans that you like to think it does.
No, I told you why it's a false equivalency. You just refuse to understand that you offered up another trademark apples and oranges comparison.
No you didn't explain why it's a false equivalency.
It's patently obvious what I was getting at, but evidently you're so uncomfortable giving up your analogy you want to cling on to it by misunderstanding the very obvious point.
No, it's not patently obvious what you were getting at. Can someone else explain it to me? If it's so obvious I'm sure everybody else got it.
You really think I cannot prove that Jews have not been physically injured because of the blood libel? Bwahahaha.
medieval pogroms in England
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel#Middle_Ages
Renaissence witch-hunts against Jews on account of the blood libel (45 executions mentioned in just the Wiki entry)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel#Renaissance
deaths under torture during the 1840 Damascus affair
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_affair
49 killed in 1903 Kishinev pogrom, ignited by a blood libel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kishinev_pogrom
10 killed in 1910 blood libel prompted riot in Iran
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiraz_blood_libel
40 killed in 1946 Kielce pogrom because of the blood libel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kielce_pogrom
Yeah, I think apples and oranges about sums it up, really.
I couldn't find anything in all those links that named even one innocent Jew who was injured directly and exclusively because of the blood libel.
Because this is well known. All you're doing here is exposing yourself to insta-rebuttal because the information is readily to hand, and widely discussed. I taught a third of a seminar this year on the blood libel. You really think I cannot point to evidence showing how it reemerged in central and eastern Europe at the end of the 19th Century when modern political antisemitism emerged?
Try reading up on the
Tiszaeszlar blood libel affair in 1880s Hungary, stirred up by antisemitic agitators who had just attended the first international antisemitic congress in Germany. Or the
Beilis case in Kiev in 1913, at which a notorious antisemite,
Pranaitis, testified as an "expert witness" on the Talmud and was shown up to be an ignoramus.
An appeal to 'common knowledge?' Not everybody just taught a third of a seminar on the blood libel. If you make a statement of fact you need to support it.
It's rooted in the Bible because Christianity has portrayed the Jews as Christ killers from a very early stage. Religiously motivated anti-Judaism has been a powerful wellspring for antisemitism well into the modern age. The same can of course be said for interpretations of the Koran's position on Judaism, however much one might also find verses preaching otherwise.
Christ-killers? Yes. But baby-killers? Where is that? Unless you want to argue that all anti-Semitism grew out the early Christ-killer thing.
Well here's the rub. Neither of us will be around in 2411, but we'll both probably be around in the near future, after the last Holocaust survivors have died. At which point future Dogzilla or his spawn will not be able to crow about how a Holocaust survivor spoke nonsense about soap, because they'll all be dead. And once they're all dead, the greater part of the Jewish soap myth will die with them.
But these things have been written down in books. The books will survive. Do you think everything that's been said about the holocaust will die along with the last survivor?
So it's actually fairly certain that the soap myth will disappear over time, subsiding into a 'is this true? no' quiz question type of myth much like catching VD off toilet seats eventually disappeared as a myth, whereas Dogzilla's hated Holocaust will still be there in all the history books. Because neither Dogzilla nor his gurus have the wit or ability to revise history properly, as the facts are entirely against them.
Your beloved holocaust will still be there in the history books. And eventually the truth of what the holocaust was will prevail, whatever that truth may be.
I don't need to in order to demonstrate that you made a false equivalency. The blood libel has lasted for many centuries and has inspired numerous acts of direct violence. The soap myth is already expiring and hasn't inspired any violence. They are apples and oranges - both may be fruit in the sense that both are wrong, but one is not like the other.
No, you don't need to in order to demonstrate that it's a false equivalency. But why is one bigotry and the other isn't?
Again: the blood libel from its inception led directly to physical attacks, pogroms, riots, murders, arrests and trumped up charges confirmed under torture, and lasted centuries. The soap myth has inspired none of that. Even the man fingered as responsible for a quite genuine case of 'soap making', Professor Spanner of the Danzig Anatomy Institute, wasn't prosecuted after the war. Not one Nazi ever went to jail for 'soap', much less was executed. Not one German was ever attacked by a Jew because of 'soap', to anyone's knowledge.
You have yet to prove the blood libel has resulted in any injury to any innocent Jew.
Maybe the man who was alleged to make the soap wasn't punished directly for doing so. But the soap was introduced into evidence at Nuremberg. It's one of the few specific atrocities of the Nazis that people remembered ten, twenty, thirty years after Nuremberg. It is part of the evidence that eventually led to the execution of a not insignificant number of defendants.
You will now demand that I prove that a single defendant was convicted and executed based upon the soap. So I'll ask you, using the same standards of evidence, for the name of one innocent Jew who suffered any violence based upon the blood libel.
And face it, whereas medieval and modern Jews have not murdered small gentile children to suck their blood, the Nazis most certainly did desecrate countless corpses by cremating them, in flagrant violation of the religious principles of Judaism and Catholicism. So it's little wonder that some Jews and some Poles have been prepared to believe that the Nazis might have also turned corpses into soap.
Whereas Nazis never used the bodies of Jews to make soap, it's likely that some Jews and some Poles didn't understand the disease control rationale behind the "desecration" of corpses. But it's a bit of a leap to see Nazis burning the bodies of Jews and assume that they're using them in the production of soap.
And let's fact it, while the notion of the Nazis turning the dead bodies of what they called the filthy vermin scourge of Europe into a cleaning product is ludicrous, Judaism does have a long history of ritualistically mutilating the genitalia of roughly half of their newborn babies. So it's little wonder that some Christians have been prepared to believe that Jews are using the blood for something besides merely inflicting excruciating pain.
Your obliviousness to the similarities makes me chuckle.
I don't need to because you've rather missed the point, and don't seem to have understood why your analogy is a blatant false equivalency. You are so keen to rant on about the Jews that you naturally display zero comprehension for why certain myths might persist among some Jewish survivors. Frankly, you're not in a position to assess anyone's bigotry because you're so blind to your own.
You don't need to except for the fact that if you don't, the logical conclusion is that you can't.
I don't have a problem acknowledging that there is genuine anti-German bigotry among a number of Jews and among a number of other European nationalities. But I do have a problem with your constant attempts to conflate Nazis with all Germans and try to claim that attacks on the Nazis constitute "bigotry".
I don't constantly try to conflate Nazis with all Germans. We're talking about ONE survivor here. HE is the one who conflated Nazis and Germans. HE is the one displaying anti-German bigotry, a bigotry which you acknowledge exists among some Jews and non-Jews.
Neither. Try not to conflate the Nazis with all Germans, and try to come up with better comparisons next time. You are really lousy at argument by analogy.
Try not to conflate my pointing out one survivor who hates Germans with a belief that all Germans are Nazis. I know there's a difference between Germans and Nazis. But at the same time don't pretend you aren't aware that many people do not distinguish between the two. I still see Goldhagen's screed on the bookstore shelves. And when the Claims Conference announces they have just negotiated X million euros for the care of holocaust survivors, which country's citizens are providing that money? But that's not the point. The point is Fred conflates the two in his mind and Fred is a bigot.
You can keep saying it's a bad analogy but until you say why nobody will believe you.
