The executive summary of my reply to the above blether is that you are too dishonest and too obsessed with the Holocaust to be able to properly compare it to anything. Ultimately, you are using a double standard whereby aspects of how the Holocaust functions in US culture are held to be uniquely malign and yet they are nothing of the sort.
This discussion started with you claiming that there was a disconnect between how there was a "disconnect" between academic/university perceptions of the Holocaust and popular perceptions of the Holocaust. It was pointed out that there is a disconnect between academic and popular understanding of every subject.
I don't see where you have refuted this point.
Now you try and claim that I don't see this as a problem. Damn right I don't,
in comparison to other displays of public ignorance. That means, I do not think it is especially meaningful to harp on about popular misconceptions when such things abound with pretty much any subject under the sun one cares to name. All that this reveals is your own petty obsession with the Holocaust and your idiotic populism.
Needless to say, rather than refute the basic point, you twisted it and introduced a new line of blether about museums. Your initial gambit failed because you forgot about the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History. In this latest post you try to claim that I didn't name the 'evolution museum' when it is perfectly obvious that by discussing natural history museums I was doing just that. The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History is de facto the national evolution museum. Asking for a 'national evolution museum' in a narrow sense is like asking for a national museum of gravity. It's sheer speciousness and idiocy.
The derail about whether there is a trend towards avoiding teaching evolution is irrelevant. So what if the evidence I have seen is anecdotal, there is perfectly good survey/opinion poll data showing that 60% of Americans do not believe in the theory of evolution. And yet there is an extensive effort to educate the public formally and informally. This is quite aside from the many other forms of wilful ignorance which plague American (and British, and Chinese, and every single) society.
Further attempts to spin the museums line ensued from you. Just to remind you, back in post #1681 you spoke of a "
proliferation of holocaust museums and memorials". I showed this to be grossly exaggerated as there are maybe 25 Holocaust museums in the US as a whole. So now you are backpedalling and claiming that "Nobody said there were a plethora of holocaust museums". OH RLY? Your own words contradict you.
Evidently you never thought to look up overall statistics. Surveys indicate
there are somewhere 15,000 and 18,000 museums in the US. So even if we double the figure of 25 Holocaust museums to include low-profile high school cabinet displays we end up with and absurdly silly percentage being actual Holocaust museums, which you called a "proliferation", despite now lying through your teeth and claiming you never said such a thing.
Oh, but Dogzilla cries, the proper yardstick of comparison is how many genocide museums there are. No it isn't. This presumes that there are actually constituencies in American society that want other genocide museums. Museums are only established if somebody wants to establish them, not because some idiot on the internet thinks they have found a talking point. In actual fact there are museums dedicated to the Cambodian autogenocide, which like the Holocaust occurred elsewhere but which like the Holocaust resulted in the arrival of an immigrant community containing a number of genocide survivors. There are also several museums dedicated to the Armenian genocide, established by descendants of Armenian refugees who arrived in the US several generations ago.
You seem not to get that museums are generally privately funded on the initiatives of specific communities or by enthusiasts who share the same interests. Museums might be able to apply for grants but they are just as beholden to the market as any other institution in American society. If communities want museums, they found them and they fund them. And they found and fund the type of museums they want. Jewish Americans evidently wanted some museums about the Holocaust, so they have established a tiny number of Holocaust museums in states where they are more numerous. They have also established a number of other museums exhibiting and archiving Judaica of cultural or historical significance.
That's also why there are many African American and Native American museums but there are not necessarily museums
solely dedicated to slavery or solely dedicated to the ethnocide suffered by Native American tribes after white settler colonisation. There are clearly a great many African American and Native American museums focusing on many different aspects of those communities' lives and pasts, and I am quite certain that many of them include exhibition rooms documenting slavery and ethnocide respectively.
It's also no accident that both Native American and African American constituencies have been able to persuade congressional lawmakers to pass acts authorising the construction of national museums dedicated to these two ethnic minorities, using federal funds and being built right on the Mall. They are just following in the footsteps of Jewish Americans who persuaded Jimmy Carter and then Congress to authorise the establishment of the USHMM (although we should point out that it was built using entirely private funds). I already said that it's perfectly clear USHMM was part of the trade-off involved in the Camp David accords, which it was. This is pretty well documented.
So now we have two museums on or near the Mall dedicated to specific ethnic themes and one currently under construction, whose costs are pretty considerable. They get federal funding to operate and there is a legitimate debate about whether they might get too much (USHMM) or too little (National Museum of the American Indian).
Here's the rub: they all represent something which is not only of specific ethnic interest, but speaks to American society more generally. That's pretty clear with African Americans and Native Americans and it's also clear with the Holocaust. USHMM represents the apotheosis of the Americanization of the Holocaust, which has given it resonance far beyond the Jewish community and universalised it to a very considerable degree. Whether you like this or not is somewhat irrelevant. African Americans gave the world soul music, among many other things, and I'm not a big fan of soul, but I'm not going to bitch if the African American museum includes a big display about Motown and there's no national museum representation for the Stooges.
Naturally, you cannot resist plunging on and trying to smear USHMM for supposedly spouting out "disinformation". I asked you what this might be and you replied with a dreary whine about the Eisenhower quote somehow being a misrepresentation. Unless you are claiming Eisenhower didn't say those words, then it's not a misrepresentation. The liberation of the camps in Germany by the Allies was very much part of the Holocaust, which is conventionally understood by all but denier loonies to include more than the gas chambers and mass graves which so obsess them.
You seem to forget that it's the
US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Earlier you whined about how the Holocaust didn't happen in the States, but forget that American forces liberated numerous concentration camps and that the US Army prosecuted hundreds of Nazi war criminals. Those are precisely the kinds of things that one would expect to see in an
American Holocaust museum because they connect
America to the events in question. There is a definite tendency in regional Holocaust commemoration to exalt the 'liberators' for the precise same reason. But as we have seen the self-same museums and survivor-speakers also talk about Auschwitz.
Eisenhower's words are precisely what one would expect to see carved on the wall by the back entrance to a place like USHMM. They'e certainly not "disinformation" or a flatly false claim, as you tried to pretend them to be.
Which brings me on to your continued hole-digging over survivors. I think I'll start with your typically pathetic attempts to reverse burden of proof and demands for money to do work that you should have done in the first place. Readers of this thread, as well as you, should be reminded that
you made a series of claims about crazy Holocaust survivors, claims which you are now unable and unwilling to back up.
Readers of this thread, as well as you, also need to be alerted to another patented Dogzilla backpedal. Earlier on you claimed that "Holocaust education in this country isn’t concerned about factual accuracy. It’s about making an emotional impact." No qualifiers, no quantification, no evidence, nothing, just a bald assertion. Now you complain that I created a strawman. No, I used hyperbole to underline a point which you dodged. Here it is again
And translated into sober speak: where is your empirical evidence that "Holocaust education in this country isn’t concerned about factual accuracy. It’s about making an emotional impact"?
Now you do have to address the point because I am quoting your direct words.
Evidence, please.
I guess you're just that dishonest you don't realise that claims must be substantiated, even claims made by a denialist. That's why you're the one who really does need to document and prove that Holocaust survivor-speakers utter a disproportionate number of untruths
before you are justified in calling them frauds or worse. And you're the one who needs to demonstrate that it's really disproportionate by establishing a proper
control group.
Once again, we observe your utter inability to construct proper comparisons or to subject the Holocaust to reasonable standards. You're the one who has made a series of sweeping generalisations based on nonexistent sampling techniques. You were the one who first posted about denier poster-boy Fred Schliefer. But you are unable to answer a simple question about how representative Fred Schliefer is of Holocaust survivors.
So naturally I took it on myself to provide some actual data and background in order that we could begin to construct such a comparison properly, and naturally you immediately misrepresent and misunderstand the data. Holocaust survivors who had experienced the concentration camps during the war arrived in the US in the 1940s and in a trickle thereafter. I pointed out that many of them opened up about their experiences when they reached old age. I observed that this is not an uncommon phenomenon among the elderly, some of whom also have a demonstrable and undeniable tendency to go senile and suffer other cognitive disorders including short-term memory loss and worse, while others retain the memories of their youths as clear as a bell.
Your response was to wonder why the middle aged survivors didn't speak out earlier. Well, duh, firstly there weren't very many middle aged survivors, and secondly the majority of Holocaust survivors who came to the US in the 1940s were actually very young. Some were orphans. Many were in their teens or very early twenties. A 20 year old in 1944 only retired in 1989. And it's not like there hasn't been an upward curve of discussion and interest in the Holocaust since the 1960s and 1970s, is it now.
But that's by the by. Yet another Dogzilla derail blows up in his face as he fails to think the facts through properly. So let's recap for a moment. Having failed to substantiate the claim that survivors are especially prone to babbling nonsense, you now switch tack and try to claim that if survivors are mistaken they should be mistaken both in 'favour' of the Nazis as well as 'against' them. This idea so enthralls you that you repeat it several times and riff on it until you're in a veritable frenzy of self-righteous idiocy.
No, Dogzilla, there are absolutely no rational grounds for thinking that people who had survived Nazi concentration camps might be mistaken 'in favour' of the Nazis. That's about the dumbest idea I've heard in a long time. Here it is again in all its glorious stupidity:
Apparently, Dogzilla needs reminding that the people he never heard say anything bad were yanked from their homes, or forced to flee from their homes, purely on the basis of their religion or putative ethnicity as defined solely by the Nazis. They were deprived of their property barring a small amount of luggage and a few valuables, ordered into internment camps or ghettos and then transported against their will to concentration camps, whereupon they were typically separated from their families, never seeing any of these close nuclear-family relatives ever again. They were humiliated ritually by having their heads shaved and being degraded from human beings to mere numbers, and made to wear badges indicating at a glance that they were Jews and thus on a very low rung of the camp hierarchy. They were badly fed and put to work which if they were unlucky was extremely exhausting and strength robbing. If they were lucky and worked sitting down in a factory they were still badly fed. They were exposed to lice, poor sanitary conditions, subjected to a random and unpredictable amount of cruelty from German guards, including women guards if they were female, and often from other prisoners as well. They were shunted bewilderingly from camp to camp and often put on forced marches. They often watched relatives who had survived selection die in front of them.
And somehow Dogzilla thinks that the Nazis deserve to sound not so bad?
In any case, I don't believe Dogzilla. I bet he has heard stories about Jewish camp prisoners being selected for work and being put to work in factories which were 'not so bad', at least compared to Dora-Mittelbau, or the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz. I bet he has heard stories about 'good' guards who showed some small kindnesses to the prisoners. They certainly exist. But they're not
mistakes. They're true stories.
That's the problem with Dogzilla's most spectacular apples and oranges comparison yet. There really aren't any mistakes which could make the Nazis sound 'not so bad'. Sometimes, the Nazis were genuinely 'not so bad', at least in comparison to the times when they were very bad indeed.
Dogzilla seems to have forgotten that when it comes to camp survival stories, Holocaust survivors do not have a monopoly on describing suffering. It might seem that way from his skewed perspective, but there are still some Gulag survivors, some survivors of Japanese POW camps, or Soviet POWs who survived German camps, lingering on. They don't live in America, though, so they don't tend to talk at schools. They are also not Jewish, so naturally Dogzilla ignores them.
But we don't have to stop there. We can include all the 'privileged' prisoners in POW camps and concentration camps who observed the maltreatment of less than privileged groups. A decade ago I sat and had a pint in a pub with a Chelsea Pensioner who described how appallingly the Nazis treated Soviet prisoners of war. He did not claim that he had been maltreated, he claimed that others had been maltreated, because he saw it with his own eyes. He added some vivid details which are not the kind of thing which find their way into the bald but utterly horrific statistics on Soviet POW mortality in Nazi camps.
It's pretty much a certainty that the sufferings of any group of camp prisoners are going to be mildly exaggerated by survivors or by people who observed their suffering. That's just how
war stories are. And unless Dogzilla or his denier chums can demonstrate that Holocaust survivors exaggerate disproportionately, then there's nothing left to the attack. That's disproportionately in comparison to other prisoners' exaggerations, and in comparison to the absolute amount of suffering Jewish camp survivors would have experienced - the suffering that isn't supposedly even denied by deniers.
But we don't have to stop there, since Dogzilla is going to try and play the 'soap' card again. Dogzilla doesn't seem very aware of how certain exaggerations spread within cohorts and groups. He certainly isn't aware of how folk and urban myths and legends arise.
Let me make it very simple for you, Dogzilla: soap supposedly made from Jewish fat was already a legend in the ghettos. It was a folk myth from the get-go. Jews who survived the Holocaust then emigrated and took the myth with them. Not all of them bothered to read about the history they themselves had experienced. Their beliefs and myths were unmediated and unmediatable. They were like the oldtimers who tell each other tall tales about this or that fishing or hunting season. So it naturally follows that there have been quite a few Holocaust survivors who believed quite genuinely but utterly falsely that the Nazis turned Jews into soap, and some of them have gone on the record saying so.
But lo! Dogzilla plays the false equivalency card and brings up the blood libel, thereby demonstrating yet again how utterly incapable he is of constructing proper comparisons. It's actually not difficult to compare the 'soap' myth and the blood libel and realise how obnoxiously stupid this pseudo-equivalency is.
You know what? If you were speaking about medieval peasants who by word of mouth spread the blood libel among themselves, you'd have a point. I have exactly the same understanding for those peasants as I do for Holocaust survivors who emerged from their traumatic experiences believing the Nazis turned Jews into soap. As long as the peasants did not then form a mob and stage a pogrom.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I am unaware of any mob of Holocaust survivors staging a pogrom against German tourists or anything like that. Maybe some Polish Christians did that once under communism or beat up a German tourist after 1990 crying 'you turned my grandfather into soap!', but if so I've never heard about it. 'Cos of course, Dogzilla doesn't realise that Polish society is even more believing of the 'human soap' myth than Jewish Holocaust survivors are.
And the comparison just gets worse for you from there on in. The blood libel was resurrected in the late 19th Century by deliberately calculating antisemites. It had a certain resilience because it is rooted in the Bible, even though the specific myth of Jews abducting Christian children has absolutely no scriptural basis whatsoever. Still, I think it's fair to say that anyone bringing up the blood libel since about the mid-19th Century has swallowed deliberate antisemitic propaganda.
Alas for poor Dogzilla, he knows full well that 'Jewish soap' has been consistently dismissed by all historians for at least two generations. The survivors who believe in 'Jewish soap' will die out and there will be nobody claiming it in four centuries' time, unlike the way in which the blood libel resurfaced long after the medieval period.
I admit it, I find it hard to get sufficiently worked up to Dogzilla levels of outrage that there is an ever decreasing number of Jewish Holocaust survivors who repeat myths about the Nazis. 1) I would
expect a certain amount of mythmaking over and above wie es eigentlich gewesen war, 2) oral tradition is incredibly resilient, 3) it's a bit difficult to work out the polite way to correct someone who did actually have a pretty horrendous experience in their youths, 4) there
are actually examples where survivors have been corrected and taken down a peg for repeating made-up claims, eg the reactions Moshe Peer provoked in a horrified audience when he started babbling his nonsense. I can well imagine that many survivors have been taken to one side and gently chided about their belief in things like 'soap'.
Quite frankly, there are many better things to do with my time than go into a Dogzilla level of frenzy over the persistence of the 'Jewish soap' urban legend. I correct it whenever it comes up and it is corrected all over the internet, on Wikipedia, Jewish Virtual Library, and god knows where else.
And yet it persists in the popular imagination all the same. I really do fail to see how anything more could be done to correct this. It's like making doctors responsible for every single old wives' tale or something. Doctors can tell patients the correct diagnosis and treatment and websites can repeat the same data to millions of people and still there are countless morons out there who 'heard somewhere' that x did such-and-such a thing to y illness when it does nothing of the sort.
So let me ask you, Dogzilla: do you really think your populist gambit is doing anything other than make you come across as even more of an ignorant bigot than you already do?
