tsig
a carbon based life-form
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Hasenfeffer actually.
Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread
- Thread starter kageki
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Hasenfeffer actually.
Clayton Moore
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Go to the Jewish sponsored sites and look for the testimonies about the alleged death camps and read them. Find the testimonies of the Nuremberg trials and read them.
Google search "gas chambers" "gas vans" "crematoria" "burning bits." Read about the raging guards throwing live babies against walls, into gas chambers, into burning pits. Read about the raging guards sometimes performing 2 or 3 consecutive atrocities in one paragraph.
Read the testimonies of people who worked to support the German war effort. Read that they got paid and could send and receive mail. Remember you don't get quality output from brutalizing workers.
Read that there were schools and recreation for camp residents/communities. Read that babies were born and raised together with their siblings.
Learn about the energy that would have been required to transport, gas(vans), and associated labor.
Learn that the Red Cross was in the camps.
Learn about the energy that would have been required to cremate millions, said to be over 10 million, of people and the associated labor.
Realize the resources that would have been required to organize, oversee, and perform the hands on labor of the ritual murder process of over 10 million people.
Think about all the people in Europe, mostly Poland, that are accused of being okay with the slaughtering in their midst of women and children.
Who do you believe? The liars and the exaggerators? Or the people being lied about?
Don't believe today's liars and blind believers. Read and make your own decision.
TheRedWorm
I AM the Red Worm!
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Eh, never mind. This tripe is no longer worth my time to bother with.
LemmyCaution
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Much ado about nothing. So, there were some false rumors making the rounds during wartime and at the buildup to the mass extermination of Polish Jews. Go figure.
Because that is what bunny's find in the "Institute for Historical Revisionism" for 1991 amounts to.
There were early reports of the penal camp, for labor, at Treblinka. Czerniakow's diary mentions deportations to the labor camp in winter 1942 about a dozen times. Sakoawska's article also mentions reports printed in the ghetto press and mention of the camp in Ringelblum's Chronicle.
Also, a correspondent from Wlodowa wrote to people in Warsaw about the spring 1942 construction of a second camp, one like Sobibor. Sakowska mentions this too. Indeed, Thomalla began construction of Treblinka death camp in spring 1942, around the time mentioned in Sakowska's article.
Sakowska mentions as well the reports of Treblinka in the portion of her article to which rabbit referred. She concludes, "Despite the close proximity of Treblinka to Warsaw, reports coming from the camps were inaccurate and partially misleading." She refers specifically to the two reports, one on the "lethal rod," which she calls "famous," and the other on the burying of victims alive in pits.
Recall the context, spring 1942. Warsaw ghetto was receiving at this time alarming reports about deportations and disappearances of Jews from cities and towns in the GG. In another context, I wrote this about the news reaching Warsaw: "Bad information circulated with good information. Nevertheless, on the whole, what emerges from the most informed of the ghetto diaries as well as from other well-connected sources is awareness of the general course of actions taken by the Third Reich against European Jews—and intense curiosity about, mixed with difficulty in believing, the accumulating evidence." That is to say, there was erroneous speculation (means of death, etc.) but also information that turned out to be accurate. And it was the latter sort that had the ghetto on edge,speculating about what the Nazis were up to and where Jews were disappearing to. Kaplan, for instance, wrote in his diary about the shootings at Vilna, Rovno, and Slonim. Lewin reported on the Slonim massacre, based on a report from an acquaintance from there, and in mid-May 1942 recollected, “After the outbreak of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union, since the tidings of Job have begun to reach us, of mass-murders and the extermination of entire historic and illustrious Jewish communities such as Wilno, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, Kowno, Slonim, Lwow, Lublin, and dozens of others—who can begin to comprehend it all?” It was during the winter when Szlamek reached Warsaw ghetto with his first-hand report about Chelmno; news of Belzec reached Warsaw from Szalmek's nephew in April as well as other sources. The removal of Jews from Lublin in April had ghetto inmates in Warsaw on edge and almost frantic: Miteylungen, a Yiddish bulletin, ran an article entitled “The Jewish Population in the Face of Physical Extermination: a report from Lublin, where thousands of Jews had been deported to an unknown destination.” The articles in Miteylungen mentioned Belzec as the destination for deported Lublin Jews and noted rumors of gassings there. Kaplan noted in his journal that “We tremble at the mention of Lublin.” Reports of deportations and disappearance also came to Warsaw ghetto from Lwow, Mielec. Kaplan also made mention that Wlodowa and Tluszcz had been “emptied of Jews.” Wlodowa Jews were sent to Sobibor on May 23, and at Tluszcz, there was a mass shooting on May 27, with survivors sent to Warsaw. And so on.
It is not really surprising that people were putting two and two together and getting mostly four but sometimes six or eight. Big deal.
A couple of more points. (1) Information reaching the penal labor camp from the Treblinka death camp, after it was operational, was inaccurate, for goodness sake, because the Nazis were not exactly encouraging the communication of information and even from camp to nearby camp the rumor mills were vexed. Again, I know of no argument by historians that says only accurate information about Treblinka was circulating . . . so precisely what is bunny debunking? (2) Although the numbers in the ghetto paper article seem perhaps exaggerated, and the buried-alive motif is certainly wrong, Cymlich, writing from the labor camp at Treblinka and from the vantage point of several months later, noted that "in our camp people were slowly tortured to death. Recently even bullets were deemed to valuable to be wasted on the job, and the killing was carried out with clubs, hammers, and iron." p 39 So Cymlich alluded, based on hearsay, it is true, to shooting executions earlier than fall 1942. And he added, "Sometimes the Jews who buried the dead would be ordered by the SS to finish off the victims. This method could not qualify as a novelty in our camp; it had already been put to use . . ." Again, leaving aside the order to finish off the victims, an indication of prisoners burying victims killed in the camp (Cymlich notes a case of 200 victims on one occasion), aligns with the rumor cited in bunny's article, as a practice at the Treblinka penal camp that seems to have been adopted prior to Treblinka death camp coming into action.
So what has bunny accomplished? He has unearthed the staggering fact that erroneous rumors, based on ominous and poorly understood events, circulated along with a great deal of good information. Bravo!
Note: Edited for civility!!??!! LOL
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Ignorantbystander
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Well, I live in Holland and I talked to elderly people a lot about the war (my parents and grandparents for example). but the answers you seek might not be here. It is undisputed (even by deniers) that about 100.000 Jews were deported from this country by the transit camp of Westerbork to mainly Auschwitz and Sobibor. Only about 5000 of them survived.
So ask yourself if there was no plan for extermination, they sure failed miserably to keep them alive...
What talking to those people make clear though is the brutality of he Nazi regime. There was no mercy for Jews, the ones who tried to help or save them, anyone who tried to skip the arbeitseinzats or in any other way tried to oppose this regime. My uncle was shot on the run while hiding from arbeitseinsatz, my grandfathers brother was caught and sent to Germany, he died a few months after the war of organ failure due to beatings and starvation during his time in Germany.
And these people were not Jews. So don't think anybody here was really surprised when they learned of the fate of the Jews.
And about this denier 'blaming the Germans' BS. I never heard anyone of my family blaming or hating Germans in general for it. They also knew that reality isn't that simple. For example my grandfathers brother was betrayed by a fellow Dutchman, arrested and deported by Germans (but with the aid of Dutch police) and later in the camp he was saved by a German mayor (who also happened to be a doctor) who took him out of the camp and took care of him until the war was over.
btw I assume this '88' is your year of birth?
I agree. Exactly what is the Rabbit on about? Further it appears that Rabbit as only gotten snippets of info from Yad Yashem studies and as not looked at the full arricle at all.
Your right it is much ado about nothing in the sense it doesn't help the Rabbits denialist arguement.
I'll try to respond to the rest of this rather long post later tonight but this part stuck out. How was the USHMM a trade-off involved in the Camp David Acccords? I have never heard that before. Carter buttkissing the Jewish community, yes. But a part of the Israel/Egypt peace talks? This sounds dangerously close to a Saggy wet dream involving Zionist demands for official holocaust recognition.
Corsair 115
Penultimate Amazing
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There's an easier way. There are these things called public libraries that are filled with these things called books. They'll even let you take these books home for awhile to read them. The books dealing with history are typically written by authors who have spent years, sometimes decades, researching the topic about which they are writing. They'll include numerous footnotes pointing to the sources used in writing the book, and you can then look up those sources for yourself if you are so inclined.
Nick Terry
Illuminator
It's a shorthand, the story is of course more complicated. But the context is pretty clear. Try reading Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life.
1978 was the first year of the Holocaust because of the TV series of the same name, which in turn was inspired by the massive success of Alex Haley's Roots. Different channels (forget which way around, but ABC and BNC) wanted to reproduce each other's success with ethnic themed TV series. The 'Holocaust' mini-series was a massive success in the US and when it was shown elsewhere, especially in West Germany.
Camp David negotiations were going on in 1978 around the same time. Jimmy Carter created the USHMC (council) in November shortly after the initial accords in September, and before the treaty proper was signed in early 1979. The council was supposed to explore the possibility of creating a national Holocaust memorial.
Novick and others have more detail on the exact circumstances leading to the formation of USHMC, but the context is obvious. One of the impetuses was Camp David. The existential threat to Israel exposed in 1967 and 1973 by the two major Arab-Israeli wars had led to an increased worry in the American Jewish community about Israel, and also to the formation of the US-Israeli alliance and aid program, especially under Nixon. In parallel, the American Jewish community became much more interested in the Holocaust. This is not in dispute and is widely recognised.
Camp David represented a major reduction in the threat of another Arab-Israeli war and also involved the US seducing Egypt away from its previous status as a Soviet client state. Cold War factors were critical in the formation of the US-Israeli alliance because the Soviets had supplied the Arab states with arms, and were essentially stirring up the pot in the Middle East to begin with. So when CD was agreed there were substantial aid provisions to both Egypt and Israel, which continue more or less to this day as is well known. And Israel gave up Sinai.
USHMC was a ridiculously cheap way of recognising other American Jewish concerns in '78 and thereby helping bring them on side to the peace process. But it wouldn't have been authorised had the Holocaust not already become a major topic of general discussion in the 70s, symbolised by the TV series the same year, building on all previous discussion in US society since 1945 (popularity of Anne Frank diary, Eichmann trial being televised and Eichmann becoming a symbol of the age, cultural discussion, numerous novels etc).
Incidentally: in early 1979, the Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge and exposed the killing fields. There were definite interplays with this as well, see Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell. It certainly increased the importance of Holocaust discourse in the US, even though as with the 1990s this was displaced from another mass murder onto the Holocaust.
The construction of USHMM was authorised by Congress in 1980 by a unanimous vote. Which shows how by 1980 the Holocaust was bipartisan, uncontroversial and the idea of recognising it by the US met with complete approval on the part of politicians. All the US did was grant some land and required the museum be built from private funding, which it was.
dafydd
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You don't have to move to Holland. There are these things called history books.
little grey rabbit
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OK I'll play along. I have read Novick but sometime ago. Perhaps Dr Terry could direct me to a specific page that links the negotiations at Camp David which involved the establishment of the USHMM.
Since the Jewish vote collapsed for Carter in 1980, it doesn't seem to have done him any good. Had Jews supported him to the same level as they did Walter Mondale he might well have beaten Ronald Reagan.
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?
Wow. I have to admit that I am impressed. Never before has anybody refuted so many of my arguments by agreeing with them or explaining/justifying why they are true. Your misinterpretations (or more likely, mischaracterizations) and some of your meanderings into irrelevancy are a distraction, of course. And the number of insults and ad hominim attacks in your post bring the overall maturity level down a notch or two for the entire discussion. But overall, not too bad.
Any way, I cannot hope to respond to every every insult but I'll try to hit the major themes. To start: You would brand me as dishonest? Is that 'dishonest' as in claiming something exists when it in fact does not? That kind of 'dishonest? Or are you using the word 'dishonest' the way it is most commonly used among supporters of the holocaust: an unimpeachable truth that is devastating to your agenda?
You say that I'm "too obsessed with the holocaust to be able to properly compare it to anything?" Really? Don't you think anybody who participates in internet discussions about the holocaust is somebody most other people would say is "obsessed with the holocaust"? Yes, there is a reason why I'm here and not a Buddhist tradition or a celebrity gossip discussion board. Would you not say that you have an above average interest in the holocaust? And "compare?" I thought the uniqueness of the holocaust placed it beyond comparison?!?
Anyhow, you correctly and honestly summarized my statement about there being a disconnect between academic and popular perception of the holocaust. You correctly and honestly summarized your response that this disconnect holds true for any subject under the sun one cares to name. You then say that you don't see where I have refuted this point.
What is there to refute? If I were somehow able to prove there is not a disconnect between the scholar and the layman regarding any topic, would that prove there is a disconnect of this type with the holocaust? Refuting what you said would do nothing to strengthen my argument. Not refuting it doesn't weaken my argument. You didn't disagree with me so there is nothing to refute.
You also appear to be angry that I interpreted your comment about there being a disconnect across the board to mean that you don't think this disconnect vis-a-vis the holocaust is a big deal. You respond by agreeing with my interpretation: you do NOT see this disconnect as a problem in comparison to other public displays of ignorance
The problem is that in fact you do. Public ignorance--or I should say, widespread notions about the holocaust that conflict with the holocaust as you know it--would actually bother you very much. But only when this ignorance goes in one direction. It might not bother you to know that a gymnasium full of high school students are being told that the Nazis made soap out of dead Jews. But if this same group of students were being told that, e.g., there were no gas chambers, it would bother you. I think it would bother alot of other people too. It might bother some people so much that they would spend their free time trying to discredit people who say there were no gas chambers on internet discussion boards and blogs. So it's disingenuous and hypocritical--as well as another example of shocking lack of self-awareness--for you to say that you're not too terribly concerned with public perception of the holocaust.
It's almost as if truth isn't important when teaching the holocaust as long as the lesson is that it was bad. And before you go off on how Doggie thinks students should be taught the holocaust was good or some other mischaracterization, remember that if the truth is that the holocaust was as horrific as you think it was, you just need to teach the truth of the holocaust and students will learn the horror of the holocaust.
Moving on. I said there was a proliferation of holocaust memorials and museums. And then I said that I didn't say there was a plethora of holocaust memorials and museums. And you call this "backpedaling" or "inconsistent"? Why? Proliferation and plethora are two different words. They are not synonyms. You can't substitute one for the other.
Just to be clear, I didn't say there was a 'plethora' of holocaust museums. Or at least I don't recall saying that. But if the definition of plethora is "an excess" or "an overabundance" of something, then I do agree. There is a plethora of holocaust museums. There was a 'plethora' of holocaust museums the day the first one opened and they have been proliferating ever since.
Anyway, next up is the museum thing, which I'm not sure why you continually come back to. I snarkily suggested the national mall needs a museum dedicated to evolution. You insisted over several posts that there is one already, without backing up that claim. Here you finally admit that you're talking about the Natural History Museum. Not the same thing. For you to be able to say that the representation of evolution near the National Mall is equivalent to the representation of the holocaust near the National Mall, you would need either 1) a stand alone United States Evolution Science Museum in addition to the Natural History Museum or 2) Replace the USHMM with a United States Defense of Freedom Museum and Memorial and cram all those lame photos and other worthless junk inside the current museum that the Feds can't sell on eBay into a display cabinet inside the World War II wing of the USDFMM.
You answer my charge that there are no museums dedicated solely to Slavery or the genocide of the native americans by filling your post with tidbits of information about various museums dedicated to different ethnic groups and you explain your Community Interest and Fundraising Theory of Museum Development. None of which is relevant to our discussion or even very interesting to read (even though it is very well written). But buried under all the prose, at least you did finally concede my point about the dearth of museums dedicated solely to the African and the Native American genocides.
Rather than leave it at that, you introduce two more genocides, telling our studio audience that there are museums dedicated to the Camodian autogenocide and that there are SEVERAL museums dedicated the Armenian genocide. Needing to provide a link that prove there are at least two museums dedicated to each of these genocides, you provide none. So I do a quick google search to find that there is is one Cambodian autogenocide museum in Seattle--in the Wing Luke Asian Museum. So it's not a standalone museum (like the USHMM) nor is it near the national mall (like the USHMM).
If you want to prove there are standalone museums dedicated to these two genocides, feel free to support your claim. Otherwise we can just assume that they don't, you're wrong, and my point is proven, again.
Then you turn to addressing the disinformation etched in stone on the wall of the USHMM--the infamous Eisenhower quote. You say it is perfectly appropriate because the liberation of the camps in Germany were very much part of the holocaust. Yet, back in #959 you said that "the Buchenwald shrunken heads and lampshades were never identified as being from Jewish victims and have nothing whatsoever to do with the Holocaust as this term is usually understood, i.e. the genocide of European Jews.....If Saggy thinks that the concentration camps in Germany are part of the Holocaust, then he should be reminded that they claimed hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish victims as well." But here you're telling us that "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."
So tell us how you know that when Eisenhower wrote a letter to General Marshall describing "things that beggar description" when visiting at the Buchenwald subcamp of Ohrdruf, he was talking about the evidence there for the holocaust. What specific evidence for the holocaust did Eisenhower see? How do you know that Eisenhower recognized it as evidence of the intentional genocide of the Jews? He doesn't mention the Jews in that letter. Did Eisenhower later explain that he was talking about the genocide of the Jews when he wrote those famous words? This is a skeptics forum. You won't get very far by making sweeping generalizations and not backing them up with any facts.
I asked you this question before and you side stepped it with a bunch of words about American soldiers fighting in the war so the holocaust is part of American history, blah blah blah. I expect you'll do the same thing again.
And while you're dancing around those questions, here's a few more: Eisenhower wrote to Marshall about the evidence for the intentional genocide of the Jews that he saw at Ohrdruf on the SAME day that German civilians were being shown the shrunken heads and lampshades at the main camp Eisenhower had visited. Why did the Americans show German civilians lampshades and shrunken heads (and, later, Americans newsreel footage of Germans seeing lampshades and shrunken heads) when they had evidence of the holocaust right down the road at Ohrdruf? Were the citizens of Weimar shown anything related to the intentional genocide of the Jews during their forced tour of Buchenwald? The shrunken heads and lampshades were part of the evidence at the IMT. Was any of the evidence of the holocaust Eisenhower saw at Ohrdruf introduced at the IMT?
You made a number of ad hominim attacks and mischaracterizations that I don't need to address. I never said that all holocaust education rests on emotive appeals yet you insist I prove that it does?!? Ma?!? How do you think the holocaust could be taught without any facts whatsoever? You have to define the holocaust. That definition is a fact. When it happened is a fact. Where it happened is a fact. Of course there are facts that need to be taught regarding the holocaust!
And we already agreed that the holocaust is taught with a healthy dose of emotion. You can see the effect of this education right here on this board. When people ask "What happened to little Henrico?" or "What did that old lady and those two little children do to deserve the gas chamber?" or the ubiquitous "Where did they go?" they're appealing to emotion, not rational thought. Some of these people might be really stupid or very young but I think they're just parroting back what the social studies teacher taught them during the holocaust unit. How often do we see photographs of people displayed as some sort of evidence of the holocaust? These are intended to provoke an emotional response to deflect the lack of evidence for gas chambers or an intentional plan to exterminate the Jews. You yourself told me earlier: "And hey, you might even be right that Holocaust education is often couched in emotive terms. But it's put in those terms as part of inculcating civic values, in tandem with teaching about racism in history and talking about other genocides. That's pretty obviously how Facing History and Ourselves do it, and they're probably the leading exponent of the 'emotive' approach in Holocaust education in the US. Feel free to object violently to schoolkids being taught racism is bad, and make yourself seem like even more of a bigot." And then you say that "You're certainly right that there are some schools where the Holocaust will be taught in an overly emotive manner." So you're not only challenging me by agreeing with me (again), you're now demanding that I prove something that you substantially agreed is true?
You demand that I prove that you can literally say whatever you want about the holocaust as long as you make it sound bad. You think it's possible that (as a hypothetical example), I could go to the SWMOT and hear one of the holocaust survivors they wheel out to yammer on about her experience tell my group how the Germans would gang rape Jewesses before catapulting them onto the sun? And that she was one of the very few to have endured this ordeal and survived? That certainly makes the Germans sound worse than they were. It's almost certainly a lie. You want me to prove that, in this hypothetical world, that the same holocaust survivor would be there the next day to tell that story to the next tour group? For somebody who uses hyperbole, you sure seem to be unable to recognize it.
Of course holocaust survivors can't say ANYTHING! But they certainly are able to lie about their experiences and get away with it in certain very specific instances--specifically when it makes the holocaust sound worse than it was. There's good ol' Fred with his soap libel story (which, btw, you utterly failed at rationalizing as perfectly rational urban myth vs a vicious anti-Semitic lie). There's The Fifth Diamond. There's the that lady in The Last Days who says she found evidence that her sister was experimented on at Auschwitz. There are those moronic sisters on Donohue. Dances with Wolves lady. There are enough of these stories floating around and accepted as true to see a definite pattern. Exaggerating the holocaust is OK, diminishing it is not. You have never refuted this.
You haven't been able to find a single holocaust survivor, a single incident of misinformation that swings the holocaust in the opposite direction. You know what I say is true so you answer me by explaining how we should expect a certain degree of fabrication because of the ravages of old age or a result of their horrific experience or some other apologetic explanation of why holocaust survivors lie.
Then you turn around and demand I prove that they are ALL liars and that they lie more than any other people in their age cohort.
If you want to prove that they're all liars, you do the research. I don't care about that. My point is that the lies all go in one direction--toward making the Germans sound worse than they are. I've proven that over and over again. You propose a study that will do nothing to answer my question so I offered you a way for you to counter what I said--show me that when misinformation about the Germans during the holocaust is presented as fact, that misinformation sometimes diminishes the depravity of the Germans.
You respond by launching into a stream of invectives about how I am right and that only a moron could possibly think that I might not be right! Earlier you explained how fading memories and the ravages of time and dementia among survivors causes inevitable mistruths to enter their testimony. Now you add a lifetime's desire for pay back, a lust for vengeance to the list of survivor character traits to explain why it is ludicrous to think that any one of them would lie in the direction of exonerating the Germans!
Again, explaining why something happens isn't proof that it doesn't happen.
Frankly, I didn't think there was any hope of finding survivors who will lie in favor of the Germans either. But the rational scholar looks for evidence that will dis-confirm his thesis as well as confirm it. I have found plenty of examples of survivors telling the truth about their experiences that tilt toward making the Germans sound not so bad. The Last Days of the Big Lie has a few clips from the Shoah Foundation of survivors describing their less than holocaustal experience. The story of the Yanov Torah includes the part about Jews being allowed to leave the "death" camp to go stay with their families. And every single survivor who miraculously made it through fifteen death camps and five death marches is subtly diminishing the horror of the holocaust.
But telling the truth doesn't really count for my purposes. It's the lies and the mistruths and how they always exaggerate the depravity of the Germans that interest me. You tell me I'm wrong about survivors being able to lie about the holocaust as long as it sound worse than it was. Then you explain how desire for vengeance and creeping senility is the reason survivors lie about the holocaust to make it sound worse than it is.
I don't think we should talk about survivors anymore. You've done enough to tarnish their reputation. You have a chance to salvage some of your credibility here however if you can find something that proves a mistake in favor of the Germans. Here's an example: You say every scholar knows that the Treblinka death toll is 700,000 or so. The USHMM lies that it is 870,000 to 925,000. That makes the Germans sound worse they were. Find an accepted and respected source that tells me the Treblinka death toll was closer to 400,000.
Sounds like there was a proliferation of all things holocaustal after 1978 compared to the years right after the war.
Or wrong. Maybe the rest of y'all have given Nick such a vicious beating he won't dare engage you whereas I have been unable to strike a similar blow?
But I do prefer your interpretation.
dafydd
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And that disproves the Holocaust? Talk about a drowning man clutching at straws. Heil Hitler.
Clayton Moore
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Dogzilla
Eisenhower saw the camps after two or three months of bombing supply lines to them.
You fall into the exaggeration trap by thinking that 400,000 would be a reasonable figure compared to the lies. The reality is that documentation puts the death toll for all the camps at under 300,000.
The purpose of Holocaust education and the plethora of Holocaust museums is not history but the future. It makes the Jews forever "It's the JOOOOOOs." (forever falsely accused.) While everyone else must wear the kick me sign.
Eisenhower saw the camps after two or three months of bombing supply lines to them.
You fall into the exaggeration trap by thinking that 400,000 would be a reasonable figure compared to the lies. The reality is that documentation puts the death toll for all the camps at under 300,000.
The purpose of Holocaust education and the plethora of Holocaust museums is not history but the future. It makes the Jews forever "It's the JOOOOOOs." (forever falsely accused.) While everyone else must wear the kick me sign.
Clayton Moore
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Christians were so respectful of the survivors it took 30 years to figure out that there was angle to be made.
Matthew Ellard
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Clayton. I directly call you a liar.
List the citations for these documents that you claim "puts the death toll for all camps at under 300,000"
I don't think you can name one document. I directly state that you made that figure up on the spot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Höfle_Telegram
abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
Any evidence to go with those fries?
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