I'm not going to continue a fisking war here, except where it is necessary. But first, there are just a few points I want to make, petty ones first.
Proliferation and plethora both denote 'many' in a very broad sense. But they are in no way synonyms. If you want to say there is a great number of something, you could say there is a "proliferation" of that thing. But if you want to say that something is rapidly increasing, you would not say there is a "plethora" of it. You call it hilarious hairsplitting. I call it using the dictionary definitions of words to communicate clearly. Tomaeto Tomahto.
You did not point to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum the first time you mentioned the issue. You said my sarcastic comment about building a stand alone Evolution Museum on the national mall was pretty funny because there already is an Evolution Museum on the national mall. You didn't identify the museum at all. Because we were talking about a museum dedicated solely to evolution, the only way it would be obvious you were talking about the Smithsonian is to assume that you would try to mislead our fans by claiming something is that isn't.
I have grown weary of the museum discussion. The facts is that there are no museums in the United States dedicated solely to the Native American genocide. There are none dedicated solely to American Black slavery (anymore). There are no museums dedicated to the Cambodian genocide nor are there any dedicated to the Armenian genocide. There are museums dedicated solely to each of these peoples (and many others) but there are no museums dedicated solely to the suffering of any other ethnic/religious/racial/whatever minority in the United States (excepting, perhaps, the Japanese American internment). There are museums dedicated to Jewish history and culture in the United States. And there is a museum dedicated solely to the inconveniences endured by European Jews during WWII. You have provided us all with a myriad reasons why the USHMM exists and why the others do not. I agree with your analysis for the most part. I'm not so sure about the Camp David connection and I would never name Jewish money and political clout exerting influence over the US government as one of the reasons the USHMM was built as you did. But that's just one of those things I can't get away with saying that you can. But the reasons why the USHMM was built does not negate the relatively insignificant point that it is a symbolic representation of the importance of the holocaust in American culture. There's really nothing more to say about it.
You do have a point about a transatlantic disconnect . I don't know how differently the holocaust is perceived in in the UK vs the USA but I know there is a difference. A program (or is it programme?) like Channel 4's "Battle for the Holocaust" broadcast back in 2001 would never be produced for American television. I don't know if it has even been shown over here. That tells me that the UK is open to examining the holocaust in a way Americans will not.
I do not dishonestly hold the holocaust to an unreasonable standard of perfection. I do hold it and every element of it to the same epistemological standard. It is for that reason that I don't question the Einsatzgruppen. I don't deny deportation. I don't deny an antisemitic policy of Nazi Germany called the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. When you have physical and documentary evidence of an event, a few wild haired eyewitness descriptions of the event aren't problematic. When knowledge of an event is known almost exclusively through eyewitness testimony, however, it's important that the testimony be consistent and believable. Demanding that isn't dishonest.
Last point, and I really hate to be tedious but your answer about the Eisenhower quote at the USHMM didn't answer my question about the Eisenhower quote at the USHMM.
To review, I said it's disinformation to put the Eisenhower quote about how he saw things that "beggar description" at Ohrdruf and wanting to be in a position "...to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to "propaganda" on the wall of the USHMM. It's disinformation because Eisenhower was talking about Nazi atrocities in general, not any genocide of the Jews. Yet, an uninformed visitor to the museum could easily assume that Eisenhower was talking about the holocaust and was even anticipating holocaust denial.
You disagreed and said the quote is entirely appropriate because "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."
That's fair enough. If you want to include the conditions in the western concentration camps as part of the holocaust, that's fine. Nobody would deny that as far as visual evidence of Nazi brutality goes, the pictures from the liberation of Belsen or Buchenwald (the heaps of corpses, the bulldozing bodies, the emaciated prisoners, and of course the shrunken heads and lampshades) are far more disturbing than anything the Soviets found at Auschwitz or Majdanek (e.g., chubby cheeked rapscallions showing us their tattoo).
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."
When I asked how Nazi atrocities in general are part of the holocaust but the heads and shades are not part of the holocaust, you danced around the question. In your latest installment, you said:
First of all, here you're saying that how Eisenhower understood Nazi atrocities in 1945 and what Eisenhower said about Nazi atrocities when he said he saw things that "beggar description" and how Americans understood Nazi atrocities to the shape of the holocaust in 1990 is irrelevant. I'm sorry but you can't take somebody's words out of context and twist their meaning to say what you want him to have said. What Eisenhower meant in 1945 is what he meant in 1990 which is what he means today.
You insist that the Eisenhower quote is entirely appropriate "to introduce Americans, who since 1945 have a "vague collective memory of the shock of liberation of the camps, to the holocaust." OK, fine. But the shrunken heads and the lampshades are among the most iconic images in the collective memory of the shock of liberation of the camps. They were shown to Germans and the world as examples of Nazi atrocities. They were introduced into evidence at Nuremberg. If Eisenhower was talking about the holocaust because Nazi atrocities in general are part of the holocaust, how can you say the shrunken heads and the lampshades are not part of the holocaust? If Eisenhower was talking about the holocaust because Nazi atrocities in general are part of the holocaust, and the heads and shades aren't part of the holocaust, what other iconic imagery from the liberation of the western camps are also not part of the holocaust?
If you're trying to say that every piece of evidence for the holocaust strengthens the moral certainty of the holocaust until said evidence is proven to be bogus at which point it never was evidence for the holocaust so the moral certainty of the holocaust remains as strong as ever, then just say that instead of going off on some esoteric flight of fancy.
