Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread

[tsig]

The very first line is a lie!

The archaeologists probably aren't Jewish.

 

[tsig]

Sturdy Colls' plans got deniers' knickers in a twist on another discussion board - until they breathed a sigh of relief when her project "went quiet": "Fantastic work, Caroline," wrote one denier there, reveling in his sarcasm, "enjoy the backdoor PhD you are earning by not visiting and searching for the mass graves of Treblinka."

Clayton Moore's critique is quite interesting, a kind of mini tour de force. Rather than deal with Sturdy Colls' findings, he takes The Independent's reporter to task for announcing Sturdy Colls' discovery by means of a common idiom with which Clayton is unfamiliar. Then, when that line of attack flops, he goes after the reporter again, for including a quotation, to which Clayton objects, from a survivor.

Why on earth Clayton thinks that the point of Matthew Ellard's post was the quality of press reportage is beyond me; what is clear is that Clayton doesn't know what to say about the findings themselves.

He seems to have been reduced to deny, deny, deny.

 

[tsig]

Way to avoid the question. Even forest animals get it that their forest is on fire and it's time to make tracks.

Were the Jewish people the most educated religious group of the day or not?

The Jew were to smart to get holocausted?

 

[Clayton Moore]

.
No, it directly addressed your "question".

If those forest animals then found fine-mesh fences too high to jump over, with armed men on the other side specifically stationed there to prevent their leaving, then what?
.

.
What has this got to do with the very real barriers which were in place to prevent Jews from "getting"? In what way is that consistent with a policy of encouraging them to "get"?

It looks very like *you're* the one avoiding questions...
.

Way to go. You managed to to get the 2 to 4 million Jewish people out of the forest and into the camps. Skipping their learning of the gassing and killing of a million Jewish people who were already summoned and had arrived at the Polish camps.

Certainly that information would be a gun to their head to gather their family and leave Europe.

 

[Clayton Moore]

The Jew were to smart to get holocausted?

"The Jew", as you call them, were indeed too smart.

 

[Wroclaw]

Certainly that information would be a gun to their head to gather their family and leave Europe.

Nice try. But when the motive is murder, the that gun is not going to allow anybody to leave now, is it?

 

[Dogzilla]

I see you've got all the goalpost moves mapped out and if anyone met those ridiculous requirements I'm sure you could make up more as needed.

Goalposts have not been moved. If it appears that way it's because you have not considered the necessity of defining the parameters prior to discussing them. If you don't know how "Jew" was defined for census purposes within a specific region and/or the borders of that region you don't know how many Jews were there. When you want to compare pre and post war Jewish populations in Europe you need to consider what happened to national borders and governments. If the Polish government counted the number of "Jews" in Poland before the war and every one of those Jews survived the war and remained in the exact same place and the birthrate and mortality rate were identical, a government census counting every "Jew" in Poland after the war is likely to be vastly different than the pre war count because the Polish government was different and Poland itself had been shifted to the west. These are factors that would not need to be considered if one were taking a similar census of the Jewish population in say the state of Oregon.

You also need to consider when a census was taken. For example, in The War Against the Jews, Lucy Dawidowicz writes in Appendix B that "The data of the 1959 census in the Soviet Union confirm the staggering Jewish losses during World War II." When a respected holocaust "scholar" openly admits to using data that far removed in time from the era under discussion (besides being the product of a long dead communist era government), it's clear that her estimates of Jewish population losses can be disregarded. How many other estimates are similarly flawed?

1959? Jeez!

I realize it's easier for you to say it was six million Jews because it's always been six million Jews. That's fine if you're pushing an agenda and don't care about accuracy. But if you want to know what really happened, you need to dig a little deeper.

 

[A'isha]

You also need to consider when a census was taken. For example, in The War Against the Jews, Lucy Dawidowicz writes in Appendix B that "The data of the 1959 census in the Soviet Union confirm the staggering Jewish losses during World War II." When a respected holocaust "scholar" openly admits to using data that far removed in time from the era under discussion (besides being the product of a long dead communist era government), it's clear that her estimates of Jewish population losses can be disregarded. How many other estimates are similarly flawed?

1959? Jeez!

I see you have no idea what Dawidowicz was referring to there when she mentioned the 1959 Soviet Census.

 

[Nick Terry]

Goalposts have not been moved. If it appears that way it's because you have not considered the necessity of defining the parameters prior to discussing them. If you don't know how "Jew" was defined for census purposes within a specific region and/or the borders of that region you don't know how many Jews were there. When you want to compare pre and post war Jewish populations in Europe you need to consider what happened to national borders and governments. If the Polish government counted the number of "Jews" in Poland before the war and every one of those Jews survived the war and remained in the exact same place and the birthrate and mortality rate were identical, a government census counting every "Jew" in Poland after the war is likely to be vastly different than the pre war count because the Polish government was different and Poland itself had been shifted to the west. These are factors that would not need to be considered if one were taking a similar census of the Jewish population in say the state of Oregon.

You also need to consider when a census was taken. For example, in The War Against the Jews, Lucy Dawidowicz writes in Appendix B that "The data of the 1959 census in the Soviet Union confirm the staggering Jewish losses during World War II." When a respected holocaust "scholar" openly admits to using data that far removed in time from the era under discussion (besides being the product of a long dead communist era government), it's clear that her estimates of Jewish population losses can be disregarded. How many other estimates are similarly flawed?

1959? Jeez!

I realize it's easier for you to say it was six million Jews because it's always been six million Jews. That's fine if you're pushing an agenda and don't care about accuracy. But if you want to know what really happened, you need to dig a little deeper.

And I'm sure we'll let the historians of East European demography know about your earth-shattering findings.

 

[Dogzilla]

Well, let's start with how many Jews lived in some specific places before the war. And then move on to how many lived in these places after the war.

Or are you arguing that there were 100s of 1000s of Jews in Warsaw after the war? 10s of 1000s in Lodz? 10s of 1000s in Vilna? 100s of 1000s in the Germany? You think there are not reliable sources on the population of these places after the war?

You're kidding, right? Do you know of a dispute, of any significance, about what the Jewish population of Warsaw was, to take one example, after Stroop finished with it - or at war's end, after the Warsaw Uprising was put down?

This is more of the same: another case of your throwing out brave statements - "you need to provide evidence they were there to start with" (as I did), "there's the problem of estimating Jewish population in Europe after the war" (I assure you, it isn't a very big problem for the five cities I asked you about) - and then running away from their implications.

The Nazis could count. That is true.

The question is whether you can count - and respond to direct, straightforward questions.

I don't know how many Jews there were. If you don't know who counted the Jews, how they defined Jews and the geographic region in which they were counted, you don't know either. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying you don't know.

If you're going to use Nazi estimates of Jewish populations you need to know how they defined "Jew." The definition of "Jew" they used for internal purposes doesn't match the definition of "Jew" that Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or any other branch of Judaism uses. Did they apply the same definition of "Jew" in Lithuania as they did in Germany?

These are the things you need to think about.

 

[Nick Terry]

I don't know how many Jews there were. If you don't know who counted the Jews, how they defined Jews and the geographic region in which they were counted, you don't know either. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying you don't know.

But LemmyCaution, along with anyone else capable of reading history books, does know. Your obfuscations are becoming increasingly transparent, tedious and childish. In several posts you have been reminded about the details of specific cities under Nazi rule. These posts refer to statistics which were compiled under the Nazis. The possibility that they are grotesquely wrong because of a redefinition of who was a Jew is essentially zero. There were generally very few converts in Eastern Europe; so few, in fact, that you are talking about a variable which is lost in the inevitable margin of error.

Moreover, you blithely ignore the fact that for several posts, you have been asked to discuss details of specific cities which are well documented and for which we don't need to rely on demography to establish the facts; we only might need to refer to demography to demonstrate the implausibility of denier claims.

Kiev had close to 200,000 Jews according to the 1939 census; i.e. citizens of the Ukrainian SSR who identified themselves as of Jewish natsional'nost when asked by census takers. By the time the city had fallen in September 1941, about 80% had escaped east or been evacuated. The SS ordered the remaining Jews of Kiev to appear for 'resettlement', rounded them up and shot them at Babi Yar. Over the ensuing months and years, they shot more Jews who had been in hiding, and perhaps some of those were people who had identified as Ukrainians or Russians in the 1939 census and been denounced by neighbours who knew that they came from a Jewish family. Or perhaps not. That issue would be regarded as utterly irrelevant to any portrayal of the demographics of Jewish Kiev. After the war, the majority of Kievan Jews were able to return home, minus some who died at the front in the Great Patriotic War and some who moved to Moscow or some other job, and joined by a large number who got jobs in the Ukrainian capital or who decided that city life was more their scene than life in the provinces.

Demographic calculations aren't even used to establish the details of the Holocaust in Kiev. They produce a broadly corroborating deficit, but the deficit is smaller than would be the case in western Ukraine, where virtually everyone was caught by the German advance and few could flee east. The basis for our understanding of the Holocaust in Kiev is the German paper trail, which documents the execution of more than 33,000 Jews in late September 1941.

The counter-claim from deniers is to argue that there was no execution at Babi Yar. But this is an utterly implausible argument, for two reasons. Firstly, the Nazis are documented as slaughtering the Jews of Ukraine in every major city; secondly it is improbable that 100% of the Jews of Kiev could flee in time. The demographics simply confirms what is obvious, that a minority would always remain behind - about 20%. And that 20% was killed, as was documented by the Nazis.

If deniers like you want to claim they were not killed, then you would have to demonstrate that contrary to all expectations, all of the Jews of Kiev were evacuated or escaped due to Soviet actions, or that the Nazis resettled the Jews of Kiev somewhere else, and both possibilities are going to require clear and convincing evidence to be substantiated.

The null hypothesis is that not everyone from a particular community in a large capital city is going to be able to escape from an advancing invader, for a variety of inarguable reasons (physical infirmity, old age, family dependents, collapse of transportation in the chaos of the German encirclement, etc). That null hypothesis, together with the documents, raises your burden of proof quite drastically if you hope to convince anyone that there wasn't a mass execution using whatever other arguments you try on. That applies whether you were to try and claim that there were mass restampings of Soviet internal passports from 1939-41, a major Stalinist deportation campaign before the war affecting 20% of the Kievan Jewish community, or whatever other figment of your imagination you brandish in your by now utterly apparent desperation to deny historical reality.

 

[tsig]

"The Jew", as you call them, were indeed too smart.

A high IQ renders one impervious to gas? Maybe they were smart enough to put their face close to the ground i hear that'll let you survive gassing.

 

[Mynott]

Uh, you do understand the concept of "scholarly research?" That and the fact it's WIKIPEDIA and not the Encyclopedia Britannica or something published in a peer reviewed journal, right?

No one has even attempted to explain why millions of Jewish people, likely the most educated and most tight knit religious group in Europe at that time, remained in Europe as million after million Jewish people were allegedly exterminated?


The reason?

It never happened.

I wonder if it is now time to just leave you with both your 9/11 Team Twoofer and Team Holohoaxer delusions and illusions.

 

[Nick Terry]

My question about this pattern of dodging is more for non-deniers and about denial. It is a bit perplexing. Ostensibly, deniers aim to critique the work done by historians showing the scope, methodology, purpose, and evolution of the Holocaust and other Nazi war crimes. Repeating a limited set of ready-made gambits (Wiesel, no mass graves, Jews went where Jews are, they wouldn't have, etc.), deniers have isolated themselves from the general public and further cannot even get a seat at the table, so to speak, where specialist discourse about these matters occurs. Their approach has failed and put them on a far fringe. Yet, taking Dogzilla's non-response to just two specific topics (I could list out others), we have here a case study of a denier walking away from an opportunity to convince readers of this thread of his claims - saying "I don't know and I don't care."

Sometimes it appears that one purpose of denial is simply to be on a far fringe ("get people hopping mad"); sometimes it appears that ideological and political agendas are the motivation. But "I don't know and I don't care" is really poor strategy to advance ideological or political agendas, no?

What gives? What are deniers really up to?

Perhaps a better question is whether internet deniers are capable of realising their mistakes, much less admitting them. After observing this strange breed for many years I have to conclude that a major motivation for them is ego, coupled with several major cognitive deficiencies. They are seduced into believing this tripe and like many other self-styled 'truthseekers' they flatter themselves into believing that they have the key to a unique, dangerous piece of knowledge. The negative reactions they provoke reinforces their conviction that they must be onto something, even if as is routine, the gaping holes in their logic, comprehension and knowledge are pointed out.

For the troll denier, it isn't of course a problem to make fact-free posts and repeat themselves endlessly. They indeed simply want to get people 'hopping mad'. Several such types live under this particular bridge, and several others have been banned from the forum over the years.

The seemingly more literate denier, of which we currently have precisely one example, is motivated to a great extent by ego. Not admitting that they are wrong eventually becomes a primary motivation for keeping the discussion going. And as we can observe in other parts of the forum, it is child's play for a crank to refuse to admit defeat and keep posting.

Another factor also affects this, which is simple incompetence in gauging the extent of their knowledge, abilities and the persuasiveness of their arguments. Dunning-Krueger is a powerful explanation for why some deniers keep on going.

It needs to be borne in mind that a fast-moving thread can allow a crank who is being pummelled from all sides to ignore corrections, refutations and pretend they do not exist. Eventually any thread will circle around on itself, allowing the crank to repost the same material and pretend this wasn't already discussed. We see that all the time in the 9/11 forum, but we also see it on this thread.

So when we ask ourselves, 'surely they must know they are wrong about this point', we should not give them the benefit of the doubt any more. In some cases, they may indeed be acting out of dishonesty, in order to get people 'hopping mad', but in the majority of cases I fear that we are observing something closer to a cognitive disorder. One of the more charitable explanations is that one might say there is an analogy with dyslexia, except on the level of argumentation and evidence rather than on the level of individual words.

Deniers and cranks are renowned for not 'seeing' what is right in front of them. They read the same words on the same page as a non-crank, but instead of absorbing the content they will launch into either a set-piece rant or treat the words as a launch-pad for their own rhapsodic speculations.

Dogzilla gave us a very convincing example of this phenomenon in his gloss on the Sonthofen speech. By all rational standards, not least of which would be how his words would be judged and marked in places of learning, his rant over Sonthofen was simply word-salad tossed together from pre-prepared ingredients. It completely failed to engage with the text and absorb its meaning or implications. This was pointed out, so instead of responding, Dogzilla ignored the posts and changed the subject. He was able to do so in his mind because there were many ongoing mini-threads and he could thus justify to himself seizing on other points where he thought he stood a chance of scoring a 'goal'. Except, as we have seen time and again, Dogzilla usually ends up scoring a own goal, and has his points refuted over and over again.

Outside observers reading this thread would undoubtedly conclude that at countless moments, the deniers are refuted on point a or point b and don't listen or follow the argument properly. The track record is there in black and white; a denier makes a point, is refuted with a lengthy post; the lengthy post goes unanswered. Over the course of what will soon be coming up to a full year of this thread, there are by now probably hundreds of such posts.

Yet I am quite sure that Dogzilla believes fervently that he has not been refuted on virtually any point. He simply hasn't noticed, because he is not following the discussion properly. Even when he is reminded of the refutations, he retains a quite awesome ability to change the subject and misconstrue what has been written.

I've received comments from a couple of readers of this thread that in the past few days, Dogzilla has been cornered on repeated occasions and is now flailing hopelessly. I'm almost certain by now that Dogzilla wouldn't see it that way; not because he is blustering, or because he is trying to cover his retreat, or really knows that he has been defeated on point x, but because his brain simply isn't wired in such a way that he can even realise or notice that he has been refuted.

This, of course, is a very charitable explanation. The only alternative is to conclude that the never-ending stream of bullflop is kept going by pure dishonesty and malevolence.

 

[MG1962]

And I'm sure we'll let the historians of East European demography know about your earth-shattering findings.

Yeah thats what I was thinking.

News flash Soviets fake census figures......

Well they have only been doing that since the 1930's. The good news in some instance we have the real figures before the statisticans were shot, and new number crunchers pulled figures that better suited Stalin's aims

 

[MG1962]

I don't know how many Jews there were. If you don't know who counted the Jews, how they defined Jews and the geographic region in which they were counted, you don't know either. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying you don't know.

You are hopelessly wrong. Because people here can't answer your specifics about data reduction, it does not mean the author of the article or their peers didn't know.

You would do better to look for peer critiques that challenge the methodology than attack a bunch of randoms on the interwebs

 

[tsig]

Perhaps a better question is whether internet deniers are capable of realising their mistakes, much less admitting them. After observing this strange breed for many years I have to conclude that a major motivation for them is ego, coupled with several major cognitive deficiencies. They are seduced into believing this tripe and like many other self-styled 'truthseekers' they flatter themselves into believing that they have the key to a unique, dangerous piece of knowledge. The negative reactions they provoke reinforces their conviction that they must be onto something, even if as is routine, the gaping holes in their logic, comprehension and knowledge are pointed out.

For the troll denier, it isn't of course a problem to make fact-free posts and repeat themselves endlessly. They indeed simply want to get people 'hopping mad'. Several such types live under this particular bridge, and several others have been banned from the forum over the years.

The seemingly more literate denier, of which we currently have precisely one example, is motivated to a great extent by ego. Not admitting that they are wrong eventually becomes a primary motivation for keeping the discussion going. And as we can observe in other parts of the forum, it is child's play for a crank to refuse to admit defeat and keep posting.

Another factor also affects this, which is simple incompetence in gauging the extent of their knowledge, abilities and the persuasiveness of their arguments. Dunning-Krueger is a powerful explanation for why some deniers keep on going.

It needs to be borne in mind that a fast-moving thread can allow a crank who is being pummelled from all sides to ignore corrections, refutations and pretend they do not exist. Eventually any thread will circle around on itself, allowing the crank to repost the same material and pretend this wasn't already discussed. We see that all the time in the 9/11 forum, but we also see it on this thread.

So when we ask ourselves, 'surely they must know they are wrong about this point', we should not give them the benefit of the doubt any more. In some cases, they may indeed be acting out of dishonesty, in order to get people 'hopping mad', but in the majority of cases I fear that we are observing something closer to a cognitive disorder. One of the more charitable explanations is that one might say there is an analogy with dyslexia, except on the level of argumentation and evidence rather than on the level of individual words.

Deniers and cranks are renowned for not 'seeing' what is right in front of them. They read the same words on the same page as a non-crank, but instead of absorbing the content they will launch into either a set-piece rant or treat the words as a launch-pad for their own rhapsodic speculations.

Dogzilla gave us a very convincing example of this phenomenon in his gloss on the Sonthofen speech. By all rational standards, not least of which would be how his words would be judged and marked in places of learning, his rant over Sonthofen was simply word-salad tossed together from pre-prepared ingredients. It completely failed to engage with the text and absorb its meaning or implications. This was pointed out, so instead of responding, Dogzilla ignored the posts and changed the subject. He was able to do so in his mind because there were many ongoing mini-threads and he could thus justify to himself seizing on other points where he thought he stood a chance of scoring a 'goal'. Except, as we have seen time and again, Dogzilla usually ends up scoring a own goal, and has his points refuted over and over again.

Outside observers reading this thread would undoubtedly conclude that at countless moments, the deniers are refuted on point a or point b and don't listen or follow the argument properly. The track record is there in black and white; a denier makes a point, is refuted with a lengthy post; the lengthy post goes unanswered. Over the course of what will soon be coming up to a full year of this thread, there are by now probably hundreds of such posts.

Yet I am quite sure that Dogzilla believes fervently that he has not been refuted on virtually any point. He simply hasn't noticed, because he is not following the discussion properly. Even when he is reminded of the refutations, he retains a quite awesome ability to change the subject and misconstrue what has been written.

I've received comments from a couple of readers of this thread that in the past few days, Dogzilla has been cornered on repeated occasions and is now flailing hopelessly. I'm almost certain by now that Dogzilla wouldn't see it that way; not because he is blustering, or because he is trying to cover his retreat, or really knows that he has been defeated on point x, but because his brain simply isn't wired in such a way that he can even realise or notice that he has been refuted.

This, of course, is a very charitable explanation. The only alternative is to conclude that the never-ending stream of bullflop is kept going by pure dishonesty and malevolence.

I'll take door number two.

 

[Matthew Ellard]

Sturdy Colls' plans got deniers' knickers in a twist on another discussion board......

It was the holocaust denier, 9/11 Investigator, on this very thread, who first mentioned Caroline Colls' desire to perform a forensic investigation on Treblinka II. This was about a year ago. At that time, I thought it was just an academic talking through a "wish-list" of things they wanted to study. I am glad I was wrong.

This is still early days yet and let's wait for Ms Colls and her team to compile, assess, compose, undergo peer review and release their information.

I'm excited by the prospect that my lone holocaust denier at the Skeptic Society forum may have to go back and delete his 2000 posts on Treblinka.

 

[Mynott]

Here is an item from the Irish Newspaper,The Independent about her findings that back up The accounts Team Holohoax have sort to deny and discredit.It is all looking very promising.But please do not expect anything in the way of a gracious concession from them.They'll no doubt withdraw into their usual nested dolls of lies ,deceit and delusions.For example Colls was in cahoots with the Mossad etc.,etc.Do keep an eye out for of the BBC Radio doco about her work and findings at Treblinka.

http://www.independent.ie/world-new...s-graves-at-treblinka-death-camp-2990076.html

 

[TSR]

Certainly that information would be a gun to their head to gather their family and leave Europe.

.
The guns to their heads were wielded by your Nazi heroes, attempting to enforce laws which made it difficult and then illegal for them to leave.

For example, the Frank family had abandoned all they owned and moved to Amsterdam. There they worked hard to start a new business and contribute to their new society.

Then the Nazi's invade.

So, having started over once, they hide, not doing anything at all which could be avoided to interact with other Dutch citizens or the Nazis.

And yet, they were all arrested and sent first to Westerbork, then to Auschwitz.

What more do you expect them to have done, being Jews and so, according to you, of above average intelligence and all?
.