Quote: (01-01-2017 03:50 AM)weambulance Wrote:
Why shouldn't we discuss the details of the holocaust? Why shouldn't we question why it's considered so wrong to do so?
Why do some people find this discussion so threatening? If the holocaust happened as described, surely it can stand on its own, yes? So why do some people not even want the questions asked?
If the questioners are ridiculous, then surely they will fail without being forced to shut up. Is it not, in fact, better and more convincing to prove the veracity of your position against the questions of skeptics rather than trying to shut down any discussion of the matter at all?
Once upon a time I was a geologist. Do you think I broke a sweat worrying about questions from flat earthers or creationists?
I find the resistance to even allowing other people to talk about the subject pretty suspicious. "Heretical" is the word scorpion used for questions about the details of the holocaust, and it fits like a glove.
I think it's a distinct minority of people in this thread who actually are proposing that we don't talk about this at all. And one of the few guys who is has said it should be shut down for fear of prosecution of Roosh in Europe. Which, I've got to say, is something of a hysterical fear; if the Man wants to come for Roosh there's plenty of other more obvious trumped-up charges it could go for.
That said, there is an awful tendency in this debate -- and I'm not singling out any particular person here, in fairness -- to inappropriately generalise, strawman, or introduce irrelevant matters into the discussion.
Let me take your metaphor of geology for a second: it's simple enough to dismiss flat earthers or creationists, simply because geology, a physical science simply measurable, is easily verifiable scientifically. The rock doesn't need to talk to you to tell you it was there for four and a half million years after the Autobots' Ark crashed into it. You have high-precision instruments and methods for measuring its age that can tell that for itself. Or if the rock is shattered, you generally have a record of where it's found so you can go dig up the one that was right next to it. The data does not alter.
Human memory and human experience is not quite so non-malleable. First, history is as difficult as hell to winnow out from the agendas of those living at the time
and those who are writing about it. In TL;DR terms, Churchill's famous quote: "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it." Every man who's been watching the culture war has been personally witness to an ongoing war by feminism to alter the perception of historical events in such a way to remove the truth from them. If they win this war, human existence will be far poorer for it and far darker. QC's jousting with one of the Zuckerberg clones is the tip of the iceberg.
Second, history, from Thucydides on, is written from fragments -- in all cases. Until the video camera came along, nobody left behind an impartial recording of events (and these days even
that can be faked.) Perhaps the most powerful example of this I've ever seen is to compare the JFK Zapruder footage with Zapruder's
testimony to the Warren Commission. Zapruder shot the most famous home movie in history, basically the first time that an assassination was captured on film, but Zapruder himself was an absolute emotional wreck on the witness stand -- mainly because he'd seen a man gunned down right in front of his eyes, and his vague, contradictory testimony shows it.
The problem being that we sometimes don't remember the fragmentary nature of history, or that well-intentioned eyewitnesses can nonetheless be wrong, or that a failure of memory or contradiction in one aspect of evidence makes the person entirely incredible in all other matters, i.e. just because a guy can't remember the colour of young Hans Gruber's boots does not mean that one of those boots did not get planted in Samuel Fuckowitz's face at some time in 1943 or that Fuckowitz's wife and daughter were gunned down in front of him at roughly the same time.
On the other hand, I suspect part of the annoyance is concern with the slippery-slope effect, the suggestion that if any element of the grim story (I won't call it the Holocaust) is proven not to be credible, the
entire story collapses by degrees. This is not a paranoid belief: the slippery slope is real, the Left has been using it against the West for the better part of forty years or more.
Panning all of the contributions to the thread to date, I don't think outright denial of a program against the Jews and many others is what's being said here in sum.
In my opinion you would be stretching reality to an entirely unbelievable result to conclude that Hitler's regime was not out to get the Jews in Germany and anywhere else he overran. In my view, there is simply too much material to conclude that.
So ask some basic questions about this debate: are we arguing that Hitler was anti-Jew, was anti-Jew and acted on it, was anti-Jew and acted on it but not as badly as has been made out? Are we now arguing precise specifics of how those killings were carried out?
And on that point, related to any tendency to bow down to historical documents or German efficiencies? Do we
really expect precise down-to-the-last-six-year-old-boy figures of how many were killed, by what method, and where? For real? We're going to argue the definition of German words around this subject when even a sociopath like Stalin, killer of far more of his own people than Hitler could ever dream of, still referred to extrajudicial killings by the euphemism of "special duties"?
If so, at the risk of resort to the Hillary Defence, what difference does it make?
Is the point that the killings were used as propaganda by the Jews/Poles/Soviets/US to justify the creation of Israel? Come on: that UN Security Resolution Obama has been shitting his pants over is essentially a non-binding resolution by the UN that Israel has essentially been breaking the Geneva Convention in that it's ethnically cleansing Palestine with its settlers to the tune of 500,000 settlers since 1978 or so. Whether the Holocaust happened or not, whether there were gas chambers or not, Israel has no excuse for that shit.
If tomorrow there were conclusive evidence that not one gas chamber ever existed in Germany (and there's no such thing as conclusive evidence when it comes to human affairs, that's why the criminal standard is beyond reasonable doubt, not beyond all doubt) it would not make the slightest difference to Israel's legitimacy as a nation in practical terms. Israel and its however-many Jews are
there now. They have US support and in a pinch are a friendly port in the Middle East where all the oil is. This situation was fucked up long before 1948, simply because moral and law break down once you have guns big enough to detonate entire cities. Welcome to realpolitik.
Is the point that Germany renders Holocaust denial criminal? Okay, I can get behind anti-censorship movements, but if that's the real point of the debate -- and I think it is -- why don't we get into the specifics of what the German law says first, talk about why it sucks, and how it should be changed?
There's also frankly what I think is the utter insanity of trying to argue this shit thoroughly or methodically on an internet message board. People can assert they've had hours and hours of work into the subject, people can assert they've spoken to Holocaust survivors, we can do all this shit and more till the cows come home but it won't mean much when they do show up for milking. This is a
massive subject. It's been seventy years, scholars have crawled over the subject end to end, libraries of books repeating the incomplete/fragmentary/political evidence/data/facts have been written from every historical perspective available, five to ten guys are not going to solve this shit conclusively in our spare time on the Internet.
Nobody on this thread is going to come up with a memo from Herr Hitler's notepad dated 30 April 1945 reading "
Oh by the way, bros, here's my letter to IG Farben specifying that I needed enough Zyklon-B at a super-high concentration to kill every Jew in Germany in the space of 12 months".
Conversely, nobody on this thread is going to come up with a memo from Herr Hitler's notepad dated 30 April 1945 reading "
Oh, by the way, bros, I was really distressed about hunger conditions in Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buchenwald, I hope nobody thinks those efficient delousing chambers we built was for killing people en masse."
So with that epic rant said, I think I'm out on this issue, expressing a mea culpa for jumping in on the subject of Witold Pilecki. Personal prejudice on that one: I have a dog in this fight, my grandmother was Polish, Christian, was in one of the work camps, received compensation from the German government for it, lost her first husband in 1939 when the Nazis decided to Go East Young Man, and met her second in the camp. But this is just a black hole of a debate. Maybe it's profitable to have it, but I query the profit margin, not the fact of the debate.