Survivor guilt
(twitter.com)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (90)
sorted by:
The degree to which democrats have lied about January 6th has made me much more open to Holocaust denial.
The official figures are as easy to dispute as pointing out that there's no way to burn that many bodies that fast.
What likely happened is they simply took large numbers of Jews as political prisoners and as the war effort soured their ability to sustain the camps diminished, which resulted in the most prisoner deaths (which probably only broke into the hundreds of thousands, if that). They weren't actually coming up with Rube Goldberg contraptions to execute Jews with, much less burning millions of corpses.
They were taking political prisoners, however. That much is undeniable. It was an authoritarian regime but so much about it has been completely blown out of proportion.
If you don't know what the Holocaust is, sure.
I can't believe I have to do this again, but if you're saying "6 million Jews 7 furnaces", then you literally have no idea what the Holocaust is or how it happened.
You must have a basic, elementary, level grasp on the topic in order to dispute it.
An awkward topic. You're aware of how this subject is taught in schools, I assume. The well has been not only poisoned but turned into a toxic dump. I have questions about both sides of the coin, but I'm too tired of the subject to ask.
I've pretty much settled on "it doesn't matter one way or the other". It's taught for political purposes rather than historical understanding, and I don't think propaganda deserves serious consideration (though it can help people understand how much of a farce school is).
Even if it didn't happen, it doesn't change the context of the war. It doesn't even change the aftermath. Things were fucked, for sure, and I mostly find myself annoyed by this distraction that impedes my understanding of the relevant events.
Personally, I blame the laws banning holocaust denial over there. Negative reinforcement is easy because it works poorly. Similarly, if we were encouraged to understand instead of simply memorize, I think most people wouldn't give it so much weight.
I am, but it's normally never as crazy as the HD'ers claim.
In my experience it's basically doing a project, reading Night, and reading Maus. It's not really any better than any other particular topic the public school likes to focus on. Most people hardly know anything about it because the school covered it for 2-4 weeks, including WW2, and that's about it.
Being a fan of history, nobody knows shit from history about public school. I took my friends to go see "Dunkirk" and I had to give them a quick history lesson before the movie started, just so they got the idea of who was fighting, where, and why. All their knowledge of history basically comes from public school... so they didn't know shit. They guess WW2 started in 1937, and I was just glad they got around a good date.
Actually watching documentaries, listening to recordings, reviewing some court documents brought to Nuremburg, and JFC seeing Night And Fog, it's a whole different story.
Unfortunately, this genocide matters for 2 important reasons:
One: It is a fundamental aspect to National Socialism. The Holocaust had to occur because of National Socialism. If Germany had been Fascist instead of National Socialist, it wouldn't have happened. The war still would have been bloody, but the explicit extermination of the Jewish race was an imperative to National Socialism and Nazi argument of Judeo-Bolshevism, the Racial Theory of History, and Socialism as applied to race. That should concern the fuck out of you given how many Racial Socialists are appearing on the right and are making all the same claims.
Two: It's methodology was vastly different from most depopulation efforts. Genocide isn't even the typical method of depopulation, although war is. The National Socialists didn't let Jews out. They wanted to eradicate all of them to save Europe. Most of the time, conquering forces push people out before them. Even in Genocides, people flee. The National Socialists made sure they couldn't. This was a very deliberate effort of total extermination on a supra-national scale. The amount of Jews that the National Socialists had to kill was extreme. And they knew it. That's why they developed an infrastructure to do it. What HD'ers will run with sometimes is they will ask why the National Socialists didn't just shoot everyone. They were! But it wasn't fast enough, wasn't orderly enough, and used too much resources.
This why they had to use extermination camps. In economics it's called "Capital Investment". You make an investment in assets to make your production flow more efficient. Instead of having 10 people make widgets as fast as they can and producing 50 /hr. Make a widget machine that requires 5 people to operate and maintain, that makes 100 /hr. Without capital investment, maybe the best you can do is 100 people making 1000 widgits an hour. With capital investment in widget machines, you can hire might not hit that point of diminishing return until you get 200 people making 10,000 widgits an hour. That's the sinister part of this. These are factories of death. Murder is the commodity that the factory is producing. They made a capital investment in murder, and a logistical system to support it. They had an agenda to kill every single Jew in Europe without exception, and they were building a logistical system to do exactly that. It was the commodification of death that makes the Holocaust truly unique.
I don't think you're wrong. Censorship doesn't fix the problem. But there's also the fact that the National Socialists want to deny it because
a) Stating that it is a moral imperative, as the National Socialists concluded, is really intolerable to all moral creatures
b) It's a way of hoisting the Marxists and Communists on their own petard. They would like the systemic extermination of the Capitalist bourgeoisie. The National Socialists are asserting the Jews are the Capitalist bourgeoisie. It's a trap: if the National Socialists are Socialists, the Marxists have to admit they want a Holocaust of the rich... which happens to also include a lot of names that end in -stein. If the National Socialists are not Socialists, then they would never call for the extermination ... of bourgeoisie. To deny Socialism is to deny the Holocaust, to deny the Holocaust is to deny Socialism.
In the end, the National Socialists are straight up lying about the Holocaust which is something they think is a moral imperative, and their Useful Idiots are normally so ignorant of Holocaust in an even rudimentary way that there's rarely anything to talk about with them.