the neoliberal vision of the future

[oppgitt]

Oppgitt do you think that the physical evidence that does exist and that helps corroborate the personal testimonies and documentary sources supports the account that there was a planned extermination on an industrial scale?

Yes.

And I should add, as it seems to me everybody already thinks I am a neo-nazi, one of the most profound experiences of my life was sitting through the entire length of Shoah.

 

[oppgitt]

What, exactly, is it that you think is lacking from the story that gives a sane and just person cause to doubt the testimony of the thousands of survivors, and to suspect that instead they all suffered from the same hallucination?

You're feeding me a straw man. I've never said anything even remotely close to what you're writing, and neither has Onar. Which is why I posted in the first place. Onar is no Holocaust denier. Yet here, he is branded as one.

 

[onarchy]

Reference needed of course. But what kind of other evidence would or could have lead to such a consensus?

Here is the article from where this quote is taken:

http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/742965--a-case-for-letting-nature-take-back-auschwitz

I don't recall having read exactly this article before, but this is exactly the kind of statement (from a perfectly mainstream source) on which I have based my assessment of this situation. I had no idea this was so controversial, but apparently so.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

You're feeding me a straw man. I've never said anything even remotely close to what you're writing, and neither has Onar. Which is why I posted in the first place. Onar is no Holocaust denier. Yet here, he is branded as one.

He is a 'gas chamber denier', though. He claims that there is not sufficient evidence that there were ever any gas chambers for such a thing to hold up in a court of law. Do you agree with him?

 

[butchersapron]

You're feeding me a straw man. I've never said anything even remotely close to what you're writing, and neither has Onar. Which is why I posted in the first place. Onar is no Holocaust denier. Yet here, he is branded as one.

I don't care at all about denial, you offer something as evidence that there is no physical proof of the holocaust (it turns to shit in you hands). Why offer that? If serious, let's have have some rigour. Let's have some references, some quotes and some evidence.

 

[Superdupastupor]

kremlin archives has the burned remains. apparently.

Not as compelling as an embalmed Lenin.

 

[butchersapron]

Here is the article from where this quote is taken:

http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/742965--a-case-for-letting-nature-take-back-auschwitz

I don't recall having read exactly this article before, but this is exactly the kind of statement (from a perfectly mainstream source) on which I have based my assessment of this situation. I had no idea this was so controversial, but apparently so.

I like the bit where he details the physical evidence and how it needs to be protected.

 

[8ball]

I like the bit where he details the physical evidence and how it needs to be protected.

You're reading the wrong bit

 

[littlebabyjesus]

You're reading the wrong bit

 

[ymu]

Feel free to e-mail the journalist. I don't see the relevance.

It's a vanishingly unlikely thing for van Pelt to have said. Hence, the onus being on you to prove that he said it.

 

[butchersapron]

Ninety-nine per cent of what we know we do not actually have the physical evidence to prove . . . it has become part of our inherited knowledge.

Means of history generally not the holocaust specifically. It's an argument that the holocaust, because it is so close is part of that 1%

 

[invisibleplanet]

Here is the article from where this quote is taken:

http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/742965--a-case-for-letting-nature-take-back-auschwitz

I don't recall having read exactly this article before, but this is exactly the kind of statement (from a perfectly mainstream source) on which I have based my assessment of this situation. I had no idea this was so controversial, but apparently so.

A mainstream source would be something like the international journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Not a liberal newspaper that only circulates in Canada

 

[butchersapron]

There's nothing wrong with the source at all. Read it.

 

[Dillinger4]

If you search where that article has been posted, almost all the results on google are on forums and blogs, with people using the article to 'revise' the history of the holocaust. Or just plain deny it. All of them put this quote in big bold letters:

Ninety-nine per cent of what we know we do not actually have the physical evidence to prove . . . it has become part of our inherited knowledge.

result number six is stormfront.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Means of history generally not the holocaust specifically. It's an argument that the holocaust, because it is so close is part of that 1%

Yep. It is incredibly dishonest to interpret his words the way these two are doing.

 

[Louis MacNeice]

Yes.

And I should add, as it seems to me everybody already thinks I am a neo-nazi, one of the most profound experiences of my life was sitting through the entire length of Shoah.

These are the accounts which onar is denying, and against which he claims a historical consensus.

Louis MacNeice

 

[invisibleplanet]

Onarchy, you have not yet given any reputable, peer-reveiewed sources. Why do you avoid giving sources?

 

[ViolentPanda]

This is getting pretty ridiculous! I was making a benign and completely uncontroversial statement about WWII and all of a sudden I've got the whole hornets' nest over me! What's wrong with you people? If you ask ANY historian on WWII (and no I don't mean David Irving) about the physical evidence for the deliberate, intentional industrial killing of the Jews you will get the same answer: it doesn't exist.

No, you won't get that answer. You'll get an answer from any historian who has any credibility along the lines of "the evidence is fragmentary but compelling. We have way bills for rail movements, property manifests and photographic evidence of the mass movement of civilians. We have chemical analysis of the rendering and bricks of the gas chambers showing levels of Zyklon B end-products that could not have accumulated in a century if de-lousing was the purpose of the chambers. We have direct chains of bureaucratic evidence following Jew from home to ghetto to grave. We have intelligence papers from US, UK, French, Italian and Soviet sources setting out the existence and function of the death camps from the time of first use.

You see, unlike you, historians don't go for sweeping, simplistic narratives. Their job is to engage with the minutiae, to sift the evidence, see what can be corroborated, and to publish findings, not to speculate.

Do you know any academic historians?

The mainstream will say that it doesn't exist because the Nazis successfully managed to destroy all the evidence, all gas chambers, all documents etc. before the allies rolled in.

Except that they didn't.

The Bad Arolsen archive alone (and it is only one of several substantial archives, especially given that there is access to former Soviet archives too) contains enough data to refute the above claim.

I don't see why I should document this with academic references when this is in no way controversial.

You make the claim, it's incumbent on you, if you have any honour (which I doubt. Cowards don't understand honour) to substantiate your claims with more than waffle.

Notice that there is ample physical evidence that a HUGE amount of Jews died in the concentration camps, but as far as I know NOT from gassing or other deliberate industrial killing. Again, this doesn't mean that there was no gas chambers or no gassing, only that the physical evidence for it is absent.

Comparatively few Jews were remanded to concentration camps. Comparatively more political prisoners/enemies of the state died in the concentration camps.

Apparently I have to stand on trial for something you have conjured in your imagination about my views on this subject. Therefore I will make very explicit my views so that there can be no misunderstanding. Were a huge number of innocent Jews rounded up in concentration camps by the Nazis? Yes. Did a huge number of them die? Yes. Were the Nazis responsible for their deaths? Absolutely. Was this evil? Indeed. Are there any circumstances that in any way reduces the evilness or responsibility of the Nazis for these deaths? Absolutely not.

You're equivocating.

Does it matter whether these Jews were killed in gas chambers or "just" died of starvation, disease or freezing? Not to me. The Nazis are just as evil and responsible in either case. Stalin starved millions of innocent Ukrainians to death in the 1930s and the fact that they died of hunger rather than of a bullet or gas in no way reduces the evilness of Stalin. Quite the contrary.

So, then the million dollar question: were the Jews gassed to death? If I were a prosecutor in the case against the Nazis in a trial, I would prosecute them for killing the Jews, but I would recognize that the lack of evidence would make it hard to convict the Nazis on the account of gassing. This does not mean that the gassing did not take place, only that it would be a gamble in a court of law to try to have them convicted for this.

I find it disturbing that the people who agree with Hitler on 95% of the issue seems to predicate their evaluation of Hitler on whether he gassed the Jews or not. Let's for a second imagine (purely hypothetical, guys, no need for alarm) that new evidence came to light that decisively proved that there were no gas chambers and that the vast majority of jews died from starvation and disease. Would this change your view of the Nazis? Would you then say "oh, since he didn't actually deliberately gas them to death he was not really that bad a guy"? I bloody well hope not!

I believe that the reason the Nazis created such a trauma in the European psyche is because Germany wasn't a third world country filled with illiterates. Germany was the land of philosophers and poets and the book "Mein Kampf" was a massive bestseller in that country. What Europe finds so scary is the fact that it wasn't dumb brutes that embraced Nazism. It was the intellectuals, the university students, the well-educated.

How very banal.
Nazism as a political philosophy was manufactured to "capture" the middle and upper social classes. They embraced it because it was designed to appeal to them. It's why Nazism took only thin roots in working-class culture, and why what resistance to the Nazis that is worthy of the name came mostly from the working classes (although the German middle and upper classes are more comfortable with the myth that the resistance was mostly like "The White Rose" and their ilk).

 

[onarchy]

What, exactly, is it that you think is lacking from the story that gives a sane and just person cause to doubt the testimony of the thousands of survivors, and to suspect that instead they all suffered from the same hallucination?

I didn't say that! I said that if I were a prosecutor against the Nazis in a court of law where the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt I would not take the chance of including the gas chambers in the accusations. And as to the testimony of thousands of survivors. So many inaccuracies have been found in so many witnesses that the defense would have a field day. Rather than to jeopardize the case with embarassing revelations of such inaccuracies, which in a court of law would be sufficient to cast doubt on the credibility of the witnesses, I would focus on what we DO know for certain and can prove with physical evidence, namely that the Nazis caused a humongous amount of innocent Jewish deaths in concentration camps and that they were criminally responsible for these deaths.

 

[Blagsta]

Feel free to e-mail the journalist. I don't see the relevance.

So that's a no then.

 

[Dillinger4]

Onarchy, you have not yet given any reputable, peer-reveiewed sources. Why do you avoid giving sources?

One article.

One sentence from one article. That is most commonly used by holocaust deniers to deny the holocaust.

 

[ymu]

By allowing nature to take over the site, do we run the risk of allowing humanity to forget what happened and set the stage for future questioning of the Holocaust?

Ninety-nine per cent of what we know we do not actually have the physical evidence to prove . . . it has become part of our inherited knowledge.

I don't think that the Holocaust is an exceptional case in that sense. We in the future – remembering the Holocaust – will operate in the same way that we remember most things from the past. We will know about it from literature and eyewitness testimony. . . . We are very successful in remembering the past in that manner. That's how we know that Cesar was killed on the Ides of March. To put the holocaust in some separate category and to demand that it be there – to demand that we have more material evidence – is actually us somehow giving in to the Holocaust deniers by providing some sort of special evidence.

Now it makes sense. The 99% statement does not refer to the Holocaust at all - it refers to "what we know", aka the sum of human knowledge. And it was said in answer to the question of allowing Birkenau to be reclaimed by nature - ie allowing it the physical evidence to disappear.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

if I were a prosecutor against the Nazis in a court of law where the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt I would not take the chance of including the gas chambers in the accusations.

We'll have to add 'law' to the long list of subjects about which know nothing, then.

 

[invisibleplanet]

i didn't say that! I said that if i were a prosecutor against the nazis in a court of law where the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt i would not take the chance of including the gas chambers in the accusations. And as to the testimony of thousands of survivors. So many inaccuracies have been found in so many witnesses that the defense would have a field day. Rather than to jeopardize the case with embarassing revelations of such inaccuracies, which in a court of law would be sufficient to cast doubt on the credibility of the witnesses, i would focus on what we do know for certain and can prove with physical evidence, namely that the nazis caused a humongous amount of innocent jewish deaths in concentration camps and that they were criminally responsible for these deaths.

Source these claims. Provide citations for your claims.

 

[SpineyNorman]

This is getting pretty ridiculous! I was making a benign and completely uncontroversial statement about WWII and all of a sudden I've got the whole hornets' nest over me! What's wrong with you people? If you ask ANY historian on WWII (and no I don't mean David Irving) about the physical evidence for the deliberate, intentional industrial killing of the Jews you will get the same answer: it doesn't exist. The mainstream will say that it doesn't exist because the Nazis successfully managed to destroy all the evidence, all gas chambers, all documents etc. before the allies rolled in. I don't see why I should document this with academic references when this is in no way controversial.

Notice that there is ample physical evidence that a HUGE amount of Jews died in the concentration camps, but as far as I know NOT from gassing or other deliberate industrial killing. Again, this doesn't mean that there was no gas chambers or no gassing, only that the physical evidence for it is absent.

Apparently I have to stand on trial for something you have conjured in your imagination about my views on this subject. Therefore I will make very explicit my views so that there can be no misunderstanding. Were a huge number of innocent Jews rounded up in concentration camps by the Nazis? Yes. Did a huge number of them die? Yes. Were the Nazis responsible for their deaths? Absolutely. Was this evil? Indeed. Are there any circumstances that in any way reduces the evilness or responsibility of the Nazis for these deaths? Absolutely not.

Does it matter whether these Jews were killed in gas chambers or "just" died of starvation, disease or freezing? Not to me. The Nazis are just as evil and responsible in either case. Stalin starved millions of innocent Ukrainians to death in the 1930s and the fact that they died of hunger rather than of a bullet or gas in no way reduces the evilness of Stalin. Quite the contrary.

So, then the million dollar question: were the Jews gassed to death? If I were a prosecutor in the case against the Nazis in a trial, I would prosecute them for killing the Jews, but I would recognize that the lack of evidence would make it hard to convict the Nazis on the account of gassing. This does not mean that the gassing did not take place, only that it would be a gamble in a court of law to try to have them convicted for this.

I find it disturbing that the people who agree with Hitler on 95% of the issue seems to predicate their evaluation of Hitler on whether he gassed the Jews or not. Let's for a second imagine (purely hypothetical, guys, no need for alarm) that new evidence came to light that decisively proved that there were no gas chambers and that the vast majority of jews died from starvation and disease. Would this change your view of the Nazis? Would you then say "oh, since he didn't actually deliberately gas them to death he was not really that bad a guy"? I bloody well hope not!

I believe that the reason the Nazis created such a trauma in the European psyche is because Germany wasn't a third world country filled with illiterates. Germany was the land of philosophers and poets and the book "Mein Kampf" was a massive bestseller in that country. What Europe finds so scary is the fact that it wasn't dumb brutes that embraced Nazism. It was the intellectuals, the university students, the well-educated.

I think that the Nazis provided Europe with a glimpse of an extremely disturbing truth: the Germans were civilized, they were educated, they were socially concerned. They were like the rest of Europe. And it ended up with death and destruction on a massive scale. If that could happen in Germany there is no reason why it couldn't happen in any other European country. It made Europeans ask themselves for a fraction of a second: "are we the baddies?" And that is a very, very good question.

I use to say that a Nazi is nothing other than a really, really, really angry and hateful social democrat. Special circumstances (WWI, a major depression) lead the Germans down the path of Nazism. Up until recently Europe has only seen happy times since WWII. But what if those times are changing? What if we've entered a depression that is equal in size of the 30s? What if Europe all of a sudden is facing many extremely challenging problems simultaneously such as abysmall birth rates, a huge debt crisis, a welfare state in crisis, massive immigration problems, possibly a bit of peak oil and possibly an emerging islamofascism in the Middle East? How will all those fat'n happy social democrats then react and behave? I'm not sure, but I must admit that I really don't want to experience the answer.

First of all you've already been told, on several occasions, that there IS hard evidence of the use of poison gas in the death camps. And, lo and behold, many of the perpetrators were convicted in a court of law. Now, I'm not swallowing this feeble attempt to get out of it, but now you've agreed that the extermination of the Jews was indeed "evil", can you please let us know what you think of the other roughly 50% of the victims of Nazi the extermination policies, namely communists, trade unionists, members of other minority religions (eg. Jehovas witnesses), the disabled and socialists. Or can we assume that, from your defence of Pinochet, you approve of most of these?

Of course, the real lesson, at the most basic level, is that if you demonise people, claim that they're evil and a threat to liberty etc. for long enough normally decent people will carry out disgusting acts. A bit like where you demonise "socialists" (though most aren't even socialists). And what do we find? Your belief that all "socialists" are evil encourages you to justify the crimes of Pinochet and to completely disregard the non-Jewish holocaust victims. Good going.

I also happen to believe that the "Islamo-fascism" thesis is yet another case of the ideologically motivated stretching of the definition of fascism. There is, however, a genuine debate to be had there (but not one I'm willing to engage in in this thread).

Oh, and you have no idea what our reasons for detesting Hitler, Nazism or fascism are. I speak only for myself, though I'd be surprised if I'm on my own here, but the gassing of Jews is most certainly NOT the only problem I have with Nazism/Hitler/Fascism. Just to name one, social darwinism. But you're with him on that one - you've already ascribed innate racial characteristics to the Ashkenazi (sp) and your economic doctrine is inherently social darwinistic, as is the Randist philosophy as a whole.

 

[Blagsta]

Yes.

And I should add, as it seems to me everybody already thinks I am a neo-nazi, one of the most profound experiences of my life was sitting through the entire length of Shoah.

so you disagree with onarchy? What was the point of your post?

 

[Crispy]

Now it makes sense. The 99% statement does not refer to the Holocaust at all - it refers to "what we know", aka the sum of human knowledge. And it was said in answer to the question of allowing Birkenau to be reclaimed by nature - ie allowing it the physical evidence to disappear.

And he's saying that it's ok to allow the physical evidence to disappear, because it has already been so well recorded and corroborated, that it's not really needed any more. The holocaust is now firmly embedded in history, without need to be checked against primary evidence.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

At the risk of people getting annoyed at me for letting onarchy off the hook here ...

Onar, leaving the question of whether you're a holocaust denier to one side for the moment, did I understand correctly what you were trying to say when you pushed that button as, in effect: "racially motivated mass-murder was not an important feature of Nazism but an enthusiasm for state funded public services and so on was, hence fascism is the same thing as socialism (and almost every other sort of government we're familiar with) ... " or something of the sort?

 

[Blagsta]

You're feeding me a straw man. I've never said anything even remotely close to what you're writing, and neither has Onar. Which is why I posted in the first place. Onar is no Holocaust denier. Yet here, he is branded as one.

He has very clearly denied the existence of gas chambers.

 

[DotCommunist]

What Europe finds so scary is the fact that it wasn't dumb brutes that embraced Nazism. It was the intellectuals, the university students, the well-educated.

Ernst Roehms brownshirts?