Unfortunately, as has been explained to you several times before over the years, the goalposts in 2026 for 'proving' any historical event before 2026 have expanded to include all of the available evidence as of 2026.Archie wrote: ↑Sun Jan 04, 2026 8:40 pm Spinning off my reply to the comment below since it's far afield of the original topic.
My gut reaction to this (and several of BA's comments prior to this) was one of amazement. It is odd to see a Holocaust promoter abandoning what has traditionally been vigorously defended territory and to suggest it is of no consequence.bombsaway wrote: ↑Sun Jan 04, 2026 4:55 amSo what if Nuremberg was hypocritical and biased? I'll admit this is indeed circumstantial evidence for the conspiracy you believe in, but it is exceedingly weak circumstantial evidence. To me it's like saying you should believe the Holocaust happened because the Nazis were anti semitic. Maybe that's enough for some people, but there are dumb revisionists too.Archie wrote: ↑Sun Jan 04, 2026 3:32 am [...]
You replied but you did not meaningfully address it.
"When has the victorious side ever been prosecuted?" Uh, this is a problem revisionists have been pointing out for decades. That Nuremberg was victor's justice and was hypocritical and biased. This is Revisionism 101 stuff.
Are you new here?
I think the major source of disagreement here can be resolved by addressing a simple question: Where are the goalposts?
My position has always been that in terms of the Holocaust debate, the goalposts are exactly where the Holocaust mainstream has decided to place them. And the Holocaust mainstream has set a very demanding standard for themselves in suggesting that the Holocaust has been factually proven with 100% confidence. They say the proof is so overwhelming that no debate can ever be permitted over the inherent historicity of it. And no one is allowed to question their interpretation of the evidence or present counterevidence.
I am holding Holocaust promoters to this 100% certainty standard until Lipstadt and company concede otherwise.
Under the 100% certainty standard, if revisionists are able to create even a small chance of doubt, say 1%, this would be of some significance as it would open the door to further debate which they are unwilling to have.
Let's look at the classic revisionists points about Nuremberg in light of the 100% certainty standard.
-It is claimed that the Holocaust is proved with absolute, 100% certainty. This conclusion is said to be inerrant and infallible.
-Suppose we ask WHEN these facts were established with certainty. The traditional answer would have to be that it was at Nuremberg (and similar trials). This is where the precedent was established.
-If Nuremberg was one-sided and propagandistic and its conclusions are highly vulnerable to critique, this calls everything into question.
From the traditional point of view, the Nuremberg critique is a crucial point because it 1) establishes reasonable doubt about the precedent (which opens the door to further debate), 2) it materially erodes the original evidentiary basis for the Holocaust, 3) it even explains to an extent the question of how such a legend could have taken hold. Does it absolutely disprove the Holocaust by itself? No, because you would still need to evaluate the claims, some of which could in theory have some real basis even if the trials were a frame-up.
Back to bombsaway's argument. Because the "100% certainty" standard is completely impossible to defend intellectually, people like bombsaway don't even try. He knows he would be laughed out of the room if he did that around here. They know that if they want to engage with revisionists and have a chance of convincing anyone they will need to bring more than "just trust me." Notice however that what bombsaway attempts to do here is a near complete inversion of the mainstream's standard. Instead of him recognizing the onus of proving the Holocaust with 100% certainty, he demands 100% certainty of revisionists, and he dismisses any point that does not, in isolation, 100% disprove the Holocaust. Again, this is absurd given the position of Holocaust mainstream.
If revisionists are able to establish any material doubt, even something modest like 5%, this would imo demand a major public and academic controversy. Needless to say, I think revisionists have gone far, far beyond that, and it has only gone unacknowledged for political reasons.
The goalposts in the 1940s depended significantly on the vantage point - what was known and knowable in Poland was fundamentally different to what was known or knowable in the United States to those who could only read English.
What was known in general about WWII and the fate of the Jews also didn't consist solely of what was entered into evidence at the International Military Tribunal, the main Nuremberg trial. In turn, the IMT evidence didn't just concern what we now call the Holocaust.
This is all the more apparent in the 2020s since so much 1940s source material has been digitised, translated, worked through, allowing us to see what was known and what was publicised or transmitted in summary form back then, but also providing entirely independent sources such as diaries, letters and indeed further photographs.
It's certainly true that IMT provided considerable exposure or amplification for the charges that had been already circulating in wartime or which were publicised to varying degrees in 1945 before the start of Nuremberg. So no doubt one could find a day in late 1946 when IMT loomed especially large, but the evidence kept on expanding even in the 1940s, even from a western perspective, as seen in early histories of the Holocaust from Poliakov in 1951 onwards, which tend to cite from the NMT trials much more.
I don't know where anyone has said that the Holocaust is proven with absolute 100% certainty, is inerrant or infallible. It'd help your case if you assembled some quotes from Deborah Lipstadt and others saying anything like this. I am fairly sure you can find non-historians and those like Lipstadt who had not worked through the evidence in full saying similar things, but Lipstadt and other historians also often point to how elements can be revised, because they clearly have been, as is normal for big complex historical events, for mega-death tolls, and much else.
There are likely many who've said something to the effect of the Holocaust is proven "beyond all reasonable doubt". Firstly, the beyond all reasonable doubt standard in courts has been tested through opinion polls, surveys of jurors and in legal commentary to be less than 100% certainty. Standards of proof in US law have at least four defined levels:
Some Credible Evidence/Probable Cause (Lowest standard)
Preponderance of the Evidence (More likely than not, common in most civil cases) = 51%+
Clear and Convincing Evidence (Highly probable, used for significant issues) - generally held to be around 75%
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Highest standard, used in criminal cases) - 95-100%
This is copied from Google's AI, supplemented by the percentage. A study surveying 124 judges had slightly lower percentages:
https://judicature.duke.edu/articles/le ... e-numbers/The means, from lowest to highest are as follows: reasonable articulable suspicion (42.1 percent), probable cause (49.7 percent), preponderance of the evidence (54.4 percent), substantial probability (55.3 percent), clear and convincing evidence (73.4 percent), and beyond a reasonable doubt (90.1 percent).
How 'proven' something is in history will change over time as more evidence becomes available. But something could be successfully 'doubted' and challenged. This is where the subsequent 80 years come in from *both* perspectives.
Lipstadt wasn't actively talking about Holocaust denial until at earliest the 1980s. With hindsight, we can see that the early revisionist arguments and claims turned out to be largely hot air from the 1940s well into the 1980s, with 1980s (or post-1978) revisionism facing the issue that the evidence or access to the evidence clearly *had* expanded since IMT, otherwise none of them would have gone beyond the IMT evidence, which is clearly not true.
Very few specific 'revisionist' claims from the 1940s-early 1980s really survive, except for marking out a few things that must be forgeries, coerced statements, etc; how it is argued the sources are forgeries, coerced, invented has changed rather drastically in most cases, and many once popular attacks have really failed. There is very little in Rassinier, Butz and even early Faurisson that has survived. This is because the conclusion had been reached in advance, and then the writers went 'shopping for receipts', as someone put it recently about current partisan 'journalism'. Of course you can find receipts if you squint hard enough and lie shamelessly, but this doesn't tend to lead to lasting results. Again: which arguments in Rassinier are still worth considering? Even other revisionists criticised Butz for nearly all of his core claims about Auschwitz, then came up with 'better' arguments.
All 'revisionist' arguments about the documentation for Auschwitz before 1989-1993 with Pressac's two books turned out to be worthless. The goalposts moved. The sheer number of attempts after 1989 to challenge Pressac shows this.
By the 1980s, a thousand further trials of Nazi-era crimes had taken place in West Germany, not all directly related to the Holocaust, but some clearly were, like the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial. The investigations and trials reexamined 1940s evidence, accessed a wider range of it (copies of materials from Poland etc) and expanded on it with their own interrogations and cross-examinations. While there were 'revisionist' attacks on some of these trials, most were overlooked, but also most were still inaccessible. The 'revisionists' couldn't talk about a trial they'd not seen, so they didn't. That remains the case today - no 'revisionist' has gone through the Dejaco-Ertl trial from 1972 in Vienna, so all they can acknowledge is the snippets which Pressac discussed.
From the 1940s to 1980s, and really beyond, there was also a general failure to identify counter-evidence that might have served to raise 'reasonable doubt'. Nazis on the run in Latin America did not come forward with counter-evidence, the former Nazis who had survived the 1940s in Germany and Austria also did not come up with much - the claims of Christophersen and Staeglich were about it, and not very credible from an objective perspective.
The Holocaust really was a missing persons case as well as a murder case, and the missing Jews remained missing. That stayed true after the collapse of communism and remains true to the present day. This is likely why bombsaway assesses the chance of revisionism being true, or the Holocaust not having happened as generally portrayed from the 1940s to the present, at a very, very low level: "I would put the probability at something like 1 out of a million or a billion."
From circa 1988, 'revisionists' began to proffer arguments they felt were slamdunks, notably the Leuchter-Rudolf 'Prussian Blue' argument followed by claims about the impossibility of mass cremation on the scale claimed. But other technical arguments eventually evaporated - the diesel issue being one example - while there were good reasons to disregard the Prussian Blue claim as unconvincing. Leuchter's appearance at the second Zuendel trial was a debacle. The mass graves issue was then undermined by Richard Krege's overly confident claim that the ground at Treblinka was entirely undisturbed under ground-penetrating radar. It's difficult to convey how damaging this was to the credibility of the 'movement', especially when so much more evidence emerged in the 21st Century of the condition of these camp sites, from photographs that had not been widely known before, from documents about grave-robbing, and from archaeological work (with more ongoing to this day).
The 'beyond all reasonable doubt' line remains valid because:
1) there still isn't any convincing counter-evidence of survival
2) the volume of evidence in general continues to expand - i.e. become more accessible and more known, and this hasn't been dealt with systematically by the 'revisionists' of the past 30 years
3) the technical arguments are still unconvincing.
When Lipstadt was most active commenting on denial and around the time she published her book in 1993, 'revisionism' was certainly in a phase where it had a brief upsurge, exemplified by increased publicity in the US and elsewhere. In the US, Britain and after the quashing of Zuendel's conviction also Canada, there were certain moments when access to the necessary material was less easy, and 'revisionists' could give the impression of being on the march. But the evidence coming to light after the collapse of communism was changing things, which was really summed up in Irving vs Lipstadt in 2000, which was a debacle for 'revisionism'.
I think you could easily find over-confident claims in the 1980s and first part of the 1990s that the historicity of the Holocaust was beyond reasonable doubt, before many of the key pieces of evidence people would point to in the 21st Century became known.
In 2026, in the English-speaking world, you have a number of spaces including this forum where a 'revisionist' can try to articulate ideas worthy of a debate. The record of history can always be revised if new evidence comes to light, and one cannot rule out new evidence emerging, even if it seems exceedingly unlikely at this stage (1 in a million or billion chance, as bombsaway said).
The thing is, you're not exactly winning the internal debate on your 'side', or potentially sympathetic circles, as exemplified by yet another article in The Occidental Observer declaring traditional 'revisionism' to be esoteric and pointless.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2 ... holocaust/
The same can be said for many other previously sympathetic influencers - yes, Nick Fuentes has denied the Holocaust in the past, and no doubt will throw out a few scraps in that direction, but his focus is elsewhere, just as it is for Richard Spencer. When the two of them sat down for their annual catch-up at the end of 2025, they eventually got to antisemitism and Israel vis-a-vis the GOP after Trump, but the Holocaust didn't come up once.
