Where are the Goalposts?

[pilgrimofdark]

Fascinating to see Vox Day's neologism midwit continues to spread.

Here's Vox Day on the Holocaust, for context of where we get this new paradigmatic word.

The Holocaust never happened: a logical proof

Being a superintelligence and the bestselling political philosopher on the planet, it is child’s play to logically prove that the Holocaust never happened.

1. Science is the sole legitimate arbiter of truth.
2. Science cannot prove the Holocaust happened.
3. That which cannot be proved by science does not, and did not, exist.
4. Therefore, the Holocaust never happened.

QED. (drops mic)

Obviously a bit reductive and lacking a definition of "Holocaust."

His most recent book explores innumeracy of biologists in the context of the theory of evolution by natural selection.

You can just imagine academics sitting in their offices drinking coffee together and decrying the midwittery of "Extreme Right Wing Holocaust Deniers" using a term coined by an "Extreme Right Wing Holocaust Denier," setting a trap for themselves to be investigated for "Extreme Right Wing Affinities" if their universities ever become aware they are insulting the intelligence of people using a term that originated from an "Extreme Right Wing Holocaust Denier."

I guess some people would steelman an argument that these academics were simply "easily duped" into using a term coined by an "Extreme Right Wing Holocaust Denier" because they are "frankly idiots," but that doesn't instill confidence. And I wouldn't say that.

[SanityCheck]

Your point is that there have been overconfident claims about the certainty of the Holocaust, but you haven't tracked them over time or clarified who said them and who didn't. That would be a worthy exercise, to collect such remarks and pull them together, rather than project claims like 'infallibility' onto others without citing anyone saying this.

First, let me just make sure you saw our new invitation, in case you would like to give it a try. Or if you know anyone who would be interested.
https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=686

It seems that every time I make a point, you demand a lengthy homework assignment. Hmm.

No, that was a suggestion, note the conditional: "That would be a worthy exercise".

It should be obvious that collecting receipts and having those to hand would make the point more powerful, but also just as obvious that one needs to check whether the slogan or catchphrase is used by historians vs activists vs people on the internet.

Why not just post a good counterexample, if you are aware of one? By now I have read a good amount of Holocaust material and authors and the number who have even hinted at any meaningful doubt is basically zero. Reitlinger and Pressac are the two major exceptions that come to mind (as I discussed here). Maybe a few others (Arno Mayer?) but the exceptions prove the rule. And even the exceptions make relatively minor concessions, they don't admit the possibility that the Holocaust could be mostly a fraud. Even relatively "based" authors like Norman Finkelstein of Albert Lindemann, if they mention revisionists at all, will dismiss them as cranks in very exaggerated fashion.

Now you're moving the goalposts. Historians don't in general express doubt about a topic they're writing up as some kind of routine genuflection to skepticism. The issue you raised was whether people overegg their claims of certainty and confidence that the Holocaust happened, is beyond all reasonable doubt, irrefutable, 100% certain, etc, and I noted that these sorts of rhetorical flourishes seem to be very uncommon in histories of the Holocaust. One could skim over prefaces and conclusions and see what is said.

I'm sure someone somewhere has introduced a book on the Holocaust with such a rhetorical flourish, but just as sure that the flourish is absent from most of them. I'm equally sure that those who typically trot out midwit slogans like 'the most documented event in history' are either non-historian or non-specialist historian activists, coupled with a lot of parrots.

Therefore, whoever says "the Nuremberg trials proved the Holocaust" is offering an utterly midwit opinion, whether they believe it, or are a denier attacking what is in reality a strawman.

This follows from the prior point about the Holocaust being supposedly rock solid history (and revisionism being the equivalent of denying that the Roman Empire existed). If the Holocaust is so rock solid, it is fair to ask WHEN and HOW and the basis of what evidence that incontrovertible solidness was established. And I think Nuremberg is the only answer that makes sense because that is in fact where the core claims (which are today taboo to question) were endorsed as factual and which served as a precedent for all subsequent histories.

No era or event in history is 'rock solid' until the overwhelming majority of sources are available and they've been worked through. There are still new sources coming to light about the ancient and medieval world, so the 'rock solidity' is still revisable for some aspects. And always new perspectives or angles.

The issue with sources is when are they fully available - which on average for 20th Century history meant the 30 Years Rule. Something could be known and accepted straight away, or within a few years of it happening, as with Nazi crimes against humanity. But it's very unlikely all the sources would be known or available at the same time. This holds true for all events, not just the Holocaust.

Certainty, incontrovertibility, etc, emerge over time, because the initial claims based on however limited an amount of evidence were not contradicted by actual counter-evidence.

I am not referring to rejection by a social group for partisan or other reasons, since atrocity denial and minimisation or deflection happens now in realtime in the social media era. There's little doubt that Germans and Austrians in the postwar era were often in denial about Nazi crimes, did not want to talk about them, and expressed doubt when polled. It's also clear that despite a strong motive and incentive to try to figure out how to deny Nazi crimes and "revise history", postwar Germans and Austrians utterly failed to assemble the kind of counter-evidence which would have challenged the evidence publicised in the 1940s, much less the sources which accumulated from the 1950s onwards.

That would or could have included revelations about utterly systematic, every-nation-state-across-Europe, coercion of testimony, and other testimonies and affidavits pointing to what actually happened. There were clear networks around the world, notably into Latin America, as well as within West Germany, like Stille Hilfe, which existed to help defend the accused in renewed war crimes investigations and trials, and which overlapped with other circles seeking to revise some of the 'Nuremberg' verdicts - think of the campaign by Waffen-SS generals and veterans to whitewash the Waffen-SS, which was not entirely without success. But none of this effort, from Der Weg in Argentina to the defense lawyers circuit to Werner Best and others in the support networks, produced meaningful counter-evidence. Nor were there 'in the event of my death' type statements or anything that has emerged in subsequent decades.

Some things brought up at Nuremberg were after all contradicted in subsequent decades, Katyn being the clearest example - the US was bringing it up in the early 1950s, and the Soviet Union under Gorbachev admitted it was responsible. Other claims were revised by considering further actual evidence, so we're not stuck repeating the Soviet 4M death toll for Auschwitz.

The passage of time makes the second-order conspiracies needed to explain away why no real counter-evidence has come to light less and less likely. New evidence could always emerge at any time, so 'incontrovertible' is just rhetoric.

What has clearly happened is more evidence for the 'Nuremberg' claims, or claims of the immediate postwar era, coming to light, so what was submitted at IMT especially looks like the tippiest tip of an iceberg. But that was already true in the 1940s, with the benefit of hindsight and pointing to a lot of clues in early books.

It's equally obvious that 21st Century histories of the Third Reich and Holocaust have expanded to consider many other provenances for sources and evidence, and indeed that 21st Century 'revisionists' also discuss and attack a much wider range of evidence than just "Nuremberg". This is why the Nuremberg fixation, including Germar Rudolf's recent 'pocketbook', is such midwittery.

Rudolf explains that his motivation for writing the book was that Michael Vann cited Nuremberg in the debate the did on the Jake Shields podcast.

And Michael Vann was expressing a midwit opinion about Nuremberg and the Holocaust. Vann isn't a historian of the Third Reich or Holocaust, and evidently isn't well read on either subject, so this illustrates the problem almost perfectly.

I would also point out that investigations should ideally be as fresh and close to events as possible, so that is another reason to prefer earlier material (over say statements collected in the 1960s). If other early sources become available, should they be considered? Of course! We do use them when available, although most of us cannot access them quite as easily as you can. Please let us know when you find something good. Until then, I will discount your assurance that there is lots of proof in newer sources that only you have seen with a grain of salt.

I didn't say anything about 'proof', on the contrary, I noted how both conventional historians *and* revisionists (well, mainly Mattogno) consider other provenances than just 'Nuremberg' in the 21st Century:

It's equally obvious that 21st Century histories of the Third Reich and Holocaust have expanded to consider many other provenances for sources and evidence, and indeed that 21st Century 'revisionists' also discuss and attack a much wider range of evidence than just "Nuremberg".

Referring to 21st Century histories also means it's not just I who have seen the sources in question. After all, quite a lot of them are published in document editions or as diaries; many more are discussed and referenced in what amount to standard works from a conventional POV; and still more have been digitised, so are accessible to all.

In America, Amazon has banned the sale of revisionist books and Google heavily censors revisionist websites. YouTube also doesn't allow revisionist videos. I consider bans by these corporations to be censorship as these are quasi-public monopolies. Revisionists are barred from most well-paying jobs.

Shifting the goalposts again - revisionists are not 'thrown into jail' in the US because of the First Amendment. Butz even retained his well-paid tenured academic job.

Censorship is something governments do; businesses are under no obligation to make anything available if they don't like it. And their bans are mostly relatively recent - Amazon's was in 2017, after years when one could buy the Holocaust Handbooks as Kindle ebooks. The key Holocaust Handbooks are given away for free or sold directly from Castle Hill and now Armreg; the Amazon ban didn't stop me from paying for revisionist ebooks if I wanted to buy them (and I have bought a number this decade). One can also download Kindle-compatible free ebooks from the Holocaust Handbooks site and load them up directly. Other social media platforms allow revisionism, notably X/Twitter, after reversing previous policies, ditto for video platforms.

The problems with the earlier revisionist authors are twofold, especially in comparison to what came later. Firstly, they simply didn't consider enough of the evidence, Rassinier's discussion of three key witnesses was already absurd considering what other evidence was being cited even in the early histories. He was writing early enough that he couldn't have factored in something like the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, but that wasn't the case for Butz or Faurisson, while all of them whiffed on the full extent of the Eichmann trial.

Secondly, the failure to provide substantial counter-evidence: vague handwaves about 'Jews went were Jews are' and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories lacking any direct proof. That was because the former Nazis failed to provide the necessary counter-evidence despite having every opportunity to do so in the 1950s-1960s, whether in Latin America or West Germany and Austria.

I think you are severely understating how damaging it is to undercut a witness like Hoess. Most pioneering works will have limited scope. Doesn't mean they are wrong.

A bit of a non-sequitur since I didn't mention Hoess in the quote you ostensibly responded to.

Hoess is amply corroborated for much of his memoir and interrogations, and is therefore still cited, alongside other witnesses and sources. He isn't relied on for the dating of a Hitler order because better contemporary sources have come along for that and the timelines are clearer; the pretzel contortions in his account stem from him being off by six months for many dates, even of uncontroversial things, in 1941-3, together with trying to portray himself as being less of a pioneer. The notion that any of the confusion has anything to do with being pressed by interrogators or coerced is utterly risible, since he burbled on for many hundreds of pages, after several dozen other Auschwitz SS had churned out hundreds more pages of statements and interrogations, before Hoess was even captured.

[Callafangers]

SC seems to give little acknowledgement to the reality that a prohibition or extreme suppression of revisionist views by the establishment (includes governments, media, academia -- the key information sources, period) equates to an assertion of 'infallibility' of the orthodox narrative. Ironically, such prohibition/suppression also renders the Holocaust narrative unfalsifiable (see: Popper, Sagan), which logically/scientifically invalidates it.

SC says "historians don't in general express doubt about a topic they're writing up as some kind of routine genuflection to skepticism"; but this suggests they are complicit (or at least complacent) with the same above-mentioned status quo. The addition of "in general" and "routine", here (by SC), is also goalposts set way too far. The problem is that historians don't ever express doubt about the Holocaust narrative or any of its key claims (nor even encourage such critical perspectives in their classrooms, apparently), even as important rationale for them to consider doing so has arisen. Instead, the cult of historians treats revisionism as the 'enemy' to be banished, abolished, eliminated.

SC also seems to maintain his position that it matters very little by whom the sources are 'worked through'. He insists a context of post-war global conquest (or desperation) do not altogether justify extreme skepticism to almost all Allied/Jewish/'eyewitness' claims of German barbarity which are not aligned (or at least compatible) with official, contemporary wartime German documents.

Interestingly, SC has for many years evaded any serious discussion or debate of the technical questions of the 'Holocaust', despite his immersion in the topic and debate against revisionists at-large. Perhaps his niche or specialty keeps him focused on bottom-up spoken/written word evidence and allegations (e.g. claimed witness reports) rather than on anything scientific or verifiable. But this seems strange, perhaps reflecting a lack of confidence in his ability to hold the position for the 'Holocaust' on technical grounds. Adding to this, it can be said that it is now confirmed in-practice there is not a single exterminationist whom could be considered qualified or capable of doing so. Muehlenkamp has long retired his effort, fully-squashed by Mattogno, where the latter has had no compelling challenges in almost a decade.

SC insists on some need for additional revisionist counter-evidence, expecting organizations like Der Weg or Werner Best should have found compelling evidence to prove a certain degree of Jewish survival or of non-gassing, both of which would have been impossible despite no actual 'Holocaust'.

"Let's gather some of the top secret German documents on Jewish policy which were destroyed and confiscated at war's end."
"Let's ask Stalin for some of his reliable demographic records behind the Iron Curtain. Or, perhaps he'll let us borrow some Soviet citizens to interview?"
"Let's prove that delousing agent was never used to kill a single Jew."
"Let's prove there were no buildings with motor vehicle engine exhaust piped inside."
"Let's prove delousing vans that can't be found didn't kill any Jews."
"Let's do all of this despite the fact that the world already believes all of this necessarily did happen."

SC also forgets that Michael Vann only joined Jake Shields' podcast because SC (Terry) would not, nor would any other Holocaust historian which SC would argue could have better represented the "real" narrative.

SC then continues to gaslight revisionists and readers alike; "revisionists are not 'throw into jail'", he says, as though [still] misunderstanding the point: that the table is tilted and revisionists cannot expect to live safe, comfortable lives as revisionists. He points out that Holocaust Handbooks are given away for free, failing to recognize that this does not exactly entice new authors into the field and is only done so out of the decency of the authors who recognize such importance to the knowledge they share that they offer this service freely to society.

[HansHill]

Interestingly, SC has for many years evaded any serious discussion or debate of the technical questions of the 'Holocaust', despite his immersion in the topic and debate against revisionists at-large. Perhaps his niche or specialty keeps him focused on bottom-up spoken/written word evidence and allegations (e.g. claimed witness reports) rather than on anything scientific or verifiable. But this seems strange, perhaps reflecting a lack of confidence in his ability to hold the position for the 'Holocaust' on technical grounds. Adding to this, it can be said that it is now confirmed in-practice there is not a single exterminationist whom could be considered qualified or capable of doing so. Muehlenkamp has long retired his effort, fully-squashed by Mattogno, where the latter has had no compelling challenges in almost a decade.

+1, and I asked a very similar question, below. From what I can gather, Dr Terry's rejection of the technical arguments hinges on 1) Markiewicz' measurement of the pH level in 1993 and 2) the kinetics of cyanide particles in the interior of the masonry (exposure time argument)

It would be interesting to see if he or HC have offered up anything more compelling than Dr Green.

My last point I'll make here is that you seem to write off the technical arguments as "unconvincing", but I haven't actually seen an argument from you on this. My understanding from the Orthodox perspective is that the strongest rebuttal to the Rudolf study is that of Dr Richard Green. Am I right in saying this set of rebuttals is why you think these technical arguments fail? If you and / or HC have offered up similar or better arguments can you please link them to me?

[Callafangers]

+1, and I asked a very similar question, below. From what I can gather, Dr Terry's rejection of the technical arguments hinges on 1) Markiewicz' measurement of the pH level in 1993 and 2) the kinetics of cyanide particles in the interior of the masonry (exposure time argument)

It would be interesting to see if he or HC have offered up anything more compelling than Dr Green.

The question of the Kremas at Birkenau are important, of course, but I was wondering about the technical arguments of all types, across all camps. That is, grave volumes at each of the AR camps and feasibility of cremation operations within alleged timelines and constructions. These are epic fails on the exterminationist side that have only increasingly become refined in support of the revisionist position, so much that not even a strained narrative supports the extermination claims. It's an area revisionism has pretty much moved on from (no need to beat a dead horse), other than to repackage/simplify the same arguments which have gone unchallenged, for accessibility's sake.

If I were SC/Terry, this would trouble me, or at least interest me. He must have spent some time in trying to challenge these arguments over the last 5-10 years, right? Yet, he only chimes in when the question is about demographics, witness claims, etc. Do "missing Jews" only matter if they remained alive?

[SanityCheck]

SC seems to give little acknowledgement to the reality that a prohibition or extreme suppression of revisionist views by the establishment (includes governments, media, academia -- the key information sources, period) equates to an assertion of 'infallibility' of the orthodox narrative. Ironically, such prohibition/suppression also renders the Holocaust narrative unfalsifiable (see: Popper, Sagan), which logically/scientifically invalidates it.

Your invocation of Popperian falsificationism got me thinking. I've read more than enough philosophy of science and philosophy of history to know that falsificationism is a contested model, but also that it was originally applied to scientific theories and thus often involved prediction. Popper famously criticised some models which might be considered social science for their unfalsifiability, such as Marxism and Freudianism, which failed to predict things. But there isn't so much discussion of Popperianism in the philosophy of history.

A great deal of history cannot be 'falsified' in a meaningful sense, especially at the factual level of personalities, organisations and events. One cannot falsify the historical existence of the House Un-American Activities Committee any more than one can falsify the fact that the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial took place in West Germany between 1963 and 1965. Perhaps you can explain in relation to Popperianism how one could apply 'falsification' to such organisations or events.

The other problem is what you call 'the Holocaust narrative' and what I and others in the real world might understand by this are two very different things. I use the term Holocaust as a shorthand for the era from 1933 to 1945 as it relates to the persecution and murder of European Jews by the Germans, their allies, collaborators (and indeed some parts of ordinary societies who participated or profited in various ways). You seem to restrict 'the Holocaust narrative' to the gassing and cremation procedures at a few camps conventionally considered extermination camps or dual-purpose concentration and extermination camps. Your use of 'the Holocaust narrative' doesn't even really include the other functions of Auschwitz-Birkenau as a labour camp, site of agricultural and medical experiments, site of punishment and executions, and so on, except very selectively if someone starts ranting about, say, Mengele.

Actual 'Holocaust narratives' have since Poliakov in 1951 understood the T4 euthanasia gassings as well as mass shootings as an integral part of the 'narrative', i.e. the origins and evolution of Nazi policies of mass murder which culminated in the extermination camps, with shootings and other gassings continuing in parallel or even following on from deportations/gassings. This has been narrated and synthesised over and over again. Just look at the short chapter in Volker Ullrich's second volume of his Hitler biography for the war years, where in 265 notes he weaves in the precedent of the euthanasia gassings together with the mass shootings and the extermination camps. Others have done it better than Ullrich, whether they are weaving in and entangling a 'Holocaust narrative' within a biography of Hitler or Himmler, a history of the Third Reich, a history of a country under German occupation, or in its own right as a history of the Holocaust, like Saul Friedlander's The Years of Extermination.

There isn't an easy way to disentangle the actual 'Holocaust narrative' over 1933-1945 from the histories of the Third Reich and WWII. Germany has to annexe Austria to start persecuting Austrian Jews and forcing them to emigrate; it has to invade Poland before it can force Jews into ghettos; and it has to occupy its former ally Italy before it can conduct a round-up of Jews in Rome in October 1943. So all of these things show up in actual 'Holocaust narratives', along with accounts of round-ups and deportations, like the Vel d'Hiv round-up in Paris on July 16-17, 1942.

In turn, the events and places which feature in actual 'Holocaust narratives' have been the causes of trials, memorials, museums, novels, histories, and feature films, as well as an aftermath in other respects. One cannot 'falsify' the fact that the Vel d'Hiv round-up prompted three memorials in Paris, two documentaries and four feature films in France, or the fact that the French state has declared the non-returning deportees to be legally dead. The only way of directly 'falsifying' the latter would be to show that someone thought to be missing actually survived, which happened to non-Jews declared missing and legally dead after WWII as well in small numbers. So this means in significant numbers, using evidence.

That might eventually produce not a 'falsification' but a genuine revision, based on positive evidence, instead of weird rules designed to help Jew-haters avoid Holocaust cooties even as they obsessively fuss over some parts (but not others) of the Holocaust. You guys seem like masochists a lot of the time, although I admit the same could be said about me bothering to see what you're up to these days...

Those rules still won't 'falsify' the historical record of the trials, museums, films, novels, histories, memoirs, and publication or digitisation of sources about the extermination camps, as well as the cultural, intellectual, social and political (and international) discussion of them, especially Auschwitz, from 1945 to the present.

More to the point, there's a problem with how you guys think of 'narrative' and what one needs to do to change a narrative. If you're not reducing 'the Holocaust narrative' to gassing-and-cremation-only, revisionists seem to use it to refer to interpretations, or meta-narratives. But there just isn't one single interpretation or meta-narrative about the Holocaust. One can argue with the interpretations, and you might refute some through straightforward argument. That isn't really 'falsification', since the interpretations aren't scientific theories.

The metanarrative level is an entirely different sense of 'narrative' to recounting a history. The persecution and murder of European Jews between 1933-1945 can be recounted in many different narratives, as noted above - as part of another history, such as a Hitler biography or account of the Third Reich, or a history of a country under occupation, or in its own right. The details don't imply anything about the significance after 1945 for a particular national or political position.

Those narratives cannot be 'falsified', they can only be revised. They have after all proliferated dramatically since 1945, with varying levels of detail and sourcing, varying levels of zooming in and out, and shown the same kind of evolution as any other collection of historical narratives. Every history, every biography, every memoir, is a narrative.

'Revisionism' hasn't produced a comparable narrative of its own. The revisionist literature is not written like conventional history - only a few authors, like Butz and Crowell, have some elements of this basic tell-a-story sense of narrative. Worse, a lot of the arguments made seem intended to avoid recounting a narrative, and end up distracting from any sense of story. But that makes them often long-winded and therefore ineffective, since the arguments often cannot be integrated into a narrative.

Case in point, your arguments about Himmler's speeches, asserting that various German words don't mean what they obviously mean. If you read conventional histories, especially in German, they can just quote from the speeches alongside other points and sources. They don't need to interrupt the flow with extra commentary. None of the attempts in published revisionist literature to 'reinterpret' the speeches or key words (such as those attempted by Germar Rudolf) are couched in a narrative of what was going on in 1943-44, following a presentation of 1939-early 1943, or any other time period.

The longer the arguments, the less they can be woven into a narrative and tell a convincing story. The more ponderous and schematic the approach ('section 1.3.4.1 witness xyz', see all of Mattogno's screeds for examples) the less it resembles conventional history on any topic, and the less concise it is. That has quite serious consequences for how convincing the arguments are, in my view. Mattogno takes hundreds of pages to slice and dice the Zentralbauleitung documents on the Birkenau crematoria and gas chambers, and doesn't deal with them in order, but as a series of crazed source commentaries in isolation from other sources. But there's nothing he or any other revisionist can do to insist that this is the only way the history must be dealt with. And it's lame if one outsources the entire argument to another text and cannot sum it up when needed, or relies on argument-by-authority or quasi-historiography when one is meant to be explaining and narrating. 'So-and-so refuted this', says a pompous revisionist text. And? What happened?

There isn't a singular 'orthodox narrative', but a massive proliferation of narratives, which use a huge variety of sources and references.

Constructing a narrative is done at different levels - school textbook, trade press book, academic monograph - and it's very easy to see that histories will be written using different types of sources, including those pesky eyewitnesses, on almost any subject. Histories of the American Civil War will cite the diaries of Mary Chesnut just like histories of the Third Reich and Holocaust cite the diaries of Victor Klemperer. Accounts of the battle of Normandy or Arnhem use memoirs and oral history interviews. The notion that one can prohibit the use of certain source types or insist on something being included doesn't fly.

It's all very convenient to reduce a huge range of histories to a singular 'orthodox narrative'. It also doesn't work to try taking one of the histories and going into critic mode. What happens when a more recent, more detailed history is written, or if there was an older one that was also detailed, that was overlooked? That has happened to the Holocaust Handbooks series and Carlo Mattogno with vol. 23 on Chelmno. He missed the goalposts, which moved before he published and moved again afterwards. The book is therefore a dud.

There's nothing stopping a revisionist from writing actual history, except it seems their inability to recognise what a historical narrative looks like and how to write one, instead of just criticising and whining and producing A-Z encyclopedias (the format is obviously NOT a narrative history). Maybe the criticisms can add up to a revisionist narrative. Maybe not.

The proliferation of narratives on the conventional side - including Wiki, website summaries, and the different levels of books - highlights that 'the orthodox narrative' also isn't 'infallible', otherwise new narratives wouldn't be produced.

[HansHill]

Maybe the criticisms can add up to a revisionist narrative. Maybe not.

Dr Terry I understand you are a busy man, and I won't keep bugging you about the technical arguments, as it seems you won't be drawn to comment on them in public. That's perfectly reasonable given your background and reputation, as I said before it seems you are most invested in staying in your lane, that of defending and representing "your tribe" (your words, not mine). Some anti-revisionists would do well to match this level of discipline.

All of that being said, and since there are people who are evidently much more interested in the technical arguments (criticisms as you call them), as it stands for those keeping score, the "criticisms" on a technical level have not been addressed adequately and therefore, at bare minimum, the murder weapon, process, and disposal, require revising.

[Callafangers]

Your invocation of Popperian falsificationism got me thinking. I've read more than enough philosophy of science and philosophy of history to know that falsificationism is a contested model, but also that it was originally applied to scientific theories and thus often involved prediction. Popper famously criticised some models which might be considered social science for their unfalsifiability, such as Marxism and Freudianism, which failed to predict things. But there isn't so much discussion of Popperianism in the philosophy of history.

A great deal of history cannot be 'falsified' in a meaningful sense, especially at the factual level of personalities, organisations and events. One cannot falsify the historical existence of the House Un-American Activities Committee any more than one can falsify the fact that the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial took place in West Germany between 1963 and 1965. Perhaps you can explain in relation to Popperianism how one could apply 'falsification' to such organisations or events.

Falsification is both a model and a principle. As a model, it has been superseded by many subsequent refinements. As a principle, it still applies and is widely endorsed as a minimal criterion for science (and other logical assessments).

For most purposes, the claim that "we are all living in a simulation" is not a testable/falsifiable claim. Thus, it remains scientifically and logically invalid (caveat: there is some extraordinary modern science that could eventually change this but, for now, the principle of falsification still rules it out).

There are multiple ways that a claim could lack falsifiability. Examples:

• Lack of specificity
• Lack of feasible analysis
• Lack of freedom to investigate

For our purposes, the third item above is especially important. If an assertion is not subject to being proven false in-practice, it isn't valid. If Brian Shaw (four-time World's Strongest Man winner) claims, "I am stronger than any man in North Korea," his claim is much more valid than if Kim Jong Un (North Korean dictator) were to make the same claim. While both could have their claims go unchallenged, Brian's strength is testable and Kim Jong Un simply prohibits testing. Jong Un's claim is not valid (and looking at the broader patterns, also appears extremely unlikely).

The notion that history should be exempt from the falsification principle is, of course, absurd. Historical hypotheses generally can be falsified, e.g.: "All casualties from the Battle of Waterloo were buried in the cemetery at Y." If later a grave is discovered that predates the battle, the hypothesis is falsified. What matters is whether the hypothesis makes risk‑bearing predictions, i.e. is fully exposed to potential refutation. If not, it is invalidated, at least in practice.

For your examples of the existence of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial:

• There is no prohibition or stigma in conducting an investigation
• The records which support such organizations having existed are subject to scrutiny
• Such an investigation could feasibly be conducted
• The claim is specific enough to be confirmed/refuted, etc.

Therefore, it can definitely be tested whether or not these existed.

The other problem is what you call 'the Holocaust narrative' and what I and others in the real world might understand by this are two very different things. I use the term Holocaust as a shorthand for the era from 1933 to 1945 as it relates to the persecution and murder of European Jews by the Germans, their allies, collaborators (and indeed some parts of ordinary societies who participated or profited in various ways). You seem to restrict 'the Holocaust narrative' to the gassing and cremation procedures at a few camps conventionally considered extermination camps or dual-purpose concentration and extermination camps. Your use of 'the Holocaust narrative' doesn't even really include the other functions of Auschwitz-Birkenau as a labour camp, site of agricultural and medical experiments, site of punishment and executions, and so on, except very selectively if someone starts ranting about, say, Mengele.

Actual 'Holocaust narratives' have since Poliakov in 1951 understood the T4 euthanasia gassings as well as mass shootings as an integral part of the 'narrative', i.e. the origins and evolution of Nazi policies of mass murder which culminated in the extermination camps, with shootings and other gassings continuing in parallel or even following on from deportations/gassings. This has been narrated and synthesised over and over again. Just look at the short chapter in Volker Ullrich's second volume of his Hitler biography for the war years, where in 265 notes he weaves in the precedent of the euthanasia gassings together with the mass shootings and the extermination camps. Others have done it better than Ullrich, whether they are weaving in and entangling a 'Holocaust narrative' within a biography of Hitler or Himmler, a history of the Third Reich, a history of a country under German occupation, or in its own right as a history of the Holocaust, like Saul Friedlander's The Years of Extermination.

There isn't an easy way to disentangle the actual 'Holocaust narrative' over 1933-1945 from the histories of the Third Reich and WWII. Germany has to annexe Austria to start persecuting Austrian Jews and forcing them to emigrate; it has to invade Poland before it can force Jews into ghettos; and it has to occupy its former ally Italy before it can conduct a round-up of Jews in Rome in October 1943. So all of these things show up in actual 'Holocaust narratives', along with accounts of round-ups and deportations, like the Vel d'Hiv round-up in Paris on July 16-17, 1942.

In turn, the events and places which feature in actual 'Holocaust narratives' have been the causes of trials, memorials, museums, novels, histories, and feature films, as well as an aftermath in other respects. One cannot 'falsify' the fact that the Vel d'Hiv round-up prompted three memorials in Paris, two documentaries and four feature films in France, or the fact that the French state has declared the non-returning deportees to be legally dead. The only way of directly 'falsifying' the latter would be to show that someone thought to be missing actually survived, which happened to non-Jews declared missing and legally dead after WWII as well in small numbers. So this means in significant numbers, using evidence.

Thanks (I guess?) for your flexing/exercising of historical knowledge, here, but it's mostly irrelevant and unhelpful. Revisionists and exterminationists agree on most of what happened in WW2. There were camps, WW2 happened, Jews were rounded up, shootings sometimes happened, Auschwitz was also a labor camp. Unfortunately, you seem to be mis-applying the concept/principle of falsification. E.g. you can definitely test (and potentially falsify) the claim that the Vel d'Hiv round-up prompted three memorials in Paris, etc. We can ask/investigate who built the memorials, and if we ever stumble across evidence that something else (e.g. political motivations) prompted the memorials, then the claim that the round-up is what prompted these could be falsified. However, if the French government became a prison state and criminalized such investigations/inquiries, this might not be possible (hence, at least partly invalidating claims that the Vel d'Hiv round-up prompted the memorials). The difference between accepted truth (the roundup occurred and the memorials were built) and validity (ensuring proper inference to what actually prompted the memorials) is critical, here, but both are required for an argument/position to be sound.

That might eventually produce not a 'falsification' but a genuine revision, based on positive evidence, instead of weird rules designed to help Jew-haters avoid Holocaust cooties even as they obsessively fuss over some parts (but not others) of the Holocaust. You guys seem like masochists a lot of the time, although I admit the same could be said about me bothering to see what you're up to these days...

I'm starting to think you whip out the ad hominem once you become nervous, Nick. Did you remember at this moment that you've blatantly dodged the technical aspects once again, perhaps projecting your own insecurities, here?

HansHill is kind enough to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume its merely a professional tactic that you "stay in your lane" and dodge these matters entirely. I'm not so sure.

Those rules still won't 'falsify' the historical record of the trials, museums, films, novels, histories, memoirs, and publication or digitisation of sources about the extermination camps, as well as the cultural, intellectual, social and political (and international) discussion of them, especially Auschwitz, from 1945 to the present.

LOL what even is this? Please Google 'falsification'. Or just read this:

criterion of falsifiability, in the philosophy of science, a standard of evaluation of putatively scientific theories, according to which a theory is genuinely scientific only if it is possible in principle to establish that it is false. The British philosopher Sir Karl Popper (1902–94) proposed the criterion as a foundational method of the empirical sciences. He held that genuinely scientific theories are never finally confirmed, because disconfirming observations (observations that are inconsistent with the empirical predictions of the theory) are always possible no matter how many confirming observations have been made. Scientific theories are instead incrementally corroborated through the absence of disconfirming evidence in a number of well-designed experiments. According to Popper, some disciplines that have claimed scientific validity—e.g., astrology, metaphysics, Marxism, and psychoanalysis —are not empirical sciences, because their subject matter cannot be falsified in this manner.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/criter ... ifiability

Here is some discussion which includes examples of Popper's application of the same principle into the social sciences:
https://www-personal.umd.umich.edu/~del ... bility.pdf

More to the point, there's a problem with how you guys think of 'narrative' and what one needs to do to change a narrative. If you're not reducing 'the Holocaust narrative' to gassing-and-cremation-only, revisionists seem to use it to refer to interpretations, or meta-narratives. But there just isn't one single interpretation or meta-narrative about the Holocaust. One can argue with the interpretations, and you might refute some through straightforward argument. That isn't really 'falsification', since the interpretations aren't scientific theories.

The metanarrative level is an entirely different sense of 'narrative' to recounting a history. The persecution and murder of European Jews between 1933-1945 can be recounted in many different narratives, as noted above - as part of another history, such as a Hitler biography or account of the Third Reich, or a history of a country under occupation, or in its own right. The details don't imply anything about the significance after 1945 for a particular national or political position.

Those narratives cannot be 'falsified', they can only be revised. They have after all proliferated dramatically since 1945, with varying levels of detail and sourcing, varying levels of zooming in and out, and shown the same kind of evolution as any other collection of historical narratives. Every history, every biography, every memoir, is a narrative.

'Revisionism' hasn't produced a comparable narrative of its own. The revisionist literature is not written like conventional history - only a few authors, like Butz and Crowell, have some elements of this basic tell-a-story sense of narrative. Worse, a lot of the arguments made seem intended to avoid recounting a narrative, and end up distracting from any sense of story. But that makes them often long-winded and therefore ineffective, since the arguments often cannot be integrated into a narrative.

It seems you're again projecting with the phrase "gassing-and-cremation-only", since gassing-and-cremation is the only topic which you leave out of your own analysis, completely and consistently. Do you think it doesn't matter? Do murder investigations or trials sometimes ignore the crime scene and murder weapon, even though these elements are readily available for review? Is it helpful to do so? Are these elements not part of the same narrative you insist that it is revisionists who ignore?

Furthermore, isn't 'storytelling' interrupted by a cover-up? Are revisionists not met with overwhelming support for their claims of a cover-up, given the motive, means, opportunity, and patterns of behavior are abundantly evidenced as such?

You began your reply to me saying that the question of falsification 'got you thinking'. Did the point about your total blackout-avoidance of any technical matter not also 'get you thinking'? In your extensive network of Holocaust-lore-fans, do none have technical know-how to assist "never again" narratives through a refutation of Mattogno's (and revisionism's) most compelling and resilient arguments? Or, do you:

• Ignore thermodynamics
• Ignore archaeology
• Ignore chemistry

And listen ONLY to witnesses of every flavor, and:

• Ignore their lies
• Ignore their individual and collective benefits

This would not be so troubling if you could at least point to colleagues or other experts in the 'ignored' fields (thermodynamics, archaeology, chemistry) who might shed light on just how/where revisionists have gone wrong. Instead, you simply ignore this demand (every single time) and continue rambling about what 'muh witnesses' have bitched-on about ad nauseum.

Case in point, your arguments about Himmler's speeches, asserting that various German words don't mean what they obviously mean. If you read conventional histories, especially in German, they can just quote from the speeches alongside other points and sources. They don't need to interrupt the flow with extra commentary. None of the attempts in published revisionist literature to 'reinterpret' the speeches or key words (such as those attempted by Germar Rudolf) are couched in a narrative of what was going on in 1943-44, following a presentation of 1939-early 1943, or any other time period.

What "evakuierung" means is "evacuation". The only interruption to the flow is in the biased lenses which were beaten into public consciousness through traumatizing world war and its relentless messages of 'good' and 'evil', extending many years postwar and into the present. Without such preloading of expectations to what 'Nazis really meant', no one would read Himmler's speeches to refer to a total racial extermination policy, period. E.g. at Posen, where there is clear evidence (still unchallenged by you or anyone) that he is not referring to such a policy:

It is one of those things that's easy to say: "The Jewish people will be extirpated [ausgerottet]", says every Party comrade, "that's quite clear, it's in our programme: elimination [Ausschaltung] of the Jews, extirpation [Ausrottung] ; that's what we're doing." And then they all come along, these 80 million good Germans, and every one of them has his decent Jew. Of course, it's quite clear that the others are pigs, but this one is one first-class Jew.

What "Party programme" is he talking about here, Nick? Does it entail extermination? Or literal evacuation?

"Bueller...?"

The longer the arguments, the less they can be woven into a narrative and tell a convincing story.

This is rich coming from someone who is notorious for extreme and excessive verbosity in his arguments, gish gallop galore. No, you are definitely a proponent of massive arguments on any topic, with a great portion of your 'successes' in any debate being simply boring or info-dumping your opponent into submission. Word count alone proves this. If you have a cogent argument/position, it can almost always be made concisely. Yet you never seem to achieve this.

There isn't a singular 'orthodox narrative', but a massive proliferation of narratives, which use a huge variety of sources and references.

Yes, that is correct. And like every religion (most of which must be incorrect), entire libraries can be filled with this nonsense. Unfortunately for your position, falsifiability is not the only principle that you have to ignore. Quality over quantity is yet another, but you still take advantage of the imbalance seen as being favorable to you (quantity), while ignoring the evidence that matters most (harder sciences a la chemistry, thermodynamics, archaeology, etc.; i.e. quality).

You point to:

Many narratives, many claims, many documents

While ignoring:

Many motives, means, opportunities, patterns of deception

You disregard how hated the Germans were by their enemies (both during the war and ever since) and instead point at how many footnotes the authors of X, Y, Z books included, each to a claim from a person well-aware their statements could be used politically against Germany (and most often recorded in investigations by victorious superpowers only interested in anti-German narrative), or to some academic works self-referentially/circularly quoting one another and/or the same sets of 'evidence'.

Victorious superpowers can have considerable control or influence on demographic data collection and publishing, on the types of major investigations conducted (or not), on the postwar trials and their scope and nature of investigation, and much more. What they cannot have considerable control or influence over (or are unlikely to) is how many corpses are actually under the earth, or how much FeCN is actually in the walls, how much wood or manpower is required, how visible the biblical-scale pyres would have been to many thousands of nearby residents and travelers, or how many maintenance operations would be required at the Kremas, etc.

It is exactly these things, which the victorious powers could not have reliably influenced, that align consistently with the revisionist narrative. This is a powerful set of revisionist arguments, and you dodge them completely.

On the documentation side of things, other than official German docs, or Goebbels' private diary, or the myriad official declarations of evacuation (non-genocide) policy which you deem "code words" ; there are also the numerous newspaper clippings published across the Eastern territories and Europe during the war (detailed in TECOAR) reporting Jewish arrivals into the Eastern territories. You write these off as mere wartime misinformation however we would expect that victorious superpowers cannot effectively erase contemporary published news reports (given they are widespread and public rather than archival) -- so, once again, the evidence we should expect to align with revisionism consistently does.

Kindly answer the question: why do you completely avoid the technical debate? It isn't that you're not familiar with it. Do you feel you're incompetent to do so? If so, is there someone you feel is better suited, perhaps a colleague?

[Archie]

Posting this reply here since it's related to what I was getting at with the OP.

In the absence of incentivization for submissions, a Beginner's Guide FAQ has been substituted for a "best case," receiving approximately 3.5 million F- grades... so far

I should clarify that although Nessie has labeled the Beginner's Guide FAQ an attempt to present the "best case" for revisionism, neither that article nor the other article in the Beginner's Guide were labeled such by me and were not intended to be comprehensive introductions to revisionism. One could of course write an article summarizing many of the key arguments, but imo this is not usually the right approach. For one thing, people often don't have enough context to appreciate the arguments. Most of the details will be totally lost on people. Second, with Holocaust revisionism, there is (usually) a strong initial barrier in getting people to consider the possibility that the holocaust could be false. If people are too closed off to the idea, the arguments probably won't get through. So the first order of business should be to deal with that barrier, or to present material that doesn't trip people's defenses.

"A Case for Open Debate on the Holocaust" - This article was written originally as a promotional article for the reboot of the forum. It was written for as broad an audience as possible. The article does not attempt to disprove the Holocaust in one go. It has the more modest goal of convincing the reader that the issue deserves to be debated and that the mainstream is lying about the level of certainty they claim. The approach was to take statements/concessions by mainstream people like Reitlinger, Hilberg, Pressac, Shermer and use these to undermine the mainstream's impossible confidence.

"Frequently Asked Questions about Revisionism" - The idea with this one is that the same stuff tends to come up over and over, so it makes sense to have something written out instead of having to repeat it all the time. It is a collection of mini-essays. It's obviously not a comprehensive presentation of revisionism. Most of the items are meant to anticipate common doubts that people might have. That sort of presupposes that they've already been looking into the topic.

If I were to write a "best evidence" for revisionism article, it would be fairly different from the above articles. But again I don't think blitzing people with tons of stuff is the best approach for an introduction.

As for the other side who is trying to prove the Holocaust, I think if the evidence for the Holocaust is as overwhelming as they say then it should be quite straightforward to present a compelling selection of that evidence in a few thousand words. It's really not symmetric at all (arguing for vs against the Holocaust) because there's no barrier to getting people believe in Holocaust. The default is that people believe it. That's a huge tailwind. Convincing people of revisionism in contrast I think will take more time because most people are going to want to do quite a bit of research before embracing a "crazy" position. It's actually not a great sign when people accept revisionism too readily (without really knowing anything about the topic) because it probably means they are just relying on strong priors and are adding revisionism to a large stable of hastily adopted contrarian positions.

[Callafangers]

Convincing people of revisionism in contrast I think will take more time because most people are going to want to do quite a bit of research before embracing a "crazy" position.

It's working backwards from indoctrination. Ask how many hours each person, on average, has spent receiving a "Holocaust education". I personally had received no less than ~20-30 such hours by the time I graduated high school, especially if including the numerous 'Holocaust' movies I had also watched by this time (including the famous 'Schindler's List' which I had seen more than once). It is unreasonable to expect that any person so heavily invested into a particular narrative will be immediately persuaded by a single article that takes ~10 minutes to read, especially on such a traumatic topic. That person usually will end up with questions they find most important, and they will need compelling answers to each one. These questions will vary, depending on the person. For me, these included (to name a few):

• What about the photographs of piles of corpses I saw, that included children?
• Why were all the Jews so starving/emaciated?
• What about the survivors I saw speaking explicitly about extreme horrors?

[bombsaway]

As for the other side who is trying to prove the Holocaust, I think if the evidence for the Holocaust is as overwhelming as they say then it should be quite straightforward to present a compelling selection of that evidence in a few thousand words. It's really not symmetric at all (arguing for vs against the Holocaust) because there's no barrier to getting people believe in Holocaust. The default is that people believe it. That's a huge tailwind. Convincing people of revisionism in contrast I think will take more time because most people are going to want to do quite a bit of research before embracing a "crazy" position. It's actually not a great sign when people accept revisionism too readily (without really knowing anything about the topic) because it probably means they are just relying on strong priors and are adding revisionism to a large stable of hastily adopted contrarian positions.

I think for most people all you need is hey, hundreds of Nazis, from top leadership down to the people working at the camps, affirmed the gassings, without any recantations or contradictory testimonies surfacing. I think this is compelling enough because there isn't a similar historical case of so many alleged perpetrators (by an order of magnitude?) admitting to crimes they didn't do.

I haven't read Nessie's essay yet to see if there is anything I can add.

[Archie]

As for the other side who is trying to prove the Holocaust, I think if the evidence for the Holocaust is as overwhelming as they say then it should be quite straightforward to present a compelling selection of that evidence in a few thousand words. It's really not symmetric at all (arguing for vs against the Holocaust) because there's no barrier to getting people believe in Holocaust. The default is that people believe it. That's a huge tailwind. Convincing people of revisionism in contrast I think will take more time because most people are going to want to do quite a bit of research before embracing a "crazy" position. It's actually not a great sign when people accept revisionism too readily (without really knowing anything about the topic) because it probably means they are just relying on strong priors and are adding revisionism to a large stable of hastily adopted contrarian positions.

I think for most people all you need is hey, hundreds of Nazis, from top leadership down to the people working at the camps, affirmed the gassings, without any recantations or contradictory testimonies surfacing. I think this is compelling enough because there isn't a similar historical case of so many alleged perpetrators (by an order of magnitude?) admitting to crimes they didn't do.

I haven't read Nessie's essay yet to see if there is anything I can add.

Only a small subset of people will be curious enough to do any research. "Most people" know nothing about the topic, so their opinions are irrelevant. They will go whichever way the wind is blowing.

I would be surprised if Nessie's essay were the best your side could do. If I were you, I would absolutely not want Nessie to be the standard bearer for my side. Nessie's problem is that he has no theory of mind, i.e., he's unable to grasp that others might have beliefs that differ from his own. This is why 1) he always takes his position as a given and can't distinguish between assertions and actual support for those assertions, and 2) he's unable even to summarize accurately the views of others (claims it is impossible). But you can't persuade anybody if you are unable to anticipate alternative viewpoints.

My essay is almost done btw. I already had an outline for it. I wrote most of it up last weekend. It just needs a little polishing.

[Nazgul]

Honestly, I think you’re kind of mixing two separate things here — what most people believe and how historical research actually works. Just because something is widely accepted doesn’t mean it’s automatically exempt from scrutiny. Looking closely at sources, how testimonies were collected, and the context around them isn’t “revisionism” in a contrarian sense; it’s just doing history properly.

Also, pointing out that someone “lacks theory of mind” or can’t summarize other viewpoints doesn’t really prove anything about the validity of their argument. It just shuts down discussion instead of engaging with the points being made. You can’t really judge a claim by how someone processes other people’s beliefs.

I think it’s more interesting to focus on methodology, evidence, and reasoning rather than social defaults or who says what. If your essay addresses that — how you’re handling sources, context, and argument structure — I’ll definitely give it a read. But trying to score points by framing your side as obvious and the other as crazy doesn’t really help anyone understand anything.

[bombsaway]

As for the other side who is trying to prove the Holocaust, I think if the evidence for the Holocaust is as overwhelming as they say then it should be quite straightforward to present a compelling selection of that evidence in a few thousand words. It's really not symmetric at all (arguing for vs against the Holocaust) because there's no barrier to getting people believe in Holocaust. The default is that people believe it. That's a huge tailwind. Convincing people of revisionism in contrast I think will take more time because most people are going to want to do quite a bit of research before embracing a "crazy" position. It's actually not a great sign when people accept revisionism too readily (without really knowing anything about the topic) because it probably means they are just relying on strong priors and are adding revisionism to a large stable of hastily adopted contrarian positions.

I think for most people all you need is hey, hundreds of Nazis, from top leadership down to the people working at the camps, affirmed the gassings, without any recantations or contradictory testimonies surfacing. I think this is compelling enough because there isn't a similar historical case of so many alleged perpetrators (by an order of magnitude?) admitting to crimes they didn't do.

I haven't read Nessie's essay yet to see if there is anything I can add.

Only a small subset of people will be curious enough to do any research. "Most people" know nothing about the topic, so their opinions are irrelevant. They will go whichever way the wind is blowing.

I would be surprised if Nessie's essay were the best your side could do. If I were you, I would absolutely not want Nessie to be the standard bearer for my side.

Most people are convinced by confessions. When you have hundreds, you automatically have a huge hill to climb for most people.

I don't really care about standard bearers since my reason for being here is not to "stop" Holocaust revisionism. In terms of getting my ideas out to people, yeah I care about that, and insofar as Nessie's essay is at the top and most people will read it without going to mine, I'm less inclined to contribute.

[HansHill]

I think it’s more interesting to focus on methodology, evidence, and reasoning rather than social defaults or who says what.

Respectfully disagree. The Holocaust is far far far bigger than the niche vocation of History, whether the standard-bearers and gatekeepers like Dr Terry like it or not. To substantiate this, I only need to point to the fact that there are morons in my country, wielding the levers of State power, who I know are far less knowledgeable than even someone as sloppy as Nessie, on these issues. These insane lunatics would have me locked up for my posts, and my children put into state care and handed over to some Homosexual adopting couple, if they could. All while knowing next to nothing about the thing they are professing, or upholding.

"B-b-but they have advisory boards!". Yes advisory boards including the likes of:

Judeo Liberal NGOs
Israeli think tanks
Transgender rights advocacy groups
etc

So you'll forgive me when I scoff at the ivory tower pompous chorus echo of "heh, just re-write the entire history, denier!" as completely tone-deaf and imperceptible to how the real world actually works. Holocaust Inc and those enforcing it, is a cargo cult.