Reviews for Best Case - Essay #2 (Archie)

[Archie]

Reposting Nessie's brief review here in a new thread. Reviews for different essays should be in different threads. Nessie apparently does not understand the concept of arguing a "devil's advocate" position. No theory of mind!

Devil's advocate - a person who expresses a contentious opinion in order to provoke debate or test the strength of the opposing arguments.

Also, as a point of clarification, it is Mattogno's opinion, not Graf's, that a small number of Struthof Jews were "probably" gassed (with phosgene gas). Graf was not convinced on the method. Mattogno and Pressac both agree that the traditional description of the gassing by Kramer and others (the funnel and all that) is false.

It is even harder now, to understand why Archie could be a Holocaust denier/revisionist, after he has written this best case for the Holocaust;

https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=21373#p21373

He criticised my best case for being "Thin on positive evidence", which is correct, but I explain why that is. I was surprised at how much of the "positive evidence" he appears to accept, such as the gas van documents and I was not aware Graf accepts the evidence of gassing at Natzweiler-Struthof. I have been having a debate on X with someone who accepts the evidence for the Holocaust, except deaths in gas chambers. It seems odd to accept the documentary, eyewitness and other evidence, from the Nazis, of mass shootings and euthanasia, and then not accept the same type of evidence, from the same source, for gassing. How is gassing at Natzweiler-Struthof proved, but not at Auschwitz-Birkenau?

...it will suffice to say that the Leuchter/Faurisson/Rudolf tests are in no way conclusive and are nowhere near enough to overturn the wealth of historical evidence.

Absolutely spot on. Just because they cannot work out, to their satisfaction, how the gas chambers worked, is nowhere near enough to overturn the evidence gassing happened. Overall, I would rate Archie's essay as very good. I am sure he will be delighted with that!

[pilgrimofdark]

Well, I guess mine is now in third place, but at least remains Top 3, which is pretty good for a non-official entry. And every day, I'm more convinced it wasn't totally satire.

Evaluation

I think Archie's essay is a good summary of many of the issues that frequently come up in the Holocaust/Revisionist debate. It fairly represents from the mainstream side the issues that have become the focus over several decades.

Importantly, it presents a narrative that logically connects each step along the way from small scale killings to mass murder of Jews at various camps, including the overarching ideological atmosphere of the Third Reich and war on the eastern front.

At a high level, it conveys a history that logically flows, and cites important documents to support the case.

It also uses this foundation to criticize revisionism at a high level. Revisionists can point to flaws in numerous aspects of the Holocaust, especially the lack of expected material traces at alleged crime sites. However, revisionism, so far, has been unable to offer a competing paradigm for how to view the rest of the history.

One weakness is that it doesn't define "the Holocaust" for the purpose of the essay. While a working definition can be inferred by the topics it addresses, adding an explicit definition would be helpful.

This would be especially important because the definition of the Holocaust continues to expand, encompassing basically every individual and organizational persecution or execution of any Jew (or Gypsy, homosexual, etc.). It would also be useful to define the term for the purposes of the essay because it now has numerous extra-historical connotations: religious, cultural, political.

I knew I read this word before:

Spoiler

Goebbels: "If we did not fight the Jews, they would destroy us. It’s a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus."

Lipstadt: "In the 1930s Nazi rats spread a virulent form of antisemitism that resulted in the destruction of millions. Today the bacillus carried by these rats threatens to 'kill' those who already died at the hands of the Nazis for a second time by destroying the world's memory of them. One can only speculate about the form of the bacillus' next mutation."

I think writing the essay is a good exercise and this is well done, despite the lack of a single orthodox/mainstream definition of the Holocaust.

I know I said a weakness of the essay is not defining "the Holocaust," but that seems to be a challenge for even those defending it the most.

Christian Gerlach, in his book The Extermination of the European Jews, refused to use the terms "Holocaust" or "Shoah," arguing they have no analytical value. The YIVO definition of the Holocaust is all-encompassing and yet entirely vague: Jewish "catastrophic losses" between "1933 and 1945."

That also means that there's no disproving or revising the entirety of the Holocaust. There might not even really be a "debating" of it because the definition is so flexible and amorphous.

Paradoxically, the more expansive the definition of "the Holocaust," the less it can be coherently "debated" at a high level. But it certainly needs to be revised and clarified at numerous points.

[Hektor]

Reposting Nessie's brief review here in a new thread. Reviews for different essays should be in different threads. Nessie apparently does not understand the concept of arguing a "devil's advocate" position. No theory of mind!

Devil's advocate - a person who expresses a contentious opinion in order to provoke debate or test the strength of the opposing arguments.

Also, as a point of clarification, it is Mattogno's opinion, not Graf's, that a small number of Struthof Jews were "probably" gassed (with phosgene gas). Graf was not convinced on the method. Mattogno and Pressac both agree that the traditional description of the gassing by Kramer and others (the funnel and all that) is false.

It is even harder now, to un,,,

https://codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=21373#p21373

He criticised my best case for being "Thin on positive evidence", which is correct, but I explain why that is. I was surprised at how much of the "positive evidence" he appears to accept, such as the gas van documents and I was not aware Graf accepts the evidence of gassing at Natzweiler-Struthof. I have been having a debate on X with someone who accepts the evidence for the Holocaust, except deaths in gas chambers. It seems odd to accept the documentary, eyewitness and other evidence, from the Nazis, of mass shootings and euthanasia, and then not accept the same type of evidence, from the same source, for gassing. How is gassing at Natzweiler-Struthof proved, but not at Auschwitz-Birkenau?

...it will suffice to say that the Leuchter/Faurisson/Rudolf tests are in no way conclusive and are nowhere near enough to overturn the wealth of historical evidence.

Absolutely spot on. Just because they cannot work out, to their satisfaction, how the gas chambers worked, is nowhere near enough to overturn the evidence gassing happened. Overall, I would rate Archie's essay as very good. I am sure he will be delighted with that!

The Best-Documented / Historical Evidence assertion is classical example for hurling an elephant.

Simply claim there is 'plenty of evidence' and point to statements by historians or historical figures and then suggest that this somehow proves or settles the case. On closer look it becomes however that the claimed evidence isn't that at all. Meaning there is no physical evidence for industrial style homicidal gassing, neither is there credible testimony for this and the many internal contradictions and indications of deception tactics can't simply be argued away. The additional trick is mostly extrapolation were cases of death, deportation and detention become evidence for the narrative, which is then sold as package deal. Now the Laymen is to pre-occupied to refute such claims of course, although plenty do indeed notice that the narrative has problems... But then they simply jump to the idea that this is somehow 'old history' that doesn't concern them.