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.

[Archie]

I will give some behind-the-scenes commentary to explain my approach.

-I decided to write for a skeptical (or at least curious) reader. I adopted an easy going tone, no outrage, no sanctimonious condemnations, no emotional manipulation, no attempt to bully the reader.
-I gave a reasonably comprehensive, largely chronological overview of the orthodox history from a functionalist perspective. I wanted to focus on the best positive evidence, but I thought it best to present this with context.
-I made various concessions toward the end (the "Easy Targets" section). I understand why anti-revisionists don't do this (slippery slope concerns), but I think it's better to inb4 these things. Defending the Soviet reports for example is a losing game and it's flabbergasting to me that so many of them choose to die on that hill.
-I made use of internal revisionist debates and/or concessions (the more normal approach is to avoid directly discussing revisionists, or if they do engage to do so in a very nitpicky way). I am a big fan of this technique (I also used it here: viewtopic.php?t=70) because people who are new to a topic usually can't evaluate the evidence very well on their own. But if you can cite people from the other side admitting something, then people will feel pretty confident that it's a strong point even if they don't entirely follow everything. I suspect the reason this isn't done much is that they don't want to lead people to the revisionist literature, and they don't actually want people to have a clear picture of the overall debate.
-I focused mostly on documentary evidence (along with some demographic arguments). I think those points are relatively stronger for them.
-I referred to testimonial evidence in general and quoted a little bit of it but not much. People who find testimonies convincing will be convinced off the bat. No need to bother with them. A really thorough defense of the testimonial evidence from an orthodox perspective would be quite the project, way beyond what I was willing to do for this short essay. I think it'd be tough.
-Physical evidence is another weak point, and so thought it wise not to emphasize these topics but I knew I couldn't ignore this completely. There was not enough space to address everything, so I decided to focus mostly on Pressac (even though his arguments are mostly documentary) and the Leuchter report (which does have vulnerabilities). The AR forensics I think is a tough sell, so I decided to avoid it. The idea is that if the reader finds the Leucher critiques convincing, they might discount the revisionist forensic arguments more generally.
-Pilgrim is correct that I did not define "Holocaust." In fact, I mostly avoided using that word at all in most of the article. I also avoided discussing the six million figure (another losing point). My thinking was that I would try to establish mass killing and extermination and would rely on the discussion of demographics and deportations to establish a rough scale of say 4+ million which is good enough for most people. Unless the revisions are really dramatic, I don't think most people care.

Quite a lot of anti-revisionist presentations do not really develop their arguments much. Often if feels like a grab bag of material presented almost a random. I tried to cite the documents with more context and I tried to buttress them with additional support. For example, we've all seen the Goebbels diary entry that's always quoted. I quoted it, but I tried to establish some context within a discussion of AR and I cited revisionists like Graf admitting to it being a difficult document and Irving endorsing the authenticity. This is much better than the usual "document dump" approach, imo.

I will not provide a full rebuttal here, but I (and others) have countered a lot of these points in prior posts. These for example.
viewtopic.php?t=340
viewtopic.php?t=514
viewtopic.php?t=443

There are individual documents where revisionist interpretations may seem strained. And you can cherry-pick and string these together like I have done in the essay. But I don't actually think it's necessary to have a perfect slam dunk explanation for every single document. The full context and meaning of individual documents may not be possible to determine in every case. There could be some inauthentic documents where forgery cannot be satisfactorily proved. What matters is the evidence in total. And if you notice, on the documentary evidence, it's very skewed toward Einsatzgruppen and euthanasia. This is because those are the parts of the story that have more of a historical basis. And it underscores the dearth of evidence for the other parts (which are frankly the parts that matter).

If I were to write a full response to this, I would hammer the testimonies which are really the basis for the whole thing. I probably should have tried to inb4 that in the essay, but I couldn't think of good way to do it. I would also of course hammer the physical evidence.

[Archie]

Open for general discussion.

[Stubble]

Taken at face value and without getting into the weeds, your steelman is quite good and condenses the main and best points of contention into just a few words.

If we were to debate it seriously, I'd argue both scale and scope and that 14f13 and 14f14 a holocaust do not make.

I do not personally contest euthanasia of the incurables, reprisals and decimations or antiterrorism. I contest the wholesale murder of the jews in a campaign of racial extermination ie genocide using exotic and contrived methods. This is where the argument rests for me personally because the evidence does not appear to support the claim.

I'm comfortable simply moving past the witnesses unless the other party makes the mistake of bringing one up. An honest witness for the orthodoxy seems to be impossible to find and all of them I have run across are taken apart without much effort, be it Hoess or be it Mueller.

The largest testament that there was no campaign to exterminate the jewish people by the German Authorities is that there are jews. Had there been a killing program, it wouldn't have stopped at 6,000,000 (granting the magic number out of hand for demonstration purposes).

In Hungary for example, there were facilities to gas entire trains with Zyklon. During the Hungarian Aktion, why bother with Auschwitz? Just Bivy the jews some distance from the train fumigation chamber, bring the train in and load it up, and gas them along with the fruit and veg. Use these magic pyres that run on a couple of twigs and a newspaper, and let the bodies self immolate on bbq grilles. If it works on the Bug River, it will work in Hungary, unless there is some geographical reason for self immolation of corpses.

Liquidate the ghettos? Simple, bind their hands and feet and throw them in the Bug. No need for a camp or some contrivance. Another option would be to take them to a port, put them on a semi submersible platform, take them into the north sea under the auspices of an evacuation, and, get them off the boat and leave them. Killing not necessary, nature will do that. It absolutely has to be cheaper than the fumigant zyklon-B as well.

Instead we end up with the ag portion of Sobibor being an extermination area, regardless of photographs to the contrary, and what was likely a milk barn or some other innocuous structure called a homicidal gas chamber.

/shrug

Everybody acts like the Germans were squeamish and wildly incompetent, leaving the methods to a bus driver or a camp administrator. That, just isn't the way things are done. There would have been a plan, a budget, orders and a time table.

We are talking about a government that completed 3 separate nuclear tests and didn't use the bomb because they didn't want to kill innocent people...

We are talking about Adolf Hitler using poison gas knowing that that is something he was morally opposed to and that the Germans never did even though they had sufficient stockpiles to kill everyone on earth 3 times over.

With regard to prewar postwar population figures, I am not even sure the base aggregate prewar is reliable because of the population explosion during ww1 and during the great depression. I have some incredulity about it. The post war revision upward of the pre war figures and post war revision downward of the post war figures also don't fill me with faith in the numbers.