No one to debate? [Rudolf vs Vann on Jake Shields]

[Eye of Zyclone]

Do you see any physical evidence of human remains in that photo SanityCheck?

I do see 7 charred corpses in the lower part of this photo. Don't you, Keen ?

[Hektor]

...

Marxists and their heirs are almost entirely uninterested in the Holocaust. The significance of Frankfurt School Critical Theory is blown out of all proportion in Macdonald and anti-woke polemics, but one thing is certain: the reflections in Adorno's work on the Holocaust did not really feed into anything else, other than providing the one soundbite, which is relevant only to debates in literature and cultural studies about representation, not to history. Only a handful of Marxists have ever reflected in a sustained way on the Holocaust, most being entirely heterodox within those traditions, and largely marginalised compared to the anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist default norm on the far left. The groupuscules from the 1960s onwards whose veterans and the people they influenced were split on just about everything, one can find a few who refused the anti-Zionist turn, but this did not necessarily translate into a greater interest in the Holocaust as well. Much of the polarisation revolved around Jewish roots with a split between anti-Zionist Jews remaining on the far left (but usually turning into Johnny One Note obsessives) and socialist-sympathising Jews distancing themselves from the far left. And this split was all over the news in 2023-2024 with campus protests and the rhetoric of settler colonialism and decolonisation. Despite the fact that Frantz Fanon and Aime Cesaire as much as Jean-Paul Sartre and W.E.B. Du Bois routinely offered significant reflections on the close kinship of antisemitism and anti-African racism in the mid-20th Century.
....

I find your commentary rather astonishing.
- The 'Frankfurt School Critical Theory' is the most significant philosophical school of thought of the 20th century.

No, it really isn't.

- Theodor Adorno's "Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?" is the blue-print for destroying any meaningful cultural conservatism first in Germany and then in any other Western Country.

Utter twaddle.

- The Nazi-whip works due to Holocaust Narrative being the foundation of present Western thought. Marxists and their front-people frequently used the NAZI tag to 'discredit' or bash any meaningful opposition to them.

No, everyone across the political spectrum except neo-Nazis will fling around 'Nazi' as an insult when it suits them. ...

Now that proves how successful the program was.
And it's quite telling that all you can say is "No" - You try the assertiveness of argument approach. The lack of real content is still revealing.

But perhaps you can come by by answering the question first: Who was the "most significant philosophical school of thought of the 20th century", if not the Frankfurt School?

[HansHill]

.

Welcome back, Dr. Terry. This analysis is atrocious. I'll start with a very simple counter, citing from Peter Novick "The Holocaustr In American Life" which summarises the role the Holocaust enjoys in modern American (viz-a-viz Western) consciousness.

Individuals from every point on the political com-
pass can find the lessons they wish in the Holocaust; it has become a
moral and ideological Rorschach test. The right has invoked the
Holocaust in support of anti-Communist
interventions abroad: the agent of the Holocaust was not Nazi Ger-
many but a generic totalitarianism, embodied after 1945 in the Soviet
bloc, with which there could be no compromise. On a philosophical
level, the Holocaust has been used by conservatives to demonstrate the
sinfulness of man. It has provided confirmation of a tragic worldview,
revealing the fatuousness of any transformative — or even seriously
meliorative — politics. For other segments of the right, the Holocaust
revealed the inevitable consequence of the breakdown of religion and
family values in Germany. And, as is well known, the "abortion holo-
caust" figures prominently in American debate on that question.

For leftists, the claim that American elites abandoned European
Jewry during the war has been used to demonstrate the moral bank-
ruptcy of the establishment, including liberal icons like FDR. For
liberals, the Holocaust became the locus of "lessons" that teach the
evils of immigration restriction and homophobia, of nuclear weapons
and the Vietnam War. Holocaust curricula, increasingly mandated in
public schools, frequently link the Holocaust to much of the liberal
agenda — a source of irritation to American right-wingers, including
Jewish right-wingers like the late Lucy Dawidowicz.

For the political center — on some level for all Americans — the
Holocaust has become a moral reference point. As, over the past gen-
eration, ethical and ideological divergence and disarray in the United
States advanced to the point where Americans could agree on nothing
else, all could join together in deploring the Holocaust — a low moral
consensus, but perhaps better than none at all. (This banal consensus
is indeed so broad that, in a backhanded way, it even includes that tiny
band of malicious or deluded fruitcakes who deny that the Holocaust
took place.

Spoiler

[ed - hi!]

"If it happened," they say in effect, "we would deplore it as
much as anyone else. But it didn't, so the question doesn't arise.") And
in the United States the Holocaust is explicitly used for the purpose of
national self-congratulation: the "Americanization" of the Holocaust
has involved using it to demonstrate the difference between the Old
World and the New, and to celebrate, by showing its negation, the
American way of life.

Right - Tick
Left - Tick
Center - Tick

Not sure if anything fruitful will be forthcoming by way of response, but things are always hopeful.

[Stubble]

I'm interested in further exploring this blithe dismissal of the influence of the Frankfurt School on the Holocaust Narrative.

Unfortunately, I'm currently under equipped for this debate and must get better armed.

I can say that there is overlap with The Frankfurt School and the OSS. How that bleeds over into policy and perspective I am not yet familiar, but, I will be spelunking.

There is even overlap with The Last Battle of WW2 (Nuremberg) as well.

[Hektor]

I'm interested in further exploring this blithe dismissal of the influence of the Frankfurt School on the Holocaust Narrative.

Unfortunately, I'm currently under equipped for this debate and must get better armed.

I can say that there is overlap with The Frankfurt School and the OSS. How that bleeds over into policy and perspective I am not yet familiar, but, I will be spelunking.

There is even overlap with The Last Battle of WW2 (Nuremberg) as well.

Not a direct Franfurt School proponent but friend and supporter of Max Horkheimer as well as teacher of Adorno was the theologian Paul Tillich:

Key Connections at Frankfurt University (1929–1933)

Professor at Frankfurt: Tillich held the chair in philosophy and sociology from 1929 to 1933 (succeeding Max Scheler). He lectured on religion, culture, philosophy, and social issues, aligning with the broader intellectual milieu that birthed Critical Theory.
Support for Horkheimer: Tillich was instrumental in helping establish a chair and bringing Max Horkheimer to the university as director of the Institute for Social Research (around 1930). They co-taught a course on John Locke in the winter term 1930–31.
Relationship with Adorno: Tillich supervised Theodor Adorno’s Habilitation (second dissertation) on Kierkegaard’s aesthetics (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, completed around 1931–1933). Adorno also served informally as one of Tillich’s assistants. They co-led seminars on figures like Georg Simmel, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Hegel.
Shared Milieu: Both Tillich (a religious socialist) and the Frankfurt School thinkers (neo-Marxist critical theorists) were engaged in analyzing modern society, capitalism, culture, and authoritarianism. They shared a critical stance toward bourgeois society and Nazism.

Tillich was dismissed from his post in April 1933 by the Nazi regime (one of the first non-Jewish professors targeted), as were many associated with the Institute. He emigrated to the U.S. shortly after; Horkheimer and Adorno followed soon thereafter.

Paul Tillich was a propagandist of the Americans:
https://archive.org/details/WarTimeRadi ... aulTillich

Tillich' s radio addresses emphasized the nature of German collective guilt for tolerating or encouraging the Nazis. Other peoples had guilt as well. But Germans had allowed Hitler to capture the country and plunge Europe into war; they had accepted the Nazi racial policies , death trains, and murders of jews and many others. The ultimate destruction of Germany , Tillich believed, was atonement for the evil into which the Nazis had led that nation.

Tillich of course had no way of knowing, if whether what he was reporting on what was supposedly happening in Europe was true or not. He did it anyway, since he had an 'axe to grind with the Nazis' who fired him. And a knife in for German 'bourgeois society'. Politically he was a leftist short of being a Marxist Leninist. Privately he had a twisted interest in sado-masochistic pornography.

His theology was a mess. It's basically the watered off version of Protestantism we know today. It's essentially Agnosticism with a Christian Cloth.

So those trends are actually connected and the Holocaust Narrative is an important ingredient to it all.