How Can Such a Strong Consensus Be So Wrong for so Long?

[Stubble]

I found myself thinking once again, "gee, it sure is ridiculous that 'ConfusedJew' isn't spending the time to first read and learn independently before expecting revisionists here to hand-deliver answers to all of his questions".

My thoughts continued: "it would be much more productive if he were to first spend the time doing his own independent research and then come to challenge us."

But that is when it hit me: "...perhaps 'ConfusedJew' doesn't really want us to be productive."

Dude, he just found me another 1,600+ Hungarian jews, I couldn't be happier. I keep looking for these slippery fellas. I'm gonna find every one of them and I'm going to give them each and every a thorough accounting.

[ConfusedJew]

That's a whole 'nother 1,600 Hungarian jews I didn't even know about, these were secured by Mayer.

So, over 3,200 out of Belsen.

Learn something new every day.

Those on the Kastner train were not released out of Bergen Belsen. They were held there temporarily while enroute to Switzerland. And again, that was not for humanitarian reasons, Eichmann allowed them to leave because he accepted a bribe.

I don't know what you are talking about with this other group. I don't know who Mayer is.

[ConfusedJew]

I found myself thinking once again, "gee, it sure is ridiculous that 'ConfusedJew' isn't spending the time to first read and learn independently before expecting revisionists here to hand-deliver answers to all of his questions".

My thoughts continued: "it would be much more productive if he were to first spend the time doing his own independent research and then come to challenge us."

But that is when it hit me: "...perhaps 'ConfusedJew' doesn't really want us to be productive."

I'm not sure what you mean by this. If you are going to present a hypothesis that denies the entirety of mainstream historical scholarship for decades, the burden of proof is really on you to educate people why you believe that. I've gone out of my way to come here to learn how and why you guys think that. This is an Internet forum where discussion and debate is the norm.

[Archie]

False premise. There isn't a consensus on "the Holocaust" and there never has been. There is a fake consensus that is maintained via coercion.

You already asked this in your other mess of a thread, so I will just copy over my first answer.

But don't professional historians and other experts accept the Holocaust?

In most of Europe, it is now illegal to do research on the Holocaust unless you go along with the predetermined conclusions. In the United States, free thought on the Holocaust is still allowed to a degree because of the First Amendment tradition, but Holocaust revisionism is still suppressed via corporate censorship and other forms of harassment and economic threats. Because the Holocaust is sacralized history, to challenge it is treated not just as an intellectual folly but a moral outrage. Thus it carries with it an especially strong opprobrium that is not present in ordinary intellectual debates. This moral dimension makes "Holocaust denial" akin to heresy in a religious context and this explains why the Holocaust is especially hard to challenge.

Unthinking deference to expert opinion is an unreliable heuristic on third rail topics like "the Holocaust" where people cannot share their true views without suffering retaliation. If institutional powers decree that "Holocaust denial" is inherently not respectable, then by definition no one "respectable" can support Holocaust denial. Such circularities mean little.

An additional, less appreciated point is that Holocaust revisionism actually fares much better from a credentialist perspective than one might assume. And this is especially true when we consider the first few decades after the war, before "The Holocaust" became socially and politically dominant. Many early Holocaust skeptics in America were surprisingly well-credentialed. Harry Elmer Barnes, had a PhD in history from Columbia and published prolifically for decades and was a long-time editor at Foreign Affairs. Another early revisionist, David Hoggan, had a PhD in history from Harvard. Amazingly enough, they were in fact better credentialed than many of the early Holocaust historians who by and large were not professional historians at elite universities. The two authors of the most notable early comprehensive histories on the Holocaust, Gerald Reitlinger and Raul Hilberg, did not have PhDs in history (Hilberg's field was political science) and neither of their books were published by prestigious academic presses. It was not until the late 1970s that "the Holocaust" began acquiring the academic prestige it now enjoys.

Despite all the pressures to the contrary, we do see some hints of revisionism even within mainstream academics. In the early 1990s, Joel Hayward, a grad student in history at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, submitted a master's thesis on Holocaust revisionism in which he largely endorsed the revisionist position. Not only was the thesis accepted, it was deemed the best thesis that year and Hayward was awarded special recognition for his efforts. The controversial thesis was submitted in 1993 but not made public until 1999, at which point Jewish activists predictably tried to get the degree revoked, prompting Hayward to begin the customary groveling. Such are the dynamics at play and such explains the artificial consensus on the Holocaust issue. Similarly, in France in 1985, Henri Roques submitted a doctoral dissertation which presented detailed and scholarly textual criticism of the statements of Kurt Gerstein, one of the most crucial and widely cited gas chamber witnesses. Roques's doctoral degree was cancelled in 1986 after intervention from a French government official.

Many major revisionists like Arthur Butz and Robert Faurisson have had PhDs in a variety of fields, and many such as Germar Rudolf and Fritz Berg have had technical backgrounds. What we find with revisionists is an eclectic group of individuals from a variety of nationalities, professional backgrounds, and political sensibilities who have all concluded, often at great personal cost and little personal benefit, that the Holocaust is not true.

There remain an unknown number of "closet" revisionists within academia and other fields. These are those who agree with us but who keep their heads down for professional and personal reasons. In recent decades, many revisionists have had to write under pseudonyms such as the late "Samuel Crowell" who had a master's degree in Eastern European history from Columbia and "Thomas Dalton" who has a PhD and "taught humanities at a prominent American university for several years." Carlo Mattogno, the most prolific revisionist researcher, has received anonymous assistance from sympathetic archival specialists in Europe.

[Nessie]

...

Victor's justice and judicial historiography are also important elements.

The 'Nazis' were heavily coerced postwar (utterly indisputable).

This really isn't so complicated.

...

The majority of death camp staff trials took place in West and then unified Germany, with no evidence of any coercion. That is not victors justice.

When asked to evidence coercion, the only evidence revisionists present is Hoess, who was subject to coercion by his British captors and a newspaper article alleging widespread coercion by US soldiers, of Nazis they had captured. Whether the Nazis were subject to coercion when captured, or not subject to coercion when put on trial in Germany, those who worked inside the death camps all admitted that they were used for mass killings. Revisionists exaggerate the extent to which coercion took place.

[borjastick]

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[Nessie]

False premise. There isn't a consensus on "the Holocaust" and there never has been...

There is no disagreement between historians about T4, 13f14, AR, Chelmno, the Einsatzgruppen and A-B, which cover the vast majority of murdering by the Nazis.

There is no consensus between so-called revisionists about those operations and places. Indeed, it is comical as to how split revisionism is, from whether the EG were responsible for mass shootings, to how connected T4 and AR were, to what happened inside Krema II at Birkenau.

That failure by revisionism is because so few revisionists know or understand the basics of historical, or criminal investigations. The inexperienced and untrained are far more likely to make mistakes.

[Callafangers]

The majority of death camp staff trials took place in West and then unified Germany, with no evidence of any coercion. That is not victors justice.

Was there any Nazi on trial whose family was not held captive by an enemy nation at the end of the war; amid rumors of horrific mass rape, deportation to Siberia, and other horrors being quite common?

The torture (despite being evidenced, in certain cases) would not even be necessary. And "I saw the extermination happen but I didn't participate" proved to be a far more effective legal defense than "it definitely did not happen, wtf are you talking about?".

[Nessie]

The majority of death camp staff trials took place in West and then unified Germany, with no evidence of any coercion. That is not victors justice.

Was there any Nazi on trial whose family was not held captive by an enemy nation at the end of the war; amid rumors of horrific mass rape, deportation to Siberia, and other horrors being quite common?

It is up to you to prove what coercion did take place and if any happened at the end of the war, how that influenced trials in Germany, run by Germans, in the 1960s, with no evidence of coercion and no chance of a trip to Siberia.

I bet you provide zero evidence, but you continue to assert widespread coercion, without evidence, since you largely operate, without evidence.

The torture (despite being evidenced, in certain cases) would not even be necessary. And "I saw the extermination happen but I didn't participate" proved to be a far more effective legal defense than "it definitely did not happen, wtf are you talking about?".

That is because of the evidence for mass murders and the lack of evidence of other functions taking place inside the AR camps, Chelmno and A-B Kremas. Imagine if the staff at TII had variously come up with it was a hygiene station, property sorting centre, customs post and transit camp, as so-called revisionists do. They would have been held in contempt of court for lying.

[Archie]

False premise. There isn't a consensus on "the Holocaust" and there never has been...

There is no disagreement between historians about T4, 13f14, AR, Chelmno, the Einsatzgruppen and A-B, which cover the vast majority of murdering by the Nazis.

There is no consensus between so-called revisionists about those operations and places. Indeed, it is comical as to how split revisionism is, from whether the EG were responsible for mass shootings, to how connected T4 and AR were, to what happened inside Krema II at Birkenau.

That failure by revisionism is because so few revisionists know or understand the basics of historical, or criminal investigations. The inexperienced and untrained are far more likely to make mistakes.

All these sweeping absolute claims of yours that you can't back up.

People like David Hoggan and Harry Elmer Barnes were historians by any definition. David Irving was a historian, just not an academic one. Many others like Joel Hayward, Mark Weber, and Samuel Crowell had academic training in history. Hayward's thesis which endorsed revisionism was deemed by the faculty at his university to be of excellent quality.

Hellmut Diwald was a highly credentialed German historian. It seems he did not believe in "the consensus" on the "Holocaust," but when he hinted at this in print we see precisely the mechanisms by which this grand fraud is enforced.

Late 1978 brought a significant escalation of the controversy in all senses. In October 1978, the German publisher Propyläen issued Prof. Hellmut Diwald’s massive Geschichte der Deutschen (History of the Germans). Propyläen is an old firm, now owned by Axel Springer, which specializes in publishing books written by scholars but for an intelligent lay readership. On two pages, Diwald said some things very much in harmony with things revisionists of the “Final Solution” have said, and of course the clamor of the Establishment’s spokesmen was deafening. Golo Mann wrote that “these two pages […] are the most monstrous that I have had to read in a German book since 1945,”[15] and the publisher responded to the clamor by stopping the sale of the first edition and substituting a new edition with the two offending pages hastily rewritten – in a style I am assured is not Diwald’s – in order to conform to the usual line. Axel Springer further promised publicly, in words I cannot imagine coming from a U.S. publisher under any circumstances, that this was only the beginning of the rewriting of the book and that by fall 1979 the book would be “not recognizable.”[16]

The original two pages that Diwald had published were not particularly significant in themselves; relatively little was said. There are, however, two points of major significance to note. First, Diwald does not lack credentials as an historian. He is a history professor at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen and has been well known in the historical profession since taking his doctorate under the German-Jewish historian Hans-Joachim Schoeps more than two decades ago. Second, the fact of the panic rewriting of the two pages, as a result of public pressure, definitively established points that should be made when people ask such questions as “why do even the Germans concede the reality of the six million murders?” or “why do the historians concede them?” The market in ideas in this area is not a free one. Throughout the world, there are at least informal and unofficial barriers to free expression and discussion. (Butz, Hoax, Supplement 1)

And amazingly enough it seems the "informal and unofficial barriers to free expression" in that era were insufficient to maintain the lies and so Holocaust promoters have had to resort to increasingly heavy-handed censorship. And potential academics are screened ever more aggressively for ideological criteria.

[Wetzelrad]

Even if a tiny amount of them are lying, and I don't know why they would even lie [...]

Truly? You don't know why? You've come here and posted 136 times. Clearly you have some reason for being here. Could that reason also be a reason some witnesses would lie? Still don't know? Let me spell it out.

Germany persecuted Jews. Every Jew therefore was incentivized to incite against Germany. Since the Allied Powers fought against Germany and won, the Allies and the Jews mutually benefited from the creation of anti-German propaganda. This has continued into the present day because Jewish power depends in part on perceived victimhood.

[Callafangers]

It is up to you to prove what coercion did take place and if any happened at the end of the war, how that influenced trials in Germany, run by Germans, in the 1960s, with no evidence of coercion and no chance of a trip to Siberia.

I bet you provide zero evidence, but you continue to assert widespread coercion, without evidence, since you largely operate, without evidence.

Just to get on the same page, here, Nessie: are you saying the Germans who were under arrest post-war had no reason to fear their families were in danger?

Please explain your rationale, if so.

That is because of the evidence for mass murders and the lack of evidence of other functions taking place inside the AR camps, Chelmno and A-B Kremas. Imagine if the staff at TII had variously come up with it was a hygiene station, property sorting centre, customs post and transit camp, as so-called revisionists do. They would have been held in contempt of court for lying.

Unfortunately for you, everything including the 'Aktion Reinhard' name, surviving documentation and economics point solely to its purpose for property confiscation (any previous doubt of this has been expertly stripped away by PrudentRegret in recent threads). It is you relying on bogus, manipulated statements, so you attempt to project this condition onto revisionists.

[ConfusedJew]

False premise. There isn't a consensus on "the Holocaust" and there never has been. There is a fake consensus that is maintained via coercion.

There's definitely a consensus on some big things like the fact that the Nazis created a "Final Solution" and gassed the Jews. I don't think it's maintained by coercion, but people are emotionally triggered and will suppress discussion on this.

I'm a Jew and I'm right here trying to see where I might find any legitimacy in your arguments and you have the ability to persuade me. I'm open minded. Hi!

So far, I have learned a lot more about epistemology but no historical facts have changed my view that the Holocaust was not real or even exaggerated. I was expected to find some ways in which the Holocaust was exaggerated a little but I haven't even seen that yet.

[ConfusedJew]

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Are you saying that you and many other people on here are geniuses? I like Einstein btw, cool example of a Jewish genius.

[ConfusedJew]

And amazingly enough it seems the "informal and unofficial barriers to free expression" in that era were insufficient to maintain the lies and so Holocaust promoters have had to resort to increasingly heavy-handed censorship. And potential academics are screened ever more aggressively for ideological criteria.

Maybe I'll make a separate discussion for censorship and suppression. I may think that you guys are factually wrong, but if you are sincere in your belief and not motivated by racial hatred, which is hard to prove, I think it can be good to get this discussion out there to deepen our historical understanding.

I am learning a lot about the Holocaust by engaging with you guys, I just don't agree with your interpretation of the facts or history.

That X video has limited context so I don't know what he's talking about. But as long as something is intellectually honest and has good motivations, it would generally be a mistake to censor that.

It's hard to differentiate between legitimate inquiry rather than trolling or hatred though.