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Re: Why "the hoax" would necessitate a conspiracy involving hundreds of thousands
Posted: Tue May 13, 2025 12:33 am
by bombsaway
Callafangers wrote: ↑Tue May 13, 2025 12:16 am
bombsaway wrote: ↑Mon May 12, 2025 11:49 pm
Yes I would expect them to remember leaving the ghetto and being sent to a resettlement camp or camps staffed by Germans in Russia, being held there for years until liberation by the Soviets.
The proportion of Soviet gulag survivor testimonies we have are miniscule. There are only 16 known published/formal memoirs on the gulag system and only a few hundred interviews in total (from academics/organizations seeking out former prisoners). Rounding to 400, that's:
400 / 16000000 =
0.0025% of gulag survivors having actually recorded their experiences (mostly due to academic outreach)
99.9975% of gulag survivors did NOT record their experiences.
Granted, they were suppressed from "speaking out" in the Soviet Union, but so perhaps were Jews who remained there. In any case, the same issue of limited research interest in unique travels and timelines has persisted both for gulag and 'Holocaust' survivors.
Here's an AI fact check (with sources)
No. Virtually every quantitative claim in Callafangers’ 12 May post is off by at least one order of magnitude.
“There are only 16 known published/formal memoirs on the Gulag system.”
• Russia’s Memorial Society had already catalogued more than 700 separate Gulag memoirs in Russian by 2003. See the Memorial bibliography:
https://memo.ru/ru-ru/library/lib6/
• Anne Applebaum’s reference bibliography for Gulag: A History (2003) lists about 250 memoirs in Western languages, in addition to hundreds in Russian. (Appendix, pp. 579-613.) Book info:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/book ... applebaum/
• The anthology Gulag Voices: An Anthology (Indiana Univ. Press, 2011) includes sixteen memoirs in one volume, drawn from a far larger corpus:
https://iupress.org/9780253223481/gulag-voices/
“Only a few hundred interviews in total … rounding to 400.”
• The oral-history project run by Orlando Figes and Memorial collected thousands of interviews with former prisoners and their families. Project overview:
https://orlandofiges.info/works/memory/ ... et_memory/
• Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Detention and Exile (Palgrave, 2011) grew out of an archive that already held over 1,000 recorded interviews at the time. Book info:
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230113730
Ratio math
Callafangers divides an invented numerator (400) by an inflated denominator (“16 million survivors”) to produce 0.0025 %. Replace his 400 with 700+ memoirs and several-thousand interviews and the proportion jumps two orders of magnitude. Even if 18 million passed through the camps, the recorded testimony is counted in the thousands, not the hundreds.
Timing
Survivor accounts began appearing soon after Stalin’s death—e.g., Yevgenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind (English ed. 1968) and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). Western and émigré presses issued many more during the 1970s–80s, and the glasnost years unleashed a flood of new publications.
Holocaust testimony (brief comparison)
Claims that “nobody was writing survivor tales for 30-40 years” ignore Primo Levi (1947), Filip Müller (1947/1965), Miklós Nyiszli (1946), and thousands of Yad Vashem witness questionnaires from the 1950s. Today the USC Shoah Foundation holds roughly 52,000 filmed testimonies:
https://sfi.usc.edu/collections/holocaust
Bottom line: The corpus of Gulag survivor narratives numbers in the thousands, not “16 memoirs and 400 interviews.” Callafangers’ figures are therefore factually incorrect, and the same pattern of understatement extends to his comments on Holocaust testimony.
The 52,000 filmed Holocaust testimonies speaks to a characteristic of Jews to talk about their persecution. Assuming they were kept in resettlement camps, conditions here were no doubt going to be pretty poor so they would have testified about them just like they testified about the ghettos and the labor camps.
You need a mechanism of suppression, and one that extends to places like Israel where it's estimated 1.3 million Jews emigrated to from Soviet states or former Soviet states, starting in the 70s.
Re: Why "the hoax" would necessitate a conspiracy involving hundreds of thousands
Posted: Tue May 13, 2025 1:05 am
by Callafangers
bombsaway wrote: ↑Tue May 13, 2025 12:33 am
The 52,000 filmed Holocaust testimonies speaks to a characteristic of Jews to talk about their persecution. Assuming they were kept in resettlement camps, conditions here were no doubt going to be pretty poor so they would have testified about them just like they testified about the ghettos and the labor camps.
Your AI 'fact-check' brought you up at most a single order of magnitude (i.e. now in the ballpark of a whopping 0.01-0.02% of gulag survivors) but doesn't adequately account for overlap (more accessible survivors with multiple interviewers in some cases) and still accounts for near-zero testimonies, overall, relative to the total number of people who could have given them.
The point stands: there is no organic drive for 'survivors' to come out and share their stories. And for Jewish organizations largely coordinating any/all survivor interviews, selective outreach, lines of questioning, editing, or even just limiting historical access by requiring on-site campus visits to view testimony (prohibitive to revisionists), cannot be ruled out.
You need a mechanism of suppression, and one that extends to places like Israel where it's estimated 1.3 million Jews emigrated to from Soviet states or former Soviet states, starting in the 70s.
You assume there was a drive by any party to 'let the truth be known'. For decades, nobody asked. This was also true of many gulag survivors, many of whom expressed great surprise or shock when the interviewers reached out to them (as for decades, no one had asked them anything).
Moreover, there were incentives for omission (for 'Holocaust' survivors), such as the State of Israel, a shared ideological narrative, collective self-preservation, and even revenge motives -- cumulatively, the most important incentives in all of Judaism.
Jews in Israel are even more subjected to recognizing and aligning with these collective aims.
Re: Why "the hoax" would necessitate a conspiracy involving hundreds of thousands
Posted: Tue May 13, 2025 1:49 am
by Archie
There were, according to the mainstream, a good 2-3M Jews in the Soviet Union after the war. Among a larger population in the hundreds of millions. The argument here seems to presuppose there were no Jews in Eastern Europe after the war and that if someone had seen one they would have published a memoir about it. That's too binary. The question is not whether there were Jews. We know that there at the very least a few million. The question is how many. And there are other territories in play.
Re: Why "the hoax" would necessitate a conspiracy involving hundreds of thousands
Posted: Tue May 13, 2025 1:56 am
by Archie
Callafangers wrote: ↑Tue May 13, 2025 1:05 am
The point stands: there is no organic drive for 'survivors' to come out and share their stories. And for Jewish organizations largely coordinating any/all survivor interviews, selective outreach, lines of questioning, editing, or even just limiting historical access by requiring on-site campus visits to view testimony (prohibitive to revisionists), cannot be ruled out
If someone had the patience to actually sit through all those orals histories, there probably would be a lot of incongruous and problematic ones. There are a few funny clips going around and that's probably just scratching the surface. The amount of records that revisionists have searched and had access to is a tiny fraction of what the establishment side has done.
If I were to post a problematic testimony that clashed with the legend, the Holocaust Industry would just IGNORE it. And bombsaway would make up some reason why it didn't count.
Re: Why "the hoax" would necessitate a conspiracy involving hundreds of thousands
Posted: Tue May 13, 2025 6:03 am
by bombsaway
Archie wrote: ↑Tue May 13, 2025 1:56 am
Callafangers wrote: ↑Tue May 13, 2025 1:05 am
The point stands: there is no organic drive for 'survivors' to come out and share their stories. And for Jewish organizations largely coordinating any/all survivor interviews, selective outreach, lines of questioning, editing, or even just limiting historical access by requiring on-site campus visits to view testimony (prohibitive to revisionists), cannot be ruled out
If someone had the patience to actually sit through all those orals histories, there probably would be a lot of incongruous and problematic ones. There are a few funny clips going around and that's probably just scratching the surface. The amount of records that revisionists have searched and had access to is a tiny fraction of what the establishment side has done.
If I were to post a problematic testimony that clashed with the legend, the Holocaust Industry would just IGNORE it. And bombsaway would make up some reason why it didn't count.
Count for what? If you had evidence of a conspiracy to systematically fabricate a mass event I would accept that. If you had evidence of resettlement I would accept it happened at least on a limited scale.
Re: Why "the hoax" would necessitate a conspiracy involving hundreds of thousands
Posted: Tue May 13, 2025 9:54 am
by Nessie
"Germany has taken commendable steps to confront its role as the perpetrator of the Holocaust and to ensure that Holocaust victims and their heirs receive restitution and/or compensation."
"As of mid-2019, approximately 25,000 Holocaust survivors worldwide still received a monthly pension for “damage to health” provided under the BEG."
"As of July 2019, more than 521,500 Jewish victims of Nazi persecution had received a one-time payment from the Hardship Fund."
If millions of Jews had survived, it needs millions to have played dead, not claim compensation and to be part of the hoax.