Only 25K?? Do you have a credible source for that number? Iran's government claims about 3,000. "Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRANA) published a full report on 23 February 2026, including a detailed named list of 7,007 deaths "
The supposed number keeps magically expanding! Last month, President Trump claimed Iran "recently killed 52,000 innocent protestors" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEfNCRahFQo Sounds like hasbara to me.
Good point, thanks. "UN Special Rapporteur on Iran, Mai Sato, said in a media interview that at least 5,000 people had been killed, noting that according to information she received from medical sources, the death toll might be as high as 20,000.."
Devil is always in the details, who are the "medical sources'? i recall digging into this subject last winter, and I recall a "medical source" was an pro-regime change Iranian-expat in Germany with no first-hand knowledge.
P.S. Quick google AI search: "Dr. Amir-Mobarez Parasta, a German-Iranian eye surgeon based in Munich, emerged as a primary source for high casualty figures ... figures were compiled via informal networks ... inside Iran who communicated using smuggled Starlink satellite terminals [so part of Mossad/CIA regime change effort, not exactly objective sources] ... . Independent verification of these specific clinic-derived tallies remains difficult"
Huh? As discussed in my previous comments, I'm skeptical of the credibility of the "sources" for the Jan '26 Iranian death count. Wasn't talking about the WWII Jewish holocaust.
BTW, my wife did holocaust research for Pat Conroy's book "Beach Music." Her father and his family fled Vienna in 1938,
But, the "medical sources" in Iran are anonymous (for understandable reasons) and some communicated by Starlink used by those involved in the regime change effort. So, I suspect some of these sources could be creating BS numbers to promote the regime change narrative to "free" Iran.
Obviously, it's impossible to know who's telling the truth here. Given the BS hasbara track record of the US & Israeli PR machine, I'm skeptical of anything they claim.
Also, it's not clear how many civilians were killed by the Mossad/CIA armed "rioters" vs killed by government forces.
For someone applying so much skepticism to the claims of murder by the Iranian government you seem shockingly credulous about the possibility that "Mossad/CIA armed "rioters" " share the blame, given your source does not even mention that. The use of vilifying language for the heroic revolutionaries is also telling (as is my deliberate use of the opposite)
Two further points. While its fine to insist on accurate figures, 7K is still enough to qualify as a mass murder and justify humanitarian intervention. And The source saying "7K - 19K" was published in February. The number will have gone up since then.
"humanitarian intervention"!! Who's "shockingly credulous"? In 1991, I got out of the Army NG (ABN RGR LRRP company) because of the lies used to get us into the first Gulf War. All of the BS wars since '91 were also justified by propaganda that we were "saving" the Iraqi people, the Syrian people, the Afghan woman, etc.
How can you possibly believe the Neocons and Trump want to "save" the Iranian people when they have bombed a lot of civilian infrastructure and threatened to send Iran back into "the stone age"? The Neocons & Israel want to destroy Iran as a state , just as they did to Iraq, Syria, and Libya.
P.S. I did not intend the citation in my previous reply to support my claim of "Mossad/CIA armed "rioters"" I've just edited it and moved the citation up to avoid confusion. Sorry for the confusion.
Personally I find East Africa fascinating and horrifying in equal measure; I was following Tigray a few years ago, and Sudan and M203/Congo stuff now. Picked it up from the old War Nerd coverage. But YMMV.
Why do you use the term “hasbara” instead of just saying “Israeli propagandists” or some other English phrase? It always seems unnecessarily alienating to use Hebrew, similar to if someone insisted on describing TikTok as “xuanchuan”. Does using “hasbara” provide any additional information?
That’s surprising because the rest of your comment doesn’t seem optimized for brevity. Couldn’t you replace the “hasbara sources” with “zionists”? You could probably replace the entire phrase “hasbara sources who deny the Gaza genocide”.
Anyways, I think you’d get more interested responses if you ditch the jargon. While I don’t find it offensive, it does make me think you spend too much time bickering online. It’s similar to how there were a few years where people used Russian terms like “kompromat” instead of “blackmail”. Others will find it offensive, and I’m sure you’ve had a lot of dead-end conversations disputing that. Why not avoid them?
Sudan is actually mentioned in the same sentence as Gaza. However it is not mentioned in the footnote which points out that comparisons between Jews in Nazi Germany and Palestinians are likely to cause complaints.
rather than actual conflicts (where i think the issue is different not that reports aren't available or people don't believe in them but just don't really care / are too exhausted because these wars happen in places where they never seem to end) this rather reminds me of our ability to compartimentalize and not worry too much about climate change or AI risk. if shit blows up we'll also look back and say all the warning signs were there and we did next to nothing.
I completed the review, and like you this bit struck out to me substantially. I see his point on Sudan, and would add on Iran, people in Southern Israel the last couple decades, the intifadas, Haiti, El Salvador, the Uyghurs, contemporary chattel slavery in Africa etc.
I assume your selective terminology (“detailed reporting,” “outlets”) is just weasel wording to hide the fact that whatever you’re talking about is NOT ordinary press (in the sense of “Conversely Gaza gets infinite press” above), right? Or are you seriously claiming the two get a similar magnitude of coverage (not to mention attention from activists)?
"While the fact is that there is obvious horror in Gaza, there is zero evidence of systemic oppression any more than any other war in urban areas."
. . .
Exactly! A great example was the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 by the Germans during WWII:
“Netanyahu has been brandishing Amalek [1 Samuel 15:3] in the wake of the Hamas attack … for the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound ... in other words, a ghetto. ... like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. … “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”
As a teenager I read Leon Uri's book "Mila 18" about the 1943 Jewish Warsaw Ghetto uprisng. Last night [03/03/2023], I googled "warsaw ghetto uprising ruins” images. Looks the same as Gaza today.
In 1943, Nazi SS General Jurgen Stroop liquidated the Warsaw Ghetto. When the poorly armed Jewish resistance fought back, the Nazi's starved out, burned out, and leveled the ghetto. The survivors were “transferred” to the death camps.
IN 1944, after the Polish 1944 uprising, Hitler ordered, 'Warsaw is to be razed to the ground while the war proceeds.’ … Himmler made sure his officers understood exactly what was intended: ‘The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth… No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to it's foundation.' … less than 5 per cent of pre-war Warsaw remained intact … in the city of ruins … genocide and urbicide march in lockstep.” https://geographicalimaginations.com/2013/04/24/city-of-ruins/
“The decision we made last night [3-01-25] to completely halt the entry of humanitarian aid [e.g. food , water, etc] into Gaza until Hamas is destroyed or surrenders completely and all our hostages are returned is an important step in the right direction— ‘standing at the gates of hell,’” said Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. “Now, we must open these gates as quickly and as lethally as possible …”
Don't you hear echos of Hitler & Himmler in Netanyahu's invocation of "Amalak," and Smotrich's promise (and President Trumps] to “open the gates of hell”?
P.S. “... many did fight back—in the Warsaw Ghetto … human instinct ... to simply pretend it [genocide] isn’t happening, is timeless. … it’s happening, in different forms and under different names, in … Gaza right now”
Do you hear echoes of Hitler in Ukrainians calling Russians “orcs?”
The aftermath of the battle of Mosul looks like the Warsaw ghetto too. So does every urban battlefield. Was the coalition to defeat ISIS the new Nazis?
You’ve fallen for a lot of Palestinian propaganda. A mix of lies (like in fact Gaza wasn’t actually that heavily populated, and half of its land was rural; far from a ghetto or prison camp, residents could travel abroad if they got visas to third countries, and its economic and health metrics were comparable to Egypt and Jordan) and selective standards to spin ordinary wartime rhetoric and the usual effects of combat as genocide.
> Do you hear echoes of Hitler in Ukrainians calling Russians “orcs?”
Dehumanization of enemy soldiers is older than Hitler. I don't know if you can wage war effectively if you don't do that. Dehumanization of enemy civilians or denying the right of their nation to exist is much more hitlery in tone, though.
It was not exactly a clandestine Hamas operation to defeat Israel by murdering a thousand people out of a population of ten millions. Instead, it was meant to be seen.
Most of the world watched with horror, some watched with glee (and wore paraglider buttons), but nobody looked away.
While Hamas managed to convince me that they are an evil organization which needs to be wiped off the face of the Earth (while still avoiding civilian casualties), since then the Israeli government has been hard at work trying to convince me that they are completely indifferent to Palestinian civilian casualties, are building a Greater Israel in the West Bank and bombing Iran for peace and democracy. Quite frankly, I view Israel like Putin's Russia, a belligerent menace which needs to be reined in through international sanctions. If the civilized peoples can't stop them from murdering and getting murdered by (but mostly the former, because the IDF has a technological edge) other religious nutjobs, then we should probably just let them get on with it rather than supporting one side or the other.
My very naive answer would be fighting off Hamas with targeted operations (1), together with promoting another alternative model in for Palestinians. By that I mean, stopping the colonization in the west bank and thoroughly working on making it a viable independent state with decent economical opportunities, hence showing to most palestinians (2) that peace a better option than terrorist attacks/'resistance". Ofc this can fail again and again, as it did in 2006, but it's definitely better than killing tens of thousands of civilians and attempting on ethnical cleansing.
(1) Thus not managing to militarily eradicate it, but limiting its nuisance power. And ofc cutting any foreign financing and not playing the game of using Hamas to make the two-state solution non-viable.
(2) I wish I made this sound less infantilizing, I'm sure many palestinians are aware of that.
You might interpret freezing settlements in the WB as a productive gesture, but to most Palestinians it’ll be vindication of Hamas’s approach.
Targeted operations which don’t endanger civilians sound really good until you try it against an enemy which literally builds bunkers under hospitals and UN offices.
This isn’t IDF propaganda; it’s verifiable. Mohammed Dief was killed hiding in a humanitarian zone. Mohammed Sinwar was killed in the airstrike on the European Hospital. How do you target people who deliberately shelter in protected civilian sites without endangering the civilians?
Not to mention weapons caches and IEDs in apartment buildings, and fighters who sneak between them unarmed and in civilian attire. Would you let your troops get ambushed on every street?
If you don't get a solution does that make the current actions ok? Sometimes the things we want come at too high a cost even if the benefits go to us and the costs to our enemies.
I'd actually be fine with Israel causing an order of magnitude more civilian casualties than Hamas, if they actually got rid of Hamas. But instead, they caused nearly two orders of magnitude more civilian casualties than Hamas, and still didn't get rid of Hamas.
Personally, I am fine with getting rid of Hamas with some civilian casualties. I am not some radical pacifist. Sometimes the best possible outcome involves accidentally killing innocents. Ridding Germany of the Nazi rule involved quite a lot dead civilians, but was obviously worth it.
If Israel had decided to occupy Gaza for a generation or two, I would not be whining about their right to self-determination.
However, for all the dead Gazans, I do not think Israel can really claim to have defeated Hamas for good. Blowing up one Hamas commander along with 50 civilians in some refugee camp does not seem like the move which will win the battle for the hearts and minds, and as long as Hamas is in the heart and minds of Gazans it will survive even if you kill 90% of its fighters.
Also, the aims of the Israeli government can be inferred from how they behave in the West Bank, where Palestinian authorities seem a lot less murderous than Hamas. Bulldozing the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank would go a long way towards signaling a commitment to a peaceful coexistence. Yet the Israeli government is encouraging such settlements, and violence against Palestinians seems widespread.
Very, very simple. Hamas has already agreed to completely disarm, agreeing to the Israeli proposed deal by the Board of Peace. Then bibi said "no, we changed our mind." Hamas is willing to let there be elections again.
Trolling for peace works. And I'm going to keep on beating this drum until people start to realize that "both sides hating each other" still means they can make peace.
This is just false. Hamas sort of agreed to a peace deal but in reality it was vague and Hamas had a different interpretation than the U.S. Now the U.S. wants to change the deal and make it more favorable for Hamas, which they agree to. But Israel does not agree to that, they want to go with the U.S./Israeli interpretation of the original deal, which they still accept (Hamas disarms before they leave).
Every peace deal is going to be vague. That's just English/Arabic/Hbrew for you. Life is vague, there's always wiggle room.
There's "had a different interpretation" that is "at loggerheads" (like America and Iran's interpretation of "get the strait of hormuz moving again" -- Iran thinks/wants to ban American ships, American war ships -- this is at the moment completely unacceptable to the United States POTUS, so they're at loggerheads).
Israel proposed a deal -- through the board of peace, deliberately crafting it to be unacceptable to Hamas. Then, Hamas agreed to it. Now Israel is going back on the deal. This is a deliberate tactic of Hamas to make Israel look bad and pull their hair out.
Yes, both sides are trolling the other. Yes, Americans are instigating said trolling, in order to make peace happen.
You seem to be under the impression that any deal would be acceptable to Bibi. No deal that means Bibi goes to jail (which is any deal, politically speaking -- he's lived as a hawk for decades) is acceptable to Bibi.
Unlike Putin and Russia, Israel was attacked, despite its soft footed policy meant to cultivate stability and economic opportunity in Gaza.
If they were indifferent to Palestinian casualties, they'd have imposed total siege instead of invading. They could have sat home, waited for a few months, and won definitively. Instead they lost a lot of troops in combat and spent a fortune and Hamas is back in power.
Israel is vulnerable to foreign economic pressure, especially if it includes weapons embargo. We faced a very real threat from Biden’s administration, and they even brought acute deficit of some munitions, which resulted in more casualties – both Israeli and Gazan.
Israel is very vulnerable to missiles. Irans "reasonably good missiles" have been hitting more than the near-bottle rockets that the Golden Dome was created to defend against. Desalinization plants (yes, warcrime, Israel gets to bitch when they aren't causing droughts in Iran) would do the trick, easy peasy.
Very easy. Bam, desalinization plants. Israel disappears. Very small country, easy weak points to hit. (Citing American analysis on this point.) Israel is not Iran, which is a very big country (thirty times Israel's size or so).
My experience of October 7th as an Australian was that the government lit the Sydney Opera House up in blue and white, everyone acknowledged it was a tragedy, I saw lots of photos of shot up Kibbutzim and music festival detritus and missing grandmas, and the media covered hostage recovery for months afterwards. Nobody looked away, although they didn't do anything particularly helpful either, since Israel is a sovereign nation with a functional government and military and is well outside our sphere of influence.
The narrative eventually shifted following a dead Australian aid worker, starvation in the wake of the blockade, broad consensus that the Israeli government was committing a genocide using the blockade as a tool (note that what got them in trouble was not the bombing and not necessarily even the blockade but the repulsive statements in the Knesset), the IDF gunning down people as they approached aid stations, and the usual bombing of hospitals and schools.
I'm not sure I agree that the world looked away. The world glanced over, said "yeah that sucks, Hamas are bad", watched for a while, and then said "wow that's a lot of bodies in Gaza though".
Because some tiny percentage of Muslim immigrants said atrocious things in public, it is the Australian government's fault for letting any Muslims immigrate at all? Come on, this is not a serious statement.
Israel demanded the outright depopulation - one might fairly say ethnic cleansing - of half the Gaza Strip, which was one of the most overpopulated parts of the world on Earth pre-war, as a condition for a ceasefire (which it then proceeded to repeatedly violate).
Hamas accepted, despite Israel's failure throughout the conflict at taking or holding territory or even setting up any sort of occupation government.
There are a lot more lines of evidence pointing to the same conclusion, but this place has become overrun with the sort of people who deny our livestreamed, modern holocaust.
Not sure what you mean, Israel pretty much had taken over that entire area already, right? And it is not depopulated, but it is mostly a rural area which was not overpopulated (the part they took control of). Hamas "accepted" but then did not disarm as agreed, and got to take back control of the remaining territory, after which they murdered a bunch of (Palestinian) people openly.
Every nation has a narrative, and "the world always looks away" is the Israeli narrative. You can't expect mere facts to change that.
The narrative is important, because it excuses everything done by Israel itself. "We must do horrible things to protect ourselves sometimes, because the world always looks away." And technically speaking, it is not even falsifiable, because you can always argue that the world could have looked more or done more.
(The obvious reply is to ask: Well, what does Israel do about atrocities that happen in distant parts of the planet? Is it really just Israel getting the special treatment, or is this simply human nature?)
I think that by 'looking away' the author here meant that the world hasn't taken any action to actually stop those horrors.
I don't get the part about the Hamas massacres on 07/10, you're referring to the fact some people in the west celebrated the act? That's definitely a very small part of "the world".
Agreed. That was a very jarring "one of these things is not like the other" moment. Hamas started a war that they couldn't win by committing atrocities and then flipped the script to "Our people are the victims because they are hiding hostages and supporting us." If the Gazans had just delivered the heads of the people responsible the fighting would have been over a lot more quickly.
The same complaints made about the destrution in Gaza could be leveled at the Allied bombing campaigns in WWII.
If Hamas and its supporters are allowed to survive in a way that lets them tell themselves "we outlasted the Israelis and were in the right and won," we're going to see the same old s--- again in about 15-20 years. Everyone seems to forget that Israel pulled all of its troops out of Gaza and left the area mostly alone (in terms of governance, etc.), and the response to being left alone was October 7.
The swiftness with which Israel's justified retaliation started being condemned with protest marches and anti-Jewish hate on the left has been very educational. I've seen a number of articles suggesting that it's safer to be Jewish in the south and in conservative areas, especially in terms of college campuses. I think it's true.
Wonder why the hell the guy had to spoil a perfectly good review by almost comically diving head first into the culture war. Like all he had to do was not mention one single word. If he said Srebrenica or otherwise it wouldn't been cool
Even though it’s probably obvious to everyone, I think it’s worth stating explicitly and plainly: the triggering issue is, of course, that using a story about the Holocaust (an actual murderous genocide, which was the horrific culmination of centuries of blood-libel) to further spread a new murderous blood-libel against the very same people who were the victims of that said genocide - might seen by some as... somewhat cynical.
To the contrary, a proper understanding of the Holocaust is necessary in order to grok what is happening in Gaza. That past horror is perhaps the #1 source of the (understandable) paranoid, us-versus-them mentality that animates Israel today. Violence begets violence and murder begets murder
On the one hand, I assume that the "violence" that "begets violence” in your view is the Palestinian violence ~3 years ago, and not the German violence ~80 years ago (because, really, blaming the Nazis for the war on Gaza would be a truly spectacular world-class exercise in blame shifting from the Palestinians).
But on the other hand, there was absolutely nothing in what the Germans did to the Jews that even remotely fits the “violence begets violence” pattern. So, to the extent that this pattern is relevant to Gaza, your claim that “a proper understanding of the Holocaust is necessary in order to grok what is happening in Gaza” becomes all the more disconnected.
> But on the other hand, there was absolutely nothing in what the Germans did to the Jews that even remotely fits the “violence begets violence” pattern.
Sure there was! Nazism would never have been a thing if not for the horrors of WWI and its aftermath, which hit the Germans particularly hard, and made them vulnerable to demagogues designating convenient scapegoats
> because, really, blaming the Nazis for the war on Gaza would be a truly spectacular world-class exercise in blame shifting from the Palestinians
True, although we can give them a little bit of blame! Some Palestinian leaders like Amin al-Husseini collaborated with Nazi Germany and sought their help in opposing a Jewish state.
I don't think so. The U.S. would have reacted the exact same way to such an attack. Any sane country would, I think. You can't just give up and surrender because the enemy is hiding under hospitals.
Hamas literally had its headquarters in al-Sifa hospital. They hid their fighters along the peaceful Gazans who clearly had had nothing to do with getting Hamas into power. And of course, the moment the Israelis drop any bomb on them the death toll comes back immediately. This is despite the fact that the Gaza health ministry was reduced to rubble long back.
The 2016-17 battle to retake Mosul from ISIS is perhaps the U.S.-involved conflict most similar to Gaza—fighting a ruthless Islamist terrorist group in a dense urban environment with population ~2 million. In Mosul, the U.S. and our allies achieved well under 1:1 civilian to combatant casualty ratio. In Gaza, the IDF is doing ~4:1 (https://aoav.org.uk/2026/why-israeli-claims-of-low-civilian-to-combatant-harm-in-gaza-do-not-hold-up/).
Oh, and unlike the IDF, we actually defeated the enemy!
Whether the accusations amount to blood-libel depends on how serious they are, and on how much the accusers actually have any regard for the truth of the matter.
As for severity, it can't get much worse than "Genocide". And your strong careless assertions, your framing, and your choice of words ("open air prison") leave very little doubt about "having regard for the truth of the matter".
It really should be clear to anyone familiar with the details that nothing remotely resembling genocide is going on in Gaza. And it should be even more clear that anyone who does not know the facts must not spread such horrific accusations.
I have seen fathers carrying their children's remains in plastic bags. I've seen western doctors talk about the seeing children double tapped by sniper routinely. I've seen the idf precisions bomb aid workers despite knowing their exact location. I've seen them bomb the camps they order civilians to move to. I've seen them rape prisoners on cctv and then take the rapists onto TV to celebrate them.
In a few years everyone will have always been against this. My conscience is clear.
Continually bringing up october 7th feels really old hat and likely a counterproductive argument for your agenda. Of course there is an acceptable retaliation to such an event, but there is also a concept of proportionality, and the overwhelming consensus is that it has been far exceeded.
The United States was brought into WW2 by the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which killed 2,400 Americans. How many Italian, Japanese, and German casualties would it have been proportional for them to inflict in response?
The answer, of course, is that whether the response is justified has nothing whatsoever to do with the number of casualties inflicted. "Defeat those countries and prevent them from being able to continue to wage war on you" is a perfectly valid response.
I think the justification has *some* relation to the death toll, but I agree that proportionality is entirely the wrong standard. I think the good arguments for "proportionality" in war are not about the justice of a retaliation, but about its consequences. Proportional retaliation is supposed to be better for deterrence in certain repeated games, which may be a genuine good. But there's no general rule, and if a military action neither directly achieves some good nor effectively deters future violence, then proportionality doesn't make it ok.
Adding my voice to the chorus, as this review lost me in that penultimate paragraph. Gaza has unending press, from state broadcasters right down to every dumb fake-revolutionary woman's dating app profile. October 7th was memory-holed within days.
The specific hatred the state of Israel gets, while terrorist groups get little to none and actually get support would already be suspicious. But the same people don't give a shit about Sudan for example. The only conclusion is rampant anti-Semitism. At least the Jews have guns now to protect themselves Alhamdulilah
Israel is a sovereign state that presents itself as a Western liberal democracy. Of course they get held to a higher standard that literal Islamist terrorists or African failed states.
Literally the soft bigotry of low expectations. I'm sure it's a great relief to those dying in Sudan that they do so at the hands of a failed state rather than a western democracy.
Just as imagery of 9/11 was downplayed or sanitized, because everyone's always so afraid of causing an anti-Muslim backlash every time a group of terrorist Muslims do something outlandishly murderous and crazy. Americans in 2006 had probably seen that stupid photo of the prisoner pyramid in Abu-whatever more than the planes striking the towers, it was seen as stoking prejudice or exploiting emotions to hammer on those haunting images but somehow when it's the *other* direction and the imagery might raise sympathy for Muslims it's always spread around without regard to the backlash *that* might cause.
Referring to Gaza AT ALL just needlessly adds Current Thing drama to an otherwise very well written piece. It does not add anything to mention a contemporary controversy, indeed the whole coda about recent historical events that may or may not be "genocides" adds nothing of value. A better article would omit such comment so as to let the people who would've arrived at that conclusion get there on their own while not alienating anyone else. This isn't an article for children to be talked down to, this is on a rationalist blog, the after-school special level observation about could it happen today / is it happening, that's beneath us here.
It seems clearly beneficial and meaningful to tie the lesson of a reviewed book to current events, to use the carefully written (and then reviewed) story as a lens and frame for what it naturally still has to say about events that happened after it.
The very fact that there is such a vocal group pushing back against _any_ characterization of malice or misbehavior on the part of Israel is _exactly_ why such a footnote is both the natural conclusion of the review and rings true.
You can probably readily point to examples in the West of antisemites or leftist crazies way overstating the case against Israel, and I can point to the spoken works of Smotrich or Gvir that are outrightly genocidal - lets put aside the vocal minorities.
70,000 Gazans (at least) are dead and Gaza is basically rubble.
Theres a real argument to be had about how many civilian casualties are acceptable in making your country safe. Even while reasonable minds may differ on where that answer lies, no reasonable mind should consider what has actually happened to be meet that mark. If Israel's response to 10/7 was to be the complete and total destruction of Hamas, they have a moral and legal duty to minimize the civilian casualties and they had better damn actually destroy Hamas.
In reality, Hamas remains a thorn and blowback promises more future radicalized insurgents. Israel the state has lost its goodwill and support from much of the rest of the world. No possible honest telling of the story of the offensive can support that they were anything but regularly entirely unconcerned with the destruction visited upon noncombatants.
The key is that we don't pin all that on _Israel_ or _Jews_ as a people - pin that on who deserves it, the Israeli administration that actually made it happen, who abdicated their moral and legal duty and caused and continue to cause useless suffering of Gazans and simultaneously great harm to their own nation.
I understand that the book review largely takes Rudi’s perspective, but also 200,000 is an unfathomable number of lives saved. I wouldn’t call his mission a failure at all. (Also, this book review was excellent.)
Not exactly. It's more like saving is a life is like saving a world since all people were descended from Adam. I'm taking this as a hypothetical rather than a statement about saving the whole existing world.
I'll go ahead and paste the comment I had planned to post as a reply here:
“no moral uplift, no lessons”
“stops deportations long enough to save an estimated 200,000 lives.”
It seems like one lesson we could draw is that, when we’re considering awfulness on such an immense scale, it’s easy to overlook things that in any other circumstance would seem like a greater victory than anything the overwhelming majority of us achieve in our lives.
The part about "and also American pressure" seems to imply that he probably had a relatively marginal effect on it though? If we wildly estimate it at 10% that's 20k, which is still big.
It's always interesting to see how hard it is to get people to accept something that is radically different from their understanding of things. I think it's human nature to be able to extrapolate trends, but also to completely miss and even deny phase changes.
This review reminded me of the sudden about-face in COVID in March 2020. It was obvious to a smallish number of people for several weeks, if not months, that COVID was going to be a big deal but by and large, nobody really cared. Then there was that one day where famous people got COVID and we had a societal phase change and started caring about COVID quite a bit.
And it's distinct from the emperor-has-no-clothes phenomenon. It's not that people are afraid to speak up, it's more like pointing out the new reality gets a non-even-wrong reaction. The new reality seems literally unthinkable, so nobody thinks about it until everybody does.
As I understand it, there was a common belief that Germany was a civilized country. They had major achievements in music and science, and their philosophers were respected. (I can't speak to how good the philosophers were.)
It turns out that music, science, and philosophy aren't evidence of ethical behavior.
There was also the problem of atrocity propaganda in the First World War, where "the Huns" had been accused of all sorts of atrocities e.g. crucifying a Canadian soldier:
TL;DR Germany and Hungary, starting in the mid to late 1800s, were some of the best times for Jews in recent memory, possibly in almost all of history up to that point.
In critique of cynical reason Peter Sloterdijk defines cynicism as "enlightened false consciousness". We know, but we act as if we don't. He sees this as a distinctly modern way to live. We live in a broadly "unmasked" world - we know better than ever all the ways in which power works and all the negative consequences of our way of living - yet act as if the mask is still on. Part of our motivation to do this is the fact that we benefit too much from the current way things are organised. We see e.g. global warming, but our big corpo is paying our mortgage so we can't fathom a world without constantly growing economies.
Applied to your COVID example, I think this cynical way of living makes us even less likely to take early warnings seriously, because for many of us our basic mode of living is already a low-grade denial of reality.
I surely hope we can reach a moment like that COVID moment on climate this decade. Things'll probably really need to hit the fan for that to happen though... which would also be really bad, but perhaps good in the long run.
It is because people mostly act on heuristics. I had the same experience during covid. In no small part because I was reading this blog, I understood that covid was likely to be a big thing weeks in advance of the world in general. When I tried to warn against that, I mainly got resistance in terms of all the other pandemic scares that petered out, sars1, ebola etc., and also appeals to my lack of authority in medicine.
The thing is "nothing ever happens" is often a good heuristic. Hype and hyperbole are common, actual crisis are rare. I would have thought the same about covid, if I had not catched on and read a lot of details.
It captured how I felt learning about factory farming on a deep level. I realized that, oh shit, this is really fucked up and I can't support this in any way, and I thought that if the people in my life just knew what was happening they would stop supporting it to. Spoiler alert: people can know and still not care.
The quote by Raymond Aron really struck me, because it accurately represents most of my life before then. I knew, but did not believe it, and because I didn't believe it, I didn't know. It even seems accurate when talking to people about it. You can tell that they agree it's bad, but that it's like a part of them doesn't grok that it's worse than someone kicking a dog.
I know it's controversial to talk about animal rights in light of human atrocities, but I think it's worth flagging that a concentration camp survivor, Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz was one of the first to make the connection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_analogy_in_animal_rights
I was disappointed to see this missing from the 3rd- and 4th-from-last paragraphs, given the sheer scale and depth of badness that is factory farming.
Not just factory farming. I would like to bring up another aspect of climate change that does not get talked about in broad publicity, but rather only in niche circles: *Still accelerating* rate of species extinction across the globe, fauna and flora. Yes, human action has been responsible for species extinction long before industrialization, apparently even before civilization and agriculture. But the scientific evidence is really depressing, the extinction rate has never been higher and it is just through climate change alone, not even direct human action anymore. It is an unseen bow wave in front of us that is drowning species every minute, and still *accelerating*.
I think it's just the prior for "nothing ever happens" is so big, and isn't easily adaptable in the span of scarcely weeks. Vastly proven by tons of "next pandemic" scare in the last few years.
The words the reviewer was looking for are “Majdanek, another Nazi concentration camp on occupied Polish soil”
Polish people are very touchy about this, and rightly so! Those were not *Polish* camps in any sense, and plenty of (non-Jewish) Polish people perished in those camps.
I know this is very much the line of (at least the former PiS-led) Polish government, but I found the insistence always a bit weird. I have yet to meet anyone who hears the objected phrase and concludes that clearly, what is meant were camps run by some Polish government.
If I say "Swiss mountains", nobody will object that actually the Swiss did neither build nor operate the mountains, and the politically correct phrasing should be "mountains currently located in modern-day Switzerland".
Quite frankly, I find this insistence on phrasing for the sake of signaling that one is one of the ingroup who keep up with current acceptable phrasings quite tiresome, no matter if the faux outrage comes from the left ("He's not Black, he's Afro-American!") or the right ("Call it Türkiye, not Turkey like the bird!").
To convince me that this phrasing is bad, you would have to show that it has a bad effect. Like, if 30% of the Baltic people have heard the phrasing "Polish concentration camp" so often (and do not have any historical education whatsoever) that they answered "Poland" to the question "which country ran Auschwitz?", then I would concede that we have a real problem and need to fix our phrasing to combat this misconception. My presumption is that the actual number will not be much above the Lizardman's constant, though.
It's easy enough to say "concentration camp in Poland" rather than "Polish concentration camp."
The government of Poland deserves blame for a lot of bad things it has done over the centuries. But it never did _that_. So let's not confuse people with sloppy phrasing.
OK, I’ll bite that bullet! Me! When I was much younger, I would hear “Polish concentration camp… Romanian… Serbian…” and without having been given the full historical context text by this misleading wording assumed that they were all led by collaborators/collaborator governments. Obviously that’s untrue, and the nature of these camps is wildly disparate, and tagging them all with the demonym of their location is actively deceptive and betrays at the very least casual carelessness with history.
This is about as far from signaling as you can get.
It’s not that hard, a death camp run by Nazis for the benefit of Nazis that happens to be located for Nazi convenience in Poland is a Nazi death camp in Poland; a death camp run by Serbs in the initiative of Serbs for the benefit of Serbs is a Serbian death camp, and calling the former a “Polish concentration camp” is semantically obtuse
I agree, that phrasing should be avoided. Same goes for the 'by sheer luck they managed to find some helpful strangers' comment...rubs me the wrong way as a non-Pis Polish person.
Just to spite the Polish version of political correctness, I will from now on always say "Polish concentration camp" instead of "Nazi concentration camp on occupied Polish soil". If anyone can name a single person who was actually confused by this, I'll consider changing my mind.
Poorly educated people will be confused, that is why German apologists use this term. The sort of people who place the Second World War in the 19th century. I would say that here in CZ, that would be approximately a fifth of the population.
Calling Auschwitz a Polish concentration camp makes as much sense as calling Los Alamos a Navajo-Apache Atomic Bomb Research Center, because those two tribes used to dominate the area.
Again, name a single person who was actually confused and I will consider changing my mind.
"Calling Auschwitz a Polish concentration camp makes as much sense as calling Los Alamos a Navajo-Apache Atomic Bomb Research Center, because those two tribes used to dominate the area."
No, it makes as much sense as calling it Los Alamos National Laboratory, because it was physically located in Los Alamos.
"name a single person who was actually confused and I will consider changing my mind."
This translates into a demand for me to run into the street and start asking people, as there obviously aren't any personal lists of confused people available online. Neither I nor anyone else here are that much invested into changing anyone's mind on the Internet to actually perform a multi-hour survey for free, and you know it. It would be fairer to say that you don't intend to change your mind, period.
"No, it makes as much sense as calling it Los Alamos National Laboratory, because it was physically located in Los Alamos."
Is it?
Los Alamos is a toponym (name of a place), so it would be like calling Auschwitz Auschwitz, because Auschwitz is the relevant toponym.
Polish / German / Navajo is the name of a nation/entity under whose laws and government that facility is/was run.
The reason why few people specify the location of Los Alamos using the Navajo-Apache attribute is because for most people "in the former general area of the West Apache and Navajo tribes" will not be very helpful to narrow the location down for most people.
Instead, it would be more like calling LANL a "New Mexico nuclear weapon research facility". It is ambiguous -- it might imply that the facility is under control of NM, or that it is located within NM.
If you are dealing with people lacking any context, this might give off the wrong impression. However, if you can assume that your audience knows that Nuclear Weapons in the US are exclusively developed by the federal government, and that individual states very much do not have their own nuke programs, then it seems very reasonable to avoid using the elaborate phrase "US federal nuclear weapon research facility located in New Mexico".
Looking at a map of WW2 concentration camps [1], they are located all over Europe wherever the Nazis held territory. So there is a need to clarify the location, that Majdanek was located in modern-day Poland and not in Serbia or France or Italy. (I will also say that all of the big Nazi death camps seem to be located in modern-day Poland, so anyone who is talking about "Polish death camps" may be reasonably presumed to deliberately muddy the water.)
Both the facts that the US president (and not the governor of NM) controls the US nukes and that the Nazi Germans (and not the Poles) committed the holocaust are deeply ingrained in our shared culture. 99.9% of ACX readers will not be confused by the phrasing.
I get that the Poles are unhappy about the phrasing, just like they are probably unhappy about the fact that one of the most significant events in modern history was committed by foreigners on their land, and I am happy to continue to avoid the phrasing personally.
But this reflexive "HE SAID JEHOVAH" language policing expressed by the top level commenter seems unconvincing, more about signaling group membership than a genuine concern for avoiding confusion.
"committed the holocaust are deeply ingrained in our shared culture. 99.9% of ACX readers will not be confused by the phrasing."
ACX readers will not, as they are usually highly educated people.
But the phrase Polish concentration camps is usually used in other context, and if you extend the "shared culture" to the entire West and start asking random people in the street what does that actually mean and who ran the camps, you'll be surprised just how miserable the overall education level is.
We used to have a TV program "Nobody's Perfect" here in CZ, where they would ask random people questions like "When was the Second World War". Always 10 randomly selected people without editing or manipulation. People were fucking clueless about things you'd consider trivial knowledge.
Yeah, people in educated bubbles are prone to overestimate the intelligence and education of the general population. TV programs like that were a useful reminder. ("Even the wise fail" in Slovakia.)
The average person has IQ 100 and that is quite stupid -- probably would not be able to participate in a debate on ACX. Half of the population is less intelligent than that.
On top of that, add the fact that many people despite being naturally intelligent simply don't pay attention to most things. (Or, recently, they take their alternative facts from social networks.)
“ I get that the Poles are unhappy about the phrasing, just like they are probably unhappy about the fact that one of the most significant events in modern history was committed by foreigners on their land, and I am happy to continue to avoid the phrasing personally.”
It’s impecise, sloppy, and unnecessary phrasing. Regardless of how unhappy the Poles are about it!
I will note you've said "New Mexico facility," not a "New Mexican facility." So one should say "a Poland concentration camp," not "a Polish concentration camp."
“Polish” (and other equivalent words) isn’t really limited to referring to a place. It’s not really a “Polish” camp. It seems sloppy and unnecessary to say it that way. It’s bad writing.
Noted, thank you. If I'm ever talking to children about the Holocaust, I'll clarify that Auschwitz was a German camp in occupied Poland. I'll also tell them that if they ever hear anyone say "Polish death camp", the "Polish" refers to geographical location only.
I think that’s a good idea. Question: in what situation is it clearer and more semantically desirable to refer to a Nazi death camp as a Polish death camp? Even to adults?
I can’t think of a single circumstance where this is not an error or less clear than another phrasing
Mhm. I bet this attitude is what explains journalists using phrase "polish concentration camp" when talking about camps which are geographically located in Germany (Buchenwald, Dachau).
Maybe it's because my elderly great-great-grandmother was burned in the barn at Jedwabne by her Polish civilian neighbors [1] or maybe it's because modern Polish governments have attempted to rewrite Poland's history of complicity [2], but I am deeply uninterested in modern Polish people's protestations that their ancestors aren't responsible for the death of 3 million of their countrymen, women, and children [3].
I'm quite surprised this review didn't go into the "victim blaming" aspect more. The mood in Israel was to blame the victims of the holocaust for not fighting back! "As sheep to the slaughter" and so on. Memories of the holocaust weren't openly discussed in Israel until after the Eichmann trial.
"But Gerta, his first wife, says the causality runs the other way: in her telling, Rudi had always been paranoid and combative, and those traits were what got him out alive in the first place."
This is something I try to keep in mind and that keeps me from getting too mad at anti-vaxxers and their ilk. Once in a blue moon, the paranoid, combatative people are going to be right, and they might just save a lot of lives. Diversity in thought and personality is good for humanity! (Even if sometimes very frustrating when encountered in individual humans.)
A million years ago when I was taking employment law, the very senior, very experienced lawyer teaching the class, pointed out that if you go into the field on the plaintiff side and are trying to do big cases, a lot of your clients are either gonna be weirdos or assholes, because almost everyone else will simply find another job. And yet, employment protections and whistleblower revelations often rely on those exact people...
For a great example of this, I recommend reading about the life story of James Meredith, who integrated Ole Miss in the face of massive riots and yet also supported explicitly segregationist politicians like Jesse Helms and the KKK’s David Duke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Meredith
As Shaw said, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Reminds me of thr H.L. Menkin quote: "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
I constantly have to remind myself that my clients wouldn't be helping me to fight the government if they weren't at least a little disagreeable by nature. A great deal of good is done by assholes you would never want to interact with in another context.
We can't punish being a contrarian *too* harshly because we must maintain a strategic reserve of people willing to dissent. Of course, dissent is easy- the real task is distinguishing the signal from the noise. So it goes.
Exactly. Low-agreeableness people are a valuable part of diversity.
America in particular has long been a haven for Borderers and other disagreeable barbarians, as well as further types of high-agency immigrants self-selected from lots of countries.
And different regions of America seem to have concentrated different communities of these folks.
I really do think this is a good thing. We might not get anything done if the country were 100% composed of contrarians - although Texas, Utah, and the Bay Area might be compelling counterpoints since they seem to be doing well in their own ways! - but it makes me sleep better at night knowing that they exist and might oppose oppression and/or stagnation.
Also, the more I look at myself and my family of origin (nyah, we don't like having an oppressive boss and so will be entrepreneurs, homemakers, homebirthers, and homeschoolers), the more I realize I'm one of them.
A lot of things that are classified as personality disorders or mental illness today have probably remained in the population because in certain situations (war, famine, etc) they are very advantageous.
So have some sympathy with the psychopaths and lunatics. This is not their time, but in an other era, we may desperately need them.
> One gets the sense that sheer bureaucratic inertia also played a role in the Allies’ reluctance to intervene. Military leaders were simply used to picking military targets; humanitarian work didn’t become a regular military function until after the war.
This would be more convincing if the Allied bombing campaign had been laser-focused on winning the war. Brett Devereaux (very much not a Nazi apologist) argues that that British target selection and air strategy was essentially not part of a successful strategy to win WW2, but more a desire for revenge for London painted in an already falsified theory of victory. https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower-101/
I think with the benefit of hindsight it would be easy to argue that bombing the railways leading to Auschwitz rather than German cities would have offered a much better RoI even from a purely military view, disregarding the obvious human externalities. After all, the Shoah was an ideologically important project for the Nazi regime which competed for resources with their war effort. If the Allies had bombed the railway platform or gas chambers of the the death camps, Himmler and Hitler would not have postponed their Endloesung until after the Endsieg. Instead they would have poured the resources into them to get them running smoothly again as surely as if the infrastructure had been vital for the war effort. By contrast, bombed German homes were not a priority for rebuilding, the welfare of their Volk was much further down on their list of priorities in the middle of a war.
There's another book review here https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-how-the-war-was on how Allied strategic bombing actually did work, but that's not specifically about the British (whose Arthur Harris sought a "morale victory" that indeed never came).
Sending strategic bombers deep into Eastern Europe to hit precise targets was tried in the U.S. raid from North Africa on the Ploesti oil refinery in Romania. That was judged to be a victory for the Germans over the Americans as the U.S. lost 53 heavy B-24 bombers and 500 crewmen in a single raid, which was never attempted again.
The round trip from British airfields to Auschwitz would have been about 7/8ths as long. So it sounds about comparable to the failed Operation Tidal Wave.
Later in the war, the Allies got some airfields a little closer in Italy.
You can be laser-focussed on something and still be mistaken about it. Granting for the sake of argument that the bombing actually bring done was not contributing to winning the war, I think it’s pretty clear that those directing bombing operations (eg Harris or Spaatz) believed that it was. The wider leadership who could have asked for different operations might have had reason to doubt that, but they also had psychological reasons (not dissimilar to those of the Czech Jewish leaders) for being in denial, at least enough not to say ‘this war-irrelevant aim is just as worthwhile’.
Note that Devereaux is *definitely* subject to Bounded Distrust. He mentions, but then ignores, the one obvious example of strategic bombing having massive effects i.e. Hiroshima. He goes so far as to extend his theory of useless strategic bombing into the plans for WWIII, when it is blatantly obvious that strategic bombing would have decided most "Cold War gone hot" scenarios.
The guy literally gloats about his ability to not just inform, but persuade.
Hiroshima was a bit unprecedented and the Japanese believed that the Americans have a lot more atomic bombs than just one after Nagasaki. In my opinion, a sudden big shock can probably knock out an enemy out of the war. But if it fails to do so, the regime may well harden and the population gets used to the new traumatic norm.
We have seen the same in the Iran war. Sudden death of the leadership did not lead to a collapse, and several weeks in, the Iranian regime was probably more stable than before the war.
It has been fairly well confirmed that the Japanese were disconcerted by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the USSR declaring war was a far bigger concern for them.
On top of that, there is the bit where there is a rather large distinction between strategic bombing in the sense of 'we will literally annihilate the enemy' and strategic bombing in the sense of 'we will bomb them so much they break.' The first is theoretically possible with nuclear weaponry. The second does not seem to have a great track record.
>It has been fairly well confirmed that the Japanese were disconcerted by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the USSR declaring war was a far bigger concern for them.
My understanding, to put it bluntly, is that the historiography on that point was significantly tainted by Soviet psy-ops during the Cold War. The Soviet entry was relevant, but we have sources quoting Hirohito and the Prime Minister as demanding an end to the war on August 8 - i.e. after Hiroshima, but before the Soviet invasion started.
>On top of that, there is the bit where there is a rather large distinction between strategic bombing in the sense of 'we will literally annihilate the enemy' and strategic bombing in the sense of 'we will bomb them so much they break.' The first is theoretically possible with nuclear weaponry. The second does not seem to have a great track record.
Except that Devereaux then elides that distinction. He pooh-poohs "literally everyone who has ever tried strategic bombing" and explicitly includes nukes in the conclusion.
Do not discount "tanks are moving, invasion is imminent" as a reason for Hirohito/PM to say "peace! Peace now!" After VE day, there was no other war for Russia to fight. And Japan had actively stolen "Russian" territory.
I recommend Dropping the Bomb: Hiroshima & Nagasaki by "Shaun" as a 2h long video essay on different sources showing that the bomb and the subsequent rationalizations of why it was dropped were mostly made by the US and that the Japanese surrender was indeed mostly due to the Soviet invasion. In brief, when you get carpet-bombed daily, getting somewhat more carpet-bombed in a different way doesn't make a huge difference; getting a new enemy opening a new front does.
There seem to be enough intelligent historians on either side of the "were atomic weapons necessary to Japan to surrender" debate that I consider it a matter of legitimate academic disagreement. I don't think it's a case of who are you going to believe, the Historians or your lying eyes!
Polish resistance, and specifically Witold Pilecki's report (he got himself purposefully arrested and then escaped after several years in the camp, recording it's evolution from a harsh concentration camp to death factory) provided information about the reality of the mass murder in 1943 to the Allies via the Polish government in exile, significantly before Vrba–Wetzler report. So it had been known, at that level, before, and no action was taken.
The following statement was issued by Allied governments on December 17, 1942 and was printed on the front page of the New York Times and many other newspapers:
"TEXT OF DECLARATION
"The attention of the Belgian, Czechoslovak, Greek, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norwegian, Polish, Soviet, United Kingdom, United States and Yugoslav Governments and also of the French National Committee has been drawn to numerous reports from Europe that the German authorities, not content with denying to persons of Jewish race in all the territories over which their barbarous rule has been extended, the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler's oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.
"From all the occupied countries Jews are being transported in conditions of appalling horror and brutality to Eastern Europe. In Poland, which has been made the principal Nazi slaughterhouse, the ghettos established by the German invader are being systematically emptied of all Jews except a few highly skilled workers required for war industries. None of those taken away are ever heard of again. The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labor camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions. The number of victims of these bloody cruelties is reckoned in many hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent men, women and children.
"The above-mentioned governments and the French National Committee condemn in the strongest possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination. They declare that such events can only strengthen the resolve of all freedom-loving peoples to overthrow the barbarous Hitlerite tyranny. They reaffirm their solemn resolution to insure that those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution, and to press on with the necessary practical measures to this end."
Note that this 1942 Allied declaration understated the genocidal murderousness of the Nazi extermination camps like Treblinka when it asserted: "The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labor camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions."
Actually, virtually no work was being done by Jews in Treblinka. Instead, practically all the newly arrived Jews were murdered within hours of getting off the train.
But the Allies couldn't seem to believe the Nazis were quite that bad. Nor did they appear to believe that they could persuade their own peoples that the Nazis were that self-destructively homicidal that they wouldn't get some work out of their Jewish slaves.
Yes, this too. But all in all, this was KNOWN (words like "extermination" appear clearly in this declaration), and nothing was done specifically to stop, avoid or slow down the killing.
That said, a substantial proportion of the murdered Jews were not killed in "death factories", but 'simply' shot -- this happened largely in the East, with Einsatzkommando units (well over a million estimated victims, starting with thousands of targeted/named Polish intelligentsia at the start of the war and moving on to systematic hunting and murder of huge number of Jews later as part of the Final Solution - estimates reach 2 million of the 6 murdered outside death camps) -- so while bombing of the railways might have slowed down the industrialised murder a little, how much difference it would have made overall isn't super clear (tracks can be fixed quickly), and it's not impossible that the goal of ending the war asap was a rational one.
The decision not to bomb the Birkenau death complex is likely more disputable (they could, they were bombing local IG Farben factories) in whether it'd have saved more people by destroying murder factories than I'd have directly killed.
Treblinka camp (and other Operation Reinhardt death camps eg Bełżec) was dismantled after its job (Warsaw ghetto "liquidation", and broader killing of Jews of occupied Poland generally) was done, so Auschwitz remained more visible and somewhat more complicated a case as both a prison, labour and death camp.
This really summarises the debate re Auschwitz (and intelligence provided early to the Allies) fairly well:
Thanks. I see that the notion of blowing up Auschwitz became much more popular after historian David Wyman's 1978 article. That fits well with my hunch that people in 1978 were much influenced by the 1977 movie "Star Wars," which climaxes with Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star.
Thus, people since "Star Wars" have conceptualized Auschwitz as the expensive, irreplaceable, yet vulnerable Death Star of the Holocaust.
You reckon? I always thought it was a shift that went roughly from "they're killing us all" to "they're killing us all, especially Jews" to "they're killing us all, mostly Jews" to "WW2 = Hitler against Jews". Obviously depending where in Europe you are, the narrative varied. But approximately. And once you arrive at the last version, especially with the full reality of the utter, unimaginable horror of the Shoah known, the "we need to win this war first and foremost rather than try to save Jews by any other means" stance starts looking inconceivably evil.
I mean I don't think historians or opinion makers in 1978 were particularly SW fixated....
I was actually surprised that there was no mention of Pilecki in this review. When I read "And crazily enough, he goes to Auschwitz voluntarily", I had to double check the name of the protagonist again to ensure it wasn't Pilecki.
"The Black Book Of Poland" published (IIRC) in 1942 referenced such reports and mentioned in passing that the Oświęcim camp was being massively expanded.
Damn. What a thing to live through. To go through all that hell only to die broken and alone.
You would think that a man clever enough to escape Auschwitz would make it far in life, but he didn't. I wonder what that says about the odds for the rest of us.
It isn't a comforting message in these times of despair.
The kind of guy who'd bury himself alive for three days, hike cross-country with no supplies, and then argue with unhelpful bureaucrats for months, all powered by sheer moral outrage with his previous line of work, might not be a good fit for any sort of job people are talking about when they say "no ethical consumption under capitalism."
He survived because he was extremely paranoid, but paranoia is not a good mindset for peaceful cooperation with others, and in peacetime conditions, you can go much further when trusting and cooperating with others.
People who are interested in historical figures whose incredible determination and moral courage sprung from the same traits that made them, in some sense, profoundly unhappy and maladjusted, may also like this article: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/on-john-woolman
Awesome review. One complaint - How did the author manage to write this right after writing about the UZ burying the lede? Is this irony that went over my head? If so, an unfortunate choice to make a small joke about what could be the most amazing part of this story.
"Rudi and Fred do achieve one small victory: in reaction to their report—and to Roosevelt’s warning that the U.S. will punish Nazi collaborators after the war—the Hungarian regent stops deportations long enough to save an estimated 200,000 lives."
That should probably get its own book. There was a book whose name I'm forgetting which was about the holocaust being most destructive in places where the local bureaucracy was destroyed.
According to Scott's review of Eichmann in Jerusalem, it was more destructive in places where Jews were organized (because they could be blackmailed into handing over lists of Jews, and organize their own deportation) than where they were disorganized.
Or do you mean occupied territories that the Nazis directly administered vs. ones where they left a semi-independent government in place, which in some cases (but not always) blocked/hindered the holocaust? There are a few cases of that mentioned in the Eichmann review.
I hate that you made this absolutely unnecessary statement and then covered it with a fig leaf footnote. Fuck you for making this “comparable” as if it is. Shame on you
Because you don't think that the world could have done more to stop the massacres in Gaza earlier? I speak in the past but ofc it's not as if it fully halted.
That's where the comparison stands, not on equaling the atrocities themselves. Same for Sudan.
I really don't understand your anger here. He listed a bunch of genocides to highlight our ongoing tendency of not responding strongly enough to them. It highlights how we're not that different from the leaders back then who ignored it. How is that bad?
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, who is at least doing his best to find out what is going on in Gaza, says that Hamas is down to 30% support. If you wanted to let Gazans out (and I think those who want to live normally should be let out) I'm not sure how you would tell who was who.
This guy codes as someone who would be MAGA under a different set of circumstances - I strongly disagree with MAGA, but I fear that I am also the type of person who would calmy have been escorted to my death. It seems there are circumstances where it pays to be low trust, "highly agentic", and conspiratorial, as damaging and annoying as it may be in most circumstances. I've been bitterly disappointed though that MAGA people seem to respond much more strongly to gas prices than attacks on democracy. I guess I should count us lucky that Trump has fucked up both.
Ironically, the people I thought of as analogous to the Jews in the story were the Maga voters who have loved ones who face deportation. Despite Trump's very public promises to do mass deportation of all undocumented people he could find, so many seem to have genuinely convinced themselves he only met some other group of people. (Not that I think your point is wrong).
I don't have much experience with that (not much diversity in the part of MAGA I'm around).
However, to add to this, my whole extended family growing up was republican, and a good number of them are conspiratorial and/or "difficult" in the way this guy was. I remember my dad telling me it was important for him to own dozens of guns because the government had a lot of power and people never consider how little it takes for our house of cards to topple into a world of gestapos and gulags. Wise words imo.
So it has been one of the greatest disappointments of my life to watch my whole family, the people I'd expect to be most sensitive to government corruption and overreach and denial of rights, gleefully embrace Trump without a second thought.
I'm not going to try to make you feel better about anything, but apparently it's a lot easier to buy guns than to organize sensibly to use them in a revolt.
It's probably worse to claim you can't be forced to put up with atrocities and then go along than just go along without making grand proclamations that you won't.
This is not... as true as you'd think, in a country as big as America. A literal revolt, a mutiny, in North Carolina where the Hurricane came swooping in? They could hold that territory for a long time... kind of like the Houthis.
And the tyranny could be broadly popular in Boswash, and very unpopular in NC.
Do you need some friends if you're ever gonna sleep? sure do.
I have no idea how to find the story, but remember one about a man who'd had an order for arrest for, like, twenty years, and just stayed home with his family and guns for twenty years until the state dropped the charges. Make something hard enough, and people will go elsewhere.
Yes, exactly, that was the flaw in my optimism. People with guns are great for protecting from government overreach that people with guns don't like, but i didn't consider the possibility of government overreach that people with guns don't mind or even embraced.
Trump's about as clean as a president can get. So was Clinton, same reason. Sunshine is the best disinfectant. ICE is even getting body cameras (which they should have had from the getgo, blame the FBI).
Reminds me of what Solzhenitsyn said about the Russians being taken to the Gulag. How they could have recognized that they were doomed, ganged up, and sought to ambush and kill as many NKVD as possible
But nobody did. Cost of action was too high. Easier to sit in your room alone and hope they came for someone else.
Here's the story of how Gurdjieff convinced Ouspensky that people are mechanical. Gurdjieff was a human potential/occultist leader. Ouspensky was his chief student.
Ouspensky kept arguing that surely people weren't mechanical.
They were looking at Crimea where the war in the 1800s was about to start. Gurdjieff pointed out that there were trains coming in loaded with artificial arms and legs for the injuries which would surely happen. And yet the soldiers were going to fight even though they knew what they were getting into.
> Both FDR and UK Prime Minister Anthony Eden had received eyewitness testimony of Nazi mass murder by 1943
Anthony Eden wasn't Prime Minister in 1943, he was the foreign secretary. He did become Prime Minister 10 years after the end of the war, but the wording as it stands makes it sound like he was PM at the time.
Auschwitz was a hybrid murder-work camp, which is why there were quite a few survivors relative to the pure exterminations camps like Treblinka, where much of the Jewish population of Poland was murdered in the second half of 1942. Very few people in the outside world could even conceive of Treblinka until around mid-December 1942.
In the sorry history of human warfare, lots of civilians have been murdered in hot blood (e.g., in the hours following the conquest of a besieged city) or worked to death in cold blood. But hundreds of thousands of Jewish civilians were murdered indiscriminately immediately upon arrival at Treblinka in cold blood, rather than attempt to select the best workers to enslave in the German war effort.
Auschwitz was horrifically tilted toward murder for the sake of murder, but it also had economic purposes. So some of the hardiest inmates survived it to tell their tales.
Treblinka was in the woods, but Majdanek was right on the outskirts of Lublin, a mid-tier Polish city (the 8th largest in Poland today). Everyone there knew.
Also, there was a lot of cynicism after World War I about anti-German war time propaganda, especially involving the German invasion of Belgium in 1914. The lesson that millions of people took away from the Great War was that the British government would make up anti-German lies. (Although some of it was true.)
So, the British government in WWII wasn't all that enthusiastic about promoting horror stories that sounded even less plausible than those of 1914.
The Germans absolutely rounded up and shot several thousand of Belgian civilians--men, women, and children--as collective punishment for real or imagined attacks. They burned entire villages. They killed tens of thousands more through imprisonment, expulsion, death sentences, and an electric fence set up to prevent Belgians from escaping to the Netherlands.
That's why you shouldn't make up atrocities that your enemies didn't commit. They're presumably committing plenty of atrocities, just not maximally emotionally effective atrocities.
The modern strategy is to accuse your enemy of the atrocities that *you* are doing.
That achieves the double effect of first making people angry at your enemy, and later when it turns out that it was actually you, they will already be in the "but isn't this old news?" mode.
A lot of thriller movies are predicated on the assumption held by Mr. Vrba that the hero just has to publish evidence of the Bad Guy's evil impact and the world will be changed forever.
But reality often doesn't work that way.
To take a much smaller but still lethal example, five years ago I produced the first evidence that the celebrated Black Lives Matter movement had twice -- during both the Ferguson Effect and the Floyd Effect -- gotten a huge number of incremental blacks killed both by homicide and by motor vehicle accident due to less proactive policing. So when people go out, they worry about getting pulled over less, drive worse, and pack illegal handguns more.
But, a half decade later, that discovery is still little known. The huge increase in black deaths by homicide in the week after George Floyd's death is usually blamed by the press on covid. And the comparably large increase in black traffic fatalities in June 2020 remains almost completely unknown to the public.
"Holocaust stories, both true and fictional, tend to repeat the same few clichés over and over. There’s the innocent child who only partially understands what’s happening (Diary of Anne Frank, Boy in the Striped Pajamas). There’s the sentimental redemption story that focuses on a small individual act (Life is Beautiful, The Book Thief). And of course, there’s the good German, or at least the morally conflicted one (Schindler’s List, The Reader)."
Am I the only one who immediately thought of Maus, an extremely-well known, Pulitzer-price-winning Holocaust narrative which is also none of those things and indeed goes out of its way to portray a fully adult, highly unsympathetic Holocaust survivor who is in no way redeemed in the course of the strip?
Also, I'm not exactly sure what the Allies could have effectively done to stop the Holocaust bar the arduous slog of advancing the frontline to conquer the territory of the camps and thus liberate them. Remember, the specific mission of the Nazis at this point was not "run a bunch of camps to kill the Jews (and other undesirables)" but just to "kill the Jews (and other undesirables)", they had already demonstrated capacity to just do this by shooting them in the East. If the Allies had (say) bombed the rail lines to the camps, wouldn't the Nazis just have found other ways to enact their mission? It might have been *somewhat* less effective - or not, there were people remaining in the camps at the time of liberation after all.
- During the first 13 months of the invasion of the Soviet Union, huge numbers of Jews near the front lines were shot in ditches and the like
- The second phase began on July 22, 1942 with the shipment by train of Polish Jews from Warsaw and other ghettos to extermination camps like Treblinka. The majority of Warsaw Jews were dead by mid-autumn 1942, well before the world (or most of the surviving Warsaw Jews, for that matter) had heard what was happening, much less could bring themselves to believe it.
- In the third phase, the main murder camp was Auschwitz, but it also was a work camp, so it was not as efficiently murderous as the phase 2 camps. The main victims were Hungarian Jews, who had been protected by their own right wing government until Admiral Horthy's regime started negotiations with the Allies and was overthrown by the Nazis, and various miscellaneous Jews.
So, a large fraction of the Holocaust had already taken place by the time the surrender of the German Army at Stalingrad on January 31, 1943 indicated to the Allies that they were unlikely to lose the war. No doubt more could have been done in the last 28 months of the war to save Jews who had survived 1942, the worst year of the Holocaust. But most of the genocide was over before the tipping point had happened on the battlefield:
"“In the spring of 1942,” historian Waitman Wade Beorn writes, “75-80 percent of the victims of the Holocaust were still alive and 20-25 percent had been murdered. Eleven months later, these percentages had been reversed.” 1942 was a true annus horribilis in world history."
That's what I was talking about. If they couldn't have transported the Jews to the camps, couldn't they just have shot them in the ghetto? Sure, it would have been messier, but once their minds were set on murder, I wouldn't think they'd just go "Well, if we can't use the camps, there's nothing that we can do now".
According to internal information from the earlier phases of the war, regular German troops found mass executions disturbing and distressing.
The camp system enabled mass murder with smaller, selected crews of people who didn't mind. Auschwitz gassed two million with barely 8000 guards in total.
You can always find a certain number of guys who like murdering, but lots of people would rather not know about it. Ohio State professor John Mueller's book "The Remnants of War" points out that while the 1990s Balkan Wars were often portrayed as the acting out on a mass scale of ancient ethnic hatreds, in reality, Balkan politicians had massive problems with draft evasion by normal young men. So they wound up making deals with semi-organized groups of men who really liked violence: prison gangs, motorcycle gangs, soccer hooligans and the like, who wound up committing a large fraction of the war crimes.
I don’t know if this is true off the top of my head, but I presume that especially toward the end of the war ammunition was an extremely critical resource that couldn’t be wasted. 6 million+ people is a lot of bullets (although of course a large number would have already been killed). I would imagine that the efficiency of the camps came in part from the fact that it required less resources to kill in bulk but also that the resources used were not necessarily diverted from wartime uses
I mean, at this point it is quite a bit less then 6 million people, considering that (presumably) the camps have already been operating for a bit, and ca 2 million have been shot on the Eastern front anyway already.
The Allies were pretty successful at knocking out transportation links in Normandy in 1944 using fighter-bombers like the P-47.
But sending heavy bombers 1000 miles to hit a 6 foot wide target was a massive challenge in the 1940s. One day of low altitude attacks on the Ploesti oil refinery cost 53 big B-24s of the 177 sent, and the refinery was back in service within a few weeks. (The Germans were really good at repairing high priority infrastructure.)
Similarly, the U.S. sent 871 sorties against North Vietnam's Dragon Jaw bridge from 1965-1972 without doing it major damage. Finally, in the spring of 1972, the U.S. knocked it out with new laser-guided smart bombs.
Finally, I don't know for sure, but I doubt that Auschwitz was all that indispensable of a piece of infrastructure.
The Nazis murdered a lot of Jews during the first phase of the Holocaust by shooting them in ditches. Then they murdered the most in the second phase by gassing them in quickly built extermination camps like Treblinka, which the Nazis themselves dismantled and hid. Finally, they murdered a lot of the remaining Jews of Europe at Auschwitz.
Auschwitz is hugely notorious, in part because more people survived it than survived Treblinka, because Auschwitz was multipurpose: to exterminate the unproductive and work to death the productive. So it was presumably more expensive and less efficient than Treblinka.
We tend to think of Auschwitz like the Death Star in "Star Wars" -- all we have to do is blow it up and then the evil empire will be defeated.
But the Nazis had lots of other options for murdering Jews.
I'm guessing that a better undertaking for the U.S. would have been to spend more money to bribe officials in German-allied and neutral countries to let more Jews leave. Vichy police captain Renault in "Casablanca" seems like the kind of man like any other man, only more so, who wouldn't let his anti-Semitism stand in the way of collecting a large payoff from the OSS for signing more exit visas.
Single points of failure are great for fiction but rather rare in the real world.
Making it easier for Jews to get out of the Reich would have made sense if allowing Jews to end up somewhere was a tolerable idea but evidence suggests it wasn't.
I've heard there was enough antisemitism that presenting the Allied effort as helping Jews would have weakened support for the war. I don't know either whether this was true or whether it was a belief at the time.
Bombing them would be very difficult and they could easily be repaired. If bombing tracks could be so effective, Allies would bomb their entire railroad network in the first place.
In Bloodlands Timothy Snyder talks about how many Jews were killed in eastern Europe not in camps but just where they loved or close by through shooting. He also argues IIRC that doing so was much easier for the Germans and the "industrializarion" of death in the camps was a costly distraction.
Internal reports of the German military indicate that massacres like Babiy Yar were distressing and a morale problem for normal troops.
It was also harder to retrieve valuables from people randomly killed. Their neighbours would likely plunder their houses first. OTOH when you persuade people that they are going to live elsewhere, they will take them intentionally.
The thesis of "Ordinary Men" however was that this wasn't much of a problem for the fairly ordinary Schutzpolizei who drug people out of their villages in Poland and shot them in the back of the head into mass graves.
However your second point about telling people they're being relocated so that they might pack all their valuables seems plausible.
Schutzpolizei was a bit selected for their loyalty to the Nazi cause. Recruits were random Germans and some of them later complained to their family or priests etc.
But I also believe that it was the logistics of stealing that prevailed.
3. masking cowardice: no one wants to be first to stand up, better just keep your head down
For MAGA I don't know what their "deportation" is. What bad foreign people are they in denial about? Who are their Nazis?
If anything they're just like Rudolph, overly conspiracy brained constantly giving deranged takes on ordinary things (e.g. Charlie Kirk Isreal conspiracies).
That's why I think this is more of a critique of "the libs".
The analogy I'm drawing is that the Trump administration is deporting large numbers of people, many of whom had permission to be here, and many of whom weren't engaging in any criminal behavior other than possibly being here without permission.
The Trump administration claimed to be deporting the worst of the worst, but the people deported were mostly having a good to neutral effect on the country.
There were people-- quite a few of them-- who voted for Trump and then were deported or who had family members deported as a result of Trump's policies.
And there were people who voted for Trump who weren't expecting friends and neighbors to be deported.
MAGA is not denying that deportations are happening; if anything, they often exaggerate the numbers. Sometimes they do not even deny that deported people had no "criminal behavior other than possibly being here without permission". What MAGA are adamant about, is that "being here without permission" is more than sufficient and totally moral reason for deportation.
When biden left office, there were a million illegals in America who'd been denied asylum, told by the courts to go home, and they just didn't. I think, when you've exhausted all legal remedies, you really ought to just go home, and deserve to get sent home listening to "la cucaracha" if you don't.
Trump's deporting about as much as Obama did. So if you want to say Trump was horrid, so was Obama. Yes, Obama deported MANY MANY people who weren't engaging in any criminal behavior other than being here without permission (that was part of his scam to get the numbers up, honest to god. It is rather hard to commit criminal behavior if you've only been in the United States for a matter of minutes).
I could go on. I think many modern right-wing issues are with these clean "deportation" stories which have rosy woke cover stories but hid a grim reality underneath with mass censorship to cover it up.
Ofc this is a very dramatic framing (none are as bad as the holocaust) but the realities are true. You should not trust mainstream "woke" stories on uk issues.
Funny the author claims these victims were low agency farmers when Rudolph's story tells the opposite story of them being well educated and informed people. I think they were much more similar to modern brits than the average person of that day. There's a long form video recording of a discussion with him on YouTube incase you're interested.
It's a bad analogy. It's very silly, describing this stuff as "politely queuing up until the last moment". What "last moment" are you imagining here? The victims of the grooming gangs weren't denying it was happening.
Hah I'm being a bit OTT here. This "last moment" is when one is actually victimised by the "deportation" folks are in denial about.
It's not that victims deny it's happening, folks who escaped the camps said it was happening as loud as they could, it's that others who are set to be victimised by it in the future deny it's happening.
It's actually an almost perfect analogy and even has identical stories of police intervening to protect abusers and stories being dismissed.
What really surprised me is the holocaust story is about complacent folks not being paranoid enough about outsiders, perhaps explains the mindset of modern Israelis.
Stop and have a think about who's who in this analogy a little bit. The Nazis believed that they had to be paranoid about those they deemed outsiders, i.e. the Jews, Romanis, Slavs, sexual minorities, communists, etc. Presumably you don't want to follow their lead with ethnic minorities in the UK?
The grooming gang leaders were arrested when the scandal was broken nationally, and many of the people in the local government that had dismissed and covered things up resigned before they were pushed. It's terrible that it went under the surface for so long, but it is a victory that it was eventually taken seriously when the news got out, saving who knows how many girls from being abused in the future. It's basically the opposite narrative to this review.
Oh 100% and that whole grooming thing is obviously several orders of magnitude less bad than the holocaust. If anything I think most people are over the top about it today. I’m just reaching for a well known story.
It’s interesting that when you think of the Nazis again you can see the overly paranoid side of it. I guess it all comes down to where you see yourself. Do you see yourself as part of a complacent minority ripe for exploitation or a mad with paranoia super majority set to exploit others.
It's a great review, and there was a nice sense of humor to it as well. If I can offer one point of criticism: the footnotes are a bit much. A lot of these could have been parenthetical inserts. As a reader, it's just a bit distracting and "immersion breaking" to be moving the mouse around to see what the footnote says every few paragraphs. But nice work all around.
> But now I’ve reached a much grimmer conclusion: the next Holocaust will simply happen out in the open, and most people, even its future victims, either won’t believe it or won’t care.
"Surely all the recent AI news is a marketing ploy," some say.
Wonderful review. Very glad it made it (I gave it a 10/10). Fits perfectly to ACX (smart, witty, stylish, showing a new way to look at the world) - and I still suspect Scott himself wrote it - which is the highest praise I can do. (Not convinced of that, it would not be one of his best reviews ever, but also not his worst. Also: I would prefer Scott to never run incognito pieces here. Still: 10-30%)
The comments here are mostly downers. Triggered by "Gaza" resp. "Polish". As in the Mc Gregor post. As Brian (peace be upon him) said: "You're all different!" Crowd: "Yes, we are all different!"
I made no statement about how "inspiring" the story is. (Though any text claiming it is not, is no proof either way). Nor did I claim all of Scott's posts are inspiring. They mostly are, mostly even rather 'mild'. How can we find out who's right, if neither you clearly say you consider it impossible to be a Scott text nor me ( I gave it a probability below 50%) ... just one more riddle. ;)
I agree with that. And am 70-90% sure it was not Scott. Compare with Scott (SSC-era): "Hungary had a lot of Jews, all concentrated in Budapest, and so it was really surprising when all of a sudden everyone from Budapest started winning Nobel Prizes around the same time. This continued until World War II, and then all anyone remembered was “Hey, wasn’t it funny that so many smart people were born in Budapest between 1880 and 1920?”
And this story is really, really, gloomy.
For centuries, Europe was sitting on this vast untapped resource of potential geniuses. Around 1880, in a few countries only, economic and political conditions finally became ripe for the potential to be realized. The result was one of the greatest spurts of progress in scientific history, bringing us relativity, quantum mechanics, nuclear bombs, dazzling new mathematical systems, the foundations of digital computing, and various other abstruse ideas I don’t even pretend to understand. This lasted for approximately one generation, after which a psychopath with a stupid mustache killed everyone involved."
Some may say that is clumsy. Me: I am looking at the screen in tears.
We do not disagree on that. - Imho: The "hot take" is slightly more of a reason to say: less likely to be Scott. Otoh: the 'hot take' made me cringe as in 'painful smile' - and not due to clumsiness. And if we did not know that "psychopath with a stupid mustache killed everyone" is true Scott: we might well feel 'oh, that's too sloppy a phrase'. I mostly feel: Scott would not choose a Holocaust book to review. But then it might be: once he did it anyway, then decided not to publish it, and now took it out of the drawer. Anyways: fascinating story, very well (re-)told.
That's true and a heartfelt 'thank you' for making me re-read a 2nd SSC-post in one day! - If I changed "Holocaust" to "concentration camps" - would that be correct then? - Scott opened that post with "For Holocaust Remembrance Day last week I read Hannah Arendt’s 'Eichmann In Jerusalem' " - makes me wonder, if Scott might have written several more potential book-reviews about the Holocaust since 2017 ... .
We do not disagree on that. - Imho: The "hot take" is slightly more of a reason to say: less likely to be Scott. Otoh: the 'hot take' made me cringe as in 'painful smile' - and not due to clumsiness. And if we did not know that "psychopath with a stupid mustache killed everyone" is true Scott: we might well feel 'oh, that's too sloppy a phrase'. I mostly feel: Scott would not choose a Holocaust book - corrected: 'Concentration camp book' - to review. But then it might be: once he did it anyway, then decided not to publish it, and now took it out of the drawer. Anyways: fascinating story, very well (re-)told.
Very well written, although the footnote regarding Gaza seems a bit misplaced, to put it mildly. Another nitpick would be the translation of "Arbeit macht frei": Work will set you free US way to friendly in my opinion. "Work liberates" would be more fitting.
This is a very old trope. the Homer epic has it with Casandra - that the gods cursed so no one believed her even though she spoke the truth. She warns the trojans against the horse, but they didn't want to believe.
I liked this review until the conclusion fell totally flat. "The human tendency to look away in the face of horror" has absolutely no place in explaining any of the hot topics, chief among them the Israel Palestine conflict. This is the most over-covered, obsessed-about topic of our lifetime. The reason it isn't solved is not that naive people in the west are "looking away". There's not anything fundamentally better to be done about a terror organization with de facto control of a territory (as a result of a high enough degree of ideological alignment with its civilian population) starting war after war with no hope of winning and fighting those wars from under their own hospitals, other than more or less what Israel is doing, and no amount of the rest of the world "looking" is going to change their incentives or the possibilities they have to choose between.
The story you reviewed is a very different shape than these examples you conclude with. There was actually something to be done, something that the people Walter contended with could have actually done themselves. The Nazi regime was actually going way out of its way to kill millions of innocent people, there was a complete lack of awareness about it at the time, and that lack of awareness was very important for the whole operation to proceed at the rate that it did. I doubt that there was much that could have been done to stop the holocaust besides winning the war faster, but there was a lot that could have been done by its would-be victims who hadn't yet been deported to give themselves a shot at survival, if their community leadership had told them. Whether or not it would have stopped them from being massacred, it could have at least stopped them from being played.
There is a difference between an individual's denial that they face a peril which they could avert by their own effort, and the sort of difficulty that a society has in deciding among a large policy space with complex tradeoffs. The solution to climate change or AI or whatever is not "get everyone to care more".
I'm not sure that the Holocaust's targets could have done a lot to help themselves. Governments are designed (evolved?) to be hard to affect from underneath.
I think we might have talked past each other a little. I agree their options were severely limited, and only a small chance at escape was the best most could have hoped for.
The conclusion of the review left me thinking that its author completely missed what Walter is raging about: his people's failure to take their own survival seriously, not the failure of unrelated people to be obsessed with every bad thing that happens under the sun. "Never Again" means "We will never again go to the slaughter like sheep. If we are killed, it will at least be manfully on our feet."
Governments are also reliant on a lot of voluntary compliance and sense of legitimacy. I don't know what exactly they could have done here, but there's little ways people can interfere just by noncompliance that adds up into the government having to spend resources to get compliance and actively monitor for continued compliance. That would be the typical reason that a government like Germany needed Vichy and the other local regimes like it, and that the Spanish had native Peruvians in charge of areas where mineral extraction was going on, you won't get much free compliance from conquered people. Or why Reconstruction failed after the US Civil War, the costs to force everyone locally to go along with things is pretty high if they don't see you as legitimate or worth cooperating with.
I thought I knew a lot about the Holocaust. I did not. I thought I knew a lot about human nature, given that I'm a psychologist; I research and read constantly, and I'm 60+; I may have inferred there were no profound truths to be revealed. That estimate was inaccurate.
My tentative theory is that people are only likely to do things they think are possible.
I'm modifying the theory to include that people are only likely to do things they think are possible and worthwhile, and unlikely to do things that revolt them.
The sense of what is possible, worthwhile, or revolting can be manipulated by other people.
Any moral equivalence of Gaza to the Holocaust, or description of Gaza as genocide is odious. The Jews of Europe didn’t massacre Germans to provoke the “final solution”, the Germans didn’t only target Jews involved in and responsible for the hostilities and certainly didn’t provide advance warnings to civilians to leave areas before they conducted sweeps. The review may have accurately summarized the book but, amazingly, after reading this book, the reviewers conclusions were unfathomable.
Minor correction: according to Wikipedia, Canada was simply considered a land of plenty. In any case, the offered pun for "Canada" doesn't work. "Kann er da" means "can he there", not " it", and doesn't imply much of anything.
It's funny to me how many people object to Gaza being used as an example of a modern genocide that is being denied, because they are denying it is a genocide. It's a perfect example, and shows the same behaviors are indeed repeating even today
Denying a real genocide and denying a fake one are not the same thing (and only one of these is bad). Moreover, I don't think what is described in the review is really “genocide denial” in the narrative-warfare sense (something you might wrongly accuse me and others of in relation to Gaza, and claim it's funny).
The comment that "the world is looking away from Gaza" is ridiculous. It's an example of the exact opposite, with an obscene amount of attention and dramatization paid to a fairly small war that's already saturated with humanitarian aid.
And to be clear, this amount of attention is actively harmful to the people it's supposed to help - both directly by incentivising the use of human shields, and indirectly in that the dramatization and hysteria flood the zone with misinformation and distract from forms of political intervention or humanitarian aid that might realistically have helped the people there. (The single biggest example of this is that misinformation about "ethnic cleansing" has caused people around the world to actively lobby *against* Egypt letting in refugees, forcing more civilians to be stuck in a warzone).
"One ÚŽ lawyer is shocked at the idea that “civilized Germany” would execute people without due process; he returns to this line of questioning again and again...."
The human whom I used to practice my Polish on told similar stories (she wasn't actually Polish but was half-german).
For that matter, Freud escaped Vienna only at the last minute, in part because he refused to believe germans were capable of such things. A lot of Jewish people at the time worshipped german Kultur. Arnold Schönberg coming prominently to mind.
This line makes me flinch. I'm all for some wit and jollity to liven up book reviews, but flip little comments about Auschwitz are just -- I dunno, off.
Flip comments, sort of like gymnastics flips, work to the extent they are powered. In the remark in question, the power for hot take mockery comes from the Auschwitz element. It's an Auschwitz-powered bit of wit, not just a piece of wit, and affects me differently from one powered by something else.
It's kind of like the dead baby light bulb joke:
Q: How many dead babies does it take to replace an light bulb?
A: An infinite number, because each can do nothing.
Of course the real antagonists are still the Nazi's. It's tremendously sad that European Jewish leaders did not do more to at least try to save their own people - and one understands Vrba's anger, but none of that would have been necessary without the people actually conducting the Final Solution. Our greatest anger should be reserved for them. There is even an argument that can be made that militarily defeating them was the best thing that the Allies could have done, even if saving Jews had been a priority.
Nazi's, f@&k them. Neonazi's are almost as bad. Fascists of all stripes.
And it's not just the high numbers (though numbers matter). It's the sheer industrialized, amoral, banality of it. Kill a man in a rage, and that is bad. But kill a man with an unconcerned casual attitude, and that somehow is worse. Nothing happening today seems comparable.
Calling anything involving Gaza other than the pogrom they perpetrated that started the current war a "genocide" is repulsive victim-blaming slander, of the same cloth as the most blatant Nazi propaganda.
This part of the review hit me like a punch in the gut-
"Walter is working outdoors when he sees a newly arrived train of deportees. Another prisoner starts shouting frantic warnings that their resettlement is a sham, that they’re all about to be gassed to death. Not only do the new arrivals not believe him, but one of them, a middle-aged mother, takes his desperate outburst as a personal affront. She essentially becomes an Auschwitz Karen, reporting the young prisoner to a nearby SS officer. The officer, never breaking character, notes the offending prisoner’s number and profusely apologizes for the disruption."
I have never read a more compelling example of why automatic trust in those performing authority theatre can be maladaptive. Even if she could have just stayed silent, perhaps the shouty prisoner could have been able to warn future cohorts, and they, perhaps, could have been more receptive to his message and been able to slow down the killing just a little bit.
> I used to be comforted by the belief that nothing like the Holocaust could happen again today, at least not in the same way: you couldn’t keep a secret this big in a world where everyone has an internet-connected camera in their pocket. But now I’ve reached a much grimmer conclusion: the next Holocaust will simply happen out in the open, and most people, even its future victims, either won’t believe it or won’t care.
The comparison that comes to mind to me are the Uyghurs in China. There are definitely a large number of people claiming genocide, but I personally have no idea what's really going on in Xinjiang, and no idea what to do with the claims currently out there.
Is an oppressed minority taking action against a ruling majority a story of freedom fighters, or terrorists? Is the PRC seeking to systematically exterminate a culture, or are they just trying to preserve the peace and control of the Xinjiang? Are the labor camps a human rights abuse (do they even exist as claimed?), or is it just forcing legitimately imprisoned people to do relatively normal farming jobs that most people have done since the dawn of history?
On some level national self-determination is an extremely important thing. On another, if, say, the ~1% of the US that was Muslim were geographically concentrated decided they wanted to secede, I would support efforts to prevent that happening, and is the American state a more legitimate central authority than the PRC? Is the ~1% of the US population that is Muslim comparably different to the ~1% of China that's Muslim? Maybe there's a different level of oppression between the US and its Muslim and the PRC and theirs, but a prominent ideology within American society claims that the US ruling class systematically oppresses minorities like Muslims. I have no idea how to compare China and the US in this regard, which differ so much culturally and materially.
So I'm left to fall back on "Huh, I guess some people think there's a genocide happening, but I don't know anything about that and don't see a path to knowing more about that with an sufficient degree of certainty to justify caring." So I can't help but not care. And even if there was enough information to believe the claims, I certainly wouldn't support starting a war over it, and I don't think softer pressure (sanctions, UN resolutions, etc.) would work, and would only make war more likely.
I don't doubt that if I was writing this about 1944 Germany, I'd have comparable thoughts about whatever was happening to the Jews in some far off land. There's people claiming genocide, but obviously it's desirable to exaggerate oppression to incentivize action, so I don't know what to think, and even if I lean towards believing the claims at face value, the demanded action seems like it will just lead to war, and war over an uncertain belief is a hard thing to support.
Doesn't need to be. "Trail of tears" level genocide is still genocide. Put people in poor enough conditions (and China, not being in a war, lacks the German "everyone is eating sawdust" explanation).
It does if you want people want to take the idea that it’s “the next Holocaust” seriously. If you keep diluting the concept of genocide, then it loses its rhetorical impact.
This really isn't that complicated. Russia (or Canada) say, murders a town. Kills it completely. Doesn't touch any other town. That's not genocide. It's mass murder. Genocide is when you have enough people getting killed that it matters, that you're actually removing the ethnicity from the area.
Trail of Tears is just as genocidal as the Holocaust.
There are actual lines, but Trail of tears is well within them.
When people talk about Uyghurs being genocided, the claims are not that they are being killed in large numbers or even removed in large numbers. It’s good to have separate words for different things, even if we would like to use the maximally strongest rhetoric as a cheat code in persuasion.
Forcible sterilization and infanticide counts as genocide to me -- that's trying to preserve workforce while removing "the problem" from the next generation.
Plus a program of intensive rape by Han Chinese men, stationed in the same house as husbandless Uigur women?
"In some Uyghur-majority counties, birth rates dropped dramatically between 2011 and 2015, where data suggest declines by 58.5%, with some exceeding 65%. For instance, in Hotan County, the reported birth rate fell from approximately 25.41% per thousand to just 7.41% per thousand by 2018.36"
That's government statistics. Frankly, your claim that the populace is not dying is incredible, when even the government statistics support pro-infanticide policies.
If genocide wasn't seen as "ethnic cleansing", this would be moot. You could say "there is infanticide, but not mass murder" (which appears to be true), but genocide has in its remit a particular set of crimes.
Now, I'm not going to say that Human Rights Watch is unbiased. But government statistics are going to show what "makes Lu look good".
The thing I'm most confused is that I think I haven't heard any news about it for the last... 3 years? Either it's "stopped", or the propaganda is bored and changed to another topic?
Also another analogy that I think relevant is, if holocaust did happen without WW2, how far would you go to stop it. If nazi haven't started it, it means you will be, which means you'll be the one pressing the switch for a very horrible trolley problem. If current uighur problem can only be "solved" by ww3, now what.
Except for the weird claim that Anthony Eden was British Prime Minister in 1943. Obviously, that was Churchill. Eden was only briefly Prime Minister much later....
"Rosenberg" DID already sound jewish then. Some other nazis did wonder if he was jewish because of it. The stereotypical german jewish lastnames are usually made of german words, and sometimes ethnic germans have them too, but they follow clear patterns. Whether they sound jewish is not based on the average ethnicity of people with *that particular name*, but that most Rosen- (and Blumen-, Gold-, etc) and many -berg (or mor commonly -stein or -thal) where and are jewish.
But I seriously wonder what the author thought happened to the german Rosenbergs?
My mother was in the resistance, writing and publishing illegal newspapers; mainly based on information from Radio London. In 1944 news about the extermination camps were first transmitted.
She told me they had discussions in the editorial staff if they should print this. They were dedicated to tell the truth, and they knew that not everything transmitted from Radio London was true. Sure, the Nazis were the enemy, but even Nazis were Germans, aka civilized people; arguably the most highly civilized in Europe. Surely they would never do anything like this?
Her take-home point after the war, when it was clear beyond any doubt that the Nazis actually did this: Civilization is far more frail than everyone assumes in times of peace and quiet. The collective shift from civilization to acceptance of mass murder happens fast, very fast.
People – in this case the German people between 1936 and 1945 - do not spend their limited time on gathering information and deliberately choosing causes of action. (Almost no one do that - given the time available to all of us, it is not rational behavior.) Instead, they take the cues of correct behavior from high-prestige leaders and adjust their opinions and behavior accordingly.
Scratch the surface of a so-called highly civilized person, and watch the Beast underneath. At least if it is a scratch carried out by the opinion leaders in one’s environment.
It is a useful way to approach an understand of how people form their opinions in troubled parts of the Middle East, Europe and Africa right now. (In troubled parts everywhere, really.)
“The conclusion he draws is not despair but a kind of furious logic: these warnings failed because they came too late, to prisoners who had little chance of fighting back. What’s needed, he decides, is to warn the Jews of Europe before they get on the trains.”
Jan Karski, a member of the Polish underground, had been briefing high level British and American officials on the Nazi extermination plan, which he had investigated. He met directly with FDR.
Bombing the rail lines wouldn't have done any good anyway.
You don't put rail lines out of commission by bombing them or just tearing them up, because they're easy to replace. Steel rails are resistant to damage, to destroy a specific rail you've basically got to hit it directly, and any near misses that instead of heave things around and put craters in the rail bed are very fast to repair. Sherman's men had to rip up the rail lines, heat them in fires, and twist them around trees. To put a rail line out of commission from the air, just bombing it once doesn't work. You need to bomb it, and then bomb it again and again, and then when the repair crews show up to replace the rails, you need to bomb them. Then you need to do it again, repeatedly. And every bomber you're devoting to repeatedly bombing this rail line is a bomber that isn't bombing the foundry that makes the rails, or that makes tanks or ball bearings, or a refinery, or German troops in the field.
Winning the war was the fastest way for the allies to do anything about it.
Tried to post this below a relevant comment re Cassandras, but Substack doesn’t remember where to put a comment when you have to sign in.
I think of another Jew, Paul Ehrlich. Midwits obsess about the famous fatuous bet with … some other guy, himself only remembered for winning (parts of) this dumb bet in the agreed time frame.
Ehrlich was no genius, it seems - certainly no evil genius.
But meanwhile, population growth has done to the natural world everything people were concerned about in the 70s.
Tungsten ain’t water, after all. It’s nothing (much) to do with animal habitats.
A smart bet would’ve probably been too depressing to contemplate.
And probably wouldn’t have been interested Simon like the price of things. So no bet.
A cute clever bet would’ve been something like, will our fruits and vegetables have less nutrition per unit in 30 years?
I guess if Ehrlich hadn’t lived, somebody would’ve had to invent him, to make a silly distraction.
> UK Prime Minister Anthony Eden had received eyewitness testimony of Nazi mass murder by 1943
Anthony Eden wasn't prime minister until 1955, I think during the war he was Leader of the House of Commons. But I do imagine that if he knew, Churchill knew. They were close.
Apart from that one quibble, excellent review, my favourite so far.
"Both FDR and UK Prime Minister Anthony Eden had received eyewitness testimony of Nazi mass murder by 1943" small correction Anthony became PM well after the wall. Winston of course was PM in 1943, and AE was foreign secretary.
also i wonder whether OP isn't slightly confused on the meaning of the word "plainspoken"
I'm gonna go there: Footnote 25 has no place here.
The world looked away during October 7th. It hasn't looked away from Gaza at all.
While the fact is that there is obvious horror in Gaza, there is zero evidence of systemic oppression any more than any other war in urban areas.
A far better example would be Iran killing 25k of its own citizens, yet the call for regime change is mocked by the world
Or China.
Only 25K?? Do you have a credible source for that number? Iran's government claims about 3,000. "Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRANA) published a full report on 23 February 2026, including a detailed named list of 7,007 deaths "
The supposed number keeps magically expanding! Last month, President Trump claimed Iran "recently killed 52,000 innocent protestors" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEfNCRahFQo Sounds like hasbara to me.
I found a source putting the high estimate at 20,000 back in January. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2026/01/what-happened-at-the-protests-in-iran/
If this is accurate its plausible that another 5000 have been executed or killed since then.
Good point, thanks. "UN Special Rapporteur on Iran, Mai Sato, said in a media interview that at least 5,000 people had been killed, noting that according to information she received from medical sources, the death toll might be as high as 20,000.."
Devil is always in the details, who are the "medical sources'? i recall digging into this subject last winter, and I recall a "medical source" was an pro-regime change Iranian-expat in Germany with no first-hand knowledge.
P.S. Quick google AI search: "Dr. Amir-Mobarez Parasta, a German-Iranian eye surgeon based in Munich, emerged as a primary source for high casualty figures ... figures were compiled via informal networks ... inside Iran who communicated using smuggled Starlink satellite terminals [so part of Mossad/CIA regime change effort, not exactly objective sources] ... . Independent verification of these specific clinic-derived tallies remains difficult"
https://time.com/7357635/more-than-30000-killed-in-iran-say-senior-officials/
https://news.sky.com/story/what-do-we-know-about-the-number-of-people-killed-in-iran-protests-13501129
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jan/27/iran-protests-death-toll-disappeared-bodies-mass-burials-30000-dead
You'd be the Nazi apologist or the holocaust denier. 6 million!? Seems too high
Huh? As discussed in my previous comments, I'm skeptical of the credibility of the "sources" for the Jan '26 Iranian death count. Wasn't talking about the WWII Jewish holocaust.
BTW, my wife did holocaust research for Pat Conroy's book "Beach Music." Her father and his family fled Vienna in 1938,
The HRANA report also mentions 11,744 death under review on top of those 7,007.
Edit: Link: https://www.en-hrana.org/day-50-of-the-protests-intensification-of-security-prosecutions-and-uncertainty-regarding-the-status-of-detainees/
Thanks. HRANA claims 7K - 19K deaths. So, Daas's claim of 25K isjust outside the upper end that range.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jan/27/iran-protests-death-toll-disappeared-bodies-mass-burials-30000-dead
But, the "medical sources" in Iran are anonymous (for understandable reasons) and some communicated by Starlink used by those involved in the regime change effort. So, I suspect some of these sources could be creating BS numbers to promote the regime change narrative to "free" Iran.
Obviously, it's impossible to know who's telling the truth here. Given the BS hasbara track record of the US & Israeli PR machine, I'm skeptical of anything they claim.
Also, it's not clear how many civilians were killed by the Mossad/CIA armed "rioters" vs killed by government forces.
For someone applying so much skepticism to the claims of murder by the Iranian government you seem shockingly credulous about the possibility that "Mossad/CIA armed "rioters" " share the blame, given your source does not even mention that. The use of vilifying language for the heroic revolutionaries is also telling (as is my deliberate use of the opposite)
Two further points. While its fine to insist on accurate figures, 7K is still enough to qualify as a mass murder and justify humanitarian intervention. And The source saying "7K - 19K" was published in February. The number will have gone up since then.
"humanitarian intervention"!! Who's "shockingly credulous"? In 1991, I got out of the Army NG (ABN RGR LRRP company) because of the lies used to get us into the first Gulf War. All of the BS wars since '91 were also justified by propaganda that we were "saving" the Iraqi people, the Syrian people, the Afghan woman, etc.
How can you possibly believe the Neocons and Trump want to "save" the Iranian people when they have bombed a lot of civilian infrastructure and threatened to send Iran back into "the stone age"? The Neocons & Israel want to destroy Iran as a state , just as they did to Iraq, Syria, and Libya.
P.S. I did not intend the citation in my previous reply to support my claim of "Mossad/CIA armed "rioters"" I've just edited it and moved the citation up to avoid confusion. Sorry for the confusion.
Or Sudan.
Effectively all the discourse about Sudan that I've seen can be divided into one of three categories:
- Detailed, in-depth reporting on all aspects of the situation, from outlets which also publish detailed in-depth reporting about the Gaza genocide.
- "What about Sudan?" with no elaboration, from hasbara sources who deny the Gaza genocide.
- “Actually the mass-murdering RSF are the good guys”, also from hasbara sources who deny the Gaza genocide.
Hasbara sources. Seriously.
Personally I find East Africa fascinating and horrifying in equal measure; I was following Tigray a few years ago, and Sudan and M203/Congo stuff now. Picked it up from the old War Nerd coverage. But YMMV.
Why do you use the term “hasbara” instead of just saying “Israeli propagandists” or some other English phrase? It always seems unnecessarily alienating to use Hebrew, similar to if someone insisted on describing TikTok as “xuanchuan”. Does using “hasbara” provide any additional information?
Brevity
That’s surprising because the rest of your comment doesn’t seem optimized for brevity. Couldn’t you replace the “hasbara sources” with “zionists”? You could probably replace the entire phrase “hasbara sources who deny the Gaza genocide”.
Anyways, I think you’d get more interested responses if you ditch the jargon. While I don’t find it offensive, it does make me think you spend too much time bickering online. It’s similar to how there were a few years where people used Russian terms like “kompromat” instead of “blackmail”. Others will find it offensive, and I’m sure you’ve had a lot of dead-end conversations disputing that. Why not avoid them?
Sudan is actually mentioned in the same sentence as Gaza. However it is not mentioned in the footnote which points out that comparisons between Jews in Nazi Germany and Palestinians are likely to cause complaints.
Or they had perfectly rational reasons for not going along with Ur which are now clear in hindsight.
rather than actual conflicts (where i think the issue is different not that reports aren't available or people don't believe in them but just don't really care / are too exhausted because these wars happen in places where they never seem to end) this rather reminds me of our ability to compartimentalize and not worry too much about climate change or AI risk. if shit blows up we'll also look back and say all the warning signs were there and we did next to nothing.
I completed the review, and like you this bit struck out to me substantially. I see his point on Sudan, and would add on Iran, people in Southern Israel the last couple decades, the intifadas, Haiti, El Salvador, the Uyghurs, contemporary chattel slavery in Africa etc.
Conversely Gaza gets infinite press
And also war and terrorism in Africa.
100% of the detailed reporting on civilian suffering in Sudan I have seen comes from outlets who also do detailed reporting on the Gaza genocide.
I assume your selective terminology (“detailed reporting,” “outlets”) is just weasel wording to hide the fact that whatever you’re talking about is NOT ordinary press (in the sense of “Conversely Gaza gets infinite press” above), right? Or are you seriously claiming the two get a similar magnitude of coverage (not to mention attention from activists)?
"While the fact is that there is obvious horror in Gaza, there is zero evidence of systemic oppression any more than any other war in urban areas."
. . .
Exactly! A great example was the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 by the Germans during WWII:
“Netanyahu has been brandishing Amalek [1 Samuel 15:3] in the wake of the Hamas attack … for the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound ... in other words, a ghetto. ... like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. … “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”
From “In the Shadow of the Holocaust” by Masha Gessen December 9, 2023 https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust
As a teenager I read Leon Uri's book "Mila 18" about the 1943 Jewish Warsaw Ghetto uprisng. Last night [03/03/2023], I googled "warsaw ghetto uprising ruins” images. Looks the same as Gaza today.
In 1943, Nazi SS General Jurgen Stroop liquidated the Warsaw Ghetto. When the poorly armed Jewish resistance fought back, the Nazi's starved out, burned out, and leveled the ghetto. The survivors were “transferred” to the death camps.
IN 1944, after the Polish 1944 uprising, Hitler ordered, 'Warsaw is to be razed to the ground while the war proceeds.’ … Himmler made sure his officers understood exactly what was intended: ‘The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth… No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to it's foundation.' … less than 5 per cent of pre-war Warsaw remained intact … in the city of ruins … genocide and urbicide march in lockstep.” https://geographicalimaginations.com/2013/04/24/city-of-ruins/
“The decision we made last night [3-01-25] to completely halt the entry of humanitarian aid [e.g. food , water, etc] into Gaza until Hamas is destroyed or surrenders completely and all our hostages are returned is an important step in the right direction— ‘standing at the gates of hell,’” said Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. “Now, we must open these gates as quickly and as lethally as possible …”
Don't you hear echos of Hitler & Himmler in Netanyahu's invocation of "Amalak," and Smotrich's promise (and President Trumps] to “open the gates of hell”?
P.S. “... many did fight back—in the Warsaw Ghetto … human instinct ... to simply pretend it [genocide] isn’t happening, is timeless. … it’s happening, in different forms and under different names, in … Gaza right now”
Do you hear echoes of Hitler in Ukrainians calling Russians “orcs?”
The aftermath of the battle of Mosul looks like the Warsaw ghetto too. So does every urban battlefield. Was the coalition to defeat ISIS the new Nazis?
You’ve fallen for a lot of Palestinian propaganda. A mix of lies (like in fact Gaza wasn’t actually that heavily populated, and half of its land was rural; far from a ghetto or prison camp, residents could travel abroad if they got visas to third countries, and its economic and health metrics were comparable to Egypt and Jordan) and selective standards to spin ordinary wartime rhetoric and the usual effects of combat as genocide.
> Do you hear echoes of Hitler in Ukrainians calling Russians “orcs?”
Dehumanization of enemy soldiers is older than Hitler. I don't know if you can wage war effectively if you don't do that. Dehumanization of enemy civilians or denying the right of their nation to exist is much more hitlery in tone, though.
I do not think anyone looked away on Oct-7.
It was not exactly a clandestine Hamas operation to defeat Israel by murdering a thousand people out of a population of ten millions. Instead, it was meant to be seen.
Most of the world watched with horror, some watched with glee (and wore paraglider buttons), but nobody looked away.
While Hamas managed to convince me that they are an evil organization which needs to be wiped off the face of the Earth (while still avoiding civilian casualties), since then the Israeli government has been hard at work trying to convince me that they are completely indifferent to Palestinian civilian casualties, are building a Greater Israel in the West Bank and bombing Iran for peace and democracy. Quite frankly, I view Israel like Putin's Russia, a belligerent menace which needs to be reined in through international sanctions. If the civilized peoples can't stop them from murdering and getting murdered by (but mostly the former, because the IDF has a technological edge) other religious nutjobs, then we should probably just let them get on with it rather than supporting one side or the other.
It would be great to get rid of Hamas without civilian casualties, but how?
That Hezbollah exploding pagers prank was as close as practically possible to minimising civilian casualties.
While an excellent operation, it did not "get rid of" Hezbollah. Not even close.
Per the usual suspects, it was a monstrous terrorist attack and breach of international law
Definitely not by causing an order of magnitude more civilian casualties than Hamas.
Edit: Sorry I read quickly and thought this was a rhetorical question.
I'm looking for a positive answer. What might work?
My very naive answer would be fighting off Hamas with targeted operations (1), together with promoting another alternative model in for Palestinians. By that I mean, stopping the colonization in the west bank and thoroughly working on making it a viable independent state with decent economical opportunities, hence showing to most palestinians (2) that peace a better option than terrorist attacks/'resistance". Ofc this can fail again and again, as it did in 2006, but it's definitely better than killing tens of thousands of civilians and attempting on ethnical cleansing.
(1) Thus not managing to militarily eradicate it, but limiting its nuisance power. And ofc cutting any foreign financing and not playing the game of using Hamas to make the two-state solution non-viable.
(2) I wish I made this sound less infantilizing, I'm sure many palestinians are aware of that.
There are a lot of Palestinians who are sick of Hamas, but Hamas is a very dangerous organization and hard to defeat.
You might interpret freezing settlements in the WB as a productive gesture, but to most Palestinians it’ll be vindication of Hamas’s approach.
Targeted operations which don’t endanger civilians sound really good until you try it against an enemy which literally builds bunkers under hospitals and UN offices.
This isn’t IDF propaganda; it’s verifiable. Mohammed Dief was killed hiding in a humanitarian zone. Mohammed Sinwar was killed in the airstrike on the European Hospital. How do you target people who deliberately shelter in protected civilian sites without endangering the civilians?
Not to mention weapons caches and IEDs in apartment buildings, and fighters who sneak between them unarmed and in civilian attire. Would you let your troops get ambushed on every street?
Gazans forced Israelis to destroy Gaza.
If you don't get a solution does that make the current actions ok? Sometimes the things we want come at too high a cost even if the benefits go to us and the costs to our enemies.
What's your suggestion? Sit down and get massacred?
I'd actually be fine with Israel causing an order of magnitude more civilian casualties than Hamas, if they actually got rid of Hamas. But instead, they caused nearly two orders of magnitude more civilian casualties than Hamas, and still didn't get rid of Hamas.
Board of Peace had an Israeli proposal agreed to by Hamas. As in hamas willing to disarm, disband and let there be free elections again.
Personally, I am fine with getting rid of Hamas with some civilian casualties. I am not some radical pacifist. Sometimes the best possible outcome involves accidentally killing innocents. Ridding Germany of the Nazi rule involved quite a lot dead civilians, but was obviously worth it.
If Israel had decided to occupy Gaza for a generation or two, I would not be whining about their right to self-determination.
However, for all the dead Gazans, I do not think Israel can really claim to have defeated Hamas for good. Blowing up one Hamas commander along with 50 civilians in some refugee camp does not seem like the move which will win the battle for the hearts and minds, and as long as Hamas is in the heart and minds of Gazans it will survive even if you kill 90% of its fighters.
Also, the aims of the Israeli government can be inferred from how they behave in the West Bank, where Palestinian authorities seem a lot less murderous than Hamas. Bulldozing the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank would go a long way towards signaling a commitment to a peaceful coexistence. Yet the Israeli government is encouraging such settlements, and violence against Palestinians seems widespread.
Very, very simple. Hamas has already agreed to completely disarm, agreeing to the Israeli proposed deal by the Board of Peace. Then bibi said "no, we changed our mind." Hamas is willing to let there be elections again.
Trolling for peace works. And I'm going to keep on beating this drum until people start to realize that "both sides hating each other" still means they can make peace.
This is just false. Hamas sort of agreed to a peace deal but in reality it was vague and Hamas had a different interpretation than the U.S. Now the U.S. wants to change the deal and make it more favorable for Hamas, which they agree to. But Israel does not agree to that, they want to go with the U.S./Israeli interpretation of the original deal, which they still accept (Hamas disarms before they leave).
Every peace deal is going to be vague. That's just English/Arabic/Hbrew for you. Life is vague, there's always wiggle room.
There's "had a different interpretation" that is "at loggerheads" (like America and Iran's interpretation of "get the strait of hormuz moving again" -- Iran thinks/wants to ban American ships, American war ships -- this is at the moment completely unacceptable to the United States POTUS, so they're at loggerheads).
Israel proposed a deal -- through the board of peace, deliberately crafting it to be unacceptable to Hamas. Then, Hamas agreed to it. Now Israel is going back on the deal. This is a deliberate tactic of Hamas to make Israel look bad and pull their hair out.
https://www.disclose.tv/id/rofk1wf03s/
Yes, both sides are trolling the other. Yes, Americans are instigating said trolling, in order to make peace happen.
You seem to be under the impression that any deal would be acceptable to Bibi. No deal that means Bibi goes to jail (which is any deal, politically speaking -- he's lived as a hawk for decades) is acceptable to Bibi.
Unlike Putin and Russia, Israel was attacked, despite its soft footed policy meant to cultivate stability and economic opportunity in Gaza.
If they were indifferent to Palestinian casualties, they'd have imposed total siege instead of invading. They could have sat home, waited for a few months, and won definitively. Instead they lost a lot of troops in combat and spent a fortune and Hamas is back in power.
If they did a “total siege” ie openly starved Gaza out Israel would’ve been invaded by all civilized nations.
The point of this review is that the civilized nations wouldn't invade. How would you like trying to conquer Israel?
Israel is vulnerable to foreign economic pressure, especially if it includes weapons embargo. We faced a very real threat from Biden’s administration, and they even brought acute deficit of some munitions, which resulted in more casualties – both Israeli and Gazan.
Israel is very vulnerable to missiles. Irans "reasonably good missiles" have been hitting more than the near-bottle rockets that the Golden Dome was created to defend against. Desalinization plants (yes, warcrime, Israel gets to bitch when they aren't causing droughts in Iran) would do the trick, easy peasy.
Very easy. Bam, desalinization plants. Israel disappears. Very small country, easy weak points to hit. (Citing American analysis on this point.) Israel is not Iran, which is a very big country (thirty times Israel's size or so).
My experience of October 7th as an Australian was that the government lit the Sydney Opera House up in blue and white, everyone acknowledged it was a tragedy, I saw lots of photos of shot up Kibbutzim and music festival detritus and missing grandmas, and the media covered hostage recovery for months afterwards. Nobody looked away, although they didn't do anything particularly helpful either, since Israel is a sovereign nation with a functional government and military and is well outside our sphere of influence.
The narrative eventually shifted following a dead Australian aid worker, starvation in the wake of the blockade, broad consensus that the Israeli government was committing a genocide using the blockade as a tool (note that what got them in trouble was not the bombing and not necessarily even the blockade but the repulsive statements in the Knesset), the IDF gunning down people as they approached aid stations, and the usual bombing of hospitals and schools.
I'm not sure I agree that the world looked away. The world glanced over, said "yeah that sucks, Hamas are bad", watched for a while, and then said "wow that's a lot of bodies in Gaza though".
> the government lit the Sydney Opera House up in blue and white, everyone acknowledged it was a tragedy
Except for the hundreds of Muslims who gathered at the Opera House to chant "Gas the Jews" of course.
Everyone who was in the government that lit up the opera house, with some possible weaseling from the Greens.
True, but on the other hand everyone in the government voted to import the people who shout "gas the Jews".
Because some tiny percentage of Muslim immigrants said atrocious things in public, it is the Australian government's fault for letting any Muslims immigrate at all? Come on, this is not a serious statement.
In reality nobody really starved though, did they?
Israel demanded the outright depopulation - one might fairly say ethnic cleansing - of half the Gaza Strip, which was one of the most overpopulated parts of the world on Earth pre-war, as a condition for a ceasefire (which it then proceeded to repeatedly violate).
Hamas accepted, despite Israel's failure throughout the conflict at taking or holding territory or even setting up any sort of occupation government.
There are a lot more lines of evidence pointing to the same conclusion, but this place has become overrun with the sort of people who deny our livestreamed, modern holocaust.
Not sure what you mean, Israel pretty much had taken over that entire area already, right? And it is not depopulated, but it is mostly a rural area which was not overpopulated (the part they took control of). Hamas "accepted" but then did not disarm as agreed, and got to take back control of the remaining territory, after which they murdered a bunch of (Palestinian) people openly.
I genuinely do not understand how one can believe that "the world looked away during October 7th".
I wouldn't say that the world looked away then, but there are plenty of people looking away now.
Every nation has a narrative, and "the world always looks away" is the Israeli narrative. You can't expect mere facts to change that.
The narrative is important, because it excuses everything done by Israel itself. "We must do horrible things to protect ourselves sometimes, because the world always looks away." And technically speaking, it is not even falsifiable, because you can always argue that the world could have looked more or done more.
(The obvious reply is to ask: Well, what does Israel do about atrocities that happen in distant parts of the planet? Is it really just Israel getting the special treatment, or is this simply human nature?)
I think that by 'looking away' the author here meant that the world hasn't taken any action to actually stop those horrors.
I don't get the part about the Hamas massacres on 07/10, you're referring to the fact some people in the west celebrated the act? That's definitely a very small part of "the world".
Board of Peace had an entire agreed upon peace deal, proposed by the Israelis, until Bibi jinxed it.
"The world" has basically allowed Israel to have a free hand to deal with Gaza as it saw fit, what more could it have done to stop those horrors?
Agreed. That was a very jarring "one of these things is not like the other" moment. Hamas started a war that they couldn't win by committing atrocities and then flipped the script to "Our people are the victims because they are hiding hostages and supporting us." If the Gazans had just delivered the heads of the people responsible the fighting would have been over a lot more quickly.
The same complaints made about the destrution in Gaza could be leveled at the Allied bombing campaigns in WWII.
If Hamas and its supporters are allowed to survive in a way that lets them tell themselves "we outlasted the Israelis and were in the right and won," we're going to see the same old s--- again in about 15-20 years. Everyone seems to forget that Israel pulled all of its troops out of Gaza and left the area mostly alone (in terms of governance, etc.), and the response to being left alone was October 7.
The swiftness with which Israel's justified retaliation started being condemned with protest marches and anti-Jewish hate on the left has been very educational. I've seen a number of articles suggesting that it's safer to be Jewish in the south and in conservative areas, especially in terms of college campuses. I think it's true.
Wonder why the hell the guy had to spoil a perfectly good review by almost comically diving head first into the culture war. Like all he had to do was not mention one single word. If he said Srebrenica or otherwise it wouldn't been cool
Yeah, how dare the author not look away from mass suffering in a review about people looking away from mass suffering
Even though it’s probably obvious to everyone, I think it’s worth stating explicitly and plainly: the triggering issue is, of course, that using a story about the Holocaust (an actual murderous genocide, which was the horrific culmination of centuries of blood-libel) to further spread a new murderous blood-libel against the very same people who were the victims of that said genocide - might seen by some as... somewhat cynical.
To the contrary, a proper understanding of the Holocaust is necessary in order to grok what is happening in Gaza. That past horror is perhaps the #1 source of the (understandable) paranoid, us-versus-them mentality that animates Israel today. Violence begets violence and murder begets murder
Here it's more like Jew hate begets Jew hate
On the one hand, I assume that the "violence" that "begets violence” in your view is the Palestinian violence ~3 years ago, and not the German violence ~80 years ago (because, really, blaming the Nazis for the war on Gaza would be a truly spectacular world-class exercise in blame shifting from the Palestinians).
But on the other hand, there was absolutely nothing in what the Germans did to the Jews that even remotely fits the “violence begets violence” pattern. So, to the extent that this pattern is relevant to Gaza, your claim that “a proper understanding of the Holocaust is necessary in order to grok what is happening in Gaza” becomes all the more disconnected.
So... which is it?
> But on the other hand, there was absolutely nothing in what the Germans did to the Jews that even remotely fits the “violence begets violence” pattern.
Sure there was! Nazism would never have been a thing if not for the horrors of WWI and its aftermath, which hit the Germans particularly hard, and made them vulnerable to demagogues designating convenient scapegoats
> because, really, blaming the Nazis for the war on Gaza would be a truly spectacular world-class exercise in blame shifting from the Palestinians
True, although we can give them a little bit of blame! Some Palestinian leaders like Amin al-Husseini collaborated with Nazi Germany and sought their help in opposing a Jewish state.
I don't think so. The U.S. would have reacted the exact same way to such an attack. Any sane country would, I think. You can't just give up and surrender because the enemy is hiding under hospitals.
Hamas literally had its headquarters in al-Sifa hospital. They hid their fighters along the peaceful Gazans who clearly had had nothing to do with getting Hamas into power. And of course, the moment the Israelis drop any bomb on them the death toll comes back immediately. This is despite the fact that the Gaza health ministry was reduced to rubble long back.
The 2016-17 battle to retake Mosul from ISIS is perhaps the U.S.-involved conflict most similar to Gaza—fighting a ruthless Islamist terrorist group in a dense urban environment with population ~2 million. In Mosul, the U.S. and our allies achieved well under 1:1 civilian to combatant casualty ratio. In Gaza, the IDF is doing ~4:1 (https://aoav.org.uk/2026/why-israeli-claims-of-low-civilian-to-combatant-harm-in-gaza-do-not-hold-up/).
Oh, and unlike the IDF, we actually defeated the enemy!
Blood libel was the false anti-semitic belief that jewish people murdered non-jewish children for their religious rituals.
It's not blood libel to point out that Israel is actually killing masses of Palestinian civilians in what is functionally an open air prison.
Whether the accusations amount to blood-libel depends on how serious they are, and on how much the accusers actually have any regard for the truth of the matter.
As for severity, it can't get much worse than "Genocide". And your strong careless assertions, your framing, and your choice of words ("open air prison") leave very little doubt about "having regard for the truth of the matter".
It really should be clear to anyone familiar with the details that nothing remotely resembling genocide is going on in Gaza. And it should be even more clear that anyone who does not know the facts must not spread such horrific accusations.
I have seen fathers carrying their children's remains in plastic bags. I've seen western doctors talk about the seeing children double tapped by sniper routinely. I've seen the idf precisions bomb aid workers despite knowing their exact location. I've seen them bomb the camps they order civilians to move to. I've seen them rape prisoners on cctv and then take the rapists onto TV to celebrate them.
In a few years everyone will have always been against this. My conscience is clear.
Continually bringing up october 7th feels really old hat and likely a counterproductive argument for your agenda. Of course there is an acceptable retaliation to such an event, but there is also a concept of proportionality, and the overwhelming consensus is that it has been far exceeded.
The United States was brought into WW2 by the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which killed 2,400 Americans. How many Italian, Japanese, and German casualties would it have been proportional for them to inflict in response?
The answer, of course, is that whether the response is justified has nothing whatsoever to do with the number of casualties inflicted. "Defeat those countries and prevent them from being able to continue to wage war on you" is a perfectly valid response.
I think the justification has *some* relation to the death toll, but I agree that proportionality is entirely the wrong standard. I think the good arguments for "proportionality" in war are not about the justice of a retaliation, but about its consequences. Proportional retaliation is supposed to be better for deterrence in certain repeated games, which may be a genuine good. But there's no general rule, and if a military action neither directly achieves some good nor effectively deters future violence, then proportionality doesn't make it ok.
Adding my voice to the chorus, as this review lost me in that penultimate paragraph. Gaza has unending press, from state broadcasters right down to every dumb fake-revolutionary woman's dating app profile. October 7th was memory-holed within days.
The specific hatred the state of Israel gets, while terrorist groups get little to none and actually get support would already be suspicious. But the same people don't give a shit about Sudan for example. The only conclusion is rampant anti-Semitism. At least the Jews have guns now to protect themselves Alhamdulilah
Israel is a sovereign state that presents itself as a Western liberal democracy. Of course they get held to a higher standard that literal Islamist terrorists or African failed states.
Literally the soft bigotry of low expectations. I'm sure it's a great relief to those dying in Sudan that they do so at the hands of a failed state rather than a western democracy.
They're getting held to a much higher standard than the Ukraine, that's for sure.
Ukraine is already discussed in all Open Threads (mostly by you).
Could that be proportional to the length of the atrocity and the number of victims?
I suppose there is a flaw in my analogy in that it compares a single incident to an ongoing conflict, so in that sense I agree with you.
I still feel if you measured the mean response to a single incident in Gaza, it would be much greater than the response to October 7.
Just as imagery of 9/11 was downplayed or sanitized, because everyone's always so afraid of causing an anti-Muslim backlash every time a group of terrorist Muslims do something outlandishly murderous and crazy. Americans in 2006 had probably seen that stupid photo of the prisoner pyramid in Abu-whatever more than the planes striking the towers, it was seen as stoking prejudice or exploiting emotions to hammer on those haunting images but somehow when it's the *other* direction and the imagery might raise sympathy for Muslims it's always spread around without regard to the backlash *that* might cause.
Referring to Gaza AT ALL just needlessly adds Current Thing drama to an otherwise very well written piece. It does not add anything to mention a contemporary controversy, indeed the whole coda about recent historical events that may or may not be "genocides" adds nothing of value. A better article would omit such comment so as to let the people who would've arrived at that conclusion get there on their own while not alienating anyone else. This isn't an article for children to be talked down to, this is on a rationalist blog, the after-school special level observation about could it happen today / is it happening, that's beneath us here.
It seems clearly beneficial and meaningful to tie the lesson of a reviewed book to current events, to use the carefully written (and then reviewed) story as a lens and frame for what it naturally still has to say about events that happened after it.
The very fact that there is such a vocal group pushing back against _any_ characterization of malice or misbehavior on the part of Israel is _exactly_ why such a footnote is both the natural conclusion of the review and rings true.
You can probably readily point to examples in the West of antisemites or leftist crazies way overstating the case against Israel, and I can point to the spoken works of Smotrich or Gvir that are outrightly genocidal - lets put aside the vocal minorities.
70,000 Gazans (at least) are dead and Gaza is basically rubble.
Theres a real argument to be had about how many civilian casualties are acceptable in making your country safe. Even while reasonable minds may differ on where that answer lies, no reasonable mind should consider what has actually happened to be meet that mark. If Israel's response to 10/7 was to be the complete and total destruction of Hamas, they have a moral and legal duty to minimize the civilian casualties and they had better damn actually destroy Hamas.
In reality, Hamas remains a thorn and blowback promises more future radicalized insurgents. Israel the state has lost its goodwill and support from much of the rest of the world. No possible honest telling of the story of the offensive can support that they were anything but regularly entirely unconcerned with the destruction visited upon noncombatants.
The key is that we don't pin all that on _Israel_ or _Jews_ as a people - pin that on who deserves it, the Israeli administration that actually made it happen, who abdicated their moral and legal duty and caused and continue to cause useless suffering of Gazans and simultaneously great harm to their own nation.
Footnote links seems broken?
Substack footnote links haven't worked for me in iOS Firefox for months.
If you switch to "Desktop Site" on mobile they work, at the cost of severly degrading the reading experience.
Or in iOS chrome.
I understand that the book review largely takes Rudi’s perspective, but also 200,000 is an unfathomable number of lives saved. I wouldn’t call his mission a failure at all. (Also, this book review was excellent.)
Isn't there some Jewish saying that he who saves one life saves the world?
Not exactly. It's more like saving is a life is like saving a world since all people were descended from Adam. I'm taking this as a hypothetical rather than a statement about saving the whole existing world.
Yes, that is the point of the quote...
I'll go ahead and paste the comment I had planned to post as a reply here:
“no moral uplift, no lessons”
“stops deportations long enough to save an estimated 200,000 lives.”
It seems like one lesson we could draw is that, when we’re considering awfulness on such an immense scale, it’s easy to overlook things that in any other circumstance would seem like a greater victory than anything the overwhelming majority of us achieve in our lives.
It's like saving 200 000 African children from malaria.
Right! Doesn’t ~single-handedly saving 200k lives put you up there as one of the greatest humans of all time, in consequentialism points?
The part about "and also American pressure" seems to imply that he probably had a relatively marginal effect on it though? If we wildly estimate it at 10% that's 20k, which is still big.
It's always interesting to see how hard it is to get people to accept something that is radically different from their understanding of things. I think it's human nature to be able to extrapolate trends, but also to completely miss and even deny phase changes.
This review reminded me of the sudden about-face in COVID in March 2020. It was obvious to a smallish number of people for several weeks, if not months, that COVID was going to be a big deal but by and large, nobody really cared. Then there was that one day where famous people got COVID and we had a societal phase change and started caring about COVID quite a bit.
And it's distinct from the emperor-has-no-clothes phenomenon. It's not that people are afraid to speak up, it's more like pointing out the new reality gets a non-even-wrong reaction. The new reality seems literally unthinkable, so nobody thinks about it until everybody does.
As I understand it, there was a common belief that Germany was a civilized country. They had major achievements in music and science, and their philosophers were respected. (I can't speak to how good the philosophers were.)
It turns out that music, science, and philosophy aren't evidence of ethical behavior.
There was also the problem of atrocity propaganda in the First World War, where "the Huns" had been accused of all sorts of atrocities e.g. crucifying a Canadian soldier:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crucified_Soldier
So when reports about the Final Solution started trickling out, a lot of people reacted with "aha, same old same old, can't fool me twice!"
It wasn't just among the allies. A lot of Jewish people had a near mystical faith in german Kultur.
Scott has (sort of) written about this before: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/
TL;DR Germany and Hungary, starting in the mid to late 1800s, were some of the best times for Jews in recent memory, possibly in almost all of history up to that point.
In critique of cynical reason Peter Sloterdijk defines cynicism as "enlightened false consciousness". We know, but we act as if we don't. He sees this as a distinctly modern way to live. We live in a broadly "unmasked" world - we know better than ever all the ways in which power works and all the negative consequences of our way of living - yet act as if the mask is still on. Part of our motivation to do this is the fact that we benefit too much from the current way things are organised. We see e.g. global warming, but our big corpo is paying our mortgage so we can't fathom a world without constantly growing economies.
Applied to your COVID example, I think this cynical way of living makes us even less likely to take early warnings seriously, because for many of us our basic mode of living is already a low-grade denial of reality.
I surely hope we can reach a moment like that COVID moment on climate this decade. Things'll probably really need to hit the fan for that to happen though... which would also be really bad, but perhaps good in the long run.
“our basic mode of living is already a low-grade denial of reality.”
Indeed, we do keep repeating “it” … time to “woke” up and up and up…
It is because people mostly act on heuristics. I had the same experience during covid. In no small part because I was reading this blog, I understood that covid was likely to be a big thing weeks in advance of the world in general. When I tried to warn against that, I mainly got resistance in terms of all the other pandemic scares that petered out, sars1, ebola etc., and also appeals to my lack of authority in medicine.
The thing is "nothing ever happens" is often a good heuristic. Hype and hyperbole are common, actual crisis are rare. I would have thought the same about covid, if I had not catched on and read a lot of details.
It captured how I felt learning about factory farming on a deep level. I realized that, oh shit, this is really fucked up and I can't support this in any way, and I thought that if the people in my life just knew what was happening they would stop supporting it to. Spoiler alert: people can know and still not care.
The quote by Raymond Aron really struck me, because it accurately represents most of my life before then. I knew, but did not believe it, and because I didn't believe it, I didn't know. It even seems accurate when talking to people about it. You can tell that they agree it's bad, but that it's like a part of them doesn't grok that it's worse than someone kicking a dog.
I know it's controversial to talk about animal rights in light of human atrocities, but I think it's worth flagging that a concentration camp survivor, Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz was one of the first to make the connection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_analogy_in_animal_rights
I was disappointed to see this missing from the 3rd- and 4th-from-last paragraphs, given the sheer scale and depth of badness that is factory farming.
Not just factory farming. I would like to bring up another aspect of climate change that does not get talked about in broad publicity, but rather only in niche circles: *Still accelerating* rate of species extinction across the globe, fauna and flora. Yes, human action has been responsible for species extinction long before industrialization, apparently even before civilization and agriculture. But the scientific evidence is really depressing, the extinction rate has never been higher and it is just through climate change alone, not even direct human action anymore. It is an unseen bow wave in front of us that is drowning species every minute, and still *accelerating*.
I think it's just the prior for "nothing ever happens" is so big, and isn't easily adaptable in the span of scarcely weeks. Vastly proven by tons of "next pandemic" scare in the last few years.
>Majdanek, another Polish concentration camp
No! No, no and no!
The words the reviewer was looking for are “Majdanek, another Nazi concentration camp on occupied Polish soil”
Polish people are very touchy about this, and rightly so! Those were not *Polish* camps in any sense, and plenty of (non-Jewish) Polish people perished in those camps.
Carry on.
I know this is very much the line of (at least the former PiS-led) Polish government, but I found the insistence always a bit weird. I have yet to meet anyone who hears the objected phrase and concludes that clearly, what is meant were camps run by some Polish government.
If I say "Swiss mountains", nobody will object that actually the Swiss did neither build nor operate the mountains, and the politically correct phrasing should be "mountains currently located in modern-day Switzerland".
Quite frankly, I find this insistence on phrasing for the sake of signaling that one is one of the ingroup who keep up with current acceptable phrasings quite tiresome, no matter if the faux outrage comes from the left ("He's not Black, he's Afro-American!") or the right ("Call it Türkiye, not Turkey like the bird!").
To convince me that this phrasing is bad, you would have to show that it has a bad effect. Like, if 30% of the Baltic people have heard the phrasing "Polish concentration camp" so often (and do not have any historical education whatsoever) that they answered "Poland" to the question "which country ran Auschwitz?", then I would concede that we have a real problem and need to fix our phrasing to combat this misconception. My presumption is that the actual number will not be much above the Lizardman's constant, though.
It's easy enough to say "concentration camp in Poland" rather than "Polish concentration camp."
The government of Poland deserves blame for a lot of bad things it has done over the centuries. But it never did _that_. So let's not confuse people with sloppy phrasing.
OK, I’ll bite that bullet! Me! When I was much younger, I would hear “Polish concentration camp… Romanian… Serbian…” and without having been given the full historical context text by this misleading wording assumed that they were all led by collaborators/collaborator governments. Obviously that’s untrue, and the nature of these camps is wildly disparate, and tagging them all with the demonym of their location is actively deceptive and betrays at the very least casual carelessness with history.
This is about as far from signaling as you can get.
It’s not that hard, a death camp run by Nazis for the benefit of Nazis that happens to be located for Nazi convenience in Poland is a Nazi death camp in Poland; a death camp run by Serbs in the initiative of Serbs for the benefit of Serbs is a Serbian death camp, and calling the former a “Polish concentration camp” is semantically obtuse
I agree, that phrasing should be avoided. Same goes for the 'by sheer luck they managed to find some helpful strangers' comment...rubs me the wrong way as a non-Pis Polish person.
Just to spite the Polish version of political correctness, I will from now on always say "Polish concentration camp" instead of "Nazi concentration camp on occupied Polish soil". If anyone can name a single person who was actually confused by this, I'll consider changing my mind.
Carry on.
Poorly educated people will be confused, that is why German apologists use this term. The sort of people who place the Second World War in the 19th century. I would say that here in CZ, that would be approximately a fifth of the population.
Calling Auschwitz a Polish concentration camp makes as much sense as calling Los Alamos a Navajo-Apache Atomic Bomb Research Center, because those two tribes used to dominate the area.
Again, name a single person who was actually confused and I will consider changing my mind.
"Calling Auschwitz a Polish concentration camp makes as much sense as calling Los Alamos a Navajo-Apache Atomic Bomb Research Center, because those two tribes used to dominate the area."
No, it makes as much sense as calling it Los Alamos National Laboratory, because it was physically located in Los Alamos.
"name a single person who was actually confused and I will consider changing my mind."
This translates into a demand for me to run into the street and start asking people, as there obviously aren't any personal lists of confused people available online. Neither I nor anyone else here are that much invested into changing anyone's mind on the Internet to actually perform a multi-hour survey for free, and you know it. It would be fairer to say that you don't intend to change your mind, period.
"No, it makes as much sense as calling it Los Alamos National Laboratory, because it was physically located in Los Alamos."
Is it?
Los Alamos is a toponym (name of a place), so it would be like calling Auschwitz Auschwitz, because Auschwitz is the relevant toponym.
Polish / German / Navajo is the name of a nation/entity under whose laws and government that facility is/was run.
Quite different categories.
“Polish / German / Navajo is the name of a nation/entity under whose laws and government that facility is/was run.
Quite different categories.”
Literate people know this.
(I agree with you.)
“No, it makes as much sense as calling it Los Alamos National Laboratory, because it was physically located in Los Alamos.”
No. It’s obviously different (there’s no implication of people or culture in “Los Alamos”). Your obtuseness isn’t really an argument.
The fact you are so righteous about it is a good enough reason to avoid the unnecessary ambiguity.
The reason why few people specify the location of Los Alamos using the Navajo-Apache attribute is because for most people "in the former general area of the West Apache and Navajo tribes" will not be very helpful to narrow the location down for most people.
Instead, it would be more like calling LANL a "New Mexico nuclear weapon research facility". It is ambiguous -- it might imply that the facility is under control of NM, or that it is located within NM.
If you are dealing with people lacking any context, this might give off the wrong impression. However, if you can assume that your audience knows that Nuclear Weapons in the US are exclusively developed by the federal government, and that individual states very much do not have their own nuke programs, then it seems very reasonable to avoid using the elaborate phrase "US federal nuclear weapon research facility located in New Mexico".
Looking at a map of WW2 concentration camps [1], they are located all over Europe wherever the Nazis held territory. So there is a need to clarify the location, that Majdanek was located in modern-day Poland and not in Serbia or France or Italy. (I will also say that all of the big Nazi death camps seem to be located in modern-day Poland, so anyone who is talking about "Polish death camps" may be reasonably presumed to deliberately muddy the water.)
Both the facts that the US president (and not the governor of NM) controls the US nukes and that the Nazi Germans (and not the Poles) committed the holocaust are deeply ingrained in our shared culture. 99.9% of ACX readers will not be confused by the phrasing.
I get that the Poles are unhappy about the phrasing, just like they are probably unhappy about the fact that one of the most significant events in modern history was committed by foreigners on their land, and I am happy to continue to avoid the phrasing personally.
But this reflexive "HE SAID JEHOVAH" language policing expressed by the top level commenter seems unconvincing, more about signaling group membership than a genuine concern for avoiding confusion.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konzentrationslager#/media/Datei:WW2_Holocaust_Europe_map-de.png
"committed the holocaust are deeply ingrained in our shared culture. 99.9% of ACX readers will not be confused by the phrasing."
ACX readers will not, as they are usually highly educated people.
But the phrase Polish concentration camps is usually used in other context, and if you extend the "shared culture" to the entire West and start asking random people in the street what does that actually mean and who ran the camps, you'll be surprised just how miserable the overall education level is.
We used to have a TV program "Nobody's Perfect" here in CZ, where they would ask random people questions like "When was the Second World War". Always 10 randomly selected people without editing or manipulation. People were fucking clueless about things you'd consider trivial knowledge.
Yeah, people in educated bubbles are prone to overestimate the intelligence and education of the general population. TV programs like that were a useful reminder. ("Even the wise fail" in Slovakia.)
The average person has IQ 100 and that is quite stupid -- probably would not be able to participate in a debate on ACX. Half of the population is less intelligent than that.
On top of that, add the fact that many people despite being naturally intelligent simply don't pay attention to most things. (Or, recently, they take their alternative facts from social networks.)
“ I get that the Poles are unhappy about the phrasing, just like they are probably unhappy about the fact that one of the most significant events in modern history was committed by foreigners on their land, and I am happy to continue to avoid the phrasing personally.”
It’s impecise, sloppy, and unnecessary phrasing. Regardless of how unhappy the Poles are about it!
I will note you've said "New Mexico facility," not a "New Mexican facility." So one should say "a Poland concentration camp," not "a Polish concentration camp."
“Polish” (and other equivalent words) isn’t really limited to referring to a place. It’s not really a “Polish” camp. It seems sloppy and unnecessary to say it that way. It’s bad writing.
See my comment above. When I was younger and reading history I was confused by this phrasing.
I am glad to hear I was able to change your mind.
Noted, thank you. If I'm ever talking to children about the Holocaust, I'll clarify that Auschwitz was a German camp in occupied Poland. I'll also tell them that if they ever hear anyone say "Polish death camp", the "Polish" refers to geographical location only.
I think that’s a good idea. Question: in what situation is it clearer and more semantically desirable to refer to a Nazi death camp as a Polish death camp? Even to adults?
I can’t think of a single circumstance where this is not an error or less clear than another phrasing
Mhm. I bet this attitude is what explains journalists using phrase "polish concentration camp" when talking about camps which are geographically located in Germany (Buchenwald, Dachau).
Maybe it's because my elderly great-great-grandmother was burned in the barn at Jedwabne by her Polish civilian neighbors [1] or maybe it's because modern Polish governments have attempted to rewrite Poland's history of complicity [2], but I am deeply uninterested in modern Polish people's protestations that their ancestors aren't responsible for the death of 3 million of their countrymen, women, and children [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedwabne_pogrom
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amendment_to_the_Act_on_the_Institute_of_National_Remembrance
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Poland
Surprisingly fresh and very well-written.
One important correction, however: Majdanek was a Nazi camp, not Polish
nit: " Both FDR and UK Prime Minister Anthony Eden had received eyewitness..." Anthony Eden was foreign secretary and Churchill was PM IIRC.
I'm quite surprised this review didn't go into the "victim blaming" aspect more. The mood in Israel was to blame the victims of the holocaust for not fighting back! "As sheep to the slaughter" and so on. Memories of the holocaust weren't openly discussed in Israel until after the Eichmann trial.
I'm not sure where that would have fit.
Great review.
"But Gerta, his first wife, says the causality runs the other way: in her telling, Rudi had always been paranoid and combative, and those traits were what got him out alive in the first place."
This is something I try to keep in mind and that keeps me from getting too mad at anti-vaxxers and their ilk. Once in a blue moon, the paranoid, combatative people are going to be right, and they might just save a lot of lives. Diversity in thought and personality is good for humanity! (Even if sometimes very frustrating when encountered in individual humans.)
A million years ago when I was taking employment law, the very senior, very experienced lawyer teaching the class, pointed out that if you go into the field on the plaintiff side and are trying to do big cases, a lot of your clients are either gonna be weirdos or assholes, because almost everyone else will simply find another job. And yet, employment protections and whistleblower revelations often rely on those exact people...
For a great example of this, I recommend reading about the life story of James Meredith, who integrated Ole Miss in the face of massive riots and yet also supported explicitly segregationist politicians like Jesse Helms and the KKK’s David Duke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Meredith
See: the 2009 film The Informant! starring Matt Damon.
As Shaw said, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Reminds me of thr H.L. Menkin quote: "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
I constantly have to remind myself that my clients wouldn't be helping me to fight the government if they weren't at least a little disagreeable by nature. A great deal of good is done by assholes you would never want to interact with in another context.
We can't punish being a contrarian *too* harshly because we must maintain a strategic reserve of people willing to dissent. Of course, dissent is easy- the real task is distinguishing the signal from the noise. So it goes.
Exactly. Low-agreeableness people are a valuable part of diversity.
America in particular has long been a haven for Borderers and other disagreeable barbarians, as well as further types of high-agency immigrants self-selected from lots of countries.
And different regions of America seem to have concentrated different communities of these folks.
I really do think this is a good thing. We might not get anything done if the country were 100% composed of contrarians - although Texas, Utah, and the Bay Area might be compelling counterpoints since they seem to be doing well in their own ways! - but it makes me sleep better at night knowing that they exist and might oppose oppression and/or stagnation.
Also, the more I look at myself and my family of origin (nyah, we don't like having an oppressive boss and so will be entrepreneurs, homemakers, homebirthers, and homeschoolers), the more I realize I'm one of them.
There is probably plenty of truth in that!
A lot of things that are classified as personality disorders or mental illness today have probably remained in the population because in certain situations (war, famine, etc) they are very advantageous.
So have some sympathy with the psychopaths and lunatics. This is not their time, but in an other era, we may desperately need them.
> One gets the sense that sheer bureaucratic inertia also played a role in the Allies’ reluctance to intervene. Military leaders were simply used to picking military targets; humanitarian work didn’t become a regular military function until after the war.
This would be more convincing if the Allied bombing campaign had been laser-focused on winning the war. Brett Devereaux (very much not a Nazi apologist) argues that that British target selection and air strategy was essentially not part of a successful strategy to win WW2, but more a desire for revenge for London painted in an already falsified theory of victory. https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower-101/
I think with the benefit of hindsight it would be easy to argue that bombing the railways leading to Auschwitz rather than German cities would have offered a much better RoI even from a purely military view, disregarding the obvious human externalities. After all, the Shoah was an ideologically important project for the Nazi regime which competed for resources with their war effort. If the Allies had bombed the railway platform or gas chambers of the the death camps, Himmler and Hitler would not have postponed their Endloesung until after the Endsieg. Instead they would have poured the resources into them to get them running smoothly again as surely as if the infrastructure had been vital for the war effort. By contrast, bombed German homes were not a priority for rebuilding, the welfare of their Volk was much further down on their list of priorities in the middle of a war.
There's another book review here https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-how-the-war-was on how Allied strategic bombing actually did work, but that's not specifically about the British (whose Arthur Harris sought a "morale victory" that indeed never came).
Sending strategic bombers deep into Eastern Europe to hit precise targets was tried in the U.S. raid from North Africa on the Ploesti oil refinery in Romania. That was judged to be a victory for the Germans over the Americans as the U.S. lost 53 heavy B-24 bombers and 500 crewmen in a single raid, which was never attempted again.
The round trip from British airfields to Auschwitz would have been about 7/8ths as long. So it sounds about comparable to the failed Operation Tidal Wave.
Later in the war, the Allies got some airfields a little closer in Italy.
You can be laser-focussed on something and still be mistaken about it. Granting for the sake of argument that the bombing actually bring done was not contributing to winning the war, I think it’s pretty clear that those directing bombing operations (eg Harris or Spaatz) believed that it was. The wider leadership who could have asked for different operations might have had reason to doubt that, but they also had psychological reasons (not dissimilar to those of the Czech Jewish leaders) for being in denial, at least enough not to say ‘this war-irrelevant aim is just as worthwhile’.
Note that Devereaux is *definitely* subject to Bounded Distrust. He mentions, but then ignores, the one obvious example of strategic bombing having massive effects i.e. Hiroshima. He goes so far as to extend his theory of useless strategic bombing into the plans for WWIII, when it is blatantly obvious that strategic bombing would have decided most "Cold War gone hot" scenarios.
The guy literally gloats about his ability to not just inform, but persuade.
Hiroshima was a bit unprecedented and the Japanese believed that the Americans have a lot more atomic bombs than just one after Nagasaki. In my opinion, a sudden big shock can probably knock out an enemy out of the war. But if it fails to do so, the regime may well harden and the population gets used to the new traumatic norm.
We have seen the same in the Iran war. Sudden death of the leadership did not lead to a collapse, and several weeks in, the Iranian regime was probably more stable than before the war.
It has been fairly well confirmed that the Japanese were disconcerted by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the USSR declaring war was a far bigger concern for them.
On top of that, there is the bit where there is a rather large distinction between strategic bombing in the sense of 'we will literally annihilate the enemy' and strategic bombing in the sense of 'we will bomb them so much they break.' The first is theoretically possible with nuclear weaponry. The second does not seem to have a great track record.
>It has been fairly well confirmed that the Japanese were disconcerted by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the USSR declaring war was a far bigger concern for them.
My understanding, to put it bluntly, is that the historiography on that point was significantly tainted by Soviet psy-ops during the Cold War. The Soviet entry was relevant, but we have sources quoting Hirohito and the Prime Minister as demanding an end to the war on August 8 - i.e. after Hiroshima, but before the Soviet invasion started.
>On top of that, there is the bit where there is a rather large distinction between strategic bombing in the sense of 'we will literally annihilate the enemy' and strategic bombing in the sense of 'we will bomb them so much they break.' The first is theoretically possible with nuclear weaponry. The second does not seem to have a great track record.
Except that Devereaux then elides that distinction. He pooh-poohs "literally everyone who has ever tried strategic bombing" and explicitly includes nukes in the conclusion.
Do not discount "tanks are moving, invasion is imminent" as a reason for Hirohito/PM to say "peace! Peace now!" After VE day, there was no other war for Russia to fight. And Japan had actively stolen "Russian" territory.
I recommend Dropping the Bomb: Hiroshima & Nagasaki by "Shaun" as a 2h long video essay on different sources showing that the bomb and the subsequent rationalizations of why it was dropped were mostly made by the US and that the Japanese surrender was indeed mostly due to the Soviet invasion. In brief, when you get carpet-bombed daily, getting somewhat more carpet-bombed in a different way doesn't make a huge difference; getting a new enemy opening a new front does.
There seem to be enough intelligent historians on either side of the "were atomic weapons necessary to Japan to surrender" debate that I consider it a matter of legitimate academic disagreement. I don't think it's a case of who are you going to believe, the Historians or your lying eyes!
Until the Allies got fighter escorts, bomber raids were sitting... er, flying ducks, and had mortality rates of IIRC >25% per run
Polish resistance, and specifically Witold Pilecki's report (he got himself purposefully arrested and then escaped after several years in the camp, recording it's evolution from a harsh concentration camp to death factory) provided information about the reality of the mass murder in 1943 to the Allies via the Polish government in exile, significantly before Vrba–Wetzler report. So it had been known, at that level, before, and no action was taken.
The following statement was issued by Allied governments on December 17, 1942 and was printed on the front page of the New York Times and many other newspapers:
"TEXT OF DECLARATION
"The attention of the Belgian, Czechoslovak, Greek, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norwegian, Polish, Soviet, United Kingdom, United States and Yugoslav Governments and also of the French National Committee has been drawn to numerous reports from Europe that the German authorities, not content with denying to persons of Jewish race in all the territories over which their barbarous rule has been extended, the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler's oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.
"From all the occupied countries Jews are being transported in conditions of appalling horror and brutality to Eastern Europe. In Poland, which has been made the principal Nazi slaughterhouse, the ghettos established by the German invader are being systematically emptied of all Jews except a few highly skilled workers required for war industries. None of those taken away are ever heard of again. The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labor camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions. The number of victims of these bloody cruelties is reckoned in many hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent men, women and children.
"The above-mentioned governments and the French National Committee condemn in the strongest possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination. They declare that such events can only strengthen the resolve of all freedom-loving peoples to overthrow the barbarous Hitlerite tyranny. They reaffirm their solemn resolution to insure that those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution, and to press on with the necessary practical measures to this end."
https://www.nytimes.com/1942/12/18/archives/11-allies-condemn-nazi-war-on-jews-united-nations-issue-joint.html
Note that this 1942 Allied declaration understated the genocidal murderousness of the Nazi extermination camps like Treblinka when it asserted: "The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labor camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions."
Actually, virtually no work was being done by Jews in Treblinka. Instead, practically all the newly arrived Jews were murdered within hours of getting off the train.
But the Allies couldn't seem to believe the Nazis were quite that bad. Nor did they appear to believe that they could persuade their own peoples that the Nazis were that self-destructively homicidal that they wouldn't get some work out of their Jewish slaves.
Yes, this too. But all in all, this was KNOWN (words like "extermination" appear clearly in this declaration), and nothing was done specifically to stop, avoid or slow down the killing.
That said, a substantial proportion of the murdered Jews were not killed in "death factories", but 'simply' shot -- this happened largely in the East, with Einsatzkommando units (well over a million estimated victims, starting with thousands of targeted/named Polish intelligentsia at the start of the war and moving on to systematic hunting and murder of huge number of Jews later as part of the Final Solution - estimates reach 2 million of the 6 murdered outside death camps) -- so while bombing of the railways might have slowed down the industrialised murder a little, how much difference it would have made overall isn't super clear (tracks can be fixed quickly), and it's not impossible that the goal of ending the war asap was a rational one.
The decision not to bomb the Birkenau death complex is likely more disputable (they could, they were bombing local IG Farben factories) in whether it'd have saved more people by destroying murder factories than I'd have directly killed.
Treblinka camp (and other Operation Reinhardt death camps eg Bełżec) was dismantled after its job (Warsaw ghetto "liquidation", and broader killing of Jews of occupied Poland generally) was done, so Auschwitz remained more visible and somewhat more complicated a case as both a prison, labour and death camp.
This really summarises the debate re Auschwitz (and intelligence provided early to the Allies) fairly well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_bombing_debate
And this specifically on the notes, reports and disbelief:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mass_Extermination_of_Jews_in_German_Occupied_Poland
Thanks. I see that the notion of blowing up Auschwitz became much more popular after historian David Wyman's 1978 article. That fits well with my hunch that people in 1978 were much influenced by the 1977 movie "Star Wars," which climaxes with Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star.
Thus, people since "Star Wars" have conceptualized Auschwitz as the expensive, irreplaceable, yet vulnerable Death Star of the Holocaust.
Q. What Would Luke Skywalker Have Done?
A. He would have blown up Auschwitz.
You reckon? I always thought it was a shift that went roughly from "they're killing us all" to "they're killing us all, especially Jews" to "they're killing us all, mostly Jews" to "WW2 = Hitler against Jews". Obviously depending where in Europe you are, the narrative varied. But approximately. And once you arrive at the last version, especially with the full reality of the utter, unimaginable horror of the Shoah known, the "we need to win this war first and foremost rather than try to save Jews by any other means" stance starts looking inconceivably evil.
I mean I don't think historians or opinion makers in 1978 were particularly SW fixated....
"WW2 = Hitler against Jews"
There should be more awareness of the Nazi's long-term GeneralPlan Ost for starving tens of millions of Slavs to death over a few decades.
Hitler made himself the enemy of far more than just the Jews.
I was actually surprised that there was no mention of Pilecki in this review. When I read "And crazily enough, he goes to Auschwitz voluntarily", I had to double check the name of the protagonist again to ensure it wasn't Pilecki.
"The Black Book Of Poland" published (IIRC) in 1942 referenced such reports and mentioned in passing that the Oświęcim camp was being massively expanded.
Damn. What a thing to live through. To go through all that hell only to die broken and alone.
You would think that a man clever enough to escape Auschwitz would make it far in life, but he didn't. I wonder what that says about the odds for the rest of us.
It isn't a comforting message in these times of despair.
"Clever enough" isn't a single scalar quantity.
The kind of guy who'd bury himself alive for three days, hike cross-country with no supplies, and then argue with unhelpful bureaucrats for months, all powered by sheer moral outrage with his previous line of work, might not be a good fit for any sort of job people are talking about when they say "no ethical consumption under capitalism."
He survived because he was extremely paranoid, but paranoia is not a good mindset for peaceful cooperation with others, and in peacetime conditions, you can go much further when trusting and cooperating with others.
People who are interested in historical figures whose incredible determination and moral courage sprung from the same traits that made them, in some sense, profoundly unhappy and maladjusted, may also like this article: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/on-john-woolman
>You would think that a man clever enough to escape Auschwitz would make it far in life, but he didn't.
This just makes me think of the Roofman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Manchester
Awesome review. One complaint - How did the author manage to write this right after writing about the UZ burying the lede? Is this irony that went over my head? If so, an unfortunate choice to make a small joke about what could be the most amazing part of this story.
"Rudi and Fred do achieve one small victory: in reaction to their report—and to Roosevelt’s warning that the U.S. will punish Nazi collaborators after the war—the Hungarian regent stops deportations long enough to save an estimated 200,000 lives."
That should probably get its own book. There was a book whose name I'm forgetting which was about the holocaust being most destructive in places where the local bureaucracy was destroyed.
What do you/that book mean by local bureaucracy?
According to Scott's review of Eichmann in Jerusalem, it was more destructive in places where Jews were organized (because they could be blackmailed into handing over lists of Jews, and organize their own deportation) than where they were disorganized.
Or do you mean occupied territories that the Nazis directly administered vs. ones where they left a semi-independent government in place, which in some cases (but not always) blocked/hindered the holocaust? There are a few cases of that mentioned in the Eichmann review.
The book would be Bloodlands.
I hate that you made this absolutely unnecessary statement and then covered it with a fig leaf footnote. Fuck you for making this “comparable” as if it is. Shame on you
Because you don't think that the world could have done more to stop the massacres in Gaza earlier? I speak in the past but ofc it's not as if it fully halted.
That's where the comparison stands, not on equaling the atrocities themselves. Same for Sudan.
I really don't understand your anger here. He listed a bunch of genocides to highlight our ongoing tendency of not responding strongly enough to them. It highlights how we're not that different from the leaders back then who ignored it. How is that bad?
Possibly the best thing that could be done for Gazans would be to let them leave Gaza, but that would mean letting them live somewhere else.
There is a good reason why Egypt is adamant about not letting Gazans in
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, who is at least doing his best to find out what is going on in Gaza, says that Hamas is down to 30% support. If you wanted to let Gazans out (and I think those who want to live normally should be let out) I'm not sure how you would tell who was who.
This guy codes as someone who would be MAGA under a different set of circumstances - I strongly disagree with MAGA, but I fear that I am also the type of person who would calmy have been escorted to my death. It seems there are circumstances where it pays to be low trust, "highly agentic", and conspiratorial, as damaging and annoying as it may be in most circumstances. I've been bitterly disappointed though that MAGA people seem to respond much more strongly to gas prices than attacks on democracy. I guess I should count us lucky that Trump has fucked up both.
Ironically, the people I thought of as analogous to the Jews in the story were the Maga voters who have loved ones who face deportation. Despite Trump's very public promises to do mass deportation of all undocumented people he could find, so many seem to have genuinely convinced themselves he only met some other group of people. (Not that I think your point is wrong).
I don't have much experience with that (not much diversity in the part of MAGA I'm around).
However, to add to this, my whole extended family growing up was republican, and a good number of them are conspiratorial and/or "difficult" in the way this guy was. I remember my dad telling me it was important for him to own dozens of guns because the government had a lot of power and people never consider how little it takes for our house of cards to topple into a world of gestapos and gulags. Wise words imo.
So it has been one of the greatest disappointments of my life to watch my whole family, the people I'd expect to be most sensitive to government corruption and overreach and denial of rights, gleefully embrace Trump without a second thought.
So anyway, now I'm the one buying guns.
I'm not going to try to make you feel better about anything, but apparently it's a lot easier to buy guns than to organize sensibly to use them in a revolt.
It's probably worse to claim you can't be forced to put up with atrocities and then go along than just go along without making grand proclamations that you won't.
The "second amendment helps people stop tyranny" argument only applies to *unpopular* tyrannies.
This is not... as true as you'd think, in a country as big as America. A literal revolt, a mutiny, in North Carolina where the Hurricane came swooping in? They could hold that territory for a long time... kind of like the Houthis.
And the tyranny could be broadly popular in Boswash, and very unpopular in NC.
Do you need some friends if you're ever gonna sleep? sure do.
I have no idea how to find the story, but remember one about a man who'd had an order for arrest for, like, twenty years, and just stayed home with his family and guns for twenty years until the state dropped the charges. Make something hard enough, and people will go elsewhere.
Yes, exactly, that was the flaw in my optimism. People with guns are great for protecting from government overreach that people with guns don't like, but i didn't consider the possibility of government overreach that people with guns don't mind or even embraced.
Trump's about as clean as a president can get. So was Clinton, same reason. Sunshine is the best disinfectant. ICE is even getting body cameras (which they should have had from the getgo, blame the FBI).
Yes, much clean. No corruption at all.
Who knows, I heard "funny" story where they support deportation specifically to get rid of their "loved" ones.
Reminds me of what Solzhenitsyn said about the Russians being taken to the Gulag. How they could have recognized that they were doomed, ganged up, and sought to ambush and kill as many NKVD as possible
But nobody did. Cost of action was too high. Easier to sit in your room alone and hope they came for someone else.
Here's the story of how Gurdjieff convinced Ouspensky that people are mechanical. Gurdjieff was a human potential/occultist leader. Ouspensky was his chief student.
Ouspensky kept arguing that surely people weren't mechanical.
They were looking at Crimea where the war in the 1800s was about to start. Gurdjieff pointed out that there were trains coming in loaded with artificial arms and legs for the injuries which would surely happen. And yet the soldiers were going to fight even though they knew what they were getting into.
And then Ouspensky was convinced.
> Both FDR and UK Prime Minister Anthony Eden had received eyewitness testimony of Nazi mass murder by 1943
Anthony Eden wasn't Prime Minister in 1943, he was the foreign secretary. He did become Prime Minister 10 years after the end of the war, but the wording as it stands makes it sound like he was PM at the time.
Auschwitz was a hybrid murder-work camp, which is why there were quite a few survivors relative to the pure exterminations camps like Treblinka, where much of the Jewish population of Poland was murdered in the second half of 1942. Very few people in the outside world could even conceive of Treblinka until around mid-December 1942.
In the sorry history of human warfare, lots of civilians have been murdered in hot blood (e.g., in the hours following the conquest of a besieged city) or worked to death in cold blood. But hundreds of thousands of Jewish civilians were murdered indiscriminately immediately upon arrival at Treblinka in cold blood, rather than attempt to select the best workers to enslave in the German war effort.
Auschwitz was horrifically tilted toward murder for the sake of murder, but it also had economic purposes. So some of the hardiest inmates survived it to tell their tales.
Treblinka was in the woods, but Majdanek was right on the outskirts of Lublin, a mid-tier Polish city (the 8th largest in Poland today). Everyone there knew.
A true heron this guy . Thanks for sharing a review so i learned about him. He really tried. His anger is justified.
This was an incredibly captivating book review!
Also, there was a lot of cynicism after World War I about anti-German war time propaganda, especially involving the German invasion of Belgium in 1914. The lesson that millions of people took away from the Great War was that the British government would make up anti-German lies. (Although some of it was true.)
So, the British government in WWII wasn't all that enthusiastic about promoting horror stories that sounded even less plausible than those of 1914.
A *lot* of it was true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_Belgium
The Germans absolutely rounded up and shot several thousand of Belgian civilians--men, women, and children--as collective punishment for real or imagined attacks. They burned entire villages. They killed tens of thousands more through imprisonment, expulsion, death sentences, and an electric fence set up to prevent Belgians from escaping to the Netherlands.
That's why you shouldn't make up atrocities that your enemies didn't commit. They're presumably committing plenty of atrocities, just not maximally emotionally effective atrocities.
It's also why you shouldn't dismiss claims of atrocities even if you've been lied to before.
The modern strategy is to accuse your enemy of the atrocities that *you* are doing.
That achieves the double effect of first making people angry at your enemy, and later when it turns out that it was actually you, they will already be in the "but isn't this old news?" mode.
A lot of thriller movies are predicated on the assumption held by Mr. Vrba that the hero just has to publish evidence of the Bad Guy's evil impact and the world will be changed forever.
But reality often doesn't work that way.
To take a much smaller but still lethal example, five years ago I produced the first evidence that the celebrated Black Lives Matter movement had twice -- during both the Ferguson Effect and the Floyd Effect -- gotten a huge number of incremental blacks killed both by homicide and by motor vehicle accident due to less proactive policing. So when people go out, they worry about getting pulled over less, drive worse, and pack illegal handguns more.
But, a half decade later, that discovery is still little known. The huge increase in black deaths by homicide in the week after George Floyd's death is usually blamed by the press on covid. And the comparably large increase in black traffic fatalities in June 2020 remains almost completely unknown to the public.
Firestarter (the novel, I haven't seen the movie) gets its happy ending because the Bad Government Program I don't remember is made public.
"Holocaust stories, both true and fictional, tend to repeat the same few clichés over and over. There’s the innocent child who only partially understands what’s happening (Diary of Anne Frank, Boy in the Striped Pajamas). There’s the sentimental redemption story that focuses on a small individual act (Life is Beautiful, The Book Thief). And of course, there’s the good German, or at least the morally conflicted one (Schindler’s List, The Reader)."
Am I the only one who immediately thought of Maus, an extremely-well known, Pulitzer-price-winning Holocaust narrative which is also none of those things and indeed goes out of its way to portray a fully adult, highly unsympathetic Holocaust survivor who is in no way redeemed in the course of the strip?
Also, I'm not exactly sure what the Allies could have effectively done to stop the Holocaust bar the arduous slog of advancing the frontline to conquer the territory of the camps and thus liberate them. Remember, the specific mission of the Nazis at this point was not "run a bunch of camps to kill the Jews (and other undesirables)" but just to "kill the Jews (and other undesirables)", they had already demonstrated capacity to just do this by shooting them in the East. If the Allies had (say) bombed the rail lines to the camps, wouldn't the Nazis just have found other ways to enact their mission? It might have been *somewhat* less effective - or not, there were people remaining in the camps at the time of liberation after all.
There were three main phases to the Holocaust --
- During the first 13 months of the invasion of the Soviet Union, huge numbers of Jews near the front lines were shot in ditches and the like
- The second phase began on July 22, 1942 with the shipment by train of Polish Jews from Warsaw and other ghettos to extermination camps like Treblinka. The majority of Warsaw Jews were dead by mid-autumn 1942, well before the world (or most of the surviving Warsaw Jews, for that matter) had heard what was happening, much less could bring themselves to believe it.
- In the third phase, the main murder camp was Auschwitz, but it also was a work camp, so it was not as efficiently murderous as the phase 2 camps. The main victims were Hungarian Jews, who had been protected by their own right wing government until Admiral Horthy's regime started negotiations with the Allies and was overthrown by the Nazis, and various miscellaneous Jews.
So, a large fraction of the Holocaust had already taken place by the time the surrender of the German Army at Stalingrad on January 31, 1943 indicated to the Allies that they were unlikely to lose the war. No doubt more could have been done in the last 28 months of the war to save Jews who had survived 1942, the worst year of the Holocaust. But most of the genocide was over before the tipping point had happened on the battlefield:
"“In the spring of 1942,” historian Waitman Wade Beorn writes, “75-80 percent of the victims of the Holocaust were still alive and 20-25 percent had been murdered. Eleven months later, these percentages had been reversed.” 1942 was a true annus horribilis in world history."
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/when-did-allies-know-holocaust
What do you think of the idea of bombing the railroad tracks leading to camps?
That's what I was talking about. If they couldn't have transported the Jews to the camps, couldn't they just have shot them in the ghetto? Sure, it would have been messier, but once their minds were set on murder, I wouldn't think they'd just go "Well, if we can't use the camps, there's nothing that we can do now".
Shooting people in situ would be less convenient. It would have at least slowed things down.
According to internal information from the earlier phases of the war, regular German troops found mass executions disturbing and distressing.
The camp system enabled mass murder with smaller, selected crews of people who didn't mind. Auschwitz gassed two million with barely 8000 guards in total.
You can always find a certain number of guys who like murdering, but lots of people would rather not know about it. Ohio State professor John Mueller's book "The Remnants of War" points out that while the 1990s Balkan Wars were often portrayed as the acting out on a mass scale of ancient ethnic hatreds, in reality, Balkan politicians had massive problems with draft evasion by normal young men. So they wound up making deals with semi-organized groups of men who really liked violence: prison gangs, motorcycle gangs, soccer hooligans and the like, who wound up committing a large fraction of the war crimes.
I don’t know if this is true off the top of my head, but I presume that especially toward the end of the war ammunition was an extremely critical resource that couldn’t be wasted. 6 million+ people is a lot of bullets (although of course a large number would have already been killed). I would imagine that the efficiency of the camps came in part from the fact that it required less resources to kill in bulk but also that the resources used were not necessarily diverted from wartime uses
I mean, at this point it is quite a bit less then 6 million people, considering that (presumably) the camps have already been operating for a bit, and ca 2 million have been shot on the Eastern front anyway already.
The Allies were pretty successful at knocking out transportation links in Normandy in 1944 using fighter-bombers like the P-47.
But sending heavy bombers 1000 miles to hit a 6 foot wide target was a massive challenge in the 1940s. One day of low altitude attacks on the Ploesti oil refinery cost 53 big B-24s of the 177 sent, and the refinery was back in service within a few weeks. (The Germans were really good at repairing high priority infrastructure.)
Similarly, the U.S. sent 871 sorties against North Vietnam's Dragon Jaw bridge from 1965-1972 without doing it major damage. Finally, in the spring of 1972, the U.S. knocked it out with new laser-guided smart bombs.
Finally, I don't know for sure, but I doubt that Auschwitz was all that indispensable of a piece of infrastructure.
The Nazis murdered a lot of Jews during the first phase of the Holocaust by shooting them in ditches. Then they murdered the most in the second phase by gassing them in quickly built extermination camps like Treblinka, which the Nazis themselves dismantled and hid. Finally, they murdered a lot of the remaining Jews of Europe at Auschwitz.
Auschwitz is hugely notorious, in part because more people survived it than survived Treblinka, because Auschwitz was multipurpose: to exterminate the unproductive and work to death the productive. So it was presumably more expensive and less efficient than Treblinka.
We tend to think of Auschwitz like the Death Star in "Star Wars" -- all we have to do is blow it up and then the evil empire will be defeated.
But the Nazis had lots of other options for murdering Jews.
I'm guessing that a better undertaking for the U.S. would have been to spend more money to bribe officials in German-allied and neutral countries to let more Jews leave. Vichy police captain Renault in "Casablanca" seems like the kind of man like any other man, only more so, who wouldn't let his anti-Semitism stand in the way of collecting a large payoff from the OSS for signing more exit visas.
Single points of failure are great for fiction but rather rare in the real world.
Making it easier for Jews to get out of the Reich would have made sense if allowing Jews to end up somewhere was a tolerable idea but evidence suggests it wasn't.
Right. In the 1930s, only the Dominican Republic dictator Trujillo positively wanted more Jews. (But Jews didn't much like the DR.)
I've heard there was enough antisemitism that presenting the Allied effort as helping Jews would have weakened support for the war. I don't know either whether this was true or whether it was a belief at the time.
At least some Japanese factions also sought to attract Jews. Others were less enthusiastic
Bombing them would be very difficult and they could easily be repaired. If bombing tracks could be so effective, Allies would bomb their entire railroad network in the first place.
In Bloodlands Timothy Snyder talks about how many Jews were killed in eastern Europe not in camps but just where they loved or close by through shooting. He also argues IIRC that doing so was much easier for the Germans and the "industrializarion" of death in the camps was a costly distraction.
Internal reports of the German military indicate that massacres like Babiy Yar were distressing and a morale problem for normal troops.
It was also harder to retrieve valuables from people randomly killed. Their neighbours would likely plunder their houses first. OTOH when you persuade people that they are going to live elsewhere, they will take them intentionally.
The thesis of "Ordinary Men" however was that this wasn't much of a problem for the fairly ordinary Schutzpolizei who drug people out of their villages in Poland and shot them in the back of the head into mass graves.
However your second point about telling people they're being relocated so that they might pack all their valuables seems plausible.
Schutzpolizei was a bit selected for their loyalty to the Nazi cause. Recruits were random Germans and some of them later complained to their family or priests etc.
But I also believe that it was the logistics of stealing that prevailed.
Holocausted Jews remind me of modern wokes.
Locked in denial of alien threats, politely queuing up until the last moment.
Sad his story of middle class cowardice is more relevant than (almost) ever and still not actually listened to.
Can imagine the Guarding articles "Why deportation conspiracies are unfounded" and Rudolph dismissed as a far right conspiracy theorist.
Wokes? Maybe some of them, but the major source of deportation denial is coming from MAGA.
To me the analogy is:
1. alien threat: Nazis "deporting" Jews
2. denial: holocaust seen as outlandish story
3. masking cowardice: no one wants to be first to stand up, better just keep your head down
For MAGA I don't know what their "deportation" is. What bad foreign people are they in denial about? Who are their Nazis?
If anything they're just like Rudolph, overly conspiracy brained constantly giving deranged takes on ordinary things (e.g. Charlie Kirk Isreal conspiracies).
That's why I think this is more of a critique of "the libs".
The analogy I'm drawing is that the Trump administration is deporting large numbers of people, many of whom had permission to be here, and many of whom weren't engaging in any criminal behavior other than possibly being here without permission.
The Trump administration claimed to be deporting the worst of the worst, but the people deported were mostly having a good to neutral effect on the country.
There were people-- quite a few of them-- who voted for Trump and then were deported or who had family members deported as a result of Trump's policies.
And there were people who voted for Trump who weren't expecting friends and neighbors to be deported.
MAGA is not denying that deportations are happening; if anything, they often exaggerate the numbers. Sometimes they do not even deny that deported people had no "criminal behavior other than possibly being here without permission". What MAGA are adamant about, is that "being here without permission" is more than sufficient and totally moral reason for deportation.
When biden left office, there were a million illegals in America who'd been denied asylum, told by the courts to go home, and they just didn't. I think, when you've exhausted all legal remedies, you really ought to just go home, and deserve to get sent home listening to "la cucaracha" if you don't.
Trump's deporting about as much as Obama did. So if you want to say Trump was horrid, so was Obama. Yes, Obama deported MANY MANY people who weren't engaging in any criminal behavior other than being here without permission (that was part of his scam to get the numbers up, honest to god. It is rather hard to commit criminal behavior if you've only been in the United States for a matter of minutes).
What alien threat are the woke denying?
From a uk perspective:
- 2 tier policing
- Refugee hotels
- grooming gangs
I could go on. I think many modern right-wing issues are with these clean "deportation" stories which have rosy woke cover stories but hid a grim reality underneath with mass censorship to cover it up.
Ofc this is a very dramatic framing (none are as bad as the holocaust) but the realities are true. You should not trust mainstream "woke" stories on uk issues.
Funny the author claims these victims were low agency farmers when Rudolph's story tells the opposite story of them being well educated and informed people. I think they were much more similar to modern brits than the average person of that day. There's a long form video recording of a discussion with him on YouTube incase you're interested.
It's a bad analogy. It's very silly, describing this stuff as "politely queuing up until the last moment". What "last moment" are you imagining here? The victims of the grooming gangs weren't denying it was happening.
Hah I'm being a bit OTT here. This "last moment" is when one is actually victimised by the "deportation" folks are in denial about.
It's not that victims deny it's happening, folks who escaped the camps said it was happening as loud as they could, it's that others who are set to be victimised by it in the future deny it's happening.
It's actually an almost perfect analogy and even has identical stories of police intervening to protect abusers and stories being dismissed.
What really surprised me is the holocaust story is about complacent folks not being paranoid enough about outsiders, perhaps explains the mindset of modern Israelis.
Stop and have a think about who's who in this analogy a little bit. The Nazis believed that they had to be paranoid about those they deemed outsiders, i.e. the Jews, Romanis, Slavs, sexual minorities, communists, etc. Presumably you don't want to follow their lead with ethnic minorities in the UK?
The grooming gang leaders were arrested when the scandal was broken nationally, and many of the people in the local government that had dismissed and covered things up resigned before they were pushed. It's terrible that it went under the surface for so long, but it is a victory that it was eventually taken seriously when the news got out, saving who knows how many girls from being abused in the future. It's basically the opposite narrative to this review.
Oh 100% and that whole grooming thing is obviously several orders of magnitude less bad than the holocaust. If anything I think most people are over the top about it today. I’m just reaching for a well known story.
It’s interesting that when you think of the Nazis again you can see the overly paranoid side of it. I guess it all comes down to where you see yourself. Do you see yourself as part of a complacent minority ripe for exploitation or a mad with paranoia super majority set to exploit others.
It's a great review, and there was a nice sense of humor to it as well. If I can offer one point of criticism: the footnotes are a bit much. A lot of these could have been parenthetical inserts. As a reader, it's just a bit distracting and "immersion breaking" to be moving the mouse around to see what the footnote says every few paragraphs. But nice work all around.
> But now I’ve reached a much grimmer conclusion: the next Holocaust will simply happen out in the open, and most people, even its future victims, either won’t believe it or won’t care.
"Surely all the recent AI news is a marketing ploy," some say.
Wonderful review. Very glad it made it (I gave it a 10/10). Fits perfectly to ACX (smart, witty, stylish, showing a new way to look at the world) - and I still suspect Scott himself wrote it - which is the highest praise I can do. (Not convinced of that, it would not be one of his best reviews ever, but also not his worst. Also: I would prefer Scott to never run incognito pieces here. Still: 10-30%)
The comments here are mostly downers. Triggered by "Gaza" resp. "Polish". As in the Mc Gregor post. As Brian (peace be upon him) said: "You're all different!" Crowd: "Yes, we are all different!"
You were told at the beginning that there was nothing inspiring about the story.
I think the style is rather like Scott's, but milder. We'll find out who's right.
I made no statement about how "inspiring" the story is. (Though any text claiming it is not, is no proof either way). Nor did I claim all of Scott's posts are inspiring. They mostly are, mostly even rather 'mild'. How can we find out who's right, if neither you clearly say you consider it impossible to be a Scott text nor me ( I gave it a probability below 50%) ... just one more riddle. ;)
We'll find out who wrote this, or at least whether it was by Scott, when the winners are announced.
The "here’s a hot take for you: Auschwitz was bad" joke seems a bit too clumsy for Scott. However, outside of that I quite enjoyed the style.
I agree with that. And am 70-90% sure it was not Scott. Compare with Scott (SSC-era): "Hungary had a lot of Jews, all concentrated in Budapest, and so it was really surprising when all of a sudden everyone from Budapest started winning Nobel Prizes around the same time. This continued until World War II, and then all anyone remembered was “Hey, wasn’t it funny that so many smart people were born in Budapest between 1880 and 1920?”
And this story is really, really, gloomy.
For centuries, Europe was sitting on this vast untapped resource of potential geniuses. Around 1880, in a few countries only, economic and political conditions finally became ripe for the potential to be realized. The result was one of the greatest spurts of progress in scientific history, bringing us relativity, quantum mechanics, nuclear bombs, dazzling new mathematical systems, the foundations of digital computing, and various other abstruse ideas I don’t even pretend to understand. This lasted for approximately one generation, after which a psychopath with a stupid mustache killed everyone involved."
Some may say that is clumsy. Me: I am looking at the screen in tears.
Right, I meant clumsy here not so much as insensitive, but jarringly abrupt. Scott knows the value a good lead-up, as your example handily shows.
We do not disagree on that. - Imho: The "hot take" is slightly more of a reason to say: less likely to be Scott. Otoh: the 'hot take' made me cringe as in 'painful smile' - and not due to clumsiness. And if we did not know that "psychopath with a stupid mustache killed everyone" is true Scott: we might well feel 'oh, that's too sloppy a phrase'. I mostly feel: Scott would not choose a Holocaust book to review. But then it might be: once he did it anyway, then decided not to publish it, and now took it out of the drawer. Anyways: fascinating story, very well (re-)told.
>Scott would not choose a Holocaust book to review.
Well, he did review Eichmann in Jerusalem. It does seem unlikely that he would review another one, presumably having already said what he had to say.
That's true and a heartfelt 'thank you' for making me re-read a 2nd SSC-post in one day! - If I changed "Holocaust" to "concentration camps" - would that be correct then? - Scott opened that post with "For Holocaust Remembrance Day last week I read Hannah Arendt’s 'Eichmann In Jerusalem' " - makes me wonder, if Scott might have written several more potential book-reviews about the Holocaust since 2017 ... .
We do not disagree on that. - Imho: The "hot take" is slightly more of a reason to say: less likely to be Scott. Otoh: the 'hot take' made me cringe as in 'painful smile' - and not due to clumsiness. And if we did not know that "psychopath with a stupid mustache killed everyone" is true Scott: we might well feel 'oh, that's too sloppy a phrase'. I mostly feel: Scott would not choose a Holocaust book - corrected: 'Concentration camp book' - to review. But then it might be: once he did it anyway, then decided not to publish it, and now took it out of the drawer. Anyways: fascinating story, very well (re-)told.
Very well written, although the footnote regarding Gaza seems a bit misplaced, to put it mildly. Another nitpick would be the translation of "Arbeit macht frei": Work will set you free US way to friendly in my opinion. "Work liberates" would be more fitting.
This is a very old trope. the Homer epic has it with Casandra - that the gods cursed so no one believed her even though she spoke the truth. She warns the trojans against the horse, but they didn't want to believe.
I'm not sure it's an old trope. Are there other people like Cassandra in fiction?
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCassandra
Thanks. There's also a Spider Robinson character named Cass Anders.
Good review.
I liked this review until the conclusion fell totally flat. "The human tendency to look away in the face of horror" has absolutely no place in explaining any of the hot topics, chief among them the Israel Palestine conflict. This is the most over-covered, obsessed-about topic of our lifetime. The reason it isn't solved is not that naive people in the west are "looking away". There's not anything fundamentally better to be done about a terror organization with de facto control of a territory (as a result of a high enough degree of ideological alignment with its civilian population) starting war after war with no hope of winning and fighting those wars from under their own hospitals, other than more or less what Israel is doing, and no amount of the rest of the world "looking" is going to change their incentives or the possibilities they have to choose between.
The story you reviewed is a very different shape than these examples you conclude with. There was actually something to be done, something that the people Walter contended with could have actually done themselves. The Nazi regime was actually going way out of its way to kill millions of innocent people, there was a complete lack of awareness about it at the time, and that lack of awareness was very important for the whole operation to proceed at the rate that it did. I doubt that there was much that could have been done to stop the holocaust besides winning the war faster, but there was a lot that could have been done by its would-be victims who hadn't yet been deported to give themselves a shot at survival, if their community leadership had told them. Whether or not it would have stopped them from being massacred, it could have at least stopped them from being played.
There is a difference between an individual's denial that they face a peril which they could avert by their own effort, and the sort of difficulty that a society has in deciding among a large policy space with complex tradeoffs. The solution to climate change or AI or whatever is not "get everyone to care more".
I'm not sure that the Holocaust's targets could have done a lot to help themselves. Governments are designed (evolved?) to be hard to affect from underneath.
I think we might have talked past each other a little. I agree their options were severely limited, and only a small chance at escape was the best most could have hoped for.
The conclusion of the review left me thinking that its author completely missed what Walter is raging about: his people's failure to take their own survival seriously, not the failure of unrelated people to be obsessed with every bad thing that happens under the sun. "Never Again" means "We will never again go to the slaughter like sheep. If we are killed, it will at least be manfully on our feet."
Governments are also reliant on a lot of voluntary compliance and sense of legitimacy. I don't know what exactly they could have done here, but there's little ways people can interfere just by noncompliance that adds up into the government having to spend resources to get compliance and actively monitor for continued compliance. That would be the typical reason that a government like Germany needed Vichy and the other local regimes like it, and that the Spanish had native Peruvians in charge of areas where mineral extraction was going on, you won't get much free compliance from conquered people. Or why Reconstruction failed after the US Civil War, the costs to force everyone locally to go along with things is pretty high if they don't see you as legitimate or worth cooperating with.
I thought I knew a lot about the Holocaust. I did not. I thought I knew a lot about human nature, given that I'm a psychologist; I research and read constantly, and I'm 60+; I may have inferred there were no profound truths to be revealed. That estimate was inaccurate.
My tentative theory is that people are only likely to do things they think are possible.
I'm modifying the theory to include that people are only likely to do things they think are possible and worthwhile, and unlikely to do things that revolt them.
The sense of what is possible, worthwhile, or revolting can be manipulated by other people.
Any moral equivalence of Gaza to the Holocaust, or description of Gaza as genocide is odious. The Jews of Europe didn’t massacre Germans to provoke the “final solution”, the Germans didn’t only target Jews involved in and responsible for the hostilities and certainly didn’t provide advance warnings to civilians to leave areas before they conducted sweeps. The review may have accurately summarized the book but, amazingly, after reading this book, the reviewers conclusions were unfathomable.
Minor correction: according to Wikipedia, Canada was simply considered a land of plenty. In any case, the offered pun for "Canada" doesn't work. "Kann er da" means "can he there", not " it", and doesn't imply much of anything.
It's funny to me how many people object to Gaza being used as an example of a modern genocide that is being denied, because they are denying it is a genocide. It's a perfect example, and shows the same behaviors are indeed repeating even today
Denying a real genocide and denying a fake one are not the same thing (and only one of these is bad). Moreover, I don't think what is described in the review is really “genocide denial” in the narrative-warfare sense (something you might wrongly accuse me and others of in relation to Gaza, and claim it's funny).
Great review, thanks for letting us know about this book!
The comment that "the world is looking away from Gaza" is ridiculous. It's an example of the exact opposite, with an obscene amount of attention and dramatization paid to a fairly small war that's already saturated with humanitarian aid.
And to be clear, this amount of attention is actively harmful to the people it's supposed to help - both directly by incentivising the use of human shields, and indirectly in that the dramatization and hysteria flood the zone with misinformation and distract from forms of political intervention or humanitarian aid that might realistically have helped the people there. (The single biggest example of this is that misinformation about "ethnic cleansing" has caused people around the world to actively lobby *against* Egypt letting in refugees, forcing more civilians to be stuck in a warzone).
"One ÚŽ lawyer is shocked at the idea that “civilized Germany” would execute people without due process; he returns to this line of questioning again and again...."
The human whom I used to practice my Polish on told similar stories (she wasn't actually Polish but was half-german).
For that matter, Freud escaped Vienna only at the last minute, in part because he refused to believe germans were capable of such things. A lot of Jewish people at the time worshipped german Kultur. Arnold Schönberg coming prominently to mind.
>Here’s a hot take for you: Auschwitz was bad.
This line makes me flinch. I'm all for some wit and jollity to liven up book reviews, but flip little comments about Auschwitz are just -- I dunno, off.
What happens if you think of it not as a flip comment about Auschwitz, but rather a flip comment about people who have hot takes?
Flip comments, sort of like gymnastics flips, work to the extent they are powered. In the remark in question, the power for hot take mockery comes from the Auschwitz element. It's an Auschwitz-powered bit of wit, not just a piece of wit, and affects me differently from one powered by something else.
It's kind of like the dead baby light bulb joke:
Q: How many dead babies does it take to replace an light bulb?
A: An infinite number, because each can do nothing.
That's not just a light bulb joke.
A correction to footnote 20, Kasztner did not testify in favor of Eichmann.
He was assassinated before Eichmann was captured.
However, he did testify in favor of some other Nazis he negotiated with. I do not know how bad those specific people were.
Of course the real antagonists are still the Nazi's. It's tremendously sad that European Jewish leaders did not do more to at least try to save their own people - and one understands Vrba's anger, but none of that would have been necessary without the people actually conducting the Final Solution. Our greatest anger should be reserved for them. There is even an argument that can be made that militarily defeating them was the best thing that the Allies could have done, even if saving Jews had been a priority.
Nazi's, f@&k them. Neonazi's are almost as bad. Fascists of all stripes.
And it's not just the high numbers (though numbers matter). It's the sheer industrialized, amoral, banality of it. Kill a man in a rage, and that is bad. But kill a man with an unconcerned casual attitude, and that somehow is worse. Nothing happening today seems comparable.
Calling anything involving Gaza other than the pogrom they perpetrated that started the current war a "genocide" is repulsive victim-blaming slander, of the same cloth as the most blatant Nazi propaganda.
This part of the review hit me like a punch in the gut-
"Walter is working outdoors when he sees a newly arrived train of deportees. Another prisoner starts shouting frantic warnings that their resettlement is a sham, that they’re all about to be gassed to death. Not only do the new arrivals not believe him, but one of them, a middle-aged mother, takes his desperate outburst as a personal affront. She essentially becomes an Auschwitz Karen, reporting the young prisoner to a nearby SS officer. The officer, never breaking character, notes the offending prisoner’s number and profusely apologizes for the disruption."
I have never read a more compelling example of why automatic trust in those performing authority theatre can be maladaptive. Even if she could have just stayed silent, perhaps the shouty prisoner could have been able to warn future cohorts, and they, perhaps, could have been more receptive to his message and been able to slow down the killing just a little bit.
> I used to be comforted by the belief that nothing like the Holocaust could happen again today, at least not in the same way: you couldn’t keep a secret this big in a world where everyone has an internet-connected camera in their pocket. But now I’ve reached a much grimmer conclusion: the next Holocaust will simply happen out in the open, and most people, even its future victims, either won’t believe it or won’t care.
The comparison that comes to mind to me are the Uyghurs in China. There are definitely a large number of people claiming genocide, but I personally have no idea what's really going on in Xinjiang, and no idea what to do with the claims currently out there.
Is an oppressed minority taking action against a ruling majority a story of freedom fighters, or terrorists? Is the PRC seeking to systematically exterminate a culture, or are they just trying to preserve the peace and control of the Xinjiang? Are the labor camps a human rights abuse (do they even exist as claimed?), or is it just forcing legitimately imprisoned people to do relatively normal farming jobs that most people have done since the dawn of history?
On some level national self-determination is an extremely important thing. On another, if, say, the ~1% of the US that was Muslim were geographically concentrated decided they wanted to secede, I would support efforts to prevent that happening, and is the American state a more legitimate central authority than the PRC? Is the ~1% of the US population that is Muslim comparably different to the ~1% of China that's Muslim? Maybe there's a different level of oppression between the US and its Muslim and the PRC and theirs, but a prominent ideology within American society claims that the US ruling class systematically oppresses minorities like Muslims. I have no idea how to compare China and the US in this regard, which differ so much culturally and materially.
So I'm left to fall back on "Huh, I guess some people think there's a genocide happening, but I don't know anything about that and don't see a path to knowing more about that with an sufficient degree of certainty to justify caring." So I can't help but not care. And even if there was enough information to believe the claims, I certainly wouldn't support starting a war over it, and I don't think softer pressure (sanctions, UN resolutions, etc.) would work, and would only make war more likely.
I don't doubt that if I was writing this about 1944 Germany, I'd have comparable thoughts about whatever was happening to the Jews in some far off land. There's people claiming genocide, but obviously it's desirable to exaggerate oppression to incentivize action, so I don't know what to think, and even if I lean towards believing the claims at face value, the demanded action seems like it will just lead to war, and war over an uncertain belief is a hard thing to support.
Is there evidence that the Uyghurs are being murdered systematically like the Jews?
Doesn't need to be. "Trail of tears" level genocide is still genocide. Put people in poor enough conditions (and China, not being in a war, lacks the German "everyone is eating sawdust" explanation).
It does if you want people want to take the idea that it’s “the next Holocaust” seriously. If you keep diluting the concept of genocide, then it loses its rhetorical impact.
This really isn't that complicated. Russia (or Canada) say, murders a town. Kills it completely. Doesn't touch any other town. That's not genocide. It's mass murder. Genocide is when you have enough people getting killed that it matters, that you're actually removing the ethnicity from the area.
Trail of Tears is just as genocidal as the Holocaust.
There are actual lines, but Trail of tears is well within them.
When people talk about Uyghurs being genocided, the claims are not that they are being killed in large numbers or even removed in large numbers. It’s good to have separate words for different things, even if we would like to use the maximally strongest rhetoric as a cheat code in persuasion.
Here's human rights watch (Edited: This is Human Rights Research, a different organization. My bad).
https://www.humanrightsresearch.org/post/persecution-of-uyghurs-in-xinjiang-torture-crimes-against-humanity-and-genocide
Forcible sterilization and infanticide counts as genocide to me -- that's trying to preserve workforce while removing "the problem" from the next generation.
Plus a program of intensive rape by Han Chinese men, stationed in the same house as husbandless Uigur women?
"In some Uyghur-majority counties, birth rates dropped dramatically between 2011 and 2015, where data suggest declines by 58.5%, with some exceeding 65%. For instance, in Hotan County, the reported birth rate fell from approximately 25.41% per thousand to just 7.41% per thousand by 2018.36"
That's government statistics. Frankly, your claim that the populace is not dying is incredible, when even the government statistics support pro-infanticide policies.
If genocide wasn't seen as "ethnic cleansing", this would be moot. You could say "there is infanticide, but not mass murder" (which appears to be true), but genocide has in its remit a particular set of crimes.
Now, I'm not going to say that Human Rights Watch is unbiased. But government statistics are going to show what "makes Lu look good".
It already has. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_genocide
The thing I'm most confused is that I think I haven't heard any news about it for the last... 3 years? Either it's "stopped", or the propaganda is bored and changed to another topic?
Also another analogy that I think relevant is, if holocaust did happen without WW2, how far would you go to stop it. If nazi haven't started it, it means you will be, which means you'll be the one pressing the switch for a very horrible trolley problem. If current uighur problem can only be "solved" by ww3, now what.
Good job, Scott!
Except for the weird claim that Anthony Eden was British Prime Minister in 1943. Obviously, that was Churchill. Eden was only briefly Prime Minister much later....
"Rosenberg" DID already sound jewish then. Some other nazis did wonder if he was jewish because of it. The stereotypical german jewish lastnames are usually made of german words, and sometimes ethnic germans have them too, but they follow clear patterns. Whether they sound jewish is not based on the average ethnicity of people with *that particular name*, but that most Rosen- (and Blumen-, Gold-, etc) and many -berg (or mor commonly -stein or -thal) where and are jewish.
But I seriously wonder what the author thought happened to the german Rosenbergs?
"Polish concentration camp"
I think the author should know how offensive this sounds to us Poles. There is decades-long campaign to ask people to stop using this phrasing.
My mother was in the resistance, writing and publishing illegal newspapers; mainly based on information from Radio London. In 1944 news about the extermination camps were first transmitted.
She told me they had discussions in the editorial staff if they should print this. They were dedicated to tell the truth, and they knew that not everything transmitted from Radio London was true. Sure, the Nazis were the enemy, but even Nazis were Germans, aka civilized people; arguably the most highly civilized in Europe. Surely they would never do anything like this?
Her take-home point after the war, when it was clear beyond any doubt that the Nazis actually did this: Civilization is far more frail than everyone assumes in times of peace and quiet. The collective shift from civilization to acceptance of mass murder happens fast, very fast.
People – in this case the German people between 1936 and 1945 - do not spend their limited time on gathering information and deliberately choosing causes of action. (Almost no one do that - given the time available to all of us, it is not rational behavior.) Instead, they take the cues of correct behavior from high-prestige leaders and adjust their opinions and behavior accordingly.
Scratch the surface of a so-called highly civilized person, and watch the Beast underneath. At least if it is a scratch carried out by the opinion leaders in one’s environment.
It is a useful way to approach an understand of how people form their opinions in troubled parts of the Middle East, Europe and Africa right now. (In troubled parts everywhere, really.)
“The conclusion he draws is not despair but a kind of furious logic: these warnings failed because they came too late, to prisoners who had little chance of fighting back. What’s needed, he decides, is to warn the Jews of Europe before they get on the trains.”
Jan Karski, a member of the Polish underground, had been briefing high level British and American officials on the Nazi extermination plan, which he had investigated. He met directly with FDR.
Bombing the rail lines wouldn't have done any good anyway.
You don't put rail lines out of commission by bombing them or just tearing them up, because they're easy to replace. Steel rails are resistant to damage, to destroy a specific rail you've basically got to hit it directly, and any near misses that instead of heave things around and put craters in the rail bed are very fast to repair. Sherman's men had to rip up the rail lines, heat them in fires, and twist them around trees. To put a rail line out of commission from the air, just bombing it once doesn't work. You need to bomb it, and then bomb it again and again, and then when the repair crews show up to replace the rails, you need to bomb them. Then you need to do it again, repeatedly. And every bomber you're devoting to repeatedly bombing this rail line is a bomber that isn't bombing the foundry that makes the rails, or that makes tanks or ball bearings, or a refinery, or German troops in the field.
Winning the war was the fastest way for the allies to do anything about it.
Tried to post this below a relevant comment re Cassandras, but Substack doesn’t remember where to put a comment when you have to sign in.
I think of another Jew, Paul Ehrlich. Midwits obsess about the famous fatuous bet with … some other guy, himself only remembered for winning (parts of) this dumb bet in the agreed time frame.
Ehrlich was no genius, it seems - certainly no evil genius.
But meanwhile, population growth has done to the natural world everything people were concerned about in the 70s.
Tungsten ain’t water, after all. It’s nothing (much) to do with animal habitats.
A smart bet would’ve probably been too depressing to contemplate.
And probably wouldn’t have been interested Simon like the price of things. So no bet.
A cute clever bet would’ve been something like, will our fruits and vegetables have less nutrition per unit in 30 years?
I guess if Ehrlich hadn’t lived, somebody would’ve had to invent him, to make a silly distraction.
> UK Prime Minister Anthony Eden had received eyewitness testimony of Nazi mass murder by 1943
Anthony Eden wasn't prime minister until 1955, I think during the war he was Leader of the House of Commons. But I do imagine that if he knew, Churchill knew. They were close.
Apart from that one quibble, excellent review, my favourite so far.
Too bad footnote 25 (and the inclusion of Gaza in the article) badly damaged what was otherwise an excellent piece.
"Both FDR and UK Prime Minister Anthony Eden had received eyewitness testimony of Nazi mass murder by 1943" small correction Anthony became PM well after the wall. Winston of course was PM in 1943, and AE was foreign secretary.
also i wonder whether OP isn't slightly confused on the meaning of the word "plainspoken"