[..] This essay will show how the English-language Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia, whitewashes the role of Polish society in the Holocaust and bolsters stereotypes about Jews. We will show how a handful of editors steer the historical narrative away from evidence-driven research toward a skewed version of history touted by right-wing Polish nationalists. [..]
Is it just me or is it weird to see articles posted on academic journals that sound like complains targeting wikipedia?
It reads like someone losing an editor war and taking the conversation to some other medium where the people involved in the process have no way to address, let alone present facts or even their case.
> It reads like someone losing an editor war and taking the conversation to some other medium where the people involved in the process have no way to address, let alone present facts or even their case.
Wikipedia is vulnerable to coordinated, tendentious editing, and the "in Wikipedia" process has no effective way, nor even will, to address it. Making accusation itself can get you sanctioned.
> Wikipedia is vulnerable to coordinated, tendentious editing
Wikipedia is not a primary source. Wikipedia quotes primary sources. If you insist in pushing a belief that's not supported by primary sources then you are the problem, not wikipedia.
To me this article reads like someone trying to push unfounded propaganda I'm wikipedia to whitewash conspiracy theories with a veneer of authoritative source, but was stopped by their inability to present primary sources that supports his personal claim.
Once that character lost an edit war, he resorted to attack wikipedia with yet another conspiracy theory.
It's telling that the article has been framed with a conspiracy behind wikipedia while leaving the supposed sources as unquestionable.
Your use of terms like “conspiracy theory” make it seem like you’ve come to some very strong opinions about this specific debate.
Your original question at the top of this thread made it seem like you had a reasonable meta-question about whether it’s appropriate to “escalate” editorial conflicts to a journal, and that was answered by several posters. But I don’t think you really had a question: you seem to have a dog in this fight. Might I suggest that HN is not the right forum to pursue it.
> Your use of terms like “conspiracy theory” make it seem like you’ve come to some very strong opinions about this specific debate.
Holocaust denial is a long lived conspiracy theory. There is no way of getting around that fact.
> Your original question at the top of this thread made it seem like you had a reasonable meta-question about whether it’s appropriate to “escalate” editorial conflicts to a journal (...)
There is no escalation. There's at best a blatant attempt to throw accusations in a way that prevents those attacked of defending themselves, and at worst there is libel.
Let's look at the facts: the wikipedia article on the Holocaust is clear in pointing out that the 6 million figure was actually provided by the leading Nazi official responsible for the Holocaust. The same wikipedia article then says in no unclear terms that "Historians estimates range from 4,204,000 to 7,000,000." What exactly is questionable about these facts? Nothing.
> Wikipedia is not a primary source. Wikipedia quotes primary sources. If you insist in pushing a belief that's not supported by primary sources then you are the problem, not wikipedia.
I'll assume you meant secondary sources.
I would normally agree. The original idea was for dispassionate scholarly discussions followed by consensus. Except that gangs who have no intention of allowing that to happen can and do circumvent that process. Bullying, hostility, gaslighting and weaponizing sanction procedures are tools in the toolbelt of these gangs, and as I said there is no effective in-Wikipedia process for recognizing and defeating it. There is in fact a willful denial that this is even a possibility, which essentially guarantees that it's rampant.
I think it's really interesting and not weird at all. Wikipedia has change records which are an absolutely brilliant way of seeing how small edits can change the meaning and intent of a document.
The particular topic is not surprising either because it is very important to modern politics.
The whole concept of an editor war is a fascinating topic in itself.
If the issue here is that Wikipedia’s editor set is being dominated by motivated nationalists, then the issue should absolutely be addressed in a non-Wikipedia forum. Both to gain access to an audience that isn’t captured, and to make sure there is public awareness that Wikipedia’s internal editorial controls might be compromised.
If the folks arguing the other side feel differently, then can certainly respond in a similar forum.
ETA: Or failing that they can hunt down any open Internet forum that is discussing the article and brigade it with opinionated takes. Which may explain what’s happening in this HN thread.
> If the issue here is that Wikipedia’s editor set is being dominated by motivated nationalists, then the issue should absolutely be addressed in a non-Wikipedia forum.
This sort of whataboutisn is a blatant attempt at reframing the issue as an irrational ideological battle where one side just so happens to be winning instead of what it really is: a random guy trying to push unfounded conspiracy theories into a medium designed to express consensus supported by primary sources.
Nobody believes that 6 million people were exterminated at just Auschwitz. It was a single camp, among many (both for labor and purely for extermination purposes).
The number that I’m most familiar with is around 1 million, followed by a similar number for Treblinka, half as many for Belzec, and so on. More Jews (around 1.3m) are believed to have been killed by mass shooting and mobile gas chambers than any individual camp.
> are believed to have been killed by mass shooting
Correct. Read "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland" to understand the many instances were whole communities were rounded up and killed in the woods nearby. The book is also chilling in other ways.
The point is, people did believe 4 million were killed at Auschwitz through 1990..
"It said the plaques were taken down in line with findings by the Auschwitz State Museum that the number of victims in the two camps in southern Poland actually was 1.1 million to 1.5 million. Of that number, at least 960,000 were Jews, the museum concluded.
Previously, plaques in front of the ″International Monument to Victims of Fascism″ spoke of 4 million victims. Poles, not Jews, were listed first among the victimized peoples."
It sounds like one non-profit used a misleading number from 1945, and that the plaques commemorating that number were removed over 30 years ago. The overall number of Jews estimated killed during the Holocaust didn't change.
> The figure widely used in Poland of 4 million victims at Auschwitz-Birkenau was arrived at by a Soviet commission that came to the camp in February 1945, one week after its liberation.
> Poland has pressed the Soviets since the 1970s to grant historians access to World War II camp records, which were packed up and taken to the Soviet Union soon after the liberation, Piper said.
Which is probably why the plaque came down within months of the communist ruling party being dissolved. Not only should we not use Soviet officials to critique Western historians, but the article even says that Western historians critiqued the number:
> Some Western scholars have long questioned the 4 million figure.
In fact, that article is a good example of how serious scholars _have_ questioned figures, have been free to do so, and have openly revised figures. The result of those decades of efforts and study is the current historical consensus, which has been pretty well vetted at this point.
> The big distortion is from 4-5 million killed to 6 million killed. More thorough review of records, and tallying up survivors, showed that fewer Jews died than first estimated. It's a weirdly touchy subject.
It's not "weirdly touchy". Holocaust denial is a relentless conspiracy theory, and those pushing antisemitism are relentlessly pushing slippery-slope arguments to push their agenda.
It's irrelevant if 6 million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis during WW2 instead of 7 million or 5 million. The problem is how this sort of nitpicking revolving high-level gross estimates is leveraged to deny it ever exist and fuel further hatred targeting Jewish people.
This implies that Holocaust deniers are somehow amenable to facts about the Holocaust, which is a contradiction in terms. Put another way: there's no number that is "correct" in a way that a Holocaust denier is likely to consider a valid data point. Approximately 6 million is the best number we have given the sum of public information available.
> Then why don't you correct the number, if it's irrelevant?
The number is not wrong. It's an estimate. Any reasonably intelligent person easily understands that the Nazis did not operated a counter which stopped the genocide when I hit 6000000. It means nothing if you say "up to 7" or "up to 6".
What makes a huge difference is the relentless effort to leverage this sort of revisionism to argue that nitpicking over estimates means the Holocaust did not happened at all.
>The number is not wrong. It's an estimate. Any reasonably intelligent person easily understands that the Nazis did not operated a counter which stopped the genocide when I hit 6000000. It means nothing if you say "up to 7" or "up to 6".
This seems like a strawman. The dispute in question isn't over whether 6000000 died or 6000001. It's over "4-5 million" or "6 million".
>What makes a huge difference is the relentless effort to leverage this sort of revisionism to argue that nitpicking over estimates means the Holocaust did not happened at all.
Suppose we had incontrovertible evidence that it was actually 4 mililon. Would you suggest that we all pretend that the number was still 6 million, because revising the official number down would give ammo to Holocaust deniers?
> This seems like a strawman. The dispute in question isn't over whether 6000000 died or 6000001. It's over "4-5 million" or "6 million".
I that my statement is not easy to misunderstand, and only bad faith can lead to this sort of conclusion. Did you actually had any difficulty understanding the point I made?
> Suppose we had incontrovertible evidence that it was actually 4 mililon.
Again, this is the sort of disingenuous argument that can only originate in bad faith.
Let's put things in perspective: the wikipedia article you're supposedly discussing is already quite clear in it's section on the death toll of the Holocaust.
It states in no unclear terms that "The most commonly cited death toll is the six million given by Adolf Eichmann to SS member Wilhelm Höttl, who signed an affidavit mentioning this figure in 1945."
Afterwards, the same article points out that "Historians' estimates range from 4,204,000 to 7,000,000.[419] According to Yad Vashem, "[a]ll the serious research" confirms that between five and six million Jews were murdered."
And here you are, pushing the Holocaust denial agenda by misrepresenting what an estimate is what wikipedia actually states, and the veracity of anything that supports the idea the Holocaust happened.
>It's irrelevant if 6 million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis during WW2 instead of 7 million or 5 million. The problem is how this sort of nitpicking revolving high-level gross estimates is leveraged to deny it ever exist and fuel further hatred targeting Jewish people.
The accurate number doesn't matter, but if you say the accurate number, that's bad, because the people who think the number is zero will somehow win. So don't say the accurate number.
We see this all the time when arguing with a side that doesn't care about the truth. Completely arbitrary, but I might say 10, and later find out 9. The other sides takes minor corrections/adjustments as fuel to say no, it must be 0 because the side saying 10 lied to you.
If everyone was really looking for the truth, this wouldn't be an issue because this is how science works. But, often one side is only pushing an agenda where the truth is irrelevant.
It's irrelevant to the truth to study history and try to make it accurate? If people were trying to determine how many people died during the civil war no one would care, but simply trying to determine how many people died during WW2 is antisemitic? Yeah, keep pretending like that isn't fishy.
It gets even worse when you find that asking questions about this specific historical event can get you considered "anti-Semitic" just because you were asking questions, inquiring about evidence presented is considered a "dog whistle". I've known many "holocaust deniers" and nine times out of ten it started out with them being presented with counter-evidence to the "official narrative" and instead of being treated like human beings they get called evil, told not to ask questions, and get shut down instead of having their concerns addressed in a kind, loving way. When getting slandered and abused it makes it much easier to justify leaps and make assumptions and go down a bad path.
I think it’s important to recognize that no one is responsible for educating you. You are responsible for educating yourself. If you have chosen to be ignorant about the facts of the holocaust, and then you were to communicate your “concerns” to a Jewish person about the accuracy of the historical narrative, or perhaps question whether it was as bad as most people believe it was, or even worse, whether it happened at all, then I really don’t think it’s their responsibility to address you in a kind and loving manner.
And it is really, truly, absolutely not their fault if you then decide to become an antisemitic holocaust denier and/or white supremacist.
The existence of the holocaust is continuously debated. It’s difficult to tell the difference between good-faith questions and attempts to obfuscate the truth.
Thus, some people are very reactive and touchy around this subject. It’s obvious why the civil war isn’t a similarly contentious topic; nobody debates its existence.
No, it is not continuously debated. Racist white supremacists peddle conspiracy theories about it (and slavery and the civil war for that matter too) but reasonable, rational people (ie people who aren’t Nazis!) are not debating the existence of the holocaust.
The comments in this thread are extremely disconcerting. I didn’t expect to find this on HN but apparently nowhere is safe.
You may have misunderstood me. I meant it’s “continuously debated” the way the US moon landing is “continuously debated”.
There are those of us who accept reality, and also a highly vocal contingent of willful deniers who incessantly muddy the waters and obfuscate the truth.
I am also shocked and saddened by the comments in this thread, how foolish of me to have thought HN was above it.
Was attempting to respond to the parent comment in a “rational” way in the event that it was a good faith comment.
But frankly I think it wasn’t. It is obvious why people are reactive to questioning the holocaust, nothing “fishy” about it. Alleging that it’s fishy implies a conspiracy, which puts us on the road to holocaust denial.
Really disgusted with all of this, I wish I hadn’t opened HN this morning.
It doesn't put you on the road to holocaust denial. Did I say the holocaust didn't happen? No, I said the ability to not question things is fishy. You seem to equate that with full on denial. Why would you be so worried about people asking questions? If people deny something that have been proven then that is just them outing themselves as ignorant. Arresting people and making laws that make questioning things illegal is full on censorship and authoritarianism. It isn't even real history when you go down that path, it is a forced narrative.
I think the person you are responding to used the wrong word when they wrote “irrelevant”, although I think their comment comes from the right place. Even a difference of just a single person is “relevant”. But when we try to comprehend the horror of the holocaust, learn from it and assign blame and guilt appropriately, then the precise numbers no longer matter. It is enough that an unspeakably enormous evil was carried out - the systematic murder of vast numbers of people with the aim of destroying everything about them. Their lives, memories, businesses, art, legacy, children, everything. And in many ways this horrific project succeeded.
With that said, the figure of six million is about as accurate a number that is available. There are good reasons for the uncertainty:
> The two most reliable sources for Holocaust data are the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem. Though this is the best information available, it is based on estimates and cannot take into the unknown number of victims whose bodies were never recovered or for whom there were no records. The Nazis kept detailed records of the people who passed through the camps; nevertheless, we do not know how many Jews may still have been unaccounted for in the many places where they were murdered. In addition, as the Allies began to close in on Germany, the Nazis began to destroy their records. We also don’t know the precise number of Jews in any of these areas. The population data ranges from 1937-1941 so, for example, the countries where the figures came from 1937 may not accurately reflect the number of Jews at the time the war began. Though the two institutions have different estimates, if you average the total number of Jews each says were murdered, the result is the commonly used figure of six million.
The allies were also motivated to inflate numbers to boost their war efforts. I remember similar things happening during the Iraq War... remember all those weapons of mass destruction that they were pushing, and then come to find out you were manipulated and fell for it.
> It's irrelevant if 6 million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis during WW2 instead of 7 million or 5 million. The problem is how this sort of nitpicking revolving high-level gross estimates is leveraged to deny it ever exist and fuel further hatred targeting Jewish people.
It's more likely that a Holocaust denier would have luck convincing someone if the commonly touted numbers are inaccurate and vociferously defended.
> It's more likely that a Holocaust denier would have luck convincing someone if the commonly touted numbers are inaccurate and vociferously defended.
Why do you think Holocaust deniers are hell bent on nitpicking about these estimates? Their tactic is to use them as a wedge to push other bad faith arguments to cast doubt on all aspects of the Holocaust. Again, do you think it makes any difference if a gross estimate is 5-10% over or under? The strategy followed by Holocaust deniers is to abuse this logic to jump to conclusions like "if they are wrong about these numbers then what other lies have they been pushing?"
Who cares what these people up to? They will always quibble. Their mechanations should not affect our literal understanding of what happened. If it was actually 4.5 million no reasonable, unmotivated person would make the leap from "wow 6 million" to "0".
No lie is too egregious if it means preventing another rise of Nazism. Humanity must be taught to believe, unquestioningly, in the evils of Nazism, if they are to have a future. Truth is immaterial when we are saving lives.
This is written like someone venting about an edit war, but it's not a big surprise. Regional nationalists ruin Wikipedia articles all the time. Just go through the history of the articles on "Night Hunting", a Bhutanese practice that often includes home invasion and violent rape, to see what I mean.
Goodness gracious. This article is ... Not very encyclopedic? This is quite an odd tone.
> The prowling may be foiled due to wrong footing, which may wake up the whole family. They intruder may get chased away with hot water splashed on him, or be thrown out of the window. Strict parents chase the intruder or threaten him with marriage or a stick while liberal ones pretend to be asleep even if they know the prowler is around. This is more likely if they know the prowler is a suitor they would like to have for their daughter. It is not difficult to guess who the prowler might be in small close-knit villages.
> Boys generally attempt to complete the task and make a quick exit if the parents of the girl are in and may stay longer if the girl is alone. It is in some places a custom that a boy discovered in the morning by the parents shall become the husband of the girl, but usually the boy and the girl make sure that the boy exits before the parents get up in the morning. If he oversleeps, they may still find a way to sneak out.
The article is bad, the first part based on impressions from pop-sources and Western memoirs, rather than scholarly sources.
> In part due to the lack of proper understanding of the practice and partly due to the influence of westernized urban bias towards the primitive folk practices of rural communities, modern Bhutanese urbanites, particularly those who are engaged in development and gender issues and who carry out their conversations in English, have inaccurately used the misnomer ‘night hunting’ in English to refer to this traditional practice although neither the word ‘night’ nor the word ‘hunting’ exists in the original terms used to refer to it in places where it is practised. The misnomer leads to a serious misinterpretation of the practice and leads the audience to think that there is a degree of exploitation and abuse, objectification, and animality involved as the word ‘hunting’ would imply.
https://texts.mandala.library.virginia.edu/text/bomena-night... by Karma Phuntsho, Bhutanese scholar. I recall similar practices in other societies, such as Cambodian 'love huts' that fathers build for their daughters, where suitors might come to her at night.
The grandparent commenter might be annoyed by the later section? But it is not a "nationalist defence", it's just putting the practice in context.
>Bhutanese practice that often includes home invasion and violent rape
Where can I read more about it? (other than Wikipedia) Now I'm curious if it's just a way for young people who still live with parents (like, most people in Asia's rural areas) to have sex, or non-consentual rape is really rampant there. Sure regional nationalists aren't objective, but outsiders aren't necessarily objective either, because they often judge foreign cultures through the prism of their own cultures, see "culture shock"
Israel was founded after the Holocaust, and has nothing to do with either the deaths in the Holocaust or the article under discussion. Conflating Jews with a state that doesn't necessarily represent them doesn't signal honest behavior on your part about your beliefs.
Meh. People who throw that word around aren't principled. Take the time to step such a person through why apartheid is an inappropriate term to describe whatever going on in Israel, and they'll just move the goalposts around.
The State of Israel is in practice an apartheid state - specifically it treats citizens differently depending on whether they're Jews or not. Inside Israel, as I understand it, this is not a controversial observation, simply one side sees apartheid as a desirable situation and the other does not. Which we might observe is exactly how it was in South Africa...
> What is weird is that they want to make it illegal in Canada and the US to even study or question history.
I don't believe that was ever the case. Holocaust denial is such a pervasive and murderous conspiracy theory that any free and open society cannot tolerate. But denying the Holocaust is not the same as studying it.
In 'my' free and open society other people are free to have ideas and I am free to avoid interaction with those people who's ideas I won't tolerate. I believe that is what it means to not tolerate holocaust denialism.
That's cool. I don't mind. I'd prefer it if you didn't try and force me to interact with holocaust deniers. I'm not sure if that's the kind of thing you want to do?
Absolutely. Freedom of association is critical. That's an individual right. That individual right being upheld is a little different than a society not tolerating an idea, which almost always means suppressing it, and is what the person I was replying to suggested was somehow right.
> If society is 99% people who refuse to associate with a holocaust denier and 1% deniers then what happens?
That's a great question. In short, the 99% of people should tolerate the 1%. They don't need to choose to associate with them, but don't take action against them to silence them.
> I am not a philosopher and I have no idea how to reason about situations where individual rights for individuals and groups of individuals clash.
I think this quote is probably appropriate:
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind." - John Stuart Mill
> I'm sure that we don't need a debate to agree that genocide is something that's not acceptable. Do you disagree?
This is a logical fallacy called equivocation. Denying a genocide happened, however repugnant it may be, is not the same thing as genocide. Pretending it is in order to borrow the weight of genocide is a common tactic used to try to silence arguments without addressing them.
Lets be serious here: I figured the Jews would have learned that holocausts are bad... Except they run their own holocaust against Palestine.
Seems like collectively they didn't learn much at all from the last time atrocities were done against them.
But any valid complaints against them will result in claims of "antisemitism". That's par for the course when they can't defend their own atrocities - they'll just call you racists.
I think concluding “illegal to even study or question history” is a big stretch, but the Canadian government has been criticized widely for plans introduced last year that seem problematic [0].
A key quote:
> The amendment would "prohibit the communication of statements, other than in private conversation, that willfully promote antisemitism by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust."
This is widely believed to be unconstitutional in Canada, and it’s not hard to imagine the chilling effect, e.g. is asking an honest question in class considered “private”? I suspect not. Is a question about 4-5 vs 6 million considered “downplaying”? I don’t think most reasonable people would think so, but I don’t think it’s reasonable people we should worry about.
I think many will argue that asking questions and promoting holocaust denial are very different things, and I think they are, but the lines are very blurry.
It’s increasingly popular on social media to immediately label people as the most extreme version of “other/out” for any form of behavior that doesn’t demonstrate complete commitment to the in group. An ambiguous law about holocaust denial implemented under the current social climate seems like a recipe for disaster.
I think holocaust denial and antisemitism are abhorrent, obviously. But it is this fact that seems to empower legislation that threatens freedoms. Various online safety bills seem to belong in a similar category.
Thank you for delivering on that. I am not denying that the holocaust happened, but what bothers me is that people are so quick to claim antisemitism for questioning things.
Thanks. I can't really believe that this law would really have a practical (chilling) affect for research around that topic. It'd be interesting to see the effect holocaust denial legislature had in the 18 or so countries that implemented it.
Wikipedia is unfortunately biased in many areas that have any kind of controversy/disagreement. Education is one other topic where Wikipedia has a lot of bias. Wikipedia's "neutral point of view" idea is not only false but unobtainable.
Persistence wins over logic or evidence.
Not sure how this would work, but I think it would be worth researching/testing:
* Essentially have regional or clustered versions of events/history
For example, Afghanistan will have a different perspective on the US invasion than the US, but I think there’s value in seeing what the other thinks. (Does *not* necessarily imply one is more correct than the other)
Then have some sort of ranking system where (not sure how this would happen) votes can be had on which perspective is more correct. This hopefully would weed out the intense/false perspectives, but still gives people the ability to see the different ones.
A core problem we have is what constitutes misinformation/disinformation/propaganda/truth
I think the incorrect approach we’ve tried to take is either having a vetting committee/website that evaluates what is true, or just outright censorship. This fuels the actual conspiracy theories because they can use this as grounds for their cause (since, at times these vetting bodies are verifiably wrong)
We cannot withhold information, it travels too quickly and is easy to circumvent without total authoritarian control.
And all it takes is a few “valid” cases for the authoritarian seeds to be sown in the soil of good intentions
But we can generate unending oceans of bullshit. If you can't stop the truth, then make up unnumbered truths that wear down the most avid learners. Democracies vote in tyrants all the time, votes are easily bought in any number of ways.
We didn't have Auschwitz museums when WWII was still occuring. I don't know if you've not noticed, but COVID is still around and its death count is still increasing. One day history will look back at this much in the same way we still talk about the 1918 pandemic.
The important difference is not the total number of deaths, but the proportion. Covid killed less than one percent of the US population, while over 60% of Europe's Jews perished in the Holocaust.
The Holocaust almost destroyed an entire people. Covid was a tiny blip in the historical record.
Note that 20% of Poland’s population died in WWII, and many more Eastern European civilians were murdered in that region than Jews were throughout Europe:
The Wikipedia controversy is talking about 4.5 vs 6 million Jewish deaths in camps, out of the total of ~11 million killed in those camps. Also, scorched earth military tactics killed many civilians too. Poland lost 5.6 million; Russia lost 7 million.
There was even an official holocaust denial policy in post war Germany, where they claimed there was no racial discrimination against Roma gypsy groups, and only criminals were sent to the concentration camps:
Anyway, there were many victims of genocide in WWII. Most were not jewish, but historians tend to ignore groups that were being killed by allied Russia (and, of course, Japan).
I believe the Holocaust happened, and I also believe
* the number of people who died as a result of ghettoization, genocide, and indirect deaths (disease, suicide, etc) was far higher than 6 million
* the number of Jews murdered by German SS, local blackguards, and in death camps is between 4.5 million and 5.5 million, with 6 million being an off the cuff estimate in the aftermath of the Holocaust ( https://yvng.yadvashem.org/ )
* investigating and accumulating evidence of the deaths of the Holocaust for the purposes of evidence and historical research is valid and should continue
* Litigating the number of dead is an extremely common tactic of Holocaust deniers, as if 1 or 2 million dead would be just reasonable domestic policy
* this article is conflating the latter with the former
* commentary on the above without deep knowledge of the research of Yad Vashem, the US Holocaust Museum, and other major reaearchers of the Holocaust (no matter one's position on Wikipedia or the Holocaust) is 100% ineffective
Some context: Jan Grabowski, like Jan T. Gross, have both been accused of shoddy, even tendentious research by other scholars. This is perhaps orthogonal to the subject of Wikipedia edits as such (Wikipedia is plagued with all sorts of systematic distortion; I've personally seen a number of German nationalist attempts to rewrite history), but I would suspend judgement about any historical claims Grabowski makes as this is topic that is politically charged and leveraged in ongoing political or quasi-political activity. (For example, see H.R. 1226 and Act S.447 which on paper enable unscrupulous organizations to brazenly extract enormous sums of restitution from the Polish state for "heirless" property formerly belonging to Polish citizens of the Jewish faith, something that is unheard of. Heirs can, of course, appeal to the courts for restitution, but the internationally accepted practice is that any heirless property reverts back to the state. The attempt to violate this practice, especially give that Germany bears the responsibility for the whole calamity in question, benefits greatly from prior manufacturing of guilt and the discrediting of unflattering historical facts through tactics like false accusations of bigotry. Norman Finkelstein calls this the "Holocaust industry", that is, the cynical exploitation of the memory of the Holocaust for political and financial gain. To avoid enabling such unjust practices, we must maintain a critical and distanced stance here.)
102 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 376 ms ] thread[..] This essay will show how the English-language Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia, whitewashes the role of Polish society in the Holocaust and bolsters stereotypes about Jews. We will show how a handful of editors steer the historical narrative away from evidence-driven research toward a skewed version of history touted by right-wing Polish nationalists. [..]
It reads like someone losing an editor war and taking the conversation to some other medium where the people involved in the process have no way to address, let alone present facts or even their case.
Wikipedia is vulnerable to coordinated, tendentious editing, and the "in Wikipedia" process has no effective way, nor even will, to address it. Making accusation itself can get you sanctioned.
Wikipedia is not a primary source. Wikipedia quotes primary sources. If you insist in pushing a belief that's not supported by primary sources then you are the problem, not wikipedia.
To me this article reads like someone trying to push unfounded propaganda I'm wikipedia to whitewash conspiracy theories with a veneer of authoritative source, but was stopped by their inability to present primary sources that supports his personal claim.
Once that character lost an edit war, he resorted to attack wikipedia with yet another conspiracy theory.
It's telling that the article has been framed with a conspiracy behind wikipedia while leaving the supposed sources as unquestionable.
Your original question at the top of this thread made it seem like you had a reasonable meta-question about whether it’s appropriate to “escalate” editorial conflicts to a journal, and that was answered by several posters. But I don’t think you really had a question: you seem to have a dog in this fight. Might I suggest that HN is not the right forum to pursue it.
Holocaust denial is a long lived conspiracy theory. There is no way of getting around that fact.
> Your original question at the top of this thread made it seem like you had a reasonable meta-question about whether it’s appropriate to “escalate” editorial conflicts to a journal (...)
There is no escalation. There's at best a blatant attempt to throw accusations in a way that prevents those attacked of defending themselves, and at worst there is libel.
Let's look at the facts: the wikipedia article on the Holocaust is clear in pointing out that the 6 million figure was actually provided by the leading Nazi official responsible for the Holocaust. The same wikipedia article then says in no unclear terms that "Historians estimates range from 4,204,000 to 7,000,000." What exactly is questionable about these facts? Nothing.
I'll assume you meant secondary sources.
I would normally agree. The original idea was for dispassionate scholarly discussions followed by consensus. Except that gangs who have no intention of allowing that to happen can and do circumvent that process. Bullying, hostility, gaslighting and weaponizing sanction procedures are tools in the toolbelt of these gangs, and as I said there is no effective in-Wikipedia process for recognizing and defeating it. There is in fact a willful denial that this is even a possibility, which essentially guarantees that it's rampant.
The particular topic is not surprising either because it is very important to modern politics.
The whole concept of an editor war is a fascinating topic in itself.
If the folks arguing the other side feel differently, then can certainly respond in a similar forum.
ETA: Or failing that they can hunt down any open Internet forum that is discussing the article and brigade it with opinionated takes. Which may explain what’s happening in this HN thread.
This sort of whataboutisn is a blatant attempt at reframing the issue as an irrational ideological battle where one side just so happens to be winning instead of what it really is: a random guy trying to push unfounded conspiracy theories into a medium designed to express consensus supported by primary sources.
The number that I’m most familiar with is around 1 million, followed by a similar number for Treblinka, half as many for Belzec, and so on. More Jews (around 1.3m) are believed to have been killed by mass shooting and mobile gas chambers than any individual camp.
Correct. Read "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland" to understand the many instances were whole communities were rounded up and killed in the woods nearby. The book is also chilling in other ways.
"It said the plaques were taken down in line with findings by the Auschwitz State Museum that the number of victims in the two camps in southern Poland actually was 1.1 million to 1.5 million. Of that number, at least 960,000 were Jews, the museum concluded.
Previously, plaques in front of the ″International Monument to Victims of Fascism″ spoke of 4 million victims. Poles, not Jews, were listed first among the victimized peoples."
https://apnews.com/article/4de24d2430cd2e900602ecf14b1db341
Where, precisely, is the grievance?
The grievance is that nobody updated total numbers even when this component was updated.
> The figure widely used in Poland of 4 million victims at Auschwitz-Birkenau was arrived at by a Soviet commission that came to the camp in February 1945, one week after its liberation.
> Poland has pressed the Soviets since the 1970s to grant historians access to World War II camp records, which were packed up and taken to the Soviet Union soon after the liberation, Piper said.
Which is probably why the plaque came down within months of the communist ruling party being dissolved. Not only should we not use Soviet officials to critique Western historians, but the article even says that Western historians critiqued the number:
> Some Western scholars have long questioned the 4 million figure.
In fact, that article is a good example of how serious scholars _have_ questioned figures, have been free to do so, and have openly revised figures. The result of those decades of efforts and study is the current historical consensus, which has been pretty well vetted at this point.
https://religiondocbox.com/73089029-Judaism/Transcript-of-th...
Required viewing.
https://youtu.be/FirfB4jSK8Y
It's not "weirdly touchy". Holocaust denial is a relentless conspiracy theory, and those pushing antisemitism are relentlessly pushing slippery-slope arguments to push their agenda.
It's irrelevant if 6 million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis during WW2 instead of 7 million or 5 million. The problem is how this sort of nitpicking revolving high-level gross estimates is leveraged to deny it ever exist and fuel further hatred targeting Jewish people.
The number is not wrong. It's an estimate. Any reasonably intelligent person easily understands that the Nazis did not operated a counter which stopped the genocide when I hit 6000000. It means nothing if you say "up to 7" or "up to 6".
What makes a huge difference is the relentless effort to leverage this sort of revisionism to argue that nitpicking over estimates means the Holocaust did not happened at all.
This seems like a strawman. The dispute in question isn't over whether 6000000 died or 6000001. It's over "4-5 million" or "6 million".
>What makes a huge difference is the relentless effort to leverage this sort of revisionism to argue that nitpicking over estimates means the Holocaust did not happened at all.
Suppose we had incontrovertible evidence that it was actually 4 mililon. Would you suggest that we all pretend that the number was still 6 million, because revising the official number down would give ammo to Holocaust deniers?
I that my statement is not easy to misunderstand, and only bad faith can lead to this sort of conclusion. Did you actually had any difficulty understanding the point I made?
> Suppose we had incontrovertible evidence that it was actually 4 mililon.
Again, this is the sort of disingenuous argument that can only originate in bad faith.
Let's put things in perspective: the wikipedia article you're supposedly discussing is already quite clear in it's section on the death toll of the Holocaust.
It states in no unclear terms that "The most commonly cited death toll is the six million given by Adolf Eichmann to SS member Wilhelm Höttl, who signed an affidavit mentioning this figure in 1945."
Afterwards, the same article points out that "Historians' estimates range from 4,204,000 to 7,000,000.[419] According to Yad Vashem, "[a]ll the serious research" confirms that between five and six million Jews were murdered."
And here you are, pushing the Holocaust denial agenda by misrepresenting what an estimate is what wikipedia actually states, and the veracity of anything that supports the idea the Holocaust happened.
preposterous, shameful exaggeration of what the parent comment was saying.
The accurate number doesn't matter, but if you say the accurate number, that's bad, because the people who think the number is zero will somehow win. So don't say the accurate number.
Okay.
If everyone was really looking for the truth, this wouldn't be an issue because this is how science works. But, often one side is only pushing an agenda where the truth is irrelevant.
Not really.
One side says "there is no way to accurately tell exactly how many died in the Holocaust, but it's estimated the number can go as high as 6 million".
The other side says "the 6 million number is a lie they made up to push the idea the Holocaust happened".
Let's not pretend that attacking estimates by misrepresenting them like this is an argument made in good faith.
I think it’s important to recognize that no one is responsible for educating you. You are responsible for educating yourself. If you have chosen to be ignorant about the facts of the holocaust, and then you were to communicate your “concerns” to a Jewish person about the accuracy of the historical narrative, or perhaps question whether it was as bad as most people believe it was, or even worse, whether it happened at all, then I really don’t think it’s their responsibility to address you in a kind and loving manner.
And it is really, truly, absolutely not their fault if you then decide to become an antisemitic holocaust denier and/or white supremacist.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions
Thus, some people are very reactive and touchy around this subject. It’s obvious why the civil war isn’t a similarly contentious topic; nobody debates its existence.
The comments in this thread are extremely disconcerting. I didn’t expect to find this on HN but apparently nowhere is safe.
There are those of us who accept reality, and also a highly vocal contingent of willful deniers who incessantly muddy the waters and obfuscate the truth.
I am also shocked and saddened by the comments in this thread, how foolish of me to have thought HN was above it.
Was attempting to respond to the parent comment in a “rational” way in the event that it was a good faith comment.
But frankly I think it wasn’t. It is obvious why people are reactive to questioning the holocaust, nothing “fishy” about it. Alleging that it’s fishy implies a conspiracy, which puts us on the road to holocaust denial.
Really disgusted with all of this, I wish I hadn’t opened HN this morning.
Why is it fishy that people get emotionally reactive about a genocide?
Again, I don’t believe you are arguing in good faith. I’m exiting this conversation now.
With that said, the figure of six million is about as accurate a number that is available. There are good reasons for the uncertainty:
> The two most reliable sources for Holocaust data are the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem. Though this is the best information available, it is based on estimates and cannot take into the unknown number of victims whose bodies were never recovered or for whom there were no records. The Nazis kept detailed records of the people who passed through the camps; nevertheless, we do not know how many Jews may still have been unaccounted for in the many places where they were murdered. In addition, as the Allies began to close in on Germany, the Nazis began to destroy their records. We also don’t know the precise number of Jews in any of these areas. The population data ranges from 1937-1941 so, for example, the countries where the figures came from 1937 may not accurately reflect the number of Jews at the time the war began. Though the two institutions have different estimates, if you average the total number of Jews each says were murdered, the result is the commonly used figure of six million.
From: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/estimated-number-of-jew...
It’s not “fishy” at all. History is not an exact science, and the perpetrators of this genocide were highly motivated to conceal their crimes.
It's more likely that a Holocaust denier would have luck convincing someone if the commonly touted numbers are inaccurate and vociferously defended.
Why do you think Holocaust deniers are hell bent on nitpicking about these estimates? Their tactic is to use them as a wedge to push other bad faith arguments to cast doubt on all aspects of the Holocaust. Again, do you think it makes any difference if a gross estimate is 5-10% over or under? The strategy followed by Holocaust deniers is to abuse this logic to jump to conclusions like "if they are wrong about these numbers then what other lies have they been pushing?"
It should be, as daenney posted: <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...>
> The prowling may be foiled due to wrong footing, which may wake up the whole family. They intruder may get chased away with hot water splashed on him, or be thrown out of the window. Strict parents chase the intruder or threaten him with marriage or a stick while liberal ones pretend to be asleep even if they know the prowler is around. This is more likely if they know the prowler is a suitor they would like to have for their daughter. It is not difficult to guess who the prowler might be in small close-knit villages.
> Boys generally attempt to complete the task and make a quick exit if the parents of the girl are in and may stay longer if the girl is alone. It is in some places a custom that a boy discovered in the morning by the parents shall become the husband of the girl, but usually the boy and the girl make sure that the boy exits before the parents get up in the morning. If he oversleeps, they may still find a way to sneak out.
> In part due to the lack of proper understanding of the practice and partly due to the influence of westernized urban bias towards the primitive folk practices of rural communities, modern Bhutanese urbanites, particularly those who are engaged in development and gender issues and who carry out their conversations in English, have inaccurately used the misnomer ‘night hunting’ in English to refer to this traditional practice although neither the word ‘night’ nor the word ‘hunting’ exists in the original terms used to refer to it in places where it is practised. The misnomer leads to a serious misinterpretation of the practice and leads the audience to think that there is a degree of exploitation and abuse, objectification, and animality involved as the word ‘hunting’ would imply.
https://texts.mandala.library.virginia.edu/text/bomena-night... by Karma Phuntsho, Bhutanese scholar. I recall similar practices in other societies, such as Cambodian 'love huts' that fathers build for their daughters, where suitors might come to her at night.
The grandparent commenter might be annoyed by the later section? But it is not a "nationalist defence", it's just putting the practice in context.
Where can I read more about it? (other than Wikipedia) Now I'm curious if it's just a way for young people who still live with parents (like, most people in Asia's rural areas) to have sex, or non-consentual rape is really rampant there. Sure regional nationalists aren't objective, but outsiders aren't necessarily objective either, because they often judge foreign cultures through the prism of their own cultures, see "culture shock"
What's really curious is that you leapt from a discussion of the Holocaust to racist policies of the former South African government.
The State of Israel is in practice an apartheid state - specifically it treats citizens differently depending on whether they're Jews or not. Inside Israel, as I understand it, this is not a controversial observation, simply one side sees apartheid as a desirable situation and the other does not. Which we might observe is exactly how it was in South Africa...
I don't believe that was ever the case. Holocaust denial is such a pervasive and murderous conspiracy theory that any free and open society cannot tolerate. But denying the Holocaust is not the same as studying it.
Free and open societies don't decide at all what they tolerate. That's the entire point. If certain ideas are banned, you are not free.
In that case you should understand that no one is obligated to hear you whining about topics, specially those you're not even willing to discuss.
I am not a philosopher and I have no idea how to reason about situations where individual rights for individuals and groups of individuals clash.
That's a great question. In short, the 99% of people should tolerate the 1%. They don't need to choose to associate with them, but don't take action against them to silence them.
> I am not a philosopher and I have no idea how to reason about situations where individual rights for individuals and groups of individuals clash.
I think this quote is probably appropriate:
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind." - John Stuart Mill
I'm sure that we don't need a debate to agree that genocide is something that's not acceptable. Do you disagree?
This is a logical fallacy called equivocation. Denying a genocide happened, however repugnant it may be, is not the same thing as genocide. Pretending it is in order to borrow the weight of genocide is a common tactic used to try to silence arguments without addressing them.
Lets be serious here: I figured the Jews would have learned that holocausts are bad... Except they run their own holocaust against Palestine.
Seems like collectively they didn't learn much at all from the last time atrocities were done against them.
But any valid complaints against them will result in claims of "antisemitism". That's par for the course when they can't defend their own atrocities - they'll just call you racists.
How did you arrive at that conclusion? Please point to relevant legislation.
A key quote:
> The amendment would "prohibit the communication of statements, other than in private conversation, that willfully promote antisemitism by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust."
This is widely believed to be unconstitutional in Canada, and it’s not hard to imagine the chilling effect, e.g. is asking an honest question in class considered “private”? I suspect not. Is a question about 4-5 vs 6 million considered “downplaying”? I don’t think most reasonable people would think so, but I don’t think it’s reasonable people we should worry about.
I think many will argue that asking questions and promoting holocaust denial are very different things, and I think they are, but the lines are very blurry.
It’s increasingly popular on social media to immediately label people as the most extreme version of “other/out” for any form of behavior that doesn’t demonstrate complete commitment to the in group. An ambiguous law about holocaust denial implemented under the current social climate seems like a recipe for disaster.
I think holocaust denial and antisemitism are abhorrent, obviously. But it is this fact that seems to empower legislation that threatens freedoms. Various online safety bills seem to belong in a similar category.
- [0] https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6446671
* Essentially have regional or clustered versions of events/history
For example, Afghanistan will have a different perspective on the US invasion than the US, but I think there’s value in seeing what the other thinks. (Does *not* necessarily imply one is more correct than the other)
Then have some sort of ranking system where (not sure how this would happen) votes can be had on which perspective is more correct. This hopefully would weed out the intense/false perspectives, but still gives people the ability to see the different ones.
A core problem we have is what constitutes misinformation/disinformation/propaganda/truth
I think the incorrect approach we’ve tried to take is either having a vetting committee/website that evaluates what is true, or just outright censorship. This fuels the actual conspiracy theories because they can use this as grounds for their cause (since, at times these vetting bodies are verifiably wrong)
We cannot withhold information, it travels too quickly and is easy to circumvent without total authoritarian control.
And all it takes is a few “valid” cases for the authoritarian seeds to be sown in the soil of good intentions
But we can generate unending oceans of bullshit. If you can't stop the truth, then make up unnumbered truths that wear down the most avid learners. Democracies vote in tyrants all the time, votes are easily bought in any number of ways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
The Holocaust almost destroyed an entire people. Covid was a tiny blip in the historical record.
Note that 20% of Poland’s population died in WWII, and many more Eastern European civilians were murdered in that region than Jews were throughout Europe:
https://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-II/Costs-of-the-w...
The Wikipedia controversy is talking about 4.5 vs 6 million Jewish deaths in camps, out of the total of ~11 million killed in those camps. Also, scorched earth military tactics killed many civilians too. Poland lost 5.6 million; Russia lost 7 million.
There was even an official holocaust denial policy in post war Germany, where they claimed there was no racial discrimination against Roma gypsy groups, and only criminals were sent to the concentration camps:
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/genocide-o...
Anyway, there were many victims of genocide in WWII. Most were not jewish, but historians tend to ignore groups that were being killed by allied Russia (and, of course, Japan).
* the number of people who died as a result of ghettoization, genocide, and indirect deaths (disease, suicide, etc) was far higher than 6 million
* the number of Jews murdered by German SS, local blackguards, and in death camps is between 4.5 million and 5.5 million, with 6 million being an off the cuff estimate in the aftermath of the Holocaust ( https://yvng.yadvashem.org/ )
* investigating and accumulating evidence of the deaths of the Holocaust for the purposes of evidence and historical research is valid and should continue
* Litigating the number of dead is an extremely common tactic of Holocaust deniers, as if 1 or 2 million dead would be just reasonable domestic policy
* this article is conflating the latter with the former
* commentary on the above without deep knowledge of the research of Yad Vashem, the US Holocaust Museum, and other major reaearchers of the Holocaust (no matter one's position on Wikipedia or the Holocaust) is 100% ineffective
* including this comment.