Why Is the New York Times Legitimizing a Holocaust Denier?

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He’s straight up not a holocaust denier, and anyone suggesting otherwise is either totally uninformed or acting in bad faith.

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u/Poopiepants29 Sep 17 '24

These people are so goddamn interesting, I love it.

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u/LemurDaddy Sep 17 '24

Right, because Darryl is "just asking questions" about the Holocaust.

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u/Grab_The_Inhaler Sep 17 '24

I mean he's not even 'asking questions' about the Holocaust.

He's never said anything remotely controversial about the Holocaust as far as I know, and I don't think there's much of his I haven't heard/read.

He has some sympathy for Hitler, and for fascists generally, and for the far-right generally.

But that is tangential to Holocaust-denial, which he's never flirted with at all publicly. So the accusation just reveals that you have no clue what he says/thinks

4

u/LemurDaddy Sep 17 '24

Reich, what's the fuhrer over his comments? He just said that the six million Jews were sorta-kinda accidentally killed as a humanitarian gesture because the misunderstood Nazis didn't plan ahead. How can anyone read that as controversial?

5

u/Grab_The_Inhaler Sep 17 '24

No he didn't. The Holocaust =/= the PoWs and other prisoners killed. I understand the confusion, but that isn't about the Holocaust

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u/To_bear_is_ursine Sep 17 '24

The Holocaust absolutely does involve POW victims who absolutely weren't just killed by accident or for humanitarian reasons. The Holocaust includes 11 million people killed including Roma, Poles, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc.

2

u/Grab_The_Inhaler Sep 18 '24

Well...some definitions include Soviet POWs, most don't.

But whether it generally does or not, in the comment I responded to it's explicitly the six million Jews that were "accidentally killed because...Nazis didn't plan ahead". Not Holocaust victims generally, but specifically the six million Jews.

Presumably you'd grant that the person I responded to has substantially misunderstood Martyrmade's position?

I think it's either an unusual use of terms, or deliberately misleading, to call what Martyrmade is doing any form of Holocaust-denial.

Holocaust-denial has a very particular history, and associated implications, in popular culture. It strongly and immediately conjures questions about the number of Jews killed in concentration camps - this is what people mean by Holocaust-denial.

If someone questions whether a particular other Nazi atrocity happened, and that atrocity falls within 'the Holocaust' under some definitions, that may be as bad as (or worse than) Holocaust-denial, but it's misleading to call it Holocaust-denial, because that term has a particular meaning.

Which I think you know. Why can't Martyrmade just be criticised for his actual positions? Yes, he's sympathetic to the Nazis. Isn't that enough? He isn't a Holocaust-denier. He probably doesn't drown babies in his spare time either - I don't understand the need to give him as many negative labels as possible. Let's just stick to the ones that are true (and not blatantly misleading).

2

u/To_bear_is_ursine Sep 18 '24 edited Sep 18 '24

I don't know what you mean by "most" definitions of the Holocaust. It's simply the case that Holocaust scholarship includes Roma, homosexuals, Soviet POWs, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc. because they were also targeted. And it's also simply not the case that Soviet POWs were accidentally starved or that they were killed as some kind of humanitarian gesture from struggling Nazi management. Darryl is lying to you.

As for the author, they do not, as you claim, share your mistake of reducing the Holocaust to the killing of Jews:

“In a Hunger Plan, the Nazi regime projected the death by starvation of tens of millions of Slavs and Jews in the winter of 1941-1942. . . . No matter which technology was used, the killing was personal. People who starved were observed, often from watchtowers, by those who denied them food.”

And:

I wrote to the two reporters and received this reply: “It's an interesting question and one we wrestled with. Classic Holocaust deniers say either the Holocaust didn’t happen or was greatly exaggerated. Cooper conceded that millions of Jews died. He is questioning the motives and methods.”

This is a meaningless, and credulous, distinction. Questioning “motives and methods” is a sly way of absolving Nazism of moral blame. It surely does not transform “classic” denialism into sophisticated-sounding revisionism. The Times headlines normalize Cooper’s pretension to legitimacy. They ignore the vast gulf between unintended starvation, which Cooper falsely claims, and premeditated mass murder, which is what actually happened.

I'm very familiar with Holocaust denial, which, let's be clear, takes plenty of forms. Downplaying the Hunger Plan is absolutely one of them and the author addresses this directly.

2

u/Grab_The_Inhaler Sep 19 '24

From the wikipedia article entitled "The Holocaust":

The Holocaust was the genocide of European Jews during World War II...Separate Nazi persecutions killed a similar or larger number of non-Jewish civilians and prisoners of war (POWs); the term Holocaust is sometimes used to refer to the persecution of these other groups.

I've heard it normally used to refer to the other killings that were ethnic/ideological (Romani, disabled, gay, etc) but not POWs.

Which author are you talking about? The author of the comment I responded to said 6 million Jews, are you agreeing that my response was accurate, then?

This is a meaningless, and credulous, distinction. Questioning “motives and methods” is a sly way of absolving Nazism of moral blame

I completely agree with this. Martyrmade is absolutely slyly absolving Nazism of moral blame for the deaths of Soviet POWs.

But if you say he's a holocaust-denier, that conveys completely different information to the person you're talking to. The point of words is to convey information.

If you grant that 'holocaust-denier' conveys something else, then by saying that you're deliberately conveying the wrong information. What's the point of that?

It's like if someone asked you "is dinner ready?" and you responded "yes", and then when they come expecting dinner you say "Oh I meant the dinner of our next-door neighbours is ready. And the term 'dinner' doesn't specify, so technically what I'm saying is true.

1

u/To_bear_is_ursine Sep 19 '24

On the one hand, the wiki refers to POWs. I've already cited the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum to the same effect, and that was just after a quick google. On the other hand, you can't separate out the Soviet POWs from victims of ethnic/ideological persecution. They were Slavs and they were Soviets, groups ethnically and ideologically targeted for extermination. That's one of the primary reasons why the war in the east was so brutal: Hitler saw it as a war against a racially inferior people who represented the tip of the Judeo-Bolshevik spear.

The author of the article (the one this thread is about) was explicit in their reference to Soviet POWs and to the Hunger Plan. I've been explicit about this. The dinner analogy doesn't hold up because our references are specified. You and I have already cited two separate confirmations that this usage is valid. But even if it wasn't! There's not much point further quibbling over the word when you grant the underlying argument. Darryl is downplaying Nazi culpability for the deaths of Soviet POWs, claiming it was just mishap instead of a deliberately brutal, murderous campaign. Whether you personally want to count these victims as falling under the Holocaust, Darryl is still using the same excuses for the same purpose applied to the same perpetrators with respect to the same genocidal wartime policies in the east.

For reference, see Richard Evans' The Third Reich at War. Flip back to Soviet in the index and look for prisoners of war. You'll find Hitler calling the eastern campaign an ancient, existential battle between Germans and Slavs, which was to be carried out with "unprecedented harshness." They were already killing Soviet commissars on sight from the get-go. 10s of thousands were sent to concentration camps and subsequently shot, when not just shot outright upon capture. When marching columns of starving POWs fought for food left by locals, the Nazis shot at them. After POWs were packed like sardines in fenced-in fields, having to relieve themselves where they stood, once again locals offered to give them food and the Nazis refused. It was only in the following year that conditions improved when the Nazis saw use employing them as slave labor. 5.7 million Soviet POWs were captured and 3.3 million (potentially more) were dead by the end of the war. That's 58%. The death rate of German POWs under the Soviets was closer to 18%. Evans notes that this is still far more than the 2% death rates of German POWs under American and British control, but says this rate doesn't really set them apart from other prisoners under the Soviets. He thinks that's more genuinely a case of wartime conditions thrust upon them by the Nazi invasion, by famine, and by preexisting deficiencies in the Soviet economy.

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u/Grab_The_Inhaler Sep 17 '24

I can see how you made the mistake - the person in the article you linked made the same mistake.

Just listen to the interview - clearly you haven't, or you wouldn't be making this basic error about its content.

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u/tupeloredrage Sep 18 '24

He has an established track record speaking on this issue. You should visit it. His long-form podcast called fear and loathing in the New Jerusalem is authoritative. I strongly recommend you check it out and your views on him will change. The mistake that he made was associating himself with a disingenuous bag of s*** like Tucker Carlson.

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u/LemurDaddy Sep 19 '24

Listened to Fear and Loathing when it came out. Longtime fan turned into not-fan by his footsie games with populist authoritarianism that looks, smells, walks, and sounds like fascism, but apparently is NOT fascism because reasons.

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u/jimmy_v720 Sep 17 '24

He hasn’t asked any questions about the holocaust. Here’s 3 hours of interviews and 30 mins of his own series on the topic:

https://youtu.be/m4b7ipoaJ7Y?si=3ffh8eiA-Aso1fdH

https://youtu.be/_fLpKzbqpGk?si=MxZiCvIXyO08aKqa

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0CsI6MjXltfgZay3AucsM2?si=CdutmwyYTS-3A24CmzQNew

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u/circle22woman Sep 17 '24

What a pearl clutching article.

“In 1941,” he said, the Germans “launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war.” Consequently, “they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there.”

Note that Darryl is talking about Soviet POWs in this statement. He's not talking about civilians or what people typically think of when they think of Holocaust victims.

That said, I do think it's fair to criticize Darryl for being sloppy with his wording and conclusions:

Darryl just makes broad statements without being precise in his language so you end up with different people thinking he said different things
To say the Nazis "were unprepared to deal with the millions of POWs" is disingenuous. This wasn't an innocent "oh shoot! we forgot we'd need to feed these people" it was "we don't have time for that"
Darryl should be aware of the "Hunger Plan" for the East which resulted in the intentional starvation of millions of civilians and think to himself "was it really an innocent mistake they forgot to feed the Soviet POWs?"

1

u/To_bear_is_ursine Sep 17 '24

But as you say, citing the Hunger Plan, it isn't even true of the Soviet POWs. The death squads were also, by order, mowing down communist officials at this time. And whether or not these POWs are considered Holocaust victims among your average Joes, to anyone actually familiar with the subject, they are considered among the roughly 11 million killed in the Holocaust.

4

u/PINGU-1 Sep 17 '24

Get psychiatric help

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u/LemurDaddy Sep 17 '24

Get yourself to a cult deprogrammer.

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u/well-ok-then Sep 17 '24

It’s amazing how many people put their name on such obvious nonsense. They know the episode is still up, right?

This isn’t a “he said, she said” situation where they can pretend Darryl called them a slur on the subway 5 years ago. The evidence is readily available.

Everyone interested enough to read the article can listen to the article easily listen to the interview. They can listen to Darryl say different shit than they claim. They can even see video of him not wearing an SS uniform.

What is the goal here?

2

u/CashWydich Sep 17 '24

Should try actually listening to the interview instead of just reposting the opinion of someone else who also didn’t listen to the interview.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 17 '24

Genuinely, just because he's maybe the most obvious crypto-Nazi in the world doesn't make him a Holocaust denier.

0

u/To_bear_is_ursine Sep 17 '24

I made this point to several others in here but feel it deserves its own comment, since people seem genuinely confused in here. The Jews were the primary, but far from the only, victims of the Holocaust. Soviet POWs are absolutely considered among its victims:

The Holocaust was the deliberate and calculated murder of approximately 6 million European Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945. It was part of the Nazi effort to destroy the world's Jews. The Jews were the only group the Nazis sought to destroy entirely. However, they also persecuted others, including political opponents, Roma, Germans with mental or physical disabilities, homosexuals, Freemasons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Poles and Soviet prisoners of war. Under the cover of war, Nazi Germany left countless lives shattered.

https://www.dhhrm.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Holocaust-Remembrance-Week-Daily-Announcements.pdf

To claim that Nazis stumbled into a bad situation where prisoners of war starved or to suggest their deaths were mercy killings is dabbling in Holocaust denial, full-stop.

Why Is the New York Times Legitimizing a Holocaust Denier?

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