Justasking wrote:I have not said any gassings took place. I have not said anyone was shot. I have not said that bodies or graves or any physical evidence of any kind exists, anywhere, and I have not claimed I know anything about those topics. I have not in any way declared that I am a "believer." I have made reference to the sorts of things believers claim because obviously you cannot have a discussion about this topic without mentioning the topic being discussed. That does not mean I believe it, or that I believe all the things that may or may not be associated with that belief.
True, you have been careful with your words. So, tell us, are you a believer? Do you believe people were gassed? Do you accept the Holocaust narrative? Or parts of it? Please tell us what you do and do not believe about this topic, otherwise the only thing we can do is make inferences or respond to vague arguments because you're not providing anything of your own position for us to respond to. Hence why you see this kind of argumentative shadowboxing you're criticising.
Nothing in those few pages you quoted from Hilberg has made the initial quote appear out of context. What Hilberg has written can be regarded as interpretive dribble, without a basis in fact. It's an exercise in academic pontification lacking any kind of verification. So it's unsurprising that he can write something that sounds plausible, but that doesn't make it true, which is a key distinction. Hilberg calls the 'engine of destruction' a 'decentralised apparatus', yet still talks about a 'decision' for extermination. He neither provides proof of this apparatus and how it supposedly worked beyond his own inane conjecture, and he provides no such proof for a decision or order to exterminate the Jews. He relies, like Pressac, on an interpretation of events to serve as a 'convergence' of evidence where he can find enough wiggle room to interpret just enough to make some plausible sounding suggestions as to how he thinks it happened, even though he cannot even prove 'it' in the first place. He talks about 'death camps' he talked about systems and bureaucracy and control, he talks about deportations, he asserts the
Einsatzgruppen were 'mobile killing units' and that 'the victims' were 'gassed'; he used words like 'destruction' and 'machinery' and mentions 'processes' and he welds it all together to produce his explanation, which is essentially that there were various departments on different administrative levels that played a part in murdering the Jews.
So that's how he 'explains' it. But it doesn't mean he has PROVED IT, which is the entire problem. He hasn't proved it, he's just used conviction in his language to trick the reader into believing he has proved it by simply saying it, and using the right words to weave a convincingly worded narrative that can be bought. After all, he never discusses whether it was or wasn't possible that the Jews were killed, he takes it for granted and is only left with how he can explain it, which I admit, he does explain - but doesn't
prove. The result is never in question, and thus, he rests all his interpretation on the
a priori assumption that the Jews were murdered and thus those who read his book will accept the process he has revised after being forced to admit no Hitler order existed.
There was literally nothing convincing about what you quoted from Hilberg, in fact I'm surprised he could say so little in so many words. He could've summed up what he was saying thusly:
"Even though a particular office might have exercised a supervisory ("federfiihrende") function in the implementation of a particular measure, no single organization directed or coordinated the entire process. The engine of destruction was a sprawling, diverse, and — above all — decentralized apparatus. [...] The cooperation of these hierarchies was so complete that we may truly speak of their fusion into a machinery of destruction."
He would've said much less, and proved just as little. Better yet, we could just quote Hilbergs original statement which has been proven, thanks to you, as being a correct summary of what Hilberg thought. Since nothing in this quotation of yours seems to contradict it by providing 'more context', it however does provide a lot more rambling on what Hilberg was perfectly capable of summarising in the words he in fact already did, as has been previously quoted in this thread.
Hilberg himself had to admit:
I will say that, in a certain way, Faurisson and others, without wanting to, did us a favor. They raised questions which had the effect of engaging historians in new research. They have obliged us to once again collect information, to re-examine documents and to go further into the comprehension of what has taken place.
Raul Hilberg quoted in: Genocide By Telepathy, Hilberg Explains , Archive.
Effectivly admitting Faurisson was right. So much for your contention that Faurisson is 'biased'. How you can even say that while you're readily believing the purveyors of the Holocaust industry, whom arrest and silence those they disagree with is beyond me.
In the end Hilberg has no conclusive answer to how the Holocaust was to have been ordered or carried out, it's bereft of proof, which is mightily convenient because believers can just made unverifiable claims all they want and justify it by attesting to its plausibility, without providing proof which they claim isn't necessary. It's a kind of circular logic that get's us nowhere.
So please tell us, if you're a revisionist, on what basis do you reject what Hilberg has written? If you're not a revisionist, just say so, don't try and be vague. Or perhaps you're just agnostic? Or maybe you're a revisionist and you somehow take no issue with what Hilberg wrote? You see this is why in the rules the poster is obliged to comment on the material they're posting about by giving their opinion.
The problem with Hilberg is that he's exactly the kind of Jew Ryan Faulk spoke about. In the first editions of his book he claimed that the Jews were attacked by a dragon, and then, in 1985 he revised his book and was humiliated at the first Zundel trial that same year, when he changed his story to claim the Jews were attacked by a bear which sounds much more reasonable, if not plausible even though it has no documentary basis in fact. We're under no obligation to believe what Hilberg wrote because it's the same huckster who initially tried to trick us into believing Dragons exist.
In 1961, in the first edition of The Destruction of the European Jews (Quadrangle Books, Chicago, p. 177), Raul Hilberg calmly affirms the existence of an order (and even of two consecutive orders!) for the extermination of the Jews. In 1985, in the second edition of his book (Holmes and Meier, New York), he totally changes his explanation of the facts; he no longer mentions any order; he writes that there was no “basic plan” (p. 53) and that “no single organization directed or coordinated the entire process [of destruction]” (p. 55); he adds: “No special agency was created and no special budget was devised to destroy the Jews of Europe” (p. 62). He explains the whole supposed business of the extermination of the Jews by ... thought transmission or telepathic divination within the German bureaucracy: “an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind-reading by a far-flung bureaucracy” (remarks made in a lecture on 22 February 1983 and confirmed by R. Hilberg at the time of his cross-examination during the Zündel Trial in Toronto in 1985, per shorthand transcription, pp. 846-848)!
Germar Rudolf (editor), Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of 'Truth' and 'Memory' (Castle Hill Publishers, November 2019), Pp. 12, note 17.
For more on Hilberg, see:
(PDF) The Giant With Feet of Clay—Raul Hilberg and his Standard Work on the ‘Holocaust’
