7 ms·

Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust

37 points by nabla9 4y ago

daenney 4y ago
The actual link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2... [..] 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. [..]
- simplotek 4y ago
  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.
  - rendall 4y ago
    > 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.
    - simplotek 4y ago
      > 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.
      - ameliaquining 4y ago
        Nit: Wikipedia articles are supposed to be based primarily on secondary sources, not primary ones, though some uses of primary sources are accepted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research#Primary,_secondary_and_tertiary_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...
      - matthewdgreen 4y ago
        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.
        simplotek 4y ago
        > 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.
      - rendall 4y ago
        > 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.
  - badcppdev 4y ago
    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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - matthewdgreen 4y ago
    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.
    - simplotek 4y ago
      > 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.
Khelavaster 4y ago
[flagged]
- woodruffw 4y ago
  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.
  - matwood 4y ago
    > 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.
  - Khelavaster 4y ago
    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." https://apnews.com/article/4de24d2430cd2e900602ecf14b1db341 https://apnews.com/article/4de24d2430cd2e900602ecf14b1db341
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      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. Where, precisely, is the grievance?
yakubin 4y ago
Wrong link. Currently it's: <https://www.tandfonline.com/action/cookieAbsent https://www.tandfonline.com/action/cookieAbsent> It should be, as daenney posted: <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...>
DoItToMe81 4y ago
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.
- mherdeg 4y ago
  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.
  - archon1410 4y ago
    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-dating 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.
encryptluks2 4y ago
[flagged]
- rendall 4y ago
  > Why? Why must an apartheid state have so much power? What's really curious is that you leapt from a discussion of the Holocaust to racist policies of the former South African government.
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    Israel is an apartheid state. Sorry if you want to deny the truth.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      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.
    - rendall 4y ago
      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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    The reference to "apartheid state" is to Israel. 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...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
edtechdev 4y ago
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.
- spacephysics 4y ago
  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
  - pixl97 4y ago
    >We cannot withhold information, 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/Firehose_of_falsehood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
theblahblahness 4y ago
[flagged]
- pixl97 4y ago
  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.
- tetromino_ 4y ago
  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.
hedora 4y ago
This article has an oddly anti-polish slant. 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-war 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-of-european-roma-gypsies-1939-1945#postwar-discrimination-3 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).
satellite2 4y ago
@dang I believe this post should not be flagged. It seems it is living the very same fate the Wikipedia's articles it describes
kthejoker2 4y ago
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/ 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.
lo_zamoyski 4y ago
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.)

37 points by nabla9 4y ago

The actual link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2... [..] 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. [..]

simplotek 4y ago
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.
- rendall 4y ago
  > 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.
  - simplotek 4y ago
    > 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.
    - ameliaquining 4y ago
      Nit: Wikipedia articles are supposed to be based primarily on secondary sources, not primary ones, though some uses of primary sources are accepted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research#Primary,_secondary_and_tertiary_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...
    - matthewdgreen 4y ago
      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.
      - simplotek 4y ago
        > 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.
    - rendall 4y ago
      > 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.
- badcppdev 4y ago
  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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  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.
  - simplotek 4y ago
    > 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.

Khelavaster 4y ago

[flagged]

woodruffw 4y ago
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.
- matwood 4y ago
  > 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.
- Khelavaster 4y ago
  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." https://apnews.com/article/4de24d2430cd2e900602ecf14b1db341 https://apnews.com/article/4de24d2430cd2e900602ecf14b1db341
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    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. Where, precisely, is the grievance?

yakubin 4y ago

Wrong link. Currently it's: <https://www.tandfonline.com/action/cookieAbsent https://www.tandfonline.com/action/cookieAbsent> It should be, as daenney posted: <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...>

DoItToMe81 4y ago

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.

mherdeg 4y ago
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.
- archon1410 4y ago
  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-dating 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.

encryptluks2 4y ago

[flagged]

rendall 4y ago
> Why? Why must an apartheid state have so much power? What's really curious is that you leapt from a discussion of the Holocaust to racist policies of the former South African government.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  Israel is an apartheid state. Sorry if you want to deny the truth.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    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.
  - rendall 4y ago
    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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tialaramex 4y ago
  The reference to "apartheid state" is to Israel. 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...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

edtechdev 4y ago

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.

spacephysics 4y ago
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
- pixl97 4y ago
  >We cannot withhold information, 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/Firehose_of_falsehood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

theblahblahness 4y ago

[flagged]

pixl97 4y ago
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.
tetromino_ 4y ago
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.

hedora 4y ago

This article has an oddly anti-polish slant. 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-war 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-of-european-roma-gypsies-1939-1945#postwar-discrimination-3 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).

satellite2 4y ago

@dang I believe this post should not be flagged. It seems it is living the very same fate the Wikipedia's articles it describes

kthejoker2 4y ago

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/ 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.

lo_zamoyski 4y ago

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.)