TREBLINKA TALK - TAKE 2

Luca did reply (see the previous post's comment section for Treblinka, and the comment section for the post on Israeli bill against Holocaust denial) - one of the replies was in Portuguese, and I will translate it here for you unfortunate readers who cannot follow my beautiful native language…

He says he is Brazilian, 50% Italian and 50% German - cool: what generation German exactly? How long has your German family been in Brazil? Boy, I should ask the same about your Italian side, even though Italians were for the most part bogus anti-Semites… Their drug of choice was truly fascism.

He finds my intolerance “peculiar” and claims my reply to his comment was aggressive - Luca, I understand you might have thought so; I don’t really feel the need to apologize to people like you, so let me just say that I actually classify that response to you as cynical, borderline aggressive. Flat-out aggressive will be the one I am writing now, by the way.

Then he says he is not anti-semitic, not a fascist sympathizer, not right-wing. He claims to have voted several times for leftist candidates, including Lula (why am I not surprised? What can one expect of the Lucas of this world?). He adds that Lula has been a disappointment (now why are you surprised, Luca? What can one expect of the Lulas of this world?). He says he is not an old Brazilian, full of prejudices - he says he is a little older than me and then in brackets he writes 24 years old and question mark.

Well, Luca - are you 24? Because I am 33.

He says it is silly I am appalled by deniers from my own country and claims that anyone anywhere and of any race could come to doubt the official version of the Holocaust after being exposed to revisionist arguments. (Yeah, but there is a certain degree of prejudice and lack of general knowledge, combined with a tad of inferiority feelings, that goes with becoming someone like you, Luca). He then says he could be black or “redskin” - that would be the closest translation to pardo, which by the way is a really bad choice here since it is full of racist connotations - and he would still not believe the Holocaust.

He always had reservations towards the official Holocaust version, it always seemed to him as exaggeration. He did believe the gas chambers though (Luca, are you trying to be original? Not working). But then he stopped believing about a year ago (unfortunately, he does not offer details of his final conversion, though I believe it would be most interesting in this context, no?).

He goes to say that not everyone in the revisionist movement is anti-semitic, the majority is not (that’s because there’s now a variety of branches within anti-Semitism with which people can associate themselves without being anti-semitic in form… It is all about form with this people anyway, since they are so devoid of real consistency).

He is sad that mainstream historians don’t have the courage to investigate the Holocaust using different approaches (angles, that is the word he used). He claims that if they did, there would be less neo-nazis and anti-Semites involved (and I think he meant involved in revisionism). Luca - that is because mainstream historians are not influenced by their prejudices as revisionist ones are. You actually got it wrong - the ultimate requirement for being a revisionist historian is to be prejudiced. How about some logical reasoning here?

Then he declares - the national socialists committed a great crime and a terrible injustice against the Jewish people by stripping them of their civil rights and by deporting them (so where is the argument, dear?). But he does not believe there was a real plan to exterminate them (I see) - he says there was criminal negligence at most.

Then he says that my words on the liquidation of the camp in regards to exhumed bodies etc are wrong, that I should use more reason and more emotion (if he refers to his type of reason, I stick with my emotion, thank you very much). He says that BURNING the bodies and CRUSHING the bones and mixing them with the ashes and RE-BURYING them would not completely destroy the evidence, that there would still be bones and ashes around, and also the pyres (what, they would not be able to destroy the pyres?! I guess we must have all overestimated the Nazis) etc. Luca - you missed the capitalized words in my original text, so I took the liberty of emphasizing them slightly here for you as a courtesy. Plus, there is plenty of bone splinters and ashes all around the camp perimeter…

I guess all the historians and all the scientists who since the war have been investigating Treblinka are completely wrong; or maybe they are lying. But Luca and the revisionist community would be right, I suppose.

About my request for specifics on the information of the 300 bodies found by the soviets, he says it comes from the records of the 65th Red Army. Ok - Luca, would you please be more specific as to this source? Can you tell me - did you read the translation or the original? Is it a report, a book, a transcript, a movie?

As for my description of how the villagers who came to loot what was left of the camp came across evidence of bodies etc in their search for gold, he then delivered some weird harangue about the correlation between their digging and the size and shape of mass graves - Luca, this one is a little hard to comprehend even in Portuguese. And wow - the size and shape of graves as a determinant evidence for mass murder. Or as a disavowing factor. I grant you this - revisionists/deniers have really fertile imagination.

He then says that the Poles found even less bodies than the Soviets (what difference does it make in their conclusion on the nature of Treblinka as a death camp? How many grotesque corpses, body parts, how many gold teeth, how many tons of ashes need to be found for people like you to acknowledge the Holocaust?). Whatever, Luca.

He moves on to Auschwitz: something about more than 100,000 registered prisoners died in the camp - as this is an open statement, let me finish it for you. Yeah, more than 100,000, up to about 1.1 million (and I am using here the figure accepted by renowned Jewish historian Raul Hilberg, who is known for his conservative death toll estimates) people were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau. No one died there, by the way - they were brutally killed, all of them (that is in reference to your word choice in Portuguese - “morreram”, which is “died” in the third person plural, is not the same as “foram mortos”, which is “were killed/murdered”.)

And Luca - I advise you to stay away from Auschwitz-Birkenau as a topic for your revisionist endeavors, since the body of evidence on it is so abundant and so detail-oriented, even more than on Treblinka. You don’t stand a chance. And also, are you referring to Auschwitz I? II (Birkenau)? III (Monowitz)?

You then say they were not gassed, these poor souls in Auschwitz. Well, some of them were beaten to death, others were hanged, others summarily shot, others starved to death, others contracted typhus or some other horrible disease, others were “operated” on by Dr. Mengele and his team…

And all this, of course, depends on which camp they were in (I, II, or III). The large majority of people arriving on the transports were gassed, though - at Birkenau. I am sure you heard that before, but as with the mass graves shape and size, you probably have another ridiculously unsound explanation for why this is a false statement from my part (and “mainstreams” like me). Then you present your conclusion - in the next sentence, right after “they were not gassed“ (the ones in Auschwitz), you say: at any rate, 300 or even more than 1000 dead in Treblinka is completely incompatible with the official version.”

Luca - what official version? Yours, the IHR, the Nazis, what? This is unbelievably poor logic anyway, Luca. You did better at the beginning of your letter.

As for being able to continue your dialogue with me in a civilized manner, why not? You can write, and I can reply. That being said, I reserve myself the right to be as cynical and as unforgiving as I choose to be. This is the only way to deal with people like you - mix of incredulity, disgust, scorn, pity… If you’re offended, you can always go somewhere else to spread your love and your gospel; you don’t specifically need to come to my blog. If you decide not to come back though, I’d appreciate it if you answered those questions I posed to you.

Now I will reply to your other comment. The one about Irving.