TRIGGER WARNING
I don’t usually show graphic photos from the Holocaust because I find them deeply dehumanizing to the victims. That said, it seems that we’ve reached such a state of ignorance regarding the level of barbarity and atrocities during the Holocaust that only graphic footage can even slightly do the truth justice.
This post also references calories.
Gaza is neither a concentration camp nor an extermination camp. Gaza is an urban war zone, possibly the most difficult urban war zone we’ve ever seen, according to numerous experts on urban warfare.
The difference between Nazi concentration camps and Nazi extermination camps is that extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka had extermination facilities — that is, gas chambers — while concentration camps did not. But Nazi concentration camps were very much deadly. There was no “minimum decency” in concentration camps.
Nazi concentration camps generally served three purposes: (1) punishment (e.g. for political prisoners), (2) slave labor, and/or (3) transit. For example, some camps were transit camps, a pit stop along the way before the prisoners were ultimately shipped off to labor camps or extermination camps.
The “living” conditions in concentration camps were no different from those in extermination camps: starvation diets, overcrowding, rampant disease, exposure to the elements (e.g. no adequate warming clothes during winter), and more. All prisoners in these camps were forced into slave labor and some were subjected to medical experimentation. Neither of those things is happening in Gaza.
In addition to dying from starvation and disease, prisoners in concentration camps could be executed at will by their Nazi captors, at any time. They were not protected from death in any way whatsoever.
This is possibly the most despicable case of Holocaust inversion I’ve ever seen, even more so because the author of the X post is apparently Jewish. There is a stark, stark difference between burning crematoria -- a piece of machinery used in the genocide of six million Jews -- and burning innocent people alive, including children.
The instigators of the 1944 Sonderkommando Revolt in Auschwitz were unarmed Auschwitz Jewish prisoners, tasked with the disposal of Jewish bodies after they’d been gassed. In total, the revolt killed three Nazi guards.
By contrast, the October 7 (very much armed) terrorists slaughtered 1,200 people, predominantly civilians, including two infants, children, women, men, and the elderly, including Holocaust survivors. They tortured 80% of their victims, including rape, mutilation, and burning, and kidnapped over 250 people -- including two Holocaust survivors, numerous children, and an infant.
People in Auschwitz were not given drinking water, and they were barely given food. There was no potable drinking water at Auschwitz. The only hydration inmates received came from the breakfast of boiled water mixed with a grain-based “coffee” substitute and watery potato, rutabaga, groats, and rye flour soup. At various points, prisoners -- who were forced into hard slave labor -- received as little as 200 calories per day.
Of the 1.3 million people deported to Auschwitz, 900,000 were gassed immediately upon arrival. Another 200,000 died from starvation, disease, exhaustion, executions, and more. If you weren’t gassed immediately upon arrival, your life expectancy at Auschwitz was less than two months.
Less. Than. Two. Months. I repeat: the starvation and dehydration at Auschwitz was such that the tiny percentage of people who were not gassed immediately upon arrival did not survive to two months.
The humanitarian situation in Gaza is deeply dire, but objectively, what happened in Auschwitz is just not the case in the Gaza Strip, by any metric. Otherwise, no one in Gaza would be alive today.
Nearly 80 years since the end of the Holocaust, the worldwide Jewish population has still not recovered. On the eve of World War II, the worldwide Jewish population stood at about 16.6 million. Today, 79 years later, we barely scrape 15 million. In some Eastern European countries, 90-95% of the Jewish population was exterminated in a matter of less than six years.
At the height of the Holocaust, the Nazis were murdering 14,000 Jews every single day. Every. Single. Day. The second largest massacre took place in Babyn Yar, when the Nazis and their collaborators executed nearly 34,000 Jews in a matter of 48 hours. I repeat: 34,000 Jews slaughtered in 48 hours. Starting on November 3, 1943, the Nazis killed 42,000 Jews during “Operation Harvest Festival.”
Of course, the Nazis deported millions of Jews to their camps, but that’s not a population boom, given they did so to murder them, if not immediately, then shortly afterward.
Even per Hamas’s own numbers, the population of the Gaza Strip has slightly grown since October 7, 2023, as there are more births than deaths. Since 1948, the population of the Gaza Strip has grown from about 60,000 to 2.23 million.
UNDERSTANDING WHY HOLOCAUST INVERSION IS ANTISEMITIC
To understand why Holocaust inversion is unquestionably antisemitic, we must first understand what Holocaust denial actually is. Holocaust denial is not just an outright denial that the events of the Holocaust happened, but more often than not, it’s a denial of well-established facts about the Holocaust. For example, someone who says the Holocaust didn’t happen at all is as much a Holocaust denier as someone who claims the Holocaust did happen, but only one million Jews were killed.
Therefore, Holocaust inversion is always Holocaust denial, because:
(1) it relies on the minimization of established facts about the Holocaust. However harrowing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza — and it is — it’s just in no way equivalent in scale, scope, and methods to the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. This is a historical fact, and denying it is denying the Holocaust.
(2) characterizing Jews — Zionist or not — as Nazis is a denial of the well-established fact about the Holocaust that the predominant force in Nazi ideology was genocidal Jew-hatred. Jews cannot be the inheritors of Nazism simply because the Nazis wanted all Jews exterminated. A denial of this basic fact is Holocaust denial.
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