Citation - fire pits

[Booze]

That's not a painting, it's a photograph! Why by golly gee, there we have it. I'm gonna have to pack it up and go home fellas, holocaust proved, right there.

(My tongue is firmly in my cheek)

Yep that's it right there, case closed.

[Booze]

In a bizarre book called Fantasies of Witnessing, the author agonizes for dozens of pages how to address Wiesel telling two contradictory versions of how his father died.

But he also believes in the flaming pits:

As director of the President's Commission on the Holocaust, created in 1978, and a council member charged with conceptualizing the Holocaust Memorial Museum's permanent exhibition, [Rabbi Irving] Greenberg has played a major role in shaping Holocaust commemoration in the United States. In a paper presented at a 1974 symposium on the Holocaust, he offered the following dictum: "No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children."

Perhaps no statement better captures the sanctimonious veneration of horror that so often serves to curtail rather than encourage critical thinking about our present-day relationship to the Holocaust. Such statements, it seems to me, promote a kind of dishonesty under the guise of virtuousness. Certainly, in the presence of the children who were thrown alive into the crematorium furnaces or burning pits at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, no abstract statement, theological, philosophical, or theoretical, would be appropriate—including, of course, Greenberg's own working principle. But this is precisely not the context in which we make statements about the Holocaust, and pretending that it is limits and distorts understanding of how present concerns shape the historical past.

Fantasies of Witnessing, p. 215-216

"The sanctimonious veneration of horror" I'm going to try to use that one more often.

Are you saying that the author of this book (Fantasies of Witnessing) believes in the flaming pits based on this excerpt or something more in the book?
I have to admit I've read this excerpt several times trying to untangle the full meaning of what he's saying, but from this alone I'm not left with that impression.

[Booze]

I don't think any serious historian will explicitly reject Wiesel's flaming pits schlock. That would be edging too close to denial.

Yes, how could they after promoting him to the extent that they have?
From the standpoint of revisionism though, the most famous witness has invented fictional atrocities of extreme cruelty.

[pilgrimofdark]

Are you saying that the author of this book (Fantasies of Witnessing) believes in the flaming pits based on this excerpt or something more in the book?
I have to admit I've read this excerpt several times trying to untangle the full meaning of what he's saying, but from this alone I'm not left with that impression.

Yes, he takes the flaming pits as a given.

He was criticizing someone else for mentioning "the burning children" in a sanctimonious context that discourages discussion of the Holocaust.

[Archie]

Great video. I've never heard of Provan. I was unable to find the full video. From what I read on Wiki it seems like he turned away from revisionism.

I'm also having a bit of trouble finding the full video at the moment. It was on archive.org but it got taken down. But this is the paper he was presenting.
https://ihr.org/journal/v20n1p20_provan-html

Provan was sort of a semi-revisionist. Ernst Zundel used to refer to him as "a revisionist who believes in the gas chambers."

It seems he didn't think Dr. Nyiszli's book was true, but he was still a believer. Go figure.

[Booze]

Great video. I've never heard of Provan. I was unable to find the full video. From what I read on Wiki it seems like he turned away from revisionism.

I'm also having a bit of trouble finding the full video at the moment. It was on archive.org but it got taken down. But this is the paper he was presenting.
https://ihr.org/journal/v20n1p20_provan-html

Provan was sort of a semi-revisionist. Ernst Zundel used to refer to him as "a revisionist who believes in the gas chambers."

It seems he didn't think Dr. Nyiszli's book was true, but he was still a believer. Go figure.

It's a strange mix

[Booze]

Are you saying that the author of this book (Fantasies of Witnessing) believes in the flaming pits based on this excerpt or something more in the book?
I have to admit I've read this excerpt several times trying to untangle the full meaning of what he's saying, but from this alone I'm not left with that impression.

Yes, he takes the flaming pits as a given.

He was criticizing someone else for mentioning "the burning children" in a sanctimonious context that discourages discussion of the Holocaust.

That's my take on it, and the reason why I'm not seeing where he believes in it, at least not in this excerpt. You're obvious are familiar with the book, I'm just going by these few paragraphs and his belief in it confuses me, because his comment is so on point.

[Booze]

Here's how E. Michael Jones analyzes it:

In describing flaming pits, Wiesel was adopting a trope which had already been accepted as evidence at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. Like the pericopes which make up the Gospels, the Holocaust Narrative is made up of tropes, which can be inserted at will to provide repositories of meaning. One can replace the other as the narrative develops in time, which is precisely what happened to Wiesel's burning pit narrative when it got replaced by the gas chamber trope after aerial photographs, released in 1979, made it obvious that there were no 80-meter-long flaming pits in the camps.

Very true. Most of the 'holocaust testimonies' are nothing but tropes.
Does anyone know what was introduced at Nuremberg regarding the fire pits for children?

[Eye of Zyclone]

Great video. I've never heard of Provan. I was unable to find the full video. From what I read on Wiki it seems like he turned away from revisionism.

I'm also having a bit of trouble finding the full video at the moment. It was on archive.org but it got taken down. But this is the paper he was presenting.
https://ihr.org/journal/v20n1p20_provan-html

Provan was sort of a semi-revisionist. Ernst Zundel used to refer to him as "a revisionist who believes in the gas chambers."

It seems he didn't think Dr. Nyiszli's book was true, but he was still a believer. Go figure.

IMO, Provan was always an exterminationist guy who first infiltrated revisionist conferences and journals with some insignificant vaguely-revisionist lectures and papers about minor Allied war crimes (like the U.S. summary execution of 50 camp guards in Dachau) and the most extravagant Holocaust tales (like Nyiszli's book) and who then seemed to be making concessions to the exterminationist/antirevisionist side as planned from the outset. With such worms in the revisionist apple, Holohoax propagandists could claim misleading things like "Even Holocaust deniers like Charles Provan conceded that millions of Jews were killed in gas chambers."

[Eye of Zyclone]

Dr. Nyiszli also claims this. There are also stories about children being shoved alive into the ovens.

Great video. I've never heard of Provan. I was unable to find the full video.

Here it is :

(at the 13th International Revisionist Conference of May 2000)

[Booze]

Thank you
He mentioned investigating the holes in the roof of krema2, it leaves me wondering what his conclusions were.

[Hektor]

I don't think any serious historian will explicitly reject Wiesel's flaming pits schlock. That would be edging too close to denial.

"You're denying my Holocaust" is the original "you're not respecting my pronouns."
...

As if those that reject obvious atrocity propaganda tales and malicious rumors are not 'serious historians'... They are to be taken more seriously based on the fact that they take far more personal risk than academics that only tow the party-line.