Archie wrote: ↑Wed Feb 25, 2026 2:42 pm
Nessie wrote: ↑Wed Feb 25, 2026 7:36 am
Archie wrote: ↑Mon Feb 23, 2026 3:20 pm
What is the last historical book you have read? Any historical topic.
I ask because it seems to me you do not actually read any history. Rather you make sweepingly inaccurate claims based on your own preconceptions about what "the historians" do and don't do.
By your own standards, this is a low quality post. You make no effort to explain why the historical method is wrong, or to defend the revisionist method and you make an accusation against me with no evidence to back it up.
1) This is the slop forum (as Hans calls it). You are a slop poster, undeserving of serious responses.
That is your excuse to at least limit debates with me.
2) There is no "the historical method" or "the revisionist method." Historians use a variety of approaches. Revisionists use a variety of approaches. Historians and revisionists are not mutually exclusive groups.
What are the variety of approaches historians, revisionists use and where do they overlap? Please stop being vague and making claims with no examples or evidence.
3) My comment about you making "sweeping" claims is clearly a reference to your OP. It is YOU who failed to offer any support. For example, you said, "I will happily explain and defend the methodology used by historians. They gather contemporaneous evidence to establish a chronological narrative of events, using corroboration to establish accuracy and truthfulness." But you didn't explain this at all. You simply asserted it. Your claims about revisionists are also simply assertions.
What do you need explaining? Do you really need instruction on what contemporaneous evidence historians gather? I doubt it, as the debates here are about the evidence historians have gathered. You must know what a chronological narrative is, as it is the basis of all histories. You also must by now, know what corroboration is and how it determines accuracy and truthfulness.
4) All of this has been discussed before. You have made this same thread probably four or five times on various forums.
Methodology interests me and it is revisionism's biggest fail, as it relies on illogical arguments, flawed analysis of the evidence, in particular the witnesses and it fails at the basic task of any historical or criminal investigation, establishing what happened.
Here is a post of mine from the last time you trotted this out.
My view is that it is the Holocaust side that is grossly out of the step with the ideals of free inquiry, scientific method, and rigorous history. Below are some irregularities that I pointed out in a recent post.
-Not allowing people to dispute it and insisting that the claims are settled with 100% certainty
There is much about the Holocaust that is not settled, for example the death tolls and to what extent senior Nazis organised the Final Solution. You are allowed to dispute events, but to do so, you need evidence that revises the history, not argument as to why you do not believe what happened. So, to dispute Sobibor was a death camp, you would need witnesses who worked there, documents pertaining to its operation or other contemporaneous evidence, that proves it had a function other than a mass killing center. You cannot argue that you think the gas chambers, mass graves and pyres were not physically possible, therefore they did not exist. You need evidence, such as GPR that proves the ground where witnesses claimed mass graves were located, was never dug up.
-Having a "brand name" for it ("The Holocaust"). This is not unique to the Holocaust, but it is not exactly typical.
Giving a historical event a name, is not all unusual, especially during Wars, where events are named after locations or operational names. Think D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge or the Holodomor.
-Having a fixed, sacred death toll (which persists to this day even though it is demonstrably ill-founded) (also, contrast this with the wildly varying figures for victims under Stalin or Mao)
The death toll is not fixed and its supposed sacred status is a denier trope. The 6 million is the commonly used toll, but most historians prefer a range, due to uncertainties and estimations. The Holocaust is no different to any other mass deaths, in that respect.
-Drawing sweeping conclusions based primarily on "testimony" collected after the war at war crimes trials run by the victors against their defeated enemy (which would obviously be very slanted)
Much of the witness evidence came from the Nazis and it has been collected by German investigators, both historians and the prosecutors who ran the bulk of the death camp staff trials.
You have never qualified victor status. Are Romanians, running war crimes trials, of Romanians who killed Jews, victors? What about French prosecutions of French collaborators who assisted the Nazis, which means France is admitting to an active role in the Holocaust, helping to kill French Jews?
-That it grew tremendously in public importance several decades after the war as Zionists gained power in the US (typically events wane in importance over time)
Many shameful historical events, take time to unfold. You forget, or ignore, or do not fully understand, that the Nazis had a lot of cooperation from citizens of the countries they occupied or were aligned to, and those countries had to face their role in the killing of their citizens. None have done so, with any enthusiasm and some, such as Latvia, are still in a state of denial.
Show me an example of a shameful event in a countries history, that country has openly and enthusiastically embraced from the start. I can show you many examples of where events have taken years, if not decades or centuries to be acknowledged, for example, the slave trade.
-Extensive reliance on mass media and commemoration rituals to condition the public. Memoirs (novels), movies, museums (shrines)
-Funding university chairs and research centers to promote within academia (not unique but notable)
I would again example the slave trade as a historical event that has followed a similar pattern of recognition as the Holocaust.
I have read a lot of the holocaust histories and I am consistently amazed at how flimsy the footnotes are, at least for the most crucial points, compared with what is being claimed. It simply isn't commensurate with what is alleged and especially with the level of certainty that is claimed (absolute certainty).
You really should provide examples and evidence for your claims.
Revisionist methods in contrast are completely normal and they are used routinely in other contexts; Often it's as simple as checking sources to see what they actually say. When this is done, we find out that Jews were using the six million figure in the middle of the war,
USHMM has an extensive library of newspaper reports from WWII, in which you will find that Jewish death tolls rose steadily throughout the war, as more evidence of mass killings was gathered. You cherry pick the use of 6 million, without checking other death tolls.
... that a variety of morgues, shower rooms, and fumigation chambers were claimed as "gas chambers."
Historians and the war crimes investigators had already established a number of claims were not backed by evidence, such as claims of mass gassing at Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. Revisionists have done no checking that had not already been done.
That a lot of the testimonies contain risible blunders.
You make no effort to analyse the witness evidence, taking into consideration, the numerous studies about memory, recall and estimations.
And so on. It's fine if you want to argue about whether our critiques are successful. But I do object to the morons who try to say that these methods are categorically invalid. That's just not true.
The way you assess the eyewitnesses, is designed to debunk all of them leaving you with no eyewitnesses at all. That alone should raise alarm bells as to how accurate your assessment is. The Holocaust involved millions of people, yet you cannot produce eyewitnesses to all of its most significant events.
When you dismiss a witness as a liar, because they made an estimation that cannot be accurate, or because of the emotive way they described what they saw, you are being inaccurate in your assessment.
Go look at any text that attempts to debunk something. You will find that they all pretty much do the same thing. Below is an example from a totally unrelated topic. It is an article from a mountaineering magazine where the author argues that the supposed first ascent of Cerro Terro in Patagonia was a fraud.
He did not argue it was a fraud, he evidenced it was a fraud.
If someone told you he had just run a 10-minute mile you would shrug your shoulders and say “so what.” If someone said he had just run a three-minute mile you would be amazed and skeptical, and a reasonable response would be to ask for evidence. Mountaineering reports sometimes fall into the latter category, and if evidence is not forthcoming one is left with the difficult decision of how to assess these claims.
Above the Col of Conquest, Maestri claims to have been able to ascend courtesy of a sheet of ice that covered the north ridge in its entirety. Maestri:“… we attack a crust of snow and ice of variable thickness, from 20 centimetres to one meter, which was carried by the wind and pressed against the blank slabs of the north ridge. For 300 meters we go up climbing on air.” Clearly this description is too vague to be evaluated seriously, and yet it is a good example of the lack of detail given by Maestri regarding the upper portion of their claimed climb (whereas the initial 300 meters are described in great detail).
https://pataclimb.com/knowledge/article ... veiled.pdf
When the weather finally improved we went back up and made it to the Col of Conquest and finally on Feb. 23rd, 1976 to the summit. After seeing a hundred plus artifacts in the first 1000 feet we were surprised to find nothing, zero, zip, nada in the remaining 1500 feet to the col. No rap anchors or fixed gear, absolutely nothing. Suspicious, even damning, but not absolute proof that Maestri lied. What seals the case is the fact that Maestri described the route to the col as it appears from below and the actual climbing is quite different from his account. He recounted the first 1000 feet, which he undoubtedly did, as difficult, which it is. He described the 1500 foot lower angled section leading to the traverse into the col as easy and the blank looking traverse into the col he proclaimed difficult, requiring some artificial aid. The converse is true: The climbing to the traverse is more difficult than it appears and the traverse into the col, due to a hidden ledge system impossible to see until you are on top of it, is by far the easiest part of the climb. There is no doubt in my mind that Maestri did not climb Cerro Torre in 1959. I also am convinced that he didn’t make it to the Col of Conquest.
Why did I write this, isn’t everyone aware that Maestri lied? Apparently not, the Trento Film Festival (trentofestival.it) this May is hosting a program about the history of Cerro Torre. Given that this years festival coincides with the 50th anniversary of Maestri’s adventure it is not surprising the Maestri will get more credence than he is due.
https://www.climbing.com/news/cerro-tor ... secration/
As we see, the authors make arguments over the technical implausibility, lack of evidence, contradictions, etc. This sort of thing is what anybody doing a debunk does.
The lack of any climbing equipment above a certain height, is physical evidence the equivalent to GPR finding undisturbed ground where a witness states a mass grave was located. That physical evidence, plus the inaccurate description of the route above that height, is circumstantial evidence that corroborates and proves the lie. That is how it was evidenced, not argued, the climb had not been completed. You cannot do that for the AR camps, and evidence they were not death camps.