The Holocaust did not take place

> /leftypol/

B&RP

We know.

We need more Baudrillard conspiracy posting.

bump

We are cut off from the events of the holocaust by the mass media. Now the holocaust is not horrifying or real for us, it is merely fascinating. It can be turned into an industry or into a television program, and we are fascinated but ultimately indifferent about it and whether it really ever happened. Cut off, fascinated, indifferent, but still attracted by the images of extermination and destruction, we are nostalgic and replay the holocaust in retro because there is no longer anything in our society that produces such images. It is the same situation with fascism: we are fascinated by the Nazis today but ultimately indifferent and can only make them a nostalgic retro mass media image.

“We need to stop talking about nazis plz”

Obviously not. Imagine having millions of people you hate in captivity, deliberately attempting to kill them all, and somehow failing over the course of four years.

The Holocaust is basically an accusation that the Nazis were so BAD at Genocide that they couldn't exterminate a captive people over the course of half a decade. And when they were at the point where they knew they were going to lose, they just sort of gave up and decided to leave millions of people alive to testify against them for atrocities they had only committed halfway.

The Holocaust definitely took place, it just wasn’t focused entirely on Jews like American children are taught to believe. Jews were roughly half of the victims. Poles were targeted equally

>like American children are taught to believe
we unironically spent more time learning about the holocaust than the entirety of American history, part of the reason why I'm so anti-semetic today. You can tell that the value of teaching it has much more to do with preserving and proliferating post war ideology than any historical value it might have.

bump

based

I know this is a shitpost but it may as well not have. Baudrillard was 100 percent right regarding the way media representation renders events as little more than advertisements

I still don't get it. What does the media representation have to do with the holocaust itself

An extremely simplified version of Baudrilalrd's theory is to think about the media reproductions of historical events as a tape loop which disintegrates and gets more and more garbled the more it repeats. That's why he said the Gulf War didn't happen in the first place because it was from the outset a cinematic reproduction of a historical event that hadn't happened

This, I learned about the holocaust like every year, in multiple classes not just history

So basically is he saying that the idea we have that we call the holocaust is not what actually happened

yeah. but other times in history, people had ideas of what happened that weren't actually what happened, but this had social and artistic meaning for them, like the battle of waterloo. the holocaust for us is just something on tv and in movies and griped about on social media and in textbooks that doesn't actually mean anything whatsoever.

Yeah but it's even more than that. Because we are in a time where the last people who actually lived through ww2 and the holocaust are going to be dead soon, the only narrative we have of it will be Hollywood films and other spectacular media representation which, both because they are literally fiction and also because they are made to push a certain ideology or to make as much profit as possible, will literally make the holocaust seem like a myth to the next generation. Basically even if you know that it didn't actually happen like how Hollywood or the history channel portrays you will still filter any reading of it through that portrayal and thus it will only become more fantastic as time goes on, and with those who actually have memories of it gone, despitevit being an empirical historical event, it will amount to little more than its fictional representation

How is that different than the books people used to write about historical events before the modern forms of media?

In a sense it isnt. Baudrilalrd's point wasn't that this phenomenon is specific to modern media just that it's the most efficient means of creating spectacle out of history and that it does so intentionally and in some instances (such as the Gulf Wars) in a premeditated fashion

That does make sense. The instantaneous nature of modern communication technologies is definitely unprecedented.

Yeah that's why baudrillard was referred to as a "post marxist" before the term postmodernism became en vogue. His early work has to do with how capitalism specifically constructs narratives out of potential future historical events in order to monopolize it's control over their ideological consequences. His basic point is that to some degree all precious socioeconomic civilizations have participated in making myth outvof history but only in capitalism is it not an accident and in many cases is actually entirely premeditated

I get what you're saying and it's an interesting insight. I'm not a Marxist so I would say that it's not just capitalists that do this, but I know that in Marxist thought the entire society is just capitalism at heart, and we don't need to argue over that, I get what Baudrillard is saying about the phenomenon, even if I think it could be applied differently because of my different views of the philosophy of history.

In any case thanks for explaining.

Then how should they represent it, pray tell?

>but only in capitalism is it not an accident and in many cases is actually entirely premeditated
Are you fucking kidding me? And battleship potemkin wasn't making making myth out of history?

This is brilliant

battleship Potemkin was making myth out of history, just as the battle of waterloo was mythologized . in postmodernity or whatever you want to call it, it is precisely myth and history that are no longer at stake, just the simulation and duplication of models in mass media.
the mass media should not represent anything

The point isn't that other cultures didn't partake in propaganda but that only in western liberal capitalism does propaganda become real. For instance in the Soviet union the populace knew what was and wasn't bullshit. In the Western neoliberal global order the real and the fiction literally don't have a border between them anymore.

>it is precisely myth and history that are no longer at stake, just the simulation and duplication of models in mass media.
Can you try putting that into fucking prose?

>the mass media should not represent anything
I'm honestly at a loss for words.

>For instance in the Soviet union the populace knew what was and wasn't bullshit.
I'm glad that you can read the minds of the average prole in the soviet union.

>Can you try putting that into fucking prose?
>I'm honestly at a loss for words.
if you're going to be a whiny fag, no ;)

>For instance in the Soviet union the populace knew what was and wasn't bullshit.
That's because, immensely ironically, they were ruled by a dictator who was fairly up front with what was going on, despite his facile dissimulations that nobody really believed.

It's the exact same way that peasants living under a monarch are basically aware of what's going on. Western progressive 'democracy' is uniquely good at lying and propaganda, and it's not because of capitalism, unless you tie capitalism intimately to the political systems like democracy and republicanism, it's because lying to the population is the basic structure of democracy, which was only accelerated by the new technologies.

I can't believe Im saying this but you should read Moldbug, he covers this in detail, how the immense amount of covert and sophisticated lying our elites do is second to none. He hates 20th century America more than any Communist ever did, because the Communists did in fact engage in those practices as well, it was just a lot less sophisticated, because they were basically run by dictators, and everyone knew the deal on some level.

Nigger it's true. The eastern Europeans want communism back in spite of its imperfections not because they don't realize them.

Yes potekim was propaganda. But it's a film and everyone knows that. The news coverage of both Iraq wars literally is a combo between real and unreal

As long as you don't shit the thread up any more with your pseud shit, that's fine with me

>The eastern Europeans want communism back in spite of its imperfections not because they don't realize them.
If they really wanted it back, they could vote for it, yet they don't

Sounds reminiscent of Gramsci to me

>imagine having millions of people you hate in captivity, deliberately attempting to kill them all, and somehow failing over the course of four years.

Are you under impression that the Nazis kept all the Jews in extermination camps?

>And when they were at the point where they knew they were going to lose, they just sort of gave up and decided to leave millions of people alive to testify against them for atrocities they had only committed halfway.

They burnt the Camps down and sent the inmates on Death marches. This isn't obscure knowledge, literally any retard with access to wikipedia can find this shit out.

>The eastern Europeans want communism back
only retarded boomers and power hungry r*ssians want that

It definitely is.

themoscowtimes.com/2019/04/16/stalins-approval-rating-among-russians-hits-record-high-poll-a65245

>they could vote for it
lmao, no. That's not how this stuff works.

Approving "of Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s role in Russian history" is hardly the same thing as wanting communism back.

Yes it is

Yeah but they don't vote for communist parties. They're nostalgic boomers missing the old days.

>for atrocities they had only committed halfway
what does this mean

Attached: vince and mel.png (700x518, 371K)