Owns Gone Wrong Part Two

Part 1

It’s time for another installment of “Owns Gone Wrong,” a segment where people who disagree with me—and therefore are wrong—make an argument for their side but end up helping mine instead.

For today’s episode let’s start by taking a look at the Twitter (X) account of “Max Ou.” Max has been on Twitter (X) for quite a while and made a lot of posts. Not many people are interested in his crusade against revisionists, as evidenced by his small follower count and low engagement.

Max has a habit of parachuting into my threads every time I mention Robert Faurisson. I recently had the following interaction with Max. (You can find the article I am referencing here.)

Here is the statement that I referenced in my tweet. It was taken from an article in Le Monde, a French newspaper:

It must not be asked how, technically, such a mass murder was possible. It was technically possible given that it took place. That is the requisite point of departure of any historical inquiry on this subject. It is incumbent upon us to simply state this truth: there is not, there cannot be, any debate about the existence of the gas chambers.

I was skeptical that this statement could be taken out of context and could mean anything other than “the Holocaust is possible because it happened so shut up about it.” Nonetheless I clicked on the PHDN article provided by Max.

I ended up being thankful that Max shared the PHDN article. One benefit I gained is that it gave me the opportunity to do something I had been wanting to do since I wrote the original article on this matter— that being to have the article translated into English. I requested the article from Le Monde, but all they gave me was a scanned image article, a major roadblock. But since PHDN provided the text of the Le Monde article I was able to easily translate it into English, albeit a crude machine translation.

The basic argument here is that the snippet of text from the PHDN that has become a meme amongst revisionists is taken out of context in a dishonest way. They claim that the article succeeds in proving the Holocaust, therefore saying that it is not necessary to question it is completely valid. We will get back to that in a bit. First I will address the following cope that the paragraph with the snippet in question was clumsy and easily exploitable:

When we have the entire paragraph, we are met with even more hyperbole. The reader is accused of “outraging the truth” if they dare question the Holocaust. The reader is told that the default is that the Holocaust happened and we know that the Holocaust is possible because it happened. Thus the statement from my tweet, “In 1979 Robert Faurisson was totally wrecked by 34 French historians when they said that we know the Holocaust is possible because it happened so shut up about it,” is not negated by further context of the paragraph. Instead it is enhanced by it.

Now I will address the following statement from the PHDN article:

Since 1979, this passage has been brandished by negationists as proof that there is a taboo and a radical inability to support the historical reality of the gas chambers (and therefore of the entire genocide since the negationist discourse, centered on one of the emblematic means of extermination, aims to deny the whole by denying its part). It is obviously never cited in the context of the entire declaration, a device that included a bibliography whose presence (always hidden by the negationists) and nature guaranteed the rigor and solidity of the historians’ argument, which moreover followed other articles by historians already cited (but never mentioned in this context by the negationists). To pass over this entire device in silence is part of the negationist bad faith.

I’d like to quickly point out that for all of PHDN’s complaining about dishonesty from revisionists, they engage in dishonesty by adding links to the text of the Le Monde article. None of that added information was available to the Le Monde readers. Moving on, PHDN is claiming that by leaving out the rigorous argument made by the historians that revisionists are being dishonest in their assessment of the concluding paragraph. In order for academics and historians to be justified in declaring that the facts of the Holocaust “unfortunately took place and no one can deny their existence without outraging the truth,” they would need to prove the Holocaust happened in their essay. This is not something that simply can be done with one page in a newspaper (see image below).

All the historians do is make disputed assertion after disputed assertion. None of the assertions have a direct citation; rather, there is a short bibliography at the end. This leaves the average reader with no idea where each assertion came from. And just because you can cite something from a book or other resource doesn’t make it true. All of my claims come from books. Yet historians like the ones who wrote the Le Monde essay would reject my assertions because they didn’t come from the right books—the right books being the ones that assumes the Holocaust narrative as fact. Thus the PHDN argument falls apart and the meme remains valid.

Critiquing the Le Monde article is beyond the scope of this article. However, I will be addressing it in the future. How could I not pick it apart considering one of the sources is Elie Wiesel’s Night? A book that says Jews were murdered in fire pits, not gas chambers? So look forward to that.