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> To get grants in academia now (particularly in some spaces), you have to justify how it will have some form of social justice impact.

Correct. You need to show that your grant can “change the world” which is just another way of saying “create power”. And for whom? Who does this “research” or “studies” or “the science” (which isn’t actually science) give a claim to knowledge and thus power?

Follow the money as the journalists say.

So whatever you want to study has to generate power for someone. If your findings don’t show evidence of something that doesn’t then you’ll just stop receiving money and the ability to work. So of course academics have responded this way because it’s the incentive. It’s why everything is a “crisis”, etc.

I don't think she set out to deceive, and your stated reasons for thinking so don't pan out. I believe the author of the article is right: historians have to be conscious of their narrative or the narrative will write the history. That's not being deceptive in the normal sense of the word, it's catering to a perceived true narrative, and unconsciously suppressing anything that might undermine it.

Politicians do it all the time, but historians in particular should not do it. They still do: in this case painting a skewed picture of the ingenious slave, in other cases they might paint a picture of the glorious supremacy of the western civilization.

Not getting caught in such narratives is ... difficult.

> I don't think she set out to deceive, and your stated reasons for thinking so don't pan out.

I believe at this moment in time she is well aware of the claims against her paper. She has not released a rebuttal to the claims, likely because she doesn't have one (otherwise she would have used stronger evidence in her paper). Every day that goes by, she leaves the paper un-adapted and un-retracted, meaning that she knowingly propagates this false narrative. It is likely she has zero intention of retracting her paper unless the journal forces her.

> Politicians do it all the time, but historians in particular should not do it.

Neither should do it, but politicians are somewhat shorter lived.

> Not getting caught in such narratives is ... difficult.

Posing a narrative isn't necessarily negative, as long as it is plausible and supported by evidence. For example, you could read a very good argument for Europe being wrong to go to war with Nazi Germany and have very good arguments being made based on proper evidence. You don't have to agree with it, just respect a difference of opinion.

The paper the article addresses does not fall into this category.

https://jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com/remember-the-11-mi...

> Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli Holocaust scholar who chairs the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, said he warned his friend Wiesenthal, who died in 2005, about spreading the false notion that the Holocaust claimed 11 million victims — 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews.

> “I said to him, ‘Simon, you are telling a lie,’” Bauer recalled in a Jan. 31 interview. “He said, ‘Sometimes you need to do that to get the results for things you think are essential.’”

6 million murdered jews is about right and well proven by facts. Then we have another 3 million soviet POWs, half a million Sinti and Roma and euthanasie victims plus 3 odd million other civilian victims of the Nazis. Depending or your exact definition of the holocaust, 11 millions victims is pretty accurate.

Edit: General question, what is it with new accounts created, seemimgly, only for comments like yours? I don't see anything controversial in it that migjt justify a throwaway... Unless of course you are new to HN, in which cade, welcome!

Edit 2: It seems I have day checking links... well, you article quotes Bauer:

>>

“All Jews of the world had to be annihilated,” Bauer said. “That was the intent. There was never an idea in Nazi minds to murder all the Russians.”

With all due respect to Bauer, the Nazis deliberately killed Soviet POWs. And they considered them sub-human of sorts. Also tue, the Nazis basically started WW2 to murder all the jews. As I said, depends if where draw the line of the Holocaust, and whether or not you want to include non-jewish victims caught in the same industrial genocide complex seperately or not. It seems the question is not the number of victims, but rather under which column they are counted. >>

> Also tue, the Nazis basically started WW2 to murder all the jews.

I don't think that's true. It's a stupid point to start a war. Where's the profit for Germany in that?

While it's also true that Nazi Germany explicitly set to murder all Russians. There're numerous official Nazi documents confirming that. Most of the population was determined to be killed directly or by causing hunger (by capturing the only lands suitable for agriculture in the South-West of USSR).

But since the West in general always considered and continue to consider Russians as subhumans, there's no mention of this fact in western books, movies and articles.

The Nazis goal of the war was to eradicate all the jews. It was since, at least, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf. It shows in their actions, in how they organized, who got which resources. It was their goal, murdering all jews, and went about it with murderous and frighting efficiency. They only stopped outright murder in has chamber to enslave a portion of people ending up concentrations camps, the vast majority being jews, when Nazi Germany ran into work force issues. It was Speer who convinced Himmler that was necessary, so the Nazis settled for murder through work.

No idea what you mean that the Nazis behaviour regarding slaws, not just Russians, isn't talked about in the West. I am in the West, and I defenitely didn't learn about from Russian books. Also, claiming the West sees Russians as sub-human is a strong claim, to put it mildly...

One issue : Wansee takes place in 1942, that is in the middle of the war. Until now, most camps are "just" concentration (death by labour) camps, and Jews are mostly in the ghettos. Only after Wansee you have start of mass transports to death camps - most people who died in Auschwitz were never inmates there - they were brought from other countries, sorted on ramp and send to death. Not to mention - at that moment camps were already full of people (Auschwitz was started for Poles and Soviet POV). So no, they didn't "stop" with gas chambers - they have inmates in camps and Jews in ghettos (all having to work in one way or the other), and the idea of Final Solution wasn't complete until 1942 (and took place until 1944).

And the holocaust by bullets pre dates operation Barbarossa. Turned murdering millions of people requires more sophisticated logistics than your average, run of the mill genocide as all tjose done before. Hence Wannsee, the final solution, the extermination camps (of which Auschwitz wasn't one initially). The goal was clear from before the war started so, the means were somewhat less well defined.

Edit: As a supply chain and logistics guy myself, the logistics of the holocaust seem to be the only historical occurance the Germans got wartime logistics right. Eichmann was a really good supply chain guy, running a tremendously efficient operation from, and beware the following will be incredible cynical now, sourcing (getting jews concentrated in ghettos) with close collaboration of local suppliers (the SS, Gestapo and local authorities ranging from French police to the various collaborators in the east) over transportation (including Eichmann himself working on details like damaged passanger rail cars to keep his prime carrier, the Reichsbahn, happy) to the classification of people arriving in incredibly well run extermination factories in the occupied East. It is that efficiency, applied at murdering innocent people for a deprived ideology, that makes the holocaust stand out from all other genocides in history. And that was the main, if not even the only goal, of the Nazis behind WW2.

There's a massive scholarly debate about when exactly the Final Solution took shape, with one school of thought being that it wasn't until after the invasion of the USSR that extermination became the goal. Christopher Browning's _The Origins of the Final Solution_ [0] provides a good overview of this position.

[0] https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bison-books/9780803259799/

The Wannsee conference would be my choice for the date the final solution (gas chambers and exterminatiom camps and sich, the holocaust of bullets started right away) became official policy. Obviouspy all the back room decision have already been met by then, the Wannsee Conference being more of a working level implementation meeting.

> No idea what you mean that the Nazis behaviour regarding slaws, not just Russians, isn't talked about in the West. I am in the West, and I defenitely didn't learn about from Russian books. Also, claiming the West sees Russians as sub-human is a strong claim, to put it mildly...

The comment you replied to is somehow assuming that all slavs are / were Russians and that the Germans didn't somehow also murder a ton of Ukrainians and Poles, among others.

> the Nazis basically started WW2 to murder all the jews

Tim Snyder's explanation in Bloodlands is at odds with that story. There were very few Jews in Germany at the start of WWII. Initially, the goal was to deport them - somewhere (Madagascar!). The systematic killing of Jews came later, after Germany had invaded Poland (which contained a lot of Jews). The irony is that the Jewish population of Germany increased during the initial part of the war, with Polish Jews being interned in Germany.

Well, the holocaust of bullets started very early. In a sense, the final solution was, as cynical as it is, by the logostocal challenges of killing all jews by bullets (after there was shooting war going on at the same time) and the practical, and ideological, impossible solution of deporting them. Hence mass extermination camps as the only logical solution. Cynical bastards, all of them.

To get some better feeling, and insihjt, I can only recommend the original film, German, about the Wannsee Conference based on the actual meeting minutes.

> Also tue, the Nazis basically started WW2 to murder all the jews.

Hitler was driven by his desire to reunify the German peoples and his wanting to enable Germans to become economically self-sufficient and militarily secure. Within Germany, these goals were supported because the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended WWI, put terms on Germany such as paying financial reparations, disarm, give up territory, and give up all its oversears colonies.

After annexing Austria and Czechosloviakia, Germany invaded Poland in 1939. The French and British had guaranteed support should this happen, so they declared war on Germany, which started WWII.

A weird way to say Germany started WW2. Glad we can agree they did so.

Nobody disputed who started WWII, but you claimed a motivation which was incorrect, so I wanted to help you get that right.

And the motivation was, in the Fuhrer own words none the less (!), Lebensraum in the east (and enslaving the slavs there while doing it) and gwtting rid of the made up jewish-bolshevik conspirancy by killing both groups. Hard to accept, I know, but none the less true.

Actually the only mistake the Allies might have made, might have because it is hindsight, is not invading Germany in the West while the Wehrmacht was busy in Poland. History is history so. Seeing the causes of WW2 so, and the motivation of the Nazis, as anything else than what they are ia something I will leave unadressed so.

We actually can't. Russia and in particular Stalin was also there. Russia absorbed more Polish acreage than the Germans. I'm happy to agree with the phrase, "Germany and Russia, acting together, started WWII."

The Russian war with Finland did escalate into a world war so. That was the Germans and the Japanese. Stalin, for once, had actually nothing to with that particular shitty thing.

That seems more like nitpicking over definitions than anything relevant to this matter.

Your quote and several other parts of the story focus on the number being "made up" and yet the same person quoted by you also says:

> The problem, according to Bauer, who has debunked the number repeatedly in his writings over the decades, is not that non-Jews were not victims; they were. It is that Wiesenthal’s arbitrarily chosen tally of non-Jewish victims diminishes the centrality to the Nazi ideology of systematically wiping any trace of the Jewish people from the planet.

> In fact, he said, the term “genocide” could accurately be applied to the 2 million to 3 million Poles murdered and millions more enslaved by the Nazis. But the mass murder of the Poles, Roma and others should not come under the rubric “Holocaust,”

So that's up to 3 million Poles, up to half a million Roma, which only requires "others" to make up 1.5 million for the "made up" number to be exactly correct. A quick Google suggests about a quarter of a million disabled people, 20 thousand gay men. So in reality this seems a surprisingly accurate "lie".

What he appears to be mostly concerned about is that the term "Holocaust" be a specific term for the Nazi genocide of Jews, and other terms be used for their genocide of other groups.

If anything, his dramatic quote about telling Simon Wiesenthal he was spreading a lie is a better example of someone using drama to advance their opinion

> ‘Sometimes you need to do that to get the results for things you think are essential.’

Yeah, which is a quote relayed by a guy who disagreed with that person was doing and who seems to have a real bee in his bonnet about the topic under discussion, calling it a "lie" when I can't see any dispassionate observer agreeing with that characterisation.

Did the person allegedly quoted actually think it was lie? Seems amazingly lucky that he got so close to the real figure if he did. It feels like someone saying "sometimes you got to break the law to get things done" because they jaywalked in the middle of the night when out buying some milk. The drama of the comment just doesn't seem plausible at first glance.

Your count here relies heavily on the 2-3 million Poles, but to the best of my understanding, those were killed in war, either during actual battle or during the Wehrmacht's pillage and destruction. I say that because, according to the article, only ("only" ... yeah) 0.5 million non-Jews died in concentration camps:

> While as many as 35 million people were killed overall because of Nazi aggression, the number of non-Jews who died in the concentration camps is no more than half a million, Bauer said.

... so I can't see a way to reconcile that with the figure for Poles except by considering them overwhelmingly casualties of war, not a policy of extermination.

And so, as far as I can see, the original article is broadly right and your comment is inaccurate.

Your understanding is wrong, see here for details:

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/polish-vic...

I see, thank you.

EDIT: Also, this linked page on this very topic was pretty interesting to me. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documentin...

> I don't think she set out to deceive, and your stated reasons for thinking so don't pan out.

If you don't think that, then you should read her Twitter, at which is pinned to the top her paper with this introductory text: "This paper details how an innovation some historians have called 1 of the top 10 of the industrial revolution was first developed in the late 18C by 76 Black Jamaicans in a foundry just west of Morant Bay, but the central concern of the paper is much more important.. 1/4"

I read her x-twitter, and it doesn't support the notion that she has set out to deceive - at all. Instead it oozes of someone who is convinced that slaves and peoples of the colonies have got a bad rap (that's true btw) and that her research rectifies that injustice to some extent.

If you read her detractors you will find that absolutely no-one accuses her of "setting out to deceive", what they are saying that her conclusions (while they could be true) are not sufficiently backed up by hard facts. And that she has got some of her facts wrong.

"Setting out to deceive" is a fairly serious accusation to level at a historian, claims that need more proof than pointing to a pinned tweet saying "she still sticks to her story" even though someone on the internet (credibly) found her conclusions to be tenuous.

    They are leaving academia and receiving a minimum of double salary in the private sector.

Historians? If so, can you name a few example? I find this hard to believe.

Good academics don't need to work in their field. Just any generic clerk position will do.

I have a friend who was a historian and now works as a data analyst for a SEO agency and makes more than double their previous salary. They had no particular expertise in SEO or data beyond being able to use Excel and being able to think and write clearly.

> Historians? If so, can you name a few example? I find this hard to believe.

I was speaking more generally about academics who are under pressure from the current political bias. As other comments have mentioned though, the critical thinking required for good historian work is also quite broadly applicable elsewhere.

In America I can believe it. The US government doesn't fund cultural institutions very much. It's all left to private institutions (who frequently have political and ideological agendas).

Nah, both public and private universities in the US are pushing this political and ideological agenda. I'm not aware of any systematic pay difference for academics in public vs private universities - for example, Stanford (private) pays similarly to Berkeley (public), and they have similar politics. Both pay much less than private sector for anyone who can get an academic job at one of those institutions.

Your comment is a little more applicable to museums and the arts, but the US government funds all universities, both public and private, pretty lavishly. Unfortunately the university administrators have a habit of accruing much of that funding to themselves and leaving the academics relatively little.

There are other examples of this genre of history. Here is a debunking from the claim that Vikings were Muslim because something resembling the word "Allah" in Sufic was found on a Viking textile. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/allah-viking...

There are more claims in this genre if you look for them: Hidden Figures, White House built by slaves, 1619 Project. There is probably more and there should be a compendium of false history. The common theme is that Europeans are evil and lack ability but their relative success is explained by theft and oppression from non-white people.