True Left

The present-day historiography of the capital-h 'Holocaust' as a sacred thing everyone needed to talk about seems to have started in the late 1970s:


This image is from the Google Ngram Viewer, which analyzes how frequently words have been used in digitized books, etc., and was produced for the article below.

In the course of reporting "A Liberator, But Never Free," about the recent discovery of the late Dr. David Wilsey’s letters home from the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, one intriguing semantic anomaly transfixed every expert consulted: the Spokane anesthesiologist’s persistent use of the word “holocaust” to describe the horrors all around him.
[...]
Yet for decades after the war, the genocide lacked any formal title in English except, perhaps, “The Final Solution,” the term the Nazis used. In Hebrew, the calamity quickly became known as “Shoah,” which means “the catastrophe.” But it wasn’t until the 1960s that scholars and writers began using the term “Holocaust,” and it took the 1978 TV film Holocaust, starring Meryl Streep, to push it into widespread use.
[...]
Allied governments, Donahue said, downplayed the extent of the peril to Jews in their rally-the-homefront propaganda materials, for fear that many non-Jews wouldn’t be willing to fight and die for what was still a marginalized religious minority regarded suspiciously even in the U.S. Wilsey himself reflected those attitudes in a letter on April 4, 1945, in which he complains about a Jewish anesthesiologist he was forced to bunk with. “ Dear, medicine is so full of them, so usurped by them, so progressively becoming ruled by them — that we white men just must not do all we can to help them.” A paragraph later, in fact, he blames his Jewish colleague’s “Prussianism”—his Eastern European background—for “exactly what has caused 3 holocaustic wars.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/121807/when-holocaust-became-holocaust

Lol, the person who first used the term "holocaust" to describe the events of WWII blamed Jewish attitudes for causing WWII! That tidbit will certainly not be printed in history textbooks. Nor will things such as the diary entries of people like General Patton (who complained about the attitudes of Jewish journalists who were covering the US military occupation in Germany).


There's countless famous quotations claiming victors write history. But the real power is the fact that the victors are the ones who get to teach history and shape the "official" narrative of what we accept as reality. Even if they don't outright make anything up, they pick and choose which pieces of information to include and which to selectively exclude, to shape what we think is important and what we will remain ignorant to. When it comes to facts of dubious accuracy, well, the vast majority of people don't care about facts and rational argumentation (and, even if they did, there is too much information in existence for every person to possibly process). The vast majority don't care about history either--it's just a subject they are forced to take in school and don't pay any attention to. They only care about the peer pressure to adhere to "accepted" narratives and the taboo against acknowledging unpopular narratives as potentially legitimate.

However, what narratives are "accepted" can rapidly change, yet we are rarely aware of these changes in paradigm. We often just think what we had been taught is how the narrative has always been taught. Again, this is much more powerful than simply writing down history after it happens. What has been written will always be there--the truth, the lies, and the half truths--but which pieces are ignored and which are included in the narrative of history can always change. Who knows, 100 years from now the manner in which WWII is taught could completely change, and no one alive then would even realize how the war is taught today!


To give another example of changing narratives of history, over the past few decades there's been a lot of revisionism trying to rehabilitate the legacy of Genghis Khan, apparently in a misguided (or intentionally misleading) attempt to be "woke".

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (2004) is a history book written by Jack Weatherford, Dewitt Wallace Professor of Anthropology at Macalester College. It is a narrative of the rise and influence of Genghis Khan and his successors, and their influence on European civilization. Weatherford provides a different slant on Genghis Khan than has been typical in most Western accounts, attributing positive cultural effects to his rule.

In the last section, he reviews the historiography of Genghis Khan in the West and argues that the leader's early portrayal in writings as an "excellent, noble king" changed to that of a brutal pagan during the Age of Enlightenment.
[...]
The book suggests that the western depiction of the Mongols as savages who destroyed civilization was due to the Mongols' approach to dealing with the competing leadership classes. The Mongols practiced killing the ruling classes in order to subdue the general population, a technique used by other cultures as well. Survivors of the upper classes wrote the histories and expressed resentment of Mongol brutality toward them. Weatherford explores the Mongol treatment of the general population (peasants, tradesmen, merchants) under Mongol rule. He suggests their rule was less burdensome than that of European nobility due to lighter taxes, tolerance of local customs and religions, more rational administration, and universal education for boys.

These benefits were enjoyed only by populations who surrendered immediately to the Mongol invaders. Those populations that resisted could be massacred as a warning to other towns/cities. These massacres were a method of psychological warfare to alert those populations not yet conquered. The resulting terror helped color the historical portrayal of the Mongols.
[...]
Weatherford explores Genghis Khan's legacy and influence; he attributes many aspects of the Renaissance, such as the spread of paper and printing, the compass, gunpowder and musical instruments such as the violin, to the influence of trade enabled by Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire. Weatherford suggests that the European Renaissance was a rebirth, not of Greece or Rome, but of concepts from the Mongol Empire. He notes the following:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan_and_the_Making_of_the_Modern_World

Yet:

One estimate is that about 11% of the world's population was killed either during or immediately after the Mongol invasions (around 37.75 - 60 million people in Eurasia).[1] If the calculations are accurate, the events would be the deadliest acts of mass killings in human history.

Oliver Chancellor conducted research and found that the Mongol invasions induced population displacement "on a scale never seen before", particularly in Central Asia and Eastern Europe, and that "the impending arrival of the Mongol hordes spread terror and panic".[2]
[...]
The reputation of guaranteed genocide on those who fought them allowed the Mongols to hold vast territories long after their main force had moved on. Even if the tumens (tyumens) were hundreds or thousands of miles away, the conquered people would usually not dare to interfere with the token Mongol occupying force since they feared a likely Mongol return.
[...]
As Mongol conquests spread, that form of psychological warfare proved effective at suppressing resistance to Mongol rule. There were tales of lone Mongol soldiers riding into surrendered villages and executing peasants at random as a test of loyalty. It was widely known that a single act of resistance would bring the entire Mongol army onto a town to obliterate its occupants.
[...]
Genghis Khan was largely tolerant of multiple religions, but there are many cases of him and other Mongols engaging in religious war even if the populations were obedient. He passed a decree charging all Taoist followers to pay more taxes. All campaigns involved deliberately destroying places of worship.[6]

Ancient sources described Genghis Khan's conquests as wholesale destruction on an unprecedented scale in certain geographical regions, causing great demographic changes in Asia. According to the works of the Iranian historian Rashid al-Din (1247–1318), the Mongols killed more than 700,000 people in Merv and more than 1,000,000 in Nishapur. The total population of Persia may have dropped from 2,500,000 to 250,000 as a result of mass extermination and famine. Population exchanges also sometimes occurred.[7]
[...]
The Mongols practised biological warfare by catapulting diseased cadavers into the cities they besieged. It is believed that fleas remaining on the bodies of the cadavers may have acted as vectors to spread the Black Death.
[...]
For example, there is a noticeable lack of Chinese literature from the Jin dynasty, predating the Mongol conquest, and in the Siege of Baghdad (1258), libraries, books, literature, and hospitals were burned: some of the books were thrown into the river in quantities sufficient to turn the Tigris black with ink for several months".[17][18] [19][20]; as well as "In one week, libraries and their treasures that had been accumulated over hundreds of years were burned or otherwise destroyed. So many books were thrown into the Tigris River, according to one writer, that they formed a bridge that would support a man on horseback" [21]

The Mongols' destruction of the irrigation systems of Iran and Iraq turned back millennia of effort in building irrigation and drainage infrastructure in these regions. The loss of available food as a result may have led to the death of more people from starvation in this area than the actual battle did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_under_the_Mongol_Empire

How many times have you seen people repeat the narrative about Genghis Khan actually being "progressive" for his time and not that bad? (Even a series as "woke" as Assassin's Creed pushes this narrative of Genghis Khan!) Simply reading a few paragraphs of the Wikipedia article above could have corrected their beliefs. But they didn't bother, since narratives (i.e. propaganda) are more powerful and compelling than facts alone.


And, of course, don't get us started on discussing communist apologists who don't even try to downplay the carnage and oppression of communist regimes, and are still able to embrace communism and cling on to the tiniest examples of how communism is supposedly positive! But it is somehow too taboo to examine any of the positives of the National Socialist regime, solely because they allegedly killed....tens of millions fewer people than the Soviets or Mongols...? I guess it's because the communists and Weatherford's narrative of Genghis Khan don't fundamentally challenge Western Civilization, and therefore such narratives are allowed to exist within the Overton Window.


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And, just for fun, if you like to read deeply into things:

From the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica:

HOLOCAUST (Gr. ὁλοκαυστον, or ὁλόκαυτον, wholly burnt), strictly a sacrifice wholly destroyed by fire, such as the sacrifices of the Jews, described in the Pentateuch as “whole burnt offerings”

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/39232/39232-h/39232-h.htm#ar175

From Webster's Dictionary, 1913:

HOLOCAUST
1. A burnt sacrifice; an offering, the whole of which was consumed by fire, among the Jews and some pagan nations. Milton.

2. Sacrifice or loss of many lives, as by the burning of a theater or a ship.

Note: [An extended use not authorized by careful writers.]

SCAPEGOAT
1. (Jewish Antiq.)

Defn: A goat upon whose head were symbolically placed the sins of the people, after which he was suffered to escape into the wilderness. Lev. xvi. 10.

2. Hence, a person or thing that is made to bear blame for others. Tennyson.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29765


So Zionist historians/propagandists scapegoated the Jews as the biggest victims of WWII, who were then capital-H holocausted... And Yahweh certainly rewarded them for their offering.