Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Ugly Voice Productions and the Holocaust

Roberto has already debunked a couple of items from a collection of short videoclips trying to "refute" the Holocaust. I decided to take a look too. Well, the videos are quite ugly - it must be both the voice (yuck) and arrogant stupidity, so usual for deniers. I think in time we will comment on all these little masterpieces of idiocy.

Let's take a look at "episode" 14 [YouTube version], "Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation and Sobibor witness Alexander Pechersky".

Read more!

The first "argument" is that if Pechersky learned so much about the camp while preparing for an escape, why did he prepare such a rough sketch of the camp.

Oh please, what's the point? We know that there was an escape (if only because it is mentioned in several German documents, including the one informing us that a couple of German planes, looking for escapees, crashed (great!)) and that Pechersky led it. So what if this accurate post-war sketch is not very pretty? Compare it to Kurt Bolender's sketch. Or maybe the point is that it is not very detailed? Well, why should it have been? According to Pechersky's comment on the sketch, it was done during interrogation. I.e. it probably was just a visual aid.

Such is the "revisionist" "logic". But it gets better.

Skipping absolutely irrelevant blather about the movie Escape from Sobibor, let's move to the part where the owner of the ugly voice claims that Pechersky loses all credibility because of his incorrect description of the murder process.

It so happens that I have already discussed this claim here, at this blog. I don't have much to add, except that Mattogno, whom the Ugly Voice quotes approvingly, is also exposed as a liar for the same reason that Graf is a liar. I.e., the Ugly Voice and his videos have lost all credibility.

Next the Ugly Voice jumps from Pechersky to another witness, Yaakov Biskowitz. This witness has also been discussed by L. Prytulak in his article about Barry, which I have debunked. The Ugly Voice probably took this line of argument straight from Prytulak.

Even though the witness was wrong about the collapsing floor, he explicitly stated that he "did not see that". So, again, what all the fuss is about? There's nothing wrong with Arad using those parts of Biskowitz's testimony which are based on what he had seen with his own eyes. And, to repeat, he said that he did not see the collapsing floor. Just because he repeated a rumor, the rest of his testimony does not suddenly become discredited. Many witnesses would repeat rumors, and when they distinguish what they have heard from what they have seen, their testimonies may be used.

Forgetting all about Sobibor and Pechersky, the Ugly Voice tries to make some point about something (?) from the fact that Israelis failed to preserve most tapes from the Eichmann trial. The Ugly Voice says:
In an article in The Nation we read what Israel's Holocaust Museum did with the footage...
But the article does not even contain the word "museum"! And according to this site the tapes were dispersed among institutions, around the world. What is the Ugly Voice's source for his claim that it was exactly "Israel's Holocaust Museum" (presumably, Yad Vashem) that did not care about the tapes?

Finally, the Ugly Voice drags out that old, tired canard about crematoria chimneys not being able to produce flames. Um, but even denier guru Mattogno concedes that chimneys can produce flames:
The above arguments do not mean that no flames would ever have come from these chimneys; we merely argue that the phenomenon is not directly related to the incineration, i.e., to the burning of corpses. As opposed to this aspect, the phenomenon may well occur as an indirect side-effect of the incineration, i.e., as a result of the combustion of the coke used as a fuel for these furnaces.

It is well known that under conditions of incomplete combustion carbonaceous fuels will produce carbon particles, which will deposit on the walls of the smoke ducts in the form of soot. Under appropriate conditions (if the soot layer is sufficiently thick and the temperature sufficiently high) the soot will ignite and flames will indeed emanate from the chimney.

In pre-war times, when the average European household was using wood, coke, or coal almost exclusively for home-heating, such cases were so common that the phenomenon was, on occasion, produced intentionally for scientific studies. For instance, in early 1933, such experiments were carried out in a nearly abandoned four-story building in Berlin. A diagram shows that 95 minutes after the ignition of the soot on the first floor one meter above ground level the combustion temperature of the soot in the smokestack reached 1060°C. This is not really surprising, for soot consists of carbon having an ignition temperature of 700°C.

Obviously, this phenomenon will not occur continuously, but only at times, because it depends essentially on the accumulation of a sufficiently thick layer of soot, and that requires some time. It is clear that this phenomenon is unrelated to the reports of eyewitnesses who speak of flaming smokestacks as a direct consequence of the incineration of corpses.
Of course, Mattogno is being disingenuous when he implies that witnesses' wrong interpretations of what they saw, somehow discredit their testimonies. So, some witnesses thought that flames from the chimneys were directly related to the incineration process. They were wrong. Does that somehow mean that they did not see the flames? No. But, to repeat, Mattogno confirms that the flames could have appeared from the crematoria chimneys. And that's all what we need to debunk the Ugly Voice (who did not get the memo).

I should note some tricks that were used in this clip - it was obviously designed to appeal to racial/ethnic minorities, such as African-Americans and Native Americans. That seems to be the new strategy of denial, as expressed by Patrick H. McNally in a letter to Adelaide Institute mailing list on June 28, 2006:
Fredrick,
I am very saddened that a law professor would make such a serious and
silly mistake as Fraser made. Why is he picking Blacks out of a clear blue
sky and attacking them?

Is he so blind that he does not see that elite Joory just delights when
people make this "David Duke" kind of mistake. As his defense, he should
study Israel Shahak`s book, "Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel." There he
will learn that there was no fiercer anti-Black than the the Rabbi
Maimonides.

When will we learn to focus on our one real enemy, our one serious threat,
the one pseudo-religion of Talmudic racism that hates all humans. We
urgently need all the allies we can find: Black, White, Brown, Yellow,
Green, Red, whatever. There are even some honest Jews who are outraged by
the crimes being committed in their name.

Very saddened,
Patrick H.



Click here to read refutations of other Ugly Voice Productions videoclips.

3 comments:

  1. It’s not that easy to brush off the mistaken crucial testimony of the handful of existing important witnesses like Pechersky, Biskowitz and Radjman as just rumors between inmates. Someone may then argue that maybe the entire gassing story was just another rumor, perhaps like the soap story. Let alone that one by one the true eyewitness list is dwindling down to nothing.

    It’s a little hard to believe that Pechersky or Biskowitz or whoever related the collapsing floor story to them could have been confused with something else. Here we have collapsing floors, trolleys going back and forth, rails coming out of the basement of the gas chambers, I assume ditches or tunnels for the rails, I guess inmates pushing a button or pulling a lever to start the process and inmates unloading bodies at the other end etc. The official story now contains nothing even remotely close to that.

    Considering that Pechersky had meticulously learned everything about the camp so he can plan an escape, even if he didn’t personally witness the killing area, he must have known that there was no such elaborate system of extermination in place. The fact that he is inventing or repeating an outlandish story does not bear well on his credibility.

    The “collapsing floor-trolley run” story sounds very much like a post war concoction in order to attach a little German hi-tech element to the whole process; dragging tens of thousands of bodies by hand wouldn’t give the desired impression that this was a well designed and centrally organized killing operation.

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  2. "It’s not that easy to brush off the mistaken crucial testimony of the handful of existing important witnesses like Pechersky, Biskowitz and Radjman as just rumors between inmates. Someone may then argue that maybe the entire gassing story was just another rumor, perhaps like the soap story."

    Non sequitur (conclusion doesn't follow from premises).

    "Here we have [...] rails coming out of the basement of the gas chambers"

    A lie on part of "t.s.road".

    "Considering that Pechersky had meticulously learned everything about the camp so he can plan an escape, even if he didn’t personally witness the killing area, he must have known that there was no such elaborate system of extermination in place."

    No, he mustn't have known, and Pechersky's source is clearly stated by him.

    "The fact that he is inventing or repeating an outlandish story does not bear well on his credibility."

    Pechersky's repetition of a false rumor, while clearly stating the source of the rumor, does not bear at all on his credibility as an eyewitness.

    "The “collapsing floor-trolley run” story sounds very much like a post war concoction in order to attach a little German hi-tech element to the whole process; dragging tens of thousands of bodies by hand wouldn’t give the desired impression that this was a well designed and centrally organized killing operation."

    And "T.S.Road" sounds like another denier idiot and conspiraloon.

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