User talk:Nishidani/Archive 31

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AE

I still don't see why you can't post there but I can post something there on your behalf if you like. Mind you, they do insist on diffs there :) Selfstudier (talk) 15:47, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

That would be WP:Meatpuppetry:) I can't work efficiently on this baby computer so I couldn't work up diffs, which in any case for me take hours and I hate wasting time. Nableezy, who pleaded on behalf of going easy on Tombah when he was up for a serious sanction, replied to one of Tombah's outrageously partisan suggestions on the Israel talk page recently by mimicking what would happen if one rewrote with a pronounced Palestinian POV what Tombah concocted with his inflammatory pro-Israeli POV. What we have here is a matter of a po calling Ma and Pa Kettle black because that's all they see of and in them. Tombah's suggestion, and Nableezy's reply, puts the finger on the former's total inability to see anything other than in terms of the official copyandpaste blahblah you find on government sites. This was serious because whatever the respective POVs, mopst editors were working hard on a balanced compromise. Palraz is not good at, or even interested in, I gather, defending himself. But he should grasp that in this area, there are many editors whose only interest in AE/ANI is to use the venues to get rid of discomforts they experience when they encounter editors familiar with the scholarly literature on the topic. One misstep, and you're dead. The quality of information is irrelevant. That is why nearly 99% of serious article construction in this area ends up being done by people wrongly labelled as 'pro-Palestinian', as opposed to being people who diligently study what Israeli and diaspora scholarship writes about the conflict (rather than browse newspapers). AhiméNishidani (talk) 16:49, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

That would be WP:Meatpuppetry:) Of course with attribution. Pot and kettle seems quite appropriate here. Selfstudier (talk) 17:56, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

I'm somewhat saddened by the probable effects of this utterly useless report. DP’s silence here and elsewhere only reminds me of a novel, Richard Powers’s Bewilderment. There are so many people around who can and do contribute knowledgeably to the encyclopedia but cannot quite master the standard default rules of conduct. They are not aggressive in interchanges, they perhaps don’t know how to handle them, as opposed to studying and editing from their chosen field of competence. To survive esp in a difficult area one needs a number of diplomatic gifts, without which you set yourself up as a target.

Me(Sic) and other editors have warned him about his disruptive behavior previously (for example: #1, #2, #3, and by an admin, Doug Weller, right here)

This is a complete fudge and I am sure admins will see it for what it is, a pot calling the kettle black by claiming he is not alone in seeing ‘extremely disruptive’ behavior. I.e.

• 1# is Shrike, writing back on 24 October 2021 8 months before Palraz had his first sanction;
• 2# is a content dispute over one edit at Maltese dog, where Palraz happened to be correct (after noting the disagreement on Palraz’s page I looked at the disaster he was trying to fix, and rewrote the whole article, where now it can be seen that the point of contention, in modern scholarship, favours what Palraz wrote, not what his complaining interlocutor thought.
• 3# concerns Tombah himself. So the ‘Me and other editors’ refers to Tombah and Shrike (identical POV with Tombah but far more careful an editor generally)writing briefly 15 months ago.

Tombah, by the way, doesn’t appear know much about (Jewish) history, as opposed to having at his fingertips the standard hasbara talking points of the modern nationalist Israeli way of presenting the past. At 3# he is upset that Palraz removed a mention that under direct Roman rule after 6 CE, the governor in Judea could tax and execute Jews sourced also to Josephus as a primary source. Direct rule all over the Roman empire always came with those powers, so there is zero value in citing this for an overview of Syro-Palestine. It only assumes importance if you want to suggest, as the reverted edit implied, that there was something exceptional in using those powers in an area where Jews predominated . It fits the famous ‘lachrymose’ narrative with its selective bias for the negative and its careful disattention to what, for example, the same source, Josephus states, i.e. that before the Jewish Roman War broke out 60 years later, Jerusalem enjoyed the happiest rule of all citystates in the Roman empire. (I don’t believe that either, by the way. It is a rhetoric of flattery nodding to his imperial and sanguinary Roman overlords) Nishidani (talk) 17:47, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Selfstudier claims that I have strong opinions, but I don't believe that he or other editors working in the same field are opinion-free. The exact opposite. I(n) the past year, a lot of articles about Israel have completely shifted to the anti-Israel side, and I observe this trend every day. The ethnic component of Jewish identity is often completely rejected in discussions, the well-documented history of Jews in Palestine is dismissed as a biblical myth, and contemporary Israel's actions are frequently harshly criticized while the wrongdoings of the other side are frequently ignored. But again, though, I'm not criticizing Dan's beliefs; rather, I'm criticizing his disruptive methods of forcing them, bullying others to accept them.

I am puzzled as how anyone can write like this. Perhaps the art of parsing what is written has been lost, because that either makes no sense, or is self-defeating in its rhetoric. I'll construe it to show why arguing here is often pointless.Nishidani (talk) 09:25, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Having strong opinions is contrasted with having no opinions. Since we all have opinions, criticising someone whose opinions are forceful is hypocritical? Misdirection. If we say someone is 'opinionated', we are not denying that we ourselves have opinions. Opinions are of two types: (a) evidence-based, and, ideally, informed by careful assessment of the available facts; (b) opinions that are impermeable to reason because anchored in preconceptions that won't yield to new evidence. 'Strong opinions' belong tendentially to the latter category and those who stick to them are 'opinionated'. They only read to buttress what they already believe is the case, and read past anything that contradicts or embarrasses their set views. Stating this is banal, of course, but an opinionated editor is not concerned with NPOV, but with proving his own is better than the other viewpoint.

I(n) the past year, a lot of articles about Israel have completely shifted to the anti-Israel side

I've been here 15 years and last year was no different from any other. The only observable change is a drop in sockpuppetry and IP interference, 99% of which came from a 'pro-Israeli' POV and was very intense for over a decade until the rules became draconian.

The anti-Israeli side. This is careless. Tombah identifies those with whom he has editing disagreements as (a) hostile to Israel (b) belonging to a clique, block or concerted group.It is an inadvertent admission that challenging his own approach to this or that edit means challenging (the legitimacy of) Israel - a conflation of his views with those of a government.

Note that 'Palestinians' have disappeared. Articles about the occupied Palestinian territories, where Tombah focuses much of his controversial editing, are not about 'Israel' primarily, but about Palestinians and their relations to Israeli military actions. For Tombah, one is forced to assume, those territories are primarily about (Greater) Israel, and editing must not disturb concerns to protect that Israel from negative images of its behaviour as a 'belligerent' (the technical word in law) occupying power.

. The ethnic component of Jewish identity is often completely rejected in discussions.

The keyword is 'ethnic', the post-war euphemism for the discredited concept of 'race'. Literally hundreds of scholarly books will tell any interested reader that ethnicizing identity is deeply problematic, especially in nation states. Identity is fluid and often bewildering in its variegations; historic identity is marked by constant shifts in self-definition; the Israelite prior to 722 was defined biblically and rabbinically as radically different from the Israelites after that date; the Judaeans, under Ezra and Nehemiah, were divided into those, the exilic priesthood in particular, with an asserted authentic line of descent and adherence to religious rules and prescriptions, and the Am ha'aretz, the caste of people who had stayed put and retained traditions and customs the returned sacerdotal caste found repulsive. Where is the 'Jewish identity' at that juncture, one ostensibly binding all within Judea and elsewhere in Palestine at that period. It emerged only later and slowly when in Hellenistic times an ethnos for Judea (not elsewhere) began to be recognized, as the word Ἰουδαῖος came into currency, not to denote 'Jews' generically, but just those who hailed from the specific area of Judea. It only assumes the broader meaning of 'Jews' collectively much later.

Can one convert to an ethnos? One converts to a religion, a widespread phenomenon in antiquity as Judaic practices and beliefs spread and won admiring converts among gentiles. In defining Jews, the same problem emerges that we find in any attempt to define an historic national identity. Everyone thinks they know what Englishness consists of, though all attempts to define it fail, and the same holds for any other example. The number of indeterminate discussions among Jews as to who is a Jew underscores the point: non consensus. No consensus, that is, outside of numerous spokesmen who shout the same vague definitions in their aspirations to homogenize for political ends the 'disturbing' diversity within their 'ethnic' ranks and thereby achieve a speciously functional groupthink. Tombah's remark reflects the latter trend. Ideologically, Zionism was an attempt to create a new 'Jewish' identity which would trump the extraordinarily rich diversity of Jewish cultures by subordinating them to a core, if invented, nationality. Race was an important ingredient in this as the work of Arthur Ruppin shows, though even his pseudo-empiricist efforts crumbled in the face of the ethnic diversity attested by peoples who each had an entitlement to being 'Jews'.

That 'ethnicity' plays a role in Jewish identity is undoubted. That the definition of what that ethnicity consists of evades closure is equally obvious. When the Yemini musician Berakhah Zephira played for Einstein and Sergei Eisenstein, the former detected a distant 'Jewish' echo in the Yemeni's performance, while the latter thought it utterly alien to his sense of Jewishness. Examples could be cited ad infinitum. Yemeni Jews, 'ethnically', are wholly distinct from Ashkenazi Jews, however valiantly wiki editors on an ethnicizing mission try to assert the contrary.

Thus, what the discussions on wikipedia do is challenge the myths surrounding assertions of some uniform Jewish ethnicity putatively forged by a chain of descent uncontaminated since the early part of the first millenium BCE when Israelite and Judaean populations briefly achieved a kind of statehood in Palestine. That mischievous meme or lie is a political fiction employed to assert the authenticity of the concept of a 'return' to the land of one's ancestors. People who tend to intermarry and share a common language or culture form 'ethnic groups', but to go beyond that, and indulge in historical fictions of racial continuity is not only wrong, but parlous, as anyone who has learnt something from the first half of the 20th century should know.

the well-documented history of Jews in Palestine is dismissed as a biblical myth,

Caricature to the point of disingenuous misrepresentation, apart from being phrased inanely.

'the well documented history of Jews in Palestine' refers to a period from the first millenium BCE down to 1948. Since the bible only refers to events before the end of the First Millenium BCE, no one on wikipedia has ever asserted that Jewish life in Palestine from 1 CE to 1948 is a 'biblical myth'. Clumsy, thoughtless, inane.

contemporary Israel's actions are frequently harshly criticized while the wrongdoings of the other side are frequently ignored

Rubbish. No article on this area where Palestinian violence is relevant and documented fails to mention those facts. It is, again, not Tombah's imaginary adversaries who 'frequently harshly criticize' Israeli actions, it is the extensive literature, much of it written by Israelis and diaspora Jews, which remarks on this. Editors who cite this are doing what they are obliged to do.

This exercise in talking to myself, making explicit the stormwater drain of reactions that run through my head at least on reading for 10 seconds a brief screed, typical of talk pages, of the kind Tombah wrote, is TLDR of course. But, people who know little of a topic and can't express themselves except by rehearsing memes and clichés, and thinking of anyone who might contradict them as embued with an animus against, say, Israel, rather than with a sense of repugnance for self-contradictory expostulations, seething with a tacit tone of political grievance, that flaunt an insouciant nescience, should edit elsewhere. Nishidani (talk) 15:04, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

R

If it wasn't pitiful, it would be laughable. Selfstudier (talk) 15:18, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

Can't read Haaretz. What's it about? The gistNishidani (talk) 20:53, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

Try this, cheers, Huldra (talk) 21:11, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

How many people in the vast bureaucratic-military-government apparatus there read up on WW2 and the Nuremberg trials? By the looks of it, none or then again as Dr Lapp might quote, if he had a better memory of his schooldays, mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.Nishidani (talk) 00:22, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

Friendly notice: reliable sources noticeboard

Hello! I'm just stopping by to inform you about an RSN discussion I recently opened concerning the recent dispute at Genetic studies on Jews. The talk page discussion shows some telltale signs of becoming unproductive on its current course, and I think we've all pushed the conversation there too far on a tangent, so it's probably best to ask for outside perspectives.

Link to discussion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Frontiers_Genetics_(ethno-religious_population_origins)

I wish you all the best and appreciate your perspectives and participation both at RSN and at the talk page. - Hunan201p (talk) 13:07, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case: Please trim your statement

Hi, Nishidani. I'm an arbitration clerk, which means I help manage and administer the arbitration process (on behalf of the committee). Thank you for making a statement in an arbitration request at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case. However, we ask all participants and commentators to limit the size of their initial statements to 500 words. Your statement significantly exceeds this limit. Please reduce the length of your statement when you are next online. If the case is accepted, you will have the opportunity to present more evidence; in any event, concise, factual statements are much more likely to be understood and to influence the decisions of the arbitrators.

Requests for extensions of the word limit may be made either in your statement or by email to the Committee through this link or arbcom-enwikimedia.org if email is not available through your account.

For the Arbitration Committee, ~ ToBeFree (talk) 18:28, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

My apologies. I've flensed to the marrow and more what I originally wrote and hope this comes under the limit. Regards Nishidani (talk) 18:45, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

Well, that settles it

Mike Pompeo 'it is in the US’s interests to back Israel whatever its policies.'The Guardian 16 February 2023a

An interesting variation,i.e.,  Your country right or wrong,, on Stephen Decatur's by now proverbial statement. Though off-the-cuff, it represents an innovation in one of the standard principles of international relations  going back to Lord Palmerston’s remark,

‘We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.'

He came to succour the Turkish Empire when Muhammad Ali Pasha challenged its hegemony in Syro-Palestine, saying that international interests must trump considerations of fairness. The Trumpian Pompeo goes one step further. The assertion of Interests are not a matter of realist calculations so much as fulfilling God’s designs for mankind as set forth in the bible. A mirror Evangelical imaging of the same mentality we find so disturbing in the notion of Islamic fundamentalist statehood. In timing, it is a clear greenlight signal to Netanyahoo's legislative proposals to put an end to Israel's separation of powers, which, the religious price he is prepared to pay, puts paid to what is left of its democracy. Nishidani (talk) 13:12, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Saw that, Bible as title deed. Duh. Selfstudier (talk) 13:25, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Huh

Each day one learns something new. Today I learned that "jejeunely" is a word (and what it means). Thanks :) Also thanks for your non-jejeunely comments in general :) _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 14:08, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

I preferred that to ‘puerile’ (which also bears, etymologically, a certain gender bias), because one takes up a reading of any academic article with an appetitive curiosity, and if the fare proves tasteless, one is left with a churning of the stomach, a distaste provoked by the frustration of an anticipated relish defeated by bland pabulum.

My dismissal is related also to the fact that anyone with extensive familiarity with, as arbs love to call it, the ‘toxic’ I/P area, notoriously a death-zone for the impartient and impetuous, could not respond to that tract without smiling. An identical case could be made out for an hypothesis that I/P articles over the last decade and a half have been consistently plagued by a coterie of highly nationalist editors and endless sockpuppet myrmidons supporting them, who use inferior sources, gut and revert edits, however well supported by first-rate academic material reliably published, where editors have been subjected to on- and offline rape and death threats, and been outed by militantly nationalist websites created ad hoc to hunt long-standing editors whose contributions are read as anti-Semitic humiliations of their fav nation/country, etc. Several of these attempts to organize offline, through tutorials, groups of young people to learn how to promote this POV and write in such a way that their country will receive a more favourable image on Wikipedia have been documented by the mainstream press. (e.g. here and here, to cite just a few).

At least one of the authors of the article that has Arbcom in panic mode, must, as a wikipedian, be familiar with these manipulative exercises in this area. Should someone like myself, familiar with all the details of this coordinated nationalist POV-pushing since at least 2010, spend two years in paranoid mode, fossicking amid the monumental-Oxyrhynchus archival pile of diffs from the superannuated past on dozens of controversial articles, to elicit a pattern of this type, and then (which I could via contacts) get it published to create a scandal and indict/shame Wikipedia itself for failing to rein in a designated ‘group’ of editors flogging their nationalist POV? Nope. Anyone who takes their reading seriously, doesn't waste time bickering on the internet, far too trivial and time-consuming. Every debate means a book demanding attention lost to thumbtwiddling repartee on line. It would be an utter waste of personal time, and evince a total misapprehension about how this place, in all of its rackety ramshackle jerry-rigged scaffolding, endlessly tinkers to self-correct the inevitable flaws of article-composition, and monitor the biases of contributors (AE, ANI etc.) And, close familiarity would tell one that many of the editors whose POV is diametrically opposed to one’s own, actually still make valid contributions or talkpage arguments, even if one reads them as endorsing the contrary POV. As a long-time amateur student of witchhunts, persecution of minorities, antisemitism, ethnocentric nationalism and cognitive bias (starting with myself (per Luke 7:36ff., onwards through Freud, Karl Mannheim and numerous modernist thinkers).) I've learnt that conspiracy-mongering, however warranted by ostensible 'evidence' leads to only to arid speculative mania. It's of course a tacit pattern still omnipresent in our sensationalist media. Only detached, meticulous analysis and rational judgment, increasingly at risk and generally ignored because 'complex', can do anything to limit the inevitable damage.

If one can’t stand the heat in a wiki kitchen, one can always go to other restaurants where things are cooked differently, and where a client’s impatience to get the recipe right, according to their palate’s particular sensitivities, .is catered for. Unfortunately this particular topic is, in the public world, riddled with discursive taboos, mined with memes and assumptions, endlessly dramatized and minutely surveilled to maintain one narrative orthodoxy. If only the inframural diaspora and Israeli scholarship and debates -generallyuntainted by the reflex, cynical and frivolous 'antisemitic' accusations thrown around in an intimidatory fashion - were better known. If only people were taught to read thinkers like Hannah Arendt at a formative age. Nishidani (talk) 13:01, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Comment at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case

Hey, just wanted to let you know that the comment you made at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case [1] is both incorrect and wildly anti-semitic. The words Holocaust and Shoah are in fact synonyms, note that they go to the same article. Would you like me to recommend some reading? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:01, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Names of the Holocaust Selfstudier (talk) 16:06, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Thank you Selfstudier. Nishidani you would do well to read the linked page. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:12, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Now I've read, as opposed to glance at, the linked page which is chaotic mishmash, I see that it has this which underscores, and could be far better documented, my point. that a distinction is needed, and the one I made is a legitimate choice. It is easy to document that, certainly in Israeli Hebrew usage, shoah refers strictly to Jewish victims, and that the English term The Holocaust if used to refer to the whole phenomenon of the 11-17 total number of WW2 victims of Nazi racial genocide policies, as many historians have done, has met with objections from many scholars and from the US Holocaust Museum authorities. who wish to reserve both terms for Jews alone. That synonymic use and restriction is a POV.Nishidani (talk) 22:19, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

I've only just noted this. Defrosting two refrigerators all afternoon and reading a novel in the meantime (The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, one of a Christmas gift of 17 novels from Tom Reedy. thanks Tom!)- an extraordinary tale tingling with descriptive genius), I opened my computer just now after a late dinner. I'll ignore the insult about my obtusity to antisemitism, -antisemites are people who use antisemitic language. I know your editing well enough to hold you generally (a remark like that is the exception) in esteem. I must be that rare breed that never reads wiki pages if I want to mug up on something. As we all know, they are not reliable (I did glance at those linked, and, sighed). Anna Vera Sullam Calimani's paper is short but will give you a quick overview of the history of both words and their vying in various languages for ascendancy in usage. I.e. I Nomi dello sterminio: Definizioni di una tragedia, Marietti 1820,2018 ISBN 978-8-821-19615-7 I could write several pages full of references,- I don't write off the top of my head without struggling against the hamstringing muscles of source-twitching memories- on why I wrote what I did over there. But they don't like anything more than 500 words. And I seriously doubt whether if I took the accusation seriously, replying would make any difference.Nishidani (talk) 20:56, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

I just don't have much time these days but perhaps I should give one example about the emotional crux undrlying wiki clashes over the Holocaust in Poland, between exclusivist (Jewish) and inclusivist approaches to that topic. Here's one example. It is remarkable for the delicacy of its mediation between Poles and Jewish Poles and yet, utterly crass, if read through (an imaginative exercise) through Polish eyes:-

John T. Pawlikowski, in his memoir-reflection on Polish Jewish relations in connection with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, tried as a President Carter appointee to its Council, to get Polish American groups to do something towards improving thel exhibitions, which mentioned Poles at the beginning as suffering the initial brunt of Nazi violence, and at the end (as rescuers) but said litte of their engulfment in the central killing programmes. He takes that constituency to task for not responding to his request. Later, the issue arose as to whether the Museum should put Polish victims (2 million) on a par with the 3 million Polish-Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Bożena Urbamowicz-Gilbride had even resigned from the Council for its failure to address this precise issue of commemorating the Polish victims. The general consensus of experts then was that a distinction does exist that militates against any idea of equation. No decision was reached when on a further occasion, she and several Polish survivors of the death camps, came to give their testimony. Pawlikowski writes:

while Urbanowicz-Gilbride, Lukas, and the several Polish survivors of concentration camps tell a story that very much needs to be heard, their failure to make proper distinctions weakens their ability to get a hearing for their story. Saying this in no way undercuts the continued need to make the story of the Nazi brutality against the Polish people as part of its racial ideology better known. We must mourn the Polish victimxs; we must make their story important components of Holocaust education programmes. But we cannot efface the special nature of the attack on the Jewish community within the Nazi programme of racial cleansing. And until people interested in achieving this fully appreciate the distinction, we will never be successful in making the Polish story better understood.' John T. Pawlikowski, 'The Holocaust: A Continuing Challenge for Polish-Jewish Relations,' in Mieczyslaw B. Biskupski, Antony Polonsky (eds.),Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 19: Polish-Jewish Relations in North America, Liverpool University Press,2022 ISBN 978-1-802-07943-2 pp.415-429.p.425

Pawlikowski notes that at an NPAJAC conference in 2004 the Catholic theologian and historian Ronald Modras gave a presentation defending the use of the word Holocaust for Polish victims of Nazi racist policies. Paulikowski, himself a priest, then glosses this with his personal view:-

For myself, I do accept the possibility of using 'Holocaust' as an overarching term for the entirety of victimization under the Nazis, but only if the proper distinction mentioned above is clearly maintained. p.426

If anyone can't see the extraordinarily arrogant putdown implicit in this discrimination, then tomorrow I will parse the passage to tease out the ethnocentric prejudice instinct in this piece of rhetoric.Nishidani (talk) 23:07, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Put bluntly, these words coming from this spokesman for the concerns of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to Polish survivors of concentration camps could be construed as conveying the message:

Unless you guys get your act together and admit that, despite the identical circumstances, you must endorse the idea that Jewish suffering was in a category of its own and qualitatively different (superior) to what Polish victims of Nazi genocide experienced, your narrative is not going to get the kind of hearing it otherwise deserves. We won't help you unless you accept our terms, admit your relative marginality and second-class status in Holocaust history.

Of course this is what, probably unintentionally, Pawlikowski's words suggest, and he alone must accept responsibility for such crass insensitivity. Nishidani (talk) 13:27, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

What is the source for that quote from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:11, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

If that refers to 'Put bluntly, the message ..' then it is self-evidently not a quote but as I clearly noted earlier('If anyone can't see the extraordinarily arrogant putdown implicit in this discrimination, then tomorrow I will parse the passage to tease out the ethnocentric prejudice instinct in this piece of rhetoric.') The passage strongly lends itself to be read that way,- I imagine the Poles concerned would have no problem twigging to that implication- as I noted, wwhatever the intentions of its author, who was on the Council for that Museum.Nishidani (talk) 17:14, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

Do you mean non-Jewish Poles concerned? Also you said spokesman, a board member is not a spokesman, you can't fabricate the views of living people like that... Even to make a point... WP:BLP applies to user talk pages. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:17, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

I've adjusted to meet your objections. I could expand, but since you have asserted my views are 'wildly antisemitic' (WP:NPA/WP:AGF violations) and haven't retracted the insinuation, I rather hesitate to reply because anything I say would, given your view of me, fall on deaf ears.Nishidani (talk) 17:37, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

I commented on what you wrote, I have no insight on your views. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:22, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

lol nableezy - 18:25, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

If someone said a bagel is uniquely Jewish, and I rejoined, ‘no it isn’t. It is just the Jewish version of a wider type of pastry’, someone might assert that my comment was ‘wildly antisemitic,’ before even asking me to clarify on what basis I made that remark. That would tell me more about the person's frail assumptions, than about my own. Your assumption of your interlocutor’s bad faith, or, worse still, ignorance, constituted a personal attack, because if someone,- esp. like myself with my long editing history on these topics, and even a half century of study- were to use ‘wildly antisemitic’ or even ‘’’just’’’ anti-Semitic language, then the conclusion would be obvious. That I am antisemitic.

The option of pausing to think (I love that phrase, because it betrays a proverbial insight into the fact that while expressing our views, we are, as often as not, not thinking. We have to stop the inner chatter and reflect on what is really being said in rapid exchanges). Some people patient enough to actually read through my edit TLDR divagations, know that I think in terms of categories and subcategories. That I strive to think in terms of universal principles or laws, as opposed to particularistic narratives that assume the sui generis nature of, whatever, and thirdly that I like the comparative method. Thus, in the case of the bagel,. that is a subset of the broad category of breads, which breaks down into a stemma of (a) those made from yeasted wheat dough, (b) such bread prepared by boiling and baking, (c) idem, for the type sprinkled with seeds, and (d) shaped like a doughnut. Thus roughly defined, one then casts about for varieties which would fit these defining terms in the final subset formed by (a) to (d), foodstuffs like some regional varieties of the Syrian ka’ak, the Polish obwarzanek, bublik and the Polish-Jewish bagel, each of which can be further defined to mark differences from the others. All words lend themselves to this category analysis. I could do one with antisemitism, as a subset of one of the branches of the category of Prejudice, and with its own internal distinctions from T. S. Eliot’s to Hitler’s. Your remark is typical of people who use the word frivolously, without apparently grasping which of its numerous uses are prompting your throw-away line.

In any case, insults like yours should always be turned to advantage, ergo, my reflections below, which aim to isolate from my early formative reading some 50 years ago, those books which led me to make the judgment I made (Despite a vast subsequent output of studies on all of the neglected or fugitive details, case by case, throughout Europe, I don't believe our understanding of what happened has changed significantly, as opposed to how it could have come to pass- which remains refractive to reason). Endorsing a general opinion, chucking around abusive adjectives, resting one’s mental butt on something called commonsense or consensus, is something we’re all raised into. I like to think, after Nietzsche, that if I find myself with an opinion, it is not a public conceit, but personal, arrived at by duly studying why and how I came about, rationally, to entertain that notion. I’m waiting on an ordered copy of a book I’ve read but lack, which should arrive tomorrow.Nishidani (talk) 21:44, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Holocaust and Nakba--a comparison

I decided to accept the draft "The Holocaust and the Nakba....:" but to change it to a clearer title. For a further discussion of my rational, see Buidhe's talk page. DGG ( talk ) 05:04, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Well, personally, I don't think they are comparable, except in one specific regard as Arendt said, namely the mass expulsion and displacement of the Palestinian population undertaken by Zionists as a precondition for the establishment of Israel, the precedent for which she found in Nazi deportation policies during the Holocaust:

'After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved- namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory- but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and the rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people. And what happened in Palestine within the smallest territory and in terms of hundreds of thousands was then repeated in India on a large scale involving many millions of people.'Hanna Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (1951)Penguin Books 2017 ISBN 978-0-241-31675-7 p.379.

I don't have much time to look at that article (and thank you for the courtesy of the reminder of it). Anyone may feel free to use that passage as they think fit there or elsewhere.Nishidani (talk) 16:56, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Doug's talk page

I am so sorry to learn about your wife but am happy that modern medicine was able to extend her life. Cullen328 (talk) 21:37, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

@Cullen328 Thanks indeed, dear friend. She was literally at death's door when diagnosed (10 days/2 weeks at most). The humble church (she had a right to a cathedral mass) she chose for her funeral couldn't contain the hundreds who turned up at her funeral, and was large enough to ensure that the psalm in Hebrew she asked her pagan spouse to sing over her was inaudible to many. I thank the Italian free-care system. She had the top surgeon in that field intervene immediately. I'm embarrassed to confide these things, but I hope our mutual friend can take some comfort, and face chemotherapy with serenity and indeed a confident hope. These days, every month gained can turned up surprises in medicine that open up better prospects than the original prognosis suggests. Best regards.Nishidani (talk) 21:55, 1 March 2023 (UTC)

Kb

Is it Italian keyboard and the tilde is not the third position of n key? Selfstudier (talk) 22:53, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Shoah/Holocaust and 'wildly antisemitic'. A further set of reflections

                                         For an outstanding wikipedian, Doug Weller

'After Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims. They balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims' fate.'Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics. Routledge (1973) 1990 p.361.

'Inman walked through the house and out the back door and saw a man killing a group of badly wounded Federals by striking them in the head with a hammer. The Federals had been arranged in an order, with their heads all pointing one way, and the man moved briskly down the row, making a clear effort to let one strike apiece do. Not angry, just moving from one to one like a man with a job of work to get done-' Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain1997 p.9 The allusion is something said to have taken place once nightfall set in, allowing a formal pause on the killing fields near Sunken Hill in the Battle of Fredericksburg.

'the United States (US) dropped eight times more bomb tonnage in Indochina – over two million tons on Laos alone – in Vietnam than in World War 11, killing two to three million people, mainly civilians. When Western publics recoiled in horror from the often-televised destructive scenes of this war, air forces moved to more accurate technologies, namely guided missiles. Even then, military strategists and lawyers acknowledge that the “collateral damage” of “surgical strikes”- what drone operators call bugsplat -is unavoidable, if regrettable.

The wiki articles I was referred to, to amend my perceived indulgence in a ‘wildly antisemitic’ distinction, reflect the POV that the Shoah and Holocaust are interchangeable terms for a phenomenon of racial victimization affecting only Jews:-

• (a) Shoah

Yom HaShoah lit. 'Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day'), known colloquially in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah (יום השואה) and in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Holocaust Day, is observed as Israel's day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, and for the Jewish resistance in that period.

That could be read, giving proper weight to 'in the Holocaust', to imply a distinction using Holocaust as the larger phenomenon of which the Jewish victims form a core reality. Any nation has a natural right to focus on its own particular perspective, in any case.

• (b)The Holocaust

The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II.[b] Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination.

This takes the terms, as is very commonplace, as interchangeable and commensurate and implicitly excludes the idea that the other half the victims of Nazi racially-designed genocidal actions are to be included in the category of the Holocaust.

Are the two terms synonyms that are denotatively exclusive of non-Jewish victims, then?

Cleave and hew are synonyms, but also antonyms at the same time (split/cling to). It is true that Shoah and Holocaust are now used as synonyms, just as it is true that Holocaust usage shows a much wider range of denotation than Shoah. Holocaust is a vintage word with usage attested for various events from genocide to devastating fires from around the turn of the 19th century down to the late 1950s, and was also adopted to refer to the mass slaughter of civilian populations in WW2. Shoah was so rare in English that the OED 2nd edition of 1989 didn’t even register the term. But among the earliest uses of Holocaust, the generic sense referring to all victims of Nazi genocide was available from the outset. As early as 1945,M.R. Cohen wrote:

’Millions of surviving victims of the Nazi holocaust, Jews and non-Jews alike, will stand before us in the years to come.’

Cohen was an acute logician and analyst of language, with wide interests, playing a seminal role in the establishment and growth of the journal Jewish Social Studies, which as our article states, concerned itself with the universal (all men) and the particular (Jews). And that is precisely the issue here. Both Yehuda Bauer and Yisrael Gutman define what happened to this other half, to the Poles for example in Auschwitz, as genocide, but argue that there is a qualitative distinction to be made nonetheless. This is the premise affirmed by John Pawlikowski as we shall see.

So what does one do with the millions of other peoples who were exterminated – which no one challenges and the larger number is widely remembered – by implementing a broader policy of liquidating inferior races, some 50 million Slavs according to Generalplan Ost. In the end, from 10 to 17 million people in Europe fell victim to actions that were inspired by genocidal racism, of whom half or a third were Jewish: 5.1 (Raul Hilberg)/ 5.3-4 (Yehuda Bauer) or 5.7 (Snyder) million upwards Given that at least 5 million were Jewish, how do we classify the phenomenon comprising ‘the other half’?(whose round number is also historically grounded in hearsay, as it was pulled out of the hat by Simon Wiesenthal.) To illustrate the point concretely, must the shoah at Auschwitz only refer to the 1.35 million Jews killed there, excluding the 250,000 non-Jews, (of whom 74,000 -83,000 were Poles) who died in that same place, by the same means, on the same racist-ideological grounds?

There are strong grounds for arguing for the specialness of Jewish victimization. For one, in Snyder’s words, ‘The project to kill all Jews was substantially realized; the project to destroy Slavic populations was only very partially implemented.’ In addition, numerous case studies show how local groups among Latvians, Lithuanians and the like, jumped with alacrity as war broke out, and Nazis hadn’t even set foot in their territory, to lynch, eradicate, murder, hang up on butcher hooks members of Jewish communities in their midst. Others stood by or actively approved, much as the Muhacir in Anatolia, themselves ethnically cleansed from Europe and elsewhere, did during the Armenian genocide. There is an important differentiating factor on a psychosociological plane among all those thrust into the forecourts of war, between the targeted Slavic nationalities and those, in their midst, who found themselves stripped of their primary identity as Poles, Ukrainians, Russians etc.,and, as Jews did, had to suffer the lacerating existential trauma of a people who, orphaned of those customary networks of tacit solidarity that inform national identities, suddenly found themselves facing the lethal hostility of the Wehrmacht/SS and the fear, insouciance or coldness of former neighbours, with drastically reduced margins for survival. The problem is, however, that this feeds into a concept of exceptionalism, with its rhetoric of uniqueness, which is not only counter-productive of understanding, but methodologically inane, as the greatest comparativist historian of the last century, as Arnold Toynbee, with all his admitted faults, pointed out almost 90 years ago.

Pt.2. Categories and definitions in historical context

Two survivors from the holocaust concentration camps meet up and exchange some black-humoured repartee concerning the Shoah. They are interrupted by God who happens by and overhears their banter. He interjects:’How on earth do you dare banter and joke about this catastrophe?’ The two survivors snap back:’how could You know what it was like? You weren’t there!”

It took some time for scholarship to settle on an appropriate word to describe the phenomenon. The words used to refer to the phenomenon of WW2 mass slaughter are many,- from the ethnospecific khurbn, shoa, continuous pogrom, Final Solution, Event, judeocide, the unnameable/unspeakable, and pseudo-sacred sacrifice etc., to the more generic genocide, (H/h)olocaust, univers concentrationnaire, (Great) Catastrophe, Götterdämmerung and ethnocide. to name but a few,- and the denotative extensions and connotations of each differ.

Shoah in Israeli usage refers to a 12 year time span, while Holocaust tends to evoke (a) broadly the institutionalization of ethnic murders over the roughly six year period of WW2, from the invasion of Poland, or, (b) more restrictively, to the three years embracing the industrialized murder of Jews specifically that accelerated massively from 22 June 1942 onwards when the invasion of the Soviet Union was launched. Usage that restricts, implicitly or explicitly, the Holocaust to (b) means that the earlier propaiudeutic operations that set precedents for administratively organized group murders, such as Aktion T4’s euthanization of from 70,273 to 275,000 deemed unfit to live, or the 61,000 members of the Polish elite prescriptively targeted in the Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen, of whom two thirds were liquidated largely in the opening months of the war, are scanted from the narrative or marginalized in contemporary Holocaust commemorations, as is the gypsy Samudaripen, 70% of whose Polish population alone was exterminated.

The AktionT4 story, in particular, is a crucial precursor for the holocaust process. One estimate made at the time was that 1,000,000 Germans would have to be exterminated on the grounds of being of unsound body or mind. The original technique consisted of killing the mentally ill with a bullet to the neck. This method of disposing of 'useless mouths' (whose murder was duly calculated to have saved the Reich 885 million marks in expenses) was replaced by building 'shower' rooms in the extermination sites, where groups of 10 to 15 patients were ushered in. Once sealed off, the showers were flushed with carbon monoxide to kill them by asphyxiation. The bodies were then burnt in crematoriums made for that purpose in adjacent buildings. What later occurred at Auschwitz and other death camps was not 'unique' but replicated on a vast scale the methods devised for those diagnosed as insane. In short, as Poliakov notes, the rapidity with which the Nazi authorities implemented the later rational and efficient industrial murder factories drew directly on the model developed to exterminate Germany's mentally ill. One striking difference, was that the euthanasia programme, despite its secrecy, generated widespread popular opposition and protests within Germany which eventually led to its suspension, as opposed to the persecution and deportation of Jews, which, according to one informal wartime poll, left 90% of the population indifferent.

All this is further complicated by the shifts in debate position and focuses over successive decades, with geopolitical pressures playing not an insignificant role. The Yalta division of Europe into an Eastern Soviet bloc sphere and Western Europe under American auspices, played into this, esp. after the Cold War kicked in. The partition translated into a neglect of the Holocaust’s other victims in countries which now became adversaries of the West. Archives were closed off from external scrutiny, with the exception of Poland; no systematic centralization of documentation had been organized, leaving archival material dispersed throughout Eastern Europe, and Soviet scholarship was given very restricted agendas. Further events like the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the showcasing of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (1961) and the Six Days War (1967) also inflected reformulations of Holocaust discourse, as did the Yom Kippur War. To which one might add the impact of a renewed nationalism in the former Soviet states as they struggled to reconstruct their identities by addressing their respective histories, particularly with regard to WW2. This last aspect is the gravamen behind Grabowsky and Klein's critique of wikipedia's Polish Holocaust articles. Whatever the biases, we have empirical evidence that affirms that in Western awareness the immense toll of 5.1 million Slavic, i.e. Polish and Russian victims of the holocaust, has been studiously wiped off the public record. They figure marginally, though constituting almost half of the victims, way under other minorities like the disabled, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, in the awaremess of schoolers in their formative years.

As early as 1941 Churchill, sizing up reports of atrocities trickling in from Europe of Nazi policies, stated that ‘we are in the presence of a crime without a name.' It was Raphael Lemkin, three years later, who in his germinal study Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944) devised the neologism genocide to describe the ethnic and cultural restructuring being conducted by the Nazi authorities throughout occupied Europe, citing the mass murders 'mainly of Jews, Poles, Slovenes and Russians.' Citing Hitler’s remark in Mein Kampf that 'the greatest of spirits can be liquidated if the bearer is beaten to death by a rubber truncheon', he defines this as referring concretely in his contemporary world to 'the practice of extermination of nations and ethnic groups as carried out by the invaders.' Lemkin had been from his youth struck by the impunity enjoyed by those who carried out the Armenian genocide. At age 18, he was shocked by the destruction systematically visited upon the Armenians and noted, 'A nation was killed and the guilty persons set free.' The term genocide was required because there was something distinctive about Nazi policy as opposed to ethnic massacres of the past and new conceptions require new terms. , for

'German militarism is the most virulent because it is based upon a highly developed national and racial emotionalism which by means of modern technology can be released upon the world in a much more efficient and destructive way than any of the pedestrian methods of earlier wars.'

Several terms vied for the choice of a terminus technicus for the Holocaust as it affected Jews. The primary Jewish victims of the Nazi onslaught eastwards referred to the Holocaust in their Yiddish mother tongue as a khurbn (חורבן), ‘disaster’. A loanword from Hebrew, as opposed to the biblical connotations of Shoa this term resonates in both the original Hebrew and Yiddish with an allusion to two earlier disasters that inform Jewish historical memory, the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in 587 BCE and of the Second Temple in 70.CE, and also to the exile from Eretz Israel. It maintains its currency among American Orthodox Jews, particularly those who speak Yiddish. Given the resonance of historical antecedents, khurbn implicitly disowns the idea that the European holocaust as it affected Jews was unprecedented. In the new state of Israel, contrariwise, the term was rejected: it retained a resonance of the language of Europe’s persecuted Jews, from whom the new society of Israelis wished to both distance itself and shake off memories of their tragic fate. According to Birgitte Enemark, at the time only examples of armed Jewish resistance were considered heroic, and 'all other aspects of the Jewish experience' were lumped together,' under the label "Holocaust"."Holocaust" thus became the `non-heroic' category.'

Shoah ( שׁוֹאָה) "calamity" was the word that emerged in a December 1938 deliberation of the Central Committee of the Mapai party, as the rampaging precedent set by Kristillnacht became routinized. Though mentioned in a work entitled Sho’at Yehudi Polin (Devastation of Polish Jewry), published in Jerusalem in 1940 to describe the calamity that had befallen European Jews, the term was rarely used during the war by the Yishuv in Palestine until 1946. The term has a biblical resonance- in the Book of Job it is used for a sudden unforeseen disaster and desolation - and began to enter common usage after the summer of 1947 , when, after its establishment in 1946 to commemorate the annihilation of European Jewry, Yad Vashem held a conference dedicated to researching both the Shoah and the Kabbalistic concept of heroism (Gevurah). Khorbn and Shoah were thereafter used interchangeably in public discourse until, by the early 1960s, Shoah emerged as the dominant term in Israeli usage to refer more broadly to what European Jews underwent in the period from the Machtergreifung i.e., Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 down to May 1945.

As alluded to above, in 1945 M. R. Cohen could refer to the general annihilation of European peoples under Nazism, Jews and non-Jews, as a 'holocaust'. The transition in the use of this term from the generic to the particular, from all victims to Jewish victims, took some decades. Hannah Arendt, in her seminal masterpiece The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), speaks of 'extermination' broadly for what befell not only Jews but other peoples in both Nazi and Soviet hands, for which, outrageously, a relatively small phenomenon like 'the Jewish question' and antisemitism could become the catalyst of world war and its death factories. Léon Poliakov recounted in his memoirs that at the time of his foundational study of the holocaust in 1951, the word 'genocide' was deemed not fit for publication, and though he did employ it occasionally in his text, he generally uses the term 'extermination'. When Gerald Reitlinger undertook in 1953 the first comprehensive English study of the genocide of Jews, he chose to write. not of the Shoah or Holocaust, but of the Final Solution, the title of his book alluding to the specific Nazi decision for an Endlösung der Judenfrage.

In 1961 Hilberg, writing what was to become the cornerstone of later Holocaust studies, rigorously abstained from using the word in his monumental study. Ever stylistically wedded to detached clinical language, he preferred the term 'destruction' - a generic term shorn of the various emotional resonances instinct in these other labels-in describing the 'annihilation' of European Jews as ‘the world’s first completed destruction process’ . The decisive words here are (a) ‘first’ and (b) ‘completed’, both implicitly denying that, in his historian’s view, we may speak of the phenomenon as ‘unique’. For ‘first’ ominously suggests that the process may repeat itself in the future,(something that is sui generis cannot recur) and ‘completed’ affirms an awareness that the shoah was, at that point in time, the last of a series of comparable events, distinguished only from its predecessors by the thoroughness of its accomplishment.

That same year was to be a turning point in the assessment of the Holocaust in another sense, since the trial of Adolf Eichman contemporaneously taking place in Jerusalem had widespread repercussions on discourse framing the event. In contradistinction to the Nuremberg trials, where indictments were laid for "crimes against members of various nations," the priority of the proceedings was to focus on the Holocaust as a Jewish tragedy, and, it was believed, justice could only be meted out by a Jewish court, which, paradoxically according to Hannah Arendt, citing the prosecutor Gideon Hausner's words, would make 'no ethnic distinctions.' This was understandable. given the extraordinary tolerance Adenauer’s Germany , for one, showed to the tens of thousands of minions of massacre in the midst of its citizenry, among them war criminals. Germany had jurisdiction to try Eichmann but studiously circumvented the idea of extradition, and given the extreme leniency of the courts in sentencing men with thousands of murders on their conscience, that country at least could not be counted on to render justice. We all know of the post-war Polish recrudescence of antisemitism, but who recalls incidents like that in August 1949 in Munich when police shot at a crowd of 500 Jews who had taken to the streets to protest the publication in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of a letter that referred to Jews as ‘bloodsuckers’ (Blutsauger)?

Pt.3.The development of uniqueness

In the aftermath of World War II, the Nazi holocaust was not cast as a uniquely Jewish — let alone a historically unique — event. Organized American Jewry in particular was at pains to place it in a universalist context. After the June war, however, the Nazi Final Solution was radically reframed. "The first and most important claim that emerged from the 1967 war and became emblematic of American Judaism," Jacob Neusner recalls, was that "the Holocaust . . . was unique, without parallel in human history." In an illuminating essay, historian David Stannard ridicules the "small industry of Holocaust hagiographers arguing for the uniqueness of the Jewish experience with all the energy and ingenuity of theological zealots".'

'According to Saul Friedländer: ‘The absolute character of the anti-Jewish drive of the Nazis makes it impossible to integrate the extermination of the Jews, not only within the killings the general framework of Nazi persecutions, but even within the wider aspects of contemporary ideological-political behaviour such as fascism, totalitarianism, economic exploitation and so on.’ I disagree.'

As seen above in Pt.2, the East European Jewish victims of the Holocaust appear to have suffered none of the brain-wracking vexations, that arose in the diaspora and Israel in the postwar period, over the mot propre for what was happening to them. They used the emic, historically resonant term khurbn. The word drew an implicit analogy between the scale of the catastrophe that hit them, and two iconic events in antiquity that branded Jewish memory with a profound sense of loss, the destructions of the First and Second Temples. Thus, khurbn disavowed uniqueness, by affirming an essential continuity, the idea that the physical destruction of the diaspora’s core population repeated an earlier pattern: it was a recurrent, if exceeding rare, event. The symbolic force of this analogy lay in the fact that, in the legend of the foundations of the diaspora, the synagogue, wherever erected, slowly came to be experienced as a substitute for the temple in Jerusalem, with rabbis replacing the priesthood, and rituals of prayer and observance supplanting sacrifice. The unique specificity of the one sacred site millennia before has been preempted by a creative solution dictated by necessity: the ‘temple’ was any site Jewish communities built to celebrate their religion. The Final Solution, in aiming to extirpate their communities and raze their synagogal institutions, constituted the third in a series.

In Israel, to the contrary, this Yiddish khurbn was disliked just as the imputed ‘sheepishness’ of the victims and those who, surviving, made aliyah to the new state with its heroic ethos, was a source of discomfort and embarrassment. One slang term in Israeli usage referred to the martyrs of the camps, as opposed to the Warsaw ghetto rebels who fought back, as 'soap'. In its stead, the word shoah, which had become current in the Palestinian yishuv, gained an ascendancy. The emergent preference for the biblical shoah marked a shift from profane history (secular time) to an idiom of religious thrust (sacred). On another plane, it was also emblematic of natural tendency, instinct in the structural dynamics flowing from the definition of Israel as the Jewish state for the Jewish people, to invest it with discursive authority, one with a final say on crucial matters of definition. One might be tempted to think of a kind of unspoken tendency towards a Vaticanization of authority arising to reign over the disiecta membra of diasporic life which had always been characterized by an intense dialogic interplay, creatively dissonant, between far-flung communities which were unified in their sense of a shared Jewish identity but which, one by one, had to, as circumstances dictated, respond to very different historical social and political challenges. The emergence of a Zionist state, which had a completely different, because national and geopolitical, set of priorities, naturally bore a logic that militated towards the subordination of the diaspora, by redefining it as a contingent expedient, chaotically dispersed and historically defeated, to what was the new unifying narrative of Jewishness as defined by the state of Israel.

Political interests play an important role in suppressing analogies, in order to assert the uniqueness of the holocaust. In the late 1990s, according to Norman Finkelstein, Jewish lobbyists in Congress succeeded in blocking the passage of a bill to commemorate a day of remembrance for the Armenian genocide. The USHMM, he adds, following declarations from both Elie Wiesel and Yad Vashem, and at the request of the Israeli government, virtually erased references to the Armenian genocide from its museum's exposition.

Over the last quarter of a century highlighting the Holocaust as a unique event affecting only Jews has passed out of scholarly fashion. though the idea that the holocaust refers to the genocide of Jews alone still holds the upper hand.

'(Genocide’s) usage in reference to the Shoah and similar events of comparable destructive intent, both prior and subsequent, has gradually increased, including by historians, especially since the 1990s. The word “genocide” in reference to the extermination of the Jews is, in some respects, more neutral than both “Holocaust,” which evokes an etymological notion of the sacrificial, and “Shoah”, which seems to exclude the affected non-Jewish groups. At the same time, the term “genocide” allows for a comparison of similar causes and effects, and emphasizes, by analogy with the legal definition of crime, the intent, which in this case is the endeavour to partially or completely destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.’(Sullam 2020, p. 4)

‘The Nazi plan of Genocide was related to many peoples, races, and religions, and, it is only because Hitler succeeded in wiping out 6 million Jews, that it became known predominantly as a Jewish case. As a matter of fact, Hitler wanted to commit G. against the Slavic peoples in order to colonize the East and extend the German Empire up to the Ural mts. Thereupon after the completion of the successful war he would he would have turned to the West and to subtract from the French people the 20 million Frenchmen he had promised in his conversation with Rauschning.’ Lemkin cited in (Moses 2008, p. 20)

If one trawls the global past for evidence of genocide, history becomes a charnel house. Though the holocaust is ‘the most documented of genocides’, genocide itself has always been a commonplace of history. It received powerful theological endorsement in the Tanakh/Old Testament, where the injunction was laid down to annihilate the Seven Nations (Deuteronomy 7:2, 20:16-18) namely the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. The logic and principle of exterminating any resistant population by murdering the males and enslaving the rest were first set forth in Western tradition in Thucydides’ vignette, The Melian Dialogue regarding the options given the islanders of Melos during the Peloponnesian War.

Lemkin was well aware of precedents stretching back to the deep past, but for our purposes, one should briefly reacquaint our fugitive modern memory with its selective, fragmentary interest in the past, with how the 19th century's periphery must have experienced the glorious march of progress whose beneficiaries, the West-is-besters, complacently celebrate. Incidents of mass killings in the name of civilization were commonplace, many implemented under impress of the Virgilian maxim drilled into the elites who emerged to gather up and govern their flourishing, expansive windfall empires, i.e., the purpose was to retread the path cut out paradigmatically by the Roman empire, whose Virgilian civilizing mission consisted of 'imposing the custom of peace, sparing the subjugated and warring down the proud.' . An illustration of how this worked out in practice was France's invasion of Algeria, beginning in 1834. At that time the country had an estimated population of roughly 2 million. Four decades later, by 1875 when the conquest was completed, approximately 825,000 indigenous Algerians had been killed. The necessity of genocidal killings lingered on in everyday conversation. One author in 1882 commented that 'we hear it repeated every day that we must expel the native and if necessary destroy him'.

An important principle in approaching history is the relationship between (imperial) core and periphery. Genocide as a twentieth century phenomenon arguably began with Lothar von Trotha’s campaign to decimate the Herero people in 1904-1905,-in one estimate 65,000 of 80,000 (80%) died- accomplished in broad daylight since it was duly covered in the German press. Remembrance of the holocaust is celebrated in postwar Germany but, until recently, this earlier episode of the country's colonial genocide was all but erased from memory. The idea of herding at gunpoint uprooted townsfolk into arid zones where they might die en masse of famine was taken up by the Turks, with their forced exterminatory marches, and the technique, a typical case of blowback, was adopted and widely deployed by Nazis, and to a lesser extent by the Japanese in WW2.

But this is all too facile, and culturally self-regarding to single out three examples which happen to instance the genocidal practices of those countries which were later to emerge as adversaries of the Western powers in two successive world wars.If we take the years around 1900 as an angle from which to reflect on what was to follow in the 20th century, perhaps the best starting point is H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) where the complacent Western core becomes, by a brilliant piece of topical tableturning of imperial prejudices, a planetary periphery. Wells reimagined this annihilation with the modern world refigured as aborigines, invaded and under mechanical extirpation from Martians just as Tasmania’s aboriginal population of 5-7,000 people was all but annihilated within a short century, starting with the Black War.

In 1896-1898 Spain’s concentration camp policy in Cuba wiped out 10% of the island’s population. The British adopted the same system in South Africa in 1899, closeting Boer civilians, women and children into barb-wire enclosures where over 2 years over 25,000 died of disease and malnutrition as their army wardens maintained guard. On the other side of the world, the the United States’ suppression of the Philippine war of independence had the collateral impact of leading to the death through disease and famine of 10 to 20 times the number of guerilla fighters killed. In all three, concentration camps, scorched earth and starvation policies took the largest toll out on civilians. Over a 20 year period Leopold II of Belgium’s murderous policies in the Congo (1885-1908) were so vastin their application that the minimal figure for those killed is 1,500,000, with a maximum estimate ranging as high as 13,000,000. By 1900, only 10% of aborigines (50,000) had survived the impact of British colonialization, with an estimated 20,000 of the original estimated 500,000 members of 300 tribes, each with their distinct languages, killed by direct genocidal settler practices. This was the international background for Germany's policies against the Herero.

After WW1, the metropolitan assault on peripheries resumed. In the Second Italo-Senussi War (1923-1932) Italy likewise killed one quarter of the population in the region of Cyrenaica, by the mass murder of civilians and surrendered soldiers, resorting to the mustard gas bombing of villages,(much as Spain was resorting to chemical weapons against the Berbers in the Rif War in Morocco at that time, as well as death marches into the desert). Having mastered the techniques there, they proceeded to Ethiopia where their spraying of areas with mustard and other gases, together with tactics of gunning down masses of surrendered soldiers and enforcing death marches. The conservative figure is that Italy's invasion of Ethiopia led to the death of perhaps 225,000 people. Mann comments:'This was the equivalent not of the Final Solution but (on a smaller scale) the Nazi mass murder of Poles.' In the Terror Famine implemented in Ukraine in 1932-1933, Stalin intentionally starved to death over 3 million Ukrainians. At the time, the future core of the Luftwaffe’s new generation of pilots was, under a secretive Soviet-Germany pact to circumvent the Versailles agreement, being trained at Lipetsk fighter-pilot school with close to a thousand German military personnel, not far from the genocidal liquidations underway to their west.

David Stannard, author of a foundational study on the massacre of American indigenous peoples, American Holocaust, has argued that the view that the holocaust as a 'unique, unprecedented, and categorically incommensurable' stand-alone event restricted to Jews, is a recent construction. Questioning the late 20th century arrogation of the term to refer exclusively to what befell the Jewish victims of Nazism, he then argues that

'it is the hegemonic product of many years of strenuous intellectual labour by a handful of Jewish scholars and writers who have dedicated much if not all of their professional lives to the advancement of this exclusivist idea.'

While conceptually incoherent, the uniqueness model is defended, he then documents, with intimidating polemical vigour. Yehuda Bauer in taking President Carter to task publicly for mentioning the holocaust's 11, not 6, million victims, (perhaps influenced by Simon Wiesenthal's recent surmise) suggested in his excoriation such an attempt to 'de-Judaize' the holocaust was, albeit unconsciously, 'antisemitic'. Deborah Lipstadt, author of one of the most popular accounts of the holocaust, has also asserted that any comparison between the Jewish holocaust and other forms of genocide put such 'holocaust relativists' on an antisemitic spectrum, one end of which included Holocaust denial.

Pt.4b.Hitler's awareness of a precedent for the Holocaust

Hitler himself, on the eve of WW2, one week before the invasion of Poland, in his Obersalzberg Speech of 22 August 1939, has the Armenian genocide in mind when he set forth before his generals the genocidal thrust of the imminent assault upon Poland:-

Our strength lies in our quickness and in our brutality. Genghis Khan sent millions of women and children into death knowingly and with a light heart. History sees in him only the great founder of States. As to what the weak Western European civilization asserts about me, that is of no account. I have given the command and I will shoot everyone who utters one word of criticism, for the goal to be obtained in the war is not that of reaching certain lines but of physically demolishing the opponent. And so, for the present only in the East, I have put my death-head formations in place with the command relentlessly and without compassion to send into death many women and children of Polish origin and language. Only thus can we gain the living space that we need. Who after all is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians? .

Those who refuse on principle to entertain the possibity that the genocide of Jews might be further illuminated by analogies or comparisons must of course deny that Hitler's stated intentions here to liquidate the Polish nation are relevant to assessing the ensuing broader holocaust. They must dismiss the explicit justification, that Germany could get away with genocide and enjoy impunity because Turkey had, as immaterial to our understanding of the holocaust affecting Jews.

The Armenian genocide (1915-1918), with perhaps 1,000,000 of 1,800,000 murdered (55%) is defined by Niall Ferguson as 'qualitatively different' from earlier Turkish massacres. The word holocaust itself appears to have been indeed first used, by the New York Times, to describe a new round (‘another Turkish holocaust’) of Turkish pogroms against the Armenian Christian population.. '(I)t is now widely acknowledged to have been the first true genocide,' he continues, endorsing the view of the American Consul in Smyrna at that time, that it ‘surpasse(d) in deliberate and long-protracted horror and in extent anything that has hitherto happened in the history of the world.'

In one sense Hitler was correct. Even today only Armenians recall their holocaust, and Hitler's onslaught on the Poles is lost to general public awareness. Western commemoration is overwhelmingly focused on the Shoah as a unique event, 'qualitatively different', affecting Europe's Jewish population. What would have been unimaginable in the European core in 1905, but proved perfectly practicable if, as with Von Trotta's extermination of the liminal Herero, the 'uncivilised' periphery of Africa was the field of implementation, had its blowback effect a mere three and a half decades later, as the technique was directed at Germany's immediate neighbour.

Pt.5. The politics of restrictive usage

There is nothing surprising in the connection between antisemitism and economic distress. A similar relationship has been observed in many other cases, and there is no reason to believe that antisemitism is exempt from social causation, or that the sufferings of the Jews are something absolutely unique. Unfortunately, the annals of cruelty are inexhaustible and other minorities have experienced at some time or other all the iniquities inflicted upon the Jews. The extermination of the Christians in Japan was just as thorough as Hitler’s genocide. If fewer were killed it was because they were fewer. When massacring the Armenians, the Turks perpetrated all of the deeds of which the SS men are guilty. If the history of antisemitism is particularly long it is because the Jews have clung to their separateness with unique tenacity. Most minorities could not be persecuted for so long because they dissolved themselves in the surrounding population.'(Andreski 1969, pp. 305–306)

How does the Hollocaust relate to genocide as a concept and an event? This question has caused considerable controversy because scholarly discourse and identity politics cannot be separated neatly. While the term 'genocide' was coined during the Second World War and enshrined in international law in 1948, the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish tragedy did not become an object of consciousness until almost two decades later. Ever since, those highlighting a distinctive experience for European Jewry have sought to separate it from that of other victims of the Nazis as well as other cases of ethnic and racial extermination.'(Moses 2004, p. 533)

Analysing the explosion of Holocaust narratives in the United States in the 1970s, after decades of silence also within Jewish communities, Peter Novick argued that the phenomenon was in part motivated by a desire by many influential Jews to make Americans more sympathetic to Israel and Jews generally. Novick went on to call the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum American Jewry's 'epistle to the Gentiles.' Originally funded by private donations, official government involvement was announced by the White House in 1978, on the 30th anniversary of Israel's foundation. This was a political measure to placate American Jews displeased by what they regarded as the President's "excessive evenhandedness" in trying to negotiate a peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. The running expenses were thereafter largely taken over by the federal government. Political calculations also contributed to government funding of such awareness programmes concerning the Holocaust, a way to woo the Jewish electorate.

It was President Carter's understanding that the Memorial Centre, following on the report he had commissioned which he appointed Elie Wiesel to preside over, would commemorate all the victims of the Holocaust. In a public address on the occasion of its establishment, Carter happened to mention the 'eleven million innocent victims exterminated'. He was immediately soundly rebuked by Yehuda Bauer, Israel's foremost Holocaust historian, for attempting to 'deJudaise the Holocaust' by including all of the non-Jewish victims. Indignant groups, led by Elie Wiesel reacted by launching a campaign, which eventually achieved its goals, to ensure that the Museum would refer only en passant to 'other' (non-Jewish) victims'. Throughout the following decade tensions arose, for example, between Poles and the Museum's authorities over the way the Holocaust was being portrayed. In a recent memoir recalling that period, John T. Pawlikowski, a Carter appointee, states that difficulties arose in efforts to get Polish American groups to do something towards improving thel exhibitions. At that time, Poles were mentioned at the beginning and the end (as rescuers) but little was said of their engulfment in the central killing programmes at Auschwitz and elsewhere, which formed the main Judaiocentric focus of the Museum's depiction of the events.

Later, the issue arose as to whether the Museum should put Polish victims (2 million) on a par with the 3 million Polish-Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Bożena Urbamowicz-Gilbride had even resigned from the Council for its failure to address this precise issue of commemorating the Polish victims. The general scholarly consensus of experts at the time was that a distinction did exist which militated against any notion the two annihilations could be equated. No decision was reached when, on a further occasion, she and several Polish survivors of the death camps, came to give their testimony. Pawlikowski writes:

while Urbanowicz-Gilbride, Lukas, and the several Polish survivors of concentration camps tell a story that very much needs to be heard, their failure to make proper distinctions weakens their ability to get a hearing for their story- Saying this in no way undercuts the continued need to make the story of the Nazi brutality against the Polish people as part of its racial ideology better known. We must mourn the Polish victims; we must make their story important components of Holocaust education programmes. But we cannot efface the special nature of the attack on the Jewish community within the Nazi programme of racial cleansing. And until people interested in achieving this fully appreciate the distinction, we will never be successful in making the Polish story better understood.(Pawkowski 2022, p. 425)

Pawlikowski adds also that, at an NPAJAC conference in 2004, the Catholic theologian and historian Ronald Modras gave a presentation defending the use of the word Holocaust for Polish victims of Nazi racist policies. Paulikowski, himself a priest, then glosses this with his personal view:-

For myself, I do accept the possibility of using 'Holocaust' as an overarching term for the entirety of victimization under the Nazis, but only if the proper distinction mentioned above is clearly maintained.’(Pawkowski 2022, p. 426)

When on 17 June 2019 the Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, called the Trump’s detention centres, “concentration camps” and added “Never Again,” her choice of words was challenged by the Republican Liz Cheney, who accused Ocasio-Cortez of deploying a ludicrous, demeaning analogy with the Holocaust and thereby setting up a false analogy, Both concentration camps and Never again preexisted Nazism, though both are commonly associated with it. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum stepped in to the dispute by stating that it, “unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary,” an assertion of the dogmatic position that the Holocaust, understood as referring to Jews, was unique. The declaration provoked an open letter of protest addressed to the director of the Museum, Sara J. Bloomfield, and published in The New York Review. The letter was undersigned by 560 academics, many of whom are Holocaust scholars, have supported the Museum, some in the capacity of fellows, and researchers given access to its archives. They remonstrated that

'By “unequivocally rejecting efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary,” the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is taking a radical position that is far removed from mainstream scholarship on the Holocaust and genocide. And it makes learning from the past almost impossible.'

This narrowing of Holocaust to evoke a specific ethnicized denotation, related to Jewish victims of Nazi ethnic cleansing and racial extermination alone, and its successful promotion in this restrictive sense, had an unforeseen collateral effect. One now remarks on how envy and admiration for the publicitarian efficacy in political discourse of the term generated its imitative adoption as a catch-all term among aggrieved constituencies in the rising vogue of Identity politics. Yet, as the headquote from A. Dirk Moses above suggests, it was precisely the wresting of the term holocaust away from its generic usage and its exclusivist application only to the Jewish WW2 tragedy that constituted the first step in the ethnicization of holocaust discourse, and its modern deployment in identitarian discourse and its correlated politics of grievance.

Pt.6. Calling in outside institutions,and the need for scholarly caution in these areas

There was, and still is, a very fine line between Israeli government politicization of antisemitism for furthering its national interests—through hasbara [Israeli propaganda] and other political interventions—and scholarly work being undertaken at universities and in research institutes. The blurring of any differences between propaganda and objective research is one of the key factors contributing to the bitter and divisive battles over antisemitism research in the academy.(Burley & Lerman 2022)

le commun des hommes est ainsi fait que si la vue d'un subit désastre émeut et provoque une pitié agissante, la contemplation d'une souffrance prolongée finit par irriter et par lasser.(Poliakov 1993, p. 336)

We recall the victims, but are apt to confuse commemoration with understanding.(Snyder 2015, p. xiv)

It is true that Israel’s current far-right government has turned dog whistles into fog horns.' (Brown & Nerenberg 2021)

This has been proposed by Chess, who nominated in this regard the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for its 'institutional' expertise. That Wikipedia is self-regulating,-often ramshackle, provisory and imperfect in its day-to-day workings, but still remains a rare experiment in a project of an autonomous, anonymous self-governing production of an encyclopedia. Its nature means that all articles will be subject to a process of continuous internal development and analysis, and that the major, overriding rules consist in a goal of strict neutrality as a final outcome, as determined by a judicious weighing of all relevant positions emerging from the best available scholarly sources. This eminently internal democratic experiment fits the ideal Popperian criteria for the slow, incremental growth, by constant ameliorative tinkering, of articles informed by recourse to the best available, verifiable knowledge.

As I indicated above, an external institution has its own distinct values, aims and interests, and functions quite differently, however excellent the results generally. In the case of the USHMM, its consultancy would be problematical for a number of of reasons. It has been known to exert pressure to censure criticism of arguments concerning the political manipulation of holocaust discourse. When Norman Finkelstein published his devastating exposé, The Holocaust Industry, and the then doyen of holocaust studies, Raul Hilberg, endorsed the accuracy of its scholarship, the USHMM and Elie Wiesel reportedly pleaded 'relentlessly' with Hilberg to retract his support for the book, unsuccessfully. If, further, as one of its Council members has recently recalled (2022), the Polish story of the Holocaust won't get a fuller hearing at the Museum until Polish advocates recognize that their Jewish confreres suffered qualitatively more than Polish victims, then their participation in a wiki dispute precisely over the Holocaust in Poland, and the proper representation of the two sets of victims would, a priori, support one side, namely the position advanced tendentiously in Grabowski and Klein's essay.

I have no set views on the underlying historiographical issues of that paper, as opposed to deep reservations about its quality and methodology. Research infused with a polemical animus and particularly of the personalised kind that weds a conspiracy theory, is not unknown in academia, and tends to have a half-life not dissimilar to an isotope like Francium 223. It is true that nationalist editing has seriously affected the three core areas under Arbcom restrictions. But it is extremely naive, epistemologically, or indeed manichaean to think that the vigorous interplay of, in each case, editors in disagreement can be spun simply as a conflict between an honourable RS-respecting party, and a group of inflammatory nationalists, who, alone, exhibit a POV. The assumption is that there is 'pure' scholarship promoted by one side to any textual dispute and contaminated thinking exhibited by their nationalistic antagonists. All research in the humanities is embedded in, curricular, human, and social intrerests, the difference being that the reliability of the results is in direct correlation with the epistemological sophistication of the research. Too abstract? Let me illustrate.

That in January 2018 a conservative Polish government passed a “anti-defamation” law which is coercive, enabling libel suits against people including scholars like Jan Grabowski when their interpretations of the past do not run in lockstep with an official narrative, is well known. Less well known is that wresting narrative control over holocaust discourse, not only by insisting it be restricted to Jewish victims, has been a major concern over decades for several institutions, and various Israeli governments. The distinguished historian of Poland, Norman Davies was recently reported on Polish Radio as recalling that in 1974 Yehuda Bauer, the acknowledged contemporary doyen of the discipline, in a holocaust seminar for historians conducted in the Israeli embassy in London, stated that the historical actors should be broken down into perpetrators (Germans), victims (Jews) and bystanders (Poles). When Davies, whose Polish father-in-law had survived both the Dachau and l Mauthausen camps, protested, he was apparently shouted down as a Polonophile. Davies was later denied tenure at Stanford University, according to him, because it was imputed that he was ‘insensitive’ to Jews.

In reading the threads, I keep in mind what Timothy Snyder wrote in his Bloodlands (2010)

Beyond Poland, the extent of Polish suffering is underappreciated. Even Polish historians rarely recall the Soviet Poles who were starved in Soviet Kazakhstan and Soviet Ukraine in the early 1930s, or the Soviet Poles shot in Stalin’s Great Terror in the late 1930s. No one ever notes that Soviet Poles suffered more than any other European national minority in the 1930s. The striking fact that the Soviet NKVD made more arrests in occupied eastern Poland in 1940 than in the rest of the USSR is rarely recalled. About as many Poles were killed in the bombing of Warsaw in 1939 as Germans were killed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945. For Poles, that bombing was just the beginning of one of the bloodiest occupations of the war, in which Germans killed millions of Polish citizens. More Poles were killed during the Warsaw Uprising alone than Japanese died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A non-Jewish Pole in Warsaw alive in 1933 had about the same chances of living until 1945 as a Jew in Germany alive in 1933. Nearly as many non-Jewish Poles were murdered during the war as European Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. For that matter, more non-Jewish Poles died at Auschwitz than did Jews of any European country, with only two exceptions: Hungary and Poland itself.Nishidani (talk) 13:31, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

Notes

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Personal attacks

Please do not engage in personal attacks as you did at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-03-09/Recent research. I'm sure you didn't mean to, but a pattern of this sort of thing is what gets long-term editors banned. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 02:06, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Please do not engage in personal insinuations by making a generic link to a huge talk page and judging my comments there to be personal attacks. If you want me to listen, provide evidence via diffs.Nishidani (talk) 13:57, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

World War II and the history of Jews in Poland: Arbitration case opened

Hello Nishidani,

You recently offered a statement in a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/World War II and the history of Jews in Poland. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/World War II and the history of Jews in Poland/Evidence. Please add your evidence by April 04, 2023, which is when the first evidence phase closes. Submitted evidence will be summarized by Arbitrators and Clerks at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/World War II and the history of Jews in Poland/Evidence/Summary. Owing to the summary style, editors are encouraged to submit evidence in small chunks sooner rather than more complete evidence later.

Details about the summary page, the two phases of evidence, a timeline and other answers to frequently asked questions can be found at the case's FAQ page.

For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration.

For the Arbitration Committee,
~ ToBeFree (talk) 00:13, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Convey to Arbcom my thanks for their courtesy in extending this invitation to me to comment. I’d rather prefer not to participate, despite my concern that the original complaint under examination arises from a mixture of incompetent scholarship, failure to grasp how Wikipedia’s internal mechanisms of slow incremental self-e(a)mendment work and, yes, political pressures. The wiki bickering over the representation of a horrifying tragedy (to both peoples) only stirs a sense of malaise. And I hate the idea of a guerre des plumes. But I'd be as useless there as tits on a bull, given my verbosity. For the record:-

My first encounter with that topic came when a close German friend told me in 1975, when we were discussing Raul Hilberg’s germinal study of the Holcaust, how he had befriended a young Pole who had ended up in Denmark as a refugee, having been forced to flee the political and social purging of Jews in Poland in the late 60s. As a volunteer in social services, my friend tried to help the young man settle in, without success. He wouldn’t entertain the idea of going to Israel or finding a new identity by adopting Danish citizenship. He felt he had been denied the only thing he was deeply attached to, being a Pole in the country he loved. He hanged himself some weeks later in despair. My friend was extremely distressed at this: he was troubled by his earliest memory, as a two year old, experiencing a thrill at watching from his parent’s window a troop of Nazi soldiers marching down the centre of Karlsruhe.

On the other side, my views are identical to those of Norman Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto, Auschwitz and several other camps. His thesis[ stirred a hornet’s nest of furious controversy, but Raul Hilberg, whose political convictions were diametrically opposed to Finkelstein’s , quietly noted (polemics of this kind are usually drowned in shouting misdirections) in defense of the latter that the scholarship was impeccable. Finkelstein, writing in 2000, argued with meticulous documentation that the rational study of the Holocaust had been hijacked for extortionate and geopolitical ends, that the reparative payments were mainly pocketed by institutions engaged in advocacy for Israel, and very little of the monies ostensibly paid out to compensate the survivors (whose numbers, 100,000 at war’s end had been officially inflated to 1 million 50 years later) was passed to the victims. Two decades later, to illustrate, the Israeli budget in 2020 augmented its financial assistance to its core Holocaust Memorial institution, Yad Vashem, by 20% while one third of Israel’s declared community of aged Holocaust survivors (165,000 =55,000) remain destitute with their monthly pittances. More is spent on publicizing the Holocaust, on conference junketing, on hammering its nationalized message home for political leverage, Finkelstein argued, than on helping the victims or funding detached scholarship. More awareness programmes while survivors languish in relative neglect. Nothing new or peculiar to Israel. A good many NGOS the world round (beginning with the Vietnamese boat people) dealing with severe refugee crises have for decades spent more covering their institutional costs than in assisting the afflicted whom they supposedly represent.

Every widow(er) who has worked through their grief, comes slowly to grasp that others in their communities have suffered similar losses, and that their own pain is not unique. The most powerful incident in The Straight Story occurs when a friendly local trying to help Alvin out in his tractor trek, takes him to a local bar. They both turn out to be war veterens.After some silence, Alvin relates an anecdote of his guilt as a sniper who had accidently shot a friend coming back from a reconnaissance foray. The other recounts a similar tragic incident for which he felt responsible. Neither comments on the other: the stories forge a silent understanding as no one tries a come-back of the type, ‘I suffer more’ or ‘I did more to help than you give me credit for’ which is the basso ostinato of this wiki (where POVers years ago could be described as overeggers or undereggers). The cultivation of our memories, esp. of a tragic past should not suffer from ethnocratic one-upmanship nor defensive grievance over being considered a 'lesser victim', qualitatively, because one’s community suffered only two million deaths compared to the other’s three million. Any serious historical knowledge is hard enough to master, without being swept up by the political uses to which it is made to lend itself. Nishidani (talk) 17:00, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Norman Finkelstein

An informative, thoughtful and insightful recent conversation with the always erudite and fearless Norman Finkelstein, about some portions of his most recent 500-page book. --- Best, Ijon Tichy (talk) 03:28, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

Lovely to hear from you (I thought you'd given up on me, understandably, for my position on the Russia-Ukraine conflict). I often think of, and worry about NF - the obscenity of a brilliant, erudite scholar of unbuyable integrity being stripped of his proper career and threatened with all but destitution simply because he privileges facts, and the rational inferences their orderly analysis generate, over the Hindenberg balloons of baloney puffed up in that discursive field by airheaded blowhards like Anus Domini and the vast gallery of sinecured hacks who throng the commentariat. I noted the book on its original publication, was perplexed by Tariq Ali's hostility to it, and have duly awaited its appearance in bookstores, since the kindle edition is, reputedly, unreadable. I can't read the interviews since this shonky makeshift of a computer I'm forced to work with this month can't access them. But when I do get a copy, I'll get back to you.

Best regards and a grandfatherly pat for the pup(s).Nishidani (talk) 12:00, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

Thank you

Hi @Nishidani. Without going into any more detail regarding the subject, just wanted to send a personal note to say I am really glad to see someone engage in serious historiographical analysis. I am not sure whether you have an academic background (I would certainly assume so, but the public discussion was not a place for me to mention anything personal), but as a Polish researcher working in the U.S. I often find myself agonizing over the problems outlined in the article. I see myself as new-generation and find ultra-nationalistic bends abhorrent, and yet still all of this can affect one emotionally. So, thank you for being rational and objective, at least to the extent a case like this allows. Ppt91 (talk) 18:35, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

Thanks indeed. I appreciate your kind remarks, esp. since though it took only a quarter of an hour to write it took me nearly 3 hours to post (a keyboard that jumps and won't easily copy and paste. Like me, it's showing the symnptoms of old age.:)

@Ppt91 Thanks indeed. I trained in classical Greek then specialized for a while in Japanese, until I settled in Italy. Not only ultranationalism, but nationalism itself (as opposed love of country and its rich human and natural landscape and heritage) - Einstein likened it to measles, which hits children, not adults. My wife and I once 'adopted' for three months a Chernobyl boy who needed a steady daily chicken diet to rid himself of exposure to radioactivity. I was surprised at the precocity of his nationalism, at 9 years of age, which extended to laughing at my accent when I recited Pushkin. I enjoyed his mocking imitations, but one day he asked me what was the best car manufactured in the world, and, racing car fan, I said, 'A Ferrari perhaps'. He stared angrily and insisted the Lada Riva was the best car ever made, and wept when I quietly told him it drew on Fiat design and technology.

Italy's attempt to go nationalist ended up in disaster and even then despite complaisance, a deep strain of cynicism held. When you see films of those marshalled crowds giving the fascist salute to Mussolini, with his jutting chin up on the balcony above Piazza Venezia, so my father-in-law said, one should recall that Romans saluting often muttered, arms stretched out to chin level -'We're up to here in shit'. Italians, I quickly discovered, are only really passionate patriots with regard to what is acceptable to their palates, i.e., they are stomach nationalists.

Please don't agonize about ultranationalism as opposed to reading widely in the sociological, historical and psychological analyses of this pathology. Doctors can't help patients if they themselves are sick. Their first obligation on qualifying as physicians is, as the Gospel of Luke reminds us, to heal themselves. Poland, like all countries in that area, has an immense linguistic and cultural richness, besides which this endless politicized farting about a collective identity is busf, more or less the same the world over. The more fervent its stridency, the hollower its spokesmen. It is one of the extraordinary paradoxes of ultranationalism that its exponents all say the same thing. The more hectic the rhetoric, the greater the index of an insecurity that typically tries to convince itself by convincing others. Its exponents utter the same things the world over - their rabid assertions of uniqueness only differ from those of their inimical kin over the border near and far in terms of the language used. It is conceptually vapid. I'll have to resort to a cliché to wrap this up (an urgent need to refresh my cigarette supplies is pressing me to rush out for a walk) -empty vessels make the most sound, while still waters run deep. When you find yourself agitated and cauight up in a crossfire of patriotic argufiers tugging at your mental sleeves, just recite a Polish version of Tyutchev's masterpiece Молчание. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 22:22, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

@Nishidani I was under the impression I had "thanked" you for the reply, but there may have been a glitch. I'd never take offense at this reference. In fact, I spent some time looking up and comparing Polish translations of the poem after reading your original (exceptionally thoughtful) reply last month. I hope you're staying well. Ppt91^talk 19:48, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

I hope that allusion to Tyutchev wasn't offensive. In 1974 a friend and I greeted two Polish doctoral students who had just arrived in Japan by welcoming them in Russian, the closest language we knew to their mother tongue. They were upset and asked us to speak English

Heard this years ago from a Polish friend. Pole #1: "I wish Ghengis Khan would come back to life, attack Poland, then return to Mongolia." #2: "That's terrible, don't you know how murderous GK was?" #1: "Yes, but he'd have to cross Russia twice"!

Steiner

Wanting to fill out the sketchy new citation you provided from the TLS, I went to look at the source. Now I can't be 100% sure, as the TLS is behind a paywall, but it does appear to show a list of the complete contents of each issue, and I can't see any mention of Steiner, nor of Adler in the issue you cite (22 July 2022). Are you able to check it, given your current inadequate computer? Thanks. NSH001 (talk) 12:21, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Sorry for the trouble, pal. Actually I should have specified that it is a letter in the Letters to the Editor page, p.6 of the 22 July 2022 issue. I have it in hard copy before me. Letters might be challenged as sources, of course, but Adler is a superb scholar and authority on our Steiner, with access to his Nachlass. Perhaps we can just expunge the link. His doctoral thesis, in the two parts I linked to on his page, is well worth reading and easily downloadable. Hope all's well and that you're over the worst of it. Best Nishidani (talk) 15:07, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Well I've added a URL that looks as though it might contain the letter, but I can't really tell if it does. The TLS website makes it really difficult to search through the letters, quite apart from the effrontery of claiming copyright over letters from readers. Perhaps if you've got a paid sub you might be able to check? Or perhaps some kind person watching this page?

Re my operation, thanks for the good wishes. Fortunately the gruesome phase is now over (lasted about 6 weeks), and I now have to come to terms with the permanent loss of the ability to produce semen. That's a bigger deal than I thought it would be, even though at my age it's not really that important. Apart from that important exception, I still have all the normal male functions and experiences (and I mean all of them, enough said). --NSH001 (talk) 06:52, 15 April 2023 (UTC)

Just an unimportant wee thought: that photo on his page – if you shave off the moustache, and give him a non-receding hairline - looks strikingly similar to photos of my father taken when I was growing up (when my father was in his 40s/early 50s). My father did look younger than his age, a characteristic I seem to have inherited. --NSH001 (talk) 15:47, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

Good news all round for your op, and a return to a normal life insofar as that is possible in this increasingly 'extraterrestial' weirdom of a world. That mugshot of Steiner was taken when he was a mere 29, so if your father resembled him in his 50s, it means he retained two decades of youthfulness, which must certainly be genetic, immune at least physically to the extreme wear and tear of WW2 he underwent. Count yourself lucky then. My wife was until her death at 75, taken to be 20 years younger by her doctors until she showed them proof on each occasion of her real age. Since the age of 19 I've always been taken to be at least 10 years older than my anagraphic age. 15 years ago, I saw old men struggling to carry an electric generator 40 yards down to a new line of olive trees which they picked by shaking them mechanically. I shinned down the tree I was on, picked it up ands hauled it to their area. They were flabbergasted. How could an 80 year old like me lift what two of them couldn't shift. They'd guessed at my age because they knew my wife and expected I was much older than her, more or less their age. They shook their heads in disbelief when I told them I was only 58 until a nearby member of the Franciscan friary, whose olive grove's yield we were harvesting to make olive oil for them, confirmed the date for the honorary (because pagan) 'lay Francisan' in their midst.Nishidani (talk) 17:15, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Editor's Barnstar
	Thanks for your work on Michael Astour Doug Weller talk 13:00, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks indeed Doug. Mind you, the article was and remains your brainchild and you gave me the essential clue, with a link, to expand it. So I consider it our article (so far. Once you decide to put it into mainspace, what others do with/to it is another matter!) Best regards Nishidani (talk) 14:57, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Precious anniversary

Precious

Six years!

--Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:16, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, but I think you are misreading the bear market price deflation for old fogeys (excuse the pleonasm but it is sanctioned by usage) whose residual value only momentarily holds up because they figure on the close-to-extinction listings.Nishidani (talk) 12:31, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

it's value not price --

Well, well, well: Update

[2],[3]

Just my 2 cents: when I see how other organisations have dealt with him, and compare that with WMF's T&S "actions" (or rather: inaction); it makes "our" T&S look like ...😫😖😩😬🤢🤢🤢☠️

"Our" T&S exist only to protect ..the WMF. The sooner editors (in "contested" areas) here, understand that (and take their precautions), the better. Cheers, Huldra (talk) 23:52, 16 April 2023 (UTC)

I was raised blokish, to brush off verbal attacks as water off a duck's back, or proof that the insulter was a 'gutless wonder'. It must be far harder on the fairer sex, that sort of hate. In any case, I wouldn't blame T&S. I never bothered alerting them to death threats in emails or on this page, and it was they who stepped in when the aggression assumed the form of a group of muggish twits trying to 'out' me. I found T&S's care over this, as they pursued the digital paper trail to nail the morons, endearing. With an operation as big as this, 36 million editors is it, an actuarial calculation would suggest that were wikimedia to take every dumbprick or twisted idiot to court, even in the extremely aggravating circumstances of your encounter with the morons in assault mode, they'd be spending half their budget on lawyers and inconclusive trials all over the world rather than keeping the servers running. Consider that no one can undo the magnificent, virtually solo achievement of your massive article output on the history of Palestinian villages before the landscape was written out of the modern record. One tough lady, with exceptional 'callipygean' (no offense:metaphorical) sitzfleisch and a zillion times the nous quotient that those who have hounded you have to live with (what horrible lives, each with their own tedious and ugly livløgn, which they must endure -punishment enough).Nishidani (talk) 15:20, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

<blushing>, but I am still not happy with T&S: one example; for years there was no cut-off for sending hundreds of harassing emails, even if you never had made a single edit to wikipedia. I complained bitterly about it; they finally -after years- set a limit (of max 6 emails, I think). That was one of the reason Tiamut cooled of the project; cleaning up her inbox everey other day of literally hundreds of emails about how she was going to be raped/killed/gassed. Another example: when a certain off-wiki harassment-site were trying to out us; they wouldn't even contact the advisors to the site, some of whom had academic position (= easy to find/contact),

So, sorry: not impressed, cheers, Huldra (talk) 22:52, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

Seeking a Mentor

I am currently appealing a Topic ban (see here) where other editors there are asking that I have a volunteer mentor who will examine my edits in the ARBPIA area, prior to my posting them, in order to receive his approval or disapproval. Do you think that you will be willing to review such edits of mine, if I write the suggested edit on my Sandbox and link your name there for a quick review? I honestly do not think that I'll be making very many edits in the ARBPIA area, but only occasionally, and therefore it should not distract from your regular duties. If you should agree to act as a mentor for me, please comment in the AE section where my appeal is lodged. Thanks.Davidbena (talk) 02:39, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

Nishidani is currently subject to a ban on commenting at AE and he would be ill suited to this as a result in my opinion. (No offense intended of course). nableezy - 02:48, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

G'day David. Actually several days ago I dropped a note to an admin I much admire on his talk page, making precisely the point Nableezy made, using that page to, well, circumvent I suppose technically, the permaban imposed on me regarding AE discussions. In it I affirmed your value as a contributor. Nableezy has, as usual, grasped the problem in your proposal to me by the short and curlies, but the real problem is that I am hopelessly ignorant about not only the fine details of policy, but even of standard rules, and so, in a case like this, where a mentor must judge with accuracy where edits risk straying from a Dostoievskian tiptoeing on the thin lines between normalcy and the tabooed minefields right or left, I'd probably prove to be a poor guide, cutting you enough slack inadvertently to get you hauled before a wiki tribunal.

Your article on I/P plants was exemplary in its framework, classifications and erudite care for evenhanded thoroughness. No one else on wikipedia can match that kind of work, and I would imagine that this means you have extensive scope to enrich our encyclopedia by further forays into the science of the land and its landscape. Arboriculture from Biblical times down to the present, using the same approach, would, if you could venture to shine your acumen in that direction, would be a wonderful addition, as would the fauna.

What the IP area desperately needs is not more stuff on the angles of I/P conflicts, - I find all that intensely tedious, even while recognizing their necessity, and most of the articles spoiled because the conflict overrides history and material facts of the kind you, Arminden, Huldra (with all of their respective differences) excel in. However things go in your appeal, rest assured I'll help, informally, where I can as time allows. I haven't the talent to mentor, and were I once, I would problably be hampered by a pseudoetymological sense that I would be more a men(s) (Lat:mind) Tor (Ger:fool) than a wise cicerone through the thickets of policy. Best RegardsNishidani (talk) 09:11, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

Just emailed you

And when I came here, noticed your post above. Good response and I've learned from it. Doug Weller talk 08:24, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

Offline coordination can assume a wiki-sponsored form?

Editing Wikipedia, even more than critiquing it, helps students realize why they should not trust Wikipedia. The strongest moment of realization takes place when students make worthy changes to an article, only to see those changes deleted, sometimes within minutes, by one of Wikipedia’s many anonymous editors, who evidently lack the expertise to recognize the value of the students’ new contributions.

A second benefit of Wikipedia editing lies in its impact. Unlike virtually any other assignment, students can educate the global community while enhancing their own knowledge, a form of service learning. Students, with their instructors’ guidance, have a tangible contribution to make to Wikipedia’s often faulty articles on Israel. Shira Klein, 'Using Wikipedia in Israel Studies Courses,' Chapman University Digital, 3-1-2018

I.e.. there are courses to (a) help students grasp that wikipedia is unreliable; (b) anonymous students, who by definition, lack expertise, can find their 'worthy' changes reverted by anonymous editors who 'evidently' lack the expertise to evaluate positively what students add.(Contradicting a student's edit only proves the reverters themselves are incompetent, while exacerbating the student's sense of grievance.) (c) Instructors (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?) at this point can assist their students in 'educating the global community' about nations to which they are attached, Israel, for example, which, viewed from a nationalistic perspective, suffers from image-distortion. Instructors know articles on Israel (that holds for articles on most countries) are at fault, and teach their students to get the 'right' image constructed on any country's page. That is structured, programmatic coordination offline via proxies to further a national perspective in my book. Nishidani (talk) 12:10, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Just such an initiative, which was roundly deplored on wikipedia, was sponsored by Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, after an earlier bid by CAMERA was nipped in the buddy-grouping.

One Jerusalem-based Wikipedia editor, who doesn't want to be named, said that publicising the initiative might not be such a good idea. "Going public in the past has had a bad effect," she says. "There is a war going on and unfortunately the way to fight it has to be underground."Rachel Shabi Jemima Kiss, 'Wikipedia editing courses launched by Zionist groups,'The Guardian 18 August 2010

Now, arguably, the war’s no longer under one's nose but in one's face and acceptable because the venue is ‘academic’. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.Nishidani (talk) 13:06, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

I mean, there are a lot of topics on Wikipedia that can suffer from bias but starting Wikipedia trainings aimed at people with a particular viewpoint is not the way to fix the problem. (t · c) buidhe 01:09, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

I once knocked back an offer to have my expenses paid to attend a study group on I/P wikiediting for precisely that reason. Whatever the formal aim, the idea lent itself to the possibility of coordinating approaches to editing.

In any case, for me the real problem here is a failure to recognize that the RS 'reliable'/'unreliable' criteria for source selection, important as it is, overlooks the need for editors to be more aware of the metacritical issues in RS (G&K are prepossessed by arguable flaws in 'Polish' scholarship, and utterly silent about the glaring assumptions of Western approaches, which is why that screed is worthless). By that I mean, that in any field, there are historic trends, where intepretative paradigms emerge, gain traction, become standardized viewpoints, and inevitably, succumb slowly or rapidly to challenges as their weaknesses are noted, and alternative perspectives, each vying for discursive ascendency, emerge to fix the paradigmatic shortcomings.

Awareness of this slippage in RS emphasis is fundamental to assessing how articles should be written. To just take the Holocaust/Generalplan Ost case we are examining. Helmut Heiber once dismissed the Generalplan Ost as just a patchwork of bureaucratic desksitters' daydreaming. This represented what Transatlantic Western scholarship thought at the time, before the fall of the Soviet Union. It just so happened that when he made the crack, scholars in the East happened to start focusing intensely on it, work which culminated in Ludwig Nestler, Wolfgang Schumann (eds.), Europa unterm Hakenkreuz : die Okkupationspolitik des deutschen Faschismus (1938 - 1945), which ran to 8 volumes by 1991 (No, I haven't read it), by which time the Wall had fallen. This then sparked off several lines of enquiry, one of which elected to redefine Nazi Germany in terms of the praxis of racialism, i.e. in terms of the way ideology inflected Germany's indiscriminate massacre policies. That in turn is under challenge (Gerhard Wolf, Ideology and the Rationality of Domination:Nazi Germanization Policies in Poland, Indiana University Press 2020 ISBN 978-0-253-04808-0. He makes the point re Heiber/Nestler and Schumann on p.19, n.46).

Wolf instances the work of Götz Aly in this regard (Aly conducted a memorable interview with another of my heroes, Raul Hilberg, back in 2002). Well, one would think with this innovative background, someone like Aly would be insulated against ethnocentric crassness. Nope. While innovative, he utterly underwrites the Holocaust uniqueness narrative, to the point of being blindsided by the obvious. As I wrote higher up on this page in my reflections, most recognize the Herero massacres as a genocide. But Aly says (per a critique A. Dirk Moses made some years ago), that since the Holocaust uniquely killed Jews because they were Jews,-that is the distinctive feature of intention- the German genocide against the Herero can't be parented to the holocaust, or even to genocide because it was a Gegenwehr or defensive war where an exterminatory 'intention' (which makes the holocaust putatively unique) was missing. Germany was just engaging in a war to fend off the indigenous response of 'aggression' to the colonial German state being created there. Sheesh! I mean, fuck, how dumb can you get? How obtuse can one be to dismiss the recorded fact that thousands upon thousands of innocent Herero were driven out into the waterless deserts to die there (a practice the Nazis themselves used by driving people into zones where food was unavailable). One sees this cognitive blindness in specialists who ethnicize WW2 thematics over and over again. The paradigm must wilter, but I won't be round to see that. I only see significant dissonance emerging quite regularly since the mid 1990s.

I probably don't need to impress you with the obvious, i.e. that knowledge is always embedded in a current, that alternates between periods of calm flow, stagnation, and swirling. And the to me highly political definition of the Holocaust which has put discussion of genocide in the iron grip of extra-scholarly interests (there are several books and articles on this) creates a perpetual stasis, because its definition as 'unique' denies historiography its proper instruments of comparativism (yes Toynbee's 12 volumes developed my convictions on this at an impressionable age). if that is the benchmark, whatever the reasons for insisting on its sui generis nature (and these change constantly) then analysis is departmentalized, analogies stymied, and history is no longer a broad field of interacting transnational ideologies, economic interests, clashing nationalisms with numerous actors where every region's history is enmeshed in broad global forcefields, but us, in our unique experience, and the rest of humanity. It's ethnocentric, profoundly (west)eurocentric, and wildly un historical because a concept of 'uniqueness' sweeps away 'causality' from history, meaning the art of history itself is, for this lone topic, impracticable. I admit, nonetheless, that this highly pointed definition still holds the podium, creating the difficulties we experience here in writing articles, and the incoherencies one notes in far too many books on the topic area.

So when we select from a field that has an industrial production of books a score of important books singularly focused on just the holocaust (excerpted from the larger picture), it is all too easy to gain a reasonably informed impression that where they converge, we have the key points. Such a vast field, in its crosscurrents and diverse thematic vectors will contain, if a larger sample is taken, a more complex and nuanced picture will emerge. And, at the same time, as I have written, genocide scholarship, which for stupid historical reasons runs parallel to holocaust scholarship as if the two were distinct, underwriting as it must by definition a general comparativist methodology, certainly is far less comfortable with the mysticism of incomparable uniqueness successfgully promoted by Elie Wiesel, with his notorious showmanship and holocaust lobbying, with his lucrative appearance fee of $25,000 for every one of his loquacious performances on the 'Holocaust as unspeakable ergo unique- theatrics'. Sorry, sleepless night, ergo early work start before the cogency of reason has had time to corral into decent shape the garrulousness of oneiric hours.Nishidani (talk) 04:34, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Public/Private

A long-retired Russian military man was discussing current events by phone with a former colleague living in Ukraine. Both resented the war between the two recently fraternal countries and expressed the hope that this madness would soon end. A few days later, representatives of the special services raided the Russian. He did not give out any military secrets, and no one accused him of this. He was charged, however, with publicly discrediting the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. In turn, the former officer, who knew the laws, objected that the conversation had been a private one. And such a charge was meant to apply to public statements only. “But it was public,” objected the intelligence officers. “After all, we heard it!” Boris Kagarlitsky. Nishidani (talk) 12:35, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Poor ol' wiki

• this
• and this Nishidani (talk) 08:13, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Nomination of Herzl's Mauschel and Zionist antisemitism for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Herzl's Mauschel and Zionist antisemitism is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Herzl's Mauschel and Zionist antisemitism until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article until the discussion has finished.

Walt Yoder (talk) 20:14, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Familiarize yourself with WP:NOTCENSORED.Nishidani (talk) 20:48, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Just a note for the record on these shenanigans. A newbie with 600 edits took 14 minutes, from my posting a new article (77kb) with 136 notes to refs and 50+footnotes, to find it among the 6.5 million wiki articles, read the whole text, make a complex move to erase part of the title and then mount an AfD. In a brief exchange my words were twisted as I duly replied to his criticisms, and when Nableezy, who reverted the move, posted an obligatory notice on the editor's talk page about Arbpia restrictions, accused both of us of tagteaming, and of insinuating by virtue of that notification that he was a sockpuppet. It was a 'nightmare' to work in this area. When i mildly suggested he had again misinterpreted things, I was told to fuck off. Nishidani (talk) 23:07, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

For the record:

1. The "new pages feed" is a thing. There's no mystery how I found the article. Your insinuations are hostile and inaccurate.
2. Special:Diff/1158561131 is a pretty blatant accusation.
3. I don't have time or energy for any of this. It has occurred to me that you aren't suspecting me of being an Icewhiz sock (which I didn't say as it would have been a personal attack), but someone associated with Grabowski and Klein. And ... I'm not. But I'm done with the topic area. I'm sure they will be less easy to roll over than I was. Walt Yoder (talk) 23:12, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Don't expect me to waste time reading not only your talk page but the diff record which duly shows you elided Nableezy's remark before I intervened. I have plenty of time and energy, but not for wikidramatics, or replying to bizarre conjectures about G&K, all water under the bridge too far(ce). Good grief. 'Nuf said.Nishidani (talk) 23:22, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Would suggest you return the fuck off revert in kind, but without the edit summary, fyi. nableezy - 00:50, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Yes. Off to the archives with this tripe-swiping. I'll do it as soon as the AfD is closed.Nishidani (talk) 06:55, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

But just for the record, I thought of writing about this in November 2022, after encountering stern opposition to my attempt to place the Anti-Zionism page on a firmer historically more rounded basis. Numerous attempts to touch on the well-documented antagonism within modern Jewish history between Zionists and anti-Zionists were reverted by what, in my view, were frivolous or POV-protectionist objections. The page is entitled Anti-Zionism so don't mention Zionism was the drumbeat of reverters. Perhaps I am wrong, but my impression was, and remains, that Herzl is the iconic object of hero-worship, and there is no room for a warts and all approach, while Zionism is the official ideology of a powerful state, whose values should not be impugned. Worst still, huge efforts have been recently invested in trying to get official global sanction for a Israelocentric proposal that would equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, a preposterous proposition given that (a) anti-Zionism is firmly rooted in Jewish intellectual life and religious tradition and (b) the scholarly record is replete with the historic ambiguities of Zionism's relation to antisemitism, to the point that Zionists often expressed as much contempt for contemporary Jewish populations as did their antisemitic adversaries, and this avowed contempt enraged many Jews, understandably. And so, I started to make notes on the foundational text for Zionist use of antisemitic stereotypes to war down opposition within the ranks of Jewry. It is a story that should be told, because so many scholars are fascinated by it, even if nary a rumour of this history seeps into the mainstream newspaper/magazine world from which 99% of the reading population get their impressionistic views.In sum, this began long before the first edition of the G&K hullabaloo (it is not prescience but mediatic logic that prescribes furthur polemical assaults on wikipedia, of which that was just a foretaste). Nishidani (talk) 11:11, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Operation Atlas (Mandatory Palestine)

Hi, about ten years ago you added harvnb references "Adams 2009" and "Bar-Zohar and Haber 1983" to the article Operation Atlas (Mandatory Palestine). Unfortunately you haven't defined them, meaning the article appears in Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors and nobody can look up the references. If you could fix them that would be great. DuncanHill (talk) 01:32, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

Goodness me. What happened there was that I had added all that information in a rush from another page (Amin al-Husayni) I was writing up. Must have been too busy to finish the edit there (Operation Atlas (Mandatory Palestine)), which I'll do now. Thanks for catching that. Nishidani (talk) 08:28, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

Thank you. DuncanHill (talk) 10:05, 8 June 2023 (UTC)

A word to the wise: take a look at this diff of yours. Note the "Tag: harv-error" at the top, immediately under "Nishidani". This is a very recent improvement to the wiki software, warning you that you have just added a harv/sfn no-target error. So you can fix it immediately! No need to wait for Asha to come along and either fix it, or draw it to your attention with a red q mark! Nor any more interruptions on your talk page from DuncanHill ! --NSH001 (talk) 14:35, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

I know it's no use my reciting 'Me a cowboy, me a cowboy, me a Mexican cowboy' and saying three penitential 'Hale Maries'. I'll come clean. I just bow my head, drink a bloody Mary and unrepetent, persist in my daze. It's a deep, uneradicable, ineludible personal defect, like reading books. I've tried to get my head wrapped round the problem, but only end up rapping my head, also with doggerel, like:-

Ar cacio je se raschia la coccia.

'Ya getten bald, ol'timer, moulten hair

shows age is creepen up, ya brainpan too,

Judgen from the way ya mess up software

Is shrinken faster'n a famished house's stew.

So get yer act tagether, pull that digit

Oudda ya ring, an fa wunce apply ya wits

Ta proven that yer ain't a mental midget

When folks spot errors ut give'em all the shits.

Spen' less time now on fags an sippen tea,

An rid ya thorts of erudite distractions,

An hour's enuf to get that mastery

Of flawless scripts preempten these infractions.'

So, stubben 'is cig, swillen the lees, he cleared

His desk a novels and monumental tomes

Wrinkles furrowed his brow as strainen, he geared

His mind into neutral, n'read what wiki gnomes

had written out - one or two simple rules

Which, memorized, would make him quite a whiz

In grasping what kiddies mug up now in schools

And prove he'd out-Jones Jones in a software quiz.

The hours ticked on, he went an took a shower

To wash away the armpit stench of sweat

Exuded as he toiled to get the power

Of mind over the scriptural matter of the net.

'If thus then sfn. Ah, right, but otherwise

It's harv or even harvnb, t'all depends

On, uh, hmm, . .ah, strewth time fa me beddibies,

A nap'll freshen me wits and make amends

For me lack of understanden. Sleep on it, ol boy,

As Poincaré sed, an when ya wake, 'Whacko'

The problems solved! The conscious mind's too coy

To twig the dope on cruxes. Off ta bed I go.'

He woke at three, from dreams of the fairer sex

With him the hero, battling to save their hide,

From the claws of a mawling Tyrannosaurus Rex,

And winning against all odds to rescue a bride.

There was an earlier dream, full of symbols and math

Glowing faintly in the ashes of recall.

But try as he might to retread that path,

A hunger for muffins forced his memory to pall.

'Aw fuggit,' he grumbled,'I've wasted me time agen

An havta get back ta catch up on readen stuff

That gives me the horn an not get stuck in the pen

A software niceties t'day. Enuf's enuf.'

An hour or two of reading gave him a hint

Of an edit or two some article might need.

Before he did it, he paused from a wiki stint

'nah dammit, I'm bound ta screw up this lead,

'Cos I still can't figure out the diff between

Sfn and harvnb, well, I can, but then forget,

An spend hours dowsing me neurons with caffeine.

Time f'ra stroll ana cappuccino. Fuck the net.'

So there you have it. The geezer's beyond reproof

Too set in his ways to ever heed advice,

Too shameless to mend these lapses that make him goof,

And far too fuddyduddled to be precise.Nishidani (talk) 16:26, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

French?

I am working (on and off) on an article about "Perhaps the finest and best preserved of the ruined monasteries in Palestine" (according to SWP), see User:Huldra/Deir Qal’a.Alas, when it comes to Victor Guérin, the English presently in the article is a

translate.bing.com-version of his French. Would you care to check that the English-version isn't too far from the French original? Thanks, Huldra (talk) 22:57, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Whoops, I completely missed this, having all sorts of 'distractions' on my greedy plate. I have some more work this afternoon, but if you don't find I have done the trans by tomorrow ping me again, at decibel level.Nishidani (talk) 12:51, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks! Do you know what ""pas de large sur" mean? The translate.bing.com gives "No wide on" ...which doesn't make much senSe to me, Huldra (talk) 23:49, 13 April 2023 (UTC) PS: sorry about the egg; that's "egg on my face", I suppose..🫤

'large' in those contexts just refers to width, as opposed to (sur) length (i.e. the chapel measures 8 by 32. Why is the 2 after 3 miniscule?) I swear I'll get to it all within the day! For the last several weeks, as my main computer is being reengineered by a very busy friend, I've been constrained to access and read the internet on a borrowed minicomputer with a two inch high window for any text, which has meant usually I throw up my hands after reading a few emails and just succumb to the strong temptations to chuck it all in and plough on with a heavy reading load instead. That explains my endless delays - operations on this petit laptop with its nervous cursor jumping all over the place as I type and splicing in words above, not consecutively after, the text I am writing, so it takes a half an hour sometimes to write a few lines. Frustrating. I don't even have access to tilde signing, so have to copy them from a special word page where the signature is conserved, and the laptop slows down drammatically if I have open more than two windows. Jayzus Nishidani (talk) 08:06, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Don't worry, I don't have a deadline :/ I just saw some photos over at commons for Deir Qal’a and for Deir Sam'an, also saw there were articles in several other wikis, and that there were plenty of references in "older" sources (Guerin, SWP, etc). That of course tempted me! Alas, I'm dreadful in that I start these draft-articles .....but never finish them. Oh well, I can always hope that someone else finish the job.. (like Tiamut and Al Ameer son did for Aqil Agha, and Onceinawhile did for Jisr el-Majami)) cheers, Huldra (talk) 23:57, 14 April 2023 (UTC) PS: and I don't envy you your computer problems...

I'm writing from myt local bar. I've lost my computer connection. I was due to have a new modem delivered within the week by the firm which runs the server, free of charge and optic fibre connection - I said no but they gave me no choice. The loss of connection arose when, notwithstanding the failure of the courier to find me home when, unannounced, they decided to deliver the new modem, they switched over to the new system which requires it. Italy! I should be able to tackle it within the week.Nishidani (talk) 10:28, 15 April 2023 (UTC)

No, I haven't forgotten. I just have one more test on the main computer tomorrow before, if all goes well, I can get back to my normal workmode. Using this nanolaptop led to eyestrain, and I found myself for the first time squinting,and so, prophylactically, drastically reduced accessing the laptop, though of course it could just be age kicking in, demanding that like everyone else I get a pair of specs after . several lucky decades of perfect vision. As soon as I have a large functional screen to work from, I'll check the translation as first priority. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 16:26, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

The Guerin at the Ein Samiya-article needs checking, and is presumably a bit more urgent, as that article is already "live", so to speak, Huldra (talk) 23:55, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

(random French-speaking passerby) in case you still need this, the translation there is good. I have a couple of quibbles, which I don't think require quarreling with a published translation, but fyi here they are. # Remarquer means "to notice" not "to remark", so this is a false friend, but not a very egregious one. "On remarque" x, as it is phrased here actually means "x can be seen", as "on" is an indefinite third person. As in "people say"="on dit" #Tronçon to me denotes a tree stump. I would have to think about how to convey that in English, but I think "fragment" may make the pieces of the columns sound smaller than they were.

Feel free to ask me about French if you encounter it elsewhere. I also have at least a couple of French-speaking talk page stalkers. Elinruby (talk) 22:56, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

Something something about scholarship on your page

(From Talk: The Holocaust) is this in a sandbox? Interested. Holocaust in Poland has 25 or 30 citations to Gerlach, who is no doubt a fine RS, but...what you said Elinruby (talk) 23:09, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

When the JudeaSamaria/West Bank went to Arbcom, since I am uncomfortable with our normal dispute processes (well, have little faith in their outcomes, though respecting their necessity and the goodwill of those doomed to arbitrate, for technical reasons based on the AynRandian principles there which deal with behaviour not content), the only way I could reply was by analysing my own knowledge of the scholarship on the issue, to explain why I arrived at the position I would adopt were I to edit such a topic area or comment there. When I did my first thesis, I found that 95% of the scholarship over 70 years, and I read it all, recycled ideas that came from just 3 brilliant papers (Hermann Diels, 1897; Karl Meuli 1935; Walter Burkert, 1962), the scholars just taking that core of results on board without challenging them, and writing variations on a theme. And successively, I found this to be a general trend. It still worries me, this bandwagon effect- I learn most from the pioneers, and am somewhat wary of the sutler noise (precisely because as an acolyte I shuffle along in the train and tend to soak up the gossip environmentally, rather than hear directly from the pathfinders blazing the trail). A huge output is not informed by methodological anxieties, but simply runs with a given trend, and does so, yes, with scruple to throw further light on details, but the details assume interest only if one accepts the 'truthfulness' of the prevailing paradigm (Thomas Kuhn 1962). It's understandable: careers tend to demand one exploit the ostensible novelties of an emerging hermeneutic fashion.

The first essay reflecting this concern remains transcluded on the top of this page. Idem with the present dispute, when Arbcom took on the Holocaust in Poland kermesse. But in the latter, the issues were far larger and, at the same time, I didn't have much free time. So I began dropping on my page some notes to clarify for myself my orientation on the problems that arise there. Other things cropped up, so it remains only half finished. Sandbox material is wotk-in-progress for a prospective article, and since I have no intention of editing that area or the broader Holocaust, a sandbox wouldn't be the place. I do this because knowledge is provisional, reflecting, beyond what the data say, human, social and time-bound interests in the continuous evaluation of how best to interpret a phenomenon, and that metacritical reality unnerves me by what it implies. I.e. that while I may feel confident about making a judgment, based on the best sources I can find, my judgment may for all that just mediate unwittingly a systemic bias in the discipline I am familiarizing myself with, or some paradigmatic trend. So, offline or otherwise, I feel under an obligation to work out the premises that induce me, via my reading, to think this rather than that 'take' on some historical reality is, as it appears to me at least, more cogent. On wikipedia, I like these personal struggles with bias, in myself or in books, to be above board. I share the results with anyone who might happen to glance at this page, and of course, since I am only drawing on RS, anything I write up here from them is, like edits, available to anyone who might find it usable for improving articles I at least have no desire to touch.

As to Gerlach, I haven't read him. But overreliance on one source is dangerous. My bias lies with Timothy Snyder et al., who, though inside the paradigm, are quietly rattling its recent eurocentric assumptions. Ethnicity with Herder arose to challenge the eurocentric hegemony of Enlightenment reason', a just move, but got hijacked by nationalism, and has now arranged itself as a shared principle by both right and left: the right asserts the primacy of the political 'ethnic' nation, the left wooes the ethnicity or identity politics of grievance minorities, now that the reformist thrust of the 'liberal' traditions of the state have died. All this reverberates at the edges of this kind of dispute. I must shut up.Nishidani (talk) 08:46, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

requiescat

Cormac McCarthy. Nishidani (talk) 21:17, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

CS1 error on Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry

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Notes, comments and suggestions for my reflections from fellow wikipedians

Heh, I knew that link would get you going :) Good stuff. Selfstudier (talk) 10:13, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

I've been a longtime supporter of dividing Wikipedia articles according to the topic rather than the name (what they are called) I think you are right that "Holocaust" has multiple meanings which each deserve their own article (personally I would divide into 1) persecution and murder of Jews from 1933 to 1945 and 2) mass killings perpetrated by Nazi Germany from 1939-1945). For better or worse, the more commonplace usage of "Holocaust" in high-quality reliable sources is the former, so IMO the best solution is to write article #2 and put a hatnote to it on the Holocaust article. (t · c) buidhe 10:04, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

1. 1 would be shoah, as defined above. I dislike it because history cannot be done in terms of a single ethnic victim or party, and shoah thus defined is somewhat weird in using that arc of time as if it were a self-contained unit for analysis (How would one fit into that narrative the split between Zionist accommodations to the New Order and the diasporic communities' abhorrence of any compromise, etc. Getting Jews out of Europe was one thing both Zionists and Nazis agreed on). I just take the articles as they are, since I know any serious attempt to put them on a rational scholarly footing will just end up in a bunfight of editwarring, and in the circs, the best one can do is add gradually enough cogent factual details that somewhere down the line a tipping point will be met demanding a rewrite of the articles.Nishidani (talk) 22:32, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

(a)Basically my purpose here is to clarify important meta-discursive contexts and elements that are not well-known generally on wikipedia, but which should be taken into consideration, - something like Michael Polyani’s tacit knowledge- in addressing the issues Arbcom is faced with. Since I consider that the restrictive scope of their enquiry is methodologically flawed, since by excluding a range of potential evidence (the competence of G&K’s paper as an authoritative source for the state of research in the given scholarly field), it will tend to preempt equally viable alternative conclusions. If, for example, it can be shown that on several occasions G&K have skewed the evidence ( elicited to buttress their claims and inferences about the motives of real people identified as editing wiki), either regarding the standing as reliable or unreliable, of RS, or have caricatured by selective simplifications the very complex positions adopted over numerous articles by the editors they indict, then they would emerge as not per se reliable. For if the gravamen of their paper is that editors distort the evidence, and it turns out, in rebuttals, that they too distort evidence, they would be hoisted with their own petard. The way the scope is defined gives them immunity from cross-examination while retaining them as witnesses, when they themselves are responsible for producing the putative evidence of fraudulent abuse of Wikipedia. That is precisely why I thought the only unselfcompromising way out of the predicament caused by the publication of this ‘research’ was to hire two ranking scholars to write their versions of the core disputed articles, according to the best and most recent scholarly research and consensus, and then have our best FA craftsmen merge them.

Regarding your essays

Perhaps they'd be better of copied to a dedicated subpage? I did this for mine a while back (now at User:Piotrus/Morsels_of_wikiwisdom). Then you can also tag them with Category:User essays. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 13:47, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

While reorganizing files regarding this topic, I came across a note I jotted in response to this suggestion, written on the same day as your remark. Like much else I draft re wiki offline, I either forgot to use it, or perhaps thought it a waste of breath. In any case, this is what I wrote on 6 March.

Arbs have an unenviable job. If they come out in favour of any of G&K’s polemical conclusions (which I think is probable because the scope dictates some accommodation to the charges made), a ruckus will ensue as many wikipedians will challenge the precedent set - which implies outside pressure, even if through an academic venue, can succeed in challenging the internal self-regulating mechanisms we have and in imposing an interventionist authority to strengthen surveillance of our work here. If they decide that G&K’s essay, its wild hypothesis of a coordinated nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy to manipulate article is unfounded, then reporting media that endorse the globally banned and ever-hyperactive IW’s spin of wikiworkings will be tempted to up the ante, and spin the outcome by pitching it as proof Arbcom cannot cope with antisemitism. I admire, privately, the canny tactical move-heads I win, tails you lose- in this perduring grandmaster’s chess game of disrupting our anarchic world – it looks like a vindictive attempt to right a perceived wrong by pulling Samsonically the pillars down on the wiki philistines, in forcing a defensive move from Arbcom (our reputation is at stake!) that technically favours, either way the dice fall, more chaos, if not a checkmate. One never knows. Perhaps a Capablanca, someone up there who takes the trouble (reading it should be obligatory for Arbcomers) to read Antony Lerman’s 2022 book, may pop up with a dazzling counterintuitive endgame to stop the rot. But I doubt that.

As one should always do when shirtfronted by complex challenges to someone’s bona fides, I began looking at how I arrived at my way of reading these things, so, as one can see from the bibliography, I will review the early postwar masterpieces which were formative for my own understanding of these issues. To tell the truth, after a relatively youthful acquaintance with Reitlinger, Hilberg,Toynbee etc. and dozens of eyewitness accounts (Primo Levi etc.,) I’ve never come across, to the degree I manage to follow the massive industrial output on the Holocaust in the last few decades, anything that has given me grounds for revising those early impressions, informed as they were by reading The Melian dialogue. The infinite tragic details require insistent documentation, but they only reinforce what was available decades ago by multiplication. They form a massive quantitative base, but don’t in my view alter the conceptual framework set out in grinding detail by Hilberg’s oeuvre, which surely ranks among the great works of the historian’s art in the millennial records of that discipline. What we need is a theoretical framework for how, for example, 11 million people could be swept up into an industrial slaughterhouse, and, to work towards that, one must dispose of evocations of a unique ethnic event in favour of a comparative historiography and sociology of genocides throughout all human history.

What embarrasses me in closely reading tirades and diatribes like this 'stuff' - esp. with its curious mélange of Holmesian pertinacity in manically hunting the spoors of an assumed crime scene while writing up the results in quarter-based tabloid speculations- is a personal malaise of profound distaste, regret at the way in which Holocaust discourse, and the correlated matter of antisemitism, now lend themselves to true-believers' ethnic and political grievances, cynical manipulation and nagging intimidation by a kind of tragedy-hogging, narrative clichéfying, semantic confusion of analytic categories and coercive browbeating that tries, with a restless spinning of minutiae to thresh out proofs of conspiracy via a pure and trivializing reductionism, to link these issues, overtly or subtextually, to Israel, or far more dangerously to the Jewish world at large which that country persistently makes out it represents. I regard the intense nationalist attempt in Israel to conflate what it may be with a perceived quintessence of the Jewish world at large, within Israel and the diaspora, 3,000 years of (pre-)history, most of it diasporic by preference, which cannot be shoehorned into a narrowminded experiment in nationalist self-assertion. It is a disaster not only to scholarship, or wikipedia's coverage of it, but to our public perceptions. No one can exercise a monopoly on the tragic without reducing the grief of all others to the banality of a minor footnote.Nishidani (talk) 08:13, 3 May 2023 (UTC)

Since I was pinged here to a user talk page, I guess I'll comment. I agree with you that the USHMM as an external institution has its own distinct values, aims and interests. That's precisely why we should seek to include them in our processes. I wouldn't want to give them a controlling or privileged role relative to other community members, but your casual dismissal of the proposal as being manichaean to think that the vigorous interplay of, in each case, editors in disagreement can be spun simply as a conflict between an honourable RS-respecting party, and a group of inflammatory nationalists is contradictory to your characterization of the USHMM as being heavily influenced by Israeli nationalism vis-à-vis the ideal Popperian state of the topic area.

I agree that there's a vigorous interplay between different factions in the area, but I disagree that the topic area is an eminently internal democratic experiment that has constant ameliorative tinkering, of articles informed by recourse to the best available, verifiable knowledge. In reality, the vigorous interplay has led to domination by editors from a certain nationalistic viewpoint. Adding the USHMM as a faction would positively influence the state of the topic area. They might not always be right, but your criticisms that research infused with a polemical animus and particularly of the personalised kind that weds a conspiracy theory, is not unknown in academia belies that the current state of the topic area is any better. Right now, we allow and encourage editors who are likely biased to edit on Wikipedia with edit-a-thons at liberal arts universities or WikiEd in certain opinionated courses. The USHMM would be a good place to find editors that are willing to read through obscure documents, often in foreign languages, and provide cogent analyses of such to prevent source manipulation. Potential bias is not ipso facto an argument against their participation if you can't mechanize how that'll lead to violations of WP:NPOV. Chess (talk) (please mention me on reply) 16:32, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

I've shifted your comment here. I don't know how you were pinged. In any case, no. Scholars who work on behalf an institution which has a known agenda, and coordinates with a government, toe a very fine line, which USHMM has crossed often. In the last instance, 560 academic specialists, many of whom work using the resources made available by USHMM, severely criticized its ideological rejection of holocaust analogies. Editors taught to edit wiki by any institution or faction are a pest. And have nothing to offer but their brand of factionalism to challenge what they perceive as another form of factionalism, No one with an average intelligence requires more than a week to pick up the technical knowledge of how to do that. It's very simple: read widely in a topic area, learn how to format a page, negotiate contested proposals. One doesn't need some institutional faction breathing down your neck or looking over your shoulder to see whether or not you are toeing the prorer institutional guidelines and content priorities. In one wiked course, students had to read 40 pages over a few weeks. Good luck with that. Most serious editing requires one to familiarize oneself with at least several books acknowledged to be fundamental to a given field. We all have biases; scholarship has its paradigmnatic biases. One learns to be sensitive to these things. But institutional bias is on a completely different level. There influence-peddling, political sensitivities, power-broking, money etc weigh heavily. I have personal knowledge of those shenanigans in another field where a leading scholar in his area (and Jewish to boot) told me of several attempts to buy influence at his prestigious university, things he fought hard to fend off. That was 40 years ago. Nowadays this abuse is quite normal. I stick by the principles I was taught to honour long ago. Follow the paper trail wherever it leads, whatever the consequences.Nishidani (talk) 21:51, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

At last ...

The mythical "Wee Sheila" now has a name, "Asha", after err, Asha. She is now nestling contentedly in her new mother's arms. As you know, she was very upset at the sudden death of her previous mother (my old computer). She is soon going to have two additional mothers (a backup, plus a laptop I can use away from home).

No, don't worry, you didn't cause me to lose any sleep. Asha can usually correct (most of) your little blunders, along with your minor insubordinations to the Manual of Style, very rapidly (in a fraction of a second). She absolutely loves cleaning up her "Onki Nishi". (For some strange reason she calls you "Onkel", though she doesn't have a word of German, and I keep telling her that you're really her honorary great-uncle.) She often operates in conjunction with my own manual labours, and in this case I was reluctant to lose all the detailed work I had done, so I thought it would be easier just to merge in changes as they were being made (not as hard as it sounds, as most of them were just changes that Asha would make anyway). Oh, and please don't stop making your little blunders, they're part of your charm.

The weather here has been perfect for going on long walks, sunny and dry with a cool north-easterly wind; the countryside round here is very beautiful, lush green with an amazing variety of trees and wildlife, the local council has been very good at providing footpaths and preserving local habitats for rare species. Which is where I shall be going in a few minutes, so you won't have to worry about my edits clashing. -- NSH001 (talk) 13:19, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

For a minute there, I thought I might step in and sue you on behalf of my niece, since 'Asha' at first glance looked like a phonetic transcription of a sneeze! Then I twigged that despite your zorrowastrian misdirection, you were actually using the phonetics as a Trojan horse to smuggle in an allusion to Japanese, i.e. 唖者, asha. The nipponic 'asha' is a mute, and thus she must have invented you to speak on her behalf. That was the true stroke of genius. What would we do without youher, uh, youse.

I'm glad to hear all's well, and that you can now saunter around a lush eye-caressing landscape, eyebalm for the spirit, a confidence-restorative after one spends hours examining the toxic idiocy of the human world. I was weeding one of my many garden terraces just the other day, and halted instinctively as I was about to tear out a handful of indifferent growth crowding in on a dwarf olive I had planted two years ago. Scrutinizing the bunched leafage, I realized why I'd stopped in mid snatch. Two thin strands of burnet, taxonomically known by the bloodless (to the unlatinized observer) nomenclature of Sanguisorba minor. Checking our wiki article, I was surprised to see its taste described as akin to 'mild cucumber'. The variety I have is called in dialect erba noce (walnut weed), as I found out when I discovered it on a friend's hideaway country retreat a decade ago, and culled the seed to plant it in my own patch. Its taste is a dead ringer for walnut, without the problem of dental wear and tear chewing those can cause, and is a superb condiment for salads. But like a lot of things one learns to love, it died on me some years ago. All the more my surprise in finding that somehow it had managed to live, like Asha, mutely unobtrusive in the soil, until a difference was wrought by the very unusual climatic change here, with rain so abundant, it makes the Chaucerian April's shoures soote look like an ageing God's prostatic leak by comparison, now that the period has begun to live up to its Eliotesque reputation as the 'cruellest month'. Instead of 'lilacs out of the dead land', the soaking bred back my walnut herb, no longer squat and bunched barely two or three inches above the ground, but spirally with tendrils well over a foot long, so lengthy they required a prop to avoid collapsing under their own giraffe-necked protrusiveness, and having their seeding interrupted by mouldering on the wet mushy earth. Handily, the little olive shrub served that purpose, and I strung the spiralling stems around the burgeoning olive's branchlets where they now prop, their crowns now edged with a twinkle of crimson as they thrust into flowering.

So, a half-century past my salad days, I'm promised in this late summer of life, the tang of walnut to garnish a midday brunch on tomatoes, diced shallots, chicory and wild onion, and anything else a tuckerfucker like myself whips up to intercept those incumbent stomach rumblings which at that time of day can blurt up, like an alarm clock interrupting a deeply pleasant dream, and disturb in antiphonic defiance one's silent reading and, say, the sirenic mathematical sonorities of Bach in the background.

Good grief, look what hearing your news about Asha has provoked, out of the blue. I'm ashamed of myself. Keep well, Neil and give an algorhythmic (misspelling deliberate- no need for her to clean up) tickle to Asha from the granduncle, or bland-nuncle whose knuckleheaded format-fiascos demand work from, but, indirectly, are partially responsible for her magnificent refinement as she was fine-tuned to cope. Best, N. Keep hale ol'son.Nishidani (talk) 15:53, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Asha's just got some name-competition from a big bad lobo. But it enhances the fairy tale resonances! Nishidani (talk) 08:02, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I saw that too. I might use that pic (eventually) on her documentation page(s), since it's public domain. The two of them are both very beautiful indeed. --NSH001 (talk) 08:09, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

Dispute re:Palestine

I noticed you reverted one of my edits which removed the assertion of the existence of the State of Palestine as an absolute fact. Please go to WP:DRN so we can hear your side of the story. RomanHannibal (talk) 15:28, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

You don't notice much apparently. I reverted your edit which removed a fact, that the largest Palestinian territory is the West Bank. Anyone can check a map comparing Gaza and the WB and see the obvious, and that the CIA source is correct. Since you expunge a reliably sourced fact - a hallmark of POV-pushing editwarriors- something moreover which no one has ever contested in the world, in sources, or on wikipedia, there is no point is engaging with you. Your dispute resolution gambit just wastes time, esp. since you make a distinction between an absolute fact and, one is forced to infer, a 'relative' fact.Nishidani (talk) 16:03, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

The Israeli right is a significant minority and has several reliable sources including the Jerusalem Post, JNS, Arutz Sheva and Israel Hayom. The significant minority established should not be rejected by the article. That’s the whole point of WP:NPOV. You are the POV-pusher for ignoring them, not me. RomanHannibal (talk) 16:12, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Thugs in Columbia are a significant minority, as is the military junta in Myanmar. Who gives a fuck for the last two rags/moronic tabloids you cite, Arutz Sheva and Israel Hayom? They are not suitable sources for anything on wikipedia, as militant mouth organ-grinders or trumpeting blowhards for a constituency of religio-fascist landgrabbers pilfering daily, when not beating the living daylights out of, or shooting, people who have the misfortune not to be 'Jewish' in what the United Nations calls The State of Palestine. So people who shit on international law are a significant minority, of racist illiterates.Nishidani (talk) 16:21, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

That’s your POV. Media Bias Fact Check gives Israel Hayom a “Mostly Factual” rating and Arutz Sheva a “Mixed” rating without labelling it questionable. You may disagree with them, but they are at least semi-reliable. RomanHannibal (talk) 16:26, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

In conclusion, these sources are numerous and credible enough to constitute a significant minority which shouldn’t be rejected. RomanHannibal (talk) 16:27, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I have a POV, and you have the facts, garnered from reading one source, whose methodology has been contested, which appears to know nothing of the politics of the rag it refers to, a freebie financed by a former casino running billionaire crony of an indicted Prime minister, whose free distribution was aimed at undermining the general israeli newspaper mainstream and contaminating the public with extremist views pitched to a grievance electorate. Your POV is self-evident: you want to legitimize news sources that like the Drudge Report and Fox News, have been consistently shown to espouse fringe lunatic conspiracy theories. Nishidani (talk) 16:37, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

I acknowledged their view as a minority view. I never claimed they were factual. I’m just saying their view shouldn’t be rejected because they are a significant minority. Two groups of sources have opposite POVs, one majority and one significant minority. That’s the whole purpose of NPOV.

Also, don’t pretend to be a neutral party. Your user page is full of pro-Palestinian quotes and allegations. RomanHannibal (talk) 16:43, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Oh yes, I'm not neutral about human rights. I've never 'pretended' to be neutral. Unlike many editors, I go to great lengths to set out the thinking that informs my reading of a conflicted area. When I edit, I edit nonetheless according to what academic sources predominantly state of a given issue, not what Arutz Sheva or Israel Hayom's hacks are paid to write. Were I a Pole in WW2 I wouldn't, judging from my character frailties, have been one of what are now lambasted as 'bystanders' as Jews were killed, anymore than I would be neutral when I see what I see in the West Bank, with its inimitable reproduction of the John Wayne reading of the Conquest of the West. In short I'm not neutral as regards the Indian Removal Act and its consequence, the Trail of Tears. I'm not neutral in thinking Zionist extremism is a threat to Judaism and, in its implicit encouragement of antisemitism, to Jews, and that in the future, it will probably lead to a new diaspora by those repelled by the 'significant minority's' espousal of appalling violence and institutional racism.Nishidani (talk) 17:00, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

You have a strong POV, which makes you incapable of deciding what is NPOV here. That is why we need a neutral mediator to decide who is right. I will not respond to your rationale behind your POV per WP:FORUM. I look forward to your contribution at DRN. If you choose to boycott the DRN, a compromise will still be made, but without your input. RomanHannibal (talk) 17:06, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

You tedious nonsense is interrupting my viewing of Mizoguchi's 元禄忠臣蔵, so please desist. As for the rest, I'm sure you are familiar with the saying kol haposel bemumo hu posel. If you're not then read a book for a change from Israel Hayom, i.e. Reuven Agushevits's, Principles of Philosophy Goodbye.Nishidani (talk) 17:12, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

I am glad to desist. Have a nice day and enjoy your movie. RomanHannibal (talk) 17:15, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

June 2023

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you.RomanHannibal (talk) 02:16, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

As was evident from the start of this user's I/P editing, RomanHannibal is a sock atque delendus est. That was what I suggested when I wrote yesterday that he was 'an apparent newbie', something made clear in the editor's sudden fishing expedition on my talk page above, inviting me to participate at DRN as an involved editor, where I don't have any notable involvement in the recently disputed articles like State of Palestine or Jordan (as opposed to a deep involvement in writing up the article on Beita, which was subject yet again to an extraordinary piece of provocative carpet-bagging by settlers trying to stabilize their outpost in Evyatar, something duly reported a week ago at length on the Italian television investigative programme Report). It was that specific incident I had in mind, together with the whole tragic history of Beita, when referring to land-grabbing above (not, as imputed, Israel or Jews). Thank goodness everyone has been saved a huge waste of time by the rapid intervention of Courcelles. Nishidani (talk) 08:27, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Notice of Dispute resolution noticeboard discussion

This message is being sent to let you know of a discussion at the Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard regarding a content dispute discussion you may have participated in. Content disputes can hold up article development and make editing difficult. You are not required to participate, but you are both invited and encouraged to help this dispute come to a resolution.

Please join us to help form a consensus. Thank you!

Potatín5 (talk) 22:50, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

New article

Thirty-seventh government of Israel and the Palestinians Please chip in. Selfstudier (talk) 16:43, 11 July 2023 (UTC)