This House Believes That On Balance The Holocaust Was Detrimental To Society!

Alright, thanks to Ajabi for providing an unfortunately limited opening argument, though I look forward to seeing his argument play out fully in the next round. Let's start with BoP. To start, just note that Con has not actually contested any of the definitions I provided in R1. Those still stand, meaning that he'll have to do more than just provide an alternative view. He's going to need to compare his interpretation to mine. My interpretation is that it's only necessary for me to show that, overall, the Holocaust was detrimental to society, whereas it is Con's burden to show that the Holocaust was net beneficial to society at large. That seems pretty firmly in keeping with the resolution. What Con seems to be arguing here is that I must prove that, for all societies everywhere across the planet, in every way shape and form, the Holocaust caused a net detriment. This isn't a reasonable interpretation. This ignores the fact that the word "society" is not plural, implying a broad community of people instead of individual groups. This ignores the "on balance" facet, instead arguing that he essentially carries no burden but to disprove my case, which is inherently unbalanced. Even assuming he's right in his definition, though, he's not yet winning this debate. Onto the opening argument. Whatever its brevity may have been caused by, Con's opening round is really insufficient to get his argument off the ground. He essentially just argues that the facts of how many people died in the Holocaust are off. Multiple responses. 1. The sources he uses to support this are basically unverifiable since I can't check the sources directly. The best I can do is find other webpages that source them. There is a page that sources the 1998 Microsoft Encarta estimate from Hilberg [1]. The book Hilberg had published in 1961, "The Destruction of the European Jews," actually agrees with that estimate, saying that "up to 2,900,000" died in death camps. Trouble is, that link with the Encarta information takes that as the sole conclusion from Hilberg's work. It assumes that adding the numbers killed at each of these death camps suffices, ignoring the numerous deaths due to disease and malnutrition, other camp shootings, and mobile killing units (the Einsatzgruppen) moving through the USSR Hilberg estimated that "over 800,000" died as a result of "Ghettoization and general privation," and 1,400,000 from "Open-air shootings." Add those up and... oh, look at that, 5.1 million, not far shy of mine.[2] Con's book citation for Yehuda Bauer doesn't exist [3]. What he appears to be sourcing this from may be "A History of the Holocaust," where he did determine many of these numbers. Unfortunately for Con, he made the same mistake here. Bauer does estimate that the number of Jews killed at Auschwitz is around 1.35 million instead of the more common 2.5 million,[4] so much like Hilberg, his estimate is lower than 6 million. Not much lower, though. Once again, Con has equated the number of projected deaths in death camps with the estimated total number of Jewish victims. That estimate runs from 5.7-5.86 million, rather akin to mine.[5] This means that even if we buy Con's sources, using what we can find on the Internet of their numbers, he's massively underestimating the death tolls they ascribe to the Holocaust (by 2.3 million and 2.4 million, respectively), which are actually closer to the 6 million that my source provided. Con doesn't even provide the third source, though I have no clue how the Third Reich coming under attack has any place in this debate. 2. However, Con asks for counter sources that shore up that 6 million figure. I'm happy to oblige. The figure, admittedly, has been the source of some of debate actually comes from a variety of sources. According to the website for Yad Vashem, the chief research center on the Holocaust in Israel, "both early and more recent estimates by a variety of different scholars have fallen between five and six million." And the estimates shore this up pretty well, as both Nazis and numerous historians (Lucy Dawidowicz, Wolfgang Benz, Martin Gilbert, Yisrael Gutman and Robert Rozett) established numbers that are normally on the higher end of that spectrum.[6] Some even range much further, as is the case with Rudolf Vrba. A Jewish prisoner of Auschwitz who survived that camp, his job was to count the number of people who arrived each day. His eyewitness estimates set the number at around 2.5 million at Auschwitz alone (far higher than either Hilberg or Bauer suggest), bringing the total to 7.5 million, well above the other estimates.[4] Admittedly, there are still rather large sources of uncertainty, but that uncertainty actually favors a higher number, not a lower one. A lack of record-keeping on the part of the Soviets and Germans alike resulted in highly uncertain numbers of people killed by the Einsatzgruppen, or mobile killing units, meaning that the estimated numbers could be far shy of the reality.[7] And this uncertainty doesn't just apply to Jews. "...the Roma, or Gypsies, with estimates of the number killed ranging from 90,000 to 1.5 million. (One reason estimates vary so widely is attributed to a traditional secrecy and silence among the Roma regarding what they endured.)" Con has failed to contest any of the numbers I provided aside from that for the Jews, and the numbers for the Gypsies are particularly relevant, as "Proportionally, these numbers are as high or higher than the fraction of Jews who were killed." That means that, from a genocidal perspective, this was just as bad, if not worse, than the effort to eliminate the Jews, despite the disparity in numbers.[6] 3. Even if Con is entirely correct that these are the right numbers, little changes. I'm not sure what Con's trying to garner from this argument, but he appears to be trying to mitigate away the detriments of the death toll. I'm not sure where Con is setting his arbitrary threshold at which the number of lives becomes negligibly important, but I'm pretty sure that line doesn't exist between 6 and 2.8 million Jews. That's not to mention that Con hasn't contested any of the deaths of non-Jews during the Holocaust, which I also cited in the previous round (adding up to at least 6-7 million more people. All of the traumas I cited in R1 and the broader societal effects of the Holocaust still stand just as strongly. These remain incredibly important to the debate, as they extend far beyond the simple loss of life, affecting magnitudes more people in broader societies worldwide. 4. Con talks about the "calculus of benefit," but never provides any actual benefits of the Holocaust to clash with my harms. He's failed to meet even his interpretation of the burden of proof by leaving this untouched. Con is going to need to present either a certain and very substantial harm that was prevented by the Holocaust or a similar benefit that resulted from it. Either way, it will have to have resulted in outcomes that outstrip millions of lives he himself acknowledges were taken during the Holocaust, and the broader effects I've discussed. 1. https://socioecohistory.wordpress.com... 2. http://en.wikipedia.org... 3. http://en.wikipedia.org... 4. http://www.jta.org... 5. http://www.chgs.umn.edu... 6. http://www.haaretz.com... 7. http://www.ushmm.org...