Several pages into the YouTube search results, which I mentioned in my previous post, I found what I was looking for: a reasoned, open-minded debate, from 1995, put on by an entire organization which shares my values: the "Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust"! I've only listened to the opening remarks so far, but it's wonderful already.

Of course, being Google, it's accompanied by an absurd "Encyclopedia Britannica" link-- "we'll let you watch this video, but remember, it's White Supremacy!" But at least the video contents itself seem to be unaltered. And boy was my moon landing comparison accurate! In that case, men really were landed on the moon, but many of the details were embellished or out-right lies.

The same goes here: after listening to the fantastically fact-driven Mark Weber-- on the "skeptic" side-- and the phenomenal Michael Shermer-- on the "establishment" side-- it's apparent that these camps did evolve to be used for the extermination of political dissidents by the end of the war, Jews among them, but that the scale and timing taught in the "official narrative" is preposterously blown out of proportion.

In general, I've observed that there is the objective history, then there is a "mythology veneer" which is painted on top of it; in the case of the moon landings, the acts of the Europeans towards Native Americans, the so-called "holocaust", and everything in between, there is truth in the core substance of what is taught-- the gist of it is at least partially correct-- but then that truth is morphed and molded through lies of omission, embellishment, and selective minimism to serve political and social agendas.

Michael Shermer talks about this in his opening remarks: he was on an Auschwitz tour, and people were uncomfortable with him asking questions-- because, he soon gathered, the point wasn't to analyze or act as a historian doing a study: it was to participate in the social ritual of memorializing the dead. In other words, the facility doesn't serve the "objective truth"-- it serves the mythology.

You can find this anywhere, from a "liberal Democracy" in America, with its Abraham Lincoln cult-of-personality mythology, to North Korea, with its truth (America bombing the shit out of their country and mutilating thousands of civilians in the process) mixed with the "and then the Great Leader rode out on a white pegasus" mythos.