Stephen McIntyre Doubles Down On Stupid

I’ve repeatedly explained that I take good information pretty much anywhere I can get it. That doesn’t mean that I agree with sources of good information on a specific topic who may also purvey basic untruths on other topics—although I do try to avoid such sources.

I’ve certainly obtained plenty of useful information from Stephen McIntyre’s work. That’s why it’s distressing to see him doubling down on his frankly idiotic—which is to say, counter factual—views regarding Poland and the Holocaust. Regular readers will be aware that I’ve been strongly critical of Poland’s role in the war against Russia, but that’s no reason to falsify Polish history generally, as McIntyre does.

Today, he repeats his previously expressed false narrative:

Stephen McIntyre @ClimateAudit

Poland, the country which murdered the most Jews in the Holocaust, protests against country that stopped the Holocaust in Poland by defeating the Nazis.

Maxim A. Suchkov @m_suchkov

#Russia'n Amb. in #Poland bullied & attacked as he was laying wreath to the memorial of the Soviet Soldier to commemorate the V-Day https://t.co/Z6vGt2KF6p

Note the essential incoherence of what he says:

Poland, the country which murdered the most Jews in the Holocaust, protests against country that stopped the Holocaust in Poland by defeating the Nazis.

translates into this:

Poland murdered the most Jews in the Holocaust. Russia stopped the Holocaust in Poland by defeating Germany.

By implication, what McIntyre is clearly suggesting is that Poles of today are attacking Russia as some sort of continuation of the Polish Holocaust against the Jews.

And yet. How could Russia have “stopped the Holocaust in Poland”—a country that had simply ceased to exist in 1939—by defeating Germany? How could a country that no longer existed (unless you hold the Polish government in exile in London responsible for the Holocaust) have conducted a mass genocide, an undertaking that required formidable administrative controls? Unlike in other countries of German occupied Europe, in Poland there was no “Quisling” type of a puppet or collaborationist Polish government. Those areas of the former Second Republic of Poland that weren’t directly incorporated into the Third Reich were relegated to the so-called General Government, in which there was no Polish participation in the administration above the local level (see the map, below). In these areas that McIntyre anachronistically designates as “Poland” there was essentially no government run by Poles. How, then, does McIntyre arrive at “Poland murdered the most Jews”?

Also note this. The death totals of Polish Jews during WW2—including those that McIntyre relies upon—typically include the very large numbers of Jew who in 1939 resided in the eastern parts of Poland (in which ethnic Poles were a distinct minority) that, in 1939, were incorporated into the USSR—never again to be part of Poland. Following McIntyre’s illogic, should not the deaths of those Jews—now citizens of the USSR—be added to the totals of Jews that “Russia murdered”, to adopt McIntyre’s narrative style? I say that because McIntyre, by his own words, absolves Nazis or Germany of having murdered Jews in what, until 1939, had been Poland, Presumably he also absolves Germans for the deaths of Jews in areas that had become part of the USSR. Poland, he claims, not Germany, murdered those Jews, too. Their deaths are the responsibility of Poles—not of the Germans or Russians who had partitioned Poland and who governed formerly Polish areas. And yet, illogically, he appears to hold Ukro-Nazis responsible for the many Jewish deaths in Western Ukraine—an area that was largely part of Poland prior to 1939—while still adding those Jewish totals to the total of Jews that “Poland murdered”.

It’s all quite incoherent.

I’m not aware of any sources that McIntyre uses for his false history, with one exception. In computing the number of Jews that “Poland murdered” McIntyre does explicitly cite a non-historian, Lucy Dawidowicz—a writer who spent many years engaged in virulent polemics against pretty much anyone who didn’t agree with everything she wrote. The Wikipedia entry quotes Raul Hilberg, an actual scholar who is “widely considered to be the preeminent scholar on the Holocaust”, regarding Dawidowicz’s work. Without going into the complexities of the “intentionalist” versus the “functionalist” interpretations of the Holocaust, I quote Hilberg’s assessment:

Raul Hilberg criticized Dawidowicz for her work The War Against the Jews, stating that it builds "largely on secondary sources and conveying nothing whatever that could be called new," and then going on to say in regards to Dawidowicz's portrayal of Jewish resistance and resisters that she included "soup ladlers and all others in the ghettos who staved off starvation and despair." Hilberg suggests that "nostalgic Jewish readers [would find here] vaguely consoling words, [which] could be easily clutched by all those who did not wish to look deeper." He then lists over 20 key authors on the subjects that Dawidowicz covers, that she did not use as references in her own work. Hilberg ends on the subject of Dawidowicz stating "To be sure, Dawidowicz has not been taken all that seriously by historians".

You can find a balanced discussion of Hilberg’s own views on Holocaust historiography here: Critical_reception. This section goes into the distinction between “intentional” versus “functional” origins of the Holocaust. The point is that the Holocaust—as also Russia’s relations with neighboring countries—is a far more complicated historical matter than McIntyre wishes to acknowledge. None of these issues, with their deep roots in complicated histories, can be usefully addressed with grotesque anti-historical narratives.

Hilberg, whose family hailed from Galicia and who grew up in Vienna, understands anti-Semitism as it was in Eastern Europe as well as German anti-Semitism. McIntyre shamefully prefers to rely on popularizing works rather than scholarly works to propagate an absurd and, frankly, disgraceful libel on an entire country. What’s most disgraceful is that McIntyre regularly repeats his libel, despite the pushback that he gets. He appears to be impervious to new information and, for what I can only suppose are personal reasons, is deeply committed to propagating his Big Lie.

Here is a map for reference: