On December 7th, the Economist published a bombshell poll. It found that 20% of Americans aged 18–29 agree with the statement, ‘The Holocaust is a myth’. That’s one in five. A further 30% neither agreed nor disagreed, which means that only 51% actually disagreed with the statement.
This shocking result was covered in numerous outlets, including the Hill, the Telegraph and the Daily Mail. It was also widely shared on social media. A tweet by Visegrád 24 garnered 11k likes. Another by Mike Bloomberg garnered 5.9k likes. And another by The Mossad: Satirical, Yet Awesome garnered 3.9k likes. There was even a spike in worldwide search interest for ‘holocaust myth’.
The only problem: it’s almost certainly wrong. When I first heard the result, I thought “that can’t be right”. But then I saw it was published in The Economist, who are usually pretty reliable when it comes to data and statistics. On this occasion, as it turns out, they were very unreliable.
We know the result is almost certainly wrong thanks to some work by Pew Research. The key issue is that it came from an ‘opt-in’ poll:
This is a type of poll in which the respondents have previously registered with a polling company to take part in regular online surveys. When a new survey is being carried out, respondents can opt-in until the required distribution of age, sex, education etc. has been achieved. Each one answers the questions anonymously and receives a small monetary incentive for taking part.
But because anyone registered with the polling company can take part, some respondents simply rush through the poll without answering questions sincerely. They may give ‘joke’ answers or just click randomly to save time.
Such ‘bogus respondents’, as they are sometimes known, usually don’t pose much of a problem. The only time they do is when the question concerns a belief or attitude that is rare (such as ‘the Holocaust is a myth’) and when you focus on a specific subgroup in which they are known to be overrepresented (like young people). Both these things were true of the Economist’s poll.
To find out whether the shocking ‘one in five’ result was due to bogus respondents, Pew Research attempted to replicate it in their January American Trends Panel – a survey for which respondents are recruited by mail using probability-based sampling. What did they find? Among Americans aged 18–29, only 3% agreed with the statement, ‘The Holocaust is a myth’.
Now, you might say that 3% is still high, but even in good-quality surveys there’s always a small percentage of respondents who don’t answer sincerely or who make errors when inputting their answers. In fact, the percentage agreement was exactly the same in every other age group, which suggests it’s nothing out of the ordinary.
Pew’s findings highlight the importance of not drawing strong conclusions from low-quality survey methods. If a result sounds wildly implausible, it probably is.
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Even more shocking, 95% of Young Americans have never heard of the Holodomor, in which the Bolsheviks, not “Russians”, starved to death 12 Million Ukrainian Christians, for refusing to hand over their farms for collectivisation.
No reparations for them, but Germany now marks 72 years of compensating Holocaust survivors, the grand total now coming to 80 BILLION EUROS.
That’s 80,000,000,000.
I wonder how many Russians have heard of it? Putin likes to hide Stalin’s misdeeds.
Spot on. I read years ago, when Putin was rehabilitating Stalin’s bad reputation, that Putin banned anyone in Russia from even mentioning the Holodomor.
I don’t think it is quite that extreme. The official position is that it was a Soviet wide tragedy but not Stalin’s fault. In addition it is rarely mentioned.
It is rarely mentioned because Putin doesn’t like anyone mentioning it.
Based on “something you read years ago”. Very convincing. Presumably it was penned by one of the many who claim to be able to read Putin’s mind.
Not for nothing do you choose “roubles” for your name.
Oh dear, that is the first time I have heard that.
Actually it was chosen at the start of Russia’s liberation of Donbas as a deliberate red rag for Zelensky apologists.
“The idea of “holodomor” as an intentional or man-made genocide which specifically targeted Ukrainians and was used to crush Ukrainian nationalists fails on multiple fronts.”
In summary, here are the established facts regarding the situation 1932–1933:
Natural drought played a role in creating the situation.
Ex-landowning kulaks and Ukrainian nationalists did in fact refuse to work, murder collective workers, slaughter their own cattle, and otherwise actively sabotage the sowing and harvesting campaigns.
Importing industrial machinery was the reason for exporting amounts of food in order to increase production as fast as possible.
The cycle of famines which had existed for centuries prior and inherited by the Soviet authorities ended after the industrialization and collectivization policies had been fully implemented and the nazi invasion had ended.
Under Stalin, the Ukrainization policy went into effect for over a decade before being changed due to rabid bourgeois Ukrainian nationalist elements exploiting it for treasonous activities.
Stalin did not harbor any unique hostility to the Ukrainian nationalists any more than he did the Russian nationalists who he fought in the civil war or even the Georgian nationalists who he fought in the August uprising.
The Ukrainian nationalist movement in question was heavily tied to anti-semitism & fascistic beliefs before the 1930’s and exposed themselves in their true goals by aligning with nazi Germany in their hopes to create an ethno-state.
Central Soviet Authorities sent hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food to the Ukrainians from other regions and Stalin himself personally intervened to scold a regional Russian official objecting to sending aid and made him send food.
The situation of hunger encompassed the entire union to varying degrees, including impacting ethnic Russians.
The situation in Ukraine during 1932–1933 was not intentional or man-made by Joseph Stalin or the Central Soviet Authorities.
The overwhelming and vast majority of countries on this planet do not recognize this situation as being a “genocide”.
https://discomfiting.medium.com/holodomor-fact-or-fiction-17324ffe1d46
“Revisiting the perspective brought forth by Douglas Tottle, we are reminded of the importance of a nuanced understanding of the famine. Tottle’s painstaking exposure of fraud, manipulation, and the selective use of evidence in the genocide claim uncovers a troubling alignment with the interests of extremist Ukrainian groups such as the OUN. By revealing these connections and the ways in which the fraudulent narrative served their purposes, he brings to light the deeply problematic reduction of the Holodomor to a Ukrainian-centric tragedy or a simplistic genocide. Such an approach obscures the broader socioeconomic context, denies the interconnected suffering that affected various ethnicities, and undermines the multifaceted nature of the crisis. Engaging with this more complex view is not only an intellectual endeavor but an ethical obligation to honor the memory and experiences of all who endured that difficult period.”
https://ddgeopolitics.substack.com/p/f23f5fff-430a-4eb5-b80e-676dfb1d5440
The Holodomor differs from the Holocaust in that the Nazis intended to kill Jews, plus other groups such as homosexuals and Roma people, whereas Stalin didn’t introduce collectivisation in order to deliberately kill Ukrainians, and yes lots of Russian peasants suffered just as much. However Stalin, or at the very least, high ranking officials knew the suffering their collectivisation was causing and could of stopped it if they were concerned about human life. Therefore they knew that their policies were resulting in millions of deaths, the only difference between them and the Nazis was that the Nazis wanted certain groups to die, the Soviets just didn’t care if people died. In terms of evil I’m sure both events qualify as such even if the motives were different.
Many historians don’t believe the Holodomor was deliberate.
Fieldwork : YouGov
Say no more. Owned by Nadim Zarhawi’s missus. I am on their panel but have not had an opt-in request for 2 1/2 years. Perhaps the answers I gave did not fit their template.
Well done for pointing out the scandalous YouGov, founded by Iraqi Muslim Zarhawi, bizarrely elected to represent Shakespeare’s home town. He handed YouGov over nominally to his wife in 2010 to avoid any conflict of interest questions in Parliament.
I would be surprised if 1 in 5 Americans can spell Holocaust or give a rough approximation of the years it occurred.
I would also doubt that 1 in 100 know that 5 million Christians were also gassed, murdered and shot during the same period. The unknown Holocaust.
To say nothing of the 12 Million Ukrainian Christians who were starved to death by Bolsheviks in ONE YEAR: 1932-33. The Holodomor is never taught in American schools, in contrast to the Holocaust:
“In the United States, the states of Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, and Wisconsin. In total, 23 states have mandatory Holocaust education.”
“As of June of 2022, laws mandating education in the Holocaust were on the books in Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.”
Laughable.
Lest we forget
Those times are quickly approaching as the old die out and the young don’t experience!
Just shows how easily past mistakes can be repeated
That’s exactly what I was thinking, Dinger. I think it’s definitely a factor that the further away some hugely significant and heinous event becomes, the less relevant it is for today’s young people. I mean, do they even get taught this stuff in history lessons at school any more, what with the dire state schools seem to be in nowadays? It’s likely that nobody going through school now has any clue, let alone any interest, in the many battles fought and won by Christian armies against the savage and barbaric Muslim invaders from centuries gone by. Sadly I think the Great War and WW2 are also but a distant echo from the past that no young person has any emotional attachment to, therefore little interest in as a result. And the more ”diverse” the population becomes the more diluted our shared history. I’m pretty sure most of us on here had grandads/great-grandads etc who fought in the wars. Could it be that antisemitism is the new social justice for the warped of mind?
Unfortunately, what has replaced historical fact and what is shaping ( and brainwashing ) young minds nowadays is social media, the influence of which cannot be underestimated. For instance, where have parents gone wrong with their kids if they now idolize, or at least sympathize, with Hitler? I’d be devastated if my kid turned out like this. But the evidence is before all of our eyes every weekend with these hateful yobs, who are little more than actual Nazis, in my mind. Take this article, as an example. Not sure how widespread this feeling is ( or how many respondents were just bots ) but the Jew-hate marches sure do give an indication of how masses of people think and feel about their fellow humans;
”Tens of millions on Elon Musk‘s social media site X have now viewed two disturbing AI-translated clips of Adolf Hitler’s 1939 Reichstag speech.
But the videos — in which the genocidal dictator can be heard, via AI-generated English, calling for the ‘annihilation of the Jewish race’ — have been met with a number of positive replies.
‘Did the psychopathic Globalists falsely demonize Hitler like they’re trying to demonize Putin?’ one user replied beneath the video. ‘It seems so.’
‘I’m beginning to think we may have lost WWII,’ one user with a verified X account posted about the AI-Hitler clip.
‘It sounds like these people cared about their country above all else,’ posted another.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13188135/hitler-anti-semitic-speech-tiktok-ai-translation-viral.html
Yes, a much maligned man. How unjust.
Absolutely staggering that people can believe this.
Why is it that the BBC Verify, the much praised (by the BBC) fact-checking service launched to combat fake news, has not exposed this blatantly antisemitic propaganda? Is it because the Verify team of 60 (sixty) journalists (PressGazette) have become a tool for promoting anti-Israel bias (Telegraph, Danny Cohen, 4 March 2024)?
4 out of 5 Americans know that Resident Biden is senile. The remaining 1/5th are Democrats.