Ok,, let's think this through. Fake may have been a too strong wording (im not a native speaker), lets bring it to fake use (we call it 'oneigenlijk gebruik' which really doesn't translate in English. fake use would come closest, so i used the word fake). My main source for this is Susan Sontag, 'On Photography', in Silvers, Robert (ed.) The First Anthology. 30 Years of The New York Review of Books, New York, 1993 But then again you make a very similar sin when starting like this: After my next posts you ditch that argument and you minimize my sources Then you ease it up a little more So don't attack me and call me an idiot who only looks for internet scraps, because that is simply a lie. Anyway, how can you know that. I guess using too strong wording is NOT only my sin, right? Let's take it from the beginning, because just like with Choulo and the end of the Israel debate, where you - again - jumped on the wagon very soon with very firm accusations, I believe you did with mine. 1. The use of your sources yourself: you revert to websites without any acclaim yourself to 'debunk' my thesis. While I at least had an academic (albeit Belgian source) while I recall the same stipulation about the use of 'changed' photo material In Saul Friedländer. 2. My thesis was that those pics are indeed pics of actual events (in Warschau and the other in Ivangorod) but they are changed to better fit a narrative - the narrative that better explained the Holocaust: that every german is a willing killing machine, even for children. You might think I am being moronic again, but alas I am not. E.g. In the museum for deportation and resistance in Mechelen, here in Belgium that explicitly uses that HALF pic as its main image during the exposition. When asked why by historians, the answer is that the image in close up is much stronger and better represents the german min set at the time (own correspondence of G. Vandenberghe with the museum). E.G. 2: Even in Goldhagens 'willing executioners' book, the pic is cropped - de facto turning into a individualistic zoom picture focussing on a child being protected by a mother while adding the subscript 'In front of a photographer a German soldier takes aim...'(is it a mother? can you actually tell that?) Goldhagen was criticized on this point but deliberately left it unchanged in other editions. You would not suspect this from a historian. Why did he do this if 'historical correctness' is his main concern? To make sure very one is even more convinced of the atrocities of the holocaust? Alas, these practices had the opposite effect - and this was my entire point. Holocaust deniers have very willingly used these altered pictures to make a case AGAINST the holocaust. An example: By the 'oneigenlijke gebruik' of the photo it made people like Faurisson the Holocaust denier it is actually a picture from 1941 and there are polish people on it, not jews. He also adds that the germans are not trying to shoot the people but instead are protecting them. I'll see in advance, before you jump on you high horse, that I resent these tactics. That is exactly why I feel it utterly unnecessary to use these pics in the WRONG way because they look more dramatically/iconic altered, because it gives the holocaust deniers exactly what they need. The other picture, the boy in Warschau, was also zoomed in. Suddenly you when you unzoom you see it in the context of people being deported away to Treblinka (they even have their backs with them - so they must have believed there was still hope). That iconic crop however had an even funnier effect, people started to recognize that boy and claimed he was still alive - a clear hoax: Here it was a london business man that thought he was the boy, other more recent examples are Zvi Nussbaum, who also claimed to be the boy even though he never was in the getto. Again the holocaust deniers used this and other photo manipulations to make a case against the number of gassings in Treblinka and thus minimizing the Holocaust. Why would a deliberate 'dramatization' of an already dramatic and horrible event be needed, especially if you give arguments to those of bad intent.... I could go on and on, but i Will not. I take very much offense with the fact you do not even TRY to get my point and just start with degrading insults - idiot, racist, ridiculous .... I says a lot about a man's true face. I think have seen yours.
