Basic guidelines
1.) No insults (ad hominems) are tolerated (that includes serious national and religious insults; this breaks Saidit's Pyramid of Debate rules)
Personal remarks in posts are strongly discouraged, and personal insults are forbidden here.
If you disagree with a contributor, please use your energy to show why his argument is mistaken. This will improve both the tone and quality of our discussions.
2.) Remarks about collective responsibility are not tolerated
3.) Holocaust revisionism is tolerated under the acceptance that many Jews were unjustly and without due process taken from their homes and placed in concentration, labor and transfer camps (note that this also applies to events such as the mass murders of Armenians during WWI and the interwar famine in the Ukraine). This skepticism has to be backed up with facts and/or primary sources.
Legitimate questions may be raised about the veracity of individual witnesses or their motives, or isolated items of evidence, or matters of interpretation of policy, etc. These questions do not affect the fact that millions of persons were deliberately murdered, nor does it alter the cumulative and overwhelming evidence of who committed the murders.
4.) No racism is tolerated
5.) No glorifying of nazism/fascism or the allies destruction of German or Japanese cities
6.) Keep the message on topic
7.) When quoting from a book or site, please provide info on the source (and a link if it is a website)
Claims of proof: If a poster raises a question about the events, other posters may answer the question with evidence. If a poster stops asking questions and begins to express a point of view, he then becomes an advocate for that viewpoint. When a person becomes an advocate, he has the burden of providing evidence for his point of view. If he has no evidence, or doesn't provide it when asked, it is reasonable for the reader to conclude that his opinion or viewpoint is uninformed and may fairly be discounted or rejected.
Undocumented claims undercut the research purposes of this section of the forum. Consequently, it is required that proof be posted along with a claim. The main reason is that proof, evidence, facts, etc. improve the quality of discussions and information. A second reason is that inflammatory, groundless posts and threads attack, and do not promote, the scholarly purpose of this section of the forum.
This requirement applies to each specific claim. In the past, some posters have attempted to evade the proof requirement by resort to the following tactics, none of which are acceptable here.
Posts which lack focus or specifics are not welcomed.
No 'dodging'. When questioned or challenged on claims, or assertions you make in a thread you must respond directly / specifically by providing the information requested in the challenge or you must leave the topic.
A general reference to a website, or a book without page references; citations or links to racist websites; generalized citations to book reviews; and citations to unsourced, secondary articles or opinions.
8.) Don't use images/videos or bold, large or colored text in the signature. If you use non-English text in the signature, include a translation.
9.) Links to non-related commercial sites are not allowed.
Atrocity photographs
Atrocity photographs are not specifically covered in the forum rules. The policy here is, if the photos are "graphic," the contributor should post a link to the photographs, rather than the photographs themselves, so that the other viewers have a choice as to whether or not to take a look.
That leaves us with the question of what is "graphic." This is apparently discretionary with the moderator/host. Here's my view on it:
I don't care who is supposed to have committed the atrocities in the photographs. Whether the subject matter is Nazi, communist, ethnic, regional, racial, religious or any other type of atrocity, links and descriptions should be posted for the following classes of photographs and illustrations:
(a) Mutilated persons, alive or dead;
(b) Severed body parts, insufficient in themselves to constitute a person; and
(c) Dead persons who are not only dead, but who clearly appear to be the worse for wear.
