Holocaust indoctrination to now include hologram & VR technology

Yes, you read that correctly.

The Guardian reports:

Gutter was seven years old when the second world war broke out. He lived in the Warsaw ghetto for three and a half years, took part in its uprising, survived six Nazi concentration camps – including the Majdanek extermination camp – and lived through a death march across Germany to Theresienstadt in occupied Czechoslovakia.

“Remembrance is the secret of redemption, while forgetting leads to exile,” he says, quoting Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism.

“For me this whole thing is about not forgetting. Because if you forget, you repeat it over and over again. To me, the great importance of testimony is not to forget what people are capable of.” Sitting opposite him here in Hampstead, meeting his eyes and hearing his voice, the idea of forgetting this extraordinary story seems impossible.

One week later I am staring into Gutter’s eyes again. But these eyes are on a screen in the Alternate Realities strand of Sheffield’s international documentary festival. The version of Gutter projected on the monitor is a prototype for a responsive hologram that will be wheeled into classrooms, lecture halls and museums. The idea is that the audience asks questions and pre-recorded memories from Gutter will respond – much as if you’re talking to the real person. This virtual Gutter meets my gaze and tilts his head when I speak into the microphone.

The project, called New Dimensions in Testimony, was thought up by concept developer Heather Maio, and was made in a collaboration between the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) and the Shoah Foundation – an organisation dedicated to making and archiving interviews with survivors and witnesses of genocide.

As if showing children images of starved prisoners and piles of corpses wasn't enough, Holocaust indoctrination now involves holograms. While Gutter is the first Holocaust "survivor" to have such technology modeled after him, the article states that 12 Holocaust survivors have been interviewed so far. If this proves to be a success, it isn't too farfetched to imagine a future in which every school and museum has its very own interactive Holocaust hologram.

The hologram is also capable of a limited amount of machine learning:

When algorithms are choosing the answers and the order in which they are spoken, are the responses those of Gutter or of an AI? “

In a way it’s both,” says David Traum, director for natural language research at the ICT. “We have to distinguish two concepts of response. Everything that is said comes directly from Pinchas. However, the decision of which recording to present as a response to a specific question is made by the technology, based on its training data of how Pinchas and other people have answered questions. In the best cases, the answers are to different questions, but the response itself is still his.” ”

Instead of AI, Stephen Smith, executive director of the Shoah Foundation, says we should consider New Dimensions in Testimony as a voice-activated search engine. He emphasises that no new content has been added beyond that in the 25 hours of video footage with Gutter.“

As time goes by and many more users use the content, machine learning will enhance its intelligence – it will understand a wider range of questions as each interaction helps train the system,” he says. “We still don’t consider it an AI, though, because AI assumes the machine is thinking independently. I think of it more like a smart search engine which gives you a conversation-like experience.”

So while the hologram will remain limited to its original library of responses, it will become increasingly adept at accessing them as time progresses. Given its finite source of information to draw from, though, one can't help but wonder if any responses to Holocaust revisionism have been prepared.

The article also offers some insight into the psychological effects of VR and hologram technology:

These projects succeed largely due to their focus on upsetting the viewer’s sense of comfort. Instead of easing you into a cosy virtual playground, these experiences jolt another world into your own.

Once again, the power of the experience comes from the sense of physicality. Like interacting with New Dimensions in Testimony, eye contact and body language communicate something unlike film documentary. And yet, as with the virtual Gutter, there’s also the question about representation. When you make aversion of a person that can watch, listen and respond, do you ultimately do more than show a recording of them in a particular moment of history? Do you have a responsibility to show them as a whole person?

“VR invites us to break taboos around how close we get to people, how directly we observe them,” says Mark Atkin, curator of the Alternate Realities programme at the festival.

The language here is very appropriate, for what is indoctrination/social conditioning if not "jolting" another "world" of opinions, beliefs, and positions into another person's psyche? The reality is, of course, that Holocaust propaganda isn't meant to be examined rationally; in fact, to do so in many countries will place one in legal peril. Holocaust propaganda is designed to be almost entirely emotional – and advances in technology, such as the hologram, seem quite capable of enhancing this experience.

Anne

New Dimensions in Testimony isn't the only tech-savvy Holocaust project. Anne, a VR project created by CGO Studios, offers the chance to experience Anne Frank's attic like never before.

From The Hollywood Reporter:

The project, Anne, was announced on Tuesday in an eyebrow-raising press release touting how the technology will allow viewers to be "immersed in the presence of Anne Frank" and other inhabitants of the secret Amsterdam annex that hid them from the Nazis during World War II.

"Anne Frank's story has kept the memory of the Holocaust alive and promoted tolerance for generations," says writer-director Danny Abrahms. "We are deeply committed to sharing Anne's experience using cutting-edge modes of storytelling so that her story can live on and reach as many young people in the world as possible.

Anne will offer viewers the opportunity to "feel like they are there" alongside historical figures who, along with Frank, have achieved iconic status through various stage, film and TV adaptations of her landmark diary over the years. It will allow viewers "to move about a room ... and sense the moment in a way never possible before VR," according to the filmmakers, who say they will recreate the attic "with photorealistic visual fidelity."

The article notes that this isn't something completely new, however, as the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam began offering a virtual reality tour – designed with handicapped visitors in mind – last year. If anything, this tells us that the Holocaust industry is keeping up-to-date with current technological advances and will continue to employ them when beneficial. Perhaps in the near future VR will allow/force us to experience life in a concentration camp, right down to every minute pain and discomfort.

Questioning the Holocaust narrative

Revisionism is a commonplace practice within the discipline of history. Major historical events are constantly reviewed and, when necessary, revised. However, in many Western nations, it is illegal to do so with the Holocaust. Why is this the case? It it because the Holocaust was a uniquely tragic event? Hardly, for if this was the case, wouldn't revisionism of other historical atrocities, such as the Holodomor or the Armenian Genocide be criminalized as well? Interestingly enough, the Anti-Defamation League, despite being comitted to battling anti-Semitism and Holocaust revisionism, has opposed recognition of the Armenian Genocide and the Holodomor – the latter having a significant number of Jewish architects.

So why is the Holocaust so special? Whatever the reason may be, it certainly isn't that the most powerful ethnic group on the planet benefits immensely from propogating the Holocaust narrative and silencing all criticism directed at them...

Always remember that the truth does not fear investigation.

Watch the following videos – they tell a far different story than the one that you've been incuculated to believe.