Everybody has hobbies. Some are stupid, some are arcane, but most are explicable.
If you check my past diaries, you'll know one of mine: I keep an eye on the Holocaust deniers and their arguments, and have for about 25 years now. When I started doing this, it seemed like an exercise in spot-the-loony, an excruciatingly bizarre way to spend/waste my time, given that Holocaust denial ranked right up there with green zonk rays from Mars on the threat-to-civilization scale.
Now we've got Holocaust deniers -- plural -- having dinner with the leader of a political party.
I liked things better when my hobby was irrelevant.
What Holocaust denial is
Because the Defend Trump At All Costs industry is going to get involved, with their usual lies and obfuscations and faux confusion, it’s worth nailing the fundamental facts to the wall and giving them a review.
Holocaust denial is a conspiracy theory that says:
- The Nazis didn’t have any special plan to kill Jews. Sure, some Jews died, but, you know, war is war.
- The Nazis especially didn’t build any of that there gas chambers to murder Jews at industrial scale.
- The number of Jews who died in WWII was nowhere near six million. [Edit: Kanye West said pretty much this today on the Alex Jones show.]
- The Holocaust as we know it is almost entirely a Jewish fraud.
These four points come from an expert report submitted in the Lipstadt/Penguin v. Irving libel trial, the one that became the movie “Denial” and which made a hero of Deborah Lipstadt, now our State Department special ambassador on international antisemitism.
How long has Holocaust denial been around?
Holocaust denial began only a few years after the Holocaust ended. I think of it as having generations 0, 1, 2, and 3.
Generation zero was the Nazis themselves, who tried to cover up their crime even as they committed it.
Generation one grew from the frustrated isolationist movement, who had fought against US participation in WWII and did so largely with the line that Hitler wasn’t so bad, not bad enough to risk American lives. With the revelation of countless Nazi atrocities, this position was impossible to defend after the war, and collapsed everywhere except the extreme far right, which refused to admit that they got it wrong. That part of the far right saw the world in terms of the global fight against Judeobolshevism, believing that there is something inherently Jewish about communism, and something inherently communist about the Jews. They couldn’t defend Hitler against the charge of genocide, so a handful of the fringiest antisemites simply shrugged and said: “What genocide?” But they couldn’t hide their antisemitism, and they stayed on the far fringes.
Generation two, coming on the scene in the 1970s, consisted of right-wing antisemites too young to have opposed the war at the time. While the first generation were openly pro-Hitler cranks, the second generation played their PR a little more carefully. “We’re not antisemites, oh no, we’re honest, objective, independent scholars with just a few questions about WWII.” This generation had something else going for it: money. A guy named Willis Carto played the role of Nazi Max Bialystok, playing to industrialist widows for donations — landing literally millions of dollars for the “League for the Survival of Freedom” from one of Thomas Edison’s granddaughters.
But along came the Irving verdict in 2000, and — more importantly — the internet, which demonetized the movement. You could no longer sell the Holocaust denial propaganda everyone could get for free, and every grifter smarter than his own shoelaces found a more lucrative grift. So the third and present generation is stuck making the same arguments blown out of the water in the Irving trial, because there’s nobody left in the movement smart enough to come up with new ones. But they don’t care. They aren’t pretending to be scholars, and they don’t try to hide their racism.
The goal: the mainstreaming of antisemitism
Holocaust denial is inherently antisemitic. There is no clean version. It gleefully mocks the greatest Jewish tragedy in nearly two thousand years by spinning it around and attacking the Jews with it: you made it up.
About a third of the world’s Jews vanished during WWII. If they didn’t die, then they went somewhere and took on a new identity, in a sort of colossal global witness protection program. And even eighty years later, not a single one broke cover. If you can believe such a thing is possible, it’s because you believe that the Jews are fundamentally demonic, capable of schemes so grand they couldn’t be done by all the James Bond villains there ever were working together.
The subgoal: making Holocaust denial a plausible alternative
The problem with Holocaust denial is that it’s too nuts to be swallowed whole.
Most of the people working to promote Holocaust denial don’t do the full Kanye. Instead, they simply argue that doing the full Kanye is an intellectually defensible position and whether or not the Holocaust is a hoax is merely a matter of opinion on which reasonable people can reasonably disagree.
And if you don’t think so, they’ll tell you that you’re narrow and sectarian thought police, help help I’m being repressed, McCarthyism, Orwell, Inquisition, free speech, and “you’re an agent of the Zionists.”
I want to be clear on this — the people saying “Holocaust revisionism deserves to be taken as a serious academic inquiry, even though I won’t publicly choose a side” are like people saying “flat eartherism deserves to be taken seriously even though my mind isn’t made up yet on whether or not a grand international conspiracy of Jewish globe makers is trying to defraud the entire planet.”
The Ballad of Jim Fetzer
About a decade and a half ago I spotted a guy named Jim Fetzer, a former professor of philosophy and all-purpose conspirowack troofer, sharing a site with the antisemitic “former Jew” Gilad Atzmon. Well, again, this was still pretty far into the weeds. Fetzer, like Atzmon, was quite emphatic that Holocaust denial was not racist crackpottery but the product of the honest work of honest minds.
Fetzer got better known for his “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook” conspiracy, and he was given plenty of airtime by Alex Jones on exactly that topic. The result is that Leonard Pozner sued Fetzer’s pants off in 2018, before any of the Alex Jones verdicts. Fetzer lost big — about half a million dollars — but has been appealing it, literally, all the way to the Supreme Court, getting rejected every time.
But Fetzer has also in the past ten years gone from “Holocaust denial could be right” to “Holocaust denial is right.” Because the Holocaust denial movement is full of wackos and grifters, and Fetzer is exactly that kind of wacko.
The performativity of Holocaust denial
The “why so upset, we’re just having a friendly little debate” game fits, naturally, with the 4chan-ization of public dialogue. A kind of discourse Elon Musk now seems to want to bring to Twitter.
Which is to say, Fetzer is one of the people Musk let back onto Twitter. Also Fred Leuchter, “execution expert” — but oh, not really — and central figure in the second generation of Holocaust denial. Leuchter and Fetzer have befriended each other.
Musk knows what he’s doing. But, like Trump, he’ll happily play with whatever fire he knows won’t burn him personally, no matter who else is burned.
I’m too goddamned angry to finish this section.
Big problem one
Problem one: Holocaust denial is leaking into the conspirawhack groundwater. It’s becoming just one more layer on the standard issue tinfoil hat.
Big problem two
Problem two: now the Defend Trump At All Costs industry is being forced to choose a side on Holocaust denial. This is the shit sandwich Trump has served them.
Here’s what to watch for, coming straight for someone who’s watched these bastards for a quarter century.
The problem won’t be Kanye West and Nick Fuentes. Everybody knows they’re nuts. It won’t even be Donald Trump, who has no more capacity to disappoint. The problem will be those leaders in the GOP who, in order not to dare to point a finger at Trump, will obfuscate and say “well, you know, opinions on the Holocaust differ.”
We will see hairs artfully split.
And then we will be in a world of shit. Because Holocaust denial has never been closer to the mainstream.
Listen for it.
[Morning-after Edit section]
Thanks for the nice reception, folks.
Since I first posted this story, Kanye West posted a jews-are-nazis image, got into a flamewar with Musk, and his account is now suspended. Jim Fetzer’s still there, and so is Fred Leuchter (the inane “expert” of the Ernst Zundel trials, if you remember those).
The subtitle of Deborah Lipstadt’s 1993 book, the one that triggered the “Denial” trial, is “The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.”
There is such a thing as history, and there is such a thing as truth.