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June 24, 2023 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
56:25
The Holocaust—and Holocaust Denial—in American Life

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comHistory Speaks joins Richard to discuss the Holocaust and his debates with “Revisionists” or “Deniers.” They also delve into the trajectory of Holocaust scholarship—and revision—and how these schools function in American life.

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I will just get us started off.
I guess I'll call you Matthew or History Speaks is what you would like.
You are a PhD student at the London School of Economics.
But you're American, as we can all tell by your accent.
We got in touch, although I would say vaguely in touch.
Maybe a year ago or months ago.
I can't quite remember.
And we've had some brief, casual conversations or just sharing of things.
I think we've been on a space together a few times or what have you.
And you actually invited me to moderate a debate that I saw you yammering away about months with Mike Enoch.
And, you know, as you can attest, I was a bit surprised by the whole thing.
And my first instinct was like, well, I'm not sure I want to touch that thing with a 10-foot pole.
But then I thought about it.
I was like, well, you know, I'll do it.
I will actually be fair.
I'll hear out Mike and his stuff.
I'm not afraid of these ideas.
And maybe I would be the best one for it in a way.
And then, of course, Mike refuses.
So it was very odd.
I want to talk about historiography of the Holocaust and Holocaust revisionism.
But before we talk about that, just give us your sense of dealing with Mike, the debate itself, and all of the ins and outs of that.
Okay, so I want to say, because it's been like some mud sleep in the last forever, I want to start with a few positive things about, and I don't take anything back I said.
He dealt with me dishonestly, and people can read about that.
I don't find it that interesting.
I want to say some things about Mike's personality, which I was impressed by.
So intellectuals...
And I will, with a bit of cringe, put myself in this category.
I think intellectuals sometimes have a tendency to look at people like Mike or Nick Flentes and say, these people are saying dumb shit.
They don't know what they're doing.
I could just embarrass them in five minutes.
Actually, the skill set a shock shock has is something that a lot of intellectuals don't have.
And I think Mike exhibited that in the debate.
And I was impressed and I felt, in terms of his charisma, I felt tired at the end.
Like, wow, he really wore me out.
In terms of the actual intellectual content we can get into more, I think he didn't have anything compelling.
I mean, he was reduced in terms of the big gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
He was reduced to arguing that, oh, it may have been intended at one point as an explanation for why hydrogen cyanide detectors were installed, why it was called a gas cellar in multiple documents, why there was a preheating system.
He was reduced to saying, oh, maybe the Germans intended it for gassing corpses.
So gas chamber for gassing corpses, which I read out.
That seems odd.
Yeah, I think that he was definitely the hardest of the verbal debates I did.
The other two were kind of cupcakes.
He was by far the most charismatic and strong.
But I just think he had an argument and I had the facts.
Well, I will praise him maybe a little bit more than you have.
That Enoch made a compelling ethical critique, but he didn't make a very compelling historical argument.
So what I mean by that is that for, I think, probably like the second half of his opening statement, and he would reiterate these themes again and again, he was saying things like, you know, we We talk about the Holocaust all day long.
And we skate over the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And in fact, there's an upcoming Christopher Nolan film that is going to lionize Oppenheimer and the group that created the atomic bomb.
And we don't even mention Dresden.
I bet most high school graduates in America.
I don't know what that is or was.
And the winners write history, and we tend to let ourselves off the hook for these things that are, at the very least, things that you should contemplate morally.
Maybe they're morally dubious, maybe they're justified but still horrifying.
I mean, these are things we need to talk about, and yet we talk about the Holocaust all day long as a...
As a pure good and evil situation and the incredible suffering, etc.
I think that is actually a very solid point.
And I agree with the basic tenor of that.
But it's not an historical argument.
And so when you say those things, you kind of lessen the power of that ethical critique by making it just kind of whataboutism.
You know, it's like, did this man murder his wife?
You know, it's like, well, Stalin murdered millions.
It's like, well, okay, did this man murder his wife?
We're trying to figure that out.
It becomes a whataboutism and thus just totally irrelevant.
And that was my impression.
So I think he's not the first one to make this case, and he's not the best one, but he did make it.
And it is something worth talking about, but it's just not a historical argument about the Holocaust.
So there is my praise for Mike.
Yeah, I mean, I agree.
And he had to resort to...
He had to resort to conspiracy theories with no evidence.
So, for example, in the case of Belzick, whether a mass grave has been exhumed in a camp or so on, it varies.
In the case of Belzick, which was the third deadliest death camp, I believe.
In the case of Belzick, 33 colossal mass graves have been uncovered by archaeologists in the late 1990s.
They drilled down and found these mass graves.
And Mike, he had two tactics on the Colomass graves in the late 1990s.
First, he said only 15,000 corpses were in them, which was true but really dishonest because there were 15,000 unburned corpses in there.
The ash is what's important, and the ash corresponded to hundreds of thousands of victims.
And so I thought just focusing on – and again, I want to try to be less in the mud than we have been on this.
I thought trying to make the point about the corpses.
Without avoiding the ash was dishonest, but I was able to call him on that.
And then when I made the point that the ash corresponds to hundreds of thousands of corpses, he just said, yeah, I don't believe that.
And they were lying or something, you know?
Yeah.
Well, let's back up here and let's kind of get out of the nitty gritty.
First off, I don't have a whole lot to say about the nitty gritty.
I mean, I'm not a historian of the Second World War or anything.
But I also think it would be more useful to listeners to understand the trajectory of all the stuff, the trajectory of the historiography of the Holocaust, but also the trajectory of the historiography of revisionism, and the history of that, because it certainly didn't begin with alt-right online podcasts or something.
It goes back further.
And then I think we could also talk a little bit about the kind of like myth of the Holocaust.
Again, not in the sense that it didn't happen, but the kind of way that it's used or misused, etc.
But I want to start with the historiography of it.
So why don't you tell us, give us the lay of the land in terms of the...
Public awareness of the Holocaust and historians beginning to examine it, kind of maybe starting after the war.
I think we'll put the event itself aside just for at least a moment, but I want to talk about kind of the reception or reaction to the event.
So what was the perception of these things as the war was coming to a close and then forward?
So, yeah, it's a really good question, a very interesting question.
So there's been a huge change, massive change in public perception of the Holocaust.
Just taking America as one country, Peter Novak has a book called Holocaust and American Life.
And the fascinating element of this is that right after the war, the position of the general public was much more indifferent.
There was a sense of Nazi barbarism, Nazi thugs.
That wasn't specifically confined to Jews in a way maybe it is today.
And among the Jewish community, there was a sense that something shameful has happened.
Rather sad, really.
Survivors weren't lionized in the way they are now.
Novik mentions this in his book.
Early efforts to create monuments to sufferings and murders of Jews were actually vetoed by the organized Jewish community in America, like the ADL, for example.
I can't remember the precise city, but they said, no, we don't want Monument X to the Nazi Holocaust, to the Holocaust victims.
So there was, in the 40s and 50s, quite a bit of silence.
Obviously, after 45, quite a bit of silence.
There was a flurry at Nuremberg of interest.
After that, there was quite a bit of silence and quite a bit of shame surrounding it.
Enough resistance.
Of course, you have resistance.
You have the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Everyone knows about it.
You also have the cases where there isn't resistance.
There's passivity, right?
A lot of them, frankly.
So there's a sense of shame and a sense of more indifference in culture.
And also, I think there's a political element to this.
So after the Cold War emerges, there was this kind of attempt at a quasi-rehabilitation of Germany.
And you even see this with Adenauer.
And early West German politics.
And also like the Wehrmacht clean hands myth.
So the idea that, okay, Hitler was bad.
The SS were bad.
Himmler was bad.
These were all thugs and evil.
But the common German soldier was not bad.
Had a nobility to him.
And there was this...
And even you see this in films at the time.
So there's a film, a very fun film, and a very...
Silly at some level, but also very fun.
I actually recommend it.
People do not get your history from it.
It's called Battle of the Bulge.
I don't know if you've seen it.
Heard of it.
I've not seen it.
Yeah, it's like an early 60s film.
But again, it's about the Ardenne offensive.
But the way the Germans are portrayed is not how they would ever be portrayed today, right?
There's a nobility and masculine power portrayed in the German panzer offensive that you wouldn't see today.
And so I think that the politics of the situation where vilifying Germany wasn't really politically expedient once the Cold War breaks up because you want West Germany to have some level of pride and dignity, right, and nationalism.
It's a bull work against communism.
And then also the attitude of the Jewish community, which was to see this event as shameful.
In terms of historiography, The first major work was written by, can I get the year correct?
It was written by, this is why I'm a PhD student, not just a historian, but it was written by Gerald Reitlinger in 1953.
Yeah, The Final Solution.
And Reitlinger represented a breakthrough, but not so much in the culture.
And there were a lot of blind spots in his research.
He didn't have all the documents we have today.
He estimated the death toll at a little under 5 million.
Again, he didn't have all the evidence we have at hand today.
But the big kind of breakthrough that made an impact on popular culture that filtered onto popular culture was Raoul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews, published in 1961, which was very controversial.
So Hilberg basically uses social science methods to try to get how many Jews died, where did they die, when did the policy develop.
Written in the language of a social science journal, right?
And there were people in the Jewish community that thought this is the most vulgar exercise you could imagine.
So Hannah Arendt, who, you know, whatever people think of her, she's a pretty brilliant woman, I think it's fair to say.
She wrote that Hilberg, she wrote a kind of contradictory comment, which I found amusing, but also insightful to her perspective.
Hilberg's book is brilliant because it's a matter of like history and empiricism, it is brilliant.
But it's also not unworthy of a singed pig.
So the idea of compiling how many died, where did they die, how did they die, when did the policies developed, is just, how can you speak about this the way you'd speak about some other kind of social science, you know?
Yeah.
Hilberg's book made a huge impact in academia and was very controversial at the time, as you can see from Arendt's reaction.
Arendt, though, and this is, even though I admire Arendt's work, one dishonest thing she did is, For her, I think it became a book, I don't remember, I think it was originally a series of articles, Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she's kind of assessing the Nazi regime in the context of this one man's trial.
One mediocre man that she sees as like a door-to-door vacuum cleaner who somehow gets involved with this evil.
She actually borrows heavily from Hilberg while she's bashing him.
So that's interesting.
But I would say the big breakthrough was Raoul Hilberg in 1961.
And then, just to put a button on this, in terms of the popular culture, there's at some point a turnaround.
So there's thirst, there's this reaction of shame or indifference or very mild interest.
And then by the 1970s, by the 1980s, there's this huge uproar in popular culture about the Holocaust.
So obviously in Germany, you get interest with the Auschwitz trial and the 68ers, so you get things in Germany too.
In Germany, again, there wasn't much discussion of this in the 50s and so on.
Very little.
But in the United States, in Britain, this starts to enter into popular culture in the 70s and 80s.
It becomes huge by the 1980s.
And to the point where people are kind of retconning, old veterans, World War II veterans are kind of retconning their motives for fighting, right?
So essentially...
The way we perceive the Holocaust now and its cultural importance to Americans, to Brits, you know, like Germans, was not the case immediately after the war.
That is interesting, and I don't think terribly surprising.
Germany in the 50s had, I mean, you had to go from being defeated, being destroyed in many ways, being divided, to...
Getting at least the western half and the eastern half in the other direction on a Cold War footing.
And you can't really be demonizing your new ally or vassal.
That is just simply not going to work.
So I think a lot of this, I mean, this is the kind of Adenauer era, you know, in a nutshell.
And so a lot of that's not surprising.
I mean, we see a lot of that in the...
You know, embrace of the Confederacy in the United States, there is a certain arrangement or deal of we are going to admire you, claim that your generals were the most brilliant gentlemen to ever walk the face of the earth, you know, under the assumption that we, the Yankees, won and we're not going to do this again.
And it's an understandable arrangement.
And so it doesn't terribly surprise me.
I mean, even Odenauer himself is kind of interesting.
He's, what is it, 20 or 20, 30 years older than Hitler.
I mean, you're going back to the previous generation after this disaster.
But that is very interesting.
In terms of a lot of the things, I mean...
There are some aspects of the Holocaust which are clearly fraudulent.
These kind of soap or the lampshade notions.
Were these kind of rumors coming out almost immediately, or is that something that developed?
Or the gassing itself?
Mike said this, and he was right on this one.
When people hear the word the Holocaust, they do think gassing.
When did our public perception solidify?
Of course, there were false atrocity claims, but you have to look at...
I would reject the idea that it's false aspects of the Holocaust, because I think Holocaust means...
There's an academic definition of the term.
Obviously, it's a little confusing, and there's some historians who really dislike the term.
Because of the role of it in popular culture.
So that can create some problems.
But like soap and so on, you know, a lot of these rumors had bases.
So like it's false, as many people believe that Jews were made into soap.
That's not true.
But at the Danzig Anatomical Research Center.
People were made into soap.
Corpses were used to make soap at a very small scale.
It wasn't of Jews in concentration camps, but this did happen.
So you can see the source of these rumors were in hearsay.
Shrunken heads were real.
We know the shrunken heads were real because the SS actually investigated this at Buchenwald, and they were upset.
They're like, don't do this.
This is not authorized.
So the fact that they're condemning it and investigating it shows that it happened.
In terms of lampshades, My understanding is that the artifacts presented as human lampshades were tested and found to be animals.
But I think you're going to have war propaganda in every war.
And the question is, what has a strong evidentiary basis?
And this stuff does not.
I mean, it's hearsay.
It's hysteria.
It's fear.
It's understandable.
These people are horrified.
And there's often kernels of truth to them.
In terms of the lampshades, though, I would say like against, you know, I don't want to get into some debate nonsense, but like, I mean, they were tested, right?
So like, they were presented as human lampshades.
Yeah, that was a mistake.
But they were then tested, and they were found to be animals.
So like, if there was some conspiracy, the tests would be falsified or whatever, you know?
So yeah, I mean, there are false, there are things that people believe that historians are found to be false.
But one thing I would clarify, too, is it's not Holocaust revisionists or deniers who've, I understand.
If you were to ask a recent high school graduate who's a bit of a dummy, These are the things that he would say.
So I'm trying to get at when public consciousness changed or kind of solidified.
Like the word Holocaust, for instance.
Was that used by Hilberg?
Because that is a powerful word.
It's a Greek word for burnt offering.
So when did that kind of come into saliency?
Well, it certainly wasn't salient after the war at the time Hilberg was writing.
I believe it wasn't until the 1960s that the term was ever used.
And certainly, the film that solidified this as the term for the annihilation of the European Jews was a 1978 made-for-TV film Holocaust, with Meryl Streep of people.
Really, I mean, it was already happening before then, but that film really got vast viewership and a lot of sympathy from Americans for the victims.
And that really solidified the cultural role of the Holocaust United States.
It's also the use of the term.
It's this very important TV show.
So I couldn't pin the exact date, unfortunately, when the first usages of this were.
Definitely not during the war.
Definitely not Nuremberg.
In the 1960s, it started.
In 1978, it kind of is confirmed, this term, with the film.
With the film, yeah, that's interesting.
So, and then where is it going now?
I was born in 1978.
I guess the year that film was produced, by coincidence.
I certainly can well remember the 90s.
I was in high school.
You know, becoming aware of these things and so on.
Schindler's List came out in, was that around 94, 95 or thereabouts?
And that was, I would say, peak Holocaust in terms of the public awareness.
Prestige Hollywood movies, documentaries, teaching in high schools.
But my sense, granted I'm out of high school now, of course, but my sense is that it's on the wane as time passes.
But what is going on, say, over the past 25 years in terms of academia?
And then I think the public awareness of it is, I think, obvious.
But what is going on in terms of academia?
Give us a taste of where that is.
I would agree just from reading about the subject that I would guess that when you were a kid in the 90s or 80s or whatever, I'm not sure how old you are, Richard.
My impression, actually I'm almost certain of it even though I wasn't alive in the 80s, is that this was a much more important issue in popular culture than it is now.
I'm not saying it's important now, it still has importance, but I think it is waning.
In terms of academia, you know, I think a lot of the debates around the Holocaust have kind of been ironed out.
I think there are still some interests.
A lot of interest, too, is the broader question of the dissolution of the European Jewish community through migration, right?
And also kind of fringe questions, such as was there a plan to extend the exterminations outside of Europe?
Jews in North Africa, for example, were not systematically killed, right?
So the question is, well, they weren't.
We know they weren't, but was there a plan to do this?
So debates like this.
I would say that research into the big questions like how many, why did they do it, when were the decisions made, the kind of big questions that even a layperson who's not a historian or a student of history but is just interested in the subject would find compelling, I feel like...
A lot of the research into those has been, you know, you never say concluded, but it's becoming more and more pedantic as volumes and volumes of this stuff have compiled.
And in terms of the popular culture, so I think it's on the wing kind of bit in both.
For me, what's interesting is the refugee movements.
And I actually got interested in this a little bit because of the anti-denial stuff.
Ryan Falk and so on, people like this, were saying, "Oh, they were all migrated from Europe." Obviously, it's not true, but they migrated in Europe in such a way that can account for the population losses, in other words, right?
And that's not true, but there are all these interesting stories which I'm researching as part of my work.
My doctoral work about these Jews who went to British India in the 1930s, or Jews who went to Hong Kong, like 1,000 here, 200 there.
It's obviously not the numbers that's going to help the deniers, but these are interesting stories about the destruction of the Jewish community, not just through murder, but also through forced immigration.
I feel like the big questions have kind of been...
Ironed out.
You know, maybe there'll be some startling new interpretation or revision.
Right.
This or that element.
But I think that the core questions are kind of, have kind of been dealt with.
Yeah.
So I mean, I viewed this as, look, I viewed my work in denial as not strictly speaking.
I have a skill set and knowledge from history, and I can use that for a popular discourse, which I see anti-denial as, if that makes sense.
But no, I think that it's on the way in both.
As the survivors, and I have to say, I didn't have a great passion for this subject going in, but I felt more of a kind of How should I say this?
More of a kind of normie compassion or interest in the survivors, even stories as well-known in our cultures like Anne Frank and so on.
And who obviously dies in Belzen.
I felt more of that as my work has gone on.
But I think, generally speaking, where the way the culture is going and historiography is going, I think this is going to be less...
Salient than it was in the 70s, 80s, 90s, where it was huge in all three domains.
I mean, one point I'll make about the historiography is that deniers are actually correct about, or were, is that before Jean-Claude Prasac, who was an ex-Holocaust denier, and he found a lot of documents about Leichenkeller I, the big gas chamber in Auschwitz, in Auschwitz-Birkenau, that I cited against Mike.
The calling it a gassing cellar, the need for hydrogen cyanide detectors, a gas-tight door with a peephole, etc.
These were found by him.
Before that, we really had very little documentary evidence of these buildings being gas chambers, right?
But we have that now, you know?
So that corresponds with the testimonial evidence that corresponds with the hydrogen cyanide in the ruins of the gas chambers.
I feel like the questions have kind of been answered by historiography, if that makes sense.
And the cultural stuff, I'm repeating myself, but the cultural stuff, I think, is also waning.
Yeah, no, that definitely makes sense.
So what is the history of so-called Holocaust revisionism or so-called Holocaust denial?
So presumably that wouldn't, presumably that was a reaction to the historical or historographic development that we've just talked about.
But when was this becoming a thing?
Yeah, so I think you have to distinguish between two things.
There's obviously popular denial, and then there's intellectuals who engaged in denial.
There's almost no historians who were involved in this.
I think the reason for that I'll come to, but they were professors and so on.
But popular denial was a thing among Germans, but became much more of a thing as the Holocaust became more salient and more kind of a source of shame for the Germans.
So in the 1950s, denial was fringe.
I can't remember the name of this book.
Very good book.
I'm going to actually look it up.
It's not about the Holocaust.
It's about Germany after the war.
It's a popular history, but it's just so good.
So I think your viewers and you would like it.
Goddammit, I cannot find this.
I'll find it.
But this book I read recently, which for some reason I'm forgetting right now.
I'm going to find it.
But it provided a history and showed very little references to the Holocaust as a source of shame or as a source of denying these crimes or really just not much discourse.
So as a matter of popular discourse, there was very little Holocaust denial among Germans or Americans and so on.
And there wasn't a major denial work written, either, until I believe the first book was – the first work of Holocaust denial, like a comprehensive work – I may be wrong about this – was The Hoax of the 20th Century by a Northwestern university who's still around, actually, Professor of Engineering Arthur Butz.
Oh, no, no, sorry.
Paul Racine, who was a French survivor of a camp – not a death camp.
He was held in Buchenwald.
Deniers say he's a witness or whatever, he's really not.
But he published in 1964 the first kind of big denial book.
He was, I believe, like a – I don't know.
I'm not quite sure what his background was.
But anyway, he wrote the denial work that Arthur Butz wrote it.
But the interesting thing is both intellectually and popularly, denial really explodes at the same time.
The Holocaust becomes a much bigger – A much bigger source of pop culture significance.
So denial was not really a thing.
You had people like Harry Elmer Barnes, who was very anti-war and kind of, I think, was sympathetic to denial as a means of deprecating the American war effort more than as neo-Nazism or whatever.
He didn't really comprehensively write in this.
He just kind of dog-whistled about how he didn't believe it.
He was a historian at Columbia University.
But the first two, I'd say, intellectuals who wrote about this were Rossigny and Butz.
And then you had the foundation of the Institute for Historical Review in 1978.
So what's interesting is denial, both at a popular level and at an intellectual level, if you will, came about decades after the war.
It wasn't really a thing right after the war.
Just as like...
Just as discussing the Holocaust wasn't a thing.
To be clear, it was seen as an uncontroversial statement of fact among normies that are informed that Hitler annihilated the Jews.
That was just seen as, yeah, he did that.
But the Holocaust wasn't this big thing used to draw broad political conclusions, if that makes sense, or to draw even derogatory conclusions about the average German.
This really changes in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
By the way, these days, interesting, so the IHR is found in 1978.
These days, the IHR has basically given up on Holocaust now.
I don't know if you've found this, but the director, Mark Webber, has admitted to...
He basically has admitted to two-thirds of the Holocaust and the last third Auschwitz.
He's like...
He's like, not sure.
The main body to advocate for Holocaust now is kind of thrown in the towel.
And I actually have some respect for Webber because you don't really have anywhere else to go, but you're like...
He has a master's in history.
So he looks at the evidence.
He's like, you know, I have to say the convergence of evidence is in favor of the mainstream on the mass shootings element and at least the Reinhardt camp's gassing element.
Like I mentioned the mass graves at Belzec, you know.
I mean, he's not going to say that's a conspiracy, right?
Right.
So, yeah.
But I would say today denial is...
Dying.
So here is dying and thriving.
So it's thriving on the far right of people like Mike and so on.
But it used to be that there were intellectuals involved in this, not historians.
I think there are reasons historians weren't involved in it, but they were like professors and so on.
And like a guy who's a guy for us on.
He's a professor of French literature.
So you have had intellectuals involved in this.
Yeah.
I just think that I think and David Irving was involved in this, right?
I just think that the defeats deniers have had, really, in open debate, as it were, and in court as well, when David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt, have been sufficiently devastating that I just think intellectuals have kind of said, you know, the case is not there.
Right.
But it probably flourishes with, you know, moon landing stuff and vaccine stuff and so on on the online far right.
It seems to just go...
I mean, I don't know if QAnon mentioned this nonsense, but it would seem to go along with that in an almost debased form.
As opposed to someone who was acting in good faith, might have had his biases, of course, but was genuinely trying to get at the truth.
Now, if it exists at all, it exists alongside...
Vaccines give you AIDS or whatever.
Yeah, I mean, look, I debated one of the higher IQ deniers in Thomas Dalton, which is available on the Committee for Open Debate in the Holocaust website.
He's really a dying breed.
I mean, people who can write, who can at least put on the form of academic discourse.
There used to be deniers like that, but I just think they lost their argument.
Now, denial isn't going to die, but I think it's going to become more and more vulgar.
So, for example, the guy debated Dalton.
He'd never make this retarded argument you see on the internet like, oh, the swimming pool or the soccer team.
So the soccer team are British POWs, nothing to do with Jews.
The swimming pool is an Auschwitz one where there was no extermination by 1944 when it's constructed and Jews were killed in Birkenau.
Nothing to do with Jews.
So it's just like...
You're going to get memes like the swimming pool and the soccer team, and I think you're going to get less of the Mark Webber IHR stuff from Kate's past, if that makes sense.
Right.
Who funded IHR in the 70s?
Oh, I'm actually not sure.
It was involved with Willis.
Willis Carto.
Yeah, yeah.
But here's the thing.
It's pre-internet, right?
They had some smart people associated with it, and they had extremists like Carto.
So they tried to...
When they thought they could win the argument, they kind of tried to – well, they thought they had some winning arguments, which they obviously don't anymore.
They're not engaged in it.
They tried to kind of sanitize the anti-Semitism because, obviously, if you have an empirically compelling argument that there were no gas chambers or whatever or that there's some explanation for how these people disappeared other than killing or whatever the case is or that there's some evidence for a hoax or whatever.
I mean, they never made the hoax claim.
I kind of trapped Mike on that.
But the smart people, like, said it wasn't a hoax.
Because they're smart enough to know if you're going to make a positive claim, you need evidence.
You can't just say hoax and then give no evidence that the Soviets or the British or the Americans did this.
But to say it's a misunderstanding is also odd.
I mean, that relieves you of a burden of proof.
Dalton did this.
He said it's not a hoax, right?
But even if it was bias, like say there was extreme bias but no attempt to frame them, it just is very strange to me that they would all confess the same thing if there's no conspiracy.
But regardless, the IHR was funded by extremists and tried to kind of disassociate themselves from them when they thought in the 1990s that they had a winning argument.
And they actually wanted to reach the public and professors.
So they tried to kind of sanitize themselves a bit.
But, you know, I don't think they're very interested in doing that at this point because they've given up on Holocaust denial, you know?
Yeah, I can remember even a kid.
I don't know if I've seen clips of this or if I might have even watched it when I was a young man in the 90s.
But, like, David Cole, who is currently an op-ed writer at Talkies Magazine and...
They went on Oprah.
Maybe not Oprah, but Montel Williams.
It was.
Donahue.
Donahue, okay.
Yeah.
Sorry, go ahead.
That's it.
They were absolutely trying to reach the mainstream, maybe successfully doing it.
They definitely were not presenting themselves as far right in doing that.
They were presenting themselves as, "We've got this good news we need to bring to the world," basically.
We're just in a very different place right now with the internet where this is something I've talked a lot about it where there's there's no mainstream so I mean Donahue wasn't The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, but he was reaching average people, and he was a source of authority.
I mean, Donahue was actually an interesting man, at the very least in comparison with his colleagues today.
He was fired for opposing the Iraq War from NBC, by the way.
But anyway, they were reaching the mainstream.
I think where we are now is that there's no mainstream.
The New York Times is all lies in the mind of, you know, your average Trump supporter.
And many people, Trump supporter or no, they are getting their information from a Facebook group or from a board server or something like that.
They have this, we're in this kind of place where technological society, as it functioned.
Has broken down, and there's no mainstream.
There's increasingly less of a shared culture, and I think it's both hyper-polarized, to be sure, but it's also kind of fragmented, where, you know, I don't want to go too much on this, because I want to focus on your stuff, but, you know, there's no...
The band that represents Americans, or at least young Americans, that they all agree with is they speak for our generation.
There were many bands like that.
At this point, music is utterly fragmented and people are in their own little echo chambers.
And I think they are as well in terms of mainstream discourse.
There's no way to even reach them.
And, you know, and so the degree to which discussion about this is going to take place, I think it is going to be, it's going to take place through the, you know, the mouth of someone like Mike Enoch, maybe at best.
And at worst, it will take place in this totally deranged and conspiratorial atmosphere.
Yeah, I agree with that.
So first I'll make the point about coal.
So coal has changed.
His views, not entirely, but he's changed his views.
So Cole has conceded almost all the Holocaust, but not quite all of it.
I'll just explain.
I've talked to David a number of times, and I like David, by the way, quite a bit.
So I think I can characterize his views, and I'll post it and tag him.
He hates me for some reason.
I've never met him.
It's very odd.
Yeah, he hates me for some reason.
He's always like...
Variously taken pisses on me on Twitter.
Although I think we still follow each other or something like that.
I just find it very serious.
David is the sweetest guy in the world.
Maybe he doesn't like the 2016 version.
I mean, I wouldn't have liked the 2015-2016 swaggering super right-wing version.
I would have said, fuck you.
I mean, I told you, for example, I was surprised by how intelligent I considered you to be because I guess maybe this is my liberal mind.
The little pieces I saw in 2015, 2016, I'm like, oh, this guy's a meathead frat boy.
And then I'm like, no, he's actually an interesting guy.
But anyway, to David, though, I guess you guys need to make up.
But in terms of David...
If we do, if we don't, it's no luck.
Yeah, it doesn't matter.
I always found it curious, though.
I was like, oh, this 90s Holocaust revision has saved me.
Make it that way you will.
More interesting, so David is actually a good example, though, of how the smarter ones have kind of run away from their view.
So let me go through a couple things.
David was right about a couple things.
So one thing David was right about, for example, is there's one building at Maidonic that was identified by the museum and some books as a homicidal gas chamber that it makes absolutely no sense.
Like the door literally opens on the inside.
For example.
And so, Maidonic did have gas chambers, but this particular building should not have been labeled a gas chamber, and Cole was correct about that.
But for the most part, Cole was wrong, and Cole has been running away from, not running away from, because he's been honest about it, but he's been backing away from the views he took in the 90s without entirely giving up on them.
So I mentioned in the Enoch debate, in the Dalton debate, and I'll just say here, there are like three big stages of the Holocaust mass shootings, Killing in the Reinhardt camps and killing in Auschwitz.
So Kohl completely concedes the first two.
He's just totally...
He doesn't say Belzick masquerade.
Basically, when someone like Kohl sees 33 colossal masquerades filled with ash, he's like, okay, let's move on.
He's not going to say conspiracy or why they pave over it.
I mean, okay, that's weird.
But the one thing Kohl will not let go of is...
Remember, in the Auschwitz debate with Enoch, we were focusing on the big gas chamber, Leisch& Keller 1, Korpseller 1. Cole will not let go, and I think he's wrong on the evidence, but he will not let go of the fact that that was not a homicide gas chamber.
And that is the one thing he continues to do.
He even says Auschwitz there was gassings, but in the bunkers, not the big gas chamber.
So Cole is still a revisionist in this regard.
He won't let go of that, but he's much more in agreement with the mainstream than he is with Mike Enoch.
I don't want to psychologize him.
I will say, I'll say this instead of psychologizing him.
If I were in Cole's position, I would find it very difficult to say, okay, Elisha and Keller one was a gas chamber.
I was wrong about everything.
So everything other than, okay, one building may have been misidentified at Maidonic or whatever.
I was wrong about every substantive claim.
And I suffered so much for something I was completely wrong about.
That's difficult for a human being to do.
I mean, we're vain.
We have confirmation.
We want to look cool.
So I'm not saying that's his motive.
I'm saying if I were him.
I could picture myself struggling with that.
But I think he's representative of the fact that...
I mean, the guy hasn't graduated college, but he's smart.
I care about whether people are smart.
Credentials are cool.
He's definitely smart.
Yeah, credentials are cool and they help us figure out stuff.
But Cole's smart.
I don't care that you didn't graduate college.
He's so smart that he steals my takes.
I've noticed this.
Okay, that's a little jab there.
But yes, I've noticed that.
I was like...
Well, you seem to hate me, and yet I'll say something and it will appear in your column three months later.
That's a curious matter.
Anyway, I'll leave it at that.
My point about David would be, he's a good example of how the smarter deniers have looked at the evidence and said, well, this claim isn't really...
That claim isn't really justified.
I will say this, too, about deniers.
So, like, for example, I'm going to read a quote that was published in a book, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken, in the late 1980s, which was true at the time, by a Princeton historian.
Sources for the studies of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable.
So that's what he said.
That was true at the time.
It isn't true anymore.
And the reason it isn't true anymore is because primarily of a historian, Jean-Claude Prasac.
Who found the construction documents.
He found what he called the criminal traces.
References to Leistung Keller 1, which we talked about as a gassing cellar.
References to it as a gassing basement, right?
References to the hydrogen cyanide detectors.
Basically, documents that I used against Mike, which I think discredit the claim that it was a morgue, a preheating system.
You want to cook the corpses, apparently, right?
So I guess the one thing you have to admit to deniers, which I think people don't want to, but I think is true, is that they did, through their provocations, they spurred more research, which led their claims to be discredited.
But probably nobody would have researched it if they hadn't done it.
Here's an interesting quote on Prasak's book.
So Prasak's book, Technique and Opera, Prasak was an ex-denier who basically went to the archives in Auschwitz and found...
These criminal traces, right?
He found the evidence that these buildings were not morgues, they were gas chambers.
So this was a review of Prasak's book.
Prasak is a former revisionist.
He's convinced the gas chambers did actually exist, and he's not discovering anything new in this.
Absolutely nothing.
He opens the door of the gas chamber.
Everyone knew they were already there.
So his work is kind of polarizing, but it's interesting.
So like, because mainstream people, some of them, okay, we didn't have documents showing that this building...
It was a gas chamber.
These documents show that.
It couldn't have been a morgue.
It must have been a gas chamber.
So what?
Who cares?
We all knew they were there already, right?
So what everyone thinks of this research, though, it was definitely prompted by deniers to some extent, and it was even carried out by an ex-denier.
This guy was a denier, and he changed his mind after going to the construction records.
There are more documents that people haven't read, because historians just aren't primarily concerned about this.
So, for example, a document was found by a Holocaust denier, of all people, I don't remember how many years ago.
It was 10, 15 years ago, which was about a gas-tight door for a delousing chamber, like for non-homicidal gassing of clothes.
And the document said this door, this gas-tight door, needs to be made exactly like the gas-tight door used for special treatment, zonderbehandling of the Jews.
And other documents, special treatment is defined as execution.
So it's not me making this up.
Himmler once says, okay, this special treatment carried out by hanging, this special treatment by shooting.
So there's a document that says the gas-tight door for the delousing chamber, non-homicidal gas chamber, should be exactly like that for the gas chamber used for the execution of the Jews.
I mean, I don't know what to tell you at that point.
Yeah.
You know?
I mean, the best thing Natanio could say is, oh, special treatment means something different in this context.
He admits it's a code word for killing because he's one of the few, very few revisionists left who's like IRQ, let's say, and works on like archives.
It's just like, bro, okay, you can find some case where some German says special treatment doesn't mean killing, but you admit it was a code for execution.
What else could that mean, special treatment of the Jews with a gas-tight door?
It's time to get off the show.
Yes.
Let me talk a little bit about where I think this is going, and you can respond.
As I was saying before, I don't think...
We can underestimate the degree to which many normies out there, that is mainstream people, average Americans, have become largely deranged in their views.
Now, there's probably a lot of causes of that in economic distress and just this kind of malaise or anxiety.
Anxious malaise that we all kind of feel about the state of the world and America, all of that stuff.
But a lot of it is caused through the internet and through what I was speaking of before, this breakdown of technological society, where the apparatuses of the nightly news, your local paper, the big national papers, just the way that...
Life was, for better and for worse, organized so that society could function and the people could have a sense of up and down and right and left and good and bad and all that kind of stuff.
These are breaking down and people are probably particularly conservatives, but I would say it's across the board, are entering these deranged places.
I imagine that Holocaust denial...
It's not a major force, but I wouldn't be surprised if it cropped up in a lot of these forums, the QAnon-type forums places.
And I'm not trying to defend them, but I think in a weird way, they might not even do it for anti-Semitic or pro-Nazi reasons.
It's just one more conspiracy to throw into the bouquet of, you know, the moon landing, you know, JFK and all that kind of stuff.
I think it will still persist with people like Enoch.
I think what he is trying to do, and I more or less, again, I take your word for it.
I agree.
I've seen this myself.
You know a lot more of it than I do.
I think in terms of higher IQ people or people who want to use some sort of historical method, I think it is a slowly dying field, and it will probably Not be with us, say, 25 years from now.
But I think it will be with us in an intense way in these deranged forums and with people like Enoch.
What Enoch would do, and I think he would actually agree with me if I talked with him about it, is that they view themselves as oppositional to Jewish power.
So that's Hollywood, Wall Street, This is, from their mind, this torpedo launched at the USS Israel.
If you can debunk the Holocaust, they're going to wither away or turn to water like the Wicked Witch or something.
They feel that this is such a powerful weapon they can use against.
They're enemies.
And that is why they do it.
And I think from my standpoint, I think it's a very, like, putting aside truth and false claims, I think it's just a bad idea to focus on this or put your eggs in that basket.
The fact that I'm revisionist, something about what I say politically and socially and intellectually is at stake in this.
But they will do that.
And they have done that.
I'm not misrepresenting them.
The Holocaust denial isn't just a curious hang-up.
I could have an argument.
Whether I win that debate doesn't matter.
It's a matter of taste on some level.
For them, it's not a matter of taste.
I think they have their eggs in this basket in a very curious way.
And I also think they feel that it's a silver bullet, if you will, or this just huge ammunition that they can win on this field.
And they might very well win the argument, quote-unquote, in the sense of influencing the far right on podcast and on 4chan, etc.
They might very well win the argument on those forums.
That that will lead them to political power.
So it's a means towards an end.
That's how I think they think about this question.
Do you agree with that?
Yeah.
I mean, look, my activities have had political salience.
So a lot of Jews ended up following me on Twitter because they see my activities as fighting anti-Semitism.
And I'm happy to do that.
I don't like, obviously, I don't like anti-Semitism.
Actually, my biggest, the biggest political motivation wasn't that.
It was trying to deprogram these people on the far right, who I think, you know, and this is controversial, obviously, for somebody who's in a PhD program who wants to be an academic and be a historian.
But I think these white boys, as it were, have some grievances with society that are legitimate, and they're being seduced by race hatred and kind of crazy ideology.
So I want to reach them and deprogram them.
Look, I think I've been effective at that, but at a very small scale.
In fact, I know I've been effective at that.
In fact, during our debate, TRS had to delete comments.
Again, a very small minority.
The vast majority of his people thought Enoch won.
But there were some who thought, and even in the Odyssey channel you see this, there's some who thought I was more compelling.
And that's kind of my goal in this.
Try to deprogram 2%, 3%.
Because you're never going, with confirmation bias as it is, if Trump debated Biden, you'd never get more than 10% Democrats saying Trump won or 10% Republicans saying Biden won.
But my goal is to deprogram a small number of these people, maybe the clever ones or the ones who may be a little on the fence.
And I think I've been successful, although it's exhausting because it's a very toxic But no, I mean, if I have a political motive in this, it's concern about the far right.
I'm concerned about these people.
I think they're a danger to themselves, to others.
And I think they have legitimate concerns, too.
So I think the problem will continue, right?
So I guess partly I'm with the left on their analysis.
This is partly I'm on the right.
So I'm on the right in the sense that I think they have legitimate grievances, right?
I'm on the left in the sense I think that, no, it isn't just Fed posting.
Mike tried to, by the way, write off the Nazis as Fed posting, like these statements about we're killing 1.2 million.
This bothered me.
I mentioned this on Tuesday when we talked about this.
Mike Enoch struck me as it's as if he believed the Nazis were TRS members or something.
And so it was all about Fed posting or letting off steam or something.
You know, it's like, oh, you can't take that seriously.
He's just being edgy.
Or whatever.
I mean, the point I made to this, though, is that, okay, Mike, you're putting your interpretation, and I think I made a very good response.
There's some things where I'm like, oh, God, why didn't I say this?
Of course, you get that in verbal debates.
But this one, I think I got a good response.
Like, Mike, you're putting your interpretation over Horty, Hitler's own ally, who was distressed.
He was an anti-Semite.
He was in the Axis.
But he was distressed by the fact, I think morally, too, by the fact that Hitler, in his words, as he said to his...
This isn't after the war and some trial.
This is 1944.
As Hitler's ally, he says to the Crown Council, Hitler reproaches me because I won't allow the Hungarian Jews to be turned over and massacred.
Kind of a tragic thing that he's put in his lot with this person who now wants him to massacre some of his citizens who he may not like, but, you know.
Right.
Yeah, but anyway, Mike was, the Fed Post's interpretation was saying, okay, am I Mike Enoch, no, in 2023, better than Horty, but Hitler's ally spoke German, knew in 1944, you know?
Right.
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