Something a bit different this week, as Daniel and Jack chat about Errol Morris' documentary film Mr Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A Leuchter Jnr, as part one of a two part discussion of Holocaust denial. Warnings most definitely apply. * Show Notes: A Militia Group Detained Hundreds of Migrants At Gunpoint At The Border United Constitutional Patriots on Facebook https://twitter.com/LCRWnews/status/1119902405821288448 https://twitter.com/leftkist/status/1118662484640976896 "Republican discussed violent attacks and surveillance with rightwingers" https://twitter.com/jason_a_w/status/1120451594825420801 Republican Representative Matt Shea Planned Violent Attacks On ‘Communist’ Leftists, Leaked Chat Messages Show Matt Shea connection to Christian Identity in 2018 (Ad-heavy but with good detail) "Biblical Basis For War" * Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr (YouTube) Mr. Death Transcript Analytical Chemistry segment from Mr. Death The Nizkor Project (it's okay to click through) 66 Questions and Answers About the Holocaust "First of all, consider the implicit conspiracy theory. Notice how the testimony of every single inmate of every Nazi camp is automatically dismissed as unconvincing. This total dismissal of inmates' testimony, along with the equally-total dismissal of the Nazis' own testimony (!), is the largest unspoken assumption of Holocaust-denial. This assumption, which is not often spelled out, is that the attempted Jewish genocide never took place, but rather that a secret conspiracy of Jews, starting around 1941, planted and forged myriad documents to prove that it did; then, after the war, they rounded up all the camp survivors and told them what to say." "The conspirators also supposedly managed to torture hundreds of key Nazis into confessing to crimes which they never committed, or into framing their fellow Nazis for those crimes, and to plant hundreds of documents in Nazi files which were never discovered until after the war, and only then, in many cases, by sheer luck. [...] "Regarding postwar testimony from Nazis, were they all tortured into confessing to heinous crimes which they supposedly did not commit? This might be believable if only a few Nazis were captured after the war, or maybe if some had courageously stood up in court and shouted to the world about the supposed attempt to silence them. But hundreds testified regarding the Holocaust, in trials dating from late 1945 until the 1960s." Holocaust Controversies Holocaust Controversies "Rebutting the Twitter Denial." Deborah Lipstadt, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory." Richard Evans, "Lying About Hitler." Nizkor on The Leuchter Report Institute for Forensic Research, Cracow, analysis of Auschwitz in 1994 Holocaust Controversies on The Leuchter Report Leuchter Report thoroughly debunked, by a fellow Nazi no less, in 1993 (page 32 in scanned "Liberty Bell" Fred Leuchter interview 2015, with Jim Rizoli David Irving "The Manipulation of History" Another Voice For Freedom with Ernst Zundel: "Left-Wing" Violence on the Streets of Canada Ernst Zundel, "Adolf Hitler -- Artist, Architect, and Designer" Highlights from the 9th IHR Conference (footage from this was used in Mr. Death) Van Pelt Report from Irving trial Richard Evans Report from Irving Trial Holocaust on Trial (Docudrama about Irving Trial)
Hello and welcome to I Don't Speak German episode 16.
Is it 16 already?
Sweet 16.
Sweet 16, yeah, in which young enough to, you know, do anything you like with according to MRAs.
OK, keep going, it's fine.
No, no, I'm not.
I'm going to take that out.
The podcast in which I talked to Daniel Harper about terrible people who believe terrible things and do terrible things as well.
And slight change of format this week.
We're going to be talking about the Errol Morris documentary film Mr. Death, The Rise and Fall of Fred Luchter.
I think it's Luchter.
It sounded like Luchter to me in the film.
Ernst Zundel calls him Luchter.
So for years I've thought of it as Luchter.
And that's because Ernst Zundel has infected my brain.
Yeah.
But no, everyone else in the film and every other thing I've ever seen in every pronunciation guide says it's Lüchter.
Well, I think it's Lüchter, so I'm going to call him Lüchter.
I think we can call him, let's just call him the really stupid asshole engineer.
How does that sound?
Well, no, because he's not an engineer.
Well, I think we'll get to that.
So we're going to be talking about that film that I just mentioned.
Because, you know, that is a change of format.
But this is like part one of a part two.
We're going to use this as a way of kind of talking about the Zondel trial and sort of the history and sort of some of the techniques of Holocaust denial prior to the present day.
And then next week we'll do a in-depth look at sort of like what that field looks like in the 21st century and kind of this new alt-right milieu.
And before we get on to that, a couple of news stories we wanted to cover.
Did you want to talk about, what's this guy's name, Matt Shea first?
Yeah, we can cover that first.
I've got a link in the show notes where you can kind of look at this.
So this is a piece, it's at the Inquisitor, and it's entitled Republican Representative Matt Shea planned violent attacks on quote-unquote communist leftist leaked chat messages show.
Now, Matt Shea, I am...
He wasn't really on my radar until just a couple of days ago, but he is a Washington State Representative, so he's not in the National House of Representatives.
He's at the state level.
By the way, there are lots of really, really absurdly off-the-wall people on all sides of politics, but mostly on the extreme right in state-level politics.
Try to be aware if you're a state-level politician, which is something I'm kind of bad at.
But be better than me at this, because there are some really, really nutso people kind of going on in this world.
Anyway, so this guy, he guested on this podcast on this radio show called Radio Free Redoubt.
And basically, let me see if I can find the quote here.
Why have these podcasts all got the same fucking name, essentially?
There are only so many ways to say we're badass military men who don't take shit from the commies.
Ultimately, I think that's kind of the problem here.
We'll read a little bit here.
The discussions took place in late 2017, during what the right wing described as an Antifa revolt.
The three men discussed various operations meant to target local leftists, who they described as communist and Antifa.
Shea, Bosworth, and Robertson planned surveillance operations, psychological operations, and violent attacks.
When we locate Antifa members, we can confront their parents, their workplaces, and landlords.
We can hit them in their safe places.
One of Bosworth's messages reads.
There's more that kind of goes on to that.
So basically, this is an elected state representative planning to, you know, dox Antifa people.
So if this was just sort of...
First of all, Radio Free Redoubt.
I looked at the webpage, I did not listen to the episodes, I didn't really have the chance to do that as prep for this episode, but this is not really an alt-right thing.
This is a little bit, we're not in that sort of, you know, explicitly race-realist, post-2009 pantheon conservative thing.
This is much more directly connected to the militia movement, and in particular, The, uh, you know, the, the, the kind of prepper with these guys are kind of go off and they're prepping for this kind of like collapse of the, uh, nation state.
Um, these are, uh, kind of the, the kind of libertarian and post libertarian types.
And they're, they're kind of planning for, um, you know, oncoming, um, martial conflict where they're going to have to shoot a bunch of people, um, planning or hoping.
A little of both.
So one thing that I would just kind of highlight here is that this is not the first time this guy's come up in the news.
And again, I can't believe I missed this one.
But this guy, there was a piece that I found, and this is also in the show notes.
He had been putting out some leaflets in 2018 called A Biblical Basis for War.
I've got a link to this again in the show notes and there's a piece about it in the local paper.
When you look at this, it does have a ton of ads.
It is worth kind of Figuring out how to get those to load for you.
There's a lot of good information in this piece, but it does connect him directly to the Christian Identity Movement.
Christian Identity is an overtly white supremacist, white nationalist movement that kind of comes out of the early, kind of proto-militia stuff in the 70s and 80s.
It comes out of the Posse Comitatus.
All this stuff, we are gonna cover this in a future episode, but this is really, really far-right, explicitly racialized stuff.
This guy is hesitant to say an actual Nazi.
He's not sort of in that milieu of what we're looking at here, but definitely kind of directly connected to some white supremacist bullshit, although it's mostly kind of in that sort of Christian supremacist, but a form of Christian supremacy that explicitly thinks that The true Israel is the white race.
So yeah, that's kind of where this guy is.
And he's an elected representative in the state of Washington.
So maybe somebody should do something about that.
Yeah, it's a thought, isn't it?
Speaking of things that somebody should do something about, there's also the horrifying news story about the militia group detaining migrants at gunpoint at the border.
Yes, so I did retweet this when it first kind of showed up, and this is the sort of thing that puts a pit in my stomach in a way that even the Christchurch Massacre doesn't quite, because this is a video, and I do have links to the original videos here from Twitter actually, and if you check those out, there were hundreds of
You know, basically starving brown people who are being detained by self-appointed militiamen who are enforcing border security where the federal government decides not to.
These are, you know, over in Eastern Europe and in the Balkans and such, operations like this ended up with a whole lot of unmarked mass graves.
So this is the sort of thing that we definitely don't want to kind of see the beginning of.
Certainly there have been, there's been sort of border watch activity.
I mean, hell, David Duke at his start doing border watch activities in the 70s.
That's actually kind of when this sort of vigilante border watch stuff started, was with David Duke.
When you start to look at this, when you look at sort of the history of it, it's mostly been kind of lone middle-aged guys kind of standing around with rifles and not doing a whole lot except pretending.
They're just kind of border control LARPers.
This is on a whole different level, and it does appear that they had, you know, connections to some actual Trump administration officials.
This is part of a group called the United Constitutional Patriots.
This is a quote-unquote patriot group, not an outright, not an overtly white nationalist group, not something that's nominally on my You know, kind of particular radar, but they are nonetheless sort of enforcing this sort of border crossing.
They're enforcing this sort of like white supremacist state vigilante style just as much as the actual active racist would.
So yeah, this is a really, really bad sign.
I actually felt awful for a couple of days seeing this.
And again, this plus the kind of growth of concentration camps in El Paso, Definitely makes this episode feel necessary.
Yes, indeed.
So yeah, speaking of, you know, concentration camps and so on and so forth, shall we get on to our main topic?
I think it's time, yeah, definitely.
So, yeah, today we're going to be discussing... I mentioned this last week, this is actually one of my favorite films.
I have seen this film probably 20 or 30 times over the course of the last nearly 20 years.
I kind of come away with new things every time I see it.
This is kind of an excuse for us to do this because I've been wanting to do this with Jack.
Jack thinks this was originally going to be a Wrong With Authority episode.
I actually suggested this as a Shabcast episode when the Shabcast was in single digits.
I looked at the dates.
I was hoping we could do this one day four years ago almost.
So yeah, congratulations.
I made an excuse for us to finally do it, Jack.
Yeah, the Shabcast is my old podcast, which is now in abeyance.
But yeah, you can look it up, Shabcast.
It's the only thing called Shabcast, so if you Google that you'll find all my back episodes, many of which have Daniel in them.
Yeah, yeah, quite a few of which.
At some point I ended up being just kind of a rotating co-host, so you know.
Yeah, we kind of accepted the inevitability of just being co-hosts.
And that's why this is happening.
Yeah, I mean people may not know, but you and I met, we were Doctor Who podcasters back in the day.
How much we hated Stephen Moffat!
How much we were still talking about that now?
- Political, over-almost creative Stephen Moffat, right?
But I was gonna be slightly more polite and say nerdy disputes over how leftist politics was interpreted in 50-year-old British science fiction television.
But yeah, so-- - I wish we were still talking about that now. - You know, if Hillary had been elected, we would still be doing that, I think.
We'd be at brunch talking about that.
I was going to end up moving in this direction regardless, but certainly the results of the 2016 election made this a lot more urgent, shall we say.
Yes, indeed.
So yeah, the Errol Morris documentary, Mr. Death.
This is the story of a guy named Fred Luchter, Jr.
I'm just going to say Luchter.
I'm going to bow to that.
This is the story of a guy, Fred A. Luchter, Jr.
I grew up the son of a guy who worked in the prison industry in Massachusetts, who ended up making various kinds of death machines, various electric chairs.
He kind of contracted with state authorities all over the country.
He made all four different types of lethal injection.
He made gallows, he made gas chambers, and he made electric chairs.
There's actually some dispute about how many gas chambers he made, isn't there?
I mean, I think he's known to have made one, but he's claimed to have made and been expert in making a lot more than he actually did, if I have this right.
Yeah, there's a lot of I'm kind of giving the overview, at least, sort of the version that he tells, right, is that he worked in that industry at least, so the actual details of how good he was at it, or what he actually built and what he didn't, there's a lot of dispute on that, and most of what he claims is Probably, okay, is almost definitely 100% bullshit, but he did work in the industry and he did make his living doing it for some time.
Based on that work, he was approached in 1988 by noted Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel in a retrial in Canada for spreading false history for basically committing hate crimes by publishing neo-Nazi propaganda in Canada, which he was absolutely doing.
And ends up traveling to Poland to the site of two of the death camps.
Collects samples from the walls.
Has them tested.
And they come back and he concludes that there is no way that these camps were ever used to gas people.
And it kind of destroyed his life as well as it should.
And this is a documentary.
And I've kind of given a very dry recitation of the facts.
But the film itself is more of a tone poem.
It's more of a kind of a – and it explores kind of the meaning of this guy.
Of what this man is doing through what – who he is as a person.
And it's very much that kind of early period Errol Morris where he's kind of looking at more like eccentric losers.
As opposed to kind of major political figures.
And I do see this as kind of a stepping stone between something like the Gates of Heaven or – I really love this film.
I hope you've seen it if you're listening to this podcast.
where he's like interviewing Robert McNamara and he's interviewing, uh, you know, kind of more, uh, yeah, and doing more overtly political stuff.
So, um, yeah, I really love this film.
I definitely, I hope you've seen it.
If you're listening to this podcast, uh, I guess, I guess, uh, Jack, what's it, what's your, what's your kind of feeling on, on, on the film?
Yeah, it's, um, I, I think I'm probably less positive on it than you are.
I've certainly seen it fewer times.
I've seen it four times, I think, including the time I re-watched it for this.
I really like it.
I find it fascinating.
I have to confess, on this re-watch that I watched earlier today in prep for this, I was irritated by how much it leaves out.
I mean, I understand what the film is trying to do.
As you say, it's more of a tone poem, and it's the sort of documentary where you don't have a narrator, you just have people talking.
It just points the camera at people and watches them.
Not in the sense of following them around, but in the sense of just, you know, Morris gets them in the studio, asks them questions, records what they say, and then gives it to you.
I think there's only one point in the entire movie where you hear the interviewer's voice.
So you're getting very much unfiltered perspectives from mainly Fred Luchta, but also people like Ernst Zundel and David Irving.
And it's fascinating, but I think there is an anecdote about this film, which is that Morris showed an earlier version of it to students, I think it was.
And because they didn't really know anything about the subject of the Holocaust, and you know, a great many people don't know very much about it, for all that we talk about it endlessly, we don't really talk about it very well.
So a lot of people know about it without really knowing anything about it.
This first group of sort of test viewers actually came away in Morris's own words, if I remember this correctly, Far more sympathetic to Lüster than he expected them to be and far more open to Lüster's ideas than he expected them to be.
He thought it was obviously wrong what Lüster was saying.
So I think he actually, if I could be wrong about this, but I seem to remember that he actually recut the film to put in more stuff that debunked the Holocaust denial stuff that you get from people like Lüster and Zundel and Irving and so on.
And I think in a way there's a sense in which the film sort of Falls between two stools there because it loses its purity as this character study because it feels obliged to put in stuff from people like chemists and experts like Jan van Pelt who it's always nice to see he's one of the world's leading experts on on this subject but it puts this stuff in to debunk some of the stuff these people are saying.
I think out of a feeling of necessity and it is I mean you can't deny the necessity of it but at the same time it does kind of dilute the original character study aspect of the film and at the same time it doesn't really go far enough and certainly I think the film could tell us more about the reality of Lushta.
So while I do find it fascinating and a beautiful film in its own sort of dark and weird and twisted way I have to say, on this last rewatch, it left me feeling frustrated.
Actually, this was something I was hoping we were going to get to, discussing it, because I think we are doing something which is an attempt to document these people and talk about this stuff, and to try to make something that's at least hypothetically entertaining, and I think people are finding value in it.
Um, and I think kind of understanding the, uh, kind of potential pitfalls of how to talk about it, um, is really worthwhile.
Um, the, uh, I, I know that anecdote as well.
And, uh, from what I understand, the, uh, the Yondan pelt material was basically non-existent in the original cut of the film.
Um, Morris considered, uh, that, you know, anybody would look at this guy and know he was a complete bullshit artist and have, and have no issue, uh, kind of, kind of seeing through it.
Like, of course, nobody actually believes this except for a few loonies and crazies off and off in the corner.
Um, Morris was definitely wrong about that, although I think, you know, in 1998 it might have seemed a little bit, you know, I think today it's a little bit clearer that this is kind of a growing movement.
At that time, you know, post-Oklahoma City, you know, any kind of discussion about this was relegated to
Incredibly niche sections of the internet, you know, like Stormfront was basically the the only source for this and a handful of other of other websites but No, and I and I think that is a really valid critique I mean if you if you do kind of a search for this film on YouTube And you kind of go through the the links particularly if you do it in incognito mode You will find people who said I saw this film and it convinced me that the Holocaust isn't real
You know, and I think that's a I mean, you know, like, like, I responded to it, you know, this was my first exposure, I believe, to to kind of the ideas of Holocaust style to to sort of what this was, I mean, in a lot of ways, I mean, I saw it when I was, you know, 19.
I mean, it's not that this was my first exposure to the Holocaust, but certainly, you know, the kind of the concrete images.
of uh auschwitz and uh you know the the kind of the the plans and kind of seeing the way this was done um and the film isn't about that as much as it's about um this tiny man who becomes this kind of fulcrum point in this in this thing um but um you know there there is a definite criticism that that it could be much more um about that and i think errol
i think morris kind of learned his lesson and kind of learned how to balance that a little bit better in some of his later films where he does uh kind of confront uh sort of sort of the factual basis as well as the sort of emotional logic of his of his uh of his film so um yeah i mean i i wonder if we got i'm sorry if we got lecture if we got morris here i wonder what he would say um to to that i i haven't seen kind of a recent interview where he's kind of a referred to that
um i i don't even necessarily offer it as a criticism to be honest because i think it's one of those things that's just an inevitable structural problem given the project that's been chosen I don't see a way out of it.
Necessarily satisfactory either way.
I think the the director has to make a choice one way or the other.
And of course, when you have a one way or the other choice, there is always the option to sort of try to do the middle path.
And that's what he seems to have tried to do.
And it's it is a wonderful film.
And he's grappling there with, I think, an inevitable and an inherent structural problem with what he's doing.
And he's managing it in one particular way.
It's just that I'm talking about my subjective reactions to it.
Oh yeah, sure.
With something like this, it is ultimately an emotional project much more so than it is sort of a factual thing.
I do have kind of different responses to this film every time I see it where sometimes things kind of jump out at me and things that I wish were better explored or things that I feel like are maybe hammered home a little bit more than they could be.
I think that's part of what kind of keeps me coming back is some of the sort of the inherent tension and kind of what's what's on screen versus what, you know, as you do kind of look into the details, what was really kind of going on in kind of the real world at that time.
And in particular, as I've kind of become more aware of sort of the left, you know, far left politics, as I've kind of become more aware of kind of that history, of that history.
There's a lot of stuff that's sort of like implicit in particularly the first third of the film, which is kind of about Leuchter's execution chamber work that strikes me as things that were kind of left on the table.
I mean, for instance, Leuchter describes it as a boy.
He, uh, was hanging out in the prison and he saw, like, where Sacco and Vanzetti, uh, were killed.
And he, uh, he talks about, he mentions a couple of, uh, cases, a couple of, uh, famous, uh, Definitely cases in one case where a guy was I mean you like cooked alive, but he didn't die and then they had to re execute him and it's this horrible horrible scene of you know just gruesome torture and lectures responses you know well.
I wanted to make the execution equipment more humane, whereas, you know, I think most people heard that story and went like, yeah, maybe we just shouldn't be doing this.
Maybe this is kind of a bad idea.
And this actually is an incredibly famous case from around that time.
I mean, this was not something that would have been unknown to Leuchter, and so the fact that he's kind of passing over it so quickly is a You know, it does speak to his place in mind, and I can only imagine that Morris is just sort of like, he's trusting the audience a lot, and you know, I think that that's sort of, you know, it's wonderful if you're willing to put the work into it, but maybe not so much for something that you kind of recommend casually to people.
So, you know, again, there is this tension in the film between, you know, like what's
What's saying too little and what's kind of kind of over explaining but yeah I find myself coming back to those to that first 30 minutes more and more because normally when I first kind of was struck with this film was the kind of explicit stuff that kind of middle third um which is explicitly about sort of the work about the holocaust which I think is the um the strongest stuff in the film is just sort of watching that footage of Leuchter uh the footage that he shot with the cinematographer
Walking around in these sacred places and not understanding what he was doing in the slightest.
And hearing Van Pelt, you know, criticize everything he does.
I find that stuff incredibly powerful.
It is incredibly powerful because, I mean, I have more admiration for Jan Van Pelt than I can put into words.
He is probably the world's greatest expert on this subject.
He knows so much about this.
He's devoted his life to understanding this and elucidating it and combating the lies of people like Fred Looshta.
And the way he speaks about it in the documentary is intensely moving.
The dignity and the humanity.
The bit where he talks about if you made a map of human suffering, crematorium two in Auschwitz-Birkenau would be the center of it.
It's incredibly moving.
And yet, you know, I do I have a kind of an instinctive revulsion to the bits where he talks about Auschwitz as a sacred site.
The holy of holies is actually the phrase he uses.
That actually really disturbs me because I understand absolutely what he means and in the sense of what he's saying.
That it's a place that should be considered off-limits, and you shouldn't just tramp in there, like you were talking about the footage that they shoot, Leuchter shoots with his cinematographer that Zundel paid for, of course, of them sort of pratting around inside Auschwitz, cosplaying at being forensic investigators, It is obscene that he should do that, and yet Van Pelt talks about it as a sacred place, and to me that's absolutely the last thing it is.
It's an obscene, profane place.
I'm not criticizing Van Pelt there, I'm just talking about my incredibly intense subjective reaction.
It's so fascinating.
Yeah, I guess I was kind of using that, the language that Van Pelt uses more as a way of not necessarily willing to sort of go into the, to sort of try to describe it for myself, I guess, to try to summarize what Auschwitz must mean for people who lost family or who have studied it that intensely.
Well, it's a tomb, isn't it?
Because the people are still there.
The people that died are still there.
Right.
One of my favorite lines from Van Pelt is where he says, you know, I stood in years to go there and this man, this fool, he walks in and he doesn't give a damn.
That does strike me as something that's very relevant to
Anyone who kind of follows, anybody who tries to do this kind of work, anybody who tries is, you know, I make a, and I know you do as well, I'm not trying to, but I have made an enormous effort to try to take these terrible, terrible people seriously and to try to understand what they're actually saying and to have references to what they say so that you know I'm not taking you out of context at all.
I feel like the, I do know that there are some fascists listening to this show and I know that, you know, we've been mentioned a few times and I noticed that they don't do the courtesy.
Of taking us nearly as seriously as we take them.
And I think that's really... I'm not trying to compare it to Van Pelt's work, obviously, but you do see this over and over again, is that they'll send Lloyd Turan deliberately to do something that's going to be half-baked and slip-shod, and that will prove the thing that it's meant to prove.
And then it takes brilliant people, hours and hours and hours and hours of work to conclusively debunk it to the degree that it needs to be in order to set it to rest.
And yet, even now, you find it quoted, I was listening to a podcast this week where, you know, some 22-year-old asshole like me.
Well, yeah, the Leuchter Report proved that.
And the Leuchter Report has been debunked over and over and over again.
There are Nazis who have debunked the Leuchter Report.
Not even the Nazis take this seriously anymore.
And I've got some links here.
We can kind of go over that if you're interested in going over that.
But I can assure you the lecture report is completely meaningless on every possible level except as a monument to this man's hubris and the degree to which this desire for this pseudo-scientific evidence to support an overtly fascistic and overtly genocidal ideal
Another of my favourite lines in the film is from Van Pelt where he says that Looster has fallen victim to the myth of Sherlock Holmes.
I think that's fantastic because he has.
He's fallen victim to the idea that you, an amateur, Can walk into an incredibly complicated situation and just through your intuitions you can discover some sort of great secret that reveals something that the idiotic normies, you know, the Scotland Yard detective in the case of Sherlock Holmes story, has failed to see because you've gone there with your special insights.
You mentioned the word hubris, that's the right word, false pride.
And also, you know, it's another thing that's absolutely rampant throughout this entire movement, you know, this Well, I mean, the phrase that you hear a lot now is the Dunning-Kruger effect.
And I think you see that very much going on inside Fred Looshta, who is a man who just decided he was qualified.
And got on the stand at the Zundel trial, by the way, and told loads of lies and misrepresented himself and his qualifications.
And as you say, it's been debunked over and over again, and yet people still believe it.
People still cite it.
And, you know, loads of the Nazis reject it, but it's still out there.
Very much like another famous forgery of a similar type, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
Loads of the extreme right will reject that.
And yet, it's still out there in millions and millions of copies.
And yet I hear people, I mean, again, I heard somebody mention that today.
Oh, they say it's a forgery, but really that's just a lie, you know, Linda.
I actually have a... Sorry, go ahead.
Well, I was just going to say, some people who reject it then re-embrace it, when they think they can get away with doing so, which is a sign of just how much good faith they're using.
David Duke is an example of that.
He said it was a forgery, and then a while ago, he republished it.
Well, you know, it's food for thought, you see.
Don't you think we should have our free speech, just put out this blatant forgery, and just say, yeah, just ask questions, yo.
That's all we're doing here.
Yeah.
But asking questions when the questions are all answered and coming to manifestly inaccurate conclusions.
Right, right.
I mean, you know, ultimately, and I think this, you know, I think it's something that, you know, we kind of struggle with is this kind of question about and something I hope...
Maybe we can we can kind of discuss, you know, as we as we kind of move forward about that sort of question of these these Holocaust denial laws and, you know, what purpose they really serve and in kind of the actual structure of them.
I think maybe we'll save that for next week.
But I did.
I was kind of thinking we'd read this at the beginning, but just just just kind of the.
The Holocaust is an established historical fact.
statement about holocaust denial but i think i think now's it now's a good time so um i did include some links um we're not any either this episode or the next one planning to uh you know debunk the lies of holocaust denial that's um for a number of holocaust is an established historical fact we are not going to we're not a a there's no need for us to do it there's no need for us to dignify it um b it has been done over and over again i
I have put two links in the show notes kind of right towards the top there.
One is to the NISCOR project.
Now, Holocaust deniers are so concerned with both their free speech and others, they have sort of mass reported this enough times that it comes up as a dangerous site.
So if you click on niscor.org, Google will give you a message like this site may contain malware, etc., which is something you virtually never see on something that isn't actually really, really nasty.
It is okay to click through.
This is literally a site I was reading in the early 2000s.
This basically collects a bunch of stuff around the late 90s era when this stuff was popular.
was kind of popular and kind of-- it all comes from news groups from around the time of the Zundel trial and the Wokter report.
And it's an excellent, excellent resource.
You just have to click through.
And it's actually hard to Google for it unless you-- I mean, you pretty much have to type in this, go.org, or follow a link.
And so that's really, really unfortunate, because this is a really important resource.
The other great resource is to Holocaust Controversies, which These are people who actually are experts in the Holocaust and in World War II and who have gone through, who continually, they post blog posts, you know, usually once or twice a week, discussing, you know, nitty-gritty details of, like, what some denier says and correcting themselves sometimes and finding new pieces of evidence.
This is an excellent, excellent resource.
Anyway, Miscor.org has 66 questions and answers about the Holocaust.
And then the Holocaust Controversies site has a list of common Twitter arguments.
And both of these are right up there in the show notes.
If you want to argue with me about this, if you want to argue with anyone about this, Your answer your question is covered in one of those two documents I don't give a shit what you have to say because these are this is this is this cover is like I have I have Pretty much never seen anyone make an argument against the Holocaust That has any kind of like even pretend factual basis that is not covered in one of these two things So I'm just gonna put it out there check that first before you bring it to me or anybody really
Because these are the sources to look at.
But I did want to read a segment because I think this speaks to kind of how this stuff works, and I do want to kind of start answering that question of like how Holocaust denial worked kind of back in the day, and in the next episode we'll kind of talk about kind of more the modern incarnation of it.
I think this is this is a really this is this is what I this is the thing I think of whenever I think about this subject and it's a from that NISCOR 66 questions and answers about the Holocaust and I have a slightly revised this but the full version is linked you can you can check it out so it says first of all consider the implicit conspiracy theory of Holocaust smile Notice how the testimony of every single inmate of every Nazi camp is automatically dismissed as unconvincing.
This total dismissal of inmates' testimony, along with the equally total dismissal of the Nazis' own testimony, is the largest unspoken assumption of Holocaust denial.
This assumption, which is not often spelled out, is that the attempted Jewish genocide never took place, but rather that a secret conspiracy of Jews, starting around 1941, planted and forged myriad documents to prove it did.
Then, after the war, they rounded up all the camp survivors and told them what to say.
The conspirators also supposedly managed to torture hundreds of key Nazis into confessing to crimes which they never committed, or into framing their fellow Nazis for those crimes, and to plant hundreds of documents in Nazi files which were never discovered until after the war, and often then, in many cases, by sheer luck.
Regarding post-war testimony from Nazis, were they all tortured into confessing to heinous crimes which they supposedly did not commit?
This might be believable if only a few Nazis were captured after the war, or maybe if some had courageously stood up in court and shouted to the world about the supposed attempt to silence them.
But hundreds testified regarding the Holocaust, and trials dated from late 1945 until the 1960s.
You have to believe, and these people actually do believe, that the entire mounted testimony of witnesses, witnesses of literally millions of people who each had some little piece of information about this massive earth shattering event are either deluded or lying.
And mostly they believe that any testimony that comes from any person with any spit of Jewish ancestry or who is related to someone of any Jewish ancestry is immediately suspect and some dickhead on the internet is a better source for that piece of data.
It is absolutely fundamental to the entire project of Holocaust denial and it is manifestly absurd.
Now, the modern-day version does get a little bit more sophisticated about this.
We'll get into it next week.
But you pretty much have to believe in either mass delusion or mass conspiracy in order to hold to this in the slightest.
Not only that, but Holocaust Denial, and you can read Defra Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust, goes into this in excruciating detail.
It's a very readable book, but in huge amounts of detail, that Holocaust Denial began and has always been a project meant to rehabilitate overt Nazi style fascism to at first to make anti-semitism okay to say well the Holocaust didn't happen But you know the original Holocaust and I was literally saying well the Holocaust happened, but it's because the Jews really were that bad
It's only in later in the 60s that they start, you know, kind of actually denying the sort of factual basis of it.
That's by, you know, kind of making arguments that like, well, Churchill was just as bad, or Stalin was just as bad, or, you know, like if you deny the systematic murder of an ethnic group, and of multiple ethnic groups at that, but particularly if you deny this kind of systematic murder of the Jews, it's a lot easier to make It just seemed like, you know, it's just part of the meat churner that was World War II.
And I think there's some, I mean, obviously there's propaganda that kind of goes around Churchill and Stalin, and nobody is denying that who has any degree of seriousness.
That said, it doesn't mean that this didn't happen, and it doesn't mean that the Germans were actually the ones who were persecuted, etc., etc.
No, absolutely.
It's profoundly irrational.
On a related subject there, I am very much not one to downplay the crimes of British, or indeed American, imperialism, or indeed of any imperialism at all, including Soviet Russian imperialism.
Yeah, so I didn't want to leave Roosevelt out of that either.
Sorry, that was, if you meant that, if you thought that was an intentional omission, that was not.
Sorry, go ahead.
I didn't.
No, that didn't occur to me.
I was just saying, you know, I'm talking about imperialism generally.
Imperialism doesn't have a nation.
It, you know, it can occur anywhere given the right circumstances.
I am very much not the sort of person that thinks we should downplay the horrors of imperialism from the British Empire or the Belgian Empire or the French Empire or the Spanish Empire, you know, any of the empires they've been.
And a lot of those horrors are downplayed.
They are forgotten about.
They're not talked about.
People don't know.
You know, here in Britain, we have Churchill on the £5 note.
People don't know that this man connived in allowing the Bengal famine to kill somewhere between 3 and 5 million people in India, right?
And what I'm saying is, I'm critical of the way we forget these things.
The crimes of the British Empire, the crimes of the Americans, etc, etc, etc.
It may even be that some people would say that I am equating things like that to the Holocaust, and that is a form, you know, some people would say that when I talk about that, or people like me talk about things like that, we're equating it to the Judeo side, the Nazi Holocaust, whatever you want to call it, and that is a form of Holocaust denial.
That's not an idea I subscribe to, but I do not think that it's comparable, and I don't think you need to think it's comparable.
I think, you know, things are true or they're not.
And the Nazi Holocaust happened.
And it was it wasn't unique in the sense of being a genocide.
There have been many genocides.
There's the Armenian genocide.
I think you can classify aspects of British rule across the world, particularly in India, as a form of genocide.
But I think there is something undeniably different about the Nazi genocide.
The Holocaust, the Nazi Holocaust, the Jewish Holocaust.
I personally don't have any problem using unique to describe it.
we can obviously kind of quibble over things.
But I think what makes it specific is that this was a deliberate-- - I personally don't have any problem using unique to describe it.
I think sometimes people interpret the word unique to mean worse in some sort of qualitative sense, which I don't.
Right, right.
No, I'm just, I'm trying to be, like, this is a subject, I mean, neither one of us is Jewish, and so I think that it's important to be sensitive on these topics, especially in...
In this format, I'm kind of talking about the issues that we are in terms of not trying to minimize anything or to kind of lend a sucker to our ideological enemies by speaking imprecisely.
Basically, I don't want fascists to use what I say as a justification for what they believe.
The Jewish Holocaust was an occasion of industrialized mass murder on an incredibly short period of time.
This was deliberate.
We know it was deliberate for a wide variety of reasons.
This was a ramping up of a kind of a gradual racial policy that started in the early 30s, right after Hitler took power.
It started not really with Jewish populations, but the Jews kind of became the central focus over time.
You know, it started off with trans people.
It started off with, you know, the disabled and the mentally disabled.
It started off with people with mental health problems.
Gay people, particularly male homosexuals, were specifically targeted.
But it really was mostly about the Jews, and it's because of a specific ideological fixation on the Jews as, you know, kind of a unique cancer on the German population that needed to be expelled at all costs.
What you see is, you know, first a sort of a marginalization, and then a ghettoization, and then as kind of the war moves on, you see them kind of start to gradually kind of moving them into, they need them for forced labor, and so they move them into forced labor camps.
And then, you know, with the eventual intention, and this was always the eventual intention of getting rid of all of them, but like, let's get some work out of them first, and then Eventually you get enough of them that you get enough sick and old and infirm and young and children and you just start taking those people and you just put them straight into a gas chamber because you're not going to be able to get enough useful work out of them to make it worth feeding them.
And this is a, I say gradual ramp up, but it's also a very specific mechanized process that was done intentionally with no, you know, this wasn't Quote unquote, just, with air quotes.
This is not just a famine.
This is an overtly deliberate, even a planned famine.
This was industrialized mass murder on a scale that I don't, to my knowledge, has not been matched anywhere else in the world yet.
Now, you may correct me on that, I'd be happy to be corrected.
That's what makes this absolutely right.
That's what makes this a thing that is planned and controlled at every stage from the top down.
It's improvised and cobbled together and it congeals over time as a result of circumstances but it is nonetheless at every stage consciously planned and controlled from the top downwards as a matter of organized and a huge amount of
Government a huge number of government agencies working in concert with each other everybody knowing what's going on as a matter of unified bureaucratic government policy to eradicate an entire ethnic group in the in the in the millions it is unique in that sense absolutely.
And, you know, it's one of those things to when, you know, I see footage of a handful of people with guns standing over a mass of huddled starving people who are crossing into this country in the cover of night with the hopes of finding food for themselves and fleeing the consequences of American imperialism and then economic imperialism, Western imperialism, we can say abroad,
And avoiding the sort of militarized, you know, the militarized security actions at the border, when I see these people then being put into camps, when I see these people, when I see this footage, I cannot stay quiet about that in good conscience because we know where this leads.
And I am frankly terrified that this is where this is leading.
Yeah, I mean, the historical circumstances are very different at the moment, obviously, because nothing's ever the same, exactly the same as anything else.
But the potential is there.
And as you constantly have to explain to people, the Nazis didn't start with Auschwitz.
They started with the disabled.
They started by burning libraries full of books about sexual health for trans people and gay people.
And with the Jews, they started with, well, suddenly you can't marry a German.
And suddenly you can't do this job and you can't do that job.
And explicitly based their laws on racial hierarchy laws in the US, which is something that...
Probably doesn't get remarked on enough that that the u.s.
Sort of exported this whole idea of like racial hierarchy at least in terms of strict sets of legal codes People dismiss that option because the American laws didn't specific weren't about Jews.
It was about African-american about black people, but they adapted those laws pretty pretty easily Yeah, yeah There's a great book.
I'll put it in the show notes that um covers that topic if you're interested in the nitty-gritty on that.
Yeah, I mean, I think...
Sorry, we're often kind of talking about how terrible the Holocaust is, but I think it's worth highlighting just how...
When I first encountered Holocaust Deniers in the Wild, this would have been on the...
I was regular on the Talk Origins website, on the news group, for a number of years, for about three or four years.
And that was a kind of anti-creationist, kind of like talking about creationism and intelligent design.
I was heavily involved in that group for a while, and Holocaust Deniers invaded that group at some point, and that was my first kind of exposure to it in sort of a real kind of on-the-ground way, and that's what made me kind of go and do the research.
That's when I first sort of read NISCOR, and that's when I first really kind of like learned kind of about how this argumentation worked, and you know, it is...
So much of the argumentation, so much of the logic, the stuff you run into online or in the literature, so much of what David Irving does is based on this fancy footwork so much of what David Irving does is based on this fancy Fancy, you know, fancy footwork around details.
There's so much of a finding this thing, you know, that is sort of technically true or maybe just sort of hard to disprove that nonetheless sort of sounds like it proves some nefarious thing.
But in reality, it only demonstrates, you know, it's largely irrelevant.
I mean, one of the kind of central things, one of the central claims is, you know, things about like the wooden doors, the wooden gas chamber doors that, you know, wouldn't be able to hold the cyanide gas inside, for instance.
And, well, those doors, A, that's to the delousing chamber, not to the actual gas chamber.
So the weight of the bodies, you wouldn't be there if you're just delousing clothes.
The central claim about the gas chambers, about the cyanide residues is, you know, it's fundamentally flawed for reasons that are kind of explored in the film, first of all.
I mean, the testing was done completely improperly.
In 1994, there was a team that went in and did the job properly, and they took samples from a cafeteria area, they took samples from the delousing chambers, and they took samples from the actual gas chambers.
Tested them all, found trace levels of cyanide residue on both the crematorium and the lousing chambers, but not in the common areas, which is exactly what you would expect.
And of course, the value is all over the place because it's been 50 years and it had been exposed to elements.
It's been smashed to pieces and rebuilt.
Right.
I mean, the point is that the whole of this topic, the whole of this thing is based on things that sort of sound plausible if you haven't done a bit of research or that sound plausible if there's sort of a lack of real the whole of this thing is based on things that sort of sound plausible if And I think that...
Um, you know, Irving, you know, sorry, I guess we should describe who David Irving is.
I know, I don't know if you want to kind of tackle that one, give me a second to breathe, but...
Sure.
David Irving is a British quote-unquote historian.
He was taken to be a historian for quite a long time.
For a while, some people felt that he was unconventional and maybe a bit too sympathetic to the German side, but that he was still nonetheless doing interesting and valuable work, raising questions, etc, etc.
It is now, I think, generally, well, I think it's now universally agreed among reputable people who actually know their subject, certainly among historians, that the man is a falsifier of history and always was.
I mean, if you want to know about this, you should read Richard Evans, who is probably the finest living historian of the Third Reich, I would say.
His book specifically about Irving, which is called, it's got different titles according to which version.
The one I read is called Telling Lies About Hitler.
In the US it was published as Lying About Hitler.
I've got a link in the show notes.
It's the same book and it's a brilliant book.
It goes, because Evans was called as an expert witness by Lippstadt and Penguin publishers when Irving sued Penguin and Deborah Lipstadt.
for libel in a famous case which has subsequently been turned into a rather bad movie called Denial.
A really terrible movie but uh you know yeah.
But um yeah he sued Penguin Publishers and Deborah Lippstadt because she wrote the book we've already mentioned Denying the Holocaust in which she said absolutely correctly that he is a Holocaust denier and a racist and a fascist and a Hitler admirer and a falsifier of history etc etc etc and under grotesque ridiculous
Outdated unjust disgusting british libel laws essentially if somebody sees you for libel the law assumes you're guilty and it's your job to prove your innocent which is a way in which the british legal system biases things in favor of rich people.
People who are rich and powerful who can afford to launch libel cases can effectively win by default if the person they're suing doesn't have the time or the freedom or the money or the ability to launch a defense.
Luckily, Deborah Lippstadt and Penguin Books, and I have to give them credit, very courageously defended themselves to the hilt against his libel action.
And he was utterly humiliated in court, as he absolutely richly deserved to be.
And he lost his case, and the judge issued a blistering summary where he called Irving anti-Semitic, racist, a liar, a falsifier of everything that I've just said.
And it's all absolutely true, as Richard Evans' book will show you.
There's a summary of that evidence on – I didn't put it in the show, but I can get it to you.
There's kind of an overall precess to the overall argument that Evans makes in the book available online.
Where he kind of demonstrates some of the falsehoods that Irving gives, and not in the same level of detail as in the book, but if you read this book, it's pretty ravishing to Irving.
I mean, it really does go into the nitty-grittiest of nitty-gritty detail to explain exactly how Irving has deliberately left things out and manipulated history where Irving is quoting from a particular document that he claims has to be real but is actually a transparent forgery and that Irving must have known it was a forgery because the person who got it from said it was a forgery and things like that.
He's translating some of the statements regarding some of the actions of Hitler's SS troopers in the early days of the Nazi party and deliberately misquotes a bit that says Hitler told them to go easy on the Jews or whatever as a way of saying that Hitler was actually kind to the Jews and that the holocaust to the degree that it happened had to have been the work of the underlings.
No, because one accomplishment David Irving definitely does have is he's an excellent speaker of German.
an overt mistranslation that cannot in any sense be considered just sort of a mistake or a slip of the pen or whatever no because one one accomplishment david irving definitely does have is he's a he's an excellent speaker of german so when he misrepresents what a document in german says that's deliberate and his his project has always been to uh put cast the nazis in the best light possible
the germans generally in the best light possible the allies in the worst light if possible, so as to create the semblance of a moral equivalence between the two.
And, you know, again, I'm not one to defend the imperialism of my own country, the behavior of my own country, etc.
But, you know, it's not equivalent.
And to imply that there's an equivalence between the Allies and the Axis in the Second World War, A direct equivalence is a form of denial, and that's what he's up to.
And he's trying to absolve Hitler.
He claimed that Hitler didn't know about the Holocaust, etc, etc, etc.
And this is blatantly because of his own racist, neo-fascist leanings.
He's described himself as a fascist, albeit a moderate fascist or something like that.
He's gone to neo-Nazi rallies.
He has his own publishing imprint.
I think it's called Focal Point Publishing, which is one of the publishing... and Zundel's was the other, I think, that publishes the Leuchter Report.
And Irving was actually one of the people, along with Forreson, who's another Holocaust denier, who advised Zundel about getting an expert and helped him arrange to get Leuchter across.
And it's not mentioned in Mr. Death, But before Leuchter went to Auschwitz and Majdanek to do his ridiculous larping around as a forensic investigator, he was actually prepped by Zundel, Furreson and Irving to disbelieve the truth of the Holocaust, the truth of the gas chambers.
So he went there already having been convinced by this bunch of Holocaust denying fascist gangsters to believe that he was going to find evidence to disprove the official theory.
I actually have a bit about this from Lipstadt's book if you'd like to get a little context on this.
So Zundel was tried twice.
He was tried in 85, convicted.
There was sort of a technical problem with the trial, and retried in 1988.
talking about how they found Lugter.
Both Irving and Forreston advocated inviting an American prison warden who had performed a gas execution to testify in Zundel's defense, arguing that this would be the best tactic for proving that the gas chambers were a fraud and too primitive to operate safely.
They solicited help from Bill Armentrout, warden of the Missouri State Penitentiary, who agreed to testify and suggested that they also contact Fred A. Lugter, an engineer, Flipstadt puts that in quotes, residing in Boston.
Quite rightly, too.
Quite rightly, yep.
Residing in Boston who specialized in constructing and installing execution apparatus.
Irving and Farrison immediately flew off to meet Lugter.
Irving, who had long hovered at the edge of a Holocaust denial, believed that Lugter's testimony could provide the documentation he needed to prove the Holocaust a myth.
According to Farrison, when he first met Lugter, the Bostonian accepted quote-unquote the standard notion of the Holocaust.
After spending two days with him, Farrison declared that Lugter was convinced that it was chemically and physically impossible for the Germans to have conducted gassings.
Having agreed to serve as an expert witness for the defense, Loetcher then went to Toronto to meet with Zundel and Christie and to examine the materials they had gathered for the trial.
And then later on you find within a few days, Loetcher left for Poland.
Loetcher provided the cinematographer.
Loetcher's paid about $35,000.
So much for objectivity.
Just one more line from Lipstadt here.
In light of the fact that Zundel paid Leuchter approximately $35,000 to make the trip, one cannot help but wonder what would have been the reaction if Leuchter had returned to confirm the existence of gas chambers.
However, Leuchter's leanings were revealed by his observation that while Zundel and Forreston could not accompany the group, they were ex-officio members of the team whose spirit was with them, quote-unquote, every step of the way.
Yeah, and that's in chapter nine of Livstad's book, and that absolutely dismantles Lüchter.
You know, if If you want the lowdown on him, read chapter 9 of Deborah Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust, because she goes through the whole thing.
She goes, basically, you can't read that chapter without coming away with the very well-founded impression that Lüster is actually just a con man.
Right, yeah.
I guess we should get into that a bit.
A lot of this kind of came out later on.
So even in the film there's a kind of discussion about, you know, he got fired for, he got kind of disinvited to participate in the reconstruction of an electric chair because of the activity from the trial.
And the film kind of doesn't really give us details on that, but it turns out that Leutcher was kind of running a scam.
He was walking into certain state penitentiaries and saying like, oh, I built the chair at like such and such other place, which he didn't actually build.
He was defrauding these guys, and then he would go to the second play, or he would go back to the original state and then say, oh, I'm building this thing at the other thing.
So he was definitely running a scam on these guys the whole time.
Apparently he would threaten to testify at hearings saying that the execution equipment he'd installed was not safe to use.
Right, or that if you don't hire me, I'm going to testify saying that I don't believe your equipment to be safe, or I don't believe it to be...
And so essentially he's blackmailing these guys.
Extortion!
And so let me be… I mean, with no sympathy whatsoever for prison wardens that murder their inmates, but… Or, you know, I am a prison abolitionist.
I am far left on this issue.
I am 100% opposed to state-enforced torture and the death penalty.
I think it's a complete abomination that should not exist.
Another detail that's left out of the film, I mean they spend at least two or three minutes on the lethal injection machine that Leutcher constructed.
Someone who actually has a medical degree and who understands how these chemicals work, agreed that this device that Lutcher constructed would indeed make the person being executed unable to move, and would definitely keep them quiet, but that's by paralyzing them while they were fully awake, being eaten from the inside by potassium chloride. but that's by paralyzing them while they were fully awake,
I can assure you that having your insides consumed by a strong base is not the way anyone wants to die.
So for all his self-righteous wittering about being against torturing people to death, and that being the moral basis of all his work, he is himself actually a torturer.
Right.
And it seems to be through incompetence.
For money.
Just for money.
He kind of lucks into this field.
It's hard to get a read on exactly how this happened, but it's easy to sort of build a narrative, which may be false.
I do not want to read into it.
But his dad was in the prison system.
He kind of grew up around this stuff.
There's footage in the film of this kid who was probably 13 or 14, he looks at the time, hanging out with prison inmates.
He's just familiar with this world.
And so it's easy to imagine that he sort of fell into this just through having connections in the prison system and said, oh, I can build that for you.
I'm an engineer.
Sure.
Shrug.
I can hammer some nails together and I get a basic understanding of how electricity works.
And then just kind of passes him off that way.
I mean, it does seem to be that he's just a complete fraud through and through.
It's as much an indictment on the people that hired him and the system that allowed them to do so.
Absolutely.
I mean, it's one of those things that I was struck by, and that I'm kind of continually struck by, this connection between this sort of ordinary man, this ultimately stupid mouse-like man, who allows himself to be used this way for his own aggrandizement, in terms of the kind of then-modern-day U.S.
death penalty, and then this connection to the gas chambers, to the Ordinary, you know, everyday run-of-the-mill soldiers, people who worked in these extermination factories and who, you know, I can imagine there were people, and I don't even have to imagine, we know because there are diary entries of, you know, people working in these camps who prided themselves on being You know, merciful on creating quick deaths, on making sure that these things were as painless as possible.
The trick is to make the extermination as comfortable as possible, right?
That's the ideal.
Some of the banality of evil stuff, I think, gets overstated.
I think it gets overstated.
I do.
Some of the banality of evil stuff I think gets overstated, and I think it gets overstated in terms of the discussion of this stuff.
But if there's one thing that...
I should say in defense of Hannah Arendt, actually, that a lot of the time when people talk about the banality of evil, they're not talking about the concept that she had in mind.
Right, exactly.
I think there's a criticism of Arendt, and then there's a criticism of the way it's used, and those are two separate critiques.
But one of the things I'm struck by in terms of studying this stuff, in terms of following these guys and sort of listening to them talk for hours, is that You know, we have, I think, this image that they're cackling evil people, that they're the kind of toothless inbred neo-Nazi, or the skinhead and all that sort of stuff.
Or, thanks to our pop culture, we glamorize them as, you know, Darth Vader.
Right, right.
Or the kind of Darth Vader figure.
And I think that what I'm struck by over and over again, and what is really a banal observation, honestly, is that these are people, these are human beings, who have individual histories, who fall into this in all sorts of different ways.
And there's not kind of one story of it, but ultimately while they do believe monstrous and awful things, and I have Very little to no sympathy for the people that we've covered on the show in terms of people who promote this bullshit.
The sort of ordinary people on the ground who just get this poison poured into them and who go on to believe and often do awful things, I have a lot more sympathy for that in the sense of, like, I understand that you have been lied to and that you don't understand where those lies are and you don't um in that you have to some degree had to had to turn off your empathy for the for the people who have been
uh you are being reliably informed are subhuman or inhuman or not part of your in group or whatever you want to phrase it as um i do have sympathy for that and i think that it's the same sympathy i have for um at least sort of the the fred lookter in the film the small man who found himself involved in this thing that was bigger than he could ever have imagined and who uh all of a sudden i'm not sure if i'm not sure if i'm
ultimately is crushed by the circumstances around it even while he is celebrated within that world and You can see, I've put a couple of links to kind of later loiter.
There's actually in the film, there's footage from the 9th IHR, that's the Institute for Historical Review Conference.
There's a link, there's footage from that.
I found a video on YouTube.
We should probably specify that the Institute for Historical Review is a Holocaust denial pseudo-academic organization that publishes a pseudo-academic journal.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, the IHR... Sorry, I should have clarified a little more clearly there.
Yeah, no.
The IHR pretends to be sort of an academic publishing house just looking to examine the evidence about previous historical events that may have been interpreted wrongly, which is a completely valid and 100% reasonable thing for historians to do, and something that, when done properly, is eminently respectable and, in fact, necessary and essential.
These guys are overt neo-Nazis who are pretending not to be, and they're hiding behind a fancy Pseudo-academic press.
Anyway, there's footage of what you're speaking at one of these conferences, and I did include, I did find sort of the the raw footage from that, at least sort of a highlight reel from it, and so you can kind of watch what this looked like at the time, and I think one thing that's essential to note is that these crowds are very old.
Lots of gray hairs, lots of middle-aged and older people in these crowds, and that's certainly not what you see That's one of the major differences.
That's one of the reasons why this is more and more frightening now than it certainly was then, is that this is reaching younger people.
This is something we're going to discuss in the next episode.
But you can also see the degree to which he's a guy who finds himself validated by suddenly, you know, like, I went over there and I did this work and I used my professional expertise.
Found this conclusion, and now I'm celebrated for this thing, and then the rest of the world reviles me for it.
And that process, in a broader context, that's called love bombing.
That's something that a lot of these groups do.
It's like, no, the rest of the world hates you, but we love you for exactly those things that they hate you for.
And that sense of like, no, you are accepted, you are loved within this group, and the fact that they hate you is reason enough for us to accept you even harder.
Which, you know, when you are someone who is legitimately marginalized and brutalized, if you're LGBT for instance.
Your family is not treating you well, to put it mildly.
Finding a community that does support you is an absolutely wonderful thing.
Less so when you're promoting bullshit pseudo-history in support of an overtly genocidal agenda.
Less so.
Yeah.
Just a little bit.
Slightly less so.
Yeah.
Very much so.
One thing I've always felt when watching this film in the past is The really interesting, certainly in the first section of the film, the fascinating irony about this being exactly the sort of man who went along and got swept up and got involved.
As you say, this is exactly the kind of guy that felt validated by the Nazi movement.
Um, and found a niche inside the Nazi movement.
And if you look at the Nazi movement, especially sort of in the, in the middle layer where things actually have to get done efficiently, you find relatively efficient, uh, accomplished people.
They have some talented bureaucrats, et cetera, et cetera, enthralled to insane.
Vile ideas, of course, but people who can actually get stuff done.
But at the top, you find a group of people.
These are not politicians.
These are people who had no right having control of, you know, ministries of state, you know, Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler and people like that.
These were not people that had any business having that much power.
They were mediocrities.
They were talentless people.
They were elevated out of this Absolute route that they were in by this extraordinary set of circumstances and this is the sort of person that i think i'm afraid list is he's one of these lost rootless non entities floating around in the middle of suddenly finds themselves swept up and as i say validated and.
In the right circumstances, it doesn't work out as well for him, although ultimately, of course, it didn't work out very well for them, luckily.
Their thousand-year Reich lasted 12 years.
That speaks to the level of efficiency and organization the master race was able to bring to this project.
That's right.
Goebbels shot himself after shooting his wife after she'd murdered their six children and ended up in a whole on fire and the bits of his body and his leg brace are now in the Kremlin.
So good luck there, well done.
But yeah, this is it.
And the process of watching him get swept up into it and seduced, and taking any responsibility off him by the way, But the process of watching him get swept up in it and seduced and then fated and applauded and lauded and hitching this newfound self-esteem, this newfound sense of importance to this movement, it's like watching the whole thing happen again.
It's like watching the whole process in the fucking beer halls happen again in miniature, right in front of your eyes.
And then, again, this time I watched it, and I was thinking that again, and on top of that I was thinking, you know, if this guy was 30 now, 25, 30 now, he'd be on YouTube.
Yeah!
That's what this guy would be doing.
He's got it all.
He's got the sort of cosplay LARPer as an intellectual, complete with all the spurious rigor.
He's got the rhetoric about free speech.
He talks about how he went there to testify for Zundel because he believes in free speech.
Um, it's, and yet he's got these blinders, these absolute blinders that stop him being able to see reality, and he's in it for the hubris, and the showing off, and the self-importance, and I was thinking, yeah, it's, it's Stefan Molyneux.
Yeah, I mean, he doesn't, he doesn't have the charm, you know, that Molyneux does, and I don't know, but, um, there actually is a... A lot of these people have a kind of anti-charm, don't they?
Right, yeah.
I mean, I mean, it's just sort of like, I kind of watch him in the, uh, I don't know.
It's interesting to me.
I kind of watch him on camera.
I watch him in the documentary.
He actually is kind of on YouTube, and that's something I put a link in the show notes to.
Believe it or not, as far as I know, he's still alive.
Liked or is.
But there is a guy named Jim Rizzoli who...
I've literally found out prepping for this episode.
He's got a BitChute channel.
He released a video on his BitChute as of three or four days ago.
He is very, very active.
And he's very much the, kind of, Whatcher's biggest fan.
There's an interview that he did with Leuchter, which is basically locked off camera, camera on a tripod, looks like it's in some office library sort of thing, and he just has a chat with Leuchter, and Leuchter whines and complains about all the persecution he's seen from the Jews ever since he testified in that trial.
Yeah, I wanted to touch on that, because he does that in the Morris documentary, he just throws out a sudden reference to Jewish groups.
So he's obviously completely swallowed the line of Irving, who is hilariously contemptuous of him, actually, in the documentary.
He calls him Simpleton.
But he's absolutely swallowed this line that Irving repeats, which is that Lüster has been persecuted by these people.
And Lüster just comes out and says it.
He just says, Jewish groups have come after me.
It turns out that when you start promoting overtly neo-Nazi ideology, and when you start saying that one of the greatest crimes in history didn't happen, Maybe the people who are victims of that might not like you very much.
You might get a bit of pushback.
You might get a bit of pushback from that.
Why the hell shouldn't Jewish groups come after you?
What do you expect?
As you become a Nazi and you find like, the Jews don't like me very much, like maybe there's a reason for that.
That isn't like the Jews have some genetic imperative or some cultural imperative to deny you an existence or whatever.
Like yeah, no.
No, he definitely – he does complain about all the Jewish influence that has locked him up.
He spent some time in jail for – basically alongside Irving and Zundeliz.
He's kind of traveling around Europe and trying to go to these neo-Nazi conferences and such.
You know, he has not had an easy life.
You look at him in this 2015... - His problems are his own fault.
- Oh no, absolutely, I'm not.
I'm not justifying it at all.
I'm just, I'm just, I'm kind of describing what he's doing.
- It's the fault of all this Jewish groups for pointing out to people that he's a con man that was misrepresented in his abilities and yeah.
- That you're full of shit, that you were never an engineer, that you should never have been, you know, even presenting yourself as that before this.
Like, if you hadn't been lying, we wouldn't have had to point out your lies.
Yeah.
You know, if you hadn't put me under scrutiny just because I said the Holocaust didn't happen, then nobody would have ever known that I wasn't really an engineer and had no right to be designing etc.
etc.
etc.
How dare you pick on me this way?
All I did was go to a mass grave and, you know, pick away at it with a chisel incompetently.
That's right.
And then, um, fraudulently have the, uh, rocks processed, uh, under, under false pretenses.
And then, uh, produce a report that, uh, fraudulently claimed that, uh, this horrifying thing didn't happen.
I can't, I don't know why you would, uh, be mad at me for that.
Why would you come after me just because I produced a document that is still today, despite being comprehensively debunked, actively putting you and your children in mortal danger?
I don't understand why you don't like me.
Absolutely.
No, I just wanted to point out that in this in this 2015 interview, I mean Rizzoli is just his biggest fan He's almost he's almost like clapping like a like a teddy bear Like how and how delighted he is to be able to sit there.
I mean he's all smiles It's you know, just the great moment in his life to meet Leuchter and Leuchter looks for for all intents and purposes he looks like a like a child sitting in his father's high chair like he's a He's shrunken into this suit that seems too large for him.
He's this tiny, little, pathetic man.
I'm not trying to demean him for his physical attributes.
That's certainly not the point, but this is a man who has been beaten by this.
This is a man who found himself in this place, who conned his way through life until the world Told him what they could do with himself, and I mean, I can't – I imagine, like, how has he been feeding himself for the last, you know – certainly since the documentary, it's been 20 years.
And you can only imagine, you know, honorariums from the – from neo-Nazi groups.
I mean, you know, he goes and he gets a speaking fee or something.
I'm sure that's exactly how he's made his money over the line.
It can't be until the last, you know, few years.
Honestly, I'm surprised.
I have been actively, like, looking to see if I can find any of these kind of major players who have ever interviewed him or anything.
I mean, some of these guys surely would interview him at least to, like, for the historical value.
No, he doesn't appear on any of this, like, normal stuff except for this one guy, Jim Rizzoli.
And Jim Rizzoli is a laughingstock among even the other Holocaust deniers.
That tells you exactly how far this guy's stock has fallen.
Yeah.
And he did it to himself.
And he did it to himself.
I don't feel bad for this guy.
It's not to that degree.
He's a pathetic figure, but he's a pathetic little evil man.
That's what he is.
The thing is, I know people like him.
Not to be too personal about it, but there are people like him in my family.
You know, I watch him in that documentary tootling around his workroom with his tools and stuff like that, and I recognize that.
And it's kind of blood chilling, you know.
He kind of reminds me of my dad in a weird way.
My dad is now passed on, but he does in some ways remind me of my father.
Certainly in the kind of the piddling around stuff in the garage, and even I see him in that video that I just mentioned.
He looks like he looks like kind of like my dad did before he died on in some ways in terms of his body language.
So yeah, no, I mean, he's a guy.
He's he's he's an old man.
He's a pathetic, pitiful old man, an ordinary human being who did some nasty shit that probably wasn't.
I mean, he was defrauding some some other like terrible imperialist system, the carceral state.
I don't imagine for a moment that he thinks of himself as evil.
into Holocaust and becomes a horrible anti-Semite and it destroys his life.
That's Fred and Loiter.
I don't imagine for a moment that he thinks of himself as evil.
I'm sure he thinks of himself as a good guy who's been poorly treated.
And he did these things not from conscious malice but from incompetence and hubris and self-interest and self-delusion.
And the trouble is that when you get enough people like that together, you can murder six million people with them.
And here we are again.
Staring that down the throat again.
I mean the people, so think about the people, the group, the militia group that was herding migrants into custody, into border control custody.
They took it upon themselves.
These are Ordinary middle-aged men.
These are, you know, again, could be your dad.
It's anybody.
Just guys who, and they believe they're doing something right.
These people are breaking our laws, you see.
Nobody thinks they're the bad guy.
I think there are some people who think they're the bad guy, but very few people think they're the bad guy.
They think it's justified, and I'm saving this for the next episode.
I'm saving a little reading for the next episode.
that kind of demonstrates some of that.
But this, I think people think this stuff happens because, like, I mean, one of the things you hear is, oh, Hitler just decided one day to just, like, kill all the Jews because he was mad.
No, Hitler thought he was doing the right thing for the German people.
He thought, you know, hey, these people are these Jews.
They're out there.
They're a cancer on our society.
They're driven to do this.
They're not proper German citizens, and they have no place in the body politic.
He believed he had very good reasons.
All the people who participated in it felt like they had good reasons to do it.
The people who turned a blind eye, the people who turned in their Jewish neighbors.
Thought you know even if it was out of self-preservation and that gets into like really deep questions of complicity and as something that within a proto-fascistic or fascistic or imperialistic system we all live with a certain level of that and we all have to make decisions we can live with and you know this this happens because ordinary people.
Don't make the decision to stand up when they could, and don't make the decision to do the right thing.
And again, not to equate, but you know, you and me, we both live in countries that have been engaging in what I think you and I can agree are essentially wars over fossil fuels for the last... No, no, it's all for Israel, Jack.
I'm reliably informed.
Israel makes this happen.
Oh, right.
It's the Jews, right, yeah.
No, Jerry Kushner is controlling Donald Trump with, like, puppet strings from the back.
That's what's happening.
Oh, well, in that case.
Ivanka puts her head in his lap and cries, and that's why we go to war in Syria.
I am reliably informed of this, Jack.
This is wonderful news!
Suddenly I don't have to worry about whether I'm complicit in my country's imperialistic mass-murdering adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan because I use petrol in my car!
It's amazing!
Suddenly the guilt, the complexity, the worries, they've all just disappeared!
I can just blame the Jews!
Isn't that fantastic?
It really gets the load off my mind, and really what that means is to be more moral people, what we need to do is just, you know, make sure that Jewish people just have less of an influence in our society.
Maybe we should just, you know, like, we need to solve this imperialism problem.
The way to do that is to just, like, to A, make sure they can't be in positions of power in our government and economics, and then maybe just get rid of them.
I don't know, like ship them away somewhere.
I don't know how, maybe you could put them on like a boxcar or something and just like ship them to the ocean and then like ship them back to Israel.
I think that would be the way to do it, you know.
Maybe we can get some work out of them on the way, you know.
We can do it that way.
I think that's a really reasonable option, don't you?
It sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
You know, we're just asking questions here.
And here's another question for you, right?
Jews are all, like, liberals and left-wingers, right?
Well, loads of them are communists.
And they're always standing up for migrants and immigrants and Muslims and trans people and gay people.
Why are they doing that?
Why do the Jews do that all the time?
It must be because there's something in it for them.
Now, what is it?
I've got it!
I've got it, Daniel!
Promoting stuff like that harms people like us, doesn't it?
It puts us down, it damages us.
So we need to do the same thing to all those people as well.
We just get all these people out of our society.
I don't know, maybe we could form some laws about making sure certain people can't be in certain professions, you know.
And as for the migrants, we can build a wall or something and it's all suddenly fitting together.
Yeah, I mean, and really ultimately – now I disagree with you slightly there, Jack.
I believe that if we were to reduce the power that these rootless cosmopolitans have in our society, then we will sort of decrease the prevalence of some of these other problems anyway.
I think, you know, I'm a little bit more of a modern on this issue.
I think that, you know, people who are, say, trans, for instance, who, once we get rid of the Jews, I mean, that comes first, right?
But I think, like, trans people, for instance, I think we can just send them to, like, mental health care facilities, like shock treatment, and then they won't have to be properly, you know, we don't really have to do anything more than that.
I think we can solve that problem.
Now I think about it.
I mean, there weren't all these trans people and gay people around the way there are now when I was a kid.
It's a new thing, isn't it?
So it must be coming from somewhere.
Somebody must be doing it.
I think it's the media.
I think it's the media convincing people that they're gay or trans or whatever.
And you know who controls the media, don't you?
I think the Jews are actually creating them.
It's not just that they're helping them and championing them, they're creating them in the first place.
So you're right, we just get rid of the Jews, this stuff will just go away.
Suddenly people won't be trans anymore because the Jews won't be making them trans.
Yeah, I mean really it was all a problem that started here in this country at least.
It was that immigration thing of 1965.
Um, once, you know, the Civil Rights Era, which we know who created the Civil Rights Era, I mean, come on, that was clearly not... I mean, African Americans don't have the, like, the agency or the intelligence to do that for themselves, clearly, you know?
Like, come on, this is ridiculous.
Alright, I think I'm... It was the Communists, and we all know who the Communists are.
I think, I think I'm officially uncomfortable going any further with this, because... Yeah, yeah, let's cut it there.
Yeah, no, um, clearly... Obviously, that was all sarcasm.
This was all, this was all sarcasm, and, uh, this was not...
in any sense meant to be realistic but i think it i mean i think it you know i would like to point out the the what we just kind of demonstrated there in sort of a joking and and uh without uh ethnic slurs manner is uh precisely the content that uh i have spent like uh two and a half years listening to at this point um but you can hear just just from us riffing like that
you can hear how as in as palpably insane as vile and stupid and ignorant and palpably nutty as all that is that we just said you can hear how to some people it can sound coherent in It fits together.
And suddenly, there's this explanation for this world that they find bewildering and frightening that's not about anything that's wrong with them.
Yeah, it absolves you of any kind of responsibility, any kind of complicity.
It's somebody else's fault in that somebody else is some already despised ethnic minority or sexual minority or whatever.
And their problems are their problems and can't we just all be middle class white people together and just all live in the suburbs and just not have all those problems for all those other people.
You don't have to give up any privilege or any power or take on any responsibilities or adjust yourself in any way.
There's nothing wrong with you.
Or think at all about the historical process that led to you having the comforts that you have, you know?
You can just accept that as given.
Well, it's your right because, you know, it's okay.
Maybe it was the result of empire, but we had an empire because we had to have an empire because we were the white man, you know?
We built civilization.
It was a good thing.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
You lost, you know, Native Americans.
I mean, we won.
You lost.
What else was going to happen ultimately?
Yeah.
And, you know, out of your loss came this wonderful, perfect world that we have now.
So suck it up.
Yeah.
And on top of all that, of course, once you go through that process of thinking, suddenly you're the one who knows.
All the other people out there, they've all been fooled.
But you haven't.
You've got it.
You've taken the red pill.
The red pill.
And any bit of disconfirming evidence, anything that, you know, doesn't go along with that narrative, well, that is just another thing that's controlled by The Jews are by the liberal or whatever, you know, yeah I mean that whole idea that whole thing that I read from this car kind of earlier on about That there has to be in order to deny the Holocaust you have to accept that Literally millions of people are either deluded or lying.
This is this is bar none 100% Bedrock principle of the alt-right about American fascism.
And I should say, just to highlight, I meant to say this at the beginning, pretty much every person we've covered on this podcast to date who has been in this movement is a Holocaust denier.
I wouldn't want to say absolutely everyone, because there might be one I'm not necessarily thinking of off the top of my head, but yeah, these people are Holocaust deniers.
Every single one of them.
They all believe in this Jewish question bullshit.
All the riffing that Jack and I did, that would be the mild version of Like, what these people actually believe.
And I do have some fascists listening in right now, and I'm sure some of them are now saying, oh, you're actually red-pilled.
You just said what you really believed, and you did this intentionally just to fuck with me.
And it's like, no!
I'm pointing out the nonsense that you believe, and I'm telling you exactly why you shouldn't believe this.
I have spent many hours on this.
Do not believe this nonsense.
It is nonsense.
Read a book.
Yeah, please.
Look, any of you, any fascists listening, we're not joking.
We're not talking in code.
We're not sending you secret signals.
We do not believe any of this stuff.
We know it's false.
It's palpably untrue.
It's been proven a hundred different ways to be untrue.
Go and get a serious book on any of these things and just read it up.
Read up on it, okay?
Seriously.
Get some independent information, because you've been sold a pack of lies.
I'm not... Validate your belief.
You know, you believe in the gas chamber.
You believe in the Lugter Report, maybe.
You know, pick one.
Go into one of those two webpages I pointed you to.
Find your belief about the Holocaust.
Just pick one.
Find one on that list.
And then go look at the references they provide.
Look at the references I provided.
I provided links to all this shit.
So you can go and look at it.
Believe me.
If you believe me, you should believe that I'm providing references for a reason.
I want you to look at me, and I want you to look at them, and I want you to decide who's telling you the truth.
It's not them.
No.
And if you think something's true, if you're convinced of something, you should seek out the best criticism of it you can find.
You should seek out the best argument against it you can find, and you should confront that.
Because if you're right, you'll be able to knock it down.
And if you can't knock it down, you need to rethink.
This is just basic intellectual honesty.
But in order to get there, you have to be actually interested in what's true, rather than what makes you feel good.
What's gonna get you speaking to us and applauded when you stand in front of a room full of people at a conference, etc, etc, etc, looping back to the movie.
I think that's the best place to leave it as is possible.
So yeah, I agree.
We're going to do more on this next topic.
So the big thing with sort of the old school Holocaust denial stuff, the stuff that's really kind of covered in Lipstadt's book, is sort of the academic sort of people arguing in sort of pseudo-academic debates about the Holocaust.
And this is kind of the form that this stuff takes as of, you know, prior to, you know, the 21st century, prior to the social media era.
In the next episode, we're going to talk about some specific examples of how this stuff gets used in the 21st century, about how the new shape that Holocaust denial has taken.
And we're going to connect that to some stuff that David Irving has done.
So, yeah, we're going to make fun of some really terrible people next time who believe terrible things and who have no actual intellectual argument who think that doing funny voices is the best way to establish historical facts.
So, yeah, that's what we're going to do next week.
More on Holocaust denial, but hopefully less depressing.
Next week, I'm at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore and Daniel is at Daniel E Harper.
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Okay, so that's it for this week and more on this lovely subject next week.
