Holocaust Memorial, Berlin

Source: Bigstock

1991–1994: the heyday of “Holocaust revisionism” in America, with four major national TV shows (60 Minutes, 48 Hours, Montel Williams, Phil Donahue) giving “revisionists” coverage. I had the unfortunate distinction of being the only dude to appear on all four programs.

During every show, my colleagues and I would face a simple question, usually from an audience member: “Why?”

“Why you doin’ this? Why are you questioning aspects of the mainstream Holocaust narrative?”

For me, the answer was as simple as it was unexciting: post–Cold War Holocaust history needed a cleanup. I had no agenda beyond that, which is why in 1994 I publicly separated from “revisionism,” as I saw that it had become as dogmatic as the ADL/Wiesenthal narrative.

But my colleagues needed a more exciting “why.” They wanted to claim they were saving the world. The standard line, repeated endlessly by the (often buffoonish) people I worked with at the time, was “WWIII will start because of Israel. If we can destroy Israel’s founding myth—the Holocaust!—we can end Israel and save mankind from nukyulur destruction.”

It was, of course, an idiotic notion. Whether one accepts the ADL’s sacred 6 million figure, Raul Hilberg’s 5 million, Gerald Reitlinger’s 4.1, or my 3.5, it was the postwar refugee problem that “created” Israel. Europe’s Jews had been served an eviction notice. Millions were murdered, but many millions more became refugees. That refugee problem would’ve driven the creation of Israel, regardless of how many Jews died in the camps.

When David Irving proclaimed in the 1990s that once he “torpedoes Battleship Auschwitz,” Israel will be gone within a year, I could only shake my head at the sheer lunacy of it.

At the time, the “revisionists” were frantically concerned about funding. The majority of their work was supported by elderly rich Germans pining for Hitler. But that was a finite resource. The old krauts were dying off quick, so in 1992, the “revisionists” got the idea to try for some of that Ay-rab money. After all, if you’re “ending Israel,” get them oil state sheeeeks and eee-murs to pony up!

But no matter how hard they tried, the “revisionists” never got a dime of Arab dough.

Why? Because for all their brutishness, the Arabs saw right through the lie that “torpedoing Auschwitz” could end Israel. To the white pseudo-intellectuals in “revisionist” circles, the notion that you can write a pamphlet and an empire falls—TOM PAINE!—was a beloved, romanticized notion. But the Arabs knew better. Only violence can “end Israel.” That’s how they saw it, and it was downright hilarious to see whites explaining the delicate intricacies of history to a tablecloth-headed thug who only knows “Kill! Burn! Destroy!”

It was like watching fruity academics try to civilize the Cavity Creeps.

“This byzantine statistical analysis is your key to victory!”

“NO! WE MAKE HOLES IN TEETH!”

That was then. Today, the “why” has shifted. Today, it’s not whites using denial to cozy up to Arabs, but the converse. When Syria’s Assad gave that Holocaust denial talk last month, who do you think that was for? His akbars? Please. That was him being Putin, trying to come off as “based” to his Western pals, his useful American idiots.

The 1990s line of “torpedo Auschwitz to save the Middle East” has been replaced with “torpedo Auschwitz to save the West.” These days, there’s a school of thought—echoed by every major Holocaust denier—that the modern woke West can be defeated if we can just drive a stake through the Holocaust.

I could offer two dozen recent examples of this line of thinking, but for brevity’s sake, here’s Keith Woods, a self-described “raging anti-Semite” and member of Nick Fuentes’ Naziboi circle who, last year, was retweeted and praised by Donald Trump Jr., Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Joe Rogan, and Jenna Ellis:

It is difficult to overstate how much everything since 1945 is shaped by the spectre of the Holocaust. The period since is the story of the religious underpinning of the West shifting from Christianity to a new foundation built on a single commandment: “never again.”

Woods and the Nazibois don’t blame Hitler and his grotesque excesses for killing the white nationalist brand—that wouldn’t be the “based” response (correct though it is); they blame Jews for making too big a deal about the Holocaust. And it’s easy to fall for the “Holocaust is the linchpin of all bad things” simple-minded talking point, because Jews have made it easy. Spending the past four decades getting Holocaust revisionism and denial criminalized in Europe and elsewhere is likely the single worst Jewish error since banning bacon. It plays right into the hands of those who think, “Ah-ha, this must be the Jews’ Achilles heel!” This, in turn, plays into Tucker Carlson’s favorite cliché: “If you’re catching flak, you must be over the target!”

Of course, that’s a nonsensical phrase. If I called your mother a whore, a stinking gutter street-whore who’s been hammered by so many black men they call her John Henry, you’d likely get angry.

So that must mean I’m correct! I’m taking flak, so obviously I’m over the target. Your mom is a whore.

Or…sometimes you take flak because you offend someone regarding something of great emotional import to them.

Look, I’m all in favor of drawing Muhammad, because nothing’s more important to me than free speech. But how foolish would I appear if I said “drawing Mohammed is the key to world peace”?

The Holocaust is an emotional topic for Jews, so they react emotionally. But more to the point, Holocaust remembrance is not responsible for the West’s woes. As I’ve written time and again, the white world—for better or worse—faced a bill come due in the latter half of the 20th century. African and Asian colonialism was never going to be forever, and U.S. blacks were never going to stay in subservience forever. You can blame Jews and the Holocaust all you like, but it’s not Auschwitz that made blacks dislike Jim Crow. It’s not Auschwitz that birthed feminism. And guess what—gays were promiscuous long before Auschwitz, and indeed, there’d even been periods in world history when they’d been out of the closet…long before Auschwitz.

Auschwitz didn’t make the Congolese hate the Belgians, and Gandhi was agitating for independence—thanks to his British-provided education—before Auschwitz was even a camp.

So here’s my biggest fear—and most dire prediction—for 2024: Holocaust denial is going to make increasing inroads into the right. Because we live in a time when work-shy grifting rightists cannot resist dead-end shortcuts (pseudo-solutions that accomplish nothing beyond eliminating the need for actual hard work). The right has no Soros (someone willing to spend billions on tedious but hugely effective ground-level foundation-laying). Rightist millionaires make movies to “change the culture”—that’s the shortcut we need! Rightist activists sleuth—expose Baron Rothschild XXI! That’s the shortcut we need!

Elect Trump—he’ll END THE DEEP STATE! How? Dammit, never question the shortcut.

And if that doesn’t work, just move to a RAYED STAYUT! Now, that’s a shortcut! Just relocate to a place like South Dakota where the GOP governor’s totally not in the pocket of Big Tranny (just like Mike DeWine totally isn’t), or move to the Deep South because Memphis, Atlanta, and Jackson are imaginary places that will never shift the balance of power via demographics.

The right is currently dangerously prone to the shortcut of “deny the Holohoax and everything bad will end.” 2023’s rightist flirtation with denial will likely explode in 2024. Remember, I’ve walked among deniers for 35 years; I know this topic better than you.

MAGA/QAnon conspiratorial thinking, the embrace of denial by mentally unwell celebrities, the rise of “be based as possible” as a response to Con Inc., the pile-on against a weakened ADL (which I covered last week), the Gaza war, the growing alliance between anti-Israel conspiracy-sleuth leftists (Michael Tracey, Glenn Greenwald) and their rightist counterparts like Carlson, a sense that anything that annoys the “Deep State” is good and deserving of amplification regardless of veracity, polls showing denial’s popularity among blacks (which rightists will take not as proof of black ignorance but as the key to finally “winning the black vote”), and (perhaps most important) Elon Musk not just allowing but rewarding Holocaust denial on Twitter—all these elements have created a deadly cocktail, an irresistible hemlock to make denial the right’s drink of choice.

Tucker wading into WWII revisionism and Jewish “duel loyalty” accusations, other prominent rightists championing Norman Finkelstein’s semi-denial, these are gateway drugs. To be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with WWII revisionism or Finkelstein’s criticisms of “the Holocaust industry” (though as a historian he’s lacking). But I’ve been in this game long enough to know when someone’s tiptoeing around the peripheral stuff with an eye toward the hard stuff. I can spot it a mile away.

Not that it’s hard to spot. Last week when it was announced that Musk would visit Auschwitz, high-profile “gateway rightists” (those with one foot in Fuentes Naziland and the other in Tucker Carlsonville) like Stew Peters tweeted Holocaust denial at Musk (Peters even invoked me, because he’s one of the retards I mentioned a few weeks ago who thinks it’s still 1992).

The more utilitarian an idea becomes, the more staying power it has. Holocaust denial is already useful to the Groyper morons as “proof of basedness,” and it’s already useful to the cretins who think it’s the “off switch” to “Jewish power.” But also, and I’ve been seeing this a lot recently, it’s being increasingly employed by anti-vaxxers, J6ers, and MAGA election deniers, who’ll show some half-assed denial meme and follow it with “if they lied to you about this, what else have they lied to you about?”

Hence the increasing utilitarianism of denial. It’s something rightists will draw people to (“follow the rabbit hole and arrive here: the silver bullet to end the Jews”), and something used to draw people to other things (“if ‘they’ faked the Holocaust, of course they faked J6 and the 2020 election”). And all of those destinations serve only to detach rightists from the issues that matter to voters.

The belief that killing “the spectre of the Holocaust” will save the West is as imbecilic as Irving’s belief that doing so would “end Israel” by 1994. But many of you will gravitate toward this line of thinking anyway. And yeah, you’ll get flak, which will strengthen your belief that you’re “onto something.”

But while you’ll certainly be hurting Jews on an emotional level, you’ll be hurting yourselves worse. “Close borders, deport illegals, imprison criminals” will be lost in a sea of “wooden doors” Holocaust memes.

I can see it in my crystal ball (and my woodpecker) clear as day.

It’s coming in 2024.

Unless we can nip it in the bud.

Let’s see if we can.