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I've learned to be distrustful of mainstream conservative commentators, but I still had hope that Dennis Prager was one of the intellectually honest ones. Having read his latest column, my disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined.
I understand that accusing someone of intellectual dishonesty without clear evidence that they are lying is frowned upon here and likely anywhere else that meaningful discussion happens. If anyone has a defensible reading of this column, I would greatly appreciate hearing it, because I can only see two possible readings.
The subject of the holocaust hits so close to home for Prager that he suspends all rational thought when discussing it, leaving him incapable of recognizing his own hypocrisy or recusing himself to avoid embarassment.
He is consciously trying to enforce a norm that you can't question anything about the holocaust; he is aware that this contradicts his encouragement of vaccine hesitancy and other forms of wrongthink, but he doesn't care, because those are forms of wrongthink he likes, and this is one he doesn't like.
The first possibility fills me with pity. The second one fills me with outrage, not only because I consider that attitude to be morally wrong, but because I consider it to be counter-productive. The best way to encourage holocaust denial, and the anti-Semitism that it so often leads to, is to tell people not to question any details about it. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that Prager does not want people to question any details about it whatsoever. He says so himself.
Prager does not define the holocaust as "the German government's mass-murder of Jewish citizens," or even "the deliberate attempt by the German government to kill all of the Jews in Europe." He defines the holocaust specifically as the murder of millions of Jews, meaning that if you put the death toll at anything under 7 figures, you are denying the totality of the event in his mind. If Prager was giving a live lecture, I would excuse this implication as an accidental result of speaking off-the-cuff, but this is a written column, which means he had the opportunity to proof-read his words and think about what they mean, and he still thought that this was acceptable.
Based on my conversations with others about holocaust denial and revisionism, I suspect there's an unspoken implication in this column that people who are neurotypical (or just not autistic in the same way I am) are capable of picking up on: that anyone who questions any detail about the holocaust is a bad faith actor trying to Ship of Theseus it out of the historical record. I've had many people, even in ratspace, tell me that this is so obvious a reason to ostracize holocaust revisionists that it doesn't even have to be stated explicitly when condemning them. Well, not only is it not obvious to me, but I think it takes an astonishingly poor imagination to think that there might not be anyone out there who, in good faith and without denying Hitler's genocidal ambitions, questions how many people were killed in the holocaust or what methods were used.
This is not a defense of Nick Fuentes. While I can't read Fuentes's mind, I have inferred based on his tone when speaking about the holocaust that he likely either doesn't believe it happened or wants other people to not believe it happened. The column, however, is not about Nick Fuentes. It's a column about the general subject of holocaust "denial," and it merely uses Fuentes as an example. And while I'm at it..
Prager, buddy, do you have any idea how many people on my university campus alone denied "Stalin’s mass murder of tens of millions of Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago?" I don't, because once you're counting in the dozens, it's impossible to keep track without administering a structured survey. I know that Bob Avakian's group canvassed there every day for years without incident, while right-wing events were met with hostile protests. I was one of the first people to know that Quentin Tarantino spoke at one of their events, but it took Breitbart a month to report on my tip, and not a single other outlet picked up on it because they didn't care.
What world does Prager live in where Stalin apologists are marginalized, but holocaust denial runs free? It's not the world he lived in five years ago, because 3 minutes into this video, he approvingly quotes a professor's statement that denial Stalin's genocide is common. Did Prager's assessment of the culture change over the past five years, or is he just contradicting himself to effectively enforce his preferred censorial norms? I'm inclined to think the latter, and it's a darn shame. I used to be a Ben Shapiro fan until I caught him doing stuff like this, and my search for people who recognized the problems with wokeness without enforcing their own intellectual taboos drove me further right to places like VDare and Unz, because they were less obviously dishonest. Several years later, I don't think those places are particularly honest, but I'm sure they're more honest than Daily Wire, and I expect many people to get stuck at that level of the radicalization rabbit hole without graduating to the general agnosticism and confusion I'm at. Shit, now I'm getting emotional.
Also, whoever chose that headline did a bad job. Prager is Jewish, and his reference to hell in the column was clearly meant to be a figure of speech. Making it the headline makes it sound literal. I wonder if Prager approved it.
There is more incentive to exaggerate the extent and significance of the holocaust than any other event in history. At the same time, it is one of the most ideologically influential events of the 21st century. These two reasons are why it should be morally acceptable, and in fact encouraged, to poke holes and relitigate the events of the holocaust. Holocaust denialism is not evidence of any bias whatsoever, because autistic men online will spend thousands of hours examining innumerable less important matters like the best tanks and rifles, who killed JFK, UFO sightings, the battle of agincourt and the policies of FDR.
In theory, it might be that some people just become obsessed with the nitty-gritty details of the Holocaust and exactly how many people actually died and what methods were used and the literal accuracy of all historical claims, etc.
In practice, I've never encountered a Holocaust denier who didn't, purely coincidentally, have a great deal of animosity towards Jews.
Some will use more evasions than others ("I don't hate every single Jewish person!" "I only feel animosity towards the organized Jewish media that pushes false narratives and ideologies on me, not Jews as a people," etc.) Even if I were to believe these disclaimers (I don't), Holocaust denial is clearly not like trainspotting, an odd hobby that certain people become obsessed with for no ideological motivation. It's something that attracts people who don't like Jews, not niche historians.
How about David Cole, who is Jewish?
I've heard of him before. White supremacists can always find that one Jew or that one black guy who agrees with them.
I'm not going to do a deep-dive into every Holocaust denier and where they are on the scale from "No Jews died" to "Actually it was only 2 million", but I'm sure there are a few deniers who have idiosyncratic non-Jew-hating reasons. I doubt very much anyone just stumbles upon the subject and doing non-motivated research has a sudden epiphany that the Holocaust is a hoax.
Do you dispute that the vast majority come from a starting position of disliking Jews, and that Holocaust denial is generally part of a larger framework of Jew conspiracy theories?
I don't think it should be any surprise that the vast majority of Holocaust deniers are people who have disreputable beliefs about Jews. Given how it's considered rank antisemitism and just about the worst thing one can be caught believing, wouldn't we expect that the vast majority of people who have gone that rabbit hole (much less admit to it) are antisemites?
I just don't see how that has any bearing on the truth value of the claim.
It's always going to be the case that the most taboo ideas in a society are only ever seriously contemplated by people who have some strong ideological or moral conviction related to those taboo ideas. I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of people espousing atheism in Europe hundreds of years ago were rapacious sinners, edgelords, and reprobates of various other sorts. So what?
In theory, it doesn't, but when the evidence strongly suggests a completely made-up set of facts constructed to support a pre-existing narrative (that everything is a Jew conspiracy to benefit Jews), it's not like a historical debate over exactly how soon Washington really got wind of the imminent Pearl Harbor attack. It's a bunch of people who really hate Jews who have this really handy theory that would make Jews the villains and their victimizers the victims, which you are suggesting we should examine impartially as if it emerged organically from independent historical research. It's like demanding I take seriously each and every new very slightly different claim made by a fundamentalist Christian that the Earth is flat and 6000 years old, and ignore the fact that all this "research" is coming from the Young Earth School of Scientists Are Dirty Satanic Liars.
I do think we should examine it impartially, but have a strong prior that their claims are highly likely to false on account of their near-universal antisemitic motivations. I think the reason it's different from creationism is that it's at least conceivable that the mainstream opinion on the Holocaust is what it is only because of institutional and social pressures against dissenters, much like I believe it is in the case of Covid policy, medical interventions for trans-identifying youth, racial differences in intelligence (observed - not even HBD), innate gender differences, etc.
With creationism, by contrast, I don't think anyone who believes in evolution is particularly ideologically and morally committed to evolution being true. It's just sort of like gravity and heliocentrism - it's just what we happen find reality to be, so we go with it. Now, I actually do understand why creationists suspect that scientists are ideologically biased and cunning purgers of threatening dissenters. They believe that secularists want a godless world to freely sin in, and that promoting evolution is one piece of a grander scheme to try and write God out of society. I just think that's 100% mistaken, so I don't doubt the mainstream view of evolution.
If institutions can purge dissent and manufacture orthodoxy and the appearance of unanimity and certainty with regard to all the hot CW topics this forum is very familiar with, why couldn't they do so with the Holocaust? I honestly don't know, but without extremely persuasive evidence I'm going to default to the mainstream opinion. Given how virtually the only people on the dissenting side are antisemites and I lack the expertise to evaluate their claims, I'm doubtful I'll ever be convinced. But why is it seemingly so inconceivable to you?
It's not inconceivable to me. I just see no reason to adjust my priors on it.
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