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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'm not sure if it's simply because of the political climate in the place i live, but the Holocaust is definitely treated with a far sterner hand than other forms of genocide denial in the western world, and by a large margin. In all likelihood it probably transpired very similarly to how historians think it did and the numbers will probably never be completely accurate given the chaos of the time period, but I'm more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt with such a large scale event. But I've found myself having to defend Holocaust deniers in Canada because of how draconian the laws have become up here. It has to be said, what is so special about holocaust denial as opposed to other forms of denialism regarding events of the 20th century?
Before you accuse me of hyperbole, in Canada there is currently active laws that were recently passed that specifically outlaw holocaust denial in particular, in public.Thats right, you will be put in jail for up to 2 years for any type of spoken "Antisemitism," including holocaust denial. This is absurd when you take into account the complete ambiguity that these laws were put in place with.
Now this would be all well and good, except this type of hate speech law is exclusively targeting this specific genocide. There are not real consequences for denying any other genocide. In fact, three years ago an assistant professor at the university I attended publicly denied the Holodomor as "Nazi propaganda."
I'm ethnically Ukrainian. Not only did he not get arrested, not only did he not get fired, he is still employed at the university. Call me whatever you wish, but that is extremely unjust. These laws are not developed with some sort of altruistic end in mind, and they are not enacted with the same amount of utility that laws against holocaust denial are. You should never be put in jail for simply thinking something. It is extremely frustrating, and it does not mean i hate Jews when i point out these clear inconsistencies and injustices with how these hate laws are currently installed. I find myself having to defend Holocaust deniers even though i do not have any real sympathy towards their arguments, simply because the laws against them are increasingly unfair, and have essentially made it illegal to think the wrong thoughts. It's not, and should not ever be illegal to think dumb shit. Holocaust denial is on the same level of believing in a flat earth or 5G cell tower conspiracies. But one should not be thrown in jail for believing in them. Much like your comment is suggesting, any criticism of this is now tantamount to holocaust denial, which therefore inherently means that I am anti-semetic. What now should we do in this situation?
Well, in the U.S. we don't have laws against Holocaust denial, and I would strongly oppose any such laws.
Every time this issue comes up, I see the same series of talking points. Yes, I think Holocaust denial is bad (and factually wrong). Yes, I think Holocaust deniers are anti-Semitic. No, I do not think they should go to jail. Yes, I think a lot of other atrocities get overshadowed by the Holocaust and shouldn't be. Yes, I think there probably is some legitimate historical research that gets quashed by the stigma of delving too deeply into the details of the Holocaust. Yes, there's probably a catch-22 here where you can't find legitimate historians who will touch it so the only ones who will are anti-Semites, so the research is regarded as illegitimate.
All of those talking points miss the point I'm making to begin with. You say you would strongly oppose these laws, and yet opposing these laws are now implied to be inherently Anti-Semitic. That is the real catch-22. I am not making talking points, i am saying that it is now illegal to point out certain legal injustices. There is not a proper way to handle that.
Yes, well, that's why I'm liberal, not woke.
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