This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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 going to let your uncalled-for use of the slur/exonym “white supremacist” roll off my back, but I do want to take extreme issue with your accusation that I went out of my way to “find that one Jew that agrees” with me. First off, I became familiar with David Cole’s work as a social/political commentator - specifically, his writing for Taki’s - long before I knew anything about his work as a revisionist. He’s far more well-known, by most on the online Right, for his more recent work. He hasn’t done any important new work on the topic of revisionism in nearly thirty years, and in the intervening years he made a name for himself first as a respected Hollywood screenwriter/producer and then as one of the most important figures behind Friends Of Abe, a secret society of sorts for Hollywood conservatives. He’s not some fringe figure or “token Jew” that I nut-picked as a fig leaf.
I think that Cole’s writing is actually extremely clarifying about the topic. Although he hasn’t done any new revisionist work in decades, he does still comment on the state of revisionism/denial as a phenomenon from time to time. Two examples would be this article from 2018, which is itself a re-evaluation of one of his earlier articles. His thesis, which I find very persuasive, is that there is a symbiotic relationship between so-called “denialists” (a field which has degenerated significantly due to the more intelligent and level-headed figures either aging out, dying, or realizing that their battle for public sympathy had been irrecoverably lost and bailing out) and the “anti-denial” lobby who build public careers as snarky “owned by facts and logic” debunkers.
When the average rational person with no strong opinions about the Holocaust over and above the standard narrative we’ve all grown up with wades into this dispute, they find it occupied on both sides by screaming lunatics and they wisely decide, as I have, that it’s probably not worth even trying to sift through the ocean of arguments. The only non-Jews who stick around to fight in that war at this point are people who love the fight. (Jews’ participation in the fight is a matter of direct ethnic self-defense and self-interest, which is healthy and normal and which I do not begrudge them, provided that they don’t stoop to transparently cynical concern-trolling like a couple of the comments below hand-wringing about this sub becoming too friendly to dissenting views on this, and only this, specific issue.)
I didn't say you personally went out of your way to find him. My point is that there are black people who like the Confederacy, Jews who sympathize with the Nazis, probably there are some Chinese historians who side with Japanese nationalists in disputing the Rape of Nanking. Yes, I do think those figures are little more than convenient fig leafs that the pro-denial side likes to trot out as a defense against accusations of ideological bias.
Also, what's your beef with "white supremacist"? Do you just find it less palatable than "white nationalist"? This sounds like the TERFs who claim TERF is a slur even when it's literally accurate (as opposed to being used haphazardly to describe anyone on the other side of a debate).
…Because I don’t think white people are “supreme”, nor do I have any desire for white people to be “supreme” over other people, to rule them, to dominate them, etc.? Like, the term you’re using has a specific meaning, which does apply to certain living people as well as to a great number of historical people. The logic of something like colonial empire is, explicitly, “white supremacist”. However, I’m not an advocate for empire - racial nor otherwise - but rather for peaceful, non-coercive racial separation. It’s the opposite of “white supremacy”, or at worst totally orthogonal to “white supremacy”.
This is less like a TERF objecting to being called “trans-exclusionary” and more like a TERF objecting to being called “misogynist”. (Because, see, trans women are women, and you hate trans women, therefore you hate women.”) It’s a blatant abuse of terms. Weaponized linguistic legerdemain.
Rudyard Kipling was a white supremacist. My beliefs are not like his beliefs, when it comes to the very centrally important questions of whether or not different racial groups should live together under the same political/geographic unit, and, conditional on one’s answer to that first question, the related question of how to best distribute relative power among those different groups. Since my answer to the first question is “no”, I don’t have to commit to any answer to the second question, let alone the “supremacist” answer that whites should hold the undisputed whip hand.
I am not convinced your distinction is meaningful. White supremacists believe white people are superior to non-white people, at least in most meaningful ways (i.e., anything to do with intellect and behavior; some will waffle about Asian IQ scores). I know not all of them literally want a white empire ruling the untermenschen. If you don't like the label, fair enough, but I wasn't directing it at you personally as a slur.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link