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I've been thinking for a while that the issue with society's response to Holocaust revisionism/denial is that we are seeing a very well-crafted piece of societal engineering (one of the instances that I actually think of as good evidence in favour of @DaseindustriesLtd's "political von Neumanns", whose influence I'm otherwise skeptical of, existing), whose effectivity in part depends on a lack of widespread understanding of its purpose among everyone including most Jews, doing its job against intended targets, as well as a handful of people (chiefly "sees a fishy orthodoxy and pathologically can't resist" autistic contrarians, but also excessive pattern-matchers with a beef against elites, in the Kanye class) getting caught as collateral damage.
WWII was, by all accounts, pretty catastrophic for humanity across all strata, destroyed untold amounts of value and industrial potential, and uncharacteristically created pain even for those social strata that normally are very good at keeping themselves shielded from any calamities short of disease and death, and for whom the social contract so far had been "we don't interfere with you living your life where and how you want close to the optimum the current tech level has to offer, in return you take token care of the plebs and advance our common intellectual and spiritual life when you feel like it". If you had to prevent "something like it" - where "it" is basically a modern, industrious, intelligent nation suddenly conquestmaxing with only a handful of years' warning - from happening again, what would you do? Simple global disarmament won't fly, because Moloch, likewise for wars of aggression, and even restricting nationalism in general won't fly, because Moloch and without nationalism you will lose against any defector that is willing to use that social tech to make its soldiers fight harder. So what's a specific, necessary and sufficient, prerequisite for any country to pull what Germany did then?
The answer on which the current architecture is based is "topple the Jews", as the Jews are a natural tripwire population for exactly that sort of thing. By virtue of aptitude and connections they float to top positions in every mostly-free country earlier or later, and by virtue of the strong ethnic identity they always have solidarity/altruism for their fellow Jews everywhere. If you want to unleash a rain of steel and fire over Europe, but you haven't removed the Jews from the top rungs of your society, then you'll find that your plans will fail, because they will be represented in every organisation that is involved in your country functioning and at least a good subset of them will be more incentivised to save their fellow Jews in the countries you seek to trample from your plans than by whatever you could offer them for cooperating with you. Now, of course, you might naively be tempted to just make this argument explicit; but then I would reckon that absent extra memes, for any leadership that has already convinced its population of the necessity of conquest-maxing, completing the inference chain by "and therefore we need to make the Jews stand aside, so we can go forward with what we must do" would be a formality. It is only by maintaining the perception that going against the Jews qua Jews is an ethical singularity that this last step becomes hard. This maintenance, however, has always seemed like a fragile affair (with threats constantly emerging left and right, from displeasure with Israel to displeasure with capitalism to most recently displeasure with white people), with the Holocaust narrative in its current form being the most reliable support of the edifice. Challenge the sacredness of it, and you might just find that you lost the last thing that pinned the singularity to minus infinity in human moral space; and if people can start bargaining about an exact finite price to put on removing the Jews, then it's only a matter of time until the next conquest-maxer successfully makes the argument to their population that it is a price worth paying for their cause. Therefore, we get the system in which Holocaust revisionism seeking a specific adjustment and even general attempts to profane the topic by dispassionate historical review are quashed, but everyone has to act coy about why this is, further triggering the pattern-matchers and /r/atheists to dig themselves into a social hole.
(How many people, either on the mainstream side or on the Holocaust revisionist side, actually think of it primarily in these terms? I should clarify that I'm actually in the pro-mainstream camp because I think the tripwire system has done great things for us, but I can imagine that many nationalists would in fact be motivated by at least a diffuse understanding that Holocaust figures in a roundabout way underpin the enduring emasculation of their country as an absolute ceiling on how far it could go in pursuing its own interest on the world stage.)
(A funny consequence, I think, is the disconnect that we're now seeing over the Ukraine narrative. The Soviet Union never was brought into this tripwire architecture, and though to some extent "one in our midst might go military FOOM" was never even a concern they shared, to the extent to which they've set up Nazi-detection heuristics at all, it's just "wants to threaten Russia". Therefore to Westerners Zelenskiy's Jewishness makes the "Ukronazis" narrative look comically incoherent, whereas to Russians it's just a curiosum that has little bearing on the perceived plausibility of it)
I don't think of myself as a decoupler, but rather, as someone who is all but incapable of coupling. I would never be able to form the link between "removing the Jews" and "imperialist empire." However, if your hypothesis that people have subconsciously formed this link in response to social pressures, then that is quite interesting and I will have to consider it.
Sorry if that wasn't clear, but my argument wasn't resting on people having to form some sort of mental association between the two; rather, I posited that without doing the former, doing the latter (while targeting your fellow developed countries) would be practically impossible. In a hypothetical world where people were actually biologically incapable of associating the two, the result I would expect would just be that those who tried the latter without coincidentally also doing the former would just fail without understanding what went wrong.
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"de-facto Jewish conspiracy exists and is a good thing as prevents world-wars" is a take that I have not seen before, so points for originality at least.
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The consensus narrative about the Holocaust might genuinely be the last support pillar holding up America's triumphalist narrative built from the end of WWII. Everything else about the rah-rah story that America used to justify its superpower status has been picked apart by a combination of history nerds and leftists with axes to grind, turning the idea of American Exceptionalism into a sham.
If even the Holocaust is turned into "boring reality," devoid of those more powerful and special qualities of narratives, reduced to another part of the "outdated" and "misinformed" story that conservative, religious boomers tell themselves about how America was great, and becoming a "race card" that Israel plays whenever it's criticized for whatever it did in Palestine on any given week, I suspect that not only will the Nazis be turned into "just another war-monging power" from an age few remember as anything but the boring, deadly past (and thus losing their uniqueness as an antagonistic force, no more or less immoral than America, Britain, or Russia), it will indeed be "fair game" all around WRT conquestmaxing and general politics-by-other-means.
Japan in WWII is also another example that doesn't fit your "tripwire" architecture, to my knowledge, as they'd already been a colonial power that had been snatching up other parts of Asia for decades beforehand (Korea, Manchuria, Qingdao, etc.).
It is easy to imagine that WW2 in general and holocaust in particular will be put on backburner and quietly forgotten, it is easy to imagine that foundation myth of new rules based international order in Cold War Two era will be Cold War One and brilliant American victory over Red Russkies.
Bored of holocaust movies? Get ready for deluge of gulag movies with Russian beasts behaving maximally sadistically brutally. Tired of compulsory holocaust classes? Get ready for gulag education at every school.
Exxageration? Germany, always the bellwether, is ready to classify Ukrainian famine as genocide (scholarly consensus? who needs scholarly consensus). Russian Z is already treated as hate symbol equal to nazi ones, other russkie/commie symbols will easily follow.
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Is it? My impression was that winning the Cold War was actually played up more these days. After all, the "Soviets only won because of lend-lease" narrative never really caught on, giving the Soviets at least a roughly equal share at the table of WWII winners in the public mind, thus not on its own really painting America as exceptional.
Well, yeah, the architecture doesn't work for those countries; it's not clear to me if the problem of the emergence of a potential WWII-Japan-like power in that area was in fact solved for that region, but maybe the victorious powers didn't consider it that concerning for some reason or another (perhaps they thought that the conditions for Japan's rise were more unique, or they were happy that the semi-permanent US occupation force plus denuclearisation were enough, or they figured that ultimately China is inevitably going to dominate the region and they can't do anything about it even if they wanted).
I actually just had to explain to my boomer dad the other day that the USSR was on our side in WW2. I'm honestly not sure how much credit they get in the view of the general public.
I've heard similar sentiments from the US before, so maybe it's different there compared to Europe (where, in the recent years, the "US did more" narrative has been winning out, but it's still not "Russia did little compared to it" outside of boo-lights discussions inspired by more recent events). In what country do you consider the maintenance of America's "triumphalist narrative" to be important? I find it hard to imagine that Americans would stop thinking of America as exceptional just because WWII receded into boring ancient history, whereas I do still think that in Europe its reputation never was exclusively dependent on it.
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If?
When.
The horrors of history always end up being mundane, and so it will end up too with the XXth century. It's only a question of time.
I'm more pessimistic, I think ideology can buttress whatever gap the passage of time leaves. Anti-semites still hate Jews for things that happened in Biblical times (or Quranic(?) times), Irish nationalists were more militant against the British in the 1920s than they were in the 1840s.
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On the other hand, the past can be scoured indefinitely long ago and reinterpreted to fit the current narrative. See how Columbus went from being a point of pride of Italo-Americans and that celebrations were held to commerorate the 500th anniversary of his discovery, to him now being vilified.
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