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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.
The Holocaust killing millions is very well documented. I'm more of a mistake theorist than a conflict theorist, so I wouldn't call people who say the Holocaust killed 5% of what it actually did are necessarily evil, but I would say they're likely mentally ill(like Kanye) and/or have made some very poor decisions in which sources they want to trust.
The question of when information should be censored is not an easy one in my opinion. Especially because we can never really be sure when information is true or not; even in mathematics "proofs" that are widely accepted can be much later shown to be false. So all information, from the planet being round to evolution to covid policy to the holocaust would be kept open to debate in an ideal society. But in an ideal society then also on the easily answerable questions like the planet being round everyone would quickly come to the right answer, and for even trickier questions like covid policy everyone would quickly dismiss the stupid information like that vaccines are being used to implant microchips.
But we do not live in an ideal society, and if you let debate spread unhindered, you'll get a lot of people believing flat out wrong stuff. And that flat out wrong stuff can have harmful effects. For example, in the 14th century, the belief that Jews were related to the spread of the bubonic plague led to massacres of Jewish communities. I think with the benefit of hindsight, most modern people would agree that if they had the magic power to censor the belief that Jews spread the black plague(and there wouldn't be any butterfly effects through the timeline), they would, since that information was very harmful.
It is actually not well-documented at all. There are no written orders for extermination of millions, likely none ever existed. The "well-documented killings" amounts to historians tallying transports with the assumption that every single person on them was murdered in a gas chamber disguised as a shower room, which is not documented (and in fact documents explicitly refer to these alleged extermination camps with non-homicidal functions, like "transit camp" or "labor camp." Historians say this was all "coded language" to get around the fact that documents paint a different picture for the purposes of these camp than their own assertions). But there's never been a single excavation of a single mass grave at any of the alleged killing sites, despite the fact they exist in precisely known locations. There was never a single autopsy of a single person killed by one of these homicidal gas chambers. Excavations are in fact forbidden by Jewish authorities using the same reasoning as is being used to refuse excavations of the alleged Kamloops Indian Reservation mass graves. They say that excavations at Kamloops would "disturb the spirits of the children" which is practically the exact same reasoning given by rabbinical authorities. More likely, they know that excavations would disprove the prevailing narrative in both cases.
In essence, "If Holocaust Deniers Don’t Go to Hell, There Is No God" is simply the conservative manifestation of the Holocaust dialectic, with the leftist manifestation being Adorno's infamous quote "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."
Holocaust deniers tend to all focus on Auschwitz, and with good reason: it was a massive operation with three prominent subcamps, it had the most victims and most survivors, it received mostly western and Balkan Jews as well as POWs and political prisoners. In short, it had a wide range of experiences; which is ideal for someone who wants to chip away at a subject that an individual has a very general and non-specific understanding of.
A classic tactic of deniers (and conspiracy theorists in general) is to insert a wedge into the mind of a layman, and then try to lever it. They have a vast array of knowledge of all kinds of minutiae about the subject, and the layman does not. They have an endless arsenal of anecdotes or factoids or even legitimately true things that they known and the layman does not. A classic example would go like this: did you know Auschwitz had a swimming pool? It's true! The Germans even let prisoners use it! Boy, that doesn't sound like the sort of thing a death camp would have, now would it? Huh, I wonder why we never learned about that in history class... wonder what else we're not told about.
And then maybe the layman goes and googles it and boy, sure enough it's true. Of course some of the details are fudged: yes, there was a reservoir for firefighting that the German guards would swim in sometimes, and even let certain privileged political prisoners use from time to time. It was a massive operation, with thousands of guards and support staff that along with lodgings and mess halls needed some form of entertainment. And in the bigger picture it doesn't really change anything: somewhere close to a million people were murdered at Auschwitz, swimming pool or no. Someone posted the link to epistemic learned helplessness: this is the exact kind of thing that heuristic is meant to guard against.
So when @SecureSignals says something like "There are no written orders for extermination of millions", he's hoping you might go google it and think "well jeez, it turns out we don't have a Führerbefehl relating to the Holocaust. Why did I never know that?", and from that be incrementally swayed to his side. Of course, if you were to actually read a history of the Holocaust you would know; but most people don't read history books about any subject, and let pop culture shape their impressions for them.
Holocaust deniers have in previous decades focused on Auschwitz because the historical narrative, and particularly the cultural depiction of the Holocaust in popular culture, was focused on Auschwitz. After all, until the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s it was claimed that four million people were murdered at Auschwitz, only to be revised downwards to the still-wildly inflated 1.5 million. Auschwitz is also the only "extermination camp" which claimed to have an intact gas chamber, the "gas chamber" which you will see frequently posted to the front-page of Reddit and has been visited by millions of unwitting tourists.
It was the Revisionists who visited the archives and procured the blueprints which label this room a morgue (Leichenkeller) during the period it was allegedly a gas chamber. It was Revisionists who exposed in an undercover interview the head of the Auschwitz Museum admitting that the "Zyklon introductory chimneys" in that room were in fact "reconstructions" built post-war in Soviet-occupied Poland, whereas previously all were told that they were original structures attesting to the homicidal function of the room.
If you talk to a smart anti-denier, he will downplay the importance of Auschwitz and in particular the importance of that famous gas chamber on the Auschwitz tour (the only one left standing at any of the extermination camps!). But that's only because Revisionists have forced a retreat.
Well then help bring back the people who would potentially be swayed upon learning that there are no such documents ordering the extermination of the Jews. You say "if you would read a history book, you would know", but can you just explain it to everyone real quick and save them the trouble? Why are there no documents, @johnfabian?
Gee, I guess these American photographers who took pictures like this were all lying and faking too, then, SecureSignals?
Or this one:
Who are the actors playing Patton, Bradley and Eisenhower in this one?
Plainly the Eisenhower presidential library is just unreliable source!
The photos only prove that many starved and many died. Look at photos of Andersonville prisoners from the American Civil War, they look the same. That doesn’t mean necessarily that there were gas chambers or a deliberate extermination program.
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