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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

Yet, some people, including an American named Nick Fuentes, aggressively deny the Holocaust, asserting that a few hundred thousand Jews, not millions, were killed.

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..

Second, Holocaust denial is not only a Big Lie; it is pure Jew-hatred, i.e., antisemitism. The proof that it emanates from antisemitism is that no other 20th-century genocide is denied (with the exception of the Turkish government’s denial of the Turks’ mass murder of Armenians during World War I). No one denies Stalin’s mass murder of tens of millions of Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago or his deliberate starvation of about five million Ukrainians (the Holodomor); or the Cambodian communists’ murder of about one in every four Cambodians; or Mao’s killing of about 60 million Chinese. The only genocide-denial is the genocide of the Jews.

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 would your opinion change if Revisionists are right? Let's say there was no order or plan to exterminate the Jews, and there were no gas chambers at all, and the 6 million number was pure symbology that Jews forced into the historical record and refuse to let go because of its symbolic importance. Would that even affect your opinion of Revisionists or would you still dismiss them as just people who don't like Jews?

there were no gas chambers at all

Just forced labour camps? Just movement to be resettled in the East? Just smash up their property and declare them non-citizens? Just requiring everyone to prove they weren't descendants of filthy Jews?

Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien:

From a letter to Stanley Unwin 25 July 1938

[Allen & Unwin had negotiated the publication of a German translation of The Hobbit with Rütten & Loening of Potsdam. This firm wrote to Tolkien asking if he was of 'arisch' (aryan) origin.]

I must say the enclosed letter from Rütten and Loening is a bit stiff. Do I suffer this impertinence because of the possession of a German name, or do their lunatic laws require a certificate of 'arisch' origin from all persons of all countries?

Personally I should be inclined to refuse to give any Bestätigung (although it happens that I can), and let a German translation go hang. In any case I should object strongly to any such declaration appearing in print. I do not regard the (probable) absence of all Jewish blood as necessarily honourable; and I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.

You are primarily concerned, and I cannot jeopardize the chance of a German publication without your approval. So I submit two drafts of possible answers.

To Rütten & Loening Verlag

[One of the 'two drafts' mentioned by Tolkien in the previous letter. This is the only one preserved in the Allen & Unwin files, and it seems therefore very probable that the English publishers sent the other one to Germany. It is clear that in that letter Tolkien refused to make any declaration of 'arisch' origin.]

25 July 1938 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford

Dear Sirs,

Thank you for your letter. .... I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject – which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.

Your enquiry is doubtless made in order to comply with the laws of your own country, but that this should be held to apply to the subjects of another state would be improper, even if it had (as it has not) any bearing whatsoever on the merits of my work or its suitability for publication, of which you appear to have satisfied yourselves without reference to my Abstammung.

I trust you will find this reply satisfactory, and

remain yours faithfully

J. R. R. Tolkien.

Just all the above? The Revisionists still aren't coming out of this looking too good.

Just forced labour camps? Just movement to be resettled in the East? Just smash up their property and declare them non-citizens? Just requiring everyone to prove they weren't descendants of filthy Jews?

Yes, all of those things. Although the assignment of class of citizenship along with financial and legal privileges based on racial laws regarding Jewish descent has made a comeback with the state of Israel.

Just all the above? The Revisionists still aren't coming out of this looking too good.

Agree to disagree. Revisionists acknowledge all those bad things happened. If they acknowledge the bad things that happened actually happened, and the things that did not happen did not happen, that "they still aren't coming out of this looking too good" is only going to be the case for a certain type of fanatic.

I'll give you another example. There are some rabble-rousers publishing articles openly declaring skepticism of the alleged Kamloops mass graves and demanding an excavation. Someone like you might say: "The history of Residential schools and the Canadian treatment of the indigenous people was completely horrible. Even if it turns out that not a single person was buried among the hundreds of alleged graves, you still come out looking bad." A lot of people will take that position, like you, but I don't. I think it would be brave for people to trust their interpretation of the evidence rather than expert consensus and popular narratives. And if they turned out to be right I would have respect for that, but clearly you would not.

Oh it's bad stuff, I agree, but there is a historical context to it.

Besides, this kind of stuff is going on right now in Ukraine against the Russophone minorities, and I don't see much reaction besides enthusiasm coming from the people that want us to care about the Holocaust.

If anyone is doing it to any minority, it's wrong. Be it Germans and Jews, the British and Boer civilians, or Ukrainians and Russian-speakers.