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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?

I suppose that's kind of like asking me "What if you found out the creationists are right and the Earth is 6000 years old?" I'd be surprised that they got that one right and wonder what else they were right about, but it wouldn't convince me that everything else they believe is true.

Well you are kind of making it sound like you would just be surprised that somebody got a particularly hard trivia question right. It wouldn't change your perception of the world in any way? When I realized that Revisionists are in fact correct, it did not make me wonder what else they were right about, it changed the way I interpret popular culture and a lot of the cultural signals which were previously influential in my perception of history, morality, and politics.

It's interesting that you compare it to young-earth Creationism being truthful, so that leads me to think you would agree that it would have a significant impact of your perception on the world. Obviously, if young-earth Creationism were true it would significantly overhaul my perception of the world.

It wouldn't change your perception of the world in any way?

Well, obviously. Learning that the Earth is 6000 years old would change everything we know about science. Considering what would have to be true for the Holocaust to be a hoax, yes, I'd consider it nearly as dramatic.

I guess what you're getting at is, would I be convinced to join the resistance against the ZOG? And just like learning creationism is true wouldn't prove to me that Christianity is true, learning that the Holocaust didn't happen would not convince me that ZOG exists.

Learning the earth was really 6000 years old would actually go a pretty long way towards convincing me Christianity is true. Maybe it doesn’t necessarily follow in a strict logical sense, but it would adjust my trust in the involved parties in such a radical way I would have to consider Christians the most trustworthy generally