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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.

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)

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.).

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.

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.