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Given that we've already had our bit of Holocaust "revisionism" this early in the week, I thought I'd share some interesting, trivia, I guess that I recently learned of in that community.
I am given to understand that the most "mainstream" source of Holocaust revisionism is an organization called the Institute For Historical Review (IHR). They appear to be a pretty standard research organization in some ways, publishing papers and web articles and holding conferences and such. While they do not claim to be solely dedicated to the subject, they sure publish a good bit of material that's highly critical of Jews and their influence on the world, the history of the Holocaust, and apologetic towards the Nazi regime. I understand them to be the original source of many of the standard Holocaust denier talking points involving such things as "resettlement in the east".
It turns out that, way back in 2009, the director of the IHR, one Mark Weber, published an article titled "How Relevant is Holocaust Revisionism?" in which he basically admits that the mainstream historical view of the Holocaust is accurate. He hasn't really changed his mind that much - no indication of some cabal "getting to him" somehow. Rather, he now takes the position that while "Jewish-Zionist power is a palpable reality with harmful consequences for America, the Middle East, and the entire global community", the Holocaust basically happened the way it's described, but it's not really that important of a factor in "Jewish Power" and it's not a good use of their time to attack it. Here's a pull quote that I think is representative of the basic point he's making:
There's also a 30 minute video interview with one Jim Rizoli, a considerably more enthusiastic Holocaust denier, in which he expresses basically the same view and goes on in more detail about a few points. IMO, he comes off as pretty calm and reasonable, while Rizoli comes off as rather unhinged and obsessed.
I think I agree with him in the sense that, if you wanna try and make a point about the role and influence of Jews in today's society, go ahead and make it, but quibbling over the details of exactly what happened to how many in the Holocaust is pointless.
Yup. In Eastern Europe it was on the backburner - the powers that be pushed quite a bit harder for the glorious sacrifice and suffering of the USSR. When we learned in school in the late 90s for wwII (after berlin wall but still some cultural inertia left) and holocaust was presented as - there were extermination camps, couple of million of jews died, lets move on to the battle of Kursk.
In the 1980s and well into the 1990s the Holocaust was on the back burner in the UK for the same reason - as long as significant numbers of people who remembered the Blitz were still alive, no Briton was going to bellyfeel that anything else was Hitler's worst crime. The way history was taught in British schools was that Hitler was the evil Lord of Evil because he was bent on Alexander the Great/Genghis Khan style world conquest long after this had ceased to be acceptable behaviour. This became a Problem that required large-scale British military intervention to stop him several years before anyone came up with the Holocaust.
During the heroic period of WW2 (for the UK, from the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939 to El Alamein in July 1942), we couldn't have been fighting Hitler in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the Holocaust, because the Holocaust hadn't started yet.
FWIW, I still think that the traditional British view is correct (which was also the view of the Nuremberg prosecutors), and that the Holocaust lobby is wrong - Hitler's worst crime was starting WW2. He isn't uniquely evil compared to other warmongering megalomanicas, just uniquely deadly because of the large European population in the 20th century.
This is ultimately how I feel about it as well. The intense focus on the Holocaust in America is largely because our involvement in the european theater was pretty slim. And because it's no longer fashionable to hold racial grudges, our real enemy of the war is no longer a valid target for rage. Because we need some great evil, we had to reanimate Europe's Great Evil in order to pin the tail so to speak, but in doing so we really lose a lot of the focus on why he was so Great and Evil.
Our history courses are dogshit, so all we ever hear about is the holocaust as the main animus for war. It's rarely mentioned, if at all, that Hitler's Final Solution was named so because his economy wasn't doing so hot and moving millions of people forcibly turns out to be a nightmare. If any focus were placed on the Reich's economic policy or Hitler's command economy, it would fit a lot better; the problem is that to speak of such things is taboo. A socialist hitler never existed, dontcha know?
Revisionism is icky, but everyone does it. Finding actual truth requires debate, and in terms of the holocaust narrative very few people are willing to sit down and have a conversation about motives and the economics of the fourth reich. It's simpler to construct The Great Murderer (which he was) and forcefeed mostly-truths to unwitting teenagers, or to Completely Ignore the relevant evidence pertaining to genocide.
All war economies are command economies - in WW2 the US less so because the war was less total for the US than most other participants, but you still had pervasive wage and price controls, rationing of key commodities, and residual New Deal restrictions still in place. For the duration, the UK was as much of a command economy as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.
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Funny, I wanted to bring Genghis Khan up to make the opposite point. Mass murder is as old as humanity, we can wrap our heads around a conqueror setting our cities on fire, looting our treasure, and basking in the lamentations of our women, but the industrialization of genocide perfected by the Nazis turned into a cold "rational" process, that might have made even Genghis Khan say "bro, that's fucked up!".
If the Mongols felt that it was deserved, they would happily massacre a six-figure number of people after sacking a city (700,000 in Merv, which was the biggest single Mongol massacre). The high-end estimates of the total death toll of the Mongol conquests (military deaths, massacres, and war-related famines) are about half the population of the conquered territory, which is notably worse than Hitler. The macro-demographic impacts of the Mongol conquests can be detected in Arctic ice cores. Once you remember that the Holocaust was mostly the killing of conquered people (the German Jews were encouraged to emigrate, and the majority who did survived), I think you can see the industrialisation of it as the application of modern technology to the old problem of carrying out a wartime massacre.
I think Genghis Khan would have considered the Holocaust militarily stupid, but not ethically fucked up.
I deliberately put Alexander the Great in my post to make the point that at some point in the past "Conquer the World and kill everyone who resists" was considered OK if it was our guy doing it. But that had ceased to be the case after WW1, and arguably earlier than that. The idea that the 19th-century British Empire required a better moral justification than the sheer rapacity used to justify the 18th-century one seems to have been held pretty universally by the Victorians.
Germany had a serious problem with food supply during WW2, and they were ready to starve millions of Russians to death.. There were major issues implementing said policy, though still about 4 million died, with a million or two in the rest of Europe.
Holocaust would have been militarily stupid in the long term had Germany won the European war. Had Germany figured out some way of conquering Europe without having to kill millions of the its smartest subpopulation, they'd have had an edge in the subsequent cold war with the US.
German state ideology was thus that the ashkenazim couldn’t be integrated into the power structure.
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I think he'd have admired the effort but scowled at the irrationality. His own successes were precisely of the «cold rational industrial» nature.
Personally I have never been able to feel any special terror at the thought that Holocaust was «industrialized». I even suspect this is a rationalization of generic technophobia. «We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death» is a sentiment for peacetime. The civilization is full of inhuman, performance-optimizing industrial processes – such as our economic system with its inscrutable hedge-fund shoggoths and multilayer grift running on the lifeblood of commoners. Nazis themselves, of course, accused «the Jew» of mechanizing and perverting the Aryan way of life; as did Germans before them, lamenting the passing of pre-capitalistic world. In every case, the machine is only a tool wielded by humans.
I beg your pardon! I wear my technophobia proudly, and don't need industrialized genocide to excuse it!
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