New Podcast Appearance: DOOMED With Matt Binder

I appeared on Matt Binder's podcast DOOMED last night. Here's the appearance plus another hour or so of content from him. Worth subscribing and watching often. I'll be back in a week or two with this term's research paper (finally).

live now with @thamesdarwin discussing holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists. tune in: https://t.co/wVqBrTGmod

— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) May 3, 2019

Mattogno on Riga, Part Four: Polishing a Turd

I’m going to finish this series on Carlo Mattogno’s treatment of the murder on 30 November 1941 of thousands of Latvian Jews, plus a thousand Reich Jews who had just arrived in Riga, by making a few general observations.

Before that, however, a couple of confessions. First, I’m not an historian, although I do have an undergraduate history degree (summa cum laude) and 20 graduate credits in history (U.K. system). Also, I’ve never read a whole book by Mattogno. Readers of this blog will know that I am not a coauthor of the white paper published by most of the bloggers here several years ago, despite being one of the blog’s founders. Therefore, the extent to which I can claim any expertise on the topic at hand should be considered with those points in mind.

I spent the last week or so writing around 2,000 words on roughly ten pages of “history” written by Mattogno. While not an expert per se, I can state the following with confidence. Mattogno’s writing of history is terrible – just awful. If I submitted a paper for a grade with the kinds of errors he makes (or lies he tells), I’d get a failing grade. Were I a peer reviewer who received his work to be considered for publication in a scholarly journal (a job I have, in fact, done in a different field of the humanities), not only would I reject it outright, refusing to consider it further upon revision, but I would seriously doubt the field expertise and/or intellectual honesty of the writer.

In the ten pages on Riga alone, in a mere 2,000 words, I’ve managed to point out a number of serious methodological errors and instances of outright lying. This is not an historian – this is either an imbecile or an ideologue bent on falsifying the historical record. That Mattogno is routinely held up as the leading light of “revisionist scholarship” says a boatload about the quality of the scholarship we’re talking about. That he has managed to keep his hands relatively clean regarding overt anti-Semitism (a claim his coauthor Jurgen Graf cannot make) is a worthless distinction given the pitiful state of his “research."

“But look at all the footnotes!” Footnotes are worthless unless they’re deployed honestly. Yes, Mattogno cites a number of sources, but he doesn’t bother to present the material in those sources honestly or thoroughly.

“Thousands of pages can’t be wrong!” Yes, they can. Plus, did you ever notice how many of those pages are taken up by direct quotations? If he were a student, Mattogno would be cited for plagiarism despite acknowledging his sources because the sheer volume of quoted material is so great.

“He’s an expert in textual analysis!” Really? Who says? He doesn’t appear to have a degree in anything except (perhaps) classics and philosophy. I assume he learned some textual analysis as part of that process. That does not, however, make one an expert. Nor are the “readings” that he offers of many texts plausible or defensible.

Carlo Mattogno is a charlatan of the highest order. That he can reasonably present the veneer of respectability is beside the point. You can only polish that turd so much.

Mattogno on Riga, Part Three: Hierarchies Are Hard

Having addressed Mattogno’s butchering of the Keine Liquidierung phone note and ignorance of points like basic meteorology, geography, and arithmetic, we move in this post to discussing how Mattogno addresses the aftermath of the shooting of a thousand Reich Jews in Riga on 30 November 1941. The “orthodox” history has it that, Lange having lodged a complaint about this shooting to RSHA and thus to Himmler, Himmler issued the orders the following day regarding the ongoing disposition of Reich Jews arriving in Riga and Minsk and summoned Jeckeln on 4 December to discuss events.

Mattogno’s first point of contention here regards why Jeckeln’s shooting of Reich Jews on 30 November should warrant the attention of Heydrich and Himmler, but the shooting of Reich Jews in Kaunas on 25 and 29 November by Karl Jäger’s Einsatzkommando would not; he writes (p. 217), “Therefore, as Himmler did with Jeckeln, the SS should also have summoned Jäger for a reprimand.” Again, on its face, this seems like a reasonable argument. However, there are a few key differences between the cases that Mattogno does not acknowledge.

First, there was no conflict of interest or “turf war” in Kaunas as there was in Riga. After all, Lange did not raise the issue of Reich Jews in Riga being shot because he was particularly concerned with their lives. Rather, he seems to have been motivated by the need to apportion some Jews to work detail and, perhaps as importantly, the fear that his prerogative to manage the arrival and treatment of Reich Jews in Riga, which he had been assigned as a member of the SD, would be taken over by Jeckeln. Also, it’s worth noting that it was Lange who had routed the Reich Jews shot in Kaunas to that city in the first place; therefore, if anyone would have raised an alarm, it would have been he.

Second, there is again the matter of geography – Riga is not Kaunas, and more importantly, the people stationed in each city were different. Jäger’s immediate superior, Stahlecker, was stationed in Riga; in contrast, Jeckeln, as an HSSPF, had Himmler as his immediate superior. Therefore, while Stahlecker, like Lange, could have taken issue with Jäger’s shooting of Reich Jews five days and one day earlier and some reprimand given, that they were in different cities made such a scenario less likely to have yet emerged, particularly while occurring in the context of the Jews of the Kaunas Ghetto being shot at the same time. Complicating matters is that, as I pointed out in my article on the Keine Liquidierung note, it seems fairly clear that Stahlecker wasn’t even in Riga on the dates in question. Otherwise, as Finnberg pointed out in his testimony, Lange would have brought his complaint directly to Stahlecker.

Mattogno pulls something similar in discussing the dispute that arose between Hinrich Lohse, Reichskommissar for Ostland, and the SS regarding the need to keep Jews alive for labor. Noting that Jeckeln claimed to have been ordered by Himmler to exterminate the Jews in the Riga Ghetto on 10 or 11 November, Mattogno points to a document dated 20 November from the Generalkommissar for Latvia, Otto-Heinrich Drechsler, commenting on labor assignments for ghetto Jews. Clearly, if the Jews of the ghetto were to be exterminated, Drechsler’s document makes no sense. Mattogno writes (p. 225), “Can one seriously believe that the Generalkommisar in Riga, who issued these orders, had never heard of Himmler’s alleged extermination order?”

Well, frankly, yes. Drechsler’s immediate superior was Lohse, who in turn reported directly to Alfred Rosenberg as Minister for the Eastern Territories – the civilian occupation regime. Jeckeln, as noted, reported directly to Himmler. Since the dispute between Lohse and the SS was ongoing, there is no reason to think Drechsler would not have begun planning to deploy the Riga Ghetto Jews for labor, particularly since, when he wrote the document in question, the Jews in the ghetto were still alive.    

A key thing to point out here is that there are two possibilities for what Mattogno has done in these cases. Either Mattogno doesn’t know or understand the differences in hierarchies between the SD, on the one hand, and the SS and Police Leaders, on the other, or between the SS hierarchy in the east and that of the civilian administration, or he’s deliberately obfuscating. The man has written several books on the topic of Nazi Germany’s crimes against humanity, so the odds favor the latter, although I suppose the former is possible.

The next and last part of this series will offer some final observations on how Mattogno has treated this topic. Spoiler alert: He has done so badly.

Mattogno on Riga, Part Two: Phone Calls in Riga, Prague, and Berlin

Picking up where I left off in my last post, Carlo Mattogno’s treatment of the mass shooting of Latvian Jews, as well as a thousand newly arrived Reich Jews, on 30 November 1941 is riddled with errors and lapses in logic. After briefly remarking on the discrepancy between the actual date of the shooting and the date as reported in Stahlecker’s famous report of the following year (“in early December”), Mattogno writes (p. 216), “The exact date is important because the shooting of the Jewish transport early in the morning depended precisely on the large number of persons who were to be killed during the day. This has its logic, but if 45 minutes (from 8:15 to 9:00 AM) was time enough to kill 1,000 persons (according to the verdict in the Riga Trial), then why did it require more than seven hours to kill 4,000 people? At Riga, in fact, the sun only came up at 8:34 AM on 30 November, and it set at 3:50 PM.”

Mattogno on Riga, Part One: Keine Liquidierung Revisited

With my blogmates already having responded to parts of Carlo Mattogno’s magnum opus on the Einsatzgruppen, I decided to have a look at the ten pages Mattogno dedicates to the killings in the fall of 1941 in Riga – a topic I’ve had occasion to look at very closely over the last couple of years. I put together some of the theories about the famous Keine Liquidierung note a few years back; for his part, Mattogno seems to have stuck with some of the less compelling explanations.

Unz, Roberts, and Irving

Simul-blogged at Holocaust Controversies

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how Paul Craig Roberts, a former Reagan administration Treasury official, was dancing tantalizingly close to flat-out Holocaust denial. He's back again, now defending the choice of libertarian activist and one-time California gubernatorial candidate Ron Unz to publish David Irving's Hitler's War on his website, Unz.com, which publishes a variety of libertarian materials, as well as "race realism," anti-Zionist polemics, and other generally far-right materials.

For his own part, Unz is a bit of a cipher. For instance, he is Jewish himself, although we have seen in the cases of Gilad Atzmon, Paul Eisen, and others that being Jewish isn't always a guarantee against anti-Semitism. For a while now, Unz has drawn suspicion for his willingness to publish blatantly anti-Semitic material, although he has generally been able to defend his editorial judgment on the basis of his libertarian leanings. This orientation has generally led to the comments threads at Unz.com being something of a free for all, as I'd noted in the past. Sergey Romanov has also commented here on Unz's activites in this regard.

The publication of Hitler's War, however, seems to indicate a kind of Rubicon. Along with the book in HTML form, Unz has also published an accompanying essay entitled "The Remarkable Historiography of David Irving." In that essay, Unz muses on his own relative ignorance of WWII historiography before encountering Irving's work and asks, "All his material is massively footnoted, referencing copious documents in numerous official archives, but how could I possibly muster the time or energy to verify them?" He continues, "Rather ironically, an extremely unfortunate turn of events seems to have fully resolved that crucial question."

From here, Unz launches into a short history (as he understands it) of the Lipstadt case as emblematic of, as he calls it, the work of "zealous ethnic-activists" (read: Jews). As he describes the events culminating in the London lawsuit, "This development [i.e., Lipstadt labeling Irving a Holocaust denier] eventually sparked a rancorous lawsuit in 1998, which resulted in a celebrated 2000 libel trial held in British Court." The next paragraph is worth quoting in full:

That legal battle was certainly a David-and-Goliath affair, with wealthy Jewish movie producers and corporate executives providing a huge war-chest of $13 million to Lipstadt’s side, allowing her to fund a veritable army of 40 researchers and legal experts, captained by one of Britain’s most successful Jewish divorce lawyers. By contrast, Irving, being an impecunious historian, was forced to defend himself without benefit of legal counsel.

Well, most importantly here, Irving was not "defending himself"; he had brought the suit himself, against one of the world's largest publishing houses. He had also been stupid enough to do so in the U.K., where the law required him to pay the costs of the defense should he lose. Instead, the way Unz presents it, Big Bad Deborah Lipstadt victimized poor old David Irving, dragging him into a court with her millions of dollars, and bullied him into bankruptcy. Whether Unz knows this is the exactly opposite of what actually happened in Irving v. Lipstadt or is merely ignorant, I can't say, but the necessary conclusions we must draw are, respectively, that Unz is lying for devious purposes or he was so careless as to not familiarize himself with the merest details of the case.

This lying by omission or frankly catastrophic ignorance carries over to his treatment of the findings in the case. Unz writes, "[T]he worst they discovered after reading every page of the many linear meters of Irving’s personal diaries was that he had once composed a short 'racially insensitive' ditty for his infant daughter, a trivial item which they naturally then trumpeted as proof that he was a 'racist.'" He draws this conclusion, it seems, on reading (perhaps) Lipstadt's own version of events in her book History on Trial, rather than the book distilled from the expert testimony of Richard Evans (Lying About Hitler), who was the primary historian-witness at the Lipstadt trial refuting both Irving's version of historical events and his historical methods. Evans's book details how Irving systematically misrepresented primary sources or ignored them altogether as part of an overall project to exculpate Hitler for crimes, misdeeds, and mistakes.

Finally, Unz tells us that, adding insult to injury, Irving was jailed in Austria after being convicted of denying the Holocaust there on a trip in 2005. I commented on this turn of events at the time, and I remain convinced of the opinion I expressed then. That point notwithstanding, it's clear that Unz has published Hitler's War at least in part in admiration for Irving's free speech battles -- as he understands them. The conclusions we must draw are clear: Unz is either actively shilling for Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism now or is a useful idiot contributing to their cause.

What about Roberts? His defense of Unz is both more amusing in its blunders and more consistent with his previous pieces. Here is Roberts's version of events:

Zionists destroyed David Irving’s livelihood with slander and libel, because he made public a letter from the former chancellor of Germany, Hitler’s predecessor, to Winston Churchill, a letter that Irving found in the American publisher’s file of Winston Churchill’s history of the war, and which the publisher prevented Churchill from publishing in his history. The former chancellor of Germany, who escaped the Nazis and lived in England, wrote to Churchill that two of Hitler’s financiers were Jews who managed two of the largest banks in Germany. One was a Zionist leader. The letter exists, and there is no reason to doubt its honesty. However, for making an important historical document public, Irving was labeled by a vicious propaganda campaign an “anti-semite” and “holocaust denier.”

Putting aside the fact that the charge of libel was disproved in court, the story of the former German chancellor (here he refers to Heinrich Brüning, the second-to-last chancellor before Hitler) is one I hadn't heard before. The lack of dates provided by Roberts makes it difficult to discern the particulars of the story of Irving being destroyed for daring to publish this letter, although it is possible, I suppose, that Irving was first to locate this information. I do, however, also note that Irving has published the letter in question at his site, and he makes no mention in doing so that he suffered any consequences regarding the letter. I know enough about David Irving to know that no opportunity to bemoan his own persecution would go unexploited.

Roberts continues

Another Irving honesty, the one that destroyed him, was that after 10 years of research he could not find one document that provided evidence for the claim that Hitler personally conducted the holocaust or that he even knew about it. Irving did find and report documents that he made available in which Hitler issues orders prohibiting extermination of Jews.

I've already written extensively on one of these pieces of evidence. Roberts as least has the sense (or lacks knowledge) to avoid referring explicitly to the Lipstadt case. He also, like Unz, does not state his own particular set of beliefs about these matters. Both men are apparently still too attached to whatever support, monetary or otherwise, that they receive from people who disdain Holocaust denial to plainly state what they seem to be strongly suggesting is their point of view.

Therefore, I invite Messrs. Unz and Roberts to clearly state their own points of view. They live in a country where they cannot be punished for doing so. Rather than coy dancing around the point, let them be the brave defenders of history and truth as they apparently see them. Then, let them defend those points of view in discussion and debate.

Stefan Molyneux Is Holocaust Denier-Adjacent

Simul-blogged at Holocaust Controversies

You probably missed, but there was a bit of a dust-up a couple of days ago on Twitter. What happened was that, about a month ago, New Atheist Sam Harris hosted Christian Picciolini on his podcast. Picciolini is a former leader of the Hammerskins skinhead group who reformed several years ago and now does the lecture circuit talking about how to prevent/undo the damage done by such groups. During the Q&A section of podcast, Picciolini stated his belief that Stefan Molyneux, the very popular Irish-Canadian YouTube (on who much more here). Now, weeks later, Harris announced that he had expunged all mention of Molyneux from his podcast, apparently because Molyneux lodged a complaint with Harris. For his own part, Picciolini took to Twitter to complain and offered some evidence.

So what's the deal here? Is Stefan Molyneux a Holocaust denier?

No, but he is Holocaust denier-adjacent.

This is a blog about Holocaust denial, so I won't bore you here by providing you with some definition of denial and showing you that Molyneux doesn’t exactly fit the bill. But what is this adjacency of which I speak? It boils down to a few key points.

1) Molyneux frequently engages in anti-Semitic rhetoric that, at the very least, seeks to "explain" anti-Semitism by identifying Jews behaving badly. For instance, while I certainly have issues with some of the content from its editor, this video provides some good examples. Among other topics, Molyneux details how communism generally and Bolshevism specifically were really Jewish movements. To be clear, it's true that the number of Jews among the Bolsheviks was larger than their proportion in the general population. It's also true that, by WWII, most of them were gone -- Kaganovich and Livtnov* being the notable exceptions. It's moreover true that other political parties in revolutionary Russia and had far higher proportions of Jewish members: specifically the Mensheviks, the General Jewish Workers' Association (the Bund), and the Zionist parties. The latter two were, in fact, entirely Jewish. Why so many Jews in left-wing parties? The answer is a pretty simple one. Left-wing politics seek to disturb pre-existing hierarchies. Jews were near the bottom of the Tsarist hierarchy. Do the math.

2) Molyneux has hosted Holocaust deniers on his show. In particular, Molyneux has hosted Chuck Johnson (discussed by our own Sergey Romanov here) and "Styxhexenhammer666," on whom see this RationalWiki article. Maybe Molyneux hosted these guys before they became deniers? One of Sergey's archived links is from January 2017; Molyneux last hosted Johnson one month earlier. But Molyneux also tweeted out a statement supportive of Johnson six months after that. With Styxhexenhammer, Molyneux has hosted him more than once since his denial statements.

3) He seems to buy every other Jewish conspiracy theory. OK, not the really dumb ones like blood libels, but he's constantly bleating about "cultural Marxism," and there's a good case to be made that this is really just an anti-Semitic dog whistle. Is it possible that Molyneux doesn't realize that it is? Sure, it's possible -- it's just not likely.

All of that makes him denier-adjacent, in my opinion. Others might call aspects of Molyneux's shtick "soft denial." That works too.

But is he a racist? Oh, you betcha.

======
* Litvinov gets an asterisk in this case due to his removal from office by Stalin, purportedly because he was Jewish and therefore an inappropriate representative of the Soviet foreign ministry and signing a non-aggression pact with the Nazis. He eventually returned to the foreign ministry. Yes, Lenin was apparently one-quarter Jewish by ancestry; no, he did not identify as Jewish, nor was he raised Jewish. No, Stalin was not Jewish. Nor was Beria.

Paul Craig Roberts Crosses the Line

Simulblogged at Holocaust Controversies

If you've never heard of Paul Craig Roberts, don't feel bad. As a public figure, he seems to have hit his high water mark during the Reagan Adminstration as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, where he stridently defended supply-side economic policy. Since 2001, he has been a rather loud voice among the 9/11 truth movement, which dovetails nicely with his Buchanan-esque paleoconservative views of Israel. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his writings over the last decade or so have walked a very fine line between perhaps overly vehement but otherwise justifiable attacks on Israel's role in American foreign policy to overtly anti-Semitic rhetoric. I want to be clear before continuing that I don't know whether Roberts is an anti-Semite and am not saying that he is. But with his latest column, he has crossed over a divide -- whether he knows it or not -- into plain Holocaust denial. And for this, he needs to answer.

Roberts's column posted on May 3, entitled "Morality, Truth, Facts Have Exited From The Dying West," begins by addressing remarks made Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in a speech to the Palestinian National Council on April 30 -- or more correctly addressing the response by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who called Abbas's remarks Holocaust denial. To be clear, I don’t know what Abbas actually said, but if the reporting is correct, then his remarks were at the very least insensitive and overly general regarding the causes of European anti-Semitism and its relationship with Zionism. That Abbas has a history of overt Holocaust denial (having written a doctoral dissertation several decades ago that minimized the death toll) didn't help Abbas's case here. For what it's worth, he has since apologized.

Roberts first expresses agreement with Abbas's remark that European anti-Semitism was not Christian in origin but rather an outgrowth of Jewish control over money lending (again, a bit of an overgeneralization), but in the fourth paragraph, he really hits his stride:

What was the Holocaust? According to zionists, the Holocaust was National Socialist Germany’s elimination of 6 million Jews by first gassing them and then cremating the bodies. It is unclear how Germany managed this feat when all of its limited and dwindling resources were employed, unsuccessfully as it turns out, on the Russian front.

The first problem, obviously, is that the definition he provides is not one limited to only "zionists" [sic]. More importantly, as noted in numerous blog posts here, no responsible historian claims that the Nazis gassed six million Jews. Fewer than three million deaths of Jews during the war can be attributed conclusively to gassing; at least an equal number were shot by Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union, were starved or died from disease in ghettos or non-death camps, or were murdered by Axis allies.

His third point is also a bit of a groaner, although if we could extend the benefit of the doubt to him regarding good faith, we might say it's a decent question. Enough ink has been spilled on the topic of the changing nature of Nazi Jewish policy during the Barbarossa campaign, so I won't reinvent that wheel here except to note that Roberts seems woefully under-read on this topic. Anyone with more than a miniseries-level knowledge of the Holocaust would consider the whole paragraph an exercise in either total ignorance of historical facts or evidence of bad faith.

Roberts continues:

Photos demonstrating the Holocaust include dead skeletal-like bodies. But these are not people gassed and cremated. These are deaths from typhus and starvation. The disintegrating German state had no food or medicines for Germans and often not for its own soldiers. Concentration camp inmates were on the bottom of the totem pole.

True enough, the bodies in German camps found by American and British liberators were of Jews who died of disease and starvation. To his credit, Roberts does not try to claim that these dead Jews are not the responsibility of the German state. But that's a less interesting point than feeling the need to point this fact out at all. Where have I seen this before? Oh yes! That Roberts deploys an opening gambit of virtually every Holocaust denier I've encountered over the last 20 years is probably not a vote in his favor here

The next few paragraphs is really where the rubber meets the road, so I want to drill down on these a bit. He begins, "We know very little about the Holocaust, because no one is allowed to study it."

Actually, we know a tremendous amount about the Holocaust and what we know about it we know because people have routinely been able to study it. This might seem axiomatic, but apparently it isn't, since it's another commonly used opening gambit used by deniers. More on this below.

Roberts continues, "Anyone in Europe who studies it and makes the slightest correction to the zionist narrative is arrested and imprisoned as a Holocaust denier."

Putting aside the point addressed above about a "zionist narrative," Roberts is simply wrong. Assuming by "zionist narrative," he means that European Jews were deliberately murdered in numbers of approximately six million by the Nazis, using methods including poison gas, then perhaps he isn't aware that this account is routinely modified on the basis of newly available evidence. Interestingly, one of the things that has happened is that the death toll estimated by historians has tended to go up, not down. Gerald Reitlinger (a European) estimated the number of deaths as falling in range of 4.3 million to 4.7 million in 1953; Raul Hilberg (another European, albeit eventually a naturalized American) estimated the number at 5.1 million in 1961. These numbers, by the way, were already at odds with numbers estimated by, e.g., the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry tasked with estimating this number. Reitlinger wasn't prosecuted for estimating a number fully 1.5 million smaller than the "official" estimate.

Roberts again: "There is no doubt that many Jews were killed, but there are different views about the various means employed and the extent to which the process was organized or haphazard. Before differences could be resolved and sorted out, the subject was put off limits."

Compare Mark Weber's writing from "The Holocaust: Let's Hear Both Sides": "They ["revisionists"] do not dispute the fact that large numbers of Jews were deported to concentration camps and ghettos, or that many Jews died or were killed during the Second World War."

Regarding the means employed, to be clear, there are not different views, at least among anyone who has taken the time to explore the issue. Regarding whether the process was organized or haphazard, thereby hangs a tale -- one told here and elsewhere repeatedly, despite Roberts's assurance that such a discussion is "off limits."

Two points bear mention here. The first is the intentionalist-functionalist debate, which I wrote about here. If it interests you, you can read about it further, but suffice it to say that it was perhaps the major point of dispute among historians for a couple of decades, and nobody went to prison.

The second point is the Historikerstreit, or "historians' fight" of the 1980s and 1990s, during which conservative German scholars openly questioned the extent to which the Holocaust might have been a natural reaction on the part of the Nazis to Bolshevist terror, which was believed by many people, not just Nazis, to be specifically Jewish in origin (owing to the Jewish backgrounds of many early Bolsheviks). None of these historians were punished either. Many of them wrote canonical works in the historiography of the Third Reich (e.g., Ernst Nolte) that remain important.

Not to put too fine a point on this issue, but I've spent the last two years researching fairly intensively the Holocaust in the Baltic States and eastern Poland. Trust me when I tell you that no small amount of the work in this area has examined the extent to which Jews living in these regions might have provoked the anger of the populations by embracing the Soviets when the Red Army occupied these regions between September 1939 and June 1941. This point is examined because it's an important one -- if one of the goals of history is to assure that, by understanding history, we can avoid it being repeated in its worst aspects, then understanding the motivations of the murderers of Europe's Jews is an important part of the process.

None of the historians who have examined this question -- difficult as it is to examine -- have been prosecuted, much less imprisoned. Where "historians" have been imprisoned is when they have publicly stated their conviction that the Holocaust was essentially a hoax -- that the number of victims have been irresponsibly inflated and especially that no gassings were committed. As wrongheaded and counterproductive as I might think these laws are, it's worth noting that these are the people who have been prosecuted -- not radical functionalists like Götz Aly, not conservative revisionists seeking to draw an equivalence between the Holocaust and Stalinist mass killing like Nolte, and not nationalist historians like Mark Paul, whose work seeks to contextualize the mass killing of Jews within the behavior of certain sectors of the Jewish population. Also worth noting is that the people who are prosecuted are often not prosecuted for denying the Holocaust per se but for inciting racial hatred -- which is a crime in more countries than it is not. Given that the Venn diagram for Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites is pretty much a perfect circle, this fact ought not surprise us.

Roberts writes the following next:

For example, suppose a scholar in Germany discovers a previously unknown document that proves that National Socialist Germany exterminated 3 million Jews. This discovery of proof of the Holocaust would be rewarded with the arrest and imprisonment of the scholar for reporting the document, because it conflicts with the official zionist declaration of 6 million. The document would be branded a falsification and discarded. The scholar’s career would be ruined.

I hope the examples of Reitlinger and Hilberg above have disproved this point. But I do believe that, were a document found smeared with Hitler's DNA and reading, "Kill the Jews, use gas chambers, and stop when you hit six million," some people would find issue with its veracity. It's fair to question the motives of people willing to seize on the smallest bit of exculpatory evidence and ignore the mountain of evidence proving the Holocaust.

The last paragraph from Roberts worth addressing is this:

The Holocaust is not a subject that can be studied or investigated. It is an occurrence handed down by zionists that cannot be examined or modified and certainly not questioned. We must take it on faith alone. If a scholar does not, he is a Holocaust denier and, if European or captured in Europe, he is imprisoned.

Well, by now, he's basically repeating himself, but a final point does emerge here in referring to "scholars" as the people being imprisoned for denying the Holocaust. With the exception of David Irving, whose early work on World War II could be considered genuinely valuable, if biased, none of the people prosecuted for doing so have been scholars -- not even close. The number of Holocaust deniers with advanced history degrees numbers zero -- the ones who did have them are either dead (Harry Elmer Barnes) or no longer deniers (Mark Weber), and they were always the minority. There's a reason for that fact.

The rest of Roberts's essay is par for his particular course, and I won't address it here. In the interest of fairness, I intend to draw Roberts's attention to this piece; should he respond, I'll note it here.

A Podcast About Holocaust Denial

I've been incommunicado at this blog for some time, since I've not been enrolled in a history course this term. (Instead, I've been fulfilling a core requirement in Interdisciplinary Studies -- a course on wellness, which is surprisingly interesting.) However, I gave an interview a couple of months ago to Matthew Buckley of Adelaide, Australia, who runs a podcast called Social Justice Warriors. You can listen to the podcast here.

I'll be back blogging regularly next month.