What this board taught me about Holocaust denial

It's long been a hobby of mine to observe crank cases, pseudo-scientists, conspiracy theorists, and other entertaining wackadoodles. So natch I'm going to keep an eye on the Holocaust deniers too. I started this in the mid-90s, a few years before the Irving trial, and I watched the Irving trial (and its failed appeals) very closely -- reading the expert reports, all the transcripts, and the verdict in its entirety.

Back in Irving's day, the Holocaust denial movement was trying to present itself to the mainstream as a legitimate alternative interpretation of history, exactly as justifiable as what historians knew and taught about the Holocaust in history departments around the world. The trial took the Holocaust denial position head-on, and demolished it, buried it in an avalanche of evidence. After Irving, there was just no excuse for saying Holocaust denial was rational or that the Holocaust itself -- the genocidal policy, the gas chambers, the six million murdered Jews -- was in any serious doubt outside the droolin' wackosphere.

So this board looked like a good place to have a look at the state of the Holocaust denial movement almost two decades later.

When the Holocaust denial movement first came together in the 1970s, it was with two purposes: to attack the Jews by jeering at their cataclysmic tragedy, and to defend and rehabilitate Adolf Hitler and Nazism's racial policies by erasing that racial policy's greatest crime. To rehab Hitler they had to deny his racial policy of genocide, and to do that, in turn they also had to deny the great physical symbol of that genocide -- the industrial-scale gas chamber -- and the enormous Jewish death toll. Combine that with assertions that the whole thing was a Jewish fraud, and you had all four of the core points of Holocaust denial, the points you see Lipstadt writing on the whiteboard at the beginning of the film.

The Holocaust denial movement in the 1970s knew that flying the Nazi flag was going to get them nowhere, so they created false front organizations ("The Institute for Historical Review") and took up pseudonyms, all in an attempt to portray Holocaust denial as an independent academic movement, rather than just the ravings of racist lunatics. To de-Nazify the Holocaust denial movement, or at least the face it manufactured for display to the mainstream, they had to pretend they weren't in it for the racism or the Nazism, oh no no no, but because they were honest seekers of truth doing nothing but the honest seeking of truth, which they honestly sought honestly and truthfully, and on and on the mantra went.

And nobody bought it. The IHR could never shake their antisemitic reputation, no matter how many fake names they hid behind.

Then along came Irving, the closest thing the movement had to a respectable figure -- and in the international spotlight, he failed spectacularly. He hoped for at worst a partial defeat, and instead he was sunk like the Bismarck. And with him he took down the whole "let's pretend we're respectable people with a dissident historical opinion" wing of the movement.

So what does the Holocaust denial movement look like now? This forum gave us a front-row seat to the cave squeakers. And the answer is: it looks like Nazi bedlam. Almost none of the Holocaust deniers here tried to distance themselves from open anti-Semitism. The few who did had posting histories belying their assertion that they weren't motivated by anti-Semitism.

The interesting thing is that the arguments they proffer now serve a different purpose. Back before Irving went Hindenburg, these arguments were genuinely meant to be genuinely persuasive. There was a genuine attempt to look scholarly, to print a scholarly looking "journal," to host scholarly looking "conferences" and to try to persuade the mainstream.

With the demolition of the "scholarly" wing, what's left? The cave squeakers now brandish the very same arguments -- in a surprising number of cases, *exactly* the same arguments, as in the Auschwitz Plaque gambit -- but without any real sign of comprehension, and with no intellectual support for it beyond Herman Hitlerlover's Trooftroopers videos on Thuh YooToob. I mean, if it's on YooToob, it's gotta be true, right? Nobody has ever lied on YooToob, not even once.

And they can't even really state their 70s-rehash arguments with any degree of clarity. They know not whereof they speak. But, functionally, that's okay. They're not meant to be arguments, per se, in any scholastic, disputational sense. They're just bloody shirts antisemites grab and wave, and -- characteristically -- they drop each one the moment it comes under any serious factual attack.

So, what did I learn? In 2009, the leader of the IHR -- blackshirt Mark Weber, formerly of the white-separatist National Alliance -- made waves in the movement by saying, look, folks, it's just not working, this pretend-we-don't-hate-the-Jews thing didn't fool anyone, and we should make it clear that we are in fact an anti-Jewish organization. And that attitude is very much on show here among Holocaust deniers, who made no effort to hide their antisemitism except for the most perfunctory and vestigial "but I'm not an antisemite" dealt randomly every now and then.

The good news is that many good people stepped in to slap the Holocaust deniers down for their nonsense, and they quickly reduced the Holocaust deniers to incoherent rubble. It's good to see.

Anyway, as the site draws to a close, the cave squeakers are now chasing their own frog tails, declaring (incorrectly) that we're all part of the movie staff, that we're paid to defeat them, that we're all sockpuppets of each other, and so on. They have nothing to lose, so they're going to throw everything they have, no matter how dumb. Get ready to have a good laugh at their expense!