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Why is Holocaust denial an old man's game?

posted 8 years ago by ZortMcFleen
3 replies | jump to latest

One of the things you'll notice quickly when you look at the front rank of Holocaust deniers is their advanced ages. Irving and Ernst "The Hitler We Loved and Why" Zündel are both nearly 80; Leuchter is 75, the National Alliance's Mark Weber is 65, Butz over 80, Faurisson almost ninety. The neo-McCarthyist Carto -- self-declared enemy of "Judeobolshevism" -- died earlier this year at 89, and CODOH's Bradley Smith died earlier this year at 86. The only Holocaust denier of any renown under 65 (aside from Ahmadinejad, the demolished clown) is Rudolf, who's crossed the Rubicon of fifty.

Being old isn't bad, natch. But still, it brings an obvious question -- why is there no new generation of Holocaust deniers of any importance? When your movement fritzes out under sixty and vanishes under fifty, what does it tell you?

I think it's the two-edged sword of the internet.

Sure, the internet makes it possible for anybody to get free access to Holocaust denial material, and in that sense it's been good for the goose-steppers. But that same free-ness also means the movement has been demonetized. You can no longer make a career in selling Holocaust denial glop, because so much is available for free.

Both CODOH and David Irving pretty much admit this by putting up their books up on the net as free PDFs. If these were actual moneymakers, they pretty obviously wouldn't do that.

Follow the money. There used to be money in Holocaust denial -- although admittedly a lot of it was in the form of schnorring rich fascists for donations for your "institute" the way Carto and the IHR sucked down money from Edison's granddaughter.

What does that mean in the long term? It means the new generation of scammers have decided that Holocaust denial is, as a "profession," too much work for too little profit. They have found other, easier, more lucrative scams to turn.

In particular, they've devolved Holocaust denial back to its white-power roots. The whole Carto/Irving experiment -- trying to mainstream it by disguising its jackbootitude, presenting it as a legitimate alternate history rather than the swastika-festooned foilfest it actually is -- straight-up failed. To the degree it will live on, it will be as just one more plank of the white-power manifesto, having learned that it can't be mainstreamed.

[–] evguenimlodik 8 years ago

What about the younger generation conspiracy theory dish*ts?

[–] ZortMcFleen 8 years ago

Their heart isn't in it when it comes to Holocaust denial. Irving and Zündel and that mob were single-issue careerists with at best a sideline in "Judeobolshevism." Now Holocaust denial is just another jangle in their wack conspiracy theory tambourine. You look at people like Jim Fetzer, and when he's not telling you the Holocaust was a fake, he's telling you that NASA faked the moon landing, Sandy Hook was a guvmint hoax, Paul McCartney was replaced with a lookalike in 1966, and on and on. Holocaust denial is just one more color in the clown face paint.

When Carto and that other bag of losers first set up the Holocaust denial movement in the 1970s, they meant it as a recruiting tool for anti-Semitism. You'd read "the facts," gasp, and say: "Gosh, Maude, I guess the Jews are conniving demons after all. Let's go join the white power league." The problem is that Holocaust denial is just too ridiculous. You have to already believe the Jews are conniving demons to be able to pull off such a fraud -- and so you're probably already in the white power league.

But to act as a recruiting tool, it also had to separate itself (or at least pretend to) from the white power stuff it was meant as a recruitment tool for. So that's why there was such a fuss with pseudonyms and false-front organizations ("The Institute for Historical Review," "Theses and Dissertations Press," etc.)

Now Holocaust denial has gone home -- the attempt to divide it from other goose-steppery failed, the movement trying to keep up the old ways (rational mask, anti-Semitic content) is on its last few gasps, and the alt-right doesn't try to disguise either their own anti-Semitism or that of Holocaust denial.

It's the extra level of duplicity -- "we're not anti-Semites, honest, we just want to show you how the Jews are tricking you about the Holocaust, damn their satanic hides" -- that wasn't sustainable, and the Irving verdict was the biggest blow against it.

And that's why the various deniers who've buzzed through this board haven't particularly bothered to hide their anti-Semitism. They know it's a game they lost.

[–] MrBelette 8 years ago

Vincent Reynouard is only 47 years old, not very old right ? But maybe you conveniently think only of English speaking people ? Some kind of denial on your part perhaps ?