curioussoul wrote: ↑Sun Dec 15, 2024 1:08 am
SanityCheck wrote: ↑Sat Dec 14, 2024 10:25 pmAside from some attempted hijacking from trans activists arguing for a Nazi trans genocide, it hasn't been subjected to much woke rebranding. Indeed, the rhetoric of 'decolonisation' means it is seem as associated with 'settler colonialism' of the *victims* rather than understanding it as part of a larger Nazi colonial project (which is the academic consensus now).
The Holocaust as a broader mythology still underpins most Western political philosophy. It is basically the short-form foundation for liberal democracy in the Western world. The argument for multiculturalism, democracy, liberalism (however you define it), "liberal values", egalitarianism, anti-authoritarianism, and so on (post-WWII), is essentially that White people would end up genociding the Jews (and other peoples) again unless we have liberal democracy, which entails multiculturalism and multiracialism. If you've actually followed the political discourse in other Western European countries (Germany, Scandinavia, Benelux, etc), any argument for nationalism or ethnic homogeneity is shot down with the Holocaust and Hitler.
It doesn't really matter whether the Holocaust as a brand has been retcon'ed recently by different socio-political movements (which it has, and which you fail to see).
No, the Cold War-era foundations of all of the things mentioned (democracy, liberalism, liberal values, anti-authoritarianism, with multiculturalism following later than any of those) rested on a rejection of Nazi dictatorship and occupation coupled with opposition to East Bloc communism, grouped together as totalitarianism. This could still accommodate colonialism (to 1960) and authoritarian rule if anticommunist enough even in Europe (Spain, Portugal, Greece), and predated the need for multiculturalism. Which evolved in Sweden and Canada in a Cold War context with Estonian and Ukrainian minorities asserting themselves alongside Jews in both cases. Predating the general expansion of non-European minorities, whose arrival stemmed either from the fallout from empire (Britain, France, Netherlands) or importing Gastarbeiter (Germany) in many cases. I'm unclear what you precisely mean by egalitarianism, but if this is ethnic/racial then that flows quite naturally from liberalism, and was underscored by Civil Rights in the US and decolonisation of European empires. If you mean social democracy the consensus politics of the postwar era around a mixed economy was a direct reaction to the Great Depression, and welfare states were already becoming quite established in the interwar era.
All of this predated greater interest in the Holocaust. By the 1990s with the formation of the EU and intended expansion after the collapse of communism, then sure, the Holocaust was a much easier cudgel to use against the far right, and by then reunified Germany was refounding itself to some extent on this. But the West German Grundgesetz shows very little sign of being influenced by fallout from the Holocaust and every sign of being influenced by the traumas of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the National Socialist 'seizure of power'. Even today, the degree to which German memory culture acknowledges National Socialism on a broader basis, and National Socialist crimes of violence, is quite striking. Look up what January 27 is called in Germany for one of many examples. One can find far more books catalogued about Nationalsozialismus than one can find books in German catalogued with some mention of the Holocaust. I don't doubt that the Holocaust per se looms larger in public memory and discourse, but this is thoroughly entangled with a fear and dislike of Nazism.
(All governments and most elites are incidentally rather hypocritical in preaching liberalism, yet practicing some form of authoritarianism through direct or indirect means. Both left and right as well as many erstwhile liberal-labelled parties are all guilty of this.)
Poland and Hungary provide two striking counter-examples to your claims about arguments for nationalism or ethnic homogeneity. Both were certainly alienating EU-Brussels type western consensus with Orban and PiS's style of government, but neither got thrown out of the club entirely, and their respective responses to the migration crisis from 2015 onwards have been predicated on exactly the lines you say can't be stated. The difference may be that neither had inherited large populations of former colonial immigrants, Gastarbeiter, rich Arabs with oil money, rich Russians with looted assets, foreign students or asylum seekers in the way that Britain, Germany, Sweden and west European countries had found themselves by the 1990s. Which by the way is when centre-right politicians typically started declaring multiculturalism to be 'dead', without then bringing about a fully assimilationist culture.
I've no doubt the Holocaust swirls around all of the other debates and discussions and might be used to shut down certain forms of far right politicking, but the shift from neo-Nazi sympathies to present-oriented populism counters that.
The Holocaust is also a really poor historical example to use when considering present day migration and national identity issues. Jews were a minuscule minority in nearly all 1930s-1940s European countries with only a few like Poland and to a slightly lesser extent the Danubian states having a really significant minority. But Poland topped out at 10% Jewish population, which threshold was busted in most western European countries for non-European minorities ages ago. The migration crisis of the 1930s before the war involved hundreds of thousands with many dozens of potential destinations, not many millions who have arrived or who might wish to arrive in the bigger western countries. The new shift happened in a matter of decades, Jews had coexisted with Christians in Europe for centuries before the 1930s and 1940s. About the only thing that is even vaguely analogous is assimilation vs separate ethnic identities, i.e. for Jews Yiddishkeit in Eastern Europe, but this was never exactly entirely separate given the millions of ethnic Germans inhabiting the exact same regions. Ethnic homogeneity in the East Bloc emerged only after the Heimatvertreibungen *and* the Holocaust (and ensuing postwar decision to quit Poland for Polish Jewish survivors). Ethnic homogeneity in West Germany was lost when Nazi-era civil servants had the bright idea of recruiting Gastarbeiter from Turkey as well as Italy and the former Yugoslavia.
Wrestling with migration, assimilation and national identity in the contemporary era requires a lot more thinking through than whether one can find analogies with the Nazis or Holocaust, to the point where it should be an obvious waste of time to fuss over the Holocaust if one is serious about the present. The global decline of fertility below replacement rates raises more questions which cannot be solved by fantasising about a return to some idyllic 1950s or earlier world, nor can this all be blamed on 'the Jews' (which would have nothing to do with whether antisemites did or did not decide to target European Jews in the 1940s).
There is a lot more to support the idea of a delayed indirect impact of the Holocaust on international law and the international order, mostly because the new concept of genocide as enshrined into a UN Convention proved semi-useful with some clear-cut cases (like Rwanda) and a new source of argument in all of the ambiguous cases. The track record with responses and interventions has been entirely mixed. This is also where 'revisionism' has more sway since denying the crimes of the enemy of my enemy has a lot of appeal. But that just raises the question, what makes Holocaust revisionists any less blatantly partisan than the tankies and Assad apologists who were frantically denying that chemical weapons were used in the Syrian Civil War? Being a partisan dickhead isn't the exclusive preserve of those on the right.
But revisionists would argue that academic institutions reject revisionist arguments for non-legitimate reasons. As you're well aware, mainstream academics do not engage whatsoever with revisionist arguments (at least not for the last 25 years) for a variety of reasons, least of them being that it's considered counter-productive to engage with revisionists lest you legitimize their ideas. But also for career and legal reasons. Rudolf said in the debate that historians and academics contact him privately about their skepticism of the Holocaust, and I don't believe for one second that he's lying about that. There's a reason Mattogno has had academic insiders for decades helping him access archives and documents. There are serious scholars and academics out there who simply will not risk their livelyhoods and lives to speak out against the Holocaust, especially in Europe. It requires an immense amount of bravery and determination to actually do what Rudolf and others have done.
So they claim - but there's little evidence there are that many of them. Mattogno was fed documents by the Black Rabbit of Inle at one point, but BRoI decided revisionism was bunk, dropped out of the scene and deleted his blog. Given there are many millions of academics across the western world (about 750,000 including adjuncts in the US, if I recall correctly), then one would expect there to be some who are sympathetic to revisionism. But be careful at claiming how well supported Mattogno is by this hidden network since his books really aren't *that* well researched, nor is he genuinely on top of the conventional scholarship.
I'll try to restate what I've pointed out several times before. For revisionist arguments to be accepted, they need to be convertible and translatable into the approaches of a variety of humanities and social science disciplines. (Rudolf as a lone chemist is on a hiding to nothing trying to assert a primacy of natural science over HASS disciplines, since chemistry departments were decimated in the 1990s and absorbed into biology as biochemistry or physics.)
First and foremost, this means the arguments must be tested in a comparative framework; it would be much more persuasive to read a general thesis and reconsideration about 'atrocity propaganda' than hear yet more about the Holocaust. But it is just not very likely that all atrocities and genocides can be dismissed as revisionists would like with the Holocaust, nor have revisionists even begun to think through how to set up these comparisons in a
systematic way.
Secondly, the history of 1933-1945 of the Third Reich and then WWII in Europe is not addressed as a whole, nor are the many aspects of the persecution and murder of European Jews that do not relate to the extermination camps. Revisionism is utterly irrelevant to nearly all of this history. It is not even that good at coping with the histories and other studies of the extermination camps that have been appearing in blissful ignorance of the perseverative repetition of the Rudolfian (edited, written) oeuvre.
Thirdly, while Rudolf has tried from time to time to get philosophical, his methodological musings are asserted again in ignorance of systematic comparisons as well as the quite substantial philosophical, theoretical and methodological literatures on all the associated source types and phenomena. Rudolf underwent a proper scientific education so should know that one states one's methods and sources at the outset, which basically never happens with any of the Holocaust Handbooks. The apparent methodological assertions end up amounting to an attempt to toss out almost all sources, which will not exactly increase the appeal of revisionism since it's not like historians don't use testimonies, memoirs, diaries, ego-docuiments, or conduct oral histories themselves, for all kinds of other eras and topics, on their own and in conjunction with other source types. To nearly all outside observers, revisionism just looks like negationism. That's because there is an awful lot of denialism around, so as these tactics have become more widespread they've elicited more negative reactions, until they seem to be useful on a partisan basis. But the centrists and liberals still end up hating that and refuse to go along with the partisan denialism du jour (over Syria in 2011 or whatever).
Fourthly, there's a fundamental problem with how revisionism pitches itself; a slalom between popularisation and pseudoscientific presentation, the latter best represented by Mattogno's unreadable 3.2.1.4 sub-sectioning (which serves to isolate each source or point from others, failing to allow the arguments to work in tandem, and then masking how long-winded the attempted bomb defusals can be). If there was a wider range of authors then eventually one might hit on a more recondite style, but the thinning of the ranks means the opposite has happened.
Moreover, for academic purposes one needs concise summaries and introductios of about journal article or chapter length (8-12,000 words) so that several can be set for seminars; students will not read entire books for classes until they're at an advanced level. They can be set book reviews but the word counts will not enable a comprehensive engagement with an entire monograph; it's really only at the comps level of North American PhD oral exams after coursework where anyone is tested on the contents of entire books. Lectures are typically 50-60 minutes long, not multi-hour presentations as we've sometimes seen with Rudolf but also with some of the 9/11 Truthers. Seminars might be two hours with a break and will involve at least some expectations of prior reading, thus the need for concise introductions and vivid case studies at the right length, not too short, not too long.
For other purposes, one needs a diversity of studies which can be synthesised comparatively into an essay or other piece of writing or presentation, or some other format. Case studies work when done properly and when they connect to broader implications. But overviews, textbooks and other formats are also crucial. The sheer accumulation of scholarship is a problem here, but this applies to *all* fields, and the intros to other topics are not actually pitched any differently to the history of the Holocaust (in general or regarding the extermination camps). No student will ever not study multiple topics even if they're doing a single-honours British style degree, much less a North American one. Nor can one simply parrot cliches and repeat claims about previous literature without someone somewhere else pointing out the misrepresentations.
Revisionism thus suffers from being written by authors who all have some academic background, but nearly always in disciplines other than history, and for decades now always by those outside of academia, so they have no Fingerspitzgefuehl for what might appeal to an academic audience much less in the 'right' disciplines, like history. It's perhaps no accident that Samuel Crowell, who progressed to doctoral studies in history but did not finish, produced a more readable introduction to revisionism than the languages and literature graduates (Faurisson, Mattogno, Graf) or scientists (Rudolf). More readable, but woefully under-researched and ultimately disposable, and still too long-winded to be set for a seminar reading.
For me, the most important considerations are #1 and #2, since I teach comparative histories of violence, and I teach and supervise across the entire NS-WWII era and into adjacent periods, as well as into the postwar era for trials and memory. There might be some handwavey assertions in past revisionist writings about this or that, but there's nothing substantive to offer up as a counterpoint to conventional studies for almost all of this coverage.
