Tucker Carlson: Holocaust remembrance is a civic religion "complete with blasphemy laws"

[Wetzelrad]

On his show today, Carlson has a long monologue about what he calls America's "new civic religion". Several minutes of this is dedicated to the subject of the Holocaust, so I share it here. Transcript below.



Alternate link: https://x.com/infolibnews/status/2044627111420281120

What are the events? Who are the people who we treat with reverence? What are you actually not allowed to make fun of? What is blasphemy in modern America?

Those are the questions you ask if you are trying to understand what our operative religion is. What's the religion of our leaders? Again, it's not a conventional religion necessarily. It's not Torah Judaism or rabbinic Judaism or Evangelical Christianity or Catholic Christianity.

It's the actual religion, the real religion, the set of beliefs that we treat with reverence.

Well, it just so happens there was a religious ceremony ongoing today in the United States Capitol complete with very recognizable religious iconography symbolism. You may not even have known this was happening, but it was happening today as part of an eight-day celebration of remembrance of the Holocaust. The period in the 1930s and 40s where the German government, the Nazi government murdered, in addition to a lot of other people a whole bunch of Jews. And that ended in part because the United States sent troops to Europe, millions of troops to Europe to defeat the German government. And with the help of the Soviets, our allies at the time, we did that. And in the process of doing that, over a quarter million Americans, American men, were killed, trying to stop the Nazi government from doing the evil things that it was doing.

A quarter million -- more than -- American men died fighting the Nazis. But in today's ceremony in the Congress, there was no mention of them. There was instead this. Watch.

[Embedded video of crowd seated in the Capitol's Emancipation Hall. An announcer speaks.] Ladies and gentlemen, a museum leadership program has included more than 72,000 US military members. Through examination of the Holocaust, they gain insight into their own professional and individual responsibilities. The candlelighters are members of the United States Army Third Infantry Regiment, the Old Guard.

[The first in a line of soldiers approaches the microphone with a candle.] I am Sergeant Ethan Ahtonen. I remember. [Soldier lights a giant menorah. Video ends.]

That is a current uniformed US military member from the Old Guard, the Third Infantry Regiment, which is you know ever present at our public events in Washington, saying -- lighting a candle at the menorah -- and saying "I remember". No explanation of "I remember". I remember what? What are we remembering here?

And we do have a sense that it's -- we're not remembering the American soldiers who liberated Dachau for example. We're not remembering the quarter million American men who joined a war they had nothing to do with inherently. It wasn't taking place in North America, it was taking place in Europe. And the dispute was over Poland and Czechoslovakia. And they sacrificed their lives to defeat the Nazi government that was murdering Jews and a lot of other people, Poles and Russians and gypsies and Czechs and lots lots of people, a lot of Jews as well.

But they gave their lives to stop that, but we're not remembering them. We're remembering only the victims of one specific ethnicity during these eight days of remembrance. As distinct from the day of remembrance that we also have that's also enshrined in American law in January.

So there's a total of 9 days of remembrance of one group of victims in a war that killed tens of millions of people globally. Tens and tens and tens of millions. The numbers are actually not even clear. So many people died. We're not exactly sure how many died, but many tens of millions died, including close to a half million Americans, over a quarter million in Europe fighting this Nazi regime, not remembered.

So that is not to disrespect the Jewish victims of the Holocaust or of the Second World War. Of course not. Merely to note that in this country only one group gets to be remembered and remembered with grave solemnity by uniformed members of our military who take no credit for ending this Holocaust.

So that doesn't make any sense. I mean, if you didn't know the backstory in any of this and someone wrote that down and told you, you'd be like, "What do you, that doesn't, what?" And it almost seems like there's a kind of guilt implied in this, which is a little weird. There are countries where, you know, that might be appropriate. This is not one of them because again, this was the country that helped liberate people from those camps and fought the government that built those camps. We're the good guys. What is this?

It doesn't make any sense except when you see it in the only terms in which it makes sense which is as a civic religion. Which is what it is, and it comes complete with blasphemy laws.

He has more to say elsewhere in the program, and I'm sure not all of it is agreeable to every viewer, but this segment is pretty solid. Since it's being said by a mainstream figure, users might find it useful to share with friends.

What he says bears some similarity to common revisionist arguments. Faurisson once wrote about the Holocaust as a "secular religion": https://codoh.com/library/document/the- ... holocaust/

The Holocaust Encyclopedia includes an entry on this same point, ending with a quote from Gilad Atzmon who called the Holocaust "the new Western religion": https://holocaustencyclopedia.com/conce ... st-as/797/

[Archie]

In 2024, Tucker was accused of being HD-adjacent over his interview with Darryl Cooper. I'll repost from RODOH.
https://rodoh.info/thread/716/mentions- ... ryl-cooper
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Tucker Carlson had a guest on his podcast named Darryl Cooper. I am not familiar with Cooper and I have not listened, but I did see that one of the NYT's opinion column Jews, Michelle Goldberg, was wow-just-wowing about it n a recent column. Goldberg portrays this as Carlson making a "turn toward Holocaust skepticism." If only! From the few direct quotes provided, it sounds like they got into some light WWII revisionism but did not directly challenge the historicity of "the Holocaust."

I was interested to see that Goldberg incidentally mentioned CODOH and Inconvenient History. I am surprised they are willing to mention CODOH at all since it could aid people in finding revisionist literature. But I suppose they figure there is minimal risk with the NYT readership, most of whom think Trump is a "Nazi."

There are few better trolls, after all, than Holocaust deniers, who love to pose as heterodox truth-seekers oppressed by Orwellian elites. (The wildly antisemitic Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust named its journal An Inconvenient History: A Quarterly Journal for Free Historical Inquiry.) Those who deny or downplay the Holocaust often excel at mimicking the forms and language of legitimate scholarship, using them to undermine rather than explore reality. They blitz their opponents with out-of-context historical detail and bad-faith questions, and they know how to use crude provocation to get attention.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/06/opin ... enial.html

"...Carlson’s trajectory was entirely predictable. Nazi sympathy is the natural endpoint of a politics based on glib contrarianism, right-wing transgression and ethnic grievance."

It is simpler than that. The Holocaust (and most of WWII) are supposed to be treated as settled history. Once you reject that presumption and become willing to entertain the matter as an open question, from that moment you are well on your way to heresy.

Original Podcast



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Thomas Dalton and Kevin MacDonald have both commented on the podcast.

www.unz.com/article/tucker-carlsons-non ... holocaust/

www.unz.com/article/the-carlson-cooper- ... p-forward/

[Archie]

Revisionists have talked about the Holocaust as a religion for decades. Me, for example:

Spoiler

In most of Europe, it is now illegal to do research on the Holocaust unless you respect certain predetermined conclusions. In the United States, free thought on the Holocaust is still allowed to a degree because of the First Amendment tradition, but Holocaust revisionism is still suppressed via corporate censorship and other forms of harassment and economic threats. Because the Holocaust is sacralized history, to challenge it is treated not just as an intellectual folly but a moral outrage. Thus it carries with it an especially strong opprobrium and moral censure that is not present in ordinary intellectual debates. This moral dimension makes "Holocaust denial" akin to heresy in a religious context and this explains why the Holocaust is especially hard to challenge.

Unthinking deference to expert opinion is an unreliable heuristic on third rail topics like "the Holocaust" where people cannot share their true views without suffering retaliation. If institutional powers decree that "Holocaust denial" is inherently not respectable, then by definition no one "respectable" can support Holocaust denial. Such circularities mean little.
viewtopic.php?t=443

And this is a good point because it is possible to separate criticisms over "The Holocaust" as a social and political force with the debate over historicity. This is potentially a good gateway for other revisionist talking points, as are free speech issues.

It would be very hard to find now and I could be misremembering, but I vaguely recall an old clip of Tucker in his cable news days where he denounces Holocaust denial in very unnuanced fashion. Here with the reference to "blasphemy laws" he is implicitly sympathetic to revisionists.

[pilgrimofdark]

Germar's presentation "Tackling Zionism’s and Judaism’s Sword and Shield" also discusses the religious aspect of the Holocaust.

There's always been a tension between how to discuss or teach the Holocaust, even among Jews. It was a point of contention regarding the USHMM, whether the Holocaust was even a legitimate topic of historical inquiry or something beyond human understanding which is only appropriate for contemplation.

Example of the reverence people are expected to have when approaching any material related to the Holocaust:

In a paper presented at a 1974 symposium on the Holocaust, [Rabbi Irving Greenberg] offered the following dictum: "No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children."

- Fantasies of Witnessing, p. 215-216

Because of the religious aspect, there's an argument that "the Holocaust" is a civic religion. The funding of the USHMM with federal taxpayer money also points to the government "respecting an establishment of religion," prohibited by the First Amendment.

And historians agree with the unhelpful religious nature of the terms Holocaust and Shoah:

The terms ‘Holocaust’ and ‘Shoah’ are not useful since neither has any analytical value. ‘Holocaust’ (derived from the Greek holókauton, or burned sacrifice) has a religious connotation unbefitting of the event it is supposed to refer to, and users of this term may mean by it either the persecution and murder of Jews alone, or Nazi German violence against any group more generally. [...] Importantly, ‘Holocaust’ and ‘Shoah’ have also been criticized as “teleological and anachronistic” terms that convey a retrospective view that makes complex processes appear “as a single event.”

- The Extermination of the European Jews, pp. 14-15.

E. Michael Jones's book The Holocaust Narrative also explores how the religious framing of the Holocaust has been used by Jews and non-Jews.

Taking it a step further, "anti-denial" could be interpreted as a subsect of the Holocaust religion, both as an inversion of Catholic Christianity and an example of a semi-secular/semi-religious Jewish movement. Not so much in its historiography, but in the general tone and engagement styles of its gurus and cheerleaders.