The New Holocaust Revisionism
Holocaust commemoration is under attack, from the radical left and populist right, as part of a wider assault on liberal democracy. I’ve written for Prospect Magazine about this new Holocaust revisionism: who is involved, why they are doing it, and what it means. It includes Nick Fuentes, Pankaj Mishra, Tucker Carlson and why the Holocaust was not ‘just’ another colonial genocide.
The opening paragraphs are below: the full essay is available on the Prospect website. It’s free to read but you need to register with Prospect to access the full essay (it’s quick, easy and free).
Nick Fuentes made a revealing aside after his box office appearance on Piers Morgan’s “Uncensored” YouTube channel in December. The 27-year-old white supremacist spent two hours sparring with Morgan, his youthful disrespect clashing repeatedly with Morgan’s middle-aged bombast. Much of the subsequent outrage focused on Fuentes’s brash insistence that Hitler was “cool”, which he explained, in part, as a love for Nazi aesthetics.
The next day, when reviewing the exchange on his own Rumble channel, Fuentes gave a more revealing explanation. “Why do we say Hitler is cool?”, he asked. It’s “because we are destroying the secular religion of liberalism and the Holocaust, which go hand in glove.”
Fuentes is an on-off Holocaust denier. In the past he has queried the number of Jews killed by comparing the capacity of the crematoria of Auschwitz with the time it takes to bake cookies in an oven. When Morgan challenged him on this, Fuentes surprised his interrogator by fully accepting that the Nazis may have killed six million Jews, if not more. Denial of the extent and goals of the Holocaust used to be an essential part of the far-right political lexicon, but Fuentes’s response signalled that it is no longer. Now it seems enough simply to argue that the extermination of European Jewry should not matter.
Read the rest via this link.
It's another great piece Dave. I think a really important point you make, and I take away from it, is the entire world order was partly built as a response to the Holocaust and Nazi crimes. Antisemites argue that only Israel came into existence in this way, rather than the entire post-war consensus.
From the full piece in Prospect:
"Of course, Mishra is not alone in implying that Israel’s actions in Gaza carry such echoes. The debate over whether Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza constituted a genocide is fiercely contested. While genocide is a criminal charge that ought to be determined solely on the evidential facts, it is also a label with broader political implications. Further, there is a long-standing academic division over whether genocide is an intentional crime knowingly committed by states or other actors, or a consequence of social forces produced by imperialism, or even by capitalism itself. The latter view often comes with the idea that the Holocaust was not unique but rather was just another colonial genocide, committed by a European power looking for lebensraum in Eastern Europe.
This is a deeply flawed argument that fails to explain Germany’s total, obsessive drive to destroy the entirety of European Jewry. The theory that the Holocaust’s purpose was to clear territory for German colonisation cannot tell us why Jews from Paris or Rome were transported eastwards, into precisely the lands earmarked for Aryan settlement. It cannot, for example, explain why the Nazis felt it necessary to capture, transport and kill Anne Frank, hiding in her attic in Amsterdam. Instead, it over-universalises the Shoah, redefining it not primarily as an act of antisemitism but of colonialism. This, in turn, leads some people to place it alongside not just colonial genocides like the destruction of Native Americans or Aboriginal peoples in Australasia, but acts of war such as the bombing of Hiroshima or the onslaught in Gaza."
A deeply flawed argument indeed, which overlooks the glaring fact that the Nazis weren't only intent on "destroying the entirety of European Jewry". The Nazis were just as intent on eliminating Jewish life wherever they found it, and made a start in Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria before the Axis powers were defeated and were at one point creating a database of the names and addresses of Jews living on the other side of the Atlantic.