In this episode of History Speaks, I sit down with a PhD student from the London School of Economics to talk about a debate he moderated with Holocaust revisionist Mike Enoch. We talk about the debate itself, how it went, and what we can learn from it.
00:11:24.980But again, it's about the Arden offensive.
00:11:28.840But it's – the way the Germans are portrayed is not how they would ever be portrayed today, right?
00:11:32.960There's a nobility and kind of masculine power portrayed in the German panzer offensive that you wouldn't see today.
00:11:46.980And so I think that the politics of the situation where vilifying Germany wasn't really politically expedient, expedient once the Cold War breaks up because you want West Germany to have some level of pride and dignity, right?
00:11:59.500And nationalism, civil work against communism, and then also the attitude of the Jewish community, which was to see this event as shameful.
00:12:06.620In terms of historiography, the first major work was written by – can I get the year correct?
00:12:14.780It was written by – this is why I'm a PhD student, not just a historian – but it was written by Gerald Reitlinger in 1953, yeah, The Final Solution.
00:12:22.500And Reitlinger represented a breakthrough, but not so much in the culture.
00:12:30.120And he – there were a lot of blind spots in his research.
00:12:33.860He didn't have all the documents we have today.
00:12:36.480He estimated the death toll at a little under 5 million.
00:12:39.440He didn't – again, he didn't have all the evidence we have at hand today.
00:12:41.580But the big kind of breakthrough that made an impact on popular culture that filtered onto popular culture was Raoul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews, published in 1961, which was very controversial.
00:12:54.480A lot of Jews – so Hilberg basically uses like social science methods to try to get how many Jews died, where did they die, when did the policy develop.
00:13:02.800It's like written in the language of a social science journal, right?
00:13:07.100And there were people in the Jewish community that thought this is the most vulgar exercise you could imagine.
00:13:11.660So Hannah Arendt, who, you know, whatever people think of her, she's a pretty brilliant woman, I think it's fair to say.
00:13:18.280She wrote that – Hilberg – she wrote a kind of contradictory comment, which I found amusing, but also insightful to her perspective.
00:13:25.140Hilberg's book is brilliant because it's – as a matter of like history and empiricism, it is brilliant.
00:13:29.620But it's also not unworthy of a singed pig.
00:13:32.880So the idea of compiling how many died, where did they die, how did they die, when did the policies develop is just – how can you speak about this the way you'd speak about some other kind of social science, you know?
00:13:46.560Hilberg's book made a huge impact on academia and was very controversial at the time, as you can see from Arendt's reaction.
00:13:52.360And Arendt, though – and this is – even though I admire Arendt's work, one dishonest thing she did is for her – I think it became a book, I don't remember, I think it was originally a series of articles, Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she's kind of assessing the Nazi regime in the context of this one man's trial.
00:14:09.400One mediocre man that she sees as like a door-to-door vacuum cleaner who somehow gets involved with this evil.
00:14:15.560She actually borrows heavily from Hilberg while she's like bashing him.
00:15:08.640So – and to the point where people are kind of retconning – old veterans are kind of – World War II veterans are kind of retconning their motives for fighting, right?
00:15:17.460And, you know, so it – so essentially, the way we perceive the Holocaust now and its cultural importance to Americans, to Brits, you know, and Germans was not the case immediately after the war.
00:15:30.500That is interesting, and I don't think terribly surprising.
00:15:36.520Germany in the 50s had – I mean, you had to go from being defeated, being destroyed in many ways, being divided, to getting at least the western half and the eastern half in the other direction on a Cold War footing.
00:15:52.380And you can't really be demonizing your new ally or vassal.
00:15:59.740That is just simply not going to work.
00:16:03.260So I think a lot of this – I mean, this is the kind of Adenauer era, you know, in a nutshell.
00:16:09.360And so a lot of that's not surprising.
00:16:10.960I mean, we see a lot of that in the, you know, embrace of the Confederacy in the United States.
00:16:17.600There is a certain arrangement or deal of we are going to admire you, claim that your generals were the most brilliant gentlemen to ever walk the face of the earth, you know, under the assumption that we, the Yankees, won and we're not going to do this again.
00:16:38.420And it's an understandable arrangement, and so it doesn't terribly surprise me.
00:16:45.980I mean, even Adenauer himself is kind of interesting.
00:16:48.380He's, what is it, 20 or 20, 30 years older than Hitler.
00:16:52.100I mean, you're going back to the previous generation after this disaster.
00:17:28.540Was it thought of – because Mike said this, and he was right on this one, that when people hear the word the Holocaust, they do think gassing.
00:17:36.820When did these – when did our kind of public perception kind of solidify?
00:17:43.440So there were – of course there were false atrocity claims, but you have to look at – so I would reject the idea that it's, like, false aspects of the Holocaust, because I think Holocaust means, like – there's an academic definition of the term.
00:17:57.700Obviously, it's a little confusing, and there's some historians who really dislike the term because of the role of it in popular culture.
00:18:46.840So the fact that they're condemning it and investigating it shows it happened.
00:18:50.100In terms of lampshades, my understanding is that the artifacts presented as human lampshades were tested and found to be animals.
00:18:56.640But I just – you know, I think you're going to have war propaganda in every war, and the question is what has a strong evidentiary basis, and this stuff does not.
00:19:15.640And there's often kernels of truth to them.
00:19:18.060In terms of their lampshades, though, I would say, like, against – you know, I don't want to get into some debate nonsense, but, like, I mean, they were tested, right?
00:19:25.100So, like, they were presented as human lampshades.
00:19:28.060But they were then tested, and they were found to be animals.
00:19:30.320So, like, if there was some conspiracy, the tests would be falsified or whatever, you know?
00:19:35.660So, yeah, I mean, there are false – there are things that people believe that historians are found to be false.
00:19:41.840But one thing I would clarify, too, is it's not Holocaust revisionists or deniers who've drawn attention to this.
00:19:48.900Only historians have debunked these things, you know, by saying the evidence – under mainstream historical systemic standards, the evidence for, let's say, lampshades or soap of Jews is not there, if that makes sense, you know?
00:20:07.400If you were to ask a recent high school graduate who's a bit of a dummy, these are the things that he would say.
00:20:16.160So I'm trying to get at, like, when public consciousness changed or kind of solidified.
00:20:21.780Like, the word Holocaust, for instance, was that used by Hilberg, or when did that – because that is a powerful word, it's a Greek word for burnt offering.
00:20:35.780So when did that kind of come into saliency?
00:20:41.540Well, it certainly wasn't salient after the war at the time Hilberg was writing.
00:20:53.420I believe it wasn't until the 1960s that the term was ever used.
00:20:59.720And certainly the film that, like, solidified this as the term for the annihilation of the European Jews was a 1978 made-for-TV film Holocaust with Meryl Streep of people that really – I mean, it was already happening before then, but that film really got vast viewership and a lot of sympathy from Americans for the victims.
00:21:22.900And that really solidified the cultural role of the Holocaust in the United States.
00:22:10.100I was, you know, becoming aware of these things and so on.
00:22:13.540That was – Schindler's List came out in – was that around 94, 95 or thereabouts?
00:22:20.420And that was, I would say, you know, peak Holocaust in terms of the public awareness.
00:22:30.620Prestige Hollywood movies, documentaries, teaching in high schools.
00:22:36.700But my sense – granted, I'm out of high school now, of course.
00:22:41.740But my sense is that this is – it's on the wane as time passes.
00:22:48.600But what do you – what is going on, say, over the past 25 years in terms of academia?
00:22:55.920And then I think the public – like, public awareness of it is, I think, obvious.
00:23:01.480But what is going on in terms of academia or where – give us a taste of where that is.
00:23:05.820I would – I mean, I would agree just from reading about the subject that I would guess that when you were a kid in the 90s or 80s or whatever.
00:23:15.300I'm not sure how old you are, Richard.
00:23:17.440The – I would – my impression – actually, I'm almost certain of it, even though I wasn't alive in the 80s – is that this was a much more important issue in popular culture than it is now.
00:23:31.300In terms of academia, you know, I think a lot of the debates around the Holocaust have kind of been ironed out.
00:23:39.780I think there are still some interests – like, a lot of interest, too, is the broader question of the dissolution of the European Jewish community, like, through migration, right?
00:23:48.300So – and also, like, kind of fringe questions, such as, was there a plan to extend the exterminations outside of Europe, right?
00:23:58.460Because Jews are not – like, Jews in North Africa, for example, were not systematically killed, right?
00:24:05.420So the question is, well, they weren't.
00:24:20.140The kind of big questions that even a layperson who's not a historian or a student of history but is just interested in the subject would find compelling.
00:24:26.920I feel like a lot of the research into those has been – you know, you never say concluded, but it's becoming more and more pedantic as, like, volumes and volumes of this stuff have compiled, you know?
00:24:40.520And in terms of the popular culture – so I think it's on the wing kind of bit in both.
00:24:44.560For me, what's interesting is the refugee movements – and I actually got interested in this a little bit because of the anti-denial stuff because, like, you know, Ryan Falk and so on, people like this, were saying, oh, they were all migrated from Europe.
00:24:58.120And I got – and obviously, like, it's not true, but they migrated to Europe in such a way that can account for the population losses, in other words, right?
00:25:07.640But there are these interesting stories which I've been – which I'm researching as part of my work, my doctoral work, about these Jews who went to British India, right, in the 1930s.
00:25:18.020Or Jews who went to Hong Kong, like 1,000 here, 200 there.
00:25:22.180It's obviously not the numbers the deniers are going to need – are going to – you know, that's going to help the deniers.
00:25:26.620But these are interesting stories, right, about the destruction of the Jewish community, not just through murder, but also through forced immigration, right?
00:25:34.920So, yeah, but I feel like the big questions have kind of been ironed out.
00:25:41.940And, you know, maybe there'll be some startling new interpretation or revision of this or that element.
00:25:48.560But I think that the core questions are kind of – I've kind of been dealt with, you know.
00:25:53.220So that – I mean, I viewed this as – look, I viewed my work in denial as not, strictly speaking, historiography or me acting as a historian in training or whatever the hell I am.
00:26:02.940But I viewed it as kind of, like, I have a skill set and knowledge from history, and I can use that for, like, a popular discourse, which is – which I kind of see anti-denial as, if that makes sense.
00:26:12.860But, no, I think that it's on the way in both.
00:26:16.100And I think cultural – look, and as the survivors, you know, and I have to say, like, I didn't have, like, a great passion for this subject going in.
00:26:23.340But I've become – I felt like more of a kind of – how should I say this?
00:26:28.580More of a kind of normie compassion or interest in the survivors, even stories as well-known in our cultures, like Anne Frank and so on, as I've – and, you know, who obviously dies in Belzin.
00:26:40.840But I felt more of that as my work has gone on.
00:26:45.620But I think, generally speaking, where the way the culture is going and historiography is going, I think this is going to be less salient than it was in the 70s, 80s, 90s, where it was huge in all three domains, you know?
00:26:59.360I mean, one point I'll make about the historiography is that deniers are actually correct about, or were, is that before Jean-Claude Prasac, who was an ex-Holocaust denier – and he found a lot of documents about Leisch & Keller I, the big gas chamber in Auschwitz, in Auschwitz-Birkenau, that I cited against Mike, like, calling it a gassing cellar for a gassing cellar, the need for hydrogen cyanide detectors, a gas-tight door with a peat pole, et cetera.
00:27:26.360These were found by him. Before that, we really had very little documentary evidence of, like, these buildings being gas chambers, right?
00:27:33.720It was – but we have that now, you know?
00:27:36.140So it corresponds with the testimonial evidence that corresponds with the hydrogen cyanide in the ruins of the gas chambers.
00:27:44.540So, like, I feel like the questions have kind of been answered by historiography, if that makes sense.
00:27:51.080And the cultural stuff – I'm repeating myself – but the cultural stuff, I think, is also waning.
00:27:54.780Yeah. No, that definitely makes sense.
00:27:58.240So what is the history of so-called Holocaust revisionism or so-called Holocaust denial?
00:28:05.620So presumably that wouldn't – presumably that was a reaction to the historical or historiographic development that we've just talked about.
00:28:17.040But when was this becoming a thing, in other words?
00:28:22.560Yeah. So I think you have to distinguish between two things.
00:28:26.580So there's obviously popular denial, and then there's, like, intellectuals who engaged in denial, like professors.
00:28:35.380Really, very seldom – there's almost, like, no historians who were involved in this.
00:28:38.720I think the reason for that I'll come to, but they were professors and so on.
00:28:41.980But popular denial, you know, was a thing among Germans, but became much more of a thing as the Holocaust became more salient and more kind of a source of shame for the Germans.
00:29:13.740But this book I read recently, which for some reason I'm forgetting right now, I'm going to find it, but it provided a history and showed very little references to the Holocaust as a source of shame or as a source of denying these crimes or really just not much discourse.
00:29:29.260So as a matter of popular discourse, there was very little Holocaust denial among Germans or Americans and so on.
00:29:39.700And there wasn't a major denial work written either until I believe the first book was – the first work of Holocaust denial, like a comprehensive work, I may be wrong about this, was The Hoax of the 20th Century by a Northwestern university, still around actually, professor of engineering, Arthur Butz.
00:30:41.120You had people like Harry Elmer Barnes, who was very anti-war and kind of, I think, was sympathetic to denial as a means of deprecating the American war effort more than as neo-Nazism or whatever.
00:30:53.120But he didn't really comprehensively write in this.
00:30:56.780He just kind of dog-whistled about how he didn't believe it.
00:30:59.280He was a historian at Columbia University.
00:31:00.840But the first two, I'd say, intellectuals who wrote about this were Rossigny and Butz.
00:31:07.600And then you had the foundation of the Institute for Historical Review in 1978.
00:31:11.160So what's interesting is denial, both at a popular level and at an intellectual level, if you will, came about decades after the war.
00:31:20.220It wasn't really a thing right after the war.
00:31:21.960Just as discussing the Holocaust wasn't a thing.
00:31:26.160To be clear, it was seen as an uncontroversial statement of fact among normies that are informed that Hitler annihilated the Jews.
00:31:33.260That was just seen as like, yeah, he did that.
00:31:35.320But it wasn't like the Holocaust wasn't this big thing used to draw broad political conclusions, if that makes sense.
00:31:42.020Or to draw even derogatory conclusions about the average German.
00:31:46.100This really changes in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
00:31:55.300These days, the IHR has basically given up in Holocaust now.
00:31:58.260I don't know if you found this, but the director, Mark Weber, has admitted to – he basically has admitted to two-thirds of the Holocaust.
00:32:05.400And the last third, Auschwitz, he's like not sure.
00:32:10.800So the main body to advocate for Holocaust now is kind of thrown in the towel.
00:32:15.640And I actually have some respect for Weber because, I mean, you don't really have anywhere else to go.
00:32:20.240But you're like – and he has a master's in history.
00:32:24.860He's like, you know, I have to say the convergence of evidence is for – in favor of the mainstream on the mass shootings element and at least the Reinhardt camp's gassing element.
00:32:33.800Like I mentioned the mass graves at Belzec, you know.
00:32:35.800So, I mean, he's not going to say that's a conspiracy, right?
00:33:05.220But I just think that – I think – and David Irving was involved in this, right?
00:33:08.440But I just think that the defeats deniers have had really in open debate, as it were, and in court as well when David Irving sued Deborah Lipschek, have been sufficiently devastating that I just think intellectuals have kind of said, look at this, said, like, you know, the case is not there, you know?
00:33:25.600But it probably flourishes with, you know, moon landing stuff and vaccine stuff and so on on the online far right.
00:33:36.080It seems to just go – I mean, I don't know if QAnon mentioned this nonsense, but, like, it just – it would seem to go along with that in an almost, like, debased form, you know?
00:33:50.620I mean, as opposed to someone who was, you know, acting in good faith, might have had his biases, of course, but was genuinely trying to get at the truth.
00:34:00.280Now, if it exists at all, it exists alongside, you know, vaccines, give you AIDS or whatever.
00:34:09.600I mean, look, I debated one of the higher IQ deniers in Thomas Dalton, which is available on the Committee for Open Debate in the Holocaust website.
00:34:19.440I mean, the people who can write, who can, like – who can at least put on the form of academic discourse.
00:34:26.460There used to be deniers like that, but I just think they lost their argument and they're a few now.
00:34:31.040Like, now, denial isn't going to die, but I think it's going to become more and more vulgar.
00:34:34.580So, for example, the guy debated Dalton.
00:34:36.240He'd never make this retarded argument you see on the internet, like, oh, the swimming pool or the soccer team.
00:34:40.860So the soccer team are British POWs, nothing to do with Jews.
00:34:43.400The swimming pool is an Auschwitz one where there was no extermination by 1944 when it's constructed and Jews were killed in Birkenau, nothing to do with Jews.
00:34:51.540So it's just, like – you're going to get memes like the swimming pool and the soccer team, and I think you're going to get less of, like, the Mark Webber IHR stuff from Kate's past, if that makes sense.
00:35:16.100So they had some smart people associated with it, even there – and they had, like, extremists like Cardo.
00:35:20.740So they tried to – when they thought they could win the argument, they kind of tried to – well, they thought they had some winning arguments, which they obviously don't anymore.
00:35:29.320They tried to kind of sanitize the anti-Semitism because, obviously, if you have an empirically compelling argument that there were no gas chambers or whatever, or that they have – there's some explanation for how these people disappeared other than killing or whatever the case is, or that there's some evidence for a hoax or whatever.
00:35:48.960I mean, they never made the hoax claim.
00:35:52.840But the smart people, like, said it – oh, it wasn't a hoax – because they know – they're smart enough to know you need – if you're going to make a positive claim, you need evidence.
00:35:58.960You can't just say hoax and then give no evidence that the Soviets or the British or the Americans did this.
00:36:03.940But to say it's a misunderstanding is also odd.
00:36:07.580I mean, that relieves you of a burden of proof.
00:36:11.860But to say it's a – even if it was biased, like say there was extreme bias but no attempt to frame them, it just is very strange to me that they would all confess the same thing if there's no conspiracy.
00:36:21.660But regardless, the IHR was funded by extremists and tried to kind of disassociate themselves from them when they thought in the 1990s that they had a winning argument.
00:36:30.540And they actually wanted to reach the public and professors.
00:36:34.280So they tried to kind of sanitize themselves a bit.
00:36:39.660But, you know, I don't think they're very interested in doing that at this point because they've given up on Holocaust denial, you know?
00:36:47.140Yeah, I can remember even a kid – I don't know if I've seen clips of this or if I might have even watched it when I was a young man in the 90s.
00:36:57.620But, like, David Cole, who is currently an op-ed writer at Taki's Magazine, and Weber – they went on, like, Oprah or Montel – maybe not Oprah, but Montel Williams or one of the lower-grade Oprahs.
00:37:23.940They were absolutely trying to reach the mainstream, maybe successfully doing it.
00:37:28.920They definitely were not presenting themselves as far right in doing that.
00:37:34.220They were presenting themselves as, you know, we've got this, you know, good news we need to bring to the world, basically.
00:37:39.280And so I do think that, you know, again, we're just in a very different place right now with the Internet where – I mean, this is something I've talked a lot about it – where there's no mainstream.
00:37:53.600So, I mean, Donahue wasn't the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, but he was reaching average people, and he was a source of authority.
00:38:04.140I mean, Donahue was actually an interesting man, at the very least in comparison with his colleagues today.
00:38:11.240He was fired for opposing the Iraq War from NBC, by the way.
00:38:16.120But anyway, they were reaching the mainstream.
00:38:21.120I think where we are now is that there's no mainstream.
00:38:24.100Like, there's no – the New York Times is all lies in the mind of, you know, your average Trump supporter.
00:38:32.220And many people, Trump supporter or no, they are getting their information from a Facebook group or from a port server or something like that.
00:38:43.420They have this – we're in this kind of place where technological society, as it functioned, has broken down.
00:38:53.200There's no – there's increasingly less of a shared culture.
00:38:56.420And I think it's both hyper-polarized, to be sure, but it's also kind of fragmented, where, you know, I'm – I don't want to go too much on this because I want to focus on your stuff.
00:39:09.860But, you know, there's no band that represents Americans, or at least young Americans, that they all agree with is, like, this is – they speak for our generation.
00:39:24.660And at this point, music is utterly fragmented, and people are in their own little echo chambers.
00:39:30.180And I think they are as well in terms of mainstream discourse.
00:39:33.960Like, there's no way to even reach them.
00:39:37.940And, you know – and so the degree to which discussion about this is going to take place, I think it is going to be – it's going to take place through the, you know, the mouth of someone like Mike Enoch, maybe at best.
00:39:53.240And at worst, it will take place in this totally deranged and conspiratorial atmosphere.
00:40:38.540David is the sweetest guy in the world.
00:40:40.180I wonder – maybe, like, he doesn't like the 2016 – I mean, I wouldn't have liked the 2015-2016, like, swaggering, you know, super right-wing.
00:40:50.820I mean, I told you, like – I think it's better than that, though.
00:40:54.080I told you, for example, like, I was surprised by how intelligent I considered you to be because, like, I guess maybe this is my liberal mind.
00:41:00.700But the little pieces I saw in 2015-2016, I'm like, oh, this guy's a meathead frat boy, you know.
00:41:36.620David was right about a couple things.
00:41:38.400So one thing David was right about, for example, is there's one building at Maidonic that was identified by the museum and some books as a homicidal gas chamber that it makes absolutely no sense.
00:41:49.300Like the door literally opens on the inside, for example.
00:41:53.540And so Maidonic did have gas chambers.
00:41:56.260But this particular building should not have been labeled a gas chamber.
00:42:00.420But for the most part, Cole was wrong, and Cole has been running away from – not running away from, because he's been honest about it, but he's been backing away from the views he took in the 90s without entirely giving up on them.
00:42:14.480So I mentioned in the Enoch debate, in the Dalton debate, and I'll just say here, there are, like, three big stages of the Holocaust mass shootings, killing in the Reinhardt camps, and killing in Auschwitz.
00:42:25.480So Cole completely concedes the first two.
00:42:27.220He's just totally – he doesn't say Belzick mass graves.
00:42:30.080Like, basically, when someone like Cole sees, like, 33 colossal mass graves filled with ash, he's like, okay, let's move on.
00:42:36.300He's not going to say, like, conspiracy or why'd they pave over it or whatever.
00:42:41.900But the one thing Cole will not let go of is – so, like, remember, in the Auschwitz debate with Enoch, we were focusing on the big gas chamber, Leichen Keller 1, Quirksiller 1.
00:42:51.540Cole will not let go, and I think he's wrong on the evidence, but he will not let go of the fact that that was not a homicide gas chamber.
00:42:58.400And that is the one thing he continues to – he even says Auschwitz there was gassings, but in the bunkers, not the big gas chamber.
00:43:06.080So Cole is still a revisionist in this regard.
00:43:10.680He won't let go of that, but he's much more in agreement with the mainstream than he is with, like, Mike Enoch.
00:43:16.500And I think – I don't want to psychologize him.
00:43:19.180I will say – I'll say this instead of psychologizing him.
00:43:21.440If I were in Cole's position, I would find it very difficult to say, okay, Leichen Keller 1 was a gas chamber.
00:44:21.920The point about David, I think, would be – the point about David would be he's a good example of how the smart deniers have kind of – have looked at the evidence and said, well, you know, this claim isn't really justified.
00:44:36.800So, like, for example, I'm going to read a quote that was published in a book, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken, in the late 1980s, which was true at the time, by a Princeton historian.
00:44:45.420Sources for the studies of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable.
00:44:53.160And the reason it isn't true anymore is because primarily of a historian, Jean-Claude Prasac, who found the construction documents.
00:45:01.240He found what he called the criminal traces, references to Leichter and Keller, which we talked about as a gassing cellar, references to it as a, you know, gassing-based, right?
00:45:10.680References to the hydrogen cyanide detectors.
00:45:12.760Basically, documents which I used against Mike, which I think discredit the claim that it was a morgue, a preheating system.
00:45:18.340You want to cook the corpses, apparently, right?
00:45:19.940So I guess the one thing you have to admit to deniers, which I think people don't want to, but I think is true, is that they did, through their provocations, they spurred more research, which led their claims to be discredited.
00:45:33.120But probably nobody would have researched it if they hadn't done it.
00:45:37.720Here's an interesting quote on Prasac's book.
00:45:39.320So Prasac's book, Technique and – Prasac was an ex-denier who basically went to the archives in Auschwitz and found these criminal traces, right?
00:45:45.700He found the evidence that these buildings were not morgues.
00:46:42.780It was 10, 15 years ago, which was about a gas-tight door for a delousing chamber, like, for non-homicidal gassing of clothes.
00:46:50.720And the document said this door, this gas-tight door, needs to be made exactly like the gas-tight door used for special treatment, zonderbehandlung of the Jews.
00:47:01.260And other documents, special treatment is defined as execution.
00:47:06.060Like, Himmler once said, okay, this special treatment carried out by hanging, this special treatment by shooting.
00:47:10.780So there's a document that says the gas-tight door for the delousing chamber, non-homicidal gas chamber, should be exactly like that for the gas chamber used for the execution of the Jews.
00:47:19.940I mean, I don't know what to tell you at that point.
00:47:22.360But, yeah, you know, I mean, the best thing that Tanya could say is, oh, special treatment means something different in this context.
00:47:29.780He admits it's a code word for killing because it's one of the few, very few revisionists left who's, like, AIQ, let's say, and works on, like, archives.
00:47:38.300It just is like, bro, okay, you can find some case where some German says special treatment doesn't mean killing.
00:47:43.100But you admit it was a code word for execution.
00:47:46.260What else could that mean, special treatment of the Jews with a gas-tight door?
00:47:49.860Like, it's time to get out of the show, you know?
00:47:54.840Let me talk a little bit about where I think this is going, and you can respond.
00:48:01.540As I was saying before, I don't think we can underestimate the degree to which many normies out there, that is, mainstream people, average Americans, have become largely deranged in their views.
00:48:21.060Now, there's probably a lot of causes of that in, you know, economic distress and just this kind of malaise or anxiety, anxious malaise that we all kind of feel about the state of the world and America, all of that stuff.
00:48:39.340But a lot of it is caused through the internet and through what I was speaking of before, this breakdown of technological society, where the apparatuses of, you know, the nightly news, your local paper, the big national papers, just the way that life was, for better and for worse, organized so that society could function
00:49:08.480and the people could have a sense of up and down and right and left and good and bad and all that kind of stuff.
00:49:14.880These are breaking down and people are, probably particularly conservatives, but I would say it's across the board, are entering these deranged places.
00:49:27.480I imagine that Holocaust denial is, it's not a major force, but I wouldn't be surprised if it cropped up in a lot of these forums, the QAnon type forums places.
00:49:42.160And I'm not trying to defend them, but I think in a weird way, they might not even do it for anti-Semitic or pro-Nazi reasons.
00:49:50.200It's just one more conspiracy to throw into the bouquet of, you know, the moon landing, you know, JFK and all that kind of stuff.
00:50:01.160I think it will still persist in, with people like Enoch.
00:50:08.200I think what he is trying to do, and I more or less, again, I take your word for it.
00:50:19.700I think in terms of higher IQ people or people who want to use some sort of historical method,
00:50:24.900I think it is a slowly dying field, and it will probably not be with us, say, 25 years from now.
00:50:35.280But I think it will be with us in an intense way in these deranged forums and with people like Enoch.
00:50:42.560What Enoch would do, and I think he would actually agree with me if I talked with him about it,
00:50:49.520is that they view themselves as oppositional to Jewish power.
00:50:56.140So that's Hollywood, Wall Street, et cetera.
00:51:01.140This is, from their mind, this torpedo launched at the USS Israel.
00:51:09.900If you can debunk the Holocaust, they're going to wither away or turn to water like the Wicked Witch or something.
00:51:21.760They feel that this is such a powerful weapon they can use against their enemies, and that is why they do it.
00:51:32.000And I think from my standpoint, I think it's a very – putting aside truth and false claims,
00:51:40.200I think it's just a bad idea to focus on this or put your eggs in that basket.
00:51:46.920Like, you know, I'm going to – the fact that I'm revisionist, something about what I say politically and socially and intellectually is at stake in this.
00:51:59.120But they will do that, and they have done that.
00:52:02.580I don't think – I'm not misrepresenting them.
00:52:05.020The Holocaust denial isn't just like a curious, you know, hang-up.
00:52:10.100Like, I could have an argument about, you know, who's better, Verdi or Wagner or whatever.
00:52:15.500Whether I win that debate doesn't matter.
00:52:18.160You know, it's a matter of taste on some level.
00:52:25.180I think they have their eggs in this basket in a very curious way.
00:52:29.500And I also think they feel that it's a silver bullet, if you will, or this just huge ammunition that if they can win on this field and they might very well win the argument, quote-unquote, in the sense of influencing, you know, the far right on podcast and on 4chan, et cetera.
00:52:53.280They might very well win the argument on those forums, that that will lead them to political power.
00:53:22.800I don't like – obviously, I don't like anti-Semitism.
00:53:24.720But my – actually, my biggest – the biggest political motivation wasn't that.
00:53:28.600It was trying to deprogram these people on the far right who I think – and this is controversial, obviously, for somebody who's in a PhD program who wants to be an academic and be a historian.
00:53:38.860But, like, I think these white boys, as it were, have some grievances with society that are legitimate, and they're being seduced by race hatred and kind of crazy ideologies.
00:53:49.720So I want to reach them and deprogram them.
00:53:52.160I think – look, I think I've been effective at that at a very small scale.
00:53:58.200So, in fact, I know I've been effective at that.
00:53:59.760In fact, during our debate, TRS had to, like, delete comments from – again, a very small minority.
00:54:04.880I'm not – the vast majority of his people thought Enoch won, right?
00:54:07.380But there were some who thought – and even in their Odyssey channel, you see this.
00:54:10.500There's some who thought I was more compelling.
00:54:16.480Because, like, you're never going – with confirmation bias as it is, like, if Trump debated Biden, you'd never get more than 10% Democrats saying Trump won or 10% Republicans saying Biden won.
00:54:26.080But my goal has been to deprogram a small number of these people, maybe the clever ones or the ones who may be a little on the fence.
00:54:33.040And I think I've been successful in it, although it's exhausting because it's a very toxic place.
00:54:38.200But, no, I mean, if I have a political motive in this, it's been to – it's concern about the far right.
00:54:44.900I don't think – I'm concerned about these people.
00:54:46.740I think they're a danger to themselves, to others.
00:54:49.200And I think they have legitimate concerns, too.
00:54:51.160So I think the problem will continue, right?
00:54:53.040So I guess partly I'm with the left on their analysis.
00:55:10.640I mentioned this on Tuesday when we talked about this.
00:55:13.520Mike Enoch struck me as – it's as if he believed the Nazis were TRS members or something.
00:55:20.020And so it was all about Fed posting or letting off steam or something.
00:55:24.840You know, it's like, oh, you can't take that seriously.
00:55:26.540He's just being edgy or whatever it is.
00:55:29.100I mean, the point I made to this, though, is that, okay, Mike, you're putting your interpretation – and I think I made a very good response.
00:55:34.620There's some things where I'm like, oh, God, why didn't I say this?
00:55:36.720Of course, you get that in verbal debates.
00:55:38.200But this one, I think I got a good response.
00:55:39.660Like, Mike, you're putting your interpretation over Horty, Hitler's own ally, who was distressed.
00:55:47.300But he was distressed by the fact – I think morally, too – by the fact that Hitler, in his words, as he said to his – this isn't after the war and some trial.
00:55:55.600This is 1944, as Hitler's ally, he says to the Crown Council, Hitler reproaches me because I won't allow the Hungarian Jews to be turned over and massacred.
00:56:04.040It's kind of a tragic thing that he's putting in his lot with this person who now wants him to massacre some of his citizens who he may not like, but –
00:56:12.600Yeah, but anyway, Mike was – the Fed Post's interpretation was saying, okay, my Mike Enoch know in 2023 better than Horty, but Hitler's ally who spoke German knew in 1944, you know?