Holocaust revisionism and market forces

Now we look at the retail sector of Holocaust revisionism in the marketplace of ideas. While CODOH and others are seen to be doing a commendable job in the wholesale division, it’s worthwhile to take note of the marketing of revisionist thought in off-shoot areas in this new matrix of intellectual dissent. Take last night (29 September), for instance.

Broadcaster Jeff Rense had Jim Condit, Jr., on in the middle hour of his radio program. In their dialogue, the two of them discussed dissenting views about the Nazi Holocaust regarding the alleged plan to completely exterminate the Jews of Europe, noting the intricate provisions for immigration that had been made in formal agreements brokered between the Nazi regime and the Zionists during the 1930s to transfer a significant number of German Jews to Palestine.

This came on the heels of the Rense website posting three videos featuring a series of discussions between David Cole and Ernst Zundel. It must be said that rense.com has become an impressive clearinghouse for a wide spectrum of dissenting views on a broad range of subjects over the years, including Holocaust revisionism.

Ditto Mike Rivero’s equally eclectic website, whatreallyhappened.com; and others, in their blogs or up on their websites. Revisionism has been welcomed into the broad community of dissentients; not by all, certainly, but by some. It has a presence, and both Rense and Rivero have carved a niche for it in their daily postings as a perfectly valid avenue of historical inquiry.

Meanwhile, in a growing number of street protests across the U.S. we see a kind of populist revisionism taking form. Posters showing the American president, Barack Obama, with a Hitler mustache are a common feature at health care and anti-tax rallies. Some policies of the government are denounced as Nazi-like. The media fend off accusations of taking their cue from Goebbels’s propaganda machine, and so on.

Over in Tehran, Dr Ahmadinjad, the Iranian president, delivers yet another barn-burner of a speech, wherein he again dismisses the Holocaust as an historical myth. Which, very predictably, elicits a Pavlovian gnashing-of-teeth reaction among the chattering classes in the West, with foaming outrage over Dr A’s “Holocaust denial” being a recurring motif for talking-heads, and knee-jerk bashing of geopolitical villain du jour, the Islamic Republic of Iran, reaching new heights (new lows?). All of which, naturally, underscores belief in the received version of the Nazi Holocaust as an Establishment orthodoxy. That alone would make it suspect for some among us, given a growing popular recalcitrance to Establishment-sanctioned viewpoints.

In the 1980s, it was reported that Holocaust revisionism was being imported into Germany via its large and thriving Turkish community, and treated as sound intellectual currency. Since then, needless to say, the population numbers in the immigrant community have grown all over Western Europe and across North America. And with that has come a degree of openness to ideas that conflict with the received version of history as promoted by the old-line Establishment. There can be no doubt that new and auspicious circumstances, in terms of multiculturalism and its by-product, the warm reception given renegade ideas, are filling up tributaries that feed into the swelling torrent that is Holocaust revisionism.

Social fragmentation married to media fragmentation is producing a mosaic composed of discrete tiles, rife with intellectual pluralism, in which old established ideas are being challenged. Michael Moore’s latest documentary deconstructs the core idea that capitalism is a force for good. On scores of university campuses, an annual Israel Apartheid Week decries Zionism as a racist ideology. Even now, as I write, an arrest warrant has been issued for a Catholic bishop in Nova Scotia, wanted for the cache of kiddie porn he had allegedly uploaded to his laptop computer. His distraught superior, the archbishop of Halifax, was heard fending off the spectre of nihilism, asking despairingly: “Who is there left that we can believe?” The man speaks for many; such bedrock disillusionment is well-nigh universal.

Skepticism regarding the media abounds, cynicism concerning the political classes abounds, a distrust of ascribed moral authorities is rampant, a rising alienation from mainstream views is rampant -- but plain old human curiosity remains constant. They all add up to market forces that will advance the fortunes of revisionism. Robert Faurisson was right: Going forward, Holocaust revisionism can only grow in strength and influence and outreach.