Transed and Nationless: The Post-Hitler West: 1

One way of explaining the last three years is the diminishing cultural salience of the Holocaust

This will be written and published as a series; I can’t guess the number of entries.

Comments will be occasionally pruned for uninterestingness or evident failure to read and reply to the thesis itself. (Anything heavily centered on Jewish “machinations” in modern cultural and political affairs will probably merit removal on those grounds.)

Series Contents:

Part 1: Introduction; RE Holocaust “Denialism” (this post)

Part 2: Introduction to the forgetting and rediscovery of the Holocaust ↗

Part 3: 1945-1967: The forgetting of the Holocaust ↗

Part 4: 1967-1980: The recalling of the Holocaust ↗

Part 5: Background trends during the “Holocaustianity” era ↗

Part 6: The need for new sacrifices 2017-pres. ↗

The dwindling of Hitler

So long as the secular, post-Christian Anglosphere and its clients in Europe could maintain the cultural narrative that the Anglosphere was singularly responsible for expunging Hitler, and that this rendered the modern West with goodness, it was morally coherent to defend populist (intrinsically Nazi-aligned, anti-communist) cultural traditions in the public sphere, namely a nationalistic ethos and taboos against visible homosexuality and queerness. This celestial beacon held the orbit of American political and cultural discourse between the relatively grounded 1980s and mid-2010s.

Although in recent years the moral stigmas of “Nazi” and “Naziism” have not lost clout per se, the terms have obviously become more abstract in use, a signifier for any type of populist sentiment including all the post-Christian Anglosphere traditional sentiments that were until very recently still valid in mainstream discourse; a signifier for, in the present, rejecting the mandate of the amorphous and plotless entity that passes for governance by the West’s cosmopolitan elites.

This transference of significance is made possible and required by diminishing salience of the Holocaust; in fact, it is not possible under the current mandate to sincerely believe that the Holocaust really signified anything at all, since the West’s cosmopolitan elites have endorsed a worldview in which the West’s largest demographic (white, post-Christians) are intrinsically and irredeemably sinned, guilty of crimes beyond scale against which the Holocaust merely appears as an eccentric foible. “Being a white, post-Christian” (and therefore imbued by blood with claims to nationalistic ethos and taboos against visible homosexuality and queerness, claims that oppose the mandate of the current regime) has become a sin on par with Naziism.

It is understandable and unsurprising at the same time that the reflex to defend the narrative of the Holocaust would, under these conditions, become more vehement and violent than ever. If the narrative has lost clout, detractors must be denounced so that habitual anti-Nazi taboos can, in their twilight, serve to prevent noticing the fact. Yet it is not detractors (“denialists”) who have deprived the Holocaust of clout, but rather the changing spiritual appetites of the post-Christian West and the declaration by cosmopolitan elites of new cosmic sins that eclipse it. The detractors merely threaten to expose the Holocaust’s cultural twilight; they are not the authors of it. Further, it should be obvious that it is reasonable for a non-Christian, white group to seek to preserve special status as a “victim of the West” at a time when the media and state have declared a fatwa against Western whiteness (regardless of the validity of that status, which is a complex question owing to the extreme diversity of individual outcomes experienced by Jews in the 20th Century). Therefor it is no surprise that in the twilight of the Holocaust’s cultural significance the most depreciated sentiments (nationalism, pro-heterosexual normativity), formerly defensible for association with ending the Holocaust, would be attacked for obvious populist themes by those in charge of maintaining the narrative that formerly preserved the validity of those sentiments in mainstream discourse.

i. Whose Denialism Is It, Anyway?

Whether it serves in conveying my thesis, the reader would probably prefer this discussion to begin with disclosure of my beliefs on the Holocaust. Very well.

Put simply, many (but not at all all) of West and Central Europe’s Jews were obviously ostracized and displaced in the 1930s and 1940s, by a legally sanctioned, international and multi-year antisemitic riot i.e. pogrom, resulting in upheaval, death, and cultural annihilation; many in the East were also the apparent victims of military killing-sprees by the Einsatzgruppen, and the best terms for this phenomenon are obviously the original ones; the Shoah; the Holocaust.

Also; I am very fond of Jews as a culture and as individual people. I would despair of living as a human on an Earth without them; it would be an Earth without so much talent, insight into the human condition and modern culture, and young, womanly beauty.

And yet

And yet, the depiction of circumstances that emerged to put-to-flesh the liberal West’s collective understanding of “The Holocaust” in the 1970s — after two decades of indifference and amnesia, and one of questionable scholarship — is, in a thousand different critical respects, facially implausible. It is a comic-book fairy-tail of good guys, bad guys, and victims; not reality.

And yet, the event is openly treated with such an unserious historical religiosity which pathologizes ambiguity and revision (the cornerstones of the work of historiography), that all permissible expert discussion of a clearly complex, disruptive, and difficult-to-interpret human epoch is forced to cling to apparently cosmic truisms delivered from Providence sometime in the 1960s, precisely when direct access to the scene of the crime was sealed from Western access by the Iron Curtain.

Most notorious of these truisms, of course, is the count of “6 million dead” which can never be revised downward. That historians two decades removed from the Holocaust and unable to pierce the Iron Curtain could better assess the death count than modern “revisionists” is patent, and patently childish magical thinking. Post-70s academic Holocaust revisionists should be considered prima-facie more authoritative and well-informed; instead they have for a half-century been mobbed and unpersoned as “Holocaust Deniers,” for upsetting the central creation-myth of the post-60s West’s cultural religion. All of this is obvious, transparent. The comic-book Holocaust (simple, certain) is sacrosanct; the real Holocaust (complex, uncertain) is a taboo.

What other historic eruption of violence is permanently locked to a death count from the 1960s, lest trying to reestimate it means it will happen again? It’s a stupid, childish farce that shows how fundamentally unserious the West really is.

The two facts above are not surprising given that post-War Western historiography spent two decades treating the Holocaust as an afterthought. But the absurd outcome of these two facts is that even a (relatively) cursory acquaintance with mainstream Holocaust knowledge is sufficient to engender “Denialist” revelations, as all available mainstream knowledge naturally calls into question the comic-book narrative.

To illustrate what I mean, it is appropriate (though awkward) at this point to disclose that the prompt for this essay is Ron Unz’s 2018 opus, “American Pravda: Holocaust Denial.” I’ll probably more extensively discuss the work later in the series; essentially it is a diaristic exploration of the origins of Holocaust “Denialism” (which are entwined with the origins of the comic-book narrative of the Holocaust in the 1960s) which, among other virtues, dramatically conveys the absurdity and the toll of the modern West’s academic and legal unpersoning of heterodox (and rigorous) Holocaust researchers. What struck me as a flaw in Unz’s work, however, was his simplistic and exaggerated characterization of the mainstream, comic-book narrative of the Holocaust. Yet it turned out that Unz was only shaking the “scales from my eyes.”

Further, Wikipedia provides the (legally-sanctioned) definition of “Denialism” as the following frighteningly ahistorical list of wrongthinks:

History: the original “Conspiracy Theory”

What I mean by mainstream Holocaust historiography being sufficient to engender “Denialist” notions is that this childish, broad-brushed depiction of the Holocaust is incompatible with much of mainstream Holocaust historiography. It is scarcely possible to deal with any sincere, ostensibly non-Denialist (i.e. mainstream) investigations of the Holocaust without immediately conceiving of “one or more” of the banned statements in the Wikipedia entry for Denialism. What is one to do, with this obvious proscription on rational thought?

Let us consider five examples of de facto Denialism, below; four of which are authored by Jewish contemporary writers or modern historians.

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1) Frank

Unz’s article depicts several examples of glaring contradictions in the comic-book narrative, and for the purpose of inserting color the one I will borrow is his subtly cutting take on The Diary of Anne Frank (emphasis added):

But for me, the most striking aspect of the story is the girl’s actual fate under the official narrative, as recounted in the thoroughly establishmentarian Wikipedia entry. Apparently disease was raging in her camp despite the best efforts of the Germans to control it, and she soon became quite ill, mostly remaining bedridden in the infirmary, before eventually dying from typhus in Spring 1945 at a different camp about six months after her initial arrival. It seems rather odd to me that a young Jewish girl who fell severely ill at Auschwitz would have spent so much time in camp hospitals and eventually died there, given that we are told the primary purpose of Auschwitz and other such camps was the efficient extermination of its Jewish inmates.

So, the (comic-book) Holocaust was a systemic, comical genocide-machine aimed at killing any Jew “Germany and her collaborators” (read: All of Europe) could get its hateful hands on; and also at preserving waifish teen Jewesses in hospitals for months if slots at the gas chamber were on back-order.

Point-being, should not the same coterie of truth-defenders that have ruined heterodox Holocaust historians for decades (the ADL, etc.) be training their sights on Wikipedia contributors who dare suggest that Frank was among “17,000” Bergen-Belsen prisoners felled not by gas-chambers, but typhus (which was also rampant in the free German population at the time, due to returns of vaccinated, asymptomatically infected troops from the East)? The Bergen-Belsen typhus toll is a whopping .28% of the Holocaust’s trademarked 6,000,000; can Frank and her Wikipedia “collaborators” really be permitted such flagrant, lore-defying heresy?

Depicted: Notorious Holocaust-Denier Anne Frank (reconstruction; Universal Pictures; author asserts fair-use)

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2) 2BW

It seems more likely, and more reasonable, that the Holocaust was many things; and one of these things was the downstream consequences of 20th-Century bureaucratic adventures in managing displaced civilian political enemies. In the Second Boer War, the British had the bright idea of confining their displaced, ethnically Dutch civilian enemies in camps, birthing the term “concentration camp,” and promptly revealing the violent incapacity of modern rifle-bearing forces to keep groups of humans fed and healthy in the concentrations that the same modern rifles can compel said groups to suffer.

“Lizzie van Zyl, a Boer child, visited by Emily Hobhouse in a British concentration camp” source: Wikipedia (public domain)

Again, is the Wikipedia entry for the Second Boer War also “Holocaust Denialism”? Because it describes an inherent lethality to concentration camps that requires no specific design of “extermination”? Per the Wikipedia entry for Holocaust Denialism, it can be construed as such.

What the Second Boer War makes clear is that the central tenets of the comic-book narrative of the Holocaust are superfluous. “IRL,” as the kids say, “gas chambers” are neither necessary nor efficient for producing the carnage that the Holocaust seems to have wrought on Jews; the lowest-energy means of effecting such a toll is to try to keep enemies alive. And by all appearances, and given the extreme disruption and stress of being fire-bombed and pillaged on all sides by the Allies at the time, this is what Nazi Germany did; and the means of care are less obviously pernicious and callous than the treatment of Germany’s (civilian and professional) POWs by the US and vassals in the Rheinwiesenlagern.¹

All of this is not to say that literally zero Germans conducted fantastically sadistic acts under the color of law against Jews (this can also be predicted to be true in conditions of confinement); nor is it to say that a total of seven figures of deaths from both overt and indirect means is implausible (even if not overwhelmingly convincing); just that it’s not obvious to any dispassionate, reasoning mind with a familiarity of human warfare why some particular moral outrage would be needed to “explain” the deaths of the Holocaust. Europe violently, abruptly displaced Jews while also being invaded by the UK, US, and communist Russia. That is the Holocaust.

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3) Arendt 1: EuroVision

Puzzlingly, Unz’s (cursory) survey of the literature leaves out Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (The Banality of Evil), the work that most shapes my (even more cursory) understanding of this epoch in Europe, and which discloses a wealth of perspectives that complicate the comic-book narrative of the Holocaust.

Is Arendt’s Eichmann “Denialist”? In my memory of a paperback copy lost four years ago, Arendt (a Jew) acknowledges in the preface that her journalism of the Eichmann Trial was promptly criticized as an apologia;² it explained evil, and thereby appeared to excuse it. This memory might be an invention of my subconscious. It is nonetheless a fact that Arendt’s portrayal of bureaucratic “banality” directly undermines the notion that the Nazis approached the Final Solution in a ruthless repose; everything in the book is an ad hoc negotiation prescribed by local sentiments and logistical scarcity. Throughout the text, “ruthless toughness” (rücksichtsloser Härte, a throwaway Party slogan that Arendt highlights to great effect) becomes a funhouse mirror revealing the reluctance and compromise of the Nazi government in administering the pan-European pogrom.

In April, 1944, two months before the Allies landed in France, there were still two hundred and fifty thousand Jews in the country, and they all survived the war. The Nazis, it turned out, possessed neither the manpower nor the will power to remain ‘tough’ when they met determined opposition. The truth of the matter was, as we shall see, that even the members of the Gestapo and the S.S. combined ruthlessness with softness.

Is Arendt’s text above, published in 1963, “revisionism” or “Denialism”? Clearly, yes, per the definitions allowed to determine legal censure of research and publication on the Holocaust after the 1970s. Yet it is only the tip of the iceberg of the nuances Eichmann casts to light across the modern “Holocaust’s” glossy psychic darkness.

In order to wrap up this segment, and move on to the modern fall of the Holocaust mythos, I will not list many. What is most impressive is that Arendt documents the ease with which European nations who did not possess a predisposed animosity toward their Jewish brethren (unlike France, the example above, which pre-empted any other nation by interring 4,000 German refugee Jews at Gurs before even being invaded, including Arendt herself) rebuffed all directives regarding “Solutions” of any stage, either directly or by dithering:

It was in [German-occupied] DENMARK, however, that the Germans found out how fully justified the Foreign Office’s apprehensions had been. The story of the Danish Jews is sui generis, and the behavior of the Danish people and their government was unique among all the countries of Europe – whether occupied, or a partner of the Axis, or neutral and truly independent. One is tempted to recommend the story as required reading in political science for all students who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence. […]

Like Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and Bulgaria proved to be nearly immune to anti-Semitism, but of the three that were in the German sphere of influence, only the Danes dared speak out on the subject to their German masters. Italy and Bulgaria sabotaged German orders and indulged in a complicated game of double-dealing and double-crossing, saving their Jews by a tour de force of sheer ingenuity, but they never contested the policy as such. That was totally different from what the Danes did. “When the Germans approached them rather cautiously about introducing the yellow badge, they were simply told that the King would be the first to wear it, and the Danish government officials were careful to point out that anti-Jewish measures of any sort would cause their own immediate resignation. It was decisive in this whole matter that the Germans did not even succeed in introducing the vitally important distinction between native Danes of Jewish origin, of whom there were about sixty-four hundred, and the fourteen hundred German Jewish refugees who had found asylum in the country prior to the war and who now had been declared stateless by the German government. This refusal must have surprised the Germans no end, since it appeared so ‘illogical’ for a government to protect people to whom it had categorically denied naturalization and even permission to work.

So that was it — if occupied native intermediaries simply threatened resignation, local execution of The Holocaust was voided. Germany was completely dependent (at least in this example) on willful local compliance.

Arendt continues by describing how even the Germans in Denmark, after years being accustomed to local resistance, “melted like butter,” balking at orders to correct the situation, with the local military commander and S.S. units uncooperative with emissaries sent to produce action. This is to be contrasted with the tragedy of Anne Frank’s Holland, where antisemitism against native Jews was generally unpopular, but found purchase (like in France) in hostility against immigrant (largely German refugee) Jewish contingent — yet native Jews were largely caught in the purge by the end:

[S]econd, there existed an inordinately strong tendency among the native Jews to draw a line between themselves and the new arrivals, which was probably the result of the very unfriendly attitude of the Dutch government toward refugees from Germany, and probably also because anti-Semitism in Holland, just as in France, focused on foreign Jews. This made it relatively easy for the Nazis to form their Jewish Council, the Joodsche Raad, which remained for a long time under the impression that only German and other foreign Jews would be victims of the deportations, and it also enabled the S.S. to enlist, in addition to Dutch police units, the help of a Jewish police force. The result was a catastrophe unparalleled in any Western country; it can be compared only with the extinction, under vastly different and, from the beginning, completely desperate conditions, of Polish Jewry. Although, in contrast with Poland, the attitude of the Dutch people permitted a large number of Jews to go into hiding – twenty to twenty-five thousand, a very high figure for such a small country – yet an unusually large number of Jews living underground, at least half of them, were eventually found, no doubt through the efforts of professional and occasional informers. By July, 1944, a hundred and thirteen thousand Jews had been deported, most of them to Sobibor, a camp in the Lublin area of Poland, by the river Bug, where no selections of able-bodied workers ever took place. Three-fourths of all Jews living in Holland were killed, about two-thirds of these native-born Dutch Jews. The last shipments left in the fall of 1944, when Allied patrols were at the Dutch borders. Of the ten thousand Jews who survived in hiding, about seventy-five per cent were foreigners – a percentage that testifies to the unwillingness of Dutch Jews to face reality.

Ultimately what Arendt’s Eichmann describes of the Holocaust is a “franchise pogrom,” where gentiles and Jews in each nation of German-occupied Europe predominantly author their own outcomes. Fascist Italy, as noted above, sabotaged all ostensible compliance without diplomatic consequence; while Central European polities, Arendt notes elsewhere in the text, exceeded the Germans in enthusiasm for the purge. In Arendt’s depiction, the Holocaust was not “German;” it was European. Saying otherwise today is… what’s the word…

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4) Arendt 2: “Language Rules”

And what to make of Arendt’s description of the Final Solution? It is in this chapter of Eichmann that her analysis makes sudden, credulous leaps regarding elements of testimony that apparently outstrip all known physical documentation:

Furthermore, all correspondence referring to the matter [of Hitler’s secret but not-secret 1941 fiat to exterminate Jews not-yet-expelled] was subject to rigid ‘language rules,’ and, except in the reports from the Einsatzgruppen, it is rare to find documents in which such bald words as ‘extermination,’ ‘liquidation,’ or ‘killing’ occur. The prescribed code names for killing were ‘final solution,’ ‘evacuation’ (Aussiedlung), and ‘special treatment’ (Sonderbehandlung); deportation – unless it involved Jews directed to Theresienstadt, the ‘old people’s ghetto’ for privileged Jews, in which case it was called ‘change of residence’ – received the names of ‘resettlement’ (Umsiedlung) and ‘labor in the East’ (Arbeitseinsatz im Osten), the point of these latter names being that Jews were indeed often temporarily resettled in ghettos and that a certain percentage of them were temporarily used for labor.

I don’t include this quote to litigate the question of extermination camps and gas chambers per se — this would be disingenuous as I have not read more recent appraisals of the evidence; and as in example 2, I am agnostic and see these tropes, real or not, as superfluous to the pragmatic reality of the Holocaust.

Rather, one could simply point out that all that would be required to render the above passage overt, and in many countries illegal “Denialism” is a few edits.

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5) Goldhagen

Finally and briefly, for a more modern example of mainstream Holocaust historiography that engenders controversial, “Denialist” notions, we can consider Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 opus, Hitler's Willing Executioners, which is a response to Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland from four years prior.

The central observation of both texts is that much of the killing of Jews done by actual Germans was apparently carried out by quasi-deputized civilians. These bands, consisting of middle-aged men, did not kill “under orders” but mostly autonomously. Like occupied European nations, they were given license to act violently toward Jews; but the will was their own.

This book is an interesting edge-case for having provoked immediate censure on academic grounds, resulting in vibrant debate on the moral complexities of the Holocaust, while never triggering the anti-Denialism landmine. Yet Wikipedia summarizes:

The book challenges several common ideas about the Holocaust that Goldhagen believes to be myths. These "myths" include the idea that most Germans did not know about the Holocaust; that only the SS, and not average members of the Wehrmacht, participated in murdering Jews; and that genocidal antisemitism was a uniquely Nazi ideology without historical antecedents.

These “challenges,” and the history of civilian banditry as an engine of the “Final Solution” naturally threaten the comic-book narrative of the Holocaust as a Nazi administrative fiat. Precisely what could be “Final” about a solution that left the fate of Polish Jews under the discretion of poorly-supervised, roving, middle-aged civilians? Simultaneously, how could such a resource find any utility in a system where efficient “extermination camps” possessed the capacity to do the same job? It’s obvious that some parts of this story include grounded, complex details of human depravity and evil, and others are stupid and fabulist simplifications.

Next in the series:

Also:

Part 3: 1945-1967: The forgetting of the Holocaust ↗

Part 4: 1967-1980: The recalling of the Holocaust ↗

Part 5: Background trends during the “Holocaustianity” era ↗

Part 6: The need for new sacrifices 2017-pres. ↗

1. Even if the outcomes in the former case were much harsher, as reasonable given logistical circumstances and the long durations of interments.

2. I originally referred to Arendt as reporting on the Nuremberg trial, rather than Eichmann’s standalone trail in Jerusalem after his capture in 1960; sometimes things blend together in the brain.