Holocaust Revisionism explained for Leftists: the short version

I. Why a short version?

One of my articles, 'The Mystical Sand Book: Holocaust Revisionism explained for Leftists' has proven to be one of my most popular posts. I wrote it for the British Left - specifically, members of the Left who have been caught up in the recent 'Left anti-Semitism' scandal - to help them in their struggle against Israel and Zionism. My reasoning was that by explaining the principles of Revisionism to them, I would be placing a weapon in their hands - an extremely effective weapon, more effective than any they have used hitherto. You could call me an intellectual arms dealer.

After I revised the essay multiple times, I was satisfied with result, but looking at the essay now, I see that it does suffer from one shortcoming, which is excessive length. I have decided here, then, to write a short version.

II. What the official story is

'Mystical Sand Book' starts out - surprisingly - with the assumption that yes, the Holocaust happened.

So what was the Holocaust? Three things:

• Hitler and the leaders of Germany ordering the extermination of all Jewry in German-occupied Europe and the USSR, as shown by documents such as the Wannsee Protocol; 

• An extermination carried out by gas chambers - fixed gas chambers in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor and other camps, and mobile gas chambers (gas chamber vans) on the Eastern Front. The German Einsatzgruppen shot dead many Jews - tens of thousands were shot at the Babi Yar ravine in Ukraine - but primarily, the Germans used gas. In 1943, the Soviet government put captured Germans on trial for gassing Russians in mobile gas chamber vans. 

• Six million Jews were killed: five million in the European camps, one million in the USSR. As for what happened to all the bodies, the Germans burned them: in Europe, Jewish corpses were disposed of in crematoria; in the USSR, on bonfires. 

The three theses were proved, beyond the shadow of a doubt, at Nuremberg and other war crimes trials. A wealth of evidence - testimonial, forensic, documentary, demographic - exists for the Holocaust, and only a crank would deny it (or someone more sinister - a Neo-Nazi who belongs to an international neofascist conspiracy).

The layman regards the Holocaust as incontrovertible, and so is puzzled by Holocaust Revisionism. It seems to him irrational. When coming across Revisionism for the first time, the layman will concede, for the sake of argument, that the USSR or the USA / UK may have invented propaganda lies wholesale in order to demonise the Germans; but he cannot understand why the Jews - all Jews - would have done the same. He asks, quite reasonably, why would the Jews lie? And he notes that if the Jews are lying, they must be lying as a collective, as the vast majority of Jews around the world believe that the Holocaust happened. Many Jewish survivors of the camps will attest, most convincingly, that the atrocities did happen: are they all lying, and if so, how did they co-ordinate their story?

III. What the Talmud says  

The layman, in order to understand the Holocaust, needs to look at it as a whole. From that vantage point, he will see that the Holocaust rests upon the fundament of religion - the Jewish religion.

Kauston, the root of the word Holocaust, means 'to burn', and Holocaust means 'burnt offering', 'burnt offering to God'.

The Talmud (a Jewish religious text which is a 22-volume set of commentaries on the Old Testament) makes many startling prophecies regarding the future of the Jewish people. One of them is that a vast number of Jews will be massacred by non-Jews - by being thrown into giant ovens. After being immolated - in what is a sacrifice - the murdered Jews will return to life. God, upon recognising their sacrifice, will award them the lost State of Israel.

I think the reader can guess for himself the name the Talmud gives to this event (here's a clue: it starts with a capital 'h'); I think, too, he can also guess the precise number of murdered Jews (here's another clue: it stands in the millions, and is a nice round figure).

Amazingly, then, the Talmud - which was written some 1500 years ago - predicts some of the most significant events of the 20th century: the mass murder of Jews by non-Jews, the mass immolation of Jews in ovens, and the Jewish recovery of the lost State of Israel.

The 20th century Holocaust fits the Talmud Holocaust like a glove. In his 1960 novel, Night, Elie Wiesel writes that the Germans tried to kill him four times - once by shoving him in a giant fire pit in the ground. (Wiesel miraculously survived).

IV. Some implications

Once you understand how the Holocaust is grounded in the Jewish religion, a number of things become clear. Among them are:

• The six million. The number of dead in most of the famines and genocides of the 20th century constantly fluctuates: one will see different figures from the Ukrainian famine, the famine in China at the time of the Great Leap Forward, the number of Cambodians killed in the time of Pol Pot... But the Holocaust death toll stays locked at six million. Why? Because the Talmud says it must be six million. The figure cannot be changed. 

• The immolation. The official account of the Holocaust - the one we find in the history books - tells us constantly that millions of corpses were cremated or heaped on bonfires. This is because the account must match what is in the Talmud: a fiery sacrifice must have taken place. 

• The resurrection. The Talmud narrative has a happy ending: the murdered Jews came back to life. This explains why the world is filled with Auschwitz survivors. (The large number of Auschwitz survivors seems rather improbable, given that Auschwitz - a death camp where 1.5 million died - would have been the deadliest place in the world for Jews between 1939 and 1945. Even if one avoided gassing, such a terrible ordeal as internment in Auschwitz (or any other death camp) would have taken a toll on the survivor's body: one would not live into one's eighties and nineties).   

• The Holocaust = Zionism. The Talmud narrative shows the identity of the Holocaust, Judaism and Zionism. If one believes in the Holocaust, then ones believes in Judaism - whether is Jewish or not. The two cannot be separated. In the same way, if you accept every word of the Book of Revelations as being literally true, you must accept every word of the Gospels. The implication is, then, that if you believe in the Holocaust, you must believe in Israel's 'Right to exist' and all the other tenets of Zionism. Palestine was given to the Jews by God after the sacrifice of the six million, and that is that. How can one question the word of God? 

• What God thinks. Anyone who is familiar with the Bible knows that God is ornery when crossed. If the Holocaust, as foretold by Judaism, did not happen in the 20th century, then Palestine was obtained under false pretenses. I here make the impish suggestion: what if someone were tell God this? Were God to be informed of the ploy, he could be expected to take a terrible revenge, as He did many times in the Old Testament, upon His people. 

V.  The cultural influence

Professional Holocaust survivors such as Elie Wiesel and Irene Weisberg Zisblatt are influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by Yiddish folk literature. Stories which belong to this genre depict the persecution of Jews by non-Jews and contain equal parts absurdity and horror. One could call the genre Kafkaesque, but as Kafka himself was influenced by it, this would be putting the cart before the horse.

Remarkably, the Wiesels, Zisblatts and others of their ilk are always automatically believed. We live in a society which treats them with reverence.

VI. The show trial

One question is, why is the Holocaust story harmful?

Towards the end of the 'Mystical Sand Book', I deliver the following parable: 

Suppose that, 75 years ago, a gang of desperadoes rob a bank which is quickly surrounded by police, and, as what was intended to be a quick robbery turns into a siege, the gang takes twelve people at hostage, one of whom dies of a heart attack. The police storm the bank, free the hostages and arrest the gang and put them on trial – not only for armed robbery, but for first-degree murder of the person who died from the heart attack (in what should have been at the most an involuntary manslaughter charge). In addition, the gang are also charged with the premeditated murder of the eleven other hostages, even though all eleven survived. As evidence for this mass murder (which never happened), the prosecutors use photographs of the heart attack victim’s corpse, documents supposedly found at the gang’s hideout, and a confession coerced out of one of the gang’s members by torture or threats to his family. The final piece of evidence, which onlookers regard as the most compelling, is the eyewitness testimony of the eleven murdered people themselves [- all of the eleven] put in an appearance at the trial. At the conclusion of the trial, the gang members are either sentenced to death or life imprisonment. No-one spoke up for them – after all, they were admittedly bad characters, had made many enemies, and should have been in jail for other crimes – and decades later, they are still regarded as guilty, because, among other reasons, the survivors of the siege and their descendants will tell anyone who will listen how the gang took a dozen people hostage and murdered them in cold blood.

The reader can deduce that the above is an allegory for what happened to the Germans after the end of the war: the gang of robbers are the Germans, the police are the Allies and Russians, and the hostages are the Jews (and perhaps the Poles). I think the story can be used to understand why precisely it is that the Holocaust story is so objectionable...

The understanding is this: the Holocaust story leads to a distrust of our institutions. Quite clearly, in our parable, the judiciary, the prosecution and the police did wrong. And so did the politicians, who did not intervene to ensure that justice was served; so did the journalists, who covered up evidence and misreported; so did the intellectuals and academics, who never questioned the narrative.

VII. Where to for the Left? 

The Holocaust story hurts both the German and Palestinian national cause. Now, the Left, being by and large Marxist and Russophile, does not care for the former (seeing as nationalist Germany waged ferocious wars against Russia and Marxism-Leninism) but does for the latter. The Left has embraced the Palestinians, who lost their country because of the Holocaust story, and has made an enemy of the Israelis, who are sustained because of that story. So the Left wants to help Palestine and hurt Israel - but how? Exposing the intrigues of the Israel Lobby, calling Israel a 'Racist Colonial Settler State', condemning the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, comparing Israelis to 'The Nazis' - none of it works. The Left, in the past seventy years, has scarcely landed a blow against Israel and Zionism, because it has so far refused to challenge what lies at the heart of the Zionist project - the Holocaust narrative.

Requiem for a Heel

I. Mourning and celebration

Who is celebrating the assassination of Qasem Soleimani? Who is commiserating?

In the first group - the celebrants - we find the opponents of Hezbollah and the aging Mullah regime in Tehran: Israel; the Syrians who are against Assad; the Lebanese protesting against the Lebanese government and Hezbollah in recent months; the Iraqis protesting against Iranian influence in Iraq in the past few weeks; Saudi Arabia and any other Arab nations in the Gulf who regard themselves as enemies of Iran. Outside the Middle East - and in the West - it is mostly the 'Ziocons' (Zionist conservatives) who number among those who are crowing and exulting. Many of the 'Ziocons' openly displaying their bloodlust are 'burgers' (that is, Americans, to use 4Chan parlance), although a few are British.

(Over the years, 'Ziocon burgers' have steadily infiltrated the dissident Right - which is surprising, given that the Far Right, especially in America, has been anti-Semitic for the past eighty or so years. Aficionados of Israel and admirers of the Jewish people have never been made welcome on the American Far Right, but they are now trying to turn the tables and make the anti-Semites unwelcome - see the comments thread at this article by Steve Sailer on the assassination. If I'm to make a prediction for the coming decade, it is that the Ziocons will increase their attempts to infiltrate the Far Right - and purge it of anti-Semites - as they make the Far Right their new home: they will abandon the Center-Right, which, as it becomes less and less credible, will continue to lose popularity).

But most on the dissident Right are mourning Soleimani's death or wondering anxiously what it portends for the future. The majority of the dissident Right is made up of what I call the 'anti-imperials'. This faction - by far the largest - sees the Mullahs and the rulers of all the other aging, kleptocratic and despotic regimes in the Third World as 'anti-imperialist' by dint of their anti-Americanism. The anti-imperials feel vaguely sympathetic to the Left, but they rarely characterise themselves as National Bolshevik ('Naz Bol'); rather, they prefer to call themselves 'populist' or 'anti-war'. On this side of the ledger stand mainstream political figures such as Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard, and also fringe libertarian individuals and groups - LewRockwell.Com, AntiWar.Com, Keith Preston's AttackTheSystem.Com - and a plethora of 'conservative' pundits: Stephen F. Cohen, Pat Buchanan, Saker in His Vineyard, Moon of Alabama, Philip Giraldi, Eric Margolis... On the fringes of the Right, a few prominent white nationalists have migrated over to anti-imperial country, among them Richard Spencer, Hunter Wallace, Mike Enoch, David Duke.

Many of the aforementioned pundits began with one ideology in their early years and subtly shifted away from it in their later. David Duke and Pat Buchanan moved away from racialism and immigration-restrictionism; the writers at AntiWar.Com and LewRockwell.Com, free-market liberalism. The newfound appreciation for Iran and Russia, 'anti-war' and 'anti-interventionist' American foreign policy, necessitates the throwing of one's original ideology overboard. One can then set sail to the land of Red and Brown, of 'Neither Left nor Right', of Naz Bollery. The Red Brown ideology does entail some radical contradictions, but these hardly seems to bother the anti-imperials. A conservative ought to oppose Muammar Gaddafi for his long-time bank-rolling of leftist terrorism; a socialist, Gaddafi's staggering wealth (Gaddafi was worth $USD200 billion at the time of his death). But the inconsistencies were shunted aside during Gaddafi's ouster, and Gaddafi ascended to the pantheon of anti-imperial demi-gods.

II. The last decade summed up

In retrospect, the two most important events for the Far Right in the last decade were the Arab Spring of 2010-11 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, both of which set the Far Right on a new path.

At the start of the decade, despots held sway in countries dominated by an ideology which was either left over from the Cold War (countries such as Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Iran, Syria, Zimbabwe) or which could be described as post-Marxist (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ukraine, Russia). The former group of despots never won an election which could be described as 'free and fair' in the best Jimmy Carter-approved manner; the latter group did win elections initially, but as time went on, they wanted to stay in power past their mandate, and so came increasingly to rely upon state repression.

Most of these despots used their position to enrich themselves, some of them becoming as rich as Croesus. Their rule produced - over the long term - economic, social, intellectual, and cultural stagnation, but it was widely assumed (by observers in the West) that these men would stay in power forever, as their subjects were passive, apathetic, and disorganised. The Arab Spring put paid to that notion. (But the Arab Spring should have been anticipated, as the Arabs, by nature, are a disputatious people given to great emotional excitement). A few years later came Maidan Square and the ouster of Yanukovych in Ukraine, as the Ukrainians sought, once again, to emancipate themselves from Russia.

Yanukovych and the Arab despots responded to the uprising with varying degrees of force, Gaddafi and Assad being the worst. At this point we saw the appearance of what I call the Gaddafi doctrine. At the beginning of the Libyan uprising, Gaddafi responded to his opponents with disproportionate violence: at one anti-Gaddafi protest outside an army barracks, Gaddafi's son ordered soldiers to fire on the crowd with anti-aircraft guns (!) (see Paul Kenyon's Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa (2019)).
Under the Gaddafi doctrine, any opponent of the anti-imperial despots becomes what Yockey calls an Inner Enemy. He is to be stripped of any rights as a consequence, and can be starved, kidnapped, tortured, raped, killed, his house and city leveled and turned into rubble, his family pauperised... 

In the past few months, we have seen a fresh round of protests by the Arab (and Persian) masses in Lebanon, Iraq, Iran; against both Assad's forces and the Kurds' in Deir Yezzor, Syria; against the Islamist HTS militia which holds sway in the rebel enclave of Idlib, Syria (which has been the recipient of a ferocious aerial bombardment and shelling by Putin and Assad, an attack which has killed hundreds and caused over 500,000 refugees to flee). Ideologically, these protests take neither ideological shape nor form - they cannot be classified as liberal or communist or Islamist - and it is not exactly clear what the protestors want; but the question is, do the protestors deserve to be punished, and punished as per the harsh strictures of the Gaddafi doctrine. 

The answer of the anti-imperials seems to be - yes, whereas mine is no.

By any stretch of the imagination, I cannot be considered a humanist or liberal or Arab-lover. I certainly do not want Syrian refugees in my country any more than the Turks or Saudis want them in theirs, and I do not want to take up a collection for the good people of Idlib. All the same, I wouldn't wish Assad on a dog.

This view of mine - a 'normie' view - sets me at odds with the vast majority of the dissident Right, as does my acceptance of information from 'normie' news sources - AFP, Reuters, BBC, Al Jazeera - on the Middle East. (I recommend this excellent summary of the Syrian War, from the Council on Foreign Relations, as the best guide to the war).

I look at Syria or Venezuela or Yemen as I would a horrific car accident. And what is the 'normie' response (I won't say the moral or Christian response, although I'm tempted to) when you pass by a car accident with wreckage and bodies strewn everywhere? It is this. You shake your head in sorrow, say a prayer for the injured or dead, stay out of the way of the emergency service workers, walk on, and go on about your business - thinking, 'There but for the Grace of God...' - and that's about it.

My attitude strikes me as being normal, and that of the anti-imperials, abnormal. During the 2010s, I stopped understanding them. Venezuela under Maduro has been plunged into misery - a misery which has inconvenienced Venezuela's neighbours, who have been forced into take in hundreds of thousands of refugees - and I agree with the 'normie' view (a truism, really) that Venezuela would be better off were Maduro to be removed. But we can't have that, according to the anti-imperials, as that would be 'regime change', a 'CIA Guaidó coup'. Fighting 'regime change', for the Carlsons and Gabbards, has become a principle which is sacred and one which has been elevated above all others.

The Tulsi Gabbard, 'anti-war', 'anti-regime' change doctrine is not built on solid foundations, and even a lackluster personality such as Shay Khatiri - an Iranian liberal activist who writes for neoconservative and anti-Trump publications - can tear it apart with ease. Perhaps it is the extreme incoherence, inconsistency, illogicality of the anti-imperials bothers me more than anything else.

Added to that is the enormous amount of time and energy expended on, for example, propping up the regime of Assad: how many videos and essays by dissident Rightists have been devoted to 'proving' that the April 2018 Douma gas attack was 'staged'? (According to the anti-imperials, the gas attack was either a) faked or b) actually carried out - more self-contradiction! - but by Syrian rebels who sought to frame Assad. The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, went as far as to say that British intelligence did the gassing. My assessment is that Lavrov is not telling the truth or is the victim of a delusion. But that opinion puts me in the minority: the amount of adulation of the Putin regime in the American dissident Right media - as opposed to lack of it in the mainstream Russian media itself - boggles the mind). 

The anti-imperials claim to be 'against war', but of course want the wars in Syria and Ukraine to continue - to a successful conclusion for Russia. Assad has become since 2015 a puppet of the Russians, and seeing as the Assads have been in power in Syria for fifty years (!) this year, the Russians are working towards another fifty. But why do the anti-imperials laud this goal? Why do they want the Assads, Putins and Maduros to stay in power in perpetuity? Why are they investing so much energy in this cause? Why are they neglecting the program of Yockey, as outlined in the last chapters of Imperium (1948) - Yockey, the original Naz Bol?