When we are talking about “ideology,” we are inundated with a sense of relativism about what is “true” or “political.” On some level, this means there is an idea that politics are just a matter of perspective and opinion. There is an aspect of truth to that: that the way you see the world is a matter of how you organize it, but this misses a fundamental dynamic. For the radical right and neo-fascism, it is not just an implicit politics driven by a lens by which they see events and facts. It requires certain things to actually be true, and not just a matter of interpretation

This sense of “truth” has to be allied with their claims. The idea that people are generally “unequal,” that some are innately inferior to others. That biological and genetic groups have biological allegiances to each other and that “in group/out group” dynamics are built in to ethnicity. That race is a good signifier of biological difference and social particularities. That a conspiracy of certain groups, often Jews, are actually controlling world events through their superior intelligence vying for increased resources through the destruction of national identities. For fascists to build a complex ideology, they need these statements to be literally and objectively true, and without that the legitimacy of their perspective unravels.

If the narrative that they prop up is to have any credibility they need to have some evidence to support most of its political ideas. The idea that human beings are best stratified rather than socially horizontal. That democracy is a sham since only a natural aristocracy is able to rule. That immigration, affirmative action, and racial justice are useless since not all races share an equal intelligence level. They must implant those ideas into different disciplines and fields of thought so they can then reference those areas as evidence for ideology. This is not usually done by actually injecting these ideas into the academy, though that does happen occasionally. Instead, they come in from the outside so they can infect the dialogue in the “popularization” of academic discourse. Therefore, things like race and IQ arguments play only inside amateur blogosphere circles, not inside actual academic conferences focusing on biology research through peer-review.

Fascism is built entirely on this untruth. It needs it to survive.

They will have to completely rewrite our intellectual foundations, hollowing out and rebuilding science, history, philosophy, and integrated studies onto a world of outright lies. For anyone that has spent time reading and listening to the intellectual core of the 21st century fascist movement, it will be obvious that many of these people are incredibly sincere. Often they feel as though they are telling the truth in a world where the truth is persecuted. In reality, they are driven by very deep feelings that nullify the common understandings of disciplines like history and evolutionary biology, where by their strong conviction requires uprooting the academic traditions if they are to make sense of the world. How can racial nationalism be a normal and healthy thing if the Holocaust resulted from it? How can we continue to argue for racial hierarchies and group formations when all contemporary science disregards race as a useful category? Instead of thinking with the critical nature useful in the academy, they indulge their biases and search for intellectual justifications. Many are even open about this, with Richard Spencer of the National Policy Institute and the Radix Journal mentioning this dynamic in his discussion of how he came to his political beliefs. In a later conversation with the Political Cesspool’s James Edwards he makes a very sincere mention that often times your political and social background can “change the way we see facts.”[1] He does not let himself off the hook for this even though he is talking about contemporary leftists around the Michael Brown killing, and this is certainly the case when those on the radical right choose very marginal studies and histories over the consensus opinion without a compelling reason other than confirmation bias. They come to their ideological opinions first, then piece out whatever scraps of academic work they can use to build a structural foundation to rely on, even though those scraps are few and far between.

While it appears that this process is only happening on the fringes of the culture, it contributes sharply to a general social “mistruth.” In the same way that obscure conspiracy theories can create distrust in complex historical narratives, or the failure of the medical establishment opens up cracks that completely untested “alternative medicine” can appear as sincere treatment, or the establishment of points of untruth about certain areas of study can have very real effects on the rest of society. Radical analysis, science and technology are built on basic factual understandings, even if those are skewed by perception and ideology. Disinformation allows for manipulation because the mass of information afforded in a modern technological society does not have the ability to be differentiated between those with legitimacy and those artificially constructed.

This is not a dynamic invented by white nationalists, and has instead been fostered in the “fake news” infrastructure of the contemporary American right, with talk radio, Fox News, Breitbart, Heat Street, and others pushing this extreme misuse of facts all the way into the White House. At this point, the truth is up for political debate, a tool of ideology rather than reality.

This can destroy very constructive social projects built on analysis because researched and sourced ideas often have to compete with sensationalistic rumors. Outside of a racial and political context, this happened very clearly with climate change. As the evidence about the correlation between human behavior and global warming mounted, an ideological core with financial interests in continuing mass fossil fuel extraction mounted counter-information campaigns on a massive scale.

One note that is important in this discussion is that by presenting this paradigm it is not meant to validate contemporary elitist liberal notions about the sanctity of civil and educational discourse. Facts are pliable in the same way perception is, and dominant ideologies and social systems underscore our filtration in all periods and all societies. The deconstruction of that matrix is part of radical analysis, and revolutionary processes, but the fascist attack on facts is done to undermine our understandings of the physical world and the people in it. Plainly put, it is a way for them to counter our underlying assumptions of the world to build their own superstructure atop it.

Fascists have often tried to use “crossover” points to bridge their politics to a less politicized group of people. This happens by using topics where they can easily manipulate data and where average people do not have the immediate tools to refute them. Fascist ideologues will take a known point, say a historical event or reading of science, and then shift it towards a small minority of evidence that would support their broader ideological points. They can then use certain fields of rupture in discourse, such as conspiracy theory or “alternative” science, whereby they play on a general distrust of “the system” to provide entry point for their ideas. Since most people are not well equipped to refute many falsehoods that make scientific sounding claims and pull at arcane and inaccessible data, it has the ability of creating distrust in the conventional narrative and sowing the seeds first for their “evidence” and then, later, for a fascist politic.

Killing Collective Memory

For a long time, Holocaust Denial was this crossover point. The purpose of Holocaust Denial is multidinous, but the central function is the recovery of the idea of the racialized state or racialized society. In recent memory, the most “successful” example of racial nationalism was the Third Reich. It is one of the only modern examples of a fully realized fascist state built on racialist principles. It does vary from the more “generic fascism” in that it was carelessly imperialistic, was even more ruthlessly genocidal, and, to a degree, bizarrely anti-rational and filled with silly superstitions.[2] Scholar of Comparative Fascist Studies, Roger Griffin, noted that the obsession that modern neo-fascist movements have with Nazi Germany was bound to happen, the two will always be linked in the mythic role Hitler and the Third Reich hold because of its shocking success at meetings its aims.

Nazism was bound to provide a role model to post-war fascists committed to a racist vision of national ‘cleansing’ from degeneration. For one thing, it was one of only two of “their” movements to have achieved state power…It was the racist aspect of Nazism, however, that was the most significant for a new generation of white neo-fascists who were less alarmed by the political or military weakness of their ‘home’ nation than by the erosion of their pan-European ethnic identity through the impact of mass immigration and multiculturalism.[3]

For the rest of the public, the brutal cruelty of the Holocaust forever demystified racial nationalism in the eyes of the world community, associating it rightly with violence and oppression. Nazi Germany is the cleanest example of this, but it is also the most clearly realized politic of racialism and anti-Semitism. The results of these politics were forever exemplified by the crematoria at Auschwitz, something that Alt Right advocates of the “Ethnostate” can never recover from. As Leonard Zeskind puts it when looking at the far-right Liberty Lobby’s Willis Carto and the creation of the first institutionalized Holocaust Denial campaign within white nationalism, getting rid of the baggage of the past was crucial to building a movement built on racial nationalism.

Willis Carto (and others) needed to rewrite the history of World War Two: it was central, not peripheral, to their white supremacist project. They all believed a civilization-level change had occurred with the defeat of Hitler…Mainstream historians, although starting from different premises, reached similar conclusions: the fight against racism and fascism in Europe had discredited these ideologies among America’s decision-making elites.[4]

To return to that politic, there is an incredible need to undo the Holocaust so that the function of racial nationalism can be disassociated with the most disgusting atrocity of the 20th century.

It is also important to take Jews off of the register as victims of genocide, and to continue to aid in the general conspiracy theory that is required for white nationalist anti-Semitism. If they are to place Jews at the top of the pyramid of racial revenge, bent on controlling and destroying the “sovereignty” of the white race, then it is not impossible for them to have been victims of such violence. Many people on the far-right have actually wanted to maintain a narrative of Jewish genocide in as much as they are open about the degree to which they have a ravenous hatred of Jewry. This is much of the dichotomy that Leonard Zeskind lays out in Blood and Politics, where by the radical revolutionary politics positioned by the National Alliance and William Pierce refused to deny the Holocaust (at least to some degree) in that they shared the need for this level of destruction of the Jews.[5] On the opposite end was Willis Cato, founder of the Liberty Lobby and the Populist Party, who needed Holocaust Denial as a centerpiece since there was no way they were going to achieve “white populism” with nationalism having that level of blood on its hands.[6] The choice between the two is whether or not you want to use the Holocaust to claim victory against the Jews, or to, in turn, deny that it happened so as to lighten the image of the Third Reich and continue to show how much control Jews have over the discourse of modern history.[7] This is not to suggest that Pierce did not peddle in Holocaust Denial as his National Alliance certainly did sell classic works of denial as a way of drumming up anti-Semitic hysteria, he just did not want to rest his case against the Jews and for fascism in the strength of that argument.[8]

To actually deny the Holocaust, there are a few fracture points that deniers tend to go after. Andrew E. Mathis explains a clear definition of Holocaust Denial that is in line with what the modern Hitler apologists contend.

Before discussing how Holocaust denial constitutes a conspiracy theory, and how the theory is distinctly American, it is important to understand what is meant by the term “Holocaust denial.” Holocaust deniers, or “revisionists,” as they call themselves, question all three major points of definition of the Nazi Holocaust. First, they contend that, while mass murders of Jews did occur (although they dispute both the intentionality of such murders as well as the supposed deservedness of these killings), there was no official Nazi policy to murder Jews. Second, and perhaps most prominently, they contend that there were no homicidal gas chambers, particularly at Auschwitz or Birkenau, where mainstream historians believe over 1 million Jews were murdered, primarily in gas chambers. And third, Holocaust deniers contend that the death toll of European Jews during World War II was well below 6 million. Deniers float numbers anywhere between 300,000 and 1.5 million, as a general rule.[9]

Since there are such varying claims inside of the Holocaust Denial camp, most of which completely contradict one another, it is almost impossible to keep a comprehensive deconstruction of all claims. To do so would be a full-time project of simply going through increasingly bizarre theories that have no basis in fact.

One of the principle ideas that deniers put forward, as Mathis mentions, is that there was no direct order of extermination going all the way up to Hitler. In Deborah Lipstadt’s book Denying the Holocaust, she traces a history of these denials from World War II forward. This looks into the life and work of David Irving, a right-wing popular historian who skated a long road from apologetics to straight revisionism. This started by altering his book Hitler’s War in later editions to remove reference to Hitler’s order of the Holocaust, as well as claims that Hitler did not have clear understandings of different German war efforts. Leipstadt’s book made clear that Irving was a liar and a denier, doing so out of racial animus. Irving, in turn, sued Leipstadt in British court for libel. Since Liepstadt refuses to actually debate with deniers, she simply counter sued and a theatrical court case ensued where Irving represented himself in trying to defend his claims as historically sound and not done out of racial hatred. This became one of the more revealing episodes in the destruction of the Holocaust Denial narrative, where it was shown that Hitler’s decisions about the “final solution” happened in stages and was definitive even if it did not have the kind of paper trail that Irving was looking for. They went through instances where 30,000 plus Jews were killed through specially designed trucks that pumped exhaust into the storage compartments. Irving was finally pressed to say that this was both deliberate and a part of a larger systematic extermination. Later, there have been claims that the deaths in the camps were simply because of disease or were actually from Allied bombing campaigns, all of which lack literally any proof. Instead, things like the IBM punch card system shows the systematization that executions went through in camps like Auschwitz and Dachau.[10]

Hitler himself, was never shy about his intentions with the Jews. In 1922 he told an interviewing journalist:

Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows – at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example – as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.[11]

He made almost identical claims in January and August of 1939 and December of 1941. Goebbels mentions this plan in his diary, saying the health of the nation requires that “therefore no other recourse left for modern nations except to exterminate the Jew.” He went on in his diary to provide entries on February 1th and March 27th that outlined that “60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only 40 per cent can be used for forced labor.” These are really just small snippets of the volumes of evidence that trace Hitler to the final solution and to the planned extermination of European Jewry.[12]

Revisionists will then go on to contest the numbers of the Jews who died, saying that the 6 million number is hyperbolic. They will suggest that there actually were not that many Jews in Europe at that time, and so the number of Jews left in Europe at the conclusion of the war is actually much closer to the number that was there before. The numbers of Jews who then died in the concentration camps is then pegged at anywhere from 150,000 to just over a million, and this is ascribed to death from illness, over work, and incidental executions not tied to any over-arching genocidal plan. It should be noted, however, for even these narratives to be true deniers have to admit to some of the vilest institutional treatments of Jews that lead to murderous death ponds.

The first point that needs to be made about the claim as to the numbers of Jews who died during the Shoah is that it is physically impossible to artificially trump up the numbers to this degree. It would require millions of people, working with unlimited budgets, on every continent, with the knowing participation of dozens of nations to continue this kind of lie. The infrastructure would be tremendous, massive even, making up a sort of “secret government” that can control media and history. If this is a narrative that moves you, then there are even bigger issues at play, but this is simply not how power works in the modern world. The ruling class institutions work despite their incompetence, not out of divinely inspired efficiencies. The reasons they give for claimed ruse is the development of the State of Israel that needed the Holocaust as justification, but this is simply not a straight enough line to justify the most massive coordination of lies in the history of the world.

Right from the start, however, the numbers are proven to be literally true. The number exactly is closer to 5,721,500 Jews executed, with the total breakdown between countries looking like:

Germany – 195,000

Austria – 53,000

Czechoslovakia – 255,000

Denmark – 1,500

France – 140,000

Belgium – 57,000

Luxemburg – 3,000

Norway – 1,000

Holland – 120,000

Italy – 20,000

Yugoslavia – 64,000

Greece – 64,000

Bulgaria – 5,000

Romania – 530,000

Hungary – 200,000

Poland – 3,271,000

USSR – 1,050,000

There is credible analysis and sourcing on this, and the burden of proof of this is on the deniers. They do, often, come up with “documents” that intend to throw a stick in the wheel on these claims, yet there are so dismal and piece-meal that legitimate scholars have to wonder why they will take non-credible sources over the piles and piles of corroborating material from verified repositories. Deniers will jump on the fact that there were rounded numbers and that the numbers are flexible, but this is true of literally every global event. The claims by many on the far right that this was merely “Soviet lies” has yet to be proven true even after the mass data dumps that happened after the Berlin Wall fell, but it also seems to believe its own propaganda in that so-called “communist” countries had a special interest in protecting Jews. This comes from the continued notion that Marxism is a Jewish idea used to destroy the natural hierarchies and “organic societies” of the West. This is a painful bit of ahistorical propaganda, one that erases the anti-Semitism suffered in the U.S.S.R.

One of the most virulent claims of the denial camp, and one that has received the most media attention, is that of the gas chambers. In the 1990s, neo-Nazi Erdnst Zundel, went to infamy for being arrested under Canadian hate-speech laws for publishing two pamphlets: “The Hitler We Loved and Why” and “Did Six Million Really Die?” He then brought in David Irving to testify in his trial that was designed to prove that the evidence of the Holocaust is a legitimate question and not driven by racial hatred. They hired Fred A. Leuchter, a man known in the U.S. for having built execution devices for prison death rows. They sent him on a trip to Auschwitz, which the strange Leuchter also used as his honeymoon with his new wife, and he took sample from the gas chambers and examined their construction. After the tests were run on his samples, he concluded that these could not have been gas chambers and that there was only a “surface” level of Zyklon B. When analyzing the Leuchter Report, the first of several documents he put out that were lauded by deniers worldwide, it became clear that the findings were shockingly without merit. The testing that was requested were the wrong tests, and the lab chemists that did the tests spoke at the trial that their results actually do reflect the amount of the toxin that would have been present on the external bricks. Leuchster did not have an engineering degree or license, and none of his break downs of the facility seem to show even a cursory understanding of engineering or architecture. The claims that the Zyklon B was only used for delousing was destroyed when the lab that did the testing explained how the amount used for delousing was a much higher concentration, which is why the lower level of the residue appeared on internal chamber bricks. Leuchter was slowly blacklisted in his work, and no one would buy his faulty electric chairs or gas chambers for their prisons any longer.[13]

The claims about the gas chambers have been refuted by thousands of eye witness testimonies, the look of legitimate engineers, the documentation en masse at each execution camp, and from tests that are ongoing. One thing is true however: many of the gas chamber facilities were both substandard in design and destroyed by the Nazis themselves to hide their work as the Allies moved closer. The BBC summarized what actually happened to the gas chambers well and why the claim that no Zyklon B vents could be found (which is still untrue) would be a red herring.

Deniers have said for years that physical evidence is lacking because they have seen no holes in the roof of the Birkenau gas chamber where the Zyklon was poured in. (In some of the gas chambers the Zyklon B was poured in through the roof, while in others it was thrown in through the windows.) The roof was dynamited at war’s end, and today lies broken in pieces, but three of the four original holes were positively identified in a recent paper. Their location in the concrete matches with eyewitness testimony, aerial photos from 1944, and a ground photo from 1943. The physical evidence shows unmistakably that the Zyklon holes were cast into the concrete when the building was constructed.[14]

For the gas chambers to have been “faked” it would again take thousands of eye witnesses to lie, engineers to be wrong, Nazi records to be forged after the fact, and graves and crematoria to be artificially tainted. There, the records of the ash collected has been explicit with photos of the mass disposal of crematoria waste, as well as its use in fields for fertilizer.[15]

Holocaust Denial was able to crossover into other fields of thought because people did not have the immediate knowledge to refute it right from the start. Most discussions of the Holocaust in school curriculum do not go over these fine details because they have no relevant need to, therefore past students are not equipped with the tools to counter the denier’s claims. Every effort was made to strip the discussion of anti-Semitism so as to make it simply a disagreement over the evidence, and, just as with debates over creationism, they wanted to “teach the controversy” over the two ideas about World War II. The problem there as with here is that there is literally zero debate amongst historians about whether or not the Holocaust happened as it has been explained in consensus literature.

The next option for many deniers is what many people refer to as “soft denial,” which is to de-emphasize the importance of the Holocaust itself. While there are a lot of deaths and genocides in war time, there is no reason why the destruction of European Jewry should take special precedence. This is one of the more thinly veiled arguments, yet one that has seen more credence on the Left who attempts to look at Jewish issues in a different context in connections to issues around Palestine. This soft denial lacks the understanding of the unique role of anti-Semitism throughout history, where by generation after generation of Jews had their community defined by anti-Semitic purges and pogroms. The Holocaust was then the grand summary of this persecution, and one that has yet to be matched in terms of its systematization and group propaganda. The idea that the Holocaust is just “one more tragedy” in the world of international warfare is factually false; it stands as significant and the codify how the contemporary world instituted racial and anti-Semitic thinking. It is not just one ethnic group that got the brunt end up the warfare gun, but the natural result of the nationalist worldview.[16]

Denial itself was so thoroughly debunked after episodes like the Irving trial, the expose done by Skeptic magazine and the subsequent debate between the Institute of Historical Review’s Mark Weber and Skeptic Magazine’s Michael Shermer, and various condemnations of the Barnes Review and the Journal of Historical Review. The Institute for Historical Review consistently saw its products decline in sales over the last decade, a sign that the questioning narrative has lost steam. Weber himself, a suit and tie nationalist and former National Alliance member who poses as a history researcher, has publicly walked away from Holocaust Revisionism and has stated that it really has not had an effect on helping the cause of maintaining anti-Semitism. He notes that no matter who is discussing the Holocaust, revisionists included, no one can dispute the suffering of the Jews during WWII, and therefore even if they think their argument about numbers is intriguing it comes across as “heartless quibbling.” Weber still makes clear that he feels the public perception of the Holocaust is exactly a result of what he labels as “Jewish power” and that Holocaust Revisionism is no longer having the effect he would like.

In short, the Holocaust assumed an important role in the social-cultural life of America and western Europe in keeping with, and as an expression of, a phenomenal increase in Jewish influence and power. The Holocaust “remembrance” campaign is not so much a source of Jewish-Zionist power as it is an expression of it. For that reason, debunking the Holocaust will not shatter that power.[17]

The same trend is happening with people like Counter-Current’s Greg Johnson has said almost identical things, and notes that the Holocaust is simply the result of ethnic conflict between Jews and Germans. Instead of trying to answer for it, he simply wants to “step over it” in the same way that those on the Marxist-Leninist left just ignore the abuses of Stalin, Mao, or Hoo-ha. This notion is that Nazism was simply just a militant response to the threat of Jewish Soviet Marxism, one that should not be repeated, but also should not be apologized for.[18] This idea is taking over the previous Holocaust denial camp where the notion is now that the execution of the Jews was simply what happens when the parasitic nature of the Jews themselves force a population into ethnic conflict. This takes elements both of the Pierce version of Holocaust celebration and of the soft Holocaust denial, where the idea that ethnic conflict is natural and normal is taken as fact and the solution being ethnic nationalism where Jews are removed so they cannot risk destruction for tempting the host people.

This idea is born out most fully in former University of California-Long Beach professor Kevin MacDonald’s work, a series of books called The Culture of Critique.[19] Here he outlines Judaism itself as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, where by a certain ethnic group created a model of parasitism and attack on ethnic identity as a way of preserving their own ethnic interests and survival. With this idea, McDonald creates a “grand theory” of anti-Semitism while also perpetuating the idea that “genetic interests” are actually a legitimate scientific concept (they are not), and also delegitimizing ideas such as “Frankfurt School Marxism” by stating that they were only concocted by Jews to destabilize white nations. His theory was that Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy” that Jews use to out-compete non-Jews for resources, developing over time as a socio-religious notion that develops ethnocentrism and tribalism. MacDonald, for example, argues that Jews internally plotted to undermine anti-immigrant legislation that maintained a white majority in the U.S. They did this, he alleges, to make the U.S. a multicultural and internationally aligned country. Through institutions like Boasian anthropology, Jews hoped to promte the “ideology of racial equality,” all to weaken the self-interests of whites and so they can manipulate other races to control the larger host population.[20] His conception of Jews and Judaism is largely the understanding that permeates the Alt Right, where Jews are portrayed as a tribal caste who use superior, evolutionarily-derived, verbal intelligence to bore into host white societies and to sow discord in white unity so that they can preserve their own ethnic interests. The effect of this is multi-pronged. It reinforces traditional antisemitism by allowing it a fully realized theory backed up by what appears to be scientific research. It also reframes all of history as defined by ethnic conflict, and further validates their ideas about racial group interests, motivations, personalities, and identity.[21]

While MacDonald’s work is certainly novel in that is uses an interdisciplinary approach caked in tangential research and very smart sounding words, it falls in line with the most renegade views from neo-Nazi right. For example, Richard Butler, the enigmatic leader of the Aryan Nations until its destruction from a Southern Poverty Law Center lawsuit, lays out the Jewish enemy in almost identical terms. If the entire history of different species is the competition for survival, than Jews are white’s direct adversary. While MacDonald uses the social sciences to drum up a narrative about the pernicious Jewish threat, Butler metaphorically translated that to the spiritual realm by weaving a mythic history of Jews as a demonic race that is set on perverting the natural order of man through the subversions of egalitarianism, feminism, capitalism, communism, and what have you. While caked in Nazi references and esoteric readings of the Bible, Butler mirrors the same model that MacDonald does. Jews, because of their lack of rootedness in the soil, use abstractions to destabilize the hard, material world of white nations. Their parasitic nature, and weakness, means they will always be a threat, whether through their control of financial markets, their “invention” of miscegenation, or emerging forms of cultural degeneracy and deracination.[22]

MacDonald’s work has been largely rejected by his colleagues in evolutionary psychology, including the founder of the field John Tooby, stating that his conclusions violate the basic tenets of the field and inaccurately utilizes group-selection theory. MacDonald’s work made huge leaps beyond what any established research on selection models have created, making wild conjecture about Jewish social cohesion, attempting to link up things like small Jewish organizational support for immigration policy to supposed genetic consciousness drummed up in ancient Egypt and sanctified in the Talmud. The books are filled with value laden language, describing Jews in horrific terms and citing them with blame for everything from the crimes of Stalin to the perceived terrors of clinical psychology, the theory of relativity, and international trade. While MacDonald says he is generally “on the fence” about the “official” story of the Holocaust, he continued to testify at Ernst Zundel’s trial to argue that the Holocaust is used to manipulate the public to insulate Jews from criticism.[23]

The reality is that Holocaust Denial is a point of utility, not scholarly intervention. The purpose of Holocaust Denial is to continue a conspiratorial view of Jews as the source of modern woes through their own use of cabals of crypsis. MacDonald’s view is simply a sanitized and footnoted version of classic anti-Semitic canards, ones that are at the heart of the logic that drives denialism. The scale of the conspiracy they claim is so totalizing and so overwhelming that it has an inflective with narratives about the centrality of Jewishness to social instability, and these narratives reinforce each other beyond facts and logic. This plays into the racial pseudo-science, where Jews remain suspect despite the stereotypes that nationalists attribute to them.

The likelihood is that the resurgence of Holocaust Denial will continue as the presence of the memory, and significance, of the Holocaust fades. The reality is that with overwhelming evidence supporting the facts, it is not a debate over history that maintains the conspiratorial worldview. Instead, it is an intentional undermining in systems of thought and logic to ensure that complex and false narratives seem more plausible than reality. To confront that in the long-term means re-enforcing education and make these organizing opportunities from the earliest encounters with these issues.

Endnotes

[1] This is cited from a now unavailable episode of the Radix Journal Podcast concerning Michael Brown. After their mass platform denial, this podcast is no longer present online and there is not bibliographic record.

[2] Nazi Germany is by no means the “ideal type” when discussing fascism for a number of reasons, yet few examples really are. Instead, when we try to “define” fascism as a method of understanding it, we find the common aspects that these movements hold in common to create a sketch of the underlying principles. This would include essentialized identity, inequality, mythological violence, and mass politics committed to elitism.

[3] Roger Griffin, “Nazism as a Manifestation of Generic Fascism,” A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin, ed. Matthew Feldman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): 110.

[4] Leonard Zeskind, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 56-57.

[5] Ibid, 58.

[6] George Michael, Willis Carto and the American Far-Right (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008).

[7] Zeskind, Blood and Politics, 56-57.

[8] Martin Durham, White Rage: The extreme Right and American politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1998): 28-29.

[9] Andrew E. Mathis, “Holocaust Denial, a Definition.” The Holocaust History Project, July 2, 2004. [No longer available]

[10] “The Trials of David Irving,” PBS/NOVA, 2000.

[11] Adolf Hitler, 1922. (Josef Hell, “Aufzeichnung,” 1922, ZS 640, p. 5, Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte. http://www.ifz-muenchen.de/archiv/zs/zs-0640.pdf Translation at Nizkor .

[12] Ben S. Austin. “Holocaust Denial: How to Refute Holocaust Denial,” The Jewish Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/how-to-refute-holocaust-denial.

[13] Fred Leuchter Jr., Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr., directed by Errol Morris (1999; Toronto: Lions Gate Films), DVD.

[14] Deborah Lipstadt, “Denying the Holocaust,” BBC, February 17, 2017, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/genocide/deniers_01.shtml.

[15] The Nizkor Project, http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/maidanek/ftp.cgi?camps/maidanek//maidanek.04.

[16] Zach Ben-Amots, “The Rise of ‘Soft’ Holocaust Denial,” The Tower, October 2016, http://www.thetower.org/article/the-rise-of-soft-holocaust-denial/.

[17] Mark Weber, “How Relevant is Holocaust Revisionism?” The Institute for Historical Review, January 7, 2009, http://www.ihr.org/weber_revisionism_jan09.html.

[18] Greg Johnson, “The Burden of Hitler,” Counter-Currents, April 20, 2011, https://www.counter-currents.com/2011/04/the-burden-of-hitler/.

[19] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, (Praeger 1998), Separation and Its Discontents Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (Praeger 1998), A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism As a Group Evolutionary Strategy, With Diaspora Peoples (Praeger 1994).

[20] MacDonald, K. Population and Environment (1998) 19: 295. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024652205516

[21] Shane Burley, “Anti-Semitism in the White House: Stephen Bannon, Donald Trump and the Alt-Right,” Truthout, November 20th, 2016, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38412-anti-semitism-in-the-white-house-stephen-bannon-donald-trump-and-the-alt-right.

[22] Raphael S. Ezekiel, The Racist Mind: Portraits of American Neo-Nazis and Klansman (New York: Penguin Books, 1995): 138-141.

[23] Rajani Bhatia, “Green or Brown? White Nativist Environmental Movements,” Home-Grown Hate: Gender and Organized Racism, ed. Abby L. Ferber (New York and London: Routledge, 2004): 218.