No one to debate? [Rudolf vs Vann on Jake Shields]

[HansHill]

Yes you're right and I mostly agree, low quality denial certainly is better than zero denial! The example I gave of Fuentes is a great example. Certainly that whole movement was a net-positive for Revisionism.

You mentioned the wooden doors as a "symbol" for the dubious nature of the claims, and again that's quite insightful. I guess my point here would be... imagine the blue staining of the fumigation chambers as that symbol instead!

I don't think low quality denial* discredits revisionism in and of itself if done right, so we agree on most points i think.

*Except the "it never happened but it should" stuff, that is a legitimate hindrance to revisionism

[PrudentRegret]

This is somewhat of an aside, but somewhat related.

Why hasn't there been a 21st century Blockbuster film on Treblinka? It's something "fresh" relative to the Nth rehash of Auschwitz. It has all manner of ultra-violence and intrigue to move audiences. It has a built-in main character drama based on a real direct eyewitness Wiernik, a humble Carpenter who gets swept up in this drama, who himself builds the gas chamber with his bare hands, witnesses every stage of the extermination, and then ultimately plans a daring escape in which he kills a Ukranian guard with an axe, escapes, and then exposes the German crimes to the world for all history...

Maybe SanityCheck wants to explain why we don't have a Treblinka blockbuster!

The answer to that question is that it's unfilmable. You can't depict those events without audiences saying "wait, we're supposed to believe this stuff actually happened?" Imagine Spielberg or somebody trying to depict the cremation operation. Audiences wouldn't accept it as something that actually happened. It's beneficial to Holocaust Industry that these claims are basically swept under the rug and unknown to the average person, because they are totally untenable.

But that also makes things harder for Revisionists because they have the dual objective of explaining exactly what Holocaust historians actually claim before refuting it. You can do that in a 3-hour film somewhat but on a Debate Podcast it's basically impossible.

The only job Rudolf really has is engaging the audience, I know we might wish he made this or that argument but having the discussion is 1000x more important than the specific points that are made.

[HansHill]

The only job Rudolf really has is engaging the audience, I know we might wish he made this or that argument but having the discussion is 1000x more important than the specific points that are made.

Correct, Rudolf did all that he reasonably was expected to do, and additionally the primary job that Shields had was to maximise Rudolf's message to his huge audience, especially after it became clear that Vann was not there to debate, or ask probing questions.

"So Germar what inconsistencies did you notice about the Chemistry at Aushcwitz?"

After following Shields for a few months now, I'm hopeful he will want to cover this again!

[SanityCheck]

But this is what I have meant when talking of the shrinking of organised revisionism. People keep misunderstanding that as 'denial is dead'. It's not about whether the idea has a bigger or smaller audience, or more or fewer social media influencers who embrace the idea. It's about how many Germar Rudolfs there are. I might not think much of Rudolf as a researcher or history writer but I respect his efforts as a publisher, organiser and promoter. He shouldn't however be the only one to go on podcasts or one of a handful of people capable of writing longer form pieces.

I know I compare Holocaust Revisionism to "Human BioDiversity" a lot because there are a lot of parallels. Another one of those parallels is that the "HBD sphere" as such is totally un-organized. There are no institutions conducting and publishing research within an organized HBD community like there has been within Revisionism. And yet that school of thought continues to penetrate and disrupt longly-held scientific and social beliefs, and it's bigger than ever. It literally is just people Noticing and talking about it on Twitter, debating it on podcasts, some people write longer blogs about it.

Holocaust Revisionism is going to survive without the same pace of organized long-form research. That research is going to continue to pay dividends for sure, and more is always better than less, but cats are out of bags and Holocuast Revisionism is going to continue to be getting bigger than ever even if the Holocaust Handbooks series slows down publishing.

The amount of engagement I see for Holocaust Revisionism on X is staggering and it's clearly growing. Sure none of those many thousands of people boosting Revisionism know anything about the Holocaust, but that is also the case for the millions of people who believe it, too. Taboos and societal consensus aren't determined by organized research but by the transmission of memes. That's how Holocaust belief gained such prominence and that's how Holocaust Revisionism is going to continue to grow, too.

This comparison doesn't really do Holocaust revisionism any favours. There are many ideas which might have barely a toehold in the academy but which have lots of writers interested in them. The 'HBD sphere' seems to be one of these, but it does have an institute *as well as* a looser network of authors and researchers sympathetic to the idea, who will cite and reference each other. There are also some academics involved, as well as magazines willing to publish these ideas, so there is more reach. There are yet more writers and Substackers interested in Elite Human Capital as a theory, and a broader influence on other milieux of these ideas can be observed. The networks of writers criticising social justice, 'woke' and other left-liberal or mainstream ideas are colossal, and adjacent enough to centrists and classical liberals to be shared by them.

Having a nonprofit organisation or think-tank is not always necessary to sustaining and developing an idea, but having people address the idea at article length (as in: towards academic journal article length) plus books rather is, especially if the idea previously could generate books and substantial articles, as is clearly the case with Holocaust revisionism.

The situation with Holocaust revisionism is quite different, since there are fewer active researchers capable of producing substantial articles or books than was the case 15-30 years ago. Having a variety of NPCs sharing memes on X doesn't really solve the problem. Eventually out of the however many thousands (four, five, six, seven figure) of meme-sharers there should be some who can progress to producing articles, books and Substacks. Because the default with even contrarian or fringe ideas becoming more accepted is that there will be a ferment of such longer-form writings *as well*.

From one perspective, the Holocaust revisionist scene looks more top down given the centralisation around CODOH, with all other platforms who espouse revisionism ultimately circling back to CODOH.

[SanityCheck]

Where I have disagreed with you on this is that you often suggest or imply that this reflects an inherent weakness in the revisionist position when it is primarily due to external pressures.

It is true that things were probably more organized in some ways in 1980s. The IHR had decent funding and had an office building and staff, none of which CODOH has right now. But let's think about what happened.

1984: IHR building firebombed and destroyed
1990s: anti-denials laws in Europe

And more recently we have seen the phenomenon where people with controversial views are often doxxed and shut out from most jobs. In the 80s, most revisionists were open under their own names. More recently, very few have operated in the open by choice. Having a bunch of anons will obviously hinder organization. Not a lot of people are going to be lining up to be the public face of CODOH.

Point being, none of this has much of anything to do with the merits or demerits of the revisionist position. Rather it's entirely a function of personal incentives and group dynamics.

The lack of results from revisionism in terms of having a real influence has been much more decisive. This is especially clear in politics, which is where the anti-denial laws ultimately did the far right a favour by steering them to contemporary issues rather than harping on about the past. One can read into Le Pen Sr's Front Nationale and rapidly realise there were still French Waffen-SS veterans hanging around. The same on the far right in Germany. The passing of the war generation - the key figures died in the 1990s and some few in the 2000s altered the dynamics. Fewer donations, an ageing audience and indeed ageing activists/writers dating all the way back to WWII all made life harder for revisionism in Germany and France especially.

In the US and UK, the track record is clear: with no anti-denial laws and either a willingness to entertain the ideas (as in early 1990s talk shows) or having to address them in court due to libel actions, the impact of the Irving-Lipstadt trial was fairly decisive. This was when the IHR largely packed up and went home. But this also meant that for many curious onlookers the game was up after being entertained in a variety of forums for over twenty years, without producing concrete results.

The fact that revisionism could regroup at all in the 2000s and continue was certainly remarkable, but the activists and authors tended to predate the Irving debacle in 2000. They found a new audience via the internet. That has been going on for over twenty years now, including a widespread culture of anonymity. The public culture of social media influencers has not been unsympathetic, either. Otherwise no Jake Shields and Stew Peters hosting Germar Rudolf, not just Jim Rizoli.

But influencers are not the same as researchers. Several entirely anonymous researchers *did* emerge, for example Thomas Kues, but have since disappeared. If such anons can only stick around for a few years or write one big thing then one needs more of them. But where is the new 'Don Heddesheimer'? Nobody knows who he is and he was a one-and-done author. Whether Santiago Alvarez was his real name or not, Alvarez was a webmaster for CODOH and updated one book by a French revisionist. But somebody else needs to refresh the update at some point, since there is always an arms race with expanding evidence, even more so with digitisation. And because errors inevitably persist, along with not always finding the right presentational style to draw people in and educate them so a small minority can pick up the baton and keep everything moving forwards. Eventually older books become visibly out-dated or off-putting; as much as you might like reading Hilberg, he is not the first port of call for conventional reading today, because things *have* progressed, however much you might not recognise or accept this.

In 2005-2009, revisionism survived Germar Rudolf being deported and imprisoned in Germany, and was healthy enough to continue into the 2010s and 2020s, now with the potential for a larger audience given social media trends reversing from the censorship of the late 2010s on some platforms. But my feeling for some time is that there is a nosedive under way regarding research, and the whole thing as a research program will come *very* close to crashing entirely (at the 'serious' end of the spectrum) if one or two more current authors become silent for whatever reason (illness, old age, death, legal troubles, losing interest). My prediction is that this might galvanise more effort to prevent things from crashing entirely, but the excuse-making about why there aren't more Daltons, Heddesheimers, Alvarezes and so on won't help if the Rudolfs go silent, as the Grafs and others already have.

[SanityCheck]

This is somewhat of an aside, but somewhat related.

Why hasn't there been a 21st century Blockbuster film on Treblinka? It's something "fresh" relative to the Nth rehash of Auschwitz. It has all manner of ultra-violence and intrigue to move audiences. It has a built-in main character drama based on a real direct eyewitness Wiernik, a humble Carpenter who gets swept up in this drama, who himself builds the gas chamber with his bare hands, witnesses every stage of the extermination, and then ultimately plans a daring escape in which he kills a Ukranian guard with an axe, escapes, and then exposes the German crimes to the world for all history...

Maybe SanityCheck wants to explain why we don't have a Treblinka blockbuster!

The answer to that question is that it's unfilmable. You can't depict those events without audiences saying "wait, we're supposed to believe this stuff actually happened?" Imagine Spielberg or somebody trying to depict the cremation operation. Audiences wouldn't accept it as something that actually happened. It's beneficial to Holocaust Industry that these claims are basically swept under the rug and unknown to the average person, because they are totally untenable.

But that also makes things harder for Revisionists because they have the dual objective of explaining exactly what Holocaust historians actually claim before refuting it. You can do that in a 3-hour film somewhat but on a Debate Podcast it's basically impossible.

The only job Rudolf really has is engaging the audience, I know we might wish he made this or that argument but having the discussion is 1000x more important than the specific points that are made.

Cinema audiences and accordingly film-makers don't really want to dwell excessively on gruesome details or entirely unrelieved horror. There are two films about the Sobibor revolt, both framed to the very end of the camp's lifespan, both with optimistic or nationalist spins. The Treblinka revolt could be portrayed similarly, but the Warsaw ghetto uprising has had more cinematic attention, along with the 1942 deportation action from Warsaw. Combining both with other phases made The Pianist a very successful movie. Since then, there have been several films about Polish rescuers in Warsaw, more feelgood stories (The Zookeepers' Wife and a TV movie about Irena Sendler).

Most Auschwitz films don't dwell too much on the crematoria or Sonderkommando. Son of Saul did, but wasn't as commercially successful worldwide as The Zone of Interest, while The Grey Zone earned even less at the box office. Producers, directors, script-writers and others would likely draw the conclusion that a film showing unremitting horror won't be a success.

Which has nothing to do with historicity.

[PrudentRegret]

The networks of writers criticising social justice, 'woke' and other left-liberal or mainstream ideas are colossal, and adjacent enough to centrists and classical liberals to be shared by them.

And now the gaze of that critique is turning on the Holocaust Narrative, and rightfully so. People correctly associate it with wokeness (which is on the retreat) and meta-premises in social science that define our morality, and even associate it with the root of race denial itself.

The root of the recent surge in HBD-consciousness traces back to Charles Murray. He was a respectful academic who got mega-cancelled for correctly identifying the problem of persistent social inequality caused by heterogenous population-level differences in IQ distributions. It wasn't even the main topic of a book, but part of a single chapter. But importantly, what happened was starting in 2015 you got these young people disillusioned with the prevailing political paradigm questioning these premises responsible for the things you mentioned.

This led to coarse and offensive 4chan memes and infographics. And then those infographics inspired "alt-right" content creators who introduced "race realism" to large audiences, mostly on YouTube. Then those ideas became debated on podcasts by scandalized liberals who thought it couldn't possibly be true, and it wasn't until later, probably 2018+ the the writers and Substackers interested in Elite Human Capital rebranded "Race Realism" as "HBD" and incorporated it into their thinking.

And now it's ubiquitous, you get people with no connection to either the Alt-Right or Elite Human Capital blogging talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBZGgrgMwvU

Point being, this started with coarse 4chan memes. Then it went to Alt Right content creators and fringe podcasts, and then Podcast debates with scandalized liberals. Then it got picked up by "Grey Tribe" intellectuals and now it's getting more ubiquitous. The proliferation of it in the past 10 years had nothing to do with centralized efforts by any institution or any original research done by those institutions. Yes, it started with offensive 4chan memes and alt-right podcasts.

The level of engagement with Holocaust Denial on X is going to herald a very similar trend here. You even have some figures closely associated with the 2015 Race Realism content that went viral are now associated with Revisionism, like Ryan Faulk AKA Alternative Hypothesis. And now it's appearing on fringe podcasts, but that's just another step forward along the same path HBD took.

Having a nonprofit organisation or think-tank is not always necessary to sustaining and developing an idea, but having people address the idea at article length (as in: towards academic journal article length) plus books rather is, especially if the idea previously could generate books and substantial articles, as is clearly the case with Holocaust revisionism.

This has already been done, the heroic life's work of Rudolf, Mattogno, and many more I won't name have accomplished this. I know you will deny it, but this part has already been done, they have won the long-form academic argument. There are some outstanding questions but the narrative as it stands now is totally untenable. HBD didn't get mainstreamed by some HBD nonprofit releasing long-form research. It got mainstreamed by Alt Right podcasts which then virally influenced non-Alt Right audiences.

I suspect the Substackers interested in Elite Human Capital as a theory will be particularly susceptible to Holocaust Denial, they have a penchant for Forbidden Knowledge, and if they start to look into this topic because of the waves being made on X then we will see something very similar happen.

But no, the path to Revisionist victory was never 'Revisionists release book, Nick Terry admits defeat and Academia corrects its errors.' Our illustrious academic institutions will be the LAST ONES to accept the truth of HBD which has long-been accepted by various bloggers and X amateur commentators. You get highly qualified professors like Eric Turkheimer, the Nick Terry of HBD denial, who will never ever accept HBD no matter what research comes out because, as he openly admits, we have to deny it even if it's true because of the Holocaust.

[Archie]

The root of the recent surge in HBD-consciousness traces back to Charles Murray. He was a respectful academic who got mega-cancelled for correctly identifying the problem of persistent social inequality caused by heterogenous population-level differences in IQ distributions. It wasn't even the main topic of a book, but part of a single chapter. But importantly, what happened was starting in 2015 you got these young people disillusioned with the prevailing political paradigm questioning these premises responsible for the things you mentioned.

Murray is an interesting case. While he is certainly much maligned in the media and he has been a fixture on the SPLC naughty list, I would argue that he has not exactly been "mega"-cancelled. More like partly cancelled. Hear me out on this. He has had a long-time position at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, and he has had a string of books backed by mainstream publishers, most of which have received media attention. Curiously, others like Jason Richwine have been pushed out other think tanks like Heritage Foundation for saying basically the same thing Murray says.

Steve Sailer is another major HBD figure, and I would say he was more severely canceled than Murray. Sailer was pushed out at National Review for being too racist and has been blogging for like twenty years, subsisting on reader donations. Recently he got a book published by Passage Press. Not a mainstream publisher but it's on Amazon and it seems to have been pretty well-marketed. And he went on some book tour for it, speaking at invite-only dinners and stuff like that. It also seems they are letting him grow on X. This partial un-canceling of Sailer on the right is an interesting development.

Going back to a more general point, I think a decentralized thing could work, but censorship and locked down platforms will be a major issue. If controversial ideas are scrubbed from all the platforms, I hate to admit it, but it seems like that works pretty well. And in my opinion the most important platforms are 1) Google, 2) YouTube, 3) Amazon, 4) X. Without those, you are basically limited to independent websites that nobody will know exist (since they don't show up on Google). The good news is that I think they locked it down too late. Holocaust revisionism has yet to make the big breakthrough, but I think enough people know by now that it would be hard to extinguish completely at this point.

[SanityCheck]

And now the gaze of that critique is turning on the Holocaust Narrative, and rightfully so. People correctly associate it with wokeness (which is on the retreat) and meta-premises in social science that define our morality, and even associate it with the root of race denial itself.

I don't think those connections are widely made at all, and when revisionist sympathisers try demonstrating that the Holocaust lies behind Civil Rights and other paradigm shifts of the postwar era, they end up losing people or sounding too conspiratorial. The opposite is the case; the Civil Rights era mood shift (however contested it was or became) preceded the greater interest in the Holocaust, which was arguably 'safer' and more anodyne than wrestling with race, since mass killing is easy to condemn.

Moreover, interest in the Holocaust was never particularly left-wing nor integrated into an intersectional canon, for a variety of reasons including left-wing anti-imperialism morphing into anti-Zionism. The portrayals of the Holocaust mostly revolve around stories that are easy to follow and not laden with jargon. The Holocaust was held up as almost an antidote to postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s. Aside from some attempted hijacking from trans activists arguing for a Nazi trans genocide, it hasn't been subjected to much woke rebranding. Indeed, the rhetoric of 'decolonisation' means it is seem as associated with 'settler colonialism' of the *victims* rather than understanding it as part of a larger Nazi colonial project (which is the academic consensus now).

There is certainly some momentum from general rejection of anything mainstream or which seems politically correct, to question 'taboos' and so on, but how far such dudebro contrarianism will go remains to be seen. Likely not as far as you'd like.

The root of the recent surge in HBD-consciousness traces back to Charles Murray. He was a respectful academic who got mega-cancelled for correctly identifying the problem of persistent social inequality caused by heterogenous population-level differences in IQ distributions. It wasn't even the main topic of a book, but part of a single chapter. But importantly, what happened was starting in 2015 you got these young people disillusioned with the prevailing political paradigm questioning these premises responsible for the things you mentioned.

This led to coarse and offensive 4chan memes and infographics. And then those infographics inspired "alt-right" content creators who introduced "race realism" to large audiences, mostly on YouTube. Then those ideas became debated on podcasts by scandalized liberals who thought it couldn't possibly be true, and it wasn't until later, probably 2018+ the the writers and Substackers interested in Elite Human Capital rebranded "Race Realism" as "HBD" and incorporated it into their thinking.

And now it's ubiquitous, you get people with no connection to either the Alt-Right or Elite Human Capital blogging talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBZGgrgMwvU

Point being, this started with coarse 4chan memes. Then it went to Alt Right content creators and fringe podcasts, and then Podcast debates with scandalized liberals. Then it got picked up by "Grey Tribe" intellectuals and now it's getting more ubiquitous. The proliferation of it in the past 10 years had nothing to do with centralized efforts by any institution or any original research done by those institutions. Yes, it started with offensive 4chan memes and alt-right podcasts.

The level of engagement with Holocaust Denial on X is going to herald a very similar trend here. You even have some figures closely associated with the 2015 Race Realism content that went viral are now associated with Revisionism, like Ryan Faulk AKA Alternative Hypothesis. And now it's appearing on fringe podcasts, but that's just another step forward along the same path HBD took.

So why hasn't this translated into a network of Substackers? I have not said 'bloggers' because revisionist-inclined blogs did not work out so well in that heyday. The Black Rabbit of Inle closed his down, and Further Glory/Gen Baugher simply passed away. Caroline Yeager retired recently. That was not quite it, but close to it for revisionist blogging. Other bloggers were the same 'name' revisionists of the 1980s, like Faurisson and Berg, who passed away in the 2010s.

This has already been done, the heroic life's work of Rudolf, Mattogno, and many more I won't name have accomplished this. I know you will deny it, but this part has already been done, they have won the long-form academic argument. There are some outstanding questions but the narrative as it stands now is totally untenable. HBD didn't get mainstreamed by some HBD nonprofit releasing long-form research. It got mainstreamed by Alt Right podcasts which then virally influenced non-Alt Right audiences.

I suspect the Substackers interested in Elite Human Capital as a theory will be particularly susceptible to Holocaust Denial, they have a penchant for Forbidden Knowledge, and if they start to look into this topic because of the waves being made on X then we will see something very similar happen.

But no, the path to Revisionist victory was never 'Revisionists release book, Nick Terry admits defeat and Academia corrects its errors.' Our illustrious academic institutions will be the LAST ONES to accept the truth of HBD which has long-been accepted by various bloggers and X amateur commentators. You get highly qualified professors like Eric Turkheimer, the Nick Terry of HBD denial, who will never ever accept HBD no matter what research comes out because, as he openly admits, we have to deny it even if it's true because of the Holocaust.

Your argument here contradicts itself; Mattogno and Rudolf have certainly not "won the long-form academic argument" if "academic institutions" won't accept the arguments.

But that's down to the failure to make revisionism fit with the *formats* of humanities and social science disciplines. Research and study are meant to be open-ended processes not about teaching a particular dogma. But they are also meant to be teachable and representable in comprehensible forms.

Some of the problems stem from the fact that revisionism's roots go back to before the emergence of several important approaches which are now deeply embedded into academia and which also 'make sense', namely memory studies and genocide studies plus now violence studies.

Revisionism is making claims about the significance of the Holocaust in the postwar world through to the present without empirically demonstrating them. It typically puts the thumb on the scale for some aspects of why the Holocaust resonated while ignoring others, especially the universalising trends regarding perpetrators (one reason why there are so many comparisons with other genocides and acts of mass violence), but also the nation-specific rather inward looking debtes in Europe. Overgeneralising from a US perspective or indeed a Jewish perspective is going to be met with raised eyebrows in Europe or from anyone familiar with Europe.

Revisionism consistently refuses systematic comparison with other genocides and acts of mass violence, and instead prefers to see the Holocaust as unique, and to focus on the specific (thus 'unique') and distinctive elements of the Holocaust, such as the camps. This doesn't work in a post-Rwandan genocide world where Jedwabne and Jozefow loom very large in what is discussed and cited.

As a result, a very high proportion of what is researched and studied about 1933-1945, for the Nazi regime, occupied Europe in WWII, other Nazi crimes *as well as* most of what is researched and studied about the persecution and murder of European Jews, goes entirely ignored.

This also extends to the source bases which are being studied, translated, researched, used. Revisionists have engaged rather shallowly with the contemporary non-German sources, both Jewish and non-Jewish, as well as postwar testimonies collections but especially the investigations and trials. They might think they have addressed them, but they really haven't. The claims made about testimonies and trials are even more ludicrous because there is no evidence any of the vaunted gurus have engaged properly with these sources in a systematic way. The same, ultimately, with the German documents as a totality.

There's another disconnect, which is the failure to translate the ideas into the frameworks of the full range of humanities and social science disciplines. Different disciplines can take the same source material and interpret them in different ways. So for example, psychologists and sociologists in Germany have examined war crimes investigation and trial records, going to the archives and not simply relying on the say-so of historians, and interpreted them in the light of psychological and sociological models, hypotheses and theories. In so doing they are less concerned with physical evidence than geographers or archaeologists. Historians as the magpies of the humanities and social sciences will synthesise everything from other disciplines, and they like other social scientists can also compare.

To visualise how narrow revisionism is, consider that it has not affected *anything* regarding the history of the Holocaust at a national level for each European country affected. Nothing that is discussed in Mattogno, Rudolf et al concerns France, Greece, Italy, etc or leads to any revisions of how the history unfolded in these countries, or their postwar aftermaths. The persecution of Jews in Germany and Austria, how Nazi antisemitism arose and compared to earlier political antisemitism, the impacts of forced emigration, Aryanisation, and basically anything inside the Reich - nothing in Mattogno or Rudolf addresses these themes in ways that would provoke anything more than derisive laughter from specialists and non-specialists familiar with the literature. It's not even go back to the drawing board, it's - become aware you're facing a totally blank slate.

The gulf between what little has been written about the mass shootings in revisionism and the histories of the Holocaust in the Baltic states, Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and Romania is colossal. Mattogno's Einsatzgruppen book is undoubtedly one of his worst, it may not be quite as bereft as his Chelmno book but it doesn't address the subject thoroughly *at all*, and is littered with errors as well as flawed arguments.

The history of Nazi concentration camps in Germany and Austria is likewise not something that revisionism has mastered in the slightest; conventional histories are reliable and well developed, so there is basically nothing to add other than droning on about haberdashery and overemphasising gas chambers when these were far from central to the KZs in Germany and Austria.

A theme like Nazi euthanasia has barely even featured in revisionist writings so the discrepancy between conventional and revisionist claims is simply colossal. Unless revisionists have done the basic work, they will have no leverage or influence on how this topic might be discussed; ditto with related themes like medical experiments. Both are of ongoing continued interest in medicine, nursing, and medical history; these fields don't need you guys at all, and you have nothing to say to them that is worth listening to.

Even regarding Poland, where the key extermination camps were located, revisionism is utterly irrelevant to the histories of eastern Poland, to ghettos, to deportations, forced labour, hiding/rescue and 'Jew hunts'. It has flubbed its arguments about Chelmno quite drastically and really boils down to a set of partial claims about Auschwitz and the Reinhard camps. Regarding Auschwitz, the results still fail to engage with the history of the camp complex as a KZ, and are otherwise too long-winded through Mattogno's many volumes to be convincing. Regarding the Reinhard camps they are too abstracted from the regional context and still haven't addressed everything of relevance to these camps.

The same problem extends to themes such as wartime knowledge and reactions, postwar trials, historical commissions, the many other aspects of the aftermath (displaced persons, emigration, restitution, compensation), and from there one segues into the memory studies and historiography themes which revisionism hasn't really got to grips with at all.

Instead of persisting with the inane insistence there is a single 'narrative', perhaps get it through your head that there are multiple narratives and subplots which unfolded in parallel, in combination and some quite separately. Different histories can combine and synthese these narratives into larger ones, about the Holocaust as a whole, or Hitler, or France in WWII. Or into smaller ones, about a single small town or less well known region. The flexibility is endless.

Then realise how little revisionism addresses these multiple narratives, which is why it cannot alter the history of the Holocaust in France, a storyline which continues to be debated and disputed with nary a reference to any revisonist ever, since they said sweet fa about the key issues with Vichy, the Germans, French society etc. It would take an awful lot to produce a better take on France than already exists in many hundreds of books, so it would seem, quite sensibly, that revisionists have decided to ignore this. But at the cost of having no influence, leverage or veto power over the conventional understanding of what happened. And thus being entirely irrelevant to this.

That conventional understanding is now embedded and summarised in countless websites as well as online encyclopedias, not just Wikipedia but many other reference works, alongside similar portrayals and summaries of other genocides, waves of mass violence, and atrocities in WWII, in parallel to other summaries and pages about all the other aspects of WWII (including bombing, the expulsions, Soviet repressions and more).

One can certainly influence some portion of public opinion to dismiss all of this but that was happening already, since most people don't care about the past; if they start to care they look things up or decide to read a book. Which should be, you know, readable. Meaning likely best in a narrative-chronological format.

Ultimately, the refusal to really research what actually happened is the simplest way in which revisionism is ultimately excluded. (Cue Callafangers offering more of his Dog Ate ALL My Homework excuses and applying for mitigation from conventional standards.)

[Archie]

Btw, if the CODOH main site does ever go down again like it did a year ago, it won't knock out the forum site. Indirectly, it would hurt us because we get most of our traffic from codoh.com, but there is no technical interdependence.

Ideally, I would like to see the forum work like a farm league in sports. It would help new people get up to speed and it would develop the "talent" so that in the future they can move on to publishing quality original research (or doing mass media projects). In the past 20 years, Germar has done a great job with Holocaust Handbooks. Even at its height, the IHR never produced anything like that. But Inconvenient History has sort of languished. That really needs to get revived. Germar has been running that by default (the previous editor stopped doing it) but it could use some more attention (from people besides Germar).

Memes and whatnot are fine and good, but I think that will be downstream from the research. Breaking it down into stages,

Research, Initial Publication, Summarization and Popularization

And there are levels for the latter. A book could summarize several longer books. This would make the material a bit more summarized and accessible. And from there you could boil it down further, all the way to "meme" level which is really just a short, pithy expression our one of our arguments. I think over time, if we have quality books, articles, wiki pages, etc this will eventually trickle down to the lower-level (e.g. Shields).

FWIW, from what I've seen our lower level material is overall not too bad. It hits on most of the right themes (silly witness statements, technically dubious gas chambers, etc).

[curioussoul]

Aside from some attempted hijacking from trans activists arguing for a Nazi trans genocide, it hasn't been subjected to much woke rebranding. Indeed, the rhetoric of 'decolonisation' means it is seem as associated with 'settler colonialism' of the *victims* rather than understanding it as part of a larger Nazi colonial project (which is the academic consensus now).

The Holocaust as a broader mythology still underpins most Western political philosophy. It is basically the short-form foundation for liberal democracy in the Western world. The argument for multiculturalism, democracy, liberalism (however you define it), "liberal values", egalitarianism, anti-authoritarianism, and so on (post-WWII), is essentially that White people would end up genociding the Jews (and other peoples) again unless we have liberal democracy, which entails multiculturalism and multiracialism. If you've actually followed the political discourse in other Western European countries (Germany, Scandinavia, Benelux, etc), any argument for nationalism or ethnic homogeneity is shot down with the Holocaust and Hitler.

It doesn't really matter whether the Holocaust as a brand has been retcon'ed recently by different socio-political movements (which it has, and which you fail to see).

Your argument here contradicts itself; Mattogno and Rudolf have certainly not "won the long-form academic argument" if "academic institutions" won't accept the arguments.

But revisionists would argue that academic institutions reject revisionist arguments for non-legitimate reasons. As you're well aware, mainstream academics do not engage whatsoever with revisionist arguments (at least not for the last 25 years) for a variety of reasons, least of them being that it's considered counter-productive to engage with revisionists lest you legitimize their ideas. But also for career and legal reasons. Rudolf said in the debate that historians and academics contact him privately about their skepticism of the Holocaust, and I don't believe for one second that he's lying about that. There's a reason Mattogno has had academic insiders for decades helping him access archives and documents. There are serious scholars and academics out there who simply will not risk their livelyhoods and lives to speak out against the Holocaust, especially in Europe. It requires an immense amount of bravery and determination to actually do what Rudolf and others have done.

[TlsMS93]

Aside from some attempted hijacking from trans activists arguing for a Nazi trans genocide, it hasn't been subjected to much woke rebranding. Indeed, the rhetoric of 'decolonisation' means it is seem as associated with 'settler colonialism' of the *victims* rather than understanding it as part of a larger Nazi colonial project (which is the academic consensus now).

The Holocaust as a broader mythology still underpins most Western political philosophy. It is basically the short-form foundation for liberal democracy in the Western world. The argument for multiculturalism, democracy, liberalism (however you define it), "liberal values", egalitarianism, anti-authoritarianism, and so on (post-WWII), is essentially that White people would end up genociding the Jews (and other peoples) again unless we have liberal democracy, which entails multiculturalism and multiracialism. If you've actually followed the political discourse in other Western European countries (Germany, Scandinavia, Benelux, etc), any argument for nationalism or ethnic homogeneity is shot down with the Holocaust and Hitler.

It doesn't really matter whether the Holocaust as a brand has been retcon'ed recently by different socio-political movements (which it has, and which you fail to see).

Your argument here contradicts itself; Mattogno and Rudolf have certainly not "won the long-form academic argument" if "academic institutions" won't accept the arguments.

But revisionists would argue that academic institutions reject revisionist arguments for non-legitimate reasons. As you're well aware, mainstream academics do not engage whatsoever with revisionist arguments (at least not for the last 25 years) for a variety of reasons, least of them being that it's considered counter-productive to engage with revisionists lest you legitimize their ideas. But also for career and legal reasons. Rudolf said in the debate that historians and academics contact him privately about their skepticism of the Holocaust, and I don't believe for one second that he's lying about that. There's a reason Mattogno has had academic insiders for decades helping him access archives and documents. There are serious scholars and academics out there who simply will not risk their livelyhoods and lives to speak out against the Holocaust, especially in Europe. It requires an immense amount of bravery and determination to actually do what Rudolf and others have done.

Revisionism is not recognized academically because they have reached a certain consensus that it is yet another form of anti-Semitism by evoking a Jewish conspiracy to control the gentiles and make them kneel to their interests.

The Holocaust is a paradigm. The representation of the supreme evil and the nature of this evil is racism and therefore to ratify this evil, Jews love to talk about ratification in the sense of correction, it is to allow monolithic nations to have open borders, while they may have the right to close them to preserve their ethnic identity disguised as religion, which they once wanted to erase. In other words, what is valid for them that we could have the right to point the finger at is not valid and nothing that they have done in the past, present or future will be enough to demoralize them because the Holocaust is a singularity.

In my opinion, even if revisionism wins the issue in the hearts and minds of the people, they will still hold the power they have acquired because even though no one was gassed, many were brutally persecuted and murdered, resembling other persecutions but the aura of supreme victims I think will not be questioned.

[Nessie]

A search of the word "evidence" for page 5 of this debate finds it is used 3 times, all by Sanity Check. That is the problem revisionism will never be able to counter, it is pretty much evidence free.

The internet is full of argument, as opinion is easy and everyone has got one. Gathering evidence is more like work, and even though the internet has made that work easier than it has ever been, it is still more effort than expressing an opinion.

People enjoy thinking that opinion is better than others, and when they convince themselves that have won the argument, they enjoy a victory, a feel good experience. Accepting their opinion and argument is wrong, is hard work, harder even than gathering evidence, so that needs to be avoided at all costs.

Entrenchment of opinion is strong within revisionism. Ironically, I am often told that I am closed-minded, by people with some of the most closed minds I have ever encountered. If I point out the flaws in their thinking, I get cancelled, or at least ignored.

That takes my point back to the evidence. True investigators are led by the evidence, not their opinion, or argument and it is clear from the words people use, only the historians amongst us follow the evidence.

[HansHill]

A search of the word "evidence" for page 5 of this debate finds it is used 3 times, all by Sanity Check. That is the problem revisionism will never be able to counter, it is pretty much evidence free.

We're discussing the Jake Shields MMA podcast here, and its ramifications for the environment of Revisionism as a movement. For evidence surrounding the Holocaust debate specifically, you can review the works of Germar Rudolf, Carlo Mattogno, John C. Ball, Friedrich Berg, and others.

[Archie]

Nessie thinks that by repeating the word "evidence" over and over like an incantation that this proves his case. And he thinks that if someone else doesn't use the exact word "evidence" enough times (in his cherrypicked sample) that it means they are automatically wrong.

This whole forum is dedicated to discussing evidence for and against the Holocaust.