Archie wrote: ↑Fri Jan 10, 2025 6:33 pm
SanityCheck wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 1:47 pm
I think you're misapplying median here. You're presumably referring to people encountering Holocaust denial and rejecting it outright, sometimes referring to their limited exposure to this or that film, book, museum visit, what they remember from school, sometimes misremembering things. Maybe they can be said to have done 'zero' research, but the minority who have read more will still pull that up past zero.
The same issue affects your side, since Nick Fuentes and the groypers are hardly avid readers of Mattogno, from what anyone can tell.
Belief in the Holocaust is the default, so I'm thinking of "believers" as more or less the general population. I do not see how the median could be much above zero. If you want to count half-reading Anne Frank and seeing a few movies as "research" I suppose you could argue it could be a handful of hours, but I personally would not count that as research.
It starts with a large pool of
uninformed believers. From there it would branch off. Among those who encounter revisionism, some will be amenable to it (the usual trajectory here will one of gradually increasing confidence) while others will "double down" on the Holocaust (I usually call this group "anti-revisionists" to distinguish them from ordinary believers). I suppose there's another group who study the Holocaust in some depth
without encountering revisionism. Unclear how common this is. Maybe some "Holocaust studies" people would fall into that category, or maybe Jews who read lots of Holocaust books.
I think you're overestimating the reach and spread of Holocaust denial; most of the general population just won't encounter it and doesn't seek it out.
Web traffic metrics for the 2010s and early 2020s whenever I've surveyed them indicate quite limited reach for the dedicated revisionist sites, and not necessarily significant reach for the endorsing/supportive sites (eg Veterans Today), certainly compared to the gamut of sites across the political spectrum and including alternative/new media as well as legacy media. And we know the cable channels still don't reach more than a few million per day (look up Fox News figures - the others are far worse).
The minority actively interested in history and who would take more of an interest in the Holocaust can be quantified to some extent. USHMM had 1.6 million visitors a year in the 2010s (2016 and 2018 for sure), and while museum visits have not recovered to pre-pandemic levels for other DC museums (look at the stats for the Museum of the American Indian - they really suffered compared to pre-2020 levels), their current numbers are likely still very high. The museum claims that 90% of visitors are not Jewish; subtracting the 24% school children and 12% international visitor rates, that's still almost two-thirds of the visitors as US adults, with a claimed 47 million visitors since opening, even with repeat visits for some, it's maybe a couple dozen million US adults who've visited the museum.
https://www.ushmm.org/information/press ... -press-kit
USHMM's website supposedly had 36 million visitors in 2023, 59% international, therefore nearly 15 million visitors in the US. The other metrics for Facebook, Twitter etc are not unimpressive.
There are 1 million history majors in the US population, despite plummeting enrollments - only 31,443 history degrees awarded in 2023:
https://datausa.io/profile/cip/history
This cohort covers every era and part of the world, so there's no guarantee that they would have studied the history of the Holocaust beyond a basic level, or even at all, but this cohort, along with the 7.5 million Jewish population in the US, will not know literally nothing.
In between the museum/website visitors and those who actually study history, there is the trade press book market, which is well served with accessible and readable titles. The readerships for trade press biographies of Hitler, or books on the Third Reich and WWII in the round, or the overviews of the Holocaust, seems to be substantial enough - these are the titles that exist in the remaining physical book stores and which show up in Amazon sales charts often enough.
How many have actually encountered revisionist books is unknown, but the holocausthandbooks.com site had very low traffic when I measured it back in the 2010s on repeated occasions, and the unknown, as with traffic for CODOH etc, is not just the bounce rate (when someone looks at one page and leaves), but how many actually finish a book they might have downloaded, and how many are convinced by the book. A non-negligible percentage might give revisionism a chance - a chapter, several chapters, a whole book - and not be persuaded.
The books in question have been around for 10-20-50 years depending on the title, from Butz to the big surge with Mattogno, Graf and Rudolf to 2005, and apparently Butz was still the best seller for Germar Rudolf quite recently, which is counterintuitive and not exactly something to tout, since it means more recent and supposedly better books aren't reaching the same audience.
My impression is a high proportion of those who try reading one of the Holocaust Handbooks give up and don't try reading another, while a minority have allergic reactions and become anti-revisionists, most then also not reading newer revisionist books (like Jeff of the many numbers at SSF), the tendency seems to be to read more mainstream books after interest is stimulated. Certainly whenever I have persuaded a historian friend to sample some of Mattogno they have been scathing and declared the sample to be unreadable, incoherent and unpersuasive.
The differences between revisionist books and conventional history books on whatever topic are palpable: conventional histories, especially those aimed at a wider audience, are readable narratives, whereas revisionist books of the modern kind are rebarbative and over-technical, requiring extensive study to fully make sense of - the contrast between Butz and Mattogno is really quite stark. Mattogno is just not very readable by regular standards.
In my own case, my initial inquiries was mostly passive reading done in isolation. I can assure you I felt zero pressure to endorse revisionism. The opposite. I was eager to discredit it so that I could move on. I suppose if someone is involved in an online community where the Holocaust is generally rejected, this could lead to peer pressure to accept revisionism without looking into it, but from what I see politically-oriented groups often avoid revisionism since there is no particular reason to bundle you political program with complex historical claims. More trouble than it is worth. Which is why in more intellectual circles you see specialization even between the Jewish question heavyweights like Kevin MacDonald and revisionists like Germar Rudolf.
So your 'conversion' took
much longer than 20-30 hours, got it.
In psychology, it's called "belief perseverance." It's a general phenomenon. To call something a "rabbit hole" is a bit tendentious. It seems to take for granted that the contrarian belief is false which is not necessarily the case. You would also want to consider the scenario where the contrarian view ends up being correct, e.g., "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
Is it true that people are slow to change their mind once they settled on something? Definitely. For beliefs that are important to one's identity or social or professional standing this effect can be extraordinarily strong. Are long-time revisionist susceptible to this? Sure. Is Arthur Butz likely to change his mind at 90 years old? No. So what? This is true of beliefs in general. The reality is that many of us were initially somewhat biased AGAINST revisionism because it seems unlikely for something that major to be false. In other words, while belief perseverance does indeed reinforce revisionist views among long-time revisionists, that ignores that initially it worked in the other direction (at least for most of us).
Contrarian views have abounded in the past 15-20 years, so there are numerous measurable examples, most of which are obvious nonsense, not all of which are right-leaning, since 9/11 conspiracy theories were the first really viral example of this back when YouTube started. A range of subsequent examples, from the flat earth revival to QAnon, are absolute classics of lunacy. And others like Sandy Hook denialism are truly vile, and have been absolutely clobbered - books on Sandy Hook conspiracy theories were pulled from sale from Amazon before it yanked Holocaust denial books, and peddling the theories resulted in Alex Jones being taken to court, losing and being made bankrupt.
Leaving aside for now whether revisionism deserves to be lumped in with these beliefs, their existence is undeniable, as is their vapidity. But this extends to the new agey alternative shtick as well, and such ideas resemble revisionism more in being longer-running and backed up by more books. It helps if the alternative lunacy can generate culture and 'tell a story', which is why UFOlogy persists and still has something of an infrastructure of conventions, whereas 9/11 Truther meet-ups were largely limited to the second half of the 2000s, and the idea has become less crucial.
The track record of the past 20 years is clear enough: 'redpilling' and similar terms reflect what is often a wholesale rejection of conventional, mainstream views, while opinion polling shows genuine declines in public trust in science, universities, the mainstream media.
So there is a certain pattern to reject anything mainstream and by default embrace the contrarian position; there is also a strong tendency to cluster contrarian beliefs, which will change as these have changed. I don't recall ever encountering a QAnon-believing Holocaust denier, the number of flat earther deniers was very small, the number of 9/11 Truther deniers was much greater, and the overlap between revisionism and UFOlogy is almost nil.
It's an open question how much overlap there has been between the above, and the more mainstream turn to conspiracism for day to day politics. Alex Jones obviously decided not to fully go there with revisionism, and the bigger names on the right likewise are more likely to have endorsed ad hoc gibberish theories swelling up from the bowels of the internet, or whatever drivel Trump is spouting that week. But that did result in a mood shift in the pandemic where the next President of the United States is nominating an anti-vaxxer to his cabinet.
There are more mainstream examples of contrarianism which rest on a more intellectual basis: much of the culture war debate around 'woke' is conducted at a fairly erudite level and involves oodles of books on top of podcasts, website articles and social media. These debates also move the needle in ways that more extreme examples tend not to. One can reject the worldviews of particular culture warriors and disagree with them on other issues, but still agree on a particular point; opinion polling tends to back this up, and one soon observes that many centrists and liberals can voice contrary opinions in mainstream platforms, even while others have been 'cancelled' or attract mobbing from doctrinaire types. This also holds true for foreign policy issues, including Israel-Palestine, where again one can access substantial literatures of books, polemics and supposedly sober studies alike, from both sides.
You noted earlier that politically-oriented groups avoid revisionism, which is generally true outside of the very small number of neo-Nazi groupuscules. Jean-Marie Le Pen died this week, and he belonged to a generation where that was not true, where Holocaust revisionism was being actively promoted by the far right as it attempted to become the populist right - see also the BNP and NPD in Britain and Germany. This effort died in the 1990s because it was turning voters off and attracting legal responses - the posturing of NPD activists getting themselves convicted for Volksverhetzung did not move the needle in their favour, quite the opposite. European countries did the populist right a favour in the medium to long term by criminalising denial and redirecting their attention to contemporary issues, or rather stopping some of the time-wasting obsession with esoterica.
So there isn't the same infrastructure of support as there has been for intelligent design and creationism on the fundamentalist religious right in the US, or the astroturfed campaign against climate change science which eventually became believed and self-sustaining. The Islamic world turned out to be feckless; the vague promises of Arab oil money never really materialised to subsidise revisionism, while Ahmadinejad was only president of Iran for a brief while, and the investment was clearly counterproductive to Iranian foreign policy given the vehemence of international condemnation. For similar reasons, the much more widely grounded Palestine solidarity movement hasn't really bothered with revisionism beyond oddball exceptions, since there is more than enough to criticise Israel for in the present, without the bad optics of being seen to be Holocaust deniers.
The track record with particular ideas over the entire postwar era is not terribly good; so the 'truth in three stages' cliche is really refuted over and over again. There are innumerable fringe but also conventional ideas which are mostly mouldering on the scrapheap, from Velikovskianism to Maoism, many of which were quite big deals in their day. Others persist as zombie ideas despite being obviously braindead.
In the end, one can only evaluate things in terms of traces, historically and sociologically: are there organisations, websites, publications, adherents? Most ideas have had some kind of endorsement from some university academics, even if only a handful of them, which obviously applies to revisionism, and really most of the ideas I've mentioned above. Perhaps the true lunatic fringe ideas have not - but that at least helps with the profiling of the traces.
Every idea has its history as well, which is something that can be discussed much more objectively. Butz being the bestseller today, his spin on everything circa the mid-1970s can be historicised from multiple angles and shown to be gibberish and misrepresenting what was known and discussed about the Holocaust at the time he was writing, and internationalised through comparisons around the world across different languages, since there's ample material on West Germany, France, etc which paints a very different picture to the one he spun in his book. The same with the other protagonists - there are biographies of Rassinier and Faurisson, Irving's career was written about extensively from the 1970s to 2000s, the lesser lights have not been ignored (studies of Willis Carto etc), nor the overlaps with actual far right politics in this era. This may be
inconvenient history for 21st Century revisionists. It certainly doesn't set up the current reduced cadre (i.e. Mattogno, Rudolf, Dalton) to look very good when they have stuck with the same revisionist brand but not really disavowed the nonsense of the past.
