Callafangers wrote: ↑Sat Mar 22, 2025 6:54 pm
SanityCheck wrote: ↑Sat Mar 22, 2025 12:54 pmThat explains why Dalton the revisionist didn't produce something that seemed very impressive to anti-deniers. I had bracketed him with the many other popularisers and summarisers of the same era (Victor Thorn, Peter Winter, Gerard Menuhin, Nicholas Kollerstrom) since they all seem to have dashed off a textbook level summary relatively rapidly. But that's also what Butz did in the early 1970s, with a limited amount of actual research on top. And what all the summaries in between have done, including Germar Rudolf's Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte aka Lectures on the Holocaust.
Revisionism is in a different battle than orthodox scholarship on the 'Holocaust'; the former needing to overcome biases in public opinion based on decades of one-sided, distorted presentations on this history. Hence, summaries are exactly what has been needed, building recognition of the quite-serious nature of this work and eventual, more widespread interest in participation. Dalton's work in translating key historical works (Mein Kampf, Goebbels' diaries, Martin Luther's writings, etc.) are further examples of his overall intent to make this field of research more accessible, not limited by language barriers and false assumptions spread by mass propaganda.
Dalton perhaps
could have found the means to spend more time digging in archives to specialize on one or a few specific areas of the 'Holocaust', which it seems you give more credit for (academically speaking), but this is not where the greatest need has been at, for revisionism. Once millions of people have asked the fundamental questions they've been conditioned into not asking, some hundreds will inevitably make a hobby or a career out of digging much deeper into nuances. There is a necessary "order of operations" here you do not seem to recognize.
On the contrary, I'm recognising a necessary
interplay for revisionism and indeed *any* set of ideas couched in the form of studies, between popularisations and summaries on the one hand, and specialisation on the other.
It also matters what other books someone writes. Many of the popularisers and summarisers in recent decades come from an explicit conspiracist background, which certainly applies to Victor Thorn and Nicholas Kollerstrom. So their other books are on other topics. Dalton wrote articles about Jesus and Christianity as far back as 2010, and these confirm the overwhelming likelihood that he is indeed Skrbina. Skrbina wrote more in that vein, while also doing more serious philosophy on technology and philosophy of mind. It's a simple inference to observe that having so many interests means spreading oneself a bit thinner than some might like.
That's fine. Nobody is expected to dedicate their entire life to one idea, especially not if it makes it impossible to earn a living. Taking a serious hobby interest is perfectly acceptable. But amateurs and hobbyists can go quite deep with their part-time work, supporting themselves with some other career while contributing a lot, especially if there are many of them. There are oodles of website owners, bloggers, and published authors - especially in areas like military history - who have probably spent small fortunes and masses of time researching something for little reward or return. Most are very obsessive and focus largely on one thing. They're hedgehogs rather than foxes. Dalton-Skrbina is a fox, interested in several ideas. Both types are needed.
The problems start when an idea finds it difficult to assemble a cast to share out work on an encyclopedia more evenly, as happened when Germar Rudolf first suggested a revisionist encyclopedia and had virtually no takers. So he had to write almost all of the first edition himself. Or if an idea wishes to convene a conference, have an edited collection, or collective work. It would be almost impossible to find enough authors to redo Dissecting the Holocaust thirty plus years on. In the 1990s, there were enough revisionists, with enough specialisms, that Rudolf could put together such a collective work. Today, he probably couldn't.
This isn't to blame Dalton for the state of affairs; it's not on any one individual to do xy or z. It's on the entire community. If a popularisation stimulates others as you suggest and hope, it does its job. That's fine.
The main collective issue is if there is a series such as the Holocaust Handbooks, then one can stand back and criticise the standards across different volumes, or if it recycles older and outdated books too much (Sanning, Butz, Ball, Leuchter), or if most of the volumes are basically authored by one person (as is screamingly obvious). The imbalances and unevenness are entirely legitimate things to discuss.
The other collective issue stems from the contrast with conventional studies. Any one individual author might be excused not being entirely up to date with conventional literature, but if a group as a whole is ignorant or behind in its reading and the points addressed, then that, too, is a legitimate thing to discuss. Dalton chiming in with only lightly updated editions of Debating is not the only weakness; Rudolf is also very busy as an editor and cannot keep up properly. Mattogno can between 8 and 20 years behind by the time he might address a key conventional study. If there were more revisionist authors, then they could crowdsource this and be collectively more knowledgeable. Kues was a lot better at keeping up with conventional historiography, but he's no longer around.
The final collective issue is how one idea or take compares with others. Revisionism still exists which is a remarkable achievement, even though it is much reduced for authors compared to previous decades. By contrast, 9/11 Truth had a big surge in the mid-2000s by way of oodles of books then videos, and has largely trailed off and declined; it was of its time and place. There have been many other crazes or controversies since then. Any existing idea is competing for attention with other ideas as well as newer ones. Some eventually fade, while there are peaks for others. Another example which is relevant because of Skrbina: Jesus mythicism seems to have been a much bigger deal, generating more books and more responses, a decade plus ago. It's still around, but the zeitgeist has shifted, online atheism isn't as front and centre as it was in the 2000s to early 2010s. On the other hand, generic WWII revisionism is likely about to surge up again, having come and gone over the years.