curioussoul wrote: ↑Fri May 23, 2025 9:54 pm
This just cracks me up, man. The absolutely pathological obsession from Nick and his cohorts with studying Holocaust revisionism as an alleged psychological phenomenon and its adherents as basically mental patients in need of obscenely detailed scientific evaluations, to the point of mapping their entire work history to determine
when exactly he "fell into" the revisionist rabbit hole and
when exactly he could have had the time to write and publish revisionist books. Actually, it's not funny at all. But it goes to show how much hysteria a singular pseudonymous revisionist writer can cause the collective antirevisionist (and Jewish) community.
Where was the
psychology in what I wrote over a few days in late March? I was much more interested in the apparent overlap between Dalton and Skrbina with their shared Jesus mythicism, and their stylistic similarities. You're commenting belatedly on a discussion that took place over a few days in late March.
There's also less overlap than you might think between circles of observers. Dalton being 'outed' (or misidentified) was greeted with little more than a shrug from those more closely following revisionism since he is seen as a second or third tier populariser. I'd not looked at the SPLC website for aeons before the news alert sent me there, and when they'd most recently crossed my radar, it was hearing they had spun a conspiracy theory about gender critical feminism which fundamentally misrepresented the movement in the UK, my own country, and wasn't necessarily any better for North America.
Since revisionist-inclined academics are fewer and farther between, they're best understood in comparison with other revisionists outside academia on the one hand, and with other fringe theory exponents inside academia on the other. Jesus mythicists aren't really that numerous in contemporary academia, there have been some in the past following the usual hobby-interest pattern. Developing a public interest in the topic is probably a negative if one wants to develop an academic career. That was certainly true also for 9/11 conspiracy theories in the mid-2000s, which is maybe one reason why a number of the academics involved were emeriti.
From there one can start considering wider patterns of 'cancel culture', except these patterns affect a much wider range of topics (including the aforementioned gender critical, biological sex realist position, which has been career-derailing for quite a number of would be or actual academics). All monitors of academic freedom including the ones down the corridor from me say Israel-Palestine is the major flashpoint, in both directions, and there are many cases over recent decades to prove this. But just as many tenured anti-Israel academics who might just be providing the excuse for the Trump administration to damage or destroy science in US universities right now. There are clearly bigger fish to fry in assessing 'cancel culture' than Holocaust revisionism's current prospects.
The academic dimension doesn't exactly exhaust the discussion, though, does it? One would have to be quite blind and deaf not to have noticed how history sprawls far past academia and how in big areas, perhaps especially WWII, academics are joined by many other voices, from Putin through to Darryl Cooper to Al Murray - politicians, podcasters and the 'pub landlord'. It would be a gross misrepresentation to contrast academics with heroic outsiders on matters to do with history, as tempting as the anti-academic 'script' is. Graham Hancock can fulminate more credibly at academic archaeologists since more archaeologists are in fact academics; this isn't the case with historians.