Strength through purity has a nice sound to it, but how many revisionists would be left? The holocaust does have a decent leg-up in mind-share relative to your run-of-the-mill genocide, but taking the “outside view” the dearth of revisionists in the western world for all the others suggests to me that the Von Brunns play at least a significant catalytic role.

I remember going to the IHR website a while back thinking that it would be worthwhile if there was actually a journal dedicated to revisionist history. What I found was like the caricature of the History channel (“all Hitler all the time”). I think they might have also had “They Were White and They Were Slaves”. Eliezer Yudkowsky pledged to say nothing for a year of the Subjects Not To Be Named when he started LessWrong (a good idea in my view, even if I still prefer OB). A journal of historical review that began (I do think there’s some value in re-examining WW2 generally and the holocaust more specifically) with the same policy toward WW2 would be an interesting thing, but I doubt it would get off the ground. I’ve got the same gripe about NGO Watch*: it seems like a good idea generally but the people involved chose to only focus on one controversy and I don’t bother reading anything they say.

*I decided to look them up again in the course of writing this comment and found that NGO Watch does have a general focus, I had them confused with NGO Monitor.

Regarding closeted skeptics, I wonder if there are some poll numbers on the idea. I often hear of similar ones for people who think the moon-landing was faked, 9/11 was an inside job, Oswald being a patsy.

http://history1a.tripod.com/hh/

1. The Nazis did not intend or attempt to exterminate the European Jews.
2. The ‘gas chambers’ are a hoax, there were no gas chabmers.
3. The six million figure is pure phantasmagoria, unsupported by any evidence.

For a brief intro, with pictures, see …

http://history1a/tripod.com/hh/

BTW, I’m a denier, and I liked your little write up, especially the “(deniers) expect sympathy for Palestinians or the civilians fried at Dresden. Those are worthwhile issues to discuss but should preferably be kept distinct from others that might turn things into a victimology contest.” It is a victimology contest, I suppose, but that ain’t the point.

Anyway. I’ll read the Kinsella paper. Thanks for the reminder.

It is not a stretch to conclude that he once believed otherwise and that motivated his revisionism.

I absolutely agree. I think Weber’s motivations are pretty damn transparent, if you look at his work over the years. He had a political agenda and viewed HR/HD as a means to an end. And yes, he’s far from alone. I’m under no illusions about this, and I got what you were doing with the Armenian genocide thing. I thought it was clever.

But here’s the thing. IF there really are serious problems with the received Holocaust story — problems that go to the core of what is said to be uniquely atrocious or “evil” — then I don’t think anyone should be surprised that politically interested unseemlies would gravitate noisily to the cause. And IF points of empirical contention are not, by dint of social decorum and status-guarding and taboo, open to traditional venues of scholarly discourse, and IF it is in fact illegal to discuss key points critically in many Western democracies, it seems even less surprising that the crankily motivated should be left to do most of the yelling.
The story really is about free speech and free inquiry, in a deeper sense than is generally recognized. I suspect there a lot of closeted skeptics.

Dubious motives surely inform and distort certain arguments, but kooks will be more likely to exploit a good argument that they see as being advantageous to their goals. Weber saw diminishing returns and shifted gears. And fuck him. To my mind, he made his bad reasons clear enough long ago, and my honest hope is that similarly motivated revisionists/deniers will follow him in his anti-Zionist crusade all the way. It’ll be a useful culling, and revisionism will be strengthened for it.

McMartin was the most notorious pre-school in the Satanic abuse panic that played out during the 80s and early 90s. I followed the story closely at the time.