How the "Hitler twisters" have helped me understand the Holocaust deniers

Just 'cause he's been gone for more than 60 years
doesn't mean Hitler can't still provide assistance to
his spiritual heirs in the Right-Wing Noise Machine.

by Ken

I used to wonder about Holocaust deniers. What I wondered was, why? While it's possible that some or even all of them actually believe the nonsense they spew, it can't be from some deep soul-defining sense of belief, because it is after all utter bullshit. Is it really possible to have a soul that is defined by bullshit? I mean, it's not as if there are any reasonable grounds for Holocaust denial. All too clearly what you've got is people who have decided first to believe in this crap and then searched out the kinds of ambiguities and cracks that exist in any kind of historical enquiry to justify the crap.

I know I'm not expressing this very well, but my question, you see, was why? Why do they choose, not only to believe but to stake large parts of their reputation and lives on the nonsense they choose to believe? Don't people normally act in their self-interest? Well, where's the self-interest in promulgating nonsense while in the process (a) making a mockery of the historical record and (b) inflicting such pain on so many millions of people with direct ties to that horror (and the many, many millions more who simply respect the pursuit of truth)?

The other day it suddenly occurred to me that there's nothing at all mysterious about it, now that we've landed ourselves in a time when we have an entire political wing, teetering out there on the precipice, shouting, "We'll believe whatever we damn well want to believe, and we'll bash the brains out of any commie homos who try to shove facts in our face!"

Now it all seems so simple. There probably isn't one uniform set of motives for Holocaust denial. There are anti-Semites so rabid that it just drives them nuts to see Jews get "credit" for all that suffering and dying, and so, what do you know, there was no Final Solution! Somebody, undoubtedly some dirty Jew, made it all up! Then there are Nazi sympathizers and other fans of authoritarianism who just don't like to see the reputation of one of their heroes sullied. And so they demand to see a single document signed by the Führer authorizing any aspect of the Final Solution. (Of course the Führer didn't generally transmit such instructions on paper over his signature. But hey, wait a minute -- you mean there was a Final Solution?)

I'm sure there are many other paths to Holocaust denial. The subject has become a lot less interesting to me, because I understand that all those paths can tell us is what kinds of psychological problems the people who follow those paths have.

So what, now, about the 2009 version of Holocaust denial? The new deniers don't seem to deny either that the mayhem caused by Adolf Hitler in his short time in power happened, or that it happened as a result of Hitler's will. No, they've simply invented a new Hitler -- apparently snipped hastily out of a sheet of construction paper -- and pasted their Hitleroid over the real Hitler's picture.

And as a result of this ingenious remaking of the historical record, you know what? Hitler has turned into a leftist!!! It's like a magic trick, only a really, really slow-acting one, because it didn't take effect until more than 60 years after the guy died. It's kind of as if a magician promised his audience to make his lovely assistant disappear, then told the folks to come back in 60, 70, 80 years -- send the grandkids if necessary -- to see the illusion completed.

Of course it's not quite like that, because when the man was alive, it never would have occurred to anyone to try to make believe that Hitler, who was not only unapologetic but proud to be the driving force behind a movement of the extreme Right, was a leftist.

That Hitler -- and his ideological soulmates Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain -- were die-hard rightists isn't a matter of opinion. There's nothing to debate. It's simply who and what they were. And in the economic mess that was Europe in the 1920s and '30s, with the specter of militant Bolshevism looming from the East, the Far Right could be a winning position to stake out.

I can't tell you how stunned I was when I first became aware that modern-day Movement Conservatives have chosen to invent such a battle and fight it. They have nothing going for them in the way of fact or historical argument. Because again, the history is straightforward and incontrovertible. It has never been challenged because there's nothing to challenge. Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco were never the least bit secretive about their political or economic philosophies. Does anyone really imagine that Franco fought the Spanish Civil War against Soviet-backed Republican forces because of his commitment to centrism?

Franco is an interesting case here, by the way, since his far-right-wing dictatorship in Spain endured until his death in November 1975. That extends the history of fascism an extra three decades. Is anyone suggesting that Franco was a leftist?

I'm forgetting, though, just how long ago 1975 was, at least in Movement Conservative-speak. They probably couldn't tell us how long ago it was either, because they're so proud of having no functional education. For all I know, they regard subtraction as a liberal plot -- to strip real American men and women of their real American manhood.

What I'm suggesting is that in a world where ignorance is not only bliss but a great blank slate on which to sketch whatever fantasy world you wish, not only is the Third Reich ancient history, but so is the Franco regime. To people who can't remember what happened yesterday -- even if it's by choice, as I would argue -- events of many, many years ago have no meaning, except as conveniently repackaged by their own propagandists.

As some of you may be aware, I had a visitation recently in our comments section from a commenter who helpfully debunked my proposition that Hitler was what he claimed to be, a man of the extreme Right. No, he corrected me, Hitler was a leftist, just not as far left as Stalin.

Just like the Holocaust deniers, he didn't give obvious evidence of being insane or unschooled, but the simple fact was that on a scale of zero to a million, he had no fucking clue what he was talking about. He was pulling it all out of his stinking butt. He might just as well have been arguing that gravity makes stuff go up rather than down, just not as far up as upsidasium. (By the way, I want to apologize for the crappy typing of my response to that visitor. I don't type well when I'm spluttering.)

All they have to go on is the fact that the Nazis were National Socialists, apparently not understanding that the whole point of the name was to offer a nice-sounding name that could be an alternative to (shudder) the other "socialism." As if Movement Conservatives didn't know about calling your political program the exact opposite of what it actually is -- what did their god George W. Bush do for eight years? You pollute, for example, in the name of "clean air."

Well, I guess it wasn't coming only out of his butt. It was coming from the same sets of talking points that Michele Malkin and Rush and Billo and Sean and Glenn use. And it's not hard to see how "Hitler twisting" has been of use to the Right-Wing Noise Machine. On the one hand, they have a Hitler Problem. They keep coming up against suggestions that they are the intellectual, political, and spiritual heirs of Hitler, as of course they are. As I've pointed out, the Right-Wing Noise Machine has to have come straight out of the dog-eared pages of their copies of Goebbels for Dummies.

At the same time, the one thing people really do remember about Hitler is that he was really, really bad. So why not do a Karl Rove presto change-o and turn your problem into the solution? Suddenly Hitler is a leftist! Just like Obama, who of course isn't much more of a leftist than Hitler was. But there we go with those pesky facts again!

Believe it or not, I have a suggestion for restoring rationality to discussion of such subjects, and I'm going to share it in my next post.

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