Nationalism and the Holocaust: A Reply to Johnson

By Thomas Dalton

July 31, 2012

(This article was freely distributed by Michael Santomauro, publisher of  "Debating the Holocaust", with permission of the author, after The Occidental Observer refused to publish it.  Thomas Dalton, Ph.D. writes for Inconvenient History Online Journal and is the author of Debating the Holocaust.)

"In the period of just six years, from 1933 to 1939, and amidst a global depression, Germany rose from a ruined, bankrupt nation to the strongest on Earth.  The Holocaust—the real event—is a nationalist success story. Rein in Jewish-controlled banks and capitalist enterprises, restore national integrity to the media, expel Jews from the seat of governmental power…and your nation will flourish.  What better lesson could revisionism provide?" ... Thomas Dalton 

Greg Johnson’s concise and articulate essay, “Dealing with the Holocaust,” is to be commended for grappling intelligently with two very controversial topics: White Nationalism and the Holocaust.  But amidst his many insightful observations, I sense a kind of misunderstanding of the nature of Holocaust revisionism, and an undervaluation of the role that it can play.  What follows are a few thoughts to clarify and elaborate on the important issues he raises.

Johnson’s basic position is this:  Revisionism is useful in its own field of inquiry, namely history, but is of dubious value to any White Nationalist movement.  This is true because (a) there is no necessary connection between the two topics; (b) a fixation on history is unhealthy for any forward-looking nationalist movement; (c) any revisionist successes (lower death tolls, explaining away the gas chambers, etc) are irrelevant; (d) the standard Holocaust narrative is actually useful for nationalist causes; and (e) revisionism avoids the moral and psychological basis for Jewish oppression of whites, and thus overlooks the central issue at hand.  I will address each of these points.

As an advocate of the “New Right” form of White Nationalism, Johnson recognizes and accepts that he cannot ignore the Holocaust question.  His answer to this question is two-fold.  First, we must promote a “universal” form of nationalism, on the principle that all peoples should desire to govern themselves on an ethnonationalist basis.  The Jews certainly wish this for themselves, and they are right to do so.  But what’s good for the Jewish goose is good for the white gander.  (As well, presumably, for Latinos, blacks, Asians, and so on.)

This is not a radical position; in fact it was the status quo for most of human history.  Humans have always been “nationalists”, where a ‘nation’ is defined as a group of people that share a common culture or ethnicity.  Throughout history, culture and ethnicity have largely overlapped.  People lived in ethnically or racially homogeneous societies, relatively speaking.  The primary exceptions were those empires that grew sufficiently large to encompass other ethnic groups; their diversity then contributed to their downfall.  Only in recent times—by which I mean, the past century or so—have we abandoned ethnonationalism.  We are now seeing the consequences.  Ethnic diversity is not a human evolutionary condition, and we ought not expect it to be a viable form of social order.

The second part of the answer is rather simple:  “move on”, “step over it”.  I understand the need to not linger on historical tragedies, and I agree that a strong culture must be able to forget, but this part of the solution is inadequate.  For one thing, it comes perilously close to “ignoring” the Holocaust—something we were just recommended to avoid.  Furthermore, it conflicts with the later call to utilize the Holocaust tale to our (nationalist) advantage.  These recommendations are mutually incompatible.  But more importantly, the “move on” approach implicitly rejects the usefulness of revisionism—a mistake, as I will argue.

The virtue of universal nationalism is that it says to all people, “You have a right to govern yourselves, and to not be dominated by others, whether an external power or any minority group within your national boundaries.”  This is true self-determination, and it is a universal human right.  Whites are an identifiable ethnic group, and, like all others, they do hold the right to self-determination.  Jews appear white, but by their own estimation, and according to human genetics, they are a distinct ethnicity; in fact the same is true for many Middle Easterners.  A truly Euro-American white nationalism must be free to self-govern, away from dominating control by Jewish or other near-white ethnicities.

But more to the point, such nationalism is, in principle, independent of events like the Holocaust—precisely as Johnson says.  In theory, they are distinct issues.  The real question is the pragmatic one:  In practice, in the actual world of today, is revisionism important to ethnonationalism?  Johnson says no, calling it “rather clumsy” at best; I disagree.  Granted, it has its drawbacks.  But the relevant question is, Do its advantages outweigh its disadvantages?  And here, I think, the answer is yes.

To begin with, the revisionists have a very strong case.  As one who has studied revisionism for several years, and documented the competing arguments in my book Debating the Holocaust, I can attest that it poses multiple, serious challenges to the conventional view—challenges that have been either weakly responded to, or, more commonly, ignored.  The many absurdities and inconsistencies of the survivor claims is only one problematic area.  The dearth of human remains, the illogical gassing procedures, wartime air photos, and the lengthy propaganda history of “6 million” suffering Jews (dating back to the late 1800s), all conspire to seriously undermine orthodox claims.  If there were rational answers to these challenges, surely by now the experts would have responded.  Instead, they react with silence, even as they subtly back down from the hardline position.  Recent expert analyses, for example, hardly mention witness statements any more.  Some, such as Peter Longerich’s long-awaited study Holocaust (2010), go further, refusing even to cite the famous “6 million” figure at all.  Orthodoxy is gradually retrenching, but popular media is lagging behind—which is why, as Johnson complains, we see no larger effects so far.

The strength of the revisionist case is precisely why they have been banned, censored, and outlawed.  Johnson notes, but underestimates, the fear that the Jewish power structure has in this matter.  He is right to observe that the Holocaust is not a “source” of their power; Jews have had disproportionate power in western nations for centuries.  But neither is it merely an “expression” of Jewish power, as he (and Mark Weber) claim.  If this were so, and if it was found to be deficient, they would simply find other ways of expressing their power.  Rather, it is a means—their most important means for effecting control.  Jews fear revisionism because it threatens to destroy their strongest guilt-tool.  They have invested much in this story, and it would be very costly and time-consuming for them to develop another, equally-effective tool.

Because the power structure has no response to revisionism except censorship, the general public, and whites in particular, can be given a “proof,” of sorts, of Jewish duplicity.  The Holocaust is a canonical case of Jewish deception and manipulation, and revisionism lays bare that fact.  Many of the central revisionist arguments are clear and obvious; they require little in the way of specialized knowledge.  Any non-Jew with a shred of rationality can be shown that they have been largely (though not completely) duped; this should make any thinking person more than a little angry.

The fact that Jewish fatality numbers never will go to zero, as Johnson emphasizes, does not really matter.  The likely death toll is perhaps 10% of the claimed figures.  A 90% reduction in deaths is not just some minor fiddling around the edges; it is a wholesale collapse of “the most well-documented event in history.”  Those who have staked their careers and incomes on this event will be in for a rude awakening.

Of course, there will be some who will say “500,000 Jewish deaths is still a Holocaust.”  Others will say, “Even one death is a tragedy.”  And on a personal level, it is.  For the Jews, 500,000 deaths is a Holocaust.  For whites, or humanity at large, it is a mere blip—one percent of the roughly 50 million deaths in World War II.  If it comes to this, and this fact is made known, the leading guilt-tool is effectively destroyed.  Without guilt, the moral burden is relieved.  And once the source of the false guilt is seen to lay in Jewish-inspired propaganda, white (and other) nationalisms will certainly benefit.

But for nationalist movements to realize maximum gain, the whole manipulation process must be spelled out.  Jews are less than two percent of the US population; in both Europe and Russia, the figure is roughly 0.2 percent.  These numbers are too small for direct personal control of finance, media, and government, so they rely heavily on two groups of servants:  their well-paid (and usually white!)corporate and governmental lackeys, and their ideological lackeys—primarily (white!) Christian Zionists and liberal leftists.  The lackeys have done, and continue to do, much of the legwork in protecting the orthodox Holocaust story, and in defending Jews generally.  And because they are predominantly white, they pose a special challenge to White Nationalism.  Downplaying revisionism lets these folks off the hook.

Finally, a few additional thoughts to bear in mind:

•         It is frankly a bit ridiculous to attempt to use the conventional Holocaust story as a lesson in the evils of genocide, on behalf of whites.  This story is destined either to collapse or to undergodrastic curtailment; the last thing white nationalists need is to hitch their wagon to a dying horse.

•         The claim that revisionist success would be a “political windfall” for Jews is likewise groundless.  Even if the Allies played a role in the scam—which they probably did, to cover for their own war crimes—few today will hold that against present-day whites.  It will rewrite Allied history, as it should, but even the Jews would be unable to turn this fact to their advantage.  Theythemselves are far more implicated than any war-era allies.

•         It seems like a losing strategy to cry “white genocide.”  The white American population will continue to grow, slowly, for at least the next century, and likely well beyond.  European white populations are likewise plateauing, but won’t be dropping significantly, let alone vanishing, any time in the coming centuries.  True, whites will be outpaced by minority groups, and they will gradually lose hegemonic power.  This is regrettable.  But it is far short of genocide.  And lacking a valid genocide claim, the conventional Holocaust story loses all relevancy. 
•         An obsession with a “long memory” is assuredly not good, but it is not as pernicious as Johnson suggests.  For one thing, all strong nationalist movements and cultures have long memories; perhaps they all are sick, but this is unlikely.  Second, that paragon of ethnonationalist toughness and persistence, the Jews, have a longer memory than anyone—so it can’t be that fatal.  Third, simple justice demands a long memory, certainly at least as far back as WW2.  Yes, the Holocaust story should ultimately be forgotten—after justice prevails.

•       Johnson is surely correct to say that there are deeper moral and psychological issues at play, to explain why so many whites succumb to Jewish guilt-ploys.  A Jewish-inspired Christianity is certainly a large part of the explanation.  Undoubtedly, we need a Nietzschean transvaluation of all values.  No one is suggesting that we all drop everything and become full-time revisionists.  But there is clearly an important role for such work in any contemporary nationalist movement.  We can trim the branches even as we hack away at the roots.

Lastly, we should not forget that the “Holocaust question” is only one, albeit important, aspect of a much larger and longer-standing “Jewish Question.”  Jews don’t just work against whites; they work against everyone.  One of the earliest recorded western commentaries on the Jews—that of Hecateus, circa 300 BC—noted that “Moses introduced a way of life which was, to a certain extent, misanthropic and hostile to foreigners.”  This is documented in the Old Testament, and in the (self-)view of the Jews as God’s chosen.  Several early commentators, most notably the great Roman historian Tacitus, wrote about the Jews’ “hatred of the human race.”  When a detested ethnicity gains power, popular outrage naturally grows.  Thus the Jews came to be harassed, beaten, humiliated, and ultimately expelled from many nations of Europe. Nazi Germany was only the latest in a long chain of such expulsions.

This is a central aspect of revisionism, and one that is insufficiently appreciated.  As the revisionists argue, there is little evidence that the Nazis wanted to deliberately kill all, or even most, of their Jews; they simply wanted them out.  All those concentration camps and cattle-car journeys were, for the most part, aspects of an enforced evacuation program.  Only late in the war did they become a means of forced labor.  Hence the event known as “the Holocaust” is best read as a nationalist effort to, once again, drive out the Jews—all the while knowing that many would die in the wartime conditions.

But the vital point is, it worked.  In the period of just six years, from 1933 to 1939, and amidst a global depression, Germany rose from a ruined, bankrupt nation to the strongest on Earth.  The Holocaust—the real event—is a nationalist success story.  Rein in Jewish-controlled banks and capitalist enterprises, restore national integrity to the media, expel Jews from the seat of governmental power…and your nation will flourish.  What better lesson could revisionism provide?

In 1771, Voltaire wrote of the Jews, “they are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts…  I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not some day become deadly to the human race.”  We should take Voltaire’s warning to heart.  White Nationalism has an important role to play, and to be effective it must defend historical accuracy, and use this to demolish the leading Jewish guilt-tool, the Holocaust.