Wednesday, February 19, 2020

Didn't even get to Thiel's Cato Institute essay on women's suffrage



This 2014 piece by Mark Ames on the relationship between the Holocaust denial movement and the Koch Brothers should be read in its entirety, but I wanted to highlight this section.

The Reason issue discussed here was from 1976. The provocative, contrarian rhetorical approach is familiar to anyone who has been following Robin Hanson. It’s a process that pretends to be a free intellectual inquiry but which always ends up attacking a liberal position and pushing the Overton Window to the right.

Of course, Reason and Hanson have something else in common.




It’s easy to dismiss the more clownish examples, but in today’s journalistic ecosystem, no one from the right is more than one degree of separation from respectability in the mainstream media. Pretty much every major press outlet (the New York Times, NPR, CNN) welcomes Koch-subsidized academics and pundits. For the serious news consumer, they are unavoidable.

Obviously, there are smart people doing serious work at places like the Manhattan Institute or George Mason University, but while we shouldn’t reject their work out of hand, for the sake of the discourse, we need to find a way of reminding ourselves that their funding comes from an initiative that promotes Holocaust deniers, rape apologists and other extremists and propagandists when they serve the agenda, and that even the most independent researchers in that world know that reaching the wrong conclusions too often will cost them.
There is a politics to all of this, a politics that's barely budged since the days of the American Liberty League: The goal is to discredit the New Deal and FDR, which can't be done effectively without discrediting FDR's most popular cause, the victory over fascist Germany and Japan. To far-right extraction industry billionaires like the Koch family, FDR and his New Deal politics were a kind of anti-business "holocaust," because the New Deal forced the long-dominant plutocrats to part with a portion of their wealth and political power. To the nation's Big Business oligarchs in the 1930s, FDR's New Deal reforms — breaking up the power of finance, trusts, and industrialists, while empowering labor unions —was a crime and a wound as raw in 1976 as it was in 1936.

For them, FDR was a tyrant and a criminal, an American Hitler, only no one else could see things their way, because the real Hitler was widely believed to be one of the worst figures in history. Therefore, libertarian "historical revisionism" had to convince these Americans that Hitler wasn't nearly as awful as they believed, which meant that the Holocaust couldn't have happened — if the goal was to discredit FDR and the New Deal.

North’s article appeals to another sensibility popular with libertarians (and the Boomer left): the cult of the anti-Establishment iconoclast, every self-absorbed middle-class Baby Boomer's fantasy. That cult of the iconoclast allows North to paint libertarianism's far-right "historical revisionism" as anti-Establishment Cool, more an expression of one's individuality than a political act. So if the boring, bad Establishment says Hitler was bad and World War II was good, then naturally the anti-Establishment maverick will question that. Gary North writes:

One topic—the ultimate litmus test of hardnosed World War II revisionism—has generally been skirted: Hitler. Was he a madman, diplomatically speaking? Was he exclusively responsible for the Second World War?”

Much of the Reason Holocaust denier propaganda is about promoting a new set of anti-authority voices to replace the Establishment’s. So Martin cites Holocaust deniers Paul Rassinier and Harry Elmer Barnes; and Gary North introduces Reason’s readers to Bay Area Holocaust denier David Hoggan, the “anonymous” author of the 1969 neo-Nazi book “The Myth of the Six Million”:

    “In American revisionist circles the most famous (or infamous) case has been that of David Hoggan, the Establishment’s number-one academic pariah of the revisionist camp...Hoggan’s thesis regarding the origins of the Second World War are straightforward, and completely unorthodox. The primary villain was not Hitler; it was Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary.”


North is a clever huckster who’s studied his Baby Boomer audience, so he uses marketing words that he knows appeal to his target consumer: “unorthodox,” “Establishment’s number-one academic pariah,” and weirdest of all for a strict Old Testament theofascist like North, he even uses the then-popular hippie expression “far-out” (meaning “cool") to sell Holocaust denial:

    “Probably the most far-out materials on World War II revisionism have been the seemingly endless scholarly studies of the supposed execution of 6 million Jews by Hitler. The anonymous author [Hoggan] of ‘The Myth of the Six Million’ has presented a solid case against the Establishment’s favorite horror story—the supposed moral justification for our entry into the war.”



2 comments:

  1. Mark:

    I'm not sure how to think about this.

    On one hand, the response from the Reason editors seems pretty horrible, not admitting that their predecessors did a bad thing by spreading Holocaust denial. Just in general it's not a good thing when people sacrifice truth and morality, instead going for loyalty toward their institutions.

    On the other hand, I feel like people didn't know so much in the 1970s. This was a time when the mainstream media gave respect to things like the Bermuda triangle, ancient astronauts, bigfoot, ESP, cancer cures, etc. There were media organizations such as whoever published Popular Mechanics and whoever published those Chariots of the Gods and Jupiter Effects books that were somewhere on the border or respectability. And Biblical literalism pretty much got a free pass in the respected media (I guess that's still the case).

    I guess what I'm saying is that, in the 1970s environment, Holocaust denial and cigarette risk denial could fit right in. The 1970s was a simpler time, when the news media were willing to accept ridiculous theories of outsiders who had no academic credentials, some relic of a Heinleinian image of an eccentric guy building a space drive using various spare parts lying around in his barn.

    Nowadays, the purveyors of junk science, whether it be NPR regurging the latest nonsense from PNAS, or climate change deniers on Fox news or wherever, are often following people with academic credentials. This is not a complete change---I followed your link above, and it does seem like some of those Holocaust deniers had some academic credentials too---but it does seem like something of a shift.

    I'm not sure what to make of all this. I'd guess that if you could ask the editors of Reason directly what they think about World War 2, they'd say that the Holocaust really did happen. But, based on the evidence linked to above, this doesn't seem like something they want to think very hard about.

    In my work I mostly struggle with bad conceptual mistakes rather than bad factual mistakes. But there is some analogy that people often do seem to be just one or two steps away from some pretty ridiculous claims such as the nonlinear-utility-of-money model of risk aversion, or decision making using statistical significance, or flat priors (hey, I still recommend those in inappropriate situations!). There's no comparison on the moral level, but on the intellectual level what I'm getting at is that, on the intellectual level, we're cluttered with what might be called "legacy beliefs": attitudes that people have based on oversimplified models of the word which stay afloat in part because of politics, existing beliefs, or general misunderstanding.

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  2. To continue my previous comment (the blog wouldn't let me post the whole thing at once):

    The details have to differ from case to case. For example, I'm guessing that the editors of Popular Mechanics didn't really believe there were car engines out there that could run on water or whatever it was they were claiming, but they knew there was a readership for it. The people who published Chariots of the Gods or In Search of Noah's Ark: I don't know if they believed or disbelieved. They probably just didn't care, and maybe they took the view that this was just entertainment. The news media that seriously take claims of Biblical literalism: this could be some mix of true belief, wariness of offending true believers, and a political view that fundamentalists are a large proportion of the population so deserve representation in the news media. Smoking risk denialism and climate change denialism are of course worth a lot of money, which means it should be possible to find a mix of people who will promote these ideas cynically, as well as people who can convince themselves of the truth of these ideas. As for Holocaust deniers . . . there are lots of racists out there, and if you combine racism with a rebellious streak, there you go. I actually had a non-racist friend who was so rebellious that he had a soft spot for Holocaust denial.

    In the junk-science domain, you get defenders such as Steven Pinker who should know better but who have friends, or friends of friends, who've built careers on this.

    There's more to say here . . . I'm still a bit of a mess trying to put all this together . . .

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