- As Goes the Holocaust, So Goes the West
by David Cole
In Taki’s Magazine
[….]
All current attempts to stifle speech in the name of protecting feelings, and all current scare campaigns about how unregulated speech inevitably leads to bad and destructive outcomes, owe their existence to the acceptance by Western whites of a set of “special circumstances” whereby traditional notions of “fight speech with more speech” and “let truth and falsehood battle it out” and “sticks and stones may break my bones but words’ll never hurt me” don’t apply to Holocaust history and Holocaust survivors.
Back in the early ’90s when I was mouthing off about how you can’t gas people in rooms where the doors lock from the inside, or where the doors open into the room, or where there are plate glass windows in the wall, I was routinely told by non-Jews who had no emotional connection to the Holocaust, “Look, maybe what you’re saying is true, but why say it? Why cause such pain to the poor survivors?” More often than not, my work was banned and censored by people who, though not personally offended by it, nevertheless felt compelled to uphold the “special circumstance” protections granted to Holocaust-related speech.
Back then, a small number of people understood that, in fact, unregulated speech actually made Holocaust history better, sounder. Christopher Hitchens, the New York Post’s Eric Breindel, and seminal Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg all conceded that the challenges posed by Holocaust revisionists and even outright deniers actually forced mainstream Holocaust historians to be better at their job; that being confronted with criticism and opposing theories compels historians to bolster their theses (to be fair, Hilberg only admitted this under cross-examination during the trial of denier Ernst Zundel in Toronto in 1985).
But Hitchens, Breindel, and Hilberg are dead now, as is the simple understanding that truth is only strengthened by having to compete with falsehood.
For anyone in the present day who’s been “canceled” for stating a fact or making a simple commonsense observation, well, welcome to the world of my youth. Don’t forget that mainstream conservatives allied with liberals when it came to “protecting” Holocaust history from the reasonable observations of revisionists like me. And now conservatives bitch that they get banned from social media for making factual observations like “There are only two genders.” Too bad. Your Holocaust “special circumstances” are claimed by trannies now. And blacks. And “immigrants.” And everyone else with an ax to grind against Western civ. Shoulda killed that beast in utero thirty years ago. By acquiescing to what was done to revisionists back then, you guys paved the path to where we all are now.
One additional point: The more dangerous it became back in the ’90s to challenge Holocaust orthodoxy, the more the revisionist side of the debate fell to the extremists. The penalties and punishments chased away everyone with a career or a reputation to preserve. What remained were the nuts, the brawlers who welcomed the fight and enjoyed being branded as Nazis. Since at least the early 2000s, rational Holocaust revisionism has fallen to the irrational deniers, dimwit extremist ideologues who have no interest in historical research and documentation. They just want to “fight the Jews.” The fight, not the historiography, is what appeals to them.
Another irony, this one totally predictable: As rational revisionists were attacked and chased away as Nazis, the field was ceded to actual Nazis.
This is the end result of speech criminalization. Rational voices go silent, because rational people—capable as they are of weighing actions and consequences—do the math and realize that it’s more prudent to pull back and shut up, when speaking freely might cost them their livelihood or freedom. What happened with Holocaust history will soon happen with topics like male/female biology and IQ inheritability. Anyone with anything to lose will think twice before challenging the left’s orthodoxy on those topics. That’s what speech penalties do; they scare away exactly the people with the intellectual capacity to best make the case that the penalizers don’t want made. And once a field is abandoned to crackpots who spout nonsense, the public becomes even more welcoming of speech proscriptions, due to the general loathsomeness of those being silenced.
Right now in the West, we’re scared to death of speech. The fact that a presidential candidate for a major U.S. political party could run on a platform of curbing speech in order to “save democracy” shows just how bad things are. And it all started with the Holocaust. Holocaust history is precious and “too much speech” poses a threat to it. Therefore, limit speech to “save” Holocaust history. Democracy is precious and “too much speech” poses a threat to it. Therefore, limit speech to “save” democracy. Acceptance of the first precept led to acceptance of the second.
Thirty years ago, sane people had a chance to stop the madness. But they allowed themselves to be emotionally blackmailed into accepting the belief that in “certain circumstances” free speech and open debate are harmful and should be curbed. They assumed that those circumstances would remain special. They’re now the norm.
You got played, folks. And like any gullible mark who falls prey to a sob story in the service of a long con, in the end you have nobody to blame but yourselves
https://www.takimag.com/article/as-goes-the-holocaust-so-goes-the-west/
- The Future of Europe Belongs to Patriots
by Santiago Abascal, in The European Conservative, February 22, 2020
For centuries, Europe has been shaped by the culture and values of the nations that call the continent their home. Through encounters between Germans, Britons, Italians, Frenchmen, Spaniards, and others, a shared philosophical and political tradition emerged that has made us who we are and made our continent unique. Europe is now under threat from within—and the very structures that claim to have our best interests at heart are betraying our heritage and asking us to give up our national sovereignty. Patriotic rebellions at the ballot boxes across the continent are a response to the threat they pose.
Europe as a collection of unique nations—each with its own language, sense of identity, and history—is at grave risk of disappearing. The drive towards globalizing the world and erasing the individual identity of nations threatens the ancient states of the European continent with uniformity. The bureaucrats in Brussels, whom we have not elected, have been trying for decades to rid Europe of the diversity of its national traditions, which is the essence of our continent. They have been trying to cut us off from our Christian roots and impose a multicultural society that despises our Greek, Roman, and Christian legacy. In the name of ‘democracy’ and the ‘rule of law’, the EU masters in Brussels have been doing their best to crush the very Europe’s nation-states which have always been the guarantors of freedom.
- Socialism Fails Every Time
By Joshua Muravchik, April 11, 2019
THE BEST OUTCOME IS A REVERSION TO CAPITALISM. THE WORST? HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS DEAD.
Self-described socialist Bernie Sanders has become a favorite of young voters by posing as an apostle of daring new ideas. Socialism, however, is anything but new. It’s hard to think of another idea that has been tried and failed as many times in as many ways or at a steeper price in human suffering.
The term “socialism” was coined by followers of Robert Owen (1771-1858), whom Karl Marx would label a “utopian socialist.” In 1825 Owen founded New Harmony, an Indiana commune, to demonstrate the superiority of what was first called the “social system.” The same year, Owen explained his experiment to a joint session of Congress attended by Supreme Court justices, President James Monroe and President-elect John Quincy Adams. Although Owen poured his fortune into it, New Harmony collapsed in disarray and recrimination within two years.
Owen’s son Robert Dale Owen salvaged the community by implementing what he called “a policy the very reverse” of socialism: “giving each respectable citizen every facility and encouragement to become (what every adult ought to be) a landed proprietor.”
Undeterred, others founded some 40 to 50 similar communes during the 19th century, and all collapsed quickly. New Harmony’s two years proved to be their median lifespan.
Based on the uniformly dismal results, the idea of socialism might have died a quiet death were it not for Marx (1818-83), who transformed socialism from an experiment—tried, tested and failed—into a prophecy, “the riddle of history solved.” Ironically, he called his vision “scientific socialism.”
Inspired by the dream of proletarian revolution overthrowing capitalist immiseration, socialist parties sprouted across Europe. Yet instead of growing poorer, workers in industrialized countries saw improvement in their living standards; and instead of disappearing, middle classes expanded—all disproving Marx.
The full article can be read in Wall Street Journal
- Roger Scruton, R.I.P
He labored to defend the great conservative ideal of home, safe from ravages of time and trends
By Michael Brendan Dougherty Jan 13, 2020, National Review
[…]
Scruton would tell another story of his political awakening, appropriately, in the spring of 1968 in Paris. From his apartment, he watched students, many of them his own age, overturning cars, uprooting paving stones, and smashing shop windows while building barricades in the streets. He was disgusted. And then a friend of his returned from the barricades, full of revolutionary fervor. For The New Criterion, in a passage worth quoting at length, he wrote of how he discovered himself a conservative:
The ensuing argument is one to which I have often returned in my thoughts.
What, I asked, do you propose to put in the place of this “bourgeoisie” whom you so despise, and to whom you owe the freedom and prosperity that enable you to play on your toy barricades? What vision of France and its culture compels you? And are you prepared to die for your beliefs, or merely to put others at risk in order to display them? I was obnoxiously pompous: but for the first time in my life I had felt a surge of political anger, finding myself on the other side of the barricades from all the people I knew.