I received the following comment a few days ago (with some follow-up in a similar vein), from someone who read at least one post of mine, and replied via the encrypted e-mail service “protonmail.com“.

EMail Address: ausoz@protonmail.com
IP Address: 37.120.215.243; 45.152.182.131

Although, of course, these are probably not their real IP addresses, and I’m not going to give them the dubious gratification of using the name they provided. Let’s call them Trevor instead. There’s nothing wrong with using ProtonMail of course, it’s a great service, check it out.

Trevor was commenting on my post of September 5th 2019, He Cried in Hatred—where I likened the current US president to Adolf Hitler. As some of you might imagine, posts like that can make for an interesting crop of responses. So let’s take a virtual stroll through Trevor’s comment… a few paragraphs of lies, foolish irrational hatred, and fascistic bigotry:

I can say with all honesty, that the people with the most profound hatred in their hearts for other races are Jews.

There isn’t a single human being dead or alive that can accurately state the thoughts and feelings of millions of others across the globe. So, we have a hate-filled, ignorant, foolish and utterly false opening line. But let’s not stop there, Trevor continues:

When I was growing up I never knew much about them, I just knew they were the people spoken of in the Bible and that they were relatively few in number. Later I was told the story of the six million and the “gas chambers of death” and felt terribly sorry for them. They were scapegoats used by Hitler to blame Germany’s defeat on in The Great War of 1914 – 1918, I was told.

Not a great grasp of history then, but I’m not going to blame anybody for a poor education. There can be a lot of reasons for an education lacking in certain important aspects, but we should all be held to account for speaking from ignorance as if it were wisdom. In addition, I’ve never been comfortable with the us and them language used above, when talking about fellow human beings. We are all us to our own, and them to the other.

However about a year and a half ago I started to read and find information on the Jewish leadership and development of Bolshevism (the most extreme and violent variant of communism) their deliberate murder of millions of Christians in the Soviet Union. The murders they were doing in Germany after The Great War, and I located many books and articles written by Jews themselves declaring their blind hatred of non-Jews particularly White Europeans.

It is entirely possible to find books, written by an array of authors with extremely differing political points of view. Book authors, within reason (and sometimes pushing reason’s boundaries), can say what they like, so long as they break no law—for which anyone with enough money and motivation for the litigation will hold them accountable. Not to mention of course, that it is often less risky from a legal perspective, to lie about the dead than the living. As a result, I tend to discount most published books for their tendency to the biases of their authors, preferring instead, primary research published in reputable peer-reviewed journals, or edited collections of peer-reviewed work. This, as I frequently tell undergraduate students, is a valuable part of what we call the citation of empirical evidence. Trevor has not cited any evidence, of any kind, for a number of profoundly unacceptable allegations; not even one of his many books and articles. Whilst I personally feel that, because of the lack of evidence, we can safely disregard these arguments as an offensive rant, I also feel that such vicious ignorance should not go unchallenged.

So let’s take a closer look at the assertion that Bolshevism was the most extreme and violent variant of communism. Marot (2014), in a peer-reviewed study of Lenin and Bolshevism, analyzed the goals of the Bolshevik leader in the following terms, “As Lenin saw it, it was the Bolsheviks’ business to make ‘All Power to the Soviets’ a reality by ‘patiently explaining’ to the masses the need for Soviet Power which, alone, would bring peace, land, bread and socialism.” (Marot, 2014, p. 156). Later he referred to the Bolsheviks as being confronted by the “White Armies, led by anti-Semitic cutthroats” (p. 168). This was, we should not forget, a period of bloody civil war in the early 1900s—far from unique in the history of many nations—but it is a lie, misrepresenting both communism and the Bolsheviks, to make them seem that they were any more or less violent than those by whom they were oppressed, or their competing revolutionary factions.

Later, I found out why questioning the “Holocaust” is illegal in 18 countries, it is because there were no “Gas Chambers of death” and the whole 6 million number had been used by Jewish owned newspapers in the USA and UK since 1869 all saying “six million Jews in imminent danger of death”! All done to firstly get money donations from the stupid “Goyim”, and secondly to fit in with their Talmudic religious leaders who needed some event where they could claim 6 million Jews had dead in a “Holocaust” thus confirming the religious belief that 6 million of their number would die before they could return to the Holy Land.

Here Trevor’s arguments just fall apart in terms of fact, logic, and even coherent thought. In response, let’s look at a peer-reviewed article, by Cox (2014), Blasphemy, Holocaust Denial, and the Control of Profoundly Unacceptable Speech, published in The American Journal of Comparative Law:

Holocaust denial laws in Germany are a particularly instructive instance of a situation where speech is legally restricted because of its offensive and immoral character, yet where the law restricting the speech has been deemed to be constitutionally acceptable and, more importantly for present purposes, where the law in question commands significant popular support.

The German constitutional court in the Holocaust Denial Case famously upheld the decision of the state government in Munich to make it a condition of the holding of a National Democratic Party meeting, at which revisionist historian David Irving was due to speak, that the so-called ‘Auschwitz Hoax’ theory not to be promoted there. The Court, on an application from Mr Irving claiming that his right to free speech had been violated, found first, that the speech was not deserving of protection in that it was, in its view, patently false fact and any opinions based on it would be, to that extent, flawed. (Cox, 2014, p. 751).

 

The Auschwitz Hoax theory—that Auschwitz was not a Nazi camp, which contained gas chambers for eradicating Jewish prisoners—was patently false fact. The purpose of the legislation discussed, is not to bar free speech, but to deny profoundly unacceptable, and patently false speech, the protection accorded to reasoned argument. Trevor then moves on to some truly offensive misinformation in the last remaining paragraphs:

Interestingly, the many thousands of skinny dead and dying Jews one sees photos of in the German concentration camps died of Typhus and other diseases brought about because allied bombing of Germany completely ruined the country’s infrastructure and food and medicine distribution!

Once again, no evidence is offered for these outrageous assertions. I would imagine that disease was rampant among the malnourished and abused of the Nazi death camps, and similarly, I would not argue the logic that the war itself claimed the lives of many innocents. The phrase skinny dead and dying Jews should not go unremarked; the hatred and inhumanity inherent in its use are simply abhorrent.

It is these half-truths, mixed with vile sentiment that I feel are so dangerous—especially in these morally divided political climes—and should not go unchallenged. As the historian Deborah Lipstadt has discussed, the arguments of holocaust deniers, are both anti-intellectual and blatantly racist (Lipstadt, 2000, p. 2). And in pursuing their drive to convince the world that the arguments of holocaust deniers represent a serious historical perspective, “[t]heir books and journals have been given an academic format and they’ve worked hard to insinuate themselves into the arena of legitimate historical debate and deliberation.” (p. 2).

Which results in individuals like Trevor sounding almost like they know what they are talking about, whilst producing no evidence to support their ignorance and bigotry. And at the very end, Trevor reveals that underlying trope of the international Jewish conspiracy that we all knew (or at least, I believed) was waiting to slip out:

Yet these people control all mainstream media, the banks, kill poor Palestinians and ALWAYS present themselves as victims!

These people, because they are not like us are they? They are other in some undefinable way. At this point, I am finding it difficult to control my rising bile and ire in equal degrees. Shadowy Jewish conspiracies control what you think, because they run the media that nobody can help but consume; they keep you poor so that you are no challenge to their hegemony; and they kill indiscriminately while pretending to be one of history’s constant victims. Don’t get me wrong here, I am no innocent, and am no fan of the current Israeli regime and the sickening violence in the Middle-East. But the Middle-East conflict is complex, and has been on-going in various forms for much longer than I can do justice to in this forum. Suffice to say, that atrocities have been committed for many years by all sides involved—as is the norm for armed conflict the whole world over, probably since the first of humankind’s distant relatives first thought to protect their hunting grounds. It doesn’t make violence any the less wicked, or justifiable in any way, it just makes it a tragic part of the human condition, as—I am disgusted to say—is ignorance, racism, and the idea that Homo sapiens is somehow different according to skin color, or which sky fairy you may or may not worship.

In Conclusion

I engaged with the this comment from the person identifying themselves as Trevor, because (i) I thought that the issues involved were critically important in today’s climate of combustible politics; and (ii) because it wasn’t the only comment in this vein that I have received. But it was the only one that seemed vaguely rational or even lucid. I won’t say intelligent, reasoned, or even well-argued, because I don’t think it was any of those things, and I believe I have illustrated that patiently and responsibly, in the manner of someone who likes to keep a web log that does not just publish agreeable opinion.

A More Personal Perspective

Thanks for that Trevor and the rest of your ilk. While I quite enjoyed engaging with your vile crap, tearing it to pieces and feeding it to the lions of logic and empirical evidence, I find that engaging with morons is not as entertaining as it used to be.

Please don’t send me any more of your bigoted nonsense, the lions are full—for now—and their patience is thin.

 

References

Cox, N. (2014). Blasphemy, Holocaust Denial, and the Control of Profoundly Unacceptable Speech. The American Journal of Comparative Law, 62(3), 739–774. https://doi.org/10.5131/AJCL.2014.0022

Lipstadt, D. (2000). Deniers, relativists and pseudo-scholarship. Dimensions, 14(1), 44. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/195064351/

Marot, J. (2014). Lenin, Bolshevism, and Social-Democratic Political Theory. Historical Materialism, 22(3-4), 129–171. https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-12341370

Sitnikov, M. (2011). Orthodox Bolshevism. Russian Politics & Law, 49(1), 83–90. https://doi.org/10.2753/RUP1061-1940490107