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Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)
David Cole (YouTube, Substack) is a man who needs no introduction to Counter-Currents readers. But just in case Ann Coulter tweets this out to her millions of normie fans (she’s one of Cole’s most enthusiastic supporters), I should probably write an introduction.
Whether you love him or hate him, you’ve got to admit that David Cole has had one hell of a life. He was born the son of Elvis’s doctor and went to a nearly all-black school, where he was king of the theater kids.In his late teens he got involved with the Holocaust revisionism scene, and by his early 20s he was one of its leading spokesmen. Before his 25th birthday, Cole had appeared on 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, The Phil Donahue Show, The Montel Williams Show, and The Morton Downey Jr Show, making the case for Holocaust revisionism.
In the late 1990s, Irv Rubin of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) put what was tantamount to a bounty on Cole’s head. Cole had to make a public recantation of his work to protect himself before slipping away into the night.
From 1998 to 2014, Cole adopted the name David Stein, becoming the event organizer for Friends of Abe, a not-so-secret group of Hollywood Republican movers and shakers that included the likes of Kelsey Grammer and Gary Sinise. It came to end when Dave’s girlfriend outed him to his friends as a Holocaust revisionist, which led to Cole being blacklisted.
Cole made his return to the world of outsider politics in 2015 when he began publishing a weekly column at Takimag, the roster of which at the time included such dissident Right icons as Steve Sailer, John Derbyshire, Gavin McInnes, and Jim Goad.
This is only to scratch the surface. Cole has done many other things as well that even longtime Cole-watchers might not be aware of. He’s won awards for mainstream Holocaust documentaries and has published articles pseudonymously in some of the largest newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, and The New Republic. He is currently working on a documentary about Hunter Gibson, Mel Gibson’s father.
1. Noël Coward once said, “I’ll go through life in first class or third, but never in second.” That quote seems like an accurate description of your life, because at various times, you have mixed with both ultra-insiders as well as ultra-outsiders. You’ve rubbed shoulders with elite Hollywood stars and fringe conspiracy theorists, millionaire movie producers and persecuted political outlaws. You’ve eaten lunch with Ann Coulter and then gone home to your porn-star roommate. At no time were you ever working at an ordinary desk job. How are you able to so smoothly transition between these vastly different worlds and their vastly different rules of etiquette? Most people who would feel comfortable on the fringes would feel uncomfortable among members of the social elite, and vice versa. Do you find that your experiences in one world inform how you operate in the other?
Good question. Keep in mind I’m the only guy ever referred to (in the Los Angeles Times, in 2000) as a “meta-ideologue” (Google it; I have the honor, so to speak, of being the one human for whom that term was coined, and the only one for whom it’s used). Apparently it means “an existentialist on a quest to understand how ideologues invent their realities.”
Oh, I’m so very special! Where’s my parade?
But the point is, I’m fascinated by ideology. True believers. There’s a bizarre psychological “meeting in the middle” between fringe-dwellers and mainstream-dwellers. Fringies flatter themselves as being more than common dirt; they need to believe that they have power, influence. They have an inflated sense of importance; they think their memes and tweets and angry e-mails make a difference. Conversely, many mainstream activists want to see themselves as common dirt (they fool themselves into thinking they represent the ordinary folk, the peeple, instead of the elites).
Scratch a fringie and you’ll find someone who’d love to be inside the halls of power. Scratch a mainstreamer and you’ll find someone who falsely sees themselves as an outsider rebel. So fringies and their inflated sense of importance, and mainstreamers and their desire to LARP as commoners, kind of meet in the middle.
Understanding the psychology, I can speak to fringe-dwellers in language that appeals to them, and mainstream-dwellers in language that appeals to them. There are only three languages I speak: English, ideology, and the film business. That’s why when people ask me why I don’t sell my Beverly Hills house (a quite modest house, but worth a fortune just for the land) and use the money to get a mansion in, say, Montana, I’m like, but who would I talk to? Yeah, they speak English over there. But they don’t speak Hollywood, and it’s hardly a center of political philosophy. So I’d be stuck at bars talking about meat or cows or whatever.
And after I say “I like beef,” there’s the entire evening’s conversation, blown. I got nothin’ else.
2. Where did you encounter the bigger narcissists, on the fringe or among the elites? Just in terms of having a titanic ego, how would people like Richard Spencer or Nick Fuentes compare to the great divas of Hollywood?
Well, again, if you separate how people feel about themselves versus how much power or influence they actually have, there’s no difference. The neocons of Friends of Abe were just as full of themselves as the sad sacks of the racialist fringe. But if I had to choose, I’d say the Hollywood neocons were less openly egotistical because, by being close to actual power, by rubbing elbows with the elites, they had the kind of confidence you get when you feel in charge (the Abes weren’t “in charge” of anything, but when Congressmen and Senators and VPs pay you visits and flatter you, you feel in charge).
That kind of confidence breeds noblesse oblige — kindness to those beneath you. An egotistical, condescending kindness, to be sure. But it’s part of that thing I just mentioned about wanting to stay connected to the “littul peeple.”
On the other hand, fringie guys live in a world of fear. Anyone they deal with might be a fed. If you get a large donation, your bank might put a hold on it. Maybe the “based buddy” you befriended is planning to take you down by claiming you’re not based enough. Maybe the “no, I’m plenty based” tiki-torch march is a fed trap. Or a rival’s trap. Who can you trust? Will you be put on a no-fly list? Do your comrades think you’re the fed?
The fringies may appear outwardly calm and confident, but inside they’re shivering little Chihuahuas. And the funny part is, if you get a calm, confident fringie, he gets accused of being a fed, for not being nervous enough! “Why aren’t you as jittery as we are? Why, you ain’t nervous at all! What do you know that we don’t?”
Now, since you mentioned the porn girl, I’ll add that my skills at understanding human psychology dead-end at the vaginal wall. As far as women go, 54 years and they still confound me. A guy like Fuentes, or a guy like Shapiro, I can figure them out in five minutes. But women are the Hellraiser puzzle box. Even trying to solve the riddle can get you chained in a dungeon by a sadist. It’s why I’ve always tried to keep them at arm’s length. Unpredictability scares me way more than the JDL. I could bargain with the JDL because Irv Rubin was a tiny-brained simple organism. I’ve never been able to bargain with an angry woman.
3. Your biological father, the man who may or may not have murdered Elvis Presley, was an Ashkenazi Jew. However, he died when you were quite young, and your grandfather who raised you was a Sephardic Jew. I think most people are aware that there are various religious divides among Jews, but far less is known of the ethnic divides. All I know about Sephardic Jews is a vague notion that they are a shade more goyish than Ashkenazi Jews. Éric Zemmour is a Sephardic Jew and he talks like Pat Buchanan. The average IQ of Sephardic Jews is more comparable to that of white gentiles, and in Israel, Sephardic Jews will sometimes make the same criticisms of Ashkenazi Jews as gentiles in other countries. Houston Stuart Chamberlain, one of the pioneers of political anti-Semitism, had nothing but nice things to say about Sephardic Jews.
First of all, how big of a cultural divide is there between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews in America? As a child of a mixed marriage, I think you’d be uniquely qualified to gauge that. Was there a difference in how the two sides of your family reacted to your Holocaust work? Second, do you think that being raised by a Sephardic as opposed to an Ashkenazi Jew influenced how you approached certain topics?
I’m one-quarter Sephardic; my maternal grandfather was Spanish-Jewish. Like many Spanish-Jewish families, his ancestors left Spain for the Netherlands before eventually relocating to London, where my grandfather was born. So my mom was half-Ashkenazi, half-Sephardic.
Dr. Cole, the Elvis-druggin’ doc, his family tree was German Jews who settled in the United States pre-Civil War (long before the influx of Eastern European Jews). Beyond that, I know nothing about the Cole line except that it ends with me. Dr. Cole had three kids from a previous marriage. The two girls never had children, and the boy ended up murdered in a ditch in Hawaii in the 1990s — yet another tragic lesson in why you should never make a “How’d you like a nice Hawaiian punch?” joke to the natives. So with me having avoided kids like the plague, I’m it.
Now, my stepdad was pure Ashkenazi. His family was originally from Minsk but had lived in London since the late 1800s — the poor parts: Whitechapel, then Stepney. It was from him I learned that Jack the Ripper couldn’t possibly have been a nobleman in a top hat and cape. A dude like that poncing around Whitechapel at that time would be like me dressing that way and trying to walk unnoticed through East LA. “Ese, dig that crazy-ass gringo. Muy loco!”
The Ashkenazi side of my mom’s family was very political. Stereotypically political: Marxists, trade unionists, revolutionaries. But my Sephardic granddad was a simple working man, a furniture maker and upholsterer. He despised politics; he saw it as a lazy man’s way to pretend to work, kind of like how the movie Barton Fink ultimately ridicules its protagonist’s belief that his “life of the mind” made him the equal of blue-collar working men.
To be sure, my maternal granddad was a highly artistic guy. He painted and played violin. But he knew the value of hard work. I still have some of his furniture around the house, a hundred years later. And his paintings line my walls. My mom took after him (i.e., the “work over politics” thing). That’s why I was raised with no Leftism. She had no attraction to that revolutionary shit from the Ashkenazi side of the family.
My stepdad, the Cockney, even being Ashkenazi also had that “work over politics” ethic. That’s what attracted my mom to him. He grew up during the Blitz, joined the Merchant Marines, and got married to an Englishwoman. She became very ill; the National Health Service pretty much killed her, thus cementing his only firm political belief (“socialism sucks”). So he came to the States, because he saw this country (at the time) as a place where a hard-working man could forge his own way. He became a citizen, joined the Army, served in Germany with Elvis (yes, my biological dad killed Elvis, and my stepdad served with him abroad. Life’s fuckin’ odd, ain’t it?), moved to Beverly Hills, and built a successful career for himself.
Even to his dying day, my stepdad never understood my interest in politics. It was never real work to him. But my parents always let me go my own way. It was a matter of trust. When I said I wanted to go to the 80% black schools instead of the toff-nosed private ones, they trusted that I’d be fine. Ditto when I started being involved in revisionism. It was just always a matter of them trusting that I knew what I was doing.
4. Holocaust revisionism was never your full-time job. Your day job for many years was working in casting for movies and TV. In that time, I assume that, just by the law of averages, you encountered a number of unknown actors and actresses who went on to become well-known. In your experience, how much of a role would you say “talent” plays in whether someone “makes it” in Hollywood as opposed to other things, such as persistence (just sticking around), networking (“who you know”), or just blind luck (“being at the right place at the right time”)? I imagine all of those play a factor to some degree, but just in general, how reliably can you predict someone’s success or failure in Hollywood just by watching them act? Is there really a mythical “it” that you can identify and say, “That person’s gonna be a star!”? Does the cream rise to the top of Hollywood, or is it more or less a lottery?
Talent, persistence, networking, blind luck — they all play a role. I’ve seen lots of actresses with “it” fail, but usually because they give up. I’ve seen actresses get incredibly lucky but blow it because in the end they’re not super talented (you can impress at an audition but ultimately fail on-set). Persistence is the one factor where if you don’t have it, you won’t make it. Talent can be taught to a point (enough to be in a second-rate sitcom). Luck’s random. But if you don’t have persistence, you’re done.
I never discovered a “star,” but in the late 1980s/early ‘90s I discovered a few actresses you’d totally know if you’re familiar with action or horror films from that period. I won’t mention their names due to my toxicity!
Funny enough, one actress I auditioned for a pilot in 2005 so failed to impress me that I wrote her off entirely (her line readings were lousy, and she was rude to boot). Yet she became the star of one of the most popular TV shows of the past ten years. How’d someone I completely dismissed become so big? I still don’t think she’s very good, and her networking skills were lousy (you should never be rude to the casting director!). So she likely got lucky somewhere along the line. Real lucky. These days she could probably buy and sell me a hundred times over. I literally dismissed her from an audition, then went back in the room and told the crew, “Man, I hated her!” and we all laughed about it, and yet she became a massive TV star.
I still have her crappy demo reel DVD she brought with her to that audition. I’ve resisted the temptation over the years to sell it to TMZ . . . because we have mutual friends.
5. Let’s talk about couches. People who work in casting are known for their famous “casting couches,” which they use to evaluate whether or not a woman is right for a particular role. What is the ideal kind of couch for “auditioning” promising young starlets on? Are there any brands that you endorse? What about upholstery? Crushed velvet seems like it would be comfortable, but leather would be easier to clean. Or perhaps you believe that the crappier the couch, the better? Maybe a great actress should be able to nail her “audition” on the lowliest IKEA futon? What say you, Dave? As an old pro in the game, what kind of advice can you give to all the aspiring casting directors out there as to the best kinds of couches for measuring a woman’s ability to act?
LOL! People have a rather inaccurate view of the “casting couch.” A majority of casting directors are women. Of the men, at least half are gay. So the simple odds are that a young actress won’t encounter a lascivious hetero man. But even the lascivious hetero male casting directors understand that you never ask an actress to trade sex for the promise of a role — especially because all a casting director does is make recommendations to the director, and the director might say no. So you get a gal to blow you with the promise of being in Michael Bay’s next piece of crap film, then Bay rejects the suggestion, and now what’ve you done? You’ve got a bitter young actress who’s likely to squeal to the cops or the trades. She came through, you didn’t (you came, but not “through”).
What you do is, you get them a role first. That establishes that you can do it. And therefore you’re likely to do it again. Then, the blowjob becomes a good investment for the girl; you’ve proven yourself to her, so she’s not blowing you on spec. And if she squeals, you’ve got a timeline showing that the BJ came after she already got the role, proving there was no quid-pro-quo.
Bottom line, the vile excesses of a guy like Harvey Weinstein are more the exception than the rule. Typically, it’s a two-person dance: a casting director shows off like some male bird doing a dance, “proves” himself by building the nest (securing a role), a grateful actress responds by thinking “this is a good guy to blow,” they have dinner, and it’s a mutually exploitative affair.
6. In your autobiography, you explained how you initially got into revisionism. As a teen, you were fascinated by fringe ideologies and groups that went against the mainstream’s grain, and initially, Holocaust revisionism was just one of several fringe movements you were studying. You also attended John Birch Society events as well as those of pinko commie groups, and at first, you were approaching these groups with a spirit of detached academic curiosity, like Jane Goodall studying gorillas in the wild. But with Holocaust revisionism, you fully “went native.” Do you remember an exact moment when things switched from “I just want to see what makes these weirdos tick” to “By Jove, I think these chaps might be onto something!”
Yes, but it wasn’t an epiphany of “By Jove, I think these chaps might be onto something!” It was the realization of a dynamic. I’ll explain.
When I first met David McCalden, I watched the raw footage of his trip to Auschwitz, and the edited version he sold to followers. His “killer” point in the video concerned the pillars of the krema II and III supposed gas chamber rooms. These were the underground morgue rooms at Birkenau, and when the fleeing Nazis dynamited the roofs, they fell in around the pillars that supported them. So in the remains, the pillars are still standing, with the roof flat around them. And McCalden would say, “These pillars are solid concrete! Solid!” Then he’d show the official Auschwitz Museum scale model of what those rooms supposedly looked like as gas chambers, and the pillars were depicted as being wire mesh — hollow, not solid at all — and the Zyklon pellets would be sprinkled loose (or in a basket; the stories vary) through the pillars, and the gas would flow out from there. McCalden had an iron-clad argument: The Auschwitz model shows that the pillars were perforated — hollow inside — but the pillars that actually exist are solid concrete.
Case closed!
Except . . . at the same time that I was dealing with McCalden, I was also reading Jean-Claude Pressac’s book, which contained the blueprints and specs of those rooms, and the rooms always had concrete pillars. The gassing story is that along with those concrete support pillars, four mesh chutes had been installed. So you had the concrete support pillars and the mesh chutes, separate.
But the Auschwitz Museum’s administrators had not included those concrete pillars in the official scale model, because doing so would’ve obstructed the view of the Holocaust porn (the writhing bodies). So based on the inaccurate model, yes, you’d think that the only pillars in the room were the mesh ones, and therefore the fact that the physical remains consist only of concrete pillars would seem like absolute proof that the gassing story was a lie. If the story was that the only pillars in the room were wire mesh, then the presence of concrete pillars would prove that you’ve been hoaxed.
And that was my “by Jove” moment. I realized there was deception on both sides. The Auschwitz Museum had constructed an inaccurate model that erased the concrete pillars for maximum horror effect, and McCalden used that inaccurate model to create new inaccuracies by saying, “If the only pillars in the room were hollow mesh, and here are obviously solid concrete pillars, then we’ve been hoaxed!”
Obviously, there were and are questions about whether those mesh columns existed. But the presence of the concrete pillars are neither here nor there. They’d have been there if there were gassings, or if there weren’t. That was the moment I knew I’d have to start traveling to Europe myself. All that the revisionists at the time were doing was exploiting the museum’s errors and inaccuracies to further an equally (in fact more) flawed narrative.
It was then I realized I couldn’t trust anyone’s word — not the establishment, not the “rebels.” Somebody had to go to Europe with no desire to create or exploit inaccuracies, and no built-in “you can go this far but no farther” boundary on what conclusions to draw. There was a vacuum, and I filled it.
7. When you got into Holocaust revisionism, the Soviet Union still existed and the Web didn’t. How did revisionists work towards the truth when so many locations and documents were not yet available to the public? How did they organize and spread the message in the pre-Internet era?
Well, regarding spreading the message, there were newsletters. Cheap enough to make. Everyone had newsletters back then. As part of my study of American ideology, I have every single mailer, newsletter, bulletin, etc., from every single American political organization — Left, Right, far Left, far Right, center — from 1988 through 1994. When I die, someone will be able to use the contents of my garage to create a museum of American political content during those years.
But in terms of knowing the historical documents, you just had to go to the archives in person. And search. And search. And befriend (and sometimes bride) the clerks. It was painstaking. And as much as I spent countless months of my life doing that, David Irving has spent a hundred times more. You’d just put your life on hold, travel to a particular archive, do what was necessary to get credentialed (everywhere had different standards), and live there for two months. No “Zoomer” today would have the patience for that.
Regarding the Soviet archives still being closed, that wasn’t as much of a problem as I thought it might be back then. It’s the nature of how the Nuremberg trials worked that, by and large, all the Allied powers got copies of everything. So we’ve sort of known from the get-go what Nazi docs are available. There was a hope, or fear, that there’d be a mass of stuff we didn’t know about in Russia, but it turned out that it was really more a matter of confirming what we already knew by comparing the Russian copies with the US, British, or German copies.
For example, after the war the handwritten and typed pages from the Goebbels diary ended up in the US at the Hoover Institution, and the microfiche Goebbels made of his diary for posterity ended up in Russia. So when Irving went to Russia to do research for his Goebbels book, he wasn’t so much looking to discover something new, but to compare the Russian-held microfiche to the Hoover-held hard-copy pages to confirm their authenticity.
8. How did revisionism change throughout the 1990s as the Iron Curtain came down and the old Soviet archives started opening up to the public? What were the major bombshells and curveballs that emerged during this period? How much revising of your old theories did you have to do in light of all this new information?
I covered that above; there really weren’t many curveballs or bombshells. If Irving had found a discrepancy between the two versions of the Goebbels pages, that would’ve been dramatic. But he didn’t. Probably the biggest change was that the more independent Poland got, the more willing Polish historians were to dump Soviet-era falsehoods. Ditto the Hungarians. Freed from the Soviet yoke, there’s been some amazing revisionist research coming out of Hungary the past few decades — stuff that’s sort of a win for “both sides” in the revisionist-mainstream debate. Certain Hungarian scholars have done really great work in showing how the Germans had only wanted Hungarian Jews for labor in 1944, but the Hungarian fascists, acting out of a desire to plunder valuables and seize property coupled with a racial desire to be rid of all Jews, were shipping the Nazis too many women and children, which rather upset the Nazis.I say this is a win for both sides because it demonstrates that the intent of the 1944 Hungarian deportations to Auschwitz was purely labor, not extermination. But it’s a win for the mainstream narrative because if [Auschwitz camp commandant] Rudolf Höss was getting trainloads of non-laboring Jews, which he didn’t want or need, and as he’d previously (in 1942) dealt with overcrowding/undesirables via murder, it’s wholly possible he reverted to his old ways, at least to an extent. Maybe not enough to leave “blue stains,” but to some extent.Of course, deniers will never cede the possibility of even limited exterminations at Auschwitz, and Jewish organizations will never allow a debate over Auschwitz intent. So I’m still the guy in the middle; back to me and those fucking pillars in 1989.And like the Cole line, common-sense revisionism dies with me. There ain’t nobody else on the horizon with any interest in doing this most unrewarding task (deniers call you an Anti-Defamation League [ADL] shill, the ADL calls you a denier, and Amazon bans your books just to be safe!).
9. A side interest of a lot of Holocaust revisionists is The Diary of Anne Frank’s authenticity. The short version of these claims is that the type of pen the diary was written with wasn’t widely available when it is alleged to have been written, that it’s implausible that the families could have remain undetected where they were hiding for so long given the building’s layout, and that there are certain internal inconsistencies within the diary itself. Have you done much investigating into this topic?
Oh, I know the claims. Remember, I knew Robert Faurisson well — but his claims are bunk. There are margin notes written after the war in a separate pen. If the diary were a hoax, I doubt the hoaxers would’ve been so foolish as to use different pens for margin notes. But the diary itself is completely real. And it astounds me that anyone doubts that a young Ashkenazi girl could write a diary. We are a very verbal, very literate people. I was reading Dickens, Dos Passos, Shakespeare, and Mencken before I started grade school. By fifth grade I was penning satires using words that my teachers couldn’t comprehend. Ben Shapiro’s a dick politically, but he was a high-performing kid, too.
Say what you will about European Jews — and heaven knows I do in my Taki’s columns — but for all our flaws — the Leftism, the hatred of whites/Western civilization, the subversiveness, the “permanent revolutionary” identity, the clannishness, the hypocrisy — at least concede that we’re verbal and literate. We can string phrases together really fucking well. And it starts at a very young age. Even if you hate black people, at least admit they can dance. Give ‘em something, for Christsake!
As far as “implausibilities” regarding how long the family remained undetected, I’ve never heard a serious revisionist make that claim. The fact is that Jews were hidden all over Europe, because generally speaking, Europeans are a good, civilized people. Hell, too good, because their kindness to outsiders is leading to the decimation of their countries today. If it’s true that the Frank family was betrayed to the Nazis, that would surely indicate that their discovery wasn’t so much due to a nation of antee-Semites searching Hans Landa style for hidden Jews, but to one bad actor who decided to be a dick because Arthur Seyss-Inquart [Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands during the German occupation] rewarded such tips.
In his diary, Goebbels contrasts Seyss-Inquart with Werner Best (plenipotentiary of Denmark). Essentially, Goebbels says “Seyss-Inquart is too hard and Best is too soft.” So while Seyss-Inquart was indeed a Hans Landa-style Jew-catcher, most ordinary Netherlanders weren’t. I’ve never heard anyone question why the Franks remained undiscovered for so long. I don’t even get the point of that claim. That they didn’t exist? But the Franks passing through Auschwitz unscathed is such a popular denier gotcha! So that talking point baffles me.
10. You have said that when you started in the late 1980s, the only people interested in Holocaust revisionism were cranks, Franz Liebkind-type Nazi fetishists, and hardcore anti-Semites. Do you think Holocaust revisionism has made progress in appealing to people beyond those narrow demographics? I can think of a few people such as Christopher Hitchens and Ryan Dawson who dabbled in Holocaust revisionism while having no other overtly racist tendencies. How optimistic are you of that becoming a broader trend?
No, rational revisionism is dead. The nutcases have taken over. Twenty years ago, Hitchens dropped his support for Irving after Irving’s dismal showing at the defamation trial he himself initiated. What would Hitchens today make of the dipshit memers and their “cookie monster” idiocy? He’d piss on them. We are long past the point where revisionism could attract top thinkers, because revisionism doesn’t exist anymore — only denial.
As I said, when it comes to rational revisionism, I’m it. Irving’s a master historian, but it can be very hard to pin him down on his actual views because they change based on his audience. And Mark Weber, one of my closest friends for 33 years, is a rational revisionist, but he has no desire to write about the topic (Faurisson and his army of irrationals proved such an irritant to Mark that he stopped dealing with the topic entirely).
Could I make inroads with a mainstream crowd? Sure. I’ve always been able to do that. Why do you think Amazon censors me, but not the Black Hebrew Hitler fanboy crap or Hadding Scott’s “Yippee! Nazism is cool” trash? Of course Amazon lets that stuff stay. It helps keep revisionism in the gutter.
As for Ry Dawson, he’s a good friend, and a good man. But he comes to revisionism via the anti-Israel angle, which is something I’ve purposely never done — in part because I don’t give a shit about that part of the world, but also because you can’t let modern-day geopolitical conflicts influence how you look at history, such as how blacks today insist that you can’t objectively examine Civil War history without putting it in a modern-day context. Screw that; you can’t let your personal beef issues color the objective examination of any historical topic. Love Israel, hate Israel; love Palestinians, hate Palestinians. You need to separate that from Holocaust historiography.
If you want to be objective. Which nobody does.
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25 comments
It’s true that nuance is hard to find in the dissident right or the mainstream, but I doubt it dies with Cole, partly because of the work that he and others like Irving have done.
As with many things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The problem is that to admit that the fringe has a point is considered to be a fringe act in and of itself.
In my opinion, the question of whether or not the holocaust happened and to what extent is actually irrelevant. The real question is whether or not the holocaust is a justification for the systematic emasculation, subjugation and genocide of the Europeans and the white world at large, the answer to which is of course a resounding “No, not at all.”
In my opinion, the question of whether or not the holocaust happened and to what extent is actually irrelevant. The real question is whether or not the holocaust is a justification for the systematic emasculation, subjugation and genocide of the Europeans and the white world at large…”
Yes! This.
I, too, believe that this approach is by far the most necessary and potentially beneficial for us. Because even if we win the details debate, the issue itself has, by focusing on it yet again, still been given too much priority of place; and the real, underlying goal of ensuring perpetual Jewish hegemony over whitey has been obscured.
No. You’re still overthinking it.
if you are an American, the proper response is “The Holocaust, whatever it was, was just another event of foreigners killing foreigners, fundamentally no different to me as an American than the Taiping Rebellion.”
Liberals can not argue against this.
Liberals say that the white race doesn’t exist. They say, you are not white. You’re either English, Irish, French, German, etc. Well, if that’s the game they want to play, make them play by those rules. Tell them that the Holocaust is completely irrelevant to you because you’re neither German nor Jewish. They will either have to concede that the white race is a real thing and that the Holocaust worthy of your attention because it was something that other members of your group did or they will have to drop the subject.
Now, if they try to wheel out “Well, Nazi Germany is an example of what happens when white supremacy is allowed to run wild. “ then you explain “well, the Nazi were not ‘white nationalist’ or ‘white supremacist’ in any sense that we would understand it today. Nazi believed that there was an Aryan strain running through the human race that originated in either central India or the lost island of Hyperboria (there were competing theories) but this strain was not exclusive to whites. Nazis believed that some non-white were superior to some whites. I mean technically, the Nazis weren’t even ‘racist’ as the believed ethnicity was more profound. White supremacists of the day thought Nazi racial theories were nonsense” and then you link that one Lothrop Stoddard essay.
I think some people just like talking about Nazis. IMO if you are pro-white, you should never bring up Nazis or the Holocaust and if the subject comes up, try to get off that subject as quickly as possible.
“if you are an American, the proper response is ‘The Holocaust, whatever it was, was just another event of foreigners killing foreigners, fundamentally no different to me as an American than the Taiping Rebellion.’”
Just about any angle from which Holocaust indifference can be approached is a good thing. I do not, however, share your view that the European actors in the skirmish (the Germans) were mere “foreigners”–in the broader racial sense–so I couldn’t take your suggested tack. (The Jews were obviously foreigners, but the Germans, no.)
The Holocaust is, most fundamentally, a tool used by Jews against white people everywhere. The goal of using that tool is Jewish hegemony over white people everywhere. So the real issue is not details about the Holocaust, rather, whether Jewish hegemony is appropriate for Jews to impose and for whites to accept.
I’m glad there are revisionists, of course, because the subject requires facts and truth. But if anyone brings up the Holocaust with me, personally, the answer will simply be, “The Holocaust is irrelevant; how it happened or whether it happened is irrelevant; the event is used by Jews to harm whites and white societies, and Jewish ploys like that should not be tolerated in any historically white country.” (As the OP, Vauquelin, said.)
That’s pretty much been my take as well. I incline to accept something like a modest version of the mainstream narrative (no “6 million”, no “lampshades”, etc, but definitely a lot of Jews intentionally killed), but I demand complete openmindedness toward all forms of historical revisionism (which is really no more than upholding critical inquiry and academic integrity). Beyond that, I emphasize the extent to which the Holocaust has been weaponized to instill racial guilt in whites with the purpose of disarming us against the territorial incursions and dispossessionary activities of our very real racial competitors and enemies.
This answer engages in a type of fallacious reasoning I once could label (but no longer). You are using the terms “Nazis” and “whites” selectively. Of course the Nazis were white supremacists. They also believed that some Europoid sub-races (Nordics) were superior to others. If any top Nazis (Himmler, perhaps?) thought there were nonwhite “Aryans”, they were definitely in the minority amongst the Nazi hierarchy.
I do completely agree that discussing Hitler or the Holocaust at all is a poor strategy for prowhites today. It is forcing us onto the enemy’s strongest terrain (not strongest in terms of the truth, but, rather, the prevalent state of cultural stereotypes and ideological indoctrination).
American whites can’t just walk away from the Holocaust, dismissing it as a foreign event irrelevant to us. Of course, it is irrelevant, in a fact-based world. But we don’t live in a fact-based world. We live in an ideology-based world, & the controlling ideology is – on the Holocaust – that whatever guilt there is cannot be limited to Nazis or Germans or even Europeans, but must include white Americans as well. Wasn’t that the whole point of the 2022 Ken Burns documentary, “The U.S. and the Holocaust?” The most famous documentary-maker in the country, revered on both the Left & mainstream Right, maintains that Americans (i.e., white gentiles) provided inspiration for supposedly horrendous Nazi laws/programs concerning racial-hygiene & eugenics, & then enabled & made worse the Holocaust itself. The Holocaust is like racial integration – whites are not allowed to escape from it, no matter where they run. Both are designed to demoralize & ultimately physically destroy us by persuading guilt-struck white couples not to have children, or to adopt non-whites, & by persuading white women (& increasingly, white men) to miscegenate.
The arguments blaming America for Nazi racial policies are easily refuted. For instance, proper racial-hygiene is the mark of a healthy society, as opposed to a diseased one like ours. As for the Holocaust itself, whatever the truth of it, using it as justification for what’s being done to American whites today is (depending on the justifier) either the most lethally demented case of pathological altruism in history, or pure malevolence (sometimes rationalized as revenge).
Except for some crude outsiders, no one here has ever believed this nonsense of Shambala, Agartha, Hyperboria, etc..
Exactly. I may joke about it, but I don’t partake in serious holocaust denial because the veracity of the holocaust is entirely irrelevant. It means no more to me than the Armenian genocide or the Rwandan genocide, or the Mongol conquests. It’s a historic curiosity which has no bearing on the modern world. My problem with the holocaust is there’s an industry designed around pretending that it does, into perpetuity. They are treating the holocaust as their messiah. The problem isn’t whether or not it happened and to what extent, but the way it is used to undermine the kinds of politics that we need as white people to uphold our civilizations.
If you are advocating pro-white policies and some scum starts lecturing you about the holocaust, lecture him on the great replacement in return, which is presently acute and just as real.
Wow, so great to see Trav back! Cc is a warmer place again! Imagine that FYC song Good Thing playing in your heads.
Good to see Cole interviewed on Counter-Currents. I had heard he disliked us.
I religiously read David Cole on Takimag. Maybe Dr. Johnson can do some more horse trading with ol’ Taki and have Cole on here as CC’s court Jew.
I didn’t quite get the “double deception” remark regarding McCalden and the Auschwitz museum. I understand the deception on the side of the museum, not showing the pillars as solid, but what was the deception on the side of McCalden?
On a recent CC radio program, Greg said getting David from Taki would be quite the chore because he “HATES Counter-Currents!”
I also heard this on the Millenniyule interview.
That’s the one!
Did Greg elaborate as to why? Cole did this interview here so maybe hate is a bit of a strong word.
Why would he HATE cc? Cause “racism” or something similar? If that’s the case then why choose Beverly Hills where diversity is not except when dropping off amazon parcels. Perhaps he meant buzzfeed or the daily wire.
He didn’t mention the mesh chutes that could have been used for gassings or similar purposes.
McCalden took advantage of the museum’s sloppy model to claim, “the museum says the only pillars in the room were perforated, but here we see that the pillars are solid. Therefore, the gassing story is a hoax.” McCalden was acting like an attorney (exploit any mistake by the other side in order to win), not a historian. A historian doesn’t try to “win.” A historian would say, “the museum’s model is inaccurate. Let’s look at the blueprints instead. We know there were four solid support pillars. Their presence says nothing about whether or not there were ALSO, separately, wire mesh columns. Maybe those columns existed, maybe they didn’t. But the presence of the concrete support pillars neither proves nor disproves that claim, because the support pillars are a totally different thing and irrelevant to whether the mesh columns also existed. Thus the solidity of the pillars is not ‘proof’ of a hoax.”
Leikerrmahgerd David Cole replied to my comment!
Thanks for the clarification. Could the same line of argumentation though be used with respect to your documentary of which IIRC you point out the crematoria (or was it the gas chamber or both?) to be a replica and not the original. Like McCalden’s claim, is it too much of a stretch to claim there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz based on the crematoria/gas chamber being a replica?
I made it very clear in the film that there are two possibilities: that Krema I was a crematorium and gas chamber converted to an air raid shelter and then restored (poorly, but in good faith) to its state as a crematorium and gas chamber, OR that Krema I was a crematorium (no gas chamber), converted to an air raid shelter, and then restored (poorly) to its state as a crematorium but phonied (in bad faith) to look like a gas chamber too. In the film I present BOTH scenarios. I give the Auschwitz Museum position, and I give the revisionist position. That’s the ethical way to do it. In the case of Krema I, I favor the revisionist position. But I presented BOTH scenarios to my viewers.
For what it’s worth, as a bit of a researcher myself, I truly appreciate the “a historian doesn’t try to “win”” sentiment. Too often people are just trying to prove their own preconceptions instead of looking at all the available sources and see what end result is, no matter whether they like it or not.
David Cole isn’t exactly an affirmative action hire.
“Certain Hungarian scholars have done really great work in showing how the Germans had only wanted Hungarian Jews for labor in 1944, but the Hungarian fascists, acting out of a desire to plunder valuables and seize property coupled with a racial desire to be rid of all Jews, were shipping the Nazis too many women and children, which rather upset the Nazis.I say this is a win for both sides because it demonstrates that the intent of the 1944 Hungarian deportations to Auschwitz was purely labor, not extermination.”
Never heard of these “Hungarian scholars”.
The Eichmann organization wanted to eliminate Jews, the Auschwitz commanders wanted labor, it is perfectly conceivable that in an empire various factions and bureaucracies have competing and sometimes clashing or mutually exclusive agendas.
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