By Carolyn Yeager
The latest White Nationalist figure to announce his flight from Holocaust Revisionism is the editor of Counter-Currents Publishing, Greg Johnson. In an article titled “Dealing with The Holocaust” published on June 20 at the Occidental Observer, Johnson gave a whole list of reasons why Holocaust Revisionism was not “necessary” to the prospering of what he has dubbed the North American New Right. Just three years ago, Mark Weber used virtually identical reasons to explain why Holocaust Revisionism had become “irrelevant” to the work of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR).
Greg Johnson’s article attracted 757 comments both pro and con, long and short, before being closed to more, and its premises are still being argued. Mark Weber’s 2009 “How Relevant is Holocaust Revisionism?” created a storm of controversy and ill-will that remains to this day. These arguments are therefore not ones that we will pass by quickly as we move on to other concerns, but they strike a deep chord in our collective White consciousness as to who we are, where we’re going and how we will get there.
In this article, I only intend to show the unmistakable similarity between the words used by Johnson and those used by Mark Weber in their respective essays. Of course, Weber’s came first. In connection with this, please see my recent blog post: The Battle for the IHR (posted July 17).
Mark Weber, for his part, has followed in the footsteps of historian David Irving, who determined after his 2005-06 stay in an Austrian prison for “holocaust denial” that there really was a Holocaust after all. Irving realized he would not sell any more books about the Nazi hierarchy unless he ties this hierarchy to the Jewish-approved WWII narrative, with just some small variations to create a sense of surprise for the public. Irving has flip-flopped since his arrest, but has now settled on the assertion that “The Nazis did murder millions of Jews” – and he is being mimicked by Mark Weber, who around that time began taking on the same view.
Weber, like Irving, is also concerned with sales. He wrote in his “Relevant” article that “over the past ten years, sales of IHR books, discs and requests for interviews about Holocaust history have steadily declined.” [Not an exact quote - cy] At the same time, interest in Jewish-Zionist power and the role of Jews in society increased, he wrote. It didn’t take Weber long to go where he thought the money was – to switch the emphasis of the IHR in that direction. However, it didn’t pan out in the long run because it’s known today that the IHR, with Weber at the helm, is suffering a long-term demise, the cause of which is probably that it doesn’t stand for anything.
When Greg Johnson began Counter-Currents Publishing two years ago after a short stint as editor at The Occidental Quarterly magazine, his views on the ‘Holocaust’ were not known, and certainly not an issue. I doubt that he had any defined views. The Counter-Currents website is a blog that features articles on and by leading intellectuals of the “New Right” along with book and movie reviews. At the same time, Johnson announced that he’s the representative of something he calls the “North American New Right,” making a big deal out of a difference he sees in “New Right” vs “Old Right” (by which he means Nazism, Fascism, and similar movements of the 1920’s-40’s).
In the article under consideration, Johnson writes,
The idea of ethnonationalism is true and good, regardless of the real and imagined crimes, mistakes, and misfortunes of the Old Right. Thus we feel no need to “deny,” minimize, or revise the Holocaust, just as the New Left felt no need to tie its projects to “Gulag revisionism.”
In other words, real crimes committed in the past (premier among them being ‘The Holocaust’) should be accepted by us now without trying to minimize or deny them. Johnson, the ‘New Right’ White Nationalist, has learned from Mark Weber, the revisionist, who wrote:
Holocaust revisionism is not the same thing as revisionism about the Third Reich or the causes, conduct, and consequences of World War II [which Weber likes to talk about]. Nor does it constitute Holocaust revisionism to compare the Holocaust to other genocides or discuss its overall meaning.
Thus Weber and Johnson can feel free to talk about such things as genocide and WWII, and even Hitler [which are popular topics - cy], without venturing into the much more dangerous territory of Holocaust Revisionism.
Why did Johnson write about the “Holocaust” at all then? The only answer he gives is this:
I simply wish to argue that Holocaust revisionism is not a necessary component of our intellectual project. We don’t need it. Which is not the same thing as saying that it is a hindrance, or that it cannot help under any circumstances, although I will argue that it is often a distraction.
This is exactly the reason Mark Weber gave for writing “How Relevant is Holocaust Revisionism?”
Setting straight the historical record about the wartime fate of Europe’s Jews is a worthy endeavor. But there should be no illusions about its social-political relevance. In the real world struggle against Jewish-Zionist power, Holocaust revisionism has proved to be as much a hindrance as a help.
But Johnson admits:
I have never been all that interested in Holocaust revisionism, simply because my main concern is with the genocide being committed against our own people today, not the real or imagined crimes committed by our people in the past. And the Holocaust strikes me as having little to do with the deep causes of our racial plight and even less to do with the solutions. [Compare this with Weber’s “there should be no illusions about its social-political relevance”]
Johnson wrote in a comment to Hadding Scott:
(1) Jews were singled out for especially harsh treatment by the Germans, and (2) countless innocent Jews lost their lives because of that policy. In the end, that is all one need claim to say that the Jews suffered their greatest tragedy at the hands of the Third Reich during World War II.
Again, this comes straight from Mark Weber:
Jews in Europe were, in fact, singled out during the war years for especially severe treatment.
And …
No informed person disputes that Europe’s Jews did, in fact, suffer a great catastrophe during the Second World War. Millions were forced from their homes and deported to brutal internment in crowded ghettos and camps. Jewish communities across Central and Eastern Europe, large and small, were wiped out. Millions lost their lives. When the war ended in 1945, most of the Jews of Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and others countries were gone.
Gone where, he is not interested in looking into. We will discover that the job is “too difficult” for this ex-revisionist.
Greg Johnson wrote in a comment to me on the article:
Back in 2001, a very well-informed gentleman sat me down to explain Holocaust revisionism. The first words out of his mouth were, “No serious revisionist denies that a very large number of innocent Jews died as a result of the Third Reich’s policy of deporting Jews to concentration camps.” I said, “Stop right there. That’s all I need to hear.”
This “well-informed gentleman” has to be Mark Weber. Why didn’t Johnson identify Weber as his source of information? You will have to know Greg Johnson to know the answer to that, but it seems to me that Johnson simply doesn’t want people to know his methods of operation – that almost everything he does is copied from someone else; that he is not the “thinker” he has convinced so many people he is.
And indeed, Mark Weber also copies almost everything he does from someone else, and has really no original ideas. As I said, Weber’s whole current world view comes from David Irving, whereas it used to come from the revisionists Arthur Butz, Robert Faurisson, etc.
Johnson mentions Weber once in his article and links to his “Relevant” essay, when he says:
First, as Mark Weber has pointed out, the cultural and political power of the Holocaust is not the foundation of Jewish power, it is an expression of pre-existing Jewish power. Before World War II, Jews already had an enormous amount of power in the United States (see here, p. 9ff): enough power to deliver the United States into two World Wars, for instance. Jewish power was based on over-representation in banking, business, law, politics, academia, and the news and entertainment media.
To be factual, revisionists don’t say the “Holocaust” is the foundation of Jewish power. This is a straw man set up by Weber to give him an argument for ditching revisionism at the IHR. But because the ‘Holo-hoax’ is not the foundation of Jewish power, is that a reason to ignore it and let it grow into even more massive proportions? It has rightly been called one of the, if not the, main pillars of the “blank check” Jews enjoy in the world since 1945. Johnson, basing it on Weber, here identifies over-representation in banking and other industries as what Jewish power rests on. Well then, what is the IHR or Counter Currents doing about Jewish over-representation in banking, business, law, politics, academia, and the news and entertainment media? Weber’s favorite topics are the Israel-Palestine conflict and Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich! When does the IHR talk about the Federal Reserve? Or go after real Jewish power?
The IHR and Mark Weber don’t address these “bases of Jewish Power,” except rarely, because they are too difficult. Weber gets by with just reading and passing around news stories about Israel and Adolf Hitler without any mental stress or hard work. Please take note of how many times Weber speaks, in a 2009 radio interview on VoR, about not doing certain things anymore because they are too difficult. Here are two instances:
But it’s difficult to get people to accept because it’s true that National-Socialists were especially harsh in their treatment of Jews. Jews were rounded up, transported across Europe, put in ghettos and concentration camps – many Jews died in these camps. MILLIONS of JEWS lost their lives.
It’s undeniable that Europe’s Jews suffered a catastrophe, no doubt about it. The extent is still questioned.It’s therefore difficult to persuade most people to accept that the Holocaust is a lie or a hoax.
These are exactly the words Greg Johnson used in the latter part of his comment to me, continued from above:
I didn’t need to hear any more [from the “well-informed gentleman" – Mark Weber] because he opened by admitting all the Jews need to establish that a great tragedy befell their people in the Second World War.
[…]
Even if Revisionists refuted every single one of these [fake] stories, the Holocaust still stands because of that great big pile of dead Jews, which is never going to be conjured away — particularly by the morally obtuse quibbling about definitions offered by Hadding Scott.
Mark Weber also said on the 2009 radio program linked to above:
Disputing numbers and methods of how people died comes across to most people as quibbling, when for most people the catastrophe was undeniably great enough that it’s hard to dispute that.
Greg Johnson continued in 2012:
So I just don’t waste my precious time on Holocaust revisionism, because no accretion of facts, details, etc. is going to alter the facts that the Germans singled Jews out for especially harsh treatment, and a great number of people died for no other reason than the fact they were Jews. That should be Holocaust enough for anyone.
For my own part, I don’t think any quibbling, morally obtuse or otherwise, can alter the fact that Greg Johnson and Mark Weber are working together to sideline Holocaust Revisionism because they don’t want to personally associate with it but they do want to appear as being at the forefront – in the vanguard – of the fight for both historical accuracy and the moral high ground. This makes me want to work harder than ever for the victory of Holocaust Revisionism (meaning by that the widespread acceptance that it is a hoax1 perpetrated by the still-enemies of true nationalism), and I must add that neither Greg Johnson nor Mark Weber are very knowledgeable about the subject.
They are good at thinking about money however. It has come to my attention that Johnson is seeking 501c3 status [non-taxable, non-profit] for his Counter-Currents Publishing-North American New Right, just as the IHR has always had. The major benefit of this is that one can tell prospective donors (specifically large ones) that their donation is tax-deductible.
I will probably write more about this topic in the future, with the goal of helping you, the reader, make informed decisions about where you want your contributed money to go. As we say on the radio, “Thanks for listening.”
1. The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Arthur Butz, 1976. Theses and Dissertation Press edition, 2003.
There is an important dispute. I wish there were a way to deal with the arguments without making it personal. I don’t care about the personal stuff myself and have no intention of wading into that part of this disagreement.
In looking to the arguments, my sentiment is that Greg Johnson is right that revisionism isn’t necessary to WNism in the sense that it needs to be brought to the front-and-center of our discourse for WNist to obtain power. There is a real-world example that seems to back up this position. In Greece, the NS-like Golden Party didn’t make revisionism part of their message to my knowledge, and Golden Dawn won power.
Maybe I have a false impression, but many revisionists seem to regard revisionism as so important they comes across to me like they want WNists to lead with revisionism. They come across like they want WNists to lead with revisionism in their appeals to persuade people rather than lead with messages people are likely to perceive as more relevant to their lives and concerns. If this isn’t true, revisionists might benefit from fine-tuning their message.
I can see where many people might consider revisionism necessary in the sense that the enemy will always make it necessary whether anyone likes it or not.
The question is what to do about it?
The GD leader Nikos Michaloliakos does not concede the essential truth of the narrative, but neither does he come right out and say “there was no holocaust.” Michaloliakos does not say this. He speaks in terms of 1) exaggerations, and 2) the fact that Jews were not the only group who suffered war crimes (an seeming implicit acknowledgment there were crimes against them), and 3) the Allies also committed war crimes, and 4) there were no gas chambers. While all of that adds up to a major challenge to the official narrative, again, I didn’t see where he used words like “the holocaust did not happen.” So if that’s the standard revisionists are demanding, absolute blanket denial in unequivocal terms, it does not appear even the NS-like, fascist GD meets that standard.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXy7f17GXtQ
I got a news flash for Mark Weber. The Israeli/Palestine conflict bores me to tears. This is one the main reasons I stopped listening to his podcasts. I’m sick of so-called “White nationalists” and their crocodile tears for the Palestinians. Crocodile tears for Palestine is a leftist cause (like crocodile tears for Africa)
These so-called “White Nationalists” have calculated that by crying crocodile tears for the Palestinians and screaming about Human rights violations that that will get yuppie urban leftists to support them with lots of cash. I think the leftist yuppies like Barack Obama better than they do Mark Weber so good luck to him.
I’d much rather cry real tears for the Germans and our White brethern who have been disabled by these horrible lies of the Holohoax for almost a century now.
Lew, it isn’t about whether revisionism should be brought front and center of all other issues. Look, Greg Johnson totally concedes period that the Germans committed Genocide. Johnson says that it is time we concede the “horrible atrocities” committed by Germans and “move on” which is laughable.
Listen to this if you haven’t already. Rodney Martin says it a lot better than I can.
http://www.wvfoundations.org/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/714.mp3
Lew – Thanks for writing your comment and I agree that this is an important dispute. I take it you are the Lew who posted quite a few comments to Greg Johnson’s original article at The Occidental Observer.
You say you don’t want to get into the personal stuff, but I have to point out that my blog is more about why Greg Johnson wrote about Holocaust Revisionism and where he got his information about it, than about how well it fits into White Nationalism. The “personal” cannot be ignored in the big picture — as character cannot be ignored.
But based on what you’ve brought up in your comment, I have to say you are wrong about this:
The truth is most “real” revisionists don’t care about White Nationalism and don’t care what it does. It is WN’s who care about it. Did you notice any “real” revisionists (those who do research and write books) posting any comments to Johnson’s article? It is White Nationalists who are also revisionists (like myself and quite a few others) who care about how WN handles holocaust revisionism. We want it to be handled honestly, accurately and respectfully.
You are also wrong when you say:
Michaloliakos says the Holocaust is a hoax. In the video you recommended he was talking to the press and trying to get around their characterizations of him. But he still said it.
However, this Greek is a poor comparison for you to use for Johnson, who not only rejects National-Socialism but even rejects political parties.
Lew, I invite you to come on my radio program (Saturday Afternoon with Carolyn Yeager) tomorrow to further discuss this important dispute. You can recommend another person of your persuasion to come on with you if you like. You have to use Skype. Let me know with a reply right here as my email account is a bit mixed up right now. I have your email address and I can then contact you further.
Golden Dawn leader Michaloliakos says that nothing extraordinary, nothing deserving special reverence, happened to Jews in World War II. If he said the same thing in English it would be the same as saying that there was no Holocaust.
Carolyn: I have nothing to add beyond the point I made up top.
This is really giving too much credit for consistency.
Lew – In that case, I will add to my reply to your comment that “Greg Johnson is right that revisionism isn’t necessary to WNism in the sense that it needs to be brought to the front-and-center of our discourse for WNist to obtain power.”
No one ever said it was. That’s why it’s sort of peculiar that Johnson wrote a long essay about it, simply copying what Mark Weber said in 2009. For myself, I had no problem with what Greg Johnson was writing about WN (excluding what I discovered he had written about homosexuality) until this essay appeared. It is a definite provocation, and I have yet to discover an answer from him as to the purpose of it. I hoped you could shed some light on that.
I would like someone to explain what good was accomplished by that article. It seems pointless to me, except for strangely expressing belief in the ‘Holocaust.’ Reinforcing Weber’s view, from Irving, that “millions of innocent Jews died at the hands of the Nazis.” So was this simply a way to distance Greg Johnson and his Counter-Currents publishing from accusations of “holocaust denial” from the ADL as he moves into his 501c3 future? A reasonable question that should receive an answer from Mr. Johnson.
Fresh from his shenanigans on TOO four days ago, Lew registered on http://www.vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t=144074&page=9 where he stated a more emphatic form of the same strawman argument that he now makes here.
Linder immediately slapped him down.
Lew backed away from that position when Linder attacked him, but he still espouses a version of it.
“Irving realized he would not sell any more books about the Nazi hierarchy unless he ties this hierarchy to the Jewish-approved WWII narrative,”
I’m not sure this is an exhaustive explanation. Stolfi’s “Hitler” book, not really a “history” book per se but a commentary on what he alleges is history for the sake of the for the reader vicarious psychodrama contained therein, is a profound meditation on the aesthetic appeal the Aryan Superman, who heroically sacrifices his decency in exterminating the Jews for the good of the Volk, may have for the outwardly tame bourgeois reader. It is the same taboo thrill-seeking that Irving implicitly attempts to cater to; to experience standing above Good and Evil, to treat Morality itself as one’s obedient slave, this is a prime reason why people so much enjoy movies such as The Godfather and why James Thurber wrote his satirical short story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
“It is a definite provocation, and I have yet to discover an answer from him as to the purpose of it.”
To refrain from explicitly denouncing the Holocaust myth as untrue is an accomodation with the zeitgeist – a zeitgeist which could not be sustained but for the tender-minded quality of most individuals. For most people, to tear away from them a set-piece of their moral cosmology is, yes, “a definite provocation”. And even were the Holo-myth decisively refuted in the minds of all and sundry, the essential “moral” of the story would remain forever pristine in the hearts of most: it can never by anything but grotesque to destroy a man for his ethnicity without regard for his individual culpability in committing immoral acts. For most Aryans (I mean racially pure Northern Europeans), death, even racial death, must precede dishonor.
Also, avoiding directly challenging the veracity of the traditional Holocaust narrative, as one tries to edge racialism ever closer to the mainstream (those that cling to the mainstream are a tender-minded sort, recall), is not ipso facto evidence that proponents of this approach would see truth’s eternal flame slapped from the hands of all who wish to carry it. Truth telling not packaged for internalization by its intended hearers is, after all, only an act of self-righteous self-indulgence on the part of truth tellers. There are those, indeed many, who are simply not prepared to hear the whole truth and nothing but. However, when they are ready, it is important that skilled proponents of the unvarnished truth come to their aid.
Analysis in the service enlightenment, it seems, can only occur at multiple levels of sophistication.
Carolyn
August 3, 2012 at 11:13 pm
I would like someone to explain what good was accomplished by that article. It seems pointless to me, except for strangely expressing belief in the ‘Holocaust.’ Reinforcing Weber’s view, from Irving, that “millions of innocent Jews died at the hands of the Nazis.” So was this simply a way to distance Greg Johnson and his Counter-Currents publishing from accusations of “holocaust denial” from the ADL as he moves into his 501c3 future? A reasonable question that should receive an answer from Mr. Johnson.
——————-
The good accomplished is the self exposure of his very unhelpful beliefs.
His de-facto acceptance of the ‘Holocaust’ combined with his self proclaimed ignorance on the topic tells me that his agenda is not good.
His long windiness consists of self contradictory opinions all over the map. A lot of slippery rhetoric indeed.
Although WN and HRevisionism are in one sense separate issues they are in reality intimately connected via jewish propaganda that brainwashes Whites to associate the two. The conventional story is that to be a WN is to condone and support genocide because Nazis were WNs and they in turn were responsible for the ‘Holocaust’.
So, Johnson’s suggestion to sideline HRevisonism is a suggestion to sideline WN.
It’s hard enough to get people to take a firm stand for the truth without some person like Greg Johnson coming along and saying that it really shouldn’t be done anyway. In effect it’s a kind of demoralization propaganda.
Holohoax Survivors who Tell the Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm8UmMuRSSw&bpctr=1344119560
——————-
Almost All Survivors Now Get Reparations
Reparations for 80,000 more Holocaust victims from former Soviet bloc
After six decades of negotiations with Germany, the Claims Conference (full title: The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany) has reached a $300 million deal that will cover what may be the last group of Holocaust survivors who have yet to receive any compensation for their wartime suffering: 80,000 Jews who fled east into what became the Soviet bloc countries and spent their lives there. “With the additional 80,000 people, virtually every single survivor in the world will have gotten something,” said Stuart Eizenstat, a former Secretary of State for Holocaust-Era Issues who is the Conference’s chief negotiator.
http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/105973/almost-all-survivors-now-get-reparations
Johnson may have gotten everything that he knows about revisionism from Mark Weber, but he seems to have derived a good bit of his attitude from French “New Right” anti-revisionist Guillaume Faye.
Guillaume Faye and Greg Johnson are both opposed to narrowing down what the word Holocaust (or Shoah as they say in Europe) is supposed to mean so that it can be asked rationally whether this essence of the Holocaust Myth is true or false:
Faye:
Johnson:
Faye and Johnson agree that all that fancy logical thinking isn’t worth a hoot.
Faye:
Johnson:
You may recognize the part of Johnson’s argument that some (Linder &co.) wish to blame on Jared Taylor in Faye’s essay “Ethnomasochism”:
Greggy published Michael O’Meara’s review of Faye’s anti-revisionist book in August of last year. From O’Meara’s review, we see the clear origin of Greggy’s genius idea of calling Hitler “Old Right” and himself “New Right,” and pretending that the past can be simply disowned:
It is beyond doubt that Johnson derived inspiration from this erstwhile performer in pornographic films.
Like Mark Weber, Johnson gets “inspiration” from a wide number of sources. Faye is a terrible Philo-Semite. Something I’ve been thinking about but didn’t say today is that Johnson’s attitude toward “our ancestors” is to throw them under the bus, just like he’s willing to do with our kinsmen, the Germans. I mean, he says “We are not responsible for whatever crimes our ancestors committed; we can just move on and leave that behind.” He would leave ‘our ancestors’ behind as guilty criminals while he goes forth into a guilt-free future! I think we have to defend our ancestors, especially if we think they weren’t guilty but are being libeled. Our ancestors, ourselves.
The Holocaust (or “Shoah”) is per definition the GENOCIDE of Jews by the Nazis during WWII. If there was neither intent nor practice of such a genocide, THEN THERE WAS NO HOLOCAUST. Period. The deportation and internment of Jews was no genocide, even if some (or many) Jews thus interned died of hunger or typhus at the end of the war due to Allied bombing. Anne Frank died of typhus in a concentration camp. She, like many of her co-ethnics who died for similar reasons, was no victim of a Holocaust. Neither are Jews who survived WWII “Holocaust survivors”. At most they could claim reparations for their internment, but not for a mythical “Holocaust”. Internment and accidental death in concentration camps should not be “Holocaust enough” as Greg Johnson would have it. That is to concede to a malicious propaganda lie ( which is now even used to promote a REAL genocide of white people). Stick to the right definition and lies and confusion disappear.