This article is a follow-up to Peace and Paranoia: Non-Interventionism's Conspiratorial Roots and Intellectual Ignorance: Non-Interventionists and the Left's Genocide Denial Problem
By now, it should be clear to anyone who follows me that I'm not a big fan of non-interventionism. I've devoted several articles to criticizing and debunking non-interventionists and their talking points.
Two of my articles have been devoted to examining the conspiratorial and denialist roots of non-interventionism, but while it might seem repetitive, I'd like to take a look at the connection between conspiracy theories and non-interventionism one more time. This time, I'd like to specifically examine the connection between Holocaust deniers and non-interventionists.
As I mentioned in a previous article, I categorize genocide deniers into two groups: the ideological and the lazy. The ideological group denies the occurrence of a genocide because they support the ideology of the genocidaires. This form of denialism can be seen in neo-Nazi groups like the Atomwaffen Division, which popularized the catchphrase "The Holocaust didn't happen but it should have".
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| A member of the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division promotes Holocaust denial. This is an example of an "ideological" denier - a person who denies the Holocaust in order to rehabilitate the public image of Nazism. |
The lazy group, on the other hand, denies the occurrence of a genocide because they want an excuse to remain neutral and not get involved. This can be seen in the works of people like Noam Chomsky or Edward Herman, who have repeatedly downplayed or denied the Cambodian, Rwandan, and Bosnian genocides.
Herman and Chomsky aren't ideological deniers, because they don't share the ideological beliefs of the genocidaires. Their sole reason for denial is because they want an excuse to not get involved in foreign affairs that clearly warrant an international response.
Holocaust denial in particular provides a clear example of the dichotomy between the lazy and ideological deniers. And it also shows the costs of denial and ignorance, and serves as a warning about why we should challenge the fervently anti-war and non-interventionist movement which traffics in such toxic, ignorant rhetoric.
The Nazis: The Original Deniers
Denial of the Holocaust began with the original Nazis, who purposely used euphemistic, coded language when referring to their genocide against the Jewish people. SS officers and high-ranking Nazi officials referred to their genocidal plan as the Endlösung der Judenfrage, or the "Final Solution to the Jewish Problem".
The Nazi death squads which massacred millions of Jews in occupied territories were officially known as the Einsatzgruppen, or "single-task groups". Killings were officially referred to as Abbeförderung, or "removal", and the infamous cattle-cars which shipped millions of Jews to death camps were referred to as Umsiedlersonderzug, or "special resettlement trains".
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| One of the most iconic and disturbing photographs of the Holocaust depicts an SS officer from the Einsatzgruppen (lit. "single-task groups") preparing to shoot a Jewish man over a mass grave in Vinnitsa, Ukraine. The Nazi genocide against Europe's Jews killed over 6,000,000 people, and remains one of the darkest periods in recorded human history. |
This carefully-crafted language was intended to hide from the rest of the world the evidence of the atrocities and crimes against humanity the Nazi regime was perpetrating against innocent people. And the language, in some ways, did its job well. To this day, no single document has been found explicitly ordering the mass slaughter of European Jews. The Nazis were very careful to leave such evidence of their atrocities scattered and/or concealed. Unlike the genocides seen in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Cambodia, the Holocaust was ordered and perpetrated in secret, and disguised through an elaborate cover-up process.
After World War II, when the surviving Nazi leadership went on trial for crimes against humanity, many top Nazis insisted that the evidence against them was either forged or that they had no knowledge of the killings. Because of the coded doublespeak the Nazi regime used, ascertaining the extent each defendant played in the Holocaust was, for the prosecution, a monumentally difficult task.
Ultimately, through a series of trials that would collectively last almost thirty years, thousands of Nazis were convicted of participating in the Holocaust. More than 300 were executed, and hundreds of others were sent to prison.
But even before the convictions were through, the Nazi's denialist language had already swayed people to their side, and many of these people were citizens of the very countries Adolf Hitler had intended to destroy.
Harry Elmer Barnes: The Father of "Revisionism"
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| Harry Elmer Barnes |
Born in Auburn, New York, in 1888, Harry Elmer Barnes had been a staunch interventionist when he entered the political forefront during World War I, producing anti-German propaganda that was so inflammatory that it was repeatedly rejected by the National Board for Historical Service.
However, after the war, Barnes underwent a transformation. Now, he became extremely anti-war and non-interventionist, and spent the next several years writing literature which sought to absolve Germany of any responsibility for World War I.
During the 1920s, Barnes penned articles in numerous magazine and newspapers which blamed the Allies for starting the war, and painted Germany as a victim of "foreign aggression". His writings caught the attention of the German government, which funded Barnes' publishing house through numerous political shell groups, such as the "Center for the Study of the Causes of War" - a pseudo-historical organization funded by right-wing German politicians that promoted rabid non-interventionism and German apologism.
During the 1930s, as Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany, Barnes increased the ferocity of his non-interventionist rhetoric, and was quick to condemn any criticism of the Nazi regime as hypocritical. When Barnes himself was condemned for his Nazi apologia, Barnes smeared his opponents' criticisms as a "plot [by] the Jews" to "intimidate any American historians who propose to tell the truth about the causes of the war".
Barnes was so rabidly anti-war, in fact, that after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, he accused President Franklin Roosevelt of having foreknowledge of the attack and deliberately allowing it to happen so that America could have an excuse to enter the war "through the back door". Such rhetoric was parroted by John T. Flynn, the founder of the anti-war and non-interventionist America First Committee. Flynn wrote in 1944 that Roosevelt had deliberately "provoked" Japan into attacking America by imposing unfair oil embargoes, and that Roosevelt had been itching to draw the US into a "foreign war" since early 1941.
After the end of World War II, the entire world saw firsthand the horrors that the Nazi regime had perpetrated on the Jewish people. The photographs and videos of the mass graves, countless corpses, and skeletal, starved survivors of concentration camps horrified everyone. A general consensus emerged that the entire world had an imperative moral obligation to prevent such terrible atrocities from ever happening again. Non-interventionism and isolationism quickly fell out of favor with the American public, and more people began to support the idea of an internationalist and humanitarian foreign policy.
To isolationists and non-interventionists like Harry Elmer Barnes, however, this posed a problem. How could they defend their isolationist ideas in the face of such repulsive horrors? But Barnes and his fellow isolationists quickly found a solution, and they took it straight from the Nazi playbook: Denial.
Following the war, Barnes' writing became even more toxic. He produced pamphlets and books which stridently defended Adolf Hitler's policies, claiming that Hitler had tried to avoid war in 1939 but had his hand forced by British "warmongers". The British, Barnes said, were "almost solely responsible" for the outbreak of World War II and had "forced" Hitler into war through "acts of economic strangulation".
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| Harry Elmer Barnes was one of the first "mainstream" Holocaust deniers, and often cloaked his denial in the rhetoric of non-interventionism and isolationism. |
Barnes also turned his vile rhetoric against Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt's foreign policy, he wrote, was "the greatest public crime in human history". Roosevelt had "lied the United States into war", Barnes said, with backing from "certain pressure groups", and his successor, Harry S. Truman, was engaged in a massive "conspiracy" to censor anti-war historians like himself, appointing "court historians" to silence critics of "foreign intervention".
Although Barnes had not originally outright denied the Holocaust, over time he became more and more "skeptical" of the occurrence of the genocide, describing the charges against the Nazi regime as "unproven assumptions" and "only a theory". In the end, however, Barnes soon began to not just deny the Holocaust, but accuse the Allies of being the true war criminals rather than the Nazis.
Barnes dismissed the gas chambers as a "postwar invention" and accused the Allies of "exaggerating" the scale of German atrocities - if they even occurred at all. In a 1964 article about "Zionist frauds", Barnes outright denied the Holocaust, describing Holocaust survivors as "swindlers of the crematoria" who "derive billions of marks from nonexistent, mythical, and imaginary cadavers, whose numbers have been reckoned in an unusually distorted and dishonest manner".
Barnes also engaged in obfuscation and false equivalencies typical of anti-war isolationists and apologists, writing "Even assuming that all of the charges [against the Nazis] are true, the Allies did not come off much, if any, better", and that the hardships suffered by ethnic Germans expelled from Poland and Czechoslovakia after the war were "obviously far more hideous and prolonged than those of the Jews said to have been exterminated in great numbers by the Nazis."
Barnes' blatant denial of Nazi war crimes and apologia for Hitler appalled many of his fellow historians. He was blacklisted from multiple universities, and lost nearly all of his credibility on the academic stage. Although Barnes died in relative obscurity in 1968, his work spawned the growth of a hideous industry devoted to Nazi apologism and Holocaust denial, and many major denialist organizations and individuals still sell and propagate Barnes' works to this day.
One of these men was Willis Carto - who would later become one of the most notorious anti-Semites in US history.
Willis Carto and the Institute for Historical Review: The Alliance Between the Ideological and the Lazy
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| Willis Caro |
Yockey's writings transformed Carto from a war hero into a rabid antisemitic conspiracy theorist. Carto became involved in extreme right-wing politics. He supported ardent segregationist George Wallace's bid for the presidency in 1968, and founded a Youth for Wallace chapter in his hometown.
After Wallace lost his bid for the presidency, Carto's "Youth for Wallace" group became the "National Youth Alliance", and recruited among its members the notorious white supremacist William Luther Pierce. Pierce later took control of the group from Carto, and transformed the group into the infamous National Alliance, which would later become the most influential neo-Nazi group in the United States.
After losing control of the NYA, Carto turned away from blatant neo-Nazism and instead focused on painting a veneer of academia over his hatred. In 1978, he founded the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a pseudo-historical "think tank" which engaged in Holocaust denial while cloaking its denialism in the sober language of scholarship. The IHR painted itself as a group of "historical revisionists" made up of academic intellectuals who "courageously" challenged "mainstream" narratives of history.
The IHR's first few years were rocky. In 1979, after offering a $50,000 reward for proof that Jews were murdered in gas chambers at Auschwitz, a Holocaust survivor named Mel Mermelstein - who lost his entire family in the death camp - provided evidence of his experiences, and when the IHR refused to pay the reward, he sued for defamation and breach of contract.
The IHR ultimately settled the case before it went to trial, agreeing to apologize to Mermelstein and pay him the $50,000 reward plus another $40,000 for infliction of emotional distress, and, for the first time in US history, a US court recognized the authenticity of the Holocaust.
The judgement led to infighting within the IHR, and resulted in an eventual change of leadership. In 1993, Carto lost control of the group to Mark Weber, a former member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance. Weber, like Carto, was a Holocaust denier. Weber dismissed Holocaust survivors as "mythmakers", and wrote of the genocide: "The Holocaust hoax is a religion."
Like Carto, Weber also admired Harry Elmer Barnes, and promoted Barnes' brand of conspiratorial non-interventionism and isolationism. He described the Holocaust "hoax" as being key to the creation of a "Zionist state", and lobbied against US foreign aid to Israel.
Since the early 2000s, though, while still promoting Holocaust denial, the IHR has shifted to a more broad focus on foreign policy in general. And, following the September 11th attacks and the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the IHR began to involve itself in the anti-war movement.
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| The Institute for Historical Review (IHR) is perhaps the most notorious Holocaust denial group in the United States. The IHR often promotes Holocaust denial through the lense of non-interventionism and "anti-war" activism. |
In July of 2005, the IHR organized a protest outside the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, CA. The Center - famous for involving itself in hunting down and capturing fugitive Nazi war criminals - had expressed support for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Mixing thinly-veiled antisemitism with anti-war rhetoric, the IHR protesters held signs with slogans like "WIESENTHAL CENTER PROMOTES WAR", "$TOP $WC FRAUD!", and "ZIONISM KILLS". Weber, interviewed by reporters on the scene, condemned the SWC's supposed "record of deceit and lies in support of war, Zionist oppression and Jewish supremacism".
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| Members of the Institute for Historical Review stage a "Rally for Justice and Peace" outside the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. The IHR used the protest - ostensibly as an "anti-war" and "anti-Zionist" demonstration - as a means to garner publicity for their cause. |
Visiting the IHR website today, one can see how thoroughly the group has entrenched itself into the anti-war movement. The group's slogan, "For a More Just, Sane and Peaceful World", makes this clearly evident. The group's "About" page also features non-interventionist and anti-war rhetoric.
"Americans have been misled into one costly, destructive and needless war after another", the page reads. "During the Vietnam and 1991 Gulf Wars, for example, government officials and much of the media lied to and deceived the American people to justify needless slaughter and devastation".
In addition to non-interventionist articles written by multiple notable non-interventionist authors, such as Pat Buchanan, Paul Craig Roberts, and Philip Giraldi, the IHR website also features many indigenous works chock-full of World War II revisionism with an isolationist flavor, with titles like "President Roosevelt's Secret Campaign to Incite War in Europe", "Churchill and U.S. Entry Into World War II", and "What the World Rejected: Hitler's Peace Offers, 1933-1939".
Many articles are laden with conspiratorial assertions, accusing the Allies of deliberately fomenting war in Europe. One such article, written by Weber and prominently featured on the IHR's website, is entitled "Collusion: Franklin Roosevelt, British Intelligence, and the Secret Campaign to Push the US Into War".
"Secretive and unlawful collusion by an American leader with a foreign power that subverts the US political process is nothing new", Weber wrote. The article goes on to accuse Franklin Roosevelt of being a subversive warmonger who "did everything he could to get America into the global conflict without actually declaring war."
The IHR has also gone beyond merely denying the Holocaust to questioning the occurrence of other war crimes across the globe. In an article criticizing the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the IHR defended late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who committed a mass genocide of Kurds in Anfal in the 1980s. The IHR referred to the charges of genocide against Saddam as "fantastic claims" with "no basis in reality", concluding (falsely) "as the world knows, these claims are not true".
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| The Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review often posts or reposts conspiratorial anti-war and non-interventionist articles on their website. Notice how many of these articles are written by Philip Giraldi (a Holocaust denier and 9/11 truther), Pat Buchanan (a paleoconservative commentator with a history of white nationalism), and Glenn Greenwald (an anti-war journalist notorious for denying war crimes committed by the Assad regime in Syria). |
The IHR has also posted and reposted countless articles critical of foreign intervention in Syria against the Assad regime, often claiming the chemical attacks against civilians by the Assad regime were "false flags" meant to draw the US into an interventionist war.
The vast majority of these articles are from conspiracy theorists, isolationists, or other Holocaust deniers such as Paul Rassinier, Austin J. App, Arthur Butz, Philip Giraldi, Pat Buchanan, and Paul Craig Roberts.
As I've covered in previous articles, Assad apologism and war-crimes denial are widespread among the non-interventionist crowd, as are conspiracy theories. But the IHR - with its history of blatant racism, antisemitism, and neo-Nazism, goes beyond simple non-interventionism. They truly represent the bridge between genocide deniers, uniting both the ideological and the lazy.
Individuals like Mark Weber - a known racist and anti-Semite - are happy to engage in Holocaust denial in order to make Nazism more palatable, and in order to do so they borrow rhetoric from lazy deniers such as Harry Elmer Barnes. And the idea that bridges the gap between the lazy deniers and the ideological deniers is non-interventionism.
And there is one more notable group that further displays this growing alliance, and it, too, is a product of the twisted legacy of Harry Elmer Barnes and Willis Carto.
The Barnes Review: Uniting Inhumanity and Ignorance
Founded in 1994 by Willis Carto after he was kicked from the IHR, The Barnes Review (named for Harry Elmer Barnes) is a publishing house that promotes white nationalism and Holocaust denial through books, a magazine, and a newspaper. Carto ran the group until his death in 2015, after which it was taken over by his executive editor, Paul Angel.
Like the Institute for Historical Review, The Barnes Review also laces its publications with anti-war and non-interventionist rhetoric, although it is more focused on racial issues than foreign policy. The publication barely attempts to conceal its Holocaust denial and Nazi apologism with scholarly language, and in 2004 the magazine referred to Hitler as a "neglected Nobel Peace Prize winner".
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| Named for isolationist Harry Elmer Barnes, The Barnes Review, like the IHR, promotes Holocaust denial and white nationalism through anti-war and non-interventionist publications. |
One doesn't need to look far to see The Barnes Review's isolationist rhetoric. A quick search through their catalogue reveals multiple books lamenting "warmongers" and "interventionist propaganda" - often with antisemitic undertones alleging a "Jewish-Zionist agenda".
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| Many of the books sold by The Barnes Review are isolationist, non-interventionist, and highly conspiratorial in nature. |
One such book, A Truthseeker's Guide to False Flags, proclaims to "expose the false-flag agenda of the Deep State", and claims that Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and the USS Maine incident were all staged by the government in order to "push a predominately pro-peace nation toward war".
"False flags are real", the book proclaims, "and have been used on many occasions to advance nations into war, change regimes or radically sway public opinion".
The TBR also promotes non-interventionism through a lense of antisemitism and Holocaust denial on its blog, which can also be found on its website. One such post - "Why the Holocaust Story was Invented" - exposes a clear, direct link between Holocaust denial and non-interventionism.
"The first reason the Holocaust was invented was for justification for the war with Germany", reads the article. "Many people wondered whether all of the death and destruction caused by the war had been necessary. The so-called Holocaust (alleged genocide of Jews) was used by the Allies to demonize Germany and prove that their war effort necessary to defeat such an evil nation".
The article goes on to claim that the Jews used the "Holocaust story" to create Israel, extort reparations from Germany, and launch a campaign of "Zionist imperialism" across the Middle East with America's backing.
This conspiracy theory is expanded upon in further posts, many of which claim that US foreign interventions are the work of a secret cabal of "Zionists" and "bankers" who seek to enrich "the elite" through "regime-change" wars.
One such post, entitled "Gold Currency and Killing Gaddafi", purports to reveal a leaked email from Hillary Clinton which supposedly exposes the "real" mission of the US intervention in Libya.
Back in 2011, during the Libyan Civil War, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was committing increasingly violent atrocities against civilians. Dissidents were rounded up and executed without trial, soldiers were given Viagra and encouraged to rape women, and the Libyan Air Force conducted bombing raids on crowds of protesters and civilian targets. In March of 2011, NATO authorized a multinational military intervention in Libya with the goal of putting an end to Gaddafi's war crimes and protecting civilians. In the end, the Gaddafi regime was ousted by the rebels, although Libya fragmented into sectarian conflict once foreign forces withdrew.
But The Barnes Review's article claims, in a wildly conspiratorial tone, that the "real" incentive behind the intervention was the "Zionist's" anger at Gaddafi's hoarding of gold and oil and refusal to trade with the West. Their source for this outlandish claim is a single email purportedly from Hillary Clinton - which is never fully quoted in the article, indicating a severe lack of context.
Nevertheless, the article completely neglects to mention Gaddafi's blatant war crimes, corruption, mass-murder, and rampant authoritarianism - as well as the grassroots revolutionary movement that rose up against him long before the West became involved in the war - and instead concludes, in a conspiracy-laden tone: "Col. Muammar Gaddafi's policies were creating a first-world, prosperous Libya without the global banking elite. This is why he was overthrown and murdered."
A different article, "MIT WMD Expert: Why Trump is Wrong about Syria 'Chemical Attack'" - repeats a common isolationist conspiracy theory that the poison gas attacks in Syria by the Assad regime were "false-flags" to justify regime-change efforts. The article, authored by Dr. Theodore Postol (who previously asserted that the 2013 sarin attack in Ghouta - widely accepted to have been the work of the Assad regime - was, in fact, "carried out by U.S.-supported rebels"), claims that the poison gas attacks in Khan Sheykhun and Douma were falsely attributed to the Syrian government's actions, when, in fact, they were most likely perpetrated by rebel forces to justify further regime-change efforts against the Assad regime.
Needless to say, there are major problems regarding the veracity of the article's main source, Dr. Theodore Postol's report. The investigative website Bellingcat produced a thoroughly-researched report which revealed numerous flaws in Postol's analysis, such as misunderstanding the mechanism of the poison gas canisters utilized by the regime.
And while Postol claimed that there were numerous "inconsistencies" in the accounts of the Khan Sheykhun attack, Bellingcat revealed that this was due to Postol reading accounts of the earlier Ghouta chemical attack and mistakenly attributing them to the Khan Sheykhun incident.
But TBR's article - in true denialist fashion - nevertheless concludes that the chemical attack on Khan Sheykhun was "based on easily refutable lies" and dismisses the entire incident as a "false-flag".
Considering The Barnes Review's penchant for dictator apologism, war-crimes denialism, and rabid non-interventionism, it honestly would have been surprising to see them come to a different conclusion.
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| This
column penned by The Barnes Review's executive editor exhibits the
typical isolationist, anti-war, and non-interventionist rhetoric common
within the Holocaust denial movement. This particular column celebrates the decision by US President Donald Trump to abruptly withdraw from Syria, a decision which abandoned hundreds of thousands of Kurdish minorities in Syria to the wrath of the Assad regime, ISIL, and the Turkish government. |
Poisoning the Well
As someone who has been a vocal critic of non-interventionism, I am often accused of being a bloodthirsty "warhawk" who is "pro-war" and relishes in death and destruction. But this couldn't be further from the truth. I am as anti-war as anyone else. But I understand the difference between a meaningful peace and a false peace. I understand that war, though terrible, is a necessary evil when injustice and inhumanity arises.
On the other hand, the isolationist and non-interventionist crowd - especially within the Holocaust denial movement - suffers from a serious lack of vision when it comes to foreign policy. They view "peace" in a way that lacks object permanence. If they can't see atrocities being committed, then they aren't really happening. If they can't see war crimes being committed, then those war crimes don't exist.
When evil arises in this world, non-interventionists see it fit to shut their eyes, plug their ears, stick their heads in the sand, and pretend that it isn't their problem. They will do this in the name of "peace" in the face of "warmongers" and "imperialists", but, at the same time, they will make nonstop apologetics for the true warmongers, the true imperialists, and the true "pro-war" demagogues.
And Holocaust denial really represents the bridge between the inhuman and the ignorant. Why would neo-Nazis like Mark Weber and Willis Carto promote isolationism? Because they want to resurrect the evil, inhuman ideology of Nazism, and they want to keep the world blind while doing so. Why would neo-Nazis deny the occurrence of the Holocaust? Because they want to make the ideology of Nazism more palatable to the public. They want to make their ideas of hatred and intolerance more tolerable in modern society, and they want to rehabilitate the image of Adolf Hitler - an image that has been rightly tarnished by genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
To keep the world blind as evil is resurrected, neo-Nazis will hijack populist anti-war and non-interventionist talking points, and poison the minds of impressionable people. They will spread conspiracy theories about "warmongers" and "Zionist elites" to pacify the public, and they will claim that, when genocide and inhumanity does strike, it is simply the work of "pro-war" politicians seeking to mislead the public into supporting another "needless war".
Of course, not all non-interventionists believe in Holocaust denial or antisemitism. Many truly believe they are working towards a meaningful goal of peace and nonviolence. But intentions are only important up to a point.
The fact is, if you believe that a dictator - who massacres his people, deliberately slaughters civilians, and butchers ethnic minorities - doesn't deserve to be removed from power, you are defending dictators. If you claim that Assad didn't commit chemical attacks against his people, you are defending Assad. You are parroting his propaganda. You are playing into his playbook.
In the end, it really doesn't matter what your intentions are. The end result is still the same. If you believe that a genocidal, murderous dictator - be it Adolf Hitler, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, or Bashar al-Assad - should still remain in power - you are defending Hitler, Gaddafi, Saddam, and Assad. You will be playing right into the hands of these dictators, and you will be promoting the acceptance of totalitarianism, inhumanity, and genocide. Issues like these are ones where we as humans cannot afford to be neutral. We can't afford to be ignorant. In the face of evil, we can't afford to be inactive.
In fact, it was Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel - who endured the horrors of Auschwitz Concentration Camp - who said it best:
"Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the oppressed. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.
Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe."
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