The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 7: The Holohoax I: Auschwitz

Mike Isaacson: The holes! The holes! The holes!

[Theme song]

Nazi SS UFOs Lizards wearing human clothes Hinduism’s secret codes These are nazi lies

Race and IQ are in genes Warfare keeps the nation clean Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine These are nazi lies

Hollow earth, white genocide Muslim’s rampant femicide Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde Hiter lived and no Jews died

Army, navy, and the cops Secret service, special ops They protect us, not sweatshops These are nazi lies

Mike Isaacson: Welcome back to The Nazi Lies Podcast. This episode, we’re lucky enough to have Robert Jan Van Pelt, Architectural Historian at the University of Waterloo and chief curator of the traveling Holocaust exhibit Auschwitz: Not Long Ago, Not Far Away. He’s the author of several books including Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present and The Case for Auschwitz where he specifically takes on Holocaust deniers or as he calls them negationists. Thanks for coming on the podcast Dr. Van Pelt.

Robert Jan Van Pelt: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here with you today.

Mike Isaacson: Thank you. So today, we're lucky enough to have a guest who's actually familiar with the Nazi lies he's debunking. So his book, The Case for Auschwitz, documents the testimony in the David Irving libel trial. So before we discuss who they are, why do you call them negationists?

Robert Jan Van Pelt: The term was actually coined in the mid-19th century by a Scottish philosopher, his name is Patrick Edward Dove, in a book called The Logic of the Christian Faith. And basically, he refers to negationist as a German idealist like Immanuel Kant or Wilhelm Fried Hegel, who basically said that physical reality doesn't exist, or at least it's not relevant, that everything is in the mind. And so he talks about them as people who are negating, who are denying, actually the existence of the world as we experience it every day. And so, the term has a philosophical background, but in the 19, late 1980s, early 1990s, it became to be applied by a number of philosophers both in France and also in the United States-- Thomas Nagel is one-- to people who we normally call Holocaust deniers. Now, when I got involved in the struggle against Holocaust denier, so negationist, I was intrigued by, let's call it the philosophical aspects of this whole thing. You can of course say, these are all crazy people or they're bad people, they're anti Semite, blah, blah, blah. All of these guys passed judgment on it. But I was always fascinated by what it takes to actually deny reality. And of course, today, when we're in the middle of many denials that are around; from vaccine denial to COVID denial to climate denial and so on, I think that one of the interesting aspects of Holocaust denial is that it was a trial run that occurred in the 1980s 1990s of actually what we're seeing today. Trial, almost like a laboratory experiment, of how do people deny, what does it take to deny, what actually does it take to actually establish reality in a narrative?

And so when I was asked to join the case, the defense team of Deborah Lipstadt who was being sued by David Irving, a English Holocaust denier, for libel in a British court, I basically took a year off of sabbatical to basically research this phenomenon. I very much went back also to the great what we might call epistemological questions, the questions of how do we know what we know? And going back to 17th century philosophers who talk about skepticism, can we have radical skepticism, under what conditions can we actually challenge a particular motion, when is it okay to accept something going back to legal theory? When actually do we have enough certainty to convict a man or a woman and chop his or her head off? Questions about negotiating a world in which in principle, we can always say, I don't believe this, I don't believe that. But then if we never have any certainty about anything, that we really cannot move forward, either individually or collectively. So I was interested in those questions. So in my choice of the term negationist, I in some way, try to show that larger context in which I was operating. And also, I wanted to connect back to a discourse, an argument that had been made first in the 1950s, by the Jewish German and later American philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who in 1941, ends up in New York after having fled from a German concentration camp or a French concentration camp controlled by Germans. And in a very famous book called The Origins of Totalitarianism, she basically says that one of the central characteristics of fascism, that is also national socialism, and she also puts it totalitarian communism in the statement, is that they basically attempt to acquire control over people and are successful in it for a considerable time, at least, they were in the 1920s and 30s, and 40s, by shaking the belief of people that they ...