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I’m going to let your uncalled-for use of the slur/exonym “white supremacist” roll off my back, but I do want to take extreme issue with your accusation that I went out of my way to “find that one Jew that agrees” with me. First off, I became familiar with David Cole’s work as a social/political commentator - specifically, his writing for Taki’s - long before I knew anything about his work as a revisionist. He’s far more well-known, by most on the online Right, for his more recent work. He hasn’t done any important new work on the topic of revisionism in nearly thirty years, and in the intervening years he made a name for himself first as a respected Hollywood screenwriter/producer and then as one of the most important figures behind Friends Of Abe, a secret society of sorts for Hollywood conservatives. He’s not some fringe figure or “token Jew” that I nut-picked as a fig leaf.
I think that Cole’s writing is actually extremely clarifying about the topic. Although he hasn’t done any new revisionist work in decades, he does still comment on the state of revisionism/denial as a phenomenon from time to time. Two examples would be this article from 2018, which is itself a re-evaluation of one of his earlier articles. His thesis, which I find very persuasive, is that there is a symbiotic relationship between so-called “denialists” (a field which has degenerated significantly due to the more intelligent and level-headed figures either aging out, dying, or realizing that their battle for public sympathy had been irrecoverably lost and bailing out) and the “anti-denial” lobby who build public careers as snarky “owned by facts and logic” debunkers.
When the average rational person with no strong opinions about the Holocaust over and above the standard narrative we’ve all grown up with wades into this dispute, they find it occupied on both sides by screaming lunatics and they wisely decide, as I have, that it’s probably not worth even trying to sift through the ocean of arguments. The only non-Jews who stick around to fight in that war at this point are people who love the fight. (Jews’ participation in the fight is a matter of direct ethnic self-defense and self-interest, which is healthy and normal and which I do not begrudge them, provided that they don’t stoop to transparently cynical concern-trolling like a couple of the comments below hand-wringing about this sub becoming too friendly to dissenting views on this, and only this, specific issue.)
I didn't say you personally went out of your way to find him. My point is that there are black people who like the Confederacy, Jews who sympathize with the Nazis, probably there are some Chinese historians who side with Japanese nationalists in disputing the Rape of Nanking. Yes, I do think those figures are little more than convenient fig leafs that the pro-denial side likes to trot out as a defense against accusations of ideological bias.
Also, what's your beef with "white supremacist"? Do you just find it less palatable than "white nationalist"? This sounds like the TERFs who claim TERF is a slur even when it's literally accurate (as opposed to being used haphazardly to describe anyone on the other side of a debate).
…Because I don’t think white people are “supreme”, nor do I have any desire for white people to be “supreme” over other people, to rule them, to dominate them, etc.? Like, the term you’re using has a specific meaning, which does apply to certain living people as well as to a great number of historical people. The logic of something like colonial empire is, explicitly, “white supremacist”. However, I’m not an advocate for empire - racial nor otherwise - but rather for peaceful, non-coercive racial separation. It’s the opposite of “white supremacy”, or at worst totally orthogonal to “white supremacy”.
This is less like a TERF objecting to being called “trans-exclusionary” and more like a TERF objecting to being called “misogynist”. (Because, see, trans women are women, and you hate trans women, therefore you hate women.”) It’s a blatant abuse of terms. Weaponized linguistic legerdemain.
Rudyard Kipling was a white supremacist. My beliefs are not like his beliefs, when it comes to the very centrally important questions of whether or not different racial groups should live together under the same political/geographic unit, and, conditional on one’s answer to that first question, the related question of how to best distribute relative power among those different groups. Since my answer to the first question is “no”, I don’t have to commit to any answer to the second question, let alone the “supremacist” answer that whites should hold the undisputed whip hand.
I am not convinced your distinction is meaningful. White supremacists believe white people are superior to non-white people, at least in most meaningful ways (i.e., anything to do with intellect and behavior; some will waffle about Asian IQ scores). I know not all of them literally want a white empire ruling the untermenschen. If you don't like the label, fair enough, but I wasn't directing it at you personally as a slur.
How is this responsive to anything in this post? Mentioning white supremacists (not even anti-Semites) in that response was uncalled for, suggested Hoffmeister specifically being one, and was irrelevant to your points in favor of ignoring Cole and other revisionists/denialists; you could just concede that instead of getting under his skin.
In principle, a white nationalist could well be – at least with regards to some groups – a white inferiorist, so to speak, i.e. employ the generic logic of protectionism against stronger competition*, only appealing to racial solidarity instead of something class-based. And this isn't mere logical possibility – despite your disdainful «waffle about» that implies some duplicity or triviality, this was a major justification for laws against Chinese immigration in e.g. Australia and the US. 1886 act was a unique and consequential precedent, an expression of popular consensus of majority-white working class in a society we can safely label white nationalist today, not some trivia about obscure HBD dudes with 50 followers who say that acktchually Asians have higher IQs so we should be allowed to say Blacks have lower ones (which is how I suspect you view those arguments). A white supremacist, meanwhile, can have any opinion on the worth of coexisting with non-white people, from a disgust-based call for segregation to a preference for casteist hierarchy.
Those are all clear distinctions, and it does seem uncontroversial that modern white nationalists are – almost by definition – against coexistence with non-whites within the same polity, regardless of their views on relative merits of races, particularly on market-relevant parameters and not some fundamentally moral, aesthetic or philosophical ones.
*that said, I must admit that these protectionists tended to be, in their own words, supremacists. I dislike this sort of hypocrisy: if you have to shelter your people from competition, have the integrity to admit that your people are weaker, at least in some relevant sense. But actions speak loud enough.
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