Good People Don’t Question (Anything about) the Holocaust

Apologies to Jeff Sessions for the paraphrase making the title above. Sessions, of course, said that good people don’t smoke marijuana, an obviously false statement whose near-infinite sweep invites comparison with the ubiquitous demonology in which everyone who grew up after World War II in any of the major countries of the West has been immersed for decades encompassing every moment of the formative stages of our lives. The falsity of my title’s statement is utterly unknown, even as an intellectual proposition, to more than ninety-nine percent of my contemporaries, and is practically unrecognizable without the two-word label (Holocaust Denier) that constitutes the blackest, stickiest tar with which any reputation or name can be besmirched in these oh, so-politically correct times.

To an extent that the makers of Reefer Madness could only dream about, we have all our lives all inhabited a world in which not only the falsity of Holocaust Refutation (not Denial, nor Revisionism, either) is totally undoubted, but further, the evil intent or proclivities of anyone entertaining those forbidden doubts also is unquestionable: they are Hitler apologists, neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and perverts of a kind difficult even to imagine. Was/is this a conspiracy? Not quite; in fact, it hatched as it proceeded, with the kick-off occurring somewhere between clandestine reports from communists in German labor camps and the Nuremberg Tribunals and other “trials” at Dachau and dozens of other places. Something more like a snowball, or an avalanche; not altogether different from successful hysterias against defenseless groups (Germans in this case, “witches” in others, Negroes in the American South in others), but this one vastly international in scope and many decades in endurance.

No matter: today, the Western world is inhabited almost exclusively by Holocaust fanatics: people so long and so thoroughly imbued with the German-demonizing (and later increasingly Jew-sanctifying) understanding of a series of events that acquired its present name only after 1967 that anyone even admitting to the slightest doubt of any of its numerous and dubious particulars immediately becomes an outlaw, de facto if not de jure.

Sessions’s risible characterization of (the) people who smoke pot (yes, all of them) is instantly rejected by a very large proportion of Americans who have heard it. But if he had uttered a line such as the title of this piece, any rejection of it would have been vanishingly small (and very quiet for the rejecters’ own sakes).

And this holds whether Sessions or any other bigot had voiced it.