CODOH, against Unz and IHR

I usually don't bother with the "Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust"; but late last June, Jorge Besada has offered what could be CODOH's new mission statement: why we should all be Holocaust deniers. More like Base-ado amirite?

I am pretty sure this Besada character is the Mises.org guy. This comes from the Mises / Hayek [/Rothbard] palaeo-Libertarian side. Think, Reason as of the 1970s, before lol-weed-lmao.

It is Besada's contention that Holocaust / Shoah revisionism should not be restricted to Jewhaters. The Holocaust-as-narrative should be assigned instead to Stalinist propaganda. It would go to Vyshinsky, the Show Trial guy, still around in the 1940s. And if we're talking about the Shoah, instead of persecutions (which interwar Poland was also doing) then we are in the 1940s and not the 1930s.

Stalin as of the 1940s was hardly Good For The Jew. If he hadn't died when he died, we would assuredly be asking after the Russian Jewish population of the 1950s. But, you know - "what if" is practically a punchline in historiography. To the extent the Soviets were pinning the destruction of European Jewry upon Nazi Germany, that was opportunistic, to browbeat the Germans and Austrians half of whose territory the Red Army had now taken. (Later they'd hand back their part of Austria, but annex much of eastern Germany into Poland and "Kaliningrad".)

Not for Besada, the smarmy sidespeak of Daniel W. Michaels and, by extension, the Institute for Historical Review. For that, Besada deserves credit. Still: in my opinion, Besada remains too kind to Ron Unz. Unz opposes the Talmud on one side - and Zionism on the other. That leaves little space for Jewry itself. So what is Unz is of Jewish descent; he wouldn't be the first Jew to allow for the uprooting of Jewish communities.

It may be that Besada feels he is sufficiently out on that limb that he cannot afford to make further enemies.

BACKDATE 7/20