Did War on Hitler Actually Cause the Holocaust?

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog, , , , ,

Despite turning 180o on almost all of my historical perspectives, there are some establishment positions that, even for me, are hard to give up. Some of my reversals are well known to the readers of TJL. For example, The United States government is the cause of evil not good. Abraham Lincoln was a murderer, not a hero. The South was justified in seceding from the US, and the North was the aggressor for invading the South. Iran is not going to nuke anybody. AIPAC is a detrimental organization and should be shut down. Those who claim Israel controls much of US foreign policy are correct, not anti Semitic. The US should have sent Japan a letter of apology for the oil embargo after Pearl Harbor instead of declaring war.

And so on.

But for me, there was one major establishment position that still stuck in me like a dagger and was only loosened last week. That is, declaring and winning World War II was justified if only in order to save what was left of European Jewry.

On the face of it, this makes sense. Hitler is exterminating us wholesale, so naturally you want Britain, Russia, America to invade and stop it. They liberate death camps in 1945 and save what is left of the survivors. Obviously they should have invaded much sooner to stop it that much quicker, no? If only Britain and America had declared war in 1933 immediately when Hitler rose to power.

But then I read Ralph Raico, a libertarian historian and student of Ludwig von Mises. And he said something that totally took me for a loop. Here’s Raico, in his collection of essays, Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal: (My bold.)

In 1940 Churchill at last became Prime Minister, ironically enough when the Chamberlain government resigned because of the Norwegian fiasco—which Churchill, more than anyone else, had helped to bring about.80 As he had fought against a negotiated peace after the fall of Poland, so he continued to resist any suggestion of negotiations with Hitler. Many of the relevant documents are still sealed—after all these years81 —but it is clear that a strong peace party existed in the country and the government. It included Lloyd George in the House of Commons, and Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, in the Cabinet. Even after the fall of France, Churchill refused even to consider Hitler’s renewed peace overtures, whether sincere or not.

This, more than anything else, is supposed to be the foundation of his greatness. The British historian John Charmley raised a storm of outraged protest when he suggested that a negotiated peace in 1940 might have been to the advantage of Britain and Europe. A Yale historian, writing in the New York Times Book Review, referred to Charmley’s thesis as “morally sickening.” Yet Charmley’s scholarly and detailed work makes the crucial point that Churchill’s obdurate refusal even to listen to peace terms in 1940 doomed what he claimed was dearest to him—the Empire and a Britain that was non-socialist and independent in world affairs. One may add that it may also have doomed European Jewry.84 It is amazing that half a century after the fact, there are critical theses concerning World War II that are off-limits to historical debate.

Churchill’s refusal to listen to Hitler’s peace overtures may have doomed European Jewry. When I first read that sentence I did a double take. I didn’t even understand what Raico was saying on a basic level, the thought was so foreign to me. So I read it again. And again. Was I reading this right? How can that be?

Then I saw that little 84 footnote. And I read that. Here’s what the footnote said:

84 On March 27, 1942, Goebbels commented in his diary on the destruction of the European Jews, which was then underway: “Here, too, the Führer is the undismayed champion of a radical solution necessitated by conditions and therefore inexorable. Fortunately, a whole series of possibilities presents itself for us in wartime that would be denied us in peacetime. We shall have to profit by this.” The Goebbels Diaries, 1942–1943, Louis P. Lochner, ed. and trans. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1948), p. 148.

When I read the footnote I understood. It was very possible that World War II cemented the Final Solution. Straight out of Goebbels’ diary. Without an all-out war, Hitler would not have been able to exterminate us on a systematic global scale. War enabled him to enact radical measures and we were doomed.

Had Churchill made peace with Hitler in 1939, it is much more likely that the worst that would have happened to the Jews is that most would have been slaves rather than be exterminated. Yes, Hitler would have killed Jews. Perhaps even hundreds of thousands. But in order to embark on a project to exterminate millions, you need the full support of an entire country, and Hitler could have only gotten that through war.

And then I just stared into space for a minute and said to myself, “Oh my God.”

It may have been Winston Churchill who set the Final Solution and the Holocaust in motion. Adolf Hitler was only the vehicle and the direct cause. Winston Churchill may have been the ultimate enabler.

And for all the naysayers out there who will point to British and American liberation of death camps in 1945, we all know that World War II had absolutely nothing to do with saving Jews. Churchill and Roosevelt could have saved every single Jew before the war by buying them out. They didn’t. They could have saved hundreds of thousands by bombing the camps or the tracks leading to them. They specifically didn’t. They were both complicit.

And deeper than that, the whole war, allying with Stalin against Hitler, made no sense. Stalin had killed many more innocent people by 1939 than Hitler did. And yet the allies sided with Stalin over Hitler. Here’s Raico again:

But the Churchill–Roosevelt intrigue should, one might think, matter to Americans. Here, however, criticism is halted before it starts. A moral postulate of our time is that in pursuit of the destruction of Hitler, all things were permissible. Yet why is it self evident that morality required a crusade against Hitler in 1939 and 1940, and not against Stalin? At that point, Hitler had slain his thousands, but Stalin had already slain his millions. In fact, up to June, 1941, the Soviets behaved far more murderously toward the Poles in their zone of occupation than the Nazis did in theirs. Around 1,500,000 Poles were deported to the Gulag, with about half of them dying within the first two years. As Norman Davies writes: “Stalin was outpacing Hitler in his desire to reduce the Poles to the condition of a slave nation.”103 Of course, there were balance-of-power considerations that created distinctions between the two dictators. But it has yet to be explained why there should exist a double standard ordaining that compromise with one murderous dictator would have been “morally sickening,” while collaboration with the other was morally irreproachable.

What is the moral difference between siding with Stalin to defeat Hitler, and siding with Hitler to defeat Stalin?

Nothing really.

Had I been stuck in the Nazi death camps in 1945, would I have rooted for the Americans, British, and Russians to save me? Of course I would. But that doesn’t change any of the facts written above.

There were millions of innocent Russians that were surely rooting for the Americans to save them from Stalin, to no avail. In fact, America forcibly repatriated hundreds of thousands of terrified Russian political dissidents back to the Soviet Union after World War II. To their deaths. That is why the question of who killed more innocent people – Roosevelt/Truman or Hitler, is indeed not such a clear cut answer at all.

The few Jewish Holocaust survivors liberated by the Americans and British were simply the beneficiaries of a historical accident. Nothing more. If Stalin had specifically gone after Jews, Roosevelt and Truman would have, and indeed did – hand over to Stalin every Russian Jew they could get their hands on.

In the end, what I’m saying is this on a calculus basis. On a scale of horror 1-1000, 1000 being the most horrific, the Holocaust was a 998. Very few survived. Total annihilation would have been 1000. It happened together with World War II. The war did certainly did not help stop the genocide. Therefore, the chances of the scale of horror lowering to 600 or 700 without World War II are greater than it rising to 1000. And perhaps, World War II is what brought the Holocaust from a 600 to a 998 in horror.

Sure, historical hindsight is 20/20. But the point is, not even the most seemingly justified offensive wars are so clear cut.

79 thoughts on “Did War on Hitler Actually Cause the Holocaust?”

  1. Lisa, I really don’t want to defend Hitler’s politics. But there is no doubt in my mind that Hitler would have created a new independent Poland in exchange for peace with England and France. Hitler always said: “A war with England would mean finis Germaniae!”

    You should be more careful with your diagnoses. Neither Sir Neville Chamberlain nor Lord Halifax thought Hitler was “insane”. Sir Lloyd George even praised him as great statesmen:

    “[Hitler] is a born leader of men. A magnetic, dynamic personality with a single-minded purpose, a resolute will and a dauntless heart. He is the George Washington of Germany – the man who won for his country independence from all her oppressors.”

    Source: The Daily Express of November 17, 1936

  2. “Without an all-out war, Hitler would not have been able to exterminate us on a systematic global scale. War enabled him to enact radical measures and we were doomed.”

    Your view presupposes that Hitler had the intention of killing the Jews all along. He did not. He confined himself to putting pressure on the Jews so they would leave Germany. And the majority did. More than 300.000 of the 500.000 Jews left Germany before the war broke out in 1939.

    In other words: Hitler had no master plan to exterminate the Jews: “In his landmark work, “The Destruction of the European Jews,” Mr. Hilberg said the Holocaust had been the result of a huge bureaucratic machine with thousands of participants, not the fulfillment of a preconceived plan or a single order by Hitler.”

    Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/us/07hilberg.html

  3. Regarding the Holocaust: It was Britain which held the mandate to Palestine… In April 1939 the British issued the “White Paper” forbidding the migration of Jews to Palestine… It fits right with your original post about Churchill’s guilt of the “holocaust” Do you expect the British to also pay billions upon billions of “restitution monies”, just like the German taxpayer has been forced to ever since the end of WW II?

    • I don’t want or expect any reparations from any taxpayer for anything. Israel should return every cent it got from German taxpayers. If individual Jews want to sue individual Nazis or heirs of individual Nazis, then that’s their choice.

  4. By the way, there is another statement of yours that I dare to disagree with. You wrote: “In order to embark on a project to exterminate millions [of Jews], you need the full support of an entire country.” This is simply wrong. The Holocaust was a State Secret. Except for those directly involved, the Germans did not know about the killing of Jews in the extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka or Auschwitz. From what we know about the public reaction to the “Reichskristallnacht”, it is safe to assume that the overwhelming majority of the German population would have never ever supported the Holocaust.

  5. There is a much more straightforward way to “blame” Churchill for the Holocaust. According to Albert Speer, it was Churchill’s bombing of innocent German women and children that prompted Hitler’s decision to take “revenge on the Jews”.

    • Uhhhh….ok. With that comment you’ve gone from thoughtful and arguably studious to a whacknut. Not that I deny Churchill was a war criminal. But that’s like saying Hitler burned his wienerschnitzel one day and decided to take revenge by killing millions of people. Maybe that’s true. But it’s a stupid observation, and I’m not going to blame the wienerschnitzel.

      • I simply cited a remark made by Albert Speer. This does in no way imply that I approve of Hitler’s thinking, leave alone his actions. His antisemitism was clearly irrational. I lost my own Jewish grandfather in World War II. He was a lawyer living in Danzig. During the “Reichskristallnacht”, his practice had been destroyed. He fled to Cracow and was never seen again.

  6. Obviously, I left out the most important part of Hitler’s peace proposal mentioned in Cadogan’s note: After defeating Poland, Hitler was willing to create a new “independent Poland subject to military restrictions to prevent her being a threat to Germany.” In other words: Poland would, once again, have been an independent state, not a colony of Germany. Thus, the Jews sent to Poland would not have to suffer under any German racial policies. The only question left is: what would Poland have done with the German Jews? As is widely known, Poland was at least as antisemitic as Germany. For instance, Poland only joined the Conference of Evian because she hoped to find a way to get rid of her own 3 Million Jews.

      • Speaking of a “retroactive” view: Sure, the West could have done much more for the Jews. But then again, in 1938 Roosevelt and others could not know what was going to happen to the Jews as of 1942.

    • Edgar, I don’t know what you’re smoking, but I could probably use some of it at the moment. You make Hitler sound like a sane person. A statesman. I’m not sure what your deal is, exactly, that makes you want to revise history this way, but whatever it is, the place to deal with it is probably a therapist’s office.

      Honest to God…

      • Do me a favour, Lisa. At least mention the statement you disagree with! Are you refering to Hitler’s peace proposal and his intention to restore a new independent Poland? His plan to send all German Jews to Poland? Or what?

      • Among other things, Hitler was extremely paranoid and had zero intention of creating an independent Poland. Once he controlled it, he was never going to release it. And he did send most German Jews to Poland. That’s where most of his death camps were.

      • I can’t resist my impression that Lisa is given to . . . diagnoses.

        Hitler is/was insane.

        You (Edgar Dahl) are on drugs and at least psychotic.

        Even Rafi dismisses “denialism/denialists” as irrational.

        Kind of keeps everything neat, wouldn’t you say? Argument over (never got started).

  7. “Had Churchill made peace with Hitler in 1939, it is much more likely that the worst that would have happened to the Jews is that most would have been slaves rather than be exterminated. Yes, Hitler would have killed Jews. Perhaps even hundreds of thousands.”

    I respectfully disagree. If England had agreed to Hitler’s peace offer, not a single Jew would have been killed! Hitler’s peace offer included a settlement of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”. As Sir Alexander Cadogan at the Foreign Office noted on October 4, 1939, Hitler’s proposal was as follows: “Germany would reoccupy the old Reich frontier in Poland. […] Ready to guarantee French and British Empire; settlement of the Jewish question, by using Poland as a sink into which to empty the Jews.” (Source: PRO Halifax Private Papers H/XV 306.)

    • Interesting, but the wording of that implies he would still have used Poland as a place to kill us all or enslaving us at best, as he eventually ended up doing.

      • No, up until 1941 there was no intention whatsoever to kill the Jews. Hitler’s original plan was to expel the Jews, not to exterminate the Jews. Between 1933 and 1939 about 330.000 Jews had already left Germany. According to the Korherr Report, in May 1939 there were 233.973 Jews left in Germany. These Jews would simply have been sent to Poland.

      • Almost all of the death camps were IN Poland, most of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust were Polish (Jewish population 3,000,000 in 1939), and Germany had already conquered Poland by the time Hitler was proposing peace with Britain. Hitler made Poland the sink for Jews and he killed us all.

  8. Re “Holocaust Denial,” I was watching a PBS program featuring Sir Arthur Conan Doyle today. Doyle says to his colleague: “The absence of evidence can be more telling than its presence” … an interesting observation I thought… Waddayathink?

  9. “Open borders” is the sure death of any nation or people. Btw. would such a policy be OK for the state of Israel? Just wondering.

    • Sorry Lisa. I didn’t fully read the comment or his agenda. I’m being barraged by holocaust deniers ever since Smith linked my post on his disgusting site. Give me some room, I’m fielding spam and actual comments with skimming. Thanks for noticing. I deleted it. I’ll be more vigilant now.

      • You really can’t think this way. Keep in mind, it is German choices that lead to the Holocaust, not Britain’s obstinacy. Had Britain surrendered in the summer of 1940 it is possible that the Germans would have proceeded with the Madagascar Plan or something like the Nisko Plan, forcing Jews into inhospitable regions of their empire. The end result is the same with millions of Jews dying of diseases, malnutrition and mistreatment.
        People often forget the first mass killings the Germans engaged in were against the Polish elite (Operation Tannenberg) and the German disabled (Action T-4), these actions predated the first mass killings of the Jews. The Nazi state was already a genocidal state before any of the mass killings of the Jews.

  11. Read A. J. P. Taylor’s “Origins of the Second World War” for several similar “aha” experiences.

  13. Ralph Raico, whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting personally, still writes for Inconvenient History (www.inconvenienthistory.com).

    Richard Widmann (editor of Inconvenient History) and I share Ralph Raico’s and Rafi’s libertarian sentiments extensively, as does, it so happens, the now-banned Bradley Smith (see above).

    • Smith isn’t banned. Holocaust denial is banned. Smith can comment about whatever he wants. If it isn’t holocaust denial or obvious anti Semitism (I don’t consider holocaust denial to be anti semitism, I just think it’s idiocy), I will approve it.

      If you’re implying that Raico agrees with Irving, he doesn’t. He quotes revisionists up the wazoo. He never doubts or even questions that 6 million Jews were murdered by Nazis.

      • Rafi: I am uncertain what you mean by H. Denial.Is it Denial to ask why Eisenhower, in his Crusade In Europe, did not mention gas chambers? 

      • Did you know that Eisenhower is also behind the round Earth conspiracy?

        http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=64503.0#.VgOXtGSqqko

        And he was also a Nazi Agent. And worked with Al Gore on the internet, which is the biggest factor in the Round Earth Conspiracy. It’s all here, at the link. Eisenhower created NASA, whose mission is to fool the sheeple into believing that the Earth is an “oblate spheroid”.

        All the evidence for a “Round Earth” is a conspiracy, lies made up by the establishment.

        And all the thousands of eye witnesses of gas chambers still alive today, and those who had to shovel the bodies out and burn them, and their memoirs and interviews and speaking tours, they all teamed up after the Americans liberated the “death camps” (which were really amusement parks, or at worst, internment camps a la FDR) to convince us of some fanciful story, just like Jews conspire all the time to fool the world into bombing Iraq. They did it because it was really the AMERICANS that killed the Jews in Europe through collateral damage, and the US government paid off all the survivors to make up stories about gas chambers, and then forced publishing houses to publish books about them all written by government agents, and then Hollywood Jews furthered the conspiracy, with Schindler’s List the ultimate cherry on top.

        Hey…wait a minute! Schindler’s List!

        Don’t you think it’s WEIRD that in that scene in Schindler’s List where they’re all in the “shower”, the water is actually turned on instead of the Zyklon B? Perfect evidence that STEVEN SPIELBERG AGREES WITH YOU! Otherwise he would have shown gas chambers instead of a shower!

        Call him up! Ask why he didn’t put gas chambers in Schindler’s List!

        Forget about “Eisenhower didn’t mention gas chambers”. NEITHER DID STEVEN SPIELBERG! That proves it!

        Look Smith. I’m one of only a handful of Jews on the planet who doesn’t care what the hell you believe about the holocaust. You can believe Hitler threw cocktail parties for Jews throughout Europe until the Americans and British killed everyone and blamed it on the Germans. I don’t care. So why do you insist on trying to piss ME, of all people, off? I’m of the very few that tolerates you and advocates that you be able to bark whatever insanity you please.

        The Holocaust is a Jewish issue. It has nothing to do with you. Therefore I don’t care what you say about it, as much as I don’t give a crap about your personal opinion on the Machlokes Rava Abayey in the Gemara Bava Basra 65A. What’s Smith’s psak on the issue בור ברשות הרבים? Does Smith hold by the Tana Kama or הלכה כבתראי?

        I couldn’t care less what you think about Halacha, or the Holocaust. I just don’t want it on MY blog, just like I don’t want some Goy’s opinion on contemporary Jewish halachic issues, and I would delete that as well.

        Your group of obsessive people means as much to me as the Flat Earth Society. Really. I think and am worried as much about Holocaust deniers as I am about round Earth deniers. I don’t give a crap about either of your “theories”. I suggest you stick to the things we agree on if you want to have any kind of constructive relationship, and stop pushing your dickish nonsense here.

      • Ah, back to the cesspool. It was nice having a day off. I’m just imagining some dips**t 40 years after Iran nukes Israel saying, “Iran never said they were going to destroy Israel! That’s Jewish propaganda!”

  14. Whatever happened in the Holocaust, be it your version or Bradley Smith’s version, was a catastrophe for the Jews that happened as a consequence of the War, ergo peace in 1940 = no Holocaust, unless, of course, war had broken out (as is likely but not inevitable) between Germany and the Soviet Union.

    • Says who? Hitler was clear on his goals vis the Jews before war broke out. You can theorize that he might have felt constrained from fulfilling those goals had there been peace, but it’s nothing but conjecture.

      • Actually, that comment was pretty accurate I think. Someone commented to me earlier that the Holocaust was inevitable because Hitler and Stalin would have gone to war regardless of what Churchill or FDR did. Hitler would have had his war cover anyway. It just would have been a slower process, possibly allowing for more escapes.

      • Nice reply. Just know that I consider the Holocaust to be an extra-historical event. The only way one third of Jewry was going to get killed was if God willed it. It was inevitable, not historically, but extra-historically. I expect only Jews will understand what I’m saying here. Just like the Egyptian enslavement of the Israelites was inevitable. But that doesn’t mean the Egyptians weren’t punished or weren’t wrong. They were both. And so were the Nazis.

      • Oh, well. If Herf said it, it must be so. Except that who the hell is Jeffrey Herf and why exactly should I care about his opinion?

      • “Hitler was clear on his goals vis the Jews before war broke out.” – No! If you would take the time to read Raul Hilberg’s “The Destruction of the European Jews” you would know that there was, as Hilberg put it, “no master plan” for the Holocaust.

  15. That the world war enabled Hilter to do what also Bismarck wanted (and many others…), and that US stepping up at Japan buzzing around the Pacific and actually confronting British Empire’s interests (which I believe was the trigger again for US’s involvement, like in WWI) is actually a new idea for me to consider. That without the extra chaotic violence everything could have been stopped. Somehow. That is engaging especially in the sense of “where was God, the lazy bump??” kind of faithlessness that has been eating me alive for years since I knew about the Holocaust from an early age from my grand parents who told me about pregnant Jewish women stabbed in the middle of the streets in broad daylight here in Bucharest and from my old nurse who was a Greek woman who told me about certain things, like the gas chambers that she herself assisted of. Now those about the accuse these people of horrid stories old people tell kids I must say I always asked my grand parents about WWII because it’s been important since everyone keeps talking about it in politics and they replied.
    Maybe it’s my demonic faithlessness in people, who I consider capable of anything bad even if I imagine myself people are just like children in the middle of a Universe not completely designed for them and thus they twist the divine rules as weapons against each other, that I would still believe the Holocaust was real in spite of personal testimony I came across of, just because the people who deny its existence are usually happy, zen-like people, with a serene smile on their faces higher than the Courts of Heaven, believing Jesus loves them or that it doesn’t matter what he thinks since he was a Jew or a God who sided with Jews, or he was associated with them, or it’s not even about Jesus since they know better, while all the angels have horns and frown and probably a tail and wings just because they aren’t human and they may anything different than what people say. These people scare me as much as I begin to hate myself because I now know what it feels like to hate.
    Never fight anyone while you hate them, thus war can be prevented.

    • The Holocaust was not God’s fault. There was plenty of time for any world leader to offer money to get everyone out that Hitler didn’t want. Nobody acted. In fact, Roosevelt acted to prevent Jews from entering the country, a la the St. Louis. Thanks for the comment.

      • According to Henry Morgenthau, Jr.’s diary, FDR’s administration gave Jews preferential treatment to migrate to USA, and under Morgenthau’s auspices, Jews and only Jews were provided federal government financial assistance to the tune of about $50 million to help 200,000 Jews settle in USA.

        That’s about $49.999 million than any other group received in that era.

      • Give me a link or a source or a book. Something. As far as I’m concerned, FDR should have allowed every single Jew on Earth who wanted to, to emigrate to the US, or any other person, Jew or non Jew, without any government assistance. Jews don’t need government assistance. We assist one another.

      • Apparently it is UNJUST for ANY country to refuse admission to ANY person (or just Jews?) who claim that they are being persecuted wherever they happen to be at the moment.

        This sounds like open borders, at least as to people, and it accords well as far as I know with anarcho-capitalism. No limitation on who may cross any border at any time, nor limitation on time they may spend anywhere. Is the claim of persecution necessary/subject to confirmation?

        Passport, shmassport. Unless I misunderstood something.

      • You understood perfectly. No borders, no passports, not just Jews, any human being who can pay his own way. The only possible problem is roads and borders have to privatized. This is in “Democracy: The God That Failed” actually. I don’t agree with Hoppe on that point. Tax-funded roads and borders are still ownerless according to my reading of halacha, and anyone can use them.

      • [[Let’s see if double square brackets makes text disappear on the internet. I didn’t realize I was subconsciously mad at Him for allowing it to happen until I wrote it and you replied. So I thank you. You shouldn’t have to thank me for saying what I know of it to be real. Any other piece of history violent or not, passes without comment in humanity. Just this part is so controversial which only makes sense in what you say “Holocaust is extra-historical”.]]

  16. You shouldn’t agree with the ‘war’ thing I said either. I was just correcting the words being used by officials when they declare war OR MAYBE just stand up for it ;-).
    I personally believe in ‘let evil be’ (because it will self-destruct eventually) as a key element of any substantial spiritual faith (to let ‘the spirits’ handle it – or God’s decision – one has to let this happen, especially in vengeance – if US would’ve let Japan have it their way, they would’ve surrendered to the Russians who were in over their head with their maxi-non-empire and let the Chinese handle Japan, and that would’ve been painful for Japan because they despise the Chinese and things would’ve been made clear).
    Thank you for the video that is excellent standup comedy! So rare. 😀

  17. Nobody ever said wars are justified. I think not even the military say these after a certain level of education.
    The excuse is ‘necessary’ and more modern ‘unavoidable’.
    US bombed Japan as vengeance and whether it was justified or not God will decide one day, but imagine being a US soldier captured by the Japanese and skinned alive or have medical experiments such as live surgeries, things done in Japanese war camps dedicated for American soldiers.

    • Let me respond to that with a video clip. Louis CK’s “Of Course, but Maybe…” As Obama likes to say, let me be clear. The only one I agree with here is the one about war. If you pick up a gun and go to another country to start shooting people, maybe getting skinned alive by the people you were shooting at is a tiny bit your fault. If you don’t want to get skinned alive, then you should refuse to pick up the damn gun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O5h4enjrHw

  18. Rafifarber:

    Interesting article but. . . . it appears you believe the gas-chamber stories.
    Perhaps I’m wrong.

    • Wow! I actually got a Holocaust denier to comment here! That’s a strange accomplishment. I am building bridges I’m not sure I even want built. Surely those who disagree with me will cite this as evidence that I have “gone too far”. Yes Bradley Smith. I “believe the gas-chamber stories”. I am a Jew whose extended family was murdered in the gas chambers.

      And I physically visited the gas chambers and saw the 17-ton pile of human ash at Majdanek filled with my family who died there in the gas chambers that I was physically in.

      Those Jews who are reading this who want to know where I’m drawing the line, it’s here. This guy is on the other side. Do not comment here again, Mr. Smith.

  19. Also, Lapin is an utter fruitcake. He wants the US to be an officially Christian country. Not exactly a Libertarian idea.

    • Alex Jones I’m pretty sure has Asperger’s. (Some people say that about me too, so whatever.) He’s a bit nutty but to say he hates Jews flies in the face of his constant interviews with Jews. An anti Semite is someone who hates all Jews. Alex Jones is not an anti Semite. As for Jeff Rense, I’m not very familiar, but I do know that the majority of the 100,000 plus hits I got for my article “From Israel: Vote Ron Paul and Let My People Go”, came from Rense.com.

      If Jeff Rense were an anti Semite, he would not have given me any traffic. Did you mean “other” people? Zero of them are anti Semites. They are all anti Zionists. And so am I.

    • Lisa:

      There is no conceptual contradiction between liberty and identity. Identitarian Moshe Feiglin says this all the time. Nor is there any operative contradiction between them. Indeed, the opposite may partly be the case. If you have any good arguments against this, please tell us all clearly what they are. Identity is religious in nature.

      (As for that specific idea re the US, especially by a Jew, and said as a Jew, and the history, and more: no comment. And no comment as regards Lapin the man, either)

      • Lapin the man I have no opinion on because I don’t know him very well. I really loved his Dvar Torah at the Mises Institute though. It was genius. And regardless of his positions, it shows Lew is not an anti Semite. Which is crazy anyway because he is the Talmid Muvhak of Rothbard, who was certainly anti Zionist, but not at all anti Semitic.

        Regarding WWII revisionism, when you break it down it really is not that far fetched. What ended up happening was as close to absolute worst as you can get. To suggest that lacking a war, it may have been less horrific for us, even slightly, should not be all that controversial.

        We all know World War II did not save many Jews from dying in the holocaust, and it is very plausible to say it sped up the killing machine. The reason we link the WWII and the Holocaust is just because we have been hammered into thinking that way.

      • But Rafi, that’s not what you said. You were quite clear that the whole thing was Churchill’s fault. Not that his refusal to deal with Hitler may have exacerbated what happened to us, but that “it was all Churchill”.

        Hyperbole is fun. I get it. But it can also be irresponsible and dishonest. I’m glad you’ve backed down from the hysterical rhetoric of your article, but you might want to modify the article in light of it.

      • We all pick apart hyperbole and add some our own in attacks against articles we don’t like. It’s an easy attack route. For example, you claimed that I “totally absolved Hitler.” I would call that hyperbole on my hyperbole. I realize though that this is a sensitive subject and toned it down just a tad.

        Churchill did not kill 6,000,000 Jews. Hitler did. Churchill killed a lot of innocent people in his life, though I’m not sure how many. But he had a role to play in the Holocaust, and could have also stopped it if he had offered to buy the Jews out of Germany as part of a peace deal. The fact that he had the power to do that but chose not to makes him partly responsible.

      • That wasn’t hyperbole, Rafi. You literally said that Hitler was just the tool. Tools aren’t culpable. Yes, I can use hyperbole as well. I didn’t this time. You went a good deal beyond hyperbole, though.

      • OK then, you got me. (Sarcasm follows.) I absolved Hitler of all responsibility for the Holocaust. Just like Moshe Feiglin admires Hitler. Congratulations, detective. I’m exposed!

      • Did I say there was a contradiction between liberty and identity? The US Identity is defined by the Constitution. In fact, that’s what the concept of a Constitution *is*. So to have the US be officially a Christian country (the way Israel is officially a Jewish one) is absurd, offensive, loony, and despicable, and when Lapin champions it, ignoring completely the fact that Christianity is avodah zarah, he’s either a fruitcake or a villain. I was giving him the benefit of the doubt.

  20. Be careful, Rafi. It’s intoxicating when you get a new look at an old narrative. The trick is, you often find people adding their own spin to the facts. Is it possible that peace would have made it a little more difficult for Hitler to murder us? It could be. He would have tried to play nice with the great powers, so he wouldn’t have wanted to do something that would outrage them. During war, he didn’t have to worry about that.

    But he was already committed to wiping us out. Long before the war started. It’s hard to make a case for the idea that he didn’t mean it. That he would have been a good boy had it not been for Churchill.

    You have to remember that a lot of the people (not all, by any means, but a significant number) in a lot of Libertarian groups (Lew Rockwell, for example) are antisemites. They have a vested interest in rehabilitating Old Uncle Adolf.

    It’s easy to poke holes in the common narrative. For example, the 6 million number comes from Nazi documents, which we know used a nutty definition of “Jew”. So did the Nazis really murder 6 million Jews? No. They murdered 6 million people *as* Jews, which is a different thing. But is that a reason to say, “Ha! The whole 6 million thing is an invention!”? It’s the same thing here. Churchill refused to let Hitler conquer by increments. But Hitler was already champing at the bit to go to war and overcome the horrible humiliation Germany suffered after WWI. You know this.

    • Lisa, this is the first time I’ve written something about foreign policy that you’ve disagreed with but haven’t yelled at me. I consider that real progress. I’ll say two things. First, give me a time machine and the power, and I would have tried everything to prevent what happened to us. Including peace with Hitler, not knowing for sure whether it would have worked. Because what ended up happening in the end was the worst of all possibilities.

      Yes, Hitler wanted to destroy the Jews. But he may not have been able to had Churchill sued for peace. It is possible. And any possibility – this one actually being plausible – is better than what ended up happening.

      Second, Lew Rockwell is in no way an anti Semite. I donate money to the Mises Institute every month and I love Lew Rockwell. I will continue donating money to the Mises Institute every month and cherish the thank you letters that Lew sends me. Lew is anti Israel and anti Zionist. Not anti Semitic. My proof?

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