After a long covid delay, my paper, “The Pre-History of American Holocaust Denial” is finally published at the journal, American Jewish History. It is part of a special double issue on American antisemitism. The roster of authors is distinguished and I’m honored and delighted to find myself in their company.
Holocaust denial is the idea that the Nazi genocide of European Jews has been greatly exaggerated or, in its most severe form, never actually happened. It is, quite correctly, labeled an extreme form of antisemitism. In the United States, the Institute for Historical Review, founded in the late 1970s. My paper focuses on the decades before that, from the end of World War II to the founding of the IHR.
Here are some of the highlights of my paper:
- Conservative publishers, Regnery, Devin-Adair, and Caxton Printers published fascist activists in the twenty years after World War II. These fascists argued that Roosevelt and Churchill, not Hitler, started the war and that the Nazis war crimes were equivalent or less destructive than the Allies.
- The libertarian Volker Fund funded some of the earliest work of Holocaust denial in the Untied States. I’ve written about a bit of this before in this space.
- The first work by an American to claim that the Nazi’s did not kill six million Jews, was written by an author while he was being paid by the Volker Fund.
- Murray Rothbard, foundational libertarian thinker, admired what he called “six million revisionism,” which was the claim that six million Jews were not killed by the Nazis.
- The infamous 1976 issue of the libertarian Reason magazine in which the Holocaust was denied was not an outlier among libertarian thought, but a continuation of the denial fostered by the libertarians since the end of World War II.
There is more, all fully documented from archival sources. All of this is not in spite of libertarian ideology but a consequence of it: they were isolationists and were perfectly willing to distort the history of World War II to suit their ends. They made active alliances with overt antisemitic, right-wing activists and, in many cases, shared their antisemitism. It is time the libertarians stopped denying their ugly history regarding Holocaust denial and started taking responsibility for it.
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Fardels Bear 
I looked up Murray Rothbard on Wikipedia. While I had an extremely low opinion of libertarianism and libertarians going in, I found that I had been a cockeyed optimist about them. The guy was a complete monster and his appreciation of human beings entirely delusional, even for a libertarian. He makes Ayn Rand look like a font of the milk of human kindness.
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“Murray Rothbard, foundational libertarian thinker, admired what he called “six million revisionism,” which was the claim that six million Jews were not killed by the Nazis.”
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Can a brotha get a source on this?
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https://www.academia.edu/61008698/The_Pre_History_of_American_Holocaust_Denial
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Shame there’s no link anywhere online to actually read most of the letters provided in the sources, seeing what Rothbard had to say about Hoggan’s book in detail would have been really interesting.
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Here's a link to the published paper for more details:
https://www.academia.edu/61008698/The_Pre_History_of_American_Holocaust_Denial
Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2022 at 4:13 PM
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Your web link goes to your essay, but not to the source of the document you cite in the footnote. Could you share the original document so that the primary source can be read?
Thank you in advance.
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Here’s a passage from Rothbard’s letter to Barnes on 30 July 1966. He is referring to the recently-deceased J.B. Mathews, Joseph McCarthy’s head of research for McCarthey’s anti-communist Senate investigations:
“That’s interesting that you knew and liked Matthews. I can’t really believe he was an ultra-Fundamentalist, but he might have reverted back to his fundamentalist upbringing. He told me once, by the way, that he was converted from socialism by reading Mises’ Socialism. I recently heard from someone by the way, that Matthews was interested in 6 Million Revisionism which raises him several notches in my eyes!”
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Thank you for sharing this, it is very interesting. Is there any way to access these letters online to read them in full?
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Thank you for sharing this, it is very interesting. Is there any way to access these letters online to read them in full?
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No. The vast majority of archival material is not online. When you visit an archive you agree not to duplicate the material. The letter is in the Martin papers at the University of Wyoming. You may be able to contact them for a copy. https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv419985
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