PandoDaily: Reason Magazine has Holocaust-denying past

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PandoDaily: Reason Magazine has Holocaust-denying past

Unread post by Stierlitz » Tue Jul 29, 2014 8:11 pm

So this happened:

The story in question, which is the work of Mark Ames.
....Astonishingly, in February 1976, Reason dedicated an entire “special issue” to promoting Holocaust deniers, under the guise of so-called “historical revisionism.” How horrifying is it? You can judge for yourself — the whole thing is embedded below.

PandoDaily contacted noted Holocaust historian and Holocaust Museum expert Deborah Lipstadt to ask her opinion. In 2000, Lipstadt won a much-publicized libel trial in Britain against a leading Holocaust denier, David Irving. When we shared with her the list of Reason’s “special issue” contributors and authors positively cited in the issue, Lipstadt described it as “the Who’s Who of early American Holocaust deniers.”

Authors who contributed articles to Reason magazine’s “special issue” included one of the most notorious American pro-Nazi activists of the postwar era, Austin J. App, author of the 1973 tract, “The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the German People for Hard Marks and Fabricated Corpses” and contributing editor to the rabidly anti-Semitic magazine, the American Mercury. Two more authors hired to write for Reason’s “special issue” included James J. Martin, a regular contributor to the same neo-Nazi American Mercury magazine; and Percy Greaves, a founding board member at the anti-Jewish hate group, the Liberty Lobby.

Both Martin and Greaves were deeply involved in leading anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denier outfits before, during and after Reason hired them as contributors; and shortly after they appeared in Reason’s “special issue,” both Martin and Greaves served as editorial directors in David Irving’s favorite neo-Nazi outfit, the Institute for Historical Review, described as “the world’s single most important outlet for Holocaust-denial propaganda” by the Anti-Defamation League.

Perhaps the most shocking article in Reason’s “special issue” was penned by Gary North, who was also Ron Paul’s congressional aide that same year, and has been one of the most influential figures in the Christian radical-right since the 1970s. North’s article in Reason mocked the Holocaust as “the Establishment’s favorite horror story” and questioned “the supposed execution of 6 million Jews by Hitler.” North also painted other rabidly anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers in a positive, “contrarian-cool” light, praising the works of David Hoggan, author of “The Myth of the Six Million,” French neo-fascist Paul Rassinier, and American historian Harry Elmer Barnes, considered the godfather of American Holocaust denial literature.
The previous article from 7/18 on the "Reboot 2014" conference.

Some quotes from that:
So now we have the “Reboot Lab” conference taking place in the heart of San Francisco’s SOMA tech district. But if the purpose of the Reboot Lab conference is to merge Koch-brand libertarianism with Silicon Valley “libertarianism,” then the first thing you have to ask is: Why the Hell did they invite a mean homophobic hick like Cathy McMorris Rodgers to the show?

Rand Paul at least does a decent job showboating outrage against Big Brother snooping and drone attacks; at least there’s something there to grab onto before you get into the rest of Rand’s loonie-right politics. But the other keynote speaker, McMorris Rodgers?

In the, I suppose, quite likely event that Silicon Valley doesn’t know who she is, here’s a quick primer:

Rep. McMorris Rodgers was homeschooled by her father, and got her higher education degree at an unaccredited Christian fundamentalist institution, Pensacola Christian College (PCC), which bans homosexuality, open Internet (PCC until recently banned all Internet access), and mixed-gender stairwells (male and female students are required to use separate stairs and doors). Pensacola Christian College is the publisher of A Beka textbooks for K-12 pupils, which teach kids that Islam is a “false religion,” Hindus are “incapable of writing history,” Catholicism is “a monstrous distortion of Christianity,” African religions preach “false religious beliefs,” liberals and Democrats are crypto-Marxists, and the United Nations is a “collectivist juggernaut that would crush individual freedom and force the will of an elite few on all of humanity.”
The involvement in Reboot of Reason.com’s editor is both telling and entirely appropriate. For all of Silicon Valley’s self-celebration and pretensions to progressive values, you can find most of the Big Ideas spouted by Silicon Valley’s 21st century geniuses in Reason’s musty, nearly half-century old archives, many of which are only available in print or microfiche via public libraries.

Peter Thiel’s floating libertarian islands? The December 1972 “special issue” of Reason magazine proposed abandoning statist America for “new libertarian countries” built on floating ocean platforms. Travis Kalanick’s disrupted, deregulated taxi cab free-for-all? Half a decade before Kalanick was born, Reason’s February 1972 issue published “Taxis and Jitneys: The Case for Deregulation,” a proposal to disrupt taxi cab “monopolies” and licensing laws, published by a DARPA spinoff called General Research Corp (where former Reason editor Robert Poole also worked). Reed Hastings’ school reforms (i.e. privatization)? Reason published “The Case for School Vouchers” in April 1971. Elon Musk’s private space company? Reason devoted its April 1979 “special issue” to privatizing space. In fact, Reason’s Robert Poole and early contributor Mark Frazier are credited with organizing the first major space privatization conference in the mid-1970s.

And then there’s the uglier, darker side of the Kochs’ libertarianism on display in Reason’s archives: the fringe-right racism and fascism that the movement has tried to downplay in recent years to appeal to progressives and non-loonie techies. Throughout its first two decades, in the 1970s and 1980s, Reason supported apartheid South Africa, and attacked anti-apartheid protesters and sanctions right up to Nelson Mandela’s release, when they finally dropped it.
Last edited by Stierlitz on Tue Jul 29, 2014 8:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: PandoDaily: Reason Magazine has Holocaust-denying past

Unread post by Randy from Boise » Tue Jul 29, 2014 8:21 pm

And Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason TV and the co-author of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, responds:
"In the newer post, Ames runs through Reason’s February 1976 issue that was billed as a “Special Revisionism Issue.” He has posted the entire issue, which I had not read before, online here (an incomplete online archive of Reason's run can be found here at the invaluable Unz.org site, which compiles hundreds of titles; we hope eventually to produce our own fully searchable, complete archive at our own site). Ames is correct that some of the contributors to that issue developed an interest in or were fellow travelers with that most pathetic area of study known as Holocaust revisionism or denialism. That scurrilous topic is not the focus of any of the articles in the issue, but the inclusion of contributors such as James J. Martin, who would go on to join the editorial board of the contemptible denialist outfit the Institute of Historical Review, is embarrassing. Another of that issue's contributors, Gary North, would later be excoriated in this 1998 Reason article for arguing in favor of violent theocracy and the stoning of gays and others.

"The “revisionism” under discussion in the 1976 special issue refers to the movement that was popular especially among left-wing critics of the Cold War such as University of Wisconsin’s William Appleman Williams. Rather than accepting the United States’ self-justifying explanations for the wars it fought and the domestic policies it pursued, revisionists typically focused on less noble motives in ways that they believed illuminated uncomfortable truths. "
Here is the link to the issue in question: link

Here is the link to the magazine's reply: link

This brouhaha is part of an attempt to whack the right wing idiot Koch Bros. in the knees for having helped to fund the magazine, I think...

RfB


Addenda: Now having glanced at the issue of the magazine, it doesn't seem that either party is correctly characterizing it. It's an effort at historical iconoclasm, focused on Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories and vaguely related fare. It's not dedicated to either holocaust denial or to the 1960s left wing foreign policy revisionism of Bill Williams and his group.

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Re: PandoDaily: Reason Magazine has Holocaust-denying past

Unread post by Stierlitz » Tue Jul 29, 2014 8:37 pm

Randy from Boise wrote: This brouhaha is part of an attempt to whack the right wing idiot Koch Bros. in the knees for having helped to fund the magazine, I think...

RfB
Dead wrong; The Koch brothers have had an affinity for Holocaust revisionism that goes back to Rampart College and it's Rampart Journal in the 1960s. They got it from Robert LeFevre, who was their mentor.

This is their Spring 1966 issue: http://mises.org/journals/rampart/rampa ... ng1966.pdf
In it, we see articles by noted historical revisionists James J. Martin and Harry Elmer Barnes, even Murry Rothbard has an article on the importance of revisionism.

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Re: PandoDaily: Reason Magazine has Holocaust-denying past

Unread post by Ming » Thu Jul 31, 2014 1:09 am

Wander around crazy right-wing blogiana, and this revisionism is everywhere. Making a distinction between those that hold to it and those that don't is a waste of time; to some degree or another, they all do, and it's just a question of whether or not they swim in each particular cesspool.

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Re: PandoDaily: Reason Magazine has Holocaust-denying past

Unread post by Stierlitz » Thu Jul 31, 2014 6:02 am

Ming wrote:Wander around crazy right-wing blogiana, and this revisionism is everywhere. Making a distinction between those that hold to it and those that don't is a waste of time; to some degree or another, they all do, and it's just a question of whether or not they swim in each particular cesspool.
The problem is Reason just didn't buckle, admit they had given these guys column-space, and apologize. Their editor dodged and waffled instead......maneuvers are impossible when you have published articles by Austin J. App, who wrote The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the German People for Hard Marks with Fabricated Corpses (1973), along with such pamphlets as Ravishing the Women of Conquered Europe (1946) and "Holocaust": Sneak Attack on Christianity (1978).

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Re: PandoDaily: Reason Magazine has Holocaust-denying past

Unread post by Ming » Thu Jul 31, 2014 3:36 pm

The problem is that all the apparent patches of conspiracy/cover-up craziness are actually all part of one seamless garment of paranoia. The anti-semitism is the racism is the sexism is the class envy, and it's all in the end about protecting their crazy worldview from reality. Therefore a lot of them are going to shy away from Holocaust denial because it's a little too disreputable to be let out in public, but in their own crazy circles nobody's going to repudiate anyone else for it because, after all, rejecting the judgements of the Liberal Establishment is part of what produces their solidarity.

Of late I'm seeing signs that the right libertarians are trying to push the others over the side, and in the process are tending to write it off as a failed movement.

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Re: PandoDaily: Reason Magazine has Holocaust-denying past

Unread post by Stierlitz » Sat Aug 02, 2014 12:01 am

Ming wrote:The problem is that all the apparent patches of conspiracy/cover-up craziness are actually all part of one seamless garment of paranoia. The anti-semitism is the racism is the sexism is the class envy, and it's all in the end about protecting their crazy worldview from reality. Therefore a lot of them are going to shy away from Holocaust denial because it's a little too disreputable to be let out in public, but in their own crazy circles nobody's going to repudiate anyone else for it because, after all, rejecting the judgements of the Liberal Establishment is part of what produces their solidarity.

Of late I'm seeing signs that the right libertarians are trying to push the others over the side, and in the process are tending to write it off as a failed movement.
The American Right seems to get crazier and crazier every year, and things that used to be fringe ideas from the John Birch Society or the Libertarians or even the Liberty Lobby are now moving into the Republican mainstream, making the party a basket case. Meanwhile, the thing that's beginning to infect Libertarianism (at least in Silicon Valley) is the "Dark Enlightenment" which posits that America would be better as a corporate fascist state or a collection of fascist mini-states or just a monarchy. Corey Pein wrote about it in Baffler magazine's blog this May.

This may be the generation that witnesses the end of the American two-party system because the Democrats have gone centrist and the Republicans are self-destructing.

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Re: PandoDaily: Reason Magazine has Holocaust-denying past

Unread post by EricBarbour » Sat Aug 02, 2014 12:53 am

Stierlitz wrote:Corey Pein wrote about it in Baffler magazine's blog this May.
And he wrote at length about "Moldbug". One of the most dangerous crackpot bloggers I've ever run across. Dangerous, because he's popular in the Valley, despite being unknown elsewhere. And now good buddies with Thiel.

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Re: PandoDaily: Reason Magazine has Holocaust-denying past

Unread post by Stierlitz » Sat Aug 02, 2014 1:55 am

EricBarbour wrote:
Stierlitz wrote:Corey Pein wrote about it in Baffler magazine's blog this May.
And he wrote at length about "Moldbug". One of the most dangerous crackpot bloggers I've ever run across. Dangerous, because he's popular in the Valley, despite being unknown elsewhere. And now good buddies with Thiel.
Which is probably why Sirota and Rall were kicked out, because Peter Thiel has made it plain that he "longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible" ("The Education of a Libertarian"*, published on Cato Unbound in April, 2009); he wants PandoDaily to focus on the tech, and possibly introduce some of his less crazier ideas though hack writers. In many ways it's like how some of the biggest universities in America were owned by robber barons in the Gilded Age, and professors could be fired for anything if they incurred the wrath of the reigning tycoon.

Moldbug is the Martin Heidegger of this far-Right scene, but more successful because he has the ear of the powerful people he thinks will make his anti-Republic possible (Heidegger never had a meeting with top Nazis, as far as I know.) I agree that he is dangerous; Pein's article needs to be republished in a more mass-market publication, and Curtis Guy Yarvin exposed for what he is - a crypto-fascist ideologue.


_______________

* Link here.

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Re: PandoDaily: Reason Magazine has Holocaust-denying past

Unread post by EricBarbour » Sat Aug 02, 2014 2:12 am

Wonder if Jimbo reads Yarvin, and takes him seriously. No, scratch that, if anyone we've seen in the Wikipedia orbit lately was prone to following Yarvin, it would possibly be Wil Sinclair.

Plus, ADHD people usually make horrible leaders. Wikipedia, Reddit and 2.0 in general seem to prove that over and over.

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Re: PandoDaily: Reason Magazine has Holocaust-denying past

Unread post by Stierlitz » Sat Aug 02, 2014 2:30 am

EricBarbour wrote:Wonder if Jimbo reads Yarvin, and takes him seriously. No, scratch that, if anyone we've seen in the Wikipedia orbit lately was prone to following Yarvin, it would possibly be Wil Sinclair.

Plus, ADHD people usually make horrible leaders. Wikipedia, Reddit and 2.0 in general seem to prove that over and over.
It's not really the users of those websites who have the real power, it's the overlooked owners, and many of them are just nuts.

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