Taki’s Mag on 1 December 2016 published an essay by Jew and former Holocaust Revisionist David Cole titled, “See, This Is Why We Can’t Have White Things.” The essay pretends to advise White Nationalists about how best to present themselves. Even apart from the question of whether David Cole really has the best interests of White Nationalists at heart, it is clear that this is a very dishonest essay.
Rhetorically, it is a venerable technique to begin an address by making points that you know your audience will find agreeable. That is what Sinon the Greek did in Vergil’s account of how the wooden horse full of Greek soldiers was introduced into Troy. Sinon told the Trojans that the Greeks were terrible people, and the Trojans were impressed with his truthfulness. Behold, an honest Greek! After that, Sinon could lie to the Trojans and they would believe it. You establish credibility with an otherwise skeptical audience by telling them what they already believe.
That is how David Cole begins this essay, by saying things that he knows will meet with approval. After an unflattering story about Hillary Clinton, he launches into criticism of Richard Spencer‘s performance at the now notorious NPI conference of 19 November. He says that Spencer should not have made quasi-hitlerian utterances and gestures “in a spirit of irony” while expecting the media to portray it, and the public to understand it, as irony. This is self-evident common sense. I have said the same myself.
It does not appear that Cole really examined what Spencer said, since he uncritically repeats the false report that Spencer referred to Jews as golems (rhetorically questioning whether they were human) when this comment was clearly about Republican strategists.
Cole then says that any association with Hitler and National-Socialism is toxic to public relations. There is certainly some truth in that, but Holocaust Revisionists, of whom Cole once claimed to be one, see this as largely due to misrepresentation.
Cole acknowledges that there are people who see Hitler’s bad reputation as undeserved, but these people, he advises, are unhelpful to the White Nationalist cause:
Their ultimate goal is only partly to make things better for whites in the here and now; they also want to reach back in time and provide a little image repair for good old Adolf.
Thus Cole tells us that revising the history of Adolf Hitler is an unnecessary distraction from White advocacy, a waste of time. Certainly we have heard this annoying refrain before, usually from people whose motives could be questioned. Often it seems to be cowardice, mental laziness, or a conflict of interest masquerading as prudence. What is always evident, however, is that they cannot defend their position in a discussion. But surely Cole’s motives are beyond reproach! Surely a swarthy Jew, a member of the ethnic group that bears primary responsibility for the defamation of Adolf Hitler and for Cultural Marxism generally, wants to make things better for Whites!
The clear necessity for White nationalists to challenge the Jewish Holocaust story was explained convincingly in Richard Harwood’s seminal Did Six Million Really Die? as long ago as 1974:
Why the Big Lie? What is its purpose? In the first place, it has been used quite unscrupulously to discourage any form of nationalism. Should the people of Britain or any other European country attempt to assert their patriotism and preserve their national integrity in an age when the very existence of nation-states is threatened, they are immediately branded as “neo-Nazis”. Because, of course, Nazism was nationalism, and we all know what happened then — Six Million Jews were exterminated! So long as the myth is perpetuated, peoples everywhere will remain in bondage to it; the need for international tolerance and understanding will be hammered home by the United Nations until nationhood itself, the very guarantee of freedom, is abolished. [R. Harwood, Did Six Million Really Die?, 1974]
In the event that one is not quite convinced of the lack of utility in revising Hitler’s reputation, Cole argues that it is not even possible anyway, because, it turns out, Hitler really is the Devil! In support of that position, to make his argument credible, he quotes three nationalist sources. The problem is that he quotes all three in a misleading manner.
Cole quotes a statement from an essay by James Harting reposted by National Vanguard (from Stormfront) that says that Hitler saw himself as a leader only of the Germans:
It must be said that Hitler did not consider himself as any kind of a world leader of Aryandom. Rather, he saw himself as the political leader of the German nation, and perhaps more generally the symbolic leader of all of the Germanic peoples. [James Harting, “Adolf Hitler: German Chancellor or Pan-Aryan Leader?”, Stormfront, 14 December 2013]
Cole omits the subsequent explanation that Hitler acquired broader significance:
Increasingly as the War went on, Hitler found himself as the de facto head of all of the Aryan peoples of Europe, and not just of the Germans or of the Germanics.
In fact it is Harting’s thesis that Hitler really was “the symbolic leader of the whole of the Aryan race.” By quoting a concessive statement out of context, Cole has inverted the essay’s overall meaning.
Cole quotes from Himmler‘s essay of 15 May 1940 , about the treatment of the inhabitants of German-occupied Poland, the words “dieses Untermenschenvolk des Ostens.” Cole omits to mention that the essay also proposes to allow children of Slavic national origin to be educated in Germany, if their parents wish and if they meet racial standards. The takeaway is that not all Slavs were regarded as Untermenschen.
However, even with the proviso that it does not mean every Pole, Himmler’s generalization may seem absurdly harsh to American ears in the 21st century. The seeming egregiousness of Himmler’s view is dispelled when one considers what some others had to say about the Poles in that era. An American reporter for the Chicago Tribune gives a very unflattering account:
Paul Super was an American who worked for many years to help Poland. He was director of the American Young Men’s Christian Association. […] After working 18 years among Polish boys, he told me the thing which horrified him most was “The Pole’s lack of respect for property.” To put it more plainly: that there were so many thieves in Poland.
In his campaigns in the United States to raise money to help Polish youth, Super mailed tens of thousands of appeals to American firms and individuals. One of these, which he presented to me, was a small mimeographed leaflet. It contained a fearful indictment of the Polish government. It runs as follows:
“I know a city — which has a population of 600,000 — but — it has water-works and no sewer system. It’s Lodz, Poland. It is probably the largest cotton-mill center on the continent of Europe. 1064 smoke-stacks belching smoke. Most of these are cotton mill smoke stacks. Tens of thousands of Mill-hands. Each one a person. There is utterly inadequate provision for decent recreation, physical exercise, vocational education, wholesome boy life. Owing to general conditions this city is a splendid breeding place for: discontent, radical socialism, bolshevism, tuberculosis, social immorality, irreligion. Young men born there hardly have a fair chance at life’s real values: education, christian character, personal growth, health, a chosen vocation, citizenship, enjoyment of beauty, home life.”
He continues to tell how the YMCA (that is himself) succeeded in organizing some of the unselfish citizens of Lodz in 1922, how they obtained promises and enrolled 1,200 members of whom 340 were attending classes, and how they founded a library with 3,376 books which were read by 1,096 persons each month. He urged Americans to help widen YMCA work in Poland. Through this and other appeals Super collected money to build a modern YMCA building with a swimming pool for Lodz. He erected three such institutions in Poland, the other two being located in Warsaw and Krakow.
But the point I am driving at is this: this appeal was mailed to America in 1934. The conditions he portrays as existing in Lodz were also to be found in many other Polish cities and towns. After 14 years of national existence the Polish government had been unable to improve such conditions. Neither in Lodz, nor any other town.
Pride has always been a dominating characteristic of the Poles. At the receptions and parties I attended I was invariably asked how I liked Poland and I very frankly stated that I did not like the country at all. This always shocked the questioner. When I explained the living standard of the inhabitants of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia was far higher than in Poland, that the streets of Baltic cities were not overrun with beggars, that the Baltic peoples could afford to buy soap and liked to use it and kept themselves, their homes, their cities and streets spotlessly clean, the Poles were very much surprised.
German prosperity and Polish poverty (1920). They were proud of their culture. That culture was much more of the past than of the present. For instance: they made much of the Poles’ love for horses. I have traveled much but I have never seen so many blind and starved horses as I have seen on city streets and country roads in Poland. In fact, there were so many that I questioned a number of veterinary surgeons. They told me the average Polish peasant is so lazy and cruel that he frequently blinds a nervous, high-strung horse rather than take the trouble of breaking it properly to harness.
At one of these receptions a titled Polish woman became impatient with me. “Please remember Mr. Day, that Poland is a backward country. A century ago Poland was culturally 200 years behind France. Today we are still two hundred years behind France and very possibly we shall be still two hundred years behind France a hundred years hence.” France was the ideal of the average Pole.
She continued:
“Let me tell you a true little story which will show you how backward we really are. It was told to me by our minister of health. Last year he issued an order directing the policemen throughout the country to make a monthly inspection of the village latrines. You see, usually a Polish village has only one latrine for the entire community and if it is a larger village sometimes there will be two. One policeman, making his usual inspection of the latrines in his district, discovered one to be clean and in good order. He complimented the Starastvo (village elder). A month later to his amazement he discovered the latrine was still in the best of order. He asked the Starastvo to tell him how he managed to keep it so clean, so he could inform the other village leaders, thus relieving him of the necessity of imposing fines each month. ‘That is easy,’ said the Starastvo, ‘I keep it locked up.'”
The Polish lady did not display the slightest trace of shame when she told me this anecdote. A few minutes later when she asked me what I thought of Polish women, I decided it was my turn to shock her. I said I found them “Beautiful, but dirty.” [Donald Day, Onward Christian Soldiers, pp. 66-67]
Cole quotes Ernst Zündel saying at a conference of the IHR in 1994 that he encountered Russians who were irritated about the fact that “Soviets” had been called Untermenschen during the Second World War. This requires some explanation.
First, the National-Socialist use of the term Untermensch comes from the American writer Lothrop Stoddard. In his book The Revolt Against Civilization: the Menace of the Under-Man, Stoddard said that Bolshevism was possible where there were many degenerate men, whom he called the Under-Man. In German this was rendered as der Untermensch. It was Lothrop Stoddard’s theory, then, that Untermenschen were the cause of the Soviet Union. One could thus generalize that the “Soviets” were Untermenschen.
Now, if some or many Russians were brutes who supported Bolshevism, it does not mean that all were like that. (In fact the Bolsheviks, at the time of their takeover, relied heavily on non-Russian muscle.) We have already seen that Himmler did not regard every Slav as an Untermensch. Even the SS publication Der Untermensch does not say that Slavs categorically, or any Slavic nation, are Untermenschen.
The false claim that the National-Socialists regarded all Slavs as Untermenschen was propagated during and after the war, along with the claim that they were being gassed by the millions in Auschwitz. (The fact that some Slavic nations, Slovakia, Croatia, and Bulgaria, were allied with Germany, and that many others were recruited into foreign legions of the SS and Wehrmacht, has been overlooked and forgotten — except when Jews wanted to accuse a Pole like Frank Walus or a Ukrainian like John Demjanjuk of warcrimes.) To make Soviet rule seem preferable to German occupation, the most extreme lies had to be told. Thus, it is not a bit surprising that Ernst Zündel encountered Russians in 1994 who believed this. But it does not reflect reality.
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| In spite of racial doctrine, the Germans appeared as liberators to many Slavs and others in the USSR. |
Finally Cole suggests that if nationalists want to succeed they should strenuously avoid any hint of association with Hitler.
The wisdom of this advice depends on what one wishes to accomplish. If one is trying to be elected to public office, then one has to take care not to buck existing public opinion too much. If, however, one’s purpose is to alter public opinion, then one must not revere public opinion as it is. One must be willing to violate taboos.
There is this famous observation about the phases in the introduction of a new truth, attributed (perhaps spuriously) to Arthur Schopenhauer:
All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; and third, it is accepted as self-evident.
Anybody who wants to change the world must be willing to endure belittlement and hostility. Anybody who thinks that it is smarter to avoid all that trouble, or gives up because he encounters opposition, is not going to be able to change very much.
On the other hand, if NPI is to be taken seriously as a think-tank, and if bourgeois respectables like Jared Taylor and Peter Brimelow are to continue appearing at those conferences, then the gratuitously provocative touches in Spencer’s presentation were unwise and damaging to NPI’s mission, but it is not clear that any net harm was done to White Nationalism as such. There is always something to be said for stretching the Overton window, and really people should not be shocked and appalled at the sight of a Roman salute (formerly practiced in the USA as the Bellamy salute), but I believe that vastly greater benefit is derived from persuasion with national-socialist ideas than from direct efforts to normalize National-Socialist symbols.
The specific taboo of association with Adolf Hitler is one that nationalists ultimately cannot avoid. This was discovered by Enoch Powell in 1968 when he called for non-White immigration to Britain to be curtailed, and it was used against Donald Trump during the year prior to his election — backfiring in this instance, because Trump had a substantial core of supporters who would not desert him in any case, due to the recognized necessity of his agenda.
Cole, as a Jew, obviously could have no interest in the success of White Nationalism. If he drew attention to himself in the early 1990s as “the Jewish Holocaust Revisionist” by capitalizing on the work of others after Auschwitz had already been debunked, it was only a few years later that he was reined in by other Jews, including not only the Jewish Defense League but his own family. Since then, by adopting the artificial Semi-Revisionist position that the Holocaust in general was real even if Auschwitz was fake (which is hard to take back), he has more or less fallen back in line with Jewish ethnic interests.
Cole says:
In my entire life, I’ve never uttered a single pro-Hitler sentiment….
No surprise there, Colenstein! It is a rare Jew (Roger Dommergue, Benjamin Freedman) who is capable of putting aside ethnic bias to that degree, and also has the courage to buck the pressure that Jews place upon other Jews to conform.
Maintaining the demonization of Adolf Hitler, who certainly was a prominent opponent of Jewish power regardless of whether any Jew was gassed, is an obvious Jewish ethnic interest. Correspondingly, the rehabilitation of Adolf Hitler and his government is an essential interest of White people, but it cannot be accomplished while heeding the advice of David Cole.