Taboos inside taboos

Last night a friend called from Washington wanting to know if it were true that Germar Rudolf is going to be deported to stand trial in Germany for revisionist thought crimes. I said that is my understanding. In about a week. We talked for half an hour. We wondered when the time will come when even the factotums working for the German State will understand that they are destroying their credibility by not allowing their credibility to be challenged with regard to the Holocaust story.

The prosecution and imprisonment of revisionists for thought crimes has very little, if anything, to do with the accuracy of what revisionists write or how they interpret the historical facts. It is all the expression of taboo. We cannot talk openly about what happened between Germans and Jews during WWII. The discussion is circumscribed, censored, suppressed, taboo.

During World War II the overwhelming majority of those in German occupied Europe collaborated with the Germans. Anne Frank’s father, Otto, was among them. He made his living collaborating with the Germans. That was then. What’s changed?

Today almost every government in Europe collaborates with the Germans in maintaining the taboo against an open debate on the Holocaust story. Americans are particularly corrupt in our collaboration with the Germans on this issue. America was formed on one ideal—that of intellectual freedom. We betray that ideal, and reveal our own moral corruption, in our collaboration with the Germans today. Nothing’s changed.

Revisionists have our own taboos. It is taboo to criticize the published writings or statements of revisionists who admire Hitler and the Hitlerian regime. It is taboo to publicly question the racialist arguments of specific revisionists. Taboo to argue publicly against the anti-semitism that exists among revisionists. It is not that we cannot do it, or occasionally do not do it, but we understand that when we do we will break the taboo against doing it, and we’ll suffer the consequences.

Creating taboo to protect something you hold dear from being questioned is what people do. It plays a significant role in human culture. All of it. And taboos do not stand alone. There are taboos inside of taboos, and other taboos inside those. Alan Watts argued that the greatest taboo of all is the taboo against knowing yourself. If you want to know yourself, you have to wake up. You can’t get to know yourself when you’re half asleep. Who among us, especially among the Germans, wants to take a chance on truly waking up?

I think Watts was right. Waking up to who you really are is taboo. Ask the Germans. Ask their primary collaborators, the Americans. The fear of waking up, of breaking the Holocaust taboo, is everywhere among them.