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Mike Isaacson: Lügenpresse!
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Muslim’s rampant femicide
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Hiter lived and no Jews diedArmy, navy, and the cops
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These are nazi liesMike: Welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. Today, we're talking about the lying press with Jonathan Hardy, professor of communications and media at the University of Arts, London. His most recent book, Branded Content: The Fateful Merging of Media and Marketing, explores the world of branded content, particularly native advertising or sponsored content–longform marketing copy made to look like news items. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Hardy.
Jonathan Hardy: Thank you, Mike. It's a pleasure to be here.
Mike: It's great to have you. So I'm really excited to talk about marketing with you because that's the industry I'm in now, and I do have some ethical issues with some of the techniques that we use. Now I write in the B2B space, selling services to business owners and officers, so I don’t super have a problem with what I do–you know, manipulating business owners into buying things.
So reading your book, what comes up again and again is that most of these marketing techniques aren’t new, but the digital age has made them more invasive and persistent. Can you talk a bit about how digitization has changed the advertising world?
Jonathan: Sure. Well, it's done so definitely in a great many ways but I'll talk about some key ones that really relate to the work I've been doing on branded content. In the 20th century, through most of the 20th century, we had a model that I call advertising integration with separation, which means that the advertising appeared in the same vehicles as media.
When you looked at a magazine or a newspaper, you turned the page and it’s editorial, you turn the page, it's advertising. Or the adverts that appeared between programs on television and radio. So we had integration, but often some quite strict rules and strict practices that kept advertising and media separate.
So what we're seeing in the digital age is an intensification of two tendencies which face in opposite directions. One is towards integration, so advertising getting baked into media content and integrated with it; product placement all the way through to influencer marketing, branding content and so on. But the other trend is disaggregation, advertising getting decoupled from media. Because essentially in the digital age, advertisers didn't need–as some of them put it–to pay the premium prices to put their ads in media content. They could track users around the internet. So these are trends going in opposite directions obviously, right? One is about integration, the other one is about disaggregation.
But I argue that they have one really common power, which is that they indicate the growing strength of marketers over media. Media that rely on advertising revenue are having to become more and more dependent, satisfying advertisers who want to integrate their content so that people will engage with it. And they're also desperate because of these other trends of losing ad revenue coming from disaggregation to kind of, again, appeal as much as they can. So what we're seeing is a strengthening of marketer power in the digital age.
Mike: So my intention with this episode was to give a deep dive into how things like the Cambridge Analytica scandal could have happened. To start, let’s get some technical details. We’re talking mostly about inbound marketing today. So before we get into advertising techniques and stuff, what is the difference between inbound and outbound marketing?
Jonathan: Sure. Well, I'll talk about that, Mike. But we should acknowledge there's some confusion here, because these terms are not always used to talk about the same things.
I think one really valuable aspect is this idea of push and pull, right? If you're pushing out messages, this is known as outbound marketing. You're sort of pushing your message out to reach people. If you on the other hand create great content that people come to you for to engage with, that's pulling. And that's known as inbound. So, so far, so good. That makes sense to me.
But this is used in other ways too, and I think that illustrates actually a broader point which is that marketers, not surprisingly, are often in a competitive struggle to be on the side of the new and the innovative, and not the old and the tired. So some versions of inbound and outbound marketing I think get a bit problematic here. Because outbound in some versions is kind of associated with scattergun marketing. Right? The opposite of inbound as highly targeted aiming at particular people.
And I don't really buy that. You know, marketers sometimes talk about spray and pray, for instance, you know? Chucking out messages. But quite honestly, most of the time modern marketers don't do that because they can't afford to do that. So I don't really buy the argument that outbound is untargeted. I think that's misleading.
What's a bit more helpful from all of this, and actually quite a crucial issue, is if you like the challenges for a thing called push marketing. The challenge is when people are not engaging with traditional advertising forms and pushing them out, and the need to come up with more engaging content; either because it's more entertaining or it's more informative. And I think that aspect of inbound is important.
Mike: So when it comes to inbound marketing, it’s all about the buyer journey or the marketing funnel. Can you talk a bit about the theory behind the marketing funnel?
Jonathan: Yeah, sure. I often test this out on students, but if you were studying advertising in the 20th century, you might have come across a model called AIDA, which was a mnemonic, helps you remember some important fundamentals.
AIDA stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. And it kind of summed up this idea of what's called in modern terms, a marketing funnel or a customer journey. Sort of how if you're a brand, people start off with awareness and then become more interested and motivated all the way up to purchase. That's essentially what the marketing funnel means.
Just to relate it to branded content for a moment, it was often argued in the past that brands branded content, which means content that's produced or funded by brands, was particularly associated with that early stage–building brand awareness.
But if you speak to people in the industry, they say it's not really true. Branded content is the content that serves people right across the customer journey. So if you think someone becomes more interested and they want to find more information about the product, for example, I think they're right and I think that's–
We're often thinking about a new world where brands are involved in kind of thinking, "What are the information needs? What are the communication needs of consumers at every point?" And engaging with it. And amongst other things, that's breaking down some old divisions between what we might call advertising and customer services. And as an academic, I'm really interested. I'm critical of a lot of what's going on, but I'm interested in how that speaks to a changing world and convergence across communications.
Mike: Where I work, we definitely use branded content across the buyer journey and we use different kinds of content for different points along the journey. So for instance, we do more informative content for when you're in the awareness stage. Whereas when you're in the purchasing stage, we hit you more with salesy content. Because that's the point where you're trying to just hear about the benefits and decide upon a final product.
Jonathan: Yeah exactly.
Mike: Can you talk a little bit about the software that's used to track customers? Because that's something that I don't think most people are aware about, the CRM software.
Jonathan: Yeah. CRM means customer relations management software. Some of your listeners might be aware of software like Salesforce, which tracks relations between a company and its clients, or including its prospects. So yeah, customer relations management is a huge area.
One of the things I looked at interestingly was the annual reports of what are called the holding companies. These are the really big groups that own advertising agencies and PR agencies. And they've been in a battle for survival and for their presence in companies, and they're often fighting alongside companies like Accenture who are offering companies all sorts of other data services.
So it's a kind of interesting world in which the traditional advertisers are maneuvering to cover more ground because that ground’s becoming more and more important to companies. And definitely, all the data around customers and other people in the chain is a really important battleground for these firms.
Mike: Okay, and we'll talk a bit about what gets fed into the CRM in a bit. So the company I work for, we do exclusively owned media and digital ads, pretty much all inbound with an occasional email campaign here or there. But there’s other forms of digital advertising, too. Let’s start by talking about what owned media is. What do advertisers mean when they talk about owned media?
Jonathan: Okay. This is content that's produced and published by the brand or the marketer themselves. It's got a really long history. In the United States at the end of the 19th century, the farm implements company John Deere had a magazine called The Furrow, for example. So what we now call contract publishing by a brand. Lots of other examples; the Michelin Guide to restaurants, the Guinness Book of Records, and so on.
Brands have been involved in producing their own content for a long time, but this really got turbocharged in the internet age. With the early internet, brands started to create their own websites and web pages. They've now moved right across social media, for example. And some brands have become essentially media companies. So a brand like Red Bull, which is involved right across kind of music, sports, etc, is producing content of all kinds to support the brand.
Your listeners, again, one of the models that's really helpful for students and might be of interest to your listeners is called PESO. PESO stands for paid, which is a term for advertising essentially, right? The brand pays and controls. Earned, which stands for traditional public relations. You work in PR, you write a great story or a feature, it gets carried by the media, you didn't pay. That's called earned media. The S is for shared. Used to be called viral, but shared is a much nicer word for things that get moved and amplified across the internet and social media. And then the O is owned. And what PESO tells us is, these things are still separate but they're overlapping and converging in the middle.
Mike: Right. So the problem with owned media is that you have to get it in front of people. What are the various ways that advertisers try to get their own media to an audience?
Jonathan: Well, I'm just gonna... If you don't mind, I'll just pick up this word 'problem', Mike, because it might help to explain where I come from on these issues.
I think the industry is essentially looking for how to do marketing better, right? And quite a lot of people who are in academia, in universities like myself, are really asking and answering the same question. Their aim is really to help marketers do better and do research on it. And I call all of that affirmative. So the problem from that framing is how can we do this better? How can we learn how to be more effective?
But I would self-describe myself as coming from a critical tradition, a tradition of critical political economy. And we ask a different question about “problem.” We say, "Are there problems in the way communications are organized and delivered? Are there problems for communication users? Are there problems for societies? And if there are, if things aren't great out there, let's identify them, understand them, and think about how to change them." So when I come to questions of problems, that's really the kind of dominant lens that I look at them. But obviously like anyone in order to understand things better, you've got to listen to everyone in this space; to industry practitioners, and I work a lot with them.
So that's just a wider framing, but actually to answer your question. Well, it's interesting because historically, they've struggled. Right? Brands have kind of invested in great content and then found surprise, surprise! People aren't always interested in going to corporate websites and finding this stuff.
So part of this story has been brands producing content that they need advertising, social media advertising, to say to people, "Hey, we've done this. Here's a snippet, but come and look at the full amount." That's an interesting feature. But essentially, in this space brands would say, "Well, you've got to produce material of value back to this language of sort of pull. People have to be engaged, entertained, and/or informed. Those are the key things you need to do to solve the problem."
But the other thing we'll come on to is when the marketing messages get disguised and buried. Just to give you another take on problems, I think there are problems about brand's own content. Sometimes that can be really entertaining and I enjoy it like anyone else, but there are problems essentially because it's a brand voice. And sometimes that brand voice can be louder than other voices. And that essentially is an issue. But actually, I see less problems with brands and content compared to the material that's weaved into media content: sponsored, editorial, native advertising, and so on.
Mike: Okay. What about things like SEO, SMO, paid search, display ads? That sort of thing.
Jonathan: Sure. SEO, search engine optimization, is a practice of trying to improve your ranking traditionally in search results, but in wider areas of content so that it gets visibility and people engage with it. Right? Because we all know people don't turn mostly past the first page of search ranking results. And as I know you know, this divides into what are called relatively good practices and bad practices, sometimes referred to as white hat–in other words, everyone does this to try and be effective–and blackhat, which is nefarious 'don't do this'.
What that sums up is a cat-and-mouse game between marketers and agencies and the platforms, because the platforms are concerned to ensure the integrity and quality of search results because they depend on that trust and therefore want to move some of these black practices off to the margins, if not get rid of them entirely.
But we should remember, of course, these platforms are not just there to serve the consumer. They're there to generate ad revenue. And some of the tensions that play out in that space are important to note, too.
But I'd say for me, again, there's a whole literature on how to do search engine optimization and if you were teaching people how to be marketers, I'd certainly say they need to understand that.
One of the bigger concerns for me is about awareness. How aware are consumers of things like sponsored search results? There was some really important research done by the UK regulator for communications, Ofcom, which looked at young people and found that a majority of them couldn't recognize the difference between sponsored listings and so-called organic ones. Only a third of young people aged 12 to 15, for example, knew which search results on Google were sponsored, were adverts, or organic. That's a really, I think, important issue and an ongoing issue.
Mike: Yeah, especially when it comes to children. Let's dig a little deeper into SEO. What kind of techniques do content producers both in media and advertising use to boost their search engine results?
Jonathan: Oh, wow. There's a lot of terms and some great names out there to describe some of this stuff: keyword stuffing, cloaking, bait and switch. What they really have in common is artificially enhancing the value of your content without the intrinsic worth and value that would come from people's clicks and engagement. Okay? So there are a whole series from mildly artificial through to downright criminal and exploitative means to do it. One of the more serious, for example, is this great term brandjacking, where someone acquires or otherwise assumes the online identity of a brand for the purposes of inquiring their followers, their brand equity as they say.
Mike: It can be less than that too. It can just be, for instance, putting a brand's name as one of your keywords in paid search. That's brand jacking too.
Jonathan: Exactly, Yeah, exactly.
Mike: Yeah. So keyword stuffing, this idea of throwing search terms into content. One other thing though that bothers me a little bit where I work is the way that we go after keywords. The content that we write is pretty much exclusively based on whether there is search for it. And so as a result–I guess in the aggregate–you end up with huge patches of knowledge that just are not covered by free media.
Jonathan: Yeah, I agree. I think one of the fundamental questions here is, "What about brand voice in a world where that voice comes with resources that are not widely shared?" Right? In order to be a marketer, you have resources of money. And money buys you the chance to speak. Not everyone in our world gets the chance to speak and be heard, but brands can do it through their money.
Now, of course there are small brands, there are radical organizations who advertise. But we also know that the concentration of voice is often in the hands of the concentration of wealth. Which means some people, some brands, some interests, some ideas get privileged over others. And that is a really fundamental concern and it drives, for me, this issue of saying, "Well, what's the settlement for society between communications and brands?"
In the old world, I mentioned the 20th century, we had some settlements. We had some rules which said, "We're going to really make sure that you know this is an advert and we're going to keep some controls on where advertising appears and how much appears and what's advertised."
And the digital age is throwing up challenges all the time because new spaces, new opp,ortunities emerge for brands. And the rules are often some way behind. So those are the, kind of fundamental issues. I think voice is a really good term to use to get into that.
Mike: Right. So in addition to the black hat and white hat, there are gray hat techniques which kind of straddle the boundaries of marketing ethics. One example is the subject of your book, which is native ads, sponsored content, advertorials. So, what are these? What is sponsored content? We've talked about it a bit, we haven't really defined it.
Jonathan: Sure. Well, lots of different forms. But what's common to a lot of the forms I examined is in the way the industry would describe it, that the advertising is blended into the media environment in which it appears. Okay? The advertising is integrated and blended in.
And I think a good way in is–building on what I was just saying to you, really–is to start by asking some questions about payment and control. Those are really key elements in tracking this story.
In the old world, we had advertorials in newspapers and magazines. We still do, of course, but they're a feature of the old world. And the brand paid and controlled the content. It was an ad, but it was an ad that started to blend in to its surroundings.
But what's happened in the digital age is that's taken off across all media. So we have native advertising as a term for adverts, which are also paid for and controlled by the brand, but are coming into your newsfeed on mobile social media and so on.
Then we have sponsored content. And here, things get a bit more complicated because these questions of payment and control get widened. Because sometimes the brand pays and controls, sometimes the brand pays and the media, the publisher, or an influencer for example says, "No, we control the content." And sometimes it's a blend of both.
And fundamentally across that spectrum, we don't have clear and consistent labeling that is readily understood by people to know exactly what's happening here. So we don't always know when a brand paid and shaped content in this space, and that's a fundamental problem.
Sorry, but can I just put in–I don't know if this will be helpful or not-- but an example I was going to give from the UK is that we have a London paper called The Evening Standard. And an investigation by an online publication, openDemocracy, discovered that Syngenta, which is a US agribusiness firm, was paying for favorable editorial in that newspaper. But those stories weren't being clearly labeled as paid for and sponsored by Syngenta. And obviously, that's a big deal because Syngenta was at the time being sued by a large number of American farmers, which of course didn't feature in this more positive coverage.
So here we have some problems of labeling and identifying content, we have some problems of what kind of story gets shown, but we also have an issue which goes to the heart of this where the brand could pay but the publication could say, "No, we're in control. So we don't have to label that as an ad."
Mike: Right. And there's also the other problem of advertisers' control over media in general, where if there's an unfavorable story they could have it pulled. And we've seen instances of this, too.
Jonathan: Yeah, it's funny. And just to share with you, sometimes when you're talking to students particularly as a professor, it's good to show them that you may make mistakes, too. So I shared the fact that, you know, I'm in a tradition which has seen advertiser influence on the media as essentially a negative force, right? And looked at, kind of, "Well, when does this happen? And how does it happen? And how is it resisted?" You know, sometimes it's resisted because journalists say, "We're not going to have it."
Chrysler company told American magazine editors it wanted to be told when they were putting its ad next to content it thought was controversial. The American Society of Magazine Editors said, "We're not doing that. We stand up for free media." So, those kinds of stories.
But I said to the students I have to update this. Because we're in an era where advertisers are using their power and clout, sometimes for positive and progressive ends–ends that many of you might agree with. So you know, Unilever doing an ad ban on Facebook. The current ban or semi-ban, if you like, in which one of these major holding companies Omnicom is, quote, "Advising its clients,” so it's not quite a ban, but it's advice, “not to advertise on Twitter because look what Musk is doing, who knows how this is going to play out." So in its language, it's concerned with brand safety. It's advising marketers to produce a boycott.
So what I'm saying is I come from a tradition which sees advertising influence as negative. You could argue and it's important to recognize there's some positive things happening in these stories, brands doing good, right? Calling out hate speech and racism and xenophobia.
That story, of course, isn't just because those brands are angelic. It's because they've been put under powerful pressure from campaigns, from #StopHateForProfit in the US, Sleeping Giants, we have Stop Funding Hate in the UK. ANd also, frankly there's still a problem. Because however good they do, they still have enormous power and they can still use it in unaccountable ways. But anyway, there's a story that just acknowledges that it's sometimes complicated.
Mike: So native advertisement's gone beyond traditional news media in the digital age. Where else do we find sponsored content?
Jonathan: Well, we find it right across what we could call audio-visual. We've had a long history of product placement in films and television programs but, you know, there's some big questions about where that's going next. Amazon is a company that sells things, but it's chock full of audiovisual content, sponsored brand videos, and so on. So as this world evolves, as we get Amazon's Alexa and audio marketing, we're going to have more and more content in which there's a brand role and a brand presence.
Another big example is the Beta Verses. I was at a recent conference with advertising lawyers and they were kind of half-jokingly saying, "What's going to happen in this world? Are people going to walk around in T-shirts with #AdOn if it's sponsored? How is the brand presence going to be seen and identified?"
And again just on this, I'd like to go back to something that was written in 1966. The code of the International Chamber of Commerce is kind of the big international code, the self-regulatory code for marketers. And it said, at the time, "Advertisements should be clearly distinguishable as such, whatever their form and whatever the medium used." Again, I like to share with you and my students, that's great language. That includes TikTok. It was written in 1966. It's really clear what it's asking for.
And it went on to say, "When published into medium post that also contains news and editorial opinion, an advertisement should be so presented that the consumer can readily distinguish it from editorial matter." That's interesting because it didn't even need to add that second sentence. It's just indicating that it really underscores the importance in some of our media like news and editorial that it really matters that we can trust the content and it's not an ad. That was 1966, I don't think that describes the world today, I don't think that rule even in its current form holds, but it does exist to call on.
Mike: Yeah, I know. We now have companies that are flooding their own reviews with positive reviews to boost their rankings on Google and stuff. I do want to talk about something that skeeves me out in what I do, and that's ad retargeting. So, what is ad retargeting?
Jonathan: Retargeting ads are a form of online targeted advertising that is served to people because they visited a particular website.
We all know this, you kind of go to a website, look at a pair of shoes, go on to some other websites, and you're being flooded by adverts for those shoes. What on earth is going on? And the answer has been third-party cookies.
So to introduce another term, cookies are bits of data that get put onto your browser, so they can then follow you as you move around the rest of the internet. And those so-called third-party cookies are sold for advertising purposes; they build up a profile of you so that you can be advertised to.
And that's essentially what's gone on in retargeting. Now, the world of cookies is undergoing a change at the moment, which is interesting. But all your listeners will know this experience, as you say, of ad targeting. And it's still very much present in our experience of the internet.
Mike: Yeah. So basically the cookies originally were intended, as I understood it, to allow websites to remember what you have, like in your shopping cart on digital marketing or on a digital storefront. And they kind of morphed into this weird thing where they can now track you across the Internet and add things to your profile so they have more and more information about you. Okay.
Jonathan: Yeah. Well, there's an important difference, Mike. The first type you're talking about is called first-party cookies. And the important thing is, again, many of your listeners will say, "Actually, some of what they provide is quite helpful to me." You know, you go to a website, you put something in a shopping basket, you don't want to pay for it. But when you come back to that site, it's still in your shopping basket, right? That's a cookie that's controlled by the website itself. And often, frankly that can be a help to us. It's still collecting data. It still raises privacy issues.But it's often helpful.
Third-party is different. For example, you go to a publisher who signed up to Google's AdSense. You go there because you want to read a story, but what gets put onto your browser is a third-party cookie. And that is being used to sell advertising to reach you.
Mike: The third party being AdSense, right?
Jonathan: Yeah.
Mike: Okay. So let's talk a little bit about market research. How have market research techniques advanced in the digital age?
Jonathan: I mentioned there’s this challenge to third-party cookies. And that's been driven by a number of factors. It's been driven partly because with more use of mobile, people are on different devices, it's harder to track them. It's been driven by privacy pressures which have led to important new regulation, particularly for us in Europe. And I'd say that from the UK, we don't know exactly what's going to happen next. In fact, we have a government that's probably going to relax rules that apply in Europe.
But from 2018, Europe said, "You need permission to collect cookies." And there was a really deep intake of breath across the advertising and marketing and platform industry saying, "This is going to destroy the model of internet advertising."
So you need permission, and we have strong rules now that demand it. As I understand it in the US, there's no federal-level regulation. But there are states–California is an example–which have brought in new rules for consent to kind of strengthen privacy and protection.
So, third-party cookies are on the slide. And to answer your question about data, one of the things that is becoming more and more important is so-called first-party data. So companies, brands are collecting as much material as they can about their customers so that they can market to them. So we're seeing a huge industry growing up around digital data in the areas of customer data, financial data, and operational data.
Mike: In addition to collecting their own market research data, businesses can also pay for data. So, what kind of marketing data are businesses and ad agencies buying?
Jonathan: What marketers are interested, as I say, in customer, financial, operational, derive from different sources. So yeah, they're buying up to create a richer tapestry of their clients and potential clients from their own data first party and from third-party data. And we're seeing the whole ecology of advertising and marketing and media changing with the growth of these firms that are basically data harvesters and data brokers.
Mike: And are advertisers the only one that are buying these data.
Jonathan: Certainly not. Political movements and organizations who want richer data on consumers to target them are also absolutely buying up this data too.
Mike: Okay, so now I think we’ve discussed is everything you’d need to know to understand how the Cambridge Analytica scandal worked. So let’s talk about it. So unlike the UK, the US did not have widely publicized hearings regarding Cambridge Analytica, so a lot of my US audience will probably be unfamiliar with what happened. So before we get into the details of how the scandal worked, big picture, what was the Cambridge Analytica scandal?
Jonathan: Well, I like to think of this as kind of a bundle of scandals actually because it involved failures across quite a range of organizations. Cambridge Analytica, this company that gathered and used data and sold it on to political campaigns, but other players too. I mean, it's one of the biggest scandals for Facebook.
So essentially what happens–and this as a practice goes back to 2015–is a Cambridge-based researcher puts out an app which collects the data on US Facebook users. But not just them–the people who willingly took part–it accesses the profiles of all their friends and family. So in the end, data on about 87 million Americans–about a quarter of the whole Facebook audience in the US–were collected.
Mike: Can you describe the app that they put out?
Jonathan: Yeah. Sure, Mike. The researcher was called Aleksandr Kogan, and he put out an app called This Is Your Digital Life. It was a psychological profile app in June 2014. Either way, one group that comes out reasonably good from this story and I'm particularly proud of this or pleased about this because it is close to my heart, was the Ethics Committee at Cambridge University, because that rejected an application by this academic and also made the damning judgment that Facebook's approach to consent fell far below the ethical expectations of the university. In other words, it was deeply unimpressed with Facebook's provision. But of course having said that, we could say Cambridge University has questions to answer because this was still an academic who undertook this work.
So it was an app, people who took part gave consent, but they didn't give consent for their entire network to be data scraped in this way. The crucial thing about the scandal is that data was then used and sold on to right-wing politicians in the US in various forms, to Ted Cruz for his presidential campaign, and later for Donald Trump, because it produced rich, detailed profiles of American voters, which allowed micro-targeting.
And we've seen this more and more, but it's a kind of early example of what kinds of micro targeting can be done. In other words, you identify a voter who's going to be particularly triggered by rights to own and carry a gun, for example, but you trigger a different message to a different voter to mobilize them. And often those messages can be actually flat contradiction that can be at odds, but it doesn't matter. It's whatever works to build your political coalition.
I think the other thing just to highlight from this is this is often framed as a digital story, but it's older and broader than that. It's about power and money. We've had lots of lobbyists who engage in political campaigns and, again, we might all agree it's okay to promote your candidate and do marketing techniques. But it's not okay to do the dark arts of demolishing a candidate through fake news and misinformation, for example.
Some of your listeners might be interested; I'm in the UK, I have a great shoutout for the Channel 4 News, a public service news channel which did amongst other things, an undercover investigation in which executives from Cambridge Analytica are sort of bragging, because they don't think they're being filmed, about how they've intervened in democratic elections. It's a deeply disturbing portrait of how money and power can be used to undermine democratic processes.
Mike: Okay. And Cambridge Analytica wouldn’t have been nearly as successful with what they did without the plethora of right-wing content farms pumping out slanted and misleading news content. Talk about the online ecosystem that existed in 2015-2016 that allowed these websites to thrive.
Jonathan: Yeah, one kind of crystallizing example, again some of your listeners will remember, was an infamous example of a Russian organization called the Internet Research Agency, which spent thousands of dollars on social media ads and promoted posts in an effort to influence the US elections in 2016. So misinformation, fake authors, pretending to be Texans when you're actually in a content farm as part of the kind of quasi-state corporate world of Russia.
How did that all happen? It partly happens because of the deeper logics and business models of the internet, right? You know, promoting controversy and hate, driving traffic and engagement. It happened because of lax rules on who's the source and sponsor of marketing messages. Lots of things caused it but yeah, that was the ecosystem at the time.
And I think, again, before we just jump to the digital, this happens because of money. And so much of the right which can often appear to be kind of grassroots is, as we know, funded by very rich corporate donors who often don't like to be particularly transparent about who they are and how they operate. And the left progressive forces, which are more rooted in popular movements, in the end have less resource. We don't have the power of capital. We have the power of trade unions and collective work, but relatively weakly resourced. And that's a key issue.
Mike: And the content farming, it wasn't just from the Russian state, it was also private sector too. I mean, there was money to be made here. So can you talk a bit about how that was profitable?
Jonathan: Yeah. Well, if you generate clicks, if you produce clickbait, then the algorithmic world recognizes success at the levels of engagement and eyeballs, and that can be monetized. We should remember that's often not the primary motivation for political campaigns, it was information, disinformation, and mobilizing people to vote for candidates.
But yeah, there's an economy built around it as well which meant advertisers became very aware that they were often not choosing to support right wing publications because of the way the algorithms were driving traffic towards popular and shared content. And that's one of the reasons we saw the first wave, if you like, of boycotts and withdrawals from big brands like– big companies, rather, like Unilever who were being advised that their brand safety was being compromised by the sites that were appearing on and that many of their consumers were deeply unhappy about hate speech being connected with their advertising and advertising dollars.
Mike: Yeah. So one of the things that happened too as a result of these boycotts was that major social media and search platforms kind of reformed their algorithms to try to suppress this misinformation from proliferating. So, how has the digital media landscape changed since the 2016 presidential election and since Brexit?
Jonathan: Well, as I say, I think we should recognize that it's often been civil society power, political power, these campaigns that have forced marketers to divest. This hasn't just come from corporate voices; it's come from popular campaigns which absolutely deserve recognition.
But as I say, I think marketers using their power for good is all well and good, if you like, but it's still an exercise in a marketer's power. And that power is ultimately private and in my view, unaccountable.
I mean, a defender would say, "What are you talking about? The market decides that consumers don't like it. That's a powerful force on brands." To which you could say, "Well, consumer power does matter." Right? Ad blocking is a really good example of consumer power in this world. But consumer power is dispersed, it's not concentrated. And it's not sufficient very often to challenge corporate power and interests.
So these are all arguments, essentially, for a much stronger public regulation of communications because it shouldn't be left to private power to regulate itself. But nor, however important it is, can we rely on consumers only, you know?
Like other people, I believe in the importance of media literacy and better education so we can find our way through this world and decode it, but I also don't think the burden of responsibility should lie on consumers. It should be a principle. If you're big and you're in a communications space, then you act responsibly, and public regulation is the only way to kind of underpin that that is actually done. Relying on self-regulation from powerful forces in this world is not enough.
Mike: Yeah. Especially when the advertising techniques are constantly changing and evolving, you can't expect consumers to be privy to new ways of reaching them. So we've talked about various advertising techniques, let's talk a bit about their social implications. What are the consequences we're seeing from the proliferation of owned media?
Jonathan: Sure. Well, I like to sum up the whole world of what I call branded content around three problem areas. The first key problem area is around consumer awareness–this principle that we should know when we're being sold to. And that gets the lion's share of attention, actually, from all parties to the discussion. And that's important. It's about labeling and disclosure and identification. But I argue that that attention tends to displace two others.
The second big area of concern is around the quality and integrity of the media. I don't think there's enough people in this world who are speaking up for the importance of having media spaces that are free from commercial influence and interference. So that's the second area.
And then the third area, which I think is really where the radical voices come in, where the critical tradition I’m part of comes in, is this notion of marketer's power of voice. You know, the significance of a world in which the ability to pay can give you a louder voice. It's not to say we can wish that away, but it is to say that it's a way of thinking about historically that societies have put limits on that. They've said, "This is where advertising can appear. This is how it can appear."
And I think we need a conversation about what those rules should be for the 21st century because at the moment, we're in a bit of a hybrid of old rules that are weak and don't work, and new spaces that are opening up. So for me, that's the call of my book, really, to say, "These are deep problems. This isn't just about surface-level techniques; this isn't just about new tools in the marketing toolbox. This is a much more deep reconfiguration of the space between commercial voices, advertising, and communication space, and we need to work out what the rule should be.
I put a call in for saying we really need to have a discussion about what a 21st century version of separation–keeping media and advertising apart–would look like. And I say that because of course we can't put it all back in the box, we can't come up with a solution that would have worked in 1960 and say that's going to do it. It isn't going to do it. But I think that's a really key discussion to be had. Where should we be seeking a world which is free or freer from commercial influence and interference? How are we going to create that? How should it be configured and organized?
Mike: Yeah. Going back to owned media, I mean, the owned media dominates search results now. It's basically impossible to look something up online unless you're finding it through Wikipedia without having to use corporate blogs. And there's always a limitation to that, right? There's always a wall where they will not give you more information than is necessary to hook you to their services, right?
When I farm out my content to freelancers, I actually specifically instruct them that the reader should come away knowing what to do, but not how to do it. And so there's a technique to writing instructional articles that make you feel more helpless, and that's definitely what we aim for in our copy, which I take particular pleasure in making business owners feel helpless and so on and whatever. So let's talk about native.
Jonathan: Can I just say, I think that's such an important point and I agree entirely, and it shows that, kind of, you know, this isn't a simple change where we can easily identify the before and after. What you're describing is a kind of world where more and more content comes from an interested party and is underpinned by money and monetizing it as a driver.
And we know historically we've relied on content to come from other quarters, right? I'm very proud to work in a university world because that's a world that defends the idea of, "Well, actually we should ask questions that are important for society, not the sponsor, not the company." So that's one side.
We've traditionally had media in various traditions, you know, a free press in the US standing up for the idea of independent and impartial, know the advertisers can't call the tune because then we lose something really precious and what it means to do journalism. And all of those alternative sites are weak because for me, this all comes down to these questions of resource, money and power as a way in, so they have relatively less. What are we going to do about it?
Well, in Europe some of us defend and advocate for public service media, but also for new forms of public service community media, non-profit, hyperlocal, because those are really important spaces where that other content gets produced.
I don't know about you, sometimes it's depressing that we don't link up the networks more effectively. Why don't we have publications that pull together all the non-governmental organizations and civil society groups who are producing great content but can't always get it out to wide audiences? We don't have a very great tradition of connecting the content with the vehicle to promote it amongst, if you like, the left and progressive causes. But plenty of people are thinking about how to do it.
And yeah, absolutely, it comes through to other solutions. We need to defend and extend public media–what I call in Europe, public service media. And do that in new ways, too, because some of the old ways have been– Well, PBS in the States and all the problems of corporate funding kind of shrinking what gets said in that space, so a lot to fix too. But I think that's a really important part of the solution. We need non-commercial media, and have to work out how to support and develop it to create that kind of other kinds of information.
Mike: So by that same token, open-access journals I think are also really important, too. The fact that so much media now is putting up paywalls, all these academic journals are charging $30-$40 to rent an article, and there's just really no way to get free information that isn't paid for in some way. So let's talk about native. What is the effect of sponsored content on the public?
Jonathan: Let me answer that by an example I show my students, which is an Exxon advertorial in the New York Times. Exxon paid for an editorial which said, "Guess what? The solution to the climate crisis isn't the removal of fossil fuels. It's smarter use of our assets." That sums up for me some of the greatest dangers, which is sponsored content amplifies voices who can speak with partiality because they're advocating for themselves, but undermines independent journalism in the process.
To give another example, Facebook, as you know, has paid huge sums into lobbying and influencing politicians in Europe because it senses danger, right? Europe has created some quite strong rules on data privacy and on cookies as we discussed earlier. Facebook took out 20 ad-sponsored content items in the British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph.
So it sets up stories with charity bosses who say Facebook is great without disclosing that they're financed by Facebook. It has people saying what great things it's doing to kind of cut content, even though it's been pushed out just after the Christchurch massacre, which of course was relayed for hours on Facebook and other social platforms before it was taken down.
That's the problem with sponsored content, it strengthens and amplifies voices. And of course there are other problems; it's disguised; it's hidden; people aren't aware of it. We should know who the source of our content is.
In fact, just be interested to talk to you because you're working in journalism. I think one of the things I grapple with but would really like to see more debate out is about the disclosure of sources. Now, I know from the Human Rights tradition and so on the absolute importance of protecting a journalist's sources. Because we don't get good stories if journalists can't protect whistleblowers and others.
But we need something which protects that important public interest right. That gives readers better guidance to what the provenance, you know, what's behind the story. We could have ingredients in food and drink, but what were the sources? And in particular, we definitely need to know when there's been a paid source underlying a piece of content.
So what drives me in that debate is one of the things that happened in the UK was we had a debate about political advertising on Facebook, which said we should be told better when there are political advertising. But that was running alongside another debate about how to save the British press, which was saying let's have more native advertising.
So we've had contradictions and gaps in the way these issues have been treated. And I think we should recognize what's happening underneath, which is we don't always know the interests and sources behind our content. And we should do. Particularly when it's either a political voice or a commercial voice.
Mike: Yeah. And I want to give a shoutout here to Corey Pein and his book, Live Work Work Work Die, where he talks about how the tech world typically, they don't really concern themselves with following rules and regulations. They just kind of do what they do and then just once regulators catch up to them, they hope they've made enough money where the fines or penalties or whatever is insignificant to how much profits they've made.
And we see that with what happened with Facebook and I guess Twitter to some extent where they weren't regulating political advertisements at all. At least in the United States, political advertising has certain rules for financing and stuff that you have to report it and stuff like that.
And so in the 2016 election, that was just out the window. And that's been fixed. Facebook now requires that political advertisements are registered as such, and they only get served in certain ways.
All right, so there are regulations in place regarding advertising. What safeguards exist to protect the public from nefarious advertisers?
Jonathan: I think just to respond to what you were saying, these are kind of almost the deeper myths, the deeper stories that have been told. The story that internet innovation was somehow kind of natural, inescapable, has-to-be-done-this-way. You want change and all these great services, this is what comes with it. It's going to be driven in these ways, we're going to move fast, we're going to trip over the old rules.
I don't know about you, I think that is a myth in the making and it doesn't stack up, and it's already fragmenting and under pressure. So when Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg gets into US hearings in the likes of Cambridge Analytica, he has to say something different at that point. He has to say we do stand up for privacy and consumer protection. The problem is he doesn't fully deliver, and perhaps the bigger problem is the grand-sounding statements are there to reassure investors and markets and other stakeholders, but behind the scenes, Facebook carries on paying millions into lobbyists who go and influence politicians to make sure the rules are kept as weak as possible.
So that would be my summary. In the space that I've looked at, native advertising and so on, we see a kind of mixed progress. So just taking the United States, 2015 Federal Trade Commission comes in with new rules and guidance on native advertising. And the rules are certainly an improvement: they're sharper; they're clearer.
But what happens? Compliance by the industry remains low. Some early studies found 70% of marketers within I think a year of the new guidance weren't compliant. It got a bit better. But all the latest studies show right across publishing or influencer marketing, there's a compliance problem.
There's that lobbying problem I mentioned. So the big marketers say, "Yes, we want to be responsible and transparent, it's in our interests that consumers know they've got ads." But actually then go and lobby. And the kind of thing they lobby over is to say, "Leave it to us what the disclosures should be."
So what happens is consumer awareness is very low. Lots of the academic studies in this area have found awareness rates of about 10%, right? People being able to fully identify ad-sponsored content in news publications, for example. And it remains very low. So these industry people are kind of saying, "Well, leave it to us. We need to be fitting for the platform." And the result is consumers have low awareness and are confused. And people like me in this debate and in my book say, "We should call this out. We should have– If the objective really was consumer awareness, then we should move to clearer and more consistent labeling." And why I perfectly accept Instagram and Facebook are not the same thing and TikTok is not the same thing, if we had much more consistent labeling, we'd be in a better place.
So one of the things I've argued for in Europe, for example, when we have product placement on television, unlike in the US it has to show a sign–a P sign to tell you that there's product placement. And not just at the end of programs as you're used to where the credits roll very quickly, but before and after each ad break.
So why don't we have a sign, a hashtag ad, or a B sign for branded content across all branded material? I think that's an important argument to have because I think we're going into a world which is going to become even less recognizable as these new forms and formats emerge.
Mike: Okay, so we've talked about some of them already, but what kind of policy gaps do you see with respect to marketing and media? And what do you think we should do to patch them?
Jonathan: Well, I must just say it's a lovely time to speak to you and your audience about this because we've just started–I'm very proud of this–a three year research project which is looking into the rules and regulation of branded content. So we have what's called a Branded Content Governance Project and we're looking at the United States, Canada, Mexico, the UK, every country in the European Union, and Australia to kind of track what the rules are and what we can learn from that to do better.
When I map this, I see the forces sitting in four areas. There's regulation, public regulation. There's industry self-regulation, when it makes its own rules. There's the power of the market, ad blocking, for example. And there's the power of civil society arguing for better.
And I think we're at a point where self-regulation by the industry is failing. And that's becoming recognized not just by activists if you like, but by governments too. So we need a new settlement. And I think that needs a strengthening of public regulation as I've outlined. But I think all the elements need to work together. And that means putting pressure on companies to actually do as they say and strengthen their own self-regulation.
Mike: Okay. Let's talk a bit about the stakes. So given the current digital landscape, what do you see the internet looking like if policy does not catch up with advertisers?
Jonathan: Yeah. Well, that's a great question. Pretty chastening one, isn't it? There's a famous moment in 1994 where the chairman of Procter & Gamble, Edward Harnes, gets up and does a speech to the American Association of Advertising Agencies. And it basically says, "Hold your nerve. Things are happening, digitalization is about to happen. You could get slaughtered. The digital world could help people bypass ads and evade them. But if you keep your nerve, you can dominate this space."
And I don't know about you, Mike, but I feel he was right. [chuckles] We knew this was happening in the early internet, the commercialization of the internet. But that corporate model and that corporate dominance is dominant. It's strong. However, I think we always need to look for sources of hope. And if it's dominant, it's also contested. There are forces challenging it, whether those forces are kind of carving out space for public media as we discussed, or whether like I am with others, we're kind of arguing for the rules to be improved on behalf of consumers and society.
So I think we're losing, but classic Gramscian and optimism of the will is required. And to recognise all the things that are being done to highlight the problem and think through solutions. Whether that's very local ones like– I mean, something we haven't mentioned I think is very important is kitemarking, right? Small publications, non-profit or low profit saying, “We're going to signal what standards are to readers." And that's good for the publication but I think it also is good for awareness. It says, "Well, yeah, why is this publication different from these other commercial ones?" Because this is how it engages with advertisers. So I think that's all really important, too.
Mike: All right. Well, cool. Well, hopefully, we can save the internet. Thanks, Dr. Hardy, for coming onto the Nazi Lies Podcast to talk about the lying press. The book again is Branded Content out from Routledge. Thanks again, Dr. Hardy.
Jonathan: Thank you.
Mike: If you liked what you heard and want to help us pay our guests and transcriptionist, consider subscribing to The Nazi Lies Patreon. Subscriptions start as low as $2, and some levels come with merch. If you don’t want to commit to monthly donations, you can give a one-time donation via PayPal.me/NaziLies or CashApp to $NaziLies.
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Mike Isaacson: Rome gets sacked ONE TIME, and that’s all these people can talk about!
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Nazi SS UFOs
Lizards wearing human clothes
Hinduism’s secret codes
These are nazi liesRace and IQ are in genes
Warfare keeps the nation clean
Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine
These are nazi liesHollow earth, white genocide
Muslim’s rampant femicide
Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde
Hiter lived and no Jews diedArmy, navy, and the cops
Secret service, special ops
They protect us, not sweatshops
These are nazi liesMike: Welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. Today we’re talking with Edward Watts, professor of history and Alkaviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair in Byzantine Greek History at the University of California San Diego. He’s here to talk to us about his book, The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea. The book is an extraordinary scholarly endeavor that managed to give a detailed and engaging history of 1700 years of Roman history in under 300 pages. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Watts.
Edward Watts: Thanks so much for having me. It's exciting to be here.
Mike: All right. Now, you are one of the rare guests on our show whose book was actually directed at debunking Nazi lies. Tell us what you had in mind when you were writing this book.
Edward: So the thing that prompted me to write this book was a recognition that the history of Rome, and in particular the legacy of Rome as it relates to the end of Roman history, was something that was being repeatedly misused across thousands of years to justify doing all sorts of violence and horrible things to people who really in the Roman context had very little to do with the decline of Rome, and in a post-Roman context, had nothing really to do with the challenges that people using the legacy of Rome wanted to try to address.
And in particular, what prompted this was the recognition after 2016 of how stories about the classical past and the Roman past were being used on the far right and the sort of fascist fringe as a way of pointing to where they saw to be challenging dynamics and changes, critical changes, in the way that society was functioning. What was happening was people were doing things like using the story of the Gothic migrations in the 4th century AD to talk about the need to do radical things in our society related to immigration.
And the discussions were just misusing the Roman past in really aggressive ways as kind of proof for radical ideas that didn't really relate to anything that happened in the past and I think are generally not things that people would be willing to accept in the present. And Rome provides a kind of argument when it's misunderstood,when Roman history is misunderstood, it provides a kind of argument that people are not familiar enough with to be able to refute, that might get people who think that a certain policy is aggressive or inhumane or unnecessary to think twice about whether that policy is something that is a response to a problem that people need to consider.
And that's just wrong. It's a wrong way to use Roman history. It's a wrong way to use history altogether. And it's a rhetoric that really needs to be highlighted and pointed to so that people can see how insidious these kinds of comparisons can be.
Mike: Okay, so your book discusses the idea of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, which you say started before any such decline or fall in the late Republic. What was politics like in the Roman Empire before the myth of Rome's decline popped up?
Edward: So this is an interesting question because the story of Roman decline actually shows up in some of the very earliest Roman literature that we have. So the very first sort of intact Latin texts that we have from the Roman period are things like the plays of Plautus. In one of the earlier plays of Plautus, he is already making fun of people for saying that Rome is in decline.
And he's saying this at a time right after the Roman victory over Hannibal when there is no evidence that Rome is in decline at all. And yet we know that there are politicians who are pushing this idea that the victory over Hannibal has unleashed a kind of moral decline in Rome that is leading to the degeneration of Roman morals and Roman behaviors and Roman social structures in such a fashion that will disrupt the ability of Rome to continue.
This is just not something that most people recognized to be true, but what we see when politicians in the third century and second century BC are saying things like this, they aren't particularly interested in describing an objective reality. What they're looking to do is insert ideas into popular discourse, so that people in the context of their society begin to think it might be possible that decline exists.
So I think that when we look at Roman history before Roman literature, or before these pieces of Roman literature exist, we really are looking at much later reconstructions. But I think that it's fair to say that even in those reconstructions of stories about things like say, the sixth king of Rome, those stories too focus on how that particular regime was inducing a decline from the proper behaviors of Romans.
So I think we could say that there is no before decline. Rome seems always to have been talking about these ideas of decline and worrying about the fact that their society was in decline, even when objectively you would look around and say there is no reason whatsoever that you should be thinking this.
Mike: Okay. Now your book argues that this political framing helped politicians shape the politics of the Roman Empire in particular ways. So how did those who pushed this declensionist narrative change the Roman republic?
Edward: So in the Roman republic, there are a few things that this narrative is used to do. In the second century, early second century BC, this narrative is used to attack opponents of a politician named Cato. What Cato tried to do was single out people who had been getting particularly wealthy because of the aftermath of Rome's victory in the Second Punic War over Hannibal and then its victories in the eastern Mediterranean against the Greek King, Philip V.
And what Cato saw was that this wealth was something that profoundly destabilized society because now there were winners who were doing well economically in a way that the old money establishment couldn't match. And so what he's looking to do is to say that when you look around and you see prosperity of that level in the Roman state, this is a sign that things are actually bad. It's not a sign of things are good. It's a sign that things are deteriorating, and we need to take radical steps to prevent this. And the radical steps that Cato takes, and that he initially gets support for, involves very onerous taxes directed specifically against groups of people that he opposed.
He also serves as the person who decides who gets to be in the Roman Senate, and he uses that position to kick out a lot of people on the basis simply of him deciding that they embody some kind of negative trajectory of the Roman State. And there's a reaction to this and Cato eventually is forced to kind of back away from this.
As you move later in the second century, the narrative of decline becomes something that first is used to again justify financial policies, and then later, actual violence against officials who are seen as pushing too radical an agenda.
And so this becomes a narrative that you can use to destabilize things. It doesn't matter if you're coming from what we would say is the right or the left, the kind of equal opportunity narrative that can be used to get people to question whether the structures in their society are legitimately in keeping with the way the society is supposed to function.
Mike: Okay. So a lot of people have this misconception that Rome kind of snapped from being a republic to being governed by an emperor, but that's not really so. What was the imperial administration like and how did it change?
Edward: The Roman republic was in many ways a very strong constitutional system that had a lot of things built into it to prevent one individual from taking over. Not only did it have a structure that was based on a kind of balance of power–and the description of that structure was something that influenced the Founding Fathers in the US to create the balances of power that we have–but in Rome, the administrative office that correlated to the presidency actually was a paired magistracy. So there were two consuls who governed together and could in theory check one another.
What the decline narrative happened or allows to happen is that these structures begin to be questioned as illegitimate. And you get, starting in the later part of the second century and going all the way through the murder of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, a long set of discussions about how the Constitution is not functioning as it's supposed to, how the interests of everybody are not being represented by the representatives in the Senate and by the sorts of laws that are being put forward in assemblies. And you have a greater sense that there's an emergency, and an emergency that requires people to assent to an individual exercising more power than the structure really permits.
And so this idea of decline heightens this sense of emergency and you have cycles every generation or so, where the sense of emergency gets greater and another constitutional structure snaps. Until eventually what you have is an individual in Julius Caesar, who is able to exercise complete and effective control over the direction of politics in the state.
Mike: Okay. So for whatever reason, the assassination of Julius Caesar sticks strong in our cultural psyche, but reading your book it seems like assassinating emperors was kind of commonplace?
Edward: It depends on the period. Yeah, there are definitely periods where the violent overthrow of emperors are somewhat common.
I think with Caesar, what we have is the assassination. We're still when Caesar was assassinated in the final death throes of the Roman republic. And so it takes a while and a really brutal nearly 15-year-long sprawling Civil War for Rome to finally just accept that the republic as a governing structure is not really going to function in the way it had before. And the first emperor is Augustus.
The first assassination actually occurs about 75 years after Augustus takes over. The first emperor that's assassinated is Caligula. Then you have moments of really profound peace and stability that are punctuated by these upheavals where, you know, in the year 68 the Emperor Nero commits suicide and this leads to a sprawling civil war in which four emperors take power in the course of a single year. Then things kind of calmed down. There's an assassination in 96, and no more assassinations for almost 100 years.
And so you have these moments where the structures of the empire are very stable, but when they break, it breaks very seriously. It's very rare when an emperor is assassinated, that there's only one assassination and things kind of work out after that.
And so generally, I think what this suggests is, if you have faith that the Imperial structure is working predictably, it's very, very hard to disrupt that. But if you have a sense that an emperor is not legitimate or is not in power or has taken power violently, there's a very serious risk that that emperor will in turn be overthrown violently, and something very serious could happen, even going so far as resulting in a civil war.
Mike: Okay so one of the biggest myths surrounding the Roman Empire is that it fell in 476 AD, and that plunged Europe into the Dark Ages, but this isn’t really so. What happened in 476 AD, and how did it become the legendary fall of Rome?
Edward: Yes, so 476 AD is one of the greatest non-events in history. Because when we look at our history and our timeline for the fall of Rome, this is the date that stands out to us. But actually in 476, there's not a single person who seems to think that Rome fell on that day.
What happens is in the middle part of the fifth century, the eastern empire and the western empire separated in 395. And in the middle part of the fifth century, the western empire has a very serious loss of territory and then a loss of stability within Italy. So that there are, in a sense, kingmakers who run the army and decide whether an emperor should be in power or not.
And so you have a number of figurehead emperors, starting really in the 450s and going through 476, who are there, in a couple of cases at certain moments they do exercise real power, but much of the time they're subordinate to military commanders who don't want to be emperor, or in many cases are of barbarian descent and don't think they can make imperial power actually stick, and in 476, Odoacer who was one of these barbarian commanders overthrows an emperor in Italy and says, "We are not going to have an emperor in Italy anymore. Instead, I'm just going to serve as the agent of the eastern emperor in Italy."
And for the next 50 years, there are barbarian agents–first Odoacer and then Theodoric–who serve in this constitutional way where they acknowledge the superiority and the authority of the emperor in Constantinople over Italy. And in practice, they're running Italy. But in principle, they are still affirming that they're part of the Roman Empire, the Roman senate is still meeting, Roman law is still used.
It's a situation where only when the eastern empire decides that it wants to take Italy back, do you start getting these stories about well, Rome fell in 476 when these barbarians got rid of the last emperor and now it's our obligation to liberate Italians from this occupation by these barbarians. In 476, though, this is not what anyone in Constantinople or in Italy actually thought was going on.
Mike: Okay. So both the east and the west of the Roman Empire eventually became Christian. How did this alter the myth of the declining Rome?
Edward: So for much of Roman history, there is very much this idea that any problem that you have is a potential sign of the decline of Rome, and if you are particularly motivated, you can say that the problem requires radical solutions to prevent Rome from falling into crisis.
But with Christianity, when the Roman Empire becomes Christian, there is no past that you can look back to say, "Well, we were better as a Christian empire in this time." When Constantine converts to Christianity, he's the first Christian emperor. And so it's very natural for opponents to be able to say, "Look, he made everything Christian and now things are going to hell ,and so Christianity is the problem."
So what Christians instead say is what actually is going on here is we are creating a new and better Rome, a Rome where the approach to the divine is more sophisticated, it's more likely to work. And so for about 100 years, you have instead of a narrative decline, a narrative of progress where Christians are pushing a notion that by becoming Christian, the Empire is embarking on a new path that is better than it has ever been before.
Not everybody accepts this. At the time of Constantine’s conversion, probably 90% of the Emperor's still pagan so this would be a very strange argument to them. And by the time you get into the fifth century, you probably are in a majority Christian empire, but like a 50% majority, not like 90% majority.
So there is a significant pushback against this. And in moments of crisis, and in particular after the Sack of Rome in 410, there is a very strong pagan reaction to this idea of Christian Roman progress. And Christians have to come up with evermore elaborate explanations for how what looks like decline in any kind of tangible sense that you would look at in the western empire is actually a form of progress. And the most notable production of that line of argument is Augustine's City of God, which says effectively, “Don't worry about this world. There's a better world, a Christian world that really you should be focusing on, and you're getting closer there. So the effect of what's going on in the Roman world doesn't really matter too much for you.”
Mike: Okay. Now at one point, there were actually three different polities across Europe and Asia Minor all claiming the inheritance of the Roman Empire. How did this happen?
Edward: There are different moments where you see different groups claiming the inheritance of Rome. In the Middle Ages, you have the rise of the Holy Roman Empire, which is a construction of Charlemagne and the papacy around the year 800. And the claim that they make is simply that there is the first empress of the Roman state who takes power all by herself in 797–this is the Empress Irene–and the claim Charlemagne makes as well that eliminates the legitimacy of the Roman Empire and Constantinople because there's no emperor. Therefore because there's no emperor, there's no empire and therefore we can just claim it.
Another moment where you see this really become a source of significant conflict is during the Fourth Crusade when the Crusaders attack Constantinople and destroy the central administration of the eastern Roman Empire. After that point, you have the crusaders in Constantinople who claim that they are a Roman state. You have the remains of the Roman state that had been in Constantinople sort of re-consolidating around the city of Nicaea. You have a couple of other people who claim the inheritance of the Roman state inEpirus and Trebizond, and they all kind of fight with each other.
And so ultimately, what you see is that the Roman Empire has this tremendous resonance across all of the space that was once Roman. So their empire at its greatest extent went from the Persian Gulf all the way to Scotland. And it went from Spain and the Atlantic coast of Morocco all the way down to the Red Sea. It's massive.
And in a lot of those territories after Rome recedes, the legacy of Rome remains. So a lot of people who felt that they could claim the Roman legacy tried to do that, because it gave a kind of added seriousness and a more, a greater echo to these little places that are far away from the center of the world now, places like Britain or places like France or places like Northern Germany. And so you, in a sense, look like you're more important than you are if you can make a claim on the Roman imperial legacy.
Mike: Okay. And so how do these would-be empires finally end up collapsing?
Edward: So, each in their own way. In the case of the Holy Roman Empire, it actually lasts for very long time. It's created under Charlemagne in 800, and it lasts really until the time of Napoleon. And it collapses because it's sort of dissolved because in Germany there was a fear that Napoleon might actually use the hulk of the Holy Roman Empire and the title of Holy Roman Emperor to claim a kind of ecumenical authority that would go beyond just what he had as emperor of France.
The crusader regime in Constantinople is actually reconquered by the Nicene regime in 1261. So the Crusaders take Constantinople in 1204, and then these Roman exiles who set up a kind of Roman Empire in exile in Nicaea reconquer in 1261. And they hold Constantinople for another 200 years until the Ottomans take it in 1453.
The other sort of small Roman states are absorbed either by the state in Constantinople or by the Ottomans, but ultimately by the end of the 1460s, everything that had once been part of the Eastern Empire in the Middle Ages is under Ottoman control.
Mike: Okay. And so despite all of the polities that could have contended for the inheritance of Rome collapsing, Rome’s decline still played a large part in political considerations across what was formerly the Roman Empire but now as an instructive metaphor. How was the decline of the Roman Empire leveraged to influence politics leading into the modern era, and who were the big myth makers?
Edward: Yeah, there's a couple of really important thinkers in this light. One is Montesquieu, the French thinker who uses a discussion of Roman history to launch into a much more wide and expansive and influential discussion of political philosophy that centers really on notions of representation and sets some of the groundwork for what actors in the American Revolution and French Revolution believed they were doing.
Montesquieu is really, really important in understanding 18th-century political developments. And I think it's impossible really to understand what the American Revolution and the French Revolution thought they were doing without also looking at Montesquieu.
But now I think the more influential figure in terms of shaping our ideas about what Roman history looked like and what Roman decline meant is Edward Gibbon. Gibbon is also an 18th-century thinker. When he started writing a history of Rome, he started writing in the 1770s when he believed that there was a firm and stable European political structure of monarchies that could work together and kind of peacefully move the continent forward.
And while Gibbon is working on this, of course, you know, the American Revolution happens, and the French Revolution happens, and his whole structure that he was looking to defend and celebrate with his Roman history disappears. And so his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire becomes a book that is extracted from its historical context.
And it seems like it is an objective narrative of what happens. It's not objective at all. What Gibbon is trying to do is compare the failings of one large single imperial structure and the advantages of this kind of multipolar world where everyone is balanced and cooperative. But everybody forgets that that multipolar world even existed because the book comes out after it's gone.
So what you have with Gibbon is a narrative that seems to be just an account of Roman history, and a very, very evocative one. I think most of the people now who have Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on their shelf don't read it. But they know the title. They know the concept.
This means that you have a ready-made metaphor for anything that's bothering you. You know, you can talk about the decline and fall of Rome. Just about everybody in the entire world knows that Rome declined and fell. And very few of them know much about why it happened or how it happened or how long it took.
And so evoking the decline and fall of Rome allows you to kind of plug in anything, as my friend Hal Drake says, anything that's bothering you at a particular moment, you can plug in and say Rome fell because of X. And if you look at the last 50 years you can see lots and lots and lots of examples of X, lots of different things that bothered people that got plugged into the story of Rome fell because of whatever's bothering me that day.
Mike: I am certainly guilty of having a copy of Gibbon on my bookshelf and not having read it. [laughs] So in talking about the modern appropriation of the memory of Rome, you of course talk about Fascist Italy. You reference Claudio Fogu, whom I absolutely love, check out his book The Historic Imaginary. How did Fascists wield the memory of the Roman Empire to justify their regime?
Edward: Yeah, it's so, so seductive what is done in the city of Rome in particular. And there's a sense that I think is a very real sense that creating and uncovering and memorializing the imperial center of the Roman Empire makes real the experience of walking through it, and with the right kind of curation can make it feel like you're in a contemporary environment that's linked to that ancient past.
And what Mussolini and his architects tried very very hard to do was create this, in a sense, almost Roman imperial Disneyland in the area between the Colosseum and the Capital line. So when we walk there, we see a kind of disembodied and excavated giant park with a large street down the middle running from the Colosseum along the length of the Roman Forum. But that was actually neighborhoods.
Before Mussolini, there were actual houses and shops and restaurants and people living there, and very, very long-standing communities that he removed with this idea that you were in a sense restoring the past and creating a future by removing the present. And I think that's a very good metaphor for what they were up to. What they were trying to do was create an affinity for the fascist present by uncovering this Roman past and getting rid of what they saw as disorder. And the disorder, of course, was real people living their lives in their houses.
But the other thing that people, you know, when tourists visit this now, they don't know that history. They don't know that when they walk on the street alongside the Forum, they're actually walking on a street that is a 20th-century street created for Fascist military parades on the ruins of modern, early modern, and medieval houses. They just see this as a way to kind of commune with this Roman past. And the Fascists very much understood that aesthetic and how seductive that aesthetic was.
Mike: Okay, so let’s circle back to where we started with your motivation for the book. How are people invoking the fall of Rome now, and what are they getting wrong?
Edward: I think that we see, again, this temptation to take what's bothering you and attaching it to Rome. And I think even if you just look over the last 50 years, you can almost trace the sorts of things people are anxious about in a modern context based on the things that are advanced for what possibly made Rome fall.
So in the 70s and early 80s, there's lots of concern about environmental contamination and the effect that this is going to have on people's lives. And we get the story of Rome fell because of lead poisoning. I mean, it didn't. It's just ridiculous that you would think Rome fell because of lead poisoning when there is no moment that it fell, the place was active and survived for well over 1500 years when it was using lead pipes. There's no evidence whatsoever that this is true.
In the 70s, Phyllis Schlafly would go around and say that Rome fell because of liberated women. I think that would be a very big surprise to a lot of Roman women that they were actually liberated, definitely in the 1970's way.
In the 80s, and even into the 2010s, you have people like Ben Carson talking about Rome declining because of homosexuality or gay marriage. Again, that has nothing to do with the reality of Rome.
There are other places where I think people come a little bit closer to at least talking about things that Romans might acknowledge existed in their society. So when you have Colin Murphy and others in the lead up to the Iraq War talking about the overextension of military power as a factor that can lead to the decline of Rome, yeah, I mean, Rome did have at various moments problems because it was overextended militarily. But most of the time it didn't. To say that the Romans were overextended militarily because they had a large empire ignores the fact that they had that large empire for almost 400 years without losing significant amounts of territory.
So comparing Roman military overextension and US military overextension could be a useful exercise, but you have to adjust the comparison for scale. And you have to adjust the comparison to understand that there are political dynamics that mean that places that in the first century BC required military garrisons, in the third century did not. And so you're not overextended because you're in the same place for 400 years. At the beginning, you might need to have an extensive military presence in a place that later you won't.
So I think that what we need to do when we think about the use of the legacy of Rome, is think very critically about the kinds of things that Rome can and can't teach us, and think very clearly about the difference between history repeating itself–which I think it doesn't–and history providing us with ideas that can help us understand the present.
I think that's where history is particularly useful, and Roman history in particular is useful. Because it's so long, there are so many things that that society deals with, and there are so many things that it deals with successfully as well as fails to deal with capably. All of those things offer us lessons to think with, even if they don't offer us exact parallels.
Mike: Okay, so we’ve talked a bunch about the fabricated history of Rome and the popular memory of Rome. What does the actual history of Rome and fears of Roman decline have to teach us about the present?
Edward: I think the biggest thing that we can see is if somebody is claiming that a society is in profound decline and the normal structures of that society need to be suspended so the decline can be fixed, that is a big caution flag. What that means is somebody wants to do something that you otherwise would not agree to let them do. And the justification that they provide should be looked at quite critically, but it also should be considered that, even if they identify something that might or might not be true, the solution they're proposing is not something that you absolutely need to accept.
Systems are very robust. Political systems and social systems are very robust and they can deal with crises and they can deal with changes. If someone is saying that our system needs to be suspended or ignored or cast to the side because of a crisis, the first step should be considering whether the crisis is real, and then considering whether it is in fact possible to deal with that crisis and not suspend the constitutional order, and not trample on people's rights, and not take away people's property, and not imprison people.
Because in all of these cases that we see Roman politicians introduced this idea of decline to justify something radical, there are other ways to deal with the problem. And sometimes they incite such panic that Romans refuse or forget or just don't consider any alternative. That has really profound and dangerous consequences because the society that suspends normal orders and rights very likely is going to lose those rights and those normal procedures.
Mike: All right. Well, Dr. Watts, thank you so much for coming on The Nazi Lies Podcast to talk about the myth of the Roman Empire. The book, again, is The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome out from Oxford University Press. Thanks again, Dr. Watts.
Edward: Thanks a lot. This was great.
Mike: If you enjoyed what you heard and want to help pay our guests and transcriptionist, consider subscribing to our Patreon at patreon.com/nazilies or donating to our PayPal at paypal.me/nazilies or CashApp at $nazilies
[Theme song]
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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Mike Isaacson: Reproductive rights are inmates’ rights apparently.
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Nazi SS UFOs
Lizards wearing human clothes
Hinduism’s secret codes
These are nazi liesRace and IQ are in genes
Warfare keeps the nation clean
Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine
These are nazi liesHollow earth, white genocide
Muslim’s rampant femicide
Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde
Hiter lived and no Jews diedArmy, navy, and the cops
Secret service, special ops
They protect us, not sweatshops
These are nazi liesMike: Welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. I’m joined today by Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education and Dean of Undergraduate Studies at Michigan State University, Mark Largent, who is with us today to talk about his book Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States. This slim volume tells the story of the historical enthusiasm for depriving certain classes of people the ability to reproduce and the efforts towards making that a reality. Really happy to get to read this book a second time for this podcast. Welcome to the show Dr. Largent.
Mark Largent: Thank you for the invitation and for your kind words.
Mike: So I want to start today by talking about what you start the book talking about, which is a discussion of your historical method of storytelling, your historiography. So you make a very deliberate choice of vocabulary that really does have a powerful effect in exposing, kind of, the grittiness of the whole issue. Can you talk about that and what effect you intended to have?
Mark: So I was trying very hard to work in an anti-presentist mode. Presentist mode is most commonly what's used in exploring issues like eugenics, things that have become recognized as problematic for a variety of reasons. What often happens when you take a presentistic view like that is you fail to understand how something that seems so obviously problematic to you could have been acceptable to large numbers of people in the past.
The danger, of course, is that you fall into the trap of becoming an apologist. So it's a fine line to walk between being a presentist and being an apologist when you're dealing with issues like this. You don't want to explain away past people's beliefs and assumptions and actions as merely products of their time because that doesn't treat them fairly; it doesn't treat them as equals; it sort of lets them off merely because they lived before you.
On the other hand, you need to understand the world as it was understood by them. So I think in graduate school is where I first heard the term “doing violence to the historical subject”. That is if you view them through your own eyes, you are doing violence to them. If you view them in such a way as to not hold them to any real standards simply because they came before you and therefore operated in a space of naivete relative to what you think you know, you're doing violence to them. You're treating them as somehow less than you and your present day colleagues.
So to walk that line really requires that you use their language and you try to understand and discuss the world the way that they may have understood and discussed it. Now, the problem, of course, when you're dealing with something like this is that many of the things that they held true, many of the assumptions on which their work is based, are deeply problematic to us today, or we at least on the surface claim that they're deeply problematic.
Because one of the real dangers of presentism is that it allows you to imagine that you're somehow better than the historical subjects were, that you're above whatever it was that they were dealing with, when in fact, you may simply rationalize some of the very same problematic assumptions that they held differently, holding them in a different way. So as a historian, I feel like it's my responsibility to treat the historical subjects fairly, and that means holding them to the same standards that I hold present-day people to, but also respecting the fact that their contexts were different in some ways.
Mike: Right. So one of the interesting things that you do is you also use the terminology that they were using at the time, and I think it gives a really good sense, not only of, I guess, how distasteful it is today, but also it gives a good sense of the logic that they're working with.
Mark: Yeah, their language matters. I mean, I really do think words matter, and unpacking words so that you understand what is within them is critically important. And one of the big ones, I address it right from the very start, is the concept of eugenics itself. Eugenics to us is by and large a slur, that if you call a person a eugenicist, you are by and large disparaging them in some way.
And that was not held to be true by the subjects that I look at, which the story runs from about 1850 to about 1950, with the most intense period being in the first 25 years of the 20th century or about 1900 to about 1925. And the idea here is that they didn't have a slur in mind when they said eugenics. In fact, eugenics as a slur didn't really even emerge until about the 1960s, I tried to show in the book.
Mike: Okay. So let's get a little into the terminology and the procedures involved. What kind of sterilizing interventions were physicians making, and what were they called at the time?
Mark: So at the beginning of the story, so from about 1850 to about the 1880s, they were what they would've called “desexing.” They were performing castrations or orchidectomies [Mike’s note: they’re actually called orchiectomies] as they came to be called. For men, a complete removal of the scrotum and testicles. So, neutering would be the closest concept that we have.
These were not widespread, it wasn't common. It was sufficiently brutal that it was considered problematic. But by the time you get into the 1880s and 1890s, a progressive new surgery, the vasectomy, had emerged. Vasectomization had first developed as a rejuvenating activity, a notion that you could rejuvenate a person by eliminating the pathways for sperm to leave the body, so by tying off or cutting the vas deferens.
But it was seen from its original holders, and these were by and large the heads of psychiatric hospitals, as a way of managing a couple of complex problems. One of them was what they called chronic masturbation. They thought that the vasectomy would somehow reduce the urge of the men in their charge to masturbate. There was also the notion that it would somehow calm them and be a management tactic.
But there'd been a broader effort both before the vasectomy and after it to cut off the inherited characteristics from one generation to another so as not to pass along what were largely seen as problematic traits that followed family lines. So all the way back to the 1850s, you have physicians, the first one that I can identify is in the 1850s Gideon Lincecum in Texas, who brings out in public conversation something that he said physicians widely discussed. And that was that there were families that were just no good, and that they produced children who themselves were no good who would grow up and have children who were no good.
And so this notion of good breeding was well aligned with notions of artificial selection and plant and animal breeding. So this is pre-Darwin or pre-Darwin's Origin of the Species, which is published in 1859–this notion that you could artificially select for different traits in plants and animals being applied to the reproduction of human beings.
And so what Gideon Lincecum, and other physicians like him, began talking openly about first castration and then by the end of the century vasectomies was intended to sort of stop these problematic lines of parenthood and then eliminate the problematic social behaviors and poverty that they believed were somehow rooted in the very biology of who procreates.
At near about the same time near the end of the 19th century in the 1880s, the operation of hysterectomy came into being and then vogue. The idea is that you could, by removing a woman's ovaries or fallopian tube or uterus or all of it, control reproduction with potentially a positive therapeutic effect to women themselves by removing these usually described as diseased organs, the women themselves would be healthier, happier for it.
But more importantly or at least equally importantly, you could prevent the passage of these deleterious social traits from parent to child, they believed, by preventing the parent from having children. So you're sort of removing from a community whatever deleterious social traits they believed were associated with the very biology of the parents who would otherwise have children.
Mike: Okay. So I tried to get Daniel Kevles to talk about this a bit when we had him on, but he didn't seem familiar too much with the pre-eugenic history. So your story of coerced sterilization doesn't start with the eugenics movement, and you briefly mentioned that. So talk a bit about the origins of the movement for sterilization in the United States.
Mark: Well, it really was focused on this analogy to plant and animal breeding which really did preceed both Darwin in 1859 and the emergence of the eugenics movement, which is a progressive era movement shortly after the turn of the 20th century. People generally associate coerced sterilization with the eugenics movement, and they certainly were closely aligned.
The eugenics movement began in the very late 19th or early 20th century depending upon which historians you're looking at. But the movement for coerced sterilization had begun much earlier. And in fact, there were even common calls to it being pressed all the way back to Aristotle and his discussion about how certain traits seem to follow in family lines.
And so by the mid-19th century when there was widespread interest in artificial plant and animal breeding, the application of it to human traits became an interesting element. And there were advocates for sterilization to prevent the passage of these deleterious traits that even preceded the invention of the word eugenics by Francis Galton in the 1860s.
But this pressure had really been focused around thinking about therapy for deleterious traits, that you could avoid them if you could somehow prevent the people who would possess them from coming into existence or from them being passed from a parent to a child. There also was no really hard line to biology proper.
And in fact, there was a lot of discussion all the way through the end of the 19th and 20th century about not just eugenics, but also a thing called euthenics, which was the study of the effect of the environment on the development of certain kinds of traits. And so in the same way that you could have a biological transfer of traits, you could have a social transfer of traits. And the thing is you can't separate. We talk about nature and nurture, you can't separate. You can't have nature without nurture and nurture without nature. The widespread analogy that was given was that seeds grow in the soil, and you can have a plant only if you have both seeds and soil. You can't have a seed that grows without soil, and you can't have a plant that grows without a seed.
So these two, nature and nurture or eugenics and euthenics, were entwined in most of the conversation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We tend to really focus on the latter, the eugenic issues, but euthenics was an important part of it. And that's the same way, if you prevent a parent from having a child who they might pass along either biologically or socially some deleterious trait. You prevent them from becoming a parent, you prevent the passage of that trait. It's really only the eugenics movement and a real narrow focus on the biological transfer of these traits that you lose that nature-nurture symbiosis. But in the 19th century, they were talked about both really hand in hand, there wasn't this sort of hard line of nature over nurture.
The place that it started to fall apart was when they began discovering genetic diseases. So Huntington's was the first genetic disease to be identified, and it was Charles Davenport himself who did some of the work to help identify that. And then you realize that that's a purely genetic trait that a parent passes along to a child, and if you prevent a parent from having a child, then you prevent the passage of that trait. So you could actually get rid of diseases if you prevented everyone who's a carrier for that disease from passing along from parent to child.
And so there was a kind of either curative or preventative medicine notion in play in this early part. But the idea of genetic disease really helped create some distance in between the people who were thinking about eugenics and euthenics as hand in hand and those who began to think primarily about just eugenics.
Mike: I do want to deviate here. So one of the things that you mentioned in the book was that even at the time they recognized that there was a flaw in the eugenic program insofar as, because they didn't have access to genetic testing, when you try to eliminate bad traits, you don't eliminate all the carriers, you only eliminate those that have dominant expressions. So they said it would take about a hundred generations to actually eliminate any of these traits, right?
Mark: Yeah, and of course mathematical geneticists came to help us understand why it was that as traits became less and less frequent it became harder and harder to reduce their frequency because they showed up so infrequently.
So I think from being fair to the historical subject's point of view, I think there's sort of two responses to it. One is, “Well, if we can substantially reduce the amount of disease by reducing the number of carriers that we know of who carry genetic disease, that's progress. So if you go from some number to a smaller number from one generation to the next of people who are likely or probable to have a genetic disease, that's progress. So you can't say, ‘Because we can't do everything, we shouldn't do anything,’ that's a foolish position to take.” So that's one aspect of it.
The other aspect of it is that, “While you're correct that lacking genetic testing we can't see the genome in an individual, we can infer a great deal about a person's genome if we have elaborate family histories.” So that's why the real burst of activity in and around eugenics is with Davenport's and Laughlin's Eugenic Record Office and the establishment of this elaborate effort to build very sophisticated family trees, because that was the way that you could infer a genome with some accuracy.
Mike: Okay. So one thing that you point out about the early physicians that were sterilizing people was that their reasons for sterilization were not necessarily eugenic, and early on they often weren't. So what were the other motivations of these physicians in sterilizing their patients?
Mark: Yeah, they run a gamut, and I'll start with the darkest motives: clearly punitive. There's a significant punitive aspect to it, especially when you're doing something as brutal as castration or as invasive as a hysterectomy. I mean, you have to keep in mind the relatively crude state of surgery in the late 19th and early 20th century. So these are pretty significant things.
There was one person in the state of Washington who had argued that a vasectomy was really not much worse than having a tooth pulled. And to imagine that without anything like sophisticated anesthetics makes you realize that having a tooth pulled is probably a pretty miserable experience in the early 20th century. So you're not comparing it to something that's not that big of a deal, but you were probably comparing it to something that was relatively common in an era before fluoride and dental health. So they were trying to sort of normalize it as something that could happen.
The use of castration continued well into the 20th century for decades after the vasectomy was invented. So when I looked really closely at the state of Oregon, for example, they were using both castrations and vasectomies. And when we looked at why they were using one rather than the other, what we found was that when people were convicted of offenses that were associated with what we would today consider homosexuality, they were more likely to be castrated. But for men who were in prison for crimes of rape against women, those men would be more likely to receive vasectomy. And so you see this interesting difference in the application of which surgery is used, and it clearly has a punitive aspect of it in the use of castration.
When you get later into the 20th century, you'll see this applied increasingly to women. And there's some very ugly stuff that happens in the 1960s and 1970s around women in poverty in which they are coerced to either have their tubes tied or to receive hysterectomies. There's a great book Fit to Be Tied by Rebecca Kluchin that is really the complement to my book. She takes it to the next set of decades, to the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties, and looks really closely at the ways in which there's punitive aspects of it all the way through the 20th century.
But it's not just punitive, there were also therapeutic measures that were in place. There were clearly people involved who sought access to control of their own reproduction because they didn't want to pass something along or because they didn't want to have children.
So keep in mind, especially with the more recent decisions around abortion and privacy rights that we're dealing with right now, until you get to the late 1960s, the guaranteed access to birth control is not a fundamental right in the United States. And so how do you control your own fertility without access to reliable birth control?
There are cases, and Christine Manganaro has written about one such case with a physician in Washington State who was using eugenic arguments to justify and get through the bureaucracy necessary to sterilize women, and the women themselves wanted that sterilization and were collaborating with him to do the things necessary to get access to be sterilized. And so in control of your own fertility, there was some of that that you can find examples of.
You also find examples of where it has therapeutic uses for people who are suffering from mental or emotional trauma. And again, Christine Manganaro does a nice job in this with looking at women who suffered severe postpartum depression. If you suffer from postpartum depression, what is the only real way in a relatively crude medical environment, what's the only really effective way to avoid postpartum depression? Well, avoid postpartum. Don't get pregnant and have a child. And so that same physician was using sterilization as a way of preventing the postpartum depression that would then follow birth being given by women who had suffered from this previously.
Now, I will tell you those cases are relatively rare. By and large, the history of coerced sterilization in the United States is one of either eugenic justification or punitive measures or it's in order to allow for easier control over people, that there's a manipulative aspect of it. So it might be if you sterilize them you can release them because you believe that they will no longer commit the crimes or no longer perpetuate whatever genetic shortcomings those people are believed to have, or a notion that if you sterilize them you can release them because they have paid for their crime, that it's cheaper to sterilize them and release them than it is to keep them incarcerated.
But what I think is important to understand here is that it's not a single simple answer to this. It's a pretty complex set of things that are all based on a pretty simplistic notion, and that is that somehow located in the testicles and ovaries of these citizens is a problem that you could surgically remove, that it could be excised from society by taking it out of these people's bodies. And lots of different people were using that to promote lots of different notions.
Mike: Right. To me, it was interesting that it wasn't just about like doing things to prevent them from reproducing, but it was also sometimes used as a behavioral control method, they thought sterilizing people would actually change their behavior.
Mark: Yeah, I mean, Harry Sharp, the guy who invented the vasectomy, firmly believed that he would reduce the problems of the young men in his mental hospital and their masturbation, what you call chronic masturbation problems.
Mike: Right, okay. So now obviously a major factor of the movement for sterilization of the so-called unfit was the eugenics movement. So, like I said, we had Kevles on, so my listeners are familiar with the general history of the eugenics movement as far as its kind of intellectual development. So talk about some of the ways that the eugenicists were instrumental in turning sterilization practice into sterilization policy.
Mark: Well, the biggest was what now is pretty normal in American politics, and that is what the founders referred to as states as the laboratories for democracy. The idea that the founders had all the way back to the Federalists was a notion that you had a federal government, but then you also had originally 13 grown to 50 states, each of which was a kind of individual laboratory for democracy. So an individual state could come up with new legislation and enact it, and the other states could see how it went. They could see what value there might be in that legislation. And then you'd have all of these different little experiments going on, and the good ones would spread to other states.
And the early proponents of eugenics in the United States seized on this structure of governance that we have to individually, state by state, go to the legislatures with model legislation. And that model legislation came out of the Eugenic Records Office, and this is really Harry Laughlin's push to get states to adopt very similar eugenic laws. And you could state by state use these sort of models for it, so that legislators wouldn't even have to do the work of writing these things. Rather, the bills could be handed to them as a model bill that could be debated and put into place.
And the promise on all of them is that if you adopted this legislation, you would have a healthier body of citizens. You would have a safer community of people who live there, that the state would save money because it wouldn't have to put so many people in prison or mental health facilities, and that by and large the public good would be advanced. And it was all leveraged on a set of prejudices against people who were not seen as sufficiently fit, that they didn't meet whatever kinds of standards that there were for human goodness.
Mike: Okay. So on the subject of model legislation, so you talked about that and you also talked a bit about how court arguments were replicated across state lines as well. So how early was the eugenics movement to this game of pre-fabricated policy?
Mark: Well, I can't find anybody who is earlier. I mean, this really seems like one of the real novel contributions of the proponents of this. And it's because it leverages certain characteristics of the way in which federalism works in the United States with the very nature of eugenics itself which is operating at this intersection of human biology and education and public health and medicine and the punitive aspects of mental health facilities or of prisons, and all of these things are under control of the state, individual states. They are powers that either explicitly or implied in the US Constitution are of state import.
And it really only is until you get Buck v. Bell in the mid-twenties that you have any kind of federal sanctification of this. But prior to that, it had been going on at lower and lower courts, the big advance being made in the Michigan case two years before Buck v. Bell. And that Michigan case, everything that ultimately would be tested in the Buck v. Bell case was all sort of laid out and sorted in a much more complex case. But Buck v. Bell was the Supreme Court's sanctification of it.
Mike: Okay. So one of the things I liked about your book was that it's rich with data, but it's not bogged down with it. So what are some of the key statistics about sterilization in the US that people should know?
Mark: Well, I think one of the biggest is that it peaks in the 1930s and begins to fade prior to World War II. Another one is who is it that's advancing it at any given time? So what you see are really interesting lineage of professions who are advancing first sterilization and then eugenic sterilization in the 20th century. And one of the things that I find most fascinating is one of the last groups to get on board and one of the last groups to get off of this train are American biologists, and that American biologists really used this as a way to help professionalize them in the early 20th century because it allowed them to demonstrate the public value of basic scientific research.
And then really are among the last ones off. You don't see biologists turn against eugenics until the late sixties and early seventies, which is really late relative to other professional groups. I mean, the psychiatrists, psychologists, anthropologists, many of the other social scientists, they are beginning to turn against it in the thirties. But American biologists sort of continue replicating a set of base assumptions that were first made in biology textbooks in the teens and twenties. They continue restating those assumptions all the way through the sixties.
Mike: So for a while, the eugenics movement was largely unopposed in it's crusade to sterilize the so-called unfit. I mean, there were parts of the Catholic Church that were opposed and individuals here there, but there wasn't any sort of organized resistance. Now you claim that all changed with Buck v. Bell, so talk about that ruling and the reactions to it.
Mark: Yeah. And again, it's funny to talk about this, funny in a like slow down and look at the car accident funny, funny weird and a little scary funny, it's funny to look at this right now in the context of, again, recent Supreme Court decisions about abortion because I do say in the book and I have said elsewhere that there really is no pro-life movement in the United States until Roe v. Wade. And in that same way, there really was no organized opposition to eugenics in United States until Buck v. Bell, that these court cases represent pivotal moments in the emergence of opposition because they crystallized something that until then really didn't have full state sanctification.
And so in both the case of eugenics in Buck v. Bell in the twenties and Roe in the seventies, you have the crystallization of something to push against. And Buck creates for an increasingly large number of professionals and social commentators something very specific against which they can push and they can begin leveraging their sets of arguments.
What I always find interesting is that the original arguments against eugenics in the 20s are very different than what are made later. That is, they often are rife with many of the same prejudiced assumptions that proponents of eugenics had. The issue for many though becomes the notion of whether or not the state has the power to do it and has the authority or is smart enough to know how to do it well.n ot really addressing the underlying civil liberties issues, which I think by the late 20th century are much more prominent in our minds.
Mike: Okay. So eugenics began to decline starting in the 30s, as you said. The Pope came out against it, there was organized resistance to it, and advances in biology were beginning to unwind some of its core claims. But according to your book, eugenics took quite a while to finally lose public respect. So talk a bit about the decline of eugenics and what sort of documentation you used in the book to gauge support for the theory.
Mark: Yeah, so that's actually my favorite part of the book, was the part that I found most interesting. For years, I had collected biology textbooks, hunting bookstores for them and libraries. And in every time I would find one, I would record if it talked about eugenics and how it talked about eugenics.
And the thing that we see very clearly is that there's no systematic turn against eugenics in biology textbooks until you get into the 1970s, and then you start seeing this sort of shift in the discussion of it. First you see a decline in any discussion, you start seeing in the fifties eugenics falls out of the textbooks. And then as you get into the sixties, seventies, and really into the eighties, you start seeing some criticism of it emerge.
But up until the 1960s, there's almost no textbook published that doesn't include eugenics, and there's almost none of the ones that do talk about it are critical. You don't see the real explosion of criticism until you get into the early and mid-sixties, and then by the time you get between the mid-seventies and 1980, it's overwhelmingly critical and overwhelmingly common to talk in negative ways about eugenics.
So I used the textbooks as a marker for the state-of-the-art sort of received wisdom. And until the sixties, the received wisdom that every college kid is taught is that eugenics is good and possible, and biology can tell us how to do it right and well.
Mike: Okay. So sterilization laws did start to also be repealed or overturned at the state level in the latter half of the 20th century with the decline of eugenics. Can you talk a bit about the decline of sterilization policy?
Mark: Yeah. So a couple of things happened, and again, I point you to Rebecca Kluchin's work which I think is very good in this regard. So my story is mostly a story about white people and disproportionately a story about men. And so from the late 19th century through the first third of the 20th century, the majority of people who were targeted for sterilization were white men.
And my argument was that this was a very racist activity because these men were being sterilized because they did not meet the ideals of white masculinity. That is, they were involved in activities that we associate with homosexuality; they were developmentally delayed; they stole or were violent. These are all unacceptable expressions or unacceptable activities of white masculinity. Violence or thievery or lower intelligence are acceptable for other races, but they're not acceptable for the white race.
And so these people had to be cleaned up, they had to clean up the white race. And I talk explicitly about how racist it was and how it focused almost entirely on white men. That began to shift first with an increasing emphasis on women, and then by the mid-20th century, an increasing emphasis on people of color. And that shift happens at the same time that eugenics itself becomes increasingly problematic. And again, Kluchin does a much better and more thorough job of looking at that latter period.
But my earlier work or my work in the earlier period makes clear that it's no less racist, that is, that targeting white men because they weren't upholding the expectations of white masculinity is a racist activity. And the latter work looks at what happens to minoritized communities and women, especially minority women, which by the time you get to 1970s, the vast majority of people who were being targeted for compulsory sterilization or coerced sterilization are minoritized women.
Mike: Okay. Now despite the general revulsion of the public to eugenics programs, the ghosts of the movement for sterilization still linger in many ways reflecting the origins of the movement. In particular, you point to legislation that was passed in four states authorizing the sterilization of certain classes of criminals in exchange for more lenient sentences as well as sort of vigilante judges who attempted to implement these sort of schemes in their own rulings. So where is sterilization still policy?
Mark: You see interesting popping up in interesting and problematic ways in certain either court cases or legislation that seems to get at the same underlying assumptions. And I guess if you were to ask simply, “What do you see as an overall historiographic trend to which you want to contribute?” One of the things that I want to argue, because I try to work very hard to not be either an apologist or a presentist, is that many of the same assumptions that led to things that we would consider deeply problematic are still present in our public discourse or our underlying assumptions today.
And so making the people in the past make more sense to us isn't an effort to apologize for them. It's an effort rather to show that today we still have some deeply problematic underlying assumptions in how we look at people and we think about issues like equity or equality that future historians will look back on and perhaps point out our own shortcomings.
So ways in which you may look at how it is that, for example, we would be much more inclined to be motivated to invest in sex ed or in birth control opportunities for people of poorer means, making investments in communities where we would allow for greater access because of a recognition that poor people should be encouraged to use birth control in ways that wealthier people don't need to be encouraged to use birth control. And I think as you're challenging some of those assumptions, you start confronting awkward concerns about what we think is happening in poorer communities, why they have larger numbers of children, and why that might be bad or problematic for us.
You certainly see it now in an increasing set of conversations about pedophilia and about how you might need to have some biological intervention in men especially who are convicted of pedophilia, and that's in some strange segment of our popular discourse right now out there.
But I think the biggest place for it is in the way in which we can very easily dismiss people in the past as merely eugenicists and oversimplify their views. Well, we would say when we are challenged for our own views that, "Oh, well, it's complicated actually," and you try to unpack it in more ways.
Mike: Right, okay. So one interesting thing you pointed to was the involvement of these private sector non-profit activist organizations in kind of a new movement for sterilization. In particular, you point to this organization called CRACK, so tell us what CRACK was doing.
Mark: Well, CRACK, and there's been others that have emerged like them that are philanthropic organizations or privately funded organizations that seek to provide access to sterilization in poor communities. Now, on the surface, there is undoubtedly both inequity in access to medical care between wealthier and poorer communities and a greater capacity for a person to have control over their own fertility if they have greater access to medical care. So you really can't deny the benefits of it.
CRACK is interesting because not only are they providing access to medical care, but they're providing stipends to people. They were offering economic payments to people in order to be sterilized in addition to the sterilization procedure. And an economic incentive like a hundred dollars means something radically different to a poor person than it does to a wealthy person. So it would've a disproportionate impact on swaying a person's decision to be vasectomized or to receive a tubal ligation if the hundred bucks mattered to them in ways that it didn't matter to a wealthier person.
But this is part of a larger movement away from state-sponsoredred eugenics to what Diane Paul talks about as a neoliberal approach to thinking about human reproduction. And this moves away from state coercion to social coercion or away from state coercion to economic coercion. The issue here is if you sort of turn this over to the marketplace and you're allowing for social coercion or economic coercion to take the place of government coercion, are you any less coercive?
That's why when I use the language in the book, I talk about coerced sterilization, not just compulsory sterilization or eugenic sterilization, but coerced sterilization, the idea that a person could be offered a shorter prison sentence or offered money or offered access to something if they were willing to be sterilized. And that coercion, whether it's in the hands of the state or in the hands of a philanthropic organization, is equally coercive and is equally problematic and is based on some of the very same underlying assumptions that there are good people who have good genes and there are bad people who have bad genes and we can figure out which are which and that we are somehow morally empowered to encourage the good people to have more children and discourage the bad people from having children. And so that commonality, whether you're on the philanthropic side of this coercion or the legal side of this coercion, shares too many similarities for me to be comfortable.
Mike: Okay. So somewhere in the book you state that while it hasn't been directly overturned, Buck versus Bell was essentially overruled by other rulings such as Griswold versus Connecticut and Roe v. Wade. So now your book was published in 2008, since then a lot of has happened in the courts. So how do things look now that we have rulings like Dobbs versus Jackson's Women's Health Organization on the books?
Mark: Well, I tell you, I'm extraordinarily happy that people understand that the recent abortion decision undermines the foundation for things like Griswold and all the way up through gay marriage. And recognizing that the legal foundations on which Roe was decided while weak–undoubtedly weak, I think any careful scholar on this is going to tell you that simply a privacy argument for Roe was liable for being overturned–but not only does the overturning of Roe on the basis of privacy threaten Roe, but it threatens all of these other things that we take absolutely for granted right now like access to birth control, like interracial marriage, like gay marriage. This is deeply problematic.
But it also tells us that we were relying on something that was not sufficient and perhaps not trustworthy. That is, there was work to be done to more carefully explicate why it is that in progressive modern society access to birth control, access to the legal recognition to marry the person you love regardless of their sex, gender, race, or ethnicity, and access to control of your own reproduction, those are all critical to a modern progressive society. And we had founded it on too tenuous a basis with Roe, and so we have good work to do, critical and important work to do to really further solidify these rights. I think the fact that these appear so important to the election of 2022 and to the election of legislators suggests that we're no longer willing to rely on just the court to preserve and protect these rights, but that we want a deeper and more binding commitment of legislation.
Mike: All right. So finally, one thing that you say in the book which I liked is that history exists to teach us about ourselves. So what can we learn about ourselves through reading this book?
Mark: So I'm a rather pessimistic historian. I like a quote attributed to Mark Twain, almost every witty thing is attributed to Mark Twain. There’s a quote from Mark Twain that says, "History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme." And I've always really liked that because I think people who study history know that to a certain degree we are doomed to repeat the past, that there's a certain similarity with things that seem to happen over and over and over again.
But like that movie Groundhog Day, the act of learning over and over and over again does change you. And we know that reading history and reading fiction generates in a person a sense of both empathy and a broader sense of why and how people do things. And so I think these kinds of histories are critical for us to look back at the ugliest, most challenging aspects of our own society's histories so that we can do a little bit better as we confront the same sorts of things generation after generation after generation.
Mike: All right. Well, Dr. Largent, thank you so much for coming on The Nazi Lies Podcast to talk about coerced sterilization in the United States. The book again is Breeding Contempt, out from Rutgers University Press. Thanks again.
Mark: Thank you, Mike, I appreciate the opportunity.
Mike: You missed Breeding Contempt with us in The Nazi Lies Book Club. Join us weekly on Discord as we discuss the books of upcoming guests of the show. Sign up on Patreon or shoot us a DM. Thanks for listening.
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Mike Isaacson: The earth isn’t flat. Everything is going downhill.
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Nazi SS UFOs
Lizards wearing human clothes
Hinduism’s secret codes
These are nazi liesRace and IQ are in genes
Warfare keeps the nation clean
Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine
These are nazi liesHollow earth, white genocide
Muslim’s rampant femicide
Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde
Hiter lived and no Jews diedArmy, navy, and the cops
Secret service, special ops
They protect us, not sweatshops
These are nazi liesMike: Welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. Today I am joined by Kelly Weill, reporter at The Daily Beast on the fringe ideology beat and author of the book Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything. Ms. Weill, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Kelly Weill: Hey, thank you so much for having me.
Mike: So now when I finished the book, I DM’d you to tell you that you're absolutely brilliant. And the reason why is your intentional approach when it comes to being a conduit of misinformation. You're very careful in how you reference your source material so as not to lead readers to it. Can you talk a little bit about your methodology a bit and how you dealt with your sources?
Kelly: Yeah, absolutely. It's weird dealing with somebody like flat earth, which is objectively wrong, right? When you're talking about that subject, you already kind of risk platforming that conspiracy theory as if there's any validity to it. So one thing that I tried to do throughout the course of my reporting and then to replicate as I was writing this book, was not to really engage with flat Earth as though it were a legitimate theory. And I kind of had it easy there. If I were doing something like medical misinformation, I would have probably had to get in the weeds a little bit more.
But as far as flat earth goes, I would go to these conferences and when I was interviewing people, I'd be really straightforward. I'd be like, "Hey yo, I'm not I'm not a flat earther. I'm a reporter; I believe in the globe. But let's talk about why you believe this thing." And for me, that was a bit more interesting than the details of what exactly they believed because flat earth is wrong, but I wanted to come to why they bought into a theory that's so wrong. And when we had those conversations about their pathways to belief, that turned out to be a lot more interesting to me than just the zaniness of this theory.
Mike: Okay, and we'll get into that soon. I want to talk about some things I learned. So the first thing I learned from your book is that flat earth theory is actually not that old? Like, there were cultures that believed in a flat earth, but there wasn’t the sort of pseudoscientific theory to justify it. So, when does the story of the flat earth movement start?
Kelly: Yeah, totally. This is a bit of a misconception actually. I know when I was a kid I thought that there was, you know, Columbus thought he might have been sailing off the edge of the world. That's not true at all. We've known for thousands of years that earth was round because you can prove it with some pretty basic math. It's something that we've been able to do long before we could physically observe the shape of the Earth.
But where flat earth theory actually comes back in is in England in around 1840. And that's when we have a guy named Samuel Rowbotham. He's a really interesting guy. He was a failed leader of a socialist commune; he had his hands on all kinds of short-lived fringe movements. I had a great time going through, you know, pre-Marxist socialist newspapers to find out what he was up to.
But one of his career trajectories that didn't fail had to do with misinformation. He sold fake miracle cures, sort of a proto-Alex Jones. And he started shelling this idea that maybe earth was flat. And that idea was really alluring to certain people in that moment because, around mid-1800s, we're talking about a time when the natural sciences are taking on more and more of a role in the discourse and the importance of things like religion are taking more of a backseat.
So when a theory like flat Earth comes out, it allows people to discard huge swathes of science and say, "Oh, I knew it was wrong all along. Oh, the scientists are all in league with each other to keep us in the dark." So as baffling and unscientific as flat earth was, even back then, it really did allow people to affirm their priors, to cast out information they didn't want to believe in, and sort of reshape their beliefs around this new and creative and just wholly counterfactual idea.
Mike: It just blew me away that Rowbotham had no predecessors whatsoever, he just kind of built this out of whole cloth, just him in the Bible. So how did flat Earth stick around?
Kelly: It stuck around because he had cronies just like any conspiracy influencer we have today. You know, I've just a couple of minutes ago compared Rowbotham to Alex Jones. He had his entourage, the people who might be like Owen Shroyers of the movement, who were even louder and a bit more virulent in their dissemination of these theories.
These were the people who– He had a follower named John Hampden who just reminds me so much of one of these guys who goes on YouTube and is like, "Debate me. Debate me." And he would lure actual scientific professionals into these stupid, pointless debates over established science about the shape of the world. But because he was just so tenacious and he wouldn't admit that he had lost a bet about a scientific wager and he would go to jail because he was harassing people about the shape of the world, you know, that emotional appeal, it continued to resonate with people throughout the years. And even though flat earth has ebbed and flowed a little bit in popularity, just the wildness of it, I think ,has always had an appeal for certain people who are looking for it.
Mike: So, one thing I was surprised about was that the flat earth movement was rather a latecomer, as far as conspiracy theories go, to the internet. So, what brought the flat earth online? How was it received?
Kelly: Yeah, that was really interesting to me, too. Because while I was researching this, I was kind of trawling through OG conspiracy pages online.
What's interesting to me actually if I might take a step back here is that conspiracy theories have always been early adopters of a lot of technology. You know, Rowbotham had a friend who was running a printing press, and he was getting his flat earth zines out. There was a flat earth commune in the early 20th century, and they had one of the earliest powerful radio programs that they could broadcast along the way.
So when I was looking at early internet conspiracy theories, I did find that conspiracy theorists were some of the first voices online who were really putting out weird information. So I was deep in the trenches looking at Y2K influencers and all that.
But there actually, to your point, was sort of a lack of flat earth theory early on in the internet. And I can think of a few reasons for that. For a while, flat earth theory was very tied to the Flat Earth Society, which was shepherded until 2001 by this very elderly couple. They were super literally off the grid. They lived in the desert, and they just were not the type of people to get online. And a lot of their archives actually burned in a house fire. So flat Earth really kind of took a nosedive with their deaths.
It came back online when some archivalist started going through those older records of this Flat Earth Society couple. And these people relaunched the Flat Earth Society online as a forum, a discussion place where people could talk. It's interesting to me. I am not completely sold on the idea that the people who relaunched the Flat Earth Society online were genuine. I think there's a reasonable chance that they're kind of fucking around like they thought it was funny. But they did resurface this huge archive of decades and decades of flat earth writings and they put them online. And that became, I think, the basis for a lot of more genuine believers to start going through the back catalog and seeing what flat earthers had been saying for the past 150 years. And eventually, it went from this sort of more moderate discussion on forums to things that could go a lot more viral with the advent of sites like YouTube.
Mike: Okay so let’s talk about the algorithm. How did flat earth wind up profiting from the YouTube recommendation algorithm?
Kelly: Yeah, this was huge. And throughout this book, I wanted to be careful about ascribing flat earth's resurgence to any one thing, you know, any one website or any one algorithm. That said, YouTube has a lot of blood on its hands as far as flat earth goes.
Basically, for quite a long time YouTube's algorithm would promote videos that it thought people would want to watch. It actually still does this, but they've done tweaks that hamper flat earth, I'll get to that in a minute. But basically, what people really want to watch, what people really want to click on at two in the morning, is not necessarily factual information. It's not really the “Eat Your Vegetables” kind of video. It's the weird scintillating stuff. If you see a video in your sidebar, a recommended video on YouTube and it says, "Is earth really flat?" Yeah, you're gonna click on that because it's just so weird you have to find out what that video is about.
Because those videos performed so well, because they tapped into this curiosity and this weird factor, they started overperforming in the algorithm, and they appear to have been promoted overwhelmingly. So conspiracy YouTubers would realize that, "Hey, I can get a lot of views by having a title that references flat earth.” So from a confluence of people making flat earth videos because they're being cynical, because they knew it would get a lot of views, and people who are actually starting to get earnestly converted from these videos going and putting their genuine beliefs in these new channels, we started seeing this huge swell of flat earth videos and a pretty powerful recommendation algorithm that gave those videos a disproportionate share of traffic. I do want to note that YouTube kind of acknowledged this and changed its algorithm in 2019 specifically so that flat earth would not be such an issue.
Mike: One thing you didn't draw a comparison to, or maybe I missed it, and I'm about to regurgitate one of your points, was to multilevel marketing. Like, these YouTubers are not just looking for converts to watch their videos, so that they can get monetized ads or whatever; they want converts to make videos themselves and then reference their videos so that they can get traffic that way. Can you talk a little about the culture of the flat earth movement on YouTube?
Kelly: Absolutely. I think the multi-level marketing comparison is such an apt one, and I'm actually kind of mad that I don't make it in the book, because it's relevant. And you bring that up. But literally the first Flat Earth conference I went to, this one flat earth celebrity YouTuber came up to me and she started talking to me. She goes, "Oh, I didn't realize you are a reporter. I was gonna say you should maybe make some videos about flat earth." Because she thought I was there and I was being genuine and... I'm gonna say something really mean. A lot of flat Earthers are kind of like boomer men that you don't want to watch a video of. And I was a 24-year-old woman so I think that was what was going on. [laughs]
But to that end, yeah, flat earthers don't just want to preach; they want to convert. And they want to build this community around themselves and around their videos because that's what keeps the theory going. Flat earth in and of itself could just be a set of talking points that you accept, and then you move on with your life. But for a lot of flat earthers, it becomes a way of life. It becomes a community that they build, and frankly, a set of relationships that they cling to because they often have deteriorating relationships with the rest of the world when they convert to this theory. So there's a very strong community basis in flat earth and other conspiracy theories. And I definitely think that flat earth YouTubers are often trying to make more flat earth YouTubers, and they're trying to promote a community that will further promote their videos.
Mike: Okay. So another thing I liked about the book was the way you brought human dignity to a lot of the people you talked about (not so much the cult leaders and grifters, but just kind of average people). Can you talk a bit about the people you met during your reporting and some of their backgrounds?
Kelly: Absolutely. I mean, there's no one profile for a flat earther. I know I just said a lot of them are kind of boomer guys. And maybe the average flat earther is a little bit older. But there's a surprising diversity in how people come to flat earth. When I was talking to people, I was trying to get a sense of, you know, “what were their priors?”
Initially at the first flat earth conference, I went and started asking people about their political beliefs. And I found that although this movement does skew conservative, a lot of people were very disenchanted with politics and they didn't really affix themselves to a tidy political profile.
So what I started doing was looking into that disaffectation. Why were people dissatisfied? Why were people looking for such a radical alternative explanation for the world? And I found quite a lot of pathways to flat earth. A lot of them are fairly upsetting; a lot of them had to do with people who were looking for new forms of community because they felt alienated in some sense, people who were looking for religious alternatives, a lot of people who came from faith traditions where they didn't fully feel like they were getting the right answers.
So when I was talking to people, I think I was in a certain sense maybe trying to diagnose what exactly had gone a little bit wrong to lead them to this movement. And I found the people who were actually quite forthcoming with me, were quite generous in explaining their path to flat earth. So that's something I tried to do regardless of, you know, if somebody told me they were a Trump supporter or an Obama fan who had completely fallen out of political circles. I just tried to try and keep an eye on that human element.
Mike: Okay. You have this chapter, Alone in a Flat World, where you talk about people losing their social lives to flat earth. This seems to play into this 21st-century decentralized cult phenomenon. You talk a lot about QAnon too, which is similar. So there are flat earth organizations, but apart from getting high-rolling flat earthers to a conference once a year, they don't really hold on to the movement. That's coming from the YouTube culture.
Kelly: Yeah, absolutely. I think a decentralized cult is a really interesting way of thinking about flat earth and frankly a lot of other conspiracy communities. It's hard to strictly call it a cult because there's no one leader, there's no one person they take marching orders from.
And yet it has a lot of the hallmarks of a cult. There's a central idea that you have to adhere to and block out all the other noise. You have to distance yourself from people who criticize this idea. It's a very in-group out-group affirming structure.
And it's interesting when I started looking at that model for flat earth, it was pretty easy to apply to a lot of other fringe movements and frankly some not-so-fringe movements. I thought it was really interesting to apply to Trumpism, and I know that sounds like a very Twitter-lib talking point saying, “Oh Trump is a cult leader.” But in the more maybe psychological aspect of it, where you do think about people's willingness to create this community around a central figure or central idea at the expense of the rest of their entire world. I think that was really interesting.
And it also, for me, explains why it's so hard to pull people away from these figures or ideas. Because they're not really operating on “debate me” facts and logic; they're operating on very emotional grounds. They tie a lot of their identity to flat earth or a political ideal. And so when you're trying to help them disengage from that, I think you need to also try and have some element of emotional healing. You need to offer an alternative to what sustenance they're getting from that movement. So yeah, that was definitely a model that helped me while I was thinking about flat earth and why people believe.
Mike: Yeah. It's like when I was doing my research on fascism for my Ph.D.-- that I didn't complete-- [laughs] one of the articles that I came across was talking about how the condition for someone deprogramming themselves from the Nazi movement, and from cult movements in general, is not only kind of a disillusionment with the movement that they're in but also kind of like an alternative that they can jump to, like a landing pad of a community that they can segue into without having to basically be alone in the world.
Kelly: Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's funny. There were a few interesting anecdotes earlier this year, and I can't fact-check them, but I think there's the plausibility to people who were saying that they had former QAnon relatives who dropped it when they found something that met that same need.
One of them was an aunt who got really into K-pop, which has this huge really loud online fandom, right? And so if the aunt was into QAnon because she wanted that community around her, well there's actually something comparable and infinitely less harmful in stanning BTS or whatever.
And then the other was someone whose relative was into QAnon because she liked the puzzle element, and she got into Wordle. And she did 500 Wordle knockoffs a day. And that was just kind of taking the place for her.
So I think people don't turn to these ultra-irrational things for no reason at all, they're seeking some unmet need. And if we can hopefully redirect them into something as harmless as BLACKPINK or whatever, that's definitely preferable.
Mike: Yeah. Okay. One interesting thing that you did in the book, which I'm not sure that you even noticed, was you adopted some of their manners of speaking. So like in particular, more towards the end of the book, you start using "flat" to refer to flat earthers in the way that someone might use "gay" to refer to someone who's gay. You describe someone as being flat. You do point out also that they often use the phrase "coming out of the closet." So can we talk about how badly these people want to be gay? [Kelly laughs] But was there an acculturation process in talking to and understanding these people, though?
Kelly: Yes. And also in terms of the coming out, what's so funny to me is these people really do want some legitimate form of victimhood because they do feel victimized and so they're just borrowing the language of the queer community, which is funny because a lot of these people are quite religious and conservative and are actually anti-gay, which I just thought was wild to see.
Yes, there definitely was a process of learning how to talk to these folks. I think one of them was– I was never, like I said earlier, I was never really trying to debate people. There was one thing that I had to dodge almost every time I went to a conference or I was talking to a new person on the phone, was I said, "Hey, I've got my views, you've got yours. I don't know that we're going to come to any synthesis in the course of a 30-minute conversation." But yeah, I did try and hue pretty closely to their language.
People would refer to themselves as being members of a community. When I talk about flat earth I, even now, refer to it as a community. I think because I've spent so much time around them, and hearing that term and actually kind of accepting that it is for them, a very communally based thing.
One thing I had to dodge quite a lot was discussions of religion. I'm very much an atheist. This is very much a religiously-influenced movement. Although flat earth doesn't necessarily have to be religious, it's predominantly quite Christian. So just kind of learning how to approach a discussion like that, and be able to honestly represent my views without putting them off.
And that's a little challenging sometimes. I'm also of Jewish heritage, and a lot of, frankly, there was a good deal of anti-semitism there. So, you know, just talking in open terms about faith I found was helpful. And yeah, you do kind of adopt the vocabulary a little bit. And I hope to put it in a way in this book that folks can read and feel like they were somewhat immersed in flat earth without completely giving them credence.
Mike: Yeah, I definitely got that sense. You devote a chapter to flat earth fascists, but in all, it didn’t seem that significant to me. Is this a misperception on my part? It didn’t seem like there were that many flat fascists.
Kelly: No. I'm very glad to say that most flat earthers are not fascists. But by that same token, I did feel like it was relevant enough that I had to put it in the book. And I think that's because it speaks to a broader issue with conspiracy theories. I think conspiracy theories are very, very useful to fascists, to totalizing movements in general, because they do allow people to cast out information that they don't want to grapple with. They allow people to have a very reduced view of the world and to perceive enemies where they don't exist, to perceive persecution where it doesn't exist, to form these in-group out-group associations.
So I was fascinated by the existence of some flat earth nazis, which they are around. One of the biggest flat earth video makers also has multiple neo-nazi rap albums. So it bore mentioning. But I thought it was maybe a good way to draw connections between something like flat earth, which is so zany that I think most people can laugh at it, to something like QAnon which is an equally absurd conspiracy theory but has way more fascist momentum behind it. QAnon is just a fascist fever dream. So I thought that I had to, in some way, make an allusion to how these conspiracy theories can be weaponized for something that's less funny than flat earth.
Mike: Yeah. So your last chapter is about one of my favorite things to do, and that’s leaving. Talk about the people that left flat earth and what we might learn from their stories.
Kelly: Absolutely. It was challenging for me to find people who left the flat earth movement who were willing to speak for this book. And that's not because a lot of people don't leave flat earth, they do, but they're kind of embarrassed about it. They don't want to go on the record, because it is an embarrassing thing to be wrong about.
So I'm very, very grateful for the people who did speak to me on the record about this. And something that they told me was that there was this intense feeling of overcoming themselves almost to leave flat earth. They had sunk so many relationships into this theory. They'd alienated people; they'd been very argumentative about this theory; they'd been passionate about it.
There were sunk costs, right? They didn't want all of it to have been for nothing. And so they put off leaving the theory really as long as they could, as long as they could still plausibly believe it. One guy told me that he was–at the end of his belief–he was so distressed that he couldn't look up at the sky. He didn't want to see a sunset because it would disprove flat earth. And he didn't want to look at it and grapple with that.
So I think it took a tremendous amount of personal honesty and bravery for these people to say, "You know what? I was actually wrong. And these losses that I've experienced from flat earth were exactly that, they were losses." But I do think what helped the people I spoke to was having a community around them outside flat earth who helped them leave and didn't make them feel like idiots, who welcomed them back even though they'd been on a long strange trip for a couple of years. And so I think going back to that idea of community, that idea of having alternatives, being able to have a safe landing, I think, was the most helpful thing for these people.
Mike: Okay. Kelly, thank you so much for coming on The Nazi Lies Podcast to talk about flat Earthers. The book again is Off the Edge out from Algonquin Books. Thanks again, Ms. Weill.
Kelly: Thank you so much for having me.
Mike: You missed reading Off the Edge with us in The Nazi Lies Book Club, but there are still plenty of great books from our upcoming guests to read. Come join us and support the show by subscribing to our Patreon. Subscriptions start as low as $2 and some come with merch. Check us out at patreon.com/NaziLies and follow us on Twitter @NaziLies and Facebook at facebook.com/TheNSLiesPod
[Theme song]
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Mike Isaacson: Encouraging inbreeding won’t get you very far.
[Theme song]
Nazi SS UFOs
Lizards wearing human clothes
Hinduism’s secret codes
These are nazi liesRace and IQ are in genes
Warfare keeps the nation clean
Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine
These are nazi liesHollow earth, white genocide
Muslim’s rampant femicide
Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde
Hiter lived and no Jews diedArmy, navy, and the cops
Secret service, special ops
They protect us, not sweatshops
These are nazi liesMike: Welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. I am joined by Uppsala University professor of animal conservation biology, Jacob Höglund. He is literally the perfect person to talk to about today’s Nazi lie: human biodiversity. He has a book from Oxford University Press called Evolutionary Conservation Genetics, which is the thing that Nazis obsess about. The book is great because it doesn’t get lost in the weeds with too much theory, it has tons of examples, and totally unintentionally, it absolutely demolishes the Nazi case for racial segregation and ethnic cleansing. I’m sure this is not at all where you expected to be interviewed for this book. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Höglund.
Jacob Höglund: Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here.
Mike: All right. So obviously, you were not intending to write a book to dispel Nazi lies writing a book about the genetics of extinction and conservation. So talk a little about what inspired you to write this book and what you learned along the way.
Jacob: Yeah, you're right. It's a completely different context, but the background is basically that the earth is facing a major biodiversity crisis. Biodiversity is defined as three basic levels; ecosystems, species, and genes. And I focus on genetic diversity. I'm concerned about loss of genetic diversity, and that's why I wrote the book.
Mike: Alright. By page two, you’re already undermining the core of Nazi racial theory by asserting that diversity, both genetic and demographic, is important for avoiding extinction. Before we get into why that is, talk a little about what diversity means in this context, because the human biodiversity crowd might be like, “Well, I believe we need diversity too.” But what they mean is a humanity segregated by race. So, what do we mean by that diversity here?
Jacob: Actually, in biology it means completely opposite. It's a bit complicated, but fragmentation-- So basically biodiversity loss or habitat loss, leads to smaller populations that become separated in a sense.
Imagine that you have a large population which is connected, and then human action causes land loss and changing land use and all that sort of stuff. So populations that once were big and connected now become small and fragmented.
And these small and fragmented populations tend to lose genetic variation through a process called genetic drift. Genetic drift is basically the random loss of genetic variants. This is what conservation genetics is trying to understand and to counteract.
Mike: Okay. You talk a bit about segregation and its evolutionary consequences in your book. Obviously, you don’t mean to refer to race here, but for practical purposes the effect of segregation would be genetically the same for humans. Talk about what happens to species with segregated populations.
Jacob: Yeah. We biologists don't talk about segregated populations; we talk about fragmented populations. So it's a small distinction, right? But as I tried to explain before, when you have fragmentation because of this process called genetic drift, you lose genetic diversity. Genetic diversity is sometimes also called heterozygosity when geneticists talk to one another.
Mike: What does heterozygosity mean exactly? How is it defined?
Jacob: It's again, a bit technical and complicated. But many organisms like plants and animals, the ones we are most familiar with, they are what we call diploid. And what a diploid is, it means that basically, these organisms have one genome from mom and one genome from dad. So it means that on every position in the genome, there would be one variant inherited from mom and one from dad. And when they are different, the two positions are different. That's called an heterozygous site. And when they're the same, so when Mom and Dad had the same variant, that's called a homozygous site. And the more sites that are heterozygous, the more diverse the genome is.
Mike: Right. So it's kind of like having enough genes in the gene pool to make sure that– Okay, so now let's talk about why genetic diversity is important. Why do we want heterozygosity?
Jacob: We want diversity in the populations because if we have– One way I can explain this is that, you know, in our homes many people keep good-to-have boxes; you save nuts and bolts and nails and whatever-- you put them in this box that you find is good to have in the future. Because if you face a problem in your home and you want to repair something, it's good to have different kinds of nuts and bolts and nails and whatever tools. And the more tools you have, the more problems in the future you can solve.
So it's the same with a biological population, if there are lots of variants in the population it means that this population will be able to adapt to future changes in the environment. And if the population has lost most of genetic variation, it means that they're sort of stuck to the circumstances that they're facing right now.
Do you follow the analogy? Diversity is good because then you have more options to change when the circumstances change. And one thing that we know for sure is that life on earth is always evolving, it's always changing. Nothing stays the same. So having a lot of variance means that a species or population can adapt to future changes.
Mike: Alright. So now, one thing that I think is pertinent in this discussion is the notion of inbreeding, which you talk about in your book. First, how is inbreeding defined by evolutionary biologists?
Jacob: Inbreeding is caused by something that we call the non-random mating, for example between close relatives. Mating between close relatives leads to increased homozygosity, that is the loss of genetic diversity. That's why in this context that it's good to have lots of genetic variation, inbreeding is bad because it leads to exaggerated loss of genetic variation and genetic variants. That's why we want to avoid inbreeding.
But there's also another problem and that is that inbreeding might also lead to fixation of bad genetic variants. Because we had this diploid thing that, you know, you had genetic variants inherited from mom and dad. And if you have inbreeding, it might be that both mom and dad have a bad variant at the zygous site. And such site might become fixed in offspring, so the offspring ends up with a bad variant at the zygous site.
And that leads to something called inbreeding depression. I think, Mike, that's your next question. That's what you're leading to.
Mike: Yeah let’s talk about inbreeding depression.
Jacob: Yeah. So, inbreeding depression is the loss of fitness or what we call viability due to expression of these deleterious variants. That might lead to the organism being less able to cope. It might lead to disease, genetic diseases might be expressed, or it might lead to other malfunctions in the organism.
Mike: And how does genetic mutation play a role in this story?
Jacob: It's because most mutations, the vast majority of mutations, mutations induce changes to the genome, and a set of new variants that pops up because of the biochemical changes in the DNA structure, basically. And most of these variants, the vast majority of them are actually bad for the organism. There are a few that are what we call neutral, they don't make a change so they might stay in the population. And a small minority might actually even be good, and they are sort of favored in the population. But most mutations are selected against and lost from the population. But they might-- because we have this fact that most organisms are diploid–some of these bad mutations might linger in the population because they are masked by a good variant at the zygous site.
Mike: How does that mutation story fit into the inbreeding story?
Jacob: If you have bad mutations, both inherited from both mom and dad, then these bad mutations may become expressed at the phenotypic level. If you're heterozygous at such site, it might suffice to have one good unit variant that would mask the phenotypic effects of the bad one. But if you have inbreeding, these bad mutations become expressed because there's no masking effect. Do you follow?
Mike: Yeah. Basically, the idea is that because you're breeding with the same small pool, basically those variants don't end up breeding themselves out through evolutionary adaptation. Right?
Jacob: Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of related to what we've discussed previously that, in small populations, these bad alleles might become fixed. And that leads to poor effects. That's why conservation biologists are concerned about inbreeding and the inbreeding depression.
Mike: One thing you include at the tail end of the inbreeding chapter is a short section on rescue effects, so measures taken to rescue subpopulations on the path to extinction due to inbreeding depression. So, what do those measures look like? And how effective are they?
Jacob: Yeah, what conservation biologists are aiming at is to try to counteract this fragmentation process that I talked about by creating corridors between fragmented populations to increase gene flow between populations. And in some cases when making corridors and promoting natural dispersal, it might actually be-- well, I shouldn't say possible, but sometimes it might be necessary to translocate individuals between populations to increase the gene flow over the migration between populations to keep up the genetic variation in these fragmented populations.
Mike: Okay. So basically the idea is that if you can find populations elsewhere, you can hopefully repopulate an area by basically connecting those areas with these corridors.
Jacob: Exactly.
Mike: Okay. So besides executing plans to racially segregate the population, how else does human action bear upon genetic diversity in the ecosystem?
Jacob: The big problem with human action is that we are too many, basically. And the fact that we are so many means that we use up the Earth's resources at the expense of other organisms. And we're transforming, we're changing the land use, so we're making agricultural land, and we're cutting down forests, and we're polluting lakes and streams and whatever. We're basically taking over the life space of the other organisms for the benefit of our own species. This might actually bite us in the end after a while because when we have transformed all natural habitats, it's going to be a very difficult Earth to live on.
Mike: Let’s talk about invasive species, because I’m sure Nazis are VERY interested in applying this logic to immigration. So, what makes a species invasive? How would you define invasive species?
Jacob: A species may become invasive if it's translocated or accidentally being moved to an environment where it does not face any natural enemies, and the population might grow unchecked because there is no predators, there's no disease keeping the population numbers under control. That's why it's called invasive. It grows unchecked, basically.
Mike: Okay. I guess, let's dive more into that. What's the problem with unchecked growth?
Jacob: It might be that an invasive species might knock out species that are native to an area, and may disturb ecosystems by changing the food webs and a lot of other problems.
Mike: Okay. Can we talk about some examples of that? Do you have any?
Jacob: Of invasive species?
Mike: Yeah.
Jacob: Oh, yeah. It depends on where you are, but in my country here in Sweden, there are lots of plants that have been brought in because of agriculture that takes over and might suppress the growth of the native species.
There are also organisms that come with shipping. You know, when the ballast water is released– So there might be a ship from Japan and they have loaded ballast water in Japan, they have accidentally brought Japanese oysters, which is a different species for European oysters, to the coastal areas of Sweden. And then they release these Japanese oysters and these Japanese oysters grow a bit faster and become a bit bigger than European oysters, and they sort of take over the living space of the European oysters.
In these contexts there are lots of sort of accidents that might happen, and it's very much depending on the context of what happens. Most of these accidental removals of organisms from one area to another, they don't become invasive. It's only a few translocated species that do become invasive. Under what circumstances they become invasive or not is a bit hard to understand still, we don't really know what makes a species invasive.
Mike: With this idea of invasion, this logic or this-- I don't know what to call it. I don't want to make it sound minimal by calling it a theory, but I mean, it's basically a theory-- it works only at the species level, it's not something that works intraspecies, right? It's not something that works with different phenotypes or anything like that.
Jacob: No, no, no. As you say, it's at the level of species, not on replacing populations. I mean, first of all species, might come as a surprise, but it's a concept which is not– There are lots of different– Biologists differ in what they call a species. We, biologists, are not at all– we don't all agree on what we think is a species.
And when it comes to other biological entities like subspecies, we have an even lesser agreement on what we mean as subspecies. And when it comes to concepts like race, race is not at all defined by biologists at all. It's a social construct thing, basically.
So it matters what we mean by a species or not, but invasiveness when you sort of talk about a particular role with this like humans, it's out of context completely. It doesn't have any bearing at all.
Mike: Now in certain instances, conservation geneticists are interested in preserving specific genotypes. What do these programs of genetic conservation typically look like? Because these are not the selective breeding programs imagined by Nazis, right?
Jacob: Yeah. But it's not at all. I mean, preserving certain genotypes comes in the context of something that we call local adaptation. Local adaptation means that certain populations might be adapted to the local circumstances. In such cases, it means that by introducing something which is adapted to something else might actually lead to problems of the population that is aimed to be rescued.
So this is called outbreeding depression: that we might introduce alien or not-so-well-adapted genetic variants into a population that may jeopardize that population's ability to work. The local variants may become swamped by something that comes from another population.
Mike: Right. And this idea of outbreeding depression is this idea that if you bring this genetic material in without concern for the history of local adaptation, right? Then you basically undo evolution, basically.
Jacob: In some cases, that may lead to the undesirable effects that we lose these local variants. So this continuum of inbreeding and outbreeding, in most cases most people think that what the big problem is loss of genetic diversity and that we should increase genetic diversity by aiding translocations and counteract biodiversity or habitat loss. But in very special circumstances, we might need to think about how we should perform these translocations.
Mike: Okay. You talk a great deal about MHC genes (and a little bit of a few other categories of genes) and their interest to conservation geneticists. Why are MHC genes and these other genes you list, why are they of interest to conservation geneticists but probably not the genetic markers that are subject to ancestry tests?
Jacob: Yeah. So this, again, goes back to this thing that I said. Most mutations are bad and there are some that are neutral, so there are some genetic variants that doesn't really matter whether or not we have different variants or not. But in some cases, there are genetic variants that are beneficial to the organism. And MHC genes especially in this circumstance, because MHC genes are involved in disease resistance. So they are involved in the immune defense of vertebrates, basically.
And because of their link to disease resistance, they are an obvious target for conservation biologists because we want populations that are able to resist diseases. That's why there has been a lot of focus on MHC genes.
Another reason is that because of this link to disaster resistance, MHC loci or MHC genes are known to be the part of the genomes of vertebrates that are the most diverse. So there has been a natural selection for diversity in MHC genes. So it's the part of the genome that is the most diverse part of the genome, which also makes it interesting to understand. It's a bit complicated to study, but it makes it interesting to understand how diversity is related to disease resistance and so on. It goes back to this analogy of the toolbox like I said. The more disease-resistant genes you have, the more viruses and bacteria and other disease agents you're able to combat basically.
Mike: Okay. So, I guess, bringing this back to kind of where I think you were hoping to go with the book, what can people who are not biologists do to help with environmental conservation efforts?
Jacob: Yeah. I think it's a really, really important area to understand and it's a big problem for humanity, the biodiversity losses. So what I encourage people to do is engage, read, educate yourselves, partake in citizen science, and in the end promote biodiversity. So that's more education and counteract habitat destruction and the fact that we are sometimes for greedy reasons, just destroying our nature. We should cherish and try to keep natural habitats as much as possible.
Mike: Okay. Well, Dr. Höglund, thank you so much for coming on The Nazi Lies Podcast to undermine the theory of human biodiversity. The book, again, is Evolutionary Conservation Genetics out from Oxford University Press. Thanks again.
Jacob: Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Hope my contribution makes a difference.
Mike: You missed reading Evolutionary Conservation Genetics with us in The Nazi Lies Book Club but there are still plenty more books to read by our upcoming guests. Join the Discord server where we host the book club meetings by subscribing on Patreon at patreon.com/Nazilies. For show updates and general mayhem, follow us on Twitter @NaziLies and Facebook at facebook.com/TheNSLiesPod.
[Theme song]
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Mike Isaacson: If your free speech requires an audience, might I suggest a therapist?
[Theme song]
Nazi SS UFOs
Lizards wearing human clothes
Hinduism’s secret codes
These are nazi liesRace and IQ are in genes
Warfare keeps the nation clean
Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine
These are nazi liesHollow earth, white genocide
Muslim’s rampant femicide
Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde
Hiter lived and no Jews diedArmy, navy, and the cops
Secret service, special ops
They protect us, not sweatshops
These are nazi liesMike: Welcome once again to The Nazi Lies Podcast. I am joined by two historians today. With us is Evan Smith, lecturer at Flinders University in Adelaide, and David Renton, who taught at a number of universities in the UK and South Africa before leaving the academy to practice law, though he still finds time to research and write. Each of them has a book about today’s topic: the free speech crisis.
Dr. Smith’s book, No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech, chronicles the No Platform policy of the National Union of Students in the UK from its foundation in 1974 to the present day. Dr. Renton’s book, No Free Speech for Fascists: Exploring ‘No Platform’ in History, Law and Politics, tells a much longer story of the interplay of radical leftist groups, organized fascists, and the state in shaping the UK’s speech landscape and their significance in politics and law. Both are out from Routledge.
I have absolutely no idea how we’ve managed to make the time zones work between the three of us, but welcome both of you to the podcast.
Evan Smith: Thank you.
David Renton: Thanks, Mike.
Mike: So David, I want to start with you because your book goes all the way back to the 1640s to tell its history. So what made you start your story in the 1640s, and what did contention over speech look like before Fascism?
David: Well, I wanted to start all that time back more than 300 years ago, because this is the moment when you first start to see something like the modern left and right emerge. You have in Britain, a party of order that supports the state and the king, but you also have a party which stands for more democracy and a more equal distribution of wealth. And essentially, from this point onwards in British, European, American politics, you see those same sites recreating themselves.
And what happens again, and again, and again from that point onwards for hundreds of years until certainly say 50 years ago, you have essentially the people who are calling for free speech, whether that's the levellers in 1640s, Tom Paine 100 years later, J.S. Mill in the 19th Century. The left is always the people in favor of free speech.
In terms of the right, if you want a kind of the first philosopher of conservatism, someone like Edmund Burke, he's not involved in the 1640s. He’s a bit later, about a century and a half later. But you know, he supports conservatism. So what's his attitude towards free speech? It's really simple. He says, people who disagree with him should be jailed. There should be laws made to make it harder for them to have defenses. And more and more of them should be put in jail without even having a trial. That's the conservative position on free speech for centuries.
And then what we get starting to happen in the late 20th century, something completely different which is a kind of overturning of what's been this huge, long history where it's always the left that’s in favor of free speech, and it's always the right that's against it.
Mike: Okay. Now, your contention is that before the appearance of Fascism, socialist radicals were solidly in favor of free speech for all. Fascism changed that, and Evan, maybe you can jump in here since this is where your book starts. What was new about Fascism that made socialists rethink their position on speech?
Evan: So fascism was essentially anti-democratic and it was believed that nothing could be reasoned with because it was beyond the realms of reasonable, democratic politics. It was a violence, and the subjugation of its opponents was at the very core of fascism. And that the socialist left thought that fascism was a deeply violent movement that moved beyond the traditional realm of political discourse. So, there was no reasoning with fascists, you could only defeat them.
Mike: So, let's start with David first, but I want to get both of you on this. What was the response to Fascism like before the end of World War II?
David: Well, what you do is you get the left speaking out against fascism, hold demonstrations against fascism, and having to articulate a rationale of why they're against fascism. One of the things I quote in my book is a kind of famous exchange that takes place in 1937 when a poet named Nancy Cunard collected together the writers, intellectuals, and philosophers who she saw as the great inspiration to– the most important writers and so on that day. And she asked them what side they were taking on fascism.
What's really interesting if you read their accounts, whether it's people like the poet W.H. Auden, novelist Gerald Bullitt, the philosopher C.E.M Joad, they all say they're against fascism, but they all put their arguments against fascism in terms of increased speech. So C.E.M Joad writes, "Fascism suppresses truth. That's why we're against fascism." Or the novelist Owen Jameson talks about fascism as a doctrine which exalts violence and uses incendiary bombs to fight ideas.
So you get this thing within the left where people grasp that in order to fight off this violence and vicious enemy, they have to be opposed to it. And that means, for example, even to some extent making an exception to what's been for centuries this uniform left-wing notion: you have to protect everyone's free speech. Well people start grasping, we can't protect the fascist free speech, they're gonna use it to suppress us. So the Left makes an exception to what's been its absolute defense of free speech, but it makes this exception for the sake of protecting speech for everybody.
Mike: Okay. Evan, do you want to add anything to the history of socialists and fascists before the end of World War Two?
Evan: Yeah. So just kind of setting up a few things which will become important later on, and particularly because David and I are both historians of antifascism in Britain, is that there's several different ways in which antifascism emerges in the interwar period and several different tactics.
One tactic is preventing fascists from marching from having a presence in public. So things like the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 is a very famous incident where the socialists and other protesters stopped the fascists from marching. There's also heckling and disrupting of fascist meetings. So this was big meetings like Olympia in June 1934, but then also smaller ones like individual fascist meetings around the country were disrupted by antifascists.
There was also some that are on the left who also called for greater state intervention, usually in the form of labor councils not allowing fascists to congregate in public halls and stuff like that. So these kinds of arguments that fascism needs to be confronted, disrupted, obfuscated, starts to be developed in the 1930s. And it's where those kinds of free speech arguments emerge in the later period.
Mike: Now immediately after the Second World War, fascist movements were shells of their former selves. They had almost no street presence and their organizations usually couldn’t pull very many members. Still, the response to fascism when it did pop up was equally as vehement as when they organized into paramilitary formations with membership in the thousands. Something had qualitatively changed in the mind of the public regarding fascism. What did the immediate postwar response to public fascist speech look like, and what was the justification? Evan, let's start with you and then David you can add anything he misses.
Evan: David probably could tell the story in a lot more detail. In the immediate post-war period in Britain, Oswald Mosley tries to revive the fascist movement under the title The Union Movement, but before that there's several kind of pro-fascist reading groups that emerge.
And in response to this is kind of a disgust that fascists who had recently been imprisoned in Britain and their fellow travellers in the Nazis and the Italian Fascists and the continental fascists had been, you know, it ended in the Holocaust. There was this disgust that fascists could be organizing again in public in Britain, and that's where it mobilizes a new kind of generation of antifascists who are inspired by the 1930s to say "Never again, this won't happen on our streets." And the most important group and this is The 43 Group, which was a mixture of Jewish and communist radicals, which probably David can tell you a little bit about.
David: I'd be happy to but I think before we get to 43 Group, it's kind of worth just pausing because the point Mike's left is kind of around the end of the Second World War. One thing which happens during the Second World War is of course Britain's at war with Germany. So what you start to get is Evan talked about how in the 1930s, you already have this argument like, “Should stopping fascism be something that's done by mass movements, or should it be done by the state?”
In the Second World War the state has to confront that question, too, because it's got in fascism a homegrown enemy, and the British state looks at how all over Europe these states were toppled really quickly following fascist advance, and very often a pro-fascist powerful section of the ruling class had been the means by which an invading fascism then found some local ally that's enabled it to take over the state and hold the state. So the British state in 1940 actually takes a decision to intern Oswald Mosley and 800 or so of Britain's leading fascists who get jailed initially in prisons in London, then ultimately on the Isle of Man.
Now, the reason why I'm going into this is because the first test of what the ordinary people in Britain think about the potential re-emergence of fascism comes even before the Second World War's ended. When Oswald Mosley is released from internment, he says he has conditioned phlebitis, he's very incapacitated, and is never going to be politically active again. And the British state buys this. And this creates–and an actual fact–the biggest single protest movement in Britain in the entire Second World War, where you get hundreds of people in certain factories going on strike against Oswald Mosley's release, and high hundreds of thousands of people signed petitions demanding that he's reinterned, and you start to get people having demonstrations saying Mosley ought to go back to jail.
That kind of sets the whole context of what's going to happen after the end of the Second World War. Mosley comes out and he's terrified of public opinion; he's terrified about being seen in public. He's convinced that if you hold meetings you're going to see that cycle going on again. So for several years, the fascists barely dare hold public meetings, and they certainly don't dare hold meetings with Mosley speaking. They test the water a bit, and they have some things work for them.
Evan’s mentioned the 43 Group so I'll just say a couple sentences about them. The 43 Group are important in terms of what becomes later. They're not a vast number of people, but they have an absolute focus on closing down any fascist meeting. We're gonna hear later in this discussion about the phrase "No Platform" and where it comes from, but you know, in the 1940s when fascist wanted to hold meetings, the platform means literally getting together a paste table and standing on it, or standing on a tiny little ladder just to take you a couple of foot above the rest of your audience. The 43 Group specialize in a tactic which is literally knocking over those platforms.
And because British fascism remained so isolated and unpopular in the aftermath of the Second World War, you know, there are 43 Group activists and organizers who look at London and say, "All right, if there going to be 12 or 13 public meetings in London this weekend, we know where they're going to be. If we can knock over every single one of those other platforms, then literally there'll be no fascists to have any chance to find an audience or put a public message in Britain."
That's kind of before you get the term 'No Platform' but it's almost in essence the purest form of No Platforming. It's people being able to say, "If we get organized as a movement outside the state relying on ordinary people's opposition to fascism, we can close down every single example of fascist expression in the city and in this country."
Mike: Okay. So through the 50’s and 60’s, there were two things happening simultaneously. On the one hand, there was the largely left wing student-led free speech movement. And on the other hand, there was a new generation of fascists who were rebuilding the fascist movement in a variety of ways. So let’s start with the free speech movement. David, you deal with this more in your book. What spurred the free speech movement to happen?
David: Yeah. Look in the 50s and 60s, the free speech movement is coming from the left. That's going to change, we know it's going to change like 20 or 30 years later, but up to this point we're still essentially in the same dance of forces that I outlined right at the start. That the left's in favor of free speech, the right is against it. And the right’s closing down unwanted ideas and opinion.
In the 50s and 60s, and I'm just going to focus on Britain and America, very often this took the form of either radicals doing some sort of peace organising–and obviously that cut against the whole basic structure of the Cold War–or it took the form of people who maybe not even necessarily radicals at all, just trying to raise understanding and consciousness about people's bodies and about sex.
So for the Right, their counterattack was to label movements like for example in the early 60s on the campus of Berkeley, and then there's originally a kind of anti-war movement that very quickly just in order to have the right to organize, becomes free speech movements. And the Right then counter attacks against it saying, "Essentially, this is just a bunch of beats or kind of proto-hippies. And what they want to do is I want to get everyone interested in drugs, and they want to get everyone interested in sexuality, and they want everyone interested in all these sorts of things." So their counterattack, Reagan terms this, The Filthy Speech Movement.
In the late 60s obviously in states, we have the trial of the Chicago 7, and here you have the Oz trial, which is when a group of radicals here, again that their point of view is very similar, kind of hippie-ish, anti-war milieu. But one thing is about their magazines, which again it seems very hard to imagine today but this is true, that part of the way that their their magazine sells is through essentially soft pornographic images. And there's this weird combination of soft porn together with far left politics. They'll get put on trial in the Oz trial and that's very plainly an attempt– our equivalent of the Chicago 7 to kind of close down radical speech and to get into the public mind this idea that the radicals are in favor of free speech, they're in favor of extreme left-wing politics, and they're in favor of obscenity, and all these things are somehow kind of the same thing.
Now, the point I just wanted to end on is that all these big set piece trials–another one to use beforehand is the Lady Chatterley's Lover trial, the Oz trial, the Chicago 7 trial, all of these essentially end with the right losing the battle of ideas, not so much the far right but center right. And people just saying, "We pitched ourselves on the side of being against free speech, and this isn't working. If we're going to reinvent right-wing thought, make some center right-wing ideas desirable and acceptable in this new generation of people, whatever they are, then we can't keep on being the ones who are taking away people's funds, closing down ideas. We've got to let these radicals talk themselves out, and we've got to reposition ourselves as being, maybe reluctantly, but the right takes the decision off of this. The right has to be in favor of free speech too.
Mike: All right. And also at this time, the far right was rebuilding. In the UK, they shifted their focus from overt antisemitism and fascism to nebulously populist anti-Black racism. The problem for them, of course, was that practically no one was fooled by this shift because it was all the same people. So, what was going on with the far right leading into the 70s? Evan, do you want to start?
Evan: Yeah. So after Mosley is defeated in Britain by the 43 Group and the kind of antifascism after the war, he moves shortly to Ireland and then comes back to the UK. Interestingly, he uses universities and particularly debates with the Oxford Union, the Cambridge Union, and other kind of university societies, to find a new audience because they can't organize on the streets. So he uses–throughout the '50s and the '60s–these kind of university platforms to try and build a fascist movement. At the same time, there are people who were kind of also around in the '30s and the '40s who are moving to build a new fascist movement. It doesn't really get going into '67 when the National Front is formed from several different groups that come together, and they're really pushed into the popular consciousness because of Enoch Powell and his Rivers of Blood Speech.
Enoch Powell was a Tory politician. He had been the Minister for Health in the Conservative government, and then in '68 he launches this Rivers of Blood Speech which is very much anti-immigration. This legitimizes a lot of anti-immigrationist attitudes, and part of that is that the National Front rides his coattails appealing to people who are conservatives but disaffected with the mainstream conservatism and what they saw as not being hard enough in immigration, and that they try to build off the support of the disaffected right; so, people who were supporting Enoch Powell, supporting the Monday Club which is another hard right faction in the conservatives. And in that period up until about the mid 1970s, that's the National Front's raison d'etre; it's about attracting anti-immigrationists, conservatives to build up the movement as an electoral force rather than a street force which comes later in the '70s.
Mike: There was also the Apartheid movement, or the pro-Apartheid movement, that they were building on at this time as well, right?
Evan: Yeah. So at this time there's apartheid in South Africa. In 1965, the Ian Smith regime in Rhodesia has a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain to maintain White minority rule. And a lot of these people who are around Powell, the Monday Club, the National Front, against decolonization more broadly, and also then support White minority rule in southern Africa. So a lot of these people end up vocalizing support for South Africa, vocalizing support for Rhodesia, and that kind of thing. And it's a mixture of anti-communism and opposition to multiracial democracy. That's another thing which they try to take on to campus in later years.
Mike: So finally we get to No Platform. Now, Evan, you contend that No Platform was less than a new direction in antifascist politics than a formalization of tactics that had developed organically on the left. Can you talk a bit about that?
Evan: Yeah, I'll give a quick, very brief, lead up to No Platform and to what's been happening in the late '60s. So Enoch Powell who we mentioned, he comes to try and speak on campus several times throughout the late 60s and early 70s. These are often disrupted by students that there's an argument that, "Why should Enoch Powell be allowed to come onto campus? We don't need people like that to be speaking." This happens in the late 60s.
Then in '73, Hans Eysenck, who was a psychologist who was very vocal about the connection between race and IQ, he attempts to speak at the London School of Economics and his speech is disrupted by a small group of Maoists. And then also–
Mike: And they physically disrupted that speech, right? That wasn’t just–
Evan: Yeah, they punched him and pushed him off stage and stuff like that.
And a month later, Samuel Huntington who is well known now for being the Clash of Civilizations guy, he went to speak at Sussex University, and students occupied a lecture theater so he couldn't talk because they opposed his previous work with the Pentagon during the Vietnam War.
This led to a moral panic beginning about the end of free speech on campus, that it's either kind of through sit-ins or through direct violence, but in the end students are intolerant. And that's happening in that five years before we get to No Platform.
Mike: One thing I didn’t get a good sense of from your books was what these socialist groups that were No Platforming fascists prior to the NUS policy stood for otherwise. Can we talk about the factionalization of the left in the UK in the 60s and 70s? David, maybe you can help us out on this one.
David: Yeah, sure. The point to grasp, which is that the whole center of British discourse in the ‘70s was way to the left of where it is in Britain today, let alone anywhere else in the world. That from, say, ‘64 to ‘70, we had a Labour government, and around the Labour Party. We had really, really strong social movements. You know, we had something like roughly 50% of British workers were members of trade unions. We'll get on later to the Students Union, that again was a movement in which hundreds of thousands of people participated.
Two particular groups that are going to be important for our discussion are the International Socialists and International Marxist Group, but maybe if I kind of go through the British left sort of by size starting from largest till we get down to them.
So the largest wing we've got on the British left is Labour Party. This is a party with maybe about half a million members, but kind of 20 million affiliated members through trade unions, and it's gonna be in and out of government.
Then you've got the Communist Party which is getting quite old as an organization and is obviously tied through Cold War politics to the Soviet Union.
And then you get these smaller groups like the IS, the IMG. And they're Trotskyist groups so they're in the far left of labor politics as revolutionaries, but they have quite a significant social heft, much more so than the far left in Britain today because, for example, their members are involved in editing magazines like Oz. There is a moment where there's a relatively easy means for ideas to merge in the far left and then get transmitted to the Labour Party and potentially even to Labour ministers and into government.
Mike: Okay, do you want to talk about the International Marxist Group and the International Socialists?
Evan: Do you want me to do that or David?
Mike: Yes, that'd be great.
Evan: Okay. So as David mentioned, there's the Communist Party and then there's the International Socialists and the International Marxist Group. The International Marxist Group are kind of heavily based in the student movement. They're like the traditional student radicals. Tariq Ali is probably the most famous member at this stage. And they have this counter cultural attitude in a way.
International Socialists are a different form of Trotskyism, and they're much more about, not so much interested in the student movement, but kind of like a rank and file trade unionism that kind of stuff, opposition to both capitalism and Soviet communism. And the IS, the IMG, and sections of the Communist Party all coalesce in the student movement, which forms the basis for pushing through a No Platform policy in the Nationalist Union of Students in 1974.
Mike: Okay. So in 1974, the National Union of Students passes their No Platform policy. Now before we get into that, what is the National Union of Students? Because we don’t have an analogue to that in the US. Evan, you want to tackle this one?
Evan: Yeah. Basically, every university has a student union or a form of student union–some kind of student body–and the National Union of Students is the national organization, the peak body which organizes the student unions on all the various campuses around the country. Most of the student unions are affiliated to the NUS but some aren't. The NUS is a kind of democratic body and oversees student policy, but individual student unions can opt in or opt out of whether they follow NUS guidelines.
And I think what needs to be understood is that the NUS was a massive organization back in those days. You know, hundreds of thousands of people via the student unions become members of the NUS. And as David was saying, the political discourse is much bigger in the '60s and '70s through bodies like this as well as things like the trade union movement. The student movement has engaged hundreds of thousands of students across Britain about these policies much more than we see anything post the 1970s.
David: If I could just add a sentence or two there, that's all right. I mean, really to get a good sense of scale of this, if you look at, obviously you have the big set piece annual conventions or conferences of the National Union of Students. Actually, it doesn't even just have one a year, it has two a year. Of these two conferences, if you just think about when the delegates are being elected to them how much discussion is taking place in local universities. If you go back to some local university meetings, it's sometimes very common that you see votes of 300 students going one way, 400 another, 700 going one way in some of the larger universities. So there's an absolute ferment of discussion around these ideas. Which means that when there are set piece motions to pass, they have a democratic credibility. And they've had thousands of people debating and discussing them. It's not just like someone going on to one conference or getting something through narrowly on a show of hands. There's a feeling that these debates are the culmination of what's been a series of debates in each local university. And we've got over 100 of them in Britain.
Mike: Okay, how much is the student union's presence felt on campus by the average student?
Evan: That'd be massive.
David: Should I do this? Because I'm a bit older than Evan and I went to university in the UK. And it's a system which is slowly being dismantled but when I was student, which is like 30 years ago, this was still largely in place.
In almost every university, the exceptions are Oxford and Cambridge, but in every other university in Britain, almost all social activity takes place on a single site on campus. And that single site invariably is owned by the student's union. So your students union has a bar, has halls, it's where– They're the plumb venues on campus if you want to have speakers or if you want to have– Again, say when punk happened a couple of years later, loads and loads of the famous punk performances were taking place in the student union hall in different universities.
One of the things we're going to get onto quite soon is the whole question of No Platform and what it meant to students. What I want to convey is that for loads of students having this discussion, when they're saying who should be allowed on campus or who shouldn't be allowed on campus, what's the limits? They feel they've got a say because there are a relatively small number of places where people will speak. Those places are controlled by the students' union. They're owned and run by the students' union. It's literally their buildings, their halls, they feel they’ve got a right to set who is allowed, who's actually chosen, and who also shouldn't be invited.
Mike: Okay, cool. Thank you. Thank you for that. That's a lot more than I knew about student unions. Okay. Evan, this is the bread and butter of your book. How did No Platform come about in the NUS?
Evan: So, what part of the fascist movement is doing, the far-right movement, is that it is starting to stray on campus. I talked about the major focus of the National Front is about appealing to disaffected Tories in this stage, but they are interfering in student affairs; they're disrupting student protests; they're trying to intimidate student politics. And in 1973, the National Front tried to set up students' association on several campuses in Britain
And there's a concern about the fascist presence on campus. So those three left-wing groups– the IMG, the IS and the Communist Party–agree at the student union level that student unions should not allow fascists and racists to use student buildings, student services, clubs that are affiliated to the student union. They shouldn't be allowed to access these. And that's where they say about No Platform is that the student union should deny a platform to fascists and racists. And in 1974 when they put this policy to a vote and it's successful, they add, "We're going to fight them by any means necessary," because they've taken that inspiration from the antifascism of the '30s and '40s.
Mike: Okay. Now opinion was clearly divided within the NUS. No Platform did not pass unanimously. So Evan, what was opinion like within the NUS regarding No Platform?
Evan: Well, it passed, but there was opposition. There was opposition from the Federation of Conservative Students, but there was also opposition from other student unions who felt that No Platform was anti-free speech, so much so that in April 1974 it becomes policy, but in June 1974, they have to have another debate about whether this policy should go ahead. It wins again, but this is the same time as it happens on the same day that the police crackdown on anti-fascist demonstration in Red Lion Square in London. There's an argument that fascism is being propped up by the police and is a very real threat, so that we can't give any quarter to fascism. We need to build this No Platform policy because it is what's standing in between society and the violence of fascism.
Mike: Okay. I do want to get into this issue of free speech because the US has a First Amendment which guarantees free speech, but that doesn't exist in Britain. So what basis is there for free speech in the law? I think, David, you could probably answer this best because you're a lawyer.
David: [laughs] Thank you. In short, none. The basic difference between the UK and the US– Legally, we're both common law countries. But the thing that really changes in the US is this is then overlaid with the Constitution, which takes priority. So once something has been in the Constitution, that's it. It's part of your fundamental law, and the limits to it are going to be narrow.
Obviously, there's a process. It's one of the things I do try and talk about in my book that the Supreme Court has to discover, has to find free speech in the American Constitution. Because again, up until the Second World War, essentially America has this in the Constitution, but it's not particularly seen as something that's important or significant or a key part of the Constitution. The whole awe and mysticism of the First Amendment as a First Amendment is definitely something that's happened really in the last 40-50 years.
Again, I don't want to go into this because it's not quite what you're getting at. But certainly, in the '20s for example, you get many of the big American decisions on free speech which shaped American law today. What everyone forgets is in every single one of them, the Supreme Court goes on to find some reason why free speech doesn't apply. So then it becomes this doctrine which is tremendously important to be ushered out and for lip service be given to, just vast chunks of people, communists, people who are in favor of encouraging abortion, contraception, whatever, they're obviously outside free speech, and you have to come up with some sophisticated justifications for that.
In Britain, we don't have a constitution. We don't have laws with that primary significance. We do kind of have a weak free speech tradition, and that's kind of important for some things like there's a European Convention on Human Rights that's largely drafted by British lawyers and that tries to create in Articles 10 and 11 a general support on free speech. So they think there are things in English legal tradition, in our common law tradition, which encourage free speech.
But if we've got it as a core principle of the UK law today, we've got it because of things like that like the European Convention on Human Rights. We haven't got it because at any point in the last 30, or 50, or 70 or 100 years, British judges or politicians thought this was a really essential principle of law. We're getting it these days but largely by importing it from the United States, and that means we're importing the worst ideological version of free speech rather than what free speech ought to be, which is actually protecting the rights of most people to speak. And if you've got some exceptions, some really worked out well thought exceptions for coherent and rational reasons. That's not what we've got now in Britain, and it's not what we've really ever had.
Mike: Evan, you do a good job of documenting how No Platform was applied. The experience appears to be far from uniform. Let's talk about that a little bit.
Evan: Yeah, so there's like a debate happening about who No Platform should be applied to because it states– The official policy is that No Platform for racists and fascists, and there's a debate of who is a racist enough to be denied a platform.
There's agreement so a group like the National Front is definitely to be No Platform. Then there's a gray area about the Monday Club. The Monday Club is a hard right faction within the conservatives. But there's a transmission of people and ideas between National Front and the Monday Club. Then there's government ministers because the British immigration system is a racist system. The Home Office is seen as a racist institution. So there's a debate of whether government politicians should be allowed to have a platform because they uphold institutional racism.
We see this at different stages is that a person from the Monday Club tries to speak at Oxford and is chased out of the building. Keith Joseph, who's one of the proto-Thatcherites in the Conservative Party, comes to speak at LSE in the 1977-78 and that there is a push to say that he can't be allowed to speak because of the Conservative Party's immigration policies and so forth like that.
So throughout the '70s, there is a debate of the minimalist approach with a group like the International Socialists saying that no, outright fascists are the only ones to be No Platformed. Then IMG and other groups are saying, "Actually, what about the Monday Club? What about the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children? What about Conservative Ministers? Are these people, aren't they also sharing that kind of discriminatory agenda that shouldn't be allowed a platform?"
Mike: Okay, and there were some objections within the National Union of Students to some applications of No Platform, right?
Evan: Yeah, well, not so much in the '70s. But once you get into the '80s, there's a big push for it. But probably the biggest issue in the '70s is that the application of No Platform to pro-Israel groups and Jewish student groups. In 1975, there's a UN resolution that Zionism is a form of racism, and that several student groups say, "Well, pro-Israel groups are Zionists. If Zionism is a form of racism and No Platform should be applied to racists or fascists, shouldn't they the pro-Israel groups then be denied a platform? Should pro-Israel groups be disaffiliated from student unions, etc.?"
Several student unions do this at the local level, but there's a backlash from the NUS at the national level so much so the NUS actually suspends No Platform for about six months. It is reintroduced with an explicit piece of it saying that if No Platform is reinstituted, it can't be applied to Zionists groups, to pro-Israel groups, to Jewish societies.
But a reason that they can't, the NUS can't withhold No Platform as a policy in the late 1970s is because they've been playing catch up because by this time, the Anti-Nazi League, Rock Against Racism are major mass movements of people because the National Front is seen as a major problem, and the NUS has to have some kind of anti-Fascist, anti-racist response. They can't sit on their hands because they're going dragged along by the Anti-Nazi League.
Mike: One thing that you talked about in your book, David, is that simultaneous to No Platform was this movement for hate speech prohibitions. Talk about how these movements differed.
David: Well, I think the best way to convey it is if we go back to the motion that was actually passed at the National Union of Students spring conference in May '74. If you don't mind, I'll just begin by reading it out.
Conference recognizes the need to refuse any assistance, financial or otherwise, to openly racist or fascist organizations or societies (e.g., Monday Club, National Front, Action Party, Union Movement, National Democratic Party) and to deny them a platform.
What I want to try and convey is that when you think about how you got this coalition within the National Union of Students in support of that motion, there were like two or three different ideas being signaled in that one motion. And if you then apply them, particularly what's happening as we're talking 50 years later now, if you apply them through the subsequent 50 years of activism, they do point in quite different directions.
To just start up, “conference recognizes the need to refuse any assistance” dadadada. What's really been good at here, I'm sure some of the people who passed No Platform promotion just had this idea, right? What we are, we're a movement of students' unions. We're a movement of buildings which are run by students and are for students. People have said to themselves, all this motion is really committing us to do is to say that we won't give any assistance to racist or fascist organizations. So what that means in practice is in our buildings, in our halls, we won't invite them in.
Now, it may be that, say, the university will invite a conservative minister or the university will allow some far-right person to have a platform in election time. But the key idea, one key idea that's going on with this, just those things won't happen in our students' unions. They’re our buildings; they’re our halls. To use a term that hasn't really been coined yet, but this is in people's heads, is the idea of a safe space. It’s just, student unions are our safe space. We don't need to worry about who exactly these terrible people are. Whoever and whatever they are, we don't want them on our patch. That's idea number one.
Idea number two is that this is really about stopping fascists. It’s not about any other form of discrimination. I'll come on to idea three in a moment. With idea three, this is about fascist organizations. You can see in a sense the motion is talking to people, people coming on and saying like I might not even be particularly left wing, but I don't like fascists. Evan talked about say for example, Zionist organizations. Could a Zionist organization, which is militantly antifascist, could they vote this motion? Yes. And how they'd sell it to themselves is this is only about fascism.
So you can see this in the phrase, this is about refusing systems to “openly racist or fascist organizations,” and then look at the organizations which are listed: the National Front, well yeah, they're fascists; the Union Movement, yeah, they're fascists; the National Democratic Party, they're another little fascist splinter group.And then the only one there that isn't necessarily exactly fascist is the Monday Club who are a bunch of Tories who've been in the press constantly in the last two years when this motion is written for their alliance with National Front holding demonstrations and meetings together.
So some people, this is just about protecting their space. Some people, this is about excluding fascists and no one else. But then look again at the motion, you'll see another word in there. “Conference recognizes the need to refuse any assistance to openly racist or fascist organizations.” So right from the start, there's a debate, what does this word racist mean in the motion? Now, one way you could read the motion is like this. From today, we can all see that groups like the National Front are fascists. Their leaders can spend most of the rest of the decade appearing constantly in literature produced by anti-fascist groups, identifying them as fascist, naming them as fascist, then we have to have a mass movement against fascism and nazism.
But the point is in 1974, that hadn't happened yet. In most people's heads, groups like the National Front was still, the best way to describe them that no one could disagree to at least say they were openly racist. That was how they described themselves. So you could ban the National Front without needing to have a theological discussion about whether they fitted exactly within your definition of fascism.
But the point I really want to convey is that the motion succeeds because it blurs the difference between saying anything can be banned because it's fascist specifically or anything can be banned because it's racist or fascist. This isn't immediately apparent in 1974, but what becomes pretty apparent over time is for example as Evan’s documented already, even before 1974, there have been non-fascists, there have been conservatives going around student unions speaking in pretty racist terms. All right, so can they be banned?
If the answer is this goes to racists or fascists, then definitely they can be banned. But now wait a second. Is there anyone else in British politics who's racist? Well, at this point, both main political parties are standing for election on platforms of excluding people from Britain effectively on the basis of the color of their skin. All right, so you can ban all the main political parties in Britain. All right, well, how about the newspapers? Well, every single newspaper in Britain, even the pro-Labour ones, is running front page articles supporting the British government. All right, so you could ban all newspapers in Britain. Well, how about the television channel? Well, we've only got three, but the best-selling comedies on all of them are comedies which make fun of people because they're foreigners and because they're Black. You can list them all. There's dozens of these horrible programs, which for most people in Britain now are unwatchable. But they’re all of national culture in Britain in the early '70s. Alright, so you say, all right, so students we could ban every television channel in Britain, every newspaper in Britain, and every political party in Britain, except maybe one or two on the far left. It's like, wait a second people, I've only been doing racism.
Well, let's take seriously the notion, if we're against all forms of racism, how can we be against racism without also being against sexism? Without being against homophobia? So the thing about No Platform is there's really only two ways you can read it in the end, and certainly once you apply it outside the 1970s today. Number one, you can say this is a relatively tightly drawn motion, which is trying to pin the blame on fascists as something which is growing tremendously fast in early 1970s and trying to keep them out. Maybe it'd be good to keep other people out too, but it's not trying to keep everyone out. Or you've got, what we're confronting today which is essentially this is an attempt to prevent students from suffering the misery, the hatred, the fury of hate speech. This is an attempt to keep all hate speech off campus, but with no definition or limit on hate speech. Acceptance of hate speech 50 years later might be much more widely understood than it is in early '70s.
So you've got warring in this one motion two completely different notions of who it's right politically to refuse platforms to. That's going to get tested out in real life, but it's not been resolved by the 1974 motion, which in a sense looks both ways. Either the people want to keep the ban narrow or the people want to keep it broad, either of them can look at that motion and say yeah, this is the motion which gives the basis to what we're trying to do.
Mike: Okay. I do want to get back to the notion of the maximalist versus the precisionist view of No Platform. But first before that, I want to talk about the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism to just get more of a broader context than just the students in Britain in terms of antifascism. David, do you want to talk about that?
David: Okay. Well, I guess because another of my books is about Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, so I'll try and do this really short. I'll make two points. First is that these movements which currently ended in the 1970s are really very large. They're probably one of the two largest street movements in post-war British history. The only other one that's candidate for that is the anti-war movement, whether that's in the '80s or the early 2000s. But they're on that same scale as amongst the largest mass movements in British history.
In terms of Rock Against Racism, the Anti-Nazi League, the total number of people involved in them is massive; it's around half a million to a million people. They're single most famous events, two huge three carnivals in London in 1977, which each have hundreds of thousands of people attending them and bring together the most exciting bands. They are the likes of The Clash, etc, etc. It's a movement which involves people graffitiing against Nazis, painting out far-right graffiti. It's a movement which is expressed in streets in terms of set piece confrontations, clashes with far-right, Lewisham in ‘76, Southall in ‘79. These are just huge movements which involve a whole generation of people very much associated with the emergence of punk music and when for a period in time in Britain are against that kind of visceral street racism, which National Front represents.
I should say that they have slightly different attitudes, each of them towards the issue of free speech, but there's a massive interchange of personnel. They're very large. The same organizations involved in each, and they include an older version of the same activist who you've seen in student union politics in '74 as were they you could say they graduate into involvement in the mass movements like Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League.
Now, I want to say specifically about the Anti-Nazi League and free speech. The Anti-Nazi League takes from student politics this idea of No Platform and tries to base a whole mass movement around it. The idea is very simply, the National Front should not be allowed a platform to speak, to organize, to win converts anywhere. Probably with the Anti-Nazi League, the most important expressions of this is two things.
Firstly, when the National Front tries to hold election meetings, which they do particularly in the run up to '79 election, and those are picketed, people demonstrated outside of them A lot of them are the weekend in schools. One at Southall is in a town hall. These just lead to repeated clashes between the Anti-Nazi League and the National Front.
The other thing which the Anti-Nazi League takes seriously is trying to organize workers into closing off opportunities for the National Front spread their propaganda. For example, their attempts to get postal workers to refuse to deliver election materials to the National Front. Or again, there's something which it's only possible to imagine in the '70s; you couldn't imagine it today. The National Front is entitled to election broadcasts because it’s standing parliament. Then the technical workers at the main TV stations go on strike and refuse to let these broadcasts go out.
So in all these ways, there’s this idea around the Anti-Nazi League of No Platform. But No Platform is No Platform for fascists. It's the National Front should not get a chance to spread its election message. It's not yet that kind of broader notion of, in essence, anything which is hate speech is unacceptable.
In a sense, it can’t be. Because when you're talking about students' unions and their original No Platform motion and so forth, at the core of it is they're trying to control their own campuses. There's a notion of students' power. The Anti-Nazi League, it may be huge mass movement and may have hundreds of thousands people involved in it, but no one in Anti-Nazi League thinks that this organization represents such a large majority that they could literally control the content of every single TV station, the content of every single newspaper. You can try and drive the National Front out, but if people in that movement had said right, we actually want to literally carve out every expression of racism and every expression of sexism from society, that would have been a yet bigger task by another enormous degrees of scale.
Mike: Okay, I do want to talk a little bit more about Rock Against Racism just particularly how it was founded, what led to its founding. I think it gives a good sense of where Britain was at, politically.
David: Right. Rock Against Racism was founded in 1976. The two main events which are going on in the heads of the organizers when they launched it, number one, David Bowie's weird fascist turn, his interview with Playboy magazine in which he talks about Hitler being the first rock and roll superstar, the moment where he was photographed returning from tours in America and comes to Victoria Station and appears to give a Nazi salute. The reason why with Bowie it matters is because he's a hero. Bowie seems to represent the emergence of a new kind of masculinity, new kind of attitude with sexuality. If someone like that is so damaged that he's going around saying Hitler is the greatest, that's really terrifying to Bowie fans and for a wider set of people.
The other person who leads directly to the launch of Rock Against Racism is Eric Clapton. He interrupts a gig in Birmingham in summer '76 to just start giving this big drunken rant about how some foreigner pinched his missus' bum and how Enoch Powell is the greatest ever. The reason why people find Eric Clapton so contemptible and why this leads to such a mass movement is weirdly it’s the opposite of Bowie that no one amongst the young cool kids regards Clapton as a hero. But being this number one star and he's clearly spent his career stealing off Black music and now he’s going to support that horror of Enoch Powell as well, it just all seems so absolutely ridiculous and outrageous that people launch an open letter to the press and that gets thousands of people involved.
But since you've asked me about Rock Against Racism, I do want to say Rock Against Racism does have a weirdly and certainly different attitude towards free speech to the Anti-Nazi League. And this isn't necessarily something that was apparent at the time. It's only kind of apparent now when you look back at it.
But one of the really interesting things about Rock Against Racism is that because it was a movement of young people who were trying to reclaim music and make cultural form that could overturn British politics and change the world, is that they didn't turn around and say, "We just want to cut off all the racists and treat them as bad and shoot them out into space," kind of as what the Anti-Nazi League's trying to do to fascists. Rock Against Racism grasped that if you're going to try and change this cultural milieu which is music, you actually had to have a bit of a discussion and debate and an argument with the racists, but they tried to have it on their own terms.
So concretely, what people would do is Rock Against Racism courted one particular band called Sham 69, who were one of the most popular young skinhead bands, but also had a bunch of neo-nazis amongst their roadies and things like that. They actually put on gigs Sham 69, put them on student union halls, surrounded them with Black acts. Knew that these people were going to bring skinheads into the things, had them performing under Rock Against Racism banner, and almost forced the band to get into the state of practical warfare with their own fans to try and say to them, "We don't want you to be nazis anymore. We want you to stop this."
That dynamic, it was incredibly brave, was incredibly bold. It was really destructive for some of the individuals involved like Jimmy Pursey, the lead singer of Sham 69. Effectively saying to them, "Right, we want you to put on a gig every week where you're going to get bottled by your own fans, and you're going to end up like punching them, just to get them to stop being racist." But we can't see any other way of shifting this milieu of young people who we see as our potential allies. There were lots of sort of local things like that with Rock Against Racism. It wasn't about creating a safe space in which bad ideas couldn't come in; it was about going onto the enemy's ideological trend and going, "Right, on this trend, we can have an argument. We can win this argument." So it is really quite an interesting cultural attempt to change the politics of the street.
Mike: Okay, now you two have very different ideas of what No Platform is in its essence. Evan, you believe that No Platform was shifting in scope from its inception and it is properly directed at any institutional platform afforded to vociferous bigots. While David you believe that No Platform is only properly applied against fascists, and going beyond that is a dangerous form of mission creep.
Now, I absolutely hate debates. [laughter] I think the format does more to close off discussion than to draw out information on the topic at hand. So, what I don’t want to happen is have you two arguing with each other about your positions on No Platform (and maybe me, because I have yet a third position).
David: Okay Mike, honestly, we've known each other for years. We've always been–
Mike: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
David: –your listeners will pick up, there’s loads we agree on, too. So I’m sure we can deal without that rubbish debate. [Evan laughs]
Mike: All right. So what I'd like to do is ground this discussion as much as possible in history rather than abstract moral principles.
So in that interest, can each of you talk a bit about the individuals and groups that have taken the position on No Platform that you have, and how they’ve defended their positions? David let’s start with you. What groups were there insisting that No Platform was necessary but its necessity was limited to overt fascists?
David: Well, I think in practice, that was the approach of Rock Against Racism. They took a very different attitude towards people who were tough ideological fascists, to the people who were around them who were definitely racist, but who were capable of being argued out of that. I mean, I've given the example of the policy of trying to have a debate with Sham 69 or use them as a mechanism to change their audience.
What I want to convey is in every Rock Against Racism group around the country, they were often attempts to something very similar. People talk about Birmingham and Leeds, whether it be sort of local Rock Against Racism groups, they might put on– might get a big band from some other city once a month, but three weeks out of four, all they're doing is they're putting on a local some kind of music night, and they might get a hundred people there. But they'd go out of the way to invite people who they saw as wavering supporters of The National Front.
But the point is this wasn't like– We all know how bad faith debates work. It's something like it's two big ego speakers who disagree with each other, giving them half an hour each to debate and know their audience is already persuaded that one of them's an asshole, one of them's great. This isn't what they were trying to do. They were trying to win over one by one wavering racists by putting them in an environment where they were surrounded by anti-racists. So it was about trying to create a climate where you could shift some people who had hateful ideas in their head, but were also capable of being pulled away from them. They didn't do set piece debates with fascists because they knew that the set piece debates with fascists, the fascists weren't going to listen to what they were going to say anyway. But what they did do is they did try to shift people in their local area to try and create a different atmosphere in their local area. And they had that attitude towards individual wavering racists, but they never had that attitude towards the fascist leaders. The fascist leaders as far as they're concerned, very, very simple, we got to close up the platform to them. We got to deprive them of a chance.
Another example, Rock Against Racism, how it kind of made those sorts of distinctions. I always think with Rock Against Racism you know, they had a go at Clapton. They weren't at all surprised when he refused to apologize. But with Bowie, there was always a sense, "We want to create space for Bowie. We want to get Bowie back because Bowie's winnable." That's one of the things about that movement, is that the absolute uncrossable line was fascism. But if people could be pulled back away from that and away from the ideas associated with that, then they wanted to create the space to make that happen.
Mike: Okay, and Evan, what groups took the Maximalist approach to No Platform and what was their reasoning?
Evan: Yeah. So I think the discussion happens once the National Front goes away as the kind of the major threat. So the 1979 election, the National Front does dismally, and we can partially attribute that to the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism, kind of this popular antifascist movement. But there's also that Margaret Thatcher comes to power, and there's an argument that's made by historians is that she has pulled away the racist vote away from the National Front back to the conservatives.
It's really kind of a realignment of leftwing politics under Thatcher because it's a much more confrontational conservative government, but there's also kind of these other issues which are kind of the new social movements and what we would now term as identity politics, they're forming in the sixties and seventies and are really big issues in the 1980s. So kind of like feminism, gay rights, andthat, there's an argument among some of the students that if we have a No Platform for racism and fascism, why don't we have a No Platform for sexism? Why don't we have a No Platform for homophobia?
And there are certain student unions who try to do this. So LSE in 1981, they endorse a No Platform for sexist as part of a wider fight against sexism, sexual harassment, sexual violence on campus is that misogynist speakers shouldn't be allowed to have a presence on campus. Several student unions kind of have this also for against homophobia, and as a part of this really divisive issue in the mid 1980s, the conservative government is quite homophobic. Section 28 clause 28 is coming in in the late eighties. It's a whole kind of homophobia of AIDS. There's instances where students object to local Tory politicians who were kind of outwardly, explicitly homophobic, that they should be not allowed to speak on stage.
Then also bubbling along in the background is kind of the supporters of apartheid, so South African diplomats or kind of other people who support the South African regime including Conservative politicians, is that several times throughout the 1980s, they are invited to speak on campus, and there's kind of a massive backlash against this. Sometimes the No Platform policy is invoked. Sometimes it's just simple disruption or kind of pickets or vigils against them. But once fascism is kind of not the main issue, and all these different kind of politics is going on in the eighties, is that there's argument that No Platform for fascism and racism was important, but fascism and racism is only one form of hate speech; it's only one form of discrimination; it's only one form of kind of bodily violence; and we should take them all into consideration.
Mike: Okay. Now there's been a fair bit of backlash against No Platform in kind of any of its forms from various sectors, so let's talk a bit about that. Let's start with the fascist themselves. So their response kind of changed somewhat over time in response to No Platform. David, you talk about this.
David: Yeah. In the early ‘70s in Britain or I suppose in the late ‘70s too, what's extraordinary is how little use fascist make out of saying, "We are being attacked, free speech applies. We've got to have the right to be heard." I made the point earlier that Britain doesn't have a strong legal culture of free speech. We do have some culture of free speech. And again, it's not that the fascists never use these terms at all, they use them, but they use them very half-heartedly. Their dominant approach is to say, "We are being attacked by the left. The left don't understand we have better fighters than them. If they attack us on the streets, we'll fight back. In the end, we'll be the ones who win in a kind of battle of machismo, street fighting power."
Now A, that doesn't happen because actually they lose some set piece confrontations, mostly at Lewisham in 1977. But it's interesting that they don't do the kind of thing which you'd expect the far right to do today, which is to say, like the British far right does today, they constantly say, "We're under attack. Free speech demands that we be heard. We're the only people who take free speech seriously." There's a continuous process in the British far right these days of endlessly going on social media every time anyone even disagrees with them a little bit, they immediately have their faces taped up and present themselves as the victim of this terrible conspiracy when in the mid-’70s when there really were people trying to put the far right out of business, that isn't what the far right did.
I think, in essence, a whole bunch of things have to change. You have to get kind of a hardening of the free speech discourse in the United States; you have to have things like the attack on political correctness; the move by the American center-right from being kind of equivocal on free speech to being extremely pro-free speech; and you need to get the importation into Britain of essentially the same kind of free speech discourse as you have in States. Once we get all of that, the British far right eventually twigs that it's a far more effective way of presenting themselves and winning supporters by posing as the world's biggest defenders of free speech.
But in the ‘70s, they haven't learned that lesson yet, and their response is much more leaden and ineffective. In essence, they say, "No Platform's terrible because it's bullying us." But what they never have the gumption to say is, "Actually, we are the far right. We are a bunch of people putting bold and dangerous and exciting ideas, and if we are silenced, then all bold and dangerous and difficult ideas will be silenced too." That's something which a different generation of writers will get to and will give them all sorts of successes. But in the ‘70s, they haven't found it yet.
Mike: Okay. Now fascists also had some uneasy allies as far as No Platform is concerned among Tories and libertarians. So let's talk about the Tories first, what was their opposition to No Platform about? Evan, you talk about this quite a bit in your book.
Evan: Yeah. So the conservative opposition to No Platform is essentially saying that it's a stock standard thing that the left call everyone fascist. So they apply it to broadly and is that in the ‘80s, there's a bunch of conservative politicians to try to go onto campus, try to speak, and there's massive protests. They say that, "Look, this is part of an intolerant left, that they can't see the distinction between fascism and a Conservative MP. They don't want to allow anyone to have free speech beyond that kind of small narrow left wing bubble."
In 1986, there is an attempt, after a kind of a wave of protest in '85, '86, there is an attempt by the government to implement some kind of protection for free speech on campus. This becomes part of the Education Act of 1986, that the university has certain obligations to ensure, where practical, free speech applies and no speech is denied. But then it's got all kind of it can't violate the Racial Discrimination Act, the Public Order Act, all those kind of things. Also, quite crucially for today, that 1986 act didn't explicitly apply to student unions. So student unions argued for the last 30 years that they are exempt from any legislation and that they were legally allowed to pursue their No Platform policy.
Mike: Okay, and libertarians also opposed No Platform. So who were libertarian figures coming out against No Platform? You talked about this too.
Evan: Yeah. So I mean, the libertarian movement in Britain is massively small, and also there's not that kind of right wing libertarianism that you see in the United States, it's much smaller. Libertarianism up until the ’90s would probably be much more talking about some form of anarchism or kind of syndicalism. But it's important now because really we're talking about the Revolutionary Communist Party, which is a small Trotskyist organization, which has kind of very different politics to many other left wing groups which eventually in the ‘90s and today has developed into Spiked Online. But from the early days of the Revolutionary Communist Party in the early 1980s, they opposed No Platform because they believed that No Platform is kind of intervention by the state rather than by the masses and free speech should be unequivocal; it should be absolute; and that any form of No Platforming is kind of a substitute of the state for– the people being substituted by the state and they oppose it. While most of the other left wing groups in Britain support No Platform in some way, is that the Revolutionary Communist Party and then Spiked Online more recently have a fundamental opposition to it, saying that free speech should be absolute.
Mike: Okay. Leftists weren't necessarily unified behind No Platform either, there was some leftwing opposition to No Platform as a whole. Can we talk about this? David, you want to get back in the conversation with this one?
David: I think the only group that's worth talking about are the people that Evan has just mentioned, who in ‘70s and early ‘80s are still presenting themselves as a parasite of the left rather than the kind of far right organization they present themselves as today. Beyond them, it's tiny individuals, I really can't think of anyone meaningfully. I've never come across, for example, anyone else on the British left at the time of the No Platform vote explaining why they told their members to vote against it. There was a pretty strong, clear, left consensus in favor of it, although, as I've indicated, I think that consensus masked what were in reality quite different ideas of what the motion represented.
Mike: Okay. So when people talk about the supposed free speech crisis, it's always argued in the abstract. But when we get down to details, the question is less about what do we lose by preventing someone from speaking than what do we lose by preventing fascists from speaking. My thinking is generally not much. I don't know what insights people think fascists could potentially bring to public discourse. Everything they say is wrong. It's almost pathological. I don't know. So why is this free speech crisis a Nazi lie? Evan, why don't you go first?
Evan: So I think that the free speech crisis is this idea that free speech is in crisis and that is being threatened, that it’s fundamentally under attack, and who is it under attack by? Well, it's identified quite significantly that the free speech on campus is the first thing to fall. Then if there's no free speech at a university, then it can permeate in that kind of idea of the cultural Marxists, the professors and the woke students are kind of working together to undermine free speech. It's this idea of crisis, and there's certain kind of controversial episodes, but they're very kind of like– they’re the exception rather than the rule that these things, and as my book points out, these things which been happening over many years, but in more recent times over the last decade, is that kind of politicians and media and commentators and particularly with social media, there's an increase in this argument that there's a free speech crisis happening on campus.
If we take that kind of the Stuart Hall Policing the Crisis idea, is that if there's a crisis that needs to be dealt with and needs to be dealt with strongly, and there's been an argument so forth in recent times, is that if there's a free speech crisis, then something needs to be done about it, and what that is depends on kind of who's arguing.
So we have a conservative government in Britain who's introducing legislation that kind of has very far reaching laws about who and who cannot speak on campus. There's also these kind of free speech union which is run by Toby Young, which advocates this kind of absolute free speech position. Then we have a whole bunch of other actors on the right particularly who are arguing that, saying needs to be done.
But the thing is they're really kind of emphasizing a crisis when there's a few small incidents, and they're kind of hyping this up into some kind of moral panic. So my suggestion for your listeners is to go back and read Stuart Hall, et al.’s Policing the Crisis from the 1970s and understand the kind of dynamics back then are working today around this idea of crisis.
Mike: Okay. David, why do you think free speech crises is a nazi lie?
David: Two points. Firstly, again, just focusing on Britain, I think it writes out of the picture who's actually taking away free speech. I work as a barrister. I take a number of free speech cases every year. As far as I'm aware, I take as many free speech cases as any barrister in Britain. They have a really common pattern. They're about teachers who complained because the government wasn't taking COVID safety measures, and therefore got sacked from their school. They're about things like local government workers who tried to speak out at the time of Corbynism around politics of Israel-Palestine, they then found themselves denounced on social media, and they found government ministers demanding they were sacked.
There is this constant pattern it seems to me, where who has the most power to set which speech is allowed or deprived in Britain, and actually it's the government. We've had a right wing government in power now for a decade. So unsurprisingly, the vast majority of free speech cases are about the right wing trying to get people sacked because they hold left-wing opinions. So you get this discussion where it said, "Oh, it's terrible, free speech is being denied," but no one ever admits the people who are complaining about this on the right are the people who have the power. They control the government, they control our privately owned press, they're the people who are trying to get people thrown out of business, and they can't turn and say, "Oh, it's terrible, free speech is being deprived," when they're the ones who are doing the most taking away of free speech.
The other thing I think is even more basic is that a lot of the complaints about free speech seems to me are about privileged people, people with lots of money, people who find they suddenly have access to new sorts of audiences through things like social media, and they seem to want to use free speech, like their notion of speech is that good speech is a monologue. What happens in good speech is that one person speaks, a million people listen, those a million people are silent, they all obey very timidly. You never understand what they're thinking, and then they go away.
Well, that's not how I understand speech. How I understand speech is speech is a cut and thrust. It's a two-way process. It's two people involved in a dialogue. If one person with a loud megaphone says, "I want to say X," then someone with a small megaphone says back, "What about this?" And heckles them or asks them a question or makes them say something, that person isn't taking away their free speech, that person's exercising speech themselves. And we seem to have this really weird notion of free speech where the only free speech that’s protected people with capital or social capital, and it's always a speech of people who want to lecture everyone else. It's never the speech of people who say, "All right, let's move this discussion on a bit. Can we make it a bit more interesting? Would you still say this if I said that?" What they want take away is the right of anyone ever to heckle, and that's not free speech. We don't have the right terms for it yet, but the idea that people get the right speak into a vacuum, that's not my notion of speech by any means.
Mike: Okay. Well, Dr. Smith, Dr. Renton, thank you so much for coming on The Nazi Lies Podcast to talk about the free speech crisis. Again, Evan Smith’s book is No Platform and David Renton’s book is No Free Speech for Fascists, both out from Routledge. You can follow Evan on Twitter @evansmithhist and David @LivesRunning. Thanks again, guys.
David: Thank you.
Evan: Pleasure.
Mike: If you find yourself interested in the books we talk about on the show, come join The Nazi Lies Book Club. The book club meets weekly to discuss the books of our upcoming guests. Sign up on Patreon or shoot me a DM for an invite. In addition to access to the Discord where we host the book club meetings, Patrons get access to early episodes, our developing backlog of audio essays and book reviews, show notes as they’re written, stickers, zines… It’s a lot. Sign up at patreon.com/nazilies.
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Mike: Common-ism
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Nazi SS UFOs
Lizards wearing human clothes
Hinduism’s secret codes
These are nazi liesRace and IQ are in genes
Warfare keeps the nation clean
Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine
These are nazi liesHollow earth, white genocide
Muslim’s rampant femicide
Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde
Hiter lived and no Jews diedArmy, navy, and the cops
Secret service, special ops
They protect us, not sweatshops
These are nazi liesMike: Welcome to another episode of the Nazi Lies podcast. I'm happy to be joined by Rutgers History Professor, Paul Hanebrink, author of the really easy to read book, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. The book charts the development of the belief that communism or certain forms of it are instruments of Jewish power and control, from its pre-history and medieval antisemitism and Red Scare propaganda, through his development among proto-fascist and ultimately a Nazi Party, and the legacy of fascist campaigns against Judeo-Bolshevism in former fascist states. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Hanebrink.
Paul Hanebrink: Thanks very much for having me, it's a pleasure to be here.
Mike: So before I opened your book, I was expecting to hear a story of the fascist myth of Judeo-Bolshevism as told primarily by fascists through to the present day, but that's not the story you tell. Instead, you tell more of a people's history of believing that Judaism and communism in whole or in part are linked and tied to bad things generally. Besides the fact that this is your area of expertise, why did you decide to tell this history?
Paul: I'm glad that you picked up on that. I am very much interested in how this myth or this conspiracy theory connects to a whole host of other issues. And I came to it actually when I was in Hungary in the 1990s. I'm a historian of Hungary by training, and I was doing my research for my dissertation, and my dissertation was on Hungarian nationalism and its relationship to Christianity in the 1920s and '30s and '40s. I was really struck by how so many of the different phrases and ideas and, sort of, thinking about Jews and communism which I was reading in my archival sources during the day, were reflected in journalism and in sort of public discussion about the recently vanished communist regime and what that had meant for Hungary and for the Hungarian national society.
And I knew also that this was not just a particularly Hungarian issue, that this same kind of conversation, the same kind of debates about the relationship of Jews to communism was going on in other countries across the former Soviet bloc, especially in Poland, especially in Romania. And I knew that it had also been a major factor in Nazi ideology and an issue that kept coming back in strange ways even in German society.
So I wanted to try to think about why this idea had such legs, as it were, why it seemed to endure across so many different kinds of regimes, and also try to figure out why it was so ubiquitous if you will, why it could be appearing in so many different places and so many different societies simultaneously. And so the book is an attempt to try to paint a broad canvas in which I could explore the different things that it meant to different people at different times.
Mike: Okay. One thing I brought up in book club was that the book almost feels like a military history in the way you tell it, very event- and people-heavy and diachronic across the chapters, but told geographically within the chapters. So talk a little bit about your choice of historiography, because it definitely feels like a careful choice you made in how consistent your style remains throughout.
Paul: Yeah. Well, I mean, as I said, one of the things I wanted to do was I wanted to capture the sense that this was a conspiracy theory that was powerful in a lot of places at the same time, and that it didn't radiate out from one place to another, but that it sort of sprang up like mushrooms in a lot of different places in different periods throughout the 20th century. I wanted a broad geographical canvas, and I didn't want to just simply focus on one country or do a kind of comparison between two countries or something like that. So I wanted to sort of figure out a way to tell this as a European story, and to be able to track the different ways in which this conspiracy theory circulated across borders and from one political formation or political group to another and also over time.
The other thing that I wanted to focus on with this book in addition to the broad geographical canvas was also the notion that I didn't want a book that was just going to be a lot of different antisemitic texts one after the other, and so I just kind of piled them up in a big heap and kind of read them closely and pulled out all the different symbolisms. I wanted instead, to try to show using carefully chosen examples of people or groups or political parties or moments in history or events to really show how this ideological substance, this conspiracy myth, became something that had meaning and had power for people that shaped the way in which they saw and interpreted what they were doing and what others were doing.
And so for that reason, I think, very carefully throughout each chapter, I try to find actors in a way that I could hang the narrative on and that I could sort of develop the analysis by leading with specific kind of concrete, more vivid examples. And that may be perhaps what you picked up on when you were reading it.
Mike: Okay, so let's get into it. A lot of people know kind of the rudiments of old-school antisemitism and anti-communism, but not how they co-evolved into the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. So, how did antisemitism and anti-communism become modern?
Paul: Yeah, it's an interesting question. What I wanted to try to think about in the book–and I explore this I think most carefully in the first chapter–is the way in which very old ideas about Jews, specifically about the ways in which Jews, have been used to symbolize in a sense a world turned upside down or illegitimate power or some kind of dystopia. And you can see this particular set of ideas throughout a number of centuries going back into the Middle Ages. So I begin with this, this idea that Jewish power is somehow illegitimate power.
And then I look very carefully at the accusations that were circulating in Europe during World War I about Jews in a sense gathering power on the homefront while the true members of the nation were away on the front fighting. And so there was a real concern across Europe about Jewish loyalty and about Jews as being potential subversives or traitors or spies. And that feeds very easily into Jews as revolutionaries.
So you have these two things that come together in that sort of end of World War I moment where also the Bolshevik revolution breaks out, and that there's this very old language that is familiar and comfortable to so many people thinking about Jews as eager to sort of accumulate illegitimate power, that's the very old story that reaches back to the Middle Ages, but tied to this very particular moment in European history in which there's concern about Jewish responsibility for the collapse, for example, of empires from Russia to the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the role that they're playing in revolutionary movements and revolutionary politics in so many different places across the European continent at that time.
And I think it's the crucible of those two in that moment that really creates the Judeo-Bolshevik myth as a particular form of Jewish conspiracy theory. I'm not saying it's different. I'm saying that there are many different faces and iterations of the myth of a Jewish conspiracy, but that this is a particular one or particular version. And that it does particular ideological things, particular political things for people during the 20th century.
Mike: Okay, so if modern anti-Semites and modern anti-communists largely belong to the right, their ideas coalesced into this conspiracy theory of Judeo-Bolshevism. Now you honestly don't spend a large amount of space in the book describing the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, and there's two things going on in your book.
On the one hand, you have the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism which is this theory that there is a secret cabal of Jews who control the world through joint efforts of banking finance and world communist movements that operate to destabilize Western civilization through financial panics and revolutions, so there's that.
Then on the other hand there's what you spend more time on, which is the perception that communism or at least its excesses in actual existing communism, is Jewish in origin and operation. Like, it's not necessarily a belief in a conspiracy necessarily so much as a dislike of Jews and the belief that they're inordinately involved in communism.
So when antisemitism and anti-communism became modern and intertwined, the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, this totalizing conspiracy theory started to form. Who were the major players in that and what kinds of influence do they have?
Paul: Yeah. I guess there are two things I want to pick up on in your question. The first is that I think you're right that I'm more interested in approaching the question in a particular way. And that is that, you know, a lot of the kind of antisemitic rhetoric and antisemitic ideology from the 20th century, there was this real insistence that you could somehow count the number of Jews who were in communist parties, and you could determine that this was a high number and that therefore Jews were somehow responsible for communism.
And so much of the politics around trying to resist that was around kind of factually disproving that. I find it much more interesting to sort of not get drawn into the trap of saying, "Well, it's partly right or partly wrong," but to look instead at the way in which this conspiracy gained momentum, and that it came to seem so self-evidently right and sort of self-evidently commonsensical to so many different groups of people.
And that brings me to the second part of your question. It's very interesting especially if you look at this moment right after World War I in the early 1920s across Europe, you find all kinds of different political groups across a wide selection of the political spectrum raising this conspiracy theory and using it to try to make sense of the fact that this massive revolutionary movement had broken out.
So you certainly find fascists or perhaps proto-fascists, if you like, in the early 1920s really making this central to their ideology. Certainly you see that in the early Nazi Party but also in a number of the other far-right paramilitary groups that you can see active in different parts of Europe at this time.
But also, you know, people who might call more mainstream conservatives, people who are definitely interested in a kind of national consolidation but very distrustful of the tactics of fascists or of national socialists, making use of this also, for example, to talk about threats to national sovereignty or threats to borders or, you know, the fear that Jewish refugees from war-torn parts of Eastern Europe are going to flood across the borders, and when they do, they're going to bring with them a revolutionary infection which is going to cause radicalism to break out at home.
You can find it also among religious conservatives who are concerned primarily with the breakdown of moral and social order and who are interested in combating what they see as being the evils or the ills of secular modernism. They also blame Jewish communists for in a sense driving it, but also being a kind of reflection of these deeper secular trends which they strongly oppose.
So you can find this language in a lot of different places, and there's, in a sense, kind of different coalitions in different countries that form among groups who disagree about a number of policy issues, but have a certain kind of common shared understanding that Jews and political activism, or left political activism and certainly revolutionary politics are somehow all related. And that somehow particular tension has to be paid to that constellation of threats in order to forestall or to ward off some kind of greater danger or challenge to the national body.
Mike: So fascist parties rode the wave of the relative popularity of the Judeo-Bolshevism myth, and it became kind of a guiding philosophy in a way for fascist public policy. So talk about Judeo-Bolshevism in the hands of fascist states.
Paul: Here I would fast forward to the late 1930s when you really see Nazi Germany making a pitch for being the most resolute enemy of communism on the European continent. I think one of the things that you can see as the Nazi vision of a new order of Europe comes into focus is that people–and far-right movements and far-right nationalist movements across the continent that see their own place in that and see a kind of shared goals and shared vision–find Judeo-Bolshevism almost a kind of shared language in which they can create common ground for working with or collaborating, if you like, with Nazi power.
You can see this in France especially on the far right, just before and after the creation of Vichy and the military defeat of France in 1940. You see the far-right really seeing the Judeo-Bolshevik threat as a kind of glue which will allow them to work together with German power to regenerate France.
You can also see this on the Eastern Front after the German army invades the Soviet Union in 1941 in Operation Barbarossa. You can find far-right Ukrainian nationalists, Lithuanian nationalists, Latvian nationalists who see the fight against Jewish communists as being a way to make common cause with Nazi power in the hopes that when the war is over, and as they believe, the Germans win, they will be able to reap the rewards by getting, for example, statehood or some other kind of political power.
You see this also amongst some of Nazi Germany's East European allies in the war against the Soviet Union, both Hungary and Romania, although those two states are in bitter opposition over so many things, especially territorial claims. Both of them go to war on the side of Nazi Germany precisely because they believe that after the war is over and after Germany has won, they will get some special dispensation in the peace that follows. They go to war against the Soviet Union in the same belief that it's a crusade against Judeo-Bolshevik threat in the East, and that the war against the Soviet Union has to be fought in this way.
And so fascist movements, fascist states, or fascists who would like to have a state in the future, see in the Judeo-Bolshevik threat not only a threat to their own national interest, but also a space of common ground or a space of cooperation which will allow them to work with Nazi power even if they disagree with Nazi ideology on other points, and even if the Nazi vision for Europe doesn't actually pan out for them in the way that they hope.
Mike: Okay, so with the collapse of the fascist states came an almost immediate transformation of the public's perception of the Judeo-Bolshevism myth. So the new states that emerged were expected to denounce such prejudices as fascist and hence bad, and publics to varying degrees were expected to comply. So talk about the, shall we call it, 'withdrawal effects' of the collapse of fascist states on their publics?
Paul: Yeah, you can see this most vividly in Eastern Europe where the collapse of fascism and the defeat of Nazi Germany is accompanied by the arrival of the Soviet Army and the immediate ambitions to political power of communist parties and communist movements across the region. You can see that communist parties have to struggle to seek legitimacy among people in societies where so many people are very well accustomed to thinking of communism as something alien, and also something Jewish. And so from the very beginning, you see communist parties and communist movements wrestling with the fact that in certain segments of society, there's a kind of association of them with Jewish power. And so they try to navigate this.
You can also see it, for example, in the efforts by post-war regimes in transition that are either communist-controlled or on the way to being communist-controlled, who are having trials of war criminals. There are many people, you can see this in Hungary and in Romania, who look at these trials and you can say, "Well, these are not trials of fascists. This is in fact a kind of Jewish justice or a kind of Jewish revenge." And so they associate the search for or the desire for justice after the war and the desire to punish real criminals with illegitimate Jewish power that has only come into being because of the fact that the Soviet power has placed it there.
And so the fact that there's a complete regime change doesn't change the fact that people across the region still have the memory of the legacy of this language that had been baked into all aspects of political life for the preceding two or three decades. And this very much shapes the way in which people see Soviet power, see Soviet takeover, see communist parties, see especially the crimes that Red Army soldiers commit–you know, rapes and seizures of property–are immediately associated in many people's minds as being somehow Jewish crimes.
All of this seems plausible because fascist movements and fascist regimes had conspired with the Germans to eliminate Jewish presence from life across Eastern Europe. And now after 1945, survivors of the Holocaust are in public again trying to put together their lives. And so a group of people who had been absent from public space are back in it. And so that only kind of heightens the attention around Jews and around how suddenly the tables seem to have been turned and how the new political regimes that are coming into being are somehow antithetical to the true national interest or the true national identity.
Mike: All right. There was also a certain evolution in the West in response to the experience of World War Two and its aftermath regarding Judaism and communism. What did that look like?
Paul: Yeah, one of the things I found really interesting, and I did devote a chapter to it because I did find it so curious, is that at the same time that this story that I'm telling you in Eastern Europe was going on, there is this really interesting transformation of the relationship in political discourse of Jews and communism in Western Europe as a result of the Cold War.
You can see this most clearly in the kind of ubiquity of the notion of Judeo-Christian civilization as the thing that Cold War liberals are going to protect against Communist aggression. And this very interesting migration of the adjective Judeo from, you know, Judeo-Bolshevism to Judeo-Christian civilization.
And you can see this in all aspects of American popular culture and political culture in the '40s and '50s, a willingness to compare using theories of totalitarianism to compare Nazi crimes to Soviet crimes and to present Jews as being victims of both. But also to, you know, really kind of focusing on Jewish communists–there was a lot of focus for example on Ana Pauker in Romania who served as a really important Communist official–as being, you know, Jews who had lost their way and who had lost their sense of religious tradition and religious identity and become completely transformed morally into this almost monster. There are lots of articles about figures like this presenting her as being just something that's called a Stalin in a skirt or something like this.
And these figures were then presented as being empowered by communism to attack the moral and religious values on which Western civilization was founded and which the US-led West was going to defend against Soviet expansion and the expansion especially of Communism and communist ideas into the West.
I guess a way to bring it back is to say that there's a very interesting way in which this relationship of Jews and communism is completely recoded and reshuffled by Cold War liberals in the 1940s and 1950s to create this kind of very stout, multi-confessional anti-communism that was so prevalent in the US at that time.
Mike: All right, so back to the East. So the death of Stalin and subsequent public inquests into his regime revealed excesses that shaped public perception and public policy across the former fascist world. How did the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism play in the post-Stalin world?
Paul: You know what's really interesting is that once Stalin dies, there is a rush by Communist Party leaders across Eastern Europe to blame the excesses of Stalinism on somebody or some group in order to present themselves as charting a new way forward that is going to make communism more compatible with the national character, the true sort of national interests, or to create a kind of truly national path to communism. You can see this happening in Poland and Hungary and Romania and other places as well.
And one of the ways in which that sort of political strategy works is by demonizing or accusing the most hardline Stalinist leaders who are now discredited for being anti-national or unnational, and for being Jews. And there were a number of figures who were sort of held up as being examples of this. You can see this in Hungary most clearly where the leading figures of the Communist Party in the early 1950s in the Stalinist period were all men of Jewish background.
And so the Hungarian Communist regime, without really launching a major antisemitic campaign, let it be known in all sorts of different ways that this new way forward after the death of Stalin, after especially the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, was going to be built around creating a much more truly Hungarian form of communism that will *wink, wink, nod, nod* have many more ethnic Hungarians at the forefront.
You can see something very similar going on in a number of different countries, coming most particularly to a head in 1968 in Poland when there is a major campaign against Jews, accusing them of being cosmopolitan, accusing them of being Zionist, as a way of saying that in fact, the Communist regime in Poland is the truly national regime and it truly represents the interests of the Polish nation. And so Jews become the enemy of this true national communism, and the fervor around that leads the vast majority of what remains of the Polish-Jewish community to emigrate in 1968, leaving what is today a very, very tiny community.
Mike: Okay. So, eventually the communist states collapse and their economies are restructured along neoliberal lines. How does Judeo-Bolshevism rear its head?
Paul: It rears its head, I think, in two ways. The first is in this, again, as a kind of an antithesis or a kind of opposition, you see right-wing nationalists coming to the fore in 1989 very ambitiously trying to create a new right-wing political party, new right-wing political movement in societies where that had been banned for decades. And they set themselves up as being the true spokespeople for the nation in opposition to the Communist regime that went before which they say was an imposition from abroad by forces that were anti-national, completely forgetting the ways in which the communist regimes across Eastern Europe had worked so hard to try to present themselves as national and to try to build up national legitimacy. And in that process, you find right-wing nationalists really very easily slipping into describing the regimes that had gone as being Jewish or inspired by Jews or recalling the role that Jews had played at various moments in it. So you see it coming back in this politics of memory.
The other way in which you see it coming back, and it also has to do with historical memory, is the debates about how to understand World War II and the Holocaust. The stakes around that are very high because in the 1990s, as some of your listeners will undoubtedly remember, there was this new focus that continues to this day on Holocaust memory as being a kind of token or sign of a society that had embraced liberal values of human rights and democracy, the idea that you know, if we commemorate the Holocaust or remember the Holocaust, that's a sign that a society is developing towards becoming a mature democracy.
And so for that reason there was a lot of intense interest in how the Holocaust should be represented, how it should be remembered, how it should be written about, how it should be talked about. And in a number of different societies across the former Communist East, you have nationalists who are very wary of this European liberal project, who express their wariness as a dissatisfaction with a memory of the war which they say is one-sided and which they say only prefaces the memories of what they would call "others' Jewish memory", and which doesn't pay sufficient attention to the crimes of communists that had been committed against “us,” “us” being the national community without Jews.
And in those debates, there's a lot of focus on what role did Jews play in Communist coming to power right after World War II? What role did Jews play in those parts of Eastern Europe where the Soviet Army had turned up in 1939 in Eastern Poland, parts of Romania, for example? And, you know, did they welcome the Soviet Army and did they, at that time, betray the nation? And how should we remember that? So there was a lot of focus in the 1990s, and into today, about how Jews, communism, fascism, and the Holocaust should all be remembered.
Some of your listeners might remember or know about the big controversy in Poland around the historian Jan Gross' book, Jedwabne, which had to do with a big, a truly terrible pogrom in which the Jews of this one particular town were killed by their neighbors. At the core of that event was the accusation that they had collaborated with the Soviets when the Soviets were in power between 1939 and 1941. And that that issue became a live one in Poland in the 2000s because it was tied up with these debates about how to remember the past, but also how to imagine the Polish future in Europe going forward.
Mike: Okay, and now you take the book to the present day. So how does the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism live with us today?
Paul: I think it lives in a number of different ways. The first place that you see it is in what you might call the ideological arsenal of the far-right in a lot of different countries. If you listened to, for example, what the marchers were saying in Charlottesville in 2017, many of them were talking about how Jews will not replace “us,” “us” being White nationalists. They also in a kind of knee-jerk way were going on about how they were opposed to communism, even though I don't think there were any communists anywhere in the area. But nonetheless, they saw communists as being somehow related.
You can see this in the number of really horrific shootings of Jews by shooters in this country and elsewhere, where Jews are associated with immigration. There's this accusation that Jewish cosmopolitans are somehow ringleaders or are organizing the migration of other sorts of racial inferiors into the country. And that's a kind of real play and adaptation of something that was central to Nazi ideology.
When, you know, Nazi Germany went to war against the Soviet Union, one of their main arguments was that the Soviet Union was controlled by Jews and that Jewish commissars were going to lead armies of racial subhumans or racial inferiors into the heart of Europe. And that the head of this Jewish-led army were going to be millions and millions of different kinds of migrants who were going to swamp Europe. You can see that kind of language being repurposed and repositioned by the far right to fit into immigration debates today. So that's one place: on the far right.
The other place where you really see it is the, kind of, reshuffling of the Jewish conspiracy, and I think this is where I would say the book that I've written really tries to focus on how this particular version of the Jewish conspiracy theory or the Jewish conspiracy myth or the myths of Jewish power took a particular form at a particular historical moment in the 20th century. And that with the end of communism, there has been a reshuffling, and so now the face of the Jewish enemy or the great threat is not a Jewish communist like, let's say, Leon Trotsky who figures so prominently in anti-communist ideology throughout the 20th century, but is now someone like George Soros who is anything but a communist, obviously. He is a very wealthy financier, someone who's not only made a lot of money in the financial markets but also is using it to try to promote things like the open society through his nongovernmental organizations.
And so you see this idea of an international Jewish plot or an international Jewish conspiracy linked to things like cosmopolitanism, which are anti-national. These themes have been reshuffled, refolded, and repurposed into a now what is the post-communist age. And so in some sense, if the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism is becoming a kind of substance of historical memory, you can see the conspiracy theory that was at the heart of it lives on because it has acquired, in a sense, new clothes. There's new language to talk about it because it's being fit into new scenarios and put to new purposes.
Mike: All right. Well, Dr. Hanebrink, thank you so much for coming on the Nazi Lies Podcast to talk about the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. The book, again, is A Spectre Haunting Europe, out from the Belknap Press which is an imprint of Harvard. Dr. Hanebrink, thank you once again.
Paul: Thank you very much for having me, it was a pleasure talking with you.
Mike: The Nazi Lies book club meets every week to discuss the books of upcoming guests on the podcast. Come join us on Discord. A subscription to Patreon gets you access starting as low as $2. Thanks for listening.
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Mike Isaacson: That’s it! That’s the joke!
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Nazi SS UFOs
Lizards wearing human clothes
Hinduism’s secret codes
These are nazi liesRace and IQ are in genes
Warfare keeps the nation clean
Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine
These are nazi liesHollow earth, white genocide
Muslim’s rampant femicide
Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde
Hiter lived and no Jews diedArmy, navy, and the cops
Secret service, special ops
They protect us, not sweatshops
These are nazi liesMike: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. Join our book club on Discord by subscribing to our Patreon. If you weren’t on the Discord at the beginning of the month, you missed our next guest giving standup comedy lessons. Elsa Eli Waithe is a stand up comedian and educator living in Brooklyn. She’s been in the New York comedy scene for ten years and was recently featured on BET’s new show On the Ropes. She is the founder of the GOLD Comedy School for Girls which teaches primarily teenage girls the craft of comedy. Elsa’s here for Women’s History Month to talk about women in comedy. Welcome to the podcast, Elsa.
Elsa Eli Waithe: Hello, thank you for having me Mike. It's good to talk to you.
Mike: Hey, how are you doing?
Elsa: Doing good. Oh man, comedy’s coming back. There's a little thing like a pandemic or something that happened? Little something-something like that threw everybody off, but I think we're turning the corner, and comedy is coming back. I'm ready to be funny again.
Mike: Good. So before we get into the craft of comedy, how did you come to stand-up comedy?
Elsa: How did I come to stand-up comedy? Oh, my God. So many things in my life, I think, were pointing itself already to stand-up comedy. Of course, I grew up in school as the class clown or whatever. In fact, by the time I started doing stand-up comedy, folks were like, "Oh, wow. I didn't know you weren't already doing that. You were always so funny in school or whatever." And then also, a lot of my jobs were sales jobs, and sales is kind of like a presentation, you know? And it helps to be funny and have a couple of lines that you say all the time. Everything was sort of just pointing towards comedy and stage and the things like that and I just sort of did it a bit on a dare almost. Somebody was just like, "You gotta want to do something else with your life, you should try comedy." And I just sort of tried it and I was just sort of naturally good at it. I did an open mic and I didn't quite know what I was doing, it's just like, "I'm just gonna go talk to this microphone." And then like people laughed. So I was like, "Okay, let's just keep doing it." And then here we go fast forward 10 plus years later, and I'm still doing it.
Mike: Right on. So give us a little behind the scenes. What's the comedy scene like in New York City? How does an aspiring comedian get started, and what should they watch out for?
Elsa: Oh! The comedy scene in New York City is a zoo. But it's my zoo. It's a fun zoo, and you're gonna learn a lot more doing comedy here in one month than you would like a year pretty much anywhere else because there's so many different venues. There's so many different avenues for comedy-- stand-up, sketch, improv, experimental, alt-style comedy-- that you could literally be in three places in one night in New York City. Do stand-up three times in one day.
I think one of the early bits of information or advice I would give somebody starting off comedy in New York is get as much of it as you can without overdosing, right? Like, you get here and you want to do it all because you can do it all and there's all these opportunities and avenues and things. Do as much as you can, but also don't burn yourself out. Because it's easy to spread yourself too thin. So, don't spread yourself too thin. And then when you find your niche, you kind of find your spot, dig into it. Of course, don't be afraid to spread out, but really dig into the thing that really is grabbing you. It's really easy to spread yourself really thin in New York. I think that's what I'm trying to say is try it all but don't spread yourself thin.
Mike: Now you are a woman in comedy. How has the scene treated you and other women compared to men?
Elsa: Oh. Well, we live in a patriarchal society so experiences are going to be different for men and women in every area. It's no different in comedy. I mean, I'm a queer, Black woman, so I got those two things too.
But, you know, when I first started doing comedy I was in the South. I was in Virginia. And very frequently I'd be the only woman, the only Black person, or the only queer, or damn, the only combination. Like, "Hey, you're the diversity hire. You check three boxes, get out there." And then I'd be on the line with all White men, all straight White men or all White men or whatever. It didn't bother me too much down in the South but when I came to New York for that sometimes to still be the case here, I was just like, "Oh, wow!" That was very interesting to see that comedy shows can still be booked in that way, even in the melting pot.
So for me, the whole trick was to just be undeniably funny. That like, "Yes, I want your show to be booked diverse or whatever." But men, the gatekeepers or so in comedy, are often hiring you because you check a diversity box. They're booking you because you check a diversity box. I want to check that diversity box, but I also want to be really funny as well. And just be undeniably funny. I think that's like the extra mission, right? You hear it from Black folks or for women, you know, for gay people, "We got to be two or three times as funny as the next." You know? I want to be just regular as funny as the next and you hire me because that's just the right fucking thing to do. But also, I'm hilarious. [laughs]
Mike: Okay. So regardless of the scene, the craft of stand-up comedy itself is pretty equal opportunity. And as part of your GOLD Comedy school curriculum, you've actually broken comedy down into sort of a science almost. I was definitely taking notes during the book club sessions you gave.
Elsa: Thank you.
Mike: So, what are elements of a good joke?
Elsa: The elements of a good joke? Yeah, when I tell people, when they take my class, it's like I'm gonna break comedy down in a boring way for a second, right? And break it down into some like formulas, and then we'll build it back up, and it'll be funny again. But yeah, I think the elements of a good joke is premise, setup, punch. Right? You need the-- what is this joke about? Which direction are you about to take me in? And then the punch, the twist. What direction do we wind up in? Right?
There's sort of like a little formula for that. So the elements of a good joke I think it's got to have– rooted in realism. This could be a real thing. Even if it's not a real thing, this could be a real thing, it's rooted in something real. And then the exaggeration and the surprise, then we take it to zany heights, you know? Things like that. So it's got to be rooted in something real. You got to show me where we're going and then you got to surprise me and take me in an unexpected direction. So yeah, that's really what I think are the elements of a good joke.
Mike: Now doing standup is more than just having well-crafted jokes. Unless you’re like Mitch Hedberg, you need a routine to tie the jokes together. How do you build a good standup set?
Elsa: You know, for me, there's lots of different ways people do it. Of course, obviously, comedy is an art form so everyone's got their way. My way, for me, is over the years over time I've written what I like to call a stack of jokes for different topics. I got weed jokes. I got gay jokes. I got going-to-the-beach jokes, or whatever.
And what I typically do is when I'm building a set, before I go on stage, earlier that day or the day before, what three things do I want to talk about? Do I want to talk about this pop culture thing that's currently happening? I'm gonna talk about this pop culture thing that's currently happening, I want to do some weed material, and then I want to end with this thing my mom did, you know?
How I sort of weave or blend those things together sometimes just sort of comes across while I'm on stage. But I just sort of go in my head with the couple of topics I want to talk about, and will then pick out the couple of jokes I really want to try out on those topics. And then if I got five minutes/ten minutes, I talk until I feel like I'm done joking about this one thing and then we move on. I just sort of feel it out on stage as best I can.
But I go in with a little bit of a game plan, you know? Do I know everything exactly down to the letter what I'm going to say? No. But I go in with a little bit of a blueprint or a little bit of a game plan and allow spontaneity. You don't know what the audience is going to do, you don't know what is going to happen in the room, so I go in with my game plan and leave room to be spontaneous or to see what the audience is giving me.
Mike: Alright, so with your experience and the framework you've built, I’m sure you’ve witnessed some comedy that’s made you cringe. What do comedians need to stop doing in their sets?
Elsa: One pet peeve I have– This is like a new comic pet peeve, so if I see you doing this, I can almost guarantee you haven't been doing comedy a full year yet. When you take the mic out of the mic stand, move the mic stand. Move the mic stand away from the front of the– Take the mic out of the mic stand and then place the mic stand off to the side or behind you. Oh dear God, why would you take the mic off the mic stand, and then leave the mic stand right there, and then like walk around it? Oh that's one thing that it's a tiny little pet peeve that makes all the difference. It's a rookie move, I don't like that.
Um, I don't like when– I think sometimes people write comedy to be edgy or to be controversial. If the topic you're talking about is edgy or controversial, that's one thing. But, you know, you ever see like a little kid and they're just learning how to curse, so then they just sprinkle curse words into everything, and it doesn't work? Like, "Stop. Stop. Stop." I think some comics want to be edgy or controversial so they'll just jump right to certain topics without any nuance. You know?
Like, "Hey, we're gonna do this abortion ate a baby joke, and then we're gonna do this Holocaust joke, and then we're gonna do this racist Asian trope. I'm gonna ching chong pretend to be Asian nang nang nang whatever" And then it's just like, "Oh wow, maybe that could have been funny if you were talking about something, but you're just rushing to be edgy or controversial."
My thing is always, everything is funny or nothing is. So I would never say you can't say something, but in the rush to be edgy, in the rush to say the clickbaity thing or whatever, we often just skip right past what funny is, you know?
It's okay to be edgy or controversial, but people are people often like, "Comedy is the last bastion of free speech! We're speech and wisdom tellers!" And I'm like, "Eh, our job is to tell jokes." Our job primarily first and foremost is to make people laugh.
Mike: Yeah, I feel like some people just mix up funny and mean, and they just think that they’re the same thing. You know?
Elsa: Oh, yeah. There's a lot of the 'mean girl' mentality in comedy, right? Guys try to say they don't get involved in that, but yeah, no, there's a lot of rushing past what's funny to be to be mean, or to be edgy, or whatever. And a lot of people think that that's what's funny.
People who speak their mind, you know what I'm saying, they often thought about what they say before they say it. A lot of times comedy is undervalued because it does look like I'm just getting on stage and just talking. Right? But I did plan this out. I did craft this. I did work it out. So a lot of people just think you just go up there, and I just say whatever comes to my mind. Maybe, sort of, but not really.
Mike: Yeah. No, you definitely have a list of jokes that I've heard several times.
Elsa: Yeah, I got my stable. I like to say I got my stable of jokes, or I call it my tool belt. I got my tried and true jokes. I got things I know work. I got things that sometimes I go back and I'm like, "Oh, wow, I haven't said this or done this joke in years. Let's try this one again." Just like when you find an old toy or something–
Mike: It’s funny. Sometimes when you're on stage, you'll actually announce that. You'll be like, "This is an old joke."
Elsa: [laughs] Yeah, it's for me. That's for me.
Mike: Okay, I know you probably don’t want to be playing favorites, but I want to make sure people leave this episode listening to women comedians, so who are the up-and-coming women comedians you want to shout out?
Elsa: Oh, I can shout folks out at all sorts of different levels. Okay, so at our national superstar level, please put some Leslie Jones in your face. That's just good, happy fun, crazy comedy. I love me some Leslie Jones. Put Leslie Jones in your face.
And then up-and-coming, definitely up-and-coming, making waves, making a name for herself, a friend of mine, somebody who I really admire, shout out Chanel Ali. Chanel Ali is really funny. We also are going to appear on the BET show together. Yeah, I want to give a big shout out to Chanel Ali. I think she's down to earth, really funny, great energy in her comedy.
Shout out to Joanna Briley. Joanna Briley is kind of the auntie matriarch of stand-up comedy here in New York City. Creator of the Black Women In Comedy Festival, which I think is in its second or third year coming up. She's originator, creator of Black Women In Comedy Festival. And I want to just shout out GOLD Comedy and Lynn Harris. Lynn Harris, not a current comedian anymore, but the creator, innovator, and big brain of GOLD Comedy where I teach, and I'm the founding teacher. Lots of talent, lots of good women and non-binary folks coming out of GOLD Comedy.
Who else? What else? I don't like playing favorites but there are just some folks who are really making waves. Yamaneika Saunders, also the host of the BET show. Yamaneika Saunders, hilarious. Yeah, that's what comes to mind right now.
Oh, Glo!
Mike: Glo?
Elsa: Glo. Glo is hilarious. Check out Glo here in Brooklyn. She is also very funny.
Yeah. Veronica Garza! I want to shout out Veronica Garza. Garza is really funny. You're gonna have to Google these folks, you ain't seen them on TV yet. But it's coming up. Yeah, that's it.
Mike: Well Elsa, thank you so much for coming on The Nazi Lies Podcast to talk about women in comedy. You can catch Elsa on BET’s On the Ropes, and send your daughters to GOLD Comedy School! Are you gonna bring back Affirmative Laughter?
Elsa: Affirmative Laughter is coming back! Check for Affirmative Laughter late March or mid-April. I haven't quite pinned down the date, but we do Affirmative Laughter at The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, that's inside of The LGBTQ Center at 13th Street in Manhattan. Show is gonna be coming back. Affirmative Laughter is my monthly comedy show where- It's a diversity show as they say, and every month we hire just one straight white man. Just one. Just to show you guys how it feels. Ain't that awkward? That's weird. [laughs] So keep an eye out for Affirmative Laughter. It is coming back soon.
Mike: Very good. All right. Okay, check out Elsa on Twitter @elsajustelsa. Thanks again, Elsa.
Elsa: Yay, thank you!
Mike: If you want to discuss upcoming topics and books with me, join The Nazi Lies Book Club. We hold weekly meetings on Discord where we discuss the books of upcoming guests and every so often we get to talk with the guest themselves. You already missed Elsa’s comedy lessons; don’t miss out on the next exclusive. Sign up on Patreon.
[Theme Song]
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Mike Isaacson: Of course you’re gonna be replaced. No one lives forever.
[Theme song]
Nazi SS UFOs
Lizards wearing human clothes
Hinduism’s secret codes
These are nazi liesRace and IQ are in genes
Warfare keeps the nation clean
Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine
These are nazi liesHollow earth, white genocide
Muslim’s rampant femicide
Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde
Hiter lived and no Jews diedArmy, navy, and the cops
Secret service, special ops
They protect us, not sweatshops
These are nazi liesMike: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. Subscribe to our Patreon to join our book club. This should be an interesting episode. I’ve got Dr. Michael Cholbi with me. He’s chair in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and editor of the volume Immortality and the Philosophy of Death. He’s joining me to discuss Replacement theory. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Cholbi.
Michael Cholbi: Thanks very much, I really appreciate the invitation.
Mike: All right, so before we get too deep into the philosophy, talk a bit about what you study and how it contributes to the human experience.
Michael: Well, I'm a philosopher, and I specialize in particular in ethics. Within ethics, much of my research addresses philosophical issues, ethical issues, related to death and mortality. Some of the issues that I have written on include things like suicide and assisted dying, the desirability of immortality, the rationality of attitudes such as fear toward death, and most recently, working a significant bit on philosophical questions related to grief and bereavement.
In terms of what I think it contributes to the human experience--well, I hope it contributes something to the experience--I do think that it's probably the case that even if non-human creatures have some understanding of death, some inchoate understanding of death, we human beings learn at a pretty early age about death, and we learn at a pretty early age as well, that death is ultimately unavoidable. We learn that every creature that we have ever known, every creature that ever will exist including ourselves, does die eventually. And I think as a consequence of that, we have to live our lives in light of that fact. It seems to be pretty clear that our attitudes about death and mortality impact a lot of how we approach the world, what our attitudes are, what our aspirations are.
So I'd like to think that philosophy of death or dying is a subject that is relevant to people not because of, you know, their being a member of a profession, or because they come from a certain part of the world or whatever it might be, but simply because they're human and they are aware of the fact of their mortality. I think we all grapple with it, and I think that philosophy has some particular tools or methods that can help people grapple with it in a helpful way.
Mike: Now, the reason I wanted to have you on is because I think replacement theory sort of revolves around a fear of death or an inability to grapple with one's own mortality. So there's this idea of being replaced, it's obviously fundamental to the theory itself, and I think this relates to the idea of the first part of your book, “Is death bad for those that die?” I think that replacement theory would answer in the affirmative, and probably most people, though less frantically. So what do philosophers have to say on this question? Does anyone say no?
Michael: Well, I actually think there's a pretty significant contingent, right, of philosophers in different traditions who don't think that death is bad for the person who dies, or at least isn't bad necessarily. And I think that those who hold that view fall into several different categories.
One category are those philosophers who believed in the afterlife. A significant number of philosophers have worked in Christian and Islamic traditions and of course, according to those traditions, death is not really the end of us; it's more like a transition for us in that we change from being mortal embodied living creatures to being immortal creatures. Not all of the thinkers who believe in afterlife have believed in what we would think of as religions in the usual sense. Socrates famously argued that his death was not going to be bad for him because this was his opportunity to be released from his body and to become acquainted with the eternal and unchanging forms that he believed are the source of all knowledge.
Another school of thought that has denied that death is bad for us were the Epicureans and they have their contemporary defenders. Epicurean philosophers believe that death is neither good nor bad for us. Their famous slogan is "Death’s nothing to us," and their point of view is that death is the end of us. We don't survive it. There's no afterlife. And because we don't survive it, we don't experience anything bad, there's nothing to be bad about death, and we simply don't exist. So in their view, death is neither bad nor good.
Then there's a third school of thought that's a bit more contemporary. Most philosophers who adopt this school of thought would call themselves Deprivationists or Comparativists, and roughly the idea is something like this, that your death can be bad for you, and the way it can be bad for you is that if you die at a particular point in time, then had you not died at that time you would have lived longer, and had you lived longer, there's the possibility that you would have had a better life overall. So were I to die today then that means I would not survive longer, and perhaps had I survived longer, I would have had the opportunity to have a better life, a happier, more fulfilling life, to say.
So there’s certainly been many schools of philosophical thought, many philosophers, that have thought that death is not bad for us, or at least not necessarily bad for us, I should say. That said, I think it's been one of the sort of perennial questions in philosophy and there are a good number of people on the other side of the ledger who think that there's something deeply terrible about death just insofar as it represents the kind of destruction of our consciousness or of our subjectivity. It's bad simply insofar as it represents the cessation of the existence of the only thing that each of us can really say that we know or count on–ourselves. And maybe that's bad enough to make death bad.
Mike: This kind of gets us into the next topic I want to get into. One of the topics that comes up in your book is the idea of life as a narrative arc that concludes with your death. And it seems like that is roundly refuted but it still feels compelling. It forms the basis of most action, adventure, sci fi, fantasy, etc, stories.
And it kind of implies destiny, which is something crucial to replacement theory. Even the Comparative approach touched on in the first part of the book takes for granted one's destiny that we compare, you know, beyond one's ultimate death, or one's untimely death. Replacement theory kind of takes this narrative arc story of an individual life and puts it at the meta level with the grand narrative of the nation. So, how do philosophers take on this idea of life as a story, presumably that concludes with one's death?
Michael: Well, I certainly think that outside of philosophy and say psychology, we see an abundance of evidence that perhaps one of the defining features of human beings is that we're storytellers, right? We tell stories about ourselves, about other people, about our communities. And it's certainly possible to look at one's life as a narrative, as a kind of story.
There are philosophers who have denied that this is sort of essential to us. There's a living philosopher now named Galen Strawson who has essentially said that, or at least from his point of view, he lives his life as a series of disconnected episodes as if there's sort of no narrative, unity, or structure to them at all. And of course, there's also the possibility that we tell stories about our lives or craft narratives about our lives that turn out to be false or incoherent or really don't make any sense.
I don't think necessarily that the notion that we view our lives as narratives and our lives as narratives implies destiny. In fact, I think a lot of what people are attempting to do in the course of their lives is to try to craft a life that corresponds to a certain story. So, perhaps you have a life where a certain kind of adversity was present early on in life, but one of the central things that you tried to do was to overcome that adversity, and by the end of your life, it's clear that you had overcome that adversity. That's a pretty common trope in the stories that people aspire to create for their lives.
I think at the collective level-- and that seems to be really what sort of Nazi replacements theory is operating at a sort of meta level as you said-- you know, the notion that we aspire to tell stories about ourselves that connect us with others, and in particular connect us with others who will continue to exist after we are gone is a very powerful human equation. I think certainly, many people when they think about what they want out of their lives, they want in some ways their lives to transcend their own biographies, right, to have a legacy, to leave an impact in the world, to improve life for the next generation. In fact there's a philosopher recently, Samuel Scheffler, who has kind of coined this idea of the "collective afterlife" that much of what we do and care about, when we sit back and reflect upon it, seems to assume that there will be people who will exist after we're gone. So if you're a cancer researcher, and you were to learn that in the days after your death the entire earth and the whole human species were to be destroyed by an asteroid, Schaeffler says that would probably change your goals, right? You wouldn't think that curing cancer was so important a goal.
So I think it's pretty baked in. I think, to human nature to be able to view our lives as stories, to want our stories to interconnect with other people, other members of our family, our community our nation, our religion. It's actually a very commonplace feature of human life that we struggle with death, and one of the ways that we try to address that struggle, I think, is by crafting a narrative that transcends ourselves as individuals.
Mike: All right. So your book ends with a part on immortality, which I think is also important for Replacement theory. This idea that you will somehow live on through your nation or your race or your genes or whatever. It seems like a mystical way of achieving immortality. So, historically philosophically, how do people seek to attain immortality? How does it color the way we navigate the world?
Michael: Well, I mean in some ways I would say that the desire for a kind of immortality that is symbolic, as some people have said, a kind of immortality that doesn't involve literally surviving as an individual, but a kind of immortality that consists in having a legacy or leaving an impact on the world. That kind of immortality is, in some sense, less mystical than in certain other ways of thinking about immortality. I suppose the most mystical or most puzzling is one that I was referring to earlier in our conversation, you know, the notion of an afterlife. It does seem to be on its face puzzling how we can die and be entirely completely dead and yet somehow survive that and come out on the other side, so to speak.
But certainly, the various narratives of the afterlife are one of the ways that people have thought they could attain immortality. Another, of course, is what we've been calling legacy through family, culture, religion, nation, and so forth. And a third one-- and this is the one I suppose that sometimes people forget about-- is that you could conceivably attain immortality simply by not dying. [laughs] So you know, if you were to be able to find the proverbial fountain of youth, that would give you eternal life rather than some post mortem immortal life, that'd be a kind of immortality too.
I think in terms of the place that thinking about mortality has in human life, you know, there's a school of psychologists led by Sheldon Solomon who put forward something called terror management theory. And as the name suggests, what terror management theory is about is the idea that we human beings are aware of our deaths, and we either find this completely incomprehensible that we could die, or we find it completely terrifying, and either way, we adopt certain strategies, perhaps subconscious or unconscious strategies, to try to manage or address that anxiety. In this respect, the terror management theorists are following upon the work of an anthropologist's writing in the 1970s named Ernest Becker, he wrote a famous book called The Denial of Death.
But the terror management theorists in effect say to us, "Well, many of us work very hard to either deny that we die. I suppose that could be one way of looking at belief in the afterlife as kind of the assertion that we simply don't die really. Or we try to live our lives in such a way that we're kind of reassured by the prospect that even if we do die, things that we care about continue, right? Our institutions that we're allied with, the community that we live in, our families, sports clubs that we root for, all of those kinds of things may continue to exist. And that gives us a kind of immortality that's not sort of metaphysical, right? It's not where you actually continue to exist, but I suppose you could call it a symbolic or ethical immortality."
But again, I think that I agree with the terror management theorists that somewhere deep in most of our consciousness is the awareness of the fact of our death, and it probably has a huge influence on how we behave individually. It's probably responsible for many of the principal features of human culture. Anthropologists have observed that pretty much every culture that has ever been studied has beliefs and rituals surrounding death, right? [laughs] That's like the starting point for anthropologist's study of the world. So yes, definitely immortality, or striving for immortality, is a way to wrestle or grapple with a mortality that I think we all come to appreciate early on in life.
Mike: So, replacement theory has been around for a while although it didn't really have a formal name as a theory until the Christchurch shooter wrote his manifesto, The Great Replacement. One thing I found interesting about the manifesto was the statistic he chooses to focus on. So fascists, racists, xenophobes, they generally appeal to a variety of statistics—racial crime statistics, racial population demographics, not very often racial immigration rates. But the Christchurch shooter chose to focus on racial birth rates.
For him, death is the birth of the Other. There's this fear of being bred out. For fascists, there's a sort of philosophical underpinning to this. It has to do with how they view the life and the nation. They consider the nation or identity or whatever, to be literally a living organism or super organism. This implies all the normal things about life–the power of decision making, a lifecycle, etc.
For fascists, the nation is a living thing with the state as its power of cognition. This is very similar to one thing we discussed on a previous episode, The Great Chain of Being, this idea that a kingdom is a living organism with the king is the head, and various classes of society as various body parts. So whereas The Great Chain of Being is held together by divine right, fascism is held together by kinship, yielding culture, civilization, politics, economics, etc.
This kinship is a unifying force that fuses individuals into an organic nation. And like all living beings, a nation is born; it has a youth, it has a maturation, a frail old age, and an eventual death. Now, fundamentally this comes from a fascist obsession with the organic and applying pseudo-biological models to everything. Anyway, here's my question. How does death shape the way we view non-living phenomena?
Michael: Hm. That's the toughest question you've asked me. When we're thinking about non-living phenomenon, are we thinking about just sort of matter? [laughs]
Mike: One example you can think of may be like the way that we think of when a computer breaks down, it dies. You know? But also like the idea that a nation in decline is dying or things like that.
Michael: Okay, I see. So death as a sort of metaphor for nonliving things, things that can't in some literal sense die. Good. Okay. Again, I think in some ways this goes back to storytelling. There is this well observed psychological tendency we have to attribute agency, personhood, to things that our better selves know aren't agents and don't have personhood. You know, your cell phone breaks down, your cell phone dies on you-- noticed how I used that word dies-- we tend to personify it, right? We sort of think of it as something like an organism.
Now, part of that, of course, is simply that thinking of things as having agency, as being person-like, is one of the ways that we try to conceptualize the world around us. And of course, this has some limitations. Sometimes I think you could say that perhaps certain advances in science have been impeded because we have some difficulty in understanding the prospect that events can happen without there being a storyteller or something sort of behind these events that instigates them or chooses them. This is kind of the basis for the infamous argument for God's existence, the argument from design that the world seems so orderly and harmonious in certain sorts of ways. And so this argument tries to infer that that order, that harmoniousness had to have been willed into existence by a god, right? By some sort of divinity.
It's certainly, I think, an instinct we have to personify other beings even when they're not persons, to treat them as agents even when they're not agents. I suppose that there's a kind of distortion there as at root in thinking about collective entities as if they are organisms. They're not organisms. And you're certainly right that there's something perhaps misguided about the Nazi replacement theory insofar as it thinks of society as a kind of organism that has these parts that can be healthy or diseased. And I suppose that part of the Nazi ideology has been to try to extirpate the diseased parts in order to preserve and maintain the healthy parts.
I'm not sure it's the metaphor that's the problem, but perhaps the particular construal ofit that the Nazi ideology gives, that societies are collectivities or organisms that have these parts that thrive or can be unhealthy on their own.
Mike: Okay so there was one article in the volume that at least one review I read took exception to. So the article in question is titled “Constructing Death as a Form of Failure: Addressing Mortality in a Neoliberal Age.” Now I won’t make you rehash someone else’s article. But I do want to talk about kind of the underriding theme of this article which is the idea that social values shape the way we conceptualize death. So how do social values shape the way we conceptualize death?
Michael: I think that particular article was emphasizing a certain way in which contemporary societies sometimes seem to understand death. That death is a sort of failure and that we should attempt to extirpate it, eliminate it if we can, or delay it as long as possible. I mean, certainly many people as they face death, as they become ill and their days become short, some people--not all--do seem to think that their deaths would amount to a kind of failure. Even some physicians have difficulty letting go of the idea that a patient who dies is a patient that they have failed.
But I think that's an indication of a sort of broader phenomenon and a broader reality where societies certainly do have values that invite certain interpretations or understandings of the significance of death. Just to give a sort of stark contrast, societies like ours that suppose often that the best sort of life is one that is very productive, where you have a lot of accomplishments, where you enjoy the various kinds of successes and various kinds of material goods. Well, death then looks like the end of all that, and that looks to be a misfortune.
Conversely, if one looks at societies or cultures that have a much more communitarian or perhaps cyclical picture of the human condition, they don't necessarily seem to view death as the end of something good or a kind of failure. They view it as a fact that we need to reconcile ourselves to, because again we do eventually die.
So I certainly think that our attitudes toward death have very rich logical and evidential interconnections with other things that we care about. And it certainly seems to be that with respect to the theme of your podcast, the Nazi belief system views deaths of white people or white culture or white civilizations as a profound loss, because of course the background ideology is one where those groups or those individuals are supposed to sort of be eternal to reign supreme. And so it's unsurprising then that they would view death as such a detrimental blow to them.
Mike: All right. Now obviously, you didn't compile this book as a metaphor for replacement theory. So what do you hope that people get out of your book?
Michael: Well, there's of course a collection of articles by a number of scholars--only one of the articles is by me--but I think that what this book can offer people is a richer understanding of two distinct questions that nevertheless interlock or overlap, if you will.
So the first question that the book addresses is really the first question you asked about today; is death bad for us? Should we think that it's a bad thing? I think there's a diversity of opinions about this as I mentioned. There are certainly philosophical traditions that have thought that death is bad for us, others that have thought that it isn't bad in fact it's neither good nor bad. Others sort of thought that it may be bad depending upon sort of the circumstances of your death and the circumstances of your life. So I'm hoping that people will garner a more robust understanding of why that's an interesting question and the different ways that philosophers might answer it, and the kinds of arguments they give for their positions.
Now, the other question that I think people will gain some insight about is the question of whether immortality would be good for us. It's natural to think that if death is bad for us then it would have to follow that the absence of death, which is to say immortality, would be good for us.
But many philosophers have been skeptical about that too. [laughs] They've sort of argued that we're simply not built to be immortal, we would ultimately find the life of an immortal boring and tedious. We would end up like the immortal gods of Greek and Roman mythology where all they seemed to do with their days is sort of meddle in the lives of mortals and create mischief.
Others have thought that this would amount to such a distortion of our values, you know, certain kinds of things that we care about in our mortal lives. They wouldn't be sustainable if we were immortal, right? I mean, what would it mean to marry someone, you know, to use that language "till death do us part" if death never comes? [laughs] Would we still value our romantic relationships in the same way? That's just one example where people have wondered whether immortality would in fact alter our values beyond recognition.
But I guess what I'm hoping people will see in the book is that those two questions about the value of death and particularly whether it's bad, and on the other hand whether immortality would be good, are both independently interesting, but also, I think, interesting jointly. Because the question of the value of immortality arises very naturally if you believe that in fact death is bad for us.
Mike: Okay. Well, Dr. Cholbi, thanks so much for coming on to The Nazi Lies Podcast to talk about death and replacement theory. The book again is Immortality and the Philosophy of Death out from Rowman and Littlefield. Thanks again.
Michael: Thank you. It was really a pleasure to talk to you.
Mike: If you want to be an upcoming guest with us, join The Nazi Lies Book Club on Patreon. Patrons get access to the Discord server where we host the book club and occasionally share Animal Crossing memes. Patrons also get a bundle of merch for signing up, access to The Nazi Lies Calendar, and advance show notes, transcripts and episodes. See you on the Discord!
[Theme song]
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Mike Isaacson: Now when you say recommended dose…
[Theme song]
Nazi SS UFOs
Lizards wearing human clothes
Hinduism’s secret codes
These are nazi liesRace and IQ are in genes
Warfare keeps the nation clean
Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine
These are nazi liesHollow earth, white genocide
Muslim’s rampant femicide
Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde
Hiter lived and no Jews diedArmy, navy, and the cops
Secret service, special ops
They protect us, not sweatshops
These are nazi liesMike: Welcome to another episode of the Nazi Lies Podcast. Subscribe to our Patreon to get access to early episodes and membership in our book club and Discord. Today we are joined by Dr. Tim Geary, a pharmacoparasitologist or parasitopharmacologist… He studies parasites and makes drugs. He's a professor emeritus at McGill University and still teaches courses at Queen's University Belfast. He's here to talk to us about hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and why they probably won't neutralize Coronavirus. Thanks for joining us, Dr. Geary.
Tim Geary: You're welcome, Mike. Please call me Tim.
Mike: Okay, Tim. Before we get into all the science, tell our audience a little bit about what you've done professionally, because you have a very extensive list of bona fides, and I don't really know where to start. [laughs]
Tim: That’s quite all right. Yes, I have been working on the study of drugs, pharmacology, for about 45 years, and most of that time I've been working on chemotherapy of infectious diseases, primarily parasites. This includes work in Africa. Most of my career has been on veterinary parasites or human neglected tropical diseases caused by parasites. During the course of my career I have worked on malaria, and that's where chloroquine and its derivative hydroxychloroquine come from, and also ivermectin, which I have studied for many, many years, both in animals and people.
In full disclosure, Mike, I once did work for the pharmaceutical industry, the animal health arm of a company called up Upjohn that is now known as Zoetis in Kalamazoo, Michigan. [ed. It’s now part of Viatris.] I also consulted and worked with the World Health Organization, with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and with the Carter Center on various problems of tropical diseases, and I continue to be a consultant for some animal health companies. That's who I am.
Mike: Very good. All right. Now you've done some research on both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, correct?
Tim: I have, indeed. I worked on both how they work to kill parasites and also how parasites become resistant to them. I have studied them in clinical settings as well as in the laboratory, and I think I qualify as an expert in both medicines in the indications for which they are used, which is essentially tropical medicine and veterinary parasitology.
Mike: Very good. And you've also been following the misinformation surrounding these two drugs too, right?
Tim: I have, with great interest and concern. There aren't very many people in the world who are experts at drug discovery and drug development for these kinds of conditions. That's unfortunate. But yes, I have followed that, Mike, and I certainly have opinions about where the misinformation came from. It was not a malintention, it was just wrong interpretation and wrong design of some initial experiments that led to inappropriate conclusions in a rush to clinical use.
Mike: Okay, so let's talk about each of these medications and then we'll talk about where the rumors started. So let's start with hydroxychloroquine. Since the beginning of the pandemic almost, it was heralded as a miracle COVID cure but was quickly discovered not to be that. What were its recognised clinical uses?
Tim: So hydroxychloroquine is a derivative of a drug called chloroquine, which was also touted initially as a possible solution to COVID. Chloroquine was a miracle drug for the treatment of malaria. It saved, oh my gosh, millions and millions of lives over the course of its use. It's relatively cheap, it's reasonably safe and it was highly effective against malaria parasites until they evolved resistance to it. It's use for malaria has now diminished remarkably.
Hydroxychloroquine was thought to be a safer alternative with a better sort of safety profile. But it never was really used for malaria. It just never displaced chloroquine. Instead, it found use as kind of an immunomodulator compound for people with systemic lupus erythematosus or lupus as it's commonly known, an autoimmune condition. So hydroxychloroquine for people with lupus does help to reduce symptoms, to reduce worsening of the disease, and it is a valuable drug for that purpose.
Mike: Okay, and how safe is it to experiment with?
Tim: Not very. I mean, it does have side effects, especially when you go over recommended dosing. We'll talk, I think Mike, in a little bit about how that relates to potential uses against COVID, if you like, but it's normal use in lupus patients, it's pretty well tolerated. But the doses are quite specific for that, and as with most medicines, it's safe when used appropriately.
Mike: And what happens when it's not used appropriately? What kinds of symptoms can you...
Tim: There are a variety; hearing loss is one that kind of stands out, but you can get imbalances, a sort of dizziness, classic nausea, vomiting, things like that. It's not a drug to be taken lightly. It's not as safe as many of the medicines that we use. But again, when it's used appropriately, it's fine.
Mike: Okay, and how did the rumors start that this could be used to be COVID.
Tim: So it's a classic story, Mike. So whenever a new condition surfaces, like COVID, there's a rush to test all the– what are known as the FDA registered medicines. These are medicines that have been approved for one use or another either by the US government or by the European agencies. It's always easier to adapt an approved drug for new indication than to register a completely new medicine. It's just way cheaper, way faster. So everyone turns to “What have we already approved just to see if by some unexpected chance it would also work in this new condition?” And that's what happened here.
People can grow the SARS-CoV-2 virus in cell culture. So we grow it in cell culture and throw every compound that is registered and approved into those cultures to see, “Does any of them work?” And hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, which we'll talk about, they came out of that effort.
There's a serious flaw with the strategy in this case. I will say, Mike, sometimes it works. Sometimes you find something you didn't expect. I don't think we'll have time to go into those exceptions but there are some. So a key-- and this is sort of basic science and I hope it's okay for everybody-- but a big factor is the kind of cell that you use to grow the virus to test it. Scientists typically use for viral diseases, a cell called the vero cell, which was derived from an African Green Monkey kidney. The reason they use this cell is because most viruses grow really well in it, so it's quite easy to adapt a new virus to that system. The problem is, it's not representative of the kinds of cells that say SARS-CoV-2, the COVID virus infect. Those would be human lung cells, if you will.
So yes, hydroxychloroquine works at relatively high concentrations against the virus in vero cells. But it turns out if you do the same experiment with cultures of human lung cells, it really doesn't work at all, because the virus enters those cells in a way that's different than how it infects vero cells. Had we done the experiment properly, which is to use cultures of human lung cells, we wouldn't be having this conversation, Mike, because no one would have advanced hydroxychloroquine as a potential cure.
I hope that answers okay, and I hope it's clear. It's not that the scientists who did this work had evil intentions, they did not. It's just that they used the wrong cell type, and people drew inappropriate conclusions from the result.
Mike: Okay, let's switch gears to ivermectin. There's actually been a lot of misinformation about ivermectin on both sides of the don't-try-this-at-home debate. So in addition to the people on one side claiming that ivermectin can cure COVID, on the other side, you have people who are reducing ivermectin to just a horse dewormer.
Tim: [laughs] Yeah. Well, ivermectin, like chloroquine is a wonder drug. Okay? First of all, ivermectin has revolutionized the treatment of parasites in animals, and we should not discount it. So maybe its primary use is actually in the prevention of heartworm infections in people's pets. It revolutionized the treatment of this.
It's an important and extremely useful drug, but it also is very useful in people. It has been donated– More than a billion doses have been donated by Merck for the treatment of individuals infected with a couple of parasites in poor areas of the world, one is onchocerciasis or river blindness and the other is lymphatic filariasis or elephantiasis.
So we have a huge history of use of the drug. It can be given once a year for these infections or twice a year. It's enormously important in tropical medicine. It is a human medicine. It is very safe as used. It's also extremely potent. So it takes very little of the drug to have a beneficial therapeutic effect.
Mike: And how safe is it to experiment with?
Tim: At the use doses, it's quite safe. There are isolated incidences which would never happen to people in the United States, for instance, or in regions that don't suffer from parasitic infections like this. It's very safe, but it can be overdosed. It's possible.
One of the things that's really important to know, and I mentioned that it's very potent, right? So you give tiny doses to people who suffer from these parasitic infections, but the solutions that we use to treat animals, because animals are so much bigger than people, like horses or cows, for instance, they contain much higher amounts of the drug. And inappropriately taking those medicines you can get an overdose that has serious lethal concentrations and lethal implications, for instance. I think there have been a couple of fatalities in the US. So it should never be taken outside of a prescription by a physician.
Mike: Okay. And where did the rumors about this one start from?
Tim: [laughs] Exactly the same place, Mike. Ivermectin works against the virus in cell cultures, in vero cell cultures. It does not work in cultures of human lung cells, so there's no basis to presume that either of these drugs act by inhibiting the virus.
I will also say that the concentrations of ivermectin that are required to be active even in the vero cells are 100 times higher than what you would see in a human dosed with a therapeutic amount of the drug. It's not even clear to me that even massive overdoses would give you enough of the drug in your blood to actually have this beneficial effect.
The other problem, of course, that happened is people said, "Well, it's doing other things,” same with hydroxychloroquine, that maybe it's not inhibiting the virus but it has an immunosuppressive or some beneficial effect on immunity to the virus.
That's unproven. I know of no real evidence that therapeutic doses of ivermectin for sure have this effect. Hydroxychloroquine is a kind of immunosuppressant and that is certainly not an effect you would like to see in acute infection, initial infection, because you need the immune system to combat the virus.
It's possible that at later stages of more serious infections, when sometimes the human immune response can be over aggressive and cause pathology. That's why dexamethasone, which is a steroid that's used to suppress the immune system, has therapeutic benefit. But there's no reason to think that hydroxychloroquine will have any benefit over and above dexamethasone. And in fact, as you know, clinical trials in hospitalized patients showed no benefit whatsoever from hydroxychloroquine.
Mike: And I would assume it's the same for ivermectin.
Tim: It is. I'm sorry. It is. It's the same for ivermectin that we have treated hundreds of millions of people and literally billions of animals with this drug. No one has ever reported an antiviral effect or an immunosuppressive effect in these individuals. So we don't really have a mechanism that would explain either one. This becomes very important. I'm going to take a segue here if you don't mind.
Mike: Hey, go for it.
Tim: So right now ivermectin is undergoing clinical trials, not because of science but because of sort of public demand. These include several trials in the United States. The problem with a clinical trial like this is we have no hypothesized mechanism. So we don't have any way to judge, “How much ivermectin should we give to these people? What dose do we use? How frequently do we give it?” We have no idea what the target plasma concentration or blood concentration of the drug should be to have a beneficial effect on COVID. This makes the trial design extremely difficult. And it's going to complicate the interpretation. Right now some people think you have to take ivermectin all the time, other people think, “No, no, you just take it when you get sick.” We don't have a theoretical or any basis in theory to account for any of these outcomes.
Mike: Okay. Switching gears again, I imagine in your relief work, you've encountered a bit of treatment and vaccine hesitancy, right?
Tim: I think, Mike, just as a citizen, not necessarily have I sought it out. [laughs] I will say I have given a couple of other interviews about this and at least one of them generated a lot of negative feedback on my character because clearly ivermectin is a lifesaver and I'm doing a disservice.
But in terms of vaccine hesitancy, I think it's coupled with enthusiasm for hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin. It's a rather bizarre demonstration of human susceptibility to anecdote and conspiracy.
I will say, look, a lot of people that advocate either one of these drugs are not evil. I think they're misguided. I'm looking forward to the results of the clinical trials on ivermectin that I hope will quell some of this over-enthusiasm. I don't believe they are malicious actors, they just are misinformed. There is no scientific rationale to advocate either of them.
Vaccine hesitancy is a bit different. It's grounded in ignorance. There's a political component to it, which is difficult for me to accept, that somehow it threatens individual liberty to require people to protect each other. I find that a bizarre and unhealthy development in our society. I suppose it’s always been there.
There is no reason to fear the vaccine. They're well-grounded in science, all of the various pipes that have been advanced. They have all been approved after regular rigorous study. None of them has nefarious intent. There is no conspiracy among major pharma companies about this.
I'm a little bit concerned that the medicines that have recently been approved, I think, one from Merck and one from Pfizer as antivirals, I think they're valuable. But it also gives people an opt-out for the vaccine to say, "Well, if I get sick I can get cured." That's unfortunate. I probably haven't answered your question, have I?
Mike: Well, I was gonna ask what you find motivates the vaccine hesitancy and what motivates the hesitancy to believe medical professionals, if you've encountered that in your personal interaction with patients.
Tim: I have. I mean, I don't treat patients. I want to be clear about that. I'm just a scientist. But of course I have lots of conversations in my life with some people who don't agree that vaccines are important. Some people don't agree that the virus is actually real. They think it's a hoax perpetrated, somehow, I don't know how.
I'm gonna-- not being a sociologist, I'm not sure how valid my opinion is, but I think one of the factors is that most people don't know any scientists. They don't really know their physicians as people. We've become a customer-client medical system. You're probably too young to remember sort of the family doctor that would sit and chat. I know there's still some GPs that do that, but a lot of this is now assembly line. You show up, you don't even get 10 minutes, and you're on to the next patient. Right?
People don't know physicians as people, they don't know scientists at all. The demise of the public school system in the US and the advance of private schools means that people who are scientifically literate often send their kids to private schools, and they don't get a chance to interact with, I’m just gonna say, non-scientists very much. They don't coach softball or baseball or football teams, they don't go to PTA meetings.
Our dependence on electronic communications, as you and I are now doing, diminishes the opportunity for interpersonal interaction or casual just to say, "Hey, I do this for a living and you shouldn't be afraid of me and the people like me." But there is a distrust, especially in the Western countries-- actually, it's global. In the so-called elite, there is this distrust of intellectual output.
I gotta tell you, just recently, the National Science Foundation released survey data of 30% of the scientists and engineers in the US are foreign born. And that's another barrier to communication; people tend to view foreigners with suspicion. So there's been a disconnect in American society between this incredible technology that drives our society and the people who benefit from it, or participate in it almost as unwitting, unwilling guinea pigs, right? That's a long winded answer, I hope it's okay.
Mike: [laughs] Well, it's a good one. So what research are you working on now?
Tim: One of the things that I have become fascinated by is how parasites manipulate their hosts. So a lot of my work is how the molecules that parasites release into their hosts affect the host response to allow them to succeed. Some of the parasites I studied live for many, many years in the host, large kind of parasites, and you’d think we should be really good at getting rid of them. And we are, in fact, really good at getting rid of almost every parasite, but some few species have figured out how to 'live long and prosper' as Mr. Spock would say, in our bodies. So I'm really curious about how they accomplish that.
The other project I'm involved with at the moment is with the Carter Center, and it's about a worm, a parasite called guinea worm in Africa, which has nearly been eradicated, but it has recently been found to not only infect people but dogs, and so we're trying to come up with a medicine that can be used to treat the parasite in dogs so that eventually we can eradicate it. This is a parasite that Jimmy Carter has said, "I hope the last guinea worm dies before I do."
Mike: And what does a guinea worm do?
Tim: Oh my gosh, you want to really get grossed out? Your listeners, go look it up. It's a parasite called Dracunculus medinensis. It's the little dragon of Medina. It lives beneath the skin. The females get to be at least half a meter long or even longer, and they burrow out of the skin, and lay their eggs basically in water. It's disfiguring. It's very painful. It's an example of a gross parasite, I will say. But it can be cured or can be prevented if you keep people from going into the water. So this is kind of a behavioral solution that the Carter Center has really promoted. Or if you use filtered straws to drink. It infects people by drinking water that's contaminated with parasites. It's a lovely story. It would be a wonderful thing to eradicate, and I hope we can do it.
Mike: Oh, really important work, Tim. Thank you so much for coming on the Nazi Lies podcast to teach us about drugs. This was fun.
Tim: It's a pleasure. I think it's important to recognise, Mike, that people involved in fighting this virus are not motivated by malicious intent. They really are working to benefit people to try to get control of the epidemic, and they want everyone to get vaccinated. But thank you for inviting me, I sincerely appreciate the opportunity.
Mike: Well, thank you so much.
Tim: And another time perhaps, my friend.
Mike: Absolutely. If you liked what you heard and want to support the Nazi Lies podcast, consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. Patrons get access to early episodes and membership in our book club. The early episodes can come in on any podcast app, and the book club is on Discord. Come join us as we read the books of our upcoming guests. It's a good conversation; your question may even end up on the show. Check us out at patreon.com/nazilies.
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These are nazi liesMike: Welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. You can join our Discord and get fun show merch by subscribing to our Patreon. Get access to our book club, calendar, advance episodes, and show notes, all at tiers starting as low as $2.
Today we are lucky enough to have Daniel Kevles, Stanley Woodward Professor Emeritus of History, History of Medicine & American Studies at Yale University. For those who don’t know, Dr. Kevles literally wrote the book on eugenics. His highly influential 1985 book, In the Name of Eugenics, remains a central point of reference for anyone studying the history or present of the eugenics movement. Thank you so much for joining us Dr. Kevles.
Daniel Kevles: It's a pleasure to be with you, Michael.
Mike: So before we talk about the eugenics movement proper, there were a lot of early scientific and medical research areas that influenced eugenics. Can you talk a bit about what biological and social science looked like in the Victorian era that led to the emergence of the eugenics movement?
Daniel: Sure. The dominant trend or scientific movement, or knock off of science, was social Darwinism. It was a derivative of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, which he advanced in his famous and influential Origin of Species, which was published in 1859. As your listeners will know, Darwin argued that evolutionary success selected the most fit organisms for survival. And the social Darwinist, in a perverse fashion which I'll explain in a moment, borrowed or extracted from his theory the idea that social evolution put the most fit people at the top of society, both economically and socially, and relegated the least fit to the bottom.
I say that it was a perversion of Darwinism in many ways, but not least because what Darwin meant by fitness was fitness for reproduction. That meant that the more offspring you reproduced, the more fit you were. And the fewer you reproduce, the less fit you are. The social Darwinists turned this idea on its head because they noticed that people at the top of society like themselves tended to have smaller families and people at the bottom of society had larger families. But that was a major impetus. Social Darwinism was a major impetus to the eugenics movement.
In addition, there were also widespread theories of racial differences, where race meant not just what we understand it to be today, say principally black-white, or yellow-white or brown-white, but ace meant differences between groups that we understand to be nowadays just ethnic groups or national groups like Poles or Italians, or Hungarians, and Jews. There are theories around that characterized these different groups and attributed to them various characteristics, many of them socially deleterious.
And then finally, there were studies of different people that were quantitative as in the case of craniometry, the measurement of the size of the head or of facial types in the 19th century, that attributed differences in character and intelligence to people of different, say, head sizes.
So that's a Victorian background, but we shouldn't forget that right at the very end of the Victorian era, the rediscovery of Mendel's papers on heredity in peas which gave rise to the new discipline of genetics. And genetics had its roots in 19th century. Mendel did his work and then published in the mid-1860s, and was buried for a long time but then rediscovered in 1900 in three different places, and then burst upon the scene of science and was appropriated by eugenicists along with social Darwinism, racism, and the study of intelligence.
Mike: One other thing that was kind of floating around there too was the the kind of enthusiasm for the sterilization of what they call the feeble minded, right?
Daniel: Well, we're getting ahead of the story. It's not floating around very much at all. In the later 19th century, people did– physicians did sterilize, but they had some weird theories about sexual drive and so on, arising from over-development of the gonads especially in males. And of course there was also always the issue of prostitution, or prostitutes and easy women. But there was no movement for sterilization at all in the Victorian era, that came with the eugenics movement in the early 20th century.
Mike: Okay. Now we can actually get into the actual eugenics movement then. First of all, let's talk about its founder, Francis Galton. Who is Galton and what kind of things did he believe?
Daniel: Well, Galton was a remarkable man. He was a cousin of Charles Darwin. He was influenced by the Origin of Species. And he was curious about lots of things. He had gone to Cambridge, he was a failed medical student. He couldn't stand blood. Then he went to Cambridge where he studied mathematics and didn't do very well. And he was at sixes and sevens but very well to do, and so he took himself in the 1840s and 50s to the Middle East and then to Africa where he established a reputation of considerable authority as a geographer. And he came back to London and became a figure in geographical circles.
But then in the mid-1860s, he got interested in following the publication of his cousin Charlie's book in differences in the quality of human beings. And he started with analysis of heredity and talent and did some biographical analyses connecting the genealogies of people who succeeded in Victorian society. His notions of success did not extend to the business very much at all, or indeed even much to, the arts. His notion of success was fundamentally scholastic and scientific, and to a certain degree, in the practices of state; that is politics and government.
And so he mapped the relationship between people in different generations who succeeded in these areas and were prominent in British life and found that there was a very strong hereditary connection. They were all in some small cluster of families. And so he came to believe that there were powerful hereditary forces that shaped human beings and their ability to succeed at least in the areas that he studied.
He decided that he wanted to figure out the laws of heredity because he convinced himself that heredity in human beings is very important for qualities of not only physical characteristics like blue eyes but also of talent and character. And so he couldn't experiment with human beings, but he did figure out that he could experiment with peas.
And he was devoted to quantifying everything. He said, "Whenever you can, count!" While he was in Africa, for example, he was interested in the size of the female bodies and their shapes among the African natives, especially their tendency to have large back sides. And so he couldn't go and ask them to allow him to measure them, so he measured them at a distance through a telescope, and quantified and analyzed the results.
He applied the same quantitative techniques to peas and discovered what we call now the law of regression, and then he wanted to see if law of regression worked in human beings. And I say he couldn't experiment with human beings, but he could take their measurements. He invited human beings, people in London, to an exhibition in 1884 where he measured the, say, height and the distance between the nose and the fingertips of parents and children, you know, such things.
And he found that there were correlations, mathematically, in how they grouped themselves. They were not one-to-one correlations, but there were correlations in the sense that there was a strong statistical propensity for children to be like their parents, and so he devised from this the law of statistical correlation. And regression and correlation have proved to be ever since two of the most profoundly important statistical tools for analyzing a whole bunch of different things.
The point I want to make here is that he was not only eccentric in his interest and devoted to the study of heredity of a certain kind, but also that he established a research programme as part of eugenics. And right all the way through the heyday of the eugenics movement, we have eugenics as a social movement and also as a research programme.
For example, one more thing about Galton is that in his later years, he wanted to institutionalize the study of heredity for eugenic purposes, and he gave University College London a lot of money to establish the Galton Eugenics Laboratory, which became a major center for research in eugenics and then ultimately, in human heredity. And then today, it's one of the leading centers of research in human heredity and human genetics that we have.
Mike: So let’s talk a little about what eugenics says. When most people think of eugenics they think of selective breeding or maybe the Holocaust, but that really discounts kind of the breadth of the theory and its popularity and influence. What kind of people became eugenicists and what kinds of things did they say?
Daniel: Well first, it's important to recognise that eugenics was a worldwide movement. It wasn't confined to England or to the United States or to Germany. It expressed itself in all of the major countries of Europe and had corollary movements in Latin America and in Asia, and to some degree in the Middle East.
It's a kind of universal phenomenon among people who were of a certain class. We would recognise them as middle to upper middle class and also people who were educated and scholastically interested. They also tended to be, in this country and in England, to be White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant.
They were, how shall I put it? They were distressed in this country by the negative sides of urbanizing and industrializing society, with its sharp distinctions and deep distinctions of class and economic standing. They were apprehensive that the lower income groups were out-reproducing upper income groups and thus leading to the degeneration of the population, they thought. And they responded to this with a eugenics movement, drawing on the new biology of genetics and the cultural context of social Darwinism.
So what they did was to invent two different kinds of eugenics, one which they called positive eugenics, and the other was negative eugenics. And the positive eugenics was aimed at people over the middle and upper classes, mainly white Anglo Saxon Protestants, with the idea that they should reproduce more. And they devised various means to incentivize that reproduction. Then they invented negative eugenics, which was to discourage lower income groups from reproducing as much as they were. That's basically how it all started and what the outlines of their commitments and programmes were.
Mike: And there were kind of some camps of eugenicists, right? I mean, there was like socialists, there was conservative people who were eugenicists...
Daniel: Right. There were– Eugenics was not by any means a uniform movement. For example, here in the United States there were African-American eugenicists; there were Jewish eugenicists; there were no Catholic eugenicists of any standing to speak up because the church, the Roman Catholic Church, strongly opposed any kind of interference with human reproduction, ranging on one side to contraception and abortion, and on the other side to sterilisation.
So, you have disparate groups. And eugenics was embraced by a number of people on the left, socialists in England and the United States, and what they shared with people on the right was the tantalizing faith that the new science of genetics could be deployed to improve the human race.
Now, they were encouraged in this regard because in the early 20th century, late 19 to early 20th century, science commanded enormous authority. It was changing the world manifestly every day in ways that people experienced, in telephones, in movies, in automobiles, in aircraft, and in radio. These were forms of physical technologies, and so people thought, "Well, now that we have genetics, why can't we do this in biology as well?" And people were doing it on the farm by improving a corn or pigs or what have you, farm animals and farm plants. And so the idea that you could extend it to a human being was seemed perfectly natural.
The socialists and the conservatives, however, had much different attitudes towards one particular element in the eugenics movement, and that was the role and rights of women. Conservatives wanted to devote women to the reproduction of– You know, the “good women” to the reproduction of more children, and only in the context of marriage. Whereas the Socialists were much more inclined to embrace free love and new ways of women taking their place in society. So they were at loggerheads on those two things, and for that reason they also disagreed about birth control at least for some years. So, it was a coalition of ideologically different groups and religiously different groups.
Mike: Now eugenics is kind of unique among scientific theories in that it was popularized largely outside of the academy. In a way, it also kind of pioneered modern grant funding. Talk about how eugenics became popular.
Daniel: Well, it became popular in the way that lots of things were becoming popular in the early 20th century. There are mass circulation magazines, for example, by the 1920s–magazines like Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post. There were many books published on eugenics, many articles and magazines by popular lectures. There were some films on eugenics. There were also lectures and exhibitions.
We have, for example, many state fairs, agricultural fairs in the South and Midwest, and in these places the American Eugenics Society mounted exhibits. And also things that were called the Fitter family contest where people could enter as individuals or families, and they would be judged. And these contests occurred in what were called the human stock section that is distinct from the agricultural stock. And many families entered these contests. If you entered as an individual you could win a Capper medal in the state of Kansas. It's hard to tell exactly what made these families fitter, but one indicator is that they all had to take the Wassermann test for syphilis. So there's a certain middle class morality that suffused the eugenics movement as well.
What also made it popular was that the eugenics literature allowed you, or the eugenics ideal allowed people, in middle classes to discuss issues that were not comfortably discussed publicly for the most part. And I have in mind issues of sex, of pregnancy, and of child rearing, but especially sex and pregnancy. Since if you're interested in the improvement of the race biologically, inevitably, you have to talk about sex; who's having sex with whom? And talk about contraception and so on. Eugenics enabled people to talk about those things publicly or attend lectures on them publicly.
Mike: Okay. Let's talk about what the eugenicists were advocating for. What was their agenda politically?
Daniel: Well as I said, in this country and in England, eugenicists were mainly White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. They were distressed by the increasing number of lower-income poor people in the cities. They were also even more distressed by the behavioural characteristics that they attributed to these people, notably alcoholism, criminality, poverty, and prostitution. They attributed these characteristics to bad biology.
They were also, in an overlapping way with what I just said, disturbed by the enormous wave of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe that flooded into the United States from the 1880s to the late teens or the early 20s. They thought that these people were biologically inferior and disproportionately responsible for the social sins that I've mentioned, such as alcoholism, etc.
So what they wanted to do then– And in addition, they also began to have access to quantitative demonstrations or evidence, allegedly, that these people were mentally inferior, that they had lower intelligence. And where that came from was World War I and the administration of an IQ tests to the 1.7 million American men who were drafted into the US Army. The tests were developed and so widely administered in the army because the army had the unprecedented task of trying to place all these people in suitable tasks, whether they were going to be in infantry or drive jeeps--not jeeps, that's an anachronism--but drive cars or be in the medical service or whatever; Quartermaster Corps, Signal Corps, etc. They had to find out if they were mentally capable– what task they were mentally suited for.
So way after the war the results of the IQ tests were published by the National Research Council, and differentiated in terms of country of national origin, region of the United States, and so on, and also by race-- black or white, etc. And it didn't take too much of a high intelligence to figure out--that is, you didn't have to be a rocket scientist--to take this data and conclude that the recent immigrants had lower IQs as compared with native Whites, and to conclude even further that Blacks were simply inferior to everybody.
So all of these trends together--the social behaviors, the disproportionate representation of lower income groups especially recent immigrants among the impoverished and the imprisoned, and the IQ tests that reinforced the idea that they were really not very smart–led to a series of legislative proposals. Nationally, eugenicists provided a scientific rationale for the immigration restriction movement that culminated in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which grossly discriminated against immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe.
Secondly, at the State level, the eugenicists deploying their data were strong advocates of eugenic sterilization laws, and they were passed in several dozen-- well, not several dozen-- but a dozen or more states before World War I. They were declared unconstitutional by state courts and appeals courts in the States on grounds that they were cruel and unusual punishment because some of these laws required castration, or that they provided unequal protection of the laws. I mean, they didn't conform to equal protection because the only people eligible for eugenic sterilization were those who were incarcerated in homes with the so called feeble-minded, and an unequal protection of the laws, and that they violated the 14th Amendment due process.
So in the early 1920s these laws were revised, and a model sterilization law was developed by a guy named Harry Laughlin at the Cold Spring Harbor Eugenics Record Office and taken up in the state of Virginia as a model law. It provided for due process with a hearing, it did not provide for castration, and so on. And they proposed to sterilize a woman named Carrie Buck under this new law in the early 1920s, and they intended this as a model case–a test of the law and its constitutionality. And eventually it made its way through the state courts, appeals courts and into the Supreme Court.
Mike: Can you talk a bit about who Carrie Buck was and kind of what her situation was?
Daniel: Sure. Carrie Buck was not an immigrant, she was a native Virginian. She was lower income, not well educated, and she was living in a foster home when she was a high teenager, I forget her exact age. The later research showed that she was raped by the son in the house. The authorities at the time didn't know that, but it was sufficient for them that she became pregnant with an illegitimate child.
So she had this child and–I'm blocking on the name, I'll come to it. It'll pop up in my head in a minute–and she was consigned, because she had an illegitimate child, to the Virginia Colony for the Feebleminded. Illegitimacy was enough to tag a woman as feeble minded. She was put in the institution, her mother was there as well, and they were given IQ tests, and they scored in the feebleminded range.
Oh, Vivian. Vivian was the name of the little girl, Carrie's child. And a nurse was assigned to test her at the age of eight months and came back, of course she couldn't give her an IQ test, but she came back and said she had a "odd look" about her and therefore cataloged her as feebleminded as well.
So there you had it, you see, with Carrie's mother Emma, and Carrie, and then Vivian, all of them found to be feebleminded in the Virginia colony. And so their feeblemindedness was putatively taken to be strongly hereditary in character. And this was introduced as evidence in the Supreme court hearing in the case of the Buck v. Bell in 1927. So the court-- have I told you enough about Carrie Buck?
Mike: Yeah, yeah. Sure.
Daniel: I mean, and she was characterized as quote "poor White trash" by this same fellow Laughlin, who didn't go to Virginia to examine her, but was given a case record about her, and he characterized her that way. So his evidence was introduced, and the evidence of three generations of imbeciles, in Carrie Buck and her mother and Vivian, were all introduced as evidence. And the Court ruled by a majority of eight to one to uphold the constitutionality of the Eugenic Sterilization Law in Virginia.
The majority decision was delivered by a very progressive jurist, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. And the decision was in a perverse way, a progressive decision. What do I mean by that? Well, the courts before the 1920s, were involved in litigation concerning the legitimacy or the constitutionality of laws passed to regulate business. Businesses, corporations, claim that they were individuals and that these laws were unconstitutional because they were being deprived of life, liberty and property without due process of law.
Well, they had due process in this procedural sense, but they were claiming due process in what came to be called a substantive sense. That is, the substance and the right that was being taken away. Their substantive claim was that they had a right to do with their corporations as they saw fit, to charge whatever prices, for example, they wanted. And Holmes was in the school of progressive jurists who said that substantive due process can also be limited, and the substantive right is not absolute and you can take away a substantive right for the public good–the public good being a more economically equitable society.
So he applied that same kind of reasoning and Buck v. Bell. The claim was that the Carrie Bucks of the world threatened the public good by reproducing because they were biologically degenerate in character. And so it was legitimate, according to Holmes, to sterilize Carrie even though it took away her substantive right to reproduce. And what trumped her substantive right to reproduce was precisely the service of the public good trumping that right produced. Which is to say that by sterilizing the the Carrie Bucks of the world, the United States would be safeguarded from the degeneration of its population. So it's a progressive decision in that that Holmes, in character of his beliefs, said that the public good dominates Carrie's right to reproduce. It puts Carrie in the same substantive relationship to the public good as a corporation, and they were claiming that they had the right to charge whatever prices they want, for example.
And Holmes took for granted the evidence introduced by people like Harry Laughlin that feeblemindedness was hereditary in the Buck line, and a dictum that as part of Holmes' decision, is rung infamously down the annals of courts jurisprudence, Holmes wrote that, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough," meaning Emma, Carrie and her daughter Vivian.
Mike: And so–
Daniel: By the way, that decision has never been flatly repudiated, Buck v. Bell. It has been undermined enormously by later jurisprudence on the 14th Amendment and so on, so that you cannot forcibly sterilize a woman nowadays legally by invoking some kind of eugenic law.
But it might interest your listeners to know that Buck v. Bell was invoked by the Supreme Court in Roe v Wade in service of the following point: does the state have a right to interfere with the human reproductive process? And as we know now, as a matter of high public interest, the Court in Roe v Wade says the State has no right to interfere with reproduction to the point of quickening. But then once quickening occurs, and the fetus acquires the ability to live outside the womb, then it does have the right to interfere, and the Court invoked Buck v. Bell in saying that.
Mike: So between the Immigration Control Act and the sterilization laws, how long are these policies in effect?
Daniel: Well, the Immigration Restriction Act was in place until the mid 1960s. It was then revised, and the national origins criteria that discriminated against people from Eastern and Southern Europe was abolished. That produced the wave of immigration that we've known heavily from the Middle East and Asia and Latin America since the mid '60s.
The sterilization laws, as I say, were never frontally struck down, but they have been undermined since the expansion of the reach of the 14th Amendment beginning in the 1940s and since. But this is not to say that eugenic sterilization did not persist after World War II. It did until probably the very early 1970s.
The reasons for it were different, you know, state sterilization were different after World War II. For example, North Carolina which had hardly done any eugenic sterilization before the War, got into it in a big way after the War because the people who were winding up in the hospital, which is where the sterilizations were conducted, tended to be lower income African American women.
And it's not a state policy, but it was sort of on the initiative of the doctors in the hospitals. But there is a kind of sympathetic support of it on the part of the State because the New Deal measure of Aid to Families with Dependent Children gave rise to so-called welfare mothers who were in North Carolina disproportionately Black. And so, North Carolina sterilized a lot of Black women in the hospitals, not by state law but by apprehension on the cost of welfare.
I should add, though, that there's an excellent study of North Carolina sterilization, which reminds us once again that it is all kind of complicated insofar as women in the relationship to eugenics are concerned.A number of the women who wound up as a candidate for sterilization in North Carolina, as I say, were Black. They were also already the mothers of multiple children. And they did not have access to birth control, and they asked to be sterilized. They volunteered for it because it was the only way open to them of limiting their births after having a number of children. So it was liberating for some fraction of the African-American women who were sterilized in North Carolina. But anyway, the process of sterilization continued until the early 70s when it was widely exposed and condemned. And it's pretty much ceased since then.
Mike: You also discuss in the book a distinction between mainline and reform eugenics. Was this terminology used among eugenicists themselves?
Daniel: Not at all. I invented the terms in the book–
Mike: Okay. Can you explain the distinction then?
Daniel: –to distinguish between the early eugenicists, whom I called mainline, and the eugenicists, or the people who embraced the idea of eugenics, that is improving the human race and improving the human family as well beginning in the 1930s. They were reformers in the sense that they wanted to use biological knowledge to improve the race on the whole, but also they were much more focused on the family than were the earlier eugenicists.
What mainly differentiated them also from the so called mainline eugenicists was that they recognised the degree of racism that pervaded the American Eugenics Movement, and they were staunchly opposed to any kind of racist eugenics. They just wanted a eugenics that was based purely on human talents and character, including medical features of human beings with regard to, say, deleterious diseases like Huntington's and Tay–Sachs and so on, and wanted to deploy human genetics to good familial and social ends.
And so part of their programme was not only to try to get rid of racism in American eugenics, but also to establish eugenics on a sound scientific basis. Their efforts played a significant role in emancipating the study of human heredity from eugenics, and setting and establishing it as a field that we call human genetics rather than eugenics.
Mike: Okay. Now, neo-eugenicists, nazis, and people who don’t know better like to say that eugenics declined because the end of the Second World War made it unpopular because of the Nazis, but that isn’t quite true. How did eugenics really die?
Daniel: Well, the idea of eugenics, I should add, hasn't fully died.
Mike: Right.
Daniel: People are still eager, even more so than ever, to have healthy children. Now that is taken by some to be a kind of neo-eugenics. I disagree with that point of view. If you just want to have a healthy child, or don't want to have a child that is doomed to die at the age of three as Tay-Sachs children are, then that seems to me a legitimate reason for a) developing knowledge of human genetics, and b) deploying it in reproduction, conception, and pregnancy. And millions of people make use of that kind of knowledge nowadays through prenatal diagnosis and abortion.
So it's not eugenics in the sense that it's trying to make a better society or a better human race, but it's simply a means of having a healthy, happy family. In that sense, the ideal of controlling human reproduction in a genetic way for improvement is about the family rather than the human race.
But eugenics as a social movement did die off. First, a key feature, a central feature of what I call mainline eugenics was precisely that the State was invoked in its advancement. You can't have it, you know, immigration restriction without the US government. And you can't have state eugenic sterilization laws without state governments. What died away was the willingness of people to invoke the state, deploy the state, enlist it if you will, in the control of human reproduction in a eugenic fashion. The reason for that was partly because of the response to the Holocaust and the Nazis, because there was the invocation of the state for these nefarious purposes in human reproduction to an extreme degree. Secondly, there were all these extensions of the 14th Amendment that made it dicey, or in many respects, impossible for the state to interfere in human reproduction in the way of the mainline eugenicists.
But then also, there was a whole congerie of scientific developments in social sciences and in genetics itself that undercut the scientific doctrine of mainline eugenics. So the recognition, for example, that human characteristics are shaped to a significant degree by environment as well as by genes, that is by nurture as well as by nature.
Secondly, the idea that the characteristics that people admire so much, like ability to do well in a scholastic test or get good grades or be a doctor or lawyer or what have you, that those are not genetically simple to a degree that they are genetic at all. They are undoubtedly, to some degree genetic, but they involve clusters of many genes. And no one to this day knows how to figure out what goes into the human characteristics and behaviors that we admire as well as deplore. I say deplore by criminality, the quest for genetic accounts of criminality go on, but they rise up and then they are slapped down by further research repeatedly.
Then there are the characteristics that we admire and willing to pay a lot for such as the ability to put a basketball through a hoop at 30 feet. Nobody knows what role genes play in that either, and it's gonna be a long time if ever before they figure it out. So, the complexity of the human organism, if you will, has also helped to undercut either both positive eugenics and negative eugenics, each in its own somewhat different way but in very similar ways. So those certainly helped undercut eugenics and basically destroy it as a social movement.
Then there's also the rise to power and advancement in society of precisely the groups who were the targets of eugenicists in the early 20th century, that is the then new immigrants coming from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe–Italians, Poles, Hungary, Hungarian and so on. They have done very well in American society, in all branches of it. And so that in and of itself, they are kind of a living repudiation of the early doctrines of eugenics, and they provide a kind of strong caution for us in embracing the temptation of any kind of new eugenics of social nature. So all of those things together had a lot to do with corroding the foundations of eugenics and removing it basically as a social movement.
I go back to in the contemporary scene in these kinds of analyses and say that, when we talk about the new reproductive technologies or CRISPR or what have you, and say that they're giving rise, or can give rise, to a new eugenics, I just think that's counterproductive and it doesn't get us anywhere. And for my money, I think we should–[laughs] What I'm saying is putting myself out of business, if you will-- just get rid of the idea of eugenics in discussing what goes on in contemporary molecular biology and reproductive technologies, and talk about them in and of themselves, rather than try to tie them to any kind of eugenics.
Mike: Yeah, I'd actually kind of agree with that. Because looking at what eugenicists who are still around do now, none of them are doing genetic or molecular biological research, right? They're all psychologists doing twin studies–
Daniel: Well, I can't say. I can't say. I mean, there are some biologists who are neo-eugenicists, but I just don't see any widespread support for them in the scientific community or elsewhere.
Mike: Okay so I asked this same question to my last guest when we were talking about the science of sex differences in the brain, but I think it works equally well here. So what can we learn from the story of eugenics both as scientists and as people who listen to scientists?
Daniel: Well, that's a very good question Michael. It's hard to provide any kind of blanket answer. And any answer might lead to counter examples that are not very attractive. So let me illustrate what I just said.
I think what we need to do in responding to these things, or these kind of dreams, is to be cautious when claims are made in the name of science, especially those of long term consequence that border on the utopian, for example that we can engineer human beings, etc. I just don't think that's in the offing. But even when more modest claims are made, I think we just have to be cautious. It's good idea to raise an eyebrow whenever you hear them and whenever people are asked to turn them into social, economic political movements.
An advantageous way of threading this needle is to encourage people to be as scientifically literate as possible. That itself is a utopian quest. But I think that it behooves us all to do that. Now we also need to pay attention as to whether any scientific claims, as in the case of sex differences between men and women, need to be treated with particular caution when they imply anything about human rights. And that is, you know, that we ought to curtail human rights of any kind or in any group because of alleged biological claims, or privilege others because of biological claims. I think we need to be very cautious about that.
I say this can be hazardous and cut more than one way, one of these points I'm making, because I automatically right away think about the the claims of the anti-vaxxers nowadays. They say we shouldn't pay attention to scientific authority, that they're interfering with human rights and liberty etc.
So you have to be judicious in the way you think about this degree of skepticism. Skepticism of the kind I'm talking about does not extend to the anti-vaxxers because virtually the entire scientific community is of one voice and one mind in saying that vaccines work, and that they're socially important, and medically important, etc. Whereas, I think in other claims about sex differences between men and women, you will find sharp divisions in the scientific community. So we need to pay attention to how the scientific community is thinking about these things as well.
Mike: Okay well, Dr. Kevles, it has been an honor to have you on The Nazi Lies Podcast to talk about eugenics. Again, the book is In the Name of Eugenics out from Harvard University Press, an absolute classic in the history of science. Thanks again for coming on the podcast.
Daniel: Thank you, Michael. Pleasure to chat with you.
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Mike Isaacson: I don’t know if my brain is gay, but it definitely fucks.
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These are nazi liesMike: Welcome back to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. Subscribe to our Patreon to get on The Nazi Lies Podcast Discord where we host our new book club. More at the end of the show. Anyway. with us today is Dr. Rebecca Jordan-Young, a science studies scholar and professor at Barnard College. Her book, Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences, is a critical exploration of brain organization theory and its conclusions about the differences in so-called male and female brains. Thanks for joining us, Dr. Jordan-Young.
Rebecca Jordan-Young: Thanks for having me.
Mike: So, I want to begin with the question you ask at the end of your book to kind of foreground our conversation. So at the end of your book you ask, “What good is a science that doesn’t tell us anything new?” So before we get into the science of brain gender, how should science be conducted and why?
Rebecca: That's a great question. I believe that the best science comes out of curiosity. An example of what that does for you- I mean, scientific curiosity means that you're studying things that are– you’re genuinely pursuing questions that you don't already think that you understand. You want to know more and understand it. You're not just trying to prove a point that you already knew, because that's a whole different form of, you know, argumentation and evidence. So I was certainly taught, and I think all scientists are taught this, not everybody follows it, but I was taught that you have to test a specific hypothesis – what you think is true about the world.
But every time you have your hypothesis, you have to have something called the null hypothesis. And a null hypothesis is the direct contradiction of your hypothesis. And when you set up a scientific experiment, you need to give both your hypothesis and the null hypothesis an equal chance of being supported by the evidence that you collect. What that means is, you have to be very clear. Ahead of time, you have to actually say, "Okay, here's my null hypothesis. When I'm collecting my data, am I already loading the dice in a way that there's no way I could collect the evidence that that might be true?"
So you're obligated to not set yourself up to just already be right all the time, you have to build in the possibility of real surprise and even disappointment. And that's really tricky. You know, there's a lot riding on being correct with your hunches and moving forward. But you have to– Good science means that you build in an equal chance that you're going to get disappointed. I'll just also say that, you know, if everybody doing work in an area shares many of the same assumptions, it can be very hard to come up with a good null hypothesis, and that's something that I think you see in brain organisation theory.
So sometimes it takes people coming from outside the usual crowd. It might mean people that aren't all trained by the same people or at the same institutions; it might mean somebody who has some different training than what everybody who's been doing the work does, so you bring in the influence of a different discipline. And that's one reason why diversifying science can be so useful by shaking up assumptions, and then there's a better chance that that's going to happen.
Mike: Yeah, and Patricia Hill Collins talks about that in “Learning from the Outsider Within,” I think. Right?
Rebecca: Exactly.
Mike: So, most of our listeners, and probably most people in general, have never heard of brain organization theory, but in all likelihood they take its conclusions as Science with a capital S. So before we get into the myths of sex differences, what is brain organization theory?
Rebecca: Brain organisation theory is an idea that got traction in the middle of the 20th century. And the idea is very simply that there is such a thing as a male brain and a female brain and that, in fact, not just that there is but (and here's the clue to why the science has been problematic) that the theory says there must be such thing as a male brain and a female brain because we're a species that reproduces heterosexually. And if you have male genitalia and female genitalia, you have to have a male brain and a female brain to know how to use them properly to reproduce, and by 'know how to use them properly', that begins to, you know, like mushrooms into this huge explosive set of even quite abstract social behaviours.
So the idea, generally, is that this must be the case. And then a lot of the studies are like, "Okay, how is that the case? What specifically is different? How do we know that?" The theory supports some very, very common stereotypes and assumptions, like “women are more oriented to people and not very good with technical systems or mechanics,” that “men are naturally risk takers and women are more cautious,” that “men don't do domestic work because they're naturally less interested in it than women are,” instead of, because of a combination of gender socialisation, gender expectations, and social power. I mean, typically, the people that do repetitive grunt work are the people with less social power.
So a lot of the broad patterns that we see in male and female behaviour, brain organisation theory says that is because of something innate and inherent inside of people, inside the different brains of men and women, and not because of history and social power and the great force of multiple cultures over millennia.
Mike: Right. The big point I that I took away from the book was that it had to do a lot with prenatal hormones, right?
Rebecca: Oh, so sorry. [laughs] I'm sorry. It's been so long since I was like thinking in the nitty-gritty, absolutely. So the way it's supposed to work mechanistically is this. With brain organisation theory, the idea is that same process of hormone exposures that shapes that genitalia, also shapes brains so that they go in two binary, you know, incommensurable directions. So in particular, the idea is that testosterone, if a developing fetus is exposed at key periods in growth to a certain level of testosterone, that they're going to develop a male-typical brain, and they're going to have this whole range of male typical traits. Whereas the idea is that the female or feminine direction of brain development is just the default. It's literally described as the passive development, which from a strictly biological point of view, is an oxymoron. There's no such thing as passive development.
So that's the idea. Early hormone exposures make concrete, physical structural changes in the brain and those changes in the brain create permanent patterns of behaviour, of desires, of skills, that either properly belong to males or to females.
Mike: Okay. And like I said before, it's kind of treated as just science, there's this not really any-- when it comes to pop culture, there's not really much in the way of questioning its conclusions. So what kind of brain organisation theory do people generally believe?
Rebecca: Some of the conclusions are, you know, I said some of this earlier; the notion that-- here's some really big ones that I didn't mention. The idea that women have greater verbal abilities and facility. That the ability to use words and communicate is going to be naturally more developed in women, whereas mathematical and mechanical skills are going to be better in men and boys. The idea that being oriented towards physical prowess is a masculine thing. Even some things that are maybe not held as such broad stereotypes, things like the idea that men are more visual or the idea of sex being something that men and boys naturally want much more whereas women and girls are less driven by our own desires, but are much more receptive and that that's just natural and normal to be less autonomous in our sexuality.
Another very clear and deep assumption that's really at the heart of all of this is that heterosexuality is the natural normal proper channel of sexual desire and that if somebody isn't both completely gender typical, fitting expectations and norms of gender, and strictly heterosexual, that something went awry at some point. There was something unusual in brain development. And you can say 'unusual' now, some years ago they would have said 'pathological', but the idea that heterosexuality is the normal path is also very much at the heart of this.
Mike: I want to actually get into more of that with the kind of the assumptions that are built into it. What are some of the other assumptions that are kind of peeking around the corner?
Rebecca: The assumptions, first of all, I hinted at this when we started and I said that the theory came out of really a conclusion that male and female brains must be different, there must be these two types of brains. And that is attached also to an assumption that gender norms and patterns are both binary, that it's kind of a package deal of sex, meaning the body, gender, meaning the ways that people fit into masculinity and femininity, and sexuality, who people want as partners, how they partner, what their sexual and reproductive lives look like.
So this idea also that gender norms and patterns, what counts as masculine or feminine behaviour or traits are universal. They're roughly similar across place and time. So, you know, this flies very much in the face of actual historical evidence, which we could talk about if you want, but that's the assumption.
Another assumption is that brains are more or less dimorphic, there's a male type, a female type. If you know somebody's gender, you can predict a lot about their skills, their aptitudes, their preferences. That's also absolutely contrary to the data that we have, but that's one of the big assumptions.
A third one, you know, this is not just a theory, it's like a whole area of assumptions. Some of the assumptions are about deep history, like early human evolution. The idea that at the dawn of human history, the typical core social form was a heterosexual nuclear family with a division of labour that looks like Victorian England or 1950s US. You know? [Mike laughs]
Again, it's not just fantastical, it's contrary to so much of the always-emerging evidence from the archaeological record about how humans actually lived. So there you go, it's not just a gender binary, but it's heterosexual at its core. And those assumptions are, you know, it's kind of like putting the blinders on and not allowing in evidence from other fields. And by other fields, I mean history, archaeology... so even, as I'm saying, even other fields of science.
Mike: Okay, so you’ve studied all of the over 300 brain organization theory articles spanning the first four decades of its existence before it exploded into popularity and then a sizeable chunk of the studies since then.
Rebecca: Right.
Mike: Can you tell us what a typical brain organization theory-driven study looks like?
Rebecca: Yeah, there are a couple of different forms. The most common forms include, they're kind of two groupings. One is studies that start with some group of people that are known to have unusual hormone exposures during their early development. These are people typically with a range of clinical conditions.
Earlier, some of those studies tended to be of people whose mothers were given synthetic steroids during pregnancy before some of the risks of giving steroids during pregnancy were understood, so they had these unusual hormone exposures.
But others are people who let's say they have an adrenal condition that causes them to make very high levels of so-called androgens, hormones that create physically masculinizing traits as one example. And so if there is a genetic or chromosomal female, so an XX fetus, that gets very high levels of testosterone in early development with a condition, there's a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, those women and girls with that have been studied just over and over and over again as one group. So again, it's like one whole group.
Another subset of those are girls and women whose mothers took Diethylstilbestrol, which is actually a synthetic estrogen, but because hormones in fact are not binary, this synthetic oestrogen has some properties in animal studies where they've decided that actually it's what they would call masculinizing. There have been studies to look at people with early Diethylstilbestrol exposures.
A second whole group of study, instead of looking at people who were known to have unusual hormone exposures, there are people who are, we could say atypical-- not fitting stereotypes of sex, gender, sexuality in their adult life-- and looking backwards in time to say, "Can we figure out any way that there's other evidence that these people with unusual gender or unusual sexuality also had unusual prenatal hormone exposures?"
So those studies typically take, let's say, gay men and compare to straight men and look at the length of their fingers, you know, to say, "Okay, there is some evidence from animals that suggests that the relative length of one finger versus another is affected by steroids in development. Do these two groups that are different on sexuality also have these physical patterns?"
I mean, they've looked at so many different aspects of the body. [laughs] There are brain organization studies that compared straight men and gay men on genital size and development. There have been lots of studies that look at lesbians and straight women and, for example, test them to see, "Do they have a difference in spatial ability across the two groups?" So what you can probably pick up immediately if you're listening to this is that all of these studies, you couldn't really control the variables a whole lot. These are studies that are not tightly controlled experiments, because you can't actually do tightly controlled experiments on this theory in human beings.
I hope that gives you some sense. I mean, the studies are kind of all over the place, but I've given you a sense of the two main kinds.
Mike: Yeah, I know. There was the case control studies and the–
Rebecca: Right. Right. Just to be clear, the case control, those are the studies that basically look at the groups that have what these people would call an unusual outcome. So gay people versus straight people, or trans people versus cisgender people. Those would be case control, where you have this outcome and you look backwards in time to see is there any evidence that they had a different, you know, input early in development?
And the other kind of study, we would call a cohort study, where you know that there's one group that has an atypical input, different hormones than is typical early in development, and then you follow them over time and compare them to people who presumably had typical hormones?
Mike: Before we continue, you kind of mentioned this. You've been calling what we typically call sex hormones, “steroids.” Can you talk about a little why you don't call them sex hormones?
Rebecca: Yeah, thank you for asking that. This is something I've worked on a lot, and I want to give a little, you know, hat tip to a couple of other people. I'm want to give a hat tip to, certainly, Anne Fausto-Sterling and also to Nelly Oudshoorn, who's a Dutch historian. The reason I don't call them sex hormones is that that idea of sex hormones actually was out there way before we knew anything at all about the actual substances, and that idea of sex hormones has really kind of deformed the knowledge that we have about what steroids are and how they operate in the body. So this idea that there's such a thing as male hormones and female hormones, there's so much inaccuracy connected to that.
First of all, all of us have the same exact hormones. We have them in different typical ratios, so there are very substantial average differences in what are typically thought of as sex hormones. Average females and average males have different ratios. But it's a real mistake to think, for example, that "Well, estrogen is the female sex hormone." In fact, estrogen is crucial for so many male typical functions as well as for functions that are just human and that have nothing to do with sex and reproduction.
The same thing is true of testosterone. Testosterone is crucial for bone density and muscle development. And testosterone and estrogen work together in both of those things. It doesn't make any sense to think of muscle tone as a male typical trait because without functional muscle tone, nobody could stand up, nobody could walk, we couldn't use our hands and arms or legs. So it's like these are species-typical traits that we need these steroids for. And there's a lot of individual variation, a lot of variation within and among males and females on all of them. When we think of them as sex hormones, I think it distorts what we can know about them.
I'm going to give you a really good example. One of my favourite examples is in the 1970s, this group at Rockefeller University led by a scientist named Bruce McEwen was studying rats, and they were studying what they thought of as male typical reproductive behaviour. So you know, mounting and so on. But they were also studying physical development, like the development of male genital and reproductive tract.
And around that time, they were understanding the way that steroids actually chemically transform in the body. So there's a process called steroidogenesis, where one steroid meets an enzyme and it turns into something else. And they understood that estrogen is produced when testosterone meets this enzyme, aromatase. So you can say that estrogen is a product of testosterone. Well, they wondered what would happen if you blocked that conversion of testosterone to estrogen? How would that affect the physical development and behaviour in these rats?
And what they found out was, if they blocked the testosterone from turning into estrogen, many of the male typical traits never appeared. What that means is that many so-called male typical traits actually develop under the direct influence of estrogen. That's just one tiny tip of the iceberg but once you start down that path, then you begin to realise that calling estrogen the female sex hormone, makes no sense whatsoever because they just don't divide in that way.
Likewise, I'll stop with this one, but another one of my favourite facts to undermine the idea of sex hormones is when you ask people, "What's the most abundant steroid hormone in women's bodies?" What do you think the usual answer is?
Mike: Probably estrogen, right?
Rebecca: Right. Do you know what the real answer is?
Mike: Not sure, actually.
Rebecca: Testosterone.
Mike: Really?
Rebecca: This confuses people. It throws them for a loop. They think I can't be right, but in fact, it is the truth. It is also true that men on average have way more testosterone than women do. But women actually have more circulating testosterone than we have estrogen.
So by what logic would you call estrogen the female sex hormone, right? It's because you already decided ahead of time that the whole thing must be split into some kind of binary system, and it must be understood through the logic of everything getting assigned to male/female.
It actually just doesn't work that way. Testosterone and oestrogen are really crucial for all of us. There are big average differences, but it's not helpful to split it up by male and female. So the reason I don't use that language is that it actually actively blocks curiosity. It blocks that thing that I said is crucial for good science, and there are many cases where not being able to absorb that evidence has actually slowed us down in scientific progress.
Mike: So back to the book, you talk about symmetry as a necessary condition for scientific veracity. And when we say symmetry, we’re talking about the correspondence between what these studies claim and various other things. And so you talk about symmetry at three levels: symmetry between a given study’s measurements and the abstract thing it’s describing; symmetry between a given study and other studies that are similar; and then symmetry between a given study’s use of terminology and how terms are commonly understood. We’ll talk about how the studies you researched measured up, but first why are these kinds of symmetries important?
Rebecca: Well, think about it this way. I mean, it's really about making sure that you're comparing apples to apples when you're building up the whole scientific field. So let's say that I'm doing a study, and I say that I'm interested in sexual orientation. But then what I do is I go out and I observe all the people on a city street over the course of a week, and I write down the people that look gay to me versus the people that don't. And I watch, you know, what stores they go into. And then I draw assumptions about where the gay people shop and when straight people shop.
Anybody could come along and say, "Hey, wait a minute. How do I know that you actually know who's gay and who's not? And on what basis are you judging who's gay or who's not?" Obviously, how I look at people is a very poor measure of something like sexual orientation. That's a really good blunt description of how some of the studies go off the rails on the first measure. And they're not quite that bad, but some of them come pretty darn close when it comes to not really measuring what they say they're measuring.
For example, I might say that we're looking at, you know, we're comparing gay men to straight men, but we actually never asked the people that we called straight what their sexual orientation was. All we did was gathered one group of men who we didn't ask but we thought that they looked and seemed "normal" based on some reason-- quote, normal in air quotes there-- and then we compared them to this group of men who we decided were gay. Well, that's a terrible measure. That's why that matters.
Another, when I say the studies "the same thing" should be looking at the same kind of outcomes, one of the best examples of that is how studies that make conclusions about how female typical or more stereotypically feminine sexuality develops, really made an incredible flip flop in the middle of when these studies were done on what counted as typical feminine forms of sexuality.
One of the most amazing examples is that in the early studies, if a woman reported that she masturbated literally ever, she would be coded as having masculinized sexuality. Or if a woman said, like in an interview– These studies, a lot of them did clinical interviews and then they coded them after the fact. So in a clinical interview if somebody asked about a woman's sexual arousal, and she actually described the way her own body, the way her own genitals felt and responded, that would be coded as masculine. Because the idea at that point was that women's sexuality was much more about romance and love and it was much less directed towards, you know, genital contact and activity. Well fast forward to 20 years later, and if a woman said that she didn't have genital arousal, she would be coded as having undeveloped feminine response. And so she would be taken out of that group. You can't put those studies together and then say they're all measuring the same thing and feminine sexuality.
And with the last symmetry principle, a good example of that where the question is: if I say that I'm studying sexual orientation, or I'm studying homosexuality and heterosexuality and how they develop, what I'm looking at should bear some relationship to the way we understand those terms out in common parlance in the world. But some of the studies use these very strange, very selective, very narrow measures of who gets in those groups in a way that just is misleading in the long run.
So people might read about a study that says, you know, that gay men have this feminised digit ratio. But then when you go in, and you figure out who they said was gay in those studies, you're like, "Oh, actually, that's really not who we think of when we're talking about that and when people are, you know, say organising for their rights in the world, they're just trying to go about their lives."
So there's a lot of responsibility when you're doing this kind of work to make sure that, among other things, to make sure that if you're studying something where the categories have enormous social importance, you should be defining that in a way that has some relevance to the real world.
Mike: Yeah. And just like kind of where to draw the line too. I mean, you gave a diagram in your book where you had the Kinsey scale and showed a study basically dividing between straight and gay at every point on the scale.
Rebecca: Yeah, exactly. One of the things I say in the book is, you know, Kinsey scale is actually not an answer. It doesn't give you a set of answers. It's a series of questions about, you know, like on a scale of zero to seven or zero to six, how much you are attracted to or have sexual contact or relationships with people of your same sex versus the other sex. And there's no– Kinsey– Kinsey was against the idea of dividing people into binary groups. So he didn't give some kind of cut point where over here, you're gay, over here, you're straight.
And different people doing this research have chosen every single place along that line. So in some studies, you have to be 100%, attracted only to people of your own gender or sex and only ever had sex with people of your own gender or sex, or otherwise you don't count as gay.
And in some other studies, it's completely the opposite. As long as you've ever had sex or thought about even fantasised about someone of your same sex one time, you will not be counted as straight. You might be counted, even in some of those studies, as homosexual or gay instead of being bisexual.
So there's just no standard in there and obviously, if you put all those studies into the same mix, it's incoherent. You can't do that.
Mike: Right. And so generally, how do the studies measure up in terms of symmetry?
Rebecca: Well, [laughs] from what I've said so far, you should have a pretty good idea. It's a pretty big hot mess. One of the things that I thought of, at one point when writing the book, is people are right, there is a ton of data out there. And there are a ton of so-called positive findings, like they're all these correlations. But if you were to try to actually build a structure out of it, where everything solidly built on something that was a proper foundation to the next thing, you couldn't possibly build a structure, what you get is a giant pile of rubble. You get this big meaningless data pile that actually contradicts itself as much as it supports itself.
Mike: So back to those common brain organization theory conclusions people believe, why are those conclusions at least questionable if not flatly wrong?
Rebecca: Well, for one thing, they're contradicted by more consistent data that we have from other places. So for example, the idea that girls and women naturally, because of deep evolutionary pressures that have shaped our early hormone exposures and therefore shape our brains in a certain way, that we naturally have poorer mathematic ability than males cannot hold up when you look at the actual mathematical ability of males and females and you look in particular at cross cultural studies that show there are plenty of places or plenty of subgroups where girls and women outperform boys and men on quite a few mathematic measures. If you look at the way that the typical American sex difference in mathematics performance has shrunk basically to nothing over the past 40 years, where it was pretty substantial, but it's changed a lot.
Some people still talk about, you know, things like there are certain forms of spatial relations, like this skill called 3D mental rotation and how that's still very different between males and females. Actually, again, that depends on what group you're testing. There are some subgroups where that's absolutely not the case, but there's no reason to think that subgroups of men and women have these different inputs.
Another thing is that with like 3D mental rotation, very, very short training on something like a target video game can actually eliminate the sex difference. And if that is the case, then you can't really claim that there is this permanent, underlying, innate sex difference. It's much more plausible that the observed differences that we see come from different experiences in postnatal development.
So things like the way young children are handled and touched and the way they're encouraged to move in the world. Things like sports involvement. Things like encouraging games that involve throwing the ball, for example, with boys.
There is a lot of evidence both from neuroscience and from cross cultural research that has stronger and more consistent findings than the brain organization findings do. And I could go on with many, many other examples.
The second category of data and reason why I would say, aside from just the fact that studies look really messy and they don't actually point in the same direction, we kind of shouldn't expect them to point in the same direction. If you look, as I mentioned before, about history and archaeology, with brain organization theory the idea is like, the sexual drive is innately a masculine thing, and girls and women are receptive to that, but they're not driven by sexual desire, they're driven by a desire for offspring. So this has been a very common Western assumption for a long time. But if you actually back away from that assumption as being just true, and you think, who is that supposed to apply to? And you look at the way norms and belief, whether it's showing up in science or in literature and poetry, for one thing, you'll see that that's always only been the norm for bourgeois white women, you know upper middle class white men. That's the expectation of being asexual, and the idea that somehow working class women, women of color, etc, were sexual in a way that upper class white women weren't. That should clue you in [laughs] that there is something wrong with that theory that it's not about some kind of evolutionary-driven innate process.
Then if you just want to stick with like, European mythology, you go back to the early modern period. And the idea was that women were sexually insatiable and that men had a much greater ability to control themselves because of greater rationality. And so it was like the sexually voracious appetite of women was something to look out for.
So the point here is, if you actually pay attention to history, pay attention to cross cultural analysis, or just class analysis or look at scientific racism and typical just cultural racism to see where the norms are, how they're limited, who they attached to, who they don't, both the science falls apart and the story falls apart. [laughs] And that's a lot to fall apart.
Mike: So returning again to the question you ask at the end of your book, “What good is a science that doesn’t teach us anything new?” What direction has research on these topics–prenatal hormones, sex and gender differences, studies of queer populations– What directions has this research gone, and where do you think it still can go?
Rebecca: Well, to be honest, there are other people that could answer this question better because I got bored with brain organization theory. And it just it keeps on churning out. There's a lot of reason for that. I think there's a lot of investment in the theory, quite literally monetary investment. People's whole careers, their labs, they've trained people in it, you know? There's a lot of reason to keep doing this.
But there's also a lot of social investment in the idea of binary indifference. There's a way in which studies that are moving on in this track haven't kept my close attention. Plus it generates at such a rate, you know, I would have to spend my entire life and career if I wanted to stay on top of that. So all of that's kind of a caveat.
At the same time, I do know a few trends. One trend is to try to kind of salvage the theory by complicating it and saying, "Okay, well, maybe it's not just testosterone exposure per se that creates this trait, but it's testosterone exposure under this condition with also either high cortisol or low cortisol or something." I mean, that's often true of other forms of studies that look at the effect of steroid hormones on adult behaviour. And that's kind of where a lot of this research has gone, there isn't as much focus on the prenatal hormone stuff as there used to be for a lot of reasons. But there is still a kind of relentlessness to this.
At the same time, there are a lot of really interesting young scientists coming up who are saying, "Okay, brain organization theory is not where it's at. Let's instead start thinking about, you know, what do we actually know?"
One more promising direction where some research on hormones and behaviour has gone is-- A great example is the researcher Sarah van Anders, a psychologist up in Canada, who has a really interesting project that is genuinely not binary. She is actually interested in doing a few things. One of the most interesting things is to not assume that traits or people should be all just split up into male and female all the time. She is coming up with more interesting measures of how people describe themselves, how they describe the actions that they do. And then, she's also looking at hormones in a way that is more accurate in terms of what we empirically have seen specific hormones’ effects to be.
As an example, she is working very hard at breaking down the assumption that testosterone is a masculine molecule. And she's looking at the kinds of effects that testosterone has been associated with, in a way that doesn't attach them to maleness or masculinity at the outset. And one example is, you know, forms of aggression and protection.
So if you think about the idea, one of the constant underlying ideas, that males are more aggressive and males across the animal kingdom is this idea: males are more aggressive. But there's also this other piece of empirical evidence that one of the most consistent, if not the most consistent, situation in which you're going to see a strong physical aggressive response, is when the offspring of a female animal is threatened.
So in fact, there is this really, really strong pattern of physical aggressive response. And so she's trying to, for example, think about the idea that aggression is all one thing, break it instead into defence and attack. And also that nurturing or parenting is all one thing, like in those cases, at this point, you can't take nurturing or take parenting behaviour and oppose it to aggression, because here they're deeply coupled.
So she's doing this really interesting theoretical work that's driving the way that she is, in my opinion, a lot careful with the actual measures that she uses. So that, to me, is one of the most promising directions out there. There are other promising directions but I think that's probably enough.
Mike: Well, Dr. Jordan-Young, thank you so much for coming on The Nazi Lies Podcast to talk to us about the science of sex differences. The book again is Brain Storm out from Harvard University Press. Thanks again.
Rebecca: Thank you so much.
Mike: If you liked what you heard and want to support The Nazi Lies Podcast, consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. Patrons get access to early episodes, access to our Discord, and a shipment of Nazi Lies merch. Join us on Discord for our weekly book club where we read the books of our upcoming guests. Get access to the show’s calendar, updates on the topics we’re looking to cover, and I dunno, what else do you do on Discord? Come hang out, and who knows? I may even ask your question on the show.
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Mike Isaacson: Race horses don’t even live in a society!
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These are nazi liesRace and IQ are in genes
Warfare keeps the nation clean
Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine
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These are nazi liesMike: Thanks for joining us for another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. You can get merch and access to early episodes by subscribing to our Patreon. Throw us a donation on our PayPal or CashApp, and we’ll toss you some merch as well.
Today, we’re trashing race realism–the idea that race is biologically real and bears upon behavior and intelligence. With me is Dr. Robert Anemone, who has his PhD from the University of Washington and is professor of biological anthropology and paleoanthropology at UNC Greensboro. His book, Race and Human Diversity: A Biocultural Approach, explores the intersections of race and biology, surveying anthropological and biological knowledge across history up to the present day. Thanks for joining us Dr. Anemone.
Robert Anemone: You're very welcome, Mike. Looking forward to it.
Mike: So one thing I liked about your book is that at the end of every chapter it has helpful discussion questions to explore the concepts further. So I decided that it wouldn’t make much sense for me to write my own questions when yours are right there. Is it okay if I ask you some questions from the book?
Robert: Sounds great.
Mike: Okay great! So the first one relates to the subtitle of your book. What do anthropologists mean when they talk about using a biocultural approach to some questions like the meaning of race?
Robert: Sure. Well, I've found in the literature on race in anthropology, sociology, that a lot of people approach it from one or the other of these sort of paradigms. And yet I really think that to understand race, you have to understand and look at the interaction between these two different paradigms; the biological, evolutionary, and the cultural or social. The biological or the evolutionary perspective recognises that human variation is a result of evolution, you know, that natural selection and the other forces of evolution like mutation and genetic drift have played a role in creating the diversity we see in Homo sapiens. However, that's not the whole story, because the cultural approach is really necessary. We recognise that racial classifications vary over time and space. Societies or cultures create the meanings and stereotypes that they associate with racial groups.
So in my book, I really tried to do two things.
I explore the biological nature of human diversity from an explicitly evolutionary perspective. For example I try to talk about things like why tropical populations tend to be darker skin than those living in the temperate zones. Or why genetic diseases like, for example, sickle cell anaemia are more common among some human populations than others.
But in addition to that sort of biological approach, I examine the historical, the economic, and the political ways in which societies sort of decide that, for example, differences in skin colour reflect deeper, innate inequalities between human populations or individuals.
So for me and for many anthropologists, really being able to bring together biological and social or cultural approaches is a more complete way to look at this very complex phenomenon that we call race or racial variation today.
Mike: This next one is a good one. In what ways does arbitrariness creep into any attempted racial classification, and how does this help clarify the difficulty that anthropologists have had in answering the question: How many races exist?
Robert: Well, it's very interesting that anthropology, which is a field that began in the 19th century with the stated goal of understanding human race and human variation, has never agreed-- We've never agreed on a simple question, how many races exist? Why is that sort of weird? Well, I think the reason is that it's basically impossible to create an objective and scientific classification of human races that everyone will agree on, because there's some really significant arbitrariness that creeps in at several different levels of the analysis.
The first place that arbitrary decisions come in is when we decide which trait we're going to base our racial classification on. I mean, skin colour is the obvious one, many people use that. But there are other ways to do it too. There's other variable traits, like, for example, another one that's been used a lot is, you know, blood group genetics. Some people use a combination of skin colour, hair colour, eye colour, body build.... There's all these different traits to choose, and there's no real rules for which one you should use. So people just sort of arbitrarily choose one and ignore the others.
Importantly, these different variables are not concordant. They don't evolve similarly. For example, Australian Aboriginals and African populations resemble each other in skin colour, but they're completely different with blood types. So, since the different traits that one might choose are discordant, any classification based on a different trait will end up looking very different. So that's the first level, deciding which trait to base your classification on.
The second level where arbitrariness rears its ugly head is that when we realise that most of these traits we're looking at are continuously variable. They vary along a normal distribution or bell curve. And we should know, if we know the most basic statistics, that you cannot really divide a continuously variable trade into a finite group of categories or groups. You can do it, but you can do it in any number of ways. You can do it arbitrarily. For example, skin colour varies continuously across different populations and within populations. Sicilians tend to be darker skin than Irish. But are they different enough to call them a different race or not? Well, it's kind of a judgement call, you know? It's arbitrary. I use the analogy a lot in the book between skin colour and stature to show how impossible it is to really reach objective answers to a question like this, how many races are there? The basic skin colour classifications try to divide the world into light and dark skinned populations.
Similar problems though, if you wanted to divide the world into tall and short races. How do you do that? I mean, height is continuously variable, where do you draw the distinctions? You know, how tall is tall? How tall do you have to be to be in this race or that race? In the book, I use the example; being tall is very different in the NBA than it is in the race track. Right? A tall jockey might be 5'7", and 5'7" in the NBA would be quite short. All these things are completely arbitrary. The simple answer is that when you have a continuously variable trait like skin colour, or gene frequencies or stature, you cannot objectively really divide that variation into finite groups in any one way. You can do it in a million different ways, but they're all equally arbitrary. Hence, I think, the 150 years of disagreement among anthropologists in deciding how many human races there are, it's just the wrong question to ask. It can't really be answered based on the continuously varied in nature the traits we're looking at.
Mike: I think your book asks a lot of the right questions, right? I guess this next one a lot of Nazis love to misunderstand. Which is, what does it mean to say that race in America is a social construction?
Robert: Yeah. I mean, it's a simple fact or statement that basically race means different things at different times in different places. And that the meanings that we associate with race are determined by social groups, typically by those in power, you know? So if we compare the contemporary United States and contemporary Brazil, completely different racial classifications, different terminology, different number of groups, very, very different. Or if we compare race in the United States of 1850 and the United States today.
If race was some objective thing, you wouldn't expect it to vary over time and space. But in fact, it completely varies over time and space. In each of these places or times, there live different experiences of people are very different. Right? The ideas that people carry around in their heads with them about what, for example, black people or Latin people are like, are different. The very names we use in classifying different races are different in all these settings. So we're just saying that basically, what we think about race is sort of decided by groups in power in different societies.
Now, this doesn't mean that race is not real, or that there are no biological differences between individuals, between groups, or that race is not important. It really just means that we, society's cultures, create the meanings associated with race. And again, I find a useful analogy here between race and kinship. What does it mean to be a brother or a cousin or an uncle? And this varies in different societies, both race and kinship are based on biological differences and similarities, right? And kinship is sort of based on the percentage of genes you share with people, right? A cousin shares a certain amount of genes with an individual. But the meanings that we associate with a cousin or an uncle, how you relate to a cousin or an uncle, can be very different in different societies.
You know, my students always groan when I tell them that Charles Darwin married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, but I then tell them that first cousins were considered ideal marriage partners for upper class Victorian Englishmen. Not so much for contemporary Americans. So, kinship in the sense of who we marry and in general, how we relate to and behave towards our relatives, is also a cultural construction. Very similar to race, I think. There's some biology there, but then there's a lot of cultural notions, cultural ideas, stereotypes that go along with it, that sort of structure our behaviour and what we think about these people.
Mike: This next one you kind of alluded to earlier, and this is when I have difficulty explaining to people when I argue that race isn’t biology. Describe the clinal variation seen in the skin colour in the old world, and discuss how vitamin D skin cancer rickets and foley play a role in explaining this cline.
Robert: This is really one of the classic and one of the best documented stories of how natural selection has shaped human evolution. We've known really since 1960s that if we look at the map of sort of where Aboriginal traditional living peoples have lived in the old world, we see this gradual geographic variation in skin colour that when you're at the Equator or close to the equator, people who've lived there traditionally tend to be very dark skin, lots of melanin, right? That's the pigment in our skin, in our eyes, and our hair. And as you move closer to the poles, skin colour tends to lighten up. People have known this for a long time. And the traditional idea has always been that well, melanin protects against the harmful effects of, of solar radiation, protects against like skin cancer, and things of that sort. So therefore, it's adaptive to have dark skin in the tropics because there's so much ultraviolet radiation.
But when overall populations spread from the tropics to the temperate zones–of course, we evolved in the tropics with almost certainly evolved with dark skin colour, the first humans certainly had dark skin colour–but when their descendants moved to Northern and Southern climes away from the from the tropics and the equator, all of a sudden, the lower levels of ultraviolet radiation led to lightning and skin colour because they do have to worry about skin cancer and things of that sort. But if you had really dark skin and you live in like Scotland, it's hard to create enough vitamin D in your skin to avoid rickets and sort of soft bones, you know? Because the calcified tissues, you know, the bones and teeth require vitamin D. And we only really get vitamin D through solar radiation in our skin. There are very few things that humans eat other than oily fish that have too much vitamin D in them.
Mike: And you mentioned the exception, generally, with Inuit peoples and the skin colour changes.
Robert: Yeah. It's not a perfect thing, and people have moved around the world quite a bit. You know the Inuit are darker, but It's not a perfect correlation. I'm not sure if there's a great answer for some particular populations. But there's been a recent sort of addition to this whole thing, because the weak point in this whole theory was that; well, skin cancer tends to kill you when you're old, long after you've been able to reproduce. Natural selection doesn't work very well with things that kill you in your 50s or 60s or 70s, right?
But my colleague, Nina Jablonski, some years ago, looked at another piece of this puzzle and it's fully one of the B vitamins which is in our bloodstream. And it turns out that foley is damaged by high ultraviolet radiation in light skin. So, dark skin protects against skin cancer but also protects against the destruction of folate. And we also know now that low levels of folate in pregnant women lead to increased incidents of neural tube defects like spina bifida. And natural selection would work brilliantly against this. So if you have really light skin colour and you're living in the tropics, you would be at a serious disadvantage because you would have low levels of folate and your offspring would tend to be born at high frequencies with these very serious problems.
So natural selection seems to have really, you know, been the cause of the variation that we see in skin colour. And it's again, final variation just means it's variation over geographic space. So it gradually lightens as you move away from the equators towards the poles. It's kind of an interesting combination of things like vitamin D and its effect on bone growth and bone calcification, skin cancer, folate, and all these things leading to this variation of skin colour. Which then sort of becomes the basis of racial classifications.
But the interesting story about skin colour, of course, is not whether people with dark skin or light skin are superior, but how each of these two skin colours have kind of evolved in particular environments. And it's really a great example, one of our best examples, of how natural selection has shaped some of the variation that we see in modern humans. It's an evolutionary story, right? The cultural stuff sort of comes in later but originally, skin colour variation is all about natural selection. It's all about biological variation and how natural selection sort of shapes that in different environments.
Mike: Right. Going back to the classification question, one of the conceits of race realists and racists in general, is taken for granted that race is natural. But race has a history. So again, another question from the book. When, where, and under what circumstances did the concept of human races first appear in the Western world?
Robert: Race definitely has a history, and it is a relatively brief one at that. Historians have demonstrated that the notion of deep innate significant differences between human populations was not something that was present in the ancient world, say the Greeks and Romans. Certainly, they had slavery, but skin colour played no role in determining who was slave and who was master. Right?Slaves were not considered deeply inferior by nature. Slaves could purchase their freedom, they could be freed, and they could become Roman citizens. Slavery was typically the fate of those defeated in warfare.
It wasn't until really the Age of Discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe, that the notion of deep and innate inequalities between global populations was created, followed quickly by the notion of chattel slavery-- lifetime slavery in which people were not even considered humans based simply on skin colour.
At the time, the Europeans were heavily influenced by the Judeo-Christian notion that's called the Great chain of being. This idea that God's creation ranges from the simplest living things to the most complex, sort of on a chain, or a scale or a ladder. And then at the top, of course of the angels and God up above at the top. So the notion of hierarchy was really built into the European worldview at the time. And when Europeans met for the first time, the new African, Asian, Pacific Islander, American populations, they immediately try to fit them into their notion of the great chain of being Where did these new populations fit? Where did the dark skinned people fit in the great chain? And, you know, anthropologists talk a lot about ethnocentrism, this notion that, you know, one's own culture is somehow superior to others. It was clearly ethnocentrism that led European Caucasians to put themselves at the top of the great chain just below the angels, and put these new dark skinned populations lower closer to the apes-- lower on the great chain and therefore less than deserving of fully human or even humane treatment.
So we see that colonialism and imperialism are really closely tied to the origins of their racial worldview as they still are today. It's a definite history. It's a recent history, it's not something that's been with us forever, and it doesn't have to be with us forever. We can change these things, these ideas are, are not written in stone. They can be changed.
Mike: Yeah, that notion of the great chain of being. It still has echoes in fascist thought, too. It reflects not just a theory of kind of biological variation among different species, and races by extension, according to these people, but also between various classes of people. I mean, it kind of explains the the class structure of society or intends to
Robert: Sure. I think the common idea here is hierarchy. Certain classes, certain races, certain genders are higher, better, more worthwhile than others. Absolutely similar.
Mike: Okay, here's a thorny one to wrap up with. Why are many anthropologists skeptical of the proposition that IQ scores provide a reasonable measure of the innate intelligence of individuals and populations?
Robert: This is a very thorny issue, isn't it? It's probably one that is highly influenced by the political leanings of individuals who talk about it. But it certainly is true that anthropologists are skeptical of what IQ tests can tell us about innate differences in human intelligence. And I think there are many reasons for this, some historical. I mean, if we started historically, if we look at the history of IQ testing, we see that the early IQ tests that were developed in the first half of the 20th century, in the First World War and the Second, they were seriously flawed. Stephen Jay Gould has really best documented the cultural biases and the methodological problems in much of this research. So while I'm no expert in intelligence testing, I'm certain that modern tests are not crudely biassed against minorities like these early ones were.
But I still remain a skeptic of whether a single test can array individuals along the linear dimension of intelligence. The idea that an IQ score, a simple number, can be independent of their background, their privilege, and their schooling is is tough for me to swallow.
Any psychologist today following Howard Gardner advocate the notion of multiple intelligences that a single IQ score doesn't tell us much. We can learn much more by studying people's spatial intelligence, their mathematical intelligence, their social intelligence, kinesthetic, spatial... all these multiple intelligences.
So I think intelligence is a very complex thing. It's tough to reduce it to a single number on a single scale. And finally, there's a sort of a methodological reason that, or maybe a philosophical reason that many anthropologists are skeptical of this notion. And that is that most anthropologists probably consider themselves to be interactionists. We are opposed to pure genetic determinism and opposed to pure environmental determinism, right? So when we consider the development of complex human traits like intelligence, it makes great sense to us that both genes and environment play a serious role.
I mean, there's much evidence that environment does play an enormous role on adult intelligence. And while genetics certainly plays some role also, I think many anthropologists are convinced that the best interpretation is that adult intelligence is a multifaceted thing that is probably not reducible to a single IQ score, and that it is strongly influenced by both genetics and environment.
And intelligence itself, I mean, finally, a very difficult thing to define and a very difficult thing to measure. So I think the story is complex, the simple idea that everybody's intelligence is simply encoded in our genes is almost certainly incorrect. No one has found a gene for intelligence. Clearly, you can mess with genes and lead to mental problems. So genes play a role. But there's no simple story that there's a gene for intelligence and some populations have more copies of the good gene than others.
Mike: Yeah. The claims of eugenicists, ultimately, is that these genes are concordant with race, right? That somehow there is a co-determination genetically between race and IQ. And we don't have evidence for a genetic causation, well, a direct genetic traceable causation for either one, much less a co-determination. Right?
Robert: Yeah, absolutely not. Those eugenic notions come from a really outdated, sort of very simplistic Mendelian model–that there's a gene for skin colour, and there's a gene for intelligence. We know intelligence as a very complex genetic thing or probably hundreds of genes that influence one's adult intelligence, one's ability to learn... It's clearly not a simple Mendelian thing like, you know, pea plants with either the gene for tall plants or short plants. Those kinds of notions are just genetically very naive and really outdated.
Mike: All right. Well, Dr. Anemone, thank you so much for coming on The Nazi Lies Podcast and helping me trash race realism. Again, the book is Race and Human Diversity out from Routledge. You could follow Dr. Anemone on Twitter @paleobob. Thanks again.
Robert: Thank you very much, Mike. It was fun.
Mike: If you enjoyed this episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast, consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. Patrons get exclusive access to early episodes and a shipment of stickers and even zines depending on how much you give. Don’t want to commit to monthly donations? No problem. Make a one-time donation to our CashApp or PayPal with your name and address, and I’ll send you some merch.
[Theme song]
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Mike Isaacson: Ride the tiger, bro.
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Nazi SS UFOs
Lizards wearing human clothes
Hinduism’s secret codes
These are nazi liesRace and IQ are in genes
Warfare keeps the nation clean
Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine
These are nazi liesHollow earth, white genocide
Muslim’s rampant femicide
Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde
Hiter lived and no Jews diedArmy, navy, and the cops
Secret service, special ops
They protect us, not sweatshops
These are nazi liesMike Isaacson: Thanks for joining us for another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. You can support the podcast by subscribing to our Patreon or donating to our PayPal or CashApp. Today, we’re going to touch on esoteric fascism by talking to someone who actually knows something about Hinduism. Shyam Ranganathan is a translation theorist and philosopher at York University in Canada. He is the author of several books including his most recent, Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation. Thanks for coming on the podcast Dr. Ranganathan.
Shyam Ranganathan: Thanks for having me.
Mike Isaacson: Okay. So the central contention in your book is that the West has gotten Hinduism wrong. How does the West get Hinduism wrong?
Shyam Ranganathan: Right. It's an even weirder contention. There are two parts to this. There's first a historical observation that religious identity is actually a creation of Western colonialism. You wouldn't know this if you only paid attention to the exemplars from the Western tradition, but even then the evidence is pretty much there. Jesus was crucified by the Romans, and Christian identity was formed within the context of Roman imperialism. So even that isn't really an exception to this rule, and of course Jews were colonized by the Egyptians and the Romans and it's within the context of Roman imperialism that we first get this idea of religion, which is the precursor to our idea of religion. So the Romans had this idea that there was some type of acceptable traditional practice but wasn't the standard practice. There's some type of standard practice that everybody has to be involved in, and that evolves into our idea of secularism and then there are these kind of traditions that are tolerated. Overtime what happens is this then gets converted into a way of making sense of the European tradition as a kind of universal standard, and then anything that's got origins outside of Europe, any origins at all, ends up being called religion. Now this is most obvious, I mean, it's kind of stark when you look at the development to religious identity in Asia, because prior to Western colonialism there was no religious identity. So one of the things I point out is that if you look at the history of South Asian philosophy, they disagreed about the right and the good, and that's just what you disagree about in moral philosophy. They had a word Dharma that they use to disagree about the right or the good, and that was just how they got along. They had different views on Dharma, and some people were really famous like the Buddha. He had a very influential view and lots of followers. But under Western colonialism, there's this need to box in the people that are being colonized. And so the British end up using a Persian word for South Asia Hinduism or rather Hindu was the Persian word. And it has a similar route to our word India, and there's a place in Northern India called the Sindu, and these are all cognates. So anyways, the Persians had this way of talking to South Asians and the British decided to use that as a word for all indigenous South Asian religion, whatever that is, and it was a way to try and make sense of South Asians in contradistinction to Islam, which has a long history, but not a very ancient history in South Asia. So the British wanted to try and just have a word to refer to some type of native or indigenous practice.
Now the thing is prior to this, no South Asian called themselves a Hindu, and then overnight you have like millions of people calling themselves Hindus because it happened under a condition of colonialism where people had to conform to these expectations in order to be recognized. So there's a kind of before and after moment when we want to study Hinduism, because there's the before moment where there's the entire history of South Asian philosophy and everybody was just happy to disagree with each other. And then there's the moment of naming this tradition of religion Hinduism, and then there's the after history that we have inherited where South Asians and everybody else tries to make sense of the indigenous tradition in terms of religious categories. And then they read these categories backwards into the history of South Asia. So people ask nonsensical questions like what did Hindus disagree with? What were the disagreements between Buddhists and Hindus in ancient times? There were no Hindus, there were just people who disagreed about how to live and what to do. So in so far as there's a misunderstanding, it's a misunderstanding that comes from taking really seriously these artifacts of colonialism.
One of the things I point out is that religious identity is just a precursor to racial identity. So racial identity is born out of the West treating itself as a kind of standard of what it is to be a full fledged person, and then everybody's judged by way of their conformity or deviation to that. And so brown people of color we get this funny expression. Europeans don't have any color, everybody else does. And religion is the same thing, it's the racialization of BIPOC intellectual traditions. What people don't often realize is the same position said by Plato, for instance, that there's a God and afterlife. And in fact, reincarnation is treated as secular philosophy because there's no extra European origin. But if it's said by a brown guy from the Middle East, it's religion, and you can find all sorts of Atheist positions in South Asia where there's no God, history of reality is just the evolution of matter. If it's said by a brown guy 2000 years ago in Sanskrit, it's Hinduism. If it said by someone of European descent today on the basis of Democritus or something, it's secular philosophy. So the misunderstanding then is in a way a matter of taking these artifacts of Western colonialism seriously as though they map out the way things really are when in reality they're just artifacts of colonialism.
Mike Isaacson: In the book, you said that Hinduism basically encapsulates four separate traditions, at least. There's the Vedic tradition, there's the Dravidian tradition, the Adivasi tradition, and then there was one other one that I forgot.
Shyam Ranganathan: Oh, I see. Well, in the sense that... I didn't say that, van Buitenen said that. [The book gives the citation as Klostermaier] But I was pointing out that there is... If you try to harvest all the things that get called Hindu, there's basically nothing that's left out of it. So my analogy here is that it's an odd kind of category, a class category like fruit salad. So some categories are kind categories, and in a kind category the criterion of inclusion is also exemplified by its members. So red is a kind category. So the category of red things is the set of things that display redness. But fruit salad is a collection of different pieces of fruit, so it doesn't follow that a piece of fruit salad is a collection of different pieces of fruit. A piece of fruit salad could be a piece of apple or an orange, but when you put them together, fruit salad. And so if we want to think about Hinduism, we can certainly catalog different traditions that go into it. But I think what's really illuminating is that it wasn't created by a matter of self representation, in exactly the way racial categories are created, they were created as a way for a hostile outsider to box people in. So I just describe it, I say the founding membership criterion of something being Hindu is South Asian, no common founder. So this leads to funny logical properties like so you could be a Hindu and say a Christian in so far as you could be a Christian South Asian, but you couldn't be a Christian first and a Hindu second because Christianity is a kind category. So all Christian things are going to display some type of commitment to Jesus, etc. But just in the same way that a piece of fruit salad can be an apple but a piece of an apple is not fruit salad. So we have to just appreciate there's more than one kind of category that we're invoking when we talk about religion. And so Hinduism, even though all religious identity is really a creation or function of Western colonialism, Hinduism is odd in simply being the disagreements of philosophy. There's no common position or text or commitment that defines what it is to be Hindu. So I argue that thinking about Hinduism historically, not what comes after people try to make sense of it as a religion, but historically has just this openness to diversity of philosophical disagreement is a model for us to think about how we can move forward from a Westernized world where there's one tradition that's used as a standard to judge everything else.
Mike Isaacson: Okay. So let's jump into the part that everybody's looking for, the fascist part. So esoteric fascists make a lot of noise about living in the Kali Yuga. “We’re living in the Kali Yuga. Everything’s fucked. Ride the tiger.” So what is the Kali Yuga? What is a yuga? Are we in the Kali Yuga? And what would that mean for us?
Shyam Ranganathan: So a yuga is a period or an aeon. It's a large increment of time. And in many stories that are part of the Hindu tradition, there are these cosmologies that divide up time into the cyclical patterns. Just like Monday will repeat itself next week and so will Saturday, the yuga as well too, but they're large scale increments of time. And according to one very popular cosmology, there are four basic yugas and it starts off with the best yuga, where it's all based on truth. And then it's a slow descent to the fourth, which we're supposed to be in Kali Yuga. And so what defines Kali Yuga in a lot of descriptions is that it's just this moral degradation. And but by moral degradation, the descriptions usually turn on violence, fear and anger as being defining features of Kali Yuga. So I think it's funny the fascists like this because they're actually evidence that we're in Kali cause they trade in things like fear and anger. So if we're in Kali Yuga, it's their fault, we can blame them for it.
Mike Isaacson: Okay. You ready for some fascist lore?
Shyam Ranganathan: Sure, yeah.
Mike Isaacson: Okay. Strap in for this one. So Greco-French Nazi and self-styled Hindu Savitri Devi like to claim that Hitler was an avatar of Vishnu, specifically the ninth avatar, describing him as a man against time and the greatest European who ever lived. I don't want to spend too much time on Hitler but I do want to talk about his Vishnu and his avatars. So what kinds of people were Vishnu's avatars and what did they do in life?
Shyam Ranganathan: Yeah, so I want to take a step back before I answer this question and just provide some context for deities from South Asia. So one of the important traditions of philosophy in South Asia, and we don't have this philosophical theory anywhere else is yoga or sometimes called devotion. And so I'm going to distinguish yoga from three very common ethical theories we have and three very common theories in the Western tradition. One is virtue ethics, the idea that in order to know the right thing to do you have to be a good person. So theism is a version of virtue ethics, God is the ultimately good person whose preferences are what we should follow. Then there's consequentialism, this idea that there are these good ends that we should aim for and then the right thing to do is instrumental to that. And then there's deontology, the idea that there are a bunch of good things that we can do, but only some of them we have special reason to do. These are very popular, salient, iconic, ethical theories in the Western tradition. We find them also in South Asia, but South Asians also had a fourth ethical theory, namely that... Well, the right thing to do involves devotion to an ideal of right doing, and then as you perfect that devotional practice, you bring about the good, but the good is just the success of that practice. So when we look at deities in South Asia, they often play a role not as good agents whose preferences are what we should follow, but rather as procedural ideals, ways of living or choosing that when we are devoted to we work on emulating those kinds of procedures ourselves. So Vishnu represents one of the essential features of the ultimate procedural ideal according to yoga, which is unconservatism, so self-challenge, not being ruled by one's own past choices, working through difficulties, and his partner Lakshmi is the goddess of self-determination, she's depicted as a lotus who sits on herself. And these two, being unconservative and self-governing, make up the ideal of what it is to be a person in the yoga tradition. So when you read a lot of the stuff about Vishnu, it makes more sense when you realize that he's that procedural ideal. Now there's a story as to why he has to have avatars, I'm sure there's lots of stories. But one story is that he was just kind of doing his own thing his realm. And these youthful people who look like kids approached the gate and he had entrusted these two guards to act as sentries, and the guards wouldn't let them in to see Vishnu because they assumed they were... They claimed to be sages, but they looked too young. And so they barred entry to these very useful looking child-like figures. But they were really sages and they look really young because of their personal work and transformation. And so they curse the gatekeepers and then Vishnu has to take responsibility for that for empowering those gatekeepers. Now, one of the interesting features of this story is that it's a criticism of patriarchy. Patriarchy is the theory that, well, not only are men superior to women, but importantly, age is an important factor in authority or being taken seriously. So the older are treated as though they are to be deferred to over the anger. But also there's this prejudice that set foot, it's a prejudice against novelty. So this story is a metaphor for that, that there are these kind of novel-looking people come along and they're not allowed to see Vishnu. So then he has to... So the story goes... Anyway, these are all thought experiments, they're just ways to think about what these ideals are like. The story goes that he has to take on these life experiences to work through basically all the issues and prejudices and problems that gave rise to that encounter. And so he has lots of different incarnations or avatars. They span species. And they choose to kind of mimic a bit of our understanding of evolution, starts with a fish and an eternal amphibian and then a boar and then half-lion half man, small man. And in every case, in virtually every incarnation, there are some themes about Vishnu. First, he is a deity of working on problems, overcoming challenges, but there's always a theme of friendship, loyalty, and diversity. So Vishnu himself presents in these diverse ways. And his friends are diverse too, and they come from all sorts of different walks of life and species. So it's really weird that fascists think that Hitler could be an avatar of Vishnu because Hitler wasn't really interested in diversity, and he also wasn't really interested in overcoming his prejudices and his assumptions. So that's entirely bizarre. And another thing that's entirely bizarre is that Vishnu as someone who's challenging himself is aware of himself by self triangulation. And that triangulation is when you look at something from two different points, but then he also triangulates the activity of triangulation. And that's actually represented as a disc. But if you look at the disc, it's got superimposed triangles that look like the star of David. So that's even weirder that Nazis would think that there's anything going on with Vishnu there. So, yeah, so I would say that as a kind of character in the stories is he's compassionate, social relationships are important and so is diversity. And one of the themes of a lot of the stories where Vishnu is concerned is that you make room for yourself or Vishnu makes room for himself by making room for other people. So he's the preserver of a world of diverse beings.
Mike Isaacson: Okay. Now surprise, surprise, there's a big reverence for caste among the esoteric fascists. So what is caste? Where did caste come from? What place does it hold in Hinduism?
Shyam Ranganathan: All right. So caste, there's two things going on. There's three things actually, I think, going on when we think about caste. First of all, I think it's really important to note, and I'm always surprised that people don't talk about this, they're not aware of this, that clearest philosophical defense of caste is to be found in Plato's Republic. And Plato argues there that there are three castes. There's kind of work or appetitive class and there's kind of implementing motivative class and then the philosophers who rules. And the state is on Plato's account the soul writ large. So just as the soul has to be, the individual soul has to be governed with reason at the top providing both motivation and appetite their proper place, so to in society should there be this hierarchy, and the hierarchy should be a kind of meritocracy. Now, one of the really important features of Plato's theory of caste, well, there's a couple of interesting features. First of all, it's hierarchical. So it's really important in the Plato story that there are some people who really should be in the position of telling other people what to do. And other people would really be smart to listen to what these wise people have to tell them, but because they're not smart, they're not going to be able to recognize that. So Plato actually thinks you have to lie to them, and you have to tell them a noble lie that they were all created by the same loving God. So I think when people think about caste, a lot of times their idea of caste is actually this Platonic idea where there are people who need to be directed, and then there are people who need to do the directing. Now in South Asia, caste goes all the way back to the start of the Indo-European peoples there. So you can find in the Vedas that caste there, I think, was different because one of the things that's really different about South Asia or rather one of the things that's really peculiar about the Western tradition is that in the Western tradition community was the basic category of political explanation. So not the individual, it was community. So you understood your place, what to do by understanding your place in your society. So we find this in Plato, find it in Aristotle, and there's a long tradition of thinking just this way in the Western tradition. But in South Asia community was not the basic unit of explanation. So if you were going to understand caste, caste allows people to have a vocational identity that they can pass, that they can inherit and then pass down, but it allows them to be modular. So they can actually float in and out of different societies because they understand what kind of contribution they could make if they were part of a society. And so that way of thinking about caste takes away a lot of the hierarchy only because it's not tied to community in the way you find it in Plato. Now in South Asia, there is a long tradition of one caste, the Brahmins, of them doing all the writing. So what ends up happening and the Brahmins are kind of the intelligentsia, the literati, and they're tasked with conserving the Vedas, which is this kind of ancient corpus of the Indo-European peoples. But they're also often the intellectuals and the advisers and stuff, but they have a class interest in making themselves seem like they're top of the [heap 26.23]. So in most of the literature that was created by Brahmins, you get this story of a hierarchy where the Brahmins are supposed to be regarded as the most important. Now the funny thing about the Brahmins is that they weren't a rich group. They didn't have a lot of money. Just that most had the ability to legitimize and influence political leaders. So if you could get a Brahmin on board, it was like saying, "Oh, well, this intellectual approves of what I'm doing." So in Brahminical literature, there's a lot of propaganda where these Brahmins try to tell the story of themselves at the top of this heap. And like most people before I started doing, well, becoming a scholar of South Asia, I believed that that's what caste was. And I remember very clearly sitting in my historiography class in Master's in South Asian studies and we're doing the history of history-- is what historiography is— and I learned for the first time that even though there's a chart for your class, which is a martial class that's supposed to be the ruling class, there were lots of kings from various castes. There were kings in dynasties from the Shudra caste, which is according to Brahminical reckoning, the lowest caste because they do all the kind of the hard labor, etc. So there's this kind of story that gets told in literature, and then there's the reality of how people related to each other. And so the story that gets told in literature is this very stylized for caste story where there is the Brahmin intellectuals, and then there are the warrior Kshatriyas, and then there are these kind of merchant class folks, and then there's a fourth caste which are the Shudras, who kind of do the heavy lifting. But the reality of South Asia is there's just a million castes. Everybody has their own story about how important they are and everybody has a caste. So Jews, Christians, Muslims, Jains, Buddhists, it's just kind of what South Asians do. They have this history of understanding themselves in terms of this idea of inherited vocation. So when the British come along and they decide that they need to figure out what's going on with these South Asians, they turn to the Brahmins and the literati who have all these stories. And so one of the funny things that starts to happen is these stories and these ritual manuals that were largely just part fantasy, part propaganda, part self idealization, gets legitimized as Hindu law. So these books where you see Brahmins talking about ritual purity and how they're so important gets retold in the colonial period as what was law for Hindus prior to colonialism. Now, there are lots of funny things about that. First of all, there was no Hinduism before British colonialism. And second of all, you have this writing of a history based on the literature of a small group of people who had a class interest. Now once this gets created as the narrative, it starts to become more and more real. And so colonialism really then ends up weaponizing caste in ways that it was probably far more benign. I'm not saying that it was perfect, people use distinctions as a way to be crappy to each other all the time, but it gets ramped up in terms of its weaponization because it gets part of the official story that people believe under colonialism and then it just ends up being what people inherit. And so there's this fantasy or myth that colonialism in South Asia is over, it's not cause people still believe all these things that were formulated during that time.
Mike Isaacson: Okay. So lastly, you reserve an entire chapter in your book to discuss what you call the global alt-right. How has the alt-right interacted with Hinduism?
Shyam Ranganathan: Yeah, so that chapter is me providing an explanation for how conservativism and xenophobia and this idea of the new conservatives, so more conservative than conservatives, it's this kind of contemporary invention of some type of path that doesn't really exist except in these people's heads. How does that happen at all? So as I was writing it, things were starting to get pretty wild in the US with the rise of the far right. And for South Asianist it wasn't anything particularly new because South Asianists have been watching the rise of the far right in South Asia for some time. And so in this chapter, I'm thinking about or I'm asking the question of how is this a global... In what way is this a global phenomenon? Or how can you account for the same weird thing happening in different places? Now in the case of South Asia, it's particularly weird because South Asians historically were super open to diversity. So people fleeing persecution elsewhere often had a place to settle down in South Asia. I don't know how old the Bene Israel is, but there's a group of Jews who've been there for some reckonings to millennia in India. And then the Farsis when Iran became Islamicized, they had to leave and a large number of those folks settled down in India, and Christians came and it was just... And the thing about South Asia traditionally, which is something that I was interested in in this book and in this chapter, was a place where two things happened.
People were okay with disagreeing and they also thought that they were right. So everybody thought that they were right and everybody else was wrong, but they were also okay for that just to be the way things are. So they were okay that they thought that they were right and everybody was wrong, and they were okay to live like that, which meant that they were really okay with diversity. So diversity for them wasn't this kind of liberal relativism or skepticism that you see now, where people go, "Oh, it's just all about your perspective." People took their philosophical commitment seriously, but they also had this long tradition of not thinking that somehow the existence of other people who didn't agree with them was a problem for them. Most people thought, "Oh, well, it's a problem..." If I was really committed to some philosophical position, I might think it's a problem for the people who don't agree with me cause they're just going to lose out. But the reality is that I'm just still going to do my own thing. And that was really a very dominant feature of the history of South Asia. And I think it's quite historically unique amongst the three major philosophical traditions with ancient roots. So in China you have Confucianism from ancient times really stressed the importance of social cohesion and conformity. And then there was Daoism that also rejected that, but there is a strong tradition in Chinese thinking about the importance of social agreement and practice. That's a major mind in Confucian thinking. And if you go back all the way to the beginning of the Western tradition with Plato and Aristotle, it was all about the centralization of all decisions in a community in the hands of a few elevated individuals. But in South Asia there was always this kind of decentralized idea. There were empires and there were kingdoms, but they tended to be fluid and people were just far more okay with diversity and disagreement. So one of the questions I ask is how is it that South Asians can go from being so comfortable with diversity in descent to being so fascist and xenophobic? So in South Asia with the rise of the Hindu right, you see all this Islamophobia, and there's this creation of this kind of very strange Brahminical Hinduism that tries to deny caste and historical injustices against marginalized peoples. And there's also just this rise of violence and lynchings or perceived slights against being Hindu. So it's remarkable, within a span of few hundred years, a whole continent, sub-continent where people knew how to get along with diversity, a large number of those people lost the ability. They went from being reasonable about diversity to being progressively and increasingly unreasonable. Not everybody but enough people to cement a new political reality of the Hindu right. So most people who try to write about these things, the phenomena fascism in the far right, etc, they'll focus on the values of the people in question. And my account of this is that it's not about the values that people say they profess because so many times you would have say Christians talking about love and then participating in genocide or forced conversion, colonialism, and kind of horrible... There's a kind of disconnect between the values that people pass and what they're actually doing. And so my story says, well, let's look at what model of thought people are operating with, not the values that they claim to endorse, but how they model thought. And so there's two options that I compare.
One option is the option that the model of thought that characterizes the Western tradition, there's no second model of thought in the Western tradition. There's this default model of thought. And it's the idea that thought is the same as linguistic meaning or the meaning of what you say. And I started to realize that this was just this hegemonic view when I was writing my dissertation on translation. And the connection between thought and speech goes back all the way to the Greeks who had one word for thought, reason, speech, logos. So if you believe that thought is the meaning of what you say, then you're going to have difficulty understanding what you wouldn't say. So everything then becomes assessable by way of whatever your culture in codes and its language. And at the same time, you lose the ability to understand alternative perspectives because understanding for you becomes a matter of explanation in terms of what you agree to. So it's a very debilitating model. I started to realize not only that it was ubiquitous, but it causes all these technical problems in trying to make sense of translation, etc. And I was thinking about alternative models of thought, and there's a South Asian model of thought that avoids all these problems where you think about thought as what you can do with something meaningful. And so I set up this thought experiment. The thought experiment is... I've written about it in a few different places, some places planted ethics, some places planted subcontinent Dharma, but the thought experiment goes like this: You have a large area where there's several different communities and each community has a national ethical identity. And in every community, the ethical identity is going to be different, it's going to be distinctive, and their word ethics or morality in the case in South Asia Dharma is going to be defined in their language, in their intellect, as their national theory. So you could imagine a place where ethics or morality is just whatever Jesus said. So that ends up you have this kind of Christian nation. Then next to them, you would have this thing you could imagine a Muslim nation where it's whatever Muhammad said. And then in the thought experiment in the South Asian version, I just populate this place with all sorts of different ethical theories, Dharma theories, that people entertained in South Asia. And I asked, "Well, how are they going to understand each other?" Because when everybody says something like hitting your neighbor is not Dharma, they actually are saying something with the different meaning because Dharma means something different in each of their languages. So if you adopt this yogic approach to thought, you would say, "Well, the thought isn't actually the linguistic meaning, but it's the disciplinary use that we can make of it. So insofar as all of those sentences could be used to articulate a philosophical thought about hitting your neighbor being inappropriate, everybody could use their native intellectual resources without having to buy the values of their culture, and it would allow them to also be critical of the values of their culture. But let's say we assume the standard Western account of thought, where thought is just the meaning of what you say, anybody who operates with this will never be able to understand anything except for the values encoded into their language as just the only possible answer. And so what that then does for people is it makes them incapable of operating successfully in a world of diversity because everybody else will seem like a threat to their moral identity. And so what I argue is that the rise of the far right if you really want to understand it, you have to understand it in terms of this adoption of a really bad model of understanding. And I think it's actually a pretty good explanation. So for instance, one of the things I talk about is antithematism, them as in t h e m. And the thems are a bunch of people who are dispersed, and they have two linguistic identities. They have the linguistic identity of the society they live in, and then they have some historical them identity. And if we operated with the yoga model of thought, it would be fine.
We could understand them just like we could understand anybody else. But if we switch to the Western models thought, where thought is the meaning of what you say, these people start to seem like double agents because once they participate, they seem to participate in your culture's linguistic practices, but they also have an allegiance to another value system in another language. So I think, for instance, it explains things like an antisemitism, why was there antisemitism in Europe but not in South Asia? Why does, for instance, why were South Asians generally okay with Muslims and then once they started becoming westernized by adopting this linguistic model of thought, all of a sudden Islamophobia becomes increasingly a problem?. So a lot of people might not be aware of this, but there was one language Hindustani, and then when the British came along and gave South Asians this idea that they had a religious identity or at least there was such a thing as Hindus, then they had to split up the language into two languages, a Muslim language and a Hindu language. And so that's where you get the birth of Urdu, a Muslim language written with an Arabic script in Hindi which is supposed to be a Hindu language written in Devanagari. But it's the same language which is just kind of remarkable. But this is what colonialism does, it convinces people that they are tied to their cultural identity by way of some kind of external threat. And then once they're tied to this cultural identity, they then experience the world from this corner of terror where everyone else is out to get them. And so that's my explanation for what we're seeing in South Asia, but also I think this explains ways in which the far right in Europe and in North America is a continuation of Western colonialism.
Mike Isaacson: Antithematism, I like it.
Shyam Ranganathan: Antithematism, yeah. They were the thems and everybody would refer to them as the thems. And whether you were scared or creeped out depended upon what model of thought you adopted.
Mike Isaacson: Okay. Well, Dr. Ranganathan, thank you so much for coming on The Nazi Lies Podcast to talk to us about Hinduism. Again, the book is Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation out from Routledge. Thanks again.
Shyam Ranganathan: Thank you so much.
Mike Isaacson: If you want to support the guest fees and transcription fees we pay to run The Nazi Lies Podcast, subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/nazilies and we’ll send you some stickers and stuff. If you’d like to make a one time donation, you can send your payment via PayPal or CashApp to user NaziLies. Include your mailing address so I can throw you some merch.
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Mike Isaacson: The holes! The holes! The holes!
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Nazi SS UFOs
Lizards wearing human clothes
Hinduism’s secret codes
These are nazi liesRace and IQ are in genes
Warfare keeps the nation clean
Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine
These are nazi liesHollow earth, white genocide
Muslim’s rampant femicide
Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde
Hiter lived and no Jews diedArmy, navy, and the cops
Secret service, special ops
They protect us, not sweatshops
These are nazi liesMike Isaacson: Welcome back to The Nazi Lies Podcast. This episode, we’re lucky enough to have Robert Jan Van Pelt, Architectural Historian at the University of Waterloo and chief curator of the traveling Holocaust exhibit Auschwitz: Not Long Ago, Not Far Away. He’s the author of several books including Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present and The Case for Auschwitz where he specifically takes on Holocaust deniers or as he calls them negationists. Thanks for coming on the podcast Dr. Van Pelt.
Robert Jan Van Pelt: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here with you today.
Mike Isaacson: Thank you. So today, we're lucky enough to have a guest who's actually familiar with the Nazi lies he's debunking. So his book, The Case for Auschwitz, documents the testimony in the David Irving libel trial. So before we discuss who they are, why do you call them negationists?
Robert Jan Van Pelt: The term was actually coined in the mid-19th century by a Scottish philosopher, his name is Patrick Edward Dove, in a book called The Logic of the Christian Faith. And basically, he refers to negationist as a German idealist like Immanuel Kant or Wilhelm Fried Hegel, who basically said that physical reality doesn't exist, or at least it's not relevant, that everything is in the mind. And so he talks about them as people who are negating, who are denying, actually the existence of the world as we experience it every day. And so, the term has a philosophical background, but in the 19, late 1980s, early 1990s, it became to be applied by a number of philosophers both in France and also in the United States-- Thomas Nagel is one-- to people who we normally call Holocaust deniers. Now, when I got involved in the struggle against Holocaust denier, so negationist, I was intrigued by, let's call it the philosophical aspects of this whole thing. You can of course say, these are all crazy people or they're bad people, they're anti Semite, blah, blah, blah. All of these guys passed judgment on it. But I was always fascinated by what it takes to actually deny reality. And of course, today, when we're in the middle of many denials that are around; from vaccine denial to COVID denial to climate denial and so on, I think that one of the interesting aspects of Holocaust denial is that it was a trial run that occurred in the 1980s 1990s of actually what we're seeing today. Trial, almost like a laboratory experiment, of how do people deny, what does it take to deny, what actually does it take to actually establish reality in a narrative?
And so when I was asked to join the case, the defense team of Deborah Lipstadt who was being sued by David Irving, a English Holocaust denier, for libel in a British court, I basically took a year off of sabbatical to basically research this phenomenon. I very much went back also to the great what we might call epistemological questions, the questions of how do we know what we know? And going back to 17th century philosophers who talk about skepticism, can we have radical skepticism, under what conditions can we actually challenge a particular motion, when is it okay to accept something going back to legal theory? When actually do we have enough certainty to convict a man or a woman and chop his or her head off? Questions about negotiating a world in which in principle, we can always say, I don't believe this, I don't believe that. But then if we never have any certainty about anything, that we really cannot move forward, either individually or collectively. So I was interested in those questions. So in my choice of the term negationist, I in some way, try to show that larger context in which I was operating. And also, I wanted to connect back to a discourse, an argument that had been made first in the 1950s, by the Jewish German and later American philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who in 1941, ends up in New York after having fled from a German concentration camp or a French concentration camp controlled by Germans. And in a very famous book called The Origins of Totalitarianism, she basically says that one of the central characteristics of fascism, that is also national socialism, and she also puts it totalitarian communism in the statement, is that they basically attempt to acquire control over people and are successful in it for a considerable time, at least, they were in the 1920s and 30s, and 40s, by shaking the belief of people that they actually can understand reality to make everything into a question mark. And of course, in English, we have the term gaslighting for that. This idea is that nothing is sorted anymore. And so when people are put in a position in which everything might be a lie, ever say might be just a fiction, then in some way they become, as she said, the perfect raw material for a fascist state. And so again, by moving the focus a little bit away from the denial of the Holocaust, per se, to denial of reality, I thought that my work might have a somewhat larger relevance.
Mike Isaacson: Okay, so now on to the negationists, who are these people that we're talking about?
Robert Jan Van Pelt: Now, they're not the people who one would expect. If we talk about common parlance Holocaust about negationists who denied the Holocaust, one would first expect that the people who would have denied the Holocaust were Germans who were involved in the Holocaust, and who found themselves in front of allied courts after the war, and who were pleading for their lives. Now, they did plead for their lives, of course, but they didn't say that the Holocaust didn't happen, and hence, they were not guilty of any involvement in the Holocaust, like the shooting of two civilians, or putting them on transports to death camps, and so on. What they said, yes, it happened but that I only had a very minor role in it, or I wasn't there, or you really got the wrong man. So generally in the 1940s, and the 1950s, when these trials happened, and even later, the 1960s, the general statement of these perpetrators was, yes, it happened but it happens to be that I had no role in it or that my role was not that important. When we talk about Holocaust deniers, we have a different phenomenon. They actually say that it never happened, that it's all a fiction, that it is all basically created, in the case of Irving by the British Secret Service as a piece of war propaganda in the 1940s, during the war, and that it was basically a piece of atrocity propaganda, and that this atrocity propaganda got a second life after the war. Now, then the question is, who are the people who basically are carrying that message? And it's a very kind of motley crew, they are people from different backgrounds and I've always found this very interesting. When we look at the 1950s at the first Holocaust deniers, they actually come from the extreme left. And they come out of a particular French situation, many of them are Frenchmen. And the denial itself in the beginning isn't that much related to the Holocaust, but it is actually related to the Soviet concentration camps. The Soviet Union was in the 1930s, the 1920s and 30s, and also the 1940s. Of course, for many communists in France, and also elsewhere, it was utopia realized, especially after 1941, when the Red Army had an incredibly important role in ultimately crushing the Third Reich and defeating Marxism. In 1945, the Soviet Union was seen by many in the West as a heroic nation, a nation that that could be credited, and rightly so, with an incredible contribution to the defeat of Hitler. Many people say that around 90% of all of the soldiers who died in the second world war on the Allied side were Soviet soldiers. And so in 1945, and 46, in France, communism was a very popular political choice. It was a choice that expressed gratitude of people who were anti fascists, and rightly so, for the achievement of the Soviet Union. And it showed the promise of a new world. What happened was that, in the late 1940s, stories started to circulate about the good luck. That, in fact, the old system of camps that had existed at Sarris times and then also later in the 1930s, had not disappeared. And a Soviet defector came to the United States and started basically giving an account of all the Soviet camps, his name was Kravchenko. And many communists, especially in France, said, this is all made up, they don't exist, these concentration camps don't exist. They are a piece of CIA propaganda, because of course, it took place during the Cold War. And it very much served American propaganda interests to show that the Soviet Union, especially Europe, that the Soviet Union was a horrible state that nobody ever should vote communist. And so the discourse of a concentration camp system being a complete fiction, created, in this case by a malicious agent, that is the CIA, began in France. And then it didn't take that much at a certain moment for in hindsight, or in a second interpretation of this discourse for the concentration camp system to become the German concentration camp system, that this was as much a fiction as the Gulag was, or had been as much of fiction that the survivors were liars, so that had been created by Allied propaganda. And once that was set in motion, that idea, you get a number of people who, for different reasons, start to become members of that in-group, members of a group of people who are interested in working out in some way that narrative that denies first a concentration camp system. And a number of them were actually concentration camp survivors, interestingly enough, most important one, French Michael [unintelligible 13:45:12], who had been in a concentration camp as an inmate, but he had never seen anything that resembled gas chambers and crematoria. And he said, "The camps were bad, but certainly they were not extermination machines, they were not factories of death, of murder." And then you've get a sociological phenomenon of groups of people who bond over this common course, and attract then, in the 1970s, what I would call the intellectuals, a number of people who could join this movement, especially in France again. So it doesn't start in Germany, it starts in France. And the most important of men who in some way then starts to supply a theory and a whole body of work is a professor of literature, whose name is Robert Faurisson and who teaches literary theory at the University of Lille in France.
Mike Isaacson: There were some other names in your book that you gave, you gave Arthur Butz. Who else? There was a guy...Staglich?
Robert Jan Van Pelt: I would say there are many people who will start to make a contribution. I worked with Errol Morris on a movie, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred Leuchter, Jr. and we were discussing and making the movie, and actually I'm quoted in the movie, how do these people get together? What is their motivation? And I said, "Some way it is like a club because like the rotary club or the Freemasonry, you get into it, you don't really know what you're getting into it. But once you get into it, you get really committed to it because it becomes part of your social life." Arthur Butz, professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University, got interested. People get interested in the argument, they get interested in the nuts and bolts of the series. You have many buffs, you have many people who are interested in history, and their history buffs. And what makes a history buff, at a certain moment, different from a historian, is that a history buff always focuses on the detail and gets completely fascinated by the detail. And that can be a detail of the uniform, of the correct uniform of a civil war and actor. And of course, there are many of them in the United States, and that's all perfectly innocent. But sometimes there are history buffs who get focused on a detail like Sherlock Holmes. They see themselves as a Sherlock Holmes, and they think that there is a hidden reality that is not being stated, that is being hidden from the world. And that by focusing on the detail in the way that Sherlock Holmes does that in his of course, fictional investigations, that is, in some way, the way to the truth. And it has to do to with the CSI effect, which is idea of the fact that history can be recovered, can be, in some way, unveiled by the study of a detail. And of course, that makes incredibly good television. So a person like Butz, I think, gets interested in all kinds of what seemed to be very obscure details of the accounts of for example, the gas chambers or the crematoria is very suspicious, doesn't believe that the reality as told is really reality as it happened. And then gets interested in analyzing these details in such a way that this whole new world in some way is revealed once the detail is unmasked as a lie. And so it takes a certain mindset of people who in some way fall for the myth of Sherlock Holmes, or want to be Sherlock Holmes, but of course that is not normally the way that reality can be discovered even not, I would say in a criminal investigation.
Mike Isaacson: Okay, so now let's talk about Auschwitz. Why Auschwitz? What about Auschwitz makes it command some attention?
Robert Jan Van Pelt: So it commands a lot of attention, both for Holocaust deniers, they focus most of their attacks on the evidence of Auschwitz. But also, they do that because in some way many Holocaust story and some people who think about the Holocaust, if you hear the word Holocaust, and you ask an ordinary person in the street, does any name come to mind when you hear the word Holocaust of the place? Most people will say Auschwitz. In 1945, in the west, in Europe, they probably would have said American Belton. But since the 1970s, that is certainly Auschwitz. And there are very legitimate reasons for that. And I can just name a few of them. The first is that Auschwitz is the single largest place where Jews were massacred not only Jews, but also separatists normally, or Soviet prisoners of war. Also, other victims group in the Holocaust, one could say, and of course, also Polish non-Jewish patriots who were murdered there. Now, if we just accept for a moment to rough estimate of 6 million Jews victims of the Holocaust, then 1 million of them were murdered in Auschwitz. So that's the first thing. It is the largest of the extermination camps, the second largest Treblinka had a death toll of around 850,000, and then it goes down. So it is the biggest. The second, which is very important, is that Auschwitz is a place for which victims came from all over Europe. So, quite often, extermination camps that were very important in the Holocaust, and I give one example, Belzec that had 550,000 victims, but Belzec which was at that time in eastern Poland, it's still in eastern Poland today, it had a reasonable function. The victims came from around 200 miles 150 miles from around Belzec. It was a very densely settled area with Jews. Traditionally, it was the heartland of the Jews, around Lviv today in the Ukraine. But Auschwitz had victims coming from all over Europe, from Greece, from France, from the Netherlands, from Germany, from Italy, from Poland, and so on. So basically, when we talk about the Holocaust as a pan-European phenomenon, something that touched almost every European nation, that was either occupied or ruled by Germany. Then Auschwitz talks about that pan-European dimension of the Holocaust. The third thing is that Auschwitz is unique in that it doesn't have only gas chambers, and the word homicidal or genocidal gas chambers in Belzec, in Treblinka and Sobibor, in Majdanek and Kamno, but the gas chambers were actually part of crematoria. There were buildings in which the victims were brought into the building, they were then murdered in the gas chamber and their corpses were incinerated in that very same building. And you did not have that combination in the other camps, that is that if you have gas chambers in Treblinka, then after the murder, the corpses of the victims were taken out of those gas chambers and originally they were buried to mass graves, and later the bodies were incinerated on open pyres. So, what happens when you get a gas chamber that is in a building that has very complicated ovens, I mean ovens in the case of crematoria two and three that have the incineration capacity of almost 1500 corpses per day, you get actually a very complex building. Architects get involved, engineers get involved, a lot of money gets involved, because the buildings need to be constructed. Which means also that there is going to be a lot of evidence. We have no designs for the gas chambers in Treblinka, they didn't survive, they probably were drawn up on the proverbial back of an envelope or on a napkin. This is how architects quite conceive of their projects. But in the case of Auschwitz, because these were expensive buildings, it took time to build, they took resources, financial and also in building materials, there's a lot of evidence about that. And in this case, also, that's important, because when you have to commit a lot of resources in a crime, the crime of genocide, then it becomes very clear that it's intentional. And just to go back for a moment, in 1941 or 42, around 2 million Russian Jews were murdered in the then occupied Soviet Union, that would be today's Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic countries mainly, and a little bit of today's Russia also. They were murdered with men having rifles, by execution platoons, and so on. But those machine guns and those rifles had not been created to murder civilians, they had been created to be used in battle.
So in that case, if you go to the smoking gun in those massacres, those killings, like the one in BabynYa in Kiev, that 80th anniversary will be happening in two months in the beginning of October, then you have the smoking gun, so to speak, you never can say this gun was actually made for the purpose of killing civilians. But if you go to a homicidal gas chamber in Auschwitz, and then you basically see it in relationship to the crematoriums that are in the same building, it's very easy to move the corpses from the gas chambers to that crematorium often, then basically, you have an installation that can only make sense in terms of a genocide, in terms of killing innocent civilians, civilians who cannot resist. Those gas chambers have no possible imaginable role in a battle. Now, you cannot, in some way, trick armed soldiers to go into a gas chamber and then you close the door and you bring in the gas. So in the case of Auschwitz, the fact that we have these very sophisticated expensive buildings that basically can only be explained from the perspective of genocide, actually, of which there were two is very important because the Auschwitz crematory and gas chambers are undeniable in that sense, as tools of genocide. And then the last reason is that actually, there's still a lot of stuff left enough. It's not only in terms of ruins, the ruins of this crematoria, but also there is a lot of paperwork preserved in the archives. And then finally, unlike these other camps, these extermination camps, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, Belzec had only two survivors, extremely effective extermination camp. Sobibor around 250, Treblinka around 200, but around 100,000, people actually left Auschwitz alive. Because Auschwitz was not only an extermination camp, but it was also a slave labor camp. And so this is why you have in Auschwitz, these selections upon arrival of the Jews where basically those who can't work are sent immediately to the gas chambers. And those who can work are basically worked to death or until they are moved somewhere else. And so what you have in the case of Auschwitz is enormous amount of eyewitness evidence. Not necessarily what happens right inside the gas chamber, it's impossible to have eyewitness evidence of that in a squared nature of the killing in the gas chamber, but eyewitness evidence of these buildings, the chimneys, the smoke. And then also in the case of the two slave workers that worked in the crematoria. A lot of eyewitness evidence was produced by them after the war, there were enough survivors of them to give evidence immediately after the war. And even a number of them had some good abilities to draw what they had seen. So there's also drawn evidence. So all in all, Auschwitz is in some way the crown jewel, in a sense, in the case that the Holocaust did happen, because of the nature of the evidence and the amount of the evidence that we have about the place. And that is exactly the reason that Holocaust deniers or negationists attack Auschwitz, because they want to attack that evidence.
Mike Isaacson: So Irving's principle claim is that far fewer people die at Auschwitz in the Holocaust in general, than is the general consensus among historians. So you mentioned that a million people died at Auschwitz. How did we arrive at that number?
Robert Jan Van Pelt: The number has evolved over time. And that actually is one of the reasons that in about 1990, the Holocaust deniers said you can never trust any number. When the Soviet, the Red Army, arrived on the 27th of January 1945 in Auschwitz, they had to make an informed guess immediately about a number of people that had been murdered in Auschwitz. And their first guess was around 5 million. And they didn't define who these people were. These were citizens of European nationals, they said. The Soviets were always very hesitant to actually divide the victims into groups. These were 5 million troops or 1 million troops, whatever like that, they never really wanted to go in there. They didn't want to separate the troops out. Then, the first forensic committee that was working there, reduced it to 4 million on the basis of almost no extra evidence, basically talking about the cremation capacity of the ovens. And said the ovens would have cremated so many bodies per day, these ovens existed in these four buildings for so many days, we assume that they were in operation 80% of the time, so they came to 4 million. Already at that time, basically, Jewish demographer said this is impossible. And they basically put the number closer to 1.5 million. They said, "Where would all those people have come from?" And in 1946, Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz from 1940 to 1943, he was then relieved of his duty, was arrested and ultimately tried. He testified first in Nuremberg as a witness and then was tried in Poland. And he wrote his memoirs while he was in prison before he was executed. And he also testified, he said, "The 4 million figure is absolutely obtainable. My calculations are that we murdered around 1.1 million people in Auschwitz during my reign as commandant." So he didn't have the whole period, but he had long enough. And by implication, if we then also take the murder rates during the time of his successor, this would have meant that the total number that he would agree to as a commandant, as a witness, as a person around the place, around 1.6 million. And he gave a detailed accounting of where those victims would have come from. He said, "The only way that you can really look at it, is to look at the transports. Which transports of Jews arrived in Auschwitz, at what time, how many people were in each transport, and how many of the transport were killed on arrival. And so there were really two numbers by, let's say, 1950. The first number was based on Hoess' testimony. And that was somewhere one and a half million. And then the second number was the official number that was fixed by the Russians. It was the Cold War. Of course Auschwitz was in Poland, it was being ruled by the communists. That was the official number of 4 million, but it didn't give any details of where those 4 million people would have come from. And so at the memorial in Auschwitz in the 1950s 60s 70s, and 80s, that said, 4 million people were murdered here, but it didn't give a breakdown of that number. However, at the Auschwitz Museum, which was a very professional Museum, it is basically the organization, the institution that preserves the Auschwitz site, it's a Poland State Museum, the historical department had already started to work on a detailed analysis of transports, and of course, the Germans had destroyed much of the evidence, and they had to come to the conclusion that the total number of people who had been deported to Auschwitz was 1.3 million. And the total of number of people that had been murdered in Auschwitz was 1.1 million. And that number still stands, by and large. When they used to say murdered in Auschwitz, the question is how? Because even if you were to say, "Okay, we accept the figure, 1.1 million people died in Auschwitz." then the question, of course, remains did they die of natural deaths or that were they actually murdered? People died in Auschwitz in all different ways. People were murdered in gas chambers. Majority of people were murdered as they did slave labor, they were beaten to death on the site by overseers. People were murdered during torture sessions in the camp, the [unintelligible 33:37:22], people were murdered when they were ill, when they were seen that they could work anymore, they were given an injection in the heart, which was poison. But also people died as a result of infectious diseases, for example, typhus, or they died as a result of starvation. And so the question now is, how did people die? And can we "blame" the Germans for all of those deaths? So one of the things that deniers like Irving did early on, is to say, "Okay, we accept that Auschwitz and also other camps are really deadly places. But almost everyone died as a result of typhus, as infectious diseases." And we might say that the Germans were not acting wisely by bringing so many people together in the place. But ultimately, typhus happens also in other places. So we can't really say that the deaths as a result of typhus are part of a genocidal programme. They might be more part of mismanagement by the camp, or they are the result and this is actually blaming the allies now, turning the finger to the allies, they are the result of the terrible conditions created in Germany as the result of the Allied bombings. And in that case, the deniers point actually to Bergen-Belsen, which in 1945 was liberated by the British Army. And that became the symbol of the German death camps because of a lot of news, men arrived to the British troops in Bergen-Belsen on the 15th of April 1945. And what you saw in Bergen-Belsen, that camp had never had any gas chambers, they had never had any crematoria. It was, for most of its history, a relatively good camp to be. If you look at all of the options in the German concentration camp system, it was one of the better camps.
But what the Allied soldiers saw in 1945 was the result of the typhus epidemic. And the typhus epidemic, according to Holocaust deniers, was the result basically the disintegration of the German economy and the German system to supply the camps with food and so on. And they ultimately decided if you have to blame anyone for the situation in Bergen-Belsen, these are the Allied bombardments which have destroyed the food and other infrastructure of Germany. And so, this is where many deniers are. They are in this grey zone. What they will say is that, "Okay, we agree that people died, they didn't die because a number of SS men put them in a gas chamber, and then supplied the chamber with cyanide, they died as a result of typhus." And this is in that discourse in the early 1990s, when actually an American historian at Princeton, basically endorsed this vision, his name was Arno Mayer in a book Why did the heavens not darken? that man like Irving was very much encouraged to take the position which he took, which he said, "This is all a big misunderstanding really. Auschwitz was not a good place to be but blame the bacteria, don't blame the Germans."
Mike Isaacson: Okay, so moving along. Robert Faurisson has an infamous line, “No holes, no Holocaust.” So, what does that line mean, and what is the significance of the holes?
Robert Jan Van Pelt: Yeah. So this goes back to the idea of show me the smoking gun, show me the evidence. Now, the two of the major gas chambers in Auschwitz, two of the crematoriums, which were the largest factories of deaths, they were underground gas chambers. And so now the question is, how did the gas enter into the gas chambers? Was it removed after the gassing, but also how did it enter? Now, people hear the word gas, they think that gas would have been pumped into a gas chamber through a system of pipes. But that actually was not the case in these Auschwitz crematoria. The gas that was used in Auschwitz was actually a delousing product, a cyanide delousing project that came in a tip. And it was really to use in ships of the Navy, it was also to use to kill vermin in grain silos because of course, all kinds of vermins would be eating the grain, it would be used on the front in the battlefield to delouse the uniforms of soldiers. Lice is everywhere where we have a lot of people who are camped wash and spent a lot of time together. So, what happened was that in the First World War, the German army had developed a delousing agent, that basically consisted of cyanide and that was commercially marketed since the 1920s. It was liquid cyanide that is soaked in either gypsum like substance or in paper discs. That happens in factory conditions. And then these paper discs or this gypsum full of cyanide is then packed in a tin, ordinary tin like canned tomatoes or something like that. In that tin, the cyanide has a shelf life of over six months. And so those tins can be shipped to whoever ultimately needs delousing job. And then what happens is that if you need to delouse, let's say a tom of clothing, then you put this in a room, seal the room, the windows and so on, and the doors, but keep one door that you can open and close, go into the room with a gas mask, open the tin with an ordinary tin opener, and then throw the contents on the floor, in this case the gypsum or the paper discs with the cyanide in it. What happens is that the cyanide will start to de-gas from the substance in it with a soak. And it will do so for around 24 hours. It de-gases very slowly because it needs not only to destroy the vermin, but also their eggs. And that takes a long time, it takes 24 hours. And immediately after the soldier or the medic has put all of that stuff on the floor, he walks out of the room and then closes the door, tapes the door so that it is sealed, takes off his gas mask and then you have to wait for 24 hours until the degassing has stopped and all of the vermin and the eggs basically are destroyed. This was the way that in Auschwitz, lethal gas was used gas chambers.
Now, the problem with homicidal gas chamber is that you cannot simply put people in a room and then have a medic come in with a gas chamber with a gas mask, and then open a couple of tins, throw the contents on the floor and then walk out. That's not going to work. You need to introduce the gas in a different way. So the construction that the Germans used was that they had holes in the roof. In the case of those crematorium two and three, they had four holes in the roof. And in the first incarnation of a gas chamber, now if it was a crematorium two, they had to open the cover and then they dumped the contents of the tin inside the room. So that fell on top of the people who were crowded in tight room and then they closed the cover again and waited for 24 hours. And then opened the doors and started airing the place until people could come in and take the corpses out. That worked well until daily transport started to arrive of which people needed to be murdered. Now, the problem was the cyclone B as it was being shipped to Auschwitz, that it had this 24 degassing cycle. The degassing is very slow from the material in which the cyanide soaked. And if you're in a hurry, and the SS was formed late 1942 in Auschwitz in a hurry because of the daily arrival of train, so you needed to have the gas chamber available relatively quickly after it had been used and you needed to burn the corpses of the people who had been killed basically within the next 24 hours before the next train arrives with victims, you couldn't afford any more to wait for the 24 hours for the degassing to stop. The moment that everyone was murdered, and that mostly happened after 10 15 minutes, you wanted to basically be able to enter the gas chamber and then start cleaning up the gas chamber. Taking out the corpses you take out the gold off the teeth and so on, and then bring the corpses to the ovens. So the key to that operation was that you now had to remove the still degassing cyclone from the room 15 minutes after you had introduced it. That was the technical problem. And the technical solution was to actually lower now with let's call it a little basket. Put all of the contents of the tin in the basket, lower that basket into the room, basically murder everyone within the first 15 minutes because that's the time it takes with that cyanide concentration, and then hoists the basket out of the room through that same hole in which you have lowered it and discard the still degassing cyclone on the roof of the building. The problem of course, is that if you simply have a dive basket going down into a room, the victims can interfere with it. So the solution to prevent the interference of the victims with that lowering of the cyclone into the room was to create a wire mesh column, a cage around it, so it is lowered in the center of a cage. And the victims can see it. And through the cage, all of the cyclone material, the cyanide can drift into the room, but they cannot actually interfere with it. And so four of those cages existed in crematorium two and the gas chamber in four and crematorium three. The problem in terms of evidence is that we have a lot of eyewitness evidence of these cages, these columns as they're called, these gas columns. We have evidence of the man who made it in 1942, we have evidence of people who worked in those gas chambers, cleaning it up afterwards, and who survived the war. We have evidence even by Rudolf Hoess, but none of these cages survived because they were taken out before the destruction of the crematoria at the time that Auschwitz was evacuated at the end of the war. So first of all, we don't have those cages anymore, those columns.
Second of all, we don't have drawings, we don't have original drawings, we don't have blueprints, because they were added into the building after the building was almost completed. And so Holocaust deniers, and especially Robert Faurisson, have said, "Because you cannot show me those cages, because you cannot show me the original blueprints, they'd never existed." And on top of that, those cages connected to the outside world through a hole because at the top of the cage was a hole and the cyclone was lowered through that hole in the cage. So they said, "If you cannot show me those holes in the concrete roof of the gas chamber, if there are no holes there at the alleged place where they were, then you can never say that actually there was any means of introducing the cyclone into those underground spaces." The problem with such roofs is that they were dynamited at the end of the war by the SS. And so they were destroyed, they're basically in pieces. So, how do you now show into a dynamited concrete slab in which there are many holes? No, the whole steps were purposely created to allow for the introduction of the cyclone. And a friend of mine, the late Harry Marcel, actually solved that problem in the year 2000 at a time of the Irving trial when he went to some forensic archaeological expedition to Auschwitz, and actually was in the case of crematory two, able to locate three of the four holes by looking actually at an important design detail. They said when you create a hole in the concrete slab, you have to do something with the rebar because if a rebar would probably run through that hole in some way, you cannot have that, otherwise the hole doesn't function. So what you do before you pour the concrete, you cut the rebar at the point and you bend to the end of the rebar back 180 degrees. And those kinds of details are still visible in the slab of that covered gas chamber of crematorium two. So in that sense, we have the forensic evidence, the physical material forensic evidence for the existence of those holes.
Mike Isaacson: Okay, another thing I’ve seen negationists take aim at is the lack of insulation on the lights in the gas chambers. So, according to them cyanide is explosive and would have ignited in such a room. So, why is this a lie?
Robert Jan Van Pelt: This the argument might be right, cyanide can be explosive, but the question is what concentration? Chemical substances behave very differently and behave at different concentrations. And the Auschwitz cyanide gas chambers operated at a very low concentration, it doesn't take that much to murder people. It takes around 500 600 parts per million and then you will be dead in 10 minutes. So the argument is derived from high concentration of cyanide into gas chambers. I certainly have not replicated the thing in a lab, so I must say that in this case, I need to lean on the authority of others. But basically, I have been taught that this can be all explained because of the low concentration of cyanide used in the Auschwitz gas chambers.
Mike Isaacson: Right. So one of the strongest pieces of supposed evidence comes from Fred Leuchter, who claimed to have illegally taken a brick from Auschwitz to run some forensic tests. So, what can we say about Leuchter’s tests?
Robert Jan Van Pelt: Now, of course, the strongest piece of supposed evidence that the Auschwitz gas chambers would never use these gas chambers. In 1988, he went to Auschwitz to take samples of the walls of the homicidal gas chambers, and also of the walls of delousing chambers, that used cyclones. And so he did a compare and contrast method. One of the big differences, and in the case of the walls of the homicidal gas chambers, he said there's very little cyanide in there. And in the case of the level of cyanide in the delousing chambers, he said, "When we take samples, there's a very high concentration of cyanide." Now, there were many different problems. First of all, there were problems, this is basic assumptions. And if you go into delousing chambers, you see actually that the walls are blue, that these are originally whitewash walls that became blue. And this is Prussian blue, and it actually indicates the pigment is the result of binding of cyanide molecules with iron, basically the result is ferro ferricyanide, and that creates a blue pigment. Now, why do you get that cyanide deposit in the wall that creates this blue stain? The first reason is typically, in these delousing chambers, cyanide could be used in high concentration, it would be used over a long period of time, that is typically 24 hours at a time and this were also used continuously. And in order for Prussian blue, for ferro ferricyanide to form, it can only form when there is actually a low level of carbon dioxide in the room. And this actually has been replicated forensic labs in Poland. However, when you have a relatively high level of carbon dioxide in the room, as when you have also the cyclone material, the carbon dioxide prevents the formation of this pigment, prevents the binding of the cyanide with the iron atom. And this is why in homicidal gas chambers, you typically will not find this blue pigment, unless that homicidal gas chamber was also used for delousing. So this is one line of explanation. The second thing has to do with the fact that the homicidal gas chambers were basically destroyed. What Leuchter did was take samples of bricks that had been exposed to the elements by the time he came there for 35 years. The plaster that had covered the brick didn't exist anymore. It was very few samples, so that he took actually, the samples from the brick. That brick had not been exposed to cyanide at all because it had been covered by plaster. So the problem is his samples that he took from the homicidal gas chambers is that we actually do not know if they were ever exposed to cyanide because they would have been covered. And also then he took samples, we don't really know how much of the dilution of the sample material. We don't know how deep he went. So none of these things was ever recorded. So ultimately, chemists who have looked at his methods say this has no value whatsoever. This is the most amateurist forensic investigation. And certainly, the argument also of the complete different chemical conditions that exist in a homicidal gas chamber. That is especially because of the high level of carbon dioxide, the results of the breathing of the victims before they die, and the absence of a heightened level of carbon dioxide in delousing gas chambers provide enough evidence to show that Leuchter's results are worse.
Mike Isaacson: Okay, so like I mentioned earlier in the show, you’re the chief curator of Auschwitz: Not Long Ago, Not Far Away. What does Auschwitz have to teach the public today?
Robert Jan Van Pelt: Yeah, there's no simple lesson. Some people will say what hatred can do. I'm a professor in an architecture school, for me, when I talk with my students about places like Auschwitz, I like to look at the macro level, at the role of professionals, of architects of people who get involved in creating these places, and who do this without really asking themselves any questions of what they're making. Or if they ask those questions, who do not really care how things are going to be used. Nowadays, bureaucrats, engineers, all of us, many of us have an incredible amount of power of ability to influence the lives of other people for good or for evil. And, of course, we find it very much right now on a very individual level when we're talking about vaccines, and masking and so on. And, in many ways, for me Auschwitz, it's not a story of a number of evil geniuses who are plotting to create hell on earth, certainly, that was a part of it. Certainly, there are moments in the history of that camp where you can say, "This is one of the major crimes in history that is being planned here." But it's also a story of a hell of a lot of people who with great thoughtlessness get themselves involved in this, and then at a certain moment, don't have the backbone to pull out. And, as a historian, I went into the research of this camp because so much evidence is there, in order to find in some way that diabolical dimension. And in the end, yes, the result is diabolical. But for the rest, I became actually fascinated by the incredible importance of mediocrity, of lies, of people lying to themselves, of where they are and what they're doing. And in that sense, I think that Auschwitz is in many ways, also a good metaphor of the situation we find ourselves in today.
Mike Isaacson: Yeah, I believe Arendt called it the banality of evil, right?
Robert Jan Van Pelt: Evil is not banal. Obviously, evil is not banal, but it's banal dimension to evil. And very few people do bad things because they want to do bad things. But most of us end up doing bad things because we're lazy, because we're intellectually lazy, because we do not basically ask for the truth. Because we're willing to basically make empty slogans into a convenient truth for ourselves so that we do not have to look in the mirror and do have to face very inconvenient facts. And we are right now clearly in many different ways, both climatalogically but also socially and politically on the crossroads. And when you have to make decision on what road you want to go, you have to ask tough questions to yourself. And certainly none of the people who were involved with Auschwitz between 1940 and 45 asked any of those tough questions.
Mike Isaacson: All right, Dr. Van Pelt, thank you so much for coming on the podcast to debunk the Holocaust negationists. To learn more about Auschwitz and its detractors, check out The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial. Thanks again.
Robert Jan Van Pelt: Thanks very much. It was wonderful to be with you.
Mike Isaacson: If you liked what you heard and want to contribute to making this podcast, consider subscribing to our Patreon. Patrons get early access to episodes and free merch. You can also make a one-time donation to our PayPal or Cash App with the username NaziLies. Include your mailing address to get some swag.
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Mike Isaacson: I’m sorry, but there’s really no comparison between Irish indentured servitude and African chattel slavery.
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Nazi SS UFOs
Lizards wearing human clothes
Hinduism’s secret codes
These are nazi liesRace and IQ are in genes
Warfare keeps the nation clean
Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine
These are nazi liesHollow earth, white genocide
Muslim’s rampant femicide
Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde
Hiter lived and no Jews diedArmy, navy, and the cops
Secret service, special ops
They protect us, not sweatshops
These are nazi liesMike: Thanks for joining us for episode six of The Nazi Lies Podcast. We've talked about Hitler survival rumors, neo-Nazis denialism, the Jewish Talmud, critical race theory and even lizard people. Today we are going to tackle the myth of Irish slavery. We are joined by Miki Garcia, author of The Caribbean Irish: How the Slave Myth Was Made. Garcia is a 20-year veteran in the media and consulting industry. She has a master's in journalism from the City University of London and is currently working on her PhD at the University of Westminster. Thanks for joining us, Miki.
Miki: Thank you for having me.
Mike: Before we get into the Irish slavery myth, I want to talk to you about how you came to this research. What sparked your interest in the transatlantic trade of Irish indentured servants?
Miki: When I was a student in the 1990s, I did some volunteer work for street workers in the Kings Cross area. It was a rundown area of London in those days and all the people sleeping rough in the 1990s in this specific area were Irish. It was the time when the IRA were bombing across England and the British media was very biased and had a hostile attitude towards Irish people. We didn't have a St. Patrick’s Day festival in London. It's hard to believe, but Irish history is not in the school curriculum in England or continental European countries either. So, I asked around, but no one knew what was going on.
To clear so many why, I immersed myself in Irish history and language and I play the Irish music instruments as well, and turned out those homeless people were the 1950s immigrant workers. So the decade was the height of Irish immigration. During the post war years, Britain used a substantial number of immigrant workers and many of them were youngsters, teenagers, and I got to know them personally. It was heartbreaking. When Irish people left home, they took a boat and they arrived at Holyhead which is in Wales and they took the train to come to London and the last stop in London was called Euston. And Kings Cross and Euston are basically side by side so there were so many Irish people there newly arrived and settled and so many Irish businesses like Irish pubs, restaurants, hostels, Catholic funeral parlors, barbers and so on. It was a very, very Irish area.
I'm basically interested in the Irish diaspora, how the Irish people were influenced by the British policies. There are quite a few people who are interested in their status within the British system. For example, Marx and Engels, German immigrants in England, they were very interested in the Irish people as workers, and they wrote a lot about them. Irish history is most part a history of struggle against England and British imperialism since 1169, the Anglo-Norman invasion. So it's been going on for such a long time, more than 800 years. 852 years.
The Irish in the Caribbean have been at the back of my mind for a while and this topic contains so many issues and it's also contentious. I wanted to write about them, but I didn't know where to start. It was the Black Lives Matter movement a few years ago. I saw many discussions on the internet, and there are so many innocent questions like, were Irish people slaves or Black? Or to more aggressive ones like “get over it” and so on. I've written some books on the Irish diaspora before so I wanted to write something very easy, simple, and informative. I think a myth is created because quite often people don't know the facts or the truth, so this is how it started.
Mike: Let's start by discussing what Irish indentured servitude was not namely chattel slavery. What were the major differences in how Irish indentured servants and enslaved Africans were treated and dealt with?
Miki: By definition, slaves are for life, so they were basically property, and they were owned, no human rights or civil rights. But indentured servants, they work for a time for a few years and they will be free, so they had human rights and civil rights in theory. But the Irish people were not homogenous. The majority of them who went to the Caribbean were forced, but many were born into service. Some of them were colonizers. They were colonial officers, administrators, traders, merchants, skilled workers, soldiers, sailors, and so on. But during the 17th century, forced people didn't exchange a legal contract. There are many types of indentured servants as well, and many wanted to go there. At the end of the servitude, they received land or sugar or whatever raw materials. They bought property, land and they settled just like mainland America, Virginia, Georgia, and so on. So that was their purpose. In the Caribbean, quite a few Irish people went there to have a better life.
But it was after Cromwell’s invasion, England captured too many people so they didn't know what to do with them, the local prisons were packed so that's why a large-scale systematic transportation policy was set. This produced many forced indentured servants. They were basically so-called political prisoners and criminals, wandering women, spirited children, and orphans, and so on. But within the context of the Caribbean, they were independent Irish settlers. For example, St. Christopher (St. Kitts) became the first English colony in the Caribbean in 1623 and then Barbados, Nevis, Montserrat, Antigua, and Jamaica and so on. So, African people and Irish people are very, very different, legally different as well.
Mike: I want to get into the Cromwell stuff. Cromwell, basically, effectively made it illegal to be Irish in the UK. Am I correct in saying that? That's what I got from reading the book.
Miki: Yeah. Because basically what England wanted to do is to wipe out the whole population. They wanted to control the whole island. So yeah, that's what's been happening all those years, centuries.
Mike: Yeah, because thinking about reading the book, one of the things that you mentioned was that there were technically people that went voluntarily into indentured servitude, but it seemed like their choices were basically either go into indentured servitude to avoid being arrested for vagrancy or get arrested for vagrancy and go into indentured servitude anyway.
Miki: Right after Cromwell’s invasion, there were a lot of people who were shipped basically, transported. They had no choice. But at the same time, they are always volunteer settlers as well because they had no choice, you know? England sent a lot of soldiers, so they didn't have a life. They wanted to have a better life in general. But majority of them right after Cromwell’s invasion, they were basically transported. They didn't have a choice.
Mike: Okay. So, now getting back to the neo-Nazis, particularly those of Irish descent, they've drawn parallels between Irish indentured servitude and African slavery usually to downplay the latter while bemoaning the former. You'd think it would be to motivate them, to show solidarity with people of African descent, but they're Nazis, so.. Every myth starts off as a misinterpreted fact as you kind of said, and there were parallels between these two instances of forced labor mainly because they were both industrial processes of the British Empire. What were the similarities between Irish indentured servitude and African slavery?
Miki: Irish people were basically the major workforce before Africans were transported. So at the beginning, they were growing tobacco, indigo, cotton and provisions and these can be grown in a relatively small space and sugarcane. The sugarcane production was extremely labor and capital intensive, so it needed unskilled workers. This speeded up with the arrival of Africans.
But it's not very simple to pinpoint servants working and living conditions as each locality or planter was different. Some planters were very nice, sympathetic, but some were not so. But generally speaking, Irish servants received better foods and clothing and better living and working conditions than African workers. But in some plantations, because they worked only for a few years, they were treated like temporary slaves, in some cases worse than the slave workers.
One of the unique aspects is that some forced indentured servants in the Caribbean, they did very well later in life. Irish workers finished their indenture and left the region or stayed as wage workers, became overseers, foremen, plantation slave owners, traders and so on. Basically, they moved up the social ladder.
I saw many documents at the local archives. It is hard to find the information when they arrived, but their wills and inventory of death are easier to find. So this indicates that they have become wealthy plantation owners and more British by the time they died. But this was the purpose of the English. They wanted to make them English.
And servants and slaves, they didn't mingle too much when they worked together in the same plantation because they had different tasks and responsibilities, but they cooperated on many occasions. For example, servants joined with slaves in plots of revolts and sea escapes. And these are very well documented in Barbados. When they were caught, slaves got heavier punishment and often tortured and executed. But servants, they were typically sent to other places, for example, from Barbados to Jamaica. Jamaica is huge, so it needed to be settled.
And another example is in Jamaica, runaway slaves and servants went to the mountains and they formed independent communities on the mountains and they were called the Maroons. In the early 19th century, the movement for Catholic emancipation in Ireland and Britain and African slave emancipation developed at the same time.
In the 1960s, it was the decade of the civil rights movement. There is the similarity of the civil rights struggle in Northern Ireland and with the struggle of the African-American civil rights movement. In the modern-day context, the status of Irish and African people as a major labor force at the bottom of the hierarchy is so visible because they belong to the most powerful nations, Britain and the US. So there are some similarities because they're both a part of American and British imperialism.
Mike: Right. And one thing that you didn't mention just now was also the mortality rate, it seemed like there was a pretty high mortality rate not only in the trip over to the Caribbean but also during one's time as an indentured servant.
Miki: Yes, because Irish people were not used to the climate, hot and humid climate, so it took time for them to get used to that climate. And also, they were not immune to tropical diseases. There were so many insects because of the climate. But African people were quicker to adjust with the local climate. That's why the Irish people the scorching sun burned their legs so they were called redlegs, and so they really struggled with the climate and tropical diseases as well. And also some early planters were very brutal as well, and they really couldn't survive.
Mike: Okay. Now in the book, you talk a bit about the various attitudes and actions that the Caribbean Irish and Irish people in general took towards enslavement of the Africans and those of African descent. Can you talk a bit about that?
Miki: The relationship between the colonizer and the colonized can be viewed a bit as like between the superior and inferior group. Thel colonizers, all colonizers, British or European colonizers, they typically felt superior to the colonized. So within the context of the British Empire in the Caribbean, I think Irish and African because they both belong to the working class at the bottom of the hierarchy. So basically, they were treated as second class citizens.
And so, Ireland is basically England's oldest colony, the last colony, the southern part is independent, but the north eastern part is not. This means Britain have not been trading Irish people with respect for such a long time. And I think discrimination, prejudice, or stereotypes don't go away immediately because it's in their culture, language, and society, everyday life accumulated over the years, centuries in fact, and I think Irish and British children they know these facts long before they start reading history books.
There was a survey in early 1980s in Nottingham, England, primary school children were asked which group was least favorable, Irish, Germans, West Indians, and Asians. Asians means Commonwealth immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. They answered Irish. I don't know which area of Nottingham the survey was conducted, but they probably have never really interacted or talked to new immigrants. But the issue is quite deep rooted because they didn't probably know what to think of new immigrants. And Irish children also they know what England did to their country and to them long before they start going to school.
So the issue is quite deep rooted. For example, in England, our grandfathers’ and fathers’ generation fought against the Germans, so they still have bitter feelings so you've got to be careful when you mention the G-word. But the children and grandchildren, they are not angry at the Germans because this was a one-time event in history. So Irish and Africans, they have been within the British or American system for such a long time, so the issue is so deep rooted.
What I think is that the things we do, say or feel every day are habitual, so our habitual thinking patterns are passed down through generations. I think you've got to be aware of your stereotypical views or negative thinking patterns too and reframe them with historical facts or healthier views on a conscious level, otherwise it's hard to break the cycle. But I think younger generations, especially the generation Y and Z, because of the internet they are more global and borderless, and they're more relaxed and less competitive. Yeah, I think they are more educated. I think. I don't know, but that's the impression I've got.
Mike: One of the things that I was thinking about was towards the end of the book you talk about the Irish that got involved in the abolition movement. Could you talk a bit about that?
Miki: There are a lot of people who are against the slavery, but before Atlantic slavery trade started, Irish people have been really oppressed by England. Daniel O'Connell and all the rest, there are quite a few people who are against the oppressive regime, England or wherever. These two, Catholic emancipation and African slave emancipation, they went hand in hand. The argument they were making were basically the same. It started at the end of the 18th century and at the beginning of 19th century.
They acquired Catholic emancipation first and then African slave emancipation, but England couldn't really give up the Atlantic slave trade because it was just too lucrative. And so they created this new system called apprentice system. It didn't end immediately but gradually, it wasn't very lucrative anymore because it was highly dangerous and morally wrong as well. So yeah, gradually, things developed and ended.
Mike: Could you talk a bit about the apprentice system real quick?
Miki: Apprentice system, it was basically English people trying to justify themselves. African slave workers, they are not used to being independent because when they were working, religion was banned, religion was highly dangerous. That’s what they thought. Education, religion, and none of those empowering activities were possible, so they believed that African people need to go through stages to be independent. So basically, it's more like indentured servitude. They sort of changed the title apprentice, but what they did exactly was exactly the same. They just changed the title. But it was a gradual development.
Mike: And there were Irish people at the time that came out against the apprentice system too, right?
Miki: Some people, yeah, but not all of them. As I said earlier, Irish people are not homogenous. And a lot of people who are still in the Caribbean in the late 17th and early 18th century,and became quite wealthy as well. Yeah, a lot of people were against. But in reality, it was very difficult to have an opposing opinion because it was also very dangerous because a lot of people are very, very directly, indirectly involved with the business. It was all over, not just the Caribbean. They were in America as well that they are established trades, you know? There were so many people benefiting from the trade in not just the Caribbean but in mainland America and British Isles as well. So a lot of people were pretty much part of the British Empire in those days.
Mike: Okay. So next, I want to talk about sources, which is my favorite thing to talk about with historians and journalists. What sources were you using to tell the story of the Caribbean Irish and how did you navigate the bias of these authors?
Miki: I think there are quite a few history books out there and probably more academic than general books. This is another reason why I wanted to write something broad and sort of an overview of the Irish people who went there. I've read a lot, but I've visited local archives throughout the Caribbean and London of course and the Netherlands and Portugal as well. I used primary sources, witness accounts and diaries when I could to navigate the biases, especially when you are writing something Irish history, Irish affairs, I think you need to read widely from different sources, writers. Catholic and Protestant writers, for example, have their own perspective to explain the same historical events. The books written by revisionists, historians and third-party writers are also very important to us. So just read as much as I can and that's what I do so that you can form your own opinion writing voice, I think.
Mike: Yeah, your use of sources really comes through in the book. Just the amount of names that you have in the book to start with. It's incredible how many people's stories you're able to tell.
Miki: Yeah, it's interesting, you know? The local archives were absolutely brilliant because imagine it's so humid and hot, and you get to see century old documents, papers. It's just amazing. A lot of them are so unreadable, and paper changes color but still, it's just so amazing they still survive those heat and humidity. Yeah, I was amazed.
Mike: It's my firm conviction that the purpose of studying history is to provide instructive lessons for the present. What historical lessons does the story of the Caribbean Irish have to teach us?
Miki: Some people think this event occurred in a faraway land many, many years ago, but I think we are all connected. I'm not going into an esoteric spiritual argument here, but we can learn a lot from the Irish diaspora because the Irish diaspora is so unique because it was not a one-time event in history, but it occurred across centuries and continents involving diverse individuals, so that's why it's used as a screening device or a massive database. You can integrate a wide range of subjects such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, and social inequality and all the rest of it. For example, I visited Bucharest, the capital of Romania, and Sofia, Bulgaria a few years ago. These countries are the weakest economies within the EU, and what I noticed first was that these countries have few youngsters as many of them are gone to Germany or France, the UK where they can make more money, so it's kind of normal. But at the same time, I spotted cracks on the streets, derelict buildings in the city centers and graffiti on the wall, but no workers are left in the countries to fix those infrastructure and buildings, and the crime rate is getting higher.
My initial thought was that this was a bit like Dublin in the 1950s when the Irish government wants to build their country and infrastructure. All their capable workers were in England. In the late 1950s, the Irish government had to ask the workers to come home, officially ask them to come home. They said that the economy is better. It was getting better, but not significantly. It was more like a gradual improvement. But anyway, the EU definitely needs to reform. They were talking about it because of Brexit but the COVID pandemic disrupted. So anyway, as long as these European countries belong to bigger and powerful economies, there'll be not only economic but also cultural and social consequences as well. There is a case study. We can learn a lot from the Irish experience.
Mike: So, you're currently enrolled in a PhD program. What research are you working on now?
Miki: I'm looking at the Irish diaspora newspaper, Irish immigrant newspaper in London that functioned as the voice of the working-class movement in England during the mid-20th century. The purpose of this newspaper was to unite two Irelands and protect Irish people's rights in Britain. What they did was they tried to bring the Irish question and working-class people together. The working-class movement means they operated with the general left wing and anti-fascist movement, Rhodes’ base. They worked with left wing organs, trade unions, communist parties, labor parties, mainly with the London headquarters but in the three jurisdictions, London, Belfast, and Dublin.
So this newspaper was basically a political campaign tool. This newspaper’s office was also in the Kings Cross area. Right after the war, first war years, this was the only support system for Irish people in England so they helped a lot of Irish immigrants as well. Yeah, so it's a very exciting project.
Mike: Miki Garcia, thank you so much for coming on The Nazi Lies Podcast to talk about the Irish slavery myth. The book again is The Caribbean Irish: How the Slavery Myth Was Made out from Chronos Books, which provides a great introductory account of Irish indentured servitude. She also has two other books on the Irish diaspora, Rebuilding London Irish migrants in Post-War Britain and The Irish Diaspora in a Nutshell both out from The History Press. You can follow Miki Garcia on twitter @mikigarcia. Thanks once again for coming on the podcast.
Miki: Thank you!
Mike: If you enjoyed what you heard and want to support The Nazi Lies Podcast, consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a one-time donation via Cash App or PayPal, both username Nazi Lies.
[Theme song]
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Mike Isaacson: Is Barack Obama a lizard?
[Theme song]
Nazi SS UFOs
Lizards wearing human clothes
Hinduism’s secret codes
These are nazi liesRace and IQ are in genes
Warfare keeps the nation clean
Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine
These are nazi liesHollow earth, white genocide
Muslim’s rampant femicide
Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde
Hiter lived and no Jews diedArmy, navy, and the cops
Secret service, special ops
They protect us, not sweatshops
These are nazi liesMike: Thanks for joining us for what will probably be the weirdest episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast so far. As we all know, nazis lie about a lot of things. A lot of things. Plenty of these things are obvious: the biology of race, the history of civilization, the gravity of the Holocaust. But LIZARDS? Lizards. Today we are joined by evolutionary herpetologist Laurie Vitt to talk about lizards and why it’s extremely unlikely that humanity is ruled by a race of reptilian aliens. Dr. Vitt has his PhD from Arizona State University and is the George Lynn Cross Research Professor Emeritus at the University of Oklahoma. With Eric Pianka, he is the coauthor of Lizards: Windows to the Evolution of Diversity. Thanks for joining us, Dr. Vitt.
Laurie Vitt: You're welcome.
Mike: Okay. So before we get into the Nazi lies, I wanna talk about you and your research. How did you get into herpetology, and what has studying reptiles taught you about life on Earth?
Laurie: Well, I spent the first 11 years of my life in Billings, Montana, of all places. It's kind of a neat area in that it has a set of cliffs that go along the kind of the north side of the Yellowstone River valley, and the cliffs have lots of rocks and so on. It also has lots of rattlesnakes, bullsnakes, a few lizards, a few other things. And when I was a little kid, I grew up out in the country. And I spent my time hiking around turning rocks over and seeing what I could find, and I was bringing home snakes, frogs, turtles, scorpions, centipedes and almost anything you can imagine. And I even caught my first prairie rattlesnake when I was nine years old, and I kept it for more than a year.
So I was fascinated by virtually every animal I came in contact with, and I wanted to know everything I could about them. And unfortunately, most animal species have never really been thoroughly studied. When I discovered that, I thought, "Gee, this is something that might be pretty fun to do." Since I was interested in reptiles, mostly lizards and snakes, it turns out lizards are really good models for doing any kinds of biological studies. And the reasons for that include the following: they're usually common; it's relatively easy to get permits to work with them; they do almost anything that any other organism does; they're often easy to capture; they're easy to measure; it's easy to take a blood sample to get gene sequences from, and so on. And so the kind of key thing that studying lizards taught me is that ecological traits of individual species can only be understood in the evolutionary perspective.
Now we know a lot about the evolutionary history and evolutionary relationships of lizards, so they're really good models for anything that one wants to do and put in an evolutionary framework. Put a lot more simply, why do animals do what they do?
Mike: So do you have a favorite reptile? [Laurie laughs]
Laurie: That's an interesting question. I like all of them. And just to give you an idea of how many all of them is, there are now 6,972 lizard species that have been described, and there are 3,879 snake species, and there are 201 species of things called amphisbaenians. All of these form one evolutionary group. When we think about lizards, most people think the lizard, and they have no idea what the diversity is like. The neat thing is that when you look at an evolutionary tree of lizards, snakes, and amphisbaenians, these other two groups actually radiate from within the group of things that we typically call lizard. In other words, snakes and amphisbaenians really are lizards. So that's kind of a neat little lizard fact. So I don't have a favorite reptile, I like almost all of them.
Mike: Yeah. When I was reading your book, I came across in the beginning it seemed like there's a little bit of a rivalry between those who study snakes and those who study lizards.
Laurie: Yeah, there is a little bit. But we're all good friends. [Laurie and Mike laugh] And so the rivalry really has more to do with just trying to do different kinds of studies with either snakes or lizards. I suspect that's where the kind of rivalry sort of comes from. But, yeah, there is a little bit. But we're all really good friends. [Mike laughs] And that's true throughout the world, by the way.
Mike: Okay. So now let's get into the Nazi lies. This one is popularized by former soccer player David Icke. According to Icke, the world is governed by a race of shape-shifting lizard aliens who feed off human fear and confusion. He claims that all world religions misidentified these technologically advanced creatures as gods and that insight into the lizard alien conspiracy can be gleaned from ancient religious texts. He also interprets the movie The Matrix as a factual account of how human energy from fear and confusion is harvested by these lizard people for sustenance.
So let's start small. Lizards are ectothermic or cold-blooded and can't produce their own body heat. How do lizards navigate this biological fact and why might that make maintaining a human facade difficult?
Laurie: Lizards on this planet are either active during the day or active at night depending on which group of lizards. For example, the family Gekkonidae, which is most of the geckos, most gecko species are nocturnal. Not all of them, but most of them are. And lizards that are active during the day gain heat by basking either in direct sunlight or by pressing their body against something warm like a rock. The pet trade even sells what they call hot rocks which are fake rocks with a plug-in heating element. And these allow people to keep diurnal lizards in captivity. Some lizards like geckos are nocturnal, and they're limited in distribution to warm deserts in the tropics.
If a human were not able to produce their own heat, they did have to bask in the morning to get warm enough to operate during the day or they'd have to live in tropics or warm deserts and be active at night. The other thing is while inactive, whether it's a diurnal lizard at night or a nocturnal lizard in the daytime, they would be vulnerable. These creatures would be vulnerable just like inactive lizards are. Moreover, we'd be able to spot them really easily in cold days because they'd be out basking and trying to get warm.
Mike: Okay. So as far as I'm aware, I've never heard of or seen Barack Obama basking. I guess maybe when he goes to his vacation home in Hawaii but not so much when he's in, say, Moscow.
Okay. So Icke also makes the claims these lizard creatures are super intelligent from a human perspective. What do we know about lizard cognitions that might make this claim unlikely?
Laurie: Well, we actually know quite a bit about lizard cognition. And there are no lizards that are anywhere near as intelligent as humans. And I'm going to come back to the word intelligence in a minute because it's a human-made word, but I don't know why anyone would ever expect that a hybrid of a lizard and human would be more intelligent than human. That makes no sense. So you have humans, and then you have something that's much less intelligent, and you supposedly cross them and you end up with a new thing that's more intelligent? That doesn't make any sense.
Lizards are capable of learning simple things like where food is and what they might have to do to get the food. To give you an example, half an hour ago I was sitting out on my deck with a straw and some mealworms. And I was shooting mealworms to some whiptail lizards that live in my yard, and they learned pretty quickly that the food is coming from me. And so they approached closer and closer, but these are basic survival kinds of things. And these are things that all organisms do. And they have nothing to do with understanding, for example, mathematical proofs or playing a musical instrument or creating art. Only humans do these things.
But there are some things that lizards do that are really astounding, and they have nothing to do with intelligence as we know it. For example, many lizards can lose and regenerate tails. We can't even regenerate more than fingertips. Many lizards have highly developed chemosensory systems involving the tongue and specialized neurosensory organs in the mouth. They use chemical cues to discriminate prey, identify their own species, and determine whether another individual is of them sex and even sexually receptive, all based on chemical cues alone.
So intelligence is something we define in the context of our own behaviors. And consequently, it doesn't apply very well when talking about any animal species. Could a dog, a lizard, a frog, a snake, a cow score well in an IQ test or even take one for that matter? So this whole notion, it's so absurd that all I can do is laugh. It's just completely out in space.
Mike: Out in space. [laughs] What's the smartest thing that you've seen a lizard do?
Laurie: I haven't seen this, but a friend of mine trained lizards to turn his lights on in his bedroom. And he did it using food and some other sorts of things, but he was able to teach it a real simple task. The most that I've been able to do is I've got one lizard out in the yard here that the other day he came out. I blew him a mealworm, and he ate it. And then I blew him another mealworm, and he ate it. This is a lizard that I hadn't seen since last year. And he was about 25 feet from me. And then all of a sudden, he looked at me. I was sitting in a chair, and he looked at me. And then he ran right up to me, ran up my pantleg and stopped right up on my thigh, which is where I was holding a container full of mealworms, and so I just tipped the container a little bit, and he chowed down on a bunch of the mealworms. So lizards do have memories for some things and particularly food, of course. But that's true of a lot of reptiles.
Turtles, for example, seem to have really good memories. I've had turtles in a pond that I had in Oklahoma that would recognize me after every winter. And so I'd go out in the yard. I fed them to start with. Then I'd go out in the yard, and they'd all migrate right to where I was on the shoreline. And they would do that first day they came out after spending the winter in the mud, and that went on for several years. Turtles learn that kind of stuff, but that's about it.
The other thing about it is if you think about most of the things that humans do, the reason we can do most of these things is because we have opposable thumbs and we can hold on to things. A vast majority of lizards can't hold on to anything with their feet. And so even when a male mates with a female, they have no real way to hold on. And so what they do is they bite the skin of the female while they're copulating with it. Hands alone really have given humans the ability to do a lot of stuff that most animals would never be able to do.
Mike: Speaking of biting, have you ever been bitten by a lizard? [Laurie laughs]
Laurie: I've been bitten by so many lizards, you wouldn't believe it. [Mike laughs] I've been bitten by a lot of them. I've never been bitten by Gila monsters which are venomous or some of these big varanid lizards that also seem to have sort of a venom. But I've been bitten by a lot of lizards. I've had some break the skin. I've had worse bites from turtles. Lizard bites usually aren't too bad, but some of them are fairly painful. And if they're really big lizards, they could do damage with a bite. And with big lizards I've always been really careful so that I don't get bitten. And I'm the same way with snakes. I've been collecting venomous snakes in the field since I was nine years old, and I've never been bitten by one. But I've been bitten by hundreds of non venomous snakes because I'm not as careful with non venomous snakes because I know they aren't going to do anything.
Mike: At least not do anything yet deadly. [Laurie laughs]
Laurie: Right. [laughs]
Mike: Okay. The last point I wanted to discuss is the issue of breeding. Icke claims that thousands of years ago these lizard aliens bred with humans to create a race of lizard alien demigods. Is this genetically and physiologically possible?
Laurie: In a word, no. And I'll tell you why. Genetics, first of all, mammals and lizards, we're mammals. Mammals and lizards have been separated for at least 200 million years. Lizard chromosomes vary between 20 and 40. Human chromosomes, we have 46 chromosomes. There are some other animals that have 46. There's a thing called a nilgai which is an African deer-like animal. It has 46. There's a Hawaiian amphipod. It's a little thing like a shrimp that also has 46. And chromosome number really doesn't tell us much about intelligence, but they do tell us a lot about whether animals can interbreed or not. There are other organisms that have more chromosomes than we do. Tobacco has 48, potatoes have 48, water buffaloes have 48, orangutans have 48, gorillas have 48. This is why we can't interbreed with orangutans or gorillas. Striped skunks have 50. A platypus has 52, sheep have 54, red king crab has 208. So chromosomes don't tell us anything about intelligence.
And so how could a lizard with at most 40 chromosomes possibly breed with a human with 46? The reason this is so ridiculous is because you can't get paired chromosomes during meiosis, which is the process by which we go from a diploid to a haploid cell for sperm and eggs. And you would end up with a haploid at 23 in a human, and you'd end up with a haploid of 48 in something with 48 or 24 in something with 48 chromosomes. So that just plain wouldn't work. You could not get the base pairs on a chromosome strand to line up during fertilization.
And then the other point, mammals and lizards had been separated for so long, but his argument rests on lizard aliens arriving here from somewhere else. If the lizard aliens arrived and did this, we would have to make the ridiculous assumptions that first, lizards as we know them, had evolved somewhere else which we know is not true. And two, that these aliens could get here. Now, how could an alien lizard that has feet like lizards and no opposable thumb construct some sort of a rocket ship to get here?
A third reason is that they had to have only arrived about 300,000 years ago or less because that's how long humans have been here, at least Homo sapiens. And unlike other organisms, what are the remnants of their arrival? Where are the spaceships? And if you think about chromosome numbers, going back to that, why not sheep-human hybrids? At least they have the same number of chromosomes. That would be more likely than a human-lizard chromosome.
I suspect that he would argue because lizard aliens were not real lizards they could do anything. Well, I can make up anything I want to make up, but that doesn't mean it's true. And this is typical of conspiracy theorists. They make up any set of facts that fit their theory because they fabricate stories to falsify and connect known facts.
Mike: Okay. And what about the physiology of reproduction?
Laurie: As you said earlier, mammals are warm blooded. We call this homeothermy, and we also call it endothermy. And endothermy means that we produce our own body heat which requires most of the energy that we actually take in. And the advantage to that for mammals is that we can operate at a peak level 24 hours a day because our body temperature's really high.
Well, with lizards with ectothermy, that is receiving their heat from the external environment, when it gets cold, they can barely move. And one of the things I often do in the winter is I go out and I route through things, and I find lizards and snakes that are so cold they can't move, and then I bring them in and warm them up and photograph them. And a lot of times I'll bring reptiles in and put them in the fridge to cool them down so that I can get them to sit still. So temperature is really a huge issue for these, and that's probably the biggest kind of physiological trait.
But some other things that kind of don't make sense, how did these lizard aliens survive such a long trip without food necessary to operate? Eating enough food to actually maintain operative temperatures? How did they respond to millions of bacteria, viruses, and other parasites for which they have no evolutionary history? If you think about some of the things that happened with Native Americans and have happened with native cultures in other parts of the world, modern man goes in and they bring with them diseases that those groups have never experienced. And so everybody gets sick, and a lot of people die.
Well, if something came to this planet from somewhere else and it had any semblance of a physiology like us or like lizards, the first thing that’d happen is bacteria, viruses, and other parasites would invade them like crazy. And they wouldn't have defenses because they didn't share an evolutionary history with all of those things.
And so that whole notion, it's so ridiculous. [laughs] I can't stop from laughing. It's just really hard to believe that anybody could even say something like this. And I often wonder if these people really do believe what they rant or if they're just trying to get attention.
Mike: Yeah, I don't know. He's been at it for a long time.
Laurie: Yeah. Well, it's amazing the things that are carried through history for a long time that can never be verified. Think of all the religions throughout the world. None of them can verify that their so-called god exists yet people follow these groups for thousands of years.
Mike: Okay. Well, Dr. Vitt, thank you so much for entertaining the absurd line of questioning that I've presented today and teaching us about lizards. You can read more about lizards and their incredible diversity in his book Lizards: Windows to the Evolution of Diversity co-authored with Eric Pianka out of University of California Press. Thank you again for coming on The Nazi Lies Podcast.
Laurie: You're welcome.
[Theme song]
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Mike: No critical race theory isn't racism; though it's cute you think that.
[Theme song]
Nazi SS UFOs
Lizards wearing human clothes
Hinduism’s secret codes
These are nazi liesRace and IQ are in genes
Warfare keeps the nation clean
Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine
These are nazi liesHollow earth, white genocide
Muslim’s rampant femicide
Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde
Hiter lived and no Jews diedArmy, navy, and the cops
Secret service, special ops
They protect us, not sweatshops
These are nazi liesMike: Thank you so much for joining us for our Juneteenth episode. I'm joined by two scholars today to talk about critical race theory in education. Marvin Lynn is the dean of the College of Education at Portland State University with his Ph.D. from UCLA in social sciences and education. Adrienne Dixson is a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Champaign with her Ph.D. in multicultural education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Together, they are the editors of The Handbook of Critical Race Theory in Education, an edited volume now in its second edition with contributors from many illustrious scholars in the field of critical race theory and critical race pedagogy. Thank you both for joining me on The Nazi Lies Podcast.
Adrienne Dixson: Thank you.
Mike: Okay. So, let's start out with the very basics: what is critical race theory and why is it here?
Marvin Lynn: Well, I think about critical race theory as a subfield within the law that is very focused on how race and racism are represented within the legal structure but also within the application of law in the United States. And legal scholars have been very interested in kind of documenting that historically, but also looking at the ways in which the law is unfortunately limited when it comes to protecting particularly racially marginalized people such as African Americans and so there's lots of examples of that as well. So, that's how I would describe it. It's a body of scholarship that comes out of the law.
Education scholars like myself and Adrienne have been drawing on this for many years, to try to think about how we talk about and theorize about schools and what happens in schools, particularly as it pertains to students of color and gaps in educational attainment and achievement for example. We look at classrooms; we look at curriculum; we look at policies both in higher education and in K-12 context, and we are trying to understand how race and racism are shaping all of those factors.
There's a whole number of tenets that we could describe for you that sort of reflect the principles and the values of critical race theory. For example, this idea of the permanence of racism is an idea authored by Derrick Bell who many considered to be the father of critical race theory. And he argues that racism is a permanent feature of American society because of the way in which the society was structured and so on. I should say there is some disagreement about that within the field. There are other critical race theorists who are a little bit more hopeful than that.
Another principle of critical race theory that you often hear about is intersectionality that comes out of Kimberlé Crenshaw's work, for example. And that's the idea that we have to understand the sort of unique ways in which folks of color are positioned within the racial hierarchy. So with black women, for example, are both gendered and raced, and those things cannot be separated as we consider their experiences with marginalization in our society. There are examples of court cases that have really gotten it wrong and have not been able to figure out how to really think about those things in tandem with each other, and Kimberlé Crenshaw writes about that problem. So, there are a number of other tenets that I could speak about, but those are two that I think probably people hear about the most.
Mike: Dr. Dixson, do you have anything to add?
Adrienne: I agree with what Marvin said for the most part, I think. I would want to kind of underscore in explaining what critical race theory is. For people who study discrimination or racism, it's an analytical or a theoretical frame. For most of us who identify as critical race theorists, it is more than a theoretical framework. It is a perspective on how race and racism, opportunity and inopportunity operate in the US that's grounded in a history of oppressing people of color. And that history is documented, so it's not theoretical; it's not something that is a figment of one's imagination; it is documented history.
One of the things that we try to understand is that even in spite of interventions to address that history or redress that history, we still find ourselves with kind of chronic disparities that map onto race. And so what we endeavor to do is to try to understand, well, if the legal obstacles, the de jure obstacles to opportunity, to voting, to schooling, to buying homes, to employment, if the de jure obstacles are eradicated, what accounts for the underrepresentation or the lack of opportunity? And that's where, as critical race theorists, we look at kind of how these historical scripts that emanate from de jure discrimination, how the remnants of that have found their way into our modern day kind of policy making.
So what are the kind of common sense, traditional, normal, if you will, rhetorics that we hold about people's ability and their capacity and their fit, their right, who deserves to be in, who deserves to be at an Ivy League, who deserves to be a dean, who deserves to be a professor, that kind of normality, if you will, or rhetorics about that are steeped in these histories of oppressing people of color, against white women, against people who have disabilities, against people who don't speak English as their first language, against people who identify differently from us, gender, sexuality, so we try to understand the persistence of oppressions and again, inequalities.
Mike: Okay. So even though critical race theory hasn't had the public spotlight for very long, there's already quite a cornucopia of Nazi lies surrounding it. So browsing the neo-Nazi forum, Stormfront, yields reams of results. Apparently, the Nazis have folded the critical race theory into their whole cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. One poster on the forum describes critical race theory as, "Cultural Marxism applied to law to benefit blacks and browns," that's his exact quote, "while penalizing whites." The poster then goes on to lament that it is targeting white children and even white babies. (Not sure how.) I'm not interested in having you answer to that, but what I do want to talk about is why critical race theory belongs in the classroom.
Adrienne: Yeah, well, again, I'll say it's a framing of trying to understand the persistence of inequalities. I don't know that– We've had colleagues who have tried to think and present multiple histories by centering kind of different experiences of people of color. So I think this kind of critical examination of race and racism in the US can be helpful. But I hasten to say that we're teaching critical race theory because it lends itself to this kind of hysteria, and I don't know that we've done enough thinking around what and if it's appropriate in a K-12 classroom. And by appropriate, I don't mean because kids can't handle it. I mean, how do we kind of structure curriculum in a way that maximizes the teaching and learning for kids through a critical race theory lens. So we haven't "tested" any of that, so I would say maybe it's an outlook on the US that one may be inclined to, but I don't know that it's in the classroom. And I'm not saying that it's not appropriate or it is appropriate, I just don't think we're there yet.
Mike: Okay. Marvin, do you have anything to add?
Marvin: Yeah, I would agree. I have been asked this question over and over and over again, particularly by conservative news outlets who want to claim that critical race theory is everywhere. And, you know, I watched a YouTube video today by Christopher Rufo, who really is the architect of this war against critical race theory. And it started with his friend Trump in the White House and in the executive ban last year, and it has continued with legislation all across the nation and kind of media attacks and school board wars and all kinds of things that are going on. And one of the things that he says is that critical race theory is synonymous with equity; it's synonymous with social justice; it's synonymous with a whole variety of terms and concepts and ideas that we've been using for a very long time in education that are not born of critical race theory.
Teachers, for example, have been trying to do what James Banks refers to. James Banks is a multicultural education scholar. In fact, he's one of the progenitors of multicultural education, uses the term equity pedagogy. And when he talks about equity pedagogy, he talks about teachers attempting to draw on students' firsthand knowledge and experience, their culture, their language as a way in which to teach. That is not related to what Adrienne and I have been talking about, which is critical race theory. Which is again, it's grand theory that comes out of the law and that's been applied to education. No, I don't know that critical race theory could be taught in elementary schools. Can you teach children to critically interrogate issues of race and racism? Absolutely. And that is what multicultural education tries to do, is to get kids to think critically about race.
Mike: And so before we go on to–
Adrienne: And can I add though that what's getting promoted as critical race theory in the classroom is really just a presentation of the kind of multicultural history that we have. So what the white supremacists seem to be upset with is that we're talking about the multiple histories that make up the United States. People of color didn't just emerge in 2008 when Obama became president, right? People of color have been here. And by people of color, I mean, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinx folks, Native Americans, American Indians, have been here. They've been here. And now we're talking about what does it mean for those groups that have been here, and what are their histories with the development of the United States, and the development of the United States has been contested. It hasn't been this great westward expansion and a celebration of the pioneers and people who have been here. Those histories have been again, complicated, contested, and if anything, that's what it seems to be, the pushback that people are wrongly attributing to critical race theory. Ron Takaki was talking about multiple histories decades ago. And he was not a critical race theorist. He was a historian. So again, the complication of American history is not the purview of critical race theory, and I think that's what people are misunderstanding.
Marvin: Yeah. Anything that critiques inequality in America along any lines or perspective is now considered to be critical race theory.
Mike: Yeah. So, I guess on that point, let's talk about some of the terms that are used in critical race theory. We've already covered intersectionality. Dr. Lynn, you described racial realism, which is the idea that racism is a permanent feature of the United States not an aberration from it. How about interest conversions? That was a big term that came up in your book a lot.
Adrienne: Yeah. So that's a Derrick Bell term. And what he argued is that the interests of the elite when people who are disenfranchised, people of color who are disenfranchised, the poor, that our interests will never align with the interests of the elites. And so that interest convergence isn't a strategy. And so the Brown decision is an example of interest convergence, where there was a bigger interest by elites that in some ways seemed to align with the interests of people of color who wanted to eradicate de jure racial segregation. But the way that power works is that we won't see the kind of freedom and the relief that we hope for. And if we do, it'll be short term, and the Brown decision kind of encapsulates that. So interest convergence is an analytical frame.
Again, it's a way of understanding why when an anti-discrimination or, we could say, anti-racist policy is introduced, why it doesn't do what we hope it will do. Because the kind of liberal wisdom is that if we align our interests or converge our interests with each other (we see this now with the Democrats and the Republicans) then we can somehow come up with a compromise. And what Derrick Bell was saying is that the interests of the elites are always incompatible with the needs of the disempowered, of the oppressed. And so it's not a viable strategy. It shouldn't be something that we argue for, and we will always be in the cycle of oppression and disadvantage if we try to align our interests in a way.
Mike: Yeah. And just spell it out further, what were the interests that Bell specifically noted in the Brown vs. Board decision that the elite seemed to have?
Adrienne: So in 1954, remember we were under the Red Scare, right? We were in a war for empire, right, who was going to be the superpower, was it going to be the US or was it going to be Russia? And was it going to be democracy or was it going to be communism? It was hard to sell democracy when you have consigned a whole group of people–and not just black people, Latinx people, Asian people, Native Americans–to second class citizenship. We're disenfranchised as a group, substandard everything from housing to schooling to unemployment. And so it was hard to sell democracy around the world when most of the world was black and brown. And so it was in our foreign interests to have something that– Bell would say that Brown was kind of performatory, it was political theater. So it appeared to the world that we had addressed our racial segregation issue when in fact we hadn't. Because the second Brown decision with all deliberate speed acquiesced to Southern whites who were incalcitrant. They were very clear about what they weren't going to do as related to racial segregation, and the court acquiesced to that. So that's the interest. There was the interest of black and brown people, because Latinx folks were a part of the suite of cases that made up the Brown decision, who wanted equal education.
They didn't necessarily want to go to school with white people, but what they wanted was their fair share, what they put in by way of their taxes that they would get out. And in fact, what we found is that people of color were double taxed. They were not only paying their taxes, but they were paying more for less. So they were paying in what they were supposed to pay in terms of taxes, but they weren't getting it back, and it was being siphoned to support a dual system of education that advantaged whites. And so what black folks at least in the south won was their fair share. Give me what I put in. So I don't have to go to school with whites, when I put my money in, build schools for our kids. And that's what they sought.
And Derrick Bell lamented his role in that. He has a piece called “Serving Two Masters.” And he wrote about how he and Marshall and the whole legal team were so wedded to undoing Jim Crow, which is a lofty idea. But it was on the backs of real people who were suffering in the South and suffering under a racial regime that was very violent. And so they knew the dangers of being forced to be around white folks. And they were under no illusions that just because the Supreme Court got rid of de jure racism they were somehow going to be safe.
And we know that after the Brown decision, we entered an equally racially violent time for folks of color. And so they weren't agitating to be next to white folks, what they wanted was their fair share. And so he, Bell, talking about this serving two masters, was that he was on one hand trying to serve these lofty ideals and also thinking that he was serving the people and he wasn't. He was in fact ignoring the people and not serving them. And so his book Silent Covenants was his re-imagining of Brown. What would it have been like if he had actually listened to the people? That he was going to collect their testimony and add their names to the lawsuit so that the Brown decision could be the Brown decision. What if he had actually listened to them? And that the aim wasn't to eradicate racial segregation but to just beef up Plessy, to make it in fact separate and equal, what would we be like as a country if they had pursued that track?
Mike: Yeah. So jumping back to racial realism, and for my anti-fascist listeners, it's racial realism not race realism, which is just another way of talking about biological determinism among fascists. We're talking about racial realism which is a CRT term. Can we explain that in terms of the Brown vs. Board decision? Because that was really well explained in the book.
Marvin: Sure. I think it relates very well to what Adrienne was talking about in the sense that the structure of white supremacy is such that it doesn't really allow for anything that will work directly against it or break it down. And so these gains that Adrienne was talking about that communities of color can experience through policy and legislation and so on have to be sort of situated within the context of something that ultimately benefits whites. And that speaks to the sort of durability of the structure of white supremacy itself and the way in which it is maintained and its permanence. It makes allowances for shifts and changes, but as a structure, kind of always stays in place.
So that's ultimately I think how I view it. Some people would talk about revolution. Bell doesn't talk explicitly about revolution in the way that Marxists talk about that, and so I think to equate critical race theory with Marxism is a misnomer. However, I do think that implicit in this idea of racial realism is the notion that if we are ever going to overcome it, or if it's ever going to change, that we do have to really look at the sort of political, social, economic deep structures of our society and really think about how folks are arrayed within that, and reconsider a whole range of institutional formations, as well as other types of structures that are designed to serve, uplift, and uphold in advance white supremacy, unfortunately to the detriment of folks of color. So again, implicit within the notion is the need for some kind of fundamental change or shift in the way our society is structured if we were going to move beyond racism as a structure.
Adrienne: And I do want to say, Bell did have a critique of capitalism. Would he have called himself a neo-Marxist? I don't know, but he– CRT came, it was– CRT scholars initially conferenced with critical legal studies scholars because they were looking for a way of trying to again, understand how, in light of the anti-discrimination law, civil rights law, voting rights act, so on, we still had persistent inequality. And the critical legal studies was a neo-Marxist or Marxist group of scholars, and the class critique just wasn't enough. But Bell had a critique of capitalism, but I don't know that he necessarily would have called himself a Marxist per se, because they believe that there was a relationship between race and class, not just class only and not just race only.
CRT has always been kind of interdisciplinary. And to Marvin's point about racial realism, I will say that I've heard people say that critical race theory doesn't have hope or that it's full of despair. And my reading of Bell is that it, this is the racial realism piece, that this is the history that we have in the US. We have a history of racism that remakes itself at every opportunity of great agitation by people of color. So with the reconstruction being one, the civil rights movement being another, I would say there are– Barack Obama's election, although I don't think he was revolutionary, was a major kind of point in our history, and here we are again in a moment of retrenchment and extreme racial hostility on the parts of whites in response to one event, and that was the election of Barack Obama.
So again, so Bell would say, which is why he would argue for the permanence of racism, which I agree with, is that racism in the US is not going to go away. It'll show up in different forms. And so now it's showing up in restriction of voting rights, an attack on ideas, attack on teaching and learning. And so it remakes itself; it reforms itself, these formations that Marvin was talking about.
Marvin: Yeah, I think I would say too that while critical race theorists, as Adrienne points out, have a critique of maybe what I would call like rampant or rabid capitalism, we are not Marxist because Marxists primarily believe that society is structured mainly according to class and that race for example is sort of, racism is an outcome of class warfare. I don't think most critical race theorists believe that.
I think critical race theorists believe that racism is or white supremacy is what we would call the superstructure, so to speak if you want to speak in Marxist terms, and that everything else is connected to and related to that including class. Not to suggest that that capitalism isn't a powerful force and system in and of itself. It is. But that, I think we would argue that white supremacy is as powerful a force, which would be a big difference between critical race theorists and Marxists in terms of their thinking. And these forces reinforce each other, just like sexism and homophobia and Islamophobia, all of these -isms reinforce each other in different ways and support a system that is inherently unequal.
Mike: Okay. So I guess more on the terminology, how about we talk about whiteness as property, and I guess first define what whiteness means in critical race theory,
Marvin: People have described Cheryl Harris's work as being a critique of capitalism and may be in some ways because she is talking about the way in which white people shifted the notion of their relationship to property, that native people in this country had never viewed themselves as owners of the land, that the land is to be respected, the land is to be valued. They don't personally own it. So this idea of land ownership was a very sort of Western European idea. And unfortunately the way it was developed, the way it manifested itself, is that only a few people had ownership to land and had access to the power and the wealth that then came with land ownership. And those were essentially middle class white men.
What Cheryl Harris is pointing out is that white people's skin color, their whiteness in and of itself, gave them access to capital, to land, to power. And so their white skin is valuable and is a form of property that could be valued. And George Lipsitz and other people talk about the same kind of concept of whiteness as something that is inherently valued by white people.
E. B. Du Bois talks about whiteness or white skin as a psychological wage. He conducted research that sort of looked at the attitudes of white working class people and their racial attitudes in particular, and many would tell you that they would rather be a poor white person than to be a wealthy black person, because they understand inherently the value of white skin in a white supremacist racist society.So that is what in my view Cheryl Harris is talking about, is the assigned value to whiteness as a form of real property that if you compare the wealth of black people to white people, for example, you see significant difference. Melvin Oliver and [Thomas] Shapiro talked about that, and they've documented historically the wealth gaps between even black wealthy people and white wealthy people, for example. And so that's what she's talking about. It's not about trying to undermine capitalism per se, although yes, they use an inherit critique of the way in which capitalism has unfortunately further marginalized folks of color in this country through the assignment of property.
Adrienne: Yeah. I would encourage people to read it because it's a really dope article, because one of the things that she talks about is that in the US property ownership was the way in which people were conferred the franchise. And your wealth was determined by how much property you owned, and that property were people literally and land, and that whiteness functions in that same way, that one can acquire wealth based on the value of their whiteness. And that there are rules with ownership of property. So you can trade it, I mean, you can give it to someone, you can withhold it. And so it was just really beautiful how she used the metaphor property ownership and the laws related to property ownership to talk about how whiteness functions as property in the US. So that was–
Mike: Okay. Last one I want to talk about is counter storytelling.
Adrienne: Yeah. So counter storytelling is speaking back to what we would say are kind of stock narratives or master narratives about a range of things. So just if we left it in education, kind of the stock narrative about–
Mike: The achievement gap?
Adrienne: –achievement, yes, is meritocracy. Or why education is so important in the US. Education is the great equalizer. And it's the great equalizer because everyone has the same opportunities. And if you work hard, you too will achieve academically, and then your life will change miraculously. You'll be wealthy, you'll be able to do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's the stock narrative about education, public education.
And what we endeavor to do as critical race theorists is to kind of turn that stock narrative on its head and to show, because with that stock narrative the reason why then we have fewer students of color graduating from high school, or we have disparities in high school graduation rates, we have disparities in discipline rates, we have disparities in college acceptance, is because there's a problem with students of color, as opposed to questioning that stock narrative and speaking back to it with the experiences of students of color, where we know that there are problems with testing, with students being disciplined more harshly, with schools not offering certain courses, or with restrictions to access for certain courses. So those are examples of possible counter stories, that it's countering the master narrative about the status quo.
Marvin: And you know, Michael, one of the things about racism and white supremacy is that it intentionally frames or I'd say misframes folks of color. Intentionally, it puts us in what Adrienne talked about, Ronald Takaki calls an iron cage. And so the view of us and our experience is limited. And you see that on television. Look at the very limited number of depictions of black people and how we're generally depicted. I don't think I've ever seen a black education dean depicted on TV, something I've done for the last 10 years. Because in most people's eyes, they don't exist.
And it's because the frame is narrow and limited, and it's from someone else's perspective. And so what Adrienne was talking about is that counter story gives us the chance to tell our own story from our own perspective, using our own voice. And it opens up all kinds of possibilities for us to explore that are heretofore unseen, unheard, invisible. And so the counter story is very important.
I do want to say that, I think about Richard Delgado's work as well as Derrick Bell's work. If you read Derrick Bell's early work, Faces At The Bottom Of The Well, for example, is all a counter story. It's a counter narrative, a conversation between two fictionalized characters about race in America. Now the characters are fictionalized, but the issues that they talk about, the laws that they put out, everything is factual that they're discussing. And they're citing chapter and verse from certain legal cases and debating back and forth about them.
It gives the writer an opportunity to use maybe a fictionalized character or composite characters, that are a combination of different real characters, to tell stories that are actually based in fact and based in reality. A lot of scholars of color you see in the handbook and in other publications are using the counter story as a way to tell stories about their experiences of trying to get tenure and promotion in higher education and what happens in those meeting rooms when white tenured faculty are considering our cases and how they talk about our work and how they frame it. And so it gives the author the freedom to be able to tell what sometimes are very personal stories in a way that creates, I guess, a little bit of distance because the characters are fictionalized, and it appears like it's a made up story, but in fact, it's very real. It's just that as a way to protect the identity of the actual individuals, there's a fictionalized element to at least who the characters are.
Mike: So in the book, critical race theory is described not only as a theory to be taught but also a praxis to be applied in education. Marvin, I believe you take credit for coining the phrase "critical race pedagogy". What does that mean and what does it look like?
Marvin: For me at the time, this was 1999, and I was finishing my doctorate program at UCLA. I had done some research with teachers of color in New York City where I did my masters. And what I realized is that their understandings about teaching as a profession, what it meant to teach black and brown kids, what it meant to teach in an urban school, and how one goes about teaching those kids in a way that values who they are, values their living histories and so on, that that story was beginning to be told in brilliant ways by people like Gloria Ladson-Billings and Jackie Irvine and many, many others. They were focused mainly on issues of culture. And I found teachers who were very, very interested in talking in very explicit ways about race and race in the classroom and trying to draw on some principles of critical race theory as a way to help kids understand who they are as racialized individuals, but how racism is functioning in every aspect of their lives.
I didn't find the literature to really support that kind of pedagogical work in the classroom and so I found a nice connection between what these teachers were trying to articulate and critical race theory, which is really about giving voice to folks of color, but also centralizing race and racism and how it operates in our very lives, but also taking a global perspective on that too and thinking about how it functions and how it situates us more broadly. That was really my effort, to try to think about and be explicit about how teachers talk about and deal with issues of race and racism that really move beyond but also incorporate issues of culture and language and so on.
Mike: Adrienne, do you have anything to add on critical race pedagogy, critical race theory as praxis.
Adrienne: Yeah. I would say critical race theory as praxis is I think what I endeavor to do as a scholar in my work is to move beyond an article, move beyond a conference paper, move beyond just sitting at my desk to operationalize it. That means connecting on the ground with folks who are organizing against educational racism through school closings or the proliferation of charter schools. That's the kind of critical race praxis pieces that kind of make the work live beyond the page and to be a part of the organizing and the movement-making that folks are engaged in.
Mike: Okay. Well, Dr. Lynn, Dr. Dixson, thank you so much for coming on The Nazi Lies Podcast and giving the people an education in education. Again, the book is the Handbook of Critical Race Theory in Education out from Routledge, a very good book. I strongly recommend it. And thanks again for coming on the pod.
Marvin: Thank you for having me.
Adrienne: Thank you so much. Yeah, this was great. Thank you.
[Theme song]
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Mike Isaacson: Da j00z!
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Nazi SS UFOs
Lizards wearing human clothes
Hinduism’s secret codes
These are nazi liesRace and IQ are in genes
Warfare keeps the nation clean
Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine
These are nazi liesHollow earth, white genocide
Muslim’s rampant femicide
Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde
Hiter lived and no Jews diedArmy, navy, and the cops
Secret service, special ops
They protect us, not sweatshops
These are nazi liesMike: At the core of nazi lies is antisemitism. Since the Second World War it has disguised itself in many guises–Rothschilds, Soros, Bildebergs, lizard people. At its core is an all-powerful entity controlling the masses and aiming to destroy the nation through the corruption of culture and politics, which remains at the heart of fascist conspiracy theory. One of the ur-texts of Jew hatred in the 21st century is David Duke’s book “Jewish Supremacism,” which makes the claim that not only do Jews control the world, but that our religion teaches us to do so. Today, we’re joined by Ben Siegel who has his master’s in Religion, the Hebrew Bible, and Ancient Near Eastern Studies from the Claremont School of Theology. (Wow, that’s a mouthful.) Welcome to The Nazi Lies Podcast, Ben.
Ben Siegel: Thanks for having me Mike. I’m grateful for the opportunity to trash a Jew hater’s biblical scholarship.
Mike: [laughs] Very good. Okay, so before we get into Duke’s book, let’s talk a bit about how Judaism works, because it’s very unlike Christianity. Can you give us a rundown of how Jewish law and Jewish morality works?
Ben: Sure. I’ll do my best. Now the Jewish legal system, known in Hebrew as halakha, is a comprehensive framework that informs the behaviors of religious, and also frequently secular, Jews. It takes as its starting point the written text, the Torah, the biblical books of Genesis through Deuteronomy, from which it derives 613 mitzvot, meaning laws or commandments, as authoritative God-given instruction on how to live an observant Jewish life. So from those texts, considered the written Torah, what’s called the oral Torah is derived. This comprises successive centuries worth of interpretation of the written Torah by rabbis. The earliest of these is the Mishnah, which was compiled early in the second century of the common era, and the Gemara, rabbinical commentary on the Mishnah that was put together between the second and fifth centuries CE. These commentaries were collected to produce the Talmud. Now one in the Galilee region of Israel between 300 and 350 CE, known as the Jerusalem Talmud, and the second far more extensive Talmud compiled in Babylon in about 450 to 500 CE. This is the Babylonian Talmud. This is the one that people tend to cite most.
It’s really these long, extensive discourses weighing legal arguments on virtually every topic that was relevant to Jews during these periods, from personal and communal religious devotion to economic regulations to laws concerning marriage, dietary restrictions, relations with non-Jews; you name it. Now the Talmud is upheld to this day by most Jewish communities across the world as the basis for living an appropriate Jewish life in accordance with halakha and in accordance with God’s will and vision for the world.
Halakha informs Jewish ethics to a great deal as much as it undergirds legal and political concerns–a concern for ethical treatment of one’s community and one’s neighbors, stemming from the collective memory of slavery in Egypt, an ethics of solidarity, really, righteousness, compassion, and justice, in effect.
Mike: Okay, so Duke takes aim at our self-description as the chosen people. This is commonly misinterpreted. What does it mean when the Jews say we are the chosen people?
Ben: As the old saying goes, “How odd of God to choose the Jews.” So there’s this notion that God selected the Israelites for a particular theological mission, to live according to His laws, and to be a light unto nations, inspiring other people through their example. But there’s also this idea that the Jews chose God. That Abraham and his descendents embraced monotheism through a special and unique relationship with the deity. Chosenness in this sense isn’t indicative of inherent ethnic or racial superiority, as Duke argues. I’d feel safe saying he’s projecting his own white supremacist views onto the Jews here.
Mike: You don’t say.
Ben: [laughs] Yeah, I do.
Mike: Okay, so another thing that David Duke derides is our holidays. Specifically, he describes Purim and Pesach as a celebration of the slaughter of gentiles, which I find absolutely laughable. Do you want to clear that one up?
Ben: This would absolutely be hilarious if it weren’t so malicious. Pesach celebrates the liberation of the Israelite people from slavery and oppression in Egypt. Recalling the ten plagues during the seder does recognize the suffering inflicted upon the Egyptians to make this happen. But this isn’t a joyful moment. It’s typically somber. The recitation of each plague is followed by dripping a drop of wine from our cups onto our plates to signify how we ourselves are diminished by the Egyptians’ suffering.
There’s also a similarly warped misinterpretation of Purim going on here, where we celebrate the prevention of genocide against us. So in the Purim story, Haman had ordered the Jews put to death. The Megillah Esther makes it clear that the 70,000+ Persians killed at the end of the book are those sent by Haman to slaughter the Jews. And the Jews were only able to defend themselves because king Ahasuerus gives them permission to pick up swords. And to be frank, Mike, defense against genocide seems to a pretty legitimate cause for merrymaking.
Mike: Yeah, no, for sure. It’s a really fun holiday if you’ve ever celebrated it, you know. It’s a lot of dress up… I’ve heard it described as basically a combination of Halloween and New Years all wrapped into one. It’s really fun.
Ben: Sure, if you like to drink and scream, Purim is the holiday for you.
Mike: There you go. [laughs] Okay, so now let’s get into the nitty gritty. So, David Duke cites a whole bunch of scriptures to make the Jews out to be haters of all things goyishe, or non-Jewish, with scriptural references that appear to justify unscrupulous behavior towards them. First of all, before we get into that, what does the word “goy” mean?
Ben: Well it would be prudent to acknowledge that the term “goy” changes meaning slightly over time. In the biblical text, it means nation or people, not nation in the modern sense of Westphalian nation-states, but more as a homogenous ethnic identity. The Israelites were recognized as a goy here. Most notably, Exodus 19 where God promises Abraham that he will make his people “goy gadol,” a great people, Exodus 19:6. As we enter into the rabbinic period, where the Jews in the diaspora are negotiating Jewish identity as a minority population, goy predominantly takes on the meaning of non-Jew as a distinguishing marker. This interpretation of “goy” has persisted to this day, and is perhaps the most commonly recognized usage of the term.
I have seen discussions among antisemites who misinterpret it as meaning “cattle,” based on connotations in Talmudic texts. But these texts offer a strict binary worldview where “Jew” is seen as akin to human, whereas non-Jews are aligned with animals. I think it’s important to make the distinction that this framework is a legal one not necessarily a political one. Post exilic diaspora Jews did not have the kind of social power needed to foster political programs that affected the disenfranchisement of other groups typically associated with rhetorics of dehumanization.
Mike: Okay, so kind of on that point, Duke points to a number of decontextualized passages from Jewish scripture which describe gentiles in various negative ways: barbarians, animals, animal-fuckers. And I’ve got a few passages here which I’ve provided to you in advance. So there’s Gemara Kiddushin 68a, Yebamoth (and correct me on any of these pronunciations) Yebamoth 98a, Baba Mezia 114a-b, Abodah Zarah 22a-b, and Baba Mezia 108b. Can you give us a little exegesis?
Ben: I’d be happy to, but first I want to talk about how Duke sourced these texts. There’s been some commentary on him plagiarizing Kevin McDonald who is an evolutionary psychologist working out of Cal State University-Long Beach. He uses the same arguments and the citations. But it also appears that Duke took many of the translations of these texts from a book by Elizabeth Dilling, who was a far-right political activist in the 1930s, noted antisemite, who went to Nazi Germany and spoke very highly of what she saw there. So with these translations that he’s using, I think it’s important that we take it with an enormous grain of salt, first of all.
Mike: Right.
Ben: But also the thing I’ve noticed most about non-Jews who rage against the Talmud is that they haven’t read the damn thing. And frankly, I haven’t read all of it either. It’s an enormous body of text. And in that body of text there are, you know, rabbis disagreeing with each other. So one view may be held, and the exact opposite view is going to be upheld a line down. Just worth noting for when we’re looking at these texts that are obviously cherry-picked.
Mike: Right.
Ben: The first one you mentioned, Kiddushin 68a, it’s from a tractate that deals with rules pertaining to marriage and engagement laws. Now what Duke says about this is the Talmud denotes gentiles as animals. So here it’s forbidding the betrothal of an Israelite to a Canaanite maidservant. One thing, there’s no Canaanites in third century Persia at this time, so this is purely a hypothetical situation.
But it’s really this legal justification for not marrying non-Jews because of the potential for them to influence a Jew’s worship in a negative way, so that they won’t follow halakha. And there’s definitely a discussion here of identifying them as like an animal, but it’s not a similar dehumanization that we see in typical nazi rhetoric of like “Jews are cockroaches” or “Jews are vermin.” It’s like, here is this category of thing that is not us, and we cannot mix with that. Does that make sense?
Mike Yeah, I guess. Does the issue of her being a maidservant matter in a subordinate position to the person?
Ben: Some rabbis argue yes; some rabbis argue no. But really it’s more that who she is, based on this identity, is making the betrothal ineffective. It’s not considered valid.
Mike: Okay, so like–
Ben: Yeah.
Mike: Go ahead.
Ben: No, go right ahead.
Mike: Okay, yeah continuing right along, let’s go to Yebamoth 98a?
Ben: Yeah, Yebamoth deals with rules of yibbum. This is what’s commonly known as levarite marriage, where the brother of a man who died without children is permitted and encouraged to marry the widow. What Duke has this translated as is that all gentile children are animals. It doesn’t say anything of the sort here. It’s saying that the children of gentiles don’t have a father. They don’t have a patrilege. Like the offspring of a male gentile is considered no more related to him than the offspring of donkeys or horses. It’s just a way of saying that the rabbis don’t care who the kid’s dad is. It’s like, they couldn’t be bothered.
Mike: I see.
Ben: They’re not interested in the patrilege of non-Jews. They’re really more concerned with Jewish family ties.
Mike: Okay, so moving along, there’s two passages from Baba Metzia, one is 114a-b and one is 108b.
Ben: Mmhmm. Baba Metzia discusses civil matters. That is property, law of usury, other issues such as lost property and damages done to it. So the issue here is again, categorizing– Duke takes issue with the categorizing of goyim as non-human. And again, it comes down to the same thing. It’s less that they are not recognized as human, and more that it is an issue of ritual purity because they don’t adhere to the same religious standards. Therefore, they necessarily can’t contaminate certain Jewish sacred spaces.
Mike: That’s probably–
Ben: And–
Mike: Go ahead.
Ben: Yeah, sorry go ahead.
Mike: I was gonna say, it’s probably also worth noting that like many Jews, I would venture even to say most Jews, probably don’t follow a lot of these laws. [laughs]
Ben: Yeah, many of them aren’t even aware of them. You know, you can spend your entire life studying these texts and maybe come across it once. You know, there are thousands of these tractates.
Mike: And last in this category was Abodah Zarah 22a-b.
Ben: Mmhmm. [laughs] This one’s funny. Duke says gentiles prefer sex with cows. What the text is actually saying is that the animal of a Jew is more appealing to gentiles than their own wives. [laughs] So, I don’t know if this intentionally, you know, throwing some shade gentiles and their own marriage relations, but it seems more in keeping with a concern that’s held by the Talmudic sages of how do you ensure that an animal that you are sacrificing is ritually pure. That means it has no blemishes; it is handicapped in any way; but very importantly, that it has not had any sexual relations with anybody.
So Abodah Zarah, literally meaning “foreign worship” or “strange service,” it deals with how to live with people who don’t adhere to the same religious convictions. And the concern of beastiality is kind of a big, overarching theme in this text to the point that there are many discussions of concern about whether or not you can purchase a sacrificial animal from a goy. Some rabbis say no; some say yes.
Interestingly enough, there is one narrative in the text, where a goy named Dama– The rabbis go to him, and purchase a red heifer which is like a really big omen in the bible. It’s like huge. That’s like primo sacrifice. And he is upheld as a righteous goy and as someone who would never shtup his cow. So what’s really interesting here is that you’ve got these two different voices in the text that are both preserved as authoritative. One, there is the concern that the goy will engage in beastiality. The other is this one goy Dama who is upheld as an example of righteousness in regards to being able to buy, you know, a sacrificial animal for him.
Of course, Duke isn’t going to look at this text because it doesn’t serve his overall purpose as vilifying the Jewish people as anti-goy.
Mike: And before we continue, I want to inform our listeners that shtup is a Yiddish word for “having sex with.”
Ben: Yeah, literally it means “push,” but yeah, it means sex.
Mike: Alright so, Duke also makes the claim that there are different laws that Jews follow when it comes to dealing with the goyim. So he specifically points to Gittin 57a, Abadoh Zarah 67b, Sanhendrin 52b, Sanhedrin 105a-b and 106a-b. Can you explain what’s going on in those passages?
Ben: Sure, so my understanding of his gripe with Gittin 57a is what is the punishment for Jesus in the next world, saying that he will be boiled in excrement. He’s going to be punished in boiling poop, and that anyone who mocks the word of the sages will be sentenced to boiling excrement. This was his sin, as he mocked the words of the sages. And the Gemara comments come and see the difference between these sinners of Israel and the prophets of the nations of the world as Balaam, who was a prophet, wished Israel harm whereas Jesus the Nazarene, who was a Jewish sinner, sought their wellbeing.
So there is this, kind of– There’s some antagonism towards Jesus in the text because of its function as– Jesus’s function and Christianity’s function as a counter-claim to the inheritance of Abraham and of Isaac and Jacob. So there’s some theological competition going on here.
Mike: And what about Abodah Zarah 67b?
Ben: Mmhmm. “The halakha from the case of gentiles that require purging. Vessels that gentiles used for cooking that the Torah requires that one purge through fire and ritually purify before they may be used by Jews.” You know, he seems to be indicating that– Duke seems to be indicating that the text is saying that goyim are dirty. But this isn’t an argument for, like, hygienic cleaning. The ancient Israelites and Talmudic sages didn’t have a germ theory of disease. What they’re talking about is purifying these vessels for religious purposes, specifically. They have to be rededicated for their sacred use because they may have come in contact with forbidden food, with non-kosher food.
Mike: Right, so this is about the laws of kashrut, right?
Ben: Yeah, precisely. And again this is Abodah Zarah which is all about how do we do our religion properly with all of these other influences around us.
Mike: Right, okay so Sanhendrin 52b.
Ben: Yeah, this is another Jesus one. So Duke says that the person being punished in this text is Jesus, and he sees this as an anti-Jesus text. But the text doesn’t mention Jesus whatsoever. It’s a general rule for capital punishment by strangulation which is outlined in Leviticus. So this is one of your big nazi lies. He doesn’t mention– They don’t mention Jesus here.
Mike: Is this one of the ones where he mentions Balaam or something?
Ben: I believe so.
Mike: Okay, can you talk about who Balaam is, because Duke misidentifies him as Jesus.
Ben: Yeah he does that a lot. So in the book of Numbers, Balaam is a prophetic figure, identified in the text as a false prophet, who goes to send a curse against the Israelite people, and he is himself cursed for it and put to death. So he’s kind of like this figure of those who would seek the destruction the Jewish people. He’s a big bad.
Mike: Right, and since he’s in the book of Numbers which is the Torah, right?
Ben: Yeah.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, that would mean that this is, like, well before Jesus’s time, right?
Ben: Absolutely.
Mike: Like there’s no way this would have been Jesus.
Ben: For sure. Granted, there are certain Christian interpreters of the text who see Hebrew bible references to Jesus throughout.
Mike: Right.
Ben: So they kind of see Jesus as foreshadowed in so much.
Mike: Alright so, moving on, Sanhendrin 105a-b?
Ben: So this one’s interesting because it says that Balaam was a diviner by using his penis. [both laugh] And he’s one who engaged in beastiality with his donkey. So what Duke takes to be a condemnation of Jesus, because he’s misidentified Jesus with Balaam, is really kind of like textbook Talmudic condemnation of a big bad goy. Now here’s a guy who sought the destruction of the Jewish people. In the book of Numbers he’s got this talking donkey who prevents him– who tries to stop him from going forward with his mission. And we know that he was bad because, according to the Talmud, he had sex with his donkey.
There’s this major preoccupation with bestiality in the Talmud, and it is weird as hell. But it’s there, and we’ve got to deal with it. [laughs]
Mike: Okay, and Sanhendrin 106a-b.
Ben: Again, this one’s not about Jesus, but rather about Balaam who has been misidentified with Jesus. I think this is– this kind of misidentification is just indicative of Duke not doing his homework. My understanding is that he took these from Dilling, and he never fact-checked to see if, you know, this is what the text says or this is what the text identifies. You know, this is bad scholarship on his part which is probably to be expected from this guy who defrauded his own his own white supremacist organization and has a fake degree.
Mike: Right, and he even says in the book that he’s not doing anything original, that it’s just collected from other sources.
Ben: Right.
Mike: Well, since we’re on the subject of Jesus, we may as well go with the rest of the passages that I have here. So Sanhendrin 90a. I’m kind of skipping around here.
Ben: Yeah this one’s all about prohibition against idol worship. And you said this one is Jesus-related?
Mike: That’s what he said, yeah. About Christianity and Jesus, yeah.
Ben: I don’t find much to do with Jesus in this text. Jesus isn’t mentioned in this one. It’s primarily about idol worship and people who prophesize with regards to it. Maybe he’s trying to say that, like, the preoccupation with idol worship is a condemnation of Christianity, but I’m just not seeing where he’s getting Jesus out of this.
Mike: Okay then, on that same subject Shabbat 116a.
Ben: Yeah, holy books in Babylonian temples. Now is this the one where he says a goy can’t read the text?
Mike: It might be, yeah. Or a Christian can’t read the text.
Ben: Yeah, oh no, this is a really particular one. Again this one is just– There’s a lot of rhetorical violence against those who do the religion improperly or don’t treat the sacred texts as they should. You know, these are practices and artifacts that are very important to the Jewish people, so they hold them in very high regard.
Mike: So I guess moving along, Duke refers to a number of passages in the Bible that he takes to mean that Jews are preoccupied with racial integrity. (Projection much?) He points specifically to Sanhendrin 59a, Deuteronomy 7:2-6, Ezra 9:1-2 and 9:12, Leviticus 20:24, and Nehemiah 13:3. So what do these passages say and what do they actually mean?
Ben: With Sanhedrin 59a, which Sanhedrin primarily deals with criminal law, it says that “A gentile who engages in Torah study is liable to receive the death penalty. As it is stated: ‘Moses commanded us a law, an inheritance of the congregation of Jacob.’” This is from Deuteronomy 33:4. “Indicating that it is an inheritance for us, and not for them.”
So there is one sage, a rabbi Yokhanon who is arguing that goyim who study Torah, you know, they’re liable to be put to death. You know, they expose themselves to capital punishment. He’s arguing this because they view the Torah with such high esteem; it is their most sacred text. They want to preserve it.
Now this text is followed a line or two down by a counterargument. It says, “You have therefore learned that even a gentile who engages Torah study is considered like a high priest.” So you’ve got one argument saying that a goy who studies Torah is liable to be put to death, and another that says that they have an incredible status, that studying Torah gives them very high regard. But this again is one of those instances where Duke does not consider that might undermine his central thesis that Jews are bad, are always bad, and will always be bad.
Mike: Okay, so what about the Deuteronomy passages?
Ben: Deuteronomy is fascinating. We could do a whole discussion of that book in and of itself because it is–Deuteronomy in Greek means “second law”–but it is kind of a later law code that is arguably the result of a very kind of reactionary sect of Israelite theology that does not see coexistence with people who don’t worship YHWH as possible.
And rhetorically, what they are saying is when the Israelites get to the promised land, they are to commit genocide against the peoples of the land. Don’t intermarry with them because that could lead to apostasy, that could lead to illicit worship. You know, their daughters will lead you to serve other gods. The sense here is that Israel is a holy people, God has chosen them to be special unto him, and if they allow this foreign influence to affect them, that will be undermined.
Mike: Okay, and what about the Ezra text? Ezra 9:1-2 and 9:12.
Ben: Yeah, there’s some scholarship to indicate that Ezra and Nehemiah represent one scholarly tradition. So after the Babylonian empire was defeated by the Persian empire, the Persians allowed the community of Israelites that had been taken into exile, the golah community, to return to the land, to rebuild the temple, and to reestablish rule.
So one of the concerns of the returning community is this very specific idea that the reason they were exiled in the first place is because God is punishing them for worshipping other gods. And that sense also undergirds the theology of the book of Deuteronomy. So their solution is that, to prevent that from ever happening again, they have to divorce from the non-Israelite wives that they had married that might lead them into temptation.
Now this is the view of the returning community, not the community that had stayed in the land of Israel during that time. So these would have been the intelligentsia, the priestly class, the aristocracy, skilled laborers, so it’s not a normative view, but it kind of becomes normative because it becomes the dominant voice of the text, if that makes any sense. But they are saying that for the sake not just of religious purity but also to establish power for themselves, you know, the returning community has a claim to power in the land, not just because they have, you know, they have a connection to it where they are before the exile, but they are supported by the Persian imperial power. They’re making this new claim of identity and religiosity to assert that power.
Mike: Okay and what about Leviticus 20:24?
Ben: “You shall inherit their land” (“Them” being the Canaanites.) “that I will give unto you to possess it, a land that flows with milk and honey. I am the Lord your God that separated you from other people.” So this is God telling the Israelites that they will be given the promised land because God has chosen them, has separated them. The word “kodesh,” to be holy, also means separate. So it’s really a theological category, not an ethnic one. You know, the Israelites are separate from these people and are given the land because of their adherence to the covenant at Sinai, not because they are of a particular ethnic or racial background.
Mike: Okay, so we talked a little bit about kind of the somewhat genocidal tendencies I guess. And so David Duke talks about massacres perpetrated by Jews in the bible. He points to Deuteronomy 20:10-18, Isaiah 34:2-3. and Joshua 6:21 and 10:28-41. And when I mentioned Joshua to you, you kind of rolled your eyes at it.
Ben: Yeah.
Mike: So I guess let’s start with Joshua then.
Ben: Yeah, I do. Good. Joshua’s a fascinating text. Scholars pretty much agree that it has no, or little to no, basis in historical fact. You know, one of these is that, these texts Joshua 6:21, is the destruction of the city of Jericho which according to archeological records happened several hundred years prior to when this narrative is supposed to have taken place. But what’s being discussed here in 21 is the devotion of the city to the Lord, the destruction of every living thing in it. So, you know, this is absolutely a genocidal text. It’s a purification of the land by the sword and by flame.
So typically in war in the ancient near east, you could take slaves, you could take cattle as war booty. But what is being done here is the destruction of all of that, saying that everything belongs to God, and as such it must be destroyed and sacrificed unto him. But it’s also seen as a kind of justice because here are these, for lack of a better word, pagans who stand in the way of the Israelite mission, and who may also tempt the Israelites to turn away from the path of God. So it’s absolutely this violent, theologically motivated holy war, genocidal slaughter, maintained in the text.
And I do think it’s important to wrestle with these notions. You know, whether or not it actually happened, it’s still– It’s there, and it informs a great deal of thinking. It informed the colonization of the New World, whereby settlers from Europe saw themselves as Israelites and the indigenous people here as Canaanites. Robert Allen Warrior is an indigenous scholar who’s done a lot of work on this. But then, the Joshua narrative also informed many of the early Zionists, and they saw themselves as, as Rachel Haverlock called the Joshua generation. Like, Ben Gurion assembled a number of different people to do bible studies on the book of Joshua. It is a text of settler colonialism and can be used to justify that kind of political programme.
Mike: Okay so back to Deutero–
Ben: If that’s what you’re trying to do, Joshua is a good place to pull from.
Mike: Okay so back to Deuteronomy, 20:10-18. What’s being said in there?
Ben: “When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open its gates, all the people shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. If they refuse to make peace and they engage in battle, lay siege to the city.” And the ban, or kherem, is in effect there. So destroy, destroy, destroy, and leave nothing because everything is for God. It’s the same scenario– In this instance, the people in the land are given the opportunity to surrender, otherwise they are subject to the sword.
It’s very similar to the kind of warfare described in other texts from the ancient near east, whether they’re Assyrian or Babylonian. So it’s not uncommon to see this kind of siege warfare described, and it’s not necessarily unique to the Israelite people.
Mike: Right, I mean, yeah, I mean that was one of the things that happened to the Israelite people, at least in engaging the Romans, right?
Ben: Yeah, precisely.
Mike: Okay, what about Isaiah 34:2-3?
Ben: This one’s interesting because it’s not actually a narrative of slaughter. It’s a prophetic oracle delivered against the people of Edom, the Edomites, for betraying the Israelites to the Babylonians and assisting in their imperial endeavors. It’s saying that, you know, you will be destroyed. You know, the corpses of your people will lay in the street. So it’s not an actual thing that happened.
It’s part of a type of prophetic literature called oracles against the nations where the prophet of a particular book will condemn a specific people on God’s behalf. Keep in mind that the prophets aren’t really seen as their own agents. They’re the agents of God; they speak God’s word. So God through Isaiah is saying, here’s what’s going to happen to you because of your betrayal.
Mike: Okay, so this next part is probably going to need a trigger warning or something. So there’s some really strange passages that he cites about rape and virginity that I honestly haven’t looked at because by the time I got to these passages I was just tired of him being wrong every time I checked the passages he cited. So he cites Kethuboth 11b, Sanhedrin 55b and 69a-b, Yebamoth 57b, 58a, and 60b. So let’s start with Kethuboth.
Ben: Right, yeah, so here he’s– The issue is Bath Sheeba, when she gave birth to Solomon, whether or not she was six years old, or whether or not she was an earlier age. It’s not saying that six-year-olds are appropriate– or that six is an appropriate age for sexual relations with a girl. It’s arguing at what age a child can conceive. Like when is conception possible? And it’s saying that because Bath Sheeba gave birth to Solomon when she was six, it’s somewhere around that time. Yeah, this whole discourse is really gnarly.
Mike: Okay, so what about Sanhendrin 55b?
Ben: So here it’s about a girl who is three years and one day whose father has arranged for her to be married, and betrothal is through intercourse. It’s concerning the legal status of the intercourse with her, if it’s like full-fledged sex. Really here the text is examining forbidden sexual acts that cause ritual impurity and calamity. And prior to this specific quotation is a broader context of unwitting beastiality, like beastiality that you didn’t know you did. It’s not justifying sex with minors; it says that the act renders the man ritually impure and liable to be put to death. Lucky for the child, I guess lucky, is that they’re exempt from execution because they’re a minor. Small condolence I guess.
Mike: Okay so it’s basically saying the opposite of what David Duke said.
Ben: Yeah.
Mike: Okay, what about 69a-b?
Ben: I mean, this is probably a discussion of the legal ramifications of this act.
Mike: Yeah this is actually, this says exactly what you were talking about earlier. So “A maiden aged three years and a day may be acquired in marriage by coition, and if her deceased husband’s brother cohabitated with her, she becomes his.” Blah blah blah.
Ben: Yeah, because it’s Yebamoth– It’s Yebamoth, right?
Mike: No this is Sanhendrin.
Ben: Oh Sanhendrin. So this is, yeah, criminal law. So this is the liability of criminal punishment, but also these rabbis debated everything. What is the likelihood that a three-year-old is going to be married to someone who then dies and then has to be– Again they have the option to be married to their brother so that the dead brother’s lineage doesn’t end. They’re really negotiating, like, every possible eventuality that might happen just in case. You know, all of these are hypothetical situations. And, you know, they’re gross. Some of them are just really fucked up.
Mike: [laughs] Yeah Jews like to talk about a lot of weird hypotheticals. Alright so now onto the Yebamoth one. So 57b.
Ben: Yeah, Yebamoth 57b. This one I’ve got, “A maiden aged three years and a day may be acquired by marriage in coition.” So yeah, the sex act is technically allowed. It’s not condoning it. But because three-year-old girls cannot become pregnant, it’s still technically forbidden because it’s a waste of seed in non-procreative sex. So it’s saying that she can’t conceive via sexual intercourse, so it’s really forbidden because sex in this worldview is not for pleasure; it’s purely for procreation. So if you are wasting sperm engaging in this sex act, it’s a bad thing. Not going to lie, this one’s fucked up.
Mike: Yeah, what about 58a?
Ben: Um, doesn’t say anything about minors.
Mike: Really?
Ben: Just, yeah, I didn’t see anything about minors in this one.
Mike: What about rape?
Ben: Most likely. Let me just take a closer look.
Mike: Or virginity or something?
Ben: Yeah, do you have a quote on this one?
Mike: Not sure. I mean, I don’t have quotes on any of these because again I stopped looking at them.
Ben: Yeah, and a lot of it is just like– It’s kind of he said, she said. I don’t know. I don’t take David Duke’s reading of these in good faith, and I don’t think we can.
Mike: This is a weird passage. There’s something about “Through betrothal alone a woman is not entitled to eat.” This is so strange.
Ben: I mean I would lie if I said that I understood the majority of Talmudic literature.
Mike: Right.
Ben: You know, people can spend seven years reading this entire work all the way through. The law of tamurah.
Mike: Yeah, and, I mean, even– David Duke doesn’t even necessarily quote these passages. He just references them. And I guess, like you said, he probably pulls them from other sources without reading them.
Ben: Yeah, I– With this, I can’t even tell, like, what he’s arguing. Like, what is the– What issue is he taking here?
Mike: Yeah, I would suggest that our listeners read this passage and try to figure out what the fuck David Duke has a problem with.
Ben: Yeah exactly. Yeah [sarcastically] read David Duke’s book. You’ll have fun.
Mike: Yeah, no don’t read David Duke’s book, but you can read the Talmud, that’s pretty good.
Ben: Spend seven years reading the whole thing. You can do it, a daf a day.
Mike: Alright, do you have any notes on Yebamoth 60b?
Ben: So this is where the Gemara cites another ruling related to who is considered a virgin. And it’s not condoning sex with a three-year-old. It says that in the event of that happening, she remains a virgin because her hymen grows back. Like if it’s through a sex act with an adult man or if her hymen is ruptured by wood. You know, she’s still considered a virgin because it grows back. I don’t know if that’s medically true.
Mike: Yeah, I was–
Ben: Sounds like bullshit, but the issue here is virginity as it relates to being able to determine paternity in the long run.
Mike: Okay, alright, so Judaism has changed a lot since these texts were written. So what can we say about the ethos of Judaism now as it relates to these texts?
Ben: Right, obviously most Jews aren’t concerned with the majority of the issues we’ve addressed here today. You know, they don’t spend a lot of time thinking about beastiality, thank goodness. But I think if there is a single Jewish ethos, it’s an affirmation of being the people of Israel, literally meaning “to wrestle with God,” Yis-ra-el. Engagement in argument over Torah are so central to our people’s identity that even secular atheist Jews still contend with these issues. So as many different types of Jews as there are and how many different ways they approach the text, there still profoundly, proudly participating in a longstanding tradition that’s engaging with and arguing with the tradition. I think that’s the modern Jewish ethos, and it’s much the same as the ancient but adapted to the current context: How do we live a good life?
Mike: Word, well Ben Siegel, thank you so much for coming on The Nazi Lies Podcast and taking the time to do the tedious work of debunking David fucking Duke. [both laugh] You can catch Ben on Twitter and Facebook at Anarcho-Judaism.
Ben: Mike it has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.
[Theme song]
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Mike: I assure you there are fascists in the US.
[Theme song]
Nazi SS UFOs
Lizards wearing human clothes
Hinduism’s secret codes
These are nazi liesRace and IQ are in genes
Warfare keeps the nation clean
Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine
These are nazi liesHollow earth, white genocide
Muslim’s rampant femicide
Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde
Hiter lived and no Jews diedArmy, navy, and the cops
Secret service, special ops
They protect us, not sweatshops
These are nazi liesMike: One of the more pernicious lies I hear about US fascism is that it doesn’t exist, particularly in the present day. So I’m here today with journalist and sociologist Dr. Spencer Sunshine, PhD from CUNY’s Grad School. Spencer has written for Colorlines, Truthout, and The Daily Beast and has an organizing guide out through PopMob called 40 Ways to Fight Fascists: Street-Legal Tactics for Community Activists. Thanks for coming on the pod.
Spencer Sunshine: Thanks for having me on the show, Mike.
Mike: Of course! So Spencer’s here to talk about the American Nazi Party; its successor, the National Socialist White People’s Party; and its remnants today. So let’s start with a brief history of US fascism before the American Nazi Party.
Spencer: Sure, so fascism as an actual political current is about 100 years old in the United States. The first Nazi group, or Nazi cell, in the United States formed in 1922 by German expats in the Bronx. And there were probably earlier groups that were Italian Fascist groups. Like many radical political traditions that started in Europe, in the United States these were first brought to the country by immigrants from Europe.
If we look further than that, if we use fascism as a broader term involving any organized white supremacist groups, of course we’d easily go back to the 1860s and the Ku Klux Klan and similarly styled far right groups go back in the United States well before that. So fascism is a longstanding political tradition in our country. It’s a century old. The fact that people can’t acknowledge this shows something interesting about the psyche of the United States where people just can’t admit that there are radical political movements here, or that such a noxious political movement such as fascism could take fairly, what looks like permanent roots in our country.
Mike: Okay, so let’s talk about the American Nazi Party itself. How was it founded? What did it do?
Spencer: So before the war there were two groups that were pro-Nazi. There was the German American Bund, who were tied to the Nazi Party in various ways; and an American group called the Silver Shirts. As you may imagine, during the war, nazism became taboo in the country. A lot of the leaders were arrested.
After the war it took quite a while for, what then became neo-nazism, neo-nazi groups to establish themselves. There was a group called the National States Rights Party who mostly recruited from Klan members and were the core organizers for nazis, but they did not say on the– On the outside of the package it did not say that; although on the inside it was.
So the American Nazi Party was sort of special because it was the first group to openly declare itself a nazi group and to, the phrase they used was, “raise the swastika,” to actually appear in public. You know, at the time they used the old stormtrooper uniforms, these brown uniforms with a swastika armband. You rarely see it these days, but this was pretty common through the early 90s for nazi groups to do this.
So the American Nazi Party was founded in 1959. There was a precursor group in 1958 by George Lincoln Rockwell. He had done advertising; was very good. And came from a vaudeville family. This is a really crazy story, but Bob Hope was actually at his christening. He used these advertising techniques to form this group. It was designed to get media attention, and the idea was for him that conservatives could never become radical enough and could never really attract the people they needed. So by using this imagery, he could attract the kinds of people that he wanted, and he could use the presence of nazis– He used to say, “No one can ignore nazis marching in the streets.” –use this public image to gain media attention which he could then use as a recruiting tool.
The party was never very big. It continued through the 60s. They did a lot of– It was almost an agitprop kind of project. The kind of murders that we associate with the nazi movement these days– They had punch ups at rallies and stuff. But the kind of violence and murders that we associate with neo-nazism these days did not come until later, which is an interesting thing.
He was assassinated by a fellow party member in 1967. Right before then he had changed his organizing strategy. He had a very successful rally in Marquette Park, Chicago, which was actually against Martin Luther King’s plan to desegregate. It was some of his late marches doing housing desegregation in Chicago. It was in an Eastern European neighborhood, a lot of Eastern European immigrants who were resisting Black Chicagoans from moving into their neighborhood. Thousands of people came to this rally. He then changed his tack a bit. He renamed the party the National Socialist White People’s Party which is a mouthful, and we’ll call it the NSWPP from now on. And he renamed the party newspaper to White Power which is the slogan we know today that he coined. So it was a move from being an antisemitic nazi party to kind of being an aggressive white nationalist party because it was the first time that he had drawn a lot of grassroots support.
He was assassinated. He was replaced by his subordinate Matt Koehl. At first it was three people. It was Robert Lloyd, Koehl, and William Pierce (Who’s important. He later formed his own party called the National Alliance.
Mike: We’ll talk about them in a bit.
Spencer: And he wrote a very influential book called The Turner Diaries. These three that ran the party for a while, and then, what’s a nazi party without a führer? Or tin pot führer at least? Kicks the other two out. And runs the party until his death a few years ago. In 1983 the party became called New Order and actually degenerated into a Hitler-worshipping, almost private Hitler-worshipping cult. It still exists. Koehl died a few years ago and was replaced by his subordinate Martin Kerr.
Mike: So before we talk about the remnants today, I want to talk about some of the splinter groups that formed in the 70s. I’m thinking the second NSLF, the National Alliance that you mentioned, the NSPA, the NSWWP.
Spencer: A mouthful of alphabet soup.
Mike: Yes.
Spencer: So the importance of Koehl taking control is that Rockwell was a very charismatic guy. A lot of his followers really adored him. They ended up fetishizing him almost as a god-like figure. The way they had– Some of them, you know, praised him the way they had Adolf Hitler before him. In the post-war period, people had started almost worshipping and sometimes literally worshipping Hitler and made altars to him and treated him as a kind of demigod.
So Koehl did not have charisma and acted in ways that alienated most of his party membership. Over the years, especially between 1973 and 1974, a lot of the party members left; the active units, they called them units the chapters, left and formed their own groups. And this became very important because this is what laid the groundwork for there to be a decentralized neo-nazi movement in the United States, the kind of which we see today. So it laid the epistemological foundation for it because before there had been a single party, a single organization with chapters. Now there were all these separate groups that had different relationships with them and that could pursue different strategies. And they did pursue different strategies.
So the first big split was in 1970 when William Pierce is kicked out. This takes a little while for the real splintering to happen. So the first group I’ll talk about is the National Socialist Liberation Front because their influence can be felt today on the alt-right, on the terrorist wing of the neo-nazis today. It was originally the name was used in the late 60s as a college student group that William Pierce actually ran that was associated with the party. They were trying to take off the energy of the New Left. You know, there were a lot of liberation fronts was a popular name for armed new left groups. This was an attempt to recruit college students. It only got one good organizer which we can talk about later which was David Duke. It was never an independent entity.
The name was revived in 1974 when, probably the best organizer in the United States, Joseph Tommasi, who was based in Los Angeles, was suspended by the party, and he founded his own group. They used the NSLF name.
Mike: Can you talk about why he was suspended?
Spencer: He was– There’s a lot of discussion about this. Accusations that he was– Some of it was cultural clashes within the nazis. He was pulling off the counterculture. He had long hair. They didn’t like to dress in uniform. They wore like fatigues and stuff. He was accused of bringing his girlfriends over to the party headquarters.
Koehl was making all of the party members (They had bought their own headquarters. This was a time they still had physical headquarters was an emphasis.) sell their headquarters. They made all the chapters sell their headquarters buildings and give the proceeds to Koehl which angered a lot of people and caused a lot of these splits because the people themselves had bought them, and they just thought he was trying to enrich himself which he probably was. He was basically shutting the party down and making a cult around himself and taking all the money.
But there was a very interesting– What probably really prompted it is– It’s attached to the Watergate scandal. Someone in the C.R.E.E.P. (The group, the Nixon support group that got involved in Watergate, it was an acronym for them.) hired Tommasi’s nazis to help get another far right, a little more moderate, party on the ballot in California to pull votes away from Republicans. This was the American Independent Party. It has a funny history. It comes out of the George Wallace campaigns earlier. Then later, I think Cliven Bundy from the Bundy ranch actually joined. Remnants of the party exist today and have attracted people from the militia movement.
[Spencer's correction to this story: https://twitter.com/transform6789/status/1388206831630180362?s=19]
Anyway, these nazis were hired by Republicans to get another far right party on the ballot to pull votes away in a certain election. I forget the details now. I’m sorry. The party– Koehl was angry that he had made this deal. This made the newspapers. It made the New York Times and stuff. This angered the party that he had done this without their permission. And they took money from it. So that may have been– A lot of more serious people think that was the actual reason for the initial suspension. And then there was a break when Tommasi formed his own group.
The NSLF was important because they openly advocated armed resistance and bombings and such and did do a few of these, although rather moderate in Los Angeles. This was a break from the parent party which always stressed legality. While there had been violent currents in it, they were really kept kind of under the rug, and it was just a sort of wing of the party of certain people including William Pierce.
And then Tommasi didn’t last long, though. He was killed in a scuffle with members of the former party at his former headquarters. He accosted one and the guy had this kid, an 18-year-old, and he shot him. Tommasi again, another charismatic organizer, founded this group, but didn’t last long. That group however did continue it had four different leaders and continued until 1986. James Mason, who we’ll talk about later, joined that group after Tommasi’s passing.
Mike: Okay so that’s the NSLF. What about the National Alliance?
Spencer: The National Alliance is a group founded by William Pierce after he got kicked out of the NSWPP. He was flirting with Willis Carto, another major nazi leader who became, amongst other things, the main popularizer of Holocaust denial in America. They had a falling out. Carto had a falling out with everyone.
Pierce founded– The group was originally the National Youth Alliance, then became the National Alliance. It was a membership based group. They tried to recruit professionals. Pierce had been an engineering professor out in Oregon before he joined the party. He was very articulate. He did not have the sort of crass approach, you know. He produced more sophisticated propaganda as well as sort of more interesting theoretical documents. So they continued. The remnants of the group exists today. They had up to a thousand members. They ended up having a huge group property out in West Virginia. It was the headquarters building. He lived there.
He wrote a book in the 70s called The Turner Diaries which is a really badly written book. It’s a fantasy novel about how some white supremacists will form a terrorist movement, and they will help promote a race war, through terrorism will promote a race war in America. And you know this will end up in the Day of the Rope where the white supremacists kill people of color and Jews and create a white ethnostate. It’s a tremendously popular book around the world. It’s sold up to a half a million copies. You can still get it today. It still inspires people today.
So Pierce’s group, they didn’t do a lot of public actions especially till later in life. Although, their probably biggest rally was in 2002. It was a supposedly pro-Palestine rally in Washington, D.C., that blamed Israel for 9/11, and hundreds of people came to it. They tended to shy away from this stuff. But it was the biggest group, and the most serious group, in the United States for many years.
After Pierce died, of course they tried to continue the group and everyone broke up into squabbling. One of the main organizers who’s come out of it who’s still active today is Billy Roper who’s part of the Shield Wall project in Arkansas. I think there’s one chapter left. The headquarters of the party still exists. There’s been a bunch of legal fights with everyone engaged in lawsuits and various other physical conflicts with each other, and the group has sort of degenerated. So that’s the second one, that’s the National Alliance.
Mike: Okay, so let’s talk about–you actually mentioned this on Twitter kind of the other day–the NSPA.
Spencer: The NSPA actually was another one of the early splinters that left in 1970. Led by a fellow named Michael Collin. [The name is actually Frank Collin -Mike] They were based in Chicago. They had seen or taken part in Rockwell’s popular organizing in Marquette Park in the 60s, and they didn’t understand why the party wouldn’t follow up with that. And that’s what they wanted to do. Again, there was a fighting over the headquarters building.
They split off formed their own group. A very small group until they started having rallies in Marquette Park that were still resisting desegregation and attracted community support. Basically, no one wanted to side with this white community that did not want Black people to move in, and they became their champions. And part of the– The thing here is that people in the neighborhood, there were a lot of like Ukrainian immigrants, people who had been from countries that were occupied by the Nazis, who were pro-Nazi. A lot of the areas the Nazis occupied people, you know what I mean, supported them. There were a lot of people, basically, with collaborationist backgrounds, and they didn’t have a problem with this. And the nazis championed their cause.
And they would hold large rallies in Marquette Park. Some of them attracted thousands of people. They became most famous for the Skokie incident which apparently is being forgotten today by younger people. but was known to everybody in the United States of a certain age. The Chicago city tried to stop them from having their Marquette rallies by putting a bunch of legal barriers. They had to have a huge insurance– Had to take insurance out to do it that was unaffordable. So to get around this they threatened a march in Skokie, Illinois, which was a largely Jewish suburb, wealthy suburb. A lot of Holocaust survivors lived there. Skokie resisted them through legal means. Eventually the case went to the Supreme Court. It was in the national news for like a year or so. It started in 1977. Went to the Supreme Court. The ACLU championed it. The ACLU had been defending nazis before this but this became what they’re famous for. Their most famous case.
The Supreme Court upheld that local cities could not put unreasonable blocks such as insurance requirements on political groups from marching including nazis. They couldn’t stop them from using particular symbols or something. They attempted to ban that. So everyone knew there were neo-nazis in America. It also made the NSPA briefly the most important nazi group, neo-nazi group in America, because at this point there was all these splinter factions from the NSWPP and were all vying to be the most important group or to set up, or attract other groups to them, or to lead coalitions of them. There were different formulations of this. They all had, you know, weird relationships with each other as they were doing this.
So the NSPA, because of this lawsuit and the attention it got, became the most popular of these groups, and certainly the most well known of these groups briefly. It eclipsed even the parent party for a while. So that was probably the high point of attention of neo-nazism in America in the 70s. Although, throughout the decade, nazis would consistently make the newspapers. They were a very small movement; had maybe a thousand people in the movement in the US. It became, unlike in the 60s, newspapers, the media started to really love them. So there’s tons of coverage of various nazi splinter groups in the various cities for all of their actions. There’s a documentary film called California Reich. You can watch it on YouTube. We’ll talk about it in a minute. It’s about a group in California and such. There was lots of stuff like that. These two things weren’t outliers.
Mike: Okay, so–
Spencer: So Collin– Oh there’s a funny ending to it. Collin and his people, they started running for alderman and like city council in Chicago. Some of them did quite well, got like 16% of the vote. But quickly the party started to wane in popularity. Collin’s subordinates wanted to get rid of him, so they rifled through his desk and found child porn of him with young teenage boys. They turn him in to the police. He was arrested for child molestation. It also came out his father was a Jewish man who had been in a concentration camp. So there was some real deep stuff going on here. Even though he was a successful organizer, right, against the odds.
He went to jail. He was replaced by Harold Covington. We can talk about Covington if we want. He’s important in the Greensboro Massacre and then died only a few years ago. Remained an organizer. And then Covington was replaced by someone else and the party frittered away. But yeah, there was a real plot twist in that one after Skokie.
Mike: Okay, do you want to talk about the NSWWP?
Spencer: Sure, so this was a group– This was the California leader Allen Vincent. He, like everyone else, broke off of the parent party. Founded– He was important cause he was– He wasn’t a charismatic organizer, but he could attract followers, and he really liked to get in street fights just as a person. He was a good, stable organizer unlike a lot of these people. Did a lot of crazy rallies in San Francisco. So of course there were fights at his events. At one point he opened a bookstore I believe in the Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco on the same block as a synagogue that a bunch of survivors went to. His bookstore was quickly burned down.
He worked with James Mason. Worked with him for a while between 1978 and 1980. Was the editor of his paper The Stormer. Briefly, after the NSPA star faded, his group became a national group. This lasted a few years and it faded away like many of these other groups. So he was well known for the documentary California Reich was filmed about his group while it was still a chapter of the NSWPP before he broke away and became the NSWWP, just to totally confuse anybody about these acronyms.
Mike: The National Socialist White–
Spencer: White Workers Party. The original group is the National Socialist White People’s Party. His group is the National Socialist White Workers Party. Although you might think they’re more of an anticapitalist group from the parent party that wasn’t true.
He lived quite a while through the late 90s. He popped back up in the late 90s, met Jeff Shoep who at the time was running the National Socialist Movement, and became his mentor for a brief period of time. Then he passed away.
Mike: Now let’s talk about the groups that exist today or the various remnants of it today. So I was going to start with Don Black and Stormfront.
Spencer: So Don Black was originally in the National Socialist Youth Movement. It was sort of part of the parent party for people who were under eighteen. There were all these names of these other groups, so people didn’t– Their membership card didn’t say American Nazi Party or NSWPP. You know he left like many other people. Many neo-nazis, almost all neo-nazis from the 70s were in the party at least at first. That was everybody’s entre into this world.
So he had been involved in the Dominica debacle. This was in 1981. A group of white supremacists were hired to invade the Caribbean island of Dominica and overthrow the government. They’d made a deal with the– The leader had been deposed and they were going to allow the white supremacists to keep a base there. They were turned in, of course, by somebody, and they all went to jail including Don Black.
Later however, he founded Stormfront. It was an early– It wasn’t the first at all, but it became the first very popular neo-nazi website. The important thing, it had all these forums where people could have discussions. And it was publicly available, so it was easy for reporters, especially, to go look at the discussions and be able to quote from them which became very important for its visibility. And this was the biggest neo-nazi or white nationalist website really until The Daily Stormer I believe in 2016-2017.
So now it’s a bit– If you look at it, it’s clearly a web 1.0 website and looks a little old school. But it’s still the main popular site throughout the 90s and the 00s. And it’s still I think for people who are probably gen X and older who are white supremacists, it’s still the place that they hang out at. So it had a very important place in the–
You know, nazis and other white nationalists have always had a hard time because they were locked out–especially before social media in the last few years even–they were locked out of mainstream platforms. And they need to have alternative platforms. Nazis are actually early adopters to the bbs. The first Nazi or white supremacist bbs opened in 1983. It was actually founded by a former member of Hitler Youth that moved to the United States. And so they were very early adapters to this technology because it was a way for them to get around the media block out. I mean even if they printed newspapers, they couldn’t sell them at newsstands. You know even these weird tankie communist sects could sell their newspapers at least some newsstands.
Mike: Right. Okay so next up, I guess his story intersects with Don Black’s story. We’ll talk about occasional political candidate, former Klan leader, former NSLF member David Duke.
Spencer: So Duke was a member of the original college student NSLF. He essentially took it over. He was at a party conference in the early 70s, and at this conference, they said NSLF will be– The group itself is changing its name to the White Student Alliance and Duke will be the leader. And this is interesting because it shows Duke’s evolution from an outright neo-nazi– He went to school in Louisiana and would go do these free speech– There was a free speech zone, and he would go sell the NSLF newspaper and give neo-nazi speeches. It was a big– You know, he was very well known on campus for this and attracted a lot of attention. There’s pictures of him in a Nazi uniform demonstrating against one of the lefty Jewish lawyers Kunstler who had gone to speak at his school. He had a sign that said “Gas the Chicago Seven” who was this left leaning, it was this left leaning political trial in the late 60s.
So he took over this new group, and the group kept evolving. So it’s originally the National Socialist Liberation Front; then it’s the White Student Alliance; then it’s the White Youth Alliance; and then it’s the Nationalist Party. And then he forms a Ku Klux Klan group or joins one, it’s a little vague, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. And this is important because it shows his evolution from a nazi to a kind of white nationalist youth organizer– to a white nationalist student organizer to a white nationalist youth organizer to just a white nationalist organizer. So each time the pool is rippling out, and he’s trying to find the right formula that attracts the most people, from very niche to much broader.
He becomes– So he forms this newfangled Klan group that doesn’t wear hoods, and he’s very good with media. This was sort of a new thing to have somebody appear in media who was dressed nice and could talk well, wasn’t trying to– You know, Rockwell had waved swastikas in people’s faces and was trying to infuriate them, and Duke was doing exactly the opposite. Became very successful. Was very young. He was still in his twenties. He was running one of the more successful Klan groups. One of the things he’s remembered for today, he started a Klan Border Watch on the California border to attempt to patrol for illegal immigrants. There he was working with Tom Metzger who later became popular for other things as well as Louis Beam. These were two white supremacist leaders in the 80’s who promoted armed struggle. Were the most militant leaders. Started out in Duke’s Klan. And as well as Don Black. And I believe Duke married Black’s ex-wife. They were all entangled in these ways.
So after the Klan stuff he starts running for office in Louisiana and does quite well. And at one point is elected state representative in Louisiana in 1989. This is sort of the high point of the wave of conservatism that goes along with Reagan’s reign of power from 1980 to 88, which continues with Bush I to 92. There becomes a revival of popular mainstream American racism. And sort of white flight that had started is very ensconced. There’s all these racial conflicts in the late 80s and early 90s like Howard Beach and the Hasidic Jewish and Black riots in Crown Heights. So there’s an incredible amount of violent racial tension in the country at the time, and so he’s sort of taking advantage of this. He runs for other offices, does quite well, but can’t get elected again.
And then he’s mostly well known for this, and it’s the slow burn for the next few decades. He was at Charlottesville which was an interesting moment. To me, this was a sort of handing of the torch from from him to Richard Spencer as the mainstream white nationalist leader. That’s how I saw what went on. Although, you know, they didn’t actually rally at Charlottesville. The rally itself was dispersed by the police before it began. There was no speeches or ceremony which he could do this, although there was some speeches in a park later.
Mike: Let’s talk about the National Socialist Movement.
Spencer: Yes. The NSM was yet another splinter party. It was formed in 1975 by people who again had come out of the NSWPP. Robert Brannan was its leader. They were sort of going in different directions at the same time. Some of the elements, which included James Mason as well as a guy named Greg Hurls, wanted a more pro-armed struggle line. They were very close to the NSLF. Brannan wanted a more sort of traditional thing, what was called the “uniform and demonstrate” which meant that they would get people in nazi uniforms and hold a rally in public and attract a lot of media attention. People would come and protest and that would just spur that.
One of the things they did–they were based in Ohio, southern Ohio–they used to hold a “Free Rudolph Hess” rally I think for over a dozen years in Cincinnati. He was a Nazi leader. He had parachuted to Britain with the intent of creating a peace deal with the British in the early 40s I believe, and then remained imprisoned until his death. I think he committed suicide in the– I think he died in the late 80s early 90s. He lived a long time in Spandau Prison.
So this group had some popularity in the early-mid 70s. There was of course splintering of this as Mason left it and went to work with Allen Vincent’s group. And it remained a tiny group with one or two units until the 90s when the then-leader, second leader Clifford Harrington, recruited a teenager named Jeff Shoep. Harrington wasn’t a great organizer, but he did, unlike some people, understood there was a revival in neo-nazism in the 80s and 90s through the skinhead thing and wanted to recruit nazi skinheads. Got Shoep to take the party over for him, and then Shoep grew it into the leading neo-nazi party in the United States. It had dozens of chapters in the 00s in particular. I think around 2006 was its height which is a very unusual time for it to be successful.
Partly they were pulling from the rest of the movement. The National Alliance collapsed, and other groups in the movement collapsed and they were able to sort of steal their local units and absorb them. But that group still exists today. They were at Charlottesville. They make the news. They just were in the news. There was a rally in Arizona.
They’re the main group, if you want a nazi group that’s going to go and march in uniforms or use nazi symbols–instead of the old brownshirt uniforms, they use black uniforms–and put swastikas on a flag to get attention, that’s the group that will do that. So they are on their fourth leader now, Burt Colucci I believe, who like many of them just got arrested. A number of the members have murdered people over the years. A lot of people who– They’re sort of the least together group. Yeah they’re the kind of group that if you have some sort of countercultural affiliation, if you’re not interested in being a professional organizer that you might want to join, if you’re a biker, if you’re like a skinhead, and if its important for you to have a card saying you belong to a nazi party and you want to yell at people in public that you’re a nazi and beat your chest about that and talk about how much you love Adolf Hitler, this is the group for you. It’s not a sophisticated organizing project.
Mike: Alright, so you have a book in the works about this next one. Let’s talk about James Mason, Universal Order, and Siege.
Spencer: So I’ve been working on this book for a while. One day it will be done. James Mason was a teenage member of the American Nazi Party in the 1960s although he never met Rockwell. His mentor in the party was William Pierce. So he met Pierce when he was I believe sixteen years old. Pierce let Mason, who was having a hard time at home, run away from home and stay with him at the party headquarters. Taught him how to– Or got him to learn how to use a printing press which was important before computers. A lot of groups would physically produce their own newspapers themselves with their own printing presses. This helped him out since it was very difficult for nazis to find a printer that would print their publications.
So he was in the American Nazi Party. He was in it as it became the NSWPP. He hung around for a while and didn’t leave until later. But then he ended up starting to join these other splinter groups while staying in the party. He left in 76. By that time he had already helped form the NSM, and he had also joined secretly the NSLF. This was after Tommasi died, so under the second leader. And he was a supporter of the National Alliance. So at one point, he’s a super insider who’s like a member of four different neo-nazi parties. And he’s always wrangling in the mid 70s as the different groups try to create– try to become the lead group or create an alliance of different groups to overtake the NSWPP. What unites them is that they all hate Koehl who’s that leader. They can’t do it, as I said before. The NSPA become the leader for a moment because of the Skokie incident.
Mason fought with everyone. He did this thing you see from some activists who are sort of sectarian, is they get more and more theoretically specific and crankier and crankier; they fall out with more and more people until they run a project that’s really just them and whoever is helping them directly. So he has a falling out with the NSM, and he joins Allen Vincent’s group. Runs his newspaper, but he doesn’t really like Vincent because he’s not radical enough. Mason is deciding more and more that it’s hopeless to do public organizing.
He comes up with some very strange ideas, not just that nazis should engage in guerilla warfare, but at the time there starts to be these nazi serial killers. Nazis start doing these multiple murders, like Joseph Paul Franklin are serial killers. He killed up to 22 people. He was another former NSWPP member. Roved around he country as a sniper killing mixed race and other couples– Mixed race couples and others, Black people, Jews. And other people just start butchering people, either just doing these random murders or doing workplace massacres. One of the first of them was in New Rochelle by Fred Cowan in New Rochelle, New York. It’s just north of New York City in 1977. And there’s a lot of serial killers at this time. It’s the height for serial killers in America. And so Mason comes up with this theory that not just is guerilla warfare good but these racially based murders are good by nazis and by others. And that the nazis can use them as an attempt to destabilize the system–he starts calling it the system–because nazis can never work through legal means to build a party that will be able to take over the system. He’s like every time we try to do this, we get shut down. We either get shut down in the streets, or the courts shut us down, or just shut out of the media. That had been Rockwell’s strategy was to attract media attention and build an organization. He’s like, “We can’t do any of that. We really don’t need organization. We need mass chaos to disrupt the system, and only after the system is disrupted will nazis have a chance to take power.
He eventually later on starts to praise armed radical left and Black nationalist groups who are coming into conflict with the system, which he doesn’t in the 70s but he starts doing it in the 80s. So he has a falling out with Vincent. The NSLF, this is revived under its third leader in 1980, becomes public again. It had actually been absorbed into Allen Vincent’s group and then it comes back out as a separate group. He restarts Siege. It’s originally the NSLF newspaper. It’s sort of their theoretical paper. But it’s just him running it, and he’s developing these ideas about how murder can be used to forward the nazi cause. Then he comes into contact with Charles Manson. Starts to promote that Manson should be the new nazi guru, just like George Lincoln Rockwell had been, just like Adolf Hitler had been. Portrays him as this spiritual racist figure. Manson had carved a swastika in his head in prison and was sympathetic. He mentions– A lot of people don’t know he was extremely racist and antisemitic.
This creates yet another tiff between James Mason and the people he’s working with. The leader of the party at that point, the fourth leader Karl Hand, who by the way is a big fan of yours. Can I tell a story on your podcast?
Mike: Yeah.
Spencer: So do you know about the interest of Karl Hand in you?
Mike: No.
Spencer: Oh you don’t? So I actually wrote– As part of this book, I’m writing people who were involved in this movement. And Karl Hand lives upstate, runs a party called the Racial Nationalist Party of America, and he was based for a long time in upstate New York. He is obsessed with you, Mike. After your appearance on Tucker Carlson, he wanted to have a fight with you. Like some sort of, go into a boxing ring, and have a fight. He’s an older man now, he’s in his 70s. And so I wrote him, and he sent back a whole packet of literature and it included a flier about you with a description of his attempts to contact you and arrange a fist fight with you.
Mike: Huh…
Spencer: So you have a fan. You have a fan. I think he said he wrote to the school you were teaching at. Anyways you have a fan in this generation of neo-nazis. And so, anyway, Hand and Mason had a falling out. In what must have been unique in the anals of– the annals? I don’t know. You can see I read a lot and don’t know how to say certain words. In the history of American neo-nazism, they had an amicable split. Hand actually gave Mason some money to continue Siege. So after 1982 until 1986 Siege is just run by James Mason.
It’s a very small. It’s like a newsletter. He printed it himself. It was six pages long. There was almost no graphics in it. It had a sort of red– It doesn’t– Although Mason was a talented graphic designer, I think, it was very plain. It was mostly text. It had a red banner that was it. He ran it off on his own mimeograph machine. Made like 75 copies of it. So this small newsletter that was running 75 copies will become quite influential in retrospect. He ran this till 1986. After the split with the NSLF in 1982, Mason started saying it was published by the Universal Order which directly said that Charles Manson was their spiritual leader. Although, he didn’t talk about Manson that much. He never describes what Manson’s supposed to do other than, they’re not just a neo-nazi group. It’s neo-nazism and more. It was a kind of really spiritual national socialism. Although, he’s never specific about what that means. But he clearly has been enchanted by Charles Manson and essentially become a follower of him.
So this sort of peters out. He becomes more and more cynical. He even gives up that these random murders are going to do anything. He doesn’t think that the system will be able to be destabilized, but he does advocate–and this is what’s influential today– He says, “Either you can drop out and wait through the apocalypse,” you know that’s coming. He becomes convinced that the whole system is going to crumble. And this sort of pessimism is very popular in the 80s across the political spectrum. Partly driven by the Cold War and the survivalist movement. But he says, “You can hide out and wait for the end to come, and then live through it, and we’ll have our chance. Or if you’re going to go be a terrorist, do it with style. Do it in a way– Don’t just kill somebody and be killed. Do it in a way that has panache, and that will inspire people, and that’s done well. Plan it well. Don’t just freak out and shoot somebody and be killed by the police.” And this philosophy is what becomes popular with Atomwaffen remnants and others today. Like these are your two options. I think it was called “Total attack or total drop out.”
By 1986, he’s pretty burned out, and that’s the end of it. Basically in short order, his book becomes– His newsletters become found by people in the industrial music scene, by Boyd Rice, who’s this industrial musician, who’s still alive today, and that denies all of this stuff that happened. He recruits several other people. He’s in contact with Adam Parfrey, who founded Feral House Press which is still around today; [Michael] Moynihan, who was an industrial and then neo-folk musician; and Nicholas Schreck, a Satanist who’s married to Anton LaVey’s daughter Zeena. They all work to promote James Mason. They start publishing him in various things. Moynihan takes the newsletters and turns them into a book.which he publishes. It’s an anthology of the newsletters. He publishes them himself called Siege in 1993.
It becomes a cult classic. It’s promoted by this network of people. Basically it’s part of the punk rock and assorted underground music and cultural scene, there was a real right wing edge to it, part of which is a predecessor to the alt-right. People like Jim Goad who was the direct inspiration for people like Gavin McInnes of the Proud Boys. There’s a lot of nazi imagery circulating, so actual nazis can function in the scene, and it’s never clear who’s using nazi imagery ironically, or with some interest in nazism but they’re not an actual nazi, and who’s an actual nazi. It’s very unclear, and in this confusion, they can hide, circulate their things, and get some attention. And they do get attention with this book. It gets– There are interviews and it’s covered in the alternative weekly newspapers, which were very popular at the time since the internet wasn’t what it is now, many which had circulation in tens of thousands in different cities. So they were able to use this network to popularize James Mason’s ideas.
The book goes out of print. Gets reprinted in 2003 by a fellow in Montana. And he keeps it in circulation, and then it gets picked up with the alt-right, with the Iron March platform which is a discussion board that all these contemporary terrorists, alt-right terrorist groups, neo-nazi terrorist groups come out of, Atomwaffen and others come out of. And they reprint the book yet again. It continues to be circulated as a pro-terrorism cult classic.
Mike: So do you think there are any other individuals or groups worth mentioning?
Spencer: There are like scattered ones. There’s a guy named Rocky Suhayda, I believe is his name who runs a group called the American Nazi Party. It used to get a lot of attention because he was good at using social media and various internet media. So people could always quote him and say the American Nazi Party says X or Y. Although, he was just a random NSWPP member.
Art Jones came out of the party while he was in Chicago, and he’s a sort of perennial candidate there. But in 2016, the Republicans failed to run someone against him in the primary. It was in a heavily Democratic district. And so in lieu of that he became the Republican candidate for– I forget what it was, US rep or something. And he’s a nazi, a Holocaust denier. And so this was all in the news, you know “How is a Holocaust denier the Republican candidate?” This had been– This was a strategy that Nazis developed in the 70s. They would run for offices. Until the late 70s, it was a much more kind of benign movement in a way, not ideologically, but in their tactics, they had not moved into this murderous terrorism phase until a little later on. And so he continues that kind of– It’s actually a toolbox of tactics that go back into the 60s: doing things that are kind of publicity stunts to get attention, one of which is running for office. So briefly Jones got in the press. He was in the press again. He tried to run again in 2020, but the Republicans finally like, they put somebody up. I mean, this is the problem, parties have limited resources. If you’re putting someone up just to defeat somebody else in the primary even though you know you won’t win in the general, that’s a waste of your resources. It shows how nazis and other white supremacists can sort of drain resources from the mainstream in an attempt to just not let them get a foothold in the various places that they’re trying to– In the various little cracks they’re trying to stick their fingers in.
Mike: And you mentioned Harold Covington. Do you want to talk about him too?
Spencer: Sure. Covington died a couple years ago but had some influence even on the alt-right. He was again a member of the NSWPP. He had taken over the NSPA from Collin after he’d gotten Collin arrested for being a child molester and exposed him as of Jewish descent. Ran that party for a bit. He was also– Some members of his party–he was in North Carolina–took part in the Greensboro massacre in 1979 where a joint group of nazis and Klansmen had killed communists who unwisely held a “Death to the Klan” march but were not prepared for what they had prodded.
He ran for attorney general around the same time in North Carolina, state attorney general, and got 40% of the vote. There are a few other instances like this where neo-nazis were able to get a huge amount of votes around this time period. This is around the period where Duke’s– Well Duke’s elected later, I guess. So he goes to this– He does all this crazy stuff. He goes to Africa to fight in Rhodesia. He was this contentious fellow. Had falling outs with everyone.
Moves to the Pacific Northwest, and becomes the last of this old guard of people who are advocating the states in the Pacific Northwest, which are overwhelmingly white, break off from the rest of the country and form a white ethnostate. His last group was called the Northwest Front which I believe still exists today. And they would both advocate this idea, try to get involved in the various– There’s a regionalist/independence movement called Cascadia that wants to break some of that area off, but it wants a kind of lefty leaning, ecological state or regionalist entity, and so he tried to give that a specifically racist cast. So this created, again, a lot of these groups in the Cascadian movement, whatever you think about it (There’s a lot of kooks.) they had to move and take their resources just to fight the white nationalists within their ranks, to make sure the white na– Because it was popular. You go to Portland; you see people with Cascadian flags on their porches and stuff. There’s a sort of intuitive popularity for it there. So they then had to redirect resources to fight against these people, to show that they weren’t racist. It might have been good in a way because it forces groups to commit to an anti-racist stance. The presence of white nationalists sometimes does shape up these majority groups to affirm anti-racism. So maybe there is a silver lining to that.
Mike: Dr. Sunshine, thank you again for coming on The Nazi Lies Podcast. You can keep up to date with Dr. Sunshine’s writings through his newsletter the Sonnenschein Update which you can find on his website. And you can donate to his Patreon. It’s also on his website, spencersunshine.com. This has been real fun. Hope we can have you back again for a book release.
Spencer: Yeah, it was great chatting with you as always, Mike.
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