 That's your four complete name. My name is Matthew Holbriel Cochral. The last name is obviously English. Middle name is Coptic Egyptian. So typical Amaro month, you could say with your accommodations of ethnicity. This is kind of the Anglosphere Western world at this point, but I'm quite proud of it. I'm a doctoral student in history at London School of Economics more permanently. OK. But between you and me, just Matthew, please. OK, great. And how did you become interested in Holocaust denial? Well, I'm interested generally. I'll start at like a higher level of generality. I'm interested generally in how history, narratives about history shaped the contemporary world and also especially how bad narratives about history shaped the contemporary world. So I'm interested on this when it comes to the woke left, for example. The woke left has this pretty ridiculous misconception that peoples of European descent are the only ones who engaged in exploitation, cruelty, slavery when these are sadly universal human phenomena. And so I think in that respect, sensible narrative about history debunked the woke left kind of anti-white male narrative. I also think sensible narratives about history debunked the far right kind of racist, racialist message in terms of specifically that the Nazis were in great regime that they were pro-white, that they did not commit genocide against the Jews. And so this is kind of part of my broader interest, which is debunking false historical narratives that lead to bad contemporary politics, namely the Wignette neo-Nazi politics. OK, so tell me more about your journey into studying Holocaust denial. So I've been interested in German history for a number of years. And I also am interested in Arab history. And I speak Arabic. And I learned Arabic in living in the Middle East for a couple years, and also knew some growing up because my mom's immigrant from the region. And because of my interest in German history and my language skills, I was brought into the study of the connection between those two regions. So like the history of German-Orientalist scholarship regarding the Middle East. And eventually I got into the question of Nazi German policy concerning the Middle East and the Arab world during the Second World War, which is kind of a new area of research in the last 10, 15 years, which is new and by academic standards, things move very slowly. So within that framework, I started to read more about the Nazi Holocaust. Within the framework of looking at the history of Nazi Germany more generally, I started reading about the Holocaust. And initially I looked into that. I didn't think a priori of the claims have to be false. There's a lot of things academia lies about for political correctness reasons, but you just investigate the claims for Holocaust denial and you find they are false by any reasonable, empirical, historical standard, obviously false in fact. A little disappointing, I mean, really. When did you first start reading the box? Did you start with books on Holocaust denial? I did, yeah. So I read Hilberg's book. I read Gerald Reitlinger's book, Kind of the Canon and also more contemporary work by Peter Lungerich and others. So I read the mainstream scholarship and then I read the denial material. And I find that almost all the denial material, the denial memes are based on lies by omission. They're either outright fabrications, but more commonly are lies by omission. So for example, they have a meme about, oh, there was a soccer team in Auschwitz and that seems very odd why their inmates playing soccer in what is an extermination camp. But again, there's a lie by omission. Auschwitz was a vast complex with well over a million people of inmates of multiple ethnicities and the soccer players were British POWs. So that's an example of their lies by omission. They give a piece of evidence that isn't necessarily false but they take it out of context. So having read the mainstream scholarship, I pretty clearly saw through the denial memes. And I think a lot of them are constructed in bad faith at this point, frankly, although I don't, when I debate that I was discussed with them, I don't make it personal because I don't think that's productive. And I also, I could be wrong. A person couldn't believe this genuinely. So, but in terms of my assessment of the scholarship, we can use that word as a whole, I think a lot of it is based on lies by omission. All right, that was on my end. That was my sound. Who are the most important Holocaust denial scholars that you've looked into? So the most important people in print, I'd say are Carlo Matanio and Guillermo Rudolph. These are people who actually have some familiarity with the documents in the German language and some facility to construct arguments. Although I don't find that we're compelling at all. I think that they're smart. I mean, to produce what they have, it takes intelligence but I think they're hopelessly biased at best and acting in bad faith at worst. Who are they? I thought I was familiar with this genre, but who are these guys? The people who are most prominent right now are writing for the website Holocaust Handbooks. The reason that you're probably familiar with like David Irving, Mark Webber, who are educated in history. These guys are not stupid but they've rejected denial more or less. David Irving, I'll send you this video after we talk. I have this saved in my cheat sheet somewhere related to these issues but David Irving has accepted essentially the mainstream story entirely at this point based on the evidence not because he was intimidated by Jew. In fact, the clip in which he says this, he makes anti-Semitic remarks and he talks about how they may have had it coming and things like this. But I mean, which obviously I find morally perverse but I don't think it's an interesting to virtue signal about that. What is interesting is that he and the evidence has accepted the mainstream account. When was this? Because for years he was kind of debunking it. Right, right. He was very proud. This was a few years ago at the London Forum, a kind of far right group in London. He basically accepts that the five to six million number is approximately correct. And he even implicitly acknowledges Auschwitz which was, because he kind of had shifted, first he was a hardcore denier then he after his humiliating defeat in the Lipschduck trial he committed toward Auschwitz denial where he said, okay, the Einsatzgruppen mass shootings happened meaning the mass for your audience who might not know the mass shooting of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union Jewish civilians are being acknowledged that then he acknowledged the extermination of the Jews sent to the Akio and Reinhard camps. So like Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzich and Maidanec but he didn't acknowledge Auschwitz and he appears to have done so because he acknowledged the numbers and also the murder of the Hungarian Jews which happened at Auschwitz. So yeah, he seems to have acknowledged the whole story which is, he's following the evidence. So you can't begrudge him that and Mark Weber also has acknowledged at least mass killings by the Einsatzgruppen and also the extermination of Jews at the Reinhard camp. So I think that part of the reason the anti-denial side is so compelling, if you will, even to a lay person who hasn't looked into this is there are a bunch of people on our side the anti-denial side who are pro-Nazi or sympathetic to Hitler or whatever but they looked at the evidence and they accept this. Mark Weber, David Irving among them because these guys are, you can say their politics are perverse, I think they do have rather perverse taste in politics but they're smart guys who know German and they've accepted the evidence on this. But Mark Weber is still routinely called a Holocaust denier and I mean, the guy's got a masters in history and I've read a lot of his work and I've listened to a lot of his work. I'm not aware of him just making stuff up or I mean, I may disagree with him about this or that but from what I've seen, he has fidelity to the facts. Well, in an interview with Jim Rosoli who does not have fidelity to the facts he's kind of a wild-eyed he's kind of your stereotypic Park Avenue, not Park Avenue, Hollywood neo-Nazi. I kind of confused my slurs and cliches but Weber in the interview with this Holocaust denier said that Jews were exterminated in Treblinka and the Reinhardt camps and he provided reasons for believing it and also acknowledged the Einsatzgruppen. So I think that the slurred record he means not though unfair entirely because he did espouse denial views in the 90s 2000s, but his credit when he saw more documents he eventually overcame his confirmation bias and I respect that. I mean, you're not supposed to, you're supposed to virtue that but if somebody admits they were wrong or changes their views, I personally respect that. I think he had a debate with Michael Schoemer. Did you expect him to have the hardcore denial? Yeah, I did back when he had the hardcore denial views. I think one of the things that changed his mind about the Reinhardt camps at least is a diary entry from Goebbels which actually David Irving authenticated in the Russian archives that clearly refers to the fact that Jews sent to the Reinhardt camps. So the second phase of the Holocaust sending to these camps in Poland, Treblinka, Sobibor-Belzec that Goebbels clearly refers to them being liquidated or exterminated systematically these Jews. So, you know, if it's authentic and he's a high-level official that kind of tilt was approved a tilting point for Weber. It appears. And what kind of historian is Mark Weber from your studies? I don't know about his background. I've conversed him on the telephone. I find his sympathy for Nazism bizarre but I don't, he knows history. So I'll talk to, I'll talk to somebody who knows history. It's not interesting to be a virtuosical, this is a bad person for half an hour. I mean, okay, like that's just boring and I think performative. But he can talk fluidly about the documentary evidence. The reason I don't label him as a top denier or whatever is, I don't know his views on Auschwitz but I think for the most part he's acknowledged that there was a genocide of the Jews. So I wouldn't, I don't know if it's fair to put him in the camp of Matanio or Rudolf who deny that there was a genocide of the Jews. Even though it certainly was in the nineties and the views he expressed, the IHR express respect them were certainly Holocaust denial views. But Weber has obviously changed many of his positions. I don't really know what else to say about that but so the most prominent people writing right now I think we're Matanio and Guillermo Rudolf and I think the most prominent. Can you spell their names? I've not heard of these people. I can spell Rudolf's name, G-E-R-M-A-R-R-U-D-O-L-F. Matanio all you may have to look up. So I don't, it's a Talian name. I don't speak in Talian. Okay, Gimar Rudolf Holocaust Denier. Yeah, he was a, so. He's a German cast and convicted Holocaust. Yes, yes. So yeah, he's tried to shore up the forensic arguments of deniers that there were no residues of hydrogen cyanide or significant residues of hydrogen cyanide in the buildings we say were the gas chambers. His work, the chemistry of Auschwitz is, and I say this as a total layperson chemistry but although somebody who took chemistry classes, his work, the chemistry of Auschwitz strikes me as fairly flawed because the whole argument, and I'll send you, I don't have a link off hand, but I'll send you this after the interview and you can look at it for yourself. His whole argument that the level of hydrogen cyanide in the gas chambers isn't significantly higher than the level of hydrogen cyanide in random parts of Auschwitz, right? In random areas. His whole argument is skewed by one sample in the other areas of Auschwitz that he admits could have been contaminated. And it's pretty clearly, if you look at it, like a brickwork that he himself guessed because he was trying to create a control sample and then it apparently got confused with his other samples. And you can infer this by the fact that he just says, oh, this may be, so my point is if you toss out the sample that Rudolph admits may have been contaminated, maybe unreliable in his book, then his data actually proves that, it proves the point of the mainstream that there is significantly much more hydrogen cyanide in the gas chambers than in other parts of Auschwitz. And why would that be the case when the gas chambers have been dynamized and they're exposed to the wind and rain in a way that other parts of the complex are not? Why do they have so much more hydrogen cyanide? And again, if you omit the one sample that he admits may be contaminated, so maybe unreliable he admits, then it proves our point. So I think his work is quite flawed and actually either quite biased or I mean, I don't want to speculate about motives, but... And he also has no training as a historian, he's a chemist. He has no training as a historian, but I don't think that you need to have formal training. I think it's important to have some kind of extensive training in archives and language, but I wouldn't say that you have to have a graduate degree or any degree to be a historian. It's the more kind of natural, easy path, but you do need to put into work, of course. You can't just be the LARP or online and say, I'm a historian, but I would allow for the possibility of informal credentials. Okay, who was the other main guy, aside from... Carlo Mutanio. How do you say that? The last thing. Yeah, let me look it up. Mutanio. He's a Hallying guy, I'm interested in. Carlo Mutanio, Italian writer. Yeah, that should be him. And Holocaust denier, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that should be him. He's on the advisory board. Yeah, he's certainly a denier. He denies these works in these facilities. So I would label him a denier. I mean, I actually debated at some point, how should I label these people? Because I don't want to be like, virtue signaling and saying, oh, you're so bad, because denier has a majority. But ultimately, I think though, deniers are better. Because I think you're kind of cupping if you believe, as I do, that their arguments are totally unfounded to call them revisionist at the end of the day, because that is such a dignifying term. So I think denier is the best choice. Have you heard about the new Israeli documentary called The Round Number, or questioning how we got to the six million? I've heard a little bit about that, yeah. Right, so questioning how we got to the six million, that's certainly legitimate inquiry. Sure, I could talk a little bit about how I estimate the number of dead in the Holocaust. Right. And then I could talk about that. So part of what was kind of engaging intellectually in the experience of being involved in Holocaust denial as a historian, is I sort of tried to reverse engineer what had happened in the books and say like, what is their methods? I deconstruct what the mainstream books said, what are their methods? How do we know the casualties? And really the best way of estimating the casualties is first with the, I don't know, are you familiar, Luke, with the, I think you probably are, with the main kind of elements of the Orthodox Holocaust account, like the mass shootings phase, the, or no, are you not, do you want me to do this? Okay, you are, but just for your audience, so the three, there's three main stages to the Holocaust. There are mass shootings in the East. So after the Soviet Union, pardon me, the Nazis in June of 1941 invaded the Soviet Union, Reinhardt-Hydrisch commissions the Einsatzgruppen, the special action groups to comb out any people, any civilians that may be a threat to the Germans. So the Germans have conquered these areas of the Soviet Union and the Einsatzgruppen follow the proper army, the Wehrmacht and kill people who are a threat to the Germans. And eventually the Germans identify all Jews, all Jewish civilians, men, women, children as a threat to their continued, as a threat to their military presence in the Soviet Union, they start to kill Jews systematically, men, women and children. And so the, how do we know how many people were killed by the Einsatzgruppen, for example? Well, the Germans produced action reports that were broadly circulated throughout the bureaucracy. And if you simply count up the number of people the Germans say they shot, it's about, it's over, it's about 1.2 million give or take. So, and then in terms of how many people were killed in the concentration camps, this is largely based on deportation statistics. So gaps in how many were deported versus how into the camps versus how many were found in the camp system at the end of the war. Because we have very good deportation statistics about how many Jews were on trains to the camp system and then how many Jews were found at the end of the war. As well as you have the Ricard Courier reports, which talks about millions of Jews having left Europe via special treatment is under the hand-lung in the operation Reinhardt camps. And we know from other Nazi documents from Himmler that special treatment means killing. Obviously, what does that mean? People might think, but it means killing. There's other documents from the Nazis that say special treatment is to be carried out by shooting or hanging. And it clearly refers to killing. It's a code word for killing. It's defined as such in numerous other Nazi documents. So basically we have deportation statistics. We have Nazi documents estimating the numbers that have been killed by the mass shootings and in the camps. And this is how we arrive at. And also we have post-war versus pre-war census data and studies. And this is how we arrive at an estimate of about five to six million. In terms of the six million number, well, the idea of a round six million number or the idea that it can't be significantly lower couldn't be five million or 4.9 million or 5.1 million. I mean, there is symbolism here and it's a sensitive issue, but people should be able to ask questions about how do we know? First of all, how is the figure calculated? Second of all, could it be significantly lower than that sensitive issue? But it's one that free speech should support. And so I'm supportive of the work of this documentary. I haven't seen it. I don't know if it's even done yet, but I'm supportive of the work because it may not be, it may be a million or so lower. It may be, we don't quite know that the, we can say with very high certainty that it's approximately five million, but estimates start to get a little sketchy after that. We were talking about people that may have died in ghettos, may have starved to death, they've been shot by the Romanians, but the deportation statistics, the Einsatzgruppen statistics are very ironclad, whereas the number who starved in the ghettos or killed by the Romanians is a bit more dicey. So that's how you get a range of about five to six million as opposed to six million. And the idea of like a clean round number is I think obviously do be as high would it be six million rather than 5.328743. So I think it's a reasonable thing to talk about. As a Jew, how do you react to this sort of skepticism, if you will, of the idea of exactly six million? Yeah, well, obviously it wasn't exactly six million. I understand Holocaust denial because the Holocaust has become the religion of the Western world. So I can understand a reaction to that. There was no Holocaust denial until the Holocaust was turned into the religion of the Western world. Well, in terms of the religion, I would reject the term religion because I think it, well, I don't know how Jews perceive the Holocaust, but I do think remembrance is appropriate of dead relatives and it certainly happened. So now if you're talking about like anachronistic uses of the Holocaust by like woke people to say, all white men are bad because I mean, that's stupid. We should say it's stupid, but I think remembrance can be done in a dignified and compelling way and it doesn't need to be turned into a political football. Well, it is used as a political platform. Yeah, I agree with you. It's used as a bludgeon and it's become, like they have a Holocaust museum in the United States. They have Holocaust museums, I assume in Canada, all sorts of countries where there never was a Holocaust is mandatory Holocaust education in many American states. I think that's ridiculous and I can understand why many people would react very strongly against that and why there are 1,000 films about the Holocaust and nothing like that about other people's genocides. I think whenever you overstate any issue and just pound it into people and use state money to build institutions and to mandate education about this one genocide, it's understandable that there'd be reaction against it. There wasn't a Holocaust denial until the Holocaust was raided. That's actually a very interesting point that I was thinking about the other day, the last time. The eminent role in Western civilization, the Holocaust. Yeah, go ahead. After the Second World War, Holocaust denial wasn't really a thing. I mean, if you look at post-war Germany, for example, the issue just wasn't talked about very much. The Americans and other occupying forces had initially, if you look at even things like the Murgentau Plan, they initially had planned for very aggressive denazification and shaming and you see some residue of that with like the films of people, Germans being brought to concentration camps but they dropped this quite quickly. They didn't want to demoralize the Germans the Western powers didn't want to demoralize the Germans because they saw them as a future ally as a Soviet Union. And the Germans themselves, this was not a big conversation in German political culture until the Auschwitz trials in the 1960s. This was just not talked about much in the 40s and 50s. It wasn't denied, it just wasn't talked about much. When it was acknowledged, it was kind of said, okay, those were sadists, a few sadists who did this. This wasn't an expression of the German people. So actually when the Holocaust became more prominent in Western culture, that is when denial happens. Denial isn't a thing in the 1950s, for example. Right, it's only until the Holocaust is raised to sacred status and this becomes pounded on people. But I, okay, so there's two things. Wait, let me finish my point. There wasn't even, if you talked about a Holocaust in 1945 or 48 or 49, people wouldn't know what you're talking about if you were, unless you were talking about World War II. The idea that there was this special thing that gets the name Holocaust for Jewish suffering when 55 million people died in World War II. I can understand why a lot of people would have a negative reaction to that and what happens when you have a negative reaction to something, you just start debunking. So I understand the Holocaust denial impulse. Finish. So let me try to think about this. I, look, the deniers are right that this issue is publicized and that it's used in a disingenuous way. It's used to, it's used against Palestinians. They try to say that Hajime and Hussaini, like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem played some seminal role in the Holocaust is not supported by the facts at all. But that Netanyahu said that several years ago. So it is used propagandistically and denying that it is ridiculous. On the other hand, I think we're losing our moral bearings if we look at like the rounding up an extermination of kids and so on and say, and just shrug with indifference to that. I think we've, without a non-virtue signaling sense. I'm not saying people have to be obsessed with it, but I think if one is going to debunk it, as you say, one should make sure the facts are there and they're not. So I understand what you're saying and I agree it's heavily propagand. I think Norman Finkelstein made points to this effect that were quite right. But I also think there's a genuine concern for people who's like grandmas were murdered or great grandparents. I think so many Jews were murdered in this that, if you look at the percentage of the population and Jews in Europe, it's quite extraordinary the proportion that were murdered. So I understand why there's concern about it. I think the best response is to criticize the political use of it and aggressively so, and rather than engage in denial. So I don't understand the impulse denial to be honest. I understand the impulse to call out politicization and victimology based on this, but I don't understand the impulse to say, oh, your great-grandmother or mother of so-and-all who was sent to Treblinka is really alive or in Fiji or whatever. I don't understand that. I understand it because Ruth is not a sacred value when you're fighting for your people or for what you want in the world. I mean, do politicians or anyone trying to make social change, do they restrict themselves to the truth? You go for that, which you go for the jugular. And so I'm not shocked when politicians lie. I'm not shocked when activists lie. I'm not shocked- I live in a more- When people lie. I live in probably a somewhat more abstract world where I'm as a doctoral student in history where I'm looking at documents. I'm looking at the world from the eyes of somebody living in 1942 when I engaged the subject, right? I'm not looking at the politicization of this in 2021 as much, although obviously anyone who is slightly, who is non-comatose knows that it is highly politicized, of course it is. And the most reprehensible politicization of it is to justify cruelties against the Palestinians or to obscure the historical record of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians after the Nekba. But I guess we just are out of loggerheads here because I don't, I just don't understand the impulsiveness in I really like- Why do you understand the impulsiveness? Why do people lie? Because these victims didn't have, look, these victims didn't have anything to do with like some woke person invoking the cynically today, you know? Well, think about when you- They're just like, many of them are just Polish, like, you know, uneducated Poles who just love their family. They didn't have anything to do with Zionism or this stuff. You know, so I'm kind of looking at from the victim's perspective, not the people who use like, not like Alan Dershowitz using it today. Like that's obviously fake and okay, we can call that how we should, but I guess from the perspective, I guess you're in a spiritual sense, you're not just attacking, I get the impulse to attack people who are using the cynically or have created like a cottage industry out of it. I understand that, but I don't understand, but you're also in a spiritual sense and not in the sense that should be illegal. I'm totally against the laws against the Nile and so forth. We can talk about those too. So I think those are ridiculous and in the front of free speech and free inquiry. I'm emphatically opposed to those, but nevertheless, I think there's some moral culpability that shouldn't be cashed out in any kind of law, but there's some moral culpability when you're like thumbing your nose at the people, at these people in history who suffered so much. You don't have to be interested in that. I'm not saying you have to care about it. You shouldn't have to care about, but you shouldn't without evidence deny that they suffered and died, you know? That's my view, but it should be legal to do that. It shouldn't be illegal to have free speeches. You want people to fight by the markers of Queensborough rules, but I'm talking about reality. You've got empathy for the victims of the Holocaust as do I, but have you ever put yourself into the shoes of groups who have different interests than say Jews, such as, yeah, Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims that have different interests, there's a piece of land and Jews have their claims to it and Arabs have their claims for it, but only one group is going to win. Only one group is going to have sovereignty. And in the course of that conflict, everything gets used to further your group's aims. I mean, that's how the real world works. What's the most important thing for any nation is to survive. And so for Jews in the direction of the modern Jewish state of Israel as a matter of they feel the survival of their people and for Palestinians, they also feel it as a matter of survival and no sane people quibbles about matters of accuracy and truth in a fight for survival. But that's how I understand it. Sure, but I just don't, so I do have, I have much more, actually I have much more familiar because of my background also living in Arab world for a couple of years. I have more familiarity with the Arab side of this and the Israeli side and much more sympathy also. So there in the Arab world, one thing that's interesting that I think your comment kind of feeds into is if you go like to the soups, like in the Arab world, like kind of moderately intellectual culture, it's full of, if you go to like these like little bookstores, you know, it's like full of, they have Hitler stuff, pro-Hitler stuff, denial stuff. It does, but I don't say they're evil for that. I have some understanding of what, I think those are obviously bad views, but they're, this is an expression of their outrage over the ethnic cleansing in the Nekba, right? Exactly. This is an expression of their kind of contempt for people they view as an enemy. It isn't that they are just sadistic people, right? And we have to understand that. On the other hand, I don't think, if an Arab friend of mine, you know, if a Palestinian friend of mine were to say, were to ask me what my views of this are, I'm not going to condescend to him and say, I don't know, I think Mike Enoch's right about this. No, I would say this happened, but it doesn't have, but it's propagandized. It's obviously propagandized. I mean, you'd be in, I think, look, I just don't understand why can't we just say, this happened, it's really terrible, it's propagandized, and there's nothing to do with the white Americans. White Americans said, no, it's just absurd. Like the way this is used anachronistically is quite absurd. I don't think we need to validate deniers, other than defending their free speech rights, which is very important to that extent, we need to. But what we don't need to validate, there are claims that I think you agree are false. We simply need to say this episode of history has been propagandized shamelessly. But I think, again, I separate between some Polish grandma, Polish Jewish grandmother who was vaguely literate, who was murdered because of conspiracy theories in 1942, from, and just wanted to be with her family, from some Israeli who's had a very comfortable life using this as propaganda. I mean, those are just totally different expressions, you know what I mean? And I think denial attacks both of them. And I only wanna attack the second person, right? If that makes sense. Because I just think that this is totally different phenomena, you know? On the other hand, as I say, they understand the, I understand the impulse to take away this as a weapon by, as a propaganda weapon by people in Jordan or Lebanon, and it's all over the place in the Middle East. In moderately intellectual discussion, it is everywhere, like. And my friends, you know, I'm not gonna get more specific as if they, if they apply for something on a Western job, I don't wanna ruin their lives, their prospects of this. But like my friends in the region say, even people who seem liberal, like there are liberal people in the LeFont in like Jordan and Lebanon, even by moderately liberal people, not like extreme liberal by Western science, but liberal people, tolerant people, these aren't the most fanatical areas of the region. But they'll all of a sudden say sympathetic, makes sympathetic noises about Hitler. And it's not about some reading of history they have, it's just an expression of contempt for the Israelis and expression of pain about the history. So I think, I don't think it's productive because they're my friends and because I'm sympathetic to their cause. I don't want to encourage something that I think hurts them politically. I think they should say, why is this propaganda is rather than engage in denial? And you actually have an opposite political correctness in the Arab world, interestingly, because I talk to, not gonna use names again, but I talk to professors at a university in Amman, Jordan, who have looked at the evidence and concluded this happened and don't wanna talk about it, right? Because they're afraid their students will say you're some equivalent of like some Israeli toady, because you're validating their story, but they're intellectuals. They speak German, why would they, they shouldn't lie about this surely, right? Or do you think they should? It depends what's in their best interest. If there was a 5% chance that they would be assassinated, then I think they should. Well, they're not gonna be assassinated for that, of course not. They're not gonna be assassinated. What are the repercussions that they could become? The repercussions are that people will be, students will react very negatively to them. Like teaching, yeah. They're not gonna be killed. Like it's the things, the free speech issues are like in place like Jordan, for example, are you going after the government or you publicly ridiculing Islam or Christianity for that matter that you can get in trouble for that too, because they have a Christian minority that is, unlike my maternal relatives in Egypt, Jordan actually protects the, we're not treated well. Jordan actually protects the Christian minority pretty well. But you're not gonna get in trouble for having saying Holocaust is real. You're not gonna get fired. You're gonna get ugly looks at you really. I mean, but it's interesting how, it's just interesting how the political correctness works the other way in like Lebanon or Jordan, you know? You might be fired or much less killed for that now. Right, but circumstances could change. Like if there was an ISIS attack, they might become much more likely targets. You really don't wanna get on the wrong end of the people around you. I mean, that's dangerous for your livelihood. It's dangerous for your just being alive. It's dangerous for your children's marriage prospects. Most people take great care to maintain at least a neutral or positive view of them by the people around them. And it would be, it would be almost suicidal to value truth over your own welfare in that situation. That situation. Well, I don't think it's- I mean, there are also situations that you're not gonna say. I understand your point. I think in this situation it's less extreme. If a professor becomes very anti-Islam in Jordan, now that's something you wanna keep quiet about. If, but if the professor believes in the Holocaust and that's not gonna, it'll get eye rolls and nasty looks and maybe, but it's not going to destroy his or her career or much less in gendered violence. I mean, people wouldn't think that's justified. It's just this like, there's this, it's a way of saying, fuck you to Israel. That's what I think. Exactly. I mean, it's ubiquitous in like, if you go to the little bookstores that are, and one thing I really like about the Arab world by the way that the Levant in Egypt, at least, is that there's this kind of, there's a reading culture that I think we don't have as much in the United States anymore in terms of bookstores everywhere, right? Little bookstores, shabby bookstores, the La Petite books, like that's everywhere, you know, like coffee shops and you grab a beaten book and you go to the coffee shop. I like this part of their culture. But these bookstores always, like not always, but kind of the vast majority of the time have this Holocaust-nile stuff in Arabic, you know, or like pro-Hitler stuff. But I don't view that as serious. I view that as just an expression of contempt for Israel. And I don't, I don't view it as productive. I don't hate people who are involved in this. But, you know, and I understand the impulse, I even, but I don't think it's productive. And I think they don't know who their enemy is because if you engage in Holocaust-nile, you are saying, okay, these people who were murdered are my enemies and they're not, you know? Their enemies are people who are like wealthy, comfortable Jews who are engaged in, in Zionism and so forth. They're not Jewish people who died in the early, in the early to mid 20th century, you know? You accept that different groups have different interests? Of course they do. Right. So if different groups have different interests, then... I don't think it's in their interest. It may be pretentious to say that as a American half Egyptian, but I don't think it's, I don't think Holocaust-nile has served the Palestinian cause at all. I think it's just like the reaction of a wounded animal more than a strategy. Well, Holocaust-nile operates on many different IQ levels. So many people think that Holocaust-nile is all moronic because the scholarship behind it is so shoddy, but it's operating with different messages for different IQ levels. So for the under 100 IQ level, the message is it didn't happen. For the 100 to 120 IQ level, the message is now it happened, but it wasn't as significant as they say. And then the message for the over 125 IQ crowd is, yeah, it happened and we want it to happen again. So you've got all these different levels of message for depending on the IQ level of who they're talking to. Like when a politician speaks, he needs to be understood by the 90 IQ, the 95 IQ. And so he's going to say all sorts of things that he wouldn't say if he was speaking to a plus 130 IQ crowd. And so too with the Holocaust-nile, the smart ones know that it happened, they just want it to happen again. But it's socially, it's generally unacceptable to say that out loud that you want it to happen again. So instead you say, oh, I'm just questioning, and I'm just challenging certain historical orthodox. Let's say this another way. What do you, what bad things from the Palestinian perspective? Or from the American perspective, the Wignette perspective even, what bad things would happen if they just acknowledge the Holocaust happened? What kind of, because I just, this is why I'm exasperated by this because I don't understand why it would affect the Palestinian cause at all. You're exasperated because you're not putting enough effort into empathizing with these people. What bad things would happen? They would lose a punching bag. They would lose a tremendous source of energy and gleeful amusement. And they would lose an opportunity to burn their bridges to polite society, to signal to their compadres how committed they are to the cause. So, emotional energy is huge. But polite society in these circles, unless there's a, if you're in Beirut or Amman, like polite society does not, or Cairo, polite society does not, would not exclude you on the basis of engaging in Holocaust now. It would not. Now I'm talking about American Wignette. Okay, sure. They get to signal to each other that they are more hardcore. Like you can't get much more hardcore than denying the Holocaust. So they get more prestige with their fellow Holocaust. Right, because like, this is my sense listening to like, it's a speculation. My sense listening to like Enoch, for example, is, you know, if I were in his shoes, if I admitted this is true or likely true, I mean, at this point, so back in the day, if he's working as an IT guy, whatever you did, I don't remember what he did. I read like an article about him. So I read a little bit about him. An interesting background, but it's something, I think he had like more prestigious stuff, but it doesn't matter. But back in the day, when he was trying to be a member of the mainstream society, obviously engaging in Holocaust denial would be a brash thing to do and the risky thing to do. But now I think affirming the Holocaust would be the risky thing for him to do, because he loses his audience. He loses his livelihood. He would lose his power and influence. Like Enoch gets to be number one in a certain world. And all you have to do is extend a little empathy. So you think this is absurd, but you just have to put a little bit of effort into it and you can understand things from his point of view. He is number one in his world. He is commander Enoch. Like he is a big deal. He has status. He has a lively way. He may have access to women. He is loved and revered. He has places he can go stay, all over the world, maybe all over the United States. And that's taken away if he acknowledges this word. And that's taken away if he acknowledges the Holocaust. Yeah, that's actually a very interesting way of putting it. I don't think it justifies denial though at all. Like I don't know if that's what you're saying, but I think it is interesting to put yourself into his shoes. But for me at least, I mean, this sounds so fucking pretentious and virtue-signally. But for me at least, I don't know if he thinks this is true or not. But if I were a neo-Nazi or something and I knew I had to keep denying this and I realized it was true, I did the research and realized it was true or almost certainly true, it would wear on me to lie like every fucking day. Like for me at least, I'm not saying I'd never lie, but I told you the truth that I was tempted because excuse is so fucking stupid. I was tempted to lie to you about the reasons it was like for interview. So I'm not saying, oh, I don't understand, but I don't believe I would be constitutionally capable of getting up and lying like every day about this. But hundreds, thousands, thousands of people do that in the Western world right now. It seems pretty obvious. Yeah, that's true. I thought the woke stuff, yeah. They lie, yeah. So the woke, you're right, the woke stuff, people pretend to believe things they don't. Yeah, that's actually a fair point. They lie constantly. Constantly. Yeah, that's true. And it wears on some of them, but I mean, there are all sorts of areas where you simply can't say. It's a very good counter example. I have to concede that that's an excellent example. Like I assume you want a career in academia, right? So you can't do anything that would destroy that. And so if you said the truth about all sorts of, you know, issues, maybe the most important issues confronting the Western world, you would not get a career in academia and you would be shunned by every friend you've made in academia. So you have to keep quiet. I agree with that, but let's, so first of all, I don't agree if the claim is that, so there's one thing I 100% agree with. So the first thing I 100% agree with is are there a bunch of things that you have to lie about to keep your job and how the Western world has been 100% politically sensitive issues? We all know what those are. But I don't, I honestly don't think that immigration, for example, will destroy the Western world. I don't believe, I mean, we could debate that. That's a whole separate issue but I don't buy into the whole ideology. But there are all, there are true things that we cannot admit because of woke power. In terms of what I want to do, I'm looking more at continental Europe, which is in terms of the woke stuff is not as bad. I mean, Edward Dodden who has far more, you know, I don't, I don't agree with hardly anything he says about the right political order, but he has an academic position in Finland. So I think people would be surprised by how much better continental Europe is compared to the Anglosphere like Australia, Britain, United States, Canada. This is the center of the rot when it comes to woke censorship. Continental Europe is not as bad in my experience and in my correspondences. I think people will be surprised by that, but it's true. The English-speaking world is the center of this stuff. How does that, go ahead. But what you say though is actually, I have to just kind of take a deep breath, clear my throat and say, yeah, it's a really good point because people do lie constantly, right? To keep their, in bourgeois spaces, you have to just lie all the time to keep your job now. Yeah, I mean, all sorts of jobs. You have to lie. No, really, any job, if you're like a working stiff, you don't need to lie. I don't imagine truck drivers need to lie, although who knows, the woke makes it aid you at some point, but I don't, it doesn't seem to me to do. The more prestigious job, the more pressure you have to lie. Exactly, the more lying you have to do. More lying you have to do. Yeah, I mean, that's a really good point. So maybe it's just an autopilot to such an extent that I don't even think about that. Right, people don't even think about all sorts of obvious things that they have to deny. And maybe that's what Mike Enoch is doing with all the time. It's like an autopilot. Right, because why do you do something once? Like the first time you commit adultery, if you've been, say, faithful to your spouse for eight years, the first time is probably difficult, but I would expect by the 15th time it's not so difficult. Yeah. And so the... Yeah, I imagine so, you have serial adulterers who are just lying, who are just living lies all the time. And they're probably not even conscious of the fact. I'm just thinking of the lies we tell in the West as the great example you point out. They're probably not even fully conscious in a moral sense of the fact that they're lying. It's like if you're a nine-year-old who's never lied to his or her parents, they'll be like a fear. They'll be a moral dilemma. They'll be agony. But like by the time you're 15 and you're out smoking pot all the time, you're just this autopilot, right? And you don't even think of it as an expression of contempt for your parents or dislike or even disdain, you know? So yeah, I just have to acknowledge that you made a very interesting point. And I may look at them in different light at this point because yeah, people lie constantly in the West now. And I think it's sad though. I don't think we need to do it. I'll say that. I'm gonna be more explicit with my views once I'm in a safe place, as it were, and have a more established view. That's what everyone says, if I'm just gonna lie until I get this safe place and then I'm gonna tell the truth. I'm not lying though, bro. I refuse to talk about it. I haven't lied to you. I haven't said anything I don't believe. You can't claim I've said anything I haven't believed. No, I haven't told you anything I don't believe. Yeah, fair. I understand though, you're referring to a general phenomenon. But what I try to do, I can't say, the system is like aspirationally totalitarian, right? It's not totalitarian practice because we can talk and so on. Soft, it's soft, it's soft totalitarian. Well, whether it's soft or hard, it's aspirationally totalitarian. It wants to invade thought, right? It wants to invade private conversation. It doesn't just seek to control public. So like, for example, my girlfriend is Russian. You go to Russia, Russia is an authoritarian society. You cannot publicly express and if you have a prestigious job, you cannot publicly express criticism for the regime or you may lose your job. They're even a rare case of people being murdered. But Russia doesn't, the Putin regime doesn't have a totalitarian aim to like control what people are saying in a bar or in a private conversation. They don't, that isn't something that is scrutinized. Whereas the woke ideology does seek to do that. So it actually, in my view, goes beyond authoritarianism in terms of the aspiration. Now, the reason that in practice, it ends up being very soft in some cases compared to historical examples is I think we still have considerable political and institutional residues of a free society. So they've been limited in that regard. I don't think they're being limited though by their goodness or by their kind of sentimental attachment to the rule of law or individual rights. I think we saw in the summer of love, like they're willing to kill, right? Or condone killing of people of all races who stand up to them, right? The strong take what they want and the weak endure what they must. It's the way the world has always been. And the woke have power. The woke have power and they take what they want. That's a very, very, very common theme of history. I am not so cynical as to think that's inevitable. I think liberalism has involved liberalism and also human rights doctrine since the Second World War, there has been. There is something in this tradition I wish to defend that involves the powerful voluntarily seeding some of their power to exploit or to be cruel to the weak. I think the West has achieved this degree of extent that whereas the weak, like let's say some immigrant from a foreign country comes to be your maid or something or to clean. Like the way such a person would be exploited 200 years ago is not how they're exploited today. There is a sense that this person should be treated with kindness and respect, you know? Like a guest worker, hypothetical best worker in Britain or the United States. So I think liberalism has tempered this tendency, which as you say is quite right, of the weak to be exploited by the powerful, which is a theory, you call it almost a law of history, I think it's, I don't think there are quite laws, but it's as close to laws as almost anything. But I think we've moved past that in the last few centuries with the enlightenment and liberalism and human rights ideology as well. I wanna reject that, but I understand the force of what you're saying too. Obviously this is a human tendency and it is a seminal historical field, seminal historical field. Are there any Holocaust deniers or Holocaust revisionists who you think have made contributions? Knowledge? Well David Irving of course has made contributions to knowledge of history. I mean, I don't know, you know, even today, look, he's tendentious, he, when it comes to this Holocaust stuff, he also, his book on Dresden is terrible. The way he estimates casualties is completely outrageous, but he has contributed to, like I mentioned earlier, the Gerber's Diaries. He was the first to authenticate the glass plates that contained actually damning references to the extermination of the Jews in the Rhinoic Gems. Irving can authenticate this. Irving was the first person to find the private papers of Adolf Eichmann from his time in Argentina. He's found important historical documents. I mean, and I also think that Hitler's war for all of its flaws and bias is important because it's the only book by a competent, right? There's a kooks who write books like this, but Hitler's war remains the only book by a competent writer that expresses the war from the German point of view. So, and I think that's important, and I have no sympathy for the German point of view in the war. And that's not virtue, that's just true, right? I think I have sympathy for the Soviet point of view of the war actually, far more than the Germans. But Hitler's war is important because I believe truth is arrived at dialectically. And so to arrive at the truth, it's important to see what was the German perspective on the war. And so I think it's an important book in that regard. His book on Rommel was a serious contribution as well. And there was a book I haven't read by Irving, but I think it's pretty well regarded even now by historians about, I think it's about the German nuclear program. So he did make contribution, and this was not a controversial point a few decades ago. Like before his fiasco with Lipschadt, the kind of common view among Western historians was like, yeah, the guy has crackpot views on Hitler. He has a weird sympathy for Hitler, but he's really smart, he knows his stuff and his books are interesting for that reason. He always finds important new doctrines. That was kind of the take on Irving 30 years ago. Now it's he's a denier and he's all these bad things, but I don't have that much sympathy for him because he brought this lawsuit against Lipschadt. Why did he bring the lawsuit when she called him a Holocaust denier? I mean, that was a foolish move. Very foolish, you know? But did he make contributions to history? Yeah, I mean, I'm not gonna lie until you didn't. It's lying. Did you see the movie Denial? I did. So David Irving is a good looking guy, but they play him with someone who looks like a creep, and they play Deborah Lipschadt with this gorgeous Hollywood actress. I mean, I enjoyed the movie, but it was obviously highly sad. That part was really silly. I mean, yeah, I mean, when he was, I'm not gonna comment on a lady's appearance, so I'm not gonna go there. But in terms of Irving, when he was younger, he was a good looking guy and he was extraordinarily a public speaker. I mean, he could write really well. He may have even been a better public speaker than he was a writer. I mean, if you listened, I mean, he's lying sometimes, but if you listened to him speak, gosh, he really had an ability to do that. Not all of this stuff is banned, which is stupid, but I'm against that, by the way. And so when I say, I'm not lying, like if I were lying, I'd say, no, yeah, ban him, he never did anything. No, I say that he was at best just extremely contentious and so emotionally invested in this, that he destroyed evidence, and at worst, he lied. But despite that, I think there are other historians who've done that, first of all, no question, who are not dismissed. And second of all, he did make, in spite of these flaws and this perversity, he made contributions. And people, if you talk to historians in specific terms, not to say what you think of Irving, but to ask about X, Y, Z thing he did, no one really denies it, I think, that he made contributions. And he not only spurred debate, but found, has found important documents, you know. So are there any other Holocaust revisionists or denialists who have made contributions of which you're aware? I don't think so, no. I think it's just Irving. I'm trying to think of, yeah. You mean significant contributions, I think, in form, how we address in history. I think David Cole has changed the cost of scholarship. I don't agree with that at all. I think Cole's work is quite shoddy. Yeah. I disagree with that. Like, look, Cole's whole work is premised on this absurd idea that, okay, so a building that has been reconstructed is not suited to gas people. Yeah, okay, sure. But that doesn't really mean, what does that mean? Because he analyzes, so there are two kinds of forensic claims that Cole makes. First of all, he talks about, there's more residue of hydrogen cyanide in the de Lawson chambers than the gas chambers. Well, that's easily answered because it takes far more hydrogen cyanide to kill lice and to kill human beings. And that's not me saying that, that's every authority on the matter, including authorities from before the Holocaust, the German sources that describe the amount of hydrogen cyanide needed to kill lice versus to kill people in the euthanasia program. I think you're probably aware that the Germans killed before the Jews, yeah, with gas. So this is not controversial. So that point is wrong. Then the second point he makes is that this building, CREMA-1 that they say killed Jews is not suited for killing Jews. Well, it was a reconstruction. Everyone knows that. It wasn't denied that it was a reconstruction. Maybe in like the 60s or 70s, the Soviets, that's pardon me, the communists holds that I bet, but François Peper, the guy who was in charge of Auschwitz and was back then, never denied this was a reconstruction. So yeah, it's gonna be, the building is gonna look fake if you scrutinize it because it's not an original, right? Because the Germans destroyed the original. So I don't, Cole's a nice guy. I've talked to him before. Personally, he's fine, but I don't see him as having contributed to history. I see him as, I don't wanna say it'd be too mean, but I see him as having kind of delusions of grandeur thinking he had done more than he had. I mean, it's great that he clarified, I suppose, that this building isn't real, but it wasn't, this was never denied, right? Yeah. The building was a reconstruction. So I don't think Cole's work is a contribution. Although Cole is one of these people who doesn't deny the Holocaust as a whole. He just denies Auschwitz. So he acknowledges that there was a genocide of Jews in the mass shootings in Einsatzgruppen and also the Reinhardt camp. So he just denies Auschwitz, the extermination Auschwitz. So he accepts there was a genocide of Jews. He thinks just Auschwitz is not true. Yeah, I'm thinking about an analogy to Holocaust denial that is true for virtually every nation. So every nation, to the extent that it thinks about its history, thinks about a highly distorted, airbrushed version of their history. So American history is this wonderful triumph of freedom. And French history, I'm not French, but I'm sure it's wonderful and stirring. And so virtually every nation does almost the, verging on the equivalent of Holocaust denial because there's no attention paid to all the people that they slaughtered. It's just all about, our group was the victim. And so I'm just thinking out loud to you now. I haven't considered this point. It's really interesting, yeah, go ahead though. Yeah, but I'm just thinking out loud to you. It does not every nation do something in effect that's the equivalent of Holocaust denial. They're denying, they don't think about, they don't consider all the genocides that their people carried out. I wouldn't say the equivalent because not all nations have tried to wipe out an ethnic group. You sure? I mean, I don't think there's any people that hasn't tried to slaughter another people. Like in a systematic, we'll talk about slaughter. That's a different question. We're talking about a systematic attempt to wipe out an ethnic group in an organized fashion. But you can always add, that's what I mean Jewish groups do all the time. Sure, you're right. Holocaust is special because they were tracked on trains. But slaughter is being just an endemic part of the human condition. I do think genocide is different than, mere slaughter atrocities. Maybe you don't accept that, but I genuinely do. Again, like we have to in this world where there's political correctness, say, okay, when are you laughing? But I honestly just, I see a moral differentiation there. On the other hand, your point is quite right. That the Germans kind of really, not since the end of the war, by the way, but since the 68er generation, really, the German boomers repudiate their parents and grandparents and make the Nazi atrocities against Jews and Slavs a salient part of their political culture. And now there really is a sense of cultivating shame about the German history among Germans. So that's quite right that the other nations don't have this really. Although the woke stuff is pushing in that direction and the Anglosphere certainly. And in France, to the extent there's, but Macron is a proposing these people, but they're trying to do it in France as well. But you're right though, that the alternative. So if you went to high school in the 1950s in America, you would learn an airbrushed version of American history that disregards atrocities and ethnic cleansing against Native Americans, for example. You would certainly learn that. And if you went to school in the South in the 1950s, you'd learn a version of slavery that disregarded the amount of concubinage. Now rightly consider rape of slaves by Southern white guys, right? So we all do this, and except kind of the Germans aren't doing it anymore. And we, and in the West, we're moving away from it too. So it is an interesting question. I'm not saying there's no analogy there. I just think, I just do think genocide is distinct, but it is certainly true that in historical narratives of a country that think countries tell themselves that they do tend to downplay and deny the ugliness. Yeah, I agree with that. Have you read the Bible? I mean, I have, but not in a serious fashion. Well, you were aware in the first five books, the people of Israel come into the Promised Land and God commands them to wipe out every man who's on the child. Well, is that, right, like the Amalekites or whatever, but is that? Every single inhabitant of that land, but is that something that happened or is that, is the Smith house, or is it a little bit of truth? We have no evidence that it happened, but I'm just thinking off the top of my head from the biblical description says it happened. I mean, is there any moral difference between the story that's told in the Bible and what happened in World War II? No, there isn't. If that happened as described, but I don't, again, I'd have to read more about ancient history and so on, but I- No, it didn't happen, but the story says it did. So that's part of Jewish heritage. So many Jews don't want to know their history, they just want to know heritage, which is a more pretty version of their history. And so the pretty beautiful story from our point of view is that God commanded us to go in there and slaughter everyone who lived there. And that's part of our wonderful heritage. Well, I remember, it is interesting you bring this up. I remember when I went to Christian school growing up when a Catholic school from my father's side, I remember reading the story about Egypt and getting very sad because I was thinking about my maternal relatives being killed by God in the plagues that was like putting face on them. But I think we do this quite naturally and the West is not doing it anymore, but I think the question is, is the West self-flagellated as opposed to whitewashing? And is there some middle ground? I don't know, these are moral questions and political questions that have to reflect on more, but you're certainly right, there's an analogy. I think there's an important difference, but I don't deny that there's an analogy too. The important difference is genocide, but the analogy is real too, of course it's real. You're right. And Germany, another interesting point is Germany, the kind of white nationalist neo-Nazis take on this is, okay, so because they have a conspiratorial view of this, is that after the Western, the allies came in, they propagandized the Germans and hitting themselves, that's not true actually. In the 1950s, the Germans didn't hate themselves. They had a view that Hitler was an aberration. They were West Germany, they had a conservative society relatively speaking. Hitler was an aberration. World War II was Hitler's fault. World War I was not Germany's fault. That was their view more or less. This mad man had led us astray. It wasn't an honest view, because why was, of course the question left out is why in 1940 was Hitler probably the most popular out of state in Europe, but nevertheless, the view was not self-flagellating in the 1950s in Germany. It became so over time, beginning with the sons and daughters of the people who were involved in the Nazi regime, repudiating them. It was a mixture of youthful rebellion and moral consciousness, if you will, the 68er movement. So that's one thing people don't understand that this, and it's interesting because the West did not, the United States, you did not impose this shame culture on Germany. Germans imposed it on themselves. It actually emerges too. The idea that Germany was always horrible was a fringe view until the publication of the works of Fritz Fischer, who's a historian who argued, I think very unconvincingly, that Germany was also responsible, was also responsible for the First World War to the same extent that it was responsible for the Second World War, which was accepted by the 1950s, but it was also responsible for the First World War and all of Germany had German history had been a special path that was underweg to Nazism. And this is actually the mainstream view in Germany now, and I don't think it's very much. Which is ridiculous. Which is absolutely ridiculous. It's actually pretentious, because you think that it's like a teleological view that you think your country was on this unique course, and the scholarship of Fischer is very poor, by the way, to say, I agree, I'm totally normie on the Second World War, I'm happily normie because I believe it, that it was Germany's fault, it was about Hitler's cravings for labors around racism against slobs, et cetera. I don't have any revisionist views on the Organs' Second World War. The First World War, though, the Fischerite view is quite dubious, really. And he relies on misrepresentation of private correspondence. But that's like the normative view in Germany, you know? Still the day. But it's so unhistorical. I mean, the Germans gave us historicism. And you can't, Zanderfeg, the idea that people have an inevitable path to World War II, that the Germans are in genocide, is just so unhistorical that Hitler would not have risen to power if the situation had been different. If a tweak here and a tweak there, you wouldn't have had a Holocaust. I mean, Germany had all sorts of incentives to launch a Second World War, but there would not have been a Holocaust if Hitler hadn't been in power. There was definitely going to be some kind of conflict and some kind of authoritarian society, almost certainly, that some kind of authoritarian right-wing government would have taken hold. But there's no reason that it would have resembled Hitler's genocidal regime as opposed to Mussolini's Italy, for example. And what can easily imagine a scenario where discrimination against the Jews takes hold? An authoritarian right-wing regime, right-wing populist regime, takes power in the 1930s in Germany, but there isn't any kind of extermination or even expulsion of Jews. There's merely discrimination. The idea that this is some kind of historical levitability, it strikes me as silly and in an odd way kind of pretentious. But this is the normative view in Germany and descending from this is very politically incorrect. So on the other hand, Austria has a different way of dealing with us. Austria just pretends that they never have been German, which is very strange. But that's just like, I mean, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but there's this notion of an Austrian ethnicity that didn't exist certainly during the 1940s, you know? Where it was an alternative German state but a German state, right? The people who supported Austrian independence like Schuchni, the Austro-Fascist, they didn't want to unite with Germany, but it wasn't because they said we're not German, it was, we're a better Germany, we're a different Germany, you know? But now that the Austrian kind of cope is, because they don't want to be self-hating like the Germans, is no, we're not, we were victims of the Anschluss and we're not Germans, you know? It's kind of worked actually, people don't, I think a lot of people don't see it as German anymore. Right, what works is usually more important than what's true. Yeah. Are you a religious man? I'm not, no, I went to, I went, I think I have more of my ancestral religions, I have more sympathy emotionally, more emotional reasons for Coptic Orthodoxy, my mother's religion than my father's Catholicism. How he became a Catholic of English besides another interesting story. But I think the child molestation thing with the church, in addition to intellectually not believing in God, which I just can't find a way to believe in God intellectually. And I'd be interested to hear what your trajectory was, but I can't find a way to believe in God intellectually. But I also lost a lot of kind of my sentimentality for the Catholic Church because of like all the, okay, like people who have sex with children shouldn't be reported to the authorities, which should be like transferred to the school for the disabled type stuff, you know? I mean, that seems like really outrageous. And I don't know of any institution, I don't think most social institutions as corrupt as they are would actually behave like that. So it just gave me a very negative taste with the Catholic Church, not just the molestation, but like the cover up, I think is worse because you can't know the thoughts and behavior of everybody in your employ, but to actually have your impulse be okay, let's make sure you go to a school for the hard of hearing in Latin America. It's like, who the fuck are these people, you know? What are they? Like are these like devils, demons? Why would, what kind of person has an impulse to do that? So I think like the child molestation stuff turned me off of the Catholic Church, a Coptic Church. I have more sentimental relation for, I went to my grandmother's funeral last year and I did feel a connection to the community, the Coptic Egyptian community, but I can't believe in it. And I think you have to believe in it intellectually before you can truly be a member of the religion. I think it's rather hollow to attend church while not believing in it. What do you think of all that? And tell me how you became, you're Jewish, tell me what your spiritual journey was like. Okay, I was raised a seventh-day Adventist. My father was a theologian, he had two PhDs. So I got a fairly intellectual approach to religion, but when she started trying to rationalize religion, he started accepting some degree of the higher criticism, we simply asked, when were these texts written? Who wrote them and for what audience? What was the context? What was the sits and laven? So I was aware of that, but eventually those rationalizing, secularizing effects of trying to make your religion rational, the inevitable result is it starts to lead the next generation out of the church. Then I had a crisis. My life fell apart. I got basically sick for six years. I was basically bedridden in my 20s. And so I could not face life on a secular atheist perspective anymore when I was bedridden. So while I was bedridden, I formed an attachment to a radio talk show host named Dennis Prager. And he was like my lifeline to vanity. Like his show and his thinking kind of gave me the strength to carry on. Like, oh, I'm gonna become a good person and I'm gonna articulate ethical monotheism and here's an approach that works and is good and it makes the world a better place. And so it's like, oh, I just became fascinated by Judaism. I was like, I'm gonna convert to Judaism. Here is divine truth and eventually converted to Orthodox Judaism. And I just absolutely loved it. One reason I love it is that it's primarily a behavioral way of life rather than a religion with a lot of things that you need to believe. I never had a rabbi ask me what I believe about God. So I love the tribe that I've joined. But if one has any religious faith, it is tremendously challenged by secular scholarship. So that's why I brought it up. So if one's a Christian or one's an Orthodox Jew or an Orthodox Muslim, you are believing in things that secular scholarship shreds. Like all the fundamental claims of traditional Judaism, traditional Christianity and traditional Islam do not end up to modern scholarship. Does that torment you, Luke? Not at all because I belong to a tribe and what you believe doesn't matter. Here's a question. So I've, you know, I had a couple of Jewish friends in high school, but I have had very little interaction with Jews, a personal level overall, which is kind of funky because I attended prestigious universities, but I guess I was a bit of a loner. So I didn't, there were a lot of Jews at the University of Chicago where I was at. So, but I didn't form any close relationships with any Jewish people. But so I don't know much about Judaism. Does, do you feel included or do you feel like you're, because you have the religious belief and commitment or do you feel excluded because you're not of ethnic Jewish origin? I have no idea what the answer to this is, but I'm curious. Yeah, and I have not posited any belief. I would never publicly deny any of the beliefs of my religion, but I haven't posited it to you that I owed any. Sure, okay, fair enough. Because for me, this is primarily an experiential tribal connection. And so, you know, my beliefs may wax away in any different directions, but it's absolutely irrelevant to how I live my life and I've never had a rabbi ask me how I believe about God. And I have found that I've been treated by Jews according to my deeds. So some Jews love me, some Jews hate me, some Jews despise me. I only, like one Jew has ever said, oh, you're not Jewish. So I knew- Only one Jew has ever said, because of the ethnic component, you're not Jewish, okay? Yeah, one Jew in, in 40 years, in Judea, 35 years in Judaism has ever said that. So I get treated according to the quality of my deeds, which are decidedly mixed. I'm not a particularly righteous person with a pristine past, but I can't think of any, so many people think, oh, you're not accepted. You know, that's the thing that I do when I do these live streams, all sorts of people say you can't convert to Judaism, it's a delusion, you'll never be accepted. And so my challenge is always, give me a concrete behavioral test that will show whether or not I'm accepted because I am unaware of any behavioral test which would show I'm not accepted. I have been set up for Shadukah, meaning for courtship and marriage. I have had Jewish children to drive to school and back. I have played all sorts of voluntary roles in the community in sensitive areas. I am invited to people's homes for Shabbat and Jewish holidays. People have gotten me jobs. I don't know any behavioral test where it would evidence that I am not accepted. I'm open to it. Like I have been thrown out of synagogues, but not because I wasn't Jewish, but because my inflammatory writing online had disturbed the community. So again, it was according to my deed. So I don't know a behavioral test that would evidence, hey, I'm not accepted because I have felt accepted according to the quality of who I am and how I'm behaving, which means some people have had very good reason to keep their distance from me and some people have absolutely loved me and plenty of people have been indifferent to me, just like the whole realm of reactions to me that I got when I was a Seventh-day Adventist or an atheist. So you invoke your past and I have read about you before because you're an interesting figure and I read about you actually read your Wikipedia page before this interview. And so were you involved in the, and I'm not asking this in a moralistic sense. No, it's fine, just go ahead and ask me. So you were involved in the pornography industry, right? Yeah, I wrote a blog about the porn industry and I wrote three books on the porn industry. Okay, so were you like part of the porn industry or were you writing just commentating on it? I always felt a part, but again, it's all a matter of perspective. From a certain angle, you could say, hi, he's part of the industry. I never felt like I was part of the industry. I always felt a part, but- Okay, interesting, I actually thought if you were part of the industry, I was gonna ask you questions like what, some questions about, did you feel like it was wrong or do you feel like this is just, are you okay? You actually have to ask- Ask me anyway. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, okay. So did you feel, because I can see two, there are two perspectives on this. There's a libertarian perspective that's like, this is what people do with their bodies. Like, states should maybe make, well, libertarians would be on the state, but like, in a broad sense, libertarian perspective, the state should make sure people aren't being forced into it, of course, or hurt, but like, if people, adults choose to do this, who cares? We're just getting, we're pearl clutching about this and we're denying a basic human impulse and we're moralizing where we shouldn't be. The other perspective is of course, that this is detrimental to the soul in the broad sense and that this is somehow demeaning of human beings in a sense that is very sad actually. And what was your perspective at the time? Was it more, was it one of these two or was it something else? Did you, were you morally conflicted or did you kind of have the libertarian view that this isn't something to be concerned about morally? I think I had both views, but the more time I spent in the industry, the more I tilted to the negative view of the industry. So I try to maintain a fairly open mind on most issues and just try to understand different perspectives rather than coming to ultimate moral conclusions. But yeah, the more time I spend steadily, as months go by, I just became more and more negative about the industry and seeing its potential for damage. Yeah. But I didn't feel, I never felt inclined to be a crusader against it. I'm much more interested in interviewing people and talking to people like I do with you than... Yeah, me too, moralism. I mean, there is virtue signaling in the sphere. I'm not saying the arguments against pornography are frivolous, far from it, but I do think there is virtue signaling in a sphere because if you look at the percentage of men who have consumed pornography, like sex work generally. I mean, so most, I think in the contemporary West, the vast majority of men probably have never gone to a prostitute. Maybe that's wrong, but like the vast majority of men have consumed some kind of sex work, whether you're talking about a strip club or pornography, it's virtually everybody. You know, pornography specifically, a strip club probably majority, I don't know if that's true, but it's certainly a lot. So the discourse on these matters, maybe they should be condemned, but if they are to be condemned, we need to kind of say, we're all in this together because we've all subsidized this industry, right? As men. I mean, if there's somebody who's never watched porn, I salute you, but... Right. To those who have never watched. Yeah, but I feel like there's a lot of lying in this. And I'm sorry, but if you've watched porn, this is somebody who was advocating the sex work position and I was skeptical of it, made this point to me a few years ago, and I have to admit, I was impressed by it. Like if you have consumed, men to strip club or consume porn, even if you've never seen a prostitute, you've consumed sex work. And that's just true. It's true. Like you have consumed sex work and in some sense supported the sex work industry if you have viewed porn. So have you heard of E. Michael Jones? I've heard of him, but I've never really followed his content. Okay, I alerted him to the JQ. He never even knew that there was a JQ, but he stumbled upon my writings on the porn industry. And when I was writing on the porn industry, I read a great deal about Jews in the porn industry. And he had no idea. And so he stumbled onto my world. Oh, so that's why he's like Jews. I know he doesn't like Jews. So he doesn't like Jews. He didn't have any stronger feelings till he read my blog. And I don't feel bad about it. Like I just, my job was to tell the truth. So if he reads the truth and becomes read pure about Jews, that's on him. Okay, yeah, yeah, that's bizarre. It is humorous. I just, I have to say I find the JQ discourse completely un-persuasive, honestly. I mean, I know like if you said all it's persuasive, you get in trouble. So it is something people have to lie about, but I don't have to lie about it because I think it's kind of ridiculous. I mean, the discourse from like Kevin MacDonald or the terrorist people. I mean, I have no sympathy for Israel. Actually, I had family members who fought against Israel in the Six Days of War. So I have no sympathy for Israel as a political institution. And I actually think they should share the land. I think that they should have one state and share the land. I mean, I'm not, obviously what should happen, you have to look at pragmatic considerations what is doable, but the moral solution would be for them to share the land. The Jews and the Palestinians that have a one state, probably multi-confessional polity, like maybe Lebanon would be a model even. So I don't have sympathy for Israel, but I don't, like the idea that Jews are responsible for all these things, it just seems like breathless rather than scholarly, you know? Like take one issue that they say is Jews are responsible for pedophilia. Well, I mean, look at, look at, I hate to say it, but because I don't have sympathy for the left nowadays, but the feminist movement in the 19th century was behind raising the age of concern in the United States from 10, 11, 12 appallingly low levels in states, disgusting to similar what we have today. So this was a left-wing feminist women fighting Christian patriarchy, which had basically normalized pedophilia and had for generations, the Catholic church had an age of consent of 12, age of marriage, I think of seven. So let's say Jews were behind this. Now this is like a enlightenment, very good enlightenment insight that fucking kids is evil because kids don't have the autonomy to consent, but then they say Jews did it. I mean, it's just, it doesn't relate to the history of like how we developed norms, stigmatizing pedophilia at all. I mean, and they say Jews did it. So it just seems, and then like the issue that Jews are so ethnocentric, the mayor and Nathan Coffness points out the marriage rates are so high between Jews and non-Jews. And that's a pretty good indication of whether you're super ethnocentric, right? Yeah. I mean, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. Oh, I said, I like how you say you have no sympathy for Israel, because that's so honest and that's how the world works. Like our two peoples, I don't know a lot about your peoples, but I understand there's some Egyptian background, you know, have a fundamental conflict of interest. I have spent zero time being concerned about Arab suffering and Arabs have suffered a tremendous amount, but I only have so much emotional energy and I primarily direct my emotional energy towards my own people. So Arabs have suffered, Muslims have suffered, there was the Nakba, tens of thousands of Palestinians where Arabs were expelled from the nascent state of Israel. And I don't care, which is, I'm glad that you said you don't care either. Like it would be unrealistic for me to care. That would be highly abnormal. It would be virtue singling. I am not shocked or bothered by Holocaust denial and it doesn't bother me if Arabs selling Holocaust denial in shocks and it doesn't bother me if the Arabs wanna destroy the Jewish state. I would consider it weird if they didn't. They've got a Jewish state in their midst, which is far higher achieving, which is far more powerful, which is far more proud and influential in the world and by comparison, they look bad and they must feel bad because they feel this land belongs to them. I wouldn't understand any Arab Muslim reaction short of wanting to destroy the Jewish state of Israel because that's the only authentic one. If I was living in an area where an outside group had taken my land and then their economy booms, they're publishing books and technical papers that are changing the world, that they have strong influence over the most powerful nation in the world, the United States of America. Now, I would be very angry towards the Jewish state. So- I like the honesty. Well, first, my specific heritage is Coptic Egyptians. So Coptic Egyptians, I would say just to generalize, I think this is a fair generalization of enough experience with them. Christian, they don't denitifize Arabs, Coptic Egyptians, although some do, but most don't. But regardless, Christian Arabs, Christian Middle Easterners will use that term. I mean, Christians in Arab countries, let's say, because I don't know about Armenians really, I don't know much about them. But Christians in Middle Eastern countries are very largely anti-Israel, but if you look at Cops, they're simply for like the cause, if you will, right? The cause is a little bit muted, not because of any affinity for Israel, but because of, they've been treated very badly by the Muslims in Egypt. In a way that, for example, the Jordanian Muslims do not treat Jordanian Christians like this, right? So that kind of mutes a little bit the sympathy for the cause. So maybe, because I was very close to my maternal grandparents who were very, my mom was an immigrant too, but she was more westernized. My maternal grandparents were very Egyptian, you can say. But, you know, there is a little bit of a, there isn't sympathy for Israel with most Cops, but there's a little bit of a conflict. They're not as full-throated in the cause, if you will, the Palestinian cause as Muslims would be because of their own treatment at the hands of the people. Right, right. Christianity is being wiped out in the Middle East. Well, it depends on what you're talking about. Like Jordan, I think Christians have a pretty favorable view generally of their Muslim countrymen, but if you look at Egypt, no, it's very, the treatment's very bad. And that complicates things, there's this meme though that, there was a neocondy in a while ago that there's somehow this unity of interests with Israel and Christian Arabs, Arab populations, and that's quite dishonest. You don't find sympathy for Israel. I mean, the only people, like you have like Janine Pirro who she was Lebanese and I think she took her husband's name or something, but she's a Lebanese Christian, Fox News late. Like, yeah, she loves Israel, but that's kind of a Western thing where you come to the West and you're a Middle Eastern Christian and then you become really pro-Israel. It's kind of a, this is maybe a little necronistic because there's so much non-white, non-European immigration that Middle Eastern Christians are probably not gonna stick out that much. But back in the day when they did, I think that support for Israel actually was, or at least virtue signaling about support for Israel was a way of fitting in and saying, we're not Muslims. I think that's probably changed. But I think back in the day, and maybe Janine Pirro being an older lady is a residue of that. Just following the sentence, like if you want to, that's a career of Fox News to be- Well, I mean, the most absurd thing of following in terms is this cultural appropriation discourse. And that is the most, that is totally fake. There is nobody in Egypt who gives a shit and the white guy wears a Gallavia, like a, you know, like Garb, my grandfather actually gave it to me. His like, like it just like a, you know, like a certain ethnic Garb associated with Middle Eastern people, especially, no one cares. The idea that this is, so this is a totally manufactured discourse. That's an example of one that's just pure fake, which actually kind of disturbs me that people, because you have like kids of immigrants making this up when there's no one from the actual culture who's offended and they're using the fact that they are of this ethnic heritage to a grift essentially. I mean, the cultural appropriation discourse is totally fake, totally fake. So I wanna just present a major worldview difference between us as I understand it. I believe that you're a classical liberal, that you believe that individuals are born into the world with rights. And I'm a nationalist. Well, I believe we should say that. I'm not saying I believe that as a matter of nature, but I believe we should, we should, that's the ideology we should adhere to. Yeah, go ahead, Luke. Right, so yeah, I get that, because it makes for liberal societies the most pleasant to live in. I mean, you have more assurance of your rights in a liberal society. I understand the world primarily in tribal national terms that whatever rights can be afforded can vary under circumstance. And so I think primarily in terms of nation or tribe and the responsibilities back and forth rather than individuals being born with rights, I think of nations and people belonging to a nation or a tribe. So I'm just curious, speaking of human rights, what do you think about the concept of the Nuremberg Trial of putting Nazi, very Nazi leaders on trial for violating these invented universal human rights? Well, first of all, I want to clear for that. I agree they're invented, they're very new and they go against historical norms. So I'm not finitely saying that this is some seminal part of the human character acknowledging human rights, surely is not. If you're looking at what comes more naturally to humans, I think your view is much more natural than mine. If you just, and that's just basically the historical data that your view is practiced far more in history, right? Mine is new. So I agree with that part. In terms of Nuremberg, I just think it's a morally superior view. I think it leads to people being treated better. I think it leads to less exploitation of the other, of guest workers, let's say, like they're not, they used, you know, in societies that are less liberal, guest workers are indentured, right? If you look at Japan or the United Arab Emirates, I think slavery is a little bit hyperbole, but like people come and they have to like give up their passport and then they have to buy it back, you know, overwork. So they're essentially indentured. It's very cruel treatment of people. They can't leave until they make a certain amount of money. So they're, you know, you could, some people call it slavery. I think there's important differences when you're voluntarily going somewhere and you're making money, but it's terrible. Regardless of slavery, we can call it, we can call it indenture. That doesn't happen in the West because we believe in liberalism used to happen. Indenture was very common in the early United States, indentured labor, but in addition to slavery of course, but we don't do that. And I think that's good. I think treating the other with kindness and respect is a good thing. And that doesn't come naturally to us. We need to cultivate that. But I think we have some impulse of kindness and compassion. I think almost all of us do it and the key is to cultivate it because I think our other impulses of tribalism and selfishness are much stronger. So the key is to cultivate that. And I think these notions of human rights very new, as you say, do that. They cultivate this part of us that I think is more noble is better. You know, that's my moral view. In terms of Nuremberg, I think the core problem of Nuremberg is my view of legal of law is not something, is not natural. I don't believe in natural law, right? I believe law is codified and written. And problem with the Nuremberg trials is the law was all essentially invented. So I understand the impulse for accountability for bringing back slavery here. At least fuckers brought back slavery. They didn't just exterminate Jews. One thing they didn't talk about very much is the enslavement of people, including for racial reasons, sloths. Huge numbers of sloths of Poles were kidnapped and enslaved because they were deemed to be racially inferior by the time. Strange thing that the people who enslaved white people are liked by the alt-right and the Wignats. It's very strange. But regardless, you know, when you call it law, you're kind of making it up, aren't you? Yes. Right? So there is something in Nuremberg that is intrinsically illegitimate. And you wonder like, you want to say to these people, okay, have the guts to kill them or let them, what I'd say is have the courage to either kill them or let them free. If you think they're just monsters, and I agree that many of these people were monsters, not all of them, not all the defendants were, but many of the defendants were monsters, just kill them or let them go. Have the courage to do one of those two things. Don't lie to yourself that you're adopting some kind of, you're recording, because, you know, when we, let's say somebody commits a crime and I call the police, right? I'm in a sense letting myself off the hook, right? Because I not, so I see someone committing a crime, let's say beating up an old lady and I call the cops and I get them arrested. So I'm letting myself off the hook, right? In a sense, because I'm not saying I'm gonna kill them and that would be some moral decision of some import. And I'm also not saying I'm gonna do nothing about it, which would, which may torment my conscience as well, because it's a terrible thing I'm letting go. So I'm basically deferring to another authority. That authority is real. I'm acting properly if I do that. But I feel like they didn't have the courage to kill the guy who was beating up the old lady themselves. And so they, and they wanted to call the police, they weren't a police, there were no laws, right? So they invented laws and pretended they were, they were invoking the law when in fact, they just, they wanted to punish these people. They wanted to cage them, they wanted to kill them. And I think it was arbitrary in a show trial essentially. I don't think that the, I don't agree with the neo-Nazis that they faked evidence or whatever, but I think it was a show trial because it wasn't law, right? Laws codified. Right, that they invented these laws that the Nazis, you know, conspired in a crime against peace. I mean, it's- And just taking the courage to say, I'm going to go kill these people. I would respect that position more than pretending that there's a law prohibiting crimes against humanity. There's a law against waging war, you know? Right, waging oppressive war. And enforced by the, by the, you know, Herman Gerr, who was actually very high IQ, I would have liked to converse with him. I mean, he's strange for kicker, very intelligent, very indolent. I mean, the guy, the guy got like fatter during the war. Right? How is that even possible? But you highly, I think his IQ was nearly 140 or around 140 when they, when the Americans tested him. Just have the balls to kill Gerr or have the balls to let him go. Don't, I feel like pretending there was law is a secession of responsibility. And also like- This is a problem with liberalism often in general. It's like, oh, we're just- No, but why couldn't we have just like, I'm not against the concept of prohibiting these things. I think after the war, they should have said, we need to have a body of international law prohibiting many of the things that the Nazis did in illegally comprehensible and specific way. I think that there should have been a movement to codify law, not a movement, but instead they pretended that this was illegal because of, you know, like, I guess Robert Jackson can discern the natural law or whatever. So, yeah, there was something phony about the whole thing. And what do you think about putting Striker to death just for his opinions? Cause Julia Striker didn't kill anyone. Just do some nasty things. It's really kind of, this is free speech in the most extreme way, but it's not only a sea. Now, if Julia Striker were in America, should his opinions be protected today? Should his opinions be protected? Yeah, that's easy. Like, if you're believing free speech, they should be. That's not even close. In Nazi Germany, my God, I mean, because he's encouraging these use while genocide is going on. He's referring to the genocide going on and condoning it. On the other hand, he's not personally doing anything other than expressing views, right? He's not actually, it's like, if somebody went on the internet today, this is a little less extreme case, I mean, and condone some kind of atrocity with Chinese or Korean or whatever. I mean, that person's opinion, I would say should be legally protected. Look, here's my view. If you're going to have a body of law that is protective of free speech, it's very difficult to justify convicting him of anything. On the other hand, if somebody had just killed him, I wouldn't talk against that person in a moral level. But I would not promote a law under which an individual who expressed these views would be criminalized, you could say. And again, what is the legalistic rationale for going after him? It's all arbitrary, right? Because there's no law here. And what's your- Oh, interestingly, Stryker, speaking of Stryker. By the way, if Eric Stryker, if you listen to us, we're talking about Julius Stryker, not you. So Stryker had a vast pornography collection that was uncovered when his private papers were rated by the allies. And he claimed this was about studying the machinations of the internal Jew because the Jew's behind pornography, so he needed to watch all these things. So- According to Wikipedia, Stryker had an IQ of 106, the lowest among the defendants. Yeah, he was not intelligent, man. In fact, the other defendants, including Göring, so I wouldn't call Göring Borsh-Wa, Göring was smart. He wasn't Borsh-Wa, he was a kind of a pirate, you could say, a bandit, you could say. But the more Borsh-Wa defendants like Speer and also the more intelligent one simply like Göring had contempt for Stryker. I mean, that's kind of funny if Eric Stryker named, I don't know if he did, but if he named himself after this guy, like the Nazis really didn't like him. Other than Hitler, the reason the guy was able to keep publishing was because Hitler had a soft spot for him and he liked, I guess he liked their Stryker, but the vast majority of upper actual Nazis thought this was pornographic and vulgar and stupid. It's just like, it's just Isaac drooling over Rapunzel and raping her or whatever it means. Always this kind of thing, right? And what's your, do you have a PhD thesis topic yet? Mike, I do, I'm going to be looking at the wartime propaganda by the Germans directed at Arabs and Arab nationalist movements during the war in North Africa. The, especially the Arabs, pardon me, the Germans sought to enlist spontaneous Arab uprisings in their cause against the British in the Middle East. And they created propaganda to this effect to try to ensure the Muslims, they had respect for the Arabs, they had respect for the Islamic religion that they didn't regard them as racially inferior because that was a fear, right? That was a fear in the region that we're going to be treated badly by the Germans because of their racial views. And also they enlisted certain intellectuals and leaders in the Arab world to try to win them over in their cause. So I'm trying to write about the reaction in Arab intellectual life and newspapers and nationalist movements to these overtures by the Nazis. And I think the reaction was quite ambiguous. I think there were, maybe I'll change my views as I do more research. I think there were people who were sympathetic, people who weren't, I think overall there was a lot, there was a lot of fear that couldn't be assuaged that at bottom they're going to oppress us racially. On the other hand, there were, there were definitely sympathies to the Nazis. And not only because of British domination and French domination of the region, but because there was a sense that Germany was the underdog, you know, Hitler had kind of post-Germany as the underdog and that appealed to, since the, because of the Treaty of Versailles and then a few of the First World War. And that is this appealed to some Third World movements. So there was, yeah. Do you have any thoughts on Hindu fascism and the Nazi fetishism in India? Have you paid much attention? I know very little about that, but maybe you could share a little bit about that with me. I know a lot about the Arab movements that were sympathetic, but like the young Egyptians, but I don't know about the Hindu stuff. Tell me about that. Sounds interesting for me. I don't know much, but there is quite a bit of fascism that is, it's a reaction to liberalism as that's Paul Gottfried's, I think. Oh yes, yes, leftism, yeah. It taps into some basic human impulses. And so for in the Anglo world, the Nazis are regarded as the epitome of evil, but for the rest of the world, the Nazis and Hitler are regarded just as people who lost a war. And so there is- That's true to some extent, yeah. Go ahead, you're quite right. Yeah, so it's just interesting in all around the world. You'll find segments here or there who are excited by various iterations of fascism because it does meet some basic human needs for like in a world that maybe like you feel is spinning out of control, that fascism brings the people together. And so I can understand, I don't know much about Hindu fascism, but it completely makes sense to me that there'd be various groups at various times in various situations who would have a fascistic impulse. I think it's completely understandable. My view at least of wartime Arab fascism and also in the post-war era is that to some extent, this is more performative and aesthetic and a way of saying fuck you to the West that is like a comprehensive anti-liberal movement. In terms of Europe, I don't know enough about South Asia really to say anything, but there is certainly, there is a certain popularity of fascist aesthetics and Nazi aesthetics even in the MENA region. There's no question about that, but I think it's more aesthetic than ideological because you find people who associate with young Egyptians party, for example, that had liberal views, right? So it's, I feel like it's more anti-Western in the case of the Arab world than anti-liberal in a fundamental sense, you know? But fascism generally was a reaction to liberalism and leftism, certainly. And fascism was an interesting movement because it's the first time our right wing movement has got three points out. A right wing movement actually gets support from the working class. It isn't just associated with wealthy people, you know? And the bourgeois, I'm not just wealthy with the bourgeois. Which is interesting because the Republican party and the Tory party in England now increasingly the body of the working class. No, actually, if they look back, I mean, you can't really say this because you'll get attacked by both, you know, the right will hate you for saying this because it sounds like you're calling them Nazis because people say fascism is, which it isn't, by the way, but they conflate fascism and Nazism as Godfrey says. But it is true that the first right wing populist movements that got a significant popular following were fascist. Popular... Hey, I've got to go. I just realized it's over Shabbat, so I'm so sorry. Let's continue another time. Good to talk to you. Yeah, again, I'm sorry about the delay earlier. Yeah, no worries.