The Hoover Hog

I Want My HBD TV!

Tipped by HBD Chick, I've just spent the past several hours watching the entertaining and controversial Norwegian television documentary series, Hjernevask (Brainwash). You should stop what you're doing and catch up.

Memento mori.

 

 

Looking for the Joke with a Microscope

A couple of years ago I watched Hard Times at Douglass High, a mesmerizing, Wisemanesque HBO documentary ostensibly about an inner-city Baltimore high school struggling—and failing utterly—to meet the proficiency requirements codified under George W. Bush's hair-brained No Child Left Behind education initiative. My use of the word "ostensibly" in the preceding sentence is advised, because although the film is packaged and promoted as a public-spirited critique of NCLB with the usual appeals for educational reform implied, the document that meets the viewer's eye soon belies every conceit of advocacy journalism. In full effect, Hard Times is as devoid of hope as a Haneke joint; it presents a grim portrait not of institutional dysfunction, but of an intractably pathological culture in free-fall. The film provokes a sense of futility that really has no place within prevailing modes of policy discourse.

I am not alone in this impression. A few seconds of Googling turns up a suspiciously intoned New York Times review that bluntly sums up the pregnant subtext:

[This] dismaying film isn’t really asking whether No Child Left Behind can help Douglass. It’s asking whether anything can.                  

There's this notion that Serious Thinkers will sometimes disguise or encode their real intentions—that by employing ironic, esoteric, obscurantist or cleverly misdirectional argumentative strategies, philosophers and intellectuals (and documentarians, we may suppose) can engage dangerous, ineffable or otherwise troublesome ideas on the sly, without griming up the scene or stirring discord. The notion is at once intriguing, plausible, and insidious. I also think it's mostly, though not entirely, bullshit.

The political philosopher Leo Strauss famously argued that esoteric modus operandi could be descried in the texture of many pre-Enlightenment works of poli-phi (that is, until Machiavelli gave the game away), and that hidden meanings sizzle just beneath the surface of the ancient canon. Probably the most commonly cited example of a purported "Straussian" text is The Trial of Socrates, which, at least according to Leo and his cult, is only read exoterically as a morality play about a persecuted truth-seeker. To the elite few who are wise enough to crack the code, the deeper, esoteric meaning is revealed to center not on the injustice done to a revolutionary spirit, but on the danger posed when elite philosophy is uncorked for mass consumption. 

Even you suspect—as I do—that Strauss was given to bookish paranoia, and that his Big Idea comes laced in Kabbalistic thread, I think it is generally agreed that problematic ideas are sometimes addressed from behind a veil of plausible deniability. It seems likely that David Hume's writings on religion are layered with the kind of self-acquitting winks that we might expect from someone—an atheist—who sought to advance skepticism without rousing the bench. If we jump-cut to the more-or-less present, I am reasonably convinced that this was Dinesh D'Souza's none-too-subtle ruse when he was writing his post-Bell Curve treatise, The End of Racism, back in the mid-90s. D'Souza's schtick comes to a head in a chapter entitled "The Content of Our Chromosomes," where he duly rehearses the strong case for a bio-realistic account of racial differences before concluding, in a conspicuous non-sequitur, that such evidence can and should—for some forgettably crucial reason—be summarily discounted.* I'm actually less persuaded concerning the HBO doc that quacks like a video addendum to a Charles Murray white paper, but I know better than to look for clues in the press kit. 

I've heard speculation concerning other threads, usually from partisan channels. Some feminists, for example, argue that Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory can be understood as a kind of "post-emptive" cover for the patriarchy's dirtiest little secret. It's also common enough to find lefties suggesting that neoconservative prattle about spreading democracy amounts to a double-spoken defense of  imperialism. Meanwhile, on the Weekly Standard right, it's just as common to find the claim that people who criticize neoconservatives—or who use the word "neoconservative" twice in the same paragraph, or with the wrong inflection—are merely encoding anti-Semitic messages. Such examples may or may not hold an ounce of water, and it's likely that your impression will tell more of your political biases than your powers of discernment as such.           

But if someone were to raise the magic curtain and let us in on the unfettered Truth, I suppose D'Souza's the only chimp I'd bet good money on (or against). One obvious problem is that once you allow that hidden meanings might be buried here and there, it becomes all-too-tempting to spot esoteric strategies everywhere, which is to say, inevitably, where none exist. Isn't this always the snare with pattern recognition? Best to sniff thrice and tread carefully, lest you squint out the N-rays or find yourself adrift in LaRouchian fantasies. 

Still, if we're inclined to go fishing, it seems safe enough to assume that the Straussian "art of writing"—or filmmaking or music or art or tetherball—will be observed where legal or cultural forces inveigh against the open and explicit engagement of certain proscribed logical sequences. Too bad I can't read Arabic.

In a 2008 Hoover Hog interview, the dissident videographer known as "Denier" suggests that Errol Morris's documentary, Mr. Death, can be read as a covert defense of Holocaust revisionism. Here's the clip:  

THH: You mentioned Errol Morris's film, Mr. Death, about Fred Leuchter. Any thoughts on Morris's work?

Denier: Mr. Death is about holocaust denial, and the only way that movie could make it into every video store in the country is to have the proponent (Leuchter) portrayed as a freak. In the 1500's, there was probably some corollary with Atheism. Some book which discussed atheism, but where it was allowed because it was a freak or a Bad Man who was an atheist.

THH: That's an interesting point. Do you think that Mr. Death can be viewed as an esoteric defense of Leuchter -- and of Holocaust denial -- even if that wasn't Morris's intention? I read that when an early cut was shown, audiences responded with sympathy toward the Bad Man, and that the film was subsequently re-edited to include the critical segments featuring Robert Jan van Pelt, which really do seem tacked on.

Denier: Yes, my video "One Third" mentions that. A preliminary screening of Mr. Death at Harvard University had some students believing Leuchter's theory, so he re-edited the movie.

I've seen most of Morris's films and I've read his books. I follow his NYT journal. I'm a fan. If I also tell you that I have long believed that Morris's oeuvre might be instructively assayed in light of Janet Malcolm's famous monograph, The Journalist and the Murderer, the irony will be revealed soon enough.

Mr. Death is an interesting film, and I think Holocaust revisionists may be correct to note that the face-saving footage is easily identified and feels out-of-place. But a more perceptive appraisal may be located in a pseudononymous review that originally appeared in the pages of the Bradley Smith's newsletter:

The film is difficult to evaluate, particularly from a revisionist perspective: Morris' films are supposed to be exercises in irony, not documentaries in a strict sense. Yet the whole aim of revisionism is to dispel the double-visions, and the superstitious delusions, which make irony possible. This simply means that if Morris had made a positive contribution to revisionism, the irony would have been tragic, but if he had made the kind of movie he wanted to make, the irony would have been non-existent. As a result, instead of a revisionist breakthrough, or a delicious satire, Morris has been left with very little, except, possibly, a friend.   

I don't think it's trivial to suggest that Morris may have felt amity toward the Bad Man. To appropriate Sister Y's preferred phrase, it could be that the learned documentarian came, slowly and against all instinct, to see Leuchter as an "epistemic peer," that is as someone whose views he could not readily dismiss. We've all had the experience: a conversation that echoes in the mind, that nests in like a dormant itch.             

A bit further in the same review:

But the problem was that for once Morris broke the surly bonds of satire and found himself soaring weightless in reality. Fred [Leuchter] is not a stupid person. His ideas are not insane. His report, although flawed, contained a genuine core of insight and inspiration. But Morris could not see any of this; for once, he could not appreciate the irony. Twenty years ago, he had college students laughing as old folks talked about meeting their dogs in heaven. He figured that Fred Leuchter would be just as funny. He was wrong: as the saying goes, the joke was on him.

Errol Morris, at least in the years since he sat down with Fred Leuchter to document the eccentric engineer's "Rise and Fall," seems curiously preoccupied with epistemological puzzles—especially those that simmer where presumptional foundations are held, by dint of cultural consensus, beyond question. His recent investigations have focused on photographs of historical and political currency—emotionally laden images that that are gradually complicated by problems of interpretive bias, or by problems of knowledge. From Roger Fenton's cannonballs to the most wrenching Abu Ghraib stills, the mysteries embedded in Morris's carefully chosen photo-gallery reside where the precept of "obviousness" collides with verifiable data, or collapses under scrutiny. With an ingenuous wink toward Donald Rumsfeld, Morris seems driven of late to explore lurking matters where "unknown unknowns" may occlude our understanding of "the obvious."

As Morris insists in his captivating study of photography, Believing is Seeing, "Nothing is so obvious that it’s obvious,"

When someone says that something is obvious, it seems almost certain that it is anything but obvious—even to them. The use of the word “obvious” indicates the absence of a logical argument—an attempt to convince the reader by asserting the truth of something by saying it a little louder. 

When does this happen? Under what conditions, and why? You look at a photograph and you read the caption and the most easily presumed—the most obvious—contextual narrative is confirmed. Close enough every time. Except when it isn't. Or when questions hover out-of-frame.

Turning to the publisher's description for The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes Morris's next book, we find the following text:

A nonfiction story can be falsified by evidence. But what happens when a theory of a crime—a narrative—overwhelms that evidence? When evidence is rejected, suppressed, misinterpreted, or remains uncollected simply because it does not support the chosen narrative? To make matters worse, what happens when the chosen narrative, despite underlying infirmities, solidifies as it is told and retold until it is accepted as fact and is no longer subject to scrutiny?

To be clear, the book being described is called A Wilderenss of Error, and it revisits the sensationally reported case of one Jeffrey MacDonald, a Green Beret doctor who was eventually tried and convicted for the murder of his wife and two daughters—a crime he blamed, notoriously in the wake of the Manson family spree, on "drug crazed hippies." Of course, we are familiar with the story through Joe McGuiness's bestselling book, Fatal Vision—as well as, perhaps and significantly, through Janet Malcolm's aforementioned study of journalistic ethics, which famously opens with a most incisive provocation:

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. 

The "nonfiction story" is specific enough. It concerns events that long ago commanded our collective attention, and it concerns a narrative long believed to have been confirmed. Morris begs our consideration not with some ironic gesture dispatched at the expense of a compliant rube, but with an appeal to look beyond the made-for-TV mythos, beyond the "obvious" conclusion that has been imprinted through telling and re-telling.

My wife thinks I'm crazy to slum for a deeper irony, and she's probably right. More than a decade has passed since the Bad Man faced the Interrotron. Obviously, we have all moved on.      

____________   

* See Thomas Jackson's review of D'Souza's book from the November 1995 issue of American Renassaince. 

Memento mori.

Channel Surf

Time for a brief tour of the Hogosphere in moving pictures and sine waves. Cut to the chase.

• Nine-Banded Books author (and auxiliary staffer) ANN STERZINGER reads from her excellent (unpublished) science fiction novel LYFE at Bucket O' Blood books in Chicago. Unfortunately, her subsequent reading from NVSQVAM (nowhere) didn't make the cut.

• "Here's to Cheating, Fighting, Stealing and Drinking!" It's a short segment from KEVIN SLAUGHTER's recent lecture, "The Great Satan," presented before the Secular Student Alliance at Wayne State University in Detroit.  In addition to being an outstanding book design artist (the Chip Kidd of the underground™), Kevin is a priest with the ever-misunderstood Church of Satan. Some background here.

• JIM CRAWFORD reads an excerpt from Confessions of an Antinatalist. Here's another -- lengthier, meatier -- excerpt that focuses on transhumanism. Jim's YouTube channel is here. Apparently antinatalism is a hot topic among a certain marginal segment of the self-broadcasting community. "The Cheeto® has no value."

• "The Epicurean Atheist" reads  (at copyright-flouting length) from JONATHAN BOWDEN's Mad. Could have done without the fake British accent, but at least he cops to it. (Note: Nine-Banded Books has signed to re-publish Bowden's long-out-of-print book, Sade, hopefully in late 2012.)

• Finally, here's TITO PERDUE waxing heretical with Tom Sunic. Watergate does not bother him. Does your conscience bother you? (Order your copy of The Node here.) 

The harlidays are upon us, and Nine-Banded Books make GREAT GIFTS!

Memento mori.

Tito Perdue's THE NODE

Tito Perdue has been described as "America's lost literary genius" (New York Press) and as "a reactionary snob" (Publisher's Weekly). Originally released in 1991 under the estimable Four Walls Eight Windows imprint, Perdue's first published novel, Lee, has since become a cult classic. Notably, it introduced Perdue's enduring anti-hero (and presumed alter-ego), Leland Pefley, a dyspeptic, cane-wielding misanthrope at war with the modern world. "Lee's language is vitriolic and hallucinatory," wrote a critic for The New York Times Book Review, who further praised the book as "a portrait both exceedingly strange and troubling."

In describing Perdue's work as "troubling," this early critic displayed unwitting prescience. For as Perdue's literary career has come to bloom in the years since Lee was published, so has his reputation as a problematic political reactionary whose avowed worldview is none-too-easily reconciled with the prevailing sensibilities of contemporary cultural gatekeepers. While Lee's abiding nostalgia for antebellum folkways and inherited Western tradition may be taken in stride so long as the the veneer of comically situated satire is preserved, some critics seem disarmed -- or troubled -- to discover beneath Perdue's most trenchent and inegalitarian prose the form of an all-too sincere lament. As the line between author and subject has blurred, the fictional landscape that once seemed so wonderfully peculiar and human and alive has thus been colored by suspicion, leaving status-conscious critics with few options. One option, obviously, is to call the author a snob. Another tack is to softcoat one's appreciation in sufficiently disclamatory verbaige, perhaps with a few contextual references to other problematic writers of import. Knut Hamsun might be close enough for roadwork, and Houellebecq is fashionably on call for precisely these occasions. Easiest, I fear, is to ignore the work altogether.                      

But let's hope Tito Perdue has yet to be consigned to the margins, because I am very proud to announce that his sixth novel, a brilliant dystopian satire called The Node, will be released by Nine-Banded Books later this month. 

Here's the squib:

Welcome to the future. The 21st century has come of age and it seems that everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong. Propelled beyond the brink by environmental catastrophe, by social degeneration and the foretold collapse of the monetary system, the American landscape has given way to a postmodern picaresque. In such a world, where crime has been normalized, sex has been mechanized, and where ethnic enclaves – equipped with inscrutable bioengineered surveillance gadgetry – vie for the last remnants of power, one hapless pilgrim stands athwart the apocalyptic tide. Emboldened by dim nostalgia and quixotic resolve, this man – our hero, as we may insist – is entrusted to mobilize a fractious retinue of co-ethnic subversives (the maligned “Cauks”) to establish a stronghold, a redoubt, a community, a last ditch … a Node. It remains only to be seen whether the seeds of renewal may yet find purchase, or be left to ash.

The speculative form may represent a superficial departure for Perdue, who is best known for his mystically suffused explorations of decaying southern heritage, but longtime fans will the relish the idiosyncrasies and strange humor that have long distinguished Perdue's writing. The Node is engrossing, sly, subversive, and wickedly funny. Read it now or catch up later.

_______________

The first printing of The Node will be released on November 20, 2011. This hardcover edition will be strictly limited to 125 numbered and autographed copies and will be available exclusively from Nine-Banded Books (the pre-order form should be active later today) for $25, which includes shipping. A $12 trade paperback edition will be released in late December and may be pre-ordered through Amazon.

Some thoughtful commentaries on Tito Perdue's work are gathered here.  Derek Turner interviews Perdue here. And Alex Kurtagic (who created the cover illustration for The Node) offers a fresh perspective on Tito's early novel, The Sweet-Scented Manuscript, here.  

Memento mori. 

Bucket O' NVSQVAM

If you live nearabouts the great city of Chicago, be sure to visit  Bucket O' Blood Books and Records on Thursday, November 3rd, when Nine-Banded Books author Ann Sterzinger will read from her novel NVSQVAM (nowhere). The book party begins at 7:30 pm, so get there early and stay late. There might even be wine and cheese.

Bucket O' Blood (which sounds like a very cool shop) is located in the Logan Square neighborhood at 2307 N. Milwaukee Ave.

Also, this happened.

Memento mori.

Rod McKuen: War Criminal

Did you know that Rod McKuen was a psychological warfare script writer during the Korean War?

Wait. Let me back up.

In high school I was in a "creative writing" class that was taught by a new-agey once-upon-a-hippie stereotype of a woman who somehow passed as a kind of low-rent cult figure, at least in the minds of the frailest set of sensitive artist youths to sulk their way in. Most days, you'd sit in a circle, read your crap aloud, and wait for the others to read theirs. Then there would be a round of critiques until teacher would cut in with one of her semester-rehearsed life-lesson monologues where she might go on about regrettable groupie adventures or some cherished acid trip epiphany. In course, teacher made sure we knew that she was bisexual, that she was a lapsed Catholic, that her ex husband left bruises, and that she had lost touch with her family (or maybe it was just her father -- I can't recall). She extolled the virtues of psychic group encounters, dream interpretation, and hundredth monkey nonsense. After teacher had sized up the room well enough to pick favorites, I remember how she would steer the class discussion in cruel and manipulative ways, prodding tearful confessions from her most captive fans. A year after I graduated, I learned that teacher had had been fucking a school friend of mine. One of her favorites. A few years after that, I heard from another friend that she was dead. Eaten by a tumor.

While I'll grant that teacher may have known a thing or two about writerly craft, she had terrible taste. She was a big fan of those Leo Buscaglia love therapy books and would sometimes read from them in class, presumably for our edification. She had given way too much thought to Judy Blume's Wifey. She made us read Janis Ian lyrics. She insisted that we watch The Breakfast Club ... and discuss.

And then there was Rod McKuen, who might still be the best-selling poet in human history. Teacher was, without a trace of irony, a McKuen enthusiast. On certain days when we weren't compelled to sit in the circle reading and critiquing and sharing too much, she would play decade-old spoken-word albums of McKuen reading his free-verse over soft music. I still remember his raspy voice. Still remember the one about the cat.

I made fun of Rod McKuen back then. The jokes came easily enough, and it would be just as easy now to dump his camp reputation on teacher's corpse. But the truth is, I don't know that he's such a bad poet. If he is -- or was -- a bad poet, the fact remains that millions of sincere people once thought otherwise. Over the years, I've picked up a few McKuen chapbooks at rummage stores and library booksales. They have soft-focus paisley covers with garish 1970s title fonts. They have titles like Listen to the Warm and Lonesome Cities. The poems between the covers fairly ooze with first-draft sentimentality, to be sure, but only a sneering critic would describe McKuen's verse as treacly. Melancholy is more accurate. The language is warm and intimate, unencumbered, distinctive, and peppered with precious free-associative singsong metaphors that go down like milk and honey -- even when inspiration is drawn, as it often is, from the shallow well of commonplace sorrow. I'll read one at random and my first thought is usually: yeah, I can see why people were drawn to this. Alienation, loneliness and spiraling self-pity are catnip themes for troubled souls, and McKuen served them up in cozily familiar snapshot narratives that tempted hope, or at least made for good company. Tastemakers of the day scoffed over McKuen's popular appeal, just as critics scoffed at the first Black Sabbath album. But that's so much distant noise. Open the time capsule and open your eyes and it's clear that the world's "most understood poet" was dispensing pre-Prosac. Probably better than placebo, and I wouldn't call it kitsch. I might even be a fan. Teachers really do change lives. 

But did you know that Rod McKuen was a psychological warfare script writer during the Korean War? It's an odd  bit of trivia that comes up often enough in the old dustjacket squibs. I had forgotten until the other day when I picked up a few pocket editions at the local book festival. Now I'm half tempted to send off a FOIA request to see if any declassified texts are available. Maybe collect them for a book.

If you Google "Rod McKuen" and "Psychological Warfare," one of the top results is an eleven-year-old archived page from McKuen's website where, in response to a question posed in a fan letter form someone named "Dixie," the people's poet provides a bit of fascinating context:

Dear Dixie,

As a GI before leaving for Korea I was stationed in Tokyo for awhile where I worked writing propaganda scripts that were translated and beamed behind the bamboo curtain to North Korea..

One of my creations was "Moran" a sort of Korean Tokyo Rose who spoke quietly and played sentimental music. In other words all I did was adapt my old Oakland radio show "Rendezvous with Rod" for a smooth talking and sexy voiced Korean girl to speak from a female point of view. The idea was to make each North Korean soldier think she was speaking only to him. Defection to the South was the plan.

A typical script might begin "Hello, My Midnight Companion, It's S0 romantic and warm in Seoul tonight, I wish you were here to share this autumn night with me." 

I know, it sounds pretty corny, but it worked so well that there were major defections and I was named by Communist Korea (along with "Moran" and others connected with the show) as an official war criminal. For all I know I'm still on the list. Wonder how that will play out when I play concerts in Korea next year?

It's a nice autumn here in California here too, Dixie, but without the famous, colorful fall foliage that Colorado can boast. I had some beautiful autumn leaves sent to me from Wisconsin recently.

Warmly,

Rod

Memento mori.                

What is a Hoax?

Was "Sybil" a hoax?

It appears that we are faced with contemporaneous evidence, no? A clear-cut confession in black and white. Case closed. The once-thriving cottage industry of MPS (now DID) quack therapies, the academic and sub-academic literature that captivated millions, the made-for-TV movies and talk show triggers ... the lamentable lot of it may now be regarded as so much epiphenomenal scratch-and-sniff; a rippling divagation of the hive-mind primed by the event of an opportunistic and closely guarded "hoax." Nothing else to see here, folks. The verdict is in. 

In completely unrelated news, Arthur Butz takes polite issue with Samuel Crowell's contradistinctive thesis.

Memento mori.

The Owl and the Ostrich

David Benatar has drafted a sharp rebuttal to Sami Pihlström's meretricious essay, “Ethical Unthinkabilities and Philosophical Seriousness” (gated reference to the latter here). For those of you who don't follow this stuff closely, Pihlström's essay was noteworthy in that it argued not against Benatar's antinatalist reasoning per se, but against the mere and open consideration of ideas that, for whatever shifting reasons, may be deemed to fall ouside the bounds of "serious" philosophical discourse. "There are ideas," according to Pihlström, "that are dangerous enough not to deserve serious argumentative attention." Allowing arguendo that such preemtively intolerable ideas may somewhere exist, the weight of Benatar's rejoinder is rightly devoted to rescuing philanthropic antinatalism from the blanket indictment.

Where the philosophical merits of antinatalism are concerned, I think Benatar's response is entirely persuasive. This is no surprise since, despite the pretense of intellectual "seriousness," Pihlström's critique  amounts to little more than an exasperated and clumsily strewn harumph and sneer that doesn't stop short of implying that antinatalists are as dangerous as Nazis. So yeah, fuck that record-skipping noise; we can discern more substance in YouTube comments (where it usually takes longer for Godwin's Law to disrupt the festivities). Philanthropic antinatalism is chiefly concerned with the problem of suffering and so long as people have the capacity to choose whether or not to make new people (who will suffer), the position merits serious philosophical -- and practical -- consideration. Done and done.

Things do become a bit more interesting as the lens widens to bring the deeper question (which Pihlström posits as resolved and about which Benatar remains skeptical) into relief. Do some ideas legitimately try intellectual tolerence?  Is the inherent -- or perceived -- "danger" of some ideas sufficient to countermand ordinary philosophical engagement and inquiry? To entertain the affirmative proposition is to tempt a swarm of paradoxical implications. Can the question even be phrased in safely meta-philosophical terms, or do we summon demons merely by asking? Don't think of an elephant, merry pranksters. And whatever you do, don't make a list. The knot tightens to a snare when you consider that, as Benatar points out, the notion that potentially dangerous ideas should be withheld  from examination is "itself a dangerous idea."

Benatar tempers his support for open intellectual engagement with a conservative stance toward praxis. "I think that dangerous arguments should be engaged," he writes, "even if we do not always act on them." This much is at least consistent with the soft-to-absent policy prescriptions on offer in Better Never to Have Been, where, having advanced the strong case against the moral beneficence (or mere neutrality) of procreation, Benatar stops short of advocating legal remedies that would limit reproductive freedom. Guided by democratic caution, the purveyor of hetorodoxy recognizes that, despite all reason and evidence to the contrary, he may yet be proven wrong. The Stoic view of death, Benatar instructively reminds us, remains perenially problematic for those who contend that death is a harm to the individual. Yet tens of centuries after Epicurus and Lucretius met the reaper, their cogitations on the harmlessness of death are perpended in the light of day, and no one worries that the penal code will be substantially revised.

Fair enough. The distinction between thought and action may be crucial in the scheme of philosophical discourse. But I fear it is also, at least potentially, a dodge.  I think it is noteworthy, if slightly tangential, that the most interesting criticisms of philanthropic antinatalism to date have been levelled not by those who would upend the structure of Benatar's hedonic assymetry, but by critics who express concern that the tacit emphasis on negative utility inherent -- or at least strongly implicit -- in an extra-mortal accounting of pain and pleasure may be logically extrapolated to justify conclusions, and potentially actions, that are almost universally believed to be, in Pihlström's phrase, "ethically intolerable." In most textbook accounts, variations of the "pinprick argument" are entertained to suggest the folly of an ethical system that seeks, at all turns, to minimize and finally abolish all manifestations of pain, but  in the face of our reflexive repugnance, the math looks back. Lay two time-tables side by side: one in which the progress of life marches on toward natural extinction; the other in which a Negative Utilitarian Demiurge calls off the parade well before the final storm has gathered. Then add up the pain chips, vast against Vast. I am absolutely confident it won't even be close. We can hedge our bets as matter of prudence and form (and perhaps it's well that we should), but confidence isn't so elusive, even if it takes a demonic supercomputer overlord to put the period at the end of the sentence.

What if Benatar had concluded his original antinatalist argument without such face-saving, if earnest, humility? What if he had claimed -- as others have claimed in marginal forums and as yet others will surely claim with greater authority in time -- that the force of antinatalist reasoning is presently sufficient to countenance the sort of proactive policy-based interventions that critics probably have in mind when they thrum on about "dangerous" slopes of ethical inquiry? In the counterfactual where Benatar comes out in favor of forced sterilization or other policies that stand in contravention of widely shared and cherished values about reproductive freedom, should the underlying argument that coming into existence is always a harm suffer by the addition of such far-flung policy proposals, however imprudent?

I don't think it should. When the distinction between thought and action is blurred, and even when the distinction gives way to legislation or its prospect, the argument against open engagement is not strengthened; it is merely complicated, ironically, by the seriousness of the proposed intervention. In whatever case, thought binds us to look closely and let the chips fall. Whether it is dressed as a tentative moral conclusion or as a more confident proposition, "No one should ever have children" is an assertion  backed by entirely "thinkable" reasons that in less radical contexts operate to justify uncontroversial laws that penalize harmful actions. Perhaps it is well for now to play it safe and wait for the smoke to clear, but don't be surprised -- and don't bury your head in the sand -- when some twice-as-clever killjoy rummages for a blunt instrument.

Memento mori.

Sorry for the interruption...

Not that there's been much going on in Hogville of late, but it seems that malevolent widget-gremlins were causing my url to redirect to a useless Blogbar page. My thanks to the few of you who brought the glitch to my attention. It's probably long past time I moved this dusty old file cabinet over  to Wordpress anyway. I'll look into it.

Irregular posting will resume later this weekend. Indeed, there's a bit of news to share.

Memento mori.

Now Available from Nine-Banded Books: NVSQVAM (nowhere)

In a recent "Future of the Underground" column, cult author Nick Mamatas implied that I was an asshole, but I'll let that slide, seeing as 1) I've never met the guy, and 2) he goes on to describe Ann Sterzinger's NVSQVAM (nowhere) as "fantastic ... the kind of book that sexists of all genders like to claim women don't write or read." Meanwhile, erstwhile Whirligig editor Frank Marcopolos aptly effuses: "Ann Sterzinger's writing is electric. Her 100,000-watt power singes every page of Nusquam (nowhere)."

True that.

I am very proud to count Ann Sterzinger among the growing stable of writers at Nine-Banded Books. I think she classes up the joint, and I can only hope that her literary ambitions aren't blotted by her affiliation with my "tiny and insane" publishing venture. She's a pro.

At first glance, Ann's novel may not seem like Nine-Banded fare. She doesn't explicitly engage controversial subjects (except perhaps at the periphery), and it's shockingly easy to imagine her work spined alongside the moment's crop of Eggers-approved lit-fic sensations on offer at your local Barnes & Noble. But Ann's stuff is different, godammit. While a thousand aspiring dynamos plot at flairful tricks, Ann's cynically inflected tale is anchored by a working writer's sense of pace and craft, and by an honest critic's sense of bullshit. NVSQVAM (nowhere) is by turns comic and tragic, sly and poignant, irreverent and soul-rendingly earnest. It's a romp that settles in dark places, and I think you'll enjoy the ride.

NVSQVAM (nowhere) is currently available from Nine-Banded Books (where domestic shipping is always free, your welcome), as well as through Amazon, Qimby's Bookstore in Chicago, and Atomic Books in Baltimore. If you want to learn more before putting down your hard-earned cash, check out Ann's dueling interview with Nine-Banded veteran, Andy Nowicki. And if you are interested in writing about the book for a magazine or blog, let me know and I'll set you up with a review copy.  

Memento mori.

 

 

Happy Bed-time Story Hour with Andy Nowicki and Ann Sterzinger

EDITOR'S NOTE

On June 15, 2011, Nine-Banded Books will release Ann Sterzinger's NVSQVAM (nowhere), a jaundice-eyed yet disarmingly elegiac novel of  Diogenesian despair and dreams deferred. Ann is a helluva writer, and I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that her comedy cum threnody tempts comparison with the most incisive efforts of Florence King, Patrick Hamilton, and maybe even Ann's own literary hero, Kingsley Amis. You can order her book here, or through Amazon. I hope you will. 

Now track back—way back to the year 2009. That's when Nine-Banded Books published Considering Suicide, by Andy Nowicki, a self-described "Catholic reactionary" who has since solidified his reputation as an occasionally polarizing shit-stirrer in the "alternative right" literary scene (such as it is). Andy's latest latest petit roman, The Columbine Pilgrim,  is a volatile, though morally centered, cocktail  that serves up a psychotic helping of revenge porn within the context of a tenuous redemption narrative. You can order his book here, or through Amazon. I hope you will.

When Nine-Banded newbie Ann sat down for a chat with Nine-Banded alum Andy, they indulged the opportunity to  trade positive affirmations over matters literary and sundry. For your voyeuristic pleasure, the only-slightly-edited product of their dueling interview session is transcribed below. Drink it down, ye word nerds. Then buy their fucking books.            

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ANN STERZINGER: Good evening, and welcome to Happy Bed-time Story Hour with Andy Nowicki and Ann Sterzinger, authors of, respectively, the recently released novella, The Columbine Pilgrim, and the soon-to-be-released novel NVSQVAM (nowhere). (Andy is also the author of the strange hybrid Considering Suicide, a novella spliced with a philosophical treatise, which will also be referenced in this interview.) We are going to ask each other nothing but mushy, idiot softball questions about each other's genius work, and many turds will be dislodged with tongues along the way.

I am Ann, and I am about to toady up to Andy regarding The Columbine Pilgrim, the disturbing (but oft-times wry) tale of Tony Meander, an adult child of abusive playmates who becomes obsessed with the Columbine murders and, at the age of 33, drops out of grad school to belatedly and pathetically commit a copycat crime. No one sees it coming; as an adult Mr. Meander is a quiet, polite weirdo. No one guesses how obsessed he is with his distant past till he finally snaps.

Q: The easiest question that comes to mind is: Why the fuck couldn't Tony get over it? I take it you were bullied in high school, as was I, but neither of us have shot anyone; life has dealt most former nerds either enough adult woes or adult joys to overshadow the fading memories of adolescent gloom. He's arguably as stuck in the past as the overweight former jocks he mocks as they relive their glory days. Does someone need to toss him a grown-up mugging or what?

Andy: There's a line in a song by Bowling for Soup: "High school never ends." On the other hand, Hall and Oats memorably told us, "Believe it or not, there's life after high school." I wonder if any of us really gets over the traumas of our past. Maybe some of us do; I dunno. We grow up, and things get better, and time heals some wounds, but some things stay with us. What I pictured with a character like Tony is someone who takes this bit of arrested development to a grotesque and distasteful extreme. Hence his fascination with the Columbine High School massacre, and hence his horrifying final act.

You're right, though. He's 33 years old. He should be over it, but he's chosen to fixate on it, kind of like someone might choose to scratch a skin rash when leaving it alone would allow it to heal. We do things like that sometimes, even knowing full well that it will ultimately do us no good... Why? Dostoyevsky's character says it's out of sheer existential spite, and I'm prone to agree.

ANDY NOWICKI: Ann Sterzinger's novel NVSQVAM (nowhere) concerns the misadventures of a misanthrope named Lester Reichartson. Lester would seem to have many reasons to count his blessings; he has a beautiful wife and a brilliant son, and a promising career in academia no doubt beckons once he completes his doctoral dissertation. But Lester is deeply, bitterly unhappy. He feels himself marooned in a hick town in rural Illinois, far away from the cosmopolitan delights of Chicago, where he was once an up-and-coming singer in a punk band. He secretly hates his wife for manipulating him into starting a family, something he never wanted. Most strikingly, he is bitterly resentful of the fact that his precocious son will likely be a bigger success than he will ever be.

Q: Let's start with an obvious question: the title. What do the initials mean?

Ann: It's not actually initials; I'm just being pretentious and spelling the Latin word nusquam—meaning literally nowhere, as in Southern Illinois, or the British Isles back in the days of Hadrian, or whatever island you got stuck on if you were a Roman poet or politician in exile—the way it would be written in Roman times, before U and V became two separate letters. V used to count for either the consonant or the vowel depending on where it was in a word, sort of the way Y does now. God, see how much good a liberal arts education does you? I'm a goddamned freak even when I title things. I knew I should have studied accounting. Lester should have too.

Q: Tony Meander, during his post-high-school life, as he gets weirder and weirder through grad school, also gets deeper and deeper into the sort of self-mythologizing—with a little help from his friends Hitler and Nietzsche—that finally allows him to declare himself a twisted God figure. (He can't be Jesus of course, considering his position regarding the story's version of Mary.) And he is definitely a God of destruction. But he's also an extremely narcissistic God—as both the god of Abraham and the gods of American Idol can be. I can see reading all this as a grim satire of today's self-centered nihilistic culture, but I also can see reading it as a parody of the Biblical god himself. I touched on this when I reviewed the book on my blog, but I was curious as to what, if any, satirical/parodic intent was running through your head when you wrote it... and if none, what do you make of my interpretation?

Andy: I am a committed Catholic, and I deeply love the Church and all of its dogmas and doctrines, but at the same time I struggle with faith. I'll cop to often having a particularly difficult time loving God the Father, because of the things he apparently wills to happen in the world, or at least allows to happen. I do think that Yahweh of the Old Testament often comes across as mean, vengeful, arbitrary. But there's a real appeal in that to someone like Tony, who has long felt so powerless and picked-on and weak. Just as God might wipe out thousands of people in a natural disaster for no apparent reason save that fact that he "can," so Tony views his own eventual murderousness as an expression of his God-like power. And of course, he's nuts, he's around the bend... but a little detail about the way the story ends almost has the reader wondering if he might in fact be in some way right about his claim to a kind of divinity!

Q: You and I have spoken before about the character of Lester, and the stumbling block his at times obnoxious personality presents for the reader. When I read the early draft of your book, I found his wistfulness about his past somewhat endearing, but I just couldn't relate to him hating his own son out of spiteful envy. There are also times in the story when he is needlessly nasty to his wife, etc. When we spoke before, you conceded all of these points, but I got the sense that you still really had an affection for your anti-hero, in spite of his numerous and massive faults. Can you elaborate on this?

Ann: That's funny, I often get such feedback about my characters, when I never mean for them to be anti-heroes at all; I simply mean for them to be fully human. Which, I guess, goes to show just how likable humans are, or at least humans as I experience and/or present them. I don't really think of writing heroes or anti-heroes when I write a character, I write about people who interest me.

But let's be more specific. The secret backbone of this novel is that it was written after I'd spent a summer digesting this enormous thick warts-and-all biography of Kingsley Amis, the great British comic novelist of the 20th century (well, after Wodehouse and maybe Waugh I guess, but Amis will probably always be nearest my heart). The bio truly was warts and all, particularly regarding Amis's relationships with his womenfolk and sons, but my affection for the guy's writing and therefore what was best in him remained unchanged. After reading it I moved back to Carbondale to finish my BA in Classics and the Amis bio began to work on my brain as I gathered other ideas for a book to be set in Carbondale’s very dystopian mid-south environment. I hadn't really consciously meant to write a parallel-universe biography of Amis when I began writing about Lester; I simply began wondering just how awful it would be to raise a kid in that town. But then I started thinking more consciously about the bio: asking, "What if
Kingsley Amis had been born at the wrong time, when things were all shitty as he predicted, on the wrong continent, where it's much harder to be a writer... oh, but let's not have him be a writer at all, let's make it even harder for him to have a day job in academia, let's make him a musician by vocation so that writing papers is like sticking needles in his eyes... Oh, let’s just make his entire life into that new Depeche Mode song ‘Wrong,’ not that it sort of wasn’t to begin with." So I guess my affection for Amis, warts and all, transferred in part to Lester, especially since I had set Lester up with extra factors to work against.

But also, I've been turning a new sort of practical literary theory over in my mind; it goes something like this: maybe the harder a character is to like, the more you like him when you finally do get to his heart of gold. Or pewter, or chocolate, or soap, or whatever isn't snarling and rage and sarcasm and self-pity.

Funny, this reminds me of a question I wanted to ask you, so here's your next...

Q: Is Tony Meander meant to be at all likable? I mean, sure, you can sort of understand where his rage comes from, but, jeez, what an angree bastiidddd... maybe he could be heroic in a sense, but he's more of a hero-follower if you scrape his God complex to find the prophets Vodka and Reb [the Columbine killers' nicknames for each other].

Andy: I do rather sympathize with Tony Meander. Of course, he's un-admirable in many, many ways, and he ultimately becomes a monster, so I certainly don't blame anyone for disliking him. I'm drawn to writing about people like him, people who have a lot of the same kind of "issues" as myself, the same neuroses, the same fears and hatreds, only more so. I won't lie; there is something very liberating about creating a character who says many of the things you only dream of saying, and who does things that you'd never do (since you are possessed of sanity and a conscience) but may fantasize about doing when you're enduring your dark night of the soul.

Ann: Your answer reminds me of a review of Considering Suicide which I read on a site called Shotgun Barrel Straight: I didn't quite follow some of the reviewer's rhapsodizing about Hamlet (though the big “to be” soliloquy is obviously germane to your book), but I found his summary of the philosophical treatise to be concise and also ironic if applied to Tony Meander. He says you hold that without God we are "doomed to the twin evils of totalitarianism and anarchy." I presume he means "doomed to choose between," but in fact in the case of Tony's murderous rampage we are doomed to both at once. Comedy gold!

Q: Do you think there's any third choice for a godless world? Do you think Tony ever saw such an option?

Andy: I tend to hold, with Dostoyevsky's character in The Brothers Karamazov, that without belief in a transcendent law (and thus, law-giver), things fall apart very quickly in very many ways. No, I don't think Tony ever saw a third option, and honestly, neither do I.

Q: Regarding your last answer: Does Lester ever get to his heart of gold? If so, can you explain the moment without givng away the ending?

Ann: I had a friend, Carlos Yu was his name, whose favorite saying—and I don't know whether this was his saying or whether he was quoting someone, but it's stuck with me—was: "A cynic is just a disappointed idealist." I think NVSQVAM maps the part of Lester's life during which his behavior is the ugliest it's ever been, and probably ever will be, but in his very grumblings and rages I see the disappointed hopes he had for a better world. He used to be dedicated to his art, for lack of a better word—to his music, which was the center of his identity, and that's been taken away bit by bit, leaving a hole where he thought the beauty in his personality, the best part of him, had been. He rages against thoughtless idiots driving around, because he wants to see a world that's more beautiful than a car-centric mall-and-tin-shack hell.

And the moment I think you're talking about—the moment where he finally realizes that he can actually find the desire to sacrifice his life for his son, but only if he literally sacrifices his life—is the moment where he scrabbles up to find the closest thing he can find to correct parental sentiment. Of course, a lot of the book is meant to question the cult of the baby, of the mini-me, of ... well, I guess I question the cult of life-that-came-out-of-moi the same way you question the culture of death in your essays and elsewhere. But Lester, despite his rejection of the idea of parenthood, still makes an effort to find something in himself that can put aside his dreams and even his beliefs for a moment for the sake of the child whose existence can't be wished or theorized away. I think that's something that is very sympathetic about him. He never wanted any part of the cult of parenthood, he doesn't want to find his own self-worth by forcing his expectations on a little person; he didn't even want to drag that little person into this ugly world in the first place. But in the very end he realizes that since the damn kid is there, maybe he should give what he can to make his life better. Unfortunately, he realizes this too late.

Andy: You have written elsewhere, in describing the type of stuff you like to write as, and I paraphrase, having a hilarious beginning and middle and a horrifying ending. In the structure of its plot, NVSQVAM reminds me a bit of Flannery O'Connor's great short short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Most of the book is, if painful and bitter, still basically funny. But the ending is absolutely brutal. The tone shift is striking. Why did you feel compelled to take the story in such a direction?

Ann: Shew, that's a hard one. Doesn't help that I've never read that story. I guess it's because I didn't see any other way out for Lester. For one thing the book is set in Southern Illinois, and it was also written there. And though I know a lot of people really love that area, and maybe it was my own frame of mind at the time, there was just something about the goddamn place that seemed to speak to me of doom. I really could not imagine a happy ending there for anybody over the age of thirty who didn't already have a PhD, because it literally is a college, and then nothingness, except for the howl of the cicadas and the occasional puma taking a swipe at your pet cat. I'm sure an isolated college town, no matter how grim and glowering the locals, is a wonderful coming-of-age setting for young kids, and a nice place to settle down for college professors, but if you're there during what's supposed to be the prime of your life it's really quite horrifying. Mid-southern gothic. There just didn't seem to be any way to get the characters off that particular stage without dragging out the poisoned chalices and daggers.

Q: Do you mind if I ask you a rape question or is that too much of a spoiler?

Andy: Not at all... rape me.

Ann: Ha ha... OK, I have two of them. The first is shorter.

Q: You've asked me in earlier conversations whether I, as a woman, was freaked out by the rape scene. (I said I wasn't since arguably the victim had assaulted her attacker first, but that takes us down the merry primrose path of arguing what constitutes sexual assault, so I won't go into that.) After the discussion, I was curious... were you hoping to freak people out with that scene? By which I don't mean simple shit-stirring, I mean... did you have any particular thoughts you wanted to provoke in mind? Some sort of self-examination on female readers' parts as to the extent and nature of theparticular powers they may hold as sexual beings? And honestly, how high are your realistic hopes for making people examine their own souls and personalities through fiction? Yes, yes, I know we're all a little bit Don Quixote.

Andy: The rape which happens near the end of the book actually surprised me. I wasn't planning on putting it there, but it just suggested itself, and I went with my proverbial gut. It definitely freaked me out, I can say that. But it also kind of thrilled me, because it worked, thematically speaking.

Your questions are interesting and insightful, and I'm not just kissing your ass when I say that. In my YouTube promo for The Columbine Pilgrim, I talk briefly about the frequent cruelty I've observed of young, pretty girls— girls who are aware of their beauty—toward dorky guys, guys who know these girls are out of their league but still can’t help but gawk. In the early part of the book, Tony gets viciously teased by a really, really mean girl, who pretends to come on to him and then rolls her eyes and basically says "As if!" when he is turned on by her pseudo-advance. There is something there, I think, to be said against some of the more facile claims of certain strains of modern feminism, which always see girls and women as righteous and men as the cruel ones...

But in a larger sense, I see the whole range of ways in which people respond to the horrific violence in the second half of the book as a commentary on the way interest groups can be so willfully myopic, so smitten with their own agendas at the expense of everything else, that they very crassly take a tragedy and try to construe it as exclusively symbolic of their own narrow concerns... What's the response to Columbine? If you're a liberal, it's to argue for gun control. If you're a Christian conservative, it's to blame godless public schools. And so forth. In The Columbine Pilgrim, some crass interest groups take the rape and make it the centerpiece of their tiresomely rehearsed response to the massacre, others take the fact that he used the words "faggot" and "nigger," others the fact that the killer apparently felt motivated by anger at Christianity, etc. I'm trying to make a plea, I suppose, for people to see things in their totality, and not to reduce them to some goddamn political cause or other.

Ann: You could almost say the same thing about 9/11.

Andy: Oh, totally. "9/11 just shows that we need to be more interventionist." "9/11 just shows that we need to be more isolationist." "9/11 just shows that we should be more welcoming of immigrants." "9/11 just shows that we need more border security." "9/11 just shows we need to take more aggressive action as the world's leader." "9/11 just shows we need to welcome a more multilateral approach to world affairs."… You name it, it was said after those towers fell nearly a decade ago. And people are still using an event like 9/11 or Columbine or Waco or Ruby Ridge or the Holocaust or whatever to crassly advance their own agendas, with little or no care for the entirety of the truth.

Ann: Here’s rape question number two.

Q: You and I had a discussion privately a while ago about why it is that people will be less freaked out by a murder in a story like The Columbine Pilgrim than they are by a rape. I couldn’t give you any satisfactory answers; the best I could do was to posit that the victim of a rape has to live with the aftermath, while a murder victim’s problems are blissfully at an end.

By chance, I’m helping Chip [Smith, the kind and noble publisher of both NVSQVAM and Considering Suicide] transcribe some old stuff by Peter Sotos, and the intro to the Sotos volume I’m working with consists of Jim Goad, who published the volume, interviewing Sotos, and they ask each other basically the same question. Here’s the very abridged conversation, awaiting your reaction:

Goad: Here’s something that’s puzzled me, particularly with the [ANSWER Me!] rape issue—it was one of the reasons we did it—why do you think that people who don’t blanch at extreme violence or murder suddenly freak out when a sexual component is introduced?

Sotos: You’d probably be a better person to ask, but my own opinion is that people are so close to it. People really—if you watch TV, if you watch what goes on—people, all they want to do is talk or think about fucking … And so whenever this happens, they really have to sort of act as if they have a sort of moral standpoint above and beyond this. That they really are above this sort of thing. And it allows them—I think—that sort of indignation allows them the chance to wallow …

Dunno how much you know about Sotos, so I don’t know what context you have, but it’s an interesting thought… does he mean to imply that people are more interested in sex than in death, perhaps?

Andy: It seems that Sotos is saying that people feel more implicated by hearing about rape, since rape is a sexual crime and people think about sex a lot and thus they have to get righteously indignant in order to separate themselves from that which they feel implicates them. Maybe he's right.

But I think people think about murder a lot, too. So why aren't they as righteously indignant when they hear about a murder? I think that there is something more viscerally humiliating about a rape, because it's a kind of psychological subjugation; someone has his way with you, and sends the message that he "owns" you in some manner. In my book, the rape which takes place is an expression of one character's thirst for revenge against someone who in a way "raped" him, though not literally. We don't normally find rape as a moment of "righteous" comeuppance, the way that we commonly see revenge killings in movies, everywhere from The Princess Bride to Inglourious Basterds. People are so squeamish about the depiction of rape in art that the context doesn't even matter. I'm sure some of this is just conditioning from feminism ("No means NO!!!!"), but there's also a part of it that's just somehow more ingrained in our collective psyche.

Let me add that the rape scene in The Columbine Pilgrim still shocks me today. I'm very uncomfortable with it, but my discomfort is part of what makes it so compelling to me.

[At this point, the interviewers realize it is well past the witching hour, and begin to truly lob mushballs as they nod over their grog.]

Andy: This is your first published novel. Congratulations!

Q: Who do you think will be able to read and appreciate the themes upon which you reflect, so hilariously and so grimly, in NVSQVAM? What would you say is its intended audience, if there is one? And finally, where do you go from here? What do you intend to write about next?

Ann: Thank you! Hm. I guess its intended audience was the ghost of Kingsley Amis. If he thinks it's funny and horrible, then maybe everyone else will too. In my fantasy world it might provide some succour for people who are trapped in hellish domestic situations... or it might be welcomed by depressive comedy fans and, well... anyone who's near enough to the end of their rope to not feel insulted and get snippy over a little harsh light shed on human nature is welcome. Even if you get snippy you're invited to the party, as long as you don't dump over the punch bowl and piss on my floor.

Next up is... well, I'm most of the way through a true crime project, but the upcoming book that's nearest and dearest to me is a dystopian sci-fi project, heavy on the dystopia and not so hard on the science. What if human beings, in the future and on a distant planet of course, discovered the secret of immortality... and then hoarded it from each other like total bastards? It's hard as fuck to create a world from scratch, but lots of fun too.

Q: And what are you going to sink your teeth into next? Something with fuzzy bunnies and
footie pajamas?

Andy: Well, I go where my Muse directs me. And lately it's taken me some pretty strange places. I've actually written a couple of "erotica" pieces in the last month, which I hope have a literary appeal and aren't just crude jizz-squirters (recall Burt Reynolds's character's hilarious speech in "Boogie Nights"). I've also got another novella that's to be released in the fall called Under the Nihil, which features a character similar to Tony Meander, but in very different circumstances. The premise is, what if you could take a pill that totally took away your inhibitions? How would you behave if you just didn't give a fuck? Once again, a guy gets broken down, and then rages back in a very rage-filled and disturbing, yet entertaining, way.

What can I say? I's got issues. Just ask my shrink...

Ann: Wow. Good luck sleeping for both of us tonight. Time for nightmares!

Yours with love,

Andy Nowicki and Ann Sterzinger

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Memento mori

Michael K. Smith on The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes

Michael K. Smith, author of The Madness of King George and Portraits of Empire (Common Courage Press), hits all the right notes in his review of Samuel Crowell's The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes. From the top:   

Reading Samuel Crowell's, "The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes" is a little like stumbling across a rational mind in an insane asylum years after being taken hostage by the inmates. Following prolonged immersion in clashing dogmas, the dispassionate use of evidence and logic to arrive at a sensible conclusion comes as a jolting but thoroughly pleasant surprise. And Crowell's modesty in stating that conclusion tentatively, knowing that genuinely rational inquiry will and should be superseded by later efforts, is an equally refreshing departure from polemical norms.

Drawing on establishment and revisionist authors, along with a careful scrutiny of German source documents, Crowell deftly evaluates contending claims arguing that Nazi "gas chambers" were (1) weapons of extermination (2) disinfection chambers (3) bomb shelters designed to protect against aerial gas attacks. Aligning eyewitness testimony with the material and documentary record, he sketches out the basis for a rational opinion, putting readers in a position to make their own judgments, without first requiring that they join in partisan warfare. Thanks to this effort we no longer need choose between delusional orthodoxy and strident dissidence, but can simply weigh evidence. This should come as a relief to everyone, while hopefully expanding the number of readers who can move beyond ritual denunciation and actually take the gas chamber debate seriously.

Crowell's work contains not a trace of anti-Semitism. He makes no attempt to whitewash Nazi racial policy, which he characterizes as a "shameful and disgraceful chapter in Germany history," even if "we assumed revisionist theses to their maximum extent." The important consideration, he notes, is that "we would still be dealing with about a million dead European Jews, who died as a direct result of Nazi persecution, plunder, forced labor, deportation, and yes, mass killing." As for his personal beliefs, he says, "they remain what they have been for thirty years or more," that "there certainly was a Holocaust in the sense that Nazi Germany persecuted and massacred many Jews," with the likelihood "that this massacre ran into the millions." Philosemitic crusaders, please take note.

A self-declared "moderate revisionist" who clearly values the standards of rational investigation, Crowell avoids exaggeration, misrepresentation, and self-righteousness. He shows no reluctance to admit when a conclusion is debatable or when the evidence is open to varying interpretations; and he is able to perceive shortcomings in the views and tactics of those who share a revisionist stance - and even some merit in those who do not. This adds credibility to his analysis, and marks him as a rare breed of intellectual who actually does what he is supposed to do: face up to facts and plausibly explain them. It is truly sad that on such an important topic his open-mindedness is all but unique.

Read the whole thing.

Also, TGGP reminds me that I forgot to link to Trevor Blake's piquant review of L.A. Rollins' The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays (which is now sold out, alas -- if the world doesn't end, we plan to do an enlarged reprint in 2012).

And for good measure, here's Keith Preston on Andy Nowicki's Considering Suicide (which still available from 9BB for $12, postpaid). 

Memento mori.

The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes: An Interview with Samuel Crowell

Editors Note: In April, 2011, Nine-Banded Books will release The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes: And Other Writings on the Holocaust, Revisionism, and Historical Understanding, by Samuel Crowell. Interested readers are encouraged to take advantage of free postage and a promotional offer by placing an advance order through the 9BB website. The book will also be available through Amazon and select independent bookstores.

What follows is an in-depth interview with the book’s author, Samuel Crowell.

____________________

THE HOOVER HOG: I guess I’ll start by asking about your background. Maybe the short version?

SAMUEL CROWELL: Well, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, attended public schools, went into the service, got out and went to my hometown school, Berkeley, on the GI Bill. Then I got fellowship to go east, and I went to Columbia for several years. I studied mostly history and languages as an undergraduate, with concentrations in Russian history and African American history and wrote my senior thesis on German-Jewish history with an emphasis on philosophy. At Columbia, I studied Russian and East European history and the history of ideas and got two masters degrees. Then I started raising a family. I did not finish my dissertation that focused on themes in late 19th Century Russian history of philosophy.

HH: Can you describe how you first encountered Holocaust revisionism? What were your first impressions? Most academics seem predisposed to reject this type of material without delving very far; what kept your attention?

SC: I first encountered revisionism via a news article in the Oakland Tribune in I believe the summer of 1977: it was a 500 word treatment on Arthur Butz' book, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. At the time, I thought it was amusing, since I assumed that this Butz character did not know as much about the Holocaust as I did.

However, I did not hear much about it subsequently. Moreover, since I had read quite a bit about Nazi Germany and its atrocities back in the 1960s, I did not want to go back there and get bogged down in those things. So at this point in my life I was deliberately ignoring 20th Century history, at least as regards Europe.

Some years later I was tasked with reading a stack of books on Nazi Germany. Simultaneously, I was obliged, as part of my graduate training, to study the Soviet Union. In those days – early 80s – it was customary to dismiss the atrocities attributed to the Soviet Union, as promoted by the likes of Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest, and to claim that these atrocities had been exaggerated and were quite possibly not true, since the only evidence that was being offered was testimonial and anecdotal. (I should stress that this is a valid criticism, even if it is sometimes carried to extremes.)  So then I started reading these books on Nazi Germany and I realized that I did not know this field at all; so I started following footnotes and consulting the sources so that I could evaluate these books intelligently, and the first thing that surprised me was that most of the evidence offered for Nazi atrocities – particularly as it concerned the camps – was also testimonial and anecdotal.

At this point, I felt that I must be missing something so I started asking around for sources, no one really had a handle on these things other than to recommend Hilberg or Reitlinger, so then I looked at them and found the same problem, and so then I started consulting the primary sources and after that started going through the stacks at the library looking for whatever it was that I was missing. Eventually, I found some books by Rassinier and a few months later I found Butz' book as well, and rather than finding the fire-breathing German nationalism or anti-Semitism that I had expected, I found them focusing on exactly the problems or gaps in the record that I had found myself.

By this time the summer was over, so I evaluated my texts, and left the matter. However, I have to say that I was somewhat surprised and rather depressed to find that the history of Nazi atrocity on which I was raised was clearly inaccurate and required revision. I left my studies of Nazi atrocity – which includes the Holocaust – and just assumed that someone else would do it. I knew I didn't want to do it. Several years later, when I browsed Arno Mayer's Why did the Heavens not Darken? in a bookstore, I was satisfied that Holocaust revisionism had come of age and that it would only continue. You can imagine my shock when I found out some years later that a movement was developing to make Holocaust revisionism illegal in the United States of America.

HH: Your book is subtitled, "And Other Writings on the Holocaust, Revisionism, and Historical Understanding." As you know, most journalists and public intellectuals refer to self-described Holocaust revisionists as "Holocaust deniers," and it's interesting that so many other forms of "denial" seem to have emerged in recent years, notably in contentious scientific contexts, such as in the debate over anthropogenic global warming. What are your views on the concept of "denial" in the sphere of Holocaust studies and otherwise? Is it meaningful to assert that some people "deny" that the Holocaust happened?  And I would be remiss not to ask: Do you "deny" the Holocaust?

SC: Well, in general I think words like “denier” and “denialist” are just sophisticated epithets. They contain no information other than, “You disagree with me, therefore you are bad.”  I think it is poor form to use such epithets, and I think it is destructive of reasoned discourse and reconciliation. That’s really all I can say about that.

As to whether I “deny” the Holocaust, I don't think so. I mean, to me, coming from the 60s, the Holocaust concerns those Nazi atrocities directed against the Jewish people, and the calamitous destruction the Jewish people suffered as a result. I have never changed my mind on that level. I think some of these atrocities are self-evidently true, and I think others are debatable. That, to me, is what “Holocaust revisionism” is about.

However in fairness most revisionists are not just questioning specific atrocities, they are also focusing on the number of victims – which I consider an uninteresting argument – and furthermore are focused on diminishing the stature, both moral and political, of the Nazi destruction of the Jews. For myself, I am not interested in diminishing the stature of the Holocaust, but I should also stress that that is not even a historical question. I do think that our understanding of the Holocaust should be open to alternative interpretations, I also think that the Jewish catastrophe has to be looked at in context, and finally I think that someone who questions the facts or significance of the Holocaust should not be imprisoned or summarily ejected from polite society.

In this respect I have to note with a certain irony that, back in the 60s, I was mystified as to why historians did not discuss the anti-Jewish atrocities of Nazi Germany more often and in more detail. As such discussion became more common in the 70s, I recall feeling a certain satisfaction that the Holocaust, as such, had been mainstreamed. However, looking back, I think the concept over-extended itself over the next two decades. It was inevitable, therefore, that there would be a reaction, and in retrospect Holocaust revisionism constituted that reaction.

HH:  It is commonly assumed that there is something inherently anti-Semitic about Holocaust revisionism. It seems clear enough from your writings that you are not motivated by such animus, but suspicion will persist. How do you address this perception?

SC: Charges of anti-Semitism are usually directed against revisionists because of the old argument that whatever happened to the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis has been exploited for political or economic gain. However, this idea was openly discussed in detail by Peter Novick and Norman Finkelstein at the end of the 1990s, so that aspect is no longer relevant. Further charges of anti-Semitism arise because many revisionists argue that some Jews deliberately exaggerated their suffering, or that Zionists deliberately exaggerated some aspects of Jewish suffering for political purposes, and so on. Finally, and most clearly, many revisionists yoke their criticism of aspects of the Holocaust with what they perceive as the threat of "Jewish power."  I am not interested in any of these other aspects of revisionism, because I don't think they have any relevance to the facts of the case, which simply turns on what did or did not happen in Eastern Europe in the Second World War.

Now you have to try to look at this from the Jewish point of view. The Jewish people – and this means primarily east European or Ashkenazi Jewry – has been threatened with violence and various assimilationist pressures for hundreds of years. This has not been a process of continual violence, but it has been a process of the erosion of Jewish identity, particularly in Eastern Europe. The Jewish people – like anyone else – have a history that emphasizes and encourages their unique identity. The Holocaust is part of that history. When someone comes along, from outside that community, and raises questions about the accuracy of that history, the response is predictable: it will be said that this person wishes harm on the Jewish community. Thus the accusation of anti-Semitism. The accusation is strengthened when the critic of Jewish history follows through with accusations of mendacity and raising the specter of “Jewish power” or associated concepts. It is not hard to see why Jewish people would look askance at Holocaust revisionism, of any kind.

From my point of view, Ashkenazi Jews – who form the bulk of European as well as American Jewry directly or by descent – are a national group like any other European group. However, they, like the Roma, or Gypsies, are among the very few European national groups without a homeland in Europe. This automatically makes the theme of national survival an issue. And I have no desire to diminish the national identity of any group, or threaten the national survival of any group. However, it is not in the Jewish interest to support the criminalization of historical interpretations that appear, at first glance, to be inimical to Jewish identity. So I have to encourage my Jewish brethren to be more tolerant of Holocaust revisionism, absent any explicit malicious accusations. I also feel a need to nudge Jewish history with regards to the Holocaust in a different direction: focusing on the "extermination camp" narrative and what is supposed to have happened at such camps, is not, in my view, the right direction.

My personal experiences in talking about the Holocaust with Jews over the years is that they are just as perplexed as everyone else about what did or did not happen. At the same time, however, they bridle when someone from outside the community seeks to revise that history, especially with a lack of respect or outright malice. Taking a very long view, I am trying to direct the discussion into more pacific and reasonable paths.

At this point I think I should add something about the moral condemnation of the persecution and massacre of the Jews. I can understand why revisionists rarely condemn it in the strongest moral terms. The main reason is that all of the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, including the German people, have grievances about the unjust seizure of wealth and property, cruel deportations, forced labor, shifting national borders, mass killings, mistreatment, and personal crimes such as rapes and so on. The attitude of some of these people is, why should we talk about the unique moral outrage against the Jewish people, when what happened to us is not only denied, it is not even discussed? 

On the other hand, from the Jewish point of view, any attempt to put the persecutions and massacres in a wider context is going to come across as something less than a forthright denunciation, a reservation, as it were, about that destruction. I understand that point of view too, and certainly the Jewish people had to endure an agony of insecurity in Eastern Europe for a century until the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe were swallowed up either by Nazi persecution and massacre or by communist ideology.

Therefore, while it really has nothing to do with historical analysis as such, it should be said that what Jewish people experienced and suffered during this time can be explained, but it cannot be justified, and if someone takes a critical posture with regards to some aspects of that ordeal, or seeks to put it into context with the suffering and unjust treatment of other peoples, that should not be construed as an attempt to sneak a justification in through the back door.

HH: You describe yourself as a "moderate revisionist." What does this mean? Or, to pose the question in a different way, where do you find revisionist arguments most compelling, and where do you find them unpersuasive?

SC: Well, as I indicated in my previous answer, revisionism tends to involve a whole set of ideas, involving not only Jews, but also Germans, and Nazis, and so on. It also tends to involve intense rhetoric about Israel, and the Middle East – that is why Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, supports revisionism – and then it descends further, into a paranoid fantasy about the last days of the White Race and so on and so forth. I am not interested in any of those things.

Another aspect of revisionism is that it tends to be extreme in its rejection of Nazi atrocities. I don't share this view. I think the history of mass gas extermination by the Nazis – directed either against Jews or against anyone, as in the euthanasia campaign – is, at least at this point, eminently arguable. I also think that the notion that the Nazis were out to kill all of the Jews of Europe is untrue, and, as I point out in "The Holocaust in Retrospect" that has been more or less conceded by standard historiography in recent years. Those two points, and free speech, are really the only issues that concern me. 

HH: Over half of the content of The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes – including the title monograph – is closely adapted from work that you did in the late 1990s. What was it like to revisit this material a decade later? Were you concerned that subsequent research might reveal serious flaws in your previous work?

SC: Well, it was strange to go back and read what I had written back then, especially since I wrote a lot of it so quickly. My instincts are conciliatory, so I tried to write in a manner that would address both sides with respect. I tried to be accurate and fair in my evaluation of evidence, and I think I did that fairly well.

It did not, and does not, concern me if subsequent research reveals serious flaws. I wrote this material because I felt an obligation to do so. In the process, I learned a lot of things I did not know. I was also able to answer my own questions for myself. I fulfilled my social obligation. I have no regrets.

If someone had found, or at some future time, finds, the cache of evidence that proves that millions of people were killed by gas both at the camps or at the euthanasia centers, that's fine with me. I would be interested in seeing such evidence. At the same time, I don't think that invalidates my argument concerning the folkloric background to the mass gassing claim. Whether that has any real significance to the history of this time period is not a question I can really answer.

HH: On a related note, it's my understanding that until you began working on this book you hadn't really written about the Holocaust controversy since the early 2000s. Is there anything to account for your decade-long silence on the subject?

SC: Well, I had intended to stop writing on the subject when I wrote "Bomb Shelters in Birkenau" in May, 2000, and I only wrote that article because I felt an obligation to defend the bomb shelter thesis one last time since it had been raised in the Irving-Lipstadt trial and I had finally obtained some primary documents about Auschwitz bomb shelters. However, it's hard to just walk away so I fulfilled some other requests over the next year or so.

The main reason why I got out of the subject is that I felt my main point about freedom of speech had been gained. I recall that there were several comments defending freedom of speech in Britain during the trial. I took that to heart. Another reason I got out of the discussion is because, at that point, the only further direction to go would be to unravel the knot of Jewish labor exploitation in Eastern Europe, and while I have a good idea about how to go about doing that, I really do not want to devote my life to studying or writing about the Holocaust.

Looking back, one thing that disinclined me to continue is that I had answered my own questions to my own satisfaction. Once you get to that point, when you are studying something, the subject becomes a lot less interesting. I am not one of those people who thinks that it is important to win an argument, or to be recognized for having won an argument. Furthermore, I have a lot of other intellectual interests that are much less contentious than this subject. So it was not hard to move on.

HH:  In all of your major writings on the Holocaust, you avow that your primary aim has been to defend the free speech rights of revisionists. Critics may argue that this stance is disingenuous since you go on to present arguments that are, to whatever degree, revisionist in nature. If your work is truly motivated by a libertarian sensibility and out of concern over censorship, why not simply present a case against prohibitive laws in more abstract terms?  In other words, why engage the content of revisionist theory at all? Isn't it enough to quote Voltaire or Thomas Paine and assert that the marketplace of ideas should sort out the rest?

SC: The problem with defending revisionism on purely intellectual grounds is that one is then trying to write a footnote to John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty,” or even to out-write Mill, and that is just not possible. The other problem is that if you start with such a lofty abstraction and then move on to say that that is why we should be able to argue whether there were gas chambers at Auschwitz (for example) one really is going to appear disingenuous.

The main problem with revisionists is that their opponents think they are dishonest. I don't think revisionists are always right, but I know enough about the evidence to know the seed of their doubts. It seems to me that that point has to be made: otherwise, we end up with an argument defending the free speech rights of people who are popularly assumed to be liars. I don't think such an argument is going to be very effective.

Naturally, I think revisionists are right about some things. I had to do what I could to prepare the ground so that someone else at some later time can revisit this history with minimal constraints. If you think there is a historical error outstanding, but yet there is a taboo or legislation suppressing the correction of that error, then the proper procedure is to simply try to set the table. One has to take the long view, which, in this case, means being tolerant, respectful, and just putting the facts out for everyone to evaluate.

HH: On the subject of free speech, I am struck by your optimistic tone, particularly in the book's new closing essay, "The Holocaust in Retrospect," where you suggest that the movement to criminalize Holocaust revisionism is losing steam. Skeptics will point to recent and ongoing cases in Europe and Australia, where revisionists have been or stand to be incarcerated. In light of such events, where do you see a silver lining for free speech?

SC: The main reason I am optimistic is because revisionism was not outlawed in my country, the United States, nor has it been outlawed in Britain. I am aware – but not very thoroughly aware – of some prosecutions in other countries, and particularly in Europe. However, in most of these cases, as with Germar Rudolf and Ernst Zündel, or even the gratuitous and cruel confinement of David Irving in Austria, the prosecution has had less to do with actual current alleged speech crimes than with the fulfillment of prosecutions that were a decade or more old. It also has to be said that in some cases these prosecutions – which nowadays are framed more in terms of hate speech than revisionism as such – have been inevitable, insofar as people have at times gone out of their way to be prosecuted.

Now, I am not a big fan of hate speech legislation. But I also do accept that there is such a thing as hate speech. Each country has to decide the trade-off between social peace and freedom of speech in each case. I would prefer that such legislation did not exist, but, quite frankly, I wish some of this speech didn't exist either. It contributes nothing. On the other hand, I don't think that intellectual activity as such, and certainly not historical study, should be criminalized. My read of current trends is that revisionist historical study of the Holocaust can avoid criminalization, but it depends on how it is done, and how it is expressed. I have few problems with such a limitation.

HH:  A name that comes up a few times in your more recent writings is Fritjof Meyer, who is not known as a revisionist. Who is Fritjof Meyer and why is his work significant?

SC: Fritjof Meyer is a retired German journalist of the first rank. He started writing on the Holocaust back in 2002, by which time I had quit the field, and he has sought to revise the history of Auschwitz. Basically, Meyer's argument is that the death toll at Auschwitz was about 500,000, of which about 350,000 were gassed, and he also argues that the four crematoriums at Birkenau were not used for gassings, but rather for disinfection, showers, and bomb shelters. I think his arguments about the Birkenau crematoriums are correct, and they coincide with my assessments in "Bomb Shelters in Birkenau" written in 2000. It is very heartening to me that a German can express such views and not be put behind bars.

I am aware that Meyer has been harshly criticized by some revisionists because his conclusions do not go far enough, which means that his conclusions do not coincide with theirs. I think such a stance misses the significance of his achievement. When someone can argue – in Germany – and as recently as 2009 – that the Birkenau crematoria were not used to kill hundreds of thousands of people that is an enormous shift in perception for the Auschwitz camp and tends to render all prior histories of the camp disputable. That Meyer is able to do so in Germany without molestation is also an enormous step forward. Historians must inevitably follow suit. And eventually they will.

HH:  I want to turn to each of the major components of the anthology, beginning with the title monograph – "The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes." It seems to me that this work has long been distinguished from other revisionist writings in a number of ways. Perhaps most curious is the way you approach Holocaust historiography through the lens of comparative literature, discerning themes and motifs in once-popular books and films that shed light on the cultural context in which specific atrocity rumors – and particularly gassing rumors – could have germinated and evolved without necessarily being literally true. Can you give readers some idea of your analytical method and explain why you felt compelled to approach the subject in this way? And do you have any thoughts on why a similar approach has been little pursued by others?

SC: I took the analytical approach to gassing claims over time because there are various elements in Holocaust history that suggested it to me. For example, Gerstein said that the hair from gassed victims was used for submarines, fifteen years later, and Eichmann claimed that the engine at one of the camps came from a submarine. I felt intuitively that there was some borrowing going on here.

Another element concerns the "geysers of blood" motif, which I had seen in a wartime discussion in which a witness saw some blood or other bodily liquids seeping out of a mass grave. Again, the issue of derivation came to mind.

And there are many others. For example, many years ago I read a description of Wilhelm Kube – a high official in occupied Russia – tossing candy into a mass grave of Jewish children who had just been murdered. Many years later, while browsing a report from 1942 by an SS officer complaining about Kube's solicitude towards Jews, I saw this officer complaining that Kube had given candy to Jewish children. That this coincided with the Jewish holiday of Purim (a traditional candy giving holiday) convinced me that the SS complaint was accurate and that the later legend was a malicious re-working of the event, which again pointed to the migration and distortion of events. (I should add that Christian Gerlach in "Kalkulierte Mord" succeeded in finding a document in which Kube confessed to handing out some sweets to Jewish children on this occasion.)

As to the mass gassing claim, one frequently finds witnesses discussing blue or yellow clouds of gas, or corpses that are green or yellow or even polka dot. A basic examination of the gases involved – cyanide or carbon monoxide – tells you that these descriptions cannot be accurate, so then the next question is, where did these descriptions come from if not from reality?  The answer can only be that they came from the minds of the observers, which in turn would contain the cultural assumptions of their time. In this particular case, the yellow coloration suggested mustard gas, the blue coloration suggested "Blausäure" or "blue acid" which is what cyanide is called in German speaking countries, and the coloration of the corpses – including the polka dots – suggested the putrefaction of bodies that had been dead for several days.

Why haven't others done this before?  I do not know. Revisionists in general are mostly interested in proving something false, they are not usually interested in the actual cultural source of a false claim or a false belief. Holocaust historians, on the other hand, are usually interested in setting forth a narrative that everyone already knows, with perhaps some new detail. I should say that Butz briefly touched on this comparative approach in his book, particularly in his discussion of the "crumpled testament of despair."

HH: "The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes" has been criticized – perhaps most notably, if I’m not mistaken, by Robert Jan van Pelt – for exemplifying the most damnable excesses of postmodernist and deconstructionist scholarship. How do you respond to this line of criticism? I know this is something you discuss in some depth in "The Holocaust in Retrospect."

SC: Well, there really isn't anything deconstructionist in "The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes." All I am really doing is examining the elements of gassing claims across time and attempting to account for known false elements by tying them back to the overall culture. As a cultural historian, van Pelt should know exactly what I am doing; and what is required here is not abstruse pomo theory but simply a knowledge of cultural history and cultural ephemera and an awareness of how ideas and concepts flow up and down from elite culture to popular culture and back again.

As to the charges of the excesses of deconstruction and postmodernism, I discussed this to some extent in the "Holocaust in Retrospect" largely because of the arguments of Lipstadt and Richard J. Evans, who made what I considered to be invalid comparisons, as well as the writings of Michael Shermer, who made what I thought was an honest but somewhat simplified discussion of the issues involved.

What I did, then, in the section on "Two Worlds," was to riff on a well-known fable by Nietzsche to discuss the dual nature of reality, as it has been understood to exist for most of recorded history. This, in turn, showed the essential inevitability and ordinariness of post-Second World War intellectual trends insofar as prior notions of duality have become more and more subjective over time, and have focused more and more on the structure of the human mind and language.

In addition, by engaging these metahistorical issues I was able to address many other themes. For example, it is absolutely necessary to isolate the word "Holocaust" as a name, or a label, or a concept, from its constituent facts. I did something like this ten years ago when I reviewed the books of Novick and Finkelstein. However, in terms of the sloppy rhetoric that frequently characterizes discussions of the Jewish catastrophe the distinction has to be made: the Holocaust is a name, it is not a thing. How does one deny, or prove, a name? People should be focused on the facts of the matter, and either reach a consensus or agree to disagree.

Also, in traversing some of these more abstract ideas I was able to address many other issues, for example, the current proliferation of categories of "denial," the Freudian roots of the concept, which in turns explains why revisionists are compared to Jeffrey Dahmer and child molesters, the distinctions that have to be made between facts and our moral interpretation of them, between facts and their interpretation as such, and the extent to which people see, not what is there, but what they want to see, or expect to see.

HH: Another criticism of "The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes" holds that your interpretive model is inversely conceived; that the rumors and feedback loops and intertextual  recursions that you identify as evidence of mass social delusion are more plausibly interpreted as essentially accurate, if flawed, fragments of evidence for the reality of a nascent program of systematic extermination that was being implemented in secret. What is your response to critics who insist that you have it backwards?

SC: I could have it backwards, but I addressed that in my conclusion, and elaborated on it in "The Holocaust in Retrospect" when I discussed the nature of conspiracy theories, which have flourished in recent decades. Simply put, the mass gassing claim is a conspiracy theory which assumes that the people involved – no more than a few hundred – not only managed to kill millions of people, not only managed to conceal the remains of these millions, but succeeded in concealing the evidence of what they were doing to such a degree that to this day there is no documentary, material or forensic evidence for gas chambers at many camps, and the evidence everywhere else is scarce, ambiguous, or non-existent. The likelihood of this being historically accurate is low, just because of the disparity between the claim and the hard evidence supporting it. The likelihood is further decreased when we note that there is abundant evidence for the killing of Jews by shooting or injections, and for the killing of euthanasia patients by sedatives and injections: it is only the gassing evidence that is lacking. The likelihood is decreased even further when we note that the Nazis were accused of just such gassings chronologically before they are supposed to have started them. Thus I conclude that the mass gassing claim is a cultural construct that took hold in the minds of Europeans – not just among Jews, but among everyone – and became truth after the war was over.

I should elaborate a bit on my allegation of a “few hundred” participants. If we consider every German or German ally who was involved in persecuting or killing Jews in the Second World War, we would probably involve hundreds of thousands. But the number of people involved in the mass gassings, according to the standard account, was very small. There were only about one hundred Germans at the three camps where it is sometimes claimed that two million Jews were gassed, and these same people are supposed to have carried out the euthanasia gassings as well. At Auschwitz, which had a guard force of a few thousand, only a few dozen people were supposed to have been involved in the mass gassings, and even then in secret from the rest of the people at the camp.

HH: More generally, many people consider doubt regarding the mass gassing claim to be incredible (if not malicious) on its face, since it seems to imply that eyewitnesses were lying about what they saw and experienced. How do you meet this objection?

SC: Well, the evolution of the theory of false memory syndrome in recent decades has made it clear that memory is not a reliable guide if not tethered to empirical reality. Of course, that has been well known on a common sense level for a long time. That is why historians always try to tie testimonial narratives to documents or archaeological data. Nor am I trying to necessarily impugn anyone's memory. However, in the first place, memory is not reliable on quantitative matters and cannot be considered reliable if it contradicts empirical fact.

It is hard to speculate successfully on why someone would say something that just isn’t true. There may be selfish motives, vengeful motives, or simply survival motives. There may be cases of sincere false memory. There may be cases of memory inspired by noble motives of testifying on behalf of the dead, or one's family, but which, regrettably, cannot be regarded as truthful when compared to the facts of the case. I generally soft-pedal these issues. I am trying to justify revisionist doubt, and reconcile what I consider to be a dangerous opposition between two sides: I am not interested in calling anyone out. Normally, when a historian considers an account unreliable, he or she leaves it out of their narrative. That’s all that need be said here.

HH: If the mass gassing narrative can be understood as a social construction, this would seem to constitute one of the most extraordinary popular delusions of all time. Can you identify other episodes in history where great masses of people have been deceived on a comparable scale?

SC: Well, the witchcraft mania of the early modern period would certainly fit the bill. So would numerous shorter panics such as the Great Cat Massacre. Cultural historians and anthropologists are just beginning to delve into these issues. Another case would certainly be the delusion about weapons of mass destruction, which dominated American thinking from the late 90s through the invasion of Iraq. I referenced this obliquely in the introduction to "The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes" precisely because even in 1997 I could see that it was no mere coincidence that Saddam's weapons were always supposed to be somewhere other than where people were actually looking. Oftentimes people look to blame someone when there are delusional problems with perception. I do not. Sometimes cultures, like individuals, make mistakes. You avoid such mistakes in the future by having freedom of speech, the possibility of dialog, and by avoiding groupthink or other recursive and reinforcing mechanisms. Yes, it makes life more irritating. But it avoids mistakes.

HH: What about the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic of  the 1980s and early 90s? That seems like a textbook case of a mass delusion. If you begin with the McMartin daycare case, you can see the germ being transferred from one episode to the next, with these dark rumors converging on a fixed narrative in the cycle of media-facilitated feedback and rehearsal. It seems very much like the process you outline in “Sherlock,” and it might be significant that millions of people – most of them evangelical Christians – still believe that these things actually happened.

SC: You are right, and I discussed some of this in “Retrospect.”  I should add that the insecurity that fosters such mass delusions is the same that, in previous times, focused on conspiracies against Jesuits or against Jews. In fact, if we really stop to think about it, the main characteristics of the delusional accusations you mentioned – instrumentalization of the victim, child abuse or murder – are identical to those made in the periodic panics and mass delusions that were directed against the Jewish people over many centuries in the form of “Blood Libel” accusations. To go even further, when we reflect on some of the accusations against the Nazis – particularly in terms of soap making accusations, human skin products of all kinds, and routine head shrinking – we find another instance of this particularly ugly brand of mass hysteria.

Now, of course, since National Socialism is itself a pitiless ideology we might, at first glance, think that it makes no difference what we say about it or its adherents. But here we have to think again. I have seen too many times how unbridled attacks on Nazis have led to extreme denunciations of Germans and their entire history and culture. In general, this kind of anxiety- and gossip-driven speech should be avoided. It does no good and can only lead to further accusations against other groups.

HH:  The second major part of the your book, "Bomb Shelters in Birkenau," is a fairly detailed exposition of an interpretive model concerning German civil defense infrastructure during the Second World War. What prompted you to turn your attention in this direction? And how does it tie in with the thesis of "The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes”?

SC: Well, the seed crystal to the bomb shelter thesis lay in my decision to approach the gassing claims chronologically. This led me to the liberation of Majdanek in the summer of 1944. I remembered reading Alexander Werth's description decades earlier, so I dug that up. Two elements stuck in my mind, the fact that he mentioned the actual maker of the gas chamber door at that location – a firm called "Auert" – and the description of some chalk scribbling on the floor. The chalk scribbling reminded me of something else, and that became the framing device for my narrative.

Now, the fact that a gas chamber door had a manufacturer's name on it seemed to me a solid clue. If I could establish that the Auert firm actually made gas chamber doors, then that would settle the argument for the traditional view. On the other hand, if I found that the Auert firm made fumigation chamber doors, that would support the revisionist view. I did not know how that would pan out, but it did make me very sensitive to any references to gastight doors or doors with peepholes. Over the next several weeks I found out that bomb shelter doors typically had peepholes and were gastight. As I have related in "Bomb Shelters in Birkenau," that is how I set about juxtaposing the civil defense literature and the Criminal Traces of Jean Claude Pressac in my first bomb shelter article.

Neither bomb shelters as such, nor even Arthur Butz' "gas shelter" thesis from the previous summer, had any role in my thinking until I was well along with my research for "The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes":  I simply assumed that when I got to the Pressac evidence chronologically I would fall back on the traditional revisionist explanation, which considered this evidence as merely indicative of disinfection chambers. I must say that I didn't think that was a conclusive explanation, but, remember, my aim was to justify revisionist doubt, not to prove anything one way or the other.

HH: For those who are not familiar with the competing arguments, what is the "bomb shelter thesis" and how is it distinguished from other interpretive theories? 

SC: The "bomb shelter thesis" simply argues that "gastight" evidence in the concentration camps can be explained by reference to German civil defense measures, because of the wartime concern not only for bombings but for aerial gas attacks. The normative thesis, of course, holds that gastight evidence is about gassing people. The typical revisionist rejoinder is that gastight evidence is about fumigating objects, and this thesis is also often true, inasmuch as there were fumigation vaults for that purpose in every camp.

HH: Your promotion of the thesis places you at odds not only with traditional Holocaust scholars but with some prominent revisionists, such as Carlo Mattogno. Was this intentional?

SC: No. My intention, in the beginning, was simply to juxtapose a previously unused literature with the gastight evidence provided by Pressac. I found the fit to work very well, and I was able to connect the dots tying in my thinking with Arthur Butz' prior discussion of gas shelters. I had expected the establishment to credit the revisionist website where I posted the article – that was the whole idea, I mean, how can you censor someone once you engage them in dialog – but I wasn't really surprised that traditional scholars completely ignored the thesis. I was surprised at the vehemence with which many prominent revisionists rejected the thesis. But I felt I was on to something so I just continued to pursue it. Ultimately, as it turns out, Robert Jan van Pelt discussed the thesis extensively during the Irving-Lipstadt trial, as well as in his expert report, as well as in his book, The Case for Auschwitz, and he also referenced the CODOH website where the materials were posted. That was what I wanted in the first place, so, regardless of anything else, I felt I had achieved my aim.

Clearly, the "bomb shelter thesis" changed my thinking for the yet unwritten "Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes," so I had to revise the structure in my mind to account for this.

HH:  The version of "Bomb Shelters in Birkenau" that appears in the Sherlock anthology is only slightly modified from previous editions. However, it is appended with a new "Postscript" in which you summarize additional documentary evidence that has come to light in recent years. Do you think that this new material will compel critics to reevaluate their conclusions? Also, do you anticipate further developments in this area? 

SC: Well, I felt that "Bomb Shelters in Birkenau" had proved the "bomb shelter thesis" inasmuch as I found several documents referencing gastight bomb shelter doors in Auschwitz and Birkenau that I presented in that article. However, these documents came from the spring and summer of 1944, and both van Pelt and Mattogno ignored this evidence. I also presented for the first time the evidence concerning the showers in the basement of Crematorium III, for which van Pelt has never offered a satisfactory reply, and which both Mattogno and Fritjof Meyer have used. This evidence fits the "bomb shelter thesis" but does not fit the alternatives, because of the bomb shelter door on the shower space.

The most important of the new evidence in the new postscript concerns the "Gaskeller" document, which I referenced in "Bomb Shelters in Birkenau," but which was not made public until 2005, after Jean Claude Pressac's death. I list in that postscript about a dozen usages of the word in German during the 1930s and 1940s, and this leaves no doubt that the normal meaning of "Gaskeller" during this time was "gas shelter" or "gastight bomb shelter" and that fact, along with the bomb shelter doors affixed to the relevant spaces, provides additional proof in support of the "bomb shelter thesis" as it pertains to the crematoriums.

Will the new evidence compel others to revise their views? I do not know, and I do not care. Given the extent to which the argument has been ignored up to now, I would expect that it would make no difference. However, my responsibility only extends to updating the evidence about my interpretation, since you have chosen to publish it. It's not my job to tell other people what to think about history.

As far as further developments, I don't know what will happen here either. I would like to see someone do some research and publish on the subject of bomb shelters, gas shelters, and decontamination facilities in the concentration camps. Perhaps my writings will serve as a stimulus in this area.

HH: The closing section of the book, "The Holocaust in Retrospect," is entirely new. What was your aim in writing this essay?

SC: Well, to be honest, as with the postscript to "Bomb Shelters in Birkenau," I did this at your request. What this meant is that I spent about a year re-orienting myself to the literature on the Holocaust on both sides, and seeing what had happened in the past ten years. There were some new things very much worth mentioning: for example, the recent writings on forced labor by Christopher Browning and Wolf Gruner, and the writings of Barbara Schwindt, Wendy Lower and Christian Gerlach. There was some new information, in particular, the authentication by David Irving of the Franke-Gricksch duty report of May, 1943, which I was able to use. On the whole, however, I used "The Holocaust in Retrospect" to further my plea on behalf of revisionism, to expand, sometimes quite extensively, observations that had been buried in the footnotes of "The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes" and finally to look at the Holocaust in a broader historical framework for the future.

HH: You also address a number of metahistorical and epistemological issues that are tangential to revisionism. To me, one of the most interesting areas concerns the relevance of "conspiracy theory" to revisionism. Holocaust revisionism is often identified as a kind of conspiracy theory, sometimes with comparisons to 9/11 Truth movement. You have a different view. I know you’ve already touched on this, but I’d like for you to elaborate. Is revisionism a conspiracy theory?

SC: It is typical to deride "Holocaust Revisionism" as a conspiracy theory, and this is accurate, insofar as some revisionists argue, or pretend, that the Holocaust as we know it was made up by mendacious Jews and then foisted upon an unsuspecting world. But as I argued in "The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes" many years ago, the conspiracy accusation actually goes the other way:  The entire notion that a few hundred Germans would gas millions of people and conceal the evidence of this is obviously a conspiracy claim; and since neither the documentary, material, or forensic evidence exists, I argue that at that point the argument moves from a conspiracy claim to a conspiracy theory, that is, a non-existent conspiracy. 

I also try to tie this into psychological dualism and hoax accusations as well. In other words, the entire argument for the mass gassing claim involves a narrative with little or no empirical support.  The disjunction between the narrative and the evidence is profound.  So how do we account for this?  The hoax concept is one way, and that argues that a small group of people knowingly created a false story and then presented it as the truth.  Another way is to accept the argument that a small group of Nazis were able to pull off these mass gas exterminations and managed to hide or destroy virtually all of the evidence.  I really cannot accept either of these explanations because they both have the typical conspiracy theory elements of unseen and hidden agency and the lack of empirical evidence. I should add two points:  the first is that to a conspiracy theorist, the absence of evidence is actually a plus, because it points to the extraordinary cunning of the alleged conspirators.  Second, I should further add the Arthur Butz' discussion of the "hoax" concept is much more subtle than the normal usage, or the usage outlined above.

So then it’s back to the original disparity between claim and evidence. My argument is that the human mind is hardwired to impose order on an oftentimes challengingly complex external world, and that, particularly when there is a need to explain terrible events, the mind falls back on explanatory models that become in effect the precursors of an explanatory model for what we would call nowadays a "conspiracy theory."

HH:  I think the late Jean Claude Pressac, who you’ve already mentioned and whose work you discuss extensively, was the first scholar to prominently challenge forensic revisionist arguments in a methodical – rather than merely rhetorical – manner. Pressac published his opus in the early 90s, and it seems that a few years later there was a spate of anti-revisionist output from major publishing houses – with books by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Robert Jan van Pelt, Richard Evans, John Zimmerman and others that addressed and rejected (and sometimes even cited) specific revisionist claims in explicit terms. At various turns in “The Holocaust in Retrospect” you appraise this critical literature, but I’m curious about your general impressions. Have such critics raised issues that seriously undermine the framework of revisionist doubt concerning key issues (i.e., mass gassing and systematic extermination)? Have such works promoted a more civil discourse and helped to normalize revisionism as a legitimate species of free inquiry? 

Pressac wrote two books and a couple of articles in the late 80s and early 90s: in all cases his professed aim was to put the history of Auschwitz on a firm material and documentary footing, because he felt the emphasis on eyewitnesses was unsatisfactory. As a result, in his writings, he set forth a lot of documentary evidence which has taken on a life of its own.

In contrast, the other authors you have mentioned have largely abandoned the document based approach and have instead gone back to dependence on eyewitness testimony. I find it rather interesting that neither Richard Evans nor Saul Friedländer referenced either van Pelt or Zimmerman, whose books were supposed to constitute refutations of revisionism. Instead, both relied almost exclusively on eyewitness testimony and a brief “research note” published in the Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, which was not very well sourced. So, no, I do not feel traditional scholarship has done anything to seriously undermine revisionist doubts. Indeed, it seems to have simply decided to ignore such issues altogether. Under those circumstances I don’t believe it has either helped or hindered the legitimizing of revisionism as an acceptable, albeit minority, point of view.

HH: If there is one critic who tends to receive special attention in “Retrospect,” I suppose it would be Michael Shermer, who is probably best known as the editor of Skeptic magazine. In his book, Denying History, Shermer – along with his co-author Alex Grobman – argues that revisionist critiques tend to collapse once we zoom out to consider the “convergence of evidence” that supports the mass gassing and extermination claims. More rhetorically, he compares the ostensible failure of revisionists to discern this gestalt to the intellectual obtuseness of Creationists who focus on anomalous details in the fossil record while ignoring the overwhelming weight of evidence for evolution. I think that’s a reasonably fair summary of his position, and it certainly sounds like a deep and compelling indictment of the whole revisionist project. What is Michael Shermer missing?

SC: The main thing Shermer is missing is that he, like many others, tends to look at the Holocaust as a large organic unity, as though it were a dog, whereby the muzzle is proof of the tail. But here he is falling victim to the idea that the Holocaust is a thing, rather than a collective noun, that pertains to many separate things.

Hence in his writings, Shermer tends to conflate all of the known, and fairly obvious, facts of the Nazi persecution and massacre of the Jews with the mass gassing claim, which is what 80% of Holocaust revisionism is about (most of the rest has to do with whether there was an extermination plan or not). Yes, the Germans shot hundreds of thousands of Jews in the East: that is what the documents say, and there is much corroborative detail. But that does not mean that they were also gassing millions of others in other locations while leaving little or no trace of their activities. It is especially hard to maintain that position when the current historiography is just now turning its attention to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were engaged in important war related work, along with the concessions by Browning and Gruner that there never was a global “extermination through work” imperative operating in these work camps. I discuss some of this in “Retrospect” and have discussed it before, when reviewing research on the fate of Hungarian Jews. The argument could certainly go further, if we take into account the numerous cases of Jews incapable of work who were not killed at various subcamps of Belsen or at the Kaufering subcamps of Dachau.

HH:  On the other side, there have been a number of revisionist books and articles in the years since you were actively publishing. Do you see new ground being broken in this more marginal literature? Or are we nearing the point of diminishing returns?

SC: I would say that, yes, we are at the point of diminishing returns. Most revisionism in the past twenty years has been focused on the same six camps where mass gas exterminations are supposed to have taken place. Thanks to revisionism, we now know a lot more about these camps than we knew before. Carlo Mattogno, in particular, has done great work in document discovery and in pulling together various documents and testimonies in his books on  the camps Majdanek, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno, and, of course, Auschwitz Birkenau. However, these books are largely compilations of rare materials.

In 2009, Thomas Dalton published Debating the Holocaust and this is a good summation not only of Mattogno’s arguments but also the relevant arguments of Zimmerman, van Pelt, Pressac, and several others. It’s a good summary, with a strong revisionist slant, but it is largely concerned with forensic issues.

The closest thing to groundbreaking research has to do with the discovery and analysis of materials about deported Jews either in southern Poland or the occupied Soviet Union during the war. Thomas Kues has done some praiseworthy digging here. However, what is really needed at this point are the supporting German documents, and I am sure that they exist somewhere.

HH:  Any thoughts on Timothy Snyder’s book, Bloodlands, and his public row with Daniel Goldhagen?

SC: Well, Timothy Snyder is a professor at Yale and has recently become the go-to guy for reviews on central and east European history for the New York Review of Books, a role previously filled by people like István Deák, Gordon Craig, and A.J.P. Taylor.

What probably happened here is that Snyder received a number of books with a request to write a review of them. In that case, the nature of the review is going to be determined by the content of the books, and the challenge is to write a review that combines the heterodox elements in a coherent manner, sort of like those TV shows where a chef is given a half hour to prepare a gourmet meal after being surprised with a pound and a half of lard, some celery stalks, chocolate sauce, and a jar of Vegemite.

In this case, Snyder’s ingredients included some memoirs, Hilberg’s book, Friedländer’s second volume, and book by Daniel Goldhagen. Goldhagen, as we recall, is the author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners and is much beloved by revisionists on that account. Now Goldhagen is a political scientist: he operates on the realm of concepts and concept creation, things like “eliminationist anti-Semitism” or just plain “eliminationism.”  His concepts, which grow out of the data, are then confirmed by the data, and then a lot of judgment, including a lot of moral judgment, is added. This sort of thing doesn’t make much sense to historians and it apparently didn’t make much sense to Snyder. So he criticized Goldhagen somewhat.

The sequel is that Goldhagen wrote a blistering rebuke and then Snyder offered a more measured reply. What I remember most about the exchange is that it seemed to focus entirely on issues of personal guilt and responsibility, yet centered on the ethnicity of the individuals: issues like, Germans were more willing than Poles, who were or were not responsible, as opposed to Jews, who were or were not willing or responsible, and so forth. I don’t consider this very worthwhile history, it doesn’t even appear as good political science, it comes across as borderline sociology with a lot of heavy duty moralizing going on. I fail to see the usefulness of this kind of thing.

Now that gets me back to Snyder’s Bloodlands.  I did reference it briefly in “Retrospect” and I consider it one of a number of attempts in recent years to look at the events in eastern Europe during this time synthetically, or as a whole. Nevertheless, I think there are a few problems with Snyder’s approach. First, he somewhat arbitrarily limits himself to the 1939 Polish borders and the western republics of the Soviet Union. This inevitably puts a pro-Polish slant on his analysis, which is not in and of itself a bad thing, but which leaves much out. For example, a third of present-day Poland comprises lands that were populated by Germans for many hundreds of years. All of these millions of Germans were driven out, and lost all of their property, and in that respect at least their fate is very similar to that of the eastern Europeans that are Snyder’s focus. However, they are barely mentioned in Snyder’s book, and if they had been, they would tend to subvert what I take to be Snyder’s main thesis, about the shared suffering of east Europeans.

The other problem is that while Snyder is engaging in some very praiseworthy shifts of emphasis towards the Slavic victims of Hitler and Stalin, in so doing he automatically creates a tension with many Holocaust narratives that tend to focus almost entirely on Jewish suffering. As a result, in many of his reviews, and in responses thereto, including the one with Goldhagen, Snyder has been forced to engage in moralistic exchanges over relative guilt, responsibility, or unique suffering that have little to do with historical understanding but a lot to do with the master narrative claims of different groups.

HH: In “Retrospect” you also provide a concise summary of the various forensic issues that revisionists continue to emphasize. For readers who may not be inclined to wade into a body of literature where cremations rates, Prussian-blue stains and the physics of diesel combustion are discussed in excruciating detail, what do you see as the most relevant points to take home from this line of inquiry?

SC: Mostly that revisionist strides in this area add to our knowledge. For example, I point out that we know a lot more about Zyklon B now than we did in 1945, and that is entirely due to revisionist investigations. Generally speaking, nearly any forensic investigation, whether it concerns the characteristics of the alleged extermination gases, or the operation of diesel engines, or the normal size of mass graves, or the normal rate at which bodies can be burned, all tend to support revisionist theses in one way or the other. In turn, that should not only support revisionism’s right to exist unmolested but also provide some impetus for thoughtful students to start looking for alternative explanations.

HH: Since I brought up Michael Shermer, I might as well add that on a couple of occasions I emailed him to see if he might be willing to provide criticism of a pre-publication draft of your book. He declined, but I was struck by the opening of his reply where he asked “Who is Samuel Crowell? Is that a pseudonym?” Now I happen to be skeptical that Shermer is wholly unfamiliar with your writings given the time he spent researching revisionism, but the answer to his second question is, of course, yes: “Samuel Crowell” is a pen-name. Are you concerned that this diminishes your credibility? How do we know you’re not David Duke, or for that matter, Elaine Showalter (as I once suspected)? Or maybe I should simply ask: Why do you choose to use a pseudonym?

SC: Well, when I told a family member last year that someone wanted to publish the stuff I had written back in the 90s, I was asked if I was using a pseudonym. I said yes, and the reply was: “Good: then we don’t have to worry about our house being firebombed.”

I have to stress that the reason I got into this was not only because of the censorship issue but because of the numerous violent acts committed against revisionists, and the many threats of violence. An early Rumanian Jewish revisionist, J.G. Burg, was apparently beaten because of his association with revisionism. Robert Faurisson was severely beaten and had to be hospitalized because of his revisionist work. David Cole, another Jewish revisionist, was threatened with death. Ernst Zündel, a German citizen living in Canada, had his home firebombed. I could cite several other instances of threats and harassment.

Of course, violence goes the other way, too. A couple of years ago a mentally deranged old man attempted to shoot his way into the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C. and killed a security guard: among other things, he was involved with Holocaust revisionism.

It seems to me that all of these instances of violence are based on, first, the taboo nature of the subject of Holocaust revisionism, and second, and conversely, the essentially sacrosanct nature of Holocaust history as such. This tension creates an opposition that makes either the defense of or the assault on the subject irresistibly attractive to true believers of all kinds. Moreover, inasmuch as revisionists are frequently characterized as less than human, one can see a kind of discourse that enables and justifies violence. I mean, clearly the people involved in violence or arson or what have you are not very stable; the discourse against revisionists seems to offer them an opportunity not only to engage their impulses for sadism and cruelty but even to justify them with an aura of righteousness. Of course, those revisionists who carry on endlessly about purported Jewish wickedness, are doing the exact same thing on the other side.

It seems to me that the responsibility of anyone who can write or speak is to promote a more relaxed and tolerant point of view on these matters. However, since I do not see such calls forthcoming from the intellectual classes, I prefer to fulfill my social obligations while not exposing either myself or my family to unwanted attention or harm.

HH: Even if key points in made by revisionists are eventually conceded –  however tacitly or quietly – the most salient revisionist arguments presently remain very much at odds with received scholarly opinion. It seems to me that there are generally very good reasons to respect consensus opinion, however cautiously, on matters that have been studied extensively and written about voluminously by dedicated scholars, but those who adhere to heterodox views can always point to famous historical examples where some deeply entrenched consensus  turned out to be flat wrong. I suppose this sort of tracks back to where we were discussing instances of mass delusion throughout history, but I wonder if you can cite examples of “false consensus” that would provide precedent for the turn that would come if the core of the revisionist critique were ever to become widely accepted?

A couple of examples that come immediately to mind are the Germ Theory of disease, and the Theory of Continental Drift. The idea of the contagiousness of disease was quite radical in the early 19th Century when it was first being developed. The “false consensus” was that disease was due to foul odors or miasmas, rather than germs, which were not yet understood. If we take Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous article on the contagiousness of puerperal fever as a start point, from around 1840, we can say that our modern understanding of the contagiousness of germs coexisted with the false consensus for over sixty years, until the germ theory became universally accepted in the 20th Century.

In the case of Continental Drift, when von Wegener first proposed his notion of drifting continents in 1910, the consensus interpretation was that the continents rose and fell. It took another fifty years until data started emerging that could not be explained in any other way except by recourse to von Wegener’s theory.

So, just in these two cases, what we might call a “false consensus” in the sciences coexisted for fifty years or more with a minority point of view which only gradually became the new consensus.

The lesson I take from this is twofold. The first is that today’s “certainty” could well be tomorrow’s “false consensus.”  So we have to be modest about what we think we know and therefore tolerant of those who think differently. The second lesson I take from this is that radically different points of view can co-exist for many decades. This also points to tolerance, modesty, and a willingness to re-think one’s beliefs.

HH: I've received inquiries from Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts who are curious about the title. While I doubt that your book will be of particular interest to “Baker Street Irregulars,” Conan Doyle's influence can be felt at various turns. You've already dropped one hint and I don't want you to spoil any surprises, but can you talk a bit about how you came to connect the fictional sleuth to the question of Nazi gassings?

SC: Well, the title of the book comes from the main essay, and the title of the main essay was meant to pique interest. Remember that this project started at the beginning of February, 1997, after I had read yet another article quoting then candidate Tony Blair’s intention to ban Holocaust revisionism in Britain if elected Prime Minister. My original intention was to write maybe 20,000 words and then email my plea for tolerance – because that’s all it was meant to be – to various historians and opinion makers in the United Kingdom. So I selected that title deliberately thinking it might cause a Briton to take a look.

On the other hand, the title does encapsulate a fundamental theme of the book, which is that fully articulated, but imaginary, gassing narratives existed decades before the Holocaust, and if we compare such prior imaginary narratives to Nazi-era gassing narratives we find essentially no difference. The question then naturally arises, how do we tell the difference between a story and a fact?  Clearly, other evidence, including material, documentary, and forensic evidence, is needed. Yet that is precisely the kind of evidence that is either non-existent or in short supply. Therefore doubt about the mass gassing claim is not only natural, but justifiable. That, in essence, is my position.

The bomb shelter articles took me in a completely different direction. Here I was arguing a positive thesis about civil defense materials; that argument really has nothing to do with mass gassing at all. Of course, the rightness or wrongness of the “bomb shelter thesis” has implications for the veracity of gassing claims as well as for the accuracy of previous historians who have written on the subject. Everyone understands this. However, acceptance of the “bomb shelter thesis” does not necessarily mean that gassings did not take place.

Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts shouldn’t be seeking to read this book because their beloved detective is in the title; although, anyone familiar with the Holmes character should be able to rattle off at least three contexts in which Holmes is associated with poison gas: in a play, an early silent film, and a short story. In fact, the short story was probably inspired by the play, which was not written by Conan Doyle.

Because of the title I had selected, I took the opportunity in the introduction to say a few words about Sherlock Holmes, and referenced Samuel Rosenberg’s Naked is the Best Disguise as an example of literary analysis that looked back to cultural ephemera. That, in turn, helped explain the context of a lot of my research, because I spent a good deal of time looking for, or trying to remember, references to poison gas, or chemical delousing, or cremation, that popped up in news articles, or short stories, or novels years or even many decades before the Second World War.

HH: The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes will be released next month. How do you anticipate it will be received? Most Holocaust revisionist publications are read by the same small group of people and ignored by mainstream critics and public intellectuals. Do you think  Sherlock has a better chance of being noticed?

Well, a book is evaluated by style and substance. I cannot comment on style, but I do know I strove for an inclusive tone that would try to address and respect the interests of all parties. That might make the book a bit less obnoxious to non-revisionist readers.

I don’t expect anyone will agree with my arguments; certainly not in public, given the nature of the taboo. With reference to the Snyder-Goldhagen dustup cited above, at one point they seemed to be debating the relative importance of the gas chambers in the destruction of the Jews. In a recent blog post, Snyder devoted himself to a judgmental argument as to whether Hitler or Stalin was more responsible for the carnage of the Second World War. If this is the way in which the war and the Holocaust continue to be discussed, I do not think my writings will have much of a place.

On the other hand I think the book has some merits. First, anyone who has seriously studied the subject knows that there are numerous unreliable testimonies. In “The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes” I provide an explanation for this that avoids accusations. Second, I think the “bomb shelter thesis” is pretty solidly supported at this point, and anyone interested in “gastight” evidence at concentration camps would gain something from the documents discussed in the book.

On the other hand, while I am satisfied that I have justified revisionist doubts, and my own doubts, about mass gassings, it is impossible to prove a negative and if revisionists are right on that issue it will take a long time for such a future consensus to emerge.

Another potential use of the book is that it sets forth a number of documents and testimonies that are rarely, if ever, discussed. In addition, I address a number of metahistorical issues concerning historical knowledge and historical understanding, the nature of conspiracy theories, and the modern-day usage of the concept of denial. These latter issues may, in particular, spur some thinking for those who are concerned with them.

Keep in mind that I walked away from this many years ago feeling that I had done my bit on behalf of free speech for historical inquiry, and towards leading the study of the Holocaust, and its revision, into a calmer and less acrimonious atmosphere. Evidently, I did not succeed in all of my aims. However, the offer to publish The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes gave me a chance to clean up and correct some old texts, to offer an updated review of both texts, as well as a retrospective review of the field as a whole in the second decade of the new century. I am glad I had the opportunity to do this, but the main rewards, as before, come from the process of study and understanding, not from the end result, or whatever might ensue thereafter.

____________________

Memento mori.

Cryonics Magazine on Antinatalism

The latest issue of Cryonics features a couple of thoughtful articles on antinatalism. The first, by editor Aschwin de Wolf, provides a critical overview of contemporary philanthropic antinatalism -- and deep pessimism -- as exposited by David Benatar, Thomas Ligotti, and Nine-Banded author, Jim Crawford.  The second is a review of David Benatar's seminal book, Better Never to Have Been. Of course, I have thoughts on all of it. But as you may surmise from the weeds growing around Hogsville, I'm not much inclined to gather and express thoughts of late. When the old familiar itch becomes infectious, I'll let you know.

In related news, this is as good a time as any to announce that Nine-Banded Books has entered an agreement with Sister Y (host of the excellent blog, The View from Hell) to publish her forthcoming book, Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide. Sister Y is a first-rate interdisciplinary writer and thinker, and I am very proud to count her among the growing stable of 9BB writers (where she will soon be joined by Samuel Crowell, Ann Sterzinger and cult author Tito Perdue). Anyway, here's the pre-order stub on Amazon. Yes, the release date is absurdly ambitious. And yes, that's her real name. 

Memento mori.

 

Nine-Banded News: Comfort and Critique

Nine-Banded books is very proud to announce the release of a new (and affordably priced) paperback edition of Peter Sotos' Comfort and Critique. This one was a mother of a bitch to produce, but I think it turned out beautifully, and I am indebted to those who helped make it happen. Special thanks go to Alex Kasavin, Kevin Slaughter, James Havoc, and of course to my good friend Peter Sotos, whose generosity is never forgotten.

Here's a fascinating interview with Peter from early 2006, when the original Void Books edition of Comfort and Critique was in release.  From the pages of Artforum, here's Lucy McKenzie naming Comfort and Critique one of the "Best Books of 2005." More recently, The Hoover Hog chatted with the author here. Caveat lector, I suppose.    

You can order a copy of Comfort and Critique for $12 postpaid through Nine-Banded Books. It's also available -- or soon will be -- through Germ Books in Philadelphia, Atomic Books in Baltimore, Quimby's in Chicago, Countermedia in Portland Oregon, and Amazon.

Peter Sotos's work coopts the cheapest, least literary forms possible -- true crime reporting, pornography, the police report, hate mail, etc. -- and invests them with as much power, intelligence, and subversive intent on the levels of content and style as possible without transforming or, as he might argue, blunting them into something identifiably literary and therefore overly qualified. As a result his work lacks many open champions among even the more renegade academics and intellectuals, i.e., the people whose support has traditionally legitimized contemporary writing considered too difficult and radical for the 'untrained' public. As I discovered ... there are extremely few essays and reviews taking up the cause of Sotos's work as significant contemporary literature. To reflect what's out there would be to perpetuate the generally held opinion that he's one of those artists only a self-styled extremist could love for reasons having nothing to do with his possible place among artists who work with language. I don't think his work needs to be upgraded or explicated by anyone, me included, and I think its inability to present the details and factors and signals that would facilitate an argument for its value as literature is one of the reasons it's among the most important writing being done today. It is scary, intense, ugly, honest, original, problematic, profoundly challenging stuff. It's also highly intelligent, refined, and kind of a masterful example of writing at its most rendered and self-investigating, all the moreso because its art refuses to give an inch to readers who need something conventionally beautiful, however offbeat and subtle that beauty, to justify a book's assault. Because Sotos and I write about some of the same things, I have a lot of questions about the baldness and relentlessness of his methodology, but his work also raises many fundamental and painful questions for me about the effectiveness of the decisions I make in constructing my own work, maybe more and more difficult questions than are raised by any other contemporary writing. That being perhaps the ultimate gift one writer can give to another, I hereby thank Peter Sotos with this small honor.

-- Dennis Cooper

Memento mori.

One Man's Exquisite Treasure

In considering the question, "who should exist," economist Robin Hanson perhaps intentionally avoids grappling with the articulated view that the answer could or should be, "no one," proposing instead a framework that Sister Y aptly characterizes as "something like R.M. Hare's Golden Rule, plus economic efficiency." Essentially, Hanson argues that a being should be brought into existence if it would want to exist and can pay for the ride. 

When pressed to address the obvious objection that it would seem to be impossible to know with perfect confidence whether a specific being would or would not "want to exist" prior to being created, Hanson comes off as mildy put upon. "It seems odd that I have to specify this in such detail," he sighs in a related thread, "but ... [f]or some creatures we know with great confidence that if they existed, they would prefer to exist." Not surprisingly, he goes on to cite himself as an example of just such a creature. So just do the play math and rev up the clone machine already. Never mind that the objection hasn't been answered. Never mind that other questions remain. This little piggy prefers to exist, and there are more like him in the imaginary queue. What more need we know? People making isn't ethically problematic; it boils down to a recruitment quiz drafted on the fly. Antinatalism is probably just a form of signaling, anyway.   

I'm late to the festivities as usual, but, obviously, I think Hanson's recipe is wildly overconfident. I think his discussion of an important question is uncharacteristically careless and flippant, and I think his use of moral language is tellingly selective and profoundly misplaced. I don't think he has thought seriously about the nature and resonance of suffering. I think he wrongly equates pre-vital nonexistence with some kind of qualitative or experientially deprived state and that he fails to consider the evolutionary basis for "a preference for existence" that nevertheless rests on force and entails nontrivial harm and risk. Finally, I am inclined toward the conclusion that Robin Hanson, a prodigiously intelligent and interesting thinker who I often read with admiration and polite envy, is being disingenuous about most of it. I'll try to explain. 

By sleight of noun and verb, Hanson's preferential test can of course be asserted to justify subordinate existential states that would strike most people as undesirable or absurd. We may know with great confidence, for example, that if "some creatures" were introduced to heroin, they would prefer continued access to heroin. Can this toggle be invoked to support the claim that such people, identified in advance, should be introduced to heroin, "if they can pay for it"? I suppose Hanson might respond that, unlike being alive, being addicted to heroin is economically inefficient, that it entails countermanding negative externalities, or something. If that is true (and ceteris paribus, it might not be true at all), there would seem to be no shortage of contending preference-based asymmetries to supplant the 'if' and 'then' with similarly dubious implications. If some creatures were to light up, they would cultivate a preference for smoking and remain productive, perhaps even saving society some significant cost in end-of-life care. If some creatures  were afflicted with heartbreak, they would nurse their limerance to produces beautiful poetry and music. If some creatures were chemically endowed with psychotic genius, they would guard their angst-inducing delusions while contributing to the advancement of knowledge. There must be countless subjective preferences that, once actualized, will ensure their own demand and buy their own ticket. Are we thus encouraged to create such preferences where they do not as yet exist? Is it OK, as Sister Y asks, to slip someone Ecstasy without their knowledge? Or, per Seanna Shiffrin, to drop gold bricks on impoverished villagers, improving their lot while breaking a few bones?

Or is there something special about the life-preference as such, even if the flowery scent is most probably an artifact of natural selection? And if life-lust is sui generis -- as it certainly is in when considered in the context of existential (rather than subordinate or post-vital) asymmetry -- should we be obligated to create miserable Golems? I don't think Hanson cares to explore such questions because doing so would tend to undermine the meta-ethical qualification that he assumes should be obvious. Creating preferences may be good or bad (regardless of efficiency) when those affected are already existent, but the idea that never-existent beings are benefited by being brought to life (or conversely that they suffer by not being brought to life) is mistaken. It is mistaken regardless of what degree of confidence may be assigned to the likelihood that they would want their existence once created. More on this later.         

Though his position at the outset is presented in insistent terms of economic efficiency, Hanson's stance of disinterested positivism is belied at later turns when his tone assumes a curiously emphatic moral cast. Perhaps irritated by the incipient noise of antinatalist discourse (yes, I'm speculating), I think Hanson insinuates a sly subtext into his reasoning. More precisely, I think he means to turn the tables on those who don't cop to his unscratched pronatalist bias. If I'm right, the tell may be evident in his Hareian suggestion that potential procreators should be guided by a strong positive obligation toward those as yet nonexistent critters nested in the static of pre-flight zilch -- you know, the ones who presumably "want to exist" and can pay for it.

I think Hanson is being worse than coy when he writes:

If asked what gives you the right to prevent the existence of creatures who could fully pay for themselves, you might respond that you need no right, if you have power and a will to use it.  Or perhaps you’ll say ethics assures you it is simply impossible to be unfair to creatures who don’t yet exist.  But wearing my efficient economist hat, I cannot support such naked selfish aggression, even if I thought it would work.  And knowing how hard is coordination, I have serious doubts re feasibility. If you can identify large negative externalities, I will help you to find ways to price them, to discourage the creation of creatures who cannot fully pay for themselves, and the theft of legacy assets.  But if not, I prefer to help creatures who can pay for their existence obtain that exquisite treasure.

Emphasis mine. Notice how the deck is shifted with a wink. Notice how the clumsily situated econ-argot serves as  misdirection. Rather than consider the agent-specific question of whether and why it should be just (or decent or right or moral) to create a new being out of lifeless chemistry, Hanson cursorily assumes away the arguments of antinatalist objectors, only to unfurl conspicuously judgmental language (what gives you the right ... naked selfish aggression) to place a burden of presumptive guilt on those who, for whatever pre-defined-as-bad reason, would fail to summon ostensibly life-craving beings into existence given sufficient  (and, at present, impossible) epistemological vantage. It is in failing to create such new beings, or, more accurately, in actively preventing their existence, according to Hanson, that we commit "selfish aggression" by denying, what he, oblivious or not to his profound metaphysical arrogance, describes as "that exquisite treasure," which is to say -- aesthetically, I suppose -- life.

It's hard to know what to unravel first. One way to begin is by observing that the  moral burden Hanson assigns to those who have the ability to create new life (under presently impossible conditions) carries bizarre implications and rests upon a concept of "aggression" that bears no relation to common usage of the term. Under his proposed injunction, every spare moment that is not devoted to creating utility-maximizing lives that are somehow (impossibly for now) predetermined to want their existence -- is a moment in which a potential procreator stands under shadow of suspicion for inflicting violence upon teeming nullities of untapped potential life-preference. Taken seriously, such a view would place every moral agent in an absurdly untenable position.  Step away from the happy consciousness emulator for a bit of down time, and you reveal your "naked aggression" by denying those potential someones the "exquisite treasure" to which they are surely and emphatically entitled. There can be no rest for the existence-mixing barkeep, given such stakes. Original sin seems like a shoplifting offense by comparison.

Even if we permit that Hanson's moral rhetoric may be less than sincere (as it clearly is), his confidence in ascribing  preference and future-resourcefulness to pre-existent beings in order to enjoin (rather than justify) their creation is questionable on his own terms. Leaving aside the first-order problem of epistemic uncertainty that I don't for a moment forgive, constancy of preference remains a big problem. If we allow that a pre-existent being's optimistically speculated potential to desire its own existence once created constitutes a valid reason to initiate that potential being's actual life, should we not be compelled to insure against events that could radically change this preference? I would argue that the problem of sustainable preference is relevant even and perhaps especially with reference to the far-flung futuristic scenarios that Hanson prefers to entertain. Check back a thousand years later when -- oops! -- a coding glitch in the latest consciousness simulator has led to a quantum holocaust. In a dynamic universe aswarm with unknown unknowns, stochastic variables are predictably inevitable and certain to thwart our best intentions from time to time. There might also be mischief, of course, and life-loving sadism to account for. And minds that change.  

During a recent news cycle, we learned about the horrific fate of a lovelorn woman. Perhaps Dr. Jacquelyn Katorac, preferred existence at one time. It seems likely enough, really. Perhaps when she was a littel girl, or when she was in medical school lost in study, or when she first fell in love with the man who would later reject her affection -- perhaps at such times she was disposed to affirm her life in terms that would neatly satisfy professor Hanson's existential criteria. Perhaps she once regarded her life -- or all life -- as an "exquisite treasure." I don't think such conjecture is unreasonable. But if we submit, arguendo, that this woman -- by all accounts well situated to pay for her existence -- once and perhaps greatly preferred being to its alternative, as most of us do, we are in a position to consider what she would have been denied had she never been born, and to further consider this counterfactual against the terrifying reality that she actually experienced in the final days and hours of the precious life that she never asked for.

I wonder how and whether Dr. Katorac's preference shifted when, in a state of  jealous desperation, she made what her unrequited lover would later characterize as "an unbelievable error in judgment" by trying to gain access to his home through an open chimney. Robin Hanson may not feel troubled to dwell over the acute panic and the white-hot shockwaves of implacable regret that this woman surely must have experienced as her body became wedged within the the hot and unyielding crampspace of a brick and mortar stack. He might not feel pressed to contemplate the agony that must have come in waves as her descent locked and her mind raced in shambolic retrospect over the choices (if they were even choices) that led her to such a position. Were Dr. Katorac's arms raised above her head when her progress down the chute was retarded by brute physics? Or where her arms locked at her side, or in some awful pretzled contortion? Which would you prefer? As time pressed on and the heat became unbearable, did she succumb to sleep in her wedged position only to awake in a renewed state of panic? Did her mind drift into some passive state, or was punishment constant unto her death? Did she hold out hope?  Were there spiders in the chimney, as there usually are? Did she piss herself?  Did she regress to cry out for the mommy who created her? Every quale and detail is fucking relevant. Because it happened in real physical space to a real living human being, who but for a chance meeting of gametes, would have been prevented and denied ... what?  

It may be observed that Dr. Katorac is but one individual, and further that her suffering resulted from choices that she made freely, if under strange duress. I doubt the latter part is true, but cling to this if it helps. It hardly matters, because we know that her fate is and will be multiplied in the deaths and sufferings of countless others, most of whom, we may speculate with equal or greater confidence, were constitutionally endowed with an adaptive preference for life. I could more easily have chosen a clear-cut victim by example. Perhaps a raped and tortured child, as the textbooks prefer. There have always been more than a few. But I want to stay with the good doctor dying in the chimney. To appropriate a Hansonian term, her plight feels "near." And I sincerely wish, as she must have wished, that none of it had happened. It didn't have to. It never does.

As Hanson finds cause to fake outrage over the plight of the never-weres who may never be, he should take pause to consider, in good faith and with some imaginative effort, the profound  horror that some certain quantity of once-life-affirming beings will absolutely endure no matter what degree of caution is exercised to ensure that they gratefully accept and embrace the "exquisite treasure" that he prefers to enthrone. If Dr. Katorac had never been brought into existence, the nearly inconceivable ordeal that marked her end would likewise not have been. That much, I submit, is simple. But to confront this existential counterfactual in particular (which we may do in countless other instances and iterations) is to confront the equation that Hanson and other overconfident pronatalists seem content to loosely rhetoricize without overmuch reflection. Hanson assures us that it is possible to be "unfair" to a nullity, indeed he is confident that we behave aggressively toward some whose existence we "prevent."

Can this be true? No, it cannot.

A nullity is not an entity. Those who are never born are deprived of nothing because they are nothing eternal. Hanson's glib assertion that we can aggress against those who would, if created, prefer existence is bullshit. Tested against reality, his words collapse into meaningless ether. Hanson fails to explain how or why those hypothetically posited would-be life-lovers are or could ever be deprived or harmed in any way by being left to the default infinity of stateless non-vitality to which they -- we -- will all return as a matter of course anyway. If some actual, experiential deprivation could be shown to manifest through the ostensibly negligent (or inefficient) inaction that denies a potential quantity of gristle-and-nerve the "exquisite treasure" of inhaling and exhaling and craving pizza, then Hanson might have some ground upon which to prop his Darwinian bias, perhaps by reference to a hedonic ledger that pits the banked suffering of uncorked souls against the benefits of a mostly rewarding and productive life that nevertheless may end up rotting in a chimney. Trouble is, souls are make-believe, and the ledger doesn't yield to whim. Where there is no person, there is no personal experience. Zip. Nada. Like the time before you were born, and after you die.

A world in which Dr. Katorac is never brought into existence a world in which she experiences nothing and is done no violence. The world in which she was brought into existence is the real world in which she actually experienced throes of agony that most of us are loath to imagine. While the actions that led to her creation, and perforce to her ordeal, may logically, if arguably, qualify as "aggressive," the inaction that creates no cluster of subjective experience cannot meaningfully be described as exacting any tangible harm or deprivation against a person who might otherwise have been. To argue otherwise is to relinquish reason to mysticism.    

Robin Hanson is no mystic. Like all of us, he is more likely entranced by his own biased life narrative. His vacuous assertions cannot change the fact that nothing is nothing, and the imaginary harm that he posits will remain impotent and meaningless before the real and unpredictable pain that sentient beings will experience in the real and unpredictable world that he feels so blessed to perceive, thanks to a cosmically indifferent scheme of happenstance and blind natural selection. I want to hammer this much because it's one thing I know for sure. Where there is no being to be deprived, there is no deprivation, no harm, no aggression. No then or now. No tomorrow. No yesterday. Nothing ever. While the moral (and economic) relevance of beings who do not yet exist may be propositionally considered insofar as their creation is being contemplated, a nobody cannot lay claim to any preference or desire, and a nobody cannot be harmed by the denial of a preference that a somebody insists it would express if only it could.

The asymmetry looks back and yawns. The argument isn't going away.

No one should ever have children. There is no good reason to bring another being into existence. Life is not a treasure, exquisite or otherwise. It's just one damn thing after another, until it ends in death. If you're lucky, it won't hurt too much. If you're luckier still, it won't be at all.

Memento mori

Random Rules

The great Linda Gottfredson reports from the trenches on the realpolitik of academic freedom. I wonder what she would make of Walter Block's position?

Sister Y outdoes Roissy.  Twice.

Slate's repentant thought criminal, William Saletan, turns his attention to the politics of eternal sunshine in a fantastic multi-part series on memory science. The series also serves as an introduction to the inestimably important work of Elizabeth Loftus, who, in her capacity as an expert witness for the defense, has arguably done more good than any living psychologist. I'm working on a longer post about this stuff that also considers the work of...

...Errol Morris on illusory competence and the problem of  "unknown unknowns." Is it just me, or did Mr. Death get to this guy?

Nine-Banded Books author Andy Nowicki visits the Beloved Country (at the movies).

Prompted in part by Peter Singer's much-discussed NYT commentary on David Benatar's dangerous idea, Nine-Banded Books author Jim Crawford has been keeping up a lively pace over at his blog, "Antinatalism: The Greatest Taboo." (Regarding Singer, see especially the June archive.) Recent highlights include a reprint of Dan Geinster's provocative essay, "Negative Utilitarianism: A Manifesto,"  a simplified primer on hedonic asymmetry, and a series of flyers, cartoons, and broadsides extolling the virtues of childlessness. Incidentally, Jim recently asked that I comment on this godawful essay which brandishes the old line that some ideas exist beyond the pale of respectable discourse (or "thinkability") and should therefore not be engaged. Since the implications scale beyond the subject at issue (antinatalism), I'm using the occasion to springboard into a more ambitious critical survey of "arguments for silence" such as have been deployed to curtail public discussion of various nostrums near and dear to the Hoover Hog's latakia-encrusted heart. I'll be looking at subjects ranging from  natural rights metaphysics to free will denial to transhumanism to the three-punch crimethink combo consisting, as ever, of biorealism, holocaust revisionism, and childhood sexuality. In addition to being more rationally situated than critics initially assume, these and other cerebral minefields are unified in that they have elicited explicit calls either for censorship or for intellectual stigmatization. I am confident there's a story here, and if I can fit the pieces together just so, this may be as close as I'll ever come to writing a manifesto in defense of dangerous ideas. Stay on my ass, and wish me luck.

In related news, I've been sparring with a small contingent of godless pronatalists here.

In further related news, Thomas Ligotti's extinctionist treatise, The Conspiracy against the Human Race, is now available from Amazon. Read it and weep. Seriously.

In yet further related news, Jim's book is slated for review (along with other antinatalist titles) in an upcoming issue of Aschwin de Wolf's Cryonics magazine. I'll post a link when it's up.

Moving on...       

Sociopaths have feelings too!

Richard Hoste cracks corn, waxes on lingusitics, and schools right-to-be-white critics of comparative advantage. Hoste is a guy with whom I often disagree, but he's a straight-shooter who writes in a breezy manner that I can't help but admire. 

Jack Donovan (aka Jack Malebranche) considers suicide.

It turns out that Katherine Dunn wasn't bullshitting about her legendarily postponed work-in-progress.  Here's an excerpt from The Cut Man presented as a short story.

Andrew Sullivan revisits the strange case of Trig Palin, and Half Sigma notices. Before she was bullied into silence by obnoxious Tea Party cultists, the sleuthing blogger known as "Audrey" was busily compiling a dossier of evidence that eventually convinced me that Sarah Palin's official Trig birth story was utter bullshit. I still think the story will break (unlike her water) before the 2012 election, and I'm willing to place my wager.

Enough then.

Memento mori.

CHIP SMITH FOR MAYOR

He will extinguish the SUN.

(We can use the MOON instead.)

Memento mori.

Malignantly Useless

Some time ago I was privileged to receive an advance review copy of Thomas Ligotti's nonfiction treatise, The Conspiracy against the Human Race. I've since read the book (twice) and have been meaning to comment on it in the depth that it deserves. Alas, I simply haven't found the time. Or the words. Perhaps I will have something more to say between now and the end of days.

Fortunately, Jim Crawford has graciously agreed to let me reprint his review, which follows below in preciously edited form (the original version is here). Jim is the author of Confessions of an Antinatalist, now available for only $12 postpaid from the Hoover Hog's publishing imprint, Nine-Banded Books. I should disclose that Thomas Ligotti was kind enough to endorse Jim's book, but don't let the incestuous funk trip your radar; both books are worth your attention, and as Jim Goad might have put it once upon a time, both books are worth hating.

____________________

The Conspiracy against the Human Race, by Thomas Ligotti.

Hippocampus Press, June 2010.

Review by Jim Crawford.

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

-- James Joyce, Ulysses

Herein lies the problem of consciousness. Before its refined emergence as the node called human, there is only sleep. An uneasy sleep, to be sure. A tranquility punctuated by appalling interruptions of rumbling stomachs and tearing flesh. No nobility in pre-solipsistic savagery, perhaps, but the agonies keep to their assigned beats and only bother those who cross their paths. A dream within a dream.

Then, the worst thing imaginable happens. The dream awakens within itself, becomes lucid. A shard of the latency breaks loose. Falls out of the sky. There is a sense of plummeting, of scrambling for altitude in the midst of obstacles. Worse yet, there comes an awareness of gravity, and of the maxim ‘What goes up...’. The dream becomes a nightmare.

In The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, a work of non-fiction soon to be released, acclaimed horror author Thomas Ligotti strikes at the heart of the lie we maintain to shield ourselves from the contemplation of that nightmare, lest we find ourselves face to face with the secret ‘too terrible to know.’ The lie? That ‘being alive is all right.’ And the unutterable secret? That life is ‘malignantly useless.’ And so we shut our eyes to that particular horror, sleepwalking our way from one oasis of distraction to the next, as we grope by faith toward whatever version of Zion happens to suit our soteriological temperament.

But even as that nightmare is not of our own making, neither are our somnambulistic defenses against it. For we are puppets, one and all. Forgotten toys dangling from the imbecilic fingers of the First Urge, moved by the mephitic winds of heritage and circumstance, believing all the while that we are real boys and girls. Condemned to dance, and twirl, and dream of what it might be like to be autonomous, rather than automatons.

Of course, none of us really wants to believe this. Question: What do you call a puppet that refuses to acknowledge its patrimony of woodpulp and ashes? That claims not to feel the tug of the wire at its wrists? Answer: An optimist. But what of his counterpart, the pessimist? The ‘man with a morbid, frantic, shuddering hatred of the life-principle itself? (Lovecraft) Does he occupy some loftier position in the kingdom of wood, cloth and string, a perch from which he can gaze down upon this play of absurd passions with -- dare I say it? -- objectivity?

Herein lies the conundrum of the hard determinist, of which Ligotti is fully aware. How to build a case on reason, when reason’s foundations are ultimately no more secure than the sound of wind whistling through cracks in the mortar? Origins are lost to us in the stifling complexity of our causative heritage; we are stuck with who we are, and with what we think we know. Our perceptions have been handed over to us bearing neither manufacturer’s label nor warranty. This being the overriding circumstance in the duchy of puppetry, what is the justification by which we can possibly proceed to make our respective cases?

There is none. We push forward -- or speaking with a tad more accuracy, perhaps, are pushed -- weighing the quality of music issuing from our squeaking joints, as well as that conjured up by our ideological opposites, against the standard of sawdust between our ears. Knowing that we do not know, the knowledge of our ignorance is splayed out against the leading edge of a juggernaut whose engines exist in a realm we’ll never be privy to, even after we’re torn to pieces.

We push forward. Make our appeals. Pessimists have made theirs, though you’d be hard pressed to hear them in the midst of the Official Life Affirmation Choir and Jug Band. There are names -- Schopenhauer. Nietzche. Sartre. Camus. Mainlander. Zapffe. Others. Some motivated by disdain, others by despair. Still others by misanthropic intellects unwilling to take their seats at ringside. Some of these held more or less true to their offending creeds, while others sought and wrought loopholes, straining for illusory beams of light in the cloud cover.

Ligotti has made his case as well, drawing from his background of horror and phantasmagorical literature, polishing the mirror of our self-reflection to an astonishing degree. Each time I gaze into it, I catch another glimpse of the darkness behind my eyes. The emptiness. An awareness made more palpable by the knowledge of my own nothingness, realizing that that nothingness is everything I am. A nothingness that one day will be swallowed by its own shadow.

There’s a picture on my desk, a piece of paper confined within a frame of wood and glass. These are my daughters. Little bits of the Nothing that coalesced into temporary simulcra of something. They will remain briefly, moved by the wind, fading in the sun, and finally dissolved in darkness. Once they were not. Soon they will return to that former station, and it will be as if they never were. There is an infinitude of raw material existing in potentia, driftwood in danger of being lifted and shaped by the madness at the core of creation. Carved into the likeness of futility, given breath, and with that breath, hope, and with that hope, pain and dissolution. Carved into the likenesses of sons and daughters. Daughters like mine. At the end of the rainbow? Splinters of broken wood. Bits of rusty wire, and springs, scraps of cloth, and hope, and aspirations. A junkpile.

The Conspiracy against the Human Race is a work of non-fiction by Thomas Ligotti, with a forward by Ray Brassier. It is an important contribution to the literature of pessimism, as well as antinatalism; of which, unfortunately, there is a paucity, especially in the contemporary sense. It is sober, insightful, and supports the feeling I’ve always had that fiction writers often have a better hold on reality than philosophers. For those interested in the subject, I can’t recommend a better piece of reading material- well, unless...er, never mind.

END OF JIM CRAWFORD'S REVIEW

____________________

Memento mori.

Inconvenient History Update

If anyone's interested, I have a review of Melissa Katsoulis' Literary Hoaxes in the Summer issue of Inconvenient History.

From the same issue, I would especially recommend Michael K. Smith's essay, "Must We Loathe David Irving," which provides a perceptive study of the Irving-Lipstadt libel trial that played out in Britain over a decade ago. Whatever your thoughts on Irving, Lipstadt, or libel actions generally, Smith's account is elevated by a sharp epistemological unpacking of the assumptions informing the "denier" label/smear. He uses apt analogies that would scarcely occur to right-leaning revisionists, and he makes important points in response to the Shermer-approved "convergence of evidence" trump so often deployed as a kind of  smokescreen to selectively and preemptively discredit the critical reading of evidence before it is engaged. Given sufficient support from whatever ranks, the catchall of "convergence" or "cumulative proof" may be dispatched by believers of any persuasion to situate the subject of their preferred belief beyond the bounds of critical inquiry. David Ray Griffin uses essentially the same tack (as Smith notes), as do those who are convinced of the Christian resurrection story, alien abductions, telepathy, global warming, sudden acceleration vehicular malfunction, satanic ritual abuse, and, of course, Nazi gas chambers. It should go without saying that proponents of any particular claim may ultimately be correct or mistaken in their conclusions. But the assertion that convergent lines of evidence -- often regardless of empirical quality -- effectively close the case is a crude ruse that leads to overconfidence and name-calling.

Mikael K. Smith is the author of two books published by Common Courage Press. He is co-contributor (with Frank Scott) to the blog Legalienate.

The first volume of Richard Widmann's web-based journal Inconvenient History has been compiled into a hardbound book that can be ordered here for the weird price of $29.68.

Memento mori.