The Hoover Hog

Forced Life and its Discontents: An Interview with Sister Y

Editor's Note: This is the second in a series of Hoover Hog interviews.

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INTRODUCTION

There are limits.  If you want to stockpile AK-47s or burn Old Glory or fuck for cash or snuff your fetus, your appeal will be met with rehearsed huzzahs from the wings. A constituency is waiting.  The polemics are signed and delivered, neatly punctuated with practiced elocution. Live and let live, young rebel. This is your heritage. Our ethos. Nobody's business if you do.

But how quickly those huzzahs fade when the subject turns to suicide. The confident rights rhetoric, so loudly trumpeted at every familiar turn, is traded for a different set of chords. The responsive default becomes concern. Becomes discomfiture. Becomes bristling incredulity.  You peer into the maw of nonexistence, only to be assured, emphatically and from all sides, that what you are contemplating is wrong. Your death wish is an expression of acute turmoil; it is the illness wanting, not you.  Applied to your pathologically confused desire, pop-libertarian slogans always read as perverse. There is no vocal constituency for suicide rights. There is no audible discourse over "choice" in this peculiar context. There is only removed compassion and anger, and a hotline. 

Because everyone knows. Suicide is a cry for help. Suicide is an act of cowardice. Or hostility. Or strange mettle. Suicide is the easy way out. A permanent solution to a temporary problem. Suicide is not chosen; it is the failure of choice. Cosmically irrational. Properly understood, suicide is foremost a public health issue. You have your whole life ahead of you. You can get through this. Think of how your friends and family will feel and tomorrow is another day and there are coping strategies and there are people who've been there who can help and you are suffering from a mental illness and there are treatment options and there is medicine and there is always hope. You're not thinking clearly. This isn't you. It simply can't be. Do you have a plan?

Even in academic circles, the study of suicide is aswarm with muddled premise-rigged thinking. Dubious statistics and theories are regurgitated with credulous deference. Emboldened by a deeply entrenched public health paradigm, scholars bow to the the coolly disinterested vantage of epidemiology to promote measures meant to thwart the scourge of self-destruction. This is for the good, they insist. Just look at the graphs.

When a choice is predefined as sick, it always circles back like this. And if you disagree, help is on the way.

Of course, there is another point of view. A heterodox suicidology, relegated to the fringe. This is the view under which the reasons of the would-be suicide can be considered in good faith. This is the view that sees suicidal ideation not as the symptom of some lazily presumed brainsick malaise, but as a rationally founded confirmation that the burden of existence is, at least for some, intolerable. This is the view that turns conventional assumptions on their head, by asking not whether self destruction is morally wrong, but whether a ubiquitous culture of "forced life" has blinded us to a far greater harm.

As Sister Y would have it, this is The View from Hell.

The moral issue of suicide has usually been stated in terms of whether suicide is morally permissible, under any circumstances. . . . This formulation assumes a major premise: that it is the suicidal person who must justify his refusal to live, rather than the community being required to justify the action of forcing him to live. These notes will focus on the moral reprehensibility of forced life, rather than attempt to justify suicide from a defensive perspective.

Known to her readers as "Curator" (possibly a nod to the Miller Williams poem),  Sister Y stands virtually alone, asking questions that are disallowed by the prevailing life-biased consensus. When she isn't working through the vicissitudes of  "Forced Life and its Ethical Alternatives," she enjoys hiking, M. Night Shyamalan movies, square-dancing, and Vietnamese cuisine. She is a triathlete in training. And yes, Sister Y wants to die.  

You can take or leave it if you please.

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FORCED LIFE AND ITS DISCONTENTS: AN INTERVIEW WITH SISTER Y

HOOVER HOG: You  describe yourself as a "currently non-practicing" suicide. What does this mean?

SISTER Y: I am very much in favor of my own death, and I've actively pursued death in the past, but I'm not actively pursuing death right now. I think "suicide" connotes someone who either has killed herself, or is actively trying to kill herself. A "non-practicing suicide" would be someone with the mental status of a suicide (a stable, long-standing desire for death that is not the product of a delusion) but not currently taking action to achieve death. I'm not acting on it because (a) I find the methods currently available to me to be unacceptable, and (b) I am still working through the morality of suicide in general and in my case in particular, especially regarding my family and social obligations.

I've found that many people -- usually those who have never seriously contemplated suicide -- scoff at the notion that self destruction might be especially difficult, either for psychological or practical reasons. Has this been your experience? And how do you respond?

I don't think I recognized the difficulty of suicide until I made a serious attempt. Just because someone is rationally set on suicide does not mean that one's hard-wired self-preservation instincts disappear. Most methods of suicide that are fairly reliable call for the suicide to do something extremely unnatural and difficult (shoot oneself in the head, cut an artery). Other methods have a high likelihood of failure, and many are also likely to result in sequelae. The only comfortable, reliable method of committing suicide is to take an overdose of barbiturates, which are now extremely controlled and almost impossible to acquire, even on the black market. Almost no other drug will reliably produce death, and certainly not without substantial pain. I graduated from one of the top engineering schools in the country, and spent nearly two years researching suicide methods, and came up pretty much empty-handed. I encourage anyone who thinks suicide is easy to spend some time on the various pro-choice suicide boards on the Internet. These people are desperate to die, but come up against problems with the available methods. It's even worse in countries outside the United States, where guns are restricted or illegal, but even in the United States, those with previous mental hospitalizations may not buy or own guns, limiting the method's utility.

In most western cultures, individual choice is highly valued. People have come to be relatively tolerant of conduct that they may view as being morally wrong or even harmful, provided that the harm is self-inflicted and contained. But those who advocate greater personal freedom to use drugs or engage in risky sexual activity seem less enthusiastic when the topic turns to suicide. There may be some allowance for end-of-life scenarios, but a more general "right to suicide" has never emerged as a mainstream libertarian issue. What do you think accounts for this difference in attitude?

There are so many reasons for this. A major one is the pathologization of suicide. An important piece of received knowledge in our culture is that suicide is, by definition, always the product of mental illness, a premise that is more axiomatic than it is supported by real data. The more people are aware of the variety of human experience, the more even compassionate people tend to favor the right of consenting adults to do whatever they please, so long as they do not harm others. But this logic doesn't tend to include suicide, because to the degree that suicide is seen as somehow the product of mental illness, it's not seen as a free choice, and therefore it's not seen as compassionate to support a right to suicide. (The attempt to medicalize, and pathologize, various actions- from alcoholism to drug addiction to "sex addiction" - might be, among other things, an attempt to subvert our societal tolerance of individual choice in each of these areas by making them appear to be less than free choices.)

Another problem is that suicide does, of course, emotionally harm people other than the suicide, to the extent that the suicide has family or friends. I think people get confused when evaluating the pain caused by a suicide. They tend to compare it to murder - where a person takes the life of another - rather than to truly analogous situations, such as ending a relationship or quitting a job. Suicides are not seen as having the right to inflict emotional harm on others, even though we don't generally posit a right to other people's company or association, and this is exactly the type of harm that a suicide inflicts (denying others his company).

People have strong emotional reactions to the idea of suicide which, I think, prevent them from analyzing the morality of suicide in a fair way. The above reasons partially explain this. But there is another reason: people have so much invested in life being generally good, and the idea of rational suicide threatens that belief. If someone can rationally choose to stop living, especially when he or she isn't facing impending intolerable pain and loss of bodily and mental function, that must mean it's not an undeniable fact that life is, on balance, good. Jim Crawford of antinatalism.net calls this "souring the milk of foundational meaning that everybody's sucking down."

But doesn't research show that the majority of people who attempt suicide and fail will never make a second attempt? And don't failed suicides frequently come to express profound regret over their prior actions? Why shouldn't such observations lend support to the view that suicidal thinking is the product of a deeper mental pathology that should be treated therapeutically rather than enabled?

There are studies that show that few people who attempt suicide go on to kill themselves within a short period of time afterward. I'm aware of one study, though, that found that between 13% and 19% of people who attempt suicide by self-poisoning go on to successfully kill themselves during their lifetimes - and that the rate of suicide doesn't decrease with time after the original attempt. A suicide attempt remains the single best predictor of future death by suicide (though I've been seeing the statistic tossed around recently that bipolar disorder comes close, with 10-15% of people with the diagnosis ending up as suicides).

Still, that leaves us with 75% or so of suicide attempters "deciding" to stay alive. Indeed, many express regret and say they are glad to be saved from their suicide attempts. But, given the suicide prohibition in our society and the general hostility toward suicide, I don't think it's fair to say that this means that most people who attempt suicide don't really want to die. Many people simply cannot manage suicide for practical reasons. Others may be reabsorbed into the anti-suicide position of mainstream society.

An analogy might be to members of an authoritarian religion in a country dominated by that religion. It might be true that few leave the religion, and many eventually "come back into the fold" if they do try to leave, but it's not fair to use that as evidence that leaving the religion is pathological and the product of a diseased mind.

But hasn't it been established that over 90% of suicides have a pre-existing mental illness? And if this is true, doesn't it complicate the notion that most suicidal individuals can rationally desire death?

The statistic that 90% of suicides have a mental illness is often tossed around. Check the sources, though, and it becomes very questionable.

The source for the statistic cited on the National Institutes of Mental Health website, for instance, is a completely uncontrolled study using the questionable "psychiatric autopsy" technique. Let me emphasize again: it's a study with no control group. It's a myth, but it's cited as if it were scripture. There have been some attempts at controlled studies demonstrating this, again using that "psychiatric autopsy" business. One of the larger controlled studies indeed seemed to demonstrate the accepted 90% statistic - but that study also found that 37% of its control group had a mental illness! Are we willing to believe that 37% of people walking around are so mentally ill as to justify interfering with their actions?

The other problem I have with this statistic is what is held to constitute a mental illness. The DSM-IV criteria for depression (Major Depressive Disorder), in particular, are so vague as to be nearly meaningless. By its definition, almost anyone could be diagnosed with depression at any time. The idea of suicide being a product of a mental illness is more definitional than descriptive. (Interestingly, the study about the Chinese women found that very few of them had any mental illness.)

Though the 90% statistic is, in my analysis, a myth, it is true that many suicidal people have a mental illness (bipolar disorder is particularly likely to lead to suicide). But it's still a leap to suggest that people with a mental illness should not have the right to commit suicide. A mentally ill person may still make a will or sign a contract or be held liable for a crime, for instance, so long as he was capable of understanding his actions at the time. Mentally ill people are still, in many cases, capable of forming rational desires. It seems presumptuous to say that, as long as you're mentally ill, you couldn't possibly rationally desire to kill yourself - although you might rationally desire other things. In fact, the unrelenting suffering ensured by many mental illnesses makes suicide, if anything, more rational for some people with mental illness than for those without mental illness.

People want to protect others. People are compassionate. But I think there is an important failure of compassion when it comes to suicides: people want to "protect" others from death, not from suffering, even when suffering is preferable to death. I do not think it is compassionate at all to substitute one's own judgment for that of the person enduring the suffering.

You make reference to Jim Crawford's antinatalism site.  You would describe yourself as an antinatalist, correct?

Yes.

Do your views on the ethics of suicide entail philosophical opposition to having children? The fact that you characterize the central problem as one of "forced life" seems to suggest a connection.

There is a connection, but I don't think that the one entails the other (suicide rights --> antinatalism - antinatalism may entail a right to suicide, though). I think it is wrong to force people to stay alive, and I think that bringing people into existence is a similar, though not identical, wrong. But there are many people who, I think logically and coherently, support a right to suicide but do not subscribe to antinatalism. In the general population, support for a moral (and legal) right to suicide seems rare, but it is the norm among professional philosophers. However, antinatalism is still a position held by few.

Suicides are the ones in the best position to understand that they have been wronged by being brought into existence. Of course, antinatalism has very little to do with suicide, and Benatar's antinatalism implies that everyone is wronged by being brought into existence, suicide or not. I worry that my intertwined support for both suicide rights and antinatalism will increase the confusion between the two, which seems rampant among non-philosophers.

You've devoted a fair portion of your project to exploring antinatalist ethics and have specifically defended philanthropic antinatalism against attacks, yet you express misgivings about the the pain/pleasure asymmetry emphasized by David Benatar in his book, Better Never to Have Been. What do you see as being the central weakness of Benatar's core argument? Is there a better approach?

I don't think the argument is weak, but it is built on intuition, as is almost all interesting philosophy. This gives people the option of claiming not to share the intuition underlying Benatar's claim when they come up against its uncomfortable consequences. I think this move is usually dishonest - people claim not to see the asymmetry, but they really do. But it's possible for people to either genuinely not share the intuitions underlying the asymmetry, or to have such a radically different conception of value that the asymmetry (and the interests of those brought into existence) is not dispositive of the question of the morality of procreation. Some people think it's so important that humanity go on that any amount of suffering is acceptable. I'm not sure there can be much of a response to this position. But this kind of honest objection to antinatalism is rare; I've much more often encountered dishonest and somewhat muddle-headed objections. But the idea is new in philosophy time; serious philosophical challenges have yet to appear, and I await them with interest.

Early on in your web project, The View from Hell, you observe that ethicists tend to treat suicide as an option that demands careful moral justification. You question the foundation of this default view by asking why the burden should not rest on others to justify laws and customs aimed at preventing suicide. Why do you think that scholars so often approach the morality of suicide in these terms while seldom considering the morality of "forced life," as you put it?

I don't know why this should be. I haven't come up with any explanations for this that I find compelling. Perhaps it's the psychological salience of the act of suicide, or the ubiquity and ancientness of the prohibition, although philosophy is usually able to get behind such things. To some degree, I wonder if the lack of self-advocacy by suicides allows people to assume that the suicide prohibition does no particular harm. This is part of the justification for my project.

You emphasize that you are not "pro-suicide" and have argued that suicide is immoral in cases where would-be self-destroyers voluntarily have children, thereby incurring positive obligations toward those they bring -- or force -- to life. Having made this exception to a general moral right to suicide (I don't gather that you are arguing that voluntary procreation should nullify a legal right to suicide, but feel free to address this), you open the door to the possibility that other voluntarily assumed trusts and obligations may also be weighted against a presumptive right to suicide. In this context, you specifically mention the formation of close relationships, tentatively suggesting that suicidal individuals may be morally compelled to avoid or terminate interpersonal bonds. 

But most lives are filled with voluntarily assumed obligations and relationships, from the trivial to the profound.  Assuming that an unpaid sewer bill is assigned less countermanding weight on a continuum where a marriage or close friendship may be injunctive, how do you address the seemingly inevitable clash between positive obligations and suicide rights? 

I think that one of the factors that weighs in favor of a right to suicide is the lack of having taken any action to come into being. But it's not the only moral consideration. Voluntary action is not all - I am in favor of a moral right to bankruptcy and abortion on demand, both cases where the consequences of voluntary action are so harsh as to require an "out."

Many voluntarily assumed obligations, from friendships to contracts, are relatively minor compared to the pain of existence for a suicidal person. Procreation is one case that seems to weigh heavily in the other direction - voluntarily creating a new person seems qualitatively different from making friends with someone. Children seem to have a claim on their parents that other relationships do not entail. It seems fine for a person to sell all his possessions and move to Vietnam, "abandoning" his friends and even siblings and parents, but it does not seem fine to do so if it entails "abandoning" his children.

I am circumspect about other obligations trumping a right to suicide. One distinction I have been examining is that between exclusive and non-exclusive relationships. By becoming friends with a person, one does not limit their capacity to make other friends (though one does hurt them by committing suicide). But by having a child, or entering an exclusive romantic relationship with someone, one limits the partner's capacity to acquire a substitute and "hedge" against one's suicide. A similar principle operates when we impose liability on a rescuer for doing a crappy job rescuing someone, because by undertaking a rescue, the person deprived the endangered person of the possibility of being rescued by a competent person.

As you imply, I don't think any of this should affect a legal right to suicide. Mostly, I think, by procreating, one gives up one's moral right to suicide.

Can you explain your concept of "mismatch and meaning," particularly as it might relate to the problem of forced life?

I have tried to make a list of some of what I conceive to be serious limitations on human happiness. One of these is the idea of the absurd as conceived by Camus - that, while there is no objective meaning to life, humans naturally desire for life to be meaningful. One of the possible results of accepting that life is not inherently meaningful, but that one will always desire for it to be so, is a rational wish to end one's life. I have focused on the limitations on happiness in order to show that "rational suicide" is not such a crazy idea.

My understanding is that women attempt suicide about twice as often as men, yet something like 75% of suicides in the U.S. are actually committed by men because they employ more lethal methods -- primarily firearms. This disparity is often interpreted to mean that for many women,  attempted suicide may be more of a desperate means of communication -- the cliched "cry for help" -- than a sincerely intended act of self destruction, while male suicides mean business. You have questioned this interpretation. Why?

Lack of suicidal intent on the part of females is the usual explanation for the disparity in success rates for women versus men. It's unquestioningly, universally accepted. But I've almost never seen any actual evidence for this claim.

One piece of evidence the "cry for help" explanation does not explain is that female physicians commit suicide much more frequently than females in the general population, that is, at approximately the same rate as men. (The suicide rate for male physicians is elevated above men in the general population, but not nearly as dramatically as that of females.) Those who have investigated this phenomenon (which is mirrored in the veterinary and chemistry professions, though not in, say, finance) chalk it up to the hardship of gender discrimination affecting female doctors. There's no evidence for this, though, and to me, the obvious explanation is that female doctors, as opposed to general population females, have access to acceptable and lethal means of suicide, and hence kill themselves more often.

Most male suicides are gun suicides. Many more men than women own, and are familiar with the operation of, guns. In every measure of violence, men far outperform women. Both in a practical and in a psychological sense, gunshot is not a method that is available to women, while self-poisoning is. Their failure to successfully commit suicide is a function of the lack of lethal drugs in the United States, as demonstrated by the high suicide rates of female physicians and of females in countries where lethal pesticides are commonly available, such as China (a February 2008 study in Current Psychiatry Reports revealed that female suicides actually outnumber male suicides in China by a 3:1 ratio).

It is access to lethal means that are psychologically acceptable, and not lethal intent, that separates women from men in terms of suicide success, in my analysis. However, the idea that the success disparity demonstrates that women want to be "rescued" from suicide attempts is often used to justify coercive suicide prevention tactics.

You also challenge the prevailing view of suicide contagion, the so-called "Werther Effect" (referring to the spike in suicides said to have followed the publication of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther). In the first instance, you argue that the purported relationship between highly publicized suicides and imitative events may result from a kind of selective pattern recognition or apophenia. But perhaps more intriguingly, you are critical of  the public health assumption that impulsive suicides justify preventive or interventionist policies since they constitute a departure from some theoretical (and arguably acceptable) baseline. Your view seems to be that this view is biased by the failure of experts to apprehend the nature and trajectory of suicidal thinking, which may, at least for some people, necessitate a trigger event. Can you describe your current thinking on the empirical basis for suicide contagion and on the conceptual issues that may bias researchers to read  impulsive or "excess" suicides as special grounds for preventive public policy?

I start from the position that preventing suicide for its own sake is not a valid policy goal. In other words, suicide is not, in and of itself, wrong or bad. Suffering so serious that it leads to suicide is bad, and policies to remedy that suffering are well justified, but policies designed to staunch the suicide rate, but do nothing about the suffering behind it, are merely cruel.

Preventing a suicide may be either good or bad, depending on the individual situation. It is not automatically good. Preventing a suicide is bad when it amounts to trapping a miserable, but rational, person with a long-standing, clear wish to die in a miserable, unwanted existence. Existing barriers to suicide, such as the drug prohibition and the pervasive anti-suicide message ubiquitous in our culture, function to prevent such suicides all the time. It is not good that they do so.

What might be considered an "impulsive" suicide by an outside observer - a suicide triggered by a crisis, for instance - could very well be the suicide of a person trapped into a miserable existence by the unfair, immoral coercive anti-suicide practices of our society. A person who clearly, unambiguously wishes to die may not be willing to shoot himself in the head under normal circumstances, but in the middle of a crisis, he may become willing to do so. This may appear to be an impulsive suicide, but is really a genuinely desired suicide that was unfairly prevented by arbitrary barriers.

In The View From Hell, you frequently wrestle with the ideas of such thinkers as David Benatar, J. David Vellemen, John Rawls,  Robert Nozick, Thomas Nagel, and Seana Shiffrin -- thinkers who tend to address moral problems in the language of what might broadly be considered contemporary normative ethics. Readers enticed to your site as a philosophical forum on suicide may be surprised by the paucity of flirtation with Continental-branded celebrity philosophers more commonly associated with the subject. I'm thinking of guys like Kierkegaard, Sartre, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Batailles, Schopenhauer, Amery, etc. (Even your obligatory discussion of Camus is appended with a note in which you begrudge his vaguely mystical free-floating style and approach.) Why has your focus centered around these more analytical currents in philosophy? I mean, if you're a suicide, doesn't that mean that you wear black, listen to Godspeed You Black Emperor and carry around a dogeared copy of Being and Nothingness?

I find continental philosophy aesthetically irritating, but honestly I don't know enough about it to trash it. Heidegger has his moments, but I see the continentals as involved in a different project from the one I'm interested in. I'm not doing deep epistemology. The American/English-diaspora analytic style seems more suited to applied ethics. And the continental stuff seems weirdly groundless. Camus, for instance, throughout all of Sisyphus, doesn't seem to be making a single recognizable argument.

As for myself, I wear pale blue and ride a bright red bicycle and listen to Erykah Badu. I would never make fun of the goth kids, though. They're fine by me.

In your discussion of Oregon's Death With Dignity Act (which allows terminally ill patients under approved circumstances to be prescribed -- but not administered -- a lethal dose of barbiturates), you argue that this amounts to merely a narrow liberalization of existing drug prohibition and cannot seriously be viewed as a form of "assisted" suicide. But in the Netherlands the law permits more clear-cut  forms of assisted suicide and even allows euthanasia at the discretion of physicians. The Dutch law has been criticized by the suicide rights advocate, Thomas Szasz, who contends that by entrusting too much power in doctors, the law circumvents individual autonomy and leads to abuse. Szasz argues that suicide rights are best ensured by lifting current suicide laws and through a wholesale repeal of existing drug laws. Do you think there is a danger that suicide rights advocacy could give way to more paternalistic "pro-death" policies that may prove harmful? And what specific policy reforms would you propose to redress the problem of forced life?

The Oregon law is a step in the right direction. My main criticism of that law is that it limits access to comfortable suicide to those judged to have terminal illnesses. I don't see a good reason for this distinction.

But another problem with the Oregon law is that it limits physician assistance to offering a prescription, not helping to administer the drug (e.g. intravenously). This does no good to a person who rationally wishes to die but whose physical functioning is limited. I cannot see what difference it makes how the means of death is administered, so long as it is at the request of the person who wishes to die, and the wish to die is long-standing, clear, and not the product of a delusion or of coercion by others.

The main problem others claim to have with the Dutch or the Swiss situation is the possibility that lethal drugs will be administered without the full consent of the person who is to die. But cutting off access to lethal drugs is not the answer to this problem. Cutting off all access to lethal drugs ensures that many people are forced to remain alive against their will, which is a horror that few are willing to address. Why is it ethical to remove the freedom of those who wish to die, to prevent a theoretical risk to those who might not wish to? The harm of being forced to remain alive is real. Most advocates of forced life treat the harm of being forced to remain alive as a non-issue. But wouldn't it be more rational to have safeguards in place such as Oregon has? Oregon has strict requirements for mental competence and witnessing to ensure that the decision to die is not the product of coercion. The purported fear of people being put to death against their will has not materialized there.

If we're concerned about coercion and consent, we can prevent that without prohibiting comfortable, reliable suicide altogether.

There are many reforms that would allow society to stop forcing people to remain alive while still respecting life. One is the ability to legally opt-out of being forcibly "rescued" from a suicide attempt, perhaps after demonstrating one's sound mind and a clear, long-standing wish to die that is not the product of a delusion. Another is to allow doctors to write a prescription for a lethal dose of barbiturates to anyone under the same condition. (Recognizing a diagnosis like "unwanted life," similar to "unwanted fertility," could provide a medical model.)

You often refer to your online writing as a "project," but projects tend to have a conclusion. Do you foresee a point when The View From Hell is complete? A synthesis?

I suppose you're right about projects usually having conclusions. I can't say that my projects usually do, though. This interview is forcing me to do a bit of synthesis. But I suppose the goal is to have all the arguments written down in one place, where all the moving parts can link together.

This may be a dangerous area, but suppose someone is reading this who is considering suicide. Let's say this person is rational, has resolved the ethical problems to his or her own satisfaction, and remains determined. Do you have any moral or practical advice to impart to such a person?

It is legally dangerous, because in most states "assisting" a suicide is a crime, which could, theoretically, include advice about methods. (A Vail, Colorado, man was recently charged with manslaughter for giving his friend a shotgun after they had spoken of suicide.)

But I am not in a legal bind at all, because I don't have any practical advice about suicide. Suicide remains extremely difficult and risky as a practical matter. There is no easy, comfortable, sure, and widely accessible method available - no Peaceful Pill. I argue that this is a moral horror.

As for moral advice - I think people need to make the decision free from pre-packaged, demeaning judgments like "cowardly," "selfish," "stupid," and "crazy." I think the decision to commit suicide or to remain alive requires a wide, balanced, and nuanced approach. That is currently not happening in our society - only various flavors of anti-suicide messages are tolerated. Like anti-drug messages, these become unreliable to those considering suicide. I think a balanced approach, respecting a right to suicide and realizing that suicide may sometimes be morally acceptable, is more likely to help people understand what their true moral duties and desires are, and to act maturely on this reflection.

Thank you for your time.

Interview with a Holocaust Denier

Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of Hoover Hog interviews.

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INTRODUCTION

In Lucifer's Lexicon, L.A. Rollins defines a "Holocaust revisionist"as "one who denies that he is a denier."  I'm sure "Mike Smith" -- aka "Denier," aka "Bud" -- would concur. As the elusive videographer behind the most provocative  underground documentaries to emerge on the web in recent years, Denier (as we'll agree  to call him), has little patience for cloudy euphemisms. He just calls it as he sees it. And in his taboo-flouting web trilogy -- consisting of  OneThird of the Holocaust, Nazi Shrunken Heads, and most recently, Buchenwald: A Dumb Dumb Portrayal of Evil -- he calls it a lie.

As Denier's unexpected John Malkovich monotone narrates over volumes of intriguing exhibits in steadily focused fact-stacking explication of his heretical thesis, intrepid viewers may find themselves clamoring for a careful refutation. Surely The Skeptics Society or the gang at Popular Mechanics can be relied on to provide a point-by-point reality check, as our entrusted skeptics did when the 9-11 Truth Squad went viral with their pyrotechnic fantasies -- no?

Well, no. At least not to date. Oh, you'll find some snarkily pitched counter-arguments percolating amid the obligatory ad hominem attacks over at Holocaust Controversies, but the guardians of historical orthodoxy have been largely content to ignore Denier and his quirky little home movies. The fact that most of his videos have been banned from YouTube and Google Video just makes it easier. The fact that his ads -- ads soliciting rebuttals -- were turned down by the UC Berkeley student newspaper. Just makes it easier. Free speech is easy when it's chained to the margins. That's the American way. 

But you already know the drill. When someone voices doubt about what all good people recognize as the greatest moral catastrophe of the past century, the refrains of suspicion are tightly scripted. Denier is to be cast as an anti-Semite who probably harbors some perverse nostalgia for Hitler's sadly misunderstood regime. Never mind that he regards Der Führer as a stunted power-mad militaristic thug, and says as much, repeatedly, in his movies. Never mind all those anti-war palliatives layered throughout his project -- the calls for "good vibes" and good will and harmony among people everywhere. You can shuck off the pacifist shtick as a long-rehearsed denialist ruse. Because you know better. Don't you?

And if you get stuck on the curious fact that the Bad Man is also an avowed atheist who equally denies the historical existence of Jesus Christ, well, just take a deep breath. Tell yourself such kinks in the profile are but clever face-saving PR distractions. Like those embedded nods to Philip K. Dick and Chomsky. Like the AdBusters-branded riffs on corporate capitalism. You see how it adds up to insidious hipster-baiting mind poison? You see through all of it. Don't you, and very good. The man is seduced by Kevin MacDonald, after all. And we are assured that Kevin MacDonald is wrong about all of it. Dangerously wrong. Because Steven Pinker said so.

"Discredited," as they say. Just keep saying it. You can save yourself a lot of time and trouble that way. Soon, you'll be safely back on track.

But for the time being, if you're feeling adventurous, why not take a peek at what the YouTube brass doesn't want you to see? Why not lend a cautious ear to a man who has come to deny what you have always believed with such peculiar certainty? There's really no danger that you'll learn anything new, is there? If nothing else, it should make for easy sport. Perhaps you can set the record straight, just for fun. Michael Shermer may thank you. Should be good for a laugh, or a sigh. There's no good reason to trust anyone.

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INTERVIEW WITH A HOLOCAUST DENIER

      

THE HOOVER HOG: People who express doubts about various aspects of the standard history of the Holocaust usually refer to themselves as "revisionists" and consider the term "Holocaust denier" to be a smear. But you have embraced the "D" word, stating that you believe the Holocaust to be a "giant myth." Why have you adopted this arguably confrontational approach? And perhaps more importantly, what specifically do you mean when you state that you "deny" the Holocaust?

DENIER: I like the term "denier." The term "revisionist" comes off as a bad euphemism. It is deniers trying to express the sentiment that they believe Jews suffered during WWII but just weren't systematically exterminated. But to the public, it comes off as a bad euphemism. The movie Mr. Death had multiple euphemistic levels, because Fred Leuchter made execution equipment and euphemistically described what he did, and he was also a revisionist!

For me, the term "denier" has parallels to gay people taking the word "queer" for their own self-definition. Turning a derogatory term around for their own power.

I'm sure some people will be amused (or confused) by the idea of applying identity politics to Holocaust denial. But just to clarify, your view is that systematic extermination is the defining element of what has come to be known as the Holocaust?

Exactly.

Are you saying that without genocidal intent, the events that took place no longer signify anything that might be considered historically unique, or uniquely atrocious?

I don't mean that, but at the same time I'm drawing a blank on how to clarify. The Nazis tried to kick the Jews out of Europe. They put them in labor camps.

What do you make of the "functionalist" view, notably of Christopher Browning who deemphasizes the role of gas chambers and argues that the Holocaust was largely carried out by German police reserve units who massacred deportees in the course of carrying out orders. Do such claims fall under the scrutiny of Holocaust denial as well? And do you think the emergence of a functionalist/intentionalist dialectic is (perhaps covertly) influenced by the arguments of Holocaust deniers or revisionists?

Nothing comes to mind on this one.

In your video documentary, One Third of the Holocaust, you focus on Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, collectively known as the Reinhard death camps. And your latest documentary is devoted to Buchenwald. Why did you choose to focus on these camps, rather than on Auschwitz, which seems to be more synonymous with the Holocaust, at least in the public imagination?

I could have started on Auschwitz, but I saw a lot of focus already on that camp. Plus I knew that if I chose Auschwitz, then people would bring up Treblinka, and if I chose Treblinka, then people would bring up Auschwitz. Which is what happened in the YouTube dialogs before my videos were removed by YouTube staff.

Why were your videos removed from YouTube?

Because they remove holocaust denial content even though in their "Terms of Service" and "Community Guidelines" they don't say they do.

At one point, episode 1 of "One Third" got removed, and I appealed, and I won. So it got put back up, only to get removed 8 months later. I appealed again and no one responded.

I put "One Third" up on Google video and it was removed also.

Jesus, I've seen uncensored GG Allin videos on YouTube. You must be a dangerous man. Of course, it will be argued that YouTube and Google are private companies and can exercise discretion over these things, even if we disagree about their guidelines. But in other Western democracies, the situation for Holocaust skeptics is more serious. Germar Rudolf is currently behind bars in Germany, along with Ernst Zundel (who was previously imprisoned in Canada for distributing pamphlets). Do you think such cases have been fairly reported by Western media? And do you foresee similar penalties ever being imposed in the United States?

I don't think Germar Rudolf's imprisonment was even reported. He was really trying to stay out of prison and the authorities in the USA nabbed him and deported him to Germany. Just days later, David Irving voluntarily goes to Austria and gets arrested, which I hate to say, overshadowed any possibility of Rudolf's imprisonment becoming a media story.

I think it's outrageous these people are in prison, and I frequently thought of Germar Rudolf while working on my videos. Thinking to myself, "they're keeping Rudolf from doing any holocaust denial art, but I'm free, and I'm making some."

When I was a kid, I remember being terrified by the TV miniseries, Holocaust. Later, I read the usual assigned books by Elie Wiesel and Anne Frank. I watched Night and Fog. And I believed all of it, as I suspect most people do. I didn't know there was such a thing as Holocaust revisionism or Holocaust denial until I saw a TV Movie of the Week on the subject (I think it starred Raquel Welch) in the late 80s. I remember thinking that there was something very odd about how the subject was presented, and I became curious.

How did you come to doubt what everyone believes? Surely you weren't born a denier.

I saw that holocaust miniseries too. And it affected me.

I'm not exactly sure how I became a denier. Seeing a 1992 issue of TV Guide with the two words "Fake News" on the front cover and an article on the "Babies Pulled off Life Support" hoax affected me. I never read TV Guide, but there it was on the counter of the convenience store mentioning how hoaxes are used to promote war. That affected me, and yet I wouldn't become a denier until years later.

Seeing how the media in the Bay Area in the late 90's presented, in an emotional way, a position to support the war against Yugoslavia affected me. I saw the propaganda element.

Seeing New York Times front page articles in the late 90's about Iraq and that "no fly zone" and realizing that there was a force trying to convince the masses to go to war and provoke the Iraqis, affected me.

Being in an academic setting and seeing some things reminiscent of what Kevin MacDonald describes in Culture of Critique about his time as a college grad student, effected me. Like MacDonald, I also saw a discourse cultivating a supposed moral high ground and yet I was noticing that there was something else really going on beneath that, that was helping people advance.

These are defining aspects that come to mind, and yet I didn't become a denier till years after they happened.

But was there a particular book or article or event that caused you to question received opinion regarding the Holocaust/genocide story? Or did it simply follow from seeing these contemporary examples of war propaganda playing out?

9-11 sent me in the direction of holocaust denial. When 9-11 happened I believed it was a response to unfair US foreign policy in the Mideast. Particularly toward the Palestinians. And in those Bin Laden videos released shortly after 9-11, Bin Laden said as much. Bin Laden mentioned Jenin. So I thought "wow, the media is spinning this in a totally different direction." The "they hate our freedom" direction. All this put me on the path to holocaust denial.

Bradley Smith routinely refers to Nazi gas chambers as the original WMDs. Did it surprise you that the US didn't fabricate evidence of Iraqi WMDs in Iraq? Or is that sort of thing too hard to pull off in the contemporary media environment?

It's a great question. If the holocaust is a fraud, then why couldn't the US plant some WMD evidence in Iraq? I don't know the answer. But maybe it's that Bush is not Eisenhower. And I mean that in a good way, not in a bad way.

I suspect that your reference to Kevin MacDonald will be a show-stopper for some readers. A major part of MacDonald's thesis in The Culture of Critique is that ethno-genetic forces have influenced academic and popular discourse in ways that tend to promote Jewish interests, often to the detriment of other religious and ethnic group interests. This point comes up a few times in your Buchenwald documentary and is humorously made in a segment of Nazi Shrunken Heads. But MacDonald's work has been harshly criticized by evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker (who we might as well note, is Jewish) and by others who see his theory as an academically polished and pseudoscientific expression of anti-Semitism. Do you think MacDonald has gotten a bad rap?

I think MacDonald has gotten a bad rap. Culture of Critique is an amazing book. You read passages, and it's just so true.

Of course, all of this brings up the most common criticism of dissident Holocaust history, which is that it is inherently anti-Semitic. How do you respond to this charge? And should it matter?

Well. I advocate kindness toward all Jewish people. I'd be against selective laws against Jews as much as the ACLU would be. Kevin MacDonald talks about Jewish Group Evolutionary Strategy, but probably every group has evolutionary strategies. The Germans fought the Romans for such a long period of time, long ago: 2,000 years ago, and maybe that gives them some inherent militarism. The holocaust myth as Jewish group evolutionary strategy might even be a response to German militarism.

At the same time, part of me wants to get away from the idea that Jews use the holocaust to their advantage. The Auschwitz part of the holocaust myth, for instance is so wrapped up in paranoia over delousing, that there's a case to be made that the entire Auschwitz death story came out of paranoia of delousing.

Can you explain what you mean by this -- about "paranoia of delousing"?

The entire holocaust myth is one giant mix up with delousing. I mention that in my recent Buchenwald movie where there's a line that says "a tiny bacteria inside the poop of a louse, is key to understanding the world's biggest lie." Because the typhus bacteria is in lice poop, and that's how it's transferred to people. Eventually it kills both the louse and the human.

Back to Kevin MacDonald. I think it's possible to realize he's right and not be anti-semitic. Think of Alex Haley writing Roots in the 1970's. He probably took writing breaks to have a barbecue with his white neighbors. I just made that scenario up, but maybe it happened. It's the kind of thing we're talking about. Research in a scholarly community, and good vibes within that regardless of what conclusions your research comes up with.

Well, I've seen Independence Day, and I don't think I'm paranoid to discern a "Jewish savior" subtext in re-runs of Taxi. But damn if I'm not cautious about who I say this stuff around. I'm all for good vibes and civil debate, but there seems to be a uniquely prohibitive aura around this issue (Kevin MacDonald being a mere footnote). My wife is "sorta Jewish" and when I have dinner with the Jewish half of her family, I am VERY careful to avoid certain controversial topics, and when such topics come up, I tend to nod politely, or abscond from the discussion. I chalk it up to decorum, but the truth is my heart races. It feels like fear.

So I'm curious. What has your experience been in explaining your controversial views to friends, colleagues and family who may harbor the ingrained prejudices about Holocaust denial. Is it all good vibes? Or does it get ugly? Or is this something you pursue privately -- in the basement, as they say?

This is an interesting question, but I can't respond to it.

Beyond the subject you've chosen, I have a hard time pinning down your documentaries. On the one hand, they're structured as straightforward investigative pieces. All these close-ups of passages from books and articles juxtaposed against public access newsreel footage. Charts and graphs and methodical dot-connecting. Yet I find your approach oddly captivating, and at times disarmingly funny. As a documentarian, you seem to have developed a unique style and sensibility. Do you see yourself as working within a tradition as a "filmmaker"? And more generally, how do you approach your work from a creative standpoint?

The phrase "Form Follows Function" comes to mind. Is that Richardson? I don't think it's Frank Lloyd Wright. Anyway, breaking the holocaust myth is so important, from an anti-war perspective. That's an idea I put forth in my Buchenwald movie where I show Ron Paul in an exchange with John McCain. And also where I show Darth Vader in an exchange with Obi Wan Kenobi, LOL.

It could be this is what the form for this function looks like.

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

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.

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.

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 almost find it hard to believe some students sided with Leuchter, because I know how hard it is to convince someone the holocaust is a hoax. It's almost impossible.

If the evidence converges the way you say, then why do you think intelligent people seldom reach the conclusion that seems obvious to you? Why should it be "almost impossible" to convince someone? That sounds more like the kind of impasse one finds in a religious dispute.

This sort of is a religious dispute. The holocaust replaced Christianity as the definer of evil. The Good Samaritan becomes the Righteous Gentile. It's nearly impossible to convince really smart people that the holocaust is a myth. Yet these really smart people know little about the holocaust. They usually don't know it supposedly happened largely in the East.

Speaking of really smart people, some intelligent friends assure me that Holocaust denial has about as much intellectual value as Intelligent Design theory or "9-11 Truth" conspiracy mongering. Holocaust skepticism is also popularly associated with those who argue that the Apollo moon landing was a hoax. What's the difference?

The holocaust really is a hoax and the other things you mentioned really are untrue conspiracy theories, including 9-11. I think 9-11 happened just like the media says it did. At the same time there are conspiracies out there which no one talks about. Like Idi Amin as mentioned in my "Nazi Shrunken Heads" video.

I guess the only documentary that might bear obvious comparison to your work is the 1992 Auschwitz expose', David Cole Interviews Dr.Franciszek Piper. Any thoughts on Cole's work, and on his "recantation" under Irv Rubin's death threat?

I like the David Cole video. I think it's good. Cole was onto this way before me.

Cole's recantation to Irv Rubin is once again a Middle Ages comparison. I mean, just the word "recantation." Middle Ages comparisons are always coming up with holocaust denial.

The folks over at Holocaust Controversies have chided you repeatedly for dodging tough questions, for failing to link to their blog, and for ducking their challenges to debate. What say you? Do they present arguments and evidence that threaten the credibility of your views? Are you chicken?

Yes, I remember the "chicken challenge" when Holocaust Controversies displayed a chicken on their main page along with a counter of the days that I STILL hadn't linked to them.

I've never linked to anybody. I don't even link to CODOH.

I think people should watch my videos, and then read their rebuttals, and make their own decision.

I tried to solicit rebuttals to my chapters at UC Berkeley and Harvard University, but they wouldn't let me place a newspaper ad asking for rebuttals.

I read all the Holocaust Controversies rebuttals. Occasionally I find a good point. Often I find a "straw man argument." It's important to know what a straw man argument is. It took me awhile to grasp the concept. I'll give an example: Muehlenkamp wrote in his Stroop Report rebuttal essay that I believe that the famous holocaust photo of the Jewish boy with his hands up, is staged, and then he writes all the reasons why that notion is absurd. I don't think the photo is staged though. I think it's at Hotel Polski. The Stroop Report forger cobbled photos from various places. Muehlenkamp presented my supposed position, and then knocked it down (like a straw man.) I find a lot of that at Holocaust Controversies, and like my writing right here, it's tedious to point it out. A rebuttal to a rebuttal tends to make confusing and non-gripping writing.

In your Buchenwald documentary, you make frequent reference to the role of Allied Psychological Warfare operations in postwar de-Nazification efforts. I'm guessing that most people are not aware that such  operations even existed. Can you briefly discuss the role of "Sykewar" and why it is relevant to the revisionist/denialist critique?

Eisenhower had his very own Psyche Warfare unit, called PWD-SHAEF. During WWII there were lots of different psyche warfare departments, but this was the big one.

The OSS was the American equivalent to the KGB and the Gestapo, but it answered to Roosevelt. Psyche Warfare, in contrast, answered directly to Eisenhower. This is relevant because PWD-SHAEF, short circuited the American government system, by hatching a psyche warfare operation at Buchenwald, and then using it to fool members of congress and the American people. It's a piece of the holocaust myth, and the reason Eisenhower became president and, in the larger scheme of the myth, the reason the country of Israel was created.

Who was CD Jackson?

He's the guy down the hall when Roman Polanski was filming Rosemary's Baby in the early 1960's, because the Dakota Apartments is where that film was shot and it's where CD Jackson lived.

He's a guy who made the remarkable career advancement of running his family's New York marble importing company, to suddenly becoming assistant to Henry Luce, owner of Time/Life.

Beyond that, you'll have to watch the movie.

In Buchenwald: A Dumb-Dumb Portrayal of Evil, Eisenhower emerges as a central villain -- a figure who colluded with psychological warfare operatives to control mass media reports of Allied atrocities and to promote a deceptive account of Nazi war crimes in order to advance self-aggrandizing political goals. Of course, this will seem preposterous and offensive to Americans who grew up believing that Eisenhower was great war hero and President. Why are they wrong?

Well, there should have been a little bit of a "heads up" regarding Eisenhower, when Gary Powers' spy plane was shot down by the Soviet Union and Eisenhower went on national TV and said we don't fly spy planes over the Soviet Union, only to have the Soviets shortly after produce Gary Powers.

Things weren't what they seemed in the 1950s, which is a central tenet of Philip K. Dick's book Time Out of Joint.

The American public was being manipulated by a media/government elite, and Eisenhower was central to it.

You've speculated that Senator Joe McCarthy may have been wise to Eisenhower's propaganda campaign and that he was possibly "poised to uncover the holocaust myth." This is a novel thesis, to say the least. Is it a loose thread, or something you are pursuing?

I got that impression from reading The Chairman by Kai Bird, even though Bird, not being a denier, wasn't putting that across. When Bird mentioned that Ed Murrow brought McCarthy down, and I knew Ed Murrow from a radio address from Buchenwald and his connection to Paley, I was like "huh?!?" You read in Bird, how Murrow puts footage on national TV of McCarthy picking his nose. Stuff like that. And in Bird's book you find where Lucius Clay, the first governor of West Germany, asks Eisenhower if there's a way to get McCarthy to stop prying.

It's also odd that so many key people die when they do. McCarthy dies at 49, just years after the McCarthy hearings. Patton dies in a car wreck just after the war. Roosevelt dies the very day Eisenhower's psyche warfare unit begins it's holocaust myth push. Then there's Kennedy. I don't believe they're all conspiracy secret assassinations. But I wonder if maybe one of them is, though I don't know which one.

But doesn't that sort of speculation edge on conspiracy-mongering? Do you worry that your research may lead you to see connections where none exist? It's a natural human tendency, according to psychologists. Apophenia, I think.

You have to know when to stop. It's disappointing to me that so many revisionists are 9-11 conspiracy theorists.

I'm not sure if it began with Jean-Claude Pressac's work, but in recent years a number of books have been published that purport to refute or debunk Holocaust denial. I'm thinking of works by Lipstadt, Vidal Naquet, van Pelt, Shermer & Grobman, and Zimmerman, although I'm sure there are others. Do you keep up with the work of such critics, and do you find any of them to have value?

I don't think in these works you'd find a lot on Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Buchenwald because they are probably largely on Auschwitz. I haven't read them nor have they come up in Google searches on topics I've looked up.

I tried to solicit scholars to debunk my videos, but I wasn't allowed to place newspaper ads. "One Third of the Holocaust" has been out for years, and Lipstadt pretends it doesn't exist.

I was allowed to place an ad in the University of Minnesota student paper asking for rebuttals to Nazi Shrunken Heads, but got no takers.

Why weren't you allowed to take out newspaper ads?

You can see the ads I tried to place on my website.

The UC Berkeley student newspaper originally took my $1,000 and accepted the ad, then they went back on that. They started making up all these new rules once I came along. Like that for over 150 dollars, a person had to pay with a personal check and supply ID. No one else had to do that! Then I got Bradley Smith involved and he said he'd pay with a personal check. Then we bent over backwards to be obliging to their requests, like they wanted us to change the ad to say say that anyone could write a rebuttal, not just professors. So we added "open to everyone" to the ad. After no less than 60 emails going back and forth, and them giving us the run around, they finally completely balked and wouldn't place the ad. The money was refunded. So much for the university that started the "Free Speech Movement."

OK. Let's assume you're right -- at least in the broad strokes -- about all of it. The Holocaust is a massive whopper, and life goes on. What I wonder is: is there a point at which the news breaks? Does the academic consensus come around at some point, vindicating the work of these outlaw historians who have been firebombed and pummeled and incarcerated and intimidated and defamed and censored? Or is the taboo against questioning the canonical Holocaust story too deeply entrenched -- like the Christian Gospels?

It could happen like the way Christianity broke: taking hundreds of years in a long convoluted path.

Or it could happen but with a head-spinning media spin. With some guy we've never heard of, being the "head of the revisionists." In other words, the media-created head of the revisionists who comes out of nowhere. And it could be spun as some incredible disservice that's happened to the Jews. And that spin would be partly correct.

I'll keep that second scenario on file. Just out of curiosity, do you have an opinion about the historical existence of Jesus? I know it's a matter of contention in some circles.

I'm atheist. I don't think Jesus even existed historically. There's definitely a connection between atheism and holocaust denial.

One revisionist text that I find interesting is The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes, by Samuel Crowell. Crowell uses intertextual literary analysis to argue that the gas chamber stories arose out of a kind of social panic over the use of poison gas -- a panic that grew out of the First World War and that finds expression in numerous contemporaneous literary works and news reports. The argument is essentially that the Holocaust narrative -- or at least the core element of genocide via gas chambers -- may have found root in an atmosphere of mass delusion that would later be exploited by Allied victors, then historicized by credulous scholars and journalists. But where Crowell focuses mainly on social psychology and the cultural reification of mass hysteria (his monograph has been aptly compared to Elaine Showalter's Hystories), your work seems more concerned with Chomsky-brand media manipulation and top-down machinations. Politically-driven collusion among high-ranking power-brokers, like Ike and his psy-ops agents.

Is the difference between your and Crowell's approach one of method and emphasis? Is his study of socio-cultural semiotics consonant with the arguments you advance in your videos? Or do you think his literary analysis fails to confront the more nefarious role of military propaganda and psychological warfare?

I think that the theory I put forth and Crowell's theory are just two "surfaces of truth" -- a term I remember reading in Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida.

I really liked Crowell's book. It's a paranoia-based theory. And my Buchenwald video has a paranoia aspect when I mention Philip K. Dick.

It's as you said: Eisenhower and his Psyche Warfare team capitalized on paranoia. But when you know about people like CD Jackson, and their connections to the Council of Foreign Relations, as described by Kai Bird, then it's capitalism capitalizing.

Can you explain what you mean by the phrase: "capitalism capitalizing"? It sounds like something out of Baudrillard.

Well, in Kai Bird's book, The Chairman, he describes these New York captains of banking, media, and industry as being members of the Council on Foreign Relations. And what that organization did was try to influence foreign policy to promote U.S business. C.D Jackson, John McCloy, Henry Luce, William Paley I believe, were all in it. And they capitalized on the paranoia, on the confusion with death from typhus, to help put forth the holocaust myth. That's capitalism capitalizing. Paley of CBS, working in Psyche Warfare. Jackson at Life, working in in Psyche Warfare, both CFR members. It's capitalism capitalizing.

To the general public, Holocaust denial is almost exclusively associated, in political terms, with the far right. But your video project is laced with references to the Palestinian cause. You allude at various points to Noam Chomsky and Ron Paul and Phillip K. Dick, and here you've just thrown out a nod to Barthes. At times you seem to buttress your conclusions with critical and arguably sinister interpretation of capitalism (the "invisible brain"; "capitalism capitalizing"), and you conclude your Buchenwald series with a humorously framed indictment of militarism and what I take to be a sincere call for peace, love, and understanding. Can you describe your political point of view? And do you think that Holocaust denial implies or precludes any political worldview or ideology?

I think right now holocaust denial is like atheism at some point in the Middle Ages. At that time an atheist position would have seemed like the opposite of a moralist view, and maybe for some pirate types, it really was.

Even feminism in the early 70's meant one thing and means another now.

Holocaust denial might go through some identity changes too. The idea of what it means to believe in something.

You've completed two feature length Holocaust denial movies and have been blacklisted by YouTube. What's next? Any future projects to plug?

No, no future projects in store.

Thanks for your time.

Thanks for the questions. I really liked the exchange.

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Comments are open.

Memento mori.

Coming Soon...

Armored edentates don't hibernate, but they are sleepy critters. I will return to the polarizing Michel Epstein thread when the work is done.  For now, I want to point up a few morsels in the offing.

First off, I am pleased to announce that L.A. Rollins' The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays is at long last off the press. The big brown truck will deliver the full run to me later this week and those of you who placed advance orders will have copies in your mitts very soon thereafter. I appreciate your patience and your interest, and I apologize for all of the delays. I still haven't gotten around to completing the Nine-Banded Books site redesign, so  if you want an autographed copy, please email me and I'll provide you with mail order instructions.

Our next book is Considering Suicide, by Andy Nowicki. I don't have a release date set, but it's on a faster track than The Myth, I promise.  After that will be Against Life, Against Death, which is a collection of essays on antinatalism and related ideas. There's one more manuscript in the anteroom, but it would be premature to announce that one just yet.

Recognizing that this space has grown somewhat stagnant, I have decided to liven things up with a series of interviews, the first of which should appear in a couple of weeks. Please keep checking in.

Memento mori.