The Greatest Trick

For a while now, I've had a "hot take" in the chamber that the scholarship of Timothy Snyder, Anne Applebaum, and others exists in service of the most pernicious ideology in existence today.  To be sure, I am not equating "pernicious" with "evil" here—there are several more explicitly evil ideologies.  But the word "explicit" is the key; for all the harm various proto-fascist groups cause, at least they're very up front about it, which makes it relatively easy for common folk to identify such groups as their enemy.  Some comfort, I know.

This is not to say that judging something as "pernicious" does not also imply some level of evil; it's just that this evil is more of a hidden, second-order concern—so much so that its perpetrators may not even be consciously aware of it.  Casual minimization of the Holocaust is certainly bad, but the true "evil" is what logically flows from such an exercise.  Take this article posted today in Politico, whose argument is a direct descendent of the revisionism in question.  Claiming that we are "conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide" is both ahistorical and putrid, but dismissing condemnation of actual living Nazis as "Russian propaganda" is even worse, as it implicitly asks those who want to fight fascism to support the increasingly fascist world order.  Grim stuff.

What's even more revealing is the manner in which I found this article.  Specifically, it was shared by some clown claiming to be "fighting disinfo":

Ignoring the way in which that term has been stripped of its meaning, it was fascinating to learn that this guy's list of research partners (fantastic euphemism for funders) literally includes the US State Department:

Where this leaves me is reconsidering just how "hot" of a take my original belief was.  If the rule that Snyder et al followed brought us to this, perhaps that is just what the rule was meant to do.  If whitewashing Nazis and minimizing the Holocaust is directly supported by US hegemonic interests, what does that suggest about what else those institutions are willing to excuse, or even worse, do?  The ultimate irony of the double genocide theory is that it invents a historical genocide in order to preclude the primary thing that can meaningfully prevent real, future genocides.  Don't believe their lies.