Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

as some researchers have argued, that once context is taken into account—​once you consider what the adherents know, what they don’t know, the social context, cultural context, historical context—​conspiracy theories should in fact be considered rational reactions. You could argue, as some researchers have argued, that conspiracy theories are a coded critique, a form of resistance against the dominant narrative, a means of casting aspersions on the entrenched power structure.

I am not so generous, however. Personally I am comfortable pathologizing beliefs in Nazi time machines.

So actually let’s not get sociological; it’s the wrong approach, it’s irresponsible, in fact: these explanations, justifications, interpretations, however insightful and interesting, obfuscate a dark and pernicious underside. Because beneath the outlandish assertions lurks an insidious claim—​that your understanding of the war is wrong. That you missed the point. Yes yes, fine, the Germans did some murdering and the Jews did some dying but let me tell you the real story. The conspiracy theory insists on reshaping the narrative, redetermining what does matter and what does not matter. The conspiracy theory radically overemphasizes the Nazi agenda and radically deemphasizes the dead. The genocide is made incidental. One cannot help but notice, when reading these extremely long and involved treatises by men who consider themselves to be world-class World War II historians, how little mention there is of any Nazi wrongdoing. Perhaps the most repulsive bit of Joseph P. Farrell’s extremely repulsive The SS Brotherhood of The Bell—​ one of the most “authoritative” and best-“researched” books on the Wunderwaffe—​is his claim that The Bell, the Nazi antigravity and time machine, was “perhaps the most important story to come out of World War Two.” I’ll note only that I would disagree with Mr. Farrell even if The Bell were real—​that is to say, even if it turned out that the Nazis actually had an actual time machine it still would not be the most important story to come out of World War II.

This trivialization is a particularly noxious form of revisionism. It’s slippery, it comes at you sideways: it isn’t blatant denial, there is nothing to counter directly. The number of murdered Jews isn’t usually disputed, for instance. Rather the murders are recontextualized, are inserted into a “grander” narrative, usually one with a technological or occult arc. You don’t have to tread that far into the muck to come across claims that Auschwitz was a uranium enrichment plant. Or that the crematoria were part of an elaborate occult ritual. The deaths are redefined and the Nazis are, in effect, let off the hook. They did what they did but they had a reason. The suspension of moral agency is a pervasive subtext throughout the conspiracy theories. Hitler was possessed, the Nazi agenda was a kind of manifest destiny, it was all done at the behest of aliens, it was all determined by ancient occult forces.

The moral narrative of the war is thus subverted, inverted, perverted. The Nazis’ misdeeds are minimized, whitewashed; they become the protagonists, even the heroes. The real bad guys are the forces pulling the strings, the conspirators, the ones hoodwinking the world into believing that antigravity is impossible. And where you have behind-the-scenes powers you have, inevitably, Jews. They’re at the levers, they’re controlling the banks, the corporations, the governments. The conspiracy theories are positively soaked through with anti-Semitism. Mostly it’s the usual tropes but some of it is truly bizarre. Farrell casually but insistently refers to the research field of physics, the physics the bad guys seek to fool all of us into believing is real, as “Jewish relativistic physics.” The Jewish involvement was, Farrell says, part of the reason the Nazis rejected it. It’s surprising at first, it feels so out of place, unnecessary, gratuitous—​Wasn’t this about Nazi time travel? Whence all the Jew-bashing?—​until you understand that there is a kind of moral seesaw here, with Nazis on one side and Jews on the other. Given the goal, stated or otherwise, of rebalancing the war’s moral weight, it isn’t surprising to see how popular conspiracy theories are among Holocaust deniers and revisionists. The objectives converge. Ernst Zündel began his Holocaust-denying career by publishing books like UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapon? and Secret Nazi Polar Expeditions.

The point is, it’s ugly stuff, and should be treated accordingly. Just because it’s preposterous doesn’t mean it’s innocent. (Zündel suggested several times over the course of his career that he didn’t actually believe the conspiracy theories he had promoted, he just used them to garner publicity and attention.) While it’s all but impossible to chart the effects of ideas, to epidemiologically trace beliefs and attitudes, it is only too clear that ideas do have effects, and can infect, and can have very serious consequences. Two days after I’d begun writing this chapter, a man named Robert Bowers walked into a synagogue in Pittsburgh and gunned down eleven Jews. Bowers’s social media activity revealed that he had bought in to a whole host of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, particularly in regard to the caravan of refugees supposedly approaching the border. However it is that Bowers came to believe what he believed, the preposterousness of the theories was, clearly, no deterrent. Your rationality isn’t all that helpful a guide to what is and what is not dangerous.

This extends beyond conspiracy theories. Our cultural obsession with the Nazis—​which can function, regardless of our intentions, as a kind of valorization—​should be examined in this light: What are we emphasizing? Deemphasizing?

To indulge the theories, even via mockery, is to grant them a power. Consider this an argument against a kind of historical prurience. I know how cranky this sounds, I know how much more fun it would be to discuss Nazi flying saucers. But there is a cost to laughing at what should be condemned.

Part III

Małachowskiego 34

9

Two years after beginning the reclamation process—​in which I felt I’d made little progress, had gotten no closer to getting the building back, no closer to my grandfather, he was still frustratingly abstract—​my mother remembered