Inevitable Historicity

            My visit to the Penn Museum’s Africa exhibit was a sobering experience. I will try here to evaluate what I think are the museum’s attempts to come to terms with the ethical issues surrounding this exhibit. On the one hand, the museum’s curators have clearly tried to demonstrate to visitors that it has deeply considered the issues of racism and colonialism that the exhibit must evoke, in part by acknowledging the problems of the provenance of much of the materials in the museum. On the other hand, these efforts are ultimately insufficient because they are incomplete.

            One of the things I noticed right away was the juxtaposition of materials from different parts of Africa. For instance, in a part of the exhibit on textiles, materials from Madagascar and Sierra Leone were placed next to each other despite the countries being on opposite sides of Africa and having vastly different populations. A nearby display case holding hairpins showed examples from Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo next to each other – the same error. The lumping together of countries and peoples in the exhibit gives the sense of an undifferentiated view of Africa totally lacking nuance. Also intriguing is how the museum treats Egypt – materials from there are placed in two separate wings, revealing a sort of reluctance to concede that ancient Egyptian civilization was African.

            I also noticed the way in which religious objects are displayed in the Africa exhibit. There is what I found to be an overemphasis on Christianity, particularly given the fact that Christianity did not initially emerge in Africa and was largely limited in effect to North Africa and Ethiopia until the advent of colonialism. Many of the religious displays that did show objects important to African indigenous religions nevertheless juxtaposed these objects with explicitly Christian ones. For instance, in one display case, statues of a creator god figure from Angola were placed in the same case with Ethiopian Christian crosses, pointing out the similarity between the objects. While the explanatory text in the case asserted the need to acknowledge the role of syncretism in the development of African religion, there seemed to be very little emphasis on African indigenous religion without colonially specific interactions.

            Indeed, the whole way in which the exhibits treats the topics of colonialism and slavery seems incomplete. An explicit mention of slavery appears on a large display on one of the longer walls of the museum detailing the economic evolution of Africa under the influence of slavery. While this is an important topic, that slavery was included in a discussion of the phenomenon of trade or “exchange,” rather than treated separately, seemed a disservice to this important topic. In addition, I am not sure I saw any materials in the museum that dated before the age of colonialism. While it is possible that this is a good sign, indicating that older items remain in their places of origin, that the political map display in the African wing only goes back to 1600 caused me to suspect that more sinister motives underlay this fact.

            All of this is reflected in how the museum treats the provenance of its objects. As noted, it acknowledges that much of the material in the museum was looted during the colonial era or, at the very least, purchased while colonialism was still a powerful force on the continent. However, this treatment felt incomplete. The most flagrant example was the display of carved elephant ivory tusks from Edo State in Nigeria. The display text acknowledged that these items were seized by the British army under conditions of extreme violence, but the story ended there. The text said nothing about how the tusks found their way from the British military to the Penn Museum. Nor did any of the museum texts discuss the important issue of the possible return of these objects to their places of origin.

            In all, while the museum visit was fascinating in terms of seeing the sheer complexity of the civilizations of Africa, even given such a small sample, it nevertheless raised more questions for me than it settled. Perhaps the exhibit would be more effective if it had taken geography and ethnography into greater account or if it organized according to a different set of topics. The museum, in the end, is a testament – whether intended or not – to the last effects of colonialism and racism in a place we might expect to see it least.

I was assigned the articles by Feagin (1991) and Bobo (2000) for this week. These are very different articles and so will require largely separate analysis. By interviewing multiple respondents, Feagin’s study sought to determine the responses of middle-class Black Americans to discrimination in public places. This discrimination ran the gamut from avoidance and hostile looks to actual violence, while responses ranged from avoidance to counterattack. Feagin found a strong relationship between individual and group experience and the type of response, noting that “discriminatory interaction is shaped today by the way in which the oppressors and oppressed mediate their relative positions” (p. 112).

The intersection of capitalism and race is included in Feagin’s work by his decision to focus on middle-class Black respondents. He views as important the then increased number of people in the Black middle class, presumably the outcome of civil rights legislation resulted in the ability of more Black people to enjoy the benefits of capitalism. That said, with regard to the outcome of focus for Feagin, capitalism – and thus class – is not a factor regarding the hostility of white people to Black people. Rather, much of this hostility is perceptual, with the language of verbal attack, e.g., often taking the form of insinuations of welfare cheating. In this regard, although many of the Black respondents had responses to oppression that were mediated by their class and thus their access to resources (police support being a notable exception), it seems that the capitalist ethos of one’s hard work paying off does not apply to Black people in the minds of many white racists, indicating a kind of limitation in white thinking about capitalism.

The primary counterfactual to Feagin’s overall argument is temporal – it has been more than thirty years since he performed his study, and over that time, the Black and white middle classes have both shrunk as percentages of the overall population. Therefore, both white expressions of hostility to African Americans and Black responses thereto might very well have changed in so far as class was a mediator of these factors in 1991. A follow-up study would therefore be informative, perhaps with age- and gender-based matched respondents but controlling for the effects of class.

Bobo’s article is more qualitative, seeking to reassert the importance of W.E.B. Du Bois’s treatment of racial prejudice to the practice of social science in the early twenty-first century. Bobo undertakes a lengthy analysis of The Philadelphia Negro, with a specific focus of the role of white prejudice in the socioeconomic conditions of African Americans when Du Bois undertook this study. From there, Bobo transitions to a discussion of the social-scientific study racism since World War II, which has focused on racism as a structural phenomenon that does not require individual prejudice to exert effects on its victims; however, Bobo contends, individual prejudice continues to play a substantial role, particularly in economic issues, e.g., hiring. As a result, a more holistic approach to understanding racism by sociologists would be warranted, particularly given the greater difficulty involved in identifying individual prejudice (“the acceptance of muted but negative stereotypes about black behavior,” which he calls the “new laissez-faire racism” [p. 198]).

Again, there is an intersection of race and capitalism here, as Bobo identifies the economic situation of Black people as tied to the phenomenon of prejudice both in Du Bois’s time and in his own. Whereas the role of prejudice in restricting the ability of African Americans to benefit from capitalism was quite overt when Du Bois wrote The Philadelphia Negro, in the early twentieth-first century, it is more muted and more rooted in beliefs about Black people based in stereotypes. The outcomes, however, remain closely related since underemployment and unemployment remain substantial results of this form of contemporary discrimination. Like Feagin, Bobo perhaps overemphasizes capitalism and its fruits as being the primary source of Black success. Also, despite his protestation that he does not want to underestimate the role of structures and institutions in racism, he goes leave the reader with the sense that he sees individual prejudice as more important, even as the primary current within sociology on the topic has continued in the two decades since Bobo’s article this non-individual understanding of race and racism.

Research that synthesized the approaches of Feagin and Bobo might answer some questions that both authors leave on the table by virtue of being largely concerned with individual experiences of prejudice. On the one hand, Bobo’s approach in particular might benefit from the kind of data that Feagin brings to bear in support of his position. On the other hand, Feagin’s analysis might find some association with the broader sociological current on race and racism by considering the roles played by structures and institutions in the ongoing phenomenon of racism in the United States.

The first five chapters of Edward Telles’s Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil Princeton UP, 2004) provide an overview of the history of how the racial complexity has been presented and interpreted over the course of Brazilian history, as well as introduction to the specific racial terminology employed both officially and popularly and an analysis of the vertical segregation of the races according to socioeconomic status.

Broadly speaking, according to Telles (and attested to by Vitor Miranda, among others), Brazil’s history of racial identification has undergone two stages: the first, engendered by the government and broadly accepted by much of the population, was the conception of Brazil as a racial democracy in which miscegenation was commonplace and racism thus not a significant social factor; and the second, emerging with black political activism in the late 1980s and 1990s, identified Brazil as a highly racially stratified society. These two conceptions reflect two axes of racial relationships in the country – a horizontal axis of social relationships, along which races relate to one another more or less equally, given the large population of racially mixed ancestry, and a vertical axis of class stratification, which is itself highly racially correlated, with whites at the top, “browns” in the middle, and blacks at the bottom.

The more heavily methodological fourth and fifth chapters of the book, which discuss racial classification and the vertical axis of economic stratification, engage with actual census data and population statistics. On the formal point, Telles notes that “ambiguity in Brazilian racial classification comes from the categories themselves, by the way in which persons are labeled in particular categories and through the use of distinct classification systems” (p. 78). Nevertheless, he concedes, “interviewers and respondents are more able to agree on who is white than who is brown or black, which demonstrates that the white-non-white distinction is the most conceptually clear racial divide in the minds of Brazilians” (p. 90). Among the trends identified by Telles is the tendency of the population to “whiten” over time, with blacks reidentifying as brown and browns reidentifying as white over time. “Thus,” Telles writes, in terms of racial classification, miscegenation tends to white the population in Brazil, while in the United States the same process blackens the population” (p. 91)

The fifth chapter demonstrates repeatedly that the population of Brazil is heavily economically stratified and that this economic inequality (at one point the worst in the world by Gini coefficient) is highly racially correlated. Here, the ideologies of racial democracy and black empowerment have clashed most notably with capitalism. Because of the rapid economic development of Brazil in the 20th century, it was believed by many defenders of racial democracy that economic growth would erase the economic distinctions between races; however, because of the tendency of capitalism to concentrate wealth at the top economic strata, development tended more to undergird racial stratification rather than erase it. As a result, Telles examines the possible influence that affirmative action policies could have in addressing Brazil’s racial inequalities.

There is a fundamental disconnect between Race in Another America and the aforementioned research of Miranda in that, while Telles identifies the whitening of the population through self-identification, Miranda identifies the opposite trend, with a greater proportion of the population identifying as black as a result of black political movements. However, much of this disagreement can be resolved by the recognition of the more than ten years between the publication of the two works. That said, Telles’s study was published only a year into the first term of President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva; in contrast, Miranda’s study was published in 2015, before the impeachment of Lula’s successor Dilma Rousseff, the completion of Rousseff’s term by Michel Temer, and the presidency of far-right populist Jair Bolsonaro, so it is unclear how clear either author’s conclusion would apply to the current situation in Brazil after four years in office for Bolsonaro. With Lula’s win on Sunday, however, anything is possible.

After an introductory chapter of American Indian Holocaust and Survival (University of Oklahoma Press, 1987) that briefly outlines the arrival of both indigenous people and Europeans to the Western Hemisphere, Russell Thornton spends the next three chapters of his book estimating the population of the hemisphere in 1492, narrowing it down to what became the contiguous United States; providing an overview of the population decline from 1500 to 1890-1900; and examining in detail the period from 1500 to 1800, during which the indigenous population decreased the most. In estimating the pre-European contact population, Thornton comprehensively surveys the research, including his own, before providing an estimate of 72 million (p. 25) for entire hemisphere, with approximately five million in the future contiguous U.S. (p. 32). Regarding causes of the population decline, Thornton identifies disease, warfare and genocide, relocation and removal, and destruction of ways of life as principal. He divides the period of 1500-1800 into two key subperiods: 1500-1700, when the destruction was most often caused by disease; and 1700-1800, when disease was augmented by warfare and genocide, particularly regarding the indigenous peoples of Illinois and California.

Thornton juxtaposes the dramatic decrease in American Indian populations to the non-native population in these chapters. With these comparisons, the intersection of race and demography is seen most clearly. Thornton calls his book “a demographic history of the populations of American Indians” (p. xv), focusing particularly on what he calls the “demographic collapse” (ibid) of indigenous people, and it is an attempt to apply the formal principles of demography to the case of native Americans. This collapse begins with Spanish contact and continues until a population recovery begins in the early twentieth century. At least in these initial chapters, Thornton does not address race per se as a concept, nor is capitalism mentioned at all in the text, although we can see it as an underlying driver of the westward expansion of Europeans on the continent that caused the demographic collapse of the Indians.

On page 43, Thornton introduces the standard demographic equation for measuring population changes over time, by which the beginning population, the net difference between births and deaths, and the net difference between immigration and emigration are totalled. This equation does not consider several variables, including how populations of mixed ancestry are counted, group self-identification, “passing” by people of one group for another, etc. To be fair, Thornton engages these topics in later chapters; however, insofar as his analysis in the early chapters assesses demographic change into the nineteenth century, it is important to acknowledge these factors once they became significant.

A final point to consider is Thornton’s use of the terms “genocide” and “holocaust.” Along with David Stannard, whose American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World was published five years after American Indian Holocaust and Survival, Thornton does not shrink from using these terms, noting about the earlier scholar James Mooney’s studies of causes of population decline, “genocide must be added to his list” (p. 44). Further, Thornton is clear that, in the cases of Texas and California, “there was blatant genocide of American Indians by non-Indians during certain historic periods” (p. 49). In this regard, he leaves no doubt that deliberate mass killing played a key role in native American population collapse – a point that is controversial given the implied consequences for the U.S. government under international law.

Because the study is limited to demographic considerations, Thornton does not participate in semantic arguments over what constitutes genocide; consequently, he says that the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 was “a genocide” (ibid), whereas it might be more accurately described as an “act of genocide,” just as the mass killing of Tutsis by the caretaker government of Rwanda in spring 1994 was genocide, while the massacre a year later of eight thousand Bosnian men and boys by Serbian soldiers and militia was an act of genocide. This is a small distinction, however, and does not detract from the overall efficacy of Thornton’s analysis.

            Zuberi’s Thicker Than Blood (University of Minnesota Press, 2001),Chapters 3 and 4, traces the origins of statistical analysis in racialized thinking, first discussing the history of statistics and then showing how statistics were used to justify and perpetuate theories of racial superiority. According to Zuberi, statistics emerged alongside the social sciences and were applied quite early in the field of eugenics. However, this early stage was plagued by false assumptions and incorrect conclusions, including, but not limited to, Quetelet’s ideas about how data fit a bell curve and Galton’s belief that his findings were based in inheritance but not understanding how inheritance is based in genetics. With Pearson, these statistical methods that emerged from eugenics were formally introduced into the social sciences. Fisher finally synthesized the fusing of genetics with statistical analysis but continued the overall embrace of eugenics.

            Over the course of the twentieth century, as the eugenics movement first grew and then was stymied by the excesses of Nazi Germany, statisticians drew conclusions about racial hierarchies both within races (different types of Europeans) and among them (Europeans’ supposed superiority to Africans). Following World War II, Zuberi writes, “Eugenics became genetically indefensible in principle and scientifically beyond practical consideration” (p. 31). Beginning with Shockley and Jensen, these theories were reasserted in reaction to events such as the U.S. civil rights and African independence movements. Perhaps the watershed moment in this reassertion was the publication of Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve in 1994. Since then, some of this research has entered the general discourse of the political right.

            The intersection of race, demography, and capitalism in this reading it to some extent mutually reinforcing. Europe and especially the United States are regions in which capitalism is the system of economic organization and in which race stratification is a pervasive feature of society. Capitalism itself creates stratification, and because of the strong correlation between socioeconomic status and race, racially tinged statistical methods justify both racial and economic stratification and systems that perpetuate it. If, for instance, African Americans are at the bottom of the U.S. racial hierarchy, but the ethos of capitalism is that hard work is all that is needed for one to succeed, then racial statistics, particularly theories of race and intelligence, justify the placement of black people in this hierarchy without blaming either the economic system itself or racist policies. Zuberi writes, “The Bell Curve helped cultivate the public policy environment that has greatly reduced governmental support for child rearing among the poor in the United States” (p. 73).

To take one example, Herrnstein and Murray famously justified black underachievement (as well as female underachievement, crime rates, etc.) in the supposedly lower IQs of African Americans. Since Herrnstein’s death before The Bell Curve was published, Murray, a fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank dedicated to market-based advocacy, has argued for policy positions that would scale back the already meager social safety net that exists in the United States because the underlying cause of racial inequality is essentially irremediable. That Murray’s analysis is based on faulty and deeply racially distorted logic means that alternate policy solutions – specifically solutions that would address racial inequality through programs providing certain race-based advantages, e.g., affirmative action – are dismissed out of hand.
            This reading is important because it demonstrates the tainted origins of statistical analysis and how this taint imbrues the social-scientific study of race. By identifying the origins of statistical analysis in eugenics and racialized thinking, Zuberi can both expose the foregoing decades of social science for its innate faults and suggest alternate routes of inquiry. Once we understand that race is a social construct and that the supposed biological underpinnings of race are “grounded in the morphological ranking of different populations” (p. 34), we can more effectively liberate statistics from its underlying racial assumptions and generate more informative research about race and racism using alternate methodologies.

            For this week, I focused on Chapters 5-7 from Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism (Cambridge UP, 1986, 2004), which discusses the phenomenon of why Europeans were successful in creating the “neo-Europes” outside of Europe but failed to so in other locations. These chapters focus respectively on the topics of how European colonizers learning the wind patterns at sea allowed them to be the first to sail around the world, the role played by pathogens in the success or failure of European settlements, and how the ability of plants to adapt or overtake newly settled areas gave an advantage to Europeans. These chapters are largely preparatory for later chapters in the book that focus more directly on the intersection of race, demography, and capitalism, although there are inklings in these earlier chapters. For instance, Crosby repeatedly refers to African slavery within the context of European “exploration,” whether referencing the early role of Portuguese traders in “gold, pepper, and slaves” (p. 114) in colonial expansion or explaining how Africa and the Americas’ “torrid zones” provided ample “sugar, slaves, and other cash crops” (p. 134). The extent to which Crosby associates human beings with raw materials and products is disconcerting. Less clear in these chapters is the role of capitalism, perhaps because these chapters’ setting in the preindustrial era.

            Crosby repeatedly contrasts Europeans with Africans, indigenous Americans, and the native populations of Asia in these chapters, and this treatment constitutes his primary treatment of race. He does not define race and only briefly addresses the topic directly in Chapter 6, in which he writes that disease was a major factor in determining the long-term racial makeup of the Americas: “Amerindians melted away, and European immigrants survived with difficulty; so the entrepreneurs of Atlantic commerce brought millions of Africans to replace Amerindian labor in the humid American tropics” (p. 141). This is the standard version of the introduction of African slavery, and Crosby does nothing to challenge it, nor does he offer a definition of race. As noted above, he also does not refer to or define capitalism.

            That said, Crosby’s treatment of demographics is a bit more expansive, particularly in Chapter 7. There he writes that “the demoralization and often the annihilation of native people” and the success of neo-European agriculture are the key factors explaining the demographic success of European colonialists (pp. 146-47). Here, he seems to understand demography as primarily the study of the growth of populations. However, his treatment is tilted far in favor of Europeans compared to non-Europeans, referring only briefly to the impressive growth of the Bantu population since the beginning of European colonialism.

            As in his earlier Columbian Exchange (Praeger, 1972), Crosby’s evidence is primarily biological, using scientific evidence of forms of life being transferred to make his larger points. In this regard, his argument is compelling insofar as he attempts to explain the factors that resulted in European colonial success. That said, at least in the chapters treated here, he is less expansive on the role of violence in and of itself, to say nothing of the racial motivations underlying violence and how these motivations might have undergirded European settlement. To truly determine the role of violence and its comparative importance to biological factors it would be necessary to compare different locations of settlement that experienced different levels of violence and determine how they ultimately differed. Since Crosby does not engage this topic, it is easy to see how his work could be used to justify colonialism, even though it seems clear that this is not his intention. Thus, Crosby’s argument is important in understanding some of the reasons for the success of European expansion but it cannot and should not be considered comprehensive.

There was a poor offering of history courses in Penn’s department this fall, so I elected to take a sociology course on race. It was originally listed as a course on race and ethnicity and I thought I’d find it useful in understanding ethnic cleavages in Eastern Europe. It might still serve that purpose, but for now, the “ethnicity” part of the paper has been deleted.

I’ll be making biweekly posts here of material from that course, so stay tuned.

A couple years ago, during a slow period, I took the time to actually read a section of a book by the Holocaust denier Carlo Mattogno. Mattogno is often touted as the cream of the “revisionist” crop — the guy who does real research, visits archives, eschews antisemitism, etc. A mere ten pages of his writing convinced me that the guy is a joke. I wrote four blogs on those ten pages; I link to them below.

Mattogno on Riga, Part One: Keine Liquidierung Revisited

Mattogno on Riga, Part Two: Phone Calls in Riga, Prague, and Berlin

Mattogno on Riga, Part Three: Hierarchies Are Hard

Mattogno on Riga, Part Four: Polishing a Turd

Simulblogged at Holocaust Controversies

There’s a British Shakespeare scholar named Neema Parvini who has made a second career out of far right commentary on a YouTube channel called Academic Agent. He Tweets under the handle OGRolandRat.

As I’ve written here before, I share something in common with Robert Faurisson and Grover Furr — and it turns out with Parvini as well. That is, all four of us took our advanced degrees in literary studies. (In the case of Furr, we both wrote our dissertations on certain aspects of medieval literature.) I mention this fact because a recent interaction I had with Parvini on Twitter called to mind why history is perhaps something best left to people with actual historical training.

The issue at hand was the issue of the shrunken heads presented as evidence at Nuremberg. Our own Sergey Romanov put in his typical yeoman’s work discussing this incident, so I’d refer the interested reader there. When I was tagged into the Twitter discussion by a follower, Parvini was vehemently insisting that the shrunken heads were fake. His objection seemed to come down to the following issues: 1) the shrunken heads were presented as evidence alongside purported lampshades made from human skin, the latter of which were later demonstrated by DNA testing to be fake; 2) both the heads and lampshades were presented at Nuremberg, which Parvini considers to be an entirely tainted proceeding; and 3) according to Parvini, the Nazis would not have made shrunken heads in any circumstance.

The problems with these three issues are the following, in order.

1) Just because one piece of evidence turns out to be bogus is no reason to dismiss all of the other evidence, although there is certainly good reason to be suspicious. In the case of the shrunken heads, since 1946, additional evidence has come to light suggesting that the shrunken heads were indeed real. Thus, whereas the human skin lampshades have been conclusively proven to be false, the shrunken heads cannot be similarly discarded. Rather, what the shrunken heads have that the lampshades lack is corroboration. In particular, there is corroboration in the form of documentary evidence. When I made this point to Parvini (“Yeah, that’s kinda how history works. We use documents.”), he dismissed the document I provided as “just a court record,” despite the document not coming to light until decades later.

2) The issue of Nuremberg as a bogus proceeding is more complicated and would require too much time and effort to go into here. The underlying assumption is one of dishonesty, and certainly we can point to instances like the Soviets’ inclusion of the Katyn Forest Massacre as a crime committed by Germany (when it was they who were the actual culprits) as reason to believe that all was not above board at Nuremberg — certainly it was not. However, there is simply no reason to believe that the American prosecutors who presented the shrunken heads and lampshades were deliberately presenting false evidence. In fact, given the verified provenance of the shrunken heads, there is every reason to believe that the lampshades were believed to be just as real as the shrunken heads turned out to be. Presented together, they tell a particular story about man’s inhumanity to man as practiced under Nazi occupation. That story is no less true if one of the pieces of evidence is ultimately disqualified. There’s enough evidence remaining to make the case.

3) The point of whether the Nazis would make shrunken heads is the one over which Parvini lost his temper. As I stated in a thread, why wouldn’t the Nazis have made shrunken heads from dead Poles? Does Parvini hold the Nazis to some elevated standard? Is this more of the old “Germans wouldn’t have done it this way” garbage that deniers routinely spout, not understanding even for a moment how ad hoc much of what the Nazis did was or how often individuals on the ground acted without the prior approval of those above them? It really is a simple question. If the Nazis would engage in human experimentation of all grotesque sorts, what would stop them from shrinking a couple of heads? After all, it’s not like other parties in the war didn’t engage in trophy hunting in combat, notably Americans with the Japanese. American GIs routinely sent Japanese ears and skulls back to friends and family stateside. But we are to assume that a handful of Nazis experimenting with making shrunken heads is simply beyond the pale?

Much of what I argue here has been said at this blog multiple times before (often by me over more than a decade). In this particular case, I do think Parvini is blinded by his lack of historical training and his inability to understand how pieces of historical evidence are weighed and assessed. His arguments were loaded with logical fallacies — primarily a flat-out appeal to incredulity — that showed no real familiarity with the larger context of what he was trying to argue. One had to wonder why he was even bothering.

The other part of the story here is that, in Parvini, we have yet another case of a semi-prominent person on the far right dipping his foot into denial but not taking the big plunge. We’ve seen this pattern already with Paul Craig Roberts and Ron Unz (the latter of whom eventually did take the plunge). Parvini is a bit more clever, but he does have a bit of a record that precedes him.

For his own part, Parvini denies being a Holocaust denier and has threatened yours truly with a lawsuit should I even dare blog about him. I’m not prepared to say he’s a Holocaust denier, to be clear. I am prepared to say that he’s out of his depth debating this material and, further, that he’s likely a deeply unpleasant person given the below tweets. 

Whether he’s aware of it or not, Parvini is using techniques of soft denial that most of us here can smell a mile off. He may not be a Holocaust denier, but absent his protestations, he sure as hell sounds like one.

Simulblogged at Holocaust Controversies

 Having written just a few days ago about Ryan Faulk’s problematic foray into Jewish population analysis 1939-1945, I checked his Bitchute video again to see whether anyone had posted the link from here to the comments section.

Turns out someone did.

I also happened to visit the Cesspit, knowing that Faulk had registered there a few months ago. And what do you know? Turns out Faulk began a new thread since I made last week’s blog post, consulting the brain trust over at CODOH to assure him that he’s right and I’m wrong. Someone also apparently pointed out the Korherr Report to Faulk, and so he’s second guessing himself in that regard as well.

“Basically, does anyone know how the Nazis were counting Jews? Did they have guys running around with clipboards?” asks our young hero.

Call me crazy, but maybe you should look into more sources than just the American Jewish Yearbook before you present yourself as an expert on the topic?