The Pooh-ish Question: Epistemology, Extermination and Weighing the Holocaust
It still seems like magic to me. With three weights and a simple set of scales, you can weigh objects in one-pound steps up to 13 pounds (or kilos or whatever). With four weights, you can weigh up to 40 pounds. And with five weights, up to 121 pounds. That’s a lot of bang for your buck.
Power hour
So how do you do it? You turn to ternary. That is, for your weights you use powers of 3 like 1, 3, 9, 27, 81… rather than, as in binary, powers of 2 like 1, 2, 4, 8, 16… Using powers of 2, three, four and five weights allows you to weigh objects of up to 7, 15 and 31 pounds, respectively. Not so impressive. Here are powers of 2 in action, where you are balancing the object in one pan against the weights in the other pan:
3 lbs = 2 lb + 1 lb
5 lbs = 4 lb + 2 lb + 1 lb
7 lbs = 4 + 2 + 1
12 lbs = 8 + 4 + 2
15 lbs = 8 + 4 + 2 + 1
22 lbs = 16 + 4 + 2
31 lbs = 16 + 8 + 4 + 2 + 1
The trick with ternary is to use both pans of the scales. That is, you’re adding and subtracting unique powers of 3. Here’s a video that explains it. For example:
4 lbs = 3 lb + 1 lb
5 lbs = 9 lb – 3 lb – 1 lb
6 lbs = 9 – 3
7 lbs = 9 – 3 + 1
13 lbs = 9 + 3 + 1
17 lbs = 27 – 9 – 1
22 lbs = 27 – 9 + 3 + 1
23 lbs = 27 – 3 – 1
24 lbs = 27 – 3
40 lbs = 27 + 9 + 3 + 1
41 lbs = 81 – 27 – 9 – 3 – 1
70 lbs = 81 – 9 – 3 + 1
71 lbs = 81 – 9 – 1
120 lbs = 81 + 27 + 9 + 3
121 lbs = 81 + 27 + 9 + 3 + 1
As I said: this still seems like magic to me.[1] Up to 121 pounds with only five weights? And up to 364 pounds with six weights? 1093 pounds with seven weights? 3280 pounds with eight? The bang for your buck gets bigger and bigger. Ethereal mathematics has a solid, practical application. And what about the “bang for buck” you get from physics, the most mathematical of the sciences? With physics, the bang can be completely literal. And not just literal but lethal. The bang of an atomic bomb or hydrogen bomb has deadly decibels. It’s so loud that it kills by sound alone.
Transient human mites
And physicists got those bangs by applying ethereal math to infinitesimal matter, that is, by using mathematics to explain and predict the behavior of atoms and other very small particles. Physics, the most mathematical of the sciences, is also the most comprehensive, explaining everything from static electricity to supernovas, from the flight of a bumblebee to the birth of the universe. This is what the Hungarian-Jewish physicist Eugene Wigner (1902–95) famously called “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.” Why should math, invented by transient human mites on a dust-speck of a planet, be so good at accounting for so much in such a vast universe? Well, I don’t think that the effectiveness is unreasonable and I don’t think that “invented” is the right word for math. What I would call unreasonable is the mathematizing of the immathematical. That is, I reject the certainty expressed by so many people in fields where mathematical methods and standards of proof don’t presently apply. And may never apply. Take theology. In the epistemological hierarchy of sciences, theology clearly doesn’t stand with physics or biology or even (for flip’s sake) sociology. And yet it’s theology that gave us the notion of infallibility, of absolutely certain knowledge without any tincture or taint of error or doubt.
Beautiful art, bad epistemics: the infallibly certain Assumption of Mary into Heaven (image from Wikipedia)
And so some Catholics assert that the Pope is God’s guide for humanity and therefore infallible when speaking ex cathedra. And some Protestants assert that, on the contrary, the Pope is Beelzebub’s butt-plug and it’s the Bible alone that’s infallible. And some Muslims assert that Catholics and Protestants are both wrong and it’s Islam that’s infallible. Their particular version of Islam, that is. And Stalinists and Maoists and fascists have piped up from politics and asserted their own brands of infallibility and absolute certainty.[2] It’s a ridiculous spectacle and I reject the entire farrago of contradictory claims.[3] Indeed, I suggest a paradox: that all who claim infallibility thereby infallibly prove that they don’t possess it. That’s why mathematicians, who do supply us with certain and eternal truths, don’t claim infallibility. They don’t need to claim it, because mathematics clearly possesses it.[4] Religion clearly doesn’t possess it, which is why religious believers have so often claimed it.
Pretty puny
In short, infallibility belongs to psychology and cratology, the study of power, not to epistemology, the study of knowledge. But that epistemological error — the mathematizing of the immathematical — doesn’t always wax so gross and produce such pathologies. Economists don’t claim infallibility but they also express too much certainty about inherently uncertain things. And in their case, they are literally mathematizing the immathematical, thinking that pretty equations can capture the huge complexities of economies and markets. As Nassim Taleb explained in The Black Swan (2007), they were wrong. The pretty equations turned out to be puny equations. Very good mathematics can be very bad economics, because economics is not yet a proper science. Its field of study is too complex for that, because another paradox is this: physics is the most powerful science because it is dealing with the simplest phenomena. That is, atoms and galaxies are far easier to model mathematically than individuals and economies.
History is even further than economics from being a proper science. And that’s why I reject Holocaust denial. Did the Holocaust really happen? Did the nasty Nazis really commit genocide against the powerless Jews? Did Himmler and his henchmen really organize and undertake a massive program of industrialized slaughter? There’s no shortage of people who proclaim that, for sure, the Holocaust never happened, that the innocent Nazis never did nothing to no-one, and that Himmler and his homies were framed. It’s the “for sure,” I don’t like. I can accept doubts about the standard Holocaust narrative. Indeed, I share some of those doubts. But doubting a narrative is not the same as demolishing a narrative. If proponents of the Holocaust narrative have often been liars, then opponents of the Holocaust narrative have often been lunatics. The argument between the two camps looks like theology to me: both sides assert infinite certainty about history, which is an inherently uncertain field. There is no way to weigh the truth of the Holocaust using an entirely objective epistemology like math. Okay, only one side — the pro-Holocaust side — has used censorship and imprisonment to enforce its ideas, but only one side currently has the power to do that. When I look at some Holocaust deniers, I don’t think they would wield power wisely and tolerantly if they possessed it.
Not even irrational
And I’ve known two Holocaust deniers well. Neither of them impressed me in the slightest as a scholar or as a thinker. One was intelligent but irrational; the other was stupid and subrational (that is, his reasoning didn’t even rise to the level of irrationality). For example, the intelligent Holocaust denier had been imprisoned more than once for his political activity, after acting as his own lawyer in court. He therefore presented himself as an expert on how to address and impress a jury. I expressed doubt about his expertise, pointing out that each time he had appeared before a jury, he had been found guilty by it. He waved this away as irrelevant. Did I not understand? He had appeared before a jury. He therefore knew what to say and do in order to impress the members of a jury. Yes, I said: impress them negatively, which was why the juries he had appeared before had all found him guilty. He again waved this away as irrelevant. I gave up.
As for the stupid Holocaust denier: he once told me that there was a White nationalist slogan running thus: “‘Racist’ means ‘anti-White’.” I pointed out that the slogan was in fact: “‘Anti-racist’ means ‘anti-White’.” It didn’t make sense otherwise. He said that not making sense was precisely the point, because the left was crazy. Marvelling at this logic, I asked him to produce a single instance of the slogan being used in the shorter form he had alleged. He said he had a clear and distinct memory of seeing a banner carried on a pro-White demonstration that bore the slogan “RACIST MEANS ANTI-WHITE.” The visual memory was right there before his mind’s eye, he told me. In further proof, he held up a finger and traced the letters on the air: “RACIST MEANS ANTI-WHITE.” Again, I gave up the argument. This same stupid Holocaust denier believed that the moon landings were 100% faked, that the moon itself is a giant space-ship parked in orbit by aliens, and that the vapor trails left by jets are definitely chemical warfare being waged against the unsuspecting population below. When I asked how he could be so certain about the vapor trails, he replied that it was because the sky had looked very different when he was young.
Ron Unz’s implacable enemy
When I declined to accept this as proof positive that vapor trails constitute chemical warfare, he accused me of arrogantly rejecting incontrovertible evidence. Shortly after that, I broke off contact with him. His stupidity made my head spin and I had also decided that he was #2 in my list of “Most Boring People I’ve Ever Known.” Strangely enough, the #1 spot in that list is occupied by the intelligent Holocaust denier mentioned earlier. Or not so strangely: like other kinds of ideology rejected by the mainstream, Holocaust denial attracts psychologically unusual people. And sometimes they’re unusual in bad ways. That isn’t proof that Holocaust denial is wrong any more than it is proof that Holocaust affirmation is right, but the psychology of Holocaust deniers does help explain why I am not a Holocaust denier. I don’t like their dogmatism or the irrationality displayed by many of them. In fact, only one Holocaust denier has ever impressed me favorably as a rational and reasonable scholar: Ron Unz.[5] He doesn’t write like a Pope setting out infallible truth ex cathedra.
No, he writes like a historian, weighing evidence, making provisional judgments, speaking of possibilities and probabilities, not certainties. But he doesn’t convince me. Nor am I convinced by Unz’s implacable enemy David Cole. However, I am more persuaded by Cole’s arguments for the reality of the Holocaust than I am by Unz’s arguments against it. To repeat: I’m not convinced by Cole’s arguments, I’m simply more persuaded by them. Maybe he’s fooling me, but “The David Cole Holocaust Chronology” seems to me better argued and written with greater knowledge than anything I’ve seen by Unz and other Holocaust deniers. Below is a passage that impressed me in Cole’s chronology, as he sails between the Scylla of Holocaust denial and the Charybdis of Holocaustianity. He’s talking about “docs ignored by both sides, the deniers and the mainstream historians,” and he says this:
For example, the Korherr Report — one of the most important documents of the Holocaust, yet generally unused and un-cited by both sides.
Dr. Richard Korherr was Himmler’s statistician. In 1942 he was commissioned by Himmler to compile a detailed report detailing how many Jews had been killed, how many had fled, and how many were still alive (and where). This wasn’t a public document; it was Himmler’s-eyes-only (with a condensed version prepared for Hitler).
Himmler wanted exact figures.
Korherr, with unfettered access to all SS documents, definitively concluded that as of the beginning of 1943, slightly over 2.4 million Jews had been killed in the Reinhard camps, the Ostland ghettoes (which functioned as death camps), and by the Einsatzgruppen execution squads.
You’d think that Himmler’s official death census would be in every Holocaust book. But no. “Great” scholars like Yad Vashem’s Yehuda Bauer rarely if ever cite it (in his 1982 magnum opus A History of the Holocaust, Bauer doesn’t cite Korherr once).
Deniers never cite Korherr either.
Amazing, huh? With the Mao and Stalin death toll, we’re forced to roughly calculate the figure via demographic extrapolation. But with the Holocaust, we have the main perpetrator, Himmler, commissioning a specific census of the murdered. A number. Everyone agrees it’s a legit document, yet few use it.
Why?
Because if you accept 2.4 million for the beginning of 1943, you cannot get to six million by April 1945. From ’43 to ’45, there would simply not be enough Jews subjected to “Aktions” to get to 6 mil. Every mainstream scholar agrees that by the close of 1942, two-thirds of all Holocaust deaths had already occurred. So Korherr’s figure presents a problem.
That’s why I put my approximate figure of total Holocaust dead at 3.5 to 3.6 million. But not six. You simply cannot get to six in the two remaining years of the war.
Meanwhile, deniers won’t accept a figure above 271,000. Accepting 2.4 million by 1943? That blasphemes the tenets of their cult. It can’t be more than 300,000, period! Their pseudo-religion dictates it.
So the Korherr Report, being too low a number for the mainstream and too high for the deniers, gets buried. I had to find all this shit out for myself with no fucking Internet, dudes. So again I say, two years pre-Internet is not that long a time to get into something, learn some things, make some mistakes, learn from the mistakes, and get out.
And lest you think my estimate of 3.5-3.6 million is a crime of denial, I’ll point out that Gerald Reitlinger, in his 1953 masterwork The Final Solution (still considered the gold standard in the field), gave, for the final death count, a range of 4.1 to 4.5 million. There’s not much space between my 3.6 and Reitlinger’s 4.1, and I’m always open to anyone who can defend Reitlinger’s number, or even Hilberg’s 5.1 mil. But as I said, the extremists who despise me, and the extremists who idolize me, share a similar trait — they like speaking about me but never to me. (“The David Cole Holocaust Chronology,” 16th August 2024, David Cole’s substack)
I’ve said before that, when I was reading some of Cole’s articles at TakiMag, I felt as though he was trying to pick my pockets. In other words, I don’t trust him. But I don’t get that feeling from his discussion of the Holocaust. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s Ron Unz who’s right about the Holocaust and not David Cole. But at the moment my subjective and fallible judgment is that Cole’s Holocaust history is accurate and Unz’s isn’t. Or more accurate, anyway. The stupid Holocaust denier I mentioned above wouldn’t agree with me, of course. He wouldn’t need to read the “Cole Chronology” to know that Cole was wrong. But that Holocaust denier is stupid, after all. And highly credulous about conspiracy theories. I’m pretty sure (but have no desire to confirm) that he’s now embraced Nuke Denial and is asserting with complete confidence that nuclear weapons are a hoax. In other words, physicists don’t get any bang at all for their buck.
How Nazis answered the Jewish Question
My head spins at the thought of arguing with him about nuclear weapons. But it would be a useful exercise to do so, all the same. After all, how do I know that nuclear weapons are real? And that man really landed on the moon? And that the moon isn’t hollow and isn’t a giant spacecraft parked in orbit by aliens? Well, I don’t know any of those things because I’ve never studied any of the relevant fields in depth. I simply accept the orthodox history and the orthodox science, because I’m not an expert, or even an amateur, in any of the relevant fields. The same applies to the Holocaust and the question of whether or not it really happened. I’m not an expert in any of the relevant fields, from history to archaeology to demography to forensic medicine. Accordingly, I neither affirm nor deny the Holocaust with any certainty. But at the moment I lean towards affirming the Holocaust with David Cole rather than denying it with Ron Unz. I think that the Nazi answer to die Judenfrage, the Jewish Question, was indeed extermination. And if not extermination of six million Jews, as Holocaustianity preaches, then extermination of “3.5 to 3.6 million” Jews, as David Cole estimates.
By denying Denial, I will of course attract abuse and vituperation from Deniers, but that’s usually true of adopting any position, for or against, on a controversial topic. The odium theologicum comes into play. And for me the Holocaust isn’t only part of the Jewish Question, it’s also part of what I call the Pooh-ish Question. I’m referring to Frederick Crews’ The Pooh Perplex: A Student Casebook (1963). Crews was a literary scholar who satirized literary scholarship by presenting wildly different crypto-humorous claims about the “real meaning” of the children’s classic Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). Crews wrote his satire of literary scholars through the personae of invented and antagonistic academics like Duns C. Penwiper, Murphy A. Sweat, Simon Lacerous (based on F.R. Leavis) and Woodbine Meadowlark. And he succeeded mightily in his satire: The Pooh Perplex is one of the most intelligent and entertaining books I’ve ever read.
Highly intelligent, highly entertaining: Frederick Crews’ The Pooh Perplex (1963) and his follow-up Postmodern Pooh (2001)
It also proved one of the most disconcerting books I’ve ever read, because Crews inhabited the academic personae so well, argued their positions so skilfully, and excavated the Ur-text so cleverly that I found every interpretation to be plausible, even though I knew all of them were tongue-in-cheek and some wholly ridiculous. When the Christian persona C.J.L. Culpepper argued that Winnie-the-Pooh was an allegory of “the Fall and Redemption of Man,” he marshalled incident after incident from the book to prove his interpretation. When the Freudian persona Karl Anschauung — “one of the last survivors of Freud’s original circle of Viennese followers in the first decade of this century” — argued that A.A. Milne wrote Pooh to assuage a “Honey-Balloon-Pit-Gun-TailBathtubcomplex,” he marshalled incident after incident from the Milnean corpus to prove his wildly different interpretation. The Marxist persona Martin Tempralis did the same for his wildly different interpretation. And so on. All of the interpretations of Winnie-the-Pooh were more or less plausible.
And later in his career he treated Freud with the same biting contempt, writing devastating critiques showing the utter foolishness of psychoanalysis: “Freud has been the most overrated figure in the entire history of science and medicine—one who wrought immense harm through the propagation of false etiologies, mistaken diagnoses, and fruitless lines of inquiry. Still the legend dies hard, and those who challenge it continue to be greeted like rabid dogs.”
The inherent fuzziness of language
And so reading The Pooh Perplex made me confront what I now call the Pooh-ish Question. It runs like this: How easily can a skeptic or subverter spin a plausible case for a heterodox interpretation of any text from literature or any genuine fact from orthodox history?[6] Could one, for example, find anomalies and contradictions in the orthodox account of, say, Superbowl XXI in 1987 or the FA Cup Final in 1923? And argue plausibly that the said Superbowl or FA Cup Final never in fact took place? Or that the alleged victor was in fact the actual loser, and vice versa? I think one could. I think one could easily take many (or even any) events that really did happen, find flaws in the otherwise accurate orthodox account, and make a plausible case that the events either didn’t happen at all or happened in a very different way to the orthodox account. And that’s what people have done to things like the Holocaust, the Moon Landings, the history of nuclear weapons, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in July 2024, and so on.
I also think the Pooh-ish Question is related to the inherent fuzziness of language and human perceptions. That’s why theology is so imprecise, so unreliable and so prone to generate contradictory claims. And why physics is the opposite. Physics depends on math and objective instruments, not on language and subjective perceptions like theology. Holocaust denial looks a lot more like theology than physics to me. Of course, it’s Ron Unz the Holocaust denier who has studied physics at an advanced level, not David Cole the Holocaust affirmer. But Unz isn’t conducting physics when he denies the Holocaust. History isn’t yet a science and conclusions can’t yet be reached there with mathematically based precision and reliability. That isn’t to say that history is entirely subjective and that no solid facts can be known about the past. But it is to say that heterodoxy and mendacity are much easier in history than they are in math or physics. Pioneering scholars like Peter Turchin are now working to turn history into a science and perhaps one day the Holocaust will confirmed or contradicted by cliodynamics. Until that day, I’ll probably remain a provisional Holocaust affirmer, siding with David Cole rather than Ron Unz. But I agree right now with some of what Unz says in his articles about Holocaust denial. For example, I definitely agree with the following. And it seems like a good way to end this article:
Back in those late Cold War days, the death toll of innocent civilians from the Bolshevik Revolution and the first two decades of the Soviet Regime was generally reckoned at running well into the tens of millions when we include the casualties of the Russian Civil War, the government-induced famines, the Gulag, and the executions. I’ve heard that these numbers have been substantially revised downwards to perhaps as little as twenty million or so, but no matter. Although determined Soviet apologists may dispute such very large figures, they have always been part of the standard narrative history taught within the West.
Meanwhile, all historians know perfectly well that the Bolshevik leaders were overwhelmingly Jewish, with three of the five revolutionaries Lenin named as his plausible successors coming from that background. Although only around 4% of Russia’s population was Jewish, a few years ago Vladimir Putin stated that Jews constituted perhaps 80–85% of the early Soviet government, an estimate fully consistent with the contemporaneous claims of Winston Churchill, Times of London correspondent Robert Wilton, and the officers of American Military Intelligence. Recent books by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Yuri Slezkine, and others have all painted a very similar picture. And prior to World War II, Jews remained enormously over-represented in the Communist leadership, especially dominating the Gulag administration and the top ranks of the dreaded NKVD.
Both of these simple facts have been widely accepted in America throughout my entire lifetime. But combine them together with the relatively tiny size of worldwide Jewry, around 16 million prior to World War II, and the inescapable conclusion is that in per capita terms Jews were the greatest mass-murderers of the twentieth century, holding that unfortunate distinction by an enormous margin and with no other nationality coming even remotely close. And yet, by the astonishing alchemy of Hollywood, the greatest killers of the last one hundred years have somehow been transmuted into being seen as the greatest victims, a transformation so seemingly implausible that future generations will surely be left gasping in awe.
Today’s American Neocons are just as heavily Jewish as were the Bolsheviks of a hundred years ago, and they have greatly benefited from the political immunity provided by this totally bizarre inversion of historical reality. Partly as a consequence of their media-fabricated victimhood status, they have managed to seize control over much of our political system, especially our foreign policy, and have spent the last few years doing their utmost to foment an absolutely insane war with nuclear-armed Russia. If they do manage to achieve that unfortunate goal, they will surely outdo the very impressive human body-count racked up by their ethnic ancestors, perhaps even by an order-of-magnitude or more. (“Holocaust Denial: Analyzing the History of a Controversial Movement,” Ron Unz, August 27, 2018)
[1] If using ternary weights seems magical, then treating ternary as binary seems mystical. When you do that, you can produce all the rational fractions uniquely in their simplest form, as though mindless math had a mind or as though God were calculating them for you. See this page at the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences for further details of what is known as hyperbinary.
[2] Leszek Kołokowski, the great Polish philosopher and intellectual historian, said this in Main Currents of Marxism (1978): “When the party is identified with the state and the apparatus of power, and when it achieves perfect unity in the shape of a one-man tyranny, doctrine becomes a matter of state and the tyrant is proclaimed infallible. … Lenin had always been right [and] the Bolshevik party was and had always been infallible.” (Op. cit., pp. 4 and 93) And Italian fascism, which was strongly influenced by Marxism, had the slogan Il Duce ha sempre ragione — “The Duce is always right.”
[3] Comparing claims for infallibility, however, I do think that traditionalist Catholics have by far the strongest. But that’s like saying that someone with $100 has a stronger claim to be a billionaire than someone with 10c.
[4] That is, mathematics clearly comes as close to infallibility as any human activity can.
[5] Please note: I’m not saying that no other Holocaust deniers are rational and reasonable scholars, I’m simply saying that I haven’t come across any denier apart from Ron Unz whom I could describe like that. Not that I’ve read much Holocaust denial.
[6] Crews’ follow-up, Postmodern Pooh (2001), made me confront the Pooh-ish Question again as he satirized newer forms of scholarship like post-modernism and evolutionary psychology.
