Dachau, Germany

Source: Bigstock

If occasionally my columns seem to wander, it’s because sometimes the story itself wanders. A columnist can write by-the-numbers drivel (see Townhall), or he can take you on a journey, like a delicate water lily swept along by a river lazy yet purposeful.

Damn, I’m getting faggoty in my old age.

But yeah, sometimes the river takes you someplace interesting.

Last week I was ruing (so much ruing) because my response to Tucker Carlson’s pseudo-historian Darryl Cooper wasn’t getting engagement. I don’t care about views; I’m not talking about virality. I wrote the piece to counter Cooper’s ignorance, and it disturbed me that nobody seemed to care. And that depressed me, because it reinforced what I frequently see on the right: Nobody wants to read Holocaust history unless it’s presented in a lurid manner.

Rightists would rather the history be exciting than accurate. And my Holocaust history is dull. It’s not BASED, just factual. And nobody cares about that. These days history writers need an “oomph,” and at my age the only time I “oomph” is after a bean dinner.

So there I was, ruing, and I see that one of my buddies posted my Cooper column on Twitter (I’m banned for life but I can still monitor the site).

And some guy, screen name “FilmLadd” with 88k followers, replied, “David Cole is a huge mess,” following up that nugget of wisdom with this one: “Dachau was built in 1933. Operation Barbarossa stalling is not why the Holocaust happened. Pure bunk.” Okay, so now I’m no longer ruing, because I’m engaged. This is the first dude to actually respond to the column. It’s a dumb response, but a response all the same. I didn’t know who FilmLadd is, but 88k followers means he’s enough of a somebody for me to cite.

So I starts to think, “Maybe I can get a column out of this.” But then I’m like, “Wait, I just did a dry historical piece last week. I can’t do it two weeks in a row.”

And that’s true.

Still, had I decided to get a column out of it, I’d have pointed out that retards like FilmLadd feed Holocaust denial. Rank amateurs who have zero comprehension of Holocaust historiography beyond having seen a movie or two are the best friends deniers have. Dachau’s opening had nothing to do with the Holocaust. It had everything to do with brutal Nazi repression of dissent, but it was not a “Jewish” camp per se. It was a camp for communists, trade unionists, outspoken anti-Nazis, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc. There were very few Jews in Dachau initially (that would change in later years). But Dachau was not a “Holocaust camp,” unless you define the Holocaust as “Nazis were meanies but the camps, though unpleasant, were for labor, not extermination,” which is exactly as deniers define it.

When you call Dachau a Holocaust camp, you energize deniers, who giddily point out that “even the camp museum authorities” admit there were no gassings there, but there were sanitation and hygiene facilities and relatively few cremation retorts.

In fact, in 1933, Jews in Germany had it no worse—better, I’d say—than blacks in the American South. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were burdensome like Jim Crow, but, as pointed out by Professor Richard Rubinstein in The Myth of Rescue (Routledge, 1997), 37,000 Jews fled Germany in 1933 after the Nazis took power, and by 1935 almost half had returned, thinking, “Oy, I guess I can ride this out.”

Of course, they couldn’t, but unless you respect the timeline, and morons like FilmLadd don’t, you muck everything up and open the door for deniers. “If they wuz exterminatin’ Jews in 1933, how does ya explain the Haavara Agreement (1933–1939)? The Evian Conference (1938)? The Madagascar Plan (1940)? Them things is incompatible with extermination; Hitler just wanted emigration. GYUCK GYUCK HOLOHOAX!”

Every mainstream Holocaust historian agrees that the decision to begin mass-killing Jews was made in 1941. We know this in part because in May 1940 Hitler and Himmler explicitly stated via privately exchanged memo that they didn’t intend to kill Jews or other racial undesirables in the East because doing so would be “Bolshevist.”

A hundred books have been written about exactly when in 1941 the extermination decision was made. That debate’s been raging since the 1970s. The (in the words of Christopher Browning) “fateful months” between June and December 1941 hold many mysteries. We know that by the end of the year Himmler forbade all Jewish emigration, the extermination camps (not labor or penal camps but murder camps) were built or being built, and the Einsatzkommandos in occupied Russia had long moved from killing only Jewish adults to children as well. But there’s a shitload of confusion about whether the decision to start en masse exterminations was made all at once, gradually, in the euphoria of the initial success of Barbarossa, or when the campaign stalled. Historians can’t even agree on when Hitler’s “euphoria” ended. With the collapse of the drive to Moscow? Or earlier, as some records indicate.

Nobody summed up the debate better than Michael Marrus in The Holocaust in History (Brandeis University Press, 1987). The relevant chapter is free. Read it, huh? No, there’s nothing lurid or “based”; it’s just solid history. Forget your groypers, forget your influencers; learn to appreciate a good historian, and maybe you won’t inadvertently encourage deniers by taking something from 1933 that isn’t related to the Holocaust (defined as the physical extermination of Jews just for being Jews) and opening the door for deniers who’ll use your stupidity to give their empty case a veneer of solidity.

These are things I would’ve written had I decided to get a column out of FilmLadd’s imbecilic Dachau comment. But then I got distracted when I looked up FilmLadd’s identity. And I found a new angle, one that also appeals to my pet issues. FilmLadd is a dork named Ladd Ehlinger, and I partly knew the man! This untalented buffoon made a series of viral and terrible campaign ads for conservative candidates in the 2010s, and he used several of my Friends of Abe buddies as actors.

So while I don’t recall ever meeting Ehlinger (and I think I’d remember, as Down syndrome faces are memorable), I do remember cringing at his inept content. Ehlinger never worked for a single candidate who won. Every GOP/independent he produced spots for lost (one ad by Ehlinger was for an Alabama “patriot” who was a chronic shoplifter!). But Ehlinger’s spots went viral. They were shown on Bill O’Reilly and the Sean Hannity Anencephaly Hour, racking up millions of views, because they were purposely outrageous in the worst possible way. For example, in 2011 Ehlinger produced a spot supporting Republican Craig Huey in his race against Democrat Janice Hahn for a California congressional seat. The “ad” attempted to hit Hahn for being soft on crime by showing her as a stripper on a pole as two gold-tooth gangsta black guys rap, “Gimme yo cash, bitch, gimme yo cash, ho,” while firing AKs in the air as photos of Capone, Dillinger, and Charles Manson are flashed over a woman’s twerking ass.

Yep, it went viral. I knew people who were working on the Huey campaign, and they were horrified by it (Ehlinger did the spot independently of the campaign). Huey denounced the ad, but the damage was done; he went down in flames.

Ehlinger’s spots got millions of views, and not a single win (that shoplifting Alabaman came in third!). Oh, Ehlinger got tons of publicity for himself, in the L.A. Times, Forbes, Politico, etc. And in the end, isn’t that what really matters?

So at this point I start thinkin’, this is the angle I should pursue! Because it’s so relevant. Ehlinger’s the great-grandtard of what’s now the MAGA golden rule: Be outrageous! Get views! Go viral; drive the libs NUTS! Because that’s the ultimate goal: your online stats. Not votes, not actually winning. Don’t work to prevent crime. Twerk to make crime wacky!

Ehlinger took the winning crime issue and drowned it in self-indulgence. He made it a joke, because he didn’t give a fuck about anything but how viral he went. Serious campaign coordinators were disgusted by Ehlinger, whereas rightist “influencers” cheered him. And today, the influencers have largely eclipsed the serious campaign coordinators. Laura Loomer’s gone from online freak show to presidential adviser: “Don’t mention real human crime victims; talk about eating cats!”

And what scares me more than anything is that I know a segment of my readers will see that “gimme yo cash bitch” spot and like it. So removed from reality are many MAGAs, they’ll think, “Yes! It’s wild! It’s young! It shows we’re balls-out BASED and unafraid of the DEMONKILLARYCRATS!”

The fact that the ad torpedoed the candidate it was supposed to help will mean nothing to these dumbasses. After all, that’s just history, and who cares about learning history?

So that’s an angle I was thinking of pursuing once I looked up FilmLadd’s identity. But then I also started reading his Twitter thread and I saw that he seems to despise the aforementioned Laura Loomer. “Liability Loomer,” he calls her.

Wait…the guy who did the “strippers ’n’ niggas” ad that became a massive liability to the Republican it was supposed to help is calling somebody else a liability? The guy who made the crime issue “wacky” to boost his own visibility is now slamming someone who’s doing the exact same?

Well, there’s my angle, folks.

I emailed Ehlinger:

I’m curious how, today, you view that Janice Hahn video you did in 2011 (which many saw as a “liability” to Huey’s campaign). Do you still stand by that spot? Or have the years altered your views on the efficacy of such political ads?

I sent it several times, but no response. Ladd Ehlinger’s so spineless, Don Knotts is like, “Grow a pair, douchebag.”

See where my “voyage” took me? From ruing over the fact that folks aren’t interested in Holocaust history unless it’s wild and sensational, to encountering a guy who isn’t a denier but whose lack of historical knowledge assists deniers, to explaining the intricacies of the Holocaust timeline, to 2011 and the birth of the present-day rightist desire not to win votes but views via outrageous and destructive conduct, to the possibility that one of the guys who gave birth to so many GOP defeats might’ve seen the error of his ways, to the fact that too many people are Twitter cowards who’ll spout off from the safety of Musk’s bosom but won’t answer a simple and direct question politely asked, right back to ruing about how politics, just like Holocaust history, has become of no interest to the right unless it involves the salacious and sensational.

Full circle! That river brought me right back to where I started, and I got a column out of merely recounting the trip.

It’s column-writing the Bruce Lee way: Be water. Don’t make water…like a coward.