Unz, Roberts, and Irving

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how Paul Craig Roberts, a former Reagan administration Treasury official, was dancing tantalizingly close to flat-out Holocaust denial. He's back again, now defending the choice of libertarian activist and one-time California gubernatorial candidate Ron Unz to publish David Irving's Hitler's War on his website, Unz.com, which publishes a variety of libertarian materials, as well as "race realism," anti-Zionist polemics, and other generally far-right materials.

For his own part, Unz is a bit of a cipher. For instance, he is Jewish himself, although we have seen in the cases of Gilad Atzmon, Paul Eisen, and others that being Jewish isn't always a guarantee against anti-Semitism. For a while now, Unz has drawn suspicion for his willingness to publish blatantly anti-Semitic material, although he has generally been able to defend his editorial judgment on the basis of his libertarian leanings. This orientation has generally led to the comments threads at Unz.com being something of a free for all, as I'd noted in the past. Sergey Romanov has also commented here on Unz's activites in this regard.