This one-sided narrative was the mass formation psychosis of the post-WWII generation, and the main precedent for the campaigns against liberty that are metastasizing today. In school in the 1960s, we were taught the mantra that Adolf Hitler murdered five million Jews in gas chambers. This was a substantive thesis that could be challenged and debated in several different dimensions, including the culpability of Hitler, the number who died, and the cause of death. A few independent thinkers did so, and by the 1970s were developing sophisticated arguments that the imposed narrative was substantially a tissue of self-serving lies.

It was at this time that the defenders of the narrative began to use the term "the Holocaust" as their starting point, as a way of side-lining their critics. By wrapping up an entire domain of historical experience under a single undefined reference term that presumed their own interpretation in general, they fuzzed up the questions so as to relieve themselves of having to justify its underlying assertions in the specific. By prefixing the word with "the", their complex and highly dubious atrocity narrative was framed as a unitary fact that was beyond dispute.

From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, free speech died in most of the Western world, as the promoters of the narrative were able, in country after country, to criminalize "Holocaust denial" and tar any opposition to their story as "hate". Many of the leading critics ended up in jail, and their movement was mostly suppressed by the mid 1990s. The United States was spared direct legal persecution of dissenters, thanks to its Constitution and First Amendment, which still had some force then. But since that time, our government, schools, and mass media have had little good to say about freedom of speech, and have been training the younger generation rather in the need to stamp out "hate speech".

The black legend against Nazi Germany has served primarily Jewish partisans, including particularly Zionists engaged in their own project of ethnic cleansing. It is also used more opportunistically by anyone who came out on top of WWII, or who can claim some political difference with Hitler, whether communist, democrat, libertarian, Christian, LGBT, or non-German nationalist. Now, as the Nazi dream fades into history and the Zionist dream goes rancid, and the WWII victors' moral pretentions openly crumble, the "Holocaust" too becomes less relevant. Its main significance post-2019 will be its legacy of political fanaticism and its leading role in the destruction of freedom of speech.