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* Those placed over us even permit some deviationism with respect to the Jewish Troubles of the 1940s, as revealed in the gap between the consensus of scholars, on the one hand, and demotic propaganda such as that found on the History Channel, on the other. As recently as a couple of years ago, the HC was still disseminating the old fantasies about lampshades made from human skin and soap made from human fat; and suggesting that Western European camps such as Dachau had extermination gas chambers. I estimate that it has been thirty or forty years since scholars — even courtier historians — have been willing to swallow those fictions. The key here, I believe, is that most TV watchers can be relied on to be nonreaders: at least, nonreaders of anything more scholarly than popbooks by the late war-propagandist Stephen Ambrose and his ilk.