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From: maynard@banished.uucp
Subject: HOLOCAUST LIES: BERGEN-BELSEN GASSINGS
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>From _The Journal of Historical Review_, Vol. 13, Number 6 (Nov./Dec. 1993):
HOLOCAUST LIES: BERGEN-BELSEN GASSINGS
Fraudulent Holocaust claims about magical gas chambers and miraculous
survival in wartime German camps are all too familiar. Occasionally,
though, we come across a claim so breathtaking in its mendacious effrontery
that it deserves special notice.
In an article (reproduced here) in _The Gazette_ of Montreal (Canada),
August 5, 1993, and in a memoir, Moshe Peer recounts his wartime ordeal as
an eleven-year-old in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Peer claims
that he "was sent to the [Bergen-Belsen camp] gas chamber at least six
times." The _Gazette_ account goes on to relate: "Each time he survived,
watching with horror as many of the women and children gassed with him
collapsed and died. To this day, Peer doesn't know how he was able to
survive." In an effort to explain the miracle, Peer muses: "Maybe children
resist better, I don't know." (These days, not a single reputable historian
claims that anyone was ever "gassed" in the Bergen-Belsen camp.)
How was such horror possible? In Peer's view, the "rest of the world
stood by and let the Holocaust happen." The evil Germans, he says, "had the
permission of the world" to kill Jews. Although Peer claims that
"Bergen-Belsen was worse than Auschwitz," he acknowledges that he and his
younger brother and sister, who were deported to the camp in 1944, all
somehow survived internment there.
___________________________________________________________________________
[Above-mentioned article from _The Gazette_, Montreal, Thursday, August 5,
1993:]
SURVIVING THE HORROR
AUTHOR RECOUNTS EXPERIENCES IN NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP
KAREN SEIDMAN
THE GAZETTE
ST. LAURENT -- As an 11-year-old boy held captive at the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp during World War II, Moshe Peer was sent to the gas
chamber at least six times.
Each time he survived, watching with horror as many of the women and
children gassed with him collapsed and died.
To this day, Peer doesn't know how he was able to survive.
[Photograph captioned, "Peer", "'Some went mad'".]
"Maybe children resist better, I don't know," he said in an interview
last week.
SPENT 19 YEARS ON BOOK
Now 60, Peer has spent the last 19 years writing a first-person account
of the horror he witnessed at Bergen-Belsen. On Sunday, he spoke to about
300 young adults at the Petah Tikva Sephardic Congregation in St. Laurent
about his book and his experiences as a Holocaust survivor.
The gathering was part of the synagogue's Shabbaton 93, which brought
together young adults from across North America for a cultural and social
experience.
Called Inoubliable Bergen-Belsen (Unforgettable Bergen-Belsen), Peer
wrote the book to make the reader feel like a witness at the scene.
But he admits he can never recreate for anyone the living hell he
experienced.
"The condition in the camp is indescribable," Peer said. "You can't
bring home the horror."
In 1942, at age 9, Peer and his younger brother and sister were arrested
by police in their homeland of France. His mother was sent to Auschwitz and
never returned.
Peer and his siblings were sent to Bergen-Belsen two years later.
He recalls the separation from his parents as excruciating. But survivng
the horrors of the camp quickly became a priority.
"There were pieces of corpses lying around and there were bodies lying
there, some alive and some dead," Peer recalled.
"Bergen-Belsen was worse than Auschwitz because there people were gassed
right away so they didn't suffer for a long time.
"But at Bergen-Belsen people stayed months and months until they died --
they suffered for a long period of time."
Peer said Russian prisoners were kept in an open-air camp "like
stallions" and were given no food or water. "Some people went mad with
hunger and turned to cannibalism," Peer said.
Peer's days began with a roll call of the numbered prisoners. This could
last as long as five hours, while their captors calculated how many
prisoners had died. Anyone who fell over during the roll call was beaten on
the spot.
After roll call, the prisoners returned to their barracks, where they
were given a tiny piece of bread and some colored water.
Peer and his siblings -- who all survived -- were cared for at the camp
by two women, whom Peer has unsuccessfully tried to find.
Children being children, they did play, sometimes chasing each other
around the barracks. But there would always be some who were too sick or
weak to get up.
REUNITED WITH FATHER
After the war, Peer was reunited with his father in Paris and the family
moved to Israel. Peer's four children were born in Israel, but after
serving in the Israeli army in a number of wars, Peer moved to Montreal in
1974.
Even 49 years later, Peer is still haunted by his concentration-camp
experience and still finds his memories keep him awake at night.
But what he is most bitter about is the way the rest of the world stood
by and let the Holocaust happen.
"No one told the Germans not to do it. They had the permission of the
world," he said.
[end of article from _The Gazette_]
___________________________________________________________________________
[end of article]
[Reprinted by permission from _The Journal of Historical Review_, P.O. Box
1306, Torrance, CA 90505, USA. Subscription rate: $40 per year, domestic.
$50 per year, foreign.]
This article was manually transcribed by the System Operator of the
"Banished CPU" computer bulletin board system, which is located in Portland,
Oregon, U.S.A.
Banished CPU supports Freedom of Speech!
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Sysop: Maynard "the Main Nerd"
[end of file]
-Dan Gannon
From _The Journal of Historical Review_, Vol. 13, Number 6 (Nov./Dec. 1993):
My Campaign for Justice for John Demjanjuk
Jerome A. Brentar
[Introduction by Mark Weber:]
John Demjanjuk's vindication -- culminating in his recent reunion with
his family in the United States -- has special meaning for Jerome Brentar.
For more than a decade, this deeply religious man of Croatian ancestry and
anti-Communist conviction has devoted countless hours of his own time and
considerable money from his own pocket to help defend the Ukrainian-American
auto worker.
This was not the first such case in which Brentar had played an
important role. In the earlier case of Frank Walus, Brentar dug up evidence
that proved to be of crucial importance in exonerating the Polish-born
American.
It was only after a protracted and devastating legal ordeal that Walus,
who has gratefully called Brentar "my savior," was able to establish that he
was not a Gestapo murderer of Jews in wartime Poland, as Simon Wiesenthal,
the United States government, eleven Jewish "eyewitnesses," and several
newspapers had insisted, but instead had spent the war years as a quiet
teenage farm laborer in Germany. (For more on this case, see the Summer
1992 _Journal_, pp. 186-187.)
Brentar's dismissal in early September 1988 as national co-chairman of
a George Bush presidential campaign organization -- after a Jewish weekly
paper focused attention on his efforts on behalf of Demjanjuk -- made
headlines in newspapers around the country, and brought Brentar's face to
national television news broadcasts.
Explained a Bush campaign aide: "We became aware of his [Brentar's]
affiliation with the group that supports the defense of John Demjanjuk, and
that position is at fundamental odds with the Vice President [Bush] and this
campaign. And we took the action based on learning about that today.... We
told him [Brentar] that his advocacy on this issue puts him at a fundamental
disagreement with the campaign and the Vice President."
___________________________________________________________________________
JEROME A. BRENTAR was born in 1922 in northern Ohio, the son of immigrants
from Croatia. During the Second World War he served in Europe with the US
Army's 93rd Armored Cavalry. From 1948 to 1950, he worked in postwar Europe
as an eligibility/screening officer for the International Refugee
Organization (IRO) of the United Nations. From 1954 to 1957 he worked in
Europe for the Catholic Relief Service of the National Catholic Welfare
Conference, a Roman Catholic refugee assistance agency. Besides English and
Croatian, Brentar speaks German, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian. He studied
at Michigan State University and at the University of Munich in Germany.
Back in Ohio, he founded and for many years directed Europa Travel Service,
a travel agency in Cleveland.
This essay is adapted from his address at the Eleventh IHR Conference,
October 1992. (Brentar's presentations at the 1989 and 1992 IHR conferences
are available on both audio and video cassette from the IHR.)
___________________________________________________________________________
Commenting on his dismissal, Brentar said: "It's part of a dirty smear
campaign that started because I said Demjanjuk is innocent. For that, I'm
called a neo-Nazi and an anti-Semitic revisionist." Brentar also noted: "I
could have been an atheist. I could have been a polygamist. I could have
been anything else, and questions wouldn't have been asked. And now because
I helped a poor victim, I'm everything under the sun." (_New York Times_,
Sept. 9, 1988.)
A mark of the sorry moral level to which our country has fallen is not
only the shameful role of the US federal government in the persecution of
John Demjanjuk, but that an American vice president could see fit to order
the removal of a man as decent and upright as Brentar from a campaign
committee because of his selfless work on behalf of an American citizen he
passionately believes to be innocent of monstrous crimes, in a country where
people are supposedly presumed innocent until proven otherwise.
On September 14, 1988, not long after his dismissal from the Bush
campaign, Brentar appeared on the CNN cable television program "Crossfire,"
along with New York Congressman Stephen Solarz and co-hosts Tom Braden and
Pat Buchanan. On a nationally-televised broadcast, apparently for the first
time ever, the great taboo of Holocaust revisionism was breached.
Although Brentar was reluctant to get into the Holocaust issue itself,
the program's "liberal" fossil, Tom Braden, gave further evidence of his
calcified mindset by vigorously claiming that he personally saw gas chamber
victims at Buchenwald at the end of the war. Co-host Pat Buchanan, a savvy
and courageous writer and probably the most prominent national defender of
Demjanjuk, thereupon cut in and pointed out that no serious historian makes
that claim anymore.
Braden responded with sheepish silence.
Stephen Solarz, a Congressman from Brooklyn who boasted in 1981 that he
had become a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in order, as he
put it, to "deliver for Israel," lost control of himself. He charged that
Brentar's greatest sin was not that he defended Demjanjuk, but that he had
doubts about the Holocaust story.
Although Brentar explained that he preferred not to get into the issue,
Solarz insisted on a statement. "Did Jews die in gas chambers at Auschwitz?
Were six million Jews killed?," he demanded. Finally, Brentar simply said
that although he is not a scholar of the Holocaust, there are certainly
absurdities and contradictions in the Holocaust story. Brentar specifically
mentioned the once seriously made allegation that masses of Jews were put to
death at Treblinka in huge steam chambers, and he mentioned the now
discredited story of mass killing by electricity.
[Photograph captioned, "Jerome Brentar at the 1989 IHR Conference"]
Brentar's calm and factual remarks only further enraged Solarz. After
another outburst from the ultra-Zionist politician, Buchanan shot back,
"don't be a complete phony," a remark that so stunned the normally
loquacious lawmaker that he was momentarily struck speechless.
Over the years, Jerry Brentar has endured a barrage of outrageous
attacks against his character, including loud criticism for speaking at IHR
conferences. But long after such mean-spirited carping is forgotten, this
noble man will be remembered as the person without whose intrepid and
selfless help John Demjanjuk almost certainly would have been deported to
the Soviet Union and executed for crimes he did not commit.
-- M. W.
___________________________________________________________________________
I appreciate this opportunity to address fellow Americans who share my
concerns. I wish first to take this opportunity to thank the Institute for
Historical Review for creating this citadel of free speech. I commend the
IHR and its supporters for their tremendous job, under very trying
circumstances, to protect this right of freedom of speech.
John Demjanjuk has been a victim of an unprecedented travesty of
justice. The US Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations,
working with the Soviet government, and those who might be called
"Holocaustians" have carried on a campaign to portray this innocent man as
"Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka.
For their part, the Soviets have always been concerned about the
Ukrainians because of their efforts for independence from Russia.
Accordingly, the Kremlin worked to instill in the Ukrainians, and in the
other non-Russian peoples of the USSR, the fear that the long hand of the
Soviet secret police can track down any of them, anywhere in the world.
This is why John Demjanjuk was targeted.
This Soviet effort received cooperation from the federal government's
Office of Special Investigations, the OSI, and the pro-Israel lobby. The
people in the OSI are interested, first of all, in holding onto their
lucrative jobs, while the "Holocaustians" want to keep alive the
[Continued in next message.]
[Continued from previous message:]
multi-million dollar Holocaust industry.
Essential to this campaign has been the sensationalism of the "hunts"
and trials of alleged "Nazi war criminals" such as Frank Walus, Andrija
Artukovic, Tscherim Soobzokov and, of course, John Demjanjuk. Newspapers
join in this because they sell best with sensationalized atrocity stories.
Wartime Beginnings
In a way, my involvement with the Demjanjuk case began during World War
II, while I was serving as an American soldier in Germany. During the final
months of the war, masses of German soldiers came under our control as
prisoners of war. I was one of those who helped to process these prisoners,
and I examined the documents of many of these men. This experience gave me
a very vivid picture of what wartime German documents look like. And then,
after the war -- because I speak German and Slavic languages -- I got a job
with the International Refugee Organization working in Germany. At that
time, there were millions of "displaced persons" in Germany. In that job,
which gave me access to additional important information, I had to examine
the documents of many of these refugees.
I first became aware of the federal government's legal prosecution of
John Demjanjuk in 1980, when I saw reprinted in Cleveland newspapers a
facsimile of a supposed identity card proving that this was "Ivan the
Terrible" of Treblinka. This in spite of the fact that this alleged
"Trawniki" ID card, which was the key piece of documentary evidence against
Demjanjuk, does not mention Treblinka at all, but instead places him at
Sobibor and at an agricultural estate in Poland.
Along with this piece of evidence, the government produced five
witnesses from Israel who testified that Demjanjuk was the notorious Ivan of
Treblinka. As it happened, though, one of these witnesses, Elijahu
Rosenberg, had told the Polish War Crimes Commission in 1945 that the man
known as Ivan of Treblinka had been killed during an uprising at the camp in
August 1943. Rosenberg repeated this claim in a statement given in December
1947 at the Jewish center in Vienna, declaring under oath that Ivan of
Treblinka had been killed. Some years later, though, testifying against
Demjanjuk in Cleveland in 1981, and again in Israel in 1987, Rosenberg
changed his story. He admitted that, yes, he had stated that Ivan the
Terrible was dead. At the trial in Israel, however, he said, pointing, "But
he's there. He's alive. I'm seeing him there!" It was testimony like this
that brought the sentence of death against this poor man.
[Photograph captioned, "A dramatic moment during the trial in Jerusalem of
John Demjanjuk: Prosecution witness Elijahu Rosenberg angrily spurns the
defendant's offered hand as Demjanjuk attorney Mark O'Conner looks on."]
Streibel's Testimony
After seeing the ID card in the newspaper, I called Mr. Karl Streibel,
who had been commandant of the Trawniki camp, where this document had
supposedly been issued. Streibel told me:
Mr. Brentar, I told your people from Washington, who came to see
me three years ago, that this is not an ID card from Trawniki. I told
them that Trawniki was a training camp for those men who were chosen to
work as guards for the Germans, and that this was a training camp not
only for concentration camp guards. There were approximately five
thousand men there, most of whom were then assigned to guard military
installations, bridges, depots, motor pools, and so on. About three
hundred of them were assigned to guard at camps such as Treblinka,
Belzec, and Sobibor.
Mr. Streibel went on to tell me:
Mr. Brentar, the attorneys from the OSI were here, and I told them
to bring me the original ID card. I wanted to see the original because
I would absolutely never sign any document without putting the date
and place of issue before my signature.
The OSI was very much concerned that Demjanjuk's defense attorneys
would try to meet and talk with Mr. Streibel. And indeed a meeting was
aranged in Hamburg with Streibel and the defense attorneys, Mr. John Martin
and Mr. Spiros Gonakis. But even though a date and a time in the late
afternoon had been set for the meeting, as John Martin later told me, he
received a phone call, allegedly from a friend of Mr. Streibel, informing
him that he was not interested in meeting with the gentlemen from America
after all. As it turned out, Streibel received a similar telephone call,
allegedly from the defense attorneys, telling him that they were not
interested in seeing him. This clearly seems to be another example of the
dirty tricks engaged in by the OSI in its campaign to prosecute and
persecute this man, and bring him to KGB-style justice.
Additional Testimony
As you can appreciate, I quickly became very suspicious of the charges
against Demjanjuk. I then began a years-long search for evidence, tracing
the route followed by the OSI in its search for evidence against this man.
In Germany, I met with the wartime commandant of the Treblinka camp, Kurt
Franz, who was then serving a sentence in a prison near Dusseldorf. During
our meeting, Franz told me: "Mr. Brentar, several years ago six of your
people were here, and I told them that this man [Demjanjuk] is not the Ivan
of Treblinka. The Ivan of Treblinka was much older, had dark hair, and was
taller. He had a stoop because he was so tall. So why do you come here
again to ask me the same questions?" I replied: "Mr. Franz, I am not from
Washington. I'm from Cleveland, Ohio, and I'm trying to help this man."
I want to mention here that the Institute for Historical Review, and
its friends and associates, have really helped me to establish contacts with
people who proved instrumental in helping put together a thorough and
truthful picture, of what happened -- and still is happening -- to John
Demjanjuk.
Well, as I continued my investigation, I arranged to meet with every
one of the people whom the OSI had visited earlier. What I discovered is
that the OSI's case against John Demjanjuk was built on lies, exaggerations,
distortions, fabrications, innuendos, and dirty tricks.
Obstacles in Israel
Visiting Israel, I arranged to go with a Jewish friend to meet with
Menachem Russek, chief of the agency that is the Israeli counterpart of the
OSI in the United States. "Mr. Russek, don't be a fool," I said to him.
"You're being misled by the OSI. This is an innocent man." And even though
I had brought along evidence to prove what I was saying, well, he couldn't
care less, because he was every bit as eager to prosecute and persecute John
Demjanjuk as was Neal Sher and his OSI entourage.
I asked Mr. Russek if I could speak with the three main witnesses
against Demjanjuk: Pinchas Epstein, Elijahu Rosenberg and Sonia Lewkowicz.
I particularly wanted to meet with Rosenberg, to question him about the
discrepancies in his sworn statements. "I'm here to give you everything I
have -- all the truth," I told Russek. "Why don't you let me meet with
these people so I can question them?" Well, for obvious reasons, I was not
permitted to meet with any of them.
Fedorenko's Fate
John Demjanjuk was originally supposed to be deported to the Soviet
Union where, as you know, the authorities make quick work of liquidating
their "enemies." That's what happened to other "Nazi war criminals" from
the United States, such as Karl Linnas and Fedor Fedorenko. While
Fedorenko's case was on appeal, OSI chief Neal Sher met with the
Ukrainian-born Fedorenko and told him: "Look, why don't you go back to your
homeland. You've already been back several times." (That was true: he had
a wife and a family there, and had returned several times since the war.)
"This appeal will cost you a lot of money. Why don't you go back and spend
the rest of your life with your family there?"
That was a trick. No sooner had Fedorenko, the poor fellow, arrived
there with thousands of dollars worth of Soviet rubles, which he had bought
on the black market (getting a much better rate than he could have gotten in
Russia), then he was arrested and, after a quick KGB trial, shot. I am
[Continued in next message.]
[Continued from previous message:]
convinced that Neal Sher had notified the Soviets of his arrival, to get rid
of him and prevent him from testifying in the Demjanjuk case.
Villagers' Testimony
In Poland I visited Treblinka and the nearby villages. In one such
village I visited the house of Maria Dudek. When I showed her the
photograph of John Demjanjuk, she said to me, in Polish: "I never saw this
man before." But when I asked her if she ever heard of "Ivan the Terrible,"
she panicked and shut the door on me.
I found three other witnesses from that village, former inmates of
Treblinka, who had seen "Ivan." These three villagers were supposed to come
to Cleveland to testify in court. But an OSI official named Michael Wolf
telephoned the US Consulate in Warsaw and told officials there: "Don't let
the witnesses come. The hearing is over." That was a lie; the hearing was
still continuing. This was another of their many dirty tricks. They
prevented these three witnesses from testifying on behalf of Demjanjuk.
[Photograph captioned, "Pinchas Epstein, a key prosecution witness in the
Jerusalem trial of Demjanjuk, accuses the defendant of being the notorious
Treblinka camp guard known as 'Ivan the Terrible.'" (Reuters/Bettmann
photo)]
Wolf also told the Polish authorities that I'm a neo-Nazi, an
anti-Semite and a revisionist, and that I'm paying money to witnesses to lie
to defend a Nazi murderer, John Demjanjuk. As a result, a long article
appeared in the Polish newspaper _Polityka_ that condemned me for trying to
recruit witnesses who would lie in court for money as witnesses on behalf of
Demjanjuk.
With regard to testimony of Maria Dudek, I'd like to mention an article
from the Cleveland _Plain Dealer_ (Sept. 13, 1992), headlined "Demjanjuk
wasn't Treblinka's 'monster,' ex-captives insist," which reports that an
additional witness named Nina Shiyenko likewise confirmed that "Ivan of
Treblinka" is not John Demjanjuk.
Such incidents tell just part of the story of what has happened to this
poor man, John Demjanjuk. But there's an old saying that I think applies in
this case: "Every evil carries within itself the seed of its own
destruction." And that seed has begun to germinate.
Exonerating Evidence
As a result of all the exonerating evidence that I was able to provide
to the defense, Demjanjuk was not deported to the Soviet Union, as was
originally planned. Instead, OSI chief Sher panicked. He ran to Israel to
tell the authorities there to work for Demjanjuk's extradition to that
country, because of the danger that the case was being lost in Cleveland.
There's too much evidence to show that Demjanjuk is innocent, he told them.
As a result of his effort, Israel made an official request for his
extradition.
According to the legal rules for extradition that were in effect at
that time, it was not permissible to submit any further evidence on behalf
of a defendant. So it was planned to present the additional evidence to the
court in Jerusalem.
[Photograph captioned, "Patrick J. Buchanan"]
The OSI was incensed at my activity. They couldn't understand how an
insignificant travel agent could be so successful in finding such potent
evidence against them -- evidence proving that they were lying.
A Journalist's Admission
Back in Cleveland, in 1984, I visited the office of the _Plain Dealer_,
the city's main newspaper, which was supposedly supporting Demjanjuk.
Regrettably, though, they printed more negative than positive articles about
him. A _Plain Dealer_ reporter said to me: "Jerry, we're not interested in
his innocence. We're only interested in his extradition."
The Bush Campaign
I want to tell you a little more about how I was asked to resign from
the Bush presidential campaign. Actually, I had never been active in Bush's
campaign, the Republican party, or even in politics. So I was very much
surprised when I learned that I had been chosen to become co-chairman of the
Bush campaign's national ethnic coalition group. In Washington I was
received by Mr. Bush, who congratulated me. When he asked me to support
him, I told him that I would. My hope was that this might give me a further
opportunity to help John Demjanjuk.
Unfortunately, in this God-blessed country of ours, it's no longer what
you know, but who you know, that counts. About a month after I was named, I
received a phone call from an official of the Bush campaign, who told me:
"Mr. Brentar, the Vice President is very much upset because we've been
getting all kinds of calls telling us that you're a neo-Nazi, that you're an
anti-Semitic revisionist, and that you are helping a convicted Nazi war
criminal. Mr. Bush wants you to leave the ethnic coalition, and I'm calling
to ask you to resign." I replied by telling him: "My dear man, I am with
the campaign by invitation. If you want me to resign, please send me this
request in writing, and I'll consider it." Well, I never received it.
As a result of that, my name appeared in newspapers around the country,
and I received phone calls from Argentina, Australia, and from people I had
met and worked with years earlier in Germany, who asked me what was going
on. "I don't know myself," I told them. "I'm just trying, as a true
American, to help an innocent man, and instead I'm being lambasted as an
anti-Semitic neo-Nazi revisionist."
Pat Buchanan
Some good did come out of all this publicity, though. One day I got a
call from a Mr. Matt Balic of New Jersey. Like me, he is of Croatian
background. He told me that he'd like to introduce me to Pat Buchanan.
Balic told me that I have an important story to tell, and asked if I'd like
to appear [on the television program] "Crossfire." "Sure," I replied. So
that's how I came to appear on "Crossfire." I got to know Buchanan very
well, and from that time on I sent him much information that he used in
writing articles in defense of Demjanjuk.
Congressman Traficant
A short time after that, Matt Balic arranged for me to meet Congressman
James Traficant. Well, after I finished telling him the whole story, much
as I'm telling it to you here, but in even more detail, Traficant said to
me: "Jerry, I can't believe this. Are you lying to me? Are you
exaggerating?" And I said, "Why should I? I'm not paid. I'm doing this
voluntarily because I am for truth and justice, and that's the only way
we're going to have peace in this world, with justice." Well, after that
meeting this man really went to bat for me, and for Demjanjuk, going far
beyond the call of duty.
Another "Ivan"
It was during its investigation of Fedorenko that the OSI had obtained
copies of court transcripts of the Treblinka trials in the USSR that
referred to the Ivan of Treblinka. These papers, which were not made
available to the defense in Demjanjuk's denaturalization hearings in
Cleveland, include the testimony of 18 former Treblinka guards who confirmed
that the "Ivan of Treblinka" was a man named Ivan Marchenko (or Marczenko).
These documents had been in the hands of the OSI since 1978, so these US
government officials knew very well that John Demjanjuk was not "Ivan the
Terrible" of Treblinka.
In August 1991, Congressman Traficant was able -- through the Freedom
of Information Act -- to obtain copies of these documents, which proved to
be crucial in finally exonerating Demjanjuk. Traficant even arranged for
John Demjanjuk's son-in-law, Ed Nishnic, along with John Demjanjuk, Jr., to
go to Poland and the Soviet Union in December 1991, as his aides, to obtain
additional excuplatory evidence. During this visit, the two men met with
Marchenko's daughter.
"Political Suicide"
Until my meeting with Jim Traficant, we had had no luck at all with
politicians. Earlier, John Demjanjuk, Jr., and I had visited Washington,
DC, where we rapped on the doors of every Congressman and Senator to ask for
help in the defense of an innocent man. The Representatives from the
Cleveland area, Demjanjuk's home, whom one might have expected to be most
willing to help, wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the case. A few
Congressmen were somewhat sympathetic, but they did nothing.
[Continued in next message.]
[Continued from previous message:]
One Congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, who represents a district in
southern California, explained frankly to me why he would not help: "Jerry,
do you want me to commit political suicide?" Is this really the kind of
country we now live in? Pat Buchanan really hit the nail on the head, I
think, when he referred to the US Congress as "a parliament of whores" on
"Israeli-occupied" capitol hill. Because of comments like that, Buchanan
is, of course, near the top of the ADL's enemies list.
I am not so far down on that list myself. I'm not trying to brag, but
while I was in Israel attending the trial of Demjanjuk, the prosecutor took
time to ask me to stand up and to identify myself as a defender of the
convicted murderer. When I did, I was booed. My name also came up during
the appeal hearing last year, when the charge was made that the defense case
was suspect because it had to rely so much on help from a revisionist, an
anti-Semite and a neo-Nazi -- me, that is -- in obtaining all this lying,
crooked information and testimony.
[Photograph captioned, "Congressman James Traficant"]
"Big Business"
The people who work for the Office of Special Investigations claim to
be motivated by concern for the memory of the dead. But I am sure that none
of those people would lift a finger for anyone if the Holocaust was not so
profitable and prestigious. There is truth to the saying, "There's no
business like Shoah business."
This point was confirmed by Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits, who is Chief
Rabbi of Britain, and Lord in the British parliament. A front-page article
in the Israeli newspaper Jerusalem Post (Nov. 26, 1987, p. 1) reports:
Despite widespread acceptance of the Holocaust as a tragedy unique in
Jewish history, leading [Jewish] Torah scholars are "unanimous" in
"denying the uniqueness of the Holocaust as an event any different ...
from any previous national catastrophe," according to British Chief
Rabbi Sir Immanuel Jakobovits.
The Holocaust, Jakobovits went on to say, has become "an entire
industry, with handsome profits for writers, researchers, film-makers,
monument builders, museum planners, and even politicians." He added that
some rabbis and theologians are "partners in this big business."
Because it is considered the most important event in Jewish history,
those who play up the Holocaust also find sensationalism necessary. Tales
about Demjanjuk and "Ivan the Terrible" give the story spark. But as
Jakobovits warned:
Would it not be a catastrophic perversion of the Jewish spirit if
brooding over the Holocaust were to become a substantial element in the
Jewish purpose, and if the anxiety to prevent another Holocaust were to
be relied upon as an essential incentive for Jewish activity?
Ivan of Sobibor?
Now, as the story of Demjanjuk of Treblinka falls apart, efforts are
being made to replace it with the story of Demjanjuk of Sobibor. Now it is
claimed that "when Demjanjuk was an SS guard he took part in mass killings
of Jewish citizens in Sobibor camp." Well, that's a lot of baloney because,
as Karl Streibel explained to me: "Mr. Brentar, anybody who was [trained]
in Trawniki had to have a Personalbogen." This refers to a German personnel
and identity record, which includes information about date and place of
birth, a thumb print, and so forth.
Here, for example [holding up for everyone to see], is a facsimile copy
of the Personalbogen identity record from Trawniki for Ivan Marchenko. If
John Demjanjuk had actually been a guard at Sobibor, as some are now
claiming, he would have received basic training at Trawniki, and his
completed Personalbogen would therefore have been on file there as well.
But there isn't any.
False and Authentic Documents
As Mr. Streibel explained to me, the Soviets advanced so quickly on the
Trawniki camp that those in charge there had no opportunity to destroy the
camp's files. The Soviets captured all those records, including the
Personalbogen for Marchenko and others, as reproduced in facsimile here in
this book [holding it up], which was written by a very good friend of mine,
a German by the name of Dieter Lehner. I am sure that if a Personalbogen
record for Demjanjuk had been on file at Trawniki, the Soviets would
certainly have made it public.
In this book, which is entitled _Du sollst nicht falsch Zeugnis geben_
("Thou shall not bear false witness"), Lehner proves the phoniness of the
widely-reproduced ID card that was a key piece of prosecution evidence
against Demjanjuk. Lehner points out some 30 different errors in the
supposed Demjanjuk ID card, and shows just what a genuine Trawniki ID card
looks like. Lehner also cites, and in a few cases, reproduces in facsimile,
authentic Personalbogen documents issued to other men who had been trained
at Trawniki. He shows that every guard of this type who was assigned to a
camp was first sent to Trawniki, where he received an Erkennungsmarke metal
"dog tag," but not a Trawniki ID card.
This [holding it up] is the ID card of Heinrich Schafer, a German
official in the camp administration who served as paymaster in Trawniki. It
has the signature of the officer in charge, and includes Schafer's rank and
the date and place on which the card was issued. Schafer testified that the
supposed Demjanjuk ID card was not issued in Trawniki.
German Subservience
Dr. Louis-Ferdinand Werner, a department chief of the Federal Criminal
Office (Bundeskriminalamt) in Wiesbaden has similarly declared -- as the
German magazine _Stern_ reports -- that the infamous Demjanjuk ID card is
not authentic, in any way or form.
It took quite a long time for the Germans to make such a statement.
Some years ago, when I had just begun my own investigation into the
Demjanjuk case, I visited the office of German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. I
went with a friend who happens to be a priest in the parish in Ludwigshafen
where Mr. Kohl is a parishioner. He had met with Mr. Kohl, who had said to
him that if there was anything he could do for him, please feel free to call
upon him. So that's why the priest and I took the liberty to go right to
Kohl's office in Bonn to ask for help in proving that the supposed Demjanjuk
ID card is not authentic. During a meeting there with an aide or adjutant
to Chancellor Kohl, I said that this supposed ID card is an insult to the
German tradition of Ordnung (order) and Punktlichkeit (precision). During
the war, the Germans were proud of the care they took with everything,
including their dress and their documents. Even during the war's final
months, everything had to be tip-top, and there was no place for such a
sloppy document.
After we explained what we wanted, Chancellor Kohl's adjutant said to
us: "My dear friends, if you want any help from us [for this], you have to
ask the Israelis for permission." Just imagine! Well, I could go on and on
to tell you about more of the many difficulties we've had in our efforts on
behalf of Demjanjuk.
"Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness," wrote Thomas
Merton, the poet and Trappist monk. Some years ago, I choose to light a
candle, and now it seems that the whole world is seeing the light of a great
fire.
[end of article]
[Reprinted by permission from _The Journal of Historical Review_, P.O. Box
1306, Torrance, CA 90505, USA. Subscription rate: $40 per year, domestic.
$50 per year, foreign.]
This article was scanned by the System Operator of the "Banished CPU"
computer bulletin board system, which is located in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
Banished CPU supports Freedom of Speech!
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Sysop: Maynard "the Main Nerd"
[end of file]
From _The Journal of Historical Review_, Vol. 13, Number 6 (Nov./Dec. 1993):
Demjanjuk, Israel and The Holocaust
JOSEPH SOBRAN
The Israeli Supreme Court has finally acquitted John Demjanjuk of the
charge of being "Ivan the Terrible," the Treblinka guard who is said to have
killed and tortured countless Jews. The acquittal is also a vindication of
Pat Buchanan, who led the calls for the old Ukrainian's release.
It has become increasingly obvious that Demjanjuk was framed. A US
appeals court has ordered that he be readmitted to this country because of
the underhanded way the sadistic Immigration and Naturalization Service
arranged his deportation to Israel in 1986: Among other things, evidence
that would have exonerated him was suppressed.
Meanwhile, the Israelis have decided to detain him for a few more days
while they decide whether to try him on another charge, which contradicts
the charge that he was "Ivan the Terrible": namely, that he was a guard at
Sobibor. If that one falls through too in a few years, they can probably
produce witnesses to swear he was a guard at Belsen or Buchenwald.
The Zionist lust to convict this poor man is incredible. If he wasn't
Ivan of Treblinka or Sobibor or Buchenwald or Somewhere-or-Other, maybe the
Israelis will finally just try him on the charge of having been named Ivan.
With any luck, Demjanjuk, now 73, could be home in time for his 90th
birthday.
Many Zionists fear that Demjanjuk's acquittal could cast doubt on the
whole story of the Holocaust and play into the hands of the Holocaust
revisionists. No doubt that is true, but whose fault is it? And should the
old man have been convicted, though innocent, just to prove a point?
Israel is one strange country, when you stop to think of it. The
standards of jurisprudence by which it claimed the right to try Demjanjuk at
all are alien to Western notions of justice and fair procedure. (As are
some of the INS practices.) He was tried in one country for crimes
committed in another country, at a time when the country trying him didn't
even exist. This is a big advance on traditional ex post facto laws. His
fate was decided, nearly permanently, 40 years after the crimes were
committed, by hysterical witnesses who had been coached or had changed their
stories.
___________________________________________________________________________
Joseph Sobran is a nationally-syndicated columnist and lecturer. This essay
originally appeared in the August 12 issue of _The Wanderer_, a Roman
Catholic weekly. A former senior editor and critic-at-large of _National
Review_, Sobran's relationship with that magazine was terminated in early
October in the wake of a column by him that was critical of NR founder
William Buckley.
___________________________________________________________________________
In short, it was a show trial. Its purpose was to drive home the
Zionist version of "the lessons of the Holocaust," and the Israeli
government gave it maximum publicity toward that end. Now it has backfired,
creating overdue skepticism about the official history -- the victors'
account -- of World War II. Someday it will be possible to ask soberly what
really happened.
I suspect that the official version will turn out to have a great deal
of truth, because a lot of it is undisputed or checks out, even when you
discount American and Zionist propaganda: but that when the full truth is
known, and exaggerations are trimmed away, what is now suppressed will make
the whole picture look very different.
Chiefly in this: The whole war was an unprecedented war on the
innocent -- on both sides. I have seen an appalling statistic: whereas
civilian deaths in World War I were about 17 percent of the total, the
percentage in World War II was about 70. It was the policy of both sides to
bomb cities, and both sides were trying to develop the atomic bomb, whose
whole purpose was mass murder. If you think Hitler has a monopoly on race
hatred, watch some videos of American propaganda about "the Japs" and "the
Nips" with their "grinning yellow faces." (At least two of the demonically
brilliant _Why We Fight_ series are easily available at low prices.)
But for the time being, there are intense pressures against any
independent view of that war. The legitimacy not just of Israel but of the
American political establishment depends on the standard version. Even many
conservatives now accept the heroic mythology of Roosevelt and Truman.
These questions are not merely speculative. They nearly cost John
Demjanjuk his life. And it's daunting to reflect that if Pat Buchanan
hadn't had the courage to endure smears for defending him, Israel might have
killed him. (Ironically, some of the most bitter abuse of Pat came from the
"Anti"-Defamation League.)
[Continued in next message.]
[Continued from previous message:]
No apologies were forthcoming from the Amen Corner, whose party-lining
and concerted smearing would do Stalin's old fellow-travelers proud; nor
from the Amen Corner's amen corner, those servile conservatives who hope the
Zionists and liberals blacken Buchanan's name. Luckily, Demjanjuk's fate
didn't depend on their honesty or courage, or he'd have been a goner.
The Corner swung into action the same week as Israel bombed southern
Lebanon, killing hundreds and driving 200,000 or so people from their homes,
in retaliation for the killing of seven Israeli soldiers. The soldiers were
killed not in Israel but in Lebanon -- yet the Israelis called the acts
"terrorism." The word "terrorism" has legitimate uses, but it hardly
describes the killing of invaders; it would be more apt as a description of
what Israel did to the entire civilian population of southern Lebanon. Of
course we don't call it terrorism when it's done from the air; the word is
used by countries with air power to condemn the tactics of their enemies who
don't have bombers and have to commit their mayhem on the ground.
Even if Israel can be defended for avenging the soldiers' deaths, its
response was immoral and widely disproportionate. Its explicit purpose was
to punish civilians, and the carnage inflicted was completely unjustifiable.
So much for hopes that the labor government would be more "moderate" than
the Likud. Of course there will be no war crimes trials for the Israeli
atrocities.
Israel wants to have it both ways. It wants to be accepted as a model
democracy, "an integral part of the West," as Likud leader Benjamin
Netanyahu put it. But it also claims exemption from the normal obligations
of a state -- to treat people justly and equally, for example.
Its real purpose, of course, is to provide a privileged existence for
Jews. All Gentiles, including Christians, are second-class citizens at
best. (A Jew who becomes a Christian can forfeit the privileges of a Jew).
This is played down by Zionists, but it is perfectly obvious to anyone who
examines Israel even cursorily.
This is why the Holocaust is so important to Israel. It helps
legitimate acts that would otherwise seem plainly barbaric. Any normal
state would be roundly condemned for doing what Israel does to its
minorities and neighbors, but Israel can always do it in the name of
"survival" -- an excuse that lets the consciences of its Western Christian
servitors off the hook, as they ignore the plight of their fellow Christians
under Israel rule, occupation, and air assault. Armed with nuclear weapons,
Israel can insist that it perpetually faces the threat of extermination.
A state that can always claim to be in a state of crisis can literally
get away with murder. The duty of a normal state is to maintain peace and
justice. But an abnormal state can do nearly anything, however violent and
disproportionate, in the name of national security. It can define anything
it pleases as a threat to its existence, and act accordingly. Everything
becomes a matter of "defense." Granting itself continuing emergency powers,
the state can do away with all the limitations that protect personal
liberty. The memory of the Holocaust -- and the supposed prospect of
another one -- prevents Israel from being judged by ordinary standards
applied to states.
World War II, in its received version, also helps legitimate the US
government as we now know it, and is invoked to justify American military
intervention everywhere. Without the war's mythology, it would be very hard
to claim that American "vital interests" are at stake around the globe and
that every little despot is a new Hitler.
But eventually the habit of intervention becomes so strong that it
sheds its rationale like a snakeskin. We have armed forces in Somalia now,
and nobody thinks our own face is at risk there. It's odd that we always
talk of "preparedness" for war, but nobody imagines for a moment that the
next war will be here.
[end of article]
[Reprinted by permission from _The Journal of Historical Review_, P.O. Box
1306, Torrance, CA 90505, USA. Subscription rate: $40 per year, domestic.
$50 per year, foreign.]
This article was scanned by the System Operator of the "Banished CPU"
computer bulletin board system, which is located in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
Banished CPU supports Freedom of Speech!
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[end of file]
From _The Journal of Historical Review_, Vol. 13, Number 6 (Nov./Dec. 1993):
Fred Leuchter Arrested in Germany
IHR Protests Politically-Motivated Act of Censorship
Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., the American execution hardware specialist who
insists that claims of war-time mass gassings at Auschwitz are not true, was
arrested in Cologne, Germany, on October 28, half an hour before his
scheduled appearance on a television show.
[Photograph captioned, "Fred Leuchter"]
Leuchter was arrested without an arrest warrant or formal charges. He
was then taken to Mannheim, leaving his wife, Carolyn, behind in Cologne.
Neither speaks German.
Only the next day was Leuchter formally charged. Cited in the criminal
charge were statements he had made during a speech at a meeting in Germany
in November 1991, in which he spoke about his 1988 on-site forensic
examination of the alleged execution gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and
Majdanek. These facilities were not used, and could not have been used, to
kill people as alleged, said Leuchter, a recognized specialist of gas
chambers used to execute convicted criminals in the United States.
Leuchter had been scheduled to appear on the show "Schreinemakers Live"
of the private television network SAT-1. He was invited to appear as an
execution expert, the show's host, Margarethe Schreinemakers, confirmed.
His travel costs and hotel expenses had been paid in advance by the station.
Schreinemakers said she had no idea that Leuchter was wanted by the
police, and was flabbergasted when they "stormed" her Cologne studio shortly
minutes before airtime. "I do not support this thoughtless act of
censorship, which now makes Leuchter a dubious heroic figure," she
commented. "With this Blitzaktion, the authorities have managed to make
Leuchter a martyr of the neo-Nazis."
Confirming the political motive of the arrest, a police official
declared that "it was decided on the political level that a television
appearance by Leuchter would harm Germany's image in foreign countries."
(_Kolnische Rundschau_, Oct. 30.)
Leuchter was formally charged by the Mannheim prosecuting attorney's
office with "incitement to hatred," and "defamation of the memory of the
[Jewish] dead." If convicted, Leuchter could face a sentence of up to five
years imprisonment.
In recent years a number of individuals who publicly reject claims
about wartime mass killings of Jews have been arrested and convicted in
Germany on these charges. Best-selling British historian David Irving, for
example, was convicted in 1992 on a charge of "defaming the memory of the
dead," for public statements rejecting stories of mass extermination of Jews
in gas chambers at Auschwitz as a myth. (For more on this case, see the
July-August 1992 _IHR Newsletter_, p. 3.)
Bail has been denied Leuchter, and eight days after his arrest he was
still being held under "investigative custody" in a Mannheim jail cell.
The Institute for Historical Review has written to the US ambassador in
Germany "to express our profound concern over this situation, and to
strongly urge you to take every legally permissible action on behalf of this
American citizen." The letter concludes:
This case is particularly important because, according to newspaper
reports, Mr. Leuchter has been arrested for actions that are not criminal in
the United States. He was arrested for expressing views that, in our
country, are protected by the Constitution. This can therefore be regarded
as a free speech case, and Mr. Leuchter consequently has something of the
status of a political prisoner.
The decision to arrest Leuchter is an apparent expression of panic on
the part of the German authorities, and will likely prove to be a major
mistake for them. A formal court hearing is now all but inevitable, which
will force a public airing of the Holocaust issue, and of the iconoclastic
findings of Leuchter and other specialists.
Reports about the arrest -- many of them unfortunately biased,
sensationalized and inaccurate -- have appeared in dozens of German daily
papers.
Leuchter, a resident of Malden, Massachusetts, addressed the IHR
conferences of 1989, 1990, and 1992. The Holocaust lobby has responded to
Leuchter's findings, which have been widely circulated as _The Leuchter
Report_, with a campaign of slander, pressure and intimidation. As a result
of this campaign, Leuchter's career as an execution hardware specialist has
been destroyed. (For more about Leuchter, his career, and the campaign
against him, see the Winter 1992-93 _Journal_.)
[end of article]
[Reprinted from _The Journal of Historical Review_, P.O. Box 4296, Torrance,
CA 90510, USA. Subscriptions: $40 per year (domestic).]
This article was scanned by the System Operator of the "Banished CPU"
computer bulletin board system, which is located in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
Banished CPU supports Freedom of Speech!
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[end of file]
-Dan Gannon
From _The Journal of Historical Review_, Vol. 13, Number 6 (Nov./Dec. 1993):
My Lunch With George
How an Influential Journalist Twists the Truth
MARK WEBER
With a syndicated column that appears in several hundred daily papers,
regular appearances on ABC television's "This Week With David Brinkley,"
several successful books, and well-paid appearances on the lecture circuit,
George F. Will has a deserved reputation as one of America's most
influential commentators on social-political affairs.
So when his secretary phoned to ask me to meet with him for lunch, I
was both hopeful and wary: Hopeful about the good that could possibly come
from such a meeting; Wary because, given his well-known biases, he might
distort whatever I say or do as part of a smear.
Still, I was optimistic, in part because his secretary had assured me
that Will merely wanted to meet and talk. She indicated that this would not
be an interview.
From the outset of our August 19 luncheon meeting, Will made clear that
he was interested in revisionist MOTIVES (or what he believes them to be),
not revisionist ARGUMENTS. Indeed, at one point he said that it is not the
truth or validity of what a revisionist says that determines whether it is
evil, but rather his MOTIVE.
In response to a question early on, Will told me that he had read the
issues of this _Journal_ and other IHR material I had sent him prior to our
meeting. It was quickly, even embarrassingly obvious, though, that he was
either lying, or was not able to understand what he had read.
When I asked Will if he considered himself to be well informed about
the Holocaust, he replied that he did -- citing visits to the sites of some
of the war-time German camps, and his reading of a good bit of secondary
literature.
I was struck by what Will did not know about this subject. He was
completely unfamiliar with the Einsatzgruppen -- the special German security
police units that operated in the occupied Soviet territories. He did not
know (or remember) that Anne Frank -- along with others in her family -- had
"survived" internment in Auschwitz. (She died later in Bergen-Belsen camp,
a victim of typhus.)
He confirmed that he accepts as accurate and reliable the often-cited
"testimony" of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss. Will acknowledged that he
did not know that this important piece of Holocaust evidence was obtained by
torture, and that, on a number of key points, it is not even consistent with
the current version of the Auschwitz extermination story.
He said that he also accepts as authentic the frequently quoted but now
thoroughly discredited "testimony" of Hermann Rauschning. Will made clear
that he was not aware of the many German wartime documents that plainly show
that the "Final Solution" policy was not one of extermination.
It soon became obvious during the course of our conversation that Will
is unable or unwilling to view Holocaust claims with the same refined
skepticism with which he critically dissects so many other official and
historical claims.
I reminded Will of something he had written about Auschwitz a decade
earlier. In his _Washington Post_ syndicated column of March 10, 1983, he
told readers:
You could tell from the smoke the sort of persons consumed in the
crematoria. Newcomers to Auschwitz, who still had some fat on their
bones, made black smoke. Persons who had been there for awhile made
white smoke. There: that is an emblematic fact of 20th century
politics.
What Will calls an "emblematic fact" is, rather, an instructive fable,
and the way he cites it not only points up the reverential, even awestruck
way he regards the Holocaust story, but shows his careless disregard for
facts.
When I told him that this statement is simply not true -- that in fact
crematory chimneys give off no flame and almost no smoke -- he asked me how
I know this. I explained that I had studied the matter, and had spoken with
crematory managers -- adding that anyone who takes a little time to look
into this question can determine the truth for himself.
Will responded by somewhat snidely asking if the Auschwitz crematories
were like those at Forest Lawn. In reply, I explained that the crematories
at Auschwitz were of the standard design used throughout Germany during the
war years. Will responded with silence.
I then asked Will for his source for this anecdote, adding that in all
the reading I have done on this subject, I had never come across any other
mention of this particular story. Will replied that he couldn't remember,
but that it was something an Auschwitz inmate (perhaps Elie Wiesel, he
mentioned) had said or written.
Will's rigid bias with regard to the Holocaust story and Israel is no
secret. Even William Buckley, himself a staunch friend of Israel and
Zionist interests, has taken note of what he calls Will's "perverse"
partisanship with regard to these matters. (_The Washington Post_, Jan. 27,
1987.) With regard to the Holocaust issue, wrote the founder of _National
Review_ magazine, "Will is losing sight of rather a lot of things." Buckley
took exception to a reference by Will to the "Vatican's contemptible
behavior toward the Holocaust."
George Will begins any discussion on the Middle East, Buckley wrote,
"by siding with Israel on every single point." He went on: "The problem
with devising peaceful solutions in the Mideast, where George Will is
concerned, is that there he sees only a single position: Israel's -- at all
times, in all places. George sometimes sounds a little like Rabbi Kahane"
(founder of the terrorist Jewish Defense League).
As part of a discussion with Will about the double standard that
prevails in America with regard to the Holocaust story, I mentioned the ban
against Austrian President Kurt Waldheim. He was barred from this country,
I pointed out, even though no evidence of his personal involvement in any
atrocity or war crime has ever come to light. At the same time, I went on,
American presidents have rolled out the red carpet for Israeli leaders
Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir -- each of whom has a well-documented
record as a terrorist.
[Photograph captioned, "George F. Will"]
Will had no comment, but when I asked him if he agrees that Waldheim
should be barred from the United States, he said yes. When I asked on what
basis he deserves to be banned, Will replied: because Waldheim is a
"suspected war criminal."
Will said at one point that he has been particularly impressed with the
presentation in Claude Lanzmann's film "Shoah" of the "testimony" of
Treblinka camp barber Abraham Bomba. Contrary to the impression given in
the film, I responded, this "testimony" is actually a staged recitation, the
absurdity of which should be obvious to any really critical person.
Will himself seems to understand this, at least implicitly. Writing in
a November 1985 column, he apparently concluded that Bomba's claim to have
cut hair of doomed Jews inside the Treblinka "gas chamber" is not credible,
deciding instead to shift the action to "the threshold of the gas chamber."
(Lanzmann's nine-and-a-half hour film "Shoah," wrote Will in that 1985
column, is "the noblest use to which cinema -- the technology, the
techniques -- has been put, ever.")
At one point, and suddenly changing the subject, Will asked me why I
think that anti-Semitism exists. I said that this is a complex issue, and
that a better way to put it might be to ask why hostility towards Jews has
persisted over so many centuries, and in so many different cultures.
I went on to say that I largely agreed with what Theodor Herzl, the
founder of the modern Zionist movement, had written (in _The Jewish State_)
on this issue. I mentioned that Herzl, along with many others, often
referred to the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in society as "the
Jewish question." (Grossly misrepresenting this aspect of our conversation
in his column, Will also pretentiously cited the German term, Judenfrage, as
if this version is somehow more sinister.)
When I put this same question to Will, he expressed the view that the
phenomenon of anti-Semitism is probably rooted in Christianity, but said
that he is completely unable to explain why it has persisted through the
centuries. "Why is there is no 'Baptist question'?," he rhetorically asked,
[Continued in next message.]
[Continued from previous message:]
an exclamation that is either disingenuous or manifests intellectual
poverty.
Near the conclusion of our meeting, Will spoke in a tone almost of
exasperation -- of having once stood in a Birkenau barracks with a former
inmate who pointed out the exact place where she had once slept. He cited
this anecdote as particularly compelling reason for his belief in the
Holocaust story.
While I didn't expect the column that Will said he would write about
our meeting would be flattering, I was surprised at just how mean-spirited
and inaccurate it turned out to be. He was unwilling even to concede my
sincerity. (The column appeared in _The Washington Post_ on August 29, and
in dozens of other daily papers on or about the same day.)
As unfair as it was, on balance it was probably more helpful than
harmful. It at least made many more people (most of them relatively
well-educated) aware of the growing skepticism about the orthodox Holocaust
story. And he paid for my lunch.
Letters of response from the IHR were published in perhaps half a dozen
of the papers in which Will's column had appeared. It was also gratifying
to note that letters from other revisionists taking issue with Will on this
matter appeared in at least several daily papers.
George Will's attitude about the Holocaust issue is, unfortunately, all
too typical of millions of relatively well-educated Americans today. His
smug sense of moral and intellectual certainty about this subject is
characteristic of the close-minded who know just enough about this trendy
subject to pronounce on it with arrogance. The self-righteous and almost
reverential way he writes about "the Holocaust" is not merely fashionable
these days, it is all but obligatory -- particularly for a successful
commentator on current affairs.
Will's column concludes with the "good news that this year two million
people" will visit the US government's new "Holocaust Memorial Museum" in
Washington, DC. In the end, though, it will be neither such state-sponsored
temples nor the motives of revisionists that matter, but rather the
historical reality -- which cannot be suppressed forever.
___________________________________________________________________________
A Letter to George Will
George F Will
1208 Thirtieth St., N.W.
Washington, DC 20007
Dear Mr. Will,
While I did not expect a friendly report by you of our conversation
over lunch, I was surprised at just how mean-spirited, unfair and
intellectually dishonest your column turned out to be.
You attribute words to me that are either invented or are crass
distortions of remarks ripped from their context. You attribute the
following sentence to me: "Anti-semitic and anti-democratic, Hitler
understood the necessity for severely hierarchical and racially homogenous
nations." I said no such thing. For you to then go on to write that
"applying these ideas, Weber says..." only adds to the dishonesty.
I did not say that Hitler was "the most philosophical" figure of the
20th Century. What I said was that he was probably the most philosophical
of the great political figures of his time. (As I recall, I added that
Churchill is a possible exception.)
Your presentation of what I said to you about Hitler gives an utterly
false impression of my view of the man. (You may recall my remark to you
that your own statements to me about Hitler could, if taken out of context,
be taken as praise for the man.)
Your assertion that "the deniers 'arguments' always return to what
Weber, like the Nazis, calls 'the Jewish question'" is likewise inaccurate
and dishonest. As you will recall, it was you who first raised the issue of
relations between Jews and non-Jews.
Your portrayal of the arguments of Holocaust "deniers" is grotesquely
inaccurate. No serious revisionist has ever claimed that "Zyclon-B [sic]
gas was too weak to kill." Your contention that revisionists claim that gas
from Zyklon was "too powerful to use for mass murder" or that "the gas
chambers were really showers" is likewise a gross misrepresentation. You
have obviously not taken the time to familiarize yourself -- even
superficially -- with the findings and arguments of revisionist scholars.
Apparently you have simply relied on Lipstadt's grossly distorted portrayal
of revisionist arguments [in her book, _Denying the Holocaust_].
What you wrote about an IHR _Journal_ advertisement for Ingrid
Weckert's book about the "Crystal Night" is similarly dishonest. Contrary
to what you suggest, neither the advertisement, nor Weckert's book, contend
that "the Jews" benefitted from that outburst of violence on November 9th
(not 6th), 1938. While you chide a young reporter for his/her failure to
read Lipstadt's book, it is obvious that you have not read the book by
Weckert you inaccurately describe.
Finally, your assertion that I "torture the past in the hope of making
the future safe for torturers" is simply contemptible.
You should be ashamed of yourself for writing such a column.
Sincerely,
Mark Weber
___________________________________________________________________________
Letters from individual revisionists, and from IHR _Journal_ editor
Weber, responding to George Will's polemic were published in several of the
papers in which the syndicated column had appeared. The entire text of the
IHR's response was published in the Cleveland _Plain Dealer_ and in the St.
Petersburg (Florida) _Times_. In most cases, though, only a portion of the
full text appeared.
Will's column, and Weber's response, touched off an exchange of views
in the "readers' letters" section of the _San Francisco Chronicle_,
including a commentary by an ADL official and this followup letter by Weber
(published September 15) that included the IHR address. It resulted in
about 60 letters and postcards to the IHR from readers seeking further
information. Typical was this comment: "Thanks for your letter to the
editor. You are the biggest secret around. Please send me your
literature."
___________________________________________________________________________
Holocaust Revisionism
Editor -- Contrary to what Richard Hirschhaut of the Anti-Defamation
League asserts, I am not a "neo-Nazi" or a "peddler of hate" (Letters,
September 10).
Such name-calling is ultimately irrelevant anyway. A growing number of
people -- including scholars and, yes, Jews -- have come to accept the
revisionist view of the Holocaust story because they have been persuaded by
the evidence -- not because of their politics, or because they hate Jews.
One young Jewish revisionist, David Cole, has recently come under intense
fire for his video debunking myths about Auschwitz.
Name calling as a substitute for solid arguments does no credit to
anyone. Unfortunately, such polemics seem to be a stock in trade for the
ADL, which has yet to respond forthrightly to specific charges of criminal
wrongdoing in the ADL/Bullock spy case, or to revisionist arguments.
To learn more about what Holocaust revisionists actually say, we offer
literature at no cost (P.O. Box 2739, Newport Beach, CA 92659).
MARK WEBER, editor
Institute for Historical Review
Newport Beach
___________________________________________________________________________
[end of article]
[Reprinted from _The Journal of Historical Review_, P.O. Box 4296, Torrance,
CA 90510, USA. Subscriptions: $40 per year (domestic).]
This article was scanned by the System Operator of the "Banished CPU"
computer bulletin board system, which is located in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
Banished CPU supports Freedom of Speech!
___________________________________________________________
| |
| For 300-9600 bps (3 lines w/V.32) call: (503) 232-5783 |
| For 14400 bps (2 lines w/V.32bis) call: (503) 232-6566 |
|___________________________________________________________|
Sysop: Maynard "the Main Nerd"
[end of file]
-Dan Gannon
From _The Journal of Historical Review_, Vol. 13, Number 6 (Nov./Dec. 1993):
Anti-Revisionist Work Takes Aim at Faurisson
CROSSING SWORDS IN FRANCE ON THE HOLOCAUST ISSUE
_Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust_, by Pierre
Vidal-Naquet. Translated and with a foreword by Jeffrey Mehlman. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1992. Hardcover. 205 (+ xxvi) pages. Notes.
Index. ISBN: 0-231-07458-1.
Reviewed by Mark Weber
In no country has Holocaust revisionism gained greater ground than in
France. Most of the blame or credit for this belongs to one man: Dr.
Robert Faurisson. A victim of numerous costly legal battles, ten physical
attacks (one of them nearly fatal), and an unrelenting media smear campaign,
this specialist of French literature and text and document analysis has had
a profound impact solely because of the solidity and persuasiveness of his
arguments -- arguments bolstered with an astonishing mountain of documents
and compiled in years of meticulous research in archives in at least four
countries.
In the years since he first presented his arguments in two articles
published in the influential Paris daily _Le Monde_ (December 29, 1978, and
January 16, 1979), few efforts have been made to confront the substance of
his arguments. This book by French Jewish scholar Vidal-Naquet is the most
serious try at it.
This is not a new work. It is a collection of four essays that
appeared first in France in 1980, 1981, 1985, 1987, and as a newspaper
article in _Le Monde_ in April 1981. The fact that this largely outdated
work has been pressed into urgent service in 1992 -- with considerable
applause from America's intellectual establishment -- suggests a feeling of
urgency on the part of the powers that be in dealing with the revisionists.
[Photograph captioned, "Pierre Vidal-Naquet"]
_Assassins of Memory_ has been given the most prestigious and
flattering treatment that a book can receive in this country: a laudatory
front page review (along with Lipstadt's _Denying the Holocaust_) in the
nationally-distributed _New York Times Book Review_ (July 11, 1993). And
yet, the appearance of this book is no cause for rejoicing, as psychiatrist
Walter Reich complains in his _Times_ review. "...The Holocaust deniers,"
he writes, "have grown ever more successful in having their arguments
presented -- and heard with receptivity and respect -- in high school
classrooms, on college campuses and on television talk shows."
This unhappy mood verging on despair is further manifest in what is
probably the most remarkable and interesting portion of this book: the 1992
foreword by Jeffrey Mehlman, a professor of French literature at Boston
University. In five pages of Mehlman's foreword, one can find these words
about either his friend, Vidal-Naquet, or about his friend's work:
A tone between rage and pessimism...disenchanted...bizarrely
pessimistic...aberrant...most intriguing [meant pejoratively]...
forced...camp of the dogmatists...dispirited...oddly dispirited
pseudo-conclusion...dispirited...depressing...refusal of open debate
...having written a book about (and against) arguments which he claims
to regard as beneath consideration...stridency and insult...a venting
of outrage...his declaration in _Le Monde_ [Feb. 23, 1972] seems both
like a closing of establishment ranks and an a priori refusal of
discussion...
For years now, Vidal-Naquet has been the Nemesis of Faurisson, even
testifying against him in court. While he has repeatedly claimed that he
does not believe that Faurisson should be brought to trial because of his
views, he has belied this by his actions. In an English-language interview
broadcast on American radio in mid-December 1992, Vidal-Naquet said that he
opposes laws that criminalize revisionism, but also stated: "I hate
Faurisson. If I could, I would kill him personally."
French officials have bestowed numerous honors on Pierre Vidal-Naquet.
His appointment to the Legion d'honneur was announced in the July 14
(Bastille day) 1990 issue of France's official gazette of laws (_Journal
officiel de la Republique francaise_). In the same issue of the _Journal
officiel_ also appeared the text of a remarkable law specifically designed
to criminalize "denial" of the Holocaust, a statute that can rightly be
called the "Lex Faurissonia."
The core of this book is the first essay; its title, "A Paper
Eichmann," refers to Professor Faurisson. Unless the reader pays close
attention to footnotes, he might not realize that Faurisson had already
replied in scrupulous detail to Vidal-Naquet's points in a lengthy essay
published in France in 1982. This reply is mentioned here in just four
footnotes, and no mention whatsoever is made of the 52-page English-language
version, "Response to a Paper Historian" (a reference to Vidal-Naquet),
which appeared in the Spring 1986 issue of this _Journal_.
In his "Response," Faurisson has done a magnificent job of answering
every one of Vidal-Naquet's pertinent points and arguments. In his 56-point
reply, Faurisson sought to leave no stone unturned. Reading this
devastating counter-attack, it is not difficult to understand Vidal-Naquet's
reluctance to let people know of its existence. (It would, of course, be
redundant and impossible to duplicate here what Faurisson has already
written: the reader interested in a scrupulous revisionist response to the
specific points and charges made in this book is referred to the Spring 1986
_Journal_, pp. 21-72.)
For years the "party line" on dealing with revisionists was simply to
ignore them. Confronted with the continued progress of revisionism, this
tactic has given way to a campaign of misrepresentation, vilification,
censorship, fines and violence. So clever and deceitful are the Holocaust
revisionists (so the argument goes), that the public is unable to see
through their specious arguments. Therefore, they must be attacked AD
HOMINEM and never permitted an opportunity to respond.
In his preface, Vidal-Naquet accordingly insists that: "One can and
should enter into a discussion concerning the 'revisionists'...but one
should not enter into debate with the 'revisionists'." Faurisson, in his
essay, "My Life as a Revisionist" (published in the Spring 1989 issue of
this _Journal_), provides a tart reply to this comment. After taking note
of some of Vidal-Naquet's reluctant but significant concessions to truth
(pp. 53-55), Faurisson wrote:
To draw an analogy from sports, Vidal-Naquet thinks he is better than
Faurisson at tennis; not only that, he claims that Faurisson cheats at
tennis. Should the latter suggest a match, before a referee and in
public, Vidal-Naquet would respond that he would certainly like to
play, but only on the condition that there be no opponent. He would
ask the judge to declare him the winner in advance; the public's job
would simply be to confirm the decision.
In the opening sentence of his chapter "Theses on Revisionism,"
[Continued in next message.]
[Continued from previous message:]
Vidal-Naquet writes: "I shall call 'revisionism' the doctrine according to
which the genocide practiced by Nazi Germany against Jews and Gypsies did
not exist..." This definition is dangerously ambiguous because he provides
no definition of genocide. Every serious revisionist -- including Faurisson
-- readily acknowledges that European Jews were victims of a cruel and harsh
policy -- one that could well be described as genocidal, but one not
essentially different than the treatment many other peoples have endured
through the ages.
A mistake that strikes closer to home is Vidal-Naquet's assertion that
"In the United States, revisionism is above all the speciality of a
Californian group, W.A. Carto's Liberty Lobby." (p. 90). Similarly untrue
is Vidal-Naquet's assertion (p. 184) that "Carto finances the _Journal of
Historical Review_."
This book's silly title is typical of the Holocaust literature of our
day, even this supposedly serious work. It suggests that revisionists are
intellectual criminals who are murdering the sacred "memory" of Holocaust
survivors. Implicit here is the notion that it is a sin, a sacrilege, to
question the "memory" of (Jewish) "martyrs."
Well, does this include the now-discredited "memory" of the five
witnesses in the Demjanjuk trial who, under oath, identified John Demjanjuk
as a mass murderer at Treblinka? Who are the "assassins" of those
"memories"? And who "assassinated" the "memories" of those who talk about
soap bars made from Jewish corpses?
Or what about the "memory" of the prominent former Auschwitz inmate
Rudolf Vrba? In sworn testimony in the 1985 trial in Toronto of Ernst
Zundel, Vrba calculated, based on personal observation, that at
Auschwitz-Birkenau during a 25-month period (April 1942 to April 1944), the
Germans had "gassed" 1,765,000 Jews, including 150,000 from France. Later,
under rigorous questioning, this impostor admitted to having resorted to
"poetic license" in making these claims. (See Faurisson's essay, "The
Zundel Trial," Winter 1988-89 _Journal_, pp. 420-421.)
Similarly, who is guilty of "assassinating" the "memory" of those who
once claimed to have witnessed mass killings by electrocution at Belzec and
Auschwitz? And who "assassinated" the "memory" of those who once recounted
executions at Treblinka in "steam chambers"?
Although Vidal-Naquet vows, in his preface, that "I have nothing to
reply to them [revisionists] and will not do so," a good portion of this
book is devoted precisely to that purpose. He also makes a few grudging
concessions to revisionist arguments. He writes (p. 97) that
there was no gas chamber functioning at Dachau, that _The Diary of Anne
Frank_, as it has been published in various languages, raises problems
of coherence if not of authenticity, [and that]...Krema I, that of the
Auschwitz [main] camp, was reconstructed after the war by the Poles.
In recent years, every serious anti-revisionist has been obliged to make
concession after concession to the revisionists in order to salvage what he
believes is the core of the Holocaust story.
In the two _Le Monde_ articles mentioned earlier, Faurisson insisted on
the physical and chemical impossibilities of the "Nazi gas chambers." An
alarmed French intellectual establishment responded to these articles with a
statement -- co-authored by Vidal-Naquet and signed by 34 scholars -- that
will certainly be long remembered as one of most shameful in that country's
intellectual history. The declaration (published in _Le Monde_, Feb. 21,
1979, and cited by Mehlman in his foreword to this book), concludes with the
words:
The question of how TECHNICALLY such a mass murder was possible should
not be raised. It was technically possible because it occurred. This
is the necessary starting point for all historical investigation on the
subject. It has fallen to us to recall that point with due simplicity:
there is not nor can there be a debate over the existence of the gas
chambers.
It has proven necessary for the defenders of the Holocaust story to
ignore even this injunction. Anti-revisionist researchers such as
Jean-Claude Pressac have devoted considerable time and energy to an effort
to show precisely "how technically such a mass murder was possible."
Another early retort to Faurisson was an article in _Le Monde_,
fittingly headlined "An Abundance of Evidence," that claimed that proofs of
execution gas chambers are plentiful. As Mehlman notes, even leading
Holocaust historians must now admit that there is no such "abundance" --
merely tortured interpretations of documentary evidence. Even once widely
quoted "testimonies" of "survivors" and famed postwar "confessions" of
German officials are being abandoned. As Mehlman goes on to inform the
reader, even Princeton University professor Arno Mayer (himself Jewish) in
his 1989 book, _Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The "Final Solution" in
History_, acknowledged that "Sources for the study of the gas chambers are
at once rare and unreliable," and that more Jews perished at Auschwitz as
victims of disease than were put to death -- a view at odds with the
"official" Auschwitz extermination story.
This book concludes with words of doubt: "Will truth have the last
word? How one would like to be sure of it..." With sadness, Mehlman aptly
comments on a striking contrast of moods:
Whereas Vidal-Naquet is left dispirited at the end of this volume as to
the future prospects of truth, Zola's great slogan has fallen --
diabolically -- into the adversary camp. "Historical truth is on the
march," writes Faurisson, and "one is hard put to see who might stop
it."
___________________________________________________________________________
"Be not intimidated, therefore, by any terrors, from publishing with
the utmost freedom whatever can be warranted by the laws of your country;
nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberty by any pretenses of
politeness, delicacy or decency. These, as they are often used, are but
three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice."
--John Adams
___________________________________________________________________________
[end of article]
[Reprinted from _The Journal of Historical Review_, P.O. Box 4296, Torrance,
CA 90510, USA. Subscriptions: $40 per year (domestic).]
This article was scanned by the System Operator of the "Banished CPU"
computer bulletin board system, which is located in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
Banished CPU supports Freedom of Speech!
___________________________________________________________
| |
| For 300-9600 bps (3 lines w/V.32) call: (503) 232-5783 |
| For 14400 bps (2 lines w/V.32bis) call: (503) 232-6566 |
|___________________________________________________________|
Sysop: Maynard "the Main Nerd"
[end of file]
-Dan Gannon
From _The Journal of Historical Review_, Vol. 13, Number 6 (Nov./Dec. 1993):
Anti-Revisionist Work Takes Aim at Faurisson
CROSSING SWORDS IN FRANCE ON THE HOLOCAUST ISSUE
_Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust_, by Pierre
Vidal-Naquet. Translated and with a foreword by Jeffrey Mehlman. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1992. Hardcover. 205 (+ xxvi) pages. Notes.
Index. ISBN: 0-231-07458-1.
Reviewed by Mark Weber
In no country has Holocaust revisionism gained greater ground than in
France. Most of the blame or credit for this belongs to one man: Dr.
Robert Faurisson. A victim of numerous costly legal battles, ten physical
attacks (one of them nearly fatal), and an unrelenting media smear campaign,
this specialist of French literature and text and document analysis has had
a profound impact solely because of the solidity and persuasiveness of his
arguments -- arguments bolstered with an astonishing mountain of documents
and compiled in years of meticulous research in archives in at least four
countries.
In the years since he first presented his arguments in two articles
published in the influential Paris daily _Le Monde_ (December 29, 1978, and
January 16, 1979), few efforts have been made to confront the substance of
his arguments. This book by French Jewish scholar Vidal-Naquet is the most
serious try at it.
This is not a new work. It is a collection of four essays that
appeared first in France in 1980, 1981, 1985, 1987, and as a newspaper
article in _Le Monde_ in April 1981. The fact that this largely outdated
work has been pressed into urgent service in 1992 -- with considerable
applause from America's intellectual establishment -- suggests a feeling of
urgency on the part of the powers that be in dealing with the revisionists.
[Photograph captioned, "Pierre Vidal-Naquet"]
_Assassins of Memory_ has been given the most prestigious and
flattering treatment that a book can receive in this country: a laudatory
front page review (along with Lipstadt's _Denying the Holocaust_) in the
nationally-distributed _New York Times Book Review_ (July 11, 1993). And
yet, the appearance of this book is no cause for rejoicing, as psychiatrist
Walter Reich complains in his _Times_ review. "...The Holocaust deniers,"
he writes, "have grown ever more successful in having their arguments
presented -- and heard with receptivity and respect -- in high school
classrooms, on college campuses and on television talk shows."
This unhappy mood verging on despair is further manifest in what is
probably the most remarkable and interesting portion of this book: the 1992
foreword by Jeffrey Mehlman, a professor of French literature at Boston
University. In five pages of Mehlman's foreword, one can find these words
about either his friend, Vidal-Naquet, or about his friend's work:
A tone between rage and pessimism...disenchanted...bizarrely
pessimistic...aberrant...most intriguing [meant pejoratively]...
forced...camp of the dogmatists...dispirited...oddly dispirited
pseudo-conclusion...dispirited...depressing...refusal of open debate
...having written a book about (and against) arguments which he claims
to regard as beneath consideration...stridency and insult...a venting
of outrage...his declaration in _Le Monde_ [Feb. 23, 1972] seems both
like a closing of establishment ranks and an a priori refusal of
discussion...
For years now, Vidal-Naquet has been the Nemesis of Faurisson, even
testifying against him in court. While he has repeatedly claimed that he
does not believe that Faurisson should be brought to trial because of his
views, he has belied this by his actions. In an English-language interview
broadcast on American radio in mid-December 1992, Vidal-Naquet said that he
opposes laws that criminalize revisionism, but also stated: "I hate
Faurisson. If I could, I would kill him personally."
French officials have bestowed numerous honors on Pierre Vidal-Naquet.
His appointment to the Legion d'honneur was announced in the July 14
(Bastille day) 1990 issue of France's official gazette of laws (_Journal
officiel de la Republique francaise_). In the same issue of the _Journal
officiel_ also appeared the text of a remarkable law specifically designed
to criminalize "denial" of the Holocaust, a statute that can rightly be
called the "Lex Faurissonia."
The core of this book is the first essay; its title, "A Paper
Eichmann," refers to Professor Faurisson. Unless the reader pays close
attention to footnotes, he might not realize that Faurisson had already
replied in scrupulous detail to Vidal-Naquet's points in a lengthy essay
published in France in 1982. This reply is mentioned here in just four
footnotes, and no mention whatsoever is made of the 52-page English-language
version, "Response to a Paper Historian" (a reference to Vidal-Naquet),
which appeared in the Spring 1986 issue of this _Journal_.
In his "Response," Faurisson has done a magnificent job of answering
every one of Vidal-Naquet's pertinent points and arguments. In his 56-point
reply, Faurisson sought to leave no stone unturned. Reading this
devastating counter-attack, it is not difficult to understand Vidal-Naquet's
reluctance to let people know of its existence. (It would, of course, be
redundant and impossible to duplicate here what Faurisson has already
written: the reader interested in a scrupulous revisionist response to the
specific points and charges made in this book is referred to the Spring 1986
_Journal_, pp. 21-72.)
For years the "party line" on dealing with revisionists was simply to
ignore them. Confronted with the continued progress of revisionism, this
tactic has given way to a campaign of misrepresentation, vilification,
censorship, fines and violence. So clever and deceitful are the Holocaust
revisionists (so the argument goes), that the public is unable to see
through their specious arguments. Therefore, they must be attacked AD
HOMINEM and never permitted an opportunity to respond.
In his preface, Vidal-Naquet accordingly insists that: "One can and
should enter into a discussion concerning the 'revisionists'...but one
should not enter into debate with the 'revisionists'." Faurisson, in his
essay, "My Life as a Revisionist" (published in the Spring 1989 issue of
this _Journal_), provides a tart reply to this comment. After taking note
of some of Vidal-Naquet's reluctant but significant concessions to truth
(pp. 53-55), Faurisson wrote:
To draw an analogy from sports, Vidal-Naquet thinks he is better than
Faurisson at tennis; not only that, he claims that Faurisson cheats at
tennis. Should the latter suggest a match, before a referee and in
public, Vidal-Naquet would respond that he would certainly like to
play, but only on the condition that there be no opponent. He would
ask the judge to declare him the winner in advance; the public's job
would simply be to confirm the decision.
In the opening sentence of his chapter "Theses on Revisionism,"
[Continued in next message.]
[Continued from previous message:]
Vidal-Naquet writes: "I shall call 'revisionism' the doctrine according to
which the genocide practiced by Nazi Germany against Jews and Gypsies did
not exist..." This definition is dangerously ambiguous because he provides
no definition of genocide. Every serious revisionist -- including Faurisson
-- readily acknowledges that European Jews were victims of a cruel and harsh
policy -- one that could well be described as genocidal, but one not
essentially different than the treatment many other peoples have endured
through the ages.
A mistake that strikes closer to home is Vidal-Naquet's assertion that
"In the United States, revisionism is above all the speciality of a
Californian group, W.A. Carto's Liberty Lobby." (p. 90). Similarly untrue
is Vidal-Naquet's assertion (p. 184) that "Carto finances the _Journal of
Historical Review_."
This book's silly title is typical of the Holocaust literature of our
day, even this supposedly serious work. It suggests that revisionists are
intellectual criminals who are murdering the sacred "memory" of Holocaust
survivors. Implicit here is the notion that it is a sin, a sacrilege, to
question the "memory" of (Jewish) "martyrs."
Well, does this include the now-discredited "memory" of the five
witnesses in the Demjanjuk trial who, under oath, identified John Demjanjuk
as a mass murderer at Treblinka? Who are the "assassins" of those
"memories"? And who "assassinated" the "memories" of those who talk about
soap bars made from Jewish corpses?
Or what about the "memory" of the prominent former Auschwitz inmate
Rudolf Vrba? In sworn testimony in the 1985 trial in Toronto of Ernst
Zundel, Vrba calculated, based on personal observation, that at
Auschwitz-Birkenau during a 25-month period (April 1942 to April 1944), the
Germans had "gassed" 1,765,000 Jews, including 150,000 from France. Later,
under rigorous questioning, this impostor admitted to having resorted to
"poetic license" in making these claims. (See Faurisson's essay, "The
Zundel Trial," Winter 1988-89 _Journal_, pp. 420-421.)
Similarly, who is guilty of "assassinating" the "memory" of those who
once claimed to have witnessed mass killings by electrocution at Belzec and
Auschwitz? And who "assassinated" the "memory" of those who once recounted
executions at Treblinka in "steam chambers"?
Although Vidal-Naquet vows, in his preface, that "I have nothing to
reply to them [revisionists] and will not do so," a good portion of this
book is devoted precisely to that purpose. He also makes a few grudging
concessions to revisionist arguments. He writes (p. 97) that
there was no gas chamber functioning at Dachau, that _The Diary of Anne
Frank_, as it has been published in various languages, raises problems
of coherence if not of authenticity, [and that]...Krema I, that of the
Auschwitz [main] camp, was reconstructed after the war by the Poles.
In recent years, every serious anti-revisionist has been obliged to make
concession after concession to the revisionists in order to salvage what he
believes is the core of the Holocaust story.
In the two _Le Monde_ articles mentioned earlier, Faurisson insisted on
the physical and chemical impossibilities of the "Nazi gas chambers." An
alarmed French intellectual establishment responded to these articles with a
statement -- co-authored by Vidal-Naquet and signed by 34 scholars -- that
will certainly be long remembered as one of most shameful in that country's
intellectual history. The declaration (published in _Le Monde_, Feb. 21,
1979, and cited by Mehlman in his foreword to this book), concludes with the
words:
The question of how TECHNICALLY such a mass murder was possible should
not be raised. It was technically possible because it occurred. This
is the necessary starting point for all historical investigation on the
subject. It has fallen to us to recall that point with due simplicity:
there is not nor can there be a debate over the existence of the gas
chambers.
It has proven necessary for the defenders of the Holocaust story to
ignore even this injunction. Anti-revisionist researchers such as
Jean-Claude Pressac have devoted considerable time and energy to an effort
to show precisely "how technically such a mass murder was possible."
Another early retort to Faurisson was an article in _Le Monde_,
fittingly headlined "An Abundance of Evidence," that claimed that proofs of
execution gas chambers are plentiful. As Mehlman notes, even leading
Holocaust historians must now admit that there is no such "abundance" --
merely tortured interpretations of documentary evidence. Even once widely
quoted "testimonies" of "survivors" and famed postwar "confessions" of
German officials are being abandoned. As Mehlman goes on to inform the
reader, even Princeton University professor Arno Mayer (himself Jewish) in
his 1989 book, _Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The "Final Solution" in
History_, acknowledged that "Sources for the study of the gas chambers are
at once rare and unreliable," and that more Jews perished at Auschwitz as
victims of disease than were put to death -- a view at odds with the
"official" Auschwitz extermination story.
This book concludes with words of doubt: "Will truth have the last
word? How one would like to be sure of it..." With sadness, Mehlman aptly
comments on a striking contrast of moods:
Whereas Vidal-Naquet is left dispirited at the end of this volume as to
the future prospects of truth, Zola's great slogan has fallen --
diabolically -- into the adversary camp. "Historical truth is on the
march," writes Faurisson, and "one is hard put to see who might stop
it."
___________________________________________________________________________
"Be not intimidated, therefore, by any terrors, from publishing with
the utmost freedom whatever can be warranted by the laws of your country;
nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberty by any pretenses of
politeness, delicacy or decency. These, as they are often used, are but
three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice."
--John Adams
___________________________________________________________________________
[end of article]
[Reprinted from _The Journal of Historical Review_, P.O. Box 4296, Torrance,
CA 90510, USA. Subscriptions: $40 per year (domestic).]
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From: dgannon@banished.com
Subject: LIPSTADT'S AND OTHER DECEIVERS' BOOKS [1/6]
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From _The Journal of Historical Review_, Vol. 13, Number 6 (Nov./Dec. 1993):
REVIEWS
New Books Seek to Discredit "Growing Threat" of "Holocaust Denial"
_Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory_ by Deborah
Lipstadt. New York: Free Press, 1993. Hardcover. 278 pages. Notes.
Index. $22.95. ISBN: 0-02-919235-8.;
_Holocaust Denial_ by Kenneth S. Stern. New York: American Jewish
Committee, 1993. Softcover. 193 pages. Notes. Index. $12.95. ISBN:
0-87495-102-X.;
_Hitler's Apologists: The Anti-Semitic Propaganda of Holocaust
"Revisionism"_ edited by Alan M. Schwartz. New York: The Anti-Defamation
League, 1993. Softcover. 86 pages. Notes.
Reviewed by
Theodore J. O'Keefe
The earlier method of opposing Holocaust Revisionism was to ignore it
entirely as a scholarly, historiographical phenomenon (except for a few
dismissive phrases about "flat earthers") in favor of attacking it as a
political threat, branding it as "neo-Nazi," "anti-Semitic," etc. With the
exception of Bradley Smith's radio talk show appearances and college
newspaper advertisements, Revisionism's opponents have been able to impose
an effective blackout on Revisionist challenges to the Holocaust. The
result? In the United States, some 16 years after the title of Professor
Arthur Butz's _Hoax of the Twentieth Century_ was mistakenly reported by
_The New York Times_ in its first notice of Holocaust Revisionism, there are
scores of millions who know that there is a determined movement that
challenges the factuality of the alleged World-War-II genocide of the Jews,
and tens of millions of Americans who, according to the latest polls,
question it themselves.
___________________________________________________________________________
Theodore J. O'Keefe is an IHR editor. Educated at Harvard, he is the author
of numerous published articles and reviews on historical and political
subjects.
___________________________________________________________________________
Whether the growth of this opposition occurred so much in spite of the
blackout of what the Holocaust Revisionists say and have written, or rather
because of an increasing aversion to the spread of what one Jewish writer
has called "Holocaustomania" is unclear, but obviously the blackout hasn't
worked to its proponents' satisfaction. Thus the powerful lobby which
propagates (obligatory) reverence for the "Holocaust" has decided to mount
an elaborate propaganda campaign against the Revisionists. This time, as
the Holocausters march into the fray, some of them are proclaiming a new
theme: confronting and defeating Revisionist scholarship.
Generous Help
Two of the three books here under review advertise themselves as
setting off on this new demarche; the third, ADL's _Hitler's Apologists_,
sticks unabashedly to the tried and true tactics of what might be called
"McCarthyism."
Chief among these three intellectually slight works is Deborah
Lipstadt's _Denying the Holocaust_, a labored expose that has been years in
the gestation (the _New York Times_ devoted a major fanfare to Lipstadt's
lucubrations on the Revisionists as far back as June 20, 1988), yet manages
to give off telltale signs of desperate, last-minute suturing and
low-voltage jolts of stylistic electricity, by a crew of editorial Igors in
New York City.
The book that shambles forth from the Free Press (a division of
Macmillan in Manhattan) is, as author Lipstadt herself acknowledges, heavily
dependent on the assistance of professional character assassins from Jewish
so-called "defense organizations": operatives of the Anti-Defamation
League, the Canadian Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the
World Jewish Congress' Institute for Jewish Affairs in London, and the Simon
Wiesenthal Center all receive thanks in the preface.
_Denying the Holocaust_ is copyrighted by something called the Vidal
Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism of The Hebrew
University of Jerusalem (as a perquisite of which the author may have
received the stylish haircut pictured on the dust jacket).
What's actually new about Lipstadt's approach? Not much, despite the
author's all-but breathless intimations that she's the first researcher who
has dared to look Holocaust Revisionism in the face, and despite the
hosannas which have poured forth from the book review sections of the _New
York Times_, _Washington Post_, and other newspapers. Although the author,
proudly enthroned on something called the "Dorot Chair in Modern Jewish and
Holocaust Studies" at Emory University, makes much of the need to analyze
the Revisionist case against the Holocaust, in sum her promised "exposure"
of the Revisionists has little to do with confronting Revisionist
scholarship.
Ineptitude and Deceit
While Professor Lipstadt is less than honest elsewhere in her book, she
is disarmingly frank about her dogmas and purposes at the outset: "The
existence of the Holocaust [is] not a matter of debate" (p. 1); Revisionists
are "extremist antisemites" who "camouflage their hateful ideology" "under
the guise of scholarship..." (p. 3).
But how to expose them, other than by proclaiming that the Holocaust is
beyond question (which comes perilously close to relegating it to the realm
of religion) and calling the Revisionists names, particularly when she has
haughtily announced her refusal to be "sucked into a debate that is no
debate and an argument that is no argument"?
In fact, her promised "analysis" and "exposure" is in large measure
derived from the tried-and-true methods of the ADL and its junior partners
at the Wiesenthal Center and elsewhere. Lipstadt parades the same labeling
and smear techniques as the slick dossiers churned out by the "watchdog
groups": antisemite/neoNazi/fascist/pofessional-hatemonger/bigot/Hitlerian/
Holocaust-denier. As you flip through the pages of _Denying the Holocaust_,
the epithets all seem to run together into a single quavering wail.
Where Professor Lipstadt can't believably pin one of her slanderous
labels on her subjects, or has perhaps temporarily tired of impugning their
supposed motives, she is forced to attempt, as best she can, historical
analysis and scholarly argument. However, she gives scant evidence of any
grasp of historical knowledge or method, and more than a little indication
of scholarly indolence and a timidity about confronting the masters of
Holocaust Revisionism in their areas of expertise. Her analytic efforts are
further vitiated by errors, big and small; omissions, deliberate or in
ignorance; and distortions and misstatements, that, coming from any real
scholar, can only be called deceitful. Lipstadt's ineptitude, after years
of ballyhooed toil amid Revisionist writings, is only underscored by her
pitiful efforts to take refuge in her own academic credentials (by the way,
all the evidence indicates that she is unable to read Revisionist works in
the original French or German) and those of the numerous professional
historian-hacks whose authority she invokes. These she brandishes, like
Medusa shaking her snaky locks, at the Revisionists in hopes of petrifying
these alleged amateurs. But this tactic will impress only other amateurs.
To catalogue the slanders and mistakes of _Denying the Holocaust_, let
alone refute them, would require almost a book itself, and despite all the
media trumpet blasts, this book isn't worth the effort. Still, a look at
some of the more important techniques that serve Lipstadt, as well as the
rest of the now sweating wardens of Holocaust orthodoxy, is perhaps of some
merit.
Word Wizards
Chief among these is one surprisingly simple: a reliance on the
emotive and minatory power of the Word. For Lipstadt and her fellows, words
such as "antisemite" (her spelling), "neo-Nazi," "denier," "Holocaust,"
"memory" and the like aren't so much (if they are at all) labels for
independent realities as they are weapons, first for controlling discourse,
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From: dgannon@banished.com
Subject: LIPSTADT'S AND OTHER DECEIVERS' BOOKS [2/6]
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then for anathematizing opponents, and finally for striking directly at the
central nervous systems of the population at large. Thanks to the Holocaust
lobby's ready access to the international media, efforts by Revisionists to
reverse the process by labeling the other side "Exterminationists" and the
like tend to strike even sympathizers as odd, labored, and reeking of
reactive, TU QUOQUE ("you too").
Nevertheless, it is indispensable for Revisionists untiringly to
confront and mercilessly to dissect the shibboleths of the word wizards: as
in this book, deceptive labels are 90 percent of their case. "What is the
Holocaust?" Revisionists must ask, and why does "denying" it sound so direr
and more unreasonable than merely questioning whether the Germans had a
policy to exterminate the Jews, resulting in the deaths of around six
million of them, largely in gas chambers?
What is an "antisemite"? If the word denotes merely someone who
opposes the Jews, what's wrong with using a term that says so?^1 (And why
don't we hear more of "anti-Hamitism" and "anti-Japhetism"?)
Was Robert Faurisson correct when he suggested, in a 1989 article, that
the Jewish "memory" that professional Holocausters so often invoke might
more accurately be defined as the "beliefs" and "legends" of the Jews?
___________________________________________________________________________
1. This reviewer recalls reading a "scholarly" article -- author, title and
source long forgotten -- on the elaborate punctilio that governs the
orthography of this term so dear to anti-defamatory bigdomes. "Anti-Semite"
was eschewed as seeming to indicate a (possibly rational) opposition to
"Semitism" and "Semites," whereas the unhyphenated, uncapitalized form
points to the unconscious miasmas of unreasoned bigotry that lead
"antisemites" to oppose US handouts to Israel, a Holocaust museum on every
block, etc. There remain simpler Jewish souls, however, who favor the term
"Jew-hater" for such creatures.
___________________________________________________________________________
Historical Revisionism
For those who doubt that Lipstadt's long tussle with Holocaust
revisionism is based largely on her manipulation of a handful of empty
words, a more specific analysis of her use of the terms "Holocaust" and
"Holocaust denial" is in order.
After decreeing that the "Holocaust" is not subject to debate, it is
the author's ploy to equate the word with the facts supposed to underlie it.
She approvingly quotes (p. 198) the following pontification emanating from
the Duke University history department shortly after the appearance of
Bradley Smith's full-page advertisement challenging several well-known tales
of the Holocaust:
That historians are constantly engaged in historical revision is
certainly correct; however, what historians do is very different from
this advertisement. Historical revision of major events is not
concerned with the actuality of these events; rather it concerns their
historical interpretation -- their causes and consequences generally.
Sorry, profs, but that sophomoric stance wouldn't fool many college
freshmen -- at least not in the days when a demonstrated ability to think
critically was a prerequisite for college admission, let alone this or that
professorship. In this reviewer's freshman days, students learned quickly
that many alleged "major events" -- such as "the fall of the Roman Empire,"
"the Middle Ages," and "the Renaissance" -- are in large measure names and
interpretations coined by historians based on their evaluation of a large,
but still painfully limited, amount of evidence. Although perhaps various
proponents of this or that historical interpretation might have welcomed
anathemas aimed at their opponents, this reviewer doesn't recall any of them
attempting to turn logic on its head by invoking the "reality" of the
"Dorian invasion" or the "Ottonian renaissance" to validate each component
of the theory, as Lipstadt and her colleagues have tried to do to save the
lampshades, shrunken heads, Jewish soap bars, and spectral gas chambers
attacked by Smith in his campus ads. Nor, outside of the flacks from the
Holocaust lobby, has he ever encountered the cheap trick of representing a
historian who doubted the applicability of the name "Dark Ages" for a period
in European history as arguing that the centuries in question "never
happened."
Exercise in Evasion
Having conjured the "Holocaust" into existence without worrying about
such inconsequential matters as the documents ordering, planning, and
budgeting it, or the forensic tests establishing the murder weapons, or the
autopsies showing deaths by gassing, Lipstadt performs her next
sleight-of-hand trick. This is to impose her own name for Revisionism,
"denial" -- with all its shopworn Freudian implications -- on her targets.
Focusing on "denial" and "deniers" as on some pathological syndrome allows
her to "analyze" them without reference to the full body of Revisionist
scholarship, of which she seems woefully uninformed, even after more than
half a decade's study.
In fact, most of her book is an exercise in evasion of precisely that
body of Revisionist findings that would seem to have made her work
necessary. Conversely, an inordinate amount of _Denying the Holocaust_ is
devoted to tracing the antecedents of contemporary Holocaust Revisionist
scholarship.
Her book is front-loaded with Revisionists and Revisionist arguments
which have been long since been incorporated, superseded, and in some cases
corrected by later Revisionists. Indeed, Lipstadt devotes five chapters,
spanning 91 pages, to the predecessors of Arthur Butz, whereas Butz and his
contemporaries and successors, including Robert Faurisson, Fred Leuchter,
and the Institute for Historical Review, get a measly three chapters and an
appendix comprising a comparatively modest 64 pages. (It should be noted
that much of this text, particularly that concerning the IHR, is rife with
the sort of irrelevancies that fill the pages of ADL's "exposes": the life
and times of Willis Carto and David McCalden, headlines from _The
Spotlight_, and the like.) Other chapters virtually devoid of analysis of
Revisionist argument include her Chapter One, largely devoted to lamenting
an alleged tolerance for Holocaust Revisionism in the mass media (that is,
agonizing that a good number of radio and television talk shows have not
blacklisted revisionists), and a speedy, superficial tour of "denial"
abroad. In Chapters Ten she marshals such arguments as she can to support
the banning of Revisionist advertisements and articles from college
newspapers in the wake of Bradley Smith's remarkably successful campaign of
two years ago. Chapter Eleven, called "Watchers on the Rhine," is her
attempt to chart "the future course of Holocaust denial," and to prescribe
what must be done to thwart the Revisionism and an evidently looming rise
of the Fourth Reich.
Paul Rassinier
Characteristic of her technique is the way she handles the work of two
courageous pioneers of Revisionism, Paul Rassinier and Austin App. Each of
these is accorded considerable space in _Denying the Holocaust_, largely to
focus on flaws and errors, many of them minor, in their work.
Most readers won't know that where both men genuinely erred,
Revisionists have long since corrected them. Rassinier's mistakes on Jewish
population statistics, avidly cited by the author (pp. 58-62) were set right
by _Journal_ editor Mark Weber in testimony at the second (1988) trial of
Ernst Zundel, a trial with which Lipstadt should be familiar since she
dwells on it at some length and has had access to the transcript. If that
weren't enough, however, Weber summarized his corrective testimony in the
_Journal_ ("My Role in the Zundel Trial," Winter 1989-90, pp. 391, 415-416),
and included three pages of specific corrections in an "afterword" to the
IHR's most recent edition of Rassinier's key Revisionist writings, _The
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From: dgannon@banished.com
Subject: LIPSTADT'S AND OTHER DECEIVERS' BOOKS [3/6]
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Holocaust Story and the Lies of Ulysses_ (pp. 414-416).
Although Lipstadt states rather murkily that what she calls Rassinier's
"use of the numbers game ... established a pattern followed by all deniers
who try to prove that the death tolls are not valid" (p. 58), the
knowledgeable reader searches in vain for evidence of this: she has omitted
any and all mention of Walter Sanning's key book _The Dissolution of Eastern
European Jewry_; the posthumous article "How Many Jews Were Eliminated by
the Nazis?" in the Spring 1983 Journal (pp. 61-81) by Professor Frank
Hankins, a longtime demographer and former president of the American
Sociological Society; and Swedish demographer Carl Nordling's two _Journal_
studies, "The Jewish Establishment under Nazi Threat and Domination" Summer
1990 (pp. 195-209) and "How Many Jews Died in the German Concentration
Camps," Fall 1991 (pp. 335-344).
Austin App
Similarly, Lipstadt has chosen to give Austin App an entire chapter,
eighteen pages long, subtitled "The World of Immoral Equivalency," by which
she means to say that App dared to compare such genuine, but comparatively
unpublicized and certainly unpunished Allied atrocities as the mass
expulsion of millions of Germans from their ancestral homelands, or the mass
rapes carried out especially by conquering Soviet troops, to those alleged
German atrocities of which we never cease to hear and for which the United
States and other governments still dog innocent men, such as John Demjanjuk,
to the present day.
While Dr. App, a member of the Editorial Advisory Committee of this
Journal from its founding until his death in 1984, deserves the highest
praise for his indomitable courage, his unflagging loyalty to his German
roots, and his dedication to propagating the case for the German nation and
people during and after the Second World War, only a writer less than
familiar with the progress of revisionist research could claim that App
"played a central role in the development of Holocaust denial" (p. 85), or
that "his major contribution was to formulate eight axioms that have come to
serve as the founding principles of the California-based Institute for
Historical Review and as the basic postulates of Holocaust denial" (p. 86).
In fact, a survey of the more than 50 issues of _The Journal of Historical
Review_ published to date reveals only a single article by Dr. App ("The
Holocaust Put in Perspective," Vol. 1, no. 1 [Spring 1980]), an obituary
tribute to him (Winter 1984, pp. 446-450), and a handful of mentions of his
incisive but not always meticulous pamphlets.
It should not be necessary, by the way, to point out that Dr. App, a
life-long Catholic who never wrote a word against the republican form of
government its founding fathers bequeathed his native America, was by no
stretch of the imagination a "fascist," as Lipstadt terms him (p. 87).
Arthur Butz
Bad as is her work on Rassinier, App, and other precursors of
contemporary Holocaust Revisionism such as David Hoggan or "Richard Harwood"
(Richard Verrall), Lipstadt's real inadequacies as a scholar begin to shine
when at length she attempts to analyze and expose the work of Dr. Arthur R.
Butz and the Revisionist scholars who have followed him.
Her tack on Professor Butz and his epoch-making _Hoax of the Twentieth
Century_ is to represent Butz as a master of TROMPE-L'OEIL, assuming "a
veneer of scholarship and the impression of seriousness and objectivity" (p.
123) to fool the unwary. To that end, she claims, he provided _The Hoax_
with what Lipstadt calls "the hallmarks of scholarly works," that is, "the
requisite myriad notes and large bibliography" (p. 124), and criticized the
work of earlier Revisionists as well as "German wartime behavior" -- a ploy
"that was clearly designed to disarm innocent readers and enhance Butz's
aura of scholarly objectivity" (p. 124).
Lipstadt's efforts to unmask Butz's pseudo-scholarly trumpery and
hidden "agenda" are vitiated by both her ineptitude and her dishonesty. She
bypasses both the central issues of _The Hoax_ and Butz's often complex
argumentation to reduce its theses to caricatures. Thus, her chapter makes
no reference either to Butz's key (and as yet unanswered) question as to how
the mass gassings at the huge, comparatively open, and closely monitored
Auschwitz complex could go unnoticed and unreported for more than two years,
or to the dual interpretations of German public-health measures at Auschwitz
(brilliantly summarized on page 131 of _The Hoax_). Instead, Lipstadt would
rather dog Butz for his appearance at a meeting sponsored by Minister Louis
Farrakhan, or for the fact that "his books [sic] are promoted and
distributed by the Ku Klux Klan and other [sic] neo-Nazi organizations" (p.
126).
Where Lipstadt does lay hands on what Butz actually writes, she almost
invariably misrepresents, misstates, or otherwise garbles his positions.
Butz does not argue that "the key to perpetrating the hoax was the forging
of massive numbers of documents" (p. 127). As the discerning reader will
discover by checking the citation from _The Hoax_ that Lipstadt cites here,
Butz in fact wrote of "a fabrication constructed of perjury, forgery,
distortion of fact and misrepresentation of documents" (_Hoax_, p. 173).
Lipstadt similarly badly misconstrues (or misstates) Butz's thesis on
why so many postwar German defendants refused to challenge the extermination
allegations. The vast majority of them did not "plead guilty" to the
Holocaust, as she clearly implies (p. 130). Rather than argue (to their
extreme peril in the context of the show-trial hysteria) that it hadn't
taken place, the defendants usually argued that they had had nothing to do
with it.
Lipstadt is either unable or unwilling to follow Butz when he argues
closely. For example, she badly misrepresents his argument regarding Oswald
Pohl's testimony at Nuremberg. Butz's point is that it is absurd to imagine
that Pohl, the head of the SS agency (the WVHA) that supervised the
construction and operation of all the concentration camps, including
Auschwitz, would only have learned of the alleged exterminations through a
speech of Heinrich Himmler at Posen in October 1943, as Pohl claimed
(_Hoax_, p. 195). Lipstadt is silent regarding this claim, stating only
that Pohl testified "that he had heard Himmler deliver his famous 1943
speech to the SS leaders at Posen" (p. 131). Elsewhere she cites the word
"ludicrous," with which Butz characterizes Pohl's claim about his first
knowledge of the supposed genocide, as evidence of Butz's dismissal of
"anything that disagreed with [his] foregone conclusion and the thesis of
his book" (p. 124).
This reviewer defies anyone to compare Lipstadt's criticisms of _The
Hoax of the Twentieth Century_ with what its author actually writes, both in
those passages Lipstadt cites as well as the far more numerous aspects of
Butz's book she has chosen to ignore, and come away convinced that the
would-be confounder of the deniers has made so much as a dent in his thesis,
even where it is perhaps most vulnerable.
Mistakes and Irrelevancies
Aside from the intellectual dishonesty that members of the professional
Holocaust orthodoxy share (which can only grow as Revisionist researchers
gain access to more evidence), Lipstadt seems to suffer from an intellectual
incapacity crippling in a scholar bent upon penetrating veneers and veils of
supposedly false scholarship through rigorous criticism. She excels at
mistaking a point or fixing on an irrelevancy, then dwelling on it for half
a page or more, as when, for example, she taxes Richard Verrall ("Harwood"),
author of _Did Six Million Really Die?_, for quoting Hitler biographer Colin
Cross to the effect that "murdering [the Jews] in a time of desperate war
emergency was useless from any rational point of view" (pp. 113-114). She
reproaches Verrall for the better part of a page for having tried to
represent Cross as challenging the "Holocaust." Checking the passage in
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From: dgannon@banished.com
Subject: LIPSTADT'S AND OTHER DECEIVERS' BOOKS [4/6]
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question (_Did Six Million Really Die?_, p. 20), reveals no such intent to
co-opt Cross.
Then again, the fact that Revisionists have paid close attention to
Exterminationist writers, and cited such authors as Raul Hilberg, Gerald
Reitlinger, and J.-C. Pressac to bolster their case either by referencing
otherwise unobtainable evidence or by employing the valid controversial
tactic of admission against interest, brings forth an anguished yelp from
our author: "They [the "deniers"] rely on books that directly contradict
their arguments, quoting in a manner that completely distorts the authors'
objectives (p. 111)." Well, what's sauce for the Gentile goose... but we
understand perfectly, Debbie, that you and your colleagues would much prefer
that we ignore your works -- and we understand why.
Omissions
Another tactic (or failing) of _Denying the Holocaust_, is in the
matter, already adverted to, of omission -- omission of all sorts of
pertinent facts, arguments, writings, personages, and attainments of
Revisionist scholars. Lipstadt seems only half aware of the compass of
revisionist research and publication. Her book contains no mention of such
key Revisionist authors as Wilhelm Staglich, Fritz Berg, Carlo Mattogno and
Enrique Aynat. And, despite the fact that she makes use of the English
translation of Pierre Vidal-Naquet's _Assassins of Memory_, she omits all
reference to world-class Jewish historian Arno Mayer's _Why Did the Heavens
Not Darken_, with its two crushing observations: "Sources for the study of
the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable" and "There is no denying
the many contradictions, ambiguities, and errors in the existing sources."
Lipstadt's understating of the achievements and credentials of
Revisionists, despite their availability from the sources she cites, is too
frequent to be anything but willful. James Martin gets mention in a single
footnote, which fails to mention his doctorate in history from the
University of Michigan, his 25-year academic career, and his authorship of
five well-received books and numerous articles: Lipstadt does credit him
(p. 44) for being listed as "a contributor to the 1970 _Encyclopaedia
Britannica_." Mark Weber, who studied history at four different
universities, including Munich and Indiana University, obtaining a master's
degree from the latter, is said (p. 186) only to have been "educated in a
Jesuit high school in Portland, Oregon."
When Lipstadt refers (p. 67) to Stephen Pinter's famous letter
published in the Catholic newspaper _Our Sunday Visitor_ (June 14, 1959),
which challenged the gas chamber and extermination claims, she leaves out
all reference to the fact that Pinter served as an attorney for the U.S. War
Department during the postwar Dachau trials, and that he based his knowledge
of the wartime treatment of the Jews on having "interviewed thousands of
Jews, former inmates of concentration camps in Germany and Austria."
Fred Leuchter
Lipstadt's noisiest evocation of the "credentials" issue comes in her
assault on the findings of Fred Leuchter regarding the purported gas
chambers at Auschwitz. She takes considerable pains to show that: 1)
Leuchter has only a B.A. in history; 2) he is not a certified engineer; 3)
a Canadian judge deemed him unqualified to "serve as an expert witness on
the construction and functioning of the gas chambers" (p. 164); and he is
not America's leading authority on execution gas chambers.
Lipstadt presents a melange of truth and fiction to make her case that
Leuchter's analysis of the feasibility of execution gassings at Auschwitz,
Majdanek and elsewhere may mislead the uninformed or the unwary, but the
essential facts and elementary common sense refute her.
Leuchter's formal educational credentials easily exceed those of
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, or the Wright brothers; he holds numerous
patents for inventions ranging from the first electronic sextant to a color
stereo helicopter mapping system to various types of execution hardware
(Lipstadt omits all mention of these). Even worse, she flagrantly misstates
the truth by writing that Leuchter was not allowed to testify during the
Second trial of Ernst Zundel as an expert on execution gas chambers: he
certainly was, as the transcript makes perfectly clear.
As to Leuchter's pre-eminence as the American expert on gas chamber
design, operation and maintenance, a recent book by journalist Stephen
Trombley, _The Execution Protocol_, makes abundantly clear that Leuchter was
all that in abundance, before his career was wrecked thanks to his
steadfastness in standing by the conclusions he reached in his widely-
circulated 1988 Report. Lipstadt is aware of _The Execution Protocol_,
since she reproaches it for having "resurrected" Leuchter's reputation, but
she has no specific criticisms to make of its massive confirmation, coming
from an author unsympathetic to capital punishment, of Leuchter's expertise
and authority. (Trombley's book also throws light on how Leuchter's
ambiguous position as an inventor and technician dedicated to humane
execution methods, and an ambitious businessman, made him vulnerable to
unfair charges from state officials that his testimony against defective and
inhumane equipment and procedures was prompted merely by venality.)
In any case, Lipstadt is unable to shake the most important aspect of
the Leuchter affair: that, thanks to the enterprise of Ernst Zundel and the
dedication of Robert Faurisson, the first-ever expert forensic examination
of whether mass homicidal gassing was feasible in the Auschwitz crematoria,
and the first quantitative investigation of the physicochemical evidence of
such gassings, was conducted by a leading, professional, court-certified
expert in homicidal gas chambers. Needless to say, she fails to report the
existence of three subsequent reports on the alleged homicidal gas chambers
of Auschwitz -- carried out by a Polish forensic institute, a German
chemist, and an Austrian engineer -- each of which corroborates Leuchter's
1988 report.
Jean-Claude Pressac
Aside from attempting to impugn Leuchter's credentials, Lipstadt makes
a feeble effort to uphold the gas chamber myth by invoking the supposed
findings and authority of Jean-Claude Pressac, the French pharmacist whose
book _Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers_ was published
in 1989 by Beate and Serge Klarsfeld. Despite its labored attempts to
substantiate the "gas chambers" of Auschwitz by revealing and discussing an
unprecedented wealth of documents from Auschwitz, Pressac's book has to date
received scant public notice from orthodox Holocaust scholars. It has,
rather, been the Revisionists, above all in this _Journal_, who have
analyzed this and other of Pressac's writings -- to the embarrassment of the
Exterminationists and to the great profit of historical truth.
Suffice it to say that Lipstadt (pp. 226-228) has merely listed (not
always accurately) a few of the 39 allegedly criminal traces which Pressac
claims to have discovered from documents relating to the Auschwitz
crematoria: a gas-tight door here, a request for gas detectors there, an
inventory listing shower heads, and so forth. Readers interested in
ascertaining the perfectly banal usages of all these items are advised to
turn to the _Journal_ articles by Robert Faurisson (Spring 1991), Paul
Grubach (Winter 1992-93), and Arthur Butz (May/June 1993). As for
Lipstadt's own gross ignorance of the Auschwitz gas-chamber question, this
reviewer is content to cite this sentence from _Denying the Holocaust_:
"The delousing chambers were constructed in the same fashion as the
homicidal gas chambers," and refer the reader to _The Leuchter Report_,
Pressac, or any other source for blueprints and photographs he or she may
choose.
Dread Portent?
Dr. Lipstadt seems to have begun unraveling in the course of her work
on this book. In her preface (pp. vii-viii) she makes less than cryptic
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From: dgannon@banished.com
Subject: LIPSTADT'S AND OTHER DECEIVERS' BOOKS [5/6]
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references to the growing stress she felt as she strove to confront and
expose the increasingly powerful arguments of the Revisionists:
I had constantly to avoid being sucked into a debate that is no debate
and an argument that is no argument. It has been a disconcerting and,
at times, painful task that would have been impossible without the aid
and support of a variety of people. Without them I would never have
emerged from this morass.
In her final chapter, entitled "Watching on the Rhine: The Future
Course of Holocaust Denial," Debbie becomes completely unglued. After
sniffing suspiciously at the work of such orthodox, but dismayingly
skeptical, modern German historians as Ernst Nolte, who has recently called
for open debate on the gas chambers, and Michael Sturmer, who seems to think
that the interpretation of his country's recent past should serve purposes
other than a source for Hollywood horror scripts and fundraising gimmicks
for the United Jewish Appeal, Lipstadt conjures up the looming horror of a
Fourth, Revisionist Reich.
The "deniers," she tells her readers, are really no different from the
Ku Klux Klan, the skinheads, the Neo-Nazis: "They hate the same things --
Jews, racial minorities, and democracy -- and have the same objectives, the
destruction of truth and memory." And the deniers are cleverer: they don't
run around in sheets or Nazi paraphernalia, but "...attempt to project the
appearance of being committed to the very values that they in truth
adamantly oppose: reason, critical, rules of evidence, and historical
distinction. It is this that makes Holocaust denial such a threat."
And just what does this dire threat portend? What final horror
threatens Jews, racial minorities, and democracy? Here's how Lipstadt
evokes (p. 218) the coming tribulation:
A strategic change will also mark the activities of the racist,
neo-Nazi, ultranationalist groups. So easily identifiable by their
outer trappings, they will adopt the deniers' tactics, cast off the
external attributes that mark them as extremists, and eschew whatever
pigeonholes them as neofascists. They will cloak themselves and their
arguments in a veneer of reason and in arguments [sic] that sound
rational to the American people. The physical terror they perpetrate
may cease, but the number of people beguiled by their arguments will
grow.
As a portent of the terrors to come, and as a tactic analogous to those
of the deniers, Professor Lipstadt cites an attempt by one of the many Klan
groupuscules to erect a cross on city property in Cincinnati during
Christmas. Horrors!
She's not done yet, however. After considering (p. 219) "the most
efficacious strategies for countering these attacks" (she lukewarmly opposes
legal censorship because it may turn revisionists into martyrs, and
advocates that the population at large be stuffed, like so many Strasbourg
geese, with more Holocaust education, museums, etc.), Lipstadt ends (pp.
221-222) with a final, quavering, self-pitying wail (a wail that begs for
annotation):
Though we cannot directly engage them [in debate -- as to why not, the
reader may decide], there is something we can do. Those who care not
just about Jewish history or the history of the Holocaust but about
truth in all its forms [comment super-erogatory], must function as
canaries in the mine [not cuckoos in the clock or bats in the belfry?],
to guard against the spread of noxious fumes. ["Gas masks for sale!
O-o-o-ld gas masks!"] We must vigilantly stand watch against an
increasingly nimble enemy. [Tough work for increasingly sclerotic
Holocaustomaniacs!] But unlike the canary, we must not sit silently by
waiting to expire so that others will be warned of the danger. ["Good,
heavens, Martha, it's raining canaries! What can it mean?"] When we
witness assaults on the truth, our response must be strong, though
neither polemical or emotional [like your book?] We must educate the
broader public and academe about this threat and its historical and
ideological roots [Oh, boy! More lavishly funded Chairs of Holocaust
Studies!]. We must expose these people for what they are. [Is the ADL
about to fold up?]
The effort will not be pleasant. [You can count on that one, Debbie!]
Those who take on this task will sometimes feel -- as I often did in
the course of writing [Does she mean typing?] this work -- as if they
are being forced to prove what they know to be a fact. [What an awful
imposition!] Those of us who make scholarship our vocation and
avocation dream of spending our time charting new paths, opening new
vistas, and offering new perspectives on some aspect of the truth. [Us
Revisionists have things so easy! But you're not getting tired of the
Holocaust, are you, Debbie? What are you -- some kind of anti-Semite?]
We seek to discover, not to defend. [Aww...] We did not train in our
respective fields in order to stand like watchmen and watchwomen on the
Rhine [100-1 she got this image only second-hand from prune-faced,
lying old Stalinist Lillian Hellman, not from hearing the patriotic
German song]. Yet this is what we must do. [What dedication!] We do
so in order to expose falsehood and hate. ["But we don't l-i-i-ke
mirrors!"] We will remain ever vigilant so that the most precious
tools of our trade and our society -- truth and reason -- can prevail.
The still, small voices of millions cry out to us from the ground
demanding that we do no less. [Ugh!]
And with that last emetic cry, the Wicked Witch of the West (or is it
the East?) dissolves into an oozing putrescence. Unwilling to confront the
Revisionists, unable of answering their arguments, at best a second-rate
mistress of the dossier and the expose, she can only bequeath her formulas
and her broom to the smear mongers at the defense agency.
As for _Denying the Holocaust_, to recall the German philologist
Wilamowitz-Mollendorff's famous dismissal of a study of socialism in
antiquity, "Dieses Buch existiert nicht fur die Wissenschaft" ("This book
doesn't exist for scholarship.") In a sane world, it would merit not a
review, but an epitaph: "Here lies Deborah Lipstadt."
Stern's Effort
Kenneth Stern, author of the American Jewish Committee's _Holocaust
Denial_, is described therein as "Program Specialist, Anti-Semitism and
Extremism" for that organization. Despite these ominous credentials, and
endorsements from Deborah Lipstadt, Shelly Z. Shapiro (who tried to frame
Fred Leuchter on orders from Beate Klarsfeld), and the irrepressible Mel
Mermelstein, Stern's book is fairer than might be expected.
Why so? After all, his book contains many of the standard slurs and
slanders: the IHR is "Carto's lie-tank" (p. 8), "Holocaust denial" is an
"enterprise of professional anti-Semites" (p. 9) and "a dogma that provides
ideological incentives to feel good about Jew-hatred" (p. 84). Stern relies
heavily on slanted information provided by Gerry Gable, editor of the
pro-Communist periodical _Searchlight_, Leonard Zeskind, research director
of the Center for Democratic Renewal, and other Marxist flacks, and opines
that "even if we do not agree with the complete agenda of the current Europe
[sic] organizations that have a mission to fight fascism -- such as some of
the mainstream left-wing 'antifascist' groups -- we should be more active in
helping them." (p. 97)
Nevertheless, Stern takes Holocaust Revisionism seriously enough to
provide nearly fifty pages of appendices with evidence -- from their own
mouths and pens -- of Revisionist scholarly and polemical activity,
including the full text of Brad Smith's first campus advertisement, "The
Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate"; a complete transcript of
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From: dgannon@banished.com
Subject: LIPSTADT'S AND OTHER DECEIVERS' BOOKS [6/6]
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Montel Williams's April 30, 1992, television show devoted to Holocaust
Revisionism, during which Journal editor Weber and Revisionist filmmaker
David Cole easily bested a gaggle of Holocausters, including a couple of
survivors; and an 18-page listing of "Holocaust-denying" books, booklets,
and pamphlets, and of articles from _The Journal of Historical Review_ that
should make even the hardiest true believer shiver at the evident industry
and sophistication of the Revisionists.
Like Lipstadt (in her first chapter), Stern offers a world tour of
Holocaust Revisionism. His Baedeker is rather more informative than hers,
for all his errors, and even this reviewer, inundated as all IHR's editors
are by Revisionist news from around the globe, read it with some profit.
Stern takes a stab at refuting selected Revisionist arguments, not very
successfully, since he has either dodged major questions in favor of trivial
ones ("[Revisionist] Claim: That neither Churchill nor Eisenhower, in their
memoirs, mention either gas chambers or a genocide program" [p. 71]), or
relied on empty pronouncements from Exterminationist authority figures, such
as Professor Yehuda Bauer, who confutes the laws of physics by informing us
that "the incinerators at Auschwitz were built to cremate nine corpses per
hour" (p. 65), or put his faith, like Lipstadt, in J.-C. Pressac.
All in all, Revisionists will likely experience a warm feeling of
satisfaction when they put down _Holocaust Denial_: we are on the march,
and Stern makes clear that he and his fellow professional anti-anti-Semites
don't know how to stop us.
ADL Hatchet Job
The second offering from the Jewish "defense agencies" under review is
a rather less attractive effort. _Hitler's Apologists_ lumbers along after
Lipstadt's and Stern's books, its knuckles grazing already well-worn grooves
of innuendo, smear, and what used to be called "guilt by association."
Compiled by a cast of professional snoops, this 86-page booklet was edited
by Alan Schwartz, who was dropped from the plaintiff's list of expert
witnesses after he was mercilessly grilled by Mark Lane in deposition during
the second Mermelstein case.
Although the booklet's subtitle, "The Anti-Semitic Propaganda of
Holocaust 'Revisionism'," would seem to indicate a programmatic
confrontation with the Revisionist case, the way _Hitler's Apologists_ is
organized belies that. Most sections are titled with the names of
individual Revisionists, who are pilloried for all manner of associations
and linkages, motives and agendas, positions and statements, some of them
dating back decades, while their formal arguments are passed over or
dismissed with ritualistic slurs.
For example, Mark Weber is falsely described as "a long-time neo-Nazi"
(p. 10). (Question: How long does one have to be a "neo-Nazi" before he
qualifies as a "paleo-Nazi"?) Bradley Smith, who has been earlier accused
of falsifying credentials -- credentials he never claimed! -- by Harvard law
professor Alan Dershowitz, is taxed for being the co-director of a
"Pseudo-academic enterprise, the Committee for Open Debate of the Holocaust"
(p. 12), although Smith has never represented CODOH as being in any way
academic.
Once the ADL's smear apparatus has been turned on and has sputtered to
life, it takes on a demonic existence of its own, like some odd carnival
amusement, ultimately repellent whatever its attraction. Amid
stomach-turning odors, to the manic burbling of a cranky calliope, the
centrifugal pump that is _Hitler's Apologists_ whirls faster and faster,
spewing filth and falsehood about Revisionists, great and small, into the
faces of the American public. Fred Leuchter! David McCalden! Jack Wikoff!
Hans Schmidt! Ernst Zundel! Pat Buchanan! Arno Mayer! Keegstra!
Faurisson! Roques! Le Pen! The Germans! Faster and faster! Eastern
Europe! Lithuania! The Muslims! Saddam Hussein! The Intifada!
And on and on it spins and stinks, this latest ADL hatchet job,
shooting half-truths and lies, irrelevancies and mistakes, to the point
where it becomes idle to track down and refute them one by one. A
production like this is of a piece -- either one great truth or one great
lie. The big lie of _Hitler's Apologists_ -- that all revisionists are
simply Nazis -- is wearing ever thinner. Thus the insane energy of the
liars and sneaks who basted it together.
Repression and Monopoly
Each of the books under examination here calls for or tolerates
continued censorship of Revisionists -- if not through judicial or police
measures, then by systematically refusing Revisionists the right of the
effective public forum -- media, academia, advertising, and commercial
distribution. Only grudgingly conceded is the right to assail the Holocaust
hoax from a soapbox in a public park.
This intolerance of debate, this relish for repression, is the reverse
of the counterfeit coin whose obverse is the gas chamber lie and the six
million myth. Whatever the responsibilities of the wartime propagandists
and the postwar survivors, the minters of the false currency of Holocaust
history cannot be excused for temporary opportunity, hot-blooded vengeance,
or passing confusion. Through their jealously guarded monopoly of
historical discussion of the "Holocaust," the Second World War, and
ultimately the entire modern era of the West, they mean to silence all
dissent, from the rantings of the most repulsive race-baiter to the
researches of the most meticulous scholar. And they aim, through their
hypostatized Holocaust, to raise their own filthy calumnies -- of the Nazis,
the Germans, the Axis, Europe, and ultimately America and the entire West
throughout its history -- to an obligatory state cult.
That is why the work of Holocaust Revisionism -- including its
sometimes peckish-seeming preoccupation with the innards of what Professor
James J. Martin has called "Polish potato cellars," with the efficacy of
insecticides, and the meaning of half-century old invoices for light bulbs
or showerheads--must continue. To use a military analogy, it is not enough
that our scouts and our reconnaissance troops have won some skirmishes, not
enough that General Rassinier's airborne troops have seized a bridgehead,
not enough that Field Marshal Butz's panzer army has knifed deep into enemy
territory. These victories must be confirmed and consolidated through
further research and new findings, while the smallest and meanest of the
Holocaust lies must be rooted out of the isolated intellectual bunkers in
which they lurk, then destroyed.
Today, no matter how badly beleaguered by state censorship, by physical
attacks, by economic pressure, Holocaust Revisionists are on the
intellectual offensive. If the books reviewed above can't be much bettered
by the Holocaust Lobby, both the lie and the lobby are in danger of
definitive refutation and exposure before the decade is out.
[end of article]
[Reprinted from _The Journal of Historical Review_, P.O. Box 4296, Torrance,
CA 90510, USA. Subscriptions: $40 per year (domestic).]
This article was scanned by the System Operator of the "Banished CPU"
computer bulletin board system, which is located in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
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From _The Journal of Historical Review_, Vol. 13, Number 6 (Nov./Dec. 1993):
Smith Steps Up CODOH Ad Campaign
Bradley Smith, intrepid chairman of the Committee for Open Debate on the
Holocaust (CODOH), attracted nationwide notoriety in late 1991 and early
1992 as a result of his success in placing advertisements calling for open
debate on the Holocaust issue in student newspapers at several major
universities. After something of a lapse, Smith has recently put new life
in his CODOH ad campaign. Some highlights:
* A syndicated College Press Service (CPS) article about Smith's campus
ad campaign appeared September 16 in _The Setonian_, the student paper of
Seton Hall University (South Orange, New Jersey). This short article is
based in part on an interview with Smith.
* Smith's CODOH ad was published in the September 27 issue of the
_Christian News_, a traditionalist Lutheran weekly paper published in
Missouri.
* The text of Smith's ad appeared September 28 as a guest editorial in
the _Record_, student paper of State University of New York (SUNY) at
Buffalo.
* In Ann Arbor, the text of Smith's ad appeared October 6 as a
"viewpoint" guest opinion essay in the _Michigan Daily_, student paper of
the University of Michigan. In the same issue, an editorial sharply
denounced Smith's piece as irrational and "absurd." A few days later,
activists of the "National Women's Rights Organization" held a campus rally
to denounce the paper, which they called "a tool of fascists," for
publishing Smith's essay.
* A rather lengthy College Press Service article appeared October 1 in
the _Northwestern Chronicle_ of Northwestern University (Evanston,
Illinois). The article is based in part on interviews with Bradley Smith
and anti-revisionist author Deborah Lipstadt.
* Smith's CODOH ad appeared in the October 14 issue of the _Georgetown
Voice_ of Georgetown University (Washington, DC). Michael Berenbaum,
project director of the US Holocaust Memorial Council (which operates the
new federal Holocaust Museum), responded to Smith's ad with a guest opinion
essay in the paper.
* Smith's CODOH ad appeared in the October 15 issue of _The State
News_ of Michigan State University (East Lansing).
* Smith's CODOH ad was published October 21 in the _Rough Rider_,
student paper of Roosevelt High School in Portland, Oregon. This is the
first publication of the ad in a high school paper. In response to protests
from some parents, the school principal confiscated the remaining copies of
the issue.
* Also in Portland, Smith's CODOH ad appeared October 24 in _The
Oregonian_, the state's most influential and largest circulation newspaper.
This is the first publication of the CODOH ad in a major metropolitan daily.
* Smith's CODOH ad was published, in slightly abbreviated form, in the
October 26 issue of _The Stanford Daily_ of Stanford University.
Accompanying it was an error-ridden and prominently displayed editorial
commentary that was highly critical of the ad.
* Smith's CODOH ad ran in the student newspaper of Ohio University
(Athens, Ohio), October 28.
* Smith's CODOH ad appeared November 2 in _The Miami Student_ of Miami
University (Oxford, Ohio).
[end of article]
Bradley R. Smith, chairman of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust
(CODOH), can be reached by phone or fax at (209) 733-2653, or by mail at
P.O. Box 3267, Visalia, CA 93278, USA.
[Reprinted from _The Journal of Historical Review_, P.O. Box 4296, Torrance,
CA 90510, USA. Subscriptions: $40 per year (domestic).]
This article was scanned by the System Operator of the "Banished CPU"
computer bulletin board system, which is located in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
Banished CPU supports Freedom of Speech!
___________________________________________________________
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[end of file]
-Dan Gannon
Article 7007 of alt.revisionism:
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From: dgannon@banished.com
Subject: VICTORY FOR REVISIONISM IN AUSTRALIA [1/2]
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From _The Journal of Historical Review_, Vol. 13, Number 6 (Nov./Dec. 1993):
Censorship Update from Down Under
VICTORY FOR IRVING IN AUSTRALIA FREE SPEECH STRUGGLE
Greg Raven
In an important victory for free speech and open debate on the Holocaust
issue, Australia's Federal Court on September 16 unanimously overturned an
earlier decision by immigration authorities to reject the visa application
of David Irving. Any decision about a visa application by Irving, the high
court ruled, must now be reconsidered "by law." There now appears to be no
legal bar to visits by the bestselling British revisionist historian, who
immediately announced plans for a six-week lecture tour.
The high court also ordered the Australian government to foot the total
bill of more than $100,000 in legal costs in the case, including Irving's
own legal expenses of $22,000.
In an editorial commenting on the Federal Court decision, the Melbourne
_Herald Sun_ (Sept. 18) offered some advice:
The Jewish community vocally opposed his [Irving's] visit. This was a
tactical error. It elevated Mr. Irving to martyr status, and ensured a
level of publicity he did not merit. The sensible course for
Australian Jews now is to ignore him.
Irving thus once again finds himself at the forefront in the free
speech struggle against the international campaign to suppress dissident
views on the Holocaust issue. "The fight is colossal," says Irving, a
_Journal_ contributor. (For more on this, see the Jan.-Feb. 1993 _Journal_,
pp. 12-19.)
"I think my opponents have underestimated the tenacity of the English,"
says Irving. "We have a tendency in England when we hear gunfire not to
move away from it but, out of a sheer sense of bloody-minded curiosity, to
go and find out what the gunfire's about..." (_Herald Sun_, May 20)
Following Australia's example, New Zealand has recently repealed its
own ban on Irving's entry. Officials there still won't let him speak in
public, though. "We shall see!," says Irving.
Background
The "fight" began late last year when Irving, planning to combine a
six-week lecture tour with attending the wedding of his daughter to an
Australian, contacted ten (mostly Jewish) heads of university history
departments in an attempt to arrange debates on matters historical.
Although not one of those contacted responded to the offer, news of his
plans triggered a campaign to bar him from the country. Citing earlier
alleged exclusions of him from Austria, Canada, Italy, and South Africa,
some legal setbacks in Germany, and the sometimes violent controversy over
his works in Britain, Jewish groups argued that this was not an issue of
free speech, but rather one of public safety.
Bowing to pressure, Immigration Minister Gerry Hand decided in February
to deny Irving's visa application on the grounds that he was "likely to
become involved in activities disruptive to, or violence threatening harm
to, the Australian community or a group within the Australian community."
(For more on this, see the May-June 1993 _Journal_, pp. 13-16.) As matters
turned out, Hand was not entirely incorrect, although the disruption and
violence came not from Irving (or his supporters), but from his enemies.
As Australia's leading daily newspapers have plainly acknowledged,
efforts to bar Irving from the country have come almost entirely from the
Jewish community. Irving has served libel writs against five major Jewish
personalities and periodicals.
A Dangerous Man?
By denying Irving a visa, Australian immigration authorities had
implied that the internationally renowned researcher, author, and lecturer
is as dangerous as four Serbian terrorists -- the only others to be refused
entry into Australia in a similar manner out of 1.68 million visa applicants
in 1991-92. (Martin Daly, _The Age_, Feb. 16.)
An editorial in the _Newcastle Herald_ (May 21) made a related point:
A worrying aspect of the ban on Mr. Irving is that it is selective. In
1987, the Foreign Affairs Department brought the then leader-in-exile
of the African National Congress, Mr. Oliver Tambo, to Australia for a
tour. This was despite the fact that Mr. Tambo's much-publicised visit
was expected to polarise opinion, and did. However, there was no
violence on that occasion and there would probably have been none if
Mr. Irving's opponents and the Federal Government alike had been
prepared to let him make his tour without surrounding it with
controversy.
Electronic Democracy
Although forced to postpone his tour by one year, Irving's message has
been getting through nevertheless. The historian has appeared, via
satellite, three times on Australian television during prime time, and has
given countless live and recorded radio interviews. Dozens of articles,
editorials, and letters to the editor have appeared in newspapers across the
country, and letters by Irving clarifying his position have appeared in at
least two major newspapers. (_The Australian_, May 24; _Sydney Morning
Herald_, May 26.)
Generating the most attention, though, has been a specially-made
80-minute videotape cassette, "The Search for Truth in History," in which
Irving effectively presents his views on the Holocaust issue and on the
international fight for free speech. According to Veritas, Irving's
Australian publisher, hundreds of the video were sold within hours of its
release in May. "They started buying it late yesterday [Wednesday]
afternoon and haven't stopped," reported Veritas manager Jan Pope. (_Herald
Sun_, May 21) Altogether some 10,000 copies have been produced. ("The
Search for Truth in History" is available from the IHR for $29, plus $2 for
shipping. See the inside front cover of this issue.)
All proceeds from sales of the video are earmarked for the David Irving
Legal Fighting Fund, which was set up to overturn restrictions on the
historian's movements worldwide. (P.O. Box 1707, Key West, FL 33041, USA)
"G" Rated
When Irving's opponents learned of the video, they immediately
contacted the Film and Literature Censorship Board (FCB). Any video
imported for commercial purposes must have a FCB rating; without a rating it
would be illegal to sell or screen the video for profit. Technically, the
FCB can legitimately censor a video only if the contents are violent or
sexually depraved. Just hours before the first screening was scheduled to
start, the FCB issued the video a "G" rating, claiming it is "suitable for
viewing by persons of all ages and contains no material that would distress
or harm children." Five members of the ten-member Board voted to award the
"G" rating, four voted for a "PG" rating, and one voted to ban the video
entirely as being "not in the national interest."
The move was applauded by International PEN, a writers' group that
earlier supported Irving's right to visit Canada. Likewise supportive was
the _Sydney Morning Herald_ (May 21), which editorialized:
This robust trust by the [Film Censorship] board in the good sense
of the public is in the best interests of a workable and useful system
of censorship. The point about censorship is that there should be as
little of it as is necessary for the well-being of the community.
There has been too much censorship by Australian authorities of Mr.
Irving's strange views, though. It's becoming increasingly obvious
that the Federal Government made a mistake when it decided, just before
the last election, to ban Mr. Irving from Australia.
Israeli Snooping?
Interest in the outcome of the FCB vote was not limited to citizens of
Australia. Israel's secret intelligence agency Mossad apparently bugged the
room in which the FCB had met to discuss the Irving video. In an article
headlined "Israeli secret agents linked with bugging," the _Sunday Times_ of
Perth (May 30) reported that "allegations of a covert bugging operation
organized in Sydney by the Israeli intelligence organization Mossad are
being pursued" by the leader of Australia's opposition National Party. "An
espionage operation using a highly-sophisticated listening device is alleged
to have been discovered" in the building where the FCB met. "There is
speculation that the alleged operation is linked to the canceled visit and
lecture tour by controversial historian David Irving, who claims Jewish
suffering in the Holocaust has been overstated," the paper went on.
Pressure and Threat
Having failed to halt distribution of the new Irving video, Jewish
groups next threatened and otherwise pressured the managers of hotels,
halls, and theaters where it was scheduled to be shown. As a result, a
number of screenings were canceled. In a letter to the _Herald Sun_ (May
25), one reader expressed his disgust at this turn of events:
What a bunch of spineless yellow-bellies have so many Australians
become! The slightest threat of protest and virtually the entire
[Continued in next message.]
Article 7008 of alt.revisionism:
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From: dgannon@banished.com
Subject: VICTORY FOR REVISIONISM IN AUSTRALIA [2/2]
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management of the proposed venues for the G-rated David Irving "The
Search for Truth in History" video presentation, cave in.
At sites where the video was scheduled to show, groups of Jews gathered
to protest. David Berinson, 23-year-old spokesman for one such protest, was
quoted as saying, "It's clear that this sort of video, though I haven't seen
it, and David Irving's statements have formed the basis of a lot of neo-Nazi
action in movements in Europe." (_West Australian_, Perth, May 20) Jewish
community leader Mark Leibler commented: "Australia is no place for the
peddling of Irving's sick, racist hate propaganda." (_Herald Sun_, May 25)
Mick Coventry, owner of one establishment where the video was shown,
defended his decision to allow the screening: "I don't care what is on the
video, as long as it's not illegal." (_Riverine Herald_, May 26.)
Media Coverage
Australian media coverage of the entire affair has been intense, as
noted in the May-June 1993 _Journal_. Front page headlines in the
_Shepparton News_ of May 21 and 23, for example, proclaimed in two-inch-high
letters, "'Nazi'video on show," and "Irving ban foiled."
A hostile review of the Irving video in _The Australian_ (Sydney, May
21) by Sam Lipski -- a "media commentator" and publisher of the Australian
Jewish News -- carefully avoided any substantive arguments and instead
relied on character assassination and misrepresentation to discount Irving's
message.
In contrast to media coverage in other Western democracies of similar
disputes, most Australian papers have fairly and accurately presented the
views of Irving and his supporters. For the most part, the country's press
reported that Irving regards the Holocaust story as "exaggerated,"
"overstated," and "open to debate." Assertions that Irving "denies the
Holocaust" come almost exclusively from Jewish sources, which have routinely
misrepresented other aspects of the issue.
The Free Speech Debate
Defenders of the orthodox Holocaust extermination story predictably
deny that repression of dissident views on this question involves any issue
of free speech. Most Australian newspapers sharply disagree, even though
none seems to think very highly of Irving.
An editorial in the Perth _West Australian_ (May 20) reflected what
might be called a consensus view:
It is one of the measures of a truly democratic system that even those
whose views and values are anathema to a majority of people are
entitled to a fair hearing.
Indeed, the ultimate strength of a democracy rests on its ability
to accommodate a free flow of ideas -- even ones which may be repugnant
and which may be seen in some quarters as posing a danger to cohesion
in the community...
The Federal Government's decision early this year to refuse a visa
for an Australian visit by controversial British writer David Irving
was an affront to principles of free speech.... [This] action has
diminished the rights of all Australians.
...Perversely, by banning Mr. Irving, the Government and those who
support the decision have given him an international platform from
which to campaign. Canberra's heavy hand has ensured that Mr. Irving's
warped material has been disseminated more widely and attracted more
publicity than would ever have happened if he had been allowed into
Australia this time -- as he has in the past.
Professor Paul Wilson, Dean of Arts at Queensland University of
Technology, wrote in the _Canberra Times_ (May 24):
...Mr. Irving has visited this country on two other occasions and
there is no record of violence being perpetrated against the Jewish
community as a result of these tours.
...To ban a person on the basis of what might occur as a result of
what he might say establishes a dangerous precedent. Such a ruling
could be used effectively against any international visitor wishing to
enter this country who has opinions that conflict with the views of any
religion, ethnic, political or special-interest group.
...The ultimate irony is that if David Irving is banned from our
shores he can justifiably claim (as he already has) that free speech is
threatened in Australia.
An editorial in the _Canberra Times_ (May 20) opined:
The Commonwealth film censor has shown considerably better
judgment in classifying British historian David Irving's video so that
it can be shown publicly, than the Government showed in February by
banning the man from Australia.
...Instead of attracting a small amount of critical press
attention for his views, the ban has generated a public debate about
his right to free speech. He has attracted respectable defenders (of
his right of free speech, not of his history) who otherwise never would
have allowed their names to be associated with his.
As is so often the case, if the Government had simply let events
take their course his views would have been more than adequately
exposed by the light of public debate.
The Melbourne _Herald Sun_ (editorial, May 21) expressed a similar
view, but upset a few readers with a reference to "that article of faith for
post-war Jews, the Holocaust":
The David Irving affair is an assault on our basic democratic
right -- freedom of speech. This newspaper holds no brief for Mr.
Irving, a historian with widely contested, controversial views. But we
believe that he has an absolute right to express them. Just as the
many people who fiercely oppose him have an equal right to publicly
disagree.
As we said in this column in February, the Federal Government was
wrong to refuse Mr. Irving entry. We also believe Australian Jews have
been mistaken in seeking to stop screening of a video of his lecture,
passed by the Office of Film and Literature.
Central to Mr. Irving's unpopularity is his challenge to that
article of faith for post-war Jews, the Holocaust.... But by
campaigning to silence Mr. Irving, Australian Jews have succeeded in
focusing unmerited public attention both on the man and his claims.
Side Issues
In the media discussion surrounding Irving's efforts to visit
Australia, marginal side issues have sometimes obscured the larger picture.
Irving's opponents, for example, have accused him of supporting Australian
far right groups, of provoking outbursts of anti-Jewish graffiti, and of
erring as an historian. In this last instance, one paper went so far as to
claim that Irving was wrong in his views about Winston Churchill, and cited
revisionist historian John Charmley's critical book on Churchill as proof.
(For more about Charmley's highly critical biography of the British leader,
see the March-April Journal.)
As part of the general debate provoked by the Irving ban, critical
attention has been given to the issue of improper Jewish influence on the
Australian government, the totalitarian tactics of those who would deny
Irving the right to enter Australia, the pointless wastefulness of war
crimes trials over allegations dating back to the Second World War, and the
precious nature of free speech.
Another Victory
As Irving has pointed out, and as the recent events in Australia
underscore, each new effort to censor or ban revisionists has ultimately
proven to be another boost for the revisionist cause. Clearly, it is
becoming ever more difficult for those who seek to monopolize history to
rely on help from venal and repressive government officials. With active
support from the growing worldwide revisionist community, each attempt at
censorship provides yet another opportunity to broadcast the revisionist
viewpoint to additional thousands who otherwise would never hear of it.
[end of article]
[Reprinted from _The Journal of Historical Review_, P.O. Box 4296, Torrance,
CA 90510, USA. Subscriptions: $40 per year (domestic).]
This article was scanned by the System Operator of the "Banished CPU"
computer bulletin board system, which is located in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
Banished CPU supports Freedom of Speech!
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[end of file]
-Dan Gannon
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