Books about holocaust denial:

Greg Raven is the head of the Institute for Historical Review. No one denies that.

But Mr. Raven has been confronted several times with the information printed in his own organization's "IHR Update," July 1995, which claims that his official title is Chief Executive Officer and President.

In March [1995] the corporate Board of Directors appointed Mark Weber as the new IHR Director, and Greg Raven as the new chief executive officer and corporate President.

The interpretation of this seems to be straightforward: that Mr. Raven is the CEO and President of the IHR. However, Mr. Raven claims that this is a "substantive falsehood." When Ken McVay posted an open letter to Mr. Raven in August 1995 which happened to mention the above, Mr. Raven's response began:

Just about everything about this paragraph, the first in McVay's open letter, is inaccurate. To save space, I will deal only with the substantive falsehoods.

First, I am not president and/or CEO of the Institute for Historical Review, as the IHR has no president and/or CEO.

The question of course arises: why is the IHR publishing "substantive falsehoods" in its periodicals?

Let's skip ahead about six months and resolve the dilemma. The answer is that Mr. Raven is CEO and President not of the IHR directly, but of its parent corporation, the Legion for the Survival of Freedom. We know this to be the case because we have obtained a legal document with Mr. Raven's signature on it as the President. Furthermore, a recent Journal of Historical Review indicated that Mr. Raven did indeed fill that post:

Since September 1992 Greg Raven has worked as Journal Associate Editor, and since February 1995 has served as President of the IHR's parent corporation.

Journal of Historical Review, vol. 15, no. 5 (Sep/Oct 1995), p. 29

If Mr. Raven truly feels it to be a "substantive falsehood" to declare him president of the IHR rather than of its parent corporation, then he might want to fire the writers of "IHR Update" for not making clear such an important point. The quotation says that "the corporate Board of Directors appointed ... Greg Raven as the new chief executive officer and corporate President." Given that no other "corporation" is mentioned in the article, it is only logical that the IHR would be that corporation. Yet this is Mr. Raven's "substantive falsehood."

All in all, we feel that Mr. Raven is merely making a legal quibble. There is very little difference between a parent corporation and a DBA ("Doing Business As") of that corporation. The IHR is a DBA of the Legion, as Mr. Raven has indicated: "The IHR and Noontide Press are both dbas for the same parent company." A DBA is really not much more than an "alias" for a corporation; they can share bank accounts, for example.

For example, in 1993, during the court battle in which Willis Carto was ousted, the then-IHR Director Tom Marcellus stated:

I was hired as assistant director, and, since 1981 have served as director of the Institute for Historical Review (hereafter IHR) and The Noontide Press (hereafter NOONTIDE), the two names under which the LEGION does business....

"Declaration of Thomas J. Marcellus, December 28, 1993."

Perhaps -- and this is only speculation -- Mr. Raven has legal reasons for insisting that this technical quibble is a "substantive falsehood." When another related corporation, Liberty Lobby, sued the Wall Street Journal to protest being called "anti-Semitic," the court's opinion was:

...there is evidence in this record that Mr. Carto specifically designed the Liberty Lobby / Legion / Noontide / IHR network so as to divorce Liberty Lobby's name from those of its less reputable affiliates.

(See a recent ADL report for more information on Liberty Lobby.)

It is possible that maintaining this "divorce" is still considered to be important.

However, Mr. Raven refuses to even discuss this matter with us. A few simple words of explanation would clear everything up, but enlightening us is apparently too difficult for him.

In any case, it is ludicrous to refer to this error as a "substantive falsehood" and to use it as a basis for refusing to cross-link with the Nizkor site. It is no more than an excuse to get out of providing the cross-links which Ken McVay's open letter has been asking for since August 1995.

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