The Holocaust
Help Truth Survive — Support
Your Website
The Holocaust
Having been fraudulently
declared on Wikipedia by CIA and Zionist trolls to be a “Holocaust Denier,” I
decided to see what that meant. I turned to Ron Unz’s article “American Pravda:
Holocaust Denial.” Just as incompetent Wikipedia attributed David Irving’s
views to me, no doubt Wikipedia will credit me with authorship of Ron Unz’s
article.
Ron Unz is a prolific reader
who provides reliable accounts. His article reports on books that promote the
official Holocaust story and on books that have researched the Holocaust and
find facts different from the official story. The best way to get your feet wet
on any subject is to see what Ron Unz has to say. Unz, of course, is thorough,
because he understands the importance of truth. Reading his articles is like
reading a monograph. This one is 18,000 words. It takes committment. You have
to really want to know. The alternative is to read the dozen plus books that
Unz reports on. So, it is either Unz’s 18,000 words or a couple of million
words. I suggest the shortcut that Unz provides. If it spurs your interest, you
can start on the books.
Unz’s article begins with a
map of Europe showing 15 countries in which any denial of the official
Holocaust account, whether true or not, lands the denier in prison. http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-holocaust-denial/ I have always wondered why the story of The Holocaust,
which has been used to extract billions of dollars from Switzerland and the
German taxpayers and to shield Israel from its vast war crimes, violations of
international law, and United Nations Resolutions (see Norman Finkelstein, The
Holocaust Industry, https://www.amazon.com/Holocaust-Industry-Reflections-Exploitation-Suffering/dp/1781685614/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Norman+Finkelstein&qid=1575645211&s=books&sr=1-1), is thought by Zionists to be so fragile that it
cannot stand challenge. A story that is true has nothing to fear from denial,
as the facts will defend the story. If Zionists are confident of The Holocaust
story, they should show their confidence by permitting their account to be
examined and debated. The truth will emerge, and if Zionists are correct they
will be vindicated.
My interest in The Holocaust
is not whether it is true or partly true or false.
My interest is in its position as a dogma that causes 15 countries to imprison
skeptics. Dogmas have not been popular in the Western world since scientists
won the struggle with the Catholic Church over whether Earth or the Sun was the
center of the solar system.
For reasons of religious
authority, the Church insisted that Earth was fixed and the Sun circled Earth.
Astronomers said it was the opposite. Astronomers were at a disadvantage not
only because the Church had more authority but also because everyone could see
the Sun rise in the east, circle Earth and set in the west. No one could see
Earth turning on its axis as it circled the Sun. It took imagination, reason,
and abstract thought to see the process as it really was. Indeed, even today in
the 21st century we still speak, incorrectly, of the Sun rising in the East and
setting in the West, because that is what it looks like.
I mention this
controversy not to imply that dogmas are always incorrect and,
therefore, that The Holocaust is incorrect like the Catholic Church. What
concerns me about dogmas is not whether they are true or false but that they
prohibit free inquiry. Science, democracy, civil liberty, and modern society
are based on free inquiry, free speech, and free thought. Dogmas are
inconsistent with free society; yet, we have an institutionalized dogma,
supported by prison sentences if it is violated. If we can have one
unchallengeable dogma, what’s to prevent a second, a third, a hundred, a
thousand? It is a slippery slope.
Indeed, we are already
sliding down the slippery slope. For example, it has become extremely
difficult, if not impossible, to investigate the genetic basis of intelligence.
All sorts of people can be upset by findings of various inquiries, both
scientific and scholarly. Once we start setting aside free inquiry because it
upsets some people, where does that take us? As I wrote in my December 3, 2019
column, “Can Truth Be Our Future?” https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/12/03/can-truth-be-our-future/ it takes us back to pre-modern time when truth
issued from the voice of authority and served authority. We are a lot closer to
returning to this pre-modern time than we are aware.
Another problem with the
official Holocaust story is that it is so inflexible that there is no room for
people who agree with it to correct errors. Suppose, for example, that German
documents documenting The Holocaust were finally found, and the recorded number
was 4 million. To publish the document would be risky in the 15 countries,
because technically it denies the official figure of 6 million and thereby
constitutes holocaust denial. David Irving, for example, found evidence that
hundreds of thousands of Jews were massacred, but not in gas chambers, so his
confirmation of Jewish deaths made him a Holocaust denier.
My interest in The Holocaust
is not its truth or falsity. My interest is in the precedent it sets for
preventing free inquiry and debate. Other topics are already joining The
Holocaust as issues closed to debate. It is obvious that all sorts of interests
will seek this protection for their agendas.
Unz got interested in The
Holocaust because of an attack on the libertarian magazine Reason for
publishing holocaust deniers. At the time Unz accepted The Holocaust story
because he had heard it repeated so often. But the attack on libertarians as
holocaust deniers made him curious, and he decided to investigate. This is what
he found:
American Pravda: Holocaust
Denial
by Ron Unz
Reason Magazine and
Holocaust Denial
A few years ago I somehow
heard about a ferocious online dispute involving a left-leaning journalist
named Mark Ames and the editors of Reason magazine, the glossy flagship
publication of America’s burgeoning libertarian movement. Although I was deep
in my difficult programming work, curiosity got the better of me, so I decided
to take a look.
During the Immigration Wars
of the 1990s, I’d become quite friendly with the Reason people, frequently
visiting their offices, especially during my “English” campaign of 1998, when
I’d located my own political headquarters in the same small Westside LA office
building they used. As my content-archiving software project began absorbing
more and more of my time during the early 2000s, I’d gradually lost touch with
them, but even so, the 40-odd years of their magazine archives had become the
first publication I’d incorporated into my system, and I was now pleased to
discover that both sides in the ongoing feud had put my system to good use in
exploring those old Reason issues.
Apparently, the libertarians
grouped around Reason had successfully been making political inroads into
Silicon Valley’s enormously wealthy technology industry, and had now organized
a major conference in San Francisco to gather together their supporters. Their
left-leaning rivals decided to nip that project in the bud by highlighting some
of the more unsavory ideological positions that mainstream libertarian leaders
had once regularly espoused. Perhaps Ron Paul and other libertarians might
oppose overseas wars and drug laws, and support cutting taxes and regulations,
but they and their Republican Party allies were unspeakably vile on all sorts
of other issues, and all “good thinkers” should therefore stay very far away.
The debate began in rather
mundane fashion with an article by Ames entitled “Homophobia, Racism, and the
Kochs” denouncing Reason for sharing a platform with a high-ranking Republican
Congresswoman of Christian conservative views, as well as the magazine’s
reliance upon Koch funding and its alleged support for Apartheid South Africa
during the 1970s and 1980s. The response by the Reason editor seemed quite
persuasive, and he rightfully dismissed the guilt-by-association attacks. He
also outlined the gross errors and omissions in the charges regarding South
Africa, and ridiculed Ames as a notoriously error-prone “conspiracy theorist.”
Surely few outsiders would have paid any attention to such a typical exchange
of mudslinging between rival ideological camps.
But then things took a very
different turn, and a week later Ames returned with a 5,000 word article
bearing a title sure to grab attention: “Holocaust Denial.” He claimed that in
1976 Reason had published an entire special issue devoted to that explosive
topic.
Surely everyone on the Internet
has encountered numerous instances of Holocaust Denial over the years, but for
a respectable magazine to have allotted a full issue to promoting that doctrine
was something else entirely. For decades, Hollywood has sanctified the
Holocaust, and in our deeply secular society accusations of Holocaust Denial
are a bit like shouting “Witch!” in Old Salem or leveling accusations of
Trotskyism in the Court of the Red Czar. Progressive Sam Seder’s Majority
Report radio show devoted a full half-hour segment to the charges against
Reason, and Googling “Reason Magazine”+”Holocaust Denial” today yields
thousands of hits. This substantial explosion of Internet controversy was what
caught my own attention at the time.
My initial reaction was one
of puzzlement. Reason had been the first periodical I had digitized in my
system a dozen years earlier, and surely I would have noticed an entire issue
promoting Holocaust Denial. However, I soon discovered that February 1976 had
been excluded from the supposedly complete set the magazine had shipped me for
processing, an omission that itself raises serious suspicions. But Ames had
somehow located a copy in a research library and produced a full PDF, which he
conveniently placed on the Internet to support his accusations.
Carefully reading his
article and then glancing through the contents, I decided that his accusation
was technically false but substantially true. Apparently the actual theme of
the issue was “Historical Revisionism” and except for a couple of paragraphs
buried here and there among the 76 pages, Holocaust Denial never came up, so
characterizing it as a Holocaust Denial issue was obviously a grotesque
exaggeration. But on the other hand, although few of the authors were familiar
to me, it seemed undeniably true that they were numbered among America’s more
prominent Holocaust Deniers, and most of them were deeply associated with
organizations situated in that same camp. Furthermore, there were strong
indications that their positions on that topic must certainly have been known
to the Reason editors who commissioned their pieces.
The clearest case comes when
Ames quoted the explicit statements of Dr. Gary North, a prominent libertarian
thinker who had served as one of Ron Paul’s earliest Congressional aides and
later became his longtime partner in politics and business:
“Probably the most far-out
materials on World War II revisionism have been the seemingly endless scholarly
studies of the supposed execution of 6 million Jews by Hitler. The anonymous
author [Hoggan] of ‘The Myth of the Six Million’ has presented a solid case
against the Establishment’s favorite horror story—the supposed moral
justification for our entry into the war…The untranslated books by the former
Buchenwald inmate Prof. Paul Rassinier, have seriously challenged the story…A
recent and very inexpensive book in magazine form, Did Six Million Really Die?,
appeared in 1973, written by Richard Harwood.”
A later issue carried a
thousand word letter by Prof. Adam Reed of Rockefeller University, a past Reason
contributor, strongly affirming the mainstream Holocaust narrative by quoting
from standard works, and taking Dr. North to task for his citation of Holocaust
Denial works of doubtful quality. But North firmly stood his ground:
“The second point, that about
6 million Jews really did die in the concentration camps, is one that will be
open until the records of the period become fully available. I am not convinced
yet, one way or the other. I am happy to have Dr. Reed’s interpretation of the
data, but until the publishing companies and academic guild encourage the
re-examination of the data, I shall continue to recommend that those interested
in revisionist questions read The Myth of the Six Million and Did Six Million
Really Die? as reasonable (though not necessarily irrefutable) pieces of
historical revisionism. If a person can’t make up his mind, he should do more
reading.”
Dr. James J. Martin was the
lead contributor to the February Revisionism issue, and the preceding January
issue had featured an extended Q&A by the editors, with one of the queries
directly addressing the controversial topic:
REASON: Dr. Martin, do you
believe (1) that the specific charge against the Nazis of having a mass
extermination program of several million Jews is true, and (2) that the Allied
atrocities were as great or greater than those of the Germans, from your study
of the question?
MARTIN: Well, I never made a head count of all who lost their lives in the
War-we’ve seen a wide variety of statistical materials, some of which have been
pulled out of thin air. As a consequence, it’s hard to make any kind of
estimate of this sort, whether ten more were killed on the one side or the
other is not a particularly entrancing subject as far as I’m concerned. Whether
allegations can be proven it remains to be seen. I don’t believe that the
evidence of a planned extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe
is holding up. I have been influenced over the years by the works of Paul
Rassinier, and he still has to be reckoned with.
His works have been ignored
for a long time, and sooner or later somebody’s going to have to do a decent
job of coping with what he has presented. I think Rassinier’s general case is
sound at the moment and I haven’t seen any strong evidence to upset his allegations
or his assertions that there was no planned program for the extermination of
European Jews. His other main case is that there were no gas chamber
extermination programs. The fact that a great many people lost their lives is
incontrovertible—that the German concentration camps weren’t health centers is
well known-but they appear to have been far smaller and much less lethal than
the Russian ones.
Another major contributor to
the issue was Dr. Austin J. App, and just three years earlier he had published
a short book bearing the lurid title The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the
German People for Hard Marks with Fabricated Corpses.
In a follow-up column by
Ames’ own editor, the stunned reactions of various journalists are listed, with
one of them Tweeting out “I had no idea that Reason Magazine was once a haven
for Holocaust Revisionism. Holy Moly.” Despite the angry obfuscations of
present-day Reason staffers, this description seems quite correct.
Indeed, there seems
considerable circumstantial evidence that around that time “Holocaust
Skepticism” extended rather broadly within the entire nascent libertarian
movement. Aside from the sharp critique of the aforementioned Prof. Reed, the
overwhelming majority of the reader responses seemed totally favorable, with
Samuel Konkin III, editor of New Libertarian Weekly and various similar
publications, suggesting that the February issue was one of the best they had
ever published. David Nolan, founder of America’s Libertarian Party, also
praised the issue as “outstanding.”
The two editors of the issue
in question even today remain quite prominent figures at Reason and within
American libertarianism, while the masthead then carried names such as David
Brudnoy and Alan Reynolds, who both later became influential figures in
conservative and libertarian politics. There seems no evidence of any
resignations or angry recriminations following the issue’s publication, which
seems to have been digested with total equanimity, apparently arousing less
rancor than might have been generated by a dispute over monetary policy.
I’d never paid much
attention to Holocaust discussions over the years, but the name of Murray
Rothbard on the 1976 Reason masthead prompted a memory. Rothbard is widely
regarded as the founder of modern libertarianism, and I recalled in the 1990s
reading somewhere that he had often ridiculed the Holocaust as being total
nonsense, which had stuck in my mind as a typical example of libertarian
eccentricity. A quick Google search seemed to confirm my recollection that
Rothbard was an avowed Holocaust Denier.
Although the whole controversy regarding Reason’s editorial line of the
mid-1970s soon died down, it remained a nagging puzzle in the back of my mind.
I’d always been quite skeptical of libertarian ideology, but my Reason friends
from the 1990s had certainly seemed like smart and rational people to me,
hardly raving lunatics of any sort, and two of the ones I’d known best had been
the co-editors of the controversial issue in question.
I could easily understand
how zealous libertarian ideologues might be swept past the point of rationality
on certain matters—perhaps arguing that the police and the army should be
abolished as statist institutions—but the factual question of what had or had
not happened to the Jews of Europe during World War II hardly fell into that
sort of category. Furthermore, libertarianism had always attracted a very large
Jewish contingent, especially in its upper ranks, and one of the issue editors
came from that background, as did Rothbard and numerous others featured on the
masthead. While deranged anti-Semitism is not impossible among Jews, I would
think that it is somewhat less likely. Clearly something very odd must have
been going on.
I was then too busy with my
work to focus on the matter, but some months later I had more time, and began a
detailed investigation. My first step was to carefully read the Reason articles
produced by those controversial writers previously unknown to me. Although
those pieces were not Holocaust-related, I thought they might give me a sense
of their thinking.
To my surprise, the
historiography seemed outstandingly good, and almost certainly accurate based
on what I had picked up over the years from perfectly mainstream sources. Dr.
Martin’s long article on the notorious framing of “Tokyo Rose” was probably the
best and most comprehensive treatment I had ever encountered on that topic, and
Dr. App’s analysis of the tragedy of the Sudeten-Germans was equally strong,
raising several points I had previously not known. Percy Greaves effectively
summarized many of the very suspicious aspects of the Pearl Harbor attack, and
although his case for the prosecution against FDR was certainly not airtight,
it accorded with the views presented by numerous scholars in other books on the
subject.
Moreover, his position was seconded
by a young Bruce Bartlett, later a prominent Reagan and Bush official, and
still later a strong Republican opponent of George W. Bush, routinely feted by
the New York Times. Most of the other writings also seemed of very high
quality, including Dr. North’s summary of World War II Revisionism. In general,
the academic scholarship of those articles greatly surpassed anything found in
opinion magazines of more recent decades, Reason itself included. Those so
interested can click on the above links, read the articles in question, and
decide for themselves.
Back then, Reason was a
young and struggling magazine, with a shoestring staff and budget. Publishing
articles of such obvious quality was surely a remarkable achievement for which
the editors could feel justifiably proud, and the overwhelmingly positive
letters they received seemed absolutely warranted. Meanwhile, the nasty attacks
by Ames appeared to be those of a mere political hack who may not have even
bothered actually reading the articles whose authors he vilified.
As a further sign of Ames’
dishonesty, he flung the epithet “Nazi” some two dozen times in his hack-job,
along with numerous uses of “anti-Semitic” as well, and Greaves was certainly
the subject of many of those slurs. But although Greaves and Bartlett wrote
back-to-back articles on exactly the same Pearl Harbor topic, and according to
Wikipedia, the former was the academic advisor to the latter on that subject,
Bartlett’s name appears nowhere in Ames’s hit-piece, presumably because denouncing
a prominent policy expert much beloved by the New York Times as an
“anti-Semitic Neo-Nazi” might prove self-defeating. Even leaving that aside,
accusing the Jewish libertarians running Reason of being Nazi propagandists
must surely be the sort of charge that would strain the credulity of even the
most gullible.
Deborah Lipstadt and
Holocaust Denial
With Ames’ credibility
totally shredded, I decided to carefully reread his article again, looking for
what clues I could find to the whole bizarre situation. Academic scholars who
publish very good history on certain subjects might still have totally
irrational views on others, but normally one would assume otherwise.
It appeared that much of
Ames’ understanding of the issue had come from a certain Deborah Lipstadt, whom
he characterized as a great Holocaust expert. Her name was very vaguely
familiar to me as some sort of academic activist, who years before had won a
major legal victory over a rightwing British historian named David Irving, and
Irving himself received further denunciations in the Ames article.
However, one name did stick
out. Apparently based on Lipstadt’s information, Ames described Harry Elmer
Barnes as “the godfather of American Holocaust denial literature” and Martin’s
“Holocaust denial guru.”
A dozen years earlier, the
name “Barnes” would have meant almost nothing to me. But as I produced my
content-archiving system and digitized so many of America’s most influential
publications of the last 150 years, I had soon discovered that many of our most
illustrious public intellectuals—Left, Right, and Center—had been suddenly
purged and “disappeared” around 1940 because of their stalwart opposition to
FDR’s extremely aggressive foreign policy, and Barnes, an eminent historian and
sociologist, had been among the most prominent of those. He had been one of the
earliest editors at Foreign Affairs and for many years afterward his important
articles had graced the pages of The New Republic and The Nation, while even
after his fall, he had edited Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, an important
1953 collection of essays by himself and other once-prominent figures. But to
have a figure of such intellectual stature accused of being a Holocaust Denier,
let alone the “godfather” of the entire movement, seemed rather bizarre to me.
Since Ames was merely an
ignorant political hack transmitting the opinions of others, I moved on
Lipstadt, his key source. Anyone who has spent much time on the comment-threads
of relatively unfiltered websites has certainly encountered the controversial
topic of Holocaust Denial, but I now decided to try to investigate the issue in
much more serious fashion. A few clicks on the Amazon.com website, and her 1993
book Denying the Holocaust arrived in my mailbox a couple of days later, providing
me an entrance into the mysterious world.
Reading the book was
certainly a tremendous revelation to me. Lipstadt is a professor of Holocaust
Studies with an appointment in Emory University’s Department of Theology, and
once I read the opening paragraph of her first chapter, I decided that her
academic specialty might certainly be described as “Holocaust Theology.”
“The producer was
incredulous. She found it hard to believe that I was turning down an
opportunity to appear on her nationally televised show. ‘But you are writing a
book on this topic. It will be great publicity.’ I explained repeatedly that I
would not participate in a debate with a Holocaust denier. The existence of the
Holocaust was not a matter of debate. I would analyze and illustrate who they
were and what they tried to do, but I would not appear with them…Unwilling to
accept my no as final, she vigorously condemned Holocaust denial and all it
represented. Then, in one last attempt to get me to change my mind, she asked
me a question: ‘I certainly don’t agree with them, but don’t you think our
viewers should hear the other side?'”
Lipstadt’s absolute horror
at having someone actually dispute the tenets of her academic doctrine could
not have been more blatant. Surely no zealous theologian of the European Dark
Ages would have reacted any differently.
The second chapter of her
book supported that impression. Since many of the individuals she castigates as
Holocaust Deniers also supported the Revisionist perspective of the underlying
causes of the First and Second World Wars, she harshly attacked those schools,
but in rather strange fashion. In recent years, blogger Steve Sailer and others
have ridiculed what they describe as the “point-and-sputter” style of debate,
in which a “politically-incorrect” narrative is merely described and then
automatically treated as self-evidently false without any accompanying need for
actual refutation. This seemed to be the approach that Lipstadt took throughout
her rather short book.
For example, she provided a
very long list of leading academic scholars, prominent political figures, and
influential journalists who had championed Revisionist history, noted that
their views disagree with the more mainstream perspective she had presumably
imbibed from her History 101 textbooks, and thereby regarded them as fully
debunked. Certainly a Christian preacher attempting to refute the evolutionary
theories of Harvard’s E.O. Wilson by quoting a passage of Bible verse might
take much the same approach. But few evangelical activists would be so foolish
as to provide a very long list of eminent scientists who all took the same
Darwinist position and then attempt to sweep them aside by citing a single
verse from Genesis. Lipstadt seems to approach history much like a Bible-thumper,
but a particularly dim-witted one. Moreover, many of the authors she attacked
had already become familiar to me after a decade of my content-archiving work,
and I had found their numerous books quite scholarly and persuasive.
Barnes, in particular,
figured quite prominently in Lipstadt’s chapter and throughout her book. The
index listed his name on more than two dozen pages, and he is repeatedly
described as the “godfather” of Holocaust Denial, and its seminal figure. Given
such heavy coverage, I eagerly examined all those references and the
accompanying footnotes to uncover the shocking statements he must have made
during his very long scholarly career.
I was quite disappointed.
There is not a single reference I could find to his supposed Holocaust Denial
views until just the year before his death at age 79, and even that item is
hardly what I had been led to believe. In a 9,300 word article on Revisionism
for a libertarian publication, he ridicules a leading Holocaust source for
claiming that Hitler had killed 25 million Jews, noting that total was nearly
twice their entire worldwide population at the time. In addition, Barnes
several times applied the word “allegedly” to the stories of the Nazi
extermination scheme, an sacrilegious attitude that appears to have horrified a
theologian such as Lipstadt. Finally, in a short, posthumously published review
of a book by French scholar Paul Rassiner, Barnes found his estimate of just 1
million to 1.5 million Jewish deaths quite convincing, but his tone suggested
that he had never previously investigated the matter himself.
So although that last item
technically validated Lipstadt’s accusation that Barnes was a Holocaust Denier,
her evidence-free claims that he was the founder and leader of the field hardly
enhances her scholarly credibility. Meanwhile, all the many tens of thousands
of words I have read by Barnes has suggested that he was a careful and
dispassionate historian.
A notorious incident that occurred soon after the Bolshevik Revolution came to
my mind.
Eminent philologist Timofei
Florinsky, one of Russia’s most internationally renowned academic scholars, was
hauled before a revolutionary tribunal for a public interrogation about his
ideas, and one of the judges, a drunken Jewish former prostitute, found his
answers so irritating that she drew her revolver and shot him dead right there
and then. Given Lipstadt’s obvious emotional state, I have a strong suspicion
that she might have wished she could deal in a similar fashion with Barnes and
the numerous other scholars she denounced. Among other things, she noted with
horror that more than two decades after his 1940 purge from public life,
Barnes’ books were still required reading at both Harvard and Columbia.
All of us reasonably extrapolate what we already know or can easily check
against what is more difficult to verify, and the remaining chapters of
Lipstadt’s book left me very doubtful about the reliability of her work, all of
which was written in a similar near-hysterical style. Since she had already
been vaguely known to me from her well-publicized legal battle against
historian David Irving more than a dozen years earlier, I was hardly surprised
to discover that many pages were devoted to vilifying and insulting him in much
the same manner as Barnes, so I decided to investigate that case.
I was only slightly
surprised to discover that Irving had been one of the world’s most successful
World War II historians, whose remarkable documentary findings had completely
upended our knowledge of that conflict and its origins, with his books selling
in the many millions. His entire approach to controversial historical issues
was to rely as much as possible upon hard documentary evidence, and his total
inability to locate any such documents relating to the Holocaust drove Lipstadt
and her fellow ethnic-activists into a frenzy of outrage, so after many years
of effort they finally managed to wreck his career. Out of curiosity, I read a
couple of his shorter books, which seemed absolutely outstanding historiography,
written in a very measured tone, quite different from that of Lipstadt, whose
own 2005 account of her legal triumph over Irving, History on Trial, merely
confirmed my opinion of her incompetence.
Lipstadt’s first book Beyond
Belief, published in 1986, tells an interesting story as well, with her
descriptive subtitle being “The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust,
1933-1945.” Much of the volume consists of press clippings from the American
print media of that era interspersed with her running rather hysterical
commentary, but providing little analysis or judgment. Some of the journalists
reported horrifying conditions for Jews in pre-war Germany while others claim
that such stories were wildly exaggerated, and Lipstadt automatically praised the
former and denounced the latter without providing any serious explanation.
Lenni Brenner’s remarkable
book Zionism in the Age of the Dictators had been published three years
earlier. Although I only discovered it very recently, surely any half-competent
specialist in her own topic would have noticed it, yet Lipstadt provided no
hint of its existence. Perhaps the reality of the important Nazi-Zionist
economic partnership of the 1930s, with Nazi officials traveling to Palestine
as honored Zionist guests and leading Nazi newspapers praising the Zionist
enterprise might have complicated her simple story of fanatic German Jew-hatred
under Hitler steadily rising towards an exterminationist pitch. Her faculty
appointment in a Department of Theology seems very apt.
Lipstadt’s wartime coverage
is just as bad, perhaps worse. She catalogs perhaps a couple of hundred print
news reports, each describing the massacre of hundreds of thousands or even
millions of Jews by the Nazis. But she expresses her outrage that so many of
these reports were buried deep within the inside pages of newspapers, a
placement suggesting that they were regarded as hysterical wartime atrocity
propaganda and probably fictional, with the editors sometimes explicitly
stating that opinion. Indeed, among these under-emphasized stories was the
claim that the Germans had recently killed 1.5 million Jews by individually
injecting each one of them in the heart with a lethal drug. And although I
don’t see any mention of it, around that same time America’s top Jewish leader
Rabbi Stephen Wise was peddling the absurd report that the Nazis had
slaughtered millions of Jews, turning their skins into lampshades and rendering
their bodies into soap. Obviously, separating truth from falsehood during a
blizzard of wartime propaganda is not nearly as easy as Lipstadt seems to
assume.
Ordinary Americans were
apparently even more skeptical than newspaper editors. According to Lipstadt:
“Writing in the Sunday New
York Times Magazine, [Arthur] Koestler cited public opinion polls in the United
States in which nine of ten average Americans dismissed the accusations against
the Nazis as propaganda lies and flatly stated that they did not believe a word
of them.”
Lipstadt convincingly
demonstrates that very few Americans seem to have believed in the reality of
the Holocaust during the Second World War itself, despite considerable efforts
by agitated Jewish activists to persuade them. Over the years, I have seen
mention of numerous other books making this same basic point, and therefore
harshly condemning the American political leaders of the time for having failed
“to save the Jews.”
Explicit and Implicit
Holocaust Denial After World War II
Yet as I began further
investigating the history of Holocaust Denial in the wake of the Reason
contretemps, I was very surprised to discover that this same pattern of
widespread disbelief in the Holocaust seems to have continued unabated after
the end of the war and throughout the 1950s, being especially strong among
high-ranking American military figures, especially top generals and individuals
with an Intelligence background, who seemingly would have had the best
knowledge of the true events.
Some years ago, I came
across a totally obscure 1951 book entitled Iron Curtain Over America by John
Beaty, a well-regarded university professor. Beaty had spent his wartime years
in Military Intelligence, being tasked with preparing the daily briefing
reports distributed to all top American officials summarizing available
intelligence information acquired during the previous 24 hours, which was
obviously a position of considerable responsibility.
As a zealous anti-Communist,
he regarded much of America’s Jewish population as deeply implicated in
subversive activity, therefore constituting a serious threat to traditional
American freedoms. In particular, the growing Jewish stranglehold over
publishing and the media was making it increasingly difficult for discordant
views to reach the American people, with this regime of censorship constituting
the “Iron Curtain” described in his title. He blamed Jewish interests for the
totally unnecessary war with Hitler’s Germany, which had long sought good
relations with America, but instead had suffered total destruction for its
strong opposition to Europe’s Jewish-backed Communist menace.
Beaty also sharply denounced
American support for the new state of Israel, which was potentially costing us
the goodwill of so many millions of Muslims and Arabs. And as a very minor
aside, he also criticized the Israelis for continuing to claim that Hitler had
killed six million Jews, a highly implausible accusation that had no apparent
basis in reality and seemed to be just a fraud concocted by Jews and
Communists, aimed at poisoning our relations with postwar Germany and
extracting money for the Jewish State from the long-suffering German people.
He was scathing toward the
Nuremberg Trials, which he described as a “major indelible blot” upon America and
“a travesty of justice.” According to him, the proceedings were dominated by
vengeful German Jews, many of whom engaged in falsification of testimony or
even had criminal backgrounds. As a result, this “foul fiasco” merely taught
Germans that “our government had no sense of justice.” Sen. Robert Taft, the
Republican leader of the immediate postwar era took a very similar position,
which later won him the praise of John F. Kennedy in Profiles in Courage. The
fact that the chief Soviet prosecutor at Nuremberg had played the same role
during the notorious Stalinist show trials of the late 1930s, during which
numerous Old Bolsheviks confessed to all sorts of absurd and ridiculous things,
hardly enhanced the credibility of the proceedings to many outside observers.
Then as now, a book taking
such controversial positions stood little chance of finding a mainstream New
York publisher, but it was soon released by a small Dallas firm, and then
became enormously successful, going through some seventeen printings over the
next few years. According to Scott McConnell, founding editor of The American
Conservative, Beaty’s book became the second most popular conservative text of
the 1950s, ranking only behind Russell Kirk’s iconic classic, The Conservative
Mind.
Moreover, although Jewish
groups including the ADL harshly condemned the book, especially in their
private lobbying, those efforts provoked a backlash, and numerous top American
generals, both serving and retired, wholeheartedly endorsed Beaty’s work,
denouncing the ADL efforts at censorship and urging all Americans to read the
volume. Although Beaty’s quite explicit Holocaust Denial might shock tender
modern sensibilities, at the time it seems to have caused barely a ripple of
concern and was almost totally ignored even by the vocal Jewish critics of the
work.
Much of this very
interesting story is told by Joseph Bendersky, an expert in Holocaust Studies,
who devoted ten years of archival research to his 2000 book The “Jewish
Threat.” His work chronicles the extremely widespread anti-Semitism found
within the U.S. Army and Military Intelligence throughout the first half of the
twentieth century, with Jews being widely regarded as posing a serious security
risk. The book runs well over 500 pages, but when I consulted the index I found
no mention of the Rosenbergs nor Harry Dexter White nor any of the other very
numerous Jewish spies revealed by the Venona Decrypts, and the term “Venona”
itself is also missing from the index.
Reports of the
overwhelmingly Jewish leadership of the Russian Bolsheviks are mostly treated
as bigotry and paranoia, as are descriptions of the similar ethnic skew of
America’s own Communist Party, let alone the heavy financial support of the
Bolsheviks by Jewish international bankers. At one point, he dismisses the link
between Jews and Communism in Germany by noting that “less than half” of the
Communist Party leadership was Jewish; but since fewer than one in a hundred
Germans came from that ethnic background, Jews were obviously over-represented
among Communist leaders by as much as 5,000%. This seems to typify the sort of
dishonesty and innumeracy I have regularly encountered among Jewish Holocaust
experts.
Meanwhile, with the
copyright having long lapsed, I’m pleased to add Beaty’s work to my Controversial
HTML Books selection, so individuals interested can read it and decide for
themselves:
The Iron Curtain Over
America
JOHN BEATY • 1951 • 82,000 WORDS
Beaty’s very brief 1951 discussion has been the earliest instance of explicit
Holocaust Denial I have managed to locate, but the immediate postwar years seem
absolutely rife with what might be described as “implicit Holocaust Denial,”
especially within the highest political circles.
Over the years, Holocaust
scholars and activists have very rightfully emphasized the absolutely
unprecedented nature of the historical events they have studied. They describe
how some six million innocent Jewish civilians were deliberately exterminated,
mostly in gas chambers, by one of Europe’s most highly cultured nations, and
emphasize that monstrous project was often accorded greater priority than
Germany’s own wartime military needs during the country’s desperate struggle
for survival. Furthermore, the Germans also undertook enormous efforts to
totally eliminate all possible traces of their horrifying deed, with huge
resources expended to cremate all those millions of bodies and scatter the
ashes. This same disappearance technique was even sometimes applied to the
contents of their mass graves, which were dug up long after initial burial, so
that the rotting corpses could then be totally incinerated and all evidence
eliminated. And although Germans are notorious for their extreme bureaucratic
precision, this immense wartime project was apparently implemented without
benefit of a single written document, or at least no such document has ever
been located.
Lipstadt entitled her first
book “Beyond Belief,” and I think that all of us can agree that the historical
event she and so many others in academia and Hollywood have made the
centerpiece of their lives and careers is certainly one of the most very
remarkable occurrences in all of human history. Indeed, perhaps only a Martian
Invasion would have been more worthy of historical study, but Orson Welles’s
famous War of the Worlds radio-play which terrified so many millions of
Americans in 1938 turned out to be a hoax rather than real.
The six million Jews who
died in the Holocaust certainly constituted a very substantial fraction of all
the wartime casualties in the European Theater, outnumbering by a factor of 100
all the British who died during the Blitz, and being dozens of times more
numerous than all the Americans who fell there in battle. Furthermore, the
sheer monstrosity of the crime against innocent civilians would surely have
provided the best possible justification for the Allied war effort. Yet for
many, many years after the war, a very strange sort of amnesia seems to have
gripped most of the leading political protagonists in that regard.
Robert Faurisson, a French
academic who became a prominent Holocaust Denier in the 1970s, once made an
extremely interesting observation regarding the memoirs of Eisenhower,
Churchill, and De Gaulle:
“Three of the best known
works on the Second World War are General Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe (New
York: Doubleday [Country Life Press], 1948), Winston Churchill’s The Second
World War (London: Cassell, 6 vols., 1948-1954), and the Mémoires de guerre of
General de Gaulle (Paris: Plon, 3 vols., 1954-1959). In these three works not
the least mention of Nazi gas chambers is to be found.
“Eisenhower’s Crusade in
Europe is a book of 559 pages; the six volumes of Churchill’s Second World War
total 4,448 pages; and de Gaulle’s three-volume Mémoires de guerre is 2,054
pages. In this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not
including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find
no mention either of Nazi “gas chambers,” a “genocide” of the Jews, or of “six
million” Jewish victims of the war.”
Given that the Holocaust
would reasonably rank as the single most remarkable episode of the Second World
War, such striking omissions must almost force us to place Eisenhower,
Churchill, and De Gaulle among the ranks of “implicit Holocaust Deniers.”
Many others seem to fall into that same category. In 1981, Lucy S. Dawidowicz,
a leading Holocaust scholar, published a short book entitled The Holocaust and
the Historians, in which she denounced so many prominent historians for having
so totally ignored the reality of the Holocaust for many years following World
War II. Indeed, discussion of that topic was almost entirely confined to the
Jewish Studies programs which Jewish ethnic activists had newly established at
numerous universities throughout the country. Although Lipstadt’s poor
scholarly habits and hysterical style hardly impressed me, she appears to have
been among the most successful academics who began a career in those ethnic
studies departments, which suggests that their average quality was far below
her own.
Meanwhile, Dawidowicz
emphasizes that mainstream histories often entirely omitted the Holocaust from
their presentations:
“But it is plain from the
most cursory review of textbooks and scholarly works by English and American
historians that the awesome events of the Holocaust have not been given their
historic due. For over two decades some secondary school and college texts
never mentioned the subject at all, while others treated it so summarily or
vaguely as to fail to convey sufficient information about the events themselves
or their historical significance.”
With regard to serious
scholarship, she notes that when Friedrich Meinecke, universally acknowledged
as Germany’s most eminent historian, published The German Catastrophe in 1946,
he harshly denounced Hitler as the leader of “a band of criminals” but made
absolutely no mention of the Holocaust, which surely would have represented the
height of such criminality. Major British accounts of Hitler and World War II
by leading historians such as A.J.P. Taylor, H.R. Trevor-Roper, and Alan
Bullock were almost as silent. A similar situation occurred in America as late
as 1972 when the massive 1,237 page Columbia History of the World, having a
Jewish co-editor, devoted a full chapter to World War II but confined its
discussion of the Holocaust to just two short and somewhat ambiguous sentences.
One almost gets a sense that many of these experienced professional historians
treated discussion of the Holocaust as a considerable embarrassment, a subject
that they sought to avoid or at least completely minimize.
Dawidowicz even castigates
Slaughterhouse-Five, the 1969 fictional masterpiece by Kurt Vonnegut, for its
bald assertion that the firebombing of Dresden was “the greatest massacre in
European history,” a claim that seems to reduce the Holocaust to non-existence.
I myself had noticed
something similar just a couple of years before Dawidowicz’s book appeared. The
English translation of German journalist Joachim Fest’s widely praised Hitler
had been published in 1974 and I had read it a few years later, finding it just
as excellent as the critics had indicated. But I remember being a little
puzzled that the 800 page book contained no more than a couple of pages
discussing the Nazi death camps and the word “Jews” never even appeared in the
index.
The vast majority of Hitler’s
Jewish victims came from Russia and the Eastern European nations included in
the Soviet Bloc. That was also the location of all the extermination camps that
are the central focus of Holocaust scholars, and therefore the Soviets were the
source of most of the key evidence used at the Nuremberg Trials. Yet Dawidowicz
notes that after Stalin grew increasingly suspicious of Jews and Israel a few
years after the end of the war, virtually all mention of the Holocaust and
German wartime atrocities against Jews vanished from the Soviet media and
history books. A similar process occurred in the Warsaw Pact satellites, even
while the top Communist Party leadership of many of those countries often
remained very heavily Jewish for some years. Indeed, I recall reading quite a
number of newspaper articles mentioning that after the Berlin Wall fell and the
sundered halves of Europe were finally reunited, most Eastern Europeans had
never even heard of the Holocaust.
These days, my morning
newspapers seem to carry Holocaust-related stories with astonishing frequency,
and probably no event of the twentieth century looms so large in our public
consciousness. According to public survey data, even as far back as 1995, some
97% of Americans knew of the Holocaust, far more than were aware of the Pearl
Harbor attack or America’s use of the atomic bombs against Japan, while less
than half our citizenry were aware that the Soviet Union had been our wartime
ally. But I’d suspect that anyone who drew his knowledge from the mainstream
newspapers and history books during the first couple of decades after the end
of the Second World War might never have even been aware that any Holocaust had
actually occurred.
In 1999 Peter Novick
published a book on this general theme entitled The Holocaust in American Life,
citing that survey, and his introduction began by noting the very strange
pattern the Holocaust exhibited in its cultural influence, which seems quite
unique among all major historical events. In the case of almost all other searing
historical occurrences such as the massive bloodshed of the Somme or the bitter
Vietnam War, their greatest impact upon popular consciousness and media came
soon afterward, with the major books and films often appearing within the first
five or ten years when memories were fresh, and the influence peaking within a
couple of decades, after which they were gradually forgotten.
Yet in the case of the
Holocaust, this pattern was completely reversed. Hardly anyone discussed it for
the first twenty years after the end of the World War II, while it gradually
moved to the center of American life in the 1970s, just as wartime memories
were fading and many of the most prominent and knowledgeable figures from that
era had departed the scene. Novick cites numerous studies and surveys
demonstrating that this lack of interest and visibility certainly included the
Jewish community itself, which had seemingly suffered so greatly under those
events, yet apparently had almost completely forgotten about them during the
1950s and much of the 1960s.
I can certainly confirm that
impression from my personal experience. Prior to the mid- or late-1970s, I had
had only the vaguest impression that virtually all the Jews and Gypsies of
Europe had been exterminated during the Second World War, and although the term
“Holocaust” was in widespread use, it invariably referred to a “Nuclear
Holocaust,” a term long-since supplanted and scarcely used today. Then, after
the Berlin Wall fell, I was quite surprised to discover that Eastern Europe was
still filled with vast numbers of unexterminated Gypsies, who quickly flooded
into the West and provoked all sorts of political controversies.
The Rediscovery of the
Holocaust
The late scholar Raul
Hilberg is universally acknowledged as the founder of modern Holocaust studies,
which began with the 1961 publication of his massive volume The Destruction of
the European Jews. In his very interesting 2007 Hilberg obituary, historian
Norman Finkelstein emphasizes that prior to Hilberg’s work, there had been
virtually no writing on the Holocaust, and discussion of the topic was
considered almost “taboo.” For a recent event of such apparent enormity to have
been so completely wiped away from public discussion and the consciousness of
historians and political scientists can be explained in several different ways.
But once I began to investigate the circumstances behind Hilberg’s
ground-breaking work, I encountered all sorts of strange ironies.
According to Wikipedia,
Hilberg’s family of Austrian Jews coincidentally arrived in the United States
on the exact day in 1939 that war broke out, and in his early teens he was soon
horrified to read all the news reports of the ongoing extermination of his
fellow Jews in the continent his family had left behind, even telephoning
Jewish leaders asking why they were doing so little to save their kinsmen from
annihilation. He subsequently served in the U.S. military in Europe, then
majored in Political Science at Brooklyn College after the end of the conflict.
The inspiration for his future scholarly focus seems to have come when he was
shocked by a remark made by one of his lecturers, Hans Rosenberg:
“The most wicked atrocities
perpetrated on a civilian population in modern times occurred during the
Napoleonic occupation of Spain.”
When Hilberg asked how
Rosenberg, himself a German-Jewish refugee, could have so totally ignored the
murder of 6 million Jews, a monstrous crime committed just a couple of years
earlier, Rosenberg sought to deflect the question, saying that “it was a complicated
matter” and “history doesn’t teach down into the present age.” Since Rosenberg
was a student of Meinecke, whom Lipstadt has bitterly denounced as an implicit
Holocaust Denier, one wonders whether Rosenberg may have shared the beliefs of
his mentor but was reluctant to admit that fact to his overwhelmingly Jewish
students in emotionally-charged postwar Brooklyn.
Later, Hilberg conducted his
doctoral research at Columbia under Franz Neumann, another German-Jewish
refugee scholar. But when Hilberg indicated he wanted his research to focus on
the extermination of Europe’s Jews, Neumann strongly discouraged that topic,
warning Hilberg that doing so would be professionally imprudent and might
become “his academic funeral.” When he attempted to publish his research in
book form, it received numerous negative reviews, with Israel’s Yad Vashem
fearing it would encounter “hostile criticism,” and over a six year period, it
was rejected by several major publishing houses along with Princeton
University, based on the advice of the influential Jewish intellectual Hannah
Arendt. One naturally wonders whether all these established scholars may have
quietly known something that a naive young doctoral candidate such as Hilberg
did not. His book only appeared in print because a Jewish immigrant whose
business had suffered under the Nazis funded the entire publication.
I’d never paid much attention to Holocaust issues, but the supporters of my
local Palo Alto Library operate a monthly book sale, and with serious nonfiction
hardcovers often priced at just a quarter each, my personal library has grown
by hundreds of volumes over the years, now including several of the thickest
and most influential Holocaust texts. Aside from Hilberg’s classic volume,
these include Nora Levin’s The Holocaust (1968), Lucy Dawidowicz’s The War
Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (1975), Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust (1985), and
Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996).
I claim absolutely no
expertise in Holocaust issues, and analyzing the evidence and argumentation
these voluminous works offer is entirely beyond my ability. But I decided to
attempt to assess their overall credibility by exploring a few particular
items, without actually bothering to read the thousands of pages of text they
provided.
Consider the interesting
case of Field Marshal Erhard Milch, Hermann Goering’s very powerful number-two
in the German Luftwaffe. His father was certainly a Jew, and according to
researchers Robert Wistrich and Louis Snyder, there is archival evidence that
his mother was Jewish as well. Now is it certainly not impossible that a Third
Reich supposedly dedicated with grim fanaticism to the extermination of each
and every Jew might have spent the entire war with a full- or half-Jew near the
absolute top of its military hierarchy, but surely that puzzling anomaly would
warrant careful explanation, and Milch’s apparent Jewish background was
certainly known during the Nuremberg Trials.
Yet when I carefully
consulted the very comprehensive indexes of those five books, totaling over
3,500 pages, there is virtually no discussion of Milch, except a few very brief
mentions of his name in connection with various military operations. Either the
authors were unaware of Milch’s Jewish background, or perhaps they hoped to
keep that fact away from their readers lest it cause “confusion.” Neither of
these possibilities enhances the trust we should place in their research skills
or their scholarly objectivity.
Indeed, the fascinating and
widely-praised 2002 book Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers by Bryan Mark Rigg notes that
aside from Milch, Hitler’s military contained over a dozen half-Jewish generals
and admirals and another dozen quarter-Jews of that same high rank, plus a
total of roughly 150,000 additional half- or quarter-Jewish soldiers, with a
large fraction of these being officers. All of these individuals would have had
some fully-Jewish parents or grand-parents, which seems decidedly odd behavior
for a regime supposedly so focused on the total eradication of the Jewish race.
Another obvious matter casts
further doubt upon the historical quality of those five immensely thick volumes
of standard Holocaust narrative, which together occupy nearly a linear foot on
my bookshelves. For prosecutors of any crime, establishing a plausible motive
is certainly an important goal, and in the case of the Jewish Holocaust, these
authors would seem to have an easy task at hand. Hitler and his German
colleagues had always claimed that the Jews overwhelmingly dominated Bolshevik
Communism, and much of their struggle against the former was in order to
prevent further bloody deeds of the latter. So surely devoting an early chapter
or so to describing this central Nazi doctrine would provide an airtight
explanation of what drove the Nazis to their fiendish slaughters, rendering
fully explicable the horrifying events that would occupy the remainder of their
text.
Yet oddly enough, an
examination of their indexes for “Bolsheviks,” “Communism,” and all variants
reveals almost no discussion of this important issue. Goldhagen’s 1996 book
provides just a couple of short sentences spread across his 600 pages, and the
other works seem to contain virtually nothing at all. Since all of these
Holocaust books almost totally avoid Hitler’s self-declared motive for his
anti-Jewish actions, they are forced to desperately search for alternative
explanations, seeking clues buried deep within the German past or turning to
psychanalytical speculations or perhaps deciding that what they describe as the
greatest massacre in all human history was undertaken out of sheer Nazi
wickedness.
The obvious reason for this
glaring omission is that the authors are constructing a morality-play in which
the Jews must be portrayed as absolutely blameless victims, and even hinting at
their role in the numerous Communist atrocities that long preceded the rise of
the Third Reich might cause readers to consider both sides of the issue. When
purported historians go to absurd lengths to hide such glaring facts, they
unmask themselves as propagandists, and we must be very cautious about trusting
their reliability and candor in all other matters, whether great or small.
Indeed, the issue of Communism raises a far larger matter, one having rather
touchy implications. Sometimes two simple compounds are separately inert, but
when combined together may possess tremendous explosive force. From my
introductory history classes and readings in high school, certain things had
always seemed glaringly obvious to me even if the conclusions remained
unmentionable, and I once assumed they were just as apparent to most others as
well. But over the years I have begun to wonder whether perhaps this might not
be correct.
Back in those late Cold War
days, the death toll of innocent civilians from the Bolshevik Revolution and
the first two decades of the Soviet Regime was generally reckoned at running
well into the tens of millions when we include the casualties of the Russian
Civil War, the government-induced famines, the Gulag, and the executions. I’ve heard
that these numbers have been substantially revised downwards to perhaps as
little as twenty million or so, but no matter. Although determined Soviet
apologists may dispute such very large figures, they have always been part of
the standard narrative history taught within the West.
Meanwhile, all historians
know perfectly well that the Bolshevik leaders were overwhelmingly Jewish, with
three of the five revolutionaries Lenin named as his plausible successors
coming from that background. Although only around 4% of Russia’s population was
Jewish, a few years ago Vladimir Putin stated that Jews constituted perhaps
80-85% of the early Soviet government, an estimate fully consistent with the
contemporaneous claims of Winston Churchill, Times of London correspondent
Robert Wilton, and the officers of American Military Intelligence. Recent books
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Yuri Slezkine, and others have all painted a very
similar picture. And prior to World War II, Jews remained enormously
over-represented in the Communist leadership, especially dominating the Gulag
administration and the top ranks of the dreaded NKVD.
Both of these simple facts
have been widely accepted in America throughout my entire lifetime. But combine
them together with the relatively tiny size of worldwide Jewry, around 16
million prior to World War II, and the inescapable conclusion is that in per
capita terms Jews were the greatest mass-murderers of the twentieth century,
holding that unfortunate distinction by an enormous margin and with no other
nationality coming even remotely close. And yet, by the astonishing alchemy of
Hollywood, the greatest killers of the last one hundred years have somehow been
transmuted into being seen as the greatest victims, a transformation so
seemingly implausible that future generations will surely be left gasping in
awe.
Today’s American Neocons are
just as heavily Jewish as were the Bolsheviks of a hundred years ago, and they
have greatly benefited from the political immunity provided by this totally
bizarre inversion of historical reality. Partly as a consequence of their
media-fabricated victimhood status, they have managed to seize control over
much of our political system, especially our foreign policy, and have spent the
last few years doing their utmost to foment an absolutely insane war with
nuclear-armed Russia. If they do manage to achieve that unfortunate goal, they
will surely outdo the very impressive human body-count racked up by their
ethnic ancestors, perhaps even by an order-of-magnitude or more.
Holocaust Frauds and
Confusions
Since the Holocaust only
became a major public topic after wartime memories had grown dim, the story has
always seemed to suffer from the problems traditionally associated with
“recovered memory syndrome.” Truths and falsehoods were often mixed together in
strange ways, and the door was opened wide to an astonishing number of outright
frauds and liars.
For example, in the late 1970s I remember many of my high school classmates
devouring The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski, perhaps the first widely popular
Holocaust memoir. But then a few years later, the media revealed that
Kosinski’s national best-seller was simply fraudulent, and the plagiarizing
author eventually committed suicide. Indeed, there have been so many fake Holocaust
memoirs over the years that they nearly constitute a literary genre of their
own.
Probably the most world’s most famous Holocaust survivor was Elie Wiesel, who
parlayed the stories of his wartime suffering into becoming an enormous
political celebrity. His career was capped with a Nobel Peace Prize in 1986,
and the announcement declared him “a messenger to mankind.” Yet journalist
Alexander Cockburn has persuasively argued that Wiesel was simply a fraud, and
his famous autobiographical work Night just another literary hoax.
Although the iconic figure
of “the Six Million” has been endlessly repeated by our media, the estimated
numbers of the dead have actually been shockingly variable over the years.
Although I never paid much attention to Holocaust issues, I have closely read
my major newspapers and magazines for decades, and had regularly seen the
statement that the Nazi death machine had brutally exterminated five million
Gentiles along with the six million Jews. But just last year, I was stunned to
discover that former total was simply a whole-cloth invention by prominent
Holocaust-activist Simon Wiesenthal, who simply made the figure up one day with
the intent of giving non-Jews more of a stake in the Holocaust story. And
despite being based on absolutely no evidence or research, his casual claim was
never effectively refuted by actual Holocaust scholars, who knew it to be total
nonsense, and therefore it was so regularly repeated in the media that I
probably read it hundreds of times over the years, always assuming it had some
firm grounding in proven reality.
Similarly, for decades I had
always read the undeniable fact that the Nazis had exterminated 4 million
inmates at Auschwitz, with most of the victims being Jews, and Lipstadt
certainly treated that number as absolutely rock-solid historical reality. But in
the early 1990s after the fall of Communism, the official total was quietly
revised downwards to as little as 1.1 million. The fact that a sudden reduction
in the official Holocaust body-count by 3 million has had so little impact upon
our public Holocaust media narrative hardly seems to inspire great confidence
in either the total figures or the media reporting of them.
Over the last couple of
generations, our media has engraved that figure of Six Million so deeply onto
the minds of every Western citizen that the meaning of the iconic number is
universally understood, and those who question it risk a prison sentence in
many European countries. Yet its actual origin is somewhat obscure. According
to some accounts, Jewish groups lobbied President Truman into casually
inserting it into one of his speeches, and thereafter it has endlessly echoed
in the media down to the present day. Some angry Internet activist has put
together a graphic displaying extracts from dozens of New York Times stories
between 1869 and 1941 all citing the figure of 6 million Eastern European Jews
as being threatened with death, suggesting that our official Holocaust
body-count actually predated World War II by as much as three generations. I
really wouldn’t be surprised if that might be the original source of the
number.
Sometimes the creation of a
new Holocaust hoax was only narrowly averted. Throughout most of the twentieth
century, Jews and blacks had been close political allies in America, with the
top leadership of the NAACP almost invariably being Jewish, as were nearly all
of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s top white advisors and a very large fraction of
the key white activists involved in the black Civil Rights movement of the
1950s and 1960s. But by the late 1960s, a schism had erupted, with many younger
black activists becoming deeply hostile to what they perceived as overwhelming
Jewish influence, while more militant blacks, whether Muslim or otherwise,
began siding with the Palestinians against Zionist Israel. This growing
conflict became especially bitter during Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign
of 1988 and reached a flash-point in the New York City of the early 1990s.
A couple of film-makers
sought to help heal this rift by producing a major 1992 PBS documentary
entitled The Liberators, recounting how black American troops had been among
the first units that captured the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps,
thereby freeing the tens of thousands of Jewish inmates from Nazi captivity. A
historical narrative of such deep symbolic resonance quickly attracted
overwhelming support from both black leaders and Jewish ones, with Jesse
Jackson sharing the stage with Holocaust survivors and numerous Jewish
luminaries at the Harlem premiere, and the film received an Oscar nomination. However,
in early Febuary 1993 Jeffrey Goldberg took to the pages of The New Republic to
reveal that the story was merely a hoax, based on falsified history. Although
the film’s Jewish co-producer angrily denounced her critics as racists and
Holocaust Deniers, those charges stuck, and were eventually reported in the New
York Times and other major media outlets. The leading Jewish organizations and
Holocaust centers that had been heavily promoting the film soon distanced
themselves, and in 2013 The Times of Israel even marked the twenty-year
anniversary of what it described as a notorious hoax. But I suspect that if
matters had gone a little differently, the story might soon have become so
deeply embedded in the canonical Holocaust narrative that anyone questioning
the facts would have been vilified as a racist.
A few years earlier, The New Republic had actually been in the forefront of
promoting a different hoax also relating to Jewish issues, one which might have
had far greater international political significance when Joan Peters, an
obscure Jewish writer, published a major historical work in 1984. She claimed
that her extensive archival research had revealed that the bulk of the
present-day Palestinians were actually not native to Palestine, but instead were
recently-arrived immigrants, drawn there by the heavy economic development
produced by the Zionist settlers who had actually preceded them.
Her shocking findings
received hundreds of glowing reviews and academic endorsements across the
entire spectrum of the mainstream and elite American media, and her book
quickly became a huge bestseller. Leading Jewish Holocaust luminaries such as
Dawidowicz and Wiesel took center stage in praising her remarkable scholarship,
which seemed likely to completely demolish the claims of the expelled
Palestinians, thereby reshaping the nature of the Middle East conflict to
Israel’s great advantage.
However, a young graduate
student in History at Princeton named Norman Finkelstein had considerable
interest in the history of Zionism, and being very much surprised by her
findings, decided to investigate those claims. Once he began carefully checking
her footnotes and her alleged sources, he discovered they were entirely
fraudulent, and her groundbreaking research merely amounted to a hoax, which
some later suggested had been concocted by an intelligence organization and
merely published under her name.
Although Finkelstein widely
distributed his important findings, they were totally ignored by all the
American journalists, scholars, and media organizations he contacted, with the
sole exception of Noam Chomsky, and the growing Joan Peters Hoax might have
destroyed the legal basis of the international Palestinian claims to their own
Palestine homeland. But some independent-minded British publications eventually
picked up his information, and the resulting wave of media embarrassment caused
the Peters claims to fade into oblivion. Meanwhile, Finkelstein himself
suffered severe retaliation as a consequence, and according to Chomsky was
completely blacklisted by his Princeton department and the wider academic
community.
More than a dozen years
later, Finkelstein’s work became the focus of a second major controversy. In
the late 1990s, international Jewish organizations launched a major effort to
extract many billions of dollars from the largest Swiss banks, arguing that
such funds were the rightful property of European Jews who had died in the
Holocaust. When the banks initially resisted, arguing that no solid evidence
was being presented for such enormous claims, they were harshly denounced by
America’s Jewish-dominated media, and Jewish lobbying led the American
government to threaten them with severe financial sanctions that could have
destroyed their businesses. Faced with such serious extortionate pressure, the
banks finally gave way and paid out the bulk of the funds being demanded, with
those billions mostly retained by the Jewish organizations leading the campaign
and spent on their own projects since the purported Jewish heirs were
impossible to locate.
This situation led historian
Finkelstein to publish a short book in 2000 entitled The Holocaust Industry, in
which he harshly critiqued what he characterized as a global Jewish
money-making enterprise aimed at unfairly extracting wealth on behalf of the
supposed Holocaust victims, often with little regard for truth or fairness.
Although almost entirely ignored by the American media, it became a major
bestseller in Europe, which eventually forced American publications to give it
some attention. Among other things, Finkelstein noted that more than a
half-century after the end of the Holocaust, the number of officially
designated Holocaust survivors had grown so large that simple mortality
considerations seemed to imply that huge numbers of European Jews must have
survived the war. This obviously raised serious questions about how many might
have actually died during that conflict and its accompanying Holocaust.
Over the years, I had
noticed the same sorts of media reports claiming enormous totals of Holocaust
survivors still alive now six or seven decades after the event. For example,
even as late as 2009 an official at Israel’s Jewish Agency justified laws
criminalizing Holocaust Denial by explaining that almost 65 years after the end
of the war “there are still hundreds of thousands of living Holocaust
survivors,” a statement which itself seems to constitute rather explicit
Holocaust Denial. Indeed, a very noticeable number of all the New York Times
obituaries I read these days in my morning newspapers seem to include Holocaust
survivors still expiring in their eighties and nineties.
Anyone who reads serious
history books knows that Jews have generally enjoyed a reputation for producing
many of the world’s greatest swindlers and frauds, hardly surprising given
their notorious tendency to lie and dissemble. Meanwhile, the Jewish community
also seems to contain far more than its fair share of the emotionally disturbed
and the mentally ill, and perhaps as a consequence has served as a launching-pad
for many of the world’s religious cults and fanatic ideological movements. Any
exploration of the Holocaust certainly tends to support this rather negative
appraisal.
The Holocaust and Hollywood
Although the Holocaust began
to enter American consciousness during the 1960s and 1970s with the publication
of major books by Hilberg, Levin, Dawidowicz, and others, together with the
resulting articles and reviews that these generated, the initial social impact
was probably not substantial, at least outside the Jewish community. Even
highly successful books selling in the many tens of thousands of copies would
have little impact in a population of more than 200 million.
Our media completely shapes
our perceived reality of the world, and although intellectuals and many of the
highly educated are greatly influenced by books and other forms of printed
content, the vast majority of the population understands the world through
electronic media, especially that of popular entertainment.
Consider, for example, the
1974 publication of Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery,
a magisterial two volume analysis by economists Robert William Fogel and
Stanley L. Engerman. By applying quantitative methods, the study overturned
generations of assumptions about the American social institution, demonstrating
that black slaves in the South were encouraged to marry and maintain their
households, while having diets and medical care comparable to that of the free
white population and often superior to that of Northern industrial
wage-earners. Moreover, following emancipation the life expectancy of freedmen
declined by ten percent and their illnesses increased by twenty per cent. All
of this is summarized in the extensive Wikipedia entry.
Although their results were
controversial, the authors had the strongest possible academic credentials,
with Fogel, an eminent scholar, being a leading figure in a school of economics
who went on to win a Nobel Prize. And Fogel’s ideological credentials were even
more robust, given that he had had a lifelong commitment to black Civil Rights
starting with the eight years he had spent as a young Communist Party
organizer, while his 1949 marriage to a black woman had often subjected the
couple to the indignities of the anti-miscegenation laws of that era.
Consequently, their findings received unprecedented coverage in the mainstream
media for an academic study and surely influenced numerous historians and
journalists. Yet I think the long-term impact upon popular perceptions about
slavery has been almost nil.
By contrast, in 1976 the ABC
television network ran the prime-time miniseries Roots, a multi-generational
account of a slave family. The story closely adhered to the traditionally harsh
slavery narrative, while supposedly being based upon the recorded family
history of Alex Haley, the author of the best-selling book of that same title.
But although his work was later found to be fraudulent and apparently
plagiarized, the ratings were stellar and the social impact enormous due to the
audience of 100 million Americans who watched those episodes. Thus, even the
most impressive written scholarship had absolutely no chance of competing with
fictionalized television drama.
All three of America’s
television networks were under Jewish ownership or control, so it was hardly
surprising that two years later ABC decided to repeat this process with the
1978 television miniseries Holocaust, which also achieved an audience of 100
million and generated enormous profits. It seems quite possible this may have
been the first time many American families discovered that colossal but almost
entirely invisible event of World War II.
The following year, William
Styron published Sophie’s Choice, a heart-rending tale involving deeply buried
memories of the extermination of Christian Polish children in the Auschwitz gas
chambers. Although such an occurrence was absolutely contrary to the doctrines
of all Jewish Holocaust scholars, the novel became a huge national best-seller
anyway, and a 1982 film of the same name soon followed, with Meryl Streep
winning an Oscar for Best Actress. A decade later, Steven Spielberg’s 1993
Schindler’s List won a remarkable seven Oscars, while grossing nearly $100
million.
With Hollywood so
overwhelmingly Jewish, the consequences were hardly surprising, and a huge
cinematic genre soon developed. According to Finkelstein, Hollywood produced
some 180 Holocaust films just during the years 1989-2004. Even the very partial
subset of Holocaust films listed on Wikipedia has grown enormously long, but
fortunately the Movie Database has winnowed down the catalog by providing a
list of the 50 Most Moving Holocaust Films.
Many billions of dollars
have surely been invested over the years on the total production costs of this
ongoing business enterprise. For most ordinary people, “seeing is believing,”
and how could anyone seriously doubt the reality of the Holocaust after having
seen all the gas chambers and mounds of murdered Jewish corpses constructed by
highly-paid Hollywood set designers? Doubting the existence of Spiderman and
the Incredible Hulk would be almost as absurd.
Some 2% of Americans have a
Jewish background, while perhaps 95% possess Christian roots, but the Wikipedia
list of Christian films seems rather scanty and rudimentary by comparison. Very
few of those films were ever widely released, and the selection is stretched to
even include The Chronicles of Narnia, which contains no mention of
Christianity whatsoever. One of the very few prominent exceptions on the list
is Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ, which he was forced to
personally self-fund. And despite the enormous financial success of that movie,
one of the most highly profitable domestic releases of all time, the project
rendered Gibson a hugely vilified pariah in the industry over which he had once
reigned as its biggest star, especially after word got around that his own
father was a Holocaust Denier.
In many respects, Hollywood and the broader entertainment media today provide
the unifying spiritual basis of our deeply secular society, and the
overwhelming predominance of Holocaust-themed films over Christian ones has
obvious implications. Meanwhile, in our globalized world, the American
entertainment-media complex totally dominates Europe and the rest of the West,
so that the ideas generated here effectively shape the minds of many hundreds
of millions of people living elsewhere, whether or not they fully recognize
that fact.
In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI
sought to heal the long-standing Vatican II rift within the Catholic Church and
reconcile with the breakaway Society of St. Pius X faction. But this became a
major media controversy when it was discovered that Bishop Richard Williamson,
one of the leading members of that latter organization, had long been a Holocaust
Denier and also believed that Jews should convert to Christianity. Although the
many other differences in Catholic doctrinal faith were fully negotiable,
apparently refusing to accept the reality of the Holocaust was not, and
Williamson remained estranged from the Catholic Church. Soon afterward he was
even prosecuted for heresy by the German government.
Internet critics have
suggested that over the last couple of generations, energetic Jewish activists
have successfully lobbied Western nations into replacing their traditional
religion of Christianity with the new religion of Holocaustianity, and the
Williamson Affair certainly seems to support that conclusion.
Consider the French
satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Funded by Jewish interests, it spent years launching
vicious attacks against Christianity, sometimes in crudely pornographic
fashion, and also periodically vilified Islam. Such activities were hailed by
French politicians as proof of the total freedom of thought allowed in the land
of Voltaire. But the moment that one of its leading cartoonists made a very
mild joke related to Jews, he was immediately fired, and if the publication had
ever ridiculed the Holocaust, it surely would have been immediately shut down,
and its entire staff possibly thrown into prison.
Western journalists and
human rights advocates have often expressed support for the boldly
transgressive activities of the Jewish-funded Femen activists when they
desecrate Christian churches all around the world. But such pundits would
certainly be in an uproar if anyone were to act in similar fashion toward the
growing international network of Holocaust Museums, most of them built at
public expense.
Indeed, one of the
underlying sources of bitter Western conflict with Vladimir Putin’s Russia
seems to be that he has restored Christianity to a favored place in a society
where the early Bolsheviks had once dynamited churches and massacred many
thousands of priests. Western intellectual elites held far more positive
feelings toward the USSR while its leaders retained a stridently anti-Christian
attitude.
The Rise and Suppression of
Holocaust Denial
Since the Holocaust had been
almost unknown in America until the mid-1960s, explicit Holocaust Denial was
equally non-existent, but as the former grew in visibility following the
publication of Hilberg’s 1961 book, the latter soon began to awaken as well.
Lipstadt’s vilification of
Barnes as the “godfather” of Holocaust Denial does contain a nugget of truth.
His posthumously-published 1968 review endorsing Rassinier’s denialist analysis
seems to be the first such substantial statement published anywhere in America,
at least if we exclude Beaty’s very casual 1951 dismissal of the Jewish claims,
which seem to have attracted negligible public attention.
Near the end of the 1960s, a
right-wing publisher named Willis Carto came across a short and unpolished
Holocaust Denial manuscript, apparently produced some years earlier, and he
ignored legal niceties by simply putting it into print. The purported author
then sued for plagiarism, and although the case was eventually settled, his
identity eventually leaked out as being that of David L. Hoggan, a Barnes
protege with a Harvard Ph.D. in history serving as a junior faculty member at
Stanford. His desire for anonymity was aimed at preventing the destruction of
his career, but he failed in that effort, and further academic appointments
quickly dried up.
Meanwhile, Murray Rothbard,
the founding father of modern libertarianism, had always been a strong
supporter of historical Revisionism, and greatly admired Barnes, who for
decades had been the leading figure in that field. Barnes had also briefly
hinted at his general skepticism about the Holocaust in a lengthy 1967 article
appearing in the Rampart Journal, a short-lived libertarian publication, and
this may have been noticed within those ideological circles. It appears that by
the early 1970s, Holocaust Denial had become a topic of some discussion within
America’s heavily Jewish but fiercely free-thinking libertarian community, and
this was to have an important consequence.
A professor of Electrical
Engineering at Northwestern named Arthur R. Butz was casually visiting some
libertarian gathering during this period when he happened to notice a pamphlet
denouncing the Holocaust as a fraud. He had never previously given any thought
to the issue, but such a shocking claim captured his attention, and he began
looking into the matter early in 1972. He soon decided that the accusation was
probably correct, but found the supporting evidence, including that presented
in the unfinished and anonymous Hoggan book, far too sketchy, and decided it
needed to be fleshed out in much more detailed and comprehensive fashion. He
proceeded to undertake this project over the next few years, working with the
methodical diligence of a trained academic engineer.
His major work, The Hoax of
the Twentieth Century, first appeared in print late in 1976, and immediately
became the central text of the Holocaust Denial community, a position it still
seems to retain down to this present day, while with all the updates and
appendices, the length has grown to well over 200,000 words. Although no
mention of this forthcoming book appeared in the February 1976 issue of Reason,
it is possible that word of the pending publication had gotten around within
libertarian circles, prompting the sudden new focus upon historical
Revisionism.
Butz was a respectable
tenured professor at Northwestern, and the release of his book laying out the
Holocaust Denial case soon became a minor sensation, covered by the New York
Times and other media outlets in January 1977. In one of her books, Lipstadt
devotes a full chapter entitled “Entering the Mainstream” to Butz’s work.
According to a December 1980 Commentary article by Dawidowicz, Jewish donors
and Jewish activists quickly mobilized, attempting to have Butz fired for his
heretical views, but back then academic tenure still held firm and Butz
survived, an outcome that seems to have greatly irritated Dawidowicz.
Such a detailed and
comprehensive book laying out the Holocaust Denial case naturally had a
considerable impact on the national debate, especially since the author was a
mainstream and apparently apolitical academic, and an American edition of
Butz’s book soon appeared in 1977. I’m very pleased to have made arrangements
to include the volume in my collection of Controversial HTML Books, so those
interested can easily read it and decide for themselves.
The Hoax of the Twentieth
Century
The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry
ARTHUR R. BUTZ • 1976/2015 • 225,000 WORDS
The following year, these Holocaust Denial trends seemed to gain further
momentum as Carto opened a small new publishing enterprise in California called
the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), which launched a quarterly
periodical entitled The Journal of Historical Review in 1980. Both the IHR and
its JHR publication centered their efforts around Revisionism in general, but
with Holocaust Denial being their major focus. Lipstadt devotes an entire
chapter to the IHR, later noting that most of the main authors of the February
1976 Reason issue soon became affiliated with that project or with other Carto
enterprises, as did Butz, while the editorial board of the JHR was soon
well-stocked with numerous Ph.D.’s, often earned at highly-reputable
universities. For the next quarter century or so, the IHR would hold small
conferences every year or two, with David Irving eventually becoming a regular
presenter, and even fully mainstream figures such as Pulitzer Prize-winning
historian John Toland occasionally appearing as speakers.
As an important example of
IHR efforts, in 1983 the organization published The Dissolution of Eastern
Europe Jewry, a very detailed quantitative analysis of the underlying
demographics and population movements around the period encompassed by World
War II, apparently the first such study undertaken. The author, writing under
the pen-name Walter N. Sanning, sought to revise the extremely simplistic
population analysis casually assumed by Holocaust historians.
Before the war, millions of
Jews had lived in Eastern Europe, and after the war, those communities had
mostly vanished. This undeniable fact has long stood as an implicit central
pillar of the traditional Holocaust narrative. But drawing upon entirely
mainstream sources, Sanning persuasively demonstrates that the situation was
actually far more complicated than it might seem. For example, it was widely
reported at the time that vast numbers of Polish Jews had been transported by
the Soviets to locations deep within their territory, on both voluntary and
involuntary terms, with future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin being including
in those transfers. In addition, huge numbers of heavily urbanized Soviet Jews
were similarly evacuated ahead of the advancing German forces in 1941. The
exact size of these population movements has long been uncertain and disputed,
but Sanning’s careful analysis of postwar Soviet census data and other sources
suggests that the totals were likely towards the upper end of most estimates.
Sanning makes no claim that his findings are definitive, but even if they are
only partially correct, such results would certainly preclude the reality of
traditional Holocaust numbers.
Another regular IHR
participant was Robert Faurisson. As a professor of literature at the
University of Lyons-2, he began expressing his public skepticism about the
Holocaust during the 1970s, and the resulting media uproar led to efforts to
remove him from his position, while a petition was signed on his behalf by 200
international scholars, including famed MIT professor Noam Chomsky. Faurisson
stuck to his opinions, but attacks persisted, including a brutal beating by
Jewish militants that hospitalized him, while a French political candidate
espousing similar views was assassinated. Jewish activist organizations began
lobbying for laws to broadly outlaw the activities of Faurisson and others, and
in 1990, soon after the Berlin Wall fell and research at Auschwitz and other
Holocaust sites suddenly became far easier, France passed a statute
criminalizing Holocaust Denial, apparently the first nation after defeated
Germany to do so. During the years that followed, large numbers of other
Western countries did the same, setting the disturbing precedent of resolving
scholarly disputes via prison sentences, a softer form of the same policy
followed in Stalinist Russia.
Since Faurisson was a literary
scholar, it is not entirely surprising that one of his major interests was The
Diary of Anne Frank, generally regarded as the Holocaust’s iconic literary
classic, telling the story of a young Jewish girl who died after being deported
from Holland to Auschwitz. He argued that the text was substantially
fraudulent, written by someone else after the end of the war, and for decades
various determined individuals have argued the case back and forth. I cannot
properly evaluate any of their complex arguments, which apparently involve
questions of ballpoint pen technology and textual emendations, nor have I ever
read the book itself.
But for me, the most
striking aspect of the story is the girl’s actual fate under the official
narrative, as recounted in the thoroughly establishmentarian Wikipedia entry.
Apparently disease was raging in her camp despite the best efforts of the
Germans to control it, and she soon became quite ill, mostly remaining
bedridden in the infirmary, before eventually dying from typhus in Spring 1945
at a different camp about six months after her initial arrival. It seems rather
odd to me that a young Jewish girl who fell severely ill at Auschwitz would
have spent so much time in camp hospitals and eventually die there, given that
we are told the primary purpose of Auschwitz and other such camps was the
efficient extermination of its Jewish inmates.
By the mid-1990s the Holocaust Denial movement seemed to be gaining in public
visibility, presumably aided by the doubts raised after the official 1992
announcement that the estimated deaths at Auschwitz had been reduced by around
3 million.
For example, the February
1995 issue of Marco Polo, a glossy Japanese magazine with a circulation of
250,000, carried a long article declaring that the gas chambers of the
Holocaust were a propaganda hoax. Israel and Jewish-activist groups quickly
responded, organizing a widespread advertising boycott of all the publications
of the parent company, one of Japan’s most respected publishers, which quickly
folded in the face of that serious threat. All copies of the issue were
recalled from the newspapers, the staffers were dismissed, and the entire
magazine was soon shut down, while the president of the parent company was
forced to resign.
In exploring the history of
Holocaust Denial, I have noticed this same sort of recurrent pattern, most
typically involving individuals rather than institutions. Someone
highly-regarded and fully mainstream decides to investigate the controversial
topic, and soon comes to conclusions that sharply deviate from the official
truth of the last two generations. For various reasons, those views become
public, and he is immediately demonized by the Jewish-dominated media as a
horrible extremist, perhaps mentally-deranged, while being relentlessly hounded
by a ravenous pack of fanatic Jewish-activists. This usually brings about the
destruction of his career.
In the early 1960s Stanford
historian David Hoggan produced his anonymous manuscript The Myth of the Six
Million, but once it got into circulation and his identity became known, his
academic career was destroyed. A dozen years later, something along the same
lines happened with Northwestern Electrical Engineering professor Arthur Butz,
and only his academic tenure saved him from a similar fate.
Fred Leuchter was widely
regarded as one of America’s leading expert specialists on the technology of
executions, and a long article in The Atlantic treated him as such. During the
1980s, Ernst Zundel, a prominent Canadian Holocaust Denier, was facing trial
for his disbelief in the Auschwitz gas chambers, and one of his expert
witnesses was an American prison warden with some experience in such systems,
who recommended involving Leuchter, one of the foremost figures in the field.
Leuchter soon took a trip to Poland and closely inspected the purported
Auschwitz gas chambers, then published the Leuchter Report, concluding that
they were obviously a fraud and could not possibly have worked in the manner
Holocaust scholars had always claimed. The ferocious attacks which followed
soon cost him his entire business career and destroyed his marriage.
David Irving had ranked as
the world’s most successful World War II historian, with his books selling in
the millions amid glowing coverage in the top British newspapers when he agreed
to appear as an expert witness at the Zundel trial. He had always previously
accepted the conventional Holocaust narrative, but reading the Leuchter Report
changed his mind, and he concluded that the Auschwitz gas chambers were just a
myth. He was quickly subjected to unrelenting media attacks, which first
severely damaged and then ultimately destroyed his very illustrious publishing
career, and he later even served time in an Austrian prison for his
unacceptable views.
Dr. Germar Rudolf was a
successful young German chemist working at the prestigious Max Planck Institute
when he heard of the controversy regarding the Leuchter Report, which he found
reasonably persuasive but containing some weaknesses. Therefore, he repeated
the analysis on a more thorough basis, and published the results as the
Chemistry of Auschwitz, which came to the same conclusions as Leuchter. And
just like Leuchter before him, Rudolf suffered the destruction of his career
and his marriage, and since Germany treats these matters in harsher fashion, he
eventually served five years in prison for his scientific impudence.
Most recently, Dr. Nicholas
Kollerstrom, who had spent eleven years as a historian of science on the staff
of University College, London, suffered this same fate in 2008. His scientific
interests in the Holocaust provoked a media firestorm of vilification, and he
was fired with a single day’s notice, becoming the first member of his research
institution ever expelled for ideological reasons. He had previously provided
the Isaac Newton entry for a massive biographical encyclopedia of astronomers,
and America’s most prestigious science journal demanded that the entire work be
pulped, destroying the work of over 100 writers, because it had been fatally tainted
by having such a villainous contributor. He recounted this unfortunate personal
history as an introduction to his 2014 book Breaking the Spell, which I highly
recommend.
Kollerstrom’s text
effectively summarizes much of the more recent Holocaust Denial evidence,
including the official Auschwitz death books returned by Gorbachev after the
end of the Cold War, which indicate that Jewish fatalities were some 99% lower
than the widely-believed total. Furthermore, Jewish deaths actually showed a
sharp decline once plentiful supplies of Zyklon B arrived, exactly contrary to
what might have been expected under the conventional account. He also discusses
the interesting new evidence contained in the British wartime decrypts of all
German communications between the various concentration camps and the Berlin
headquarters. Much of this material is presented in an interesting two hour
interview on Red Ice Radio, conveniently available on YouTube: https://holocausthandbooks.com/index.php?page_id=31
The lives and careers of a
very sizable number of other individuals have followed this same unfortunate
sequence, which in much of Europe often ends in criminal prosecution and
imprisonment. Most notably, a German lawyer who became a bit too bold in her
legal arguments soon joined her client behind bars, and as a consequence, it
has become increasingly difficult for accused Holocaust Deniers to secure
effective legal representation. By Kollerstrom’s estimates, many thousands of
individuals are currently serving time across Europe for Holocaust Denial.
My impression is that by the
late 1960s, the old Soviet Bloc countries had mostly stopped imprisoning people
merely for questioning Marxist-Leninist dogma, and reserved their political
prisons only for those actively organizing against the regime, while Holocaust
Denial is treated today in far harsher fashion. One clear difference is that
actual belief in Communist doctrine had entirely faded away to almost nothing
even among the Communist leadership itself, while these days Holocaustianity is
still a young and deeply held faith, at least within a small slice of the
population that exerts enormously disproportionate leverage over our public
institutions.
Another obvious factor is
the many billions of dollars currently at stake in what Finkelstein has aptly
characterized as “the Holocaust Industry.” For example, potentially enormous
new claims are now being reopened against Poland for Jewish property that was
lost or confiscated during the World War II era.
In America, the situation is
somewhat different, and our First Amendment still protects Holocaust Deniers
against imprisonment, though the efforts of the ADL and various other groups to
criminalize “hate speech” are clearly aimed at eventually removing that
obstacle. But in the meantime, crippling social and economic sanctions are
often used to pursue the same objectives.
Furthermore, various
Internet monopolies have been gradually persuaded or co-opted into preventing
the easy distribution of dissenting information. There have been stories in the
media over the last few years that Google has been censoring or redirecting its
Holocaust search results away from those disputing the official narrative. Even
more ominously, Amazon, our current near-monopolistic retailer of books, last
year took the unprecedented step of banning thousands of Holocaust Denial
works, presumably lest they “confuse” curious readers, so it is fortunate that
I had purchased mine a couple of years earlier. These parallels with George
Orwell’s 1984 are really quite striking, and the “Iron Curtain Over America”
that Beaty had warned about in his 1951 book of that title seems much closer to
becoming a full reality.
Various figures in the Holocaust
Denial community have attempted to mitigate this informational blacklist, and
Dr. Rudolf some time ago established a website HolocaustHandbooks.com, which
allows a large number of the key volumes to be purchased or easily read on-line
in a variety of different formats. But the growing censorship by Amazon,
Google, and other Internet monopolies greatly reduces the likelihood that
anyone will readily encounter the information.
Obviously, most supporters of the conventional Holocaust narrative would prefer
to win their battles on the level playing fields of analysis rather than by
utilizing economic or administrative means to incapacitate their opponents. But
I have seen little evidence that they have enjoyed any serious success in this
regard.
Aside from the various books
by Lipstadt, which I found to be of poor quality and quite unpersuasive, one of
the most energetic Holocaust supporters of the last couple of decades seems to
have been Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic magazine, who had earned his
degrees in psychology and the history of science.
In 1997, he published Why
People Believe Weird Things, seeking to debunk all sorts of irrational beliefs
popular in certain circles, with the book’s subtitle describing these as
“pseudo-science” and “superstition.” His cover text focused on ESP, alien
abductions, and witchcraft, but rebutting Holocaust Denial was the single
largest portion of that book, encompassing three full chapters. His discussion
of this latter subject was rather superficial, and he probably undercut his
credibility by grouping it together with his debunking of the scientific
reality of “race” as a similar right-wing fallacy, one also long since
disproved by mainstream scientists. Regarding the latter issue, he went on to
argue that the alleged black-white differences claimed in works such as The
Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray was entirely
pseudo-scientific nonsense, and he emphasized that book and similar ones had
been promoted by the same pro-Nazi groups who advocated Holocaust Denial, with
those two pernicious doctrines being closely linked together. Shermer had
recruited Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould to write the Foreword for his
book and that raises serious questions about his knowledge or his judgment since
Gould is widely regarded as one of the most notorious scientific frauds of the
late twentieth century.
In 2000, Shermer returned to
the battle, publishing Denying History, entirely focused on refuting Holocaust
Denial. This time he recruited Holocaust scholar Alex Grobman as his co-author
and acknowledged the generous financial support he had received from various
Jewish organizations. A large portion of the text seemed to focus on the
psychology and sociology of Holocaust Deniers, trying to explain why people
could believe in such patently absurd nonsense. Indeed, so much space was
devoted to those issues that he was forced to entirely skip over the official
reduction of the Auschwitz body-count by 3 million just a few years earlier,
thus avoiding any need to explain why this large shift had had no impact on the
canonical Holocaust figure of Six Million.
Although various writers such as Shermer may have been encouraged by generous
financial subsidies to make fools of themselves, their more violent allies on
the extreme fringe have probably had a greater impact on the Holocaust debate.
Although judicial and economic sanctions may deter the vast majority of
Holocaust Deniers from showing their face, extra-legal violence has also often
been deployed against those hardy souls who remain undeterred.
For example, during the
1980s the offices and warehouse storage facilities of the IHR in Southern
California were fire-bombed and totally destroyed by Jewish militants. And
although Canada has traditionally had little political violence, in 1995 the
large, ramshackle house that served as the residence and business office of
Canada’s Ernst Zundel, one of the world’s leading publishers and distributers
of Holocaust Denial literature, was similarly fire-bombed and burned to the
ground. Zundel had already faced several criminal prosecutions on charges of
spreading “false news,” and eventually served years in prison, before being
deported back to his native Germany, where he served additional imprisonment.
Various other prominent Holocaust Deniers have even faced threats of
assassination.
Most historians and other
academic scholars are quiet souls, and surely the looming threat of such
serious terroristic violence must have dissuaded many of them from involving
themselves in such obviously controversial issues. Meanwhile, relentless
financial and social pressure may gradually wear down both individuals and
organizations, causing them to eventually either abandon the field or become
far less active, with their places sometimes taken by newcomers.
The year after the 9/11
attacks, the JHR ceased print publication. The growth of the Internet was
probably an important contributing factor, and with the national focus shifting
so sharply toward foreign policy and the Middle East, its IHR parent
organization became much less active, while much of the ongoing debate in
Revisionism and Holocaust Denial shifted to various other online venues. But at
some point over the years, the JHR digitized many hundreds of its articles and
posted them on its website, providing over three million words of generally
very high-quality historical content.
Over the last couple of
months, I have been repeatedly surprised to discover that the historians
associated with the IHR had long ago published articles on topics quite
parallel to some of my own. For example, after I published an article on the
Suvorov Hypothesis that Germany’s Barbarossa attack had preempted Stalin’s
planned attack and conquest of Europe, someone informed me that a reviewer had
extensively discussed the same Suvorov book twenty years earlier in an issue of
JHR. I also discovered several pieces by CIA defector Victor Marchetti, a
important figure for JFK assassination researchers, who had received little
attention in the mainstream media. There were also articles on the fate of the
Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, a topic almost entirely excluded from the
mainstream media.
Casually browsing some of
the archives, I was quite impressed with their quality, and since the archives
were freely available for anyone to republish, I went ahead and incorporated
them, making the millions of words of their Revisionist and Holocaust Denial
content much more conveniently available to interested readers. The material is
fully searchable, and also organized by Author, Topic, and Time Period, with a
few sample links included below:
The Journal of Historical
Review, 1980-2002 Issues
Author Archives:
• David Irving – 11 Articles
• Arthur R. Butz – 15 Articles
• Robert Faurisson – 47 Articles
• James J. Martin – 13 Articles
• Percy L. Greaves, Jr. – 8 Articles
Topic Archives:
• Holocaust – 306 Articles
• World War II – 201 Articles
• Pearl Harbor – 15 Articles
• USS Liberty – 3 Articles
So for those particularly interested in Holocaust Denial, well over a million
words of such discussion may now be conveniently available, including works by
many of the authors once so highly regarded by the early editors of Reason
magazine.
Secretive Holocaust Denial
The steadily growing
economic and political power of organized Jewish groups, backed by Hollywood
image-making, eventually won the visible war and crushed the Holocaust Denial
movement in the public arena, enforcing a particular historical narrative by
criminal prosecutions across most of Europe and severe social and economic
sanctions in America. But a stubborn underground resistance still exists, with
its size being difficult to estimate.
Although my interest in the
Holocaust had always been rather minimal, once the Internet came into being and
my circle of friends and acquaintances greatly expanded, the topic would very
occasionally come up. Over the years, a considerable number of seemingly
rational people at one time or another privately let slip their extreme
skepticism about various elements of the canonical Holocaust narrative, and
such doubts seemed to represent merely the tip of the iceberg.
Every now and then someone
in that category spoke a little too freely or became a target for retaliation
on a different matter, and our media went into a feeding frenzy of Holocaust
Denial accusations and counter-accusations.
For example, during the
impeachment battles of the late 1990s, Clinton partisans believed that
prominent liberal pundit Christopher Hitchens had betrayed the personal
confidences of presidential aide Sidney Blumenthal, and journalist Edward Jay
Epstein decided to retaliate in kind, widely circulating a memo to the media
accusing Hitchens of secretly being a Holocaust Denier. He alleged that at a
1995 dinner gathering following a New Yorker anniversary celebration, Hitchens
had drunk a little too much wine and began expounding to his table-mates that
the Holocaust was simply a hoax. Epstein backed his claim by saying he had been
so shocked at such statements that he had entered them into his personal diary.
That telling detail and the fact that most of the other witnesses seemed
suspiciously vague in their recollections persuaded me that Epstein was
probably being truthful. A bitter feud between Hitchens and Epstein soon
erupted.
In 2005 Hitchens denounced
various opponents of Bush’s Iraq War as anti-Semites, and in retaliation
Alexander Cockburn published a couple of Counterpunch columns resurrecting that
1999 controversy, which is when I first discovered it. As a regular reader of
Counterpunch, I was intrigued and Googling around a bit, quickly located media
accounts of Epstein’s explicit accusations. Numerous reports of the the
incident still survive on the web, including one from the NY Daily News as well
as a portion of an MSNBC piece, and although some of the more extensive ones
have disappeared over the last dozen years, the media text I remember reading
in 2005 has been preserved on the static HTML pages of several websites:
“Epstein told MSNBC that
Hitchens had misspoken himself on the Holocaust on Feb. 12, 1995 – in fact,
practically four years ago – as the two of them, along with some other friends,
were dining in New York.
“Epstein was so shocked, he
says, and considered Hitchens doubts so grave, that he went home and noted them
in his diary!
“According to the Epstein
diary: ‘Once seated in a booth, and freely sipping his free red wine, Hitchens
advanced a theory more revealing than anything going on at the Hudson theater.
His thesis, to the shock of everyone at the table, was that the Holocaust was a
fiction developed by a conspiracy of interests bent on ‘criminalizing the
German Nation.’”
“’He explained that no
evidence of German mass murder had ever been found – and what gruesome
artifacts had been found had been fabricated after the event,’ Epstein confided
to his diary.
“’What of the testimony of
Nazi generals at Nuremberg about the death camps,’ he asked.
“Hitchens, according to the
Epstein diary notation, explained ‘. . . without missing a beat, that such
admissions were obtained under Anglo-American torture.’ Epstein then asked, as
noted in his diary: ‘But what happened to the Jews in Europe?’ Hitch shrugged
and said, ‘Many were killed by local villagers when they ran away, others died
natural deaths, and the remainder made it to Israel.’”
After reading these interesting columns, I began noticing that Cockburn himself
sometimes provided hints suggesting that his own personal opinion on the
Holocaust might be somewhat heretical, including his cryptical remarks that
huge hoaxes were actually much easier to create and maintain than most people
realized.
Just a few months after his
attack on Hitchens, Cockburn published a two-part article strongly arguing that
Nobel Peace Prize Winner Elie Wiesel, the most famous of all Holocaust
survivors, was simply a fraud. I had always been taught that Zyklon B was the
deadly agent used by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews of Auschwitz and I had
vaguely become aware that Holocaust Deniers absurdly claimed the compound had
instead been employed as a delousing agent in the camps, aimed at preventing
the spread of Typhus; but then the following year, I was shocked to discover in
one of Cockburn’s columns that for decades the U.S. government had itself used
Zyklon B as the primary delousing agent for immigrants entering at its Mexican
border. I recall several other columns from the mid-2000s dancing around
Holocaust issues, but I now seem unable to locate them within the Counterpunch
archives.
My growing realization
15-odd years ago that substantial numbers of knowledgeable people appeared to
be secret adherents of Holocaust Denial certainly reshaped my own unquestioning
assumptions on that subject. The occasional newspaper account of a Holocaust
Denier being discovered and then flayed and destroyed by the media easily
explained why the public positions on that subject remained so unanimous. Being
busy with other things, I don’t think I ever had a conversation with anyone on
that controversial subject or even so much as an email exchange, but I did keep
my eyes and ears open, and huge doubts had certainly entered my mind many years
before I ever bothered reading my first book on the subject.
Meanwhile, the concurrent
collapse of my belief in our official American Pravda narrative on so many
other controversial topics played a major role as well. Once I realized to my
dismay that I couldn’t believe a word of what our media and political leaders
said about major events in the here and now, their credibility on controversial
happenings so long ago and far away entirely disappeared. For these reasons, I
had grown quite suspicious and held a very open mind on Holocaust matters as I
eventually began reading books on both sides of the issue in the wake of the
Reason controversy.
The Future of Holocaust
Denial
For many years following the
end of World War II very little seems to have been written about the momentous
topic now known as the Holocaust. But from the 1960s onward, interest surged so
enormously that many thousands or even tens of thousands of volumes on that
once-ignored event have been produced. Therefore, the fifteen or twenty books
that I have personally read is merely a sliver of that total.
I have invested only a few
weeks of reading and research in studying this large and complex subject, and
my knowledge is obviously dwarfed by that of the considerable number of
individuals who have devoted many years or decades of their lives to such
activity. For these reasons, the analysis I have presented above must surely
contain numerous gaping errors that others could easily correct. But sometimes
a newcomer may notice things that deeply-involved professionals might normally
miss, and may also better understand the perspectives of those who have likewise
never paid much attention to the subject.
Any conclusions I have drawn
are obviously preliminary ones, and the weight others should attach to these
must absolutely reflect my strictly amateur status. However, as an outsider
exploring this contentious topic I think it far more likely than not that the
standard Holocaust narrative is at least substantially false, and quite
possibly, almost entirely so.
Despite this situation, the
powerful media focus in support of the Holocaust over the last few decades has
elevated it to a central position in Western culture. I wouldn’t be surprised
if it currently occupies a larger place in the minds of most ordinary folk than
does the Second World War that encompassed it, and therefore possesses greater
apparent reality.
However, some forms of
shared beliefs may be a mile wide but an inch deep, and the casual assumptions
of individuals who have never actually investigated a given subject may rapidly
change. Also, the popular strength of doctrines that have long been maintained
in place by severe social and economic sanctions, often coupled by criminal
ones, may possibly be much weaker than anyone realizes.
Until thirty years ago,
Communist rule over the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies seemed absolutely
permanent and unshakeable, but the roots of that belief had totally rotted
away, leaving behind nothing more than a hollow facade. Then one day, a gust of
wind came along, and the entire gigantic structure collapsed. I wouldn’t be
surprised if our current Holocaust narrative eventually suffers that same fate,
perhaps with unfortunate consequences for those too closely associated with
having maintained it.
Related Readings:
• The Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Arthur R. Butz
• The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry by Walter N. Sanning
• The Remarkable Historiography of David Irving
• American Pravda: Jews and Nazis
• American Pravda: Post-War France and Post-War Germany
• American Pravda: Our Great Purge of the 1940s
• Our American Pravda
Afterword: I myself am not
going to write on The Holocaust. The topic is too far removed from my interests
and my expertise. However, when I locate better evidence for The Holocaust than
Ron Unz and David Irving have found, I will post it. Every story has two sides,
and both need to be examined in order to arrive at a conclusion.
I will have a look and
report Wear’s report, at the risk, of course, that the incompetent idiots at
Wikipedia will attribute John Wear’s report of the findings of scientists as my
views.
If Wikipedia keeps this up,
all sorts of people will sue me for plagiarism.
More evidence of Jewish
power:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.