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 Reasonpeople, 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 Reasoneditor 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 Reportradio 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 Reasoneditors 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.
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 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.”
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:
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 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.
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.
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.
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 articleappearing
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 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:
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 Curveby 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:
Author Archives:
Topic Archives:
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.
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 Counterpunchcolumns 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 Pravdanarrative 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 Reasoncontroversy.
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