“The ‘gas chambers’ were wartime propaganda hoaxes.”
The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry by Arthur R. Butz
The apogee of banned books.
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Over the past dozen or so years, my reading choices have reflected a greater movement in my soul — I have crossed the Rubicon of “conventional conservatism” into the red-pilled land of the dissident right. To be sure, I am a relative nobody — just my own version of Winston Smith who has progressively discovered that the curated version of reality that I have been inculcated to accept has been largely fabricated. Like Winston Smith, I discovered that the past (i.e., “history”) is in a constant state of alteration. Like Winston Smith, I live in an era in which objective truth itself is being destroyed. For whatever reason, I am drawn by an almost-pathological contrarianism to read and contemplate that which I have been told to avoid. Now, many years later I hold views that make me, by conventional standards, a deplorable of the first rank — worse, perhaps, because I am educated and well read.
In reading a variety of banned books and authors, I had yet to touch a work that attacked the singularity from which all banishments flow: the Holocaust. One can hold a variety of “deplorable” views and still retain some semblance of a public life even if such intellectual persuasions are deemed unforgiveable by elite culture. However, a revisionist (or a “denier”) of the Holocaust is deemed so foul — so awful — so heretical that it destroys the possibility of any public life in the modern West. The day is coming when these modern witch hunts end, and it is coming sooner that people realize.
So, I took the time recently to dip my toe into — dare I say it — Holocaust revisionism. In my intellectual journey, I have touched upon aspects of Holocaust mythology by reading — quite intensely at times — the suffering of the German people during and after the war and the moral bankruptcy of the “good guys” of WWII (i.e., the Allies). The modern orthodoxy that surrounds WWII and the post-war settlement is crucial to understand the “Pottersville” that we call the modern West — dissenting from it is tantamount to heresy in past ages. In that sense, I became a political heretic by reading politically heretical works.
To be candid, I have had serious reservations for some time about the standard Holocaust narrative although there was never any reason for me to focus on it. It is not that I doubt Jews — and other non-Germans — suffered through expulsion and exploitative slave labor that took place during total war. If that is a genocide, I do not deny it. I don’t think anyone denies that. Notwithstanding that proviso, the idea that the Germans systematically exterminated European Jewry through gassings, etc., always struck me as farfetched. It always reeked of the same outlandish elements of WWI propaganda against the “Hun” bayoneting Belgian babies. For full disclosure, I am ancestrally “Hun” or German. I know my people. I do not think they were (or are) capable of it — not only in the macabre sense but also in its gross stupidity. I have always viewed it — at least internally — as its own form of blood libel against my people.
Questioning the Holocaust in any fashion comes at a great personal cost. While I am undoubtedly contrarian, outsiders seldom understand the cost — the conscious cost — that comes from intellectual dissidence and political heresy of this type. True, there is something liberating in seeking the truth no matter the cost, but the unfurling of each layer of dissidence further isolates the dissident. Some people — especially the congenitally empathetic people of northwestern Europe — just want to get along. I fight an invisible battle within myself between my desire for truth (no matter the cost) and my predisposition to get along and understand the “other.” Be that as it may, the truth-seeking part of my being has gained the upper hand over my empathic amiability. Reading something like Arthur Butz’s takedown of the Holocaust narrative then followed a series of intellectual and moral steps. To take them all at once would be to careen down the entire flight of stairs. Taking them, however, one step and one book at a time led me to Butz.
So here I am — as if an inner compulsion towards understanding the truth drives me — reading and reviewing Arthur Butz’s work, which follows herein. Again, to demonstrate how powerful the persecution that follows from questioning the Holocaust narrative, reading — and certainly reviewing — this book is enough to get anyone in the United States fired. That alone speaks to the level of cultural and political totalitarianism that exists. It is, to say the very least, a dangerous book to take seriously. So be it.
What strikes me about an author like Butz is his fearlessness and imperviousness to outside pressure. Butz, a native of New York City, was born in 1933. He is an American electrical engineer and a long-time faculty member at Northwestern University, which is, at least for the uninitiated, one of the finest universities in the United States. He is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and he completed his PhD at the University of Minnesota. The only reason he remains a faculty member at Northwestern University is that he was tenured in 1974 — he is as ostracized at Northwestern as a tenured professor can be because of his views and research on the Holocaust. The tapestry of the academy will permit — and even celebrate — a variety of anti-social views such as acclaiming White genocide, championing Stalinism, blaspheming Christ, cheering violence, or defending the worst sexual depravity. All these outlandish views find academics who will defend their substance or at least see them as being cloaked in the First Amendment view that lauds their “courage.”
But Butz has no academic champions, and that lacuna should tell us something about the moment of time in which we live. Think about it — numerous professors openly espouse the desirability of White genocide — genocide of me and my children, and they are openly celebrated by the academy. The double standard is real: see it applied to those who question the Holocaust narrative based upon assessments of the evidence without any ostensible guile and they are instantly turned into “untouchables.” Whatever moment of history this is, it cannot last much longer. Butz accordingly has always been an army of one. Setting aside his lack of qualifications as an historian, Butz is a very, very smart individual (an MIT graduate and engineer after all) who has demonstrated an almost otherworldly obtuseness to outside pressure.
He is also an unusual suspect to have taken such a stance. While, at least to my knowledge, Butz has not provided a detailed public account of his personal motivations or a precise “origin story” for his interest in the Holocaust. However, based on his own statements in contemporary interviews around the time of his book’s publication, he described becoming interested through reading various books on the subject and studying the records of the Nuremberg Trials. He began his research in the summer of 1972, leading to the completion of his manuscript (which became The Hoax of the Twentieth Century) by the following spring. No sources indicate a specific triggering event, personal experience, or earlier ideological bent—such as prior involvement in “far-right” circles. Indeed, this is a man who is an elite academic and was educated at — and educating at — some of the most elite American institutions. That he would effectively throw away his standing as an elite is curious, to say the very least. In a sense, he is that one strange bird that followed an intellectual curiosity with an otherworldly tenacity and absolute moral belief in the truth. He is the classic pattern of low conformity (lack of intimidation by groupthink); high openness (vision of possibilities others miss); high cognitive abilities (comprehension of how systems work); and a strong internal compass (willing to bear the social opprobrium). Regardless of whether he is right or not, men like Butz fascinate me — they fearlessly challenge orthodoxies and systems. If such a man and type confront a thoroughly corrupt system, heroes are born........
