Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Holocaust revisionism and market forces

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Now we look at the retail sector of Holocaust revisionism in the marketplace of ideas. While CODOH and others are seen to be doing a commendable job in the wholesale division, it’s worthwhile to take note of the marketing of revisionist thought in off-shoot areas in this new matrix of intellectual dissent. Take last night (29 September), for instance.

Broadcaster Jeff Rense had Jim Condit, Jr., on in the middle hour of his radio program. In their dialogue, the two of them discussed dissenting views about the Nazi Holocaust regarding the alleged plan to completely exterminate the Jews of Europe, noting the intricate provisions for immigration that had been made in formal agreements brokered between the Nazi regime and the Zionists during the 1930s to transfer a significant number of German Jews to Palestine.

This came on the heels of the Rense website posting three videos featuring a series of discussions between David Cole and Ernst Zundel. It must be said that rense.com has become an impressive clearinghouse for a wide spectrum of dissenting views on a broad range of subjects over the years, including Holocaust revisionism.

Ditto Mike Rivero’s equally eclectic website, whatreallyhappened.com; and others, in their blogs or up on their websites. Revisionism has been welcomed into the broad community of dissentients; not by all, certainly, but by some. It has a presence, and both Rense and Rivero have carved a niche for it in their daily postings as a perfectly valid avenue of historical inquiry.

Meanwhile, in a growing number of street protests across the U.S. we see a kind of populist revisionism taking form. Posters showing the American president, Barack Obama, with a Hitler mustache are a common feature at health care and anti-tax rallies. Some policies of the government are denounced as Nazi-like. The media fend off accusations of taking their cue from Goebbels’s propaganda machine, and so on.

Over in Tehran, Dr Ahmadinjad, the Iranian president, delivers yet another barn-burner of a speech, wherein he again dismisses the Holocaust as an historical myth. Which, very predictably, elicits a Pavlovian gnashing-of-teeth reaction among the chattering classes in the West, with foaming outrage over Dr A’s “Holocaust denial” being a recurring motif for talking-heads, and knee-jerk bashing of geopolitical villain du jour, the Islamic Republic of Iran, reaching new heights (new lows?). All of which, naturally, underscores belief in the received version of the Nazi Holocaust as an Establishment orthodoxy. That alone would make it suspect for some among us, given a growing popular recalcitrance to Establishment-sanctioned viewpoints.

In the 1980s, it was reported that Holocaust revisionism was being imported into Germany via its large and thriving Turkish community, and treated as sound intellectual currency. Since then, needless to say, the population numbers in the immigrant community have grown all over Western Europe and across North America. And with that has come a degree of openness to ideas that conflict with the received version of history as promoted by the old-line Establishment. There can be no doubt that new and auspicious circumstances, in terms of multiculturalism and its by-product, the warm reception given renegade ideas, are filling up tributaries that feed into the swelling torrent that is Holocaust revisionism.

Social fragmentation married to media fragmentation is producing a mosaic composed of discrete tiles, rife with intellectual pluralism, in which old established ideas are being challenged. Michael Moore’s latest documentary deconstructs the core idea that capitalism is a force for good. On scores of university campuses, an annual Israel Apartheid Week decries Zionism as a racist ideology. Even now, as I write, an arrest warrant has been issued for a Catholic bishop in Nova Scotia, wanted for the cache of kiddie porn he had allegedly uploaded to his laptop computer. His distraught superior, the archbishop of Halifax, was heard fending off the spectre of nihilism, asking despairingly: “Who is there left that we can believe?” The man speaks for many; such bedrock disillusionment is well-nigh universal.

Skepticism regarding the media abounds, cynicism concerning the political classes abounds, a distrust of ascribed moral authorities is rampant, a rising alienation from mainstream views is rampant -- but plain old human curiosity remains constant. They all add up to market forces that will advance the fortunes of revisionism. Robert Faurisson was right: Going forward, Holocaust revisionism can only grow in strength and influence and outreach.

Ads for Break His Bones run in student newspapers at Iowa State and U Michigan-Dearborn

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My ad announcing a "Blow-out" sale for my book Break His Bones, The Private Life of a Holocaust Revisionist, is in the Iowa State Daily. It is also runing in The Journal at University of Michigan-Dearborn

This is a test to scan the lay of the land with regard to advertising a revisionist title on the American university campus. In 2002 when I first advertised Break His Bones I ran a quarter-page ad that contained an image of the book cover with my happy smiling face and beneath it the address to Committee for Open Debate on the Hoalocaust www.codoh.com. That was the entire enchilada.

It ran one time at Harvard when it was pulled under pressure from the usual perps. It ran one time in The Daily Texan, when it was pulled under pressure from the usual perps. My understanding is that it ran twice in The Daily Californian at Berkeley before it was pulled under pressure from the usual perps.

In each case student journalists at those three universities were okay with running the ad. Student journalists were okay with the propostion of contributing to a free exchange of ideas. It was special interest groups backed by faculty, in the sense that no professor stood with any of the student journalists against those special interests, that took care to see that the ad was censored.

Same story, again, with Harvard earlier this month. Student journalists are oftentimes willing to go out on a limb in the name of a free press. Faculty, as at Harvard again this month, are victims of their own taboo against intellectual freedom. The taboo has become so powerful that the professors have frightened themselves with their own doing to the point of being willing, more than willing, to leave student journalists to hang and twist in the wind.

What a crowd!

Friday, September 25, 2009

Double exposure

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I can still hear the gruff timbre of his voice, a Polish immigrant for whom English was a second language. Asked his opinion of some televised current event or other, he replied: “I don’t vatch a TV. H’OK? Maybe some time joost to see what’s dey arr feeding the public.”

The phrase “what they are feeding the public” conjured up the image of a barnyard trough brimful of bland animal fodder where people lined up to uncritically consume a daily ration of “news” calories.

The phrase “what they are feeding the public” stuck with me. The man was a defector from behind the Iron Curtain, a physicist in the employ of the National Research Council in Ottawa. I thought: If you want to know about propaganda, this would be the fellow to talk to: An intellectual, a political refugee from an East European nation ruled by a communist regime, a diehard cynic and skeptic.

Now I, too, find myself watching TV network news to learn what it is they’re feeding the public nowadays. Not solely that, though. In this age of the Internet, a viewer is far better equipped than he’d been before to discern the different ways in which a news story is configured and presented. The attentive reader will be mindful of not only what's in the news, but also of what’s been left out of it.

James Baldwin had once described a writer’s capacity for listening this way: “[A] writer is never listening to what is being said, he is never listening to what he is being told. He is listening to what is not (italics) being said, he is listening to what he is not (italics) being told, which means that he is trying to discover the purpose of the communication.” (1)

What, according to Baldwin, is true of writers, is now also true for millions of news junkies who get their information online. Which may explain, in part, why it is public trust in the veracity of mainstream media ranks generally low. (2)

Their sins of ommission in reportage, which speak to "the purpose of the communication," are often glaring; the failure to adequately report on Israel's vicious assault on the Gaza Strip, last December and January, being a salient example.

Quote from Haroon Siddiqui in the Toronto Star: “[Judge Richard] Goldstone's report is a condemnation not only of Israel but also its apologists in Canada, including the media. The latter are now busy burying the report under an orchestrated avalanche of negative reaction without ever properly reporting its contents.” (3)

The headline for Nathan Guttman’s article in the Jewish Forward: “A Quick Burial for Goldstone Report on Gaza.” (4)

A growing awareness of the news report as a product tailored to sell us on a given narrative makes it more likely that the holes in a current story will not go unnoticed; an insight that extends to the many forms of media; fewer things get past the informed citizen in today’s world.

Consider this passage from the autobiography of notorious fraud artist, Julius Melnitzer. In 1992, A Canadian court had sentenced Melnitzer to nine years in prison on 43 charges of fraud totalling more than $67-million. The disgraced lawyer used the two-and-a-half years he actually served time to pen his memoirs.

“I believed in criminal law,” he wrote. “I valued procedural justice in a meaningful, passionate, substantive way that filled an inner vacuum. The strong civil libertarian tendencies endemic to children of Holocaust survivors, the streak of antiauthorianism that got me tossed out of high school, my internal sense of not belonging, and my own victim mentality gave me the perfect psychological makeup for a specialty that pitted outcasts against the State.” (5)

Melnitzer penned those words in a prison cell in a country where Holocaust revisionists like Ernst Zundel have endured long and costly trials with the prospect of prison time hanging over them, all for peacefully expressing their views on a matter of history; with the charges against Zundel and others brought at the behest of Jewish groups that included both Holocaust survivors and their families, with the touted “strong civil libertarian tendencies endemic to children of Holocaust survivors” not being in any way toweringly evident.

Of all the civil liberties issues in matters to do with free speech, nothing so stridently calls forth the strong arm of intellectual repression by the State in our fair dominion as manifestations of Holocaust revisionism. If anyone needs the qualities Melnitzer has ascribed to himself -- the “strong civil libertarian tendencies,” the “streak of antiauthorianism,” and a “sense of not belonging” -- it’s a Holocaust revisionist, an outcast with often limited resources who is pitted against the limitless resources of the State, goaded by an unforgiving Holocaust lobby.


1. James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, Holt, Rinehart and Winston: New York, 1985, p, 95.

2. “Public trust in US media eroding: Pew study,” Agence France Press, September 14, 2009.

3. Haroon Siddiqui, “Shining a light on Israeli aggression in Gaza,”
The Toronto Star, September 20, 2009.

4. Nathan Guttman, “A Quick Burial for Goldstone Report on Gaza,”
Jewish Forward, online September 23, 2009.

5. Julius Melnitzer, Maximum Minimum Medium, Key Porter Books: Toronto, 1995, p. 103.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

The Eisenhower Ad

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On 08 September, when we ran our “Eisenhower” ad in the Harvard Crimson, it reached an audience of some 26,000 students, faculty and staff. One university campus, one focused audience. For the first time in their lives most Harvard students were introduced to a question about the WWII German WMD (gas chambers) that was simple and provocative.

There was no assertion of fact in the ad, no claim to “truth,” only a simple question. The question asked why General Eisenhower, the leading Allied commander on the Western front during WWII, made a decision to not mention the German WMD in his account of that campaign in his book Crusade In Europe published in 1948.

He made that decision consciously! To not mention the German WMD! We are not going to suppose that it just slipped his mind. The question asks why he chose to make that decision? That’s all. Why?

Eisenhower AD

Once the ad was published in The Crimson it caused a furor on and off campus. The story was picked up by all local media in the area, and then by CNN. CNN quotes me as saying, with respect to the scandal caused by the ad at Harvard: “Why the fuss? Because it’s taboo, and has been taboo from the beginning. When you break a culture-wide taboo, supported in theory and practice by the State, the University, and the Press, you create a fuss.”

That quote was repeated again and again in media all around the States, the Spanish speaking world in Europe and South America, in Israel, the Jewish American press, in the Portuguese language O Globo in Brazil, and on so many Web pages and Blogs (most recently on History News Network, a Web page run By Historians For Historians) that we stopped keeping track.

I want to run the “Eisenhower” ad in student newspapers on university campuses all over America. The number of university-connected people we can reach is very impressive. If we use the Harvard statistics for a base, and those stats are minimal, when we run the ad in ten student newspapers we will reach some 260,000 students, faculty and administration. A good number of State universities have 40,000/50,000 students alone, so you can see where this can go.

This is where you come in, hopefully. Will you help me run the Eisenhower ad in student newspapers on university campuses? Every contribution you make will help and be much appreciated. The ad itself will cost about $135 per insertion. It varies. If you can fund the cost of running the ad one time, that would be swell. If you can fund two, three or more runs of the ad – that would be magnificent.

We are working here to break through a taboo. The professorial class in America joined with the State following WWII in asserting the “unique” monstrosity of the Germans with their infernal behavior (Germans cooking Jews to make soap from their fat, Germans skinning Jews to make lampshades and riding breeches from their hides, Germans using WMD to “exterminate” millions of innocent civilians—the list goes on and on). No one is saying that the Germans behaved like angels during WWII, but enough is enough.

It is more than enough when we understand how the assertion of “unique” German monstrosity is exploited to morally justify the conquest of Arab land in Palestine by European Jews, to morally justify the ongoing Israeli subjugation of and humiliation of the Palestinians, and to morally justify the U.S. Congress in passing on more than 100-Billion (!) dollars of American tax-payer monies in direct aid to the Israeli State—so far (The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs).

The American university is not the place, under any circumstance, where taboo should be preferred by academics over the questioning of historical orthodoxies. To the contrary! You do not have to be a professor to understand that it is better to encourage a free exchange of ideas than it is to discourage such an exchange via suppression, censorship, and taboo. We all understand that whether we have been to university or not.

If you agree with the thrust of this letter, please help me run our Eisenhower ad in student newspapers in universities around the country. Your contribution will be very much appreciated, I will use it carefully, and it will be productive. We will encourage the debate, in the full light of day, that the professorial class and those who serve the Holocaust Marketing Industry are determined should not take place.

Thank you,

Bradley R. Smith

PS: All communications regarding contributions will he held strictly confidential.

PPS: I realize that you don’t really know who I am, that so far we have done no work together. With that in mind I want to remind you that you can get my 320-page confessional, Break His Bones: The Private Life of a Holocaust Revisionist, for $4. No shipping, $4. That’s it. All my cards are there on the table, face up. I think it will help you decide that this is an important project, and that I am someone you can trust to carry it forward.

You can order Break His Bones here.

You can contribute directly to the Eisenhower ad via Paypal here.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

An Exchange Between Prof. George Saltzman and Prof. Robert Faurisson

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[Thanks to Michael Santamauro and Reporters Notebook for this.]


Oaxaca, Mexico, Thursday 17 September 2009

Dear Thomas Dalton and Michael Santomauro,

Today Michael, you notified me that you added me to your Reporters Notebook mailing list, and sent me three other e-mails as well. I hope this is not the beginning of a flood of e-mails. One of them announced Thomas Dalton's book, [where I found]the following:

Preeminent Holocaust expert Raul Hilberg said: "What began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. [These measures] were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus -- mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy."

Please let me have a specific (Title and page number) reference for this quote. I have, and have read cover to cover, The Destruction of the European Jews (Student Edition), by Raul Hilberg, published in 1985 in the U.S. by Holmes & Meier. Thank you.

Sincerely,

George Salzman

++++++++++++


Sept. 18, 2009

Dear Michael,

The source of that statement of Raul Hilberg is to be found in: George DeWan, “The Holocaust In Perspective”, Newsday (Long Island, NY), 23 February 1983, p. II/3.

On 16 January 1985, R. Hilberg confirmed those words during his cross-examination at the first Zündel trial in Toronto, Ontario (Canada); see transcript, p. 846-848.

He repeated his strange if not metaphysical theory (but with other words) in The Destruction of the European Jews, [second] revised and definitive [sic!] edition, New York, London, Holmes & Meier, 1985, in his chapter on “The Structure of Destruction”, especially on p. 53, 55 and 62.

On p. 53 he said there was “no basic plan”.

On top of p. 55 he wrote there had been: “Written directives not published” / “Broad authorizations to subordinates not published” / “Oral directives and authorizations” / “Basic understandings of officials resulting in decisions not requiring orders or explanations” (emphasis mine).

On the same page he explained: “In the final analysis, the destruction of the Jews was not so much a product of laws and commands as it was a matter of spirit, of shared comprehension, of consonance and synchronization.”

On the same page, he also specified: “no one agency was charged with the whole operation [of destruction]” and “no single organization directed or coordinated the entire process.”

On p. 62 he concluded: “The destruction of the Jews was thus the work of a far-flung administrative machine. This apparatus took each step in turn. The initiation as well as the implementation of decisions was largely in its hand. No special agency was created and no special budget was devised to destroy the Jews of Europe. Each organization was to play a specific role in the process, and each was to find the means to carry out its task.”

Please, acknowledge receipt of this message.

My next trial (because of what happened at the “Zenith Palace” with Dieudonné on December 26, 2008) will take place in Paris on September 22 at 13:30. The result will be known about one month later.

Best wishes.
R. Faurisson, September 18, 2009

+++

Thursday, September 17, 2009

The ebb and flow of appropriations

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Several years ago, a debate flared up among promoters of CanLit here in Canada over the issue of cultural appropriation. It was one framed as a question: Was it right for an author, like Ruby Wiebe, say, with German Mennonite roots, to appropriate the voice of an Aboriginal woman?

Some critics of the Say No to Cultural Appropriation camp drove home their dissent by sub-dividing communities into an infinitesimal number of sub-groups, and then re-framed the issue with a question like: “Can a straight, able-bodied, male, Aborginal author write a novel in which the hero is an infirm, Aboriginal Lesbian?”

In any event, it got me brooding during my commute to and from my job on the whole issue of appropriations, which my Concise Oxford Dictionary defined as to “take possession of” -- but more especially “without authority.”

I thought back to an early struggle that I had with appropriation as I wrestled with puberty and my compulsion to indulge my favourite sexual fantasies every night after lights out. In those mental porn movies I projected up on a screen in my imagination, my “co-star” was often a friend’s sister or a pretty class-mate or other, older women whom I happened to catch a glimpse of during the day. It was their enticing image I lasciviously co-opted.

In those younger days -- during the early 1960s -- a remnant of Victorian prudery still prevailed in matters of sexuality, and because of this I felt the practice of masturbation to be intrinsically bad, but made much worse by a habit of appropriating the images of women I knew, young and old, and including them in my X-rated mental movies. Was it right to do this (I asked rhetorically) and, more importantly, since grievously wrong, how might the God overseeing the Catholic Church punish me for it in the hereafter? I carried on despite dread of divine wrath, of final judgement, and eternal hellfire.

Of course, appropriation can take many forms. I recall a chum of mine in university describing the week he’d spent in Quebec City during the summer of 1967. Mike was Jewish only on his father’s side, and his old man was room temperature as regards his devotion to both Judaism and Zionism, but Mike was exhilarated by the Israeli victory in the Six Day War and introduced himself to girls he met as an IDF veteran. The image of the Israeli soldier promoted by the Western media was a heroic one then, and posing as such, Mike averred, definitely helped him to score.

The funny thing is, Mike did “make aliyah,” as they say, five years later. He moved to Israel; was assigned work on a kibbutz; and slept in a barracks-like dorm, along with other, wannabe Zionist pioneers. A disenchantment with the campfire life of a kibbutznik soon set in. Certainly, the task Mike had been given in the egg hatchery -- collecting and disposing of the rotten eggs -- was very off-putting, to say the least. He suddenly up and quit the kibbutz, and left Israel after just a couple months; he hightailed it back to Montreal.

It was around this time, living in Montreal’s north end, that I made friends with a student at Sir George Williams University. Jerry was the first child of Holocaust survivors that I got to know. Because of this, his was, he said, a family home that was deeply troubled and dysfunctional. His mother had attempted suicide; his father was an incurable hysteric. Jerry himself was receiving psychiatric counseling at the Jewish General.

One day he told me his father’s story. How, as a Red Army captain, he paid a visit to his home town in Ukraine, and stood before a common grave that contained the bodies of his father and mother, of three bothers and three sisters, his first wife and their twin children -- all victims of the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union.

His telling me this story came on the heels of our discussion of a made-for-TV series, QBVII. Based on the Leon Uris novel, it starred Anthony Hopkins as Sir Adam Kelno, a good Polish doctor, who was knighted for his charitable work, but now forced to defend his otherwise sterling reputation in a libel suit after allegations surfaced that formerly, as a prisoner of the Nazi regime, Kelno performed ghoulish experiments on Jewish inmates in a German concentration camp.

Jerry flushed as he recounted his father’s rants during the TV commercials as they watched one of the QBVII episodes together.

“If we learn anything from all this,” he declaimed, “It is that gentiles absolutely cannot be trusted.”

As he quoted his father, forked veins inflated on his temples, pulsed and throbbed; for a moment he seemed to channel his father’s boiling outrage. The penetrating expression in Jerry’s darkening eyes left me in no doubt that, then and there, he also included me among the general run of treacherous gentiles.

Jerry was appropriating the tragic and bitter legacy of his father’s wartime experience. It was as if a sudden gust of wind had blown open the front door to the house, rattled everyone momentarily, until somebody promptly shut it again, and calm was restored. For after a while the tension between us eased and dissipated, and we resumed our casual banter.

After graduation from university, we went our separate ways. On a snowy afternoon several years later I shared a subway ride with his sister, Rosalind. She explained that her brother had become an orthodox Jew, dressed like a Hasid, and was constantly hectoring their parents for their lack of strict kosher observance in matters pertaining to diet, subscribing as they did to Judaism’s slightly more lenient conservative branch. “Jerry’s turned the tables on them, after all the years they were nagging him about his lacklustre display of observance.”

Another captive eddy in the ebb and flow of appropriations.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Break His Bones Ad

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Here is one of the new ads that I am submitting to student newspapers around the country.

My book, Break His Bones, presents a human face to students who have been taught for decades that it is a “sin” to question the gas-chamber stories, that only a moral monster would question the “unique” monstrosity of the Germans.

Break His Bones exposes the double standards that the professorial class, along with the rest of the Holocaust Marketing Industry (Holocaust Inc.) exploits to suppress and censor the call for a routine examination of the gas-chamber question.


Click on Ad to buy book or read a chapter.


By running this ad in student newspapers we will reach, accumulatively, tens of thousands of professors and their administrators, and hundreds of thousands of students.

The ad will cost on average about $100 -- $125 per run. Your contribution will ensure that the ad will be read by university students around the country, and that each of these students, with a couple clicks on his keyboard, and $4, will get a copy of Break His Bones, a book unlike anything he/she has ever read.

It will be clear to one and all that no one is going to “make money” selling a 320-page book for $4 with free postage and handling. Money is not the purpose of the ad. I want students to have the opportunity to see a side of the revisionist struggle that they have been successfully blinded to because of a Holocaust Marketing Industry with hundreds of millions of dollars to spend, an ignorant press, and at the bottom of it all a broken-backed professorial class that will not stand up for its own ideals.

Once the ad is running, you will be able to follow the story on the CODOH blogs, and in Smith’s Report.

Break His Bones: The Private Life of a Holocaust Revisionist by Bradley R. Smith

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CHAPTER ONE

For ten years and more I suppose I have been the most visible holocaust revisionist activist in America. I'm very far from being the right person for the job. The most visible revisionist activist in America should be a scholar and someone who is passionately interested in the litera-ture.

I'm very far from being a scholar and I find the literature to be a real yawner. At the beginning of course it was awfully shocking to discover that it has not been demonstrated that the gas chamber stories are true. What I couldn't get out of my mind however was not the apparent fact that there had been no program for the mass gassing of Jews, thank God for that as they say, but how urgently intellectuals argue against intellectual freedom on this one issue.

Even in the early 1980s I had only a casual interest in the historical record. What held my attention was what I perceived to be the challenge of finding a way to convince the intellectuals, and the media intellectuals, that revisionist research should be judged on its merits, as I presumed they judged all other historical research. I see now I presumed much too much. These days, as students display a growing interest in an open debate about the Holocaust controversy, the intellectuals increasingly display signs of bad temper and even hysteria.

Professor Deborah Lipstadt, the leading voice representing the Holocaust industry in academia, has chosen to single out the work I do on college campuses for special attention in her muchpraised book, Denying the Holocaust, The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. There she devotes a 26-page chapter to what she sees as "The Battle for the Campus," writing plaintively that: "Colleagues have related that their students' questions are increasingly informed by Holocaust denial:

"How do we know that there really were gas chambers? . What proof do we have that the survivors are telling the truth? . Are we going to hear the German side?"

Now there's a real scandal for you! Some students are no longer willing to accept on faith what their professors assure them is true about the gassing chambers, but want to learn what the evidence demonstrates. They suspect that while most survivors speak truthfully about their wartime experiences in the camps, some do not. Where do students get such ideas? There are even students who want to hear the "German" side to the Holocaust story. Unbelievable!

The Deborah Lipstadts of the world must be asking themselves what in hell is going on? They've run the Holocaust show on campus and in the media for so many years they see these signs of student curiosity and principle as the outbreak of some dreadful intellectual pox. I see them as the cure to one. The Lipstadts write about the "terrible harm" such questions can do. I ask why such questioning does not measure the good health of the culture?

Professor Lipstadt is no shrinking violet when it comes to arguing against intellectual freedom. She even has the brass to argue against "light of day," the concept that false statements and even false ideas can be exposed as such by flooding them with the light of free inquiry and open debate. She writes:

"[I]t is naive to believe that the 'light of day' can dispel lies, especially when they play on familiar stereotypes. Victims of racism, sexism, antisemitism, and a host of other prejudices know of light's limited ability to discredit falsehood."

What does Lipstadt believe will dispel lies and discredit falsehood? Night? How many victims of racism, sexism and antisemitism speak against light in favor of suppression and censorship? I wonder how Jews felt about "light" in pre-war Nazi Germany? Early on the Nazis moved against Jews in the arts, against Jews in publishing, against Jews in the universities-all places where traditionally light is so highly valued. The Nazis had views about light in the 1930s that are similar to those of some professors today. Light for the Nazi-minded, darkness for everyone else. In the long run, light might not have made any difference for German Jews, but when you look at the record you find that when Hitler began to deny light to Jews, the Jews began to leave Germany. Those Jews understood the necessity of "light." Those who didn't soon found out what it meant to live in darkness. Without tyranny, human life is full of light.

The problem for the Lipstadts is that light is there for all of us without fear or favor. It is no respecter of persons. Just as the sun shines on the good and the bad alike, light refuses to choose sides. Historians who ask it to betray their professional ideals and the ideal of light itself. It's Lipstadt's need for guarantees from light that causes her to argue against this great ideal of Western culture. We all have to be willing to accept what light illuminates. I admit on principle I might be wrong about the gas chambers, to say nothing about a lot of other stuff. Nevertheless, here I am, looking for ways to encourage intellectuals to encourage intellectual freedom with regard to the holocaust controversy. I don't care anymore who's right or wrong about the gas chamber stories. I'm fishing a bigger lake.

My friend William called from Chicago to ask how the video project on Auschwitz is going. William is one of my volunteer advisors. I told him there had been too many production problems and I'd had to lay it aside. I said I was going to concentrate on finishing the book manuscript.

"Is that the manuscript you've been talking about the last two or three years?"

"Has it been that long?"

"This is bad news. This is really bad news."

"What are you suggesting?" I said. William is one of those very sincere men who wears his thoughts on his sleeve. You always know what he's suggesting.

"What I'm suggesting is you're very mistaken if you think people are interested in reading about your inner life as a holocaust revisionist. Nobody wants to read about you, Bradley. Are you listening to me? Your personal life is a bore. People are interested in their own lives. The only interesting thing you've ever done is revisionism and you don't want to write about that. You want to write about your feelings. Can't you understand how childish that is? I have that first little book you published, what's it called? It's unreadable. Do you understand what I'm saying? It's a miracle you've been able to accomplish anything at all for revisionism."

"I understand what you're saying. But some people like the way I write. A writer can only have his own audience."

"I don't know who the hell you've been talking to. Listen to me. Let me tell you what your problem as a writer is. I'm telling you this as a friend. As someone who's interested in the work you're doing. Your problem is that you write like a sixty-year-old teenager."

"Sixty-four."

"What?"

"Sixty-four, William. I'm sixty-four now."

"Oh."

After a moment William said: "Is that a joke? I know how old you are. What the hell are we talking about here? Are we talking about something serious? I'm worried, Bradley. It's no joke that revisionism's got you for its point man."

When I found out that something was wrong with the gas chamber stories I was fifty years old. By the time you're fifty you've been around the block a few times. You've come to believe you're finished with fear, for example, yet here it was again. In a certain way, it was the fear that held my attention. I quickly lost interest in "survivor" yarns about gassing and torture and how good and innocent Jews are compared with Christians and everybody else.

Instead, I was intrigued and maybe a little obsessed with how afraid I was of admitting-of confessing I might even say-that I no longer believed. I had lived most of my adult life among Jews and with Jews, and some of us were terribly devoted to one another. When I realized I was going to go against the gas chamber stories, a terrible tumult entered my life because I understood many of my friends would feel I was going against them too. It was in that place that fear grasped me and held on.

I could have dropped the story and gone on my way, but when you write the way I write, the stories you dread most are the stories you are most obligated to pursue. My sense of things was that I had to risk friendships, even risk my family. I had to risk the contempt of my peers and the ostracism of a community and society, which would judge my doubting to be despicable. Nietzsche writes some place that we all work out of our weaknesses and I suppose that's what I did. In my anxiety and fear I decided to take on, not the gas chamber story itself, but those who run the story as if it were their private franchise, who condemn those who question it. Those who have the power to destroy many of those they condemn.

The ruling discourse in America, and indeed the West, demands that the Holocaust story remain closed to authentic debate. The holocaust happened. Revisionists say it didn't. For that reason all worthy persons and particularly intellectuals-who are all worthy persons by definition-favor the suppression and even censorship of revisionist theory. Meanwhile, because over the last half century the story has been revised so much, it becomes increasingly difficult to say exactly what the holocaust was. That's where I saw my role. I fell into it like a blind man falling down a well. All I could see was the taboo that protected the story from real examination. How could anyone put his finger on what the thing itself had been if it was taboo to talk about it freely-really freely? I would be the one then, the blind man said, to help start the discussion going.

I didn't know how to get it going. Not knowing what to do, I did everything. One on one discussion, newsletters, radio talk shows, newspaper articles, television interviews, books, public speaking, print interviews, video tapes. You name it, I tried it. I became a one-man band. Dr. Franklin Littell, professor of religion at Temple University in Philadelphia and a holocaust scholar himself, refers to me as a "malicious burst of energy" and compares me to "the adversary who wanders to and fro in the earth and goes up and down in it."

Friends tell me this is an insult. I think maybe it's something more subtle. I'm being compared to one of the great innovators in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Wanders to and fro in the earth and goes up and down in it? All right. Maybe I see what he's getting at. There's a whole world down there I didn't know existed. Dr. Littell's thoughtful observations on my character and movements illuminate the learning gap that exists between highly educated, professional holocaust scholars on the one hand and ex-concrete contractors on the other.

When you express doubts which others believe are evil, and which in fact may cause many individuals to suffer and to feel diminished and perhaps even humiliated, you have an obligation to act out of a good conscience and to value what can be called right relationship. Which means I must be a good man or the mischief and grief I cause by saying I doubt what I doubt will be gratuitous. What does it mean to be a good man? I have only the foggiest notion. It would seem to me as a writer, however, that it would include being willing to say publicly I do not believe what I do not believe, particularly when what I no longer believe relieves another people, in this instance Germans, of the moral burden of a specifically horrendous crime I no longer believe they committed.

When my first essay advertisement, "The Holocaust Story: How Much is False? The Case for Open Debate," appeared as a full-page ad in the Daily Northwestern, an article responding to it appeared in the Daily written by Peter Hayes, an associate professor of history and German with a special interest in Nazi Germany. Titled "Some Plain Talk About the Holocaust and Revisionism," Hayes' article is a paint-by-the-numbers example of how your typical holocaust historian reacts when faced with even the simplest text challenging what he wants his students to believe.

I note his response here, not because it proved to be unique in any way, but because it was the first to reply directly to one of my ads, and because it proved to be a textbook guide to the subjective life of those academics who are willing to betray light.

"When this newspaper printed Bradley Smith's advertisement last Thursday it fanned not one, but two, gathering controversies on campus. The first concerns our knowledge about the Nazi massacre of the Jews of Europe. The Second centers on the policies of the Daily itself.

"Surprisingly perhaps, the first issue is far easier to clarify than the second. Of course, there's been no suppression of free inquiry into the Holocaust. It is precisely because of extensive and vigorous research by bona fide scholars over the past three decades that we know not only several of the facts that Smith manipulates in his ad, but also a good many that he does not want you to believe.

"There's no point in writing more here about the factual deceptions and distortions in Smith's ad."

[....]

No point in writing more about the factual deceptions in my ad? Which factual deceptions? For a moment I felt I must be blind to something your average Northwestern professor could see at a glance. Was there a misstatement of fact in my text or wasn't there? We all have our own way of looking at things, but this thing was not clear to me. How do you describe an intellectual environment in which an historian can write there is no point in writing more about factual deceptions in a specific text when, as a matter of fact, he hasn't written anything about them at all. However you do describe it, you should include the word vulgar.
Professor Hayes' article on my article continued for another seventeen paragraphs.

He avoided the temptation of attempting to reveal an error of fact in what I had written but charged me with "deception," "manipulation," "distortion," "ignorance," "nastiness," "dishonesty," "duplicity," "maliciousness," "tastelessness," "conspiracy mongering," "promoting implausabilities," "promoting anti-Semitism," "spreading disinformation" and, the one I still like best, "brow beating academics." I would not have thought,
considering the bold language the professor used, that he would have mentioned that last one.

Revisionist theory isn't wrong about everything, and there's the rub. Revisionism is simply a criticism of pub-lished academic writings on the holocaust story. I take it as a given that revisionist research is wrong about a lot of things. The problem the professors face is that if they point out where revisionists are wrong the professors are left with what's left over-with what revisionists are right about. This is a conceptual tragedy for your average academic. In each case where the revisionist is right, a bunch of academics are wrong and would have to fess up to being wrong, to having been wrong for a long time-and to having been stonewalling about being wrong. It would then become clear that while the good guys are right most of the time with what they publish on the story, the bad guys are right some of the time.

After the ad ran in the Daily Targum at Rutgers University, the New York Times ran an editorial on the controversy, as well as several news stories, letters to the editor, and a dumb opinion piece by two Rutgers' professors. It also assigned a reporter from its San Francisco bureau to drive down to Visalia with a cameraman to do a profile on me. I expected the worst but I liked the reporter, Catherine Bowan. She's a big hearty woman with a big hearty laugh. A photo ran with her story showing me gesticulating dra-matically, giving the impression I actually believed what I was saying. Bowen informed me she is a specialist on the White separatist movement in the Northwest. She said she'd interviewed all those guys, in prison and out. She said every racist and anti-Semite in the Northwest knows who I am and all about the work I do.

"Is that right?" I said.

"Do you keep up with the people in the movement?"

I understand she's fishing, but then, I'm here to be caught. I tell her a lot of those people contacted me when I first started doing revisionism but over the years they'd all dropped me. "I'm not anti-Jewish, so that was a big strike against me. My family is Mexican, so the racialists see me as a race traitor, and I don't have any guns so the militias and the anti-Zog forces are convinced I have no sense of honor."

"Three strikes and you're out," Bowan says laughing:

"I suppose so. I think the movement people think I'm a pantywaist."

"That's exactly what they think," Bowan says laughing heartily. "They think you're a pantywaist.

Her photographer thinks my being a pantywaist is funny too but it's Bowen's laugh that rings in my ears. Maybe it's because she's a lady. You can laugh at being called a pantywaist when a man says it because you have a choice what to do about it, but when a lady laughs about something like that you're kind of helpless. So I remain quiet. I'm a good sport about it. When the movement people read this they'll say, "Of course Smith's a good sport. Smith has no sense of honor."

When William Blake writes that Jesus acted on impulse, not from thought, he means that Jesus' actions did not depend on his being obsequious before the ruling discourse of his day. Of course in Blake's view Jesus was good all the way through so his impulses were good so his acts were good. It pleases me to think that Jesus acted on impulse and not by the rules, because I think when push comes to shove that's what I do and that throws me in with good company. How good I am is another question. It's not one I can pass judgment on. Actually I think I'm a pretty swell guy. One irony here about impulse is that the professors can be seen to be acting on it too. They dismiss revisionist theory with a wave of the hand, holding that there can be no debate about the gas chambers because there can be no "other side" to the story. Only their side. Maybe it was something like this 200 years ago that drove Blake to conclude that education is the work of Satan.

It's simply a core belief among our intellectual classes that the Germans killed millions of Jews and others in gassing installations. Entire classes of intellectuals have become True Believers. I understand it can be argued that I'm a true believer too-in intellectual freedom. I can't prove that intellectual freedom is better than tyranny. It's something I want. That's the long and short of it. I doubt many things that others believe. No one can keep me from doubting, but I crave the freedom to be allowed to express my doubts to others.

This isn't an argument over natural rights. I don't want to make intellectual freedom a plank in a party line. Intellectual freedom is not primarily a political issue or even an intellectual one. It's a spiritual issue. You either desire it or you don't. You either want it for others as well as for yourself or you don't really want it. They say Buddha said that desire is at the root of all pain. I'm willing to go with the pain. My desire is the foundation of whatever arguments I make to convince others that intellectual freedom is better than tyranny. First the wanting, then the argument. The other way around and it's mere thinking.

One day I ran across an article about mad poets in the New York Review of Books. Not poets who are annoyed. Crazy ones. I have some interest in poetry, and an intermittent interest in madness. Professor Charles Rosen of the University of Chicago wrote the article. Early this year I submitted a second fullpage advertisement to a student newspaper on that campus, The Chicago Maroon. You can see the coincidences gathering themselves together here. This ad was titled "The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate." In the end it was suppressed so Chicago students didn't get to read it, but the word had gotten out on campus about the text of the ad and there was a big stink about it.

So one afternoon I was in the mall here drinking a diet Pepsi and reading Professor Rosen's discussion of madness in English and Continental poets from about 1750 to 1850. It looked as if half my favorite poets from the period were goofy. At the same time, Rosen noted that madness is oftentimes a matter of social convention and that social pressure oftentimes determines whether or not you will be certified as a lunatic. It is not clear, he writes, that those men with their visions were any more insane than the people today "who believe that no one was gassed at Auschwitz."

What was this? Was Professor Rosen talking about me? It's come to the place where professors can't make mention of Mayan sinotes, bureaucracy during the Sung dynasty or a lunatic English poet without introducing some fatuous reference to Auschwitz. I read someplace fifteen years ago that there were already 200,000 bibliographical references to Auschwitz, and that was before the professors really got cooking. I suppose Auschwitz will start popping up in new editions of Grimm's collected tales for first readers.

Despite the obstacles and the longing for night so prevalent in the universities with regard to holocaust studies, I've been able to create a tremendous free-press scandal throughout the academic community. My ads call attention to revisionist theory on one campus after another across the nation. My second article, "The Holocaust Controversy: The Case For Open Debate," has run as a full page ad at Michigan, Duke, Cornell, Rutgers, Ohio State, Georgia, Vanderbilt, Louisiana State, Howard, Arizona, Montana and at half a dozen others. Howard is the largest Black university in the country. When the ad ran at the University of San Diego, the President of that Catholic institution ordered special agents to fan out over the campus and confiscate every copy of the paper still available and destroy it. Prospective entries for a new Catholic Index perhaps?

When the New York Times ran its snooty editorial on my ad, asserting it was trashy and barren of ideas, it nevertheless affirmed, "When there is free expression, even the ugliest ideas enrich democracy." How do ugly ideas enrich democracy? Professor Lipstadt found the answer at The Harvard Crimson and took the trouble to repeat it in her Denying the Holocaust.

In one of the most unequivocal evaluations of [Smith's] ad, The Crimson declared it " . . . utter bullshit that has been discredited time and time again."

So there we have it-light on the one hand and bullshit on the other. The yin and yang of intellectual freedom. What browbeaten professors and far-too-elegant editorial writers at The New York Times find ugly is actually part of the process of fertilization when open debate is allowed. Of course, everything new and daring looks bullshit-ugly to those who have something to lose from the new and the daring. When you live in a farming community like ours, you learn to appreciate the necessity for light and fertilizer both. Together they're what make the grapes grow. They make the white blossoms appear on the fruit trees.

Yousof, another of my volunteer advisors, says serious people don't take me seriously because my writing reveals my lack of a university education.

"You missed something by not going to school," he says. "It shows in everything you write. Your thinking is disorderly and incomplete. How can anyone who is well read take you seriously? You don't understand the logic of language. You have no formal intellectual training. Educated people understand that when they read you. When you write about the Holocaust from an intellectual perspective they know you're in over your head."

It's obvious to me Yousof has his finger on something. There's plenty missing here. More than he suspects maybe. But this is the hand I was dealt. We can't all be scholars. Most of us aren't. Many of us never went to school at all. When my father-in-law finished the first grade in a Mexico City grammar school, that was it for him. He had to get a job. Nevertheless, ordinary people everywhere feel committed, in the context of their own lives, to right action and right relationship. These are no more and no less the first responsibilities intellectuals bear, in the context of their lives. I have found everywhere that ordinary people sense it is good to be truthful, generous and open minded and that it's base to be deceitful, uncharitable and bigoted. With respect to the Holocaust controversy, I don't know of a single intellectual elite that has not betrayed those simple standards.

Occasionally one of my revisionist colleagues will speak to me of honor and urge me not to allow my enemies to insult and ridicule me without striking back. Honorable men feel it's degrading to be ridiculed and insulted. I've come to see something of the comic in it. That's how low I've sunk. When I was a kid it made me angry to be insulted or treated contemptuously, but the older I grow the more difficult it is for me to feel offended by anything said by anyone. One of my problems is that I don't have enemies. Many people think of me as their enemy but I see those persons as potential friends with whom I disagree on a few matters. Maybe if I had been to university I'd be able to relate to them in a more mature way.

Ramana Maharshi advises going at this matter very differently, but he's a Hindu so you have to cut him some slack. He says he doesn't care why an insult hurts, he wants to know who it is who believes he is being hurt. It doesn't do to tell the Maharshi it's you because the Maharshi will ask you who you are and you won't be able to tell him-not to his satisfaction anyhow-and after a while not to yours either. That's the theory. I think there's something to it.

I can still see (who am I?) the television images of the monks in Saigon sitting on the sidewalk setting fire to themselves. They weren't laughing or cracking jokes but they weren't complaining either. They were protesting what they held to be unacceptable behavior by those who had chosen to rule them. I detest complaint but I admire protest. One of the many reasons Adolf puts me off so is that he was a truly chronic complainer (many "survivors" resemble him in that way). I don't think he ever would have been a happy camper, but if he'd chatted up the Maharshi every now and then (their lives spanned the same decades) maybe his own life and the lives of everyone in Europe would have taken a different turn.

Debbie M. Price, a good looking syndicated columnist writing for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, begins one of her columns:

"From California it came, a voice of pure evil, whispering gently, persuasively into the phone . . . . on the very day President Clinton dedicated the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, here was this voice, this man, Bradley Smith. . . . "

Now that's a terrific lead. Her prose goes down hill after that opening paragraph, but I have a soft spot in my heart for anyone who'll kick off a column the way Debbie kicked that one off. I've gotten clippings of it from newspapers all over the country. A voice of pure evil. That's something. Secular journalists are joining Christian scholars to elevate me to extravagant heights of influence. Still, it makes sense. When you find yourself identified with the One who wanders to and fro inside the earth and goes up and down in it, a voice of pure evil comes with the territory. What I need to know is, when I come up to the surface to chat with Texas journalists, where is my point of entry? If the time ever comes when I have to make a run for it, I'd like to know where the devil the hole is.

It's six o'clock in the afternoon on the last Sunday in May. A surprise storm has covered the valley with dark heavy clouds. I'm in the patio behind the house checking the air in the tires on Marisol's bicycle. The front one is low. I hear thunder, a sudden wind blows through the plum trees, then the first drops of rain fall heavily on the patio roof. Fat water drops splatter the concrete walk that leads around the side of the house. I sit on the saddle of the metallic-red girl's bike and watch the rain shake the plumtree leaves and listen to it fall on the corrugated plastic above me. When it stops I pedal over to Mooney Boulevard to the gas station where I use the air.

I wait out another squall beside the pumps, then start pedaling toward downtown-toward the Main Street Diner and Bar. I might make it before it rains again, I might not. Since coming to Visalia I've been drinking Bass Ale but the last time out after I drank a few Bass and left the Diner and was pedaling back along Locust-I don't know how it happened-I fell off the bike into the gutter in front of the Tulare County Escrow Office. From now on when I'm riding the bicycle, no more Bass Ale. Today I'll drink something lighter. Maybe a few Becks clear. Nearing downtown I cut across Noble and coast over the Locust street bridge across the sunken freeway. I look east up the freeway past where the concrete goes out of sight and beyond to the mountains and there, where the clouds have blown apart, I can see the first ranges of the Sierra Nevada beneath a pure blue sky and how their crests are covered with a fresh white snowfall. And then out of the blue as they say, I hear a voice speak.

"The time is come for you to live a life of intellectual freedom, not argue for one."

I don't understand very well what the voice is getting at. But I'll think about it.

end

Monday, September 14, 2009

The Harvard Crimson -- Don't Ask, Don't Tell Journalism

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This release was sent to the national press,
on campus and off, this date.

=========================================================================


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Bradley R. Smith, Founder
Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust
PO Box 439016
San Ysidro, California 92143


Desk: 209 682 5327
Email: bradley1930@yahoo.com
Web: www.codoh.com

14 September 2009



The Harvard Crimson -- Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Journalism

On 09 September the Harvard Crimson published a letter from its own staff titled Obligations of the Press.” The letter addressed an advertisement run by Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) that asked two questions.

The first question asked why General Dwight Eisenhower, in his 550-page book Crusade in Europe, did not mention the WMD (gas chambers) that the Germans used to “exterminate” millions of Jews and others.

The second question asked for the name, with proof, of one person killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz. No Harvard academic has offered a reply to either question.

The letter from The Crimson staff observed that “the advertisement offended large segments of the campus,” and that “we believe this item should never be found in the pages of a college newspaper.”

Why? Because the questions “promote hate and could actually jeopardize the psychological and emotional well being of others in the Harvard community.”

What others? Was the psychological and emotional well being of the Palestinians at Harvard jeopardized? The Lebanese, the Syrians, Egyptians or the Iraqis? How about the Koreans, the Japanese, the Chinese? The Brazilians, Argentinians, the students from Liberia and Uganda?

How about students of German decent at Harvard? Who at the Harvard Crimson has ever expressed concern about the psychological and emotional well being of Germans? Let’s not joke around. If the accusation is against Germans, it’s good to go. Decade after decade for more than half a century. It is taboo to question the gas-chamber accusation. Not to deny it, but simply to question it. Issues of psychological and emotional well being be damned. No time for that. We’re talking about Germans here.

Following the lead of Harvard faculty, which is only natural, the Crimson staff writes: “We hope to see The Crimson and other college newspapers refrain from printing similar content going forward.”

The staff of the Harvard Crimson has stated it clearly. The “obligation” of the press with regard to the gas-chamber question is:

Don’t ask. Don’t tell.

Some of us feel a different obligation. Ask. If you get an answer you believe is reasonable, tell others. That is—do ask, do tell. It’s called a free exchange of ideas. It’s a concept that makes the same promise to those who believe what The Crimson staff believes about the gas-chamber story that it makes to those who question what The Crimson staff believes about the gas-chamber story. That promise is to shine the light of day onto the question and to reveal what is there without fear or favor.

Light has no interest in fear, no interest in favor. The one interest of light is to reveal clearly that which it is bathing in its own essence.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

A short follow-up to the CODOH Harvard ad by Professor Thomas Dalton

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Sept. 10, 2009

A short follow-up to the Bradley Smith ad, and the statement by Prof Lynn, on the three war memoirs by Eisenhower, De Gaulle, and Churchill:

Eisenhower’s book, Crusade in Europe (1948), is a single volume of some 550 pages—the smallest of the three. Reviewing the index, one finds no listing for ‘Auschwitz’, ‘Holocaust’, or ‘gas chambers’. The single entry for ‘Jews’ refers to the following paragraph:

"Of all these displaced persons, the Jews were in the most deplorable condition. For years they had been beaten, starved, and tortured. Even food, clothes, and decent treatment could not immediately enable them to shake off their hopelessness and apathy. They huddled together—they seemingly derived a feeling of safety out of crowding together in a single room—and there passively awaited whatever might befall. To secure for them adequate shelter, to establish a system of food distribution and medical service, to say nothing of providing decent sanitary facilities, heat, and light was a most difficult task. They were, in many instances, no longer capable of helping themselves; everything had to be done for them." (pp. 439-440)

No mention of extermination, mass murder, gassing, crematoria—nothing. Only “beaten, starved, and tortured”—which, given the alternative, isn’t so bad.

De Gaulle’s work, The Complete War Memoirs (1954/1964), consists of three volumes and a total of more than 2,000 pages. In the index we again find no reference whatsoever to ‘Auschwitz’, ‘Holocaust’, or ‘gas chambers’—nor this time even to ‘Jews.’ This being the last-written of the three works (French original in 1954), De Gaulle obviously had plenty of time to reflect on the Holocaust; evidently it merited no discussion at all.

The largest memoir was written by Churchill. The Second World War (1948-1953) is a massive, six-volume account of the war. It consumes nearly 4,500 pages of text. Once again, the indexes (one per volume) have no entries at all for ‘Auschwitz’, ‘Holocaust’, or ‘gas chamber.’ There are a few references to Jews, but most are simple passing comments. Only one entry, out of six volumes, addresses Jewish persecution. In Volume 1, page 58, we find one single phrase: “brutalities towards the Jews were rampant.”

These men all knew what transpired at Nuremberg. They saw the concentration camp photos, and actually visited some of the sites. They had access to the most confidential information available. And yet: no extermination camps, no ‘6 million’, no gas chambers, no Auschwitz—only beatings, starvation, and assorted brutalities. One could almost be forgiven for thinking there was no ‘Holocaust’ at all.

--Thomas Dalton.

Professor Dalton is the author of Debating the Holocaust.

FREE Chapters and Contents for Debating are here.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

CNN Reports on Harvard's Questionable Advertising Policy

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09 September 2009

(CNN) -- Harvard University, one of America's premiere academic institutions, is coming under fire for running an advertisement in its campus newspaper questioning the reality of the Holocaust.Recently named for the second straight year as the No. 1 school in U.S. News & World Report rankings of American colleges, Harvard is known for its rigorous scholarly standards and prestigious reputation.

On Tuesday, however, The Harvard Crimson, in what it said was an error, ran the Holocaust-questioning advertisement, which had been rejected by the paper over the summer.
[….]

It is widely accepted that approximately 5.7 million of Europe's 7.3 million Jews perished during the war. In total, historians say, between 11 million and 17 million people were killed by the Nazi regime, including religious and political opponents, ethnic Poles, Romani, Jehovah's Witnesses, Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, homosexuals and people with disabilities.
[….]

Smith said he is not surprised by the reaction because "it's taboo, and has been taboo from the beginning. When you break a culture-wide taboo, supported in theory and practice by the state, the university and the press, you create a fuss."

Robert Trestan, civil rights counsel for the Anti-Defamation League of New England, …. finds it shocking that such an advertisement would fall through the cracks, as Child said. … He said his organization will continue to work with college newspaper editors to educate schools that they don't have an obligation to publish questionable advertising.

Harvard Crimson censors CODOH ad after one run

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A Letter To Crimson Readers

Published On Wednesday, September 09, 2009 12:19 AM

By MAXWELL L. CHILD


In yesterday’s newspaper, The Crimson ran an advertisement that questioned whether the Holocaust occurred and which unsurprisingly angered many members of the Harvard community. We did not intend to run the ad—a decision we made over the summer when it was initially submitted. Unfortunately, with three weeks of vacation between submission and publication, that decision fell through the cracks.

Yesterday’s advertisement was the result of that miscommunication. And while running the ad was not our intent, we accept responsibility for our failure to carry out the planned cancellation. We recognize how sensitive a subject this is for our community and appreciate all the e-mails and letters we have received about it from concerned members of the University. We have made sure that the rest of the ad’s planned run has been terminated, and any money that has changed hands in exchange for the ad to date will be returned.

We want to stress that we do not endorse the views put forth in any advertisement that runs in The Crimson, and this case was no different. That said, we do recognize that in our role as distributors we are responsible for the content that runs in our newspaper. And though we did seek to intervene in this case, we failed to see the process through to its conclusion. We will work hard to avoid such lapses in communication in the future, and hope our readers will accept that yesterday’s error was a logistical failure and not a philosophical one.

Sincerely,

Maxwell L. Child
President
The Harvard Crimson

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

CODOH ad runs in Harvard Crimson

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An ad focusing on Dwight D. Eisenhower and his (missing?) observations on the German gas chambers is running in the Harvard Crimson this week. Maybe next week if you want to help fund it. Below is the opening paragraph of the text, sans formatting.

====================

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

published his Crusade in Europe in 1948. In 582 pages General Eisenhower did not mention the German gas chambers in which it was claimed that millions of Jews and others were “exterminated.”

WHY NOT?

====================

If you want to see the ad formatted the way it is running in The Crimson, you will find it here.

Post Traumatic Embitterment Disorder: Treatable?

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Dr Prendergast received the forty-something man and woman, two siblings, in his office promptly at 10 a.m. They were concerned by their elderly father’s state of mind. Since his retirement, he’d been spending a lot of time brooding on the past.

Dr Prendergast: “You say your father survived the Holocaust?”

Man: “Yes.”

Dr Prendergast: “And the problem is?”

Woman: “Well, he seems of late, now that he’s got more leisure time to dwell on the past, to have become very embittered by the experiences he had to endure as a Jew during the war. Not only that -- but he’s been going to area high schools to give talks, to share those experiences with the students.”

Dr Prendergast: “Has he?”

Man: “Oh, yes. His degree of bitterness is so intense we believe it has reached clinical proportions. Together with an obsessive need to make sure no one is left unaware, in any doubt, of what he had to endure.”

Dr Prendergast: “Possibly a case of PTED, do you think?”

Woman: “PTED?”

Dr Prendergast: “That’s ‘post traumatic embitterment disorder.’”

Man: “Possibly. . . What are some of its symptoms?”

Dr Prendergast: “According to Dr Michael Linden, our German colleague, who discovered this disturbing pattern of behaviour,
what we’re dealing with here is a pathological reaction to a single, negative life event -- in this instance, the Holocaust -- now being obsessed over as grossly unjust, as violation of his person on a very deep level, and a compulsion to showcase his suffering for all the world to see.”

Woman: “That seems familiar.”

Dr Prendergast: “According to Dr Linden, sufferers of PTED have a tendency to rewind and re-run intrusive thoughts and memories over and over again, long, long after the triggering-event has come and gone. In addition, they’re also consumed by an intense desire for revenge. For payback.”

Man: “It’s interesting you mention that. Because, Dad has told us that he’s seen that new Quentin Tarantino movie, Inglourious Basterds, about a half-dozen times, claiming he finds its motif of Jews avenging the Holocaust to be ‘therapeutic’ for him.”

Dr Prendergast: “There you go. The appetite for vengeance!”

Woman: “So what you’re saying is, persons who feel they’ve been especially wronged in life, been humiliated and endured injustice in some form are especially prone to this brain disorder?”

Dr Prendergast: “Exactly. Moreover, such people sometimes show a righteous, missionary zeal in their endeavour to improve matters. For example, you say he’s been going to area schools to share his experiences with the students. To promote tolerance, no doubt?”

Man: “I believe so.”

Dr Prendergast: “Here let me quote Dr Linden’s own words from this text regarding PTED sufferers: ‘These people don’t have the feeling that they must change, but rather have the idea that the world should change or the oppressor should change.’”

Woman: “Interesting.”

Dr Prendergast: “However, I caution you that PTED has not as yet been given official recognition as a mental disorder. That is, it has yet to be listed in our psychiatric Bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Nevertheless, we’re very hopeful that when the fifth edition is published, in 2012, that PTED will be among the newly-discovered pathologies to be included. That will, in fact, constitute the DSM’s first major revision since 1994.”

Man: “Will that make a big difference?”

Dr Prendergast: “I should think so. Consider, for example, how it impacted Western society after the DSM delisted homosexality as a mental disorder in the 1986 edition.”


NOTE: The foregoing was a fictional account of what might lie just around the corner -- or not. Perhaps, Holocaust survivors will be put into a special category and exempted where can’t-let-go-of-it bitterness tied to PTED is concerned.

For additional information concerning the scourge of this newfound malady google PTED and the name Dr Michael Linden.

Monday, September 7, 2009

Third Reich Secret Weapons

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A letter from Paul Fritz-Németh Sr.

Hi Bradley,

I bought a German DVD about the secret weapons of the Third Reich. As I was watching it, it suddenly hit me, there were references constantly to the very active and effective Polish underground that was reporting about German activities involving Polish slave laborers. Two things struck me in particular, one how easy it was for the Poles to keep tabs on German activities and two, the Germans did let many prisoners go, either because their sentences were up or they stopped using them for other reasons.

Normally, documentary producers do not miss a chance to mention the "holocaust" whenever they can, yet in this documentary, not a word about it. Surely if the holocaust had been such a big deal, they would have brought up this important subject in their reports, yet not a word. One could argue that the Poles were even more anti-Semitic than the Germans, but surely not those which were sitting in the KZs with the Jews.

I believe that holocaust studies have introduced in some of the US schools, and even the head honcho of the US genuflects at the sound of that word. In my mind, allowing the study of the holocaust in your schools is not a necessarily bad thing, and I tell you why. First of all, those who teach it are as ignorant about it as those they are teach it to and they hope that the children will learn by rote and ask no questions.

BUT, and there is always a BUT, there will always be those who cannot help themselves and do the forbidden thing that is most normal to every child: They ask WHY, and the teacher will have to give a satisfactory answer. Unfortunately he/she will not be able to give it and the child will continue to ask and ask and ask. Once the seeds of doubt has been sown, there is no turning back and the story that was built on a lie will come unravelled. So you see Bradley, the holocaust proponents will eventually destroy themselves; all we need to do is fuel the fire of inquisitiveness and leave the rest to the new generation.

I have faith in the new generation and I am sure they will come to the same conclusions I did on my own about the Jewish holocaust, namely with all the other holocausts that happened before, during and after World War II, how come the only holocaust that needs to be protected by law is the Jewish holocaust. Just becasue our leaders' silence had been bought by a tiny Jewish minority, it does not mean to say that they can buy everybody's silence as well. Eventually even the American populus will wake up and realize that it had been taken for a ride. I am only sorry that I will not be alive to watch it happen.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

It's a small world

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He was waving to me from a distance as I approached the bicycle rack on the campus of McGill University. I waved back. I unhooked the chain that secured my bike, then standing it up placed my books and notebooks in the basket. It was a gorgeous September day: I was looking forward to the ride home. When, a minute later, I glanced in the direction that my friend was waving from, I saw he was beckoning me, clearly in some distress. I climbed on my bike and peddled over to where he was standing; unable to move, seemingly.

“It’s these meds I've been prescribed,” he explained, “they have a side-effect that makes me have awful muscle spasms. I need relief. Bring me to the emergency ward, please. Will you?”

“Sure,” I said. I tied my bike up again, and walked him over to the parking lot where I asked a fellow student to drive us just up the hill, to the Royal Victoria Hospital.

When it came to arrange for him to receive medical care the nurse on duty asked that I provide information to help her complete an admissions form. One of the questions she asked was, “Religion?” I was about to say “Jewish” when he astonished us both with his sudden vehemence -- till then my friend had seemed distracted by his condition. “No ‘religion’!” he insisted. “No!”

Of course not. He had been raised in a Marxist household. Indeed 20 years earlier, during the McCarthy era, his father had been the object of surveillance by RCMP agents. Mind you, it was a comfortable, middle-class home that he hailed from. His extended family included a number of nimble tailors who cut and sewed Savile Row, pinstripe suits for bankers and cabinet ministers; one suit, intended for an organized crime-busting Justice Minister, even included a special vest pocket to insert a handgun.

As it turned out, he was minutes away from a 5 p.m. appointment with a family therapist and other family members at the hospital’s psychiatric wing, the Allan Memorial Institute. The nurse explained that inasmuch as he was due to meet with his own doctor so soon it would be pointless to summon another physician in the meantime.

We were on the path the led from the Royal Vic to the Allan. On a golden autumn afternoon, the walk was most pleasant. Suddenly, my companion emitted an anguished cry of distress, and picked up the pace.

“Oh, no! Oh, no! Here they come again!” By “they” he meant the muscle spasms; as they coursed through his body, he presented me with a tableau of grotesque bodily contortions. It was as if a demonic being was trapped inside of him, determined to escape, to break free.

I laughed at the ludicrous figure he cut. It was wrong, I shouldn’t have, I but I couldn’t help it. Which naturally angered him.

“Don’t laugh, dammit! Don’t laugh!”

“Sorry! Sorry!” I hastened to apologize, but then doubled over in an even stronger fit of laughter. All of which, of course, served to further anger and exasperate the poor bugger.

At last, we stood before the massive doors of the Allan Memorial Institute. We went inside. His parents were already there in the foyer, waiting for him to arrive.

“I’m leaving you in capable hands,” I said. “By the way,” I added, “you’ll be in good company: I understand the prime minister’s wife is a patient here.” Maggie Trudeau had been admitted several days earlier; according to media reports, she was said to be suffering from depression, from a bout of exhaustion, after a gruelling summer on the campaign trail, trying to get Pierre re-elected as Canada’s prime minister.

It would be April before I set foot again in the Allan, this time as an employee on the payroll. I was hired as a weekend caregiver: My job consisted of shadowing a single patient, to make certain he took his meds and did not harm himself or others. When I spoke to a supervisor about the Do’s and Don’t’s of the job, she asked only that I not wear a white shirt.

My imagination had pictured a couple of serene afternoons where I sat with a patient subdued by his dosage of meds while I’d quietly read my Herman Hesse and Kurt Vonnegut. Instead, I was paired with a hyper-kinetic young man, who was unable to sit still for any length of time. He was constantly on the prowl.

The supervisor on duty at the nursing station told me: “Consider yourself his shadow.” And so I trailed after him down the hospital corridors, to the reception areas, in and out of the washroom, where he tried to “hide” inside a stall. I waited by the pay phone, while he spoke to “Nixon” and “Brezhniev” in order to forestall World War III. And so on.

When I asked the supervisor for the name of his mental affliction, she replied: “He’s ... he’s ... [and, unable to dredge up a clinical term for it, simply blurted out] he’s just plain crazy.”

By Saturday afternoon, I was all done in trying to keep up with him; Sunday was virtually a re-run of Saturday. I never went back. And, I never gave the Allan a second thought, until the case of Dr. Ewen Cameron made headlines in 1977. By then, my friend had died of a heart-attack in the Douglas, a Montreal hospital that handles what are considered hard-core psychiatric cases; his body overcome by a top-heavy regimen of potent drugs.

Between 1957 and 1964, Dr Cameron, a Scottish-born psychiatrist, conducted a series of ghoulish, CIA-funded experiments in mind-control at the Allan Memorial Institute, using, often without their knowledge or consent, his patients as guinea pigs. His experiments involved LSD, various paralytic drugs, as well as well as electro-convulsive therapy at 30 to 40 times above the normal range.

Dr Cameron’s so-called "psychic driving" experiments consisted of putting his subjects into a drug-induced coma for months on end while playing tape loops of white noise or tape-recordings of simple, repetitive messages. His experiments were typically carried out on trusting patients who had gone to the institute seeking relief from minor problems, such as anxiety disorders and post-partum depression, many of whom suffered permanently from his actions; among them the wife of David Orlikow, a Winnipeg MP with the socialist New Democratic Party.

Far from being a rogue agent, Dr Cameron was for a time second President of the World Psychiatric Association, and a president of the Canadian and American psychiatric associations. The man was sprouting credentials all the way up to his beetling eyebrows.

After the Second World War, he also served on the Nuremberg Medical Tribunal, which put on trial German doctors for performing experiments of a kind he would himself later perform. For example, had the notorious Dr Josef Mengele been arrested, it’s very possible, if not probable, Dr Cameron might have had some input into his prosecution.

It’s a small world.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Important legal decision on the validity of the Canadian Human Rights Act to censor Internet postings and online media

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TORONTO, September 1, 2009: The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal is expected to finally release it’s ruling on the constitutional challenge of internet censorship brought by computer systems engineer Marc Lemire. In 2003 a complaint was filed against Lemire for hosting an internet message board, where comments allegedly violated Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act. None of the complained of material was written or approved by Lemire, yet he was forced to endure a six year costly legal ordeal to defend his Charter guaranteed rights to freedom of speech and expression.

As part Lemire’s defence to the allegations, he challenged Section 13 and 54 of the Canadian Human Rights Act as being an unjustifiable limitation on freedom of expression and violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Attorney General of Canada (requested by Liberal Irwin Cotler – then Justice Minister) and five interested parties intervened in the case. The constitutional challenge was heard over a four year period by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.

This constitutional challenge of Section 13 is the largest ever undertaken in the 32 year history of the law. During the course of the trial, evidence was brought to light that employees of the Canadian Human Rights Commission actively take part in internet websites, which the CHRC has described as neo-Nazi. The RCMP also investigated the CHRC for 8 months over criminal allegations of internet and WiFi theft based on testimony in the Lemire hearing. The RCMP was forced to abandon criminal charges because the evidence led to an American website where the RCMP has no jurisdiction.