The Holocaust Question Today

This blog moving on

2010-01-13T14:26:00.000-08:00

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I am in the process of reorganizing The Founder's Page, which includes
this blog,The Holocaust Question Today. The first thing you will note is that this blog will not accept new posts of any kind, and those who have been writing for it will be writing for Bradley Smith's Blog. From here on out, one blog, not two. We'll find a place to put the posts that are here now together with other materials. When I do, I will announce the fact on Smith's Blog.

No regrets.

--Bradley

A (Small) Battle Won on Wikipedia

2010-01-01T20:32:00.000-08:00

I was browsing Holocaust-related articles on Wikipedia, most of which espouse the “traditional” Holocaust mythology (many virulently) when I came across a reference to David Cole, main on-screen talent in a long and very influential 1992 video debunking tour of the Auschwitz theme park. I noted from the reference that the article itself that concerned Cole had been deleted fairly recently (December 6).

Why wouldn’t Wikipedia, which covers Ernst Zündel, David Irving, and even (scathingly) Holocaust Denial, cover David Cole? Why, indeed? Wikipedia doesn’t provide access to deleted articles (they wouldn’t be deleted if Wikipedia did), but it does provide access to a kind of “audit trail” in which it is recorded “who” (that is, which Wikipedia Editors) deleted an article, and their statements as to why the article should be deleted. The article was established on November 29 by an Editor identified as Ramos221, who has since been deleted. The article lasted a week, and Editor Ramos not much longer. Thank you, Ramos221, whoever you are!

I looked up the Deletion Discussion on David Cole and encountered a few disingenuous citations as to why he didn’t merit coverage on Wikipedia, concluding in four votes to Delete and none to Keep. I recognized one of the participating Editors (WilliamH) as one who has in the past monitored my contributions to Wikipedia on the Holocaust, and altered or, in most cases, deleted them. The other Editors voting were the one that apparently initiated the deletion, and two others that, when I checked them around December 30, had been permanently banned from Wikipedia, which is usually done to notably destructive Editors.

One of the two had been identified as a “sock puppet,” which is a fake account created by an Editor (who may or may not have a “legitimate” account) who wants to make edits without their being associated with his or her “real” account. Having and using “sock puppets” is a way to get around having been banned, and Editors detected doing this are themselves banned, along with their sock puppets, of course. The other banned User also showed all the indications that it was a sock puppet.

Wikipedia, which is nothing if not procedural, has a procedure for calling a situation like this to the attention of Administrators, which are “Super-Editors” who have official responsibilities and powers in Wikipedia. I wrote up the situation I describe above, and in a matter of minutes, the Administrator who had approved the original deletion put the article back!

This small victory is likely to be transient without ongoing vigilance on the part of me and all the rest of us concerned that the truth regarding the Holocaust be allowed even the slightest chance of being detected by the determined researcher. The Holocaust Legacy has squads of Einsatzkommando who patrol Wikipedia day and night and jump on Editors like me and Ramos with amazing speed and ferocity. They have probably already marked David Cole for deletion out of fear that Wikipedia users will discover his persuasive videos through links from his article.

So go check the article fast, while it’s still there! And help me patrol Wikipedia. If you haven’t yet trained yourself to be a Wikipedia Editor, log a Comment to this blog post to let me and the other readers of this blog know that we need to act on Wikipedia. Again.

Irving Hacker Caught?

2009-12-18T19:04:00.000-08:00

David Irving arranged his November 23 meeting near Chicago with his fans with all the discretion of a witch assembling her coven for a private toad-boil. Despite this, a group of eight (young, male) witch-hunters invaded the Edelweiss Restaurant in suburban Norridge and proceeded with a maximum of noise and destruction to the back room in which Irving was conducting his oh-so-quiet, by-invitation-only gathering, throwing furniture and some red fluid they had brought with them.

Quick action by Irving's team and the local police department resulted in the collaring of one of the two carloads of troublemakers involved, and out of it tumbled one miscreant of very special interest in view of the criminal destruction of Irving's Web sites mere days before this incident: one young cybercriminal named Jeremy Hammond, described in some detail on Irving's Web site, which continues its struggle to get back on its feet.

Hammond completed two years in the federal pen in late 2008 after his conviction of stealing 5,000 credit-card numbers from another Web site. The possible connection to the far more-damaging attack on Irving's sites is tantalizing.

For their Chicago caper, Hammond and four accomplices have been charged with disorderly conduct. Hammond, still on parole from his earlier offense, may be expected to muster an especially spirited defense in order to avoid being sent back into the slammer for violation of the terms of his parole at their trial scheduled for January 6.

Should be interesting, especially if any evidence can be developed linking Hammond to the destruction of Irving's Web sites.

Elie Wiesel's Hope for America

2009-12-15T11:19:00.000-08:00

Elie Wiesel fails Holocaust lesson

2009-12-12T09:16:00.000-08:00

News on December 10th coming from Hungary announced Holocaust spokeman Elie Wiesel's urging of the Hungarian government to outlaw Holocaust denial. Although a holder of the Nobel Peace Prize Wiesel thinks that Hungary should follow the example of France and Germany where skepticism about the orthodox Holocaust story results in imprisonment.

Wiesel's anti-free speech and anti-freedom stand demonstrates his complete failure to understand the true lesson of the Holocaust. Lucy Dawidowicz in her War Against the Jews explained how post World War I anxiety and insecurities produced "an emotional milieu in which irrationality and hysteria became routine and illusions became transformed into delusions." She describes the mass proportions of a "delusional disorder" where otherwise rational people - the Germans - gave into pathological fantasies about the Jews. During the National Socialist period there can be no doubt that many regarded the Jews as a source of evil and disaster.

Dawidowicz explains further, "...the mass psychosis of anti-Semitism deranged a whole people. According to their system of beliefs, elimination of the Jews resembled medieval exorcism of the Devil. The accomplishment of both... would restore grace to the world."

Today power sits around the world not with anti-Semitic National Socialists but largely with those who continue to prop up a long gone "devil" as a method of demonstrating their own morality. Those who question the Holocaust - revisionists, or as their detractors, like Wiesel, prefer "deniers" are today's Jews.

Wiesel and others who support draconian anti-revisionist laws have developed pathological fantasies about those who seek to correct the record of the Holocaust story. Wiesel's delusion allows him to believe that the elimination of Holocaust deniers would indeed exorcise a Devil and restore grace to the world.

Wiesel, like those who passed Holocaust revisionist criminalization laws throughout Europe, has learned nothing from the Holocaust. In Wiesel's case he has gone from victim to victor, from powerless to powerful. In his transformation, he continues to make all the same mistakes as his enemies of years gone by.

Elie Wiesel doesn't even realize that today, it is he who has become the "Nazi." In his new found role he exacts his hatred and pathological fantasies on the powerless. As a spokesman for the Holocaust, Wiesel has proven to be a complete failure.

John Demjanjuk: What does the Guardian judge offensive?

2009-12-07T21:05:00.000-08:00

This is the letter that offended the ideals of good journalism at the Guardian

"What kind of justice is it that proscribes the normally accepted right of the accused to challenge the assumption that a crime had, in fact, occurred? Normally the prosecution is obliged to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the crime of murder had taken place. This is not the case in the trial of Demjanjuk. The court will, without proof, arbitrarily accept that the crime took place. Being stripped of his most powerful defence, the accused is reduced to pleading mistaken identity or that he had nothing to do with an unproved murder."

John Mortl

***

The Guardian issued this fearless statement explaining its principled stand:

"We published a letter by John Mortl in the Guardian of 3 December [page 37, and guardian.co.uk] relating to the case of John Demjanjuk, who is accused of assisting in the murder of 27,900 people in Poland. Unfortunately, we misread the letter. The underlying meaning, we now realise, implied Holocaust denial. As soon as we realised our mistake, we removed the letter from the website. It should never have been published and we apologise unreservedly that it was."

The State, the University, the Press. It's a hard row to hoe.

Never Forget ... to Pay ... and Pay ... and Pay

2009-12-04T07:17:00.000-08:00

The Alamo. Pearl Harbor. 9/11. The Holocaust. Never forget! Actually, we won't get the chance to forget - at least not for a hundred years or more. Because the open palm is always outstretched. "Victims" - in this case of 9/11 - are virtually always in a position to collect pensions if they survive, or their heirs collect if they don't, and today this very much includes not only Holocaust survivors, but millions more who have managed to pass themselves off credibly or otherwise as being one.

The linked article has nothing to do with the Holocaust - it has to do with 9/11, barely eight years ago. As with the Holocaust and all other affronts to people's sense of decency and safety, this eleemosynary project is displaying "mission creep." Initially for "first responders" killed or injured at the site, we see from this brief article that two additional groups have gotten on board: (a) people who die years later from conditions said somehow to have been contracted from the aftermath of the crisis; and (b) those who sustain injuries not from first responding, but from the cleanup that went on for over a year after the mess was made.

And these projects aren't just slow to die - they spring to life very fast, too. The morning after the recent massacre at Fort Hood Army Base in Texas, I encountered uniformed "soldiers" rattling cans at motorists stopped at traffic lights right here in my home town. I, of course, drove on, confident in the feeling that I had already paid full compensation for the victims at Fort Hood, 9/11, and, 64 years after the last concentration camp was liberated, the Holocaust.

And confident, too, that I would keep paying for all these.

And paying.

And paying.

Nazi victims' families testify at Demjanjuk trial

2009-12-03T12:48:00.000-08:00

AP reporter David Rising writes that Rudolf Salomon Cortissos sobbed as he told a Munich court about the letter his mother had written on May 17, 1943 — four days before she was gassed in the Nazis' Sobibor death camp with some 2,300 other Dutch Jews.

David Rising does not reflect on how this letter is shown to be what Cortissos claims it to be.

Cortissos says he found the letter in 1959 after his father died. Presumably, it was in the father’s possessions. David Rising doesn’t tell us. How did the father get possession of the letter? AP reporter David Rising only tells us that Cortissos’ mother had “tossed if from the train that was taking her from Holland before it crossed the German border.”

I can see the senior Cortissos now, racing on foot along the railroad track, keeping up with the train, waiting for his wife to toss her farewell letter to him. How far did her husband have to run before he saw the letter? Did he see the letter flutter out a window of the train? In his mad race to keep up with the train, was he able to keep one eye on the train windows, or doors, and one eye on the ground at the same time so he didn't fall on his face?

How did he know from which side of the train his wife would throw her missive to him, or to the world? Was it mere luck that he was running along the side of the train that his wife was occupying? Could she see him out there? Were there other husbands running along with Cortissos, each hoping, waiting, for a missive from their wives or mistresses?

Or was it just this one guy? Cortissos the elder?

AP reporter David Rising is not inclined to express any wonderment about any of this, or whether this letter contributes, or does not contribute, to proving that John Demjanjuk helped murder 29,000 Jews, or that there were gassing chambers at Sobibor

But then that is not the work of AP reporters when they treat with the Holocaust story. Their work is to forward the orthodox story, whatever Holocaust Inc. says it is on any given day, always emphasizing the “unique” monstrosity of the Germans. That’s where the money is for Holocaust Inc., and it’s one way that AP reporters advance their careers.

Coffee with Bradley Smith : Elie Wiesel, a ludicrously unreliable survivor

2009-12-02T13:09:00.000-08:00

Me and the H-Bomb Part Two: The Gas Chamber of Samuel Crowell

2009-12-02T13:00:00.000-08:00

By Chip Smith

PREFACE

In 2010, Nine-Banded Books will publish a newly and finally revised edition of Samuel Crowell's long-developed monograph, The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes. In addition to the text of "Sherlock," the book will include a revised and updated restatement of Crowell's empirical research on German civil defense architecture (largely an expansion of his other major work, Bomb Shelters in Birkenau) as well as a new closing essay appraising a number of revisionist and counter-revisionist texts that have appeared over the last decade.

I mention this first by way of disclosure, but I will say up front that I feel a special obligation about this one. To state it plainly, I think Crowell's book is important. I think it will be read. And I am perhaps naively hopeful that it will be taken seriously by people -- even some few public intellectuals -- who are understandably skeptical of revisionist challenges to the consensus historiography regarding the Holocaust. I don't expect that an encounter with Samuel Crowell will change many minds, but I do think there is a real possibility that some readers will come away with an understanding that, as Crowell puts it, "the revisionist interpretation on the subject of mass gassing [is] possible, and since possible, a particularly unworthy candidate for censorship."

What follows, the second in a three-part series devoted to the Holocaust controversy, is my digressive introduction to Crowell's major theoretical work, The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes. Though I believe that Crowell's other contributions to the literature of revisionism are just as relevant, I have chosen to focus on Sherlock because its central argument is so shockingly novel, and so seldom engaged. I also think the argument will be vindicated, at least in broad form.I've been wrong before. Time will tell.

The third and final installment in this series (part one is here) will be broadly devoted to "Skepticism, Epistemology, and 'Belief in Belief'." In that post, I will respond to a number of points raised in reader commentary and correspondence. I will also revisit the curious case of Irène Némirovsky and Michel Epstein, with a few surprises.

My apologies for the delay.

Demjanjuk tried on Nazi death camp charges

2009-11-30T12:44:00.000-08:00

AP’s David Rising reports that John Demjanjuk was put on trial today charged with being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews at the German camp at Sobibor more than six decades ago. The wheels of justice never stop turning for Germans and those who served Germans during WWII—always with the exception of Jews who served Germans during WWII.

Rising mentions Nazi “death camp” charges, Nazi “machinery of destruction,” and “the mass killing of Jews.” He doesn’t mention “gas chambers.” I take this to suggest that Mr. David Rising does not much believe the Sobibor gas-chamber-story. A reasonable man, perhaps.

Holocaust Denial, Meet Climate-Change Denial

2009-11-29T08:25:00.000-08:00

These two denials will meet, December 3, in London, at an event held under the auspices of the Index on Censorship magazine. I celebrated what now is becoming known as ClimateGate on this blog a couple of days ago ("A Hack-in for the Rest of Us,") and now, the sort of institutionalized censorship arrayed against climate-change skepticism is being appreciated as similar to the grand-daddy of them all, the censorship of Holocaust skepticism. The perpetrators are different, the cause seems different, but the methods are the same, and money is coming from the same places - taxpayers like you and me.

Way back in 2006, a fascinating piece appeared in the Daily Articles of the Ludwig von Mises Institute that extensively adumbrated ClimateGate. It is a spoof e-mail from a "generic" colleague to Richard Lindzen, possibly the doyen of professionally qualified skeptics of the climate science of Global Warming, and it complains to him how his refusal to participate in the Climate-Change Industry is damaging not only his career, but the careers of his colleagues and the climate-change profession in general. In light of recent events, it seems especially percipient.

There's still time to get over to London in time for Censorship's event. But bring lots of warm clothing - it's cold in London this time of year, Global Warming or no.

"Holocaust Denial is Pervasive, Growing, and Doomed"

2009-11-24T19:02:00.000-08:00

Sunday, November 22, 2009
Interview with Deborah Lipstatic - "Holocaust Denial is Pervasive, Growing, and Doomed"

November 22, 2009, CNN

by Michael K. Smith

New York City -- Speaking from the Bellevue psychiatric ward, where she is undergoing evaluation for advanced schizophrenia, Holocaust Confirmer Deborah Lipstatic today declared, "The situation is critical and victory is at hand," in the war on Holocaust heresy.

Lipstatic, Professor of Victimology at Coca Cola University in Atlanta, insisted that Holocaust denial is not a legitimate field of study and entirely worthless intellectually, which, she said, explains why she devotes herself night and day to refuting its claims.

This year marks nine years since historian David Irving lost his libel suit against Lipstatic, who chronicled her battle against him in her book, “Money Can't Buy Love But It Can Buy The Courts - How I Single-Handedly Defeated David Irving With Swarms of Lawyers and Researchers and an Avalanche of Holocaust Industry Cash" (Orthodox Books, 2000).

Legalienate's editors were generously granted a lengthy interview with her on the recently proclaimed Holocaust Obsession Day, which lasts for 24 weeks instead of what Lipstatic called the "stingy" 24 hours of the standard day. Speaking from the isolated back ward where she currently resides, she explained how to make failure look like victory, why freedom requires adherence to a single view, and how Holocaust denial plays a crucial role in forging Jewish identity, especially among gentiles.

LEGALIENATE: Nine years later, how would you characterize the Irving trial?

LIPSTATIC: It was a resounding victory for the world inside my head. I went head-to-head with the world's leading Holocaust denier and I single-handedly won a judgment stating that historical facts are not to be determined by the courts.

LEGALIENATE: But wasn't that obvious from the beginning?

LIPSTATIC: Not to me it wasn't.

LEGALIENATE: Have you solved the problem of Holocaust denial?

LIPSTATIC: Of course not. But we did provide precise explanations proving that what Deniers say are complete deviations from what we say. We didn't prove what happened, and nobody else better either, but [....]

A Hack-in for the Rest of Us

2009-11-23T08:00:00.000-08:00

With the effluent from the discouraging hack-in of David Irving's Web site being downloaded by holoterrorists all over the world, it is refreshing to see that hack-ins occur in our favor, too.

At first blush, the massive (60MB) leak of e-mails and other data from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia would seem to have little to do with the perpetuation and enforcement of Holocaust mythology. But regardless of your own position with regard to the "science" of human-originated global warming, the leak from the CRU is a blockbuster exposé of the role of profession-advancing enforcement of "consensus" among scientists and policymakers in subverting the entire academic establishment, "peer review" and all.

As with Holocaust perpetuation, the unholy alliance of government and the academy, fueled by money and the incessant quest for power, is what drives the Global Warming Industry, and sixty Megabytes of data prove this over and over again (you can download it all through the article linked above, just like you can download data said to come from David Irving's Web site).

Holohoaxers invariably cite "reputation," "academic standing," "peer review" and other talismans of orthodoxy when advancing their views of the Holocaust. The mendacity and manipulativeness of orthodox establishments of all kinds is indelibly illustrated in the data exposed by this magnificent event.

The emperor has no clothes.

Wikipedia and the Holocaust

2009-11-22T18:01:00.000-08:00

“Born” decades after the end of the Holocaust, Wikipedia knows all about the Holocaust, including quite a bit of stuff that is either impossible or highly speculative, just like a lot of other people that young and older, too. The English-language Wikipedia has over one million articles, and in them, there are over ten thousand pointers to the over 700 categories and sub-categories concerned with “The Holocaust” (yes, I counted them, and yes, this is much less than six million).

In the aggregate, Wikipedia is “crowd wisdom,” in this case of a crowd most of whose members received extensive indoctrination in the mythology of the Holocaust in both their educations and from the popular culture. Vis á vis the world’s English-speaking population, the subgroup of contributors to Wikipedia’s content, of which I am one, contains overrepresentations of two groups: (a) younger, better-educated, computer-literate folks; and (b) members of groups considered to be victims of the Holocaust. Groups from which most Holocaust revisionists come are correspondingly underrepresented.

Wikipedia is justly famous as “the encyclopedia anyone can edit,” and I can attest to this attribute, as I have contributed two or three articles and edited several dozen other ones, including articles concerning the Holocaust. But the notion that “anyone can edit it” is seriously misleading, on two scores. The lesser factor is the ability “wall” that composition and entry of material places before less-experienced and –dedicated computists. Wikipedia has, in effect, an editing “language” which must be to at least some extent mastered to do anything more than cross a tee or dot an eye. I have devoted many hours to its mastery, and remain able only to enter the most-rudimentary embellishments on straight text such as a table or a footnote. It is far more-challenging than making this blog entry.

The other, far more-serious threat to the survival of anything you might enter into Wikipedia is Wikipedia “standards,” which I heartily approve in principle, that are enforced by an army of “Administrators” who constantly patrol new entries and “correct” (usually expunge) those that don’t meet their ideas of the standards. Among the standards are ones concerning “original research” and “verifiability.” Original research means you can’t enter stuff that isn’t published somewhere else, by someone else, including, fortunately, the Web. Verifiability comes to mean something pernicious on controversial points as to which competing points of view are published. It means, all too often, that whichever of the two points of view that is more supported by establishment authorities is favored, and the one(s) opposing it, either suppressed or given short shrift.

A sterling example of this is to be found in the (main) article on “The Holocaust,” as well as in “Holocaust Denial.” One of dozens of related articles, “Criticism of Holocaust Denial” contains, under the heading “Jewish Population,” (the first) three paragraphs whose import runs diametrically counter to the bias of most of the Administrators as I have experienced it. I am the proud author of these paragraphs, assuming they’re still there, which supplant an earlier version that my version both replaces and refers to. A(n un)suitably disposed Administrator may indeed have noted its thrust but left it intact because it is totally (and easily) verifiable—there are responsible Administrators, including some quite devoted to the mythology of the Holocaust. More likely, it hasn’t been discovered yet, at least by an irresponsible Administrator.

I’ve lost Wikipedia battles, too, including right there in the “Criticism” article. There is a heading, “Denial as Anti-Semitism” that I had the effrontery to change to “Anti-Semitism as a Motive for Denial.” I didn’t change anything in the section—just the heading. An Administrator whipped that baby right back where it came from (and as you see it now), noting that “informed opinion” establishes incontrovertibly that denialism is anti-Semitism.

Of course, having ready recourse to the counsel of my own sentiments, I know that statement can be totally untrue.

But Wikipedia doesn’t allow “original research.” Check it out, and contribute your own—that is, somebody else’s—wisdom.

Clemson University -- response to a confused and slanderous letter from History News Network

2009-11-20T12:37:00.000-08:00

Editor of the Clemson University Tiger:

Gord McFee of the Holocaust History Project finds it necessary to begin his comments on my “Eisenhower” ad by slandering me personally. I have “duped” the Tiger staff into running the ad. My goal is one of “deception, dishonest [sic] and duplicity.” My wish is that readers will “ask themselves the wrong question [who decides what the right question is—Gord McFee?].” My question is “dishonest” and I am “dishonest” and a “hypocrite” to boot.

Once Mr. McFee has purged himself, for the moment, of his personal animosity, he asks a perfectly reasonable question:

“Why would one expect Eisenhower to have discussed the gas chambers or the Holocaust? [the ad does not mention “Holocaust”]." Here I will suggest why I think he would have.

Dwight D. Eisenhower was Supreme Commander of Allied forces on the Western front. By 1943 it was getting about that the Germans had weapons of mass destruction (gas chambers) in which they were murdering perhaps millions of civilians with a particularly lethal gas.

Would the Commander in Chief of one army, faced with an enemy army in possession of weapons of mass destruction, have no professional interest in the matter? Does that make sense to you? If it does, I believe you have every right to say so and to say it in print and I will not slander you but will respond in a reasonable manner.

I do not believe it likely that the commander of one army, hearing that the commander of his opposing army has weapons of mass destruction and is using them at that moment to murder millions(?) of civilians, would not express some interest in the matter. Could the “gas” be delivered against his own troops in the field? How would he know if he did not look into the matter? Could the gas be delivered over the great populations centers in Central Europe? Would he have no interest in the possibility of such a scenario?

I believe the question is a reasonable one to ask in a university setting. And I find it interesting, though not surprising, that not one academic has chosen to reply to the question in the pages of the Tiger.

Bradley R. Smith

Would You Buy an Apartment from This Guy?

2009-11-19T15:01:00.000-08:00

New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind has got a bridge he'd like to sell you--er, no, it's an apartment, actually, hardly a stone's throw from Israel in formerly Jordanian territory occupied by Israel in the 1967 War. Followers of Zionist politics in America recognize the name of Dov Hikind as the guy who led the effort in October to get American Express to abrogate its merchant agreement with David Irving, who soldiers on despite this and other serious harassment with his rounds of private visits with his devotees in cities across the United States.

While you're thinking about taking Dov's real-estate advice, you might wish also to consider his indictment and trial in 1998 for taking bribes for steering state and federal money to Jewish "non-profits" that themselves were embezzling much of the lucre, and were convicted of same at the same time as Assemblyman Hikind was acquitted by a jury of his peers.

The spectacle of an elected official in American government urging (certain of) his countrymen to purchase conquered real estate calls to mind the infamous Transfer Agreement arrived at between the young Nazi government of Germany and German Zionists eager to harness the growth of anti-Semitic policy there in aid of their own agenda of building the Yiruv--the then-embryonic Jewish community in Palestine. Dov's initiative lacks the support, as yet, of the government of his home country, and it more-explicitly supports Zionists' irridentist claims on the Holy Land, but it certainly does hark back to the earlier Nazi-Zionist agreement of the mid-1930s.

Anti-Semitism: New Movie

2009-11-18T07:37:00.000-08:00

Every revisionist is accused (sooner, rather than later) of anti-Semitism - it doesn't come with the territory, really, but it comes, with breathtaking speed and vociferousness, just as soon as one expresses interest in the facts of the experience of European Jews in World War II.

Having grown up among, and being friends (and better) with many Jews, I have always been interested in anti-Semitism. Going public with my revisionist interests has produced many grossly incorrect (not to say, shrill and obscene) characterizations of my sympathies - illogically at that. If I'm anti-Semitic, would it interest me to minimize the dimensions and motivations of the holocaust? Quite the contrary - I would take satisfaction in its magnitude, and laud its purposes. Revisionism is, if anything, pro-Semitic, though the inquiry it entails puts a bad taste in one's mouth regarding the many "carpetbaggers" (Jewish and otherwise) taking a free ride on the holocaust train for their own benefit.

I just read a detailed review in Jewish Week of a new film out from Israeli Director Yoav Shamir called "Hashmata" ("Defamation" in English), and I have placed the not-yet-released DVD in my queue at Netflix. It sounds balanced, insightful and, for the severely alienated, an intelligent "view from the other side." Provisionally, I regard it as a view from much closer to our side than many of us might suppose (this is not a group, racial, or even identity matter, after all).

It must be the exceptional revisionist who resists all interest in anti-Semitism despite the yellow swastikas we're forced to wear, though the association between it and revisionism is nothing like the accusations. For those of us who share my interest, I (in advance of having seen it myself) recommend getting this movie.

Fredrick Toben is out of jail and talks about it

2009-11-17T10:29:00.000-08:00

Not Much of a Blog . . . Yet

2009-11-16T17:55:00.000-08:00

Though it treats perhaps the hottest old topic in American opinion today, this blog doesn't seem to have a lot of activity - at least in items posted - yet. I just got posting privileges, and perhaps I may improve matters over time.

I'm going to start out with bait, from other blogs (if you can't lick 'em, join 'em - or at least exploit 'em)! These are put here to encourage you two or three other visitors to: (a) enter this blog in your Favorites or Bookmarks, and visit back often; and (b) tell others about this blog. Both of today's purloined treasures arise from the sensational hack-in of David Irving's Web sites last weekend. By my count, at least two separate (?) organizations seem to be claiming responsibility for it, but information on the Internet truly is free, so each is claiming to have what in fact anybody can have, putatively from the victim Web sites.

The first one comes, I would say, from "the enemy," someone named Lemons whom Irving denied admission to his session in Phoenix not too long ago, evidently with good reason. In this case and in the other, the string of dozens and dozens of Comments is what's interesting, so don't neglect to view them, and infer what you may from the "balance" of opinion, as it were.

The second one comes from a "neutral," Wired Magazine, but again, the string of comments is from practically anybody but the neutrals. Both the article and the comments here are about one level higher than those for the Phoenix entry.

Check back here soon for more plagiarism. I'll be here, undoubtedly doing something disreputable. Maybe beneficial, too. Or even interesting . . .

Anti-Free Speech Mob attacks Irving's Website

2009-11-14T07:18:00.000-08:00

News this morning tells of hackers who broke into David Irving's Website(s) and internet accounts. They apparently stole private information including ID's and passwords and even bank account information. They took mailing lists and destroyed content on his Website. This same group, or an associated group also sought to have events on his speaking tour cancelled.

Those involved apparently think they are doing a good thing -- fighting "Holocaust denial," "neo-Nazism," "racism," add the slur, you get the idea. The value of free speech and a free press is completely lost on this crowd. They miss the point that their methods are in fact "fascist" or "Stalinist" in nature. The desire to prevent someone from sharing ideas which oppose your own is the type of dogmatic thinking that led to the burning of heretics, the witch trials, and the extremes of National Socialism and Communism.

For these hackers and "anti-Fascists," none of this matters. They are sure that they are right. In being so right, it is fair to stop the speech of those they oppose.

They miss the point that if the only speech we defend is that which we support, then freedom is lost. It is only offensive speech or speech we disagree with that NEEDS the protection of the law.

Many years ago Huey P. Long said, Fascism will come to America,but likely under another name, perhaps anti-fascism." Today it is clear that Fascism is live and well in the United States -- brought to you by those with little understanding of what they have done.

Clemson University Tiger publishes proscribed revisionist ad

2009-11-13T15:37:00.000-08:00

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

13 November 2009

The Clemson University Tiger published an ad this date asking why Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his book Crusade in Europe published in 1948, did not mention German weapons of mass destruction (gas chambers).

Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) has run similar ads asking brief questions about World War II in student newspapers at some 30 colleges during 2009. Reaction to the ads has oftentimes caused some controversy, but nowhere has any academic attempted to answer the “Eisenhower” question.

In September, when this question was asked in the Harvard Crimson, special-interests put so much pressure on the Crimson that its president, and then the entire Crimson staff, apologized. They used a language that shamed them as men and women, and humiliated them as journalists. The Crimson staff actually wrote, under pressure, that such a question as the one I ask about Dwight D. Eisenhower should never again be asked in the pages of any student newspaper in America.

CODOH congratulates the Clemson Tiger in standing with the ideal of intellectual freedom in running this ad. Our ad “denies” nothing. Our ad makes no “accusation” against anyone. Our ad proposes no “conspiracy theory.” Our ad asks a question. Let’s see how many academics, let’s see if one academic, at Clemson University will try to answer the question in the pages of the Tiger.

CODOH is willing to be surprised.

CODOH would hope that special-interest groups would not try to publicly humiliate the editor and staff of the Tiger with the intention to institutionally “censor” this ad as they did the staff of the Harvard Crimson. For student journalists to refuse to break under special-interest attack by influential and highly connected individuals and groups takes a special self confidence, and an especial respect for the ideal of a free exchange of ideas.

It’s what is known as “journalistic integrity.” If that is not what it is known as, we are here to be corrected.

The President of the Harvard Crimson apologies
http://holocaustquestion.blogspot.com/2009/09/harvard-crimson-censors-codoh-ad-after.html

The Crimson Staff: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Journalism
http://holocaustquestion.blogspot.com/2009/09/harvard-crimson-dont-ask-dont-tell.html

Coffee with Bradley Smith. Simon Wiesenthal, Denyin' no. Lyin' yeah

2009-11-09T19:24:00.000-08:00

Halloween is almost upon us ...

2009-10-22T14:02:00.000-07:00

The deadline is approaching for entries to the 2009 David McCalden Most Macabre Halloween Holocaust Tale Challenge. This is our sixth year of competition, and although we have some great entries, there's still time to get yours in and win a Big Cash Prize. Make certain you get yours in now, and tell all your friends!

As we did last year, we'll be awarding $200 for the first-place entry, and $50 for the second-place entry. Entries are judged on four factors:

Originality (search our site before entering),
The macabre nature of the tale,
Citation of the source(s) where the tale or claim has appeared, and
The use of the tale in official Holocaust histories. (Receive added points if your submission was used in a court of law.)

The contest deadline is Thursday, October 30, 2009. You may enter as many times as you wish, but there will be only one winning entry per person. Each contest entry is subject to verification. The winners will be announced on Friday, October 31, 2009 (Halloween).

The prize is in honor of skeptic and founder of the Institute for Historical Review, David McCalden. Each submission becomes the property of the Holocaust Historiography Project, and may be published on this website. Please let us know if you want attribution for your submission, or if you wish to remain anonymous.

Send all questions and comments to webmaster@historiography-project.org.

Let's make David proud!

CODOH is an Idea

2009-10-21T17:42:00.000-07:00

The ADL's recent publication, "Fighting Holocaust Denial in Campus Newspaper Advertisements" casts the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) as having one member, that is, Bradley Smith. CODOH however is not an organization with members or employees. It has no National Chair, National Director, no Deputies and certainly no assistant directors!

To better understand what CODOH is, I borrow the following with slight alteration from Rodrigo Mendoza:

CODOH is an idea. CODOH is every man who has ever stood up for what he has believed in. CODOH is every man who has taken a stand when he saw injustice-- regardless of the cost. CODOH is an idea and ideas, unlike men cannot be imprisoned.

CODOH is heroes of the past both from history and from fiction. CODOH is William Tyndale shouting at the fiery stake for the Lord to open the King of England's eyes. CODOH is Dietrich Bonhoeffer hanging in Flossenbürg for standing up to a dictatorial regime. CODOH is Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr.. CODOH stood up to the Pope at the Diet of Worms and said, "Here I stand." CODOH is an artist, but it's work has been called "degenerate."

CODOH is Winston Smith. CODOH is Howard Roarke. CODOH is Guy Montag with a hidden library. CODOH will not renounce it's values and accept slavery. CODOH will stand up for the principles that we were taught as children. As Americans, we have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have been taught to stand up when we see injustice. We stand with David against Goliath. We stand with the Jews against the Gestapo. We stand with the Communists against the McCarthyite witch-hunt. We stand with African Americans against the Klan. We stand with the soldiers who have died for propaganda and political lies-- on the fields of Flanders, on the USS Arizona, in Korea and Vietnam and in Iraq.

Today there is no group of people more villainized and defamed than revisionists. The governments of the world stand poised to root them out, to bring an end to their "insidious" ideas. Their jails can hold men, but they cannot hold ideas. Their fires can burn books, but not ideas. Their power comes by force. Our power comes from truth and freedom. We are willing to take the chance that you too might be stirred to action. If the battle is joined, we cannot lose. Of course, this is no battle of might but rather of ideas. CODOH's fight, our fight, is for that great value which if known, will set us all free.

Who is CODOH you ask? CODOH is that value and that idea.

The ADL's storied past

2009-10-21T16:11:00.000-07:00

It seems that Abe Foxman’s ADL is deeply concerned with Bradley Smith and CODOH’s outreach program on American campuses and is looking to intellectually innoculate US college students against revisionist scholarship, to render them immune [read: incurious, resentful, mentally recalcitrant] to what Holocaust revisionism is really all about.

Whenever I hear or read of Abe Foxman's ADL voicing its moral outrage about one thing or another, I am reminded of what George Will once wrote of the icon of the liberal movement in the US, the late Senator Edward Kennedy, during the derailed confirmation hearings of Judge Robert Bork for the US Supreme Court: "Edward Kennedy [of Chappaquidddick infamy] finds Judge Robert Bork morally unsatisfactory."

In the same vein of irony one might paraphrase George Will thus: Abe Foxman finds CODOH’s Bradley Smith morally unsatisfactory.

As long ago as 1980, the icon of the conservative movement in the US, the late William F. Buckley Jr., opined: "Really, I wonder if anyone in the future can ever again take seriously the Anti-Defamation League."

That was nearly 30 years ago. Since then the ADL has done a lot worse things to vindicate the low regard in which Buckley held the ADL following its decision to honor the hedonistic pornographer Hugh Hefner (see Buckley’s article copied below).

For the "fun" of it, gentle reader, you might google Roy Bullock + ADL. That would be a good place to start. Take it from there.

Say, did I mention that the award the ADL gave Hef was its "First Amendment Freedoms Awards?" The "freedom" the ADL had chosen to celebrate, according to the old Yale alumnus, being that of selling "pictures of parted pudenda in order to make a dollar, a nickel of which he [i.e., ADL honoree Hugh Hefner] donates to institutions devoted to the rights of Nazis to march in Skokie. . ."

-=-=-=-=-=-=

ADL defames itself by honoring Hefner | William F. Buckley Jr.

The St. Louis Globe-Democrat | September 19, 1980

It is axiomatic that the village underworlder will seek the approval of the same community he systematically despoils by ostentatious public benefactions. Joe Bananas supporting the local church. Billy Sol Estes hosting a boy scout picnic. Louis B. Mayer contributing to an institution of higher learning.

No one has practiced the art of civic diversion more prodigiously than Hugh Hefner, the founder of "Playboy" magazine and godfather of the sexual revolution. His formula was as straightforward as the advertisements in "Playboy" for sexually stimulating paraphernalia: make a lot of money by pandering to the sexual appetite, elevating it to primacy - then spend
part of that money co-seducing critics or potential critics.

It was years ago that Harvard theologian Harvey Cox wrote an essay on "Playboy," denominating it the single most brazen assault on the female as a person in general circulation. What seemed like moments later, the same scholar found himself writing earnest essays for "Playboy"; and before long he forgot all about his mission to identify "Playboy" for what it essentially is: an organ that seeks to justify the superordination of sex over all other considerations - loyalty to family, any principle of
self-discipline, any respect for privacy, or for chastity or modesty. Sex omnia vincit, Hugh Hefner's magazine told us, issue after issue.

Really, I wonder if anyone in the future can ever again take seriously the Anti-Defamation League. Here is an organization "dedicated to the combating prejudice and discrimination against Jews and other minorities, and to the protection and extension of our democratic system for the benefit of all Americans." "The League" the brochure continues, "works
with the various institutions of our society, public and private, religious and secular, to achieve these ends." And it is celebrating later this month its First Amendment Freedoms Awards by giving a dinner-dance in honor of - Hugh M. Hefner.

About the honoree the ADL says, with an apparently straight face, that he "began with little more than a unique idea for a magazine" (nude women, jokes about copulation, and advice on how to seduce young girls) "and a philosophy of social change." (The "philosophy," quite simply, that the gratification of the male sexual impulse is to be achieved without any
second thought to the possible effect on a) the girl b) her family c) your family d) any code of self-restraint.) "The empire he founded has had a far-reaching impact, not only on the publishing industry, but on the mores of American society as well."

That is correct. Any serious disciple of Hugh Hefner would not hesitate to purr anti-Semitic lovelies into the ears of his bunny, if that was what was required to effect seduction. The Anti-Defamation League has, in the past, surrendered to temptations
alien to its splendidly commendable purpose, namely to focus attention on, and bring obloquy to, acts of racial discrimination. It meddled actively in the presidential campaign of 1964, endeavoring to scare its clientele into believing that Senator Goldwater was an ogre of sorts, backed by fanatics and cravists. Its current director, Mr. Nathan Perlmutter, is a man of high sensibility, gentle, firm, discriminating, a scholarly man long associated with Brandeis University. One notes that he is charging $250 a plate to guests who seek the privilege of joining with him to honor Hugh Hefner.

The tawdriness of the symbolism is driven home. Even as Hugh Hefner sells pictures of parted pudenda in order to make a dollar, a nickel of which he donates to institutions devoted to the rights of Nazis to march in Skokie, and of fellow pornographers to hawk their wares, the ADL raises money to combat discrimination by honoring the principal agent of the kind of selflessness that deprives racial toleration of the ultimate sanction. This sanction rests on a profound belief in the sanctity of the individual, yes, even that of the nubile girl. Take away from the struggle for racial toleration the profound spiritual commitment to the idea of a higher law, and the code against anti-Semitism becomes a mere matter of social convenience, the kind of upward mobile patter one is taught in the pages of "Playboy" to imitate, on the order of wearing Dior handkerchiefs or Gucci loafers.

Racial toleration draws its principal strength from the proposition that we are all brothers, created equal by God. The Playboy philosophy measures human worth by bustline and genital energy. The affair will be celebrated, appropriately enough, in Hollywood, at the Century Plaze Hotel. The invitation specifies "black tie." Well, if the guests arrive wearing only
a black tie, that will be more than some of the guests wear at Hef's other parties.

New Resource to Confront Holocaust Denial on Campus

2009-10-21T14:49:00.000-07:00

[From the Jewish Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith]

October 21, 2009

In response to the appearance of Holocaust denial advertisements in American college newspapers, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Life unveiled a new resource to help students respond.

A new resource guide, Fighting Holocaust Denial in Campus Newspaper Advertisements, is available on the League’s Web site and is being widely distributed throughout the United States by ADL and Hillel.

“Holocaust denial ads are not only extremely offensive, but unequivocally false,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director and a Holocaust survivor. “This is not a First Amendment issue; newspaper editors routinely choose to accept or reject advertisements. Would editors publish ads claiming the world is flat, or that slavery never existed?”

“Holocaust Denial advertisements are an affront to truth and an insult to the memory of those who were murdered by the Nazis,” said Wayne L. Firestone, Hillel President.

The joint ADL-Hillel guide was developed in response to a series of campus newspaper advertisements placed by Bradley Smith and his Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH). In his 2009 campaign, Smith successfully placed advertisements in more than a dozen campus papers, with an ad most recently appearing in the Harvard Crimson.

Fighting Holocaust Denial provides historical background on Holocaust denial and a profile of Smith and the CODOH. The guide provides legal analysis of the First Amendment and newspaper advertising policies, and offers actionable strategies for responding when Holocaust denial ads are published.

ADL and Hillel recommend that editorial staffs develop and implement policies defining acceptable advertising standards, such as those maintained by the newspaper industry, which they can reference when declining hateful ad submissions.

Fighting Holocaust Denial in Campus Newspaper Advertisements may be accessed here. For more information or to obtain a print copy of the publication, please contact the Anti-Defamation League at education@adl.org.

(YWN Desk - NYC)

Amazon Kindle Books, leading the way to darkness

2009-10-16T13:44:00.000-07:00

Oct. 15, 2009--10:55pm
New York City

From Michael Santamauro

Now it is all 22 of the Kindle books from Theses & Dissertations Press that is part of The Holocaust Handbook Series of 22 titles, have been banned from Amazon. This all happened today, at a slow moving process without Amazon telling me they were doing this, nor will they tell me why they did it. The softcover editions are still available. I hope this is a mistake on the part of Amazon.

When you click on the banned title it says it cannot be sold to registered Kindle users in the United States. Until last week all the millions of Kindles (E-readers) were only registered in the United States. Maybe the new international version of the Kindle is putting a block on Holocaust Revisionist books that is causing this confusion in their system.

This is the first time in Amazon's short history in selling books wirelessly with the Kindle (E-reader), that they have banned books for their content. They sell millions of books a month with their Kindle.

John Demjanjuk, a Not-So-Funny Farce About the Last Nazi

2009-10-16T10:20:00.000-07:00

ESQUIRE 15 October 2009

Funny thing is, he was never a Nazi, nor Ivan the Terrible, nor even German. So why now is he standing trial in Munich as accessory to 27,900 Nazi murders? Is this one last blow struck for justice for the Holocaust? Or is it a farce?

By Scott Raab

[John Demjanjuk, who] was stripped of citizenship and shipped to Israel to face his accusers — brought to justice onstage in a concert hall converted into a courtroom for a yearlong trial broadcast on Israeli television and radio, meant to remind the younger Jews never to forget the evil done to them — and heard the survivors, in simultaneous translation, identify him across all the years and miles as the Ukrainian savage so bloodthirsty, so unforgettably depraved — with a whip or a sword or a drill, it was his pleasure to maim Jews only a few moments away from being gassed — that inmates called him Ivan Grozny: Ivan the Terrible.

[….]

Demjanjuk didn't hang, of course. After five years alone on death row in Israel's Ayalon prison — where Adolf Eichmann, too, had sat, the desk jockey who saw to it that the trains groaning with doomed Jews ran on time, and who was strung up in 1962; Eichmann and Demjanjuk are the only men Israel has ever tried for the Nazi genocidal crimes — Demjanjuk presented evidence on appeal that another man, one Ivan Marchenko, was Ivan the Terrible, and that Israel was about to hang the wrong Ukrainian.

Funny thing: The Israeli Supreme Court decided to let Ivan Demjanjuk walk.

The Valencia Partido Popular replaces Ricardo Costa with a holocaust denier

2009-10-14T12:48:00.000-07:00

By h.b. - Oct 14, 2009 - 7:03 PM

The new PP Regional General Secretary is César Augusto Asencio

The Partido Popular in Valencia has decided to replace Ricardo Costa as Regional General Secretary with César Augusto Asencio.

El País reveals that Sr. Asencio is a holocaust denier, who described the holocaust as ‘The greatest fraud in History’ in an article published in the publication, ‘Diario Información’. He described the extermination of six million Jews during the Second World War as a ‘legend’.

In the article he said that ‘a detailed study’ had shown ‘propaganda on a worldwide scale’ in the hands of the Jews, supported by countless tricked photos and documents.
He noted that the International Red Cross never mentioned the existence of any gas chambers or mass exterminations in its reports.

The political group, Iniciativa del Poble Valencia, has called for the immediate resignation of César Augusto Asencio, because of his ‘Nazi position’.

The 6th Annual David McCalden Most Macabre Halloween Holocaust Tale Challenge.

2009-10-07T10:05:00.000-07:00

From the Historiography-project

Enter our 2009 Contest and Win Cash!

Send in your entries now for the 6th Annual David McCalden Most Macabre Halloween Holocaust Tale Challenge.

Pits of boiling human fat? Human soap? Giant "death by steaming" pressure cookers? Fountains of blood squirting from the earth?

Help us find new Holocaust stories you find macabre and ridiculous.

The deadline is approaching for entries to the 2009 David McCalden Most Macabre Halloween Holocaust Tale Challenge. This is our sixth year of competition, and there seems to be no shortage of entries. Make certain you get yours in now, and tell all your friends!

Webmaster

The Taboo Against Germans at Harvard University

2009-10-05T20:21:00.000-07:00

This letter was copied to faculty and administration at Harvard, and to the press nationwide.
===============

President Drew Faust
Office of the President
Harvard University
Massachusetts Hall
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA

05 October 2009

Dear President Faust:

It is apparent that Harvard faculty supports a strategy of refusing to ask questions about WWII German weapons of mass destruction (gas chambers). It is equally apparent, by its silence, that Harvard faculty has found that it is not right to question the “unique monstrosity” of the Germans, and that they will not support Harvard students who might be disposed to a free exchange of ideas on either matter. Does the Office of the President support that taboo? I have heard nothing to suggest that it does not.

On 08 September the Harvard Crimson printed my advertisement asking why General Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his Crusade In Europe, chose (chose!) to not mention the WWII German weapons of mass destruction, the “gas chambers.” The ad asked: “Why not?” The ad also asked that a professor, someone, at Harvard University provide, “with proof, the name of one person killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz.”

On 09 September Maxwell L. Child, President of the Harvard Crimson, felt it necessary to apologize for having run the advertisement, saying that the text “questioned whether the Holocaust occurred” (it did not) and that it had angered many members of the Harvard community. The Crimson staff then published a letter stating “we believe this item [these questions] should never be found in the pages of a college newspaper.”

No member of the Harvard faculty attempted to answer either of my questions, and there is no evidence that any member of the Harvard faculty supported student journalists at The Crimson who had been in favor of publishing the ad. When the emails, telephone calls and letters poured in to The Crimson from on-campus and off-campus special-interest groups, Harvard faculty played out the role of “bystander,” allowing Crimson journalists to hang and twist in the wind.

President Faust: why do you believe no academic at Harvard is willing to respond to two simple questions about German weapons of mass destruction? Why do you believe Harvard faculty is unwilling to support Crimson journalists who favor a free exchange of ideas on the matter? Does the Office of the President support what appears to be a taboo at Harvard that prohibits questioning the orthodox (the State) position on German weapons of mass destruction?

Do you not think it right for Harvard students to be aware of the fact that Dwight D. Eisenhower chose (chose!) to not mention gas chambers in his Crusade In Europe? That Winston Churchill, in his six-volume History of World War ll, chose to not mention gas chambers? That Charles de Gaulle chose to not mention German gas chambers in his Memoirs? That when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly only last month to proclaim that the Wannsee Protocols contained “precise” information on the extermination of the Jews, that those who produced those Protocols chose to not mention gas chambers? How “precise” does Harvard faculty believe that is? Exactly?

Perhaps you believe it is “hateful” to ask critical questions about German weapons of mass destruction. If that is so, you must view the asking of such questions as a moral issue. I see it as a moral issue myself, but from what I believe is a different perspective. I believe it is immoral to suppress intellectual freedom at Harvard, as it is to suppress it anywhere. I believe it immoral for Harvard (or any) faculty to not come to the aid of students who have opted for a free exchange of ideas and a free press. That it is immoral for Harvard faculty to exploit taboo to forbid students to question a charge of unique monstrosity routinely made against others.

Harvard faculty has the right to be skeptical of every revisionist argument that questions German weapons of mass destruction. Skepticism is not a sin. Revisionists are skeptical of the orthodox claims about German WMD and have published a good deal of material to illustrate why they are skeptical. To my knowledge, no Harvard professor has published one paper in one peer reviewed journal illustrating where a core revisionist text about German WMD is worthless. The skepticism of Harvard faculty, then, only reveals its credulity.

President Faust: do you believe it right that the Office of the President should allow and even encourage taboo to trump intellectual freedom at Harvard? That taboo should be used to forbid an open debate in student publications on the question of the German use of weapons of mass destruction? If so, how am I to distinguish a member of your faculty committed to this particular taboo from a member of a South Seas cargo cult committed to some other taboo? His trousers?

Thank you for your attention.

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

NOTE: I will copy this letter to some of your colleagues and to others who I believe might find it interesting.

Holocaust revisionism and market forces

2009-09-30T19:11:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-30T14:33:00.000-07:00

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!

Double exposure

2009-09-25T12:59:00.000-07:00

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.

The Eisenhower Ad

2009-09-24T17:26:00.000-07:00

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?

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.

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

2009-09-19T23:05:00.000-07:00

[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

+++

The ebb and flow of appropriations

2009-09-17T18:36:00.000-07:00

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.

Break His Bones Ad

2009-09-15T13:31:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2009-09-15T12:57:00.000-07:00

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

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

2009-09-14T17:09:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2009-09-10T19:34:00.000-07:00

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.

CNN Reports on Harvard's Questionable Advertising Policy

2009-09-09T17:05:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-09T09:45:00.000-07:00

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

CODOH ad runs in Harvard Crimson

2009-09-08T21:53:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-09-08T10:57:00.000-07:00

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.

Third Reich Secret Weapons

2009-09-07T13:59:00.000-07:00

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.

It's a small world

2009-09-03T15:16:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2009-09-01T21:37:00.000-07:00

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.

Viva Las Vegas, Viva "the Holocaust"

2009-08-21T13:03:00.000-07:00

In 1959, I was 11 years old, living frugally with my parents, both of whom were, as they say, gainfully employed.

My father ran a small supermarket, while my mother managed her rooming house for transients up on the 2nd floor. They were very careful about quickly paying off their debts and putting away their savings for a rainy day.

For example, if I asked for a quarter to go to the movies with my school mates on a Saturday afternoon, my parents, as often as not, would deny my request; sometimes, with a tedious lecture on my need to learn to exercise thrift.

One day, one of my mother’s transient lodgers moved out leaving behind a deck of cards. The man had used them to play solitaire, and had taught me how.

I was in the middle of a game of solitaire when my father came upstairs for supper and noticed me off in a corner, playing. He came over and brusquely interrupted me.

Gathering up the cards, he explained that playing solitaire was an unseemly actvity -- one that was worthy only of shiftless gypsies -- and relieved me of the deck.

Several years later, the Main Street property my parents owned quadrupled in value during a period of economic boom. They sold it, and went into semi-retirement. They travelled abroad. Travels that even included Las Vegas, where they spent a week gambling and going to shows.

It was in August in 1974 -- during the week President Nixon had resigned his office -- that my parents spent a week in Las Vegas. Since we had little in common, my father and I typically bridged the divide that separated us by discussing current events. I asked him how the Americans he met in Vegas reacted to Nixon resigning his office. He shrugged, so I asked instead about how he had enjoyed Sin City.

It was obvious the man was proud of the fact that he was able to afford to vacation there, for in his circle of friends it meant he had “arrived.” I have no interest in gambling or Las Vegas, least of all in gambling in Las Vegas, but I thought it polite to at least pretend to share his enthusiasm.

“What kind of gambling do you do?” I asked.

“I just pump a roll of quarters into a slot machine -- and hope to get lucky.”

“Any luck?”

“Naw . . .”

Naturally, I remembered the times I had to beg him for two-bits to go see a Western during a matinee at the movie-theatre down the street, and of the time he seized my deck of playing cards.

It is through this Las Vegas that-was-then, this-is-now peephole that I consider all of the hoopla that attends the release of Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, a Judeo-centric World War Two satirical sendup entitled Inglourious Basterds.

Against a backdrop of sober Holocaust pieties, Tarantino and his stars Brad Pitt et al. are perfectly free to blithely screw over the received version of the Holocaust narrative. Even as in Australia and Austria -- and, of course, in the German Fatherland -- daring revisionists languish in prison, punished for having demonstrated their temerity by challening the typical Hollywood-inspired version of the traditional Holocaust story.

Exceptions to the Holocaust rule

2009-08-15T15:55:00.000-07:00

The late Michael Elkins was for many years the BBC correspondent in Jerusalem, reporting on such major Israeli events like the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann and the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six Day War.

In 1971 Michael Elkins published Forged in Fury, a book about the men and women of DIN, a group of Jewish avengers bent on tracking and killing alleged Nazi war criminals.

In 1996, the book was reprinted to mark the 25th anniversary of its publication, almost unchanged, except for a new Foreword in which Elkins disputed the traditional six million (Holocaust) figure.

More a wobbler than a blatant "Holocaust denier," Elkins owed to having no set opinion as to even the approximate number of Jews killed in World War Two; all he knew was that it was not the six million figure he had alleged in the first edition of Forged in Fury.

Elkins: "The dimensions of the Holocaust are terribly important, but whether it was five million dead or four million or three, the enormity of the crime and the weight of the tragedy maintains." [1]

Otherwise, Michael Elkins' Forged in Fury remained the very same self-righteous schizoid denunciation-celebration of violence that it was in 1971. Elkins, who registers a seismic frisson, just about, each time he describes another Nazi getting wacked, would have, I dare say, enjoyed watching Quentin Tarantino’s over-the-top revenge-fantasy Inglourious Basterds.

But what about those for whom the Six Million figure is inviolable?

For example, longtime senior counsel for B'nai Brith Canada, David Matas has -- as have many, many others in a similiar position -- said the "Holocaust was the murder of six million Jews" and that what is called "Holocaust denial is [tantamount to] a second murder of those same six million.” [2]

Shouldn’t the Guardians of the Holocaust Flame have denounced Elikins as a Holocaust denier and then dragged the poor sod and his reputation from pillar post? Suffice is to say, they didn’t; they gave him a free pass. It happens in special cases. Elkins was one of those; Dr Joachim Prinz was another.

Dr Prinz, a German rabbi with Zionist leanings, is profiled in the sizzling little volume, Jewish History, Jewish Region, by the late Israel Shahak, a Buchenwald survivor and an Israeli human rights advocate. [3]

In 1934, Dr. Prinz published a polemical work entiled Wir Juden (We, Jews) wherein he hailed Hitler's rise to power. Seems he viewed this as a defeat for liberalism and, hence, a very good outcome for Jews.

"[T]he fortunes of liberalism are lost," he wrote gleefully. "The only form of political life which has helped Jewish assimilation is sunk."

See: The victory of Nazism ruled out assimilation and the bane of mixed marriages between Jews and gentiles. Said Prinz: "We are not unhappy about this." His book [said Shahak] contained a lot of unblushing praise for Nazi ideology.

Later on, Dr. Prinz emigrated to the United States, where he then eventually became a vice-chairman of the World Jewish Congress and a leading figure in the World Zionist Organization. Despite his words of praise for Hitler and the Nazis, he was also on friendly terms with the onetime Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir.

1. Michael Elkins, Forged in Fury, London: Judy Piatkus (Publishers), 1996, p. xiii

2. Letters to the Editor, Toronto Globe and Mail, January 22, 1992.

3. Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion, Pluto Press: London, 1994, p, 71-72.

Fredrick Toben Jailed in Australia

2009-08-13T06:50:00.000-07:00

Revisionist and free speech activist Dr. Fredrick Töben has been taken into custody to serve a three-month jail term for violating Australia’s anti-free speech laws.

Australian Federal Police took Töben, the author of Where Truth is no Defence, I want to break free, from the Federal Court in Adelaide after losing his appeal against his conviction for contempt of court. Töben refused to be silenced in his struggle to correct the historical record of the Holocaust on the Adelaide Institute website.

The judges said Töben also had a disregard for the orders of the court and had acted to undermine the authority of the court.

The Full Court of the Federal Court also ruled that his jail term, for what amounts to thoughtcrimes, was in no way excessive.

Earlier this year, Töben was found guilty on 24 counts of contempt for ignoring court orders preventing him from publishing Holocaust revisionist material. When he later imposed a three-month sentence, Justice Bruce Lander said Töben had continued to breach those 2002 orders, which prevented him from publishing material which was deemed anti-Semitic.

The 2002 orders stemmed from a racial discrimination case brought against him by Jeremy Jones, former president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.

Töben’s counsel David Perkins suggested that the revisionist material published on the Adelaide Institute website, was just a "drop in the bucket" compared to the amount of material questioning the orthodox Holocaust story available on the internet.

The judges said in their verdict that the case before them was not about the Holocaust, gas chambers or the execution of Jews during World War II. They said it was about whether or not Töben had complied with orders of the court. Those court orders however were intended to silence Töben on these very issues.

"Obedience to the court is not optional," they said.

In a final example of the limits on free speech in Australia today Töben asked if he could say something to the judges as the court rose, only to be cut off by Justice Jeffrey Spender who simply said, "No".

There are no guarantees of freedom of speech in Australia.

http://www.codoh.com/thoughtcrimes/0908toben.html

Giving the Holocaust a competitive edge

2009-08-12T09:16:00.000-07:00

In 1992, New Star Books of Vancouver published Chronicles of Dissent, David Barsamian's collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky.

Chapter 13, titled "World Orders: Old and New", contains the following exchange between Barsamian and Chomsky, which, according to the chronology, occurred on November 18, 1990 [p. 217]:

BARSAMIAN: In a conversation I had with you a couple of years ago at UCLA you said something that I've always wanted to ask you about. We were talking about the Armenian genocide and you made the observation that Israel 'didn't want anyone elbowing in on the Holocaust business.’

CHOMSKY: Israel has been very strongly opposed to efforts to bring the Armenian genocide into consideration. The extent of this is really astonishing. I keep learning new things about it all the time. For example, in 1982 there was a conference on genocide in Israel... The conference was dealing with all kinds of genocide. The Israeli government put pressure upon it to drop the Armenian genocide. They allowed the others, but not the Armenian one. The honorary chairman was to have been Elie Wiesel, and he was pressured by the government to withdraw, and being a loyal commissar as he is, he withdrew from the conference because the Israeli government had said they didn't want Armenian genocide brought up.

Just recently, a well-known Holocaust historian in Israel, Yehuda Bauer, told the Israeli press that Wiesel had called him from New York at that time pleading with him to drop out of the conference because the Israeli government didn't want it because it was dealing with the Armenians, and he agreed to that and felt very bad about it in retrospect. That gives an indication of the extent to which people like Elie Wiesel were carrying out their usual function of serving Israeli state interests, even to the extent of denying a holocaust [sic], which he does regularly.

Why are they [the Israelis] so fixated on denying the Armenian holocaust? That's very simple. Part of it is that they want to monopolize the image for their own purposes, but the other part of it is that this is the Armenians. They were massacred by the Turks. The Turks are allies, and you don't want to alienate allies, because that's much too important. So if they happened to carry out a genocide, that's not our business. They're our allies. Therefore you don't talk about the Armenian holocaust.

What Noam Chomsky was saying is, many exclusionary Holocaust promoters, including Elie Wiesel, can be charged with unconscionably adopting a stance which they themselves routinely and vociferously denounce: Namely, that of indulging in a variant of "holocaust denial". In a way, ironically enough, becoming holocaust deniers at war with alleged holocaust deniers of another stripe; of being Holocaust monopolists, if you will, anxious that their "competitors" should not get to share too much of the historical limelight with them.

In short [says Chomsky], the Jewish promoters and merchandisers of their own World War II tragedy, which they guard and defend with all the zeal of profiteering corporate suits, don't take kindly to any upstart competition.

It ain't necessarily so . . .

2009-08-09T07:54:00.000-07:00

A convergence of evidence is the same as a consilience of inductions -- where two or more separate and distinct sets of facts mutually reinforce each other. Such convergence allows the student of history to more confidently defend a particular version of an historical event as likelier to have occurred this way rather than that; its absence means having to fall back to some extent on speculative reasoning, on conjecture, to decide what might have happened -- and why. It's a sound, but hardly failproof, method of getting near the real version of events. For example:

As "proof" of the homicidal gassings said to have occurred at Dachau, in the trials of accused Nazi war criminals Nuremberg prosecutors were able to point to the "gas chamber" itself, refer to an official American congressional report of an on-site investigation, and to cite the "eyewitness" testimony of the onetime camp doctor, Franz Blaha. Yet, claims of death by gassings at Dachau are now largely dismissed as false, and so reams of what was once touted as damning evidence have become worthless. Many such Holocaust extermination claims, once widely accepted, have likewise been quietly discarded.

Take the stories of the Treblinka "steam chambers," a set of bizarre allegations now part of the Nuremberg record. At Nuremberg, American prosecutors submitted a report (exhibit USA-293) charging that Jews had been killed in Treblinka "by suffocating them in steam-filled chambers." [1]

One of the American prosecutors referred to it in an address to the Nuremberg court on December 14, 1945. The report, later added to the official Nuremberg trial record as document PS-3311, bolstered a November 1942 "eyewitness" account sent to London via the Warsaw ghetto underground organization that described masses of Jews being exterminated by the "steam pouring out of ... pipes." [2]

Today, despite this so-called convergence of evidence, no reputable historian still claims the stories of death-by-steaming
at Treblinka are factually true.

Although, the allegations were revived in 1979 and 1985 by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and included in a publication entitled The Record: The Holocaust in History. Among the several documents the ADL reproduced was an August 8, 1943 article from the New York Times claiming the Germans had murdered two million Jews in Treblinka by steaming them to death. This despite the fact no one at Nuremberg was ever convicted of the killing of masses of Jews by employing the grisly steaming method.

What could have motivated the ADL to revive this false, rather lurid old tale, I wonder? Was it simply “too good" to abandon?

1. IMT, Trial of the Major War Criminals ("blue series"), vol 3, p. 567-568.

2. "Likwidacja zydowskiej Warszawy, Treblinka," Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego (Warsaw), January-June 1951, pp. 93 -100.

Holocaust fabulists offer a new frisson

2009-08-08T09:45:00.000-07:00

With Holocaust literature, as opposed to forthright historiography, we enter into a virtual realm where truth and falsehood are apt to very quickly and easily trade places. Auschwitz survivor and Nobel laureate, Elie Wiesel, once explained how he, too, was not above conjuring the what-might-have-been Holocaust mirage. He said as much with reference to his own writings:

“Things are not that simple, Rebbe. Some events do take place but are not true; others are, although they never occurred.” [1]

Enter Binjamin Wilkomirski, the Great Pretender, who was able to outWiesel even Elie Wiesel. Hardly any sober students of the Holocaust nowadays believe the Wilkomirski tale; unlike in 1995, when his alleged Holocaust memoir, Fragments, was first published and assumed to be genuine, however improbable its tale of recovered memories of an indescribably painful childhood lived out in Nazi concentration camps. [2]

There's this hilarious scene in the futuristic Woody Allen comedy Sleeper where WA impersonates a robot tasked with having to whip up a chocolate pudding for his mistress. Things get out of hand in the kitchen when the batter he employs quickly bubbles up into the size of a baby beluga. As it wobbles across the kitchen floor toward him, WA’s robotic character is suddenly compelled to brutally clobber it into submission with a broom. An apt metaphor for honest scholars and scholarship desperately fending off sticky-gooey encroachments by Holocaust fabulists like Wilkomirski and Wiesel.

A letter Canadian writer Ann Charney addressed to New Yorker magazine graphically describes some of her frustration with “the Holocaust industry” and its fabulists. Charney:

“Philip Gourevitch's article on Binjamin Wilkomirski and his memoir ‘Fragments’ ("The Memory Thief," June 14th) reveals much about the Holocaust industry. In 1996, Suhrkamp, also Wilkomirski's publisher, published a German translation of my account of a wartime childhood in Poland. It is entitled ‘Dobryd’ -- an anagram of the name of the real town where the action takes place. I chose to write it as fiction, because, like Aharon Appelfeld, I did not trust the factual accuracy of my recollections. At the time of publication, it was suggested to me that the book would sell much better if it was reclassified as nonfiction, but I did not accept the suggestion. Though the book has received excellent critical notices, it has never enjoyed the attention given to ‘Fragments.’’’

Here the implication is clear: With an eye for the bottomline, Ann Charney’s novel would have rung up more sales, her publisher felt, had it been touted as a memoir; any factual inaccuracy it may have contained being a somewhat lesser consideration. She continues:

“Wilkomirski's success in impersonating a Holocaust survivor confirms my suspicions about the increasingly rapacious nature of the Holocaust industry -- a highly profitable enterprise, be it in tourism or in any of the arts. The steadily expanding business of merchandising dead Jews requires a constant flow of new ideas, new imagery -- hence the frisson of appreciation for the bloody rat emerging from the dead woman's womb. Wilkomirski may have created a new genre, which could attract other practitioners: impersonators more real than the real thing, who thrive as devoted fetishists of suffering.” [3]

Ah! Our suffocating, Byronic need for a new frisson. I am reminded of the aftermath of an accident I witnessed 40 years ago. I was a student travelling north into a blizzard by greyhound coach.

We progressed very slowly. I had been sitting on my ass for ten hours when the bus came to a complete stop. The driver got off and when he returned minutes later asked if there was a priest on board. There was; he sat across the aisle from me. And, when he stood up, I followed him out to the accident site.

Apparently, a school bus had slid into the ditch just alongside the highway and a tow truck had been summoned to drag it out. The steel cable the tow truck attached to it was stretched across the highway when a car, with two men on board, came barrelling along through the opaque veil of drifting snow -- with near zero visibility -- in what proved to be a fatal game of chicken. Later on I learned both men had been drunk.

There were a couple of teenagers brandishing flashlights already at the scene as the priest administered the last rites. I lingered a moment after he returned to the bus to take in the enormity of the destruction. The steel cable had torn away the roof from the oncoming vehicle; the faces of both the driver and his passenger were pulped.

One of the teenagers shone his flashlight on what seemed like a wee white billiard ball amid shattered glass on the seat of car. It was an eyeball. “Hey! Look at that!” he exclaimed in his backwater French, excited by the discovery of this macabre detail.

The calibre of excitement the teenagers experienced on finding the detached eyeball on the car seat is the same, according to researcher Michael Hoffman, as “the reason why the ‘Holocaust’ museum in Washington D.C. is breaking attendance records.”

Not, says Hoffman, “because people want to learn a moral lesson or improve or save anything. They’re going there in the hopes they’ll see a working gas chamber or the whip that ‘Ilsa of the SS’ used, or the boots they claim Himmler made out of the skin of Jewish babies.” [4]

In other words, fueled by morbid fascination, they’re after a new frisson dredged up by a fresh encounter with a grotesque specacle akin to that displayed at the Madame Tussaud Wax Museum; the kind that moves us to slow down and drink in the details of a roadside car crash.

1. Elie Wiesel, Legends of Our Time, New York: Holt, Rinehart, and
Winston: 1968, p. viii.

2. Martin Daly, “An impossible but true story of the Holocaust,” The Sunday Age , November 8, 1998.

3. Ann Charney, “The Holocaust's Legacies,” Letters, The New Yorker, July 19, 1999.

4. Michael A. Hoffman II, Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, Independent History and Research: Coeur d'Alene, 2001, p. 136.

Props as shorthand for radical evil

2009-08-07T14:12:00.000-07:00

A page-long obituary in Maclean’s magazine informs readers that the late Walter Paul Sieber, better known to professional wrestling fans as “Waldo von Erich,” owed his fame as the prototypical villain to a decision in the 1960s to adopt a German Nazi persona.

“[I]t was his German Nazi persona that propelled Waldo von Erich into superstardom. With his monocle, helmet, armband and whip, Waldo incited rage among fans still reeling from the Second World War.” [1]

Pro wrestling back then offered fans a version of the black-and-white morality plays of the Middle Ages, where characters personifying good and evil clash head on. Waldo’s use of such standard “Nazi” props as the monocle and the swastika armband, the Wehrmacht soldier’s helmet and a whip -- like Ilse, She-Wolf of the SS -- was par for the course in terms of the often garish, mass-appeal morality play so inherent in pro wrestling.

As it happens, the Holocaust “memoir” sometimes fills up the same niche, falls into an identical slot. Consider this rather glammed-up, thumbnail sketch of the SS general, Odilo Globocnik, as he appears -- with all the Satanic majesty of a wrestling villain -- at the gates to the Majdandek concentration camp in the 1980 “memoir” The Survivor by Jack Eisner:

“... I watched the [“beautiful white horse and rider”] gallop closer and closer. In the saddle was a majestic, monocled figure in an SS general's uniform decorated with red velvet lapels, topped by a striped SS cap. A long white cape lined with red satin floated behind him. Several SS officers, using their whips and guns, cleared a path for the ‘emperor.’" [2]

Note the reference to the monocle. Mind you, Globocnik, the SS general, never wore one, but no matter. The radical evil that Nazi villainy embodies is flagged by a number of signifiers, which Waldo duly incorporated in his Nazi persona, among them a monocle.

The monocle also makes a cameo appearance in Elie Wiesel’s “memoir” Night. Notice I have hedged the term memoir between quotation marks to underscore its uncertain status as such.

You see: Oprah was still reeling from the realization that she had promoted James Frey’s fraudulent memoir A Million Little Pieces as the real thing, when she fell back on Wiesel’s Night and promoted it, amazingly enough, as the genuine article, as a counter-measure, notwithstanding the fact the cover on thousands of copies of the book had for many years included the words A Novel to denote its fictional status. [3]

Here the monocled Nazi arch-villain is the notorious Auschwitz physician, Dr. Josef Mengele. Wiesel:

“In the middle [of the square] stood the notorious Dr. Mengele (a typical SS officer: a cruel face, but not devoid of intelligence, and wearing a monocle.); a conductor's baton in one hand, he was standing among the other officers. The baton moved unremittingly, sometimes right, sometimes left.” [4]

Ah, yes. The conductor’s baton. Forgot about that! Another in the list of hoary Hollywood props that are shorthand for radical evil.

One final note about Waldo. His signature move was to knee-drop onto his opponent from off of the top rope and so deliver a crushing, often final, blow. The name he gave this ploy: The Blitzkrieg.

1. Cathy Gulli, Maclean’s magazine, August 06, 2009.

2. Jack Eisener, The Survivor, New York: Wm. Morrow, 1980.

3. Hillel Italie (AP), “Amazon recategorizes Elie Wiesel’s ‘Night’ as a ‘memoir’,” Seattle PI Books, January 18, 2006.
http://www.seattlepi.com/books/255982_oprahbook18.html?source=rss

4. Elie Wiesel, Night, Bantam paperback edition.

No ambiguity -- just like an old western

2009-08-07T13:03:00.000-07:00

Part of the myth that the Holocaust true-believers buy into is the myth of the Second World War as the “Good War.” Americans love the Second World War because there is no ambiguity --it is about good and evil – that’s it. Vietnam wasn’t like that. Neither was Iraq.

We love World War Two in movies and TV for the same reason – it’s good guys versus bad guys. Simple. Fun. Entertainment. Like an old western.

When the true-believers first discover Holocaust revisionism, or those who spout the heresy that all is not as it seems, they are aghast. After all, this is the clearest example of good and evil in a conflict that was about good and evil. This one is black and white. No shades of grey.

The Holocaust is proven fact. The bad guys (the Nazis) did it. Not only did they do it, but they admitted that they did it. We held trials, they admitted it, and they were hanged for their crimes. End of story. It’s all up to Hollywood now.

When the revisionists say all is not as it seems. When we ask for forensic information, when we ask for documents, when we ask for proof, the true-believers get angry – very angry. Such questions are not just about a historical event, they take on an entire world view—a world view about good and evil – about morality.

The Nazis admitted it! You can hear them shout. They are torn between considering revisionists idiots or evil creatures attempting to resurrect a long dead Reich.

Many of those true-believers don’t like the war on terror. They don’t like the American treatment of Muslims accused of terror. They don’t like the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. They particularly disliked Bush, because among other things he sanctioned torture. Torture is not only un-American, it is pointless. With torture so-called Muslim terrorists may admit to all sorts of crimes – but the confession is worthless. Who might not tell their accusers what they wanted to hear to stop the pain of torture?

Torture however did not begin with the war on terror. In fact, torture was used to get many of those admissions from the Nazis that we cling to as proof of the most horrific crimes of the Second World War.

According to historian Montgomery Belgion:

“Soon interrogations [of SS members] began. They were of three kinds. The first kind was a straightforward matter of question and answer. If, however, the result of an interrogation of this kind was not what the investigator was bent on obtaining, one of the second kind followed, it might be forthwith. A suspect was made to remove his coat and shirt, and to pass his hands inside his belt or inside the top of his trousers. His arms were then strapped to his body. He was told to stand to attention in the middle of the floor space. An American soldier was stationed on either side of him, and a third faced his back. The investigator sat at a table and ordered him to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Each time he failed to reply, or replied the opposite of what was expected of him, the American soldier on one side of him would strike him in the bare stomach with the edge of his hand while the solder on the other side kicked him. He was thereby thrown off his balance, and as he swayed backwards the solder behind fetched him a crack on the back of the head. The effect of this was to push him towards the upright again, and as this happened he was struck in the face. In this style questioning went on for, perhaps, two hours at a stretch.

A suspect was then conducted back to his bare cell, his face bloody, his eyes blackened and half-closed, his mouth so tumefied that he could hardly open it to drink, his bruised lower jaw making him incapable of biting his small lump of bread, his body red and blue. So long as no ‘confession’ was forthcoming, suspects were kept on bread and water. They were allowed to wash only every other day, and they were not allowed to shave.

The third kind of interrogation commonly took place in an underground cell. Several such interrogations might go on at the same time, and a German policeman wearing a white armband was stationed on the stairs in order to prevent anybody from coming down and hearing in the passage the cries and moans audible from behind several of a row of closed doors. This third kind of interrogation usually went on till a suspect had become unconscious.

Once a suspect had ‘confessed’, he was promised hot food and a blanket. In fact, he might not be given a blanket; he might be left to discover his own next time he went to the washroom where it had been place; his own-that is to say, the blanket that had been taken from him on arrival. As for the hot food, that might be forgotten too.

It was useless for a suspect to later on to withdraw his ‘confession’ and to say that it had been obtained from him under duress. The ‘confession’ figured as the principal evidence at his trial, and the sentence was pronounced on the strength of it.”

Torture also involved the psychological torture of claims to have imprisoned one’s spouse or children and that they would be executed if a confession was not forthcoming.

On April 26, 1946 Julius Streicher stated in the evidence of the Nuremberg trials that he was kept for four days in a cell without clothes. He went on, “I was made to kiss negroes’ feet. I was whipped. I had to drink saliva. My mouth was forced open with a piece of wood, and then I was spat on. When I asked for a drink of water, I was taken to a latrine and told ‘Drink.’

Many of the accused Nazis were detained in camps with the official names “Ashcan” and “Dustbin.”

Abu Ghraib was not new. We did nothing worse at Abu Ghraib than we did at Ashcan and Dustbin. But Iraq was not the “good war.” There is room for grey on that one. We have trouble accepting that the good and evil caricatures of the “Good War” might not be reflective of the truth.

We hate ambiguity in our image of the Second World War. We hate the ramifications of the torture that resulted in the ‘confessions’ that prove the outrageous crimes that we now call “Holocaust.” We hate letting that grey slip into the one thing we are so certain of. It sort of ruins everything. It’s like the day I learned of the massacre at Wounded Knee. The old westerns were never the same.

Holocaust denial and 9-11 denial

2009-08-06T18:18:00.000-07:00

I was struck by a comment by a Holocaust true-believer today -- one of those who buy the entire story -- lock, stock and barrel. He made the comment that to deny the Holocaust happened is like denying that 9-11 happened.

On the surface, to those who haven't thought much about these matters, such an argument -- such a sound byte -- sounds convincing. Sure, we can make him define his terms. That's the normal starting place. What do you mean when you write "Holocaust?" What do you mean by "deny the Holocaust?" What do you mean by "9-11?" And so on.

But we have an idea of what this guy meant. We don't really have to get all the definitions out there. Heck, this is an age where all great ideas will be limited to 140 characters -- there's no time for clarity (what would Kant or Schopenhauer have done with Twitter?)

The fact is however that this guy has his thoughts twisted -- in fact they are 180 degrees from the correct direction.

It would be far more accurate to say "to believe the Holocaust story is like believing the US government was behind a grand conspiracy on 9-11."

What do I mean?

There are those who "deny" the official story of 9-11. They claim that rather than an Al-Qadea terrorist attack on the World Trade Center that the US government in fact orchestrated the entire thing. Bush knew about it -- or even ordered it. And of course there was a grand conspiracy to cover the whole thing up.

The Holocaust story -- that is, the official Holocaust story is also a grand conspiracy tale. Those who buy it say the Nazi government orchestrated a plan to exterminate the entire Jewish people. Hitler knew about -- and even ordered it. There was a grand conspiracy to cover the whole thing up. In fact, one SS officer was even given the horrific job in the final months of the Third Reich to march a small band all around Europe and cover up the Nazi crimes by exhuming all the victims and destroying the evidence on makeshift pyres, with explosive devices, and even through the use of "bone-crushing machines."

I'm not much for conspiracy tales. I don't think Bush had any idea what was coming on 9-11. I think Bin Laden and his gang orchestrated the entire thing. I haven't seen any evidence to make me believe that Bush ordered such a horrific event. Neither is it reasonable to think that such a cover-up would be possible, what with the partisan in-fighting of Washington DC. It is unthinkable.

The official Holocaust story is an even bigger conspiracy tale. It didn't last for a morning but rather for years. It is a story without evidence of the murder weapon -- without forensic evidence -- and without the documentary evidence.

I don't buy the 9-11 conspiracy story and neither do I buy the Holocaust conspiracy story. Like I said, I'm not much for conspiracy tales.

The perils of tolerance

2009-08-05T14:01:00.000-07:00

A dozen years ago, the Toronto Globe and Mail published a book review by Queen’s University historian Gerald Tulchinsky entitled "Is Jewish History Ending?" in which he flagged the dangers posed by the growing gentile tolerance toward Jews:

"What 20 centuries of persecution culiminating in the Holocaust could not do -- the obliteration of the Jewish people -- U.S. toleration ... will soon accomplish." 1

The biggest threat to world Jewry, according to Tulchinsky, back then, was the growing rate of intermarriage between Jews and gentiles. A decade later, similar concern about the rate of Jew-gentile intermarriage was again expressed:

"The rate of intermarriage is rising sharply given that nearly seven out of 10 Jews under the age of 30 marry outside of their faith."

The source for this statistic was an article headlined “Jews face 'holocaust' by interfaith marriages” that served as an introduction to an upcoming lecture by Esther Jungreis on “The Holocaust and the Final Solution to Intermarriage” to be delivered on the campus of Ottawa’s Carleton University.

Esther Jungreis is an international lecturer, called “the Jewish Billy Graham,” who compares -- so the article claims -- “intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews with self-imposed annihilation on the scale of the Nazi extermination campaign.” She is also described as a “Holocaust survivor ... [who] argues [that] there is a moral imperative for Jews to marry within the faith” and who sees in the tendency of Jews to intermarry with non-Jews a veritable "spiritual holocaust" that threatens the survival of Judaism. 2

Not surprisingly, Mrs Jungreis is controversial among some of her co-religionists, given that she has proved unwilling to concede even the validity of gentile conversion to Judaism:

“Conversions are usually a sham, you know, in name only. It's easy come, easy go, and there's no commitment behind it. It doesn't mean anything.”

Hardcore? Oh my word, Yes!

I wonder if Deborah Lipstadt is as hardcore as this? Jewish author Ellen Jaffe McClain in her book, Embracing the Stranger [p. 18], has included a reference to Lipstadt's exclusionary Jewish chauvinism that leads me to suspect she may well be.

McClain writes: "Although people like Deborah Lipstadt, the Emory University professor who has written and lectured widely on Holocaust denial, have exhorted Jewish parents to just say no to intermarriage [with gentiles], much the same way they expect their children not to take drugs, a large majority of [Jewish] parents and (more than a few rabbis) are unable to lay down opposition to intermarriage as a strict operating principle."

Typical of the double standard of many of the captains in the Holocaust industry, it is other people's exclusionary chauvinism Professor Lipstadt is apt to disapprove of, which she may damn as "racism" and so on, even as she flogs a marry-your-own-kind approach to life for Jewish singles.

1. Source: The Globe and Mail’s July 12, 1997, issue.

2. “Jews face 'holocaust' by interfaith marriages, Unions pose threat to Judaism: expert talking at Carleton,” Pauline Tam, The Ottawa Citizen, March 07, 2007

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=486f8ed7-e85e-4967-ae40-3912809ec843

Jerry Springer's reflections on the Holocaust

2009-08-02T11:18:00.000-07:00

In his latest book, Empire of Illusion, the Pulitzer prize-winning war correspondent, Chris Hedges, takes a hard look at America’s cuture wars as portrayed by the medium of reality television.

In one stomach-turning passage, he describes an episode of the Jerry Springer Show that Hedges sees as emblematic of the sadism and masochism, the slime and trash, that now typically inform America’s social ethos.

Springer has invited a grossly obese couple to be show-cased in an installment of his program dealing with secret sexual fantasies. The fat man tells his host and, by extension, the studio and television audience, that his long-held secret sexual fanatasy -- one that he wishes his fat wife would fulfil -- would be to get it on with a girly cheerleader.

Soon after, a girly cheerleader emerges from the wings and to the beat of raunchy music gets it on with the fantasist, performing the equivalent of a lap dance for his benefit. His wife who, it seems, is upset by this turn of events, suddenly leaves the stage.

However, in the next segment of the show it is the fat wife who makes her grand entrance attired in a cheerleader’s costume and to the beat of raunchy music performs a groteseque parody of the bump-and-grind of the let-it-all-hang-out “cheerleader” who got it on with her husband minutes before. It is exercise in self-abasement, self-degradation, on a Linda Lovelace scale.

Naturally, all of this unfolds to the raucous jeers and catcalls and hoots and whoops from the low-brow peanut gallery that are the hallmark, the identifying signature, of the Jerry Springer Show.

A decade ago Jerry Springer published his autobiograpical book, Ringmaster! The publisher was a reputable one: St. Martin's Press in New York; the same publisher that cravenly backed away from a contractual obligation to publish David Irving's Goebbels biography, after organized Jewry had applied its habitual thumbscrews.

The final excerpt in the last section of the book, entitled "Favorite Final Thoughts" -- just after "I Cut Off My Manhood!" and "I Married a Horse!" -- is reserved for Springer’s reflections on the Holocaust [“Final Thought: The Holocaust Show, pp. 247-248].

Here ol’ Mr S movingly shares with readers a slice of his family life. He tells of visiting his elderly father at his NYC apartment and of learning how the old man kept a car all primed in the basement parking garage, just in case he needed to make a fast getaway -- to evade capture by the Nazis. Springer picks up the story . . .

“Understand, he was a bright man. He'd been living here in America for almost forty years. Nazi Germany and storm troopers and the concentration camps and the loss of our family, it was almost a lifetime ago -- or so I thought. And how wrong I was. It suddenly hit me: the scars of a Holocaust are forever. Apparently, Dad never had a night where he didn't think it could all come back; he knew how fragile the character of civilization was.

“But here's the good news. The same species that gave us the slime of a Hitler and his Nazi cohorts also can give us the bravest and most decent humans who graced our show today. I hope our kids were watching. I want them to know that there is good in this world, that there are heroes and not all of them hit home runs -- some just open up their basements.”

The "banality of evil," anyone?

2009-08-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, veteran Canadian journalist Peter Worthington observed that "Stalin -- next to Mao Zedong [was] the cruellest and most ruthless tyrant of the 20th century." 1 Mao was far and away, certainly, the greatest mass murderer of the 20th Century. Or, was that Stalin?

Hitler? A distant third.

China’s supreme leader between 1949 and 1976, Chairman Mao was, say the husband and wife team of historians, Jon Halliday and Jung Chang, responsible for the death of 37,670,000 people. 2

After Mao’s death was announced, in a scene as banal as it was surreal, Canada’s prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, stood up in the House of Commons and paid homage to the late dictator, saying that he had been “good for his people.”

In 1990 -- stilll with the banality of evil -- in tandem with China, the arm of the government-run postal service, Canada Post, issued a commemorative stamp celebrating the life and work of Dr Norman Bethune, a socialist hero in the pantheon of Maoist Newspeak. It was but a year following the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing, ordered by China's Maoist heirs.

The casualties in Tiananmen Square, you may recall, reached into the thousands -- in the main, Beijing university students, all peacefully staging a collective hunger strike to protest a lack of democracy in China.

Dr Bethune had died in China in 1939, after a year and a half as a medical officer, serving with Chairman Mao’s communist army. That there were Canadian missionary doctors, who had spent decades working as physicians in China, has not received even a fraction of the publicity that attaches itself to Dr Bethune’s experience. The banality of goodness?

Throughout the 1930s, before his departure for China, Dr Bethune crisscrossed the country and delivered stirring speeches at a number of rallies, where the good doctor extolled Joe Stalin’s murderous, totalitarian regime for its democratic leanings.

Most recently, Canada’s former governor-general, Madame Adrienne Clarkson, has brought out a new bio in the Extraordinary Canadians series that has further burnished Norman Bethune’s image as the Horst Wessel of China's Maoist movement.

Afterthought: A combined total of Stalin’s and Mao’s victims would exceed twice Canada's present population of 34 million. It
in no way inhibits some elite opinion here from extolling Dr Bethune's heroic stature, notwithstanding his Stalinist and Maoist
affiliation.

1. Peter Worthington, "Time has blunted spy's vile betrayal," The Calgary Sun, 16 October 2005.

2. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story, Random House, 2005.

Professor Dershowitz: Air guitar moralist

2009-07-31T13:51:00.000-07:00

Reading Preemption, we find our hero, the somewhat compulsive trafficker in sanctimony, Professor Alan Dershowitz, wrestling with the age-old moral dilemma of whether (or not) the end justifies the means:

“The problem can be posed even more concretely in the context of the Holocaust. What if the Jewish underground had credibly believed that if by blowing up German kindergartens in Berlin, they could force the closure of the death camps--that the killing of a hundred innocent German children would save the lives of one million innocent Jewish children and adults? Would this be a morally permissible choice of evils?” 1

When David Ben-Gurion contemplated the peril confronting German Jews during the Nazi era, he came to the following conclusion:

“If I knew that it would be possible to save all the [Jewish] children in Germany by bringing them to over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these [Jewish] children, but also the history of the People of Israel.” 2

I think we may safely conclude that Israel’s first prime minister, were he to consider the “choice of evils” put forth by Professor Dershowitz, would be OK with the good that would result from the “killing of a hundred innocent German children.” Of course, Ben-Gurion would also have been OK with the “good” that would result from the killing of a hundred innocent Jewish children-- just so long as a second group of one hundred Jewish children was able to find safe passage to Israel.

1. Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways, W.W. Norton & Company: New York, 2006, pp. 222-223.

2. Yoav Gelber, Zionist Policy and the Fate of European Jewry (1939-1942), Yad Vashem Studies, Volume XII, p. 199.

Summer of '09

2009-07-31T08:31:00.000-07:00

The Holocaust is
a bikini dissolving
in pristine water . . .

French Humor: Robert Faurisson and Dieudonne

2009-07-30T19:52:00.000-07:00

Here is an English sub-titled video of French comic Dieudonne presenting Robert Faurisson with an honor for being insolent. It's quite something. An audience of some 5,000 cheering spectators. Just received this from Michele Renouf of Telling Films

The Holocaust Question -- Today!

2009-07-30T09:43:00.000-07:00

Here we are. It took a couple weeks longer than I expected, but here we are. This is the page where we will post on The Holocaust Question as it exists today, and tomorrow. Smith's personal blog remains where it was.