This blog moving on

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

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?

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

Elie Wiesel fails Holocaust lesson

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?

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

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.