Holocaust revisionism and market forces

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

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

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

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

[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

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

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.