CENSORSHIP PAGE I

      WHAT ARE "THEY" SO AFRAID OF?

           Go To Articles:

            The “Dangerous” David Irving by Joseph Sobran

          International Campaign for Real History Testimony of Kevin MacDonald in the Matter of David Irving vs. Deborah Lipstadt

             Behind An Eye for An Eye Revenge, Hate and History, by John Sack

            GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE: HOLOCAUST REVISIONISM AS A TEST CASE FOR FREE SPEECH AND THE SKEPTICAL ETHIC

           'Political Correctness' in Germany  The Social Danger of Stifling Free Expression

       World Wide Demonstrations against NPD Ban

       Censorship is on the rise. Is it coming to America?

        by Jared Taylor

Americans think of Europeans as essentially like themselves. They believe European societies are like their own-rooted in the rule of law, freedom of religion, democratic government, market competition, and an unfettered press. In recent years, however, Europeans have given up an essential liberty: freedom of speech. It is true that in the United States prevailing orthodoxies on some questions are ruthlessly enforced but it is still legal to say just about anything. Not so in much of Europe. In the last decade or so countries we think of as fellow democracies-France, Germany, Switzerland and others-have passed laws that limit free speech for the same crude ideological reasons that drove the brief, unsuccessful vogue of campus speech codes in the United States.

Today in Europe there are laws as bad as anything George Orwell could have imagined. In some countries courts have ruled that the facts are irrelevant, and that certain things must not be said whether they are true or false. In others, a defendant in court who tries to explain or defend a forbidden view will be charged on the spot with a fresh offense. Even his lawyer can be fined or go to jail for trying to mount a defense. In one case a judge ordered that a bookseller's entire stock-innocent as well as offending titles-be burned!

Just as Eastern Europe is emerging from it, Western Europe has entered the thought-crime era, in a return to the mentality that launched the Inquisition and the wars of religion. It is a tyranny of the left practiced by the very people who profess shock at the tactics of Joseph McCarthy, an exercise of raw power in the service of pure ideology. The desire not merely to debate one's opponents but to disgrace them, muzzle them, fine them, jail them is utterly contrary to the spirit of civilized discourse. It is profoundly disturbing to find this ugly sentiment codified into law in some of the countries we think of as pillars of Western Civilization. At the same time, these laws cannot help but draw attention to the very ideas they forbid. Truth does not generally require the help of censors.

There are two subjects about which Europeans can no longer speak freely. One is race and the other is Nazi Germany. "Anti-racism" laws generally take the form of forbidding the expression of opinions that might stir up "hatred" against any racial or ethnic group. In some countries, it is now risky to say that genetic differences explain why blacks have, on average, lower IQs than whites or to say that non-white immigration should be prevented so as to preserve a white majority. There are probably parts of every issue of American Renaissance that could be banned in some European country, and we have an obvious interest in opposing censorship of this kind.

Far more prosecutions have taken place, however, in connection with what is called "Holocaust revisionism" or "Holocaust denial." This appears to cover any skepticism about the generally-accepted view that the Nazis had a plan to exterminate Jews and managed to kill some six million, mostly by gassing. There is considerable variety in the laws that forbid disagreement on this matter (see sidebar, page 6), but the Jewish Holocaust has become the one historical event on which people in France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Holland, Poland, Austria, Lithuania (and Israel) can be legally compelled to agree. It is still legal to dissent from Holocaust orthodoxy in Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Britain, Ireland, and Croatia, but there is powerful pressure in some of these countries to join the censors. Third Reich Jewish polices are of no special interest to AR, but it is outrageous that any point of view on any question be forbidden.

In the United States there is widespread complacency over this blatant thought control practiced by our closest allies. This complacency proves the utter lack of integrity of those who make principled free-speech claims for Communists, pornographers, rap "artists," and flag-burners, but who will not lift a finger to stop the persecution of "racists" and "Nazis." Liberals get dewy-eyed over the First Amendment only when it suits them, and are quietly delighted to see their opponents dragged off to jail because of their opinions. Indeed, several thousand Europeans are arrested every year who, if they were leftists, would be lionized as "prisoners of conscience." Indifference, even joy, over their fate is the contemptible sentiment that prevails across the political spectrum even in America.

France has had perhaps the most colorful history of modern European censorship, perhaps because it has the longest history of Holocaust revisionism. The leftist Paul Rassinier cast doubt on accepted views as early as the 1950s, but it was in 1978 that revisionism came to the attention of a larger European public. In that and the following year Prof. Robert Faurisson of the University of Lyon published two articles in the newspaper Le Monde asserting that there were no execution gas chambers in the Nazi concentration camps. Mr. Faurisson, an expert at textual analysis who made his case from original documents, provoked a storm of opposition.

Nine anti-racist and concentration-camp survivor organizations brought civil and criminal suits against Prof. Faurisson for "falsification of history in the matter of the gas chambers," a curious charge brought under the French anti-racial-discrimination law of 1972. In April 1983, the Paris Court of Appeals found Prof. Faurisson innocent of "falsification of history" but found him guilty of the equally curious crime of "reducing his research to malevolent slogans," and made him pay a small fine. At the same time, the court upheld the right to express any opinion on the existence of Nazi gas chambers (presumably so long as it was not expressed "malevolently"), concluding that "the value of the conclusions defended by Faurisson rests therefore solely with the appraisal of experts, historians, and the public."

This was a setback to the suppressers of free speech, who responded with what is known as the Gayssot law-named for the Communist deputy who promoted it-signed into law in 1990 by President François Mitterand. This law made it a crime punishable by up to 250,000 French francs (at that time approximately $50,000) or one year in prison or both to dispute the truth of any of the "crimes against humanity" for which Nazi leaders were charged at the Nuremberg trials. Prof. Faurisson, who had continued to publish views on the Holocaust, was the first to be convicted under this law, and was fined 100,000 francs in April, 1991, a penalty reduced on appeal to 30,000 francs. He has not given up his work and has been repeatedly found guilty of the same crime. At last count, he has also been physically assaulted ten times and on at least one occasion was nearly killed.

Although the Gayssot law was controversial when it was passed, the French are now happy with it. According to a 1998 Sofres poll, 79 percent think it necessary "because one does not have the right to say anything one likes about the extermination of the Jews."

The extent of this sentiment explains why there were other convictions for Holocaust-related comments before passage of the 1990 Gayssot law. In 1987 the leader of the French National Front Jean-Marie Le Pen was fined under anti-racism laws, not for denying the existence of Nazi gas chambers but merely for describing them as a "detail" or "minor point" in the history of the Second World War. Astonishingly enough, not only must a Frenchman affirm a certain historical fact, he must attribute to it a certain prescribed importance.

Another French celebrity-turned-thought criminal is Brigitte Bardot, the former actress. In retirement she has become an ardent animal-rights activist and has often denounced the ritual slaughter of sheep by French Muslims during the festival that marks the end of the Ramadan fast. She has also spoken in more general terms, lamenting that "my country, France, my homeland, my land is again invaded by an overpopulation of foreigners, especially Muslims." Like Prof. Faurisson, she is impenitent and has been fined at least three times-in 1997, 1998 and 2000-under the 1972 anti-racism law. A judge concluded that Miss Bardot was guilty of inciting "discrimination, hatred or racial violence," and that her condemnation of Muslim practices went beyond any possible concern for animal rights.
There has been a host of other less-well-known Frenchmen convicted under the censorship laws. In May, 1999, the editor of a small-circulation magazine Akribeia was fined 10,000 francs ($2,000) and given a suspended six-month sentence for writing favorably about Paul Rassinier, the founder of French revisionism. At his arrest, police strip-searched Jean Plantin and confiscated his two computers and a dozen computer disks, destroying the results of several years' research. In September 2000, a 53-year-old French high school teacher in Lemberg in the Moselle region was fined 40,000 Francs ($8,000) and given a one-year suspended sentence for telling his students that the Third Reich gas chambers were used for delousing clothes and that the concentration camps were not extermination centers.

Censorship cases now get little attention in France unless there are unusual circumstances or the defendant is a celebrity. In July 2000, a local National Front politician in the Rhône-Alpes region, Georges Theil, was charged with "disputing the existence of crimes against humanity." In what he thought was a private e-mail exchange and using a screen name, he had written, "Homicidal gas chambers never existed for the simple reason that they were simply and profoundly impossible." Mr. Theil had not counted on the diligence of the French police, who tracked him down through his Internet service provider, Wanadoo, and hauled him into court where prosecutors asked for a six-month suspended sentence. Cases of this kind, which show how deeply the French police are willing to burrow into what people think are their private lives, have been completely ignored in the United States.

Two recent censorship trials that did receive international attention were "the Garaudy affair" and the successful attempt to shut down certain activities by the American Internet portal Yahoo. The Garaudy scandal is particularly instructive because it shows how willingly the left will sacrifice its own to the gods of Third Reich orthodoxy. Roger Garaudy was born in 1913, served in the French army, joined the war-time Resistance, and sat in the French National Assembly as a Communist, first as a deputy and later as a senator. For 25 years he was a major theoretician for the Communist Party, but broke with the comrades over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He continued to teach philosophy and promote anti-racism and socialism. He converted to Islam, and enjoyed great prestige as one of France's most influential public intellectuals.

Over the years he took an increasing interest in the Palestinian cause, and came to believe Jews were exaggerating the horrors of the Holocaust in order to squelch criticism of Israel. This and other views expressed in his 1995 book The Founding Myths of Modern Israel (published in English in 2000 by the California-based Institute for Historical Review) unleashed not only a flood of criticism but likewise brought the octogenarian into court for violation of the Gayssot law. Prof. Garaudy's impeccable credentials as a leftist and anti-racist were no defense. In February, 1998, he was duly fined the equivalent of $40,000 after a trial that caused a sensation in France and throughout the Islamic world. Probably no event has prompted more interest in Holocaust revisionism among Arabs than the trial of this French Muslim who defended Palestinians. Religious and political leaders from Egypt to Iran denounced France for putting him on trial, and the wife of the president of the United Arab Emirates contributed $50,000 to his defense. Egyptian Nobel laureate in literature Naguib Mahfouz wondered about the health of Western societies in which it is commonplace to deny God but a crime to doubt the Holocaust.

The affair took on yet another tragi-comic dimension when Abbé Pierre, one of the most popular and admired men in France, made a few offhand remarks in support of Prof. Garaudy. Abbé Pierre is a Capuchin friar whose real name is Henri Groulès. He came to be known as "the abbé" during his work with the French Resistance smuggling Jews out of occupied France. He has devoted his life to good works for the poor and for immigrants, and has a reputation something like that of Mother Theresa. He had become acquainted with Prof. Garaudy and shared his concern about Israel's treatment of Palestinians. After a few comments in favor of his old friend, he was horrified to discover that despite much backtracking and many apologies his reputation had vanished. He acknowledged he had not read the book, called on Prof. Garaudy to correct any errors, and disavowed any association with Holocaust denial. Even so, leftists whom he thought were life-long friends turned on him, kicking him out of the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism, a French anti-racist organization of which he had long been a member. Perhaps the cruelest blow was his expulsion from Emma-us, the charitable organization he himself had founded. Although not charged with violation of the Gayssot law, Abbé Pierre fled to Italy and hid in a monastery until the controversy blew over.

The French case against the American Internet giant Yahoo, which is a gateway to search engines, auctions, shopping and much else caused only a brief murmur of disapproval in the United States, but is an ominous first step in bringing the Internet under the control of European censorship laws. The same International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism of which the abbé used to be member-known by its French acronym LICRA-joined the French Union of Jewish Students in suing Yahoo to stop Internet auctions of Nazi medals, arm bands, photos, autographs and the like. France's anti-racism laws forbid commerce in anything "racially tinged," and the California-based Yahoo promptly removed these auctions from its French web site.

This was not enough for LICRA and the Jewish students, who insisted that Yahoo find a way to block French Internet users from reaching Yahoo sites in the U.S., where auctions continued. Yahoo said it was technologically impossible, and the court appointed a panel of three computer experts-American, British, and French-to render a ruling. Two of the experts said it could not be done, but Judge Jean-Jacques Gomez chose to believe the Frenchman, who said it could. In May 2000, he gave Yahoo two months to make it impossible for French Internet users to reach the Nazi auctions. He said he would fine the American company ----100,000 Francs (now $13,000) a day if it did not, since the sale of Nazi souvenirs offended "the collective memory of the nation." Judge Gomez also ordered Yahoo to pay 10,000 Francs to the plaintiffs LICRA and the Union of Jewish Students. A LICRA spokesman hailed the ruling as a great victory for democracy, of all things.

The next month Jerry Yang, a co-founder of Yahoo, said his company would ignore Judge Gomez' order. "Asking us to filter access to our sites according to the nationality of web surfers is very naïve," he said, adding, "we are not going to change the content of our sites in the United States because someone in France is asking us to do so." Six months later, in January 2001, Mr. Yang ate crow when Yahoo decided "voluntarily" to stop auctioning anything that bears a swastika or any other "hate" symbol such as a KKK insignia. "Yahoo recognizes that we were right," exulted LICRA, and Ygal El Harrar, chairman of the Jewish students, welcomed "the return to its senses by the American company." Incredibly, Yahoo claims daily fines had nothing to do with its decision. Noting that it already bans auctions of live animals, used underwear, and tobacco, it is pretending it is was only adjusting its list of forbidden products.

No one is fooled. Lee Dembart wrote in the International Herald Tribune on Jan. 15, 2001, that the precedent has now been set for any country to try to control the Internet all over the world. China could threaten to fine sites that promote the Falun Gong Buddhist cult, which is illegal in China. Arab countries could fine Internet sites that sell Jewish memorabilia, since such things no doubt offend their "collective memory." But by and large the American media have had nothing to say about what amounts to the imposition of French law on Americans. Needless to say, there would be a frenzy of denunciation if it were not "Nazis" who were being shoved off the net but, say, abortion-rights activists.

Switzerland

In the minds of Americans Switzerland is an orderly, sensible country of decent, independent-minded people. It is also perhaps the only country that has ever brought censorship upon itself through referendum. Over the weekend of Sept. 24 and 25, 1994, the Swiss voted by a majority of 54.7 to 45.3 percent to make it a crime, punishable by fine and/or up to three years imprisonment, to "publicly incite hatred or discrimination" or "deny, grossly minimize, or seek to justify genocide or other crimes against humanity." Half of all Swiss cantons voted against the new law but thanks to the overall majority, it went into effect Jan. 1, 1995.

Swiss authorities had not actually needed this law to censor foreigners. In November 1986, the Geneva police stopped two French Holocaust revisionists-Pierre Guillaume and Henri Roques-from giving a press conference and banned them from speaking publicly in Switzerland for three years.
The first Swiss citizen to fall afoul of the new law was Arthur Vogt, an 80-year-old retired school teacher. On June 3, 1997, a court in Meilen fined him 20,000 Swiss Francs ($15,000) for mailing copies of a revisionist book to seven acquaintances and for publishing a private newsletter in which he had written revisionist essays.

In December 1997, a court in Vevey sentenced Aldo Ferraglia, an Italian citizen, to four months in jail and court costs of 15,075 francs. He was also made to pay 28,000 francs in "atonement" to three Jewish organizations for having distributed a number of Holocaust revisionist books, including Roger Garaudy's The Founding Myths of Modern Israel. At the Ferraglia trial the judge defended the new law by explaining it did not forbid opinion, only the public expression of certain opinions-a distinction that may be a little too fine for Americans.

By June of last year, there had been no fewer than 200 trials and 100 sentences based on the 1995 law. As in France, such trials no longer attract much attention. Probably few Swiss heard about it when animal rights activist Erwin Kessler went to jail for two months for writing that Jews who practice ritual slaughter of cattle are no better than concentration-camp guards.

The press took only slightly more notice of Gaston-Armand Amaudruz whom a Lausanne court sentenced to a year in prison for articles he wrote in his monthly newsletter Courrier du Continent, which he started in 1946 and had only about 500 subscribers, mostly in France. Mr. Amaudruz holds a doctorate in social and political sciences and has been a teacher of French and German. These are the words for which the 79-year-old paid with a year in prison: "For my part, I maintain my position: I don't believe in the gas chambers. Let the exterminationists provide the proof and I will believe it. But as I've been waiting for this proof for decades, I don't believe I will see it soon." At sentencing, the judge criticized Mr. Amaudruz' lack of remorse and noted that he had continued to violate the law, writing "Long live revisionism" in the issue of the newsletter that appeared just before the trial.

Perhaps the most prominent Swiss to be found guilty under the censorship law is 49-year-old school teacher Jürgen Graf. In March, 1993, after the publication of his 112-page book, The Holocaust on the Test Stand, in which he cited reasons to doubt the accounts of extermination, he was fired from his job as a teacher of Latin and French at a private secondary school. The French banned the book in 1994. Before long Mr. Graf found himself in court, and in July, 1998, he was sentenced to 15 months in jail for various revisionist writings. Sentenced along with Mr. Graf was his 70-year-old publisher, Gerhard Förster, who got 12 months. The court fined both men 8,000 Swiss francs ($5,500) and ordered them to turn over 55,000 francs ($38,000) in proceeds from book sales. Presiding Judge Andrea Staubli said the defendants' "remarkable criminal energy" and lack of remorse justified harsh punishment.

Their defense counsel protested that he could not even try to explain the reasons for Mr. Graf's statements without, himself, being prosecuted under the same law. He also argued in vain that censorship law violated the free-speech provisions of the European Human Rights Convention which Switzerland has signed. Wolfgang Frölich, an engineer called to vouch for the authenticity of Mr. Graf's findings, found himself threatened with prosecution if he testified. Just as absurdly, the court included The Holocaust on the Test Stand in its reasons for finding Mr. Graf guilty even though he wrote it before the 1995 censorship law.

Mr. Graf decided to flee the country rather than spend 15 months in prison. In November 2000, he ended up in Iran, where he planned to stay for some time. He has been welcomed by scholars in Tehran, and was invited to give lectures at Iranian universities. Mr. Graf does not intend to return to Switzerland until the country restores the right of free speech. As we will see, he is not the only European to go into exile rather than face jail as a prisoner of conscience.

Germany

Since the end of the Second World War, beginning with de-Nazification, Germany has had censorship laws unthinkable in the United States. Nazi songs, salutes, and symbols are illegal even in private, and the country has been as aggressive as any in trying to expand the effects of its own repressive laws beyond its own borders. By now, thousands of people have fallen afoul of anti-Nazi, and "incitement to racial hatred" laws, which violate the German constitution's own guarantees of freedom of expression. Any number of quite remarkable cases of state-sponsored thought control have gone almost completely unreported in the United States.

Fredrick Toben was born in Germany in 1944 but emigrated with his parents to Australia when he was ten, and is an Australian citizen. He studied at Melbourne University and at universities in Heidelberg, Tübingen, and Stuttgart, and has a doctorate in philosophy. In 1994 he established the Adelaide Institute, in the Australian town of that name, to promote Holocaust revisionism. He sent some material to Germany, and was arrested in Mannheim in April 1999 during a visit. He was held without bail until his trial seven months later and was charged with "incitement to racial hatred," "insulting the memory of the dead," and "public denial of genocide." The court sentenced Dr. Toben to ten months in prison but let him off with a fine of 6,000 marks ($3,500) on the strength of time already spent in prison. As in Switzerland, it is impossible to mount a defense against these charges. Defendants and even lawyers who try to explain or justify their statements have been immediately charged with additional offenses right in the courtroom.

The prosecution tried to charge Mr. Toben on additional counts because of articles on his Australia-based Adelaide Institute web page ( www.adelaideinstitute.org ), but the court ruled that his only violation of German law was to have sent printed matter directly into Germany. Foreign Internet sites were not covered by the law even if Germans could read them. As Deputy Interior Minister Brigitte Zypries explained in July 2000, "That's life and that's the Internet . . . . You can't build a wall around Germany." Since the government could not use the most serious evidence against him, Dr. Toben got off lightly; the shortest previous sentence for his crimes had been two years, and the prosecution was asking for two years and four months.

However, in December 2000, in a very significant ruling that went virtually unnoticed in the United States, Germany's highest court, the Bundesgerichtshof, reversed the lower court. It said German law applies to any ideas or images Germans can reach from within Germany, so someone who posts a swastika on a web page anywhere in the world is a criminal under German law. Dr. Toben, whose case provided the high court with the basis of this ruling, could presumably be the subject of an extradition request. As we will see below, Dr. Toben faces problems enough back home in Australia.

One of the few Americans to notice and comment on this extension of German (and French) law to the Internet was Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. "We commend the German authorities for sticking to their commitment," he said; "it's their democracy, these are their laws." He went on to praise the French, too: "We have to commend the Germans and the French for basically saying 'In our societies, this is how we deal with the problems of hate, racism and Holocaust denial. You in America have your own laws, but at least respect our values.' " Perhaps Rabbi Cooper would be pleased to see European-style censorship in the United States.

The case of Germar Rudolf is likewise remarkable. Born in 1964, Mr. Rudolf graduated summa cum laude in chemistry from the University of Bonn and is a certified chemist. After serving in the German air force, he entered a Ph.D. program at the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Solid State Physics. While still at the institute he carried out a forensic physical examination of the gas chambers of Birkenau and concluded that for a variety of technical reasons they could not have been used for executions. In 1993 he published his findings in what is called The Rudolf Report, and was promptly dismissed from the Max Planck Institute. A court in Stuttgart ruled that the report "denies the systematic mass murder of the Jewish population in gas chambers" and was therefore "popular incitement," "incitement to racial hatred," and "defamation." The court rejected Mr. Rudolf's request for technical evidence about the truth or falsehood of his report, ruling that the "mass murder of the Jews" is "obvious."

Mr. Rudolf has continued to commit thought crimes, editing a compendium of revisionist articles called Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte [Foundations of Contemporary History]. In 1996 a court fined his publisher 30,000 marks ($18,000) and ordered all copies seized and burned. Police raided Mr. Rudolf's apartment three times, and in 1996 he was finally sentenced to 14 months in prison. Rather than serve time he fled to England, which has anti-racist laws but where Holocaust denial is not (yet) a crime. He is now director of Castle Hill Publishers, which issues revisionist works, and publishes a German-language revisionist quarterly. Jewish groups have brought pressure on the British government to enact laws to outlaw Holocaust denial so that Mr. Rudolf can either be prosecuted in England or extradited to Germany. Like Jürgen Graf of Switzerland, unless free speech is restored in his homeland, he will go to jail if he ever returns. Recently he moved to the United States and has applied for amnesty as a political refugee. It will be interesting to see how the INS, which has stretched "political persecution" to include wife-beating and making fun of homosexuals, will avoid granting him asylum.

One German defendant who did not flee the country was the elderly historian Udo Walendy, publisher of the "Historical Facts" series of booklets. In May, 1996, the district court of Bielefeld sent him to prison for 15 months, and a year later a court in Herford added 14 more months to his sentence. He was also fined 20,000 marks ($12,000) when 12 copies of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf were found in his possession. Judge Helmut Knöner of the Herford court took the curious position that Mr. Walendy was guilty not of a sin of commission but of omission:

"This [case] is not about what was written-that is not for this court to determine-but rather about what was not written. If you had devoted just a fraction of the same exactitude to highlighting the other side [of the Holocaust question], you would not have been sentenced."

Here we find the tortured reasoning to which censorship laws invariably give rise. To have failed to write about a particular historical event in a balanced manner is a crime that can send a historian to jail. In the court's view, this one-sided writing was "meant to disturb the public peace," not withstanding the "exactitude" of Mr. Walendy's work. Moreover, although Mr. Walendy has been a model prisoner he was denied the usual grant of release after serving two-thirds of his sentence. Authorities explained that this was because he was unlikely to change his views.

It is possible to argue that Austrian censorship laws have already claimed a life. In 1995, Werner Pfeifenberger, a German professor of political science published an essay called "Internationalism and Nationalism: a Never-Ending Mortal Enmity?" in a collection issued by Austria's Freedom Party (see AR, Dec. 1999, and March 2000). A prominent Jewish journalist attacked the essay, accusing Prof. Pfeifenberger of writing in a "neo-Nazi tone," and "extolling the national community." Because the professor had criticized the 1933 Jewish declaration of an international boycott of Germany, the journalist also accused him of reviving "the old Nazi legend of a Jewish world conspiracy."

The German state of North Rhine-Westphalia dismissed Prof. Pfeifenberger from his teaching position, and a court in Vienna prepared a case against him under Austrian anti-Nazi laws. On May 13, 2000, just a few weeks before the trail, Prof. Pfeifenberger took his own life. His lawyer explained that Prof. Pfeifenberger faced ten years in jail under the charges, did not expect a fair trial, and had already spoken of committing suicide. As in Germany and Switzerland, Austrian law does not permit a defendant to argue the veracity of his statements; offensive "tone" or "diction" is sufficient to secure conviction.

United States citizens have fallen afoul of German censorship laws-without the slightest gesture of support from their own government. Hans Schmidt of Pensacola, Florida, runs the German-American National Public Affairs Committee, which publishes a newsletter. Mr. Schmidt, who fought in the German army, moved to the United States after the war and became a U.S. citizen. In 1995, on a trip to Germany to visit family members, German authorities arrested him for having sent some of his newsletters to Germany. They held him in jail for five months but released him in conjunction with the first part of his trial. Mr. Schmidt, who could have been sentenced to five years in prison, slipped out of the country rather than stay for the rest of his trial.

Another American, Gary Lauck of Lincoln, Nebraska, was not so lucky. Known as "the farm-belt Führer," Mr. Lauck is an unapologetic supporter of Nazism, and has shipped a considerable quantity of Nazi material to Germany. In March, 1995, he was visiting Denmark, a country that does not have anti-Nazi laws, but in an operation of questionable legality, the Danes extradited him to Germany. In August, 1996, a Hamburg court convicted him of inciting racial hatred and distributing illegal materials-which he did legally in the United States and not in Germany-and sentenced him to four years in jail. He served his sentence and returned to the United States, where he continues to promote Nazism.

At almost the same time Mr. Lauck was on trial in Germany, the American citizen Harry Wu-a fervent critic of China-slipped into China illegally on a mission of support for dissidents and was arrested. The U.S. State Department mounted an extraordinary effort to secure his release, but completely ignored Germany's prosecution of Mr. Lauck.

Another curious case involving the United States is that of a young German musician Hendrik Möbus. Mr. Möbus said provocative things about Jews, gave the Nazi salute during a concert, and later turned up in the United States. In a little-known incident in the summer of 2000, federal officers arrested Mr. Möbus with the intention of extraditing him to Germany, even though his offenses were not crimes in the United States. Apparently thinking better of this unjustifiable proceeding, the government released Mr. Möbus, who promptly turned the tables by suing for political asylum. With the help of William Pierce of the West Virginia-based National Alliance, Mr. Möbus has hired immigration lawyers to argue his case on the grounds that he will be persecuted for his political beliefs if he returns to Germany.

One of the common difficulties for applicants for asylum is that they must prove they face a realistic threat of persecution. In Mr. Möbus' case, the German authorities have already issued an extradition request in which they openly state they want to send him to jail. Once again, it will be interesting to see how the INS responds.

Neo-Nazi music is increasingly popular in Germany, and bands play a constant cat-and-mouse game with the police. Most make their recordings in secret studios or across the border in Poland, and the recordings are then pressed in the United States. The CDs come back to Europe via Sweden, where the material is not illegal. Mere possession is a crime in Germany, but the authorities estimate there are more than 100 neo-Nazi bands operating clandestinely.

Some repressive measures fall short of imprisonment. In August, 2000, the German postal bank, which is part of the government-owned post office, systematically shut down all accounts used by any group it considered "far-right." These included Germany's two main nationalist parties, the German Peoples' Union (DVU) and the National Democratic Party (NPD). Postbank chairman Wulf von Schimmelmann explained that the measure was "a contribution to political hygiene and cementing of democracy in Germany."

Thought-control can take a comical turn. In August, 2000, Dresden police ordered a 25-year-old man to get a haircut because he had shaved the back of his head leaving only the letters "SS," in the distinctive angular script used by the Nazis.

Mein Kampf has been banned in Germany for years, and German companies have been quietly enforcing the ban overseas as well. Publishing giant Bertelsmann polices its US-based website bookstore for titles forbidden in Germany, and is trying to do the same with Barnesandnoble.com, of which it owns 40 percent. Mein Kampf is banned in several other countries, including Holland and the Czech Republic, where distributors were recently fined. There is considerable irony in suppressing Hitler's turgid autobiography. For years it was common to say that if only people had read it in the 1930s they would have stopped Hitler in his tracks. Now we must presumably be kept from reading it for fear we will follow its advice.

Other Countries

Until 1995, Spain was a popular refuge for dissidents facing prosecution elsewhere in Europe but in that year it passed new laws putting it firmly in the camp of the censors. The first conviction came in November, 1998, when bookseller Pedro Varela was sentenced to five years in jail for "incitement to racial hatred" and "denying or justifying genocide." His case began in December, 1996, when police raided his Librería Europa bookstore in Barcelona and confiscated 20,000 volumes. Nearly two years went by before he went to trial because many of the books were in English, French, or German, and the court insisted that they be translated into Spanish. In addition to the five-year prison term, the court fined him 720,000 pesetas ($5,000) and ordered all 20,000 books burned-even though only 30 of some 200 titles were found to violate the law.

In December 1998, Mr. Varela appealed the sentence to the provincial court or Audencia of Catalonia, which ruled unanimously in April 1999 that the censorship law violates guarantees of free expression in the Spanish constitution. The case will now go before the Constitutional Tribunal in Madrid. In the meantime, Mr. Varela's 20,000 volumes have not yet been burned, but he has not gotten them back either. He restocked his store and continued to operate, but in January 1999, a mob of "anti-fascists" smashed through the protective metal shutters of his shop, ransacked it, and burned hundreds of books. Police arrived but did nothing. Mr. Varela rebuilt his store and continues to sell books.

In Britain, despite campaign promises from Tony Blair that Labour would ban Holocaust denial, in early 2000 Parliament resisted pressure from Jewish groups to do so. Home Office Minister Mike O'Brien explained that the government was unable to "strike a balance between outlawing such offensive statements while ensuring that freedom of speech is not unduly restricted." Since 1986 the Public Order Act has made incitement to racial hatred an offense, but Jewish groups argued this law was inadequate because prosecutors have been unable to show that Holocaust denial incites hatred. This is not to say that these laws have never been used. Although enforcement is sporadic, a few racial nationalists have been convicted.

Originally prosecutors had to prove a defendant intended to stir up hatred, but that was difficult. Later the laws were broadened to permit conviction if hatred was stirred up whatever the intent, but that was also hard to prove. Now, it is sufficient to show a "likelihood" that some act will incite racial hatred, and it was on this basis that Spearhead editor John Tyndall and British Nationalist editor John Morse were tried together and convicted by a single jury in 1986. The prosecution's tactic was to read page after page of "offensive" material in court and the cumulative effect seems to have convinced the jury what they wrote was "likely" to incite hatred. The judge decided the crime deserved six months in jail. Mr. Tyndall, who after serving his sentence returned to editing Spearhead, despises incitement laws but believes they have the beneficial effect of keeping racial nationalists from using intemperate-and ultimately unpersuasive-language.

Nick Griffin, now head of the British National Party, received a suspended sentence after a similar conviction in 1998. He also edited a magazine, which discussed Holocaust revisionism and opposed non-white immigration to Britain. In his case as well, there seems to have been no clear line between acceptable and unacceptable opinions; his magazine apparently created an overall atmosphere that was "likely" to incite hatred.

Some British anti-racism measures approach outright insanity. As reported in the July 2000 issue of AR, a recently-passed law forbidding "racially threatening or abusive words" was recently invoked against a Cambridge man who got into a whispered argument in a library. A woman overheard Robert Birchall tell Kenyan-born Mugai Mbaya to "go back to your own country," and reported him to police. Mr. Birchall was fined 100 pounds. In the city of Gloucester police officers are reported to have been sent to eat in ethnic restaurants and listen in on the conversations of other patrons so they can charge them with crimes if they say rude things about other races.

Perhaps even more than to Europeans, Americans feel kin to Canadians and perhaps Australians-fellow English-speakers who have established themselves far from the homeland. But here, too, traditions of free speech have crumbled under the pressure of special-interest groups. In October 2000, the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission ordered Frederick Toben-back from prison in Germany-to remove Holocaust revisionist material from the web page of the Adelaide Institute. Commissioner Kathleen McEvoy said Mr. Toben violated the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act by "having published materials inciting hatred against the Jewish people." She also ordered Mr. Toben to post a lengthy apology. Mr. Toben refused, saying he would not apologize for material he believed to be factual and that any proceeding against him was immoral if truth was not permitted as a defense. The government-funded commission has no enforcement powers, but could initiate proceedings to have Mr. Toben jailed for contempt.

In Tasmania, the commission has also accused an associate of the Adelaide Institute, 58-year-old Olga Scully, of selling anti-Jewish material and putting it in mailboxes. She also refused to apologize, and the commission announced plans to take her to court. The Russian-born grandmother says she is not intimidated and is "quite prepared" to go to prison.

It will be a surprise to many Americans to know that our next-door-neighbor Canada now has a nearly 20-year tradition of censorship. In 1981 a well-liked secondary school teacher and mayor in Lacombe County, Alberta, named Jim Keegstra was reported to be telling his social studies students that Jews run the world. The school board fired him-which it no doubt had the right to do-but Canadian authorities also charged him with violating section 281 of the criminal code, which prohibits spreading hate against an identifiable group. Mr. Keegstra remained unrepentant during a ten-year legal battle that took him to the Canadian Supreme Court, which upheld his conviction.

The most famous Canadian thought criminal is undoubtedly Ernst Zundel, a German who immigrated to Canada in 1958 and established himself as a commercial artist. Since the mid-1970s he has published and publicized Holocaust revisionist materials, and in 1983 he was charged under section 181 of the criminal code, which prohibits spreading "false news" that the purveyor knows to be false.

His case became something of a cause célèbre, and the trial dragged on for eight weeks before reaching a conviction. Mr. Zundel filed numerous appeals and in 1992 the Supreme Court ruled the law under which he was convicted unconstitutional because it was "an unjustifiable limit on the right and freedom of expression."

Mr. Zundel was not out of court for long. At the urging of Jewish groups, he was brought before the Canadian Human Rights Commission in what must be one of the most Kafkaesque censorship proceedings of modern times. There is a section of the Canadian criminal code written to outlaw telephone answering machines with "hate messages." It makes it illegal "to communicate telephonically" "any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred [for reasons of race, ethnicity, etc.]." In a tortured interpretation of this law, Mr. Zundel was charged on the basis of a web page that contains Holocaust materials by him and by others. Although the site is commonly known as the Zundelsite, it is based in the United States and run by an American.

Ironically, the Human Rights Commission has been asked to find Mr. Zundel guilty because he is associated with a foreign web page that publishes articles that, in print form, have been found to be legal in Canada. Indeed, the first and lengthiest of the pamphlets cited in the charge is the very one cited in the previous case that was thrown out by the Canadian Supreme Court! What is more, this case has dragged on for an astonishing five years. At the same time, the chairman of the Human Rights Tribunal has conceded that "the truth is not an issue before us. . . . The sole issue is whether such communications are likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt." Mr. Zundel, who has spent an estimated $140,000 on the case, recently gave up even trying to defend himself, saying "I would rather save my money and appeal their grotesque ruling when it comes out." Amazingly, the case continues to drag on without him, with final arguments expected in late February.

Yet another prominent censorship victim has been Doug Collins and the newspaper that used to publish him, the North Shore News. In February 1999, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal found Mr. Collins guilty of acts "likely to expose Jews to hatred or contempt." Found criminal were four columns he wrote in 1994. Interestingly, the tribunal decided that taken individually none of the columns was a criminal act, but taken together they were. The tribunal ordered Mr. Collins and the North Shore News to desist from further incitement to hatred, and to pay $2,000 to a Jewish man who had brought the charges, as compensation for injury to his dignity and self-respect. It also ordered the paper to publish the judgment in full, which was perhaps the first time the government ever forced a Canadian newspaper to print something against its will. Mr. Collins now publishes on the Internet.

Canadian authorities have been very unpredictable in their enforcement of laws against "incitement of hatred." They have never been bothered by the lyrics of black rap "musicians" who openly urge blacks to kill whites, but it has taken a very close look at academic studies of racial differences. Canadian customs authorities have seized many shipments of books from the United States including Race, Evolution and Behavior, by Philippe Rushton (reviewed in AR, Dec. 1994). Prof. Rushton, who teaches psychology at the University of Western Ontario, has been himself investigated for inciting hatred and nearly lost his job because of his carefully-researched studies of racial differences. Other books Canadian customs have held at the border include Shockley on Eugenics and Race (reviewed in AR, Jan. 1993), Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe by Roger Pearson, The Dispossessed Majority by Wilmot Robertson, and The Immigration Invasion by Wayne Lutton and John Tanton.

The United States does not have censorship laws but we are creeping in that direction. Hate crime laws are an ominous step, because they add penalties to crimes based on motive. Until the passage of hate crime laws sentencing did not depend on the motive of a crime but whether it was premeditated or spontaneous. You could punch a man because he was fat, black, insulted you, or seduced your wife, and you were guilty of assault. Now, certain motives-that is to say certain thoughts-bring heavier penalties. In February of this year, a Houston, Texas, judge sentenced 21-year-old Matthew Marshall to no fewer than ten years in jail for burning a cross in front of a black family's house. People who commit gruesome violent crimes often get less jail time.

We have also had a few cases of censorship almost as absurd as those that have begun to crop up in England. In August, 1998, Janis Barton was leaving a restaurant in Manistee, Michigan, and walked by another group waiting to be seated. Those in the other group spoke to each other in Spanish, and Mrs. Barton said, out loud, "I wish damn Spics would learn to speak English." One of the Spanish-speakers filed a complaint and Mrs. Barton was charged with the crime of committing "insulting conduct in a public place," on the grounds that what she said were "fighting words" that could provoke violence. A jury bought that argument and the judge sentenced Mrs. Barton to 45 days in jail (she served only a few days). This is an odd case that may not be repeated, but it clearly shows the direction in which hypersensitivity to the feelings of non-whites is taking us.

Another worrying step towards censorship is a law passed just last December 15, which requires all libraries receiving federal money to use content filters on computers connected to the Internet. The idea is to protect people from pornography, violence and "hate speech," but the makers of filtering software invariably give it a leftist slant. The federal government is using the power of the purse to restrict access to certain views and information.

What These Laws Mean

The full-blown, unabashed censorship laws in Europe and Canada are a giant step backwards in the history of Western Civilization. It was perhaps one of the most significant conceptual breakthroughs in human thought to recognize that the social cost of suppressing "error" is far greater than the damage unchecked "error" can do when men are free to refute it. It is cause for great sadness that our European brethren have stepped back into the mentality of the witch hunt, forcing their citizens into exile and making them prisoners of conscience.

Indeed, it is in the defense of prisoners of conscience that Amnesty International (AI) made a name for itself, and cases like those described here would appear to be tailor-made for them. According to their own publications, prisoners of conscience are "people who are imprisoned, detained or otherwise physically restricted anywhere because of their beliefs, color, sex, ethnic origin, language or religion, provided they have not used or advocated violence." Every person mentioned in this article and thousands more have been charged with crimes because of the non-violent expression of beliefs. AI goes on to say that "all people have the right to express their convictions and the obligation to extend that freedom to others" and that "Amnesty International seeks the immediate and unconditional release of all prisoners of conscience."

A number of people have appealed to AI to intervene on behalf of imprisoned Holocaust revisionists but AI refuses. In 1995 it affirmed "Amnesty International's intention to exclude from prisoner of conscience status those who advocate the denial of the Holocaust . . . ." They took this step on the grounds that dissent from accepted views on the Holocaust means one has "advocated national, racial, or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence." What this means is that AI does not consider someone a prisoner of conscience unless it agrees with him.

It is probably true that some of the people charged under incitement laws really do want to stir up hatred-something that however reprehensible is legal in the United States and should be legal everywhere-but there is no evidence whatever that this is the motive of people like Robert Faurisson, Fredrick Toben, Pedro Varela or Germar Rudolf. It is the people who oppose their work who appear to be driven by hatred. Furthermore, as British prosecutors have found, it is unclear just how disputing the existence of gas chambers or the number of Nazi victims incites hatred against anyone. People are not suddenly going to start hating Jews just because a pamphlet convinces them the Nazis killed only one million rather than six million.

It would be more plausible to say that anyone who harps on slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation is inciting hatred against whites, or that anyone who describes the way Indians mutilated the bodies of Custer's men at Little Big Horn is stirring up hatred against Indians. If you scoff at the miracles in the Bible are you inciting hatred against Christians? If not, why not? After all, neither the truth of the statements nor the intent of the speaker matters. Laws of this kind cry out for abuse and invidious application.

Obviously of concern to American Renaissance is the possibility that any description of race or sex differences could be considered incitement to hatred. What if the French and the Germans decide discussions of race and IQ are hate-mongering? This is actually more logical than saying skepticism about gas chambers makes people hate Jews. Will AR be banned in Europe? Will people who write for AR be arrested if they go to Europe?

Laws about inciting hatred are really very simple: If you hurt the feelings of certain people you can be charged with a crime. So far, the people about whose feelings one must be most careful are Jews. Pressure from Jewish organizations has turned what may have been intended as universal prohibitions into prohibition of opinions that upset Jews.

Laws of the French, German, and Austrian type that specifically prohibit Holocaust denial likewise reflect the pressure of Jewish organizations. There is only one historical event in all of human history-an event of particular interest to Jews-about which the law forbids dissent. Legally requiring acceptance of a historical event is an absurdity on its face, but why just this one? In January 2000, the French National Assembly voted officially to recognize the Turkish "genocide" of Armenians during the First World War. There are many people who strongly dispute the number and circumstances of these deaths; Turkey angrily withdrew its ambassador after the vote. No doubt there will be vigorous "genocide denial," "whitewashing of crimes against humanity," and "insulting the memory of the dead." Why will this not be a crime in France? One can only conclude that it is because Armenians have less influence than Jews.

But the real shame is how few people, either in Europe or the United States, are willing to oppose this clampdown on freedom. The left loves to quote lines attributed to Martin Niemoller (1892-1984), the German Lutheran minister interned by the Nazis:

"First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me."

The message, of course, is that we must be vigilant against wrongs done even to people with whom we may disagree, because if we do not resist evil we may some day be its victims. European censorship laws are precisely the kind of creeping evil Niemoller warned against, but the left ignores them because it has no principles and the right ignores them because it has no spine. Censorship is therefore on the march in Europe and licking at our own borders. We have entered a new Dark Age.

The laws under which Europeans, Canadians and perhaps now Australians can be prosecuted for thought crimes are of several kinds. The first includes the French Gayssot law, which, though amazing, clearly says what it means: No one is to dispute the genocide or other crimes against humanity for which the Nazi leaders were put on trial at Nuremberg after the war. There is no ambiguity about this. Anyone who says the Nazis did not have an extermination program is a criminal.

Laws that forbid "incitement of hatred" are much more ambiguous. These laws are particularly frightening because there is no way to know what they mean. Presumably, if it is against the law to "incite hatred" there should be no conviction unless it is proven that something caused hatred. The prosecution should produce someone who, having read the offending work or heard the offending speech or seen the offending picture or symbol, became a hater. None of the censorship laws requires this. Courts have decided without the slightest evidence that anyone who takes a position on certain questions-even if all he does is deliver this view to subscribers who have paid to receive it-is "inciting hate." The other breath-taking aspect of these laws is that intent does not matter either. It makes no difference if someone sincerely believes he is uncovering the truth; if what he says can be construed as likely to incite hate, he can end up in behind bars.

Finally, there are laws that have no clear meaning at all. What does it mean to "glorify National Socialism" or "insult the dead" or "whitewash the crimes of the Nazis"? Crimes that depend on wording as vague as this-and there have been plenty of convictions under them-are close kin to Communist laws that forbade "anti-Soviet behavior" or "parasitism." These were justly decried in the West, but there is almost complete silence about anti-Nazi laws. In the United States vague prohibitions of this kind are clearly unconstitutional.
Another astonishing aspect of these laws is that truth is not a defense. Once again, in the United States, the law is clear: Truth is an absolute protection for anyone charged with making hurtful, damaging, or embarrassing statements about anyone or anything. In the American colonies this tradition dates back to the famous John Peter Zenger trial of 1735. Zenger, publisher of the New York Weekly Journal, was charged by British authorities with publishing articles "tending to raise seditions and tumults among the people of this province, and to fill their minds with contempt for his majesty's government." Zenger was arrested, jailed, and tried. Jurors, however, were persuaded that "truth ought to govern the whole affair of libels," and in concluding that what Zenger had written was true, both set Zenger free and, in effect, rewrote the law.

To many people, it seems preposterous that anyone who disputes gassings at Auschwitz or doubts Germany's extermination program could appeal to the truth as a defense. However, in cases of this kind facts are of so little importance that there have been convictions for statements that appear to be almost certainly true. British historian David Irving, who in 2000 lost a celebrated libel case against an anti-revisionist author, was fined $30,000 by a German court for telling a German audience that the Auschwitz gas chamber is a post-war reconstruction. Even the Polish curator at Auschwitz has conceded it is a fake, but Mr. Irving is a criminal and the curator is not. A different German court is seeking Mr. Irving's extradition for having said the same thing to a different German audience.

James Alexander, one of the lawyers who defended John Peter Zenger, would have been appalled. "Freedom of speech," he wrote after the trial, "is a principal pillar in a free government: when this support is taken away, the constitution is dissolved and tyranny erected on its ruins."

Reproduced From:  American Renaissance

Reproduced From:  Sobran's The Real News Of The Month  Web Site

International Campaign for Real History Testimony of Kevin MacDonald in the Matter of David Irving vs. Deborah Lipstadt

NAME AND AFFILIATION: Kevin MacDonald, Professor of Psychology at California State University-Long Beach, Long Beach, CA 90840-0901 USA

ACADEMIC BACKGROUND: I have a Ph. D. in Biobehavioral Sciences from the University of Connecticut. I have published six books (including two edited books) and over 30 academic papers in the area of evolutionary approaches to human behavior, particularly in the field of evolutionary psychology and the application of evolutionary psychology to understanding ethnic conflict in history (e.g., Social and Personality Development: An Evolutionary Synthesis. New York: Plenum, 1988). I am editor of the journal Population and Environment, published by Human Sciences Press, a division of Kluwer Academic Publishers. This journal deals with issues related to the interface between environmental issues and human population, including issues of ethnic conflict. I am also Secretary/Archivist and member of the Executive Board of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, the main academic organisation dealing with the application of evolutionary biology to the study of human affairs.

RELEVANT PUBLICATIONS: Since the early 1980s I undertook to extend the evolutionary paradigm to the study of broad social phenomena such as group strategies in Ancient Greece and socially imposed monogamy in ancient Rome and in Europe beginning in the Middle Ages. This led to the study of the Catholic Church as a major institution of social control, and to the study of Judaism as a religious group strategy. The Judaism project has resulted in three books:

KEVIN MACDONALD: A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994; 302 pp.) delineates key aspects of Judaism within an evolutionary theory of groups. The basic proposal is that Judaism can be interpreted as a set of ideological structures and behaviours that have resulted in the following features: (1) the segregation of the Jewish gene pool from surrounding gentile societies; (2) resource and reproductive competition with gentile host societies; (3) high levels of within-group co-operation and altruism among Jews; and (4) eugenic efforts directed at producing high intelligence, high investment parenting, and commitment to group, rather than individual, goals. KEVIN MACDONALD: Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998; 325 pp.) develops an evolutionary theory of anti-Semitism. The basic thesis is that Judaism must be conceptualised as a group strategy characterised by cultural and genetic segregation from gentile societies combined with resource competition and conflicts of interest with segments of gentile societies. This cultural and genetic separatism combined with resource competition and other conflicts of interest tend to result in division and hatred within the society. A major theme of this volume is that intellectual defences of Judaism and of Jewish theories of anti-Semitism have throughout its history played a critical role in maintaining Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. The book discusses tactics Jewish groups have used over the centuries to combat anti-Semitism. Particularly important are discussions of Jewish self-interest, deception, and self-deception in the areas of Jewish historiography, Jewish personal identity, and Jewish conceptualisations of their in-group and its relations with outgrips. KEVIN MACDONALD: The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998; 376 pp.) Ethnic conflict is a recurrent theme throughout the first two volumes, and that theme again takes centre stage in this work. However, whereas in the previous works ethnic conflict consisted mainly of recounting the oftentimes bloody dynamics of Jewish-gentile conflict over the broad expanse of historical time, the focus here shifts to a single century and to several very influential intellectual and political movements that have been spearheaded by people who strongly identified as Jews and who viewed their involvement in these movements as serving Jewish interests. Individual chapters discuss the Basin school of anthropology, psychoanalysis, leftist political ideology and behavior, the Frankfurt School of Social Research, and the New York Intellectuals. An important thesis is that all of these movements may be seen as attempts to alter Western societies in a manner that would end anti-Semitism and provide for Jewish group continuity either in an overt or in a seem-cryptic manner.

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TRIAL TESTIMONY: DAVID IRVING IN THE CONTEXT OF JEWISH

INTELLECTUAL AND POLITICAL ACTIVISM

I am not a historian. Although the history of Judaism is important to my work, I can offer no expert opinion on the work of David Irving except to the extent that I have noted that his work has been favourably reviewed by a considerable number of academic experts on World War II, including Gordon Craig, A.J.P. Taylor, and Hugh Trevor-Roper

I believe that my background as an evolutionary psychologist and my research into Jewish-gentile relations equips me to describe to the court some competitive features of those relations. Anti-Jewish tactics are widely known, and it is widely accepted that active anti-Semites have and still do exist. But competitive behavior on the part of Jewish organisations is not as widely known. In my research I have reviewed the writings and activities of both Jews and their opponents, and I think I can help place the actions of Dr. Lipstadt and some Jewish organisations against Mr. Irving into a wider context.

The main point of my testimony is that the attacks made on David Irving by Deborah Lipstadt and Jewish organisations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) should be viewed in the long-term context of Jewish-gentile interactions. As indicated by the summaries of my books, my training as an evolutionist as well as the evidence compiled by historians leads me to conceptualise Judaism as self-interested groups whose interests often conflict with segments of the gentile community. Anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior have been a pervasive feature of the Jewish experience since the beginnings of the Diaspora well over 2000 years ago. While anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior have undoubtedly often been coloured by myths and fantasies about Jews, there is a great deal of anti-Jewish writing that reflects the reality of between-group competition as expected by an evolutionist. Particularly important have been the themes of separatism:

(1) Jewish groups have typically existed as recognisably distinct groups and have been unwilling to assimilate either culturally or via marriage; (2) the theme of economic, political, and cultural domination;

(3) the theme of disloyalty.

Because anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior have been such a common response to Jews as a Diaspora group, Jewish groups have developed a wide variety of strategies to cope with their enemies. Separation and Its Discontents discusses a great many of these strategies, including a very long history of apologia dating to the ancient world. In the last century there have been a great many intellectual activities, most notably many examples of Jewish historiography which present Jews and Judaism in a positive light and their enemies in a negative light, often with little regard for historical accuracy. Most importantly for the situation of David Irving, Jewish groups have engaged in a wide range of political activities to further their interests. In general, Jews have been active agents rather than passive martyrs; they have been highly flexible strategizers in the political arena. The effectiveness of Jewish strategizing has been facilitated by several key features of Judaism as group evolutionary strategy-particularly that the IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is at least one standard deviation above the Caucasian mean. In all historical eras, Jews as a group have been highly organised, highly intelligent, and politically astute, and they have been able to command a high level of financial, political, and intellectual resources in pursuing their group goals. For example, Jews engaged in a very wide range of activities to combat anti-Semitism in Germany in the period from 1870 to 1914, including the formation of self-defence committees, lobbying the government, utilising and influencing the legal system (e.g., taking advantage of libel and slander laws to force anti-Jewish organisations into bankruptcy), writing apologias and tracts for distribution to the masses of gentile Germans, and funding organisations opposed to anti-Semitism composed mainly of sympathetic gentiles. Jewish organisations commissioned writings in opposition to "scientific anti-Semitism," as exemplified by academically respectable publications that portrayed Judaism in negative terms. Academic works were monitored for such material, and Jewish organisations sometimes succeeded in banning offending books and getting publishers to alter offensive passages. The result was to render such ideas academically and intellectually disreputable (Levy, 1975; Raging, 1980).

Jewish organisations have used their power to make the discussion of Jewish interests off limits. Individuals who have made remarks critical of Jews have been forced to make public apologies and suffered professional difficulties as a result. Quite often the opinions in question are quite reasonable-statements that are empirically verifiable and the sort of thing that might be said about other groups or members of other groups.

The main point of my testimony is to discuss Mr. Irving's difficulties which he argues have been brought about by Jewish organisations and with the defendant, Deborah Lipstadt who has contributed to the effort to ban Mr. Irving from publishing his work with reputable publishers. This is a major part of Irving's complaint. As evidence I call your attention to Lipstadt's comments in The Washington Post of April 3, 1996 in which she is quoted as stating that "In the Passover Hagadah, it says in every generation there are those who rise up to destroy us. David Irving is not physically destroying us, but is trying to destroy the memory of those who have already perished at the hands of tyrants." "They say they don't publish reputations, they publish books. . . . But would they publish a book by Jeffrey Dahmer on man-boy relationships? Of course the reputation of the author counts. And no legitimate historian takes David Irving's work seriously."

These comments were made in reaction to the St. Martin's Press rescinding publication of Irving's book, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, and were clearly intended to support that decision. The decision to sue Lipstadt came only after St. Martin's Press had rescinded publication of the book, and only after Lipstadt's public support for that decision (see Guttenplan (2000, 53).

Moreover, as the plaintiff has noted in his statement, the intense pressure brought to bear by certain Jewish groups on Mr. Irving goes far beyond preventing publishers from publishing his work. Mr. Irving has been prevented from travelling to certain countries, his speaking engagements have been disrupted and cancelled, his contracts with other publishers have been voided, and he has been subjected to physical intimidation.

While David Irving has to my knowledge been a target of these organisations far more than any other author, Jewish organisations in the U. S., and particularly the ADL have also attempted to censor books critical of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. These books include Paul Findley's They Dare to Speak Out (Wilcox, 1996, 82) dealing with the activities of the pro-Israel lobby in the U. S., Victor Ostrovsky's By Way of Deception which deals with Israeli intelligence operations, including recruitment of Jews in foreign lands to act as spies for Israel, and Assault on the Liberty by James Ennes on the role of Israel in the attack on the USS Liberty during the 1967 war (recounted in They Dare to Speak Out by Paul Findley). For example, an ADL official claimed that Findley's book "is a work of Holocaust revisionism seeking to spread the claim that the Nazi slaughter of Jews was a hoax" although it made no such claim (Wilcox, 1996, 82). The ADL is also actively engaged in attempting to censor the Internet (Boston Globe, 3/25/99). Moreover, the ADL has flouted the law by engaging in "espionage, disinformation and destabilisation operations, not only against neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen, but against leftist and progressive groups as well" (Laird Wilcox; Crying Wolf: Hate Crime Hoaxes in America, 1996, 7). These activities include illegal penetration of confidential police files in San Francisco and elsewhere. This story broke in early 1993.

Another example of behavior by Jewish organisations that tends to chill free expression involved the Canadian teacher Luba Fedorkiw. Running for the Canadian Parliament in 1984, she "discovered to her utter amazement that B'nai B'rith Canada . . . had circulated an internal memo which accused her of 'Jew-baiting!' " (Wilcox, 1996, 81-82). The allegation was repeated in the Winnipeg Sun along with the assertion that she was being investigated by B'nai B'rith on suspicion of anti-Semitism. The resulting defamation cost her the election to David Orlikow and subjected her to malicious harassment. According to Ms. Fedorkiw, when the investigation was publicised, she received obscene and harassing telephone calls, a swastika was spray-painted on her campaign office and a number of her political supporters withdrew their support. She sued for libel and won a $400,000 judgement on the basis that it was false that she had said that her opponent was "controlled by the Jews."

In my book, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Analysis of Anti-Semitism I discuss several other examples of Jewish activism aimed at suppressing criticism of Jews, Judaism, or Israel. Media critic William Cash (1994), writing for the British magazine The Spectator, described the Jewish media elite as "culturally nihilist," suggesting that he believed Jewish media influence reflects Jewish lack of concern for traditional cultural values. Kevin Myers, a columnist for the British Sunday Telegraph (January 5, 1997) wrote that "we should really be able to discuss Jews and their Jewishness, their virtues or their vices, as one can any other identifiable group, without being called anti-Semitic. Frankness does not feed anti-Semitism; secrecy, however, does. The silence of sympathetic discretion can easily be misunderstood as a conspiracy. It is time to be frank about Jews." MYERS goes on to note that The Spectator was accused of anti-Semitism when it published the article by William Cash (1994) referred to above. MYERS emphasised the point that Cash's offence was that he had written that the cultural leaders of the United States were Jews whose Jewishness remained beyond public discussion.

Cash stated that there is a double standard in which a Jewish writer like Neal Gabler is able to refer to a "Jewish cabal" while his own use of the phrase is described as anti-Semitic. He also noted that while movies regularly portray negative stereotypes of other ethnic groups, Cash's description of Jews as "fiercely competitive" was regarded as anti-Semitic. As another example, actor Marlon Brando repeated statements originally made in 1979 on a nationally televised interview program to the effect that "Hollywood is run by Jews. It's owned by Jews." The focus of the complaint was that Hollywood regularly portrays negative stereotypes of other ethnic groups but not of Jews. Brando's remarks were viewed as anti-Semitic by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL) and the Jewish Defence League (Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1996, F4).

These claims regarding Hollywood are empirically verifiable claims, but the response of major Jewish organisations has been to label the claims "anti-Semitic" and attempt to ruin the careers of the people involved. Both Cash and Brando have apologized for their remarks and, as part of their apologies, visited the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles (Forward, April 26, 1996). (Cash's apology occurred some two years after publication of his remarks.) The Forward article suggests that Cash has had trouble publishing his work in the wake of the incident. Moreover, the same issue of Forward reported that the publisher of Cash's comments, Dominic Lawson, editor of the London Spectator, was prevented from publishing an article on the birth of his Down Syndrome daughter in The New Republic when Martin Peretz, the owner, and Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor, complained about Lawson's publishing Cash's article. There is abundant evidence that Peretz strongly identifies as a Jew that he has an unabashed policy of slanting his journal toward positions favorable to Israel.

Similarly, Noam Chomsky, the famous MIT linguist, describes his experience with the ADL:

In the United States a rather effective system of intimidation has been developed to silence critique. . . . Take the Anti-Defamation League. . . . It's actually an organisation devoted to trying to defame and intimidate and silence people who criticise current Israeli policies, whatever they may be. For example, I myself, through a leak in the new England office of the Anti-Defamation League, was able to obtain a copy of my file there. It's 150 pages, just like an FBI file, [consisting of] interoffice memos warning that I'm going to show up here and there, surveillance of talks that I give, comments and alleged transcripts of talks . . . [T]his material has been circulated [and] . . . would be sent to some local group which would use it to extract defamatory material which would then be circulated, usually in unsigned pamphlets outside the place where I'd be speaking. . . . If there's any comment in the press which they regard as insufficiently subservient to the party line, there'll be a flood of letters, delegations, protests, threats to withdraw advertising, etc. The politicians of course are directly subjected to this, and they are also subjected to substantial financial penalties if they don't go along. . . . This totally one-sided pressure and this, by now, very effective system of vilification, lying, defamation, and judicious use of funds in the political system . . . has created a highly biased approach to the whole matter. (Chomsky 1988, 642-3) Consider also the comments of columnist Joseph Sobran, who was forced out of his position as columnist at National Review for remarks critical of Israel: The full story of [Pat Buchanan's 1996 presidential] campaign is impossible to tell as long as it's taboo to discuss Jewish interests as freely as we discuss those of the Christian Right. Talking about American politics without mentioning the Jews is a little like talking about the NBA without mentioning the Chicago Bulls. Not that the Jews are all-powerful, let alone all bad. But they are successful, and therefore powerful enough: and their power is unique in being off-limits to normal criticism even when it's highly visible. They themselves behave as if their success were a guilty secret, and they panic, and resort to accusations, as soon as the subject is raised. Jewish control of the major media in the media age makes the enforced silence both paradoxical and paralysing. Survival in public life requires that you know all about it, but never refer to it. A hypocritical etiquette forces us to pretend that the Jews are powerless victims; and if you don't respect their victimhood, they'll destroy you. It's a phenomenal display not of wickedness, really, but of fierce ethnocentrism, a sort of furtive racial superpatriotism. (Sobran 1996, 3).

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DEBORAH LIPSTADT AS A JEWISH ACTIVIST

I regard Deborah Lipstadt more as an ethnic activist than a scholar. It is highly significant that Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust was written with extensive aid from various Jewish activist organisations, including the ADL. Lipstadt's book was commissioned and published by The Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In her acknowledgements, she credits the research department of the ADL, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Institute for Jewish Affairs (London), the Canadian Jewish Congress, and the American Jewish Committee-all activist organisations.

Lipstadt is the Chair of the Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University. Historian Jacob Katz finds that academic departments of Jewish studies are often linked to Jewish nationalism: "The inhibitions of traditionalism, on the one hand, and a tendency toward apologetics, on the other, can function as deterrents to scholarly objectivity" (p. 84). The work of Jewish historians exhibits "a defensiveness that continues to haunt so much of contemporary Jewish activity" (1986, 85). Similarly the pre-eminent scholar of the Jewish religion, Jacob Neusner, notes that "scholars drawn to the subject by ethnic affiliation-Jews studying and teaching Jewish things to Jews- turn themselves into ethnic cheer-leaders. The Jewish Studies classroom is a place where Jews tell Jews why they should be Jewish (stressing "the Holocaust" as a powerful reason) or rehearse the self-evident virtue of being Jewish." (Times Literary Supplement, March 5, 1999).

Perhaps the best indication of Lipstadt's Jewish activism is that she has served as Senior Editorial Contributor at the Jewish Spectator, a Jewish publication for conservative, religiously observant Jews. Her column, Tomer Devorah (Hebrew: Under Deborah's Palm Tree), appears in every issue and touches on a wide range of Jewish issues, including anti-Semitism, relations among Jews, and interpreting religious holidays. In her column she has advocated greater understanding and usage of Hebrew to promote Jewish identification, and, like many Jewish ethnic activists, she is strongly opposed to intermarriage. "We must say to young people 'intermarriage is something that poses a dire threat to the future of the Jewish community.'" Lipstadt writes that Conservative Rabbi Jack Moline was "very brave" for saying that number one on a list of ten things Jewish parents should say to their children is "I expect you to marry a Jew." She suggests a number of strategies to prevent intermarriage, including trips to Israel for teenagers and subsidising tuition at Jewish day schools (Jewish Spectator, [Fall, 1991], 63).

In his recent book, The Holocaust in American Life, Peter Novick clearly thinks of Lipstadt as an activist, although not as extreme as some. He repeatedly cites her as an example of a Holocaust propagandiser. He notes that in her book Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945, Lipstadt says Allied Policy "bordered on complicity" motivated by "deep antipathy" toward "contemptible Jews." Novick says that while there is no scholarly consensus on the subject, "most professional historians agree that "the comfortable morality tale . . . is simply bad history: estimates of the number of those who might have been saved have been greatly inflated, and the moralistic version ignores real constraints at the time" (Novick, 1999, 48). Novick characterises Lipstadt as attributing the failure of the press to emphasise Jewish suffering as motivated by "wilful blindness, the result of inexcusable ignorance-or malice" (p. 65) despite the fact that the concentration camp survivors encountered by Western journalists (Dachau, Buchenwald) were 80% non-Jewish. Lipstadt is described as an implacable pursuer of Nazi war criminals, stating that she would "prosecute them if they had to be wheeled into the courtroom on a stretcher" (p. 229). In a discussion of the well-recognized unreliability of eye-witness testimony, Novick writes: "When evidence emerged that one Holocaust memoir, highly praised for its authenticity, might have been completely invented, Deborah Lipstadt, who used the memoir in her teaching of the Holocaust, acknowledged that if this turned out to be the case, it 'might complicate matters somewhat,' but insisted that it would still be 'powerful as a novel.' " Truth is less important than the effectiveness of the message.

The intrusion of ethnocentrism into historical scholarship is a well-recognized problem in Jewish historiography, discussed at length in Separation and Its Discontents. Historians such as Jacob Katz (1986) and Albert Lindemann (1997) have noted that this type of behavior is commonplace in Jewish historiography. A central theme of Katz's analysis - massively corroborated by Albert Lindemann's recent work, Esau's Tears-is that historians of Judaism have often falsely portrayed the beliefs of gentiles as irrational fantasies while portraying the behavior of Jews as irrelevant to anti-Semitism. To quote the well-known political scientist, Michael Walzer: "Living so long in exile and so often in danger, we have cultivated a defensive and apologetic account, a censored story, of Jewish religion and culture" (Walzer 1994, 6).

The salient point for me is that Jewish historians who have been reasonably accused of bringing an ethnocentric bias to their writing nevertheless are able to publish their work with prestigious mainstream academic and commercial publishers, and they often obtain jobs at prestigious academic institutions. A good example is Daniel Goldhagen. In his written submission to the court on behalf of Deborah Lipstadt, historian Richard Evans, describes Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, as a book which argues "in a crude and dogmatic fashion that virtually all Germans had been murderous anti-Semites since the Middle Ages, had been longing to exterminate the Jews for decades before Hitler came to power, and actively enjoyed participating in the extermination when it began. The book has since been exposed as a tissue of misrepresentation and misinterpretation, written in shocking ignorance of the huge historical literature on the topic and making numerous elementary mistakes in its interpretation of the documents."

These are exactly the types of accusations levelled by Lipstadt at Irving. Yet Goldhagen maintains a position at Harvard university; he is lionised in many quarters and his work has been massively promoted in the media while his critics have come under pressure from Jewish activist organisations (Guttenplan, 2000). Regarding the latter, in an interview in the German magazine Der Spiegel, historian Ruth Bettina Birn comments on the "unexampled campaign since 1995 to promote the Goldhagen book. A literary first effort becomes a world sensation, and immediately the newspapers start hinting that there's a Harvard professorship waiting for the views his book propagates." She also comments on "the attempts to stifle the criticism voiced by me and [her co-author, Norman] Finkelstein," including efforts to pressure her publisher to rescind publication of a book critical of Goldhagen. The contrast between the treatment of Goldhagen and the persecution of David Irving speaks volumes.

Because I am not a historian, I am reluctant to pass judgement on the competence and integrity of Mr. Irving as a historian. However, as indicated by my written statement to the court, I have taken notice of the fact that some well-known historians have praised his work and have been dismayed at the efforts to censor him-that it is simply false that, as Lipstadt claims, "no legitimate historian takes David Irving's work seriously." Indeed, based on my own reading of Irving, I would venture the opinion that whatever the faults of books like Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich or Hitler's War in dealing with certain issues, such as the role of Hitler in the Holocaust, there is no question in my mind that any student of World War II would benefit from reading it-that, quite simply, it is an indispensable resource for scholars.

What I find deeply distressing as a scholar is that the pressure on St. Martin's Press exerted by Lipstadt and Jewish organisations like the ADL occurred independently of the content of the volume. The same Washington Post article referred to earlier in quoting Lipstadt's support for the actions of St. Martin's Press noted that several other companies had rejected the manuscript without having read it. The effort to pressure St. Martin's press was spearheaded by Jewish ethnic activist organisations and by newspaper columnists, such as Frank Rich of the New York Times, who are not professional historians, and by people like Deborah Lipstadt who do not have the expertise to evaluate a manuscript on Goebbels. In other words, the effort occurred independently of the analytic content of the manuscript and was therefore an illegitimate intrusion on free speech. Therefore, even if the court comes to believe that the scholarly objections raised, for example, in Richard Evans's report are valid, the fact remains that this book was rescinded because of who Irving is-because his ideology conflicts with that of some Jewish activist organisations, not because of its scholarship. I find that utterly appalling.

Besides promoting Goldhagen and attempting to censor his opponents, the ADL has also condemned responsible scholarship that deviates from its version of the Holocaust. The ADL condemned Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem as an "evil book", presumably because, as Peter Novick (1999, 137) notes, her depiction of Eichmann "could be read as trivialising the Israeli accomplishment and undermining the claim that he was an appropriate symbol of eternal anti-Semitism." Similarly, the ADL included Arno Mayor, author of Why Did the Heavens Not Darken as a "Hitler apologist" because of his view that Hitler was motivated more by anti-Bolshevism than anti-Semitism. The ADL claimed that Mayor's was an example of "legitimate scholarship which relativises the genocide of the Jews." Clearly Holocaust scholarship has been politicised to the point that there are received dogmas whose truth is jealously defended by Jewish activist organisations.

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DEBORAH LIPSTADT AND THE UNIQUENESS OF THE HOLOCAUST

One such politicised dogma is that the Holocaust is unique:

Civil Judaism's belief in the Holocaust's uniqueness as being ultimately significant per se . . . thus epitomises the type of belief for which religious faith is both famous and infamous-a dogma. And like all such dogmatic beliefs, the more it is challenged, the fiercer the faithful become in its defence. For them, the first of the Ten Commandments has been revised: "The Holocaust is a jealous God; thou shalt draw no parallels to it" (Goldberg 1995, 48; inner quote from Lopate [1989, 56 ]). The most commonly expressed grievance was the use of the words "Holocaust" and "genocide" to describe other catastrophes. This sense of grievance was rooted in the conviction, axiomatic in at least "official" Jewish discourse, that the Holocaust was unique. Since Jews recognized the Holocaust's uniqueness-that it was "incomparable," beyond any analogy-they had no occasion to compete with others; there could be no contest over the incontestable. (Novick 1999, 195) As Novick notes (1999, 196), one can always find ways in which any historical event is unique. However, in Lipstadt's eyes, any comparison of the Holocaust with other genocidal actions is not only factually wrong but also morally impermissible and therefore the appropriate target of censorship. Lipstadt clearly places herself among those who would not merely criticise but censor scholarship that places the Holocaust in a comparative framework-i.e., scholarship that questions the uniqueness of the Holocaust (Novick, 1999, 259). Novick (1999, 330n.107) quotes Lipstadt as follows: Denial of the uniqueness of the Holocaust is "far more insidious than outright denial. It nurtures and is nurtured by Holocaust-denial." In Denying the Holocaust, Lipstadt castigates Ernst Nolte and other historians who have "compared the Holocaust to a variety of other twentieth-century outrages, including the Armenian massacres that began in 1915, Stalin's gulags, U.S. policies in Vietnam, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and the Pol Pot atrocities in the former Kampuchea" (Lipstadt, 1993, p. 211). Lipstadt calls these "attempts to create such immoral equivalencies." In the section on the uniqueness of the Holocaust, she cites approvingly the claim that "the Nazis' annihilation of the Jews . . . was 'a gratuitous [i.e., without cause or justification] act carried out by a prosperous, advanced industrial nation at the height of its power'" (p. 212). The inner quote is from Richard Evans' In Hitler's Shadow (p. 87). (Evans is an expert witness for the defence in this case.) While there are different meanings one might attribute to this, I take it as an attempt to make the actions of the Nazis completely independent of the behavior of Jews. In my view, such a position is untenable and is part of a common tendency among Jewish historians of Judaism to ignore, minimise, or rationalise the role of Jewish behavior in producing anti-Semitism. This is a major theme of Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism.

From my perspective as an evolutionist, bloody and violent ethnic conflict has been a recurrent theme throughout history. The attempt to say it is unique is an attempt to remove the Holocaust from the sphere of scholarly research, interpretation and debate and move into the realm of religious dogma, much as the resurrection of Jesus is an article of faith for much or Christianity. By accepting the type of censorship promoted by Lipstadt's writings we are literally entering a new period of the Inquisition wherein religious dogma rather than open scientific debate is the criterion of truth.

Peter Novick has a great deal of interesting material on the political campaign for the uniqueness of the Holocaust. In the same discussion where he comments on Lipstadt's statements on the uniqueness of the Holocaust, he notes Elie Wiesel's idea of Holocaust "as a sacred mystery, whose secrets were confined to a priesthood of survivors. In a diffuse way, however, the assertion that the Holocaust was a holy event that resisted profane representation, that it was uniquely inaccessible to explanation or understanding, that survivors had privileged interpretive authority-all these themes continued to resonate." (i.e., in recent years) (Novick, 1999, 211-212).

Novick also describes a massive campaign to make the Holocaust a specifically Jewish event and to downplay the victim status of other groups. Speaking of 11 million victims was clearly unacceptable to [Elie] Wiesel and others for whom the "big truth" about the Holocaust was its Jewish specificity. They responded to the expansion of the victims of the Holocaust to eleven million the way devout Christians would respond to the expansion of the victims of the Crucifixion to three-the Son of God and two thieves. Wiesel's forces mobilised, both inside and outside the Holocaust Council, to ensure that, despite the executive order, their definition would prevail. Though Jewish survivors of the Holocaust had no role in the initiative that created the museum, they came, under the leadership of Wiesel, to dominate the council-morally, if not numerically. When one survivor, Sigmund Strochlitz, was sworn in as a council member, he announced that it was "unreasonable and inappropriate to ask survivors to share the term Holocaust . . . to equate our suffering . . . with others." At one council meeting, another survivor, Kalman Sultanik, was asked whether Daniel Trocme, murdered at Maidanek for rescuing Jews and honoured at Yad Vashem as a Righteous Gentile, could be remembered in the museum's Hall of Remembrance. "No," said Sultanik, because "he didn't die as a Jew. . . . The six million Jews . . . died differently." (Novick 1999, 219) Activists insisted on the "incomprehensibility and inexplicability of the Holocaust" (Novick 1999, 178). "Even many observant Jews are often willing to discuss the founding myths of Judaism naturalistically-subject them to rational, scholarly analysis. But they're unwilling to adopt this mode of thought when it comes to the 'inexplicable mystery' of the Holocaust, where rational analysis is seen as inappropriate or sacrilegious" (p. 200). Elie Wiesel "sees the Holocaust as 'equal to the revelation at Sinai' in its religious significance; attempts to 'desanctify' or 'demystify' the Holocaust are, he says, a subtle form of anti-Semitism" (Novick 1999, 201). A 1998 survey found that "remembrance of the Holocaust" was listed as "extremely important" or "very important" to Jewish identity-far more often than anything else, such as synagogue attendance, travel to Israel, etc. Reflecting this insistence on the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Jewish organisations and Israeli diplomats co-operated to block the U.S. Congress from commemorating Armenian genocide. "Since Jews recognized the Holocaust's uniqueness-that it was 'incomparable,' beyond any analogy-they had no occasion to compete with others; there could be no contest over the incontestable" (p. 195). Abraham Foxman, head of the ADL, stated the Holocaust is "not simply one example of genocide but a near successful attempt on the life of God's chosen children and, thus, on God himself" (p. 199).

Novick has also shown how the Holocaust successfully serves Jewish political interests. The Holocaust was originally promoted to rally support for Israel following the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars; "Jewish organisations . . . [portrayed] Israel's difficulties as stemming from the world's having forgotten the Holocaust. The Holocaust framework allowed one to put aside as irrelevant any legitimate ground for criticizing Israel, to avoid even considering the possibility that the rights and wrongs were complex" (p. 155). As the threat to Israel subsided, the Holocaust was promoted as the main source of Jewish identity and in the effort to combat assimilation and intermarriage among Jews. During this period, the Holocaust was also promoted among gentiles as an antidote to anti-Semitism. In recent years this has involved a large scale educational effort (including mandated courses in the public schools of several states) spearheaded by Jewish organisations and manned by thousands of Holocaust professionals aimed at conveying the lesson that "tolerance and diversity [are] good; hate [is] bad, the overall rubric [is] 'man's inhumanity to man'" (pp. 258-259). The Holocaust has thus become an instrument of Jewish ethnic interests as a symbol intended to create moral revulsion at violence directed at minority ethnic groups-prototypically the Jews.

A PLEA FOR TOLERANCE OF HETERODOXY

Irving, like many historians, may indeed see events through a filter of personal political and intellectual convictions, and this may even lead him, perhaps unconsciously, to interpret his data in a particular way. This is a commonly acknowledged difficulty that afflicts all of the social sciences, and Jewish social scientists have certainly not been immune from these tendencies. I have already commented on the many examples of the historiography of Jewish history written by Jews in which there are clear apologetic tendencies-tendencies to view the Jewish in-group in a favourable manner and to pathologize anti-Semitism as irrational and completely unrelated to the actual behavior of Jews. These works have been published by the most prestigious academic and commercial presses. It is noteworthy that Albert Lindemann's examples of biased historical research include the work of Jewish Holocaust historians Lucy Dawidowicz and Daniel J. Goldhagen-a clear indication that the area of Holocaust studies remains politically charged. Moreover, in The Culture of Critique I describe several highly influential intellectual movements (Basin anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School of Social Research) that presented themselves as science but were strongly influenced the Jewish ethnic agendas of their founders, particularly combating anti-Semitism.

Intellectual blinders and political agendas are a fact of academic life. However, even were it to be proved that David Irving does indeed bring a certain set of biases to his work, even the most biased researchers may well contribute invaluable scholarship. Science emerges when the work of all investigators becomes part of the marketplace of ideas and when scholars are not vilified and their scholarship censored simply because their conclusions fly in the face of contemporary orthodoxy.

REFERENCES

Cash, W. (1994). Kings of the deal. The Spectator (29 October):14-16.

Chomsky, N. (1988). Language and Politics. Black Rose Books: Montreal-New York.

Goldberg, M. (1995). Why should Jews survive? Looking past the Holocaust toward a Jewish future. New York: Oxford University Press.

Guttenplan, D. D. (Feb. 2000). The Holocaust on trial. Atlantic Monthly, 45-66.

Katz, J. (1986). Jewish Emancipation and Self-Emancipation. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America.

Levy, R. S. (1975). The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Lopate, P. (1989). Resistance to the Holocaust, Tikkun 3(4), 56).

Lindemann, A. S. (1998). Esau's Tears. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Raging, S. (1980). Jewish Responses to Anti-Semitism in Germany, 1870-1914. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press.

Sobran, J. (1996). The Buchanan frenzy. Sobran's (March):3-4.

Walzer, M. (1994). Toward a new realization of Jewishness. Congress Monthly 61(4):3-6.

John Sack, a man of courage, integrity and honor.

One of the few and the best!

John Sack and his famous book

Behind An Eye for An Eye

Revenge, Hate and History

Three years ago I was scheduled to speak at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The speech was announced in this brochure and also on the Internet. But then the Museum canceled it.

For the next forty-five minutes, I'll say here what I'd planned to say at the Holocaust Museum, and then, just as I'd have done at the Museum, I'll stay here as long as you'd like, answering questions. The audience at the Museum would have been historians, mostly, and I'd have said something like ...

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me, thank you for listening to me. What I'm going to talk about happened fifty years ago. And for fifty years, no one, no historian, no one at all has spoken about it in public anywhere in the world. Not until now.

Now myself, I'm not an historian, I'm a reporter. And what I write is the raw material of history, something that historians will -- I hope -- someday make some sense of. I go places. I watch events. I listen to people. And then I tell stories. And I'll start by telling one now. A true story about a teenage girl.

Lola

Blonde hair, brown eyes, very pretty. In high school she's doing the flying rings, trapeze, acting in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. She's one of the title characters. She comes home. She's skipping through the streets singing, "On the Good Ship Lollipop ..." Not exactly. She's really singing [in accented English], "On the Good Ship Lollipop ..." Because she's a Polish girl, and she's in Bedzin, Poland, in the 1930s. Her name is Lola Potok.

And when she's 18 years old, the Nazis invade. Lola is put on a train to the town of Oswiecim -- we know it as Auschwitz. Her baby, one year old, is ripped from her arms; she never sees the baby again. She isn't sent to the cyanide chamber, but her mother is. Her mother is killed, her brother and sister, nieces and nephews are killed. Fourteen people.

(You know, I wasn't going to say this at the Holocaust Museum, but in this particular room I know there are people who don't believe there were cyanide chambers at Auschwitz. I believe, and Lola believes, there were cyanide chambers at Auschwitz.)

Her mother was killed. Her brother and sister, nieces and nephews were killed. Fourteen people. The one brother at Auschwitz who's still alive stands on the gallows and says in Yiddish, "Nem nekumah! Take revenge!" Then he's hanged.

Revenge

In January 1945, Lola escapes. She weighs sixty-six pounds. Her eyes are hollow. Her hair is this short. Her back has been broken. Her hand is mangled. She's wearing two left shoes. All the people she loves are dead, or she thinks so, and she is just bursting with hate. She wants to release that hate, to spew it onto the Germans. One of her childhood friends is in the Polish government, and Lola goes to him and tells him, "I want revenge."

And two months later the war is still going on, and Lola is now in Germany, the part occupied by the Russians and administered by the Poles. Lola's in an olive-colored uniform. On her jacket are brass buttons. On her collar, what the GIs call scrambled eggs. On her shoulders are stars. On her hip is a Luger. Lola is working for the Polish government, she is the commandant of a prison for Germans, and she is attempting to take revenge for the Holocaust.

Now, Lola is a Jewish girl. She's studied the Torah, and the Torah says, "You shall not take revenge." Lola knows that. She's disobeying that. But is there any of us here who'd condemn her? Any of us who can't understand her? I can understand her, and I can have rachmanis, compassion, for her.

I met Lola Potok. It was in April 1986. I'm living in Hollywood. I'm a writer, and I have a meeting at Paramount. And the secretary there, she's reading something I wrote about the Billionaire Boys Club. She tells me, "I like it. It reminds me of my family."

I say, "The Billionaire Boys Club? Your family?" Secretary says, "Yes, all those murders. My mother, Lola, was at Auschwitz." I say, "Oh." Secretary says, "And after that, my mother commanded a prison full of Nazis." I say, "What? She commanded ..." I say, "Do you know there's a movie there?" I say, "You should tell Lynda," Lynda is the producer, the secretary's boss, but the secretary tells me, "I know there's a movie. I won't tell Lynda. I want to produce it myself!"

There's a saying in Hollywood: a producer is someone, anyone, who knows a writer. I'm a writer, the secretary knows me, and therefore she's a producer. We're in business together. The deal is, I'll write a magazine article on Lola, her mother, and the secretary will make a movie from it.

Cut. A few days later. Hollywood, the Moustache Cafe. I'm having spinach crepe. I'm having dinner with Lola. An elegant woman. Coral lipstick, black eyeliner, like on a femme fatale. Speaks five languages fluently. She's sixty-six years old. And Lola starts telling me her story.

Gleiwitz

At the end of World War II, she tells me, she commanded a prison in Gleiwitz, Germany. She says the inmates were German soldiers. But she says some were Nazis, even SS, pretending to be German soldiers, and Lola was looking for them. Looking for Höss and Hössler, the commandants at Auschwitz. Looking for Mengele, the man who once said to her mother, "Go left, you die"; who said to Lola, "Go right, you live." And if Lola ever found him, she didn't know what she'd do. But she'd do it.

And Lola tells me: One day in her prison she found a Gestapo man. Fat, forty years old. Under his arm was a tattoo. It said A or B. It was his blood type. Everyone in the Gestapo had it. Lola freaked out. She started screaming, "Du schmutziges Schwein! Du verfluchtes Schwein! Du ... How many Jews did you kill?" She slapped him. The man was down on the floor. He was hugging her boots, saying, "Gnade! Gnade! Have mercy on me!," and Lola was kicking him and kicking ...

This story of Lola's: Is there anyone here who likes it? I didn't like it. I didn't want to write it. I thought it was ugly. Lola didn't like it. She told me her mother, if she were alive, wouldn't like it. Her mother used to read to her from the Torah and tell her, "You mustn't hate. It only hurts you. It corrodes your soul."

And Lola said that after some months in Gleiwitz, she remembered this. She was in the prison one day. And there was a Jewish guard there. His face was red. His teeth were bare. There was spit on his teeth. Ugly, ugly. The man had a whip. He was screaming in Polish, "You son of a whore." He was whipping a German prisoner. Lola said, "Stop." Lola said, "Why are you whipping him?" The man said, "Well, the Germans did it to me!" Lola said, "And now you hate them?" The man said, "I despise them!" Lola said, "Well, if you despise them, why do you want to be like them?" Because to Lola, to Lola, this man, this Jew, he looked, talked, acted just like the Nazis she'd known at Auschwitz.

At that time, Lola didn't care about the Germans, the German prisoners. They could have dropped dead for all she cared. But she told me she cared about the Jewish guard. For years the Nazis had called him a pig, a dog, and if now he'd truly become a beast, then who had won, the Jew or the Nazis? So according to Lola, she called all the guards to her office and said to them that from now on, we'll treat the Germans like human beings. And from then on, Lola told me, that's what she did.

Writing Lola's Story

Now, this story I liked. If it was true, this was a story worth telling. I had this dream: maybe the Serbs and Croats will read it, the Irish Catholics and Protestants will read it, the Hutus and Tutsis, the Israelis and Palestinians ... Maybe they'll read it, and maybe they'll learn, as Lola did, that to hate your neighbors may or may not destroy them, but it does destroy yourself. And maybe these people will stop their revenge, stop their genocide.

We Jews always say of the Holocaust, "Never again. Never again will people hurt us simply because we are Jews." But Lola was apparently saying, "Yes, and never again will I hurt a German simply because he's a German." Fifty years ago, Lola was apparently saying, "Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me." This story I wanted very much to write. So ...

I start interviewing Lola. At the Inn of the Seventh Ray in Los Angeles. At a Jewish cemetery in New Jersey. On the Champs Elysées in Paris. I interview Lola on and off for two-and-a-half years. Her memories just pour out, and she also introduces me to a dozen other people, all Jews: people who knew her in Gleiwitz, prison guards in Gleiwitz, even the man who appointed her the commandant in Gleiwitz.

I write a twenty-page article on Lola's revenge and Lola's redemption. Lola reads it and likes it. The story runs in California magazine. Lola, at her own expense, comes to Washington to promote it on National Public Radio. The story is sold internationally, and it's reprinted in Best Magazine Articles, 1988. We have movie offers. Bette Midler and Suzanne Somers want to play the Lola part.

And then I write a book proposal. I write, "It's Lola's redemption, not Lola's revenge, that this book's about." I'll go to Germany. I'll find some prisoners maybe. I'll go to Poland. I'll find some more guards, maybe. I'll write a book. The title will be Lola. And in August 1988, the publisher Henry Holt in New York City says, "Okay! We want it!" Good news, and I phone it to Lola.

And Lola on the telephone says, "Listen, John, I don't want you to write it." I say, "Lola? Lola, this is the first time you've told that to me." I say, "Lola, we signed a contract." We had signed one. Lola had written, "I grant you the exclusive right to write and to publish a book about my life."

Threats

That night I go to Lola's apartment in Hollywood. Anyone here ever been in an encounter group? Remember your first night? Everyone shouting and screaming. You're just sitting there stupefied. You're thinking, "What is going on?" Well, I'm in Lola's condo. Lola is saying, "Lookit, John. I don't like the way you write. You write like a reporter. If you start writing this book, I will stop you. I will stop you!"

Lola's daughter is there. She's saying, "John, give it up. I'm begging you to give it up. John! Give it up!" Another daughter of Lola's is there. She's a lawyer, and she says, "John! You're going to have instantaneous and very expensive litigation!" Lola's saying, "I'll go to court." The daughter's saying, "John, I want you to sign this release. John! Sign the release!" The other daughter's saying, "John! Just leave us! Just go!" Lola's saying, "John! Get out of our lives!"

I leave. I telephone Lola but she doesn't answer. I write her, but she sends the letters back, unopened, inscribed "refused."

And not just Lola. Lola's second-in-command at the prison in Gleiwitz was Moshe, also a Jew. He won't talk to me. His wife on the telephone says, "We don't give you the permission to write this." I say, "I ... You ..." That's what I say, "I ... You ... One doesn't need permission!" I have permission, from the Constitution of the United States. Moshe's wife hangs up.

And then there is Jadzia, also a Jew, she was one of Lola's guards in Gleiwitz. Jadzia says on the telephone, "I was never in Gleiwitz!" Then she says, "Yes, I was in Gleiwitz, but I'll never talk about it!" And then she talks for an hour saying, "I don't know nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Nothing! Nothing!"

People won't talk to me. People tell other people, "Don't talk to John Sack." People talk to me, and they lie to me. People say they'll sue me, they'll destroy me, they'll kill me. One man takes my driver's license, writes down my address, and says, "If you write about me, I will call the Israeli Mafia."

Here's some advice. Never tell a reporter, "You'd better not write this." I have a contract with Henry Holt. I've made a promise to Henry Holt. I keep my promises.

Doing the Research

In April 1989, I fly to Germany. I go to this castle, this concrete castle, high on a hill above the Rhine. It's the German Federal Archives, and they've got forty thousand statements there by Germans who lived in what now is Poland during World War II. The statements of course are in German, in German script, and I find five statements from Germans who were in Lola's prison.

I go to another place in Germany: a great medieval hall, with banners on the stone walls. It's a reunion of a thousand people from Gleiwitz. They're drinking beer. They're eating sausages and sauerkraut. They're laughing and singing, "Ein prosit, ein prosit ..." And I'm like a little flower girl. You know, the girl who goes from table to table selling roses? I'm going around asking, "Uh, excuse me. Anyone here who was in prison in Gleiwitz?" Yeah, I am a party pooper. I admit it. But eventually I find five of Lola's prisoners.

I take the train to Gleiwitz. Now it's Gliwice, Poland. And going through Communist East Berlin, I'm arrested, taken off the train, and locked up in a little room because with me I have a copy of the book Die Vertreibung der deutschen Bevölkerung aus den Gebieten östlich der Oder-Neisse ["The Expulsion of the German Population from the Territories East of the Oder-Neisse," published in the 1950s by the Bonn government]. Hours later I'm let out and I get to Gleiwitz/ Gliwice at four in the morning. It's a city of two hundred thousand people, almost none of whom speak English. I don't speak Polish, but I find three of Lola's guards. They remember her well.

It's 1989, Poland is still Communist, but I get into Lola's prison, into the prisoners' cells. I tell them, "Djien dobre. Good morning." I see the prison records. Remember when, according to Lola, she went to the Polish government and said, "I want revenge"? Well, I find her application, in her own handwriting. She wrote, "I want to cooperate against our German oppressors." I find the official document appointing her commandant in Gleiwitz.

After that, I go to Germany eleven more times, to Poland three more times, to France, Austria, Israel, Canada, and all around the United States. Through interpreters I talk to two hundred people in Polish and Russian, Danish and Swedish, German and Dutch, French and Spanish, Yiddish and Hebrew. I left out English. I get three hundred hours of tape-recorded interviews, and I see thousands of documents.

And what do I learn? Well: Lola was telling the truth. She was the commandant in Gleiwitz. And she was taking revenge. She slapped the Germans around. And just as she said, she stopped. I remember one day in 1989, I'm having lunch with one of her guards at the Hotel Leszny. We're eating wienerschnitzel. And out of the blue the man says, "You know, Lola stopped. She told us, 'Stop!' She said, 'We're going to show the Germans we're not like them.'"

The Facts Come Out

So Lola was telling the truth. But, she wasn't telling the whole truth. Lola had told me the people in her prison were German soldiers. And yes, twenty of them were German soldiers, men who worked as painters, carpenters, and such. But there were a thousand other prisoners there, and they were German civilians: German men, German women, German children.

One prisoner was a fourteen-year-old boy. He had been out in Gleiwitz wearing his boy scout pants. A man cried out, "You're wearing black pants! You're a fascist!," and he chased the boy and tackled him at the Church of Saint Peter and Paul, and then took him to Lola's prison. Now, the boy was completely innocent. So were most of the people in Lola's prison. They weren't Gestapo. They weren't SS. They weren't even Nazis. Out of a thousand prisoners, just twenty were ever even accused of it.

But the Germans in Lola's prison were slapped and whipped. And I'm so sorry to have to say it, but they were also tortured. The boy scout: the guards poured gasoline on his curly black hair and set it on fire. The boy went insane. The men: they were beaten with a Totschläger, a "beater-to-death." It's a long steel spring with a big lead ball at the end. You use it like a racketball racket. Your arm, your wrist, the spring: they deliver a triple hit to a German's face.

Lola didn't tell me, but the Germans in her prison were dying. I found their death certificates in Gleiwitz city hall. One of Lola's guards told me, "Yeah, the Germans would die." He told me, "I'd put the bodies in a horse-drawn cart. I'd cover them with potato peels so no one would see. I'd ride to the outskirts and, after I threw the potato peels out, I'd take the Germans to the Catholic cemetery. To the mass grave."

We all know about Auschwitz. But I have to tell you, the Germans in Lola's prison were worse off than Lola had been at Auschwitz. Lola at Auschwitz wasn't locked in a room night and day. She wasn't tortured night after night. She herself told me: "Thank God, nobody tried to rape us. The Germans weren't allowed to." But all of that happened to German girls at Lola's prison in Gleiwitz.

One woman I talked with wasn't even German. She was Polish. In 1945 she was twenty years old: a tall, blonde, beautiful medical student. The guards at Lola's prison pulled off her clothes and told her, "Let's do it!" They beat her and beat her, night after night, until she was black and blue. One morning, she came back to her cell and fell on the floor, sobbing. Her cellmate asked her, "What, what is that blue thing you're wearing? Oh, oh, it's your skin."

And ten feet away was Lola's office. Lola in her brass, braid, and stars. I once asked her, "Lola, where did you get that uniform?," and Lola said, "Well, the Russians must've given it to me." That wasn't the whole truth either.

Lola was in the Polish secret police. Its name was the Office of State Security, in Polish the Urzad Bezpieczenstwa Publicznego. The Germans called it the Polish Gestapo. One of its missions was to round up Nazi suspects. But for all practical purposes, if you were a German, you were a Nazi suspect. So the mission was to round up Germans, imprison them, interrogate them, and if they confess, prosecute them.

In the Office of State Security, the lower ranks were Polish Catholics, but most of the leaders were Polish Jews. The chief of the Office in Warsaw was a Jew. (When I was in Poland he wasn't alive, but I met some of his family.) The department directors, all or almost all of them, were Jews.

In Silesia, the province where Lola was commandant, the director of the Office of State Security was a Jew. I met him in Copenhagen, a little bald-headed man. The director of prisons was also a Jew. I met his whole family in Tel Aviv. The secretary of state security was a Jew. I met him time and again at his home in New Jersey. And in the Office of State Security in Silesia in February 1945, of the officers -- not the enlisted men, not the guards, but the lieutenants, captains and such -- one-fourth were Catholics, and three-fourths were Jews.

Solomon Morel

I interviewed twenty-four of them. And I learned that the Office of State Security ran 227 prisons for German civilians like Lola's. It also ran 1,255 concentration camps, and I interviewed four of the commandants. They were also Jews. One was Lola's boy friend, a man who'd lost in the Holocaust his mother, his father, all his brothers (he had no sisters), all his uncles and aunts, and all but one of his cousins. I hope that, like me, you can all have compassion for Solomon Morel.

But one night in February, 1945, Solomon went to his concentration camp in the city of Swietochlowice. He went into the Germans' barracks, and said, "My name is Captain Morel. I am a Jew. I was at Auschwitz. I swore I would take revenge on you Nazis." They weren't Nazis, but Solomon said, "Now! Everyone! Sing the Horst Wessel song!" That was a Nazi anthem. No one wanted to sing it. One boy, fourteen years old, didn't even know it.

Solomon had a club. He said, "Sing it!" Some people began, "Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen fest geschlossen ..." "Sing it! Sing it, I say!" They started singing, "Clear the streets for the brown battalions. Clear the street for the Storm Section men." Solomon had all this hate inside him, and he released it. He picked up a wooden stool and he started beating the Germans to death. For this one camp, I found the death certificates for 1,583 Germans.

Death Toll

In other camps and other prisons, thousands of German civilians died. German men, women, children, babies. At one camp there was a barracks for fifty babies. They were in cribs, but the camp doctor, Dr. Cedrowski -- he was a Jew who had been in Auschwitz -- he didn't heat the barracks, and he didn't give the babies milk. He gave them only some soup, and forty-eight of the fifty babies died.

All in all, sixty to eighty thousand Germans died. Some were killed by Jews, some by Catholics, and many by typhus, dysentery, and starvation, but sixty to eighty thousand died in the custody of the Office of State Security. Now, someone, a German, once told me that this was another holocaust. Well, I'm sure it seemed like a holocaust to the Germans.

But let's not forget: sixty thousand is one percent of the number of Jews who died in the capital-H Holocaust. Jews didn't do what the Germans did. We didn't plot to exterminate the German people. We didn't mobilize all the Jews and the Jewish state. (There was no Jewish state.) We didn't send the Germans systematically to cyanide chambers.

But let's also remember that sixty to eighty thousand civilians is more than the Germans lost at Dresden, and more than, or just as many as, the Japanese lost at Hiroshima, the Americans at Pearl Harbor, the British in the Battle of Britain, or the Jews at Belsen or Buchenwald.

Cover-up

All this was covered up for nearly fifty years. Jews who were involved didn't talk about it. For example, the chief of police in occupied Breslau, Germany, in 1945, who was Jewish, later wrote a book about the Holocaust. And in telling about his time as chief of police in Breslau, all he says is, "We moved westward to Breslau and ... from there ... to Prague." That's it. And Jewish reporters who knew didn't write about it. There's a working reporter right now in New York City who was in Poland right after World War II. He told me, "Whatever, whatever the Germans tell you, believe me, it's true." But he himself, he never wrote about it.

The truth was covered up, and was still being covered up. In 1989, I went to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel's central Holocaust center. As you may know, they have fifty million documents there about the Holocaust. I ask them, "Well, what do you have on the Office of State Security?" They have nothing. I ask them, "What do you have on the Jews in the Office of State Security?" Nothing. I say, "Well, there were Jewish commandants, Jewish directors, Jewish ..." The chairman of Yad Vashem responds, "It sounds rather imaginary," and the director of archives says to me, "Imm-possible! Impossible!"

Denial, denial. I know that denial is a very human thing. But historically I don't think it's a Jewish thing. When Abraham, Isaac and Jacob committed sins, we Jews didn't deny it. Yes, Abraham, the father of our people, sinned. God told him to go to Israel, instead he went to Egypt, and we admitted it in the Book of Genesis. Judah (the word "Jew" comes from Judah) made love to a prostitute. We admitted it in Genesis. Moses, even Moses sinned, and God didn't let him into the Promised Land. We admitted that in Deuteronomy. Solomon -- good, wise, old King Solomon -- did evil. He "worshipped idols." We didn't cover it up. We admitted it in the Book of Kings.

It seems to me that that's the Jewish tradition. How can we say to other people -- to Germans, to Serbs, to Hutus -- "What you're doing is wrong," if we ourselves do it and cover it up? I wish it were someone else who was here today. Abraham Foxman. Elie Wiesel. I wish he or she would simply say yes, some Jews, some Jews, did evil in 1945. But when the Jewish establishment didn't say it, then I had to say it.

I'm a reporter. That's what reporters do. Someone kills sixty thousand people, we report it. If we don't report it, it might become common, or more common, than it already is. But also I'm a Jew, and the Torah says (Leviticus 5:1), that if someone does evil, and if I know it and don't report it, then I am guilty too.

So I start writing this book. The title now won't be Lola. It'll be An Eye for an Eye. And on the third page I write, "I hope that An Eye for an Eye is something more than the story of Jewish revenge: that it's the story of Jewish redemption." I write about Jews taking revenge, yes. But that is one tenth of An Eye for an Eye. Mostly I write ...

I write about Zlata, Moshe, Mania, and Pola. They were Jews who refused to look at, much less work at Lola's prison. I write about Ada, who visited the prison once, just once, and then fled to Israel. I write about Shlomo, who was in the Office of State Security and, at the risk of his life, told people in it, "You must stop doing this."

I write about Lola. I write that in Gleiwitz she finally remembered how a Jew should act and, at the risk of her life, she got bread, her own bread from her own home, and smuggled it to the German prisoners. Now this isn't something that Lola told me. No, the prison guards told me. They said that if Lola had been caught, she'd have gone to prison herself.

And I write that at Yom Kippur, 1945, Lola -- again at the risk of her life -- escaped from Gleiwitz, just as she had escaped some months earlier from Auschwitz, and came to the United States. Almost all the Jews in the Office of State Security escaped, at the risk of their lives, in September, October, and November 1945. And I write that too. They crept through the woods into Germany, or climbed the pass into Italy. They did what the SS never did: they deserted, they defected.

Rejection

I was crying while I was writing this. My advance from Henry Holt was $25,000, and for three years I was writing An Eye for an Eye. In September 1991 I finally finished it, wrapped it up, and mailed it to Henry Holt in New York. And I told myself: "Okay. I've done it. That's the end of the cover-up."

No. Because then the people at Henry Holt say, "We don't want it." They don't say it's wrong. They know it's right. They just say, "We don't want to publish it. Keep the twenty-five thousand." Okay. My agent and I send the manuscript to other publishers: to Harper's, to Scribner's -- you name it, we sent it -- to two dozen other publishers.

And let me tell you. The letters we get from these people, they're practically blurbs. The publishers say: "well-written," "extremely well-written," "chilling," "compelling," "disturbing," "dismaying," "shocking," "startling," "astonishing," "mesmerizing," "extraordinary," "I was riveted," "I was bowled over," "I love it!" And the publishers all reject it. The letter from St. Martin's Press says, "I am always moved by Holocaust books, but I'd have trouble distinguishing this book ... from other books ... in this vast area of literature."

Okay. My agent and I agree that if we can't sell a book, we'll try magazines. One of the chapters is on Solomon Morel. Remember? The man who lost his mother, father, all his siblings, uncles, and aunts in the Holocaust. The man who had so much hate for the Germans, he had to disgorge it, who commanded a concentration camp at Swietochlowice, and beat Germans to death.

Solomon is still alive. He's wanted by Interpol for crimes against humanity. Interpol has an international warrant out for his arrest. But he's fled to Israel. He's taking refuge in Tel Aviv, and no one in America -- no newspaper, magazine or television network -- has ever reported it.

So we send the chapter on Solomon Morel to Esquire magazine. I've been a contributing editor there, a war correspondent in Vietnam, Iraq, Bosnia. Esquire says, "No." We send it to GQ magazine. GQ says, "Yes!" The editor says it's the most important story in GQ's history. He even tells that to an editor of Esquire at a bar in Greenwich Village. He tells him, "Ha, ha! You don't have it! We do!"

For six weeks GQ is fact-checking. They don't find a single error. They send me the galley proofs, the page proofs, and on Wednesday the presses will roll. And then the telephone rings at my home in the Rocky Mountains. The editor of GQ says, "John, this isn't a happy phone call. We aren't going to run it." He tells me to keep the $15,000 and to sell the story somewhere else.

So once again my agent and I are making calls, sending faxes, passing out the GQ page proofs. Harper's magazine says no. Rolling Stone says no and "I'm sure you'll understand." Mother Jones, that great exposé magazine ("Extra! Extra! Cigarettes are bad for you!") doesn't even call back. The New Yorker (which has published ten pieces by me) refuses even to look at it.

The Attacks Begin

But finally, finally, in March 1993, the story of Solomon Morel is published in the Village Voice. And in November, An Eye for an Eye is published by Basic Books, a division of HarperCollins. So, thank God, now it's all over. I can relax now. Not.

Because one day later there's a telephone call to Basic Books. It's from the executive director of the World Jewish Congress. He says he wants an immediate retraction, and if he doesn't get it he'll call a major press conference tomorrow. He says he'll denounce me, Basic Books, and HarperCollins, and say, "They are all anti-Semites." Well, we don't retract, and the World Jewish Congress doesn't denounce. But ...

Then the reviews come out. And the reviewers say that An Eye for an Eye isn't true, that what I wrote there never happened at all.

Please! Much of An Eye for an Eye had been fact-checked by California magazine, fact-checked by GQ, and, for the Village Voice, fact-checked by a woman who is the Fact-Checker from Hell. She and I checked every single word, even if we had to call up Poland. And when, after two weeks of this, night and day, we were finally done, the editor of the Voice gave an interview saying, "This may be the most accurate story in the history of American journalism."

Much of An Eye for an Eye was corroborated by 60 Minutes, which found eight eyewitnesses I hadn't found. It was corroborated by the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. Historians hired by major newspapers in Germany went to the German Federal Archives and wrote, "The facts are true," "The facts are right," "The facts are iron-bound."

But in the United States, one review was entitled "False Witness." Another was headed "The Big Lie, Continued."

The Jewish paper Forward said, "Sack is transparently writing docudrama," and told readers that Lola Potok was not the commandant of the prison in Gleiwitz. Well, Lola herself had told me, "I was the commandant," and thirty-five other people, including the current commandant, including the current director of prisons, said yes, Lola was the commandant. I have the document that says, "We appoint Citizen Lola Potok Commandant," and I have a document signed by Lola Potok, Commandant. But still the Forward said, "The unlikelihood is overwhelming but Sack ... seems ... oblivious." As I read this, I felt I was being lectured by Chico Marx. Remember? "Who you gonna believe? Your own two eyes or me?" I wrote a letter to the Forward. Over the last seven years, I've had to write, at last count, about 1,500 letters about An Eye for an Eye. And all those letters, added up, are twice as long as the book is.

Maybe you're wondering. What sort of a crazy man am I? Why don't I just say the hell with it? Why do I carry on?

I'll tell you. There are eighty-five thousand books about the Holocaust. And none of them, if you ask me, has an honest answer to the question, "How could the Germans do it?" How could the Germans -- the people who gave us Beethoven, the Ninth Symphony, the Ode to Joy, "Alle Menschen werden Brüder, All men will be brothers" -- perpetrate the Holocaust?

This mystery, we've got to solve it. We've got to, or we'll keep on having genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, Zaire. Well, what I report in An Eye for an Eye is that Lola has solved it. The Jews from the Office of State Security have solved it. Because in their agony, their despair, their insanity, if you will, they felt they became like the Germans -- the Nazis -- themselves.

Wages of Hatred

And if I had been there, I'd have become one too, and now I understand why. Lola, like a lot of Jews, understandably, were full of hate in 1945. They were volcanoes of red-hot hate. They thought if they joined the Office of State Security, and spit out their hate at the Germans, then they'd be rid of it.

No. It doesn't work that way. Let's say I'm in love with someone. I don't tell myself, "Uh, oh. I've got inside of me one, two pounds of love, so if I love her and love her, then I'll use all of my love up, and I'll be all out of love." No. We all understand that love is a paradoxical thing, that the more we send out, the more we've got.

So why don't we understand that about hate? If we hate, and if we act on that hate, then we hate even more later on. If we spit out a drop of hate, what happens? Well, we stimulate the saliva glands, and we produce a drop and a quarter of it. If we spit that out, we produce a drop and a half, then two drops, three, a teaspoon, tablespoon, a Mount Saint Helens. The more we send out, the more we've got, until we are perpetual-motion machines, sending out hate and hate until we've created a holocaust.

You don't have to be a German to become like that. You can be a Serb, a Hutu, a Jew. You can be an American. We were the ones in the Philippines. We were the ones in Vietnam. We were the ones in Washington, DC, for ten thousand years the home of the Anacostia Indians. They had one of their camp grounds at what now is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

We all have it in us to become like Nazis. Hate, as Lola discovered, hate is a muscle, and if we want to be monsters all we have to do is exercise it. To hate the Germans, to hate the Arabs, to hate the Jews. Hate. The more we exercise it, the bigger it gets, just as if every day we curl forty pounds, far from being worn out, in time we are curling fifty, sixty pounds. We become the Mr. Universe of Hate. We all can be hate-full people, hateful people. We can destroy the people we hate, maybe, but we surely destroy ourselves.

That's what the Jews in the Office of State Security have taught us. That's what I tried to write, what I did write, in An Eye for an Eye. The very first words are the dedication. I'd like to read them: "For all who died and for all who because of this story might live."

That's what I'd planned to say at the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Questions from the Audience

Question: I'm very much moved by your presentation. I wish to commend you for your courage. Did you mention that Solomon Morel was also the commander at Jaworzno? At Jaworzno, there were young people, young boys -- fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen -- Poles, Germans, and Lithuanians -- and other ethnics were tortured and murdered there. There is now a group of Jaworzno, and also Swietochlowice, survivors (as they use the term), who are getting together, Poles, Germans, Lithuanians, whoever.

John Sack: Morel was at Jaworzno afterwards. Jaworzno was a camp for Poles. By that time they were putting Poles in the camp, rather than --

Q: There were Germans there also.

JS: There were? Thank you.

Q: What would you recommend on the hate train that we're on here in the United States and the hate laws that are being promulgated?

JS: Well, I don't think that we're on a hate train. I'm writing an article for Esquire magazine about the revisionists and in the three conferences that I've been to, and certainly at this conference, I have not seen hate manifested. I don't see people who feel hate. Even people who are called neo-Nazis, like Ernst Zündel, who is not a hate-filled man.

Q: No, I mean in the United States, we're seeing hate laws, thought police, politically correct speech, people are winding up ... as many have here, for that matter ...

JS: Well, of course I'm for free speech, and even if what Fred Töben said was hateful -- and it wasn't -- and even if what Germar was saying was hateful -- and it certainly wasn't -- and what Ernst was saying and what Faurisson was saying was hateful -- and none of it was -- even if it was, it should be allowed, of course, and I'm glad it's allowed in the United States.

Q: What has Lola's reaction been to the book?

JS: Lola actually called me right before the book came out. We had a nice talk. We chatted. I sent her the book. It took her about half a year to read. Her only comment on it was that I had made a mistake, that she was first in Germany and then she came to Paris and there she met her husband and she went back to Germany and got married, and I had it the other way around. That was her only comment. She's now living in Australia and I understand she has Alzheimer's disease.

Q: Would I be correct in assuming that these people should be brought to justice, given a fair trial, and hanged? After all, we're still prosecuting seventy-five-year-old German corporals.

JS: Well, I wish we wouldn't. I think it's too late for anybody to be brought to justice. But I think there should be a trial of Solomon Morel, if for no other reason than to bring out the facts. I would hate to see him go to jail, and as a matter of fact most of his prisoners at Swietochlowice, his former prisoners do not want to see him go to jail, but they want the facts to come out. They would like him just to apologize.

Q: Both the German government and the Polish government are wishy-washy on this. They aren't really seeking to have Solomon Morel extradited from Israel.

JS: That's true. The German government had a prosecution of him going and that just fell by the wayside, disappeared, and the Polish government was very strange. They could have accused him of murder. There were witnesses that saw him commit murder. They just accused him of brutality and other things that expired under the statute of limitations in 1965.

Q: Not only that, but Solomon Morel, living in Israel, is collecting a pension from the Polish government and the "Polish" government is not Polish. The Polish government is a Communist government, and most of them, not all, are Jewish -- they call themselves "former Communists." So, the "Polish" government is not Polish, and we heard about what's happening in Germany a little while ago. So, what chance is there of catching this monster and exposing him to the world?

[Voice] Kidnap him like the Israelis did Eichmann.

JS: I suppose that would be one answer. As I understand it Solomon Morel cannot collect his pension unless he's in Poland -- that's why he wanted to stay there -- I don't know whether that may have changed.

Q: Has Solomon Morel said anything?

JS: Solomon Morel, people keep going up to his door every couple of weeks. Once they camped in front of his door for a couple of days, and his daughter comes to the door and says that he doesn't want to give interviews and says that he's writing a book about all of this. That's just what they say. I don't know if it's true.

Q: You say that you believe in the gas chambers. Have you gotten far enough into it that you could produce any evidence that you could present here tonight?

JS: Do I have any evidence here tonight about the existence of gas chambers? No. I accept that people of good faith, honest people, can really look at the evidence and feel that there's not enough evidence that there were gas chambers. I hope that you accept that other people can look at the evidence and conclude that there is enough evidence, and that's my conclusion. I don't think that anybody who disagrees is a "neo-Nazi" or an "anti-Semite" or a hate-filled person. I think that you just happen to have a different opinion from me.

Q: Can you talk about your own experience being discriminated against and called an "anti-Semite," and yet you're a Jew. These reviews and articles were obviously libelling you.

JS: On the Charlie Rose show I was called an "anti-Semite" and a "neo-Nazi" by Deborah Lipstadt. [laughter and applause] I called her up after that and reminded her that I'd read her book, and I sent her a nice note about it and told her what I was trying to do in my book, and I said "How could you have said that about me?" She said "You are worse than a 'Holocaust denier,'" and I said "Deborah, I'm worse than a 'Holocaust denier'?" and she said "You are worse than a 'Holocaust denier.'" I said "Could you explain why?," and she said "No. I have a faculty meeting," [laughter] and that's the last I talked to her. It doesn't scare me. It doesn't hurt me. It amuses me.

Q: Are there any Jewish organizations, major Jewish organizations which would permit our principal speakers to speak in front of them?

JS: Not only that, are there any major Jewish organizations that would permit me to speak in front of them? [laughter and applause] So far, none, and believe me I've asked. I asked Hillel at UCLA. I certainly asked the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and no, so far, none.

Q: You refer to Nazis as a model for hate. As a German-American I consider the model for hate to be the Jewish Bolshevik regime that killed anywhere from thirty to sixty-six million people. I've just become aware of that by reading Solzhenitsyn's three books and I'm wondering if you have read these books?

JS: I haven't, but you know, when you talk about the Jewish Bolshevik regime be aware that just because, if most of the Bolsheviks, I don't know, were Jews, please be aware that most of the Jews weren't Bolsheviks, and never were.

About the author

John Sack is one of America's most eminent literary journalists. His reporting over more than half a century, from North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, has appeared in such periodicals as Harper's, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. He has been a war correspondent in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Yugoslavia, as well as CBS News bureau chief in Spain. He is the author of nine non-fiction books, including M, Lieutenant Calley: His Story, and Company C, as well as An Eye for an Eye (available from the IHR). The founding editor of Esquire magazine has compared his writing to that of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernst Hemingway. For more about Sack and his career, see his Web site: http://www.johnsack.com .

This essay, slightly edited, was presented on May 29, 2000, at the 13th IHR conference. For more about his travails with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, see "Suppressing the Story of Genocide Against Germans," in the Sept.-Oct. 1997 Journal. "Inside the Bunker," a lengthy article by Sack based on his participation at the 13th IHR Conference, appeared in the February 2001 issue of Esquire.

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GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE: HOLOCAUST REVISIONISM AS A TEST CASE FOR FREE SPEECH AND THE SKEPTICAL ETHIC

By Frank Miele

From: Rich Graves <llurch@Networking.Stanford.EDU> Newsgroups: alt.censorship,soc.culture.german,alt.revisionism  Subject: Skeptics Society on Zundel and his Censorship Claims (69K) Date: Tue, 30 Jan 1996 18:13:50 -0800 Organization: Stanford University Lines: 1226 Message-ID: <Pine.ULT.3.91.960130180831.22977a-100000@Networking.Stanford.EDU> Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE X-PGP-key: finger llurch@mordor.stanford.edu X-URL: http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~llurch/ 

http://www.skeptic.com/02.4.miele-holocaust.html#fire 

From Skeptic vol. 2, no. 4, 1994, pp. 58-70.

The following article is copyright (C) 1994 by the Skeptics Society, P.O. Box 338, Altadena, CA 91001, (818) 794-3119. Permission has been granted for noncommercial electronic circulation of this article in its entirety, including this notice. A special Internet introductory subscription rate to Skeptic is available. For more information, contact Jim Lippard (lippard@skeptic.com).

GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE: HOLOCAUST REVISIONISM AS A TEST CASE FOR FREE SPEECH AND THE SKEPTICAL ETHIC

By Frank Miele

Contents: * Introduction * The Criminalization of Revisionism * Ernst Zundel: Playing With Fire * L'Affaire Faurisson * The Leuchter Protocol * David Irving: Self-Made Historian * Down the Slippery Slope * Can There Be Valid Holocaust Revisionism? * Bibliography * Sidebar 1: Holocaust Revisionism and the Law * Sidebar 2: Also Sprach Zundel

The exchange between Sir Thomas More, stalwart of due process in Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, and the younger and zealous Roper, epitomizes the argument advocates of open inquiry have presented in many lands at many times (Act 1, Scene 6):

Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law.

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that.

More: Oh? And when the last law was down--and the Devil turned round on you--where would you hide? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

The revisionist assertion that the Holocaust (the Nazi persecution of European Jewry culminating in the intentional mass genocide of five to six million) is a snare and a delusion foisted upon the rest of society by powerful Zionist Jews is generated by only a handful of scholars and propagandists at a few fringe organizations. Despite fears and claims to the contrary, it is taken seriously by only a small percentage of the American population. (I use the term "revisionist" rather than "denier" because that is the term these individuals use; just as newspapers use "Pro-Choice" and "Pro-Life." Likewise, I do not use the term "exterminationist," by which the revisionists often designate their opponents.) According to the most recent Gallup poll on the subject, when asked directly, "Do you doubt that the Holocaust actually happened or not?" only 9% said yes and 4% said they were unsure (Morin, 1994). The Gallup organization explained the discrepancy between the low level of support for Holocaust revisionism found in their poll and the much higher level (22% doubters; 12% unsure) in the Roper poll commissioned by the American Jewish Committee, as resulting from the different wording, especially the use of a double negative in the Roper question.

Denying or even doubting the Holocaust has the same effect on Jews (and others) as would burning an American flag in front of a VA hospital filled with disabled war veterans. To many, it's yelling "liar!" at a crowded gas chamber. And in countries other than the U.S., it's a criminal offense for which violators can do hard time in the slammer.

Should skeptics take the claims of Holocaust revisionists seriously or simply write them off as yet another product of the lunatic fringe? And, do the claims of the Holocaust revisionists have any historical merit? So asked Michael Shermer in a recent issue of Skeptic, in the process of identifying the concept of pseudohistory, the fraternal twin of pseudoscience (Shermer, 1993). Shermer's essay in this issue provides a detailed analysis of these questions. Tom McIver's article specifically compares revisionism with creationism and argues that they share underlying racist assumptions. What I shall examine is how Holocaust revisionism provides a useful test case for the skeptical ethic, our views on freedom of inquiry and expression, academic freedom and responsibility, and the extent to which the "received version" of history is enforced as an article of faith, to be questioned only at the loss of one's reputation, job, or even personal freedom.

The Criminalization of Revisionism

The Russian language emigre newspaper, Russkaia Mysl' ("La Pensee Russe"), once described how in the former Soviet Union what began as a criminal charge became just another part of the day to day operation of government: "Censorship, which began as a judicial term, became an administrative one."

In the United States, the First Amendment protects the right of every citizen to question the very existence of the Holocaust (or of Pearl Harbor, the moon walk, the death of Elvis, or anything else for that matter). According to FBI Director Louis Freeh, "no matter how despicable, it's protected by the 1st Amendment." (Shanker, 1993, p.72).

That is not the case elsewhere in the world. In Canada, anti-hate and pornography statutes and the law against spreading "false news" have been used against Holocaust revisionists. In France it is illegal to contest the existence of any of the crimes against humanity as defined by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal. In Germany it is against the law to "defame the memory of the dead." Similar laws are on the books in Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, Sweden and Israel.

Mark Weber, editor of the Journal of Historical Review (the official organ of revisionists) is presently compiling a detailed list of anti-revisionist laws and criminal prosecutions. He, along with Zundel, Irving, and Faurisson, supplied me with information on these laws (as well as considerably more material despite being told in advance that the resulting essay could be critical of their positions). No one disputes the existence of these laws. Indeed, the most prominent critics of the claims of Holocaust revisionists, Deborah Lipstadt, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and Michael Shermer, have publicly stated they oppose laws that criminalize revisionism. (Lipstadt, 1993, p.17; Vidal-Naquet, 1992, pp. 71-71; Shermer, 1994, p. 14).

This can be an especially difficult philosophy to live by, with the most extreme proponents of Holocaust revisionism--those who have not-so-hidden anti-Semitic agendas. A classic example is Francis Parker Yockey's Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics, written under the Irish-Viking-Russian nom-de-plume of Ulick Varange and dedicated to Adolf Hitler. Yockey, who originally worked for the War Crimes Tribunal, but then quit, was one of the earliest Holocaust revisionists. Imperium was republished by Noontide Press, the publishing arm of IHR. The 1992 IHR catalogue describes Imperium as, "a sweeping historico-philosophical treatise in the Spenglerian mold and a clarion call to arms in defense of Europe and the West." This "prophetic masterwork brought its author a martyr's death" (p. 11). According to Lipstadt (p.147), Yockey had a history of paranoid behavior and committed suicide by taking a cyanide capsule while in prison on a passport violation. Yockey claims Darwinian evolution amounts to the "materialistic animalization of Culture-man." Species, he tells us, do NOT evolve. They arise spontaneously and disappear just as magically. Needless to say, "parasites" (that is, Jews, Negroes, and Communists) come off even worse in his view than does Darwin (McIver, 1988, Entry #1829a).

In Yockey's league is the self-described former Marxist (now unclassifiable political extremist) Lyndon LaRouche, and his wife Helga Zepp LaRouche. Her Hitler Book argues along the lines of creation scientists that Darwinism is the origin of Hitlerism, both of which the LaRouches despise (McIver entry #1841). In addition to having revealed the Queen of England as the Godmother of the International Drug Trade, LaRouche and his followers have resolved the wave-particle duality, uncovered a 3,000-year old conspiracy against humanity, discovered the critical error in the thinking of "capitalist reformer" Karl Marx, rendered all previously existing economic systems meaningless, and conceived the strategic defense initiative (LaRouche, 1979a, 1979b, 1980, 1983). Amidst all these claims, the LaRouches have also dismissed the Holocaust as "mythical" and "a swindle" (King, 1989, p.138).

Conspiracy theories interpret history as governed by "demonic forces of almost transcendent power." They have a long history in the United States and are equally at home among both right- and left-wingers (Hofstadter, 1965, p. 29). Among those fingered as the evil ones: the Illuminati, the Knights of Malta, the Masons, the Jews, the Crypto-Jews, the Cosmopolitans, the Abolitionists, Slaveholders, the Catholics, the Communists, the Nazis, the neo-Nazis, the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Warren Commission, the World Wildlife Fund, the International Monetary Fund, the New Agers, and the list goes on.

Not all Holocaust revisionists are conspiracy theorists. Mark Weber, in fact, is redirecting the IHR away from both conspiratorial thinking and overt anti-Semitic leanings, in an effort to lead the movement into the mainstream of historical scholarship. In this process they must also distance themselves from some of the more extreme revisionists. The best known cases of prosecution of Holocaust revisionists reveal a lot about both the social movement of revisionism and the unwillingness of some countries to grant them the freedom to revise certain histories.

Ernst Zundel: Playing With Fire

A Canadian resident but German citizen, Ernst Zundel is the most outspoken and visible advocate of Holocaust revisionism. He is, interestingly (especially for skeptics) also the author of UFO's: Nazi Secret Weapons?, which has sold out seven underground printings. The book argued that what are usually described as flying saucers from outer space are actually Nazi secret weapons, still being launched from a hole in the ice in Antarctica. This may be why he jokingly told me in an early phone conversation to realize that I was dealing with the "real lunatic fringe." In a later phone conversation, Zundel told me that the UFO book was in fact a ploy. "I realized that North Americans were not interested in being educated. They want to be entertained. The book was for fun. With a picture of the Fuhrer on the cover and flying saucers coming out of Antarctica it was a chance to get on radio and TV talk shows. For about 15 minutes of an hour program I'd talk about that esoteric stuff. Then I would start talking about all those Jewish scientists in concentration camps, working on these secret weapons. And that was my chance to talk about what I wanted to talk about."

"In that case," I asked him, "do you still stand by what you wrote in the UFO book?" I asked. "Look," he replied, "it has a question mark at the end of the title."

While some Holocaust revisionists operate quietly and seek outlets in academic or academic-like journals, Zundel unleashes an avalanche of newsletters, audio cassettes, stickers, radio and TV broadcasts. The sheer volume of his output would be the envy of any political campaign manager or television evangelist. His tone, however, in person, phone conversations, audio cassettes (which open with a trumpet fanfare that sounds like a 40's Movietone newsreel) is almost always calm and didactic.

During a recent visit to German-American friends in the San Francisco Bay Area, Zundel surprised me with a phone call and invited me over for a lengthy and wide ranging discussion and interview. The word "Zundel," I found out, comes from the same root as "zundeln"--to play with fire. The word, he explained, can have the connotation of either a spark plug (that which ignites something for a desired purpose) or someone running irresponsibly through the haystacks. "A Jewish woman psychic told me that in my previous incarnation [he meant it figuratively] at a convention where I was peddling my UFO book that this was a very powerful name. Something that can spark a revolution. Like 'Iskra'" (in Russian, "the spark," the title of one of Lenin's journals).

Zundel was born in Germany in 1939, and his earliest memories while growing up in a small village in the Black Forest are of the sound of the Allied bombing raids and of waking up frightened, cold and shivering, even in summer. Zundel said he has no memories whatsoever of Jews from his days in Germany. He did not meet his first Jew until he was 19 years old and living in Canada. There he met and married a French Canadian girl and became a successful commercial artist, specializing in photo retouching, (which he found to be a most profitable line of work). He paints in a style he likens to that of Andrew Wyeth, and has sold over 700 paintings to buyers around the world, 80% of whom he estimates were Jews, a fact he apparently thinks is important for us to know.

When discussing his work as a commercial artist, Zundel told me that he had never employed a salesman, but acted as his own salesman and used lunches and dinners to combine business with pleasure. I have worked with a fair number of salesmen over the years and Zundel is as good as any I have met. His introduction is pleasant and filled with stories and self-deprecating humor. He quickly reverses himself in order to agree with his interlocutor on anything that is not critical to his "game plan" Without making a written note, he remembers any points that seem either to test the credulity or win support of his interviewer and at convenient breaks produces supporting documentation from his "briefing book" (a huge three-ring binder, similar to a salesman's pitchbook). And he has his pitch down cold. I feel sorry for any opponent who goes up against Zundel unprepared.

Zundel will dangle a reference to UFO's or the wisdom of the ancient Atlanteans. If it has no effect, he just moves on. If it elicits skepticism, he blows it off with a jovial "for whatever it's worth." Given our early conversation on the UFO book, I'm still not sure whether Zundel really believes any of this esoteric stuff or whether he's just learned how effective pushing hot buttons is in grabbing the media spotlight and perhaps bringing in donations.

"It's a lot like operating a church" he explained. "We survive on donations." He has, in fact, survived well enough to provide for his own defense, assist others in the preparation of theirs, conduct a research project to determine who was really behind the U.S. internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and is currently going to send a multilingual team to Europe to investigate and interview the "enigmatic revisionist" and noted Russian ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

It is as a Holocaust revisionist that Zundel has become incendiary. In 1983, Sabrina Citron, a Holocaust survivor and founder of the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association, placed a private complaint against Zundel. Zundel claims that Citron was a loose cannon and that her action was based upon the desire to raise her profile and status in the Canadian Jewish community and that most members considered her action counterproductive. Lipstadt agrees that "most Canadian Jewish organizations did not support her decision" (p.157).

In 1984, the Canadian government initiated criminal proceedings against Zundel based on Citron's complaint. Specifically, Zundel was charged under section 177 (the false news section) of the Criminal Code of Canada which provides that "every one who wilfully publishes a statement, tale or news that he knows is false and that causes or is likely to cause injury or mischief to a public interest is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term of not exceeding two years" (Samisdat, 1992, p.1). Zundel's actionable behavior was publishing (not writing) two books: The West, War, and Islam, and Did Six Million Really Die? (Again that question mark at the end of the title.)

The trial, during which he appeared in court wearing the now familiar Zundel garb of a bullet-proof vest and a hardhat bearing the motto, "Freedom of Speech" in both English and German, took place in 1985. Zundel was acquitted of the false news charge for The West, War, and Islam, but convicted for Did Six Million Really Die? He was sentenced to 15 months in jail. That conviction was subsequently overturned on appeal and a new trial ordered.

The second trial became a revisionist media event in which Zundel's lawyer largely succeeded in putting the Holocaust, rather than his client, on trial. Zundel was able to call leading revisionists Faurisson, Leuchter, Irving, Weber and others as expert witnesses. Zundel's company, Samisdat Publishers (1993) has printed a 566-page summary of the testimony presented in that trial. ("Samisdat" is derived from the Russian word for "self-publication" the way all works, fact and fiction, had to be published unless they were "officially approved" in the former Soviet Union.)

Zundel was again convicted, but the case worked its way up to the Canadian Supreme Court, which struck down the publishing false news statute as an unconstitutional violation of free speech (B'nai B'rith Covenant, 1993, p. 7). Thus Ernst Zundel, self-described admirer of der Fuhrer, became a civil libertarian hero of Canada.

Zundel is not, however, home free, as some Canadian Jewish groups have initiated further action against him under the anti-hate provisions of Canadian law. The German ambassador to Canada, Dr. Guenther Sulimma, joined with them when he told a B'nai B'rith luncheon in Canada that he would formally ask the Canadian government to do what it could to stop Zundel from publishing Holocaust revisionist materials (B'nai B'rith Covenant, p. 7).

Zundel has retaliated by filing his own anti-hate suit against various Canadian Jewish groups, citing the statement by Elie Wiesel in his book, Legends of Our Time: "Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate--healthy, virile hate--for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German." (Journal of Historical Review, 1993b, p. 16). To date no action has been taken by the Canadian authorities.

Zundel's "game plan," as he calls it, is to "first, bring down Jewish suffering in terms of numbers and events, both real and imagined, to what it really was, not what they say it was, what they exploit for their own political, financial, and geopolitical purposes." When asked to be more precise, he estimated total Jewish deaths from all causes under the Nazi regime as only about 300,000. His second goal is to make the world look at German suffering and the Allied brutality toward Germany and realize that both peoples were victims.

"Suppose," I asked, "new evidence, either from the archives or from scientific analysis, proves that you and the revisionists were really right all along. What would change?"

"First," he replied "all the numbers would go down. It would be a satisfying personal victory to know that I was right; that I had been a trailblazer and an iconoclast. History would be rewritten and corrected and I could get out of this stuff and get back to my life."

"What about aid to Israel?"

"I would cut it off immediately," he stated, as his voice shifted from its usual avuncular tone to the more strident one he calls "the eloquence of emergency." Israel, he says, is "a parasitic enterprise and they don't deserve it. It wouldn't happen if it weren't for the Holocaust. The Jews will have to give back the money to the Germans or to the Palestinians and make restitution to the Germans. They must apologize verbally and then financially. They got the money illegitimately. It must be turned over to legitimate causes."

"Why go back in time?" I asked. "Why not just wipe the slate clean?"

In an even more strident tone he replied, "Why should we let parasites and liars live with their loot? They took it from Egypt (a reference to the Old Testament Exodus). They're not going to take it from the Germans."

"Those are awfully strong words," I said, offering him a chance to take them back were he to feel they were spoken in a moment of anger.

"They are strong words. After what I've suffered, the price I've paid, I have the right to use strong words."

I gave him yet another chance. "You're comfortable being quoted on that?"

"Absolutely. The Holocaust has become an enterprise based on falsehoods and lies and they are promoting it criminally."

I asked Zundel what might have happened if in 1917, when both sides had been putting out peace feelers, all sides had gone back to the pre-World War I borders and there had been no Treaty of Versailles. He replied that it was the Treaty of Versailles that created Hitler. The Kaiser had offered to do that, but there wasn't peace in 1917 because the Jewish political and financial interests manipulated the U.S. into the war.

Realizing that in Zundel's view the Jews had a hand in everything, I granted him that there was a Jewish lobby (or an Israeli lobby) and that it was powerful. But how is what AIPAC does (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) different, quantitatively or qualitatively from what the National Rifle Association does?

Zundel replied that they were totally different. The NRA was made up of Americans concerned about their Second Amendment Rights. Zundel told me he wasn't envious of Jewish power; he was alarmed by it. Unlike the NRA or other lobbying groups, the Jewish lobby, he said, works for a foreign power.

And at that moment Zundel's conspiratorial mind opened up. He referred me to Francis Parker Yockey's book, Imperium, which shows how the Jews have distorted and perverted the direction of Western culture. He informed me that Jews lack what he called, "fingerspitzengefuhl," which he translated from the German as "the touch of the fingers." Throughout history this has derailed Jewish enterprises. Since they didn't listen to Moses, Zundel doubted they'd listen to him. They were on the path to becoming intellectual Baruch Goldsteins (a reference to the American born Israeli West Bank settler who recently gunned down defenseless Palestinians in a mosque). When I asked what the result of their not heeding him would be, Zundel told me massive pogroms were ahead.

"Suppose the evidence proves you're wrong. What will you then do?" I asked. He replied "I'll spend my last money issuing apologies and retire."

When asked if he could think of any definitive experiment that could decide the gas chamber issue one way or the other Zundel offered the macabre suggestion that someone build a gas chamber according to what are alleged to be the plans, get DEGESH to supply the gas, fill it with people, gas them and see if they in fact died. Since the U.S. continues to execute people, we could also save some money in conducting such an experiment.

Zundel's Judeophobia is clear enough. His Germanophilia is no less potent. In our conversation he waxed eloquent about all of Hitler's accomplishments. He believes that Europe is only now 50 years later arriving where Hitler wanted it to be. Hitler, according to Zundel, evolved from being a German ultranationalist, to a Pan German, to a European. By the time the war ended, der Fuhrer had hit upon the idea of a "Europa ethnica," in which each ethnic group could live peacefully in its own little place. When I asked him if this was not just so much propaganda to get Poles, Slovaks, and others to fight and die to keep the Third Reich going just a little longer, Zundel explained that I too was a victim of my limited American perspective.

Even if viewed from his perspective as a German ethnic activist, I queried, was not Hitler more responsible than anyone for ruining Germany and making Germans subservient to the Jews? "No," he stated. "That would be blaming the victim! Hitler didn't bomb the German cities. Hitler didn't fire the German university professors. Hitler didn't . . . . " All this started to sound a little too much like Franz Liebkind in Mel Brooks' The Producers: "Hitler was a better dancer than Churchill. Hitler was a better singer than Churchill. Churchill couldn't even say Nazi. He would say Naah-Zees, Bloody Naah-Zees."

In checking my notes before publication I called Zundel one more time, by chance on April 2Oth, the 105th anniversary of the birth of Adolf Hitler. He complained that the Canadian authorities had detained him when he returned and tried to seize his notes and briefing book. He told me he was celebrating Hitler's birthday "the way we Germans like to--by hard work!"

L'Affaire Faurisson

Robert Faurisson, a professor of literature at the University of Lyon 2, has in a number of articles, argued that: (1) there never was a preconceived German master plan to exterminate Jews; (2) no gas chambers were ever in use in the Third Reich or its territories for that purpose (those structures being, in fact, delousing chambers, as is standard in POW camps and prisons); and (3) that the conventionally accepted figure of six million Jewish deaths (including those from disease and other "natural causes") is absurdly high.

For making these statements, Faurisson was first dismissed from his academic post on grounds that should send shivers down the spine of any civil libertarian: ". . . the authorities couldn't protect him from his enemies" (Herman, 1993, p. 8). He was in fact physically beaten rather severely by anti-revisionists. Faurisson, his publishers, and supporters who have distributed or promoted his materials have been tried, convicted, fined, and barred from holding any government jobs (Le Monde, 19 September 1983).

The convictions were under the Fabius-Gayssot law of 1990, largely written with the express intent of criminalizing Faurisson's revisionist activities, which should also raise civil libertarian eyebrows. That law makes it a criminal offense "to contest by any means the existence of one or more of the crimes against humanity as defined by Article 6 of the Statutes of the International Military Tribunal, attached to the London Agreement of August 8, 1945, committed either by the members of an organization declared criminal in application of Article 9 of the same Statutes, or by a person held guilty of such a crime by a French or international jurisdiction."

Any meaningful appeal of those verdicts is therefore impossible under French law. Faurisson and his supporters have been restricted in court from mentioning "gas chambers" (ostensibly, the existence of which they were convicted of questioning) and have been denied government jobs. Le Choc du Mois ("The Shock of the Month") had to cease operation because of the fines it repeatedly incurred in publishing Faurisson's work.

The Leuchter Protocol

For years, Fred Leuchter (who described himself as an "engineer," though he does not possess an engineering degree) made his living developing, selling, and servicing execution devices. The Execution Protocol: Inside America's Capital Punishment Industry (Trombley, 1992), contains a sympathetic portrait of Leuchter in his pre-revisionist days. Lipstadt (1993) offers a scathing evaluation of Leuchter's professional competence, even before his venture into Holocaust revisionism.

Leuchter's involvement with Holocaust revisionism began when Zundel called him as an expert witness as to the existence of gas chambers in the Nazi concentration camps. Zundel's defense paid Leuchter $30,000 to perform an analysis on samples from the chambers, which Leuchter obtained without the knowledge or consent of the Polish authorities. This was strictly illegal.

According to the analysis performed by an independent laboratory on the samples, Leuchter claimed, in the now famous "Leuchter Report," ("An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek, Poland"), no gassing could have taken place. (See Shermer's article for an analysis of this controversy). The Leuchter Report became a revisionist international best seller and Leuchter an overnight (and by his account, reluctant) star of the movement. This produced a good deal of ill feeling for Leuchter in certain circles.

In response, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld joined a local Massachusetts survivors group and brought an action against Leuchter for practicing engineering without a license. This statute had been previously untested (Trombley, p. 88) and according to the figures supplied by Zundel, less than 20% of the "engineers" practicing in Massachusetts are so licensed. Like the Zundel trials, the Leuchter trial became a media event.

Leuchter eventually signed a consent decree barring him from using the title "engineer" (Trombley, p. 90). This was really academic. All of his contracts with the various states have been terminated and, according to Zundel, some states have reneged on outstanding invoices so that Leuchter has been left holding the bag on some rather expensive equipment.

In the tape interview distributed by Zundel (1993), Leuchter (whose name in German, Zundel tells his listeners, means "illuminator," though "candelabra" is the preferred translation) tells his lawyer Kirk Lyons, that his life is a shambles and his business is ruined. Leuchter now exists on speaking fees from sympathetic revisionist groups and working at odd jobs. He receives no royalties on the Leuchter report. (Leuchter did not return any of my numerous phone calls.)

Leuchter gave a speech in Germany in 1991 based on the finding of his report. He later returned to that country to appear as a guest on the popular German TV program, Schreinemakers, to discuss capital punishment. He was arrested in the TV studio before the program began on "suspicion he would use the TV show to incite racism and to slander the memory of Holocaust victims" (Canada News, 1993, p. 12).

Initially held without bail, he was subsequently released and is now in the United States. Gunther Deckert, head of the right-wing National Democratic Party of Germany set up the Leuchter speech and served as translator. He was arrested and charged with "defaming the dead" by translating and agreeing with Leuchter's arguments. Leuchter's lawyer, Hajo Herrmann, was also placed under investigation, though not formally charged, for having repeated Leuchter's arguments during his client's bail proceeding (Kolner Stadt-Anzeiger, 1993, p. 3).

In March of 1994, the German Federal Court of Justice (Germany's highest appeals court) revoked Deckert's $6,000 fine and one year suspended sentence. The court ordered a retrial of Deckert on the grounds that it was "too much of an overgeneralization" to assume that he had "attacked the dignity of the Jewish community in Germany by claiming that the Holocaust had not occurred" and that a new trial must prove that he was guilty of specifically "inciting racial hatred" (Boston Globe, 1994, p. 6). This ruling should affect Leuchter's trial, which will take place later this year.

David Irving: Self-Made Historian

If David Irving were an American baseball fan, he would turn off the sound on the TV because he could not stand the announcers, and he would read the box scores every morning without even looking at the AP wire, let alone the big name columnists. When he decided to become fluent in German, he did not take German 101 or order "learn-a-language" tapes; he spent two years as a steel worker in Germany.

Irving goes about writing history in the same do-it-yourself manner. He has no formal academic training in history. In fact, he holds most academic historians in contempt. While they spend their time reading each others' books, Irving avoids secondary and interpretive sources and instead immerses himself in the archives, going through diaries, correspondence, handwritten notes of the person he's writing about, his staff and intimates.

Irving has written or is in the process of writing a book on most of the major figures of World War II. When I reached him for a series of telephone interviews he was going over the final draft of Dr. Goebbels.

Irving's method of relying on only primary sources gives his books a unique style and a very controversial impact. Some are more in the form of a chronology than an interpretive summary. They often read more like Joe Friday than Gibbon or Macaulay. And like a police report, they contain firsthand information you will find nowhere else, which is why they have been required reading at such places as West Point, the Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the British Open University, and the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

Critics would argue that Irving's methodology is not only his strength, but his greatest weakness. The mildest criticism would be that in his avoidance of secondary and interpretive sources, his reader loses any sense of context and is unable to see the forest for all the (unearthed) trees.

A stronger criticism would be that after providing a mass of details, Irving seizes upon some "zinger" as support for some controversial thesis and thereby guarantees publicity and sales. When I asked Irving if he thought this criticism had any merit, he answered that if he discovers "zingers as you call them," he documents them and follows the evidence wherever it leads him; he does not manufacture them. He also told me that certain forms of controversy hurt sales and result in costly litigation.

The strongest criticism would be that Irving uses whatever he can find in the mass of documents to support his own "mild fascist" position. In 1979 he argued in Hitler's War that not only was there no evidence of a Fuhrer order for the extermination of the Jews, but that Hitler himself did not know what was going on with respect to the Jews (at least in the beginning). Since then his conclusions have consistently moved in a revisionist direction that reduces the culpability assigned to Germany in general and Hitler in particular, both for starting the war and practicing genocide.

Irving told me that the oft-repeated characterization of him as a "self-described mild Fascist" was neither fair nor accurate and was based on a 1959 article that was "retracted immediately." He prefers to describe himself as an "ultraconservative with socialist leanings." As for reducing Nazi culpability, Irving stated that he has publicly accepted every Nazi atrocity or crime for which he can find hard evidence.

Controversy and litigation are no strangers to Irving. But it was only after his testimony in the Zundel trial that governments placed criminal charges against him, that he was deported or denied entry, and that his books were removed from stores and/or the stores vandalized. He told me he realized that there was "a campaign to shut me up" and that he "was up against an international organization with considerable clout." I asked him to identify the organization, which he did as "the traditional enemies of the truth."

In May, 1992, Irving told a German audience that the gas chamber shown to tourists at Auschwitz was "a fake built after the war." In June, 1992, he was coming to Rome from Moscow. When the plane landed, it was surrounded by police and Irving was put on the next plane to Munich. He was charged under the German law of "defaming the memory of the dead" and fined 3,000DM. He appealed the conviction and on subsequent appeals the conviction was upheld and the fine increased first to 10,000 and then to 30,000DM, or about $20,000. (The German legal system provides for increasing the penalty on appeal. Irving was not the victim of extralegal tactics, nor has he ever claimed this). In all his appeals, Irving was not allowed to call the director of the Auschwitz museum as a witness to confirm his statement. (The Auschwitz gas chamber is, in fact, a reconstruction built after the war. No one at the Auschwitz museum denies this.)

Later that year, while in California, Irving received a letter from the Canadian government saying that he would not be allowed into that country because of the German conviction. He did enter Canada, legally, in October, 1992, to receive the George Orwell award from a conservative free speech organization. He was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, led away in handcuffs and told that he was being deported on the grounds that he had been convicted of a criminal offense in Germany and was likely to perform similar acts in Canada. According to Irving, he had been to the country numerous times before without even a traffic ticket.

At present he cannot legally enter Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Germany, or South Africa. When he is allowed into certain countries, the authorities sometimes present Irving with a list of just what it is he is not allowed to say. The list can sometimes run 12-15 pages.

Irving feels he has also suffered professionally because of his revisionist views. Waterstones and Dillon's (British book chains) decided to keep Irving's books out of view after a number of their stores had been vandalized (Brownlee, 1992). The German Federal Archives in Coblenz, to which Irving has donated one ton of materials, has denied him further access and he is demanding the return of his materials. In March of 1994, Macmillan, the American publisher of Irving's forthcoming book on Dr. Goebbels, rejected his final draft and demanded the return of his (sizable) advance.

Irving's current position is that no one has offered proof (or now even tries) to contradict his argument that there was no "Fuhrer order;" that the total number of Jewish deaths should be reduced to a figure below one million; that the Leuchter Report is firm evidence against the existence of gas chambers which has been independently confirmed; and that the number of gassings that may have taken place in mobile vans or other experimental devices was at most an insignificant percentage of the total deaths.

Having grown up in a mob town in New Jersey, I asked Irving why one would even hope to find a written order, as such things usually take the form of verbal commands: "Hey Vito, can you take care of that thing for me?" Irving agreed that the "Godfather" method might well have been the way it happened.

I suggested to Irving that Hitler's declaration of war on the United States on December 10, 1941, was evidence that der Fuhrer realized he would either win the war and have the history books written the way he wanted, or lose completely, in which case he would take as many of his enemies with him as he could. Given this mindset, he probably encouraged Himmler to "take care of that Jewish thing." Irving responded that such an interpretation did not contradict the evidence and may well have been what happened. While going through the Goebbels diaries he found that from about 1942 on Goebbels repeatedly said things like "We have crimes on our book. We can't go back. We can only go forward." I quoted Shakespeare's murderous Richard III (Act IV, scene ii), "I am so far in blood that sin will pluck on sin. Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye," which Irving thought fit quite well.

My conversations with Irving were quite different from those with either Zundel or Mark Weber. Where Zundel struck me as a supersalesman looking for a way to close, and Weber seemed like a therapist trying to help me get over denial, Irving came across as the polished professional, with immediate recall of a wealth of facts and figures and little concern whether I agreed with him or not. This difference became even more obvious when I asked Irving: "suppose the revisionists are proven correct, what would change?" He responded, "the press would immediately say, 'we knew it all along.'" He then read his "Note for the Record," which he asks all journalists to sign before interviewing him on the Holocaust:

Being a responsible journalist reporting for _______, I solemnly affirm that I still believe in the existence during World War Two of "gas chambers" and "factories of death" in which Nazis killed millions of their opponents. Signed______ Print Name______ Date______ _Alternatively_: signature declined, (signed)______

(Since I am acting as a journalist for Skeptic, here is how I responded to Irving's note: "I neither affirm your note as provided, nor decline to participate. Here's what, based on reading and interviews, including you and revisionists, I presently think: Millions of Jews died in Europe under the Nazis. Some died of disease, overwork, brutality in the camps. Some were shot on the spot by Einsatzgruppen and Nazi collaborators. Some were systematically killed in the camps by methods that included gassing. I've found no 'hard' percentages. I'll continue to believe this until and unless you or someone else can convince me otherwise." Irving told me that I was the second person to provide an alternative version. All others had simply declined. None had signed.)

When I asked Irving what he would do if proven wrong, he again offered a professional and unemotional reply. He said he'd move on to something else, satisfied that he had argued the case well.

Where revisionism is a crusade for Zundel, for Irving it seems more an intellectual battle royal. And when it's done and over, he believes he'll be the last one standing and will take particular delight in stepping over the bodies of the academics he has KO'd along the way.

Intellectually, Irving's extremely proud. He told me how, when he was imprisoned in England for contempt of court arising out of a libel action brought by Australian Jewish organizations, his fellow prisoners, especially blacks, treated him with respect and dignity. Irving is miffed that John Charmley is getting the credit for the current wave of Churchill revisionism going on in Britain, when it was he (Irving) who started it all. He's even more miffed that Vladimir Zhirinovsky has taken Irving's place as the star speaker at right-wing talkfests put on by the German publisher Gerhard Frey. He considers Zhirinovsky an unstable lightweight who'll never be taken seriously, and feels Frey has wasted his money bankrolling Zhirinovsky's political campaign.

Irving enjoys taking chances and defending controversial positions for the intellectual challenge. He doesn't like to be labeled or pigeon-holed. He's currently working on a book on FDR, whom he found to be an exceptionally capable war time leader who listened to his generals, lost relatively few lives, "took us (Brits) for all we had," and made the U.S. a great power. He considers America's subsequent wars (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Panama) to have been counterproductive and racist and thinks the American media have done a terrible job of presenting the story to us. After likening the Gulf War to the Holocaust, in October, 1991, he was thrown out of an Argentine TV studio and all his lectures in that country were cancelled.

Down the Slippery Slope

Given the unpleasant nature of the subject matter and in many cases the motivation, manner, and association (past, present, and probably future) of Holocaust revisionists, one might accuse me of falling back on the Slippery Slope argument. That argument contends that when government invokes some compelling state interest to "trump" an existing right for an unpopular minority, one sets in motion a process that eventually undermines the rights of all. With respect to the history of the Third Reich, the Slippery Slope argument takes the form of Reverend Niemoeller's famous challenge to bystandars: "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out--because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade-unionists, and I did not speak out--because I was not a trade-unionist.Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me."

I will go even further and argue that in the post-Cold War world censorship in general is on the increase, not the decrease. And where once "national security" could be invoked to deny basic civil rights to dissidents, now preventing injury to some one's (or particularly some group's) "self esteem" is the cry being used by one and all to erode long established constitutional rights. A recent poll by the National Law Journal found 49% of Americans surveyed "say it would be 'compelling' for a defendant to argue that fury as a result of long-term, institutionalized racism, caused an individual to snap" (Sherman, 1994, p. A19).

Related to anti-revisionism legislation, consider next the unintended consequences of anti-pornography legislation. Canada has led the free, industrial world in anti-porn laws. Indeed, the hate speech laws used against Zundel are part of the same legislation. The Canadian Supreme Court has expanded the definition of pornography "to include depictions of sex that degrades or exploits women or other groups." The result--customs officials have gone on a rampage of seizing books that include scenes of rape, bestiality, child sex, sex with family members (even if not genetically related) or even if such acts are just implied! The same customs service memo also covers "hate propaganda," defined in the memo to include "material blaming any specific group for economic problems or for manipulating the media" (Lyall, 1993, p. A6).

According to Lyall's story in The New York Times, "hundreds of books, magazines, and newspapers have been detained, often for months at a time, or banned outright." The most frequent targets of such seizures have not been 24-hour hard-core porn shops filled with inflatable dolls and misogynistic "stroke books," but gay and lesbian books and magazines, small publishers, and small (often gay and lesbian) proprietorship bookstores--one quarter of Canada's feminist bookstores according to the National Coalition Against Censorship (1993b, p. 1).

Well-known feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon have argued that pornography by its very nature constitutes violence against women, and must therefore be banned. It is perhaps the ultimate vindication of the Slippery Slope argument to point out that their works are among those that have been seized (NCAC, 1993a, p. 4)! And based on the examples Dworkin provides of just what it is she is against, they would have to be. By like reasoning, Deborah Lipstadt's book, and this issue of Skeptic, for that matter, could be seized on the grounds that we have, by way of summary, repeated the arguments of the Holocaust revisionists and some simple soul out there could conceivably be won over by them.

Along these lines, a librarian in Montana recently was fired because "she assisted two seventh-grade girls with their research by giving them information from encyclopedias and lending them two books of her own after making sure that they had their parents' and teacher's approval" (Hoffman, 1994, p. A23). The subject was not revisionism, but the Salem witchcraft trials (though the study of the government suppression of witchcraft could be classified as feminist revisionist history). The West Valley School Board of Trustees in their press release argued that Ms. Denzer was only a "library aide" and that while the two books in question contained "graphic text and pictures depicting atrocities toward women," they contained "only a few pages of information" or "no references" to the Salem witch trials (West Valley School Board, 1994). Apparently the West Valley School Board sees no value in background research. Since the Bill of Rights does not explicitly mention the Salem witchcraft trials, I guess students at West Valley should not request a copy of it either. As to protecting school children from the harmful effects of "graphic depictions of atrocities," the school board should perhaps feel compelled to speak with Zundel before allowing any pupils to see Schindler's List.

Librarians are in fact duty bound by American Library Association policy "to obtain requested material without regard to bias or personal judgment" (Hoffman, p. A23). A decision by the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that Holocaust revisionist materials be treated in "a reasonable and nondiscriminatory manner, equally applicable to all and administered with equality to all" (Polish Historical Society News Release 1993). As some feminists consider witchcraft trials the "women's holocaust," the school board's actions have the effect of not only violating the rights of revisionists but of simultaneously "denying a holocaust," a punishable offense in other countries.

Regarding the use of law to restrict and prohibit Holocaust revisionism, the skeptical ethic can do no better than to follow the counsel given by Thomas Jefferson: "If a sect arises, whose tenets would subvert morals, good sense has fair play, and reasons and laughs it out of doors, without suffering the state to be troubled by it" (Jefferson, 1964, p.154). He noted that when "reason and experiment" are employed, "error" flees before them. "It is error alone that needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself" (p. 153).

If the skeptical ethic is clear on anything it is that individuals should not be subjected to government force (that is, arrest, imprisonment, fines) simply for what they believe, say, or write, rather than for what they do. It is perhaps as good a definition of dictatorship (as opposed to rule of law) as any that individuals are prosecuted (and persecuted) not for what they have actually done, but for what unspecified actions they or others influenced by them (also unspecified) might perform at some unspecified future time.

The quashing of the false news law by the Canadian Supreme Court in the Zundel case, and the demand for retrial on the grounds of overgenerality by the German Appeals Court in the Deckert case, indicate that the courts in the countries that do have anti-revisionist laws are moving in the direction of the skeptical ethic and of Thomas Jefferson. They are also acting in the spirit of those sections of the Helsinki Accords that deal with freedom of travel, personal contact, and communication (Lawson, 1991, pp. 717-719). To date, the most effective and respected revisionist has been the Israeli high court, which in effect threw out both survivor testimony and documentation from government archives that were introduced as evidence by the prosecution when they acquitted John Demjanjuk.

Can There Be Valid Holocaust Revisionism?

If the Holocaust is to be treated as a historical event, rather than an article of religious faith, it must be subjected to continued, critical revision, and treated no differently than the Battle of Waterloo or any other historical event. As Eatwell (1992) points out, the defining characteristic of serious revisionism, as opposed to propagandistic denial, is that the former serves to broaden debate, the latter to narrow it. Valid revisionism provides information on which others may reach different conclusions, rather than confirmation and reconfirmation of a predefined (though contrarian) point of view.

In doing so, valid revisionism raises more questions than it answers. Among those noted by Eatwell regarding the Holocaust are "detailed questions about the procurement of transport for the Jews . . . general questions about the Nazi regime, whether the system was truly totalitarian, or whether it was more chaotic and fragmented than has generally been assumed . . . sweeping issues, such as the question of human nature, or the concept of progress" (1992, p. 143).

One of the important matters raised by historians is the debate between "functionalists" who believe the Holocaust "just evolved," and "intentionalists" who contend that exterminations were planned very early on (see Marrus, 1987, pp. 34-48). Irving's archival research satisfies Eatwell's criterion. It was, in fact, Martin Broszat's critique of Irving's Hitler's War that moved the functionalist-intentionalist debate from academic circles into broader public debate (Marrus, p. 40).

Even Zundel, who sparks more heat than light and is often deliberately inflammatory, did get the "false news" law struck down and thus extended the civil rights of all Canadians. The summary of the second Zundel trial, produced by Zundel's Samisdat Press, provides a bibliography and an index in addition to the testimony and is a valuable resource.

Lipstadt, one of the severest critics of Holocaust revisionists, notes that Jean-Claude Pressac was at first impressed by Faurisson's "seemingly vast array of knowledge" and "began to meet with him on a regular basis" (p.175). It was only after Pressac studied Faurisson's work and then rejected it that he produced his own work, which Lipstadt and others believe so effectively destroys the revisionist argument on the gas chambers.

"The problem of all factionalism," philosopher Hans Sluga pointed out in this analysis of the Heidigger controversy "is that it already knows the answers to the questions it raises" (1993, p. 5). To fully participate in a valid historical examination of the Holocaust, revisionists cannot continue to simply "nibble at the edges" of the accepted version, seizing upon any discrepancy or seeming contradiction between proponents of the accepted view as proof that the whole thing never happened, in the manner of creationists and Kennedy conspiracy theorists.

A defense lawyer need only create a reasonable doubt in the mind of at least one juror to deny the prosecution a conviction. In academic argument, when challenging the "received version," at some point one must provide an alternative interpretation of greater plausibility. And this is precisely what most serious skeptical literature on ESP, faith healing, and the like does. Likewise, Holocaust revisionists must provide their own detailed account of what actually did happen to all those Jews if they did not die the way we have been told they did. To date, their best attempt is Butz's (1976) virtually unreadable The Hoax of the Twentieth Century.

In particular, to be taken seriously and not be dismissed as "conspiracy theorists," revisionists cannot invoke the machinations of powerful, nefarious Zionist controlled entities to explain away any testimony or evidence that supports the received version. Rather, revisionists must demonstrate independent, falsifiable (in Popper's sense of being capable of being disproved) evidence that a small group of Zionist Jews could so effectively put one over on all the rest of us, at no small cost to us, and yet have proved singularly unable to rescue the bulk of their coreligionists from the horrors that befell them (even if only the limited set of horrors conceded by the revisionists).

If and when Holocaust revisionists produce such material they must be provided full liberty to write, speak, and distribute it, and be accorded the opportunity to present it in respectable journals and academic fora. They should be extended the opportunity to engage in open, fair, and lengthy debate before knowledgeable audiences (rather than "hit and run" appearances before self-selected groups) along with anyone of a contrary view who chooses to appear opposite them. If such opportunity is refused, they should self-publish their work along with the rejections and accompanying correspondence and thereby, as Mr. Jefferson said, "let good sense have fair play."

Bibliography

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Bolt, R. 1962. A Man for All Seasons. London: Samuel French.

Boston Globe. 1994. "Denying camps doesn't amount to stirring hatred, Germans rule." March 16, p. 6.

Brownley, N. 1992. "War book goes under cover." Evening Chronicle. (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne), June 10.

Butz, A. 1977. The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Southam: Historical Review Press.

Canada News. 1993. "American Holocaust Revisionist Arrested in Germany." November 8, p. 12.

Eatwell, R. 1992. "The Holocaust Denial." in L. Cheles, R. Ferguson, and M. Vaughn (eds.). Neo-Fascism in Europe. New York: Longman's.

Herscher, E. 1994. "Castlemont High Hears Spielberg on Holocaust" San Francisco Chronicle. April 12, p. Al.

Hitchens, C. 1993. "Cultural Elite." Vanity Fair. December.

Hoffman, A. 1994. "Librarian Fired for Doing Her Job." San Francisco Chronicle. March 16, p. A23.

Hofstadter, R. 1965. The Paranoid Style in American Politics. New York: Knopf.

Irving, D. 1977. Hitler's War. New York: Viking.

___. 1994. Author telephone interviews and faxes.

Jefferson, T. 1964. Notes on the State of Virginia. New York: Harper.

Journal of Historical Review. 1993a "French Court Orders Heavy Penalties Against Faurisson for Holocaust Views." March-April, pp. 26-28.

Journal of Historical Review

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King, D. 1989. Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism. New York: Doubleday.

Kolner Stadt-Anzeiger. 1993 "Verdacht gegen Anwalt." December 14, 1993, p. 3.

LaRouche, L. 1979a. The Power of Reason--A Kind of Autobiography. New York: New Benjamin Franklin House.

___. 1979b. Will the Soviets Rule During the 1980's? New York: New Benjamin Franklin House.

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Lawson, E. 1991. Encyclopedia of Human Rights. New York: Taylor and Francis.

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Lipstadt, D. 1993. Denying the Holocaust. New York: Free Press.

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McIver, T. 1988. Anti-Evolution: A Reader's Guide to Writings Before and After Darwin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.

Marrus, M. 1987. The Holocaust in History. New York: Meridian.

Morin, R. 1994. "Survey on Holocaust Was Seriously Flawed, Rival Polltaker Says." San Francisco Chronicle. March 22, p. A7.

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National Coalition Against Censorship. 1993b. NCAC Newsletter. Issue 4, Number 50.

New York Post. 1993. "Censors still listing to right." March 9.

Parker, D. and Hollinger, H. 1994. "'Schindler' Won't be Edited for Muslims." San Francisco Chronicle. April 9.

Polish Historical Society. 1993. Press Release of December 12.

Russkaia Mysl'. 1994. "The Place Where It's Uncomfortable to Publish" January 6-12, p. 13.

Samisdat Publishers Ltd. 1992. Did Six Million Really Die? Report of the Evidence in the Canadian "False News" Trial of Ernst Zundel--1988. Toronto.

Shanker, T. 1993. "U.S. Group helps neo-Nazis, Germany says." Chicago Tribune. December 19, p.72.

Sherman, R. 1994. "Crime's Toll on the U.S.: Fear, Despair, and Guns." National Law Journal. April 18, p. Al.

Shermer, M. 1993. "Holocaust Revisionism and Pseudo-History." Skeptic. Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 20-22.

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Sluga, H. 1993. Heidegger's Crisis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Toronto Sun. 1994. "Malaysia Bans Schindler's List." March 24, p. 78.

Trombley, S. 1992. The Execution Protocol. New York: Crown.

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SIDEBAR 1: HOLOCAUST REVISIONISM AND THE LAW

Ernst Zundel: Convicted by a Canadian court of inciting racial hatred by spreading false news for publishing (not writing) the Holocaust revisionist pamphlet, Did Six Million Really Die? Retried because of procedural errors in the first trial, the second trial became a media event, with other revisionists listed below called as expert witnesses on his behalf. Zundel was again convicted. On appeal, the Canadian Supreme Court struck down the false news law as unconstitutional.

David Irving: Best-selling British historian of World War II, has moved to an increasingly revisionist position since he first claimed in Hitler's War (1977) that Hitler knew nothing of the extermination of the Jews until late in 1943. Since testifying on behalf of Zundel, Irving was fined in Germany for "defaming the memory of the dead," deported from Canada on the grounds that he was "likely to commit a criminal offense" (based on the German conviction) and denied entry to Australia on the grounds that he was "likely to become involved in violence." At present, he cannot legally enter Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Italy, or South Africa.

Robert Faurisson: Professor at University of Lyon 2, who wrote that no homicidal gas chambers were ever in use in the Nazi concentration camps. Originally suspended from teaching on the grounds that the authorities "could not protect him" after he was physically beaten, Faurisson, his publishers, and supporters have been fined for "contesting the crimes against humanity as defined by the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal."

Fred Leuchter: American developer and servicer of execution devices, testified at Zundel's second trial that, based on his examination of the Nazi concentration camps, no executions by "gas chamber" could have taken place. He repeated his findings before a right-wing group in Germany. His translator was arrested for "defaming the memory of the dead." Leuchter was arrested when he returned to appear on a German TV program to discuss capital punishment. He is currently in the US, awaiting trial in Germany. The highest German Appeals Court ordered a retrial of Leuchter's translator (a leader of the right-wing party) and revoked the prison sentence and fine on the grounds that simply denying the Holocaust did not constitute defamation. Leuchter's lawyer has been placed under investigation, but not officially charged, for repeating Leuchter's findings as to the nonexistence of gas chambers during a bond hearing.

SIDEBAR 2: Also Sprach Zundel

From Skeptic's Interview of Ernst Zundel by Frank Miele:

The number of Jews killed: "All deaths, from all causes, in concentration camps--300,000."

What the Germans did to the Jews: "I think that there should have been much kinder methods found."

Holocausts and Genocides: "To the Germans, Dresden was the Holocaust--burning by fire."

Steven Spielberg: "He is celebrating the tribe in Hollywood. This is so arrogant."

His own politics: "I'm not a Marxist Socialist. I'm a National Socialist."

Persecution: "Because of what has happened to me I now know how it must have felt to be a Jew in Nazi Germany."

Adolf Hitler: "I am an admirer of how this man took a country that was like a beaten child amongst nations and within six years turned that place around and made it into the marvel that National Socialist Germany was in 1938. He was a humble man with wonderful, intuitive gifts. Hitler's contribution to mankind, if he had died in 1939, would be as one of the great statesman of the 20th century."

Ernst Zundel: "Society would do well to listen to its outcasts. These people have a story to tell."

Long term goals: "To bring Jewish suffering down to what it was, not what they say it was, and what they exploit. Then make the world take a look at the Allied behavior toward Germany. Then we can talk to each other as equals and see that both peoples were victims."

Reproduced From: The Sceptic  web site

'Political Correctness' in Germany

The Social Danger of Stifling Free Expression

Political Correctness, derived from an essentially well-intentioned "Code of Conduct," has become an instrument of moralistic terror in Germany. The self-appointed "politically correct" think of themselves as the sole possessors of the truth, and refuse anyone else the right to differ. As [German writer] Martin Walser has pointed out, this applies particularly to the best-known German taboos: Germany's National Socialist history, women and foreigners. When one attempts to deal with any of these themes, even in the most open-minded way, one is beaten down unmercifully with the "fascism club," a term coined by political scientist Helmut Knütter. Whenever, by means of this deadly method of argument, someone is successfully labeled a racist, fascist or sexist, he is degraded to the status of a leper, with no further opportunity to present his view.

The unfortunate thing about Political Correctness is that, as a result, disputations or discussions often either do not take place at all, or only in the form of a campaign of defamation or a show trial. This prescribed thought control has led to a stunting of intellectual freedom in the former "land of thinkers." Political Correctness reveals itself as the instrument of intellectual coordination, and, in modern cultural history, sets an extraordinary precedent for censorial manipulation of the process of building public political consensus. (note 1)

Assault on Differentiation

Some telling examples will illustrate this manipulation: For some time now in Germany, presumably motivated by a rejection of discrimination, it is no longer proper to speak of Gypsies [Zigeuner]. In German now the politically correct term is "Roma and Sinti." But this term is actually incorrect because these are merely the two main Gypsy branches or tribes. In reality, the generalized term "Roma and Sinti" is itself racist, inasmuch as it ignores, and thereby discriminates against, the smaller Gypsy branches, such as the Lallers, the Manusch, the Joneschti, the Polatschia, the Sikligars, the Boschi or the Calé.

In the Spring of 1996, officials of the Lutheran missionary organization Evangelische Missionswerk, in their journal Eine Welt ["One World"], advocated human rights for apes! They based this demand on the fact that humans and chimpanzees are genetically very similar. On this basis the theologian Martin Brückner concluded that there is an "incredible similarity," and contended in all seriousness that the denial of human rights to apes was essentially no different than racism or the denigration of women. Today no idea seems too absurd to be considered as a new and generally valid guide to behavior. The price we pay for this is absurdity and undermining of a sense of self-worth.

The direct consequence of enforcing politically correct modes of behavior, which can be observed daily in much of the German media, is the creation of a sexless, inexpressive and uniform mode of speech, one driven by political calculation. In this way those who were once referred to as alien workers [Fremdarbeiter] became guest workers [Gastarbeiter], and then as foreign employees and foreign fellow citizens, and are now regarded as immigrants. In the course of socialist equalization, the apprentice [Lehrling] became a trainee [Auszubildender], a term that quickly atrophied into the infantile "Azubi." The cleaning woman [Putzfrau] has become a virtual "shooting star," rising to room cultivator [Raumpflegerin] and then to parquet beautician. She no longer cleans, but rather devotes herself to the care of inner architectural beauty.

Fighting Against Thought Control

Today it is especially important to fight against restrictions of free thought in scholarship, research and education. Especially in these fields Political Correctness often impedes serious work by tabooizing from the outset certain research projects and problem areas, thereby putting them off-limits to investigation.

Politically correct or "anti-fascist" publications are by no means the only ones to denounce "political incorrectness." The self-appointed guardians of morality have succeeded in extending their influence to high-level government agencies and positions. Not surprisingly, the Office for Defense of the Constitution [Amt für Verfassungsschutz] succumbs to this jargon. In its questionable view, those who "defend against Political Correctness seek to immunize themselves from criticism of their own extremist viewpoints." (note 2) This denunciatory statement sweepingly categorizes as extremist not only political opponents and critical scholars, but every unprejudiced contemporary who seeks to make use of his right to freedom of information and expression. Imposing such a stigma extinguishes a free exchange of views.

Certainly the "Historian's Dispute" [Historikerstreit] of the mid-1980s showed that for some time scholarship had been divided into political spheres of influence. What Ernst Nolte and other prominent historians demanded was nothing less than the beginning of a revisionist view of history. (note 3) This does not mean anything disreputable or offensive. The critical re-examination of previous research is essential to all scholarship. The word "revision" is derived from the Latin word "revidere," meaning "to look at again." To examine the facts is the foremost and most natural task of any scholar. Historians as well are thus obliged continually to reevaluate and, if necessary, correct the writing of history on the basis of new insights, discoveries and research. This is the one and only tool of serious scholarship.

Revisionism in the Physical Sciences

At this point it seems appropriate to comment in a basic way about revisionism, because this is the target par excellence of the Politically Correct. One may perhaps still recall one of the many "historical facts" of this century that needed revising. Until rather recently millions of God-fearing pilgrims admired Christ's "Shroud of Turin" -- until laboratory tests established that it dated from the Middle Ages. To my knowledge the Pope did not excommunicate the scientists -- revisionists! -- who conducted the tests, nor were they accused of dishonest methods.

Almost daily new insights are gained, not only in the political and social sciences, but even more in the physical sciences and in technical fields. Here is a representative example from paleontology: most readers of these lines probably believe that the largest and earliest carnivorous prehistoric reptile was Tyrannosaurus rex. In September 1995, however, Argentine paleontologists uncovered in northern Patagonia the petrified remains of a previously unknown kind of dinosaur (Giganotosaurus carolinii), which was larger than Tyrannosaurus rex and lived 70 million years ago in the Cretaceous period. Yet those who then thought they were in possession of "the truth," that Giganotosaurus was the largest carnivorous reptile, learned better in May 1996 when, in Morocco, scientists discovered a creature 20 million years older and even larger, Carcharodontosaurus saharicus, a discovery that of course entailed inevitable revisionist consequences. What is valid for paleontologists, genetic scientists or nuclear physicists is naturally also valid for social science scholars. When he begins his scholarly work, the historian questions or reexamines the starting premises, the previous findings and the current state of research. Today, however, if he proceeds to conduct research on this basis, he is already suspect in the eyes of the politically correct. But scholarly research cannot be conducted except by investigating existing premises and by not assuming existing conclusions to be correct. Otherwise we would still be thinking that the earth is flat.

Barriers to Thought Instead of Discussion

Defaming revisionists out-of-hand as right-wing extremists has nothing to do either with an objective appraisal of their work nor with the necessary critical discussions within scholarship and research. In my opinion it is, instead, politically motivated. The operating motto is as simple as it is effective: "Make your political opponents contemptible instead of respecting them with counter-arguments, and thereby establish your position in a broad spectrum as the single force to be taken seriously." What is left laying on the ground, of course, is the often-praised "democratic basic order," which guarantees a free development of political opinion. Horst Mahler, who was once the defense attorney of the Red Army Faction terrorists, said recently: "In France it is estimated that today in Germany there are more political prisoners than there were in the DDR [Communist East Germany] in the year before it collapsed." (note 4) This is a shocking indicator of freedom of expression as it is practiced in this country.

Political Correctness sets up rigid barriers to thought that block an open discussion aimed at solving problems, and thus impedes further intellectual development. (note 5) Freedom of research must not be restricted by any power that prescribes in advance what may be considered true. Otherwise research threatens to become the ideological instrument of an opinion cartel, and thus of a power cartel, and in so doing to lose its standing as a precondition of intellectually robust and creative people. Political Correctness is a threat to a politically free state, because ultimately it will produce a state of like-minded conformity and ideological uniformity. As the writer Reiner Kunze has put it, political correctness is nourished by the merciless ideological refashioning of intellectual life in Germany. Steffen Heitmann, Saxony's Minister of Justice, regards this as the symptom of a spiritually sick people. One need not be a psychoanalyst to recognize in this the source of German self-alienation.

Notes

1. Ethnologist Hans Peter Duerr regards Political Correctness as a flight from reality. Its exponents, he writes, create "a dualistic view of the world, an infantile Disney fantasy of good and evil people." Source: "Ein Lügengespinst," Der Spiegel, No. 28/ 1994, p. 162. In the book Die Diktatur der Guten: Political Correctness (Munich: 1996, p. 9), Klaus J. Groth writes that "Political Correctness means, in fact, incorrectness, and comes close to being a liturgy of inhuman thought and struggle stereotyping, of leftist pressure for conformity, and finally, of censorship."

2. See the interview with Ernst Nolte, professor emeritus of contemporary history (Free University of Berlin), in the Jan.-Feb. 1994 Journal, pp. 15-22, and, in the same issue, the review of his 1993 book Streitpunkte (pp. 37-41). See also Nolte's remarks about Auschwitz in history in the March-April 1999 Journal, p. 36.

3. Source cited: Verfassungsschutzbericht Nordrhein-Westfalen 1995. This is the 1995 annual report of the "constitutional protection" agency of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
According to the Verfassungsschutzbericht Baden-Württemberg '96, (p. 113), "The goal of 'revisionism,' which has become one of the most important areas of agitation for right-wing extremists, is the rehabilitation of National Socialism by making it once again socially acceptable."
Revisionism, according to the Verfassungsschutzbericht Brandenburg '97, p. 137, is a "detestable expression of right-wing extremism."

4. Horst Mahler, "Der Geheimagent des Weltgeists," Süddeutsche Zeitung (München), Sept. 30, 1998.

5. See also: Ludwig Römbild, Politisch nicht korrekt (Bielefeld: 1998), p. 11.

About the author:

Claus Nordbruch is the author of two books on freedom of expression in today's Germany: Sind Gedanken noch frei? Zensur in Deutschland ("Still Free to Think?: Censorship in Germany"), published in 1998 by Universitas (Munich), and Der Vefassungsschutz: Organisation, Spitzel, Skandale (Tübingen: Hohenrain, 1999). Dr. Nordbruch lives in Pretoria, South Africa. This essay is translated from the text that appeared in the prestigious Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung, June 12, 1999, under the title "Die selbsternannten Tugendwächter im Visier: Schaltet Political Correctness das einstige Volk der Denker gleich?" A lengthier version of this essay, with footnotes, appeared in the quarterly journal Deutschland in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Postfach 1629, 72006 Tübingen, Germany), June 1999, pp. 12-15.

Reproduced From:  The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)

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