"The virulently
anti-Semitic
Zundelsite has posted
this essay, (“Jewish
Power” by Paul Eisen) which it describes as
"brilliant". Of course, Eisen cannot control the use of his work by these scum,
but that is hardly the point. The sad fact is that it represents a "brilliant"
endorsement of their own ideology of Jew-hating.
--
Joel Finkel1
I. Scum
The “scum” to which Joel Finkel refers
are Ernst Zündel, currently in solitary confinement in the Metro West Detention
Center, Toronto, and Ingrid Rimland, his wife, who owns and runs the Zundelsite
– a website dedicated to supporting Zündel, his work and his struggle. All day
every day Zündel sits in his cell on a pile of court transcripts (chairs are not
permitted), wearing the same orange jumpsuit as all the rapists and murderers,
and with the permitted pencil stubs (ball-points are forbidden) he fights his
campaigns, writes, draws and meditates on the past, present and future.
Meanwhile, from her Tennessee home Ingrid wheels and deals, begs and borrows,
plots, posts and publishes to try to get him out, or at least to stop his
imminent deportation to his native Germany where he can expect a warrant for his
arrest under Germany’s severe “hate laws” and a possible five year sentence.
Ernst Zündel immigrated to Canada in
1958 to avoid the draft (he is a lifelong pacifist), where he has lived for
forty-two years. Unlike most Holocaust revisionists (rather an austere,
academic lot), Zündel is a hands-on activist – by all accounts, a gentle,
good-humored man, kind and honest and with those qualities often found in the
strangest places: a fine mind and a good heart. Born in Germany’s Black Forest,
Zündel sometimes refers to himself as a ‘Swabian peasant’, and it’s true, he
does have that about him. But Zündel understands people and, most important, he
understands history. He is, to use his own word, a Vordenker – one who
thinks ahead of the crowd, one who sees the panorama of life.
For decades now Zündel has battled the
Holocaust establishment:
“I was like everybody else in my own
postwar years in Germany. I was disgusted with my father’s generation whom I
believed to have been monsters. Like practically all people on our planet, I
used to believe in the standard, widely accepted notion that the government of
National Socialist Germany, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, had attempted
to kill the Jews by an act of state-decreed genocide. I was ashamed to be a
German…..In the 1960’s ….I experienced my first doubts about some details of the
Holocaust story. Further study, mostly at night, convinced me that many
segments of the story were highly exaggerated, and the number of Jewish losses
were wildly inflated.” -- Enst Zündel
Thus began Zündel’s activism –
persistent, flamboyant and effective. Who else would have got himself
photographed carrying a martyr’s cross up the steps of a Canadian courtroom? And
who else, after having been beaten on the steps of a courthouse by members of a
violent Jewish group when he appeared for court dates, would thereafter appear
for all court hearings in a hard hat and bulletproof vest?
His first brush with Canadian law was
when the government sought to remove his special mail privileges. He won that
one and has never looked back.
In 1985 Zündel ended up in court when he
distributed a booklet: Did Six Million Really Die?, and ran foul of
Canada’s “False News” Laws:
Everyone who willfully 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 offense
and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years.
Twice Ernst Zündel was in court for what turned out to be the two greatest
Holocaust revisionism trials of our time, twice he was convicted and twice the
convictions were overturned. The first in 1985 lasted seven weeks and ended
with a 15 month sentence, overturned in 1987 by the Ontario Court of Appeal
citing errors of law ordering a retrial. This, the second Zündel trial in 1988,
lasted for almost four months. It was in this trial that Zündel commissioned
Fred Leuchter, an expert on executions by gas in the U.S. to visit Auschwitz and
conduct a forensic examination, which was presented in court as proving
conclusively that there were no homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz. For the
revisionist community, that day in April 1988, when Fred Leuchter presented his
report to the court, was the day the myth of the Holocaust was finally laid to
rest.
Despite an impressive defense from revisionist heavyweights such as Robert
Faurisson, Mark Weber and David Irving who, having just read the Leuchter
report, took the opportunity of the trial to proclaim his conversion to
Holocaust revisionism, Zündel was again found guilty and sentenced. But in
1992, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down as unconstitutional the law
banning the spread of false news. This decision temporarily put an end to the
deportation proceedings launched against Zündel after his 1988 conviction.
For the next few years Zündel continued
his struggle despite various assaults, both legal and illegal – prosecutions,
violence against his person, arson against his home and possessions.
In the spring of 1994, several Marxist
street groups organized to attempt to drive Zündel out of his neighbourhood in
Toronto. Pamphlets were distributed calling him a "hatemonger" and "white
supremacist" and calling for his charging under Canada's hate laws. These groups
began a campaign of posters put up across Toronto with Zündel's face in a rifle
sight, giving directions to his home with instructions on how to build Molotov
cocktails. Street graffiti appeared on fences and buildings calling for people
to "drive Zündel out." Zündel lodged complaints with Toronto police but nothing
ever came of his complaints…On May 7, 1995, an arsonist torched Zündel's house
which was almost completely gutted on the second and third floors, causing over
$400,000.00 in damages and destroying an extensive library and rare book
collection. No person was ever charged with this offence. After the arson,
Zündel suffered from severe anxiety, loss of memory, and loss of
concentration……At the end of May 1995, a powerful pipe bomb was sent to Zündel
through the mails from Vancouver, British Columbia. Suspicious of the parcel, he
took it unopened to the police. The bomb contained nails and metal shrapnel;
Toronto police determined it would have killed anyone who opened it and anyone
within 90 metres of the blast. (2)
Twice he submitted faultless
applications for Canadian citizenship, and twice he was refused. There was a
conviction for ‘hate crime’ in Germany and prosecutions for being “a threat to
the safety and security of Canada”, and there were the incessant legal battles
about the Zundelsite.
In 2000, exhausted after the struggles
of the eighties and nineties, Zündel moved to the United States, where he
married Ingrid, a U.S. citizen. There the couple lived quietly, establishing an
art gallery, experimenting in organic agriculture and thinking about future
campaigns. Then, on February 5th 2003 Ernst was arrested because, as
he was told, he had missed showing up at a scheduled immigration hearing in May
of 2001.
“Remember what I told you?” He said to
Ingrid as they faced together the arresting officers, “That’s what they were
going to do. Use a bureaucratic excuse to get me.” He also told her, as he was
led away in handcuffs, where to find her Valentine gift.
In what amounted to a legal kidnapping,
Zündel was deported to Canada, where he faces extradition proceedings to Germany
where “Holocaust denial” is against the law. There, you can get up to five
years in prison for having the wrong opinion or, as they put it, for “...
defaming the memory of the dead.” Two years later Zündel is still in prison as
the legal wrangles continue.
“…you have just arrived at what is
sneeringly called a “Holocaust denier.” -- Ingrid Rimland
I had neither heard of Zündel nor the
Zundelsite until I received an email from Ingrid Rimland asking permission to
post my essay Jewish Power as one of her ‘Z-Grams’ – the emails she
sends out to Zündel supporters all over the world. I agreed, and logged onto
the Zundelsite. I appreciated its excellent selection of revisionist literature,
but confess to being a little unnerved by its schwarz-weiβ-rot livery,
runic-style logo and anti-Jewish cartoons. But I carried on until I came across
her introduction to my piece.
“Despite some occasional slipping into
the RKPS mode….this Eisen essay is one remarkably crafted essay! Beautifully
done! Rich in imagery and ice-cold in precision. “ …one remarkably crafted essay! Rich in imagery and ice-cold in precision!
But what was this RKPS that I was
occasionally slipping into?
Dear Paul
RKPS stands for Requisite Knee-fall
Paragraph Syndrome. It is a common, near universal writer’s affliction in every
Western country. It neutralizes what crude folks call a “sh-t detector.” It
befalls otherwise perfectly reasonable intellectuals much more than low-brow
folks. It is as common as freckles.
It kicks in whenever the so-called
“Holocaust” comes up. It’s automatic. One cannot help it. By inner command,
one must immediately get down on ones knees, bow to the dust, pay homage to the
“six million”, get up, kick Hitler in the shin, deplore the “racism” of the
Third Reich, and otherwise distance oneself from the period of ’33-‘45 so that
there is no doubt as to exactly where one stands - fair square against (gulp!)
“Nazis”.
Now, dear (future) friend - I have probably nixed a potentially congenial
friendship right at the start by showing my true colors and putting my foot in
the mouth - but I am a German, married to the world’s premier thought-criminal
presently languishing in Abu Ghraib North, and my heart aches when I read
otherwise magnificent writing like yours - and then detect the RKPS. It hurts
me, because it is unworthy of thinking and otherwise fair people who have been
raised on the Holocaust Drip that has deformed that part of their nature that is
meant to be fair and critical.
Here is the example of the RKPS in your
piece:- “In its zeal and self belief Zionism has come to resemble the most
brutal and relentless of modern ideologies. But unlike the brutal rationality of
Stalinism, willing to sacrifice millions for political and economic revolution,
this Jewish ideology, in its zealotry and irrationality, resembles more the
National Socialism which condemned millions for the attainment of a nonsensical
racial and ethnic supremacy.” (From “Jewish Power” by Paul Eisen) (3)
You see, Paul, when I read passages like
that, I wince. Let me take it apart, bit by bit. “Zealotry”, yes - to the
extent one wants a better, cleaner, saner, more honest, more compatible world
for one’s own where life does not feel like having to wear a hair shirt for the
benefit of strangers. Scientists deeply committed to their inventions are
zealous. Mothers are zealous in wanting the best for their children. I am
zealous when it comes to keeping smut out of the language I love. But not
zealous like some Deep South Baptist preacher who thumbs the Bible, chews
tobacco, and thinks nothing of spitting on your feet.
“Irrationality” - far from it! I used
to think like that - I am ashamed to say I suffered badly from RKPS for most of
my life. When I first started questioning why I behaved exactly like some
brainless robot, I became curious about what people who were part of the
National Socialist movement really thought. I talked to an old man whom I
respected deeply for his integrity, and who had lost his only 18-year-old son at
Stalingrad. He said to me, holding his son’s picture in his hands: “It felt
right in my mind, and it felt right in my soul.” I asked: “You paid a price.
Do you regret it?” And he said very quietly: “How could I? How could anyone
who took the trouble understanding?”
That was the start of my resolve to take the trouble understanding.
“Non-sensical racial and ethnic supremacy.” You are just plain misinformed.
Let me put it this way. You have been lied to about the murder of JFK, about
Vince Foster, about the USS Liberty, about Weapons of Mass Destruction, about
--- you get the point. You have been lied to and lied to and lied to. You know
you have. You accept that. And you haven’t been lied to about this “racial and
ethnic supremacy” nonsense?
Here’s what I say to people who question
my motives. Hitler has been dead for more than half a century. I don’t want to
resurrect him. Nobody in my circle does. It cannot be done. What is gone is
gone and is never going to return. But what we Germans want is balanced
thinking, fair assessment of what the Hitler days were like. We don’t want
people to assault us morning, noon, and night for things we didn’t do. I for
one don’t like to watch grown men and women run and hide like rabbits the moment
the Holocaust Lobby says “Boo!” After all, we all enjoy the Autobahn, don’t we?
Why should not our world enjoy the benefits that came out of those times - the
research in fighting cancer, for instance? The superb appreciation of genuine
art? The emphasis on simple lifestyle, respecting the ecological system? The
brilliant strides in space research? It is unworthy of us to let ourselves be
spooked by professional smear mongers for profit. Paul, put your hand on your
heart and confess: Just what have you read of the times that did not come out
of the propaganda mills of Hollywood and such?
For me, your sentence read like a
traditional RKPS - to nodding agreement of the audience. Am I wrong?
If I am right, you have just arrived at
what is sneeringly called a “Holocaust Denier.” I will look you straight in the
eye and say that one cannot deny what did not exist. And now, to my regret, we
have a mis-tone in our new-found mutual love (dare I say zealotry?) for ideas
expressed in precise and finely honed words.
I suggest that forensic science ought to
settle that disagreement about what Germans did or did not do in World War II in
an open public forum - not by imprisonment and “torture lite” - as has happened
to my husband, who sent the first forensic team EVER to inspect the “murder
weapon”, the so-called “gas chambers at Auschwitz” - and found it not what it
was purported to be.
Ingrid.
…I am frightened of you but I am
more frightened of my ignorance…
Message to Ingrid Rimland from a ZGram
reader
Ernst Zündel is a Holocaust revisionist
or, a ‘Holocaust denier’ as some would have it. Like all revisionists, Zündel
does not deny that the National Socialist regime targeted Jews or that Jews
suffered at their hands, but he does deny specific, albeit key aspects of the
Holocaust narrative as we know it. His denial is limited to three areas which
should be clearly understood.
That there ever was an official
plan on the part of Hitler or any other part of the Nazi regime
systematically and physically to eliminate every Jew in Europe.
That there ever existed homicidal
gas-chambers.
That the numbers of Jewish victims
have been exaggerated.
Although unpopular enough itself, if
Zündel had stuck to Holocaust revisionism he might have had an easier ride. But
for Ernst Zündel revisionism is but a means to an end. He cannot and will not
relinquish his loyalty and devotion, as he sees it, for his country, his people
and their history. For him, the revision of the Holocaust is not just the
pursuit of a truth, but the pursuit of a truth that will set his people free.
Germans stand accused of having committed the worst crime in human history: the
premeditated attempt to coolly and efficiently annihilate every Jew in Europe.
Zündel rejects this. He is prepared for National Socialist Germany to be held
accountable for the crimes it did commit but the attempted genocide of European
Jews is, for him, not one of them.
Some readers, even those who stand for
free speech, may now be reaching for their delete buttons. After all, maybe
Zündel should not be penalized for his beliefs, but that doesn’t mean that his
views must be disseminated, and it certainly does not mean that we have to read
them. But free speech is not only the right to think, to speak and to write
freely, but also to be given a fair hearing without ridicule and abuse or at
least until a proper examination has been made. And you never know, even those
who generally find such views repellent, if they were to hear them, even they
might hear something worth hearing. So, for those folk prepared to grant to
Ernst Zündel the same freedom they grant to themselves, for those who have the
curiosity and the courage to pause awhile, this could be an opportunity rarely
offered - an opportunity to hear and consider another and hitherto unheard,
point of view.
Everybody has a story and everybody has
a point of view, and in the matter of the events in Europe from 1933-1945 there
are many points of view. The British have a point of view, the Americans have a
point of view, the Poles, the Dutch, the Russians, the Serbs they all have a
point of view and the Jews certainly have a point of view. But the Germans,
too, have a point of view, even those Germans who once called themselves
National Socialists, even those Germans who still call themselves
National Socialists.
Dear Paul
Many WWII soldiers (now very old) have
told me that World War II - that is, the war against the East - was really a
preventive/defensive war against Communism, which was Jewish. Europe was about
to be overrun by the Red Terror - Stalin had amassed his assault troops at the
border, and it was only a matter of weeks, so Hitler hit first. Right now I am
reading a book by a Swede, Juri Lina that is one long, horrid accounting of the
Bolshevik/Jewish horrors. I don’t know how good his sources are - but he has
certainly documented them. Six million? Even if it were true, which we say it
isn’t, it was peanuts compared to the bloodbath in Russia, starting with the
1917 Revolution, all of it laid at the feet of the Jews. How much of that was
known in Germany by the common people, I don’t know. But it was certainly known
by the leadership. And the Jews were seen as subversives, rightly or wrongly,
more and more so as the war went on. Add to that the Versailles Treaty that
brutalized Germany financially, and the corruption of the Weimar Republic, which
brutalized it spiritually, both of which were blamed on the Jews - and you have
cause aplenty, as that generation saw it.
Ingrid
How do those Germans now nearing the end
of their lives, feel when told that what seemed so right then and perhaps even
still seems so right, was in fact so wrong? And how do those Germans today,
born and educated in postwar Germany, feel when told of the shame and disgrace
of their parents and grandparents? How might it feel, to be forbidden, alone
amongst the peoples of Europe, to recall your recent history with anything but
shame? Year after year all over the western world nations proudly parade,
remembering their country-men and women and the contribution they made in the
war. At ceremonies they remember their dead and the sacrifices made. But for
Germans, only the atrocities are to be remembered - not a word, nothing of the
achievements and sacrifices of their fellow Germans. Such was and is the price
of ‘rehabilitation’ and the re-entry of Germany into the family of nations.
Of wartime suffering we hear plenty.
The British in the blitz, Americans in the Pacific, French, Dutch and Danes
under occupation, Russians and Poles in the East and of course, Jews in the
Holocaust, but who hears about the suffering of Germans: the terror-bombing of
German cities with the deliberate causing of firestorms, the only purpose of
which was the mass slaughter of civilians? In the 1940 bombing of Coventry
around 550 civilians were killed, whilst in the 1945 bombing of Dresden around
35,000 (the lowest figure I could find) were killed. And our response is to
twin Dresden with Coventry, which says all you’ll ever need to know about
‘balance’.
Who cares or even knows about the
deportations of millions of Germans from their generations-long homes in the
East, the rape and pillage of Berlin and other cities and the hunger and
deprivation endured for years and years after the defeat of National Socialism?
Who remembers the ten million Germans and Austrians who died in World War 2?
Who much cares about Germany post World War 1 – the injustices of Versailles,
the hunger, hopelessness, degradation and humiliation? So who will try to
understand how it might have felt when a leader came along - a veteran of the
war, a brave soldier by all accounts (twice wounded; Iron Cross First-Class), a
fellow sufferer, one of their own, a man who promised peace, stability and
well-being and the restoration of pride and honor - and, most incredibly of all,
at that time kept his promises?
The Hitler we loved and why…
Ernst Zündel was once involved in the
publication of a book called The Hitler We Loved and Why, but Ernst
Zündel was not the only German who loved Hitler and is probably not the only
German who still loves Hitler. Millions of Germans loved Hitler, who
for twelve years impacted on them as no German has or probably ever will, and,
though they never say so, some must, deep down still cherish his memory.
In his book Setting the Record
Straight: Letters from Cell #7 Zündel tells of a visit he made back to
Germany to his aged mother still living in their Black Forest home. They were
sitting there, at the table eating supper, just the two of them. It was dark,
the clock ticking away on the wall as it had done for years, when his mother
said to him,
“You know, Ernst, you would never have
been born if Adolf Hitler had not come to power.”
And she told him how because Hitler kept
his promises of bringing work, peace, stability and honour to a ravaged German
people, thousands of families who had felt unable to have children, now felt
able to have them.
“You are one of those children” she
said.
Ernst Zündel the Holocaust denier is a
German nationalist and, by his own admission, a racialist. He is an admirer of
Hitler and is nostalgic for the National Socialist period of German history. He
is anti-Jewish. He is also interested in UFO’s. So Ernst Zündel is easily
dismissed as a crank, a Nazi, or as Joel Finkel would have it, as ‘scum’.
But Ernst Zündel is a Holocaust denier
because he believes the Holocaust narrative falsely defames his people and their
history. He is a racialist because race, for him - a cultural, emotional and
spiritual, as well as biological determinant - is vital and precious in the life
of human beings, and that his own white and German race, as he would term it,
is, as is every other race, something to be cherished and preserved. He is a
patriot who loves his country, his people, their language, culture and history.
He remembers Adolf Hitler for the national regeneration he brought. He knows
that he committed terrible crimes but asks that he be judged as any other
historical figure like Stalin or Napoleon, no more, no less, and that National
Socialism be judged also on its merits and demerits. He believes, as do many
others (including many, if not most, Jews), that there exists some kind of
Jewish spirit or sensibility, but further believes that this Jewish spirit, so
often creative and energizing can, if unchecked and unbalanced, be damaging and
corrosive to any society, and he grieves for the damage he believes it has
caused to the world he loved.
But Ernst Zündel does not hate Jews because
Ernst Zündel doesn’t hate anyone. Ernst Zündel has never committed an act of
violence, nor has he ever called on anyone else to commit an act of violence.
Ernst Zündel has never discriminated against anyone, nor has he called on anyone
else to discriminate against anyone. Ernst Zündel has never stifled anyone’s
freedom of expression, nor has he ever called on anyone else to stifle anyone’s
freedom of expression. Ernst Zündel looks on his enemies as they try to
silence, prosecute, imprison, bomb and burn him, with bewilderment, sorrow and
some anger because, as he has said, “sometimes I simply run out of cheeks to
turn”.II. The War for the Truth
The Revisionists
It bears repetition that the denial of
the Holocaust revisionists does not extend to the entire Holocaust narrative.
Revisionists do not deny that the National Socialist regime brutally persecuted
Jews. They do not deny that Jews in Germany were discriminated against,
violently assaulted, dispossessed, imprisoned in camps and expelled. They also
do not deny that Jews in countries occupied by Germany or within the German
sphere of influence were also pitilessly assaulted, dispossessed and subjected
to brutal deportations many to forced labour camps where many hundreds of
thousands died. Nor do they deny that many Jews were executed by shooting in
the East. But they do deny the Holocaust narrative as we know it in three
specific areas.
They deny that there ever was an
official plan on the part of Hitler or any other part of the Nazi regime
systematically and physically to eliminate every Jew in Europe;
They deny that there ever existed
homicidal gas-chambers;
They deny the figure of six million
Jewish victims of the Nazi assault and claim that the actual figure was
significantly less.
In making their claims, Revisionists
have offered a considerable body of work. To what degree they are right,
everyone must judge for themselves. Many will take the view that Holocaust
revisionism is but pernicious nonsense motivated only by a hatred of Jews and a
desire to rehabilitate Hitler and National Socialism specifically, and fascism
in general, and therefore not even worthy of scrutiny. I don’t agree, and those
with sufficient curiosity to wish to research the subject can visit the website
of the premier Revisionist think tank, the Institute for Historical Review,
locate the Journal of Historical Review (4) and its archive of articles and
papers and start reading. For an overview of the whole subject, they can obtain
a copy of Joel Hayward’s 1993 M.A. thesis “The Fate of Jews in German Hands” (5)
The Revisionist case is broadly as
follows:-
There exists no documentary
evidence whatsoever that there ever was a decision on the part of Hitler or
the National Socialist state to physically murder all the Jews of Europe.
There is, however, an abundance of evidence for the decision to persecute,
disempower and expel all Jews from Europe
There is no physical evidence
whatsoever for the existence of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz or
indeed anywhere else. There is, however, abundant evidence for the
widespread use of hydrogen cyanide (Zyklon B) gas and gas chambers for
delousing and disinfection against typhus. No-one has yet been able to
produce, draw or describe a homicidal gas chamber or produce a photograph or
plan of one, because no-one has ever seen a homicidal gas chamber.
No-one has ever seen a homicidal
gas chamber because they did not exist. The gas chambers shown to thousands
of visitors to Auschwitz are, by the admission of the museum authorities,
post-war reconstructions. Common images of gas chambers from other
locations are either disinfestation chambers or more commonly morgues,
air-raid shelters (often gas-tight) or crematoria. Common images of the
gassing of Jews – deportees boarding and disembarking from trains, mountains
of eyeglasses and shoes, piles of corpses, crematoria chimneys are just that
– people and trains, eyeglasses and shoes, corpses, smoking chimneys, no
more, no less - they do not constitute evidence of mass gassing.
Not only is there no physical
evidence for the existence of homicidal gas chambers, there is substantial
physical, architectural, topographical, geographical and forensic evidence
against their existence. The critical evidence is in three reports all
resulting from investigations at the site itself at Auschwitz. The first
and most famous of these was the Leuchter report commissioned by Ernst
Zündel in 1988. Acclaimed by revisionists, this report was somewhat
hurriedly put together and, because of dispute about the interpretation of
its conclusions, must be regarded as revelatory but nonetheless,
inconclusive. However, Leuchter’s findings and conclusions were refined and
confirmed by a forensic study carried out by German chemist Germar Rudolf
and by a forensic examination and report commissioned by the Auschwitz State
museum and conducted by Institute of Forensic Research in Krakow.
The gassing and cremation of the
numbers claimed, in the time claimed and with the facilities claimed, is
simply not possible. Some of the evidence for this conclusion comes from
studies of individual gas executions performed in the United States, any
study of which will show how hard it is to kill one person safely and
efficiently, let alone the hundreds claimed.
The numbers of Jews killed by the
Nazis, usually held to be around six million, is grossly exaggerated. This
is largely because of greatly inflated pre-war Jewish population figures and
underestimated Jewish survival and emigration figures.
The context of much of the evidence
for the Holocaust narrative was the Nuremberg Trials – an extraordinary and
unprecedented set of trials of the vanquished by the victors with little
attempt to find or to tell the truth. Without the evidence generated by
these proceedings, there would be no significant evidence that the
extermination of Jews took place at all. The legitimacy of the court itself
was questionable, its procedures were a disgrace with defendants denied
basic procedural rights and with much of the evidence presented in the form
of survivor testimony taken at face value or confessions beaten and tortured
out of the hapless defendants. As a matter of record, the key confession of
Auschwitz Commandant, Rudolf Hoess, was obtained through torture and
coercion. (6)
Overall there is very little
evidence for the established Holocaust narrative. Hard evidence is elusive,
and what evidence as does exist is built largely on eyewitness reports,
confessions and hearsay. Witness reports, notoriously unreliable anyway,
are in this case totally false. Many key witnesses have already been
demolished in the witness box and many noted ones, such as those by Rudolf
Vrba, Felipe Muller, Kurt Gerstein and Rudolf Hoess, are now partially or
completely discredited.
Many key elements of the Holocaust
narrative have already been disproved to the extent that even establishment
Holocaust writers have conceded their inaccuracy. Examples of these are the
Jews-into-soap story – the long disproved story of how the Nazis used the
bodies of gassed Jews to make soap - the use of “steam chambers” to steam
victims to death, and the existence of homicidal gas chambers at
concentration camps in Germany itself such as Dachau and Buchenwald. All
claims were made at Nuremberg, and all have subsequently been quietly
discarded. Most telling is the quiet downgrading of the figures of victims
illustrated by the removal of nineteen signs at Auschwitz, which told
visitors in nineteen languages that four million Jews died in the camp.
These have now been replaced with signs claiming a million and a half (still
claimed by revisionists to be a significant exaggeration).
Revisionist research seems to have been
carried out in a scholarly manner, is well supported by evidence and is
presented in a calm and restrained way. That some revisionists (not all) have
histories in far-right activism is true. That some (not all) exhibit
anti-Jewish sentiment is also true, although this may in part be due to the
assaults that many have come under from Jews and Jewish organisations. Some
(not all) have, in the past, been affiliated to racist and nationalist
organisations, some (not all) speak fluent German and some even are Germans.
Such information should lead us to look closely for signs of bias in their
research; but not to discount their findings per se.
“Show me or draw me a Nazi gas
chamber…” Robert Faurisson(7)
No-one is able to show us, at Auschwitz
or anywhere else, even one of these chemical slaughterhouses. No-one is capable
of describing to us their exact appearance or workings. Neither a trace nor a
hint of their existence is to be found. Not one document, not one study, not
one drawing. Nothing. Nothing but some occasional, pitiful “evidence”, which
vanishes, like a mirage, as soon as one draws near, and which the Jewish
historians themselves, in recent years, have finally been obliged to repudiate.
Robert Faurisson (8)
For 15 years, every time that I heard of
a witness anywhere, no matter where in the portion of Europe that was not
occupied by the Soviets, who claimed to have himself been present at gas
exterminations, I immediately went to him to get his testimony. With
documentation in hand, I would ask him so many precise and detailed questions
that soon it became apparent that he could not answer except by lying. Often
his lies became so transparent, even to himself, that he ended his testimony by
declaring that he had not seen it himself, but that one of his good friends, who
had died in the camps and whose good faith he could not doubt, had told him
about it. I covered thousands and thousands of kilometers throughout Europe in
this way. Paul Rassinier (9)
Robert Faurisson, the veteran
revisionist scholar, has written that at the heart of the Holocaust is
Auschwitz, and at the heart of Auschwitz are the gas chambers. He therefore
urges those who wished to combat the Holocaust myth to focus their efforts on
that heart. It was Faurisson who, in the mid seventies first thought of putting
Holocaust revisionism on firm ground by focusing on the material and forensic
evidence for or against the existence of homicidal gas chambers. He visited a
functioning gas execution facility in the U.S. and saw for himself exactly what
it took to efficiently and safely (for the executioners at least) kill one
person at a time, let alone the many hundreds at a time claimed by Holocaust
writers, and he concluded that “for physical and chemical reasons understandable
to a child of eight” the existence and operation of the Nazi gas chambers was
fundamentally impossible. But it was the activist Ernst Zündel who, at the time
of the second False News trial in 1988 had the idea of sending to Auschwitz a
forensic team to determine the issue once and for all. According to
revisionists, and despite its flaws (most likely due to the speed under which it
was formulated), the findings of the Leuchter Report were clear – the facilities
held to have been homicidal gas chambers were neither used for that purpose nor
could they have been used for that purpose.
Nothing seems to fit about the gassing
story. The numbers of victims crammed into the space, the design and
construction of the gassing facilities, the lack of protection for the
attendants, the implausibility surrounding the rate of cremation, the huge
errors, omissions and disparities in eye-witness accounts – all these and more,
when added to the near total absence of hard affirmative evidence, makes one
wonder why anyone believed such a story in the first place. No-one has yet been
able to explain how a gas chamber worked. No-one has been able to explain how
pellets of Zyklon B were poured into holes that do not and never have existed.
No-one has been able to explain how the Sonderkommando (special
detachment) of Jewish prisoner/attendants was able to enter a gas chamber
immediately, (even wearing gas masks which do not offer anything like proper
protection especially when the wearer is active), after a mass gassing to remove
the bodies, even though such an environment would have been an ocean of hydrogen
cyanide. The deadly gas would have still been everywhere and particularly in
the soft tissue of the corpses. In effect, no one has been able to take up the
Faurisson challenge: “Show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber!”
The established Holocaust narrative can,
and to a degree, has survived the successful promotion of two of the three
revisionist claims. The debate between “intentionalists” and “functionalists”
within the establishment in effect concedes that there may not have been a
definite intention on the part of the German state to exterminate all the Jews.
Similarly by downgrading the Auschwitz figures, the establishment has accepted
at least the possibility of downgrading the overall figure of six million. But
with the issue of the gas chambers there is simply nowhere to go. To paraphrase
Faurisson: no gas-chamber, no Holocaust.
The Holocaust Establishment
Anti-revisionists, Holocaust affirmers,
exterminationists - the range of labels on offer reflects the difficulty in
naming the opposition. Even the word “opposition”, like the phrase
“anti-revisionist” itself is misleading because it implies a reflexive,
defensive posture. Although establishment writers do often find themselves
responding to revisionist initiatives and do often sound rather defensive, the
words “opposition” or “anti-revisionist” also suggest that they are the weaker
party or that they have not themselves taken the initiative. This is not the
case. Few narratives, true or false, have been promoted more forcefully or more
widely than the Holocaust, and few lobbies have been stronger, better resourced
and enjoyed such complete dominance over the accepted discourse. The same holds
true for the term ‘affirmers’. The Holocaust narrative may well turn out to
require affirmation, but you would never know it looking at the huge amount of
‘affirming’ material currently available. Finally the term ‘exterminationist’,
usually used by revisionists to describe their opponents, though strictly
accurate, is rather sneering and demeaning in tone. So we will adopt the
relatively neutral term of ‘Holocaust establishment’.
For over sixty years there has been no
shortage of material promoting the establishment view of the Holocaust - books,
articles, films, plays, poems, TV programs, academic studies,
conferences,memorials, museums – all supporting and promoting the established
narrative, and it is only recently that the establishment has felt the need to
respond to the claims of the revisionists. As before, for those who wish to
research the subject, the following starting points are recommended:
The ADL website (10)
The Nizkor website (11)
Many of the contributors to these sites
are known Jewish and Zionist activists, many with open and established links to
Jewish and Zionist activist organizations. Again, this may lead us to view
their findings with appropriate caution, though not to discard them per se.
The establishment has attempted to
respond to specific revisionist claims, but only sporadically. They claim that
extermination and cremation facilities were indeed perfectly capable of
processing the numbers claimed, and that all claims are well supported by hard
evidence. Any reader can study the evidence, which is freely available on the
internet, but the debate has degenerated somewhat into a yes-it-is, no-it-isn’t
squabble – one which could possibly be resolved by the appointment of some kind
of judicial body with powers to call on expert witnesses.
But there still remains the problem that
there is just not all that much available evidence to support the Holocaust
narrative and what is available is often far from satisfactory - documents are
often “ambiguous”, witnesses are often “confused” or “traumatized”, and
buildings and installations are often “demolished”. Instead of denying the
undeniable, the establishment has chosen rather to offer explanations. The lack
of documentary evidence is explained by the fact that the final solution was top
secret so not only were written communications kept to an absolute minimum but
were also written euphemistically. Thus “special treatment” must mean
extermination and “evacuation to the East” must mean deportation to a death
camp. Similarly, no-one has yet been able to come forward and take up Robert
Faurisson’s challenge to show him or draw him a gas chamber, because anyone who
saw a gas-chamber obviously did not live to tell the tale. The gassing
facilities at Auschwitz-Birkenau shown to so many visitors over the years are
now conceded to be “post-war reconstructions”, but only because the original gas
chambers were destroyed in 1944 to remove the evidence in the face of the
advancing Soviet forces. Finally the statements of survivors and perpetrators,
whilst conceded to be confusing and contradictory, are so because of the
traumatic conditions under which these terrible events were observed and the
sheer quantity of these statements, and often their poignancy as well, qualify
them as acceptable evidence.
But whether because of the lack of
evidence or not, the establishment has, in the main, been less concerned with
refuting specific revisionist claims than with questioning the right of
revisionists to make them. For many Holocaust writers, and indeed for almost
the entire intellectual establishment worldwide, the Holocaust happened and that
is that. In 1979 in response to Faurisson’s questioning of the gas chambers,
thirty four French intellectuals published an appeal in Le Monde, the second
sentence of which stated, “We must not ask how such a mass murder was
technically possible - it was technically possible because it happened.” For
most establishment figures to even discuss the issues is to concede to
revisionism legitimacy it does not deserve.
If somebody came along today and
reported the calling of a scientific congress to examine the question of whether
the sun revolves around the earth or the earth around the sun, he would either
be ridiculed or declared non-compos mentis. It wouldn't occur to anyone to
discuss the matter seriously... A similar thing occurs with the propagandists of
the so-called 'Auschwitz Lie' or 'Holocaust Lie': their statements that there
was no extermination of the Jews, is so obviously false that it is basically
unworthy of serious scientific discussion. (12)
Such is the view of Deborah Lipstadt,
Associate Professor of Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory College. Lipstadt,
to her supporters a scholar of the Holocaust, to her detractors, a Jewish ethnic
activist, has written extensively about Holocaust revisionism. Jewish herself
and from a relatively orthodox background, Professor Lipstadt has had a lifelong
allegiance to, and has been active in Jewish causes. She is a committed Zionist
and is funded and aided by many Jewish and Zionist organizations such as the
Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew
University and the ADL – again, cause for scrutiny of her claims but not
outright rejection.
Rather then dealing with revisionist
claims, Lipstadt has focused on the revisionists themselves: their credibility,
qualifications, motivations, affiliations and methods. In her book Denying
the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, she traces the
development of revisionism from the late forties to the early nineties and aims
to demonstrate that the revisionists are overwhelmingly anti-Semitic with long
connections to fascist, white supremacist and generally racist organizations,
that their motivation is nothing less than to rehabilitate the Hitler regime
specifically, and fascism and anti-Semitism generally, and their scholarly
veneer is just that; a cover for their racist and intolerant views.
Those who argue that the Holocaust
deniers must be given a fair hearing fail to recognize that the deniers' quest
is not a search for truth. Rather they are motivated by racism, extremism, and
virulent anti-Semitism.
…their methodology is based on deception and falsification, and the scholarly
and restrained tone of most revisionist writings, are merely window dressing to
conceal their real character and intentions. Deborah Lipstadt
(13)
She maintains that the revisionists are
not only a danger to the validity and memory of the Holocaust itself but also
constitute a general danger to history and scholarship itself and even to
democratic life as we know it.
Holocaust denial should not be seen as
an assault on the history of one particular group. It repudiates reasoned
discussion, the way the Holocaust, itself, engulfed all civilization. Its
attack on Jewish history is, like anti-Semitism, an attack on the most basic
values of a reasoned society. Deborah Lipstadt (14)
For a long time Professor Lipstadt chose to ignore the revisionist challenge,
but the ever-improving quality of revisionist scholarship does not go unnoticed,
Lately, the deniers' work has become
more virulent and dangerous, in part because it has become more sophisticated.
Their publications, including The Journal of Historical Review, mimic
legitimate scholarly publications. This confuses those who do not immediately
know the Journal's intentions. Deborah Lipstadt (15)
So she now responds, but only insofar as
to challenge their credibility, she still refuses to either debate them or to
respond to their specific claims. For her there can be no discussion of the
essential truth of the Holocaust.
Despite the favorable balance of power
and their successes both inside and outside the courtroom, neither Professor
Lipstadt nor the rest of the Holocaust establishment are actually doing all that
well. Revisionism and its influence has grown steadily and the revisionists
exhibit a confidence and sureness of touch whilst the establishment seems at
times to be somewhat rattled. And the revisionists are not without guile.
Identified as the eternal underdogs in this struggle, they have adopted a
devastatingly effective passive-aggressive posture – a wide-eyed innocence in
claiming that revisionism has no ideological base and is simply a method for
seeking the truth. Nonetheless, whatever their ideological motivations, they
have in the main confined themselves to scholarly investigation conducted in a
responsible manner and have, with devastating single-mindedness, piece by piece,
proceeded to unpick the hitherto sacred Holocaust narrative.
Take the case of Raul Hilberg. In 1961
Hilberg published The Destruction of the European Jews. In this book,
seen as a foundational text of the Holocaust, Hilberg describes an undertaking
personally supervised by Hitler, who issued two effective orders to set the
genocide in motion. These orders were acted upon by various administrative
agencies, especially in the police and military which prepared, organized and
executed this vast criminal enterprise. For twenty-five years this view
remained substantially unchallenged until in 1976 Arthur Butz published The
Hoax of the Twentieth Century and in 1978-1979 Robert Faurisson published
two articles in Le Monde claiming that the Nazi Gas chambers could not have
existed. A panel of experts was assembled to assert that the gas chambers did
exist, and among the experts was Raul Hilberg. Just before the start of the
proceedings Hilberg gave an interview to the French magazine Le Nouvel
Observateur in which he acknowledged there were no existing documents to
prove the existence of the gas chambers or that the extermination of the Jews
was conceived and planned by the National Socialist regime. On February 22nd
1983 in New York, at an event organized by the Holocaust Survivors Foundation,
Hilberg said,
What began in 1941 was a process of
destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency.
There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They
were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan
being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus - mind
reading by a far-flung bureaucracy.”
This was confirmed in Hilberg’s
testimony at the first Zündel trial in Toronto in 1985 and again in the same
year in the revised edition of his book which included the following:
In the final analysis, the destruction
of the Jews was not so much a product of laws and commands, as it was a matter
of spirit, of shared comprehension, of consonance and synchronisation.
Apart from bewilderment at such a tale
of consensual genocide conceived and directed by mind-reading, there must also
be some acknowledgement that such a protracted and agonizing volte-face
could only have come about as a result of the steady drip-drip of revisionist
endeavor – and all achieved whilst the revisionists were being prosecuted,
fined, imprisoned, assaulted and certainly shunned.
The Holocaust establishment has often
preferred to respond less with argument and more with power. Largely due to
pressure from Jewish organizations, Holocaust revisionism is subject to legal
penalty in Israel, France, Germany, Canada, Switzerland, Australia, Belgium,
Austria, Sweden, Poland, and Spain. Laws in these countries make it a crime for
anyone, regardless of their credentials or the factual basis of their views, to
question or revise any aspect of the history of World War II or the Holocaust in
a manner that goes beyond the standards established by the governments of those
countries. Also some countries punish revisionism without even having such laws
(USA, Great-Britain, Netherlands etc). In the U.S. a California judge took
against the IHR “judicial notice” of the existence of the Nazi gas chambers. In
France, in 1949-1950, forty years before the specific law of July 13 1990,
revisionists had been sentenced for their writings.
A person who, in writing or by word of
mouth, publishes any statement denying or diminishing the proportions
of acts committed in the period of the Nazi regime which are crimes against the
Jewish people or crimes against humanity, with intent to defend the perpetrators
of those acts or to express sympathy or identification with them, shall be
liable to imprisonment for a term of five years (16)
Historians, researchers, authors, and
publishers are being fined, imprisoned, placed under gag orders, expelled from
their native countries, and denied entry into others. Revisionists facing
prosecution have sometimes faced the absurdity that any defense of a revisionist
character, i.e., any claim that the revisionist position was actually correct,
would itself constitute a repetition of the offence; also, any witness who gave
testimony in support of the revisionist position could, upon demand of the
prosecution service, himself be immediately charged.
In addition in these and most other
countries in the western world, even where not technically illegal, revisionism
has carried the risk of severe penalty including loss of employment and social
exclusion of many kinds. Finally revisionists have been on the receiving end of
much violence, both threatened and real. All leading revisionists suffer legal
assaults, all suffer social and professional exclusion, and many have suffered
physical attacks. Holocaust revisionism today is, quite simply, held as
witchcraft was held in previous times - to be a Holocaust denier is to place
oneself on the outside of civilized society on a level with a pedophile.
This exercise of power has yielded
victories. Revisionism has been kept out of the main media; revisionists have
been denied access to the discourse, and the establishment has achieved a couple
of stunning retractions such as this one from Joel Hayward, who in 1993 wrote a
thesis in which he endeavored (and in my view, succeeded) to faithfully describe
the state of the revisionist/establishment conflict.
I now regret working on such a complex
topic without sufficient knowledge and preparation, and hope this brief addendum
will prevent my work causing distress to the Jewish community here in New
Zealand and elsewhere or being misused by individuals or groups with malevolent
motives….. I can now see that I failed in my M.A. thesis to place adequate
analytical weight on the motivation of numerous authors on the Holocaust, even
though some were obviously writing with a view to attacking Jews and
rehabilitating Nazis. Joel Hayward (17)
And this statement from the young Jewish
revisionist David Cole, obtained through less than legal means and faxed to Irv
Rubin, then head of the Jewish Defense League, is worth quoting in full.
This statement is given in an attempt to
set the record straight about my current views regarding the Holocaust and
Holocaust denial. As anyone who follows the subject of the Holocaust denial
knows, from 1991 until 1994 I was well known in the movement as a Jewish
Holocaust denier (a self-described "revisionist"). For the last three years I
have no longer been associated with this movement, having realized that I was
wrong and that the path I was taking with my life was self-destructive and
hurtful to others. I have spent the last few years in silence on the subject of
my time with the denial movement, a silence caused mainly by my shame at what I
had done with my life and my desire to distance myself from that life.
However, in that shame-induced silence
it has been brought to my attention that I have not gone as far as I should have
to make a clear and complete public statement in order to set the record
straight as to where I stand. It is my great hope that this statement
accomplishes that task.
I would like to state for the record that there is no question in my mind that
during the Holocaust of Europe's Jews during World War II, the Nazis employed
gas chambers in an attempt to commit genocide against the Jews. At camps in
both Eastern and Western Europe, Jews were murdered in gas chambers which
employed such poison gases as Zyklon B and carbon monoxide (in the Auschwitz
camp, for example, the gas chambers used Zyklon B). The evidence for this is
overwhelming and unmistakable.
The Nazis intended to kill all of the Jews of Europe, and the final death toll
of this attempted genocide was six million. This atrocity, unique in its scope
and breadth, must never be forgotten.
During my four years as a denier, I was wracked with self-hate and loathing, a
fact that many of my critics were quick to point out. Indeed, this self hatred
was obvious to most, but I was too blind to see it. The hate I had for myself I
took out on my people. I was seduced by pseudo historical nonsense and
clever-sounding but empty ideas and catch-phrases. When my eyes were finally
opened, thanks to several good, kind friends who refused to give up on me even
at my worst, I was horrified by what I had done. My instinct was to flee and
never look back, but I now understand that I owe it to the people I wronged to
make a forceful repudiation of my earlier views. I also owe a very large
apology, not only to the many people I enraged, and to the family and friends I
hurt, but especially to the survivors of the Holocaust, who deserve only our
respect and compassion, not re-victimization.
Therefore, to all of the above people, let me offer my most humble and very,
very sincere apology. I am sorry for what (I) did, and I am sorry for the hurt
I caused.
And just as I must set the record straight concerning my views, it is also
incumbent on me to set the record straight regarding the video "documentaries"
and media appearances I did from 1991 to 1994. These "documentaries" are merely
videotaped garbage filled with self-hatred and pseudo-intellectual nonsense. My
"media appearances" were nothing but an embarrassment. My glazed look, specious
reasoning, and talking-in-circles during my talk show appearances would have
hopefully alerted any astute viewers that this was a man not in touch with
reality.
It has been brought to my attention that Bradley Smith is still using one of my
videos in advertisements he is running on college campuses. Therefore, I would
like to make these additional points: This video is being advertised without my
consent, and I denounce this video as being without worth. Bradley Smith is no
historian, and denial is no "historical field". Students on college campuses
should look elsewhere to find out about the Holocaust. To these students, I
would say, look to books like Hilberg's "Destruction of the European Jews",
Yahil's "The Holocaust", and Dawidowicz's "War Against the Jews" for correct
information. If your school library doesn't stock these books, have them order
copies. Do not pay any attention to any "David Cole" videos, except to rightly
denounce them as frauds.
I am thankful for being given the opportunity to make this statement. This
statement is made freely and under no duress, and is quite willingly, even
happily given to Mr. Irv Rubin of the Jewish Defense League for the widest
possible distribution. This statement is the most current and accurate
compilation of my views, and it supersedes any previous writings, videos, or
statements. It is my hope that there will be no more confusion as to where I
stand. I thank you for letting me set the record straight. David Cole
(18)
Despite these victories it is still true that there is remarkably little hard
evidence to support the established Holocaust narrative, and people are bound to
ask how such a vast and complex undertaking as the premeditated and mechanistic
extermination of such a huge number of people could possibly have taken place
without leaving a clear trail of evidence, both documentary and physical. Also
with regard to tactics and strategy, Holocaust activists are in something of a
no-win situation. If they debate the revisionists they give them credibility
and concede that the Holocaust is a matter for debate; if they refuse to debate
with them, as in the main they do, they lay themselves open to the charge that
they have something to hide.
And of course the internet has changed
everything. Revisionist material, previously unseen, is now available at the
click of a mouse and you don’t have to go into some dubious bookshop to get it.
Online booksellers who have elected to stock revisionist materials have
inevitably given it a new respectability. E-mails and newsgroups have widened
and speeded up the debate. So much more can be said, so much quicker and to so
many more people and for the moment at least, no-one can stop you saying it or
reading it.
Reading the revisionist literature one
senses a confidence, not only that revisionists believe themselves to be right
but also that the future lies with them. In 1988, at the time of the second
Zündel trial and in reference to Ernst Zündel himself, Robert Faurisson wrote:
“Zündel may once again go to prison for
his research and beliefs or be threatened with deportation. All this is
possible. Anything may happen when there is an intellectual crisis and a
realignment of historical concepts of such a dimension. Revisionism is the
great intellectual adventure of the end of this century. Whatever happens, Ernst
Zündel is already the victor.”
But how could it be so?
This must surely be the establishment’s
strongest weapon - the sheer incredibility of the revisionist proposition. How
could such a deception have taken place? How could all those survivors be so
wrong in their testimonies? How could all those perpetrators be so wrong in
their confessions? How could all those documents, unspecific as they are, have
been falsified? Arthur Butz called his groundbreaking revisionist study “The
Hoax of the Twentieth Century”,but a hoax of this size and nature just
defies belief. Conspiracy theories rarely convince, nor do those who propagate
them, so surely the sheer absurdity of the revisionists’ claim tells us all we
need to know. If revisionism is to have any credibility at all, it must
demonstrate how, if false, the Holocaust narrative, as we know it, came to be.
The first reports of the mass slaughter
of Jews by the Germans were propagated in the spring of 1942 by Jewish and
Zionist agencies and published in the Jewish press. These entirely
uncorroborated reports received immediate and unmatched credibility by being
broadcast (on one occasion in Yiddish) back into Poland by the BBC, and by
repetition in the American press, particularly the New York Times. They spoke
for the first time of extermination, but not only by gas. According to these
reports Jews were being steamed to death, suffocated to death, pressed to death
and electrocuted as well as being gassed. It is only later in reports compiled
by the Soviet authorities, when they liberated the camps of Majdanek and
Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 and 1945, that gassing emerges as the main method of
slaughter and even later, as just one element in the shower-gas-cremation
sequence which now lies at the heart of the Holocaust narrative.
It is with these Soviet reports, plus
others from the World Refugee Board, that the now-familiar extermination
narrative emerges. The victims disembark from trains for selection. Those
designated for extermination are taken to complexes designed to look like
disinfection facilities. There they are separated into sexes and led to
undressing rooms where they undress. Then they are led, 600-700 at a time, into
huge rooms resembling shower rooms. When the rooms are crammed full, Zyklon B
pellets are dropped from apertures in the roof and, as the temperature rises,
hydrogen cyanide gas is released. The victims take about five to fifteen
minutes to die, watched all the time through glass peepholes in the doors by SS
personnel. An interval of about half an hour is allowed for the gas to clear,
assisted by a ventilation system, after which a Jewish Sonderkommando
(special detachment) enters with gas masks, rubber boots, gloves, hooks and
hoses to disentangle, hose down and remove the bodies. The bodies are taken to
mortuaries, where gold teeth etc. are extracted with pliers, and they are then
transported to crematoria where they are burned to ashes. If the number of
corpses should prove to be too great for the cremation facilities, then those
remaining are taken to be burned in specially designed open pits.
But if such a narrative is false, it is
interesting to speculate as to how it took the form it did. Possible answers
may be found in the 50-100 year history of Europe prior to the events under
investigation. This period saw huge movements of people westwards, many of them
Jews and many of them migrating to or through Germany. All over central and
western Europe, but particularly in Germany, there was a problem with, and a
fear of epidemics, particularly of typhus - and many of the receiving
authorities, and particularly the German authorities, were intent of developing
and implementing mass disinfection and disinfestation procedures. These
included mobile and stationery mass steam and shower baths and mobile and
stationery facilities for the disinfestation of clothing by gas. The gas used
for disinfestation was of course hydrogen cyanide gas in the form of Zyklon B
pellets.
This use of gas for delousing and
disinfestation must be set against the background of the very real use of poison
gas as a weapon in the Great War and in various other areas of conflict both
real (such as by the Italians in Abyssinia) and imaginary (as by the Martians in
The War of the Worlds radio broadcast of 1938). It should also be noted how
after the introduction of gas onto the battlefield in 1915, stories of homicidal
gassings of civilians began to appear in atrocity propaganda. In March 1916 the
Daily Telegraph reported that the Austrians and Bulgarians had murdered hundreds
of thousands of Serbians using poison gas.
At roughly the same time cremation was
increasingly being used for the disposal of bodies and particularly for the mass
disposal of epidemic victims. Cremation as a means of corpse disposal was
widely promoted by the German National Socialist regime - a regime noted for its
modern attitudes to technology – and it was also universally used in its
euthanasia programme. One result of the use of cremation in these euthanasia
killings, was that it fed the general suspicion that cremation was used to
conceal the cause of death by gas poisoning (deaths in the euthanasia programme
are now thought more likely to have been by lethal injection) which was widely
(and falsely) believed to cause disfigurement. So cremation became associated
with attempts to deceive the population about the cause of death. In effect,
all these techniques of disinfection and cremation, considered to be at the very
cutting-edge of modernism by enlightened western Europeans, were viewed by large
sections of the European masses - and particularly by immigrants, usually poor,
conservative and deeply superstitious, and even more particularly by the eastern
Jewish masses with their additional religious concerns about mass undressing and
cremation etc – with the deepest suspicion.
It’s not so crazy if you put yourself in
the shoes of a poor Jewish immigrant fleeing the conditions of Tsarist Russia.
You arrive exhausted and terrified together with a mass of similarly exhausted
and terrified folk at a German border station where you are confronted with
uniformed guards and officials shouting at you in a language you barely
understand. They want to separate you from your men- and women-folk, to undress
you and to put you into large cold and forbidding chambers. You’ve heard the
stories as you stand naked and shivering under the showerheads and wait for what
you have been told will be water, but for what a part of you fears will be gas.
An account from a surprising quarter illustrates the point – Ingrid Rimland:
I remember fairly clearly one such
"experience" sometime in 1944. This was during the Wehrmacht retreat from the
Eastern front, when huge refugee treks of ethnic Germans traveled westward with
horse-drawn wagons under German Army protection, experiencing horrendous
hardships from hunger and cold, the advancing Red Army ever in our backs.
My family belonged to German-descent
Mennonites, a fundamentalist Christian community who had come to the Ukraine in
1789, but we still considered ourselves to be Germans and still spoke the German
language. Ever since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution - which happened when my
grandmother was still a young woman and my mother was only four years old - my
people had been savagely persecuted by the
Communists. Many of my cousins, aunts, uncles, more distant relatives perished
in waves of ethnic cleansings. This persecution started before I was born and
became deadly in 1938, affecting practically every male age 14 and over. My own
father was exiled to Siberia when I was only five years old in 1941, and our
entire family escaped exiling only at the last moment, literally hours before
the German Army overran the Ukraine in September of that year - only weeks after
my father was taken from us forever
When the (for us) voluntary retreat to
Germany began two years later, in the fall of 1943, there were four of us left -
my grandmother, my mother, my baby sister and I. The rest of our family had
either been exiled to Siberia, been killed, or simply disappeared in the havoc
of those horror years since 1917. Now we were running for our lives from the
Red Army - almost all of us women and children.
We entered Nazi-occupied Poland sometime
in 1944 and were invited to be officially naturalized as Germans. I remember
the city as Litzmannstadt (Lodz) but I cannot be sure.
But first we had to be deloused.
Naturally! As far as I know, this was routine for everybody entering
German-occupied territory and certainly Germany proper, an obligatory health
measure to control epidemics such as typhus, a disease that was carried by lice.
Everybody who was coming from the East was infested with lice in those days -
Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews - soldiers and civilians. There
was no way not to have lice, unless you underwent delousing. We were made to
enter a long train. Whether that train took us to a building, or if it ended in
a building, I don't remember any more. Somehow the rumor sprang up that we were
going to be gassed. I have no idea who started it. As a seven-year old, I do
remember how terrified I was.
We were all stripped naked, had our hair
shorn, and then, while we were all sitting, old and young, in long rows of
benches, water and soap, probably mixed with insecticide, rained down on us from
shower heads above. I don't remember the relief, only the fear. Similarly, the
rumor sprang up on that train that the Germans were looking for "yellow blood",
presumably Jewish, by clipping our ear lobe. I was just as terrified of that
one. Ingrid Rimland
So these Soviet reports with their
now-detailed descriptions of the shower-gas-cremation procedure of
extermination, coming after three years of other terrifying reports of
exterminations of Jews and others by the Germans, and also in the context of
fears in Europe about the use of gas as a weapon used against civilians and of
cremation as a new and unfamiliar method of the disposing of bodies, could
possibly have been instrumental in laying the foundations of the Holocaust
gas-chamber narrative as we know it. Certainly from the time of those reports,
the mere presence of showers, disinfestation gas chambers and crematoria had
become in itself evidence of mass homicidal gassing.
So when the western armies came across
the German concentration camps at Belsen, Dachau and Buchenwald sites at
which it is now known that there were no mass extermination facilities, and
saw the now familiar images of skeletal, diseased inmates and piles of
discoloured corpses and discovered sealed rooms, showers and crematoria
which we now know had been used only for disinfection and disinfestation,
and encountered inmates who were prepared to tell them tales of mass
exterminations, they were both able and willing to interpret it all in terms of
what they had heard, rather than what, in this instance at least, was the truth.
Whatever conditions might have been in
the German camps throughout the war, by 1945 and the final defeat of Germany the
system, and particularly the camp system, had collapsed and conditions were
catastrophic and it was the results of this collapse which the western armies
came across. The Americans and the British saw these things, and, most
critically, filmed and photographed them, as clear evidence of a planned
genocide, rather than what they were: the result, particularly in the form of
typhus epidemics, of a breakdown of Germany generally and the camp system in
particular, under the onslaught of the allied saturation bombing.
Although it cannot entirely be ruled out
that some of these authorities knew that they were propagating a myth, it seems
most likely that the Jewish authorities who first spread reports of
exterminations, were reacting only from a real concern for their fellow-Jews,
known to be under ferocious assault by the Germans who, at the time of those
first reports, were ratcheting up their assault on the Jews by beginning brutal
deportations to the East. But what of the other authorities involved – the
Americans, the British and the Soviets? These authorities surely would have
been happy to accuse the Germans of absolutely anything and possibly not averse
to a little falsification of the evidence if needed. After all, these same
authorities had been perfectly prepared to continue to accuse the Germans of the
massacre of over 4000 Poles at Katyn - a deed they knew full well had been
perpetrated by the Soviet NKVD. In fact, the only cases where there is any
evidence of contrived fabrication occur at the liberation of the camp at
Majdanek by the Red army, at which time the Soviet authorities closed the site
for a month and then presented to the world some highly questionable evidence of
mass extermination of Jews. A similar conscious fabrication may also have taken
place at Auschwitz. In any event, intentional or not, all was now ready for the
story to take off.
Any story, true or false, is easily
spread if there are fabricators, peddlers and believers, and this is all the
more so if all three are combined. The Holocaust had plenty of all three.
Moving down the chain of command we find plenty of examples at the Nuremberg
trials where the alleged crimes of the vanquished were formalised by the
victors. The Nuremberg investigators, as they worked their way through the
mountains of alleged eyewitness testimonies, believed that there were gas
chambers as they strove to establish the truth. The army interrogators, as they
punched and pummeled their way through the hapless defendants, believed that
there were gas chambers and that they were merely trying to get at the truth.
The lawyers, as they presented highly questionable documents as hard evidence,
believed that there were gas chambers and that they were only trying to get at
the truth. And the survivors of the deportations, raw and traumatized, full of
unimaginable feelings including hatred and a thirst for revenge, were surely
perfectly capable of believing that there were gas chambers and that they were
only telling the truth. After all, was not all Europe, including the camps,
rife with reports of gas chambers and anyway, had not so-and-so seen them? And
as for the defendants, many unsure of the truth themselves and possibly
themselves totally bewildered by the extermination claims, they may have seen it
in their best interests to go along with what the court had ready decided. Some
may even have found some comfort in their moment of world-class notoriety as
they mounted the gallows and anyway, stopping the pain was motivation enough:
the solitary confinement and sleep deprivation, the floggings, the threats to
family and loved ones and the constant humiliations - perhaps it was just easier
to confess.
Nor do we need much to persuade us that
the Jewish leadership might have been ready and willing to propagate and believe
such a tale. Jews suffered terribly under National Socialism - nobody denies
that, neither revisionist or non-revisionist. They had been persecuted,
expelled and assaulted. They had been forcibly deported and incarcerated in
brutal labor camps where thousands upon thousands had died from exhaustion,
malnutrition and maltreatment. In the East many Jews had been shot. Jews had
little reason to love the Germans.
Nor would it be the first time that Jews
have accepted and propagated stories, true, false or a mixture of both, of their
suffering. The Holocaust is only the latest, albeit the worst of a series of
tragic calamities to have befallen the Jewish people, and Hitler sits well with
Pharaoh, Amalek, Haman, Tomas de Torquemada and Bogdan Chmielnitski - all
enduring hate-figures in the Jewish martyrology. Nor would this be the first
time that Jewish chroniclers (or any other chroniclers for that matter) have
used some poetic license in describing their suffering. The Talmud tells that
at the time of the destruction of the second temple – held in Jewish history to
be the one historical precedent for the Holocaust - the Romans slew ‘four
billions,” the blood of the Jewish victims was so great that it became a ‘tidal
wave carrying boulders out to sea’, and staining the water for four miles out.
The bodies of the Jews were used as ‘fence posts’ and Jewish children were
“wrapped up in their Torah scrolls - and burned alive all 65 million of them.”
In a context like this, the utterances of Elie Wiesel, become a little more
understandable.
Not far from us blazed flames from a
pit, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drove up to the pit
and dumped its load into the pit. They were small children. Babies! Yes, I had
seen it, with my own eyes...Children in the flames (is it any wonder, that sleep
shuns my eyes since that time?). We went there, too. Somewhat further along,
was another, bigger pit, for adults. 'Father", I said, ' if that is so, I wish
to wait no longer. I shall throw myself against the electrified barbed wire
fence. That is better than lying around in the flames for hours." (19)
But for a story of this magnitude to be
spread, many more believers were needed, than a few over-mighty politicians and
soldiers and thousands of traumatized and broken survivors, and, save for a few
insightful cynics at the very top of the British, American, Soviet and Jewish
leaderships, believe it they did. True, there was little hard evidence, but
what there was could so easily be made to fit. After all, everyone knew that
the Germans had engaged in purposeful mass extermination of Jews therefore
“special treatment” and “deportation to the East” must be euphemisms
for extermination, and any sealed chamber attached to a crematorium, especially
if used for disinfestations by gas, must have been a homicidal gas
chamber.
Once momentum is achieved, all that is
needed is an extended game of Chinese whispers to result in a Holocaust
narrative, conceived in the real and terrible wartime suffering of Jews,
portrayed as imagined in newsreels and photo-reportage, framed and formalized at
Nuremberg and subsequent trials and then, most critically of all, later turned
into religious dogma. Set all this in the context of a western world obsessed
by Jews and its own ambivalence about Jews and Jewish suffering, a Jewish
population traumatized by its very real and recent suffering, an immensely
influential Jewish culture which places suffering at the core of its
self-identity, and a Zionist leadership desperate to win world sympathy for a
Jewish state in Palestine, and the idea of such a story, even if false, gaining
near universal acceptance, really isn’t that hard to believe.
After all, people once believed the earth
was flat and sat on the back of four elephants riding on a turtle. They
believed the earth was the centre of the universe and persecuted skeptics with
the same fervor and with about as much justification as they do today’s
Holocaust revisionists. People today believe that JFK was assassinated by a
lone gunman with a magic bullet. They believe in astrology and fortune telling,
in bodily auras and out-of-body experiences. They believe that the Children of
Israel were guided in the desert by a pillar of smoke by day and of fire by
night, that Jesus was born of a virgin, died and was resurrected, and that the
Prophet Mohamed ascended to heaven after seeing Mecca and Jerusalem. Why, they
even believe that Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a
land! So what is so hard to believe about the planned and premeditated
slaughter of six million Jews by modern industrial methods, loaded in their
millions onto trains and taken to industrialized killing centers where they are
done to death thousands at a time in huge slaughter halls, their bodies burned
to ashes and their bones ground into dust? People believe in heaven and they
believe in hell - so why not the hell of the Holocaust?
III. The War for the Spirit
A friend and colleague in solidarity
with the Palestinians wrote:
(Your writing) ultimately serves the
same forces of racism that allow Israeli soldiers to kill Palestinians in cold
blood. The Nazis not only articulated – they took daily, direct action to
implement -- their conception of a racial hierarchy. They killed people they
believed threatened Aryan racial purity and superiority -- the physically and
mentally handicapped; gypsies; homosexuals; Slavs; Poles; Jews. Tinkering
around trying to establish whether or not millions were gassed or killed by
other means seems to me to be simply running away from the central political
point: that racist ideologies are fundamentally murderous, and when people who
espouse them get into power, they become literally murderous. What else
matters? Do you really think that 'proving' that a few hundred thousand
Jews/Slavs/Poles here and a few hundred thousand there were shot rather than
gassed, will make any difference at all to how the state of Israel is perceived,
or how Israelis perceive themselves, to Europe's sense of culpability (displaced
onto the Palestinians, of course), or whether or not Europe and the US decide to
implement sanctions against Israel, or withdraw financial support to Israel.
These are difficult questions. Does
writing about Holocaust revisionism give it a credibility it does not deserve?
Does revisionism give to National Socialist ideology a credibility it does not
deserve? Is Holocaust revisionism inextricably linked to fascism, racism and
anti-Semitism and if so, should we then not investigate it? Is National
Socialism worse than many other ideologies such as Stalinist Marxism, which we
do deem suitable for objective investigation? Does confirming the truth or
otherwise of the Holocaust have any bearing on the struggle of the Palestinians
against Israeli oppression?
For what they’re worth my views are:
Writing without prejudice about Holocaust revisionism must inevitably give it
some credibility but in my view, for reasons now obvious, this is deserved.
Holocaust revisionism is not inextricably linked to fascism, racism and
anti-Semitism, though I can see how it might seem that way. Revisionist
scholarship inevitably gives increased credibility to National Socialism, in
that it allows the possibility that the National Socialist regime was not quite
as unspeakable as it has been painted. Whether this is deserved or not depends
on the result of the scholarship. As for whether National Socialism is worse
than the many other ideologies that are considered worthy of unbiased study, the
answer is that I don’t know.
But we are entitled to search for the
truth. The real crime committed by the National Socialists – the exclusion,
disempowerment, deportation, enslavement, death by omission and by commission
and expulsion of a people simply because they were that people – was a terrible
one. One does not need gas chambers to make the targeting of Jews, just because
they are Jews, extraordinary and unacceptable. Nonetheless, if this targeting
did not extend to extermination, if there were no gas chambers and if six
million Jews did not die, then we should know it and, if necessary, address the
implications. If there is some reason why we should not investigate this
matter, then the onus is on those who would deny us that right, to say why.
Those who would deny us that right have tried to say why, but in my view they
have failed miserably.
But what does it matter how many Jews
were murdered and in what way and with what intention? A murder is a murder and
one murder is one murder too many. What difference will it make whether the
Holocaust is proven or not? Will it have any affect whatsoever on the status
and attitudes of Israel or on its behavior towards the Palestinians – issues on
which we pressingly need to focus?
But the Holocaust is not just murder.
Nor is it just mass murder. Nor is it even just genocide. There have been
plenty of murders, mass murders and even genocides, but none have been
memorialized like the Holocaust. The Holocaust is held to be the worst crime in
human history, and this is not because more people were killed or because they
were killed more brutally or more senselessly. Three million Polish Jews are
held to have died in the Holocaust. Three million Polish non-Jews also died in
the same period of history - yet the Jews, as evidenced by the memorialisation
accorded them, are seen as more important. Fifty million people died in the
Second World War, including twenty million Russians, ten million Germans and
Austrians and six million Jews. Yet only the Jews warrant a “Holocaust”’.
Is this because it was only Jews who
were targeted for obliteration simply because they were Jews, and because it was
only Jews who were exterminated in such a cool, premeditated and modern fashion
by such an advanced, liberal and enlightened nation in the heart of Christian
Europe? If the revisionists should prove their case that Jews were not targeted
for extermination, that there were no gas-chambers and there was no six million,
would there then be no Holocaust? Would Jews become just more tragic victims of
a tragic period of history, on a par with the millions of other victims,
including the thousands upon of thousands of German civilians slaughtered in the
terror bombing of German cities by the western allies?
The revisionist community has probably
said just about all it can say and proved all it can prove and have probably
made the case sufficiently to at least cast doubt on the veracity of the
Holocaust narrative. Future historians may well reject the Holocaust as
history, but the Holocaust may yet go on, no longer as history but as ideology
and even theology. Even though the evidence may lead us to accept that there
never was intent to eliminate every single Jew from Europe, or any gas-chambers
at Auschwitz, or anything near six-million victims, this may not make one iota
of difference any more than archeological evidence might prove that there was no
Exodus from Egypt and medical science might throw doubt on the virgin birth.
Because there is another possibility -
that the suffering of the Jews is held to be the worst crime in human history
not because of the nature of the crime but because of the nature of the
victims. Maybe Abe Foxman had it just about right when he wrote:-
(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”(20)
Because it may be that the Holocaust is
not just special, it may be that the Holocaust is sacred. It may be that
speaking of the Holocaust alongside other atrocities is like speaking of the
Passion as being the crucifixion of one troublemaker and two thieves. It may be
that the Holocaust is a narrative of suffering greater than just of one person
on a cross.
If Auschwitz is something other than a
horror of history, if it goes beyond the 'banality of evil', then Christianity
totters on its foundations. Christ is the Son of God, who went to the end of the
humanly endurable, where he endured the cruelest suffering... If Auschwitz is
true, then there is a human suffering which simply cannot be compared with that
of Christ... In this case, Christ is false, and salvation will not come from
Him…… Auschwitz is the refutation of Christ. Claude Lanzmann
So the Holocaust and Jewish suffering,
no longer history, now theology, have become a religious imperative for Jews,
and more critically for allJews, even for those Jews who
regard themselves as secular, who haven’t been near a synagogue since they were
children, even for those Jews who don’t much consider themselves Jews.
Take ten Jews today, maybe three will worship God, perhaps nine will worship the
state of Israel, nine-point-five may worship "The Jewish People" but nine-point
nine-nine-nine recurring will worship Jewish suffering and the Holocaust. The
Holocaust resolves the great dilemma of modern Jewish life - how to be a Jew
when you no longer believe in the Jewish God. Secular Jews have found many gods
to replace the one they reject – Marx and Trotsky, atheism, psychoanalysis,
multiculturalism, human rights, money and success, and of course, Zionism –
there’s lots to choose from but only one that serves as a catch-all for
everyone. And if you don’t believe it, try this - go find the most educated,
secular, progressive, enlightened, perceptive, sensitive Jew you know - deny the
Holocaust and then stand back.
But the Holocaust is not confined to
Jews. The Holocaust is not only the central martyrdom and therefore a religious
focus in modern Jewish history but also, if not in world history, then certainly
in American and European history. All over North America and Western Europe:
Holocaust museums - cathedrals to the new religion with their own priests and
priestesses; Abe Foxman, Deborah Lipstadt, Elie Wiesel, Simon Wiesenthal, abound
– the biggest and best in Washington DC with all the other symbols of American
nationhood and power. Holocaust Chairs at major universities, memorials,
foundations, conferences and symposia, books, magazines, films, TV
documentaries. The further we travel in time from the actual events the greater
the sacralisation. But these are only the outward manifestations. The
Holocaust, the ultimate in suffering is a paradigm for all Jewish suffering and
for all intolerance, discrimination and hatred against Jews and this is in
itself is a paradigm for all suffering and all intolerance,
discrimination and hatred against all people. That’s why a major
Holocaust Museum in the U.S. is able to style itself as simply “The Museum of
Tolerance”, and that’s why those who dare to challenge the Jewish claim to a
particularity of suffering are nearly always accused of “intolerance” or of
“promoting hate”. The Holocaust may be the ultimate symbol of Jewish power, the
most visible means by which the Jewish will in this world is enforced and
displayed to a cowering non-Jewish world. It proclaims that Jews are suffering
and Jews are innocent so Jews can do what they like and, by association the
state of the Jews is also suffering, is also innocent and can
also do what it likes.
The Emperor’s new clothes But the world doesn’t jump because it feels sorry for Jews. As Israel
Shamir says, compassion and guilt may get you a free bowl of soup but not a lot
else, and certainly not the ninety billion deutschmarks paid in reparations by
the Federal Republic of Germany to the infant state of Israel, the billions of
dollars paid by successive US governments to maintain that state, nor the free
pass given to Israel by just about everyone to do pretty much what it likes to
the Palestinians. The power of the Holocaust is not the power to arouse pity
and compassion in the rest of the world. Anyone can see that Israel has no need
of our pity or compassion and neither have Jews. Israel is not weak and Israel
is not innocent and neither are Jews. What is harder to see is how anyone could
ever have thought otherwise. Could it even be the same with the Holocaust? Is
it not by now plain that there is very little evidence to support the Holocaust
narrative, that the extermination narrative just doesn’t add up, and that the
issue of the gas-chambers could, as Ingrid Rimland reminded us, be settled
easily by forensic investigation.
I suggest that forensic science ought to
settle that disagreement about what Germans did or did not do in World War II in
an open public forum
Why has this not been done? Everyone
must know that if the establishment could disprove revisionist claims they
would, so why haven’t they? And anyone can visit any number of websites and
find mountains of evidence against the veracity of the Holocaust, so why don’t
we?
The reason is the same reason why
courtiers have, since time began, acted as if a stark naked emperor was
beautifully attired - because they have to. The power of the Holocaust
is the same power as enabled a few thousand Englishman to rule hundreds of
millions of Indians; a few hundred French aristocrats to rule a few million
French peasants and a Czar and a few hundred Russian nobles to rule millions of
Russian serfs. It is the same power that all over the world and throughout
human history has enabled the prosperous few to rule over the impoverished
many. It is the very essence of power in this world; the power of bluff. As
the unclothed Emperor can force people to believe that he is clothed, so the
Jewish and Holocaust establishments can make us believe that black is white in
the Holocaust narrative and that Jews and Israel are suffering and innocent. And
if they can’t make us believe it, they can at least make us say that we believe
it. To the wannabee dissenter, the power behind the Holocaust says this, “Watch
it! If we can enforce this we can enforce anything!”
But why should we care if Jews choose to
create for themselves such a mythology, even if that mythology has been accepted
by so many others? The answer is: we must care because if the Holocaust is
false, then there are those who suffer under that falsehood. First, if the
special status of Jews is removed, then the equal status of every single non-Jew
who died in that same time, till now demeaned and denigrated, is immediately
restored to its rightful and equal place. And there are other victims too. The
German people stand accused and found guilty of having committed the worst crime
in human history. The Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians etc. etc. stand
accused and found guilty of aiding, abetting and even applauding the commission
of the worst crime in human history. Add to them the Catholic Church and the
Pope, the Americans and British who stand accused and found guilty of not having
done enough to prevent the commission of the worst crime in human history. Add
to them Christianity and Christians who throughout the ages stand accused and
found guilty of laying the foundations for the commission of the worst crime in
human history. And finally you may as well throw in pretty much the entire
non-Jewish world accused and guilty of what amounts to simply not being one of
the chosen victims of the worst crime in human history, and therefore condemned
forever to hush their voices whenever the word ‘Jew’ is mentioned and to stand
silently as the myth of Jewish chosenness in the Holocaust is propagated.
The weapons of the poor…
There is one other victim: a present,
pressing, ultimate victim. The Palestinian people -denied, denigrated and
abused by a power which uses the Holocaust as a shield behind which any and
every atrocity may take place - are surely the primary sufferers under the
Holocaust.
On March 22 2001 Robert Faurisson wrote
a paper for the proposed Beirut Conference on Revisionism and Zionism, which he
knew would never be presented. He was right. The conference was cancelled due
to external pressure, largely by Jewish groups. In his paper for the first
time, Faurisson addressed the Arab world. First he put it to them that an
intelligent adversary may say that they fear something when they don’t, and that
they don’t fear something when they do. Thus their enemies’ firepower is
deflected from those places where it may do real damage to those areas where it
can do little damage.
Then he listed those things that
Zionists do not fear: They do not fear military power – they’ve more than
enough of their own and anyway, they know that anyone who has military power is
far more likely to support them rather than oppose them. They do not fear
anti-Semitism – on the contrary they feed on it to create sympathy for their
cause. They do not really fear denouncers of Holocaust exploitation – the Norman
Finkelsteins and the Peter Novicks – so long as they do not challenge the
Holocaust itself. After all, the fiercest critic of something can (albeit often
unwittingly) become its staunchest guardian – (If Norman Finkelstein says it, it
must be true.) They do not even fear anti-Zionism since Zionism, like Jewish
power itself, has the wondrous ability to transform itself into anything it
wants – left/right, religious/secular, one-state/two-state – all provide fertile
ground for Zionism and Jewish particularity. Nor do they much fear attacks on
the founding myths of Israel – that is, all of them except one. Finally, they do
not even fear being called Judeo-Nazis. On the contrary, being labeled by one’s
adversaries as a Nazi merely affirms that ‘Nazi’ is the very worst thing
imaginable.
He then told his audience what Zionists
do fear: They fear the weapons of those who have nothing left to lose - the poor
and the weak. They fear the stones and suicide bombers of the Palestinian
Intifada – and they fear the weapons of that other Intifada - the words of the
revisionists.
Zionists truly fear the weapons of the
poor (children's stones, their slingshots like that of David against the giant
Goliath, the suicide attacks) and all that may endanger persons and business;
they fear a demeaning of their brand image. But they are above all apprehensive
of "the poor man's atomic bomb", that is, the disintegration, by historical
revisionism, of the lie of the gas chambers, the genocide and the six million;
they dread this weapon that kills no-one but that would not fail, if properly
used to explode their big lie like a bag of hot air…..to lose the "Holocaust" is
to lose the sword and the shield of Israel as well as a formidable instrument of
political and financial blackmail; (21)
Despite their honourable intentions and
dedicated efforts, the solidarity movement, which includes many Jews of
conscience, has had little success in stopping the Zionist juggernaut. The
truth is that the only thing that has stalled it has been Palestinian
steadfastness and Palestinian stones. Although they will never say so,
Palestinians must know that they are not just facing the might of the Israeli
state but also the power of organized world Jewry and its primary arm, the
Holocaust. Perhaps Palestinians should consider lobbing a few stones in that
direction. Perhaps we all should.