Revisionism

   Introduction

FOR FEAR OF THE JEWS' By Joseph Sobran

Reflections on the Second World War, Free Speech and Revisionism

Revisionism and the Promotion of Peace Harry Elmer Barnes

Revisionism and Censorship Down Under

Revisionism in Croatia: Croatia's President Rejects 'Six Million' Story

Revisionist Master's Thesis Under Fire New Zealand University Resists Jewish Demands

Joseph Sobran is former editor of the National Review -- removed due to his alleged "anti-Semitism".

`FOR FEAR OF THE JEWS' 

By Joseph Sobran 

http://www.fpp.co.uk/Sobran/Sobran17.html 

The news that I would be addressing the Institute of Historical Review came to some people as, well, news. It was mentioned in the Jewish newspaper Forward [June 14] and on the Zionist Wall Street Journal OnLine. The editors of two conservative magazines called and wrote me to express their concern that I might damage my reputation, such as it is, by speaking to "Holocaust deniers."

I'm not sure why this should matter. Even positing that I was speaking to a disreputable audience, I expect to be judged by what I say, not whom I say it to. I note that my enemies have written a great deal about me, yet they rarely quote me directly.

Why not? If I am so disreputable myself, I must at least occasionally say disreputable things. Is it possible that what I say is more cogent than they like to admit?

My enemies are always are welcome to quote anything I say, if they dare. I would say the same things to them, and they may consider my remarks to the IHR as addressed to them too. I wasn't just speaking to "Holocaust deniers," but also to Holocaust believers.

Because I've endured smears and ostracism for my criticism of Israel and its American lobby, some people credit me with courage. I'm flattered, of course, but this compliment, whether or not I deserve it, implies that it's professionally dangerous for a journalist to criticize Israel. That tells you a lot.

But if I'm "courageous," what do you call Mark Weber and the Institute for Historical Review? They have been smeared far worse than I have; moreover, they have been seriously threatened with death. Their offices have been firebombed. Do they at least get credit for courage? Not at all. They remain almost universally vilified.

When I met Mark, many years ago, I expected to meet a raving Jew-hating fanatic, such being the generic reputation of "Holocaust deniers." I was immediately and subsequently impressed to find that he was just the opposite: a mild-mannered, good-humored, witty, scholarly man who habitually spoke with restraint and measure, even about enemies who would love to see him dead. The same is true of other members of the Institute. In my many years of acquaintance with them, I have never heard any of them say anything that would strike an unprejudiced listener as unreasonable or bigoted.

It was their enemies who were raving, hate-filled fanatics, unable to discuss "Holocaust deniers" in measured language, without wild hyperbole, loose accusation, and outright lies. I began to wonder: if they can't tell the truth about "Holocaust deniers," how can they tell the truth about the Holocaust itself?

Even if the Holocaust had really happened, as I assumed, maybe it should be studied with a critical rationality most of its believers obviously lacked. After all, even Stalin's crimes might be exaggerated, quite understandably, by his victims. As Milton puts it, "Let truth and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?" Even those in error might have some thing to say, some marginal clarification to offer. Why stop our ears against them?

Why on earth is it "anti-Jewish" to conclude from the evidence that the standard numbers of Jews murdered are inaccurate, or that the Hitler regime, bad as it was in many ways, was not, in fact, intent on racial extermination? Surely these are controversial conclusions; but if so, let the controversy rage. There is no danger in permitting it to proceed. It might be different if denying the Holocaust could somehow affect the course of events, as the denial of Stalin's crimes by the New York Times in the 1930s helped him to continue committing them. Why is the Institute for Historical Review notorious, while the Times, despite its active support of Stalin at the height of his power, remains a pillar of respectability?

The Holocaust has never been a consuming interest of mine. But as I read the Journal of Historical Review over the years, I found in it the same calm virtue of critical rationality I'd found in Mark himself. And it was applied to many other subjects besides the question of whether Hitler had tried to exterminate the Jews. An article it carried about Abraham Lincoln some years ago caused me to revise my entire view of Lincoln and stimulated me to write a book about him. [Robert Morgan, "Abraham Lincoln and the Issue of Race," The Journal of Historical Review, Sept.-Oct. 1993.]

The IHR's mission can't be fairly summed up as "Holocaust denial." Its real mission is criticism of the suffocating progressive ideology that has infected and distorted the telling of history in our time. But of course its specific skepticism of the standard Holocaust story is regarded as blasphemy, and has earned it the dreaded epithet of anti-Semitism.

Not long ago the only label more lethal to one's reputation was that of child molester, but, as many men of the cloth are now discovering, there is this difference: a child molester may hope for a second chance.

There is also another difference. We have a pretty clear idea what child molestation is. Nobody really knows what "anti-Semitism" is. My old boss Bill Buckley wrote an entire book called In Search of Anti-Semitism without bothering to define anti-Semitism.

At the time I thought this was an oversight. I was wrong. The word would lose its utility if it were defined. As I observed in my own small contribution to the book, an "anti-Semite" used to mean a man who hated Jews. Now it means a man who is hated by Jews.

I doubt, in fact I can't imagine, that anyone associated with the IHR has ever done harm to another human being because he was Jewish. In fact the IHR has never been accused of anything but thought-crimes.

The same is true of me. Nobody has ever accused me of the slightest personal indecency to a Jew. My chief offense, it appears, has been to insist that the state of Israel has been a costly and treacherous "ally" to the United States. As of last September 11, I should think that is undeniable. But I have yet to receive a single apology for having been correct.

If I were to hate Jews en masse, without distinction, I would be guilty of many things. Obviously I'd be guilty of injustice and uncharity to Jews as human beings. I would also be guilty of willful stupidity. More personally, I'd be guilty of ingratitude to my benefactors -- which Dante, in his Inferno, ranks the worst of all sins -- since many of my benefactors, in large ways and small, have been Jewish.

Moreover, I would be becoming exactly the man my Zionist enemies would like me to be; a man like them, in whom ethnic hostilities take priority over all other values and considerations. I would justify them in treating me as an enemy. In fact I'd go so far as to say that I would be helping to justify the state of Israel. I consider that if I fight these people on their terms, they have already won.

What, exactly, is "anti-Semitism"? One standard dictionary definition is "hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious or racial group." How this applies to me has never been explained. My "hostility" toward Israel is a desire not for war, but for neutrality -- out of a sense of betrayal, waste, and shame. Our venal politicians have aligned us with a foreign country that behaves dishonorably. Most alleged "anti-Semites" would wince if Jews anywhere were treated as Israel treats its Arab subjects. Moreover, Israel has repeatedly betrayed its only benefactor, the United States. I have already alluded to the place Dante reserves for those who betray their benefactors.

These are obvious moral facts. Yet it's not only politicians who are afraid to point them out; so are most journalists -- the people who are supposed to be independent enough to say the things politicians can't afford to say. In my thirty years in journalism, nothing has amazed me more than the prevalent fear in the profession of offending Jews, especially Zionist Jews.

The fear of the label anti-Semitic is a fear of the power that is believed to lie behind it: Jewish power. Yet this is still pretty much unmentionable in journalism. It's rather as if sportswriters covering pro basketball were prohibited from mentioning that the Los Angeles Lakers were in first place.

There has been a qualitative change that is downright eerie in American conservatism generally. The "fear of the Jews," to use the phrase so often repeated in the Gospel according to John, seems to have wrought a reorientation of the tone, the very principles, of today's conservatism. The hardy skepticism, critical intelligence, and healthy irony of men like James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, and the young Buckley have given way to the uncritical philo-Semitism of George Will, Cal Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and of course the later Buckley -- men who will go to any lengths, even absurd and dishonorable lengths, to avoid the terrorizing label anti-Semite.

It was once considered "anti-Semitic" to impute "dual loyalty" to Jews -- that is, to assert that most American Jews divide their loyalty between the United States and Israel. This is now passé. Today most politicians assume, as a matter of course, that Israel commands the primary loyalty of Jewish voters. Are they accused of "anti-Semitism" for doing so? Does this assumption cost them Jewish votes? Not at all! Dual loyalty nothing! Dual loyalty would be an improvement!

Once again, it's a practical necessity to know what it would be professional suicide to say. No politician in his right mind would accuse Jews of giving their primary loyalty to Israel; but most politicians act as if this were the case. And they succeed.

You can read Jewish publications like Commentary for years, and you'll read interminable discussions about what's good for Israel, but you'll never encounter the slightest suggestion that what's good for Israel might not be good for America. The possibility simply never comes up. The only discernible duty of Jews, it seems, is to look out for Israel. They never have to choose between Israel and the United States. So much for the "canard" of dual loyalty.

I've often noticed how eager and desperate mainstream conservatives are to avoid Jewish wrath. Again, they don't just speak favorably of Israel: they refuse to acknowledge any cost to American interests in the U.S.-Israel alliance. They treat the two countries' interests as identical; when they scold either government, it's always -- always -- the U.S. Government for failing to support our "reliable ally. They are in headlong flight from reality. They have none of the realism of James Burnham, whose writings and style of thought would be wholly unwelcome in today's conservative movement.

They are frightened. You can sense this in their bluster, in the vicarious jingoism with which they address Israel. Their fear produces a peculiar intellectual thinness that pervades all their thinking on foreign policy. Individualists have been replaced by apparatchiks. Zionism has infiltrated conservatism in much the same way Communism once infiltrated liberalism.

Here I should lay my own cards on the table. I am not, heaven forbid, a "Holocaust denier." I lack the scholarly competence to be one. I don't read German, so I can't assess the documentary evidence; I don't know chemistry, so I can't discuss Zyklon-B; I don't understand the logistics of exterminating millions of people in small spaces. Besides, "Holocaust denial" is illegal in many countries I may want to visit someday. For me, that's proof enough. One Israeli writer has expressed his amazement at the idea of criminalizing opinions about historical fact., and I find it puzzling too; but the state has spoken.

Of course those who affirm the Holocaust need know nothing about the German language, chemistry, and other pertinent subjects; they need only repeat what they have been told by the authorities. In every controversy, most people care much less for what the truth is than for which side it's safer and more respectable to take. They shy away from taking a position that is likely to get them into trouble. Just as only people on the Axis side were accused of war crimes after World War II, only people critical of Jewish interests are accused of thought-crimes in today's mainstream press.

So, life being as short as it is, I shy away from this controversy. Of course I'm also incompetent to judge whether the Holocaust did happen; so I've become what might be called a "Holocaust stipulator." Like a lawyer who doesn't want to get bogged down debating a secondary point, I stipulate that the standard account of the Holocaust is true. What is undisputed -- the massive violation of human rights in Hitler's Germany -- is bad enough.

What interests me is the growth of what Norman Finkelstein has called "the Holocaust Industry." True or not, the Holocaust story has been put to many uses, some of them mischievous. It is currently being used to extort reparations and to blacken reputations, for example. Daniel Goldhagen is soon to publish a book blaming the Holocaust on the central teachings of the Catholic Church. This is only the most ambitious project of a school of thought, largely but not exclusively Jewish, that sees Christianity as the source of all "anti-Semitism."

So if you want to avoid being called "anti-Semitic," the safest course is to renounce Christianity. Whether this is a safe course for your immortal soul is a question Goldhagen doesn't address. The important thing is to avoid Jewish censure. Obviously this sort of thinking presupposes Christian fear of the Jews. Jews themselves are not unaware of Jewish power; some of them have rather exaggerated confidence in it.

But the chief use of the Holocaust story is to undergird the legitimacy of the state of Israel. According to this view, the Holocaust proves that Jewish existence is always in danger, unless the Jews have their own state in their own homeland. The Holocaust stands as the historical objectification of all the world's gentiles' eternal "anti-Semitism." Jewish life is an endless emergency, requiring endless emergency measures arid justifying everything done in the name of "defense." Jews and Israel can't be judged by in normal standards, at least until Israel is absolutely safe -- if even then. Their circumstances are forever abnormal.

But the daily news reports suggest that Israel may not really be the safest place for Jews. Theodore Herzl's original dream was of a Jewish state where Jews could at last live the normal lives they were denied in the Diaspora. Yet today it's Diaspora Jews who live relatively normal lives, at least in the West, while they must worry about the very survival of Israel. And far from being the independent state Herzl hoped for, Israel depends heavily on the support not only of Diaspora Jews but of foreign gentiles, especially Americans.

Israel insists that its "right to exist" is nothing more than the right of every nation on earth to be left in peace. This right is allegedly threatened by fanatical Arabs who want to "drive the Jews into the sea," as witness the recent wave of Palestinian terror. But in truth, Israel's claimed "right to exist" is much more than it seems at first sight. It means a right to rule as Jews, enjoying rights denied to native Palestinians.

We are told incessantly that Israel is a "democracy," and therefore the natural ally of the United States, whose "democratic values" it shares. This is a very dubious claim. To Americans, democracy means majority rule, but with equal rights for minorities. In Israel and the occupied territories, equal rights for the minority are simply out of the question.

Majority rule itself has taken a peculiar form in Israel. The original Arab majority was driven out of their homes and their native land, and kept out. Meanwhile, a Jewish "majority" was artificially imported. Not only the first immigrants from Eastern Europe, but every Jew on earth was granted a "right of return" -- that is, "return" to a "homeland" most have never lived in, and in which none of their ancestors has ever lived. A Jew from Brooklyn (whose grandfather came from Poland) can fly to Israel and immediately claim rights denied to an Arab whose people have always lived in Palestine. In recent years Israel has been augmenting its Jewish majority by vigorously encouraging Jewish immigration, especially from Russia. Ariel Sharon has told a group of American senators that Israel needs a million more Jewish immigrants.

Israel rejects demands for a "right of return" for Palestinians exiled since 1948. Its reason? This would mean "the end of the Jewish state." An Arab majority would surely vote down Jewish ethnic privileges. If Israel remained democratic, it wouldn't long remain Jewish. It must be the only "democracy" whose existence depends on inequality.

American gentiles, bemused by the propaganda claim that a beleaguered little democracy is fighting for its very right to exist, still haven't figured out that Israeli "democracy" is essentially and radically different from -- even repugnant to -- what they understand as democracy. Put otherwise, Zionism is a denial of the "self-evident truths" of the Declaration of Independence. To acknowledge those truths, and to put them into practice, would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Again, honest and rigorous Zionists have always seen and said this.

With the verbal sleight-of-hand at which they are masters, the Israelis always appeal to the Holocaust. Maybe they have nuclear weapons, but their existence is threatened -- once more! -- by rock-throwing Arab boys. The Arabs are the new Nazis, repeating and perpetuating the eternal peril of the Jews. Israel is determined to prevent another Holocaust and must crush the Arab threat by any means necessary, including harsh measures.

Israel without the Holocaust is hard to imagine. But let's try to imagine it.

Suppose the Holocaust had never occurred, had never been alleged, had never been called "the Holocaust." Imagine that no great persecution had provided the Jewish state with a special excuse for oppressive emergency measures. In other words, imagine that Israel were forced to justify itself like any other state.

In that case, Israel's treatment of its Arab minorities would appear to the world in a very different light. Its denial of equal or even basic rights to those minorities would lack the excuse of a past or prospective "Holocaust." Civilized people would expect it to treat those it ruled with impartial justice. Special privileges for Jews would appear as outrageous discrimination, no different from insulting legal discrimination against Jews. The sense -- and excuse -- of perpetual crisis would be absent. Israel might be forced or pressured, possibly against its will, to be "normal." If it chose to be democratic, its Jews would have to take their chance of being outnumbered, just like majorities in other democracies. Nobody would suppose that losing elections would mean their annihilation.

In short, the Holocaust has become a device for exempting Jews from normal human obligations. It has authorized them to bully and blackmail, to extort and oppress. This is all quite irrational, because even if six million Jews were murdered during World War II, the survivors are not entitled to commit the slightest injustice. If your father was stabbed in the street, that's a pity, but it's not an excuse for picking someone else's pocket.

In a peculiar way, the Holocaust story has promoted not only pity, but actual fear of the Jews. It has removed them from the universe of normal moral discourse. It has made them victims with nukes. It has made them even more dangerous than their enemies have always charged. It has given the world an Israel ruled by Ariel Sharon.

Benjamin Netanyahu has written that Israel is "an integral part of the West." I think it would be truer to say that Israel has become a deformed limb of the West.

Joseph Sobran is an author, lecturer and nationally syndicated columnist. For 21 years he wrote for National Review magazine, including 18 years as a senior editor. He is editor of the monthly newsletter Sobran's (P.O. Box 1383, Vienna, VA 22183, or see http://www.sobran.com/ ). This article is adapted from his address at the 14th IHR Conference, June 22, 2002, in Irvine, California. It is published in the August 2002 issue of Sobran's newsletter.

         Reflections on the Second World War, 

        Free Speech and Revisionism

• Based on presentation to the IHR Tenth International Revisionist Conference, October 1990.

When I accepted the invitation to make this address I made it clear that I am not an expert on what is called "the Holocaust, " and would not be able to tell you anything about this subject that you don't already know.

But I may be able to bring the perspective of one who was a prisoner in Germany during the darkest year of the war -- the year after Dunkirk. My views were shaped by my experiences, and by this I mean not just combat experiences and its effects, but also the values that were at stake -- including freedom of speech - values that are not always respected by pressure groups that should know better.

Some people write convincingly about things of which they know nothing at first hand. They are able to do this even when they make it all up. I should know because I've been a journalist for a long time and have seen all the tricks of the trade. Copying one another's stories and going with the tide has, unfortunately, become the custom in today's journalism, which is why it's not easy to get any fair play for dissident views of current issues.

In forming an accurate perspective about an issue, there's nothing like being on the scene. And I was on the scene when Hitler was making his first moves toward mastery of Europe. Later I gained perspective of another and more restricted kind from behind the barbed wire of German prisoner of war camp, Stalag VIIIB.

My views on Hitler

In order for you to understand my perspective, I must tell you right up front what I think of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi period. To put it mildly, I do not believe that Hitler was some kind of misunderstood Boy Scout whose reasonable aims were thwarted by a sinister Winston Churchill or a duplicitous Franklin D. Roosevelt. And, simple soul that I am, I have always thought that the side that is responsible for starting a war is the side whose tanks advance thirty miles the first day, and which occupies countries that would prefer not to be occupied.

Hitler was also a dictator who had no compunction about knocking off dozens of his close comrades, let alone others. Anyone who doubts this has only to consider the events of June 30, 1934, the "Night of the Long Knives, " when Hitler ordered the deaths of storm-trooper chief Ernst Röhm and many others.

Nor do I accept the view that Hitler had a soft spot for the British and the British Empire. In 1945, while I was with an Intelligence Section of SHAEF [Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force], I read the original German document of the plan for Operation Sea Lion the German invasion of Britain as well as the German directives for the occupation of Britain. These stipulated that anyone over the age of twelve who insulted a member of the German occupation forces was to be subject to the death penalty, and all males between the ages of 17 and 45 who were not working in war-related industries in the United Kingdom could be sent to Germany and Poland to work as forced labor in preparation for the German attack against the USSR.

Prisoner of War

As a prisoner of war in Stalag VIIIB we knew nothing of all that, of course. But we did know that we weren't in a Club Med vacation resort, and that our prospects for the future were not favorable. In spite of that, our morale was pretty good. In our imperial ignorance and possibly arrogance, it simply never to occurred to us that we could lose the war. The unhappy thought did sometimes pop into my head, of course, that we might be prisoners for many years, and that it could be quite a while before we return to the pleasant world of fish and chips and summer holidays on the beaches. When such dreary thoughts came to mind, I would engage in daydreams of dining out in London.

When I was a prisoner in the German stalags in 1940 and 1941, the huts were stuffed with smelly, lice-ridden torsos, and rations were practically on the starvation level. One loaf of bread per day for five men, plus very watery soup. Rumor had it that conditions in some of the work camps were heavenly, and that the soup served there was so thick you could stand your spoon up in it. Whatever truth there may have been to such stories, during my year as a prisoner in Germany I never came across anyone who had personally experienced such conditions. In our camps, at any rate, nobody waxed fat. I myself developed a severe case of jaundice. There's no doubt that the death rate would have been quite high if it had not been for the Red Cross parcels we received.

I mention all this because some peopleseem to believe that conditions in the concentration camps were really not so bad. Well, I was never in a concentration camp, although during one of my escape attempts, on a proverbial dark and stormy night, I did nearly walk into a camp of the Auschwitz complex by mistake, which shows how clever I was. It must have been the neighboring camp of Birkenau, as I determined last year during a visit to Poland on the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the war.

My point here is that there can be no doubt that the death rate in the concentration camps was high. I was with the British troops when they liberated the Bergen-Belsen camp in 1945, and what I saw there is not something I ever want to see again. Nor do I accept that the death rate there was due almost entirely to unavoidable disease. There is, I think, no point in denying the obvious, and for me the obvious is that if the prisoner of war camps weren't all that wonderful, the concentration camps would certainly have been worse.

On the more positive side, I can confirm that -- with regard to British and later American prisoners -- the Germans in most respects did honor the terms of the international agreements on the treatment of prisoners of war. They did not confiscate the food parcels, for instance, even though they often contained items that were scarce in wartime Germany, such as tea, coffee, chocolate, and so on.

But there were some awful exceptions. It is the duty of a prisoner of war to try to escape, and for my failures I spent a lot of time in solitary confinement in cells. No complaints about that - win some, lose some, as they say. But there was also the infamous case at Stalag Luft III, where 53 British and Commonwealth air force officers were murdered after being recaptured.

Life for prisoners of war was full of contrasts. During that visit to Poland last year, I met a former British enlisted man who had struck a German guard. Legally, he could have been shot. Instead, he was sentenced to 15 years hard labor, and went home when the war ended. And even though life in the stalags was grim in the year after Dunkirk, conditions improved somewhat as time went on. It became possible to take correspondence courses. Some prisoners got an education that way. There were theatrical productions. Conditions in some working camps were better than others, especially after Red Cross parcels began to arrive regularly and it became possible to trade with the locals. I have even heard of a few cases where prisoners employed on farms managed to get some female sleeping company. I never had such luck myself. Perhaps I should have stayed longer.

Conditions were incomparably tougher for the Soviet prisoners of war in German hands, a reflection of the brutality of the war in the East. It is generally estimated that two million Soviet servicemen died in German prison camps. Almost as many Germans died in Soviet hands: 1, 750, 000, according to West German figures. In his book Die Verlassene Armee (The Forsaken Army), author Heinrich Gerlach reports that of the 91,000 Germans taken prisoner at Stalingrad in early 1943, fewer than 5, 000 were still alive at the end of the war in May 1945. And many of these never returned home.

It is very likely that the death tolls of both German and Soviet prisoners of war would have been much lower if the USSR had been a signatory to the international agreement on the treatment of such prisoners. We also know that there were many German atrocities in the Soviet Union, and many Soviet atrocities in eastern Germany, not to mention the expulsion at the end of the war of some ten million German civilians from lands that had been German for centuries.

In 1947, when I was an Intelligence Officer with the British Control Commission in Germany, I was once sent to the border of the British and Soviet occupation zones to screen prisoners returning from the USSR to get whatever information they might offer on conditions there. I had also been told to have any former Waffen SS men of officer rank arrested and sent to camps in our zone. Instead, I sent them all home. Instructions or no instructions, I was not about to arrest walking skeletons, which is what they were.

As I've mentioned, Russians in Germany were also badly treated. During my visit to Poland last year, I returned to the site of Stalag VIIIB in what had been German Upper Silesia but is now part of Poland. We saw a large memorial to the 40,000 Soviet prisoners of war who died there -- or one in five of the 200,000 who were sent there. They had no shelter of any kind and simply lived in holes in the ground, even during the winter. British prisoners in the adjacent Stalag proper witnessed this tragic business. I did not witness anything of that myself, because I was long gone by the time the Soviet POWs arrived. But I've spoken to many former British prisoners who did, and they were not lying.

As I hope this little account helps to show, I am not the sort of man who can easily be persuaded that black is white. Flights of fancy I leave to others. I like what Clemenceau, the French premier known as the Old Tiger, said during the First World War. "When this war is over, " he declared, "many reasons will be given as to why it started. But no one will ever be able to say that it was because the Belgians invaded Germany." Not a bad way of putting it, in my opinion. At the same time, I want to make it clear that I hold no grudges. On the contrary, I have contempt for those who act as if the war ended last week. There are grandfathers in Germany today who were five-year-olds when the last shot was fired in 1945. Why should they be made to feel guilty? One might as well hold me responsible for the excesses of Lord Kitchener during the South African War of 90 years ago.

Free Speech in Canada

Let me now jump ahead to take a look at recent efforts in Canada to stifle free discussion on historically and racially touchy subjects -- a matter that is closely connected with the Second World War. I won't deal here with the situation in the United States, which you know more about than I do. But up in The True North Strong and Free -- which is how our national anthem describes Canada, anyway -- freedom of speech is under severe attack.

It started in the mid-1960s when a few pimply-faced youths were running around Toronto painting swastikas and various graffiti on walls. By 1971, as a direct result of Jewish group pressure, the so-called "hate laws" were passed. These make it illegal to say nasty things about any identifiable group -- unless, as it turned out, one said nasty things about the Germans or any other similarly "safe" target.

As it happened, I was in Ottawa at the time reporting on the Parliament. I witnessed some of the debate on the legislation, which was highly contentious. One member of parliament called it a legal monstrosity, which it was and still is. The bill was passed by a vote of just 89 to 45. In other words, it was passed by a minority of MP's, 127 of them having found pressing business elsewhere that day. That was when Canada was starting to become Wimpland. To paraphrase a former Canadian prime minister on the subject of wartime conscription, "Free speech if necessary, but not necessarily free speech."

The dangers inherent in the hate laws were clear. And before long, charges were laid against a bunch of loonies who had been agitating against an American Shriners' convention. These charges were dropped, but were nevertheless a sign of things to come. Today, anyone who takes on a minority group does so at his peril. For even if it's not a matter of legal action, it will be a matter of public castigation.

Many of you know about the case of James Keegstra, the Alberta teacher who has been before the courts for years because he told his students that the Holocaust was a hoax. Keegstra lost his job, became the subject of national vilification, was hauled into court, and was convicted and sentenced. On appeal, the conviction was overturned. The provincial attorney general should have then dropped the matter. Instead, responding to Jewish pressure, he sent the case to the Supreme Court of Canada, which is still considering it. [It was later decided to subject Keegstra to yet another trial on the same charges.]

Another Canadian teacher, Malcolm Ross, has been in a similar situation. His case is even worse than Keegstra's because he has never mentioned the Holocaust or the Jews in his New Brunswick classroom. Ross has merely written books about these subjects. But as a result, he has been hounded mercilessly, and has had to appear repeatedly before "human rights commissions" - I call them human wrongs commissions -- and before the courts. He reminds me very much of Sherman McCoy, the anti-hero of Tom Wolfe's novel Bonfire of the Vanities, who was forced to become a life-long litigant. And this in a country -- Canada - that with marvelous hypocrisy boasts of its great tradition of freedom. Sadly, there are now as many loopholes in that tradition as there are in the tax laws. In the broadcasting world, for instance, truth is no defence if the Canadian Radio, Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) decides that a broadcaster is using the truth for reprehensible purposes. Although Canada's new Constitution does guarantee freedom of speech, astoundingly it makes an exception, as it says, whenever a democratic society might reasonably decide otherwise. I call it the Hypocritic Oath, for greater two-facedness hath no man. The Constitution was written that way, naturally, to please the minorities and their pressure groups which now have so much influence in Canada, not the least of which is the Canadian Jewish Congress and its allied organizations. All this is reminiscent of the so-called "affirmative action" laws, those acts of hypocrisy and discrimination with which you are well acquainted here in the United States, and which we now also have in Canada.

The biggest scandal of its kind in The True North has been the Zündel case, which has been dragging on for six years. As most of you know, Ernst Zündel was charged with "spreading false news likely to do harm to a public interest" -- itself a truly Orwellian concept -- because he had reprinted a booklet entitled Did Six Million Really Die?. Initially, his persecutors and prosecutors wanted him charged under the "hate laws." But after it was determined that he would probably win such a case, the obscure "false news" statute was pressed into service.

It was as a journalist that I became interested in the Zündel affair. I had never heard of Zündel before he was charged. But I wanted to know why anyone in a democratic society could possibly be charged with "spreading false news." Doesn't everybody spread false news? Don't Santa Claus and the weatherman spread false news? Indeed, does not every politician in the country spread false news? Doesn't every newspaper spread false news? Hadn't I, in reporting what the politicians had to say, spread false news? Mindful of all this, when Zündel's attorney, Doug Christie, asked me to appear as a witness for the defense in the first Zündel (of 1985), I readily agreed.

The trial was a revelation. The judge was as biased as they come. So biased, in fact, that when the case went to appeal it was thrown out on God only knows how many grounds. As I wrote at the time, the judge himself had spread false news by misdirecting the jury. The day I appeared as a witness, and for no reason at all that I could detect, he took to shouting at Christie. I was reminded of Charles Laughton's Captain Bligh bawling out Clark Gable's Fletcher Christian, "Do you know what you are doing, Mr. Christian!"

The Media Dodge Irresponsibility

But that wasn't the worst of it. The biggest surprise was the indifference of the media. In light of the implications of the Zündel case for Canadian society, every major newspaper, magazine and television and radio station in the country should have been knocking on the door of that courthouse demanding to be heard. "False news?!, " they should have been yelling and writing. "What is this nonsense?" Instead, they kept quiet.

It has been said, you know, that the journalists of Germany were silent when Hitler came to power. Well, I can tell you that they could hardly have been more silent than the journalists of Canada were in the Zündel case. When the trial was over, a couple of "Oh dear me" editorials appeared in the Toronto press. And that was it. One can be very sure of one thing, however: If any attorney general in the country had tried to put some Marxist professor on trial for saying that Stalin's crimes were fiction which would certainly be false news the uproar in the Canadian media would have been audible in Timbuktoo. In such a case, the politicians would have scrambled to defend freedom. But Canadian politicians are as expert as any in the noble art of the double standard. Uriah Heep had nothing on them.

When the verdict in the first Zündel trial was set aside on appeal, the case should have been dropped, if only out of consideration for the taxpayer. The trials, each lasting months, cost the taxpayers millions of dollars. Also, by this time a different political party had taken power -- the misnamed Liberal Party -- and it would have been easy and right for the new attorney general to have said that all sides had their day in court, and that was an end to it. But against all logic, apart from the logic of political lickspittling, a new trial was ordered.

There then followed more education for the innocent, including me. The biggest lesson was the blatant way in which the Canadian Jewish Congress and its allied groups managed to lean on the media. There was a time, you know, when anyone going to a Canadian newspaper or broadcasting office with a request that an important trial or indeed any trial should be played down or ignored would have been shown the door in short order. But from the Toronto Globe and Mail, to the Canadian television networks, to lesser outlets, almost total silence reigned in print and on the air. The single exception was the Toronto Star, the largest circulation newspaper in the country. But even this paper played things safe. Instead of giving this remarkable trial the coverage it deserved, the Star decided to run only brief daily reports on page two, always under short and very innocuous headlines. It was the first time in the paper's history that such a thing had been done. It's laughable excuse was that this coverage made it easier for readers to find the tepid, page-two articles about the trial in the paper. Well, this silly argument could have served just as well for running the articles on same page every day among the classified ads.

The reason why Jewish groups didn't want any publicity is no mystery. Zündel knew how to work the media, and these groups did not want a repeat performance of the first trial. On that occasion, the entire country witnessed his stunts -- such as walking to the courthouse carrying a big wooden cross on his shoulder. Whether such antics did him any good with the public I don't know, but they certainly got him into the news. Even worse, from the Jewish point of view, was that the media had reported on the points made by the defense. Headlines such as "Nazi gas chambers unproven, court told" and "Camp gas chambers fake, Holocaust revisionist says" appeared in newspapers across the country. One can't blame Jewish groups for disliking such coverage, of course. Jews are certainly not alone in wanting things played their way. But one can find fault with the spinelessness of Canada's Fourth Estate, which is brave enough when it comes to stories of smelly tuna fish being put into cans. But there's more than one kind of fish that stinks, and in the case of the second (1988) Zündel trial, the role of the Canadian media was like that of the piano player in the whorehouse, if I may mix my metaphors.

There was a sequel to all this that involved me. After I wrote a column about how the pressure groups had been able to draw a blanket over the trial, a Jewish professor in Vancouver complained to the British Columbia Press Council. I don't think you have press councils here in the United States, and you're not missing much. In Canada these are voluntary bodies whose members are the newspapers themselves. Each council -- which is mostly made up of laymen -- hears complaints made by the public. Councils cannot fine journalists or send them to jail, although one never knows what the future may hold. The idea is that by their judgments they should exert what is called "moral pressure."

Sometimes they get things right and sometimes they don't. On an earlier occasion, another Jewish professor brought me before the press council when I reviewed Arthur Butz's book, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. I might not have reviewed it -- indeed, I might never have even heard of it -- except that my interest had been aroused because the book had been placed on the list of forbidden imports again as a result of Jewish pressure. I found the book to be fascinating, and I recommended it as an alternate view. At the same time I bashed those who had banned it. I should mention here, incidentally, that it is quite common in Canada for books to be banned in response to complaints from pressure groups. For example, the best-selling book None Dare Call it Conspiracy had been banned for years. Such an order means that a book cannot be imported or sold in stores, nor can it legally be sent through the mails. In the case involving my review of Butz's book, the council found against me, incredibly enough, even though it is supposed to uphold freedom of the press. But my position has always been that press councils can press my pants.

To come back to the case involving my column about the blackout in the second Zündel trial, the council refused to hear the professor's complaint. Perhaps they were tired of looking at my strikingly handsome features. Or it could have been that what I had written on the matter was unassailable. Jewish delegations had in fact visited all the mainstream media, and those media had complied with their demands. To give just two examples in the television field: The Canadian Television Network (CTV) mentioned the trial only on the day it opened, while the nationally-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) mentioned it not at all. Not while it was in progress, that is. Both networks eagerly leapt into action, naturally, when Zündel was found guilty. That made it all newsworthy. One consequence of the blackout, by the way, has been that hardly anyone in Canada has heard of the Leuchter Report, a devastating document if there ever was one.

Free Speech Under Attack

When I said a moment ago that one never knows what the future may hold, I wasn't joking. You Americans are lucky to have the First Amendment, because freedom of speech is now under attack not only in Canada but in several European countries, including Britain, which claims to have given birth to it. In short, a lot of people are inclined to talk freedom of speech but not to practise it.

It was my pleasure a couple of years ago to point out that the rarely invoked Canadian law against "spreading false news" bears a striking resemblance to similar legislation enacted by Mussolini in Italy. Even the wording is similar. Here's the text, in part, of Mussolini's 1924 law:

If any newspaper or periodical, by false or misleading news causes any interference in the diplomatic action of the government ... or hurts the credit of the nation at home or abroad . . . and if the newspaper or periodical ... incites to crime or to class hatred ... or insults the nation, such newspapers shall be suppressed.

And here is the wording of democratic Canada's "false news" law:

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 is liable to imprisonment for two years.

In what respect, I ask, is this Canadian"false news" goose fundamentally different from the Italian "false or misleading news" gander?

I must make one other point about the Zündel case that should tell you a lot about the situation in our country. In the first trial Zündel was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment, and to nine months in the second. This is nothing less than savage, considering that rapists and bank robbers often get away with less. (The Zündel case is still before the Supreme Court of Canada, by the way, but I'm not holding my breath for a just decision. Let's hope I'm wrong.)

And consider this: After the first trial, the then Minister of Immigration took only five minutes to issue a deportation order against Zündel, who is still a German citizen. Compare that with the decision of an immigration appeal board to allow an immigrant from Guyana to stay in Canada. The immigrant was a member of a gang that specialized in robbing restaurants. During an armed robbery of a McDonald's restaurant, he had brutally attacked the 21-year-old female manager and threatened to rape other female employees. After six months in jail, he was released on parole, but then had his parole revoked on account of drug offenses. This fellow has been given permission to stay in our country. Don't hold your breath in the hope that Zündel will receive equally generous treatment. Zündel's German.

Views on the Holocaust

Let me conclude with some views on the Holocaust. I don't know whether six million Jews died in Europe during the war, but I have my doubts about it. That would be six times as many British and Empire soldiers as died in the whole terrible slaughter of the First World War. To me the Six Million figure is not credible, even though one hears it repeated constantly on television and in the other media. I admit that my view is not based on professional research, but neither is most of the orthodox stuff put forward in the media. Most journalists simply repeat what they have been told. I did much the same when I wrote my memoir P.O.W., in stating in a footnote that millions had died in Auschwitz.

A lot of questions rather naturally come to mind about the Holocaust story. For instance: If the Six Million figure is unquestionably accurate, why is it that Jewish organizations are so keen to hound those who dispute it? Although I was in the war for six years, it wouldn't bother me one bit if some group were running around claiming that the war didn't take place. I know it did. I suspect, therefore, that there's some truth to the Jewish quip that "there's no business like Shoah business." This is not to say, of course, that Jews were not disgracefully treated and that a large number of them did not die, simply because they were Jews.

There are other flaws in the official story. We knew there were crematoria in Bergen-Belsen when I saw the camp in 1945, but no one talked about gas chambers. Indeed, we did not hear of gas chambers at that time, nor did I ever see any. So I was surprised later to read reports in the press that there had been gas chambers at Belsen. Well, I thought, maybe I missed something. Later, it turned out that, in fact, there had been none in any of the concentration camps in western Germany, including Belsen. The extermination gas chambers, it was said later, had all been in the East.

During my recent visit to Poland, I found Auschwitz to be a decidedly gloomy place. I am confident that during the war it was a hell hole. When our tour of the camp began, we were told that four million people had died there. But by the time we left, the guide was saying that some Polish sources were putting the total at one million. The four million figure, we were told, had been announced by the Soviets soon after they arrived at the camp in 1945. It was also featured in the Soviet film about Auschwitz that is shown to visitors. But now the Poles, as well as Israeli professor Yehuda Bauer, have reduced that total by more than half. Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center says that it makes no difference to the Six Million figure we are always hearing about. If that is so, it must be a true marvel of mathematics.

All of this is very confusing. Also puzzling is that Auschwitz survivors are to be found in such large numbers. I understand that there are thousands of them in the Chicago area alone. Well, if the Nazi killing machine was so efficient, how is that any survived? Perhaps that's too simple a question. But as I've said, I'm a simple fellow. I could go on in this vein, but as I've told you, I have no claim to be an expert on this subject. I can claim some knowledge, however, of related matters. I recognize attacks against open discussion and free speech, no matter how clever the casuistry in which they are clothed. And I don't want to hear anyone say they are in favor of freedom of speech but ... Freedom of speech is indivisible. You either have it or you don't. I know, too, that the common weal is not served by hate laws passed by weak-minded politicians who would sell their mothers for a vote or a campaign contribution. I am equally sure that war crimes trials held fifty years after the end of the war are unlikely to serve the ends of justice, but are very likely to serve the ends of vengeance. As Lord Hailsham said in Britain during the debate over "war crimes" legislation in that country: "What these people want is a lynching party."

Reproduced From:  Journal Of Historical Review

Revisionism and the Promotion of Peace 

Harry Elmer Barnes

During the last forty years or so, Revisionism has become a fighting term. To so-called Revisionists, it implies an honest search for historical truth and the discrediting of misleading myths that are a barrier to peace and goodwill among nations. In the minds of anti-Revisionists, the term savors of malice, vindictiveness, and an unholy desire to smear the saviors of mankind.

Actually, Revisionism means nothing more or less than the effort to correct the historical record in the light of a more complete collection of historical facts, a more calm political atmosphere, and a more objective attitude. It has been going on ever since Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) exposed the forged "Donation of Constantine," which was a cornerstone of the papal claim to secular power, and he later called attention to the unreliable methods of Livy in dealing with early Roman history. Indeed, the Revisionist impulse long antedated Valla, and it has been developing ever since that time. It had been employed in American history long before the term came into rather general use following the first World War.

Revisionism has been most frequently and effectively applied to correcting the historical record relative to wars, because truth is always the first war casualty, the emotional disturbances and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime, and both the need and the material for correcting historical myths are most evident in connection with wars.

Revisionism was applied to the American Revolution many years ago. Beginning with the writings of men like George Louis Beer, it was shown that the British commercial policy toward the Colonies was not as harsh and lawless as it had been portrayed by George Bancroft and others among the early ultra-patriotic historians. Others demonstrated that the British measures imposed on the colonies after the close of the French and Indian War were in general accord with the British constitutional system. Finally, Clarence W. Alvord made it clear that Britain was more concerned with the destiny of the Mississippi Valley than she was with such disturbances as those connected with the Stamp Act, the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party.

The War of 1812 was similarly subjected to Revisionist correction. Henry Adams revealed that Timothy Pickering and the extreme anti-war Federalists played a decisive role in encouraging the British to continue their oppressive commercial policies that aided the American "warhawks" in leading this country into war. They misrepresented Jefferson's commercial and naval policies to an almost treasonable extent. More recently, Irving Brant, in his notable biography of Madison, has shown that Madison was not actually pushed into war against his personal convictions by Clay, Calhoun, and the "warhawks," but made the decision for war on the basis of his own beliefs.

The Mexican War has been specifically treated by Revisionists. For a long time, historians who sought to correct the wartime passions of 1846 criticized Polk and the war group as rather conscienceless war-mongers, impelled by political ambition, who pounced without justification upon a helpless little country. Then, in 1919, along came Justin H. Smith, who, in his The War With Mexico, showed that there had been plenty of arrogance, defiance and provocation on the part of Santa Ana and the Mexicans.

'The Wrong War'

While the term Revisionism has been little used in connection with the process, the causes of the Civil War (War between the States) have been a field for far more extensive Revisionist research and restatement than the causes of either World War. This was made clear in the remarkable summary of Revisionist studies of the coming of the Civil War by Professor Howard K. Beale in 1946. The outcome of these scholarly efforts demonstrated that the Civil War, like General Bradley's description of the Korean War, was "the wrong war, in the wrong place at the wrong time." Hotheads on both sides brought on the war, while judicious restraint might easily have averted the catastrophe. Professor William A. Dunning and his seminar students at Columbia University rigorously applied Revisionism to the aftermath of the Civil War and vindictive reconstruction measures piloted through Congress by Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens. Their verdict was popularized in Claude Bowers' book on The Tragic Era.

Revisionist historians soon tackled the propaganda concerning the Spanish-American War which had been fomented by Hearst and Pulitzer and exploited by the war camp among the Republicans of 1898. James Ford Rhodes showed how McKinley, with the full Spanish concessions to his demands in his pocket, concealed the Spanish capitualtion. from Congress and demanded war. Further research has revealed that there is no conclusive evidence whatever that the Spanish sank the battleship Maine and has shown that Theodore Roosevelt quite illegally started the war by an unauthorized order to Admiral Dewey to attack the Spanish fleet at Manila while Secretary Long was out of his office. Julius H. Pratt and others have exposed the irresponsible war-mongering of the "war hawks" of 1898, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge and Albert J. Beveridge, and indicated the primary responsibility of Admiral Mahan for the expansionist philosophy upon which this rise of American imperialism was based.

Hence, long before the Austrian Archduke was assassinated by Serbian plotters on 28 June 1914, Revisionism had a long and impressive history and had been brought into use on all the important wars in which the United States had been engaged. Applied abroad to the FrancoPrussian War, it clearly proved that the initiative lay with France rather than Bismarck and the Prussians. But it was the first World War which brought the term "Revisionism" into general use. This was because many wished to use the historical studies of the causes of the War as the basis for a revision of the Treaty of Versailles, which had been based on a complete acceptance of the theory of sole German-Austrian responsibility for the outbreak of the European War in early August, 1914.

By that time, the new methods of communication, mass journalism, and greater mastery of propaganda techniques enabled the combatants to whip up popular opinion and mass hatred as never before in the history of warfare. Jonathan French Scott's Five Weeks revealed how the press stirred up violent hatreds in July, 1914. The intensity of feeling in the United States has recently been recalled in an impressive manner in H.C. Peterson's Opponents of War, 1917-1918. As C. Hartley Grattan, the present writer, and others, have pointed out, the historians scrambled on the propaganda bandwagon with great alacrity and vehemence. It was almost universally believed that Germany was entirely responsible not only for the outbreak of war in 1914 but afso for American entry in April, 1917. Anyone who publicly doubted this popular dogma was in danger of the tar bucket, and Eugene Debs was imprisoned by the man who had proclaimed the War to be one to make the world safe for democracy. Debs' crime was a statement that the War had an economic basis, precisely what Wilson himself declared in a speech on 5 September 1919.

There is no space here to go into the scope and nature of Revisionist studies on the causes of the first World War. We can only illustrate the situation by citing a few of the outstanding myths and indicating the manner in which they were disposed of by Revisionists.

Crown Council Myth

The most damaging allegation brought against Germany was that the Kaiser called together a Crown Council of the leading German government officials, ambassadors, and financiers on 5 July 1914, revealed to them that he was about to throw Europe into war, and told them to get ready for the conflict. The financiers demanded two weeks delay so as to be able to call in loans and sell securities. The Kaiser acceded to this demand, and left the next day on a well-publicized vacation cruise. This was designed to lull England, France and Russia into a false sense of security while Germany and Austria-Hungary secretly got ready to leap upon an unprepared and unsuspecting Europe. The first complete statement of this charge appeared in Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, which was ghost written by a leading American journalist, Burton J. Hendrick.

Professor Sidney B. Fay, the leading American Revisionist dealing with the outbreak of war in 1914, proved from the available documents that this Crown Council legend was a complete myth. Some of the persons alleged to have been at the Council meeting were not in Berlin at the time. The Kaiser's actual attitude on July 5th was completely at variance with that portrayed in the legend, and there was no such financial action as was implied. But it was a long time before it was revealed how Mr. Morgenthau got this story. It was known that he was an honorable man, and not even the most severe critics of the myth charged that he had deliberately concocted and disseminated a lie.

Many years later, Paul Schwarz, who was the personal secretary to the German Ambassador in Constantinople, Baron Hans von Wangenheim, revealed the facts. Von Wangenheim had a mistress in Berlin and, in the early days of the crisis of 1914, she demanded that he return at once to Berlin to settle some critical matters with her. He complied and, to conceal from his wife the real reason for his making the trip, he told her that the Kaiser had suddenly summoned him to Berlin. On his return, he told his wife about the fanciful Crown Council, that he had dreamed up. Shortly after this with his wife by his side, von Wangenheim met Morgenthau, then the American Ambassador at Constantinople, at a diplomatic reception. Morgenthau had heard about von Wangenheim's trip to Berlin and pressed him as to what had happened. Under the circumstances, von Wangenheim could only repeat the myth he had told his wife. To what extent liquor may have lessened his restraint and how much Morgenthau and Hendrick elaborated on what von Wangenheim actually told Morgenthau are not known and probably never will be.

This fantastic tale, created out of whole cloth, both indicates the need for Revisionism and demonstrates how momentous and tragic events may hang on the most palpable fabrications. Since Morgenthau's book did not appear until 1918, his tale about the fictitious Crown Council had a great influence upon Allied propaganda against Germany at the end of the War. It was used in Lloyd George's campaign of 1918 advocating the hanging of the Kaiser and by the more vindictive makers of the Treaty of Versailles. It is quite possible that otherwise the latter would never have been able to write the war-guilt clause into the Treaty. Since historians are agreed that it was the Treaty of Versailles which prepared the way for the second World War, the hare-brained von Wangenheim. alibi of July, 1914, may have had some direct relation to the sacrifice of millions of lives and astronomical expenditures of money in the wars since 1939, with the possibility that the ultimate consequences may be the extermination of much of the human race through nuclear warfare.

Another item which was used to inflame opinion against the Germans was their invasion of Belgium. The Allied propaganda presented this as the main reason for the entry of England into the War and the final proof of the charge that the Germans had no regard for international law or the rights of small nations. Revisionist scholars proved that the British and French had for some time been considering the invasion of Belgium in the event of a European war, and that English officers had travelled over Belgium carefully surveying the terrain against this contingency. Further, the Germans offered to respect the neutrality of Belgium in return for British neutrality in the War. Finally, John Burns, one of the two members of the British Cabinet who resigned when Britian made the decision for war in 1914, told me personally in the summer of 1927 that the Cabinet decision for war had been made before a word had been said about the Belgian issue. The following year, the Memorandum on Resignation of the famed John Morley, the other Cabinet member who resigned in 1914 as a protest against the war policy, fully confirmed Burns' account of the matter.

Atrocity Tales

A third leading allegation which produced violent feelings against the Germans in the first World War was the charge that they had committed unique and brutal atrocities against civilians, especially in Belgium -mutilating children, women and the helpless, generally. They were said to have utilized the bodies of dead German and Allied soldiers to make fertilizers and soap, and otherwise to have behaved like degraded beasts. The distinguished British publicist, Lord James Bryce, was induced to lend his name to the authentication of these atrocity reports. After the War, a large number of books riddled these atrocity tales, notably Sir Arthur Ponsonby's Falsehood in Wartime, and J.M. Read's Atrocity Propaganda. The first World War was no picnic, but no informed scholar today believes that any considerable part of the alleged atrocities actually took place, or that the Germans were any more guilty of atrocious conduct than the other participants in the War.

Scholars and publicists who had been condemned to silence during the War soon sought to clear their consciences and set the record straight after the close of hostilities. Indeed Francis Neilson anticipated many basic Revisionist conclusions in his How Diplomats Make War, which was published in 1915 and may by regarded as the first important Revisionist book on the causes of the first World War. Lord Loreburn's How the War Came, a scathing indictment of the English diplomats, came out at the same time that the Treaty of Versailles was drafted.

The first American scholar thoroughly to challenge the wartime propaganda was Professor Sidney B. Fay of Smith College who brought out a series of three striking articles in the American Historical Review, beginning in July, 1920. These first aroused my interest in the facts. During the War, I had accepted the propaganda; indeed, had unwittingly written some of it. While I wrote some reviews and short articles dealing with the actual causes of the first World War between 1921 and 1924, I first got thoroughly involved in the Revisionist struggle when Herbert Croly of the New Republic induced me in March, 1924, to review at length the book of Professor Charles Downer Hazen, Europe Since 1815. This aroused so much controversy that George W. Ochsoakes, editor of the New York Times Current History Magazine, urged me to set forth a summary of Revisionist conclusions at the time in the issue of May, 1924. This really launched the Revisionist battle in the United States.

Even the largest publishing houses and the best periodicals eagerly sought Revisionist material for publication. Professor Fay's Origins of the World War, J.S. Ewart's Roots and Causes of the Wars, and my Genesis of the World War were the leading Revisionist books in 1914 by American authors published in the United States. American Revisionists found allies in Europe: Georges Demartial, Alfred Fabre-Luce, and others, in France; Friedrich Stieve, Maximilian Montgelas, Alfred von Wegerer, Hermann Lutz, and others, in Germany; and G.P. Gooch, Raymond Beazley, and G. Lowes Dickinson, in England. Turning from the causes of war in Europe in 1914, other scholars, notable Charles C. Tansill, Walter Millis, and C. Hartley Grattan, told the truth about the entry of the United States into the War. Mauritz Hallgren produced the definitive indictment of American interventionist diplomacy from Wilson to Roosevelt in his A Tragic Fallacy.

At the outset, Revisionist writing was rather precarious. Professor Fay was not in peril, personally, for he wrote in a scholarly journal which the public missed or ignored. But when I began to deal with the subject in media read by at least the upper intellectual level of the "men on the street," it was a different matter. I recall giving a lecture in Trenton, New Jersey, in the early days of Revisionism and being bodily threatened by fanatics who were present. They were cowed and discouraged by the chairman of the evening, who happened to be a much respected former-Governor of New Jersey. Even in the autumn of 1924, a rather scholarly audience in Amherst, Massachusetts, became somewhat agitated and was only calmed down when Ray Stannard Baker expressed general agreement with my remarks.

Gradually, the temper of the country changed, but at first it was caused more by resentment against our former allies than by the impact of Revisionist writings. It was the "Uncle Shylock" talk of 1924-27 which turned the trick. This indication of implied Allied ingratitude for American aid in the War made the public willing to read and accept the truth relative to the causes, conduct, merits, and results of the first World War. Moreover, with the passage of time, the intense emotions of wartime had an opportunity to cool off. By the mid-1930's, when Walter Millis's Road to War appeared, it was welcomed by a great mass of American readers and was one of the most successful books of the decade. Revisionism had finally won out.

Interestingly enough, as a phase of the violent anti-Revisionism after 1945, there has set in a determined effort on the part of some historians and journalists to discredit the Revisionist scholarship of 1920-1939 and return to the myths of 1914-1920. This trend is devastatingly challenged and refuted by the eminent expert on World War I Revisionism, Hermann Lutz, in his book on German-French Unity (1957), which takes account of the most recent materials in the field.

Genesis of the Term

As we have already explained briefly, the historical scholarship that sought to produce the truth relative to the causes of the first World War came to be known as Revisionism. This was because the Treaty of Versailles had been directly based on the thesis of unique and sole German-Austrian responsibility for the coming of the war in 1914. By the mid-1920's, scholars had established the fact that Russia, France and Serbia were more responsible than Germany and Austria. Hence, from the, standpoint of both logic and factual material, the Treaty should have been revised in accordance with the newly revealed truth. Nothing of the sort took place, and in 1933 Hitler appeared on the scene to carry out the revision of Versailles by force, with the result that another and more devastating world war broke out in 1939.

Since Revisionism, whatever its services to the cause of historical truth, failed to avert the second World War, rnany have regarded the effort to seek the truth about the responsibility for war as futile in any practical sense. But any such verdict is not conclusive. Had not the general political and economic situation in Europe, from 1920 onward, been such as overwhelmingly to encourage emotions and restrain reason, there is every probability that the Revisionist verdict on 1914 would have led to changes in the Versailles Diktat that would have preserved peace. In the United States, less disturbed by emotional cross-currents, Revisionism exerted an impressive influence, all of which worked for peace. It was partly responsible for increasing the restraint imposed on France at the time of the Ruhr invasion for the mitigation of the harsh reparations system, for the Nye investigation of the armament industry and its nefarious ramifications, and for our neutrality legislation.

The fact that, despite many months of the most vigorous and irresponsible propaganda for our intervention in the second World War, over eighty per cent of the American people were in favor of refraining from intervention on the very eve of Pearl Harbor proves that the impact of Revisionism on the the American public mind had been deep, abiding and salutary. If President Roosevelt had not been able to incite the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, the Revisionist campaign of the late 1920's might have saved the United States from the tragedies of the early 1940's and what may be the greater calamities which grew out of our intervention in the second World War and still lie ahead of us.

The Role of the Mass Media

Long before the second World War broke out at the beginning of September, 1939, it was evident that, ~ when it came, it would present an even more dramatic and formidable Revisionist problem at its close than did the first World War. The stage was all set for a much greater volume and variety of distorting hatreds than in the years before 1914, and the capacity to whip up passion and disseminate mvths had notably increased in the interval. Many technical advance8 in journalism, larger newspaper staffs, especially of foreign "experts," and greater emphasis oil foreign affairs, all made it certain that the press would play a far more effective role in swaying the masses than in 1914-18. Indeed, even in 1914, as Jonathan F. Scott and Oron J. Hale have made clear, the press was perhaps as potent a cause of the War as the folly of the heads of states and their diplomats. It was bound to exert an even more powerful and malevolent influence in 1939 and thereafter.

The techniques of propaganda had been enormously improved and were well-nigh completely removed from any moral restraint. The propagandists in 1939 and thereafter had at their disposal not only what had been learned relative to lying to the public during the first World War but also the impressive advances made in the techniques of public deceit for both civilian and military. purposes after 1918. A leading English intelligence officeri Sidney Rogerson, even wrote a book, published in 1938, in which he told his fellow-Englishmen how to handle Americans in the case of a second World War, warning them that they could not just use over again the methods which Sir Gilbert Parker and others had so successfully employed from 1914-1918 to beguile the American public. He suggested the new myths and strategy which would be needed. They began to be applied during the next year.

There was a far greater backlog of bitter hatreds for the propagandists to play upon by 1939. However much the Kaiser was lampooned and reviled during the war, he had been rather highly regarded before July, 1914. In 1913, at the time of the 25th anniversary of his accession to the throne, such leading Americans as Theodore Roosevelt, Nicholas Murray Butler and former-President Taft praised the Kaiser lavishly. Butler contended that if he had been born in the United States he would have been put in the White House without the formality of an election, and Taft stated that the Kaiser has been the greatest single force for peace in the whole world during his entire reign. There were no such sentiments of affection and admiration held in reserve for Hitler and Mussolini in 1939. Butler had, indeed, called Mussolini the greatest statesman of the twentieth century, but this was in the 1920's. British propaganda against 11 Duce during the Ethiopian foray had put an end to most American admiration of him. The hatred built up against Hitler in the democracies by 1939 already exceeded that massed against any other figure in modern history. American and British conservatives hated Stalin and the Communists, and they were later linked with Germany and Hitler after the Russo-German Pact of August, 1939. This hatred of the Russians was fanned to a whiter flame when they invaded eastern Poland in the autumn of 1939 and Finland during the following winter. Racial differences and the color bogey made it easy to hate the Japanese and, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the real facts about which were 'hot to be known until after the War, the hatred of the Japanese went so far that even leading American naval officers like Admiral Halsey could refer to the Japanese as literally subhuman anthropoids.

Against this background it was obvious that hatreds could thrive "without stint or limit," to use Mr. Wilson's phrase, and that lies could arise and luxuriate with abandon and without any effort to check on the facts, if there were any. Every leading country set up its official agency to carry on public deception for the duration and supported it lavishly with almost unlimited funds. It was more than evident that there would be a super-human task for Revisionism to wrestle with once hostilities had ended.

After the first World War, the Russians took the first important steps in launching Revisionism. The Communists wished to discredit the Tsarist regime and saddle it with responsibility for the first World War, so they published the voluminous documents containing the secret Franco-Russian agreements from 1892 to 1914. These, together with supplementary French materials, did prove that France, Russia and Serbia were mainly responsible for the outbreak of war in 1914. The Russian documents were followed by the publication of the archives in other countries, and I have already indicated that many important Revisionist books appeared in European countries.

Following the second World War, the overwhelming majority of Revisionist writings have been produced in the United States. There was no Tsar for the Russians to blame in 1945. Stalin desired to preserve intact the legend that he had been surprised and betrayed by Hitler in the Nazi attack of June 22, 1941. England was watching her Empire disintegrate, and the British leaders were aware of the primary responsibility of Britain for the outbreak of war in 1939; hence, every effort was made to discourage Revisionist writing in England. France was torn with hatreds far worse than those of the French Revolution, and over 100,000 Frenchmen were butchered either directly or quasi-legally during the "liberation." Only the famous journalist, Sisley Huddleston, an expatriate Englishman resident in France, the distinguished publicist, Alfred Fabre-Luce, and the implacable Jacques Benoist-Mechin, produced anything that savored of Revisionism in France. Germany and Italy, under the heels of conquerors for years, were in no position to launch Revisionist studies. Even when these countries were freed, the hatred of Hitler and Mussolini which had survived the war discouraged Revisionist work. Only Hans Grimm and Ernst von Salomon produced anything resembling Revisionism in Germany, and their works were not devoted to diplomatic history. The only book which has appeared in Germany that can literally be regarded as a Revisionist volume is the recent work of Fritz Hesse, Hitler and the English. This amplifies the already known fact that Hitler lost the war primarily because of his Anglomania and his unwillingness to use his full military power against the English when victory was possible. In Italy, the eminent scholar and diplomatic historian, Luigi Villari, wrote an able book on the foreign policy of Mussolini, which is one of the substantial products of post-World War II Revisionism, but he had to get the book published in the United States. The same was true of his book on the "liberation" of Italy after 1943.

Historical Blackout

In the United States, Revisionism got off to an early start and flourished relatively, so far as the production of substantial books was concerned. This relative profusion of Revisionist literature was, however, far surpassed by the almost insuperable obstacles that were met in trying to get such literature known to the public and read by it. In other words, an unprecedented volume of Revisionist books was accompanied by an even more formidable "historical blackout" that has thus far concealed such material from the reading public.

The reasons for the relatively greater productivity of Revisionism in the United States after 1945 are not difficult to discover. There had been over four years of debate about the European and world situation between President Roosevelt's Chicago Bridge Speech of October, 1937, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Most of the men who produced Revisionist books after 1945 had taken part in this great debate, had gathered materials on the issues, and were well aware of the realities and of the lies told by the Interventionists. They were eager to come forth with books to sustain their old position as soon as the end of hostilities made this possible. Pearl Harbor had only silenced them for the duration. Further, the United States had been untouched by the ravages of war, it was in good economic condition at V-J Day, and it had not lost any colonial possessions. Four years of vigorous debate before Pearl Harbor and nearly four years of passionate lying and hating after that date had at least slightly exhausted the American capacity for hatred for the time being, as compared with the existing situation in Europe and Asia. There was at least a slight and brief breathing spell until hatreds were revived when Truman launched the Cold War in March, 1947.

Some Revisionist Books

We have space to mention only the outstanding Revisionist products in the United States. John T. Flynn's As We Go Marching was published in 1944, his pioneer brochures on Pearl Harbor in 1944 and 1945, and his The Roosevelt Myth in 1948. George Morgenstern's Pearl Harbor appeared in 1947; Charles Austin Beard's two volumes on Roosevelt's foreign policy were brought out in 1946 and 1948; and Helen Mears' Mirror for Americans: Japan, came out in 1948. William Henry Chamberlin's America's Second Crusade was published in 1950; Frederic R. Sanborn's Design for War came off the presses in 1951; Carles C. Tansill's Back Door to War made its appearance in 1952; the Symposium, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, which I edited, presents the best anthology of Revisionist conclusions on the second World War, came out in the summer of 1953; and Richard N. Current's Secretary Stimson was published in 1954. Admiral R.A. Theobald's The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor appeared in 1954; Rene A. Wormser's The Myth of the Good and Bad Nations came out in the same year; Admiral H.E. Kimmel's Admiral Kimmel's Story, was published in 1955; Bryton Barron's Inside the State Department was brought out in 1956; and Elizabeth C. Brown's The Enemy at His Back was published in 1957.

In addition to these books by American Revisionists, there was an impressive list of volumes by Europeans who had to escape the even more stringent historical blackout at home and secure respectable publication in the United States. Such were Sisley Huddleston's books on Popular Diplomacy and War, and France: the Tragic Years; the trenchant criticisms of the war-crimes trials by Lord Hankey and Montgomery Belgion; the remarkable book of F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism, which criticized both the barbarous saturation bombing of civilians and the war-crimes trials; Russell Grenfell's devastating exposure of Germanophobia in his Unconditional Hatred; Emrys Hughes' brilliant biographical study of Winston Churchill; and Dr. Villari's volumes on Mussolini's foreign policy and the Allied liberation of Italy. There were a number of other books on the periphery of literal Revisionism, of which Freda Utley's High Cost of Vengeance, dealing with the Allied folly and barbarism in Germany after V-E Day, is representative and one of the more notable. Along with it might be mentioned such books as Andy Rooney and Bud Hutton's Conqueror's Peace, Marshall Knappen's And Call It Peace, Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free, and Harold Zink's American Military Government in Germany.

What We Now Know

Not only have there been many more formidable Revisionist volumes published in the United States since 1945 than in the comparable period after 1918, but the facts revealed by this recent Revisionist research have been far more sensational than those produced by Revisionist scholars after the first World War. From 1937 onward Stalin had worked as hard for a war of attrition and mutual destruction between the capitalistic Nazi, Fascist and democratic countries as Sazonov and Izvolski did in 1914 to start a Franco-RussianEnglish war against Germany and Austria. Hitler, far from precipitately launching an aggressive war against Poland on the heels of brutal and unreasonable demands, made a far greater effort to avert war during the August, 1939, crisis than the Kaiser did during the crisis of July, 1914. And Hitler's demands on Poland were the most reasonable ones he made on any foreign country during his whole regime. They were far more conciliatory than Stresemann and the Weimar Republic would even consider. Poland was far more unreasonable and intransigent in 1938-39 than Serbia had been in 1914. Mussolini sought to dissuade Hitler from going to war in 1939 and made repeated efforts to summon peace conferences after the War began. Far from wantonly sticking "a dagger in the back of France" in June, 1940, he was virtually forced into the War by unneutral acts of economic strangulation on the part of Britian. France was loath to go to war in 1939, and only extreme pressure by the British Foreign Office prodded Bonnet and Daladier into reluctantly acceding to the bellicose British policy on September 2-3,1939.

Whereas, in 1914, British responsibility for the first World War was chiefly that of weakness and duplicity on the part of Sir Edward Grey-more a negative than a positive responsibility -the British were almost solely responsible for the outbreak of both the German-Polish and the European Wars in early September, 1939. Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Minister, and Sir Howard Kennard, the British Ambassador in Warsaw, were even more responsible for the European War of 1939 than Sazonov, Izvolski, and Poincare were for that of 1914. Chamberlain's speech before Parliament on the night of September 2, 1939, was as mendacious a misrepresentation of the German position as had been Sir Edward Grey's address to Parliament on August 3, 1914.

The Case Against Roosevelt

As for American entry into the second World War, the case against President Roosevelt is far more impressive and damaging than that against Woodrow Wilson, who maintained at least some formal semblance of neutrality for a time after August, 1914. Roosevelt "lied the United States into war." He went as far as he dared in illegal efforts, such as convoying vessels carrying munitions, to provoke Germany and Italy to make war on the United States. Failing in this, he turned to a successful attempt to enter the War through the back door of Japan. He rejected repeated and sincere Japanese proposals that even Hull admitted protected all the vital interests of the United States in the Far East, by his economic strangulation in the summer of 1941 forced the Japanese into an attack on Pearl Harbor, took steps to prevent the Pearl Harbor Commanders, General Short and Admiral Kimmel, from having their own decoding facilities to detect a Japanese attack, kept Short and Kimmel from receiving the decoded Japanese intercepts that Washington picked up and indicated that war might come at any moment, and ordered General Marshall and Admiral Stark not to send any warning to Short and Kimmel before noon on December 7th, when Roosevelt knew that any warning sent would be too late to avert the Japanese attack at 1:00 P.M., Washington time.

Roosevelt also had a major responsibility, both direct and indirect, for the outbreak of war in Europe. He began to exert pressure on France to stand up to Hitler as early as the German reoccupation. of the Rhineland in March, 1936, months before he was making his strongly isolationist speeches in the campaign of 1936. This pressure on France, and also England, continued right down to the coming of the War in September, 1939. It gained volume and momentum after the Quarantine Speech of October, 1937. As the crisis approached between Munich and the outbreak of war, Roosevelt pressed the Poles to stand firm against any demands by Germany, and urged the English and French to back up the Poles unflinchingly. From captured Polish and French archives, the Germans collected no less than five volumes of material consisting almost exclusively of Roosevelt's bellicose pressure on European countries, mainly France and Poland. The Allies later seized them. Only a small portion has ever been published, most notably some seized by the Germans in Poland in 1939 and published as the German White Paper. It is highly probable that the material covering Roosevelt's pressure on England might amount to more than five volumes. There is no certainty whatever that England would have gone to war in September, 1939, had it not been for Roosevelt's encouragement and his assurances that, in the event of war, the United States would enter on the side of Britain just as soon as he could swing American public opinion around to support intervention. Yet, when the crisis became acute after August 23, 1939, Roosevelt sent several messages for the record urging that war be avoided through negotiations.

Despite this voluminous Revisionist literature which appeared since 1945 and its sensational content, there is still virtually no public knowledge of Revisionist facts some thirteen years after V4 Day. The "man on the street" is just as prone to accept Roosevelt's "Day of Infamy" legend today as he was on December 8, 1941. A member of the state historical department of a leading eastern state recently wrote me that he had never heard of any Revisionist movement relative to the second World War until he read my article in the Spring, 1958, issue of Modern Age. By 1928, most literate Americans had a passable knowledge of the facts about the coming of war in 1914 and the American entry in 1917. What are the reasons for the strange contrast in the progress of realistic knowledge after 1918 and after 1945, so our examination of the reasons for the blockage of knowledge may be limited to the United States.

A main reason why Revisionism has made little headway since 1945 in attracting public attention in the United States is that the country never really had time to cool off after the War. We have pointed out above that the situation was not as acute here after 1945 as in Europe and Japan, but it was far more tense than it was in the United States in the 1920's. Even as early as the Congressional campaign and election of 1918, there was a rift in the wartime political monolith. By the campaign of 1920, disillusionment with the war had set in and a trend toward isolation from European quarrels had begun to assert itself. The United States refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles or to enter the League of Nations. There was a cooling off period for about twenty years after 1918. As late as 1941, the overwhelming majority of the American people wished to remain aloof from the European War, and Roosevelt had great difficulty in forcing through a peacetime draft law and in getting any repeal of the neutrality legislation.

Nothing like this happened following 1945. By March, 1946, Winston Churchill was proclaiming the Cold War in his speech at Fulton, Missouri, delivered with the benediction of President Truman, and a year later Truman actually launched the Cold War. This led, in 1950, to the outbreak of a hot war in Korea. The Orwellian technique of basing political tenure and bogus economic prosperity on cold and phony warfare had taken over by 1950, to enjoy an indefinite domination over the public mind. A hot war spontaneously provides plenty of genuine, even if dangerous and misguided, emotion, but a cold war has to be built up by propaganda and mythology and sustained on synthetic excitement which is provided by planned propaganda. The tortures of "1984," as administered by the "Ministry of Love," have not as yet proved necessary in the United States. The American public proved more susceptible to simple brainwashing through propaganda than Orwell could imagine, although he was himself a veteran propagandist on the BBC. Orwellian doublethinking has enabled the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations to formulate and enforce mutually contradictory policies, and the " crimestop" technique of the Orwellian semantic system prevents the public, and many of its leaders, from thinking through any program or proclamation. A policy of perpetual war for perpetual peace does not appear unreasonable or illogical to the American public. Thus far, the propaganda carried on by our "Ministry of Truth," with the almost unanimous aid of our press, has been sufficient to maintain popular support of the Cold War.

It is obvious that such a brainwashed and excited public is not likely to concern itself seriously with facts and writings that are designed to discredit warfare and furnish a solid basis for substantial peace. It should be about like expecting desert sheiks to concentrate on books devoted to water polo or outboard motorboat racing. The public mind has become all but impenetrable on such matters. In the mid-1920's, for the Allies to deride Uncle Sam as "Uncle Shylock" relative to a paltry 12 billion dollars of war debts made Americans so angry that they were willing to listen to Revisionist conclusions. In the mid-1950's, even such flagrantly offensive and ungrateful gestures as "Yanks Go Home," after the United States had poured tens of thousands of lives and over 65 billion dollars of foreign aid appropriations and the public appeared to approve. Congressmen like John Taber, who for years had sought to kill as many appropriations as possible which were devoted to the effort to create a better life here at home, proclaimed that foreign aid was so important that it transcended the considerations of restraint, thrift and economy which they had so long demanded of appropriations to be used within our own borders.

The Fearful Fifties

Another explanation of the antipathy or indifference of the public to Revisionism since 1945 is to be found in the sharply contrasting intellectual atmosphere of the 1920's and of the period since 1945. Conditions in the 1920's and early 1930's were the most conducive to independent and fearless thought of any decade in modern American history. This was the period of Mencken and Nathan, of the height of the popularity of H.G. Wells. It was an era when James Harvey Robinson's Mind in the Making could become a best seller and Thorstein Veblen was the most respected American economist. Since 1945, we have run into a period of intellectual conformity unmatched since the supreme power and unity of the Catholic Church at the height of the Middle Ages. Between the pressures exerted by the Orwellian cold-war system and those which are equally powerful in the civilian or commercial world, intellectual individuality and independence have all but disappeared. In this era of Nineteen Eighty-four, "The Organization Man," "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit," the "Hidden Persuaders," and "Madison Avenue," even the average American college graduate is no more inclined to independent thinking than was a Catholic peasant during the papacy of Innocent III.

Another reason for the unprecedented resistance of Revisionism after the second World War is the fact that the liberals and radicals, who became the shocktroops and spearhead of Revisionism in the 1920's, have since 1945 been overwhelmingly the chief opponents of any acceptance of Revisionist facts and conclusions. They were the leaders of the war party in Britian, France and the United States for months or years before 1939 and 1941, and they have never recanted. Although most of the prominent liberals heartily supported Wilson's war after 1917, they were completely disillusioned by the "Peace" Treaty and led the Revisionist parade after 1919. Especially notable were Herbert Croly and his editorial associates on the New Republic. They recanted, but plenty. Oswald Garrison Villard and most of his associates on the Nation did not need to recant, for they had never supported American intervention in 1917 with any enthusiasm.

'The Facts Be Damned'

A leading reason why the liberals and radicals have been unable to revise their pre-war views and attitudes is that their hatred of Hitler and Mussolini has been just too great to permit them to accept any facts, however well established, that might to any degree diminish the guilt with which these men were charged from 1939 onward -- or from 1935, for that matter. In such a case, "facts can be damned." There was no comparable pre-war hatred of Stalin on their part for them to have to live down. The hatred of Hitler has been especially bitter among some minority groups that were notably enthusiastic about the Revisionism that followed the first World War.

Indeed, the aversion to setting down any historical facts that might present the diplomacy of Hitler and Mussolini in any more favorable light than that of wartime appears to have extended to most Revisionists of today, even to those of a conservative temperament. After the first World War, most of the Revisionist historical writing was on the European background of August, 1914. There were only three important Revisionist books written on the American entry into the War-those by Tansill, Grattan and Millis, while there were a score or more on the European situation published in Europe and the United States. The first definitive book on American entry, Tansill's America Goes to War, did not appear until 1938, ten years after Fay's Origins of the World War.

After the second World War, all of the Revisionist books written by American authors have dealt chiefly with American entry into the War. There has not been a Revisionist book or a substantial Revisionist article which sets forth the truth about 1939. The nearest approach is the able and informed treatment of the European background in Tansill's classic Back Door to War, but this book is devoted primarily to the American entry into the War. Either aversion to even the slightest mitigation of the wartime indictment of Hitler and Mussolini, or fear of the results, appears to have prevented even Revisionists in both the United States and Europe from having systematically tackled the crisis of 1939 in nearly twenty years after the events.

In the light of the fact that, earlier in this article, I have summarized the Revisionist conclusions about responsibility for the outbreak of the wars in 1939, it may legitimately be asked how I know about such matters if no definitive book has yet been published on this subject. All that I have stated is sustained by Professor Tansill's Back Door to War. But there has also recently been completed a detailed treatment of the 1939 crisis by a superbly equipped scholar. This book will rank with the monumental work of Professor Fay on 1914. 1 have read this manuscript with great care and thoroughness. As a work of scholarship, it was approved by the most illustrious history department in the world today. The remaining problem is one of publication.

The anti-interventionist groups of 1937 and thereafter, like America First, were primarily conservative and for the most part welcomed the early Revisionist publications. But they soon fell in line with the Cold War because of the business advantages in industry, trade and finance which an extravagant armament program provided. Thereafter, they feared or refused to give any open support, financial or otherwise, to a scholarly movement which undermined the cold-war assumptions as thoroughly as it did the interventionist mythology of 1939-1941. Hence, Revisionism since 1947 has not only been unpopular or ignored but also poverty-stricken. On the other hand, the rich foundations have given lavish aid to the writing of anti-Revisionist books. About $150,000 was given to aid the publication of the Langer and Gleason volumes, the most impressive effort to whitewash the diplomatic record of Roosevelt and Churchill.

Other factors have led to the almost incredible obstruction of Revisionism since 1945. The excessive "security" policies and measures which have been adopted under the cold-war system have greatly increased fear and timidity on the part of public officials, scholars and general public. Since Revisionism logically challenged the whole fabric of American public policy since Pearl Harbor, it was precarious to espouse it. It has become dangerous to work for peace except through war. The press, naturally, prefers the emotion-provoking frame of reference of a Cold War to the prosaic scholarship of Revisionism. In the 1920's, the press was congenial to Revisionism because it buttressed our prevailing public policies relative to reparations, war debts, isolationism, disarmament, neutrality and the like. Today, Revisionism challenges the honesty, intelligence, and integrity of our basic foreign policies by its devastating revelation of the disastrous results of our martial world-meddling since 1937.

Especially important is the difficulty in having Revisionist books published under auspices likely to arouse public interest and knowledge and in getting them presented to the reading public honestly and effectively. There have only been two publishers, and these relatively small ones, which have consistently published Revisionist books: the Henry Regnery Company in Chicago; and the Devin-Adair Company in New York City. Only five other small publishers have produced a Revisionist book-one book only in each of these cases save for the Yale University Press, which brought out both of Beard's volumes because the director was a close friend and great admirer of Beard. University presses have found it precarious to indulge in Revisionist publication; W.T.Couch, the able head of the University of Chicago Press, was dismissed primarily because he published so peripheral a Revisionist volume as A. Frank Reel's admirable book, The Case of General Yamashita.

Not one large commercial publisher in the United States has brought out a single substantial and literal Revisionist book since Pearl Harbor. This stands out in sharp contrast to the attitude of publishers toward Revisionist volumes in the 1920's and early 1930's. The largest publishers were then very eager to get such books. Professor Fay's classic work was published by the Macmillan Company, and the monumental two-volume work of John S. Ewart by Doran. Alfred Knopf published my Genesis and a veritable library of Revisionist books in the 1920's, but in 1953 he refused even to consider such a mild and restrained Revisionist book as Professor Current's scholarly study of the public career of Secretary Henry L. Stimson.

There are a number of obvious reasons why the big publishers shy away from Revisionist books today. In the first place, they are American citizens and, for reasons already discussed, like most of their fellow Amer-cans, they dislike giving up their pre-war and war-time convictions, emotions, hatreds and prejudices; most of them just do not like Revisionists and Revisionism. Further, knowing that Revisionism is publicly unpopular, they realize that Revisionist books are not likely to sell well; hence, Revisionist publication is relatively poor business. Moreover, those publishers who may privately espouse Revisionism and would like to see some Revisionist books published, even if they had to do it with slight profit or even a small loss, just cannot consider a Revisionist book on its own merits or by itself alone. They have to take into account its possible effect on the general publishing trade and the book-buying public. The loss that they could sustain through merely publishing a Revisionist volume might be nothing as compared to what they would lose by the unfortunate impression such publication might make or from the retaliation which might follow.

Fear of the Book Clubs

They are especially alarmed at the possible retaliation at the hands of the various book clubs, since all the powerful ones are tightly controlled by those groups and interests most hostile to Revisionism today. William Henry Chamberlin's America's Second Crusade is the one Revisionist treatment of the second World War which is admirable suited for popular sale and reading. It is precisely comparable to Walter Millis' Road to War on our entry into the first World War. The Millis book was a Book-of-the-Club selection and sold by the hundreds of thousands. The head of one of the largest publishing houses in the world knew and liked Chamberlin, admired his book, and personally would have liked to publish it. But he held, quite understandably, that he did not feel that he could do so in the light of his responsibilities to his stockholders. As he put it, if he published the Chamberlin book, his company probably would not get another Book-of-the-Month-Club adoption in a decade. The Chamberlin book was published by Henry Regnery.

A comparison of its fate with that of the Millis Road to War is instructive. Macy's, in New York City, ordered fifty copies of the Chamberlin book and returned forty as 61 unsold." If it could have been handled on its merits, surely five or six thousand copies would have been sold. A year after the date of publication, there was still not a copy of the book in the New York Public Library or any of its branches. Revisionist books are virtually boycotted, so far as sales to the general run of public libraries are concerned. The woman who exerts a greater influence upon library book orders than any other person in the United States is violently anti-Revisionist. She sees to it that Revisionist books are either ignored or smeared in her advice to librarians seeking guidance as to purchases.

Even when Revisionist books get into stores, clerks frequently refuse to display them and, in some cases, even lie about their availability. In the book department of America's outstanding store, a woman sought to purchase a copy of the most widely read Revisionist book. The clerk told her decisively that the supply was exhausted and no copies were available. The customer suspected that she was lying and was able to get the head of the store to make an investigation. It was found that over fifty copies were hidden under the counter and that the clerk knew that this was the case. The head of the store was so outraged that he ordered the book department to make a special display of the hitherto concealed book.

The leading magazines are just as reluctant to publish Revisionist articles as the great commercial publishers are to publish any Revisionist books. This is also is complete contrast to the situation in the 1920's when the editors of the better periodicals were eager to get authoritative articles by leading Revisionism in the 1920's and early 1930's were solicited by the editors. So far as I know this was true of other Revisionist writers. But not a substantial Revisionist article has been printed in a popular and powerful American periodical since Pearl Harbor. The reasons for editorial allergy to Revisionist articles are the same as those that affect the heads of the large commercial publishing houses relative to Revisionist books.

Incredible as it may seem, not only publishers but even printers have sought to suppress Revisionist material. When I presented a restrained brochure, based on extensive research and designed to set forth the basic facts about the military and political career of Marshal Petain, to a printing firm in New York City, the printers refused to put the material into type unless it was approved by the censorship department of one of the most powerful and vehemently anti-Revisionist minority groups in the country. Whereupon, I took the copy to a leading upstate New York printing firm which was not accessible to this form of pressure. The episode reminded one of the pre-publication censorship which existed back in the days of Copernicus.

Fate of the Reviews

The handicaps imposed on Revisionist books are not limited to the difficulties of publication and distribution. When these books are published they have usually been ignored, obscured or smeared. They have rarely been given decent notice or honest reviews, even if the opinion of the reviewer might be unfavorable. As one of the leading blackout organizations has advised its agents, it is preferable to ignore a book entirely if one wishes to assure killing its distribution and influence. Even a viciously unfair review will at least call attention to the volume and may arouse some curiosity and interest. To ignore it completely will do more than anything else to consign it to oblivion. Under the editorship of Guy Stanton Ford, it was the announced policy of the American Historical Review not to review "controversial" volumes, but, upon careful examination, it turned out that "controversial" meant "Revisionist." The most controversial anti-Revisionist books in the field were given good position and reviews as long as those usually accorded to books of comparable importance.

When Revisionist books are actually listed and reviewed, they are usually given an obscure position, often in the book notes. This was the case with Dr. Luigi Villari's book on Italian Foreign Policy under Mussolini. Although it was a book of major importance in diplomatic history-the only authoritative volume which had appeared on the subject and the author was the most distinguished living authority in the field, the book was consigned to the book note section of the American Historical Review, and outrageously smeared. It should be pointed out, in fairness, that since Dr. Boyd C. Shafer succeeded Dr. Ford as editor, Revisionist books have been given a somewhat more decent treatment in the American Historical Review. Space limitations do not permit me to cite here in detail the fate of the leading Revisionist books at the hands of scholarly periodicals, and the book review sections of leading periodicals, and the newspapers. I have gone into this matter at length in the first chapter of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.

The essence of the situation is that no matter how many Revisionist books are produced, how high their quality, or how sensational their revelations, they will have no effect on the American public until this public learns of the existence, nature and importance of Revisionist literature. That they have not been able to do so as yet is obvious, and the obstacles that have thus far proved effective have not been reduced to any noticeable extent. It is for this reason that honest historians and publicists will welcome the apparent desire of the editors of Liberation to open its columns to a discussion of Revisionism and to the revelation of its import for the public welfare of the country. It is the first step which has been taken in this direction in a liberal magazine since Pearl Harbor.

Favoritism

Thus far I have dealt almost exclusively with the private or non-official efforts to obscure the truth relative to the causes and results of the second World War. The official censorship has been as unrelenting and in many ways more shocking. Those who publish official documents do not have to be restrained by considerations of profit and loss. More than a decade ago, Charles Austin Beard, blasted the procedure of the State Department in its tendency to permit historians favorable to the official foreign policy to use the public documents rather freely, while denying such access to anybody suspected of Revisionist sympathies. This led to some momentary relaxation of censorship, and it was fortunate that Professor Tansill. was able to carry on much of his research at this time. But soon the censorship and restrictions returned full force.

The Republicans promised drastic reform of this abuse when they came into power in 1953, but they failed to implement these assurances and, under Secretary Dulles, the scandal grew to, far greater proportions than under Democratic auspices. The same historical advisor, Dr. G. Bernard Noble, was continued in the service and actually promoted to be Director of the Historical Division of the State Department. He was a Democrat, a Rhodes scholar, and known to be one of the most frenzied advocates of our intervention in the second World War among all American social scientists and an implacable enemy of Revisionism.

In May, 1953, the State Department promised that all records of the international conferences during the second World War would be ready for publication within a year and that all other documents on the period since 1939 would be speedily published.

Nothing was done until the spring of 1955, when the documents on the Yalta Conference were finally published. It was evident, and soon proved, that these had been garbled and censored in flagrant fashion. Two able members of the historical staff of the Department, Dr. Bryton Barron and Dr. Donald Dozer, protested against this suppression and garbling of documents. Noble forced Barron into premature retirement without pay and discharged Dozer. The latter was reinstated by the Civil Service Commission, but Noble was able to get him discharged a second time-and this time permanently. Barron had been assigned to compile the material bearing on the Yalta Conference, and Dozer that on the Cairo-Teheran Conferences. Only one other publication has since been produced, some incomplete documents on 1939. This appeared during the last year and was also censored and garbled.

In the meantime, some 37 volumes dealing with our foreign policy since 1939 were collected and made ready for publication. But nothing was sent to the printer and, in the spring of 1958, the State Department blandly announced that it did not propose to publish any of these volumes in the predictable future. It gave as the reason the assertion that publication might possibly offend some persons among our NATO allies. To give this amazing procedure some semblance of historical authority, the State Department had appointed a hand-picked committee in 1957 to advise the Department on publication. The personnel of the committee, which did not contain one Revisionist historian, assured that the right advice would be turned in. The chairman was none other than Professor Dexter Perkins, admittedly a jolly and affable historical politician, but also one of the half-dozen outstanding and unremitting opponents of Revisionist scholarship in this country. The committee dutifully reported that publication of any of the 37 volumes lying on the shelves awaiting the government printers would not be politically expedient.

When Dr. Barron appeared before a Senatorial committee to protest against the censorship and delays, he was allowed only eleven minutes to testify, although witnesses supporting the official censorship we're allowed ample time. As one of the abler editorial writers in the country commented, quite correctly: "Such a record of concealment and duplicity is unparalleled. Its only counterpart is the ,memory hole' in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where an authoritarian regime of the future was depicted as disposing of all document and facts that failed to fit into the current party line." All this is hardly consistent with the assumed role of the United States as the leader of the "Free Nations" or with our bitter condemnation of the Russians for censoring their official documents.

There are, of course, some vital official documents dealing with the onset of the second World War that the Government has never even dreamed of publishing at any time and are so full of dynamite that not even historians engaged in whitewashing the official record are allowed to use them. Such are the so-called "Kent Documents," namely, the nearly 2000 secret messages illegally exchanged in the American code between Churchill and Roosevelt from September, 1939, onward. Churchill, himself, has frankly told us that these documents contain most of the really vital facts about the collaboration between him and Roosevelt in their joint efforts to bring the United States into the War. When the most impressive historical effort to whitewash the Roosevelt-Churchill record was about to be undertaken, Churchill threatened the principal author with a court suit if he made use of these "Kent Documents."

The suppression of documents relative to responsibility for the second World War extends, of course, far beyond all Anglo-American activities and relations. When the Communists and Socialists in Russia, Germany and Austria published their archives following 1918 in order to discredit the old imperial regimes, this forced the British and French ultimately to do the same. Eventually, scholars had virtually all the factual material at their disposal.

Nothing like this has been possible after the second World War. The victorious Allied Powers, chiefly Britain and the United States, captured the German and Italian archives, except for some of the more vital Italian materials which the Italian Communists destroyed, with Allied connivance, when they captured and murdered Mussolini. Today, Germany and Italy could not publish all their documents even if they wished to do so, for they do not possess them. Some have been returned to Italy, and the Germans have been promised theirs. But one may be sure than any material which seriously reflects on the United States and Britain will not be included. Publication thus far has been limited to what the American and British authorities have seen fit to release, and there is no evidence that it has been any more fully and honestly presented than the documents on the Yalta Conference. Nor can the Germans and Italians be expected to publish anything likely to modify the wartime indictment of Hitler and Mussolini. Unlike the Weimar Republic, the Adenauer Government is vigorously opposed to Revisionist scholarship and publication. The same is true of the Italian Government.

The main import of all this official censorship is that the Revisionist verdict relative to responsibility for the second World War is far less drastic than it will be if and when all the documents are available. If the documents now suppressed in such abundance and with such thoroughness would lessen the already severe indictment of the wartime leaders, elementary logic and strategy support the assumption that they would have been published long before the present moment in order to modify or eliminate the severe judgments already set forth in existing Revisionist volumes.

One paradox should be noted relative to the status and results of Revisionism after the two World Wars. After the first World War, the Revisionist verdict as to the responsibility for the war was very generally accepted by scholars and intelligent public leaders, but little was done about it in the way of revising the European post-war system that had been based on the lies and propaganda of wartime. If the logical steps had been taken to revise the post-war treaties while the German Republic was in existence, it is unlikely that Hitler would ever have risen to power in Germany, that there would ever have been any second World War, or that any Cold War would have come on it heels. After the second World War, while the facts brought forth by Revisionism as to the responsibility for the War have been ignored, indeed, are virtually unknown to the publics among the victorious Allies, there has been an almost complete revision of public policy toward our former enemies. Both Germany and Japan have been almost forcibly rearmed and given extensive material aid so that they can now function as allies against our former ally, Soviet Russia. One can imagine the outcry if, say in 1925, we had insisted that Germany and Austria must re-arm to the hilt and we had expressed our determination to enable them to do so.

Any such situation as has taken place since 1945 could only be possible in an era of Orwellian double-thinking and "crimestop." We spent about 400 billion dollars to destroy Germany and Japan and, after their destruction, we have poured in more billions to restore their military power. If it were conceivable that we could fight a third world war without exterminating all the participants, we might envisage a situation where, after destroying Russia, we proceeded to give her billions to rebuild her fighting power to defend us against China and India.

One lesson that Revisionism might teach us is that we should learn from it public attitudes which could protect us against repeated folly and tragedy. The eminent philosopher, John Dewey, told a friend of mine that if he had not been so wrong in his attitude toward the first World War (as exemplified by his German Philosophy and Politics), he might have succumbed to the propaganda that led us into the Second World War. But publics appear to profit less by experience than pragmatic philosophers. They seem to vindicate Hegel's classic observation that the only lesson that history teaches us is that we learn nothing from history. In an age of hydrogen bombs, intercontinental guided missiles, terrifyingly lethal chemical and bacterial warfare, and pushbutton military technology, we shall have to do better than the publics of Hegel's time if we are to have any prospect of survival or of attaining such a degree of peace, security, and well-being as would justify survival. But the American public can hardly learn any lesson from Revisionism if it does not even know that it exists, to say nothing of its content and implications.

Unless and until we can break through the historical blackout, now supported even by public policy, and enable the peoples of the world to know the facts concerning international relations during the last quarter of a century, there can be no real hope for the peace, security and prosperity which the present triumphs of science and technology could make possible. The well-being of the human race, if not its very survival, is very literally dependent on the triumph of Revisionism.

Reproduced From:  Journal Of Historical Review

Revisionism and Censorship Down Under

George Orwell said that "anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself being silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing." J. S. Mill said that "unmeasured vituperation, employed on the side of prevailing opinion, deters people from expressing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who express them."

Historical revisionists, such as the UK historian David Irving, whose books are in libraries and bookshops throughout the Western world, Professor Faurisson, Professor Butz and myself, who, after much research, much of it uncontradicted, have concluded there was no plan to exterminate Jews in World War II; there were no mass gassings; and fewer than one million Jews died of all causes, face such vituperation. O'Brien, a member of the "thought police" in Orwell's novel, 1984, said: "Who controls the past controls the future.Who controls the present controls the past."

Dissident thinkers who challenge the accepted version of the past cannot expect a fair hearing in Australia, are subject to "unmeasured vituperation" and are not given a fair hearing. Thus my attempts to query the extent of the Holocaust of Jews in World War II have led to me being described as "more evil than Himmler and Pol Pot" (Quadrant), a "pathological raver" (New Statesman), "unhinged" (Commentary), "comic" and "bizarre" (The Age), "scum" (3AW) and "dangerous and foolish" (Derryn Hinch, 3AW). A play written by a Jew from Sydney called "The Diary of Anne Frank -- a Forgery?" describes me as a vicious evil neo-Nazi professional propagandist who poses as a civil libertarian and is utterly discredited. I am not afforded a right of reply to such attacks.

Gerard Henderson attacked me in an article in The Australian in 1989 headed "It's Time to Muzzle Lunar Rights Baying, " and I was attacked in a feature article in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1989 headed "Lies, Damned Lies and Hogwash." The Press Council predictably rejected my complaint about the failure of the SMH to publish a reply. Phillip Adams attacked me in three feature articles in The Australian in 1990 claiming that I was masquerading as a civil libertarian, that I was carrying on where Julius Striecher, the editor of Der Stürmer, left off, and that I had been spewing hate since the 1930's (I was born in 1936 and did not become a Revisionist until 1979).

Adams regards those querying the extent of the Jewish Holocaust as committing blasphemy a curious view for a self-proclaimed skeptic and atheist. Is the official version of the Holocaust his religion? Was the recent reduction in the official figure for deaths at Auschwitz, from 4 million to about 1 million, blasphemy? The camp records indicated an even lower figure. Anti-Zionist Jews, such as Dr. Alfred Lilienthal, who support freedom of speech for Revisionists, claim that the "official" version of the Jewish Holocaust has become a new religion for many Jews, and for non-Jews such as Mr. Adams. It is the religious aspect of the Holocaust which places the freedom of speech of Revisionists at such risk. Anti-Zionist Jews such as Dr. Lilienthal and Noam Chomsky have defended the freedom of speech of Revisionists. The Jewish writer J.G. Burg, who was a Holocaust survivor, has denied that gassing took place at Auschwitz, and the Jewish historian Arno Mayer agrees with Revisionists that the extent of the Holocaust has been exaggerated.

The Sunday Age, owned by the Fairfax group, published three feature articles in July and August 1990, discussing whether alleged "racists" such as myself (and I was the only person named) should be dealt with by racial vilification legislation. The articles were triggered by a complaint against Your Rights to the NSW Anti-discrimination Board by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies. The Sunday Age devoted more than 100 column inches to the three articles and an "over the top" cartoon and allowed me about six column inches in reply. The headings in the articles attacking me were "The Right to Be a Racist" (with a cartoon of a Neanderthal ape spewing forth hate), "Package Poison with an Inbuilt Antidote" and "Cloaking Hate with Freedom's Mantle" (with the cartoon repeated). The contents of the articles, and several letters attacking my views, did not create a climate for objective debate and sometimes approached "unmeasured vituperation." Even if the "pathological ravings" of "unhinged, " "evil" revisionists are "poisonous, " the "ravings" may, if examined, and if not refuted, eventually be largely accepted.

"Freedom of the Press" seems to mean freedom for press proprietors and editors, accountable to no one, to indulge in character assassination and not give any, or any adequate, space for a reply. The only reply from me published by the Sunday Age (August 8, 1990) stated that Terry Lane, who wrote the first two articles and who has previously objected to racial vilification legislation because of its threat to freedom of speech, now says (August 12) that material found to be "offensive" and "poisonous" by "Nanny State" must be dealt with, by forcing the writer of the material to give equal space to those offended, and to participate in a public debate. Those seeking to censor the section in the 17th edition of Your Rights (written by myself) discussing Zionist power, the extent of the Jewish Holocaust, and the use of the Holocaust as a propaganda weapon for Israel oppose freedom of speech on those issues, and would reject Mr. Lane's suggestions, which are acceptable to me (without compulsion). The suggestions would be an interesting precedent for disparate groups objecting to material as diverse as The Last Temptation of Christ, Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, the New Testament, and daily references to the Jewish Holocaust in the media with negative stereotyping of Germans.

Mr. Lane, who has said that he would, "never ever" discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict again "because the consequences of doing so are altogether quite unnerving, " has not given any explanation for his retreat on the issue of freedom of speech, especially for those he has described as "soft targets, " including Historical Revisionists such as David Irving, Professor R. Faurisson and myself. My letter in reply concluded by stating that the heading to an article by Mr. Lane, "The Right To Be A Racist" (July 29), may have inferred I am a racist. I reject notions of racial superiority and racial discrimination but accept that people prefer their own kind.

After the publication of my letter, I was attacked in a Sunday Age feature article, headed "Cloaking Hate in Freedom's Mantle, " by Mr. S. Rosenkranz, the president of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria. My unpublished reply stated that Mr. Rosenkranz claims (falsely) that I say the Holocaust didn't happen or was a hoax, and also claims my views are racist a word he uses often and without definition. He also falsely claims that I criticize a film for portraying Jews as, "in general, " admirable (I said, "without exception") and says that the view falsely attributed to me is racist. Words such as "blasphemous" and "racist" are designed to inhibit debate, and those using such words against independent thinkers such as Historical Revisionists ( Terry Lane's "soft targets") rely on those attacked being given no right of reply.

Mr. Rosenkranz, having attributed to me views I do not hold, then argues that such views are "racist, " and should be dealt with by draconian anti-free speech legislation. He also justifies further free speech restrictions because the U.K., etc. have such restrictions. This is a "copy-cat" argument, which ignores the increase in racial tensions in the U.K. caused by such restrictions, documented in Russell Lewis's book AntiRacism - A Mania Exposed. His argument that we should adopt restrictions because of a U.N. Covenant ignores the dominance of anti-free speech countries in the U.N. and the need to tailor laws relevant for Australia. He ignores the adequacy of existing laws to deal with criminal offences by racists. Mr. Rosenkranz's tunnel vision leads him to regard Revisionist comments in a brief section of a pamphlet with a yearly circulation of 10,000 as being "racist" on the basis of misquotations (Has he read Your Rights?), while he appears to lack the empathy to realize the almost daily stereotyping of Germans and Arabs in films from Hollywood with a nightly viewing audience of often more than 200,000 people are offensive to those groups. Instead of singling out a minor pamphlet for special treatment, he should consider the daily harm done by Hollywood films (often designed to help Israel) to Germans and Arabs. Why should these groups not have equal space to answer those vilifying them?

The almost daily references to the Jewish Holocaust in the media are because, as Professor W. Rubinstein has said, the Jewish Holocaust is the number one propaganda weapon for Israel. His claim that Jews have become the new socioeconomic and political elite of the West helps to explain the passage of selective discriminatory war crimes legislation, described by Jim McClelland in an address with which he launched Sanctuary, a book by Mark Aarons, as "a sop to the Jewish lobby." There have been many other sops. The strength of the Zionist lobby in Australia, and its role in pushing for War Crimes legislation and for racial vilification legislation as a means of imposing political censorship of Revisionists challenging the official version of the Jewish Holocaust, is discussed in a leaflet headed War Crimes Vendetta, available from the Australian Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Those attacking revisionists with vituperative language will have, at some stage, to answer Revisionists, who point out that the Wannsee Conference, setting out Nazi policy for Jews, refers to evacuation to the East, not extermination; that Fred Leuchter, described in The Atlantic as the main authority on execution procedures in the U.S.A., including gas chambers, has found that Jews could not have been gassed by Zyklon B at Auschwitz; that the crematoria known to have existed could not have disposed of the numbers claimed to have been killed; and that an extermination campaign of which the Vatican, the Red Cross, the German resistance to Hitler, Allied Intelligence and German Intelligence were not aware could not have existed. The fate of Anne Frank, shunted from camp to camp and dying of typhus (which Zyklon B was used to combat); the survival of members of the immediate family (siblings and parents) of some of the best-known names of the Holocaust (Simon Wiesenthal, Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, etc.); the number of survivors claiming compensation from the West German government; and the survival of the small ghetto boy photographed with his hands raised, help to validate the Revisionist case.

Those seeking to censor, intimidate, and even imprison Revisionists will be in an interesting position if the Revisionist position becomes at some stage the prevailing orthodoxy. Academic historians who refuse to answer Revisionists, and people in the media who belittle or ignore them, may be queried as to whether they have justified the power and influence given to them. The critical question, not asked and not answered, is whether the "unfashionable opinion" is correct. There are many examples in history of fashionable opinions becoming modified or abandoned. One justification for freedom of speech, given by John Stuart Mill, is that those holding unpopular opinions may be correct, or closer to the truth, than the prevailing orthodoxy.

My unpublished reply concluded by stating that as well as reading Your Rights, the Leuchter Report, and the minutes of the Wannsee Conference, Mr. Rosenkranz should read John Stuart Mill (On Liberty), tolerate the expression ofarguments he dislikes, and endeavor to answer them.

The Holocaust is so important to Zionist Jews that Professor Friedläander has said that "the Revisionist School of historians, those who say the Holocaust never existed, that it is a Jewish invention, are more worrying than countries' political positions, " while Professor F. Littell has said "You can't discuss the truth of the holocaust. That is a distortion of the concept of free speech. The United States should emulate West Germany, which outlaws such exercises."

I cited some of the methods used to silence historical revisionism in Australia in Censorship of Dissident Opinions, available from the ACLU. More drastic measures are used in some other countries. A Revisionist received a two-year jail sentence in Canada, a Revisionist in France was assassinated, Professor Faurisson was suspended from his teaching position in France, Henri Roques had his Ph.D. (granted for research on aspects on the Holocaust) revoked, a retired judge in West Germany had his law degree revoked and the plates of his book The Auschwitz Myth seized, other writers in West Germany have been jailed, and the headquarters and warehouse of the Institute for Historical Review was burnt to the ground in the U.S.A. For further information, write to the ACLU for a leaflet headed "The Worldwide Persecution of Dissent. "

All of the attacks on Revisionists (including Jewish Revisionists) I have mentioned have one thing in common. They are subjected to character assassination but no, or very little, attempt is made to refute their arguments.

[This article is adapted from Your Rights 1991, published by John Bennett for the Australian Civil Liberties Union, Box 1137, Carlton 3053, Australia. Ed.]

Source: Reprinted from The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 365-370

Reproduced From:  Journal Of Historical Review

Revisionism in Croatia: 

Croatia's President Rejects 'Six Million' Story

While Holocaust Revisionism is suppressed in some countries, in Croatia it has official support from the highest level. Croatian President Franjo Tudjman publicly rejects the "Six Million" Holocaust story.

In a 500-page book entitled Bespuca -- Povjesne Zbiljnosti ("Wastelands -- Historical Truth"), which was published in 1988, and republished in 1989 and again in 1990, Tudjman comments in some detail on Second World War history. About the familiar Holocaust story he writes:

The estimated loss of up to six million [Jewish] dead is founded too much on both emotional, biased testimonies and on exaggerated data in the postwar reckonings of war crimes and squaring of accounts with the defeated -- In the mid'80s, world Jewry still has the need to recall its "holocaust" by trying to prevent the election of the former U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim as president of Austria!

Tudjman, who worked for many years as a university history professor, also suggests that many wartime Jewish deaths would not have occurred if German armed forces had prevailed over the Soviet Union, allowing for a "territorial solution" to the Jewish question such as a "reservation" in eastern Poland or in Madagascar. (The New Republic, Nov. 25, 1991, pp. 16, 18.; Die Presse, Vienna, Jan. 28, 1992.)

Tudjman reaffirmed his Revisionist outlook in a recent interview with Canadian television: "With regard to Jews, I'm inclined to agree with those scholars in the world who say that the figure of six million is exaggerated." (The New Republic, Jan. 20, 1992, p. 5.)

Tudjman's views are all the more noteworthy because they are by someone who cannot be regarded as a "Nazi" or "fascist." During the Second World War he fought against Croatia's pro-German Ustashe regime as a general in Tito's partisan army.

Tudjman readily acknowledges that Jews suffered "terrible hardships" during the war years. But, he adds, "the Jewish people soon afterward became so brutal and conducted a genocidal policy toward the Palestinians that they can rightly be defined as Judeo-Nazis."

In light of the harsh anti-Jewish policies of the wartime Croatian state, it is hardly surprising that Israel and Jews around the world have not been particularly friendly toward the new Croatia. In an effort to offset this bitter legacy, Tudjman sent a conciliatory letter to World Jewish Congress president Edgar Bronfman. "We deeply regret the tragic burden of the Holocaust that was endured by the Jewish people on Croatian territory," Tudjman wrote. (Die Presse, Vienna, Jan. 28, 1992.)

He has also sought to relieve the fears of Croatia's Jewish community. Indeed, the country's Jewish leaders have applauded Tudjman and his government for its unequivocal condemnation of neo-fascism.

In spite of such gestures, Tudjman's Revisionist statements may ultimately prove to be politically too costly. In that case, he may be obliged to "recognize reality" and repudiate them.

Tudjman also writes in his book about Jasenovac, a concentration camp run by the wartime Croatian government. Orthodox historians have insisted for decades that "at least 700,000" people were killed there. According to an estimate cited by American Holocaust historian Nora Levin, for example, 770,000 Serbs, 40,000 Gypsies and 20,000 Jews were put to death in Jasenovac. (N. Levin, The Holocaust, 1973, p. 515.)

Croats have long maintained that about 60,000 perished in the camp, but Tudjman reckons that even this figure is too high. The most probable figure, he maintains, is between 30,000 and 40,000. Moreover, he goes on, Jewish inmates were largely responsible for the killings there. (The New Republic, Nov. 25, 1991, pp. 16, 18.; Die Presse, Vienna, Jan. 28, 1992.)

The anti-Croatian guerrillas -- whether Tito's Communist "partisans" or Drazha Mihailovic's Royalist "Chetniks" -- had no "death camps" before the war's end, because they normally murdered their captives. (The lucky ones were shot out of hand.) Tito's Communist forces -- which were backed by the United States and Britain -- carried out mass killings of German prisoners of war and native "collaborators" (most of them Croatian "Ustashe" soldiers and Slovenes) both during the war and in the period just afterwards.

Historians have estimated that Tito's forces shot between 70,000 and 100,000 people without trial within weeks of the war's end. (A few scholars have estimated that there may have been as many as 500,000 victims.) Most of these were people who had been trying to flee from Tito's grasp. Instead of finding freedom, though, they were forcibly returned by British troops from detention camps in Austria, or were turned back at the border by British occupation forces in southern Austrian and northern Italy.

One of the Tito execution sites was Sosice, located about 40 miles west of the Croatian capital of Zagreb. An estimated 40,000 people -- many of them sick and wounded -- were put to death there. It wasn't until 1990 that the grisly details of the Sosice killings finally emerged from 45 years of suppression. ("Pile of Bones in Yugoslavia," New York Times, July 9, 1990.; "Yugoslav Killing Fields," Los Angeles Times, Nov. 4, 1990.)

In recent articles about Croatia, American newspapers and magazines frequently refer to the Second World War Croatian government of Ante Pavelic as a dictatorial regime that was a "puppet" of Hitler's Third Reich. This is not accurate. The vast majority of Croatians welcomed and strongly supported Pavelic's wartime "Independent State of Croatia." If any regime in the region might properly be called a German "puppet," it would be the wartime Serbian government of Milan Nedic.

Meanwhile, Croatian television has reportedly decided that it will no longer broadcast motion pictures that depict Germans as evil Nazis or aggressors. In light of wartime Germany's staunch support for Croatian freedom, the television announced, showing such films would be in "poor taste." (Der Standard, Vienna, Jan. 4, 1992)

Reproduced From:  Journal Of Historical Review

Revisionist Master's Thesis Under Fire

New Zealand University Resists Jewish Demands

A New Zealand university is rejecting demands by Jewish groups to revoke a master's degree it awarded six years ago for a thesis that disputes Holocaust extermination claims. Citing academic traditions of open scholarship, the University of Canterbury (in Christchurch) has told Jewish community leaders that it will not rescind the degree earned by Joel Stuart Hayward, who endorsed revisionist arguments about Germany's wartime policy toward Europe's Jews in his master's thesis.

Hayward, who now teaches at Massey University in northern New Zealand, recently expressed regret over the thesis.

At the center of the dispute is Hayward's carefully researched 360-page overview of the development and impact of Holocaust revisionism from 1948 to 1993. Written in 1991 and 1992, The Fate of the Jews in German Hands: An Historical Enquiry Into the Development and Significance of Holocaust Revisionism, was approved in 1993 with first class honors by the University of Canterbury.

In it Hayward presents evidence to show that there was no German policy to exterminate Europe's Jews, that fewer than six million European Jews died during the Second World War, and that numerous claims of killings in gas chambers are untrue. He points out the unreliability of "eyewitness" evidence of "Holocaust survivors," and notes that numerous Holocaust claims "have been quietly dropped by historians over the years, although few non-specialists have been informed of this and, consequently, the claims are continually repeated."

On the emotion-laden question of wartime killings of Jews in gas chambers, Hayward wrote: "A careful and impartial investigation of the available evidence pertaining to Nazi gas chambers reveals that even these apparently fall into the category of atrocity propaganda." Among the evidence he marshals in support of this view, Hayward cites the 1988 forensic examination by American gas chamber expert Fred Leuchter of the alleged "gas chambers" at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek ("The Leuchter Report"). "Leuchter's unorthodox conclusions, which at first seem incredible, do appear to be supported by ample evidence," wrote Hayward.

In summing up "the revisionists," Hayward writes: "It is worth repeating one point made above: some revisionist books and articles (such as those by Weber, Irving and Faurisson) are balanced and authoritative, containing both solid research and highly-developed analysis. They contribute substantially to the accumulated body of knowledge about the Holocaust, and should not be ignored or discounted out-of-hand by historians upholding received opinion. The truth-seeking historian has nothing to fear from these scholars." In a 60-page chapter on the Institute for Historical Review, Hayward praises Mark Weber (now IHR Director) as a "thoughtful and serious historian" who has produced "consistently well-researched and cogently-argued writings on the Holocaust and other historical topics."

In his thesis' conclusion, Hayward sums up:

... The gassing claim is irreconcilable with the overwhelming weight of evidence on the nature of official Nazi policy on the Jewish question. That policy, our careful and unbiased reading of the evidence suggested, was not one of total extermination, but was a brutal policy of deportation and forced labor.

... The weight of evidence supports the view that the Nazis did not systematically exterminate Jews in gas chambers or have an extermination policy as such, [even though] it cannot be denied that Jews in German hands suffered terribly during the Second World War ... The total would undoubtedly be more than one million and far less than the symbolic figure of six million.

In an analysis of the thesis published in the New Zealand Jewish Chronicle (April 2000), a Jewish academic, Prof. Dov Bing, speculated that "in 1991 it seems that Joel Hayward had been caught in the web of Holocaust deniers. Although he set out to critically analyze their views in an objective academic manner, he ended up supporting them. He came to admire people like Irving, Faurisson and Weber."

Jewish groups are understandably upset with Hayward's thesis, especially because it was approved -- after seemingly careful supervision and review -- with first class honors, and then remained unchallenged for five years. The New Zealand Jewish Council, the main body representing organized Jewry in that country, has asked Canterbury University to revoke Hayward's master's degree.

As soon as the thesis was accepted, Hayward imposed an embargo on it, allowing only those with his permission to see it. Until last year is contents remained unknown, except to a small number of revisionist scholars around the world. Then it was posted, without his authorization, on the Internet, and Fredrick Töben, director of the revisionist Adelaide Institute, sought to use it (also without Hayward's authorization) in a legal dispute in Australia.

At this point, Hayward issued an addendum to his now-public thesis, repudiating its main conclusions. In his "recantation" he wrote:

My thesis represents an honest attempt on my part to make sense of events I wanted to understand better. Yet I now regret working on such a complex topic without sufficient knowledge and preparation, and I 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 ... With the benefit of hindsight and eight years of subsequent research, I can now see that it [the thesis] contains several errors of fact and interpretation ...

In a recent letter to the New Zealand Jewish Chronicle, Hayward wrote: "I believe that, without doubt, around six million Jews perished during World War II. They were murdered by Nazis and their allies. The perpetrators used a range of methods, including gas chambers, shooting, physical exhaustion and starvation, to carry out this monstrous crime."

How sincere is Hayward's "recantation"? One indication that his most recently expressed views on the Holocaust may be less than entirely sincere is that they were issued only after his thesis had (without his authorization) been made public, and was beginning to come under attack. As recently as November 1998, Hayward was sharply critical of anti-revisionists. For example, he called Deborah Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust, "hopeless. Very poor indeed."

Hayward was born in 1964 in Christchurch, New Zealand. While in his twenties, he adopted Joel as his first name to affirm his partial Jewish ancestry. Today he is a well regarded member of the academic faculty at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, where he is "senior lecturer" and program coordinator of defense and strategic studies in the university's School of History, Philosophy and Politics.

Hayward writes and teaches on military history, strategy and operational art. In addition to numerous articles published in scholarly journals, he is the author of a critically well-received 395-page historical study, Stopped at Stalingrad: The Luftwaffe and Hitler's Defeat in the East, 1943-1943, which was published in 1998 by the University of Kansas Press.

The Kupka Affair

In a related affair in New Zealand, Jewish groups recently demanded that Waikato University expel from its doctoral study program a German student who, they charge, is an anti-Jewish "Holocaust denier." Hans-Joachim Kupka, 55 years old, had been working on a Ph.D. dissertation that would analyze the contribution to New Zealand society of immigrants from Germany and Austria.

Jewish groups expressed alarm that before moving to New Zealand in 1992 Kupka had been active in Germany in the allegedly "neo-Nazi" Republikaner party. During the 1980s he was the party's regional chairman in lower Bavaria, and in 1987 became deputy chairman of the party's Bavarian section. Jewish academics also cited writings by Kupka in recent years that he had posted on the Internet, calling them "anti-Semitic Holocaust denial." Jewish students organized protest marches at the University demanding his expulsion.

On the other hand, three Waikato University professors who evaluated Kupka's writings concluded that they "could in no way be interpreted as being remotely right-wing." Similarly, the university's vice chancellor found that the writings did not constitute "Holocaust denial."

With Jewish pressure mounting, Kupka suddenly withdrew from his doctoral study program. In spite of this, the local Waikato Times reported (July 6, 2000), "the Jewish community will not let the matter rest," and demanded a critical review of the university's handling of the matter.

The Roques Affair

The Hayward and Kupka affairs recall the 1986 case of Henri Roques, a French scholar whose doctoral degree was revoked by government order -- for the first time in the nearly eight centuries of French university life -- because the revisionist conclusion of his doctoral dissertation enraged Jewish groups. In his dissertation, Roques closely examined the "confessions" of SS officer Kurt Gerstein, which for decades have been a main piece of evidence for gas chamber killings. Roques concluded that Gerstein's postwar testimony is "extravagant and crammed with improbabilities," lacks the evidentiary value one should require of a historical document, and cannot be accepted as a proof for the existence of wartime homicidal gas chambers.

Roques doctorate was revoked even though his dissertation had been accepted by a panel of three professors at the University of Nantes. And even after the "Roques scandal" became public, the prominent British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) praised Roques' dissertation (in a 1990 letter) as "an entirely legitimate, scholarly and responsible work of Quellenkritik [source critique] on a limited but important subject." (See the Sept.-Oct. 1993 Journal, pp. 40-41.)

Roques, a member of this Journal's Editorial Advisory Committee, addressed the Eighth (1987) IHR Conference. (See H. Roques, "From the Gerstein Affair to the Roques Affair," in the Spring 1988 Journal, pp. 5-23.) His dissertation was published in English by the IHR under the title The 'Confessions' of Kurt Gerstein, and is still available for sale from the IHR.

Reproduced From:  Journal Of Historical Review

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