SMITH'S REPORT
 

Contents

• John Sack's Esquire Article: Major Breakthourgh- or More Revisionist Bashing?
• The Campus Project
• Hard to know what's right and wrong
• CODOH Partners with Amazon.com
• and more!

and now... our front page!

In January of 2001, Esquire magazine published a nine-page, 7,000 word article on Holocaust revisionism, written by John Sack, the well known Jewish journalist and author. Many of us have been aware that Sack had been preparing such an article for a year or more, so we looked forward to this piece with anticipation: how would Sack portray revisionism?

Would he follow the usual hate-mongering platitudes found in Lipstadt and other Holocaust hired guns? Or would Sack accurately describe the principles of Holocaust revisionism? These were questions of more than passing importance, since Esquire has an international circulation of about three quarters of a million, and it is a certainty that Sack's piece will go a long way to spreading the word about revisionists. But what kind of word would it be? P> It turns out that Sack neither followed in the footsteps of the usual revisionist bashers nor did he depict the bases of revisionism accurately. At the same time, his treatment, decent and respectful, creates the opportunity to open a lot of doors for outreach, outreach that is the specialty of CODOH and CODOHweb.

The Background

To a certain extent there is nothing new about "literary journalism" inasmuch as most journalists of talent have tended to allow their personalities to intrude on what they write. But Sack took the process a step further, and in the 1960's, with several writings about the Vietnam War, perfected the style that has been widely practiced by such well-known authors as Norman Mailer, Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion, and scores of others.

To revisionists, however, Sack is best known for his 1993 book, An Eye For An Eye, which described the horrible vengeance wreaked on innocent ethnic Germans by Holocaust survivors in Poland. As is becoming increasing well-known, during the German expulsions, tens of thousands of German men, women, and children, were herded into concentration camps runs mainly by Polish Jews and that thousands died as a result of epidemics, starvation, systematic beatings, and random killings.

An Eye For An Eye was remarkable, not only because it told of one of the dark sides of the postwar period, but also because it identified Jewish criminals. As a result the book was mercilessly attacked by the usual run of Jewish apologists, who cannot bear to allow the publication of any Jewish sin for fear of fomenting antisemitism. Somewhat surprisingly, in 1996, Sack was invited to discuss the issue of Jewish persecution of Germans at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Shortly before his lecture, however, the board of that Museum, following its usual form of suppressing all reference to non-Jewish holocausts, cancelled the appearance. Sack however was determined to give his speech, and found that only revisionists would allow him a platform. Hence Sack's involvement with Holocaust revisionists. Sack attended revisionist conferences in Australia in 1998, spoke at David Irving's 1999 Real History convention in Cincinnati in 1999, and was invited to address the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) convention in May of 2000. It is that convention that forms the backdrop to Sack's article.

The Esquire Article

While the setting for the article was the convention held by the Institute of Historical Review (IHR) held in Southern California last year, the proceedings of the conference get little attention. This is unfortunate because the conference -- the first sponsored by the IHR in several years -- featured most of the leading lights of revisionism, including Arthur Butz, Robert Faurisson, Mark Weber, Germar Rudolf, and several others. Yet, instead of focusing on these individuals and the force of their arguments, Sack chose an anecdotal and impressionistic approach describing his conversations over meals with only a handful of revisionists, running the gamut from the British historian Irving,to the retired historian Robert Countess, to Ernst Zuendel and Ingrid Rimland, and above all, to Charles "Chuck" Provan.

The inclusion of Chuck Provan in an article about revisionists will surprise many. After all, it is well known that Provan ceased to be a revisionist after receiving the revelation of Saint Kurt Gerstein some ten years ago. Still, he was allowed to speak at the IHR convention, because, although he is a relentless self-promoter of his own research, he does do some good work and revisionists are inclined to recognize it.

The focus on Provan may have served a variety of authorial purposes for Sack. Certainly, the photo of Provan with a quorum of his ten children, several of them barefoot, was likely designed to inspire amusement to the high-toned readership of Esquire. In the same way, Sack was careful to mention that Provan, in addition to being a "revisionist" was also an author who had written extensively on supposed Biblical injunctions against birth control. Given the audience that Esquire appeals to, it seems clear that the emphasis on Provan was designed at least in part to make revisionists appear somewhat clownlike.

On the other hand, there was a good reason for Sack to promote Provan. Sack's sole engagement with revisionist arguments turned on the "holes in the roof" argument, one which has been extensively discussed on CODOHweb in a series of brilliant analyses by the Canadian researcher Brian Renk. As we recall, David Irving had made an issue about the absence of these holes -- through which the poisonous Zyklon would have had to be inserted -- during his libel trial against Deborah Lipstadt. During those proceedings, Irving was able to get Robert Jan van Pelt to state that the holes that were supposed to be in the roof of the crematoria "gas chambers" were no longer visible. Yet Sack, by leading with Provan, was able to trump the argument, because Provan at the convention handed out a homemade pamphlet arguing that the holes were in fact there.

The Positive Side

Nevertheless, in our view, there are several notes of encouragement in the article. For example, Sack goes out of his way to depict the normality of revisionists. So he writes

"All in all, the deniers that day and that weekend seemed the most middling of Middle Americans. Or better: Despite their take on the Holocaust, they were affable, open-minded, intelligent, intellectual. Their eyes weren't fires of unapproachable certitude, and their lips weren't lemon twists of astringent hate. Nazis and neo-Nazis they didn't seem to be."

Sack also eschewed the hate-mongering so typical among those who write about revisionism as well:

"Nor did they seem anti-Semites. I'm sure many anti-Semites say the Holocaust didn't happen (even as they take delight that it really did), but I don't believe I met any that weekend."

Why should Sack be able to be tolerant of revisionists, when others have been unable to restrain their hatred? Part of the reason has to do with the source of the hatred in the first place. Many Jews, and Jewish organizations, foster an utterly unrealistic and in fact impossible story about what happened to the Jews in World War Two. But they believe the story. Hence, anyone who doesn't believe the story becomes a threat to the belief system they are trying to maintain. Exactly the same kind of psychology was at work during the periods of religious persecution in the Middle Ages: if one dissident was allowed, he or she threatened to undermine the regime of truth. Therefore such dissidents had to be exposed as devils and burned at the stake. The persecutions of revisionists over the past 20 years follow exactly the same pattern.

However, Sack, unlike many of his co-religionists, understands that the essence of tolerance is not hatred. If someone questions a belief that is important to you, then either that belief is unimportant, or the questioner is simply deluded. Thus, on the one hand, Sack is able to oppose those Jewish leaders who demonize revisionists:

"Myself, I disagree with these Jewish leaders. Most deniers, most attendees in their slacks and shorts at the palm-filled hotel, were like Zündel: people who, as Germans, had cho-sen to comfort themselves with the wishful thinking that none of their countrymen in the 1940s were genocidal maniacs."

In other words, to Sack, Holocaust revisionists are simply harmless Germanophiles who can't accept the worst about German conduct. As for the issue of the holes in the roof of the crematoria, which was the crucial argument to Sack, he is able to dismiss the entire matter with a whimsical comparison of cheeses and the rhetorical equivalent of a shrug: "it may be a hundred years before we know whose views prevail."

To be sure, these kinds of sentiments have been perceived by some revisionists as condescending, and hence still more ridicule of revisionism.

Conclusion

A the same time it ought to be said that perhaps revisionists expect too much too soon from revisionism. Remember that Holocaust revisionism asks people to change their deepest beliefs about what happened in World War Two, and this can be an excruciatingly painful process for Jews who either lived through the war, or who lost family in it. People change their beliefs only slowly, and, while the long-term odds are in revisionism's favor, we would be wise to abandon the idea that revisionism will prevail in some dramatic showdown.

In order to facilitate the process of change revisionists have to be approachable, and we have to leave no stone unturned in making our arguments presentable and available as people gradually allow their curiosity to challenge their innermost beliefs. CODOH has long been in that business, and CODOHweb is a particularly gratifying experiment in that area, since our tens of megabytes of cutting edge research is accessed on average more than 150,000 times every week.

Yet the true opening of communication between revisionists and non-revisionists has long been stymied by the hate-mongering and demonizing that revisionists have experienced. In a word, the enemies of revisionism have attempted to frighten people away from us. But the truth of the matter is that revisionists are nothing to be frightened of, they are just ordinary individuals who, by virtue of their own study, have hit upon an alternative explanation for World War Two, which just happens to be the most accurate one. The spreading -- really, the sharing -- of the work of Holocaust revisionists has long required a treatment that at once makes them human, interesting, and approachable. To his credit, that is the kind of treatment that John Sack has handsomely provided.

 
Smith's Report