SMITH'S REPORT

Contents

• A Watershed for the Holocaust Story?
• The Campus Project
• Captain America and the Gassing of the USA
• The View from My House
• and more!

and now... our lead story!

Early in January, the Holocaust appeared to have reached an ebb in public consciousness. However, in the past few weeks there have been several highly charged references to the subject in the media, and a close analysis of these indicate that the argument, in our view, is starting to turn to the advantage of revisionism. Nevertheless the situation is still fraught with difficulty.

The majority of these public indications seem to have flowed out of the International Holocaust Day celebrations of January 27, 2001, but some appear to have been fortuitous. For example, ex-President Clinton's pardon, on his last day in office, of a wealthy Jewish fugitive of justice raised the specter of Jewish control in politics, but the timing was coincidental. The murder of two German professors at Dartmouth on the morning of International Holocaust Day also appeared unrelated, but the authorities pointedly did not dismiss a possible connection. On the other hand, Norman Finkelstein's arrival in Germany and Austria, to promote the German translation of The Holocaust Industry appears to have been timed to coincide with the festivities, as was the Holocaust miniseries "Haven", as well as the carefully orchestrated book publication and suit filing that raised the issue of IBM's "complicity in the Holocaust."

These last issues deserve treatment on their own, but it suffices to say here that while Finkelstein's promotional tour was a rousing success, leading to wide publicity of essentially revisionist attitudes towards the Holocaust, the TV miniseries and the IBM expose both failed miserably. Yet while these help to argue that a sea change in Holocaust attitudes is beginning to take place, it is worthwhile to keep in mind the centrality of the Holocaust holiday.

International Holocaust Day

As might be expected all of the world leaders in attendance made the appropriate gestures. There were calls for more education. There were calls for more reparations to Jewish and non-Jewish victims of German aggression in World War Two. There were even calls for more abject apologies to the Jewish people, and a number of the politicians present shamelessly complied.

The most contentious item on the menu was the need to tighten the legislation that would outlaw Holocaust revisionism, or "Holocaust denial." This was of course particularly pressing since David Irving was using the occasion of his trial to raise all kinds of uncomfortable questions about the reality of the story that has been repeated endlessly in the western media for over the past fifty years. However, the British were disinclined to follow the lead for censorship, and, announced instead an alternative plan: to establish a national Holocaust Memorial Day on the British calendar, on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Of course, this did not take anyone by surprise. The ability of the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to debase himself and his country to secure a little extra political leverage for his party had been remarked even as far back as his initial campaign for office in 1996-97. Indeed, the idea for the British Holocaust Memorial Day had already been floated for a couple of years, leading many to speculate how it would be carried out: solemn strokes from Big Ben while traffic came to a standstill in Piccadilly Circus? The lighting of an eternal flame in the courtyard of Buckingham Palace? A procession of flaggellants in hair shirts, led by Her Majesty, the Queen?

In the event the Holocaust memorial in Britain was a far less spectacular affair, although it lacked nothing in loss of dignity. Missing theatrics, it compensated by stressing, as only Britons can, the fundamental phoniness of the entire charade. The ceremonies consisted mostly of Blair and other leading British political hacks engaging in "readings" and "recitals" aided, appropriately enough, by one self-admitted actor. As for the Queen, it was announced a few days before the ceremonies that she was accustomed to vacationing until February, and would not change her routine.

Even while the ceremony played out to its anticlimactic end, the British press was full of criticism of the enterprise. As one might expect, there were a number who were a little unclear why it was necessary to devote a day in the British calendar to commemorating an event that took place in another country. Some took swipes at the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC, wondering how Americans would feel if the Germans opened up a museum commemorating American Slavery in Berlin. (Indeed, Norman Finkelstein would repeat the rather subversive suggestion in Germany himself a few days later.) Even some staunch Holocaust believers in Britain questioned the effect of reducing a national tragedy for the Jewish people to a billboard slogan for international repentance.

The British event was timed to coincide with a number of other festivities, more or less manufactured for the occasion. For example, it was announced that Steven Spielberg was to be knighted in a ceremony to take place two days after the memorial day, and the day was marked both before and after with several announcements concerning discovered artworks, discussions of reparations, potential indictments against elderly men for alleged crimes, and so on.

While the British memorial received the most publicity, it coincided with a number of other gestures that took place worldwide. In America, there were the usual television and newspaper features on the Holocaust, and in the New York Times an impassioned review of a "new" five volume study that once again sought to prove the conventional Holocaust story beyond a shadow of a doubt. The fact that the bulky set of volumes in fact contained nothing new, and was in fact little more than a vanity publication of the US Holocaust Museum, funded by the US taxpayer, somehow escaped the reviewer. There were other gestures as well: perhaps even Bill Clinton's eleventh hour pardons, featuring a number of Jewish criminals and financial swindlers, constituted the outgoing president's attempt to personally atone for the Holocaust.

An odd review of an odd book.

For example, Bauer spends an inordinate amount of time in the first chapter setting forth his own liberal credentials, and makes a number of arguments -- for example, concerning the fundamental sameness of all human suffering -- that revisionists have been making for years. On the other hand, Bauer also uses this chapter to set forth his definition of "Holocaust" and we read this with mounting interest, bearing in mind the crabbed definition that was used against David Irving and is routinely employed against other revisionists, the definition that insists that the Holocaust was "the systematic, state-sponsored attempt to exterminate the Jewish people, which involved the killing of six million people, many in gas chambers."

Surprisingly, Bauer avoids specificity in his definition: no six million, and no gas chambers. Still, Bauer manages to insist that there is "genocide" -- which involves the killing of some members of a group in the course of destroying them -- and then there is "Holocaust" -- which he differentiates thus:

"To make this as simple as possible, I would suggest retaining the term genocide for "partial" murder and the term Holocaust for total destruction. I will argue that Holocaust can be used in two ways: to describe what happened to the Jews at Nazi hands and to describe what might happen to others if the Holocaust of the Jewish people becomes a precedent for similar actions. "

"Whichever way Holocaust is used, it and genocide are clearly connected; they belong to the same species of human action, and the differences between them remain to be seen, beyond the obvious one of partial versus total destruction."

In other words, Bauer is allowing -- just barely -- a recognition that other mass persecutions are similar to what happaned to the Jews. That is frankly a step forward for a mainstream professor, particularly one active in Israel. To be sure, the disinction between "partial versus total destruction" is by no means "obvious."

A further concession comes when Bauer invokes Saul Friedlander, who Bauer gratuitously calls "brilliant", which means that what he is about to quote Friedlander on is not only true, but very true, but that he, Bauer, hasn't the temerity to say it himself:

"In a brilliant statement (in Jerusalem, on December 24, 1997), in the course of a discussion of his latest book, Saul Friedländer explained that the Holocaust presents problems that have so far not been solved. In the past he himself had used the expression "the unease of the historian." He did not mean that these problems cannot ultimately be understood, but that tremendous difficulties stand in the way of understanding them. He did not want to imply a mystical interpretation of the Holocaust events; but because convincing explanations are still unavailable or are being argued about, he wanted to avoid what he called "closure" of the argument, as though we historians had found satisfactory answers to our questions. He advocated a certain open-endedness whenever we put forward our views: we might, he implied, be wrong-there is nothing terrible about that-and, in any case, others will come along and present new findings and insights."

The first thing one notices about this is the amusing circumspection of the prose. What problems? What tremendous difficulties? Of course, Bauer does not say, and cannot say, that the problems and difficulties surround the traditional story of extermination camps in which millions disappeared.

Yet underneath the typical curlicues of academic speech we find another concession: there are open questions, apparently, several, and these haven't yet been completely answered, and "we might … be wrong", not only "might be wrong" but "there is nothing terrible about" being wrong. This is the kind of thing someone says when he knows he is wrong. It sounds to us like Bauer is having a late, though somewhat timid, conversion to revisionism.

France: Once Again, The Garden of Revisionism

The first of these statements was made by Jacques Mandelbaum in an article in a leading French daily to correspond with the Holocaust Day celebrations. He wrote, among other things:

"The photographic exhibit "Memory of the camps" now taking place at the Sully Hotel, raises […] the question of the role and use of images in the process of recalling an especially grim era in the history of the Western world. […] Pictures taken (during the liberation of the camps) were used in ways that were often historically problematical, from the very first newspaper photos and newsreels to the [now] famous documentary films, such as Alain Resnais's memorable Night and Fog (1956). […] All the well-known images employed in the portrayal of this crime are, if not fakes, at the very least inappropriate. […] Aerial photos of a [concentration] camp taken from an altitude of 7,000 meters, on April 4, 1944, by American reconnaissance planes, where the readers can make out all the mundane details, except the presence of gas chambers. […] Devoted for the most part, by the cumulative impact of the exhibit, to photographs of the world of the concentration camp, (this exhibit) is literally haunted by the near-total absence of photographs relating to the extermination program […] . If seeing is believing, how then does one make the admission that where the Shoah is concerned it is precisely [tell-tale] images we are [almost] completely without."

The second comments came from Holocaust fabulist Alain Finkelkraut, who was quoted as remarking:

Of course, to veteran revisionists the baby-steps of Messrs. Mandelbaum and Finkelkraut are likely to cause impatience, however, bearing in mind the atmosphere of criminalization and persecution that reigns on the European continent, such concessions are extraordinary. Indeed, Dr. Faurisson himself attended the exhibit that has inspired the depression of Monsieur Mandelbaum, and noted the following:

"On arriving at the thirtieth and last display panel, [the visitor] will note that revisionism is no longer called "négationnisme" but by its true name, and will observe that an unexpected tribute is rendered to a few French revisionists. At the top, he will read: From the late 1940s, it was in France that there appeared the first revisionist publications, attempting to deny or to distort the Holocaust: the first works were by Maurice Bardèche and Paul Rassinier. Since then, revisionism has become a world-wide phenomenon of French predominance, under the stimulus, notably, of Robert Faurisson."

Dr. Faurisson certainly deserves much of the credit for revisionism's progress, and he is right to take pride in his accomplishments. But there are others who have contributed as well: just before the Holocaust Day celebrations, the intrepid Jean Plantin, who was arrested, imprisoned, fined and peronally plundered for publishing the journal Akribeia in 2000, managed to publish the first volume of his new Etudes revisionnistes, a handsome new series which included in the first 500 page volume extensive writings by Robert Faurisson, Juergen Graf, and several chapters from Samuel Crowell's The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes, in French translation.

Conclusion

Meanwhile, broader approaches do not seem to be taking root at all. One indication is the tepid response to International Holocaust Day celebrations. Another was the failure of the TV miniseries "Haven", which was set for the February television sweeps: it failed, and was described in the entertainment press as a "low-rated and older-skewing special" that "freed up a lot of young adults." Could it be that even the media is beginning to concede that there has been too much Holocaust?

A further indication came with the publication of a book that attempted to argue for IBM's "role" in the Holocaust, by providing punch cards to the Nazis. Although it was front-paged in several dailies, the story immediately disappeared from the radar, along with the suit filed the following day demanding "reparations" from the computer firm.

However, these failures are no cause for complacency: rather they indicate a need for greater vigilance and dissemination of information. In this respect it is important to note that CODOH's web presence remains vital, and continues to rack up Internet accesses at a rate 50% higher than a year or two ago. Still, as we witness the unraveling of the Holocaust Leviathan, we can expect it to be promoted more extravagantly, if less consistently, and with less restraint and more damage. For example, just days after noting the plaque in the French exhibit, Dr. Faurisson was subjected to an outrageous search and interrogation by members of France's Holocaust Police. To counteract these assaults we need to continue to offer our alternative view to all who would listen, so that the experts who today express doubts, will tomorrow come into the sunshine and declare their agreement with the main tenets of revisionist theory.

Smith's Report