Christmas 2013 And The Life Itself

I’ve noted elsewhere that life, for me, is less interesting than it used to be. Why so? I can only speculate that it’s because I have allowed the work to divide the life itself into two parts. Work on the one hand, “life” on the other. I have allowed the work to swamp the life until the life itself plays an increasingly smaller role in my daily round. I have always been interested in the life itself, and revealing it, in a way that most people are not.

I suppose some of the reason/s that life is less interesting than it used to be is my being in my 80s and the energy that used to be here for recognizing life as it is, is not here any longer. Complicating the situation is the burden of the cancer, the chemotherapy and so on. And then there was the stroke and some other stuff. Still, I do not see those matters as a reason for not paying attention to the life itself. If I can pay some attention to the work, there is no reason to not pay some attention to the life itself. In the old days, when I was paying attention, it was remarkable the things I saw, that I experienced. It was not a matter of making an effort, but of being attentive. It takes no strength, no energy, to be attentive.

When I published Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist, and later Break His Bones, I was still able to do the work and remain attentive to the life itself. I could go back and forth. But after Bones, which was published in 2002, the life was increasingly caught up with work, with the CODOH Web-site, the Campus Project, all the behind-the-scenes the work that never ends but is an unavoidable part of the game. And then I was arguing the same thing over and over again. That intellectual freedom is better than censorship and suppression, and that the Holocaust question should be open to a routine examination as are all other historical questions. Stuff that is old hat for revisionists, has become boring for some, but remains shocking to all others everywhere. In more than 30 years I have never questioned the value of doing this work. I do not question it now. At the same time, I am increasingly aware that I have become inattentive to what is in the heart, inattentive to what is. The life itself.

At this moment the brain recalls reading somewhere that when Buddha was asked who he was, he replied: “I am the one who woke up.” I probably have it wrong. Nevertheless, it is becoming clear to me that I am starting to doze off, that all the effort I can still make is going into the work, and that I am allowing the life itself to slide past me as if it were a dream.

*** Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton presented the World Jewish Congress’ Theodor Herzl Award to Elie Wiesel and his wife, Marion at a dinner at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York on November 19, 2013. “Elie Wiesel’s … ground-breaking memoir Night brought the experience of Holocaust survivors into world consciousness …” That is, his autobiographical memoir, or at least what he claims is auto-biography. Autobiography, as a matter of fact, is the core phenomenon of the Holocaust construction. Without the “memory” of those who were in the camps there is no proof of gas chambers, along with any number of other idiocies. It’s nearly all memory. Autobiography that has become sacred to those who profit most from it.

*** United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has visited Auschwitz-Birkenau “where millions of Jews and members of other minorities perished during the Second World War . . .

He said that nothing can truly prepare a person for a visit to ‘the epicentre of evil, where systematic murder unique in human history reached its atrocious climax.’ ….I stare at the piles of glasses, hair, shoes, prayer shawls and dolls, and try to imagine the individual Jews and others to whom they belonged. I stand in disbelief before the gas chambers and crematorium – and I shudder at the cruelty of those who designed this death factory.”

Thus spake the leader of all the World Bureaucracy yesterday.

Today I received a note from a supporter in New Jersey.

“Dear Sir: I am done with the Holocaust. If Hitler killed six million Jews he proved their religion has no God, yet they invade Palestine to create a religious state to honor the God who ignored the six million. How can the Jews have a God and a

Holocaust all at the same time? You may as well discontinue my subscription.”

Okay. A former supporter. He put a question to me that Elie Wiesel once asked. None of us appears to have the answer. Including Elie.

*** There was a time when I wrote about the misadventures of our daughter Paloma here in SR. Beginning when she was 13. Paloma is beautiful, intelligent, funny, and great company. Her brain computes better than mine—a small compliment I suppose. I am associated with a number of folk who have brains that compute on a higher level than mine. Most of them went to university, however, while Paloma did not finish junior high. She took up abuse of crystal meth and other drugs and buried her education in street adventures.

I used to follow her trail here in Smith’s Report, in and out of drug rehab. Her adventures were a part of our lives, the life itself. Some of the stories were comic, others pure melodrama and occasionally were tales of considerable danger. Auto-biography always includes tales of the other as well as of oneself. I stopped writing about her after her first child.

Paloma is 27 years old now, has two children out of wedlock, and is back in drug rehab. I am not one of those who believe that getting high, on whatever, is a moral issue or should be judged a crime in itself. When one does commit a crime, it can be judged based on the law of the land. It makes no difference that the perpetrator was sober or not, only what she did while committing the crime. Paloma never committed any crimes that I know of, but she became the most untrustworthy person I have ever known.

It is time for me to think seriously about the responsibility I share for what has become of our daughter. It was part of my job to see that she was okay, that she thought it a good thing to be honest, thoughtful, to be decent. I failed at every point. I was a good boy, and it did not occur to me that my daughter would not be a good girl. There is a kind of stupidity there that, in light of the facts, is moronic.

In this moment the brain recalls one late morning here in Baja when I was driving Paloma down the coast to a place where she would surf. She was in a good mood. She was maybe 14. She was starting to keep a journal. She was happy and laughing.

“Oh, Dad,” she said laughing in the seat beside me. “Ya know what, Dad? You know what I am? I’m a crack-head, Dad. That’s what I am. I’m just a crack-head.” And she was laughing merrily.

I listened to her that morning as I drove down the road. I didn’t say anything. She was being honest with me. That was good. She would be okay. She would work it out. Keeping a journal was a good idea. I let her out at the place where she was going to surf with friends. I had been a good boy. She would be a good girl. She would get over it. I cannot understand today how I could have been such a moron that morning. And so many other mornings.

I have come to find her story interesting in a way that somehow I never did before. She does not need to hear any more criticism. She’s heard it all. She needs to reveal what is in her heart, to empty the vessel of all its lies and secrets. That it is my work to find a way to help her do that. It would be an interesting story. A fascinating story. There would be no judgment. I’m a writer. I am committed to the story. She has one. She is one. There’s enough stuff in her life story to make a best-seller. I told her that the other day. She just looked at me.

I understand that she is ashamed of much of what she has done. But that’s in the past. Here she is now. Here I am. What can I make of it? What can she make of it? Taking into consideration that she has a moron for a father, it might not be easy for her to get focused, but I am going to do what I can do.

*** Letter: James Cleveland [email protected]

Subject: Smith’s Report #198

What a pleasant surprise to see a dialog on Revisionism and homo-sexuality in your August issue. The two subjects are made for each other. Gay history is revisionistic. It was a Jew who (according to one accepted account) presided over the “court of honor” that condemned Tchaikovsky to suicide. Without Nikolai Jacobi, would Tchaikovsky have gone on composing into the 1920s…. nice, normal, un-Jewish music like Rachmaninoff?

Having endlessly pondered and researched homosexuality I've recently had to conclude once and for all that it's simply what some of us are. It's a gift, not a curse. Having spent a lifetime fighting off my own gayness, I'm accepting it and finally feeling at peace within. This is as much of a turnabout as my discovery of Revisionist truth decades ago considering that I've been a dedicated right-wing Christ-ian fundamentalist ever since. (This is my first “coming out” moment. How to tell friends, family and compatriots, that will be the challenge.)

You and Peter have rightly described the situation. Society has rejected and persecuted Revision-ism, forcing it into a “right-wing” pigeonhole by equating it with Nazism. The extreme wacko left has the gay rights movement in its grip, and as it exists it's tailor-made to polarize everybody: “either you're with us or you're with the haters!” Since the Jewish monopoly media defines everything, the public goes along with these clichés, sprinkling them on its breakfast cereal each morning.

This is an old, old pattern. Without Jewish media control liberals might see Revisionism as a great way to diss the system. (Of course without said factor there'd be millions fewer liberals.) Without Jews running gay lib in such a histrionic and extremely decadent, Babylonish fashion, I feel the many non-Babylonish gays would have found de-facto acceptance in so-ciety as throughout so much of real history.

Gays are in fact one of the whitest and most white-centric groupings since the NSDAP. The first people who ever clued me about the Jewish problem outside my family were gay activists. That was in conversation, of course; publicly they marched for “holocaust remembrance.”

Things may be improving. Gays are increasingly divided over Israeli apartheid. A Libertarian Party activist was asked how he gets along with his fellow gays. “Everything's fine until I tell them I'm not a Democrat,” he sighed. “End of conversation!” But he's working on them.

Maybe the left-dominated gay community are Nazis at heart. Huffington Post is chronicling the conflict among them about their own diversity failures. Gays are in fact one of the whitest and most white-centric groupings since the NSDAP. The first people who ever clued me about the Jewish problem outside my family were gay activists. That was in conversation, of course; publicly they marched for “holocaust remembrance.”

Nice to know the IHR once had a quietly gay Director. There are tons of deeply closeted gays in the freedom movement like any other sector or class of people you can name. The other nice surprise this week (besides your article in dialogue) is that suddenly Glenn Greenwald is in the news as the life partner of one David Miranda. Surely Greenwald's bold work against Zionism makes him a kind of Revisionist, whether he would agree or not.

Interesting that it was the Jewish Tribal Review that roped Peter into the Revisionist fold. One of the best yet least noticed sites while it lasted.

*** Reading Thomas Patter-son’s Inventing Western Civilization and am reminded of the history of slavery in the West. It was always based on greed, never race. In America it became a matter of race, but it originated in greed. Couldn’t be more clear than in Athens and Rome.

But what caught my attention was Patterson’s notes on slavery in Europe.

“From the last of the 13th to the mid-15th century merchants from Genoa had purchased captives from Scandinavia and Slavs from Russia and the Balkans in Black Sea slave markets located in the Crimea near the mouth of the Don River. By 1400 these people probably constituted a majority of Europe’s slaves.”

This was followed by the buying and selling of Muslims and Jews before these European mer-chants turned their attention to sub-Saharan Africa and the indigenous folk in the Americas. Interesting.

One question I have for Blacks in America is why they make little (no?) reference to the fact that it was Black African slave traders in their homelands who sold their own Black captives into White slavery for a profit. Profit was everything for those Black Africans. For some of them it still is today. The profit motive. One human chain that binds us all. It would be good for American Blacks to occasionally reflect on the matter.

*** We visited with Paloma today at her drug rehab. She is relaxing, cheering up. It’s an environment she is well acquainted with, where there is no danger. It’s a rural setting in a canyon about 45 minutes South of town. She isn’t thinking about things yet. She’s just getting to the place where she will begin thinking, trying to think. I reminded her that she has a book in her that, if written well, might make her rich and famous.

This time she thought the idea amusing.

*** ADL Expresses Condolences on the Death of Israeli Rabbi Ovadia Yosef

New York, NY, October 7, 2013. Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, issued the following statement:

“Rabbi Ovadia Yosef will long be remembered as one of Juda-ism’s towering rabbinic figures who has left a lasting legacy for Sephardic Jews in Israel and for Jews all around the world. Rabbi Yosef was not without controversy and it is no secret that we disagreed with some of his statements in the past which we considered intemperate and biased.”

His funeral was the largest to ever be celebrated in Israel, with something like half a million Jews attending service.

But intemperate and biased? Like what? Like this?

“Goyim (cattle) were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel. That is why gentiles were created.”

“Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from this world,”.

“God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians.”

Rabbi Ovadia gave one speech in which he said of the Arabs: “It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.”

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef

Arabs? Kill ‘em all.
The rest of us? We’re animals.
Save us for dinner.

This stuff is intemperate in Abe Foxman’s opinion, but acceptable. What is not acceptable is that we ask college students, journalists and professors to provide, with proof, the name of one person killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz. Such a question is hateful and beyond any religious call to murder the Wogs.

It makes one wonder why, when there are so many Jewish scientists around, why we hear nothing about how the rhetoric of the rabbis might be one of the causes related to the effect of the world-wide rise in anti-Semitism?

It’s a question that comes from the Brit, Anthony Lawson. It’s a good question. Cause and effect? Does it exist outside the scientific laboratory? In life itself?

*** Now that Dov Hikind has put the near-finishing touches on the CODOH donation pages, contributions are doing badly. This month I don’t have enough to buy some of the supplements I use to keep the cancer down. I need a new way to raise money. I would consider buying and selling slaves if that would not damage my reputation with the rabbis . No. My reputation is everything for me. I’m going to have to look around for some other opening.

*** Early this month I received a note from a college student in Oregon asking for an interview where he would put some questions about what revisionists are up to. I agreed. He was brand new to the subject and asked the first questions that everyone asks. I used to do this a lot, but not lately. This time I said okay. I responded but somehow the questions got around to Jett Rucker as well and he responded too, as did Richard Widmann. The young man got every-thing he could have hoped for. Here I have decided to use Rucker’s response for reasons hav-ing to do with “tone:”

FIRST Question: And probably the most important one: how did you come to be a revisionist? What made you decide that the majority of society was incorrect in their belief that the Holocaust happened? Was it an event? Did someone you know explain it to you?

A1: The question has about it something of the one in the joke, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” The Holocaust did not “happen” nor “not happen”. EVENTS happened, or more accurately, ACTS were DONE, some of which some people picked out and gave labels. For example, when Germany attacked Poland in 1939, Hitler did not then, deliberately or otherwise, “start World War II.” Great Britain and France declared war on Germany for attacking Poland, and the whole matter STILL had not acquired the name “World War II” until long after Germany invaded and occupied much of France. The label began to be used after the Japanese bombed the US Fleet in Hawaii in late 1941. Likewise, “the Holocaust” did not acquire that name until after Israel’s 1967 war of aggression against its neighbors.

I have been studying “the Holocaust” for much longer than it has been called that (since at least 1959, as I recall). Revisionism – and sound historical understanding in general – starts with “unpacking” the handy labels that selected events of the past have had stuck onto them, so as to try to recover the perspectives of the actors, who did not, as we do, know how things were going to turn out. I know I haven’t told you how I became a revisionist, which is itself uninteresting and happenstance. Suffice it to say, I studied the Holocaust with what some called morbid interest from 1959 to 2010 substantially believing the whole thing. In 2010, the scales fell from my eyes and I discovered that I had been wrong those 51 years, and my shock at discovering this motivates me today in revisionism, specifi-cally with regard to the events that gave rise to the story, and the many things in the story that didn’t happen or, more accurately, didn’t happen that way.

SECOND: If the “Holocaust” never happened, then what did happen during World War II? And why?

A2: A lot happened during the package of events we know as “World War II,” and one thing we can say about all of them is that for the most part, the stories we (and they) receive about “that War” are misinformed and/or deceitful. Your question is far too open-ended to answer, even if I knew the answer(s). I have pursued the ans-wers all my life, to the exclusion – to some extent – of other historical matters that might have interested me. The available “answers”—including sincere, informed gues-ses— outnumber the facts by 1,000 to one. Keep that in mind as you consider what you hear/read.

THIRD: how do you answer to all the people who present you with “proof” such as photographs, documents, war records, etc.?

A3: My answers to “proofs” depend on what is offered. If they are pictures of bulldozers pushing piles of bodies into trenches, I point out that this is of people who died in former concentration camps AFTER the camps were “liberated” (there was no place for the inmates to go upon “liberation,” so many of them stayed right where they were for a while). When the emaciated condition of the bodies is pointed out, I explain that most of them died of typhus, which is a “wasting” disease. Everyone who experiences typhus loses an enormous amount of weight, INCLUDING people who recover from it and regain the weight. Those who die of it never regain the weight. And so on. And on. The amount of bogus “proof” of the Holocaust exceeds even the proof that God designed Man and all the rest of Creation (which proof, as you know, is abundant). It comes down to the willingness to seriously consider the “proof.”

FOURTH: what about survivors? There are still people alive today who claim that they survived the “Holocaust.” What is your opinion on them? Are they just lying? Or did something happen to them and they just don't remember so they’re making things up?

A4: Many of the people I meet present themselves as good and honest people worthy of my trust, when I feel pretty sure they aren’t. The difference between these people and “Holocaust survivors” is that most of those receiving these protestations feel themselves under moral (or psychological) pressure to credit the accounts these people give of themselves. Veterans, facing such incentives as this, are also prone to such behavior and many people present themselves as veterans who never wore a uniform. People who really did suffer the incredible privations experienced by many in concentration camps tend not to talk about it – rather like real veterans. The significance I at-tach to the vocal behavior of many people presenting themselves as victims is that opportunity produces people eager to exploit it.

FIFTH: why are you a revisionist? Is it because you want to make sure everyone knows the truth? Or is it that you just want to dispel the “myth” of the “Holocaust”? Is there perhaps a more personal reason? Or is it just because? Is there a goal to being a revisionist? Are you trying to achieve something?

A5: I am a revisionist for three reasons: First, I seek to atone for my intellectual sin in having believed the story, as described above, for the great bulk of my long life; Second, I deeply resent the coercion, repression, and censorship that is routinely and widely employed by those who support the dominant story, including LAWS AGAINST expressing doubt about any significant detail of the dominant story – it all amounts to a SERIOUS attack on the essential right to free speech; and Third, the Holocaust Legend is vigorously exploited by Israel and self-anointed representatives of world Jewry to so enshrine Israel and Jews in a mantle of martyrdom that nothing they – or any of them – do, however in fact reprehensible, may be deemed in any way culpable. The Holocaust Legend to-day empowers the greatest threat to world peace on the planet.

SIXTH: Is there a unified body of revisionists that agree on the same thing? Or is being a revisionist an individual experience? Is there a generally agreed among revisionists theory about what happened? Something along those lines?

A6: I can’t imagine any sort of writ that would qualify a (Holocaust) revisionist. Every revisionist no doubt has his own standards by which she might judge some other person a revisionist or “not a revisionist,” but at bottom this is like asking “Did the Holocaust happen?” Well, EVERYONE who chooses to credit one account of history over some other account could be said to be a revisionist. Revisionism in any case is a matter of degree – so I might style some other person whose opinions I was extensively familiar with, “more” of a revisionist or “less” of a revisionist. Sorry, the concept is not patented, copyrighted, or even well-defined, any more than is, in fact, the Holocaust itself. Revisionist is – that’s right – a label

END

In my own response I did include links to two YouTube videos, Denierbud’s One Third of the Holocaust, and Eric Hunt’s The Last Days of the Big Lie.

And I suggested that he ask his professor if he or she could provide the name, with proof, of one person killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz. Last night I rang him up. A young man with a diffident manner answered. He was unsure about most everything

He did say, however, that he had actually asked his professor my one-person-with-proof question. His professor answered that he could not, but that he did know a couple others who could. The student asked me what I would consider to be proof. I told him that I would not want to put any limits on what a proof might be. That that decision was the responsibility of the person who submitted it.

He thanked me very much. I see now that he might have felt a little uncomfortable talking to me. Maybe I’ll call him again. I’d like to follow up with the “one person, with proof” question. Since he appears to be willing to talk about it.

*** Every once in a while I reprint here a story I published in Smith’s Report ten years back. It’s interesting to note how the work has evolved over the intervening ten years. What was I doing in 2003 for example? Last night I decided to take a run at it.

The first thing I noted was to be reminded that my computer exploded a couple times over the last ten years, stuff is missing and a good part of the rest is very disorganized. Yet within minutes I found an article that took me by surprise. I do not recall writing it. or that it was ever published. The surprise is that it treats with the very same issues that I begin with in this issue of SR 201. Primarily the struggle in the writing to continue the work without ignoring what is going on in the life itself. What I found is that I was already addressing that issue ten years ago.

That was about the time that Richard Thomas, my original Web-master, had to bow out of CODOH to take care of his own business. And then Richard Widmann, the CODOH Editor in Chief, bowed out for family and work reasons. I was alone. I decided to replace my work on CODOH with a new page that I would call Smith’s Online Report and Journal. Nothing ever came of it. It was probably too much for me to do by myself on top of the Campus Project and making an effort to get revisionism back onto radio.

But there was this first article, essay, journal entry, whatever. It’s titled “The Elephants (plural) In The Room.” It demonstrates how things can remain the same while they change constantly. The work goes on, as does the life itself.

Here it is, from ten years ago.

*** Forgive me. I’m going to argue for intellectual freedom here, and try to contribute a human face to that argument. Even when it addresses such taboo subjects as whether the U.S. alliance with Israel is either just or moral. Or how the orthodox Holocaust story is exploited by Israeli-firsters to compromise American institutions and ideals, and turn entire cultures against us. That’s what I want to do here.

It’s said that desire is at the root of all suffering. I don’t know if it is or isn’t, but it does ring a bell softly for me. Israeli Jews want to colonize Arab land in Palestine one village, one hilltop at a time. They are willing to risk war and death to fulfill their desire. Palestinian Arabs want the Jews to stop taking their land and creating Jewish-only settlements on it. They are willing to risk war and death to fulfill their desire. Yes, I think there’s some-thing to the desire-creates-suffering theory.

It may be that the endless talk about “solutions” to the problems in the Middle East and around the world is the wrong focus. How many solutions have been proffered to the Jewish/Arab issue in Palestine? Fifty years of solutions and we’re still looking for more. I think it’s time that we look at the problem rather than another solution. Desire is the problem. There is no solution to desire. Every party to conflict has a solution for it, solutions are a dime a dozen, yet the conflict goes on and on. With respect to the theory that desire-creates-suffering, wanting what is right or wrong is neither here nor there.

My work, which is the expression of my desire, is to put a human face on such issues. I do not expect to be successful, so the question of suffering is compromised. I’m prepared to suffer a little. My perspective on intellectual freedom differs from that of our intellectual classes. I hold that intellectual freedom should be the right of all. They hold that it should be the right of some. Those who are not “bigots.” If you raise questions about the Holocaust issue, or the value of the U.S. alliance with Israel, you are a bigot and your freedom to engage in public debate is curtailed.

It may be that the endless talk about “solutions” to the problems in the Middle East and around the world is the wrong focus. How many solutions have been proffered to the Jewish/Arab issue in Palestine? Fifty years of solutions and we’re still looking for more. I think it’s time that we look at the problem rather than another solution. Desire is the problem.

I am routinely identified as a bigot by all the best people – those who work for the Holocaust Industry, those who work for the universities, for the press. Yet, as a bigot, I share with those good people all their issues of desire, violence, and suffering. There is no escaping it. We’re all in it together, the bigots, the anti-bigots, and those who are only onlookers. There are none who are only onlookers.

We all live with desire. I want to go on writing words on paper – forever – and have people read them. I am perfectly aware of the anxiety I feel when thought recalls that no matter what I desire, pretty soon the words will stop and it will be all over with me. That’s life. The desire to avoid suffering is still desire.

I want our sixteen-year-old daughter to return from the dark sea of drug addiction in which she drifts so silently. I want her to rise up as it were and once again walk in sunlight and the breathtaking transparency of the morning air while her voice and her song are heard all about. My desire for this is an unrelenting source of suffering to me.

Thought being what it is – but then, what is it really? – it chooses this moment to recall watching a home video on television where, after 9/11, Osama bin Laden is seen sitting on a rug on the floor of a darkened house somewhere in Afghanistan. He is surrounded by half a dozen associates, all men, discussing the tremendous success of the attack on the World Trade Towers.

According to the translation of his spoken words, Osama was agreeably surprised that the towers fell all the way down. He had expected only those floors to fall that were above the point of impact where the aircraft struck the buildings. Osama may not have gotten more pleasure than he had desired, but he had gotten more than he had expected. His gestures and words were warmly, softly ebullient.

If Osama’s desire was to murder thousands of Americans, as it appears it was, and he was successful, and he felt no remorse but was pleased about it, as it ap-pears he was, then the desire-equals-suffering theory could be found wanting. His desire did lead to others suffering, but that’s a different question, perhaps only an irony of life. Still, the story isn’t over. Which is the point. The story never is over so long as you think in terms of story. And that’s how we do think. That’s the miracle, as Picasso remarked, that keeps us from dissolving in our bath.

The fact that the story is not over suggests that Osama’s desire to kill Americans may not have been fulfilled on 9/11. Logically speaking, why should it have been? There are so many of us, we are giving so much money to Israeli Jews – tens and tens of billions of dollars – who press on with their forced settlement and colonization of Arab land in Palestine, a humiliating and brutal experience for Palestinian Arabs, that I suspect that Osama’s desire for vengeance far exceeded his accomplishment. His problem with his desire is still before him. Maybe he will never be able to kill as many of us as he believes he should kill in order to complete God’s work – the God as Osama put it who “raised the heavens without pillars,” a beautiful phrase that I suppose is in the Koran.

Osama is a damaged man, or was, whatever the case might be. The truth of the matter is that we are all damaged. It’s important that we understand that. That’s why we are unable to make heads or tails of the great religious teachings. Do not murder, do not steal, do not lie, do not covet what belongs to others, do not treat others as you would not have others treat you. With respect to human culture, what a laugh. Thousands of years of such counsel, yet we get nowhere with it. Thousands of years reading the sacred texts, yet here we are. Consider the history of the 20th century. Consider the brief history of the 21st century. Consider the administrations of Iraq, Israel, and the United States.

The problem appears to be in our genes, together with the cultural context in which our genes find themselves at any given moment, that dictates how extensively we are willing to damage the others. I don’t know how to even try to change that. Still, here we are. It’s only human to want to help, to find the solution to the problems that we created, and to be willing to suffer for the wanting. If the theory that desire-creates-suffering holds water.

Every morning I get up at 8.30 by the alarm, urinate, and brush my hair and beard with my fingers so that if Alicia opens her eyes, even for a moment, I will look okay. I may be 73 years old but I still want to look okay. Desire in the heart, pain in the mirror.

In this journal I am going to follow desire wherever it leads me and write about the trip. For better or worse. Like everyone else, my desires are rooted in my genes and my culture – did one or more of Osama’s wives do something terrible to him? I will write about why I think there should be an open debate on the U.S. / Israeli alliance. About why the Holocaust story, as the professorial class teaches it, is a fraud, and why it matters. And how the latter is exploited to morally legitimize the former.

There is a public life and a private, or personal life. It’s argued that it is reasonable that one wants to keep them separate. The question of an inner life and an outer one is another matter. Talking about the unconscious, the soul, the inner and outer life, are only ways of speaking. Outside the imagination or belief, both sub-categories of thought, these places don’t exist.

All we have for each other is language. All we have for ourselves is one life, a mish-mash of the personal and the public. All I have for the reader are the words I put on paper.

Every morning I get up at 8.30 by the alarm, urinate, and brush my hair and beard with my fingers so that if Alicia opens her eyes, even for a moment, I will look okay. I may be 73 years old but I still want to look okay. Desire in the heart, pain in the mirror. I put on a robe and walk across our little indoor patio filled with flowers and birdcages and bird song and dogs and cats to the kitchen. I say good morning to Cyrano, the parrot that Audrey left with us when she returned with her family to the States and was killed in her automobile at a rural crossroads in Alabama.

I make enough coffee for three large cups, one for Alicia, two for me (what’s fair is fair), and at 9am I turn on CNN to discover, as I like to put it when asked, who’s been killing who overnight. I note that I want to learn that the Palestinians have not been entirely crushed, that one among them has chosen this morning to cross into Israel, or into some Jewish settlement in the Palestinian territories, and given his life to take some of theirs.

I understand that this is a stupid and brutal desire. It’s not that I want anyone to be hurt. What I want is evidence that Palestinians still believe they have a chance, and some evidence that they do have a chance. I’m a good American that way. I’m for the under-dog. I’m a bad American in another way. I argue that it is stupid and brutal for the U.S. Congress and one U.S. administration after another to continue to fund the Israeli military so that it can go on brutalizing and humiliating Arabs.

Palestinians appear to have no way to protest the creeping con-quest of their land and destruction of their society by Jews other than to kill Jews who ride buses, eat pizza, and attend bat mitzvahs. The precedent of Gandhi, King and others is outside Arab culture. Arab martyrdom is machismo at its ultimate. I’m not forgetting that some suicide martyrs are young women. What’s the difference?

One wonders what the inner life of a Sharon might look like. Or an Arafat or a Saddam. Or a Bush for that matter, though Bush has less to him than the others. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong about Bush. The interior life, if I can use this literary expression, of Sharon must resemble the more disgusting scenes in Dante’s Hell. I’ll never know. He may still have time to finish off Israel in the eyes of the world, contribute to the disgust that a growing number of people across the planet feel toward the U.S., and bring his memoirs up to date. I’ll just have to wait and see.

During a crisis, every time a writer, anyone, says what he thinks, he is going to offend someone. Every time he reveals what is really in his heart, he will offend someone. Can’t help it. No culture is interested in the individuality of its members. Individuals are seen as a threat. They are a threat. The desire of culture is to remain as it is. Individuality causes culture to feel distress. It‘s like how you feel after a very large, very bad dinner. When individuals cause the culture to feel distress, the culture turns first to slander, the bad-tasting Tums that the cultural elites use to protect the status quo, support the thought police, and destroy reputations, careers, lives. Nothing new under the sun.

To a man like me, culture doesn’t matter. Not much anyhow. It doesn’t much matter that my own culture has spit me out like a chewed-over prune pit. I pay no attention to slander or to thought police. I have a streak of insensitivity running right through the center of my character. I have the good fortune to have no reputation to guard, no career to further, and not enough time left to worry about it. Nothing new under the sun.

END

*** Carolyn Yeager is creating a special website to mark Jan. 27, 2014 as the “1st International Day of Commemoration Honoring Revisionist Success in Returning Sanity to 20th Century History.”

As you know, Jan. 27th is designated by the United Nations as “International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust”, with ceremonies and speakers at the UN in New York and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial in Poland. 2014 is the 69th anniversary of the “liberation of Auschwitz”; next year will be the 70th. She notes that we should be prepared for a good response, especially as A-B's fakery has been so well exposed by revisionists.

The theme of the Commemoration will be “A Return to Sanity” taken from Mattogno's book Auschwitz: The Case for Sanity. This book will be featured in several ways. She is asking a number of us to supply here with, or suggest, a piece of our writing that we consider our best, easy-to-grasp, powerful argument directed at the Auschwitz-Birkenau mythos. It can be an essay, a chapter from a book, a speech, etc. It will be included in a section featuring revisionist writings on the subject.

Sounds like a very good idea to me. Terrific. She has already made a number of decisions with regard to the documents she is going to use. More next month.