From the Editor

In this issue The Journal of Historical Review is proud to introduce Italian Revisionist Carlo Mattogno to the English-speaking world. Mr. Mattogno, a classicist and Orientalist trained in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Hebrew, has during the past three years produced a stream of Revisionist monographs painstakingly analyzing and debunking Exterminationist claims relating to the Holocaust. This first part of Mr. Mattogno's “historico-bibliographical introduction to Revisionist historiography,” which ran first in the outstanding French Revisionist quarterly Annales d'histoire révisionniste, is as lucid and salient an exposure of Exterminationist rodomontade on the “Final Solution” – myth and reality – as we've seen anywhere. (Part II will appear in the Fall issue of The JHR.)

The Journal is also pleased to welcome Paul Grubach, a graduate student in sociobiology, to the ranks of Revisionist writers. Mr. Grubach's careful study of the function of the charge of “anti-Semitism” as not merely thwarting but rendering taboo discussion of the role of Jews in American and world politics could not be more timely in the light of recent developments in Washington and the Middle East.

Two important articles by Editorial Advisory Committee member Mark Weber appear in this issue. Weber's “Open Letter to the Reverend Herbener” is not only an important survey of the scanty documentary evidence on the transit camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, which Exterminationists present as “killing centers,” but a challenge to Exterminationists to debate their claims in the public forum, a challenge that has been taken up by a group of fundamentalist Christian Exterminationists subsequent to the appearance of the “open letter” in 1987. The debate is scheduled for early 1988, in Washington, D.C. Weber's analysis of West Germany's huge reparations payments to Jews, and to the state of Israel, since the 1950's is noteworthy, not merely for documenting the massive subvention these enforced payments have represented for Jewry, but for using the reparations statistics to impugn still further the arbitrary and false figure of six million Jews dead in Europe during the Second World War.

Martin Merson, a former naval officer, veteran of the Pacific War, and retired federal administrator, has, in reviewing an important testimony by the late Admiral James O. Richardson, leveled important criticisms at the American Establishment historians of Pearl Harbor, who remain as anxious as ever to safeguard the Roosevelt flame by continuing to tarnish the reputations of the unwitting defenders of Pearl Harbor. Merson has further reported on the continuing tenacity of the Pearl Harbor Survivors' Association in its fight to vindicate the commanders of Army and Navy forces at Pearl, General Short and Admiral Kimmel, as to their role on that “day of infamy.”

As ever, the book reviews reflect the broad concerns of Historical Revisionism, concerns imposed by the ruling historical Establishment's continuing obsessive attempts to hamper the rewriting of the propaganda of the victors of the Second World War. On the contrary, there are unremitting attempts by some, particularly militant Zionist interests, to drum up new hatreds out of old witness the campaigns against Kurt Waldheim and German-American rocket expert Arthur Rudolph, campaigns ably dissected by historians John Ries and Robert Countess in their reviews of two relevant books.

Englishman Dennis Nayland Smith applauds an Austrian philosopher's persuasive case for Josef Stalin as a more able manipulator than either Adolf Hitler or the Führer's Western counterparts, Roosevelt and Churchill, while Jack Wikoff reviews yet another treatment of Hitler, this time in the form of a gloss on World War II caricatures, which fails to rise above wartime partisanship and hatreds.

Libertarians John Strang and Samuel Konkin throw approving yet critical glances on two books dealing with American history. The two libertarians' anti-statist perspective has afforded them valuable insights on a biography of the man who succeeded Dwight Eisenhower's brother as chief of America's wartime concentration camps for Japanese-Americans, as well as on a neo-Marxist study of the history of the American Left.

The necessity for Historical Revisionism, the bringing of historiography into accord with the facts, is being demonstrated daily by reports from the Soviet Union and China, where ruling elites are laboriously scrapping a wrong-headed and injurious scheme of history, politics and economics, Marxism-Leninism. Mao Tse-tung and Josef Stalin, each of whom consolidated a mighty continental empire, and went on to rule absolutely over his creation for three decades, have been relegated to the status of a virtual non-person, in Mao's case, or to the object of growing condemnation, in the case of Stalin. IHR and The Journal of Historical Review do not intend to confer cheap laurels on regimes which continue to oppress their own peoples and the subject nations under the rule, regimes which continue to falsify history by generating fake documents and perjured testimony in order to send innocent men to their deaths. Nevertheless, the ruthlessly practical men who wield power in the USSR and China are finding that they cannot reform the present without revising the official view of the past, a revision which has lately included acknowledgement of the extent of and state role in the great Ukrainian hunger terror of the early thirties.

It is imperative that the leaders of the Western world now join in the trend toward historical revision now underway in the Communist nations by jettisoning wartime propaganda, including the Holocaust myth, that has long congealed into a hardened mass of antipathies and hatreds, ever ready for evocation against enemies old and new. The key to Western Revisionism, furthermore, is the skewed and distorted history of the two world wars, which continues to sap the West's collective will to reasoned deliberationn and caution in matters foreign and domestic by holding the image of a diabolical enemy up to our politicians and our populace, an enemy which must not be “appeased,” but rather annihilated, not once but again and again in ritual trials and auto-da-fés. If the JHR, and the Institute for Historical Review, have one great task, it is to bring home to the world, as forcefully as possible, that the ongoing Hitlermania and Nazi frenzy have not supplied a basis for peace and understanding, as good-hearted supporters of the United Naffons and other peace schemes may have once thought rather, unchallenged lies and distortions about the Second World War have supplied leaders, East and West, with all the weapons, and all the power, to accomplish far greater devastation and ruin than Hitler and his most evil henchmen ever could have dreamed.

– Theodore J. O'Keefe