Letters to the Editor
General Remarks
Walter Lüftl Defeats Pavlov
Dear Mr. Rudolf!
End of 1997, I accidentally tumbled over the topic “revisionism.” I was actually looking for works authored by Walter Lüftl, the former president of Austria’s Chamber of Civil Engineers, who, in the 1980s, had worked on public debt issues and who had published his insights (derived from mathematical formulas) in books together with Paul C. Martin. When I found technical papers on crematory capacities during my search, I initially did not see any importance in it, as I was not interested in that issue. A few months later I found that paper again with the help of an internet search engine, but this time I read it.
Until then I was an adherent of the official thesis of extermination, because in 1984 (during a student exchange) I had visited the Auschwitz camp, and the four million victim number was still in my memory. During that visit I purchased two books, Rudolf Höß’ memoirs and a general documentation of the camp. After my return from this camp visit, I literally devoured both books, whose exact titles I cannot recall. It all seemed so unreal, so atrocious, and yet it apparently happened. Why should I doubt the witness accounts? I also had seen the footage before, where caterpillars pushed those emaciated corpses together in Bergen-Belsen. It all seemed to fit together, and it never crossed my mind to questions these thing scientifically. Perhaps this is linked to a kind of “psychological blockade.” I also wouldn’t pose penetrating questions to a woman with a ripped blouse approaching me crying out for help, if she perhaps was a little too complacent toward her rapist or if this rapist existed only in her fantasy. Courtesy forbids pestering a person perceived to be a victim.
Lüftl’s article had in impact on me like a bomb! My emotions switched between amazement, horror, and fascination. But I never had any doubts about Lüftl’s explanations. This man was so knowledgeable and equipped with a major reputation, so that he certainly would not jeopardize his existence with some senseless brown games. After all, he had made several Members of Parliament in Vienna aware of the danger that feebleminded witness accounts could lure the brown hordes to creep out of their caves.
To cut a long story short: The topic electrified me, and I started to search for it consciously. This unavoidably led to your name and your fate.
I herewith want to express my utmost respect for your extraordinary courage, your determination, and your apparent iron will power for the sake of the truth.
For many years now I have been downloading your articles and the papers of others from your website at www.vho.org. For many years I have also been reading about your appeals, your permanent flight and all the problems resulting from it. For many years I had a bad conscience, because on one hand I was grateful for the dangerous work performed by the revisionists, but on the other hand I was too cowardly to risk even much less than you, for example by appearing on some unofficial black lists for having ordered books from you. After all, I assume that the most important secret services monitor closely your Internet activities and are aware of your contacts and customers.
The most recent scandals in Germany, however, finally burned my fuse. The mental diarrhea of the bootlicking German politics and the sycophantic system media regarding crimes of the Third Reich nauseate me. I am reminded of the red propaganda of the late Communist East German Democratic Republic. During a recent TV talk show, American-Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein shone as a bright star between all those wet blankets of German politics.
By the way, more people than I thought of only half a year ago are aware of the true events of the past. The Internet seems to have become a very important instrument for the distribution of historical facts. But most people react as I did: they simply don’t dare. They fear reprisals by the authorities. It is the well-known coward behavior of hundreds of thousands of individuals – including me – who simply do not have the spine to put up and argue resistance.
Many other individuals simply do not want to face the truth. What they agreed upon will be recanted or labeled as “nonsense” just a few minutes later. I have experienced that over and over again during discussions and was repeatedly disillusioned. You can confront the brightest heads with simple mathematics; it is all in vain. The Pavlovian reflex always kicks in.
Most people apparently fear that all security fences around them might collapse. I observed a similar phenomenon during the early 1990s in East Germany, when the East Germans suddenly found themselves in a room devoid of their former communist ideology. Despite all the deficiencies of their former dictatorship and the temptations of the West, they did not want to face reality as it was unfolding. The old system had vanished almost noiselessly in a black hole. Even I had a funny feeling in my stomach as I walked through the Brandenburg Gate during those days and could inspect the tables of slowpokes offering officer coats and epaulettes, which used to be so intimidating. Over night the insignia of power had ended up on the flea markets. It all seemed to have been just a nightmare.
May a guardian angel always hover over you protecting your mental and physical well-being. For the future, I wish all the best for you and your coworkers.
Cordially, HM, Saxony
Chicago Conference Suggested
Dear Mr. Rudolf,
I just want to mention that The Revisionist is a great publication and I enjoy all the articles and their presentation. The publication is reminiscent of the Journal of Historical Review of the 80’s, which published a great series and collection of intellectual articles. It can’t be emphasized enough that the integrity of your magazine must be maintained to avoid being labeled a scandal book; just as the JHR, there must be detached considerations with academic, even scientific, treatises so that the articles can be shared with the uninitiated. I know it can be difficult to do when the subject matter can be as absurd and ludicrous as the WWII relocation matters. One suggestion I’d like to make concerns conferences: I was in Chicago many years ago for a JHR gathering and it was quite inspirational. It seems that most of them tend to be in California or some other distant place and not easy to participate in. That aside, I think it is a wonderful idea to have gatherings of like-minded people along with featured speakers so that ideas can be shared as well as experiencing the thrill of great camaraderie. Perhaps you may want to host a weekend conference sometime for your loyal supporters. In spite of the impossible odds, it’s great to have another publication such as yours. Sometimes I am surprised at the new evidence emerging after all this time. It needs to be made public.
By coincidence I just viewed a video tape of a high school presentation that was given to me by an aunt. It was about a Jewish couple who were, of course, survivors… and in this case professional survivors, as I think they are the same people who gave a lecture in a local high school. The man was interned almost three years and was shuffled to over six camps during that period… must be the luckiest man alive to have survived all those death camps. He didn’t actually see them, naturally, but he knew that there were Jewish skin lampshades, and when he did shower he used Jewish derived soap.
Their diet was so limited that if you missed a meal you would perish from starvation; they were so jammed in the train cars that, if someone wanted to turn around, everyone had to turn around. The women were marched from a camp in rows of five without food, so they had to run from the columns and snatch vegetables from the farmland – but if the guards saw them they would be shot. Aso., asf., etc,… I think you know the lecture by heart.
The teacher was more of a survivor than the Jewish couple, since she filled in all the facts: 12 million victims total, the usual 6 million Jewish victims, a rather slick propaganda effort for the students. Deniers were mentioned during the talks, and the students were given stern warnings as to the dangers of listening to them, so beware!
The irony of the survivor phenomenon is that someone who lasts 3 years in at least 6 different camps is living proof that there was no holocaust.
Best regards, Cliff Stroke
Re.: Ch. Lindtner, “A New Buddhist-Christian Parable,” TR, 2(1) (2004), pp. 12-24.
Danish scholar and renowned specialist in Sanskrit, Pali, and Buddhist documentary studies, Dr. Christian Lindtner, has promoted his theory for some years in print and in lecture format, that the NT Gospels and Jesus Christ are completely non-historical and, rather, are the result of Buddhist missionary activity in Palestine in the First Century AD (Christian Lindtner Theory = CLT).
The theory holds that these Buddhist missionaries (= BM) composed oral and/or written stories reflecting the Buddha’s life and teachings by using puns on proper nouns, verbs, adjectives, and geographical terms so that the religious ideas of the Buddha might be propagated by means of using an Israelitish context, but in the Greek language – the lingua franca – of the era.
A bold and radical thesis indeed, Dr. Lindtner is quite serious about its historical verifiability, and he held a conference on September 11-13, 2003, at the Folkets Hus in Klavrestrom, Sweden, where some German scholars and I responded in order to support or criticize the theory.
On the campus of the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, on September 20, 2002, at a “Christianity and Native Cultures” conference (St. Mary’s College), Dr. Lindtner also presented his theory, and I offered a critical response, in which I claimed, among other points, that if the purpose of the BM was to promote Buddhism under the guise of a fraudulently created corpus of NT documents, then the BM utterly failed in their purpose since the result was a new and highly successful religion (Christianity) that at no significant point agrees with Buddhism.
In the present paper, I shall take my earlier critical reflections to a more detailed level of analysis. I must admit at the beginning that I have no competence in Sanskrit or Pali, but I do hold a doctorate in New Testament Greek Text and have spent the past 40+ years in almost daily reading and study of the NT documents.
The Pun Method for Propagating Buddhism
Dr. Lindtner offers evidence for this method, but for my purposes, I must ask if there is evidence that the method was demonstrably employed for creating the NT Gospels as he insists. His evidence is that his list of puns is the evidence – certainly a fair enough proposal in itself – but the final result must be: Is his theory convincing?
I ask certain questions that I consider to be crucial to demonstrating the CLT and these questions are based, in part, on the concrete statistics for the NT corpus of 27 canonical writings.
Using Nestle’s Novum Testamentum Graece 24th Edition (1960), I calculated that in 657 printed pages with approximately 7 words per line and approximately 30 lines per page that there are about 138,000 words and particles in the average printed Greek New Testament. Dr. Lindtner has stated of the whole Gospel Story that “It’s all exactly there in the Buddhist documents.” And, I take this as a fair statement of his thesis. Therefore, I shall take as a starting point that a statistical analysis is also a reasonable approach for verification or falsification of the CLT. (All the while, I keep in mind that Dr. Lindtner is an atheist and does not believe in Buddhism either.)
- How many Proper Personal Nouns are alleged to have been created by the BM from Sanskrit? An approximate yet concrete number ought to be available from the CLT for comparative analysis.
- How many Proper Personal Nouns are actually found in the Four Gospels themselves? Again, a definite number is readily at hand by means of computer generated word count.
- What percentage of the latter is alleged by the CLT to be based on BM puns? Is the percentage small, large, very small, or very large?
- Same questions for Geographical Place Names and verbs and adjectives. This sort of correlation must also be asked for Buddhist concepts such as Monism, Maya, Buddhahood, Samsara, Karma, the negation of the individual, and other key “doctrines” of Buddhism. (I place “doctrines” in quotation marks, since my understanding of Buddhism is that, at bottom, there can be no real doctrine or dogma because of the overriding principle of illusion (maya) itself – which destroys traditional logical postulates and analytical treatment.)
- Is Dr. Lindtner’s concordance method for discovering BM puns itself valid? His method, I have observed, is to use a Watchtower Greek interlinear with English for finding puns, with various transpositions of letters alleged to be based on generally accepted linguistic principles. On this crucial aspect of his method, linguistic experts must be consulted for their critical analysis.
- Since his method is not primarily focused on contexts and historical and cultural settings within the NT corpus, one may ask if the concordance method might find in, for example, the US Constitution or any lengthy document, similar “puns” that might then be used to demonstrate that BM had been at work, as it were, on this document.
- Is the CLT reliable for comparing any two languages beyond Greek and Sanskrit in order to find BM puns? For example, might one use a computer generated analysis to find such puns in the Soviet Constitution or a Swahili novel or a Chinese history book?
- In what significant ways – if any – does the CLT concordance method differ from the recent Bible Code fraud wherein a Jewish Talmudic fanatic discovered all sorts of modern events prophesied – as he dogmatized – in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament? Or by which Christian Identity (whom I refer to as “Caucasian Identity”) types have found the White Race to be Israel and thus the objects of God’s primary revelatory and salvific activity? Likewise, might one argue that the Russian Christian Ivan Panin a century ago was correct in his “Bible Numerics” theory that God designed both the OT and the NT with a perfect correlation of numbers and multiples of numerical combinations so that Christians can verify the texts – with Panin accomplishing his work without the aid of computers, I might add! But, a careful study of Panin’s work demonstrates that he sometimes freely contrived his numbers with a +1 here or a –1 there in order to force the data to fit his theory.
- Indeed, one might argue – as Dr. Lindtner does – that BM “PUN-ers” (my term) did make attempts to piggyback onto existing traditions and documents found in India, China, Persia, and the Fertile Crescent in order to propagate their Buddhist “Gospel.” (I place this noun in quotation marks since I hold that maya precludes any meaningful “good news” of any sort.) And I suggest a bit humorously that one might even consider these “PUN-ers” to have been associated with “the Punjab” region, with the Persian Panjab from the Sanskrit panca apah (= “the five rivers”) and thus discover “Pun-ers” in Jesus’ reference to “the five loaves” of bread and the two fish for a certain miracle in Mark 6:38 (but seven in Matthew 15:34 and Mark 8:5).
- Matthew is at the center of the CLT as an Ur-Buddhist Document, but I ask where the BM “PUN-er” found “Jesus” (or, “Jehoshuah” or similar spelling) in his “Ur-“ source. One must begin with Matthew 1:1 and account for “Biblos geneseos Iesou Christou huiou David huiou Abraam” and then demonstrate the “Ur-” sourcing for the remaining dozens of Personal Names leading to verse 16. Likewise for Luke 3:23-37. Likewise for Luke’s radically historical framework in 1:1-4 and then 2:1-6. Does the CLT find the patriarchal Abraham in an alpha privative (= no) plus Brahman, and thus Abraham as “anti-/no Brahman” as I have read in a Theosophist writer?
- At the close of Matthew (28:19-20), the CLT BM “PUN-er” has his Jesus commanding his disciples to go worldwide and evangelize homo sapiens types with a personal belief and commitment to Jesus the Christ, not to a denial of their individuation so that they might be reabsorbed into a monistic abstraction that is, at bottom, maya-illusion. One might add to this mix that Jesus Christ promises here to be (= existence rather than Buddhist non-existence) with them “heos tes sunteleias tou aionos” (unto the concluding of the world-age) – all this quite contrary to a Buddhist cycle of reincarnations on an eternal wheel wherein the soul is deterministically condemned to the impossibility of meaningful resolution of his/her endless cycle of reincarnations. One must confront here the opposite teaching of the Buddha and thus one must ask: If the BM “PUN-ers” were really seeking to promote Buddhism through this marvelous literary scam, then they quite “marvelously” failed egregiously, in my opinion. On the contrary, a new religion developed from their creative scam and this new religion regularly fails to bring anyone to embrace Buddhism. Further, I may add that a homo sapiens is much more likely to become a Buddhist by walking a beach and staring at the billions of grains of sand rather than by reading the alleged BM Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, or Acts.
- Additional questions for CLT analysis are based on a text critical and historical critical approach. Some of them are:
- Regarding textual criticism, Dr. Lindtner informed me in an email on August 19th, 2003:
- For the NT text we have some 13,000 documents to work with – about 8,000 Greek, 4,000 Latin, and 1,000 in other languages. And we have the NT text rather well established for the mid-Fourth Century AD with a major effort now to take the text back into the Third Century AD. Question: Can we have any certainty that any Buddhist written texts in Sanskrit existed before the Second Century AD?
- Perhaps one must consider that some Hindu religionists even created “Buddhism” out of whole cloth and that there was never a historical Gauttama, but that some “PUN-ers” created it as well. One matter, however, is clear: As in the saying “No holes? No Holocaust!” one can affirm “No Resurrection? No Christianity!” If the CLT be firmly established, then Paul was quite correct when he stated in First Corinthians 15:16-17 that if Jesus did not rise from the dead, “your faith is vain” (= mataia).
How much time in months and years did the BM labor to produce this fraud? Where did they live and support themselves financially all this time? With what local non-BM neighbors did they associate with and how did they keep this gigantic fraud a secret? Or, did they openly discuss with locals what they were doing? How did they manage to spread their Matthew, Mark, Luke, John et alia so that significant numbers in the thousands came to embrace the fraudulent Jesus Christ and the fraudulent historical non-events, and non-persons they created? What role did the BM themselves play in preaching and teaching this gigantic fraud? Did they suffer persecution and even death at the hands of Pharisees and Sadducees and Roman authorities for their fraudulent Gospels? Did the BM have before them copies of Hebrew and Greek Old Testament writings? If so, where did they obtain these? From a synagogue president? Did they fraudulently represent themselves as pious Israelites in order to gain access to these documents? How did they gain linguistic skills necessary for this marvelous fraud? Did they make written notes on papyrus or vellum or parchment with quill pens and the black ink of the day? How did they earn money to buy these expensive materials? How did they go about the mechanics of a general outline of their “Jesus story hoax” and then count and correlate words and letters and then organize and write the final product? How long in running feet (there was no codex form of writings in that early period) was the final product? Was it 10 meters long? Was it 100 meters long? Did they immediately make extra copies in the event the Israelite religious authorities at the Temple might confiscate the documents? Were they faced with arguments from Pharisees as was their fraudulent Jesus in the BM story itself? Were any BM “PUN-ers” ever tried judicially and crucified by Romans at the urging of Temple priests and lawyers?
These critical questions could continue to a much greater length, but at least these must be confronted by the CLT.
“Unfortunately there is no such thing! I am one of the few persons who (with my background in Latin and Greek) have discussed such things here and there when publishing critical editions of Sanskrit texts. In fact, I am considered one of the main authorities in this field.”
Concluding Remarks
Dr. Lindtner’s thesis is the result of several contributing factors, one being his expertise in his field of Sanskrit, Pali, and Buddhist studies; another is that he is accustomed to years of diligent, disciplined research; another is that he is fearless in promoting a theory that will – if it ever becomes widely publicized via the media – be met with enormous hostility and rejection by the masses of Christians, many Jews, and many Biblical scholars who have expertise in the Biblical languages. For instance, in April, 2002 at a Jesus Seminar in Dallas, Texas, where two scholars who believe very little in the NT is of historical credibility, I raised the basic CLT thesis and was met with immediate rejection by these two rejectionists.
As a Christian myself, I must promote full freedom of research and discussion and publication of every serious theory regarding religion, philosophy, history, politics, society, and culture, and, of course, the physical sciences.
I have debated a Darwinian Evolutionist (January 2002) in a public forum, because I hold this theory to be seriously lacking in rigorous scientific requirements for acceptance. I have debated the Jewish Holocaust Story because I hold that whatever happened to thousands of “Jews” ( a problematic term for careful definition) between 1939-1945 was fundamentally similar to what happened to all sorts of people caught up in the horrors of war, and I hold quite firmly that the Jewish Holocaust Story has become a religious dogma wherein Jewish sufferings – both real and alleged – are legislated into uniqueness (Einzigartigkeit) so that dissidents and so-called “deniers” are fined, fired, and imprisoned in many otherwise modern liberal countries. I can no more support the Jewish Holocaust Story as a religious dogma justifying billions of materialistic dollars in a Holocaust Industry of reparations than I could support a dogma for Negroes alive today in my own country to receive billions of dollars for what really happened or is alleged to have happened from the late 15th century to the early 19th century during the Slave Trade.
Thus, I participate in a critical analysis of the Christian Lindtner Theory and support his freedom to pursue it as long as he believes he has solid evidence for it, even though I remain unconvinced of the truthfulness of the theory. Scholars must debate each other’s theories, and they must do so in an ambience of cordiality as I seek to promote.
Robert H. Countess, PhD
New Testament Greek Text [address deleted, as Dr. Bob died in early 2005; ed.]
Re.: G. Rudolf, “On The Brink of World War Three,” TR 1(2) (2003), pp. 124-130.
To The Editor:
In The New York Times of April 18, 2004, historian Niall Ferguson devotes a paragraph to describing the ruthlessness with which the British suppressed the Iraqi insurgency of the 1920’s (“The Last Iraqi Insurgency”).
“Putting down this rebellion will require severity. In 1920, the British ended the rebellion through a combination of aerial bombardment and punitive village burning expeditions. It was not pretty. Even Winston Churchill, then the minister responsible for the air force, was shocked by the actions of some trigger happy pilots and vengeful ground troops.”
He couldn’t have been too shocked since he authorized the use of poison gas against these same rebels and the villages that supported them. As a historian, Ferguson must certainly have been aware of this, yet why he chose to ignore this little tidbit of information, one can only speculate. Perhaps it was to avoid any comparison to Saddam Hussein, who we have been told ad nauseam “gassed his own people.”
I guess if you gas people other than your own and for a good reason, such as putting down an insurgency, you do not surrender the moral high ground. It’s interesting to note that in the interwar period Spain’s use of poison gas against the Riffs in North Africa and Italy’s use of it against the Ethiopians received only muted criticism in the West. Later, during World War II, the same Churchill who gassed the Iraqis suggested gassing the Ruhr as re-retaliation for Germany’s retaliatory use of the V-1 and V-2 against London. When he was told it wasn’t feasible, he had to settle for Dresden instead. Even the United States did not shrink from the idea of using poison gas. In 1945 the United States military commissioned a study on the feasibility of drenching Tokyo and other Japanese population centers in phosgene gas (some fifty-thousand tons!) as a way of avoiding a costly invasion. The idea was rejected, not because it was immoral but because it was impractical. Eventually two atomic bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. These “weapons of mass destruction” have been generally regarded as a “godsend” by most Americans, since they brought the war in the Pacific to a rapid conclusion, thereby saving countless American lives.
Giuseppe, [email protected]
Re.: C. Mattogno, “Flames and Smoke from the Chimneys of Crematoria,” TR 2(1) (2004), pp. 73-78.
To the Editor
In your February 2004 edition of The Revisionist, Carlo Mattogno’s above mentioned article discusses the operation of crematoria muffles and the associated equipment.
I have spent over 30 years as a combustion engineer installing mainly gas and oil burners on water tube industrial boilers. On occasion, our equipment replaced coal burners on existing furnaces in order to reduce the high emissions common with coal firing. My experience, though not with crematoriums, I think can be extrapolated.
Black smoke from a stack while burning a solid fuel such as coal consists mainly of ash. It is also possible to have unburned hydrocarbons, but this is considered a dangerous explosive condition, so systems are designed primarily for complete combustion within the combustion chamber.
Smoke that contains unburned hydrocarbons is mainly caused by insufficient air or poor air-fuel mixing. Preheated air has a minimal effect. Preheated air is mainly a method to reduce fuel use, i.e., increase fuel efficiency. The air is preheated by passing through a heat exchanger system extracting heat from the furnace itself. There are different techniques to preheat the air.
If you ever tried burning garden waste such as grass clipping, leaves, and other refuse and you have a smoldering pile refusing to burn, simply take your leaf blower and induce air into the pile. Flames will quickly reignite with the additional air.
A furnace system consists chiefly of a burner, combustion chamber, exhaust breeching and a stack. The furnace or crematorium is designed to have complete combustion inside the combustion chamber for several reasons:
- High temperature firebrick is expensive and it is used exclusively in the combustion chamber and not in the breeching or stack where temperatures are much lower, thus low temperature inexpensive bricks are utilized instead.
- Metal ducting and uptake dampers are constructed of carbon steel, which also will deteriorate (above 700 degrees F) if exposed to flames. Flame temperatures can be several thousand degrees F, depending on the excess air.
Once burning gases leave the combustion chambers, they are promptly deprived of air in the reduced space. Oxygen is used up similarly to a candle being snuffed in an enclosed jar.
The idea that flames leaped from the stacks is a propaganda invention, another of many.
I would also like to describe uptake damper function and controls. The dampers are designed to control a set negative pressure at the base of the stack. This is usually done with automatic controls or can also be done manually with the use of a manometer reading pressure at the appropriate sensing point and setting the damper accordingly. The damper or stack does not know if there are one or eight muffles in operation. The damper simply has to be set to accommodate the exhaust gas volume. It is no different then in a single furnace where combustion rate is increased or decreased depending on system demand. The uptake damper adjusted position will compensate for the various flow rates.
Reinhard Tixel
Re: G. Rudolf, “The Moon Landing: Fact or Fiction,” TR, 1(1) (2003), pp. 75-81.
To the Chief Editor
Being of an older generation that has observed and recorded the early development of space flight with interest, your article leaves no doubt in the context of your publication that there is hardly a field of human activity and history not subjected to distortion, deceit, fraud, and lies by the influential mass media.
You cannot be aware of the hidden connections between the cancellation of the last lunar landings, “due to the mounting criticisms of the immense costs and of its sheer uselessness,” conspiracy claims “that the entire NASA Moon project was a hoax,” fabricated as a “result of the Sputnik-shock” and a deliberate campaign to smear and sabotage the American space program. This is the point: The role of clandestine Soviet propaganda in creating the tale of the “Moon landing hoax”! I know that rumors of a faked moon landing originated already about 1970 and in communist circles. This letter does not allow the elaboration of the overwhelming evidence of pro-Soviet bias in western media concerning what was in the early sixties called “Space Race” and “Race to the Moon.” The fact is that – apart from Sputnik – most of the “Soviet successes in space,” as opposed to American, were scientifically improbable or useless, often technically impossible. The Soviet Union did not have the know-how, human, and financial resources to challenge the USA in space (or any other field). Sputnik noisily opened a road to human progress, which was to come anyway, as Wernher von Braun’s “Explorer 1” proved three months after the Soviet spectacle. If the communist leaders had foreseen the consequences of Sputnik, which culminated in Apollo 11, they would have done all to prevent them. It may not have been the only reason, but the collapse of the Soviet economy at that time (downfall of Khrushchev, “reforms” by Brezhnev, bailout by Western financial blood transfusions) also changed Soviet space policy in 1968 from total secrecy to bitter opposition against space expenditure – especially when facing Apollo – and eventually – who wonders? – to open collaboration with the U.S., which is why NASA pays for it to this day.
The story of the alleged first “space walk” by cosmonaut Leonov, which I attach, is but one of many cases in space development, where deficiency of technology was made good by the efficiency of deception. It was published first 1975 in the Australian periodical Intelligence Survey.
Yours, F.G. Kausch
Editor’s Remark
We will publish this paper about Soviet astronautical deceptions in the next issue of TR. If, by the way, the Soviets really thought the U.S. would deceive the world with fake moon landing program lasting many years, they surely would have revealed it while it happened: For example by simply pointing out that all communications of the astronauts did not originate from the moon. But of course they never made such a claim during the years between 1969 and 1975, because with simple instruments it could have been verified where the communications sent by the astronauts were indeed coming from.
Bibliographic information about this document: The Revisionist 2(2) (2004), pp. 233-237
Other contributors to this document: n/a
Editor’s comments: n/a