Outlaw History #4

I should have noted in the last issue of this NL that I would be out of town for a week or so and that this issue would be late. I have not yet fully integrated this NL into my routine, if what I have can be called a routine.

My escape from Baja was to work on one of those “secret” revisionist projects that have to be developed behind the scenes so that it can't be pre-empted by the other side. Sometimes these things come off, sometimes not. We'll see how this one goes. At the moment, it looks very good.

I returned to Baja to winter storms and, again, a broken computer. Worked fine when I was here. When I got back, it was no longer working. I may have it again in a couple days. At which time I will send this missive. But then, I may not have it. Mexico. In any event, the responses to the last issue are in the computer that is in the shop, not in the one that I am using here, so I can not respond to them. Maybe next week.

Following is a letter from an old friend, Bill Wright. I think it fairly expresses the concerns that many have about my work, and about my lack of character with regard to the Jewish issue, which I do not see as an issue for those who are not Jews.

Bill heads his letter: “A Booksellers Mentality.”

The “pornographic” book that Wright refers to is Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. At that time Tropic was censored by the Feds, and I was prosecuted by the State for refusing to stop selling it. That was in 1961 when I was a bookseller on Hollywood Boulevard. Many of those who supported my stand against censorship then were Jews. Many who protested that the book should be censored were Christians. One irony here is that now Jews lead the effort to censor and suppress revisionist books, including my own Break His Bones, while many Christians support them.

Those Jews who stood with me, and helped me, were, in fact, “sincere believers” in intellectual freedom. Those who, today, have “no tolerance” for intellectual freedom with regard to the Holocaust story, do indeed put “Jewish group interests” first, “have no tolerance at all” for any discussion “which might expose their favorite propaganda hoax,” the Holocaust story. With these Jews, “Jewish group interests are paramount, truth is expendable.” I discovered this many years ago.

It is true that I want college students to become aware of revisionist arguments, and that I do not want to study the “true nature of Jews.” The idea that we can study the “true nature” of Jews is a fantasy. In my mind. Or the true nature of any other people. Or what true “nature” actually is. Or what true is, for that matter. Or nature, if we are to speak of “human” nature. I do rely on my “own personal experiences as a guide.” Unlike many key Holocaust survivors, however, I should say that I try not to forward the stories of others as my own experience.

But here is where the Bill Wrights of the world, and those in revisionism, go wrong. “After all, if Jews really are the enlightened, tolerant people they pretend to be, then why their steadfast refusal to practice what they preach on Holocaust Heresy?” When something grand is seen to be at risk, there are no (no) “enlightened, tolerant people.” It is all a struggle for influence and power, from the ground up. Everywhere. Along the way, some of us do it better than others. But to ask of other peoples what we do not demand of our own, which is commonplace among revisionists specifically and peoples who are not Jews generally, is exactly the kind of gushing, self-serving, double standard that I criticize.

I admire the work of Israel Shahak and Kevin MacDonald, with which I am somewhat familiar, as well as the work of others who work with similar materials. I would be surprised to find that there were not Jews who have a “tribal” and “totalitarian” mentality. What is the difference between a “tribal” mentality and the desire for community, other than degree? What is the difference between a Jewish “totalitarian” mentality and the totalitarian mentality of the British, Dutch, Spaniards, Saudis, Japanese – or the Americans? The “totalitarian” mentality was alive and well in the despots of ancient Greece, and the emperors of Rome, with hardly a Jew among them.

It's true that I tend to judge people by the experience I share with them. Jews have about the same pretences regarding intellectual freedom as do Christians, atheists, Muslims and whatever the rest of us are. And then I have many other reasons to judge Jews to be other than what the Bill Wrights make of them. I lived in the Jewish community for the best part of thirty years. I worked with Jews, and lived with Jews. I helped raise two children who are Jews. I read at the bar mitzvah of one of them, an afternoon that I treasure still.

Bill Wright would ask that I find some way to judge the Jews I have known, other than by my experience with them. I'm a simple, working class guy. I judge people – “judge” is not quite the right word – by the relationships I have with others. Including the Bill Wrights. If it works, I feel one way, if it doesn't, I feel some other way. It's all pretty subjective. Love, friendship, honor, hate – none can be defined by thought. They are all ideals.

Which brings me to my relationship with Bill Wright. We have known each other for maybe fifteen years. I've always liked him. The relationship we have now is about what it was at the beginning. His is a more disciplined intellect, his a more principled world view. Yet I wonder what it all comes to.

Bill visited me when we were living in the San Joaquin Valley, in Visalia, California. He bought me a good lunch in a nice restaurant. We had a good talk. Talking with Bill is always interesting. Afterward we went to a park and sat at a picnic table beneath a tree. When the talk moved to the matter of the Jews, which it always does with Bill, his position was that all Jews should be killed. He is one of those revisionists who, while they understand that the gas chamber stories are a historical fraud, feel a nostalgic loss over the fact that Hitler did not do, or even want to do, what he is accused of doing.

I wasn't certain I heard Bill right, so I asked him what he meant.

“Do you mean all of them?”

“All of them.”

“The old folk? Jews you have never seen? Chinese Jews?”

“That's right, Bradley. It would be a better world.”

“How about the babies?”

“The babies too.”

“But why the babies? What crimes have the babies committed?”

“They haven't committed any crimes. But they will grow up and be big Jews.”

“So you want to kill the babies too?”

“Yes, Bradley. The babies too.”

There was a surge of heat in my chest. The muscles in my back, the right shoulder, and the right upper arm, tensed. The body was at the point of moving forward. I was being urged by sensation to reach across the picnic table and smash Bill Wright in the face. It was very close. For a moment the brain seemed to stop working. I didn't know quite where I was. The moment passed. I was unhappy, but I didn't say anything. And then it was time for him to go.

What we have here is a conundrum for the Bill Wrights, both those in revisionism and those not in it. They believe their solutions for the Jewish problem have been reached through intellectual effort. I don't think so. No one who wants to murder babies via mass extermination, or any other way, gets there by reading books and scholarly journals. They get there some other way. Each in his own way.

You don't get to the place where you do not want to murder all the babies by reading scholarly works either. You get there long before you have read very much of anything. Little Red Riding Hood, maybe. There are not very many of us who reach a place where we have to decide if it would be best to kill the babies or not to kill them. Those who do reach that place do so on principle, worked out over many nights, years, of earnest thinking, study, and observation. So much for “thought.”

If it was wrong for the Americans to intentionally murder the civilian populations of Nagasaki and Hamburg, for example, in my view it would be wrong to murder all the Jewish babies on earth. I haven't spent very much time, very much thought, on either issue. I don't expect to. For me, it's simple.

Intellectuals look at such issues in a more complicated way. There is no significant portion of the intellectual class in America, or the West, that argues it was criminal to intentionally murder all the babies who got in the way in Hiroshima and Dresden, and no significant portion of them who argue that it would be the right thing to do to murder all the Jews. The intellectuals have always parsed the murder issue. Here it's good, there it's bad, and we are to take their word for it.

Maybe if I read a well-written paper that morally justifies the mass-murder of Jews, babies or adults either one, I could be convinced that I am being a sissy about all this.

At the same time, I am not unaware that for all my talk about intellectual freedom, and the right of the minority to express its opinion, I betrayed myself when I got angry with Bill for expressing the idea that all baby Jews should be murdered. He was being sincere with me. He was being honest. My anger, my desire to smash in his face, illustrates how difficult it is for ordinary people to accept the right of others to express an opinion that you do not share. I am the one who is not supposed to believe in “thought crimes.”

It is, therefore, incumbent upon me to understand how difficult it is for ordinary Jews to accept the fact that they have been lied to for over half a century about the gas chambers. Why they get so angry when the story is challenged. They understand that the gas chamber story is the one, the only, moral justification that Jews had for invading Palestine, subjecting its people to a form of social serfdom, and taking the land for themselves. It's not easy for Jews to wrestle with this kind of “greed,” everything considered.

The Bill Wrights, then, and the Israeli-firsters, are two faces of the same coin. The Israeli-firsters do not argue that all Arabs should be killed, as Wright does Jews, but they are willing to kill any Arab who gets in their way, and as many Arabs as necessary to secure the land for themselves.

At bottom it is the same double standard, the same chauvinism, the same lust for power and influence. There is nothing more human. Including the true nature of the Jews.