The Holocaust Claims Another Victim

This victim, then a 67-year-old history professor at Arkansas Technical University, was claimed in 2005 by his colleague, a self-proclaimed Jew named James L. Moses, who made it known to their university’s president that his victim had included three books that “denied the Holocaust” among nine from which students in a graduate history seminar might choose one to read and on which to report. As a consequence, his victim, Michael Link, was required to remove the offending titles from his list, and was denied assignment to teach any further graduate history courses for ten years thereafter.

In his defense in the ensuing processes, Dr. Link explained that he wished to make his graduate students aware of diverse opinions on the Holocaust and other historical controversies. To little avail, unless it be noted that Dr. Link was not actually dismissed from the employ of the university of whose faculty he had by then been a member for fully forty years. The specifics of Dr. Link’s crime, in which he neither endorsed the heretical volumes nor specifically required anyone to read are freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. Paul Rassinier, a French survivor of several Nazi concentration camps, published several commentaries on them in his native language that were then combined and translated to English as Debunking the Genocide Myth, which is available for free download to anyone who clicks its title in this very sentence. Carlos W. Porter conducted an in-depth analysis of the official records of the postwar International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg and published a compendium thereof titled Made in Russia: The Holocaust, likewise available free and complete for download in one click. Amazon.com carried both books for decades, but delisted both on March 7, 2017 with no official explanation for them or the dozens of similar books they delisted at the same time.

Fast-forward another 14 years. Michael Link has been dead these two years, now. The administrator of his estate approaches his employer of over fifty years with a bequest: $190,000 to fund a scholarship for a deserving history major in his or her senior year, named for Dr. Link’s mother and, of course, the testator himself. The university’s acceptance of this generosity appears in the university’s newspaper, as do all such beneficences.

This generous act is noted by one Sarah Stein, a (Jewish) assistant professor of English at ATU, and she somehow has knowledge of Dr. Link’s crime of 14 years prior. She, or her (and Dr. Moses’s?) zealous acolytes arrange a protest against their university’s acceptance of a bequest named after a … Holocaust denier—and an anti-Semite. They called for their institution to reject “Nazi money,” or to change the name of the fund to something else that in effect denied the denier.

Martyrdom is defined as having died in the defense, or assertion, of a cause, or even for having been a member of some condemned group. Michael Link was not martyred in this sense. After over fifty years on the faculty of the only university at which he was ever a faculty member, he died at the rank of a mere associate professor, but that isn’t martyrdom either. But then, two years after his own death, his estate comes forth with a bequest from his will, and … they should spurn this? If that wouldn’t be martyrdom, then what would?

His university, if motivated only by pecuniary considerations, has so far resisted the blandishments of none other than Jonathan Greenblatt, national director of the vaunted Anti-Defamation League, to refuse the tainted savings of their long-time faithful servant. It would seem the good Dr. Link might have entertained doubt regarding certain details of the Holocaust Narrative, and might even have confided these to one and another of his personal acquaintances. And for this, possibly the considered opinion of a degreed historian, his bequest, or at least his name, should be spurned?

In support of that notion, I would quote a young female demonstrator declaiming against the free-thinking professor. She said, “Eleven million deaths! How could anyone deny that?”

How indeed? The hills of northwest Arkansas are secure against any and all honest discussion of the Holocaust as history. And a working historian was key in keeping them that way.

Postscripts:

Dr. James Moses is today a full Professor in the History Department of Arkansas Technical University. He has, at this point, been on the faculty for almost 20 years. A report on RateMyProfessors.com mentions that some of the books on his reading lists are novels.

Dr. Link’s scholarship curiously is named for his mother, and his obituary reports no surviving spouse or children, reminding of another famous victim of Jewish persecution, Benedict Spinoza, who lived and died in just such a way. Or perhaps Dr. Link’s surviving family, if any, feels threatened…