Bad News, Good News

Holocaust Education.

September 26: on the Canadian prairie, an obscure former high school teacher, James Keegstra, is sentenced to a year in prison (suspended) – for introducing his students to a different side of the Holocaust question nearly 20 years ago. October 22: in Paris an attorney, Eric Delcroix, is fined over 20,000 francs for writing a book entitled The Thought Police vs. Revisionism. Early October: Blackpool, England. The Labor Party, likely winner in Britain's next general election, pledges legislation making it a crime “… to publish, broadcast, distribute or display any material for the purpose of denying the Holocaust.”

Here in America, where so far the First Amendment has restrained politicians and policemen from putting the “Fahrenheit 451” fantasies of the Simon Wiesenthal Center into action, the censors move more circuitously – but no less determinedly. July 10: in Washington D.C., less than a week after the “sneak attack” shutdown of CODOHWeb, our Internet site on the World Wide Web, Congressman Dick Zimmer (R-NJ) introduces legislation that would require government agencies – including the Department of Justice – to report on how “Holocaust deniers” are using the Internet, and on what steps may be taken to deny young students access to revisionist sites in “cyberspace.” October 22: in New Jersey the taxpayer-funded state Commission on Holocaust Education gathers 500 top high school students to warn them away from Holocaust revisionist Web sites: “These Holocaust deniers are very slick people. They justify everything they say with facts and figures,” complains commission chairman Steven Some.

Background to Censorship

Are you thinking, “Well, more bad news – what else is new?” As a matter of fact, a great deal, and much of it is extremely encouraging.

Smith's Report and other revisionist periodicals have been publishing a steady stream of information about the undisguised censorship of revisionism abroad and the de facto censorship at home – the “free speech” side of the revisionist story. It is understandable that sometimes we see anti-revisionist censorship as a static, unchanging given. But it proves to be very much worth the while to pause occasionally and take a look at the big picture, an overview of the struggle between revisionism and its censors during the last four decades.

Nothing historical is fixed and unchanging. Consider the history of historical revisionism as a field of study: its growth from the audacious skepticism and heroic dissent of Rassinier and the other pioneers to Butz and Faurisson's razor-sharp, unanswerable questions for the establishment historians; to the articles and monographs of the later 70's and 80's on demographics (Sanning), on Diesels (Berg), on Dachau (Cobden), and much else; to the past decade's forensic studies (Leuchter, Lüftl, Rudolf, et al.) and the on-going exploitation of such newly opened archives as those in Moscow (Irving, Mattogno, Graf and others).

Exterminationist Damage Control

Consider the academic response from the exterminationists: at first scornful dismissal, then feverish exposition of the “standard” version of the Holocaust by Hilberg and his epigoni, followed by the first general, major concession of the exterminationists: the triumph of “functionalism” over “intentionalism” (i.e. the Holocaust was a wartime improvisation, not a long-standing policy of Hitler or his Nazis). Then, in recent years, the spate of academic and amateur exterminationists who, in evident reaction to revisionist advances, have cast doubt on the gas chambers, the eyewitnesses, the numbers, indeed most of the components that make the Holocaust the Holocaust: Arno Meyer, Jean-Claude Pressac, Yehuda Bauer, Franciszek Piper, even – as we pointed out in SR 32 (May 1996) – in spite of himself, Daniel Goldhagen.

The list is a long one, and growing longer. Indeed, some revisionists have wondered if the concessions the other side is making to the historical facts foretell some future compromise: in place of a Holocaust, say, a “Halfacaust.”

No More Mr. Nice Guy

To date we know of no such overtures, and note that each grudging concession seems to be accompanied by a vigorous new laying of blame: the anti-Semitic Poles exaggerated the Auschwitz dead, the anti-Semitic Soviets withheld Holocaust data, and so forth. Rare is the damage controller who permits himself to wonder openly at why the travesties of fact and logic that underlay this or that bit of canonical Holocaust nonsense went unchallenged for decades by all but the revisionists.

In fact, if anything, the removal of one structural member after another—Hitler order, Nazi plan, gas chambers here, gas chambers there, three million dead stricken from the rolls at Auschwitz—from the Holocaust story has left it no more altered in its essential presentation be exterminationist academics and propagandists than a hot air balloon subjected to a few mild buffets.

Which brings us back to censorship. It hasn't been unchanging, after all: it's gotten worse. The last few years have seen no let-up abroad, and indeed new laws—in France, in Germany, perhaps soon in England—as well as intensified pressure in those countries and others to make revisionism a dangerous calling, an expensive vocation, and a criminal pursuit. The roll of revisionist martyrs abroad is long and growing longer. Robert Faurisson never prophesied more truly than when, at the 1989 IHR conference, he predicted good times for revisionism, but bad times for revisionists.

You're thinking: “So there’s bad news and good news—the good news is that we're beating them with facts. The bad news is that they're beating us with—everything else. In foreign countries they arrest revisionists; in the U.S. they libel us, boycott us and try to freeze us out and use academia and the media to propagandize everybody else.”

The Good News

But there is more good new s for you and more bad news for them. We've not only won the biggest part of the academic battle—as far as the facts are concerned-we revisionists, including CODOH, have acquired the technology to lick the censors at home and abroad, by bringing the latest findings—as well as the classics—of revisionist researchers direct to a potential audience of tens of millions, even in countries such as Germany where revisionist texts in traditional forms are proscribed. So protean and shifting is the Internet and the World Wide Web that it is unlikely a way will ever be found to stop us, no matter what the likes of Congressman Dick Zimmer and the rest of the thought police are panting to make happen.

CODOH, through its Internet site CODOHWeb, is making the acquisition and communication of revisionism around the world one of its top priorities. We carry no excess political baggage, and we feature an already large library of revisionist writings, many of them by academics and other professional researchers. Just as the USA styled itself the “arsenal of democracy” in World War II (arming the Soviet Union in passing), we're making CODOHWeb a worldwide arsenal of Holocaust revisionism. We've got the arsenal, we've got the delivery systems, and we've got the significant targets—journalists, opinion-makers, university faculty and students (as the ADL notices worriedly in its latest screed, “Bradley Smith: Targeting Colleges”), and revisionists here and abroad—and we’ve got the truth and, what is better and stronger than the truth (anyone can believe he has the truth), we have the willingness to be shown where we are wrong.