| |

Break His Bones

The Private Life of a Holocaust Revisionist

By Bradley R. Smith ∙ August 1, 2002

Last updated on

If you are curious about how it is to try to convince intellectuals that it is better to encourage intellectual freedom than it is to discourage it, I offer you the true story of a Holocaust revisionist.

Table of Contents

Authors Note

It’s a truism. Things are different since 11 September 2001. Of course, things are always different, which is why the open-minded find life so mysterious. The mystery goes beyond mere unpredictability. We don’t know how we come into the world, never learn what we are or what happens when we’re finished. It’s been noted by an English sage that, as a matter of fact, we do not come into the world at all, that we come from the world. I am beguiled by the implications of this observation. What it implies lifts up my heart, but this too is mysterious.

After radical Islamists expressed their displeasure with American foreign policy at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon it was suggested by some that, having experienced our own holocaust, we would never talk about the Jewish Holocaust the way we had talked about it before. On the one hand that would be a mitzvah for those of us who do not personally represent the Holocaust Industry, or profit from it, and in any event do not want to hear about it any longer. On the other, I have lived with the story for so long that at first I was uncertain what I might do without it.

I’ve spent my golden years trying to convince the professors and our other cultural elites that they should encourage, rather than discourage, intellectual freedom and open debate, even with regard to the Holocaust question. I have failed—so far. If I had been successful it might have become widely known, even in the U.S. Congress, that many of the core elements of the Holocaust story are schlock, and that the story should not be used by the Congress to morally legitimate, and fund, Jewish greed for Palestinian land. It appears that some Islamic radicals have come to the same conclusion.

The barbarity of Israelis and Palestinians toward each other is demonstrated again and again on national television. But the U.S. Congress has not given the Palestinians a couple hundred billion dollars to fund the humiliation and brutalization of Israeli Jews. It has given Israeli Jews, however, a couple hundred billion to fund the brutalization and humiliation of Palestinian Arabs. Why? Because of the “Holocaust” story, significant parts of which are nonsense tales. It is clear to me that what the Palestinians do are not my responsibility in the same way, or to the same degree, as are the actions of the U.S. Congress and the Israeli State.

The issues of intellectual freedom and a free press with regard to the Holocaust story and American-Israeli relations remain today what they were before 9/11. American-Israeli relations and the Holocaust story are two sides of the same tabooed coin. A handful of radical Islamic killers have managed to flip the taboo on its back, like a child flipping a penny. The struggle against intellectual taboo in this century remains what was in the last. Those who rule, and those who inform those who rule how to rule, are not going to change their spots. It’s up to the rest of us.

Preface

Journalists and others in questionable professions like to ask why I argue for an open debate on the Jewish Holocaust story instead of some other story. I don’t really know why. Of course, those who ask that question do not ask themselves why they do not ask me some other question. That’s how it goes. The why questions are the difficult ones. That’s why we ask them of others but seldom of ourselves.

Patting myself on the back, I will say that I have asked myself many times why I argue for an open debate on that story and not some other one. After twenty years I am left with the same answer. I don’t know why I started asking, and now I don’t know why I don’t stop. The experience of trying to get academics to be honest about the moral corruption and historical fraud forwarded by the Holocaust Industry has left me isolated, broke, and old\. I’m not saying that the experience has been a waste of time. Far from it. There have been many laughs, I have made many friends, even if it is a rare moment that I can spend time with them, and I have gained one interesting insight. Now I understand that not only do I not know why I decided to argue for an open debate on the Jewish Holocaust story, I do not know why I decide to do anything. Which either complicates the issue or simplifies it, depending on which way you perceive the wind to be blowing at any given moment.

I mean the big stuff of course, not the little stuff. We all understand the little stuff. I understand why, for example, I decide each time to eat the inside of the banana rather than the outside—but wait a minute—thought has just recalled, using a process too racy and complicated for me to follow, that it has been observed that during the high periods in the history of the novel narrative dominates, while in its low periods the subjective dominates. Thought responds: and Proust? I don’t do novels, however, so I don’t understand why thought would have bothered me with this little back and forth.

If I am unable to understand what thought just did with regard to bananas and the history of the novel, I do not think I am going to find out why I began to argue that the history of the 20th century will have to be rewritten. In seventy years I have made only three big decisions. It’s clear to me that each was made without benefit of purposeful thought, that each was the expression of a small collision where my personality bumped (originally I wrote “crashed” but that’s too large a word for it) into the movement of the age, and that in any case it hardly matters one way or the other. I’ve stayed afloat, had a relatively interesting life whatever that is, have damaged relatively few people, have few regrets, accomplished nothing remarkable, and now it’s coming to an end, which appears to me to be remarkable in itself—no beginning, no end.

At twenty-one I decided to become a writer. This was an okay decision and never hurt anyone directly. When I was thirty-three I decided that the visions were real, but real for me alone. That one was okay too for the same reasons that the first one was okay. When I was forty-nine I decided that there was something fishy about the “gas chamber” stories. That time it was different. That time my decision was not about me, but about the age. If the gas chamber stories weren’t right, the “genocide” of the Jews would begin to smell bad. I had never dreamed that I would sniff that one out. But once I had, there was nothing for it, and I have been following my nose ever since.

My sense of smell soon put me up against many of the great brains and great souls of the age. Many of these, perhaps all of them, know more about everything than I do and are more sensitive about everything than I am, except for one thing. I understand something of how the mechanism works, the movement of my own heart. I recall Hemmingway observing in a letter to someone that he had a “built-in shit-detector.” For a while, he did. For a while he could smell shit a mile away. I’m skating on thin ice here, but my reaction to my first reading of a revisionist paper on the gas chamber stories was, shall we say, Hemingwayesque. Nothing I have read or heard since about gas chambers has been able to put a good odor to them.

From one morning in my twenty-first year to this one I have never stopped writing. I have failed as a literary writer, and failed as a journalist, but it makes no difference to me. I’m the fool that Sam Johnson warned us against, the scribbler who will write when he has no audience and does not even get paid for it. You can say it’s obvious why I decided to become a writer, that it was the psychological stress of having been in combat and so on. But there were many young men in the army hospitals with me, most of them had seen worse than I had seen and all were hurt worse than I was hurt, yet I’m the one who became the writer. Why? On the other hand, why ask? It’s already gone.

After I turned seventy it became increasingly clear that the time is come to focus my energy, what I have left of it. This was brought home to me the other night when my daughter and I were horsing around. She pushed me, I pushed her back. She kicked me with the side of her foot, I kicked her. She tried to throw me on the bed. I threw her on the bed. We played King of the Mountain. We wrestled and punched each other around for maybe half an hour. We were both sweating. She’s fourteen now, five foot nine, weighs 120 pounds and kicks like a horse. I won, I was King of the Mountain again, but it wasn’t easy. The next day I was exhausted. It took two days to fully recover. I could not help but reflect on how fragile I have become, how the end is in sight.

I don’t expect to make any more big decisions in this life. From here on out it’s all small potatoes. Focusing on the daily round, remaining vulnerable, and following my nose for better or for worse. In the end, life is lived as simply as the good marriage—till death do you part.

Chapter One

For ten years and more I suppose I have been the most visible holocaust revisionist activist in America. I’m very far from being the right person for the job. The most visible revisionist activist in America should be a scholar and someone who is passionately interested in the litera-ture.

I’m very far from being a scholar and I find the literature to be a real yawner. At the beginning of course it was awfully shocking to discover that it has not been demonstrated that the gas chamber stories are true. What I couldn’t get out of my mind however was not the apparent fact that there had been no program for the mass gassing of Jews, thank God for that as they say, but how urgently intellectuals argue against intellectual freedom on this one issue.

Even in the early 1980s I had only a casual interest in the historical record. What held my attention was what I perceived to be the challenge of finding a way to convince the intellectuals, and the media intellectuals, that revisionist research should be judged on its merits, as I presumed they judged all other historical research. I see now I presumed much too much. These days, as students display a growing interest in an open debate about the Holocaust controversy, the intellectuals increasingly display signs of bad temper and even hysteria.

Professor Deborah Lipstadt, the leading voice representing the Holocaust industry in academia, has chosen to single out the work I do on college campuses for special attention in her muchpraised book, Denying the Holocaust, The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. There she devotes a 26-page chapter to what she sees as “The Battle for the Campus,” writing plaintively that: “Colleagues have related that their students’ questions are increasingly informed by Holocaust denial:

How do we know that there really were gas chambers? . What proof do we have that the survivors are telling the truth? . Are we going to hear the German side?

Now there’s a real scandal for you! Some students are no longer willing to accept on faith what their professors assure them is true about the gassing chambers, but want to learn what the evidence demonstrates. They suspect that while most survivors speak truthfully about their wartime experiences in the camps, some do not. Where do students get such ideas? There are even students who want to hear the “German” side to the Holocaust story. Unbelievable!

The Deborah Lipstadts of the world must be asking themselves what in hell is going on? They’ve run the Holocaust show on campus and in the media for so many years they see these signs of student curiosity and principle as the outbreak of some dreadful intellectual pox. I see them as the cure to one. The Lipstadts write about the “terrible harm” such questions can do. I ask why such questioning does not measure the good health of the culture?

Professor Lipstadt is no shrinking violet when it comes to arguing against intellectual freedom. She even has the brass to argue against “light of day,” the concept that false statements and even false ideas can be exposed as such by flooding them with the light of free inquiry and open debate. She writes:

[I]t is naive to believe that the ‘light of day’ can dispel lies, especially when they play on familiar stereotypes. Victims of racism, sexism, antisemitism, and a host of other prejudices know of light’s limited ability to discredit falsehood.

What does Lipstadt believe will dispel lies and discredit falsehood? Night? How many victims of racism, sexism and antisemitism speak against light in favor of suppression and censorship? I wonder how Jews felt about “light” in pre-war Nazi Germany? Early on the Nazis moved against Jews in the arts, against Jews in publishing, against Jews in the universities-all places where traditionally light is so highly valued. The Nazis had views about light in the 1930s that are similar to those of some professors today. Light for the Nazi-minded, darkness for everyone else. In the long run, light might not have made any difference for German Jews, but when you look at the record you find that when Hitler began to deny light to Jews, the Jews began to leave Germany. Those Jews understood the necessity of “light.” Those who didn’t soon found out what it meant to live in darkness. Without tyranny, human life is full of light.

The problem for the Lipstadts is that light is there for all of us without fear or favor. It is no respecter of persons. Just as the sun shines on the good and the bad alike, light refuses to choose sides. Historians who ask it to betray their professional ideals and the ideal of light itself. It’s Lipstadt’s need for guarantees from light that causes her to argue against this great ideal of Western culture. We all have to be willing to accept what light illuminates. I admit on principle I might be wrong about the gas chambers, to say nothing about a lot of other stuff. Nevertheless, here I am, looking for ways to encourage intellectuals to encourage intellectual freedom with regard to the holocaust controversy. I don’t care anymore who’s right or wrong about the gas chamber stories. I’m fishing a bigger lake.

My friend William called from Chicago to ask how the video project on Auschwitz is going. William is one of my volunteer advisors. I told him there had been too many production problems and I’d had to lay it aside. I said I was going to concentrate on finishing the book manuscript.

“Is that the manuscript you’ve been talking about the last two or three years?”

“Has it been that long?”

“This is bad news. This is really bad news.”

“What are you suggesting?” I said. William is one of those very sincere men who wears his thoughts on his sleeve. You always know what he’s suggesting.

“What I’m suggesting is you’re very mistaken if you think people are interested in reading about your inner life as a holocaust revisionist. Nobody wants to read about you, Bradley. Are you listening to me? Your personal life is a bore. People are interested in their own lives. The only interesting thing you’ve ever done is revisionism and you don’t want to write about that. You want to write about your feelings. Can’t you understand how childish that is? I have that first little book you published, what’s it called? It’s unreadable. Do you understand what I’m saying? It’s a miracle you’ve been able to accomplish anything at all for revisionism.”

“I understand what you’re saying. But some people like the way I write. A writer can only have his own audience.”

“I don’t know who the hell you’ve been talking to. Listen to me. Let me tell you what your problem as a writer is. I’m telling you this as a friend. As someone who’s interested in the work you’re doing. Your problem is that you write like a sixty-year-old teenager.”

“Sixty-four.”

“What?”

“Sixty-four, William. I’m sixty-four now.”

“Oh.”

After a moment William said: “Is that a joke? I know how old you are. What the hell are we talking about here? Are we talking about something serious? I’m worried, Bradley. It’s no joke that revisionism’s got you for its point man.”

When I found out that something was wrong with the gas chamber stories I was fifty years old. By the time you’re fifty you’ve been around the block a few times. You’ve come to believe you’re finished with fear, for example, yet here it was again. In a certain way, it was the fear that held my attention. I quickly lost interest in “survivor” yarns about gassing and torture and how good and innocent Jews are compared with Christians and everybody else.

Instead, I was intrigued and maybe a little obsessed with how afraid I was of admitting-of confessing I might even say-that I no longer believed. I had lived most of my adult life among Jews and with Jews, and some of us were terribly devoted to one another. When I realized I was going to go against the gas chamber stories, a terrible tumult entered my life because I understood many of my friends would feel I was going against them too. It was in that place that fear grasped me and held on.

I could have dropped the story and gone on my way, but when you write the way I write, the stories you dread most are the stories you are most obligated to pursue. My sense of things was that I had to risk friendships, even risk my family. I had to risk the contempt of my peers and the ostracism of a community and society, which would judge my doubting to be despicable. Nietzsche writes some place that we all work out of our weaknesses and I suppose that’s what I did. In my anxiety and fear I decided to take on, not the gas chamber story itself, but those who run the story as if it were their private franchise, who condemn those who question it. Those who have the power to destroy many of those they condemn.

The ruling discourse in America, and indeed the West, demands that the Holocaust story remain closed to authentic debate. The holocaust happened. Revisionists say it didn’t. For that reason all worthy persons and particularly intellectuals-who are all worthy persons by definition-favor the suppression and even censorship of revisionist theory. Meanwhile, because over the last half century the story has been revised so much, it becomes increasingly difficult to say exactly what the holocaust was. That’s where I saw my role. I fell into it like a blind man falling down a well. All I could see was the taboo that protected the story from real examination. How could anyone put his finger on what the thing itself had been if it was taboo to talk about it freely-really freely? I would be the one then, the blind man said, to help start the discussion going.

I didn’t know how to get it going. Not knowing what to do, I did everything. One on one discussion, newsletters, radio talk shows, newspaper articles, television interviews, books, public speaking, print interviews, video tapes. You name it, I tried it. I became a one-man band. Dr. Franklin Littell, professor of religion at Temple University in Philadelphia and a holocaust scholar himself, refers to me as a “malicious burst of energy” and compares me to “the adversary who wanders to and fro in the earth and goes up and down in it.”

Friends tell me this is an insult. I think maybe it’s something more subtle. I’m being compared to one of the great innovators in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Wanders to and fro in the earth and goes up and down in it? All right. Maybe I see what he’s getting at. There’s a whole world down there I didn’t know existed. Dr. Littell’s thoughtful observations on my character and movements illuminate the learning gap that exists between highly educated, professional holocaust scholars on the one hand and ex-concrete contractors on the other.

When you express doubts which others believe are evil, and which in fact may cause many individuals to suffer and to feel diminished and perhaps even humiliated, you have an obligation to act out of a good conscience and to value what can be called right relationship. Which means I must be a good man or the mischief and grief I cause by saying I doubt what I doubt will be gratuitous. What does it mean to be a good man? I have only the foggiest notion. It would seem to me as a writer, however, that it would include being willing to say publicly I do not believe what I do not believe, particularly when what I no longer believe relieves another people, in this instance Germans, of the moral burden of a specifically horrendous crime I no longer believe they committed.

When my first essay advertisement, “the Holocaust Story: How Much is False? The Case for Open Debate,” appeared as a full-page ad in the Daily Northwestern, an article responding to it appeared in the Daily written by Peter Hayes, an associate professor of history and German with a special interest in Nazi Germany. Titled “Some Plain Talk About the Holocaust and Revisionism,” Hayes’ article is a paint-by-the-numbers example of how your typical holocaust historian reacts when faced with even the simplest text challenging what he wants his students to believe.

I note his response here, not because it proved to be unique in any way, but because it was the first to reply directly to one of my ads, and because it proved to be a textbook guide to the subjective life of those academics who are willing to betray light.

When this newspaper printed Bradley Smith’s advertisement last Thursday it fanned not one, but two, gathering controversies on campus. The first concerns our knowledge about the Nazi massacre of the Jews of Europe. The Second centers on the policies of the Daily itself.

Surprisingly perhaps, the first issue is far easier to clarify than the second. Of course, there’s been no suppression of free inquiry into the Holocaust. It is precisely because of extensive and vigorous research by bona fide scholars over the past three decades that we know not only several of the facts that Smith manipulates in his ad, but also a good many that he does not want you to believe.

There’s no point in writing more here about the factual deceptions and distortions in Smith’s ad.

No point in writing more about the factual deceptions in my ad? Which factual deceptions? For a moment I felt I must be blind to something your average Northwestern professor could see at a glance. Was there a misstatement of fact in my text or wasn’t there? We all have our own way of looking at things, but this thing was not clear to me. How do you describe an intellectual environment in which an historian can write there is no point in writing more about factual deceptions in a specific text when, as a matter of fact, he hasn’t written anything about them at all. However you do describe it, you should include the word vulgar\. Professor Hayes’ article on my article continued for another seventeen paragraphs. He avoided the temptation of attempting to reveal an error of fact in what I had written but charged me with “deception,” “manipulation,” “distortion,” “ignorance,” “nastiness,” “dishonesty,” “duplicity,” “maliciousness,” “tastelessness,” “conspiracy mongering,” “promoting implausabilities,” “promoting anti-Semitism,” “spreading disinformation” and, the one I still like best, “brow beating academics.” I would not have thought, con-sidering the bold language the professor used that he would have mentioned that last one.

Revisionist theory isn’t wrong about everything, and there’s the rub. Revisionism is simply a criticism of pub-lished academic writings on the holocaust story. I take it as a given that revisionist research is wrong about a lot of things. The problem the professors face is that if they point out where revisionists are wrong the professors are left with what’s left over-with what revisionists are right about. This is a conceptual tragedy for your average academic. In each case where the revisionist is right, a bunch of academics are wrong and would have to fess up to being wrong, to having been wrong for a long time-and to having been stonewalling about being wrong. It would then become clear that while the good guys are right most of the time with what they publish on the story, the bad guys are right some of the time.

After the ad ran in the Daily Targum at Rutgers Uni-versity, the New York Times ran an editorial on the contro-versy, as well as several news stories, letters to the editor, and a dumb opinion piece by two Rutgers’ professors. It also assigned a reporter from its San Francisco bureau to drive down to Visalia with a cameraman to do a profile on me. I expected the worst but I liked the reporter, Catherine Bowan. She’s a big hearty woman with a big hearty laugh. A photo ran with her story showing me gesticulating dra-matically, giving the impression I actually believed what I was saying. Bowen informed me she is a specialist on the White separatist movement in the Northwest. She said she’d interviewed all those guys, in prison and out. She said every racist and anti-Semite in the Northwest knows who I am and all about the work I do.

“Is that right?” I said.

“Do you keep up with the people in the movement?”

I understand she’s fishing, but then, I’m here to be caught. I tell her a lot of those people contacted me when I first started doing revisionism but over the years they’d all dropped me. “I’m not anti-Jewish, so that was a big strike against me. My family is Mexican, so the racialists see me as a race traitor, and I don’t have any guns so the militias and the anti-Zog forces are convinced I have no sense of honor.

“Three strikes and you’re out,” Bowan says laughing:

“I suppose so. I think the movement people think I’m a pantywaist.”

“That’s exactly what they think,” Bowan says laughing heartily. “They think you’re a pantywaist.

Her photographer thinks my being a pantywaist is funny too but it’s Bowen’s laugh that rings in my ears. Maybe it’s because she’s a lady. You can laugh at being called a pantywaist when a man says it because you have a choice what to do about it, but when a lady laughs about something like that you’re kind of helpless. So I remain quiet. I’m a good sport about it. When the movement people read this they’ll say, “Of course Smith’s a good sport. Smith has no sense of honor.

When William Blake writes that Jesus acted on impulse, not from thought, he means that Jesus’ actions did not depend on his being obsequious before the ruling discourse of his day. Of course in Blake’s view Jesus was good all the way through so his impulses were good so his acts were good. It pleases me to think that Jesus acted on impulse and not by the rules, because I think when push comes to shove that’s what I do and that throws me in with good company. How good I am is another question. It’s not one I can pass judgment on. Actually I think I’m a pretty swell guy. One irony here about impulse is that the professors can be seen to be acting on it too. They dismiss revisionist theory with a wave of the hand, holding that there can be no debate about the gas chambers because there can be no “other side” to the story. Only their side. Maybe it was something like this 200 years ago that drove Blake to conclude that education is the work of Satan.

It’s simply a core belief among our intellectual classes that the Germans killed millions of Jews and others in gassing installations. Entire classes of intellectuals have become True Believers. I understand it can be argued that I’m a true believer too-in intellectual freedom. I can’t prove, that intellectual freedom is better than tyranny. It’s something I want. That’s the long and short of it. I doubt many things that others believe. No one can keep me from doubting, but I crave the freedom to be allowed to express my doubts to others.

This isn’t an argument over natural rights. I don’t want to make intellectual freedom a plank in a party line. Intellectual freedom is not primarily a political issue or even an intellectual one. It’s a spiritual issue. You either desire it or you don’t. You either want it for others as well as for yourself or you don’t really want it. They say Buddha said that desire is at the root of all pain. I’m willing to go with the pain. My desire is the foundation of whatever arguments I make to convince others that intellectual freedom is better than tyranny. First the wanting, then the argument. The other way around and it’s mere thinking.

One day I ran across an article about mad poets in the New York Review of Books. Not poets who are annoyed. Crazy ones. I have some interest in poetry, and an intermittent interest in madness. Professor Charles Rosen of the University of Chicago wrote the article. Early this year I submitted a second fullpage advertisement to a student newspaper on that campus, The Chicago Maroon. You can see the coincidences gathering themselves together here. This ad was titled “The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate.” In the end it was suppressed so Chicago students didn’t get to read it, but the word had gotten out on campus about the text of the ad and there was a big stink about it.

So one afternoon I was in the mall here drinking a diet Pepsi and reading Professor Rosen’s discussion of madness in English and continental poets from about 1750 to 1850. It looked as if half my favorite poets from the period were goofy. At the same time, Rosen noted that madness is oftentimes a matter of social convention and that social pressure oftentimes determines whether or not you will be certified as a lunatic. It is not clear, he writes, that those men with their visions were any more insane than the people today “who believe that no one was gassed at Auschwitz.

What was this? Was Professor Rosen talking about me? It’s come to the place where professors can’t make mention of Mayan sinotes, bureaucracy during the Sung dynasty or a lunatic English poet without introducing some fatuous reference to Auschwitz. I read someplace fifteen years ago that there were already 200,000 bibliographical references to Auschwitz, and that was before the professors really got cooking. I suppose Auschwitz will start popping up in new editions of Grimm’s collected tales for first readers.

Despite the obstacles and the longing for night so prevalent in the universities with regard to holocaust studies, I’ve been able to create a tremendous free-press scandal throughout the academic community. My ads call attention to revisionist theory on one campus after another across the nation. My second article, “The Holocaust Controversy: The Case For Open Debate,” has run as a full page ad at Michigan, Duke, Cornell, Rutgers, Ohio State, Georgia, Vanderbilt, Louisiana State, Howard, Arizona, Montana and at half a dozen others. Howard is the largest Black university in the country. When the ad ran at the University of San Diego, the President of that Catholic institution ordered special agents to fan out over the campus and confiscate every copy of the paper still available and destroy it. Prospective entries for a new Catholic Index perhaps?

When the New York Times ran its snooty editorial on my ad, asserting it was trashy and barren of ideas, it nevertheless affirmed, “When there is free expression, even the ugliest ideas enrich democracy.” How do ugly ideas enrich democracy? Professor Lipstadt found the answer at The Harvard Crimson and took the trouble to repeat it in her Denying the Holocaust.

In one of the most unequivocal evaluations of [Smith’s] ad, The Crimson declared it ” . . . utter bullshit that has been discredited time and time again.

So there we have it-light on the one hand and bullshit on the other. The yin and yang of intellectual freedom. What browbeaten professors and far-too-elegant editorial writers at The New York Times find ugly is actually part of the process of fertilization when open debate is allowed. Of course, everything new and daring looks bullshit-ugly to those who have something to lose from the new and daring. When you live in a farming community like ours, you learn to appreciate the necessity for light and fertilizer both. Together they’re what make the grapes grow. They make the white blossoms appear on the fruit trees.

Yousof, another of my volunteer advisors, says serious people don’t take me seriously because my writing reveals my lack of a university education.

You missed something by not going to school,” he says. “It shows in everything you write. Your thinking is disorderly and incomplete. How can anyone who is well read take you seriously? You don’t understand the logic of language. You have no formal intellectual training. Educated people understand that when they read you. When you write about the Holocaust from an intellectual perspective they know you’re in over your head.

It’s obvious to me Yousof has his finger on something. There’s plenty missing here. More than he suspects maybe. But this is the hand I was dealt. We can’t all be scholars. Most of us aren’t. Many of us never went to school at all. When my father-in-law finished the first grade in a Mexico City grammar school, that was it for him. He had to get a job. Nevertheless, ordinary people everywhere feel committed, in the context of their own lives, to right action and right relationship. These are no more and no less the first responsibilities intellectuals bear, in the context of their lives. I have found everywhere that ordinary people sense it is good to be truthful, generous and open minded and that it’s base to be deceitful, uncharitable and bigoted. With respect to the Holocaust controversy, I don’t know of a single intellectual elite that has not betrayed those simple standards.

Occasionally one of my revisionist colleagues will speak to me of honor and urge me not to allow my enemies to insult and ridicule me without striking back. Honorable men feel it’s degrading to be ridiculed and insulted. I’ve come to see something of the comic in it. That’s how low I’ve sunk. When I was a kid it made me angry to be insulted or treated contemptuously, but the older I grow the more difficult it is for me to feel offended by anything said by anyone. One of my problems is that I don’t have enemies. Many people think of me as their enemy but I see those persons as potential friends with whom I disagree on a few matters. Maybe if I had been to university I’d be able to relate to them in a more mature way.

Ramana Maharshi advises going at this matter very differently, but he’s a Hindu so you have to cut him some slack. He says he doesn’t care why an insult hurts, he wants to know who it is who believes he is being hurt. It doesn’t do to tell the Maharshi it’s you because the Maharshi will ask you who you are and you won’t be able to tell him-not to his satisfaction anyhow-and after a while not to yours either. That’s the theory. I think there’s something to it. I can still see (who am I?) the television images of the monks in Saigon sitting on the sidewalk setting fire to them selves. They weren’t laughing or cracking jokes but they weren’t complaining either. They were protesting what they held to be unacceptable behavior by those who had chosen to rule them. I detest complaint but I admire protest. One of the many reasons Adolf puts me off so is that he was a truly chronic complainer (many “survivors” resemble him in that way). I don’t think he ever would have been a happy camper, but if he’d chatted up the Maharshi every now and then (their lives spanned the same decades) maybe his own life and the lives of everyone in Europe would have taken a different turn\. Debbie M. Price, a good looking syndicated columnist writing for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, begins one of her columns:

From California it came, a voice of pure evil, whispering gently, persuasively into the phone . . . . on the very day President Clinton dedicated the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, here was this voice, this man, Bradley Smith. . . .

Now that’s a terrific lead. Her prose goes down hill after that opening paragraph, but I have a soft spot in my heart for anyone who’ll kick off a column the way Debbie kicked that one off. I’ve gotten clippings of it from newspapers all over the country. A voice of pure evil. That’s something. Secular journalists are joining Christian scholars to elevate me to extravagant heights of influence. Still, it makes sense. When you find yourself identified with the One who wanders to and fro inside the earth and goes up and down in it, a voice of pure evil comes with the territory. What I need to know is, when I come up to the surface to chat with Texas journalists, where is my point of entry? If the time ever comes when I have to make a run for it, I’d like to know where the devil the hole is.

It’s six o’clock in the afternoon on the last Sunday in May. A surprise storm has covered the valley with dark heavy clouds. I’m in the patio behind the house checking the air in the tires on Marisol’s bicycle. The front one is low. I hear thunder, a sudden wind blows through the plum trees, then the first drops of rain fall heavily on the patio roof. Fat water drops splatter the concrete walk that leads around the side of the house. I sit on the saddle of the metallic-red girl’s bike and watch the rain shake the plumtree leaves and listen to it fall on the corrugated plastic above me. When it stops I ride over to Mooney Boulevard to the gas station where I use the air.

I wait out another rainfall beside the pumps, then start peddling toward downtown-toward the Main Street Diner and Bar. I might make it before it rains again, I might not. Since coming to Visalia I’ve been drinking Bass ale but the last time out after I drank a few Bass and left the Diner and was peddling back along Locust-I don’t know how it happened-I fell off the bike into the gutter in front of the Tulare County Escrow Office. From now on when I’m riding the bicycle, no more Bass Ale. Today I’ll drink something lighter. Maybe a few Becks clear. Nearing downtown I cut across Noble and coast over the Locust street bridge across the sunken freeway. I look east up the freeway past where the concrete goes out of sight and beyond to the mountains and there, where the clouds have blown apart I can see the first ranges of the Sierra Nevada beneath a pure blue sky and how their crests are covered white with a fresh snowfall and then out of the blue as they say I hear a voice speak.

“The time is come for you to live a life of intellectual freedom, not argue for one.”

I don’t understand very well what the voice is getting at. But I’ll think about it.

Chapter Two

While one year follows the other inexorably, the subjective life has a different logic. Pamela and I were married then and living in a friend’s single on the fortieth floor of the Waldorf Towers on 42nd Street in New York City. We were up from a year in Mexico where I’d been studying meso-American archeology on the GI Bill. Pamela thought we were going to Munich where I would continue working toward a degree but I had found out that I did not like digging in the meso-American sun and the truth was I wasn’t going to study anything in Munich and I was looking for a way out.

The week we got to New York Pamela found a job at a hospital on First Avenue. She was a registered nurse so it was a cinch for Pamela. For my part, I only knew how to work with my hands and in New York, I don’t know why because it had never been a problem in other places, I didn’t know how to find those kinds of jobs. It never occurred to me to try to make a living with the writing. The writing was a way to save my soul. For reasons I did not understand, my soul had become an issue. An elaborate dream life was beginning to flower, and for the first time I began to see things when I was awake as well as when I was sleeping. That worried Pamela but it fascinated me. Many of the things I saw made me laugh, but not all of them, and Pamela couldn’t see any of them and she didn’t think it was funny when I said I could. One day I saw God appear on the wall of our apartment in the shape of an hour glass and beckon to me and Pamela couldn’t see that either and when I told her about it that may have been the beginning of the end for us.

One morning after I walked Pamela to her First Avenue bus stop I strolled back up Forty-Second Street buzzing with the excitement that was becoming an increasing part of my life and on Times Square I spied a little shop that sold only paperbound books. I’d never seen a paperback bookstore. It was a brilliant new concept. It was beautiful. The moment I saw it I understood what I thought it would mean to the book trade. I experienced a fantastic insight into the nexus connecting the writing life, my life, with the world of business. I would forget about archeology once and for all, open my own bookstore, sell only paperback books, earn a living and make Pamela happy. And each morning many hours before it was time to go to the shop I would sit down to the typewriter and work on the journal and the other manuscripts. It was perfect. I would spend the rest of my life reading and writing and selling books, in that order unfortunately.

When I told Pamela my new plans for our future she laughed and said, “El Estupido strikes again!”

Within days I was in Los Angeles scouting locations. Pamela would follow in four weeks. I found a good location, the right size at the right rent, on Fairfax Avenue on the south edge of West Hollywood. What cinched the location for me was how much it resembled Second Avenue in New York with its liveliness, its neighborhood-like warmth, and for me its note of the exotic. It was very foreign to where I had grown up in South Central Los Angeles. Fairfax couldn’t compare to Second Avenue in New York in size or in the density of population and number of businesses, but there was a whiff of all of it there and that was enough to turn the trick for me.

The folks were going to bankroll the bookstore. One afternoon I drove Mother to Fairfax and parked at the curbing to watch the foot traffic. After a while she said, “Why do you want to put our store on a street with all these people?”

“All what people?”

“All these Jews.”

It was the first time in my life that Mother had ever mentioned the word Jew to me. I was twenty-nine years old. I felt a little set back.

“There’s not that many Jews here, Ma. Some of them are Jews.”

“Well, they all look Jewish to me.”

I realized I didn’t really know what a Jew looked like. “I don’t think so,” I said.

We sat silently in the car watching the people go by. I began to imagine that a lot of them did look Jewish. I wasn’t sure what that should mean. I had spent several hours on the street over a three-day period and hadn’t noticed anything peculiar. Now I saw that the signs scotch-taped to the windows of a meat market next to my store were lettered in what looked like Hebrew. I’d noted that before but it hadn’t rung a bell. Across the street was the big Bagel Delicatessen. On Second Avenue, and everywhere else in New York, the delicatessens had been terrific. A few doors to the North there was a bookstore specializing in Jewish books and gifts with lots of silver candlesticks. I’d checked it out the day before and decided we would not be in competition.

So I leased the space, designed the store, ordered the stock and opened for business. Everything was painted white and all the shelving was glass. It was beautiful. The night Pamela arrived I drove her from the airport directly to the bookstore and turned on the lights. She stood there looking around as if she were dazzled. She put her arm through mine and hugged it. “I didn’t expect this,” she said. “I’m going to write dad and tell him how proud I am of El Estupido.”

Business was a little slow, sometimes six, eight, sometimes fifteen dollars a day. A lot of the people who walked past the front of the store were elderly and talked to each other in what I discovered was Yiddish. I didn’t see the writing on the wall. I thought we needed more time. Mother didn’t have anything more to say about Jews. She didn’t mention Jews again for about thirty years. That was after I’d started writing about revisionism and one day she said she wished I’d stop writing about Jews. She said, “It just means trouble, Bradley. You know they don’t like it.”

After the bookstore was open three or four months I rented out the rear of it to a middle-aged lady named Esther Levine who sold books by mail. Her son Philip was an English instructor and a locally recognized poet. My own mother was working in the store by then and she liked Esther and Esther liked us and we all got on fine.

One morning a slightly built man in his fifties came in the store, bared his teeth, squinted through his wire rimmed glasses and went over all the shelves one by one. He turned to me with a long-jawed, wolf-like grin and said, “What’s a Gentile doing opening an intellectual bookstore on Fairfax Avenue?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “My mother warned me against it.”

“Well,” he said, sighing a little, “your mother was right. Of course, you’re still too young to listen to your mother. When you get to be my age you’ll start taking what your mother says pretty seriously.”

All his life Boris had thought of himself as a writer but for years he’d made a living selling men’s shoes. One day it occurred to him that he was fifty-eight years old and hadn’t written a line in ten years. He decided that afternoon to quit men’s shoes and break into sit-com writing for television. That first morning I had no way to know how large a part Boris would come to play in my life, or how attached to him I would become. It would prove to be the first time in my life that I would associate regularly with an intellect of high order-soaring, direct, extraordinarily sensitive, flushed through with good sense and good will.

One day a few months later Boris found out I had given him the name of Maurice in my journal.

“For Christ’s sake,” he said, “call me Joe, will you? I understand what you’re doing, or what you think your doing, but I’ve never been a Maurice. The day I set foot in this country I knew I was born to be an American. A Joe. Nobody could fool me about it, either. In America, who the hell wants to be a Maurice when he can be a Joe, will you tell me that? Do you have even the foggiest notion of what I’m talking about?”

So, I liked the street, I was in a business I thought I could handle, but I was losing our investment. I didn’t know what to do. My store was right across the street from The Bagel. A man about my age then, I suppose he’s still about my age, slim with dark curly hair, worked behind the deli counter. When he stretched out his arm over the glass counter to hand a customer his order, I would look at the numbers tattooed on the inside of his left forearm. I recognized them as identifying someone who had been in a German concentration camp. I didn’t know at that time that it was only at Auschwitz that internees were tattooed. It interested me to watch him work and talk to the others. I understood he’d had an adventure and I would’ve liked to have heard about it, how it had been for him and so on, but I was never able to make a connection with him. I had the feeling he did not want to talk to me. Maybe I was just being shy.

It was about that time that Adolf Eichmann was seized in Argentina by Israeli intelligence, kidnapped and flown to Israel. There he was interrogated for months, tried and hung for having been a big mover in Hitler’s program to exterminated the Jews of Europe. Now that the historians are backtracking to the idea that there was no state plan to exterminate the Jews after all, and that the genocide originated in a kind of spontaneous combustion of mass psychosis among SS officers, an unattractive light is beginning to illuminate the Eichmann trial. But at that time I didn’t know those kinds of ideas even existed.

Several books on the Eichmann affair were published in paperback very quickly after his capture, complete with cover illustrations of swastikas and SS uniforms. I bought a couple of the titles for the store. I had never heard of Eichmann until the press reports of his kidnapping. When the books arrived and I saw the photographs that illustrated them I felt a horror and disgust that I had not felt even in Korea where I had seen the real stuff. It was the photographs of the emaciated, skeletal-like cadavers thrown together for burial, or pictured looking into the camera with dazed and empty eyes. I’m accustomed to seeing those photos now and can look at them with equanimity. But that afternoon when I saw them for the first time I was filled with so much helpless rage that I swore I would never look at them again.

Early one sunny morning I was walking up and down the streets in the neighborhood west of Fairfax placing a leaflet announcing my bookstore in the door handle of each house. As I walked along through the beautiful sunlight I began to see very clearly, with a kind of heightened awareness, how pretty the painted houses were, like illustrations in children’s books are pretty. The red and yellow roses and pink camellias were suffused with a rich, luxuriant beauty I had never seen before. The green lawns, still damp with night dew, sparkled like rectangular lakes of light points. A father stepped out of the door of one of the pretty houses into the yellow morning sunshine with his little girl and they walked up the street ahead of me holding hands. Something drained out of me then, something heavy, and I felt flooded by the sunlight, and while I walked I felt the body lifted up and I sailed slowly along over the concrete walks passing out my flyers, the heart suffused with the warmth, the rich color and the heavenly light that was everywhere inside and out.

The journal had taken an interesting turn. I was doing a running commentary on how the lives of the Kennedy brothers impinged on my own, especially that of Ted, who was about my age. I tracked what they said about the passing scene and noted how I felt about what they had to say. I kept in mind that Ted’s family was well connected, while mine had never gotten plugged in. That he was formally educated while I had completed only a vocational course in high school, and that he was rich and I was poor. It was a complicated project, a good project, but too grand for me at the time.

The owner of the electrical repair shop which was on the other side of my store from the meat market kept a television playing in his window for people to watch from outside. One noonday I picked up a sandwich from The Bagel and when I crossed the street to return to my store there were four or five people standing on the sidewalk looking through the window. That was unusual, so I joined them and found they were watching President Kennedy giving his inaugural address. When he came to the place where he urged us to not ask what our country can do for us but what we can do for our country, I turned away with contempt for the sentiment and for the prose. I was having plenty of trouble with my own writing and I didn’t feel very generous toward others who used the language poorly, particularly if they were in public life or had successful careers

Esther, Mother and I were a happy threesome. Esther was about fifty years old, overweight, had a rotten front tooth and she smoked all the time but she was an attractive woman and you could see that when she was young she had been very attractive. She was bright and knew more about books than I did and was more widely read than I was. Politically, she was on the left. Esther and I laughed a lot, sometimes Mother was in on it, but usually it was Esther and me. One day I remarked to Mother what good company Esther was and Mother said, “Well, maybe she is, but she’s not my type.” I think it was the smoking and a set of cultural and political references unfamiliar to Mother that divided them.

One morning Esther called to me from the back of the store and when I went behind the partition I found her standing by her worktable, her face ashen and drained. “Bradley,” she said, “I never thought you would do anything like this.”

I could see she was suffering terribly. I sensed she thought that somehow I was the cause of it. I was utterly at sea as to what was going on.

“I like you so much,” she said with tears in her eyes. “I feel so sorry for you.”

I was flabbergasted. All I could do was stare at her. She appeared to feel that I would know what she was talking about but I didn’t know. She looked like she was about to lose hold of herself. I was terrified by the thought that she might begin to weep. It crossed my mind that she might be having a heart attack, but what would that have to do with her feeling sorry for me?

“Bradley,” she said, “I was reading your diary and I saw where you wrote that you hoped Eichmann would act like a man. Oh, Bradley, how could you? I’m so sorry. I really am.”

“You were reading my diary?” I didn’t really care that she had looked at it. What I really needed was some time for the brain to sort out what was happening. It was true I had made an entry in the journal where I expressed the hope that Eichmann, now that he had been captured and was going to be hanged, would act like a man during the proceedings.

“I know I shouldn’t have looked at your diary,” she said. “But it was lying open on your desk and when I walked past I glanced down at it. Oh, Bradley, I’m so sorry. I’m not angry with you. I’m really not. I’m just so sorry.” There were tears in her eyes.

I felt incredibly uncomfortable. I was beginning to see what she was getting at. I wasn’t certain. It was my remark about hoping that Eichmann would act like a man during his trial and when he was hung. It could be taken in more than one way. Esther didn’t ask me what I meant. Her opinion of what I had meant must have formed and set itself in concrete the first instant she had read the words. Without reflection, without considering who had written it, in what context, from what perspective and so on. She’d read the statement and-Bamm!

“I’m so sorry, Bradley,” she said over and over. “I really am so very sorry.”

When I wrote that I hoped Eichmann, now that he was going to be tried and executed, and it was commonly understood that was the scenario that would be played out, would behave like a man during the proceedings, I think that’s pretty much what I meant. I felt a real need to see him as a full-blown individual, not a cardboard cutout, not a fool, a coward or an idiot, not a man who would appear to not be capable of having committed the crimes I had every reason to believe he had committed. I saw Eichmann as one of the great criminals in modern history and I wanted to see him project an image large enough to match his crimes. Over the years I had read a lot of journalism and seen a lot of movies about Nazis who at first would perform heroic deeds but in the end would irrevocably reveal themselves to be cowards or clowns or mere psychopaths or all three. I had never been able to make the connection between Hitler as he was portrayed on the screen and in the American press with the immense catastrophe I was told he had brought about. How could such a pip-squeak have brought on so many earth-shaking events? I had never doubted that he had, but there was something unreal about it for me. Why did so many Europeans-not just Germans-idolize a man portrayed as a mere brute? Why were the German military willing to follow Hitler so far down such a desperate road? Had they all been clowns and cowards too? How could such little men have performed so magnificently in the field during such catastrophic defeats? It wasn’t that I actually asked such questions-I didn’t-but I was aware of something not being right, something about the story and the people involved in it I didn’t understand.

I think I was half-consciously looking to Eichmann to at last prove to be a man who could have done what the Germans did and what they were accused of having done. There was some way in which I wanted Germans to become whole in my imagination. Maybe Eichmann would prove to be the key that I could use to integrate the history of my time, as I understood it, with those people I believed had brought it about. It wasn’t that I would feel personally diminished if Eichmann behaved poorly during his trial. I didn’t identify subjectively with Germans any more than I did with Jews. But if Eichmann had said he would be willing to leap laughing into his grave because of his part in successfully exterminating six million Jews, I wanted to see a man who could make me believe it. I wanted to see a man who was real, not another Hollywood construct. If Eichmann were to prove out, as it were, then maybe the great historical events of my century would become real to me. If at last one great German criminal would measure up to the crime he was accused of, if he were to reveal himself to be a man to fit his deeds then maybe, just maybe, I would be able to get a handle on the Holocaust and the Nazis and the Jews in a way that I had never been able to before. Maybe I would find out how so many millions of Jews could have been so mesmerized by Hitler and his Nazis that with hardly more than a whimper they would have handed their children over to a race of evil brutes to be smashed and burned and gassed and then trail off to their own graves like so many soulless robots.

I suppose now that Esther’s imagination had run away with her. I suppose that when she read that I wanted Eichmann to act like a man-as opposed to what?-that I admired him, or approved of him, or-what? If I admired Eichmann, Esther might have imagined that I admired or sympathized with other Nazi war criminals. If that much were true it would not be unthinkable that I admired or was sympathetic toward Adolf Hitler, and that in my heart I sympathized with Nazism and its depredations against the Jews. If all that were true maybe I despised Jews as a people and, secretly, maybe I held Esther herself in contempt. And if all that were true then I must have approved of the mass gassings of the Jews and had a few laughs over the stories about Germans smashing and bashing the brains out of Jewish babies and burning them alive.

I don’t know what Esther imagined. She didn’t say and I felt too miserable to ask. Maybe she wasn’t clear about it herself. I can’t recall how the scene ended that morning. I knew that I had been misjudged in some way, but I didn’t want to offer an explanation without being asked for one. I didn’t want to apologize for what I had said, and even less for something I hadn’t said and didn’t feel. I can still see the hurt on her face and still hear her saying, “I feel so sorry for you, Bradley. So very sorry.” And I can’t recall either of us ever mentioning the incident again. We more or less picked up where we’d left off, laughing and horsing around and talking 1960s politics. How did we ever do it?

That summer with my business failing I moved the store to Hollywood Boulevard and I believe Esther dropped by one morning to say hello and then I don’t recall ever seeing her again. I still come across her son’s name in the poetry journals, however-Philip Levine. He’s quite well established now as a professor and poet. I wonder if Esther ever told her son about what that fellow she worked with at Bradley’s Bookstore had written in his journal.

Chapter Three

Tom Marcellus was one of seventeen individuals who subscribed to Smith’s Journal after reading the first issue, a quarterly with twenty-four photocopied pages stapled together with a gray paper cover. I produced it with a typewriter on Mother’s dining room table and had two hundred copies reproduced at a photocopy place on Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood. The writing was autobiographical, as is all my work (I either have no imagination or do not understand what imagination is), addressed current political issues from a libertarian viewpoint, with an emphasis on tax resistance to short circuit the stockpiling and further development of nuclear weaponry.

When Marcellus subscribed to Smith’s Journal he was in a publishing venture of his own, headquartered in Marina Del Rey, one with substantial financial backing, as I could see from an issue of the magazine he sent me in exchange. But that venture folded and the next I heard from Marcellus was the day he called to congratulate me on issue number three of Smith’s Journal, which was now an eight-page tabloid-the Nazi-gas-chamber issue. The issue that ruined Smith’s Journal. The gas chamber question, and particularly the taboo that protected it from open debate, had quickly become something of an obsession with me. I could not get it out of my mind. I was unable to integrate my new interest in revisionist theory with tax resistance and the issue of nuclear arms. It was the taboo that made the difference.

There were many individuals and organizations around the country allied with tax resistance, it was widely held as a principled movement even by those who did not support it, and it was an issue that was debated publicly. But a free exchange of ideas about the Holocaust story was absolutely forbidden. I had never come up against anything like it. The authoritarianism promoted by the intellectual classes themselves, the naked, primitive absolutism of the prohibition, and the vicious attacks carried out against those who dared talk about what they were forbidden to talk about was a drama that I was unable to distance myself from.

On the telephone Marcellus said: “I have a surprise for you. I work at the Institute for Historical Review. When I came here to apply for the job, I had no idea what I was getting into. I’d never heard of the Institute for Historical Review or its director, David McCalden. I’d never heard of Holocaust revisionism. When I found out what they were doing I didn’t know if I wanted to take the job or not. Now I’m glad I did. We’re publishing important stuff here. When your new tabloid came in the mail I just looked at the cover and a couple of the cartoons and walked it across the hall to David’s office and slapped it down on his desk. David started reading and didn’t look up until he’d finished it.”

The Institute for Historical Review had modest offices and storage in a modest industrial park in Torrance, near Los Angeles. The front windows were smoked or painted black and when I tried to open the door it had to be unlocked from the inside. McCalden was in his mid-thirties, tall and dark-haired and spoke with a Belfast Irish accent. Tom was younger and fair and spoke like I do. Behind the offices I could see the storage space for the Journal of Historical Review and for the Noontide Press books.

The three of us drove to a nearby restaurant and had a two-hour lunch. David drank half a dozen beers, I drank a bottle of burgundy, while Tom sipped a glass of water. Tom, as it turned out, is a scientologist and believes that it’s best to eat moderately, drink moderately if at all, take good vitamins, work toward getting clear, and lead a decent life. So over the last ten or fifteen years while I’ve gotten fatter and the knees have started to go out and I still haven’t found a way to make a living, Tom looks just like he did that first day except that he has a little more forehead.

McCalden grew up in Belfast but went to London to get educated. There he became an atheist but he never got out from under the mad-dog Calvinist moralism that appears to be in the air in Belfast. When he went to university he became an animal-rights activist, protesting fox hunting in particular. He and his friends would wait in the forest and after the dogs passed on the chase they would leap out at the horsemen beating pans with spoons and scare the shit out of the horses. Close on that he joined the nationalist/racialist National Front to protest Black and Asian immigration into England, particularly the Pakistanis. He was a troublemaker in the Front as well as for the establishment. Its leadership had too little principle for McCalden’s taste and not enough courage and he was largely responsible for splitting the movement and weakening it. He appears to have made bitter enemies everywhere. Cast out and downcast, he immigrated to America for a new start.

McCalden arrived in the US in the mid-seventies and found his way to Willis Carto’s Noontide Press in Torrance, California. The Noontide book list included titles on banking and money and the Federal Reserve, race, religion, the IRS, philosophy, conspiracy and communism, Zionism, Jewish politics, American history and so on, much of it from radical right or populist perspectives. A good number of the titles looked like crank books to me. What drew McCalden to Noontide was that its list included books on racial issues and racial anthropology that were not liberal in perspective and which could not be distributed through regular channels. And Noontide had recently published The Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Arthur R. Butz, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at Northwestern. Race, banking, Zionism and Holocaust revisionism then were the interests that drew him to Noontide.

McCalden said he’d had his first doubts about the Holocaust when he visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. He had always believed the Anne Frank story, and all the implications of it, but as he walked through the building where she wrote about how she and her family hid from the Nazis, he began to have doubts.

“When you’re there, when you see the whole building and when you see where they were supposed to be hiding out, it’s not believable. And that’s when I started thinking about the Holocaust, about how it fit so perfectly into Zionist rhetoric about Israel and how Jews talk about themselves in other ways.”

McCalden was the first individual I’d met personally who knew anything about revisionism and revisionists. He appeared then to know a lot about both. As it turned out, he did.

“I didn’t become a revisionist overnight,” he said, “but almost.”

When he started working for Noontide his job was to develop books and the Noontide catalog and market the titles by direct mail. McCalden wasn’t there long before he proposed starting a journal and maybe even a book list, with himself as editor, that would treat primarily with Holocaust revisionism and would be independent of Noontide. It would be called the Journal of Historical Review. It would be the first such journal in the world. It would be a historical milestone. Willis Carto, who owned everything, was the one who would have to decide. Noontide would be the source for startup funding and whatever was needed to maintain the new journal. He went along with the idea. The rest is history, living history, though David is dead.

I think now that David saw himself as an historical figure. He believed he was making a difference and he wanted to be recognized for the figure he saw himself to be. He worked hard, was very productive, and had a terrific sense of humor. He was smart, his intellect was exceptionally well organized, he had an exceptional memory, and you could say anything to him. He was bone-headed. I always imagined that I could read it in his face, the way his nose joined his brow. He believed that because it was all right for you to say anything to him that it was all right no matter what he said about you. That was all right by me but there were a lot of people who it wasn’t all right for so David made a lot of enemies. It wasn’t long before Willis Carto became his enemy. One afternoon long after David had left the Institute we were drinking at Bergin’s on Fairfax Avenue and we were arguing about Willis and he said:

“I don’t care what you say. I hate him.”

As time went on David wanted to deny he had said it because he always said he had never hated anyone and that he was ready for a rapprochement with Willis but Willis isn’t the kind of man to kiss and make up with people who write about him the way David did year after year. It’s a long story.

By the time we finished our lunch that first afternoon I had made two new friends. McCalden had raised issue after issue that I had never thought to raise. The little I had read about Holocaust revisionists and in particular those connected with the Institute and Willis Carto had been filled with so much condemnation, hatred and even horror that I had felt uneasy approaching their office. In the event, the event itself was perfectly ordinary. I was talking to men who no longer believed what others believed, who gossiped and laughed and were interesting and interested and knew how to eat with knives and forks. That’s one thing the integrationists are right about. When you mix it up with other folk, other folk become human. I think I understood from the beginning that my work in revisionism would be to integrate revisionists with those who profess to hate and be hated by them.

Back at the Institute’s offices David loaded me up with revisionist books free of charge and we must have had one of our first discussions about Jews and “the” Jews. I remember walking toward my car and David standing in the doorway, not wanting it to end, talking about how Jews are so in charge in America that Americans don’t even like to use the word “Jew.” We don’t say that so-and-so is a Jew. We say he’s “Jewish.” There’s something about the very word Jew, David was saying, that’s taboo. I understood that to be true but I didn’t want to give it to him at the moment and I remember grinning and backing off and getting in the pickup.

It was a beautiful afternoon, windy and blue. I’d intended to return to work but the wine and all the new information and the wonderful quality of the air blowing off the ocean made me change my mind. I drove into Westwood and passed the afternoon drinking beer and going through the bookstores. By nightfall I was at the little bar in The Hamlet with the latest issue of Commentary, drinking coffee with double shots of rum. I felt terrific.

In Commentary there was an article by Walter Laqueur titled “The Mysterious Messenger and the Final Solution.” Professor Walter Laqueur was Chairman of the Research Council of Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies. He’s a renowned Holocaust scholar. Here is a man I could depend on. I turned to “The Mysterious Messenger and the Final Solution” well fortified with drink and in fine good humor. I was willing to go wherever the story led. It could go any way it wanted. My job was to follow it out to the end and throw over the revisionists if the story went against them. Who was this mysterious stranger then, and what significance does he have for understanding the Final Solution?

Laqueur writes:

It has been known for a long time that the first authentic information about Hitler’s decision to destroy European Jewry came from a German industrialist who visited Switzerland in July 1942. But the identity of the industrialist has remained a mystery. What follows is a report of my attempt to trace who he was, what made him act as he did, and what became of him subsequently.

One day in July 1942, Benjamin Sagalowitz, the press officer of the Swiss Jewish communities headquartered in Zurich, received an urgent phone call from an acquaintance… [Sagalowitz] … had many contacts, among them his caller who told him on that day that a German industrialist Sagalowitz had vaguely known in the past was in town, with information of great importance. They then met. The industrialist … knew from an unimpeachable source that Hitler had decided to have all European Jews exterminated by means of poison gas by the end of the year.

… Sagalowitz decided that whether the information was true or half-true, no time was to be lost in transmitting it. He got in touch with Gerhart Riegner in Geneva. Riegner, aged thirty at the time, was the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland… on August 8, Riegner went to see the American Vice Consul, Howard Elthing, Jr., and handed him a document which began as follows:

“Received alarming report that in Fueher’s headquarters a plan discussed and under consideration according to which all Jews in countries occupied or controlled by Germany numbering three and one-half to four million should after deportation and concentration in East be exterminated at one blow to resolve once for all the Jewish question in Europe.”

I am not the only one to have been intrigued by the questions of the identity of the industrialist who brought Sagalowitz the news. Riegner, who gave his word not to divulge the man’s name, has been asked about the matter countless times but has steadfastly refused to respond. The other two who had known the man’s identity, Sagalowitz and Ambassador Harrison, are dead. Actually, Harrison had never met the industrialist, but upon his insistence Riegner had given him the name in a closed envelope. The OSS had also been informed. Riegner himself did not meet the industrialist until February 1945, according to Sagalowitz.

So there you have it. Laqueur has described the situation, given us the principal figures occupied with it, and now he sets out to unravel the mystery. Considering Laqueur’s training, his expertise and his obsession with the material, it did not occur to me that he might not find out anything. Nevertheless, Professor Laqueur has a hard time of it from the beginning.

My search among Harrison’s papers in Washington produced no results ¼. As for the relevant OSS files, if they still exist they have not been declassified… Some of Sagalowitz’s papers are kept in the archives of the Swiss Jewish communities in Zurich… Again the search proved fruitless… Howard Elting, Jr., the Vice Council whom Riegner had first contacted upon receiving the horrible news … assured me that he had never known the name…

Laqueur went on to consider, then reject, a “description” of the industrialist published in America in “a Jewish weekly.” He decided that Arthur Sommer “must have some connection” with the affair and “followed this lead without great hope, but with “surprising results.” The surprising result was that he uncovered a letter written by Sommer to Edgar Salin “to the effect that extermination camps had been prepared in Eastern Europe to kill all European Jews and also most Soviet prisoners of war by poison gas.”

Laqueur notes here that he is “following, more or less, Salin’s account written after the war…” Laqueur does not produce the letter. I do not want to be a party to discredit Salin’s good name, but where’s the letter? Or is Laqueur really giving us hearsay here? And Sommer lived on to 1965, working as a respected lecturer. Didn’t Arthur Sommer have anything more to say of note for those twenty years about how he had gotten his knowledge about the gas chambers? Or was that hearsay too?

Arthur had been one of the early warners but clearly not the (industrialist)… A key figure … was Carl Burchhardrdt, the “foreign minister” of the International Red Cross… In October 1942, he told American diplomats that he too had heard about Hitler’s order. On November 7, he saw Paul Squirte, the U.S. Consul in Geneva, and assured him that while he had not actually seen the order, he could confirm “privately and not for publication” that Hitler had signed an order in 1941 that before the end of 1942 Germany must be free of Jews. He had received this piece of information independently from “two very well-informed Germans; one a “German foreign ministry official,” the other “someone” inside the war ministry…

That is, briefly, all the information was hearsay, two or three times removed from its original source, and every source remains anonymous. Pretty impressive.

Laqueur turned next to Ernst Lemmer, a German journalist and intriguer who in July 1942 “met several public figures in Zurich and told them about gas chambers, stationary and mobile, in which Jews were killed.” Laqueur follows out Lemmer’s complicated career until Lemmer becomes the head of the Christian Democratic Party in the regional West Berlin Parliament, and from 1956 to 1965 served in the Bonn Federal Government as Minister for Communications and later for all German questions. Before his death in 1970 he published an autobiography in which … [he did not refer] … to his warnings about the Final Solution…”

Maybe Lemmer just forgot about them. What the hell, eh? Maybe there was some other reason. But Laqueur, a real academic bloodhound, stays on the trail. It may not be a real trail, but he keeps doing what he’s doing.

What other leads existed? … The files of the Swiss legation in Berlin had been destroyed… I made a few inquiries in business circles… [in Switzerland] … and found them not always helpful… I located a Nathan Schwalb in Switzerland; he had kept in touch with Jewish youth organizations all over occupied Europe during the war, and his correspondence of those years is thought to be a most important historical source. Unfortunately it is not yet accessible to historians…

One day in New York I told the head of a Jewish institution about my search. He put me in touch with his father-in-law in Miami, Dr. Julius Kuehl¼. During the war he was assistant to Alexander Lados, the Polish diplomatic envoy in Berne, and he also played ping-pong with Monsignor Bernardini … but about the industrialist he knew nothing.

Here Laqueur devotes hundreds of words to the fascinating career of an American, Sam Woods, but his preoccupation with Sam Woods seems to be of “no help in my search for the industrialist.”

One item in Riegner’s account had bothered me from the beginning. The industrialist was said to have employed 30,000 workers in his factory. This was not possible. There were few enterprises of that magnitude in the country.

I see.

Laqueur follows with a discussion of a number of other industrialists and concludes:

In short…(the industrialist)… could have been almost anyone. And if, as it seemed, he had kept silent after the war, I would probably never find him.

Then it occurred to me that there had been yet another man, whom I had forgotten; the original go-between with Sagalowitz. Who was he and why had he kept silent? (…) in the course of my search I came across a little book which seemed at first unpromising.

The author, Sergeant Mueller, was a noncommissioned officer in Swiss army intelligence… Twenty years after the war, Sergeant Mueller published his recollections… Certain embellishments and exaggerations apart, the book seemed authentic. It seemed likely that Sergeant Mueller had been in touch with my industrialist.

Laqueur found out that Mueller’s name was really Dr. Johann Conrad Meyer. Meyer had been the economic correspondent for a Berlin newspaper until March 1940, and was associated with a bogus corporate enterprise “established by the Rote Kapelle (“Red Orchestra”) during the war in Paris and Brussels as a cover for its activities.

The Rote Kapelle did not engage in music but was the most important Soviet spy ring in Europe during World War II. Dr. Meyer, I was told, had confirmed in conversation that some of his informants had also been in contact with the Rote Kapelle. Meyer himself, I learned from another source, had been in touch with Alexander Rado and Otto Puender, who had been running the Soviet intelligence network in Switzerland during the war. These were interesting new perspectives, in effect writing off Dr. Johann Conrad Meyer.

It looks like Laqueur is going to have to give up his search for the notorious but unidentifiable “industrialist.” So he begins to try to “imagine” what kind of a man the industrialist would have been if only he had existed and Laqueur could have found him. He half-heartedly discusses the case of the “Schoellers

… though they did not contact Sagalowitz, I have been assured.” Then there were the von Selves where it was “possible” that it was with one of the members of this family that the message which reached Sagalowitz had originated.

There were still more leads to follow, each weaker than the one before: the “ascona” connection… the case of Edmund Dtinnes… and finally one connection which bears further exploration concerns a family which represented the leading international fat and oil trust in Germany… Much evidence points in the direction of one or another of these people. But it cannot be proved beyond a doubt for, to the best of my knowledge, all the potential informants are now dead, and none confided in me.

Powerful stuff.

So there I was at the bar in The Hamlet in a rum haze reading Commentary, the primary neo-conservative, Jewish, Holocaust promoting journal in North America about the “mysterious messenger” who revealed the existence of the extermination gas chambers to the world and there was nothing there. Nothing. I’d been drinking for eight hours, I could hardly find my way from the bar to the men’s room and back to the bar again, but it was coming through to me very clearly that nobody knew anything whatever about the “mysterious stranger,” who provided the “first authentic information about Hitler’s decision to destroy European Jewry.” Nothing. If a revisionist had published a paper as empty as this one it would have been laughed out of town.

It looked comic to me. Maybe it was the booze. It hadn’t even occurred to Professor Walter Laqueur, Chairman of the Research Council of Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, and renowned holocaust scholar, that just maybe he and his friends were being had by an agent of the World Jewish Congress, Mr. Gerhart Riegner. Laqueur went into the story a true believer, and after an immense effort of burrowing around he didn’t find zip, but he came out as he went in-a true believer. A man of conviction.

While I was paying my bar bill a wonderful research idea for Professor Laqueur came to me. He had found one authentic lead during all his scurrying around but hadn’t followed it up. Dr. Johann Conrad Meyer and the role of the Rote Kapelle, the most important Soviet spy ring in Europe during World War II, and its role in the camps. And Meyers relationship with Alexander Rado and Otto Purender who ran the Soviet intelligence network in Switzerland.

For while it is well known of course that there was very little communication between European Jews and Soviet communists before the war, despite anti-Semitic charges that there were, and while it’s hardly believable that the Soviets under Stalin would create false intelligence to support their own cause, and while communists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, had no influence inside the German concentration camps, it came to me that Laqueur should have taken a look down that rat hole. With a little luck he might have discovered the real skinny on World Jewish Congress agent Gerhart Riegner, and on top of that maybe the “first authentic information” about the factories run by a mysterious industrialist where Germans manufactured soap from the cooked cadavers of exterminated Jews.

There have been hundreds of academics and agents for the Holocaust lobby burrowing their way through the Holocaust story for decades trying to come up with something on their “industrialist” but they had failed. Being true believers, they don’t need hard information on about the unproven “evidence” provided by their unknown industrialist. Belief and their attachment to their belief will do just fine. Belief has its own rewards, particularly when it comes to the Holocaust story.

It had been a hell of a day. McCalden and Marcellus, the rum, the “industrialist” and Professor Walter Laqueur. An almost perfect mix. One that encourages a man like me to go on following his nose against the sound advice of the academics, the intellectual classes generally, and everyone who knows me and wishes me well.

A couple days later I was eating lunch in Malibu beneath the tree in the little courtyard behind Jim’s health-food store. The sky was blue and sunny. The air was wonderful. In the Examiner I came across a story reporting how two neuroscientists have found a “negative brain wave, which shows up when something doesn’t make sense.” The negative wave shows up only when a person does a mental “double take” as with an inappropriate or incongruous thought. It also appears when a sentence begins with one thought but ends with another.

The two neuroscientists, Hillyard and Kutas, call their new brain wave “n400”. I think my own brain must have been bombarded with n400’s when I first read the article by Faurisson denying that the Nazis used gas chambers to murder Jews. No gas chambers? When my mental apparatus clanked to a halt that night, it must have been because of the storm of n400s that was bombarding it. It happened again and again during those first few weeks. The night I was at the Hamlet bar with Commentary and Professor Walter Laqueur, however, the n400s were unable to get through. I’d beaten them. There was no proof of the existence of a German plan to murder the Jews of Europe.

Chapter Four

At noon I drove the pick-up across the parking lot at the Colony Market in Malibu and pulled up under the big eucalyptus trees back where the trash bins are. I went through my cardboard food box, pulled out a can of vegetarian beans, the can opener and the plastic spoon and ate lunch leaning back against the truck bed. The sky was very blue and a breeze was blowing off the ocean across the asphalt. When I finished eating I got in the cab and went to sleep with the door half open so my legs could hang out.

Then my friend Val was laughing and snapping pictures with a little camera. “You look like an old walrus in there,” he was saying. “You look like something that washed up on the sand and a couple kids are taking you home to show mommy. Oh boy, let me get another shot of this.”

“Shoot away.”

“I’m going to send some of these shots to Mrs. Smith. Gladys will be interested in seeing what her son does in Malibu when she thinks he’s working.”

“Uh huh.”

We decided to drive up Latigo Canyon where Val was going to photograph a house he’s designed and built. I’d worked on it a little too. It was a beautiful, sunny, breezy day.

“I got your paper the other day,” Val said. “You must be crazy to print stuff like that.”

I knew what he was going to say. “What do you mean?” I said.

“A paper that says the Holocaust didn’t happen? Are you trying to kid me?”

“I didn’t write that the Holocaust didn’t happen.”

“You wrote that the Nazis didn’t have gas chambers. That’s what the Holocaust was. The gas chambers.”

“I wrote about how some of the evidence used to support the gas chamber stories doesn’t hold up. Some of it. It’s only history, you know. You’ve heard about the gas chambers so many times for so many years you don’t know any more what the stories are.”

“You want to know what I know?”

“ What do you know?”

“I know what the Jews are going to say. You’d better get ready for a little action.”

“Yeah?”

“You better start doing push-ups every morning, get yourself a Doberman, someone to take care of you.”

I didn’t say anything.

“When the Jews find out what you’re putting in that paper they’re going to send a couple goons around to fix your head for you. Have you thought about that?”

“It’s crossed my mind.”

“Crossed your mind, eh? You better let it cross your mind again. They’ll fix your head first, then they’ll straighten out that paper for you too. You’re messing with the Jews now, sucker. You’re in big trouble. You’re not messing with your ordinary American. You’re in the big-time now.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You know what Joe told me? I was up on the job yesterday and he had a copy of your paper. He was laughing his ass off. He told me to tell you its time you got your affairs in order because you’ve got about thirty days. He was laughing about it. Thirty days, he said. What does Joe care?”

“Joe doesn’t really care.”

“Joe says you’re gonna get offed. He thinks it’s damn funny too.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I think it’s pretty funny myself.”

I didn’t say anything. The clean bright afternoon air blew in through the cab across my arms and face.

“Putting stuff against the Holocaust in that rag of yours? Stuff the Jews don’t approve of? Who are you trying to kid? You think you’re printing the truth? Is that what you think? What the hell does the truth matter? You’ll find out the truth some night when you least expect it. That’ll be the night some big Jewish Defense League goon shows up to adjust your head for you.”

“You sound like you’re looking forward to it.”

“I am. I think your head needs an adjustment. I’d like to be there when they do it for you. Looking down through a little hole in the ceiling in that tenement in Hollywood where you live. I’d like to observe their technique. I hear they know how to make professional-caliber head adjustments.”

“The JDL gets a lot of headlines in this town. They don’t make much real trouble.”

“You keep on bird-dogging that gas chamber business, you’re going to find out what real trouble is. Listen to old Joe. Joe says you’ve got thirty days.”

“Listen to this one. I got up at four this morning and drove around inspecting my news racks. I only have six racks. I put them out to get a quick reaction to something I’m doing. This is the first time people have vandalized the racks. They slashed the plastic bubbles with knives. They stuffed chewing gum and cardboard in the coin slots. They smashed off the coin boxes with rocks and hammers. They even went to the trouble to pry apart the metal case frames and twist them out of shape. They did a real job on me.”

“What the hell did you expect? Did you think the Jews were going to let you get away with that shit?”

“How do you know it was Jews? Sincere gentile liberals might have got into the act.”

Val laughed. “Yeah, it was probably the liberals.”

“This one rack, I put it at the rear entrance to the Holiday Inn in Hollywood. Stop laughing and listen to this. A lot of Germans stay there and I was curious to see what reaction Germans would have to seeing a paper that was questioning some of the gas chamber stories. This morning, that’s where I went first. Someone had used quarter slugs to open the rack, then they unscrewed the plastic bubble from its frame and stole the papers and the bubble too. A real professional job. Inside the empty rack there was a note with a beer can sitting on it. I put the note in my pocket, got back in the pick-up in case somebody was watching and drove over to Hollywood Boulevard and parked where there was some light. The note said: `You Nazi asshole, if I catch you putting this anti-Semitic paper in this rack again I’ll cut off your nuts and feed them to my poodle.’”

Val was laughing and shaking his head.

“And then it said: `After that I’ll do something you won’t even like.’”

“Oh, man. Now there’s a funny Jew,” Val said.

“What do you think’s funny about that?”

“I’ll tell you what’s funny. The Jews are going to bust your ass for this one. You better not take any more naps in your truck. You better start scattering rocks in front of the door where you live too.”

“Don’t you have any feelings about a free press?”

“Hell no. What’s a free press to me? I’m an architect. Anyhow, you’re the free-press man. You’re going to take care of it for all of us, right?”

“Sometimes I ask myself, why do I even talk to you?”

“Old Joe, he gives you thirty days.”

A couple miles up Latigo Canyon we came across two vultures standing at the side of the road. As I slowed they flapped heavily up off the pavement and started circling just over the telephone wires. I drove ahead about fifty yards, pulled over and we walked back down. At first I thought it was a cat, but it was a fox. White and tan, very pretty in the face, it was the first fox I’d seen in Malibu. Its hindquarters were crushed and a hole was torn open in its flank. The stench was fierce. A line of blackened gut was pulled out of the hole across the fox’s face. Overhead the vultures were circling so low we could hear the sound of their wings in the thin blue air.

We walked back to the pick-up and waited but the vultures kept circling. We got inside the cab and closed the doors but they wouldn’t light.

I said: “I wonder why they won’t come down?”

“Maybe they’re finished,” Val said. “Maybe they don’t want anymore.”

“Half the fox is still there. There’s still a lot of good stuff there.”

“That’s the difference between you and those vultures. You think there’s a lot of good stuff there. They don’t think so.”

“You know what this guy said to me this morning?”

“What guy?”

“I was at Malibu Lumber picking up some one-by-four for stakes and we got to talking. He’s a framer now but he used to be a schoolteacher. He taught English to junior high school kids.”

“That’s why he’s out framing houses today.”

“One thing led to another and I showed him a copy of my paper. He looked through it for a while kind of thoughtfully. Then he said: `It’s interesting, but you know you can get yourself killed for this, don’t you?’”

“He’s right. You’re tangling with the Jews now, not your ordinary man in the street. I think old Joe’s right. You’ve got about thirty days to get your affairs in order. I want that new Black and Decker saw you bought. You won’t need it where you’re going. You won’t need anything. I’ll take the hydro level too. No use letting those Mexicans you work with have that stuff. They can’t make them work anyway. Do you still have that six foot wood level trimmed in brass?”

“I’m leaving everything to Mother.”

“What the hell is Gladys going to do with an electric saw?”

“Mother gets everything.”

“Your mother is eighty years old and all you’ve got to leave her is an electric saw? I think she’s going to be disappointed. What the hell have you done with your life? Do you ever think about that?”

“You don’t always do things with life, Val. Sometimes life does things with you.”

At the job site I sat in the warm afternoon sun while Val photographed the house and oak trees and the little stream that runs down the canyon toward the ocean. Then we drove back down to the coast and drank beer in the Cantina Cafe at Broad Beach. Val talked about being raised an Italian Catholic, then we talked about God and how it’s difficult to have much respect for Him. I said it’s my view that if He couldn’t do people right He shouldn’t have done them at all and after awhile the talk turned to women.

Val said: “When my old man was in the hospital dying I went back to Chicago to be with him. I noticed two things: the place was run by women, and they were incompetent. When my old man was dying he was in a coma for hours, sometimes for days. Then he’d come around, open his eyes and ask for a glass of water. I’d give him some water and he’d turn his head and go under again. I sat there thirty days, waiting, and when he opened his eyes and asked for water I’d give it to him. After a while I noticed that when he opened his eyes there was never a woman around. Do you think there was? Not one time. I began to look around then. I watched how those broads worked, how much time they spent on the telephone, how much time they stood around in the halls gabbing. When I really saw how they ran that place I was surprised anyone was still alive up there. Then I started thinking about other situations run by women, the schoolrooms and the homes. Everywhere they’ve taken over there’s chaos. It’s the women who have the power in the homes. It’s the women who raise the kids, and they run the schools and the hospitals. What’s more important than those things? Every place they take over, it falls apart. They’ve got no sense of organization, no sense about how to do things. Now they want to get into business and government. This country is going to be in one big mess. What are you laughing at?”

“What do you care what I’m laughing at?”

“I’ll tell you. If it wasn’t for sex, men and women wouldn’t even talk to each other.”

“Yeah?”

“That’s what you say, isn’t it?”

“I may have said that.”

“You want another beer?”

“One more.”

“Or what do you want to do?”

“You want to go back and check out those two vultures?”

Val said: “Do you know why the condors are becoming extinct?”

“Because they’re dying off?”

“They’re dying off, you jerk, but do you know why they’re becoming extinct?”

“I don’t know. That’s the truth.”

“I read this on the science page. You want to know why they’re becoming extinct?”

“What science page?”

“What the hell do you care what science page? The Times. All right?”

“You going to tell me?”

“The condors are becoming extinct because when a condor needs to take a shit he likes to fly up and stand on one of those high power lines up behind Santa Barbara. Did you know that? You didn’t know that, right? This is science. The condor, he stands there on that high power line, he looks around at the mountaintops, he watches those itty bitty hawks flitting around down below and after a while, when the time’s right, he eases out one of those long condor goobers. This is no ordinary goober we’re talking about. This is no canary, a little spot here, little spot there. This is a condor goober. You understand? Three, four feet long. That thing trails out there in the wind and makes a connection with one of those other high power lines and that’s when that condor gets a big surprise. He blasts himself straight out into space. He’s nothing but shit and feathers.”

“You believe that? You believe that’s why the condors are disappearing?”

“I’m telling you. It was on the science page. Can you see it? He blasts himself right off the face of the earth. The Sierra Club knows all about it. They’re plenty worried too, but they don’t want to talk about it.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“You believe there weren’t any gas chambers but you don’t want to believe something that was on the science page?”

“I don’t want to talk about the gas chambers.”

“I’ll believe you about the gas chambers when I see it on the science page.”

“That’s the point. So will I. I’m sick of talking about the gas chambers.”

“That’s all right. You’re going to get your head adjusted for you and afterwards you won’t ever think about gas chambers again.”

“You want another beer?”

“I’ve had enough. I go home drunk, my old lady socks me.”

“She shouldn’t do that. You have a professional career.”

“The other night I got home drunk, I was smoking a two-dollar cigar, and she socked me right in the end of it.”

“Science is politicized like everything else. No scientist has written anything on the gas chambers one way or the other. Why would that be if it wasn’t politics?”

“When you get your head adjusted by some big Jew you can take it to a scientist, have him study it. He can write something for the science page and your friends can read it and find out what went wrong with the way you think.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“All you got to do is stay alive. Joe says you’ve got thirty days. Maybe you need more time than that.”

“I need lots of time.”

We walked outside and stood around. There was no traffic and across the highway we could hear the surf smacking on the sand. The cool air blew off the top of the ocean against our faces. To our right the sun was setting behind Point Dume. It was very beautiful. After awhile Val said: “Malibu, right? Beats the hell out of Chicago.”

I got in the pick-up and drove down the coast toward Santa Monica. I was pretty drunk but not more than I like to be. The sea in the bay was still and blue and green and the sweep of the cities along the shore toward Palos Verdes was clean and white. The General Telephone building in Santa Monica rose up above everything else and some of its black windows flashed back the fiery light of the setting sun. The mind began to think again about how something is wrong with the gas chamber stories and how nobody wants to talk about it or let anyone else talk about it. I didn’t like thinking about it. Thought turned to how I feel when I talk about the gas chambers and my friends get angry with me. Not all my friends are like Val. Most are politicized. Then thought recalled a story I’d read in Time magazine two, maybe three years earlier. It came to me out of the blue. Even in the first instant I was intrigued by the curious relevance of the little flash of memory. That’s how it is with thought, memory and imagination. You never know which way the cat will jump.

The story was about a highwayman in Turkey who waylaid travelers in the countryside, robbed them and if they gave him any nonsense murdered them and threw their bodies in the brush. This highwayman was so successful that others joined him and soon he commanded a band of brigands so large that the Turkish army had to be sent into the field to knock him off. As it happened, he was ambushed and taken prisoner. He was a big old fellow with huge mustachios. There was a photograph of him in the magazine. He was astounded by the number of reporters who were on the scene to question him and take his picture. There were reporters from as far away as Japan and the United States.

“I don’t understand,” the big old fellow said. “Why am I so famous? Why do these people want to know about me? I am only a simple murderer.”

Driving along in the light from the setting sun I was laughing. I felt wonderful. I told myself to keep the story ready. The next time I’m attacked for following out a story line about the gas chambers, no matter where it leads, I’ll remember the old Turkish highwayman.

“Why do you make so much of me,” I’ll say? “Why are you so upset? I am only a simple writer.”

Chapter Five

The other night I dreamed about the number eighteen. At first there was only the number, then there was the understanding that I had eighteen minutes left to live. Eighteen minutes to prepare myself to die properly, with a little style. I knew that wasn’t enough time, not for me. Then I realized it wasn’t minutes, that I had eighteen hours to make the proper arrangements. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it right in eighteen hours either because I’m just not ready, and when I woke up the body was swamped with fear.

The next day after work I parked the pickup in Mother’s drive and went inside to have a chat and pick up my wash. In her front room she was in the wheelchair at the card table eating off the tray Alicia had prepared. The front of her dress was stained from breakfast and lunch. Her left hand was making involuntary movements from side to side. Sometimes she would press it down on her thigh, sometimes she would hold it with the other hand.

“Well,” she said, “what did you get done today?”

“I worked on the Topanga Canyon job,” I said. “It went pretty well.”

“Are you going to have any money this week? We need a grocery marketing done around here.”

“I’ll be able to do a marketing. No sweat. Then I may take a little trip. I feel like I need a little adventure.”

“What are you talking about?” Mother said. “Your adventuring days are over. Who do you know who’s fifty years old and talks about having a little adventure?”

“You think it’s all over with me, eh?”

“It’s been all over with you for years.” She looked at me sideways and laughed. There was food in her mouth. “You’re so absent-minded you just haven’t noticed. Anyway, don’t talk to me about having a little adventure. Just do the marketing. Make yourself useful around here.”

“All right, Ma.”

“A little adventure. If you only knew how asinine that sounds.”

In the dining room the paper bag was on the sewing machine with my wash that Alicia had folded neatly inside. There was some mail and I put that in the bag, said goodbye, locked the front door, turned off the porch light and walked down the hill toward my room.

I was taking off my boots when the telephone made the special ring. It was Jenny. After Pamela, Jenny had filled up my life. Not right away but after awhile. We were together almost ten years. We had raised her two kids. It had been over for a year or so. That night we chatted about this and that and then she said, “Bradley, you know how Princess has all those allergies? The way she scratches and chews at herself all the time?”

“Yes.”

“I’m afraid she just feels miserable all the time.”

“She’s so insouciant it’s hard to tell how she really feels. But if I was a dog and I had to spend all my time scraping my belly across the asphalt in the alley I don’t think I’d feel real good about my life.”

“It’s hard for me to say it,” Jenny said, “but maybe it’s time for Princess to go to dog heaven.”

“I think you’re right. She’ll like it up there too.”

“I don’t feel comfortable saying it.”

“I think her time has come. One day we’re all going to have the same problem. She’s no good the way she is and you’re never going to be able to fix her.”

“She’s a good barker,” Jenny said. “It’s nice to know she’s here at night-now that I’m alone.”

“Well, she is a good barker. She’s getting good at the biting too. The other day when I went over there to meet the washing machine repairman she’d already bitten him twice.”

“Really?”

“Not that he minded all that much. He’s Mexican, you know.”

“Don’t try to be outrageous, Bradley.”

“All right.”

“I’m really upset about this.”

“All right.”

“The problem for me is, I feel guilty about taking her to the pound.”

“That’s only cultural you know. It’s not real. The Vietnamese, they have a different culture, so they eat the dogs. Have you noticed how few dogs are running loose in Hollywood these days and how sleek the Vietnamese look?”

“Is that true?”

“When you get Princess to the pound, pretend she’s something to eat, something you feel you have the moral right to kill. Pretend she’s a cow. You’ve always been fond of cows and you eat them too. If you pretend she’s a cow you’ll be able to off her and not have any real feelings about it.”

“I see,” Jenny said.

“Or you could give her to a Vietnamese child and make the kid promise he won’t eat her. The kid will promise you. The Vietnamese are so polite they’ll promise you anything and after he eats her you can say he promised and it isn’t your fault.”

Jenny said, “I feel like I need a dog that barks.”

“Listen, I think I’ve got it. Take your cow to the pound and while you’re there pick up a barking dog. If you get it home and it doesn’t bark good you can take it back and trade it for one that works. This is something you don’t want to be sentimental about.”

“I feel bad just thinking about it. Bradley, will you take her to the pound for me?”

“Sure I will.”

“Scratch that. This is something I should do for myself.”

“All right. Here’s the way to handle it. When you take one in, see it for the cow it is. When you take one out see it for the dog it is.”

“Bradley, why are you talking so crazy?”

“The other way is to see the dog you take in to the pound as having reached the end of its suffering, while the dog you take out will discover an unexpected happiness living at your feet. That way you’ll increase the level of dog happiness on earth, on balance. In Los Angeles anyhow.”

“All right, Bradley.”

“Pretty good thinking, eh?”

“Thanks for your help, Brad.”

“Sure. When you need help, it’s always good policy to call a writer. Writers have answers for everything.”

Jenny said: “Bye, Brad. It’s been a pleasure.” She said the words with such an effusion of charm that they almost knocked me over.

I undressed, got in the tub and pulled the shower curtain across it. It hadn’t been a real conversation. Every real conversation I have with Jenny now is something of a tragedy. I stood under the shower and in my imagination I said, “Jenny, that’s the difference between how a humane liberal talks and the way your typical Holocaust revisionist bigot talks. There’s just no comparison.”

I laughed a little thinking about it.

When the telephone made its special ring again it was Marrissa.

“Oh,” she said, “I’ve been trying to get you for days. Where have you been? I call and call and you’re never there.”

“When I’m typing I pull the plug on the telephone and the rest of the time I’m working.”

“But why haven’t you called me? Do you know I’m leaving for school in a few days? I’ve been home all summer and you’ve hardly seen me.”

“I thought you still had a couple weeks.”

“Bradley, I’m leaving Wednesday night. I’m going to New York for a week, then I start school.”

“I didn’t think about you for a couple weeks, then just yesterday I made a note to call you.”

“You didn’t think about me for two weeks? You asshole.”

Her voice turned away from the telephone. “Mommy,” I heard her say, “Bradley says he didn’t think about me for two whole weeks.”

I heard Jenny’s voice say, “Marrissa, I don’t want you to talk to Bradley that way.”

“Mommy says I shouldn’t call you asshole.”

“Marrissa,” I heard Jenny say, “You’re not being funny.”

“I’ve only got until Tuesday,” Marrissa said. “Then you won’t be able to see me for months, maybe a whole year.”

“I thought you had until Wednesday.

“I’m leaving Wednesday. Don’t you understand? You have to see me before then.”

“All right, kid. Name the hour.”

“Tuesday morning. We can drive to the beach. I know a neat place to have breakfast. It’s really nice at the beach in the mornings. You’ll like it.”

“Okay. Sold.”

“You won’t forget me, will you, Asshole?”

“Now, Marrissa,” I heard Jenny say. “I mean it.”

“I won’t forget you.”

“Call me before Tuesday.”

“I’ll call you.”

“Don’t forget.”

“I won’t.”

“Past?”

“Yes?”

She was whispering and giggling. “Goodbye, Asshole.”

“Now you just stop that,” I heard Jenny say.

When I hung up the receiver there were tears in my eyes.

Monday afternoon I was in from the Canyon early when Marrissa called. She said, “Mommy wants us to take Princess to the pound.”

“Us?”

“It’s your responsibility. You’re the one who brought her home in the first place.”

“That was eight or nine years ago. Don’t you ever forgive anyone anything?”

“Come on, Brad. I don’t want to do it by myself. Please?”

I showered, walked to Mother’s, got the pickup, drove over to Jenny’s for Marrissa and Princess, and then headed across the Cahuenga pass toward the Valley.

Marrissa said, “I’m not sure if what we’re doing is moral.”

“We’re only going to kill an animal. What could be more commonplace?”

“But I don’t know if it’s really right or not.”

“I didn’t know you were having those kinds of problems. Are you starting to think about things? Is that what those private schools do to girls?”

Marrissa said, “I’ve thought about things all my life.”

“Yeah, I guess you have. When I was your age I didn’t think about anything. One experiment you can make right now is in your imagination visualize all the animals that are being slaughtered in this city at this moment. So we can eat them. Thousands of cows, hogs, sheep, lambs, chickens, turkeys, ducks, quail. Animals we won’t even be able to imagine on short notice. That’s what Princess is, another little animal with scabby skin that can’t imagine anything. Get rid of her.”

“Those other animals, it doesn’t feel the same as killing a dog.”

“You’ve just put your finger on one primary philosophical methodology. Identify your feeling accurately, reflect on it, prepare to suffer a little anguish, and you won’t go astray in your thinking. You may go astray in your ethics class but you won’t go very far astray in your real life. Killing animals is similar to aborting fetuses. It’s disgusting but it doesn’t seem to matter much morally.”

“I’d have an abortion if it was necessary.”

“My little girl.”

“I would.”

“Well, it’s the Christians who are transfixed by the horror of abortion. They think they’ve read someplace that God doesn’t like it. If I were God they’re’d be a lot of things down here I wouldn’t like. That’s the difference between God and people. People are sensitive and caring. God just goes along doing whatever He wants, no matter how much disaster He trails out behind Him. I’ve never understood why people have such respect for God. They talk about God’s love, but what they really respect is His power. What’s power without sensibility? God’s like a big animal. He does anything He wants because there’s nobody to stop Him. It’s the Christians who talk up morality all the time. God takes things as they come.”

“Mommy says you’re the most moral person she knows.”

“Your mother has always been on my side.” I felt a little uncomfortable. I fell silent. Marrissa was silent too; stroking Princess absentmindedly while the dog gazed up at her adoringly. I took the Sherman Way exit and headed west toward the pound.

“Bradley, are you going to do another issue of your paper?”

“I think so.”

“Why do you want to publish something that makes people feel bad?”

“Did you feel bad about something you read in the paper?”

“I don’t think of myself being Jewish. I just don’t have those feelings at all. I feel like everybody else. Like an American.”

“Did your mother feel bad about something I wrote?”

“I think she struggled with it. Mommy definitely feels Jewish.”

“I feel an obligation to publish it. There’s a lot of lying going on about the gas-chamber stories. Straight-out lying. I stumbled onto it. A lot of stuff is being covered up that shouldn’t be covered up. People are being accused of crimes they didn’t commit. I don’t like it. I’m going to write about it and I’m going to go on publishing what I write. I don’t know how far the lying goes but I think it goes right to the top. I don’t know how important any of it is but I’m going to go straight ahead with it. I’m doing the right thing, within the context of my life.”

“If you’re not sure it’s important, why would you go on writing things that hurt people’s feelings?”

“Marrissa, do you mean why would I write things that might hurt Jewish feelings?”

“That’s what you do, isn’t it?”

“What if your mother was German rather than Jewish, and you were told all your life that she had done horrible things when she was young, then you discovered that some of the things you had been told were false but people went on saying them anyhow?”

Marrissa didn’t say anything.

“What if you were told all your life that your German father had been a monster when he was young? What if it had been pounded into you year after year after year and then one day you found out that one, just one of the monstrous acts you had been taught to believe he had committed, he hadn’t committed? You found out by accident, because you had always been a true believer in your father’s monstrosity and guilt, but you found out? Do you think you’d let it slide?”

“I’ve never thought about how Germans feel.”

“Think about it now. Put yourself in the place of a German girl. How would you feel?”

“I still think I wouldn’t write something that made others feel bad.”

“That’s not fair, Marrissa. After all the war hate against the Germans you still see in the movies, on the television, that you read in the papers and in books and magazines. Has there ever been anything to compare with it? Have you ever heard of any society in history so obsessed with making a whole people felt bad?”

“I’ve never thought about Germans one way or the other.”

“I can understand that. One of the things a writer does is look at the others in the same light that he uses to see himself. That’s one of the things that separate artists from others. It’s natural for a Jewish kid to grow up trusting Jews and being suspicious of Germans. When you get older the time comes to start seeing through the implications of all that. If you want to.”

“I don’t think I like what you’re doing,” Marrissa said. “I can’t prove it’s wrong, but I don’t think I like it.”

“Uh huh.”

“Everybody says you’re wrong about the Holocaust. Everybody.”

“Not the Holocaust, Marrissa. The gas chambers. I am absolutely not wrong about the gas chambers because I’m only asking questions about them. I’m asking, is this piece of information about the gas chambers accurate? This particular gas-chamber story, does it make sense? Is there any real evidence to support it, or am I supposed to take somebody’s word for it? I’m told it’s bad taste to ask questions about the gas chambers. I don’t think so. Not bad taste, not good taste. Not moral, not immoral. I ask questions about the gas chambers to find out what’s going on there. I’m not sneaking around about it either. You should look into your reasons for not liking it that I’m asking these particular questions when you’ve never thought that it was wrong to ask any of the other questions that I’ve gone around asking. Then you should look into the reasons your professors don’t like it either. If you do, you’ll get a whiff of what obsessive conformity and sniveling evasion are all about. You’ll see professorial bowing and scraping before received opinion that’ll turn your stomach. You’ll discover…”

“Why are you getting mad?”

“That’s not mad. That’s intensity.”

“I just don’t know what to think,” Marrissa said. “I don’t have the information to say that you’re wrong, or that you’re right either.”

“I understand that.”

“I have this gut feeling though.”

“Well, what do you think, Kid? Right or wrong?”

“Wrong, Asshole.” She put one hand to her mouth and laughed until tears came from her eyes.

When I turned into the parking lot at the pound Marrissa said she didn’t want to go right in. We walked along Sherman Way leading Princess with a piece of clothesline.

I said, “Your mother taught me something about dogs I’ve never forgotten. Now I’m going to pass it on to you, her only daughter.”

“Thanks, Brad.”

“One day in the kitchen Princess was pleading with Jenny to pet her, to show her a little attention, so Jenny went along with it. Petting dogs isn’t her strong suit. But she petted Princess and looked into her eyes for a long moment. Then she said, `When you look into a dog’s eyes it’s always the same. You just know there’s nothing there.’”

“That’s what she taught you about dogs?”

“That’s it.”

“It doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“That’s not the point to understanding, to make you feel better. The purpose of understanding is understanding.”

“Let’s talk about something else,” Marrissa said. “Will you go shopping with me after the pound?”

“After we have your dog killed? Sure. We’ll kill the dog first, then we’ll look around for something to buy.”

“Thanks, Brad.”

“Sure.”

We walked along silently for awhile. The afternoon traffic was heavy and the air was full of its exhaust. Princess took an interest in everything in her quick neurotic way.

“Want to hear a dream I had? All right? You’ll love this one. I dreamed a decision had been made that I was to be burned at the stake. I think Mother was in on it. I accepted the decision as a matter of course. It wasn’t something that was presented to me for my consideration. A decision had been made. The post was already in the ground, the wood was piled up around it and there was some way to light the fire. I climbed up on the wood and stood with my face to the post. There wasn’t anyone there to tie me up or see to it that I didn’t run away. It was the honor system. At first I did pretty well. The fire came up over my shoulders. It seared the left side of my face until the skin glistened, but when the smoke got too thick I turned my head to the side to get a little fresh air. I’d get a little air to the left, then I’d turn and get a little to the right. It was as if I were willing to be cooperative, to carry out the decision that had been made for me, but I didn’t have enough character to see it through. I didn’t have quite enough of the right stuff. Then the wood was all used up. The flames died out, the smoke drifted off, and there I was. I’d failed to finish what I’d started. But I still felt the obligation to carry it through, and that’s when I woke up. I was awake but I could still see myself there in the dream. I was out under some trees gathering firewood.”

“Oh, my God,” Marrissa said. Then she said, “It sounds just like you.”

“At first I saw the dream as a comic event. Now I see the pride and the self-indulgence in it.”

“I wish I had dreams like that.”

“What for?”

“I’m bored,” she said.

In the pound there was a line of people waiting to destroy their animals or to save an animal. It was the same line. It was like something God would have thought up. When it was our turn I said we had an unwanted dog. That’s the expression they use. A teenage girl was clerking behind the window.

“Shall we destroy her immediately?”

“Sure,” I said. Just then Princess stood up and put her front paws on my thigh and licked my fingers. I felt the heart tug. Marrissa laughed nervously.

A young couple was standing in line behind us. They didn’t have an animal with them so I supposed they wanted one. When the young man saw Princess licking my fingers he asked Marrissa, “What are you going to do with your dog?” There was an edge to his voice.

“We’re destroying her,” Marrissa said.

“Why are you doing that?” the young man said tensely.

Marrissa started making excuses and twisting from one foot to the other. The clerk handed me the destruction slip and told me to follow the yellow line through a glass door out to a courtyard. Marrissa pushed against my back to hurry me along.

“Did you hear what that guy asked me?” she said. “Why did he think I’m doing it to my dog?”

She imitated his tense masculine voice. “Why are you doing that to your dog, lady?”

“Oh, I really don’t know,” she answered in her own schoolgirl voice. “I just thought it’d be kinda kinky.”

Chapter Six

“But why?” they ask. The reporters. “Why do you defend Nazis? How can you justify Hitler? What does it matter to you how the Jews were murdered? Aren’t you just a tourist in somebody else’s tragedy? It’s not the gas chambers that are important. What’s important is the fact that the Jews were murdered. There are so many more important issues in the world today than if the gas chambers existed or didn’t. What are your motives? Your real motives? Free speech? Don’t try to put us on about free speech. What did the Jews ever do to you? We don’t care about your fantasy about how there are no proofs that the gas chambers existed. We’re past that. We know they existed. We want to know why you do it. Why the gas chambers? Why the Holocaust? Why the Jews?”

That’s the big question of course-why the Jews? The rest of it’s all nonsense. Smoke screens. I don’t even answer that stuff any more. If what I do were in fact about Jews I would say it is so because Jews and Jews drive the story have dominion over it and because finally it’s a Jewish story but what I do isn’t about Jews, it’s about intellectual freedom. Jews are just folk. They need intellectual freedom just like the rest of us. There’s a long tradition in Western culture prohibiting intellectual freedom with regard to stories by Jews and about Jews. It’s been a bad tradition. Until the 15th century the prohibition was maintained by the Vatican and afterwards by the Vatican in alliance with the Protestant sects. Jews had little enough to do with it.

A couple centuries ago it became possible to express doubt about the teachings of the Church. Early this century the Marxists and their progeny set out to finish the job, to destroy the Church first in Russia, then everywhere else in the world. They believed they were destroying all the old sacrosanct Jewish stories. Inwardly they were like children. While they struggled to destroy Christian monotheism in Russia they were creating the first secular monotheistic state in the West and before long we found ourselves faced with another tremendous story about Jews-and they called it “Holocaust,” and it was good. And this new story about Jews became sacrosanct like the old stories had been sacrosanct.

The more things change the more they stay the same. We’re a nation run by the One-God people, Christians and Jews. I’ve had enough of it. I’ve had enough of their natural issue, secular monotheistic tyrannies. If it isn’t the One-God people it’s the One-Leader people. Intellectual freedom is anathema to all of them. Jew and Christian, Stalinist and Nazi. It wasn’t the One-God people who urged intellectual freedom on the West. It was the Greeks. The Greeks had a thousand gods but when it came to thinking they let it rip. I don’t care what stories others choose to believe, but I do care about the right to doubt stories by or about anyone and the right to say I doubt them and the right to be wrong in what I doubt. I don’t belong to the Temple or the Church or their natural issue either. I’m a writer, not a politico. My trust is to write what I choose and to have the courage to choose.

So people ask me to explain why, if what I do isn’t about Jews but about intellectual freedom, why did I pick an angle to talk about it from so that I have to talk about Jews all the time? I don’t know. It’s been a real bother. Maybe it’s a little irrational. I have nothing against irrationality on principle. Everything deep I have ever experienced has been irrational. Or groundless or absurd or mad. Passion isn’t a product of logic. To the contrary. Writing itself is irrational the way I do it. In forty-five years as a writer I’ve had three subjects. First one, then another, and now this one. Each time I set out to record how it happened that I was swept off my feet by events. When I was twenty-one I found a way of life. When I was thirty-four I found my subject. When I was fifty I lost it again. Thumbnail sketch of an American writer\.

1951

That morning in the forest we fell out alongside the trail for a rest and some chow. There was the creek, the trail that followed alongside it, the trees, the bars of slanting sunlight with the specks drifting down, the underbrush and so on. It was a nice spring morning. I ate a can of C-rations and threw the empty over my shoulder. The sound the can made when it landed didn’t sound right. When I looked back the empty can was sitting on the quilted, uniformed chest of a Chinese infantryman.

“Hey, Decker,” I said. “Look at that.”

Decker looked back. “Dead Chink,” he said.

“I threw my empty back there and it landed right on the guy’s chest. Look at that. Right side up and everything.”

“Chink coaster,” Decker said.

“I’m gonna get a look at him.”

“Say hello for me.”

There was the brown leather chest strap, the quilted cotton cap with the earflaps tied up on top, the serene, sallow face. I circled the body carefully, my M-1 at ready. I don’t know why I was being so careful. He was missing from the belly button on down.

“Hey, Decker,” I said. “This guy is seriously disabled.”

Decker looked around again. He didn’t say anything.

“He’s been whacked in half, clean as a whistle.”

Decker said, “What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m being careful to look at him from the top end, I can tell you that much.”

I couldn’t see any wires attached to him. I couldn’t see his legs or ass anywhere either. I looked around through the trees and brush. Nothing. I felt odd.

“Decker, don’t you have any curiosity?”

“Oh yeah. I’m curious. I want to know what the hell you’re doing up there.”

“The other half’s got to be around here some place.”

“When you find it, what the hell you going to do with it? Save it?”

“I think it was artillery.”

“Get the hell back down here, will you? Before you start tripping off wires or some other goddamn thing.”

I went on looking through the trees and the underbrush but I couldn’t find any more of the Chinaman, and then the column started up again and I fell in with the squad.

“Are you satisfied?” Decker said.

“I’d like to know the answer to that one.”

“The answer is, that Chink never had no legs. He never had no ass either. It’s the latest thing in Chink infantry. He’s probably following us right now.”

The image of hundreds, maybe thousands of assless, legless Chinese infantry gliding silently through the forest all around us was hilarious.

“You won’t laugh tonight when you wake up and find that no-ass Chinaman cutting off your balls.”

“Will you quit it?” I said. I wanted to stop the laughing but it was very difficult.

That year the corpses were everywhere. Under the trees, on the ridgelines, along the trails, in the paddies, in the thatched huts and in the houses with tiled roofs. At the beginning they were in the snow and on the ice. Later they were in the mud, the swollen creeks, in the irrigation ditches. At the end they were in the dirt in the hot summer sun covered with flies.

The first corpses were three Chinese machine-gunners in a shallow hole on a ridgeline. I paused in the cold afternoon wind and looked down at them. They were charred black, like barbecue left too long on the grate. Gray dirt blew across the top of the hole and settled on the blackened heads and hands. I snapped a picture with my Brownie Box and hustled on up the ridgeline to my place in the column.

One afternoon in a rainstorm we climbed up on a small plateau where the Chinese had slaughtered a battalion of English. The English had buried their dead where they had fallen. We stayed on the plateau three days and nights. The first couple days the rain-washed out the graves of the rotting English corpses. The third day it began to wash out the Chinese graves. The Chinese had had time to bury their corpses deeper than the English had. It’s nearly always better when you win.

I didn’t have the same interest in the American corpses as I did in the Chinese and Korean. The Chinese made a corpse out of O’Neill by shooting him through his radio backpack so that he fell face down in three inches of paddy water and drowned. They made a corpse out of Steubbens when they shot off his jaw with a fifty so that he bled to death on the side of the dirt road. He couldn’t have made it without the jaw anyhow. Doug Smith became a corpse one moonless night while he stood at my side on a narrow mountain ledge. A Chinese officer with a revolver in his left hand appeared out of the blackness like an apparition and Doug took a single bullet in his heart.

Those things were all right with me. I didn’t get angry about how the Chinese made corpses out of us. Fair’s fair is how I looked at it. We nearly all looked at it that way. We made more corpses out of them than they did of us. The night Doug fell across my feet with a single heavy groan I sat over him all night, and when dawn came and I saw how yellow his face had become I thought, “That’s all right. They turn pale and we turn yellow and that’s how it works.” But when they made Captain Grey into a corpse with four machine-gun bullets in his stomach my feelings about the corpses began to change and I didn’t look at them the way I had before. They became less interesting but more meaningful.

One afternoon when we relieved the Fifth Battalion along a mountain road there were the usual corpses. One Chinese who wasn’t a corpse yet but would be very soon was sitting against an embankment with part of the top of his skull off. A Mexican kid was sitting on the embankment above him, his legs dangling over the edge, poking a straw into the open place in the skull. Each time he poked with the straw the Chinese who was becoming a corpse moaned and shrugged his shoulders.

“Don’t do that again,” I said.

“Oh, man,” the kid said, “it’s a Chink.” He gave another poke with the straw and the Chinese who was almost a corpse moaned and shrugged its shoulders. I started up the embankment.

The kid jumped up. “Man, you crazy or what?”

“Leave him alone,” I said.

“It’s a goddamn Chink,” he said. “Can’t you understand?”

I put the muzzle of my M-1 in the ear of the soon-to-be corpse. The blast tore off the back of its head. I’d wanted it to go straight through but I hadn’t done it right.

“Ah, man,” the kid said quietly. “You make me feel bad.”

There were many things in Korea I did not do right and afterwards I found out that no matter where you are or what it is you are doing it’s always difficult to get it right but that that’s what the work is.

When I was a child my one ambition always was to go to war and be killed in battle. My great hero was Roland. I’d read the Song of Roland at nine or ten and couldn’t get over it. I never wanted to be a fireman or a scientist or President. I wanted to be a great hero like Roland and fight the enemy to a standstill and be killed at the moment of my greatest feat. I daydreamed about it for years. The being killed part was very important. The way I looked at it when I was a child and all the time I was growing up was that if you are not killed when you’re trying to do something then you aren’t trying very hard or what it is you’re trying isn’t very important.

After they brought me back to the States to the hospital I had time to think about what had happened to me over there and what had happened to the others. I thought about how I hadn’t tried to do anything heroic. Real life, it seemed, had thwarted my ambition. At moments of great danger I had looked to my survival and the rest of the time I’d tried to not be any more uncomfortable than was necessary. It was as if I had suffered a failure of imagination.

And then it wasn’t as if there had been something significant about the fighting. None of us thought that. It was a real war all right, but that’s all it was. It had no significance. If it had had some significance maybe a lot of us would have behaved differently. At that time, though, I didn’t understand how important significance is. I didn’t know anyone who did.

One morning in the ward at Camp Cook I was sitting cross-legged on my bed remembering, which is how I spent a lot of my time. At a certain moment without any preliminary consideration I stepped into my slippers and walked through the cold empty wooden corridors to the Post Exchange and bought a pencil and a fifteen-cent note pad and returned to the ward.

I got up on the bed again and began to write down how it had been that last day on line, the mountainside, the Chinese bunkers, the machineguns, the blasts of the hand grenades, the blood bubbling from the hand, the white bones gleaming wetly in the sunlight, how I sat beneath the tree looking through the pine needles for the missing finger which wasn’t actually missing, I found, but only hanging down while all around the air filled up with bullets and falling branches and all the yelling and the noise.

It didn’t come out like I wanted so the next day I sat at a card table in the little recreation room at the end of the ward with the fog off the ocean washing across the windows and wrote it out again. It didn’t come out that time either. No matter how many times I tried I couldn’t make it come out. But I started writing down what I couldn’t stop remembering all the time, especially the corpses and the two dreams I dreamed all the time, and the old childhood and the father. The usual stuff. None of it came out but it was becoming very important to keep trying to get it right. I wouldn’t have been able to say why.

The hospitals lasted eight months, then I was discharged from the army. I had no plans. I moved back into the front bedroom in my parents’ house in South Central Los Angeles. I hitchhiked to Mexico City and came back. I took a job loading trucks at a milk plant. I enrolled in a drawing class. When the milk plant laid me off I found work as a brakeman for the Southern Pacific Railroad. No matter what else I did or what job I had, when I got home I’d set up the card table in the bedroom doorway and try to get it down on paper, whatever it was. Sometimes I tried to invent things but it wasn’t easy to think up stuff I hadn’t actually seen. I felt like maybe I had already written what was important even if it hadn’t come out and I was half afraid there was nothing left to write and that it was pointless to keep on trying.

One night at the Southern Pacific yard I was riding an oil tanker I couldn’t brake and I had to jump off its running board just before it slammed into the rear of a train of empty boxcars. When I hit the ground I bruised the heel on my left foot and had to quit the railroad because for a long time I couldn’t walk without a cane. I took a job driving a Good Humor ice cream truck. There was a loudspeaker on the cab and a musical recording I could switch on to get the attention of the kids while I drove slowly up and down the streets in South Central. I didn’t mind the job. I didn’t mind anything, really, but oftentimes I felt there was something inside that was coming up, something I couldn’t see or figure out but something I wanted to know about.

I wrote the Consul of Viet Nam in San Francisco to ask about the procedure for enlisting in the Viet-Namese army. I didn’t have anything against the Viet Minh but I was willing to do what was necessary. I felt it was important to start doing something. The Consul replied that there was no procedure for accepting foreigners into the Viet-Namese military.

One empty Sunday afternoon I drove my parents’ car to Playa Del Rey and parked at the curbing there and rolled down all the windows and looked out over the sand and the blue ocean. A breeze was blowing off the water and it was a nice afternoon but I could feel it coming up and I didn’t know what it was or what I should do about it. I’d taken a couple paperback books with me and I decided to open the one by William Saroyan. The first story was called “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.” The young man in the story must have been about my age, and he was a writer. Nothing was important in his life except the writing. He lived alone in a rented room and wrote every day but couldn’t get any money for his stories. He couldn’t pay the rent and much of the time he didn’t have money for food.

One Saturday afternoon after he finished writing he went out walking. When he came to a cafe he stopped and looked in through the window. He looked at the people inside eating food, people who had ordinary jobs and earned ordinary salaries and could afford to eat food in cafes. The young writer knew he didn’t want to be like them but he couldn’t stop looking at their food and imagining he had some. He walked around the neighborhood looking in all the cafe windows. He was very hungry and very weak but he was happy because he was living the life of a writer and not the ordinary life of the others. He walked slowly and uncertainly back to his room and collapsed on his bed. He grew delirious with hunger. He had already been delirious with that other hunger, the hunger to be true to himself, and now his room began to whirl through his hunger delirium. It was a wonderful story. Then the young man died. I was stunned. The young man had starved himself to death on principle. He had died for his art. It had never occurred to me it was possible to do that. No one had told me that writing could be that important. To suffer, certainly, but to die for it? It was a decision the individual writer had to make for himself. You could take the writing as far as you wanted. If you wanted, you could take it all the way. I knew that was what I wanted. I had never thought about it but I recognized it the moment I saw it. I wanted to take the writing all the way. I wanted to risk death for it.

I hadn’t noticed how hard the wind had begun to blow. It was coming in off the top of the ocean across the sand and through the rolled-down windows of the car. I sat behind the wheel in a kind of elevated stupor, the pages of Saroyan’s open book whipping in my hand. Inside, it was coming up really strong but I sensed that whatever it was it was still a long way off. I sensed that I was at the beginning of something and I was right about that all right but that afternoon I had no idea how far off the real beginning still was\.

1964

It was a beautiful warm fall evening just before sunset and Pamela and I were living in the little second floor apartment on Grace Street in Hollywood. Pamela was in the kitchen cleaning up our supper dishes and I was lying on the bed reading the paper, though my mind was on other things, on how one part of my life was finished and I was starting over with a new life but how I couldn’t get started. I had closed down the bookstore and filed bankruptcy. The “Tropic of Cancer” trial was over. I had thrown my manuscripts in a dumpster in an alley off Hollywood Boulevard, everything I had written during the previous twelve years. I’d gotten rid of everything I could get rid of. I was ready to start over but I couldn’t start because even though I told myself I had gotten rid of everything there was something tremendous in my life still and it was crushing me from the inside.

So I wasn’t reading the paper to find out anything but just to use the time. After a while I saw something from the corner of my eye. There was a peculiar looking fox in the hallway. It had translucent glass eyes the size of tennis balls. There was the impression that until I noticed it, the fox was just moping around there. But then I noticed it and it really came alive. It leaped in through the doorway, jumped over the bed and sailed out the window toward the west. For a moment I was a little set back, then I got up, opened the window, put my head out and looked up then down the street toward Franklin. I didn’t expect to see anything unusual and of course I didn’t. I was perplexed but I was kind of laughing too. The light over the hills was golden and red and the evening air was moving softly through the trees and across my face. I went to the kitchen and told Pamela what I’d seen. I didn’t know how she would take it. She laughed, which pleased me. Then she said, “Well, Poopsy, you’ve lost everything else. Why not lose your marbles too?” Then she turned and put her arms around my neck. “Oh, I’m sorry, Honey. I really am. Does he want a little special attention? Tell Pammy what he needs. Come on, tell her.” For my part, it was very often my pleasure to tell Pamala what I needed.

The next day, it was a Saturday afternoon, and we were sitting on the bed listening to Vivaldi on the radio. Pamela was sewing a garter belt but I think I was just sitting there. Before Pamela I didn’t know who Vivaldi was. Since Pamela I haven’t known a woman who’s used garter belts. When I was a boy my father used calf garters to hold up his socks. It was considered very sophisticated on our block to do that. In the bedroom I was thinking I’d like to go out on the desert maybe and camp. Alone. Then I saw myself standing under a waterfall in ancient Greece. The image was crystal clear. I don’t know how I knew it was ancient Greece. No voice spoke to tell me what I was seeing. The setting was a simple rustic clearing in a forest. It was like an illustration in a 19th-century novel. Then I realized I’d seen the same image a moment before and had forgotten about it.

Suddenly I was very alert. I decided to go in the front room and sit down to the typewriter. I would describe what I had seen with as much detail as possible. Before I got to my chair the vision of the waterfall recurred so vividly that I knew I was in the presence of something extraordinary. I could hear the water pouring and roaring down. I somehow understood I could watch the waterfall or I could avoid watching it. It was up to me. I decided to watch. I felt I had an obligation to watch. I couldn’t have said why. I also didn’t know how. I got down on the floor so that if something happened I wouldn’t fall. I put my face in my hands.

At once I saw myself standing naked beneath the falling rushing water. My body glistened whitely. My head was thrown back, my arms outstretched, the palms of my hands turned upward. My hair was uncut, there was a yellow beard and long flowing mustaches. I was smiling rapturously and as the water poured through my outstretched arms I wanted to embrace it but I didn’t. In the vision I was waiting for something. I didn’t know what. I waited a long time and when nothing happened I saw myself walk away through the trees. When I reached a glen in the forest I turned and peered back through the undergrowth. At the foot of the waterfall I saw a pool that hadn’t been there before. There was nothing unusual about the pool, yet at the sight of it, from where I lay on the floor, the blood drained from my head.

In the scene I forced myself to go back to the pool. The water was dark. But I realized that something was in there and if I wanted to know what it was I would have to go down into the darkness. In the apartment, the body began to tremble. I decided I was going to have to get out of the scene because something terrible was about to happen and at that instant I saw myself jump up and start searching through the leaves under the trees. I found a piece of rope, tied one end of it around a rock and the other to my ankle and threw the rock into the pool. It was like a scene from a Buster Keaton movie. The weight of the rock on the rope jerked me over into the water but just before I went under I grabbed a ledge that projected out over the pool and held on for all I was worth. Then I felt ashamed of the fear and I let go. I watched myself sink down through the dark water, my long golden hair trailing up behind me. In only a moment I was on the bottom of the pool. I could hardly believe how easy it had been once I’d let go. I was standing on a floor of clean white sand. The walls of the well were made of blocks of mortared stone. I looked around and waited but nothing happened. I was at a dead end. I was going to have to do something more, make an additional effort, but I didn’t know what. I saw myself scratch my head.

In the apartment I rolled over on my back. I could hear the radio playing in the bedroom. I supposed Pamela was still sitting on the edge of the bed sewing. The announcer was saying that the next recording we would hear would be a Somali corn chant. Out on the street a car shifted into low gear to climb the hill. Down in the court a water spigot was turned on. Then, in the well, right at my feet, I saw a movement in the sand. It was a hole the size a rat might use and sand was slipping down it. Seeing the sand go down the hole frightened me. There was a danger that I would slip down the hole myself. There was something underneath the bottom of the pool and now I understood I had to go down there too. A chair appeared on the sand and I sat on it, gripped the edges of the seat with both hands and braced my feet against the sand. I wasn’t going anywhere if I could help it. The hole grew larger and more sand poured down it. The hole began to whirl furiously and move toward my feet. The whole bottom of the pool was going to fall through. I sprang up from the chair toward the top of the pool but at that instant a hand reached out of the hole and grabbed my ankle. The hand was black and horny and immensely strong. An inkling of an idea crossed my mind that at the last moment, just before the hand destroyed me, I would be able to turn myself into stone or change my form but the fear was so strong that I sat up on the rug and I heard myself moan. I was aware of Pamela appearing in the doorway, pausing, then going on to the kitchen. I didn’t want her to see me lying on the floor again so I got up and sat in the red canvas chair. Outside the window a blue jay hopped along the top of a concrete block retaining wall.

Then there was an explosion in the room and the monster emerged from its hole into full view in the apartment. It was a tree with the top of its trunk blasted off. It had eyes in its flabby bark and a crown of bushy white hair. It threw its arms around me then, and when I felt its body all full of knots and twigs pressing against my flesh I swooned with terror and revulsion. I felt relieved too and utterly lost and it was as if I went out of my body and was no longer in the apartment. The tree demon transformed itself into a giant reptile that held me to its breast with stumpy, leathery arms. Its rear legs, churning in circles, clawed out my heart, entrails and genitals. Its claws shredded my thighs and I saw the femur bones glistening and white. Then the great lizard fell over backward, still clutching my body, down through the hole in the bottom of the pool into a murky darkness.

There, everything was calm. The giant lizard was gone and I was whole again. I was alone on the bottom of the sea. In the darkness my body was chalk white. Sea foliage swayed in the dark current. Eels and snakes rubbed their lengths along my back and chest, nosed into my armpits. I smiled at their antics. I was sitting on a rock, my hands clasped, my elbows on my knees, waiting, but nothing happened. I waited a long time. I peered through the darkness anxiously. In the distance I saw a cliff appear. While I watched, two caves appeared high in the face of the cliff. I understood immediately. What I had thought I would find at the bottom of the pool was now up in the cliff in one of the caves. But I was exhausted. I didn’t want any more. In the apartment, pains were shooting up through my neck into the back of the head.

Sunday afternoon we drove out to South Central to have dinner with my folks, then returned to the apartment. Toward midnight Pamela was in bed and I was sitting on the couch in the living room thinking about why it was so impossible for me to write. After a while I heard a man’s voice mutter, “You are a stupid and cowardly man.” I looked around the room but no one was there. I knew nobody was there. I didn’t believe what the voice said, either, but it pleased me that I’d heard it. I started pacing around the room. I sensed that maybe something incredible was going to happen. I looked at the clock. In ten minutes it would be midnight.

From the bedroom I heard Pamela ask if something was wrong. I said no. Out the window I saw a dawn breaking over the edge of a dark forest. On the horizon an observation balloon was moving back and forth over the trees. It was searching for something. I realized it was searching for me. I suddenly turned cold, my skin prickled, and then I couldn’t see the balloon any longer. I went to the front door, opened it and looked out. It was very dark.

From the bedroom I heard Pamela ask if I were going out.

“No, no,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Will you stop mumbling then? It makes me think there’s an animal in the house.”

Monday morning I got up quietly, heated water for coffee, and mixed a can of frozen orange juice. I put something by Bach on the record player, then recalled that the machine was broken. It hadn’t worked for weeks. I put juice and coffee on Pamela’s night table and sat on the edge of the bed. She stretched luxuriantly. Her breasts were full and shiny.

“Well, el estupido,” she said grinning. “Do you have something against music?”

“Oh. I forgot about the radio.” I got up in a way that prevented her seeing the front of my pajama trousers. I dialed the radio to some classical music I didn’t recognize. I had an erection but I didn’t want it. I always had an erection and sometimes it was a pain in the ass.

“What’s the matter?” Pamela said. “Why are you hunched over like that?” She was grinning.

I sat down on the bed. “Like what?” I said.

“Ah, Honey,” Pamela said. She held her open arms out to me. “Come here, Sweetie. Huh? Come on.”

“Just a minute,” I said. I went in the living room as if I had something to do there. After a while I heard Pamela get out of bed and open a dresser drawer. When Pamela left for work I packed my suitcase, filled a cardboard box with books and the new manuscript and locked the typewriter in its case. Pamela’s car keys were on the dresser. I took them and five minutes later I was driving up Highland Avenue and onto the Hollywood Freeway going north. I didn’t know where I was going or what I would do when I got there. Just before dark I parked at a roadhouse on 395 in the Sierra Nevada overlooking Mono Lake. There in the cold darkening air I watched half a dozen wild horses far below on the dry lake bed, loping easily across the barren moonscape. Then I spied my bones heaped up in a wheelbarrow in one of the graveled parking spaces. They filled it half full and thought easily calculated their weight at thirty-four pounds. Piled up there in the cold, they were cracking and popping. Dogs had snatched a few and buried them. At one time the skull had been on top of the heap, but now it had fallen down to one side.

A week later I was working the night shift in Harrah’s Casino at Lake Tahoe. The first morning walking back to my cabin I saw the sky laden with the first clouds of autumn. I had failed at business, failed at marriage, at writing. I had failed in some way peculiar to myself and now, while I didn’t know what was happening with me or how much more I was going to have to see, I sensed I was about to find my subject as a writer. I was thirty-four years old and I had a pretty good idea about where the cliff with the caves and their terrible treasure really were and that at long last the journey was underway and that I would have to accept all that was going to happen now and everything I was going to see no matter what it was and not turn back because this was it.

That afternoon it rained hard and afterwards in the cabin while I lay on the bed in the dark I listened to the pine cones hitting the needle beds beneath the great dark trees\.

1979

It’s New Year’s Eve and I’ve spent the afternoon at the library in downtown Los Angeles reading Butz’s Hoax of the Twentieth Century and I feel as if I have been invaded by something tremendous. I am terribly charged and restless and crazily alert. I walk half-floatingly to where the car is parked and take the freeway to Hollywood, and when I get to the house I go straight to the kitchen cupboard and pour out about six ounces of Kaluha. That’s all there is or I’d make myself a real drink. Alicia is going to Tijuana, then on down to Rosarito for New Year’s, so I drive her back downtown to the Greyhound bus station. We’re only a few blocks from the library where I’d been reading Butz an hour ago. We miss her bus so we walk to Cole’s restaurant on East 6th and sit at the bar where my father used to drink back in the 1920s, and even before that I think, and where he used to eat in the little back room. I lift a couple rum and cokes and because Alicia doesn’t drink I lift a couple for her. I want Alicia to lift a few herself and not go to Rosarito but I won’t say so and I know she won’t do it even if I do say it so why say it? The time will come. I find it very exciting to be there with her. I’m begining to get crocked. I want to tell her about Butz and the Hoax but there’s no place to start with Alicia. I’d have to run down Western civ to prepare her for it.

What is so tremendous about Butz’s book for me isn’t that he takes a run at knocking down the gas-chamber stories but that what he has done is being kept secret by the professors and all the intellectuals who are the ones who have always made so much of the story in the first place, and of course that’s the rub. I’m even more excited by Butz than I am by Alicia, by the slender beautiful shapes of her body and her beautiful smile and the warmth there is between us. Butz is nothing to look at, his picture is in his book, but at this moment if I had to choose between Butz and Alicia I’d choose Butz hands down. Usually a thrill is a thrill but there’s nothing to compare with the thrill of an idea when its time has come.

I see Alicia off at the Greyhound station, then take the freeway and Santa Monica Boulevard out to Barney’s Beanery where I buy a fifth of burgundy. I say “Hi” happily to a tall guy with a little Hitler mustache standing next to me and he says, “Don’t say hi to me. The last guy who said hi to me in this place was a fag.”

I know I’m a little drunk so maybe I didn’t hear him right so I start to say, “Well, I’m not …” but he breaks in on me.

“Listen,” he says. “I don’t want to talk to you. Do you understand? For all I know you’re a fag too. As a matter of fact, you look like a fag.”

If I were sober I think probably there would be a scene. I think a good shot right above his belt buckle would fold the sonofabitch in half but then what? It’s New Year’s Eve. I finish the bottle and drive back to the house and help Mother get from her wheelchair into bed. I don’t come close to dropping her but she wants to know what the hell I’ve been drinking. It’s too complicated so I don’t say anything. Once I have her settled in and the lights turned low the way she likes them I drive back to Barney’s and drink Irish coffees with a red-headed woman who likes country music because it doesn’t agitate her, which is something I have never thought about. When midnight is sounded she raises her face and her mouth to me to be kissed but something holds me back. I don’t know what it is. She’s good-looking, she’s alone, she likes me, it’s New Year’s Eve and there’s her face and mouth but I can’t commit myself and I realize my heart has gone south on a Greyhound bus so I give the redhead a little nudge on her cheek feeling guilty because for all I know I’m ruining her New Year’s Eve but that’s all I have for her.

After midnight the people are coming in from all over town. The redhead is gone and I’ve forgotten about Butz and the hoax of the twentieth century. I’ve forgotten almost everything. I drink a few more Irish coffees then sensibly switch to Guiness stout because after all I still have to drive back to the house. When the bar closes it takes me about forty-five minutes to find the truck, which makes me a little uneasy because I know Mother doesn’t like being alone at night and I should be there with her but I find it and make it back to the house without killing anyone or damaging any property and park in the drive and go in the front room and pull the foam pad from behind the couch and make my bed on the floor like I do every night. It isn’t easy. I take my clothes off and put on my caftan, knocking a few things off the card table on the way. I’m wondering if there’s a beer in the fridge or maybe a little port when I hear Mother call from the bedroom.

“Bradley,” she says, “what the hell are you doing in there?”

“I’m going to bed, Ma.”

“It sounds like you’re knocking the place down.”

“Nope. Just going to bed, Ma.”

“Do you hear those people out on the street?”

“I do hear them.”

“Do you hear what they’re saying? They’re talking about how they could set off a fire with those firecrackers. They sound like they’re drunk to me.”

“Drunk?”

“Yes. Drunk. Don’t you understand English?”

I go outside barefoot wearing my caftan, which I am very attached to because Jenny gave it to me while we were still together. I’m ready for anything. My will will be done. I should have taken time to put my shoes on because I know from experience it’s no good when you are making your will be done and the other guys all have shoes on and maybe even work boots and you’re in your rubber thongs. There are eight or ten of them, attractive, well-dressed men and women laughing and talking softly and setting off their fireworks. The colors are very beautiful and radiant in the black night air. There isn’t going to be any trouble. They’re my kind of people, the kind of crowd I was a part of when Jenny and I were together but that’s gone now. I feel drawn to these new people. They can be my friends. The first one I reach I grab and kiss. He doesn’t appear to care for it. I feel a little set back, but not much. I work my way through the crowd kissing everyone in turn until I embrace a small blond woman.

“Oh,” she gasps, “for a moment you startled me.” She smells wonderful. Didn’t she see me coming? I think she did and that she was waiting for me. She’s wearing a fur over her shoulders. The way she smells, the softness of the fur, her pettiness almost overwhelm me. I kiss her again, then once more with feeling. Then I notice she resembles someone I know. She’s my neighbor’s wife. He’s an actor. They live next door. We don’t really know each other. A moment before I felt unusually distracted. Now I experience a moment of great clarity. I walk back to the house and get under my sheet.

From the bedroom I hear Mother say, “What did they say?”

“They said not to worry, Ma.”

I’m thinking about the soft little blonde’s husband. He’s what out-of-work actors call a working actor. He makes commercials. He’s Jewish. If I hadn’t kissed his wife the second and especially the third time maybe I could have told him about Butz. Maybe we could have discussed the gas-chamber controversy. Now I don’t know.

Mother says: “It makes me nervous when people talk about setting the whole place on fire. I feel so helpless.”

“They were just joking, Ma.”

The room is moving clockwise and when I close my eyelids the yellow light goes on and off in the dark, on and off. Thought is moving slowly, languidly through the new memories of the Holocaust story and how something is wrong with it and how you are not supposed to say so and how someone has got to say it anyhow because the implications of what is wrong are so tremendous.

Chapter Seven

As usual that year in Hollywood I was up at three-thirty in the morning to type, and at five-thirty I dressed and left the apartment and walked east along Franklyn Avenue. Three coyotes, their heads down, trailed across the parking lot where the bungalows used to be where Janis Joplin ended her last fun-filled night. I turned up Pinehurst Canyon toward the two-story duplex where Mother had the lower apartment. The pickup was parked in the driveway. I put the axes, the chain saws, the cold box and the rest of it in the bed. Mother would still be asleep in the front bedroom, and in the little back bedroom Alicia and Marisol would just be waking up. I drove across Hollywood Boulevard, turned south on La Brea to the Santa Monica Freeway, west to the Overland turnoff and there on the corner of Pico I found my two laborers waiting outside the coffee shop.

They threw their bags in the back and hopped in the cab with their lunches and we drove through Santa Monica and up along the coast under a low dark sky. Sometimes that year I’d go for weeks without getting enough work to keep things together. Other times there would be more work than I could handle, which is how it was that month. To our left the ocean was gray and quiet. In Malibu blond kids were putting on black rubber suits at the edge of the pavement, their surfboards still fixed to the tops of their cars. Overhead a single opening in the dark clouds revealed a patch of milky blue sky. It looked good enough to drink. The air between the earth and the bottom of the black clouds had a pinkish cast. A carnival had pitched its tents on the parking lot beside the Colony Market. The empty metal seats high up on the Ferris wheel hung there upside down, motionlessly.

I turned up Malibu Canyon, drove through the tunnel and down into Las Virgines, then up Piuma Road. To the east the sky was clear and sunlit. To the west just above the road the rain clouds were piling up heavily along the ridgeline. On the road, a couple hundred yards below, the pavement was bright with morning sunshine. Quail and rabbits scurried off the pavement ahead of me. It was beautiful, like the pictures in children’s fairy tale books are beautiful.

Just past Saddle peak Road I pulled over into a clearing in the scrub and parked. We carried our gear up the draw and around a small bowl onto a knoll. Val was designing a house to be built on the knoll and he needed the site cleared. The mesquite and sumac stood seven and eight feet tall. Bees swarmed in the new sunshine and lizards crawled the rocks looking for good places to sun themselves. Columns of red ants wound through the thickets. We kept moving and stamping our feet while we set up the job. Once the saws were working the ants would go underground.

I’d always said I was going to make my living as a writer so I never bothered to learn a real trade or profession. I don’t know what I really thought. I just always put the typing first and earning a living second. It didn’t matter what work I did so long as it didn’t interfere too much with the typing. For thirty years that was the way I looked at it. In thirty years I never got anything published but it never occurred to me that I’d taken a wrong turn someplace. I didn’t think about how I might not ever get good at it. I was all desire and need. I was little more than a teenager when I started and desire and need is what teenagers are.

When I started out I could hardly write a sentence. A paragraph was beyond me entirely. I had an ear for the way things get said but I couldn’t figure out how to get the language onto paper. I wanted to tell stories but I had no interest in plot. I kept hearing that stories have to have a beginning, a middle and an end, and since that’s what plot is I had a hard time conceptualizing what I was supposed to do. What a relief it was to discover after twenty or thirty years that you don’t have to plot, that you can just accumulate. You accumulate a little, throw away a little, accumulate a little more, throw most of it away, always going by the feel of the thing and after a while you have something that makes sense. You don’t get plot that way but you get structure and it’s all under ground, which can be a very good place for it.

Because I’d been in Korea I thought when I was still very young that I had something to write about. In that sense I was at the heart of the American literary tradition in the twentieth century. After a dozen years at it I had to admit I didn’t have anything to write about after all, so I trashed the manuscripts. That was a big day for me. Twelve years’ work into a trash bin in an alley off Hollywood Boulevard. Maybe I thought that kind of break would create a psychological tension that would help the writing. In a search for symmetry I closed down my business and filed bankruptcy. Throw it all away, that’s how I looked at it, but I still had a wife. You don’t just throw your wife away, so one day I put my clothes in a paper bag, picked up the typewriter and left and after awhile she divorced me. Same thing. The big problem with our marriage was that Pamela had a mature attitude toward it while I was like a thirty-three-year-old juvenile delinquent husband. Looking at it from another perspective, I’d chosen a mature, responsible woman to be my wife while she had chosen to marry me.

So I’d gotten rid of everything for the writing and I was free and ready for anything. I worked day and night at the typewriter. There was a kind of desperation to it. I was looking for something and I thought I could find it in the typewriter. What happened was that the writing remained a problem but I started hearing voices. That’s one of the things that can happen when you go for intensity. Who can forget Joan of Arc? First it was the voices, then the visions. I didn’t want to be grandiose about it, I was in Hollywood, so I thought about what I was seeing as being moving pictures. They weren’t much like anything being produced in the studios. There was a jumbled mix of the transcendent and the sordid together. Mostly sordid. When I started seeing the pictures I understood I was coming face to face with my subject.

That went on for about four years. One effect of watching the pictures was that I became so absorbed with them I was happily relieved of the burden of women, but after I calmed down a little there they were again, waiting, and it was really difficult to know which was worse, or maybe better. After that there was Vietnam, and then family life and the failure of family. It was all grist for the mill now. Being alone was grist for the mill. Working, looking for a woman, having or being had by a woman, the drinking, the writing, the aloneness. The effort with the writing to trace the route of public experience as it worms its way into the subjective life and how political philosophy and the moral life are shaped in the heart rather than with thought. All that was grist for the typewriter.

I never learned how to get published in the regular way so I started publishing myself. That was in 1978. I self-published a sixteen-page quarterly tabloid I called Smith’s Journal. Smith’s was autobiography about work, women and the issues of the day from a libertarian angle. I had found out how to integrate politics and the subjective life in the writing. I was happy. It was at that moment that Fate cursed me with a new insight. What else could it have been that sent me to the 1979 Libertarian Party presidential nominating convention in Los Angeles where Fate’s special envoy, the little prick with the white pointy beard and the devil eyes, pushed his the-gas-chamber-stories-are-not-true pamphlet on me? I’ve written reams of stuff since then and from that day to this the possibility for a career as a writer has grown increasingly less likely.

Clearing the building pad was going too slowly, so I drove down to Calabasas to a rental equipment yard to pick up another chain saw, then headed back up Las Virgines Canyon. I was half listening to a preacher talk about how God loves each individual and how He is always with each one of us. In this part of the country the preachers are all over the radio. They’re patriots on the one hand and preach the Good News on the other. Christ is come. Sometimes I pass the time trying to relate the seed of what they’re saying with what passes for religious experience generally. Very few Catholics or Jewish religiosos are on radio around here. The Evangelicals have swamped them.

The preacher was going on with great sincerity and intensity. He was shouting. He was grunting, screaming. I decided to go along with him. What could I lose? I made a conscious decision to go all the way with the preacher and for a moment I allowed myself to believe what he was saying. You can do that if you try. That’s what most people do try and not just with the preachers either. It’s like a giving-in. It wasn’t that difficult to give in to the idea, then the sensation itself, where I felt as if God were present in the cab of the pickup with me. For a moment I felt there was some presence, some One, to communicate with. Where was I? I felt good. Real good. I felt like I was not alone. I realized it would be possible for me to have that presence with me always. A presence whose demands I was familiar with, against which I could measure and guide my acts. All that was necessary to have Him with me always was to not doubt, to allow myself to experience profoundly what at that moment I was experiencing in a small way. All I had to do was to go all the way. Then thought reminded me that I have reached that place in my life where I no longer think it seemly to join belief to experience.

The next moment, thought grew restless. The warm deep sense of being in profound relationship to another remained, but thought began to turn over one idea after another. It was relentless. Thought never lets it alone. Never gives you any peace. Curiously then, I become aware that a moment before, thought had been quiet. It had stopped. Now it was working again, but for a moment it had stopped and during that moment without thought I had still been quite aware of everything happening in the truck cab and on the road before me. Somehow I understood again how awareness is different from thought because awareness has no story line, and the instant I recalled that, thought was gone again and the brain lay quietly inside the head as it was carried along in the cab of the pickup over the pavement at sixty miles an hour.

The eyes noted the morning mists lying softly over the brown fields. They saw through the hazy sunlight to the dark oak trees scattered across the round brown hills. I felt the cool air washing over the arms and face. Without thought I looked at the great expanse of sky stretching out before me then mind itself, something, rose up from me into the sky. From high above the valley I saw myself below, inside the cab of the truck, driving, gazing out at the hills and the black and green trees. Inside the cab I was aware of the road conditions, the occasional passing car, how I would soon arrive at the turnoff for Piuma Road. At the same time I was high above the road looking down at myself driving across the top of the land at the bottom of the sky. I wasn’t on the earth and I wasn’t in the sky. I was within the universe like everything else is within it, and I was at home where I found myself because in the moment there’s no up or down and no in and out and no place to go because no matter where you are the beginning and the end are already there.

As I turned onto Piuma Road I could feel myself filling up. I was going to spill over. There was a tremendous pressure of abundance all around. Not an abundance of this or that but abundance itself. The road was one I had driven a hundred times but it was like I’d never followed it before. I had never seen its beauty the way I was seeing it now. Nothing had changed. Every tree, every rock, every fold in the hillsides was just like it had been every other time. I’d seen all of it many times in the ordinary way but now the earth and everything it had produced was glowing and pulsing with light. The unique beauty of the land, the exquisite sensation of the air blowing across the skin, the welling up of abundance in the abdomen and the heart, the elevation that causes the mind to be everywhere at once, the flow of tears, the ecstasy, and I suppose that’s what it was, as if beauty itself were becoming unbearable but unstoppable too because beauty is in everything everywhere so long as it’s not ruined by opinion.

I pulled into the clearing at the job site and walked back to where I could hear the chain saws working. There wasn’t much for me to do. The Mexicans didn’t need me. I was standing there beside a mesquite when I felt something inside my pants bite the calf of my right leg. I slapped the place hard to squash whatever it was. I felt it crawl up my leg past the knee and bite me again. I rubbed my hand around over the spot to mash whatever it was. I felt the spidery legs scurry up the inside of the thigh. I started slapping and rubbing at it and then I felt whatever it was dart through the crotch of my undershorts from the inside of my right thigh and bite me on the inside of the left thigh, and at the same time, in the mind’s eye, I saw a trapeze performer sail fearlessly though the top of a circus tent. I pulled down my pants. Welts the size of quarters were bubbling up. I slapped and rubbed all up and down the legs and shook out my pants but I couldn’t find the animal. It was a mystery.

My friend James is an alchemist, a believer in body auras, out-of-body experiences, Scientology, God, reincarnation-you name it and James takes it seriously. He makes his living as a plumber and sometimes when he has to break up a concrete slab to get at the pipes underneath he’ll call me in afterwards to pour a new slab.

One day James and I were looking at a job in the hills above Silverlake when the talk turned to the uses of the intellect, and James said it’s doubtful that human beings really need their brains at all. I thought that was pretty funny but James was serious. He reads periodicals like Brain/Mind Bulletin and he’d come across an article where he thought a British neurologist studying hydrocephalics had written that individuals who have lost even 95% of their cranium to fluid can have IQs greater than 100. I finally had James where I wanted him. I told him to send me the article. I couldn’t stop laughing.

“Sometimes,” James said, “you’re a real butt hole.”

A few days later I got a photocopy in the mail of the article James was talking about. It was startling to read in a paper reprinted from Science that a British neurologist had used brain scans on hundreds of hydrocephalics to show that the inside of your skull can be filled to the top with water, you can have a brain the size of a peach pit, and you can still walk the streets like a normal person. And there was the anecdote about the English honors student in mathematics with an IQ of 126 who was socially competent and “yet the boy has virtually no brain. His cranium is filled mainly with cerebrospinal fluid.”

So you don’t have to have a big brain to be able to know the difference between a horse and a gopher or to know that you ride one and drown the other. I’d suspected as much for a long time. You can be a perfectly ordinary guy and still ask insightful questions about the Holocaust story, for example. You don’t have to be an academic or a media intellectual. There isn’t one hydrocephalic professor anywhere in the land who writes papers defending the gas-chamber stories. If there is, I’d like to meet him. At the same time, there are thousands and maybe tens of thousands of big-brain Ph.D.s who don’t know anything about gas chambers but who have been preaching and teaching them anyhow for forty years.

My friend James may be right about how much brain we really need to get along in the world.

Chapter Eight

No subject enrages the Thought Police on campus more than Holocaust revisionism. Students are encouraged to debate every other great historical question as a matter of course, but influential pressure groups with private agendas have made the Jewish Holocaust story an exception. I believe students should be encouraged to investigate the Holocaust controversy the same way they are encouraged to investigate every other historical controversy. This isn’t a radical point of view. The premises for it were worked out a while back during a little something called the Enlightenment.

Revisionists agree with establishment historians that the German National Socialist State singled out the Jewish people for special and cruel treatment. In addition to viewing Jews in the framework of traditional anti-Semitism, the Nazis also saw them as being an influential force behind international Communism. During the Second World War, Jews were considered to be enemies of the State and a potential danger to the war effort, much like the Japanese were viewed in this country. Consequently, Jews were stripped of their rights, forced to live in ghettos, conscripted for labor, deprived of their property, deported from the country of their birth and otherwise mistreated. Many tragically perished in the maelstrom of World War II. In short, Jewish culture in Eastern Europe was destroyed during the Hitlerian regime.

Revisionists part company with establishment historians in that revisionists deny that the German State had a policy to exterminate the Jews of Europe, or any other peoples, by putting them to death in gassing chambers or by killing them through abuse or neglect. Revisionists maintain that the figure of 6 million Jewish deaths is an irresponsible exaggeration, and that no execution “gas chambers” existed in any camp in Europe under German control. Fumigation gas chambers did exist to delouse clothing and equipment to prevent disease at the camps. It is very likely that this life-saving procedure contributed substantially to the myth of the homicidal gassing chambers.

Revisionists generally hold that the Allied governments decided to carry their wartime “black propaganda,” which accused Germans of committing uniquely monstrous crimes, over into the postwar period. This was done for essentially three reasons. First, the Allies felt it necessary to justify to their own people the great sacrifices that were made in fighting two world wars.

Secondly, the Allies wanted to divert attention from, and to justify, their own brutal crimes against humanity which, apart from Soviet atrocities, included the intentional slaughter of civilians through mass terror bombings of German and Japanese cities.

The third and perhaps most important reason was that the Allied governments needed justification for the postwar arrangements which, among other things, involved the annexation of large parts of Germany into Poland. These territories were not disputed borderlands but included huge parts of Germany proper. The millions of Germans living in these regions were to be dispossessed of their property and brutally expelled from their homelands in the greatest program of ethnic cleansing in the history of the West. Many hundreds of thousands of these German civilians were to perish in the process. A similar fate was to befall the Sudeten Germans. One result was that more Germans died after World War II, during “peacetime,” than were killed during the war itself!

During the war, and in the postwar era as well, Zionist organizations joined with the Allied governments in creating and promulgating Germanophobic hate propaganda. There is little doubt that their purpose was to drum up world sympathy and political and financial support for Jewish causes, especially for the formation of the State of Israel. One result was to morally legitimate the invasion and conquest of Palestine by European Jews, the brutal program of ethnic cleansing that followed, and the destruction of Palestinian culture at the hands of the Zionist regime.

Today, while the political benefits of the Jewish Holocaust story have largely dissipated for all others, the story still plays an important role in the ambitions of the Jewish State, and of Zionists and other organizations in the Jewish community. It is the leaders of these political and propaganda organizations who play the major role in continuing to promote the gas-chamber hoax and the myth of the unique monstrosity of Germans during the Second World War.

For those who still believe that the Nuremberg Trials revealed the truth about German war crimes, it is a bracing shock to discover that the then Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Harlan Fiske Stone, described the Nuremberg court as “a high-grade lynching party for Germans.”

The photographs. We’ve all seen “The Photographs.” Endlessly. Newsreel photos taken by U.S. and British photographers at the liberation of the German camps, and especially the awful scenes at Dachau, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. These films are typically presented in a way in which it is either stated or implied that the scenes resulted from deliberate policies on the part of the Germans.

The photographs are real. The uses to which they have been put are base.

There was no German policy at any of these camps to deliberately kill the internees. In the last months of the war, while Soviet armies were advancing on Germany from the east, the British and U.S. air arms were destroying every major city in Germany with saturation bombing. Transportation, the food distribution system and medical and sanitation services all broke down. That was the purpose of the Allied bombing, which has been described as the most barbarous form of warfare in Europe since the Mongol invasions.

As the war ground toward a close, millions of refugees fleeing the Soviet armies in the east were pouring into Germany. The camps still under German control were over

whelmed with internees. By early 1945 a significant number of the inmate population was beginning to starve, and the camps were swept by epidemics of typhus, typhoid, dysentery and chronic diarrhea. Even the mortuary systems broke down. When the press entered the camps with British and U.S. soldiers, they found the results of all that. They took “The Photographs.”

Still, at camps such as Buchenwald, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, tens of thousands of relatively healthy internees were liberated. They were there in the camps when “The Photographs” were taken. There are newsreels of these internees walking through the camp streets laughing and celebrating. Others picture exuberant internees throwing their caps in the air and cheering their liberators. It is only natural to ask why American media does not show these films and photos when they have shown the others thousands of times.

Spokespersons for the Holocaust Industry like to assure us that there are “tons” of captured German documents that prove the Germans murdered millions of Jews and others in “gas chambers” and “gas vans.” When challenged on this, however, they can produce only a handful of documents, the authenticity of which, or their interpretation, is always highly questionable. If pressed for reliable documentation, the Industry will then reverse itself and claim that the Germans destroyed all the relevant documents to cover up their deeds, or it will make the asinine claim that the Germans used a simplistic code language, or whispered verbal orders for mass murder into each other’s ears.

With regard to the alleged genocide of the European Jews, all available documentation indicates that there was no order for it, no plan, no budget, no weapon (that is, no so-called execution gas chambers) and no victim (that is, not a single autopsied body at any camp has been shown to have been “gassed” as part of a program of “genocide”).

As documentary “proofs” for the mass murder of the European Jews fall by the wayside, the Industry depends increasingly on “eyewitness” testimonies to support their theories. Many of these testimonies are ludicrously unreliable. History is filled with stories of masses of people claiming to be eyewitnesses to everything from sexual union with the Devil to abductions by moon men in flying saucers.

During and after the war there were “eyewitnesses” to mass murder in gas chambers at Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and other camps in Germany proper. Today, virtually all recognized scholars dismiss these “eyewitness” testimonies as crude inventions, and agree that there were no extermination gas chambers in any camp in Germany proper.

Industry spokesmen still claim, however, that extermination gas chambers existed at Auschwitz and at other camps in Poland. Simply put, the eyewitness testimony, and the evidence for these claims, is qualitatively no different from the false testimony and false evidence for the alleged gas chambers at the camps in Germany proper.

During the war crimes trials “eyewitnesses” testified that Germans made soap out of human fat and lampshades and riding breeches from human skin. Allied, particularly Soviet, prosecutors even produced evidence to support these charges. For decades, highly respected scholars at the most prestigious universities sanctioned these sordid stories, leading us to believe that they were “irrefutable truths.” With time, such stories have become untenable, and in May 1990 Yehuda Bauer, director of Holocaust studies at Hebrew University in Tel Aviv, admitted that “the Nazis never made soap from Jews…” (Jerusalem Post, International Edition, 5 May 1990, p. 6). This is only one example where an “irrefutable” Holocaust “truth” has been exposed as a stupid and vicious lie.

With regard to confessions by Germans at war crimes trials, it is now well documented that many were obtained through coercion, intimidation and even physical torture.

The Auschwitz State Museum recently revised its half-century-old claim that four million humans were murdered there. The Museum now says that maybe it was one million. How does the “proof” that the Museum has for the “one million” dead at Auschwitz differ from the “proof” it used to have that “four million” were exterminated at Auschwitz? There is no difference. The Communist propagandists who created the museum simply replaced the old “four-million” plaque, before which the Pope and an endless stream of world leaders had

prayed and grieved for 40 years, with the new “one-million” plaque. The Museum bosses did not change their displays of hair, boots, toothbrushes and eyeglasses, etc. Such displays are worthless as historical documentation for “gassings” or a program of “extermination,” but they remain effective propaganda devices that the Industry uses to impress children and fools.

Meanwhile, I have a couple questions for students to ask their professors about the three million (mostly Jews, of course) dead at Auschwitz who in fact we now know did not die there after all: Where were they all those years? How did they pass their time? Where are they now? And if three million exterminated Jews were found to not have been “exterminated” at Auschwitz, why are we still being lectured about the fabled “Six Million”? Do the people who drive the Holocaust Industry believe that students will never begin asking these simple questions?

Those in the Industry who promote the Jewish Holocaust story most feverishly complain that “the whole world” was indifferent to the “genocide” of the European Jews. When I ask why this was the case I am told that it was due to some great “moral flaw” in the nature of Western man (a moral flaw to which the Industry promoters themselves are exceptions). It is true, of course, that the world responded with indifference to the alleged genocide of the European Jews. How else should people have responded to that which they did not believe was happening?

It is certain, however, that if there had been “killing factories” in Poland murdering millions of civilians, the Red Cross, the Pope, humanitarian agencies of every sort, the Allied governments, neutral governments, and prominent figures such as Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill, Stalin, Eisenhower and many others would have known about it. They would have spoken of it often, and unambiguously, and would have condemned it. But they didn’t! Those who speak for the Holocaust Industry admit that only a tiny band of select individuals believed the story at the time it was originally being floated. Simply put, nearly all these individuals were connected with Jewish propaganda agencies and other special-interest Jewish groups. The Holocaust story increasingly reads like the greatest, most successful PR campaign of the 20th century.

Winston Churchill wrote his monumental six-volume The Second World War without even mentioning the “genocide” of the Jews. Maybe it slipped his mind. Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his memoir Crusade in Europe, also failed to mention “gassing chambers.” Was the existence and use of the greatest murder weapon ever known to man, a weapon that the hated Nazis employed to consume millions of Jews and others, unworthy of even a passing reference? Was our future President insensitive to the murdered millions? Did Eisenhower not understand that special interest Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL) might expose him as being an anti-Semite? So far, no problem.

Many people, including campus and city newspaper editors, when they first hear the questions revisionists ask about the orthodox Holocaust story, find themselves bewildered. The questions appear to make sense, but they wonder: “How is it possible? The whole world believes the Jewish Holocaust story. How could such outrageous falsehoods be successfully promoted and the truth about them successfully suppressed for half a century? It’s just not plausible.”

To understand how it could very well have happened, these fearless journalists need only to reflect on the intellectual and political orthodoxies of medieval Europe, or those of Nazi Germany and the Communist-bloc countries. In all these societies the great majority of the professorial class, and in Nazi and Communist countries the journalists as well, were caught up in the existing political culture. Committed to a prevailing ideology and to its interpretation of reality, these professors and journalists felt it was their right, even their duty, to protect every aspect of that ideology. They did so by oppressing the “dissidents” who expressed “offensive” or “dangerous” ideas. In every one of these societies scholars and the professorial class generally became Thought Police, while a fearful and intimidated press kept its doubts to itself.

On American campuses today, faculty and administration attempt to write off the suppression and censorship of revisionist theory. They claim there is no problem with open .

debate on their campuses, only civilized rules that defend minorities from having their feelings hurt. In practice, however, no student (and no professor) is allowed to question any significant part of the Jewish Holocaust story without “permission” from the Holocaust Industry. One can learn much about the psychology and methodology of the Industry thought police by watching how it reacts when one of its taboos is broken, and revisionist ideas are allowed a public forum in a campus newspaper.

First, Industry agents will express outrage that such offensive and dangerous ideas have been allowed to be expressed publicly. They will contact the president of the University, key faculty members, and the editor of the student newspaper “suggesting” that it is a grave error to answer or debate any specific revisionist idea, claiming that to do so would give revisionism legitimacy. They make vicious personal attacks against the revisionist heretic, calling him dirty political names, and it may even be suggested that he is a potential mass murderer himself.

They publicly accuse the revisionist of lying, and charge the editors and advertising departments of the paper which prints a revisionist opinion piece, or runs a revisionist ad, with being tainted with all the worst qualities of the revisionist they published, though the editors are seldom revisionists themselves but are merely following their best instincts as journalists who take seriously the ideal of a free press.

Industry spokespersons accuse revisionists of promoting a doctrine of hatred. In fact, revisionism is not a doctrine or an ideology either one. It is a scholarly process. If those in the Industry really want to expose hatred, they should reflect on their own doctrines of exclusivity and special privilege, and the techniques they use to defend them. And then they should take a long look at their own faces in a mirror.

Any campus organization that invites a revisionist to speak will be attacked as being “insensitive” or “anti-Semitic.” Campus libraries and bookstores have to withstand the most brutal kind of intimidation and scorn if they shelve revisionist materials. This goes on while the overwhelming majority of faculty and university administrators remain silent, allowing political activists to determine what can be read and debated on their campus.

The Holocaust Industry often claims, deceptively, that revisionist theory has been proven false during a court trial. Revisionist theory has never been evaluated or judged by the courts, and in a free society it never should be. No man or woman committed to the ideal of intellectual freedom will agree that the State should have the right to disallow or limit a free exchange of ideas, or judge the truth of a historical theory.

Finally, the Holocaust Industry works to “straighten out” that segment of academia or the media that does allow revisionists a forum. It can be an instructive intellectual exercise to identify taboo subjects, other than holocaust revisionism, which would evoke comparable responses from thought police on our campuses. I urge that every one of those taboos be broken and exposed, along with those who promote them, to the light of day.

Some in academia hold that university administrations should suppress ideas that cause disruptions of campus routine. This is a very dangerous position for administrators to take. It is an open invitation to tyranny. It means that any well-financed, well-organized, influential political activist group like the Holocaust Industry can rid the campus of ideas it opposes – and then impose its own orthodoxy. Historically, the professorial class has always found it safer to suppress controversial ideas than to encourage intellectual freedom. It is no different today.

During the Nazi regime the professorial class (with rare exceptions) agreed to agree that Jews were a dangerous minority who should not be allowed to express themselves openly on university campuses. Today, under successive Democratic and Republican administrations, the professorial class has agreed to agree that Holocaust revisionists are a dangerous intellectual minority who should not be allowed to express themselves openly on the university campus. In times of strife you always know where the professorial class will stand.

In the 1960s I owned a bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard. One afternoon I was arrested and jailed, then tried and

convicted, for selling a book banned by the U.S. Government – Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. My defense was that I did not choose to become a bookseller to aid the State in suppressing books. I argued that students had the inalienable right to read radical literary works.

More than forty years have passed but I see the ideal of intellectual liberty today as I saw it then. Today I argue that students have the right to read radical papers on the Jewish Holocaust story – and moreover to read what they want on any historical controversy whatever. I argue that they have the right to discuss openly what they read, without being humiliated by their professors, or libeled by special-interest ethnic groups. I argue that without intellectual freedom universities in the West are degraded to mere vocational schools.

Those of us who doubt some part of the orthodox story of the Jewish Holocaust are routinely demonized as bigots and worse. In real life, however, there are no demons. Those who serve the Holocaust Industry, including the professorial class and their lap dog journalists, are not demons. Those of us who are skeptical of the orthodox story are not demons. We are simply skeptics. The Holocaust story is a war story. Like every other war story, some of it’s true and some of it isn’t. Revisionist theory is skeptical and intends on separating the wheat from the chaff.

At the same time, it is true that there are those who do use revisionist scholarship as a weapon to attack Jews. The Holocaust Industry has chosen to demonize revisionist theory because of how a minority misuses it. Revisionists are on every side of the political and philosophical spectrum, from far left to far right and all the places in between. As for myself, when the Los Angles Times reviewed one of my plays (protesting U.S. nuclear arms policies), it was described as the work of a “libertarian anarchist.”

While the ideal of intellectual freedom has political and philosophical ramifications, it also has a spiritual one. It is wrong, and spiritually stupid, to use force, or the threat of it, to suppress intellectual freedom for others – and there are no other ways to suppress it – while encouraging it for yourself. Intellectual freedom promises the same thing to those who believe and to those who doubt. It promises the “light of day,” and the understanding and insight that can only be seen in that rare light. In the end, those who argue against intellectual freedom, against “light,” are, to use the language of the day, “spiritually challenged.”

Chapter Nine

The New York Times publishes an interview with an old fellow in the Bronx who claims that every day at Buchenwald the Germans threw a Jew into a cage with a bear and an eagle. The bear would eat the Jew and the eagle would pick his bones. Give me a break. The old Jewish guy says he saw it with his own eyes. A Jewish lady present at the interview says: But that’s unbelievable! That doesn’t bother the old survivor. Yes, he says, it is unbelievable. But it happened.

Twenty or thirty years ago those stories were still amusing, but I’ve heard them too many times now and they bore me. Sometimes I start snoring right in the middle of some old geezer’s windy tale. Awful lack of respect for Jewish sensibilities. Sometimes it goes beyond boredom to contempt. There must be times when my contempt is unjust. It’s the politics lying only half-concealed under these stupid stories that annoys me. Not precisely the political agenda itself, but the vulgarity of the methods used to further it. The ritualized self-pity mixed with shameless self-promotion. The brazen anti-German bigotry. The charges of anti-Semitism when you express doubt about even the most brainless story when some so-called survivor is telling it.

I have similar reactions toward those Vietnam veterans who weep and mew around over supposedly having killed too many people over there, or the wrong people, or who saw too many of their own comrades killed or maimed. In addition to the self-pity in so much of it there’s the underlying pitch for a political worldview that’s self-serving and wrong-headed, in my view. A worldview that suggests there was something wrong with killing Vietnamese but that it was all right to off the Japanese and the Germans at random. Why not treat everybody alike is the way I look at it. Why not kill ‘em all equally? Why not be fair about it?

We’ve had supper and now Mother and me are in the little front room watching TV. It’s a program on how the U.S. government, which invented our Vietnamese war much like it invented our Japanese and German wars, is setting up veterans centers to treat mostly Vietnam vets suffering from PTSD syndrome. Post-trauma-stress-disorder.

Alicia and the kids are out shopping, so the house is quiet. I expected to see a therapist leading a confessional and a lot of close-ups of Vietnam veterans crying into the camera about their terrible war experiences and how hard it’s been for them to readjust to civilian life. In fact, that’s what I am seeing. It touches me to see grown men cry on camera, but I can’t help feeling a little contemptuous toward what I’m watching.

I’m surprised to hear that maybe a third of all homeless men in the U.S. today are Vietnam veterans. It makes me wonder for the first time if maybe I haven’t misjudged the seriousness of PTSD syndrome. I watch a chubby fellow who had been a medic describe how it had been for him in the Ia Drang Valley in 1967. It was his first action and he had expected to take care of the ideal wounds he had been taught about in the army’s five-week basic training course for medics.

The first thing he observed about the wounded in the Ia Drang Valley was that they didn’t have very many ideal wounds. He talks about a rifleman who had so many bullet holes in him, including one through his nose, that the kid didn’t have a chance. He says he told the kid: Die, or I’ll kill you myself. Now the ex-medic takes off his glasses and begins to cry on camera. I expected that but I hadn’t expected to be so terribly moved by the story. The medic has used a line of prose that rings absolutely true.

The end of the program is here and the camera returns to the ex-medic who is sitting stone faced and silent in the circle of other vets. The therapist suggests that the ex-medic has closed up, that he has distanced himself from the rest of the group. The therapist pushes until the medic nods yes. The therapist says: Tell us one thing that you want to say about your experience in Vietnam. The medic’s round chubby face is set in concrete. The therapist pushes at him. I don’t think the medic is going to speak. I believe in his distress. The therapist is making me edgy. If you could say one thing, the therapist pushes, what would it be? He isn’t going to let up. I’m getting very edgy. I don’t think the medic will break. One thing, the therapist insists. If you had to say only one thing.

The ex-medic says: “If all those other men had to die like that, I should have died too.”

“You don’t have the right to be alive,” the therapist says cheerfully. “Right?”

“I don’t have the right,” the medic says, and he starts to cry again.

I try to hold back my own tears but I can’t. I get up and stand behind Mother’s chair so she can’t see me. I think about how I have never felt that I don’t have the right to live. I watch the other vets in the group express sympathy for the ex-medic. They speak simply, straightforwardly, without jargon. I’m torn by the scene. I go out on the back porch where Mother can’t hear me. Mother doesn’t cry over scenes like that. She doesn’t cry over much at all. I think that’s one reason she’s never cared for the movies.

While I lean against the washing machine, thought reminds me of those Jewish survivors who claim that they feel guilty for having lived through the camps where so many of their family and friends perished. How they feel guilty because they didn’t die too. Jenny was the first who told me that story. She was talking about her father who had left Germany before the war and sat it out in Cuba and New York. He lost contact with his family and when the war was over he came to believe that all those closest to him had been destroyed by the Germans. Jenny said that his guilt over having survived, or having survived the way he had, plagued him the rest of his life. I didn’t disbelieve the story but I didn’t take it too seriously either.

There’s a lot of talk about guilt among my progressive friends. Feeling guilty has a certain moral standing in progressive circles. It doesn’t for me. I see guilt as an expression of self-indulgence and spiritual laziness. Over the years so many ex-internees of the camps have claimed they feel guilty for not having been exterminated themselves that it’s come to be a particularly vulgar cliché. Still, some of them probably do feel that way.

When I first told Jenny about finding out that something is wrong with the Holocaust story, she said that no matter what I found out about it, for her the Holocaust would always be the memory of her father in their little grocery store in Hoboken searching the refugee lists published daily in the New York Times, looking for the names of members of his family and never finding any.

After Korea when I was in the camp hospital at Fort Ord getting the hand fixed up, I told Doctor Silverman about the headaches. When he found out that a few months before the hand I had taken a little hit in the side of the head he ordered up some X-rays. When he didn’t find anything wrong with the head he suggested I might be suffering from delayed shock. It was the first time I had heard that you could be hurt in the winter, say, and start to suffer from it the following summer. Doctor Silverman prescribed two aspirins daily and I don’t recall ever mentioning the headaches again. It had been gratifying however to be told that there might be something real behind the headaches and after a while I stopped having them. Maybe I had a little PTSD myself.

There was no whining and weeping around about Korea by the guys who had been there. There were no vet centers to take care of middle-aged ex-soldiers who couldn’t get their lives together. No therapists, no group confessionals, no support groups and no calls for any of that. I knew that the VA hospitals had men in them too damaged to ever leave. As a boy I had seen World War I veterans shaking spasmodically along the sidewalks and gutters of downtown Los Angeles, but we hadn’t suffered in Korea the way our fathers had suffered in France in 1918/19. World War II infantry hadn’t suffered either like those who had been in the trenches in the first Great War. For the Germans it was another story. No infantry in this century has gone through what the German has, twice. Soviet artillery and U.S. and British air forces saw to that.

So after Korea I was happy about what had happened over there, on balance, but I knew something was a little wrong too. I never told myself that something was wrong but I was aware that for a long time I would not talk about Korea to anyone who had not been there in combat. And then there were the dreams that came and came and came. They were breathtaking in their directness. Many camp survivors tell a similar tale. They say that if you were not in the camps that you will never know what it was like in the camps. That must be true. More than that, it must be a truism. What life experience can you imagine that you could not say the same thing about? The word is not the thing. So survivors have their dreams too. They should be thankful for them. It’s not likely that anything else they got from the camps will ever be so valuable.

We can’t direct memory or force its expression in dreams to take any certain path, but we are not obligated to employ memory to manipulate others, either. There are Vietnam veterans who are neurotically attached to memory just as so many “survivors” affect to be. But I don’t see Vietnam vets using their suffering to encourage contempt and hatred for others, or to try to maintain a hegemony in intellectual and cultural affairs that is based on fraud and falsehood. I can’t say that the same is true for the so-called survivor community.

There is a contingent of these “survivors” along with their flunky intellectuals who tell us that if we forget the Holocaust it might happen again. Aside from the fact that it didn’t happen the first time, the puerility of the observation is clear. How many slaughters of the innocent have taken place during the half-century we have been urged to not forget the “Holocaust?”-

Remembering the Holocaust is what the most regressive elements among the Zionists are most enthusiastic about. Men and women who, in the service of what they feel is a higher goal, speak of Arabs as “two-legged animals” that breed like “many many dogs,” or refer to the people of Austria as “anti-Semitic dogs.”

One reason American veterans might use memory as a tool for personal insight and reconciliation with old foes while Holocaust survivors use it to reinforce hateful stereotypes for political gain, may be that our Vietnam vets took an active part in battle as free men while “survivors” surrendered up front to their sworn enemies and labored for them as “slaves” throughout the war. Unwilling to express their rage while Germans were tearing their women and children from them and sending them off to God knows where or what, Jewish men labored for their masters throughout the war to help defeat the armies sent to liberate them. Self-hatred, which some Jews talk about so much, must have deepened considerably during the war and the years following it, particularly among the men. It would be interesting to learn what differences there might be in the psychological profiles of those Jews who worked for the Germans during the war and those who joined partisan or other resistance groups and fought the Germans.

Maybe it’s this “self”-hatred that some survivors feel – and if it isn’t that what is it? – that encourages so many of them to want to keep alive stories that Germans skinned Jews and cooked them and burned their babies alive in furnaces and ditches and used pesticides to exterminate their families as if they were vermin. Is it this self-hatred that encourages some Jews to claim that, while they themselves are innocent everywhere of all wrongdoing, everywhere they are despised by everyone? If it isn’t that, what is it? I believe we are failing in our responsibility to those “survivors” of the German labor and concentration camps who immigrated to this country after the war. We treat them like children. We listen to their stories as if we are listening to children imagining giants and witches and dragon lairs. In a curious way we listen to their stories-and all their stories are accusations against others-as if the stories don’t matter. When do we ever turn to these “eyewitnesses” and ask them to demonstrate that their accusations are true? We sympathize and empathize and throw up our hands at the horror of it all. We don’t take seriously the fact that in these survivor tales real German men and women are the “monsters.” That these “monsters” had mothers and fathers and children themselves and were part of a community and a people.

It’s not an attack on all Jews to question stories some Jews tell. It’s a mitzvah. It’s a blessing, which I have denied Jews the benefit of nearly all my life, first with my foolish credulity and then with my fear of shaming them. My own dishonesty has been a guide for many Jews, while my weaknesses have encouraged them to fall victim to their weaknesses. I owe Jews everything I owe my friends and myself. At the very least I owe them honesty, regard and forthrightness. I’m going to give to Jews and to all others now what I have denied them for so long. The time is come.

I’m not unaware that I am too easily moved to tears. Even Robert Faurisson has commented on it. I wear my heart on my sleeve and always have. I don’t know why. I am moved terribly by revelations of inner anguish, particularly by those who ask nothing in return. Sincere expressions of friendship or brotherhood, in which I may be playing no part whatever, touch the deepest hollows in my heart. Malcolm Muggeridge observed that the ideal of brotherhood is more pertinent to human society than the struggle for equality. I think that must be true. The promise of fidelity is a common thread that runs through such ideals as friendship and brotherhood. Fidelity is an obligation too of the literary writer whose promise is to reveal the writer’s inner struggle selflessly.

Fidelity. I suppose I could have used the word love, but I don’t use that word. Even as I begin to write about the word my eyes fill. I have to take out my handkerchief and wipe my face and blow my nose. I don’t tell Alicia I love her. I don’t tell the kids. They know it but I don’t say it. I suppose they know it. I suppose I do. Maybe that’s why I am so moved watching the ex-medic who was in the Ia Drang Valley recall on TV how he had told the terribly wounded soldier: Die, or I’ll kill you myself. Maybe it’s the medic’s promise to kill the soldier, which at that moment was his expression of his love for the young man lying in the dirt before him, that moves me so. Not the dying, which there was so much of over there. The love. Without a single note of hatred for the enemy. Or for anyone else.

Chapter Ten

Yehuda Bauer tells a Holocaust memorial meeting for Yom Hashoah, the yearly Jewish celebration of German bestiality, that the Jewish soap story isn’t true after all. Bauer is director of Holocaust studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a renowned Holocaust scholar. He says that the “technical possibilities” for rendering soap from the cadavers of murdered Jews were not yet understood during World War II. Maybe it’s been worked out since.

If it has been, who accomplished this technological breakthrough? Where did he do it? In what laboratory? At whose order? How was the human fat collected? Who were the guys and gals who chose to donate their corpses to this worthy project? Humanitarians all, surely. We hope it wasn’t some careless Palestinians. What a naughty thought. Will we ever know? We are not told what evidence Bauer has to show that Germans didn’t know how to make soap from Jews during WW II. Were they working on it? They were working on an atomic bomb. Of course the Americans were working on an atomic bomb…

The Los Angeles Times publishes an op-ed article titled “Nazi Soap Rumor During World War II.” It’s written by Deborah Lipstadt, who used to teach modern Jewish history at UCLA then something else at Yeshiva University and Occidental and now has landed at Emery as a full-blown Holocaust historian. The article reports that the “soap rumor” was put to rest long before:

The fact is that the Nazis never used the bodies of Jews, or for that matter anyone else, for the production of soap. The soap rumor was prevalent both during and after the war. It may have had its origin in the cadaver factory atrocity story that came out of World War I. The soap rumor was thoroughly investigated after the war and proved to be untrue.

I’m troubled by Lipstadt’s article because I haven’t heard about the “thorough investigation.” Revisionist authors who challenge the story don’t mention it. Why not? It would back up their case. So I write Professor Lipstadt, congratulate her on her scholarship, ask her where I can find the report of this thorough investigation and enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope. I don’t hear back. No one else mentions her thorough investigation. I’m a little suspicious. Maybe some day I’ll get a big surprise.

When Deborah Lipstadt tries to defuse the Jewish-soap hoax she doesn’t mention Yehuda Bauer’s “technical possibilities” problem. While Yehuda Bauer is taking a run at the soap hoax, he maintains a sophisticated silence on Lipstadt’s thorough investigation. Does it make you wonder why? Maybe Bauer wrote Lipstadt to inquire after the thorough investigation and discovered Lipstadt isn’t talking to Bauer the same way she isn’t talking to me. Makes you wonder when you look ten years down the road what proofs the Holocaust scholars will use then to show that Germans did not cook Jews to make soap.

At the same time, it’s going to be difficult for ordinary Jews to take Bauer and Lipstadt seriously about Germans not making soap from their murdered kinsmen when the Encyclopaedia Judaica (New York, 1971) contains a photograph of the inside of a German soap factory. Titled “A German soap factory near Danzig,” the photo accompanies the Encyclopaedia’s article on Poland. It shows a room about the size of a two-car garage, a counter, a sink, and in the middle of the room a cart with half a dozen bony cadavers dangling out over the edges. The photograph is not sourced but who would want to doubt the intellectual integrity of the publishers of the Encyclopaedia Judaica?

And then there’s Rabbi Charles Rosenzveig, founder of the Holocaust Memorial Center in the Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield. He keeps a bar of Jewish soap wrapped in blue paper in his office cupboard. When reporters drop by he takes it out and shows them how it makes his hand tremble just to hold it. He says, “You see yourself what has been done to the human being…” Then he adds, a little enigmatically perhaps, “It is inconceivable.”

One afternoon after an interview with Rabbi Rosenzveig appeared in the Toledo Blade about his bar of Jewish soap and how the Gentiles should never forget, I do a telephone interview on an Ohio radio station, and here’s the good rabbi to talk things over with me. He must not have known that I’ve read the Blade story on his bar of soap, and when I nail him with it he agrees that he doesn’t know if the cake of soap is made from human fat or not. He gets a little testy. He wants to know why I think it makes a difference about the soap when the Germans murdered and tortured so many Jews in so many other ways?

After the interview I call the editor of the Detroit Free Press and tell her that the rabbi running the Holocaust Memorial Center in her town, who is telling people he keeps a bar of Jewish soap in his office cupboard, has admitted during a radio broadcast that the story isn’t true. I ask her if she’d like to have something from me on this story and on a few other Holocaust stories that don’t hold water. She says she doesn’t think so. “I believe those stories,” she says. “I believe in the Holocaust.” It appears to me she doesn’t understand the piquancy of Rabbi Rosenzveig admitting that he has been faking an atrocity story that puts Germans in a bad light and creates false sympathy for Jews. In any event she doesn’t have time to chat about it. She has a big-city newspaper to edit. She’s a professional.

The Holocaust Foundation in Skokie, run by actual “survivors,” displays photographs of cut-up bodies on their way to a German soap-making machine during its grand opening. The Foundation also displays its own chunk of Jewish soap (made in Germany?). Jewish soap has been piously buried in the Haifa cemetery. (Jewish piety sanctifying German inhumanity?) The Jewish Press in Brooklyn publishes a symbolic drawing of a swastika edged with bars of Jewish soap (Jewish newspapermen standing tall against the haters?).

What is this? A worldwide Jewish-soap conspiracy? Where did it all begin? I read in Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth Century that in 1943 representatives of the Moscow-based Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee toured the United States to raise aid for the Soviet Union. Big meetings were held in many cities. At each meeting Salomon Mikhoels would show the public a bar of soap made from Jewish flesh and taken from a German concentration camp. That’s the earliest reference I know of to Germans using Jews to make soap. Who was peddling the story then? Commie Jews, I suppose, in the words of the bad guys. Where is Mikhoel’s soap now? In whose care was this Jewish cult relic left? Who knows?

What is there about sado-masochism that gives it such appeal among so many Jews? The underlying psychology of all the primary Holocaust stories is sado-masochistic. Fits in nicely with Israeli nuclear bombs and the talk about Israeli-Jewish “Samson” and “Masada” complexes. Do Arab-Israelis suffer from those complexes? When I start thinking along these lines I feel a little anxiety for the people who live in and around the only democracy in the Middle East. I don’t feel very encouraged about American culture either, such as it is.

When Lipstadt writes that the Jewish-soap story is only a rumor she goes out of her way to puff the stories that the infernal Germans skinned Jews to make lampshades and other inventive decorations from them. It looks like Lipstadt needs to promote the demonization of Germans one way or another. If Germans didn’t commit one uniquely disgusting and inhumane crime against Jews, well, they committed another. It’s all the same to those historians and intellectuals feverishly committed to holocaustomania, which appears to be most of them:

… [In Buchenwald] the young wife of the commandant used the skin of Jews to make lampshades and other bric-a-brac for her home.

Lipstadt’s angle here is to pretend that proofs for her creepy human-skin lampshade charge are better than the proofs for the Jewish soap charge, so it doesn’t really matter that the anti-German hate story about human soap was an invention (lie) because the hated Germans did something else that was just as bad. That’s still her angle. I look forward one day to becoming acquainted with Deborah’s proofs for the human-skin lamp shade story.

The guy I’m really disappointed with though is Nat Hentoff, our authority on the First Amendment. Along with Yehuda and Deborah, Nat is one of my Jewish friends. He writes on free press issues primarily for papers devoted to the Jewish cultural perspective on the Holocaust, The Village Voice, New York Times, the Washington Post and so on. I’ve spent years defending Nat to revisionists, telling them to trust him, that Nat’s one of the good guys. What good does that do me with Nat? When I write him he doesn’t respond. When I ring him up he doesn’t return my call. I’ve gone out of my way to be humble with him. Nat maintains a sophisticated silence.

My friend O’Keefe thinks I’m being a sentimentalist about Nat. He says Nat’s one of those Jews who, before he writes anything at all, asks himself, Is this good for Jews? Or, if it’s unclear that it benefits Jews now, is there any chance whatever that sometime in the future, if the drift of human life in its totality shifts a millimeter in this or that direction, will it be good for Jews then? And only if the answer is yes will Nat forge ahead at the typewriter. I don’t want to believe this about Nat but I’m feeling some anxiety about him. He’s making me a little tense.

A couple years ago Nat toured Israel and when he came back he wrote a piece for the Voice describing how when he was in Jerusalem he visited the Chamber of the Holocaust and was shown three bars of human soap “made from the tissues of Jews.” Nat writes that he was so taken with the display of his paisanos lying there in that condition that he returned to the display twice more to reflect on it. Reading his article you get the impression that Nat experienced a small spiritual rush that day.

So I write Nat telling him about Deborah writing that the Jewish-soap story is only a rumor and about the thorough investigation after the war that proves the story false. I suggest that while Deborah won’t give me the time of day, if he writes to her she will no doubt aim him in the right direction so he can get to the bottom of the rumor because between Deborah and Nat it’s all in the family. I don’t write this time about it being all in the family but the way things are turning out I might just as well have.

The other suggestion I make to Nat is that he write the director of the Chamber of the Holocaust in Jerusalem and ask for what proofs the Chamber has in its archives that demonstrate that the three bars of soap on display there made from the tissues of Jews is soap that is actually rendered from humans. If it can be shown that the soap was rendered from human fat, Nat can ask how the Chamber can demonstrate that it’s Jewish. He would also want to ask of course where it was made, who made it and how it got to Jerusalem. Things like that. Maybe there’s documentation demonstrating that the soap was manufactured by the dreaded Nazis, but what if it turns out it was manufactured by one of our user-friendly commies under the direction of that anti-Fascist hero Joseph Stalin? Wouldn’t that be an interesting turn of events, I ask Nat?

I suggest to Nat that if the Jewish-soap story isn’t true he would not want Jews to go on believing that Germans thought Jews so worthless that they cooked the extras. What do such stories do to the Jewish psyche? If the soap story isn’t true is it really good for Jews to go on telling little Jewish boys and girls that when they grow up they run the risk of being cooked by Christians? Isn’t there a little something wrong in teaching Jewish kiddies fake horror stories about the people they live among? Doesn’t it risk encouraging bigotry and hatred in a society that has already got enough of it? Those are the kinds of interesting questions I ask Nat, but like I say, he doesn’t get back to me.

Is Nat trying to get to the bottom of the Jewish-soap story on his own? Your guess is as good as mine. If he is and he’s found out that the story was true I think he’d write something about it. If he’s found the story to be an example of media manipulation by the Holocaust Lobby he’s not going public with that either. Now that Nat’s landsman Yehuda Bauer has come up with the “technical possibilities” scam maybe I’ll write Nat again. I think it’s bad for Nat’s spiritual life that he has peak experiences at peep shows, and I think it’s bad for Jews as a community to have sordid historic lies employed in their name to maintain an inflated level of Jewish cultural influence, in spite of their experience to the contrary this last half century.

One of the problems the Lipstadts and Bauers have when they try to write off the Jewish soap hoax is that at Nuremberg the human-soap indictment against the Germans was upheld. You can read the judgment for yourself in Nuremberg documents (IMT-I – p252). On the same page the Tribunal upholds the charges that Jews were gassed and that their hair was used to stuff mattresses. If Bauer and Lipstadt are right, who supplied this false evidence about human soap to the court? Why? Was the court bamboozled about other anti-German atrocity stories? Which ones? The gas chambers maybe? What convinced Bauer that the evidence used by the court to uphold the Jewish soap hoax was false? Where is the paper demonstrating Bauer’s detective work on this important revelation? What do history buffs Bauer and Lipstadt have to say about such questions? They maintain a noble silence.

Hugh Orgel and Elena Neuman, the staff writers for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency who reported Bauer’s rejection of the Jewish soap hoax, have confirmation of the hoax from Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg. Hilberg is quoted as saying that “no evidence has turned up” to suggest that Nazis used human fat to make soap. Not even a suggestion of evidence, eh?

How about human-soap-maker Sigmund Mazur’s confession to the Soviets (USSR-197)? How about the affidavits of two British prisoners of war John Henry Witton (USSR-264) and William Anderson Neely (USSR-272)? Three pages each, single-spaced, naming names and describing procedures? Mazur even provided us with a recipe explaining how to use people to produce soap and all this was accepted at Nuremberg. I suppose Hilberg doesn’t want to chat this up because it might suggest to ordinary people, and maybe even to some intellectuals, that false documents proving other German atrocities as well were simply cooked up at the Great Nuremberg Trial and that maybe even that was the primary reason for the proceedings.

Hilberg takes a run at squashing a few other anti-German hate stories but without giving away anything serious. He says the rumor that Germans electrocuted Jews in water at Belzec is “based on nothing at all.” The original charge that the Nazis electrocuted Jews in water at Belzec was made in The Black Book of Polish Jewry, published in 1943 and sponsored by the Polish Government in exile. The Black Book has been used for half a century to condemn Nazi crimes against Jews and Poles. What’s the difference in the quality of the evidence used to document the electrocuting-Jews-in-water hoax, which was based on nothing at all, and the other anti-German hate stories published in The Black Book of Polish Jewry? Not a whole lot maybe?

The willingness of Holocaust historians like Bauer, Hilberg and Lipstadt to expose this and that anti-German hate hoax looks to me like their attempt to brush aside other, more far-reaching historic lies. Because to investigate the backgrounds to these other hoaxes means they will have to report to us that these so-called falsehoods are not falsehoods innocently repeated at Nuremberg but deliberate lies and that the Nuremberg court was flooded with false documents, that the court knew it and that it operated on the principle that the end justifies the means. It might demonstrate that the court was willing to commit any impropriety, admit any evidence, come to any conclusion so long as it condemned the hated Germans and exonerated the beloved Allies.

At this moment I recall the letter Dwight Eisenhower wrote to Mamie in 1944 where he told her, “God, how I hate the Germans.” Not the Nazis. The Germans. Was it this spirit of hatred that blew so darkly beneath the robes of the justices and prosecutors at Nuremberg?

Why did Yehuda Bauer choose to deny the Jewish-soap hoax this year rather than last year or the year before? Or ten or even twenty years ago? Did he only now discover that the Germans did not have the “technical possibilities” to render soap from human cadavers? Did I have anything to do with it? I’ll never know. I have given hundreds of interviews to print journalists and radio and television news broadcasters and talk show hosts and I hardly ever miss a chance to talk about how the Jewish-soap story is a vulgar hoax. Year after year, interview after interview. Millions of people, literally, have heard me say it or read where I said it. It’s been fun blowing the whistle on this dirty human-soap business. How much fun has it been for the Yehuda Bauers, the Hilbergs and Lipstadts when people ring them up or stop them on the street and ask, What is it with this Smith guy? On the other hand, maybe they’ve never heard of me.

Talk radio has become an institution in America. It’s on the cutting edge of the free press. Ideas and stories that are routinely suppressed in the prestige press are thrown around every day on radio. (Access to technology overcoming the biases of State culture and State propaganda.) There isn’t one university historian anywhere in the land who will give revisionist theory the time of day-in public. Men and women who work in radio and television are eager to talk about it. Establishment orthodoxy has used the media for fifty years to close the minds and hearts of the people toward the history of the age. Now revisionists are using it to open up those organs. Access is everything. Technology has no favorites among ideas and no preferences about information transmission. It’s the people themselves who make those decisions.

The intellectual classes, cowed by the State and the orthodoxies they’ve helped the State institutionalize, are trapped in their own creation. It was the intellectual classes that invented the orthodox contempt for Germans. Ordinary people resisted the intellectuals as long as they could. We didn’t like German bigotry against Jews but we had the grace to understand, living in country like this one, that prejudice and bigotry are as American as pumpkin pie. We sensed that we should clean up our own house and let the Germans clean up theirs. Why should the fate of far-away Jews on a far away continent press us down more than the fate of Blacks in America? We allowed Pearl Harbor to confuse us. We believed our government was innocent of all wrongdoing in that one. We didn’t have access to information the way we do now. In 1941, media was even more craven than it is today.

Popular culture may prove to be the saving grace of America. Vulgar, noisy, poorly informed, sexy, juvenile, rootless, all ears and no patience, mistaking desire for thought and drumming for music, it nevertheless usually exhibits more creativeness and more courage than what you find in the universities and the mobs of academic bureaucrats that run them. Radio and television and supermarket magazine racks are the carriers of popular culture. Government press releases and university tenure systems carry the rest of it, which is what some call high culture but should be called State culture. The immense value of pop culture is its drift-away from bureaucracy and scholarship and toward people and the enthusiasm of everyday life. You don’t have to be a scholar to ask to see proofs for the Jewish-soap story and you don’t have to be a bureaucrat to know where the interest of the State really lies with respect to it. How much education does it take to ask who benefits from all the culturally inspired hate propaganda against Germans and now against Arabs and Moslems? Who encourages it? Who is it who believes it benefits them? Do their enthusiasms ring a bell with you?

The Deborah Lipstadts travel from campus to campus warning the professoriat and its students to beware the insidious nature of Holocaust revisionism. Revisionists take “a little bit of truth” and plant seeds of doubt in the minds of the young. Revisionist teachings are “not based on historical fact” and “there is no place for revisionist teachings in the classroom” and real scholars “don’t debate people who are not committed to the truth.”

What better time to recall Deborah’s claim that at Buchenwald “the young wife of the commandant used the skins of exterminated Jews to make lampshades and other bric-a-brac for her home? Just the thought of it makes you detest the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and look kindly upon the anti-fascists. Doesn’t it?

Someone should tell Deborah – she won’t listen to me – about the video tape showing general Lucius D. Clay, Military Governor of the U.S. Occupation Zone of Germany during 1947-49, explaining to a conference sponsored by the George C. Marshall Research Foundation at Lexington, Virginia, that the infamous human-skin lamp shades of Buchenwald were in fact made of “goat” skin. Maybe General Clay is mistaken. Maybe one, just one of the tens of thousands of professors that swarm across our campuses should ask Deborah what proofs she has that the Nazis skinned Jews and used their hides to fashion lampshades and bric-a-brac for their homes.

If one professor were ever to do that, the Lipstadts, Hilbergs, Bauers and even our media intellectuals might discover that the Founding Fathers were not just shooting from the hip when they coughed up the First Amendment. Those men actually believed that the rights to free inquiry and to exchange ideas in public are more valuable to the people than suppression and censorship. It’s not complicated.

I think I’ve finished with my friend Nat for a while, but before I know it he’s exposed himself yet again in the pages of the New York Village Voice. It looks like Nat thinks there’s something pretty sexy about his Jewish-soap schtick. It’s the sort of story Sigmund liked so much to write about. All in the family.

Believe it or not, Nat has taken another run at the Jewish-soap story in the Village Voice. There he is in Jerusalem in those “eccentrically furnished” rooms that are the Chamber of the Holocaust. He stands there staring at “some bars of soap on a shelf.” He turns to an “ancient attendant” who nods gravely. “Jews,” the old geezer says. “They used to be Jews.”

I’m worried about Nat. Something in his brain is turning the Holocaust story into an Addams Family cartoon. The last time he ran this sado-masochistic survivor fantasy past his readers I took time out from my busy schedule to write him about it. I told him what Professor Lipstadt has concluded: “The Nazis never used the bodies of Jews, or for that matter anyone else, for the production of soap.” Doesn’t he remember? How the rumor had been thoroughly investigated after the war? It didn’t occur to me then Nat likes the Jewish-soap fantasy just the way it is. It occurs to me now.

But why? So that he can exploit it yet again in yet another whiny article on anti-Semitism headed “God Must Have Loved Anti-Semites, He Made So Many of Them.” He never gets tired of it. It’s never too much trouble for Nat and his bunch to feed the trough of anti-German bigotry. It never occurs to the Nat Hentoffs that if God does love the anti-Semites, it might have something to do with the way He feels about how some Jews are behaving.

Maybe Nat doesn’t trust individuals like Lipstadt, Bauer and Hilberg to give him the real skinny on the Holocaust story. If that’s true, I have to say I don’t blame him. I haven’t trusted them myself the last ten years. But he has another alternative. He can make a little effort to put his finger on one proof that the Jewish-soap story is true. When he’s found that one proof he can pass it on to key people at the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and the World Jewish Congress and the other like organizations that have been promoting the story for half a century now. They’ll be grateful to him. Very grateful. Nat can forget the historians. The historians are working at cross-purposes to those of mainline Jewish organizations.

In his article “God Must Have Loved Anti-Semites, He Made So Many Of Them” Nat appears to be adrift somehow about why there is so much anti-Jewish feeling around the world when in real numbers there are so few Jews and they own such a tiny fraction of the real estate. There’ are the Holocaust deniers. Anger and contempt for Jews in the Black community. Even “blood libel” against Jews. While I can’t explain everything to fellows like Nat, I do have something for him on the “blood libel” business.

He relates the story about Mustafa Tlas, the Syrian minister of defense, who in 1986 published a book titled The Matzoh of Zion. The book claims to demonstrate that Jews murder Gentile children and use their blood as an ingredient for matzoh at certain rituals. This sort of allegation is what Nat and other extremist Jews refer to as a “blood libel.”

When the Mustafa Tlas story broke I followed it for a couple months. I was pretty impressed, believe me, when about ten days after the story first appeared, then Secretary of State George P. Shultz and then Vice President of the United States George Bush both protested against the book to the United Nations and the Syrian Government itself. That’s clout. That’s influence. That’s an example of what Organized Jewry can do about bigots and bigoted books. It was the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the WJC and probably others who got the ball to Shultz and Bush. No one makes a case against Jews for fighting bigotry. It’s the double standards about bigotry so prevalent among some Jews that is so frustrating.

Here’s what I have for the Nat Hentoffs on the blood libel business. I encourage them to try and get a handle on this simple, wholesome concept. There have never been any proofs that Jews murder Gentile children to use their blood for matzoh. There have never been any proofs that Germans murdered Jews and used their fat to manufacture hand soap. It’s the same shitty story, guys. Try to understand. It’s the same story!

The Gentile-blood-for-matzoh version of the story is bad for Jews, so Jews like Nat do what they can to discredit it. The Jewish-fat-for-soap version of the story, however, is perceived by the Nat Hentoffs as being useful to Jews, so they promote that version. They put what they see as the good-for-Jews version of this blood libel into the museums. They put it into magazines, newspapers, books, television scripts and movies where it corrupts public discourse and contributes to the bigotry and hatred they like to say they’re struggling against.

This is only one example of the double standards that many of us understand to be a way for some in Nat’s circle to win unearned sympathy for Jews at the expense of others. Do they really believe that Blacks and others do not see what goes down and don’t understand why? Maybe Jews should step back and ask themselves, Is it really possible that anti-Semitism is everywhere while everywhere Jews are innocent of all wrongdoing?

With regard to this particular issue, I have a simple suggestion for Jews such as Nat. Stop exploiting the Jewish-soap fantasy until you have turned up a couple proofs for it. If your investigation leads you to doubt the story, G-d forbid, start working up your apology to the German people for having repeated this blood libel against them in your writings. Contrary to what many in your circle might tell you, my sense of things is that in the long run your repentance will be judged to be an act of faith in the good sense and good will of the great majority of Jews everywhere.

Chapter Eleven

After supper I’d driven the old Nova down the hill across Hollywood Boulevard and over to Melrose and parked and walked around for a couple hours. I stopped at the newsstand to look through the magazines. No one at the Melrose newsstand knows who I am or what I do so I can relax a little. When I got back to the house Alicia was leaning against the kitchen sink eating an orange, an odd expression on her face.

“You had better get some sleep,” she says in Spanish, “because when morning comes you might have to make a run for it.”

I feel the head empty itself out. Thought recalls the scene in James Cain’s Serenade where he writes about how Mexicans clean iguanas before cooking them. They drop the live iguana into a pot of boiling water and the big lizard purges itself in one tremendous whoosh.

I speak very carefully in Spanish. “Why do you say that?”

“Because I had two contractions while you were out and I feel peculiar.”

“Precisely, what do you mean when you say you feel peculiar?”

“It is happening, Gordo. Tomorrow I will have a little gift for you.”

I go to the bathroom, take off my clothes and get in the shower. I feel very alert. Thought goes over what I will have to take care of tomorrow. Yesterday we made a practice run over the Cahuenga pass down into Burbank and over to St. Joseph’s hospital. I made a wrong turn and got lost. After I found the hospital we bought some hamburgers and sodas and ate them sitting in the Nova in a deserted parking lot outside a boarded up night club. Yesterday I was very relaxed. Alicia was relaxed too. She ate quietly while I talked about this and that. I was content and ready.

When I get out of the shower Alicia says: “This must be the cleanest you have ever been.” She has a queer look on her face.

“What is the matter with that?” I say very evenly in Spanish “Tell me precisely what you want to say. Do not permit me to misunderstand you.”

“I think you had better take me. I had two pains one after the other while you were in there cleaning yourself. They almost broke my head.”

For the first time in months I feel suddenly that something might go wrong. I don’t ask any more questions. I dress as fast as I can. Thought is wonderfully concentrated. I have already checked the tires on the car, checked the gas, the timing, the water. I’m ready. I’m very aware of how focused thought is. I don’t make a false move. When I’m ready I go to the bathroom door and find Alicia using the mirror in the medicine cabinet to put her eye make-up on.

“What are you doing? Are you putting on eye make-up? Put that down. Let us go. You look fine.”

In the mirror her face looks tired. There are dark circles under her eyes. She keeps working at the eyes.

“This is crazy.” I go back to the dining room where we have the plywood bed I made. I look around for something to do. There’s nothing to do. I hear Mother call from her bedroom. She knows we’re going to the hospital. She wants to know what I’m waiting for.

“Alicia’s putting on her eye make-up.”

“She’s what?”

“Goddammit it, she’s putting her eye make-up on.”

“Don’t make her any more nervous than you have to. And stop yelling at me.”

I don’t say anything.

Mother says: “Is the car running?”

“The goddamm car is running but Alicia’s putting on her goddamm eye make-up so we aren’t going anywhere.”

“Don’t get yourself worked up.”

I don’t say anything.

Marisol comes in the bedroom and says, “I think your mother’s right. You sound all worked up.”

Marisol is fourteen.

Alicia comes out of the bathroom and I start for the front door. Alicia goes around the bed to where some baby clothes are folded and stacked on a chair next to the baby bed.

“What are you doing?”

“I am going to take a different slip to the hospital. I do not like the one I have on.”

“Let us take what you already have packed. I will take the other slip to you tomorrow.”

“You say you will, but I am not confidant you will.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Calm yourself, Gordo.”

“Please, Alicia, go with me now. This is crazy. Why don’t you vacuum the carpet before we leave? Is there some washing you can throw in the machine?”

“Gordo, listen to me. Calm yourself and do not annoy me.”

We say goodbye to Mother and Marisol and go out the front door onto the old wood porch. Alicia pauses.

“I don’t feel it now,” she says. “Maybe it is too early.”

“ It is not too early. How can it be too early? If we get there and it is too early we can come back. What do we have to lose? If we do not go and something happens what will we do then? How can it be too early? It is never too early. It is not too early now. We must go.”

Alicia doubles over and moans. When the contraction is over I take her hand and help her down the wood steps.

“Thank you, dummy. I thought you were never going to touch me.”

It will take seventeen minutes to drive to the entrance of St. Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank if nothing goes wrong. Alicia has a contraction while we’re still on Highland Avenue before we reach the Cahuenga pass. She has another driving down Barham Road into the Valley.

“Just eight minutes now, Alicia. I think we are going to be okay.”

Alicia doesn’t say anything.

“Seven minutes and we will be there”

She doesn’t say anything.

“Just five minutes now… Four minutes…”

When I pull up at the curbing in front of the entrance to St. Joseph’s Alicia has a fourth contraction and inside the lobby while she sits in the wheel chair signing her name on three different forms she has another. I’m getting very intense. I can see how she’s hurting and trying to not make a scene. Now we have to wait for an attendant from the right floor to come down for her. Anything can happen. I’m at the edge of blowing it off and I know once I get started I won’t be able to stop. If I blow it’s going to be hard on Alicia. But I’m right on the edge. In another minute it’ll be like someone has shot me out of a cannon. I begin seeing pictures of myself smashing up everything in the lobby, including the people. It’s very close.

An elevator door opens and a young woman comes out and takes the wheel chair and we all go up to the fifth floor. She wheels Alicia down a hallway into what she says is a labor room. She doesn’t appear to be in much of a hurry, but I’m not agitated the way I was downstairs. I follow them into the labor room. A tall, good-looking Black nurse comes in and chats up the attendant. She doesn’t say hello to Alicia or pay any attention to her. In the wheelchair Alicia is having another contraction. I’m in the middle of a horror movie. The Black nurse says something over her shoulder in English and Alicia pushes herself up out of the chair. Sweat has popped out on her forehead. She looks like she’s going to cry.

“What do you want her to do?,” I say. “Do you want her to get on the bed? Take her cloths off? What do you want? She doesn’t understand.”

“I want her to get undressed,” the Black nurse says, writing something on a clipboard. Without bothering to look at me she says: “You can stay here if you like but I don’t want you giving me directions.”

“She doesn’t understand English,” I say. I feel the anger coming up.

Alicia nods to me that she understands what the nurse expects of her and starts pulling her dress over her head. The Black nurse and the White attendant are chatting and laughing an arm’s length away like they’re in another world. I want to slap the shit out of both of them.

Now Alicia has her dress off. She’s spilling out of her bra and panties beautifully. I step out into the hallway and close the door behind me.

One day she said, “Gordo, do you want to be there when it happens?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Why not?” She was grinning at me.

“Men used to do that in the nineteen sixties. They do not do it any more.”

“Why are you such a fool?”

“Maybe some men still want to watch.”

“Why do you not want to see your son being born?”

“I do not feel it is necessary. Do you want me to be there?”

“Do you think I am going to do this for you again next year?”

“I do not think so.”

“When your son is born he is going to look around for his Gordo and he will not see him. But he will know where his mother is. His mother will be there with him. She will be his rock.”

“Every baby needs a rock.”

In the hallway I think about how happy and content Alicia has been with her pregnancy. We both understand this is the last time she will go through it. I’ve known men who have gone through their wife’s pregnancy as a partner, so to speak, who played as big a role in it as they could right on through the birth. Some of those events had been long and exhausting. The idea of looking on never appealed to me. There’s nothing wrong or ludicrous in the father wanting to be there but it’s never been something I’ve wanted to see. I’ve known men who have taken photographs of their children being born. I’ve never wanted to be a tourist in a place where serious business is being taken care of. I’ve never wanted to look at the photographs. What they reveal is none of my business. That hasn’t stopped some men from showing them to me. I understand Alicia would rather like it if I were with her when the baby is born but I don’t think it’s terribly important for her.

Through the closed door I hear Alicia moan and cry out and I go back in and take her hand. She’s going to stay here in the labor room until it’s time to give birth, then she’ll be wheeled down the hallway to the delivery room. The Black nurse is alone in the room with us now. On my side of the bed the floor is flooded with water with a little blood in it. The Black nurse is on the other side of the gurney telling Alicia in bad Spanish not to push. “No empujas,” the nurse is saying. “Do you understand? No empujas. No empujas.” Alicia is moaning and clenching my hand furiously. She’s saying that the baby is coming but the nurse can’t understand her.

The nurse is annoyed. I can hear it in her voice. She keeps saying “No empujas. No empujas.” She’s right there and I think maybe Alicia is getting nervous and is exaggerating what’s happening and that the nurse knows what’s best. But I don’t like the tone of the nurse’s voice. There’s something very wrong with how she’s behaving. It occurs to me that there’s a little something about race at the bottom of it. It’s as if everything the Black nurse has done and said in Alicia’s presence has had a note of disinterest or even contempt in it. The only thing she knows about Alicia is that she’s Mexican.

Alicia is moaning and sweating and saying in Spanish that the baby is coming the baby is coming and the nurse is telling her in bad Spanish not to push, don’t push and I’m very confused and I’m getting very angry again and then I happen to look down, I don’t know why, and I see something odd. There’s a little something down there that I haven’t seen before. It looks like a dark little dome. “Jesus Christ,” I say, “here it comes.” I can’t believe I’m seeing what I’m seeing. I feel an enormous rush of excitement. In all my life I had never expected to see anything like this.

“Well, it sure is coming,” the Black nurse says. Her voice is changed entirely. It’s like a new spirit has her in its grip. It’s a warm, welcoming, motherly spirit. A nurse’s spirit. “All right, Honey, go ahead and push,” the new woman says. “It’s all right, Honey. Go ahead. Push. Empujas. All right? Empujas, Honey.”

Alicia is holding on to our hands and we’re holding on to hers. The first time she pushes a head comes out. I can’t believe it. A moment passes and when she pushes again the upper part of a torso comes out.

“Jesus Christ, will you look at that.” I’m aware of being in a Catholic hospital but the only thing I can say is “Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ.” A middle aged White nurse comes in and stands at the foot of the gurney and sort of takes over. She looks happy and pleased to be there. A wonderful calm fills the room. She’s the great mother that all new procreating mothers want to have. For just an instant the mind loses its focus and I see reproductions of a couple paintings of St. Francis and I try to imagine the sound of his mother’s voice but then Alicia, grasping one hand of mine and one of the Black nurse’s pulls herself half up off the gurney and a deep terrible cry and groan comes out of her and it is so profound it’s like something that has come out of the heart of a great thousand-year-old oak tree followed by the deepest moan of relief I have ever heard and the entire baby is plopped out between her legs in the hands of the White nurse who is all smiles and talking calmly and happily to no one in particular and I hear myself saying “Oh my God oh my God there it is there it is.”

I can’t make out its various parts. It’s all pressed together. Memory recalls my old Fourth Street apartment of twenty years ago. I’ve cut the top off a can containing a whole cooked chicken and now I turn it upside down and the chicken plops out into the sink and bounces around a couple times. Its wings and legs are pressed so tightly against its carcass it occurs to me that it might not cook good until I’ve pulled them out and loosened the bird up a little.

Alicia has fallen back onto the gurney wet with sweat. The sheet and her gown are wet through and I can see the shape of her engorged breasts through them. Her long black hair is soaked and some of it is pasted across her face. I pull the hair away from her eyes. The White nurse is wooling the baby around in a white cloth drying it off. The baby starts yelling. “Oh, what welcome news,” the White nurse says happily. The Black nurse is using a pair of forceps to sever the cord. She’s sort of mashing it in two. We’re still in the labor room, not the delivery room, so I suppose there’s nothing around here that cuts.

It’s taking the nurse long time. The cord is like rubber. There’s another attendant in the room now too. Everybody is busy. No one is in a hurry. They calmly exchange the words they need to inform each other what each one is doing and what each wants from the other. It’s become professional. It’s reassuring.

“Oh my God,” I’m saying. “Jesus Christ. Look at that. Look at that.”

Alicia wants to know what sex the baby is. “What is it?” she asks in Spanish. “What is it?” She’s exhausted. Her eyes are closed. The nurses are cleaning and drying the baby. “It does not matter,” I say excitedly. “It does not matter.” Alicia sits up under her own steam. I can’t believe it. It’s one surprise after another. She cries out in a tremendous voice, “QUE ES? QUE ES?” The Black nurse, apparently the linguist in the room, pauses in her on-going efforts to mash the cord in two, and takes a look. In Spanish she says, “It is a boy.” She turns to the White nurse. “How do you say girl in Spanish?”

“It is a girl,” I tell Alicia in Spanish. She moans and falls back on the bed.

The White nurse lifts the baby up by her ankles and looks her over. Nobody’s slapped her but she’s already bawling like crazy. She’s a genius. I hadn’t noticed but someone has brought a portable incubator into the room. The White nurse puts the baby in it and closes the door. It looks like a microwave oven. It has a little glass door on the side. I stoop over and look in. The baby is lying on its back quietly. She’s stopped crying. Her eyes are wide open. I hadn’t expected that. It takes kittens and puppies how many days to open their eyes? This kid is already looking around. She’s only four or five minutes old and she’s already casing the joint. While I watch, her head moves a little and her wide-open gaze catches mine through the glass. She looks right into my eyes with an unblinking fixed gaze. It stuns me. She looks just like me and her eyes are looking without blinking right into my eyes. It’s as if she can actually see something. I’m telling everyone what I’m doing and what I’m seeing the baby do. I’m aware that no one’s answering so maybe no one’s listening but it doesn’t matter. I’ve been telling stories for thirty-five years without anyone listening. A moment passes and the baby’s eyes lock into mine again. It’s electrifying. I feel the charge all over the surface of my skull. I can’t stop talking. I kept saying Jesus Christ Jesus Christ and the room is charged and crackling.

The nurses are making Alicia comfortable. They say they’re waiting for the doctor. I don’t know what the hell they need the doctor for now. There hadn’t been anything to it. One two three and there it was. Now the doctor arrives and he’s a big guy, some kind of Persian or Arab with an indecipherable accent and the facial expression of a professional murderer. He’s a big beefy guy with black hairy arms. He doesn’t say anything to anyone and before I know what’s happening he has his arm inside Alicia half way up to his elbow. She shrieks with pain and maybe surprise. The two of them struggle, the nurses join in on the side of the doctor and then he drags out a big bloody pile of something that must be the placenta and plops it on the sheet between Alicia’s legs. It’s a wonderful sight. Alicia falls back on the gurney again with a moan. I stare at the doctor in amazement. Everything about him reminds me of a butcher, including the black hair on his arms. My heart goes out to my wife. She’s wet with sweat again, her hair is in her eyes, her head has fallen down onto her bare right shoulder, her eyes are closed.

A third nurse comes into the room, pulls the incubator with the baby in it out into the hallway and starts wheeling it off. She invites me to follow along. We arrive at a little glassed-in room with half a dozen infrared ray machines mounted over little tables and scales. The nurse working there takes the baby out of the incubator, cleans her off a little more and weighs and measures her, notes the results on a chart, then inspects her body closely from head to toe like she’s going over a big potato. She makes small talk while she works, explaining each step as she goes along, reassuring me that all the different parts of the little body are within the range of normality.

Across a passageway there’s a larger glassed-in holding room where about twenty newborns are lying in their little beds on their stomachs asleep. Behind that room behind a big glass wall a couple nurses are feeding newborns with bottles. The nurses look very happy and content. Every detail of the scene reassures me that my baby will be safe, secure, and under constant, calm, knowledgeable observation. There isn’t a man in sight anywhere. After watching that hairy goddamn Arab at work, it’s all right with me. I walk back to the room where Alicia is. The nurses are putting her in a wheelchair. She has her robe and slippers on. Her hair is brushed and she’s dry. We wheel her down the hallway and pause to look in through the window of the little room where our baby is still bathing in the rays of the infrared ray machine. The nurse holds her up for us to see. An incredibly deep strong laugh explodes out of Alicia. A powerful gush of happiness and power blowing off from a small woman in a wheelchair. The force of it sets me back.

“She looks just like you, Gordo.” She laughs happily.

We take Alicia to a bed in a room where there are already two other women. It’s the cheapest in room in the hospital. When they bring the baby in I see how tentatively Alicia handles her. She looks unsure, as if she’s afraid she might damage it. “What a beautiful baby,” she says over and over again. “What a beautiful baby. I never expected to have such a beautiful baby.”

The floor nurse says it’s time for me to leave. It’s three in the morning. We’d left the house at 11:30.

Three and a half hours from start to finish. It feels like minutes. I go downstairs and through the lobby. The Nova is still parked at the curbing in front of the entrance where I’d forgotten it. I get in, start the motor, put it in gear and start driving back the way we’d come.

I don’t know where to go. My heart is floating. The floating is inside my breast but my sense of things is that the heart itself is some place else, suspended in some great airy expanse, beating in an emptiness. Overhead the stars are brilliantly blue and white in a perfect black sky. A great peace infuses the darkness over the San Fernando Valley. I feel blessed with a great good fortune. I’m not crying but tears are flying around everywhere inside the car. Mother and Marisol must be asleep. They would both want to know what the news is. I drive back over Barham Road, up through the hills and down Cahuenga into Hollywood and turn west on Franklyn but when I come to our street I don’t turn but keep on going up Franklyn. I’m driving the old Nova at fifteen, twenty miles an hour. It’s the perfect speed. Sometimes I slow down a little.

The only place I can think to go that will be open at four in the morning is Cantor’s Delicatessen on Fairfax Avenue. I decide to drift in that direction. Thought begins to reflect on all the times over the years I have met with friends at Cantor’s. I remember how most of those friends were Jews. My heart floods with good will toward them.

Then thought reminds me of the work I’m doing and I remember the awful chasm that’s between Jews and me now and in a flash it’s as if the immense beauty of the night is gone and in its place are the goddamm Nazis and the goddamn gas chambers and the photographs and all the old hatreds and lies and the propaganda and self righteousness and anger and all the rest of it. Now there is just the dark empty city street at three or four o’clock in the morning. For a moment I feel nothing whatever. Thought has stopped. For an instant there is no memory, no pictures, no speculation. And in the silence of that one still empty moment I become aware that I want to perform an act of reconciliation with Jews.

Then thought, obsessed with movement and noise as it always is, starts up again. As I recognize the implications of the proposal I have made to myself, my awareness of the great beauty of the night returns, a silver flood of starlight pours through the trees washing the street and my bare arms inside the car and there’s the sense again of great elevation, of a gorgeous surplus of feeling, an immense good will toward everyone and a thankfulness for the wonderful gifts the night has bestowed on me.

I drive slowly toward La Brea, turn south to Santa Monica Boulevard, west past Barney’s Beanery, which is closed now, and turn south again on Fairfax and park in the new lot beside Cantor’s. I don’t understand what it would mean for me to perform an act of reconciliation with Jews. There’s something about the word that suggests I have wronged someone. Questioning the gas chamber stories-how can that be a wrong? If what I suspect is false is false, I’m a bearer of good news for Jews and for Germans too. In any event, the questions I ask have to be asked. They aren’t my questions. I discovered others already asking them. I heard the others asking the questions and when I heard them I felt I had to ask them too. I don’t know why, but it didn’t have anything to do with Jews. That’s the part Jews don’t understand. Questions about the gassing chambers are beyond who’s a Jew and who isn’t. The questions have gone beyond any one of us. They have a life of their own.

As I push though the glass doors and approach the bakery counter thought somehow flies off to Buddhists thinking about the nature of mind and to Plato and how we ourselves come and go but how there’s no end to thought. The gas chamber questions don’t have to be answered but once they’re asked they have to go on being asked or something is being evaded. The questions either have to be asked or something else has to be done with them. I can’t bring myself to do that something else.

Cantor’s is still doing business. I half hope I’ll see someone I know from the old days and half hope I won’t. In any event, to hell with the gas chambers and the Nazis and the Jews too. I’ll buy marzipan for Mother and something chocolate for Marisol and I’ll drive back to the house and tell them how it was with Alicia and with Paloma Kathleen and something maybe about how it’s been with me. About me, maybe not that much.

Chapter Twelve

A feminist attends a beauty contest wearing a dress made of uncooked pork chops sewn together. An unpublished writer, who it’s said has no talent but is certain of his worth, auctions off his pathetic memorabilia. His typewriter, outlines for stories he never wrote, rejected manuscripts with contemptuous notations by editors, old erasers, ball point pens. He invites the press. His attractive fiancée slips her arm through his and smiles and nods to the attendees. An amusing story, but I want to know how much money the writer makes. What’s his real income?

It wasn’t the money that drew me to revisionism, obviously. There’s no money in revisionism. So what the hell was it? It must have been the contest. Every intellectual elite in America is contemptuous of revisionist theory. Every institution of higher learning cooperates in the suppression of revisionist scholarship. No book or periodical distributor will handle revisionist publications. No philanthropic organization will contribute funds to revisionist research. It looks like those are the kinds of odds I like. I feel irresistibly attracted to a contest where so many are committed to destroying so few. A handful of scholars and researchers and the handful of books they have published. What a long shot. How hopeless it all feels. Gorgeous!

No matter what I’m doing at the moment, thought has its own agenda. In my life thought has a life of its own. While I wrote the above paragraph, thought took another direction entirely. It recalled the place in David Irving’s first volume of Hitler’s War where he describes the give and take, the lack of resolution in the Nazi inner circle before Hitler made his decision to invade Poland. Hitler didn’t have to kick off that little affair. There were other choices available to him and Hitler knew it. Irving reports how in the last days before the beginning of World War II Goering urged Hitler to relax about invading Poland. He tried to convince Hitler that the invasion wasn’t necessary. At one point Goering said to Hitler, “It isn’t absolutely necessary for you to go for broke.” And Hitler replied, “That’s what I’ve done my whole life. Go for broke.” Within a week then, as Irving has it, a stain of blood began to seep across the map of Europe.

What was thought trying to get at with this little diversion? Remind me that Hitler loved the long shot too? What kind of invidious analogy is that? I’m suspicious of men who choose to try to do the impossible. Often as not they’re more than half in love with easeful failure. They use flamboyant gestures to evade ordinary responsibilities. There will always be those who will admire your willingness to court certain disaster, not wanting to understand that what makes you uneasy is the possibility that you might not achieve the possible.

And at the end, when the European peoples lay broken and smashed all around him, Hitler changed the rules. Time and again he had ordered his soldiers to fight to the death and spewed his rage and contempt over those who would not. Unwilling himself at the end to bear any longer the responsibility for his people, from whom he had asked so much, he chose to die among the women and the children. I can only try to imagine how much humiliation he might have saved Germans, and how many lies and how much horseshit he might have saved the rest of us, if he had chosen to fight it out to his death in the dock at Nuremberg. After all the fat jokes are finished with, Goering behaved with more honor than the Hitlers and Goebbels.

I work through the afternoon at the office then go downstairs and outside to the taco stand. There, a powerfully built one-armed Mexican is laughing and whooping it up with his friends. His laugh says he doesn’t have a care in the world. The instant I see him thought flies out of my head like a scalded dog and runs me back twenty years. I see myself in the Mekong on the road leading west out of Sedec. It’s morning, the sky is heavy and dark, the paddies are lush with the uniquely beautiful green of young rice. I’ve hitched a ride in a Vietnamese army jeep. My typewriter and bag are on the seat beside me. We’ve come to a roadblock. We get out of the jeep and walk forward past the trucks and buses to where the tree trunk is lying across the road. It’s about four feet thick. Six hundred yards to the north across the paddies the tree line is dark and quiet. I don’t like it. Then there’s the explosion on the road behind us. None of us throws himself to the ground. We’re all old-timers.

When I look back I see the little French passenger van settling on its side and up underneath the dark clouds the maroon and black colors falling back down into the beautiful green paddy. Inside the colors, I know, is an assortment of body parts. The van had pulled off the two-lane highway onto the dirt shoulder. A moment before we had walked past the place where the mine had been buried. When you’re a Vietnamese bus driver you are supposed to know that you do not drive off the pavement onto dirt shoulders, especially at roadblocks.

I watch myself start to walk back toward the bus to look at the results. That’s my job. I’m not going to carry a weapon in this war. I have a different discipline. My discipline is to not avert my eyes, ever, from the results of so much passion institutionalized. This is the morning I change my mind. I know what it is that I’m going to see. I can hear the babies crying in the gray green air. This is the morning I decide I don’t want to look anymore. I’ve seen enough. I’m going to change my discipline. I watch myself stop and wait in the middle of the asphalt road.

Now the one-armed man dressed in black pajamas saunters up with a couple Vietnamese officers. He’s short and powerfully built. I ask a Vietnamese about him. The one-armed man is bodyguard to a Vietnamese colonel. A Viet Cong rocket blew off the arm. Now someone spies the hand grenade lying down the embankment in the paddy a few yards away. One of the Viet Cong who had pulled the tree trunk across the road during the night had probably dropped it. The babies are crying very far away and the heavy dark sky is about to burst itself open while we all pause to consider the grenade. The one-armed man is not the contemplative sort. He goes down the embankment and approaches the grenade. I feel an awful surge of anxiety. I want to yell out in English, “Let a two-armed man do it!” The one-armed man bends down, picks up the grenade with thumb and forefinger, looks it over like it might be a toad, and tosses it farther out into the paddy and climbs back up on the road. There are pocks and lines on his face and a shock of thick black hair falls over his forehead. The chances that he understands English are pretty remote. I’m beside myself with the idea that he has taken the chance of blowing off his last remaining arm, gratuitously.

At the taco stand I eat a machaca burrito then walk over to the newsstand on Cahuenga. While I was eating and daydreaming, the sun had set. To the west over the end of Hollywood Boulevard the hills are black beneath the green and pink horizon. In Mother Jones there’s a photograph of a Nicaraguan girl with the stump of one leg wrapped in bandages. Some progressive-forces group is using the photo as anti-contra propaganda. The one-legged girl is laughing and the propagandists are asking for money. These are the same folks who did not take photographs of the one-legged girls manufactured by the Sandinistas when the Sandinistas were guerrillas. They are also the folk who did not take photographs of the one-legged girls manufactured by the Viet Cong. The folk who advertise in Mother Jones don’t take photographs of the girls who have their legs blown off by the progressive-forces people around the globe because their own politics are more important to them than the one-legged girls.

When I telephone the house, Marisol answers. She’s fifteen now. I make a little joke about the photo of the one-legged girl, I don’t know why, and Marisol says: “Bradley, that’s a total barf.” When Alicia comes to the telephone we speak in Spanish. After a moment she says: “You don’t sound right, Gordo. How do you feel?”

“I can’t wake up. I feel torpid.”

“Oh, Gordo,” she says urgently, “come home right away. I like you so much when you’re torpid.”

At the house Marisol is at the kitchen sink washing dishes. I can hear Alicia and the baby in the back bedroom. When I put my arm around Marisol I see she’s been crying. She shakes off my arm and won’t speak to me. It isn’t hard to figure out. She’s had an argument with her mother over washing the dishes.

“Marisol,” I say, “I suffer because I can’t sell my writing and I can’t pay our bills. Sometimes I don’t know what we’re going to do. You suffer because you have to wash the dishes. Maybe both of us should look around for better things to suffer over. It should be easy for you. You’re a Christian. Christians have immense issues to worry about. God, death, morality and sin, the creation of life. Those are real problems. They’re worth worrying about. Washing dishes isn’t a problem, Marisol. You want to suffer about something? Suffer about heaven and hell. Don’t even bother suffering about having to wash the dishes. It’s not worth it.”

Marisol isn’t buying it. She goes on washing the dishes and sniffling, her chin on her chest. I decide to take a hot bath. As I draw the water I notice I feel better than I did earlier. Cheered up somehow. I hear Marisol in the kitchen begin to hum along with some Christian hymn being sung in Spanish on the radio. I think about how much I care about her, what a good kid she is. She’s boy crazy, which I somehow half-suspect is my fault, but she’s a good kid. Maybe if I’d been more demonstrative a few years ago she wouldn’t be so boy crazy now. I don’t think it really works that way.

The hot water is wonderful. In the kitchen Marisol is singing about Jesus. Thought turns to his story – it’s a wonderful story – and the next thing I know I’m seeing Jesus there before me hanging on the cross. The image is unusually clear. In a moment of doubt I reach out with my toe and turn on the hot water tap. Then I see him vividly. He’s pierced with arrows, but thought recalls I’ve seen that in a painting. I see the lips of the slit in his side where the spear has been thrust in, opened up like a coin purse, but thought counters that that’s a painting too. Then somehow I see his face with its unbearable anguish and the sponge with vinegar pushed into his mouth and for the first time ever I see he’s sweating. I’ve never seen the sweating before and now I feel the awful anguish driving itself into my own heart like a nail being driven into a wall stud.

The next moment the image has disappeared and thought is off and running again, like it usually is. It’s telling me I have no moral obligations toward Jews that I do not have toward Germans and Ukrainians and Poles and Palestinians and all the others. That the answer to the Israeli-Arab problem is that there is no answer. Thought has told me these things before but now it’s telling me them again, with great clarity. The answer for Americans, thought tells me for the thousandth time, is to stop paying others to blow the legs off children no matter what the political beliefs of their fathers might be. The answer for the Jews of Israel is to bring them here since we’re responsible for them being there. The answer for American Jews is to start telling them the truth. I’ve known all this for years but for some reason thought wants to go over it again. The answer for you, thought says, is to tell yourself the truth too and to go on writing and to say the same thing to everyone. That’s your cross, thought says, to say the same thing to everyone.

It’s Sunday noon and I meet O’Keefe downtown at Philippi’s. It’s rained and now the air has turned chilly. We walk over to First Street and eat Chinese noodles. O’Keefe says that Israel is the Jews’ Apollo program. They think it’s under attack by aliens. He says that the Holocaust Industry people want to explain everything to everyone when what they ought to do is just be quiet for a change and watch what’s going on. We walk back to Philippi’s and drink beer for a couple hours. The conversation turns to race, as it does so often in this country. I say that the problem with racial idealism is that it doesn’t take seriously the question that race isn’t a problem for the day. What about a thousand years from now? Ten thousand years? What about a hundred thousand years in the future? The thought of still having to wrestle with race that far down the line exhausts me. Sometime, somewhere, we’re going to have to give up on it. On this planet anyhow.

Everyone is in bed asleep and I’m watching a documentary on television about the Jains in India. In a parched, treeless Indian village children are marched into the village square and sat down in the dirt in a wide circle. A naked, middle-aged Jain holy man enters the circle, his dangling genitals swinging from side to side. He sits in the center of the circle and begins to lecture the little children on the meaning of life. I feel a wave of longing and nostalgia wash through me. I’m half afraid my life has been sidetracked, that I have switched myself onto a siding with the Holocaust and revisionism that goes nowhere. That I’m using up my life explaining something I have no interest in to people who don’t want to know about it. Watching the screen before me, I’m filled with longing to leave explanation aside and return to a life of observation. Have I ever lived such a life?

Chapter Thirteen

Alicia and I were at K-Mart buying a nightgown for Mother for Mother’s Day and afterwards we drove across the parking lot to Burger King to get some hamburgers to take home. While we waited in line at the drive-by window we saw an old White guy standing at the entrance to the lot with a beat-up sign saying, “Will work for food.” Maybe he was about my age. I didn’t say anything but I was surprised to feel how my heart went out to him.

“Pobrecito,” Alicia said-poor little old guy-and when she got her change back with our hamburgers she folded up a five-dollar bill and told me to stop and give it to him.

I thought that was too much but I didn’t say anything, and when I stopped the car I was going in the wrong direction so the old guy had to cross the drive to get to us. He had a frail, shuffling walk that made me wonder what kind of work he would really be able to do and when he reached the car window I saw he was unshaven and didn’t have a very good face. I said we don’t have any work right now but my wife wants you to have this and gave him the five-dollar bill. A shade of confusion passed over his face, then he took the bill and said, Oh, thank you very much, and turned to shuffle back to where he had been standing. As we drove away I heard a horn honk and in the rear view mirror saw the old guy shuffling back across the drive again with a big grin on his face and a woman’s arm sticking out of her car window with a hamburger at the end of it.

Driving toward the house I was surprised at how much feeling I had for the old guy with the sign. I suppose I was thinking about how close to being him I am. I’m hardly able to pay the rent on our house. Every day I think about how it will be if I have to put Mother in an institution someplace and take Alicia and Paloma to Mexico. I don’t mind the Mexico part but I feel desperate about abandoning my mother. At the same time I was aware it wasn’t only the age and poverty and aloneness of the old guy that touched me. It was his being White, too. If he had been Mexican I wouldn’t have been touched so deeply by what I perceived to be his situation in life. No point in even mentioning the Laotians, of whom there are so many around here.

The first time I noticed those kinds of feelings and the lack of them was in Korea in 1950 and ‘51. It wasn’t pleasant seeing the corpses of the Chinese but it was a very different experience to see American corpses. All the dead Americans I saw were White like me while none of the Chinese were, of course, and when I saw the corpses that made a big difference. If I had been born a few years earlier and had been able to participate in a campaign against the Germans I might have had different feelings about it, feelings that weren’t based on race. When I was in Korea I could camp out with dead Chinese-we never engaged the North Koreans to my knowledge-and not think twice about it. I even had some interest in the wounds of individual Chinese corpses. It was a different experience entirely with the Americans. Maybe it was because they were American, not that they were White, but I don’t think so.

When I was in Vietnam in ‘68 I found I had reactions similar to those I had had in Korea. There was still a difference between Vietnamese and American corpses. In Vietnam there were plenty of Black American corpses but as luck would have it I never saw one of those. Only White ones. The difference for me between Korea and Vietnam, with respect to the corpses, was that in Vietnam the corpses were more significant than they had been in Korea no matter what kind they were. In Korea I didn’t see the Chinese as individuals. I did Vietnamese because I walked with them and ate and slept with them and watched them fall in firefights and sat with them while they died. It didn’t matter that they were North or South or indeterminate. Nationality was indeterminate. Race wasn’t.

What I remember most about the American corpses, as a generality in Vietnam, was how heavy they were. I remember watching the Vietnamese firemen in Cholon picking up Vietnamese corpses and throwing them in the back of flatbed trucks, and I would think how they wouldn’t be able to do that with the Americans because we were too big. Even when the corpse was in body bag you could usually tell if it was a Vietnamese or an American. You could tell by how it sagged when it was picked up.

The philosophy behind the ideal of racial integration is that when you associate with the other you find him to be more vulnerable and more valuable than you had thought he was, if you had thought about him at all. Thought doesn’t have a lot to do with it. Experience is everything, for most of us. Before Korea I hadn’t known any Chinese-I think I knew one when I was in Junior High but I can’t recall who he was or what he looked like-and I could look at a Chinese corpse torn into pieces and view it as an interesting experience. But after a while in Korea there were times when I couldn’t bring myself to even cast a glance at an American corpse. That’s the way it was with Captain Grey. The afternoon I was told he had received four machine-gun bullets in his stomach, even after what I had been through with him, I let them carry his corpse down the mountain without crawling over through the trees to look at him one last time. There are many things I remain ashamed of.

After Korea I began reading famous novels. In Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms there is the famous passage about a battlefield after an Italian victory over the Austrians where the Austrian corpses are all turned on their faces, their butts in the air and their pants pockets turned inside out. I remember what a horrifying image that was for me. The Austrians weren’t American but they were White. On the other hand, Europeans have been butchering White people for millennia and have thought nothing of it, so I suppose I could have learned to live with it too at the beginning, though later I know I would not have been able to. These are the things thought called up to me as I drove back toward the house with Alicia and the hamburgers, thought bouncing off its image of the old geezer outside Burger King. Maybe it was doing the same thing with Alicia because the thinking never stops for any of us. If it was, it was probably taking a different tack with Alicia than it was with me. I didn’t wonder then about what it might be with her but I do now. I could ask her, but too many days have passed, and why would she remember? Still, it hasn’t been too many for me so I don’t know why I should think it’s been too many for her.

A young man I’m acquainted with writes that once he understood “the natural order of things” he became a racist and National Socialist. I suppose it’s only natural to feel pretty self-confident once you understand the natural order of things. You can make final determinations about who is good and who is bad, who should live and who doesn’t matter. It’s not only National Socialism that helps you feel such self-confidence. It isn’t a matter of the left or the right. Christians can be very self-confident about what they believe.

I have never understood the natural order of things. I’m too old for it to come to me now. It would have to be a miracle. I know people who believe in miracles but I’ve never understood miracles either. Believing you understand a miracle when you think you experience one is similar to believing you understand the natural order to things. I’ve never had enough confidence to believe either. I’m not talking about the evolution of fish here. For someone like me, intellectual freedom is the easy way out. I don’t have to decide who gets it and who doesn’t. If we leave it alone there’s more than enough to go around. There’s no end to the thing itself. It’s not like money. It doesn’t grow on trees. It’s there like the air, like space really. Anyone who wants it can have it. It can never be used up. That’s why, as an ideology, intellectual freedom is too wishy-washy for those who understand the natural order of things. There’s no elite. No hierarchy. No leader. Intellectual freedom blows away the party people.

The National Alliance is dedicated to the racial hegemony of Whites, as it sees Whites. Its members speak poorly of Jews and Blacks. If they’ve got the space they’ll bad-mouth Mexicans and Native Americans too. Ten, maybe fifteen years ago William Pierce, founder and leader of the NA, asked me to write for his magazine, National Vanguard. I never got around to it. He has a nice telephone voice with a soft Georgia accent. Pierce thought that because I had become a revisionist I had something against Jews. He must have thought that if I have something against Jews I’m a racist too. I understood that. For some it’s true. He sent me a copy of his novel, The Turner Diaries. I critiqued it for him. It was already published so it didn’t make any difference what I said. I think I said the next time out he was going to have to take his characters more seriously. Since then the Diaries have allegedly become a moving force in the imaginations of White racists, militia groups and the men convicted of bombing the Oklahoma City Federal building. It’s possible, though it’s written so amateurishly-as a novel-I don’t see how. That’s the difference between the artist and the ideologue. The ideologue can just say what he wants however he wants to say it. The artist has to be truthful to the human characters he works with.

Those who want to prohibit revisionist theory from becoming a part of public discourse have found the best way to do it is to associate it in the public mind with anti-Jewish and anti-Black sentiments. If you do not accept the received history of the gas chambers it’s because you despise Jews and Blacks. That’s how the Holocaust Industry has manipulated the story. It’s a juvenile idea but a shrewd one. If you wonder how Blacks got in there you haven’t yet understood that it’s a given in our culture that those who despise Jews despise Blacks too, unless you are Black. If you are Black and question the gas chamber stories you are a Jew-hater but you are excused from hating Blacks. This has proven to be a very valuable propaganda concept for the Industry and for the progressive cultural establishment it speaks for but does not represent. At the same time, as with every successful propaganda concept, there’s something to it. Almost everyone I have met who is anti-Jewish is anti-Black as well. On the other hand, I can’t say the reverse is true. I have met many Jews who are anti-Black yet remain entirely free of anti-Jewish feelings. It’s a little beyond me how to account for this.

The belief that only someone who despises Jews and Blacks would express doubt about the gassing chambers is so widespread that even nominally intelligent academics find it profitable to pretend it’s true. The morning I walked onto the University of Texas campus at Austin I was met with a front page story in the Daily Texan where Harvard lawyer and academic Alan Dershowitz was quoted in bold relief saying, “Bradley Smith [is] a known anti-Semite and an anti-Black racist with phony credentials.” I’ve always wondered what Dershowitz meant with his phony-credentials crack. I’ve always told everyone I have no credentials whatever. I do understand the charge of anti-Semitism. That charge comes with the territory when you express doubt about the gas-chamber stories. But I didn’t know what he was talking about with regard to being an anti-Black racist. I read the story to find out what he meant but it didn’t say. The reporters didn’t ask him or didn’t bother to report his reply. What does it matter to a journalist when a revisionist is being nailed? It’s progressive to believe the gas-chamber stories, it’s reactionary not to believe them, and journalists have agreed to report without comment whatever progressives say about who progressives consider reactionary.

It’s bad for your career to be labeled an anti-Black racist, an anti-Semite and a man with phony credentials. How can people believe anything you say when they are told again and again that beneath everything you say there must be a hateful hidden agenda you never own up to? You want to do something that will stop Harvard professors from speaking that way about you in public. You can think about suing an Alan Dershowitz for libel, but when you look into doing it you find you will need about two hundred thousand dollars to get the ball in play so you are going to decide against it. With regard to reporters who will report that you are an anti-Black racist without questioning the accusation because in the context of our progressive newspaper culture it means you are a racist if you question the gas chambers, that’s just the way that one is too. If you don’t like being misrepresented and having your words quoted out of context and being treated with contempt you might just as well get out of the revisionist wing of the intellectual freedom business.

When my ad challenging the gas chamber exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum ran in the Quad at Queens College in Flushing, New York, its editor, Andrew Wallenstein, condemned me in an editorial for being, in addition to an anti-Semite of course, an anti-Black and anti-Latino racist. The quote was pulled up in bold relief so no reader would miss it, just like Dershowitz’s quote was in the Daily Texan:

Bradley Smith is an equal opportunity offender: in an interview with the University of Nebraska Sower in 1989, he lamented that America wasn’t a “white country” and felt that it wasn’t possible for “black Americans to be assimilated into white society.” He also feared the nation would become “a sort of Mexicanized, Puerto Ricanized country.”

I have never given an interview to the Nebraska Sower. The attribution of the quote to me was an invention. Nevertheless, thousands of students and faculty at Queens College read about how the man who ran the ad in their newspaper questioning the gas-chamber exhibits at the Holocaust Museum was an anti-Black and anti-Latino racist. The quote would circulate through academic circles for years, turning people against me everywhere it was used, making my work, my life, more difficult. If a reporter from the Sower had called me she could have had a real interview but no one called so a story was invented. I used to give interviews to everyone who asked. The Sower didn’t think I was worth the call. The Quad reporter could have called to confirm that I had said what he was going to say I’d said, but he didn’t think it was worth his time.

I have that issue of the Sower in which the quote appeared originally. I have it in my files. I know the person who, in real life, is being quoted. His picture is there in the Sower along with the interview in which he is quoted. The photo looks just like him. It doesn’t look anything like me. It looks like my friend Mark Weber. As a matter of fact, that’s who it is-Mark Weber. So why did Wallenstein say it was me? I’m not prepared to believe that Mr. Wallenstein had that issue of the Nebraska Sower to hand when he did the article on me and that he deliberately lied about me. I believe the young Mr. Wallenstein was fed the quote by a third party, a party whose work it is to libel those of us who question what they propose we ought to believe. A party associated with the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, say, or the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

When I wrote about this affair in Smith’s Report, David Nestle, who directs Popular Reality, called the Quad and talked to Wallenstein, who we have to remember is a young Jewish fellow who has been raised to believe that men like me despise young men like him and Blacks too and now Latinos as well. Nestle wanted to know where Wallenstein had gotten the quote he had used from the Sower but Wallenstein wasn’t talking. He was protecting his source, even if the source was a Zionist propaganda organization. Wallenstein wanted to know why Nestle was interested. Nestle said it was he who had published the first little volume of the expanded edition of Confessions, and he wanted to know if he had published a racist writer because he didn’t like the idea of having done it. Still, Wallenstein wasn’t talking. When Nestle mentioned to Wallenstein the irony of the quote, in light of my being married to a Mexican immigrant, Wallenstein had a difficult time processing the information.

Nestle rang me up later and told me about the conversation. “He kept asking me,” ‘Are you sure? He’s married to a Mexican? Really? Are you certain? A Mexican?’” On the phone Nestle and I were laughing about it. But the damage was done. A week or so later Wallenstein left a message on my answering machine saying he would post a correction in the Quad but I never saw it and I know it would not mean much after all the hullabaloo over the original libel. If you don’t like being slandered and lied about, if you don’t like being treated contemptuously by your peers-and I know this, so I can not complain very loudly-you simply do not question what anyone connected with the Holocaust Hate Industry says should not be questioned.

But what about Mark Weber, you say? He did say what they said you said. Weber is a racist. And you say he’s your friend? When all the shooting’s over, what’s the difference? You associate with racists. You’re friends with racists. You move in racist circles. Why wouldn’t you be thought of as a racist? If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck it’s not a saddle pony.

My answer is that it goes deeper than that. Not only is Weber a racist and my friend, but together we founded Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust. We were partners. He wrote the now famous leaflet “The Holocaust: Let’s Hear Both Sides” for CODOH. He resigned from CODOH only when he took a job at the Institute for Historical Review. He’s the editor now of the Journal of Historical Review. He’s still my friend.

One summer night in 1988 Mark and I were driving across the desert toward Twenty Nine Palms where we were going to stay a couple days with friends of his. A little vacation. It was a beautiful, clear, moonlit night and it may have been the first time that we had spent time together alone. We had gotten to know one another by telephone and the U.S. mails while I lived in Hollywood and he still lived in Nebraska. We had founded CODOH together without ever having met. Later, Mark had been to our house one evening in Pinehurst Canyon, a couple blocks off Hollywood Boulevard. I recall his gentlemanly manner when I introduced him to my wife, and his good humor and his obvious desire to be a good guest in the very simple place where we lived.

Now, while we drove across the desert where you could see the features of every rock and plant in the warm moonlight, Mark was talking about how he felt about National Socialism, Hitler and particularly the defeat of Germany. He talked about it as having been a great tragic drama, particularly the last days of the war and the fall of Berlin. He asked if I didn’t have that sense of it myself, being a playwright. I said I wasn’t really sure how I felt about it, that I hadn’t read the literature. I said I was certain it must have been a great drama for those who had been participants in it, in a century that had had far too many such dramas. Mark said that for him the final days of Hitler’s circle in Berlin were a modern Götterdämerung.

I recall one other thing Mark said while we were driving that night. The talk had drifted from Hitler and Germany to race, American Blacks, Third World immigration and so on. Mark was particularly concerned about Third World immigration, Mexican immigration especially, changing the nature of American culture for the worse, and the need for idealism and courage to face the issue. I said I more or less agreed that it was a very big problem and then I said to Mark, “You must not approve of my marriage.”

“Why do you say that?” he said. I could see by the expression on his face in the moonlight that he was trying to re-focus his attention.

“Mark, my wife’s a Mexican. Remember?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. And after a moment he said, “That’s right, Bradley. I don’t approve.”

“I don’t mean you are against us personally, but on principle.”

After a moment he said, “Yes, on principle.”

My friends, and many who are not my friends, ask how Mark Weber can be my friend when he argues against immigration policies he believes will “Puerto-Ricanize” and “Mexicanize” the culture. Well, won’t they-to one degree or another? Have you been in East Los Angeles recently? I have. We have family there. Mark believes such a scenario would be bad for the country. How do we know it wouldn’t? It’s a theory, for Christ’s sake! What proofs do we have that it would be good for the country? The problem isn’t racialist theory, but the need many racialists feel to impose their theories on the rest of us.

I’m not outraged by Mark’s views on the dangers of Third World immigration into the U.S. I admire him for speaking publicly about his ideals in an informed and decent way. That’s how I try to speak about my ideals. I’m not a racist but I don’t believe racial theory must be obliterated and racists ground into the dirt. I don’t have a theory about race. I can live with the racists and have for fifteen years. I can live with the anti-racists and did that for thirty years. As two classes, I found nothing to distinguish between them but their theories. I found the same levels of generosity, intelligence, good humor and intolerance in each group. The worst in each group have no interest in a free society but prefer one in which they themselves rule the others with an iron fist. As a class, the worst of them are made for each other, a human symbiosis of intolerance and irrational hostility.

I don’t believe in thought crimes. How can there be thought crimes and intellectual freedom too? Thought “crimes” are interesting and valuable in the same way the horror and exaltation of the dream life is interesting and valuable. In a free society dreaming and thinking are not criminal. When dreams and theories are institutionalized and used to initiate violence against others, those institutions become criminal. There’s only one way to get rid of bad thought: kill everyone who dreams and thinks. I’m reminded of a bumper sticker that puts it well: “Kill ‘em all. Let God sort ‘em out.” It’s a simple program but a distasteful one for those of us who are not determined to rule.

I don’t find the racial question a very interesting one, but racists do. That’s why they call themselves racists. If I were a racist I would think about naming myself something else. Racists believe that human culture has reached some kind of apogee in the West. Racists compare the cultural achievements of Whites to Blacks and others, but particularly Blacks, and worry that race-mixing will prove a threat to high human accomplishment. I think the racists are too eager to move on this question. The data is only beginning to come in. We need another thousand, another five thousand years maybe, before we start coming to conclusions like that. Those who charge that racialist theory is without any possible merit, however, are simply pushing their own ideology. They don’t know any more about it than the racists do, and in this culture they oftentimes are less honest than the racists.

I am increasingly aware of the limitations and weaknesses of character I recognize in myself. I forgive myself, one by one, the many wrongs I have committed against others-a life threaded through with insensitivity, wrong-headedness and small brutalities. It’s either going to be forgiveness, or it’s going to be guilt and shame. Guilt and shame are a waste of time. I suppose there are some things I have done I will never be able to forgive, but I’m not going to ignore how human it all was either. Just as I have committed unforgivable acts, others have too. These acts should be named but an individual act does not define an individual. The more accepting I am of my own frailties, the more able I am to accept the frailties of others. If we believe racial prejudice to be a weakness of character, we should help those burdened with it the same way we help those afflicted with other psychological and spiritual weaknesses. What’s hate got to do with it?

Being “prejudiced” against others and even hating the other is not a crime, it’s part of the flow of human life. Hating those who hate is hating still. Strong racial prejudices lead some individuals to initiate violent acts against others. Auschwitz and the shootings on the Eastern front are emblematic of the racists. Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are emblematic of the anti-racists. What’s the difference? Hating is a matter of the heart, just as principle and ideals are. At bottom, if you will, they’re all spiritual problems. Those who hate or believe they do, and those who battle against them, are in a struggle with their inner lives, as we all are. Projecting the struggle out into institutions and political movements is what leads to the violence, not the feelings themselves. For myself, the initiation of violence is the overriding issue here.

Every time one of us, on any side of any issue, expresses himself honestly, someone is going to get hurt. A truth spoken with civility is not violent. It’s the frailty of our character that allows truth to hurt us so. We have to grow up about being hurt. With a little luck we’ll get hurt exactly where it will do the most good. No pain no gain. I’ve been annoyed with Weber plenty of times. I’ve learned a lot from him. He’s a self-professed racist. My wife and child are mestizos. Weber admires Hitler, who, whatever else he was, was a horse’s ass. Weber’s my friend. He’s a terrible editor, for me anyhow. He has admirable personal qualities. I like him. I always have. He’s a good guy to have around. I look forward to being in his company. The big difference between Weber and those who condemn him, and myself, is that they all lead lives based on principle and theory. That’s not quite clear to me. I’ll have to think about it.

Paloma and I were discussing World War I last night when she mentioned that it took place in the 18th century. She’s ten years old now, she’s in the fourth grade, so she’s beginning to study world history. I told her World War I happened in the 20th century, and that her grandma was already a teenager when it started. Paloma said I was wrong about this one and that I don’t know everything about everything like I always think I know. I felt obligated somehow to disabuse her of the notion that World War I happened in the 18th century. But she wasn’t having it. Pretty soon it became a test of wills. She was going to have her history her way and I was going to have it mine because I was the adult and she the child and it should be obvious to a ten-year-old that she should not argue such issues with me or anyone like me. She still wasn’t having it. Mrs. Appleby, her fourth-grade teacher, had told her very plainly when World War I happened. I knew damm well Mrs. Appleby hadn’t told Paloma what Paloma was saying she had told her.

Finally it got to be too much for me. I cracked. I don’t remember what the crowning insult was but I told my daughter to shut up about World War I being in the 18th century but she wasn’t having it about shutting up either, she was going straight ahead with the 18th-century gambit, so I grabbed her and slapped her hard on her bottom. She changed her tune then. She started crying. She was willing give it up about when World War I happened or if it had happened at all. Then she really fell apart.

“Come on,” I said. “Come on, Honey. It was only a swat on the bottom. Why are you crying like that?”

“Because when you hit me,” she sobbed, “I’m afraid you’re going to hurt me.”

The pain was like a knife in the heart. It was the simplicity of her statement, without a note of accusation in it. I started to fall apart myself then, but held on. I wanted her to come to me so I could hold her but she turned and went to her bedroom. She’s no longer a baby. Other things mean more to her than being held by her father.

This morning I was at the computer while Alicia made breakfast and when Paloma was ready to leave for school she did not come over to kiss me goodbye and let me kiss her in return but simply said, “Goodbye, Daddy.” There was no hint of malice in her voice. She has never been one to hold a grudge, my daughter. I was still frozen by my behavior of last night. “Goodbye,” I said neutrally. I listened to the front door open and shut and then it was as if I heard thought speak to me:

“Why are you so patient with Nazis and racists when you are so impatient with your daughter?”

There was a moment of quiet, then thought said: “What’s going on there?”

Chapter Fourteen

I’m at the office this afternoon when a man calls from Dallas to chat. He has something on his mind. He’s worried about me. Like me, he doesn’t believe the Jewish holocaust story any more either. He distributes revisionist books and pamphlets, but he plays his cards close to his chest. He doesn’t tell just any guy on the corner what he does. He’s called to warn me about how dangerous it is for me to go on television to talk about Holocaust revisionism. He doesn’t say so, but I get the idea he believes that Jews control the media and that it’s dangerous to provoke them.

“I’m with you,” he says. “I’m with you all the way, but I don’t want to end up in a ditch at the side of the road.”

“The truth is, I don’t either.”

“Then you ought to think about what you’re doing,” he says. “You put your photograph on those leaflets. You even put it on the outside of the envelopes. You go on radio to talk about Holocaust revisionism and now you’re making sounds about going on TV and speaking at colleges. Do you really think they’re going to let you get away with that? I admire what you’re doing, but I worry about you. Don’t take this the wrong way, but sometimes I wonder if you’ve got both hands on the plough.”

After the phone call I put a couple books on the floor for a pillow and lay down for a snooze. The carpet is dusty. I like my siestas but at night they keep me awake. Today when I wake up I go down the three flights of stairs to Hollywood Boulevard and walk the couple blocks up to Cahuenga to where the old Tick Tock Restaurant used to be to see how Gorky’s is coming along.

Almost every afternoon for two months, since the first week in March, after my nap I’ve been walking over to see how Gorky’s is coming. The notice at Gorky’s downtown said that Gorky’s Hollywood would open the first week in March.

There hasn’t been a room anywhere in Hollywood that I’ve wanted to hang out in during the twenty years since I stopped going to Barney’s on Santa Monica. There’s been plenty of rooms I suppose but I’ve gotten too old for them or too poor. Musso’s on Hollywood Boulevard is a terrific room but I haven’t been able to afford Musso’s for about fifteen years.

One afternoon I was looking through Gorky’s window when I remembered the old Clifton’s cafeteria downtown and how at Clifton’s in the 1930s and 40s there was a special room in the basement where bums and the down-and-outers could eat for free. Sometimes at night at Gorky’s downtown you can see bums sitting at tables alongside artists and regular people listening to the music watching the goings-on. The Gorky bums are mostly drunks and they like having the chance to sit with regular folk in a place close to the sidewalks that a lot of them sleep on. The bums sit very quiet and stiff so they won’t be thrown out but the last couple times I was down there at night I didn’t see the bums in there anymore so it didn’t do them any good to be so polite. What those bums are going to have to do to become regulars at Gorky’s downtown is get jobs and a place to clean themselves up. They won’t have to stop the drinking.

Gorky’s is getting close but it’s still not ready. I look through the windows for a while at the guys working, then turn around and head for the Cahuenga newsstand. Alongside the Security Pacific Bank a couple drunks try to panhandle me. I don’t have any money with me or I’d give them some because they look terrible. They say they’re Vietnam vets. They could be. They’re very polite. I usually keep a little money on me for the bums but I try not to give to more than three in one day because it adds up. It can add up to seventy, eighty dollars a month. I also distinguish between the bums who look all right and those who are filthy and look hopeless and maybe even look like they’re killing themselves. If they aren’t dying I don’t give them anything. That’s my discipline. Just giving to the ones killing themselves keeps me busy.

One of the bums is barefoot and has a blanket wrapped around him in place of a shirt. He asks me twice to help him, which is unusual. Bum etiquette is that they ask you only once, then let it slide. When he asks me the second time he starts getting weepy. He says he needs something to eat. The other bum pulls on the weepy bum’s blanket and mumbles something. I still don’t have any money but I have two tangerines in my jacket pocket that I am going to eat if I walk too far and get tired along the way.

My impulse is to give the vet the tangerines but I hesitate. I feel uncomfortable. He isn’t going to believe me about the money, and there’s a chance he’ll feel too ashamed to accept the fruit out on the street like this. It isn’t a line of reasoning I want to try to defend, but that’s the problem thought’s wrestling with while we stand here on the sidewalk looking at each other. I can’t decide what to do so I walk off with the tangerines still in my pocket.

It’s my experience that thought nearly always puts sensibility before action. Sensibility can be unusually vulgar when it’s only thought thinking against itself. Something, someone, is being protected in there at the expense of someone or something else. Thought goes over that while I cross the Boulevard then returns to chatting itself up again about Gorky’s Hollywood, asking itself if Gorky’s going to make a little food available to the Hollywood bums. Thought doubts it. There are places in Hollywood where bums can get something to eat free but the places I know about are all run by Christians.

This afternoon after my nap I walk over to Gorky’s thinking this might be the day. Yesterday it looked wonderful inside with 18-foot high ceilings and all the space in the world. Today the booths and tables and chairs are all set up and behind the bar the glasses are hanging from their racks. Today there’s a paper sign in the window that says OPEN. This is what I’ve been waiting for.

I go in and buy a beer and stand at one of the freestanding counters near the bar. There are already about 50 others in the room but there’s space for a couple hundred more so everyone still has his own air to breathe. I’m content. I have a place to be and here I am.

I usually carry something to read with me in case I stop someplace to loaf but want to feel I’m not losing time, which is one of my big anxieties because over the years I’ve lost so much of it. It’s odd to be aware of that and at the same time to know that if you had to do it over again you wouldn’t change very much. Maybe time isn’t as valuable as we like to believe it is.

On this fine afternoon in April at Gorky’s Hollywood I have with me a recent issue of The Journal of Historical Review. The lead article is Mark Weber’s translation of Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States. I’ve never been a Hitler buff, unlike so many other revisionists, but I’ve been aware for a long time that translations of Hitler’s speeches aren’t lying around in your ordinary bookstores and libraries. As a matter of fact, I’ve never seen one. Weber prefaces his translation by noting that this is the first time that the full text of Hitler’s declaration of war has been made available in English.

In the address Hitler recounts how he saw, from his point of view, the German invasions of Poland, France and the Soviet Union. He uses a direct masculine prose and there’s a sense of connection between himself and the Reichstag. From his perspective Hitler reviews the course of the war and the increasingly hostile Roosevelt policies toward Germany up to that moment. It all sounds perfectly reasonable and logical. He’s a politico blowing smoke. Then he announces that Germany is going to join with Japan in the war against the United States. Along the way he has attacked his Jews of course for their “satanic baseness,” but this was in 1941 and you could still get away with that.

The British and the French still had their wogs then while the Americans had their niggers and spics and had just rediscovered their yellow-bellies. I was never so outraged over the bigotry of the Germans as I was always told I ought to be. Now that the French and British have been removed from the Middle East our Jewish friends over there have discovered to their delight that they have those wogs pretty much to themselves, bought and paid for by ourselves. What goes around comes around. Hitler talked about something that day-it was 11 December 1941, a Thursday afternoon-that I didn’t expect. A couple thousand words into the speech he pauses, then says:

First of all, the personal side of things: I understand very well that there is a world of difference between my own outlook on life and attitude, and that of President Roosevelt. Roosevelt came from an extremely wealthy family. By birth and origin he belonged to that class of people which is privileged in a democracy and assured of advancement. I myself was only the child of a small and poor family, and I had to struggle through life by work and effort in spite of immense hardships.

I’m surprised that Hitler would speak on such an occasion about the personal side of things from a class-conscious perspective. He notes that Roosevelt experienced World War I as assistant secretary of the navy, a position he received as a member of “the privileged class,” and as a result Roosevelt

… only knew the agreeable consequences of a conflict between nations from which some profited while others lost their lives. During the same period, I lived very differently. I was not one of those who made history or profits, but rather one of those who carried out orders. As an ordinary soldier during those four years I tried to do my duty in the face of the enemy. Of course, I returned from the war just as poor as when I entered in the fall of 1914. I thus shared my fate with millions of others, while Mr. Roosevelt shared his with the so-called upper “ten thousand.”

Hitler then recounts how after the war Roosevelt “tested his skills” in financial speculation while Hitler lay in a German hospital with “hundreds of thousands of others.” Roosevelt, financially secure and “enjoying the patronage of his class,” decided to go into politics while Hitler “struggled as a nameless and unknown man for the rebirth of my nation…”

Two different paths of life! Franklin Roosevelt took power in the United States as the candidate of a thoroughly capitalistic party, which helps those who serve it. When I became the Chancellor of the German Reich, I was the leader of a popular national movement, which I had created myself. The powers which supported Mr. Roosevelt were the same powers that I fought against out of deepest inner conviction…

That is, that “parasitical expression of humanity,” the Jews. Yet, Hitler notes, he and Roosevelt had something in common as well. Each took control of a nation in 1933 that was on the edge of ruin-”thanks to democracy.” He then outlines how in five years, under his leadership, Germany experienced enormous improvement in “social, economic, cultural and artistic life” while during the same years “Roosevelt enormously increased his country’s national debt, devalued the dollar, further disrupted the economy and maintained the same number of unemployed.”

I didn’t know that Hitler had looked at his life in such a dramatic way. He saw himself and Roosevelt as players together on a gigantic stage in a theater of murder and ruin. It wasn’t Shakespeare but it was Shakespearean, in the worst sense. Until that hour he had been a more formidable man than Roosevelt, dominating every scene in the great drama Europe had become. Now the moment had come to begin building to the final terrible climax. Hitler looked forward to the orgy as much as Roosevelt did. Hitler understood Roosevelt but, fatally, he didn’t understand America.

Roosevelt didn’t understand Hitler but he understood the American government. He understood that war makes it cook like nothing else. Here in Gorky’s this afternoon, Hitler became a little more real for me,

Gorky’s brews its own beer. It’s sweet, the way I like it. The way I like most everything. I’ve been thinking that if I come to Gorky’s regularly I’ll meet a new circle of friends. I lost a lot of the old ones when Jenny and I split up, and when I discovered the Jewish holocaust scam I lost the rest. I figure I’ll even meet some of the people I used to talk to at Barney’s in the 60s and 70s.

Tonight after half a dozen beers I meet a very well put-together blonde who shows me where a Mexican kicked her in the jaw when she discovered him robbing her apartment.

“I should have kicked him in the balls the minute I saw him,” she says. “But I hesitated a split second and he nailed me first. I don’t know why I hesitated. That’s not my style. I like to give ‘em my best shot first, then ask for an explanation.”

“Maybe you’ll get another chance,” I say.

“You’re Goodman right I will. The little spick lives around here someplace. I’ve seen him on the street. The next time I see him I’ll kick him in the nuts first and talk it over with him afterwards. I haven’t studied martial arts all my adult life to let some sleaze ball Mexican rob my apartment, kick me in the face and get away with it.”

A group is playing jazz now for all they’re worth. A couple hundred people are in here. The place is jumping. We do some straight-ahead beer drinking and I fall into conversation with the blonde’s boyfriend. He’s in construction and is the kind of guy you like right away. He thinks I’m putting him on when I tell him my wife’s a Mexican. Pretty soon we’re talking about spiritual experiences and he says his most transcendent spiritual experience happened on night when he had sex in a hot tub with his old lady and with her daughter at the same time. He says it was like nothing else he ever experienced. I ridicule him a little for thinking he can have a spiritual experience that way but I’m a little envious too. I don’t let on, but I’m pretty envious.

People are eating ad drinking and the band is knocking us over and our ears are ringing and the beer’s running and we’re shouting happily and laughing and it’s the kind of night I used to have every night but never have anyone more because I have no circle and no money but I do have a wife and a sick mother and two children and no money and I’m sixty years old, too old to keep having this kind of night, but now that I’ve got one I remember very clearly how much I used to like them and how I knew how to have them back then even when I had no money at all, I think. What’s gone wrong with me?

Nicely drunk I make my way across the floor toward the men’s room when I overhear a woman even older than me and caked with make-up shouting to the little old guy she’s with. “Morrie,” she’s shouting, “Isn’t this nice? It’s like a people’s nightclub.” Morrie’s looking a little stupefied. Gorky’s isn’t like any cafeteria he’s ever seen before.

But that’s it, I think, winding my way to the urinals-a Peoples Nightclub. No one on the right could have put together a cafeteria nightclub for the people. They don’t have it in them. Not in America. Maybe Gorky’s Hollywood is a gesture of atonement from Gorky himself, sent up from the world below where all the old Stalinist collaborators are burning and baking in the Devil’s kitchen. I hope it is. Gorky doesn’t have very many ways left to apologize to us. Maybe Gorky’s Hollywood represents, at last, Gorky’s move in the right direction.

I wonder if there is even one among us who doesn’t want to experience transcendence, whatever it is? The sadhus warn against this desire but most of the evidence suggests that most of the sadhus want it too. Hitler must have felt that he had such experiences during the tremendous organizing struggles he went through. It appears that he was oftentimes overwhelmed by emotion. He seems to have daydreamed of institutionalizing his own desire for transcendence through his conquests in the name of the State. Toward the end of the speech that preceded his declaration f war on the U.S. he said:

When I decided 23 years ago to enter political life in order to lead the nation up from ruin, I was a nameless, unknown soldier…. The way from a small movement of seven men to the taking of power on 30 January 1933 as the responsible government is so miraculous that only the blessing of Providence could have made it possible. Today I stand at the head of the mightiest army in the world … Behind and around me is a sacred community-the Party, with which I have become great and which has become great through me.

So Hitler chose to lead a chosen people rather than speak for all of us. Is there an irony there? His hatred for Jews goes against every expression of transcendence that convinces me. Without trying to diminish his great abilities, some of which he shared with Stalin, there is something dirty about the man. And what is most soiled about him is not profound. It plays all around the surface. It’s merely neurotic. Neurosis magnified by strong character magnified tremendously by the terrible meeting of some of the worst men possible at the worst possible time.

It’s late evening and I’m at Ralph’s market on Sunset Boulevard in the checkout line trying to keep Paloma from grabbing the candy bars. She’s turned three now and chatters away in two languages. We’re horsing around when she glances behind me and says: “Look Daddy. Santa Claus.” When I turn I see an elderly man with a gay beard spread out raggedly over his chest. As a kind of apology I say: “First time you ever heard that one, eh”

He laughs with an unusual sweetness, pursing his lips a little, and says: “Why, yes. It is.”

I’m immediately drawn to the man. If he weren’t so old, approaching 70 maybe, I’d take him for Ram Dass. Then I realize that Ram Dass must be about ten years older then me, which would make him about 70. I look back at the old geezer again. He is certainly Ram Dass. He’s very thin and his skin is yellowish. He doesn’t look well. He’s dressed in khaki pants, a sport shirt open at the throat, and he’s wearing worn sandals. He’s counting out change into one hand with the other like he might not have enough money to pay for the tomatoes and carrots he’s buying. I want to say something to him but suddenly I’m tongue-tied. I’m like a teenager before her favorite movie star. Wanting to ask for a photograph but too shy to do it.

I went someplace to hear Ram Dass talk once, maybe fifteen years ago. Maybe downtown at the old Embassy Theater on 9th street. He’d been a picture of ruddy good health then, his bald dome shinny and strong. He was younger then than I am now. Jenny and Saul and Betty and me had all gone together. Ram Dass had been full of good cheer, good stories and good thinking. He liked to suggest that some Hindu holy men can do magic but I overlooked that in my appreciation of his wonderful presence. I remember particularly how he had talked so tenderly about working with the dying and how he wouldn’t take any shit from them.

If there’s one thing nobody can kid me about any longer it’s the role that desire plays in the great tragedies of human life. The Hitlers talk of greatness while the holy men talk about right relationship. The Hitlers speak of leading powerful armies while the holy men talk of neither leading nor following. Our Hitlers speak of Party and Providence while the best among us speak of no-party and no-providence. If we were given the opportunity to have for our friend one of our Hitlers or one of our holy men how many of us would choose a Hitler? More than I would want to count I suppose. Before Ram Dass was Ram Dass he was Richard Alpert, a parasitical expression of humanity. He’s the one I would choose. I wish he were with me now, sitting on the sofa drinking beer and watching television. I’ve never wanted to associate with the great ones. You have to make too many excuses for them.

This afternoon I set the alarm, lie down with my face on the two books and take a snooze. When the alarm rings I get up and walk around to Gorky’s to drink coffee and read the papers about the Islamic revolution in Iran. I’m reading and drinking the coffee and after awhile I notice that I’m seeing an image of myself in an amphitheater, maybe someplace in ancient Persia. I’m wrapped around in a blanket and under it I’m naked. I watch myself walking along. Someone is at my side. I’m unsure if it’s a man or a woman. It doesn’t matter. A crowd is beginning to form behind us. Yes, it’s following us. As we walk however we out pace the others and I begin to feel disassociated from them. Then I see that I’m alone. Then I’m at a station about to board a train and I realize I’ve forgotten my weapon.

The scene stops moving. I’m there at the station, I’m waiting, and I’ve forgotten my weapon. Than I don’t see it any more and I see the inside of Gorky’s again. There’s a moment of distraction, then thought begins to chatter in its usual way. And I’m ware for the first time ever that my weapon is the writing. For years I’ve watched myself use guns and even my fists as weapons. It’s exciting and interesting to realize that that’s changing at last. It’s exhilarating. A hot energy surges up through the body from some very deep place. For a moment it’s electrifying. Then it subsides and I don’t feel anything except that I feel very alert. The body is very relaxed and alert and although I can’t hear it a voice is speaking to me, saying that that isn’t how I want to use the writing. I don’t want to use it as a weapon. Thought is saying that the writing is for something entirely different.

Chapter Fifteen

When the trial of John Demjanjuk opened in Jerusalem the State brought in Yitshak Irad, director of Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum, to describe for the court how Treblinka had been organized and run. Yad Vashem is the acknowledged brains, heart and soul of the internationally based Holocaust industry. Demjanjuk was accused of being the man known by some Treblinka internees as Ivan the Terrible. Ivan is supposed to be the man who operated the gas chamber machinery at Treblinka where about a million Jews were allegedly gassed.

As there are no documents relevant to “gas chambers” known to exist anywhere in the world from Treblinka, or anywhere else for that matter, the case against Demjanjuk was prosecuted primarily with eyewitness testimony. While it’s claimed that about a million Jews were murdered at Treblinka, a few dozen internees escaped during the tremendous uprising that took place there one afternoon in August 1943, during which it has been estimated that perhaps one German was killed during the fierce fighting that took place. Yankiel Wiernik was one of those who escaped. It’s primarily the testimony taken from these escapees that form the foundation of the story that Treblinka was a German “extermination” camp for Jews.

When Yitshak Arad provided the Jerusalem court with the official history of Treblinka during the first week of the Demjanjuk trial, he relied on the eyewitness testimony of Yankiel Wiernik more than any other. Wiernik was a Polish Jew, a carpenter by trade, who was interned at Treblinka in 1942 and escaped during the great August 1943 uprising. At that time he returned to Warsaw where he was able to make immediate contact with the underground. Put up in a safe house he wrote an autobiographical essay allegedly describing his experiences at Treblinka, two thousand copies of which were published in Polish for local distribution. In 1944 the essay was published in English in-Brooklyn, New York! So we are not dealing here with esoteric material that has been unavailable to American scholars. Today, Wiernik’s essay is available in an anthology published by ex-internees in New York City titled Death Camp Treblinka.

If there are no documents about gassing chambers known to exist anywhere in the world from Treblinka, and I am asked to believe the testimony of a man who claims that he witnessed a mass-murder factory operating in the camp, I want to consider carefully what the man tells me. I don’t want to be a credulous ninny. Jews are only half the Treblinka story. Germans and Ukrainians are the other half and a terrible accusation is being leveled against them. On balance, Jews are no more valuable as persons than Germans and Ukrainians, and they’re no more truthful either. I want to know a little something about this Yankiel Wiernik before I believe his story, which is a long litany of accusations against others. I don’t want to buy a pig in a poke. Can any of his statements of fact be questioned? If some can be, are they primary to his story or peripheral to it? I want to know something about the man’s character. On balance, does he appear to be truthful, reasonable, psychologically sound and so on? Does he appear to be otherwise?

With respect to Mr. Wiernik’s character, we have his own introduction to it from the first page of his remarkable autobiographical essay.

I sacrificed all those nearest and dearest to me. I myself took them to the execution site. I built their death chambers for them … I led millions of human beings to their doom.

That’s clear enough. Wiernik claims he acted the part of the Judas goat at Treblinka, leading Jews to the place where they were to be slaughtered, including, one concludes, his family and his friends. He collaborated with the SS in the construction of the poison-gas chambers. When he writes that he led millions of Jews to their doom he is speaking of tens of thousands of Jewish babies with their mothers and fathers, their grandmothers and grandfathers, their brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins. Everybody! Entire communities of Jews erased from the face of the earth, according to our eyewitness survivor.

I have a natural inclination toward disbelieving Yankeil Wiernik on this score. I don’t believe the Germans did what Wiernik claims they did. I don’t believe Jews behaved the way he claims they behaved. And I don’t believe that Yankiel really was the inexplicable slug of a human being that he makes himself out to be. I doubt that anyone ever has been. At the same time, historians and professional Holocaust lobbyists have accepted his testimony at face value. Who am I? I don’t know of a single published paper containing reservations about this-let’s say it-Nazi collaborator. It falls to me then to do a little imaginative work here for our historians. Break the ice for them, you might say. Nothing extravagant. I’ll simply quote Wiernik’s own words in context and, as I am not a professional Holocaust historian, look them over from the perspective of a human being. Here then is the story of a true Holocaust survivor hero.

In Warsaw, on 23 August 1942, the Germans loaded Yankiel Wiernik onto a train with thousands of others bound for the east. The next afternoon the train pulled into Treblinka. There Wiernik found

… the camp yard was littered with corpses, some still in their clothes and others stark naked, their faces distorted with terror, black and swollen, the eyes wide open, with tongues protruding, skulls crushed, bodies mangled. And blood everywhere-the blood of innocent people, the blood of our children, of our brothers and sisters, and fathers and mothers.

Helpless, we intuitively felt that we would not be able to escape our destiny and would also become victims of our executioners. But what could be done about it…?

That’s is, Wiernik disembarked from his train into a living hell and, with a passivity that appears to pass all understanding, decided to settle in as quickly as he could and make the best of things. He, together with other Jews who were assigned the task, passed that first afternoon carrying the mangled and bloody corpses of their children, brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers to ditches where they were being burned. The only break in this labor occurred during the half hour or so when, in a different part of the yard, the Germans machine-gunned four hundred Jews into oblivion. While this was going on Wiernik and his fellow work Jews, as they are called in the literature, stood to one side with their hands in the pockets listening to the “screaming” and “moaning.” At the end of the work day Wiernik and the other patient and forbearing Jews allowed themselves to be driven with whips and rifle butts into a barrack that was dark and “had no floors.”

The next morning Wiernik was wakened at daybreak and assigned to “handle the corpses” again. Work Jews in teams of two were to drag Jewish cadavers “approximately 300 yards” to the ditches where they were burned. A German or Ukrainian armed with guns and whips hovered over each work team, hitting the work Jews “over the head” as they pulled the corpses along.

“The corpses had been lying around for quite some time and decomposition had already set in, making the air foul with the stench of decay. Already worms were crawling all over the bodies. It often happened that an arm or a leg fell off…

Thus we worked from dawn to sunset, without food or water… under these appalling conditions. “

Appalling conditions indeed! Nevertheless, Wiernik and the great majority of the other work Jews were able to adjust. Wiernik describes how quickly he was able to fall into the camp routine.

On August 29 there was the usual reveille… Second Lieutenant Franz Kurt delivered a speech in which he said that from now on everybody was going to be put to work at his own occupation.

The first to be called were specialists in the building trades; I reported as a master construction worker…

So here it is that Wiernik, after passing what admittedly was a laborious and unpleasant first week at Treblinka, was able to improve his position considerably. And here it is that Wiernik began his long and successful collaboration with the SS in the destruction of European Jewry.

Our group of workers grew… the foundations were dug for some sort of building. No one knew what kind of building this would be. There was in the courtyard some wooden buildings surrounded by a tall fence. The function of this building was secret. A few days later a German architect arrived with an assistant and the construction work got under way. Fate spared me nothing. A few days later I learned the purpose of the building behind the fence, and the discovery left me shuddering with terror.

What is intended to be understood here is that the building behind the fence contained a “gas chamber.” The foundations that the work-Jews built “for some sort of building” were foundations for additional gas chambers. This is what Wiernik referred to early on when he wrote that he himself had built the death chambers in which millions of Jews were exterminated, among them his nearest and dearest. In 1963, after a spectacular kidnapping and trial, Adolf Eichmann (German) was hanged in Israel for allegedly having transported Jews to camps such as Treblinka. Eichmann’s defense was that he knew nothing about exterminations in such camps and, in any case, he had been following orders. He was hanged in Jerusalem.

Yankeil Wiernik (Jew) claims that he knew everything about the exterminations at Treblinka and moreover that he helped build the chambers in which they took place. His defense was that he followed orders. Wiernik survived Treblinka and the war and lived out the remaining 30 years of his survivor life in Israel as an honored citizen. In university English classes the professors call this sort of thing irony and it’s much admired.

Once Wiernik and his Jewish work crew completed building the gas chambers for the SS, it wasn’t long before he was able to observe the fruit of his labors.

The day I first saw men, women and children being led into the house of death I almost went insane. I tore at my hair and shed bitter tears of despair… Many of us saw our children, wives and other loved ones among the victims…

I can understand his being upset. The sight of hundreds, maybe thousands of naked Jews being herded to the gas chambers. Naked parents carrying their naked children. Ukrainian brutes beating them with pipes and slashing them with sabers. Dogs biting and tearing at them until these unfortunates begin to rush through the gas chamber doors on their own, as Wiernik has it, the stronger shoving the weaker ahead of them, anxious to die quickly in the human slaughterhouses. And all the while Wiernik and his pals standing by, tearing their hair and bawling. Twenty-five minutes later the extermination is over and the work Jews are dragging their brethren from the death chambers and carrying them to the cremation ditches.

We could have refused, but that would have meant a whipping or death … so we obeyed without grumbling.

I’m staggered when I read of the capacity of the Treblinka killing factory. Ten to twelve exterminations in one day in a dozen or so 16×16 foot gas chambers. Terrible, but remarkable too. Who could have pulled off such a feat but the Germans-the most technologically developed society on the planet, at that time. Secretly, I have to admire them a little. Who were the research scientists who were able to develop such a murderous gassing agent? Where were their secret laboratories located? How did all that perverted high scientific technology really work? Yankiel has that information for us.

A motor taken from a dismantled Soviet tank stood in the power plant. This motor was used to pump the gas into chambers by connecting the motor with the inflow pipes. The speed with which death overcame the helpless victims depended on the quantity of combustion gas admitted into the gas chamber at one time.

Simpler than I would have thought, really. But then I suppose genius oftentimes expresses itself simply.

How were the personal chosen and trained who operated this fearful abattoir of death?

The machinery of the gas chambers was operated by two Ukrainians. One of them, Ivan … enjoyed torturing his victims. He would often pounce upon us while we were working; he would nail our ears to the walls or make us …

Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Do I have this right? Nailed our ears to the walls? To what walls? The walls of the “wooden” gas chamber inside the fence? What a wonderful image. I can see it now.

Hundreds of naked Jews, maybe thousands, are being driven to the gas chambers with whips and clubs. They are beginning to reflect seriously on the injustice of how they are being treated. Some of them are growing annoyed. It’s beginning to cross the minds of a select few that they are not going to take it anymore, that maybe they ought to turn on their captors who, after all, are not very numerous, and beat the shit out of them. At that decisive moment, however, they come upon the sight of six or eight master construction workers nailed by their ears to the outside of a gas chamber wall, pinned up there like so many homely butterflies. The naked Jews can’t believe their eyes. Two or three of the master construction workers, following orders to the last, still have hammers and saws clutched in their gnarly hands. The hundreds-or thousands-of Jews who, a moment before-(maybe)-had been on the point of resisting their extermination and that of their wives and children, suffer a moment of distraction at this grotesque vision and before they can recover it’s all over for them. They’re inside the infernal Treblinka death chambers.

How often did Yankeil Wiernik find himself nailed up to the wall of a gas chamber by one of his ears? “Often,” if we’re to take his word for it. It’s important that we believe him about this story, because if we don’t it might tempt some of us to have reservations about a couple of the other stories he tells about the Treblinka death camp. Who knows what that would lead to?

Nevertheless, a serious question presents itself. When the back doors to the gas chambers were opened, Yankeil could see the exterminated Jews inside, still standing up. There wasn’t enough room for them to fall over, you see, so they continued to stand there and “just leaned against each other.” Do you wonder why the knees of these exterminated folk didn’t buckle a little? That’s a perfectly a good question but it isn’t the serious one. The serious question refers to a second aspect of Wiernik’s eyewitness account where he claims that these standing-up cadavers were “all yellow from the gas.” The second serious question is this one: What do the toxicology manuals say about the color of folk who die by carbon monoxide poisoning?

According to Merck & Company’s Treatment of War Injuries for example, (2nd revised ed., 1942, p56) death by carbon monoxide poisoning may result in the skin assuming a “cherry red color.”

It’s either Merck and Company then, or Yankiel Wiernik. Let’s admit it. It looks like Wiernik is a little something here. Is it going to be claimed 45 years after the fact that the man was color blind? The evidence is mounting that Wiernik is no great pillar of truth. I suppose he wanted to be a big shot eyewitness testifier against Germans, took a flyer at what a gassee might look like who was pumped full of carbon monoxide, and guessed wrong. I can forgive Jews for telling such stories about Germans, but what can I say about academics who repeat such testimony to their students without examining it?

While Wiernik and his fellow work-Jews labored to finish ten new gas chambers in camp II for the homicidal, Jew-hating SS, transports were arriving daily to be gassed in the three original chambers. These newly arrived Jews were stripped of their clothes and marched naked to the original gas chambers to be exterminated, passing the work Jews working along the way.

Many of us saw our children, wives and other loved ones among the victims.

No protest from the designated gassees. No warnings from the work-Jews who watched them pass.

No rage. No desperate attempt to fight, to escape, to kill those who were about to kill them. Occasionally, with an “impulse of grief,” a man would rush to his loved ones to embrace them but he would be killed on the spot.

It was under these conditions that we constructed the death chambers for our brethren and ourselves.

According to his own account, that was Wiernik’s routine for five weeks. Then he was transferred back to Camp number One where he was ordered to set up a barbershop and perform other services for the Jew-murdering SS, who needed their little comforts. Transports of Jews bound for extermination continued to arrive, carrying perhaps a thousand to five or six thousand Jews on each train.

“The children cried, while the grownups moaned and screamed.” When winter came naked children would stand in the open for hours on end waiting to be gassed. Their feet would freeze to the icy ground, which made them cry. Some froze to death. Germans and Ukrainians walked up and down the ranks of designated gasees beating and kicking them. A German named Sepp

… would frequently snatch a child from (his mother’s) arms and either tear the child in half or grab it by the legs, smash its head against a wall and throw the body away … scenes of this kind occurred all the time.

It’s important to picture the scene here. There’s the receiving yard in Camp One with maybe two or three hundred work-Jews being supervised by a dozen or so Germans and maybe fifty or sixty Ukrainians. A transport of maybe four or five thousand Jews is disgorged into the yard. Try to visualize the confusion and craziness. The Germans and Ukrainians are shoving and shouting orders while they beat and whip the Jews. The Jews are moaning and screaming. Now the “vile and savage” Sepp is walking up and down the ranks of those thousands of Jews snatching babies from their mother’s arms and tearing them in half or smashing out their little brains against a wall. Can you see it? How the Jewish mothers resist the urge to fight savagely for their babies? Can you visualize it-how maybe a thousand adult male Jews look on while their sons and daughters, their nephews and nieces are being brained and torn in half? Terrific scene, isn’t it? Sepp may be a vile and savage beast, but where are the words that can be used to describe these Wiernik Jews who are mothers and fathers and look on passively while a beast murders their babies? Where are the words?

The number of transports grew daily, and there were periods when as many as 30,000 people were gassed in one day.

Not bad, considering that the sole agent of death was the exhaust fumes of a single diesel engine removed from a Soviet tank. Looks like about 1,250 gasees each hour. The little engine that could. If we take time out for removing the cadavers after each gassing and cleaning the place up a bit we might have a figure of about 1,250 exterminated Jews each 40 minutes. Remarkable! Particularly when it’s noted that the carbon monoxide produced by a diesel engine is about fifteen percent of that produced by an engine using regular gasoline. How did Yankiel Wiernik ever come to dream up this baloney? Mexicans have an expression for men who are willing to talk like this. They say a man such as Wiernik has the balls of an ox.

Wiernik has returned to Camp Two, the “death” camp, where he performs repair work in the kitchen. A carpentry shop is built, its foreman a “baker” from Warsaw. Now Wiernik’s primary job as a carpenter is to make stretchers for carrying the cadavers from the gas chambers to the mass graves. The stretchers are nothing fancy, “just two poles with pieces of board nailed at intervals.” Just what your state-of-the-art death factory would use, wouldn’t you say, to transport 10,000 or 12,000 or maybe even 30,000 corpses a day 300 yards from the gas chambers to the burial pits?

If one work-Jew could make the 300-yard trip from the gas chamber to the burial pit three times an hour, and each time he was able to load his stretcher-sled with two cadavers, and he worked twenty hours a day without taking time out for dinner or a smoke break, which appears to be about an average work day for these hapless but superhuman work-Jews, he would be able to transport about 120 cadavers during each work day. To get 12,000 cadavers from the gas chambers to the burial pit then would take about 100 superhuman Jews dragging like crazy back and forth between the gas chambers and the pit. On those days when “30,000” Jews were gassed it must have been a real whirlwind of activity.

When Wiernik had laid in enough stretchers to assure the SS that the extermination of the Jews could go forward without any glitches, and after he finished working on the SS kitchen, he went on to build a laundry for the SS, a laboratory and accommodations for 15 women. If you’re going to collaborate with the bastards you might as well go all the way.

I selected my crew and began to work. I brought in some of the new lumber from the woods myself. Time flew fast on the job.

I’ll bet it did. Time always flies when you’ve found a place in the whirlwind to save your own ass. Meanwhile, as Wiernik works in the woods between the two camps dressing lumber in nice warm work clothes:

The procession of nude children, men and old people passed that spot in a silent caravan of death… Now and then a child would whimper but then some killer’s fingers would grasp the thin neck in a vise-like grip, cutting off the last plaintive sobs. The victims walked to their doom with raised arms, stark naked and helpless.

In an event that no historian has been able to trace, Himmler now arrives at Treblinka and orders the previously exterminated one-half million Jews be dug up and cremated. It’s about then that things go from bad to worse. A typhus epidemic breaks out, but even more seriously it’s discovered that it isn’t so easy to burn the corpses of the guys who have been offed.

… the male corpses simply would not burn.

The work-Jews of Treblinka were problem solvers, however, if nothing else.

It turned out that bodies of women burned more easily than those of men. Accordingly, the bodies of women were used for kindling the fires.

And I’d always thought dead broads were completely useless. But leave it to the Treblinka work-Jews. They’ll figure it out for you. But these unusual Jewish lady corpses displayed yet another rare talent.

It was a terrifying sight, the most gruesome ever beheld by human eyes. When corpses of pregnant women were cremated, their bellies would burst open. The fetus would be exposed and could be seen burning inside the mother’s womb.

I go back and forth on this one. One moment I admire the creative force behind this sado-masochistic imagery. The next I see it as an expression of hard-core Jewish chauvinism. The British and the Americans incinerated tens of thousands of pregnant German and Japanese women in mass terror bombings and I don’t know of a single report that claims that those non-Jewish ladies were able to create such a spectacle with their own fetuses. But then, if we don’t love and admire ourselves, who will love and admire us?

Wiernik tells s that the work-Jews were well along with excavating half a million cadavers from the burial pits and burning them for the Jew-hating SS when a new problem surfaced. Soviet over flights.

Whenever an airplane was sighted overhead, all work stopped, [and] the corpses were covered with foliage as camouflage against aerial observation.

Here’s the picture: once a work Jew, busy destroying the evidence for the extermination half a million of his compadres, eyeballed an airplane coming in the direction of the Treblinka death camp, he would shout out a warning. The work Jews of course didn’t want to be discovered down there below and run the risk of being liberated by the commies. So they’d drop their shovels and start covering up the 3,000 to 4,000, and later when things were really cooking more than 12,000 cadavers, with foliage that was kept nearby. This had to be completed between the time the airplane was sighted barreling toward them at 300 or so miles per hour and before the aviator happened to glance down. Can you imagine how desperately the work-Jews had to hustle to pull off a caper like that one? Little wonder that after the war they had such bitter complaints about how hard the SS had worked them.

Maybe you’re wondering why the perversely clever SS chose to cover up thousands of gasoline-soaked male corpses, together with all those quick-burning kindling women, with foliage (brush?) in order to hide their cremation from Soviet aviators? Maybe you’re wondering if there wouldn’t be some telltale signs of smoke from such a pyre that might alert even the most vodka-soused Soviet flyer. Wiernik has already described the scene of 12,000 corpses burning at one time as

…a huge inferno, which from the distance looked like a volcano breaking through the earth’s crust to belch forth fire and lava.

Nevertheless the SS, who we believe was still more or less running things at Treblinka, although with work Jews like Yankiel Wiernik maybe the SS didn’t have all that much to do, figured that the very best material to top off a fiery volcano would be “foliage.” And all in a matter of minutes.

While work-Jews are “overwhelmed with horror and pain” at viewing these infernal cremations, Germans react differently. They stand

… near the ashes, shaking with satanic laughter. Their faces radiant with a cruel satanic satisfaction, they toasted the scene with brandy and with the choicest liqueurs, ate, caroused and had a great time … (While the work-Jews suffered)… the hearts of the … (German) … fiends were filled with pride and pleasure… The sergeant who had created this inferno sat by the fire, laughing, caressing it with his eyes and saying `tadellos (perfect)!”

While these work-Jews are feeling overwhelmed with horror and pain at what they are collaborating with, their instinctual drive to came out on top, as it were, never leaves them.

Since cremation was hard work, rivalry set in between the labor details as to which of them would be able to cremate the largest number of bodies. Bulletin boards were rigged up and daily scores were recorded. Horror and pain are all right in their place, but with half a million stiffs to burn, might as well make game of it.

Camp discipline became stricter. In Camp Two-the death camp-a guard station was built and a telephone installed. If you ask me, with half a million already dead, it was about time to build a guard station. I don’t know about the telephone. That appears a little excessive.

An SS officer approached Wiernik to ask his advice on building a four-story observation tower. This was to make it easier to keep an eye on those slippery work Jews and the tens of thousands gassees as they arrived. We wouldn’t want any to escape, would we? The observation tower would also help the SS to watch out for those avenging Jewish partisan bands in the nearby woods that, in the event, never thought to attack the Treblinka death camp. The SS officer was very happy when Wiernik gave him

… all the required information and he rewarded me with some bread and sausage… I knew that my life would be spared for a few weeks longer because as long as they needed me, they would not kill me.

And what did they need him for? We don’t want to lose sight of that. To help the SS exterminate a million or so Jews. When Wiernik completed the first tower he writes that the SS praised him “extravagantly” and asked him to build three more of the same around Camp Two, the death camp. What the hell, why not?

By April 1943 another typhus epidemic was raging in Camp One. Transports began to arrive from Warsaw. These Jews were treated with exceptional cruelty, unlike those who came before I suppose.

While one batch of women and children were being killed, others were left standing around, waiting their turn. Time and time again children were snatched from their mothers’ arms and tossed into the flames alive.” (Their tormentors laughed) urging the mothers to be brave and jump into the fire after their children …

At the same time, because many of the tens of thousands of Jews who were being exterminated had brought food with them, happily, “the food in our camp improved.” A shower is built for the work-Jews, clean linen is issued to them once a week, and a laundry is built in which female work-Jews labor. It’s at this time that Wiernik and a handful of the most courageous work-Jews decide that when spring arrives they will make a break for it. So far they have collaborated with the SS in exterminating about 600,000 of their nearest and dearest and they’re getting fed up with the routine.

Wiernik catches a cold, which develops into pneumonia. The policy at Treblinka is to kill anyone who is not in perfect physical condition. A black eye, a scratch on the face, a dizzy spell and it’s a bullet in the neck, no appeals allowed. Wiernik however, being invaluable as perhaps the only master construction worker in that part of Eastern Europe, is attended to daily in his sick bed by a Jewish physician who gives him “medicine and comfort.” His German superior, Loeffler, brings him white bread, butter and cream. When Loeffler confiscates food from smugglers he shares it with Wiernik.

… despite the incredible hardships under which I lived, I recovered. I went back to work to finish the construction of the observation towers.

Once the observation towers are out of the way the SS approaches Yankeil Wiernik to ask if he wouldn’t be so kind as to build them a blockhouse. Of course Yankiel will build the SS a blockhouse. Where’s the problem?

Compared with Camp One where thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of Jews are being exterminated every day, work-Jews in Camp Two

… enjoyed complete freedom. For instance, we were permitted to smoke while we worked and even received cigarette rations.

Yankiel’s crew also receives additional daily rations of ½ kilogram of bread apiece to sustain them in the hard work they are performing for the SS. When the blockhouse job is finished the SS and the work-Jews celebrate the occasion with “liquor and sausages.”

No hard feelings you see.

While it isn’t all sweetness and light at the Treblinka death camp, Yankiel and his companions are not deserted by their native sense of humor. One night when “the yard was littered with thousands of corpses” Yankiel watches Germans and Ukrainians beating the work-Jews with rifle butts and canes while the moon and the reflector lights

… shed an eerie light upon that appalling massacre… the… moans of the tortured mingling with the swishing of the whips made an infernal noise… Would you believe that a human being, living under such conditions, could actually smile and make jokes at?

Sure. Why not?

In order to demonstrate that Germans, too, have their lighter side, the SS decides to organize theatrical performances, concerts, dance recitals and so on. Performers are recruited from among the inmates who are excused from their regular work-exterminating the Jews of Europe-to participate in rehearsals. The performances take place on Sundays, of course. Lady work-Jews form a choir while a three-piece orchestra provides accompaniment. This orchestra had been formed earlier to play each day at roll call “after the whippings.” While the SS eat their midday meal, performer-Jews stand in front of the mess hall making music and singing.

…our tormentors had quite a bit of fun with the rest of us, dressing (us) up as clowns and assigning functions which, heart-sore though we were, actually made us laugh.

Encouraged by such laughter, and ever apt to go a little too far in any case, the SS dresses up one of the work-Jews as a Circassian in red pants, a tight-fitting jacket, belts of wooden cartridges, a wooden rifle, and a tall fur calpack. He’s forced to “clown and dance to the point of exhaustion.” On Sundays it’s particularly hilarious. On Sundays this same work-Jew is dressed in white linen with red stripes on the pants, red facings and a red sash, after which he’s given too much to drink and used for “horseplay.”

Another of the work-Jews is called the “shitmaster.”

He was dressed like a cantor and even had to grow a goatee. He wore a large alarm clock on a string around his neck. No one was permitted to remain in the latrine longer than three minutes, and it was his duty to time everyone who used it… Just to look at him was enough to make one burst out laughing.

As the end of July 1943 rolls around it is estimated that seventy-five percent of the cadavers of the exterminated Jews have been dug up and cremated on giant pyres. Maybe 700,000 Jews. Now it’s time to “fill in the empty ditches with the ashes of the… victims, mixed with soil in order to obliterate all traces of the mass graves.” It appears then that the ashes of the cremated Jews had been put to one side temporarily. If one cadaver reduces to about six pounds of materials, lets say that there are something like 27,000 tons of ashes piled up behind the gas chambers.

This must have been a sight for sore eyes, but none of the other brave survivors seems to have mentioned it. Maybe it was covered with foliage. How is this mountain of ash pushed into the giant ditches and mixed with maybe 27,000 tons of earth? Yankiel says that the job was given to the work-Jews. With shovels and rakes? If those exhausted and heart sore work-Jews are supposed to mix 27,000 tons of ashes with 27,000 tons of earth inside those giant ditches I couldn’t really blame them if they demanded a little help with it.

Somehow, the job gets done. “The parcel of ground thus gained had to be utilized one way or another.” So it is fenced in with barbed wire, together with some land from Camp One, and the work-Jews plant lupine and pine trees on it.

One day the SS celebrates the “retirement” of its excavator by pointing its scoop high into the air, firing “salvos,” and having a banquet with much drinking and merriment. “Ashes don’t talk,” Wiernik writes. I think 27,000 tons of ashes and ground bone would say a little something if they were discovered to constitute half of a 54,000-ton land fill within the borders of carefully delineated excavations at a site where, eyewitnesses claim, Germans murdered about a million Jews. Maybe I’m overlooking something.

By now the Treblinka underground, made up of the most farseeing and courageous of the work-Jews, is furthering its plot to revolt, escape, and tell their story to the world. The underground had been formed during the early days of the camp and has been functioning all the while that its members, in their aboveground life, have collaborated in the extermination of about a million Jews. As August approaches even the underground has grown “sick of our miserable existence, and all that mattered was to take revenge on our tormentors and to escape.” They are “fully aware” of the problems in making a break for it. Armed guards, for example, now man the observation towers that Yankiel had built for the SS.

However, we decided to risk it, come what may. We had had enough of the tortures, of the horrible sights.

On the afternoon of August 2, 1943, as Yankiel Wiernik has it, the work-Jews of Treblinka stage their revolt and Yankiel is one of those who makes it to safety, where he is able to pen his moving eyewitness memorial to German bestiality and Jewish patience and suffering. What are the qualities of character, and how are these revealed in Wiernik’s memoir, that allow Yankiel to endure such suffering yet retain his dignity and humanity? Perhaps the answer lies in this simple anecdote:

I never acted obsequious toward the Germans. (For example)… I never took off my cap when I talked to Lieutenant Franz. Had it been another inmate, he would have killed him on the spot. But all he did was whisper to me in German: `When you talk to me, remember to take off your cap.’

Well, there it is. Yankiel Wiernik was willing to go only so far with the SS and there he would draw a line in the sand. He would build their poison gas chambers for them; he would build their kitchens, laboratories and quarters for women. He would build birch wood fences around the SS flower garden and menagerie and he would construct special gates for the fences. He was willing to collaborate in the extermination of a million or so Jews, bury the cadavers and then help uncover them and burn them in order to hide evidence of the crime. He was willing to go along when he saw SS guards brain Jewish babies on the corners of buildings or tear the kids in half with their bare hands, but when it was necessary to converse with SS Lieutenant Kurt Franz, Yankiel Wiernik could go no further. He would refuse to remove his cap.

Yankiel Wiernik’s testimony was used by the Israeli prosecution and accepted by the Jerusalem court in their charges against John Demjanjuk. Wiernik’s testimony was presented by Yitsak Irad, director the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, the international center for research on the Holocaust. Allen Ryan, while he was chief prosecutor for the United States Office of Special Investigations was the man most responsible for the extradition of Demjanjuk to stand trial for his life in Israel, made Yankiel Wiernik’s testimony the centerpiece of his book Quiet Neighbors: Hunting Nazi War Criminals in America.

In 1944, who could have predicted it? Yankiel Wiernik could have simply disappeared from history and the memory of his folk. With his shameless lying, however, together with his penchant for sado-masochistic fantasies and his crazy sense of humor, he was able to turn himself into an internationally respected hero of the Holocaust cult. His autobiographical essay has influenced entire classes of intellectuals and the prosecutorial staffs of the most sophisticated Western governments. Yankiel Wiernik’s lunatic and, let’s face it, dirty-minded essay has become a cornerstone of the orthodox history of the Holocaust.

Chapter Sixteen

It’s Saturday morning and we’re driving North from Hollywood through the San Joaquin Valley to look for a house to rent that we can afford. We couldn’t take a chance on driving the old Nova so I borrowed Mike’s credit card and rented a car. We have Paloma with us. Marisol stayed home to look after Mother.

Alicia is worried about leaving Hollywood because she’ll have to give up the housekeeping jobs that she’s cultivated so well over the years. It makes her nervous to think that she’s going to have to depend on me to make enough money for both of us and for the kids and my mother too.

“You understand,” she says in Spanish, “that you are not a man who gives his wife confidence.’

“I have an advantage being a writer. I can work anywhere. It is all the same to me.

“The disadvantage in you being a writer is that you do not make a profit. If you can’ not make a profit being a writer in Hollywood, how do you think you are going to be able to make a profit out in the country?”

“The work is taking a turn for the better. I think we are going to be all right.

“What worries me most is that I have no faith in you.”

“We will be all right.”

“Where is the money? Where’s the profit? When I listen to you talk about money it is like listening to how birds fly toward the horizon.”

“That is an interesting image.”

“Gordo, I want you to think about profit. Your daughters can not eat birds that never land.”

“I am thinking about profit.”

“You are not a man who thinks about profit. I don’t know what you think about.”

The owner of the apartment we live in Hollywood is selling it so we have to move. Mother has lived there seventeen years. The owner bought the house in 1972 for thirty thousand. It’s on the market now for four hundred fifteen thousand, which illustrates where things are in Los Angeles for working folk and what we can look forward to in the years to come. Individuals who invested a few thousand dollars in a house fifteen years ago now have small fortunes at their disposal. The working poor who look back and imagine they could have bought a house themselves fifteen years ago curse their shortsightedness. But they were the working poor then too and it wasn’t in the cards for them to buy a house.

We’re four adults and one child living on the first floor of a two-story duplex. There is one bedroom, and in the back beside the bathroom there is a little sewing room just big enough for a single bed and that’s where Marisol sleeps. Marisol is seventeen now so she counts as an adult. Mother sleeps in the bedroom while Alicia and the baby and me sleep in the dining room. At five hundred dollars a month it’s a deal. But we need three bedrooms and they go for about two thousand in our part of Hollywood. Some of the other parts of Hollywood are too dirty and too dangerous for young women or children to live in.

We drive north through Bakersfield, which is destroying a good part of the south Valley, then northeast through the oil fields and the scrubby countryside that turns slowly and beautifully into farmland and orchards and vineyards. The morning is hot now but the rental car, unlike our Nova, has air conditioning. What a luxury. Paloma is still torpid from being wakened so early so she’s quiet and Alicia and I talk about how it might be for us living in a small town in a house that’s right for us and that we can afford.

Alicia says: “If we move up here I can work in the fields. All my family has worked in the fields but I never have. It would be a new experience. It would be security for us. I think I would like it.”

“It did not occur to me that you might say that.”

“Where is the problem, Gordo? I have a lot of surprises waiting for you.”

“You’re forty-three years old. You have never done that work. It is harder than you think.”

“It would be hard for you, Gordo. Everything is hard for a man your age. Maybe I would like it. I think I would like it. I have cleaned houses for thirty years. Do you think I do not get bored cleaning houses?”

“This is a bad time of life for you to start getting bored.”

“Gordo, when you teach yourself how to make a profit, life will be more interesting for both of us.”

“My life is not going to get any more interesting if I can help it. If it gets more interesting than it is now I could be in a lot of trouble. That is what the Chinese say. There is more to life than how interesting it is.”

“Do you want to know what Mexicans say? When you have two daughters you need a profit. I want you to organize your thoughts, Gordo. You think you have an interesting life now. Interesting is nothing. When we move to the country and I have given up my jobs in Hollywood and you still can not make a profit, you are going to discover the difference between what is interesting and what is profound.”

I am struck by how she had distinguished between the two concepts. I think about it. We fall quiet. We drive through Portersville, Lindsay, Exeter and Farmersville to Visalia. It’s very hot, up in the nineties. We spend most of the afternoon in Visalia getting a feel for the town. We think we can live here. We drive back to Exeter and spread out a blanket in the little town park. There isn’t a sound anywhere. The sun is falling toward the horizon. It’s almost as hot as it was at noon. While I settle down for a snooze, Alicia set’s out to chat up a couple Mexican women and get the local dope on the costs of renting a house in Exeter.

When I wake up in the muggy twilight Alicia is sitting on the grass picking through Paloma’s hair for lice. It’s a scene I’ve seen a hundred times in villages all over the Far East, and Mexico. I don’t say anything. There’s a stillness over the park unlike any I have known for a long time. Even Paloma seems to sense it. We all sit here without speaking, placid as cows. I feel a wonderful contentment and somehow a sense of homecoming.

Alicia says: “You can die of loneliness in a place like this.”

A couple days later, back in Hollywood, I deposit Mother’s social security check in the Bank of America on Hollywood and Highland. She has me withdraw two hundred dollars from her account. When I give her the cash she says: “I want you to stay out of this two hundred dollars. You’re going to need it one day and you’re not going to have it. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

I’m not sure but I decide to take a flyer. “Is it for your coffin, Ma?”

“That’s right,” she says. “It’s going to cost money to bury me and you’re not going to have any, if I know you. I gave you a thousand dollars once before to bury me. What you did with it, I have no idea.”

“That was fifteen years ago, Ma. And besides, you didn’t die.”

“I can’t do everything right on time. Now listen to me. I’m going to put this money in the top dresser drawer and I’m going to put some more with it every month. I don’t want you or anyone else to touch it. Explain that to all the Mexicans around here, will you?”

“Sure, Ma.”

“And don’t sure-Ma me either, Bradley. I’m serious about this. I don’t want this money to go the way of all the rest of it. Now, wheel me to the dresser. This may be the last time for a week I’ll have any privacy. Here. Take this.”

She tries to hand me the two hundred dollars but she can’t control her arm and she throws the twenties across the front room carpet.

“Goddammit,” she says. “Pick those things up. And while you’re down there, fix my left foot. That heel hurts like a tooth ache.”

I can’t bend over very well anymore so I get down on my hands and knees and pick up the twenties, put them in my pocket and start to adjust her foot on the pillow.

“Take that money out of your pocket.”

That annoys me but I don’t say anything. I put the money on the table where she can reach it then adjust the foot. I get up by holding onto the arm of her chair, then wheel her into the bedroom to the dresser and when she tries to put the money in the drawer her arm throws it across the floor again.

“I really wish you’d stop doing that, Mother.”

“I’m not in the mood for jokes, damn it. Now pick it up and put it in the drawer. Make yourself useful.”

“You need a younger son, Ma. I’m almost sixty years old. I can’t get up and down off the floor very many more times this morning. Besides, what kind of coffin do you think I can buy for two hundred dollars? Do you know how much it costs to bury someone today? This isn’t 1934. I need two, three thousand dollars or you might not like very much what happens to you.”

“I’ve told you more than once, I don’t want to be cremated and I mean it. Those coffins aren’t much use, I suppose, but I don’t want to be cremated.”

“I’m not going to cremate you, Ma.”

“Well, I don’t want you to.”

“I won’t.”

“If you don’t have any money, how are you going to buy a coffin? Will you tell me that?”

“Come on, Ma. What do you want to do? Go on about it? You die, I’ll get the coffin. You do your part, I’ll do mine. I’ve got three or four hundred Mexican nephews now. Half of them are either carpenters or carpenter’s apprentices. You’re going to have a coffin, one way or the other. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“I never thought I’d live to see the day that you would talk to me about a Mexican coffin.”

Alicia dreams that the real estate agent came by to say he can’t sell the house and that we can live in it for another year.

“It made me feel very contented,” she said. “You should have seen how relaxed I became.”

It’s summer now so Marisol is home from school. When Alicia goes off in the morning to clean a house she drops Paloma off at pre-school and Marisol picks her up at noon. I type in the garage until 10 o’clock then go in the house and get Mother up, make her breakfast then go to the office. When I’m ready to leave Marisol likes to say casually: “Do something to make some money today, will you?” It’s kind of funny, but there’s a little something behind it, too. Marisol is in love again and doesn’t want to leave Hollywood. She sees our money problems as being my fault, so I’ll be instrumental in tearing her away from her boyfriend.

Marisol has been complaining about a varicose vein in the calf of her right leg. She says it hurts and it’s ugly. The vein does pop out there pretty good but I haven’t taken her seriously about it hurting. She’s very conscious about her good looks and doesn’t want anything to mar her beauty. One morning when she wraps an elastic support around the calf of her leg before walking to school I decide to take her to my doctor.

Ried looks the leg over and says there’s nothing for it but a little surgery. “You haven’t done anything wrong,” he tells Marisol. “It’s just bad luck. A bad throw of the dice.” He’s a little jokey, like he always is. Eighteen hundred, a couple thousand dollars and he can find somebody to fix it up for us.

“Oh, good,” Marisol says.

I don’t say anything.

Ried doesn’t make his Nazi jokes this time. When I go in alone to see him he always wants to know if I’m still working for the Nazis or if I’m still writing my Nazi book. He thinks it’s funny but it makes me edgy in front of his nurses. Being a Jew, he doesn’t think what I write is funny but he thinks his joking about it is. It is kind of funny about the nurses. The last time I saw Ried about something we were talking about money when he said, rather out of the blue, that he hopes I take my Nazi friends for everything they have. I must have looked surprised because he looked up at me and said seriously: “I really mean it, Bradley. I hope you take those Nazis for everything they’ve got.”

It wasn’t clear to me exactly what he meant, even though he said it twice. It was the first time his joking about the Nazi business left a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe because it was about money. Maybe because he said he meant it. I decided I wanted to talk to him about it. I talked to him once before about revisionism and why I’m working with it but like every well-informed Jew I know, or used to know, he sees no value whatever in what I’m doing. After ten years of joking, his jibe about Nazi money is the first to make me feel uncomfortable. The implication is that I am specializing in soliciting money from people who hate Jews, maybe even because they hate Jews. I don’t get over it. It nags at me.

I haven’t done anything about Marisol’s leg. Where would I get two thousand dollars for something like that? If Ried says two thousand it would probably be three. Every morning I look at the leg to see how it is. The vein is always there, the thickness of a pencil, popped out about an inch long on the calf. Sometimes she has the elastic support wrapped around it, sometimes she doesn’t. Neither of us has said anything more about surgery.

This morning I get Mother up and dress her, give her her medicines with the frozen orange juice, fix her toast and coffee and while we sit at the kitchen table I read her an article from an old issue of Vanity Fair about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She’s one of Mother’s absolute favorites. The author tells how in the 1960s Jackie’s fortune was about twenty million dollars. In her circle that isn’t much of a fortune but by putting her affairs in the hands of the right man it was now estimated to have increased to 200 million. Now when she is with the Kennedys she doesn’t feel, as the writer has it, like the poor relation.

When I get to the place where Jackie’s fortune went from twenty to two hundred million I feel a rush of envy so powerful it stuns me. It’s a tidal wave of emotion that inundates the kitchen and sweeps over the entire house. I begin seeing things. I see us there in the kitchen but we’re beneath the ocean too. The kitchen and Mother and everything looks normal except that Mother’s hair is waving upward in the current. Some fish come in through the closed window and swim around aimlessly.

I hardly pause in my reading, but after the envy I feel a torrent of rage pour in behind it. How the hell did this society get arranged so that one woman, without putting her hand to anything in particular, could end up with a two hundred million dollar fortune while a couple hundred million people like myself have to work all day and worry all night about how we’re going to pay the rent on our houses and apartments? What the hell were the Founding Fathers thinking about? No wonder revolutionaries preaching the slaughter and oppression of the rich are greeted with open arms in one country after another. Poverty is nothing, but the rich living side by side with the poor while grasping onto their riches is enraging. Kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out, like it says on the T-shirts. Nothing personal.

Later Jackie O. took a job editing books for a New York publisher. Her specialty was autobiographies where the rich and famous reveal the secrets of their lives. The secret of their lives is that they’re rich. Screw ‘em all. All over the world mothers and their babies are starved and slaughtered and smashed into the earth while the Jackie O. play at working for forty-five thou a year because they don’t have anything to do. No wonder Jesus was so impatient with the rich. Money touches something awful in the human soul. A little cell of cancer, oh so eager to be exploited.

How would I have felt about Jackie O. if she’d dropped me a note saying she was interested in my book? What if she’d invited me to lunch to talk over a book contract and I’d been able to watch people watch us eating lettuce sandwiches and drinking a nice little bottle of white? Wouldn’t I have forgotten for the moment the injustices of the unequal distribution of wealth here and abroad? Wouldn’t I have ravaged my imagination to nail down what the little luxuries might be that would soon become available to me but might not if I didn’t play my cards right? Wouldn’t I have done all that and plenty more? Wouldn’t I have?

It wasn’t long ago when I was ten thousand dollars in debt and sinking. There was no way I could find to make a living writing about the gas chamber hoax. I couldn’t do real work anymore because I couldn’t stand up more than an hour at a time. I couldn’t work a job where I had to sit in one place all day either. I was a fragile guy with a fragile back and now I had a year-old baby. In desperation I mailed out a solicitation begging for money, promising I would use part of it to get college speaking dates to talk about Holocaust revisionism. Within a month I’d gotten enough money to pay off my debts. One man alone sent me 2,000 dollars. I couldn’t believe it. When I saw the check I started to cry. I was in the Cherokee station post office in Hollywood the morning I opened the envelope. I must have looked pathetic standing there at the counter bawling into my mail.

I’ve known for a long time I can’t make a living writing about the Holocaust story. I can’t make money publishing my book either. I don’t understand why I committed myself to it. I can’t make money with the book because I can’t get an agent or a publisher either one. No publisher will touch it. Some agents take the time to write me insulting letters when they reject the manuscript. I’ve had agents insult me on the basis of only a query I’ve sent them. I can’t promote it and sell it myself because it takes money to promote and sell books. Every day I sit down to work on the manuscript knowing I won’t be able to find a publisher for it.

I’m living a not-for-profit life. Where I got the idea that I could earn a living bad mouthing the Holocaust story is a mystery. It’s idiotic. You can’t make money writing about what I write about. You have to solicit money to be able to write about that. You do what the Cancer Society does, or the Heart Fund, the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies. Soliciting money is a job in itself. You go to the people who are most likely to believe that you’re doing valuable work and you ask them to help you. They’re smarter than you are so they already have the money. They already know you need help. Lots of it. Soliciting money is simple, but it isn’t easy. I’m doing the best I can. Meanwhile, and thank God as they say, I have a wife who knows how to clean houses.

Two years ago I promised Alicia I wouldn’t start any more projects I don’t get paid for. Last month I went to Mike’s house in Northridge to ask him to promote some paid speaking engagements for me but one thing led to another and by the time we were shaking hands good night I had agreed to produce a series of interviews with revisionists for public access TV. It’s a project where nobody will get paid for anything. Ever. It wasn’t even his idea. It was mine. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m trying to think how I can explain this one to Alicia.

It’s going on midnight and I’m sitting in the rocking chair in my shorts reading The Los Angeles Times Book Review by the light from Mother’s crooked neck table lamp. I read that a certain male moth can smell only the pheromone of his own mate, but can detect that particular odor five miles away. What a terrible talent that one must be. No matter where you go or what you’re doing your old lady is giving you a nose-full. Then I’m aware that thought is telling me that that’s the way I am about work that doesn’t pay. If there’s an idea anywhere on the horizon that needs to be done but won’t pay diddly, I’m the one who’ll sniff it out.

The house is quiet. Everyone’s asleep. Alicia and Mother are snoring, each in her own way. I’m finished reading but I’m not ready to go to bed. Thought’s darting around in a dozen directions at once, like a room full of flies. Then, somehow, there’s a moment when the mind becomes still and I’m aware that I’m seeing the image of a white planet out in blue space, self-contained, lifeless, cold. There’s nothing in the image that quickens my interest, yet while I gaze at the dead white moon I feel as if the situation were changing. I wonder idly-what situation? And in that unhurried moment I understand that I am going to back out of the public access TV project. I don’t make a conscious decision to back out. I become aware that a decision has been made. However it happened, I feel a wonderful sense of relief. Somebody else will have to introduce holocaust revisionism onto public access television. I’m going to get serious about the money. The next time I do some work I’m going to get paid for my labor. It’s not a novel idea. I didn’t invent it myself, but it’s an idea I’m happy with.

In the morning I’ll tell Alicia the good news. I’ll leave out the parts about the bee and the planet.

Chapter Seventeen

SATURDAY. The plane lands at the Pittsburgh airport at 8pm. I have the typewriter and one bag. I’m going to do some radio and television in Pennsylvania, talk at a couple universities, talk to the print press. We’ve been working on the tour, setting it up via telephone, for two months. Eric Stuart has done most of the work. Several hundred hours over two months. I couldn’t have done this without him. We’ve never met. He was on my newsletter list, he wrote me, we had some back and forth on the telephone, and now we’re doing the tour. Nothing like this has ever been done by a revisionist in America. I’ve never done anything like this.

Word is getting around. We’ve already lost a number of radio interviews, half a dozen college dates. In the end, I want the print press to get involved. For that to happen I have to make news via radio, television, and on campus. But word is getting around and one venue after another is canceling. The bad guys are on to me. The ADL, various Jewish activist organizations. The usual perps. Nothing for it but to go straight ahead. Once the story starts to unfold there will be nothing they can do about it. They will become part of the story. They will help publicize it. Am I certain? Can’t be certain. But that’s what I expect. Half expect.

Why Pennsylvania? A supporter in Philadelphia suggested I run a small advertisement in the student newspaper at Pennsylvania State University announcing the availability of Holocaust revisionist publications. My friend is an alumnus of Penn State, so it’s a natural for him. He offered to pay for it. I ran a two-column-inch ad, didn’t get any requests for literature, but after three weeks the ad was pulled at the instigation of a Penn State professor. Anti-anti-Semitism. The old story. If you question what you are not supposed to question about the H. story, you’re an anti-Semite. I sent open letters to Penn State professors, heads of student organizations, everyone I could locate in the journalism department. I talked about a free press, and stupid H. stories. The story spilled over to off-campus newspapers. This tour is the next step. I convinced the Institute for Historical Review to pay the airfare and a bonus for each radio and television show I do. If I don’t produce anything, I don’t get anything. Not a real good business deal, the situation being what it is. Nevertheless.

I walk into the modest waiting room at the Pittsburgh airport carrying my typewriter and my bag. A tall, very blond guy in his thirties rises from his seat and walks toward me. He has an assertive jaw and a big toothy smile. He puts out his hand and says, “Hello, Brad. Let’s have a drink.”

I don’t want a drink but I like the way he carries himself, the way he looks. I feel like I’m in good hands. I explain that I had better call Provan first to let him know I made it and that we will be in Monongahela about eleven. Then Eric and I have a couple drinks at the airport bar. We’re happy to see each other. He’s a gentleman and a tough guy. About nine we drive onto the turnpike for and head for Monongahela, about sixty miles south. We talk and laugh and a couple times Eric suggests we stop for a drink but I don’t think it’s a good idea because it’s getting late and I don’t want to keep Provan waiting. Eric lives in Gettysburg. He will provide the transportation and we will overnight in the houses of friends. We’ll crisscross Pennsylvania spreading the good news of Holocaust revisionism and the ideal of a free press, then we’ll radiate out in whatever direction looks promising. Eric is very good on the telephone. The telephone is everything when you’re setting up a tour and managing it.

Provan is waiting in his car in the parking lot of the Monongahela Burger King. I have never met Provan either. I see the faces of two of his five young children looking out the back window to get their first glimpse of us. We follow him to his old two-story house where we meet his gracious wife. After a few minutes Eric says it is absolutely necessary that we have a drink but the Provans do not drink. I don’t need a drink but I have a feeling it would be best if I have a couple, so Eric and I get in his car and drive down along the river looking for a roadhouse. We find a dark little place on a precipice overlooking the water. There are no lights outside and the river is black and threatening. When we walk into the dimly lit bar everyone there is Black. They look at us like we are probably thinking we made a big mistake. It occurs to me that maybe we have, but we stand at the bar and have a couple drinks and everyone is fine. We return to Provan’s house where we settle down upstairs on the floor of an empty bedroom.

I discovered Provan through the Christian News, a traditionalist Lutheran weekly out of Missouri that sometimes publishes revisionist articles. Provan is overweight and his photo in Christian News makes him appear stodgy and even torpid but he’s anything but. He’s a live wire. A radical Christian who belongs to no church, who has an energetic interest in political issues. He earns his living as a printer, but his life is dedicated to God and producing children, as scripture enjoins him to do. What I have to do now is focus on the tour and on nothing else.

SUNDAY. This evening Eric and I drive up to Pittsburgh to WPXI-TV to tape a half-hour interview for the Don Riggs show. It will be aired next Sunday morning. Eric made the original contact, I have spoken to Riggs twice, and he’s enthusiastic about the interview. We sit in a spacious bowl-like studio, with no audience, the staff in glassed offices above us like sports broadcasters. Riggs is maybe 50 years old and is in a wheel chair. Before the taping begins I watch Riggs reviewing the materials I sent him. After a while he looks up and says:

“This is what’s at the bottom of everything that’s going on in the Mid-East. It’s all right here.”

Once the interview is rolling I realize that Riggs has not reviewed the material very well. He doesn’t know what questions to ask. I rather take over the interview. I become aware that Riggs isn’t talking enough, and that I’m talking too much. I note that more and more staff people gather at the glassed walls up above us to watch. Riggs does not ask me one challenging question. He appears to be deeply interested in what I am saying. He wants to hear what I have to say. At one point he exclaims that I am “fifty years ahead of my time.” Then the interview is over.

Once we are off camera I say: “You may get some hostile reaction to this interview from groups like the ADL.” I mention this because I don’t want him to be taken by surprise.

“I don’t care,” Riggs says. “I’m going to run it.”

Up above us all the glassed offices are full of staff people looking down. Everyone who works for the station must be there.

When we leave the studio Eric is very happy. “That was good. Exceptional. You said everything. I couldn’t believe what he let you say. Wait till Pittsburgh sees this one. There’s going to be an uproar. Reporters are going to be all over us. What a kickoff. We did real good. We deserve a drink.” We’re laughing happily. We walk across the street to an Irish bar. We drink for a couple hours, then drive back to Provan’s house. Eric is right. It was an exceptional thirty-minute interview.

MONDAY. I set up a private message center in Chambersburg. The center will bill a third party and I will pay him. Then I get out my clipboard, put a chair next to the telephone in Provan’s front room, and call Duquesne University to confirm my lecture room and that my ad announcing the talk will appear in the Duquesne Duke, the student newspaper. The plan is to play the lecture off against the Riggs television interview. I am told that the meeting room I had reserved has been given to a student group celebrating Winter Carnival. And no, no other room will be available. I walk down the wooden steps of the old house and around the corner to Provan’s printing shop and tell him not to print the Duquesne leaflets. He’s already printed them. I throw them in the trash.

This afternoon Temple University cancels. Five broadcast television stations had shown interest in covering the talk at Temple. Now there is nothing for them to cover. Without Temple, talk radio will not be interested. Philadelphia was to have been the big kickoff for the tour. There was to be the Riggs television interview, followed by the talk at Duquesne, which would set up the talk at Temple, and we would be off to the races. There would be radio opportunities everywhere. We had both worked hard to put it all together. As recently as Friday everything was set. I had expected to create a blowout in Philadelphia that could conceivably blast over into New York and who knows where else. In three days it’s all gone. Word does get around. I call the Temple News and canceled my ad for the talk. We still have the Don Riggs interview for next Sunday, but not it’s something of an orphan.

Eric had made hundreds of telephone calls to Pennsylvania media and colleges. Media all over the state had expressed strong interest in the tour. We had called every broadcast TV station, every cable station, every radio station, sent press releases to them all and to the print press and other organizations. While the print press was standoffish, other media were all interested. But when push came to shove, one after another had dropped out. I understood, even before flying east, that many of the bookings were beginning to fall apart. But we had put too much work into the tour to drop it.

At the last minute, Eric nails down an in-studio interview on WBVP radio in Beaver Falls, a town just north of Pittsburgh. We have to do the interview this evening. The host is Rick Bergman and I have done one interview with him via telephone maybe two years ago. He has about twenty thousand listeners in the Pittsburgh area. Meanwhile, Eric finds out that Duquesne has changed its mind and promises to find me a meeting room within fifteen days. The new situation: We will do the Bergman interview tonight, which will help promote the Riggs broadcast for Sunday. And then we will do Duquesne University. All in the Pittsburgh area. Okay. We’re still okay. Driving north alongside the Monongahela, in many places the road lined with trees, we are feeling okay again.

In Beaver Falls we find that WBVP is on the second floor of an old brick building on the main street. It’s a street of old brick buildings. As we reach the front entrance, which is simply a doorway opening onto a staircase leading to the second floor. It must have been a house at one time. We hear Rick Bergman talking about the interview he is going to do with me. There is a small speaker system in the ceiling of the entrance. I hear the words “bigot,” “Nazi,” and “crazy.” We climb a long flight of stairs and enter what is a small, nondescript suite of offices. One of them is Bergman’s studio.

Bergman is a thin young man with shoulder-length curly brown hair. I give him my leaflet, “The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate,” and some other materials. I had sent them to him before in the regular mailings I send to all talk radio. He agrees to make a cassette recording of the interview that I can take with me. I appreciate it. Eric takes a chair in the studio so he can listen and maybe prompt me a bit. The interview lasts an hour. I emphasize the free press issue, as I always do. There are a couple breaks for commercials. It goes well enough until an elderly lady calls in. She rambles on as if something is wrong with her. I’m not sure what to make of it. She asks me a couple of stock questions to which I give rather stock answers. Then she says:

“Look, if the Nazis were willing to breed women with gorillas, they were capable of doing everything else they have been accused of doing.”

At that moment I understand what’s wrong with the old woman.

“Mr. Bergman, this lady is drunk. Get her off the line.”

Bergman says: “Don’t you ever insult anyone who calls in to my show. Not anyone. Do you understand? Do you have any proof that Germans did not breed women with gorillas? How do you know what they did?”

“She’s drunk and talking stupid. Say goodbye to her.”

“I’ll say goodbye to you if you insult any of my listeners again.”

I decide to let it go. I thought I’d heard them all but I hadn’t heard the one about the gorilla-breeding program. I watch Eric leave the studio. I keep working on some of the more obvious fraud in the Holocaust story and arguing for intellectual freedom. After the show Bergman relaxes.

“I understand better what you’re trying to get at. It wasn’t clear to me when we talked before.”

He wants to put our disagreement behind us. Meanwhile, he is punching buttons and pulling levers on his control board. He keeps getting country music.

“I made a mistake,” he says finally. “I didn’t record your interview. Sorry.”

I walk down the staircase to the sidewalk. I don’t see Eric. Across the street there is a bar with an Irish name. I take a really wild guess and stroll on over. Eric is there and we have a few drinks. He’s already had a few. He laughs about the old woman, but he’s not happy. We both wish we had the old gorilla woman on tape. It would be a wonderful exchange for my stupid-Holocaust-story kit bag. Still, we don’t feel too bad, on balance. We have completed two events in two days. The Bergman broadcast is live so nothing can go wrong with it. Twenty thousand people in the Pittsburgh area. Next Sunday the Riggs interview will be shown. Fifty thousand people in the Pittsburgh area. The Duquesne University event is on track. After Bergman and Riggs, Duquesne could be very good and we may very well get some print press. We go to a café next door to the bar, eat hamburgers, then begin the drive to his place in Gettysburg. We arrive at midnight. The lady he lives with is voluptuous and very sweet and maybe a couple years older than Eric.

TUESDAY. We work on the telephone until mid-afternoon when I get a message through the Chambersburg center to the effect that Don Riggs is not going to air the interview he did with me. I call him back but can’t reach him. I call all afternoon but can’t reach Riggs or his producer. An assistant to the producer says it is not likely that they will send me a videotape of the show, as they had promised. They do not distribute tapes of shows that do not air.

Eric says: “I can’t work with liars and hypocrites.”

He takes a fifth of Seagram’s from the cupboard and takes a long drink from the bottle. I think he’s joking around. He lies down on the couch with the fifth standing on his chest and doesn’t say anything. I don’t say anything. I start working on the telephone trying to use the Bergman broadcast to get some more radio dates. Eric just lies there. By dark the Seagram’s bottle is half empty. Tomorrow we have an appointment to tape four half-hour interviews with Jim Nichols on WGCB-TV. This is a Christian station that goes out on Broadcast TV, cable, AM and FM radio and satellite. It goes all over the world. The plan is for me to do the tapings and for Eric to use that time to work the telephone.

WEDNESDAY. This morning Eric doesn’t want to get out of bed. He lends me his car and I drive to Red Lion. The two-hour taping takes six hours. There’s a breakdown in the switching equipment, whatever that is, in the middle of the event. Nichols is favorable to revisionism, but he is so circumspect in getting into the material that he does the first two segments talking about how he is going to talk to me. It never fails to surprise me how fearful media people are in treating the Holocaust story with even a little honesty. We finally get into it during the third segment, but very slowly. It isn’t until the fourth segment that I am able to get out my message that the Holocaust story is full of fraud and falsehood and that it should be open to free inquiry and open debate, just like every other historical issue.

A week ago Eric and I had both understood that some, perhaps many, of the events we had booked were not going to happen. I suggested that we expand the tour beyond Pennsylvania. Eric got us a one-hour spot on the Jerry Williams (television) Show in Boston. The Williams show would take place Monday evening. Fifty thousand viewers. He got us an in-studio radio interview for that morning at WBET-AM in Brockton, a town just south of Boston. Its audience is about twenty thousand, all in the Boston area. When I do the WEBT program I’ll be able to announce my appearance on the Jerry Williams Show that evening. And then I was able to find a lecture room at University of Massachusetts two days later. Very nice. Each date will promote the other. We might be able to pull off in Boston what we failed to pull off in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

This afternoon when I finish the WGCB interviews, I confirm by telephone that the lecture room at University of Massachusetts is solid. I find a place in York with a fax service and fax a one-column by 4-inch advertisement to the campus paper, Mass Media, announcing the talk for next Wednesday. I wait half an hour, then call Mass Media advertising and confirm that they have received the ad, just meeting the deadline for the Tuesday publication date. So, I have taped the WGCB interviews, which makes three events in four days, and Boston is looking very good.

THURSDAY. My inclination is to work the telephones hard, try to make up for what we have lost. Eric is watching television and drinking beer. We don’t say anything. The print press in Pittsburgh is unwilling to talk to me because I have not created a local event. We do have a local event in York with the Nichols taping, so I call the York Daily. I am passed from one editor to another until 4pm when it is finally agreed that I will drive back to York tomorrow morning where a local reporter will interview me. York is about thirty miles from Gettysburg.

FRIDAY. Eric doesn’t think it necessary to go to York with me. He lends me his car and I drive over and have a good interview with Peter Bulleton. Bulleton has been to Dachau and is impressed with my letter to Penn State professor Brian Winston.

Winston had written in the student paper there that no one had ever claimed that there had been gas chambers at Dachau. I had nailed him on that one. While it is true that there were no gas chambers at Dachau and that no one was ever gassed there, everyone had claimed that there were, including the U.S. Army. The interview goes well. Bulleton says he will send me a clipping of the story.

When I return to Gettysburg I call the message service in Chambersburg. There is a message from Jim Nichols saying he cannot air the shows beginning Monday but will have to put them off for thirty days. This is bad news. We need the airtime now. We won’t be in Pennsylvania in thirty days. Who knows where we will be?

There is also a message from the student radio station at Penn State. I had hoped to do an in-studio interview there. I am told the one program that might have been open to me is called “The Dean’s List.” Dean Brian Winston hosts it. The same professor who I demonstrated was wrong when he claimed that no one had ever claimed that there were gas chambers at Dachau. I wasn’t annoyed with Dean Winston. I would give him the chance to say he had been wrong about Dachau. And I would give him a chance to demonstrate where I was wrong about something. I have never minded being wrong. When I find out I’m wrong about something I just accept it. In a certain way, when you have an open mind, being right and being wrong is not all that different. We’re all wrong about something, and none of us is right about everything. Dean Winston’s producer, a young man named Steven Aaron, appears to feel differently. Aaron tells me that he doesn’t believe anything I say and that he will never book me on “The Dean’s List.”

Eric is drinking boilermakers. I report on the day’s news.

“It looks like Pennsylvania is dead in the water for us. Boston is shaping up fine. Maybe we ought to pack up and get on the road. What do you think?”

Eric doesn’t say anything.

“How many hours do you think it is from here to Boston?”

Eric remains silent.

We can stop at Fritz Berg’s the first night. Then I have a place for us in upstate New York.”

Eric says: “I don’t want to work with people who don’t keep their word.”

“Well, it’s media. This is what I have learned to expect.”

“These people have no honor.”

“Their word means nothing. That’s just how they are. Most of them.”

“Nothing about this tour is working out right.”

“It looks like we’ve lost Pennsylvania. For the time being.”

“I’m sick of it. They’re all liars.”

He says some other things. I have a sinking feeling.

I say: “It’s hard to make decisions sometimes.”

“What decisions?”

“Maybe you should just sign off the tour.”

“I think maybe I should.”

“It’s okay.”

“I hate working with people who lie and don’t keep their word.”

“It’s okay. I’ll be okay.”

I call Fred, my friend who lives in a suburb of Philadelphia and the man who started this whole thing off by buying the ad space in the Penn State Daily Collegian. He says it will be fine for me to stay over with him a couple days. Eric drives me to the Greyhound station in Harrisburg. We have a couple drinks and say goodbye. I like Eric. He did a lot of work for me. Booked a lot of interviews. He worked at it for two months. Nevertheless, here I am at a Greyhound bus station in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It’s night. I have no car. I have two bags, a typewriter, and five boxes filled with propaganda tied together with ropes. I have less than $150. It doesn’t look real good.

The Greyhound takes me to the train station in Philadelphia. I’m standing outside on the steps of the columned portico. I’m the only one here. After a while a black Oldsmobile pulls up to the curbing, the driver puts his head out and calls my name. He’s smiling from ear to ear. The welcoming face peering up at me is so Jewish it’s a stereotype. I take a moment to see if there is anyone else in the car. If another car is following. I don’t see anyone on the street. Nothing out of order. But I am very alone in a place I have never been before and it’s midnight, and… Turns out that Fred is Lebanese, married to a German woman. He lives in a fine old two-story house where he uses part of the second floor to do his work as a bookbinder. They are wonderful hosts and I have a fine place to sleep. I couldn’t have chosen a better place to crash. But I have a schedule to meet.

SATURDAY. After breakfast and some good talk I start calling around to find someone who will rent a car for me on his credit card. After Fred hears me say “that’s okay, thanks” a couple times he says I can use his card. One moment I’m stymied in Philadelphia without wheels, the next I have transportation. The whole body relaxes. Before noon I have a car, my stuff is loaded in it, and I’m driving across New Jersey toward Fritz Berg’s house in Fort Lee where I will stay tonight. I find the house without much trouble and meet his mother and their dog, an old red hound of mixed breed. Fritz has a copy of the new Jean-Claude Pressac book on Auschwitz. It’s an impressive publication, though on close inspection it does not have much on gassings, and nothing on gassings that is convincing. That’s strange, since the purpose of the book is to set to rest the revisionist argument that gas chambers did not exist.

Fritz says: “What did you expect?”

“I don’t know. I expected more than this.”

“That’s because you don’t know the literature.”

“I suppose so.”

I call the Institute, which is paying my expenses for this tour, more or less. Marcellus expects my call. I ask for $1,100 against billings but they’re short. He agrees to send me a check for $650, which I will endorse and send to our landlord in Visalia for the March rent. Fritz gives me a check for $150. If nothing goes wrong I’ll be able to make it through to Boston.

SUNDAY. At mid-afternoon I leave Fritz’s place and drive north out of New Jersey toward upstate New York and Henry Smith’s house. Tomorrow morning I have an in-studio radio interview in Brockton, south of Boston. It’s the last interview Eric set up before he dropped out. Tomorrow evening I’ll do the Jerry Williams television show, and Wednesday I’ll give the talk at U. Massachusetts. I may be able to do in Boston what I failed to do in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Maybe I can still pull this tour off.

The countryside is covered with snow and the roads are icy. I get lost a couple times on rural roads and have to call Henry for directions. Henry is a doctor and when I find his place it’s a beautiful modern house of stone and wood on the shore of a small lake in the woods. I leave the car on the road where the long driveway begins. If I drive up to the house and it snows in the night, I could get stuck. Henry has four or five children, all in university, and a beautiful wife. It’s wonderful being in their warm house while outside the snow is in the trees and covers all the ground. We drink wine while Henry cooks supper and we talk and laugh and then I get into one of the kid’s beds.

MONDAY. At 2:30 in the morning I get up by my alarm, dress and carry my bag out to the car. Henry follows me out. I didn’t expect him to get up at 2:30 in the morning. He has to help me push the car as I try to get it off the ice and out onto the road. A hasty goodbye and I begin my drive in the dark toward Massachusetts. The temperature is six degrees. But I have a good, warm, comfortable car and a couple hundred dollars and some good dates waiting for me. South of Boston I get caught in morning traffic but make it to Brockton, to WBET-AM, half an hour before show time. It’s something of a miracle that I make it. If I had made one wrong turn, one mistake, I would have lost it. The host, Bill Alex, is very friendly, professional, and tough. His audience is about twenty-five thousand and he goes all over Boston. He’s responsive to the argument for an open debate on the Holocaust story. He helps me tout the Jerry Williams Show tonight several times. He even helps me with the talk at U Mass. It couldn’t get any better. This could be where it begins to work.

I’m exhausted. I don’t have anyone to stay with in Boston so I rent a motel room a couple miles from U Mass. In my room I have something that appears to me to be an intelligent idea. I make a couple phone calls and am able to arrange for Fred Leuchter to appear on the Jerry Williams Show with me. Leuchter, an engineer, has written an engineering-chemical “report” on Auschwitz that demonstrates that no gassings took place in the alleged gas chambers at Birkenau. Forty years after the alleged events, it was the first report of its kind, from any side of the issue. Now we have Pressac, for what it’s worth.

On the telephone I tell Leuchter, who I met once a couple years ago at an IHR Conference, that he should be very careful tonight. He should not take his wife or son to the station, and he should not drive his own car to the station, but park it across town and catch a cab. Our appearance has been promoted on Boston radio, we don’t know who will be there, and while I have never had any trouble at a radio or television station yet, there is going to be a first time and tonight could be it. Leuchter listens very soberly and agrees. He is probably recalling the trouble we had with the rabbis and the JDL the weekend he spoke at the IHR Conference in Costa Mesa.

I know I should do some preparation for Jerry Williams, this is the big time, but I’m too tired. About three hours sleep, a long drive, and so on. I’m going to have to wing it. In the end, I always wing it. I’m a winging it sort of guy. Always the amateur. I must get some sleep or I’m not going to be able to even wing it. I make one last confirmation call to Williams’ producer. All is well, with one new wrinkle. A spokesman for the Jewish Defense League will be on the program with Leuchter and me. I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, the JDL guys mean trouble. They don’t want to talk to me on principle. And then they’re ignorant about revisionist theory so they can’t talk about it any event. On the other, they are addicted to violent, stupid behavior, so if you get out of it without getting hurt, you come off looking like a reasonable person. Anyhow, there’s nothing for it. I’m going to do the interview no matter who is there. I set my alarm and go to sleep.

An hour before showtime I get a cab to the station. Leuchter is already there. He has arrived in his own car, and he has his wife with him. So much for practicality and caution. There are half a dozen other guys hanging around the lobby. They look like they have nothing to do. Some of them look Jewish. Some of them look at me in a way that I judge to be a little hostile, not to make too much of it. But no one says anything as I enter the lobby. When we are taken into the studio we are told the guy already sitting at the table is Mike Shmelko, the local spokesman for the JDL. Shmelko is a big beefy guy who resembles Popeye’s old nemesis Bluto. We walk up to the table and Leuchter extends his hand to introduce himself.

Shmelko says: “If you do that again, I’ll break it for you.”

Jerry Williams, who is Jewish himself, doesn’t say anything.

Once the interview is under way Leuchter is very direct, and for the first time on broadcast TV in America it is said again and again. No attempt to exterminate the Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau by gassing. I let Leuchter do most of the talking. He’s the one who’s the engineer. He’s the one who scraped samples from the walls of the phony gas chambers at Birkenau and brought them back to Boston where he had them analyzed by a professional laboratory. The talk soon turns to “eyewitness” evidence to gassing chambers and that’s where I shine. All such evidence is demonstrably unreliable, or corrupt, or unverifiable or all three. I talk about how the stories that Germans skinned Jews to make lampshades and riding breeches from their hides, or cooked them to make hand soap, are vulgar lies and so on. For revisionists, the usual stuff.

Bluto doesn’t know anything. He does appear to be sincere. He’s brought several major books on the Holocaust written by professors from the usual orthodox perspective. He wants to read long passages from eyewitness rather than speak on his own. Williams knows that reading from history books is not good television and cuts him short. Eyewitnesses are one of my favorite subjects. You do not have to be a scholar or an engineer to discuss the more notorious eyewitness testimony. Much of it is stupid on its face. I say so, and give examples. Elie Wiesel. Simon Wiesenthal. Rudolf Vrba. One after another.

Jerry Williams turns out to be a true believer in the “Jewish soap” story. I blow it out of the water. But he won’t give up on it. I ridicule the idea that Germans skinned Jews to make lampshades, riding breeches, and gloves from their hides. In the end it’s Williams and Bluto against Leuchter and Smith. We do well. We do very well. The Jewish soap stories are among the weakest and most stupid of all the Holocaust stories, which is no small claim, but Williams makes a case for them and won’t let it go.

It becomes too much for Bluto. He’s scowling at me. His hands, lying on the tabletop, are the size of waffle irons. He says: “Let’s you and me meet in the alley and straighten this out between us. Man to man.”

“You’re a tough guy, eh?”

“When this program is over we’ll meet in the alley behind the station and we’ll see who the tough guy is.”

This is too much even for Jerry Williams. He tells Bluto to cool it. When the show is over Williams remains in the studio but will not speak to either Leuchter or me. We hang around waiting for the producer to run off our videotapes of the program. Bluto waits with us. None of us speaks to the other.

Leuchter gets the first video copy, we say a brief goodbye, and he leaves the studio with his wife. A few minutes later I’m given my tape and walk through the short hallway into the small lobby. An attractive young lady is crossing the lobby, approaching me from my left. I pause to let her pass. She changes course and moves directly toward me. I don’t understand where she wants to go. Then I notice that her eyes are almost completely closed, that her shoulders are hunched forward a bit, and that the expression on her face is zombie-like, as if she were drugged. I don’t understand. Then it occurs to me that she is consciously trying to bump into me. In the last instant I am able to dodge out of her way. She steps past me as if in a trance.

Then I hear a man’s voice right behind my head.

“Would you like me to piss in your mouth?”

I turn and look up into the face, only a few inches from mine, of a blond-haired young man leering down at me.

“I’d really like to piss in your mouth. Would you like me to do that?”

I don’t say anything, but start to walk out to the parking area. He moves around in front of me.

“You want me to piss in your mouth, don’t you? You just don’t want to say so. Isn’t that it? You’d really like me to do that, wouldn’t you?”

I see that there are a couple other guys in the lobby who don’t have anything to do. I see that the young lady who wanted to bump into me is watching. Then I see out in the parking area that men are kicking Leuchter’s car and yelling and spitting on his windows. Leuchter’s wife is looking this way and that. I understand now that the JDL people are looking for an excuse to beat me. That’s what the young lady was doing. She was going to fix it so that I walked into her and then she would yell that I had attacked her and then, for me, it would have been up for grabs.

I turn and walk back up the hallway toward the studio. Just then I see Bluto entering the other end of the narrow hallway with his video in his hand. We are going to meet in the center. This may be it. I feel some apprehension. I watch him very carefully as we approach each other. I watch his eyes. I have no plan, but I’m watching very carefully and I am going to do whatever it becomes necessary for me to do. His eyes are averted. I watch them very carefully. As we pass without touching his eyes are looking down. I don’t know why. I don’t know why he doesn’t look at me. I am also glad he does not look at me.

In the studio Jerry Williams is chatting with three men. They’re standing in a little circle and Williams’ back is to me. I interrupt.

“Jerry. There’s going to be trouble with your JDL friends out in the parking lot. They’re out there right now kicking in Leuchter’s car. And there’s some other cretins in your lobby.”

Williams doesn’t respond to me directly, but turns and yells for his producer to call the police.

In about fifteen minutes two patrol cars arrive. They put the JDL people in their van and hold them there until my own cab arrives. It looks like Leuchter got away okay. The cab driver is a big young guy with long curly hair. I can’t see his face in the dark. I’m a little worried about the driver’s hair. It being curly. Could be Jewish. Could be any number of things, but it could be Jewish. The studio isn’t in Boston proper but out on a country road. On the way out I saw farmland and forest. I could be facing a small irony here.

Before we leave the police have a few words with the cab driver. Once I’m in the cab the driver wants to know why the JDL is after me. I try to see his face in the rearview mirror but I can’t. I explain that I was there to argue for an open debate on the Holocaust story.

“The police told me to not tell anyone where I’m taking you.”

“Please do that.”

“I’m not going to tell anyone anything.”

We’re on a dark country road and he keeps looking in the rearview mirror. He turns off onto a side road, then turns onto another. I’m completely lost.

“Where we going?”

“To your motel.”

“I didn’t come this way.”

“I’m not going to take any chances with that van. Those people are crazy.”

“Yeah?”

“They’re crazy as hell.”

When we stop at a lighted intersection of two country roads I can at last make out his face. He doesn’t look Jewish. But then half the guys at the station didn’t look Jewish either. A lot of Jews look like everybody else, not Jews.

I tell him who I am, what I do, and relate what went down at the station.

“Those people are crazy.”

Turns out he’s Boston Irish and that he’s a history major at U Mass. He’s taking a semester off to make a few bucks. The more I talk about revisionism, the more agitated he gets, the more he looks out the rearview mirror, the more turns he makes from one road to the other. The cab fare from the motel to the station cost twelve dollars. It was about a twenty-minute drive. My Irish history major is so intent on not being followed that it takes us an hour to reach a place about a mile from my motel room and the fare is fifty-two dollars. No problem. The station will pay for it. I give the cabbie some revisionist literature and suggest he drop me a line if he has any questions. If he follows the lead of his professors, he will throw the literature away and never tell anyone that he has touched it. I walk up the street in the dark and stop across the street from the motel. I wait a while, keeping my eyes open, then cross the street and go to my room.

Turns out that eighty to one hundred thousand people in the greater Boston area watch the Jerry Williams Show, which is aired live. Not fifty thousand. Nice.

TUESDAY. I call the scheduling office at U Mass and everything is in order for my talk tomorrow. This looks like it will be very good. I pitched it yesterday morning on the Bill Alex show. Completed the Jerry Williams interview last night. My ad announcing the talk is in the student newspaper today at U Mass.

I check with my message center in Chambersburg. Nothing. There is no more television on the schedule. No radio. Every single college date in Pennsylvania has fallen through. There’s a story about a revisionist professor in Indianapolis that has been in the news. I make a few calls to Indianapolis but can’t turn up anything. I’m spending a lot of money on telephone calls. Tonight I’m to have supper with Leuchter and his wife. I look forward to talking things over with him. But when I call, Leuchter tells me that his wife has not recovered from what happened last night outside the Jerry Williams studio. She’s still vomiting. Our supper date is off.

Here I am in the room. I need to work the telephones but I have no heart for it. I need Eric to pitch in. Won’t happen. I think I’m tired. Tomorrow will be a big day. I decide to just hang around. Sleep. About eight o’clock I eat supper in the motel cafe.

WEDNESDAY. I walk out to the café for breakfast and when I return to my room the red message light on my telephone is blinking. It’s a man who does not give his name but says he is looking forward to meeting me at U Mass this afternoon. No one knows where I am. No one has my telephone number other than Leuchter. This is one easy decision. I pack my stuff and in fifteen minutes I’m checked out of the motel. It’s very cold. I don’t know where to go. I drive around until I find a supermarket with three telephone booths in the parking lot. I check with Chambersburg. Nothing. I make a few calls to Indiana but can’t find out anything about the revisionist professor story.

In three hours I have to be at U Mass. It’s going to be very messy, which is what I want. At the same time, I feel unsettled. The JDL is going to be there. I will be entirely alone. I don’t have a tape recorder so won’t be able to record the talk. Stupid. A supporter was to have sent me one in Gettysburg but didn’t do it. I owe it to IHR to make a cassette recording of the talk and give it to them. But I have only ninety dollars. If I buy a tape recorder I will have less that fifty dollars and will still need a place to sleep tonight. It’s too cold to sleep in the car.

I have to decide between the tape recorder and being certain I have a place to sleep. I can’t decide. I keep an eye on every car that enters the parking lot. I can feel an anxiety building up. It’s interesting to watch the anxiety built, but I’m starting to freeze. I have gotten myself into a stupid corner. I cannot afford to buy the recorder, but I owe it to IHR to buy it. It’s comic, but I’m not laughing. I need to call IHR and ask them to wire me some money. I only have a couple hours before IHR will be shut down for the day. I don’t want to call them for money because a couple days ago Marcellus said he didn’t have any. I know he has some, but I don’t want to make a problem for him.

There’s only one person I can call. Henry Smith. No one answers. I call several times but no one answers. The anxiety is becoming really something. I call his office. He’s out to lunch. I sit in the car with the motor running and the heater on. I keep my eye on the cars coming into the parking lot. I work on my notes for the talk. An hour before I’m to be at U Mass I make the connection with Henry at his office. I ask him to wire me $500. There’s a booth in the market that accepts money wires and cashes them. Half an hour later I have the money in my pocket. The anxiety flows out of the body like bath water flowing out of the tub. I have a new life. I’m ready for anything. It doesn’t take much.

I call campus security at U Mass to ask for protection. The talk is to begin at two o’clock, in twenty minutes. If I had called earlier I might have provided security with enough time to invent an excuse to cancel the talk. It wouldn’t be the first time. If I call any later, I might get to the lecture room before security gets there. Bad idea. It’s too late now to be certain that I can get a cab and still arrive on time so I drive my rental car directly to the campus. I keep an eye peeled all along the streets but don’t see anything unusual. I drive into one of the parking structures and go up several floors. This would be the perfect place to be caught out alone, but nothing happens. I walk to the McCormick building where I’m to speak.

It’s very quiet. Nothing unusual is going on. Why is that? The press should be here, maybe some television people. A crowd. But nothing’s going on. I walk up and down the hallway looking for my room. Can’t find it. I ask a few students for directions but they can’t help me. Now I’m fifteen minutes late. I go to an information booth and ask for directions. They can’t help me. They call around but no one knows about my talk or where it is supposed to be. They tell me that others have asked for directions to the talk but that they didn’t know anything about it.

I call administration and the lady who had reserved the room for me says that she made a booking error. I have the right room number but the wrong building. My meeting room is not in the McCormick building, but in the Wheatly building on the other side of the campus. She is very apologetic. She tells me to wait where I am and that she will come down and take me there herself. When she arrives I am more than half an hour late. I suggest that if no one knows where the room is, security doesn’t know either. She tells me that she called security before she came down to meet me and that they are on the way to the Wheatly building.

By the time we get to the lecture room in the Wheatly building it’s almost three o’clock. No one is here. Only the two plainclothesmen. Those who had somehow found the right room in the right building had left. There had not been very many. I went into the room and sat down by the lectern. The Boston Herald was to have had a reporter here but no one is here. Except the two security guys. No television. No JDL. No audience. Nothing. I suppose that after the Jerry Williams show the JDL have been advised to not make themselves look any worse.

At 3:15 two professors and one student arrive. One professor is Jewish while the other is not. The student is not. I tell them what the story is. They tell me that my announcement about the talk had not appeared in the student newspaper. I had confirmed it, but it was not there. Each of the three had watched Leuchter and me on the Jerry Williams show. That’s why they persevered in finding me. The professor who is not Jewish and the student are very interested in chatting me up. The Jewish professor just listens. Security leaves. We talk for about an hour, and then it’s over.

To coin a phrase, much ado about nothing. I rent a room at a motel. Not the same one where I was this morning.

THURSDAY. Today is reserved for handling all the press that I created with my talk at U Mass. So I have the day off. Saturday morning I’m to do an in-studio interview with Dave Feda at WQQW in Waterbury, Connecticut. I call the station, talk to Feda who is his own producer, and we move the interview up to tomorrow morning. I lie around the motel until checkout time, then drive to Waterbury and take a motel room and sleep.

FRIDAY. Drive over to WQQW-AM, arrive at 9:30am and at 10 we begin the interview. It’s to last at least one hour. Feda is very open to revisionist theory, to the idea that it should be discussed and either destroyed through argument or used for what is helpful in it. We talk and handle call-ins for three hours. It’s a loose but very good three hours. When we finish, I’m finished in New England. There’s nothing more. I can sit in the motel room and work the telephone to book more radio, but I’ve lost connections with the campus press, and with the off-campus press so far as that goes. There is no more television on the horizon. I have a week left, depending on the money maybe four or five days, to produce something more. Whatever I try, I will be starting from nothing.

This afternoon I start the drive back down to Henry’s place. There we watch the video of the Jerry Williams show. It’s the first time I’ve seen it. Henry and his wife are enthusiastic. It’s imperfect, but there’s a lot of information in it. There’s some good laughs. And we can all see immediately that nothing like it has ever been seen on television before, anywhere. Nothing.

SATURDAY. I drive down to New Jersey to stay with Fritz Berg. I have only a few days left before my return trip. On the way I stop at a couple pay phones to call Nat Hentoff at his home. I leave messages on his answering machine. Hentoff is a sincere free-press guy. When I get to Fritz’s house I call Hentoff’s office. Can’t get through. I write him a letter saying I have a lot of interesting information about censorship at Penn State, some background on the scandal that is going to erupt at Atlantic Monthly because of the upcoming Leuchter “Profile,” some interesting questions about the human-soap story, which I remind him he has an especial interest in, along with some other stuff. I fax the letter and a copy of my brochure “The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate,” and a newspaper clipping about Don Hiener, the Indianapolis professor who is going to lose his job for mentioning Holocaust revisionism in a favorable light. I include Fritz’s phone number.

Fritz, who is of a scholarly nature, very critical and serious, who knows about one hundred times more about revisionism than I do, watches the Jerry Williams video three times. His friend Matthew comes to the house. Matthew has never been particularly keen about how I approach the work. His politics are on the right, mine are not, and anyhow I leave politics aside. But he sits through the video twice himself. By this time Fritz is talking about buying video equipment because, for revisionists, “video is the way to go.”

SUNDAY. I admit to myself that Nat Hentoff, the sincere free-speech man at the Village Voice, is not going to respond to my phone calls or my fax. I send another fax saying that tomorrow I will drop by his office to chat him up. It’s a joke. I don’t have the time. At midday I leave Fort Lee for Monongahela and Provan’s house. There I’m able to touch base via telephone with the Indianapolis professor. Very ingratiating, intelligent, a fully convinced closet revisionist. His life has been hell the past month. A lot of stuff that didn’t get into the papers. Originally his department at the college was going to keep his case “in-house,” but the ADL mounted a demonstration with 350 protestors and the administration caved in. I explain that I need help with media in Indianapolis. He wants no part of it.

He wants to let the fire die down so that he can go back to work. All he wants is be allowed to work. I tell him it’s too late for that. I tell him he’s already in the meat grinder, that he is finished in Indiana. I am going to do all I can in Indianapolis to make a case about his being fired for having committed a thought crime. I don’t feel very good about it, but that’s my work. To promote open debate and to fight censorship. I apologize. I may fix it so he will never again be able to teach in Indiana, or anywhere else. I tell him there’s nothing for it. He understands. He is not pleased.

MONDAY. I work the telephones to Indianapolis for six hours. I rent a room at the college. For some reason I can’t raise anyone at the student paper to place an ad. There’s no interest at local radio or press. Nobody wants to talk to me about a professor getting fired from a State institution for having committed a thought crime. I’m still using my message service in Chambersburg but they don’t have anything for me. I’ll drive to Indianapolis, get a motel room, have some flyers printed announcing my talk, and hire a couple guys to pass them out. I’ll create my own story. Maybe it will work. I’m clutching at straws. This will be my last hurrah.

This evening the Provans and I sit around the kitchen table talking and laughing. Mrs. Provan is not interested in revisionism, especially for her husband, but she’s good company.

TUESDAY. This morning I get through to the student paper at Indianapolis and find that the campus is on Spring break this week. What a surprise. I’m going to have to stay another week, maybe longer, to do the talk. I can’t. No money. Indianapolis is finished. I’m going to have to settle for the Jerry Williams video. All this work and that’s what I will go back with. The truth is, now that I know it’s over, I’m exhausted.

I call the Chambersburg message center to tell them to cut the cord tomorrow morning and find that I have a call from WBBW-AM radio in Youngstown, Ohio. A local rabbi wants to debate the Holocaust with a revisionist. The rabbi is available this afternoon at 2pm. He will be in-studio. We can sit across the table from each other and talk things over. Michael Young is the host. I did an interview with him a year ago by telephone. This time it will be a two-hour debate with a rabbi, head to head. I pack up the car and drive across Indiana to Youngstown. It’s a three-hour drive. I find the little studio outside town and when I walk in I discover the rabbi has changed his mind. Michael Young had such an eventuality covered. He had arranged for two “backups” for the rabbi. At the last minute, they can’t make it either. I do a one-hour interview with Young, then drive the three hours back to Monongahela. The tour is over.

WEDNESDAY. Say goodbye to the Provans and drive to Pittsburgh where I return the car. There’s a problem with the US Air ticket and they try to get $560 from me for the return flight. Not possible. I call the travel office in Cleveland that arranged the round trip originally and in the end have to pay eighty dollars. Provan has offered to ship some of my accumulated stuff to Visalia by UPS so I have only three bags with me. It’s bitter cold. The flight is boring, as they always are for me. Late this afternoon in Los Angeles the temperature is 68 degrees. Wonderful. I catch a flight to Fresno. In Fresno I can’t find my ride. I call his house but he’s not there. Now I discover the Greyhound people are out on strike. I’m very tired. I pay a cab driver seventy-five dollars to drive me to Visalia. It’s about forty-five miles.

Three month’s work. One video to show for it. It was a good idea. It was a fine idea. It just didn’t work. So far, I haven’t done anything that’s really worked. Eleven years.

Chapter Eighteen

One night in late December I dream that I’ve been gassed at Auschwitz. In the dream, as I become aware of myself inside the gas chamber, the gassing itself is already over. I see myself sitting naked in the center of the floor; the room around me choked with naked cadavers heaped to the ceiling. The dead are filthy with feces, urine, vomit and menstrual blood. The scene is faintly illuminated in an ugly green light.

I’m not dead and I’m not suffering. Before I have time to evaluate my situation two large doors at the rear of the chamber are thrown open and there, revealed against a somber gray sky, is the gang of work-Jews, the sondercommandos as they are called in the literature. They are ready to begin their filthy labor of dragging out the dead, searching the mouths and rectums and even the vaginas of their murdered families and friends for diamonds and gold. Soon they will be using iron tools to pry open the mouths of their slaughtered children to search for contraband. It is these same work-Jews who will drag the violated cadavers to the crematory ovens. Then, as this sordid story has it, they will grind the very bones of their wives and children until their gravel can be disposed of in the Vistula. They will do this contemptible work to gain another week, another day, another hour of life for themselves.

There are about a dozen workers in the sondercommando. They’re on the short side, stocky in build, dressed in shabby clothes and billed caps. They looked like men you have seen in photographs of Jewish immigrants in the streets of the Lower East Side in New York City after the turn of the century. The workers appear to be posing there in the doorway, turning this way and that as if modeling themselves for me. They give off an air of self-satisfaction, of self-importance even. Some are smoking cigarettes and I notice that they are all barehanded. None is wearing a gas mask.

When I wake from the dream I feel stunned. I can still see the individual faces of the work gang as they pose before the open gas chamber doors. They have the faces of ordinary working class Jews. In my mind’s eye I can still see the piles of corpses heaped up in their own filth. I think about what it is the work-Jews are going to do next, according to the story. I don’t just think about it. I see it. And it’s at this moment of seeing when I know, once again, I am going to do something about the Holocaust story.

I’m lying on my pad on the floor in the front room of Mother’s apartment. The first light of day is edging the drawn window blinds. I go on seeing the faces of the work Jews posing in the open gas chamber doorway. I know in my heart, without reservation, that those men would not have done what it is claimed they did. I’ve worked and lived among such men and their children for twenty-five years. They would not have done it.

Once maybe. Twice. A handful of them. But not all of them. Not day after day, week after week, month after month. They would not have done it. The gas chamber story is a lie. For half a century I have observed historians all over the world work to help legitimate the injustice, repression and lies of the orthodoxies for which they toil. At the same time I have seen artists from every discipline protest all that and cry out for liberty, truth and generosity. How could it have come about that I would chose to join with the historians all those years in a silent pact to repeat and even to exploit the lies and platitudes used to institutionalize as truth the alleged genocide of the Jews? Human-skin lamp shades, hand soap made from cooked Jews, Jewish babies thrown alive into raging furnaces, millions of people exterminated like animals and all of it proven by State decree, State courts seething with corruption and the usual army of bought bureaucrats and corrupt intellectuals. I’d bought it all, and as an artist I’d used it all.

No more. Four months earlier, when I had read the Robert Faurisson’s article about the “problem” of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, I had felt in my bones that something was badly wrong. Faurisson claimed that the gas chamber stories and the genocide of the Jews are one and the same historic lie. I had felt an immediate and deep anxiety that he might be right. The news didn’t make me happy, it made me fearful. It made my hands sweat.

Faurisson’s paper turned on a statement made by Rudolf Hoess, the SS colonel who claimed to have dreamed up the Auschwitz gas chambers, overseen their construction and murdered millions of victims in them, mostly Jews. In his confession Hoess wrote that after the gassings took place the work-Jews would enter the gas chambers “immediately” to drag out the dead. They would do this while “eating and smoking.” If they were eating and smoking, Faurisson wrote, it was unlikely they were wearing gas masks. But if they were going to enter the gas chamber immediately after a mass gassing Faurisson believed they would have had to use gas masks with special filters or be “gassed” themselves. This alone suggested to Faurisson that Hoess didn’t know diddly about mass gassings with Zyklon B, his poison gas of choice, and that his famous gas-chamber confession was the invention of a tortured mind. We hadn’t yet learned that Hoess, after his capture by British military intelligence, had in fact been tortured to obtain his confession.

I remember how thought wouldn’t let go of Faurisson’s thesis. It was doing a wild dance inside my skull. Thought wouldn’t go along with it either. It wouldn’t make a decision. It was like having an insane bee in my bonnet. Endless movement but no destination. Then thought did what it sometimes does with me. One night while I was asleep, thought went underground as it were. Thought treated me the way it treats children and other primitives, putting its argument into pictures so that I would see clearly what I had been unable to assure myself rationally. The pictures convinced me that it was all right, that it was good to doubt what I had begun to doubt.

In that stupefying first moment of recognition, I knew in my heart that the faces in the dream would not do what the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz claimed they had done. They would not eat their sandwiches and smoke their cigarettes with hands slimy with the blood and shit of their murdered families and neighbors. They would not jam their filthy fingers into the vaginas and rectums of their dead little girls to search for jewels and coins for their German bosses while enjoying a fag and a snack. The story was a lie. It was a lie even if “eyewitnesses” themselves repeated it. It was a lie. My heart told me that it absolutely had to be a lie. The dream was a powerful aesthetic experience. It was the quality of the pictures that moved me to finally go to the library that week, the last afternoon in December 1979, and confirm some of Faurisson’s claims.

Argument alone had left me uneasy. There’s no end to argument. A new thought, new information is always turning argument back on itself. There’s no end to it. At the same time, you have to make decisions. Little leaps of faith. Faurisson’s argument had stirred things up for me but it was the direct experience of the dream that forced me to admit that I at least half-suspected it was possible that he was right and that Hoess had lied about himself, the Jews and the SS too. The dream went beyond doubting, beyond a movement of the intellect. It permeated the whole body. There was completeness to it that thought can’t produce. It was a holistic experience. Thought and its tools of doubt and fear were overwhelmed. Still, if it wasn’t thought that caused me to see through the gas chamber hoax, what was it? It would seem that intellection is only one of several means of expression in thought’s kit bag.

So I became a Holocaust revisionist because of a dream. Without the dream, who knows? I might still be evading my responsibilities as an artist and as a man. I didn’t tell anybody about the dream, and after awhile I half-forgot about it. There are thousands of books and countless articles written by respected academics and survivors demonstrating that both Jews and Germans did what they are accused of doing in the camps. I suppose I wasn’t really very eager to challenge the history of the 20th century on the grounds that I had seen through it in a dream.

Some artists pride themselves on their uniqueness. I rest secure in my ordinariness, my vulgarity and ignorance, my insensitivity to the social standards of the day. I excuse my careless intellectual life with Whitman’s observation that while his words may mean nothing, the drift of them means everything. Where are the human-skin lampshades? You don’t have to be a historian to ask that question. You can ask it if you are only an artist. Where are the human skin riding breeches, the boots, the saddles, gloves and pornographic books made from human skin that are reported by “survivors” in documents signed, sealed and delivered to the Nuremberg court? Where are they?

We don’t have to be geniuses to ask these questions. We don’t have to be historians-or artists. We only have to be willing. Not asking the questions has been of small consequence to our historians, who routinely avoid doing such work as part of their perceived obligation to those who pay and oversee them. For we artists, however, our collaboration with the State in the promotion of the gas-chamber lie has been a catastrophe. It has coarsened our sensibilities and vulgarized our art. We have made ourselves invulnerable before those who played the role of our enemies in the past. We have encouraged neurosis and other sicknesses of character in those we have chosen to sympathize with, no matter what.

With the Holocaust story as with no other we have closed off our artist-minds and our artist-hearts to the accused. Even in law, that clumsy attempt to formalize the ideals of the good and the just in everyday life, the accused is innocent until proven guilty. Where are the human skin lampshades? Where is the soap made of Jewish fat? Where is the documentation that proves the soap? Where is there a single scientific or scholarly paper that demonstrates that the pesticide Zyklon B did what is claimed for it in the manner that’s claimed for it? Who do we make our art for if it does not embrace the accused, the vanquished and the despised?

More subtly, more insidiously perhaps for the artist, we have closed our selves off from the accusers as well as the accused. Denying “survivors” the benefit of our rationality and the delicateness of our sensibilities, we have denied them our full humanity and the burden of it. We respond to survivors, to the “eyewitnesses” with- Yes! Yes! We believe you. Absolutely! Every word of it! Not one of you has ever exaggerated an important story, merely imagined an atrocity! Not one among you has ever lied or ever would! Not one of you has ever revenged yourself on a stranger for what was done to you by another or allegedly done to others! You are a survivor, perfect in the truth. In your virtue, you are like no other!

Can Jewish cadavers really spurt geysers of blood from their graves for months after they are buried? Of course they can! At Buchenwald did German SS really throw a Jew into a cage every morning where a bear would eat him and his bones would be picked clean by an eagle? Yes! Yes! At Auschwitz did Jewish fathers really take their sons by the hand and leap into flaming ditches to be burned alive? Did the work-Jews, to save their own miserable lives for another day, really attend to the cremation fires by basting their families and neighbors with ladles of Jewish fat? Yes, of course they did! Of course!

For half a century we have said Yes! to such stories and a thousand like them. For half a century we have camouflaged our baseness as artists in expressions of empathy for the tellers of these unspeakable lies. We know-it’s our business to know-that every misrepresentation of human life made by a so-called survivor, as by anyone else, becomes a moral burden on the falsifier himself. With our mindless acceptance of false accusation against Germans and our heartless sympathy for those Jews who repeat them, we have made of ourselves the thieves of their virtue. There must be a very special place in Artist Hell for a generation of men and women who have done what we have done.

Who can argue that artists of every discipline do not promote the orthodox Holocaust story? Our television, our cinema, our stages are run over with fake Holocaust drama. Our novels and memoirs are full of it. Our universities and even our high schools employ the arts to urge Holocaustomania onto our children. Our poets poeticize over the Holocaust, our painters paint it, our sculptors sculpt it, while great philanthropist-thieves chat up the funding of a Holocaust ballet so that our dance artists can at last express themselves about the Holocaust.

Our scholars co-mingle with our artists to thrive on the holocaust story, using it to illustrate their speculations and support their politics. The holocaust is universally perceived among our intellectual elites to be the most morally significant story of the 20th century. Every citizen is expected to know the outline of the story and have a clear understanding of who the villains and particularly who the heroes are-the victorious allied governments. No less can be expected of the artist, and in the event we have dedicated ourselves to the project with all our fervor. Where is there a single artist in this great nation of 250 millions who has not gone along with whatever charge of filthy criminality and moral debasement has appeared in the press about Germans and Jews alike? Where is there a single artist among us who has not substituted the theories of the intellectuals for his own direct experience when making art about the Holocaust? Where has one artist among us made one artistic statement about the alleged genocide of the Jews that does not stand in conformity with the State and the State factotums responsible for overseeing State policy on this issue?

One of the things I do as a writer is to use my art to stand witness to the intellectual and moral corruption of the society in which I live. I do no more or less than artists of every discipline have always done. It’s what is expected of us, and it’s especially what we expect of ourselves. But am I not being insensitive to the feelings of Jews, I am asked? I respond that Jewish feelings are no particular concern for me. I’m an artist. My responsibility is to human feeling, human sensibilities. The German bleeds from the thrust of a lie just as the Jew does.

The Great Debate on the Holocaust that’s beginning to rumble around through the countryside is being organized and implemented by citizens from every walk of life, excepting academics, media intellectuals and artists. Long-haul truck drivers, computer programmers, sci-fi enthusiasts, engineers, pilots, plumbers, house framers and housewives, small time journalists, country preachers, retired machinery salesmen, bankers- the list is more varied than our artists have any idea of. Artists in this country haven’t a hint yet that with respect to the holocaust story they have chosen to stand with the intellectuals against the people. Artists pretend they’ve been thinking about all this, content to believe that the professors have given us the real skinny on the holocaust. The State and those who serve it to serve it ourselves have intimidated us, and to make our art from images created by others.

What is so powerful in being an artist is that you don’t have to wait. Unlike the historian, it isn’t necessary for you to undo what has gone before. You don’t have to set old records straight. You don’t have to disprove yesterday’s truths in order to tell your own truth today. In the passion of the moment the artist tells the truth of the moment. Our history and our museums become irrelevant in that instant of passionate impulse. Afterward, history and the museums will take care of themselves, moving slowly in the direction of least resistance.

Was I wrong yesterday? Did I do something I regret? It’s all right! In this very moment I’ll right myself. In this moment I will make art that will uplift and liberate us all. I’ll make it for the accused and the accursed, for the shamed and for the guilty too and for those who are wrong about everything and all the rest. None of us is wrong about everything. I’ll make something even the rich, successful and influential can use. I’ll make art that’s good for the bigots. I identify with bigots of every persuasion for my art has taught me that when your mind is closed to some you are unable to open your heart to all and you are lost to the joy an open heart brings and to the quiet movement of ecstasy that comes with the full experience of brotherhood.

Am I going to be wrong about something on this very day? Am I going to do something stupid or vulgar, something I’ll regret? You can almost bet your ass on it. But I’m an artist. I don’t have the right to remain silent about what I’ve seen. So stand aside. Tell the professorial class and the holocaust hate industry to stand aside too. I’m making art. Their reputations are doomed. I’m making art for the people, without qualification.

Chapter Nineteen

Just as Auschwitz is the centerpiece of the Holocaust cult in Europe, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. is the focal point of the cult in North America. No one ever doubted that it would be. The President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, spoke at the opening festivities, condemning Holocaust revisionism while he was at it. His speech was written by Norman Podhoretz’s boy, the senior Podhoretz being the longtime editor of the interesting and influential Jewish ethnic monthly, Commentary,

When the Museum opened I believed it would become the organizing instrument around which the Holocaust controversy could focus. That the standing of the cult itself would be increasingly and irreversibly linked to the perception of the cult that the public would have after touring the Museum or talking to others who had. The Museum would provide revisionists with a focus for promoting an open debate that we could never have provided by ourselves.

With the details of the Holocaust story exhibited on the walls and in the glass cases of the Museum, the story could no longer be obfuscated and mystified in the isolated sanctuaries of universities, and in the endless river of media junk stories focused on a nexus of unique German bestiality. What would be there in the Museum would be there, what wasn’t there wouldn’t be there, and there would be no escape from either one or the other, either for the Museum or for revisionism,

I believed that a continuing, growing interest in revisionist theory would depend on the dialogue, the debate, which would ensue over the museum’s exhibits and how they were interpreted. Not on condemnations of the Museum as a Zionist plot to destroy Western culture, but on the response of revisionists to what would be exhibited in the Museum, to the context in which the exhibits were displayed, and to the importance of relevant materials that might have been omitted from the exhibits.

The Museum would either exhibit proof of the extermination “gassing chambers” or it wouldn’t. It wasn’t complicated. If the proof were there, the Holocaust happened like the cult, and the Holocaust Industry it had spawned, argue that it happened. If the proof wasn’t there, the version of the Holocaust story they had promoted would be seen as an intellectual and cultural fraud. This would be do or die for the Industry. It would be do or die for revisionist theory. Revisionism would either reach increasingly broad public audiences through its response to the museum’s exhibits, or the public would ignore revisionist research because of its reasonable perception that the Museum’s exhibits displayed proof of the gas chambers, thus proof of the orthodox Holocaust story.

Because of these and other factors that were associated with the Museum, I decided that I would make the Museum the focus of my attention. The Museum’s exhibits, the Museum’s publications, the people who managed the project that created the Museum, spokespersons for the Museum, and how the museum would be written about by media and scholars. I had been waiting for the Museum’s opening impatiently, eager to get on with the work, unable to move forward with the project until I saw the thing itself. As is often the case with my enthusiasms, I overstated the importance of the Museum with regard to the Holocaust story itself, and overstated its importance to the revisionist struggle to get the story into accord with the facts.

Oddly, the week the Museum opened, while I was still in California, I received a call from a producer at WFTL radio in Ft. Lauderdale-Miami. I was offered the chance to be interviewed on the Al Rantel show along with Professor Michael Berenbaum, Project Director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. We would be on a conference call, the professor would be in his offices in Washington D.C., myself on the horn from Visalia, California. I was rather taken aback by the coincidence of the call, and why the project director of the USHMM would want to go on the air with me. What did he have to gain?

Al Rantel’s producer explained (with rather more satisfaction than was necessary it seemed to me) that Berenbaum was the author of eight books, most of them on the Holocaust, and scores of scholarly articles. On top of that, he was also the author of the coffee table book titled The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust As Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This is the book that represents the Museum itself. It’s the book everyone will buy when they visit the Museum and take back home and display prominently for their guests to see. Its pages follow the actual Museum tour and contain much of the text and photographs that, I learned later, you actually see when you take the tour. So Berenbaum would know everything about the Museum when we did the broadcast, while I would know nothing about it.

I had done a lot of radio during the mid and late 1980s, I hadn’t done much in several years. I hadn’t seen the Museum yet, I hadn’t read any of Berenbaum’s books, not even the one on the Museum. So the morning of the interview I rose from my slumbers two hours early and boned up on the story. If Berenbaum could spend most of his adult Ph.D. life producing books and scholarly articles about the “German Holocaust” (the expression I later found used on the back cover of his Museum book), it seemed prudent to me to pass a couple hours getting my radio and TV interview notes in order.

When the time came, and I was already on an open line with Al Rantel, Professor Berenbaum could not be found, so Rantel, who later identified himself as being Jewish, interviewed me solo. With regard to the Museum, I had only one point I wanted to make. If the Museum exhibited proof that homicidal gassing chambers existed at Auschwitz I would find that very interesting, but if it did not exhibit proof that gas chambers existed at Auschwitz, the Museum would have to be seen as a 150-million-dollar fraud, paid for my U.S. taxpayers. I had one question for Professor Michael Berenbaum. The people who ran the Auschwitz Museum had recently decided that it was not true that the Germans had murdered four million people at Auschwitz, but something like one million. My questions was: where were three million murdered victims of Auschwitz who had not been murdered after all, and where had they been for the last forty years? And of course I argued that an open debate on these matters would shed more light on the Holocaust story than the suppression and censorship of open debate. Nothing new.

For his part, Professor Berenbaum appeared to be playing some kind of game. He came on the show late, said that he could not hear what I was saying, but one time uncontrollably jumped into the middle of something I was saying. He refused to have any back and forth with me, stating that it was his policy to not discuss anything with “deniers,” the standard maneuver of those who represent the Holocaust Industry and cannot afford to discuss matters openly. He would listen to what I had to say, then maneuver to have the last word. Everything for Berenbaum was maneuver. He blamed the false four-million-murdered figure at Auschwitz on the Poles, Jews had nothing to do with it, although the figure had been used for decades by Jewish ethnic special interests and the professorial class as a whole, to slander Germans. It’s similar to how the human soap story was being handled. Now that the story was recognized to have been a fraud, Germans were being accused of starting the rumor that it was true.

In the end, it was just another radio interview, reminding me of the reasons I had stopped doing them. The project director for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum mouthed the same platitudes, used and misused and omitted the same information that I had heard so many hundreds of times before. At one point he asked me if I was familiar with his work. When I said I wasn’t he became agitated, saying that he had read my published work. The only book I had published was Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist, a text of literary journalism. And then there were the texts of a couple large advertisements that I had run in student newspapers in universities around the country. While he had read my book, and maybe the ads, he had nothing to say about any of it. That was his chance. Berenbaum could have used all the expertise represented in his eight books and uncounted scholarly articles to demonstrate to our listening audience that I had published errors of fact either in the book or the ads. But that might have caused an exchange of ideas to occur. He wouldn’t want that. He said had already said he wouldn’t want it. So he didn’t get it. That’s how professors manipulate the Holocaust question in public.

Over the next few weeks my initial enthusiasm over the Holocaust Museum slipped away. I had heard about the Museum from other revisionists who had toured it and I did not expect to see anything that would particularly interest me or surprise me. I was already terminally bored with the focus on the cult on Jewish suffering, and I didn’t want another big dose of it. Nevertheless, I had told everyone I would go, so I went. I’m very glad I did. The exhibits were considerably more interesting than I had expected them to be, and I experienced something I would never have expected to experience.

The day before I left I sent a press release to major media outlets in the Washing-ton-New York area announcing my imminent arrival in Washington, my plans to travel to New York, and my availability for interviews. The primary statement in the release was a question:

Is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum “A necessary, civilizing memorial” [Time magazine] or a 150-million-dollar monument to vulgarity and fraud?

The second part of the release was a letter (printed below) to the Museum’s permanent exhibit director, Raye Farr, asking five pertinent questions. The third part was a copy of “The Holocaust Controversy The Case for Open Debate,” the article that had caused such a scandal in the university system and the prestige press when I ran it as a newspaper advertisement student newspapers at colleges and universities around the country the year before.

Arriving in Washington I rented a car, a hotel room in Crystal City, which across the river from Washington and less expensive, and called home to Visalia to pick up the responses from media. There was nothing. I was surprised and I wasn’t surprised. I’d been blacked out on Washington D.C. radio and TV for six years and largely blacked out in New York for five years, so I wasn’t surprised. But I was in Washington, all those media people know more or less who I am and what I do, and I was there to talk about a hot story and I had at least half-believed that this time I would get through. The travails of a hopeless optimist.

The note I addressed to Raye Farr, permanent exhibit director for the Museum, and included in the press release, briefly listed the four questions that I would have liked to have answers to. They were not new questions or questions that I thought up on the spur of the moment. They were the questions revisionists have been asking for years:

Is there one or more exhibits in the Museum that demonstrates that there was an order or a plan to exterminate the European Jews?

Does the Museum exhibit proof that there was a budget worked out to pay the costs for such an immense mass murder?

Which of the displays in the Museum exhibit proof that the gassing chambers actually existed.

And what displays in the Museum prove that one man, women or child was murdered in a homicidal gas chamber?

Somehow, I sent the Raye Farr letter to everyone on my media list in Washington except Farr herself. I was still in Visalia when I discovered this little oversight, so I rang up Ms. Farr at her office, introduced myself and asked for her fax number so I could get the letter to her right away. She was very nice, gave me the number, and I tried for two days and nights to fax her the materials but I couldn’t get through. In the end I did not think that it was entirely coincidence. By the time I arrived in Washington I suppose she had gotten copies of the questions from two or three dozen media and other sources. It is certain that Farr and everyone else at the Museum knew how to reach me. But no one reached me.

At 7am on the morning of 27 May I walked into the lobby of the Crystal City Marriot Hotel, took the escalator down to the underground and rode under the Potomac River to the 15th street exit. Up on the surface, I soon found myself on the Washington Mall. I’d never been there. The dimensions of the green were more impressive than I had thought them to be. There was a casualness to it all that I found pleasant. The walks were of brown sand and gravel. The grass was cared for but accessible, as if you are invited to use the green, to walk on it and sit on it, not just look at it.

I wasn’t sure how to get to the Museum. There weren’t many people about. I asked six different people where the Museum was before I found someone who knew. The first five were White guys. The guy who knew was Black. I wondered if there were the suggestion of some sociological significance there. Probably not. I expected the Museum to front on the Mall itself but it’s two blocks off the green. It is, indeed, “beneath the shadow” of the Washington Monument, but so are the U.S. Department of Agriculture and half a dozen other uninspiring buildings. I think too much has been made of the “location” issue, which is different from the issues of government sponsorship, the dishonest financing, etc., etc.

It was not quite 8am when I arrived at the Museum to stand in the modest line that trailed back alongside the building. By 10am, when the exhibit opens, the line led back a quarter mile and turned a corner out of sight. While we waited I did a kind of ethnic survey of those in line and those passing by to reach the end of it. About half appeared to be Jewish. There were four or five Blacks, a half dozen Asians and maybe a couple Latinos. The rest appeared to be Gentile tourists from all over the country.

By 10am I had my tickets and in a few minutes my friend Hans Schmidt met me at the front entrance. Schmidt is older than me and is a veteran of the German Waffen SS who fought on the Eastern front against the Soviets, where he was wounded, and in the Battle of the Bulge against the Americans. We took the elevator to the fifth floor and when the doors opened we stepped out into a modest room where the one thing we could view was an immense black and white photographic mural covering the entire wall facing us, maybe eighteen feet across and reaching from close to the floor almost to the ceiling. It pictured a smoldering pyre of logs and fifteen or twenty half-consumed corpses. In the background are a similar number of American Gils looking on, their hands in their pockets, unintelligible expressions on the faces. It’s a powerful photograph, revealing a terrible event. The technical quality of this singular graphic display is top notch. The caption reads:

American soldiers in front of calcinated corpses of concentration camp inmates. Ohrdruf, Germany, April 1945. National Archives, Washington, D.C.

And here we have the primary exhibition concept of the Museum from top to bottom. A startling photograph enlarged into a powerful mural presented in a stunning manner and, at the same time, entirely out of context, intentionally misleading, dishonest and finally base.

The viewer is not told, for example, who the people are in the photo that have been cremated. Were they Jews? How do we know? If they were not Jews, who were they? If they weren’t Jews, what significance does the display have? We are not told how they died. Did they do something naughty for which they were executed? If so, what did they do? Was their punishment cruel or unusual? Or were they victims of disease? If so, was an effort made to treat them? Did their sickness take place in a context where it was impossible to treat them? In any event, why were the bodies burned rather than buried? Did the victims die of exposure? How do we know? Did they die of malnutrition? Were the victims worked to death? How do we know? Did the Germans create this grisly scene as a photo op for the U.S. Signal Corps, or did they have something else in mind? What does the exhibit tell us about any of this? Does it matter? More importantly, what does the use of the photograph, and the way it is used, tell us about the Museum?

The Museum doesn’t answer any of these questions and doesn’t attempt to. It presents the graphic display with verve and virtuosity and allows the viewer to “fit it in” to his pre-formed understanding of what happened during the “Holocaust,” which the Museum directors are betting is the orthodox understanding promoted so heavily and with so much money and propaganda. This approach, a repetition of one interesting and even powerful and sometimes horrible graphic display after another, either entirely out of context or in a highly debatable or even straightforwardly dishonest one, makes up the five-floor display of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

There was almost nothing in the Museum of any value other than the photographs and some print graphics from the same era. I understood from the get-go that I was touring a museum organized around a crooked cultural and political scam. At the same time, the photographs were real and endlessly interesting. As I went from display to display I became immersed in the pictorial record of the destruction of one Jewish community after another by the German State. I ignored as best I could the one-sided context and dishonest interpretations that accompanied the photographs. The photographs were very real. I began to feel the terrible anguish that Jews felt when they experienced the sudden destruction of their homes, their family life, their communities, their cultural presence in city after city, nation after nation.

As I continued the tour-and there is simply too much material on exhibit for me to try to even outline it for you here-as I witnessed a pictorial history of the terrible catastrophe of the European Jews during the Hitlerian regime, I grew increasingly aware of how each photograph condemned Western culture. At the same time there was no compassion whatever for the awful catastrophes suffered by Christians and other Gentiles. No historical aware-ness, and no desire to express an awareness, that all the peoples of Europe were failed and betrayed by their leaders and suffered great catastrophes. This gross failure of sensibility, together with the dishonest historical context where lying by omission is clearly the rule rather than the exception, gradually created an environment that was suffocating.

The Museum is about Jews and nothing else, Jews from beginning to end and those who mistreated Jews or are accused of mistreating Jews. Jews as the centerpiece of World War II. Jews as historically the most significant people of the 20th century. Jews as role models for all others. Jews as victims, victims, victims but never as victimizers. The complete suppression of the Jewish role and Jewish players in the gigantic upheavals and turmoil of 20th century Europe. The message of the Museum is that everybody everywhere hates Jews and wants to murder Jews but that everywhere Jews are innocent of all wrongdoing. It’s a childish point of view, but when so much money and so much influence can be pumped into it, it can be an insidious one too.

This is a museum that follows the rules that all historical museums would follow in a totalitarian state. No other people in America, so long as we remain a relatively free society, would even think of creating an exhibition like this one. Absolutely shameless in its propagandizing, shamelessly presenting its exhibits in isolation from the relevant historical context, incorrigibly insensitive to all peoples but those people related to themselves by blood and culture, and without any intelligible need to tell the truth-any other people in America trying to establish a museum like this one would be hooted out of town. In the old days they would have been candidates for being tarred and feathered and ridden out on a rail. All that said, a little surprise was waiting for me.

My main interest was in seeing what the Museum exhibited to prove the “gas chambers.” There were three significant items in the gas chamber exhibit:

a) an aerial photograph of Birkenau from the National Archives in Washington which we have all had access to for years and doesn’t contain any proof whatever for gas chambers or even any evidence for them;

b) a plastic model of a metal door from a standard disinfestation chamber at Majdanek, the sort of structure that was used in German camps all over Europe to fight disease;

c) a plastic model of an artist’s conception of the morgue and cremation facilities known as Krema II which here is labeled as one of four “killing installations” at Birkenau.

The evidence for gas chambers at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum was pathetically weak and vacuous. The plastic model of Krema II on display in Washington is a copy of the plastic model that’s displayed at Auschwitz. The original was created from the imagination of Mieczyslaw Stobierski, a Polish artist who we are told based his creation on documents and on the testimonies of SS guards. Stobierski has used his imagination to sculpt scores of little figurines inside this “killing installation.” He has sculpted imaginary scenes of his imaginary people being prepared for an imaginary “gassing,” shows them actually being “gassed,” and then their little corpses being disposed of afterwards. If you have nothing real, you might as well hire an artiste.

And there you have it. That was more or less what I had expected to see as “proofs” of the gassing chambers. That’s why I didn’t much want to spend the money to go there to start with. I had lost faith entirely in the capacity of these people to put together anything whatever about gas chambers that could prove to be interesting. So why bother schlepping around the country pretending that I might actually see something? Those were my thoughts as I continued on my way through the rest of the exhibits. And it was then that I was taken a little by surprise.

I was in that part of the exhibit titled “The Last Chapter.” It covers the liberation of the camps, includes some of the terrible photographs we have been shown so many times and a few I hadn’t seen, and has one section titled simply, “Children.” The standard claim is repeated that the Nazis murdered a million Jewish children “in their attempt to achieve ‘The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.’” You can’t escape from the distress of seeing photographs of children who are suffering or who have been mistreated but when you’ve been shown the photos for 40 years or so, and you begin to realize why you are being shown them so often, you tend to rather take them in stride.

Then I before an enlarged photo of the head and shoulders of one poorly dressed man holding a little girl. The caption read:

“Father and daughter in the Warsaw ghetto. Warsaw, Poland.”

Bundesarchiv, Koblenz, Germany.

The father is a thin, black-eyed, hook-nosed, sunken-cheeked specimen with big ears that in the photo look pointed. He’s wearing a cheap woolen coat or jacket with the collar turned up against the cold, and a style of billed cap that I have seen in other photos of central and eastern Europeans. His scrubby face looks like it hasn’t been shaved for a week or two. He’s looking uncertainly to his left from the corner of his eye at something we can’t see. His expression is apprehensive, distrustful, perhaps fearful. We don’t really know.

The little girl appears to be wrapped around in cheap woolen blanket. She’s wearing a kerchief so that you can’t see her hair, but we can see her face clearly in three-quarter profile. She has dark eyes like her father but pretty features. She’s going to be considerably more attractive than her daddy, if she survives. Her head is lying against her father’s shoulder, almost touching the side of his face. Her eyes are open and she appears to be looking in the same direction as her father, but there is no suggestion in her expression that she sees anything to worry about. She’s resting, she’s comfortable, and her daddy will take care of everything for her. She’s absolutely convinced of it. He always has and he always will.

As I stand looking at the photo I feel a movement of anguish well up in me that even there among the other onlookers I can’t keep down. I feel wracked with the pain of a father facing death or maybe something worse holding his little girl in his arms who is comfortable and content and who trusts him utterly to protect her and stay with her and never let her go while he knows it is out of his hands, that she is going to share his fate and there is nothing he can do about it and at the moment his fate looks very bad. I’m unable to suppress my feelings, to stop the tears, and I duck into a men’s room to get a hold on myself.

I’m not a kid any longer. I understand something of the mechanics of what goes down in these little incidents. After all, I have a little girl myself. She lays her head on my shoulder just like the girl in the photo because she loves me and knows that when she’s with me she is safe and that it is unimaginable that anything can go wrong. But I’m standing on thin ice, just like the man in the photo. I’m not in the Warsaw ghetto but I’ve been on thin ice for a long time now. I accept it and like to joke about it but I understand too that at any moment something or someone can break the ice and I can go down and my little girl might well go down with me, along with the rest of us. It’s the awareness of that kind of uncertainty, rooted in the lack of a regular income, the hostility and contempt of almost everyone for the work I do, the loss of old and even lifelong friends, the feeling of alienation that is irreparable, the threat of violence that’s always in the background and so on and so forth that creates the anxiety. This little bundle of anxieties isn’t focused on any one present danger, so it “floats,” and at odd moments will suddenly fix itself onto something or someone that you would never have predicted it would choose-for example, a photograph of a Jewish father holding his little girl on a street in the Warsaw ghetto half a century ago-and that’s the moment when suddenly something is out of your hands and you make a fool of yourself in a public place.

There are many photographs of similar power and beauty in the exhibition. Simple, directly conceived, humane images of Jewish life in central Europe, which we now view with our understanding of the terrible impending doom that was waiting just beyond the reach of the camera’s lens. But the beauty and power of the photographs have been co-opted by transparent Jewish chauvinists intent on condemning Germans for bestial crimes the Museum cannot demonstrate were committed. Because of these failures, and other similar failures, the Museum illustrates a crude exercise in special-interest ethnic propaganda intended to convince us, as is clear in its final exhibits, that after World War II the Jewish invasion of Palestine was morally legitimate. That’s the cheap, final, historical message of the Museum.

Chapter Twenty

I’ve invented a kind of chess game in which those who are naturally disposed toward intolerance and a closed mind have chosen to be my perennial opponents. Rather than rules to play by, there’s a process during which each player makes up his or her own rules as the game progresses. No player has the authority, or the ability, to change the rules his opponent operates under, though it’s possible for any player to influence the moves of any other player. Those aren’t rules, it’s just how the game is played. It’s like life that way.

The play begins with the start of each academic year and continues through to the following summer when each player decides for himself if the game is over, and if so, who won and who lost. I like to play the game, my opponents don’t though they feel they must, so each year it’s up to me to make the first move. My goal, and all my subsequent play, is to find a way to create a context on college campuses in which the Jewish holocaust controversy can be addressed through free inquiry and open debate. The goal of my opponents-who foolishly see me as their enemy-is to suppress free inquiry and open debate. They appear to be afraid that intellectual freedom promises something to me that it will withhold from them. How is that possible? Intellectual freedom shines its light on one and all, those who have been through the universities and those of us who have not.

I don’t choose who will become my opponents in the game, each one chooses on his or her own to participate. Among those who claim to speak for the Holocaust industry, Campus Hillel is always anxious to enter the play, followed by humanities professors, particularly those in history, English, and Jewish studies and, often as not, university chancellors and presidents. Off-campus, the players representing censorship and an intolerance of intellectual freedom is typically led by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL), or, as we who play the game say, The Jewish Defamation League.

My ads focus on challenging the Holocaust industry where it lives and breathes-on college and university campuses. How can it be demonstrated that Germans used homicidal “gassing chambers” during WWII to kill millions of Jews as part of a plan of ethnic “genocide?” Can it be shown that key “eyewitness” survivors give false testimony about gas chambers and many other things? Is the Diary of Anne Frank an authentic personal diary or a “literary” work? Are the events described in Schindler’s List (the novel or the movie) true, or are they fiction based on a vulgar misrepresentation of the facts? Are mainline Jewish organizations like the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League committed to the undermining of the First Amendment and the ideal of Intellectual freedom? Does the ADL and other organizations representing the Holocaust Industry remain silent when a sister organization encourages violence against revisionists? And so on. It’s a real laundry list.

ADL literature informs us that the organization was founded to protest anti-Jewish bigotry in America, a worthwhile liberal endeavor. When the ADL discovers my game of intellectual freedom being played out in campus newspapers however, a liberal pursuit itself, ADL responds as a regressive political and cultural force driven by men and women who act out the roles of transparent Jewish chauvinists. They do no more than the rest of those organizations and individuals who swell the ranks of the Holocaust Industry.

Everywhere I submit my proposal for an open debate on the Jewish holocaust controversy-a proposal which asks that those with money, influence and access to a free press allow those of us who have no money and no influence access to it-I find ADL and other Industry agents working like ferrets behind the scenes and under the tables to convince student journalists that the ideal of a free press is not what the Founding Fathers were convinced it was. Rather, Industry spokespersons argue that the highest ideal of a free press would be to print nothing that is not vetted first by the Industry.

The game I am pursuing is not one where I demand that access to a free press be taken from those who have it now and given to those of us who have been denied it in the past. That’s the deal the tyrant makes. My play is based on the understanding that the ideal of a free press is not devisable, that those who have access to it now should continue to have access to it, while those who have been denied access in the past should be allowed to have it now. I am not going to exchange one tyranny for another.

The Industry makers and shakers, along with those in media and the universities who follow the Industry line, play a very different game. They argue that intellectual freedom is in fact divisible, that some should be allowed it while others should not, depending on who has what perspective on which issue. It only follows that when it comes to the growing controversy over the Jewish holocaust story, the Industry people argue that that is exactly where intellectual freedom must end, where a free press must become a controlled press.

Because we still live in the remnants of a free society, however, the so-called “Anti-Defamation” League, or any of the myriad other organizations and individuals that operate under the umbrella of the Holocaust Industry and specialize in defaming those with whom they have disagreements, can not do as they do in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria and other nations. They cannot call on the State to imprison those of us who do not follow the Industry line, which has become the State line on the Jewish holocaust story. Unable to use the US government to censor revisionist theory, and unwilling to participate in an open debate either, the Industry, led by the ADL, has an unparalleled record in the use of smear, slander and character assassination to destroy the reputations of those of us who chose to say we doubt what we no longer believe.

Industry agents refer to me as “racist,” “Nazi,” “neo-Nazi,” as “scum,” an “anti-Semite,” an “apologist for Hitler,” They claim that I “distort” and even “fabricate” history, that I am making an “assault on truth and memory,” In short, the Industry has adopted the smear and slander strategies that Jews formally suffered under in the old Central and Eastern European societies from which they fled to gain the benefits of our new, free society. These ADL-Jews recall to mind the Christian preachers on television who rail against the sins of the flesh but secretly employ prostitutes to get off in.

Abraham Foxman, maximum leader of the ADL, is quoted in one document on the ADL Website that, with regard to my ads:

The First Amendment is not an issue here. There is no moral or legal obligation to present [print] anti-Semitic, hateful propaganda. Rejecting these ads does not violate freedom of expression. They [the ads] deny the reality of the Holocaust and perpetuate blatant lies about the near-extinction of European Jewry.

The text of my ad then is “hateful” (but where?); “Anti-Semitic” (but how?); and “perpetuate[s] blatant lies” (but which lies-specifically?). The Abraham Foxmans cannot afford to address any specific statement that is actually in the ad because that might initiate an open debate on the matter that could, that just might, cause some to become skeptical about what Abraham Foxman needs them to believe is certain.

ADL has a yearly budget of 45-million dollars. It maintains thirty regional offices in this country alone, employs more than 400 staff, and has numberless snitches around the country who “report” to it every word and act that deviates from the ADL line on the holocaust controversy. Abraham Foxman knows that no professional journalist and no academic will question his language of smear, slander and character assassination. Abraham knows this because he knows, and he knows that academics and journalists know, that any one of them who speak out in favor of intellectual freedom with regard to the holocaust controversy risks the certainty of being smeared and slandered himself.

Every professor and working reporter understands perfectly well that once he or she is smeared with the neo-Nazi label (a neo-Nazi being one who is obsessed with the longing to murder all Jews, including every little Jewish baby and every Jewish girl and woman and all their mothers and fathers and all other Jews including the Abraham Foxmans)-they know they are dead ducks. They know that from that moment on they are going to have to get a job at McDonalds or at a car wash someplace because no newspaper and no university will ever again employ them.

Abraham and the ADL are unwilling to take a chance on the vagaries of a free press and join in an open debate with one man who has one office, one part-time employee, and two volunteers. ADL is accustomed to winning every game. It appears to many that ADL holds all the best cards, but it’s a bluff. When you have forty million dollars to throw into the pot every year, you can raise the ante again and again, you can back your bluff. But I’m calling them. In a free society, it’s possible for truth to turn the tables on money and bluff.

When I write about intellectual freedom, Abraham and the ADL respond that I’m writing about Hate. The accusation of Hate is the trump card of the Holocaust Lobby. Where I argue for a free press for revisionists, Abraham protests that that’s Hate. If I write that it can be demonstrated that an “eyewitness” to gas chambers at Bergen-Belen gave false testimony, Abraham argues that I hate Jews. If I note it can be demonstrated that the Soviets submitted fraudulent documents to the Nuremberg Court-that’s hate. If I suggest that some Germans are innocent of the crimes they are accused of, it’s Hate. If I ask what the Nazis did during WWII (that is, intentionally kill civilians) that Democrats and Republicans did not do, that’s hate. Hate is the game the ADL plays.

The accusation of hate is the trump card of the Holocaust Hate Industry. All argument, every ideal that is not claimed as an ideal by the ADL, is reduced to hate. Hate is the one concept that appeals to Abraham and his followers. Hate works for them. They can live with hate. Hate is their cup of tea.

The ADL’s Abraham Foxman is certain, as Adolf Hitler was certain, that he understands what good is and what evil is. Abraham knows what love is and who the haters are. He knows who should be allowed to exercise intellectual freedom and who should not, which historical issues should be open to free inquiry and which should be closed to it. Abe is a natural born leader, just as Adolf was. He knows which books should be read and which should be censored and burned. He knows who should be allowed to say what he thinks and who should be punished for it. Adolf understood why it was necessary to slander Jews, while Abe understands why those who question what ADL-Jews believe should be slandered in turn. Abe is devoted to principle just as Adolf was and he knows, as Adolf did, who should be treated with respect and who should be shit on.

In our pulsinanimity and our carelessness, we have allowed rich, influential, narrow-minded special-interest groups to appoint themselves guardians of our cultural ideals. Curiously, their agenda resembles the agenda followed by Democrats, Republicans and Nazis during World War II. Their agenda is to win at any cost. Any ideal can be betrayed if it leads to victory. Intellectual freedom, a free press, open debate, the right to free inquiry, holding yourself to the same moral standards you hold the others to, not intentionally killing the innocent for the deeds of the guilty, simple decency-it’s all thrown overboard in the name of a corrupt principle meant to benefit those who promote principle.

That’s what distinguishes those of us who argue for intellectual freedom and a free press from those who argue for limits on intellectual freedom and a controlled press. ADL principles leave out those they argue against, while the principle of intellectual freedom promises to those who argue against us exactly what it promises us. Intellectual freedom is democratic, promotes diversity, and encourages an open debate on the multiculturalism of ADL-Jews, just as it encourages open debate on the ethnic exclusivity of Israeli Jews. Intellectual freedom shines its light on all of us equally, on holocaust true believers and on holocaust revisionists, on those who have good sense and those who have none.

Those who appreciate what I do but think it hopeless ask how I can expect to play, and play to win, against such a large, successful and influential organization as the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith-or, as we say, the Jewish Defamation League? My answer is, anyone can play. Not everyone can win, but everyone can play. That may be what was behind a cliché that was current when I was a kid and in the atlases of the world a quarter of all the land on earth was tinted rose and pink and belonged to the British Empire. It was current then that the British Empire was won on the playing fields of Eton, where the boys were taught that it was not important who won or lost but how they played the game. In those days the Brits were still winning everything so they could afford to teach their kids that.

It may have been a cliché, but it was a good cliché. It was on the mark, as many clichés are. It really is time the professors stop thinking about who’s winning and who’s losing and take a look at how they’re playing the game. Now is the time for them to stop kissing the collective ass of the Holocaust Hate Industry, unfold their bent backs and stand up straight like grown men and women stand who believe they are free and who have a little dignity. It’s time for journalists to do the same, and for those who plan on becoming journalists. In the end, surely, none of us is going to win.

This isn’t a game. It’s life. You are not going to win. If you can’t win, if you understand that in the end you really cannot win, no matter what, then how you play the game must be absolutely everything.

Chapter Twety One

Dream that I’m shot in the head, then the heart. The hit to the head is accompanied by a tremendous blast of hot air. I see everything blowing apart. The shot to the heart is a little high and to my left. It’s an unnecessary follow up. The dream half wakens me and I lie under the covers in the dark, the heart pounding.

The bedroom door clicks, opens slowly and I sit up in the dark in a frozen blaze of fear. It’s Alicia. A moment before she must have been in bed beside me. Now she has her robe on and is in the doorway.

In Spanish I say: “Where are you going?”

“To the sofa,” she says. “Sleeping with you is like being in a bed full of restless donkeys.”

I’m awake now and I turn on the light. Maybe I’ll read something. I can’t focus my attention on any of the titles on the nightstand. There have been some new telephone threats, some of them by a repeater who says he’s going to shoot Marisol and Paloma as well as myself. He’s upset about one of my ads that’s been printed in a student newspaper in New York. Threats to kill me are old hat, but men calling to tell me they are going to murder the kids too is a new wrinkle.

Reporters want to know how I feel about the fact that so many professors and so many spokesmen for the Jewish community publicly condemn me. Scores of articles, interviews and opinion-pages, more like hundreds I suppose, have condemned me as a racist, an anti-Semite and hater. Editorial writers and reporters for all the top papers, the presidents of universities, spokespersons for Jewish organizations, and professors everywhere have indulged themselves with slandering me. I find the attention interesting and encouraging. A reporter for the New York Times writes that my wife has to clean houses to help me make ends meet. Angry people, some who identify themselves as Jews, call me and write me letters saying that’s what I deserve, a wife who’s a cleaning woman. Where’s the connection?

I accept the ridicule, the charges of being a hater, the contempt. That’s part of what the work is. Bringing those charges against me publicly is the first halting step taken in my direction by those who most need to be in better relationship with me. It’s been suggested that my sensibilities have been coarsened over the years by the anger others feel toward me, that that’s why I am so accepting of being a target for it. I believe such attacks make me more sensitive toward others, not less. It isn’t the acceptance of anger that coarsens sensibilities, but the rejection of it. Any rejection of relationship is stasis. Acceptance is action.

A few years ago there were very few in the Holocaust Industry who felt they had to condemn me personally for my views. Revisionism didn’t count. Now revisionism does count, and there’s a contest going on among the cultural elites to discover who can express contempt for its spokesmen most effectively. The outrage expressed over the Campus Project is one sign that the game is starting to play itself out in the theater of public life. That the contest is joined. All the forces of the Industry’s lobby are being brought to bear to stop the work. The difference between myself and those who condemn me is that I look forward to the play. I’m not angry with the other players. I’m pleased that the curtain is going up at last on this great spectacle. I await the unfolding of the dramatic line with eager attention. I don’t much care who wins and loses. With me, the play itself is the thing.

When I run an advertisement in a college newspaper I expect to be taken to task (to not put too fine an edge on it) by the administration, its faculty, and the special interest organizations on campus. Among the latter, the Hillel rabbis are the most energetic, the most persevering. Here and there a university president, a member of the faculty perhaps, will defend the ideal of an open press, even if that means printing something a revisionist has to say. The Hillel rabbis? Never (well, almost never)! I thought they would be more understanding, being so close to God and so on. While they don’t have much influence among Jews at large, on university campuses they know how to put the fear of the Almighty into everyone else. Wherever I rear my ugly revisionist head, the Hillel rabbis are there to crush it. They think they’re back in the Garden, jousting with the Serpent.

Hillel is the leading private Jewish policing agency on college campuses dedicated to serving what it believes are Jewish goals, mistakenly. The rabbis talk of hate, without let, never seeming to tire of it. They almost convince me they think it a gesture of love to slander those who express doubt about any part of the orthodox Holocaust story. While they appear to have a broad cultural and political agenda, there is no evidence they have a spiritual one. The Hillel rabbis have become the Jimmy Swaggarts of the Holocaust Industry. Ignorant of what they profess to be experts in, sweaty with self-righteousness and bad faith, they are ever ready to argue against intellectual freedom, and to slander those of us who argue for it.

Sitting on the sofa tonight watching Oliver Stone’s The Doors. Jim Morrison needed to feel a passion in his life. He was very young and very talented and he probably mistook stimulation for passion, which is what the very young often do. Nevertheless, the film makes me aware that I have no passion for the work I’m doing. The work has my attention, it keeps me busy day and night, it’s worthwhile work, but I have no passion for it. It’s the contest as much as anything that keeps me going. The odds. It’s a million to one I won’t be able to accomplish anything significant. There’s something about those odds that excites me. There’s something boyish in that excitement, like there was something boyish in Morrison’s talk about needing to risk death. The difference is that Morrison was a boy when he talked like that and I’m old enough to be his grandfather.

Doctor Franklyn is here to check Mother’s vital signs. She’s only half conscious. Her mouth is open, her eyelids half closed with the eyeballs rolled up in her head. He gives her a couple injections, then we step into the kitchen where he says she might die today.

“She looks like she might,” he says. Then he adds: “She has no fever though.”

“I gave her three Tylenol. I didn’t think it was enough so I gave her two tablespoons of liquid Tylenol too.”

“If you give her too much of that you can damage her liver.”

“The truth is, I gave her three tablespoons of liquid Tylenol. I could have blown her liver right out of there.”

“I’m not sure what you want me to do if there’s a crisis.”

“Nothing heroic. I’m ready for her to ease on out of this affair. I’m ready.”

“I’m not suggesting we let her die.”

“No. I understand. Don’t worry.”

“It has to happen some time.”

“Now’s a good time,” I say.

I tell Alicia what Doctor Franklyn said about how Mother looks like she might die today. Alicia doesn’t say anything but after a moment tears roll down her cheeks. Later this morning I see Marisol sitting at Mother’s bedside holding her hand and crying. Mother is unconscious. Later Alicia is frowning grotesquely and crying while she helps Paloma trim the Christmas tree. Paloma wants to know why her mommy is sad. Alicia distracts her with a box of decorations, the tears dripping off her nose. For my part, I feel pretty good but I need some shut-eye.

It’s 4am and I’m sitting on the toilet with a bad stomach. I’ve been up with Mother most of the night. I feel a sudden surge of anxiety. Thought has recalled a passage from a biography of Gandhi. Gandhi’s father was sick and Gandhi was nursing him attentively. One afternoon he began thinking about his wife and after a while he got up from his father’s bedside and went to his wife and gave her a tumble and when he returned to his father the old man was dead. It wasn’t too long after that that Gandhi gave up sex entirely. I finish in the bathroom hurriedly and go to Mother’s bedside. She’s resting comfortably. She’s all right.

All the women in the house are sick. Marisol has the flu and Paloma and Alicia have colds while Mother is prostrate. Dante carelessly left out of his poem that level of Hell where one man is doomed to live alone with four sick women spanning three generations.

One morning in the Mekong beneath a dark, heavy sky I was hiking through the countryside with a young man from Saigon. We passed mud and brick forts with little guard towers. Vietnamese boys stood guard in them with red kerchiefs tied about their throats. Beau Geste in the tropics. We walked the narrow roads through the paddies, passed villages, crossed canals with men sitting on the banks beneath coconut and banana trees repairing fishing nets. The men greeted us with loud rough shouts as if they were pissed. That’s how farmers greet each other in the Mekong.

The sky grew heavier and darker and thunder began to roll. We asked permission to enter a farmhouse. Inside, the large room was clean and tidy. The storm broke with a roar. Three workers came in from the paddies drenched and laughing. Two women came in from the lean-to kitchen at the side of the house. We men sat on a mat and chatted and watched through the one wide window opening as the water poured down, obliterating the view of the canal only a few yards away.

Suddenly a wind came up and blew the rain inside the house. Two of the women went out in the pouring blowing water to remove the sticks propping up the woven shutter over the window opening. They laughed as the wind blew the shutter out of their hands. They were already drenched. Their drenched clothes clung to their strong bodies. Their hair blew in strings over their laughing faces. They looked at me when they laughed. The rain splashed on their white teeth. Inside the room, warm and dry, I shivered watching the two drenched laughing bodies. The men in the room laughed with me. They were probably the husbands and brothers.

Older people were in the room too. With the shutter down, closing off the room to the blowing storm, an older woman set about heating water on a brazier. A little food appeared. The storm thundered and poured down on the roof. We chatted about this and that. I happened to look at the back of the room and for the first time saw the tiny old woman lying on the mat on her side, her temple resting on a polished mahogany wood pillow, watching us silently. She was immaculately dressed in a simple lavender sheath dress. I could see the swell of her little hip. They never lose that line. It’s structural. The old woman was dying, someone told me. I glanced at her again. Her gray hair was immaculately combed. Her dress was immaculate. The mat she lay on and her pillow were immaculate and she was perfectly still. Our eyes met and I nodded once. Her eyes didn’t leave mine but there was no recognition in them. I turned back to the others.

Mother is past 90 now. She has multiple sclerosis and hasn’t been able to walk for about 25 years. She lost control of her bladder and bowels years ago. We use a sling with a lift to get her from the bed to her wheel chair. She hardly eats any more but when she did still eat there was shit everywhere. She’d soil her sheets while she was asleep, sometimes two or three times during a day and night. She’d soil the floor while we were transferring her from the chair to the bed and back again. One time, during a transfer, she dumped on Marisol’s bare foot. Marisol didn’t know what hit her.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “But there it was. It was hot. It was confusing. What the hell is that, you know? Afterwards I thought, now I’ve experienced everything.”

“You think you’ve experienced everything,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

Sometimes when I’m cleaning Mother I recall the tiny old Vietnamese woman who was dying so immaculately in the little thatched house surrounded by rice paddies in the Mekong Delta during a war that was out of control and how much care her family must have been giving her and in that respect how, in their hearts, they must have been immaculate themselves.

A young man calls from Los Angeles asking about the scandal I’ve set off at a University in New York. News travels fast. He thinks it incredulous that asking for an open debate about an historical controversy could create such a fuss. Tonight I dream that when we are at the dinner table the young man appears at our window and peers in at us. He’s a homely little Jewish guy. I invite him in, introduce him to everyone and put a place for him at the table. We talk about many things but don’t get around to the Holocaust story. Later he says: “When you invited me in-that was heavy.”

When I wake, thought recalls the Admiral Peary advertisement soliciting companions to trek to the South Pole: “Wanted: A few good men. High risk. Low pay.” That’s the kind of advertisement I need to place in college newspapers. “Needed: A few good Jews. High risk. No pay whatever.” It’s Jewish students who will be among the first to give themselves permission to do what’s necessary about the Holocaust story. They won’t be alone, but they’ll be among the first.

When Rabbi Meir Mitelman, executive director of the University of Hofstra Hillel, learned that the Hofstra Chronicle was going to insert the first issue of The Revisionist in 5,000 copies of the paper, he apparently thought to let it go. I don’t know what he thought, but he did not rush out into the quad to exterminate the revisionist serpent. The majority of those on the Chronicle staff, a number of whom were Jewish, voted to run the ad. Maybe Rabbi Mitelman thought that the time had come to test the waters, that maybe it would be good for there to be an open discussion of an historical controversy on a university campus. There are many rabbis who believe that intellectual freedom is more a more important principle than defending on principle every twist and turn in the Holocaust story. I believe there are. The rabbis are pressured to keep their mouths closed, just as priests and pastors are. It’s no longer a Jewish problem, but a cultural one.

Maybe it occurred to Rabbi Mitelman that when The Revisionist appeared on campus, the Hofstra professors would be able to handle it. Certainly the professors were better prepared to argue the truth of the Holocaust story better than some so-called revisionist with no academic training, no credentials, no published papers on the Holocaust. No nothing. I’d like to think that that is more or less how Rabbi Mitelman thought about the coming distribution of The Revisionist when it was brought to his attention. A bother perhaps, something of an uproar perhaps, but at a university all in a day’s work.

Then-it hit the fan.

In a public forum called to denounce The Revisionist, Smith, and revisionist theory, and to denounce the Hofstra staff and particularly its editor, for having voted to publish the ad, Hofstra Vice President for University Relations Michael DeLuise turned on Rabbi Mitelman and berated him in public for not informing the university’s administration the moment he heard about the impending distribution of a revisionist publication. Hofstra Provost Herman A. Berliner told the Jewish Chronicle that if he had been informed of the coming distribution of The Revisionist, he would have asked the Chronicle to reconsider. If that didn’t stop the distribution of TR, he would have taken out an ad in the same issue of the paper to say that the Chronicle staff had shown poor judgment. Good judgment, you see, would have been to suppress The Revisionist.

Now that Rabbi Mitelman was outed publicly for not having done what he could have done to stop the distribution of TR to Hofstra students, he was eager to clear his name. He was caught in the dilemma that typically Hillel rabbis snare others with. He folded up like a cheap metal chair. He drafted a written statement apologizing for “the error in judgment in not taking more aggressive actions before the paper came out (a tip of the hat to Stalin if you will).” If he had not forgotten, even for a moment, that Hillel is dedicated to the censorship of revisionism, he would not have made such a clumsy and self-destructive error.

So Rabbi Meir Mitelman reverted to form-the form that Hillel rabbis have developed over the past couple decades, have nourished and promoted-he fell back on that old Holocaust Industry standard-slander.

“However,” Rabbi Meir Mitelman told the public forum, “it is essential to focus on the real issue at hand-to make sure we expose the lies and hatred in Bradley Smith’s ads.” The good rabbi did not mention which “lies” he was referring to. He did not quote from any of the text in the magazine to demonstrate where the “hatred” is. Slanderers do not do that. Slander is a means and an end in itself. So there you are. Another good man-and I am sure Rabbi Mitelman is a good man-goes down.

It’s interesting to watch a Hillel rabbi squirm under the cultural pressures Hillel rabbis have helped create for everyone else on campus. When revisionism raises its satanic head on a college campus, it won’t do to pause and consider what is actually being said. It won’t do to put intellectual freedom before Hillel’s own special agenda. Rabbi Mitelman forgot that for one moment, then found himself pilloried just as Hillel rabbis pillory others for expressing doubt about what they insist everyone believe.

What a disaster these rabbis are for students. Sex isn’t the Achilles heel of these Holocaust fundamentalists. Pride is, and a lust to control the thoughts of others. They’re helping to turn the Holocaust story into a quasi-religious cult, complete with an immense crank literature of infallible texts, crazy miracles, saintly eye-witness tales of miraculous escapes from nazi devils, all of it protected by taboos and media witch trials that condemn as heretics those of us who say we no longer believe what we no longer believe.

The Hillel rabbis act like they believe they’re living in a culture foreign to them, pressuring students and others into the service of a cult committed to the undermining of American idealism. Rabbis who work to destroy those who argue for open debate on the Holocaust stories represent a New Inquisition. These Jewish Torquemadas have the media rack waiting for all who disagree with them about the truthfulness and historical accuracy of their sacred writings. Revisionist theory is on the Hillel index of forbidden thought. In 20th century America the rabbis believe the proper punishment for expressions of doubt about what the rabbis believe is public disgrace and financial ruin.

With guys like me, the Hillel rabbis have an insoluble problem. Disgrace means nothing to me and I have no money. I’ve been disgraced now for years. As a man of action, I accept disgrace. As a pragmatist, I accept poverty. The rabbis, full of their lust for dominion, don’t understand that inwardly they’re trapped. They don’t understand yet that I’m here to help free them, to help point the way to a new freshness of spirit.

In the old days some Jews felt in their bones that pride goeth before a fall. Today’s Hillel rabbis have no sense of that. They’ve put all their eggs in one basket. Influence means everything to them, liberty nothing. They’re living in another, psychologically more primitive era. They remember (never forget!) the tragedy of the ghettos of Eastern Europe but haven’t yet opened their eyes to the wonderful vistas in America of liberty and intellectual freedom. I’m going to help fix this for them. I’m going straight ahead working for an open debate on the Holocaust story. I’ve accepted the responsibility for helping our rabbis, no matter what their religious background, no matter what profession they follow, to get a hard look at American idealism. That’s how men of action put it together. I’m a door through which the culturally unassimilated arrive in the real America. Hallelujah!

It’s 2am and I can’t sleep. I’ve been too busy spreading the good news about Holocaust revisionism to do much walking and when I don’t exercise I sleep poorly. I put on my long sleeved padded jacket and lie on the sofa under a blanket with Andrew Harvey’s The Hidden Journey. Harvey is an Englishman born in India who’s become a Hindu religioso. He’s been spiritually awakened through sitting darshan with a young Hindu woman called Ma. She’s an interesting religious phenomenon in that she doesn’t preach and has no rules. That’s my kind of religion. While you sit, she takes your face in her hands and peers into your eyes in silence and if you’re receptive, light and radical understanding begin to flood your daily life. So Harvey says.

One night while walking on the beach at Pondicherry, Harvey heard a voice speak out of the darkness: “You can not transform what you have not blessed.” After a moment the voice said: “You can never transform what first you have not accepted and blessed.”

The words strike a deep note in me. I’m not sure why. I think once more about how useless it is to search and how valuable it is to be aware of where you are and to remain open. Everything is coming to you all the time. Then thought recalls how Jesus taught that it’s a virtue to love our enemies and I see the relationship between that idea and the necessity to accept and bless what you want to see transformed. I’ve got to bless the Hillel rabbis and dismiss my contempt for them. Not them, but their behavior. Turning the other cheek is not an act of meekness in the face of societal brutality. It’s an act of courage directed at the inner life. It’s a concept of radical cooperation. It’s only a gesture but it stands on rock. The Hillel rabbis, literally, know not what they’re doing. They can’t help themselves. There must be exceptions here and there. Apparently there was an exception at Hofstra University-for a moment.

When the Hillel rabbis denounce me as their enemy, sometimes I return the favor with some smart-ass reply. I have a clever talent for that sort of thing. Later, I always regret having used it. There’s a time in life when every one of us is blessed, while those who age and look for enemies and avoid painful truths and disseminate falsehoods are already burdened with a terrible weight. Maybe I can be counted among such people; certainly the Hillel rabbis can. From this night on, while I will not accept their bad behavior, I am going to accept them as men and women (if there are women among them) and bless them with my good will, my patience, and my radical cooperation.

Chapter Twenty Two

Before I submit a new ad to student papers at colleges and universities I run the text past a few individuals for review. When I passed the current ad around for peer review, as it might be called, I found that my challenge to debate the authenticity of the Anne Frank “diary” was considered a bad idea. They wanted the diary removed from the challenge.

The argument was that the diary has nothing to do with gassing chambers or an extermination program, so it was off subject. Furthermore, any remarks I make about Anne’s writings would give the reader the disquieting feeling that I am attacking a young Jewish girl who was a victim of Nazi brutality, which she was. I would be adding insult to injury.

I understood that it is not politic to challenge the authenticity of the “diary” in the ad, but then the ad itself was not politic. Nothing I do or could do as a revisionist is, or can be, politic to those who want to see revisionist theory suppressed, so I decided there would be no benefit in ducking the issue. The ad ran in some eighty student newspapers at colleges and universities around the country, including the challenge to debate the authenticity of the Anne Frank diary.

The so-called Diary of a Young Girl, even if it is in fact a literary work only based on a diary, does symbolize what really happened to European Jews during the Hitlerian regime. Of course, that’s exactly why the Holocaust Industry does not want the Anne Frank diary manuscripts “debated” on national television. There are no Jews shoved into gas chambers in what Anne wrote. No Jews murdered in gas vans. No human skin lampshades made from the hides of flayed Jews. No Jewish internees using melted Jewish fat to burn the corpses of their families and friends. No German SS lashing Jewish girls with horse whips. No hand soap rendered from vats filled with the body parts of murdered Jews. No Jewish babies thrown alive into burning ditches or having their brains bashed out against walls by “ordinary” Germans. That’s exactly why the government of the Netherlands, which “controls” the Anne Frank manuscripts, has made it illegal to question them from a revisionist perspective.

In short, Anne’s writings do not give us a picture of ordinary Germans acting out in uniquely monstrous ways. She addresses her experience of the Jewish holocaust story in a very different way than how the story is forwarded so unrelentingly, and so profitably, by the Holocaust Industry. What she does write about is the tragic story of an ordinary Jewish family, including two young girls, innocent of all wrongdoing, forcibly removed from its home and in the end transported to a German internment camp where the girls sicken and are left to die. Which does represent, after all, roughly what the Jewish catastrophe really amounted to. In my view, that’s enough catastrophe for anyone. It should be enough as well for those who are stirred by even the deepest urges toward Germanophobia. It should be enough for even the greediest. It should be enough for the Holocaust Industry, but it isn’t.

Germans did not murder Anne and her sister. The girls were collateral damage, as the term has it. The German State, under the administration of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazis), decided to remove by force all Jews from all the lands under its administration and ship them to other lands. There would be detours in the plan, stops and starts, forced labor and so on, but in the end, once the Nazi regime was victorious, its Jews would be removed to foreign lands governed by administrations less enlightened than the Nazi one. Things just didn’t work out for the Nazi administration. When the regime began to implode, it was unable to take care of its own, much less its Jews and all the other prisoners and many of them became collateral damage of failed political and military policies.

To understand the difference between collateral damage and intentional killing you have only to ask yourself—

how many German girls became collateral damage of the Bi-partisan policies of the Roosevelt administration? Does it matter? In a hundred towns and cities across Germany, tens of thousands of German girls and German babies, innocent of all wrongdoing, were massacred during the implementation of Bi-partisan Democratic and Republican policies in collaboration with their allies. It didn’t really matter about the German girls. Never has.

Not one American bombardier wanted to intentionally kill any specific German girl. The German girls killed and maimed by American high explosive, who were burned alive by American airmen in deliberately set fire storms, or crushed in collapsing buildings, were “collateral damage” of US policies, innocent of all wrongdoing, just as Anne was. See how it works? US policy to deliberately kill the girls followed logically from the policies of the Bi-partisan Democratic and Republican administration as it went about its perceived duty to deliberately destroy every city in Germany and intentionally kill their inhabitants.

From the perspective of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations the German girls died for the “greater good” of Western civilization. Of course, that was the reason the Frank girls died—from the perspective of the Hitlerian administration. When we reflect on the slaughter of young girls en masse, it’s always a good idea to reflect on it from the perspective of the administration under which you are living at the time. It doesn’t matter that a Hitler or a Roosevelt runs the administration, by National Socialists or Democrats and Republicans. They are all going to tell you that they are wasting the girls in the name of the highest ideals of the State.

What does matter considerably is that those who convince you that they have good reasons to off the girls do, in fact, win the war. Because if those who are killing the girls in your name lose the war it’s going to be a real bother for you. And for your children and your children’s children, because today it is once again as it was in the days of old. The son is responsible for the deeds of the father, and each is held to be the keeper of his brother. There is no escape, because nowadays when you lose a war, you lose it forever. One German girl (for Anne was a German) who died will be remembered forever, for remembering her is immensely profitable to the Industry that has dedicated itself to remembering. The tens of thousands of other German girls who died will remain anonymous forever because remembering them won’t bring in the bucks. Fortunes of war, of propaganda, and heartlessness.

Journalists and professors have allowed themselves to be convinced that there are good reasons to kill the girls just as there are bad reasons to kill them. Motive is everything. And now that we have the Holocaust Industry people metastasizing throughout our culture, we have professional guides to inform us who it is who have good motives to intentionally kill little girls and who it is who have bad ones kill them. Those who are judged, by those among us who are above judgment, to have had good motives for killing the girls are judged innocent of all wrongdoing. Those who are judged (by those who hold themselves above judgment) to have killed the girls out of bad motives, are condemned to be condemned generation following generation.

Because the Germans were to be judged at Nuremberg as having exhibited a unique monstrosity during the war, of a completely different order and magnitude than what the US and its allies had exhibited, it was necessary to show that someone had suffered a unique victimization. Without the unique suffering of the Jews, how would the unique monstrosity of the Germans be demonstrated? Oddly, the one document which does not forward a theory of unique German monstrosity has become the one most favored by the Holocaust Industry people, the one they exploit most often as they forward their demands for more money, which buys more influence, which means more money which means more influence which, and so on.

The Bi-partisan Truman administration, with its allies, institutionalized the Jewish holocaust story at Nuremberg. The professorial class did not oppose this corrupt (if not criminal) behavior, but joined with the State in forwarding it, just as it had not opposed the wartime propaganda of the administration—if it’s working don’t fix it and to hell with the ideals of your profession. So the Jewish holocaust story was just lying around, waiting to be picked up. Some twenty years after the end of the war the fledgling Holocaust Industry came to understand that there was no movement in the academic community to “revise” what it had helped create. So the Industry people picked up the ball and began to run with it with an energy, a passion, and a genius that overwhelmed the professorial class. The professors did what they always do as a class when the chips are down. They became silent, and they went along.

The question of when intellectual freedom should be allowed on a university campus and when it should not is handled by the professors much like they handle the question of when it is right and when it isn’t to intentionally kill young girls. Under the Nazi administration the professors as a class agreed to agree that Jews were a subversive racial minority which should not be allowed to argue openly against the racial policies of the State. That is, the professors serving the Nazi regime argued that intellectual freedom is an ideal meant for some but not for all, depending on the administration under which you labor.

That’s the way it works under American “democratic” administrations. When revisionists attempt to get access to a free press on university campuses to argue that, in fact, the Holocaust Industry line on the Jewish holocaust story is wrong about the “gas chambers,” and the “six million” (for starters), and that we want to debate the issue, the American professoriat agrees to agree that revisionists represent a “racialist” minority which is unjustly attacking Jews as a people and attempting to subvert the ideals of a “multicultural” society. The ideal of intellectual freedom in America, then, is an ideal for some, but hardly for all.

In short, the professorial class is what it is. It doesn’t matter that they lecture under a Nazi administration or a Democratic one. Students must be warned about this. Because when the chips are down this class of men and women will always follow the State and betray the student. It’s not something to complain about, that’s just what they do. They’re like junkyard dogs. Once you get to know one personally, it can be lovable. But they are trained to do what they do and if you want to jump the fence in your intellectual life you need to have sense enough to know what to expect from the professorial class.

The two most widely read authors associated with World War Two and the Jewish holocaust controversy are Adolf Hitler and Anne Frank—Adolf with My Struggle (Mein Kampf) and Anne with her “diary.” Both manuscripts were written while their authors were under attack by the German State, Adolf in prison and later Anne sequestered in a “safe house” in Amsterdam. Both authors were ambitious and self-centered. While Anne was still a very young girl, Adolf, with an immense energy and they say will, whatever that is, took control of the State that had once imprisoned him for having said what he thought. Adolf, building a state apparat on the ideals that are universal among tyrants, began to imprison an entire people, and before he was finished he had imprisoned Anne along with her family.

Anne didn’t know what hit her. How could she have? She had gone along with her life as best she could, being shunted about here and there, observing the behavior of her family and neighbors, thinking about boys and maybe girls, working on her manuscripts, until finally the Germans took her away from her family and interned her in a prison camp where they allowed her to sicken and die.

Soon Adolf was overwhelmed by the same immense forces that had overwhelmed Anne, which he had helped set in motion but Anne had not, which is why we allow that he got at least a token of what he deserved while we are certain she did not. Of course Adolf didn’t know what hit him either, though he thought he did. He thought the Anne Franks of the world had finally gotten to him. If only he had been able to imprison them all, and all those who sympathized with them, and all who sympathized with those who sympathized with those who sympathized with them, things would have turned out differently.

As world-famous writers, Adolf Hitler and Anne Frank are joined at the hip in a grotesque expression of 20th-century Western culture. Though they each worked on writing their own life’s story, they were rather different kinds of writers, if I can mention the obvious. Adolf addressed his own subjective life as middle-class, middle Europeans did in his generation. He kept it under cover as a matter of principle. Those who live by principle in any age can seldom afford to have it get about how they really feel about things. Too often they are aware, though they will choose not to reflect on it, that during their daily round they experience thoughts and feelings that, if revealed, would undercut their public image of high principle. Today, those who still believe about Adolf what he believed about himself are not, typically, enthusiastic about revealing their own subjective lives. They are committed to instituting great programs for others, have grand principles to maintain, and are too serious to take seriously the web of feelings that spawn their ideals.

Anne on the other hand was to be a modern woman and a modern writer. She would reveal her subjective life openly, as directly as she could, to her father’s dismay, which I can understand. How many fathers want to know what their daughters really think of them, or of their father’s wives? Anne was willing to find out who she was. She had no great plans for others—of course she was very young and maybe she would have dreamed some up as she got older—

but one has the sense that she would have spent her life as a writer trying to find out who she was and thus helping others find out who they are. She was a natural as a writer for what has been described as our therapeutic culture, and I think she would have had a successful career.

Adolf became famous as a writer through his successful use of others for his own benefit. Anne became famous when others found a way, in turn, to use her successfully for their benefit. Anne was a better writer, as a writer, than Adolf was, and it’s not difficult to see that my interests as a writer resemble hers, not his. I can read Anne, while it’s been impossible for me to read Adolf. As I put the period to that sentence, thought recalls the lady Buddhist who lives in Sri Lanka—she has a Jewish name—who writes of “going nowhere, doing nothing.” It’s a concept for a way of life I find particularly intriguing, and troubling. I can only imagine the contempt, and the terror, Adolf would have had for it. When I ask thought how it made the connection between Adolf Hitler and the Buddhist lady in Sri Lanka, thought is unable to respond.

Thought never makes such connections clear to us. We can’t observe where thought comes from because we don’t know it’s there until it’s there. Thought cannot demonstrate that it travels alone, either. Does it ever make a move that is not in tandem with desire? When Adolf ordered the Jews to be rounded up and interned in camps, when, in effect, he ordered that Jewish culture in Eastern and Central Europe be destroyed, did his decision originate as pure thought without desire? Do we want to joke around about this? When Roosevelt ordered what was, in effect, the intentional mass killing of German civilians through aerial bombardment, did the order originate in his heart or his head—

or did it have one root in each place? Can we argue that a principled man can conclude that he must slaughter the innocent for the deeds of the guilty while being empty of feeling but full of thought?

Adolf’s book sold successfully as he became a widely known Nazi politico, and once the Nazis had won everything it became a best seller. My Struggle enhanced, or perhaps I should say decorated, the coffee tables of hundreds of thousands of German living rooms. There was no peer review of his writing in the German press or academy because that would have required a cultural context in which intellectual freedom was seen as a good rather than a danger. Anne’s book too was rather successful early on, but as the anti-Nazis won everything, including cultural dominion over all those they perceived as their enemies, it became a phenomenon.

Anne’s writing didn’t go through peer review either. Early on it would have been viewed as poor taste to criticize it. Now it has become an act of hatred toward Jews to write about it in any way not approved by the cultural elites, and particularly those who make up the Holocaust Industry. Any writer who does so has no thought for career or making a living. In some Western countries the writer faces jail if he writes critically about the “diary.” That’s how it is in Germany—of course. In Germany they didn’t understand the free press thing under Hitler, and they don’t understand it now. The Austrians and French followed the lead of the Germans, naturally. Now the Dutch have made it illegal—beyond the law—to dispute the authenticity of Anne’s “diary.” Why do they believe they really must?

Today, then, Anne’s book is used as a tool to suppress intellectual freedom, just as Adolf’s book was used as such a tool during the Third Reich. It’s not quite the same thing of course. While Adolf wanted his writing to be used that way, there is no evidence that Anne would have wanted the same for hers. But then, who cares what Anne would have wanted?

Chapter Twenty Three

I started writing when I became aware that I was thinking about the same things over and over and that I couldn’t stop. At first I told myself I was writing to try find myself. I wrote and wrote and looked all over the place but never found myself or found out what it was. There was thought, there was the body, and all the stuff on the planet. It all came along and went along and there was little I could do about it. In the end, I decided I was going to have to get along without it. Then, when I kept writing anyhow, I told myself I was trying to make art.

There was also the dreaming where I saw the same dreams again and again and of course I couldn’t make those stop either. I was twenty-one years old. Amost half a century ago. In those days the thinking and the dreaming was about Korean and my mother and father. It was mostly about Korea. I had no complaints about Korea. I’d volunteered and once I was there I’d liked it well enough, the mountains were very beautiful, but afterwards in the hospitals there was the thinking and the dreaming and it was always the same and they wouldn’t stop.

One noonday at the Camp Cook hospital in California I was coming awake after surgery when I became aware that some of the guys were standing around my bed laughing. Then I became aware that I was sobbing and yelling for the machine gunners and trying to sit up and shouting that if we didn’t get the machine gun in place it was all over for us. Then I saw that doctor Silverman was there too. He was telling me it was okay, that I didn’t need the machine guns anymore. He was saying that it would be best if I did not try to sit up or move around too much. After a moment I began to understand where I was, the desperation passed, and I heard Vasquez who had the bed next to mine laughing and saying:

“I tol’ you before, Smeeth. Forget about those Chinks. You got the Mexicans after your ass now.”

It wasn’t long after that when I started the writing. I’m seventy-two years old now and I still write about what thought attaches it to as I go about my daily round, and sometimes I still write about what I see in the dreams. I worked my way through the dreaming a long time ago. When I was a kid I believed thought was one thing and dreaming another. Later I understood that they are both thought. While I seldom dream any longer, or seldom dream anything interesting, when I’m awake thought never stops, just like it never stopped when I was a kid. Dreaming is a good, built-in thought program. I used it for twenty years, maybe longer. After awhile, if you watch carefully how thought works in dreams, and you are able to more or less stand aside from it, the dream program winds down.

The thinking that goes on when you’re awake is something else again. Everyday thinking is a program built in so deeply that it never winds down. Oddly, if you pay attention, day thinking is full of dream pictures too but you miss most of them. Buddhists talk about how if you stop the thinking at least part of the time you’ll understand something you didn’t understand before. Buddhist ideas have been seeping into our porous culture at an accelerating rate for most of the century, which I think is to the good. I think the Buddhists are right when they tell us it is beneficial to not think when it’s not necessary, which is most of the time. It’s clear to me that there is much too much thinking going on among those who govern us, Christians, Jews and Muslims alike, and too much institutionalizing of thought. How else can we explain the endless catastrophes?

I find Buddhist talk about Buddhist theory very alluring. I’m infatuated with reading the Buddhists, or some of them. If I had to choose between reading the Buddhists and reading the revisionists, the Buddhists would win hands down. As a matter of fact, they won hands down a long time ago. Buddhists talk alluringly of non-attachment and subjective freedom, yet wherever Buddhists are a majority in the population they are unable to give up their attachment to the tyranny of Buddhist hierarchy, under which the ideal of subjective freedom is neither here nor there.

Thought recalls the night in 1968 when I deserted my ship, an old Victory, in Satchel, Thailand. I carried the suitcase in one hand, the typewriter in the other, and walked into the little town square where a platform or stage had been set up illuminated by strings of naked light bulbs. Young monks with shaved heads wearing saffron robes lounged on the illuminated deck drinking fruit waters and eating ice cream and laughing. I remember how healthy and strong they looked, how fine their shaven heads were, how at ease they looked lying there.

The ideal of non-attachment and subjective freedom has taken hold, not in the East among the Buddhists, but among those peoples in the West who were among the last to commit themselves to Christianity and the first to find a way to start leaving it behind. It’s in post-Christian culture where the ideal of non-attachment has taken root. Not only are we trying to overcome our attachment to the concept of the tyrannical State and Church, but to the tyranny of men over women, the rich over the poor, the schooled over the ignorant-in short, the tyranny of the past over the present. It’s probably not going to work. In real life we remain oblivious to the moment and sacrifice everything to the authority of the past, or to what we imagine the future might be.

Four years ago I was so deep in debt I could no longer see the sky. I had no hope of paying what I owed. I would have to file bankruptcy. After I did that, what would I do? I was sixty-six years old. Where would I get a job? The job I had as a revisionist activist was a lot of work but there was no pay. People have to contribute or you’re a dead duck. What would I do with my mother? She was ninety-four and bedridden. My wife had cancer. She had just finished her chemotherapy and radiation treatments and maybe she was in remission but how was I to know? What about the insurance? How was I going to pay for it? Our oldest daughter was in San Diego State University. What with student aid and working, she could get by. Paloma was only ten. She was more or less healthy and she’d do okay, but what about her future?

There was my career as a writer, of course, but I had failed at that. I was still at it forty-five years after I started and I was still failing at it. Now that I was writing about revisionism it was pretty certain that I would go on failing to the end. The one chance we had was to go to Mexico. We had a half-finished house in Baja that we had been working on for about ten years at fifty dollars a throw. Now I was so broke I didn’t have enough money to rent the truck we needed to take our stuff across of the border. I had to call people who were contributors to my newsletter, some of whom over the years had become friends, and ask for enough money to get me out of the country. There were no doors in the house, no windows, no roof over the bedroom and so on. I borrowed enough money to close the place up against the weather and the passers-by. I didn’t have enough money left over to file bankruptcy and had to go hat in hand for that too. I understand now that Baja is the end of the trail. There’s nowhere else for us to go. Sometimes thought recalls my father working as a carpenter’s helper, a boilermaker’s helper, doing odd jobs. The last years of his life running the little clubroom in South Central Los Angeles for the Boilermakers union. I have never been able to pull myself out of the working class I was born into. I don’t think I ever really tried.

David Mamet tells us that in theater you reveal character by having your character respond to very different events in one predictable way again and again. I had never thought of it so simply. My behavior as a writer fits Mamet’s theory of character very well. Without ever giving up the writing or ever thinking of giving it up, at every turn where I have had to make a decision whether to put the writing first or something else first, I’ve gone with something else. Usually it was a woman. Now my working days are behind me. I’m seventy years old. Did I already say that? The soldiering, the police work, the bulls were never in the picture after the first run. There won’t be any more bookstores or art galleries. No more jobs loading trucks, or working in dairy plants or in the studios in Hollywood. No more long shoring. I’ll never get my seaman’s papers back so there’ll be no more ships. I can’t work in construction any longer, or do concrete again, or any of the rest of it. It’s all over.

Because it’s certain that I will not have a career as a writer, I don’t have to worry about that. But I do have to find a way to make a living writing, which is not the same thing as a career and is much easier to do or so they say. I have not found that to be true. No one in America makes a living writing about how the gas chamber stories are an ugly joke. I knew that at the beginning. Nevertheless, when I turned fifty, that’s what I chose to address as a writer. What would I do with success? Alicia doesn’t understand why I have so much trouble making a living writing when so many others are able to do it so easily. Watching the soaps on Mexican television she suggests I should study Spanish and write for Mexican TV. When she makes that suggestion it’s as if someone has injected the brain with a deadly bacteria soup.

Speaking of brains, Alicia is worried about mine, my seso as the Mexicans have it. “You write things that make everybody despise you,” she says, “and now your faculties are failing. What do you think is ahead of you?”

“My faculties are not failing.”

“You take your daughter out to buy tortillas and you leave her standing on the Boulevard and come home for a nap and you do not think your faculties are failing? What do you think is happening to your faculties?”

It’s true that I’m absent-minded. I forget things. The shoes, the car keys, the daughter. Alicia notices everything, unfortunately. Sometimes I don’t know what day it is, or what week, and she’ll say: “It is your faculties, Gordo. They are failing. It makes me worry.” I’m almost always right about the month, which is a good sign.

Upstairs in the office I mislay correspondence, forget to return calls, get the numbers mixed up in my checkbooks. This afternoon I mislaid letters from the advertising managers of campus newspapers at Stanford and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Are they lost permanently? How many more papers will I lose today? I brought my mail up here about an hour ago, opened it, and immediately lost the letters from Stanford and NJ Tech. How did I do that? It’s not just the memory, there’s other stuff. One night I fainted right in front of Alicia. It was kind of interesting. We were downstairs in the bedroom. I stepped into the bathroom to brush my teeth and there I watched myself, as if I were somehow looking down from above, fold up in sections like an accordion being closed and settle onto the floor.

One afternoon I was here at the computer when I started feeling light-headed. After about twenty minutes I couldn’t sit up without holding on to the table I use for a desk. I called Doctor Horcasitas around the corner and told him to send the chemico over to take blood. I carry a chemistry/toxicology request in my wallet and am supposed to get the blood drawn when the event is actually happening to see if some chemical change is taking place in the seso that can be identified. I’ve done it twice but nothing was found, except the second time it was discovered that I had an intestinal bug that eats holes through your gut so I got some pills for that. That afternoon the chemico wasn’t available. It was Saturday and he was off somewhere having a beer. I went in the room next to the office and lay down on the bed and held on and after a couple hours I was okay. If I could choose between having to hold on for two hours and losing consciousness, I’d rather lose it.

Sometimes I worry about being a writer and running the Campus Project and CODOHWeb and The Revisionist and the rest of it when I don’t have the energy I used to have and when I can’t remember everything. The truth is, Thomas and Widmann run CODOHWeb and let me have the credit, so I’ve worked that one out pretty well. And Brewer runs The Revisionist so that’s taken care of too. I put in my two cents worth when I think it’s necessary. Thought still remembers some things, and sometimes new stuff appears, or new twists on old stuff, so the writing is still okay, the kind I do. And it’s not like I have a great talent that’s going to waste, or that I wasn’t absent-minded before. When Paloma was a baby I left her on the floor of the Bank of America at Hollywood and Highland and the little Guatemalan guard had to run up Hollywood Boulevard after me. That bank is closed now. Now they sell T-shirts there and trinkets to tourists.

That was twelve years ago, longer, and here I am in Baja still taking care of business, more or less. How much memory do you need to challenge a taboo in the 21st Century? How much memory do you need to argue before the professors that intellectual freedom is a good, not a danger? How much memory do I need to argue before chancellors and presidents of universities that a free press is more conducive to a free society than a controlled press, or that an open society is to be preferred to a closed one? What do I have to be able to recall to be able to argue that the taboo against a free exchange of ideas about one historical question is regressive and represents a return to an old culture of tyranny? The gas chambers stories are here now, the taboo against open debate on the gas chamber stories is here now, and I’m here now. As Tina Turner might say: What’s memory got to do with it?

Last night Alicia and I went out to eat pork tacos and drink a little wine. It doesn’t sound like much of an evening, but when you live in Popotla it’s about as much evening as you’re going to get. Alicia looked pretty good. After 25 years and an extra twenty or thirty pounds she still looks good to me. She talked about the family for awhile, her mother is dying of cancer so she talks about family a lot, and then I told her in the best Spanish I could muster about the campus project for this academic year. I explained how I have decided to go head to head with a special interest group that has a yearly budget of tens of millions of dollars and the ears of governments and corporate big shots around the world. An organization that has the media and the professors cowed to the point where they are afraid to stand up for their own ideals, which are my ideals too.

“Gordo,” Alicia said, “when are you going to find something to do that will not make trouble? Do you think nothing bad is ever going to happen to you? I know you do not think about it because your head is in the clouds. You sit upstairs in that cave where your work looking at your computer and you think that is the world. In your old age you have forgotten what the world is and what it can do to you. I worry when you go out that you are going to forget where you live. You know how you are. You lock your keys in the car. You lose your eyeglasses. Yesterday you forgot your daughter. You drove right by her. You left her standing on the corner like an orphan.”

“I am a little absent-minded,” I said. “It is not serious.”

I had some pork between my teeth so I stood up and walked to the cashiers stand to get a couple toothpicks. In Baja they don’t put toothpicks on your table, you have to look around for them. Twenty, thirty years ago the pork didn’t get stuck between the teeth all the time. Now everything gets stuck in there. It’s a real bother. It’s gotten so bad that I go to a dentist regularly for the first time in my life. When I was a kid in South Central and you had gaps in your teeth, you just had gaps in your teeth and there was the end to it.

When I returned to our table, Alicia leaned toward me and said: “Gordo? Please do me a favor.”

“I do not know if that is necessary.”

“I am not joking. Please close your fly.”

“My fly?”

I felt around under the table. It was open all right. I zipped it up.

“You know,” I said, “when we were at the house, I was sitting on the bed putting on my shoes, and I saw that my fly was open. But then I forgot. One moment I knew it was open, the next moment I forgot it was open. It is interesting.”

“Gordo, it is not interesting. Your fly is telling you something you need to hear. Listen to it. Your fly is telling you that you are too old to go on doing what you do. Gordo, I want you to get out of this business you are in where everyone is mad at you. How can you argue with professors and presidents of universities when you cannot remember to keep your fly closed? Before you leave the house everyone in your family checks your fly. Even your daughter. Do you know what it means to a fourteen year-old girl to have a father who goes out on the street with his fly open?”

“She thinks it is funny.”

“She laughs, Gordo, but she does not think it is funny. She wants you to have your fly closed up when she goes out with you.”

“Okay. You are right. I am going to pay more attention to the fly.”

“I watch you going around the house bumping into doors, looking for your glasses, and I say to myself, ‘My Gordo is thinking. I hope he is thinking about something he will get paid for.’” She reaches across the table and puts her hand over my hand. This isn’t the first time I have heard this particular line from my wife. I drink a little wine and listen. She says: “I know your working days have flown away, but maybe, if you think about it, you can still find work, something that is not too heavy for you to carry. Work that is appropriate to your age.”

“My work is not that heavy. It is a bother, but it is not that heavy.”

I lean back in my chair and signal the waiter for another glass of red wine. Thought has started reflecting on the work. At the curbing there’s a four-piece banda playing its rinky-dink music. The music and singing are pleasant. When the band finishes a tune I hear the deep heavy movement of the ocean in the night as it comes in on the shore and retires, moves in on the shore and retires. On the surface of the water there is the broken reflection of the white moon. Thought, inaudibly, says that’s how it is with tyranny. Thought, without forming the words at first but connecting two disparate images, displays to me the idea that intellectual liberty is a mere moonbeam playing on the surface of the great sea of tyranny and taboo that fills our psyche and our culture. The moon’s quick beam of light is beautiful on the surface of that swelling darkness, and when I first notice it something haunting moves in my heart, as if I understand that there is something profound about to be illuminated in that darkness. I get the connection immediately, I know what it is I want to be revealed, but I know too that I will turn away from it and it is that recognition, that I will turn away from freedom again and again, that haunts me so.

Moonbeams and unzipped flies-I’m working on them. They aren’t problems to be solved, they’re life’s work. Unless life is a problem. The cows don’t think so, which caught the attention of Whitman one summer noon, but oftentimes the rest of us think so. Thought has fixed it so that we understand we have a life but soon won’t and we see that as the problem. I see it as the problem. Contrary to what I heard a Mexican evangelical say at my mother’s funeral, death is not a victory. It signals a great loss. There are no victories for me. The day is coming when memory will stop, desire will end, and I will end, whoever that is.

Recently, a man who read my Confessions On-line posted his reaction to it so all those who visit the biggest Holocaust revisionist Website in the world can contemplate his reaction to how I live my life, which I appreciate.

A few weeks ago I read Bradley Smith’s Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist and I just can’t seem to get it out of my mind. Whenever I think of Bradley Smith now I think of that scene in Papion in which Steve McQueen is brought before the judges and they accuse him of having wasted his life. Papion (Steve McQueen) answers, “Guilty!”

This is not to say that revisionism isn’t an important job-it is, but the way in which Bradley Smith has led his life really leaves me puzzled. I’m sure he’d say it puzzles him too! The best-known revisionist in America admits to being on a radio talk show drunk-too drunk to understand a question a caller asked him. He admits that he accidentally got his wife pregnant like some dumb high school kid who forgot to use a rubber. He writes that he fell off his bicycle after leaving a bar drunk. I just don’t get it!

Bradley Smith continues to live his life like a 70-year-old kid. I suppose it disturbs me so much to see this because most of the people I know involved in revisionism live lives exactly like Smith’s. And I wish them all the best. But their all-too-human flaws seriously detract from the importance of the issues at hand. I’m sure we’ve all done unworthy things in our lives, some more than others. The problem with discussing these things on a Website devoted to revisionism is that many people now sitting on the fence will be unable to differentiate between the man and his ideas.

An honest, heart-felt letter. I understand the writer’s disappointment with me. Reading my stuff, it’s only natural for a sober man to ask: “Where is learning, where is discipline in there? Where are the attributes of the leader-the one to raise up a great movement among his people, to call on them for great sacrifices, to lead them in the accomplishment of great deeds?”

That man just isn’t around here anywhere. No learning, no discipline, not much time left. There is only the sense that it is better to be free and open than closed and imprisoned, better to have my fly zipped up when I leave the house than have it open, whether I’m with Paloma or not. At the same time, I ask my worried readers to contemplate the happy circumstance where even a commonplace, poorly read, and undisciplined man can play a role in reinvigorating one of the great ideals of his culture-intellectual freedom. Is it not a matter for joyous celebration to discover a great cultural ideal that the most ordinary man can recognize as his own-on his own? An ideal that does not require a professor to explain it, a zealot to promote it, or a tyrant to protect it?

Chapter Twenty Four

Boston University Chancellor Dr. John Silber wrote an “Open Letter to Colleges and Universities” and mailed it to college and university presidents around the country, then published it on the World Wide Web so no one would miss it. He didn’t like the text of one of the ads I was running in campus newspapers around the country titled “Holocaust Studies: Appointment With Hate?”

He wrote that my ad was “false propaganda … a violation of civil discourse … a repudiation of learning [comparable to] flat earth theory … a jumble of “vicious lies” and some other nonsense. If a nationally known university chancellor like John Silber, a good man, an advocate of intellectual freedom and a free press, can be wrong, or half-wrong, or wrong-headed about most everything he writes in response to such texts, the problems separating American students from the professorial class in this country are even more serious than I had supposed.

Maybe I failed to communicate clearly what I was trying to say. Dr. Silber is not the only university chancellor or president who has dismissed my work as contemptible. He’s one of many. But his prose has a certain edge, a directness, that catches my attention. With regard to the Holocaust story and the professorial class, it appears that I have to spell out everything as if I were talking to children. It’s difficult to explain why this should be so.

In his Open Letter Chancellor Silber wrote:

The advertisement begins by misunderstanding the idea of the university. It is not merely to promote intellectual freedom, but also to promote intellectual responsibility in the pursuit of truth.

I did not write that the idea of the university is “merely” to promote intellectual freedom. What I wrote is that “one” ideal of the university is to promote intellectual freedom. The way I look at it, “merely” implies one, while “one ideal” implies that there might be more than one. Two, perhaps? Not having attended university myself, I may be wrong about this. Not only did Silber misstate what I wrote, he did not give the URL to my ad so his readers would not have access to my text and would not know if Silber had quoted me correctly or not. I do not think Dr. Silber deliberately misquoted me. He’s a busy professional. He probably tossed off his response with his left hand one morning over coffee and bagels.

Dr. Silber wrote:

… anyone who cares about the truth is under an obligation to think twice before offering a platform to those who systematically lie by denying the Holocaust. Those lies are at the heart of the advertisement submitted by Mr. Smith ….

Well, my ad does not state that I “deny the Holocaust.” What was the Holocaust? Does Silber have in mind what I have in mind when we use the word “Holocaust?” I doubt it. But in any event, I did not write what he suggests I wrote. Here is a guy who is one of the most respected academics in America and he is not willing or not able to read the simplest text accurately in order to criticize it usefully. I can only observe that he represents very well his professional peers on this particular matter, for which he is a guiding light. I suppose it’s easier for someone like me. I didn’t go through the university processing mill. I quit higher education when I graduated from John C\. Fremont High School in South Central Los Angeles. You know about South Central-the place where they do the riots?

I’m a skeptic about some of the core stories promoted by the Holocaust Industry regarding the Jewish Holocaust. I am most skeptical about those charges against Germans, which most clearly allege a unique German monstrosity. The more unique the alleged crime, the more skeptical I am of it. Germans have enough on their conscience without being burdened with charges that are not true. Skepticism on the university campus is a good, not an evil. Belief is not an evil, either, but it is merely belief. The Jewish Holocaust story is a war story. Like every other war story, some of it’s true and some of it isn’t. It’s not an all or nothing affair. Students do not have to swallow the entire enchilada the way the Holocaust Industry peddles it. Students have the right to their own integrity.

The primary thrust of Silber’s Open Letter is that my ad “libeled” Nobel Peace Prizewinner Elie Wiesel. Wiesel is a former inmate at the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. In the ad I wrote ironically about Elie Wiesel as an “eyewitness authority” and as an “authority on hate.” My language is ironic because I find Elie to be a false eyewitness and a man devoted to promoting hatred for Germans and others. Silber was particularly troubled by my use of a direct quote from Elie’s book Legends of Our Time. Wiesel’s use of Legends in the title of this book is significant in ways that Silber’s professional peers have been reluctant to recognize. I’m here to encourage them to take charge of their professional lives with regard to this one subject.

In my ad I wrote “Elie Wiesel has won the hearts and minds of Holocaust Studies professors with his counsel on how to perpetuate a loathing for Germans. I quote directly from Elie:

Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate-healthy virile hate-for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German.” (Legends of Our Time, “Appointment With Hate,” NY, Avon, 1968, pp. 177-178.)

The ad states: “Students understand the implications of this statement when brought to their attention, while their professors appear not to. Perhaps if we change one word in Elie Wiesel’s advice, it will focus their attention:

Every Palestinian, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate – healthy virile hate – for what the Jew personifies and for what persists in the Jew.

Many professors, including many Jewish professors, have been outraged by this little exercise. Silber was outraged by it. So far, however, no Palestinians and no Palestinian professors have communicated their outrage to me. Why not? Surely those Palestinians who belong to the professorial class have about the same moral and ethical concerns, as do Jewish professors and those from Texas. Or are we to presume that ethics on the university campus generally are, and should be, an expression of ethnic identification?”

Silber wrote:

The quotation cited by Smith doesn’t even support his libel. In the quote, Elie Wiesel does not say that every Jew “should set apart a zone of hate-healthy virile hate” for Germans. Rather he said they “should set apart a zone of hate-healthy, virile hate-for what the German personifies and for what persists in the Germans.” As the Nazi generation has passed from the scene, what Germans personify and what persists in the Germans has changed. What Germans personified in 1945 is not what a different generation of Germans personify today.

I’m willing to be convinced that Silber is right about this, and that I am wrong. A hatred for Jews is one thing, shall we say, while a hatred for what the Jew “personifies” and for what “persists” in the Jew is something very different. Is that the way our John Silbers would have us have it? And is it not ironic that while the Nazi generation has “passed from the scene,” the “Zionist generation” that co-existed with the Nazi generation and cooperated with it in significant ways, and which at the close of World War II directed the invasion and conquest of Palestine, the destruction of Palestinian culture, the creation of a million Palestinian refugees, and built a Jewish settler state on Palestinian land, did not pass from the scene at all but still flourishes today?

What part does Silber and his professional peers believe the policies of that generation of Zionists play in the hatred so many Palestinians feel for Jews today? How do they distinguish their hatred of Jews from, say, their hatred for what “the Jew personifies,” or for “what persists in the Jew?” Are these issues that should even be addressed?

Silber wrote:

Smith writes, “Elie Wiesel claims in All Rivers Run to the Sea, ‘I read [Immanuel Kant’s] The Critique of Pure Reason in Yiddish.’” Smith continues, “Kant’s Critique has not been translated into Yiddish. Here again, EW did not tell the truth.” But selections of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason had been translated into and published into Yiddish in pre-war Warsaw-I have a photocopy of the title page before me as I write. After the passage of 50 years, Wiesel misnamed the Critique he had read in 1945, but his minor slip hardly justifies Smith’s claim that “EW did not tell the truth.”

Frankly, I did not know that a chapter from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason was published in Yiddish in pre-war Poland. Always glad to learn something new. It turns out that others also knew about it. For example, Norman Finkelstein, author of The Holocaust Industry, knew about it. When he was chatted up by Salon, Professor Finkelstein had an interesting take on the Wiesel/Kant matter.

Wiesel claims to be a Kant scholar. He says that when he was a teenager, girls were running away from him because all he could do was talk about Kant … [what was] published in Warsaw in 1929 was Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason.” One chapter, 60 pages. … Everybody agrees on that. There is no dispute. The “Etik” comes from Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason.” Confusing the two Kant books is like a Tolstoy scholar having read one chapter of “Anna Karenina” and confusing it with the whole of “War and Peace.” That’s ridiculous.

Knowing the facts of the matter, as I now know them, I could not have said it better myself. Wiesel is a foolish man who has found an entire class of fools, the professorial class, to help him promote his foolishness.

In his Open Letter Silber wrote:

Smith writes. “EW claims that after Jews were executed at Babi Yar in the Ukraine, ‘geysers of blood’ spurted from their grave for ‘months’ afterward.” Wiesel’s words are these: “Eye witnesses say that for months after the killings the ground continued to spurt geysers of blood. One was always treading on corpses.” Nowhere did Elie Wiesel claim to see geysers of blood, only that he heard these reported.

It’s remarkable how often I have to agree with the John Silbers and others in his class, when we are at such loggerheads with one another. Dr. Silber is right. Elie does not claim to have seen these “geysers of blood” with his own eyes-he only forwards the story as if it were true.

But then, if we are going to go with that standard of public story telling (which in this instant is a charge of unique German monstrosity), I have a story for Dr. Silber about how Jews murder Christian children and drain their blood to use in cooking matzoh balls. Remember that one? No? Many Jews know about it. Jewish patriots call it a “blood libel.” Admittedly, I have not seen such a cookout with my own eyes-but I have heard it reported by others! Using the standards that Dr. Silber, Elie Wiesel and the professorial class employ, I suppose it could be found to be ethically correct for me to forward the Christian-blood-for-matzoh-balls story to Boston University students as if it were true. It depends on how vulgar one really wants to be.

Or-maybe Dr. Silber and some of the other old farts at Boston University will be willing to argue that there really were eyewitnesses to Elie’s grotesque geysers-of-blood-months-after-the-Jews-were-buried gossip, and that this can be demonstrated to be fact. Is that how I should take it? I kind of hope so. It would be immensely comic to discover that the chancellor of a great (well, large) American University has been taken in yet one more time by his little buddy in the humanities department.

Dr. Silber wrote:

[Smith] reports that Elie Wiesel claims that he was liberated from Dachau, from Buchenwald and from Auschwitz. That is contrary to fact. Elie Wiesel wrote in Night that he was liberated from Buchenwald, and he has never claimed anything else. Newspapers occasionally get facts wrong, and Smith bases his claim about Wiesel not on Wiesel’s writings but on newspaper reports. From these erroneous accounts, Smith claims that Wiesel is not a credible witness.

Again, I agree with Dr. Silber. Elie wrote in Night that he was liberated from Buchenwald. I agree that newspapers do occasionally get facts wrong. But when Dr. Silber writes that the newspaper accounts reporting that Elie claimed to have been liberated from Auschwitz and from Dachau are erroneous, he does not tell us what evidence he has that those two reporters misquoted what Elie said. If Dr. Silber, or anyone else, has such evidence, I’d like to see it. And then one wonders why Elie has not publicly pointed out these errors of fact so that readers of the New York Times and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency would not go on believing he said what they reported he said?

Are reporters for the JTA so unprofessional, for example, such amateurs, and have such tin ears that they would mistake “Dachau” for “Buchenwald?” What is the JTA, a refuge for the comprehension impaired? Is it possible that there is or ever has been one editor at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency who has not followed the Elie Wiesel story for the past ten years-the last thirty years-who is not aware that Mr. Wiesel was liberated at Buchenwald? Is there one print editor in any great city in America who has not seen over and over again the famous photo where Elie is posing for photographers in someone else’s bunk at Buchenwald-the photo that has been reprinted endlessly all over the world?

Who are we kidding here? Who are we trying to kid? the New York Times reporter mis-heard “Auschwitz” for “Buchenwald?” I believe that the Times would have printed a correction of such a stupid blunder-if our Nobel Laureate had sent it to them. What are we to think the New York Times is-chopped liver?

Dr. Silber writes:

Elie Wiesel was invited by the President and Chancellor of Germany to speak in Berlin on January 27, 2000, the day of the remembrance of the liberation of Auschwitz […] In that address Wiesel commented favorably on Germany’s support of Israel, on Germany’s compensation for the victims of the Third Reich, and on Germany’s recent initiative in compensating those who were used as forced laborers.

I believe it. I have no doubt whatever that Elie Wiesel, along with the rest of those who speak for the Holocaust Industry, and those who have profited so greatly from the creation of the Israeli State upon the ruins of a destroyed Palestine, look “favorably” upon the billions of marks that have flowed from the German people into Israeli coffers and Jewish coffers. To say nothing of the hundred billion dollars that have flowed to the same places from the US taxpayer and now from one European nation after another-all of which is being paid for by the labor of people who, for the most part, were not yet born during WWII.

As a matter of fact, isn’t that really rather the point of it all? The whole Holocaust Hate Industry scam? Influence? Then money? Then more influence, more money? If it isn’t about that-that is, about power, what is it about? Remembering? If it is, I have a suggestion that would be a great boon to ordinary Jews the world over-forget it!

In the final paragraph of Dr. Silber’s Open Letter to Colleges and Universities, which compresses into a few words the entirety of the message of his letter, he writes:

What is the motivation and purpose of Mr. Smith and his CODOH? Why do they find it personally important to deny the Holocaust and to abuse and denigrate Professor Wiesel? Isn’t it relevant to ask? Bradley R. Smith and his Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust are a travesty and a repudiation of all that a university should stand for when falsehood is disseminated and truth is suppressed

It is customary for all members of the professorial class to introduce the issue of motivation when they run up against sensible criticism of men like Elie Wiesel. Yet none of us knows what the motivation of the other is, and when we look closely at our own motives we find each one to be rooted in a maze of complexities. Who knows what tangle of motive lies behind the cruelty and bad faith of an Elie Wiesel? How would I ever get to the bottom of the motives of a man like Dr. Silber, who is willing to write with such carelessness about such important matters? I would have thought he would understand the problems with motive. I thought he was a philosopher.

I wonder what Dr. John Silber, along with so many others in the professorial class, think the “Holocaust” was? Has he just gone along with the journalists, who have gone along with the big money people in the Holocaust Industry? Did he believe for forty years, for example, that four million victims were murdered by the Germans at Auschwitz? When the Auschwitz Museum authorities admitted that it was not four million and more like “one million” (Yehuda Bauer had mentioned publicly that revisionists can count) did Dr. Silber stop believing the four million figure and start believing the new one-million figure? Or did he know all the time that it was not four million-but chose to remain silent-as did the entire professorial class in America? Did Dr. Silver, or any of his colleagues, ever comment publicly on the contemptible role their professional peers played in the Auschwitz four million charade? Or did he and they consciously choose to remain “bystanders?”

Dr. Silber charges that I am a liar. He does not demonstrate that I am. Even if he were able to show that I am factually wrong about something in the ad, and he did not, it does not follow that I lied about it. He knows that, I know he knows that, but it looks like he thought he could get away with saying it anyhow because he’s a university chancellor and I’m-what?-a simple writer with no position, no wealth, and no influence. I don’t know what Dr. Silber’s motive was for deciding to write something so careless and empty, but I think if he were to take a run at trying to figure it out it could change something very deep about the way he lives his life.

Just for a lark, Dr. Silber should ask Elie Wiesel about the New York Times story where Elie relates how he was hit by a taxicab and flew “an entire block” (200-plus feet) down Broadway. A friend suggests that Elie should be nominated for the Nobel Prize for Flying. But then, this tale was just another error, I suppose, on the part of a New York Times reporter who meant to write something entirely different. Maybe that rag is chopped liver after all.

Chapter Twenty Five

I’m standing in the dirt alongside the main drag in town, Benito Juarez, watching the movement of the sow’s belly as she breaths in and out. She’s white with sorrel splotches, close to three hundred pounds. There’s a chain link fence half-fallen down, a little dirt yard filled with trash and junk, and then a dirty, two-story stuccoed house with its windows boarded up.

After awhile an old Mexican guy about my age comes up, and with an English I can understand if I listen carefully, says:

“That is some pig.”

“I think so.”

“She knows who is good and who is bad.”

“Is that right?” When he smiles he has only two teeth in his lower jaw. One is broken off at the gum line.

“I could tell you a lot about this pig.”

A young boy comes out of the upholstery shack next door, pauses to kick the pig a couple times, then goes on his way. The pig doesn’t pay any attention to the boy.

“The pig does not like that boy,” the Mexican says. “She knows everyone in town.”

“Yeah?”

“She can see auras. She knows who has one and who does not.”

“Yeah? How did you find that out?”

“I asked her. This pig and me, we have a lot in common.”

“Do you see auras?”

“No, not that way. I mean, I know how it feels to eat garbage and sleep in the dirt. I respect her, and she respects me.”

I tell him how some mornings I see this pig grazing in the gutter when I drive Paloma to school. It’s a nice way to start the day, driving slowly along the main drag, the sun coming up over the plateau to the east, a little mist blowing off the ocean here and there, and a three-hundred pound hog loose on the Boulevard.

“She enjoys those mornings as much as you do. This pig has a soul just like you and me. You can take that to the bank.”

I laugh and he laughs.

“If you want to learn something about pigs, read that English guy-about the animal farm?”

“Orwell?”

“That’s right. George Orwell. There was a man who understood pigs. Have you read Orwell?”

“Some of him.”

“It is good to talk to an educated man. Orwell was a big man. He was right about pigs, and he was right about communists. A very big man.”

“I hadn’t thought to think of Orwell that way.”

“Can you doubt it?”

“I don’t think I can. Who owns her?”

“The pig? An ex-federale. You have probably seen him on the street. He is not quite right. Too much dope, too many shootings. You know how it is with Mexican federales.”

“Maybe.”

“You are not a man to judge others quickly. I like that. Mexicans judge everybody right away. They cannot wait to judge you. This pig, she will never judge you. No matter what you do, she will not judge you.”

“I like that in a pig.”

“She does not like that boy that kicked her. But she will not judge him.”

“Uh huh.”

“She is like my wife that way.”

“Your wife?”

“Yes. My wife. I met her in La Paz thirty years ago. Longer. I was sleeping under a bridge in La Paz. There was just us tramps and some animals. Those were good days. They were okay days. One morning she drove down in a pickup looking for stray dogs. She was American. She loves dogs. She finds stray dogs and takes care of them and finds them owners. All her life she has been like that. She is an educated woman. Not like me. I don’t know nothing. That morning, instead of taking one of those lost dogs, she took me. She said there was something about me. She said there was a light near me, like it moved when I moved. I did not know what to think, but I wanted to go with her. She said she would make something out of me. That she would start from nothing, which is what I was, and make me into something special. She did a hell of a job, but she didn’t know how hard it would be. Now here I am. I am a changed man-and I am still nothing.”

He laughs and I laugh. We watch the sow breathe.

Gradually he finds out that I’ve read Huxley, even Philip Wylie, and the Hindus and Buddhists and the Zen people. He puts his arm around my shoulders and hugs me. There are people passing back and forth. He says: “I like a man who reads books and knows how to laugh and does not judge others.”

After awhile he finds out that I read Krishnamurti.

“Oh, my,” he says. “Krishnamurti was the one who was in my wife’s heart.”

I’m starting to get in the mood. “Have you read Casteneada?”

He jumps away from me, laughs and slaps both his legs. “Casteneada! Sure I have read Casteneda. You have read Casteneada? You see what this pig has done? She has brought us together. You are the first person I have met in this town who has read Krishnamurti and Casteneda too.”

He bends down and rubs his hand over the sow’s heaving belly. “I love you, pig,” he says. “You are my querida,” he says to her. “You are my dear one.”

I am a changed man too. Who is not? I’m the same man I have always been but I am less and less. At the same time, there’s still a lot of me around. I wonder if my new friend really has become nothing.

That morning I was upstairs in the office working on a newspaper article, waiting for my computer technician to arrive. He was to up-grade my motherboard, CPU and fan. Two hundred and fifty dollars that I didn’t really have but was going to spend anyhow because I had kicked off the first step in the campus project and wanted to be able to move quickly as the first stories developed.

The technician was late, which in Baja is not that unusual, but when I was about to call him he called me to say he had been watching television and that the World Trade Center had been attacked by airplanes and that it was gone.

“Ignacio, have you been watching Mexican soap opera?”

“I am not making a joke. It was attacked and it is gone.”

“You mean it has been damaged?”

“No. It is gone. It is not there. Gone. I have never seen anything like it. That is why I am late. I have been watching the television for two hours. Do you mean that you do not know?”

“I do not watch television during the day.”

“That is good. You work. I called you to tell you why I am late. It is incredible. The World Trade Center is gone. I will be right over.”

I went downstairs, turned on the television and saw the airplane bank to it’s left and smash inside one of the World Trade Center towers. I watched it several times. The tower was still standing. How could Ignacio be so wrong? Then I saw the camera shots where first one tower exploded and collapsed, then the other. It was astounding. The visual images were so arresting that for several moments the mind was thoughtless. When thought did come back it was not to empathize with those inside the Towers and the mad horror and pain that they must have been suffering, but to report that I was watching Arabs respond to half a century of America’s heartless support of Israel, half a century of Palestinian Arabs being brutalized and humiliated by Israeli Jews.

I was entirely ignorant of the facts of who had planned and carried out the attack or why. Nevertheless, thought was telling me that finally the guys on the bottom, those who identified with Palestinians, had made a powerful statement condemning those on the top-Americans and Israelis. It was murderous and primitive, but it was powerful. At last. In the moment I was still oddly removed emotionally from the human catastrophe that was being played out on the little screen. Thought was in its “historical” mode. There was only thought repeating over and over that what I was watching was blowback for half a century of U.S. policies regarding Israel and the Middle East, the centerpiece of which has been American support for the conquest of Palestine by European Jews. That an open debate on the Holocaust story would have destroyed the image of the unique monstrosity of the Germans, thus the “moral duty” of the U.S. Congress to fund the subjugation and humiliation of Palestinians for half a century. It was more complicated than that, but that was at the heart of the drama.

I watched American and Mexican news broadcasts the rest of the day. On Mexican television the connection between Palestinians and Israel and America came up very quickly. Not on American television. On American television it was as if the attack against America had come out of the blue, a lightening bolt from some evil god. It was a given for American journalists and the politicos they interviewed that Islamic radicals were the most likely perpetrators, and while Osama Bin Laden was mentioned again and again, no American journalist or government spokesman asked why or mentioned Israel. Why would any Arab want to commit such an atrocity against American civilians? No one wanted to mention the Israeli connection. No one was willing to ask why?

That first evening at dusk I went out walking on the Boulevard as I usually do. The broken sidewalks, the taco stands with the mangy dogs hanging around, the oil-soaked little auto repair shops, the men still working under naked light bulbs. Inwardly I was flooded with the drama of the World Trade Center. I was still removed emotionally from the tragedy. I was in something of a trance-the mind filled by the images of the utter destruction of the immense buildings, the awareness that a great historical event had happened in America that very day.

We have known for years that sooner or later some Arab with a grudge and a plan would walk into Times Square with a suitcase carrying a nuclear bomb or some chemical or biological weapon. He wouldn’t be searching for the guilty, he’d already have made the decision to just kill everyone who happened to be on the island. He might be a young man whose family had been killed by American bombs, or whose village in Palestine had been erased from the face of the earth by our Israeli clients. Or maybe he would have watched his little sister in Iraq starve, or die from lack of medicine because of the American-inspired blockade of his country. Among Arabs, there is a surplus of reasons to have a grudge against America and our belligerent little friends in Israel.

As I walked along I kept seeing the Trade Towers explode in great clouds of fire and smoke and collapse in on themselves until on the television there was nothing left but a great pile of rubble. It was as if the picture of it were engraved my mind. It was dark now and after awhile I realized I was watching coconuts drop from palmed trees in bright sunlight. I could hear the nuts striking the ground. It was a moment before I realized that I was seeing something that wasn’t there. And then I understood I was watching the destruction of the Eighth District in Saigon in 1968. That July I had watched from the Y-bridge in Cholon as the Eighth District was leveled by American artillery and air strikes. The Viet Cong had returned after their setback at Tet and it was either go house to house to clear them out or take down the neighborhood. Being Americans, the decision was foreordained. Every building, every house in the Eighth District was leveled. I had gone along with a company of the 9th Infantry that afternoon to see if anything was still moving in the rubble. We didn’t find one body that still had life in it, and as we returned through the smoke, the intense heat and the complete silence, we passed three tall coconut trees where the coconuts were dropping one by one, and the sound they made as they fell into the rubble was the only sound left in the afternoon.

Walking along in the dark on the Boulevard I understood that thought, using its dumb-show of memory, was connecting the television images of the great pile of rubble that only that morning were the World Trade Towers, and the field of flattened rubble I had watched come down more than thirty years before where thousands of families had lived and worked and raised their children. Memory has its own way of thinking, juxtaposing one image against another, and if you are alert you might understand the drift of what it is trying to express. I suppose that what my own memory was expressing that night on the Boulevard is that American culture has become generically predisposed toward turning the cities of other people into rubble and now one terrible chicken had come home to roost.

On the third day after the attack-I think it was the third day-I was finally wrenched out of all the obsessive thinking, for a moment, by coming across a live television presentation where Billy Graham was preaching at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. In the audience were most of the President’s men and many of his generals. Graham is an old man now, he cannot walk well, but he still preaches with a full strong voice. That morning he spoke directly to the President’s men, telling them that vengeance belongs to God, not to man, and he spoke of the “mystery of evil.” I had heard nothing but talk of war, retribution, and justice from the President on down. When I heard Graham preach that vengeance belongs not to man but to God, something opened up in me and from that moment on I began to feel the anguish of those who had lost family and friends in the attack. And then the anguish was with me, and remained with me, and made itself known again and again as I watched the images over and over on television and listened to the stories.

While I am not horrified at the thought of killing those who were directly responsible for killing three thousand Americans, I am not yet certain who the guilty parties are. For years Osama bin Laden passed his time encouraging Muslims to kill American crusaders and Israeli Jews. He appeared to revel in the fact that with the attack on the World Trade Center some Muslims had accomplished what he had encouraged them to do. I think he is certainly guilty of something. Among a civilized people, under the rule of law, that’s not good enough. Osama is innocent until proven guilty-not in the press, not in the Office of the President of the United States, but in a court of law. That’s the American way. That’s what we tell ourselves is the American way. We don’t want to take the assertions of our government at face value about who is guilty of what. We did that from the beginning to the end of the 20th century. The result was one monstrous disaster after another.

I don’t share in the rage that so many feel about the attack on the World Trade Center. I understand the “hopeless” rage of those who had family and friends murdered there, but the mass killing of innocents for the deeds of the guilty has been deeply embedded in U.S. foreign policy for a century now, beginning with the campaign in the Philippines. Osama referenced this fact publicly again and again-Germany, Japan, Vietnam, Iraq, Palestine. Revisionism has called my attention again and again to how we accept this fact of life, these double standards, so readily, and how we have no public shame and no public sense that we should start taking seriously the idea that we need to change our foreign policies and confront the moral and ethical double standards we have been living with, as a people, for so long.

With respect to killing the innocent for the acts of those who rule them, the Islamist radicals did nothing unusual. They represent an old established human tradition. They want to right what, from their point of view, are the injustices being carried out against “their” people. That’s what they all say. Hitler said it, Stalin said it, Mao, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Truman all said it. Pol Pot and Idi Amin said it. Even Che Guevarra and the pipsqueak Fidel Castro said it. They all were willing to intentionally kill the innocent for what they convinced themselves was a “higher good.” The people who did the World Trade Towers were unique only in that they represented no nation state, but an NGO, a non-governmental organization. You don’t have to have your own state any longer. Western technology has created a world in which NGOs can organize and kill the innocent on a scale that compares favorably to the ability of a State to intentionally kill the innocent. NGOs can use the same justifications the State uses. Their leaders can feel the same self-righteousness and peace of mind.

The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL) has named me one of the “Top Ten Extremists” in America. The ADL published the charge in a print booklet, and to make certain no one missed it, published it on the Internet as well. I’ve never been an extremist, while the extremists I have met think I’m a cupcake. I feel a little like one of those serial murderers listed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list-it’s nice to see my picture at the post office, but is it what I really want?

What do I do to be taken so seriously? I place advertisements in student newspapers. I ask for some back and forth on a historical issue. I encourage intellectual freedom—even with regard to the Holocaust question. Always with the cooperation of student editors, their business managers and faculty advisors. That makes me one of the top ten extremists—maybe one of the most dangerous men (there are no women on the list) in the nation? What’s extremism coming to?

On the Internet the ADL Homepage for Extremism In America displays a photograph of the Oklahoma City Federal Building after it was bombed by Timothy McVeigh, et al. Is that what intellectual freedom leads to? The mass killing of civilians and their children? What kind of fundamentalist, authoritarian personalities would believe that? I believe intellectual freedom leads to a non-violent exchange of ideas, encourages communication among the citizenry, creates confidence in an open society, and illuminates the activities of government agencies and other special interest organizations, particularly those that have an agenda that is anti-democratic. But then-of course! That’s it!

The Anti-Defamation League does some good work, I’m not going to dismiss the League entirely. At the same time it is a leading ethno-centric, Jewish, special-interest organization that puts Zionist political and cultural issues before everything else, both here and in the Middle East. Among its many sins is that it has provided unwavering support for the humiliation and brutalization of Palestinians by the Israeli Government for half a century and lobbied American politicos—successfully—to do the same.

The one common thread among nine out of the ten of those on the ADL’s Top Ten list of Extremists in America is that they are all involved with the White racialist movement. I’m the one exception, but I made the list anyhow. What a guy! How did I pull it off? I have never been a member of a racialist organization. I have never written on racial issues. And then there is what may be called a small irony—my family is Mexican, my children are Mexican, and most of my friends are Mexican. Why is CODOH and Smith on the list then?

This is a no-brainer. Those who manage the Holocaust Industry, and the ADL is in the top management tier of this peculiar business, exploit the premise that anyone who encourages intellectual freedom with regard to the Holocaust question hates Jews. One explanation for this moronic idea is that it is a sickly way of reacting to those who express skepticism about what you happen to believe. A second is that the Industry is saturated with greed and lust for authority. There you have it. I’m one of the top ten extremists in America because I make the simple observation that in one respect the Holocaust story is like every other war story—some of it’s true, some of it isn’t—and I argue that the time is come to separate the wheat from the chaff.

When I believed the gas chamber stories, the Jews I knew thought I was a swell guy. When I changed my mind about them, I become an apostate. I had betrayed a political-religious cult to which, while I had never been a member, I had looked upon with favor. Those dedicated to the cult believed the story was written in stone. I had doubted that God wrote His Ten Commandments in stone and gave them to Moses but that was okay. The Jews I knew didn’t believe that story either. But they all believed the gas-chamber stories, and they all believed those stories were written in stone.

Some began to see me as their enemy. Those who were already working in the Holocaust Industry felt they had an obligation to shut me up—to keep me off radio, suppress my writings, refuse me the right to buy space in student newspapers, close down my website. Some even felt it necessary to threaten to kill me, to threaten to murder my children. Those who wanted to kill the kids—they didn’t know what they were getting into. They didn’t know my kids are Mexican. They would have committed a “hate” crime. Their asses would have been mud. Now that they know, I’m no longer getting those kinds of threats. Maybe it’s coincidence.

What exactly is an extremist? One who goes fartherest from the center. For example, one who believes absolutely that an all-knowing God exists-or one who believes absolutely that no such god exists. For myself, I understand that I know nothing whatever about the matter, and when I’m at my best I have no opinion about it. It’s the same with the “gassing chambers.” I’m skeptical. I see no adequate evidence that they existed, and no absolute proof that they did not. One can have a rational viewpoint about gassing chambers, however, based on available physical and documentary evidence. I don’t see myself as an extremist then-as one who goes fartherest from the center-but as a skeptic. I’m one, in the broad sense of that word, who is in the center of an issue that is in the hands of true believers-that is, extremists.

But that’s old news now. Americans have discovered what extremism really is. After 11 September, when Islamic radicals made their views known about the foreign policies of the United States of America, my importance as a “top ten” extremist became very small potatoes indeed. The media pundits and the President are in agreement-America will never again be the same. For one thing, Americans are going to start putting behind them the Jewish “Holocaust” Americans watched their own “holocaust” take place on their own television screens. This holocaust is not like the “gas-chamber” holocaust. Americans know this one happened, and they know what happened.

We know the airplanes actually existed. We know that the World Trade Towers existed. We know the airplanes really did crash into the Towers. There really were great fiery explosions. Immense columns of smoke really did lift up into the heavens. There were hundreds if not thousands of “eyewitnesses” to the same specific event. People really did jump from windows eighty and a hundred floors above the ground. The towers really did fall down. Are there going to appear “deniers” now who will try to dismiss the destruction of the World Trade Center as a hoax? Will they try to “revise” the story, claiming that the planes missed their mark? That the towers did not really collapse but are still standing? That there really was no deliberate plan to kill the people in the towers? Not likely. Very different from the “gas-chamber” stories-or don’t you think so?

An Independent Television Network article titled “Website confronts the Net Nazis” tells us that the government of Great Britain is getting into the anti-Holocaust-revisionist business on the Internet. It will begin to celebrate “Holocaust Memorial Day” each year on 27 January, the day the German camp at Auschwitz was liberated by those governed by the Allied tyrant and mass-murderer, Josef Stalin. There is something particularly appropriate about this. The news story has an interesting sub theme that I would not have expected.

Home Secretary Jack Straw’s decision to use the Internet as a platform to promote Britain’s first Holocaust Memorial Day has significance far beyond the web’s use as a global message board … [The Web is] a useful tool for those who want to deny the Holocaust or promote virulent anti-Semitism. [One] site regarded as particularly pernicious by the Israeli authorities is the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH)….

“Israeli authorities?” “Particularly pernicious?” This is getting serious. Which Israeli authorities? The author of the article is not identified. No specific Israeli authority is identified. Thought turns immediately to the Israeli Mossad. International assassins feared the world over. Should I leave my light on at night? Would it do me any good? The record suggests that if the Mossad decides it wants me, they’ll have me for breakfast. I don’t think they want me very badly or I’d already be gone. Still, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of the Israeli authorities. Unlike myself, they can do two or more things at once. They can move forward with settling Jewish religious fanatics on Palestinian land, shoot those Palestinians who protest, and take care of someone like me all at the same time.

If this ITN journalist knows what he’s talking about, Israeli authorities believe that CODOH might cause irreparably destructive (pernicious) damage to-what? Well, the reputation of the Jewish Holocaust story. The story that legitimizes whatever Israeli Jews want to do to Palestinian Arabs and anyone else they want to do something to, and legitimizes the policy of the U.S. Congress to fund it all from beginning to end. If Israeli sharpshooters do not have a morally legitimate reason to shoot Palestinian kids through the eye, it would make Israeli Jews look bad. But they do have a legitimate excuse to shoot and bomb and displace any Palestinian they choose. Half a century ago Germans Holocausted Jews in “gassing chambers.” That’s why, today, Israeli Jews can do what they want to whomever they want. The logic is clear. The whole world can see that it’s legitimate. But if the gas-chamber stories are brought into question-what then?

An associate asks what I get out of doing revisionism. Don’t I get dispirited? It’s hard work, there’s no money, and all the best people hold you in contempt. I don’t get dispirited. I don’t know why. There must be something missing in my character. I think it has to do with the fact that I am not focused on winning, on the future. I appear to be interested in the daily round. The process. I noticed this a long time ago. It’s not an accomplishment, it’s just the drift of my character.

So here I am, seventy-two years old, still up to my neck in work that few care about and many detest and fear. No savings, ten thousand dollars in debt, barely able to pay the bills. I don’t know why I stay at it. It’s what I do. I receive word that one old friend after another has sickened and died, or has simply fallen down dead, and I feel the whisper of anxiety about my own coming demise. I suppose I’m like most other old guys that way. When the day comes, I am not going to want to give up what I will have to give up, which is everything. I understand that once I give it up, afterwards I’m not going to miss it, but that doesn’t change how I feel. I feel about life the way the miser feels about his gold-I want to take it with me.

Fall is come again and the hour has changed and now when I go out walking in the evening it’s dark, and lonely, in a way that it’s never been before. For the first time in my life I want someone to walk with me when it’s dark. Not certain why. Sometimes I fall down, but that isn’t the reason. I just want someone with me. So far I haven’t broken anything. The other night I fell in the street only a block from the house and four Mexicans from four different points on the compass ran over to help me up.

Sometimes I stop at the little bar at Vicente’s fish restaurant. There’s standing room for three people at the bar. There’s one stool. One evening I was there drinking wine and reading Khema’s Being Nobody, Going Nowhere, which is a wonderful book for someone like me-a wonderful title anyhow-when a waitress came to the bar to order a drink. When she turned to take the drink to her table her long hair brushed across the back of my neck. It was soft and wispy and memory filled up with pictures of other women in other places in other times. I stopped reading and ordered another glass of wine. Memory recalled the images of women I haven’t seen in half a century but have never forgotten. I reminded myself to not have more than three glasses or I would risk breaking many bones before I got back to the house.

A Mexican came to the bar, ordered a beer, and we fell into conversation in English. He was thin and intense. I learned that he had grown up in the U.S., served twenty years in the U.S. army, but had not become a citizen. He was planning to sue the U.S. Government, specifically the Department of Justice, charging that it had planted a microchip in his body and that government agents use it to give him commands that he must obey. A couple years ago, when he was living in Yuma, government agents used their microchip to command him to shoot a Black guy who had been getting on his nerves. After the shooting he had been deported from the States and now he can’t go back.

It wasn’t that the U.S. Government had done something to him alone. The U.S. Government implants every baby born in America with a microchip. That’s how the government programs Americans to do what it wants. It’s a crime against humanity but no one has been willing to speak out. He will be the first. Local law enforcement agencies in the U.S. would not give him the time of day. He had to go straight to the top. He had already written to all the major law enforcement agencies in the United States about the microchips, including the U.S. Department of Justice, and while he had received a few replies he had the feeling that he was being strung along.

While he was still in America he had tried to get doctors at the Veteran’s Hospital to cat scan his whole body. He wanted the hospital administrators, along with his own eyewitnesses, to be there so that nothing would be covered up. The Veterans people would not cooperate. He went to mortuaries and asked permission to observe autopsies so that he could keep an eye out for the microchips. No mortuary would allow him to observe. They were all in on it. He decided he would make the ultimate sacrifice for Americans and for humankind. He would offer to kill himself if it were guaranteed that his autopsy would be monitored by the Department of Justice, televised by at least two networks, and observed by journalists representing six major dailies. What more could he do? He was waiting now for a reply from Justice.

I like a good story, and I know a good story when I hear one. I order another glass of wine, then another. I lose count. My new friend is willing to elaborate on his story for as long as I’m willing to drink. At ten o’clock the gods of time intervene and Vicente’s closes for the night. I pay the bill for the two of us and we part, promising to get together another time. Outside, the night is black and starry and at the same time the street is awash with the moon’s white light. I begin walking carefully along the dirt and broken-brick walks toward the house. I put my hands in my jacket pockets, then take them out again in case I fall. My heart is floating in some vast inner space. And thought says: “So then-it’s been the microchips all along!”

But of course! It’s always been the microchips. Habitual thought, commands to react to stimuli in specific ways, habits implanted in every individual by his culture, his nation, his family, his genes. President Bush had to bomb the Afghans because Islamist radicals attacked America because Americans killed Iraqi Arabs and funded Israeli Jews to kill Palestinian Arabs because Palestinians had not agreed to the conquest of their land and the destruction of their culture by European Jews despite the fact that at the beginning the United Nations and President Truman and the U.S. Congress had said it was okay because Germany had holocausted the Jews because Hitler didn’t like them because-well, he was part of the first axis of evil-so what choice did President Bush really have after what Hitler did to the Jews? He absolutely had to bomb the Afghans. What choice does he have now? He’s going to have to bomb somebody else. Bombing, blowback, and more bombing have become the fate of the American presidency.

Revisionist theory has addressed microchip thinking for five decades. Revisionists understood very early on that no good would come from the exploitation of a historical fraud that demonized Germans. That no good would come from exploiting that fraud to justify Jewish greed for Palestinian land, and then to demonize Palestinian Arabs who resisted their colonization. The U.S. Congress and its Jewish clients are going to have to get out of the phony, anti-evil thought-box that they have constructed for themselves, and start seeing each other as men and women who are wrong about almost everything, just like the rest of us.

Microchip thinking is only habit. We can choose to go with the habits that have been implanted in us by others, that we have adopted for ourselves, or we can choose to opt out of them one by one and face ourselves, and each other, as if for the first time, fresh and without preconception-that is, without memory. Memory, the subjective life, is where all the violence, brutality, greed and lust for revenge hang out. Memory is the tool that justifies all our crimes. Nobel Prize recipients laud memory. I think it’s time we begin to forget it. Beneath this black and star-filled night, awash with wine and white moonlight, I tell myself, once again, that I will try. I’ll try to let memory go and focus on what is right here, right now. It won’t be easy. I know, because I have tried many times and failed. I don’t fail every time I try, but I do fail most of the time.

  • Bradley R. Smith

    Bradley R. Smith was born in Los Angeles on February 18, 1930. At 18 he joined the army and in 1951 served with the infantry in Korea where he was twice wounded. After three decades of a variety of professional activities, it suddenly hit him: In 1979 he read a leaflet by Professor Robert Faurisson, "The Problem of the Gas Chambers." Then, Arthur Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth Century did it for him. He understood from the beginning that he would address the censorship, the suppression of independent thought, the taboo against publishing and debating revisionist arguments—not the arguments themselves. That has remained his position. In 1989, Smith founded Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) dedicated to defending free speech and free inquiry into the Holocaust question. He handed over CODOH's helm in late 2014. He passed away on his 86th birthday, February 18, 2016. Read a series of obituaries here.

Bibliographic information about this document: n/a
Other contributors to this document: n/a
Editor’s comments: n/a

Similar Posts

  • Bradley in Baja

    There is a lot I can say about Bradley… and I can start with how I knew about him for years before I ever met him. About 20 years ago, a group of friends and I put together a weekly publication that later came to be one of the main weekly papers in our little…

  • Smith’s Journal

    Thursday, 1 February 96 David Stennett, a student at University of Puget Sound (WA) left a review copy of David Cole's video about fraud at Auschwitz, “David Cole Interviews Dr. Franciszek Piper,” at the UPS History office. The video was reviewed by Professor Theodore Taranovsky, who teaches something on the Jewish holocaust and revisionism. Taranvoski…

  • Bradley Smith: In Memoriam

    The first time I ever heard of Bradley Smith was about 30 years ago when he appeared on a radio talk show talking about how the history of the atrocities laid at the feet of the Nazis, and that includes the Holocaust, was probably inaccurate and historians and other intellectuals ought to be talking about…