By Ernest Sommers ∙ August 1, 2000
About twenty years ago, a city supervisor in the city of San Francisco went berserk and murdered the mayor of the city, along with another supervisor, who just happened to be the only openly gay man on the city council. At his defense, the killer tried to justify his actions by claiming diminished mental capacity,…
By William Halvorsen ∙ August 1, 2000
While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust, Jeffrey Shandler, Oxford UP, 1999 Everyone knows at this point that the Holocaust has been promoted to such an extent that one can hardly turn around without running into Holocaust imagery of some kind. Any time there is a massacre anywhere, you can bet that some talking head will…
By William Halvorsen ∙ August 1, 2000
We in America are so used to having the Holocaust bulk large as the preeminent symbol of inhumanity that we tend to forget that there are about 5 billion people outside of the reach of Western Civilization who just don't see Twentieth Century history the way we do. Recent events in Asia demonstrate the culture…
By George Brewer ∙ August 1, 2000
Michael Berenbaum's Op-Ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, “The Growing Assault the Truth of Absolute Evil” represents a wild and irrational attack on Holocaust revisionism with little logic and lots of overblown maledictions. Then tenor of the article is clearly shown by its title, which appends to Deborah Lipstadt's notorious formulation not only “evil”…
By George Brewer ∙ August 1, 2000
When confronted with the horns of dilemma, pick up a handful of sand and throw it in the bull's eyes. The defense attorneys for Deborah Lipstadt must have had something like that in mind, for in the last days of the Irving trial they made a spectacular but utterly meaningless gesture: they announced that they…
By George Brewer ∙ August 1, 2000
A libel suit filed by the British historian David Irving against the American Jewish religious instructor Deborah Lipstadt is playing itself out in a London courtroom. The worldwide attention given the trial, which Lipstadt's defense attorneys have attempted to exploit, is not due to the nature of the libels alleged. Instead, the trial has gained…
By Ernest Sommers ∙ August 1, 2000
The Nazi War on Cancer, Robert N. Proctor, Princeton UP, 1999 If I were to describe a society that was obsessed with carcinogens, which was militantly anti-smoking, which extolled the “organic” in everything from food to shampoos, that emphasized exercise and body culture and a “back to nature” ethos, you'd probably think that I had…
By Samuel Crowell ∙ August 1, 2000
There are two types of knowledge in a society. The commonly accepted and the arcane and unproved. Everybody knows that 2+2=4. That's common knowledge. In the 1400's, everyone knew that too. But there was other knowledge, rarer, not as widely known, contradicting the popular wisdom, and not yet demonstrated. Copernicus did not “discover” that the…
By Richard A. Widmann ∙ August 1, 2000
Photo Fakery: The History and Techniques of Photographic Deception and Manipulation, by Dino A. Brugioni. Dulles, Virginia: Brassey's, 1999. Richard A. Widmann Dino Brugioni begins his study of photo fakery with a brief discussion of Arthur C. Lundahl, the first director of the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center. Lundahl always cautioned that the discovery of…
By Ernest Sommers ∙ August 1, 2000
As many revisionists expected, the British historian David Irving failed in his libel suit against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt. In his complaint, Irving had accused Lipstadt of libeling him in her book, Denying the Holocaust in which she characterized Irving as a “Hitler apologist” who distorted, manipulated, and falsified documents, as an anti-Semite who…
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