Columnist Blasts News Story

[From the North Shore News, Oct. 7, 1994]

There I was, barely off the plane from a holiday in England, when a callow youth from the morning trash sheet called me to ask why a couple of my columns had appeared in a sinister magazine in the US called The Journal of Historical Review.

The pieces in question were my famous columns on the propaganda movie “Schindler's List” and the Holocaust.

The next day [Oct. 5] there was a “zip” across the bottom of the [front page of] said rag that read “Holocaust? What Holocaust?”, plus a picture of Doug the Villain and the words “North Van columnist Doug Collins denies it happened.”

On page five the headline was “Holocaust just a story: Collins,” plus a picture showing me with a curled lip. (All the best people curl their lips now and again, there being newspapers like The Province around.)

The lead paragraph contained the breathless news that “Right-wing columnist Doug Collins came out of the closet yesterday and denied the Holocaust occurred.” Fact: I did not deny that “it” occurred. I said I did not believe in the six million story; but that there was no doubt that large numbers of Jews died in the concentration camps, as did large numbers of non-Jews.

Nor did I say that the Holocaust was “just a story.” If the interview was taped, I challenge young Mr. Callow, aka Gordon Clark, to produce such words. They were never spoken.

As for coming out of the closet, someone must be mad, and it ain't me. I have been accused of many things, but hiding in closets isn't one of them. Mountain tops yes, closets no.

The columns reprinted in The Journal of Historical Review had of course already appeared in the North Shore News and caused endless discussion. So talk of closets is pure balderdash.

Clark also asked me whether I was anti-Semitic. This came out as “Collins doesn't consider himself to be anti-Semitic or neo-Nazi (thanks, Gordon) 'but I can't say that some of my best friends are Jews'.” What I said on the question of anti-Semitism, was, “The usual answer to that is often the cliché, 'Some of my best friends are Jews.' I can't say that, but it would be idiotic to be opposed to Jews simply because they are Jews.”

I also pointed out that I had fought against Hitler for six years during the war (and would do so again if I had the choice). For the record, I take people as I find then. There are vicious Jews, kind Jews, poor Jews, rich Jews. The same applies to any other group.

I did say that in my opinion the gas chamber story was false, and pointed out that for some years after the war it was being claimed that gas chambers existed in the concentration camps of Western Germany; also, that I had seen Bergen-Belsen in 1945 and that it had contained no gas chambers.

Today, as I told the reporter, if such he be, even “Nazi-hunter” Simon Wiesenthal admits there were no gas chambers in the West. As to their existing elsewhere, there is considerable doubt. Not that such doubts would appear in our politically correct press, except to be ridiculed.

Also for the record, it isn't only “neo-Nazis” who are asking questions. Arno Mayer, a Jew and Professor of European History at Princeton University wrote a book on the Holocaust called Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? In it, he admitted that “sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable.” Also that “there is no denying the many contradictions, ambiguities and errors in the existing sources.”

David Cole, who is also Jewish, has the director of the Auschwitz Museum confessing on video tape that the “gas chamber” shown to tourists there was a reconstruction done after the war by the Soviets. And the Poles have stated that the story of “four million” deaths there is not true. All of which is food for thought, except that some people do not want thought. They want tunnel vision.

To repeat. The Nazis did horrible things. But the six million story is something else. And it's curious that, while we get the Holocaust thrown at us daily, the crimes perpetrated by the Communists are dropped into the memory hole. I leave you to guess why.

So why did two or three of my columns appear in the revisionist Journal? Because they asked me for them and I said OK. It is reviled by Jewish pressure groups but is a scholarly publication. My arrangement with the News is that if anyone wants to run my column regularly, as Sterling News did before my critics got to work, it had to be cleared with my publisher, Mr. Peter Speck. But he told me years ago that the occasional column did not need clearance.

Is the Institute for Historical Review “neo-Nazi?” If so, there must be a lot of neo-Nazis in or from the universities because its magazine's masthead contains the names of 18 PhDs. And in the issue in which my two pieces appeared, so did some Solzhenitsyn stuff. So did an article by Joseph Sobran, whose column appears in 70 U.S. newspapers. If I don't watch it I'll get a big head.