Editors at 75 College Newspapers Receive First Internet Mailing from CODOH

Patrick J. Buchanan’s statements in support of the legal rights of some accused World War II criminals, as well as his support for some aspects of revisionist theory about the Nazi “gas chambers,” have been the target of columnists, academics, politicians and special interest groups for years. On 6 March I mailed a 750-word opinion piece commenting on these facts to the editors at 75 college and university newspapers, in effect announcing that CODOH is on the Internet and telling them where to find us. Following is a somewhat expanded version of that column.

Patrick Buchanan: a revisionist candidate for president?

No presidential candidate in recent memory has been drilled for Revisionist sympathies—or any others—as has Pat Buchanan. Working from dossiers obviously supplied by the Anti-Defamation League, America's ranking Ideological Police Force (America's IPF is to effective freedom of opinion in the US as the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] is to effective Palestinian freedom in the Mideast), journalists across the land exhumed Buchanan quote after quote from his columns and broadcasts over the years, to show that, gasp, the candidate is a revisionist.

Now it may be true that Pat Buchanan is a revisionist, that, for instance, he wants to submit the US record regarding World War II to the same scrutiny and doubt that many of his journalist opponents reserved for the US role in Vietnam. But in their attacks on the specifics of Buchanan's World War II revisionism, the journalistic herd was factually wrong, or factually incomplete, again and again.

Attacks on the candidate concentrated on two key areas—defending alleged war criminals and challenging key details of the Holocaust story—in addition to searing him for violating such miscellaneous taboos as ascribing courage to Adolf Hitler or supporting President Ronald Reagan's 1985 visit to a German cemetery supposed to be off limits due to the presence of a few Waffen SS graves among the thousands of other war dead.

Facts unmentioned in the storm of criticism and pseudo-analysis:

• the finding of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals that the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations withheld evidence that would have allowed Demjanjuk to defend himself against extradition to Israel, and that OSI chief Alan Ryan and his henchmen were “guided in part by a desire to appease Jewish groups that sought to establish Demjanjuk's guilt.” Quite a journalistic establishment, for which it's more reprehensible to defend an innocent man than it is to frame him!
• any scientific evidence that would demonstrate how diesel exhaust could kill hundreds of thousands, in the free of engineer and diesel expert Friedrich Berg's study of the extreme unlikelihood of just that. Oh, and among the journalistic swarm of would-be Treblinka experts, there was more than one-including the NY Post's Eric Breindel and Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter—who tried to solve this historical riddle by blandly alleging that Zyklon-B, not diesel exhaust, was the alleged culprit. Problem: their solution is just as much at odds with Holocaust dogma as Buchanan's query—will they be called on the carpet for their own Holocaust heresy?
• that during the First World War, Adolf Hitler was awarded both the Iron Cross First and Second for his bravery in serving as a messenger on the front lines, seeming to justify Buchanan's characterization of Hitler as “an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier” (imagine some of Buchanan's tormentors—such as George Will, A.M. Rosenthal, or Jack Newfield—dodging machine-gun bullets, shell fire, and poison gas in No Man's Land!). Love Hitler, hate him, or feel sublimely indifferent to that much-hyped war hero—but don't display the puerile impulse, so beloved by so many of our countrymen, to paint our enemy-of-the-moment as the embodiment of every failing and every vice: cowardly Japanese kamikazes, psychotic German soldiers and civilians, and mindless, spineless Islamic suicide bombers.

Being revisionist may well have cost Pat Buchanan a real shot at the Republican presidential nomination. But the frenzy his revisionist stands have evoked reveals—as revisionism will—a good deal about the intellectual and intestinal qualities of his opponents.