FGCU Professor Is a Holocaust Hatchet Man

A “permanently in exile” graduate of the UK’s Leicester University is an adjunct professor of sociology at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Meyers, Florida, from where he runs a number of little-visited blogs on subjects such as lynchings in his adopted neighborhood. Jonathan Harrison also works long and hard (226 posts since 2007) attacking people who express an interest in examining the facts behind the historical enterprise today labelled “The Holocaust,” on holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com.

In that undertaking, he displays aptitudes that would serve a lynch artist well indeed. His 2010 attack on my (even to him) harmless publishing involvement with a Web site that concerns itself with matters of economics is a good example. In a manner that notably fails to reflect the respect for honest opinion that college professors are supposed to exemplify, he lifts quotations out of context from articles I published (elsewhere) on the Web, castigates me for having two Austrian uncles who served with the Wehrmacht during World War II, and finally pillories me for editing articles—all under my own name—on Wikipedia having to do with World War II history. The first of his list of my offenses is an article in Smith’s Report of January 2010 in which I decry the growing number of fraudulent “victims” of the Holocaust titled “Free Riding on the Juggernaut of Conscience.” Then he (correctly) accuses me of comparing Auschwitz with the notorious Confederate prisoner-of-war camp at Andersonville, Georgia.

In noting the Jewish descent of the namesake (Ludwig von Mises) of the Web site on which I did most of my publishing up until then, he expresses the hope and expectation that readers and supporters of that site would ignore and reject what I wrote on subjects having nothing to do with Jews, the Holocaust, or any of the other subjects to which he urges unwonted sensitivity. His efforts succeeded in getting me banned from further publishing with the Mises Institute, as well as emblazoning Google searches on my name with the infamous red “H” (try it and see).

Dr. Harrison, in the meantime, urges further sensitivity—and guilt, if you’re white—on matters such as lynchings that occurred ninety years ago, averring that such acts were intended as notifications to potential future victims (young black males) who might attract similar attentions from lawless white men by consorting with white females. It is likewise to be inferred from Harrison’s attack on me (he launched a similar attack on Sculptor Charles Krafft, but only after satisfying himself that he was not the first to do so) that he would like his defamations to serve as a warning to anyone else who might reveal himself on the Web as interested in inquiring into the facts of the Holocaust.

For my part, I would counsel those interested in freedom of opinion and opposed to defamation on the score of viewpoints on historical matters to shun the fulminations of Dr. Harrison, his employers Florida Gulf Coast University and Hodges University, his publisher History News Network, where he is a contributing editor, and the Web sites militaryhistorynow.com and thesocietypages.org, along with his own blog africanamericansflorida.blogspot.com.

I submit that we are already plagued with enough exiled guiltmongers ensconced in ivory towers such as the University System of Florida.

Not to mention lynch artists.