FRAGMENTS: Another Ordinary Life

***  Now that my Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist is on the Amazon Kindle program, I will want to publicize the fact that it’s there. The first move would be to announce it to our online subscriber base. What text should I use? The easiest thing would be to send out one brief chapter from the book with a short intro. That suggested I would have to go through the book to find the most relevant chapter to use. I haven’t read Confessions in years. Can’t remember. I have a lot on my plate, one thing and another. In an unguarded moment, I picked up the book and read the Preface.

“Here I am, 57 years old, 5'10″ tall and 240 pounds, regrettably. A high school graduate, I have worked at many odd and boring jobs, traveled to exotic places, seen many people killed and maimed and so on. I've never understood what life is all about but I have never told anyone that I do. I've never been interested in intellectual work; it takes too long. My lack of faith in information would wring the heart of the most advanced computer. Experience and sensibility are easier for me. I have always taken the easy way, though to others it must appear to have been tortuous  and circumscribed. I discovered long ago that my character is made up in part of all the bigotries and prejudices that have been identified and catalogued by the best people in the worst. I never fell for the tyrant's tune however, never fell in with the left — or the right.

“I've been writing for 35 years, unsuccessfully. I don't seem to have minded, an example perhaps of ambition flawed beyond repair, an excessive enjoyment of process. I live with a wife, a mother, two children and two cats. As I write these lines a spider with a turquoise ass is stalking across the bookshelf behind the typewriter and I suppose that I have been living with him as well. Or her. Spiders look cruel to me, in an inhuman way, and that is why I see them as masculine. It's been my experience to never have seen women doing the killing or the rest of it. Always men. Women have their own failings.

“I began to write because I wanted to be conscious of what I was feeling. I still do. I agree that we choose our work out of our weaknesses, an inherent drive toward balance. Self-regarding from beginning to end, I have always wanted to hand myself over, the mind, the heart, the fly open to the breeze and the light. Not a program for others, but my own desire. I have no program for others. My program for myself is to reveal how I feel and what I think, a modest endeavor. In order to be able to do that I need to live among a people who sense the significance of the ideal of free expression. Free intellectual expression. The others can say it or they can keep it to themselves. My sense of things is that I should say it—openly, clearly, accurately. With good will. None of us knows what the answer is, but that's no reason to suppress a free exchange of ideas. No reason to censor the press. It's no reason to despise those who express doubt about what others believe.”

Well, I don’t think I can use it. But it was interesting to see how it was 25 years ago with me sitting at my worktable in the old wooden garage in Hollywood, and how it is today sitting at my worktable in what used to be my mother’s bedroom. It suggests both the weaknesses and the strengths of what went into how I did the work then, how I do the work now.

***  This one surprised me: Henry Wallace?

“The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.” – Henry A. Wallace – The 33rd Vice President of the United States.

***  Saturday night. It’s raining. It’s very cold. Watching Saturday Night Fever with John Travolta on the tele. I’d seen it before, maybe 35 years ago in Hollywood. I remembered some of the dance scenes, the music. The dance work seems dated now. But what I did not remember was the background theme of wise-ass Italian kids taking it for granted that they would live out their lives at the bottom of the heap until the end times swallowed them. Some of those exchanges were very well written. I was caught by surprise by where my own brain took me. To something like despair about the fact that my own life is coming to an end and that there has been pretty much nothing to it. I never thought about the end time. For me it has always been the here and the now. I suppose that’s where I should remain.

Now it’s Sunday morning, a new day, and I’m over my Saturday Night Fever.

***  Received a copy of the new printing of Carlos Porter’s Not Guilty at Nuremberg. He’s having it printed in eight (8) languages. It’s on Amazon with a “search inside this book” feature. In an email he tells me that he’s also produced his The Holocaust: Made in Russia. I have not seen it yet but he says it is an absolutely beautiful printing job.

In an aside he writes: “Do you realize Soviet ass tattooing was taken seriously by William L. Shirer? Also for 30 years he told people Hitler was a ‘carpet eater,’ a gross mistranslation. He was also single-handedly responsible for the universal delusion that the Nazis claimed that the Germans were a Master Race, a complete lie based on another mistranslation. Nobody ever made such a claim, but everybody in the world believes it.”

In SR 193 you will find Porter’s Arsch, bitte!, his examination of the Nuremberg documents regarding how the Soviets allegedly marked the left buttock of Soviet POWs with a tattoo one quarter inch long. There is no mention in the documents of numbers for identification purposes, or of Jews. I didn’t know Shire attached himself to this story.

***  On a recent Sunday morning the pastor at my wife’s church delivered a sermon on the issues involved in drawing new people to the congregation. There is the value alone in hearing God’s word, in associating with others who value His word, the need for utter honesty, sincerity, the willingness to become a brother to the other. The brain began to wander about. Oddly, to the press release I had sent treating of Oprah and Elie Wiesel.

In the headline I referred to Oprah as a “fool” and to Wiesel as a “fraud.” Sitting in church that morning I felt particularly uncomfortable with having called out Oprah in public as a fool. While she might believe foolishly in the Holocaust, so did I back when. She might lack good sense or good judgment in treating Elie Wiesel as a sage, but so do how many other big-brains in our universities across the nation? I think what my own brain was getting at is that we are all a jumble of right and wrong opinion, good and poor judgment. Where is the perfect woman?

The case with Elie is something else. It can be shown that he tells tales and makes accusations against others that are demonstrably false. It’s very difficult to believe that he is not a liar. And yet, there must be many things about which he tells the truth. When he is having dinner with his wife, say, taking a walk with his son, chatting with associates. Which suggests that sometimes he lies, sometimes he doesn’t. I know it’s commonplace that if we catch some guy lying about one thing, we call him a liar. He is at that moment. But in how many places does he tell the truth? No one could get through one day and one night without telling the truth about any number of things. Was the soup hot? Was that the dog barking? Do you remember exactly what you dreamed last night? What am I getting at here?

Why would Wiesel lie about Germans and Jews? What was, is, his motive? He’s a Jew, a Holocaust survivor, a Zionist, an ambitious, greedy man. At the same time he appears to be a good husband, a good father, a good friend, a hard-working writer, a man who likes a good joke. I suppose the fact is that no motive lives alone. I still remember that New Year’s Eve of 1979 when I first read Butz and walked out of the library in downtown Los Angeles fully aware that my life had just changed and that I was going to do something I had never dreamed of doing. Thirty-three years ago. What was my motive? I have no real idea.

David Hackett Fischer, writing in Historian’s Fallacies, notes that motives are usually pluralistic in both their number and their nature. That typically an act has more than one motive, and more than one kind of motive.

I will never know for certain what makes Elie Wiesel lie so openly about some things. The explicit nature of his lying, so easily demonstrated, suggests that he has no control over it. As if he were crazy. As Hackett writes: “Men are neither perfectly rational nor perfectly irrational but imperfectly both.”

I’m wandering here.

To get back to that Sunday morning listening to the pastor preach about calling people to the congregation—I felt drawn to keeping in mind as I encourage others to join with revisionists in our work, that we are all human, including the Oprahs, and even the Elie Wiesels, and that I would like to be in some kind of relationship with them when I write that is not limited to their being fools and frauds.

***  And here it is again. This is the text of a second press release I sent to students and academics around the nation in December, following the one that addressed Oprah and Elie.

“Filmmaker and producer Claude Lanzmann, whose documentary Shoah is considered one of the great films made about the Holocaust, will be honored at next year's Berlin International Film Festival with a lifetime achievement honor, the Berlinale Golden Bear. http://tinyurl.com/-awb7br9.

Claude Lanzmann

“Shoah is a nine-and-a-half-hour ‘documentary’ composed primarily of interviews with demonstrable frauds by a man who is too smart to have produced this kind of Hollywood schlock innocently.

“One primary example of Claude Lanzmann’s schlock intellect is the segment in Shoah where he interviews Abraham Bomba, (excerpted from: Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist)

The Barber of Treblinka:  http://tinyurl.com/b5hkwj3

“NOTE:  From 1986, when Shoah was first exhibited, to this day, no professor on your campus has examined publicly the demonstrable fraud in this film (Abraham Bomba is only one such Holocaust ‘eye-witness’ fraud). What does this imply to you about how your professors ‘teach’ WWII and the Holocaust?

“Special pleaders exploit Shoah schlock to morally justify the Jewish conquest and occupation of Arab land in Palestine? I do not believe that any professor on your campus has ever introduced to you the moral conundrum created by giving a pass to a movie saturated with fraud about Germans and Jews during WWII.

“Am I wrong?

“Bradley Smith”

This one does not trouble me as did the release on Oprah and Wiesel. In fact I kind of like the term “Shoah-schlock.”

***  It’s been suggested that I follow the lead of the Holocaust Hoax Industry, which specializes in groaning over the fact that the “last eyewitnesses” to the existence of German gas chambers (for example) are dying out. It’s suggested that I do something with the idea that the last eyewitness Holocaust Deniers are dying out as well.

Ernst Zündel

***  Ernst Zundel. The photo on page six of this Report displays one real side of his character. But that is less than half of it. The other side is his sheer determination. His strength of character. He has what we used to call “true grit.”

Those few times when I was with him or around him, he was invariably good humored, willing to listen, eager to talk, laughing at those who were persecuting him, with those who were helping him, and laughing at himself. There was the high energy, the kindness, his convincing concern for the German people. I like the representation on page six, but I like this one too.

Focused. Determined. What’s not to like about it?