FRAGMENTS: Another Ordinary Life

*** I’m hearing a lot of talk about how American veterans are committing suicide while on duty and after they are back in civilian life. But the military says that its suicide rate remains lower than that of America's civilian population. The AP cites the Pentagon as saying “the civilian suicide rate for males aged 17-60 was 25 per 100,000 in 2010, the latest year for which such statistics are available. That compares with the military's rate in 2012 of 17.5 per 100,000.”

So what are we talking about?

When I was in Vietnam I didn’t hear any talk about suicide issues, tho later I did. When I was in Korea none of us ever talked about it. Or thought about it so far as I was aware. There was one of us there in the mountains who wanted out. One afternoon in a small clearing in the forest he chose to sit on the edge of some kind of hole, his legs inside, pulled the pin from a fragmentation grenade and dropped it in. The explosion blew him backwards ass over teakettle (to coin a phrase) but oddly did not scratch him. He was not sent to the rear for psychiatric counseling, and he was not forced to continue to carry a rifle and stay in combat with the rest of us. The captain simply assigned him to the platoon of Korean bearers who carried our food and ammunition up and down the mountain trails behind us. The American was tall and blond and we did laugh at him a bit seeing him among the short, dark-haired Koreans, but none of us held anything against him or ever said anything to embarrass him.

Nowadays he would have been lifted out by helicopter and flown to an army hospital someplace for long chats with any number of shrinks and a couple sacks of pills to calm him down and cheer him up.

*** Still, last night the left foot was cold. I couldn’t sleep. The right foot was okay. Only the left one was cold. I had to get up and put a couple socks on it, after which I was able to go to sleep. Sounds a little goofy to me. Maybe I’m gonna need some help myself.

*** Carlos Porter and I were chatting via email a while back when he had occasion to remark that William L. Shirer had told people for 30 years Hitler was a “carpet eater,” which Porter termed a “gross mistranslation.” He also noted that Shirer was almost 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.”

I too have heard these things all my life but never looked into them. I asked Carlos to comment.

Porter wrote: “I've been thinking about this for years. I spent most of the 1980s reading the Nuremberg transcripts, then went to work as a translator for over 20 years, and when I found that Herrenvolk was supposed to be a translation of Master Race, or the other way around, I was astonished. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn't believe my eyes. For years I kept wondering what would correspond to Master Race in German. I couldn't think of anything that really fit. I still can't.

“The principal objection against the Lebensborn by most liberal writers is that there was an ‘Ausleseprinzip’, a selection principle, that they were elitist, they didn't accept just anybody. So really I think the closest thing to Master Race in German would be something like ‘auserlesenes Volk’ or ‘ausgewähltes Volk’, a Chosen People! You see how hypocritical this is. (Of course selection in a concentration camp means killing. That's different.)

Even at Nuremberg, they never claimed there was any Master Race Principle, they just used it as a blanket jargon-term of accusation alleging racism, military aggressiveness, and so on, things that are not unique to Nazis or Germans. If Master Race means anything, why not introduce the original term, Herrenvolk, into English as a foreign word, like ‘hubris’? If it means anything at all, it's essentially the same thing, but none of these things are uniquely Nazi or German.

“In the meantime, there are still 100 million Master Race hits on Google and 200 million on Yahoo.

“Hitler said some dumb things, like saying that we all feel that at some time in the future the world will come to be ruled by one dominant race. Everybody does feel this, and always has. At the moment it seems like it will be the Chinese. This is not a uniquely National Socialist idea. It is as old as mankind.

“Anybody can take a few short paragraphs or sentences out of context from a 700-page book, manipulate the translation, and presto! World War! It's something like how Ahmadinejad’s ‘Wipe Israel off the map’ quote is mistranslated and misused.”

*** Jewish “eyewitnesses” to German monstrosity during WWII are oftentimes demonstrable liars and psychologically impaired in ways too obvious to deny. Other Jewish eyewitnesses tell stories that are largely true though in a context of German monstrosity that usually cannot be shown to have actually happened. There are old and very old Jewish women and men now who go about the country talking to high school students and synagogue audiences remembering things sometimes the way they happened and sometimes in ways that they could not have happened.

A few years ago I devoted some time to exposing the fraud and falsehood in widely accepted Holocaust survivor eyewitness testimony. The Philip Muellers, the Abraham Bombas, the Yankiel Wierniks, the Mel Mermelsteins. They and other mostly Jewish “eyewitnesses” to German monstrosities exposed themselves as being morally and intellectually corrupt in ways so obvious it’s beyond refutation.

Still today there are “eyewitnesses” who have no reputation in the literature but go about telling oftentimes crazy or demonstrably false stories. When I read what these folk are saying, sometimes there is the suggestion that while what they are testifying to might be untrue, they are not lying, or no longer lying, that they have come to actually believe what they are saying.

In short, they are “innocents” basing their stories on lies they heard years ago or on real memory that is not dependable. To that point, below are the opening sentences from my first book, Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist. They refer to an incident that took place with what turned out to be a remarkable fellow one night in 1979 on the mezzanine of a Los Angeles hotel during a convention being held by the Libertarian Party. It turns out to be an illustration of memory that is not dependable.

Most of that story is true. One part is not. The man who handed me the newspaper clipping was not a small man with a white pointy beard, clear blue eyes and a ruddy complexion. When David McCalden read what I had written, he corrected me. He explained that the two men who handed out the Le Monde article by Faurisson that afternoon and evening were himself and his friend John Bennett, an Australian. He said John Bennett didn’t look anything like the man I had described. I protested. I was certain about what the man looked like. He had stood there before me. I had seen him. I could still see him in my mind’s eye. McCalden laughed at me, insisted that it had to have been either himself or Bennett.

Sometime later, maybe a couple years, I met John Bennett at an IHR conference. He told me what McCalden had told me earlier. It was McCalden and he, Bennett, who had passed out that article that day at the Libertarian convention. I was shaking my head “no.” We were both laughing. I was certain about what I had seen—the white pointy beard, bright blue eyes, the ruddy complexion. Nothing like the John Bennett who was there before me now. Later on I was to record an interview with Bennett while driving him someplace and we went over the story again. It was he, not a man with a white pointy beard and the rest of it.

The story had gotten to the place where I was forced to understand that in all likelihood my memory of my encounter with the man in question was, well, false. But how could that be? I had nothing to gain from this false memory. Yet to this day, when I recall the incident, now accepting the fact that the man who gave me the Le Monde article was John Bennett, in my mind’s eye I still see the man with the white pointy beard, the clear blue eyes and the ruddy complexion. I accept the fact that it is an instance of false memory. I have no idea why it still exists after thirty-three years, why the brain produced it in the first place, what possible reason there could be for this particular false memory to persist.

With this one example of false memory, I place myself in the company of those Holocaust survivors who themselves are plagued with false memory. Filip Mueller might truly have “seen” buckets of human flesh jump about on the floor of German hospitals. Yankiel Wiernik may have truly “seen,” in his mind’s eye, the fetuses of Jewish ladies burning like torches in their exploded wombs. How could they ever forget such sights? How could they ever be convinced, once they had “seen” them, that they had not “seen” them? If I could see a man with a white pointy beard who did not exist, in place of the man who did and was there before me, could not Mueller and Wiernik and a boatload of other such Holocaust eyewitness crazies have actually seen what they claim to have seen?

What I am getting at here is that human memory sometimes recalls what truly happened, even about Germans, and sometimes it recalls something else. That being so, it is of some import for me to keep in mind that I share with even the craziest Holocaust survivor eyewitnesses a faculty that is imperfect, one that sometimes recalls with great clarity something that happened, and other times with great clarity something that did not happen. For me it suggests, once again, for what it’s worth, that we are all in this together, revisionists and True Believers alike.

Note: The above is a slightly edited version of a story I posted on my Blog.

*** Received a message from UCLA. “Hi. This is Ho Joon Choi from the Daily Bruin Marketing at UCLA. There have been CODOH stickers (http://www.codoh.com) posted on UCLA kiosks on campus. Please do not advertise on the UCLA campus without authorization through the University. If this continues we would be forced to bill for the damage/cleanup cost/ advertising. Thank you.”

Mr. Serious early in 2013

I made a couple phone calls and was told that there are a lot of CODOH stickers all over UCLA. Other people write on them and around them with a big dark Sharpie marker with words like “Nazi,” “Seig Heil,” “Jew Killer,” “Gay Killer,” etc. Will they be billed? There are similar promotional items all over campus with a variety of messages and equally messy, but those appear to be ignored. Looks like we have an independent CODOH admirer doing this. CODOH has no responsibility.

Occurs to me that I should make these stickers available again and advertise them on the internet. I’ll add it to the to-do list. My to-do list is of a considerable length.

*** Well, I have committed myself to using Twitter, as Widmann advised me to do some time ago. Each morning when I go through my email I tweet on one of the stories. Today I tweeted “#UNESCO facilitates Open Education Resources (OER) for Saint Vincent and the Grendaines, but not in Europe or Israel.” The “hash” mark in front of UNESCO is not a mistake. It’s how the post connects with all others using Twitter and are “following” UNESCO.

Mr. Have-a-Good-Time
Later in 2013

*** At the moment Rucker and I are in the initial steps of addressing some issues with The Karski Institute in Washington D.C. The idea is to use Karski as a stepping stone to… something else. No use in giving the game away. We’ll see how it goes.

*** Many problems with Smith’s Blog, but it looks like only this week it was straightened out. The story above re Confessions and my own experiences with “false memory” was my first new post.

*** Did my first radio interview in maybe twenty years. Deanna Spingola on Republic Broadcasting. You can listen to it via http://www.spingola.com/SpingolaSpecials.html. In the 90s I did more than 400 interviews on AM and FM across the nation. I got tired of it. I think one error I made in those days was to place more emphasis on the “facts” re the Holocaust story rather than insisting on talking about taboo vs. free expression. Every once in a while I have been asked to do radio. Just didn’t want to. Then a couple three weeks ago when the Karski project came up, it occurred to me that I might want to tie radio into it. Doing Ms. Spingola was a rehearsal for me. Turns out it was not difficult, I was very, perhaps too, loose, but it was easy. Looks like I will, I may, pursue radio. Interesting. To me.

*** Volume IV of Inconvenient History: A Quarterly Journal for Free Historical Inquiry, 2012, Numbers 1 through 4, has just been published. It’s a remarkable volume, there is nothing like it being published anywhere, and there is no one even trying to do anything like it with regard to revisionism. You can find it online at: http://inconvenienthistory.com/index.php

*** A subscriber in Georgia writes that he is surprised to find that I am 83 years old. He’s 82 but always thought he was older than me. He asks what year the photo on this newsletter, which is the same one we use on CODOHWeb, was taken. That photo was taken at the end of 2009.