FRAGMENTS – Another Ordinary Life

*** On 18 February I celebrated, if that is the right word, my 84th birthday by sending my Open Letter to Abraham Foxman re his interest in prosecuting men who served as perimeter guards at one German camp or another, and his complete lack of interest in prosecuting Jewish Sonderkommando who worked in gas chambers responsible for killing millions of their own folk—or so the scripture goes. It was a pleasantly distracting bit of work. Irene wanted to have a bash here with all the family but I knew I would not want to stay up. I was working on Abe during the day and did not notice that she was doing anything special. But after it was dark I understood she had been baking a turkey with a delicious dressing, making a Waldorf salad, potato salad, and choco-flan, a two-layer desert with custard on top and chocolate cake on the bottom. A nephew was here and he built a fogata (a camp fire) inside our closed patio and we had our dinner outside on a cold night gathered around the fire. With the two grand-kids, there were only the five of us. It was swell.

*** David Merlin called my cell when I was up in the hills on a dirt road, returning from seeing Paloma where she is interned. In the moment I was standing outside the car in a falling rain making my own water and looking out over the ocean only a mile away. Merlin had discovered that the USHMM had uploaded all the Kempner documents onto their website, photos of the documents themselves with transcriptions in German to one side. This is exactly what we urged USHMM chief archivist Henry Mayer to do two months earlier with Merlin’s piece on the Rosenberg Diaries. Merlin was very pleased. Our “suggestion,” which we had addressed to Mayer himself, was copied to his associates at the Museum and to the staffs of Holocaust centers and museums around the country. Merlin suggests that the Museum uploaded the documents because that letter to Mayer was posted on our Blog. I demurred a bit. Surely the project was already in process when we addressed that issue. But the fact of the matter is that CODOH and Smith’s Blog are monitored daily by those people. They do want to know what we are doing because when we mess with their work we do so with real care in a way that consistently compromises them. As I stood there in the falling water, I realized again how important the Blog actually is. Not because a million people go there to read it, but because the people important to the Industry go there to read it.

And then the other day I was informed that the Simon Wiesenthal Center is now following me on Twitter. Why would that be? Because I’m brilliant?

*** In a letter to dissident Israeli journalist Israel Shamir, Germar Rudolf described himself as follows:

"That's my personality: a contrarian with enormous will power, stubbornness, if need be. […] Pressure causes counter-pressure. In this way I am a simple physical principle. Here is my human right to doubt, research, scrutinize, disagree, dispute, refute, challenge, question. […] And that is the strongest motivation: Anybody who punishes me for merely exercising my human right of being a human—a creature able to doubt and explore, will meet my utmost unbreakable resistance. I won't allow anybody to reduce me to a submissive slave. Nobody."

Germar lived with us here in Baja for the best part of a year a couple three years ago, and my sense of things is that he is describing himself pretty accurately. When I try to think of myself in those terms, I cannot do it. The term most difficult for me to try to imagine is my “unbreakable” resistance. I think I could be broken. In the brain an image came of a torture rack from the Spanish Inquisition.

*** The following exchange was provoked by my letter to Sara Bloomfield at the USHMM

From:
Rebecca Church, PhD
Visiting Adjunct Professor
University of Iowa
History Department
280 Schaeffer Hall
Iowa City, IA 52242-1409
[email protected]

February 28,

What exactly is your point? You don't see a difference between a prisoner, in order to survive, 'collaborating' versus someone working at a concentration camp as a soldier, with a gun? Your spamming emails on college campuses with such tripe is offensive and dishonest and I hope you gain nothing from it. Do not send me another email. Rebecca Church, PhD

To Professor Church:

If I may: A soldier is not a free man. If he does not follow orders, he is shot. What good will his “gun” do him? He will be executed. Short and simple, a time-honored tradition. Not only by German military, but by US military. Please take a moment to think what will happen to the U.S. soldier in Afghanistan who refuses to follow orders in the face of the enemy.

I think you are most likely well-intentioned, but it does not appear that you have taken even a moment to consider how it is with “soldiers” in real life. Has it not occurred to you to consider what it means for a sonderkommando, to survive, that he will spend weeks, months collaborating with his bosses in mass murder and genocide to save himself? I can imagine that some of us will do that, but I cannot imagine why those of us who do should be treated with respect, or be trusted, or felt sorry for.

It’s really a matter here of looking at an issue that academics and others have declared to be taboo to look at. As I have it on the header on my Blog, it is an issue of academic group-think. Don’t go along with it. You will find out many interesting and personally valuable insights into these issues.

I’m perfectly willing to be convinced that I am wrong about any of this.

To: Bradley Smith
Subject: Re: Spam email

Not at all the same—and not entirely true, either. A prisoner is not the same as a military person following commands. The degree of agency is worlds apart. You are being dishonest because you would

like there to be doubt about the culpability of participants and the established facts of the Holocaust. As I said, stop spamming me with your tripe. I’m not interested in your dishonest dialogue and find your tactics offensive. I will report your activities to my university. Do not email me again.

Rebecca Church, PhD

To: Professor Church

I agree they are not the same.

I don’t understand your reference to what is not “entirely” true. That is, what “is” true there?

You give no evidence that the “degree of agency is worlds apart.” I disagree, but I might be wrong. You provide no evidence that I am being “dishonest.” Where? A simple reporting of the “facts” and my response to them?

Jewish Sonderkommando collaborated with the Germans to murder a million or so innocent men, women and children. Are you saying that you can innocently collaborate with Nazis in the mass murder of children so long as it puts your own life in danger?

That is apparently the operational code of the USHMM, fully supported, I might add, by the American academic class.

Which are the “established” facts of the Holocaust story that I “doubt”? (You might be surprised.) There are very likely a lot things that I can be criticized for, others that I am wrong about.

If you were to try to perform the role of professor, rather than that of a washerwoman, you might be able to say something that is original to you, rather than a heated expression of the group-think of your colleagues.

An image just came to the brain out of nowhere. That of a painting by Edvard Munch titled “The Scream.” I do not think the purpose of the image was to infer anything

about how you look, but to express an opinion about the quality of your behavior here. Your prose.

Is there a place at the bottom of the page of the original send you received from me where you can click and “unsubscribe”?

– Bradley

That would appear to be the extent of the back and forth between Professor Church and myself, which took place two nights ago. I can see a couple three places where I could have been more careful, more accurate. One example would be Church’s remarks about being a solder with a gun and being an unarmed prisoner are two different things. They are. But their life choices appear to be the same. Still, it’s an issue I have to be careful with. Thank you, Professor Church.

*** A joke from somewhere. A sign in the campus bar says, "Infinite beer, $3." So the math student orders one. "How's this work?" he asks the waitress. "It’s simple," she says. "Each sip you take is half the size of the previous sip.” Duh?

*** The quote below is from an article titled “The Uncontrolled Opposition” by Gilad Atzmon.

“Holocaust deniers – In the real world there are no ‘Holocaust deniers’: what we have instead are history revisionists – people who understand that the making of history, is a continuous attempt to narrate the past as we move along. The so-called revisionists re-visit, re-write and revise the past. Those whom Zionists and progressives often tag as ‘Holocaust deniers’ are often enough the last True Historians.”

See: http://tinyurl.com/phf4ttl

I note this here not because of what it says, for us this is old hat, but because it was written by Atzmon, an Israeli-born “ex-Jew” who now lives in London and travels the world as a musician. I quote him because his voice is many times larger than mine.

Atzmon is one of a growing number of important voices who have absorbed revisionist arguments. We truly are a growing “movement.” Not as an organization like the initial IHR, but a “movement,” like the Tea Party perhaps. A movement of understanding and volunteerism that is finding its way into mainstream media.

Mainstream media no longer being limited to a print press, radio, and TV. But the Internet and all the programs and “Aps” associated with it. It really is quite something. Seeing it, we are increasingly aware that new media is on our side. The side of the “people” who can now communicate with each other. It’s estimated that there are some five-billion mobile phones in use around the world. Ordinary folk are “out of control” in any way that resembles what was possible until a generation ago.

*** There are some who doubt that I am on the right road with regard to where my interests have taken me recently. They doubt that it is my role to question such matters as the Sonderkommando, the USHMM and so on. It is suggested that my work should be to focus on Free Speech, on laws against revisionism internationally, on the persecution of revisionists, and on the taboo against looking into these issues.

I see the technical logic of this argument. CODOH was founded to encourage Open Debate on the Holocaust question. Open debate is impossible without free speech, a free press. Still, I think there is more than one way to skin the cat (to coin a phrase).

One way to focus on Free Speech issues is to simply say what cannot be said, what is prohibited to say, and to urge others to do the same. I am going to speculate that there is not one professor in the U.S. of America who has ever suggested that work-Jews (Sonderkommando) who collaborate with Nazis to murder hundreds of thousands of children in camps such as Auschwitz should be prosecuted. Why not? I am going to ask, if they are as much accessories to mass murder as the camp guard who never killed anyone, or the German soldier who worked as a cook in the camp kitchen, why should they not be prosecuted? That’s Free Speech in action. You just say it.

The idea here is not to argue that work-Jews should be prosecuted, but to ask academics, media and bureaucrats to state openly, clearly, why they should not be. It’s a question that “they” have never addressed, and so far as I am aware, a question that “we” have never addressed.

The brain recalls a one-line e-mail I received from Fredrick Toben. The full message was this: “Don’t Criticize, seek clarification.” It is attributed by Toben to a Nigerian academic who he spoke with in 1981. I have already used the idea a couple three times in my Open Letters to Foxman at the ADL, and to Bloomfield at the USHMM. More clarification, less criticism. I’ll do it better as we move along here.

*** STOP PRESS ! As David McCalden used to have it. As I write this, a new revisionist film that has a remarkably pertinent viewpoint and mass of evidence has just been created and put online.

THE JEWISH GAS CHAMBER HOAX, an Eric Hunt film produced by Friedrich Paul Berg was uploaded onto the Internet only yesterday (as I write this). Following is how its producers present it.

The Jewish Gas Chamber Hoax is a Revisionist documentary which presents the latest evidence debunking the greatest hoax in human history.

An Eric Hunt Film
produced by Friedrich Paul Berg
http://gaschamberhoax.com/
Also available at CODOH.com

“The Holocaust”—the fraudulent claim that six million Jews were murdered by Germans, mostly in “Gas Chambers disguised as Shower Rooms.”

Never before seen evidence helps prove that Treblinka was a transit camp, far from the “Pure Extermination Camp” myth currently promoted by the Holocaust religion.

For the first time ever, listen to Jews themselves who were transited through Treblinka describe the process of being transferred from Treblinka to other camps, along with hundreds and thousands of other men women and children. Documentation is presented which affirms that Treblinka was no top secret “pure extermination center”, but a simple transit camp where many Jews took real showers in order to keep them alive.

The absurdity of diesel gassings, non-existent mass graves, forced confessions, and more are covered in THE JEWISH GAS CHAMBER HOAX, a new documentary from the filmmaker of THE LAST DAYS OF THE BIG LIE. [also at codoh.com]

That’s all. Next month!

Bradley