From the Editor
This issue of The Journal of Historical Review, the forty-fourth, completes Volume Eleven. Its two feature articles, Dr. Andreas Wesserle's passionate critique of George Bush's “New World Disorder” and Dr. Charles Lutton's survey of half-a-century's study (and evasion) of the facts beyond the December 7, 1941 “Day of Infamy,” signal an advance and a return, namely to a Revisionism that looks beyond what French nationalist and populist Jean Marie Le Pen properly styled “a point of detail,” i.e. the gas chambers and the Holocaust.
Not that we're abandoning our critique of the lie of the Holocaust – the non-existent Hitler order to exterminate the Jews, the fraud of “the six million,” and what Louis-Ferdinand Celine called “the magical gas chambers” – not at all. Just that, with the Holocaust Lobby in full flight, as IHR associate Bradley Smith places advertisement after unanswered Holocaust-debunking advertisement in the newspapers of America's leading universities (if it be agreed that throwing a grand mal epileptic fit and shrieking for more censorship is no answer); as two American presidential candidates (Pat Buchanan and David Duke) are dogged for their alleged Holocaust Revisionism by those journalists and politicos who hearken most carefully to Their Masters' Voice; and as the conmen and crooks who promote and profit from the twentieth century's emblematic hoax thrash and drown in the life-giving ocean of historical truth (those that aren't dead before they hit the water, that is), we Revisionists, with The Journal of Historical Review in the van, resume the assault begun by Harry Elmer Barnes and associates, on the key, and not yet properly answered, historical questions of the war and peace in this century.
Dr. Wesserle's essay will surely generate controversy among Journal readers – its social-democratic, Middle-European, anti-imperialist viewpoint will stimulate and challenge Revisionists, just as it would enrage the bar-stool patriots and coffee-house cosmopolitans who sanction and support the media-consecrated, White-House-directed America-Last coalition.
Dr. Lutton has expertly and fluently reviewed, and if we may say, revived the Pearl Harbor debate, by reminding us of the solid Revisionist scholarship that skewered FDR's known lies – that he, too, and his administration was taken completely by surprise, and that Admiral Kimmel and General Short, the Navy and Army commanders at Pearl, deserved censure and ruined careers for their unpreparedness – and works on, today, with exemplary fairness to establish the precise responsibility of Roosevelt and his lieutenants for the Pearl Harbor debacle.
Two long book reviews complement these two long essays. JHR Associate Editor Mark Weber, an expert witness in the second trial of Ernst Zundel, reports on Robert Lenski's substantial account of that trial. Jack Wikoff, a student of twentieth-century propaganda in word and image, contributes an assessment of S.J. Taylor's important biography of New York Times-man and Pulitzer-Prize winner Walter Duranty, who deliberately hushed up a real Holocaust, Stalin's annihilation of millions of Ukrainians and other Soviet subjects through starvation and disease, even as the Roosevelt administration hastened to recognize the mass-murderer and his regime in 1933. Thus work on another key Revisionist project picks up steam – rather than rehash the sordid crimes of Red Russia, known virtually as soon as they were committed by influential Western opinion-makers, we focus on precisely those journalists, academics, politicians, and bureaucrats who concealed, minimized or defended (in the name of “anti-Fascism”) our century's real laureates of tyranny and genocide.
A new section, “Document” will attempt precisely that in this and forthcoming issues: to document from primary sources aspects of the Second World War unfamiliar to Americans schooled and spoonfed on the authorized propaganda of the “Good War.” Our GI's sometimes less than scrupulous about taking prisoners? Read and weep. Or better, read and think . . .
A 1958 commentary and interview with the late Admiral Husband E. Kimmel by the late, distinguished American lawyer and educator Dean Clarence Manion (of Notre Dame Law School) moves and informs not merely for its revelations of Kimmel's views of Pearl Harbor, but for the principled, non-interventionist American conservatism that we have all but lost to the baying pack of “neo-cons” and “new rightists.” Carl Hottelet says what must be said about “Holocaust education”: let us know if you believe this letter to a newspaper editor should be published in pamphlet form. Last and not least, Mark Weber reports on the little-known facts of the FDR-approved plan for American bombing attacks on Japan – from China in American planes flown by American pilots (disguised as Chinese planes piloted by American “volunteers”) – months before Pearl Harbor! Readers who watched ABC's recent “20/20” episode dealing with Plan JB-355 will marvel at the network's inability to integrate the documentary evidence for this plan – available at the National Archives for two decades, although ignored until very recently by historians – with the background to FDR's “back door to war” as revealed over the past 50 years by Revisionist historians.
—Theodore J. O'Keefe
Bibliographic information about this document: The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 11, no. 4 (winter 1991), pp. 387, 430, 468
Other contributors to this document: n/a
Editor’s comments: n/a