Holocaust Revisionism Is No Longer Merely a Heresy, a Calumny or a Lie—It’s a Threat!

A two-page story in the May 10 New Republic on revisionism and booksellers begins by lamenting that the Internet book selling giant, Amazon.com, not only offers Bradley Smith’s Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist but also carries a glowing, five-star review of the book on its Website.

John Podhoretz, editor of the neo-con New York Post and worthy scion of his dad Irving, blasts the “Crimes of the Holocaustologians” in the April 21 issue of the Post. He’s not defending us revisionists, but he is concerned that Holocaust true believers like Professor Franklin Littell are branding other orthodox Holocaust fanatics as Holocaust deniers.

In his New York Post column of March 25, George Will, than whom there is no more fervent Holocaust loyalist in print today, took a shot at Hillary Clinton’s mooted run for the U.S. Senate in New York next year. Blasting Hill and Bill’s supposed support for a Palestinian state, Will assailed Palestine—not for terrorism—but because its schools “teach that the Holocaust is a Zionist lie.” The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s magazine Response (Winter-Spring 1999) protests “a recent article which appeared in the mass circulation Istanbul daily, Sabah, which quoted Roger Garaudy and cast doubt on the existence of gas chambers by relying on the racist, neo-Nazi [sic] Internet site, CODOH[Web].”

Last year a lead story in Smith’s Report (no. 56, July 1998, “Revisionism’s Inroads Shock the Lobby”) raised a few eyebrows by arguing that Holocaust revisionism was making considerable strides in America and around the world. A syndicated columnist’s advice to a coed whose boy friend supported running a CODOH ad in his campus paper; an ADL award to student journalists for essays opposing Holocaust revisionism; and an Egyptian human rights bureaucrat in Geneva opposing censorship of Roger Garaudy’s Founding Myths of Israeli Politics—these seemed to readers mindful of the ongoing blackout here and persecution abroad at best two or three swallows that didn’t make a revisionist summer.

The point of that article wasn’t that the media or the campuses or the international diplomatic corps were stampeding to revisionism, but rather to take stock of the fact that revisionism’s enemies have become increasingly aware of the inroads that revisionism—particularly as spread by CODOH—is making on the campuses, over the Internet, and in the Islamic world. Today, for the ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the George Wills and John Podhoretzes and for Martin Peretz’s New Republic, Holocaust revisionism is no longer simply a heresy or a calumny or a lie: it’s a threat. And it’s a threat unfolding in ways and along avenues essentially determined by the Holocaust lobby and its servitors—no matter how Podhoretz and Peretz and George Will and the “defense organizations” may grind their teeth to read it.

Deny revisionist books outlets with publishers, advertisers. reviewers, and book sellers? Revisionists turn to the Internet, where the ethos of free expression has even a giant like Amazon.com not only selling Confessions, but carrying a punchy review by author and old friend and critic of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, Art Kleps. The New Republic asks its readers:

Then, as the same article in the New Republic makes clear, word of mouth on revisionist books is gathering momentum: on-line booksellers are carrying revisionist classics: barnesandnoble.com offers Henri Roques’s Confessions of Kurt Gerstein, while borders.com sells Arthur Butz’s Hoax of the Twentieth Century.

If anything, it might surprise us that Holocaust revisionism has taken so long to take root in the Islamic world, for the connection of Zionist ideology and propaganda with the most extravagant excesses of the Holocaust cult has always been an intimate one. In the Moslem world, the pairing of Israeli practice with Jewish Holocaustomania might act the role of fertilizer. Together they prepare the Muslim soil for the seeds of truth developed by the Rassiniers and Faurissons, which are then ably disseminated by such diverse men as Achmed Rami and Roger Garaudy, supported by the many revisionist institutions now represented on the Internet. The patient work of the men and women involved in translating and posting on CODOHWeb Garaudy’s Founding Myths has been hailed in Turkey’s leading Islamist newspaper. And, as George Will reminds us, revisionism’s appeal in the Muslim world is as diverse as it is here: after all. Arafat and the Palestinian Authority are no friends of “Islamic fundamentalism.”

Even in the ranks of hardcore of Holocaust true believers there are signs that suppressing revisionism is beginning to have unhealthy effects—among the believers! In his recent op-ed column “Crimes of the Holocaustologians” (New York Post, 21 April). Podhoretz reports on how one noted Holocaust poobah recently accused a certified Jewish Holocaustomaniac, Gabriel Schoenfeld, of being guilty of “a subtle form of Holocaust denial.”

The offense, that Schoenfeld cast ridicule on some of the kitschier products of the Holocaust industry, is not half as interesting as the accuser. Professor Franklin Littell. Littell, a Protestant theologian long active in the Holocaust business, called years ago for the outlawing of Holocaust revisionism in the United States. More recently. and perhaps more memorably, he explicitly compared Smith to “the Great Satan: The One who moves to and fro in the earth.”

Franklin Littell has always been the Lobby’s American Protestant equivalent of Oral Roberts, and for our money the likeliest of the Holocaust scholars to bump into a 600-foot tall Anne Frank as he makes his way across north Philadelphia. But it’s interesting to learn that, according to Podhoretz. Littell has compared Schoenfeld to Faurisson and David Irving, that the Holocaust “historians” are jousting full tilt with the Holocaust “theologians” and Holocaust “studies” crowds, and that Podhoretz feels compelled to observe. “There is something indefinably questionable about making a permanent career out of the murder of six million people….”

While it may be “indefinable” to Mr. Podhoretz. those of us who work with this story day in and day out do not find it all that difficult to characterize.

The Littell-Schoenfeld spat puts us a little in mind of the famous Martin Niemoeller quote (see SR 60. December 1998). but with a new twist. “First they came for the Holocaust deniers…” If Littell and similar scolds held sway, of course, numerous exterminationist scholars who’ve been slowly backing away from the least tenable tenets of the big H over the years, including the likes of Amo Mayer and Raul Hilberg. would be joining the likes of, well, you and me, in America's prisons.

An intellectual school that forbids disagreement and prescribes banning and imprisonment for its intellectual opponents has already begun to decompose, if it ever possessed any real vitality. As those whom Podhoretz calls the “Holocaustologians” (without seeming to realize that he’s one of them) hurl mutual anathemas at one another and haggle over the preferments to be had from one Holocaust shrine or another, genuine thinkers will reach increasingly for the sort of intellectual liberation available in. most recently for instance. Samuel Crowell's The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes.

Meanwhile, the grunt work goes on. The persistent day to day slugging it out. promoting revisionist theory to university students and faculty alike, to print journalists and electronic media, and most importantly to the free and not-so-free citizenries the world over through CODOH on the World Wide Web. There is no institutional support, no medals, no private fortune or even income—only those of you who understand the work is important and voluntarily decide to help support it.