How Holocaust Revisionism Can “Cause” “Anti-Semitism”

Deborah Lipstadt and the host she leads have made it holy writ that anti-Semitism is the leading cause for “Holocaust Denial.” To people schooled in this concept, which is most of us, the idea that the process can proceed in the reverse sounds backwards. Is it possible then that the process of “Denial” (questioning?) can lead to anti-Semitism?

Let us start with the Seed of Doubt, the discovery that most of us who read this newsletter can probably remember, the Seed that led us to inquire into the veracity of the Holocaust Tradition we‘ve all been fed all our lives through every orifice—auditory, digestive (metaphorically), intellectual, and even unmentionable in some cases. The Seed gets planted in a thousand different ways. For me, it came in an epiphany concerning the criminalization of Holocaust denial in Germany and a dozen or so countries scattered over both (or all three) sides of the Second World War. Employing the broad, deep streak of anti-statism I‘ve developed in my old age, I realized in a blinding flash that laws of this kind are made for only one reason: to protect lies.

For others, the Seed might have come in recognition of something Deborah Lipstadt of previous mention has herself condemned: Holocaust abuse—the enlistment of the legacy of the popularized Holocaust story in the service of some political agenda, more often than not a patently nefarious one.

Or it might have come from noting the prominent position in literary fraud occupied by the Holocaust in the form of entirely fictive Holocaust experiences such as those reported by Herman Rosenblat, Misha Defonseca, Elie Wiesel, and the many other mendacious scribblers. Or perhaps the latest scam involving fraudulent reparations-payments claims—but I digress—the Seeds are everywhere, and the wonder is that they don‘t sprout more profusely among what must be an intimidated and badly misinformed public.

My own Seed, then, led down a path that I‘ll outline in general terms in expectation that its branches will all be familiar to anyone manifesting a logical response to his own awakening. My realization that criminal penalties were protecting lies opened up all manner of questions for me that I had previously considered answered.

I received my education in the United States somewhat before the great wave of Holocaust education swept the schools, leaving in its wake a plethora of state laws mandating the teaching of “the Holocaust” (these laws spreading and perpetuating lies, rather than punishing their refutation). But I am of German extraction, and about half of my friends were Jewish, not only because the population where I grew up includes many Jews, but also because I was an egghead in school, and eggheads in particular know that Jews are overrepresented among eggheads.

These circumstances led me to have a greater interest in the Holocaust than any of my friends, Jewish or not, and this great interest of mine had two consequences: first, obviously, I “knew” a great deal about the Holocaust long before it even had that name; and second, ironically, this interest coupled with my not being a Jew left many of my schoolmates (chiefly non-eggheads who didn‘t know me well) suspecting and saying that I was a closet Nazi. Nazi or no, I believed the Holocaust mythology even as it was developing, and I was properly horrified by it, if only because a repetition of it would lose me half my friends. Thus, when decades later I came to realize the error of my ways, I felt betrayed far more than anyone else would have who had not had a lifelong special interest in the matter. The suddenly opened questions had an urgency for me they would not have had for most others.

The first question about lies was, what lies? Of what I had learned over all those years, what was true and what was false? And as for the things that were false, what then was the truth? Just running down these matters was a huge job, with surprise after surprise awaiting me that at least enabled me to take a new pride in my Germanic heritage, something of which I was always proud, despite the unsavory reputation it won me here in America.

Along with the contents of the lies and the histories of their development, there then arose parallel questions: How are these lies told? It was not difficult to see the answers to that, everywhere I turned. Who is telling these lies, and within that, who is telling which lies? And then, the blockbuster. Why are these lies told? Who benefits from them? Is there money in it? (I was very naïve at the beginning.)

Then the questions became: Who refutes these lies, and why are there so few of them, and why so little heard (entire sagas lie among the numerous and tragic answers to this question)? What happens to people who refute these lies, or even just disclose disbelief in them (an answer I very soon got right between the eyes)? Who‘s been jailed, when, why in particular, and for how long? Who lost their job, their livelihood, their reputation, their marriage, to the vicious defenders of these lies? Who‘s been financially ruined, and who‘s had to flee their country, quite like victims of the original Holocaust?

The questions kept coming up as quickly as I gained the new answers to the old questions. In fact, many of these questions were new, including: How extensive is fraud within the Holocaust narrative? How many people claim to be victims who are not, and what (besides Nobel Peace Prizes) do they gain from their fraud? How many of the recipients of individual reparations payments (which originally I hadn‘t even known about) were frauds, and how many others not even claiming to have been direct victims are, like Senator Alphonse d‘Amato, profiting handsomely from it, who aren’t even Jewish? How were all the mountains of “evidence” “proving” the Holocaust produced, and by whom, and from what motivations? From the answer to this question I gained a whole new understanding of the Nuremberg Trials and the entire history of the Allied occupation of Germany, a period whose legacy it was that actually tipped me off to the whole game.

The “why” questions relating to the “who” questions produced for me a cascade of evil schemes that draw life from the Holocaust travesty, beginning with the program of the Allies after the conclusion of hostilities to imprison and kill Germans and culminating in the expansionist war-making of Israel that continues unabated to the present day.

In between lies the collection of billions of dollars in Holocaust reparations from German and Austrian taxpayers born long after the Holocaust ended. Collected by individuals and Jewish organizations, including Israel itself, it usually amounted to sheer extortion such as the 1998 $1.25 billion heist from the Swiss banking industry by Edgar Bronfman and Stuart Eizenstat with the help of the Clinton administration. And then the never-ending investigations, rescissions of citizenship, deportations, trials and kidnappings of hyperannuated “Nazi war criminals” such as John Demjanjuk, and the wanton destruction of the careers of writers and academics from David Irving to Norman Finkelstein, whose book The Holocaust Industry was my first book after the scales fell from my eyes.

So, how does this unending odyssey through an ocean of lies, liars, and lying incline the voyager toward anti-Semitism? It comes in noting the identities of the villains of this piece. I don‘t mean, of course, of the original Holocaust, in which Jews were chiefly victims (some played both roles, e.g., as kapos, while others escaped by various means). Rather, Jews figure prominently as villains in the development and exploitation of the Holocaust mythology since 1945. Jews as a group also figure as the victims in whose name all manner of scams and outright atrocities are committed and defended. To be sure, various other non-Jewish actors participated pivotally in the launching of the Holocaust enterprise, and they are also very much to be found among the various scalawags who contrive to benefit on the back of this all-too-genuine tale of suffering and injustice borne by huge numbers of people.

From these frequent and noxious appearances in an infinite sequence of deceptions and exploitations for profit—ever for profit—the inquirer can, and usually does, acquire a reflexive distaste for any sort of public enterprise that is identifiably Jewish or undertaken in the name of Jewish beneficiaries. And the appearance in current news of figures such as Bernard Madoff further reinforces this distaste in ways it probably wouldn‘t have if the observer had remained deceived by the mythology in which today all our children are raised. This distaste can be mistaken for real anti-Semitism (a hatred of individuals because they are Jewish) not only by one‘s friends and relatives, but in one‘s own heart if one fails to reflect thoughtfully on what is actually, and very logically, being learned.

Personally, I know, respect, and love a good number of Jews, a very few of them above all other people. This has made it easier for me to have the following reflections. It may not be so easy—indeed necessary—for others not as blessed as I am in this particular way. Most Jews do not, at least if they are called upon to think about it, support the exploitation of the Holocaust, nor do they support, take part in, or benefit from, the various other depredations worked upon the larger society by organizations identifying themselves as Jewish, as serving Jewish beneficiaries, or staffed largely by Jews. The many who do are simply fellow victims, like so many of the rest of us, of the brainwashing campaigns we have been subject to pretty much since first drawing breath. There is and always has been among the Jews a cabal (or two, or three) that is devastatingly effective in penetrating and taking over powerful organizations such as government, law, and medical professions in any number of countries, as well as banking systems, media, academia, labor unions, and so on.

This/these cabals, in turn, are a select minority of Jews—a tightknit core group/s to which not even all rich, powerful, or professionally successful Jews belong. And while out-group Jews naturally and without much reflection tend to give the artfully disguised groups like AIPAC, the WJC, and Israel lip service, they in fact do not lend significant financial support to these groups, nor do they support their policies if and as they are (gently) made familiar with their particulars. At the point where one realizes this, one is in a good position to distinguish the distaste and even antipathy for certain “Jewish” enterprises from actual anti-Semitism.

Now, why do Deborah Lipstadt, Abe Foxman, Elie Wiesel, and others so scrupulously avoid pointing to the sequence of attitudinal developments I present above and why don‘t they launch attacks from a fresh angle against Holocaust revisionism on the basis of it? A little contemplation produces an obvious answer: because to deplore revisionism on this basis would constitute an admission that inquiry into the facts of the matter shows Zionism, Israel, and Jews in a very bad light, and possibly draw their defenders into a bottomless pit of apologetics for any or all of these groups.

Simpler, by far, and in keeping with the dominant tenor of their tactics, to simply tar the whole lot of us as motivated by (inborn, irrational, unjustified) anti-Semitism and leave the matter standing as pure character assassination. Doing this even denies our command of the discriminating ability to engage in the very focused, reasonable condemnation that I propose in the paragraph above, where the true object of hatred is not the people, but rather the things they are doing.

The expression of hatred, like fear and curiosity, is a basic human behavior that has evolved with the species as an essential survival mechanism without which the progeny of Adam and Eve would long ago have died out under the fangs and claws of larger and less-mindful predators. We have these gifts, however, and it is incumbent on us to employ them vigorously, judiciously and discerningly along with, here and there, a dash of human empathy.

In precisely the way they say we don‘t.