Letters

“PAPPY” BOYINGTON AND THE “FLYING TIGERS” EPISODE

To the Editor:

With regard to your item in the Spring Journal, “Roosevelt's Secret Pre-War Plan to Bomb Japan,” it is worth mentioning the experiences related by Gregory “Pappy” Boyington in his memoir, Baa, Baa Black Sheep. The Marine fighter pilot, who was a notorious womanizer and drinker, relates how amused he was when, during the sea journey to Asia to join the “Flying Tigers” squadron, he masqueraded, at the government's demand, as a minister. He also relates that while ostensibly flying for the Chinese, he was on the US military payroll.

While Dr. Wesserle has written a very provocative sketch, “The New World Order,” I believe he has touched too many bases. With his knowledge and writing ability, it might have been better if he had written a more narrowly focused account that dealt, for example, with American carnage in the Gulf war.

I hope all of you keep up your good work.

John R. McLaren, M.D.
Atlanta, Ga.

NEW THREAT AGAINST FREE SPEECH IN AUSTRALIA

To the Editor:

Jim Kennan, Attorney General of Victoria (Australia), announced in March his intention to work for a new “racial vilification” act. We have good reason to believe that, if enacted, this law would be used to try to suppress Historical Revisionism, with the usual pretext that anyone who questions the “official” Holocaust story must be punished as “racist” and “anti-Semitic.”

We encourage interested persons to write to Kennan to urge that freedom of discussion and inquiry be upheld with regard to all aspects of Second World War history, including the Holocaust issue. (Kennan's address: The Attorney-General's Dept., ACI House, 200 Queen Street, Melbourne, Vic. 3000, Australia.)

Geoff Muirden, Secretary
Australian Civil Liberties Union
P.O. Box 1137
Carlton, Vic. 3053, Australia

THE HOLOCAUST ISSUE IN CHANGING SOUTH AFRICA

To the Editor:

[With regard to the] political situation in South Africa and the Holocaust and the New World Order: I have recently for the first time openly referred to the above matters in important circles.

The fact that two prestigious US newspapers [in recent editorials in the Washington Post and the New York Times] have taken the stand that students at universities should investigate these matters for themselves is a breakthrough after many years of toil, trouble and sweat on your part, and the way is now open for us to freely draw the attention of people in ever widening circles to the “hoax of the 20th century.”

South Africa is entering a time of troubles, and those of us who understand the forces that are ranged against us require only the facts and the proof, and the rest is then up to us.

It is very gratifying indeed to note how the truth of revisionism is breaking through.

Please accept our deepest appreciation for the great job you and your associates are doing.

Louis F. Stofberg
Member of Parliament for Sasolburg,
House of Assembly, Cape Town, South Africa

REMEMBERING AUSCHWITZ

To the Editor:

I was born in Czechoslovakia. Before I moved from Norway to Canada in the summer of 1968, I met several Czech refugees who had been inmates at Auschwitz. They were quite familiar with conditions in the camp, and they emphatically denied that “abuses” of any kind had been carried out against the inmates by the German camp personnel. Insofar as there were abuses, they said, these were carried out by inmates who acted when the German camp personnel were not able to intervene to prevent them.

Some of these former inmates were familiar with Rudolf Vrba and his “memoir” about Auschwitz, I Cannot Forgive. They agreed that Vrba had given in to pressures and had lied about the “extermination gas chambers” and similar stories.

In particular I should mention Mrs. Anna Kvapilova, who knew Vrba personally during the time they were both interned in Auschwitz. She was especially bitter about his lies. In Auschwitz Mrs. Kvapilova had been a sort of “Capo,” a prisoner overseer. She had distinguished herself by helping and aiding Norwegian women who were interned there. She returned to Czechoslovakia after the end of the war, but after the Communist putsch in 1948, she was warned by Western intelligence that she was on a list of persons to be arrested by the Communists in Prague. They therefore provided a guide to help her escape across the border into West Germany, from where she made her way to Norway. That's where I got to know her.

A truly remarkable person of the highest caliber, she was regarded with affection and admiration by all who knew her. She held important and influential official positions in several organizations in Norway, including a post with the High Commissioner for Refugees, a United Nations agency.

Over the years I have met numerous former inmates of German wartime camps, but never a single one who believed that extermination “gassings” ever took place. Many former inmates have told me of the high standards of the German camp personnel, and attested to the good organization, procedures and orderliness in all of the camps.

Jaromir J. Dan
P. O. Box 948
Helena, Mont. 59624

THE FATE OF AN AUSCHWITZ RESISTANT

To the Editor:

Thank you for publishing the informative essay by Enrique Aynat, “Auschwitz and the Exile Government of Poland,” in the Fall 1991 Journal. The essay mentions Witold Pilecki, the Polish officer who organized an underground Resistance network in Auschwitz while he was a prisoner there. Readers may perhaps be interested to know about Pilecki's tragic fate after he escaped from the camp in 1943.

After taking part as an officer in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, he was captured by the Germans and thus once again came into German custody. After the end of the war he lived for a few months in Italy, where he wrote a memoir.

In late 1945 he returned to his Polish homeland where he was arrested as an officer of the Polish resistance movement by the Soviet-controlled government. Pilecki was tried by a Communist court in 1948, sentenced to death, and executed in a Warsaw prison. His family was not permitted to bury his corpse.

My source for this information is an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Jan. 28, 1980) and two follow-up letters by Polish readers (Feb. 20 and March 21, 1980). I am enclosing photocopies.

Hans Wahls
Cologne, Germany

A DOUBLE STANDARD

To the Editor:

The campaign by Bradley Smith, media representative of the IHR and director of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, to place advertisements in student newspapers calling for open debate on the Holocaust issue points up a double standard that seems to prevail in much of the American media.

Consider this:

Rabbi Avahram Toledano, head of the Jewish-supremacist “Kach” movement founded by the late Meir Kahane, recently conducted a lecture tour in the US and Canada. Toledano advocates the forcible mass expulsion of Arabs from “greater Israel.” He told a Heights Jewish Center meeting on November 14, 1991, that Arabs would be forced out of Israel. In response to the question, “What would the nations of the world say to Israel's expulsion of Arabs?,” Toledano said: “I don't know and I don't care. We are proud to be Jews and to have a Jewish State.” (Cleveland Jewish News, Nov. 22, 1991.)

In spite of his intolerant views, Toledano was given a respectful public forum in prominent Jewish synagogues throughout North America. In Cleveland, for example, his lecture was announced beforehand in the city's main Jewish community paper. (Cleveland Jewish News, Nov. 8, 1991, p. 12).

(This is nothing new. While he was still alive, this same paper also routinely announced the lecture appearances of Kahane, who was sentenced in 1975 to one year imprisonment as a result of his terrorist activities.)

The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, which is so alert to every expression of real and imagined anti-Semitism, has never protested against the advertisements in the Cleveland Jewish News announcing the appearances of Toledano and Kahane. Nor does the Zionist group condemn Rabbi Toledano's message of hate.

At the same time, though, “the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith is urging college newspapers to reject ads by individuals or groups denying the reality of the Holocaust” (RNS dispatch of Nov. 27, 1991, in Christian News, Dec. 9, 1991, p. 16). To show that it means business, an ADL official was sent to the University of Texas to make sure that the student paper there did not publish Smith's ad. (Houston Chronicle, Dec. 19, 1991.)

While the ADL insists that the Holocaust issue is “not debatable” (Christian News, Dec. 9, 1991, p. 16), and works to deny Revisionists a public forum, this same organization seemingly has no problem with advertisements in Jewish community papers by militant Zionists who demand brutal forcible expulsion of Arabs.

While it is true that the ADL has occasionally condemned the Kach movement and its views, neither the ADL nor any of the other prominent Jewish (and non-Jewish) groups that want to silence Smith have ever tried to deny a forum to arrogant supremacists like Toledano.

In Toronto, Toledano told an enthusiastic crowd of more than 300 at the Shaarii Tefilah synagogue: “The Jewish state, the Jewish land, belongs only to the Jewish people. There is no room for a people that doesn't recognize Jewish sovereignty.” (The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 1991, p. 58.) That's in the same city where GermanCanadian publisher Ernst Zündel was put on trial and sentenced to imprisonment for publishing a booklet that questions the Holocaust extermination story.

Consider the utter hypocrisy here. It is legal in Canada for a militant Rabbi to openly put call for the expulsion of Arabs from Israel, an action that would cause horrible hardship and suffering for millions of people. Yet, it is a crime for a Gentile to present valid evidence showing that the “Holocaust” is not all it's cracked up to be.

Given this hypocritical double standard, it's hard to believe that even a single student newspaper in Canada would dare publish Smith's call for open debate on the Holocaust.

In a January 15, 1992, editorial, The New York Times castigated Smith's Revisionist views as “trash” and “ugliness.” (The Times did not permit readers to judge Smith's words for themselves by publishing his advertisement.)

But in its issue of February 12, 1991, the Times published a letter that seriously argued that St. Paul, the Christian apostle who wrote much of the New Testament, was a deluded epileptic. Similarly, in the issue of March 9, 1991, Times editors published a letter insinuating that St. Paul was a homosexual. On another page of that same issue appeared an article that reported sympathetically on the “Jesus Seminar,” a group of intellectuals that claims that much of the New Testament is grossly inaccurate or a patchwork of fabrications. The Times made no editorial condemnation of these views.

While simplistically dismissing the views of Holocaust Revisionists as “trash” and “ugliness,” this highly influential pro-Zionist paper has no qualms about providing a forum, and thus a measure of support, for views that are patently offensive to millions of Christians.

Paul Grubach
Lyndhurst, Ohio

REFLECTIONS ON A DEATH

To the Editor:

On the morning of May 12, I was called to inform me of the demise the previous day (night) of Pete Kuetzing. I am having a lot of trouble with that, and still can hardly believe it.

I had talked with Pete at some length a week earlier, and he had expressed great confidence in the progress of his medical treatment. As part of my regular routine, I read thousands of obituaries every year, but I must admit that an occasional one, especially of someone I consider young, vastly disturbs me.

I think it safe to observe that Pete did extremely valuable editing work on the first Noontide edition of the Rassinier work [currently available as an IHR book under the title The Holocaust Story and the Lies of Ulysses], and was a most sturdy supporter of revisionism for a considerable time – but unofficially as a consideration of his occupation. (I have been told that my review of Rassinier's book in the Oct. 9, 1978, issue of The Spotlight is still the only real review the book ever received.)

Profound disbelievers such as Paul Rassinier and Harry Elmer Barnes might have smiled a bit to see [a new edition of] Rassinier's book come out with an introduction by a theologian [Dr. Robert Countess]. One does not have to tread the sawdust trail to be a Holocaust revisionist, though a disbelieving temperament surely helps, as the Holocaustians have turned the whole thing into a new religion anyway.

To me there is a close relation between a racket like this one and spiritualism, for example. Holocaust zealots trap their revisionist critics in much the same way that the spiritualists treated their scoffers during their heyday (roughly 1890-1930). When Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were busy spreading the spiritualist message far and wide, they encountered the razzberry from doubters. Instead of proving that the levitating tables, the moaning voices and the wavering auras of the deceased were genuine, the spiritualists simply demanded that their skeptics prove otherwise.

The “Hoaxers” do much the same thing: the more outrageous of the Holocaust atrocities they endlessly circulate don't have to be proven. Instead, it is up to those who deny they happened to prove that they did not. When we write about the October 1871 fire that burned down Chicago, I am glad that we don't have to prove at the same time that Pittsburgh and Baltimore were not also consumed in flames. One of these days I should try to get a foundation to underwrite a trip to central Africa. After returning I would announce that I had encountered a tribe of talking monkeys, and then challenge anyone who does not believe me to prove otherwise.

It's absorbing to watch two more Versailles mistakes – Yugoslavia and Czecho-Slovakia – coming apart, while contemporary Journalists are apparently in total ignorance of the antecedents of the current situation. Or perhaps they believe that modern imbecility cannot handle that whole burden of history.

Henry David Thoreau used to be quoted as saying that it took two to tell the truth: one to speak it and one to hear it. But I am afraid that things have reached the point where this is almost unattainable.

James J. Martin
Colorado Springs, Col.

The Editor welcomes letters from readers. Ideally, letters should be no more than about 500 words in length. We reserve the right to edit for style and space.