Letters

Hollywood and the Spanish Civil War

For decades Hollywood and the rest of the American media have routinely portrayed the “loyalist” side in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) in an admiring and sympathetic way.

Good examples of such propaganda distortion of history are two widely praised wartime motion pictures. In “Casablanca,” the 1942 Warner Brothers classic, Captain Renault reminds Rick Blaine, the suave American played by Humphrey Bogart, that he had fought in the Spanish Civil war on the side of the “loyalists.” In “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” a 1943 Paramount release based on an Ernest Hemingway novel, Gary Cooper plays the role of an idealistic young American fighter for the “loyalist” cause.

In reality the “loyalists” were Communists who imposed on Spain the same Bolshevik terror they had already brought to Russia. This included the killing and raping of thousands of priests and nuns, and the desecration of numerous Catholic churches. America's contribution to the “loyalist” cause was the Communist “Abraham Lincoln Brigade.”

The Spanish Civil War was an overture to the Second World War, during which millions of European men, women and children, and prisoners of war, were slaughtered in a frenzy of revenge and hatred.

P.M.
Spokane, Wash.

Changing and Growing

Notwithstanding the incredible persecution around the world, the Marco Polo incident shows that revisionism is growing. I note that a “human rights” group in New York has finally spoken up against the persecution of revisionists in Germany – another sign that things are changing.

So don't get discouraged. Keep plugging away. You are doing a wonderful job.

K. B.
Brighton, Onto Canada

Obsequious Behavior

I despise the obsequious behavior of the publisher of the Japanese magazine Marco Polo. Such craven behavior serves only to augment the chutzpah and arrogance of the “eternally persecuted.”

Groups such as the Wiesenthal Center are experts at using intimidation, boycott and pressure tactics. It is time to become militant and flex our own muscles.

A.B.
Long Island, N.Y.

Unicorns and Other Fantasies

The positively suffocating Holohoaxery of the past spring has got me edging toward a position of disagreeing with Abraham Lincoln: you can fool all the people all the time, by making sure that the tiny knot of those you do not fool are ignored and made to seem nonexistent.

Personally, I am about brimful on “gas chambers” and may stop reading about the subject. As I have mentioned, I classify them with unicorns; for centuries Europeans have believed tenaciously in the latter since at least the time of Aristotle, but in all that time never came up with one.

Maybe there will be centuries of belief in “gas chambers” with the same consequences. I am sure the 'hoax Establishment must stick by this fantasy, for to admit that it is all smoke would seriously undermine faith in anything else they allege. However, they did slink off from the fable of soap made from Jewish fat, after years of repeating it; I still remember the somber funeral procession in Israel portrayed on television, led by their Premier, Menachem Begin, where they buried soap bars with great solemnity. Maybe a scoot out from under the “gas chambers” might eventuate in the same way.

Regarding Holocaust revisionism: It is high time that wartime Jewry's profound involvement with the fortunes of Stalinism be given some attention again as partially involved in German wartime policy toward Jews. The Red Army hero Colonel-General David Dragunsky (twice Hero of the Soviet Union) insisted in a string of Anti-Zionist Committee of Soviet Public Opinion pamphlets issued by the Novosti Press Agency in Moscow, e.g., Aims and Tasks (1983, p. 21) that 200,000 Jews were killed in action in the uniform of the Red Army. Students of war casualties surely realize that their final death toll was far higher than that, after one accounts for the consequences of lingering wounds and a wide range of war-related diseases and other privations. There is no longer any boasting of the immense part of Jews in the underground “resistance” movement fighting in street clothes behind the lines in ten or more countries, as was the case a generation ago.

All that is now down Orwell's Memory Hole. And the substantial complement of Soviet Army prisoners of war in a number of the German concentration camps seems likewise to have vanished from the record.

Getting back to Honest Abe: in the war of 1861-65 his regime was not above engaging in a goodly campaign of atrocity and related propaganda, which started right after the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, and grew substantially by the month. One might memorialize the following from the editorial commentary in the Continental Monthly for April 1862 (pp. 607-608):

We were not at first disposed to believe in the many revolting stories, so generally circulated, stating that the rebels had actually in many instances boiled the bodies of Federal dead, for the purposes of obtaining the bones as relics. So frequently however has the story been repeated, and from so many trustworthy quarters that we are reluctantly compelled to admit that such … are very possibly founded on fact.

Eventually there came into existence a ponderous compendium of Union atrocity tales, Narrative of Privations and Sufferings of United States Officers and Soldiers While Prisoners of War in the Hands of the Rebel Authorities (Philadelphia: United States Sanitary Commission, 1864).

The Report of the Commission of Inquiry of this official Union government agency concluded that “tens of thousands of helpless men are now being disabled and destroyed by a process as certain as poison, and as cruel as the torture of burning at the stake,” deliberately and intentionally inflicted by the Confederate Government, with the lead sentence of the conclusion reading: “The next step is to fix the responsibility for all these horrors.” A lengthy review of this big book was published in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly for December 1864 (pp. 777-778), and read by a wide swath of America's most highly educated citizenry of that day.

James J. Martin
Colorado Springs, Col.

Fawning, Flawed Admiration for Keynes

Mr. Gray's review [Jan.-Feb. 1995 Journal] of Robert Skidelsky's biography of John Maynard Keynes presents a view of the British economist's life and work that is replete with the distortions that naturally accompany a treatment of such fawning admiration.

Leaving aside his obsequious characterization of Keynes the man (“In what other individual in this century had such a panoply of gifts been united under one brow?”), it is worthwhile to address a few of the writer's numerous distortions.

First of all, Gray implies that the concept of marginal utility was somehow developed by Keynes. For the economic tyro, marginal utility refers to the valuation placed on the last available unit of a supply of a homogeneous commodity, and can be measured in terms of the satisfaction or dissatisfaction caused by the addition or subtraction of one unit of the commodity item. This explanation of market prices as a result of consumer valuation and commodity supply was a revolutionary development in economic thought. It also lay at the heart of devastating critiques of socialism developed later. The problem here is that the concept of marginal utility was formally codified not by Keynes but by the Austrian economist Carl Menger in 1871.

Secondly, Mr. Gray introduces the Keynesian fallacy that “'effective demand' produced 'equilibrium' at less than full employment.” This is simply not true. The world of economics can be characterized by two facts: there are infinite human wants and desires, and, we live in a world of scarcity. As long as scarcity is a fact – that is, forever (short of supernatural intervention) – there will always be a demand for labor, and jobs will be available for those who wish to work. With their policies of debt and inflation, Keynesian planners may cause abrupt economic dislocations, but without state interference the free economy will provide jobs for all those willing to work.

Mr. Gray mentions affinities between the policies advocated by Keynes and the economic policies of Germany's National Socialist regime. There is indeed an important link: Hitler's National Socialist economic policies were essentially Keynesian, as James J. Martin notes in “The Unresolved Question of Fascism,” an essay published in his book Revisionist Viewpoints. A German edition of Keynes' General Theory was published under the National Socialist regime with a special foreword by Keynes. (The text of this foreword is reprinted in Revisionist Viewpoints [available from the IHR].)

In his famous (and lamentably out-of-print) volume, As We Go Marching, Old Right stalwart and revisionist historian John T. Flynn attacked Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal policies as essentially fascist. Flynn identified the debt-based militarism of Europe's authoritarian regimes as implicit in Roosevelt's New Deal.

Mr. Gray also praises the arrangements of the 1944 Bretton Woods conference as a “workable world monetary order.” This economic “New World Order” is indeed the Keynesian goal. At Bretton Woods the currencies of the world were taken off gold and pegged to the US dollar, a move that opened the door to devaluation of currency, inflation and, eventually, total fiat money around the world. With money no longer backed by commodity, the governments of the world, through their central banks, were essentially given free reign to inflate and inflate and inflate. Good, if you favor perpetual inflation, poverty, statism, and income redistribution (hardest hit are the elderly and disabled on fixed incomes), but bad if you are a decent working person with a family.

Incidentally, readers interested in economics might consider getting a copy of The Failure of the 'New Economics,' by the late Henry Hazlitt. This powerful line-by-line refutation of Keynes' General Theory leaves no doubt as to the proper status to which Keynes ought to be relegated.

A.C.
New York City

Keynes' 1936 German Foreword

In his review in the Jan.-Feb. Journal, Andrew Gray mentions that John Maynard Keynes contributed “a special preface to a 1930s German edition of The General Theory.”

Readers may be interested to know that the complete text of Keynes' foreword to the 1936 German edition of General Theory, is printed, both in the original language (in facsimile) and in translation, in James J. Martin's collection of essays, Revisionist Viewpoints. [This 248-page softcover book is available from the IHR for $8.95, postpaid. (check www.ihr.org for current availability and price; ed.)]

In this foreword, dated September 7, 1936, Keynes wrote: “The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state [eines totalen Staates] than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire. This is one of the reasons that justifies the fact that I call my theory a general theory.”

Martin comments: “Some economic scribblers hostile to Keynes want too much to attack him personally, as if he created the modern state, but appear to be most hesitant about challenging the state themselves. Keynes did not create the modern state. He found it the way it is, and, obviously, from the context of the German foreword, prepared a scheme or system to work within its confines; the greater and more total the state employment of his General Theory, the better.”

E. Svedlund
Seattle, Wash.

Uncovering Truth

The other day [early March] I saw the last few minutes of a German television report about how you introduce your texts in Germany through the internet, thus avoiding German laws that punish those who deny the Jewish Holocaust. In this broadcast a spokesman for the Wiesenthal Center also spoke. He was furious, of course.

I encourage you all to continue in this fight to uncover the total truth about Holocaust lies. Thanks to people like you, the truth won't be manipulated, and Zionist lies will be uncovered.

J.F.
Majadahonda, Spain

Moscow Discussion of Suvorov's Thesis

I am sure you've noticed the deafening silence in our mass media about Viktor Suvorov's book, Icebreaker, which presents detailed evidence to show that Stalin was preparing to invade and conquer Germany and Europe in the summer of 1941, and that his invasion plan was thwarted by the German-led Axis attack against Soviet Russia.

I listen daily to the BBC and Deutsche Welle short wave radio, and I've heard not a word about it. Today, though (Feb. 1), on C-Span's re-broadcast of the “Moscow Evening News” television program, the name of Suvorov and the subject of his book broke through the ice. The simultaneous translator's voice drones simultaneously with bad inflection, so one has to pay close attention, which I hadn't until I heard the words “World War II … painful questions.”

Apparently a conference of historians was recently held in Moscow, at which the question was discussed of who was about to attack whom in 1941. It was noted that Suvorov [Vladimir Rezun] was not present. There was, however, an Israeli participant who has written a book purporting to refute Suvorov and his thesis.

To another matter: have you read Churchill's Deception by Louis Kilzer? This recently published work is a concise and damning exposé of Churchill's perfidy.

D.S.
Harrison, Tenn.

Soviet Milliary Buildup Recalled

I have read Icebreaker by Victor Suvorov, and would like to make a few comments based on my own experience in support of the thesis of this truthful book.

I am a former Soviet citizen of German ancestry. I witnessed and participated in the enormous Soviet military buildup against Europe in 1941 that Suvorov describes.

In 1941 I was serving in the Soviet Red Army in the Trans-Baikal region as a newly-recruited soldier with the 492nd Artillery Regiment of the 152nd Division of the 16th Army. The 152nd was a newly established motorized division organized from units that had been engaged in action against the Japanese army on the Siberian-Manchurian border.

In February 1941 we in the 152nd Division were informed that we would soon have the honor of participating in the most massive military operations ever of the Red Army. We were therefore forbidden from writing home to our relatives. The families of the officers were ordered to return to their home towns, and not allowed to write to their husbands and fathers.

Even before the German “Barbarossa” attack on June 22, 1941, officers made comments such as “I'm going to replace my fur boots in Paris” or “I'll change my boots in Berlin.” After the German attack, officers made comments like “The sons of bitches beat us to it.” So, it was obvious what was being planned, and the Germans had no choice but to spoil those plans.

In spite of all the propaganda truth about this chapter of history, I believe that the objective truth will prevail. Keep up your good work.

Helmut Krohmer
San Jose, Calif.

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