Letters

Profound Effect

I'm enclosing a check for $50 to assist the Institute in carrying on its work. Since being introduced to the Institute and its library in the early 1980s, I must say that your work has had the most profound effect on my intellectual life, more than anything else. I no longer read any of the mainstream periodicals and newspapers, but rely on the Institute and its resources for forming a true picture of the world and possible roads of action to remedy the frightful mess the Holocaust myth has led us into. Keep up the good work!

I like the IHR Update newsletter, but I think the Journal is the instrument that in the long run holds everything together. It should be emphasized over everything else.

My impression is that the Holocaust myth and its promoters are rapidly running out of steam. Most of the world, including many Jews, are getting tired of hearing about it and are beginning to understand the myth for the nonsense it is. Only the professional haters seem to be making the majority of noise on this, and their voices grow weaker by the day.

More than ever now is the time for people to support the Institute so it can increase its attack against myth. Victory is within sight!

W. P.
Hayward, Calif

Double Standard

As the enclosed newspaper clipping about “hunting Nazi war criminals” in Argentina shows, the tentacles of Zion seem to reach everywhere. No comparable energy is devoted to bringing to justice former Stalinist criminals in Russia, or former Khmer Rouge Communist killers in Cambodia.

In those countries, Communist criminals today hold respectable positions.

A. S.
Logan, Utah

Flood Coming

I know you are very busy, but I just want you to know that there are many people out there – yes, even here in South Africa – who have great appreciation for the work you are doing. Please keep it up, and sooner or later the trickle will become a flood.

O. L.
South Africa

Jews in the Bolshevik Takeover of Russia: A Dissenting View

Some of the points raised by Mark Weber in his article, “The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's Early Soviet Regime,” in the Jan.-Feb. 1994 Journal should be challenged. There can be no dispute of the principal facts: Yes, the Bolshevik Revolution was very largely a Jewish enterprise and, yes, it was an extremely bloodly business.

I take exception, though, to what seems to be Weber's unspoken implication that it was so bloody because of the heavy Jewish participation in the Communist takeover of Russia. I am inclined to attribute its particularly brutal character, especially in the earliest phase, to two factors: First, the desperate nature and the life-and-death stakes of the struggle for power, and, second, the fact that it took place in a country with no developed traditions of civility, and which had always been ruled by violence.

Bolshevik ranks were indeed heavily staffed with Bronsteins, Solomons, Sobelsohns, Rosenfelds, etc. There are two main reasons for this: First, revolutions can only be led by educated men and, at that time, the best-educated part of the Russian population was disproportionately Jewish; and, second, of all the peoples in the Russian Empire, the Jews had the strongest reasons for wanting to do away with the Tsarist regime. Why so?

Jews in Tsarist Russia were a brutally oppressed nationality. For one thing, they were legally permitted to live only in the area known as the Pale. Apart from special cases, Jews could not legally live in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the most important cities. Furthermore, to be a Jew in Tsarist Russia was to be an automatic victim of every petty jack-in-office who wished to affirm his importance by making life miserable for the poor so-and-so on the other side of his desk.

People who pay their taxes and obey the law have a right to expect the protection of the law. What many Jews, especially in smaller towns and villages, got instead were looting, raping, and murdering visitations from marauding Cossacks. Often these bloody raids were tolerated or even instigated by the local authorities. (Israel's present-day feistiness and belligerency are rooted in memory of such experiences.)

Russia's Jews thus had a deep and legitimate grudge against the Tsarist regime, and possibly against the Russian nation. Added to this was raw fear. A victory of the anti-Communist “White” forces in the civil war of 1918-1920 certainly would have resulted in the execution of every Jewish Bolshevik official.

A Communist defeat might well have also resulted in widespread massacres of Jews no matter what their politics – as, indeed, did happen in areas that came temporarily under White control. Jewish Bolsheviks were convinced, with good reason I think, that torture and death awaited them if they did not prevail. So it was not surprising that they were prepared to act with great brutality to crush their enemies.

It is doubtful that Jewish Bolsheviks envisioned terror as a more or less permanent state of affairs. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Jews are civilized people. One must remember that Russia's Jews were essentially European in feeling and outlook. They had come out (or were driven out) of western and central Europe. What they wanted most of all was that Russia become a European country, a society of cleanliness, order, efficiency and civility – in other words, a copy of Germany or Austria. (This was especially true of Trotsky who, in his days of exile, was very much at home in the Vienna coffee house circuit.)

What Russia's Jews dreaded above all else was living in a country cut off from Europe, fearful that they would never be safe in such a society. At the risk of seeming foolish, I suggest that the Bolshevik program for world revolution may have been motivated more by a desire to avoid isolation than by a drive to impose an ideology on the world.

Many Russians today will tell you that the Bolshevik regime was an alien tyranny imposed by an alien people. This is rubbish. Absolutism, envy, and a disdain for individual rights all run deep in the Russian character. Bolshevik rule in Russia was a more or less natural political expression of this mentality. Moreover, the Communist regime of Lenin and even Stalin enjoyed general popular support for a considerable time. Even today, many old-timers look back with nostalgia on the days when at least they were fed and housed. (A Russian asks little more from life.)

Weber's article pointed out that Jews played a wildly disproportionate role in the Soviet secret police (Cheka, NKVD, etc.). True, but the Jewish role was likewise “disproportionate” in every branch of the Soviet government. Weber seems to be trying to imply here that trigger-pullers and ball-kickers could only have been recruited from among Russia's Jews, and could not have been recruited from among Russia's Gentile majority. This isn't so. Stalin had not the slightest difficulty in enlisting whoever he wanted, and in whatever numbers he wished. Moreover, any Westerner who has lived there can testify to the streak of brutishness that runs deep in the Russian character.

Both inside and outside of Russia, many voices now say that Russia's last Emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, perhaps wasn't such a bad fellow after all. Nearly 80 years after his death, he is apparently far more esteemed than he ever was during his lifetime. I must dissent from this newly-fashionable effort to “rehabilitate” Russia's last Emperor. While it is true that he was never an outrightly evil man, he was certainly empty-headed and weak.

Keep in mind that throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, Russia was regarded in the West with utter loathing and revulsion. Even within Russia, Tsar Nicholas had become so unpopular by 1917 that when at the time of his abdication – making way for the Kerensky regime – no one in Russia, high or low, was willing to lift a finger to prevent it. Everyone agreed: he had to go.

Richard Phillips
Montville, New Jersey

'Covering Fire' Letters

Enclosed is a copy of a letter by me that was recently published in a left-leaning San Francisco weekly paper.

Some may feel that writing such pro-revisionist letters is a waste of time, but there's a good chance that your letter will be published if it focuses on one or two basic points, includes a reputable reference, and avoids inflammatory rhetoric.

The battle for Holocaust revisionism shouldn't be left to the brave scholars who are leading the way, often alone. It's time for the legions of supporters to provide “covering fire” by writing well-aimed letters for publication in newspapers and magazines.

B. H.
San Francisco, Calif

Controversy

Greetings from Australia. Located your [Internet] WWW page. Great stuff! You certainly are creating some controversy. On March 5 our main national daily newspaper, The Australian, ran an article from a US paper about historical revisionism and specifically IHR's use of Internet.

D. J.
Melbourne, Australia

Credit Due

I have to give the media credit for doing something right for a change. If it wasn't for the Canadian magazine Macleans, May 22, 1995, issue, I would not have found the IHR's Internet Web page. Keep up the good work!

G. W.
Canada

Inspiring

Keep up the excellent work. It is very inspiring to be able to read you and get this excellent material on the Internet. Even just the presence of the IHR on the net, in the face of such vast exterminationist and Holocaust resources, is a comfort.

G. R.
Victoria, B.C. Canada

'Hungarian Revisionism'

The letter by B. L. in the Jan.-Feb. 1995 issue of the Journal (“Suppressed Hungarian History,” p. 48) is “Hungarian revisionism” that strays very far from the historical truth.

The thrust of this letter attacks the Treaty of Trianon (1920) which, it claims, was based on “blatant lies” and “reduced Hungary to about a third of its prewar size.” It is, however, the letter by B. L. that contains lies.

He writes: “With the Treaty of Trianon, a natural geographical unit and a well-established Hungarian ethnic community was carved up.” This is not true. Transylvania had been uninterruptedly inhabited by the Dacians, ancestors of the modern Romanians, since prehistoric times (as confirmed by historians Herodotus, Strabo and Dici Cassius), and by their Romanian descendants since the Roman conquests of the first centuries A.D. (see A History of the Roumanians, by British historian R. W. Seton-Watson). On the other hand, the Huns and the Magyars, whose descendants are the Hungarians, came from Asia to Europe later, during the Middle Ages. Even under Hungarian rule, Transylvania remained a distinct principality with its own currency and its own legislature, until the Austro-Hungarian dualism of 1867.

Another lie in this letter is the statement: “Under the pretext that Hungary had subdued and mistreated them, various ethnic minorities claimed for themselves parts of ancient Hungarian lands.” In fact, the Hungarians had so brutally suppressed the Romanians of Transylvania that the only natural outcome of the plebiscite organized in the aftermath of World War I was the restoration of the region to Romania.

In 1920 the Hungarian minority of Transylvania was 1.5 million (not 2.5 or 3 million, as B. L. suggests), and it made up 23.7 percent of the region's total population. Two years before the Treaty of Trianon, 76.3 percent of the population of Transylvania asked to be reunited with Romania, and the Treaty satisfied their wish. Of the Transylvanian population, 71.1 percent were Romanians, living in their ancestral, historic homeland. They did not claim any part of ancient Hungarian lands.

B. L. also writes: “Unfortunately for Hungary, in 1920, the Allied peacemakers did not consider the Carpathian Basin as a geographical unit, but rather looked only at certain isolated areas.” A cursory glance at the map of Europe suffices to reveal the absurdity of this statement. Transylvania is the cradle, the heart and the stronghold of Romania.

Another lie is the claim that “in August 1940, the 'Second Vienna Award,' backed by Germany and Italy, restored to Hungary 43,104 sq. km. of territory in northern Transylvania that had been turned over to Romania in 1920.” In this 'Second Award,' Hitler and Mussolini did not “restore” northern Transylvania to the Hungarians, but ceded it to them as part of a bargain. Following this, the Hungarians unleashed a cruel and barbarous campaign of oppression against the Romanians.

I deal more extensively with some of these issues in my book, Transylvania and Hungarian Revisionism (second edition, 1988).

Now, as part of an effort to install a “New World Order,” there is a drive to destroy the European nations. The internationalists who push for this have slated Romania to be the first country to fall under the “New World Order” axe.

Traian Galea
President
The Romanian Association
Hallandale, Fla.

Rethinking Liberal Democracy

Liberal, egalitarian democracy is endlessly praised as the ideal form of government, indeed as the only conceivable form of just and rational social organization. However, this was not at all the view of those who founded the American republic or of many other wise men down through the centuries who regarded egalitarian democracy with fear and contempt.

As we grapple with growing and seemingly insoluble social, racial and economic problems, more and more Americans and Europeans are reassessing the wisdom of liberal democracy as the proper model for our society. In this regard, I was very glad to read your article about how attitudes toward Mussolini and Fascism changed drastically during the 1930s [“America's Changing View of Mussolini and Italian Fascism,” May-June 1995 Journal, pp. 6-7]. Such information is especially important these days.

We can't build for the future on lies about the past.

B. A.
Arlington, Va.

Vituperatlon in Australia

The July-August [1995] Journal [p. 31] refers to two new theatrical productions in the United States about historical revisionism. I was the subject of attack in a play produced in Australia in 1983. “The Diary of Anne Frank: A Forgery?” was reviewed in the Australian Jewish News (June 30, 1983). The main character, “Bennet” (sic), was played by the writer of the play, Geoff Sirmai.

The review said that “the neo-Nazi character, played by Mr. Sirmai, is modelled on 'a certain Australian anti-Semite' who masks as a guardian of civil liberties.” In the play this character is “totally discredited,” and the performance “leaves one with an eerie feeling of evil.”

Over the top attacks on revisionists are common. J. S. Mill said that “unmeasured vituperation, employed on the side of prevailing opinion, deters people from expressing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who express them.”

Historical revisionists such as English historian David Irving, whose books are in libraries and bookshops throughout the western world, Professor Robert Faurisson, Professor Arthur Butz, and myself have concluded, after much research, much of it uncontradicted, that there was no plan to exterminate Jews in World War II, there were no mass gassings, and that fewer than one million Jews died of all causes. As a result, we routinely face vituperation.

Dissident thinkers who challenge the accepted version of the past cannot expect a fair hearing in Australia and are subject to “unmeasured vituperation.” Thus my attempts to query the extent of the Holocaust of Jews have lead me to being described as “more evil than Himmler and Pol Pot” (Quadrant), a “pathological raver” (New Statesman), “unhinged” (Commentary), “comic” and “bizarre” (The Age, Melbourne), “scum” (3AW radio) and “dangerous and foolish” (Derryn Hinch, 3AW radio). I am not afforded a right of reply to such attacks.

Phillip Adams attacked me in three feature articles in The Australian in 1990, claiming that I was masquerading as a civil libertarian, that I was carrying on where Julius Streicher, editor of Der Stürmer, left off, and that I had been spewing hate since the 1930s. (I was born in 1936 and did not become a revisionist until 1979.)

The ACLU publication, Your Rights, available throughout Australia at newsstands, quotes George Orwell: “anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself being silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.”

John Bennett
President
Australian Civil Liberties Union
Box 1137, Carlton 3053
Melbourne, Australia

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