Letters

20 Years in the US Foreign Service

I am a former diplomat in the US Foreign Service, speak and read Arabic (as well as several other languages), and have lived overseas in France, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. I have twice had lunch with Israel's ex-Prime Minister Shimon Peres (when he was still Foreign Minister), and have many Israeli friends. In their candid moments, they will admit that the Holocaust is a firewall constructed to keep to a minimum American criticism of Israeli foreign policy (that is, aggrandizement). In the vernacular it's called “guilt tripping.”

I have several interesting anecdotes I could recount from my 20 years in Washington, DC, and overseas which support the revisionist thesis, or at least dilute the inflated and hysterical claims of the cultural commissars.

I hope this gets through the welter of hate mail you must be getting. Keep up the good fight to preserve free speech in America. Right now the most endangered environment for free speech is, ironically, the American university campus, where cultural commissars are attempting to limit discussion of the Holocaust to a one-sided parody.

M.J.D
Chicago, Ill.

Qualified Appreciation from Israel

Jürgen Graf's essay, “The Social and Political Impact of the Holocaust Campaign in Today's Europe” (Nov.-Dec. 1995 Journal) is brilliant! He is right about the intentional purpose of the open immigration policy, the “anti-racism” laws, “democracy,” and the Holocaust campaign. This is the program of the “New World Order” elite.

On the whole, the Journal is very interesting and informative.

However, I don't agree with most of the anti-Israel articles. For example, I cannot agree at all with Donald Neff's article, “Zionism's Violent Legacy” (Jan-Feb. 1996 issue). It should be remembered that the treatment of Palestine's Jews by the British authorities was not very humane, and that in 1948 the Arabs were waging war against the Jews in Palestine. The Deir Yassin “massacre” is a myth. Today Israel is simply trying to survive!

The Holocaust myth propaganda is very strong here in Israel, and it is impossible even to think differently. This propaganda is part of the establishment's “New World Order” policy. I support the revisionists, and I don't like the “Holocaust” myth. It is not ethical to enrich oneself building “Holocaust” museums.

You are doing great work. I am enclosing a $50 donation to help support the Institute.

B.H.
Jerusalem, Israel

Permissible Revisionism

The shameless Roger Garaudy/Abbé Pierre episode in the land that gave the West the Enlightenment, along with the St. Martin's Press cancellation, under pressure, of Irving's biography of Goebbels, and the shutting down of Japan's Marco Polo magazine, are proof positive that the only permissible Holocaust revisionism is that which magnifies German brutality and collective guilt – as manifest in Daniel Goldhagen's hateful book, Hitler's Willing Executioners.

M.J.
Great Neck, New York

Myriad of Half Truths and Lies

While surfing the net I struck your Web page, and was thrilled to see that others share my view of World War II. At last someone to stand up and state the facts, and not just what some people want us to hear!

It was only after doing a fair bit of reading on World War II that I started seeing the myriad of half truths or flat lies around this subject. I understand the difficulty in even hinting at another angle. Those who have not studied the subject are quick to label those speaking out as Nazi, White supremacist, and so forth. But if we are ever to gain a truer understanding of World War II history, and to prevent such terrible events from ever happening again, the sheer volume of inconsistencies definitely need to be addressed.

I admire you no end. Good on you!

A.R.
University of Canterbury
New Zealand
[by Internet}

Blown Out of Proportion

I downloaded some of the articles from your Web site, and am very impressed! These folks prove what many of us have believed all along: that the Holocaust has been greatly exaggerated and blown way out of proportion. Please send me more information on the Institute for Historical Review.

R.P.
Salisbury, North Carolina
[by Internet}

Third Reich Book Burnings and Jewish-Zionist Book Censorship

Doug Collins writes that the suppression of “politically incorrect” literature today, such as in Canada and western Europe, are “in essence no different from the Nazi book-burnings of the 1930s.” He adds: “There was one thing to be said for the Nazis, though. they did their book burning in public. We do it secretly” (Nov.-Dec. 1995 JHR, p. 27).

Actually, the Third Reich book burnings were essentially “publicity stunts,” meant to focus attention on and encourage public censure of the trashy, pornographic and subversive literature that was very widespread in Germany in the decade before Hitler came to power. Among the targeted items were, for example, Marxist writings and “religious” literature such as the obscene and anti-Christian Babylonian Talmud.

Probably the best known of these events was the bonfire burning in Berlin on May 10, 1933, at a large square near the University. Some 40,000 people packed the square to cheer on the 5,000 students who took part. As Irving points out in his new biography of Goebbels, the initiative for this “symbolic” destruction of “decadent and anti-German literature” came from the party's student organization. Similar book burnings were staged simultaneously in every German university city.

In an address to the Berlin gathering that was broadcast by radio to the entire nation, Goebbels declared: “The era of an exaggerated Jewish intellectualism is over … This symbolic fire is blazing now outside many a German university to show the world that here the intellectual basis of the [liberal-democratic] November Republic is sinking into the ground.”

It should also be kept in mind that such burnings had an honorable historical precedent. During Germany's early 19th-century struggle for freedom against both foreign oppression and reactionary rule by oppressive princes, German students publicly burned reactionary writings.

In contrast to the public Third Reich book burnings, Jewish-Zionist organizations have for decades carried out a systematic campaign to silence all critical or even non-flattering treatments of Zionism, Israel and Jewish history, as well as every non-critical treatment of Third Reich Germany. For the most part this campaign is carried out underhandedly, using behind-the-scenes pressure and threats, although in some countries such as France, the force of law is used. When these aren't sufficient, brute terror is applied. (A good example is the July 1984 arson destruction of the IHR's office warehouse.)

Through its debunking of powerful and enduring historical myths, scholarly historical revisionism inevitably will seem to “exonerate” Third Reich Germany. For this reason, it is understandable that revisionists might seek to put some distance between themselves and the National Socialist regime, to deflect the predictable charge of being “pro-Nazi apologists.” However understandable and even justifiable this distancing may be, it must not be a pretext for historical distortion.

D.M.
St. Louis, Mo.

A Holy Man

As a devoted student of Pius XII, I want to thank you for your excellent article in defense of this truly holy man [“Pope Pius XII During the Second World War,” by Mary Ball Martinez, in the Sept.-Oct. 1993 Journal]. I have an extensive library on Pius XII, and found your article informative and in agreement with much of the information I have uncovered.

L.W.
[by Internet]

Ray of Sunshine

Receiving the May-June 1997 Journal felt like a sudden and unexpected ray of sunshine. I don't mind the delay. The waiting was well worthwhile.

I am under no illusion that the crisis is all over yet, but since you have survived arson and smear campaigns of unprecedented ferocity, I am sure you will survive this internal turmoil as well. You are the true survivors! I admire your tenacity. Overworked and financially strapped, you are carrying on determinedly even after several others have left the ship. May this ship prove to be unsinkable, thus confounding all the enemies!

Our sympathies and prayers are with you! I am doing what little I can to make the transition more bearable. Enclosed with my book order is a donation [$100] to help rebuild the IHR – this most effective voice for the truth in history. I'm eagerly looking forward to the next issue of the most scholarly of historical reviews.

M.S.
Ottawa, Canada

A Gold Mine

I was looking on the net for information on the Boer war, but there was very little. With great joy I found Greg Raven's [IHR] site, and found it a gold mine of information. I would personally like to thank you for this great service. Keep up the good work.

G.K. (grade nine)
[by internet]

Hiroshima Bombing Was Right and Necessary

In their articles in the May-June 1997 Journal, Mark Weber and Greg Pavlik argue that the American nuclear bombings of Japan could have been avoided. My response to that is: why should they have been? The Japs got exactly what they deserved. My disagreement with Weber and Pavlik is not so much one of political attitude, but is based on the fact that I was reading newspapers in 1945 and they were not.

The hatred we had for the Japs at that time was one we Americans had never felt before and have never felt since for any enemy. It cannot be described in words; it can only be experienced. I was part of that hate, which has not completely left me to this day. It may help to grasp its depth if we recall that at the time President Truman's mail was running eight to one in favor of “unconditional surrender.” It is useless to now say we were foolish to insist on this. The American people simply would not have tolerated anything less.

There were also practical military considerations. How many recall what happened when we invaded Okinawa, the last island we took before the end of the war? What we ran into was a last-ditch, clenched-teeth, do-or-die resistance that did not end until every last Jap soldier had been shot, bombed, burned or blasted out of his cave or bunker. As a grand finale, several thousand Jap soldiers and civilians committed mass suicide by jumping to their deaths from a high cliff. That ought to give some idea of the kind of people we were fighting. It certainly impressed Truman's military advisers, who took this fanaticism into account in anticipating the likely consequences of an invasion of the Jap home islands.

And there was a very good political reason to use the Bomb: it provided a sobering demo to the Russkies of just exactly what we could do to them, if need be. And be in not the slightest doubt that it was a very effective curb to their ambitions (at least until they got a Bomb of their own).

Weber goes to some length to show that the Japs were ready to surrender, and would have done so even without the nukes. Well, the fact remains that they surrendered only after we dropped the Bomb.

And let's be clear about just why they surrendered: they did so only because their Emperor told them to. Had he not done so, beaten or not beaten, the Japs would have fought to the last man, woman and child with knives, rocks, clubs, garden implements, or whatever, all the while subsisting on roots and berries.

I put this question to Weber and Pavlik: if you had been President, and had decided not to use the Bomb, would you have been prepared to face tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of angry, aggrieved American parents. Could you have said to them something like: “Well, yes, we had this powerful weapon, and we could have used it, and even though using it might have saved your son's life, we're really a civilized people, and just couldn't do a thing like that.”

Richard G. Phillips
Derry, New Hampshire

Day's Criticism of Chamberlin

Your tribute to William Henry Chamberlin in the Nov.-Dec. 1994 Journal (p. 18) calls him “one of the few western journalists in Moscow who tried to provide truthful reporting about the imposed famine” in the Soviet Union.

Former Chicago Tribune correspondent Donald Day gives a different story. In his memoir Onward Christian Soldiers (published by Noontide Press), he writes (pp. 126, 127):

“[Walter] Duranty, [Eugene] Lyons and Chamberlain [sic] (Christian Science Monitor) all made a special point of denouncing me and my reports of the great famine in the Ukraine in 1934 when some five million people died of starvation. Lyons, after his reformation, estimated the victims at between seven and fifteen million … In books written after they had left Russia both Lyons and Chamberlain admitted it was they who had done the lying and confirmed the Tribune's famine reports …

“Another correspondent who carefully complied with Soviet wishes was Henry Chamberlin of The Christian Science Monitor. He has also written books since he left Russia; excellent books, the result of much observation and hard work. But no matter how excellent they may be, such books and articles written after many years of doping American newspaper readers with false news and propaganda disguised as 'the truth about Russia' does not excuse the writers from betraying their calling as correspondents.”

By the way, Eugene Lyons, in his book Assignment to Utopia (New York: 1937), maintained that Stalin suffocated to death scores of currency-smuggling Jews in airtight chambers – an early version of the “gas chamber” story?

Well, for what's it's worth, here's a revisionist's revision of Journal revisionism. Anyway, keep up the good work!

M.O.
Oesteraes, Norway

Day's verdict is overly harsh, I think. In The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: 1986), historian Robert Conquest relates (pp. 307, 321) that Chamberlin and a few others were able to provide, at least “adequate” reports on real conditions in the Soviet Union, in spite of censorship. At the same time, Conquest concedes that “it was only when they left the country for good that men like Chamberlin and Lyons were able to tell the full story.” Journalists such as Chamberlin who wrote factually saw their careers suffer as a result. As Conquest notes, “reporters of the truth like Muggeridge and Chamberlin were under continuous and violent attack by pro-Communist elements in the West over the next generation.”

– The Editor

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