Lyle Stuart “Barricades” Revisionist Manuscripts

I recently had occasion to read an article sent me from the Hoboken Record (2 February 97) titled “House of Stuart.” It gave the background to the publishing history of Lyle Stuart, who is perhaps the most independent and controversial mainstream book publisher in the United States. He specializes in publishing books that challenge orthodox American culture, including The Anarchist Cookbook, the exposes of the CIA by Philip Agee, and most recently The Turner Diaries. His latest publishing house is called Barricade.

The Turner Diaries of course is the revolutionary racialist diatribe written by William Pierce of The National Alliance and is said to have helped influence Tim McVeigh to bomb the Oklahoma City federal building, if he bombed it. Reading the Hoboken Record article I was so carried away with Mr. Stuart’s credentials and courage that I decided to send him the opening section of the book manuscript I’ve been working on, which used to be titled Break His Bones but which now I’m calling A Simple Writer (I have my reasons).

It occured to me that if Lyle Stuart won’t publish me, no main line publisher of any note will publish me. I might as well get over it. On 6 June I received a page and a half letter from Mr. Stuart rejecting the mere idea of publishing any Holocaust revisionist work, and particularly mine. I was so pleased that this daring and independent publisher would take the trouble to that at first I failed to see how interesting the letter really is.

Stuart dismisses me as a “misguided” fellow and notes that he has never met anyone in the German government… who denies the existence of the gas chambers…” Recalling the adventures of Germar Rudolf, William Staeglich, Fred Leuchter, Hans Schmidt and a score of others who have the misfortune to be German in this day and age, or simply to have passed through that benighted land, I can easily accept Stuart’s experience on this matter. What it would mean for a high-ranking or well-known German to tell a Jewish-American publisher that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz?

In his letter Stuart writes: “Where I differ from the Jewish holocaust professionals is that they speak of only 6,000,000 Jews. The fact is that some fourteen to eighteen million gypsies, homosexuals, Jews, Catholic priests and nuns and political prisoners were murdered by starvation and disease or were cooked in the camp ovens.”

He does not say the whole 14 to 16 million were “cooked” in the camp ovens, so in all likelihood we have here a man of reasoned restraint. Maybe only a million, or even half a million nuns and priests and gay ladies and gents and others were broiled and roasted in the camp ovens. Nevertheless, this lends more credibility to the Hansel and Gretel syndrome than I have imagined I would ever hear, and suggests that the German propensity for cooking those who annoy them was already well developed by the end of the 18th century.

You can judge how evolved we are becoming as a people when you compare the unsavory (no pun intended) but powerful imagery of Lyle Stuart’s imagination with that of the simple, almost simple-minded, Sinclair Lewis of three-quarters of a century ago (see: Letters, Lou Rollins).

Stuart was particularly enthusiastic about Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, so I sent him my Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist, which has a chapter devoted to a key segment of the film. that of Abraham Bomba, the barber of Treblinka. I don’t think it will do the trick. Lyle Stuart is a man who is ready and willing to challenge anything and everything—except one thing.

Stuart can publish a book that proposes the mass murder of millions of people based on a racial ideology he loathes because he knows that while such a book is a great scandal for the media, no one in his circle will take it seriously. Revisionism is something else again. His circle takes revisionism very seriously. There's something about Revisionist theory that makes these very sophisticated people nervous, particularly when it is advanced by someone like myself who likes these people and has lived a good part of his life among them.