Mark Weber: Squishy Semi-Revisionist Shirker – Part Two

In the first part, I showed that Mark Weber, in his interview with Jim Rizoli (10 February 2016), consistently tried to avoid acknowledging any findings of Holocaust Revisionism, and also tried to conceal his past acknowledgment of such findings. In this part, the focus is on Weber's attempts to justify his retreat from Holocaust Revisionism.

Mark Weber gives several arguments to justify his current refusal to support the revisionist findings that he once supported in regard to the Holocaust. I was able to discern the following, somewhat contradictory arguments, listed here in ascending order of absurdity:

1. The question of whether the Holocaust-story is true or false is no longer relevant.

2. Although the truth about the Holocaust is relevant (contradicting the previous point) it should not be relevant!

3. There is no point in disputing the Holocaust because Jews really were gassed!

Mark Weber Claims that the Holocaust is Irrelevant (37:30-51:35 et passim)

This is a position that Mark Weber publicly declared with an essay, "How Relevant is Holocaust Revisionism?" that appeared in January 2009. He claims that the Holocaust is no longer relevant because it was so long ago. Young people, he says, are no longer interested in it. Weber proposes to attack what he calls "the Jewish-Zionist power" through some avenue other than Holocaust Revisionism.

Weber, however, notably does not avoid discussing decades-old history in general, only the Holocaust. You will find much work by Mark Weber about the Second World War and National-Socialist Germany online that was done after he proclaimed the irrelevance of Holocaust Revisionism (e.g. his Worldwatch podcasts for Voice of Reason). The rationale that Weber gives for not discussing the Holocaust — that nobody is interested anymore because it was so long ago — is patent bunk.

Even if there had been a decline of interest in the Holocaust, it would not be a reason for the director of the IHR to avoid the subject as Mark Weber clearly does. In fact, the director of the IHR does not have the right to avoid Holocaust Revisionism, because it is the reason why the IHR was established.

For some, the Holocaust itself is still very relevant. Tell the nonagenarian former camp-guards recently put on trial in Germany that the Holocaust is no longer relevant.

More important than the Holocaust itself, however, are the so-called "lessons of the Holocaust," which are very influential, and affect not only nonagenarian Germans but the entire world.

Weber opines that the Jewish-Zionist power is waning (39:32-39:44). Even if this is true, the false “lessons of the Holocaust” that this power has established as dogma must still be combatted because of their destructive effect. Why wait for that Jewish-Zionist power to disappear before challenging its “lessons”?

Today we are seeing what may be the death of Europe, and it is clear that the "lessons of the Holocaust"  have much to do with it. In the United States, Donald Trump, as a nationalist politician like Enoch Powell before him, is targeted with invidious comparisons to Adolf Hitler because he wants to curb some forms of immigration. All of this propaganda derives its force fundamentally from belief in the Holocaust.

Comparisons to Adolf Hitler and references to the Holocaust have also been used to motivate unnecessary wars. Weber says that "the Jewish-Zionist power" causes these wars (1:23:31-1:24:05), but Weber is playing a word-game when he says this. The Holocaust is the tool that they use. Labeling some foreign leader as "another Adolf Hitler" and, if necessary, presenting spurious evidence of "another Holocaust" has become the standard method of generating moral pressure to go to war. Think especially of Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and the war against Bashar al-Assad's government that would have happened in 2013 if Vladimir Putin had not interfered.  

The fact that the Holocaust is a cherished myth of the "Jewish-Zionist power" that Weber claims to want to attack is already a reason to dispute it (given that the falsity of the Holocaust story is easily shown). It is a way to expose that "Jewish-Zionist power" as dishonest or delusional.

If the Holocaust were no longer relevant, then Mark Weber should have a relaxed attitude toward the subject, instead of carefully avoiding saying that Robert Faurisson and Ernst Zündel were ever right about anything — as if such an affirmation would have amounted to stepping on a landmine. Mark Weber certainly knows that the Holocaust is still relevant.

In response to Weber’s belittlement of Holocaust Revisionism, Rizoli asks Weber:

“”What should we be doing then, now? What should we be attacking? … Are we wasting our time talking about the Holocaust, with all those aspects of it, or should we just go off in another direction on another part of the Jews?" (1:21:34-1:22:09)

What Rizoli clearly means is: what should we be saying, in lieu of disputing the Holocaust?

Thereupon, Weber delays with a flood of verbiage that dims the memory of Rizoli's question, finally telling Rizoli that since he has a capacity for making videos, he should do that — which obviously does not answer the question as Rizoli intended it.  

While trying to maintain that the Holocaust is irrelevant, Weber nonetheless directly admits that it is relevant: "It's also a source of power in that it's referred to, to justify what Israel is doing, of course."

If, as Weber says, mass-media are compelling the public to think about the Holocaust, the most feasible way to oppose that propaganda is not to try to resist thinking about it, but rather, in a judo-like maneuver,  to use the enemy’s own power against them by thinking about the Holocaust more than they want anyone to think about it — thinking it through to the point of destroying it. Trying not to think about the Holocaust is no answer when Jewish influence through mass-media is so great. Every presentation of Holocaust-propaganda, however, is also an occasion to challenge that propaganda with compelling facts and logic.

Although the Holocaust is relevant, it should not be relevant (1:19:30-1:21:28)

Weber asserts that giving indulgence to people who claim to have been victimized is stupid.

"And I think it's childish and stupid to take the view that, well if Hitler killed six million Jews, that means we should all be friends of Israel or like Netanyahu, but if he killed 100 thousand Jews then it's okay to say  Netanyahu's the bad guy. That's just ridiculous. I mean Israel's policies, or the policies and actions of the Anti-Defamation League or the World Jewish Congress, should be evaluated in and of itself, regardless of how many Jews died or were killed during the Second World War.  The whole notion implicit in this victimization narrative of our society, that people are somehow morally better if they've been victimized, is a stupid one."

Weber understands, when he says that it is "childish and stupid" to be "friends of Israel" because of the Holocaust, that this is in fact what happens. He is saying that people should not react the way they do react. He is saying that people should be other than how they are.

Some individuals may find this kind of exhortation to pitilessness appealing, but among people of European descent in general this does not seem a very auspicious approach. Surely it is easier to show people that a story is false than to coax them (using what?) to act contrary to their character and upbringing.

Mark Weber claims to believe that Jews were Gassed (51:36-1:18:23)

During the 1990s Mark Weber developed the habit of telling interviewers, "We don't deny" the Holocaust. What Weber meant by that however was unclear. He had copied the phrase from Professor Robert Faurisson, who meant that as a revisionist scholar he does not merely deny, but affirms based on evidence that there was no Holocaust. It was not clear however what Weber meant when uttering the same words. Was Weber conceding that the Holocaust was fact?

In 1995 Weber became director of the Institute for Historical Review. In December 2003 when Faurisson asked the director to clarify his position on the legend of "Nazi gas-chambers," Weber gave this response:

"I do not like to say that 'the Nazi gas chambers never existed,' in part because I do not regard myself as any kind of specialist of 'gas chambers,' and in part because I avoid making such categorical statements (on any subject)."

It was after this evasive response from Director Weber that Faurisson resigned from the IHR. (R. Faurisson, "Mark Weber Must Resign" )

In 2016, however, when Jim Rizoli asks Weber whether he believes that Jews were gassed, Rizoli gets the clear answer that Faurisson never got. Weber says:  

"My view about the gas-chambers or gassings is the same essentially as David Irving. And I believe that Jews were gassed. Yes." (52:06-52:18)  

More specifically, Weber says:  

"My belief, based upon my best assessment [shakes his head] of the evidence, is that large numbers of Jews were killed at Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka, most likely by gassing." (54:40-54:55)  

After that he repeats that his position is the same as David Irving's (55:09-55:12).

This alignment with David Irving seems to be an important point for Weber. It is significant that Weber does not say that David Irving's position is the same as his, rather the reverse. It is Irving who has influenced Weber.

Weber says that "the balance of evidence" supports his (and Irving's) conclusion. But the evidence that Weber cites to Rizoli is really no evidence at all.  

First, it should be noted that Mark Weber realizes that all alleged documents that are supposed to prove claims related to the Holocaust have a cloud of doubt around them, because many have been proven false. Weber gives an example of this when he tells Rizoli that the number of Jewish deaths claimed in the reports of the Einsatzgruppen is certainly false: "It's certainly not as large as the reports themselves, issued between 1941 and 1943, might indicate" (1:16:49-1:16:57).

Nonetheless, in this interview Weber refers to an alleged document as proof of the Holocaust: specifically a passage in the so-called Goebbels Diaries,  

Weber had testified to the inauthenticity of the so-called Goebbels Diaries in 1988, as follows (quoted by R. Faurisson, "Mark Weber Must Resign"):

"The later entry, which I think is the 27th of March [1942], is widely quoted to uphold or support the extermination thesis. It is not consistent with entries in the diary like this one of March 7th, and it is not consistent with entries at a later date from the Goebbels diaries, and it is not consistent with German documents from a later date.

"[…] there is a great doubt about the authenticity of the entire Goebbels diaries because they are written on typewriter. We have no real way of verifying if they are accurate, and the U.S. Government certified, in the beginning of the publication, […] that it can take no responsibility for the accuracy of the diaries as a whole.

"[…] I think again it is worth mentioning that the passage of the 27th of March is inconsistent with the passage of the 7th of March and the one from April, and I don't remember the date exact (Transcript, p. 5820-5821)."

"Goebbels had no responsibility for Jewish policy. He wasn't involved in that. He was the Propaganda Minister. He was involved only to the extent that there were Jews in Berlin and he was responsible for Berlin (p. 5822-5823)."

Weber's testimony about contradictions in the Goebbels Diaries, and his observation that Goebbels (even if he had written those things) was not in a position to know about secret gassings of Jews, is now supposed to be negated by David Irving's discovery in Soviet state archives (euphemistically called "Russian archives" by the Mark Weber of 2016) of photographic plates that include previously published and some unpublished sections of the supposed Goebbels Diaries. (56:02-57:57)

But it is not apparent how David Irving's discovery of old photographic plates would eliminate the contradictions that Mark Weber has noted in the sections already published. It cannot.

It also does not put Goebbels in a better position to know about secret gassings. (Recall that it has been David Irving's position since the late 1970s that Hitler himself had no knowledge of such doings. Especially in that light, the claim that Goebbels did have such knowledge is astounding.)

When Rizoli makes the point that photographic images of alleged diary-pages are unverifiable as to authorship, and that the Soviet government is untrustworthy as a source, Weber responds as follows:

"The glass plates are a kind of primitive form of microfilm, but we also have the papers from which the glass plates were made. That's what's important. If that was the only evidence, that would be one thing, but these plates, the finding of these plates, is a confirmation of what was already known from other archives." (59:10-59:36)

The "papers" to which Weber refers are typed pages that have been in the United States since 1947. They are currently held by the Hoover Institution in California. Weber was already aware of those typed pages when he gave his testimony against their authenticity in 1988.

In fact, all "Goebbels diaries" dated later than July 1941 are typewritten. This means that all alleged pages from alleged Goebbels diaries that could be adduced as contemporary evidence for the Holocaust, including the ones that Weber now adduces, are typewritten, and thus absolutely unverifiable as to authorship.

David Irving pretends, in a speech that he gave at an IHR conference in 1994, that the discovery in Soviet state archives of photographic plates that include images of the typed pages held by the Hoover Institution somehow proves that those pages come from an authentic Goebbels Diary. (quoted by Mark Weber, "Faurisson's Unfair Rebuke", 21 April 2009 )

It proves no such thing. It proves only that the typed pages were in Soviet possession before they came into American possession. This in no way vouches for their authenticity: rather the opposite.

Weber merely copies David Irving in espousing this pretended proof. The argument is a non sequitur that can be accepted as valid only by somebody too confused, or too overawed with David Irving's manner, to take it apart. It means that David Irving knew that he was pulling a fast one when he started making this argument for the authenticity of the Goebbels Diaries in the 1990s, and that Mark Weber too, unless there is an affliction to his brain that he did not suffer 25 years ago, must also know that he is pulling a fast one by repeating what Irving says.

Another argument that Weber offers in support of the Holocaust is that there could have been gassings in the Aktion Reinhardt camps because there are no structural remains in those places that could be used to produce the kind of debunking represented by a Leuchter Report or Rudolf-Gutachten. "There's nothing really to investigate at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka because the camps have been razed," says Weber (1:04:25-1:04:31).

Weber thus pretends that there is no way to attack the accusations relating to those camps, and that they must therefore be accepted as true. Note that Weber gives the benefit of the doubt to the accusers rather than the accused, and, beyond this, ignores the general damage to the credibility of such stories that revisionists have already inflicted.

In the absence of physical evidence, it is still possible to criticize the specific claims about how gassings are supposed to have occurred in those places. Rizoli points out that gassings in the Reinhardt camps, according to so-called witnesses, were done with diesel-exhaust, which is not practical. Weber says that he knows it. When Rizoli then asks Weber how he thinks Jews were killed in those camps, Weber says:

"I don't know." (52:54-53:59)

Weber thus supports an accusation of mass-murder by gas that is utterly void of details, even the detail of what kind of gas is supposed to have been used.

Rizoli asks Weber how many Jews he thinks died in the Holocaust (1:06:30-1:10:24). Weber embarks on a lengthy digression (echoing Faurisson) about the distinction between "Jews who died" and "Jews who were killed" — which turns out to be pointless, because Weber ultimately makes no such distinction. This digression seems to be a delaying tactic and an attempt to sound at least a little bit like a Holocaust Revisionist toward an interviewer who has been probing him about his hypocrisy. Finally, Weber's embarrassing response is:

"The number of Jews who died is probably between two and four million."  (1:08:30-1:08:41)

Rizoli objects that if Weber claims that 4 million might have died, then he must think that a much larger number of Jews lived in the German sphere of influence, since so many Jews survived. Weber then admits that the number of Jews in German-dominated Europe was "probably not even four million," which is inconsistent with what he had just said.

It is clear that Weber's assertion, that 2-4 million Jews "died," and that some were gassed, is gratuitous, since he cannot even say how that gassing is supposed to have occurred, and when he states the supposed number of Jewish dead, a contradiction results.

Whereas in 2003 Weber told Robert Faurisson that he did "not like to say" that the Nazi gas chambers never existed, it becomes clear in 2016 that Mark Weber — despite the repeated declarations of his own superior disinterestedness and objectivity — does like to say that the Nazi gas chambers did exist. Furthermore, Weber likes to state a number of Jewish deaths that, like Gerald Reitlinger's 1953 estimate of 4.2-4.7 million, deviates only moderately from the mythical six million and does not constitute a rejection of the Holocaust as such.  

Mark Weber is a Follower, not a Leader

Mark Weber has copied his current general position on the Holocaust from David Irving. Both, the reliance on a "Goebbels Diaries" that Weber himself once denounced, and the eager acceptance of the claim that Jews were somehow gassed in those camps where little physical evidence can be adduced, were copied from David Irving.

David Irving's retreat from general skepticism about the Holocaust during the 1990s makes sense in terms of Irving's economic motives, since, as a formerly celebrated author, when he embraced the Leuchter Report and gave testimony for Ernst Zündel in 1988, Irving suddenly had difficulty getting major publishers to accept his work. Irving was a latecomer to Holocaust Revisionism and bailed out of it to the extent that he could when he saw what it cost him.  

The IHR, however, was created to go against the grain. The director of the IHR (in theory, at least) does not have the same motives as a commercial author like David Irving, and should not be following David Irving as a role-model, nor invoking his name as a defense.

Today Irving and Weber together, along with "Jewish Revisionist" David Cole, assert that there were gassings in the Aktion Reinhardt camps. While it is to be expected that a commercial author and a Jew would find it convenient to retreat from the full controversy of revisionist findings, Mark Weber, as director of the Institute for Historical Review, is the one who absolutely should not be doing this. If Mark Weber is in his essential character a follower rather than a leader, and feels that he must retreat from this controversy, then he is unfit for the position that he occupies and ought simply to resign.