Notebook

Marco den Ouden, president of the West Coast Libertarian Foundation in Vancouver (Canada), contacts me by email. “Brad, I understand that you are a political libertarian as am I. There are two revisionists in our group here and … one of them and myself have started discussing [revisionism] at length. We started with a short discussion recently in which I told him I had been exploring the Nizkor [Internet] site and asked him about the Goebbels diaries and the Himmler speech at Posen. He sent me a long reply …. I'd be interested in your own comments.”

Den Ouden's message pleases me no end. For twenty-five years I've recognized the libertarian environment to be my natural habitat. Libertarians emphasize the rights of the individual against the mass and the State, and intellectual freedom over compliance with what the State claims is right thought and the orthodoxies of the mass. So libertarian idealism then is with neither the left or the right, and that suits me just fine.

Libertarians are the only organized political body in America that puts individual liberty, thus intellectual freedom, first, and the only one in which you can hear revisionism discussed openly. The one political club I have been invited to address is the Libertarian Supper Club in Los Angeles. Now, along comes Marcoden Ouden. I don't know anything about him. But if he's president of a libertarian foundation and he wants to talk to me, I want to talk to him.

Den Ouden writes that until recently he has avoided discussing revisionism, even though there are two revisionists in his own group, because it is his understanding that Nazi philosophy was “racist, collectivist and totalitarian [and] as such, it has no redeeming values with which, a libertarian can identify.” He wants to know if I will comment on this. I respond with my usual observation that revisionist theory has nothing to do with Nazi political theory being good or bad, just as it has nothing to do with whether democratic theory is good or bad—or libertarian for that matter. That revisionism addresses the historicity of the alleged genocide of the European Jews. We go back and forth a couple times and the next thing I know we have agreed to post our exchanges on the Internet, on CODOHWeb, so that we can carry on this exchange for all the world to see, not that all the world will be interested.

As it turns out, Den Ouden is rather more interested in revisionism at the moment, while I am more interested in libertarian idealism. He points out that revisionism serves the interests of “a great many overtly evil people like skinheads, white supremacists, Ku Klux Klanners and the like, and for that reason I am pretty leery of it.” When I used to do a lot of radio, this was usually the first observation I was asked to respond to. I would dismiss that stuff and point out that revisionism addresses the question of whether the Germans did in fact use homicidal gassing chambers to kill millions of Jews and others. I have come to see that the issue of “evil” is, in fact, the first question that needs to be addressed when speaking to people who are approaching revisionism for the first time. The politicos who manage the Holocaust story do not waste their time arguing over the properties of Zyklon B, sourcing Nuremberg documents, or establishing the truth of “survivor” testimony. The Holocausters cut to the chase at the first opening, charging revisionism with being racist, hateful and stupid. The undeniable consequence of this is that anyone who is interested in revisionism is a hateful, evil racist.

My job is not that of the engineer, the chemist or the historian. Without them I would be unable to function, but my own work is to reach out to newcomers and to demonstrate to them that it is not racist to defend those who have been falsely charged with monstrous crimes, not hateful to say you doubt what you doubt, and not evil to demand of the intellectuals that they demonstrate the truth of what it is they insist you believe. This is why I am so pleased that Marco den Ouden has come forward to offer me the opportunity to do this, and to do it with good will.

Got a check from the guys who run the Student Revisionists Website and who arranged the David Irving talk at Washington State University. They reimbursed me most of the money I sent them to nail down the security for the lecture hall. First they give me credit for having played a small but indispensable part in assuring that the lecture happened, then they give the money back. What's the younger generation coming to?

The Portland Oregonian reports (18 March) that a high school biology teacher commits suicide using hydrogen cyanide gas, apparently by drinking it, that he mixes himself. His body is found in a classroom storage closet. The report tells us it took six hours for a hazardous materials team to clear the gas so the body can be removed. Once again we find that our school bureaucrats have failed to learn from the Holocaust story. There they could learn that ordinary Joes could clear a gassing chamber of hundreds of gassed bodies in about twenty minutes. No special training! Just the will to get the job done.