Notebook

On stereotyping revisionists: The Library of Congress has updated its Subject Headings in Jewish Studies. According to the latest info, the subject heading “Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)–Errors, inventions, etc.” has been removed from the subject authority file. It’s been replaced by two new subject headings:

“Holocaust denial” (Deborah Lipstadt wins one), in which are entered works that “discuss the diminution of the scale and significance of the Holocaust or the assertion that it did not occur,” and “Holocaust denial literature,” in which are entered “works that diminish the scale and significance of the Holocaust or assert that it did not occur.” The difference between the two? The first “discusses” denial “assertions,” the second makes such assertions but doesn’t discuss them.

I have discovered that at the UCLA library the subject heading for my book Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist (2nd edition, enlarged [it’s mis-catalogued; should read “Part 1” —the book being “Part 1” of the “enlarged” edition, a work I am not going to finish]), has been changed from “Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)–Errors, inventions, etc.” to “Holocaust Denial.”

I’m a little disappointed Confessions is autobiography. It’s literature! I should be listed in “Holocaust denial literature,” not “Holocaust denial.” I’m going to petition the library at UCLA to change its subject heading accordingly. Then I’ll check into where the Library of Congress has put me. If I’m going to be stereotyped, I want to be stereotyped as accurately as possible.

On stereotyping fascists: In the May issue of Smith’s Report (#43, p.2) I remarked that in Toronto Ernst Zuendel “appears to be pummeling the censors and the Holocaust Lobby fascists as hard as ever.” It’s a scene I very much enjoy witnessing and even laughing at. One of our readers, Guillermo Coletti, thought I had expressed myself in a very unfunny way, and wrote to tell me so with considerable irony:

I really want to know more about their (the enemies of Zuendel and revisionism) conversion to Fascism. I am sure you know that some misinformed bigots use the word Fascism as a punch-line, the same way traditional right-wingers use the term “commies.” Do these adversaries of Mr. Zuendel actually think they can embrace the beliefs of Mussolini, Marinetti or Evola? Have some of the visions of Pareto or D'Annunzio entered their souls? I'm quite eager to know more about this. I'm confident your statement, at least regarding its intentions, was based on facts.

Well, no, it wasn’t, as a matter of fact. It was a wisecrack based on a stereotype. I suppose it might as well be Coletti as someone else who cures me of this habit. I sometimes use words like “fascist” or “commie” to stereotype the behavior of others. Stereotypical labeling can be a real shortcut in communication, but no stereotype can embrace a complete individual or movement. Stereotyping is a bad habit. It’s a bad habit because while it’s quick, it’s not fully accurate and by nature cannot be. At the same time, to make it plain where I stand here, I should say I gave up on the fascists when I was about ten years old.

It was about 1940, when I was in grammar school in South Central Los Angeles. In those days you could buy a sheet of bubble gum a little larger than a playing card for a penny.

Inside the wrapper, under the gum, there would be a colored card depicting sports figures and so on. Kids collected them. One lunch time I opened a new gum package and on the card found a colored drawing of Italian pursuit planes, as they were called then, machine-gunning Ethiopian natives armed with spears.

I suppose it could be argued that there was more to the story than what was in the picture (when I was in grammar school I still had not read the fascist intellectuals), but as I grew older I never found that fascism as a party or movement ever came to very much more than what I saw on the bubble gum card.

Now that I’m past middle age I can say that over t he years I gave up on all the others as well; the commies, the Nazis, and finally the “democrats” of the West. At first I went by the bad taste they all left in my mouth, but as I grew older I realized that what really made me give up on them is that when push came to shove they all stood against intellectual freedom.

Censorship, by definition, is an act of violence against intellectual freedom. Censorship cannot function without violence or the threat of it. In the end the only way to prohibit intellectual freedom is violence. How else can you keep men and women from saying what’s on their minds? This issue alone of SR is rife with reports of acts of violence committed against those who are trying, simply, to say what they think.

Mr. Coletti was right to call me on this one. I'm not against those who want to censor Ernst Zuendel in Canada because they are “fascists.” I’m against them because they are using the threat of violence (forced incarceration, fines, expulsion) to stop Zuendel from saying what he thinks.

While you don't have to be a fascist to be a censor, as we all know, it isn’t going to stand in your way either. One of the inferences I draw, is now, from that old bubble gum card, that no matter what the intellectuals write, it's not kosher to use the courts or pursuit planes either to suppress the intellectual life of those you have decided don’t need one.