Outlaw History #16

A student at Brigham Young University writes to say that she is doing a paper on how the international attention given to Holocaust denial via the Internet and the press is affecting the way people think.

I answer that I think we need to clear up a language issue first. When I am asked about the “Holocaust” I have no idea what is meant by the word. I take it that the person who uses the word believes every story she has ever heard about the Holocaust is true, and that none is false. I believe some Holocaust stories are false, including the gas chamber stories. So neither of us knows very well what the other is referring to by “the Holocaust,” other than in the most general way.

When someone uses the term Holocaust “denial,” it suggests that I know the Holocaust story/s is true, and that I am denying that truth. Those who “deny” what is true are liars. We see the issue then. We call ourselves revisionists because we want to “revise” those elements in the Holocaust story that we believe are false, and get them into accord with the facts. To revise a part is not to deny the whole.

With regard to whether Holocaust revisionism is changing how people think: the first thing to say is that I don't know.

The second is to observe, however, that revisionism has been criminalized in most European countries, and in Israel, while it is taboo in the rest of the West. This suggests that revisionist arguments challenge deeply held cultural views throughout Western culture, and that the universities and the press have helped initiate a retreat from core Western values of intellectual freedom and the right to free inquiry.

The third would be to observe that throughout the Muslim world revisionist arguments regarding the Holocaust are widely accepted, and promoted. The Muslim press, and many Muslim academics, talk about the Iraqi WMD fraud as the step-child of the German WMD (gas chamber) fraud, a point of view that I agree with. Each of these WMD frauds has benefited the Israeli-firsters, at the expense of Arabs. The German WMD fraud morally justified the creation of Israel on land where Arabs were living. The second morally justified the U.S. to initiate preemptive war against Iraq to defend Israeli interests.

A nice irony: The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Executive Committee Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is a Holocaust revisionist. He published a paper to that effect when he was a student in France, several decades ago, and he has not recanted.

So I would say that revisionist arguments, which are never addressed by academics, have caused the intellectual classes in the West to corrupt our ideal of intellectual freedom and a free press, to the benefit of Israeli-Firsters. At the same time, revisionist arguments, by undercutting the traditional Holocaust story, have contributed to the moral justification of Muslim fanatics in their attacks on the West.

The suppression and censorship of revisionist arguments, then, encourage fanatics in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim cultures to attack each other, each morally justifying its acts by its belief, or its disbelief, in the Holocaust story.

The second question I was asked, and I have been asked this many times before, is what caused me to become an “active voice” on the subject that the genocide of the Jews during the Nazi regime was a hoax?

I have told this story before, but here I will tell it again. When I was fifty years old I discovered that there were legitimate questions that could be asked about the gas chamber stories. I was stunned. Not an overstatement. I had believed the stories all my life. The next thing I discovered was that it was taboo to ask the questions. It became clear very quickly that there were no legitimate gas chambers extant, and that there were no war-time generated documents that proved that there ever had been. So far as the “survivor” testimony about gas chambers was concerned, it was riddled with so much fraud and falsehood that, as a body of literature, it could not be taken seriously.

In the event, I was not inclined to do historical research. I was interested in the taboo that protected so much trash from a simple call to open debate. In an open debate, in public, revisionist arguments could be proven wrong for all the world to see. And that would be that. But the professorial class was unwilling to chance such a debate. It had chosen to follow the State line on the Holocaust, and then to follow the dictates of the growing Holocaust Industry. The professors preferred to betray the ideals of the university itself. It remains so to this day.

But there was a second issue. The fact that I had believed the gas chamber fraud for thirty years was an expression of my intellectual laziness. The fact that I had accepted as true, without any reflection whatever, that the charge of “unique monstrosity” made against the Germans was true because “everybody” said it was true, made me feel ashamed. You do not take for granted the “monstrosity” of another because someone with an agenda repeats the charge over and over. There are no “monsters” in the real world. Only men and women. There is no “axis of evil” either.

The student then asked what “key points” I would make to prove my theory regarding the Holocaust?”

My response was that I am not a scholar, not a historian, so my “theory” of the Holocaust is of little consequence. I'm a simple writer. I theorize that intellectual freedom is more valuable to human life than censorship and taboo. I share this simple ideal with common folk all over the world. Farm workers, auto mechanics, and old writers all sense that we have a “natural right” to say what we think, and to reveal what is in our hearts. Some of us even believe that we are obligated to do so. You don't have to be a scholar to understand these things. As a matter of fact, judging by my experience on campus, while scholars do believe in the theory of intellectual freedom, they believe that it is for people like themselves, not people like me.