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  • Study of Roosevelt’s Path to Pearl Harbor Debunks Popular Historical Myths

    A Time For War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Path to Pearl Harbor, by Robert Smith Thompson. New York: Pren- tice Hall, 1991. xiii+449 pages. Hardcover. Photos. Source notes. Bibliography. Index. Joseph Bishop studied history at a South African university. He now resides in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and three children. In the…

  • Robert Jan van Pelt: “The Case for Auschwitz”

    British historian David Irving was viciously smeared by the media after his testimony at the 1988 Ernst Zündel false-news trial in Toronto. As part of the smear campaign against Irving, Deborah Lipstadt writes in her book Denying the Holocaust that “on some level Irving seems to conceive himself as carrying on Hitler’s legacy.” David Irving filed a libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt in British courts to attempt to end these and other similar statements. Canadian-Jewish architectural historian Robert Jan van Pelt was hired by Lipstadt’s defense team to act as an expert witness for Lipstadt’s defense. Van Pelt wrote for this trial a 700-page report addressing the historical and forensic evidence for the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He subsequently wrote the book, The Case for Auschwitz, which presents the bulk of the evidence he submitted in his expert report for this trial. This article discusses some weaknesses in van Pelt’s research which was designed to discredit David Irving’s views of the “Holocaust.”

  • Book Notices

    A. James Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, hardcover, 288 pp., $35.– A. James Gregor, professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley, is that rarity among scholars of Fascism: brilliant, learned, and above all objective. In Mussolini’s Intellectuals Gregor brings four decades of study…

  • The Changing Definition of “Holocaust'

    Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, Jan T. Gross, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2001 Although erroneously charged with “denying” the Holocaust, revisionists have for years actually only sought to redefine “Holocaust.” In the standard historiography, “Holocaust” is defined as the systematic destruction of over six million European Jews by…

  • Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II

    Sean McMeekin is a professor of history at Bard College in upstate New York. Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II is McMeekin’s latest book that focuses on Josef Stalin’s involvement in World War II. This well-researched and well-written book uses new research in Soviet, European and American archives to prove that World War II was a war that Stalin had wanted—not Adolf Hitler. A remarkable feature of Stalin’s War is McMeekin’s documentation showing the extensive aid given by the United States and Great Britain to support Soviet Communism during the war. This article focuses on the lend-lease and other aid given to the Soviet Union during World War II which enabled Stalin to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism.