Review and Revision

Axis to Grind:

As America’s hollow, but cheap, victory over the Taliban continues to unravel in Afghanistan, President Bush has disheartened those of us who had hoped that what we recently called the “American wing” of his administration would prevail in the national councils. By designating Iran, Iraq, and Red herring North Korea as the “Axis of Evil” in his annual State of Union speech, the president both signaled the ascendancy of his administration’s Zionist faction, and reduced the rest of the planet, including our chief allies and clients (save one), to consternation and confusion.

Thus the emotional response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, with its (understandable) aura of preliminaries to a World Wrestling Federation match, has not been supplanted by a sober strategy that sets realistic limits to U.S. intervention abroad and puts American, not foreign (or “international”), interests first. The bizarre monicker “Axis of Evil” alone gives cause for trepidation. Those (often cuttingly cruel) skits parodying George W. on Saturday Night Live begin to seem believable, and it grows more difficult to repress the fancy that the president’s daily intelligence briefing comes in comic book format, with our leader confronting a Saddam Hussein who declaims: “Stand back, Pretzel Man, or, by Allah and Lex Luthor, I shall destroy the universe!”

The Bush administration has offered no credible evidence that Iran and Iraq (which have long detested one another), let alone North Korea, supported or took part in, jointly or singly, the murderous attacks on U.S. soil of September 11, 2001. Lately none of their regimes seems any more active than any of their neighbors (including Israel) in supporting attacks on innocent civilians. But both Iran and Iraq are opponents of Israel, so that President Bush has been forced, like a bumbling chef, to fold “seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction” into his anti-terrorist omlet. In his moral ardor (or, perhaps, ardor to pass for moral) the president made it seem as if seeking such weapons were worse than having them, and having them were worse than having used them (although, to be sure, Iraq used such a weapon against its own minorities and against Iran in the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein was our de facto ally against the now long forgotten Shiite menace). Of course, just as Bush decides who’s a terrorist today, tomorrow he will be the judge of which nations are guilty of attempts to come by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons (who doubts that Israel, with its large and stealthily acquired nuclear arsenal, will emerge unchastened?). And, thanks to a timorous Congress and a slumbering citizenry, in his role as commander in chief President Bush has virtually a free hand to attack any country that meets the criteria he finally settles on with the help of Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of the administration’s Zionist wing.

Afghan Unraveling:

We’ve vanquished the Taliban with minimal casualties of our own, and the truth is that U.S. bombing was not as murderous as we and other critics had feared. Indeed, it’s probable that U.S. and British bombs killed more non-combatants on many a single night over Germany than in the Afghan campaign to date. Nonetheless, our forces have failed to capture putative 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, or a single leader of his network. At this time that effort continues, with mounting American casualties. Simultaneously the U.S. is roiling the contentious ethnic and factional mix by yet another patronizing, and likely doomed, attempt at “nation-building” (it’s difficult to recall a successful republic ever being founded by a convention largely peopled by “warlords”). The different gangs are already tweaking Uncle Sam into bombing rivals falsely tagged as Taliban, exposing deficiencies in gathering and assessing local intelligence that augur ill for U.S. military ventures already underway in the Philippines, the Caucasus, and Yemen, or being mooted for Colombia, Somalia, and elsewhere. By far the worst effect of the Afghan affair, however, has been its transformation of George Bush into a war president (without a declaration) who seemingly intends to keep American forces in constant combat around the planet – at least until his approval ratings begin to drop.

‘Little Brown Brothers’?:

The ominous news that the U.S. has dispatched hundreds of “military advisors” to the Philippines has been underplayed in the media, and thus largely overlooked by the public. The ostensible purpose of the intervention is to train the Philippine armed forces attempting to subdue “terrorists linked to Al Qaeda” in the southern part of the archipelago. Our leaders assure us that this expedition will ignore Muslim separatists in and around the island of Mindanao who have been waging a guerrilla war unrelated to Osama bin Laden for decades now. American commanders have acknowledged that our troops will accompany Filipino regulars into battle, and take part as necessary. Clearly the nexus “Southeast Asia-jungle-guerrillas” no longer gives pause.

If Vietnam has slipped our minds (except for the occasional war movie), the first American foray into the Philippines has vanished into oblivion. Yet the Spanish-American War, as the American republic’s portal to overseas empire, is worth remembering. The climate for the war was stirred up beforehand by American newspaper reports. These consisted largely of atrocity propaganda aimed at the concentration, or “reconcentration,” camps the Spaniards had instituted for interning Cuban guerrillas and their families. (In today’s spin, those Cuban “freedom fighters” might qualify as “terrorists.”) Despite Spain’s recall of its commanding general, Valeriano Weyler, and the relaxation of his internment policy in late 1897, the propaganda continued. The explosion and sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana’s harbor in early 1898, blamed (not very convincingly) on the Spaniards, led to an American declaration of war against Spain and the invasion of Cuba. Admiral Dewey’s quick victory over a Spanish fleet in Manila Bay and the rise of an armed Filipino independence movement put Spain’s Philippine colony on the table, too. By the terms of the peace treaty Spain was forced to give up the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, as well as Cuba.

Of these four former colonies, only Cuba was granted formal independence immediately. This came at the cost, however, of the inclusion in Cuba’s constitution of the humiliating Platt Amendments, by which the United States was awarded the somewhat paradoxical prerogative to intervene in Cuba whenever it deemed the island’s independence to be threatened. After President McKinley declared his intent “to take them all and to educate … and civilize and Christianize” the largely Catholic Filipinos (to whom McKinley insultingly referred as Americans’ “little brown brothers”), their islands were made an American colonial dependency. When the Filipino guerrillas continued their fight for independence against American rule, U.S. troops waged a grueling, merciless war against them in the jungles. The methods of our forces soon rivaled those of the Spaniards in Cuba. In the words of the American diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis: “The maddening guerrilla tactics of the natives caused the Americans to feel some measure of sympathy for ‘Butcher’ Weyler, and to do him the honor of adopting a form of reconcentration.” While many countries have fared worse than the Philippines under half a century of American rule (and nearly as long a period of U.S. suzerainty), no one denies that the Filipinos were happy to see us go.

Thus, as in the First and Second World Wars, did a foreign policy begun in proclaimed altruism and pursued with thundering self-righteousness end not only in failure, but in a betrayal of America’s professed national ideals.

As of this writing, ten of the American soldiers sent to the Philippines have perished, in a helicopter crash that may have been caused by enemy fire.

On the ‘Homeland’ Front:

To date there has been no serious inquiry into why our bloated intelligence and security apparatus failed to detect the 9/11 plot and foil the attacks (the incipient Congressional investigation is not expected to be very searching). CIA chief George Tenet, who continues to deny that the disasters represent a failure of U.S. intelligence, not only remains in place (seriously inhibiting his underlings from blowing any whistles), but is a leading strategist in the continuing Afghan imbroglio. Meanwhile, the FBI continues to dawdle in apprehending a suspect in the anthrax killings, although a prominent scientist has recently revealed that the feds have known for months that the perpetrator probably worked in a laboratory for biological warfare at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, and certainly was a government insider. In January, sources in the Justice Department were still disseminating the lie that revisionists, among other “extremists,” might have been behind the murderous mailings. Finally, a propaganda office hatched in the Pentagon fell victim to guileless military spokesmen who let out that the purpose of the Office of Strategic Information was to disseminate false information. Administration efforts to deny this embroiled spokesmen in difficulties that recalled those ancient paradoxes so appealing to the Sophists: “Donald, a Pentagon official, says that all Pentagon officials are liars …”

Mideast Mayhem:

Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians remains the number one lightning rod for Muslim discontent with the United States. Heartened by their American patron’s indifference, the Israelis are plumbing new depths of cruelty and depravity in their war on refugee camps. The hard truth is that the responsibility for what our media miscall “the cycle of violence,” including the abominable attacks on civilians by Israelis and Palestinians alike, lies chiefly with the United States. Were it not for our government’s insistence on financing Zionist mistreatment of the land’s rightful inhabitants, and its persistence in rejecting the advice of the rest of the planet, the Israel-Palestine quandary could have long ago been resolved under international supervision.

Realm of the Senseless:

France is formally a republic, but when it comes to freedom of thought and inquiry, King Holocaust rules with an iron fist. Government measures against revisionists – which over the years have included outlawing dissent on the Holocaust, fining or imprisoning heretics, dismissing them from jobs, ending their careers, revoking academic degrees, draining them by lawsuits, and allowing them to be physically attacked – have lately intensified. Now the French government has expanded its onslaught against free speech to target an entire university.

One might think that the University of Lyon III, where Jean Plantin’s master thesis (on Paul Rassinier) was annulled last June, eleven years after it was duly accepted with high marks, had earned the congratulations of France’s powerful Holocaust lobby. Instead, a commission formed by France’s Jewish minister of education, Jack Lang, will comb through university records dating back to the 1970s in an attempt to sniff out a plot by revisionists to recruit and advance their own kind. That there have been a few Lyon III professors willing to listen to revisionists is true (two of them, Jean-Paul Allard and Pierre Zind, sat on the jury that awarded Henri Roques a doctorate, based on his study of the testimony of Kurt Gerstein, that was subsequently revoked by order of an earlier French minister of education). What would have been dubbed a witch hunt had it targeted Communists during the Cold War has been gearing up for months with scarcely an admonitory notice from the press of what used to be known as the “Free World.” Education minister Lang explains that he has no desire to restrict academic freedom, but reminds that combating “xenophobia and Holocaust denial” in line with French law is the higher principle. Although the mayor of Lyon has formed a separate commission to investigate the university, banshee-like wails are already rising from various Holocaust-affirming groups affronted at the slow progress of the inquisition.

Jean Plantin, the scholarly, industrious, and courageous revisionist from Lyon, who was convicted of Holocaust denial and given a suspended sentence one year before his master’s degree was effectively revoked, has continued to irk the Holocaust bullies by privately circulating his Etudes Révisionnistes – but not so privately that the local Holocaust enforcers didn’t get wind of it and sound the alarm. While Plantin is legally within his rights, his attackers figured that the police and judges could get around such technicalities – and so they have: in the form of a long list of court-prescribed harassments by judges, probation officers, and policemen issued last November.

On December 19 of last year, Robert Faurisson prevailed against an appeal of his successful suit against the magazine L’Histoire for denying his legally prescribed right to respond to a personal attack. On the next day, however, Quid, a one-volume reference work widely consulted by French students, knuckled under to five Jewish pressure groups by agreeing to omit an estimate of deaths at Auschwitz by Dr. Faurisson, which had somehow crept into the book, from future editions. The media hullabaloo over the affair doubtless caused more than a few curious students surreptitiously to look up this latest offering to France’s memory hole.

King Holocaust, despotic usurper that he is, continues to pauperize such French revisionists (and family men) as Jean Plantin, Serge Thion, and others who have paid with jobs and careers to keep the torch of Paul Rassinier, the first systematic revisionist of the Holocaust, ablaze. They need, and deserve, our support. (Contributions earmarked for Plantin, Thion, and other French revisionists may be sent to the IHR, which will see that they reach the intended recipients.)