Revisionist Notebook

Boneheads at Auschwitz Museum Admit to Faking “Original State” of Auschwitz Gas Chamber.

For the best part of half a century the official guides who work at the Auschwitz Museum have told visitors from around the world that the “gas chamber” at Auschwitz I is in its “original state.” That's the one everyone visits. No telling how many people-millions?-have heard this from the official tour guides. Tens of millions all over the earth have read, or been told, that Auschwitz I is in its “original” state. We have a couple of those people on a 1994 video tape telling a group of visitors exactly that-in English.[1] God only knows what they were saying in Polish.

The official Auschwitz Website[2]

Revisionists pointed out some thirty years ago, and have repeated it endlessly, that the claim is, well, a demonstrable lie. It is a lie that is so easy to demonstrate that one would think only the stupid, or those committed to the demonization of Germans, would attempt to propagate it. I suspect it is the latter. The people who run the Museum, and who support it, find that there is nothing they are unwilling to say, or do, to forward the charge of unique German monstrosity.

Now, without fanfare, the Auschwitz Museum has added a little note to its spiel about the phony “gas chamber” at Auschwitz I on its Web site:[2]

One more detail to the unraveling of the Auschwitz story. Until a few years ago we were told, and told again and again, that the German monsters at Auschwitz had murdered “four million” Jews. This story was so incredibly stupid that even the boneheads at the Museum decided it would be better to abandon it. The press in America and Europe showed every sign of being willing to go on for another half century to repeat the four-million figure, but they were deprived of that pleasure by the growing shame that those who had promoted the story for so long must have felt, knowing that it was a lie. Not a “falsehood.” A lie.

Now the Auschwitz Museum boneheads tell us about “one million” Jews were killed there. As the truth would have it, we don't know how many Jews were killed at Auschwitz. It may have been a dozen or so. Maybe more. One thing appears certain. None were killed in “gas chambers,” not one was killed as part of an organized attempt at genocide. None. Zip.

If you work for the New York Times, say, you bought the “four-million-exterminated-Jews-at-Auschwitz” lie from the Auschwitz boneheads for half a century. You also bought the lie about the “original state” of the Auschwitz “gas chamber” for close to half a century. I don't want to be a cause for the folks at the Times to get too deeply introspective over this matter. Every other paper in America followed whatever line the Auschwitz boneheads dished out to them, not just the Times.

I wonder what the Elie Wiesels will have to say about this little, but very telling, story. They must be slapping their foreheads over this one. Still, it will take years for the significance of this new confession of personal and historical shame to leak into the press. The Elie Wiesels and their handlers know how to handle the press. First you buy it, then you program it, then you manage it. Nothing to it. The Auschwitz bonehead factor can be handled.

Palestinian President a Holocaust Revisionist

While Abbu Mazen, aka Mahmud Abbas, the new Palestinian prime minister, is a Holocaust revisionist, the left is not attacking him as a “hater.” That's how thought works. The seamless integration of the homely with the significant. It's so liquid that it's difficult to notice. Politicos and intellectuals, the gurus, make it a practice to not notice. I have discovered only recently that J. Krishnamurti, one of my highly principled heroes, was screwing his best friend's wife and covering it up. His whole high-falutin circle helped in the cover-up. What were they thinking? Imagine if we were able to observe what really goes on in the minds of the powerful, the influential, our role models. The world would turn upside down.

Many on the left argue for the “human rights” of Palestinians and against Israeli occupation of Palestine. All those on the left argue against intellectual freedom for Holocaust revisionists, as if wanting to be free to say what you think is not a “human” right. At the same time, to forward its cracked political agenda of human “rights,” the left has nothing to say about Abu Marzun's Holocaust revisionism. If you're a widely known Palestinian, you can argue that something is very wrong with the Holocaust story. If you're an ordinary American-or, even worse, if you are an ordinary European-you risk everything when you mention it. The politics of the left.

America's Most Wanted Criminal Caught after 5 Years

Eric Rudolph, the fellow arrested in North Carolina on suspicion of being responsible for four bombings, including the attack at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, wrote a paper when he was in junior high school claiming that the “Holocaust never happened.”[4] Maybe at that youthful age he was still interested in intellectual issues, and had not yet decided to just kill the people who he believed were doing something wrong (I know-he's innocent until proved guilty).

In addition to Holocaust denial, Rudolph has been associated with Christian Identity people, a sect based on an imaginative reading of Christian sacred texts. Because there is no end to human variation, there is no end to the interpretation of sacred texts, and no end to people who might take such interpretations to heart. Christian Identity people circulate in revisionist circles. Nice guys and gals for the most part. They can tell you in detail about how the historical migrations of the Israelites led them to the British Isles where they became Englishmen.

Identity people don't trust Jews, don't often like them, and for the most part wish them ill. This is a perfectly rational attitude if you believe what they believe about the Bible, the serpent, Cain, and the rest of that Jewish story. It's in the same ballpark as the idea some Jews have about how 3,000 years ago Cain's father gave them some dirt in the Middle East to keep forever and ever.

Those of us who believe that revisionism can, and should, play an important role in American culture would do well to distinguish revisionist theory itself from those who are drawn to it out of interests that are eccentric at best and far too ambitious. Their ambition is no less dangerous than that of those who nurture and exploit the taboo that protects the Holocaust story from disinterested examination.

Those who would dismiss revisionist theory because some exploit it for their own purposes should keep in mind that it is not the Christian Identity people, for example, who do the killing for us. It's Republicans and Democrats. Always. Not the “haters,” but Democrats and Republicans-good folk all.

Brainwashing and Brain-Cleaning

A reader in New Jersey writes that his interest in revisionism has been reawakened upon discovering that his daughter is being force-fed Holocaust “tripe” in her eighth-grade public school class. It culminated with mandatory attendance at a showing of Spielberg's shoddy movie Schindler's List, which in turn is based on a cheap Australian novel. He writes:

So the State of New Jersey is exhibiting a Hollywood movie, based on a novel, to teach eighth grade students Holocaust 'history.' Who benefits from such a disingenuous exercise? Follow the struggle for cultural hegemony. Follow the money.

Are the Gurus Irrelevant?

Watching the Fox channel this Sunday morning. After the usual discussion with Brit Hume and the other guys is finished for the week, the California (Carpentaria) Buddhist guru comes on. Can't recall his name. About the first thing he says is: “It is not what you do, it's who you are.” That's an issue that interests me for the moment and I look around in the kitchen for a pencil to make a note of it. By the time I find a pencil I'm not certain if he said what I first thought he said, or if he said: “It is not who you are but what you do.”

Now that I have the pencil to hand I have a free moment, and that's about all it takes, to wonder how I can differentiate who I am from what I do? Who I am is what I do, and what I do is who I am. What's the difference? If I do something inexpressibly stupid it would be nice to be able to say: “Sure, I did that, but it wasn't me.” If it wasn't me, who the hell was it?

When the devout Muslim, following his reading of the sacred texts, intentionally blows up a bus to kill the Jews riding it, he can say “Yes, I did it, but that's not really who I am. If the Jews of Israel would withdraw to this line in the sand, or that one, and leave me alone, I would do something else and be a different fellow altogether.” Meanwhile, however, he's a devout Muslim who randomly kills Jews riding Israeli buses. That's what he does, that's who he is.

Same for those Jews of Israel who take land for themselves that belongs to Palestinians. They justify it by readings from their sacred texts, or from one or another political or moral perspective. Still, they remain who they are, Jews greedy for Palestinian land who continue to take it for themselves. And the irony is that the more devout they are, the greedier they are apt to be.

The American president is a devout man himself. He has his own reading of the sacred texts. I don't know what his reading is, but those who we call, and call themselves, “Christian Zionists,” appear to believe that the American president understands what the correct reading of the texts should be. He may have discovered the correct reading shortly after being, as he put it, “born again.”

One thing is certain in all this. If we follow the gurus-Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist or any of the rest of them-we'll keep to the path we have followed for five or ten thousand years. The path that urges an eye for an eye. The path that illustrates through deeds that might makes right; the path demonstrating that, no matter which culture you had the good fortune to be born into, your gurus are smarter and know more about God than the gurus in all other cultures, no matter how much devotion is paid to them.

It can be argued that no one has followed the path of the gurus in any culture, and that if we had we would have a different world. I reply with the obvious. After five or ten thousand years listening to the gurus, it must be obvious that they are irrelevant. More accurately-they are downright dangerous. Just consider the joy in the streets of Gaza City when Jewish civilians are intentionally murdered by devout Muslims; the cigar-smoking, self-satisfaction in Tel Aviv when the Apache gun ships successfully kill Arabs who are struggling to free their homeland of Jewish conquerors; the frustration in Washington to see Jews being killed along with Palestinians instead of only Palestinians.

No use going on about it. That's who we are. It's not going to change. We are all driven to hope that it will change. We want to do what we can to see that it does change. But we are who we are, and what we do, and since being and doing is the same thing, it just doesn't look very good for us.