The Holocaust, the Left, and the Warmongers

If one breaks The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels down according to its own internal logical flow, one finds two distinct blocks to the pamphlet, each consisting of two chapters, the second block shorter than the first. The first block of two chapters consists of general philosophizing about history and sociology. The second block consists of an attempt to lay down a specific program for the point in time and space at which Marx and Engels were placed.

The first block discusses stages of history, with the declaration:[1]

Here the pamphlet has briefly touched upon questions that would continually rock the later left-wing movements built around it back and forth. To what extent do there exist certain 'natural' stages of history which every society must be able to pass through, in a 'natural' way? To what extent does colonialism, an outgrowth within certain technologically advanced societies of the 'natural' stage which they are passing through, alter the 'natural' stages of other parts of the world that have not yet reached the same 'natural' stage of history? Although these questions would promote many political divergences and splits in the future, the form in which these questions were approached was frequently influenced by the pamphlet's second block.

The most significant conclusion of the second block was:[2]

Here the authors have laid out what would later give birth among the Russian Mensheviks to the Theory of Two-Stage Revolution.[3] According to this theory, two revolutions happen consecutively, a bourgeois revolution and a proletarian revolution, with the proximity of these two events being inversely proportional to the degree of technological development already in place under feudalism at the time of the bourgeois revolution. The Russian Mensheviks theorized that there could be a significant time-gap between these two developments in Russia, and a narrower time-gap in Germany in accordance with the Manifesto.

However one may assess the general theory presented in the pamphlet, the central conclusion of the second block had already had a wrench thrown into it by the close of the 19th century. Otto von Bismarck's unification of Germany was designed as a highly conservative bourgeois revolution,[4] one which explicitly set up a constitutional monarchy, and enacted a measure of labor reforms through this procedure of constitutional monarchy, with the aim of achieving a secure bourgeois revolution with royal throne preserved. The picture which had been drawn for many readers of the Manifesto, of a German bourgeois revolution superseding the English and French revolutions in its radical development, seemed to be undercut. This triggered a wave of political splinterings, even as many who had stridently believed in the Manifesto tried to explain the new context.

Leon Trotsky's Theory of Permanent Revolution was an outgrowth of this, returning to the interaction of colonialism with 'natural' development and posing a new formula. According to this theory, the 'natural' stages of history within a country such as Russia were hopelessly corrupted by the failure of Russia to achieve a bourgeois revolution on the historic time-table would have placed Russia in synchronization with England, France and the USA. Instead, the birth of Russian capital had been altered by the Czar's relations with more developed capitalist societies and the importation of capital from the developed imperial powers to the underdeveloped world. This was then seen as giving birth to a Russian bourgeoisie that was permanently corrupted by its own manner of development, one growing up around the monarchy and unable to fulfill its historic mission because of its dependency on being fed by foreign investment. The conclusions drawn by the Theory of Permanent Revolution were:[5]

Although this captures the general theme of Trotsky's concept that a would-be Russian proletarian revolution must spread beyond Russia by virtue of the inability of Russian liberals to serve their theoretical function, one basic theme is blurred here that would arise again and again later. This is that the general phrase of “European soil” which Trotsky uses here does, in his own way of thinking, attach a high priority to Germany specifically. This assessment by Trotsky is determined by the technological development existing in Germany at the time; the geographical proximity of Germany to Russia; and a close reading of the Manifesto, read with an awareness that its classical conclusion of a German bourgeois revolution reaching further than any other was then in a state of flux. Only in such a context can one understand a title such as “Germany, the Key to the International Situation.”[6]

In a letter to the Politburo of July 6, 1921, Lenin cites a report from the Jewish Department from Belorussia:

In response, Lenin asserts:[7]

What should stand out the quickest from this letter (though the Zionist Richard Pipes doesn't note it) is that Lenin uses the phrases “systematically exterminated” in describing “pogroms against the Jews” which no historian today, regardless of politics, would ever assert did in any way amount to being “systematically exterminated.” Since Lenin quite explicitly notes the Zionists as “politically and socially alien” it would make little sense to say that he is simply parroting this for the ADL, a description that would fit many people today. Rather, a more rational explanation is that the atheistic Communist Lenin has retained some imprint of a religious influence.

From Benjamin Blech, The Secrets of Hebrew Words,[8] we know of an ancient Jewish prophecy which promised the Return to the Promised Land of the Jews after a loss of six million. By June 11, 1900, The New York Times was running a speech of Rabbi Wise:

This story appeared again in WWI and ran as late as October 31, 1919, in The American Hebrew:

Don Heddesheimer, The First Holocaust, provides much relevant information on this WWI propaganda.[9] During this time of WWI, political splits broke out across the political left when the German Social-Democrats voted for war credits in the summer of 1914.[10] Simple revulsion against WWI[11] would leave many with an aura of the “worker's paradise of the Soviet Union” for years thereafter, even as new evidence accumulated which would discredit this new myth. The general propaganda of WWI was viewed by many such as James Patrick Cannon in the way that Cannon would later assert, to Rose Karsner, that WWII propaganda should be viewed. It is then possible to pick out some intriguing signs of the future from this WWI era.

That Lenin would retain some religious influence is in itself hardly surprising for anyone familiar with the Hegelian philosophy that Lenin strongly believed in. The precepts of Hegelianism would, if anything, predict that the “atheistic Communist Lenin” may be able to make a formal break from religion in a way which facilitates a larger historical process, but that in practice he should be ultimately found to have echoed his environment of the time. This raises pertinent flags, however, for anyone who might wish to assess Trotsky's statement of December 22, 1938, (and others like it):[12]

Does this actually represent a specific insight into the world of the future by Trotsky, or does it reflect an echoing of religious influence similar to Lenin's “systematically exterminated” (which is recognized as overblown)?

If one temporarily blinds oneself to the factors that would have theoretically influenced someone from Trotsky's background, it may seem hard at first to grasp in what way Germany would be perceived as such a specific “key” for that time. The Nuremberg Laws enacted policies of racial separatism, but the USA had a fair share of such laws already. Although many members of the USA left (whether Stalinist, Trotskyist, Social-Democrat, or some other form influenced by the early Comintern) campaigned during that era on behalf of black rights,[13] the response by all sectors of the left to Hitler and the Nuremberg Laws carried a higher ideological content to it. Around the world, the vision of Germany as the place where the proletarian revolution was meant to truly begin allowed many Stalinists to willingly endorse Roosevelt's campaign of capitalist-preservation-via-social-reform, while being sharply critical of Nazi statements that they were not against capitalism per se but believed that its worst features needed to be tamed.

Though one can make the argument that Nazi initiative in introducing racial laws to Germany caused these to be more fully identified with Hitler than Roosevelt was with the racial laws that already existed in the USA, that argument has its weaknesses as well. The Nuremberg Laws were welcomed and encouraged by Zionists with the planned expectation that this would encourage Jews who had become integrated to instead look towards Palestine.[14] The long term effect certainly worked that way, yet until 1938 many European Jews showed a preference for Germany over Poland. While the stream of immigration out of Germany in this time was real enough, it is difficult from an abstract perspective to see why anyone would have so sharply re-ordered the emphasis from Poland (where a full campaign to drive Jews out preceded the German campaign) to Germany (which moved in the direction of Poland after 1938).[15] During this time period, as Germany moved in the Polish direction, the only flag that was permitted to be flown side by side with the Swastika was the Star of David.[16]

The closest one can come to a parallel in the USA for this would be Roosevelt's taking a flag from Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam and hanging it next to the Stars and Stripes, while seeking to promote Elijah Muhammad's notion of a 'return to Africa.' Although many of the leftists of that era often had well-deserved criticisms of Marcus Garvey and black nationalism, a different attitude was generally taken that is hard to account for outside of the framework set by the second block of the Manifesto and the various derivations from it which emphasized the significance of a German revolution. The Stalinist CPUSA willingly endorsed an election campaign for Roosevelt, while still taking up such cases as the “Scottsboro Boys” as a way of upholding a theoretical position that went back to Lenin's “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination.”[17]

With the Stalinsts there is, of course, the added point of their subordination to Stalin's foreign policy in the '30s. Trotsky's perspective deserved some highlighting simply because, as a skilled writer, he more clearly spells out the theoretical reasoning that motivates him. However, from the point of view in Moscow at this time, Stalin was sharply against the idea of foreign Communist parties seizing power in the manner of Mao Tse-Tung and then posing as rivals in the personality-cult.[18] Victor Suvorov and Joachim Hoffmann[19] have confirmed that Stalin was interested in carving out a wider domain that involved invading Germany, and that Hitler was perceived from Stalin's perspective as one who would inadvertently, willingly or not, upset the international order in a way that was meant to play into Moscow's hand. However, Stalin remained sharply suspicious of anyone who might be able to place themselves in a revolutionary role independently of Moscow. As such, the CPUSA was specifically counseled by Moscow away from anything that would upset the political order of things in Washington too far and instead steered towards acting as lobbyists for a Moscow-Washington alliance.

Roosevelt, to be certain, had his own reasons entirely for pushing war ahead. Joseph Kennedy has been noted for attempting to arrange an Anglo-American gold loan of 0.5-1.0 billion dollars to Germany in the spring of 1939, at a time when James Mooney of General Motors was claiming that Hitler was indicating a willingness for disarmament.[20] Regardless of how anyone might wish to guess at Hitler's real intent in this offer, it is crucial to understand that Hitler's real crime in the eyes of Washington was that he took Germany away from the gold standard. This measure of capitalistic reform had worked more successfully than Roosevelt's New Deal efforts.

The US Department of the Treasury posts the description of the Fort Knox Bullion Depository:[21]

In this context alone, Roosevelt and others like him were eager to tear Germany apart. The South African economist and gold mining executive Sir Henry Strakosch, in his 1935 study The Road to Recovery: With Special Reference to the Problem of Exchange Stability and the Restoration of the International Gold Standard, commented:[22]

The main historical ambiguity which has been posed in regards to Strakosch is in his biographical background. Arthur Butz traces Strakosch's birthplace back to Hochenau, Austria, on May 9, 1871, with several documentary source citations. Butz also finds little to hold up the reference to Strakosch as Jewish. David Irving simply throws out the comment:[23]

The specific footnoting of the first sentence and not the small paragraph indicates rather that Irving has no specific source available for either the stated birthplace of “Moravia, Czechoslovakia” or the asserted ethnic-cultural background. As Butz notes:[22]

The only thing which deserves to be added is that Irving has already been noted as someone who censors revisionists over 9/11.[24] For all of these reasons, barring further evidence to the contrary, we will discount Irving's description of Strakosch as sloppy, at a minimum, and potentially deliberate disinformation.

The slogan “No War for Oil,” which has appeared at many anti-war rallies since Washington began to occupy Iraq, had a natural analogy in Roosevelt's time, “No War for Gold.” It simply wasn't treated in the same way. On this failure, the most immediately relevant factor to the left of that era was the Comintern line from Moscow and its endorsement of Roosevelt as a capitalist reformer seeking to preserve capitalism from internal economic crisis via reform. Also pertinent, however, was the influence which even those expelled from the Comintern such as Trotsky had retained from the final conclusion of the Manifesto, that Germany should be where the proletarian revolution at last begins to genuinely take root and flower. These political and ideological influences clouded the ability of many who often showed sharp critical capacities when the context was shifted elsewhere. The self-admitted willingness of A. J. P. Taylor to swallow certain propaganda myths in relation to Germany which he openly repudiated later is just one of the better known cases.[25]

When the US did enter the war, the Smith Act first fell against the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, a case which set the legal precedent for later applications of the Smith Act.[26] By this time Trotsky had been assassinated under Stalin's orders and the SWP saw itself as upholding the thesis put forward by Trotsky that the war between the capitalist states was inter-imperialist in nature, while any defeat of the Soviet state by any capitalist power was resolutely opposed. This was a sharp enough departure from Roosevelt's push for war alongside Stalin that the Smith Act was brought out. Serving his sentence at Sandstone on 9/21/1944, Cannon wrote back to Rose Karsner about the 9/16/1944 issue of the SWP's newspaper The Militant:[27]

Though Cannon is frequently cited today among various Trotskyite groups, and his clear rejection of fascism as a nationalistic philosophy to be counter-posed to his view of international communism is frequently emphasized, the most central point is generally buried. The only time Cannon can be found to have put a statement down on record which somehow pertains to 'Nazi death camps' was when he immediately rejected this figure of 1,500,000 for Lublin. Furthermore, this part of Cannon's views has already been 'officially confirmed' in that by 1948 the figure had been changed to 360,000 and by 1992 to 235,000. Though these lower figures are also sharply contested on technical grounds,[28] the 'official figures' do themselves already give the lie to the “the 1,500,000 part, we mean,” and discredit authors such as Lucy Dawidowicz, who gives a figure of 1,380,000 for Lublin-Majdanek.[29] In the abstract, one might very well expect many of the different Trotskyite splinter factions that exist to point to this verification of Cannon's statement as evidence of his foresight. Instead, the mute silence treatment is given.

Further questions are raised by Trotsky's 9/25/1939 comments:[30]

The picture that shows through in such a passage is primarily one of a person fighting demoralization in seeking to hold onto his view of the coming proletarian revolution. But also, one is obligated to ask, “how would Trotsky have responded to the same report from Lublin which his protégé Cannon scoffed at?” More fundamentally, “what type of long-term problem might Trotsky have posed for the post-war Holocaust propaganda enterprise which Moscow and Tel Aviv jointly implemented?” Whatever someone's assessment of Trotsky, everything that is known about his personality indicates that over the long run he would have become a troublesome sore for those putting across the story of the 'Holocaust,' if only just out of political rivalry with Stalin.

Victim numbers of German concentration camps have always been a matter of propaganda. Robert Faurisson has published a list of such exaggerated numbers and their inventors for the Auschwitz camp.[31] How many inmates really died in that camp has yet to be established. Since it is claimed that those victims were incinerated in crematories erected for that purpose, one approach is to determine an upper limit by calculating how many corpses those crematories could have cremated at most. Carlo Mattogno's research is at the cutting edge of science in this regard,[32] which is acknowledged even by his adversaries.[33] Based on a thorough study of documents and technical issue, Mattogno concludes that not more than 162,000 corpses could have been cremated in Auschwitz – in contrast to post-war propaganda figures claiming that 4 million or even more inmates were killed and incinerated.

A deeper look into one of the most (in)famous Auschwitz eyewitnesses, Miklos Nyiszli,[34] is also worthwhile here, because when reading it carefully, it indirectly confirms Mattogno's assessments, although Mattogno himself went at length – and quite successfully so – to show that Nyiszli's testimony is a fraud otherwise.[35] Miklos Nyiszli's testimony had already been looked at cautiously by Paul Rassinier, who in April 1951 wrote a letter in regards to the early extracts of Nyiszli's writings published in French translation by Le Temps Modernes, only to receive an indirect answer the following October in the form of a letter from “Nyiszli” transmitted by Tibère Kremer. Rassinier was later informed that Nyiszli had died well before the initial French translation of his testimony was published, sometime around 1949-50. This did, for a time, set off a wave of speculation as to whether such a person had ever existed.[36] Eventually questions shifted to the disappearance of the “real Nyiszli.” Also pertinent, though, is the query as to why so little interest was shown in Nyiszli by the official handlers of his book. The difference in style between Yehuda Bauer's foreword to Filip Müller's propaganda[37] novel[38] Eyewitness Auschwitz[39] versus Bruno Bettelheim's foreword and Richard Seaver's introduction with regards to Nyiszli is apparent. Bauer presents some brief sketchy outline of Müller's post-war life:[40]

No similar sketch is provided by Bettelheim or Seaver. Rather, they each combine amateur philosophy with references to Nyiszli's claimed war-time experience. Nor do they refer to any question hanging in the air of unknown post-war details. The closest thing to a biographical detail, produced by Seaver, is the reference to “his city, Oradea-Nagyvarad.”[41] This raises some flags, if only just because the final page of a dissertation written under this name of Nyiszli claims that “I, Nicolaus Nyiszli, was born on June 17, 1901 in Simleul-Silvaniei,” a locale that is distinctly to the northeast of Oradea-Nagyvarad. In addition, the book's first appearance seems to have been in the Budapest newspaper World from February 16 to April 5, 1947, with repeated references to a Hungarian doctor from Nagyvarad.[42] This blurring of 'where is he from and where did he go?' would normally excite curiosity from purported academics, yet it has clearly been buried as an issue in the various 'introductions' and advertisements.

On July 28, 1945, according to the records of the Nuremburg Tribunal, a deposition entitled “Deposition: Miklof Nyifcli A Physician from Nagyvarod in Hungary” was written by someone.[42] Though major doubts have been cast on the validity and the source of the Nuremberg Documents, we are generally meant to assume that this “Physician from Nagyvarod in Hungary” was, in fact, the same person with “Place of birth: Simleul, Rumania.” Alternatively, if one was to cast dispersion on this early document as a possible fabrication by the Nuremberg Tribunal, then the query would have to be 'At what point did Nyiszli himself become a part of the project leading to the later book that came after the deposition, given that purported friends of his did claim to have witnessed him writing the book personally?' With this in mind, there's no denying that such an origin for the original document would explain much about the seeming errors in it. This would also explain such testimonial comments as “From the prisoner's doctors, of which we had several ones, I only knew Dr. Niczly by name. He was an imposing presence, a bit fat” by Milton Buki of Poland; and “a companion, who was helping with the carrying of the corpse, commented she had recognized Dr. Nyiszlit Miklos, a deported physician, as she said, she knew Nyiszlit still from Nagyvara” from Mrs. Jozsef Sabo of Hungary. This recurring of “Nagyvara” as a consistently recalled detail, even as the spelling of “Miklos Nyiszli” fluctuates, is highly consistent with a quick manufacture of evidence by a bureaucratic machine such as the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Even so, Nyiszli's book has been held up on many an occasion as a powerful example of “Holocaust testimony” and, as such, deserves to be noted. Some pertinent details to note are the following. When describing an alleged attempt by “860 members of the kommando to try and force their way out of the camp” on October 6, 1944, Nyiszli asserts:[43]

Although made in the manner of an out-of-the-way comment, this would seem to reflect, even in a novel produced for political propaganda purposes, the reality that a 12-hour operating shift had been recommended on March 17, 1943, and that the crematoria were going dead nevertheless. In other words: Mattogno's maximized cremation figures are probably too high, because the crematories did not operate 24/7 – with some interruption for cleaning, maintenance, and repairs – as he assumed. According to Nyiszli, there was no need to have the crematories work around the clock…

Charles D. Provan is self-classified as being

Provan can therefore not be called an 'official handler' of Nyiszli. Provan was able to contact his granddaughter Monica and obtain “Information about Nyiszli's subsequent life”:[42]

This raises some questions in itself, since Nyiszli's harassment by the Rumanian secret police was never widely publicized in the manner of the Raoul Wallenberg legend,[44] not even during the Cold War at a time when Rabbi Meir Kahane received funding from the CIA's Jay Lovestone and the Syndicate's Meyer Lansky.[45] This was an era when the Holocaust Memorials across the United States were built with falsified versions of the Martin Niemoller quote,[46] falsifications which served the Cold Warriors and Zionists alike. One might easily have expected a campaign around Nyiszli's fate by Elie Wiesel. Instead, on the contrary, the introduction by Tibère Kremer in March 1951 gave the impression of a Hungarian Jew, not a Rumanian.[47] Even where the history of territorial shifts in World War I and the possession of what is now northern Rumania by what was until 1918 Austria-Hungary, is taken into account[48] as a technical point, it doesn't explain the absence of quick elaboration on this query of 'was Nyiszli Hungarian or Rumanian?' One would expect a brief commentary, similar to Bauer's note on Müller, to intersect Nyiszli in Rumania in the foreword and introduction to Nyiszli's assumed book.

Yet one possibly pertinent statement is furnished by the testimony of Grace Pratt, or rather of her friend. The latter has supposedly asserted:[49]

However one wishes to ultimately assess this story, it points towards at least one plausible explanation in regards to Nyiszli. If Nyiszli really had become alienated from the Jewish community in his region after his record as a war-time collaborator with the enemy of that era, then he certainly would have had incentive to seek redemption. In the general time-frame for Nyiszli's death that was given originally to Rassinier, between the writing of Nyiszli's post-war manuscript and the initial French translation, Stalin was still going through a political motion in regards to his attitude towards Zionism. Starting with a secret Czech arms deal,[50] which supported the Zionist settlers in Palestine in the 1948 war, Stalin moved towards the “Doctor's Plot.”[51] But this political shift did not occur overnight. Although the version of Nyiszli being placed under the watch of the Rumanian Stalinist police for “cosmopolitanism” fits perfectly well within 1956, the image of Nyiszli, or someone writing in his name, being offered around 1949-50 a trip from Eastern Europe to Israel as part of an agreement that his book would support the general popular-frontist line of Moscow, and that Tel Aviv would help to market the book, is just as consistent as many another given explanation. To really answer these two related questions, of what happened to Nyiszli and why did the World Jewish Congress and related organizations treat the matter as they did, will require a much more detailed probing that has not yet been done.

On February 14, 1947, advertisements for the soon-to-be-published serialized book of “Dr. Miklos Nyiszli of Nagyvarad” began appearing in the Budapest World newspaper. By April 10, Nyiszli was responding to reader's criticism, “In the Communist Party, of which I am a member, they call me 'Comrade Doctor,' and that's the way it should be.” One would assume here that the Rumanian Communist Party is what is meant, even with the serialization being promoted in Hungary rather than Rumania. Yet again one must ask 'why this specific promotion in Hungary rather than Rumania?' Certainly a plausible conjecture would follow from the hypothesis that “Miklos Nyiszli” had, in fact, been assigned the job of legitimizing something that was originally written in his name by the Nuremberg Tribunal, so that the new task required specifically publicizing the book in those areas that were identified by the earlier deposition statement. On September 30 it was announced by World newspaper that the author of “the extremely interesting novel” had been summoned by the Soviet delegate to the Nuremberg Tribunal, E. E. Minskoff. With this summons, the card catalogs of the Nuremberg records now describe Nyiszli as “Dr. Nicolae Nyiszli, born […] in Simleul-Silvanei, requested […] by Minskoff.”[42] The difference here between “Miklos” and “Nicolae” is much more along the lines of a translation between languages than some of the other divergences of the name “Miklos Nyiszli” which are very similar to simple typographical errors. Yet, somehow, the effect of this identification of Nyiszli's locale of birth doesn't seem to be reflected in later publications, which relentlessly return to the emphasis on “his city, Oradea-Nagyvarad” without an attempt at biographical detail or explanation. The card listing “Simleul-Silvanei” faded quickly, perhaps, in part, because Nyiszli was not actually called to testify on this summons, despite his taking a trip to Nuremberg.

This hypothesis is in some ways further encouraged by the evidence that there likely were at least two “Lee Harvey Oswalds.” The number of selectively consistent yet broadly conflicting reports of Oswald sightings prior to November 22, 1963, has pointed to this as a likely explanation.[52] If one translates the same phenomenon to Miklos Nyiszli, then many of the apparent inconsistencies between stories of Nyiszli being dead by 1950 versus alive until 1956 could be resolved. With such an assumption made, the question would be posed as to whether both “Nyiszlis” died at the indicated dates, one in 1949 and another in 1956, or whether something else happened with one of them.

Let us now go back to the Trotskyite left and the important issue of what exactly happened with it in the post-war era. Cannon was more of a labor union organizer than a theoretician. When the post-war era made clear that Trotsky's forecast of the imminent collapse of Stalinism under the force of proletarian revolution had not materialized, the Fourth International tended to split organizationally and politically in two directions. The first direction was set early by Max Shachtman, who had already in 1940 been formally expelled from the Fourth International. The second was oriented around Michel Pablo.[53] Although one could go through the various theoretical somersaults which the different factions engaged in, the bare essentials of this split were that Shachtman moved increasingly closer towards the CIA and in the '70s campaigned for Richard Nixon, while Pablo headed steadily into uncritical echoing and endorsement of Stalinism. In such a context, the framework for arguments about what form should an 'independent left' take was increasingly guided by this Shachtman-Pablo paradigm. Political splits which took place among the left in the coming decades were generally about some faction being attacked for either leaning to close to Shachtmanism or to close to Pabloism. In such a context, any serious debate about what actually happened in WWII was effectively buried.

Meanwhile, the policy in Moscow, and among the various Comintern-born parties which still maintained an allegiance to Moscow, was determined by the division of power in the post-war era. While Moscow took over Eastern Europe, Stalin acted to isolate guerillas in Greece who were still fighting the UK and US after WWII;[54] the French and Italian Communist Parties were directed to give up arms to the occupation forces and work with the occupation governments;[55] the Vietnamese were pressured by Moscow and Peking into accepting a North-South division of Vietnam after Dien Bien Phu had nearly brought about the collapse of colonialism in Indochina.[56] This way of seeking to divide up spheres of influence necessitated that the Popular Front strategy of the CPUSA required a continued maintenance of the 'Nazi death camp' legend. The reason for this was that Moscow's efforts to carve out power-splitting deals for its own purposes required that a Comintern member be prepared to accept something like the counter-insurgency campaign in Greece waged by London and Washington without putting on too much of an 'anti-war' air. A safer form of post-war Comintern propaganda was, rather, to place primary stress on the way that 'America and Russia fought together against the Nazis, we can all be friends again,' while being prepared to downplay questions about CIA coups in Iran or Guatemala.

A new wave of political splits began occurring on the Stalinist front after 1956 and Khrushchev's de-Stalinization speech. Some of the splits from the Stalinist left moved instead towards some brand of anarchism, pacifism, or even Trotskyism,[57] others moved across further to the right and became Zionists. Of course, to go from being a Moscow-oriented Stalinist to a Tel Aviv-oriented Zionist gave no major reason for altering the Moscow-line about 'genocide in the Nazi concentration camps.' It simply involved a political shift in one's present-day leanings. Those elements who moved away from Stalinism but didn't consign their left-wing orientation to the dustbin of history were, instead, quickly drawn into the Shachtman-Pablo paradigm that had overwhelmed the Trotskyist Fourth International. Again, this only inhibited critical inquiry of what actually occurred in WWII.

At the same time, the aura of 'diversity of opinion' which all seemed to willingly accept, on the surface, gave the WWII propaganda a higher credibility than anyone would have assigned to the propaganda of WWI. Yet for the duration of the 1950s, the story of 'six million Jews exterminated by the Nazis' mainly survived within explicitly Stalinist or Zionist sources. Jean Paul Sartre, aligned in the '50s with the French CP,[58] came out promoting Miklos Nyiszli's variation of an 'Auschwitz memoir,' a book that was sharply critiqued by the French Socialist and former Dachau prisoner Paul Rassinier. When James Cannon spoke on May 30, 1943, of “the betrayal of the proletariat in the Second World War, first to Hitler and then to Roosevelt and Churchill”; on March 9, 1956, of “the Stalin-Hitler pact, which precipitated the Second World War”;[59] and on various occasions in these decades of the '40s and '50s, it was not to recall any 'Nazi death camps with gas chambers.' The one recorded comment by him about this remains his note to Karsner in 1944 where he rejected the story around Lublin.

Within the strategic planning centers of Washington, the perspective was somewhat parallel, although sharply different in formal political orientation. After a wave of post-war trials based on evidence that would never be considered admissible in any other context, many sectors of the US Establishment (including even Zionist Cold Warriors such as James Jesus Angleton, the CIA head of Counter-Intelligence) were prone to simply shift the language of the 'Good War' into the Cold War framework with a re-aligning of formal enemies and priorities.[60] However, the historical link between the war-time OSS and the post-war CIA was such that no one among the CIA of the '50s would have felt much inclination to suggest that the forced confessions used at the Nuremberg Trials should be given a serious review. Instead, it was assumed that the matter would quietly fade.

There are several indicators showing that the claim of an industrial extermination of Jews in homicidal gas chambers by National Socialist Germany was not as manifested a dogma in the United States as it is today. For example, in November 1944, George Gallup ran a poll across the US:

The response was: 76% Yes, 12% No, 12% No Opinion. Asked for estimates on the numbers which they felt had been murdered in the Nazi concentration camps, the poll response was:

• 36%: 0 – 100,000
• 14%: 100,000+ – 1,000,000
• 16%: 1,000,000+ – 6,000,000+
• 33%: No Opinion.

A common fallacy is to distinguish WWII atrocity stories from those of WWI by characterizing the latter as being luridly related to a fantasy world, and attempting to contrast this with WWII stories. In fact, the precedent for all of this set by Martin Glynn in 1919, and the religious connotation of the “6,000,000” figure noted in the 1919 context, underscores the relation of WWII propaganda to a fantasy world. On December 9, the captured concentration camp of Natzweiler was inspected by Colonel Paul Kirk and Lt. Colonel Edward J. Gully of the American 6th Army Group. Shown a space “allegedly used as a lethal gas chamber,” they characterized it as the “so-called lethal gas chamber.”[61] Given that the establishment history of Dawidowicz lists 6 out of 7 of the Polish camps (Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka; Stutthof left out) as the “annihilation camps” with gas chambers, we can see the vindication of the cautious attitude of Kirk and Gully.[62]

In the type-written portion of his diary, John F. Kennedy wrote on June 30, 1945:[63]

This diary entry betrays an element of sympathy for a defeated enemy, weighed in the context of what suffering allies have gone through. It also shows an early sense of empathy for Eisenhower, who would one day as President be caught in a major political contest with Israel. In a 1960 interview with Hugh Sidey, JFK expressed a general contempt for older military minds against a modern nuclear context, figures such as Carl von Clausewitz, Alfred Thayer Mahan and Basil Henry Liddell Hart, but exempted George Marshall, Douglas MacArthur, and Dwight Eisenhower with the comment:

At the time of Kennedy's inauguration, Sidey recounts Eisenhower pointing to southeast Asia on a map:

Sidey further elaborated:

This is of general significance, since one of the consequences of the propaganda film JFK, which Warner Brothers and Oliver Stone put out in 1991, was to push the heroic image of JFK as someone in principled conflict with the whole of the US power elite and all its caretakers.[64] Warner Brothers was acquired in 1967 by Meyer Lansky's Mossad-laundering Seven Arts Productions and became Warner-Seven Arts with “major blocks of stock” owned by Bernard Cornfeld's alternate face of the Mossad, Investors Overseas Service. Despite the overinflated image of JFK as a grand new frontier man that is put across in the Mossad-Stone PSYOP film, it is essential to understand the continuity of flow that went from Eisenhower to Kennedy, and the troubles which Eisenhower had already had.[65]

On August 1, the same type-written diary of John F. Kennedy carried:[66]

This passage is mainly of significance in illustrating that JFK could easily see through the Holyhoax propaganda that was just in its early stages at this point. Whether or not he actually had any “insider's” knowledge to the Holyhoax is another matter, though at this time his position in the US Government was close enough to the propaganda machine that he very well may have.

Possible hopes by the US intelligence community that their own post-war propaganda stories would eventually fade away were upset by the 1960s. As Moscow's credibility went down after de-Stalinization, while the onset of the Cold War ended the original basis for Moscow ordering its political allies to back Roosevelt, waves of protest against the new war in Vietnam and racial segregation on the homefront began breaking out, especially heavily among college students who had grown with an image that somehow WWII had been a grand fight for high ideals. Elie Wiesel's career was launched in this framework. In 1968, when French students protesting the attempted deportation of Daniel Cohn-Bendit raised the slogan “We are all German Jews,” Wiesel quickly labeled this with the mantra of 'Holocaust insensitivity.' It became clear to the upper layers of the power elite in North America that basic measures of propaganda had to involve playing upon the myth of the 'Good War' which was made with the blessings of Dear Old Uncle Joe, yet in such a fashion that Cold War anti-communism would be bound to WWII anti-fascism, while communism, anti-anti-communism, fascism and anti-anti-fascism would all be deliberately tied together.

One of the crudest but earliest efforts in this direction was the late-'60sTV sit-com Hogan's Heroes. The biggest weakness in this initial effort was that it too heavily (and honestly) echoed the Nuremberg Tribunal atmosphere. The Nuremberg Tribunal had been able to charge defendants with using atomic bombs so that “20,000 people were eradicated almost instantaneously, and in such a way that there was no trace,”[67] even as Miklos Nyiszli presented an 'eyewitness testimony' which portrayed temperamentally stupid Germans. Hogan's Heroes followed in this path of presenting very stupid Germans who somehow managed to provide sabotage work for prisoners who could have escaped anytime.[68] This type of imagery could sell easily after WWII, but it was getting stretched by 1971.

The next really major move to rehabilitate the 'Good War' came in April 1978 with NBC and The Holocaust.[69] Although this came in for a ritual denunciation from Elie Wiesel, some of the cruder aspects of Hogan's Heroes were cleaned away. At the same time this TV series fell within a sequential pattern that launched the post-Vietnam era with Star Wars (overtly non-political, despite comparisons with 'Cowboys and Indians' films), continued on to The Holocaust (politics begin to enter, but this is placed in the framework of the 'Good War'), began introducing Vietnam with The Deer Hunter, and finally graduated to out-and-out Cold War propaganda with Rambo. Out of this sequence, the one that carried some overt politics and was most successful in achieving its propaganda aim was The Holocaust.

It was in such a context that Jimmy Carter announced a commission to create a national memorial to “the six million who were killed in the Holocaust.” From here on the promotion of Holocaust literature, films, and museums became a steadily growing industry, one which many of the various left-wing groups that had grown out of the '50s and '60s felt very hesitant to challenge in any direct way, as they often had with other branches of American capitalism. This fact alone guaranteed the Holocaust Industry a solid place at the table set by American monopoly capital. It is unavoidable to note that the launching of the Holocaust Industry in the '70s, though at times raising the issue of Christian anti-Semitism, did, in fact, also correspond with the growth of the Christian Coalition during the same time-frame of the '70s and '80s. Yet many groups that formally placed themselves on the left-wing of American politics during this period tended to still buy up to the notion, put across by Stalin in the immediate post-WWII era, that 'Remembering the Holocaust is a way to fight the right.'

To really grasp this correspondence in the political growth of the Holocaust Industry and the Christian Coalition it is worthwhile to recall Benjamin Blech's assertion that the Holocaust as a premonition for the re-birth of Israel was a type of ancient religious prophecy. In general, people who leave religion of any type behind and either shift to a different religion or become atheists are influenced in this choice less by any specific sins they may see around them (since almost every religion contains some concept of sin as something that is in some way to be not only expected but even forecast) and more by what seems an apparent failure of prophecy. Although the Holocaust Industry has periodically projected the image of 'Christian sin,' the fact that it is possible to align it with a specific prophecy would, if anything, make it into a political magnet for the Christian Coalition.. The actual events square quite well with this hypothesis. Yet as a source of right-wing propaganda, the Holocaust Industry was frequently marketed to the political left under the guise of anti-anti-communism (if Uncle Joe helped to fight this, then he wasn't all bad).

As a political maneuver in fighting what Norman Podhoretz called the “Vietnam syndrome,” “the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force,”[70] the Holocaust Industry clearly played a key role. The fact that numerous groups which 'willingly acknowledged' the claims of the Holocaust Industry (whether out of a self-perceived 'honest investigation' or a reminiscence for Dear Old Uncle Joe or some other reason entirely different) also attempted to resist the rollback of the “Vietnam Syndrome” doesn't alter the basic direction which was served by this industry. Nor did the end of the Cold War. If anything, the sudden disappearance of the “Evil Empire” and the opportunities for military expansion into the Persian Gulf which it opened up, together with the sudden expectation of a “peace dividend”[71] by large sectors of the US public, only reinforced the stress on the 'Good War' by US Establishment propaganda.

Since 1945 there has been a slow steady growth of literature which sheds light on WWII that was once thought impermissible to look at.[72] Yet the long-term intellectually crippling effects of so-called revolutionary groups being unable to look rationally at this piece of the past have been devastating. At a time when the “Vietnam Syndrome” has shown itself to be very much alive, many remain stuck in the past in ways that only aid those who would wish to rollback the “Vietnam Syndrome” once and for all.

Notes