What I Believe, What I Don't Believe, and Why – Redux

This is what I believe with regard to the gas chamber controversy, what I don’t believe, and why.

I understand perfectly well that the Hitlerian regime was antisemitic and persecuted Jews and others. I understand that many peoples, European Jews among them, experienced unfathomable tragedies at the hands of the Allied and Axis powers during World War II.

Nevertheless, I no longer believe the German State pursued a plan to kill all European Jews or used homicidal “gassing chambers” for the mass murder of millions of persons.

The reasons I no longer believe either story is that no physical remains of authentic homicidal gassing chambers exist today, and there are no war-time generated documents which prove they ever did. I believe the gas chamber story to be a grotesque hoax. In any event, if there were no gas chambers, what was the Jewish holocaust?

The attempt to identify every call for open discussion about the gas chamber controversy with anti-Jewish sentiment is juvenile. Those who protest it is more important to be “sensitive” than truthful about the historical record represent a world view that is foreign to a free society.

I’m willing to be convinced I’m wrong about any or all of this. I’m willing to be convinced it is “hateful” to weigh the evidence for and against gas chambers. I’m willing to consider the possibility that the press and our intellectual elites are right to cooperate with the suppression of such a discussion. I’m even willing to discuss the idea that intellectual freedom is evil when it involves the gas chamber controversy .

I’m not willing to go away, however. I don’t know why, but I’m not willing.

I have printed the above sentiments in Smith's Report before. Because I have, some Jews have chosen to define me as someone who hates them. This is the very successful ploy professional Jews have used for decades now to try to control the cultural and intellectual life of Jews first, and following that, of as many of the rest of us as they can. The professionalism of Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League is almost continually on exhibit.

In the latest (March/April 1996) issue of ADL: On the FrontLine, Abraham has once again identified me as someone who hates him because I express doubt about the gas chamber stories. The newsletter announces a new ADL pamphlet titled Web of Hale: Extremists Exploit the Internet. Among those cited as being partners in hate are the KKK; Tom Metzger-WAR (White Aryan Resistance); The National Alliance; Pastor Peter Peters; Holocaust-deniers Ernst Zuendel and Bradley Smith; The Aryan Crusade; Neo-Nazi Skinheads and Resistance Records.

And there beside my name is a cartoon lifted from the Tom Metzger Website. The drawing shows a huge insect with a grotesque Jewish-looking face. It shows a White guy speaking in murderous language and spraying the Jewish insect with “poison gas.” There are two issues with respect to this cartoon that I feel I do not understand.

First: why Tom Metzger would want to express himself in this way is beyond me. In the context of our society today, the Metzger cartoon is exactly what persons with decent sensibilities say it is, a primitive expression of vileness. Even the ADL’ers, who for the most part have sensibilities coarsened by decades of sniveling and bad temper to something resembling the texture of rhinoceros hide – even they are right about this one. Why shouldn’t professional Jews put their attention to condemning this spiritual garbage?

The second issue I don’t understand is why Abraham Foxman and his hirelings would place me in context with Tom Metzger. They know I have never published cartoons or prose that urges anything resembling what Metzger’s cartoon urges. They know this. I have been monitored by the ADL for 15 years. They have every word I have ever published or printed anywhere. Foxman knows his hirelings are acting out the roles of liars and deceivers when they associate me with Metzger and his cartoon. They don’t care about such things. Long ago they left decency far behind. Abraham Foxman and Tom Metzger share a similar Stalinist culture in which misrepresentation, guilt by association, bad mouthing, bad feelings and bad acting are taken as givens. It’s a culture I want no part of.

The other night I was flipping channels on the television when I caught Lany King interviewing Marlon Brando. Brando has long been an artist-hero for me. Brando was talking about the social responsibilities of Hollywood as an institution and said that Hollywood, which is “run by Jews” and “owned by Jews” has given us “the nigger, we have seen the greaseball, we have seen the chink, the slit-eyed dangerous Jap … but we never saw the kike because they know perfectly well that’s where you draw the wagons around.”

Brando was making an important observation and chose as an actor to make it using street language, imagining as an actor, I suppose, that he was taking part in a melodrama in National Theater. He was. And his observations were more or less on the mark. Anyone who has gone to the movies for a few decades and kept his eyes open has made the same observations to himself that Brando made to King.

Movies with corrupt priests and preachers but no movies with corrupt rabbis. A never-ending run of movies about Italian communities inundated with viciousness and brutality but nothing to compare with it about criminality in the Jewish community. Endless soap operas about the suffering of Jew's but hardly a mention of the Palestinians. Sophisticated movies exposing fascism aid even communism but none—ever—exposing Zionism. Marlon knew whereof he spoke all right, but he made a severe artistic misjudgment about what “voice” to use saying it.

A couple nights later I was knocking around the Web when I came to the Homepage of the Jewish Defense League. Those who run the site had turned their attention to Mr. Brando’s TV performance, which I could hardly blame them for, and had posted an “open letter” to the actor.

“Marlon Brando: You are a disgusting, fat, Jew-hating whore …” and so on and so on. And that was just for starters. I don’t really want to repeat the rest of it. I was unusually disturbed by the anger expressed by the language. I didn’t know why. Inside it felt as if the anger expressed by the language was sounding through my flesh like little vibrations. It was what kids mean when they speak about bad vibes.

While I sat there before the computer screen, memory recalled the afternoon a few years ago when we still lived in Hollywood and my typist Valerie and I entered my office on Hollywood and Vine just in time to listen to a fellow with a Yiddish accent leaving a message on my recorder explaining how he was going to murder me, that he would do it while I was having breakfast with my family so they could watch what was going to happen to me and so on. At the moment it struck me as being comic but Valerie didn’t say anything and that night she telephoned to say she had decided to look for a job someplace else, that she didn’t need those kinds of vibes in her life. I didn’t really understand how she felt, probably because that wasn’t the way I felt. That’s one of the side effects of a having a strong comic sense. It distracts you from most see as the real context of a situation and shields you from bad vibes.

How you see context is everything. That’s what Lenny Bruce taught us. In that respect he had a better ear than Marlon Brando. Lenny could have said and probably did say many times what Brando said to Larry King that night but he forged a context for it in which it was acceptable to say the taboo words and express the taboo thoughts. It was a remarkable experience to watch an actor with sensibilities so finely tuned to theater and cinema as Brando has display such a tin ear for television. It’s a medium which exists in a social context Brando hasn’t learned to understand. I understood that at the moment of watching him say what he said.

Controversial ideas can only be examined in a context in which they are socially approved. Questioning the gas chamber stories is not approved in the context of the society' in which we live and to question them is perceived to be ugly. That’s why it’s called “hateful.” That’s the perception that the Jewish lobbies, exemplified so well by the ADL and the JDL, work so strenuously to perpetuate. They are willing to sacrifice honesty, delicacy of sensibility, forthrightness and good will in the pursuit of their goal.

My work is to help create a social context in which intellectual freedom is socially approved, even with regard to the gas chambers. This has nothing to do with Jew's or even with the Jewish holocaust. Nothing to do with gas chambers, which serve only as a hook, in the context of my own life, upon which to hang the discussion. My work, in this little comer of the world where I sing and dance, is to help create a social order in which there are no boundaries to intellectual freedom, even when the subject matter carries profoundemotional baggage for some. That’s exactly the baggage in which freedom and liberty are so often locked away.