I swear that this is not an April First joke!
Below are the words of a man who was (or is?) supposed to prove, once and for all, the evil intent of Ernst Zundel. I kid you not - this is (was?) one of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal's main "expert witnesses". Enjoy!
"Precis of Memorandum on Lethal Antisemitism, Old and New
Prof. Frederick M. Schweitzer, Ph.D.
I have reviewed and analyzed the selection of documents assembled in the "Book of Zundelsite Documents Referred to by the Commission," whichwas made available to me by the solicitors for the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Most but not all the material was authored by Ernst Zündel; nevertheless, the "documents" are all of a piece. Their common denominator, antisemitism, is novel only in its application to contemporary targets, not in its essence, which is age-old. This phenomenon will be familiar to any student of the history of antisemitism, which endlessly repeats itself. Antisemites are notoriously unoriginal: down the centuries they plagiarize each other, only recycling their libels to suit varying climates of opinion and values, transposing them from a religious to a secular to a racial idiom, and so on. If one sheared away the accidents of time and place from the Zundel material, the resulting antisemitica would serve equally well the brute purposes of antisemites at any time from the thirteenth to the twentieth century, and could be readily embedded in the medieval adversus Judaeos texts as in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (strikingly, one of the "documents" makes the claim that the Protocols is authentic rather than a forgery). The most salient feature of this archetypal antisemitism is its dehumanizing of the Jew/s and attribution of superhuman powers of evil and destruction to him/them which make "the Jews" a standing danger to "us." Such baleful defamation leaps out from almost all the Zündelsite documents and are likely to have the same effect they have had so often over the centuries: to inflict suffering and injury on Jewish people.
Among historians a concensus has emerged that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries marked the decisive stage in the formation of antisemitism as a lethal mode of hatred which, though it ebbed and flowed in intensity, had a continuous existence until its genocidal climax in the German Shoah of European Jewry. This extreme form of Judaeophobia is appropriately designated "chimeria," a term derived from chimera (unreal monsters, fantasies, delusions etc.) and intended to distinguish the types of antisemitism that are irrational and anti-empirical from anti-Judaism, which is no more than a dislike of Judaism or of Jews and comparable to anti-Catholicism or anti-Buddhism. Chimeria, a lapse into the irrational and illicit reification, requires a mentality that defies common sense, that flouts empirical evidence, tangible factors, or genuine witnesses, but, enveloped in subjectivity, is susceptible in literal extreme to allegory, myth, and symbol. In the medieval imagination, Jews, abetted by demonic powers, engaged in vile acts, including ritual crucification, ritual murder-cannibalism, host desecration, poisoning of wells, and much else of the same tenor leading on to Christendom's destruction and Jewish domination of the world. These superhuman crimes also hinged on the Jews being identified as animals, the other side of a double dehumanization-supermen and subhumans. The era that opened with the crusades and the invention of the crucifixion libel was thought to have ended when Auschwitz ceased functioning in 1945. But, in the title of Martin Lee's new book, "the Beast Reawakens."
The many medieval elements one finds in Zundel's invective include: a fear and hatred that generate aggression; an indifference to evidence that amounts to chimeria: evidence was always irrelevant, and if the issue were addressed at all the will to believe evil of the Jews nullified the rules of evidence; the branding of the Jews as a criminal people and race; the attribution to Jews of powers and control through various means (e.g., the press) to conspire and fabricate the story of six million Holocaust victims, the depiction of the Jews as a criminal people who poison their opponents and innocents; the Jews as mysterious "Dark Powers" who have superhuman capacities to dominate-coerce-control; the Jews are congenital liars and use the many little lies-Big Lie technique to attain their evil ends; the Jews are congenital Marxists/Bolsheviks who committed enormous crimes in Soviet Russia and elsewhere; the Jews are congenital capitalist exploiters and economci wizards animated by greed and corruption; international financial predators; they are fomenters/planters of diseases such as AIDS; the fraudulent use and quotation of Jewish texts or sources to "prove" accusations against Jews; seeing oneself or one's party or group as victims of the Jews; the menace of "Judaization" of our civilization. Zundel strikes every note in the medieval cacophony. His defamations are so many monuments to chimeria.
These diatribes will strike moderns the way similar ones struck a medieval pople when he expostulated that "If what is said about the Jews . . . is true, no punishment would be sufficiently great or sufficiently worthy of their crime." For if half of what Zundel says about the Jews were true or is taken to be true, the Jews are a great danger whom we have to get before they get us; they are made into a target by fear and hatred, which is made compelling and plausible because of its resonance with age-old calumnies and Judaeophobia of which one, especially the uninstructed neutral bystander, is only partly conscious; violence against Jews or indifference while Jews are being ill-treated is an all too logical sequence to such venomous reprobation; names do hurt, more than sticks and stones. Zundel does indeed "promote racism, antisemitism, mayhem and violence" as the New York Times noted on 10 Jan. 1996, first page. The import of much of his vituperation is that Jewish heads must roll in the sand, and round the world; this is a crude threat of annihilation; verbal vituperation is readily translated into physical violence, even though the verbalizer "doesn't mean it," those who hear it and take it at face value can and will. The danger factor is greatly multiplied by the limitless distribution available through the Internet. Such malignant phantasizing places Jews in a category distinctly different from normal humanity, a loathsome category that sanctions aggression against Jews, publicly branded as dangerous, a menace, etc., invites attacks and persecution, not because they have done anything but simply because they are Jews, like the radio personality in Denver who was killed a few years ago simply because he was Jewish, or the black man recently slain by a skin-head in the same city because he was black.
It was in the later Middle Ages that the idea of the Jewish world conspiracy-which would be updated and secularized in the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion-took shape, and Judaism, talmudic rather than biblical, was defined as a "satanic law" in obedience to which Jews sought to inflict injury and destruction on Christian society in manifold ways-ritual crucifixion and cannibalism, poisoning everything and everyone, draining away the kingdom's wealth and debasing the currency as they did its blood and health. This whole evil heritage was secularized and reinforced by the racial phobias and pseudo-science conjoined to the hyper nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: it was surely no accident that chimerical racial antipathy fastened on the same people as had the chimerical theological variety. In Nazi ideology Jews were the antithesis of sanity, creativity, health, and order, a secularized antichrist. The German-Hitlerite fixation with the Jews as a menace and highly organized race of negative supermen is a modern, secular version of the medieval demonized Jew. Hitler certainly spoke in medieval accents when he asserted, "The struggle for world domination will be fought between...Germans and Jews. We are God's people...Two worlds face one another-the men of God and the men of Satan!"; equally when he stated that "The Jews...invented capitalism...an invention of genius, of the devil's own ingenuity," and much else in that vein. The churches and universities were transmitters rather than combatters of medieval myths, which endured and were modernized, and profoundly affected the thinking and feelings of the elites and the masses from the later Middle Ages into the twentieth century. Irrational obsessions with mythical supermen is the most unexpected continuity between medieval phobias and the Shoah and now the antisemitic Holocaust deniers.
Historians estimate that during the common era, seven to ten million Jews were killed before the Holocaust, simply because they were Jews placed upon the bull's-eye of fear and hatred by an ideology. Such was the harvest of hate. Such is the danger raised by the use of the same ideological formulations and their widespread distribution by Zundel and his kind."
What else is there to say except: "Woe to the Zundelsite!"?
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"This is the larger issue: Why has our will to defend ourselves collapsed?"
(John Bell)
Comments? E-Mail: irimland@cts.com