On October 12, 1997, a lady without guile named Rae West gave a talk at Conway Hall, London, about "Free Speech, the Internet and
Holocaust Revisionism." I read it and couldn't stop laughing. It is a real gem. It does us good to get the mirror held up to our faces once in a while to know how we come across on the Net.
The segment below is shortened, but I give you the URL at the end so you can check what else she said. I say she was utterly genuine and gave us her heart on her sleeve.
Rae West:
"I had naturally assumed the revisionist case was nonsense, but being aware of the possibilities of systematic lying (cf. e.g. official downplaying and evasion of Vietnam War Crimes, also on this website - just one example) I considered I had an obligation to look into it. (...)
The conclusion I came to was that the 'Holocaust' was a largely or completely manufactured story.
· Revisionism as a Concept
Let's look at revisionism as a concept. . . Until recently I'd more or less ignored what I'd thought of as right-wing revisionists. In fact, at least on the Internet, the word 'revisionism' now applies only to holocaust revisionism. For example, there's a Usenet site called alt.revisionism devoted entirely to this topic.
· Holocaust Revisionists' Beliefs
I'll try to summarize what the revisionists claim in common, the subset of beliefs that more or less unite them. These are actually fairly simple: the claims are that a deliberate extermination policy of Jews didn't exist, that gas chambers are a myth, and that although lots of Jews died, the deaths weren't proportionally more than other groups; Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, various Baltic peoples; a quarter of all British merchant seamen. Those are the key beliefs, but of course, as you appreciate many other issues get brought in. Many of these issues are very well-established taboos indeed.
· Types of Holocaust Revisionist
The next section is the longest; I'll look at the most important revisionists, at least as far as I can judge by their Internet presences.
First let's see the motivations. There seem to be about ten categories: Some seem purely anti Semitic, for example posting more or less selective lists of what famous people have said about Jews - Voltaire, Henry Ford, George Washington, Mark Twain. Some are anti-Zionist and/or pro-Palestinians. There's a group called Radio Islam of this sort; I'll talk more about them later. Some are German-extraction Americans; I recall reading in a paper that a third of all Americans in the US claim German ancestry (whatever that means), and such people have a motivation of course for not being anti-German. There also seem to be white Russian or Polish types who consider Bolsheviks were Jewish, some of them Catholics (cf. Hilaire Belloc, the Roman Catholic who wrote his book 'The Jews' in 1922). There are anti-Communists, laying stress on Stalin's crimes rather than Hitler's. There are miscellaneous types including for example Protestant fundamentalists, blacks like Louis Farrakhan, and other black Americans, quite a few of whom seem to dislike American Jews, and also whites who think their power is slipping. (...)
Another site is Michael A. Hoffmann III, who looks among other things at neglected aspects of history like white slavery in the US. There are groups who consider fairly taboo second world war issues, such as the connections between Zionism and the Third Reich. Common sense suggests there must be Polish or Hungarian or South African groups and others, but if so they're not on Internet, or not much.
And there are, I presume, genuine truth-seekers, who are interested in truth in history, who might or might not be in some of the previous groups. I'll concentrate on what I take to be people of this sort.
And here we come to my first surprise. Namely how old all this is.
The first revisionists appeared at the same time as the Nuremberg tribunal which started in November 1945 and ended in 1949, producing 22 volumes of official transcript. Recently I was told (by a researcher into AIDS) that she'd heard the holocaust described as a myth in the mid-1970s, by an American, on a journey on the trans-Siberian railway.
My second surprise is how industrious some revisionists are - many have been doing this for years. E.g. the Swede Dietrich (sic) Felderer says he has 30,000 slides, some in infra-red, taken at all the concentration camps. The Frenchman Faurisson seems to have spent years following up reports and interviewing, or trying to interview, people. Another example is David Irving, the self-trained document historian, who has amassed mountains of documents and has a card index of 10,000 separate items, arranged by date, so he can see what happened on any date he's interested in. Perhaps more cards by now. However I should add that Irving doesn't claim to be a holocaust revisionist, strictly speaking; the holocaust appears as something of a side-issue in his work on original documents. . . . He is somewhat looked down on by some holocaust revisionists. (...)
· Internet Revisionists:
The first name I'll mention is Professor Paul Rassinier, a Frenchman, now dead, who was in concentration camps for much of the war. Depending on your taste, he was a socialist who turned to fascism after the war, or a socialist who didn't believe accusation being made against the Germans and published quite a few books on the subject. (...)
Rassinier (and another man, Bardèche) seem to have started what I might call the French school, which includes Robert Faurisson (of Lyons - the man whose book had a preface on free speech signed by 100 people, including Chomsky, and for which act Chomsky received endless attacks. (...)
Rassinier influenced Faurisson, according to Faurisson, by replying in detail to Faurisson's letters when anti-revisionists were evasive. And also Roger Garaudy (described as an ex-Marxist 'theoretician', now a Catholic). (...)
Faurisson is a literature professor (I'm not sure what that status means) whose writings don't look very well in English, paying minute attention to documentary oddities. However I think he claims to be the first person to assert that gas chambers were a myth.
There's no German school - in Germany and Austria the entire topic is banned under a law apparently passed by Hitler. So far as I gather this law prohibits any discussion of the holocaust, which is simply stated to be a historical fact.
However, there are isolated Germans, including Wilhelm Staeglich (a judge who published The Auschwitz Myth in 1979 in German), Udo Walendy who has published on what he says are fake photos, and several historians of the second world war. (...)
Butz has an Internet site, but his book is not available on his site, perhaps because he's still selling it. His chemical engineering background enabled him to take a long look at the technical side of Auschwitz as a manufacturing plant, the sort of thing which historians generally are unable to do. So far as I know, no legal action has been taken in the U.S. over this.
Incidentally my third surprise is the obscurity of almost all the people involved in this dispute, in the sense that very few are official historians, on either side. (...)
From the viewpoint of Internet users, Canada has one of the largest sites; this is because of Ernst Zundel, a naturalized German born in 1939 who has a site called the 'Zundelsite' in Toronto. (sic) This contains the complete text of 'Did Six Million Really Die?' (which Zundel started to distribute in 1980) and also a trial transcript, the outcome of two trials of Zundel in 1985 (7 weeks) and 1988 (four months). . . . The suit seems to have been brought by Sabina Citron of the 'Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association' and Simon Weisenthal. (sic)
At this point I register surprise #4: amazingly, there seems never to have been any official technical examination, or even description, of the gas chambers.
I had intended to include part of Raul Hilberg's (witness for the prosecution) cross-examination, in dramatized form, to give you a change from my voice, but there seems not to be time for this. However, I found it surprisingly unimpressive; for example Hilberg admitted he'd never been to any of the concentration camps except on a day-trip or two. The impression I received from this trial of Zundel was that it went wrong from the prosecution point of view, somewhat in the way the McDonald libel trial twisted out of their control.
Zundel was found guilty on both occasions and I think jailed. He is provocative, though whether as a cause or effect I don't know.
Other sites include: CODOH (Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust) Campaign for Radical Truth in History (Michael A. Hoffmann), Institute for Historical Review (California). Also someone called Greg Raven - there seems to have been a lot of behind the scenes maneuvering in these organizations.
Another group is called the Adelaide Institute, but they seem a bit elusive. I haven't been able to find much out how they are funded.
· Anti-revisionists
Let's now look at the anti-revisionists, though not all would call themselves this. Their opponents call them 'exterminists'. As I said before, the surprise really is how obscure these people are.
There's one main organization, called Nizkor, N-I-Z-K-O-R. This is by far the most important. (...) Nizkor is the main anti-revisionist Internet group, so I'll concentrate on them.
Several names appear relating to Nizkor, Daniel Keren, Jamie McCarthy, Ken McVay, who seem to be full-time employees; I'm uncertain even if the names are genuine. I don't know whether they claim any originality.
(end of excerpts)
(For complete text, see: <http://www.homeusers.prestel.co.uk/littleton/w2holrev.htm>)
Thought for the Day:
"If all the good people were clever,
and all clever people were good,
The world would be nicer than ever
we thought that it possibly could.
(Elizabeth Wordsworth)