There are four players in this ZGram - three Revisionists (Slade, David Thomas, and Dr. Robert Faurisson) and one anti-Revisionist, Gabor Laufer.
Said Gabor, speaking in the chutzpah mode:
"And once more, just to make sure it sticks: I NEVER insisted that there were gas chambers. I merely followed what history books presented to me, and I insist and will insist on the data in there, until it is proven otherwise to my satisfaction."
And elsewhere:
"That is why I stick to the holocaust account. Discrepancies don't add up to proof to the contrary - only specific proofs to the contrary."
Of course if your opponent digs in his heels that way, what can you do or say? If logic and reason are dismissed out of hand - as when you find a trout in the milk and stubbornly refuse to wonder how it got there - you don't try to jump-start his heels.
You make what we in my South American youth used to call a "vuelta" around him.
The small, specific example below is so poignant I want to ZGram-archive it for posterity, to wit:
Slade, speaking to other Revisionists who are trying hard to reason with Gabor:
"The problem is very simply that all your verbal ballet is in a darkened theatre. Nobody sees it but Gabor and the few of us who yet have patience for private showings.
Your wit and wisdom, brilliance and bombast, ebullience and emoticons, should be on Broadway, out there, under the big lights, on Usenet."
Wrote David Thomas on the theme as well:
"The historiography of the holocaust ***has*** been changing slowly but steadily through the years and some of the revisions by academia have been spurred by challenges and doubts raised by non-academic revisionists.
Take the number of dead. It was never estimated by any reliable source at six million, that's a rounding up of highly suspect early estimates in the fives. Since then, several respected historians have made their own downward revisions, sometimes to the detriment of their careers and never to any public mention, let alone acclaim. (...)
But the Holocaust (as in "canonical") has changed hardly an iota. The long discredited soap manufacturing from Jewish corpses story still appears at intervals in the immense outpouring of semi-fictional accounts dressed up as history - in the same fashion that the grainy black and white renditions in Schindler's List give it a newsreel flavor that it does not begin to deserve."
So what you have here now is what I have said for some time:
Our energies should move away from arguing specifics, over and over and over again, and focus on the nature of the ***dogma*** that we are being forced to swallow - soon with the help of tighter "hate laws" and sure-to-follow cyber censorship.
My argument is simply that time is running out. We better re-think our strategies.
As part of that, I had done a ZGram, "Input Wanted", September 18, 1998, where I asked for help in formulating some kind of position paper, in essence saying:
"The struggle for Holocaust details is over. We have more than enough information on lies, fraud, graft and corruption put out by the Holocaust Enforcement Lobby for people to make up their minds. Now let us focus on the ***larger*** threat - the threat of a brand new global religion with all the earmarks of a Cult of Death to keep the gravy train rolling."
Here Dr. Faurisson replied - and I ask that I be forgiven for having broken up his paragraphs so as to conform to ZGram style:
Our Millenial Struggle
I approve of the project. .. I approve, in particular, of the idea that it is necessary to begin by saying "We have solved the Holocaust riddle."
But, in my opinion, we need to have the readers understand that they must nevertheless not harbour illusions. In any case, as I put it in my address to the IHR in September 1994, I personally do not believe that we shall one day be able to "bring that vastly expanded struggle to an end".
I fear that there will, unhappily, be no end.
My own opinion - which may be wrong, for no-one knows what tomorrow will be made of - is that, in the struggle between exterminationists and revisionists, nobody will ever definitively win, nor will anyone ever definitively lose. In effect, this struggle merely lies within the scope, the 20th century scope, of a very old conflict which began with the dawn of civilisation.
It is the conflict that pits superstition against knowledge.
Being a Frenchman, my thoughts turn especially to the efforts deployed by Voltaire in the mid-18th century to denounce what he called "the Vile" and which, for him, was to be found above all in the Old Testament and in Jewish beliefs. He used to say : "Écrasons l'Infâme", "Let us crush the vile foe".
Two centuries on, we can see that Voltaire has not crushed the vile foe, and that the vile foe has not crushed Voltaire. The two go on battling one another.
On the whole, men seem to have as much need of superstition as of knowledge. They need darkness as much as light. And, despite their virtuous protestations, they are attracted as much by evil as by good. I say: "men on the whole" and specify that these opposing tendencies are either conscious or unconscious, visible to all or camouflaged.
David Irving was right when, in 1992, he exclaimed: "The Auschwitz battleship is sunk!" but he was mistaken in believing that the religion which had been built up around the Auschwitz crematoria would thus be dealt a fatal blow. As I explained in 1994, these religions can manage quite well with the disappearance or the fading of the concrete realities onto which they are grafted. I cited the example of Massada.
According to a Jewish legend, the Jews who had taken refuge in that Dead Sea fortress put up a furious armed resistance to the Romans who had, in 70 AD, just destroyed Jerusalem. In the 20th century, archeological digs carried out on the site came up with the proof that neither the siege nor the battle of Massada had taken place.
What do you think happened then?
The myth of "Massada", that shrine of the Jewish people's and martyrs' heroic resistance, became all the more steadfast! The same goes for "Auschwitz".
Those with a long experience of the revisionist adventure have, it seems to me, the duty to warn newcomers that this adventure in which, obviously, nobody achieves honours or wealth, will sadly not end, one bright morning, in definitive victory.
Let us be wary of an artificial optimism. Let us be equally wary - it goes without saying - of an artificial pessimism.
Let us avoid over-enthusiasm in the same way that we avoid moroseness.
And up to our very analysis of revisionism itself, let us endeavour to be revisionists - that is to say, exact."
Thought for the Day:
"Life is short and we are up to our hips in alligators. Why waste energy with non-nutritious email from people who show no respect for the time of others?"
(Elena of the Wake-up-or-die website fame.)
P.S. My server is clogged. Try searching for "wakeupordie" to find Elena's URL.