Philip Knightley is the author of "The First Casualty: A History of War, Correspondents and Propaganda." He wrote a commentary for the Independent, June 27, 1999 that I would classify as yet another piece of traditional media paying left-handed - pun intended - compliments to what historical Revisionists, especially Holocaust Revisionists, are up against.
Knightley places the most recent, Kosovo, atrocity stories in their historical context. It is a fine piece of writing.
Independent:
If history is any guide, then many of the atrocity stories from Kosovo that have dominated the media since the end of the war will turn out to be false. Written and filmed by some of the self-styled "mass-grave correspondents", they may at the moment appear to have the chilling ring of truth: after all, mass graves have unquestionably been found. Some of the stories may indeed be genuine, but many will vanish under investigation, or the scrutiny of time.
When passions have cooled - as one hopes that they will even in the hate-strewn Balkans - we may even hear the confessions of those who invented them. Invented? In the case of Kosovo the inventions will have been the work not of British journalists but of those feeding them with information.
Zundelsite:
Remember the overturned Iraqi incubators with premature babies dying on the floor? Remember the tearful tales told to Members of Congress - all of which turned out to be lies, concocted by a New York advertising agency?
Independent:
In the Boer War, however, the British press invented hundreds of atrocity stories - Boer civilians murdered wounded British soldiers; Boer soldiers massacred pro-British civilians; Boers executed other Boers who wanted to surrender; Boers attacked British Red Cross tents while brave British doctors and nurses were treating the wounded.
They were all made up, spun out of the imagination of the journalists, rendered more believable by artists back home who specialised in atrocity drawings. The attack on the Red Cross tent was even deemed worth filming, and when presented as genuine documentary footage caused great outrage against the beastly Boers. It was actually shot with actors on Hampstead Heath.
Zundelsite:
The British propagandists were the unchallenged masters of the genre - until the Holocaust Promoters unleashed their sado-masochistic sex-torture-and-feces horror tales like "Schindler's List."
Independent:
But if we want to examine the false atrocity story at its insidious worst, then we need to look at the Bryce Commission in the First World War. If as you read, the parallels with Kosovo and the Serbs appear striking, it is because they are so.
A committee of lawyers and historians chaired by Lord Bryce, a former ambassador to the US, produced a report which stated that the Germans had systematically murdered, beaten, raped and violated innocent men, women and children in Belgium. "Murder, lust and pillage," the report said, "prevailed over many parts of Belgium on a scale unparalleled in any war between civilised nations during the last three centuries." The report gave titillating details of how German officers and men had raped 20 Belgian girls in the market place at Liege, how eight German soldiers had bayoneted a two-year-old child, and how another had sliced off a peasant girl's breasts in Malines.
Zundelsite:
One must not forget the much-publicized story of the "crucified Canadian soldier" which made front line news then. It took the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 70 (!) years before investigative reporters found the story to be totally false and concocted.
Independent:
Bryce's signature added considerable weight to the report and when its main findings were published around the world they were widely believed. In fact, the Germans had committed atrocities in Belgium, but not on the scale described by Bryce. It was not until after the war - when it no longer mattered - that the truth began to emerge. Bryce had not spoken to a single witness. The report was based on 1,200 depositions, mostly from Belgian refugees in Britain, taken down by barristers. None of the witnesses had been placed on oath and their hearsay evidence was accepted at face value. And although the depositions should have been filed at the Home Office, by the end of the war they had mysteriously disappeared.
Finally, in 1922, with the Bryce report under attack as British propaganda, the Belgian government appointed a Commission of Enquiry. It was unable to corroborate a single major atrocity mentioned in the report.
Zundelsite:
The same method was at work with "Jewish Holocaust survivor claims" after the war about alleged German atrocities. The same can be said for Steven Spielberg's "Oral History" videotaped collection of "survivor" stories - and of the Kosovo refugee claims. It is practically all just wartime propaganda - grotesquely magnified after the war!
Said Josef Ginzburg, Jewish writer and Zundel witness in the witness box in Toronto during his under-oath testimony on Auschwitz and the crematoria, as summarized by Zundel attorney Barbara Kulaszka:
"When they were in full operation, the chimneys had an increased amount of smoke. So, logically, depending on the weather or the time of day, the colour of the flames was different. People invented stories that inside devilish things were going on. They said living human beings were being burned. They invented the story that every crematorium was a gas chamber. It had even gotten to the point that the authors had such large imaginations that when they saw the blue colour of the smoke, they knew that Jews were being burned. (26-6898, 6899)
"Others invented the story that living Jews were being pushed in to be burned. Burg testified that he would like to see a Jew who had given such statements during a trial. He said such a Jew should be forced to take an oath under the rabbi rites with the skull cap, without pictures of Christ, with the Hebrew Bible, in the presence of a rabbi or a pious religious Jew. Then he should swear an oath that he had seen something like that. Then these false statements, these sick statements, would go down by 99.5 percent because ***the superficial oath was not morally binding for these Jews***. (26-6900)
Independent:
The Bryce report is admired by professional propagandists because it achieved its aim. In order for the war to continue, for Britain to win, the British people had to be made to hate the Germans as they had never hated anyone before.
(To be continued tomorrow)
Thought for the Day:
"The measure of man is what he does with power."
(Pittacus, 650 - 569 B.C.)
Back to Table of Contents of the July 1999 ZGrams