This is NOT a repeat of what I sent to my "old" list this morning. Please skip the first three paragraphs below if you received the other one, too. I tried to save myself some typing.
Well, my August ZGram list is a bit shorter than my July list was - and even though I said I would not speak again about the matter that made me angry enough so as to cause a ZGram blast on July 18 asking for people to pitch in and help out - I find myself having to explain a bit more.
Quite a few people agreed with what I said, put up their socks for future ZGram contributions, and sent me their letters and financial support in the meantime. Exactly three got very mad at me and told me off that I was just about a traitor to the Cause - that there was no difference in sending 10 ZGrams or sending 10,000.
True - but 10,000 readers who do nothing for the struggle except clutter up my mail are a time-consuming and costly burden to me - because there were times this past year when I was literally drowning in petty, irrelevant and sometimes miserably complaining letters that I didn't push their pet peeves. I can only do so much - but please understand that I was not cutting off people who are useful to our cause. Why would I? If it happened, it was because I did not recognize their e-mail names. I don't keep track of actual names - it is just too much of a hassle.
Below is a most valued fighter for the cause who examplifies what I am looking for - people with some gumption. People who educate themselves on the nature of our struggle, and who put their knowledge to work where it counts.
I will call this gentleman Rick. Rick had it out with a gent named Jeff White of the National Post, who did the time-honored thing that lapdog media people do - smear Mr. Zundel at every opportunity, whether yet another smear belongs or not.
Here is Rick's letter to me, followed by a spirited exchange with Jeff White:
Hi Ingrid,
Well looks like you went ahead with paring down your email list. Good for you! The bad news is my address was one of those that got the boot. The good news is that the email addresses you have are in such abundance that you can't keep track of which real name matches which anonymous email address.
Because, according to the rules you laid out, I may have a chance of remaining on the email list since I am also on your snail mail list. A few months back I made my first non-anonymous donation of $100 and have received in the mail a couple of your newsletters by now.
Anyway, if there is some other reason I didn't make the new list, I'm sure it's a good one and I accept your decision. But now that I'm emailing you, I've decided to add a sample of letters I've written on the topic of revisionism. I wouldn't expect you to have the time for comment, or even to read through them all, but just include them as an example of another person chipping in.
I liked the letter you wrote to the National Post. The first letter I include is one I wrote to a writer at the National Post after he mentioned Ernst's name in a piece he wrote (also some back and forth afterwards):
Rick:
Dear Mr. White,
I'm not a very good writer but was compelled to write after reading your piece "Bethune and the burden of guilt", National Post, April 3, 1999.
I've heard other columnists say that readers seldom write in a complimentary vein even if they respect the writer, but usually only write if they are bugged about something.
What bugged me about your article was the following: "Compare this unparalleled hero worship - at least by officialdom - with the fate of Toronto graphic artist Ernst Zundel. The honours he's been given include a nine-year court prosecution, a mail bomb, an attempt to deport him, a postal ban, a ban from Parliament Hill, and visits to his home by arsonists and masked marchers tossing paint bombs. Not an ounce less opprobrium than he deserves, given his loathsome denial of the horror seared into the memory of every Holocaust survivor in Canada."
Really? For having a dissenting view of the "Holocaust", Ernst Zundel deserves to have attempts made on his life in the form of fire-bombs and pipe-bombs?
To begin with you mischaracterize his beliefs by repeating the establishment party line that he denies "the horror seared into the memory of every holocaust survivor in Canada" and asserts that "the Holocaust itself didn't happen". What revisionists do believe is that there was never a policy by the German government aimed at exterminating all Jews, that Zyklon B gas chambers were never used as a means of mass extermination and that the popularly quoted six million figure is a gross exaggeration.
Revisionists do not dispute that the Jews were persecuted, deported and suffered greatly. They also died in large numbers in the camps in much the same way that Soviet citizens died in the gulags and German POW's died in the Allied holding camps at war's end.
So revisionists don't deny the suffering of Jews, only the propaganda of the allies. Of course unlike Hollywood and the mainstream media, many revisionists also take note of the suffering of other peoples during World War II (including the Germans), which immediately makes them suspect in the eyes of our ruling "elite".
So maybe you should do . . . research on the "Holocaust" before you start saying that people who don't subscribe to your beliefs about it are the proper targets for fire and pipe bombs. I'm sending you some literature on it to get you started (sending today in snail mail). Some of it is even put out by the man with horns and pitchfork from Carlton St. in Toronto. You'll recognize his pamphlets because they are blunt and to the point which may offend genteel Canadian writers who think that dissenting views on the "Holocaust" should be met with fire and pipe bombs (among other forms of opprobrium).
I've followed Mr. Zundel's career for the last few years and have come to the conclusion that he is more right than wrong in his views on the "Holocaust", and at least more right than establisment "Holocaust" historians (mostly Jews) who have put out various cookie cutter accounts of the Jewish Holocaust which desparately try to conform to the received history offered by the victor's justice at Nuremburg.
It seems to me that Ernst Zundel is one of three things:
1. He is what the political and media establishment say he is i.e., a man who knows what he is saying is wrong but says it anyway because of his irrational hatred of Jews and his sick love of Adolf Hitler. I would agree that such a person should have all kinds of opprobrium thrown his way but, having a principled belief in freedom of speech, I would not include pipebombs among the forms of opprobrium I would sanction.
2. He is a man who is sincere in his beliefs about the "Holocaust", but wrong in them. In this case he may be a fool but one would still say that he is endowed with the admirable quality of standing up for what he believes in in the face of aforementioned opprobrium.
3. He is in the main right about his views on the "Holocaust", which would mean that those lovely people in establishment media and academia who have been excoriating and dehumanizing him all these years would have to admit that they are wrong. And there is a better chance of the earth being flat or the sun falling from the sky than that possibility. (Funny, that's the establishment's party line about "holocaust deniers".)
Establishment media and academia being wrong about someone they want to vilify? No, that is too horrible to contemplate -- perish the thought!
Well, I had a few minutes at work tonight to respond to your kind sentiments about Ernst Zundel. I won't waste any more of your time or mine with anything more in depth because I tend to believe HL Mencken's quip about the futility in trying to convince somebody of something that will cost him his job. Anyway, I see your comments on Ernst Zundel as little more than a kowtow to the politically correct forces that be.
Jeff White:
Well, I don't actually advocate bombing or any other kind of lawbreaking. When I wrote that paragraph I was just trying to avoid giving anyone the perception my piece was defending Zundel -- as you are. All the real historians who have examined the question have concluded 5-6 million Jews died in WWII and German/anti-Semitic lobbyists only have an interest in covering that up.
Rick:
I'm sure you've read all the "real" historians too. By the way, is a German lobbyist the same as an anti-Semitic lobbyist?
Jeff White:
In Zundel's case it is.
Rick:
Well I'm glad you don't see German as being synonymous with anti-semite. After all when it comes to persecuting "nazis" and "holocaust deniers", the German authorities aim at being more Catholic than the pope. Hundreds of people are imprisoned in Germany because they don't subscribe to the official history of World War II. Yet when the leaders of Germany, France or Spain come to Canada for a visit and hold a joint press conference/photo opportunity with our Prime Minister, I have never heard a question directed to them by a member of the mainstream media as to why they are holding people in their prisons for thought crimes.
I guess newspapers like the National Post and Globe and Mail have a sound free speech policy on paper, but when our European allies imprison people with a different political or historical belief than you, it doesn't bother you all too much. In fact, you don't raise a peep over it. (...)
As to Mr. Zundel being an anti-semite, you say he is, he says he isn't. I know it doesn't take much to be called an anti-semite these days. Former President Bush was called an anti-semite by a member of the Israeli cabinet - no less because he was tardy in authorizing a billion dollar loan guarantee to Israel. Maybe we can hire one of the government diviners in the "Human Rights" industry to look into Mr. Zundel's heart and see if it is really full of hatred towards good people. Apparently they're capable of that.
Jeff White:
Well, I support free speech, here & in Germany. I oppose Canada's hate propaganda law. But Keegstra certainly blamed the world's problems to an irrational extent on Jews, as the Nazis did. That counts as hatred/anti-Semitism to most people. Similarly, Zundel denies the experience of hundreds of Holocaust survivors now living in Canada, one my aunt, who lives a mile from where I am now. Calling them liars counts as hatred to me.
Rick:
A couple of years ago I read a book called "Denying the Holocaust" by American academic Deborah Lipstadt. Ms. Lipstadt fashions herself a crusader against the insidious influence of Holocaust revisionism. In her book and in her lectures, Lipstadt discourages anybody from getting into what might be seen as debate with the revisionists, but believes the proper approach to them is condemnation and ostracism.
And while she claims to answer the revisionists in her book, she really only sticks to her formula and tries in however tenuous a manner to connect each individual revisionist to anti-semitism or neo-nazism. But I recall that one of the things she accused one particular revisionist of (as a means of attacking his position) was: "philo-Germanism".
Which got me to wondering if accusing somebody of philo-Semitism would be a proper way of defeating an argument. I don't think that would be politically correct.
I don't think anyone is going to accuse Ernst Zundel of philo-Semitism and, if philo-Germanism were a crime, Mr. Zundel may have more legal pursuers than he already has. But I do know that Joseph G. Burg, a German-Jewish writer, testified in Mr. Zundel's favor at both of his "false news" trials.
Mr. Burg is a believer in communism, which Ernst Zundel is not, but they had coinciding beliefs about the Holocaust. At one place on his website Mr. Zundel refers to his communist friend as "an incorruptible Jew". [Note: I think I actually heard Ernst say that on a tape I listened to]
Mr. Zundel has also cooperated with other Jewish revisionists and has asked for meetings with various Jewish community organizations (to no effect). So Mr. Zundel may be more open-minded about Jews than you give him credit for. But since various influential Jewish organizations, in cooperation with government, have been trying to relieve Mr. Zundel of his freedom for the past 15 years, I can see that he would have to be almost saintly to not harbour some resentment towards those particular Jews.
If your aunt's experience was that she was forced to work hard for minimal food rations in unsanitary and unhealthy conditions with little medical help available, then I don't think Ernst Zundel would deny that. If your aunt was a witness to gas chambers, Jewish corpses being turned into soap, or lampshades being manufactured from Jewish skin (the latter two claims having been abandoned even by establishment Holocaust historians) then I think Ernst Zundel would question that.
But as long as we have freedom of speech, I think the truth will prevail in the end, whatever it may be.
Thought for the Day:
"Journalism is a false picture of the world, thrown upon a lighted screen in a darkened room so that the real world is not seen."
-G.K. Chesterton
Back to Table of Contents of the Aug. 1999 ZGrams