A very merry Christmas to you all!
It is a glorious, sunny day in California! It is warm enough to sit by the pool - and dream of a White Christmas! :)
I have been thinking about what to give my readers and loyal supporters all over the world beyond just the usual "Merry Christmas" and "A happy New Year" - when yet another present was given to Revisionism I am now glad to pass on.
And it is this: It's final! "Mr. Death" is officially opening December 29 in New York and Los Angeles and will from there get distributed nationwide - and ***it's raining Fred Leuchter reviews***!
The powers that be have apparently decided to take their chances with this extraordinary Errol Morris film about the Great Divide between Revisionism and Holocaustomania - The Leuchter Report, and the story of the man responsible for it.
I was afraid the project was going to get shelved, based on the nervous behavior and statements made by Errol Morris before largely Jewish audiences in Los Angeles and New York when the film premiered in Art Museums in those cities. The fellow traipsed into one whopper of a controversy - and has been backpedaling with all his might ever since! At times, he has obliged his audiences by telling them a thing or two that are hilarious!
I thought since the reaction to this extraordinary film was not, as hoped for by our enemies, the usual black-and-white Hollywood fare and Holocaust fanfare, the movie might be prematurely pulled. Not so. Two days ago, a friend informed me that he had picked up a shortie review in Esquire, and since then there have been a number of simply amazing reviews.
For instance: Just this morning, I learned that the December 27, 1999 (Vol 154, No. 26 special Person of the Year Time issue is running a review written by Richard Corliss. Here is that important review, interspersed with comments by Ernst Zundel:
DIRECTOR: Errol Morris
OPENS: Dec. 29 in N.Y.C. and L.A.; wide (sic) in Jan.
Time:
To do good you don't need a graduate degree, just a smart idea. To do harm you don't need bad intentions, just a plodding arrogance. Those truisms are at the heart of the latest documentary enthraller from artful Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, A Short History of Time).
EZ:
Harm to whom? To those who cashed in on the Holocaust? The reviewer starts off having it all wrong. Fred was sent to specificially examine the "gas chambers" shown to tourists in "Nazi Death Camps". Were they real, or were they fakes? He came back with amazing answers that have plagued the Holocaust racketeers ever since.
Time:
Fred Leuchter won renown for devising more "humane" electric chairs, gallows and gas chambers. Now considered an expert in all aspects of state torture, Leuchter was hired by Ernst Zundel, a prominent denier of the Holocaust, to use his expertise to determine if the Nazi concentration camps had in fact been death camps.
Leuchter went to Auschwitz with his bride (it was their honeymoon!) and discovered no trace of cyanide. His methods were faulty, his conclusions inane. He was discredited and, suddenly, unemployed.
EZ:
Again, the reviewer has it wrong. Fred did find traces of cyanide - in places where ***clothing had been disinfected.*** He found little to no traces in places where supposedly millions had been gassed by cyanide.
Fred Leuchter's methods were scientific, and his conclusions accurate though rudimentary, as subsequent forensic data clearly showed. And he was not "discredited" - he was deliberately destroyed by those he found to have deceived the world. The threatened tribe destroyed the accuser - the movie makes that very clear between the lines.
Time:
Morris, an elegant and scrupulous filmmaker, is fair both to Leuchter and his aggrieved accusers. The movie makes clear that Mr. Death's sin was not race hatred but hubris; he simply could not, does not, doubt his qualifications to do a job beyond his expertise.
EZ:
Utter nonsense! This reviewer is fumbling in the dark and hasn't got the faintest about "what's up" - he is trying to do a hatchet job beyond ***his*** expertise.
Time:
Morris takes this quietly agitated fellow (he consumes about 40 cups of coffee and 100 cigarettes a day) at face value, letting Leuchter explain how tinkering with science led to his rise and fall. It's the fascinating film equivalent of a humane execution.
EZ:
Could be the wish is father to the thought? That's why all the reviews so far have danced the most amazing jitterbug around the mark of what Fred Leuchter's work was really all about. That's why the edgy nervousness by all.
Just look at what Naomi Pfefferman wrote in the Jewish Journal (Los Angeles) | December 24, 1999 in yet another ever-so-jittery review:
Pfefferman:
Then there was Aaron Breitbart, senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who feared that viewers of "Mr. Death" might get the wrong idea about Leuchter. "Errol Morris portrays him as a simple, naive, even foolish man who was perhaps duped into being a tool of the Holocaust revisionists," Breitbart says. "But in fact, Leuchter is intensely involved with the Holocaust deniers and has a real Holocaust denial agenda."
The Center's Museum of Tolerance passed on a chance to screen "Mr. Death," in part, because of Breitbart's critique; Morris bristled at the news. "The charge is that I provide a relatively benign Fred Leuchter for public consumption, but that's just wrong," he said, adding that "Mr. Death" screened at a Holocaust center at Clark University. "I think that what disturbs some people about my movie is that they don't come out hating Fred. They don't see him as Satan. They see him as a human being, if a vain, pathetic, confused human being. Maybe there's a great need to see him as a monster, but to me, that's just a mistake. Because then, what have you learned from Fred? You haven't learned a thing."
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Thought for the Day:
"I don't think Fred sees himself as an anti-Semite . . . but I found myself wondering again and again, what on earth was he thinking?"
(Errol Morris)