As they say in conventional media parlance, ". . . we interrupt this broadcast to bring you an important message . . . " I interrupt the Myatt Essay series to give you a description of what happened yesterday.
A small group of friends and acquaintances went to see the opening of the Fred Leuchter documentary in Los Angeles. I want to record here that this time it felt much different from the experience we had in September at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Here is a summary:
First, the setting. Whereas in Toronto, the movie was shown in a super-elegant theater, this one was called NUART ( as in Nu Art . . .) in a non-descript 1930s architectural style that felt greasy, threadbare and seedy - much like the neighborhood.
Second, the audience: Whereas before, the theater in Toronto was virtually full, and whereas in a recent showing in Boston the seats were sold out days before the showing of the film, here the attendance was extremely sparse. I would say, no more than 35 people - with a seating capacity of 468 seats (. . . keeping in mind that the film ran five times a day and was scheduled to play several days in a row - 14 different showings in all).
Third, this "Mr. Death" film has been doctored and reworked AGAIN since the International Film Festival in Toronto last September where it premiered!
The first tip-off we got was a question from an attentive Revisionist who saw it approximately four weeks ago in a museum in LA and commented on the fact that Ernst ". . . did not, as he claimed, look straight at the audience when he said: "We Germans will not go down in history as genocidal maniacs. We will not!" I watched for this scene. I paid close attention. Ernst's words are still there, spoken in his voice, but his face has been obliterated by a blank, black screen - almost like a visual bleep! - lessening the powerful impact the scene had on the viewers. (I considered this part ***the*** most powerful part of the film when I first saw it in Toronto). It's there no more! A shame!
There were other less glaring oddities and strange cuts and rearrangements in this film. I remember seeing Van Pelt while he spoke his first words denouncing Revisionists for their irreverence going into Auschwitz and chiseling away. In this version you hear his voice for a minute or two (. . . from memory here: "Fred Leuchter is a FFFFFFFoooool!") before you actually see the narrator. It's very subliminal.
In the Toronto International Film Festival version, an elephant was being electrocuted in what seemed a scene oddly out of place, with no reference or explanation given. Back then, some of us commented later on the fact that it seemed to be pre-World War I film footage. In this version, a source is given in white-on-black type: Thomas Edison, 1903.
Little malevolent touches denigrating Fred Leuchter seem to have been added that I don't remember from the first viewing: Fred's ugly teeth; Fred grinning devilishly at inappropriate places; Fred waving a hammer at the camera man; Fred (or an actor playing Fred) bathed in bright, glaring, over-exposed sunlight, pounding like some Neanderthal at a pile of rock in front of him, with pieces flying every which way. That's not the way Fred worked, given his methodical nature.
I remember quite a passionate speech by Fred about Freedom of Speech and Ernst's right to his own opinion toward the end of the film. Poof! Gone! No more!
Probably the clearest evidence that the film has been sanitized even more than before is a strange sequence where a segment is actually spooled backwards, where one hears the squeals of the video play-back unit, interrupted by Van Pelt's excited voice pointing out some unexplained sequence. It is almost as if the film was doctored in haste and this segment was accidentally left in.
This version feels less symbolic than the first. The film is much more choppy in the cuts and edits and much fuzzier in the faces of Irving, Van Pelt and others. Some of the smooth-flowing, almost ballet-like choreography of image and sound that so impressed Ernst seems to have been lost in this "cinema release" version. The Revisionist cause is definitely more maligned by the doctoring and fine-tuning than even the already twice-reworked, sanitized one we saw in the International Film Festival in Toronto.
Finally, the Toronto version lasted 96 minutes. This one is advertised as 90 minutes; some reviewers refer to its length as 91 minutes. So we can safely say that 5-6 minutes have been sacrificed to strengthen the Politically Correct Holocaust version. I personally am vain enough to think that maybe my ZGrams and Ernst's Power and Germania letters describing some powerful scenes in our favor might have been the tip-off to slice them off. Who knows?
When I asked Ernst for his comments about what all this means, he said:
"You heard about the scared kid who is whistling in the dark? The Jewish Holocaust-addicted leadership is desperately trying to reassure themselves that this film is not going to blow up in their faces, causing a chain reaction and Revisionist melt-down, if I may be so bold. They are very, very nervous - the feeling of nervousness is palpable in every review so far. They don't know how this film is going to be perceived in Peoria, Illinois.
"I stick to my first verdict about the usefulness of this film to our cause: It stimulates the debate about what really happened at Auschwitz! It definitely stimulates the debate! It opens up the topic!
Regarding Dr. James Roth's on-screen recantation, contradicting his under-oath testimony in the Second Great Holocaust Trial in Toronto in 1988, about which much is made in the film, Ernst simply said:
"What Fred has done is replicable. It can be verified. It has been verified. It can again be verified - or, if you will, refuted! Van Pelt and Errol Morris went to Auschwitz with a crew of 30 people. They could have taken their own samples in their own way, taken them back to a lab of their own choice such as MIT or Israel's Technion University and filmed the whole process to document it all. They had the people there, along with the cameras and recording devices, light crews, the Leuchter blueprints which carefully specify the exact locations where the samples were taken. They could have even given them to the same Dr. James Roth to test. They could have told him where the samples came from.
"They did not do any such thing. Why not? Because they KNOW that Fred's science was right! They are afraid of the truth - Fred's truth!
So they did what they have done since biblical, Old Testament times - they have stoned the messenger of a truth they did not like. They have stoned Fred Leuchter (and, by implication, Ernst Zündel) with doctored images and distorted translations of documents. They have hurled invectives and abuse - with verbal rocks called "anti-Semite", "Neo-Nazi" etc. etc.
"What we see on display in this "final" version is not so much a revelation of Fred Leuchter's quirks and foibles or his "scientific shortcomings" - but the handiwork of those who destroy the accuser of an unpalatable truth. What America gets served up is another Jewish agenda film. Watch for it on Oscar Night."
Thought for the Day - (referring to Errol Morris's comment that Leuchter must have been "insane" to have gone to Auschwitz to check up on the facts for himself):
"Why did he go 'mad'? That doesn't matter, he just is - because his conclusions were 'mad' of course. How do we know, given that he is an expert? Because he disagreed with the dogma, and you have got to be crazy to do that. Quick, let's gloat about how he was 'destroyed' - but be careful not to go into the details of how he became a pariah."
(Letter to the Zundelsite)