I am repeating the introduction in each of this 11-part ZGram series. Read it until you know it by heart!
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A mainstream Jewish writer, giving his readers the standard Jewish slant on well-worn Holocaust orthodoxy in response to the then upcoming Irving/Lipstadt-Penguin Trial, made amazing and telling pre-emptive admissions in an article published in the February 2000 Atlantic Monthly. This 19 page article, significantly titled "The Holocaust on Trial" by D.D. Guttenplan, is so far the most comprehensive and extensive write-up on the subject of Revisionism and the Holocaust that has appeared in the global mainstream press.
The choice of the title itself speaks volumes. It is an open acknowledgement - long overdue! - that Revisionism, far from being a fringe movement run by a few crackpots and "Hitler lovers", is in fact a vibrant, legitimate historical discipline of far greater spiritual depth and political importance than has been admitted by those who would like us to listen to the B'nai Brith and Anti-Defamation League type smearmongering just a little bit longer.
Holocaust orthodoxy is not yet a sacred religious dogma of Judaism. It is, in fact, the central core of the Zionist political agenda. This agenda has had diabolical, monstrous results. It gave us World War II, the Morgenthau Plan, Operation Keelhaul, the Nuremberg Trials, an Israeli state, German reparations to maintain that state, more than half a century of Bolshevic occupation of the heartland of Europe, deliberately media-induced, all-permeating "Holocaust thinking" and, as a by-produce, permanent, bloody wars and upheaval in the Middle East. It is also the backbone of the New World Order.
Understanding this Zionist agenda is of crucial relevance to every person on this earth who prefers truth over lies, unfettered scientific and historical inquiry to back up that truth and demolish those lies, and freedom over slavery for future generations.
Leuchter's findings, Irving's adoption of these findings, and the subsequent Errol Morris documentary film about Leuchter played a central role in the lengthy Irving-Lipstadt/Penguin litigation, as the court transcripts reveal. This illustrates the crucially important role played by the much-maligned Fred Leuchter in the demolition of this edifice and relic of World War II propaganda lies.
Guttenplan's choice of the Title, "The Holocaust on Trial" - was borrowed from a Zundel publication - the 1988 'consumerized" version by Reporter Robert Lenski of the 1988 Zündel trial, reviewable on the Zundelsite. (Use the Zundelsite-specific search engine for topics of specific interest!) The title signifies acknowledgment by the back door of the importance of the two Zundel Trials and their seminal impact on Holocaust historiography.
It is only fitting that Ernst Zundel should review the Atlantic Monthly article. In this article, Guttenplan is continuing the traditional modus operandi of the "in-elite" by talking about us, around us, past us and against us. Who better than a German to respond to the continued blood libel against the Germans - and to assure more balance, sanity and honesty?
Who better than Ernst Zundel, battle-scarred veteran of this herculean struggle and originator/catalyst of the all-important Leuchter Report?
I yield my ZGrams to Ernst Zundel. The Internet allows this veteran of Holocaust Revisionism to have his say - his way!
(Paragraph pairs are numbered and separated by a line. )
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Part II
9. Guttenplan: The accompanying ideological retooling took place at breathtaking speed, but in 1950s America, few besides Communists shouted, "Remember the six million!" For most Americans, including American Jews, the Holocaust was "the wrong atrocity" - mention of it was at best an embarrassment, at worst a cause for suspicion.
ANSWER TO 9. Guttenplan is wrong! Shallow! Surfacy or dishonest! Ilya Ehrenburg coined the "six million dead Jews" figure. It appeared first in English in a news release of the Soviet Embassy in London. The British, the Americans and the Soviets knew that atrocity propaganda against the Germans could serve as a deflection maneuver away from their own murderous activities carried on at the very time by the Soviets in Katyn, Silesia, Prussia and Pomerania, as well as by the Poles and the Czechs, to draw public attention away from their barbaric policies.
On February 29, 1944 the British Ministry of Information sent the following note to the higher British clergy and to the BBC, requesting them to help spread atrocity propaganda:
Sir,
I am directed by the Ministry to send you the following circular letter: It is often the duty of the good citizens and of the pious Christians to turn a blind eye on the peculiarities of those associated with us. But the time comes when such peculiarities, while still denied in public, must be taken into account when action by us is called for. We know the methods of rule employed by the Bolshevik dictator in Russia itself from, for example, the writing and speeches of the Prime Minister himself during the last twenty years. We know how the Red Army behaved in Poland in 1920 and in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Galicia, and Bessarabia only recently.
We must, therefore, take into account how the Red Army will certainly behave when it overruns Central Europe. Unless precautions are taken, the obviously inevitable horrors which will result will throw an undue strain on public opinion in this country.
We cannot reform the Bolsheviks but we can do our best to save them - and ourselves - from the consequences of their acts. The disclosures of the past quarter of the past quarter of a century will render mere denials unconvincing. The only alternative to denial is to distract public attention from the whole subject.
Experience has shown that the best distraction is atrocity propaganda directed against the enemy. Unfortunately the public is no longer so susceptible as in the days of "Corpse Factory." the Mutilated Belgian Babies," and the "Crucified Canadians."
Your cooperation is therefore earnestly sought to distract public attention from the doings of the Red Army by your wholehearted support of various charges against the Germans and Japanese which have been and will be put into circulation by the Ministry.
Your expression of belief in such may convince others. I am, sir, Your obedient servant
(signed)
H. Hewet, Assistant Secretary
There was even a postscript, as follows:
The Ministry can enter into no correspondence of any kind with regard to the communication which should only be disclosed to responsible persons. (Rozek, Edward J., Allied Wartime Diplomacy: A Pattern in Poland, John Wiley and Sons, NY. page 209-210)
See alo John Sack's book, "An Eye for an Eye" about the treatment of millions - and murder of between 60,000 to 80,000 Germans in Silesia - by largely Jewish jailers and torturers from 1945 to 1948. See Michael Hoffman's summary of Jewish Communists at http://www.hoffman-info.com/communist.html
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10. Guttenplan: Today the Holocaust is ubiquitous. Films such as Schindler's List and Sophie's Choice, television programs, novels, memoirs, and works of history all add to the sum of what we know - or think we know - about what Raul Hilberg, the pre-eminent scholar in the field, called The Destruction of the European Jews.
Hilberg's opus by that title was first published in 1961, but only after having been sat on by academic presses at Columbia and the University of Oklahoma, and rejected outright by Princeton, and only after a Czech refugee donated $15,000 toward the cost of publication. The first reviews were mostly hostile, and it would be years before Hilberg won any prizes.
ANSWER TO 10. When academic honesty still had a tenuous hold on more or less gentile American universities in the 1960s, books containing absurdities like Hilberg's conjectures, suppositions, faulty and tendentious interpretations, and excerpted and "quoted out of context" German documents and statistics were suspect. These books were seen in those more neutral, more balanced times as self-serving Jewish agenda books. Only after a worldwide campaign, deliberately adopted by Israel, American and other Diaspora Jews at the time to use the Holocaust as a tool for raising money and bludgeoning Israeli critics, did Hilberg find a "former refugee" to donate the funds to get his Holocaust Lobby agenda book published. The question remains: Was it by accident or deliberate plan that Hilberg had a book ready when it was most needed by and useful to the Lobby?
It should be noted here that Hilberg revised it significantly after being grilled by Zündel lawyer Christie in Toronto in the 1985 Great Holocaust Trial, based on Dr. Faurisson's Revisionist scholarship. The cross-examination of Hilberg so devastated his carefully constructed house of cards that he refused to come back as a government-Holocaust Lobby flak in the 1988 Zündel trial. See Hilberg entire chapter in Barbara Kulaszka's book at <http://www.lebensraum.org/english/dsmrd/dsmrd09hilberg.html> ((Ref: Did Six Million Really Die? Report of the Evidence in the Canadian "False News" Trial of Ernst Zündel - 1988. Edited by Barbara Kulaszka. $50. Available from: Ingrid Rimland, 6965 El Camino Real, # 105-588, La Costa, CA 92009-4195)
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11. Guttenplan: We need merely consider the reception of Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments (1995) to see how much has changed. Decorated with endorsements by famous academics, Fragments won the National Jewish Book Award for autobiography/memoir, beating out works by Elie Wiesel and Alfred Kazin. Even after evidence mounted that "Wilkomirski" was really Bruno Düssekker, a Swiss musician whose account of a childhood in the concentration camps is completely fictional, Fragments continued to attract readers. Such is the public appetite for Holocaust literature.
ANSWER TO 11. Embarrassed, Guttenplan skims over this much promoted and widely acclaimed literary fraud titled "Fragments"- showered with praise by the Holocaust industry, promoted globally for its "sensitivity" etc. - which was finally exposed by a Swiss journalist of Israeli background as a complete invention and fabrication. Incidentally, this courageous Jewish journalist faced nothing but virulent condemnation and opposition from an uncritical publishing industry and academia as well as a brainwashed public for exposing this fraud. Finally, and belatedly, the BBC did an expose on "Fragments" - and the German publisher withdrew it from the market. Only then! Only after numerous translations had been sold in millions of copies around the world!
And get this, please: There is no public appetite for Holocaust literature. Neither is there a desire for Holocaust mini-series on television, or films like Sophie's Choice or Schindler's List. The public are victimized by incessant hype and promotion of a dishonest, ethnocentric version, the Jewish version in fact, of WWII history - a circumstance well known to many Jewish academics like Professor Norman Finkelstein and even Professor Peter Novick. Finkelstein especially has paid a heavy price for writing his upcoming The Holocaust as an Industry, a book selected to come on the market in July of this year (2000).
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12. Guttenplan: How did this change come about? Peter Novick mentions various factors: a gradual easing of the Cold War, outbreaks of neo-Nazism in Germany and the United States, the 1952 publication of Anne Frank: The Diary of A Young Girl, later adapted to stage and screen. But the single greatest catalyst, he says, was the kidnapping and trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Here, too, much of the initial response was negative: The New Republic said that Israel should "confess error and hand Eichmann back" to Argentina. The Wall Street Journal worried that the proceedings would only benefit the Russians. But as the trial wore on, the sheer mass of detail evidently overcame such skepticism. The trial was televised, and for the first time the American public was confronted with the Holocaust as an event distinct from the general carnage of war. The controversy over Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) - Arendt's focus on Eichmann's ordinariness, on what she called "the banality of evil," struck some commentators as overly sympathetic - further piqued public interest.
ANSWER TO 12. Hyperbole and obfuscation are evident in this paragraph of Guttenplan's article. Franklin D. Roosevelt's statement about "Things just don't happen; they are planned this way" comes to mind.
From the drummed-up charges leveled in Nuremberg against the German leadership - and German people who elected those leaders - to the doctored or concocted Diary of Anne Frank, to the conveniently staged show trial of Adolf Eichmann, down to the monstrous Demjanjuk spectacle, there runs a thick line, as thick as a ship's hawser, of the Zionist-Jewish agenda. These events and literary products did not just happen by a fluke of circumstance, by random chance. It is not that the public had its interest piqued by thirty-, forty- or fifty-year-old tales of ever more fanciful horrors!
Those who have the ear of our morally and politically bankrupt political and academic elites in the Western world have force-fed Western society, like stuffing some hapless goose, with their coolly and cruelly, exploitatively used Holocaust agenda. They manipulated our best qualities - like compassion, feelings of honor, fairness towards the Jewish victims - for callously calculated political, ethnic and financial advantage. In other words, they pulled the wool over our eyes - shrieking "Nazi!" and "Holocaust!" as they were fleecing us!
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13. Guttenplan: Now, nearly forty years after Eichmann's capture, the Holocaust is once again on trial. This time the venue is London, Courtroom 37 of the Royal Courts of Justice, where for the next few months Charles Gray, a judge of the Queen's Bench, will preside over the matter of David Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd. and Deborah Lipstadt. To Irving, the author of numerous books on the Third Reich, the Holocaust is "an ill-fitting legend." Irving doesn't deny that many Jews died. Instead he denies that any of them were killed in gas chambers, that Hitler directly ordered the annihilation of European Jewry, and that the killings were in any significant way different from the other atrocities of the Second World War.
Of course, many right-wing cranks have argued along similar lines. What makes Irving different is that his views on the Holocaust appear in the context of work that has been respected, even admired, by some of the leading historians in Britain and the United States.
ANSWER TO 13. What makes Irving different is not that at all - it is that he has the courage and intellectual integrity to call a spade a spade. And "right wing cranks"? Ad hominim arguments to the rescue! Two thousand years ago, the philosopher Seneca said: "When you have lost an argument - all is not lost. You can still call your enemy names!"
Irving is right; the Holocaust is an "ill-fitting legend" - a lie told 6 million or 6 billion times does not turn into the truth by mere repetition.
It still remains a lie! When Guttenplan's hero, Raul Hilberg, was asked in the First Great Holocaust Trial in 1985 to produce a Führer Order to prove his allegation - stated as "fact," that Hitler had ordered the extermination of the Jews - he could not! He said, after hemming and hawing in the witness box, that he was "at a loss." But all along, he had insisted there was such an order! After he was flushed out by the cross-examination in the Zundel Trial and confronted with information to the contrary, he promptly proceeded to change his "scholarship" by adding one obscure footnote to subsequent revisions, eliciting a scathing condemnation by his fellow Holocaust Promoter Christopher Browning, in a treatise he pointedly called "The Revised Hilberg."
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14. Guttenplan: In her book Denying the Holocaust (1993), Deborah Lipstadt argues that it is precisely Irving's considerable reputation that makes him "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial." "Familiar with historical evidence," she writes, "he bends it until it conforms with his ideological leanings and political agenda."
ANSWER TO 14. Irving is not a Holocaust Revisionist. He has never written anything on the subject, save for the foreword to the English language edition of his Focal Point Imprint/Leuchter Report. The Holocaust Lobbyists are building him up as their straw man, because they know that he is easier to steamroller than Professor Butz, Professor Robert Faurisson or Mark Weber would be.
Furthermore, Guttenplan says, quoting Lipstadt: "Familiar with historical evidence. . . he bends it until it conforms with his ideological leanings and political agenda." Now that is rich indeed! A typical case of what psychologists would call a clear case of projection - where mentally imbalanced, psychopathic people accuse others of what they are doing themselves. It's like a thief or pickpocket shouting "Hold the thief!" while running for his life!
According to Jewish author, John Sack, there are 85,000 books which have been written about the Holocaust - with only a handful, less than 50, that bring critical analysis to the subject. All the rest are by Jewish writers or their fellow travelers, like Christopher Browning, who also want to nuzzle up to the lucrative feeding trough of Holocaustomania.
Each and every book, from Hilberg's falsely titled The Destruction of the European Jews right down to Arno Mayer, Daniel Goldhagen, Deborah Lipstadt and even D.D. Guttenplan in this piece before us, are guilty, to some extent or another, of bending the evidence to suit their ideological or political agenda - either to promote the Zionist political or Jewish ethnic and religious agenda, or to give vent to their anti-Nazi, anti-German, or pro-Communist feelings and inclinations. Thousands of examples could be cited for this state of their prejudices of 70 years' duration.
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15. Guttenplan: Irving claims that those words are libelous. He cheerfully admits to having said "There were never any gas chambers at Auschwitz" and "The structures which you can now see as a tourist at Auschwitz were erected by the authorities in Poland after World War Two" and are "a fake." That doesn't make him a Holocaust denier, he argues, because his comments "are true." In effect Irving is seeking to put not just Lipstadt but the Holocaust itself on trial - an effort in which he will receive considerable help from British libel law.
ANSWER TO 15. People who sit in glass houses, like Lipstadt, Hilberg, Goldhagen and others, should stop throwing rocks - rocks of false accusations. There are bound to be people like the Faurissons. the Webers, the Butzes and the Irvings - and, yes, the Zündels of this world! - who will pick up some of those rocks heaved in their direction and who will with the accuracy and resolve of a David-and-Goliath scenario hurl some of those rocks right back at them. David Irving is doing just that now to Lipstadt!
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16. Guttenplan: In the United States the burden of proof in a libel case is on the plaintiff. In an American trial, Irving, as a public figure, would have to prove not just that Lipstadt's criticisms were untrue but also that they were made with "knowledge of falsity or with reckless disregard" of the truth. In Britain the burden of proof is on the defendant. It will not be enough for Lipstadt to point out that even historians who "always learn something from" Irving - among them Gordon Craig, of Stanford, who pays tribute to Irving's "energy as a researcher and to the scope and vigor of his publications" - find his views on the Holocaust, in Craig's words, "obtuse and quickly discredited." Lipstadt will actually have to discredit them. She will also have to show that the evidence is so clear-cut that only a willful misreading or conscious distortion of the facts could account for Irving's positions. This will not be easy.
ANSWER TO 16. Deborah Lipstadt could be dragged before an American court for some of her writings and public statements she makes "with knowledge of falsity or with reckless disregard for the truth." They are recorded in her writings and on video. She has not yet been sued in America because of the enormous costs involved - which does not mean that she will get off scot-free in the future.
Whether Irving's views on the Holocaust - whatever they may be at any moment - are "obtuse and quickly discredited," as Guttenplan quotes British historian Gordon Craig as saying, history will tell. The outcome of the Irving-Lipstadt libel trial will settle very little. Irving's win, or Lipstadt's win, will not affect the thirst and search for truth in a world drowning in Jewish agenda-driven spin-doctoring of their exclusive "victimhood." Long after the dust has settled in that trial and Justice Gray has taken off his powdered wig, the struggle for truth in history will go on.
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Tomorrow: Part III