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 V
43. Guttenplan: But Irving v. Lipstadt is no dinner party, and Lipstadt is not in London to see the sights. "Hello! I'm the defendant here," she says. "If I hadn't fought this, he would have won by default. He could have said - it would have been said - the High Court in London recognizes his definition of the Holocaust. Now, some people would say, 'Oh, that's ludicrous. Who would believe that anyway?' But it's naive to think you can just say, 'I'm going to ignore this.'"
ANSWER TO 43. "The Holocaust on Trial" is the title of Guttenplan's own piece. It is also the title of a book about the 1988 Zündel Trial by Robert Lenski, ( available from Ingrid Rimland at 6965 El Camino Real, # 105-588, La Costa, CA 92009-4195 ).
Lipstadt says she couldn't ignore Irving's challenge. Good! Even if Irving loses, he has won this round! He has forced her, at least through her lawyers and witnesses, to debate the essentials of their fraudulent Holocaust fantasies.
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44. Guttenplan: Deborah Lipstadt was not brought up to be naive - or to walk away from a fight. Her father came to the United States from Germany in the 1920s. "Because of the economic situation - nothing to do with anti-Semitism," she offers before being asked. Her mother was born in Canada. Lipstadt herself was born in Manhattan, in 1947, but the family moved to Queens soon afterward. "I went to Jewish day schools there," she says, "and got an intensive Jewish education, both at home and in school."
ANSWER TO 44. The idea that after an "intensive Jewish education" she might have a one-sided or at least somewhat skewed viewpoint, especially when it comes to "Nazis," obviously never entered her mind!
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45. Guttenplan: The Lipstadts considered themselves "modern Orthodox" - partly to distinguish themselves from the black-hatted, caftan-wearing Hasidim, and partly to signify that although they observed Jewish dietary laws and regulated their lives by the Hebrew rather than the secular calendar, they did not set their faces against modern life. "We were very much of this world," Lipstadt says. "Theater, opera, books, journals, museums."
ANSWER TO 45. "Modern orthodox" - and writing about an emotional issue so dear and central to the Jewish experience as the Holocaust? Could she have done it fairly, in a balanced, even-handed way? Come on! Give the world a break!
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46. Guttenplan: Lipstadt grew up in a mixed neighborhood, but her interactions with non-Jews were limited. "When you're an observant family, you go to day schools, you keep kosher - just technically you march to the beat of a different drummer," she says. Class may also have been a factor. The comfortable, parochial, culturally voracious, slightly smug yet socially conscious world of German Jews is difficult to convey to outsiders, though the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer provides a wry introduction.
ANSWER TO 46. She is not only steeped in Jewishness; she is besotted by it, like Isaac Bashevis Singer's shtetl characters!
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47. Guttenplan: After her family moved back to Manhattan, in the mid-1960s, Lipstadt says, Singer lived next door. But she is just as proud of the fact that the civil-rights worker Andy Goodman's family also lived on her street. When Goodman's body was found in Mississippi, along with those of his murdered comrades, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, Lipstadt's father, who had a small headstone business, was commissioned to make his monument. "In the summer of the freedom rides," Lipstadt says, "I was too young to go down to the South, but I knew that if I had been older, I would have. I remember going with my mother - this was 1964 or 1965 - up to Harlem on a Sunday to participate in a march. It was my mother's idea."
ANSWER TO 47. She did not meet Mengele or Schindler, but like all the survivors, she met the famous Singer and civil rights activists Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner. Role models are important in Jewish life after all, rubbing elbows, dropping names of celebrities is a Jewish need and character trait, as is being involved in revolutionary activities. Going to Harlem no less! Engaging in "radical chic" is what Stokely Carmichael called this "Jewish activity."
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48. Guttenplan: At City College, Lipstadt says ruefully, she was part of "the last generation where you could get a really good education." She majored in political science and history, spending her junior year in Israel. "I took a couple of courses on the Holocaust, met more survivors than I'd met before," she says. "Though I'd met survivors growing up, I didn't know they were survivors. My parents had lots of German Jewish friends, but I didn't know them as survivors, I just knew them as the Peisers or the Ullmans."
ANSWER TO 48. "Jewish survivors?" Relatively few were incarcerated for political activities or for purely ethnic affiliation. Many former concentration camp inmates - many of them criminals, con-men, crooks and saboteurs, rapists, check forgers, thieves, robbers and paedophiles - only received "sainthood" in the 1980s. For decades, they were simply former concentration camp inmates.
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49. Guttenplan: Just as the academic year was ending, the Six-Day War broke out. Lipstadt decided to remain in Israel another year: "If I'd been there in June of '67, to go home in July '67 made no sense." When she returned to America, she enrolled in the graduate program in Judaic studies at Brandeis. Her priorities were shifting.
ANSWER TO 49. Israel had changed her - not enough, of course, to toil as a Kibbutzim, a pioneer to help build a new country, but just enough to return to the comfort and cozy existence of academic life and studies in the USA?
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50. Guttenplan: "I remember showing up at the synagogue my parents went to on the Upper West Side," she says, "wearing my SNCC [Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee] button, and somebody yelling at me, 'They're leftists, anti-Semites, and terrible people!' I went berserk!"
ANSWER TO 50. The SNCC was a Communist front. Scratch one of these people, and you will find a Communist connection sooner or later - from Einstein to the Rosenbergs.
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51. Guttenplan: Like many other Jews of her generation, Lipstadt felt herself pushed from civil rights to Jewish causes by the bitter 1968 struggle between the mostly black parents of Ocean Hill and Brownsville in Brooklyn and the largely Jewish teachers' union over community control of the schools. Neither side had a monopoly on racism - and there were Jews on both sides of the picket lines once the union went out on strike rather than cede power to the parents. But what Lipstadt saw was "overt anti-Semitism coming from people whose struggle you had always thought ... cut to the core of America."
ANSWER TO 51. A very interesting revelation! When the Blacks no longer allowed themselves to be manipulated, dominated and used as tools to break down Gentile society and wanted control of their own children's school so they could dictate the Black agenda, they were no longer of any interest to the likes of Lipstadt. Once again, Lipstadt, the blinkered, closed-mind set, steeped-in-Jewishness activist, interprets Black self-assertion as overt "anti-Semitism." Quite a mindset Ms. Lipstadt reveals here!
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52. Guttenplan: Despite her upbringing, Lipstadt describes herself as "not Orthodox." The exclusion of even the mention of women from so much of Orthodox ritual disturbs her. "I want them to at least acknowledge that you're only talking about the men. Because if the rabbi stands up and says, 'We need as many people as possible to come tomorrow morning,' I'll come." But her discomfort with organized religion - "I'm equally unhappy in any synagogue I go to," she says, half joking - does not extend to estrangement from organized Judaism. "So much of my personal life is tied up with being Jewish. Being a Jew and being Jewish, culturally, religiously, intellectually - it's what I know best."
ANSWER TO 52. Before she was "modern orthodox." Now she is not orthodox? She confesses to be equally unhappy in any synagogue she goes to - she always "fights." What does that sound like? A malcontent? Like so many of her kind - constantly at war with her surroundings? Could that be the reason she finds so much evidence of "anti-Semitism"? Maybe it's "anti-Lipstadtism" instead?
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53. Guttenplan: "A Paper Eichmann"
When David Irving and Deborah Lipstadt come face to face in a London courtroom, it will not be their first meeting. That took place in November of 1994, in Atlanta, when Irving turned up at a talk Lipstadt was giving on the danger of legitimizing Holocaust deniers as "the other side" in some historical debate - a theme of Denying the Holocaust, which had been published the previous year. Irving described the encounter in his diary, which he later posted on his Web site.
ANSWER TO 53. What would the Lipstadt side do without those 40 volumes of Irving diaries?
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54. Guttenplan: (Irving speaking): I then politely put up my hand. Invited to speak, I boomed in my very English, very loud voice to her: "Professor Lipstadt, I am right in believing you are not a historian, you are a professor of religion?" She answered that she was a professor of religion but (something special else) in history too. I then waded in with verbal fists flying: "I am the David Irving to whom you have made such disparaging reference in your speech .... " Brandishing a wad of $20 bills, Irving repeated his standing offer. Lipstadt attempted to take other questions, but, in Irving's account, "several times I wagged the bundle of $20 bills aloft, as she was speaking, and hissed: 'One thousand dollars ... !'" Irving's diary goes on to recount his success in giving away free copies of his books to the students in attendance, who duly lined up afterward for his autograph: "Sweet victory. Then students came to me with copies of the printed invitation to autograph: I did so - they were blank, which meant that either they had not asked Lipstadt for her autograph, or she would have to sign after me. Total Victory! Revenge!"
ANSWER TO 54. Poor Deborah! That must have been an embarrassing moment for her! It is also Irving at his school-boy prankish best.
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55. Guttenplan: Three observations immediately suggest themselves: 1) by November of 1994 Irving was clearly aware that Lipstadt had repeatedly and publicly attacked his work; 2) Denying the Holocaust had come out in Britain in 1994, yet 3) far from seeming aggrieved or on the point of seeking redress in a court of law, Irving showed every sign of enjoying playing the "scamp" in his jousts with Lipstadt, and clearly felt that in this contest the advantage was his.
ANSWER TO 55. Why Irving sued is open to conjecture. However, my guess is that he came into possession of documents under the "Freedom of Information" Act in Canada and elsewhere, which revealed a conspiracy to deprive him of his livelihood by a deliberate campaign to damage his reputation that he simply could not ignore, for by then book deals were falling through, sales were falling off sharply, and Irving was facing tough economic times.
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56. Guttenplan: David Irving didn't file suit for libel until September of 1996. The previous spring St. Martin's Press had canceled the publication of his Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. Given Irving's history, available to anyone with a modem or a library card, a certain amount of controversy was to be expected, perhaps even courted. So when Publishers Weekly pronounced Irving's book "repellent," and Jewish organizations expressed outrage, and Deborah Lipstadt was quoted as saying that St. Martin's Press would hardly sign up the Louisiana white supremacist David Duke for a book on race relations, St. Martin's stood firm. For about two weeks.
ANSWER TO 56. The sequence of events is quite logical. The pressure and public campaign to isolate and discredit him mounted, and Irving decided to hit back. Anybody who knows Irving could have predicted that this would happen. It was as certain as "Amen" follows prayer in a church!
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57. Guttenplan: Sometime between the March 22 Daily News report headlined "NAZI BIG'S BIO AUTHOR SPARKS UPROAR" and Frank Rich's April 3 New York Times column calling Irving "Hitler's Spin Artist," Irving's publishers lost their nerve and announced that they were shocked - shocked! - to discover that the book they were on the brink of shipping to stores had suddenly become unpublishable.
ANSWER TO 57. Nonsense. The book was already published to all intents and purposes. Irving's publishers did not want to distribute it, fearing the usual demonstrations, vandalism against bookstores, negative publicity etc.
The terror and intimidation campaign - hidden before, but now quite public - worked! Irving knew it. The book trade knew it. The public knew it. This was not the first time this had been done to authors who did not toe the party line. Just look at what happened to Pat Buchanan with his recently released book, A Republic, Not An Empire!
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58. Guttenplan: The principal effect of this decision, as Christopher Hitchens properly pointed out in a caustic rÈsumÈ of the scandal in the June, 1996, Vanity Fair, was to transform a man with "depraved ideas" about the Holocaust into a poster boy for free speech. One ancillary effect was to lend the Goebbels book the cachet of suppressed literature. Another was to give rise to Gordon Craig's lofty declaration, in the course of a four-page review of the biography in The New York Review of Books, that "silencing Mr. Irving would be a high price to pay for freedom from the annoyance that he causes us." Craig continued, "The fact is that he knows more about National Socialism than most professional scholars in his field, and students of the years 1933-1945 owe more than they are always willing to admit" to his research. "Such people as David Irving ... have an indispensable part in the historical enterprise, and we dare not disregard their views."
ANSWER TO 58. Irving became a poster boy for free speech. The Holocaust Lobby became the villains, as they still are. He flushed them out, and now pillories them for the whole world to see. That he makes odd concessions and shoots from the hip is not surprising to those of us who have watched him and who know him. He is often so unpredictable that I think he frequently astonishes himself. Put it down to his "quicksilver"-like personality.
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59. Guttenplan: "We dare not." If Craig is right, then we are all - all of us with a stake in "the historical enterprise" - injured parties, deprived of Irving's unique contribution. But what if he's wrong? What if Irving's work is meretricious, sloppy, anti-Semitic, and dishonest? The question has a familiar ring.
ANSWER TO 59. How about if Irving is right, Mr. Guttenplan? What then?
How about verifying Leuchter's findings, which had such a profound impact on Irving so as to change his outlook drastically? Never mind quibbling about interpretation of a few numbers or German phrases. Go for the fundamental argument! Were the gas chambers shown to tourists for the last 40 years in Auschwitz and Birkenau suitable to kill millions of Jews in the manner described by Holocaust schlocks and so-called "survivors"?
Appoint a commission of international experts. Repeat Leuchter's sample taking. Retest them! Refute him scientifically. That will settle the question once and for all!
Neither Deborah Lipstadt nor Guttenplan nor Hilberg have the courage to do that, for they know by now that Leuchter is right! They dare not repeat the test - and so they kill the messenger! They have silenced Leuchter and even symbolically executed him in the Errol Morris documentary, Mr. Death. Irving, so far, has been a tougher nut to crack!
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60. Guttenplan: In the late 1970s French intellectuals were convulsed over l'affaire Faurisson, which began when Robert Faurisson, a professor of literature at the University of Lyons, published an article in Le Monde proclaiming the "good news" that the gas chambers did not exist. "The alleged Hitlerian gas chambers," Faurisson said, "and the so-called genocide of the Jews form a single historical lie whose principal beneficiaries are the State of Israel and international Zionism and whose principal victims are the German people, but not its leaders, and the Palestinian people in its entirety."
ANSWER TO 60. Dr. Faurisson is the originator of the technical approach - of disproving the Holocaust by forensic, scientific means. He is widely acknowledged for his impeccable work and logical arguments. David Irving has adopted Dr. Faurisson's "no holes, no Holocaust" argument during the trial in London.
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61. Guttenplan: Faurisson's public supporters were found mostly on the far left of French politics - which is what gave the affair its frisson. When the linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky lent his name to campaigners defending Faurisson's freedom of expression, the controversy became a trans-Atlantic one. There is, Christopher Hitchens once argued, "no obligation, in defending or asserting the right to speak, to pass any comment on the truth or merit of what may be, or is being, said." Indeed, the suggestion of something rank about a speaker's views, as Hitchens gently reminded Chomsky, merely gives those who would defend his right to speak "all the more reason not to speculate" about those views. Hitchens wrote those words fifteen years ago - about five years after he'd done me the first in a long string of kindnesses, still unbroken. So I take no pleasure in pointing out that his first mistake in l'affaire Irving was to ignore his own sound advice, by describing Irving as "a great historian of Fascism."
ANSWER TO 61. More Talmudic gyrations of a member of the tribe - all heat and noise, signifying little.
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Tomorrow: Part VI