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 X
120. Guttenplan: Here is some risk," Judge Charles Gray told me in his chambers on the day before his first hearing on the case, "of one's being asked to become a historian. Judges aren't historians."
ANSWER TO 120. Judges aren't historians! Keep that always in mind. The most important thing to recognize is that courtrooms are contemporary ideological battle fields, and as such, crucially important for the precedents they carve. Even so, they are poor places to discuss and debate controversial issues of history, because defendants and prosecutors frequently chafe under, and are hampered by, rules and requirements imposed by legal procedures. One should think of political trials as very restricted, stilted debates, supervised by a moderator who has absolute power to dismiss virtually any argument or document - a man called a judge.
It must be understood that the judges in Revisionist trials are human beings - men and women who have usually grown up in the same nations and pretty well in the same environment as the accusers or the prosecutors. Judges went to the same schools and had the same doctored, slanted text books and history courses. They earned their grades and diplomas and degrees by largely agreeing with what the instructing professors had taught them and by regurgitating ideologically approved opinions and texts from their recommended reading lists.
This means that judges, prosecutors and jurors are a reflection of the prevailing theory of history - the culture myths of the day. In Nazi Germany it would have been that the Jews were a huge problem for the well-being of the nation. In Stalin's Russia it would have been that capitalists were evil and the proletarian masses were good. In Canada, Germany, the USA, France and England it is the same - there is uncritical acceptance that Hitler was a monster, and World War II was fought by the Allies for a supremely righteous cause - increasingly, as is falsely claimed, to ". . . save the Jews from genocide".
This post-war view of history, laced with Allied propaganda claims of World War II and buttressed by the grotesque Nuremberg trial proceedings and verdicts and the media's incessant, repetitious brainwashing campaign, are what judges and jurors have been exposed to since they were born - in school, in universities and in their daily lives. Every time they turned on the radio, the TV, or picked up a newspaper, every time they went to a library or a bookstore, they were confronted with the same one-sided point of view. There simply was no balance in the information available.
An accused Holocaust Revisionist, or even a World War II Revisionist is never ever judged by an impartial judge or a "jury of his peers". He is always, without exception, judged by a judge or jury of his enemies - at least by the judge's or jury's mindset formed by his enemies.
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121. Guttenplan: Gray's disclaimer is slightly misleading. Appointed to the bench only eighteen months ago, Gray spent ten years as a Queen's counsel, or QC - the elite among trial lawyers. He represented the Tory Cabinet Minister Jonathan Aitken in his suit against The Guardian and defended the Daily Mirror journalist Alistair Campbell - now Prime Minister Tony Blair's spokesman - when he was sued by a Tory member of Parliament. His most famous case, however, came when Lord Aldington sued the writer Nikolai Tolstoy over charges that at the end of the Second World War, Aldington had been responsible for handing over to the Soviets - and certain death - Cossacks who'd fought in the German army and been taken prisoner by the British. Gray's pleadings, which, as he told me, "did involve history," resulted in an award to his client of a record £1.5 million ($2.4 million) in damages.
ANSWER TO 121. Judge Gray is strictly a member of the establishment, having attended all the right schools, and no doubt belonging to the right social clubs or lodges. He is not immune from the public pressure, the odium which would attach itself to him and his career if he found for the embattled Irving. It would take an almost Solomon-like individual to please everyone in this case.
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122. Guttenplan: If Gray seems unduly modest about his command of history, his concern to ensure not just the reality but also the appearance of a fair trial makes more sense. Anthony Julius will be joined at the defense table by Richard Rampton QC, the lawyer representing Penguin Books. David Irving will represent himself. Libel cases cost thousands of dollars a day, and under British law any attorney who took on Irving's case might be liable for the other side's costs if he lost. As a "litigant in person," when David Irving appears in court, he will be on his own.
ANSWER TO 122. It is said that "he who defends himself in court has a fool for a client." I don't know if this is a slogan invented by an advertising agency for lawyers? David Irving is sharp. Contrary to what Richard Evans says in his smear job on Irving, David Irving is no slouch and no pushover.
He has a grasp of history, near photographic recall of facts, figures, names, documents. I would not count that man out if his physical and emotional health remains stable. He says he could not afford a lawyer. If that is true, it is infinitely sad. He faces a legal team of 20 people, according to early press reports and observers. If he loses, it might only mean that he was deficient in the legal department, not deficient in his grasp of history.
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123. Guttenplan: "It makes the judge's task more difficult," Gray says. "One has to ensure that he's not disadvantaged by not having the legal expertise available to the other side." This disparity in means may be good news for Deborah Lipstadt and her supporters, though Richard Rampton, who acted for McDonald's in its recent Pyrrhic victory over a pair of penniless vegetarian anarchists, also litigants in person, which cost the corporation $15 million and gained nothing but bad publicity, is well aware of the perils of overkill.
ANSWER TO 123. Nothing but bad publicity? Irving had to get used to that for the last 10 years since testifying in Toronto in the Zündel Trial where he endorsed Leuchter's findings. Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books have generated more soul-searching in somewhat tendentious articles about the misuse of the Holocaust - its "instrumentalism for the Jewish agenda" - than all the Revisionist pamphleteers the world over could produce in years of toil. If Irving loses, he will simply declare bankruptcy - and continue writing! Pyrrhic victory indeed!
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124. Guttenplan: David Irving has had decades of practice at playing the lone iconoclast whose devotion to truth puts establishment noses out of joint. This pose is, I suspect, what accounts for his unlikelier supporters. Certainly it was one he adopted with relish during our interview, whether by inviting me to share his belief that "the Conservative Party is largely financed by the CIA" or by jauntily acknowledging a desire "to see egg on faces."
ANSWER TO 124. Yes - egg on their faces! Pranks! Irving delights in that, like the schoolboy he still is, hoisting the hammer and sickle flag.
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125. Guttenplan: A desire we all share. At times the contrarian impulse is almost enough to make us forget that Irving brought this on himself. He is the plaintiff, Lipstadt the defendant.
Irving's odd fascination, though, has little to do with the urge to see authority get its comeuppance - and even less with some hidden vein of nostalgia for the Third Reich. It is rooted instead in something far more basic, something that mere facts can never completely banish: doubt. How do we know that there really were gas chambers at Auschwitz? Or that millions of Jews were killed? What if, as Irving says, we are off by an order of magnitude? Even if the Nazis killed only hundreds of thousand of Jews, isn't that bad enough? Do the numbers really matter?
ANSWER TO 125. Doubt - sowing doubt about the Holocaust - erodes faith in the Dogma of the Day! That's why there were laws in every country in every war to punish rumor mongers who were sowing doubt in final victory. In German it's called "Wehrzersetzung" - weakening the will to fight - and a goodly number of concentration camp inmates were in the hole for that crime! But what is Guttenplan really saying in the paragraph above? That doubt has crept even into his Jewish brain?
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126. Guttenplan: Last May, just as I started reading about this trial, the London Review of Books ran an account by a reporter for The Guardian of her attempts to corroborate accounts of atrocities in Kosovo. Her tale was inconclusive, honorably so. But her final words made me deeply angry.
Maybe the truth here is not one thing: but I don't want to be an accomplice to a lie .... Nobody much wants to return to Jean Cocteau, but there was something soothing in the words my friend quoted. 'History is a combination of reality and lies,' he said. 'The reality of history becomes a lie. The reality of the fable becomes the truth.' That seemed to me a fancy argument for letting herself off the hook. Maybe she couldn't find out what happened. Maybe she should have tried harder. And if she believes that reporting the facts makes no difference to whether the fable becomes the truth, and even finds the prospect "soothing," then maybe she should find another line of work. All the same, I understood the temptation.
ANSWER TO 126. The "Holocaust" is a combination of reality and lies. It's a classic. Guttenplan senses it. The reality of the Holocaust fable has become the truth for millions of hitherto uncritical readers. Irving with his brash one-liners is supplying jolt after jolt - in fact, a reality check to their thinking. It's the nightmare of every Holocaust Promoter that the fable will be examined.
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127. Guttenplan: The Atheist
It wasn't that I thought Irving might be right - more that I allowed myself to wonder, with a little shudder, "But does it matter?" It wasn't, in other words, exactly that I doubted the facts; rather, I was curious about what would happen if the facts somehow made no difference.
What pulled me back was a memory: I am six years old, and my father has brought his best friend home for dinner. After we eat, the friend takes the back off our television and shows me the tubes lighting up inside. One is burned out, and as he replaces it, I notice a line of numbers on his arm, just below the wrist. "What are those, Uncle Mike?" He tells me that the Germans put them there when he was a little boy, "so I wouldn't get lost."
My Uncle Mike was never a little boy. When he was twelve or thirteen, the Germans occupied Hungary, and his entire family was put on a train to Auschwitz. Big for his age, and claiming to be older, he was sent to work in the mines. This was 1944, and Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army in January of 1945. By then the rest of his family had been gassed.
ANSWER TO 127. "By then the rest of his family had been gassed..." Says who? Proven by what? What if Irving is right? How will Guttenplan explain his unexamined childhood - or should one say, childish belief in the Gas Chamber Myth?
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128. Guttenplan: The truth is, I can't be certain of all these details, and my Uncle Mike has been dead for some time. I was reminded of him while reading Irving's response to the obvious questions: What happened to the missing Jews? If they didn't die in the camps, where were they? Irving talks about "the large number that turned up in the state of Palestine, what's now the state of Israel," and sometimes, as if acknowledging that this number isn't nearly large enough, claims that others might have been killed in Dresden. The rest, he suggests, fled to the USSR or the United States. As a simple matter of accounting, this is preposterous. As an explanation, it is also monstrous - because the assumption behind it is that, lured by the good life to the United States, or chasing the workers' paradise in Russia, or seeking the Zionist dream in Israel, people like my Uncle Mike would simply forget that they had mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents, children, and wouldn't bother to look for them, which is why so many Jews are still unaccounted for. In other words, it presumes that Jews are not human beings.
ANSWER TO 128. Irving, the non-Holocaust expert, the non-Revisionist historian, gives a less-than-in-depth response. Dr. Faurisson, Dr. Butz, even the overly polite Mark Weber would have given Guttenplan little space to exercise his wild fantasies. Some of the witnesses in the Zündel Trial, bemoaning the alleged loss of dozens of cousins, nieces, aunts, uncles, even brothers or sisters - when asked point blank in court by Christie whether they had ever contacted the International Tracing Service of the Red Cross in Arolsen to find their relatives - had to admit they did not. Why not? Did they know their relatives were alive under different names in faraway places, collecting pensions and restitution? What is one to think?
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129. Guttenplan: No one knows this better than Raul Hilberg. The Politics of Memory tells the story of Hilberg's uncle Josef, interned by the Vichy French in 1940.
My father, by then in New York, received Josef's frantic appeals for help, but there was no money for tickets which might have enabled Josef to escape to America. When the deportations from the Vichy-French zone began in 1942, Josef disappeared. "The blood of my brother is upon me," my father would say .... Hilberg, who spent years of his life in archives, never forgot about his uncle Josef. In 1978 he found him, on a list of deportees from France: Joseph Gaber. "He was deported on August 19, 1942, and arrived in Auschwitz two days later," Hilberg writes. "Since he was already forty-eight years old, he must have been gassed immediately."
ANSWER TO 129. Josef Gaber, brother of Raul Hilberg's father! Strange - two brothers having different last names. Something to be looked into in the Death Registry books. We must check for "Gaber," not "Hilberg," obviously. One more puzzle to solve - Revisionists to the front!
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130. Guttenplan: Yet when St. Martin's canceled Irving's Goebbels biography, Raul Hilberg stood up for David Irving. "If these people want to speak," he told Hitchens, "let them .... I am not for taboos and I am not for repression." Hilberg reaffirmed these views to me over the telephone last summer, with two minor modifications: "Denial hurts people. There are survivors. That should not be forgotten." And "I believe in the freedom not to be responsible. But that doesn't mean I endorse it."
ANSWER TO 130. That hypocrite Hilberg! "I am not for repression"! He had no qualms or ethical concerns leaving the United States with its First Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing Freedom of Expression to come to Canada for over a week - for pay in the neighborhood of US$20,000! - to help convict me, to have me jailed, silenced and deported to Germany to more jail time for not believing the chief lie of the Jewish agenda. Some mind on parade here!
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Tomorrow: Part XI - Conclusion