ZGram - 2/8/2002 - "Irving tackles Goldhagen: The Opening Salvo"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

Copyright (c) 2002 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

February 8, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

I think it is apropos that we send the frazzly Jonah Goldhagen back into
the Revisionist limelight, for I have a feeling we are going to hear a lot
more about him in the weeks and months to come.  He has laid a new egg -
oops!  brought out a new title.

This time he is attacking not just Germans - his targets are the Catholics.
To that I say:  Good Luck!  This new Jewish-agenda book, "A Moral
Reckoning:  The Catholic Church During the Holocaust and Today," is sure to
stir controversy and angry public reaction and debate.   My guess is that
the Catholics, unlike the guilt-dripping Germans, are going to make
literary mincemeat out of Jonah!

A previous Jewish-agenda smear book, maligning the Germans and their
wartime government, is titled "Hitler's Willing Executioners".

Below we encounter Jonah Goldhagen through the eyes of the much-maligned
and persecuted David Irving, the best-selling British historian.  Irving
has written over 35 books on World War II - its colorful history and
personalities.  Showman par excellence, Irving used to be the darling of
the worldwide media, for as to flash and pizzazz, he was unequaled - that
is, until he testified in Ernst Zundel's 1988 Great Holocaust Trial and,
after studying the Leuchter Report, changed his mind publicly about the
standard, Hollywood version of the so-called "Holocaust".  Of course that
made him an outcast - a target for those promoting the ethnocentric Jewish
agenda.

As David Irving fans know, Irving is one prodigious journal writer who
"lets it all hang out", as Americans have it so descriptively.  His Action
Report is on-line, and I invite you to go and read for yourself.
http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/index.html

Below you can sit in the bleachers and enjoy Irving tackling Goldhagen.  It
makes one understand why he was targeted for destruction - but then, never
say never, these days, the way the cookie crumbles!

[START]

Irving vs. Goldhagen

  In the evening William C., a local chiropractor, drives me over the 26
mile causeway to downtown New Orleans, to the magnificently decorated
synagogue in St. Charles Avenue where Daniel Goldhagen is to speak on his
book "Hitler's Willing Executioners".

 It came out last May and, of course, my own book, "Goebbels, Mastermind of
the Third Reich" was sacrificed by St. Martins Press, to give "Professor"
Goldhagen a clear run with his work, as Frank Rich admitted in his
syndicated OpEd piece at the time - no nasty confrontations on talk shows,
etc., with somebody who might really know what he was talking about when it
came to the Nazi era.

 The rotunda is packed with over a thousand listeners, and there is a
sprinkling of police outside. A rabbi reads an introduction, while a thin,
badly shaven young man, with a gaunt face reminiscent of Key West's
HIV-positive population, slouches on a chair at stage-right.

 This turns out to be Goldhagen. His talk is disappointingly bland -
delivered without notes in a disconcertingly gentle, laid-back voice, at
such a slow and hesitant pace that one wonders whether he suffers perhaps
from some chromosome defect that the newspapers have been too polite to
mention.

 Goldhagen utters a ninety minute tirade against the "ordinary Germans" who
he claims were fully aware of what was going on, and were willing and
indeed eager to make up the firing squads when it came to getting rid of
the Jews.

 As he talks of the zeal with which these "ordinary Germans" rounded up,
tortured, mocked and killed their opponents, I think involuntarily of the
West Bank, of the Arab children shot down with live ammunition, and of
modern prime ministers who send assassins into neighbouring countries armed
with nerve-gas syringes to dispose of their opponents.

 Dr. C. afterwards remarks that he has never before heard so much hatred
spewed forth in a House of Worship. The same thought occurs to me: it was
undiluted Volksverhetzung, far more ugly than the kind which now earns
revisionists and other searchers for the truth hefty prison sentences in
Europe.

 Goldhagen finally rambles to a conclusion - mid-sentence, mid-paragraph,
in fact mid-lecture for all anybody can tell, since the whole talk is
utterly shambolic from start to finish, without starting point,
mile-markers, or objective. If he is a lecturer in politics at Harvard, I
feel endlessly sorry for his students. One wonders how he got the job; one
must ask his father, a long-time benefactor and professor at the
university. Goldhagen Jr. probably picked up at least a $20,000 fee for his
performance this evening.

 At question time I get to the microphone, and challenge him:

 " Professor Goldhagen, we have listened with enormous interest to your
talk, but forgive me if I now voice some criticism.

 " I too am an historian, an English historian who has worked for
thirty-five years at the other end of the spectrum, as I might put it,
questioning most closely every member of Hitler's private staff about what
decisions were taken at the very highest level.

 " Let me make plain that there can be no doubt whatever as to the scale of
the killings of Jews carried out on the eastern front during Hitler's
Russian campaign. But you are aware that your book has attracted much
informed comment world-wide, both for the narrowness of its focus and for
the cavalier manner in which you used archival records during your visit to
Ludwigsburg.

 " For instance, you claimed in your talk to have used the interrogation
records of 'literally thousands of the Perpetrators,' as you call them; but
we know that in fact you used scarcely a hundred if that."

 At this, I can feel the temper of the audience behind me rising. I press
on:

 " What concerns me most, however, is the claim that it was only 'ordinary
Germans' who carried out the killings. This is totally untrue and might
lead to the very wrong conclusion that because Germany was finished -
squashed flat during the appalling military conflict of World War II -
therefore the Jews of the world no longer have anything to fear.

 " We know the make-up of the police battalions which carried out the
killings on the eastern front, the battalions to which you attach such
emphasis. In these units the Germans were in a minority - most of the men
were drawn from units of the Baltic states, the Estonians, Latvians, and
Lithuanians, as well as a large number of Ukranians and other Russians too.
And surely this raises a fundamental question, which you would have done
far better to address - "

 The audience are now very restive, as it has dawned on them that I am not
a Goldhagen fan.

 "  - Why did you not ask the far more important question: why everybody
joined in getting rid of their Jews with such zeal, 'Why us?' Let's face
it, when Germany said to her neighbours, in 1942 and 1943 and 1944, 'Give
us your Jews,' Hungary, France, Slovakia, etc., could not hand them over
fast enough! There was no reluctance to do so."

 This generates uproar, but I carry on:

 " And when other countries like England, Sweden and so on were invited to
take in these Jews nobody, nobody, wanted to have them."

 At this there is a sprinkle of applause.

 " Why did you not address that far more vital question? Why did nobody
want the Jews! You address only the question, 'Who did it?' and you fail to
ask the far more ominous question 'Why us?'"

 The answer is more verbal Jello from Goldhagen. He is clearly furious to
have been accused of "inventing," as he (not I) put it, and he has no real
answer to my point that, as he said, the Jews are now "complacent" about
the risk of it all happening again.

 The chairman makes a point of saying that no more questioners will be
allowed to "make statements." So it seems I got in not only under their
radar, but right under their skin as well.

=====

   David Irving, from issue 13 (December 1, 1997) of his Action Report

(Source:   http://www.heretical.com/miscella/irving1.html )

=====


Thought for the Day:

"When the Lord sent me forth into the world, He forbade me to put off my
hat to any, high or low."

(George Fox)