Copyright (c) 2000 - Ingrid A. Rimland


ZGram: Where Truth is Destiny

 

November 8, 2000

 

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

 

Long before I knew Ernst Zundel as well as I do now, I knew that if he were to retire that moment and never lift another finger for Western man after the Leuchter Report, he would have left his mark on the Twenty-First Century - like no other man on earth.

 

Of course we know today that the Leuchter Report was rudimentary, compiled as it was in the midst of a grueling trial, but it has since been verified and refined by three additional reports - and thus, the Great Holocaust Hoax has now been scientifically disproven.

 

But it is still gasping politically - much like a mortally wounded dinosaur, thrashing and flapping about. You see this in many places on earth - for instance, in the courts of Canada where the Marxist-flavored, so-called Human Rights Commission is still trying to contain what cannot be contained: the myth that industrial-scale genocide of Jews happened exactly as Hollywood has told us. IT'S A LIE! IT'S A HISTORICALLY USEFUL AND FINANCIALLY PROFITABLE LIE! And Ernst Zundel said it first as loudly as he could - and then set out to prove it, document by document. And is still doing that - precisely that! - today.

 

God, how they hate that man!

 

But the revolting gas chamber story that has been barfed all over Western man is not the only historical lie that has been forced down everybody's throats - against every healthy instinct in our bones.

 

As the Human Rights Tribunal hearings around the Zundelsite begin again today, Professor Tony Martin of Wellesley College, a Black educator, will testify for the defense in the Zundelsite hearings. Our enemies aren't going to like that one bit! After all, is Ernst Zundel not supposed to be a "racist" whom they are trying to ban from the Net?

 

I am quoting Professor Martin because his story parallels mine regarding Canada Customs who confiscated his books with impunity - as arbitrarily as they did my "Lebensraum!" novels:

 

"My own book, THE JEWISH ONSLAUGHT, has been arbitrarily deemed "hate literature" by Canadian customs authorities, presumably at the behest of organized Canadian Jewry. The book is a scholarly polemic responding to organized Jewry's attempts to vilify me for raising in my classes a historical fact which they deem inconvenient, ***namely the well-documented Jewish involvement in the African slave trade***. My book has been effectively banned in Canada without prior notification or opportunity to respond to this act of arbitrariness." (Emphasis added)

 

Here is a slightly shortened summary of Professor Martin's testimony today:

 

"Synopsis of Views"

 

for Appearance as an Expert Witness in the Matter of Sabina Citron and Toronto Mayor's Committee on Community and Race Relations and Ernst Zundel and Canadian Human Rights Commission, File No. T460/1596

 

Tony Martin

 

Professor of Africana Studies, Wellesley College

 

Prepared September 21, 1998

 

1. I have done neither original research nor extensive reading on the Jewish holocaust. The question of the precise figure for Jewish casualties is not a pressing concern of mine. I do not believe, however, that this question should be exempt from the possibility of historical revisionism.

 

2. I do not know Ernst Zundel and had never read the Zundel website before being asked to be an expert witness for this hearing. I am willing to appear as an expert witness, however, because I believe that the questions raised here transcend the facts of this particular case. Many Black scholars have in recent years come under attack for their interpretation and reinterpretation of the historical record as it pertains to the Black experience. The trend towards criminalization of historical revisionism at the urging of powerful and influential groups seems out of place in a democracy. Racism and bigotry are always to be deplored. In the absence of genuine evidence to the contrary, historical revisionism ought not to be equated with racism just because some individuals or groups find the facts inconvenient.

 

2. Revisionism is at the very core of historical scholarship. It is a well-known maxim of the historical profession that each generation rewrites history. This may be due to new documentary evidence, new theories or simply a result of historians asking new questions of old data in the light of new contemporary issues.

 

3. As a historian of the African world I can say that many (perhaps even most) of the important books by Black historians this century have been revisionist in nature. Examples would include Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery (1944), which challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of English philanthropists being primarily responsible for the abolition of British slavery. (Williams posited an economic explanation). W.E.B. DuBois' Black Reconstruction in America (1935) also comes to mind. DuBois challenged the popular view that African Americans did not deserve civil rights in the reconstruction period after the United States Civil War.

 

My own magnum opus, Race First: the Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (1976) is a revisionist work. It challenged the prevailing scholarly notion of Marcus Garvey as a buffoon and a crook.

 

Books like these often generate great controversy and strident invective. It has not been normal, however, for such invective to include calls for the criminalization of dissenting opinions.

 

4. Black historians are especially sensitive to these issues since we have suffered more than most as a result of our revisionism. Yet I am not aware of any successful efforts to legislate into silence those who have disagreed with us.

 

5. The depth of Black sensitivity to this question can perhaps be gauged by the following quotes from Black historians and one white abolitionist (Wendell Phillips) -

 

"...I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience."

 

-W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 ( 1934).

 

"Another reason why some object to the facts as given in my books is that they feel that their own learning is being impeached. If such facts were true, why, they certainly would have known them."

 

-J.A. Rogers, Sex and Race, Vol. III (1944).

 

"The schools of America and Europe, therefore, have practically no conception of history. They have been so far misled by propaganda that actual history is branded as heresy."

 

- Carter G. Woodson, in the Journal of Negro History (1927).

 

"The colored people are not yet known.... Their history ... has been written by them who ... are not their representatives, and, therefore, do not properly nor fairly present their wants and claims among their fellows."

 

- Martin Robison Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852).

 

"We have too often a deliberate attempt so to change the facts of history that the story will make pleasant reading for Americans."

 

- W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935).

 

"Even as the white manufacturers have bleached out our salt, sugar, flour, so the white historian has bleached out world history. The dark or mineral portion has been rejected. Of course this process has produced a product beautifully pleasing to the eyes of those who have been psychologized to admire it, but which, nevertheless, is constipative and harmful to the mental digestion."

 

- J.A. Rogers, Sex and Race, Vol. III (1944).

 

"...the West Indian historian of the future has a crucial role to play in the education of the West Indian people in their own history and in the merciless exposure of the shams, the inconsistencies, the prejudice of metropolitan historians."

 

- Eric Williams, British Historians and the West Indies (1964).

 

"The historical field therefore provides the battleground on which imperialist politics struggle against nationalist politics."

 

- Eric Williams, British Historians and the West Indies (1964).

 

"It is hardly necessary for me to say that, as a life-long Anti-Imperialist, I make no pretense (as is the fashion among imperialist writers on Colonies) to impartiality. Nevertheless, I have tried to be as objective as possible in presenting the facts, yet critical in my interpretation and analysis of these facts.... In this respect the book constitutes an indictment of a social system

 

Imperialism -- from the point of view of an African."

 

-George Padmore, Africa: Britain's Third Empire (1949).

 

"You think me a fanatic to-night, for you read history, not with your eyes, but with your prejudices."

 

- Wendell Phillips, "Toussaint L'Ouverture," (1861) .

 

6. Black historians and the Black population generally have also had to deal over the years with academics in other disciplines and others who have propounded views considered insensitive to most Black people. Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. founding father, thought that Black people lacked the capacity to reason (Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ca.l781). Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in The Bell Curve (1994), thought that African Americans were genetically inferior to whites, Ashkenazi Jews and Asians. Professor Michael Levin of the City College of New York freely expresses views of supposed African American inferiority. The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and the Court of Appeals both nevertheless upheld Levin's right to teach, free of university strictures (966F.2d 85 [2nd Cir. 1992]). Mary Lefkowitz of Wellesley College has written that Afrocentric scholars (who have revised many areas of white interpretation pertaining to African world history), are introducing an element of irrationality into academia (Chronicle of Higher Education, May 6, 1992, A52.)

 

7. Jewish scholars and activists have been just as likely as anyone else to end up on the wrong side of these issues. Herrnstein of The Bell Curve, Michael Levin and Mary Lefkowitz were/are all Jews. Jewish scholarly revisionism on the topic of the enslavement of Africans has on occasion appeared racist and hurtful to many Black people. It need hardly be said that slavery for African descended people is a subject no less sensitive than the Jewish holocaust is for Jews. The Jewish historians Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, for example, caused deep anger in the Black community when they appeared to argue that slavery wasn't so bad after all (Time on the Cross, 1974). The Jewish historian David Brion Davis has similarly tried to blame Africans for their own enslavement .

 

8. Nor is such modern Jewish revisionism at the Black community's expense without historical precedent. The Jewish historian, Dr. Harold D. Brackman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in California, has documented the fifteen hundred year old Talmudic origins of the Hamitic Myth, which alleges a Biblical curse on the African race. "There is no denying," he writes in his 1977 Ph.D. dissertation, "that the Babylonian Talmud was the first source to read a Negrophobic content into [the Noah story in the Biblical Book of Genesis, from which the Talmudic gloss derives]." Brackman continues,

 

The more important version of the myth, however, ingeniously ties in the origins of blackness -- and of other, real and imagined Negroid traits - with Noah's Curse itself. According to it, Ham is told by his outraged father that because you have abused me in the darkness of the night, your children shall be born black and ugly; because you have twisted your head to cause me embarrassment, they shall have kinky hair and red eyes; because your lips jested at my exposure, theirs shall swell; and because you neglected my nakedness, they shall go naked with their shamefully elongated male members exposed for all to see ("The Ebb and Flow of Conflict: A History of Black-Jewish Relations through 1900," Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, 1977, pp. 80,81.)

 

The Hamitic Myth in time became a major pretext for enslaving Africans. Both Jewish and non-Jewish slave traders subscribed to this notion.

 

It must be noted in all fairness, however, that Brackman now appears to deny authorship of the above sentiments, as witness his letter to the New York Times (Feb. 14, 1994, A 16.) Lenni Brenner, author of Jews in America Today ( 1986) comments, "It is amazing that anyone could lie about what he wrote in a book that sits in the libraries for all to check!" (New York Amsterdam News, Feb. 19,1994).

 

The Israeli scholar Israel Shahak was likewise moved to say of the twelfth century Jewish philosopher Maimonides, "Unfortunately, in addition to his attitude towards non-Jews generally and Christians in particular, Maimonides was also an anti-Black racist." Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed, "justly considered to be the greatest work of Jewish religious philosophy," considered Black people to be somewhere between monkeys and human beings (Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion, p.25).

 

The unthinking rush to criminalize and demonize those who do not subscribe to some people's view of historical orthodoxy can lead to a level of arbitrariness, inconsistency and cavalier disregard for the truth that will do justice to a totalitarian state. Those who follow this path often impute to the accused statements they did not make, attack straw men of their own dishonest creation, myopically see only one side of a story and rely on sweeping undocumented generalizations that cannot withstand disinterested scrutiny.

 

I have already cited the case of Dr. Harold D. Brackman saying in the New York Times the opposite of what he says in his Ph.D. dissertation. The same Dr. Brackman, in his Jew on the Brain: A Public Refutation of the Nation of Islam's The Secret Relationhip Between Blacks and Jews (1992), takes issue with the suggestion that Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World with Jewish refugees from the Spanish inquisition, among others (pp. 17,18). He sees this as some sort of thinly veiled charge of a "Jewish conspiracy." Yet Simon Wiesenthal, for whose center Brackman works, is the author of the Macmillan Publishing Company's Sails of Hope: The Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus (1973). In this book Wiesenthal goes even further than those Brackman condemns as anti-Semitic. His self-proclaimed "radical re-interpretation" (that is, revisionism), proves, according to the book's dust jacket, that "Columbus was of Jewish origin." So here we have the eponymous founder of the Wiesenthal Center saying something which one of his own lieutenants considers anti-Semitic.

 

The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, condemned as anti-Semitic by Brackman, but closer in this instance t o Brackman's employer, Wiesenthal, has been denied entry into Canada as "hate" literature. Wiesenthal's book probably has not been denied entry. This highlights the arbitrariness and lack of principle into which the effort at criminalizing historical dissent can descend in the hands of the over-zealous.

 

Jewish groups in the United States had the film "The Liberators" (1992) pulled off the air at the Public Broadcasting Service because they disputed its depiction of African American soldiers liberating Jews at the concentration camps of Buchenwald, Dachau and Lambach. The fact that some of the liberators and liberated Jews were still alive and there were photographs to substantiate the historical record counted for nothing.

 

The goal of all this seems to be what Israel Shahak calls "a deceitful, sentimental and ultra-romantic Jewish historiography from which all inconvenient facts have been expunged" ( Shahak, Jewish Religion, Jewish History, p. 16). I am in a position to corroborate this from personal experience, since my own book, The Jewish Onslaught, has been arbitrarily deemed "hate literature" by Canadian customs authorities, presumably at the behest of organized Canadian Jewry. The book is a scholarly polemic responding to organized Jewry's attempts to vilify me for raising in my classes a historical fact which they deem inconvenient, namely the well-documented Jewish involvement in the African slave trade. My book has been effectively banned in Canada without prior notification or opportunity to respond to this act of arbitrariness.

 

The situation at the moment seems to be one in which Jewish authors such as Richard Herrnstein and Michael Levin can espouse openly atrocious doctrines of racial inferiority in other races while scholars of other races, such as myself, have our books confiscated or worse for putting forward factual refutations of materials we consider offensive. Real hate literature is something to be abhorred, but the heavy-handed suppression of dissenting historical opinion under the cloak of anti-hate activism is equally bad. It may be worse.

 

=====

 

Thought for the Day:

 

"Truth is on the march, and nothing can stop it!"

 

(Émile Zola)


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