Okay, now! Two days ago, I said some rather complimentary things about the John Sack Esquire article, based on an advanced review a cyber scout had sent me. Today I am taking back practically all my praise. While the article made some good point and delivered some excellent quotes, I don't think it did the nature of our struggle justice.
Therefore, this matter calls for a follow-up ZGram.
To be specific, two days ago I wrote:
Sunday is customarily the day when I try to review and abstract the Revisionist News of the Week. I am replacing it today with something I consider really significant - of importance for Revisionism worldwide, for it makes Revisionism 'salonfähig", to use a fitting German word: a topic to be discussed in polite company, tuxedo and all - and without genuflection.
Hot off the presses, and boasting a readership of some 700,000, Esquire Magazine - a "highbrow slick", as it is known in the vernacular, read by the intellectual elite in America - ran an extensive feature on Revisionism that is supposedly already on the news stands around the country and overseas. I haven't seen it yet. It runs nine pages long.
I have read that article now. I consider it a supercilious, snide article - albeit cleverly written.
By way of background:
In his January Power Letter, Ernst Zundel wrote:
On December 30, '99 I decided to go back to LA to watch the Leuchter film quietly by myself one more time, with my note pad in hand, to write down the fine-tuning changes I felt I had detected. Traffic can sometimes be horrible in Los Angeles, and on this day I got into a gridlock situation. I realized I was not going to make it to the 2 p.m. film showing on time, and therefore I decided to make a detour to visit the Institute for Historical Review in Costa Mesa instead for a while.
I was hardly there when in walked none other than John Sack, whose disturbing book "An Eye for an Eye" I had read years ago. I had also seen him on 60 Minutes which did a pretty good piece on him and the controversy about the book.
Sack looked around at the people in office while I studied him without saying a word. He looked at me quizzically. A slight, nervous flutter seemed to come over his face. Then he burst into a broad, to me surprising, smile, walked toward me, and we shook hands while Mark Weber made the introductions. I was surprised at the reaction he had to me. It was genuinely warm, I felt. Within minutes we sat at the IHR conference table and John Sack - insisting that I call him by first name and borrowing my little, ever present tape recorder - proceeded to make an interview with me right on the spot for an article he plans to do about Revisionists for Esquire in the next few months.
I told him I had to leave soon to watch the Leuchter film one more time in the evening. He thought it would be a great idea to come with me, watch the film with me, and make notes of my reaction right in the theater, asking me questions during the film. I thought that was a swell idea. I was happy to cooperate, for he was going to interview Errol Morris [the producer of the film Mr. Death] and ask him about the changes I thought I had detected, and my criticisms. This way I could get my message through to Errol Morris. Pretty neat!
We drove up separately. He was a little late, but we met in the theater. Unfortunately, a Jewish woman became very agitated by our "in-movie interview", stood up, came over, and indignantly admonished us - and being the polite people we are, we obliged and shut up so she could watch the film undisturbed.
Afterwards, Sack invited me out to a nice Polish restaurant, the Varsovy, just off a ritzy Santa Monica area, and we continued our interview for almost another two hours. We covered every topic from the torture and murder of Germans by Polish-Jewish interrogators and prison wardens and guards in Silesia in 1945-46 to the atrocities committed in "The Hell at Lamsdorf" where thousands of Germans died and more thousands were beaten to death after the end of the war. We covered all kinds of Revisionist topics, the technical requirements and times needed to cremate a body, to the possibility of Germany's Eastern territories coming back to Germany and Germany demanding reparations and restitution for losses and damages incurred during and since World War II from the Poles, Czechs and especially Israel and Jewish groups and individuals who have received billions upon billions in reparations based on fraudulent claims and events which never happened - like homicidal gassings!
I found John Sack woefully ignorant in some areas, blinded by dogma in other areas - but as a human being I found him to be a cultured, educated, interesting companion. I was sad to leave that night. On the way home, as I drove and drove and drove through rush-hour type traffic at 70 miles an hour after 10 o'clock at night, I reflected on my encounter with this man. The more I thought about the things we discussed while he interviewed me, the more I thought I should interview him instead - about his extraordinary book, "An Eye for an Eye."
The next morning I faxed a query to the IHR, asking them to broach the subject with him. It was not long before John Sack called me personally to say he would be delighted to do the interview. We agreed on a time and date. He had to go home to the Midwest, but he said he would fly back in from Idaho, and we would meet in LA at the end of the week.
I have known Ernst since September 1994 and have worked with him intensely, but I have never seen him so agitated as he was for several days as he sat by my California pool and studied up on "An Eye for an Eye" in preparation for the John Sack interview. He had borrowed my copy, and soon it was bulging with Post-it stickies. I almost felt sorry for Sack because I know that he was in for the intellectual pummeling of his life - and "pummeling" is speaking euphemistically.
If John Sack had harbored any talmudic delusions about the seriousness and thrust of Revisionism, this was the time for him to wake up. Fast! Ernst Zundel was going to see to it. Of that I could be certain.
What they actually talked about when they met for the second time, I do not know - but I saw, when Ernst came back, that he had unloaded thoroughly, and that he had succeeded, for he commented, kind of in passing, that Mark Weber had hovered over them, afraid that the interview might get out of hand - intellectually, of course, you understand!
And what did Sack absorb? You be the judge if this is honesty!
Sack in the Esquire article:
Everyone in America believes in one or another ridiculous thing. Me, I belong to the International Society for Cryptozoology, and I firmly believe that in Lake Tele, in the heart of the Congo, there is a living, breathing dinosaur. Admittedly, this is trivial compared with Holocaust denial, but fifteen years ago I even went to the Congo to photograph it. I didn't - I didn't even see it - but I still believe in it. Other people believe more momentous things, and the ... deniers believe that the Holocaust didn't happen. Like me in the Congo, they're wrong, wrong, wrong, but to say that emphatically isn't to say (as some people do) that they're odious, contemptible, despicable. To say that they're rats (as does Deborah Lipstadt, the author of Denying the Holocaust) is no more correct than to say it of people who, in their ignorance, believe the less pernicious fallacy that Oswald didn't kill Kennedy."
Well, isn't that rich, John Sack? Did anything stick what Ernst told you of the substance and the essence of Revisionism? No? Well, you don't say!
You pay attention, closely! You say Ernst Zündel and the other activists who have been subjected to a Talmudic array of abuses - of beatings, bombings, jailings, arson, bombs etc. are ". . . wrong, wrong, wrong"? They kind of hang around Revisionism for a hobby?
You are too smart a man to believe that. So why do you say that? Why do you imply that? Just what is the thrust of your article?
On Memorial Day, I met John Sack for the first time at the International Revisionist Conference, which is the backdrop for the Esquire article. Ernst, I and Anita Wilson, one of our Black Revisionists - we do have a few, and they aren't being vilified in our company! - were having breakfast together in the restaurant when Sack appeared around the corner - and asked if he could join us.
Soon, Anita was leaning hard on the guy, as in "...why do you Jews always..." and ". . . how come you Jews never..." and "Don't you Jews GET it at all ...?" etc. etc. as I was listening. John Sack sat pretending that he was amazed at her fire and fury. She let him have it good!
Then I spoke up, for I couldn't let this opportunity pass by, could I?
Here's how I described that encounter in my June "Lebensraum!" letter to my supporters who, with their donations, are underwriting our activism:
I met John Sack at the IHR convention in California during Memorial Weekend. I have my own feelings about Sack, which I will share with you.
John Sack has done some good things for Revisionism, and everybody dances around him and praises him to the hilt. I say that's fine and good - but do we have one Jewish journalist here who will put jaw on jaw and come right out and say that we are right? Is he brave enough to say the gas chambers are nothing but bunk? He has been well-connected to CBS, Stars and Stripes, The Harvard Crimson etc, and such a statement would count with the powers that be. But no. He keeps that sweet, politically correct little goodie for himself, just to be on the safe and sunny side - as do so many other Jews who could make a difference to our struggle, including the otherwise courageous and outspoken Norman Finkelstein and the "revised" Hilberg.
So I watched John Sack with a very jaundiced eye all through that convention weekend, and when we finally had breakfast together and he was putting jam, as we like to say in German, around everybody's chops, he slyly commented that I was helping Ernst and, gee, no wonder he was still before the Human Rights Commission for our "collaboration" known to all and sundry! At that, I could feel that "my cup runneth over" and I stepped forward and gave him a piece of my mind.
He immediately switched on his little tape recorder - and I leaned into it and finished with gusto exactly what I had to say.
So now I assume that I am in the Esquire article which is supposed to come out early next year.
In the Esquire article, Sack describes this encounter in the following way:
"The tone of the Jewish establishment," said Zündel at another breakfast in the airy downstairs restaurant, "is so strident, offensive, grating, so denigrating of Germans, there's going to be -" He stopped short.
"We are so sick of the Holocaust!" a German woman with us took up. "Gentiles have it thrown in their faces morning, noon, and night without relief. Do the Jewish people know that?"
"They convict us, imprison us, make us into outcasts," said Zündel, who is now being prosecuted in Canada for, among other things, truthfully saying that Germans didn't make soap out of Jews. "Teachers lose their jobs. Professors lose their tenure, and I say this isn't good for the Jewish community."
"I see dissatisfaction," said the German woman, "that I shudder about. I think the Jewish community has to try to lessen it. This censorship! This terrorism!" In no way did her or Zündel's jaw get twisted like a twisted rubber band into the outward contours of hate, but the woman's quivered at the edges somewhat.
You see, John Sack, we have a cause. You know that. You are too smart not to know that. And it is unfair to the nature of our struggle, and to the price we have already paid, to sit there and insinuate that what you see is, Number One, a bunch of kooks to get together for playing footsie with each other with their latent "Anti-Semitism" - and Number Two, for you to keep on playing ostrich with your feathers in the air. It is dishonest to describe us, as you did in the following passage, weaving hard-earned Revisionist findings of truth into some paragraphs that ring with supercilious cackling:
Sack in the Esquire article:
The deniers also say that at Auschwitz the witnesses said that the Germans poured cyanide pellets through holes in the chamber roofs - even said that the Germans joked as they poured, "Na, gib ihnen schön zu fressen"-Well, give them something good to eat. It's there that the NO HOLES? NO HOLOCAUST! on the T-shirts comes in. The roofs at Auschwitz still stand (or, rather, lie collapsed, for the Germans blew up the buildings in November 1944 so the world wouldn't know), and, the deniers say, you can't find holes in those former roofs for the Germans to pour the cyanide through.
Myself, I'd call this one of life's mysteries, like why there are holes in Swiss cheese and not in cheddar, but everyone in the palm-filled hotel made a tremendous deal of it.
John Sack, there are no holes! That is the absence of the smoking gun - the smoking gun your people have pretended that they found. There arent's any holes through which, allegedly, the poison was poured in. There never were. So how could your Six Million have been poisoned through non-existent holes? It's called forensic science - and you know well and good that that is where it's at!
And now you think you can dismiss it by some silly sentence read by some 700,000 people that "...everyone in the palm-filled hotel made a tremendous deal of it ..."? And now you have the gall to say, "Well, gee, these people claim there IS no smoking gun? Ha-ha!"
Show us the smoking gun, John Sack!
Sack, writing of David Irving and his headline-making Holocaust Trial against Deborah Lipstadt at the beginning of last year:
Irving lost, but not before he invoked the "No holes? No Holocaust!" argument. On the stand, a witness for the author and publisher cited some Auschwitz witnesses, and Irving, acting as his own attorney, leaped like a crouching lion. "Professor," said Irving, a granite-featured, imposing man, "we are wasting our time, really, are we not? There were never any holes in that roof. There are no holes in that roof today. They [the Germans] cannot have poured cyanide capsules through that roof. You yourself have stood on that roof and looked for those holes and not found them. Our experts have stood on that roof and not found them. The holes were never there. What do you say to that?"
"The roof is a mess. The roof is absolutely a mess," said the professor. "The roof is in fragments."
"You have been to Auschwitz how many times?"
"Sometimes twice or three times yearly."
"Have you frequently visited this roof?"
"Yes, I have been there, yes."
"Have you never felt the urge to go and start scraping where you know those holes would have been?"
"The last thing I'd ever have done is start scraping away."
"How much does an air ticket to Warsaw cost? $100? $200?"
"I have no idea."
"If," said Irving triumphantly, "you were to go to Auschwitz with a trowel and clean away the gravel and find a reinforced concrete hole, I would abandon my action immediately. That would drive such a hole through my case that I would have no possible chance of defending it."
Not quite flying to Auschwitz, the author, the publisher, or the professor apparently called up the Auschwitz Museum, for the museum told the Times of London that it had started searching for the fabulous holes. A two-mile drive. A trowel. A camera. That's what the search entailed, but it's now nine months later and the museum hasn't found them.
But lo! Someone did. Not someone from the Auschwitz Museum, but Charles "Chuck" Provan, a letterhead printer in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, and another scheduled speaker here in California. A man of childlike enthusiasms, a roly-poly, red-bearded, merry man, a man with a brandy-glass-shaped face, he'd been an earnest denier until he had an epiphany in December 1990.
Show us the smoking gun, John Sack.
Show us the holes through which, supposedly, industrial-type genocide was committed by the Germans against the Jewish people. And don't haul forth a fringy hillbilly who happens to have bought into your people's smoke-and-mirror plays - and make him front page news. You were privy to the fact that there were many at that conference who felt that Provan should never have spoken. But do you know the difference between us Gentiles and you Jews?
We cut some folks some slack.
You don't. You said so yourself in that Esquire feature, describing yourself and your tribe:
My own speech was on Monday afternoon. It was about An Eye for an Eye, which the Germans among the deniers wanted to hear about so they could share their parents' guilt with the Jews, their parents' victims. No longer did I want to tell the deniers off, but I did want to edify them (and I did) that I and the Jews in An Eye for an Eye devoutly believe that the Holocaust happened. But also I wanted to say something therapeutic, to say something about hate. At the hotel, I'd seen none of it, certainly less than I'd seen when Jews were speaking of Germans. No one had ever said anything remotely like Elie Wiesel, "Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set aside a zone of hate - healthy, virile hate-for what persists in the Germans," and no one had said anything like Edgar Bronfman, the president of the World Jewish Congress. A shocked professor told Bronfman once, "You're teaching a whole generation to hate thousands of Germans," and Bronfman replied, "No, I'm teaching a whole generation to hate millions of Germans."
Well, there you have it. In a nutshell. The haters aren't of our kind. They are to be found in your camp. You recognize that perfectly. You even say so, but in a smug, suave, supercilious tone that is a thin veneer indeed about the Jewish Angst that barely conceals that you are whistling in the dark for fear what might come at you.
Sack:
The normal constraints of time, temperance, and truth do not obstruct some Jewish leaders from their nonstop vituperation of Holocaust deniers. "They're morally ugly. They're morally sick," said Elie Wiesel on PBS. "They bombard us with disinformation", said Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, on the op-ed page of The New York Times. "Holocaust deniers," said Foxman, spreading disinformation himself, "would have [us] believe there were no concentration camps." Myself, I disagree with these Jewish leaders. Most deniers, most attendees in their slacks and shorts at the palm-filled hotel, were like Zündel: people who, as Germans, had chosen to comfort themselves with the wishful thinking that none of their countrymen in the 1940s were genocidal maniacs.
I can sympathize with the Germans, for I've seen a bit of this wishful thinking among some Jews. Seven years ago, I ruefully reported in my book An Eye for an Eye that thousands of Jews who'd survived the Holocaust had rounded up Germans and beat, whipped, tortured, and murdered them - German men, women, children, and babies - in concentration camps run by Jews. This little holocaust was corroborated by 60 Minutes and The New York Times but not by Jewish leaders. They, pardon the expression, denied it, writing reviews whose titles were "The Big Lie" and "False Witness" and "Do Me a Favor - Don't Read This Book." If Jews feel pressed to deny what happened to sixty thousand Germans, then Jews might forgive the Germans, like Zündel, who choose to deny what happened to six million Jews.
And elsewhere, Sack still whistling:
In the United States, thank God, we have the First Amendment. But even in that shuttered ballroom in California, the sixth speaker couldn't say all he wanted to - couldn't, for example, say the Germans didn't kill the Jews deliberately. A few hours earlier, he and I had debated this at a waffle breakfast, debated it in audible voices with no qualms of being arrested, indicted, or imprisoned by federal marshals.
"But what about Eichmann?" I'd asked him. "He wrote that Hitler ordered the physical destruction of the Jews. He wrote about Vergasungslager, gassing camps."
"John. The man was in Israeli captivity."
"Well, what about during the war? Hans Frank, the governor general of Poland, said to exterminate all the Jews, without exception."
"He was only quoted as saying that, John."
"And what about Goebbels? He said a barbaric method was being employed against the Jews. And Himmler? He said the SS knew what a hundred, five hundred, one thousand corpses were like."
"John, I don't know. They might have said it," the sixth speaker told me. "But it isn't true that genocide was a German national policy." A few hours later, the speaker didn't dare repeat this up in the ballroom, for he's a Canadian citizen and his speech was carried live on the Internet in Canada, and if he said what he'd said over waffles, he'd have been prosecuted in Canada. Already he'd been tried twice as well as hit, beaten, bombed, engulfed by a $400,000 fire, and told, "We'll cut your testicles off."
The man's name is Ernst Zündel. He's round-faced and red-faced like in a Hals, he's eternally jolly, and he was born in Calmbach, Germany. If you saw the recent movie about the Holocaust deniers, Mr. Death, he's the man in the hard hat who says, "We Germans will not go down in history as genocidal maniacs. We. Will. Not."
Perhaps this is the place where my ZGram and my message to the Jewish community via half-hearted, half-assed, wishy-washy journalists like Sack should end:
"WE GERMANS WILL NOT GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS GENOCIDAL MANIACS. WE. WILL. NOT."
Let that be your Thought for the Day!