Copyright (c) 1997 - Ingrid A. Rimland
ADL: Ingrid Rimland is an example of an extremist who has achieved a measure of notoriety on the Internet. Rimland describes herself as a writer and speaker with a "flourishing" speaking career. Since the beginning of 1996, she has been actively promoting Holocaust denial on the World Wide Web, where she is the Internet voice of Ernst Zündel of Canada, a neo-Nazi Holocaust denier. She writes a daily column, "Ingrid's Z-Gram," for Zundel's eponymous Web site "The Zundelsite."
Reply: I had to look up the word "eponymous" and found out that
it derives from a noun, "eponym," meaning "A real or legendary
personage from whom a nation, city, epoch etc. is reputed to derive its
name."
So far, so good. Small correction, however: It is my website, and not Ernst
Zundel's website. I merely borrowed his name, because I wanted to make known
to the world the nature, scope and essence of the Zundel struggle.
ADL: An eager acolyte and fervent admirer of Zundel, Rimland shares and peddles his "revised" version of history. It is standard conspiratorial, Holocaust-denial material with a strong flavor of atavistic German nationalism: The Holocaust never happened; it is an extortion "racket" run by Jews for the purpose of financing Israel and humiliating Germany and Germans.
Reply: My handy dictionary tells me that an "acolyte" is an ".
. . attendant on the ministers officiating at a sacred rite, who performs
subordinate duties."
:)
ADL: Rimland and Zundel also share a common childhood experience: they lived through the total defeat of the Nazis - he in Germany, she in the Ukraine - a defeat both lament. They both express profound admiration for Hitler and National Socialism.
Answer: Well, we do admire Hitler more than Stalin, while speculating that,
in all likelihood, the opposite is true of members of the tribe.
"Lament" is the wrong word, however - we grieve for some 50 million
people (and quite possibly many, many more!) who lost their lives as a direct
or indirect result of too many Aryans having chosen Stalin over Hitler,
thanks to a lot of tribal coaching, which is why the entire world now fears
the "New World Order" and shivers at what it might mean.
ADL: Born in 1936 in Ukraine, Rimland, in a brief autobiography published on her personal Web site, describes her family as "German-descent Mennonite wheat farmers . . . who had been persecuted in {Stalin's} Soviet Union . . ." Her personal experiences make their way into her novels as in a work-in-progress she describes on her Web site. Titled "Lebensraum," it will be a multipart epic about the loss of ethnic identity. In it, she plans to show that World War II was fought "for the benefit of a shadowy power" that used a "relentlessly liberal media" to convince Americans that the war had been "unleashed by Germany to hurt and decimate the Jews." In the work, she will portray Hitler's Germany as offering "the hope that rescue and delivery {would} be sent to {the ethnic Germans living in Russia}." The story of Hitler's invasion of Russia will be presented as an initially "spectacular success" that was transformed into "an almost apocalyptic rush into terror, defeat and disaster."
Answer: So far, so good. "Lebensraum" is serious business - you
bet your shabbiest shekel!
ADL: Given the obvious sympathies of her family, it is no wonder that they left the Soviet Union in 1943 with the retreating German army. But finding Germany "a devastated wasteland," her family moved on "to the rain forests of Paraguay" where she later married and had children, one of whom was brain damaged.
Answer: "Obvious sympathies?" Out of an ethnically tightly knit
clan of several hundreds, four of us were left in 1941: My grandmother,
58, my mother, 28, my baby sister, 6 months old, and I, a kindergartner.
The rest of my own German family, by then, had been arrested, clubbed, starved,
shot, shipped to Siberia to chafe and die like beasts of burden - including
my own father. Who would not have had obvious sympathies for liberators
who wrestled us out of the bloody teeth of Communism, which many - then
as now - held to have sprung straight out of Jewish brains?
Think Marx, Bronstein, Kaganovich. Think Ilya Ehrenburg who hectored the
Red Army: "Kill. Kill. Kill. No one is innocent. Neither the living,
nor the yet unborn!"
ADL: In the 1960s, Rimland was on the move again, migrating to Canada in 1960 and then, in 1967, to the United States. There she went to college and, personally interested in the education of special-needs children, eventually earned an Ed.D. Since coming to the United States, Rimland has written three books, two of which are based, in part, on her personal experiences. One of these, The Wanderers, is an account of the Mennonite "exodus out of Ukraine in 1943."
Answer: True. The write-up could have mentioned, for the sake of balance
and fairness, that I started college with no more than 3 years' worth of
grammar school, and that I wrote "The Wanderers" in my sixth language
- an ethnic novel depicting the Wehrmacht precisely as it was perceived
by the genocidally decimated ethnic Russian-Germans at that time: As liberators!
not destroyers!
That novel won several awards, including the highly prestigious California
Literature Medal Award as "best first novel by a California writer
for 1977." I must have said something worthwhile.
ADL: Rimland's personal web pages advertise her writing and speaking, indicating that her areas of emphasis are Special Education, Migrant Education, Literature and History. One page has a list of her speaking engagements. It includes a number of major universities including Stanford and the University of Wisconsin, numerous workshops sponsored by the National Education Association, various organizations such as the American Association of University Women, Federated Women's Clubs, the Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs. And though (her) Web site media page shows that she has been a guest on several of Ernst Zundel's radio programs, she does not identify Zundel or give any but the most oblique indication of his or her views about Hitler and the Holocaust.
Answer: Why should I? I have two web pages: One that advertises me and my
writing/speaking career, and one that is my activist page on behalf of my
defamed people and country.
I was a writer and speaker in my own right long before I met Ernst Zundel.
I had crafted a highly illustrious professional life long before I met Ernst
Zundel. Need I say I had no enemies before I met Ernst Zundel? I have plenty
of enemies now - foremost such outfits as the ADL whose business is defamation
and censorship by stealth and intimidation through character assassination.
What does Ernst Zundel have to do with what I have achieved with my own
strength in my own right? And who will blame me for throwing my linguistic
talents behind a man who has been systematically defamed and vilified with
buckets of slime as few other people on earth?
For what? Because he is an activist on behalf of HIS defamed people and
country?
It is not to anyone's credit that the spotted owl enjoys more protection
in our times and on this earth than a human being called Ernst Zundel. Now
there are two of us.
Might there be four? Eight? Sixteen? Think exponential thoughts! Just keep
on going for a month and see what numbers you will get.
ADL: While she has learned to be cautious, experience and education have not diminished her sense of injury, persecution and victimization. She denounces and heaps scorn upon those who attack her views as gross distortions of history willfully constructed to further her anti-Semitism and neo-Nazi views. Her enemies are "Holohoaxers" or "Holohuggers" who try to destroy the "ethnic pride" of Aryans:
"We {of German descent} have been decimated horribly. . . And now we must rebuild. . . We have been deceived in the most vicious, cruel way, about most anything pertaining to {World War II}. We have been lied to and lied to and lied to - and that includes what National Socialism was really all about. It was NOT about a witch hunt to kill every Jew in sight." (Z-Gram, July 6, 1996)
Answer: How brazen can our opposition be! Here they whine and weep and moan
for decades in the electronic media, films and public print about their
own travails, and mock a German stating his own people's suffering. The
"defamation" of a people called the Germans surely didn't start
with me!
ADL: The Holocaust, in her view, is emblematic of this assault. "Holocaust teaching" she writes, "is . . . child abuse. It is adult abuse. It is ethnic abuse. I want to go on record that it is soul-abuse." (Z-Gram, June 5, 1996)
Answer: That is exactly right. I couldn't have said it better today!
ADL: Rimland knows who is responsible for this "distortion" of history: it is ZOG, the "Zionist Occupation Government." She does acknowledge, presumably to fend off the charge that she is an anti-Semite, that not all Jews are part of ZOG. But she insists that "many influential {Jews} are, and when writers like myself use this term, not only are these Jews addressed, but also. . . their nest-fouling toadies, lackeys and yes-men who come out of the Aryan ranks." (Z-Gram, July 20, 1996)
Answer: Well, how else could I have put it? I don't think every Jew is guilty.
I do think many are. I don't think every member of the Aryan fold is exactly
a model of deportment for whom our people can feel pride. I do think many
are.
As one of my protagonists in "Lebensraum" has put it: "It's
not that we're the best. It's that we are the FIRST who STRIVE to be the
best."
ADL: Rimland's goal is identical to that of other Holocaust deniers. Destroy the memory of the Holocaust and it might just be possible, by relativizing the rest of history, to reconstruct the mythic Hitler who, in an article reprinted by Rimland, is described as "the most notable figure of the 20th century . . . {the man} who directed the miraculous transformation of a broken {Germany} into the most progressive and advanced Nation of its time." (Z-Gram, June 26, 1996).
Answer: No. The ADL has that one wrong. We do not want to "reconstruct
the mythic Hitler." He was unique - a product of his times. I personally
disapprove of all this infantile Heil-Hitlering. Each generation finds its
own heroes. The coming generations will find theirs. And it could happen
that those leaders will not be to the ADL's liking. I, furthermore, believe
that the world's coming leaders will not be willing to ignore the potent
lessons of the Hitler times.
But do I want to "destroy the memory of the Holocaust"? You betcha.
It is a filthy lie the way it has been concocted and is being peddled and
marketed like so much other chintzy merchandise of questionable quality
that comes apart once you examine it.
ADL: Each day, Rimland pushes material such as this out onto the Internet, expressing confidence that she and her fellow anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers are having a terrific impact on the prevailing view of history. While her potential audience is enormous, her real readership seems very modest. Zundel's Web site, decorated with his symbol, the twisted "Z," is visited, Rimland claims, by some 300 people a day. The "Z-Gram" is also E-mailed to little more than 300 subscribers, posted on the alt.revisionism newsgroup, and is circulated by recipients to a number of extremist-oriented computerized mail-lists.
Answer: This piece was obviously written a year ago - possibly at the beginning
of 1996, when the Zundelsite was still a relative unknown. Since then, the
actions of our enemies have made it known world-wide.
How known? There were over a dozen spontaneous mirror sites during the cyber-standoff
in February of 1996. One German magazine - I believe it was Der Spiegel
- said that 7% of the estimated sixty million websites sported the blue
ribbon in response to the Zundelsite censorship attempt.
That's 4.2 million right there! And that was 18 months ago!
Since the latest censorship attempt by Jewish groups using the Canadian
Human Rights Commission as a vehicle of choice for censorship, approximately
30 mirrors now exist globally. What is the combined visitor count? Why don't
we let them guess? Obviously worrisome enough to the ADL - otherwise, why
the continued vitriolic attacks and smears?
ADL: Rimland's impact on Internet users as a group cannot be fully determined but it is clear that she does play a role in the world of Holocaust denial. Some of those on her mailing list are the stalwarts of the denier crowd - Greg Raven, Bradley Smith, Arthur Butz, author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Some are known racists and anti-Semites such as Don Black and Louis Beam. Others, less well known, are people whose E-mail addresses frequently show up in the various extremist areas of the Internet. Ingrid Rimland is helping to shape the rhetoric of Holocaust denial and to create a sense of solidarity among the widely dispersed cyberspace extremists.
You be the judge. Am I a "dangerous extremist"?
If the rest of the "widely dispersed cyberspace extremists" are
as "dangerous" as I, why would the ADL be worried - since by their
own assessment, I am officiating as an underling with little credibility?
The truth is dangerous. Not I.
And truth, my Webster's dictionary says, means "corresponding or conforming
to fact and reality" and "Right, according to divine law."
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"Nobody worries about being called "anti-Italian" or "anti-French" or "anti-Christian"; these aren't words that launch avalanches of vituperation and make people afraid to do business with you. It's pointless to ask what "anti-Semitic" means. It means trouble."
(Sobrans, September 1995, p. 4)