We live in interesting times. No longer do we have to beat our drums, it now appears. The Chosenites are doing it for us.
I am piecing this together from half a dozen different sources.
It seems to have started out with a comment that one Christopher Hitchens, editor of Vanity Fair, has made, wherein he said something to the effect that ". . . child molesters and Holocaust deniers don't survive in politics." ( I am quoting here from memory)
From there, it went from bad to worse.
Now Washington, D.C., is aflame with this latest. It was on major TV shows last night, and major papers across the country have run articles with the heading or subheading "Beltway dispute takes ugly turn with charge of Holocaust denial."
When I asked Ernst Zundel about his opinion on this highest echelon political flap, his response was a dry: "The Revolution is eating its own children."
I don't know the background of the ". . . falling-out between Christopher Hitchens of Vanity Fair and well-known White House aide and Clinton defender Sidney Blumenthal. It is reported that Hitchens and Blumenthal had been friends for fifteen years - not any more, it seems!
According to Jonathan Broder reporting from Washington a couple of days ago, whatever enmity might have been brewing between those two has "escalated from harsh charges of perjury and perfidy to one of the most emotionally charged accusations one can level at a political foe in the United States: Holocaust denial."
There is a third player in this tale, author Edward J. Epstein, friendly with Blumenthal, who told a reporter from NBC that four years ago, Hitchens had - horrors! - questioned whether the Holocaust had ever taken place.
The Anti-Defamation League waded into the brawl by stating that Hitchens is not a Holocaust denier, and now Hitchens, no friend of President Clinton's, is accusing Epstein of launching a plot to destroy his reputation and is considering legal action against him.
"Why now?" Hitchens said in an interview. "I suspect it is an effort by the Clintonoids to change the subject."
The White House now denies - no, not the Holocaust; not yet! - that it had anything to do with Epstein's charges.
This public falling-out between Hitchens and Blumenthal occurred earlier this month when Hitchens swore in an affidavit that the senior White House aide had passed on to him over lunch last March Clinton's unkind description of Monica Lewinsky as a "stalker".
Epstein told MSNBC that Hitchens had misspoken himself on the Holocaust on Feb. 12, 1995 - in fact, practically four years ago - as the two of them, along with some other friends, were dining in New York.
Epstein was so shocked, he says, and considered Hitchens doubts so grave, that he went home and noted them in his diary!
According to the Epstein diary: "Once seated in a booth, and freely sipping his free red wine, Hitchens advanced a theory more revealing than anything going on at the Hudson theater. His thesis, to the shock of everyone at the table, was that the Holocaust was a fiction developed by a conspiracy of interests bent on 'criminalizing the German Nation'"
"He explained that no evidence of German mass murder had ever been found - and what gruesome artifacts had been found had been fabricated after the event," Epstein confided to his diary.
"What of the testimony of Nazi generals at Nuremberg about the death camps," he asked.
Hitchens, according to the Epstein diary notation, explained ". . . without missing a beat, that such admissions were obtained under Anglo-American torture." Epstein then asked, as noted in his diary: "'But what happened to the Jews in Europe?' Hitch shrugged and said, 'Many were killed by local villagers when they ran away, others died natural deaths, and the remainder made it to Israel."
Don't laugh. Rejoice in how far we have come.
What Hitchens has become, apparently, is someone still after Clinton. In fact, he has so stated, saying that the target of his affidavit was Clinton, not his old tribal buddy, Blumenthal.
Some people are now mad at Hitchens, accusing him of treachery, while others, mostly Republicans, have praised him to the hilt.
When I talked to Ernst about this, Ernst remembered a Hitchens piece in The Nation, a left-wing magazine, that mentioned Dr. Robert Faurisson, and later on another piece for Vanity Fair about David Irving.
So Hitchens, it turns out, is no spring chicken to Holocaust Denial - he has been playing footsy for some time.
Not only that, three years ago he ". . . raised a forest of eyebrows with his 1996 Irving piece. In it, Hitchens flayed St. Martin's press for canceling plans to publish Irving's book on the papers of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, after protests from other Holocaust historians and commentators who labeled Irving an anti-Semite."
At the time Vanity Fair even published a reply from Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, wherein Foxman is quoted as saying: "Intellectual dishonesty pervades Christopher Hitchens' comments on the well-known Holocaust denier and Nazi apologist David Irving. He glosses over Irving's extensive record as an anti-Semite."
Now Foxman says that Hitchens is no Holocaust Denier!
Others have come to the rescue of the newest Holocaust Denier's jam. A number of Hitchens' friends claim that he likes to imbibe, implying that being soused might have made him say things he didn't really mean. But others, such as Vogue editor Anna Wintour, who was there when it is said to have happened, let it be known through a spokesman that she does not remember any such thing.
Epstein insists. In fact, he let it be known he was so troubled at the time that he even tattled about Hitchens to the editor at The Nation, Victor Navasky.
Navasky, in turn, said it was so - but he hadn't paid any attention.
Why is all this of interest to us? Well, there are many levels where this is yet another sign that dams are breaking and keep spilling. To me, the most fascinating thing is how the enemy keeps watching and spying and noting and monitoring everything and everybody for the smallest sign of heresy - even members of the tribe.
Writes one of my ZGram faithfuls:
"Shades of Tiberian Rome as viewed through Tacitean spectacles. I recall the way that informers called Delatores were the ruin of people (usually wealthy ones) who made a religiously incorrect remark at a dinner or similar affair.
"Hitchens made what amounts to a cynical observation - some might even say joke - about contemporary American judgments.
"The funny thing is that he didn't (at first) DENY anything. He simply implied that child molesters and deniers of the little big H are on a moral par. That won't do in the Judean empire."
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"I pitied him in his blindness,
But can I boast, "I see"?
Perhaps there walks a spirit
Close by, who pities me."
(Harry Kemp)
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