3,124 words
Nicholas Kollerstrom
Breaking the Spell
Uckfield, UK: Castle Hill Publishers, 2014
Dachau blues those poor jews
Dachau blues those poor jews
Down in Dachau blues, down in Dachau blues
Still cryin’ ’bout the burnin’ back in world war two’s
One mad man six million lose.
— Captain Beefheart, “Dachau Blues” [1]
Blue has always been the colour with which I identify. It’s the sea, the density of a mood, solitude, the colour evoked by Marc Almond’s voice; it’s a French poem and a concentrated head of cornflowers bunching in a white vase. Blue is the color that stretches like a cat in one’s mind.
— Jeremy Reed[2]
Blue, blue, electric blue/That’s the colour of my room
Where I will live/Blue, blue
Pale blinds drawn all day/Nothing to do, nothing to say
Blue, blue
— David Bowie, “Sound and Vision”
Just as Nietzsche, at the end of his sanity, only wanted to be a professor in Basel,[3] or, perhaps more modestly, just as George Costanza always wanted to be — or at least pretend to be — an architect,[4] I always wanted to have attended (note the past perfect tense) the London School of Economics, graduating with a M.Sc. in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method.[5]
Just as Harvard was classier than MIT,[6] and Oxford classier than Harvard, the LSE topped them all by combining both class and a sleek, technocratic edge; more EU mandarin than Big Bang nerd. And, of course, philosophical study in the midst of science would cut down significantly on the bullshit factor.[7]
But although my scholastic fantasy may have been purely subjective,[8] the hard edge I imagined philosophy having there (unlike the difficult but superficial academic twaddle of “analytic” philosophy stateside) resulted in some pretty significant work being done there, by the likes of Sir Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, and, ultimately (and admittedly to their despair)[9] the “anarchist epistemology” of ex-Luftwaffe pilot Paul K. Feyerabend.[10]
Briefly,[11] Feyerabend insisted that the study of the history of science revealed that actual scientific progress requires a multiplicity of rival theories to generate the data that empiricism requires to test theories;[12] conversely, science stagnates during periods of theoretical conformity (such as mediaeval scholasticism, or Kuhn’s “normal science”).
Such theoretical conformity results in what Lakatos called “degenerating research programs,” which fail to make new, confirmed predictions, and handle disconfirmations through ad hoc “auxillary hypotheses;” for example, the epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy.[13]
So imagine my delight to find this former University of London academic (close enough and we’ll look at that “former” business) employing the radical philosophy of science of Feyerabend and his mentors, Popper and Lakatos to one of my favorite areas of post-war culture distortion . . . . [T]he [H]olocaust.
Kollerstrom, a now former professor of the history of science, had the novel idea, as explicated by James Fetzer in his Foreword (The Holocaust Narrative: Politics Trumps Science), to apply the Official Methods of Science to the claims of the Holocaust.
Specifically, he applied the following simple experimental test to the core of The Holocaust Hypothesis:
Hypothesis: Six million Jews were exterminated by the National Socialists.
The method used to exterminate many if not most Jews was Zyklon B in human gas chambers.
If Zyklon B was used, the corpses would have been a bright pink, and the walls of the chambers blue.
There is no photographic, eye-witness, or current physical evidence of either effect.[14]
Therefore, the Holocaust Hypothesis is false.
Surprisingly, the reaction to his little contribution to scientific debate was rather not as he had anticipated:
Naively, I did not apprehend that what I reckoned or hoped to be a scientific question was apparently more like a deeply religious one.
The fastest way to get expelled from a British university is by saying you are looking at chemical evidence for how Zyklon was used in World War II . . . This is considered absolutely forbidden. How strange is that?
Searching for answers to this further puzzle, Kollerstrom discovers he’s stumbled into an area that can only be called a Public Religion, heresy from which is subject to social exclusion, or worse. As Andrew Hamilton wrote in another context:
Reason and empiricism have been banished, outlawed by governments or suppressed by dominant cultural elites and institutions in a manner essentially replicative of Communism. Bizarre fantasies and cult beliefs of the most primitive sort reign in their stead.
In particular, the history of Germany, 1933–1945, has been subsumed to the needs of a bizarre new religious cult. Its elaborate mythology . . . was constructed and imposed during the lifetimes of people who actually lived through the historical events, proving the supremacy of collective social constructions, even false ones, over the limited personal experiences of individuals. Surprised National Socialists formally accused of genocide universally responded with half-belief: “This is the first I’ve heard of it!”[15]
In all this, Prof. Kollerstrom resembles those 9/11 skeptics who have eschewed black ops and reptiles to focus on questions of purely scientific plausibility.[16] Reflecting on how so many bodies could have been disposed of, he muses, like an engineer confronting the Towers’ collapse, that the official narrative is:
a bizarre explanation of how they were all burned, which tends to violate known laws of physics.
Which is pretty ironic, since while it’s no surprise that he’s a UK 9/11 sceptic, it turns out even the UK skeptics turfed him out at the first sign of “Holocaust Denial.”
Sure, empty radar-guided planes and missiles striking the Pentagon, that’s just good solid investigative work and speaking truth to power, but ask whether the walls of the “gas chambers” show evidence of, like, actual use of cyanide gas, you know, and everyone loses their minds![17]
For all this, we have to ask: cui bono?
Kollerstrom’s answer is: having genocidally destroyed Germany,[18] the Allies looked around and at each other and said: Well, we can’t take the fall for this.[19]
So, by various means, including the use of torture,[20] a Holocaust Hypothesis was concocted and leveraged onto wartime propaganda to shift the blame for “the destruction of a people” to the defeated National Socialist regime.
Now, what lifts this from a mere historical footnote is that this Hypothesis has become an all-purpose excuse for intervention everywhere to “prevent another Shoah” or “head off [literally] the next Hitler.”
At Nuremberg the foundation was laid for a civilization based upon Horror and Untruth: horror because we were asked to believe that six million Jews were gassed for no reason whatsoever, and untruth because it never happened.[21]
And that’s what terrifies the Powers That Be:
People who don’t have the common sense and curiosity to ferret out the truth end up as nothing more than compliant, subservient, slaves. This is as the Ruling Class and big money special interests want it. The biggest threat to a corrupt regime is when truth moves away from the “conspiracy theory” fringes and into the mainstream.[22]
Speaking of “moving into the mainstream,” the reader will have noted that I’m taken with this blue business. It brings to mind, at least to my mind, an appropriately Aryan archeofuturist angle to Kollerstrom’s project:
The permanence of the ferrocyanide bond carries with memory of what happened seventy years ago. We here seek to remember what happened then.
As the cyanide percolated through those walls, sixty years ago, our truth percolates through the solid walls of establishment Denial.
Two can play the “never forget” game.[23] As Kollerstrom sums up the situation:
What is here going on is a Clash between Science, which represents the human capacity of rational thought, and religion, whereby a high priesthood decrees what the people have to believe and threaten and “excommunicate” those who will not bow down.
All of which connects up with another of Feyerabend’s themes: since Science will use the State to enforce orthodoxy, and the State will have its own reasons to do so,
The separation of state and church must be complemented by the separation of state and science, that most recent, most aggressive, and most dogmatic religious institution.[24]
Thus, Feyerabend supported the right of American parents in the ’80s to exempt their children from being taught dogmatic Darwinism in the name of “science,” since all theories, even ones as apparently “stupid” as Creationism, are capable of producing the data needed for rigorous testing of even — or especially — the most accepted hypotheses.
If you don’t like standing alongside creationists, and for more modern instances, consider IQ:
If neo-Stalinism wins the battle by shutting down research on the genetics of IQ — and especially the science of race differences in IQ, that will represent the victory of politics over science, of language over legitimate research.[25]
Or, perhaps, childhood vaccination raises your Federalist or Distributist hackles:
No less a champion of government in your face than Hillary Clinton jumped into this debate with a whacky Tweet that argued that because the Earth is round and the sky is blue and science is right, all kids should be vaccinated. What she was really saying is that in her progressive worldview, the coercive power of the federal government can be used to enforce a scientific orthodoxy upon those states and individuals who intellectually reject it.[26]
Four Appendices discuss the “Hoefle Telegram,” the “Tall Tales” of Elie Wiesel and others, a dryly humorous recitation of the all the crimes attributed to NS Germany (from a “pedal-driven brain-bashing machine” to head-shrinking and compulsory violin-playing), and a compendium of EU and UN laws relating to Holocaust speech.
The Bibliography presents a guide to the Essential Books (there’s only seven, so feel free to master the literature!) as well as Carlo Mattogno’s “technical studies” of the various camps, British Intelligence decrypts, the three volume report compiled by the International Red Cross (before the appearance of the Holocaust story), and even a guide to searching of the online transcript of the Nuremberg proceedings.
Kollerstrom suggests, perhaps facetiously, that readers might consider putting a brown paper cover on the book (which actually would draw more attention, I would think) or else using the Kindle. Those taking the latter course will appreciate that the kindle is well-formatted, including the all-important linking of text to endnotes. There is also an index, apparently based on the print edition, which, the entries not being linked, does not really supplant the use of the “search” function.
Trying to suggest where Coleman Francis had gone wrong in filming his brilliant notion of combining aviation and adultery, The Skydivers, one critic suggested that “Instead of having the actors do their own skydiving, he had the skydivers do their own acting.” In the same spirit, I could say that as a science writer, Kollerstrom’s talents lie on the science end of the spectrum. Despite a superficial appearance of organization, the actual text is often vague and meandering, leaving the reader unsure of the significance or of where this is going. He also tends to overuse common metaphors, like “breaking the spell,” as if he were proud of having discovered them.[27]
But these are superficial criticisms, in the face of the amount, and importance, of the factual information offered here. Literary flaws don’t really matter since Kollerstrom isn’t doing literary writing, or even, in the end, science writing. To avert back to the spell breaking metaphor,[28] he’s conducting a counter-spell, turning the Elite’s magic — science — back on themselves. As Williams S. Burroughs wrote, in the voice of Hassan i-Sabbah:
Boards Syndicates Governments of the earth Pay – Pay back the Color you stole –
“Pay Blue – Pay back the blue you stole and bottled and doled out in eye droppers of junk – Pay back the blue you stole for your police uniforms – Pay that blue back to sea and sky and eyes of the earth –
Not the ovens . . .[29]
This book would make an excellent start for someone new to the “revisionist” idea, since it introduces a new, simple, entirely scientific argument against the official story, while also providing a guide to further research. And purchase, of course, will be a show of solidarity with another martyr to Liberal Orthodoxy.
Notes
[1] “Dachau Blues,” Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, Trout Mask Replica (Straight/Reprise, 1969).
[2] Bitter Blue: Tranquilizers, Creativity, Breakdown (London: Peter Owen, 1995), p. 14.
[3] “In the end, I would much rather be a Basel professor than God.” Letter of January 6, 1889 to his mentor at the University of Basel, Jacob Burckhardt.
[4] “George: Why couldn’t you have made me an architect? You know I always wanted to pretend that I was an architect.” – Seinfeld, “The Marine Biologist” (1994).
[5] Despite its name, even in its extended form (London School of Economics and Political Science), the LSE like most fancy schools, offers a degree program in Philosophy, Politics and Economics ( or some variation on the phrase — PPE, PEP, etc., like the variations on “Peace on Earth/Purity of Essence” (POE, EOP, etc.) that Capt. Mandrake tries out to find the recall code in Dr. Strangelove.
[6] In terms of The Big Bang Theory, Wolowitz is uncool not because he has “only” an M. Eng., but because it’s from MIT.
[7] Above the gate of Plato’s academy, a sign read “Let no one enter who doesn’t know geometry.” Oxbridge and Harvard did the same thing by requiring that philosophy be studied in the context of classical languages (which of course Plato had taken for granted; barbarians (those non-Greeks whose speech was just “bar, bar” need not apply). Cf.: “Mathematical studies were scarcely ever “supervised” ideologically in the Soviet Union, as even the omniscient high priests of Marxism did not pretend to understand them; consequently, standards were upheld and Russian mathematical science was saved from temporary destruction. (Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Vol. III, The Breakdown [Oxford,1978]; “Marxism as the ideology of the Soviet state,” p. 102 )
[8] “He imagined himself doing picturesque things in a picturesque manner” says a classmate, mocking Fr. Rolfe/Baron Corvo’s claim to have had a vocation to the priesthood. See A. J. A. Symons, The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (1935; London: Folio Society, 1992) and my “E-Caviar for the Masses!” here.
[9] “I heard what you were saying. You — you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy [sic] is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.”– Marshall McLuhan, Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977); for my meditation on McLuhan’s odd wording see my blog post “You Mean My Whole Fallacy Is Wrong!” here.
[10] Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso, 1975). 4th ed., with introduction by Ian Hacking, New York: Verso Books, 2010.
[11] James Fetzer gives an excellent concise account in his Foreword.
[12] Since all so-called “data” are actually determined by theories (“theory-laden”) only rival theories can produce rival data.
[13] To anticipate, “Holocaust Studies” is such a degenerating research program; for example, the “dean” of such “scholars,” Raul Hilberg, has explained the absence of any documentary or eye-witness evidence for an extermination plan by invoking the otherwise unknown idea of “bureaucratic telepathy.” Indeed, the very core of the theory of the Holocaust is a textbook example of an ad hoc hypothesis, described by Kollerstrom as, “An especial and unique weapon of mass destruction was used: one which did not exist before the war, nor after the war, but only during it.”
[14] Apparently, as no one had thought of this test being used, no one thought to manufacture evidence of the expected result. Similar embarrassing lacuna occur in the early Holocaust narratives, such as the use of electrocution, geysers of blood, etc. As a side note, the walls of the delousing chambers are bright blue.
[15] Andrew Hamilton, “Alfred Rosenberg in Translation,” here. That the total lack of awareness, apparently genuine surprise, not merely obstinate denial, of every defendant at Nuremberg, to say nothing of the complete lack of any documentary proof — orders, manifests, what have you — could be accounted for by postulating “denial” or “cover-up” is a paradigm example of an ad hoc hypothesis in defense of a degenerating research program.
[16] Such as, obviously, Physicists and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.
[17] “In a ‘free’ society we can’t suppress dangerous truths altogether. So we have to be immunized against them. That’s why Hollywood lets dangerous truths appear on screen, but only in the mouths of monsters: Derek Vinyard in American History X, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, Ra’s al Ghul in Batman Begins, the Joker in The Dark Knight, etc.” — Trevor Lynch reviews The Dark Knight, here and in Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012).
[18] The real Holocaust (which of course means, as Kollerman points out, massive buring, not gassing) happened to the German people. Hellstorm by Tom Goodrich, details all their appalling torture, enslavement and mass murder at the end and after the Second World War. See J. A. Sexton’s review here.
[19] Neocons and Iraq, anyone?
[20] Is it any surprise that today’s JudeoCons are the leading cheerleaders for torture, both for “national security” here and to fabricate “evidence” for interventions abroad? See “Senate report finds CIA torture produced ‘fabricated’ intel and thwarted no plots; After waterboarding, 9/11 mastermind told interrogators what ‘he thought they wanted to hear’” by Michael Isikoff (December 9, 2014) here; and for the case of Alan Dershowitz, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History by Norman Finkelstein (University of California, 2005).
[21] Literally as I write these words, O’Reilly is ranting about Nazis, and last Tuesday Bibi Netanyahoo has demanded that his pocket politicians (“our” legislators) listen to his harangue on the topic of Iran delenda est.
[22] “Gallup CEO: America’s Unemployment Rate is One Big Lie,” here.
[23] See my review of Timur Vermes’ Look Who’s Back, here.
[24] Feyerabend, op. cit., p.295.
[25] “The Sharks of Marx: Science vs Censorship;” February 4, 2015 by Tobias Langdon http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2015/02/the-sharks-of-marx-science-vs-censorship/.
[26] “To Vaccinate or Not To Vaccinate? Judge Joseph Napolitano, Town Hall, February 05, 2015. Remember, as Trevor Lynch said, “In a “free” society we can’t suppress dangerous truths altogether. So we have to be immunized against them.”
[27] “Award-winning” translator Joachim Neugroschel suggest that one difference between American and British prose style is that American’s eschew what they perceive as “clichés” while Brits welcome them as “idioms,” reliable, tried and true; see his Introduction to Mann’s Death in Venice and other Tales (London: Penguin, 1999).
[28] Ever notice how obsessed filmmakers are with the whole “breaking the German code” trope, which rivals, or rather, supplements, the Holocaust obsession? Projection, much? Or mis-direction: these are the codes you should be looking at. . . .”
[29] Nova Express. You can listen to his last words in multiple languages here. For more on Burroughs, magic, and counter-spells, see my review of The Magical World of William S. Burroughs, here.
19 comments
So does Kollerstrom’s argument hinge on the premise, “The method used to exterminate many if not most Jews was Zyklon B in human gas chambers”? Such that the mass murder of Jews with, say, bullets or disease or slave labor or starvation does not constitute a holocaust?
This is just another version of Robert Faurisson’s too-clever-by half argument that no gas, no “holocaust,” because “holocaust” is simply defined as 6-million-gassed-Jews. I submit that this is just dishonest wordplay, an attempt to define the holocaust out of existence. For instance, by this definition, Ann Frank was not a “holocaust” victim because she died of typhus.
But even if we grant this sophistry, could we still not ask about the other genocide of Jews by bullets, disease, etc.? Because none of the literature I have seen from revisionists reduces the death tolls to zero. No matter how many lies about the holocaust are refuted, we have to remember that the lies were told by the survivors, not those who actually died.
I haven’t had time to read O’Meara’s article (and so don’t know the author’s arguments), yet, but surely you will agree that if the Jews that died were not actually gassed (or murdered according to a plan), but instead died of typhus, and the Zyklon B was in fact used to protect the camp inmates and guards from typhus (by delousing), then we have been lied to — big time! — by the movie industy, media, education system and “survivors” — the whole Jewish storytelling complex? Then the stories we have been told differ so much from what actually happened, that they in fact constitute lies. And pointing that out is not sophistry.
If there was no plan to physically exterminate the Jews, in an industrial fashion, with gass chambers (inter alia), and if, in fact, nothing close to six million were killed, then the specific stories we have been told have been made up. And that is not history, but war propaganda – no better than the stories about Gaddafi importing Dumpster loads of Viagra to make his soldiers rape so much better. I think you are unfair to Faurisson: He did not define the Holocaust as the murder-by-gassing, according to an explicit plan and order from Hitler, of six million Jews (and the ambition to kill all of them). They defined it thus, by feeding us that story, over and over and over again, and blaming us for it. If there is another story, or a more generous interpretation of the Holocaust story, that is actually true, then we should not stop calling them liars until they start telling that story, instead of the one they are telling us now. You are letting them off the hook too easy.
If there are two stories, A and B, that are eaqually bad regarding the morality of the perpetrator the stories are about, and A is true but B is false, and you tell story B, you are still a liar. To say that “well, yes, but A is in fact true, and that is eaqually bad” is no defense.
“No matter how many lies about the holocaust are refuted, we have to remember that the lies were told by the survivors, not those who actually died.”
The stories are also told by historians and “educators” who should be held to the same scientific standards as anyone else in the scientific community, and who should be expected to have intellectual integrity and look at the actual facts, and not tell sentimental stories for political purposes.
Where the project becomes sophistical is when they claim that deducting lies from the total story refutes “the holocaust” or “the holocaust hypothesis” in toto because of a definitional stipulation that holocaust=x, x being some lie told about the holocaust.
I think that a non-tendentious description of what Jews object to about their treatment in WWII by the Third Reich and its allies is that many Jewish non-combatants were uprooted, deported, imprisoned, and enslaved, and that many of these individuals were abused in various ways and many of them died from a whole host of causes, including intentional homicide. Deduct all the war propaganda and fake memoirs, and a lot of that happened.
My own approach to the holocaust problem is outlined in “Dealing with the Holocaust.” https://counter-currents.com/2014/04/dealing-with-the-holocaust/
I support the freedom of revisionists, but I do not think that Jewish power in the world today, or the creation of a White Nationalist ethnostate in the future, hinges on the outcome of their efforts, and I think that revisionism is over-sold in our sphere as a political panacea, which it is not.
If we define “the Holocaust” broadly as the intentional killing of Jews during WWII by whatever means, then Anne Frank was no victim of the Holocaust, since she died of typhus at the end of the war, when many inmates of the concentration camps died due to lack of food and medicines, which was a result of Allied bombing of the supply lines to the camps and not of intentional Nazi policy. Normally, sick inmates of the camps were treated in the camp hospitals, like happened to Anne Frank’s father.
I still don’t understand what happened to all those Jews who were obviously deported to the concentration camps and “did not return”, but there are no proofs, forensic or documentary, of mass killings, either by gassings or by shootings. Yet Holocaust revisionism is incomplete untill account is given for those “missing Jews”. My experience is that revisionists cannot give a satisfying explanation for that.
The research should go on.
Regarding the numbers, Walter Sanning’s short book, The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry is enlightening. In short, they were likely mostly absorbed by eastern European countries, as well as elsewhere. I mention this study because it apparently is not widely read.
Actually, I am not attacking a straw man. That is Faurisson’s position, and it seems to be Kollerstrom’s basic position as well, although he inserts a weasel words “many if not most.”
I think that a reasonable description of what the Jews object to about their treatment in World War II is that, due to German policy, a great many Jewish who were non-combatants were uprooted, deported, imprisoned, suffered, and died (from a whole host of causes) simply because they were Jews. You can deduct a whole raft of hoaxes from that, and there is still “holocaust enough” for Jews to complain about. And on that account, Anne Frank was a victim of it.
So far, I have spoken only of Faurisson and Kollerstrom. So who is attacking a straw man here?
This mild-mannered Danish prof brings up some important points:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-ieNfu97qo
Thanks for posting this. I watched all 7 of them. Indeed he has added a great deal to the knowledge base.
“..Robert Faurisson’s too-clever-by half argument that no gas, no “holocaust,” because “holocaust” is simply defined as 6-million-gassed-Jews. …G.J.
Agreed. From a practical standpoint, if the Germans wanted to kill jews (or any others) what is the most logical way? Any that think gas chambers are efficient or effective devices are invited to study the procedures employed to execute a single convict in the now disused gas chamber at San Quentin.
Suffice it to say that it employs a large number of people to set up operate and clear the lethal gas out to allow entry after the execution.
In Wartime, what is the simplest (and cheapest) way to send the enemy to bliss eternal? What is around virtually everywhere in great profusion? if you said small arms ammunition, rifles and pistols, give yourself a gold star.
That’s right. Any jews, partisans or other enemies of the Reich that were killed were likely sent to their eternal reward with a bullet.
Regards,
Greg South
Great article and it sounds like a great book! Nicholas Kollerstrom was also interviewed on RedIceCreations.com.
So does Kollerstrom’s argument hinge on the premise, “The method used to exterminate many if not most Jews was Zyklon B in human gas chambers”?
He is continuing the attack on what historian David Irving called the “mothership” of the holocaust. According to the holocaust promoters “Auschwitz” was where much or most of the killing took place. Their claim took its first big hit in the late eighties when revisionists made their claims untenable. and they were forced to tear down a sign at Auschwitz that claimed four million were murdered there and replace it with one that claimed (still without evidence) one and a half million died and then lowering the claim to one million.
The fact that some holocaust promoters have now completely changed the accusation from one of several death camps being killing centers to one that “thousands of camps” were used all over Europe to kill Jews, the remains are spread supposedly all over Europe demonstrates that what they claimed for so long was a lie without any scientific basis whatsoever. With the control of the mainstream media they can promote a whole new theory and the masses may accept it, but revisionists and scientists can only refute one lie at a a time.
The fact that there were isolated incidents of atrocities against Jews by mass shooting does not constitute “holocaust”, the claim that the state was behind a program of mass murder to rid the world of the Jewish race, especially when it has been demonstrated by David Irving that Hitler intervened after he heard of such an atrocity and ordered the Jews “not” be shot, at least in a particular instance.
As David Irving also said, every army has it’s murderers or psychopaths, people that will carry out atrocities – “every army.” These people can be blamed for what they did, that is different than claiming the state was behind an atrocity.
As the allies were burning thousands of Germans alive every night by bombing their cities culminating in an orgy of murder of at least 135,000 people in Dresden (perhaps several hundred thousand more) and murdering at least one million by bombing during the war, it would be very unusual not to have some people who would strike back at the murderers with an atrocity of their own and if anyone begins to study how the Jews began paying off Churchill with huge sums of money beginning in 1936 as well as there activities in the USA to incite a world war and bring the USA into it, you’re attitude towards these atrocities might change.
Hitler knew the Jews were the primary movers behind the war and the “genocide” of the German people and other leaders including Chamberlain reportedly said the same thing.
I just enjoy that someone is quoting both David Bowie AND Captain Beefheart around here.
Greg says, I think that a reasonable description of what the Jews object to about their treatment in World War II is that, due to German policy, a great many Jews who were non-combatants were uprooted, deported, imprisoned, suffered, and died (from a whole host of causes) simply because they were Jews. You can deduct a whole raft of hoaxes from that, and there is still “holocaust enough” for Jews to complain about. And on that account, Anne Frank was a victim of it.
That may be what they object to – and quite reasonably, I think – but that is not what ‘The Holocaust’ is claimed to be.
Contrary to popular belief, holocaust revisionism doesn’t seek only to answer the question: Was there a Holocaust? Revisionism seeks to revise the standard narrative in light of new evidence and new arguments. For some revisionists the degree of revision this entails is so enormous that they are comfortable claiming there was no Holocaust. Others are more cautious.
Jews and leftists, however, object furiously to any questioning of or tampering with that narrative. Even pointing out that the narrative has changed some (eg Auschwitz numbers) is enough to set them off. That’s because they recognize the Holocaust is a political weapon, a weapon that is extremely powerful but also one which is constantly in danger of being taken away from them. And that’s why revisionism should matter to you – even if it isn’t a panacea.
Kollerstrom’s answer is: having genocidally destroyed Germany, the Allies looked around and at each other and said: Well, we can’t take the fall for this. So, by various means, including the use of torture, a Holocaust Hypothesis was concocted and leveraged onto wartime propaganda to shift the blame for “the destruction of a people” to the defeated National Socialist regime.
Since few of the Allied leaders and few of their voters would, understandably in my opinion, have been especially concerned in 1945 about the killing of Germans and the destruction of German cities, I think Faurisson does a better version of this argument:
La croisade des démocraties (à partir d’une idée de D. Irving)
http://robertfaurisson.blogspot.com/1996/05/la-croisade-des-democraties-partir-dune.html
His chronology doesn’t work perfectly either, since it is unlikely that these thoughts would have occurred to many of the victors in the immediate aftermath of the war.
But in the years and decades after 1945 the massive destruction of the war, the severe wounds it inflicted on the British and French empires, and (above all) the empowerment of Soviet Marxism that the Allied victory caused, would have made the war seem indefensible — were it not for the charge of an extraordinary German evil that the Allies had successfully ended. Belief in unprecedented cruelty and genocide therefore became — so an argument along these lines would run — a way of defending an indefensible war after the fact by casting it as a contest between civilization and barbarism, with the concentration camps as visible evidence of the latter. You could look, as Faurisson puts it, at the concentration camps and discover, as though by a miracle, a new reason for the war that could replace your old reasons, which had been overwhelmed by history.
Traditional British and French patriots could no longer easily conceptualize the war as a defense of Empire, since in the postwar period their empires were vanishing before their eyes, in large part because of the war. Americans were facing in the Cold War the expansion of Communism and the prospect of physical annihilation at the hands of the wartime Soviet ally that they had essentially rescued from defeat and transformed into a rival superpower with atomic weapons.
Belief in unique German evil would thus be an act of patriotically recuperating the death and destruction of the war by enlisting it in a new noble cause, given that the most common of the original justifications for the war were increasingly implausible. Belief in unprecedented German cruelty and genocide (later restructured and dubbed the Holocaust) would be patriotic and disbelief would be an unpatriotic denial of the sacrifice of the Allied soldiers who had died in the cause of civilization. Postwar depictions of special German evil would be acts of patriotic solidarity with the dead.
(Of course, we should never forget that the Holocaust we really dislike — viz. the instrument of anti-White and anti-Western propaganda — did not exist in 1945 and only arrived as a Jewish political weapon in the late 1960s. Pre-Holocaust anti-German propaganda was a serious source of complaint only for Germans, because in the West only Germans were stigmatized by it. The Jewish Holocaust isn’t something we did to Jews; it is something Jews did to us, regardless of the existence or non-existence of gas chambers.)
— Irmin
“Kollerstrom’s answer is: having genocidally destroyed Germany, the Allies looked around and at each other and said: Well, we can’t take the fall for this. So, by various means, including the use of torture, a Holocaust Hypothesis was concocted and leveraged onto wartime propaganda to shift the blame for “the destruction of a people” to the defeated National Socialist regime.
Since few of the Allied leaders and few of their voters would, understandably in my opinion, have been especially concerned in 1945 about the killing of Germans and the destruction of German cities, I think Faurisson does a better version of this argument:”
Well, you’re entitled to your opinion, but your logic is wrong. With the destruction of Europe and over fifty million people dead, there needed to be a justification for all this and this is where many of the lies began, from Germany wanting to “take over the world” to “gas chambers”. In my opinion, if there is a just God and he plays a part in what goes on in the world, Germany would have been untouched and Great Britain, France and the USA would have looked like Germany. Great Britain started the war, France went along and the USA got in on it because they were eager to see Europe destroyed.
If not for Winston Churchill and the payoffs he received from Jews, there is a very good chance there would have been no WW II. That is why the allies, in particular the main culprits the British said “we can’t take the fall for this.”
Well, you’re entitled to your opinion, but your logic is wrong. With the destruction of Europe and over fifty million people dead, there needed to be a justification for all this
My point was only that you cannot expect the victors of a horrible war to have, at the moment of their victory, a special concern about the suffering of their enemies. They had suffered losses too. They were unlikely, understandably, to feel much empathy for Germans. So if Kollerstrom bases his argument on Allied empathy for Germans in 1945, or on any Allied feeling of guilt for German suffering, he is likely mistaken.
That is true regardless of what side you think was principally responsible for the war.
— Irmin
Together with Nick Kollerstrom, we have published all of the Bletchley Park decodes for Auschwitz, Jan 42 to 43, from the PRO at Kew, London, where they had been languishing, for the most part, very quietly, for some 16 years or so.
These primary source data provide a day by day account of the Auschwitz population, the comings and goings, the men, the women and their nationalities / religion.
The main site is: http://whatreallyhappened.info
The BP Auschwitz prisoner decodes page is:
http://whatreallyhappened.info/decrypts/ww2decrypts.html
Historiographically the story that was dubbed the “Holocaust” (a term popularized by the 1978 TV mini-series of that name) is/was indeed: Wannsee Conference + “Final Solution” + Auschwitz-Birkenau and other “death camps” + mass extermination through “gas chambers” using Zyklon B – brand cyanide crystals.
Those are the major touchstones and images in any discussion of the H-word among historians of the 1970s-90. Adding peripheral matters—Anne Frank, typhus at Belsen, slave labor, the Kaunas murders—is just playing Mr. Potato Head. They are interchangeable and not essential to the received narrative.
That having been said, I basically agree with GJ’s attitude. Hair-splitting about terminology is a waste of vital resources. We can never profit by protracted discussion of this. We have to do a Bowden and “step over” the whole matter.
They have used it as a weapon against us, but now they are vulnerable and we could use it as a weapon against them. Why does a prosecutor try to prove a lie, any lie? Because then the defendant is shown to be a Liar, and may well be lying about other things – as they did about Palestine being a land without a people. Of course we don’t put all our eggs in this one basket, but not to use it all would be crazy.
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