Friday, March 23, 2007

That's why it is denial, not revisionism. Part IX (4): «The reports of the Einsatzgruppen

... are «questionable with respect to the number of Jews shot», Mattogno & Graf claim on page 211 of their Treblinka screed.

So did the former commander of Sonderkommando (SK) 4a of Einsatzgruppe C, Paul Blobel, in regard to the largest of all massacres committed by the Einsatzgruppen, the one at Babiy Yar near Kiev on 29 and 30 September 1941.

Blogiversary

Hard to believe that it's been a year to the day that the first post went up on this blog. No, Holocaust denial is not dead yet. But in looking over the events of the past twelve months, it might as well be. We won't claim any strategic role in this development, we'll not crow about our part in their downfall, but it behoves us to point out how Holocaust Revisionism, that much-vaunted ideological tool of the far right, has increasingly proven a blunter and blunter sword.

Contrary to a thousand internet message board arguments over the past 365 days, this isn't because of the legal cases. There is now widespread consensus among the liberal intelligentsias of Europe and the rest of the world that jailing deniers only breeds martyrs and contradicts the principle of freedom of speech. What deniers have yet to realise is this is now a Pyrrhic victory. Defending someone's right to say it doesn't mean that their words will be listened to. Debates about the abstract principles of free speech, which make up virtually the sole discussion of Holocaust revisionism in the mainstream media, and discussions about the legalities, which now make up nearly 80-90% of the content of the sole surviving denier journal VffG, mean that the underlying ideas are not being discussed. Far from stimulating interest in revisionism, the free-speech martyrdom strategy has simply reaffirmed what public opinion largely already held to be the case: they can say what they like, but they are still assholes.

So, Irving was released in December to a brief burst of publicity, and then nothing. He will have to work hard to regain much momentum or credibility after his repeated U-turns and bizarre statements. Zündel's attempt to portray himself as the denier Joan of Arc slowly backfired over the course of the year; by the time he was jailed, there wasn't even much of an echo at places such as RODOH or the Phora. No one has even posted a thread concerning Germar Rudolf's 30 month jail sentence on either board. The propaganda value of these acts of 'martyrdom' have, strange as it is to say, diminished utterly.

There are several reasons for this turnabout. The first can be summed up in one name: Ahmadinejad. Far from ushering in a new golden age of Historical Revisionism, the endorsement and state sponsorship of Holocaust denial by a Middle Eastern head of state has done more to discredit the creed than any other event barring the Irving libel trial defeat. In hindsight, the ritual denunciations by governments, NGOs and institutes of the vapidity and offensiveness of the Tehran Holocaust conference seem overblown. No doubt they needed to be said; and no doubt there will be some who 'discovered' the joys of denial because of it, but as a propaganda stunt, it backfired totally. An ageing cast of no-name Z-listers as well as the overly ubiquitous Faurisson, still trading on the impact of his 'intervention' more than a quarter of a century ago, does not add up to a reputable cast of intellectual adventurers. Henceforth, Holocaust denial will be associated almost exclusively with the Islamic world, and thereby damned by association with state-sponsored propaganda and terrorism. The obvious sound of axes grinding in Tehran and elsewhere in the Islamic world is now drowning out the revisionist 'message'.

The second reason for the accelerated decomposition of revisionism can be found closer to home in the United States, and that is the comet-like rise and fall of the 9/11 Truth movement. If Holocaust denial was, once upon a time, an offensive intellectual tragedy, then 9/11 denial is pure farce. The Truth Movement has passed through the same cycle of emergence, word-of-mouth growth and pseudo-intellectual articulation, followed by the same cycle of circular firing squad contradictory and competing explanations, splits, feuds, and debunkings. More importantly, it has distracted from its older cousin, simply by providing what Holocaust denial lacks: immediacy, video footage and no need to delve into obscure historical matters involving strange foreign languages like German. That there is a proven, demonstrable overlap between the two forms of woo, as well as other conspiracisms, serves only to discredit and self-debunk both of them. The next time you encounter a Holocaust denier, ask them how the Twin Towers collapsed, and if they spout Truther nonsense, you have already shown them up for the gullible fools that they are.

There is a third reason, which derives from the struggles internal to the white nationalist/ racialist far right that has long made up the core constituency for Holocaust denial. Namely, that many racist organisations have begun to distance themselves from the more obviously insane and pathological mantras of Jew-hatred and Hitler-worship in an endeavour to mainstream themselves. There is now an undeniable split in the far right between organisations such as American Renaissence and the British National Party on the one hand, who wish to forget about the 'Jewish Question' in the interests of reaching a wider audience, and the hardcore of neo-Nazi uniform fetishists on the other. So far, this split has yet to filter down to the numbskulls, but can be seen in the often bitter debates on the Phora and certain other locations. It is as if it has finally dawned on many self-styled white nationalists and racialists that after nearly sixty years of post-1945 propagandising along Nazi lines, and after equally as much emphasis on the 'Jewish Question', that perhaps these were not the most effective tactics to espouse. The downside to this development is that racist ideas may yet achieve a wider appeal; the upside is that this wider appeal will not emphasise Holocaust denial or antisemitism as much as has been historically the case.

Optimistic? Perhaps. One can easily point out many contrarian trends, and future posts will no doubt do so. But it's helpful to keep a perspective. Part of that perspective comes from the 350+ posts we have racked up, and the internal discussions we have had within the blog team. Simply put, we know much more about Holocaust deniers' arguments and where they are fallacious than we did 12 months ago, and by creating this repository of posts, so too do many other internet surfers, acquaintances, friends and strangers. Andrew, Roberto and Sergey have almost finished debunking the 'denierbud' YouTube videos, and there is more to come. I myself have been fairly inactive this past while both because of teaching commitments at university but also because I have been researching this milieu on a more systematic basis for a future academic monograph. Some of the fruits of this reading will be posted as trial balloons over the next few months. In the meantime, we resume our normal (albeit irregular) service.

Check it out

Andrew Hammel has written a nice short overview of denial here.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Just when you thought that a Nazi can't get more stupid ...

... he just says something and proves you wrong.

Steve Mock informs about a National Alliance article, which describes some illiterate doofus trying to harrass Deborah Lipstadt, but making a total fool of himself in a very humorous way:
Still seated, Robert interrupted her speech and asked "now which Holocaust are we talking about here, the first or the second?" As the room fell silent, Robert continued, "are we talking about the one in 1919 where Ilya Ehrenburg claimed that 6 million Jews were being killed in a Holocaust or the second one."
Ilya Ehrenburg? The imbecile couldn't even get the "revisionist" memes straight, and confabulated the two of them, one about Martin Glynn in 1919, and another about Ilya Ehrenburg in 1944. That wasn't all, of course. What's a Nazi without spouting some long-ago-debunked antisemitic myth?

Lipstadt fumbled for a second and Robert rose, determined to make clear to the crowd, who had all turned around to listen, the facts regarding Israel for which Lipstadt had, just minutes earlier, lied about. "In 2001 Ariel Sharon said we the Jewish people control America and the Americans know it, what more needs to be said?"


I've already made some observations about low intelligence of WN creatures. But it seems for some of them the intelligence is not even low. It's simply non-existent.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

So much for "k0nsl"

I had this idiot nailed a year or two ago. Now we have the confirmation.

His reaction: To pull down all of his Web sites. What a coward...
Expo magazine reveals: The spider in the virtual revisionist web

Many of the Internet revisionists hide behind aliases and conduct their business anonymously. One of the most important, and mysterious, is "k0nsl". The Swedish anti-racist magazine Expo can now reveal that the man behind the pseudonym is Swedish and called Jonathan Andersson.

Writing under several different pseudonyms, the 22-year-old Jonathan Andersson has become a central figure in the online revisionist web. As the webmaster of CODOH Forum, he has a key role in the premier virtual meeting place for Holocaust deniers – a meeting place where he is also an active participant.

In addition, Jonathan Andersson runs his own homepage, the "Holocaust History Archive"; a revisionist "copy" of the genuine site "Holocaust History". It is a fact that several famous deniers link to articles on Jonathan Andersson's website.

Andersson has for quite some time eluded historians and writers specializing in the field of Holocaust denial. Using aliases such as "k0nsl", "system33r" and "Julius Streicher", he has been able to successfully start and run revisionist hate sites while remaining undercover.

He has also extolled the virtues of Holocaust denial in Internet forums related to completely different topics.

"The anonymity offered by the Internet makes it possible for people who trade in racial, religious and ethnic supremacy to safely market their ideas and beliefs," says Ray Franklin, one of America's foremost experts on Internet hate crime.

Apart from, for example, currently serving on the national Counter-Terrorism Training Coordination Working Group of the U.S. Department of Justice, Franklin runs a well-known website called The Hate Directory. It lists global hate sites, including Jonathan Andersson's "Holocaust History Archive."

"It is of utmost importance that we investigate the attempts made by these groups to disseminate their propaganda," says Franklin.

Journalist Albrecht Kolthoff works on the anti-racism research project Redok in Germany. He has followed "k0nsl" and his activities for years without knowing who's behind the pseudonym.

"This whole Internet scene is filled with disinformation, but we believe that "k0nsl" has been active for the past 4-5 years," says Kolthoff.

"Of course, "k0nsl" cannot be compared to someone like Ernst Zündel, but he uses his Internet-related talents to promote something he believes will further the national socialist goals," Kolthoff points out.

One of the reasons why Jonathan Andersson up until now has been able to keep his identity a secret, is his unusually good computer skills.

"He is a very talented and able person when it comes to computer programming, and has created hacker programs and 'Trojans' infecting computers all over the world," Kolthoff explains.

Andersson himself claims to have been a member of the famous hacker group "Sm0ked Crew", who during the early 2000s hacked companies such as Intel, Compaq, the New York Times and Hewlett-Packard. It is not clear whether or not he is a suspect in these crime cases.

Jonathan Andersson's forum posts are characterized by a poorly concealed anti-Semitism:

The German civilian population who was the victim of repeated fire-bombs are "holocaust" victims a hundred times more than the Jews who were just sent to concentration camps (safe-keeping), where they learned how to work, how to be somewhat decent.

There was no "jewish holocaust", no "gas chambers" and no "systematic extermination". (…)

To hell with the "holocaust" lies and those who try to uphold them.


Albrecht Kolthoff believes that it is important to expose persons such as Jonathan Andersson: "The public has a right to find out about what kind of actors claim to 'just be searching for the truth.'

"They use very nasty and dishonest methods to spread their ideas. If any one of them has done something illegal, we should be able to hand over these lunatics to the law enforcement."

Expo has tried and failed to get a comment from Jonathan Andersson himself.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

And now for something not completely different...

[Update: see a full debunking of Furr's Katyn book.]

[Update (30.03.2007): the page with Katyn discussion is now here on Prof. Furr's site (the URL has been renamed). Prof. Furr emphasizes on his site that I have put our exchange online despite his objections - you should read the whole posting to see why (the relevant info is near the end). Basically, he does the same thing to other people, so the emphasis is, let's say, misleading.]

The reason the Holocaust denial is the most prominent example of historical pseudo-revisionism in Western world is prominence of the Holocaust itself in the West. But whenever there's an "inconvenient" past to deal with, there's also an attempted denial of that past, sometimes on a state level (the Armenian genocide), sometimes on the grassroots level, as is the case with the Katyn massacre "revisionism" in Russia.

"Katyn responsibility deniers", as they may be called, are usually Stalin-admirers, but not necessarily Communists. Quite a lot of non-Communist (but pro-Soviet) nationalists and "statists" (derzhavniki) - many of them Orthodox Christians - see Stalin as a symbol of the mighty Russian empire. Thus the need for apology of Stalin's crimes - either by justifying (e.g., the purges of 1930s are often seen as "good" purges of "Old Bolsheviks" and "Jews") or denying them.

Katyn "revisionists" basically repeat the Soviet "interpretation" of evidence, blaming the German Einsatzkommandos or other units for the massacre. The Soviet version is slightly modified for "revisionist" purposes - thus, it is claimed that there was some deliberate disinformation in the Soviet Katyn report, but it was necessary for political purposes. Namely, allegedly the Polish POWs were no longer POWs since spring 1940, actually they had been sentenced to 5 years without the right for correspondence (thus the absence of letters to families after May 1940 is explained) and were sent to labor camps near Smolensk, where they were captured by the Germans and murdered. The lie about them no longer being POWs was allegedly necessitated by a need to cover up the breach of international conventions in sentencing the POWs for labor in camps. "Conversion" of POWs into sentenced prisoners also "solves" the problem of absence of these Poles in POW-related Soviet documents (whenever they were mentioned after the massacre, they were described as "sent to UNKVD in April-May of 1940"). See how neatly everything is explained?


Sunday, March 04, 2007

That's why it is denial, not revisionism. Part IX (3): «The reports of the Einsatzgruppen

... are «questionable with respect to the number of Jews shot», Mattogno & Graf claim on page 211 of their Treblinka screed.

We will now look at what the Munich District Court (Landgericht München) found in respect to the Einsatzgruppen reports’ reliability, at the trial against Dr. Otto Bradfisch and other former members of Einsatzkommando 8 (hereinafter EK 8). A transcription of the judgment at this trial (LG München I vom 21.7.1961, 22 Ks 1/61) can be found here [broken link replaced on 13.03.2012 - RM].