Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Yes, But...

In light of all the bad press they've received over the last two weeks, the ADL now admits that what befell the Armenian people was, indeed, genocide.

How very.

The kicker in the statement issued today, however, was this:
Having said that, we continue to firmly believe that a Congressional resolution on such matters is a counterproductive diversion and will not foster reconciliation between Turks and Armenians and may put at risk the Turkish Jewish community and the important multilateral relationship between Turkey, Israel and the United States.
Oh, really? Why's that?

Turkey needs to grow up. And the ADL needs to shitcan Foxman. Enough is enough.

Monday, August 20, 2007

How Do You Sleep?

In case you missed it (and really, unless you live in New England, or you're Armenian, or you're an ultra-right-wing radio host, you probably did), there's been something of a to-do between the ADL of B'nai Brith and very specifically its leader, Abraham Foxman, and the Armenian-American community of Watertown, Mass. It seems the ADL recently honored the city as one of its "No Place for Hate" cities, only to have the city reject the honor because of the ADL's position on the mass killings of Armenians by the Turkish governments between 1895 and 1922 (peaking in 1915 under the so-called Young Turks).

Estimately run between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians killed during this period -- either slaughtered wholesale by Ottoman troops and auxiliaries or starved on death marches out of Anatolia for "relocation in the east" in Syria and elsewhere. The Armenians have been living in a Diaspora very much like that of the Jews for a large portion of their history -- certainly since the conquest of their land by the Turks -- and these massacres took a serious toll on the Armenian population not already safely domiciled in the United States, Canada, Australia, and other points outside Asia Minor and the Caucasus.

So what is the ADL's position on the Armenian massacres?

Read more!
The position of the ADL and Foxman is that what happened to the Armenians does not constitute genocide. I'll go over the U.N. definition of genocide in a few moments and show that the Armenian massacres more than meets the criteria set forth here, but what Foxman and the ADL are up to is something much more sinister, and the ideology behind what they're doing falls into two prongs: (1) Insisting on the uniqueness of the Holocaust; and (2) Trying to preserve the generally positive relationship between Turkey and Israel by denying the genocide against the Armenian people.

The first issue is a thorny one, because I, personally, would say that the Nazi Holocaust against European Jewry was unique in some ways and not unique in others. But the uniqueness that Foxman and others like him (notably Elie Wiesel) argue for is on a mystical level (which is garbage -- the Nazis killed the Jews because they were in the way and they were deemed as subhumans, and this is pretty much the prerequisite conditions for all genocides), on an historical level (the Holocaust was the culmination of 2,000 years of European anti-Semitism -- and with this point I can agree to a certain extent, though I think van Pelt and Dwork's Holocaust: A History put a good dent in that argument), and the mechanization of the killing of Europe's Jews (fair enough -- on this point I agree wholly).


But am I, a Jewish person, willing to say that this was the worst genocide in history or that other mass killings don't count as genocide? In short, do I harbor that level of chutzpah?

I am personally of the opinion that the worst genocide in history took place on the continent where I am currently writing this, and that this genocide is continuing as I write. This genocide was/is against the indigenous pre-1492 populations of North and South America by European conquerors and was one of the most wholly effective genocides in all of history. More than 95 percent of the original population of these two continents were either decimated by disease or slaughtered outright, mainly by the Spanish and British colonists, and later by the U.S. military and Latin American death squads. Entire nations were wiped off the face of the earth, and because they were often preliterate cultures, no trace of them is left except for the occasional archaeological find. That I sit on land right now that used to belong to Lenape Indians, and I've never met a Lenape Indian (and I've lived in this part of the country my entire life) should speak volumes. I would refer the interested reader to David E. Stannard's American Holocaust, published fifteen years ago but no less relevant today.

So, in the sick moral calculus to which all of is in "the business" must resort at one time or another, I rank the American genocide as a greater crime against humanity than the Nazi Holocaust. But I digress. Back to the ADL's uniqueness argument. I deny any epistemological uniqueness to the Holocaust, and I deny that it was worse than other genocides. Prong #1 addressed.

The ADL's second prong here is the "special relationship" between Turkey and Israel (not to mention Turkey and the U.K. and Turkey and the U.S.). Turkey is the only secular Muslim state in the world. It is also one of very few Muslim nations that has relations with Israel. The Turkish military and the IDF engage in joint training exercises and arms sales, and basically Israel counts on Turkey as a regional ally, figuring that in a regional war, Turkey might side with Israel, and that, subsequently, any attack on Turkey by a hostile party would then be an attack against NATO and would then involve European-wide involvement. In short, along with nuclear weapons, Turkey is Israel's ace in the hole.

A year before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I wrote on this issue and others, and you can read that essay here.

The issue that remains before is whether what happened to the Armenians constitutes genocide. Recalling the U.N. definition, a genocide is characterized by any combination of the following: (1) Killing members of the group; (2) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (3) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (4) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and (5) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The Armenian genocide meets all five of these critiera. Armenians could only save their own lives (and even then it was a stretch) if they agreed to abandon the Armenian language and adopt Islam as their faith (an action that should, under no circumstances, be considered "typical" of Islam as a faith). Armenian children were given to Turkish families. Forcible relocation always (not sometimes, but always) results in deaths of the "relocated" groups.

So what is Foxman thinking in this odious example of genocide denial (which genocide scholar Gregory Stanton has noted is typically the final stage in a genocide? Well his "denial" is really his opposition to a Congressional resolution on the Armenian genocide. Asked to explain further, Foxman has said this: "This is not an issue where we take a position one way or the other . . . This is an issue that needs to be resolved by the parties, not by us. We are neither historians nor arbiters."

Well, if Foxman would keep his nose out of Holocaust historiography, I'd take him at his word. I'd also take him at his word were it not for the Stalinist firings of ADL officers who have publicly disagreed with him.

I don't know how this will resolve (if at all), but in the meantime all I can ask Foxman is this: "How do you sleep?"

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

How Irving tried to create a Soviet forgery

This self-explanatory exchange happened on 9 August. It concerned the alleged doctoring of Soviet documents by Soviet/Russian historian Lev Bezymenskij:
Bezymenski, a Jew, had also written a definitive account of the death of Adolf Hitler. He had been attached at that time as an interpreter to the Red Army unit concerned in Berlin. As an Appendix to his book he published the autopsy report, and it struck me as odd that while it contains such prurient details as that the body had only one testicle, which may well be true, it concealed the fact that Hitler had shot himself; if Bezymenski was to be believed, Hitler had just swallowed poison. There were psychological and propaganda reasons for asserting this.

YEARS later, Bezymenski came clean and admitted that he had been ordered by the Soviet Authorities to doctor the autopsy to conceal the fact that Hitler's skull clearly showed the bullet's entry and exit wounds, and he published a revised edition of his work.

This again just goes to show how careful one has to be before accepting any documents from governments which have political axes to grind. To which I must add that in all the years in which I have worked in Western Archives I have never personally found any forgeries. There are, however, very many such documents floating around private hands, fabricated for one reason or another.
Below you will find the exchange which Irving chose not to publish on his site. The reason for this should be obvious.

Read more!
Mr. Irving, you wrote:

"YEARS later, Bezymenski came clean and admitted that he had been ordered by the Soviet Authorities to doctor the autopsy to conceal the fact that Hitler's skull clearly showed the bullet's entry and exit wounds, and he published a revised edition of his work."

Then you continue about forgeries.

Well, this is incorrect. In his book "Operatsija 'Mif', or how many times Hitler was buried" (http://militera.lib.ru/research/bezymensky2/index.html) Bezymenskij explains what exactly he had lied about on KGB's request (otherwise his book would not come out). He lied when he wrote that the bodies were burnt in 1945 and that on June 3 some SMERSH official reported about this to Moscow. That's all. He did not "doctor" any existing documents, rather, he invented a new one, this SMERSH report. Or, to be more precise, he invented not the document itself, the "text" of which he did not cite, but rather he invented the existence of this document, so to say. He also omitted one forensic report, which stated that no traces of poison were found in the bodies (the Soviet experts explained to him that this doesn't play any role, since the bodies were in bad shape and a week had passed since death). Bezymenskij himself suspects that there was a "double" suicide - both by shooting and poisoning.

In that same book he reprints the (authentic) act which doesn't mention the shooting. The suicide by shooting issue is complex and is explored by Bezymenskij in his book, and doesn't actually involve any forgeries.

Sergey
My dear Sergei

I am reporting what my friend Besymenski TOLD me privately, not what he wrote in his book. We know how much to trust his boks now, don't we. Don't we?

I am very sad that he is dead.

David Irving
(currently in Wiltshire)

By the way: My own bookstore is now open at irvingbooks.com
Mr. Irving, since Bezymenskij confessed about his single lie and a single omission in his book, which are rather serious confessions by themselves, there is no reason to believe that he reprinted the falsified report once again in his new edition, and moreover, there is no reason to think that he wouldn't confess to have had doctored that same report in the first (Soviet) edition.

Yet the report is the same in the new book, because it doesn't mention shooting, and Bezymenskij elaborates on this point at length in his "new" book. This is actually one of his major points - the ideology of the time required for Hitler the "cowardly" death by poisoning rather than "officer's death" by shooting (although, again, probably he used both methods).

I.e.: either you misunderstood Bezymenskij, or you're misremembering what was said by him.

Sergey

PS: an example with Bezymenskij actually demonstrates how _reluctant_ were the Soviets to forge documents. There would be nothing easier for them than to simply write some fantasy reports from scratch, "proving" whatever point they wanted to prove (e.g. that Hitler's corpse was wholly incinerated and ashes were scattered). Rather, Bezymenskij was simply told to omit one report from publication (but they still showed it to him!) and to write that Hitler's corpse was indeed completely incinerated somewhere in beginning of June (they didn't supply him with any fake documents for this either).
Update: Irving linked to this post after the URL had been sent to him.

Well. Well? Well! (Part II)

Our previous analysis aside, assuming himself correct (i.e., that the water pump was "dangerously close" to the mass graves), the UV asks how such a mistake in the mapping of the camp could be made. He relies on one of his favorite arguments: Urban Jews wouldn't have known. The Jews of Treblinka, we're told, were urban with likely having little formal education. Water wells being a rural phenomenon, they wouldn't know that the well would be contaminated, so they didn't bother to place it far enough away from the mass graves when they "made up the story."

The UV is, of course, making an inherently incorrect assumption, as he does in other parts of this film, i.e., that Jews from Poland were urban and had little or no knowledge about rural life. In this case, his argument follows on this point with his claim that Jewish eyewitnesses wouldn't know that a well would have contaminated groundwater because they would never have encountered a well.

There are a couple of points where the UV is wrong. First, while it's true that the majority (77 percent) of Polish Jews resided in cities and large towns on the eve of World War II, one-quarter of the Polish-Jewish population lived in rural areas of the country. Among the towns on the deportation lists in Arad are towns with Jeiwsh populations of fewer than 2,000 people. For example, Arad lists the town of Sulejów as one deportation point for Jews. At the town's Web site you can see that today Sulejów has only 6,400 residents, and that's sixty years after the war. Arad's list tells us that only 1,500 Jews were deported from the town.

You can also see pictures of the town, particularly around the town's biggest tourist attraction, the eight-hundred-year-old Cistercians Abbey. Does this look "urban" to you?

In the same sub-section in Arad, by the way, we have the town of Kamiensk, from which we are told 600 Jews were deported (the smallest number on the page); the town has 2,800 inhabitants today.

All this leads to another problem: Are wells a "rural" phenomenon? My parents used to own a house in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania. The house was on the outskirts of a small town of slightly more than 5,200 people. This was not urban, nor was it even suburban. It was what is commonly called by demographers "exurban," although perhaps not "rural."

The point is this: The drinking water in my parents' house (which they had built for them) came from a well that was dug by the contractor. This was the case with every other house in the development where they had bought their plot of land. So if there were wells on the outskirts of a town of 5,200 people, can't we safely assume, particularly sixty years ago in a country (Poland) that was (then) less developed than the United States is today, that there would have been wells in towns all over Poland, including towns with largely or mostly Jewish populations?

The UV has done a particularly bad job in this section of the film. Thankfully, it's among the shortest sections of the thirty-part film.

Well. Well? Well!

by Andrew Mathis, Roberto Muehlenkamp and Sergey Romanov

In Part 2 of the One Third of the Holocaust video [YouTube version], The Ugly Voice tries to cast doubt on Treblinka witnesses' testimonies by trying to point out the absurdity of using the water from the well which was situated near the graves.

The UV cites Arad to the effect that the inmates used the well in the extermination area for washing dishes and preparing supper in the last period before the revolt (summer of 1943). Since the well was surrounded by thousands upon thousands of corpses, the well would have been severely contaminated and unusable, or so the UV says.

This may sound reasonable until you take into account a number of factors influencing the risk of groundwater contamination by leachate from the corpses.

Read more!
The factors include, first of all, the environmental conditions affecting the chances of micro-organisms contained in the leachate to survive and reach the underground waters. According to a WHO paper about The Impact of Cemeteries on the Environment and Public Health, the factors affecting the survival of viruses are temperature, dessication (increased virus reduction in drying soils), soil PH, cations and soil texture. Laboratory work, according to this article, has shown that most micro-organisms are filtered out on or near the soil surface, but adsorption of micro-organisms by the soil decreases with increasing water velocity. This means that, without information about these environmental conditions, it is impossible to predict the extent to which the presence of large numbers of corpses in the soil is likely to have contaminated the ground water at Treblinka. Then there is the – also unknown – depth of the unsaturated zone separating the groundwater table at Treblinka from the bottom of the mass graves, a factor mentioned in the article about Infectious disease risks from dead bodies following natural disasters from which the following quote is taken (emphases added):
Although there is some evidence of microbiological contamination in the immediate vicinity of cemeteries, the rapid attenuation of these microorganisms suggests that they pose little risk to the public (27). However, where it is necessary to choose a new burial site, several issues should be considered. A soil of sand-clay mix of low porosity and a small- to fine-grain texture is likely to maximize pathogen retention in the unsaturated zone (27). In such soil conditions, the water table should be at least 2.5 m deep in order to allow a “traditional” grave depth of six feet (1.8 m), with a 0.7-m unsaturated zone (34). This may have to be adjusted for more porous soil conditions, topographic lows, and low points of hydraulic gradients (25). To protect water supplies, distances of at least 30 m from springs or watercourses and 250 m from any well, borehole, or any source of drinking water have been suggested. However, there are no accepted standards, and distances are best chosen based on local hydrogeological conditions and with the agreement of nearby communities.
Another possible factor is wax-fat transformation. As has been pointed out earlier on our blog, layers of wax-fat-transformed corpses were found in Belzec graves. One can reasonably assume that these were the bottom layers, not taken care of by the Nazis. If the unsaturated zone separating the bottom of the graves from the water table was thin enough for the lower layers of bodies to be in a humid environment, it is fairly certain that an amount of corpses would have been transformed into wax-fat in Treblinka, too. In such case, the filtration of the leachate by the subsoil would have been less, but on the other hand the wax-fat would have at least partially retained the leachate and kept it from leaking into soil and groundwater.

Yet another factor is the disinfecting effect of quicklime, which is mentioned in a natural disaster context in this article, from which the following quote is taken (emphases added):
Stanley Michael, 31, the Chennai health expert tasked with averting disease, was consumed by concerns that the drinking water would be contaminated by all the corpses -- particularly after learning that the water table is as high as six feet below the surface here. First and foremost, he was concerned about cholera, an often-fatal disease that is endemic in the area and is spread in part by drinking contaminated water.

"I knew I was sitting on a time bomb," he said. "Once we had one case of cholera, it would have been four, then 100, 200 within a day. Thousands within two or three days."

The World Health Organization was recommending the use of an injectable cholera vaccine, but Michael doubted its effectiveness. The day after the tsunami struck, he sat at a desk in the health office and sketched out an alternative. Bodies would be placed in mass grave pits lined with multiple layers of bleaching powder, lime and soil, which would purify whatever fluid leaked through. Pipes would be inserted, allowing disinfectant to be poured in.

Local officials built 73 mass graves, the largest holding as many 800 bodies. "This is what prevented the epidemic," Michael said.


To assure drinking water quality, he handed out chlorine testing kits to his health officers. Wherever chlorine levels were not adequate, he instructed them to dump in more. He gave simpler contamination testing kits to village leaders.
The article implies that people would be drinking some amounts of corpse leachate for some time.

It also suggests that the risk that mass burial sites pose to groundwater can be considerably reduced, if not eliminated, by using disinfecting lime and/or bleaching powder. We know that at Treblinka each layer of bodies in the mass graves was covered with a thin layer of sand or quicklime before adding the next layer of bodies. When quicklime was used, it may have kept a considerable amount of pathogens from getting to the ground water.

Another effect of quicklime is that it hastens decomposition. Apart from acting as a disinfectant, quicklime may thus have led to the corpses more quickly reaching a stage of decomposition at which they would be less of a potential hazard to the ground water. Just how relevant the "age" of corpses in a mass grave is to the question of possible groundwater contamination becomes apparent from the following quote, taken from the article Carcass Disposal: A Comprehensive Review (emphasis added):
Some of the best information available on the decomposition of animal carcasses in burial sites stems from the 2001 outbreak of FMD in the UK. Although a devastating event, this incident provides unique and valuable information relative to decomposition of mass quantities of animal carcasses. A report commissioned at the very early stages of the outbreak as a result of problems related to the use of mass burial sites attempted to estimate the volume of fluid leachate which could be expected to originate from cattle, sheep, and pig carcasses. It was estimated that about 50% of the total available fluid volume would "leak out" in the first week following death, and that nearly all of the immediately available fluid would have drained from the carcass within the first 2 months (Table 15).

The author of this report highlighted the fact that much of the information used to generate the estimates was obtained from the rates of decomposition established for single non-coffined human burials, and these estimates may not accurately reflect the conditions in mass burials of livestock (Munro, 2001).
Although, as the above-quoted authors point out, the estimate may not be immediately applicable to mass burials, they - and the author of the original study - still provided this estimate, which means that it is useful, if even very approximately. Corpses eaten away by quicklime would much sooner be "old" enough to issue a considerably lower amount of leachate.

The above doesn't mean that the water in the well would be the best and healthiest water out there, without any corpse contamination whatsoever, but we aren't talking about a health resort either; we are talking about the health risk from a water well used by condemned men in death camp’s extermination area, which their captors, who had access to water sources further away from the mass graves and therefore safer, had no reason to care about. And there is also no reason to think that the water from the well in the Treblinka extermination sector wouldn't be usable for dish-washing and - when boiled - also for supper-preparation and even drinking.

In fact, here's what PAHO/WHO/ICRC manual "Management of Dead Bodies after Disasters: A Field Manual for First Responders" says:
1. Do dead bodies cause epidemics?

Dead bodies from natural disasters do not cause epidemics. This is because victims of natural disasters die from trauma, drowning or fire. They do not have epidemic causing diseases such as cholera, typhoid, malaria, or plague when they die.

2. What are the health risks for the public?

The risk to the public is negligible. They do not touch or handle dead bodies. However, there is a small risk of diarrhea from drinking water contaminated by fecal material from dead bodies. Routine disinfection of drinking water is sufficient to prevent water-borne illness.

3. Can dead bodies contaminate water?

Potentially, yes. Dead bodies often leak feces, which may contaminate rivers or other water sources, causing diarrheal illness. However, people will generally avoid drinking water from any source they think has had dead bodies in it.
Although this is a manual for "first responders", it does mention decomposed bodies, meaning that the above quote covers at least the first stages of decomposition. What is of special interest for our case, however, is how the contamination potentially caused by dead bodies is characterized, and what possible effects are attributed to that contamination: dead bodies may contaminate waters because they tend to leak feces, and the ingestion of such feces is likely to cause diarrheal illness. More specifically, the already quoted article Infectious disease risks from dead bodies following natural disasters tells us that
Where dead bodies have contaminated water supplies, gastroenteritis has been the most notable problem (7), although communities will rarely use a water supply where they know it to be contaminated by dead bodies.
Gastroenteritis, a disease also associated to sewage, usually comes in the form of viral gastroenteritis, a condition that is critical for infants, young children and persons who are unable to care for themselves and drink enough fluids to replace what they lose through vomiting or diarrhea, such as the disabled or elderly. It is one of the waterborne diseases frequently caused by drinking water contamination through human waste in India. Another such disease is known in English as typhoid fever. It is caused by the bacterium Salmonella typhi and unrelated in its cause – though similar in certain symptoms, namely a rash on the skin of the diseased – to the disease known in English as typhus, which is caused by the louse-borne bacterium Rickettsia prowazekii. The German terminology is different, designating as "Typhus" the water-borne disease caused by Salmonella typhi, whereas the disease caused by Rickettsia prowazekii is known as Fleckfieber (spotted fever) in German medical terminology. This discrepancy between English and German terminology, together with the similarity of certain symptoms, may be the reason why a disease that broke out among the permanent inmates of Treblinka extermination camp was referred to as "typhus" by Richard Glazar and as Fleckfieber in the Düsseldorf County Court’s judgment at the 1st Treblinka Trial. It is also possible that both diseases were present among these inmates, one caused by poor hygienic conditions leading to the presence of Ricksettia - bearing lice, the other caused by Salmonella typhi from the water consumed by the inmates. In what concerns the latter disease, it should be pointed that whether or not an inmate contracted the disease would depend on whether that person actually ingested the carrier (the possibility of which, in turn, essentially depended on the degree to which the factors mentioned in this article reduced or prevented the water’s contamination) and on the constitution of that person’s immune system. Even among those infected by Salmonella typhi, according to this article, up to 5 % become carriers of the bacterium without ever having symptoms of the disease.

In sum, we can conclude that gastrointestinal infections due to groundwater contamination from the corpses in the mass graves may but need not have affected the permanent inmates of the Treblinka extermination camp, and that the possibility of such infection need not be at odds with the evidence and may even be borne out by the evidence, referred to in the previous paragraph, to what may well have been the presence among the Treblinka inmates of the disease caused by Salmonella typhi that is known as typhoid fever in English and as Typhus in German medical terminology. The Treblinka inmates were hardly more at risk of contracting that disease due to the leachate from the corpses in the mass graves than a substantial part of the inhabitants of present-day India are at risk of contracting the same disease from water contaminated by untreated human waste.

So there’s no banana for the Ugly Voice also in what concerns this attempt to discredit evidence to the mass killings at Treblinka, which is followed in the same clip by the fellow’s characteristic considerations about why those lying Jews are supposed to have got it all wrong. This part is left to Andrew, who in his addendum to this chapter will show that the UV got it all wrong about water wells and urban Jews.

OK, let's finish with the UV stuff

I've finally managed to get off my lazy ass and prepare one of the last postings on the UV idiocy. Actually it's been ready for months, but hey! Fellow slackers will understand me ;-)

Other parts should follow shortly.

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Farewell to the Giant

Raul Hilberg, professor emiritus of political science at the University of Vermont and author of the canonical Destruction of the European Jews (first publication, 1961; revised and updated, 1985), has died at the age of 81.

Read more!
Hilberg and his family were run out of Austria in the aftermath of Reichskristallnacht, bouncing around the Caribbean before landing semi-permanently in New York, where he wrote his Ph.D. under the direction of Franz Neumann, author of Behemoth: National Socialism in Theory and Practice, a look at the Third Reich from a political refugee while it was still in power. Hilberg took as his doctoral thesis subject the Holocaust (a first among American scholars), which was eventually published as Destruction in a much expanded form.

I always admired Hilberg for not shrinking from saying what others refused to say, and this admiration was only increased by reading his Politics of Memory in the spring of this year. Hilberg had been roundly denounced for some of his conclusions when he first published -- conclusions that, by and large, Holocaust historians accept as truths today, e.g., that Jewish resistance was lacking in most of Europe during the Holocaust. While Mordecai Anielewicz and Abba Kovner were heroic in their actions, they were the exceptions and not the rule, and I think we all know today that this was a factor in European Jewry's destruction. Further, Hilberg did not shrink from discussion of issues like the Blood for Trucks deal between the yishuv and Eichmann or the Transfer Agreement, even if Hannah Arendt was publishing articles about these issues simultaneously.

The point is this: If we are going to be honest and thorough researchers into this period, we have to take our medicine like everyone else. Not everyone was a hero and not everyone did everything they could to help.

Hilberg had popped up in the last decade as a defender of some of Norman Finkelstein's conclusions in The Holocaust Industry -- particularly on Israel's misappropriation of some reparation funds and the culture of victimhood that continued to propagate itself. He drew fire for this (unsurprisingly), as he did for his general political conservatism in a field dominated by Jewish lefties like yours truly.

While Hilberg's other work (Documents of Destruction and Perpetrators, Witnesses, Bystanders) also made important contributions to the field, it is his three-volume magnum opus that put him on the map and has made him the yardstick by which all Holocaust historians are currently measured.

Well done, sir. May you rest in peace.

Monday, August 06, 2007

And The Cowardice Continues...

Recently I made a blog post -- I can't recall if it was here or at my now defunct personal blog that I provided a copy of a post from the old Upstream mailing list that proved (along with other evidence) that the "man" posting as Hannover at the Führerbunker is, in fact, Jonnie A. Hargis.

(Here's a screenshot, by the way, as the coward has successfully had the proof page removed again.)

Read more!
This morning, predictably, I found this old thread, where in some other jackass, "jnovitz," mentions me, so Jonnie piles on by stating that I have been made a fool of at the fascist closet that he controls. As if.

By way of proof, he offers the same stale list of links where I'm supposedly "routed" or whatever, but he offers this a new link, entitled "Holo. Hist. Proj.'s Andrew Mathis attempts damage control."

Apparently the damage I'm attempting to control is, according to Hargis, "wild allegations" by survivors of impossible death rates at Auschwitz Birkenau. I'd written, "No credible figure has ever claimed that 20,000 or 40,000 people were gassed in a day."

But is that all I said? Of course not. My entire post is here. I noted, "Höss claimed during the Hungarian Aktion that 12,000 were being "processed" a day. This was with five gas chambers and 52 crematory muffles, but still they had to resort to pit burnings. That's the highest claim I've ever heard, and it strikes me as specious also."

So please explain something to me: If I'm attempting "damage control," then why would I say that the 12,000 claim made by Commandant Höss was specious?

Returning to the "damage control" post cited by Hargis, he quotes three Holocaust survivors (two basic unknowns and Primo Levi), and then writes, "So, are all these characters deemed 'not credible'?"

Yes, Jonnie, they are not credible.

Pitecki died in 1948. He was not an historian and never carried any exhaustive study on Auschwitz. He certainly was dead before any truly reliable numbers for Auschwitz were in circulation.

Rosa Robota, according to the link Hargis himself provides, died in Auschwitz. Again, she could not have engaged in any real study of the camp.

As for Levi, his glitch is a bit less easy to excuse. But there's a bit of sleight-of-hand (read: lying) that Hargis engages in, claiming that Levi made his claim in 1986, the alleged publication date of Survival in Auschwitz.

In reality, Survival in Auschwitz was published as Se questo è un uomo in 1947 -- a mere two years after Auschwitz was liberated. And one would know, if they had read Levi's subsequent book, The Awakening, that he didn't make it back to Italy for over a year. So perhaps we may cut Levi some slack for an error made in 1947?

The really intriguing thing is that Hargis cites p. 388 in the book as where Levi wrote this. There is no p. 388 in Survival in Auschwitz; it runs a lean 187 pages. I even did a search on Google Books and Amazon.com for this phrase in the book and couldn't find it. Really funny is that Robert Faurisson makes the same quote here but also quotes a nonexistent page (pp. 201-202) and he doesn't even offer a footnote for an edition for us to check.

This is very likely the edition of Levi that Hargis believes he is citing. (Can you believe this guy works in a library?). The year is correct and publisher, but p. 388 would fall in the "Afterword : the author's answers to his readers "questions": p. 375-397."

So if Levi actually made this claim, he didn't even make it in Survival in Auschwitz, but rather in response to a question from a reader. What year? We don't know, of course, because Hargis never tells us, and -- alas! -- the book is out of print.

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Hitler the Jewish Zionist (Part III)

Here we go with the third and final installment of my ongoing analysis (mainly of the sources) in Jim Condit Jr's film The Final Solution to Adolf Hitler.

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  • The Rakovsky Interview. This is Condit's big source for the last fifty-odd minutes of this film. This is a singularly difficult book to get one's hands on, so I'm going to take the somewhat risk approach of trusting Condit at his word that he's quoting correctly when quoting directly. There are some real gems offered here:
    1. The first thing that Condit pulls out of this alleged interview of Christian Rakovsky (more on him later) is this remark: "They [the bankers] were very displeased with Stalin. They viewed Stalin as a Bonapartist."

      Condit tells us that "Rattisbone" figured out that, as it was the bankers who funded Napoleon, but Napoleon turned on them. Thus any person who turns out the bankers is a "Bonapartist."

      Unfortunately, it seems neither the forgers of this interview, "Rattisone," nor Condit know what the term "Bonapartist" means to a Marxist. "Bonapartist" is a term coined by Marx in his 1852 piece The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. So first of all, we're not even talking about Napoleon Bonaparte; we're talking about Louis-Napoleon III Bonaparte, the second French Emperor who ruled from 1848 to 1870.

      According to the commentary on the article, Bonapartism "has been used to describe a government that forms when class rule is not secure and a military, police, and state bureaucracy intervenes to establish order. Nineteenth century Bonapartism is commonly associated with Twentieth century fascism and stalinism." In plain speech, Bonapartism is, to Marx, counterrevolutionary activity.

      Of course, if Condit's overarching theory -- that "the Jews" control both finance capitalism and communism -- is true, then perhaps Stalin was being referred to as a Bonapartist in the sense Condit suggests. But I have yet to hear a plausible explanation for why capitalists and communists would be in cooperation.

    2. Now Rakovsky is "quoted" as saying that, in looking for an agent to bring down Stalin, they turned to Germany and the "gifted orator" Adolf Hitler. More on this later.


  • The Prisoner of Ottawa by Douglas Reed. Condit refers to Reed as an "historian," but he was in fact a journalist. This book was about Otto Strasser, written while Strasser was living in Canada.

    It should be noted that Reed was an inveterate anti-Semite. He was attacked at least twice by none other than George Orwell on this point.

    Anyway, Reed says that Strasser told him that Hitler had money to burn in 1929, and Condit links this up to Rakovsky allegedly saying that "Warburg" (we're not told which one) to give Hitler $10 million. Condit makes reference to Who Financed Hitler? by James Poole, who wrote that in the 1933 election, the Nazis had unlimited funds.

    Condit is able to chalk this up in its entirety to Rothschild/Warburg funding, but he never takes up the issue of Hitler's funding by German industrialists such as Ferdinand Porsche, the Krupp family, etc. Condit also seems to believe that Hitler and Stalin both invaded Poland on the same day. Actually, the invasions were sixteen days apart.

    Condit next tells us that Hitler had the support of the Cliveden Group. We're told these were pro-Zionist English sympathizers of Hitler; their "Zionism" is no proved by Condit. If anything, they seem to be Mosleyites or perhaps of the Edward III set. Will Condit tell us that the Duke of Windsor was Jewish?

    Condit also mentions his belief that Rudolf Hess was incarcerated entirely alone in Spandau Prison for forty-four years. No, all the Nuremberg defendants went to Spandau. Hess was simply the last to die.

    Now Condit returns to Reed's book on Strasser. Strasser says, supposedly, that Hitler was in Munich while it was under communist control. So, we can assume, Condit says, that Hitler was "working with the communists" in Munich in 1919-20. His source for this?

  • Hitler: Hubris, 1889-1936 by Ian Kershaw. According to Condit, Hitler acted as a "go-between" for the communist Bavarian government in Munich and the army.

    Is this what Kershaw actually writes? (Never mind that Kershaw completely dispenses with the "Hitler's grandfather was a Jew" theory -- If Condit is quoting Kershaw correctly know, then he's quote-mining again.) No, of course not. Condit says that Hitler was a messenger between the communist government and the troops. The problem is that the government was not "communist" until after Kurt Eisner was assassinated and, as a whole, was "communist" for perhaps a month. Hitler's loyalty, Kershaw writes, was to the SPD (Social-Democratic Party of Germany), which had actually called in the Freikorps to crush the revolution in Berlin. And why did Hitler compromise his principals? Kershaw chalks it up to something that Condit never mentions -- he wanted to avoid being demobilized from the army for fear of being deported to his native Austria. Why does Condit omit this? Is he lying? Did he not read the book?

  • The House of Nasi: The Duke of Naxos. This book is about "Joseph of Nasi," the "prince of worldwide Jewry" in the sixteenth century (he was a Sephardi, and there is no "prince of Jewry." Its importance is beyond me, to be frank.

  • Perfidy by Ben Hecht. The thing that Condit seems not to realize in bringing up the Kastner case is that despite their protestations, the Irgun collaborated with the Nazis far more than the Labor Zionists.

    By the way, from the beginning of the state of Israel through Kastner's assassination, the foreign minister of Israel was Moshe Sharrett.

  • Zionism in the Age of Dictators by Lenni Brenner. Yaaaaawn. He also cites Brenner's 51 Documents.

    On the heels of this, we get the tired old story that the Zionists brought the U.S. into World War I in exchange for Palestine. (Germany was losing on the Eastern Front when people like Condit claimed they were winning.) Condit totally misconstrues Brenner's motives, by the way, since he never mentions that Brenner is a Marxist.

  • The Secret World Government by Major General Count Cherep Spiridovich. This is anti-Semitic conspiracy shit by a defeated White Army offficer. That Condit would rely on such a steaming pile of pony loaf speaks volumes about his inherent prejudices.

  • Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler by Anthony Sutton. So what? We know that big American industrialists were bankrolling Hitler. This does nothing to support the notion that Zionists or Rothschilds were doing it.

  • The War Against the Jews by Lucy Davidowicz. She's kind of a joke. I wonder if Condit know that. According to Davidowicz, everyone was responsible for the Holocaust.

  • The Jews of Italy by ADL of B'nai Brith. If we should be surprised that there were Italian-Jewish fascists, then Condit underestimates our knowledge of the history of fascism. He states that this ADL pamphlet says that Mussolini and Adolf Eichmann set up Irgun training camps in Italy.

    Well, that's a new one. As for Eichmann, he spent part of 1937 in Palestine and then returned to his native Austria to oversee security during the annexation of Austria. Again, if we're supposed to be surprised that Eichmann spent time in Palestine, we're not.

  • Special Treatment: The Untold Story of Hitler's Third Race by Alan Abrams. This is a book about Mischlinge. Since when is this story untold, for one thing? The 1935 Race Laws are clear that Mischlinge are distinct from Jews.

    If Hitler felt that people of partially Jewish and partially German ancestry would "rule the world," then why did he outlaw marriages between second-degree Mischlinge?

  • The Abandonment of the Jew by David Wyman. What I said about Davidowicz goes for Wyman too.

  • The German-Bolshevik by Nesta Webster? Condit seems not to realize that Germany is not a religiously heterogeneous country and therefore could not be unified on religious grounds.

  • John "Birdman" Bryant. Claims Alfred Rosenberg was Jewish.
I want to return to Rakovsky because Condit never really finishes up with him.

Condit claims Rakovsky was Jewish. The man's first name was "Christian," but disregard that -- he was a Jew because "Rattisbone" said so. Curiously, Trotsky, who was Jewish and was working on a biography of Rakovsky when he was assassinated, never identifies Rakovsky as being Jewish. This is probably because he wasn't.

A final point: What Condit's long, rambling film (and thus these long, rambling posts) never takes into account is this: If Hitler wanted Jews out of Europe, why wouldn't he cooperate to some extent with Zionists who were willing to do so? It's the simplest possible explanation for much of what Condit presents, and not that Hitler was getting Rothschild funding and was himself a Jew.

Condit wraps things up with a bit of Holocaust denial and religious anti-Semitism. He appeals to Denis Fahey and Hutton Gibson and his idiot wife who says there weren't six million Jews in Europe in 1941: The Nazis' own census show 11 million. He quotes palpable lunatic Michael Hoffman to the extent that the word "Holocaust" didn't appear capitalized in the dictionary until 1980. And this proves what? It's a complete non sequitur.

Condit, like most conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites, is unable to apply the principle of Occam's Razor: The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Isn't it possible -- just possible (I'd say probable if not definite) -- that a politically adept demagogue who hated Jews for no reasons of "family blood" was able to exploit fears of communism to rise to power in Germany and eradicate millions of Jews in the process? It wasn't the first genocide and sadly probably won't be the last, so why is it the most questioned?

Why the double standard, Mr. Condit?

Hitler the Jewish Zionist (Part II)

So we were talking about Jim Condit's Jr's film The Final Solution to Adolf Hitler, particularly his sources. We'll pick up from where we left off, about forty-five minutes into the film.

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One thing I forgot to mention is that for all the attempts that Hitler purportedly made to destroy evidence of his ancestry, his parents' headstone is still right there outside of Linz for all to see: Looky!

Hitler did destroy his father's home town, but Condit never entertains the notion that Hitler despised his petty bourgeois, civil-servant, abusive father.

In this section of the film, Condit also returns to the idea of a Jewish Hitler by returning to Hitler's Vienna (despite the author's notation from our last post that Hans Frank is the only person seriously alleging Jewish ancestry on Hitler's part) and noting that some Jews in outlying areas of Austria-Hungary had the last name "Hitler." The name means "smallholder" in German, so it isn't surprising that some Jewish people, most of whom have German or Yiddish names, would have the name also.
  • Condit returns to Hamann's Hitler's Vienna, never once noting that Hans Frank was the sole source for the story of Hitler's alleged Jewish ancestry.

    Let's hit on sources again:

  • Star Wars by Nord Davis. Condit mentions this book for the first time in this segment, but he doesn't mention that Nord Davis was a Christian Identity preacher and a profound racist. We're promised "more later."

  • The Last of the Hitlers by David Gardner. Condit's claim to the believability of this book is that Gardner wrote a biography of Tom Hanks. Right: So being the biographer of a Hollywood star qualifies you as an historian? Does it matter to Condit that Gardner's account of Hitler's interaction with his half-nephew William Patrick is at direct odds with the interaction as described by Hamann? Hamann says nothing about a payoff to William Patrick to keep quiet about "Jewish ancestry."

    Just for shits and giggles, I checked out how many academic libraries carried each book. Hundreds carry the Hamann book; about sixty carry the Gardner book. My own book was published in 2002 -- the same year as Gardner's book -- is carried by 400 libraries.

    Another bit that Gardner apparently writes is that the Austrian government led by Engelbert Dollfuss investigated Hitler's background and found he was the grandson of a "Rothschild banker." I can buy that there may have been Rothschilds in Vienna in the early to mid-1930s, but in Linz or Graz or Braunau?

  • Adolf Hitler: Founder of Germany by Heinnecke Kardel. Condit tells us that Kardel is a "socialist Jew from Germany." In fact, Kardel was a decorated WWII Wehrmacht veteran. The book is generally regarded as worthless by historians; even Condit submits it is poorly sourced.

    This anecdote that Kardel tells about the Viennese Jew who served in the Wehrmacht is ridiculous given that Hitler couldn't have been a "Vienna Jew," as he came from Linz.

  • At 59 minutes into the film, Condit produces a source -- a photograph of Hitler and Hindenburg taken the day that the Reichstag was sworn in with Hitler as Chancellor. Here we get a good view of what Condit really thinks about Jews. First, there is the issue of Condit's stupid mistakes: The photograph was taken two months after Hitler became Chancellor, not before. Second, Hitler didn't succeed Hindenburg as Chancellor. He succeeded him as President a year later when Hindenburg died. For a full year, Hitler served as Chancellor with Hindenburg as President. In fact, Hitler ran against Hindenburg for President a year earlier and lost.

    Shouldn't a man making a film about Hitler know a little more about German history and government?

    Back to the photo. Condit says that Hitler's body type is "a little Sephardic Jew-type of a person." Of course, were Hitler even a Jew at all, he would be an Ashkenazi Jew, but I digress. This whole body type argument is classical racial anti-Semitism.

  • Condit brings up Frank Collin's march of the Nazi Party through Skokie, Illinois, and points out that Collin was Jewish. Then leaping to conclusions, he seems to induce that all Nazis must be Jews. At least that's the best I can pick up from Condit here.

  • Condit returns to Hamann again, hammering Hitler's desire to hide his family history. Perhaps what Hitler wanted to hide was not that he was Jewish, but rather that (1) his father was illegitimate, (2) his half-brother Alois was a petty criminal, (3) his father never divorced his first wife and thus was a bigamist. Again, note: Hamann never links the "Hitler was Jewish" rumor to William Patrick Hitler.

  • The Jewish Connection by M. Hirsh Goldberg. Condit pulls out this book to make several points. Notably, this book (published over thirty years ago) cites several sources but has no footnotes or endnotes. Thus the claims made by Goldberg, unless his source is explicitly stated in the text proper, must be researched on one's own. There are not only glaring omissions in the book (e.g., Stalin is mentioned as one of the people that helped found the State of Israel, but Stalin's anti-Semitic purge of the late 1940s and early 1950s, thinly veiled as "anti-Zionism" is excluded). And some of the information offered is just plain wrong. E.g., Goldberg claims the term "sour grapes" comes from Jeremiah 31:29, but if we look at Young's Literal Translation of the verse, not to mention the original Hebrew (where the word is boser), we don't find the word for "grape" in Hebrew (gefen or kedem). Jeremiah and Aesop (the latter from whom the term comes), if they lived, would have been contemporaries, but the likelihood is that a translator got clever and changed the Hebrew original to the English "grapes."

    So it's not surprising that points that Condit takes out of Goldberg's book are wrong. For instance, there is the allegation on p. 27 that Hitler was not a struggling student in Vienna who was rejected as an artist but rather than he had Jewish patrons. The author of the report cited is Walter C. Langer of the O.S.S. (precursor to the CIA). The problem is that Langer's report has never been considered reliable (he never interviewed Hitler's Vienna roommate, August Kubisczek, for one person), and the book version says Hitler's grandmother worked in Vienna for the Rothschilds -- what about Graz and the Frankenbergers?

    Goldberg's errors don't end here. His next reference is to William Shirer's canonical Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Shirer writes, on p. 20 of the Bantam paperback edition, that a Hungarian-Jewish clothes dealer gave a coat that looked like a caftan, i.e., a robe-like coat like those worn by Chasidic Jews.

    What's truly astounding is that at the top of the very same page in Rise and Fall, Shirer concludes a section about Hitler's alleged art career in Vienna, writing, "This was the extent of Hitler's 'artistic' achievement, yet to the end of his life he considered himself an 'artist.'"

    The next whooper is that Hitler employed a Jewish cook, a Fräulein Kunde, on loan to him from Romanian leader Antonescu during the war. Surprisingly, the exact same story, told in almost exactly the same words, appears in Gerald Fleming's book Hitler and the Final Solution. One of the only references to this woman I could find was in a 1939 article in American Imago, a psychoanalytic journal. A shared source between Fleming and Goldberg is The Psychoanalytic Interpretation of History (1971), edited by Benjamin B. Wolman, which is almost assuredly the source that both Fleming and Goldberg used -- unless Fleming, who published a decade after Goldberg, used Goldberg's book, which is extremely doubtful.

    The problem is not only that, as with the O.S.S. report, the psychoanalytic views of Hitler have been shown to be unreliable, but the majority of Hitler scholars idenity Hitler's cook not as a "Fräulein Kunde" but as Marlene von Exner, who, according to Martin Gilbert, was not Jewish but, instead, had a Jewish great-grandparent. Upon disclosing this to Hitler, she was fired (Gilbert, The Second World War: A Complete History [2004], p. 504).

    Another source to mention the cook as Exner and not Kunde is none other than Brigitte Hamann (p. 412), whose book is sitting right on Condit's desk as he reads from what appears to be a xerox of Goldberg's pages. Clearly Condit never read all of Hamann's book and was simply pointed to the "incriminating" portions by his shady "mentor," whom he calls only "Ratisbone."

    The revelations about Hitler's Jewish superior officer during World War I and Dr. Bloch are not anything to anyone who knows anything about Hitler at all. (As an aside, I'm personally of the opinion that Hitler deserved his war decorations, one of which was awarded for carrying a message between platoons under fire.)

    The allegations about Angela Hitler having worked for a Jewish Mensa organization. I was able to track this down to a Czech publication of 1933. It's poorly sourced at best but, as Condit concedes, proves nothing about Hitler being Jewish. Nor, for that matter, does Hitler's personal modesty, mentioned by Condit while referencing David Irving's Hitler's War. Condit implies that Hitler would not allow people, even physicians, to see him naked because he was probably circumcised, and only Jews were circumcised before World War II Europe.

    So here we go from Hitler being one-quarter Jewish to having undergone ritual circumcision, presumably in 1889, the year of his birth. Really? Are we to assume that the small town of Braunau had a mohel to perform such a circumcision? And what of Hitler's parents' Catholic upbringings?

    I realize that this is anecdotal evidence, so take it with a grain of salt, but I myself had a single Jewish grandparent. However, that grandparent's son, my father, was raised Catholic, as was my mother, and as was I.

  • The Rakovsky Interrogation by Anonymous. This book Condit refers to as one of "our" publications, then in process. Before he gets into that, however, he shows us a copy of the newspaper he used to publish, All These Things -- particularly an article entitled "The Rakovsky Interview and the Beginning of World War II." Condit wrote this article himself. He says we'll get back to this also.

    Next he pulls out Red Symphony by J. Landowsky, who was purported part of the interrogation of Christian G. Rakovsky. The next book is Alan Bullock's Hitler and Stalin and a reference by Condit to Trotsky's autobiography on the topic of Rakovsky. Condit calls Rakovsky a Jew and a "gentleman banker."

    Condit next references "Ratisbone" again and then pulls out The Rules of Russia by Fr. Denis Fahey, the famous anti-Semitic Catholic priest and schismatic. Fahey quotes Douglas Reed, who, we're told "once worked for The London Times. Did you know that many of the Bolsheviks who overthrew the provisional government in Russia were Jews from New York who couldn't speak Russia?

    I can think of one American who went to Russia during the Bolshevik take over -- John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World. But I disgress.

    Next Condit talks about communist takeovers of Hungary by Bela Kun and Bavaria by communists, etc., after World War I. Condit references the Polish-Soviet War, which the Poles won in August 1920. Condit links this Soviet loss to the overthrow of Kun and the Bavarian communists. The problem is that both Kun and the Bavarian group were overthrown before the Battle of Warsaw (the battle Condit repeatedly refers to), and it was by no means clear that Poland would win the war until this battle was over.

    While discussing Stalin's succession to the rulership of the USSR from Lenin, he mentions that Trotsky was married into the Rothschild family. Before we address that idiocy, Condit wraps up his intro by stating that Trotsky was the bankers' man in Russia and by Stalin pushing Trotsky out, the bankers and communists (who, as we all know, always work as a team) tried to get rid of Stalin. Finding this out, Stalin made massive arrests and began the show trials of the 1930s -- also known as the Great Terror.

    Interestingly, Condit doesn't mention the Kirov murder, which is the key event that set off the Great Terror. Does he know who Kirov was? Does he know who killed him and why?

    Condit also seems not to know (he never mentions it) that between Lenin's death and Stalin's consolidation of singular power (1924 to 1929), Stalin ruled the USSR part of the time with two Jews -- Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev, the former of whom was Trotsky's brother-in-law. Why wouldn't Stalin distance himself from these men?

    As for Trotsky's marriage -- or should we say marriages -- he married Aleksandra Sokolovskaya in Siberia 1899. He married his second wife, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, in Paris in 1903. Condit mentions neither woman nor any connection between them and the Rothschild family.

    Eventually we get to the often-repeated allegationi that New York Jewish banker Jacob Schiff funded the Bolsheviks, he (rather than Kaiser Wilhelm II, as history records) finding Lenin in Zurich and shipping him to Petrograd and Schiff, via Bernard Baruch and their puppet, Woodrow Wilson, getting Trotsky released from jail in Newfoundland, where he was in fact held by the British en route from New York to Petrograd in March 1917.

    The point is this: Schiff did help fund the March Revolution in Russia that put a democratic provisional government in place under Alexander Kerensky. (Most conspiracy theorists like Condit seem not to know that there were two revolutions in 1917 in Russia.) However, because he felt communism was detrimental to capitalism (which it was), he withdrew his funding when the Bolsheviks took over eight months later.

    If Schiff had been funding Trotsky, by the way, don't you think Trotsky would have mentioned it in his autobiography, published ten years after Schiff had died? What did Trotsky have to lose at that point? He had been forcibly exiled from the USSR and Stalin was plotting against his life.

    Condit is called a "half-Jewish gangster"; Stalin wasn't Jewish. His father and mother were both Georgian Orthodox Christians. Jughashvili does not mean "son of the Jew."
That pretty much wraps up the second third of Condit's film. We'll do the third part last, when time allows.

Kevin MacDonald: Old Whine in New Bottles

Holocaust denial is always seeking a veneer of scholarship, but whenever a ‘revisionist’ academic appears on the scene, it quickly becomes apparent that his work is a list of familiar antisemitic canards dressed in scholarly garb. Kevin MacDonald is one of the most notorious members of this fraternity, and shares at least three core beliefs with hardcore Holocaust deniers. Firstly, MacDonald and the deniers believe that gentiles have been apologizing to Jews for too long, and the Holocaust perpetuates this unfair culture of apology. Secondly, they believe that there are scientific grounds on which anti-Jewish statements can sometimes be defended; there may often be cases where ‘ad hominem’ attacks on Jews are not only defensible but necessary for cultural protection. Thirdly, MacDonald shares the deniers’ Manichean reading of Jewish-gentile historical conflict. The Jew in MacDonald’s universe is the pollutant of the Body Politic. Jews are therefore partially, and sometimes even fully, responsible for the violence and discrimination they have suffered down the centuries.

Continue reading...


The subtext of Holocaust denial can be expressed in one command: the white man must stop apologizing to the Jews. Holocaust deniers are not merely seeking to whitewash the Fuehrer and portray Jews as liars; their aim is to reverse what they see as a culture of apology. Irving served the libel writ on Lipstadt for this very reason: to force Lipstadt to become the apologizer, to reverse the psychological pain felt by antisemites every time they have to apologize to a Jew. MacDonald’s witness statement to the Lipstadt libel trial makes clear his unconscious understanding of this motive and his sympathy for Irving’s agenda. The original statement, which is still posted on Irving’s website, is less than twenty paragraphs in length, yet makes eight references to Jewish strategies that involve Jews writing “apologia” or forcing their opponents to make apologies. The theme is stretched over wide frames of time and space to give the impression that the strategies derive from an inherent Jewish trait:
Separation and Its Discontents discusses a great many of these strategies, including a very long history of apologia dating to the ancient world. In the last century there have been a great many intellectual activities, most notably many examples of Jewish historiography which present Jews and Judaism in a positive light and their enemies in a negative light, often with little regard for historical accuracy...
http://www.fpp.co.uk/Legal/Penguin/experts/MacDonald/report1.html

Moreover, his statement condemns Jews for protesting against early forms of German ‘scientific’ antisemitism, which were the precursors of Nazi racial theory:
For example, Jews engaged in a very wide range of activities to combat anti-Semitism in Germany in the period from 1870 to 1914, including the formation of self-defense committees, lobbying the government, utilizing and influencing the legal system (e.g., taking advantage of libel and slander laws to force anti-Jewish organizations into bankruptcy), writing apologias and tracts for distribution to the masses of gentile Germans, and funding organizations opposed to anti-Semitism composed mainly of sympathetic gentiles. Jewish organizations commissioned writings in opposition to "scientific anti-Semitism," as exemplified by academically respectable publications that portrayed Judaism in negative terms. Academic works were monitored for such material, and Jewish organizations sometimes succeeded in banning offending books and getting publishers to alter offensive passages. The result was to render such ideas academically and intellectually disreputable...
MacDonald therefore, by implication, places himself on the side of the antisemites whose ideas led to Nazism, and whose intellectual mantle is now carried by Holocaust deniers. MacDonald’s statement then applies this theme to the current British and American cultural scene by expressing outrage that the British journalist, William Cash, had to apologize for antisemitic remarks written in 1994:
A theme of anti-Jewish writing in the contemporary U. S. has been that Jewish organizations have used their power to make the discussion of Jewish interests off limits. Individuals who have made remarks critical of Jews have been forced to make public apologies and suffered professional difficulties as a result. Quite often the opinions in question are quite reasonable-statements that are empirically verifiable and the sort of thing that might be said about other groups or members of other groups. For example, media critic William Cash (1994), writing for the British magazine The Spectator, described the Jewish media elite as "culturally nihilist," suggesting that he believed Jewish media influence reflects Jewish lack of concern for traditional cultural values.
The second way in which MacDonald travels alongside Holocaust deniers is in his desire to make “ad hominem” statements respectable. Since 1945, liberals in Western democracies have persuaded moderate conservatives to accept the moral and logical truth that it is irrational to make assumptions about entire groups based purely on their supposed biological origins. In a statement given to H-Net on February 28th, 2000, MacDonald opposes this consensus and explicitly defends “ad hominem” attacks:
…whether anti-Semitism is irrational is always a difficult empirical question. In the stereotyping sense, some general statements about Jews may be true and thus constitute rational anti-Jewish attitudes among groups that have very different interests…[There] are also virtues in defining anti-Semitism along the lines of disliking Jews more than is rationally warranted. In this definition, anti-Semitism is always irrational, but of course there may be rational reasons to dislike Jews. In any case, I am proposing that rational anti-Jewish attitudes involve reasonable perceptions that one's interests conflict with those of influential and important Jewishly motivated groups or the Jewish community in general.
http://tinyurl.com/2b67by

In this regard, MacDonald shares a fallacy espoused by Scientific Racists such as Charles Murray, the co-author of The Bell Curve, which holds that principled opposition to racism is unscientific. In the view of MacDonald and Murray, there are no intrinsic rational reasons why antisemitism and racism must always be opposed. Moreover, there may be occasions when these attitudes are necessary in order to protect society as a whole from the low IQ’s of blacks or the group conspiracies of Jews.

MacDonald’s links with Scientific Racism are not only theoretical. In 1995, his book A People that Shall Dwell Alone was reviewed favourably by Hans Eysenck, who had gained notoriety in the early 1970’s for his support of Arthur Jensen and as the author of Race, Intelligence And Education, a neo-eugenicist forerunner of The Bell Curve. Eysenck's links to Scientific Racism are discussed here:

http://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/othersrv/isar/archives2/billig/chapter6.htm

Eysenck's review appeared here:

http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/late/aptsda02.html

In 2003, writing in the white nationalist journal, The Occidental Quarterly, MacDonald returned the favour:
Hans Eysenck, renowned for his research on personality, claims that Jews are indeed rated more aggressive by people who know them well.
http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/vol3no2/km-understanding.html

In 2000, MacDonald spoke approvingly of the work of Arthur Jensen:
From what we know about the heritability of IQ it seems very likely that whatever cultural pushes there have been for IQ, there is also a strong genetic component. Arthur Jensen estimates a maximum of 10 IQ points for environmental manipulations like adoption.
http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/newtimes-Amherst.html

However, antisemitism brings other ingredients to the party that are not always found in Scientific Racism. It is important to recognize that MacDonald’s work also contains these elements. He is not simply riding on the coat-tails of the Bell Curve racists but is also tapping into a repertoire of libels that depict Jews as a pollutant, a spoiler race, and a conspiratorial menace. Whereas racists such as Jensen frame their discussions around the supposed ‘passivity and low IQ’ of blacks, MacDonald accuses Jews of the opposite offences: over-activity and hyper-intelligence.This therefore leads to the third, and most virulent, connection to Holocaust denial: a reading of history that ultimately holds that, in many cases, the Jews deserved their rough treatment. For MacDonald, it was Jewish activism, not a corrupt bunch of medieval clerics, which was responsible for the torture and murder of Jews during the Inquisition:
Jews who had nominally converted to Christianity but maintained their ethnic ties in marriage and commerce were the focus of the 250-year Inquisition in Spain, Portugal, and the Spanish colonies in the New World. Fundamentally, the Inquisition should be seen as a defensive reaction to the economic and political domination of these “New Christians."
http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/vol3no2/km-understanding.html

Although MacDonald has (to date) avoided an explicit application of this principle to the Holocaust, the above statement does seem to be inviting the reader to infer, “If Jews can be blamed for a crime as heinous as the Inquisition, why not the Holocaust?” MacDonald’s argument is simply a more nuanced version of the claim made by Irving to an Australian television presenter:
'Cover Story' (Australian television) Sunday 4 March 1997, (p. 7).
PRESENTER: At times in your speech to these groups you speak at, you ask if the Jews have ever looked at themselves.
IRVING: Yes.
PRESENTER: To find a reason for the pogroms and the presentation and the extermination. In other words you're asking "did they bring it on themselves?"
IRVING: Yes.
PRESENTER: Thereby excusing the Germans, the Nazis.
IRVING: Why... well, let us ask that simple question, why does it always happen to the Jews?
PRESENTER: But isn't that an ugly, racist sentiment?
IRVING: It is an ugly, of course it's an ugly, racist sentiment, of course it is, you're absolutely right but we can't just say therefore lets not discuss it, therefore lets not open that can of worms in case we find something inside there which we're not going to like looking at.
http://www.holocaustdenialontrial.org/trial/judgement/09.03?keyword=australia

In conclusion, therefore, it was not a desire to defend academic freedom that brought MacDonald into Irving’s orbit. The two men had a similar view of Jews and their place in history. They wanted to force a Jew to make a public apology on behalf of all the Jews, living and dead, that occupy their antisemitic obsessions.

We have a fine addition to our team!

Today Jonathan Harrison joins our blog team. He has a Ph.D. in Sociology and specializes in the history and sociology of antisemitism, racism and Holocaust denial. Expect a lot of posts from him, dealing not only with deniers' arguments, but also with sociology of denial and with the "fellow travelers", such as the infamous Kevin MacDonald.

Correction Corner #4: Auschwitz Museum and the number of Gypsy victims

Today, 63 years ago, the liquidation of the Gypsy Family camp in Birkenau commenced.

On the website of the Auschwitz Museum we can find the following information:
The “Gypsy” camp was liquidated on the night of August 2/3, 1944 on orders from Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler. All the people still alive, 2,897 of them, were murdered that night.
The figure of 2897 murdered Gypsies, is, however, absolutely wrong and unfounded.

This is one of the cases when an examination of Holocaust deniers' claims leads not only to refutation of those claims (this is usual), but also a refutation of mainstream claims, as new facts are uncovered (this also happens sometimes).

What's ironic this time is that the mainstream claim (in this case - about the liquidation of the Gypsy camp) probably diminished the scope of tragedy, and, what's worse, this mistake has been mindlessy perpetuated in books and media.

Informational items about the liquidation of Auschwitz Gypsy camp on August 2, 1944 are usually based on D. Czech's reconstruction. Here's a another example from the Auschwitz Museum's site:
The extermination of the Roma in Birkenau took place on the night of August 2/3, 1944. A ban on going outside the barracks was imposed on the Gypsy camp on the evening of September 2 and, despite resistance, 2,897 men, women, and children were loaded on trucks, taken to gas chamber no. V, and exterminated. Their bodies were burned in the adjacent pits.
In his article "The "Gassing" of Gypsies in Auschwitz on August 2, 1944" Carlo Mattogno claims that no Gypsies were gassed on August 2, 1944. He makes some ignorant claims to arrive at this conclusion, although he does make one good point in the process. Let's examine his claims and compare them to the claims by Danuta Czech and the Auschwitz Museum.
  • 1. There were 1518 inmates listed in male labor deployment report for July 30, 1944 in the Gypsy camp.
  • 2. This number increased to 2815 on August 1, 1944 and to 2885 on August 2, 1944. July 31 report is missing.
  • 3. On August 3 there are 1408 Gypsies explicitly mentioned for BIIe camp, noted as being transferred elsewhere.
  • 4. The difference, therefore is 1477 inmates of the Gypsy camp, who seem to have disappeared.
  • 5. To explain the bulk of this disappearance Mattogno brings up the transport of 1298 Radom Jews (males), who arrived on July 31, 1944 and were registered on the same day. These Jews, however, don't appear in male labor deployment lists of August 1 and 2 (labor deployment lists noted the new arrivals). As could be established from quarantine camp documents, these Jews weren't in that camp either.
  • 6. Mattogno, therefore, makes a logical conclusion: the increase of the male Gypsy camp population from 1518 on July 30 to 2815 on August 1, 1944 (the difference being 1297) is due to these Radom Jews being temporarily placed in the Gypsy camp. This is not unheard of, as the Gypsy camp was also used to lodge some Jews during the Hungarian action. The difference in 1 person might have been covered by the missing July 31 report.

    So far, the argument seems reasonable, and it's a pity the mainstream researchers didn't put it up first, and rather assumed that all 2815 inmates on Aug. 1 were Gypsies, because this, obviously, does some serious violence to their Gypsy death toll estimates.
  • 7. Now, Danuta Czech assumes that all 2885 inmates of the Gypsy camp on August 2 were Gypsies (she calculates 2898 for Birkenau as a whole). She notes the transfer of 1408 Gypsies to other place (she says Buchenwald) and claims that 2897 Gypsies were gassed afterwards.
  • 8. Mattogno thinks this is a stupid mistake:
    Here it should be pointed out that the number of the allegedly gassed gypsies contains a glaring arithmetic mistake: if there had been altogether 2,898 gypsies, and 1,408 thereof have been transferred, it is completely impossible that 2,897 were "gassed"! The number of the "gassed" would rather amount to (2,898-1,408 =) 1,490.
    Actually it is Mattogno's glaring mistake.

    Czech doesn't deal only with Birkenau Gypsies, she explicitly notes that 1408 transferred Gypsies came from Blocks 10 and 11 of Auschwitz I camp (Aug. 2 entry). The 1989 text of the Kalendarium (both English and German) is actually confusing, but even then one can understand that she is talking about Stammlager Gypsies, especially when one reads May 23 entry. Here's the more clearly worded German version, from the Auschwitz Trial DVD:
    Am Nachmittag wurde auf der Eisenbahnrampe innerhalb des Lagers Birkenau ein leerer Gueterzug bereitgestellt, in den 1.408 Zigeunerinnen und Zigeuner verladen wurden, die am 23. Mai 1944 im Lagerabschnitt BIIe selektiert worden waren, damals in die Bloecke 10 und 11 im Stammlager verlegt worden waren, am Leben gelassen und in andere Konzentrationslager ueberstellt werden sollten und jetzt vom Stammlager nach Birkenau gefuehrt wurden.
    Indeed, in May 23, 1944 entry Czech claims, based on a testimony of T. Joachimowski, that there were about 1500 Gypsies lodged in blocks 10 and 11 of the main camp, waiting to be transferred elsewhere.

    So Mattogno's argument about Czech's "mistake" is bogus (regardless of veracity of Czech's method).

    Czech gives the death toll of 2897 (and not 2898) because one Gypsy stayed in camp BIIf.
  • 9. And yet, we still have to subtract 1298 Radom Jews from Czech's death toll, leaving us only with only 1599 Gypsies which, according to Czech's methodology, could have been gassed.
  • 10. However, here is where both Mattogno and Czech make a fatal mistake. All this time they were dealing with male labor deployment lists. How on the basis of the male population of the Gypsy Family camp Czech could make a conclusion that "2897 defenceless women, men and children" were gassed, and how, on the basis of male population could Mattogno make his conclusion about the lack of gassings of any Gypsies?
  • 11. What they both amazingly ignored are the existing strength reports for female population of camp BIIe, i.e. the Gypsy camp. I've had them for some time from Dr. John Zimmerman, but only recently Dr. Nicholas Terry realized, that this is it - the actual numbers for the female Gypsies, covering the period from 16 to 31 July, 1944. The reports were available to Czech, and basically to everybody, and yet nobody seems to have realized their significance until Nick, which is rather baffling.
  • 12. July 31, 1944 report records 3422 women in Gypsy camp BIIe:

  • 13. Therefore, taking into account everything said before, and assuming D. Czech is correct about 1408 Gypsies being from Auschwitz I, there could have been as many as (1599+3422)=5021 Gypsies gassed.


Well, actually this is problematic too, because this assumes that Czech is correct when she claims that 1408 Gypsies were male AND female Gypsies from Stammlager. Once again, the assumption that female deportees were mentioned in the male labor deployment lists is shaky at best. So we're left in uncertainty about the number of Gypsies who could have been gassed. Until proven otherwise, we should assume that 1408 transferred Gypsies were males, and there could have been females transferred as well (though we don't know the numbers).

It is also not completely clear whether these 1408 Gypsies were indeed from Auschwitz I, or from Auschwitz II. If they were from Auschwitz II, then we should subtract them from the Birkenau Gypsy population, having as many as (5021-1408)=3613 Gypsies potentially gassed.

It is possible that it was a mix of both Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II male Gypsies, but it is also possible that no Gypsies were brought from the main camp at all, and this is only D. Czech's assumption (testimonies from the Frankfurt trial don't seem to support this version, and some contradict it, saying that the Gypsies were in the main camp just for quarantine for several days only).

In any case, it seems clear that D. Czech's - and Auschwitz Museum's - number of 2897 gassed Gypsies is absolutely unfounded, and potentially, many more hundreds of Gypsies could have been gassed, mostly women and children. To establish the true number and to remove uncertainties, further research is required.