Saturday, December 01, 2007

CODOH Demographics

In January 1953, Paul Rassinier wrote an article for Der Weg in which he claimed that "the majority (80%) of the Jews in the Ukraine, White Russia, Lithuania and Latvia" were rescued from the Nazis by Soviet evacuation procedures. As Pierre Vidal-Naquet noted here, Rassinier based this claim on a single source - a Soviet newspaper article by David Bergelson - that had no primary corroboration. This single-source claim was repeated by deniers Richard Verrall in 1974 and Walter Sanning in 1983. In April 2003, fifty years after Rassinier's article, CODOH repeated the single-source propaganda claim on this thread. What does the thread tell us about the state of revisionism, and CODOH's intellectual bankruptcy?

Read more!

Unlike Sanning, CODOH moderator Jonnie 'Hannover' Hargis makes no attempt to fabricate a pseudo-scientific method based on fraud, deception and manipulation. For Hargis, it is sufficient to state a faith position:
Jews went where Jews are.

Look at Israel.. how many Jews were there before WWII? How many are there now? Jews were literally flooding out of Europe immigrating to Israel, US, Canada, S. America, S. Africa..you name it.
It never occurs to Hargis that the onus is on him to prove this claim with demographic evidence from the countries concerned. He also embarasses his fellow revisionists, Mattogno and Graf, by showing that they - like Rassinier, Verrall and Sanning - are forced to rely on hearsay from journalists rather than proper historical and demographic sources:
Mattogno/Jürgen quoted in their Treblinka book a Jewish journalist Louis Rapoport from his book La guerra di Stalin contro gli Ebrei, Rizzoli, Mailand 1991
This is the best that CODOH can do. Like all its fellow fraudsters in the 'revisionist' school, therefore, CODOH does not have a clue how to study a demographic or historical subject seriously.

24 comments:

  1. I always tried to understand Rassinier, who was a prisoner in Nazi camps, who aided Jews and was tortured by the Gestapo, yet seems profoundly confused in his decision to portray the Third Reich as not being that bad, to try and clear it from charges of genocide and mass murder. Solzhenitsyn does not try to donwplay the crimes of the Soviet Union, and unapologetically lays its atrocities out on the table for all to read about. I don't know if Rassinier would rub elbows with the full-fledged deniers today, but he comes close to sounding like one at times, which I find odd, considering his experiences during WWII.

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  2. So, if Rassinier has reason to be acrimonious toward the Nazis because of the way he was treated by them, he should adjust his recollection (or sense of justice) to besmirch the entire country?

    It would be like U.S. Senator John McCain (Republican senator from Arizona and former POW in Vietnam) embellishing (or falsifying) his war time experience in Vietnam because of the treatment he received at the hands of the North Vietnamese. His position is quite the opposite. It was a war you dolt.

    In other words you are saying it baffles you that someone would actually tell the truth when they have a perfect opportunity to lie.

    Butch

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  3. Rassinier was the godfather of Holocaust denial. No ifs, no buts, he was a denier, an antisemite and an apologist for the Third Reich.

    As for his background, let it not be forgotten that other socialists (Rassinier was SFIO, not PCF) made the leap to fascism - Moseley and Mussolini being the best-known.

    The available evidence suggests that Rassinier (1) generalised from his own unusual experiences in a KZ to *all* KZs, (2) became vitriolically antisemitic after losing his seat in the French Parliament after the war to a Jewish rival, (3) hung out with professional antisemites such as Celine and Albert Paraz, who egged on his 'researches', and (4) liked the attention he received for his ever more bizarre claims.

    There are two biographies of Rassinier available in French, by Nadine Fresco and Florent Brayard. Both are worth reading.

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  4. Nick,

    Just so I understand this.

    Rassiner is lifelong pacifist, part of the French resistance movement, imprisoned by the Nazis, tortured by the Gestapo, aided the Jews... but when he looses an election to a Jewish rival he becomes virulently (your word) antisemitic?

    Is that how "convergence of evidence" works?

    Let's try Occam's Razor instead:

    Rassinier won't validate the holocaust therefore he is antisemitic.

    Wadda ya think?

    Butch

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  5. "Just so I understand this.

    Rassiner is lifelong pacifist, part of the French resistance movement, imprisoned by the Nazis, tortured by the Gestapo, aided the Jews... but when he looses an election to a Jewish rival he becomes virulently (your word) antisemitic?"

    That's what one of his biographers found when going through his private papers.

    You're making a reverse ad hominem argument if you think that because Rassinier was a pacifist, member of the resistance, etc, he was always going to be on the side of the angels. People aren't like that; people can change, and Rassinier certainly did.

    It is well known that his first book was autobiographical; it earned him controversy from *French* camp survivors and he was also convicted of libel in the 1940s for his writings at this stage. He was acquitted on appeal.

    In the 1950s, Rassinier was drawn into right-wing and antisemitic circles. His credentials as a socialist pacifist wore off. He was expelled from a pacifist association before he began to outline his full Holocaust denial theory.

    I need hardly add that he was likewise expelled from the SFIO. So much for his credentials by the mid/late 1950s.

    "Rassinier won't validate the holocaust therefore he is antisemitic."

    You've either never read Rassinier or you are incapable of recognising antisemitism when you see it. Rassinier's texts from the early 1960s are antisemitic in their characterisation of a 'Jewish conspiracy' of document-forging factories and so forth. They are saturated with antisemitism.

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  6. Nick,

    Good to hear from you and hope all is well.

    Let me start by saying, you guys sure do have an answer for everything! And it was good that you jumped in when you did because I surely scored a point against "danton".

    Let’s see, how did it go? Oh yeah:

    “In other words you are saying it baffles you that someone would actually tell the truth when they have a perfect opportunity to lie.”

    Which is essentially what he said and you guys couldn’t take the chance that someone would happen along and see what an ass he made of himself and that I got the last word. So good save on that one.

    But then again you countered with the “reverse ad-hominem” argument which really clears things up. That’s PhD. stuff and hard for me to understand.

    OK, back to the point. Well, you didn’t do so well there. You did make a fairly compelling argument that Rassinier became a holocaust denier (some 10 years later) but not that he was one at the end of the war which is when he could have made his most damming accusations concerning the Nazis and when he would have felt the most compelled to so (hell, they damn near killed the bastard) ... but he didn’t. Could it be that he didn’t witness it or possibly that it didn’t happen as advertised?

    Then again, immediately following the war (and for some time after that) the holocaust wasn’t the industry it is today, was it Nicky? For example, how many lines of text did Sir Winston Churchill devote to the holocaust in his post-war writings? Or Eisenhower? Are they anti-Semites too?

    ‘Course you guys think everyone is an anti-Semite who doesn’t lock-step with you. See Nick you’re too sensitive. Just because a particular statement is not flattering to Jews does not make it anti-Semitic. For example, if I said, “Jews circumcise their male children”, that would not be considered anti-semetic but if I said “a pornographic film is 10,000 times more likely to be produced by a Jew (than a non-Jew)”, that would be considered anti-Semitic -- even though both are demonstrably true -- because the latter is not flattering. Therefore if Rassinier made the comment that there was a “'Jewish conspiracy' of document-forging factories” he’s automatically an anti-Semite because it’s non-flattering even if it was true (and I’m not debating the veracity of the forgery conspiracy claim, just using it as a point).

    To my knowledge, there was no evidence that Fred Leuchter was an anti-Semite until AFTER he published his Auschwitz report but he sure is one now! And this is just a wild-ass guess but had his report come back favorable to the industry, I’m kinda thinking he would be a hero. Wadda you think?

    Tell you what else, I’ll bet you if Elie Wiesel were to search Leuchter’s home (if he still has one), I bet he’s come away with volumes of anti-Semitic material... maybe even some Jew-soap or a tattoo-lampshade. As a minimum, he’d find a couple eye-witnesses that has seen such contraband.

    Finally, you also made the statement that “he (Rassiner) was likewise expelled from the SFIO. So much for his credentials by the mid/late 1950s.”

    Nicky, that’s called a non-sequitur. The expulsion of a man from an organization -- 10 years after the timeframe in question -- does not dictate his credentials. Did they strip him of his education or ban his writings? What? Truth to tell, you’re a lot closer to being stripped of your credentials than Rassiner ever was. Where would you say we are world-wide right now with believers and deniers? Maybe 80/20 (you guys ahead) but who do you think is gaining ground faster? Anecdotally, I know several grade-school teachers who are almost too embarrassed to teach the traditional 6M story anymore because it has just become too transparent. One day you’re going to wake up and realize you have a PhD. in... astrology.

    You lose all objectivity Nicky. Didn’t I read somewhere that your PhD. advisor is a holocaust denier? Yet he still maintained enough objectivity to sign off on your dissertation even though he must have strongly disagreed with you. But you don’t do that. You continue to spew bull-shit when the truth would serve you better.

    Let’s consider Sergey Romanov’s little canard. He claims in his Wikipedia profile here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sergey_Romanov), that he is a native speaker of Russian but only an advanced speaker of English (BTW, there are three levels higher than advanced). I have read many, many of his posts and he seems to write English as well as you or me (or is it “you or I”?? Better ask Andrew. While you’re at it, ask him if it’s redundant for you to refer to yourself as: Dr. Nick Terry, PhD.). In fact, I would say that he (Sergey) writes English as well as, say, a native speaker of English? Is he just being modest or is he misrepresenting?

    Conversely one day I ran across SR “debating” a real Russian (who happened to be a denier) and the real Russian was trying to explain the nuance of a certain Russian word but was having considerable difficulty making his point in English yet Sergey never used a single word of Russian to help clear things up (and yes he has access to Cyrillic characters). The exchange went back and forth three or four times and Sergey not once addressed the man in Russian or alluded to the fact that he (Sergey) spoke Russian. Does that seem normal to you?

    OK, that’s it for now. I know I got off subject a bit with the Sergey stuff but hell, I’m the #1 poster at HC (except for you guys when you respond to each other’s posts) so maybe I deserve a little special treatment... and it is Christmas.

    Butch

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  7. "Good to hear from you and hope all is well."

    which ghost from the past are you then?

    "Let me start by saying, you guys sure do have an answer for everything! And it was good that you jumped in when you did because I surely scored a point against "danton"."

    Um, no, I was simply trying to clarify a confusion. Yours and dantonj's alike it would appear.

    "Let’s see, how did it go? Oh yeah:

    “In other words you are saying it baffles you that someone would actually tell the truth when they have a perfect opportunity to lie.”

    Which is essentially what he said and you guys couldn’t take the chance that someone would happen along and see what an ass he made of himself and that I got the last word. So good save on that one."

    Aha, the 'point-scoring' starts. Well, Butch, it really doesn't matter very much since anyone reading your quoted and now repeated comment will notice the unproven assertion that Rassinier spoke 'the truth'. About what? Rassinier wasn't in Auschwitz or any other death-camp. He was in a KZ.

    What 'truth' could Rassinier possibly know and how could he know it?

    "But then again you countered with the “reverse ad-hominem” argument which really clears things up. That’s PhD. stuff and hard for me to understand."

    Shouldn't be. An ad hominem as you *ought* to know by now hanging around the internet, is when you dismiss someone's argument because of *who* they are.

    You were doing the reverse, and implying that because Rassinier was a pacifist etc, that this somehow makes him more believable.

    It's also known as an appeal to authority.

    "OK, back to the point. Well, you didn’t do so well there."

    Better than you manage, what with the forthcoming discussion of penises and porn videos.

    "You did make a fairly compelling argument that Rassinier became a holocaust denier (some 10 years later) but not that he was one at the end of the war which is when he could have made his most damming accusations concerning the Nazis and when he would have felt the most compelled to so (hell, they damn near killed the bastard) ... but he didn’t. Could it be that he didn’t witness it or possibly that it didn’t happen as advertised?"

    It's now *very* clear you've never read Rassinier at all.

    "Then again, immediately following the war (and for some time after that) the holocaust wasn’t the industry it is today, was it Nicky?"

    And this has precisely what to do with anything? I could reel off 100s of books and articles published on this subject in the 1940s alone.

    "For example, how many lines of text did Sir Winston Churchill devote to the holocaust in his post-war writings? Or Eisenhower? Are they anti-Semites too?"

    Fallacious argument, Butch. And a very, very hoary denier canard.

    "‘Course you guys think everyone is an anti-Semite who doesn’t lock-step with you."

    Really? Where have we ever said that?

    "See Nick you’re too sensitive. Just because a particular statement is not flattering to Jews does not make it anti-Semitic."

    Sure, but we aren't dealing with just any old statement about how godawful Jewish cooking might be. We're dealing with an accusation against an entire people that they created a gigantic 'Hoax'.

    "For example, if I said, “Jews circumcise their male children”, that would not be considered anti-semetic"

    No, it would be considered merely bizarre in this context. Are you obsessed by penises or something?

    "but if I said “a pornographic film is 10,000 times more likely to be produced by a Jew (than a non-Jew)”, that would be considered anti-Semitic -- even though both are demonstrably true"

    You've *counted* them? Wow.

    "-- because the latter is not flattering."

    Ya think? What have you got against porn?

    "Therefore if Rassinier made the comment that there was a “'Jewish conspiracy' of document-forging factories” he’s automatically an anti-Semite because it’s non-flattering even if it was true (and I’m not debating the veracity of the forgery conspiracy claim, just using it as a point)."

    You don't have a point.

    "To my knowledge, there was no evidence that Fred Leuchter was an anti-Semite until AFTER he published his Auschwitz report but he sure is one now!"

    Leuchter is an idiot. Whether he is now personally antisemitic is quite irrelevant. Next!

    "And this is just a wild-ass guess but had his report come back favorable to the industry, I’m kinda thinking he would be a hero. Wadda you think?"

    I think you missed the part where his report was commissioned by the Zundel defense team.

    "Tell you what else, I’ll bet you if Elie Wiesel were to search Leuchter’s home (if he still has one), I bet he’s come away with volumes of anti-Semitic material... maybe even some Jew-soap or a tattoo-lampshade. As a minimum, he’d find a couple eye-witnesses that has seen such contraband."

    Why would anyone bother to search the home of a fraudulent engineer?

    "Finally, you also made the statement that “he (Rassiner) was likewise expelled from the SFIO. So much for his credentials by the mid/late 1950s.”

    Nicky, that’s called a non-sequitur. The expulsion of a man from an organization -- 10 years after the timeframe in question -- does not dictate his credentials."

    Yes, they do, when it is repeatedly claimed by 'revisionists' that Rassinier was a socialist - sometimes they even claim he was a communist. What they never mention is that he had been expelled.

    "Did they strip him of his education or ban his writings? What?"

    I see you're having difficulty with the concept of group membership here.

    "Truth to tell, you’re a lot closer to being stripped of your credentials than Rassiner ever was. Where would you say we are world-wide right now with believers and deniers? Maybe 80/20 (you guys ahead) but who do you think is gaining ground faster?"

    I'd say denial is sinking like a stone, actually.

    "Anecdotally, I know several grade-school teachers who are almost too embarrassed to teach the traditional 6M story anymore because it has just become too transparent."

    I'm suuure you do.

    "One day you’re going to wake up and realize you have a PhD. in... astrology."

    No, my PhD is in history, and wasn't actually about the Holocaust. So there you go.

    "You lose all objectivity Nicky. Didn’t I read somewhere that your PhD. advisor is a holocaust denier?"

    Really? That would be news to him, me, and everyone else in the historical profession.

    "Yet he still maintained enough objectivity to sign off on your dissertation even though he must have strongly disagreed with you."

    Bwahaha. Shows how much you know. Who on earth do you think my supervisor was? Have you even read one of his books?

    "But you don’t do that. You continue to spew bull-shit when the truth would serve you better."

    Oooh, gimme some of that ol-time twoof!

    "Let’s consider Sergey Romanov’s little canard. He claims in his Wikipedia profile here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sergey_Romanov), that he is a native speaker of Russian but only an advanced speaker of English (BTW, there are three levels higher than advanced). I have read many, many of his posts and he seems to write English as well as you or me (or is it “you or I”??"

    gorbatogo mogila ispravit.

    Sergey can understand that. Can you?

    "Better ask Andrew."

    Why? Obsessed by him too?

    "While you’re at it, ask him if it’s redundant for you to refer to yourself as: Dr. Nick Terry, PhD.)."

    Where do I refer to myself as that? I'm curious.

    "In fact, I would say that he (Sergey) writes English as well as, say, a native speaker of English? Is he just being modest or is he misrepresenting?"

    Why on earth would Sergey be pretending to be a Russian?

    "Conversely one day I ran across SR “debating” a real Russian (who happened to be a denier) and the real Russian was trying to explain the nuance of a certain Russian word but was having considerable difficulty making his point in English yet Sergey never used a single word of Russian to help clear things up (and yes he has access to Cyrillic characters). The exchange went back and forth three or four times and Sergey not once addressed the man in Russian or alluded to the fact that he (Sergey) spoke Russian. Does that seem normal to you?"

    Let me guess: this was on an English-speaking board, right? Wow, such a weeeird thing to do, to write in English.

    "OK, that’s it for now. I know I got off subject a bit with the Sergey stuff but hell, I’m the #1 poster at HC (except for you guys when you respond to each other’s posts) so maybe I deserve a little special treatment... and it is Christmas."

    Maybe you do indeed deserve Sonderbehandlung.

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  8. Sorry, I can only give you a "fair" on your bravado attempt -- it sounded kinda school-girlish.

    You did manage to avoid answering any questions so we'll make it a fair-plus.

    The only thing I see falling like a stone are the comments at your site.

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  9. Butch has not really answered any questions either, and if he wants to think he has demolished me with a sentence or two, I will leave him to his delusions. Rassinier, as I discovered, was not an ordinary prisoner.

    I wanted to compare him to Solzhenitsyn, who was an ordinary prisoner. If Solzhenitsyn had said the gulags were not that bad, or that Stalin or the Bolsheviks in fact did not commit mass murder, then who would take him seriously? He survived the hellish gulags of the Soviet Union, wrote about them, and the evil of Stalin and Communism as a whole.

    Rassinier makes no moral judgments about the Naiz regime, and apparently seems to think the Jews deserved what they got. Revisionists have never mentioned that Rassinier was not an ordinary prisoner, and spent most of his time at both camps in what more or less amounted to a state of isolation.

    Going from socialist to fascist is not unique, and I believe Rassinier may have always been an anti-Semite, like Proudhon and other prominent French leftists. I agree with Dr. Terry, in his analysis of Rassinier.

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  10. The claims made by many revisionists seem to echo those made by the Turkish government regarding the Armenian genocide. It is all war propaganda. There are too many survivors. The victims' testimonies are too emotional to be taken seriously or be considered objective. I found that some people just find it illogical that the Germans would waste manpower, resources, and time in the middle of a war to round up and kill Jews, but the their soldiers to liquidate the Armenians, rather than to fight against the British or Russians.

    They could spare the troops, I guess, so they did, but even if they couldn't, they did anyway, since they were motivated by a zealous, fanatical idea that Armenians were traitors, racially and religiously unacceptable, and thus had to be exterminated at any cost. This was what the Nazis believed.

    Many revisionists seem to neglect the importance of fanaticism. I truly appreciate this blog, which must do something right, since the Codoh posters seem to hate it so much.

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  11. Danton,

    Damn, you two keep missing each other!

    Nick was just getting ready to hit the submit button to correct you when I jumped in first.

    And Nick, weren't you at Auschwitz museum with a hammer and chisel to change the 4M figure to 1M when Dr. Piper beat you to it? BTW, what's the figure down to now?

    History ain't so hard... especially when you use "convenience of evidence

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  12. "Skypilot", was it?

    Thought the smell of troll was familiar.

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  13. Oh yes, here we have his earlier incarnation as 'Skypilot' trolling Orac's blog:

    http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2006/10/an_actual_honest_holocaust_denier_1.php

    and being run off after leaving behind a trail of cliches, ad hominems, logical fallacies and general trollishness.

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  14. Oh my God, do I have good luck or what?! Thank you for pissing all over yourself -- in two separate posts no less!

    You spanked me pretty good with your last response but that wasn’t quite enough, it kept gnawing away at your feminine-like brain.

    Just like a true parasite, you just didn’t know when to quit. That’s why most of the holocaust myths are debunked in the first place; the Jews (and I’m sure they consider you an honorary Jew even though they have to be laughing behind your back) never quite know when to quit.

    I got an ear-to-ear smile when I read your comments and imagined a grown man -- a Doctor of Philosophy, a scholar -- scouring the internet trying to find some dirt on me... and you don’t even know if you’re right!

    And now try and convince us you didn’t spend three hours fucking with this thing. You are one dopey fuck... but thanks!

    Butch

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  15. "I got an ear-to-ear smile when I read your comments and imagined a grown man -- a Doctor of Philosophy, a scholar -- scouring the internet trying to find some dirt on me... and you don’t even know if you’re right!"

    Oh, I'd say the whinings about this blog and especially the verbatim repetition of the obsession about Sergey gave away the fact that 'Bankdraft' at CODOH forum is you. And that one I came across by chance.

    The rest was a simple Google search and guess what, one hit came up on one search for 'Sergey Romanov Skypilot'. What do we find? The same idiot whining about the same thing in a third place on the internet.

    Considering *you* admitted to tracking down Sergey's Wiki profile - let me guess, through a Google search! - I'd be careful about projecting the hours you must have spent trolling around the net obsessing over us, compared to the minutes of my attention you've earned in the last day or so.

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  16. Excuse the delay, but it is Christmas and the wife and kids (one still in the Santa Clause age) and even the f-ing dog this year.

    OK. You last post was better than I expected -- seriously -- but a bit duplicitous none the less. It took you 22 minutes between your “Skypilot” epiphany (and post) to discover (and post) the Orac comments (that’s according to the time-stamps but they could have been tampered with), plus I see four other comments at HC directed at me and then there is the Bankdraft discovery but you just happened on that “by chance” so I guess we can’t count that. Anyway, all that time adds up, but, strictly speaking, it was only “minutes” of your time. But slightly specious, don’t ya think?

    I’m thinking the real time-line went something like this:

    Spontaneous skypilot epiphany -- Nicky runs (walks? you’re kinda pudgy, no?) to computer for posting; gets call from Elie Weasel for secret Nazi-hunting mission in Paraguay; helps Sergey translate a couple chapters of ‘Crime and Punishment’, and before you know it -- 22 minutes gone! My guess is it took you somewhere between 22 and 180 minutes of your day(s) (probably closer to the latter), which is what I said from the start.

    Alternatively, yes, I ‘admitted’ (your word) to doing a Google search for Sergey Romanov to clear up this Russian/English inconsistency (that was actually at Jonathan Harrison’s suggestion but I’m the one who actually depressed the keys, so I plead guilty) and the second item to come up was his (Sergey’s) Wiki profile (so “research” is kinda of a stretch too but, again, I suppose it qualifies as accurate) and, indeed, his profile exposes a misrepresentation of his linguistic abilities. But, to be fair to me, I have never said anything other than that he is he is lying about that (and I believe he is).

    You extrapolated my curiousness (probably more like pre-occupation, but let’s not parse it too finely) as to Sergey’s mendacity to “obsession”, so again we see disingenuousness (you also said I was obsessed with Andrew Mathais (spelling?)). I’ve even begged you fucks to explain it to me but no such luck. I’ve asked it here, CODOH, and everywhere I’ve ever posted. As an aside, no one (including the H.C. folk) has ever disputed that he is misrepresenting. The real question is why? But I don’t expect an answer and at this point, I don’t even care. As a general rule if someone lies about one thing, he or she will lie about other things. (Read that sentence again.)

    Finally -- and this is strictly for my own edification -- I’m wondering what’s wrong with catechism? It seems to me if you guys could answer anything at all it would be the simple stuff? But that’s what seems to gives you the most trouble. For example, I ask you why Churchill doesn’t mention the holocaust and you call it hoary. Hoary? When your kids (or students) ask you the sum of 2+2, do you tell them it’s hoary? I mean is “hoary” supposed to be a genuine answer or do you guys get a pass on that sort of thing? Am I automatically supposed to know why he (Churchill) doesn’t mention it? You’re the holocaust expert, help a brother out. Is there maybe a short answer or a website? Something? Anything? Would not a question like that qualify as a holocaust controversy?

    Maybe someone should set up a website to clear up such inconsistencies? You seem to have plenty of time on your hands, you could do it? Perhaps call it holocaust controversies or something like that.

    And it’s not just the Churchill inconsistency, there are dozens (thousands?) of similar logistical problems. You saw one-third of the holocaust and yes, it is very definitely presented from a revisionist view point, but can you tell me it makes no points what-so-ever? None? Zero? I know a bit about cremation, for example, and the procedure suggested by the eye-witnesses is ludicrous.

    All of this does reiterate a basic tenant of HC: duplicity, misrepresentation, and lying is part and parcel of your technique. The ends justify the means I suppose? But I gotta tell you, I’m genuinely tired of this exchange so looks like you’re gonna win on attrition alone.

    Happy Chanukah,

    Butch/Bank

    P.S. Thanks for the “bankdraft” info. I’ll re-register under a different handle.

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  17. Churchill wrote to Eden about Auschwitz on July 11, 1944:

    'There is no doubt this is the most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe. It is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved.' (Gilbert, "The Second World War", p.554).

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  18. May I give my two pennies on Paul Rassinier here? I've read Nadine Fresco's biography recently, and when doing research for my PhD thesis about Mittelbau, I studied, among much other survivor literature, the very early writings of Rassinier (Passage de ligne and Le Mensonge d'Ulysse) in detail, and (not in detail) some of the bruhaha around these books in France. (I never looked into his later writings, because I was not interested in them.)

    In both books, Rassinier attacks prominent fellow survivors of Buchenwald and Dora of distorting facts and exaggerating events, of reporting camp rumors as "facts," and, above all, of maltreatment of fellow prisoners, as kapos or other prisoner functionaries. With this, he got seriously into trouble and was heavily attacked, which - as I see it - in turn made him more and more radical, doubting in the end everything that survivors told about the camps and thus becoming "the godfather of Holocaust denial."

    I see Rassinier as a tragic personality. From that what we know today, his early criticism of the exaggerations of fellow survivors of Buchenwald and Dora, and his criticism of the "Red Kapos," were justified. But telling such things publicly was unacceptable immediately after the war, especially in France, where the Communist Party was one of the major political forces and the Résistance became the founding myth of postwar French society. Maybe I don't remember well the two aforementioned books - but I did not notice "antisemitism" in them. Anti-Communism - yes.

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  19. The way I see it, Rassinier was spurned by the left (both by his own socialist party the SFIO and the PCF/camp survivor associations), and fell into the arms of the radical right.

    Thus, an event in his own personal biography such as being defeated in an election by a rival Jewish candidate of his own party, made him more receptive to the arguments and values of the right-wing milieu into which he drifted by the end of the 1940s.

    The early purely autobiographical memoirs certainly don't contain overt antisemitism. Rassinier *became* an antisemite, but not because he was attacked by 'the Jews'. He wasn't; he was slammed by fellow camp survivors, in a country where there were 10s of 1000s of French men and women who had passed through KZs.

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  20. Joachim,

    It's worth reading Annette Wieviorka's Deportation et genocide to get a flavour of French public and private discourses on KZs in the 1940s.

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  21. 'There is no doubt this is the most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe. It is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved.' (Gilbert, "The Second World War", p.554).

    Too bad it all slipped his mind by the time he got around to writting his History.

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  22. Christ, at least you could have left it in context!

    (START)

    In March 1944 German troops occupied Hungary. Three quarters of a million Hungarian Jews were at risk. Churchill asked Marshall Tito to protect any Jews who escaped Hungary to partisan-held Yugoslavia. That July, Jewish leaders brought Churchill an horrific account of Auschwitz. It had been smuggled out by two escapees, and revealed for the first time the nature of the gas chambers there. Asked to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz, Churchill instructed Eden: 'Get anything out of the Air Force you can, and invoke me if necessary.'

    So Churchill had no idea what was allegedly going on in Auschwitz until March 1944 at a time when momentum had decidedly switched to the Allies. Germany was losing on all fronts and had to be crawling with British agents?

    A few days later, when it was learned that the deportations from Hungary had stopped, the Jewish request changed from bombing to protective documents. This too Churchill supported.

    Supported? What’s else would he say? “No, you can't have protective documents (as if the Nazis would have abided by them anyway) because paper is being rationed"

    Does this mean the earlier reports to Churchill by the escapees were not considered credible? Or was it a coincidence that the deportations stopped ‘a few days’ later? Not to mention that Churchill apparently could obtain real-time knowledge of deportations, for example, but couldn’t figure out what was going on inside Auschwitz until March 1944? And then only because of the ubiquitous escaped Jews

    With regard to how the British should react to a Jewish appeal for publicity of the atrocities, Churchill replied: 'I am entirely in accord with making the biggest outcry possible.' This too was done.

    It was? Where?

    Reading in July 1944 the first detailed account of Auschwitz, Churchill wrote:

    'There is no doubt this is the most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe. It is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved.'

    Apparently he didn’t believe the escapees but when he ‘read’ it, he bought into it? Makes perfect sense.

    Sounds a little over-the-top. Probably never even said by Churchill

    In London, Churchill continued to press the War Office to agree to an all-Jewish military force to join the Allied armies, writing on July 26: 'I like the idea of the Jews trying to get the murderers of their fellow countrymen in Central Europe, and I think it would give a great deal of satisfaction to the United States.'

    Yeah, fuck the half-million dead British soldiers -- let’s get reparations for the Jews! Now! And why on God’s green earth would not the War Office agree to an all-Jewish military force? Or any force to defeat the Nazis? Maybe they couldn’t find any Jews to do it. What possible reason would there be to object to it?

    In October 1944, as further news about the killings at Auschwitz reached the West, the Polish government in exile asked for an official protest. The foreign Office was reluctant to respond, but Churchill was not.

    'Surely,' he wrote, 'publicity given about this might have a chance of saving the multitudes concerned.'

    This one takes the cake. Why would the “Foreign Office” be reluctant to respond? Why? And after CH overruled them, then what did he do? Where is the publicity he favored?

    In any event, it all slipped his mind by the time he got to his History.

    No wonder Irving called you guys “incest historians”; you’ve been reading each other each other’s crap for so long you’re starting to believe it.

    Weak. Very weak.

    I'm gone, this is too ridiculous to even consider anymore.

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  23. Butch: "Too bad it all slipped his mind by the time he got around to writting his History."

    Er, he includes the memo in his history - Volume 6, "Triumph and Tragedy", p.597.

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  24. JH,

    I'll check on that.

    It appears that the quote you provided was in Sir Martin Gilbert's book.

    You wrote:

    Churchill wrote to Eden about Auschwitz on July 11, 1944:

    'There is no doubt this is the most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe. It is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved.' (Gilbert, "The Second World War", p.554).

    But I'll check it out. Volume 6, p. 597, you say? You better not be lying to me.

    BTW, I never said that you guys supported imprisionment laws, ngoodgame said it, you putz.

    Plus why did you delete my well-written post about how you should have answered ngoodgame's question -- other than it made you look stupid? It's hard to follow the action if you delete posts.

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