An Interview with ex-denier Christian Lindtner

This blog recently conducted an interview with former denier Christian Lindtner, who had once been involved with the 2006 revisionist conference in Tehran. After continuing his research into the Holocaust, Lindtner came to disavow his earlier position, and as a result has suffered public attacks from the likes of Juergen Graf and Frederick Toben. Lindtner has established his own blog, Holocaust Denial is Chutzpah, in order to publicize and support his position.

While HC members may not necessarily endorse all of the statements that Lindtner makes, we feel that his work on denial would be worthwhile for our readers to access. We have bolded some of Dr. Lindtner's responses which we found especially interesting.

History Carnival no. 84

Frog in a Well

This watchblogging lark, it's clearly catching

Never let it be said that we are alone in taking an interest in the bizarre little world of Holocaust Denial. Nor that we are the only ones to take part in the spectator-sport of watchblogging, a term that if it doesn't already exist, should definitely be invented. Let's see what Google has to say: okay, 251 hits, people are claiming they invented it first, but it came to me entirely independently. Honest. Who the hell cares anyhow?

Ahem. Anyway... Just when you thought the dust had settled from the discovery of our mirror-blog CODOH Watch, along comes
Xcalibur and takes watchblogging to a new level: RODOH Watch.

As he writes in his opening post:

RODOH stands for Real Open Debate of the Holocaust(*). Yes, there are some folks out there in internetland who don't believe in Nazi gas chambers, Einsatzgruppen killings and such-like. The site's owner is an amiable Holocaust denier from Arizona called Scott Smith. He would probably prefer to be thought of as a "Revisionist". Scott doesn't like Nazi gas chambers unless they were used for fumigation puposes. No homicidal gas chambers in Scott's world. You might be tempted to ask at this point, "Hey Xcalibur, is Scott an anti-semite"? Hmm. More on that at some future date. Scott does like free speech, however. And so he is a champion of David Irving, Ernst Zundel, Germar Rudolph and other Holocaust Deniers who have run afoul of the laws of distant lands which prohibit such denial. I agree with Scott on this point but not necessarily for the same reasons. Anyway, he runs RODOH as a free speech forum.

Free Speech. Interesting concept that. A value to be held dear. Yet the practicalities of it are often not so lofty as the notion. This is the essence of RODOH's problem: How does one maintain a free speech forum on the internet and yet deal with all the mental patients, day-dreamers, idiots, cranks, fucktards, trolls, morons, anti-semites, fools, and garden-variety motherfuckers who make up a slice of the human population who would really be better off exiled to their own island? Madagascar, anyone? Since it is RODOH's problem, it is Scott's problem. And up 'til very recently he hasn't dealt with it. Last week he has begun to take baby-steps toward moderating the boards. Unfortunately Scott decided to announce long ago that he would never ban anyone from the boards on a permanent basis. Sounds good, for a free speech forum. On the other hand, Scott painted himself into a corner with this announcement. This is good news for Scott's nemesis, Jonnie A. Hargis, aka "Hannover" of the CODOH forum. Jonnie doesn't like free speech. In fact, he's a racist, fascist cunt and runs his forum accordingly. And he'd love to see Scott forced into banning someone permanently from RODOH. So Scott is boxed: He forgot that one of the basic rules of strategy is that you never announce to your opponent what you "never" intend doing.

Indeed. We look forward to seeing what Xcalibur makes of 'the antics of the mental patients inhabiting the RODOH forum', and who he diagnoses as deranged. Who will feel his barbs? Stay tuned to find out. Now all that remains is for Xcalibur and us to blogroll each other and the incestuous circle will be complete....

32nd History Carnival

Here.

How time flies!

It's already 35th Skeptics' Circle.

Jonnie "Hannover" Hargis advertises our blog

Here.

Interestingly, he doesn't address a single argument, and only engages in ad hominem attacks on Andrew Mathis.

I understand - it's hard for Jonnie to argue with informed opponents when he can't edit, censor and delete their postings. Too bad!

Update: to clarify: "CODOH Watch" is our "meta blog" in which short announcements of our messages are posted for "Google" reasons, so to say. The links lead here. So it is funny that Jonnie did not choose to advertise the main blog.

Update 2: Poor Tommy Moron, deluded as always. Kudos to Obersto for being less cowardly/obtuse than the others and posting the link to the main blog. ;-)

Update 3: Two more deniers have chimed in with ad hominems. But where's the discussion of specific arguments? Why the dodging? And here I sit thinking that "revisionism", that intellectual adventure of the previous century, is all about debate... NOT!

Update 4: Here's Andrew's response.

The Cesspit Stirs

Never let it be said that our friends at The Cesspit are quick off the mark. Having noticed the existence of this blog on April 10, it's taken Johnny Hargis (57) and the gang until, what is it today? May 18 to realise that we have a mirror-site, which we deliberately called CODOH Watch in order to direct some Google traffic our way. All it consists of is Andrew placing links to every post on here and poking fun at Hannover et al in short one-liners. So now sit back and enjoy the overreaction:

-----------------------------------
Hannover
Thu May 18, 2006 11:37 am
Tinfoil Hat Mathis and The Nutjobs bring you CODOH Watch
-----------------------------------
Beautiful. A great indicator of the strength of our points.
You gotta see this wacko site. They're in a state of panic about the thorough debunking we're doing of the so called 'holocau$t'. Think of it, in their desperation they resort to building a site dedicated to attacking CODOH. Are they obsessed or what? You gotta love it.
see:CODOH Watch
Take note that Tinfoil Hat Mathis and The Nutjobs have been utterly demolished here at this forum.
- Hannover

In typical Hannover style, he then posts again, having pulled off his trusty list of links to past threads hallowing famous debating 'victories':

-----------------------------------
Hannover
Thu May 18, 2006 11:48 am
-----------------------------------
The CODOH Revisionist Forum has given Tinfoil Hat Mathis plenty of rope to hang himself and his 'holocau$t' lies. Take note that he is the same nutjob who specializes in threatening Revisionists.
Also remember, Tinfoil Hat Mathis is the premiere spokesman for the so called 'Holocau$t' History Project, talk about desperate. Read these and see just what a fool Mathis is.
- Hannover

'Holo. Hist. Proj. rep. attempts to intimidate Bradley Smith'

'Holo. Hist. Proj.'s Andrew Mathis humidity/gassing canard'

'holocaust' denial article by Andrew Mathis debunked here'

'Prof. Mc Nally dissects HHP's Andrew Mathis' bogus article'

'Holo. Hist. Proj.'s Andrew Mathis on Zyklon scent removal'

'Green, Mathis refuted / cyanide: lice, humans, & more'

'Believer org. spokesman, Andrew Mathis, demolished in debate'

'Holo. Hist. Proj.'s Andrew Mathis attempts damage control'

'Email from Andrew Mathis (The Holocaust History Project)'

'holocaust' History Project to unveil section on Treblinka'

This, by the way, is vintage Hargis: whereas deniers are allowed to reopen debates that have long been settled, everyone else is 'debunked' once and for all. The constant references to 'panic' and 'imminent shattering of the myth' are also vintage Hannover, betraying, as we've said before, a perhaps dim awareness of his own mortality (Johnny is 57) and the fact that though he rules supreme in the Führerbunker, aside from a handful of acolytes, no one takes him seriously. That's why we check in at his forum, so we can have a good laugh.

And then we have the comment of Friedrich Braun:

-----------------------------------
friedrich braun
Thu May 18, 2006 11:54 am
-----------------------------------
Andrew Mathis writes:
Wilhelm Stäglich Dies
CODOH hates it when I celebrate deaths of Holocaust deniers, but let me just say: This bastard should rot in hell.

Now, how psychologically twisted and morally depraved do you have to be to do a little dance while high-fiving each other and yelping with joy because someone died? Did Stäglich participate in some "war crimes"? NO. All he ever did is write books exposing the endless lies of the holocau$t industry...and that's enough to to earn him eternal enmity.
Mathis has always struck me as both a creep and an asshole.
What kind of a man hates with such blind passion?

And thank you for overreacting precisely in the way Andrew hoped for - poor ol' Herr Braun does not seem to realise he has been comprehensively wound up.

A short while later, another specimen of pond-life, Vali, chimes in wondering why CODOH Watch hasn't met the NAFCASH 'Treblinka Challenge':

-----------------------------------
vali
Thu May 18, 2006 12:51 pm
CODOH Watch and NAFCASH
-----------------------------------
I notice that the mentally retarded/ill cowards and liars at CODOH Watch have yet to make any comments on the NAFCASH site, much less accept any of the NAFCASH challenges. What does it say about an issue when the Jews give it the silent treatment?
By the way, if you haven't visited the - http://www.nafcash.com/ - site lately, The Treblinka CSI Challenge is up to $210,000.00 and the NAFCASH Forensic Challenge is up to $25,000.00.
I wonder what that idiot - loser Mathis is waiting for?

Such rage. Such coherence. Such a shame Vali is projecting so badly onto us that one might wonder whether he might not be a cousin of Celtic Patriot.

Denier-baiting: fun for all the family...

Update:
Friedrich Braun sneers:

Oops, I almost forgot. That would be Mathis "PhD" of course.
In the cognitively demanding field of... English lit. -- and from a second rate place. A trained, one-lobed monkey can get a grad. degree in English lit....it's not exactly particle physics.

We look forward to seeing Herr Braun's own qualifications. A Habilitation perhaps?
- Nick Terry, PhD in History, King's College London

History Carnival 31

The Time Machine

The 34th Skeptics' Circle

Critical Thinking Crystallised.

History Carnival no. 30

At Clioweb.

King Kill Skeptics' Circle 33

It's that time again.

Carnies built this country.

The carnival part of it, anyway.

Our first blog carnival

The 32nd Skeptics' Circle is up, and it contains our little contribuiton ;-)

Irving Meme Spreads

Two different anti-denier bloggers have separately posted links to what might well be a fast-spreading meme, 'specially now we're adding to the trackbacks, heh heh.

Both Orac's Respectful Insolence and Deborah Lipstadt's History on Trial picked up on an album review in the NME which opened with the classic line

Aside from the deaf or those in a level of denial up there with David Irving's idiot pronouncements on the Holocaust, everyone's aware that we live in great times for music.

Not that we're trying to claim prescience or anything, but one of the tag-lines we played around with when scheming up this blog was:

Some countries lock up Holocaust deniers... but we believe in free speech. We prefer just to laugh at them.

Irving's recent mishap might have attracted a certain abstract sympathy from libertarians (among whom be us, let it be reiterated), but in his home country, such feelings have been strongly tempered by a sense that the old fool really has become little more than a figure of fun.

No, he doesn't deserve to be in jail. He should have been laughed out of polite society years ago.

Our First Link

Our first link, courtesy of Respectful Insolence. Forgive us for the childish excitement, but it's early days. Oh, okay then, full disclosure: Orac is a mate of Andrew Mathis. Still, it's fun to see part of our manifesto cited somewhere else on the net.

Intention and Explanation

This is where we begin.

To choose the title of a twenty-five-year-old essay by Tim Mason to headline the first post of this blog might at first glance seem obscure. But although Mason was writing a quarter of a century ago, his exposition of the debate been the rival intentionalist and structuralist or functionalist schools of interpretation of the Third Reich retains a power and impact which has rarely been bettered since. Moreover, this essay, to be found in the collection Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class, Cambridge, 1996, was one of the few occasions in which the leading historian of Nazi Germany of his era tackled the subject of the mass murder of European Jewry, the Holocaust. Like many historians of the 1960s generation that began to study the Third Reich intensively, Mason concentrated his efforts on the period leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. He openly admitted that he was psychologically incapable of confronting the horrors of Nazism at war; a psychic block which some of his friends believe may have contributed to his tragic decision to take his own life in 1990.

Holocaust deniers would only snort at this tragedy. How could anyone be so affected by atrocities that never happened? To the doyens of 'historical revisionism', Mason's personal tragedy would become transmogrified into a far-right morality tale: look, see, the psychic damage that is being done because of this incessant propaganda about the Holocaust!

Yet they have reckoned without two things. The first is that the study of the Third Reich consists of much more than the forensics of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. I would almost wager that few leading 'revisionists' other than David Irving would even be aware of Mason's existence, let alone his writings. Holocaust denial fails not only as an account of the Holocaust, but of the Hitler era as a whole; it is a curious, stunted, impoverished freak-show of a history that has nothing to do with the rich historiography of Nazi Germany.

The second omission that 'historical revisionists' have made is to abstract their obsessions with the gas-chambers from the surrounding context of Nazi persecution and mass-murder of European Jews. They proffer interpretations of the death-camps and, more rarely, of Nazi Judenpolitik, that bear no resemblance to the reality of wie es eigentlich gewesen war, how it really happened. Time and time again one hears a litany from Holocaust deniers - it is alleged that six million Jews died in the gas chambers. Wrong. They confuse the 'Hollycaust' of media myth with the grubby reality of genocide; a reality that encompassed deliberately-induced starvation, epidemic diseases incubated inside ghettos and concentration camps; mass executions by rifles, machine-guns and the Genickschuss.

As a practising historian of the Third Reich and Stalinist Russia at war, I hope to dedicate some of my postings to this collective blog to discussing the genuine revisionist controversies that make my chosen profession and field so exciting. All historiography barring the first draft of history - the newspapers of the day - is by its very nature revisionist, challenging our previous interpretations of the past, and in the process hopefully forcing us to think through the events afresh. Since long before I began researching in this field, the study of the Third Reich and the Holocaust has proven especially controversial. Perhaps beginning with Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem in the 1960s, these controversies have come thicker and faster. From the intentionalist-functionalist debate of the late 1970s, the field moved on to disputing the tasks of the Einsatzgruppen five years later, and soon after to the Historikersteit of 1987. Before the end of the Cold War, German historians were tearing into Götz Aly and Susanne Heim for daring to highlight 'The Economics of the Final Solution'. They did so again after unification when Aly and Heim published Vordenker der Vernichtung in 1991, since translated into English as Architects of Annihilation. Five years later came the turn of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and Hitler's Willing Executioners. This in turn generated a follow-on controversy over Norman Finkelstein's critique and subsequent publication of The Holocaust Industry. Finkelstein himself then intervened into the latest controversy, over Jan Tomas Gross's Neighbours and the pogrom of Jedwabne in eastern Poland scant weeks after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

Holocaust Controversies was set up in part to discuss these debates between historians as well as news related to them. Since both myself and some of my fellow contributors have interests in similar controversies over the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, we will from time to time also discuss these debates, which offer so many remarkable parallels and sharp contrasts with the historiography of Nazi Germany.

But this blog has an additional, perhaps more important purpose, namely to confront the arguments of Holocaust Revisionism and 'historical revisionism' in general. It may come as no surprise to learn that professional, mainstream historians have paid relatively little attention to what they regard as the ramblings of cranks. I can testify to meeting expert witnesses for the defense in the David Irving libel trial, world-famous professors, who have never heard of the leading Italian Holocaust denier Carlo Mattogno.

Yet one only needs type in a concentration camp-related Google search to be met with a barrage of hits to 'Revisionist' websites. In this sense, professional historians have left the internet wide open for colonisation by deniers. Valiant efforts have been made by many, starting with the 1990s Nizkor project and the flame wars on alt.revisionism, to battle deniers online. We have linked to many such organisations, not least the explicit anti-denier site The Holocaust History Project as well as the implicit rebuttal of many a denier argument, the Aktion Reinhard Camps website. Some of the contributors to Holocaust Controversies are members of both organisations, yet this blog is independent of them both, and remains the expression of our personal views, not those of any corporate body.

The contributors here met online at the RODOH forum, the only place on the internet where there is Real Open Debate On the Holocaust. Other internet forums have either censored denial, or censor its rebuttal, but RODOH has allowed deniers and anti-deniers to argue with each other freely and openly.

The decision to set up Holocaust Controversies was a simple one: a blog allows forms of expression which a forum cannot; by its very nature, it demands more from the writers than even the best php-ed bulletin board can ever do. We are not, then, fleeing a denier onslaught; we can still be found hanging out over at RODOH. Rather, we hope that the medium of a blog will allow us to hone, refine and develop our arguments, and to present material that falls in between the quickfire postings of a forum, and longer essays that might find homes elsewhere.

In engaging with denier arguments, some might charge that we pay them too much respect. Yet this reckons without the insidiousness of what are otherwise absurd debating-points. Like it or not, Holocaust Denial must be confronted. In spite of the work done by web projects and academics to demolish Holocaust Denier arguments, 'revisionist' literature is mushrooming yearly and by no means all arguments have been deconstructed and exposed. We therefore will from time to time post reviews, critiques and ongoing debates about the 'classics' of 'Revisionist' literature, which we hope readers may find instructive, even perhaps enlightening as to the inadequacies of 'Revisionist' argumentation.

Yet we also intend to have fun here. So much of what is posted on the internet as 'Revisionism' is so ludicrously absurd that we will also respond with laughter. In part, we were compelled to set up this blog in order to maintain a record of the illogicalities, inanities and insanities to be found on the heavily censored, hyper-moderated circle-jerk known as The Revisionist Forum over at the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust website. That we informally call this The Cesspit will persist so long as this forum remains censored and inaccessible for us. Most contributors here have either been banned from CODOH forum or have not even bothered trying to post there, knowing full well they would not survive much longer than.... well, you can probably guess.

'Revisionists' might charge that the playing-field is not level; that 'Revisionist' writers are hampered in their research efforts, persecuted, prosecuted and thrown into jail. Let it be stated from the outset that we do not endorse censorship of any kind; nor are we in favour of anti-Holocaust Denial laws being passed in Britain or the United States. We would prefer that continental countries such as Germany, Austria and France did not make martyrs out of Deniers. Yet it should not be forgotten that Holocaust Deniers are convicted and sentenced for hate-speech, not for 'revising history'. No functionalists can be found in jail, as much as some within my profession might like to lock up mavericks like Christian Gerlach or Götz Aly.

In Britain, the bar for incitement is set relatively high; as it should be. We will show no compunction or mercy towards revisionists who express what we feel are racist or antisemitic views; we will accuse and criticise them accordingly. It is however up to others to decide whether their racism has breached the laws of the land in question. As far as we are concerned, it is beyond proven that David Irving, for example, is a racist antisemite; yet he would not be convicted in a British court.

Therefore, we will state the following: we are paying Holocaust Denial the respect of engaging its arguments on a scientific, historiographical basis. No others. If we discuss history, comments from readers are welcome on the history, from all viewpoints. Should readers post tired old saws about how many 'revisionists' are jailed in their comments on history posts, their posts will be edited or deleted at the administrators' whim. This is editing and moderating, not censorship.

We will, however, also discuss the politics of Holocaust controversies and Holocaust Denial. Readers are welcome to comment on the proprieties of censorship, jail sentences and the International Conspiracy in response to those posts.

In similar fashion, we reserve the right to use the terms Holocaust Denial and 'Revisionism' interchangeably. This is our blog, after all.

With that, let the blogging begin.