Posted By admin on July 14, 2015
Quotation Let me start with an account:
According to the New York Times of October 3, 1965 there have been.. 170,000 civilians killed; 800,000 maimed by torture; 5,000 burnt alive, disembowelled or beheaded; 100,000 killed or maimed by chemical poisons; 400,000 detained and tortured savagely. One method of torture used by the American troops is partial electrocution or frying as one United States Adviser called itby attaching live wires to male genital organs or the breasts of Vietnamese women prisoners.
Already 8,000,000 villagers are living in the 6,000 hamlets so far completed.. with bamboo fences, barbed wire, and armed militiamen.
Whats the relevance of that? Well see later.
Outline On the principle of telling them what youre going to tell them, this is what Im going to say: First, some comments on Internet, since this is the source of this talk. I should make it clear Im not obsessed by this topic and indeed only became aware of its existence a month or two ago. Many of the things said came as a surprise to me, and Ill flag these during my talk. Ill also supplement Internet with a few publications, of the sort readily available in second-hand bookshops. Then some comments on free speech and the issues surrounding it, including technology. This is apparently a well-worn theme and Ill try not to be too banal. Then Ill survey revisionism as a concept, and home in on holocaust revisionism, looking first at the types of revisionists. Then Ill go into detail as to the personalities involved, first the revisionists, then the anti-revisionists. Ill have to look at the Nuremberg Military Tribunal, and try to summarise the evidence brought by revisionists and by anti-revisionists. Ill end with political and historical comments (some addressed specifically to the left.)
The Internet On Internet, opinions vary; Christopher Hitchens said its been tremendously oversold, youll get oligopolies and the same consumerist hogwash; he likes print. John Pilger said look to see who controls the Internet; the American government and multinationals. I ought to point out that, in fact, its quite difficult to use; skilled computer people can store downloaded text on their computers for use later, but unskilled ones find this difficult; in my view, the promotional campaigns of the BBCs Computers Dont Bite type are dangerously misleading; Ive seen adults go into rages of frustration trying to work these things. There are dangers of losing all ones work, and so on. In practice, most users seem to belong to institutionstypically students or employees who offload the costs onto their organisations. Many sites are maintained not by the people whose names appear there, but by associates or friends or whatever. Incidentally youll often be told that the quality of the material is very poor. In my opinion this isnt truethe medium is purely verbal, theres no way of making your points other than through well-chosen words, and the standard is generally not at all bad, though of course much of it is repetitive and rather silly. Incidentally many people dont know theres a subset of Internet called Usenet, consisting of thousands of interest groups, a bit like special-interest magazines.
Free Speech On free speech, the amazing thing really is that such an ideology exists at all. You might expect any group having achieved some sort of dominance to oppose free speech, and generally this is true. Roughly speaking, without straining for precision, you might divide a population into well-off & poor, and also into intelligent and not intelligent; this gives four types, of which only two are likely to be interested in free speech; and of these, established people generally cant be expected to favour free speechKing George V said people who write books ought to be shut up. That was his contribution to culture. Many important intellectual changes have therefore only been introduced by the intelligent not-well-off, for this reason; Im thinking for example of Faraday. This is the pragmatic argument for free speech; something useful might come of it. But in practice free speech is something of a dead letterand Ill give this organisation as an example! So far as I know, in its 100 years, nobody at South Place has ever spoken on the financial resources of the Church of England. [Or of course the Talmud, and Jewish issues]. With critics like that, establishments can rest easy. This sort of thing of course isnt anything special; for example, democracy is more of a slogan than a reality; free trade is generally a cover for the expansion of strong economies, and theres an analogy with free speech, which may be a cover for pushing pornography or Hollywood tripe or what not. Many of the theoreticians of free speech are more restrictive than is generally realised; Miltons Areopagitica , at least according to Chomsky, advocates licensing of books rather than anything that would normally be considered free speech. John Stuart Mill would not (e.g.) allow the view that Queen Victoria should be assassinated, even by someone conscientiously convinced that it would be a good thing. So generally free speech is conceived in rather vague terms, and I think its fair to say nobody has come up with a theory to adequately deal with it. As a problematic issue you might take secrecy of banking, which seems more secure even than government, where there are at least 30 or 100 year rules on documents allowed to survive; but banks have no obligation to publish papers (as far as I know). And in practice censors dont take a theoretical line; they just cut out anything that might be tricky. One of the most important determinants of free speech is technological change; for example the Arab world had not one single printing press until the 1880s. In Britain, the Levellers broke up the Stationers Company monopoly, partly because printing was becoming easier. Similarly theres a widespread belief that the Dutch were valuable in the 17th century, as permitting the publication of books banned in Britain and elsewhere. In my view this is probably a mistakeif you consider Dutch printers, they had the capacity to print books, but demand in Dutch of course was limited. So an Englishman with a bag of gold wanting 200 copies of a book on how terrible the Archbishop of Canterbury was would be an attractive proposition. Something similar appears to be the case with Internet; providers of it want to make moneyor, if Ive read the press aright, in most cases, want to lose less of it. Technology is also important because the most up-to-date type looks reliable. About the time of the first world war, Ive read, English people believed newspapers were as reliable as encyclopaedias, and this must have been a factor in promoting the war. Later, radio was the thing, and one finds for example Bernard Shaw, when he wasnt writing in his garden shed, listening to his radio most of the time. This attitude still exists in some elderly people, who imagine the 1 oclock BBC news to be the apex of accurate communication.
Revisionism as a Concept Right. Lets look at revisionism as a concept. As far as I know the word originated with Marxism, Bernstein starting the revisionist movement of the German sozialdemokratisch movement. Lenin wrote on this disapprovingly in (or before) 1908. There are no doubt religious revisionists too, considering e.g. whether Jesus Christ ever existed. But by now its extended into very many fields; in history journals Ive found revisionism applied to the Merovingians, Danes, and 19th century Wales. If we consider WW2, we find what we might call left-wing revisionists who point e.g. to Standard Oil of New Jersey, which seems to have supplied Germany with oil through the war, or Opel (the German branch of General Motors) making German armoured cars; I might quote Tony Benn: I think its time we did a bit of reexamination, you know, of the 1930s and got away from the idea that the British government believed in appeasement. They didnt .. appease Hitler. They supported Hitler. They backed Hitler. .. captured German foreign office youll find that when Halifax went to talk to Hitler on behalf of the British government the first thing he did was to congratulate the German chancellor on having destroyed communism in Germany, and acted as a bulwark against it in Europe. And the whole of that 1930s period was a period when western governments were happy to use fascism in order to destroy socialism in all its forms, not just in Russia but in the west as well. ... Revisionists also look at the entire basis for war: Robert Blake, the Disraeli biographer, Why Britain Went to War:It would be nice to say that Britain fought for idealsdemocracy, freedom, the rule of law etc. But it would be untrue. Britain fought because government and people believed that its existence as a great imperial power was threatened. In America, Gabriel Kolko was, or should have been, very influential, on the American Empire. Now. Until recently Id more or less ignored what Id thought of as right-wing revisionists. In fact, at least on the Internet, the word revisionism now applies only to holocaust revisionism. For example, theres a Usenet site called alt.revisionism devoted entirely to this topic. However, Ill look at the various distinctive people and groups which you find if you search using the key phrase holocaust revisionism or revisionist.
Holocaust Revisionists Beliefs First, for orientation purposes, Ill try to summarise what the revisionists claim in common, the subset of beliefs that more or less unite them. These are actually fairly simple: the claims are that a deliberate extermination policy of Jews didnt exist, that gas chambers are a myth, and that although lots of Jews died, the deaths werent proportionally more than other groups; Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, various Baltic peoples; a quarter of all British merchant seamen. Those are the key beliefs, but of course, as you appreciate many other issues get brought in. Many of these issues are very well-established taboos indeed, but, as were in a sort of temple of rationalism, Ill list a few which seem important; (i) that Jews actually are descended from Jews, (ii) that Jews took no special part in the Bolshevik revolution, (iii) that Judaism is a fundamentalist/racist ideology. Thus for example E H Carrs series of books on the Bolshevik Revolution, which came out from the 1950s, has virtually no mention of Jews, despite purporting to be serious history; its rather like discussing former Yugoslavia without mentioning Moslems and Christians.
Types of Holocaust Revisionist The next section is the longest; Ill look at the most important revisionists, at least as far as I can judge by their Internet presences. First lets see the motivations. There seem to be about ten categories: Some seem purely anti Semitic, for example posting more or less selective lists of what famous people have said about JewsVoltaire, Henry Ford, George Washington, Mark Twain. Some are anti-Zionist and/or pro-Palestinians. Theres a group called Radio Islam of this sort; Ill talk more about them later. Some are German-extraction Americans; I recall reading in a paper that a third of all Americans in the US claim German ancestry (whatever that means), and such people have a motivation of course for not being anti-German. There also seem to be white Russian or Polish types who consider Bolsheviks were Jewish, some of them Catholics (cf. Hilaire Belloc, the Roman Catholic who wrote his book The Jews in 1922). There are anti-Communists, laying stress on Stalins crimes rather than Hitlers. There are miscellaneous types including for example Protestant fundamentalists, blacks like Louis Farrakhan, and other black Americans, quite a few of whom seem to dislike American Jews, and also whites who think their power is slipping. It may seem strange to think of the 1930s or 1950s as a golden age, but then US cars led the world, the blacks were kept in their place, and so on. Another site is Michael A. Hoffmann II, who looks among other things at neglected aspects of history like white slavery in the US. There are groups who consider fairly taboo second world war issues, such as the connections between Zionism and the Third Reich. Common sense suggests there must be Polish or Hungarian or South African groups and others, but if so theyre not on Internet, or not much. And there are, I presume, genuine truth-seekers, who are interested in truth in history, who might or might not be in some of the previous groups. Ill concentrate on what I take to be people of this sort.
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Holocaust Revisionism, Free Speech, and Internet. (1997 ...
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