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Chapter Ten By Bradley R. Smith
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THE THINKING IS PREOCCUPIED crazily with Butz's The Hoax of the Twentieth
Century. There are days in the mountains when I can't get the thinking
to address the work. It's as if thought has grown legs and is running away
with me. Butz writes simply and with so much self-assurance I can't dismiss
him. I know my ignorance of the literature is responsible for my being so
open to his observations and claims. I have no perspective of my own. At
the same time, his Hoax is extensively referenced. It would take
months of diligent reading and cross-checking of sources to know if he's
being serious or pulling my leg. It's work for scholars, not for me. I feel
certain Butz is on to something, but I'm afraid of being suckered into a
point of view that I won't be able to support without a tremendous amount
of work. I can't ignore the questions his book raises. It's gone beyond
ignoring. I'm stuck with it.  I'm absolutely alone with this. I don't know one reputable
historian or intellectual in America to turn to for a learned response to
Butz's book. I'm on my own. This isn't something I should be alone with.
It's not just an idea or line of thought that's at stake. If I don't dismiss
Butz, everything is at risk. Friends, neighbors, reputation, career. My
lifelong understanding of my relationship to the history of my age. It sounds
a little grandiose but that's how I see it. I will be unable to drift with
the tides of the age. If I dismiss Butz without first nailing down where
he's gone wrong, I will have done something shameful. Secretly, I will know
for the rest of my life what I have done--and why. Professor Butz appears to feel less feverish than I
do over the prospect of not buying the orthodox historical beliefs of our
time. He's made of sterner stuff than I am. I feel like a storm is blowing
through my head, through my heart. At this very moment I see an image of
a southern belle, the back of one hand held to her forehead, about to faint
with a bad case of the vapors. The image resembles Gainsborough's portrait
of Pinky. Some hidden mechanism in the brain is trying to tell me that when
I look back on these days I'll see what a sissy I'm being. In his forward to The Hoax Butz writes calmly:
"Noting the obvious way in which this legend [that is, the Holocaust] is exploited in contemporary politics, notably in connection with the completely illogical support that the U.S. extends to Israel, I had long had lingering doubts about it. . . . This evening after supper I walk down the hill to Pickwick
Bookstore and buy Hilberg's Destruction. I feel a little excited
thinking that I might discover in a single passage where the Holocaust story
went off the track. On pages 567-71 Hilberg treats with the manufacture
and distribution of Zyklon B insecticide. There are tables of organization
for its manufacturers and distributors. I read over the five pages noted
by Butz several times but I am not rudely awakened. Then my eye is caught
by a single sentence:
"Almost the whole Auschwitz supply (of Zyklon) was needed for the gassing of people; very little was used for fumigation." Hilberg documents this assertion with the statements
of one Jewish survivor and one former Austrian intelligence agent who had
been imprisoned in Auschwitz. Hilberg is talking about the substance supposedly
used to commit the greatest mass murder in history. In a hugely documented
book he uses the statements of two men, neither of which had been in a position
to know for certain that their claims were true, to document his assertion.
Butz holds that Zyklon B was used extensively by the
Germans to protect camp inmates against typhus. He indexes typhus seventeen
times in The Hoax. He discusses the problem of typhus at Belsen,
Buchenwald and Dachau. He writes about the typhus epidemic at Auschwitz
during the summer of 1942 "which resulted in the closing of the Buna
factory for two months starting around 1 August." There's a photograph
in his book of a sign at Belsen posted by the British after they liberated
the camp warning of a "5 mph speed limit" because "dust spreads
typhus." Hilberg doesn't think it worth his while to index typhus in
Destruction. It looks to me like Hilberg and Butz have a few things
to talk over. Hilberg published his book in 1961. Now Butz has replied to
it. The ball is in Hilberg's court but he doesn't want to play. Why not?
Nobody else has responded to Butz either. Why not? Butz has laid his cards
on the table. He has offered himself up to the historians and intellectuals
of the age and not one has been willing to do the decent thing. Hilberg
is quoted everywhere while Butz is suppressed everywhere. I don't like it.
I'm on Butz's side against Hilberg. When Hilberg response to Butz openly
and fairly, I'll be on Hilberg's side too. As long as Hilberg cooperates
in suppressing Butz by evading him, I'll be with Butz. Hilberg has done an immense amount of work with his
The Destruction of European Jewry During Wold War II. It will be relevant
for generations to come. But his purposeful ignoring of Butz's work is contemptible.
Hilberg has the support and respect of every historian in America and yet
he is unwilling to respond to his one critic, Butz. I don't know what is
going on behind the scenes in academia. In my heart I think I know what's
fair. Butz had done the fair thing. He has published his book. He's called
the Hilbergs of the world to account. He had called a spade a spade. Hilberg
and the intellectuals refuse to answer Butz. They're doing the craven thing.
- I've met my friend Betty at the Acapulco Mexican restaurant
on La Cienega for dinner. We decide to have a few drinks at the bar. I'm
trying to think what it is that I enjoy more than standing at a bar boozing
with a good looking intelligent woman but my mind's a blank. My first priority
with Betty is to waste the evening, my second is to ask her to help me figure
out how to start selling my writing so I can stop working the other jobs.
I've been trying to sell the writing myself for 30 years and it's been a
no-go. I'm the only one Betty and me know who can't figure out how to make
a living in his chosen profession. We tossed my problem around for three or four drinks.
I begin to understand the gist of what she's saying. I talk well, but my
writing is something else again. I am considerably surprised at her telling
me that. I don't feel humiliated but I'm a little embarrassed. She says
I should begin to give public readings. My work will come off better being
listened to than being seen on the printed page. If I give readings I'll
meet people. Maybe I'll meet someone who will offer to help promote the
writing. "Bradley," she says, "you don't have
the least idea how to promote yourself." She's laughing gaily. "Oh,
Bradley," she says, "you need so much help." I think it's admirable how easily she has gotten all
that together. I order a couple more drinks. I think excitedly about places
where I can read my stories and journals. I think about the new friends
I will make. I'm going to lose the old ones so getting new friends sounds
pretty good to me. I'll become part of the literary circle in Los Angeles.
I lost my circle when Jenny and I separated. It had been her circle so it
stayed with her. I need my own circle. Everyone needs a circle. Now I tell Betty about The Hoax of the Twentieth
Century, about Faurisson and Bennett. I explain how I have come to think
that there is something wrong with the gas chamber stories. I see she knows
even less about the Holocaust than I do. While most people don't know very
much about the Holocaust, I say, everyone knows that everything they do
know about it is true. Betty listens quietly. I waltz her around a while
longer. "What bothers me," I say finally, "is
that the Holocaust is over and done with. It was finished 35 years ago.
Now it's nothing. But if that's so, why have I become so caught up with
it?" Betty laughs, but she's thinking. "I mean, sometimes I wonder what my motives are
for being so interested in the Holocaust so long after it's over. It didn't
interest me when I thought it was true. Why should I think it's so interesting
now that people are saying it isn't true?" "Why, Bradley," Betty says seriously. "It's
tremendously important. What you've been telling me has to do with the great
question of belief." - One morning when I arrive at the job site in Escondido
Canyon it begins to rain. The framers and I stand under a great old California
oak. We watch the rain fall on the job and on the steep sumac-covered hill
behind it. Across the little roadway the creek is already running swiftly.
Higher up in the mountains the rain had started earlier. Joe lights a cigarette.
In the moisture filled air the odor of the smoke is rich and tasty. The
birds are grown still. The only sound is the falling rain. In my mind's
eye, hovering above the ridge line, I see us standing down here silently
under the oak tree in our work clothes and quilted nylon jackets, the little
canyon enveloped in rain and an immense peace. I decide to take the day off. I drive out to the coast
then down to Santa Monica. On a whim I stop at the library in Santa Monica.
I go through the Book Review Digest and Reader's Guide to Periodical
Literature looking for references to Faurisson and Rassinier. I've learned
that Rassinier was the first major Holocaust revisionist. I can't find anything
on either of them. The librarian suggests I look in the New York Times
Index. I've never used it before. I've used the Digest and the
Guide a couple times when I wanted to find out what was being written
about libertarian politics. Butz's name is listed in the Times Index five
times in 1977. I'm surprised and excited to see him there. There is one
article and four letters in response to it. The article is headlined: "Professor
Causes Furor by Saying Nazi Slaying of Jews is a Myth." In 1978 Butz's
name was mentioned once in passing. The library has the Times article on microfilm. I discover
that it had not been known at Northwestern University that one of its own
had taken a swing at the Holocaust story from a revisionist perspective.
Somebody on the staff of the student paper, the Daily Northwestern, had
seen an article about Butz in the Jerusalem Post. When the Daily published
its own article it apparently did so without interviewing Butz. It just
rewrote the Post article. As the Times reports it:
"The Daily Northwestern's story on the book brought a flood of letters from students and faculty members, most of them denouncing Mr. Butz and deploring the book. I was amazed by the reported intolerance of the academics
at Northwestern but I wasn't surprised. There was no evidence in the article
that even one professor who had denounced and deplored Butz's book had laid
eyes on it. A couple kids on a student paper had pressed the well-known
anti-anti-Semite button. Students and professors alike had jerked to attention
and parroted the anti-anti-Semite party line. I had heard the anti-anti-Semite
caper used for years to suppress criticism of United States policy toward
Israel. Now here it was being used to silence criticism of Holocaust orthodoxy.
- It's late afternoon and I'm delivering a load of lumber
to a job site up on top of Topanga Canyon. The Canyon itself is already
in shade and the air is chilly. This morning when I sat down to type it
was still dark, as usual. The next time I looked up from the machine the
horizon to the east was aflame with sunlight while overhead the sky was
capped with thick black clouds. All day the beauty of what I had seen influenced
me, urging me ever so lightly toward right action, toward right relationship.
Now, while I drive slowly up the winding road in the
Canyon I'm listening to a Pakistani on KPFK radio discussing American-Soviet
relations. His intellectual sensibilities are of so high an order that I
feel transfixed listening to him. Following the nuances of his observations
my feelings resemble those I have experienced hearing fast powerful symphonic
music. His learning, his care to distinguish between similar but separate
ideas, his clarity of expression are far beyond my own. I reflect on how
powerful, sensitive intellects flower irrespective of the political conditions
or the cultural history of the society in which they live. I feel comforted.
I have been reminded of one attribute of the race that is in all our favor.
I feel a sense of brotherhood for men everywhere flooding my heart. I drive the truck up out of the darkening canyon into
the last sunlight of the day and off-load the lumber at the job site. Then
I go in the house to talk to my friend Beatrice. I half-dreaded to do it
but I wanted to tell her about Butz and The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
and about how the book is being suppressed. I weaseled around for half an
hour but finally got to it. Her reaction was abruptly dismissive, not of
me personally but of revisionist claims. I don't know how to describe the
tone of our conversation. She hasn't heard of Butz or of his book either.
She immediately questions his motives for having written it. In all likelihood,
she says, he belongs to a lunatic fringe or he's an anti-Semite. It's only
natural that his peers won't comment on a book written by such a man. When I mention Faurisson and Rassinier Beatrice says:
"Sure. French. The French are the worst anti-Semites in Europe."
I get sidetracked trying to convince her that other Europeans are just as
anti-Semitic as the French. It isn't something I know very much about. Several
times she asks me if I have seen the "photographs." I say I have.
We don't discuss which photographs. I take it for granted she means the
photographs taken at the German camps in the western theater when they were
captured by the British and Americans. She appears satisfied that I will
know automatically which photographs. In each instance we go on to talk
about something else. I never find out for certain which photographs I have
admitted to seeing or what, precisely, their significance is. I don't even
ask. I say it is almost certain that I am going to write
something on the Holocaust. It will be something from a free press angle.
Even at that, I say, I'm afraid I will be branded as an anti-Semite. I'm
afraid that everything I write afterwards will be considered contaminated
by what I will have written previously about the Holocaust. "That's right, Bradley." She holds her nose
with her thumb and forefinger and lifts it up. "It's going to smell
all over the place." I'm at a loss for words. "Bradley," she says, "what's in this
for you? You've never been interested in the Jews. You've never empathized
with their suffering. What's in it for you now?" I say it excites me to think about the possibility that
a contemporary horror story that's believed by everyone is probably built
on fraud and falsehood. "I don't know. It just excites me. Just that
part of it alone is a tremendous story. But what's really nailed me to this
thing is how it's being suppressed and that those who are suppressing it
are absolutely obsessive and fanatical about it. And it's not fair about
guys like Butz. It's not fair that he's dismissed out of hand. It offends
me. You should see the book. It's a real book. He isn't wrong about everything.
No man is. The intellectuals owe it to me to tell me where he's wrong and
where he's right too. What the hell's going on here? It's not right. It
offends me that the intellectuals beat their chests about how important
the Holocaust is then refuse to allow the details of the event to be debated.
I think that's what stinks." "Well, you're right about that," Beatrice
says. "The historians have a professional obligation to at least look
at the material in their field. Especially if it's documented." - This evening in the apartment my thoughts return again
and again to Beatrice's question, "What's in it for you, Bradley?"
This afternoon I'd felt half shaken by the question. I will never be able
to prove that I have good motives for not dismissing revisionist writings
out of hand. Tonight, thought won't let it go. "What's in it for you?
What's in it for you?" I don't know. But inside the head thought is
cooking away on it. Cooking away. Then I hear thought ask, What's in it
for the others? What's in it for those persons who want to believe that
Germans holocausted Jews in poison gas chambers? What's in it for those
who want to censor and shut up open debate about those accusations? What's
in it for those who become enraged at expressions of doubt about what they
themselves believe? What's in it for all those people? What's always in
it, thought says, for true believers. It occurs to me than that the true believer might respond
to Holocaust revisionism with rage for the same reason I respond to it with
interest. I don't want to be lied to about the Holocaust. The true believer
doesn't want to be lied to about it either. Do we each approach the literature
with the same demand--that we not be lied to? Is that possible? How is it
possible for two individuals, each adamant in his contempt for lying, to
be at loggerheads over any specific issue? Is the hatred for lying felt
by one of us compromised by certain desires that remain unexpressed? By
a secret agenda? - The Twisted Cross, narrated by Alexander Scourby, is
being aired on television. It's about Adolf Hitler so it isn't strictly
a documentary. It portrays Hitler as ugly, unimaginative, brutal and stupid.
The Germans people are pictured as being like Hitler. It's an outrageously
propagandistic film, the kind of film produced at the height of a great
conflict, a chauvinistic orgy decrying the enemies of the State. The Twisted
Cross, however, was produced in 1981, thirty-six years after Hitler shot
himself and the war ended. Now it's being exhibited on KPFK, a public television
station supported by "the people." Who hears a great cry from the people for more cheap,
twisted propagandistic films about a man and a movement that have been dead
for so long? Whose purpose does it serve to exhibit it on "public television?
It doesn't serve those who might want to get a clear picture of the multiple
origins of World War Two. Or those who might want to gain some insight into
why tens of millions of ordinary individuals supported the Hitlerian regime.
It doesn't help anyone who wants to watch an honest and objective review
of Mr. Hitler. There are those in media who believe that it is a little
elegant to be involved with exhibiting crappy propaganda films that flog
dead Nazis while they cover up the war crimes of Democrats and Republicans.
At this hour the planet is aswarm with multitudes forced to lick the boots
of their despotic rulers. Media intellectuals urge us to treat the despots
of our own age with understanding, evenhandedness and good will. They speak
of the despots of their fathers' time with moral outrage and great courage.
They speak of living despots with a brilliantly restrained circumspection.
They are not ill-willed people. They are most ignorant about that which
they believe most deeply. It's a commonplace state of affairs. Ignorance
and true belief ar what go best together. - I'm standing on Hollywood Boulevard in front of a Popeye's
fried chicken joint thinking about seeing a movie when my old friend Jo
sticks her head out the door and calls my name. She's about sixty-five years
old now and overweight but she's still lively and talkative. She looks to
be in good health but mentions she has cancer and has just returned from
a cancer treatment center in Tijuana. Jo tells me how it's been with her,
it hasn't been that good, so I decide to tell her the truth about what I'm
doing. "You're one of those?," she says. "Just
hearing the word revisionist makes me angry." She reaches over the
table top and pats my hand. "That doesn't mean I don't think you're
a nice man, Bradley, but I don't see how you can do it." "I've hardly told you anything about it, Jo."
"You don't have to. I've heard about those people.
I don't blame Jews for being angry at them. I've never read anything they've
written but I'm angry at them myself." She pats my hand again. "I
don't mean I'm angry at you, honey." I tell her my Elie Wiesel story about how he claims
that when some Jews were shot at Babi Yar that for months afterward their
corpses spurted geysers of blood from their graves. She blinks. A smile
starts to appear at one corner of her mouth but she stops it. Then her face
turns angry. Jo has always had a wonderfully expressive face. "Are you trying to tell me that Hitler was something
different from what we have always known he was?" "How did we get from Elie Wiesel to Hitler?"
"I can see where it's leading. I don't like it.
How old were you during the war? After everything American boys went through
over there, what are you saying about that? This whole subject makes me
angry. Sitting here I can feel how the anger is coming up." I don't know what to say. I recall that her former husband
had been the right age to have fought in Europe. "I can't help it, Bradley. It makes me uncomfortable
hearing what you're saying. Now I can see that I've made you feel strange
too. I'm sorry." I walk her to the bus stop. She shows me a purple and
black scarf and a pair of purple shoes she bought this afternoon. She says
she's had to give up her car, that she can't afford to drive it any longer.
"Life isn't as easy as it used to be, honey." She sounds very
brave and cheerful about things. She really always was. While we stroll
along chatting thought recalls the night I met her twenty five years ago.
She had come into the bookstore and I had almost let her get away. I ran
down Hollywood Boulevard after her like a kid. I was thirty-one years old.
Just to look at her had been so exciting that my body had begun to tremble.
It had started in the legs but by the time she had left the store even my
voice was shaking.I caught up with her at the corner of Las Palmas and asked
if I couldn't ring her up. "Mmmmm," she said. "I'd like that."
A couple nights later we had dinner then drove out to
South Central to a tiny frame bungalow not far from where I had grown up.
In the early 1960s that part of the city was already Black. Mother was still
living there in our old house. Jo and I sat in the tiny front room with
a few other Whites chatting with Dorothy Healey, who at that time was California's
best known Communist. It had been Jo's idea. While Jo wasn't politically
well-informed she attended the left radical Unitarian church on 8th Street.
Ms. Healey appeared to believe that I agreed with her on a lot of issues
where I didn't. Jo, who was a dozen years older than me and too beautiful
to even be in that little house, sat at my feet laughing and laying her
hand on my thigh. Healey knew who I was because I was in the middle of
a long trial where I was being prosecuted for refusing to remove Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer from my display windows and selling a copy of the book
to an undercover police officer. At that time the book was still banned
by the U.S. Government. Many people took it for granted that because I butted
heads with the State over a censorship issue that I was on the left. I wasn't
on the right but I was never on the left. I didn't know where I was politically.
All I understood was that on almost every issue I was against almost every
body. I didn't feel particularly annoyed at being prosecuted
over Tropic. My sense of things was that I would sell the book as
a matter of course and that as a matter of course the Government would prosecute
me. I understood that Christians were particularly offended by the book.
They saw it as pornography. Overwhelmingly, Jews and my Jewish friends were
on my side and the side of a free press. They didn't worry about Christian
sensibilities. When it was pornography my Jewish friends where on the side
of the First Amendment. I had no background arguing First Amendment issues.
My sense of things was that I would feel humiliated if I participated in
black-balling a book that I had read with so much interest and pleasure.
It would be wrong to refuse to allow a writer to bear the responsibility
for revealing in his books what he thought and how he really felt. For me,
it wasn't a matter of law, but of sensibility. |
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Committee for Open Debate on the
Holocaust, Bradley R. Smith, Director - Post Office Box 439016,
San Ysidro, CA 92143 |