Other Victories for Revisionism:
Addendum to Faurisson’s Iran Holocaust Conference Speech
copyright 2007
At the recent momentous event in the history of Holocaust revisionism, the
Iran Holocaust conference (December 11 and 12, 2006), veteran revisionist
scholar Robert Faurisson delivered a speech entitled, “The Victories of
Revisionism.” Although it was not a history of the revisionist movement,
it did list and discuss twenty important concessions to and victories by
the Revisionist movement over the traditional view of the Holocaust.
In his own words: “[The speech] deals only with victories that our opponents
have had to concede to us either explicitly or implicitly.”1
This essay will list other significant concessions to and victories by Revisionism
that Dr. Faurisson did not mention. [Editor's note: Professor Faurisson
purposefully limited himself to twenty revisionist victories.]
1) At the post war Nuremberg Trials, the victorious powers charged
that four million people were murdered at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration
camp complex. The four million figure was concocted by the Soviet
Extraordinary State Commission, and later reiterated by a Polish commission
that investigated Auschwitz. Until 1990, the four million figure
was backed by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, as it was engraved on
memorial stones that were blessed by Pope John Paul II in his June 1979
visit to the camp.2
In 1989, Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer pointed out that the four
million figure was a deliberate myth.3 In his 2002 tome, The Case
for Auschwitz, Holocaust historian Robert Jan van Pelt also admitted
that the four million figure was a falsehood, and it was maintained to serve
an ulterior political agenda.4
Why is this admission of such importance? One of the standard charges
leveled against Holocaust revisionism is that it is an unfounded, foolish
“conspiracy theory.” Consider the words of the bitter critic of Holocaust
revisionism, Deborah Lipstadt. In her attack upon Arthur Butz’s revisionist
study, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, she wrote: “Despite its
veneer of impartial scholarship, Butz’s book is replete with same expressions
of traditional anti-Semitism, philo-Germanism and conspiracy theory as the
Holocaust denial pamphlets printed by the most scurrilous neo-Nazi groups.”5
Professor van Pelt also criticized Holocaust revisionism, because in his
view it attacks the traditional view of the Holocaust “on the unproven assumption
of a general conspiracy.”6 In what some consider as the most important
book on the Holocaust in the past decade, Jeffrey Herf’s The Jewish Enemy:
Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, it is claimed
that conspiracy theories are a danger to the world. Here is what is
stated on the dust jacket: “In an era when both anti-Semitism and conspiracy
theories continue to influence world politics, Herf offers a timely reminder
of their dangers…”7
In the “four-million-murdered-at-Auschwitz” falsehood, we have evidence
that conspiracy (i.e., conscious intent to deceive for political purposes)
was involved in the shaping of the Holocaust story. As Israeli historian
Bauer pointed out, it was a deliberate myth concocted to serve ulterior
political purposes, and van Pelt concedes that even into the 1980s the four
million myth was put forth because it continued to serve a political purpose.
2) One of the standard dictums of the mainstream Holocaust historians
is that the traditional view of this Jewish Holocaust is an indisputable
fact that is not subject to debate. In the words of Deborah Lipstadt:
“The existence of the Holocaust [is] not a matter of debate.”8 In
the aftermath of the Iran Holocaust conference, the Swiss Foreign Ministry
expressed it as best as anyone: “The Shoah is a historical fact. It
is unacceptable to call this into question.”9
According to premier Holocaust
historian Raul Hilberg, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec were three concentration
camps in Nazi occupied Poland where approximately one million, five hundred
thousand people were supposedly murdered.10 Yet, in one of the most
important Holocaust histories ever published, Professor van Pelt’s The
Case for Auschwitz, it is admitted that the evidence for mass murder
in these camps is very sparse at best, thus undermining the claim that the
Holocaust is “indisputable fact.”
In regard to the alleged evidence for mass murder at these three camps and
their role in the Holocaust, here is what he stated: “The evidence for the
role of Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor—sufficient as it may be to come to
a moral certainty about the wartime history of those places—is much less
abundant. There are few eyewitnesses, no confession that can compare
to that given by [Commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf] Hoss, no significant remains,
and few archival sources.”11
3) Dr. Richard Evans, a Cambridge University historian, served as
the principal expert witness for the Lipstadt defense team at the famous
David Irving-Deborah Lipstadt libel trial in London in 2000. In his
book in which he attempts to discredit Holocaust revisionism, he admits
that non-Jewish corpses are exploited and used to prop up the Jewish Holocaust
ideology. He wrote: “Visiting the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Wahsington,
D.C., for example, I was struck by its marginalization of any other victims
apart from the Jews, to the extent that it presented photographs of dead
bodies in camps such as Buchenwald or Dauchau as dead Jewish bodies, when
in fact relatively few Jewish prisoners were held there.”12
I believe I understand him correctly. He is claiming that the Holocaust
Memorial Museum is promoting a falsehood, by using non-Jewish bodies to
gain sympathy for Jews.
4) One of the main forms of evidence for the traditional view of the
Holocaust is the eyewitness testimony of former concentration camp inmates
and other “Holocaust survivors.” Yet, what the renowned “expert” on
“Holocaust denial,” Deborah Lipstadt, admitted in her 1993 book casts doubt
on the value of this form of evidence.
She wrote: “For a variety of reasons some [former Nazi concentration camp
] inmates did and still do embellish their experiences. Others sometimes
adopt the experiences of fellow survivors as their own.”13 Nevertheless,
she argues that there are methods by which to corroborate the testimony
of former concentration camp inmates. The reader is encouraged to
examine her argument.
But even more revealing is this admission. Yad Vashem is Israel’s
national memorial to the Holocaust. In reference to a very important
concession from this Israeli institution, Lipstadt wrote: “[T]he Institute
for Historical Review published a report from the Jerusalem Post
in which the director of Yad Vashem’s archives reported that more than half
of its testimonies from Holocaust survivors are ‘unreliable.’ According
to Yad Vashem officials, these testimonies have never been used as evidence
in Nazi war crimes trials because survivors who wanted to be ‘part of history’
may, in fact, have allowed their imaginations to ‘run away with them.’”14
It seems as though a day does not go by that the mass media does not try
to “prove” that the “Nazi gas chambers” existed by using some “newly discovered
eyewitness testimony” of former concentration camp inmates. Indeed,
in the January 14, 2007 issue of the Chicago Tribune, it was reported
that “new” testimony that “proves” the existence of the “Nazi gas chambers”
was recently found.15
But here we have Deborah
Lipstadt, a major Holocaust historian, unwittingly putting forth reasons
that show that a large portion of this “eyewitness testimony” is simply
unreliable. Since such a large portion of this “eyewitness testimony”
has been declared unreliable, it is certainly correct for historians to
be, at the very least, skeptical of all such testimony.
5) We close this essay with a tidbit of information from an Israeli
source that corroborates a conclusion that Arthur Butz put forth as far
back as 1976. “The consequence of World War II did not create Zionism
as an effective political movement,” he observed,” they merely gave Zionism
the world political victory it needed for the final stage of the takeover
of Palestine. All world power had fallen to the U.S. and the Soviet
Union, both of which were most friendly to the Zionist cause at the time.
Under the circumstances the Arab position was hopeless, since it depended
on the firmness and political independence of a Britain that was almost
prostrate politically and economically.”16
I direct your attention the study of the Israeli historian, Benjamin Pinkus,
The Jews of the Soviet Union. Buried in a footnote we read:
“According to what Roosevelt told [Zionist leader] Stephen Wise in March
1945 (Weizmann archives, 18 March 1945): ‘The Big Three [Roosevelt, Churchill,
Stalin] agreed on handing over Palestine to the Jews. As far as the
immediate future is concerned, Jewish immigration will be continued.’”17
So there you have it. An Israeli historian unwittingly put forth evidence
that corroborates what Holocaust revisionist Butz had the historical vision
to see in the 1970s.
Footnotes
1.
Dr. Robert Faurisson, “The Victories of Revisionism,” A paper
read by Professor Robert Faurisson to the Tehran Holocaust Conference, December
11, 2006. Online:
http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/Faurisson/at_Teheran_conf_2005.html and
http://www.codoh.com/viewpoints/vprfvict.html
2.
Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, ed., Anatomy of the Auschwitz
Death Camp (Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 61-62.
3.
Yehuda Bauer, “Auschwitz: The Dangers of Distortion,” Jerusalem
Post International Edition, week ending September 30, 1989, p.7; Peter
Steinfels, “Auschwitz Revisionism: An Israeli Scholar’s Case,” New York
Times, November 12, 1989.
4.
Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the
Irving Trial (Indiana University Press, 2002), p.5.
5.
Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on
Truth and Memory (The Free Press, 1993), p. 126.
6.
Robert Jan van Pelt, p.140.
7.
Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During WWII and
the Holocaust (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006).
8.
Lipstadt, p.1.
9.
See “Iran Hosts Anti-Semitic Hatefest in Tehran: Responses from World
Leaders.” Online:
http://www.adl.org/main_International_Affairs/iran_holocaust_conference.htm?Multi_page_sections=sHeading_4
10.
Raul
Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews: Student Edition (Holmes
& Meir, 1985), p. 338.
11.
Robert
Jan van Pelt, p. 5.
12.
Richard
J. Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving
Trial (Basic Book, 2001), p. 261.
13.
Lipstadt,
p. 53.
14.
Ibid.,
p.101.
15.
Ron
Grossman, “Echoes of history: Holocaust voices resurface at IIT,” Chicago
Tribune, January 14, 2007. Online:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0701140387jan14,1,4214717.story?coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true
16.
Arthur
Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed
Extermination of European Jewry (Institute for Historical Review, 1976),
p. 233.
17.Benjamin
Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority
(Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 346, footnote 98.
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