David Irving's Action Report On-line

http://www.fpp.co.uk/Online/99/02/Hitchens.html

Hitchens also noted that "Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism."

'INTELLECTUAL DISHONESTY' Vanity Fair later published a reply from Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. "Intellectual dishonesty pervades Christopher Hitchens' comments on the well-known Holocaust denier and Nazi apologist David Irving," Foxman wrote. "He glosses over Irving's extensive record as an anti-Semite." But when asked if the ADL considered Hitchens as a Holocaust denier himself, spokesperson **Myrna Shinbaum** said Tuesday, "No. He's a writer. We don't always agree with what he writes about, but he's not a controversial Holocaust denier." **Joshua Muravchik**, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, describes Hitchens as an "intellectual entertainer," one who often takes controversial positions "simply for the fun of exercising his brain." A number of Hitchens' friends said he also often drinks too much, an observation Hitchens does not dispute. Among those who were present at the controversial 1995 dinner were Vogue editor **Anna Wintour**, who said through a spokesman that she did not recall the conversation that Epstein described. Epstein, however, is adamant about his recollection of what Hitchens said that night. Moreover, he insists that he didn't keep it to himself until now, as Hitchens claims, but that he shared it with a number of people at the time, including Hitchens' editor at The Nation, **Victor Navasky**. Navasky confirmed in an interview that Epstein had told him about Hitchens' alleged remarks at the time, but he said they did not trouble him and he never brought up the subject with Hitchens. "I never took it seriously as a charge," Navasky said. ■

Our opinion

Altogether another illuminating episode providing further proof of how the traditional enemies of Free Speech operate. Note how Epstein went secretly to Hitchens' editor, to discuss the British writer's offensive remarks. They operate like this, and then years later, when the innocent victims round on them, they whine: "Why us? Why us?" Not that it is the Foxmans and Epsteins of this world who suffer: it is their innocent fellow citizens, who have had no part in the skullduggery.

AR

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What is 'Holocaust Denial'?

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because he recently declared: "The public still repeats, time after time, the silly story that at Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was arrived at." In Bauer's opinion, Wannsee was a meeting but "hardly a conference" and "little of what was said there was executed in detail." (note 5)

## Extermination Policy?

Is someone a "Holocaust denier" if he says that there was no order by Hitler to exterminate Europe's Jews? There was a time when the answer would have been yes. Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, for example, wrote in the 1961 edition of his study, *The Destruction of the European Jews*, that there were two Hitler orders for the destruction of Europe's Jews: the first given in the spring of 1941, and the second shortly thereafter. But Hilberg removed mention of any such order from the revised, three-volume edition of his book published in 1985. (note 6) As Holocaust historian Christopher Browning has noted: (note 7)

> In the new edition, all references in the text to a Hitler decision or Hitler order for the "Final Solution" have been systematically excised. Buried at the bottom of a single footnote stands the solitary reference: "Chronology and circumstances point to a Hitler decision before the summer ended." In the new edition, decisions were not made and orders were not given.

A lack of hard evidence for an extermination order by Hitler has contributed to a controversy that divides Holocaust historians into "intentionalists" and "functionalists." The former contend that there was a premeditated extermination policy ordered by Hitler, while the latter hold that Germany's wartime "final solution" Jewish policy evolved at lower levels in response to circumstances. But the crucial point here is this: notwithstanding the capture of literally tons of German documents after the war, no one can point to documentary evidence of a wartime extermination order, plan or program. This was admitted by Professor Hilberg during his testimony in the 1985 trial in Toronto of German-Canadian publisher Ernst Zuendel. (note 8)

## Auschwitz

So just what constitutes "Holocaust denial"? Surely a claim that most Auschwitz inmates died from disease and not systematic extermination in gas chambers would be "denial." But perhaps not. Jewish historian Arno J. Mayer, a Princeton University professor, wrote in his 1988 study *Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The 'Final Solution" in History'... From 1942 to 1945, certainly at Auschwitz, but probably overall, more Jews were killed by so-called 'natural' causes than by 'unnatural' ones." (note 9)

Even estimates of the number of people who died at Auschwitz -- allegedly the main extermination center -- are no longer clear cut. At the postwar Nuremberg Tribunal, the Allies charged that the Germans exterminated four million people at Auschwitz. (note 10) Until 1990, a memorial plaque at Auschwitz read: "Four Million People Suffered and Died Here at the Hands of the Nazi Murderers Between the Years 1940 and 1945." (note 11) During a 1979 visit to the camp, Pope John Paul II stood before this memorial and blessed the four million victims.

Is it "Holocaust denial" to dispute these four million deaths? Not today. In July 1990, the Polish government's Auschwitz State Museum, along with Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center, conceded that the four million figure was a gross exaggeration, and references to it were accordingly removed from the Auschwitz monument. Israeli and Polish officials announced a tentative revised toll of 1.1 million Auschwitz dead. (note 12) In 1993, French Holocaust researcher Jean-Claude Pressac, in a much-discussed book about Auschwitz, estimated that altogether about 775,000 died there during the war years. (note 13)

Professor Mayer acknowledges that the question of how many really died in Auschwitz remains open. In *Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?* he wrote (p. 366):

> ... Many questions remain open... All in all, how many bodies were cremated in Auschwitz? How many died there all told? What was the national, religious, and ethnic breakdown in this commonwealth of victims? How many of them were condemned to die a

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'natural' death and how many were deliberately slaughtered? And what was the proportion of Jews among those murdered in cold blood among these gassed? We have simply no answers to these questions at this time.

## Gas Chambers

What about denying the existence of extermination "gas chambers"? Here too, Mayer makes a startling statement (on page 362 of his book): "Sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable." While Mayer believes that such chambers did exist at Auschwitz, he points out that

most of what is known is based on the depositions of Nazi officials and executioners at postwar trials and on the memory of survivors and bystanders. This testimony must be screened carefully, since it can be influenced by subjective factors of great complexity.

## Höss Testimony

One example of this might be the testimony of Rudolf Höss, an SS officer who served as commandant of Auschwitz. In its Judgment, the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal quoted at length from his testimony to support its findings of extermination. (note 14)

It is now well established that H°ss' crucial testimony, as well as his so-called "confession" (which was also cited by the Nuremberg Tribunal), are not only false, but were obtained by beating the former commandant nearly to death. (note 15) H°ss' wife and children were also threatened with death and deportation to Siberia. In his statement -- which would not be admissible today in any United States court of law -- H°ss claimed the existence of an extermination camp called "Wolzek." In fact, no such camp ever existed. He further claimed that during the time that he was commandant of Auschwitz, two and a half million people were exterminated there, and that a further half million died of disease. (note 16) Today no reputable historian upholds these figures. H°ss was obviously willing to say anything, sign anything and do anything to stop the torture, and to try to save himself and his family.

## Forensic Investigations

In his 1988 book, Professor Mayer calls for "excavations at the killing sites and in their immediate environs" to determine more about the gas chambers. In fact, such forensic studies have been made. The first was conducted in 1988 by American execution equipment consultant, Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. He carried out an on-site forensic examination of the alleged gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek to determine if they could have been used to kill people as claimed. After a careful study of the alleged killing facilities, Leuchter concluded that the sites were not used, and could not have been used, as homicidal gas chambers. Furthermore, an analysis of samples taken by Leuchter from the walls and floors of the alleged gas chambers showed either no or minuscule traces of cyanide compound, from the active ingredient of Zyklon B, the pesticide allegedly used to murder Jews at Auschwitz. (note 17)

A confidential forensic examination (and subsequent report) commissioned by the Auschwitz State Museum and conducted by Institute of Forensic Research in Krakow has confirmed Leuchter's finding that minimal or no traces of cyanide compound can be found in the sites alleged to have been gas chambers. (note 18)

The significance of this is evident when the results of the forensic examination of the alleged homicidal gas chambers are compared with the results of the examination of the Auschwitz disinfestation facilities, where Zyklon B was used to delouse mattresses and clothing. Whereas no or only trace amounts of cyanide were found in the alleged homicidal gas chambers, massive traces of cyanide were found in the walls and floor in the camp's disinfestation delousing chambers.

Another forensic study has been carried out by German chemist Germar Rudolf. On the basis of his on-site examination and analysis of samples, the certified chemist and doctoral candidate concluded: "For chemical-technical reasons, the claimed mass gassings with hydrocyanic acid in the alleged 'gas

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chambers' in Auschwitz did not take place . . . The supposed facilities for mass killing in Auschwitz and Birkenau were not suitable for this purpose . . ." (note 19)

Finally, there is the study of Austrian engineer Walter Lueftl, a respected expert witness in numerous court cases, and former president of Austria's professional association of engineers. In a 1992 report he called the alleged mass extermination of Jews in gas chambers "technically impossible." (note 20)

## Discredited Perspective

So just what constitutes "Holocaust denial"? Those who advocate criminal persecution of "Holocaust deniers" seem to be still living in the world of 1946 where the Allied officials of the Nuremberg Tribunal have just pronounced their verdict. But the Tribunal's findings can no longer be assumed to be valid. Because it relied so heavily on such untrustworthy evidence as the H°ss testimony, some of its most critical findings are now discredited.

For purposes of their own, powerful special interest groups desperately seek to keep substantive discussion of the Holocaust story taboo. One of the ways they do this is by purposely mischaracterizing revisionist scholars as "deniers." But the truth can't be suppressed forever: There is a very real and growing controversy about what actually happened to Europe's Jews during World War II.

Let this issue be settled as all great historical controversies are resolved: through free inquiry and open debate in our journals, newspapers and classrooms.

## Notes

1. *Globe and Mail* (Toronto), Jan. 22, 1992.

2. *Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal* (IMT "blue series"), Vol. 22, p. 496.

3. IMT "blue series," Vol. 22, p. 496.

4. *Globe and Mail* (Toronto), April 25, 1990; See also: M. Weber, "Jewish Soap," *The Journal of Historical Review*, Summer 1991.

5. *Canadian Jewish News* (Toronto), Jan. 30, 1992.

6. See: Barbara Kulaszka, ed., *Did Six Million Really Die: Report of the Evidence in the Canadian 'False News' Trial of Ernst Zndel* (Toronto: Samisdat, 1992), pp. 192, 300, 349.

7. "The Revised Hilberg," *Simon Wiesenthal Annual*, Vol. 3, 1986, p. 294.

8. B. Kulaszka, ed., *Did Six Million Really Die* (Toronto: 1992), pp. 24-25.

9. A. Mayer, *Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The 'Final Solution' in History* (Pantheon, 1988), p. 365.

10. Nuremberg document 008-USSR.; IMT "blue series," Vol. 39, pp. 241, 261.

11. B. Kulaszka, ed., *Did Six Million Really Die* (Toronto: 1992), p. 441.

12. Y. Bauer, "Fighting the Distortions," *Jerusalem Post* (Israel), Sept. 22, 1989; Auschwitz Deaths Reduced to a Million," *Daily Telegraph* (London), July 17, 1990; "Poland Reduces Auschwitz Death Toll Estimate to 1 Million," *The Washington Times*, July 17, 1990.

13. J.-C. Pressac, *Les Crémetoires d'Auschwitz: La machinerie du meurtre de masse* (Paris: CNRS, 1993). See also: R. Faurisson, "Jean-Claude Pressac's New Auschwitz Book," *The Journal of Historical Review*, Jan.-Feb. 1994, p. 24.

14. IMT "blue series," Vol. 22, p. 485; Nuremberg document 3868-PS (USA-819), in IMT "blue series," Vol. 33, pp. 275-279.

15. Rupert Butler, *Legions of Death* (England: 1983), pp. 235-237; C. Hitchens, "Whose History is it?," *Vanity Fair* (New York), Dec. 1993, p. 117.

16. See: R. Faurisson, "How the British Obtained the Confession of Rudolf Hoess," *The Journal of Historical Review*, Winter 1986-87, pp. 389-403.

17. A deluxe edition of *The Leuchter Report* is available from the IHR for $20.00, plus $2.00 shipping.

18. The complete text of this report was published in English in *The Journal of Historical Review*, Summer 1991.

19. G. Rudolf, *Gutachten ueber die Bildung und Nachweisbarkeit von Cyanidverbindungen in der*

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http://www.fpp.co.uk/StMartinsPress/Hitchens0696.html

through Goldhagen's presentation, which is one tautology piled on another, I wait to make my point. And then the two big scholars present come to the podium with their comments, and I realize I have been wasting my time.

Sophomoric, meretricious, unoriginal, unhistorical, a product of media hype by Knopf (the book's publisher), contradictory, repetitive, callow... I'm just giving you the gist of what they said about *Hitler's Willing Executioners*. It must have been quite an ordeal for Goldhagen, who looks about 12, to sit through this kind of thing from revered seniors. Professor **Yehuda Bauer** of Hebrew University, for example, is effectively the academic founder of the Yad Vashem Holocaust archives in Jerusalem and the author of at least three of the dozen or so standard works on the subject. Professor **Konrad Kwiet** is no lightweight, either. He is the scholar-in-residence at the Research Institute at the Holocaust Museum and the adviser to the government of Australia on war crimes.

I watch Goldhagen being ground between these heavy millstones and two things happen to me. First, I feel a rush of sympathy for the kid. *Sixty-three* percent of German electors voted against Hitler in the last free election in Weimar, says Bauer witheringly, and there were vicious Jew-baiters in Germany in the early 19th century. So how come, Mr. Clever Young Historian, that one time it ends in blood and another time not? If you don't know, you shouldn't talk. This big-time book of yours should have remained a doctoral thesis and maybe those supervisors at Harvard could try harder. (I'm paraphrasing the scholars only slightly.)

The second thing that happens is that I feel a new respect for the Research Institute at the Holocaust museum. It can't have been easy, this trashing of an attractive and earnest young man. How was he to know that there is more to the Holocaust than meditations on cruelty and the German character, or that he was supposed to have a deep theoretical knowledge of Fascism? Doesn't almost every Hollywood and pulp outlet make the Final Solution seem like a sort of morality tale? Did not *The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier*--whose remarks closed this seminar--once observe mordantly that "there's no business like Shoah business"? So, good for the institute.

There is, of course, another answer to the question I never asked. Goldhagen is involved in an argument with an unseen opponent, and so are all the other experts on the platform, including Christopher Browning, whose book *Ordinary Men* anticipated Goldhagen by four years.

This unseen opponent is **David Irving**, a British historian with depraved ideas about the whole narrative.

Irving *does* have a rounded and developed theory of Fascism, which is to say that he has studied it a lot and it's had a bum rap. He's even been *quoted* as calling himself a "mild Fascist" or "a moderate Fascist"--oxymoronic if true. In the week that I went to the Holocaust-museum seminar, Irving was hastily dumped by *St. Martin's Press*, which had undertaken to produce his *book* on the papers of Hitler's minister of propaganda, *Joseph Goebbels*, the choreographer for the Nuremberg style, and had then, at the very threshold of publication, taken fright. Book canceled, author disowned, tearful statements from the top brass about how if only they had known...

Encountering **Tom Dunne** of St. Martin's that very week, I told him I was going to criticize him in print, and he replied, "If you want a title for the article, call it 'Profiles in Prudence.'" A good joke from a good man. But at whose expense?

I have thought about this a lot and I feel the need to say, very clearly, that St. Martin's has disgraced the business of publishing and degraded the practice of debate. David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism. But you would never have known this from the way that the controversy was written up.

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"David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism."

HITLER'S SPIN ARTIST was the headline on a typical column, by Frank Rich in the *New York Times*, raising the alarm about the mere idea of Irving's being published. The *Washington Post* was not laggard, saying that Irving "routinely refers to the Holocaust as a hoax." **Jonathan Yardley**, a cultural critic of some standing, wrote a whole article that positively sighed with satisfaction at the idea that, having neither read nor seen the book, he could now safely counsel others to do likewise. Nary a voice was raised, in American publishing or academe or journalism, to ask if David Irving had anything to contribute as a chronicler.

Things were rather different in my country of birth, which doesn't even *have* a First Amendment. More than 120 book sections of English magazines and newspapers have requested copies from Irving's British publisher, and *reviews* are pouring in. I might mention **Robert Harris**, author of *Fatherland* and *Enigma*, who *wrote* in the *London Evening Standard* on April 1 that "in the *words* of the military writer **John Keegan**: 'No historian of the Second World War can afford to ignore Irving.' Few contemporary scholars have his depth of knowledge, virtually none has met as many of its leading figures and nobody, surely, has unearth more original material--a private archive known as the 'Irving Collection,' always generously made available to other researchers, which weighs more than half a ton."

Harris could have added that his own brilliant book *Selling Hitler*--describing the 1983 *forgery* of "the Hitler Diaries," which hoodwinked a large chunk of the British establishment (including historians of the caliber of **Hugh Trevor-Roper**, author of *The Last Days of Hitler*)--was made possible in part by Irving's finding that those nasty papers were indeed a fake. Irving rendered another service by unmasking some spurious documents connecting Churchill and Mussolini. He speaks faultless German. He has, in the most recent case, been the first historian to see some 75,000 pages of *diary entries* by Joseph Goebbels, held in secrecy in Moscow from 1945 to 1992. His studies of the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship, of the *bombing* of Dresden, of the campaigns of Rommel and others, are such that you can't say you know the subject *at all* unless you have read them. And, incidentally, he has never and not once described the Holocaust as a "hoax."

I have caught David Irving out, just by my own researches, in one grossly anti-Jewish statement and one wildly paranoid hypothesis and several flagrant contradictions. But I learned a lot in the process of doing so. It's unimportant to me that Irving is my political polar opposite. If I didn't read my polar opposites, I'd be even stupider than I am. But what did I get when I went round that Holocaust seminar? Professors Bauer and Kwiet and Browning, asked if they agreed with the St. Martin's decision, shrank as if I had invited them to a Witches' Sabbath. None of them would say that Irving should never be published, but all of them said that if it were up to them he would not be.

**Deborah Lipstadt**, author of the standard text *Denying the Holocaust*, told *The New York Times* that one wouldn't and shouldn't publish **David Duke** on race relations, and (varying her pitch a bit) told *The Washington Post* that one wouldn't and shouldn't publish **Jeffrey Dahmer** on man-boy love. What is this vertiginous nonsense? These are supposedly experienced historians who claim to have looked mass death in the face, without flinching. And they can't take the idea of a debate with David Irving? Quite apart from the fact that many publishers would have rushed to promote a Jeffrey Dahmer manuscript, what are we afraid of here?

I have now read the exchange of correspondence between Irving and St. Martin's. For a long time, everything was hunky-dory. The manuscript was read seven times in 15 months (and understandably, since it contained amazing new material). The Military Book Club chose it as a main selection. Sales representatives made enthusiastic noises. And then, after a few hysterical and

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old-maidish articles in the press (*Eek--a Nazi!*), Irving is told that his contract is void. He is told this not by the publishers but by members of the press telephoning him for his reaction.

I remember when my friend **Aryeh Neier**, of the American Civil Liberties Union (whose parents got out of Berlin just in time), made the decision to uphold the right of the American Nazi Party to mount a demonstration in Illinois in 1978. The A.C.L.U. lost a lot of donors and subscribers that time. In a fine book entitled *Defending My Enemy*, Neier explained soothingly that the law on free expression covers everybody, and thus that in defending it for anybody you defend it for everybody.

After weeks of general acquiescence on the Irving suppression, **Steve Wasserman** of Times Books was moved to push Neier's point with his colleagues at Random House. In a contentious meeting, it was agreed they would *actually* read the book. Someone will no doubt pick up where St. Martin's left off; until then, one will have to seek David Irving on some ghastly Brownshirt Web site, which will parade its bravery in making the occult facts into revealed truth. Is this what the established experts want?

A little depressed at this last thought, I made a late-night call to Professor **Raul Hilberg** at the University of Vermont. Professor Hilberg's book *The Destruction of the European Jews* was the original text on the Holocaust, published in 1961. He is acknowledged as an ancestor on the matter. He sighed a bit when I mentioned Irving, whom he regards as a slippery customer but with whom he has had correspondence about documents and details. A very good man in footnotes and archives, allowed Hilberg, but you had to suspect his motives. However:

> "If these people want to speak, let them. It only leads those of us who do research to re-examine what we might have considered as obvious. And that's useful for us. I have quoted Eichmann references that come from a neo-Nazi publishing house. I am not for taboos and I am not for repression."

Currently, though, there *is* a taboo. And who really believes that if it were lifted any honest person would be the loser? ■

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JHR Volume 16 number 1 cover letter

http://ihr.org/letters/v16n1/letter.htm

INSTITUTE FOR HISTORICAL REVIEW

P.O. Box 2739 -- Newport Beach -- California -- 92659 -- USA

June 1996

Dear Friend,

In April a major New York publisher capitulated to a vicious pressure campaign, which included death threats, and cancelled publication of David Irving's new biography, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich.

The Anti-Defamation League and other powerful Zionist groups don't want you to see this book, and they've been doing everything in their power to suppress it. Predictably, the New York Times Book Review reviles it as a "sophisticated blood libel" against Jews. At the same time, though, it calls it a "Rolls Royce" of a book, "filled with costly color photographs" and written in "lively and compelling" prose.

Now you can see for yourself why this the ADL fears this brilliant product of seasoned scholarship and gifted writing. At last we are able to offer imported copies of this sumptuous 740-page hardcover masterpiece to Journal subscribers. See the accompanying order form for details.

Irving, Smith to Speak at IHR Special Meeting

If you live in southern California, please be sure to mark Saturday, September 7, on your calendar to hear David Irving and Bradley Smith at a special IHR meeting.

The independent bestselling British historian will give a first-person, up-to-the-minute report on the international campaign to destroy his career. He'll provide inside details on just how and why St. Martin's Press cancelled his Goebbels biography.

Smith, chairman of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), will speak about the international struggle for free speech and open historical inquiry, and report on how he's reaching people around the world through the Internet.

We'll soon be mailing out details about this special meeting to friends in southern California.

The Carto Mess

Unfortunately, we must still divert precious time and effort to fighting off legal and propaganda attacks against the Institute by former associate Willis Carto.

Unable to make any headway in California courts, Carto brought a "back door" lawsuit in Texas against three directors of the IHR's parent corporation (LSF). He claims that he secretly purchased control of the LSF in 1966 from the daughter of one of three original incorporators, who made him a "permanent substitute incorporator." Although this farfetched argument was rejected as meritless by California Superior Court Judge Polis in 1994, Carto apparently hopes for better luck in Texas.

It won't be easy. Judge Polis already ruled that "Carto was exercising substantial control" over the LSF/IHR "without any apparent legal authority." Judge Polis also declared that sworn statements and other items presented by Carto in the case "are untrustworthy as evidence and disbelieved by this court."

In our lawsuit against Carto and his associate Henry Fischer to recover money stolen from the IHR, the trial date has been postponed once again, and is now set for October 28.

As we've repeatedly emphasized, Carto adamantly refuses to meet with us to work out a peaceful

5/3/99 10:02 AM

'False News' Trial - 04 Criminal Prosecution of 'Holocaust Denial'

http://ihr.org/books/kulaszka/04kulaszka.htm

Another forensic study has been carried out by German chemist Germar Rudolf. On the basis of his on-site examination and analysis of samples, the certified chemist and doctoral candidate concluded: "For chemical-technical reasons, the claimed mass gassings with hydrocyanic acid in the alleged 'gas chambers' in Auschwitz did not take place . . . The supposed facilities for mass killing in Auschwitz and Birkenau were not suitable for this purpose . . ." (note 19)

## Discredited Perspective

## Notes

13. J.-C. Pressac, *Les Criméaires d'Auschwitz: La macellerie du meurtre de masse* (Paris: CNRS, 1993). See also: R. Faurisson, "Jean-Claude Pressac's New Auschwitz Book," *The Journal of Historical Review*, Jan.-Feb. 1994, p. 24.

16. See: R. Faurisson. "How the British Obtained the Confession of Rudolf Hoess," *The Journal of Historical Review*, Winter 1986-87, pp. 389-403.

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resolution of this regrettable dispute. He rejects even the advice of his own attorneys to reach an out-of-court settlement.

## Steady Progress and Real Impact

Careful research, clear writing, and solid scholarship rarely make headlines. But these have been the keys to the Institute's remarkable impact in the 16 years since its founding.

Through our Journal and the many books we publish and distribute, as well as through Internet outreach to thousands monthly, and in direct cooperation with individual scholars -- we're steadily winning respect from thoughtful men and women around the world, and playing an important role in educating a new generation of leaders.

More and more, even influential adversaries are acknowledging (if only grudgingly), the Institute's effectiveness. A good example is a recent comment by Eric Breindel, an influential New York Post editor and widely-read columnist. Speaking with writer Christopher Hitchens on the "Charlie Rose Show," broadcast nationally on the PBS network, May 8, he said:

> "... There are serious scholars, or people you would find serious in the sense that they unearth new information, who publish in, for example, the Journal of the Institute for Historical Review, which dedicates itself to proving, for example, that the gas -- there were no gas chambers at Nazi death camps. There has been scholarship, Christopher, in those journals. Let there be no doubt about it. They have uncovered train records that many of us who study this field didn't know existed. They go to the actual archives ..."

This acknowledgment of Journal scholarship is all the more remarkable because Breindel, who is Jewish, has been a staunch defender of Zionist interests, and a harsh critic of revisionist historians.

## Your Help Needed

Thanks to support from dedicated friends across America and around the world, the IHR survived last year's life-threatening financial crisis. Once again, many thanks for your help -- including every one who responded generously to the recent "matching fund challenge."

We're by no means out of danger, though.

## We still need your help

Terribly overworked and financially strapped, each day we strain to make every dollar and hour count. Only with the sustained help of friends can the Institute carry on the struggle against historical lies, further the cause of truth in history, and enlighten people about key historical issues that have real political-social impact in today's world.

If you agree that the Institute's work is important, please support it with your generous donation.

Yours truly,
Mark Weber
Greg Raven

P.S. Please take a minute right now to mail your donation/order. We've enclosed a return envelope for your convenience.

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Who's Inciting Anti-Semitism?

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The Campaign for Radical Truth in History PO Box 849, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 83816

# Who's Inciting Anti-Semitism?

Copyright ©1996 by Michael A. Hoffman II

The international campaign to jail and censor writers, artists and historians who have the temerity to question or doubt the dimensions of the gilded *Shoahboat*--the gas chambers, kabbalistic six million figures and similar relics of "Holocaust" religiosity--is associated almost exclusively with the snoops and turnkeys of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

In other words, this inquisition is identified in the public mind with Jews, or at least those self-appointed spokesmen for the Jewish people who hold court in the corporate media.

Some Jews threatened to kill David Irving and his editor at St. Martin's Press, last March, if the contract to publish Irving's biography of Joseph Goebbels wasn't canceled. (It was canceled).

What is most amusing about the suppression of Irving's book, on grounds that it's a Nazi screed, is the fact that it's actually one of the most withering indictments of a top Nazi ever penned in any language, including Hebrew!

But since Irving's history doesn't toe the total "Holocaust" line, he's been consigned to outer darkness. The Zionists disapprove of history writing. They require theology masquerading as history.

In Germany and France, the Zionist hounds are barking in the ears of judges and prosecutors, demanding imprisonment for more than a dozen scientists, professors and writers who do not agree with certain Jewish notions about WWII.

French writer Roger Garaudy stated in his recent book, *The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics*, that the Zionist state is using Auschwitz gas chamber tales to excuse its massacres of Palestinians. For writing this he is facing prison on a charge of "denying crimes against humanity."

The hypocrisy of the charge is revealed by the fact that no Jew in France has been arrested for denying the "crime against humanity" that occurred in Qana, Lebanon, on April 18, when Israelis massacred nearly 100 Arab refugees who had taken shelter at a United Nations base.

An 83 year old Capuchin monk, Abbé Pierre, who was once voted France's most popular man for his charitable work, lost his halo as soon as he performed the most basic duty of friendship--refusing to condemn his friend, Garaudy, for having written a book the Jews and the Jewish Cardinal Lustiger, don't like. Abbé Pierre actually had to go into hiding in Italy.

Dr. Robert Faurisson of the Sorbonne has been on a criminal trial merry-go-round for the past decade, because he's written books doubting homicidal gas chambers. In 1989 he was nearly beaten to death. Faurisson's colleague, Henri Roques, forfeited his doctorate after submitting a thesis skeptical of gassings.

In Germany, historian Udo Walendy has just been sentenced to 18 months in prison for publishing skeptical gas chamber research. Max Planck Institute Chemist Gemar Rudolf has been ordered to prison because his studies in Auschwitz contradict the official claims. He has had to flee Germany to avoid a two year prison sentence.

Last August, the elderly American writer Hans Schmidt ended up in a German jail after prosecutors charged him with writing an anti-Zionist newsletter in *America* (Schmidt was released on bail in January and fled to Florida).

Writer Günter Deckert languishes in prison for the 'crimes' he committed with his pen (Günter Deckert Freedom Committee, c/o G. Coletti, Box 61221, Pasadena, CA 91106).

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Gary Lauck of Nebraska, publisher of a right wing newspaper, is serving a four year sentence in Germany. The U.S. Consul General said he has not "registered any concerns with Washington" regarding Lauck's treatment or legal due process in the case. Media access to Lauck is restricted.

In Canada, David Irving was handcuffed and deported. (He is banned from entering Australia as well). Canada is the billionaire Bronfman family's fiefdom (Edgar Bronfman Sr. once called the people of Austria, "dirty anti-Semitic dogs"). Bronfman, the head of the World Jewish Congress, financed the Marilyn Manson rock album, "Anti-Christ Superstar." The cover art sports a stylized SS rune. When kosher Judeo-Nazism is used as a marketing gimmick by Jewish moguls themselves, to sell CDs and rake in the dollars, it is entirely permissible. In fact, it becomes a top ten hit on the record charts.

The Canadian government has thus far prosecuted publisher Ernst Zündel twice for distributing the book, *Did Six Million Really Die?* Having failed to silence him by public means, he is now being subjected to secret star chamber proceedings within Canada's security bureaucracy. Zündel's house was destroyed by arson in 1995.

The list of infidel intellectuals facing jail, censorship or violence for their dissent from Zionist doctrine is, to borrow a phrase from Wordsworth, continuous as the stars that shine and twinkle on the Milky Way.

The rabbis are persecuting men and women who cannot find it in their conscience to assent to official dogma about World War II. And while Wiesenthal & Co. are riding high for the moment, one wonders if they have not blundered badly and provoked a backlash. Freedom of speech is something almost genetic in the American and European people. It has been the defining right which distinguished us for centuries from the Oriental empires of the Ottomans and Mongols.

Christopher Hitchens has come to Irving's defense, in the pages of *Vanity Fair*, calling on historians to debate Irving, and for an end to the censorship of his books as well as recognition that he is "...a great historian...Few contemporary scholars of the Third Reich have his depth of knowledge."

When the Germans, at the insistence of the Zionist Wiesenthal Center, blocked access to Zündel's web-page on the Internet, students on-line at schools like the Carnegie Institute, defiantly "mirrored" Zündel's page on their own web-sites. And the defiance is growing.

For many years the renegade chief rabbi of the Satmar, Joel Teitelbaum, claimed the Zionist movement had a vested interest in provoking anti-Semitism. It seems as if the Satmarer rebbe had a point.

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5/3/00 9:00 AM

Time Puts the Boot In

http://www.fpp.co.uk/StMartinsPress/ABCRadio0596.html

Australian ABC
Radio National

A DISCUSSION IN MAY 1996

about two books, David Irving: Goebbels, Mastermind of the Third Reich, and Daniel Goldhagen: Hitler's Willing Executioners

On 28 May 1996 in his Latenight Live program on ABC-Radio National, broadcaster and author **Phillip Adams** discussed, among other things, the above books with U.S. based British journalist and author, **Christopher Hitchens.**

*Explanation:* THE FAMOUS New York firm of publishers, St Martin's Press, which had previously published several books by David Irving and requested him to provide jacket-puffs to promote the works of their other authors, contracted to publish his biography *Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich* in April 1996.

SMP came under savage assault from the Anti-Defamation League from February 1996, and their chairman Tom McCormack, who had visited Irving in London and dined with him over the previous years, suddenly became A Denier. SMP dumped the book, the product of eight years' research, in an unprecedented action of jibbering, craven, panic.

**Phillip Adams:** ...I must say I agree with **Christopher Hitchens** that much of **Daniel Goldhagen's** book *Hitler's Willing Executioners* is tautological, and you wonder who **Goldhagen** thinks he's fighting, and he argues that many German citizens, a great many German citizens, willingly took part in the murder of Jews and that the prevailing winds of antisemitism were of fundamental importance to the Holocaust.

Well, surprise, surprise. Now, Christopher Hitchens was not impressed by the book, believing that it was not all that revelatory. But he is concerned that another manuscript on the Nazis may not, thus far has not, been published. Now the manuscript, which is the first to access Goebbels diaries is by the naughty David Irving.

Now, I'm often in trouble in this country for being one of the few to decry **the ban on Irving**. I think that it's madness, nonsense that actually increases his video sales here. I've met Irving, I've talked to him, I've read his books. he can be debated with. I think that it's just crazy to lock him out and, in a sense, make him a martyr of the ultra right.

But now Irving's far-right political association make North American publishing houses run scared: St

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Martin's Press were to publish the manuscript. At the eleventh hour *they pulled out* of the deal and Christopher feels this cancellation not only amounts to an infringement on our free speech but also means that we don't get a chance to read and critique Irving's research which is really quite important and interesting. Now, Christopher, can you outline the run-up to St Martin's cancelling the Irving contract.

**Christopher Hitchens:** Well, yes, Irving had laid hold of Goebbels' diaries which had been kept in an archive in Moscow since the end of the war and it's worth mentioning, by the way, if you or I were handed those documents, we wouldn't be able to make head or tail of them. They are written in a particular kind of script. There are various decodings necessary and very few people in the world, few historians are actually competent to unscramble it. So it wasn't just Irving being an opportunist. His own expertise in the language and so on was probably essential to the realisation of the project which I suppose St Martin's Press stuck with him for a long time, gave the book their reps their sales people with high recommendation, had the book nominated for a military book prize and did all the things that publishers do when they think they've got a hot number on their hands.

Then, after a couple of articles in - one in the *New York Times* and one of the trade papers, I think *Publishers Weekly* - unsigned, incidentally the second one, saying that Irving was not a kosher figure, that he had unpleasant associations with right-wing groups and that he had expressed some doubts about the generally accepted version of the Final Solution. There was a terrific panic and St Martin's, in fact, crying much before they were being hurt, allowed Irving to be told by reporters that they had cancelled the contract. they couldn't manage to tell him first - they were so anxious to show clean hands.

**Phillip Adams:** You said that St Martin's have disgraced the business of publishing

**Christopher Hitchens:** Sorry?

**Phillip Adams:** You've said they disgraced the business of publishing and degraded the practice of debate.

**Christopher Hitchens:** Yes, I think I would say both of those thing; both as regards my right to read a book - which I'm extremely keen to uphold - and Mr Irving's right to publish one - which is not quite the same thing but is obviously related. And, you know, the question really is whether or not we would amputate or amend the historical record. In other words deny ourselves the Goebbels diaries which we wouldn't get any other way. It would to spite Mr Irving. It seems to me that your characterisation as that of "insane" was perfectly acceptable.

**Phillip Adams:** Christopher, you are a bit kind to him on one issue and that is on the authentication of the Hitler Diaries. He went this way and that on that issue and apparently very easily influenced by money but, of course, he finally came down on the side of forgery. And of course neither of us are denying that he does have impeccable fascist neo-Nazi connections.

**Christopher Hitchens:** Well, there's no question about, well, there is actually a question of whether he ever did describe himself as a moderate fascist. he tells me, which is a bit of an oxymoron anyway, I must say, that he tells me that that piece of defamation by the *Daily Mail* which later withdrew it. But you know it's remained in the clipping files and it keeps on coming up. I haven't actually checked it myself but in all fairness that's his staunch claim. Look, let me give you an example from the book - a general example of the argument. In the book it is revealed for the first time that Sir **Oswald Mosley** - I'm sure some of your listeners have heard about. He was the

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leader of British fascism and was a great terror to the Jewish community in London - was in receipt of direct financial subsidy from the Third Reich, that the Nazis fed him quite a lot of ready money. Now, that's always been denied by the quite large number of people in the British establishment who remain so insanely sympathetic to Mosley, and it's very interesting to have it confirmed, and it's entirely due to the work of Irving. In laying this out, Irving describes Mosley as an "outstanding and forceful politician". That is actually what most of Moseley's contemporaries did think of him. It's sad to say, but I do think this point has to be brought out. Now, I think I would have used different adjectives or some additional ones, shall we say. But look, you know, I'm over 21 and been around and seen a few things. I think I can take it. I can take it that Irving's description is a bit euphemistic in exchange for the very valuable information that he's unearthed. I feel I'm strong enough to decide that for myself.

"Christopher, he's not technically a holocaust denier."

**Phillip Adams:** Christopher, he's not technically a holocaust denier. He more argues Hitler himself was not personally responsible.

**Christopher Hitchens:** Well, actually Irving hasn't been a holocaust historian. he's been a second world war historian and he's curried what you might call a revisionist view, like the reputation of Winston Churchill and so on, and the bombing of Dresden, matters like that for quite some time. It's worth enforcing a distinction here between holocaust deniers and holocaust revisionists. the two terms are often used as is they are interchangeable which they are not. Everyone is actually a revisionist of some kind or another. Even **Deborah Lipstadt** who wrote the famous book *Denying the Holocaust*, which is an attack on holocaust deniers, concedes that some of the pornographic stuff that people used to believe about the Final Solution isn't true. For example, no Jews were ever made into soap, that's a myth. No Jewish skin was ever used to make lampshades. That's also a myth. There are lots of things that we now know not to be true that used to be articles of faith. So, you know, one's engaged in the business of revision.

There are those who say there is no such thing as the Final Solution at all. Their position seems to me untenable and probably malignant because it would involve denying that the Nazi party ever had any antisemitic elements in its program. I mean, opening stages in their Final Solution all took place before the documentary cameras. We know that regime which detested the Jews came to power in Germany, and deported all the Jews that it could lay its hands on to the east and that not many of them came back. There can be an argument about what exactly happened to them while they were there but it doesn't seem to me that that would make an enormous amount of difference.

**Phillip Adams:** Let's turn now to the Goldhagen book *Hitler's Willing Executioners*. Now, the week that St Martin's Press backed down on publishing Irving's book, Goldhagen gave a seminar at the Holocaust Museum and you saw him being put through the wringer by some heavyweight scholars. Now, although you didn't like the book much, your heart went out to him.

**Christopher Hitchens:** Well, I thought he actually - I've never seen a scholar subjected to such a battering from experts as Goldhagen underwent, including from one of your countrymen, actually. Gentleman by the name of Quit, I think [Konrad] **Kwiet**. He's an adviser to the Australian government on war crimes and a historian of the holocaust, and **Yehuda Bauer** who is the senior Israeli scholar on the subject and I think the curator of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. I think he said the book was unhistorical. It had no concept at all of what the origins of fascism in Germany had been, that where it was correct it wasn't original. It was borrowed from the works of early historians like Christopher Browning. And where it was original, which was in suggesting a much higher collective guilt then collective responsibility among the German people. It was tendentious. Goldhagen also expected a free ride with his book because of the general Hollywoodisation of the holocaust and the willingness of the people to believe almost anything about it. So he looked very shell-shocked but held up quite well. So, having gone myself with the

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intention of asking him a few hostile questions -

**Phillip Adams:** What was the question? You had a zinger that you proposed asking.

**Christopher Hitchens:** Well, it wasn't exactly a zinger, nice of you to put it like that. I mean, you wouldn't know from Goldhagen's work, you wouldn't know it from Stephen Spielberg's work either, if it comes to that but in the last two free elections held in Weimar Germany, the Nazi vote was beginning to collapse and nearly 60% of the Germans voted against the Nazis the last time they had a chance to do so. Indeed.

**Phillip Adams:** Well, that does undermine Goldhagen's central proposition just a little, doesn't it?

**Christopher Hitchens:** Excuse me?

**Phillip Adams:** That does undermine Goldhagen's thesis just a little.

**Christopher Hitchens:** I would say very much so, yes. That's of course why there was a constitutional coup with the extreme right and the senile Chancellor Hindenburg. They had to move fast and take power by force because they realised they'd passed their peak. Now, Goldhagen doesn't even mention German opposition to the Nazis and it seems to me his book was part of something David Irving is very informed and arguing about which is whether or not the holocaust is used for propaganda purposes, so to speak, to criminalise the whole German people and that's, to wrap up and go back to where we began, that's another reason why I believe it's very important that Irving's voice not be silenced.

**Phillip Adams:** Well, let's go back to Irving because you make a distinction. You call him - I'm just trying to find the notes here - an important historian of fascism.

**Christopher Hitchens:** Well, I say he's not a fascist historian. he's also a very important historian of fascism, yes.

"... he's also a very important historian of fascism, yes."

**Phillip Adams:** Is this because he's just about the only living person who has extensively interviewed a lot of these turkeys? Is it his special ability in translation or does his politics give him a depth of insight that perhaps others lack?

**Christopher Hitchens:** Well, there I'm not sure whether I'm the right person to ask what it would be like to be fascist and when I try to imagine, I find that's a limit to my imaginative faculties. Perhaps it's a limitation, perhaps it isn't. I don't know if it's in that way that he got his interviews either, by presenting himself as a sympathiser or not. One would hope not - or I at any rate would hope not. But the fact is that he does have a very distinctive language ability in translation. he has really emersed himself in the subject. he is skilled in the reading of documents. I don't know any occasion where he can be shown to have altered the meaning of a document either - either by suppressing something or interpreting something beyond its evidentiary value. He occasionally throws in the odd waspish comment that gives you a slightly teasing impression. For example, he always refers to the bombing of Dresden as a holocaust and I think that his intention there is to annoy people and he insists you know as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth that he's only applying the technical term because *holocaust*, of course, means destruction by fire. But I have the feeling that he's trying to make another point, don't you?

**Phillip Adams:** Absolutely. Have you ever debated him, Christopher?

**Christopher Hitchens:** I've got a broad enough back to take it and in fact the book on the

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bombing of Dresden is a masterly piece of work.

**Phillip Adams:** He was not bad on Churchill either in part.

**Phillip Adams:** He's not bad in part on Churchill.

**Christopher Hitchens:** No, I was about to say I've written quite a lot on Anglo-American special relationships and the Churchill - Roosevelt relationship, and the picture you get from Irving's work is a more accurate one than the official pious accounts of that- a sort of love-fest between two blood brothers. I mean, Churchill and Roosevelt despised and detested one another and it's very clear to anyone who reads deeply in the correspondence between them that that was true - and one of the people who helps one to understand this is undoubtedly David Irving, and I would have to give him credit for that.

My disagreements with him are much greater actually than those of many of his critics. For example, I wrote a piece about him earlier on where I caught him saying to conference of revisionists that he himself had always believed that the Jews of the world should all be sent to Madagascar where they couldn't exert their terrible influence on the stockmarket and international banking and so forth. Well, he says he still thinks that would have been a good idea. So my disagreements with him are not with emphasis. He says, for example, in his book on the Hungarian revolution that the main motive for the rebels in Hungary was to get rid of the Jews who'd taken over the Hungarian communist party. this is very toxic stuff, in my opinion.

**Phillip Adams:** Yes, I was in the C.P. at the time and there was a lot of discussion in the communist party about that dimension of the Hungarian uprising.

**Christopher Hitchens:** Well, actually the Stalinist justification for putting down the Hungarian revolution was that its leaders were antisemites and fascists - and it's true. There's a lot to be said about this that the way in which Irving emphasises it in the words that I've read has, what I can only describe as a certain undeniable relish in it.

**Phillip Adams:** Well, neither of us like him but in Britain you argue that a debate on Irving's work is possible. We can't have one here because we won't let him in to participate in it. The state in the U.S., it seems to be even less likely to be energetically debated.

**Christopher Hitchens:** I'm afraid I haven't been able to get anyone to take me on on this argument so far. Britain, yes, the book has been reviewed very respectfully by **Hugh Trevor-Roper**, by **Norman Stone**, by **Don Cameron-Watt**, by all the main historians of the period, by **Gitta Sereny** who gave it a _very critical and hostile review_ but none the less open to big debate, very interesting one, too.

In most of the former English dominions he seems to be banned: Canada, Australia, New Zealand - even from visiting the countries. But an interesting fact, he was until recently banned in South Africa also, but **President Mandela** has lifted the ban on the grounds that it was undemocratically imposed by the discredited previous regime. So there is an irony for you if you like.

**Phillip Adams:** Will another publisher take it up now that St Martin's has dropped it?

**Christopher Hitchens:** Well, my friend, Steve Wasserman, who was my publisher of my last book and is editor of *New York Times* books which is division of Random House, has proposed that Random House take it up but it's being read by Random House now, but I don't know what the outcome of that is going to be. I wouldn't put an enormous amount of money on the likelihood of their doing it. There are publishers to whom I've spoken to in New York who are perfectly candid about it. They'd love to do it but life is just too short. They expect me to know what they mean by that and I believe I do.

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http://www.fpp.co.uk/StMartinsPress/SMPvDI.html

St Martins Press in New York bows to ugly pressures and in April 1996 bans David Irving's exclusive biography of Nazi propaganda minister Dr Goebbels. Eight Years' Research Dashed to Pieces by One Cowardly Publisher.

Nazi Propaganda Minister, Dr Joseph Goebbels. David Irving went to Moscow in 1992. He was the first historian to use the entire long lost Goebbels diaries, 1923-1945.

Chronology of the Biggest Publishing Scandal of the Nineties

[THE SMALL PRINT: This is a copyright work. The manuscript is reproduced as part of the Focal Point Publications Website. While it can be downloaded for personal use, the manuscript may not be marketed or commercially traded. ©1998 David Irving.]

MARCH 22, 1995 Tom Dunne, senior editor at St Martins Press in New York, tells Mr Irving's U.S. literary agent that they are so impressed by his biography of Dr Joseph Goebbels that they will sign a contract for its publication.

The book has been seven years in the writing: in June 1992, four years into the project, with the draft MS already complete and on the point of delivery, Mr Irving has run into every author's bitter-sweet nightmare: a vast cache of new materials? in this case, a colleague has discovered the diaries of the former Nazi minister microfilmed by the Nazis on primitive glass microfiches, twenty-five or forty pages to a plate, in the former Soviet archives in Moscow. Mr Irving counts 1,400 glass plates. The Red Army has seized them in Berlin, but the Russian archivists are unable to enlarge them, or even read the handwriting. Mr Irving is one of the three or four people in the world capable of reading the minister's strange handwriting. Those plates hold some 75,000 pages, or fifteen million words. The final biography runs to 200,000 words, which has not prevented critics from sneering, "Mr Irving has been selective in his choice of extracts from the diaries."

After that initial decision, it takes five months for SMP to draw up and sign the agreement. Mr Irving speaks with Dunne for the first time on Apr. 20, for twenty minutes: "He is very keen to buy US rights in Goebbels, which he has read and finds very authoritative," Mr Irving notes in his diary that same day.

Mr Irving tells Dunne that Focal Point will produce the British Commonwealth edition, since beside the commercial advantage it results in a better product with more illustrations including

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beside the commercial advantage it results in a better product with more illustrations including many in colour. FP will produce a glossy dummy edition, with the entire picture section and several chapters, for SMP to market. SMP would then offset our edition, and pay an additional fee since FP would have the entire costs of typesetting, design, and manufacturing the photographic section.

With this letter on Apr. 21 last year Mr Irving sends to Dunne a copy of his flagship work Hitler's War, first published by The Viking Press in 1977 and repeatedly reissued since then.

**May 24, 1995** At 9:30 a.m. there is the important phone call from Ed Novak, who states after personally meeting with Tom Dunne that although SMP had yet to suggest any figures, "The bottom line is they're going to do it."

**June 2, 1995** SMP make their formal offer; it is not high. It seems that Dr Ralf-Georg Reuth's ponderous German biography on Goebbels has soured the bookstores' enthusiasm for the man. The contract is not signed between SMP and Mr Irving's agent until July. The first payment under the contract is finally made in August 1995.

**September 11, 1995** Tom Dunne's office notifies the author that they have launched his Goebbels biography at the first of many marketing meetings for the spring and summer of 1996. They now ask him to let them have a list of all his previous books and sales in the USA, and to change the title, Dr Goebbels. His Life and Death, to something punchier. He suggests The Trail of the Jackal (Mr Irving's Rommel biography had become a best seller under the title The Trail of the Fox).

After a few days, they selected from a short list of suggestions made by Mr Irving, Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich.

**October 13, 1995** SMP has routinely asked the author to tell them what is new in the book. He is on the road, completing a gruelling one-month, twenty-thousand mile road and air lecture tour of the USA. From Myrtle Creek, in Oregon, he sends them this description:

> What is new: of course, I am the first and so far only historian to have had full use of the 75,000 page Goebbels Diaries that were discovered in the Moscow secret state archives in 1992. I am said to be one of only three historians capable of reading the handwriting. From these diaries we get new insight into the ruthless conduct and planning of Hitler's political conspiracies and military operations; we have fresh evidence about the role of Goebbels (and Albert Speer) in planning and inspring the Final Solution. On a personal level we learn much about the tortured psyche of the Nazi propaganda minister, from the warped mind created by his physical deformities, through his abnormally late sexual development, to his family problems and romantic escapades with Germany's most beautiful film actresses. The photographs, nearly all of which have never been published before, also deserve a mention.

**October 26, 1995** SMP presses Mr Irving for data on the sales of all his previous books in the United States. In a four page letter he gives a complete breakdown of his publishing history, including well known works published over thirty years by

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The Viking Press, Simon & Schuster, Avon Books, William Morrow, Macmillan, and Little, Brown.

January 25, 1996 SMP notifies David Irving that The Military Book Club, run by Doubledays, has bought Goebbels as a dual main selection (the club's editor, I was told, called it "a strong work of history"). The money will in the first instance go to SMP. SMP's own publicity chief Joe Rinaldi also starts to build up the publicity machine.

February 5, 1996 SMP's Neal Bascomb (of Tom Dunne's office) phones author Mr Irving in Key West to report, worried, that they are suddenly getting "hate mail" on the Internet about his being involved in Holocaust controversies. Mr Irving replies that he has never written on the subject, and that SMP should duck such ugly matters if they can. Bascomb reveals that SMP are planning to publish in the first week of May, about two weeks behind the British publication date.

Knowing full well from ten years' experience fighting off these ugly enemies what is about to happen, Mr Irving sends to Bascomb this fax:

> If you get hate mail attacking me, please ask the writer for permission to show me their letters, e-mails, etc, so that I can respond and if necessary protect myself with legal actions as I am doing in Britain and Canada (with libel actions against Deborah Lipstadt and others).

> You'll be surprised how many will back off then. Then tell them in that case you'll file their message in the appropriate receptacle.

> You can draw the attention of serious inquirers to the passages in the book about the expulsion of the Jews from Berlin, and their fate; the brand new documentary sources on this, and the photos illustrating it.

> I have not written on the Holocaust; if asked, my personal view is that the figures are open to scrutiny, and that there is quite a lot I find no archival evidence to support.

February 6, 1996 Mr Irving notes in his diary: "Ominous silence from St Martins Hope nothing's going wrong there now, intimidated by the traditional enemy." These proved premature, but prophetic, words.

February 20, 1996 There is a morning phone call from Joe Rinaldi, SMP's publicity chief, stating that Kirkus, the biggest publishing trade journal in New York, will be reviewing the book in the "next week or so," and wants to know if "I'm still with the IHR" ? the revisionist California-based Institute for Historical Review. Mr Irving replies that he is not a member or official of the IHR, but that he has spoken to functions of the IHR. He adds that of course others like Pulitzer-prize winner John Toland also address such audiences.

Seeing the methods being used by the enemy, he sends a fax to Tom Dunne at

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["David Irving? Who's he?", "http://www.fpp.co.uk/StMartinsPress/SMPvDI.html", "Saint Martin's Press:", "Dear Tom,", "I hope that everything is on track. I hear that Kirkus will be reviewing the book shortly; I hope they give it serious treatment.", "Anticipating trouble Mr Irving asks SMP now to pay the $5,000 contractually agreed for permission to offset (photograph) our production. (They never pay it.)", "It is now known that by Feb. 10, and probably several days earlier, The Shallit Report, an odd and incoherent newsletter written by Jeffrey Shallit, professor of computer sciences at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, and published on the Internet by Ken McVay and The Nizkor Project [see link] (a Jewish-funded website which monitors the world of Holocaust revisionists) has printed a two-page fact sheet on author David Irving.", "This quotes only Jewish sources (David Cesarani, Bernard Levin, Andrew Cohen) and contains such lies as \"He calls himself a 'moderate fascist'"', and \"In Nov. 1991 a reporter from The Independent showed that Mr Irving omitted crucial lines from a translation of Goebbels diaries ? lines that would have contradicted his theory that Hitler knew nothing about the extermination of the Jews.\"", "All the allegations contained in the Shallit Report (subtitled \"Lies of Our Times\") are vicious and untrue; a copy reaches Mr Irving only months later, unfortunately, and he sends a seven page list of lies and corrections to the professor.", "February 29, 1996 SMP seem to be undeterred. They ask Mr Irving urgently to arrange for the printing film to reach them from the British printers. Doubleday proceeds with promoting their edition too, producing a lavish brochure by mid March.", "Behind the scenes however the bigots and censors have begun their campaign, full blast. These are some of the tricks they employ:", "Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and other Jewish authors instruct SMP that unless they cancel the book they will withdraw the puffs that they have provided for other SMP books. Wiesel wants, said Eric Breindl, quoting the author, \"nothing to do with a firm that publishes Mr Irving.\"", "According to Norman Oder, of Publisher's Weekly, writing an exclusive feature in the New York Jewish Week, as well as to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) newsletter Frontline, Wiesel refuses to \"blurb\" the Goebbels book. Mounting pressure, says Frontline, forces Thomas J McCormack, chairman of SMP, to \"read the 640 page manuscript and to research David Irving's Home Page on the Internet.\"", "[Facts: the book totals 770 pages David Irving had at that time no site on the Internet.", "Best-selling Jewish author Jonathan Kellerman writes to Thomas Dunne a letter later quoted in Response, newsletter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Los Angeles-based fundraising body, thus:", "\"David Irving's identity as a neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier is well known, and because of it he has been forced to self-publish in the U.K. Your attempt to elevate him to mainstream status in the U.S. is the single most repugnant act I've witnessed in over a decade of publishing. You should be ashamed of yourself. Don't send me anymore [sic] books for blurbs. Anything with the St. Martin's label on it will go straight in the trash.\"", "4 of 16", "5/3/99 3:04 PM"]

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[1c]

Given that fate for any written response, SMP may well have not have bothered to point out to Kellerman that, quite apart from the other libels contained in his letter, Mr Irving was not forced to self-publish, but purchased the rights back from Macmillan Ltd on his own initiative in 1992; and that since he had a thirty-year record of publishing in New York's finest publishing houses, SMP had not "elevated him to mainstream status."

Breindl: "Private protests by influential figures within the [publishing] industry along with public declarations of opposition by legitimate Holocaust historians, seem further to have concentrated St Martin's attention."

**March 18, 1996** An item published in the United States newspapers based on a Jewish Telegraph Agency despatch has a bold story about the Oklahoma bombing, with a picture of Mr Irving next to a picture of Timothy McVeigh. Great. Stating that he has been subpnaed to provide information on his links to the Oklahoma tragedy, they cite the London-based Institute of Jewish Affairs as their source. Mr Irving sends this warning letter to the institute's director Antony Lerman by registered mail:

The statements made in the enclosed article are defamatory and untrue, in so far as they refer to me, and this letter gives due warning that any repetition of them within the jurisdiction of the British courts will be met with an immediate lawsuit by me.

**March 21, 1996** A newspaper phones from Perth in West Australia, asking for comments about today's hearing of Mr Irving's case by the Full Federal Court in Perth. The author makes some general remarks about freedom of speech. The new immigration minister has told this journalist ? a coalition has defeated the Labour Government which issued the original ban on Mr Irving's entry at the behest of the Traditional Enemy ? that it would be inappropriate to comment on this case. Mr Irving says that he would appeal to Supreme Court and to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal if today goes against him. La lotta continua!

In New York, the non-fiction book review editor of Publisher's Weekly, the country's leading trade journal, approached the magazine's book news editor warning her that somebody (unidentified to this day) has written an unusually harsh pre-publication review of the biography *Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich*; she says that she has also learned that the book is to receive a no less harsh review from *Library Journal*, which just happens to share an office with their own journal. The LJ's review is also anonymous, but the editorial that backs it with triumphant, hate-filled prose, is penned by ?? . Finally, this review editor has also magically learned that the separate *Kirkus Reviews* publication is also about to scarify the biography. It is a rare hat-trick of hatred.

PW handed the story to Norman Oder to investigate, as he exclusively reported a week or two later in New York's Jewish Week (Apr. 12). "Fortunately," he describes, "our office had recently acquired access to the Internet. I typed in the name 'David Irving,' and soon found a mother lode of material."

First he stumbled across the huge file on David Irving dumped on the Net by The Nizkor Project, a Canadian based organisation co-ordinating Websites monitoring Holocaust denial. Some people have nothing better to do. There were excerpts from the book by Lucy Dawidowicz, condemning Mr Irving's best-selling biography Hitler's War (published by The Viking Press in 1977) To Oder's horror "there was even a whole set of pagings supporting Mr Irving, courtesy of the Committee for open Debate on the Holocaust."

Oder pours all these facts into an article for *Publisher's Weekly*, due for publication on Mar. 25.

**March 21, 1996** Oder's editor faxes a copy of his article to the wire services, four days ahead of its publication.

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Shortly after midnight, Reuters begins issuing around the world an advance preview of what Publishers Weekly intended to say about the book. "British historian David Irving, whom critics have accused of being a Nazi apologist," is about to get "blistering prepublication reviews" for the book, which PW itself in anonymous review is calling "repellent," and alleges there is "an agenda to Mr Irving's documentation." The PW reviewer alleges that in the book "Nazi brutality is almost always retaliation for the plots of international Jewry and the criminality of domestic Jews."

SMP's Tom Dunne tells Reuters he and his editors are mystified at such suggestions.

Mr Irving is back in London, awaiting delivery of the first two thousand copies of the book from the printers. That afternoon, Mar. 21, the journalists begin to phone, as the newswires hum with the Reuters and AP dispatches from New York. At 5 p.m. that evening a phone call from the London Daily Express tells him what the PW is saying. "Sounds like a major mudslide is building," he predicts in his diary. "I'm going to have a fight on my hands."

Joe Rinaldi of St Martins Press phones him for half an hour, and Mr Irving gives him a list of professors and others who know him and will contradict the smear.

March 22, 1996 Thomas Dunne puts up a brave fight. He issues a press statement defending Mr Irving, listing the famous publishing houses which have published his books in the past, and the major newspapers which have reviewed them. "In the last few weeks, we have received several calls denouncing our publication of Mr Irving's latest volume, Goebbels, which, they maintained, is an apologia for Hitler's evil propaganda minister. [Note: At that time nobody has seen it outside our two publishing houses.]

"Since a number of the calls we have received have expressed fury that we would publish a book by 'a man like David Irving' and have questioned our moral right to do so, I can only say that Joseph Goebbels is doubtless laughing in hell. He after all was the man who loved nothing better than burning books, threatening publishers, suppressing ideas, and judging the merits based not on their content but by their author's racial, ethnic or political purity. That is indeed a sad irony."

It is also tough talk indeed to level at SMP's Jewish tormentors. Dunne in effect accuses Mr Irving's critics of using Nazi tactics to besmirch the author's reputation.

If PW's advance circulastion of its review to the wireservices has been unorthodox, Kirkus Reviews now joins in, mailing out early copies of its April 1 review of the Goebbels biography (it calls the book "ponderous, tedious, and scurrilously misleading"), with a press release to newspapers.

"As a result," reports Norman Oder in Jewish Week, New York Times columnist Frank Rich whom he identifies as Jewish, pricked up his ears; Oder and Sarah Gold, the non-fiction editor of Kirkus, talk off the record with Rich, and Gold supplies to him a copy of the manuscript (SMP having refused to do so).

March 25, 1996 Mr Irving's fax machine has by now churned out clipping from his agents all round the world, reporting the Reuters smear. It is impossible for him to counter all of them. He faxes to the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia:

Sir, ? Here we go round the Mulberry Bush again. My biography of the Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels, Mastermind of the Third Reich is not even out yet ? but New York Publishers Weekly is to publish an anonymous review denigrating it as "repellent" (closing words: "The real insidiousness of the biography is that its formidable documentation will gain it acceptance as history").

Immediately Reuter and AP ? as though there is little greater world news worthy of pushing ? circulate this to every corner of the globe

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Who is behind this latest orchestrated smear? Either the same people who have been agitating to keep me out of Australia and who told the media four weeks ago that Mr Irving "might have" supplied the detonators used to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City; or somebody who has been eating too much British cow-meat recently.

The first reviews were already appearing in the British press, and they were brilliant. The rest of the world's press is reverberating to the smear campaign. Mr Irving is going down with pneumonia. And St Martins Press are going berserk.

This fax to their Mr Joe Rinaldi:

> I have now seen further AP bulletins, as well as news stories printed by the Toronto Star, the Sydney Morning Herald, Die Welt, and other newspapers around the globe. I take it you have seen the story printed by Fred Kaplan in the Boston Globe on March 23. This states that Kirkus and the Library Journal will also carry blistering notices (how does Kaplan know?)

> I am doing what I can to answer these ill-advised press stories. I intend to refuse to discuss any unsigned and anonymous articles with the media; that would be like trying to debate with a masked mugger. I am always willing to defend myself against critics who identify themselves.

March 25, 1996 Publishers Weekly, in a major story, states: "Mr Irving, undaunted offers his own action report on the Net. In it, he describes himself as 'under world-wide attack by the traditional enemy of truth.'" (In fact Mr Irving had then no contact with the Internet, though supporters were at liberty to post extracts from this action report on it.). PW also quoted Tom Dunne as asking, "I'd like to know what people would have me do ? cancel the book? There's an irony here," he added, "pointing to the book's subject, Goebbels, who suppressed publications in Germany."

On days to come, Dunne will also draw attention to the book's opening sentence: "Writing this biography, I have lived in the evil shadow of Dr Joseph Goebbels for over seven years."

March 21, 1996 Ian Katz of Guardian says there is an item on AP wires about a "review" of Goebbels and does he have any details. Later Rebecca English of the Daily Express phones, Reuters are carrying a story quoting an anonymous Publishers Weekly review in New York as calling Mr Irving's Goebbels biography (still unpublished) "repellent," and accusing it of following "an agenda".

Mr Irving does what he can to refute these descriptions. He says that if the review is anonymous this justifies Goebbels' own law which made it illegal to publish anonymous reviews; writers had to stand by what they had written. Sounds like a major mudslide is building.

Mr Irving phones his new York publisher, St Martins Press: yes, they say, they have been buried by phone calls from journalists quoting Reuter's advance summary of the Publishers Weekly report. Somebody faxes the PW dispatch through to Mr Irving.

Joe Rinaldi, publicity chief at St Martins Press, phones until 10:25 PM. Damage control. What ammunition can Mr Irving provide them with? Mr Irving gives a list of names of famous historians who will provide very different views on his reputation ? e.g. Charles Burdick, David Kahn, Robert Wolfe, Richard Hunt, etc.

March 23, 1996 Mr Irving wakes at 00:15 and finds a fax from Australia, with an article from the Sydney Morning Herald about the anonymous advance review in the New York Publisher's Weekly

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entitled: "Mr Irving 'accuses Jews of provoking brutality'"! Oy! These people get their stories around the world with the speed of a hurricane. How interesting it is to see them at work like this, while simultaneously proclaiming with hurt and injured eyes that there is no international network behind them.

More faxes from Germany: the Munich court has turned down lawyer Hajo Herrmann's appeal on Mr Irving's behalf against the order banning him from Germany. Freedom of speech! What step next? Today's Daily Telegraph also reports this in a small item. Windeseile!

Over the next week or two it emerges that several branches of the major British book chain Waterstones have developed a country-wide policy of refusing to stock David Irving's books, while deliberately continuing to stock books by people who libel him like Deborah Lipstadt and Gerald Gable. "We have a store policy of not stocking books by David Irving," says Miss Louie Smart of Waterstone's Earls Court Road."

March 24, 1996 Simultaneously the Traditional Enemy of Free Speech steps up his fight to suppress the book. The Toronto Star carries the ADL smear. From Los Angeles comes a computer print of the A.P.'s latest despatch, quoting ADL-chief Abraham Foxman, that carapace of Jewish virtues. He has written, as the ADL newsletter Frontline later describes, a strongly worded letter to Roy Gainsburg, the president of St Martins press: "We were astonished to learn that an institution of your prominence and reputation will publish and promote as serious scholarship David Mr Irving's Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. We hope you will at least categorize the book as a work of fiction and not allow it to be passed off as a legitimate historical tract."

ADL noted: "No response was received."

Foxman has not read the book but demands its banning and forces Tom Dunne, Mr Irving's editor at St Martin's Press in New York, into contortions to defend their decision to print it. World-wide!

Significantly the British Sunday newspapers make no mention of the rumpus in the USA.

Bild am Sonntag carries a story about the banning of the unbelehrbare (incorrigible) David Irving from Germany.

March 25, 1996 Faxes arrive in London from Saint Martins Press, and the actual anonymous review from Publishers Weekly. Two pages of news about the controversy in Publishers Weekly (it even quotes action report on the "traditional enemy of the truth"!) as well as the review; Tom Dunne of St Martins Press seems to be hanging in there anyway.

Knowing whom he is up against, Mr Irving confides to his diary: "Fight might get ugly. I still think it is fifty-fifty that Saint Martins Press will cancel publication."

An overnight fax from Adelaide, Australia, suggests that the hearing on Mar. 21 in West Australia went badly. Mr Irving sends this fax to the Adelaide institute:

March 27, 1996 Daily Mail carries a review by British (and Jewish) author Tom Bower article. The article is vigorous, blustering, and libellous, but David Mr Irving decides not to act on it: he cannot take on wealthy newspapers too often in the courts.

April 1, 1996 Hajo Herrmann reports that two days after the Munich judgment last week the Judge revoked his own judgement against Mr Irving, without giving any reasons! Unheard of. The judge may have been afraid of U.N. repercussions? they are known to be preparing a complaint to Germany about their laws curtailing freedom of speech. David Irving is less optimistic; more likely the judgement as framed left loopholes for us to take such action. Vamos a ver.

April 3, 1996 Gloomy but objective fax from Ed Wall in Australia, summarising the hearing of

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March 21. The judges still have not issued their judgement.

"Even if it turns out to be gravely flawed," concedes the Jewish Internet newspaper Electronic Telegraph, "the book will be of interest to scholars because Mr

Irving was the first author to gain access to 75,000 pages of Goebbels's diaries stored in Moscow."

On this same day ("the eve of Passover," as Norman Oder points out) the fight gets uglier. Frank Rich ? and they don't come much uglier than that ? writes a major Op-Ed piece in the New York Times attacking Mr Irving's (still unpublished and unseen) Goebbels biography: it is lethal, but punchy. Reflecting that "only Two Passovers ago American Jews were kvelling over the newly Oscar-anointed Steven Spielberg," and that this Passover the mantle had passed to Daniel Goldhagen for his book Hitler's Willing Executioners, Rich laments that in May, David Mr Irving's book will destroy all that

He rehashes all the lies that he claims to have found about the author on the Internet, adds more of his own for good measure, and quotes Deborah Lipstadt, the Emory University Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies as saying: "What David Irving and St Martin's is facilitating is not the destruction of live people but the destruction of people who already died. It's killing them a second time. It's killing history."

(In July 1996 Prof Lipstadt will receive a writ from author Mr Irving for her tract Denying the Holocaust, which she has foolishly started peddling within the jurisdiction of the British courts).

David Irving drafts this response to be published in the NYT (they do not print it):

> Sir, ? While I refrained from responding to the unfriendly advance reviews which appeared in trade newspapers ? being attacked by a anonymous critic is not unlike being mugged by a masked man ? I do appreciate the concerns expressed by Frank Rich about my forthcoming book Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich.

> I hope that readers who obtain the book, which is already on sale in London and being reviewed, will find his fears unjustified; and that a balanced reading of the entire work will provide a better overall feel than the quotations which he has selected.

> May I remark briefly on his little cameo of myself? "Only 10 days ago," writes Mr Rich, "a Munich court upheld an order barring him from entering Germany, where Holocaust denial is a crime."

> Is Mr Rich suggesting that I have preached what he calls Holocaust denial in my book? Is he advocating that the United States should act in the same dismal fashion as modern Germany, adopting the same restrictions on free speech ? illegal under the UN Charter of Human Rights ? as were perfected by other, less illustrious Germans and by Dr Goebbels himself not so long ago?

Those restrictions levied against me culminated in 1993: On Jan. 13, a Munich court fined me $22,000 for speaking one sentence, an historical opinion, in a public lecture (words which the Polish authorities concerned have now publicly confirmed were true). The court permitted no defence evidence.

On Jul. 1, as I sat in the German federal archives for my final hour's work on the now-published biography, the president of the archives personally informed me that their ministry of the interior had ordered me banned from the building with immediate effect. I was to pack within minutes and leave ? becoming the first historian ever to be so treated ? on the grounds that my

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continued work in the archives was "not in the interests of the German people." (I glimpsed Heinrich Himmler's daughter working on her father's files as I was ushered out).

On Nov. 13 as I arrived to lecture to students of Munich university on world-wide problems of freedom of speech, I was handed an expulsion order by the city's political police.

As Mr Rich correctly writes, only ten days ago a Munich court upheld this order. I am sure that he would in fairness have added, had he known, that the judge reserved the grounds for his decision, and two days later, after it had been published in newspapers around the world, privately notified my attorney that he has now withdrawn his decision in its entirety. Evidently the lay assessors were refusing to go along with him, something of a rarity in German law.

We shall see. As in history, on some matters the jury is still out.

THEN THE skies begin to darken. Mr Irving is confined to bed in his London apartment, crippled with pneumonia and unable to speak except in short, gasping sentences.

At eight p.m. there is a long phone call from the New York Daily News, trying to do a hatchet job; they have got Mr Irving's number from his agent Ed Novak, say The Washington Post also ran a big piece attacking him today by one Marc Fisher.

Mr Irving ends this conversation by predicting that his Goebbels book will never see the light of day in the USA: the reporter interrupts to say that St Martins Press are insisting that they will not buckle under to intimidation. But he corrects her: he knows who his opponents are ? though he steadfastly refuses to identify them to her ? and they would not have undertaken the risks they have if they were not already sure that they have won before starting this terror campaign against St Martins Press (SMP).

Around nine p.m. a call comes from The Washington Post, a female reporter. She asks for Mr Irving's response to the news that St Martins Press have pulled the book. She puts to him the items in the Marc Fisher article, all of which are untrue. Will he sue, she asks?

He writes in his diary: "The consequences may be financially serious, if St Martins refuses to make the final payment or the offsetting fee they were contracted to." This will proves prophetic.

He says politely to the Washington Post that he cannot comment until he has been told officially the book is cancelled, and until he knows precisely what pressures they came under, etc. He would expect another US publisher to step forward when they see the favourable British press which the book is bound to get.

The Marc Fisher article is libellous, and packed with lies. The Washington Post fails to print the reader's letter which Mr Irving faxes to them:

> Sir, ? While there are many other totally fictitious "quotes" in his article which I could challenge, can I ask your writer Marc Fisher to provide the evidence for just one, namely that I "routinely refer to the Holocaust as a 'hoax'." Please give me credit for a degree of intelligence. "Routinely"? That should make it really easy to prove which of us might be lying.

He sends fax this letter to St Martins Press:

> It is an unusual sensation to lie in bed with pneumonia, and be told by the New York

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It is an unusual sensation to lie in bed with pneumonia, and be told by the New York gutter press on the phone that your publisher has "pulled" your book from production.

I have so far responded that until I am officially informed of any such move, I can not comment.

As he approaches the machine to fax it through at 11:19 p.m. it begins to whir and a fax comes in from Thomas J McCormack, Chairman and CEO of St Martins Press: "After much thought, we have made the decision not to publish your book Goebbels. The fact is that, at the time we acquired your book, we were without information essential to our decision." Neither in this fax, nor before, nor since, does SMP specify what the new information they have received is and invite Mr Irving's comment on it.

They are not cancelling the contract, this fax insists, merely not going to publish the book, which "entitles you to terminate the contract".

A few minutes later, at 6:21 p.m. in New York, 11:21 in London, McCormack issues his own three-page press release to the newswires (again without sending a copy to the author in London).

"I want to emphasize," states McCormack, "that we are not canceling under coercion ? publishers can often be at their best in resisting pressure ? nor was our decision prompted by mere embarrassment. We are canceling because we think many of the arguments put to us as objections to publication are valid and convincing, and because of discoveries we made on our own as we investigated the matter more deeply."

Describing how Dunne came to accept the book, McCormack states: "The book was long, detailed, and based on an immense coup of Mr Irving's ? exclusive first access to the never-published diaries that Goebbels kept. The diary material was by turns tedious, ludicrous and horrifying. And in the biography Mr Irving made it amply clear that he despised Goebbels."

But then: "Beginning two weeks ago people more informed than we started sending us new information about Mr Irving" "We condemned ad hominem arguments," continues McCormack, "but then had to ask ourselves: Could we hoenstly say we never rejected a propsoal because we didn't want to be associated with the author because of ugly, loony, or murderous things he said or did?"

The rest is History.

"The final decision about whether or not to go forward with goebbels fell on my desk. Among many other things I did, I at last sat down to examine the page proof myself. I despised it intensively. There were several reasons for this, but one was

sufficient for me: The subtext of Goebbels was in my judgment this: The Jews brought it on themselves. My feeling was that this is at base an effectively anti-Semitic book, an insidious piece of Goebbels-like propaganda that we should have nothing to do with."

"I wish we knew back in 1995 what we know now," McCormack adds add mysteriously. "I wish, once the new information began coming in, we were faster to push through to this decision." "I won't try to defend St Martin's against the criticism we have received, because the fact is I agree with much of it. We made a mistake. We now know it. We now should admit it ? and correct it. I am informing David Irving today of our decision. We will not publish his book. I should say that Tom Dunne agrees with this decision. The [Doubleday] Military Book Club also joins St Martin's: They are cancelling the book as an offering to their members."

In this extraordinary press release about David Irving, one of their own authors, rushed out to the media without consulting him or offering to him the slightest chance to defend himself, the

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cowardly chief of St Martins Press has chosen to grind his corporate stiletto-heel in the author's face as he himself picks up his skirts and flees.

Neither he nor SMP cares if they make the author's name and books unpublishable ever again in the United States ? or in the English-speaking world for that matter, because McCormack's news release is being flashed around the world hours before Mr Irving even hears about it.

In an odd postscript, reported in the New York Times on April 7, McCormack is quoted as saying :
"My whole family is Jewish and there was anguish there." (His wife is of the Jewish faith).

April 5, 1996 Good Friday. Mr Irving sets out on his rounds of the clamouring bookstores in London, racked with pneumonia. Around 10 p.m. a wad of faxes comes through, including SMP's three-page statement on David Irving announcing the ending of the book, etc. In turning to flee the Wrath of the Traditional Enemy of the Truth, they have ground their heel well and truly in his face.

Nonetheless he considers it proper to draft this lengthy but considered letter, to St Martin's Press's CEO, Tom McCormack, regretting what has happened.:

Dear Tom, ? It is I suppose twenty years since you came to London and we had our first exchange of letters. Since then much water (and ink) has flowed, but I little anticipated then that I would have to face, at the summit of my career as an historian, an onslaught such as this.

For about ten years I have had to withstand a cruel and insidious campaign waged around the globe against me by rivals and enviers, and by people of meaner motives, bent on my destruction and the ruination of my livelihood. I have withstood it until now and although I am currently laid low with pneumonia and beset by other demons within and without, no doubt I shall see it through.

I am sorry to see that your great firm was also subjected over the last three months to this terrorisation on my account. I do not blame you for having capitulated so quickly, as your "family" is considerably larger than mine. Having watched, so far as I was able, your brief battle rage I am more glad now than ever that I founded my own imprint a few years back with precisely this situation in mind. Six years ago I actually wrote to Macmillan UK and requested them to sell back the rights in Goebbels to me; what a wise move! My editors and sub-editors and indexers are beyond reach; my printers, down in Somerset, are craftsmen carved of the same oak, I sometimes think, as the men-o'-war in which Horatio Nelson put to sea. I do not think that your tormentors would get very far with them.

If I regret one thing ? and one thing only ? in our relationship as author and publisher, it is this: when Tom Dunne informed me on February 5 that your firm was beginning to receive approaches, I sent him this immediate response:

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"If you get hate mail attacking me, please ask the writers for permission to show me their letters, E-mails, etc, so that I can respond and if necessary protect myself with legal actions as I am doing in Britain and Canada (with libel actions against Deborah Lipstadt and others). You'll be surprised how many will back off then. Then tell them in that case you'll file their message in the appropriate receptacle"

Unfortunately, from that day to this, your firm did not put to me one single item of the allegations raised against me. This surely would have been the fair and proper thing to do. Instead, you appear to have accepted at face value all the canards about my having "authenticated" the Hitler Diaries (the very reverse is the truth), and having called Auschwitz, Anne Frank's diary, the Holocaust and everything else "a hoax" ? vicious libels which Lipstadt, Foxman and others have perpetrated knowing that under the prevailing American libel laws there is little I can do to repair the damage. Recently (March 7) the Jewish Telegraph Agency even spread the rumour, complete with photographs of myself and Tim McVeigh, that "Mr Irving had supplied the detonators for the Oklahoma City bombing".

Tom, I have read the text of your 3pp. statement of April 3: It was faxed to me from the other side of the world by somebody who retrieved it from the Internet. I am not on the Net, which I regard as a poisonous cesspit of stale and fid information; I do not know what is posted on it about me, nor do I have any means of reply. I am sure there are any number of "friends" who think they are doing me favours by clanking off into battle on my behalf. I cannot stop them.

I appreciate the very fair words you used to describe the book, which is surely what our relationship was all about. Your colleagues have had nothing but praise for it since the first day; Tom [Dunne] told me he had read it seven times. It should have soared aloft in May to a great and vibrant success for us all. It is a real pity that nobody in New York has yet seen the final product; perhaps you should have gone into production sooner, so that people could judge for themselves. Perhaps I should have shipped a score of copies over to you.

The book is already prominently displayed in most bookstores in London (release date April 14), and 120 national, Sunday, and provincial newspapers have asked for review copies; many of the Sunday papers have asked for several. Small though my imprint is, we are poised for a very great publishing success indeed. Several newspapers have praised the book's superlative production. The literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, John Coldstream, has privately spoken well of it, Robert Harris (Fatherland) produced as you know a most positive one-page leading review in the Evening Standard a few days ago. I shall take the liberty of sending you three or four of the best reviews (the others, of course, I shall ruthlessly suppress!).

I hope that my only problem will be ensuring deliveries in time to the other 980 bookshops which my imprint services in the U.K. I would not put it past my opponents, whom I call the traditional enemies of the truth, to do what they can even now to sabotage things here too.

If I succeed in re-placing the book in the United States publishing world, I shall of course consider it a matter of honour to repay the entire advance to your firm.

A Mr Alexander Pericles Maillis phones from Nassau in the Bahamas. The news has been splashed everywhere ? except in the U.K., where presumably the Traditional Enemy of the Truth is not keen to give Mr Irving any publicity which might benefit him and disadvantage them.

**April 14, 1996** The British press embargo on Goebbels reviews is lifted today. Mr Irving is up at 7:01 a.m., and borrows his neighbours' Sunday Times from downstairs. A triumph! The Sunday Times has a major review by Professor Norman Stone, without a sour word; the Sunday Telegraph also has a good review of the book by Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper who also criticises the Americans. Both reviews are big and prominent. Nothing could now be clearer than the divide between Jewish and non-Jewish reviewers and critics of the work. This increases the author's sense of outrage at the violence done to him in New York last week.

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April 18, 1996 The Daily Telegraph features as the principal Reader's Letter, one from a Dr John Fox of south east London, editor of a leading Jewish historical journal:

In 1991, on behalf of a Jewish academic body, I was asked to exert direct pressure on Macmillan to stop its reported publication of the Goebbels biography by David Irving. I refused because this seemed an unethical and immoral attempt to deny him freedom of speech.

April 22, 1996 Professor Francis Loewenheim, at Rice University in Houston, tells the author he has read and discussed the Goebbels book with Professor Gordon Craig, the noted historian at Stanford; after seeing what Loewenheim has written for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Craig agrees the book should be published. John Walsh at The Independent phones Mr Irving, and mentions that the review by Professor Donald Watt (London School of Economics), which they're publishing next week, is highly favourable.

April 25, 1996 Steve Wasserman of Random House faxes to David Irving an article from yesterday's New York Post, which contains a leak. Somebody has revealed that Random House are interested in Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich. Wasserman warns him not to be optimistic, advises that I should take up the feelers of other publishers.

A very generous letter arrives from Tom Dunne, Mr Irving's (former) editor at St Martin's Press. He calls Mr Irving's farewell letter to Tom McCormack "a model of dignity." And encloses a great review on the book, from the American Booklist.

April 28, 1996 The Observer has not printed Mr Irving's Reader's Letter replying to Gitta Sereny's lies. He has no recourse but to sue them for the very serious libels.

May 1, 1996 At the High Court at 11 a.m., to issue the Writ against The Observer's publishers and Gitta Sereny; Mr Irving serves it on both defendants by post during the afternoon.

May 4, 1996 Karl Ph. arrives; he says that Ewald Althans has been seen, he is out of jail: he has not served two years for his Thought Crime, then. No doubt released early as he was a German government agent.

May 10, 1996 In Glasgow: At Waterstones' the History buyer gets the store manager, who comes, and says looking very worried that "David Irving's books like Hitler's War etc haven't sold in the past." (Then why are Focal Point reprinting?! It is a question of display. If the books are hidden away, they do not sell, that is clear!

Over at John Smith & Co., the company's manager Willie Anderson doesn't look the author in the eyes, but says, furtively, "We're not going to stock it. I'm not going to explain to you why, I don't have to explain why!"

Then on to Dillons: as the author leaves to get the Goebbels books they have ordered, he notices from the corner of his eye a group of unkempt young men and women beginning to form up outside the shop, and start pointing. It is all very like the Richoux riot of July 12, 1992.

The Mob has arrived, the usual spotty, unwashed, mean-faced, coarse-mouthed bunch of jostling, threatening lunatic left-wing screechers and thugs: the traditional enemies of the truth. Somehow they have found out that Mr Irving is visiting Dillons. Probably one of the staff has phoned for them.

Mr Irving walks out through them, before they gather their wits, and without letting on that he has spotted them he heads up Gordon Street, walking deliberately away from the truck, with its doors gaping open and boxes of his books inside. He pauses twice to look in shop windows ? the reflection shows that the ugly urchin throng quietly surging along the pavement on the far side of

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the road is growing in size, as they summon up reinforcements by hand-held telephones. Yes, they have all the modern accoutrements of street war: Who is paying for them? Who puts them up to this?

Things begin to look hazardous: Mr Irving has his order-book in his hands ? that will be the first thing to vanish in a mêlée. He ducks into the Central Station concourse, and walks into the Central Hotel foyer on the far side. Within seconds, the Mob's first scouts saunter into the foyer, to find where Mr Irving is: that accomplished, they post lookouts on all the exits and summon still more reinforcements. They still do not realise that he has rumbled them.

> He hands in his order book at the reception desk and ask the girl to look he says: "About half an hour?," and, after she tucks away the precious book: " ? Now please call the police."

The Mob bursts in at this point, but before the violence begins one of the scouts whispers urgently: "He's already called the police." Furious at this news, an unappetising woman screams at the hotel staff that they ain't seen nothing yet, because the real force is still on its way.

It takes an hour for the uniformed police to restore order; the hotel staff are most co-operative. One secures the book truck. The deputy manager invites the famous author to coffee upstairs, at the hotel's expense.

From the motorway heading south back into England Mr Irving telephones the Scotland on Sunday reporter, and apologises for having had to mislead him for security reasons yesterday. He says: "Are you driving up to Aberdeen now then?" Mr Irving murmurs inconclusively ? and heads off due south to London.

May 10, 1996 Vanity Fair publishes a good article in its June 1996 issue, though Christopher Hitchens hedges his bets. A fax from Los Angeles informs Mr Irving that Hitchens was also glimpsed on television, on the PBS Channel, defending him stoutly against a journalist from the New York Post, Eric Breindl, a night or two before.

There are letters from lawyers acting for the Observer and Gitta Sereny, entering an appearance in Mr Irving's libel suit against them.

June 5, 1996 During the day Mr Irving receives by fax articles from New York Times (Tina Rosenberg) and Washington Post (Richard Cohen) about the banning of Goebbels. Both now murmur that in their view the book should not have been cancelled by St Martins Press. What hypocrisy. Tina Rosenberg accidentally says that the book is "a Rolls-Royce of a book, with costly color photos." Mr Irving decides to use that quotation in his next advertising campaign.

May 6, 1996 Time, the weekly magazine, publishes two reader's letters. The first is from a Mr Harry Conway, who claims to be an historian and writer, 'bitterly pained' to see Time devote an entire page to 'this shabby book'. (Focal Point know the name of every single person in the USA who has so far received this book: a Conway is not among them). The other, from a reader in Wisconsin, reads:

> I am a Jew whose parents lost their families in the Holocaust. I grew up in Israel among Holocaust survivors. Since I was a child, I have read every book I could find on Nazi Germany. I have tried to understand why and how the Germans came to carry out their plan for exterminating the Jews. I have read all of Mr Irving's excellent books. He is no 'apologist for Adolf Hitler.' His words record the extermination of the Jews and provide evidence of Hitler's direct involvement. Mr Irving is not an anti-Semite, nor is he a supporter of Hitler or Nazi Germany. His books, more than any others I have read, help explain what happened in Germany. If we are to prevent future exterminations, we have to eradicate hate. The process must start with free speech and the ability to discuss openly all aspects of history and express all viewpoints. Mr Irving through his writing

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has made a large contribution toward preventing future Holocausts.

The letter is signed by one Josef Hose, of Madison, Wisconsin: Mr Irving does not know him. He will later write in his own international newsletter action report: "It is comforting to think of six million Time magazines around the world containing this prominently displayed letter, from a Jew, vindicating everything I have worked for as an historian."

April 26, 1996 SMP editor Tom Dunne, who behaves impeccably throughout, will write to Mr Irving privately, enclosing a glowing review of the book in the American trade journal Booklist (Sample: "With diligence and judiciousness, Mr Irving capably connects the curse of Goebbels' diabolical energy to the larger nervous system of the Nazi Party"). Dunne states that his last letter to McCormack was "a model of dignity."

"I hope you succeed in placing the book in the U.S." he added.

PUBLISHER Tom McCormack never replies to the long letter written him by Mr Irving; the cowardly publishing is hiding in his skyscraper office.

June 17, 1996 Bill Glauber's article is published in the Baltimore Sun. It is the usual piece of craven journalistic hypocrisy, the usual vitriolic mindslop which intoxicates modern career journalists the moment they take out their pens. Glauber writes that "many of the British reviews were just as hostile as those in the United States"; what he does not say is that most of them, around 95% of them, were glowing with praise! The article concludes with the revelation that Mr Irving has a Roosevelt biography under contract to a major U.S. publisher.

June 22, 1996 The wheel continues to turn. His German Lawyer Schütz reports that Günter Deckert has been sentenced to 20 more months in jail for having organised Mr Irving's September 1990 lecture in Weinheim in 1990. Deckert is now charged with Volksverhetzung, racial incitement ? on the basis that Mr Irving linked the payments to Israel with the Holocaust allegations. When it is pointed out that Mr Irving never made this link in his Weinheim speech, the prosecutor argues, "Yes, but he meant to." The defendant Deckert is accused of having known that Mr Irving meant to make this link (though he did not eventually do so.)

At midday on June 22 Mr Irving cycles over to the post office in Key West; in his P O Box is a letter from general counsel for the Hearst Corporation in New York. It comes from out of the blue. It cancels the contract between him and William Morrow Inc. for the book Roosevelt's War, and demands repayment of the advance ($30,000) "within two weeks."

© Focal Point

F

David Irving 1998

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Letters to David Irving's Website

http://www.fpp.co.uk/Letters/History/Doyle220298.html

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**ALBERT DOYLE** writes about the
Blumenthal-Hitchens feud on Monday,
February 22, 1999:

THE wheel within the wheel here is the fact that the ADL is running away from the fight. They are at pains to disclaim any notion that Hitchens is a "denier". Why? If he indeed said the things that **Epstein** says he said, then he is indeed a "denier" par excellence, far greater than, say, **David Irving**, that famous "anti-semite".

Why are they running from the fight? I say that it is because they fear what he might do if provoked. Hitchens may be a maverick in many senses but he is (or has been until now) a member of the inside literary cogniscenti of what passes for the literary establishment...and he has a very mean and skilful pen. No, they don't mind pissing on David Irving (who is not nasty), but they really fear Hitchens. "Yella bellies", as we say here.

Though I disagree with many things he has done (like insulting **Mother Theresa** at her funeral) I share your view of his essential integrity. And I never trust a man who doesn't drink.

Albert Doyle

David Irving notes:

WHEN **Christopher Hitchens** came out on my side against St Martins Press and the ADL in a famous **Vanity Fair** article in June 1996, **Abraham Foxman** wrote a vicious letter attacking both of us. I replied with a reader's letter backed by the threat of a writ. **Vanity Fair** asked if they might remove my backing for Hitchens, as he was taking other steps against Foxman. (They published my letter). -- David Irving

For further proof that Hitchens has an independent mind, see his article about Monica Lewinsky: **Weapon of mass distraction** published by The London Evening Standard in Dec. 1998, and by **Vanity Fair** March 1999.

© Focal Point 1999 F

David Irving

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Posted Saturday, February 20, 1999

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AN EXTRAORDINARY row has erupted in Washington DC between high-profile journalists who were once the closest of friends. It has all the classic black comedy-elements of a Jewish squabble, except that the chosen victim, British columnist (Vanity Fair) **Christopher Hitchens**, was unaware until relatively recently that he must count himself one of their number.

Since Hitchens rounded on **Sydney Blumenthal**, and outed him in an affidavit as the source of White House smears against **Monica Lewinsky**, which Blumenthal had previously denied on oath, Hitchens has learned what all Free World writers must soon or later discover:

* that, be you ever so humble, the Anti Defamation League of the B'nai Brith (ADL) in New York, headed by that lovable rogue **Abraham Foxman**, has a dossier of filth on you, much of it fictitious, but enough of it true, which he will pour across your head the moment you step out of line; and

* that the rest of the yowling mob of the New York journaille will come snapping after you, licking at your heels.

Hitchens is accused, among other crimes, of consorting with British historian **David Irving**: which is more than enough to consign him to the eternal fires of damnation. [Mr Irving's response]

From the pages of MSNBC:

Hitchens-Blumenthal feud escalates

Beltway dispute takes ugly turn with charge of Holocaust denial

The falling-out between writer Christopher Hitchens, left, and White House aide Sidney Blumenthal has escalated.

By Jonathan Broder SPECIAL TO MSNBC WASHINGTON, Feb. 16 -- The bitter personal feud between White House aide Sidney Blumenthal and British

Meet the Press file

Reuters file

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HITCHENS The Chorus and Cassandra (1985)

http://www.radiolslam.net/aaargh/fran/chomsky/cassandra.html

AAARGH

| **Accueil général** | **Accueil français** |

[English homepage | Chomsky]

The Chorus and Cassandra

Christopher Hitchens

1985

In his imperishable Treatise on the *Art of Political Lying*, published in 1714, Dr. John Arbuthnot laid down a standard for falsifiers and calumniators that has yet to be excelled:

> Detractory or defamatory lies should not be quite opposite to the qualities the person is supposed to have. Thus it will not be found according to the sound rules of pseudology to report of a pious and religious prince that he neglects his devotions and would introduce heresy; but you may report of a merciful Prince that he has pardoned a criminal who did not deserve it.

Sixteen years ago I went to the Examination Schools at Oxford University to hear Professor Noam Chomsky deliver the John Locke Lectures. The series was chiefly concerned with modern theories of grammar, syntax, and linguistics, but Chomsky attached a condition which the syndics of the university could not easily decline. He insisted on devoting one entire, self-contained lecture to the American war in Indochina and to the collusion of "academic experts" in an enterprise which was, he maintained, debauching America even as it savaged Vietnam.

Several things intrigued me about the stipulation. First, I liked the way Chomsky separated his political statement from his obligation as a guest lecturer rather than, as was and is the style at Oxford, pretending to objectivity while larding the discourse with heavily sarcastic political "pointers." There was no imported agenda of the kind one got from Hugh Trevor-Roper, Max Beloff, or John Sparrow. Second, I was impressed by his insistence, which was the inverse of the shifty practice of Tory and liberal scholars, that academics could and should have a role in political life but should state their allegiance squarely. It had, after all, been only a few months since Gilbert Ryle had told us, as we clamored about the crushing of Czechoslovakia, "What can we do? We are philosophers, not lifeboat men." That there was something wrong with the Rylean bleat I was certain. What it was, I was not sure. Chomsky seemed to suggest that you need not politicize the academy in order to take a stand, but that if you did not take a stand, then you were being silent about a surreptitious politicization of it. To the hundreds of us who broke the habit of many terms and for once attended lectures consistently and on time, he seemed to have a measured, unshakable, but still passionate manner that contrasted rather well with the ardent ultraleft confusion and the creepy conservative evasions that were competing at the time.

Still, Chomsky was unmistakably on the left, though he scorned the sectarians and the know-alls. In those days, also, you could read him everywhere; his name had a kind of cachet. He was interviewed with respect on television and radio, though more often abroad than in America. He was a seminal contributor to *The New York Review of Books*. His predictions about a widening of the Indochina war, and a consequent narrowing of the choices between a Sovietization of the peninsula and an utter devastation of it, now seem almost banal in their accuracy. Nineteen sixty-nine was before Nixon's "madman theory," before Kissinger's "decent interval," before the Christmas bombing, the Church Committee, the "plumbers," and all the rest of it. Tumultuous as it seemed at the time, the period in retrospect appears an age of innocence. The odd thing -- and I wonder why it didn't occur to me more forcefully then -- was that, the more Chomsky was vindicated, the less he seemed to command "respect." To the extent that I reflected about this at all, I put it down to shifts in fashion ("Chomsky? -- a sixties figure"), to the crisis undergone by many superficial antiwar commentators when the American war was

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succeeded by Spartan regimes (of which more later), and to the fact that Chomsky had started to criticize the Israelis, seldom a prudent course for those seeking the contemplative life.

As "wound healing" went on in American society, and as we were being bidden to a new age where "self-doubt and self-criticism" were things of the past, and just as I was wondering whether one would admire an individual who had put self-doubt and self-criticism behind him, Oxford struck back at Noam Chomsky. In the *1983 Biographical Companion to Modern Thought*, edited by Alan Bullock, there appeared a 550-word entry under Chomsky, Avram Noam. Of these 550 words, the most immediately arresting were those which maintained that he had

forfeited authority as a political commentator by a series of actions widely regarded as ill-judged (repeated polemics minimising the Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia; endorsement of a book -- which Chomsky admitted he had not read -- that denied the historical reality of the Jewish Holocaust).

The piece was written by Geoffrey Sampson, an academic nonentity who made various other incautious allegations and who later, while engaged in an exchange with my friend Alexander Cockburn (*The Nation*, December 22, 1984, and March 2, 1985), strolled into the propellers and was distributed into such fine particles that he has never been heard from again.

Elsewhere in his entry, Sampson alluded foolishly to "relationships between the academic and political sides of Chomsky's thought," going so far as to say that "Chomsky has sometimes made such links explicit, for instance in arguing that Lockean empiricist philosophy paved the way for imperialism," and concluding lamely that "recently, however, Chomsky has insisted on a rigid separation between the two aspects of his work." This, insofar as it was not a simple-minded *non sequitur*, I knew to be flatly untrue from my attendance at the John Locke Lectures in 1969. In a 1985 article in *The New Criterion*, Sampson made an equally false claim about threats of legal action against his person from Chomsky, succeeded in convincing only its editor, the too-credulous Hilton Kramer, and the undiscriminating Martin Peretz, of *The New Republic*, of his veracity, was made to apologize by Cockburn, and, as I said, disappeared like breath off a razor blade.

My curiosity was ignited, not at first by the debate over the integrity of the Bullock crib, but by the fact that anything so cavalier and crude had been published at all. Bullock and his deputies are nothing if not respecters of persons. And we live in a world where fact checkers, subeditors, and (except for people like Chomsky, who eschew them on principle) libel lawyers work mightily to protect reputations on both sides of the Atlantic. How came it that Noam Chomsky, among the few Americans of his generation to lay claim to the title of original thinker, could be treated in such an offhand way? As I later found, Chomsky had written to a stoically indifferent Bullock:

> If you would have the time or interest to look into the matter, I would be intrigued to hear your opinion about what the reaction would be under the circumstance that such scurrilous lies were to appear in a biographical dictionary -- or were to be published in a book by a reputable publisher such as Oxford or Fontana -- about a person who is not known as a political dissident.

All this began to interest me at about the turn of the New Year. In the following weeks, without even trying, I was able to glean the following merely from the journals and papers to which I subscribe in the ordinary way:

> As the Khmer Rouge were about to take over, Noam Chomsky wrote that their advent heralded a Cambodian liberation, "a new era of economic development and social justice. " (David Horowitz and Peter Collier, *The Washington Post Sunday Magazine*, April 8, 1985)

> To justify his assertion that American political science is corrupt (a very serious charge), he [Philip Grant] quotes from Noam Chomsky and other supporters of the North Vietnamese cause in the Vietnam war, who attacked those leaders of political science in America who were either impartial in their attitude to that war or were sympathetic to the cause of South Vietnam. (Professor Maurice Cranston, Letters, *The Times Literary Supplement* April 5, 1985)

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Who among them [leaders of the antiwar movement] has been willing to suggest that the murder of a million or more Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge might have been averted if American military force had not been removed from Indochina? If any of them spoke out this way, I missed it. But I did hear Noam Chomsky seek to prove the Cambodian genocide hadn't happened. (Fred Barnes, Senior Editor, *The New Republic*, April 29, 1985)

Nor was this all. Without digging very much further, I found that the *London Spectator* had just published an article by Richard West on September 29, 1984, which lustily indicted the Communists and their apologists in the West like the odious Noam Chomsky. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia and let the world see the proof and magnitude of the Khmer Rouge crime, the Chomskys were able to turn to *Sideshow* for an explanation: the Khmer Rouge were the creation of Nixon and Kissinger. The atrocities in Cambodia were used to justify not only the Vietnamese invasion but their remaining as an occupying power.

This comment appeared in a review of *The Quality of Mercy*, which, like *Sideshow*, was written by William Shawcross. On page 55 of *The Quality of Mercy*, which was published in the fall of 1984, appears the following, as an explanation of relative Western indifference toward the Calvary in Cambodia. Of the assumed indifference, Shawcross wrote:

> Through 1976 and 1977 and especially in 1978 the Western press's coverage of Cambodia increased. Nonetheless, the issue never reached critical mass. I did not write enough myself. And there was no broadly based campaign of protest in the West as there was, say, over abuses of human rights in Chile.

One reason for this was the skepticism (to use a mild word) displayed by the Western left toward the stories coming out of Democratic Kampuchea. That skepticism was most fervently and frequently expressed by Noam Chomsky, the linguistic philosopher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He asserted that from the moment of the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975 the Western press collaborated with Western and anti-Communist Asian governments, notably Thailand, to produce a vast and unprecedented" campaign of propaganda against the Khmer Rouge.

It seems that Chomsky is impaled on some kind of inquisitorial fork here. He is accused of leaning on Shawcross, who in turn accuses him of culpable complacency, if not outright intellectual complicity. Then there is the bland assertion by the editors of *The New Republic*, on December 24, 1984:

> This is also a very old controversy, which Mr. Chomsky has sought to confuse over the years by tossing adjectives like "brazen" and "scurrilous" at critics who recognize both Pol Pot's crimes and the efforts to whitewash the Nazi genocide for what they are.

After reading which, Martin Peretz's flat assertion earlier that "Noam Chomsky's views are quite mad" seems a mere grace note. Reaching for the denunciation of last resort, Peretz yelled that "even in circles which had once revered him, Mr. Chomsky is now seen as a crank and an embarrassment."

As I said, I found all these references with no more effort than it takes to keep up with the weeklies. And I can count William Shawcross and Richard West among my friends, *The Spectator* and *The Times* *Literary Supplement* among my employers, David Horowitz and Fred Barnes among my distant nodding acquaintances. No real "research," in other words. was needed to amass these confident citations. But a little work was required to establish a small fact. Not one of the extracts quoted above, whether you take them "in their context" or out of it, contains any approximation to the truth. I lay down my pen and look at what I have just written. Have I the blind spot or have they? Have I discounted enough for my own prejudices? Should I say here that Noam Chomsky once gave a book of mine a very decent review? That I have met him three times and found him sane? All these allowances made, I still maintain that we are in the territory so deftly mapped by Dr. Arbuthnot -- and by Ryszard Kapuscinski in *Shah of Shahs*;

> What should one write to ruin an adversary? The best thing is to prove that he is not one of us -- the stranger, alien, foreigner. To this end we create the category of the true family. We

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here, you and I, the authorities, are a true family. We live in unity, among our own kind. We have the same roof over our heads, we sit at the same table, we know how to get along with each other, how to help each other out. Unfortunately, we are not alone.

The gravamen of the bill against Noam Chomsky is this. That, first, he did euphemize and minimize the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. That, second, he did "endorse" or otherwise recommend a pamphlet or paper that sought to prove the Nazi Holocaust a fiction. That, third, he is an enemy of the Jewish state and a friend to footpads and terrorists of every stripe. This is what "everybody" knows about the lonely, derided linguist who no doubt blames America first and is a self-hating Jew into the bargain. Never was an open society better insulated from dissent. In Britain, he would be dismissed as "brilliant but unsound; doesn't know when to stop." In the United States, it takes a little more than that to encompass the destruction of a reputation.

The best procedure must be the tedious one: to take the accusations in order, and to put them at their strongest. Let me arrange them as did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with the suspicions uppermost.

## The Case of the Cambodian Genocide

David Horowitz and Peter Collier were wrong, in the syndicated article announcing their joint conversion to neoconservatism, to say that Chomsky hailed the advent of the Khmer Rouge as "a new era of economic development and social justice." The Khmer Rouge took power in 1975. In 1972, Chomsky wrote an introduction to Dr. Malcolm Caldwell's collection of interviews with Prince Norodom Sihanouk. In this introduction, he expressed not the prediction but the pious hope that Sihanouk and his supporters might preserve Cambodia for "a new era of economic development and social justice." You could say that this was naive of Chomsky, who did not predict the 1973 carpet-bombing campaign or the resultant rise of a primitive, chauvinist guerrilla movement. But any irony here would appear to be at the expense of Horowitz and Collier. And the funny thing is that, if they had the words right, they must have had access to the book. And if they had access to the book... Well, many things are forgiven those who see the error of their formerly radical ways.

The Richard West-William Shawcross fork also proves, on investigation, to be blunt in both prongs. Chomsky and Shawcross have this much in common: that they both argue for and demonstrate the connection between the Nixon-Kissinger bombing and derangement of Cambodian society and the nascence of the Khmer Rouge. It is not the case that Chomsky borrowed this idea from Shawcross, however. He first went to press on the point in 1972, seven years before *Sideshow* was published, with an account supplied by the American correspondent Richard Dudman of the *St. Louis Post-Dispatch*. Dudman is one of the few people to have been both a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge and a chronicler of his own detention. His testimony indicated a strong connection between American tactics in the countryside of Cambodia and the recruitment of peasants to the guerrilla side. (Imagine the strain of composing an account that denied such a connection.)

This more or less disposes of West, who has simply got the order of things the wrong way about and added some random insults. The case of Shawcross is more complicated. In his *The Quality of Mercy*, he quotes three full paragraphs apparently from Chomsky's pen, though he does not give a source. The three paragraphs do not express "skepticism" about the massacres in Cambodia, but they do express reservations about some of the accounts of them. They also argue that the advent of the Khmer Rouge should be seen in the historical context of the much less ballyhooed American aerial massacres a few years earlier -- a point which the author of *Sideshow* is in a weak position to scorn. Finally, the three paragraphs convey a sardonic attitude toward those who claim that it "took courage" to mention the Khmer Rouge atrocities at all.

But mark the sequel. The three paragraphs as quoted do not appear anywhere. They are rudely carpentered together, without any ellipses to indicate gaps in the attribution, from the summary and introduction to Volume 1 of *The Political Economy of Human Rights*, which was written by Noam Chomsky and Professor Edward Herman of the Wharton School of Business. The book went to press in 1979, after the forcible overthrow of the Pol Pot regime. Thus, even if the paragraphs were quoted and sourced properly, and even if they bore the construction that Shawcross puts on them, they could hardly have contributed to the alleged indifference of civilized opinion "throughout 1976 and 1977 and

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especially in 1978" or inhibited the issue from reaching "critical mass." Since Shawcross lists the book, with its date, in his bibliography, the discrepancy can hardly be due to ignorance.

As for the gratuitous insinuation about protest over Chile, I can't help recording that one of the anti-Khmer Rouge blockbusters with which the American public was regaled came in *TV Guide* (circulation 19 million) in April 1977 and was written by Ernest Lefever. Lefever had earlier told Congress that it should be more "tolerant" of the "mistakes" of the Pinochet regime in attempting to "clear away the devastation of the Allende period." He also wrote, in *The Miami Herald*, of the "remarkable freedom of expression" enjoyed in the new Chile. In 1981, Lefever proved too farouche to secure nomination as Reagan's Under Secretary for Human Rights.

William Shawcross enjoys his reputation for honesty. And so I have had to presume that his book represents his case at its most considered. Why, then, if he has room for three paragraphs from Chomsky and Herman, does he not quote the equally accessible sentences, published in *The Nation* on June 25, 1977, where they describe Father Francois Ponchaud's *Cambodia: Year Zero* as "serious and worth reading," with its "grisly account of what refugees have reported to him about the barbarity of their treatment at the hands of the Khmer Rouge"?

Chomsky and Herman were engaged in the admittedly touchy business of distinguishing evidence from interpretation. They were doing so in the aftermath of a war which had featured tremendous, organized, official lying and many cynical and opportunist "bloodbath" predictions. There was and is no argument about mass murder in Cambodia: there is still argument about whether the number of deaths, and the manner in which they were inflicted, will warrant the use of the term "genocide' or even "autogenocide." Shawcross pays an implicit homage to this distinction, a few pages later, when he admits that Jean Lacouture, in his first "emotional" review of Father Ponchaud, greatly exaggerated the real number of Khmer Rouge executions. These errors, writes Shawcross, "were seized upon by Noam Chomsky, who circulated them widely. In a subsequent issue of *The New York Review*, Lacouture corrected himself. Not all of those who had reported his mea culpa published his corrections. Chomsky used the affair as part of his argument that the media were embarked on an unjustified blitz against the Khmer Rouge."

If this paragraph has any internal coherence -- and I have given it in its entirety -- it must lead the reader to suppose that Chomsky publicized Lacouture's *mea culpa* without acknowledging his corrections. But in *The Political Economy of Human Rights* there is an exhaustive presentation of the evolution of Lacouture's position, including both his *mea culpa* and his corrections and adding some complimentary remarks about his work. Incidentally, Lacouture reduced his own estimate of deaths from "two million" to "thousands or hundreds of thousands." Is this, too, "minimization of atrocities"?

Ironies here accumulate at the expense of Chomsky's accusers. A close analysis of *Problems of Communism* and of the findings of State Department intelligence and many very conservative Asia specialists will yield a figure of deaths in the high hundreds of thousands. Exorbitant figures (i.e. those oscillating between two and three million) are current partly because Radio Moscow and Radio Hanoi now feel free to denounce the Pol Pot forces (which now, incredibly, receive official American recognition) in the most abandoned fashion. Chomsky wrote that, while the Vietnamese invasion and occupation could be understood, it could not be justified. May we imagine what might be said about his complicity with Soviet-bloc propaganda if he were now insisting on the higher figure? For both of these failures to conform, he has been assailed by Leopold Labedz in *Encounter*, who insists on three million as a sort of loyalty test, but, since that magazine shows a distinct reluctance to correct the untruths it publishes -- as I can testify from my own experience -- its readers have not been exposed to a reply.

Chomsky and Herman wrote that "the record of atrocities in Cambodia is substantial and often gruesome." They even said, "When the facts are in, it may turn out that the more extreme condemnations were in fact correct." The facts are now more or less in, and it turns out that the two independent writers were as close to the truth as most, and closer than some. It may be distasteful, even indecent, to argue over "body counts," whether the bodies are Armenian, Jewish, Cambodian, or (to take a case where Chomsky and Herman were effectively alone in their research and their condemnation) Timorese. But the count must be done, and done seriously, if later generations are not to doubt the whole slaughter on the basis of provable exaggerations or inventions.

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Maurice Cranston's letter to *The Times Literary Supplement*, with its unexamined assumption that Chomsky was a partisan of North Vietnam, falls apart with even less examination. In 1970, Chomsky wrote up his tour of the region for *The New York Review of Books* and said:

> It is conceivable that the United States may be able to break the will of the popular movements in the surrounding countries, perhaps even destroy the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, by employing the vast resources of violence and terror at its disposal. If so, it will create a situation in which, indeed, North Vietnam will necessarily dominate Indochina, for no other viable society will remain.

I think of that article whenever I read wised-up Western newsmen who dwell upon the "ironic" fact that the North Vietnamese, not the NLF, now hold power in Ho Chi Minh City. It takes real ingenuity to blame this on the antiwar movement, but, with a little creative amnesia and a large helping of self-pity for the wounds inflicted by the war (on America), the job can by plausibly done.

Finally, to Fred Barnes, recruited to *The New Republic* from *The Baltimore Sun* and *The American Spectator*. I wrote to him on the day that his article appeared, asking to know where he heard Chomsky say such a thing. I received no reply until I was able to ask for it in person two months later. I then asked him to place it in writing. It read as follows:

> I sat next to Noam Chomsky at a seminar at Lippmann House (of the Nieman Foundation) of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., in 1978. On the matter of Genocide in Cambodia, the thrust of what he said was that there was no evidence of mass murder there. As I recall, he was rather adamant on the point. He had, by this time, I believe, written a letter or two to *The New York Review of Books* making the same point. Chomsky seemed to believe that tales of holocaust in Cambodia were so much propaganda. He said, on another point, that there was an effort underway to rewrite the history of the Indochinese war -- in a way more favorable to the U.S. Perhaps he thought the notion of genocide in Cambodia was part of that effort.

Since this meeting took place in the year after Chomsky and Herman had written their *Nation* article, and in the year when they were preparing *The Political Economy of Human Rights*, we can probably trust the documented record at least as much as Mr. Barnes's recollection. And there was no letter from Chomsky about Cambodia in *The New York Review of Books*. It is interesting, and perhaps suggestive, that Barnes uses the terms "genocide," "holocaust," and "mass murder" as if they were interchangeable. His last two sentences demonstrate just the sort of cuteness for which his magazine is becoming famous.

Here is the story, as far as I can trace it, of Chomsky's effort to "minimize" or "deny" the harvest of the Khmer Rouge. It will be seen that the phony "credibility" of the charge against him derives from his lack of gullibility about the American mass killings in Indochina (routinely euphemized or concealed by large sections of the domestic intelligentsia). From this arises the idea that Chomsky might have said such things; was the sort of person who could decline to criticize "the other side"; was a well-known political extremist. Couple this with the slothful ease of the accusation, the reluctance of certain authors to prove they are not unpatriotic dupes, and you have a scapegoat in the making. Dr. Arbuthnot was right. Nobody would believe that Chomsky advocated a massacre. But they might be brought to believe that he excused or overlooked one.

## The Case of the Negated Holocaust

Here, Dr. Arbuthnot gives way to Ryszard Kapuscinski. The tactic is not to circulate a part-untruth so much as it is to associate the victim with an unpardonable out-group, against which preexisting revulsion and contempt can be mobilized.

My tutor at Oxford was Dr. Steven Lukes, a brilliant and humane man with an equal commitment to scholarship and to liberty. His books on Durkheim, on power, on utopianism, and on Marxism and morality are, as people tend to say, landmarks in their field. He took me as his guest to one of Chomsky's private seminars in that spring of 1969. When, in 1980, he told me that Chomsky had written an introduction to a book by a Nazi apologist, and that the book described the extermination of the Jews as

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a Zionist lie, I was thunderstruck. Like Noam Chomsky, Steven Lukes is Jewish. Like Chomsky, he was and is much opposed to the usurpation of Israel by the heirs of Jabotinsky. But this seemed incomprehensible. The political rights of hateful persons was one question (rather a vexed one in the British case, where the police and not the courts usually decide who may or may not speak in public), but keeping company with them was quite another. More, it appeared that Chomsky had dignified this character's book with a preface and had not even bothered to read the text he was decorating. I admit that I allowed myself a reflection or two about the potentially harmful effects on Chomsky of his political and personal isolation on the Middle East.

When I began to write this article, I wrote to Lukes at Balliol and asked him to furnish me with the background material to l'affaire Faurisson. I also pursued all the other references in print. I do not read French very well, but I have studied Nadine Fresco's famous article "The Denial of the Dead," adapted in *Dissent* from *Les Temps modernes*; Pierre Vidal-Naquet's "A Paper Eichmann?" reprinted in *Democracy*; and Arno J. Mayer's "Explorations" column on the same theme in the same magazine. There is also Paul Berman's article in *The Village Voice* of June 10, 1981, "Gas Chamber Games: Crackpot History and the Right to Lie," which is a sort of macedoine of the first three.

Let us not waste any time on Robert Faurisson. He is an insanitary figure who maintains contact with neo-Nazi circles and whose project is the rehabilitation, in pseudoscholarly form, of the Third Reich. How he came to be appointed in the first place I cannot imagine (from what I have seen his literary criticism is pitiful), but in 1979 he was a teacher in good standing of French literature at the University of Lyons. If, like our own Arthur Butz, who publishes "historical revisionist" garbage from Northwestern University, he had been left to stew in his own sty, we might have heard no more of him. But in that year he published an article entitled " 'The Problem of the Gas Chambers' or the Rumor of Auschwitz.' " The whole appeared in Maurice Bardeche's sheet, *Defense de l'Occident*, and extracts were reprinted in *Le Monde*. Faurisson summarized his conclusions in a supplement:

(1) Hitler's "gas chambers" never existed. (2) The "genocide" (or the "attempted genocide") of the Jews never took place; clearly, Hitler never ordered (nor permitted) that someone be killed for racial or religious reasons. (3) The alleged gas chambers and the alleged "genocide" are one and the same lie. (4) This lie, essentially of Zionist origin, permitted a gigantic politico-financial swindle whose principal beneficiary is the State of Israel. (5) The principal victims of this lie and swindle are the Germans and the Palestinians.

The rest of the "supplement" concerned the sinister ways in which the media had prevented these truths from becoming generally known.

I have no idea whether Faurisson hoped to attract unpleasant attention by the publication of this stuff, but the consequences were fairly immediate. His sternist critic, Nadine Fresco, records: "At Lyons, there were displays of antipathy and Faurisson was lightly molested by Jewish students. Consequently, the president of the university chose to suspend his classes." Fresco slightly minimizes (if that is the word I want) the fact that a subsequent suit, brought against Faurisson for "falsification of history" and for allowing others to use his work for their own fell purposes, was successful and he was condemned by a French court.

In the early stages of this process, Chomsky received a request, from his friend Serge Thion, that he add his name to a petition upholding Faurisson's right to free expression. This, on standard First Amendment grounds and in company with many others, he did. The resulting uproar, in which he was accused of defending Faurisson's theses, led to another request from Thion. Would Chomsky write a statement asserting the right to free speech even in the case of the most loathsome extremist? To this he also assented, pointing out that it was precisely such cases that tested the adherence of a society to such principles and adding in a covering letter that Thion could make what use of it he wished. At this stage, only the conservative Alfred Grosser among French intellectuals had been prepared to say that Faurisson's suspension by the University of Lyons set a bad example of academic courage and independence. Chomsky's pedantic recitation of Voltairean principles would probably have aroused no comment at all had Thion not taken rather promiscuous advantage of the permission to use it as he wished. Without notification to Chomsky, he added the little essay as an avis to Faurisson's pretrial *Memoire en defense*.

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Chomsky's seven-page comment received more attention in the international press, as Paul Berman noted, than any other piece of work for which he had been responsible. Let me summarize those reactions, which are still worth quoting and which are still (when occasion demands) being repeated:

Poor Chomsky, innocent victim of a quasi-Pavlovian automatism. Someone mentions "rights," he signs. Someone says "freedom of speech," he signs. He goes even further with the famous preface (which is not really a preface, though it strangely resembles one) to Faurisson's *Memoire en defense*. The press seized on the event, and I leave to others the delicate pleasure of pinpointing the ambiguities and contradictions that run through Chomsky's comments about the preface. But it is important to emphasize that the Faurisson affair is not an issue of legal rights. (Nadine Fresco, *Dissent*, Fall 1981)

Chomsky -- who, breaking with his usual pattern, praised the traditions of American support for civil liberties... (Ibid.)

Regrettably, Faurisson's new book has an unconscionable preface by Noam Chomsky that is being used to legitimate Faurisson at a bona-fide scholar of the Holocaust. As an unqualified civil libertarian Chomsky claims -- disingenuously -- that he has not read the book he is prefacing! (Arno J. Mayer, *Democracy*, April 1981)

Certain people have rallied to Faurisson's defense for reasons of principle. A petition that includes several hundred signatures, among the first those of Noam Chomsky and Alfred Lilienthal, protests against the treatment that Faurisson has received. It implicitly describes his activities as authentic historical research: "Since 1974, he has been conducting extensive independent research into the Holocaust question," and continues by confirming what is not true, namely, that "frightened officials have tried to stop him from further research by denying him access to public libraries and archives." What is scandalous about this petition is that it doesn't for one moment ask whether what Faurisson says is true or false; and it even describes his findings as though they were the result of serious historical research. Of course, it can be contended that everybody has the right to lie and "bear false witness," a right that is inseparable from the liberty of the individual and recognized, in the liberal tradition, as due the accused for his defense. But the right that a "false witness" may claim should not be granted him in the name of truth. (Pierre Vidal-Naquet, *Democracy*, April 1981)

Of these criticisms, the most nearly fair seems to me the one offered by Vidal-Naquet (an early hero of mine because of his book on torture in Algeria). But he is wrong on one factual point. Fresco herself confirmed, and justified, the refusal of certain archivists and documentation centers to permit access to Faurisson. And he is at risk in his distinction between truth and false witness, a distinction which Milton understood better in *Aeropagitica* when he argued that the two must be allowed to confront one another if truth is to prevail. There is therefore no obligation, in defending or asserting the right to speak, to pass any comment on the truth or merit of what may be, or is being, said. This is elementary.

Also rather unsafe is the injunction (employed above most crudely by Vidal-Naquet's colleague Arno Mayer) to be careful of the use that may be made of one's remarks or signatures. Elsewhere in the same essay, for example, Vidal-Naquet asserts, "In the case of the genocide of Jews, it is perfectly evident that one of the Jewish ideologies, Zionism, exploits this terrible massacre in a way that is at times quite "scandalous." Scandalous -- the same word that he attaches to Chomsky's signature on a petition. But he supplies the corrective himself -- "that an ideology seizes upon a fact does not make this fact inexistent." Precisely. And the "fact" here is that Chomsky defended not Faurisson's work but his right to research and publish it. Vidal-Naquet undoubtedly knows better than to resort to the old Stalinist "aid and comfort" ruse. Where, then, is the core of his objection?

Does this not leave Arno Mayer, also, in some difficulty? The fact that neo-Nazis may have seized upon Noam Chomsky's civil-libertarian defense does not, of itself, make that defense invalid. Or, if it does, then by himself seizing upon what they have seized upon, Mayer is "objectively" associating civil-libertarian principles with the Nazis -- an unintended compliment that the latter scarcely deserve. Vidal-Naquet's point about Zionism's exploitation of the Holocaust could, if cleverly enough ripped from its context, be used to support point (4) in Faurisson's "supplement" above. Who but a malicious falsifier would make such a confusion as to who was in whose galere?

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I wouldn't accuse any of the critics listed here of deliberate falsification. But it is nevertheless untrue to describe Chomsky's purloined avis as a preface, as Fresco does on almost a dozen occasions and as Mayer does twice. It is also snide, at best, to accuse Chomsky of "breaking with his usual pattern" in praising "the traditions of American support for civil liberty." He has, as a matter of record, upheld these traditions more staunchly than most -- speaking up for the right of extremist academics like [Walter] Rostow, for example, at a time during the Vietnam War when some campuses were too turbulent to accommodate them. It is irrelevant, at least, to do as Fresco also does and mention Voltaire's anti-Semitism. (As absurd a suggestion, in the circumstances, as the vulgar connection between Locke and imperialism.) Would she never quote Voltaire? Finally, she says that no question of legal rights arises because the suit against Faurisson was "private." What difference does that make? An authoritarian law, giving the state the right to pronounce on truth, is an authoritarian law whoever invokes it.

Chomsky can be faulted here on three grounds only. First, for giving a power of attorney to Serge Thion, who seems rather a protean and quicksilvery fellow. Second, for once unguardedly describing Faurisson as "a sort of relatively apolitical liberal." Admittedly, this came in the context of an assertion that Faurisson's opinions were a closed book to him; still, all the more reason not to speculate. The whole point is that Faurisson's opinions are not the point. Third, for attempting at the last minute, when he discovered too late that he was being bound into the same volume as a work he had not read, to have his commentary excised. He writes of this that "in the climate of hysteria among Paris intellectuals it would be impossible to distinguish defense of the man's right to express his views from endorsement of these views." Maybe. But Voltairean precepts involve precisely the running of that risk.

This is still nothing to do with "endorsement" and explains the repeated feverish sarcasm with which his critics claim that he had not "even read the endorsed" volume. Again, the irony would seem to be at their expense. An unread book is an unendorsed one, unless one assumes that Chomsky would endorse any Holocaust revisionist on principle -- an allegation so fantastic that it has not "even" been made. If, by any action or statement, Chomsky had hinted at sympathy for Faurisson's views, I think that we would know about it by now. The recurring attempt, therefore, to bracket him with the century's most heinous movement must be adjudged a smear. And the wider attempt -- to classify all critics of Israel as infected or compromised with anti-Semitism -- is, of course, itself a trivialization of the Holocaust.

## The Case of the Forgotten War

Chomsky's evolving position on the Middle East conflict is the source of much of his unpopularity and (one sometimes suspects) the cause of much of the spite with which he is attacked on other issues. But where are the baying hounds this time? I can offer no lists of critics, no litany of denunciations. Chomsky wrote a book of more than 450 pages that was devoted to the United States and the Lebanese war of 1982, and what do you think? There was barely a squeak.

An unreviewed book is no rare thing in the United States, There is usually some explanation for the nonevent. The author may be obscure, or the subject arcane, or the issue dead, or the "issue" too widely covered already. Again, there may be no qualified reviewer in sight, so that, rather than assign the volume to an amateur, the books department may blushfully "pass" on the whole idea. A version of the same procedure is sometimes followed when no reviewer with a big enough "name" is on hand. And there are postal delays, crowded schedules, demands on inelastic space. Everyone remotely connected with "the trade" understands this, even when the rough and the smooth seem to be insufficiently random in their distribution. A good advertising budget has been known to help, but nobody is so coarse as to insinuate that it determines anything much.

These well-known vagaries and mutabilities cannot explain why, in the fall of 1983, Chomsky's book *The Fateful Triangle* was treated as if it did not exist. Consider: One of America's best-known Jewish scholars, internationally respected, writes a lengthy, dense, highly documented book about United States policy in the Levant. The book is acidly critical of Israeli policy and of the apparently limitless American self-deception as to its true character. It quotes sources in Hebrew and French as well as in English. It is published at a time when hundreds of United States marines have been killed in Beirut and when the President is wavering in his commitment, which itself threatens to become a major election

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issue. It is the only book of its scope (we need make no judgment as to depth) to appear in the continental United States. The screens and the headlines are full of approximations and guesses on the subject. Yet, at this unusually fortunate juncture for publication, the following newspapers review it: (1) *the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner*; (2) *The Boston Globe*. In Los Angeles, Chomsky has an admirer who is also a local book reviewer. This man prevails after a struggle. In Boston, Chomsky is a well-known local figure. But that's it. Many months later, after its foal, the London *Review of Books*, has devoted many respectful columns to the book, and after almost every major newspaper and magazine in England, Canada, and Australia has done the same, *The New York Review of Books* publishes a "mixed review." This presumably takes care of the only other possible editorial excuse (itself significant) -- that *The Fateful Triangle* was published by a small radical house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, named South End Press.

Paranoia would be inappropriate here. After all, this was not 1973, when the first edition of Chomsky and Herman's *The Political Economy of Human Rights* was suppressed by its own publishers, Warner Communications, for making unpatriotic assertions about United States policy in Indochina and elsewhere. The twenty thousand copies might have been pulped if it were not for a legally binding contract. Instead they were sold to an obscure outfit named MSS Information Corporation, where upon Warner -- which later bid high for the Nixon memoirs -- washed its hands of the entire deal and of all responsibility for advertising, promotion, and distribution. Difficult to imagine that happening to anyone else of remotely comparable stature, but, as I say, 1983 was different. The book was out, and the foreign-policy intelligentsia had every chance to comment.

I confess that I have no ready explanation for the total eclipse that followed. *The New York Times* had found Chomsky interesting enough to publish two long and pitying articles about the Faurisson business. Other newspapers and magazines seem, as I suppose I have shown, to find him deserving of comment. I therefore rang a selection of literary editors and asked if they could explain their reticence on this occasion.

I began with *The New Republic*, because it is mentioned so often in *The Fateful Triangle* and because its editors had assured me at the time that they would not let the critique go unanswered. Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor, told me jauntily when I inquired:

> The book was sent to reviewers. The first was too disgusted to review it. The second said that he would, and finally didn't, which frequently happens. I see no reason not to assign Chomsky's books for review, because I see no reason for him to be above criticism.

Editors at *The New York Times Book Review* and *The Washington Post Book World* were less ready to be quoted but quite ready to talk. From the *Times* I heard variously, "I think we tuned out on Noam after Vietnam," "It fell through the cracks," and "We never received the book." From the *Post*, I heard that "by the time we got all those letters protesting about not reviewing it, the book wasn't in local bookstores -- so we didn't." I also heard that there was some doubt about having received the copy in the first place.

Katha Pollitt, who was literary editor of *The Nation* at this time, told me that there were already too many books about the Middle East, that the "front half" of the magazine devoted plenty of space to the subject, and that she herself preferred to preserve her pages for articles on fiction, poetry, and feminism.

Joe Clark, then books editor at *Dissent*, told me, "My guess is that I didn't feel a very strong desire to review the book." He said he would "have needed an overpowering reason." Clearly, the frequent and scornful mention of *Dissent* in *The Fateful Triangle* did not supply this incentive. For the literary editor of *The New Republic* to say that he sees "no reason for [Chomsky] to be above criticism" is presumably a joke. For him to say that the first invited contributor was "too disgusted" to review the book is not. The first invited reviewer, as I know and as Wieseltier confirmed to me, was Ze'ev Schiff, military correspondent of *Ha'aretz* and coauthor of *Israel's Lebanon War*. "Disgust" is certainly not what he evinced when I spoke to him about the book in the summer of 1984.

A category mistake is involved in the *Post* explanation, unless the editors of that newspaper assume there to be no connection between their failure to review a book and its absence from Washington's bookstores. I like the idea, though, of their not giving in to letters from readers.

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The *Times* may perhaps not have received a copy, though South End Press was doing nothing but lobby for its chief title between November and June, and claims to have sent four in all. Radical incompetence allowed for, what is there to prevent an editor from doing what editors do every day and requesting a copy?

Pollitt has a point, and even though the rules of fairness oblige me to be harder on a former colleague, I can't see a way through her candor.

So what it comes down to is this. Life is unfair, and though it does seem odd that such a book is ignored only in its country of origin (and the country whose state policy it attacks), the whole thing is easily explicable. Above all, it is nobody's fault. Does this mean that there is no reluctance to hear the bad news about the Middle East? Well, again, and whether or not you believe in cock-up rather than conspiracy -- a favorite evasion of the soothing commentator -- it does seem harder for some people to get an audience than others. Especially hard for the man who, according to Shawcross, enjoyed sufficient sway to confuse or silence the American press over the question of Cambodia.

Whether he is ignored, whether he is libeled, or whether he is subjected to an active campaign of abuse, Chomsky is attacked for things that he is thought to believe, or believed to have said. A lie, it has been written, can travel around the world before truth has even got its shoes on. Merely to list the accusations against Chomsky, whether they are made casually or with deliberation, is a relatively easy task. Showing their unfairness or want of foundation involves expense of ink on a scale which any reader who has got this far will know to his or her cost. Perhaps for this reason, not all the editors who publish matter about Chomsky ever quite get around to publishing his replies. I could write an ancillary article showing this in detail, with his answers either unpublished or unscrupulously abridged. And, of course, a man who writes a lot of letters to the editor soon gets a reputation, like Bellow's Herzog, as a crank, an eccentric, a fanatic. Whereas the absence of a reply is taken as admission of guilt...

Ought I to be "evenhanded" and indicate where I disagree with Chomsky myself? I don't really see why I ought. My differences with him concern things that he does believe and has said. I also dissent from him, quite often, concerning the way in which he says things and on his repeated misuse of the verb "to brutalize." I think he has sometimes been facile about Cold War "moral equivalence" as well. But this is between him and me, or him and any other political opponent or critic who observes the rules of evidence and debate.

For the recurrent way in which this is not done, and for the process whereby the complaisant mainstream and the conservative guardians actually agree not to hear what is being said about them and their system, we need a word. "Marginalization" is too merely descriptive. "Ghettoization" is too self-pitying. It may come to me.

The contemporary United States expresses the greatest of all paradoxes. It is at one and the same time a democracy -- at any rate a pluralist open society -- and an empire. No other country has ever been, or had, both things at once. Or not for long. And there must be some question about the durability of this present coexistence, too. Already spokesmen of the Reagan Administration say plainly that their foreign and military policy is incompatible with the disloyalty and division that stem from a deliberative Congress and an inquisitive press. They laughably exaggerate the reflective capacity of the first and the adversary character of the second, but they have a point. If it is to have the least chance of success, their strategy calls for an imposed national unanimity, a well-cultivated awareness of "enemies within," and a strong draft of amnesia.

The academy and the wealthy new batch of think tanks are awash with people who collude, at least passively, in the process. As C. Wright Mills once wrote:

> Their academic reputations rest, quite largely, upon their academic power: they are the members of the committee; they are on the directing board; they can get you the job, the trip, the research grant. They are a strange new kind of bureaucrat. They are executives of the mind... They could set up a research project or even a school, but I would be surprised, if, now after twenty years of research and teaching and observing and thinking, they could produce a book which told you what they thought was going on

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in the world, what they thought were the major problems for men of this historical epoch.

Not even Mills, or Chomsky in his *New Mandarins* essay, could have anticipated the world of the
Heritage Foundation, of "Kissinger Associates," of numberless power-worshipping, power-seeking
magazines and institutes interlocking across the dissemination of culture, priority, information, and
opinion. But Mills did write, in 1942:

> When events move very fast and possible worlds swing around them, something happens to
> the quality of thinking. Some men repeat formulae; some men become reporters. To time
> observation with thought so as to mate a decent level of abstraction with crucial happenings
> is a difficult problem.

Noam Chomsky has attempted, as a volunteer, necessarily imperfectly, to shoulder this responsibility at a time of widespread betrayal of it. And it must be an awed attitude to the new style -- a willingness to demonstrate flexibility in the face of so much pelf and so much cant -- that allows so many people to join in ridiculing him for doing so. As a philosophical anarchist, Chomsky might dislike to have it said that he had "done the state some service," but he a useful citizen in ways that his detractors are emphatically not.

Originally published in *Grand Street* magazine, Autumn 1985; this version was scanned in from the version that appeared in Hitchens' anthology *Prepared for the Worst*. Original text file information: FROM THE NOAM CHOMSKY ARCHIVE http://www.lbbs.org/archive/index.htm. Filename: reviews/hitchens.txt. Source: skulick@linc.cis.upenn.edu (Seth Kulick)

This text has been displayed on the Net, and forwarded to you as a tool for educational purpose, further research, on a non
commercial and fair use basis, by the International Secretariat of the Association des Anciens Amateurs de Récits de Guerre
et d'Holocauste (AAARGH) in 1998. The E-mail of the Secretariat is <aaargh@abbc.com>. Our snail address is: PO Box 81
475, Chicago, IL 60 681-0475, USA.

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ARTICLE 19. <Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.>
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948,

ARTIKEL 19 der Menschenrechte: <Jederman hat das Recht auf Freiheit der Meinung und der Meinungsäußerung; dieses Recht umfaßt die unbehinderte Meinungsfreiheit und die Freiheit, ohne Rücksicht auf Staatsgrenzen Informationen und

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Gedankengut durch Mittel jeder Art sich zu beschaffen, zu empfangen und weiterzugeben.>
Vereinigten Nationen, 10 Dezember 1948.

ARTICLE 19 <Tout individu a droit à la liberté d'opinion et d'expression, ce qui implique le droit de ne pas être inquiété pour ses opinions et celui de chercher, de recevoir et de répandre, sans considération de frontière, les informations et les idées par quelque moyen d'expression que ce soit>
Déclaration internationale des droits de l'homme, adoptée par l'Assemblée générale de l'ONU à Paris, le 10 décembre 1948

ARTICULO 19 <Todo individuo tiene derecho a la libertad de opinión y de expresión; este derecho incluye el de no ser molestado a causa de sus opiniones, el de investigar y recibir informaciones y opiniones, y el de difundir las, sin limitación de fronteras, por cualquier medio de expresión.>
Declaración universal de los derechos humanos, adoptada por la Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas el 10 de diciembre de 1948 en París

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The Unfailing Solidarity of Chomsky with the Revisionists

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(page under construction -- November 1998)

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# The Unfailing Solidarity of Noam Chomsky with Revisionists

"However scandalous are your ideas, if you have no right to express them, you loose what is the essence of democracy and freedom" (Chomsky in *Le Monde*, 1 Sept. 1998)

The unfailing solidarity of Noam Chomsky, the well-known linguist, with the Revisionists deals with one very specific issue: he claims for them, **as for anyone else**, the complete freedom of thinking and speaking out. Full stop.

It would seem to be a menial task, a kind of triviality which would not deserve further commentaries. In fact, his demand, uttered about twenty years ago, has not ceased to create a scandal. As a matter of fact, whenever Noam Chomsky, an activist involved in the critique of the State, with an anarchistic background, criticizing most of all the US State and its imperialist policies, starts a speech in front of an ever-growing audience, in North America, or in front of the medias, there is always a guy or a small group in the public to complain in a more or less bitter way about Chomsky's involvement with the revisionists, materialized by a text he has written and which has been used as a foreword to the pretrial defence tract issued by Faurisson in 1980, his *Mémoire en défense*. So that, Chomsky, after twenty years, has to repeat, every evening, that the freedom of expression is a whole, cannot be cut into pieces and that Revisionists, whatever their views **that he does not share at all**, have the same right as anybody else to talk freely without being victimized by a stupid repression. This question reappears in each of Chomsky's intervention in the press, TVs and elsewhere. We know how irritating the recurrence of these silly questions can be, launched by the Lobby spokespersons, the supporters of an aggressive Israel and the enemies of freedom. Day after day, in a thousand articles and interventions, Chomsky has to claim again and again his solidarity with our basic rights. We greet his constancy and we know that the bonds of friendship and solidarity which united us before the emergence of the revisionist question maintained themselves unadulterated because they are rooted in the same critique of the State, of its violence and its lies, of the classes and the groups that use its power to impose their private interest over the toiling people who feed them.

We'll return on the way Chomsky got involved in this matter because the tales that evoke this question in order to blame him are generally not fully accurate. We'll display our attempts to straighten up the record and the reception we met. We'll sort some of the commentaries that this affair triggered and we'll try to answer, if we have not done it already, to the least stupid of them. We'll pick up some rejoinders by Chomsky from the multitude of them.

But before going farther, it is useful to point out what are the political objectives of Noam Chomsky. He is trying, through his many interventions, to help to create in the public opinion a trend which would bear on the US foreign policy in order to stop expansion, exploitation, the support to dictatorships, the terror triggered by the role of world policeman that the US bestowed upon themselves and all by themselves. Chomsky considers that anything that would distract him from this line of action is of secondary importance and should be dismissed. This is exactly how he reacted when, in 1979, in one of his last trips to Paris, the revisionist question was explained to him by Serge Thion and Pierre Guillaume. This very fast and methodic mind did not blink nor outright reject the idea of a possible absence of the gas chamber in the archetypal image of the fate of the Jews in the Nazi camps. But he could not conceive either any link between this question and the continuation of his work of

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undermining the US foreign policy. He then decided not to involve himself in the study of this question and to keep as a working implement the views that he had acquired as a youth in the leftwing Zionist movements he had approached at the time. As we said at the start, no one is under the obligation to get involved in this affair. If those who do get involved are then under the control of rationality, those who stay outside cannot provide well-grounded opinions on the core of the question. We provide here an exemple of Chomsky's interventions, a speech he delivered last year in the heart of occupied Palestine, at Birzeit University, to a packed Palestinian audience. The title was "National Sovereignty and Democracy in the Third World".

As a starter we recommend the interview published by *Le Monde* on Sept. 1st. We consider as very significant the fact that this newspaper which in the last 15 years has exhibited the worst bad faith and the most violent hostility towards Chomsky, guilty of judging the Parisian intelligentsia as mediocre and deeply committed to Stalismism, is now, all of a sudden, opening its columns to him. Something weird is happening in the wonderland of the journalists.

Then, to make everything clear, we display the text by Chomsky which started the prairie fire. We have it in English and in the French translation which was used as a foreword to the Faurisson defence tract. Look at what Christopher Hitchens has to say about it: "Chomsky's seven-page comment received more attention in the international press, as Paul Berman noted, than any other piece of work for which he had been responsible." We can see very well that twenty years later this text still raises hair on many bald heads. He later gave his reasons in a famous *Nation* article (Feb. 1981), "His Right to Say It". Its conclusion was: "It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers."

We then proceed to the way a recent biographer accounts for Chomsky's involvement in what he calls the Faurisson Affair and the Pol Pot Affair. There is a great need here for corrections. Then we'll see how Serge Thion, as an actor at the time, explains how things happened. Other versions will be displayed, including the one given in 1985 by the British effete essay writer Christopher Hitchens who tried to save Chomsky from his old daemons, i.e. his own very principles. Hitchens was to meet more Revisionists later, in the flesh.

It is necesseray, at this stage, to refer to the pamphlet broiled in the dark recesses of ultra-Zionism under the pen of Werner Cohn. This is a typical police approach of politics which we consider as mainly farcical.

We are adding another pamphlet which has been widely seen as mythic because it was difficult to find. And there is no English version for it: "Réponses inédites à mes détracteurs parisiens", or "Unpublished replies to my Parisians detractors", in fact letters to newspapers which strangely failed to publish them. The standard of French journalism is among the lowest on this planet, we are sad to report. After that, the French press and the French "intellectuals" built a wall of silence around Chomsky. This wall broke down only last month with the *Le Monde* interview, and we do not know for sure why it broke down.

These questions have been taken up in a recent biography of Chomsky which is not entirely devoid of mistakes. We can considere now as classical: for instance, the mistake attributing to Thion or the Vieille Taupe Group the initiative of a petition, signed by Chomsky, to demand the respect of the right of Professor Faurisson. Even Chomsky himself seems to believe this! It was the doing of Mark Weber, who later rose to become the present-day director of the Institute of Historiavl Review. This petition reached Paris only later. As for the rest, this biography, written with a kind of tired sadness, brings forth some factual elements. We have extracted the pages dealing with the Faurisson and Pol Pot affairs, as well as some considerations on the French intellectuals, in particular those producing these heaps of crap that are ponderously called "postmodernism". We find them ludicrous. The choice is there between the original English version and a (rather poor) French translation.

What we always found stricking was the need in which Chomsky's opponents found themselves to invent and lend him opinions they found thus easier to fight. It has been the case of a particularly disgusting underdog called Claude Roy who, as a former royalist, fascist, stalinian, socialist, turned liberal, was an usual writer in *Le Nouvel Observateur*. In 1980, Serge Thion had to vigorously intervene to dismantle his castle of lies and deceptions. In a more general way, he had analyzed the attacks against

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Chomsky published in the French press in an article published in a monthly called *Esprit*. This issue of September 1980 was something of a monument: The opening was the attack, now a classic of sorts, by Vidal-Naquet against Faurisson and the Vieille Taupe Group: *A Paper Eichmann*, an article Vidal had refused to communicate in advance to Thion because he was fearing a reply (We have it now in English). The issue then proceeded with some Jew-licking papers, then a rather critical assessment of Elie Wiesel by a Wladirmir Rabi, the article by Thion on Cambodia and Chomsky and an attack against this very article by Paul Thibaud, the then editor of the journal. Thion was thus caught in a kind of sandwich and prevented, in that position, to reply to the attacks against him at the beginning and the end of the issue. These perverse games soon stopped as Thion was not allowed to reply anyway. At the same time, Thion felt compelled to reply to a particularly debased article written by Leopold Labedz in the London based Encounter, a journal which had been used to receive CIA funds. This reply was titled: *A Strange Revisor*.

The Vieille Taupe (Old Mole) group had played a decisive role in inducing Chomsky in the defense of revisionists -- who badly needed it at the time. The Vieille Taupe consistently tried to push newspapers to face facts. Vainly. But as fall-outs of these efforts we still have a number of unpublished letters which have been ignored by journalists, for whom ignorance is a cult.

-- Letter by Pierre Guillaume to *Le Monde* (15 Feb. 1993) on an aborted tentative which had been foiled by a Chomsky file...

-- Letter by Pierre Guillaume to *Le Monde* about a movie dedicated to a movie on Chomsky called *Manufacturing Consent* (30 Nov. 1993).

-- Letter by Pierre Guillaume to *Le Monde Diplomatique* (14 Feb 1994) on the same subject, but with more details.

-- Letter by Pierre Guillaume to *NC* (7 Jan. 1996) announcing the issue of Garaud'ys book.

-- Letter by Pierre Guillaume to *NC* (25 Feb. 1996) asking with humor if NC would care to write a short foreword to Garaudy's book.

See also *Mutatis Mutandis*, a text circulated in the Palais de Justice at the first Garaudy trial in January 98.

There is a last point on which we wish to draw the attention of the observers. Chomsky has stated many times that he had exprssed once for all his feekings about what some people want to call the "holocaust". He has quoted times and again THE sentence he had written long before the Revisionist affair had broken loose, a sentence he hoped would exonerate him from any lingering suspicion: the sentence is a warrant of his orthodoxy in the acceptance of the official version of the said Holocaust. Let's consider it once again: "[...] savage persecution culminating in the most fantastic outburst of collective insanity in human history [...]" The reference: *Peace in the Middle East? Reflections on Justice and Nationhood*, [1969], Vintage Book, 1974, p. 57-58. We should note, first, that it is only a fragment of a sentence, that the whole book is devoted to the Middle East and does not deal with events of WW2. It belongs to a chapter titled "Nationalism and Conflict in Palestine". Reading the whole paragraph indicates the presence of a rhetorical ploy: there are two sets of arguments, he says, one Arabic, the other Jewish; but the other, when he unveils the content, he calls Zionist. And it is in the middle of the Zionist set of arguments that one can find the famouc fragment of sentence. If we put it in another way, we see that these considerations about Holocaust are those of the Zionists, anxious to justify their military occupation of Palestine, and certainly not of Chomsky who does not share their views. As a consequence, the extraction of this sentence fragment from its context and its portraying it as a justification of a behavior willing to ignore everything about revisionism, is akin to a leger-de-main. The critiques of Chomsky could have realized that, if only they'd read the texts. What conclusions can we draw from this trick? First, Chomsky never expressed the bottom of his mind on the "Holocaust". He never had the opportunity to deal with the historical question, to really deal with what happened to certain Jewish communities in Europe under the Nazi rule. He has consistently evaded the question because he knows that he does know much on the subject, that he has not done the minimum of research into the subject to obtain at least an educated understanding of the basics of the question. This is a

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correct attitude for someone who knows what learning is about. (This is the reverse of the Parisian
intelligentsia for whom the rule is to always talk about sujects on which you know nothing about.)
Chomsky always maintained the possibility of having the revisionist thesis verified by the facts. He
repeatedly said the same thing we have been saying all along: even if the gas chambers have not
existed, this does not change at all our condemnation of Nazism as a particularly inhumane policy. As he
refrained to judge the orthodox thesis on this subjet, he also refrains to judge the revisionist thesis. But
if, by hyopthesis, he would start to work on this question, who can say today to what conclusions he
would arrive, what side he would take in the conflict betwwen rationalists and materialist who lead the
revisionist crowd and crazy mystics like Elie Wiesel, meandering rabbis like Berenbaum, silent
historians like Rousso, mind-consensus readers like Hilberg, document destroyers like Lanzmann,
leading the anti-revisionist hordes. We are committed to publish here those who would want to take up
the challenge.

Those who would like to carry further their research should of course start by reading Chomsky's books, of which there is a lot. Some of them are to be found at the bookshop on the next block. The movie *Necessary Illusions* has got a website: you can have a quick glance there at MM. Faurisson, Guillaume and Thion. There is an Archive for the latests linguistic publications and another one for the political articles, including some books. Radio Free Maine has audio and video documents on Chomsky. The web archives of Z Magazine have articles by and on Chomsky. Discussion occur at <alt.fan.noam-chomsky newsgroup>. If you want to contact Chomsky, do so by ordinary mail and write to: MIT, E39-219, 77 Massachussetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

The latest book by Noam Chomsky ? In Great-Britain, it is *Profits Over People -- Neoliberalism and the Global Order*, October 1998, Seven Stories Press. A collection of essays. What is democracy? Is it government for the people, by the people? Or is it government for those who seize the opportunity? After all, Chomsky must realize that the questions solved in the 18. century should be raised again and again.

This text has been displayed on the Net, and forwarded to you as a tool for educational purpose, further research, on a non-commercial and fair use basis, by the International Secretariat of the Association des Anciens Amateurs de Récits de Guerre et d'Holocauste (AAARGH) in 1998. The E-mail of the Secretariat is <aaargh@abbc.com>. Our snail address is: PO Box 81 475, Chicago, IL 60 681-0475, USA.

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What is 'Holocaust Denial'?

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INSTITUTE FOR HISTORICAL REVIEW LEAFLETS

# What is 'Holocaust Denial'?

In recent years, more and more attention has been devoted to the supposed danger of "Holocaust denial." Politicians, newspapers and television warn about the growing influence of those who reject the Holocaust story that some six million European Jews were systematically exterminated during the Second World War, most of them in gas chambers.

In several countries, including Israel, France, Germany and Austria, "Holocaust denial" is against the law, and "deniers" have been punished with stiff fines and prison sentences. Some frantic Jewish community leaders are calling for similar government measures in North America against so-called "deniers." In Canada, David Matas, Senior Counsel for the "League for Human Rights" of the Zionist B'nai B'rith organization, says: (note 1)

> The Holocaust was the murder of six million Jews, including two million children. Holocaust denial is a second murder of those same six million. First their lives were extinguished; then their deaths. A person who denies the Holocaust becomes part of the crime of the Holocaust itself.

Often overlooked in this controversy is the crucial question: Just what constitutes "Holocaust denial"?

## Six Million?

Should someone be considered a "Holocaust denier" because he does not believe -- as Matas and others insist -- that six million Jews were killed during World War II? This figure was cited by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-1946. It found that "the policy pursued [by the German government] resulted in the killing of six million Jews, of which four million were killed in the extermination institutions." (note 2)

Yet if that is so, then several of the most prominent Holocaust historians could be regarded as "deniers." Professor Raul Hilberg, author of the standard reference work, The Destruction of the European Jews, does not accept that six million Jews died. He puts the total of deaths (from all causes) at 5.1 million. Gerald Reitlinger, author of The Final Solution, likewise did not accept the six million figure. He estimated the figure of Jewish wartime dead might be as high as 4.6 million, but admitted that this was conjectural due to a lack of reliable information.

## Human Soap?

Is someone a "Holocaust denier" if he says that the Nazis didn't use Jewish fat to make soap? After examining all the evidence (including an actual bar of soap supplied by the Soviets), the Nuremberg Tribunal declared in its Judgment that "in some instances attempts were made to utilize the fat from the bodies of the victims in the commercial manufacture of soap." (note 3)

In 1990, though, Israel's official "Yad Vashem" Holocaust memorial agency "rewrote history" by admitting that the soap story was not true. "Historians have concluded that soap was not made from human fat. When so many people deny the Holocaust ever happened, why give them something to use against the truth?," said Yad Vashem official Shmuel Krakowski. (note 4)

## Wannsee Conference?

Is someone a "Holocaust denier" if he does not accept that the January 1942 "Wannsee conference" of German bureaucrats was held to set or coordinate a program of systematic mass murder of Europe's Jews? If so, Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer must be wrong -- and a "Holocaust denier" --

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(Continued from page 110) death in 1965 by calling him "The Greatest Englishman of His Time," 28 years later devoted an editorial to John Charmley and said of his book that it "introduced doubt to a field of history hitherto dominated by certainty and clubbability. In this sense, revisionism is the friend of skepticism, the enemy of cant."

Other reactions to the book were of the sort that you get from those who discover, later in life, that their own parents wanted to abort them. It's as if Charmley had hired a time machine in which to travel back and assassinate the national grandparents. "Questioning the ancestral gods of any nation," as he writes, "has never been an enterprise rewarded by anything save calumny."

In his judgment, Churchill's rash and needless picking of a fight with Hitler (while Churchill was often frolicking in a cataract of booze, just as Berlin radio used to claim) led to Eastern Europe's being gifted to Stalin (half true) and the British Empire's being mortgaged to Washington (quite true, as the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence had shown) and the rise of the British Labour Party (one-tenth true). Yet Charmley describes himself as a "radical-right Thatcherite." And if history means anything at all, it means that you can't have Thatcher without Churchill. The Lady herself gets quite lachrymose at the mention of his name, and her memoirs are full of Churchilliana. Indeed, in her attempt to install a patriotic curriculum in English schools, she upbraids those elements in the teaching and historical professions who "gnaw away at our national self-respect, re-writing British history as centuries of unrelieved gloom, oppression and failure—as days of hopelessness, not days of hope."

A more devastating book is James Rusbridger's *Betrayal at Pearl Harbor*, published in 1991, which provided a mass of evidence to show that Churchill had known of the impending Japanese assault and kept it to himself because he yearned for Roosevelt's entry into the war. Rusbridger was rudely trashed in respectable organs, even though he had had the exclusive cooperation of Eric Nave, the Australian code breaker who had access to the secret. But then, Rusbridger was a double disappointment: First, he offended the Establishment monopoly of historians who have "access" to things like code-breaking archives. Second, he gravely upset those who had striven for years to prove that

it was Roosevelt who had known all along. But at least he was producing facts and papers rather than induction and speculation. Charmley may have made people take an overdue second look at Churchill, but he doesn't have a prayer of proving that Hitler would have broken the rule of a lifetime and honored a pact with Churchill, even if he had made one.

The most sinister of the current revisionist arguments—if indeed it is an argument at all—concerns the reality of the Holocaust. Terrific alarm broke out in the American Jewish community last spring when a Roper Organization poll (commissioned by the American Jewish Committee) found 22 percent of adults agreeing that "it seems possible"

> Reactions to the book were of the sort that you get from those who discover that their own parents wanted to abort them.

that "Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened." You could probably get 22 percent of people to say that any damned thing "seems possible" (this is America, where anything is), but there were some who believed that the large doubt recorded by the poll was evidence that the "deniers" and "revisionists" had been at work. The headquarters of Holocaust denial is the Institute for Historical Review in California, which publishes a regular update on the "non-event" of the Final Solution. It is the target of a recent book by Deborah Lipstadt, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, who wrote *Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory* as a reply to the proliferation of "denial" on call-in shows, university campuses, and elsewhere—including more recently a leaflet campaign at the national Holocaust Memorial Museum, newly opened in Washington.

Even though Deborah Lipstadt refuses to engage in direct exchanges with Holocaust deniers, because she believes that they are trying to rehabilitate the Nazis, she agreed to help me in an experiment. I contacted the Institute for Historical Review and asked them to send me their best shot. I then ran it by

Professor Lipstadt and by Professor Christopher Browning, of Pacific Lutheran University, who is the author of *Ordinary Men*, a haunting account of one Nazi extermination squad in wartime Poland. The revisionists sent me an article by a Frenchman named Robert Faurisson, which claimed that Rudolf Höss, one of the commandants of Auschwitz, had been tortured by the British into confessing to a fantastic and unbelievable number of murders. "I declare herewith under oath that in the years 1941 to 1943, during my tenure in office as commandant of Auschwitz Concentration Camp, 2 million Jews were put to death by gasing and a ½ million by other means." This statement, specially mounted and reproduced, is an important exhibit at the Holocaust Memorial.

I then got in touch with Lipstadt and Browning for their responses, which were surprising: "Höss was always a very weak and confused witness," said Browning, who has been an expert witness at trials involving Auschwitz. "The revisionists use him all the time for this reason, in order to try and discredit the memory of Auschwitz as a whole." And Professor Lipstadt directed me to page 188 of her book, which is quite a page. It says that the stories about the Nazis making Jews into soap are entirely untrue, and it also says that while the memorial stone at Auschwitz itself lists the number of victims—Jews and non-Jews—at 4 million, the truer figure is somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million. Since Höss was the commandant of the place for only part of its existence, this means that—according to the counter-revisionists—an important piece of evidence in the Holocaust Memorial is not reliable. A vertiginous sensation if you like.

"It's the same with the soap story," said Lipstadt. "I get protests from survivors, saying that I shouldn't admit it's not true, because it gives ammunition to the enemy. But I'm only interested in getting at the truth." An old-fashioned concept.

These ironies cut both ways. The leading revisionist historian of the Holocaust is David Irving, who is the star of the institute in California and author of his own anti-Churchill text. Self-

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described as a "mild Fascist," which I would say is putting it mildly, he has publicly endorsed Adolf Eichmann's original scheme to deport all the Jews of Europe to the island of Madagascar. Irving has been making a reasonably good living these many years, not by denying the Holocaust but by claiming that it all took place without the knowledge or consent of the *Führer*. He has challenged other archivists to come up with an extermination order signed by Hitler. Having flourished in this way, Irving was suddenly handed Eichmann's memoirs in Buenos Aires in 1991. He pronounced them genuine, but was then brought up short by the disclosure in the said memoirs that Eichmann believed there *was* a direct order. "Food for thought" was Irving's take on that, followed by the butter-wouldn't-t melt-in-his-mouth admission that he would "have to revise" his previous thesis. He has since gotten as far as saying that Eichmann's confession doesn't count because his memoirs were written after 1945 and therefore do not constitute a specifically wartime document. Oh well, that's all right then. By the by, at a recent revisionist conference, Irving and Faurisson had a public disagreement on whether there had been any mass extermination of the European Jews at all, with Irving saying that it looked rather as if there had been. So even on the wilder shores, it remains true that to be a revisionist incurs the risk of being revised.

This all bears on the great American textbook debate, with every classroom and publisher involved in the scrutiny of texts. Who ever said that Americans don't care about history? In the test case brought by fundamentalist parents in Hawkins County, Tennessee, in 1983, which has become the classic of the genre, one crucial objection was to the inclusion in a book for seventh-graders of Benjamin Franklin's epitaph for himself, which runs, as you will all remember from your own studies:

The Body of B. Franklin, Printer: Like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out. And stript of its Lettering and Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost: For it will, as he believ'd, appear once more. In a new & more perfect Edition, Revised and Corrected By the Author.

You may find that use of the word "revised" to be apt, but the Christian

plaintiffs did not. It would give impressive young minds, they argued, the errant notion that old Ben Franklin was a Hindu. And people believe that textbooks these days are censored only by the multicultural.

At a recent conference at the Mark Twain Memorial in Hartford, Connecticut, which concerned among other things the long history of efforts to ban *The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn* for everything from indecency to atheism, from race mixing to "insensitivity," I had the chance to interview John Wallace, a black campaigner from Chicago who says that *Huck* is (and I quote from his leaflet) "the most grotesque example of racist trash ever written." Mr. Wallace claims to have been badly upset as a child by having the book read aloud in

class and hearing the word "nigger" from a teacher's lips, and has been up and down the land ever since seeking to have the book withdrawn from schools. He has even published his own expurgated edition, with all "offensive" words and phrases removed. As fashion has evolved, Mr. Wallace has kept pace. In the latest edition of his anti-*Huck* leaflet, the accusation that teaching the book "amounts to racial harassment and child abuse" has been added in pen to the printed text. The life of a literary revisionist, too, is one of constant updating. (Incidentally, far from being P.C., Wallace is an admirer of Jesse Helms, Jerry Falwell, and Rush Limbaugh.)

But if you really want to find out what trouble is, try taking on the myth of the Kennedy dynasty. Such was the fate of Nigel Hamilton, an acclaimed and garlanded biographer who decided to have a second look at the J.F.K. legend. (So far has the wheel spun these days that Hamilton is the John F. Kennedy Scholar at the McCormack Institute of the University of Massachusetts.) Upon arrival in Massachusetts, to begin work at the Kennedy Library, Hamilton ran smack into the twin buffers of history as property and history as unassailable myth.

"I never began it as a work of revisionism," Hamilton told me about his book *JFK: Reckless Youth*. "But the existing work by Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger had been written in a cocoon of sentiment, and I thought a new generation required a fresh look."

Alas for Professor Hamilton: he was to find that the idea of passing torches to new generations was one that began and ended with the Kennedys. They clung to it like grim death. "On my first day at the Kennedy Library I was told, They'll lead you a dance—you may as well pack your bags." By dint of incredible persistence Hamilton extracted more than 500 letters that the archivists had been sitting on, but it took him five years instead of the anticipated three.

Even before publication, Hamilton says, he felt the weight of the authorized version. A private letter from him to his publisher was intercepted in the Kennedy Library. A Kennedy-family lawyer materialized, saying that Hamilton's research would be harder to conduct if he mentioned J.F.K.'s treatment for gonorrhea. Like Churchill, J.F.K. was very unwell for much of his time in office, but the story of his Addison's disease, for example, was successfully kept out of the 60s hagiographies. An op-ed piece was written by somebody for *The New York Times*, and signed by four Kennedy siblings, excoriating Hamilton. A particular cause for complaint was his treatment of Rose Kennedy. "The fact is that she's *non compos mentis*," says Hamilton. "So she can't possibly be hurt by what I write. But she's also the Queen Mother of the clan, because she stepped in to fill the breach after Jackie went off to marry Onassis."

Which is where we came in, so I leave the last word to Hamilton. "William Manchester was taken to court by Jackie Kennedy for publishing things that she had actually told him. Now William Manchester is threatening to sue Joe McGinniss for plagiarism. What was once considered revisionism is now considered biblical. And the revisionist endeavor is something that every generation *must* embark upon, whether it's the Holocaust or any other subject." To this generation has fallen the misfortune of living in a time when everything is up for revision. ☐

Irving endorsed Eichmann's
original scheme to deport the Jews
of Europe to Madagascar.

118

VANITY FAIR/DECEMBER 1993

Theresa Cimino

From: Ed [edepstein@att.net]
Sent: Saturday, July 28, 2001 8:43 PM
To: KISSINGER,HENRY
Subject: FYI: Prior Incident of interest

Hi Dr. Kissinger

It turns out that Hitchens himself may himself have opened the issue of the Holocaust a month before you ever referred to it. On April 19th, when you were going to William and Mary, you will recall that Hitchens organized a sort of teach-in in which he lectured students and called for an opened discussion. At that time, the issue of his position on the holocaust was raised. The student newspaper, Flat Hat, reported:

"A period of questions followed Hitchens' lecture. An audience member questioned whether it was true that Hitchens said that the Holocaust never happened. When Hitchens did not give a clear yes-or-no answer, the audience questioned him further and Hitchens became defensive. The question-and-answer period was cut short due to time constraints but Hitchens invited anyone with questions to talk with him as he smoked on the stairs outside Washington."

The next day, the student newspaper had a number of letters further elaborating on this incident. I quote from two different letters featured in Flat Hat:

1) "Perhaps, also, they do not recognize the strong responses they invite by associating themselves with Hitchens, a revisionist who, among other things, denies the Holocaust and sneers at such selfless and beloved individuals as Mother Teresa. These left-wing extremist elements may claim that I speak out of fear of Hitchens' message, but the fact of the matter is that I need not fear what is not true."

2) "An audience member, a Holocaust survivor, claimed he had read that Hitchens stated that the Holocaust never occurred. The man said he also read that Hitchens denied making this statement, using the defense that his mother was Jewish. Finally, the audience member cited examples of anti-Semitic officials of Jewish descent, showing the defense to be feeble. He asked, "So, did you claim the Holocaust didn't happen?"

Hitchens repeated the question clearly enough, with minor alterations. Sadly, his answer contained little clarity. Just five minutes later, the audience learned that Hitchens' mother, wife and daughter are Jewish. They also heard that the Holocaust statement came from people "given to lying" and an "old enemy, who is a psychopathic liar."

Another audience member asked, "Yes or no?" Hitchens ignored him. A freshman, Aaron Oetting, repeated the question louder, "Please, yes or no?" Not only did Hitchens refuse to answer, but he took out his anger on the student, calling him "Ducky."

Hitchens continued his rude behavior by specifically directing his statement about "cheap and dirty" people in politics at Oetting. However, Hitchens crossed the line at the end of the "teach-in." As the audience left Washington 201, Hitchens strode over to Oetting, shoved his finger in the student's face and yelled, "Fuck you, fuck you. I will remember you the next time I'm here." Yes, this happened. There are witnesses. I am one.

As per Hitchens' invitation to speak to him after the talk, students followed him out to the steps. Hitchens continued his snide remarks, claiming Oetting did not have the intellect to debate him about the Holocaust. Obviously, Hitchens considers a yes or no answer a controversial debate."

So, when you arrived at Williams & Mary, Hitchens putative views were the subject of discussion by offended students-- and in the local press. Hitchens, by not answering a simple question, after he opened up a discussion, evidently did much to provoke this furor.

In case you need further references to it, I enclose the links:

Original story: http://www.wm.edu/flathat/February092001/newsstory2.shtml → 3 pages

Aftermath: http://www.wm.edu/flathat/February162001/opinionsstory3.shtml → 15 pages

There may be further reports, but the above were sufficient to convince me that this issue was being publically aired in Hitchens own forum, well before you ever referred to it.

I hope this helps,

1 of 2

The Flat Hat: News

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Copyright 1999, 2000, 2001
The Flat Hat

News

## Heating Things Up

Hundreds gather to learn about Kissinger

By Lisa St. Martin and Emily Wengert
Flat Hat Variety Editor and Flat Hat Editor

Last night students, professors and other members of the Williamsburg community crowded into Washington 201, filling every seat and close to every inch of floor space, overflowing into Washington's lobby. The occasion was a teach-in that questioned the appropriateness of Henry Kissinger's installation as chancellor during the Charter Day ceremony tomorrow morning. Multiple newspaper reporters and cameras from news channels 3, 6 and 8 were also on hand to record the evening's events.

Before leaving to attend a dinner with the Board of Visitors, College President Timothy Sullivan said a few words to those in attendance.

"William and Mary is a great university and we are not afraid to listen to differences, to respond to those differences and to stand for one of the great principles, which I believe makes this country great -- the privilege of a free mind and free speech," he said.

Sullivan, who served one year in Vietnam, tried to express that Vietnam was a highly emotional period in our nation's history.

"The worst thing about that time was that mostly we shouted at each other. We would not listen; we would not believe that those who had convictions different from our own held those convictions honorably," he said.

Sullivan also commented on the inappropriateness of Christopher Hitchens' article published in the Feb. issue of Harper's Magazine.

"I think the article is a disgrace. It is an issue of inaccurate research, of half truths and whole truths. He has the right here to speak here and be heard," Sullivan said. "All I ask you to do is not to believe me or to believe him but to take the time to make your own judgments about these issues. You are William and Mary students. I know you, and you will take the time before reaching conclusions as extreme as those made in this report."

After a fiery start, which involved Hitchens challenging Sullivan to refute the statements in the article and involved mixed reactions from the crowd, the College president took his leave. History professor Ed Crapol introduced the first speaker, George Herring, author of "America's Longest War" and currently a visiting professor at the University of Richmond. Herring spoke in regards to Kissinger's involvement in foreign affairs as National Security Advisor and later as Secretary of State under Nixon, which resulted in the secret bombing of Cambodia and also the expansion of the Vietnam War. When the Nixon administration took

TIFFANY KIM -- The Christopher Hitchens, who wrote an article for Harper's Magazine about Henry Kissinger as a war criminal, debated with author George Herring at a teach-in yesterday.

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Flat Hat: News

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office in 1969, they inherited the problems of Vietnam from Lyndon B. Johnson.

"Henry Kissinger, who took office as National Security Advisor in January 1969, was especially ill-equipped to deal with these sorts of problems," Herring said.

Nixon and Kissinger both entered office with the promise that the war would be over in 6 months, which was never kept.

"Also like Nixon, ... Kissinger fell victim to that most American of traits – excessive optimism," Herring said.

Herring argued that Kissinger might not have been as responsible for foreign policy matters as some would believe. Rather, Herring felt that Kissinger was trying to find favor with Nixon and as a result reinforced Nixon's concerns and ideas instead of questioning them. Herring is quick to add that although Kissinger may not have been completely at fault, he is not blameless.

"Kissinger's views, at this point, reinforced Nixon's with enormous costs and consequences. Kissinger also played a more central role than he has been willing to concede in the expansion of the Vietnam War into an Indochina War," Herring said. "The result was grim. Kissinger and the United States cannot escape their share of responsibility."

Kissinger is author of one of the longest memoirs in history, according to Herring. His memoir is three volumes and fills a total of 3,955 pages, including the index.

"It's disturbing, I think, that his version of history has held up, at least in the popular mind despite the damning investigative reporting," he said. "He remains, 25 years after the war, a celebrity, a writer of columns for "Newsweek," a commentator on television shows and soon, I am told, the chancellor of the College of William and Mary."

After a question-and-answer period, Hitchens spoke about his article, "The Case Against Henry Kissinger," which was published in February's issue of Harper's Magazine and accuses Kissinger of being a war criminal.

In addition to several human rights violations, Hitchens accused Kissinger of violating the Logan Act that outlawed secret diplomacy. Hitchens expressed support for the student effort on campus against Kissinger being named chancellor.

"You're going to let a man who is not welcome anywhere because of the stench of crime that surrounds him, and murder and torture and genocide, be your chancellor. I honestly don't think so. I don't think you can let it happen," Hitchens said. "I'm here to encourage you to take it as seriously as this."

Hitchens bases his arguments on federal documents that have surfaced in the past 25 years. These involve telegrams, letters and transcripts of conversations. Hitchens pointed out that among many of the world and national leaders 25 years ago, Kissinger is the only one who remains unindicted. However, with international law, a case can be brought against Kissinger at any time.

"I hope he lives to see what's coming to him," Hitchens said.

For those who remained in the room, junior Chris Mercer delivered a highly emotional speech in which he expressed disappointment in Sullivan for his earlier statements and also denounced Kissinger as chancellor.

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Flat Hat: News

[Lc]

"Those who do not speak out are de facto participants of what's going on," Mercer said "Kissinger does not represent me, and he never will represent me because I will not be another silent accomplice."

The evening concluded with junior Peter Maybarduk reading a statement issued by the Students for Environmental and Economic Justice.

"We expect -- we demand -- that the Board of Visitors revoke their appointment of Henry Kissinger and open the selection of chancellors to democratic processes of, by and for the entire William and Mary college community, including students, faculty and staff," he said.

A petition was available for attendees to sign and will also be distributed around campus. Maybarduk did not propose boycotting the Charter Day ceremony.

"However we might feel about the appointment of our chancellor, attend the Charter Day ceremony. This is still all of our school. Our efforts do not end with the conclusion of this evening," Maybarduk said. "This is only step one of the campaign, and I'd like you to join us."

Sophomore Barbara Marrin was extremely pleased with the outcome of the teach-in.

"Herring was an excellent speaker. I enjoyed his speech," she said. "I was really amazed that we had so many students interested in this."

Tyler Smith, a sophomore, also attended the teach-in because he heard it was going to be exciting. He was not optimistic about the power of the students on campus.

"Our chances of affecting it are slim to none," he said. "However, it is our duty to take our own opinions to the Board of Visitors."

Tyla Matteson came to the teach-in from Hampton.

"I'm very heartened that college students are making a difference," she said. "The appointment [of Kissinger] was totally inappropriate, I guess that's a nice way to put it."

Not all students were so pleased with the speakers. Sophomore Elizabeth Williams did not feel as if Hitchens could be taken completely seriously.

"I thought that Christopher Hitchens had a lot of interesting things to say, but he was arrogant and pompous and extremely rude at times," she said. "The audacity of his statements were harmed by his arrogance."

7/30/01

"The Flat Hat"

Opinions

Letters about Kissinger

**Editor's Note:** Letters to the Editor and letters about Kissinger have been edited for length this week due to the high volume and space restrictions. All submissions were cut to the current two-page limitation (Times New Roman, 12 pt font, double-spaced). Thank you.

Call for apology of President Sullivan to Hitchens

Open Letter to President Timothy Sullivan:

We did not have the pleasure of being introduced Feb. 8, which left me in the position of hearing
your short presentation while delivering my own somewhat longer one in your absence. This
inequality, however, was partly at my expense since just before your departure, you publicly
called me a liar and then hastily withdrew.

I am writing to you now in order to renew the challenge that I made to you as you made ready to
scuttle from the room. Either make good on what you said, or have the decency to apologize.

For the sake of leniency, I will accept as a "lie" any misstatement of fact or any historical error in
my Harper's essay.

I do not see any third course of action open to you. I was a guest on your campus; I am a fellow
teacher (though I cannot claim any acquaintance with your own scholarship or any acquaintance
with anyone who claims familiarity with it), and you insulted me upon my arrival, in front of a large
audience made up of your own students and faculty.

When asked to materialize your very grave accusation, you first refused and then turned tail. You looked a fool all right -- I wish you could have heard what was said of you after your retreat -- but that won't suffice since you looked something of a fool to begin with.

I think that you have to accept the responsibility here, since you have chosen to associate your
ancient seat of learning with a very questionable public figure and have chosen to do so without
consulting your faculty or your student body in advance. They therefore had no choice but to
invite guests who could state the contrary view.

You -- who briefly favored the meeting with your condescending permission to discuss all matters
under the rubric of civility -- did not live up even for one minute to the standard you invoked.

As a guest and visitor I can only warn you of the harm that will come to the reputation of your
college as the reputation of your new chancellor becomes better understood. That could have
remained a matter of deep, but polite, disagreement between us. (After all, I approached
Kissinger well in advance of publication, soliciting his reply to the very serious accusations I made
against him, and we have dueled in the pages of the New York Times.)

However, I shall not be saying, as I lecture on various campuses or talk to my own academic
colleagues at the New School in New York, that the president of William and Mary has deluded
opinions about Henry Kissinger. That would be too flattering. I shall have to say that the president
of William and Mary keeps his opinions about recent history to himself, while reserving the right to
abuse visiting speakers and then to excuse himself in a hurry.

I don't wish to sound too easily offended; I enjoy polemics and debates (which of course take two

sides). The courtesy and consideration of your students and faculty, shown to me repeatedly after
that event, were more than enough, and I wish you could have heard them, too, as a lesson in
elementary good manners.

The honor of your school, in other words, has been vindicated in spite of you. However, I have to
be inflexible on the main point. You publicly called me a liar, and I now insist again that, as a
scholar and a host and a gentleman, you either provide evidence for the assertion or find the
grace to withdraw it.

If you choose, I shall treat your response as confidential. This letter, however, is being offered in
public, as was your original slander.

-- Christopher Hitchens

In our president's defense

Open Statement to Hitchens' Letter:

President Sullivan has designated me as his second in this affaire d'honeur, and I pledge my
untiring efforts to avoid a deadly trip to Dueling Oak. Beneath Hitchens' windy bluster and
overblown rhetoric, it seems odd for him -- the author of a book about Mother Teresa called
"Missionary Position" -- to claim slander. But as we have learned, Hitchens will go to any length to
sell a magazine or hawk a book. We do not propose to aid him in these mercenary tasks, but to
let him slink back into the obscurity he so richly deserves. This is reason: let him make the most
of it.

-- William T. Walker,
Director of University Relations

Supporting Kissinger

To the Editor:

I am writing to express my disagreement with the letters arguing that Henry Kissinger be removed
as chancellor of the College. I would like to make it clear that not all students feel Kissinger is a
misguided appointment or that the chancellor selection process should necessarily be something
the student body participates in.

I fully support the Board of Visitors' decision to appoint Kissinger as our chancellor and would be
honored to hear him speak about foreign policy issues on any occasion.

-- Tim Miller,
Class of '03

Loud voices don't necessarily make infallible argument

To the Editor:

It is a common misconception in this country, especially on college campuses, that those who yell
the loudest are more important than those who do not. This is not true. As a conservative college
student, I realize that many may believe me to be in the minority in this.

[Lc]

3.

This is because I do not seek to drown out those of different opinions with borrowed rhetoric and loud protests. However, faced with recent events at the College, I feel that a more direct approach to the continued campaign of harassment and discrimination against College conservatives is warranted.

I refer primarily to the teach-in recently staged on campus. This event amounted to little more than a left-wing extremist rally and smear-session against Dr. Henry Kissinger, and I write to express my strongest and most vehement objections to it.

I support our chancellor. I also support our college President Timothy Sullivan. The presentation given by George Herring and Christopher Hitchens was disgraceful and represented slanted, left-wing revisionism at its most seamy.

Hitchens was arrogant, self-righteous, haughty and offensive. He presented an argument based upon dubious grounds that sought to discredit a man of great integrity and forthrightness, a man who served his country honorably in a very difficult period of American history.

Throughout, both Hitchens and Herring used such terms as "one can presume," "it has been suggested" and "it is possible," but presented little concrete evidence that could be taken as convincing proof of anything relating to the serious allegations they made.

Increasingly, left-wing groups on campus, as in the nation at large, have been presuming to speak for "the people." I don't know which people they mean to speak for with their riotous behavior, patronizing words and sanctimonious "demonstrations," but they certainly do not speak for me. I object to the presumption that their opinions are more important than anyone else's simply because of the volume of their voices.

I also object to their attempts to remove an honorable and decent man from a well-deserved position of respect as the chancellor of our college. They claim that the fact that he is a controversial figure makes him ineligible for the chancellorship. Perhaps they are not aware of the irony of that position.

It is a sad sign of our times that these liberal elements of our community feel the need to invent crises where none exist. It is unfortunate also that they feel it necessary to perform these acts in the name of a vast, faceless "movement." Although this "movement" claims to be working towards some amorphous greater good, I frankly cannot see it, and I cannot imagine it being furthered by the slander of a respectable American.

It saddens me that this obvious left-wing political agenda has been so easily mistaken for legitimate fact, and that a minority on this campus -- and it is a minority -- is so convinced of its own infallibility that it presumes to speak for the entire community. This is unacceptable.

I do not accept the unjust and unprovoked vilification of Kissinger, and I do not support the misguided attempts to remove him from the chancellorship. Moreover, self-assured, pious "demands" on my behalf are not welcome.

I will not be silent while liberal extremists presume to speak for me and for others like me. No, thank you; such left-wing revisionist claptrap is not the truth, no matter how loud you yell it. No, thank you.

[Lc]

-- Matthew P. Cairo,
Class of '02

Finding pride in protest

To the Editor:

As I sat and watched the protest that ensued this past Saturday during the Charter Day
ceremony, I was unexpectedly overcome with emotion. I was not fearful, embarrassed or
enraged, but rather filled with amazement and admiration. To me the scene was something so
beautiful that it brought tears to my eyes.

I arrived at the ceremony with a neutral perception of Dr. Henry Kissinger. I went to hear him speak merely out of curiosity. I can't say that I was glad to be witness to his public assailment, yet I found the incident represent the true essence of everything that is good about the United States of America.

Public protest is something that happens all the time in this country whether it be fighting for a
cause, signing a petition, writing letters, contacting our government official or even writing articles
challenging someone or something. We forget that many citizens of other countries view this
right, this guarantee of the freedom of speech, as a luxury. To many, the decision to protest is
often a decision that could jeopardize or even end their life.

In the United States, we are allowed to protest the election of our president without it resulting in a civil war. We can criticize his actions, call him stupid and have it broadcast by the media. As we grow up, we are taught to fight for what we believe. If we dislike the status quo, it is ingrained in us that we have the power to change it. All too often, it is easy to lose sight of the rarity and beauty of this freedom.

When President Sullivan introduced Kissinger, a group of students arose chanting "Not our chancellor," and I was proud. I was proud that those students felt so passionate about a cause that they decided to act, and I was even more in awe that our country ensures our right to protest. The fact that the situation was resolved peacefully speaks volumes as well.

When the president said that most of the people there wanted to hear what Kissinger had to say, everyone else in the Hall stood and clapped, the protesters left, having made their presence known, and the majority ruled ... no blood, no tear gas, no brutality. The anti-Kissinger group was still allowed to voice their protests outside and was even broadcast on the evening news.

Whether or not you like Kissinger seems irrelevant to me. What I saw this past weekend allowed me to witness first-hand the ideals upon which our country was founded. Certainly, the United States has many problems. Our election process is obviously very flawed in light of recent events; however, at least we have an election process rather than a leader usurping his power by force.

We can say what we think; we are free to believe what we choose to believe; we can act on these convictions without fear of repercussions. For this, I love our country and I thank the protesters and everyone else in attendance last Saturday for reaffirming this.

-- Shanley Pinchotti,
Class of '01

Sullivan's definition of "real" student questionable

To the Editor:

I would like to respond to a comment made by President Timothy Sullivan on Charter Day. After the protesters voluntarily left the ceremony, Sullivan mentioned that the remaining members of the audience were the "real William and Mary."

Are people who call attention to issues and actually exhibit passion for something not the "real William and Mary?" If so, that is highly unfortunate. We apparently attend the best small public university in the country, but Sullivan seems to imply that going against the norm is taboo, or that even thinking for oneself should be condemned.

Who is the "real William and Mary"? Are they the people who feel threatened by activism and therefore malign the actions of those who oppose Kissinger? Are they the people who live in a colonial bubble, refusing to recognize there is life beyond the 'Burg? Is the "real William and Mary" a club consisting of people who all think alike? I am extremely disappointed that ignorant and conservative people feel threatened by others who think differently and act passionately.

If the "real William and Mary" are the people who booed and clapped wildly as the protesters left the Hall, this is not a community of which I would like to be a part. I am proud of all those who walked out of Charter Day because they stood up for what they believe. I consider them to be the "real William and Mary" because they are using their education to expand the mind, not limit it.

-- Molly Bloom,
Class of '01

Alumni approve activism

To the Editor:

It warms our hearts to find that student activism still lives at our alma mater.

-- Kathy Baldwin,
Tom Cooney,
Jerry Coyne,
Michele Donithan,
Jane Ball Entwisle,
Tim Groves,
Betsy McAlister Groves,
John Hempel,
Bruce Hockman,
Cathy Bryan Johnson,
M. Greyson Pannill,
Richard Phillips,
Janice Toone Russell,
William H. Sizemore Jr.,
Larry D. Smith,
Skip Stiles,
Ken Valz,
Class of '71

[L]

6.

Intolerance towards minority opinion in recent Kissinger controversy deserves rebuke

To the Editor:

This past week, I attended both the teach-in about Kissinger and the Charter Day ceremony. What struck me the most about the present controversy on campus is not the audacity of the protesters, nor the shaky reputation of our new chancellor, but rather the shocking intolerance with which the College and the City of Williamsburg treated an opinion that was clearly in the minority.

The first evidence of this intolerance that I witnessed was at the teach-in. President Sullivan asked the organizers of the event to speak and then proceeded to insult their guest. His speech began quietly and decently, but to proclaim that everyone is entitled to their own opinion and that we should respect all interpretations and then to promptly criticize someone's beliefs and work without defending his attack is not only inconsistent, it is also inordinately rude.

I also read an article ("Anti-Kissinger Author to Appear at William and Mary," WAVY TV online) that quoted Sullivan saying, "The opinions of those undertaking this [protest] are flat-out wrong. I have a right to my opinion, and they have a right to theirs. I'm happy for them to entertain foolish ideas if they want." One might as well just say "You can have your own political opinion, but don't expect to be able to express it unless it agrees with mine." His wife also reportedly called the protesters "dummies" to their faces. This is not the mature behavior of those in administrative and representative positions.

Sullivan's and other people's comportment at the ceremony was what drove me to write this letter. At the ceremony, not only did Sullivan insinuate that the protesters were not acting like "ladies and gentlemen," but he also declared that the demonstrators "were not William and Mary." This was directed towards actual tuition-paying students. This, coming from the president of a school that is currently striving for a higher level of diversity.

These comments were almost directly followed by Sullivan's speech, which bemoaned our generation's lack of political participation and called for the College to teach more democratic values and to install a willingness to challenge conventionality! It was a bit hard for me to swallow after he had antagonistically mocked, condescended and set the crowd against a group whose opinion happened to differ from his.

The president's response is not the only one that deserves rebuke. Protesters were spat upon, threatened violently, slapped and called "communists." A friend of mine was chanting during the ceremony, and a College employee wearing an "Event Coordinator" pin turned around and threatened her, yelling in a thick Southern accent, "If you don't shut up, I'm going to knock you down!" Her employment here marks her as a representative of the College, and that sort of behavior is hardly professional.

In conclusion, I would like to add that I am not an incendiary. I hate confrontation and don't have an innate desire to mistrust all authority figures. I am merely a student of literature, and I will readily admit that I don't even begin to understand the complexity of the period during which Kissinger held office. I do not believe in the black and white and the absolute right and wrong of situations. I do believe that the manner in which the administrators and body of the College reacted to controversy is intolerant and disrespectful. A responsible amount of respect is due to all people, despite their opinions. That is not only an opinion that "is William and Mary," but is also universal.

-- Anna-Claire Fourness,
Class of '02

Arrogance and self-righteousness overshadow respect College traditions deserve

Open Letter to Chancellor Henry Kissinger:

My parents fled Chile in 1972, shortly after democratically elected president Salvador Allende took office. Chile was in great uncertainty. Allende came to power and, almost immediately, changed a free market society into a socialist state. His government brought support from Moscow to help with the transformation of Chile. He came into power through the consent of the people, but he didn't execute the will of the people.

My parents arrived in Nicaragua in November 1972. They closely monitored the deteriorating situation in Chile. They feared their homeland would become a second Cuba, a means to bring communism further into the new world. When General Pinochet overthrew the government in 1974, they were relieved because they knew problems would be solved.

They had seen first-hand that the will of the people was no longer respected under Allende. Pinochet simply exercised force where a government no longer existed because it had ignored and contradicted its very source of power. Perhaps Pinochet abused his power, but it was after the fact, and for that he will answer.

My parents have lived in America for more than 27 years. I have come to appreciate all the wonderful opportunities this country has to offer. I was blessed to be able to grow up here with all the rights and freedoms and responsibilities it offers. Today, I also enjoy returning to a prospering Chile.

I have no regrets that I could not grow up in Chile because I know I would not be the person I am today without the experiences I have had here. I still know, however, that I can enjoy the cultural heritage of the United States and of Chile, and that can only make me a richer person.

I want to apologize for my fellow students' actions this past weekend. Their passion got the better of them and perhaps they forgot for a moment the atmosphere of tolerance and respect we foster for one another at the College. Sometimes our differences generate great anger, but as educated men and women, we have to learn to channel that anger in the right place.

President Sullivan worried that our generation shows indifference and apathy when it comes to politics. But this weekend, I saw something that concerns me even more: an air of arrogance and self-righteousness that closes dialogue and minds to differences of opinion. This college has traditions, which many respect and esteem.

It is sad when a few individuals say that their opinions are valued more than the greater respect for the community. It is sad when the minority imposes their will upon the majority, when they don't have the authority to do so. I know what it is like to be in the minority, and I know what it is like to protest.

We must work to change hearts and minds through civilized and peaceful means, respectful of traditions and institutions. The protestors held a passionate, but very open, intellectual discussion about your role in Vietnam the Thursday before Charter Day. Such a gathering is William and Mary.

I close by asking you to keep watch over our college. What worries me is the anger and passion involved. I admire their zeal, but I wonder if they have abandoned dialogue too soon and are not merely becoming a polarizing force in our society. It is all too easy to call attention to yourself. It is all too easy to yell. It is all too easy to divide.

But the discord this division causes is destructive and deceptive. It is destructive because a few can hurt the community, deceptive because it does not put forward a cause but more a group of people, who wish to be heard and seen. Someday, this passion may be put to good use.

[Lc]

8.

Hopefully, as Sullivan said, this college will train future leaders. Thank you for being patient with our growing pains.

Please come back soon!

-- Mattias A. Caro,

Class of '02

## Showing respect to both sides of argument

**To the Editor:**

Over the past few weeks I've become greatly disturbed by the actions of members of our college community -- including President Sullivan, the administration and the student body. I feel that Charter Day was a culmination of the frustrations that we all share, but I don't believe that we would have these frustrations if we could relearn the principles of freedom and respect that our country is based on.

I believe that President Sullivan failed to give students the proper forum for their concerns regarding the position of chancellor and, in doing so, did not give the students the proper respect they deserve, which caused the students' reaction at Charter Day. On the other hand, I also believe that the students have failed to give respect to the traditions of Charter Day and to the participants and observers of the event. I'm not accusing anyone, nor am I condoning anything that people have done.

Frankly, I'm disappointed in many of the actions of individuals and feel that they have shown disrespect for each other. I believe that we owe it to ourselves as representatives of the College to do better. Allow me to explain.

It's always the same debate. When an individual erring on the right side of the political spectrum is presented, those on the left protest greatly. Likewise, when an individual has beliefs that are more leftist, those on the right cry out in horror. I'm not saying that one side is better than the other; in fact, both sides have their own problems.

Here is one thing that I do know. I believe that all people, no matter what side they are on, have the right to speak their mind and be treated with respect while doing so. What I mean by respect is not reverence or even trust, but treating people like the human beings they are because while we may not condone what they are saying or what they represent, we have the chance to voice our own opinions. That is what this whole country is about. Everyone has the freedom of speech and assembly. But for this right to be sustained, we cannot silence those whom we do not agree with.

This does not mean that we just have to take everything lying down. Not in the least. If we feel someone is the vehicle for beliefs that we feel are dangerous, we must act, especially if that person affects our lives. Voice your own opinions; lead petitions, protests, whatever you think will get attention. Rally outside the location of their speech if you want to get heard. Do what you need to do to be understood and taken seriously.

But please know that, in order for us to have these rights, all others must have these exact same rights. We can learn much from those with whom we do not agree. If we don't want to listen to what they have to say, that's fine, and it's our own choice. No one is forcing us to listen.

But if we are listening and learning, I believe that we should extend to all people the same respect that we would like. We don't all have to agree, and we must fight against what we think is wrong.

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9.

We have to make the most effective fight possible, and I believe that such a fight includes mutual
respect between both parties, even if they both despise one another.

Maybe I'm a bit idealistic, but I think that what I've just written is what should be done. Everyone
should have the chance to say what they feel. I know it is uncomfortable to let everyone speak,
but I think it is necessary so that we get that chance to be heard. It is one of the prices we pay for
our freedoms.

I hope that everyone on this campus can learn something from this statement. I don't believe that anyone is innocent. I'm not saying that Dr. Henry Kissinger should or should not be our chancellor. That's a whole different debate. What I am saying is this: President Sullivan, the administration and the student body have all mishandled the situation and refused to listen to the other sides involved.

A little more compromise and listening would have resulted in a very different ending to this story. All I ask is that you think about what I've said and see how it relates to your life. Take some time out to listen and to learn. I assure you that the result will be positive.

-- Lara Ponomareff,
Class of '01

Standing up for beliefs, representing College

To the Editor:

I went to Charter Day and clapped hard for Adolphus Hailstork. Then I protested the installation of Henry Kissinger as our chancellor. Now, according to our president, I do not represent the College.

Why did I do it? Why did I stand up? It's hard to say. I was conflicted. I stayed up until 3 a.m. the
night before Charter Day talking it over with my roommate. And during the ceremony, my heart
was pounding hard. When I saw Kissinger shuffle out wearing my school's robe and regalia,
though, I had to do it. I couldn't accept this man as my college's representative to the world. Yes,
it was rude, but I considered it a small price to pay for speaking out.

I am William and Mary. I tutor kids, check out your books at the library and play for the orchestra. I go to Richmond to talk to a House of Delegates subcommittee about a living wage and I work against the death penalty. And because the College has helped build this conscience in me, I can take into account many sides of an argument and still assign moral responsibility.

Most importantly, though, I stand up for what I believe in: however you interpret his responsibility in foreign affairs, Mr. Kissinger remains tainted with the blood of Cambodian civilians and Chilean activists. This is not debatable; his association with the administration that extended the Vietnam War (temporally and spatially) and helped overthrow Salvador Allende is historical fact.

I like this school too much to see him sully our reputation as much as he has tarnished our government's. I stood up for the College just as much as I did for peace and justice, and I've never been prouder to attend this college. I'm sorry that our president feels differently.

Hark the students' voices swelling, strong and true and clear; Alma Mater's love they're telling, ringing far and near ...

-- Matt Schroeder,
Class of '02

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10.

Administration unresponsive to students', faculty's input in selecting chancellor

To the Editor:

In an attempt to create dialogue between the administration and students, individuals of all ages met Feb. 8 to discuss whether Henry Kissinger should be the College's 22nd chancellor. President Timothy Sullivan opened the teach-in with the observation that "the worst thing about it [the Vietnam era] was that mostly we shouted at each other. We would not listen; we would not believe that those who had convictions different from our own held those convictions honorably."

Yet history repeats itself. On Feb. 10, as Kissinger prepared to address the College for the first time as chancellor, black-robed seniors stood and split the silence with cries of "Not our chancellor!" And when the utilitarian argument that most wanted to hear Kissinger's speech failed to quell the protesters, Sullivan declared to the applauding, gray-haired audience, "That's not William and Mary; you are."

The breakdown of decorum on Charter Day results as much from the administration's failure to consider student opinion as it does from the disruptive tactics of the protesters themselves. Because the privilege of selecting a chancellor belongs to the Board of Visitors, a politically conservative body appointed by the governor of Virginia, neither students nor faculty have any say in choosing who represents them at the international level.

Few would disagree that Kissinger was a formidable Secretary of State under Nixon. Yet those who object to his role in prolonging the Vietnam War, obstructing democracy in Chile and aiding human rights violations in Cambodia, East Timor and Indonesia have had no forum in which to voice their dissent.

Their outrage is justified by the fact that the College is not a state school, but a state-sanctioned school. It receives only one-fifth of its budget directly from the state, while 40 percent of its undergraduate population, shouldering more than half of the tuition burden, hails from out-of-state. The choice of chancellor should be less beholden to political interests at the state level and more reflective of the College community's desires.

Disappointingly, however, the administration has remained unresponsive to the idea that students whose beliefs differ from its own "[hold] those convictions honorably." During his short speech at the Feb. 8 teach-in, Sullivan praised those in attendance for actively pursuing "a free mind and free speech" in the finest tradition of William and Mary. Yet when those same students exercised their free speech two days later, Sullivan claimed that the soon-to-be graduates were not, in fact, William and Mary. He deliberately alienated one part of the student body from the rest on behalf of its minority viewpoint.

Sullivan's remarks following Kissinger's address underscored the need for courage at high levels of leadership, yet moral courage begins by speaking out against injustice at all levels. If the College is to rank among the world's greatest institutions by 2010, as Sullivan optimistically projects, we, the College community, must be able to exercise our opinions and voice our dissent before it's too late for action. Henry Kissinger may be our chancellor, but we are William and Mary.

-- Sarah Mi Ra Dougherty,
Class of '02

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11.

Protest good example of student spirit

To the Editor:

On Charter Day, President Timothy Sullivan presented Henry Kissinger to College students and the public at large as a model citizen who consistently put moral principle over transient political expediency. As much as I respect President Sullivan I must say that this seems to me a profoundly mistaken moral judgment.

I, at least, know of no reasonably impartial observers who praise Kissinger for consistently allowing principle to obstruct his quest for personal political advancement. What he has consistently practiced is the morally dubious policy of Realpolitik to the detriment to the basic human rights and the very lives of others, including thousands of Southeast Asian non-combatants and innocent people elsewhere in the world.

His defenders often remind us that he received the Noble Peace Prize for his efforts to end the Vietnam War, as though this fact alone established his commitment to democratic values. His North Vietnamese counterpart, however, was offered the same prize on the same grounds. Were he available, would the Board of Visitors, President Sullivan or anyone else be prepared to name Le Duc Tho as chancellor? If receiving the Peace Prize doesn't prove Kissinger worthy of that office, neither, I submit, does anything else in his career.

Of those who question this judgment, I can only ask that you review Kissinger's actions during the Nixon years and ask yourselves whether, in all honesty, you want the next generation to adopt the political values that guided his conduct (which is a different question, incidentally, from the legal one of whether Mr. Kissinger committed war crimes). As for myself, I agree with the conclusion drawn by the students who protested Kissinger's installment as chancellor.

If some of these protesters risked angering many by briefly disrupting the Charter Day ceremonies, it was because they felt it imperative publicly and dramatically to express opposition to a perceived grave wrong. Their offense against College traditions was trifling compared to the offense against human rights ideals that the Board of Visitors committed by naming Kissinger chancellor. They are indeed "real William and Mary students" and the College is fortunate to have them.

-- Mark Fowler,
Professor of philosophy

Individual interpretation of history subject to personal moral standards of 'experts'

To the Editor:

Imagine this: on Feb. 8, two of your friends attend the teach-in about Henry Kissinger. Afterwards, you ask them what happened. This is one story:

"It all started when President Sullivan spoke in defense of Kissinger. He called Christopher Hitchens' Harper's article 'a disgrace ... an issue of inaccurate research, of half truths ...' He was right. Hitchens interrupted him mid-sentence. Unfortunately, Sullivan had to leave for a Board of Visitors meeting before he could go through the article line by line. But he did the right thing, refusing to allow these charges to go unanswered."

This is what the other has to say:

"It started when President Sullivan stood up to try to defend the indefensible. He couldn't back up any of his claims about the Harper's article. He called it 'a disgrace ... an issue of inaccurate

research, of half-truths' but couldn't support any of these accusations. Instead he ran out,
claiming he had to attend an important meeting. His name-calling, and especially his leaving
before Hitchens could respond, is inexcusable!

This example illustrates an interesting principle: history is fundamentally interpretative. Historians must make sense of complicated events and fashion the hodge-podge of everyday life into a coherent story. In doing so, they make judgments about which events and people matter, which don't and what it all means as a whole. Since historians play fundamental roles in the story they craft, credibility becomes an issue. Before we take any historian's word as truth, it's important to understand where he's "coming from." In the recent debate surrounding Kissinger, there is an actor to whom we have not paid adequate attention: Christopher Hitchens, whose article in Harper's Magazine re-ignited the debate over Kissinger's rightful place in history.

Hitchens is a colorful character. He has built a career on his willingness to question the most sacred of sacred cows in our society. Sometimes this instinct has led him to do things that were admirable, even if they were controversial. But other times, he has misdirected his cynical questioning of our popular icons, with some odd results.

Hitchens' instincts are far from infallible. His cynicism seems to cloud his judgment about a
subject's character. His book "Missionary Position" about Mother Teresa comes to mind. In it, he
writes, "Her kingdom was of this world and of the nastiest bits of it, and the net effect of her
career was to enormously impoverish the poor."

He examined records of the Missionaries of Charity, discovering that there were "unsavory"
names on her donor list. Hitchens suspects the worst -- that Mother Teresa was complicit in the
crimes of her contributors. This ignores the possibility that Mother Teresa's sin may have been
inattention to names on checks she received. Hitchens fails to see that Mother Teresa's good
character and pure motives refute his theory.

What does this mean for the Kissinger controversy? Hitchens' background gives shape and size to the "grain of salt" with which one should take any historical writing. Hitchens is a cynic with a flair for the controversial. He'll ask tough questions. In answering, he'll take a dim view of human nature and intentions. Sometimes cynicism is warranted. Other times (such as with Mother Teresa), it's unlikely that he's justified.

Occasionally, as with Kissinger's case, it's hard to know who's right and who's wrong. One thing is clear: in Kissinger's case, where the historian must decide if his acts were human errors or criminal acts, Hitchens' personality inclines him to believe the worst.

So, as we evaluate Hitchens's article, "The Case Against Henry Kissinger," our best bet is to take
the questions Hitchens raises, and run with them. He may introduce some new and important
avenues of inquiry, but we should be wary of his own answers.

-- Joseph Sternberg,
Class of '04

Unprofessional behavior towards student

To the Editor:

The following events should be listed in the police reports under assault. A guest speaker, one personally invited to the College campus, verbally attacked a student. At the teach-in, Christopher Hitchens, delivered a speech against Henry Kissinger.

[Lc]

13.

Hitchens set the mood for the teach-in by interrupting President Sullivan's opening comments. Sullivan expressed his belief in the freedom of speech, although he felt Hitchens' writing was made up of "half-truths and lies." Hitchens attacked him for his opinions. This behavior continued throughout the evening with comments like "I don't know why people insist on calling Kissinger a doctor just because he has a Ph.D."

While soaking up the praise of a select group of students, Hitchens dodged committing to concrete answers to several questions. Hitchens gave vague and rambling answers, certain that none would call him on it. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, a young man pointed out that a definitive answer to a particular question was never given.

Fellow students, I hope you are outraged. He knew he was speaking to a crowd largely unknowledgeable about matters of Vietnam politics. Hitchens relied on this, spouting facts unrelated to the question at hand, yet acting as though he had answered effectively. However, more than one person recognized this tactic. One even asked for a definitive answer, a reasonable expectation of a speaker willing to stand up and announce his views.

Hitchens' attempts to incite anger against Kissinger relied on his own brand of propaganda. Rather than becoming anti-Kissinger, I left the meeting anti-Hitchens. A man who feels justified in yelling obscenities at a student is not a man at all. The students who so enthusiastically applauded Hitchens must not have been listening to his speech. Christopher Hitchens is not a hero.

And by the way, Mr. Hitchens, a Ph.D. does make one a doctor.

-- Megan Mize,
Class of '04

Autocratic demi-gods rule students' lives

To the Editor:

This college, supposedly founded upon the best ideals and graced by the noble and true
characters of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, seems willing to throw this hard-earned
tradition away for profit and ease.

How truly great is a body claiming the highest of values but being directed by the whims of an
untouchable autocratic group of demi-gods? And under the auspices of democracy, as the blinds
on the eyes dissolve, the screaming injustice is heard deafeningly loud, and the true nature of the
College is known.

If only we had Washington and Jefferson back. If only money and needless politics of a select, non-elected few behind tightly closed and locked doors did not steer the course of this ostensibly valorous and self-guided university.

The outrage is there to be known. And now I know. It troubles me deeply, and I could merely
feign to understand how the thieves of justice sleep at night and manage to live their dirty lives
without being crushed by the infinite gravity of their morbid trespasses.

I am grateful not to be one. Can a conscience successfully be manipulated out of existence,
silenced and coaxed by money and power? Ask the Board of Visitors. Ask Henry Kissinger. Ask
the people at this college who know in their twinkling inner brain that they are little more than
cogs in a machine of self-interested misuse.

But when you inform the bright-eyed neophyte, do not do so as a "realist" describing the
inevitable, but as a fellow hopeful that the ideals of this college can fill more than empty speeches
and letterhead. And let your conscience be on the outside and not imprisoned in a dishonest lair
of vagabonds.

-- Colin Doyle,
Class of '01

New chancellor needs to focus attention back on students, not concentrate on protesters

To the Editor:

I have never been as proud to be a student at the College as I was Feb. 10. I knew protesters
were going to disrupt the Charter Day ceremony and that they were going to try to prevent
Kissinger from speaking.

Although I think that he is a crook, liar, thug, bad politician, worse political theorist and his morals
and moral intention are dubious, I wanted to hear what he had to say. I wanted him to tell the
students why he is and should be the chancellor of our college, and what his vision and hopes for
the future are.

When protesters stood up and disrupted the ceremony and the crowd stood up, I found myself on
my feet. Was it for Chile, Indochina, my college, my president or the right of the new chancellor to
speak? It was for all. As the protesters were shouting, I looked at Kissinger and saw the face of a
man who was used to this kind of treatment.

His speech offended me. It offended the entire audience, but I imagine they do not realize that.
His speech was a defense! Did he think the audience wanted him to vindicate himself for what he
did when he ruled this country? The audacity. A lot of what he said was true, but it somehow lost

15.

its meaning and truth when it came from his lips.

Here is a point that I think we have lost in this entire discussion about the legitimacy of the new chancellor: the entire point of higher education is to educate the student. This college exists for the students. Yet why did the chancellor never talk about us? Why did he not lay out his vision for our future?

For those who object to the "case against Henry Kissinger," let me remind you that history consists of the good and the bad, the black and the white; all exists in one story of one man.

There is no separating the Middle East from Indochina, and this is not about adding up pros and cons. Even if you don't object to his actions, you must wake up to the corruption around you, that, if it doesn't make you upset, makes you an accomplice.

I was proud Feb. 10 when my friends, my sometimes-ideological opposition and my fellow students decided that they were not going to collude in the actions of the Board of Visitors or of Kissinger himself. They stood up and yelled because they love this school so much.

BOV practices need to be reformed. Their meetings need to be transparent, the minutes available to all and decisions like the election of chancellor need to involve the students. I won't allow political appointees to decide who represents me without my consent. The choice is not as important as the process by which one is chosen.

On Friday, a friend of mine mentioned to a member of the administration that the selection process was the root of the problem. This person replied, "that will never change." I am sure my friend heard wrong.

How dare one think that things will not or cannot be changed. Did Thomas Jefferson ever think that blacks would come to this school? Did John Tyler imagine women would? We cannot simultaneously glorify our past, reify our future and think things do not change.

At that moment in the Hall, we were allowed to actualize together and realize that this place exists for us. We did not forget where we were, we just realized how much we loved it and could not bear to see it damaged or bloodied.

Here is a piece of advice to all: do not ever tell a black person that things cannot be changed. Do not ever tell homosexuals that things will always be the same. Do not tell women to be silent, and never ask for convenience or appropriateness. Please, do not look at the globe and say, "what is it for?" when so much of this world is mute.

Mr. Kissinger, you are not my chancellor. You are not my chancellor because you were not selected in a process by which I could voice my opinion on the matter. Give me a humble man before a rich one, an honest woman before a liar, but do not give me a criminal and ask me to be polite about it.

How dare we not internalize and externalize history. Without that, we can have no tradition.

-- James Long,
Class of '03

6/20/01

To: Dr. Kissinger
From: Theresa
RE: **Message from Ed Epstein about material he sent**

Mr. Epstein called to ask you to keep in mind the
following as you review his file:

1) It is important to note that *every* Holocaust denier (and there are only about four) has used Hitchens as a footnote.

2) Hitchens himself is very involved in this issue. Robert Faurisson is known as the "#1 Holocaust denier", and Hitchens puts forth Faurisson's position in his piece in *The Nation*. By doing so, Hitchens can't deny being a Holocaust denier because he does not deny what deniers like Faurisson claim.

3) Mr. Epstein said his advice to you would be to stay as far away from Hitchens as you possibly can. He said you should keep in mind that such an odious figure has absolutely nothing to lose.

4) Mr. Epstein said he wouldn't characterize Hitchens any differently than he (Hitchens) describes himself. The simple facts are that he defends David Sterling and accompanied Robert Faurisson on a visit to the Holocaust Museum. In this way, he is as complicitous as anyone else who denies the Holocaust.

Cultural Elite

In his judgment, Churchill's rash and needless picking of a fight with Hitler (while Churchill was often frolicking in a cataract of booze, just as Berlin radio used to claim) led to Eastern Europe's being gifted to Stalin (half true) and the British Empire's being mortgaged to Washington (quite true, as the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence had shown) and the rise of the British Labour Party (one-tenth true). Yet Charmley describes himself as a "radical-right Thatcherite." And if history means anything at all, it means that you can't have Thatcher without Churchill. The Lady herself gets quite lachrymose at the mention of his name, and her memoirs are full of Churchilliana. Indeed, in her attempt to install a patriotic curriculum in English schools, she upbraided those elements in the teaching and historical professions who "gnaw away at our national self-respect, re-writing British history as centuries of unrelieved gloom, oppression and failure—as days of hopelessness, not days of hope."

Professor Lipstadt and by Professor Christopher Browning, of Pacific Lutheran University, who is the author of *Ordinary Men*, a haunting account of one Nazi extermination squad in wartime Poland. The revisionists sent me an article by a Frenchman named Robert Faurisson, which claimed that Rudolf Höss, one of the commandants of Auschwitz, had been tortured by the British into confessing to a fantastic and unbelievable number of murders. "I declare herewith under oath that in the years 1941 to 1943, during my tenure in office as commandant of Auschwitz Concentration Camp, 2 million Jews were put to death by gassing and a ½ million by other means." This statement, specially mounted and reproduced, is an important exhibit at the Holocaust Memorial.

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Cultural Elite

described as a "mild Fascist," which I would say is putting it mildly, he has publicly endorsed Adolf Eichmann's original scheme to deport all the Jews of Europe to the island of Madagascar. Irving has been making a reasonably good living these many years, not by denying the Holocaust but by claiming that it all took place without the knowledge or consent of the Führer. He has challenged other archivists to come up with an extermination order signed by Hitler. Having flourished in this way, Irving was suddenly handed Eichmann's memoirs in Buenos Aires in 1991. He pronounced them genuine, but was then brought up short by the disclosure in the said memoirs that Eichmann believed there was a direct order. "Food for thought" was Irving's take on that, followed by the butter-wouldn't-t melt-in-his-mouth admission that he would "have to revise" his previous thesis. He has since gotten as far as saying that Eichmann's confession doesn't count because his memoirs were written after 1945 and therefore do not constitute a specifically wartime document. Oh well, that's all right then. By the by, at a recent revisionist conference, Irving and Faurisson had a public disagreement on whether there had been any mass extermination of the European Jews at all, with Irving saying that it looked rather as if there had been. So even on the wilder shores, it remains true that to be a revisionist incurs the risk of being revised.

The Body of B. Franklin, Printer: Like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out. And stript of its Lettering and Gilding. Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost: For it will, as he believ'd, appear once more. In a new & more perfect Edition, Revised and Corrected By the Author.

plaintiffs did not. It would give impressionable young minds, they argued, the errant notion that old Ben Franklin was a Hindu. And people believe that textbooks these days are censored only by the multicultural.

At a recent conference at the Mark Twain Memorial in Hartford, Connecticut, which concerned among other things the long history of efforts to ban *The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn* for everything from indecency to theism, from race mixing to "insensitivity," I had the chance to interview John Wallace, a black campaigner from Chicago who says that *Huck* is (and I quote from his leaflet) "the most grotesque example of racist trash ever written." Mr. Wallace claims to have been badly upset as a child by having the book read aloud in

But if you really want to find out what trouble is, try taking on the myth of the Kennedy dynasty. Such was the fate of Nigel Hamilton, an acclaimed and garlanded biographer who decided to have a second look at the J.F.K. legend. (So far has the wheel spun these days that Hamilton is the John F. Kennedy Scholar at the McCormack Institute of the University of Massachusetts.) Upon arrival in Massachusetts, to begin work at the Kennedy Library, Hamilton ran smack into the twin buffets of history as property and history as unassailable myth.

Even before publication, Hamilton says, he felt the weight of the authorized version. A private letter from him to his publisher was accepted in the Kennedy Library. A Kennedy-family lawyer materialized, saying that Hamilton's research would be harder to conduct if he mentioned J.F.K.'s treatment for gonorrhea. Like Churchill, J.F.K. was very unwell for much of his time in office, but the story of his Addison's disease, for example, was successfully kept out of the 60s hagiographies. An op-ed piece was written by somebody for *The New York Times*, and signed by four Kennedy siblings, excoriating Hamilton. A particular cause for complaint was his treatment of Rose Kennedy. "The fact is that she's *non compos mentis*," says Hamilton. "So she can't possibly be hurt by what I write. But she's also the Queen Mother of the clan, because she stepped in to fill the breach after Jackie went off to marry Onassis."

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VANITY FAIR/DECEMBER 1993

Theresa Cimino

From: Ed [edepstein@att.net]
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2001 3:49 PM
To: KISSINGER,HENRY
Subject: Nation Article (Followed by my analysis

The Nation, Oct 3 1994, Volume 259, no.10,pg335 (990 words)

Minority Report
by Christopher Hitchens

R.D Laing once wrote an essay titled "The Obvious." The idea was suggested to him by an opinion poll finding in the 1960s that appeared to show that millions of Americans were not aware that mainland China had a Communist government. Laing wondered aloud what one can take for granted by way of shared assumptions- not just on the part of others but oneself. George Orwell once contrived a similar exercise, trying to imagine what he would say to prove the earth was spherical if confronted by a convinced Flat Earther, These mental challenges are useful for their own sake.

So when Professor Robert Faurisson came through Washington to visit the Holocaust Museum, I hastened along to meet him. Probably no fact is more agreed upon than the scope and magnitude of the Final Solution, and its necessary as well as interesting to hold converse with those with those who maintain the whole story is a fable. Faurisson presents himself in a brisk, rationalist and Cartesian style: it is widely alleged that gas chambers--"chemical slaughterhouses"-- were used to destroy European Jewry. Very well, where is there a surviving authentic model, or photograph, or model of the operation of one such?

My own first answer must be that I have never seen such a relic of an operating gas
chamber (though I have seen small-scale crematoria in camp museums in Germany). Have I
studied the feasibility of asphyxiation en masse on the scale claimed? Do I appreciate
the immense difficulty, supposing the task to be possible in the first place, of removing
heaps of cyanide poisoned corpses from the alleged chamber? My answer must be, again, no
and no. Eh Bien, we are getting somewhere. Have I understood that much anti-Nazi
propaganda is just that? That there was no soap made from human fat? That the confession
of Rudolph Hoss, commandant of Auschwitz was extorted by coercion and in any case
mentioned a total death at Auschwitz that not even the Israel experts at Yad Vashem
credit? Here, my answers are yes and yes, because I know that the story in the first case,
and Hoss in the second, have been debunked. So, am I not ready to sign myself among the
brave and persecuted, who deny the myth of the Six Million? Not at least until I can try
a syllogism of my own, on a professor who relishes the Socratic method.

Is it not true that the National Socialist Party's propaganda specifically and
openly cited Jews as the root of all rot and evil? Is it not the case that, before the
world and before the war, Jewish persons and property was violated and vandalized in
Germany? Further, once the war had begun, were the Jews of Western Europe not shipped
eastward against their will? Suppose me to be credulous about "gas-chamber pornography,"
if these people were not put to death why did so few of them return?

There is something-- I scarcely know what to call it-- something distant about
Faurisson's response. He does not consent, as I did with his questions, to answer mine
cumulatively and in order. He remains polite and he continues to discuss, but he has
become bored--that's it--bored.

I have read the debate between Faurisson and David Irving that took place under the auspices of the "Holocaust revisionist" Institute for Historic Review at a conference in October 1992. Irving is infamous for his claim that no proof of a Fuhrer-order exists, and that if there were any mass killings of Jews, they were unauthorized by the Nazi emperor. In that debate he announces that he is an anti-Semite. When Adolf Eichmann, for example, spoke of a Final Solution:

It was quite plain to him that it was only a plan to sweep all the Jews of Europe aboard boats and transport them lock, stock and barrel down to Madagascar, where they would be on an island where they couldn't bother any of their neighbors and where none of their neighbors could bother them. I've always said and I say it here again- even though I risk making a few enemies- that I think that it would have been an ideal solution to a perennial world tragedy.

Irving also concedes that there were, indeed, mass murders of Jews on the eastern

front, most commonly by firing squads. He takes very seriously the testimony of Gen. Walter Bruns, who described a massacre he witnessed near Riga as early as November 1941. And he credits other testimony as well—doubtless with regret, since such unpleasantness makes the Madagascar option look positively humane.

Faurisson disagrees with Irving about both these occurrences of the massacres and the responsibility for such deaths as did occur. This he attributes, in our discussion, to the inevitable side effects of war. He is contemptuous of Irving as a historian and, oddly for a man with such insistence on detail, has no memory of Irving's Madagascar statement. He insists that he himself is guided in his quest by no prejudice and no ulterior motive, merely an imperative to pursue objective and verifiable truth.

One of his fellow revisionists sat at the same table to observe our discussion and broke in (obviously to be helpful, as he thought) to say "we all agree that the deportation of the Jews was a great crime. I know Robert agrees, don't you Robert?"

"No," replies Faurisson, "I do not." He explains that the Nazi responsibility in the second world war is no graver than that of many parties and regimes in modern and ancient history. So, I ask him finally, You think there was nothing unique in the Nazi system? "Nothing, morally unique, no."

Both Faurisson and Irving have been subject to a lot of stupid censorship and harassment for their writing, and it has been known for persecution to distort judgment. Some overt neo-Nazis deny the Holocaust while openly wishing that there had been a Final Solution, or will be one soon. Faurisson, I judge, is not of this company. He just doesn't think that Nazism was a big deal to begin with.

## MY ANALYSIS:

In an article in the October 3, 1994 Nation, Christopher Hitchens writes about meeting Holocaust-denier Professor Robert Faurisson on his visit to the Holocaust Museum. In that article, he uncritically accepts as true at least 5 tenets of Holocaust deniers--who holds that it that the gas chambers are a myth. To wit:

1. No "relic of an operating gas chamber" has been found

2. There would be "immense difficulty" of removing corpses from the "alleged chambers" on such a massive scale.

3. Much "anti-nazi propaganda is just that,"-- ie. untrue

4. That the confession of Rudolf Hess, commandant of Aushwitz, "was extorted by coercion"

5. That the totals of death given at Aushwitz are false.

Hitchens then asks "So, am I ready to sign myself among the brave and persecuted, who deny the myth of the 6 Million? [note:"myth\)]. And he answers conditionally: "Not until I can try a syllogism of my own on a Professor who evidently relishes the Socratic Method."

But most of what he asks concerning the Nazi persecution of the Jews, such as their detention, is not denied by the Deniers. His only real query is: if there were no gas chambers, "why did so few of them return?"

He then goes on to cite David Irving, a historian who is also a Holocaust denier (in his affadavits, if not his books), as explaining there were massacres of jews by military units on the Eastern front. And Faurisson adds the "side effects of war" as a cause for non-returning Jews.

Hitchens, in short, presents their argument, without any refutation, that the Holocaust was a myth,

[4]

the new rumors of the Second World War only as Jewish inventions and many in American circles shared that conviction.[3] Edward Beneš, President of Czechoslovakia (in exile in London), announced in November 1942, after inquiry by his staff, that the Germans, contrary to what had been reported to him, were not exterminating the Jews.[4] The American Jew, Felix Frankfurter, a Supreme Court judge, stated to Jan Karski on the subject: "I can't believe you."[5] In August of 1943, Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, warned the U.S. ambassador in Moscow by telegram that in planning a joint Allied statement on "the German crimes in Poland", it would be advisable to eliminate any mention of the gas chambers, since, as the British pointed out, there was "insufficient evidence" in the matter.[6] Even after the war, high-ranking Allied officials such as Eisenhower, Churchill and De Gaulle, in their respective memoirs, would refrain from mentioning the existence and operation of 'Nazi gas chambers'. In a manner of speaking, all these skeptics were in their own way Revisionists. Neither the Vatican, nor the International Committee of the Red Cross, nor the anti-German Resistance acted as if they put any faith in the rumors which, moreover, took the most fantastic forms: invariably the Germans were said to be exterminating the Jews, but as to the methods of extermination they were most varied: steam, gas, electricity, fire, acid, an injection of air, drowning, vacuum pump, etc. Why gas wound up the winner in the Greuelpropaganda competition is not exactly known. The Frenchman Paul Rassinier was the first true Revisionist of the postwar period. In 1950, this former deportee began to denounce the "myth of the gas chambers" in Le Mensonge d'Ulysse[7] and in a whole series of works. In 1976, the American engineer Arthur Robert Butz published The Hoax of the Twentieth Century[8] which is the most profound revisionist work written to date on the subject of the alleged genocide and the gas chambers. In 1979, a German judge, Dr. Wilhelm Stäglich, in turn published Der Auschwitz Mythos,[9] a study devoted principally to the manner in which the German courts of law were able to collaborate in the fabrication of a myth, somewhat the same way that the judges of the witchcraft trials in the past, above all from 1450 to 1650, lent their support to even the most preposterous stories told about the stake, the grill and Satan's ovens. Without wishing to diminish the great importance of Paul Rassinier, of Arthur Butz, and of Wilhelm Stäglich, I hope I may be permitted to say that, at the end of the seventies, revisionism would for once become materialistic and scientific with the research conducted on the ground by Ditlieb Felderer, the Swedish Revisionist, as well as with my own discoveries at Auschwitz proper, my observations on the use of Zyklon B for disinfestation (delousing), and my reflections on the utilization of hydrogen cyanide gas in the gas chambers of US-American penitentiaries for the execution of men condemned to death. Neither Rassinier, nor Butz, nor Stäglich had gone to Poland to the supposed sites of the crime, and none of them, moreover, had really utilized to their fullest extent the arguments of a physical, chemical, topographical, and architectural nature which today, following the investigations of D. Felderer and my own inquiries, are currently employed by the younger generation of revisionist researchers. As for the Jewish researchers, who defend the theory of the extermination of the Jews, they have resolutely remained what I call paper historians: Léon Poliakov and Raul Hilberg have stayed with paper and words and in the realm of speculation.[10] It is surprising that this vast field of properly scientific argument was not seen by Germany, which has so many chemists and engineers, and by the USA, itself with no lack of scientific minds who even had the examples right there before them of their own gas chambers using hydrogen cyanide. In 1976 at Auschwitz, I discovered both the exact configuration of the crematories that were supposed to contain homicidal gas chambers, of the delousing gas chambers (Entlausungsgaskammern), and the plans (hidden until then) of certain crematories. In 1978/1979, I published two articles in Le Monde[11] in which I summarized some of my discoveries. In 1979, at the first conference of the Institute for Historical Review, in Los Angeles, I presented those discoveries in detail. Among those present in the audience was one Ernst Zündel, a German now living in Toronto. From 1985 on, this man would prove to be the most ardent, the most effective, and also - though many seem not to know it - one of the most innovative minds among all the Revisionists. He was the first to understand why I so insisted on the chemical argument and, in particular, on the importance that the technology of the American gas chambers in the thirties and forties had for us. He understood why I wanted a specialist in these American gas chambers to go and examine the alleged execution gas chambers on the spot, in Poland. Thanks to my correspondence with American penitentiaries in the seventies, I had already discovered such a specialist in the person of Fred Leuchter, but it was Ernst Zündel, and he alone, who had the brilliant idea of asking him not only to make an examination of the buildings, but to take constituent samples of material from the disinfestation gas chambers on the one hand and from the alleged execution gas chambers on the other. In February of 1988, he took the risk of sending Fred Leuchter and an entire team to Poland at his own expense to study the alleged gas chambers of Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek. The results of the study of the buildings and of the analysis of the samples taken proved spectacular and totally in favor of the revisionist thesis. In the following

2

[4]

years, other reports would confirm the basic accuracy of the Leuchter Report: [12] first the very learned report of Germar Rudolf, [13] then the involved and secret specialist's report of the Poles, [14] and finally the study of the Austrian Walter Lüftl. [15] It only remains to be said that if Germany's accusers are not satisfied with these studies, they are at liberty to initiate their own specialist's report. What has kept them from doing it publicly, in broad daylight, these past fifty years? We must understand the disarray of Germany's accusers in the face of revisionism's successes. For half a century they have sincerely believed that the tragedy undergone by the Jews during the Second World War was of exceptional seriousness and magnitude, whereas, when reduced to its proper proportions - that is, without genocide and without gas chambers - their tragedy was just one of many other tragedies of that terrible conflict. Under the thrust of revisionist inquiries their historians step by step have had to admit that there was neither an order, nor a plan, nor a budget for the alleged genocide of the Jews; [16] that 'Wannsee' was at best only a "silly story"; [17] that there existed no specialist's report on the weapon of the crime concluding that 'the building (whether intact, "reconstructed", or in ruins) served as a homicidal gas chamber' that there is no autopsy that would allow us to conclude: 'This is the corpse of a deportee killed by poison gas'; that the confession of Rudolf Höß was no longer of any value ("Höß was always a very weak and confused witness" [18]); that their alleged witnesses had probably never seen gas chambers or gassings inasmuch as the best of them, the famous Rudolf Vrba, in 1988, had been obliged to admit before a Canadian judge and jury that in his famous book on the subject he had made use of "poetic licence" or "licentia poetarum"; [19] that the "Jewish soap" had never existed; [20] that the figure of four million victims at Auschwitz was only a fiction [21]; and that the "sources for the study of the gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable [...]. Besides, from 1942 to 1945, certainly at Auschwitz, but probably overall, more Jews were killed by so-called 'natural' causes [starvation, disease, sickness and overwork] than by 'unnatural' ones." [22] Since 2 July 1982, at the end of an international symposium the exterminationists had organized at the Sorbonne (Paris) to attempt to answer me, they had shown themselves incapable of producing the slightest proof of the existence and the operation of a single gas chamber. In March of 1992, I hurled my challenge: "Show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber!" Jean-Claude Pressac, on whom the exterminationists so much counted, had proven himself incapable of bringing forth anything but what he called "traces of the crime", and he had taken great care not to provide us with a total physical representation of the weapon used in the crime. [23] On 30 August 1994, I had a meeting with Michael Berenbaum, the scientific director of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, in his office and in the presence of four witnesses (two on his side and two on mine). I forced him to admit that, paradoxically, his museum contained no actual representation of a 'Nazi gas chamber' (the model of Krema II being only an artistic creation bearing no relation to reality). I asked him why. He finally replied: "The decision had been made [by us] not to give any physical representation of the Nazi gas chambers." His response was equivalent to that of a Catholic priest - Mr. Berenbaum is a Jewish theologian - who decided to eliminate any representation of the cross from his church. To be driven to such extremities, one must surely feel that he has his back to the wall. I think that the co-religionists of Mr. Berenbaum will at last abandon the gas chamber as they have abandoned the Jewish soap and the Auschwitz 4 million. They will go farther than that. As in the two previous cases, they will present themselves as the discoverers of the myth and accuse the Germans, the Poles, or the Communists of having fabricated the 'myth of the gas chambers'. In support of their impudent thesis, they will then invoke the names of Jews who are Revisionists totally or in part (J.G. Burg, Jean-Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Roger-Guy Dommergue, Arno Mayer, David Cole, Christopher Hitchens, Joel Hayward 1/4). They will then assign themselves the starring role. At the same time, however, transforming the 'Holocaust' of the Jews into a religious belief, this time divested of all material content, they will be only the more inflexible in denouncing authentic Revisionists as 'deniers', or 'negationists', as being intolerant, heartless, basely materialistic and hostile to the free expression of religious sentiments. For those Jews, the true Revisionists will thus continue to be diabolical in spirit even if they must be acknowledged to be in the right from a factual point of view. The Revisionists are neither diabolical nor negative. By no means are they 'naysayers'. They are positive in outlook. At the conclusion of their research - which is positivist in character - they affirm that certain beliefs are just myths. Such myths are harmful in that they feed hatred. The Revisionists strive to describe what has taken place and not what has not taken place. In sum and substance, what they proclaim to a wretched humanity is good news. Seeking only historical accuracy, they find themselves fighting against calumny and for justice. They have suffered and they will continue to suffer, but I believe, all things considered, that history will declare them right and render them justice. [24] ROBERT FAURISSON, September 23, 1994 Notes * This preface was translated from the French original by Tom Kerr.

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[1] "Stockholm, Dec. 21 (JTA). - More than 1,000 victims of spotted fever in the densely crowded Warsaw ghetto have been put to death by gas [1/4 ], it is learned today from reliable sources" (The Jewish Telegraphic Agency Bulletin, December 22, 1941, p.1).

[2] The Terrible Secret. An Investigation into the Suppression of Information about Hitler's "Final Solution", Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1980.

[3] Ibid., see "Foreign Office" in the index as well as pp. 83, 91, 94, 116, 225, etc.

[4] Ibid., pp.162f.

[5] Ibid., p.237.

[6] Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, US Printing Office, Washington 1963, vol.1 of 1943, pp. 416f.

[7] Le Mensonge d'Ulysse, La Librairie française, Paris 1950 (online: abbc.com/aaargh/fran/archRassi/prmu/ prmu.html).

[8] The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of the Jews, Institute for Historical Review, P.O.Box 2739, Newport Beach, California 92659, USA. It is advisable to read the 1993 edition which contains, in three separate supplements, the lectures given by the author in 1979, 1982 and 1992. In the 1982 lecture, I recommend the dazzling demonstration contained in pages 350-362 about "The story of the invisible elephant."

[9] Der Auschwitz-Mythos. Legende oder Wirklichkeit? Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme, Grabert-Verlag, Tübingen 1979 (online: vho.org/D/dam). The work was destroyed on orders of the German authorities. A second edition was published in Great Britain: Der Auschwitz-Mythos [...], Vorwort von Mark Weber, Beitrag von R. Faurisson, Bemerkungen von Revilo Oliver, Charles E. Weber u. Arthur R. Butz, Historical Review Press, 20 Madeira Place, Brighton, Sussex, England BN2 1TN, 1984. In both editions, the photographic documentation is from my archives.

[10] For a detailed critique of Raul Hilberg's work see Jürgen Graf, Riese auf Tönernen Füßen. Raul Hilberg und sein Standardwerk über den Holocaust, Castle Hill Publishers, Hastings 1999 (online: vho.org/D/Riese) (note of the editor).

[11] Le Monde, 29 December 1978 and 16 January 1979.

[12] An Engineering Report on the alleged execution gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, Poland, April 5, 1988, 193pp. (online: www.zundelsite.org/english/leuchter/report1/leuchter.toc.html) Ernst Zündel published this report on 23 April 1988, with a preface written by me: Samisdat Publishers, 206 Carlton Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5A 2L1.

[13] Rüdiger Kammerer and Armin Solms (eds.). Das Rudolf-Gutachten, Cromwell Press, London 1993; Engl.: Germar Rudolf, The Rudolf Report, in preparation (online: vho.org/D/rga/rgatoc.html).

[14] Die offizielle polnische Antwort auf dem Leuchter-Bericht [The official Polish reply to the Leuchter Report]. Translation of the Polish by T. Rudolph, distributed by E. Zündel (address see note 11). [A different report was published in 1994: J. Markiewicz, W. Gubala, J. Labedz, Z Zagadnien Nauk Sadowych, Z. XXX (1994), pp. 17-27; editors note.]

[15] Walter Lüftl, "Holocaust", in The Journal of Historical Review 12 (4), Winter 1992/93, pp. 391-420 online: ihr.org/jhr/v12/v12p391_Lueftl.html).

[16] In 1961, in the first edition of The Destruction of the European Jews (Quadrangle Books, Chicago, p.177), Raul Hilberg calmly affirms the existence of an order (and even of two consecutive orders!) for the extermination of the Jews. In 1985, in the second edition of his book (Holmes and Meier, New York), he totally changes his explanation of the facts; he no longer mentions any order; he writes that there was no "basic plan" (p.53) and that "no single organization directed or coordinated the entire process [of destruction]" (p.55); he adds: "No special agency was created and no special budget was devised to destroy the Jews of Europe" (p.62). He explains the whole supposed business of the extermination of the Jews by 1/4 thought transmission or telepathic divination within the German bureaucracy: "an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind-reading by a far-flung bureaucracy" (remarks made in a lecture on 22 February 1983 and confirmed by R. Hilberg at the time of his cross-examination in the Zündel trial in Toronto in 1985, per shorthand transcription, pp.846-848)!

[17] Yehuda Bauer, Professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, states precisely: "The public still repeats, time after time, the silly story that at Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was arrived at" (The Canadian Jewish News, 20 January 1992, p.8, reproducing a dispatch of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in London).

[18] Professor Christopher Browning, a contributor to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, to Christopher Hitchens, "Whose history is it?", Vanity Fair, December 1993, p.117. The professor had the gall to add: "The revisionists use [R. Höß] all the time for this reason, in order to try and discredit the memory of Auschwitz as a whole."

[19] Zündel Trial in Toronto in 1985, transcription, pp.1447-1448, 1636. The book in question is: R. Vrba, I Cannot Forgive, Bantam Books, Toronto 1964.

[20] Shmuel Krakowski, archives director of Yad Vashem, and Professor Yehuda Bauer

4

finally admitted in 1990 that "the Nazis never made soap from human fat" (The Jerusalem Post International Edition, 5 May 1990). In a cemetery of Nice (France), there is a monument which bears the following inscription: "This urn contains soap from human fat manufactured by the Germans of the Third Reich with the bodies of our deported brothers."

[21] In Jean-Claude Pressac's opinion, the total number of deaths at Auschwitz, in round numbers, lies between 630,000 and 710,000; among them we must count 470,000 to 550,000 Jews who were gassed: Die Krematorien von Auschwitz. Die Technik des Massenmordes, Piper-Verlag, Munich 1994, p. 202.

[22] Arno J. Mayer, The "Final Solution" in History, Pantheon Books, New York 1988, pp.362, 365. The author, of Jewish origin, is a Professor of History at Princeton University (USA).

[23] It is noteworthy that although he knows how to draw, in none of his works does J.-C. Pressac venture to offer us a concrete representation of an entire gas chamber with an explanation of its "technique and operation". In his huge book (Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York 1989), he says that no "direct proof" exists but only "criminal traces" or "indirect proofs" (p.429).

[24] A basic work, indispensable for the study of historical revisionism, is that of Canadian trial lawyer Barbara Kulaszka, Did Six Million Really Die? Report of the Evidence in the Canadian "False News" Trial of Ernst Zündel - 1988, Samisdat Publishers, 206 Carlton Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5A 2L1, 1992 (online: www.zundelsite.org/english/dsmrd/dsmrdtoc.html).

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Preface

Installed: 5/16/98, 6: 00 PM, PST

Theresa Cimino

From: Ed [edepstein@att.net]
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 11:21 AM
To: KISSINGER,HENRY
Subject: Timeline,CH&Faurisson

JUL 06 2001

Timeline: Hitchens and Faurisson

1. 1985. Hitchens defends Chomsky right to defend Faurisson's right to be published. Grand Street, the Chorus and the Cassandras. Hitchens says Faurisson is "insanitary" but he has right to be heard

2. In the December 1993, Christopher Hitchens, wrote an article "Whose history Is It?" in Vanity Fair in which he conducted a test to verify a charge of Faurisson that the Holocaust Memorial Museum contained false documentation of the Holocaust. As part of "an experiment," as he himself describes it in Vanity Fair, he asked the Institute for Historical Review, an overt center for Holocaust Denial research, to provide him with their "best shot." He got in response an article Robert Faurisson which asserted that Rudolf Hoss, one of the commandants at Auschwitz had been tortured by the British into " confessing to a fantastic and unbelievable number of murders." (2.5 million). Hitchens called scholars Christopher Browning and Deborah Lipstadt, whom he calls "counter-revisionists", to get them on record about Hoss. He quotes Browning as saying "Hoss was always a very weak and confused witness" and Lipstadt as referring him to her book which estimates that a slightly lower number (1.5 to two million).

Hitchens concluded (confirming Faurisson) in Vanity Fair, that "according to the counter-revisionists, an important piece of evidence in the holocaust museum is not reliable."

3. Dinner with Faurisson and Faurisson associate Andrew Gray (A top revisionist and Wagner expert) in which, according to Faurisson, he told Faurisson he was impressed with his debunking of Hoss.

4. On August 31, 1994, Hitchens went to the Holocaust Memorial in Washington with Robert Faurisson, and Gray to confront Michael Berenbaum, then Head of the Research Institute at the Holocaust Memorial at Washington (and now head of the Shoah Project in Los Angeles). Faurisson notes in his book on Revisionism;

We spoke in his [Berenbaum's] office, in the presence of four witnesses (two on either side). I forced him to admit that, paradoxically enough, his Museum contains not a single concrete representation of a Nazi gas chamber (since the model

of Krema II is only an artistic creation bearing no resemblance to

reality).

According to Berenbaum, this confrontation was taped by his assistant.

(The other witness is probably Andrew Grey)

5. On September 23, 1994, Faurisson wrote a preface to his book on "revisionism" in which he cited seven other revisionists or partial revisionists who he said were Jewish and who he asserted had a special role in "revisionism". He wrote:

... [Jews] will ultimately give up
the gas chambers just as they gave up the stories of Jewish soap and
the
four million of Auschwitz. But they will go further. Just as in the
latter
two cases, they will again make themselves seem to have discovered
the
myth, and will accuse the Germans, the Polish or the Communists of
having fabricated the 'myth of the gas chambers' in the first place.
To
lend credence to their claim, they will then name Jews who are
partial or
full revisionists (J.G.Burg, Jean-Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Roger-Guy
Dommergue, Arno Mayer, David Cole, Christopher Hitchens, Stephen
Hayward.)

1

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6. Christopher Hitchens then wrote his Minority Report column in the Nation (cover date October 3, 1994) about a dialogue between himself and Faurisson.

Faurisson begins:

> "it is widely alleged that gas chambers--"chemical slaughterhouses--" were used to destroy European Jewry. Very well, where is there a surviving authentic model, or photograph, or model of the operation of one such?."

Hitchens replies (echoing Faurisson's own words to Berenbaum):

> "My own first answer must be that I have never seen such a relic of an operating gas chamber (though I have seen small-scale crematoria in camp museums in Germany)."

Faurisson then asks whether Hitchens

> "understood that much anti-Nazi propaganda is just that? That there was no soap made from human fat? That the confession of Rudolph Hoss, commandant of Auschwitz was extorted by coercion and in any case mentioned a total death at Auschwitz that not even the Israel experts at Yad Vashem credit?"

Hitchens answers

> "Here, my answers are yes and yes, because I know that the story in the first case, and Hoss in the second, have been debunked."

Hitchens concluded "Both Faurisson and Irving have been subject to a lot of stupid censorship and harassment for their writing"

7. Faurisson writes a letter to Hitchens
noting "You told me you have been very impressed by my article on "How the British
obtained the confessions of Rudolf Höss [...]." You had the opportunity of revealing this
to the readers of Nation. Why didn't you do"

8. Hitchens dined with Irving in Washington in 1994. Irving, who described Hitchens as "open minded," noted in his journal about the trip (which he put on the internet)

10. Subsequently in his Vanity Fair column, "Hitler's Ghost", 1995, Hitchens argued that Irving's books deserve to be published in America, describing criticism of Irving as "hysterical and old-maidish," declared "David Irving is not just a Fascist historian, he is also a great historian of Fascism."

Time Puts the Boot In

http://www.ipp.co.uk/StMartinsPress/Hitchens0696.html

Vanity Fair

JUNE 1996, pages 72-74

Christopher Hitchens

Explanation. THE FAMOUS New York firm of publishers, St Martin's Press, which had previously published several books by David Irving and requested him to provide jacket-puffs to promote the works of their other authors, contracted to publish his biography Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich in April 1996.

To the lasting credit of the American literary world, and the spluttering rage of the ADL, **Vanity Fair** published this article by left-wing British journalist **Christopher Hitchens** only a few weeks after the scandalous episode, backing David Irving to the hilt.

# Hitler's
Ghost

by Christopher Hitchens

CHERRY BLOSSOMS are bursting over the Tidal Basin and the Jefferson Memorial as I ascend the steps of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. There is to be a learned seminar today, on the newest interpretation of the Final Solution. **Daniel Jonah Goldhagen**, a 36-year-old assistant professor at Harvard, is to defend his thesis in *Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust*, a book which has been a spring sensation.

Having immersed myself in this volume for a weekend, I am eager to ask one big question that cries to heaven for an answer. It is this:

*Who on earth does
Goldhagen think he is
arguing with?*

He comes to tell us there was a good deal of state- and church-sponsored anti-Semitism in German culture. He adds that the Nazis made great use of Jew hatred in their propaganda. He goes on to say that many Germans took part in beatings, killings, and roundups not because they were coerced but because they liked the idea. He announces that not many Germans resisted the persecution of their Jewish countrymen.

Excuse me, but I knew this and so did you. Moreover, the sarcastic phrase about "obeying orders" is not even a well-known explanation, only a well-known *excuse*. All the way

1061

5/3/00 3:01 PM

http://www.ipp.co.uk/Online/99/02/Hitchens.htm

[L.C.]

## Our opinion

AR

David Irving's
ACTION REPORT

© Focal Point 1999 F

E-MAIL

write to David Irving

3 of 3

5/3/99 3:12 PM

What is 'Holocaust Denial'?

## Extermination Policy?

## Auschwitz

So just what constitutes "Holocaust denial"? Surely a claim that most Auschwitz inmates died from disease and not systematic extermination in gas chambers would be "denial." But perhaps not. Jewish historian Arno J. Mayer, a Princeton University professor, wrote in his 1988 study *Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The 'Final Solution" in History'*: ... From 1942 to 1945, certainly at Auschwitz, but probably overall, more Jews were killed by so-called 'natural' causes than by 'unnatural' ones." (note 9)

> ... Many questions remain open ... All in all, how many bodies were cremated in Auschwitz? How many died there all told? What was the national, religious, and ethnic breakdown in this commonwealth of victims? How many of them were condemned to die a

What is 'Holocaust Denial'?

## Gas Chambers

## Höss Testimony

## Forensic Investigations

What is 'Holocaust Denial'?

chambers' in Auschwitz did not take place... The supposed facilities for mass killing in Auschwitz and Birkenau were not suitable for this purpose..." (note 19)

## Discredited Perspective

## Notes

2. *Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal (IMT "blue series"), Vol. 22, p. 496.*

13. J.-C. Pressac, *Les Crèmetoires d'Auschwitz: La machinerie du meurtre de masse* (Paris: CNRS, 1993). See also: R. Faurisson, "Jean-Claude Pressac's New Auschwitz Book," *The Journal of Historical Review*, Jan.-Feb. 1994, p. 24.

18. The complete text of this report was published in English in *The Journal of Historical Review* Summer 1991.

19. G. Rudolf, *Gutachten ueber die Bildung und Nachweisbarkeit von Cyanidverbindungen in den*

SIGN
HERE

5/2/99 9:37 AM

Time, Puts the Boot In

http://www.tpp.co.uk/StMartinsPress/Hitchens0696.htm

The second thing that happens is that I feel a new respect for the Research Institute at the Holocaust museum. It can't have been easy, this trashing of an attractive and earnest young man. How was he to know that there is more to the Holocaust than meditations on cruelty and the German character, or that he was supposed to have a deep theoretical knowledge of Fascism? Doesn't almost every Hollywood and pulp outlet make the Final Solution seem like a sort of morality tale? Did not *The New Republic's* Leon Wieseltier--whose remarks closed this seminar--once observe mordantly that "there's no business like Shoah business"? So, good for the institute.

Irving *does* have a rounded and developed theory of Fascism, which is to say that he has studied it a lot and it's had a bum rap. He's even been *quoted* as calling himself a "mild Fascist" or "a moderate Fascist"--oxymoronic if true. In the week that I went to the Holocaust-museum seminar, Irving was hastily dumped by St. Martin's Press, which had undertaken to produce his *book* on the papers of Hitler's minister of propaganda, *Joseph Goebbels*, the choreographer for the Nuremberg style, and had then, at the very threshold of publication, taken fright. Book canceled, author disowned, tearful statements from the top brass about how if only they had known...

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Things were rather different in my country of birth, which doesn't even *have* a First Amendment. More than 120 book sections of English magazines and newspapers have requested copies from Irving's British publisher, and *reviews* are pouring in. I might mention **Robert Harris**, author of *Fatherland* and *Enigma*, who wrote in the London *Evening Standard* on April 1 that "in the words of the military writer **John Keegan**: 'No historian of the Second World War can afford to ignore Irving.' Few contemporary scholars have his depth of knowledge, virtually none has met as many of its leading figures and nobody, surely, has unearth more original material--a private archive known as the 'Irving Collection,' always generously made available to other researchers, which weighs more than half a ton."

Harris could have added that his own brilliant book *Selling Hitler*--describing the 1983 *forgery* of "the Hitler Diaries," which hoodwinked a large chunk of the British establishment (including historians of the caliber of **Hugh Trevor-Roper**, author of *The Last Days of Hitler*)--was made possible in part by Irving's finding that those nasty papers were indeed a fake. Irving rendered another service by unmasking some spurious documents connecting Churchill and Mussolini. He speaks faultless German. He has, in the most recent case, been the first historian to see some 75,000 pages of *diary* entries by Joseph Goebbels, held in secrecy in Moscow from 1945 to 1992. His studies of the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship, of the *bombing* of Dresden, of the campaigns of Rommel and others, are such that you can't say you know the subject *at all* unless you have read them. And, incidentally, he has never and not once described the Holocaust as a "hoax."

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Time Puts the Boot In

> "If these people want to speak, let them. It only leads those of us who do research to re-examine what we might have considered as obvious. And that's useful for us. I have quoted *Eichmann* references that come from a neo-Nazi publishing house. I am not for taboos and I am not for repression."

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June 1996

Dear Friend,

The Carto Mess

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## Discredited Perspective

## Notes

13. J.-C. Pressac, *Les Crimetoires d'Auschwitz: La machinerie du meurtre de masse* (Paris: CNRS, 1993). See also: R. Faurisson, "Jean-Claude Pressac's New Auschwitz Book," *The Journal of Historical Review*, Jan.-Feb. 1994, p. 24.

15. Rupert Butler, *Legions of Death* (England: 1983), pp. 235-237; C. Hitchens, "Whose History it?," *Vanity Fair* (New York), Dec. 1993, p. 117.

17. A deluxe edition of *The Leuchter Report* is available from the IHR for $20.00, plus $2.00.

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AN EXTRAORDINARY row has erupted in Washington DC between high-profile journalists who were once the closest of friends. It has all the classic black comedy-elements of a Jewish squabble, except that the chosen victim, British columnist (Vanity Fair) Christopher Hitchens, was unaware until relatively recently that he must count himself one of their number.

Hitchens is accused, among other crimes, of consorting with British historian **David Irving**; which is more than enough to consign him to the eternal fires of damnation. [Mr Irving's response]

From the pages of MSNBC:

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AAARGH

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It would seem to be a menial task, a kind of triviality which would not deserve further commentaries. In fact, his demand, uttered about twenty years ago, has not ceased to create a scandal. As a matter of fact, whenever Noam Chomsky, an activist involved in the critique of the State, with an anarchistic background, criticizing most of all the US State and its imperialist policies, starts a speech in front of an ever-growing audience, in North America, or in front of the medias, there is always a guy or a small group in the public to complain in a more or less bitter way about Chomsky's involvement with the revisionists, materialized by a text he has written and which has been used as a foreword to the previous defence tract issued by Faurisson in 1980, his *Mémoire en défense*. So that, Chomsky, after twenty years, has to repeat, every evening, that the freedom of expression is a whole, cannot be cut into pieces and that Revisionists, whatever their views **that he does not share at all**, have the same right as anybody else to talk freely without being victimized by a stupid repression. This question reappears in each of Chomsky's intervention in the press, TVs and elsewhere. We know how irritating the recurrence of these silly questions can be, launched by the Lobby spokespersons, the supporters of an aggressive Israel and the enemies of freedom. Day after day, in a thousand articles and interventions, Chomsky has to claim again and again his solidarity with our basic rights. We greet his constancy and we know that the bonds of friendship and solidarity which united us before the emergence of the revisionist question maintained themselves unadulterated because they are rooted in the same critique of the State, of its violence and its lies, of the classes and the groups that use its power to impose their private interest over the toiling people who feed them.

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undermining the US foreign policy. He then decided not to involve himself in the study of this question and to keep as a working implement the views that he had acquired as a youth in the leftwing Zionist movements he had approached at the time. As we said at the start, no one is under the obligation to get involved in this affair. If those who do get involved are then under the control of rationality, those who stay outside cannot provide well-grounded opinions on the core of the question. We provide here an example of Chomsky's interventions, a speech he delivered last year in the heart of occupied Palestine, at Birzeit University, to a packed Palestinian audience. The title was "National Sovereignty and Democracy in the Third World".

As a starter we recommend the interview published by *Le Monde* on Sept. 1st. We consider as very significant the fact that this newspaper which in the last 15 years has exhibited the worst bad faith and the most violent hostility towards Chomsky, guilty of judging the Parisian intelligentsia as mediocre and deeply committed to Stalism, is now, all of a sudden, opening its columns to him. Something weird is happening in the wonderland of the journalists.

Then, to make everything clear, we display the text by Chomsky which started the prairie fire. We have it in *English* and in the *French* translation which was used as a *foreword* to the Faurisson defence tract. Look at what Christopher Hitchens has to say about it: "Chomsky's seven-page comment received more attention in the international press, as Paul Berman noted, than any other piece of work for which he had been responsible." We can see very well that twenty years later this text still raises hair on many bald heads. He later gave his reasons in a famous *Nation* article (Feb. 1981), "His Right to Say It". Its conclusion was: "It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers."

These questions have been taken up in a recent biography of Chomsky which is not entirely devoid of mistakes. We can considere now as classical: for instance, the mistake attributing to Thion or the Vieille Taupe Group the initiative of a petition, signed by Chomsky, to demand the respect of the right of Professor Faurisson. Even Chomsky himself seems to believe this! It was the doing of Mark Weber, who later rose to become the present-day director of the Institute of HistoriACL Review. This petition reached Paris only later. As for the rest, this biography, written with a kind of tired sadness, brings forth some factual elements. We have extracted the pages dealing with the Faurisson and Pol Pot affairs, as well as some considerations on the French intellectuals, in particular those producing these heaps of crap that are ponderously called "postmodernism". We find them ludicrous. The choice is there between the original English version and a (rather poor) French translation.

What we always found stricking was the need in which Chomsky's opponents found themselves to invent and lend him opinions they found thus easier to fight.. It has been the case of a particularly disgusting underdog called Claude Roy who, as a former royalist, fascist, stalinian, socialist, turned liberal,was an usual writer in *Le Nouvel Observateur*. In 1980, Serge Thion had to vigorously intervene to dismantle his castle of lies and deceptions. In a more general way, he had analyzed the attacks against

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