Theresa Cimino

From: Ed [edepstein@att.net]
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2001 3:51 PM
To: KISSINGER,HENRY
Subject: Nation Article Analysis (forgot in include this last section)

MY ANALYSIS OF NATION ARTICLE (LAST SECTION)

Analysis: Faurisson presents argument in form of 4 questions; none of which Hitchens challenges, and affirms 3 of Faurisson's points.

1. Faurisson: 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?

1. Hitchens: 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).

[Note: Faurisson does not dispute existence of crematoria which he claims were necessary to dispose of death from typhoid and other diseases.]

2. Faurisson
claimed? Do
possible in the first
corpses from the alleged chamber?

3. Hitchens
no and no.

I have studied the feasibility of asphyxiation en masse on the scale
I appreciate the immense difficulty, supposing the task to be
place, of removing heaps of cyanide poisoned

2. Hitchens no and no.

3. Faurisson
That there
3. Hitchens

Have I understood that much anti-Nazi propaganda is just that?
was no soap made from human fat?

3. Hitchens yes, because I know that the story [has] been debunked

4. Faurisson
by
Israel

The confession of Rudolph Hoss, commandant of Auschwitz was extorted
coercion and mentioned a total death at Auschwitz that not even the
experts at Yad Vashem credit?

4. Hitchens yes, because I know that Hoss[has] been debunked

Hitchens "syllogism " is a series of rhetorical questions, none of which contradict Faurisson's stated argument that the Jews were targeted, abused, put in concentration camps and deported to Eastern Europe, where many died of disease and the side effects of war. The questions in no way rebut or take issue with these thesis.

Theresa Cimino

From: Ed [edepstein@att.net]
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2001 3:59 PM
To: KISSINGER, HENRY
Subject: Hitchens & Faurrison & Irving

1. Robert Faurisson, the most outspoken of Holocaust deniers- or "revisionist" as he refers to himself, summarized his opinion on the "Holocaust" in sixty words [in French]:

The alleged Hitlerite gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews are one and the same historical lie which opened the way to a gigantic political-financial fraud, whose principal beneficiaries are the State of Israel and international Zionism, and the principal victims the German people - but not its leaders - and the entire Palestinian people.

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 four million of Auschwitz. But they will go further. Just as in the two cases, they will again make themselves seem to have discovered 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.)

2. Faurisson was well acquainted with Christopher Hitchens. On August 31, 1994, he went with him and another associate to the Holocaust Memorial in Washington for a pre-arranged meeting with 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)."

3. 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

1

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."

4. How has Hoss, the German commandant who testified the Holocaust had taken place, been "debunked? The relevant footnote in Faurisson's book is curiously circular, citing "Christopher Hitchens, "Whose history is it?" in Vanity Fair, December 1993, p. 117."

5. Hitchens wrote that column, he claims, as part of "an experiment." He conducted his "experiment" as follows:

A) he asked the Institute for Historical Review, an overt center for Holocaust Denial research, to provide him with their "best shot."

B) He got in response an article 'by a Frenchman named Robert Faurisson that claimed 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." Hoss stated that between two million and 2.5 million Jews were killed by gas at Auschwitz.

C) Hitchens called Christopher Browning and Deborah Lipstadt, both of whom had written books affirming the holocaust, and 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—victims of Auschwitz.

D) Hitchens then writes in Vanity Fair that Hoss' confession is "an important exhibition at the Holocaust Memorial." He concludes "according to the counter-revisionists, an important piece of evidence in the holocaust museum is not reliable."

6. Hitchens's article— and "research" — is cited as "evidence" that the Holocaust Memorial contains bogus evidence in the pamphlets put out by the Institute for Historical Review and the tracts of other Holocaust deniers on the Internet.

7. Hitchens, in the Nation (10/3/94) defended Faurisson as well as writer David Irving on civil liberty grounds, noting "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."

8. David Irving is less overt than Faurisson in his books, such as the War Path, in which he goes no furth than make the case that there is no contemporaneous evidence that Hitler gave a written order for the Holocaust. In public statements, however, he goes much further. For example, when he addressed a convention sponsored by the Institute for Historical Review in 1990, he told the audience "the holocaust of the Germans of Dresden was real. The holocaust of the Jews in the Auschwitz gas chambers is a fabrication."

9. 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." As for Irving's holocaust denial (see point 9), Hitchens states "And, incidentally, he [Irving] has never and not once described the Holocaust "as a hoax."

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Time Puts the Boot In

http://www.fpp.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.

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.

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

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The Unfailing Solidarity of Chomsky with the Revisionists

http://www.radiolslam.net/aaargh/engl/chomskyengl.html

[LC]

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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http://www.radiolslam.net/aaargh/engl/chomsky.engl hi

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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 hypothesis, 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 between 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 Massachusetts 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.

Interested readers are kindly requested to consider buying the original document from the publisher, which is handier to read as a book on paper. In order to survive, books must be produced and sold by publishers.

We see the act of displaying a written document on Internet as the equivalent of displaying the said document on the shelves of a library open to the public. It costs us a modicum of labor and money. The only benefit accrues to the reader who, we surmise, thinks by himself. A reader looks for a document on the Web at his or her own risks. There is no reason to believe that the author of the present text would take responsibility for any other document displayed on this Website.

Be reminded of the US copyright law, Section 107:

Section 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use

... the fair use of copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified in above sections, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use),

What is 'Holocaust Denial'?

http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/denial

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" --