Having been fraudulently declared on Wikipedia by CIA and Zionist trolls to be a “Holocaust Denier,” I decided to see what that meant. I turned to Ron Unz’s article “American Pravda: Holocaust Denial.” Just as incompetent Wikipedia attributed David Irving’s views to me, no doubt Wikipedia will credit me with authorship of Ron Unz’s article.

Ron Unz is a prolific reader who provides reliable accounts. His article reports on books that promote the official Holocaust story and on books that have researched the Holocaust and find facts different from the official story. The best way to get your feet wet on any subject is to see what Ron Unz has to say. Unz, of course, is thorough, because he understands the importance of truth. Reading his articles is like reading a monograph. This one is 18,000 words. It takes committment. You have to really want to know. The alternative is to read the dozen plus books that Unz reports on. So, it is either Unz’s 18,000 words or a couple of million words. I suggest the shortcut that Unz provides. If it spurs your interest, you can start on the books.

Unz’s article begins with a map of Europe showing 15 countries in which any denial of the official Holocaust account, whether true or not, lands the denier in prison. http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-holocaust-denial/ I have always wondered why the story of The Holocaust, which has been used to extract billions of dollars from Switzerland and the German taxpayers and to shield Israel from its vast war crimes, violations of international law, and United Nations Resolutions (see Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry, https://www.amazon.com/Holocaust-Industry-Reflections-Exploitation-Suffering/dp/1781685614/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Norman+ Finkelstein&qid=1575645211&s=books&sr=1-1), is thought by Zionists to be so fragile that it cannot stand challenge. A story that is true has nothing to fear from denial, as the facts will defend the story. If Zionists are confident of The Holocaust story, they should show their confidence by permitting their account to be examined and debated. The truth will emerge, and if Zionists are correct they will be vindicated.

My interest in The Holocaust is not whether it is true or partly true or false.
My interest is in its position as a dogma that causes 15 countries to imprison skeptics. Dogmas have not been popular in the Western world since scientists won the struggle with the Catholic Church over whether Earth or the Sun was the center of the solar system.

For reasons of religious authority, the Church insisted that Earth was fixed and the Sun circled Earth. Astronomers said it was the opposite. Astronomers were at a disadvantage not only because the Church had more authority but also because everyone could see the Sun rise in the east, circle Earth and set in the west. No one could see Earth turning on its axis as it circled the Sun. It took imagination, reason, and abstract thought to see the process as it really was. Indeed, even today in the 21st century we still speak, incorrectly, of the Sun rising in the East and setting in the West, because that is what it looks like.

I mention this controversy not to imply that dogmas are always incorrect and, therefore, that The Holocaust is incorrect like the Catholic Church. What concerns me about dogmas is not whether they are true or false but that they prohibit free inquiry. Science, democracy, civil liberty, and modern society are based on free inquiry, free speech, and free thought. Dogmas are inconsistent with free society; yet, we have an institutionalized dogma, supported by prison sentences if it is violated. If we can have one unchallengeable dogma, what’s to prevent a second, a third, a hundred, a thousand? It is a slippery slope.

Indeed, we are already sliding down the slippery slope. For example, it has become extremely difficult, if not impossible, to investigate the genetic basis of intelligence. All sorts of people can be upset by findings of various inquiries, both scientific and scholarly. Once we start setting aside free inquiry because it upsets some people, where does that take us? As I wrote in my December 3, 2019 column, “Can Truth Be Our Future?” https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/12/03/can-truth-be-our-future/ it takes us back to pre-modern time when truth issued from the voice of authority and served authority. We are a lot closer to returning to this pre-modern time than we are aware.

Another problem with the official Holocaust story is that it is so inflexible that there is no room for people who agree with it to correct errors. Suppose, for example, that German documents documenting The Holocaust were finally found, and the recorded number was 4 million. To publish the document would be risky in the 15 countries, because technically it denies the official figure of 6 million and thereby constitutes holocaust denial. David Irving, for example, found evidence that hundreds of thousands of Jews were massacred, but not in gas chambers, so his confirmation of Jewish deaths made him a Holocaust denier.

My interest in The Holocaust is not its truth or falsity. My interest is in the precedent it sets for preventing free inquiry and debate. Other topics are already joining The Holocaust as issues closed to debate. It is obvious that all sorts of interests will seek this protection for their agendas.

Unz got interested in The Holocaust because of an attack on the libertarian magazine Reason for publishing holocaust deniers. At the time Unz accepted The Holocaust story because he had heard it repeated so often. But the attack on libertarians as holocaust deniers made him curious, and he decided to investigate. This is what he found:

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American Pravda: Holocaust Denial
by Ron Unz

http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-holocaust-denial/

Reason Magazine and Holocaust Denial

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A few years ago I somehow heard about a ferocious online dispute involving a left-leaning journalist named Mark Ames and the editors of Reason magazine, the glossy flagship publication of America’s burgeoning libertarian movement. Although I was deep in my difficult programming work, curiosity got the better of me, so I decided to take a look.

During the Immigration Wars of the 1990s, I’d become quite friendly with the Reason people, frequently visiting their offices, especially during my “English” campaign of 1998, when I’d located my own political headquarters in the same small Westside LA office building they used. As my content-archiving software project began absorbing more and more of my time during the early 2000s, I’d gradually lost touch with them, but even so, the 40-odd years of their magazine archives had become the first publication I’d incorporated into my system, and I was now pleased to discover that both sides in the ongoing feud had put my system to good use in exploring those old Reason issues.

Apparently, the libertarians grouped around Reason had successfully been making political inroads into Silicon Valley’s enormously wealthy technology industry, and had now organized a major conference in San Francisco to gather together their supporters. Their left-leaning rivals decided to nip that project in the bud by highlighting some of the more unsavory ideological positions that mainstream libertarian leaders had once regularly espoused. Perhaps Ron Paul and other libertarians might oppose overseas wars and drug laws, and support cutting taxes and regulations, but they and their Republican Party allies were unspeakably vile on all sorts of other issues, and all “good thinkers” should therefore stay very far away.

The debate began in rather mundane fashion with an article by Ames entitled “Homophobia, Racism, and the Kochs” denouncing Reason for sharing a platform with a high-ranking Republican Congresswoman of Christian conservative views, as well as the magazine’s reliance upon Koch funding and its alleged support for Apartheid South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s. The response by the Reason editor seemed quite persuasive, and he rightfully dismissed the guilt-by-association attacks. He also outlined the gross errors and omissions in the charges regarding South Africa, and ridiculed Ames as a notoriously error-prone “conspiracy theorist.” Surely few outsiders would have paid any attention to such a typical exchange of mudslinging between rival ideological camps.

But then things took a very different turn, and a week later Ames returned with a 5,000 word article bearing a title sure to grab attention: “Holocaust Denial.” He claimed that in 1976 Reason had published an entire special issue devoted to that explosive topic.

Surely everyone on the Internet has encountered numerous instances of Holocaust Denial over the years, but for a respectable magazine to have allotted a full issue to promoting that doctrine was something else entirely. For decades, Hollywood has sanctified the Holocaust, and in our deeply secular society accusations of Holocaust Denial are a bit like shouting “Witch!” in Old Salem or leveling accusations of Trotskyism in the Court of the Red Czar. Progressive Sam Seder’s Majority Report radio show devoted a full half-hour segment to the charges against Reason, and Googling “Reason Magazine”+ ”Holocaust Denial” today yields thousands of hits. This substantial explosion of Internet controversy was what caught my own attention at the time.

My initial reaction was one of puzzlement. Reason had been the first periodical I had digitized in my system a dozen years earlier, and surely I would have noticed an entire issue promoting Holocaust Denial. However, I soon discovered that February 1976 had been excluded from the supposedly complete set the magazine had shipped me for processing, an omission that itself raises serious suspicions. But Ames had somehow located a copy in a research library and produced a full PDF, which he conveniently placed on the Internet to support his accusations.

Carefully reading his article and then glancing through the contents, I decided that his accusation was technically false but substantially true. Apparently the actual theme of the issue was “Historical Revisionism” and except for a couple of paragraphs buried here and there among the 76 pages, Holocaust Denial never came up, so characterizing it as a Holocaust Denial issue was obviously a grotesque exaggeration. But on the other hand, although few of the authors were familiar to me, it seemed undeniably true that they were numbered among America’s more prominent Holocaust Deniers, and most of them were deeply associated with organizations situated in that same camp. Furthermore, there were strong indications that their positions on that topic must certainly have been known to the Reason editors who commissioned their pieces.

The clearest case comes when Ames quoted the explicit statements of Dr. Gary North, a prominent libertarian thinker who had served as one of Ron Paul’s earliest Congressional aides and later became his longtime partner in politics and business:

“Probably the most far-out materials on World War II revisionism have been the seemingly endless scholarly studies of the supposed execution of 6 million Jews by Hitler. The anonymous author [Hoggan] of ‘The Myth of the Six Million’ has presented a solid case against the Establishment’s favorite horror story—the supposed moral justification for our entry into the war…The untranslated books by the former Buchenwald inmate Prof. Paul Rassinier, have seriously challenged the story…A recent and very inexpensive book in magazine form, Did Six Million Really Die?, appeared in 1973, written by Richard Harwood.”

A later issue carried a thousand word letter by Prof. Adam Reed of Rockefeller University, a past Reason contributor, strongly affirming the mainstream Holocaust narrative by quoting from standard works, and taking Dr. North to task for his citation of Holocaust Denial works of doubtful quality. But North firmly stood his ground:

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“The second point, that about 6 million Jews really did die in the concentration camps, is one that will be open until the records of the period become fully available. I am not convinced yet, one way or the other. I am happy to have Dr. Reed’s interpretation of the data, but until the publishing companies and academic guild encourage the re-examination of the data, I shall continue to recommend that those interested in revisionist questions read The Myth of the Six Million and Did Six Million Really Die? as reasonable (though not necessarily irrefutable) pieces of historical revisionism. If a person can’t make up his mind, he should do more reading.”

Dr. James J. Martin was the lead contributor to the February Revisionism issue, and the preceding January issue had featured an extended Q&A by the editors, with one of the queries directly addressing the controversial topic:

REASON: Dr. Martin, do you believe (1) that the specific charge against the Nazis of having a mass extermination program of several million Jews is true, and (2) that the Allied atrocities were as great or greater than those of the Germans, from your study of the question?
MARTIN: Well, I never made a head count of all who lost their lives in the War-we’ve seen a wide variety of statistical materials, some of which have been pulled out of thin air. As a consequence, it’s hard to make any kind of estimate of this sort, whether ten more were killed on the one side or the other is not a particularly entrancing subject as far as I’m concerned. Whether allegations can be proven it remains to be seen. I don’t believe that the evidence of a planned extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe is holding up. I have been influenced over the years by the works of Paul Rassinier, and he still has to be reckoned with.

His works have been ignored for a long time, and sooner or later somebody’s going to have to do a decent job of coping with what he has presented. I think Rassinier’s general case is sound at the moment and I haven’t seen any strong evidence to upset his allegations or his assertions that there was no planned program for the extermination of European Jews. His other main case is that there were no gas chamber extermination programs. The fact that a great many people lost their lives is incontrovertible—that the German concentration camps weren’t health centers is well known-but they appear to have been far smaller and much less lethal than the Russian ones.

Another major contributor to the issue was Dr. Austin J. App, and just three years earlier he had published a short book bearing the lurid title The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the German People for Hard Marks with Fabricated Corpses.

In a follow-up column by Ames’ own editor, the stunned reactions of various journalists are listed, with one of them Tweeting out “I had no idea that Reason Magazine was once a haven for Holocaust Revisionism. Holy Moly.” Despite the angry obfuscations of present-day Reason staffers, this description seems quite correct.

Indeed, there seems considerable circumstantial evidence that around that time “Holocaust Skepticism” extended rather broadly within the entire nascent libertarian movement. Aside from the sharp critique of the aforementioned Prof. Reed, the overwhelming majority of the reader responses seemed totally favorable, with Samuel Konkin III, editor of New Libertarian Weekly and various similar publications, suggesting that the February issue was one of the best they had ever published. David Nolan, founder of America’s Libertarian Party, also praised the issue as “outstanding.”

The two editors of the issue in question even today remain quite prominent figures at Reason and within American libertarianism, while the masthead then carried names such as David Brudnoy and Alan Reynolds, who both later became influential figures in conservative and libertarian politics. There seems no evidence of any resignations or angry recriminations following the issue’s publication, which seems to have been digested with total equanimity, apparently arousing less rancor than might have been generated by a dispute over monetary policy.

http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-holocaust-denial/

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Afterword: I myself am not going to write on The Holocaust. The topic is too far removed from my interests and my expertise. However, when I locate better evidence for The Holocaust than Ron Unz and David Irving have found, I will post it. Every story has two sides, and both need to be examined in order to arrive at a conclusion.

There is scientific evidence relating to The Holocaust. There is a chapter reporting this evidence, I am told, in John Wear’s book, Germany’s War https://www.amazon.com/GERMANYS-WAR-Origins-Aftermath-Atrocities/dp/0982344899/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1R5633GAJZ7K5&keywords=john+ wear+ germany%27s+ war&qid=1575589900&s=books&sprefix=John+ Wear%2Caps%2C202&sr=1-1

I will have a look and report Wear’s report, at the risk, of course, that the incompetent idiots at Wikipedia will attribute John Wear’s report of the findings of scientists as my views.

If Wikipedia keeps this up, all sorts of people will sue me for plagiarism.

More evidence of Jewish power:

http://www.unz.com/gatzmon/as-of-today-i-am-the-only-winner-of-the-12-december-election/

https://russia-insider.com/en/society/jews-demand-obedience-apologies-church-england-weak-obsequious-british-clerics-eager-obey

https://russia-insider.com/en/jews-behind-drag-queen-story-hour/ri27989