In his piece today demolishing the anti-Semitism witch-hunt against the Labour Party, and Jeremy Corbyn’s absolute capitulation to the liars and smear merchants behind it, Tony Greenstein suggests how Corbyn should have handled Andrew Neil in an interview he gave with the broadcaster on his politics show back in November.
Neil challenged Corbyn to apologise to the Jewish community for the anti-Semitism that was rampant in the Labour party and his failure to deal with it. Anti-Semitism was not rampant in the Labour party, and Corbyn had dealt very effectively with real anti-Semitism. Greenstein therefore rightly says that Corbyn should have refused, saying he had nothing to apologise for. And then he should gone on the attack pointing out Neil’s hypocrisy in asking the question. When Neil was editor of the Sunday Times, he hired David Irving to write a piece about the supposed Goebbel’s diaries. That’s the David Irving, who really was an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier and was proven in the court case he lost against Deborah Lipstadt. And then he could have raised the issue of Taki’s continuing employment with the Spectator. Taki really is an anti-Semite, who recently praised the Greek neo-Nazi Golden Dawn in the magazine’s pages. This would have been extremely uncomfortable for Neil, whose chairman of the board government the wretched rag. When Owen Jones raised this very issue when he was on one of Neil’s wretched programmes, Neil was visibly frightened and asked if he was trying to get him sacked. Greenstein writes
‘That Andrew Neil Interview and David Irving
Not once did Schneider, Milne and Carrie Murphy ask themselves why, if the ‘anti-Semitism’ offensive was genuine, that it was the Right who were its most ardent advocates? One of its most fervent supporters was BBC broadcaster Andrew Neil. Neil crucified Corbyn in an election interview in November 2019 when he asked whether Corbyn would apologise to the Jewish community for Labour anti-Semitism.
It was a predictable question and there was a simple response. ‘I have nothing to apologise for’. Corbyn could then have gone on to condemn Labour’s genuine racism, against Black people:
‘I do however wish to apologise to Britain’s Black community for Labour’s previous support for the ‘hostile environment’ policy and the Windrush scandal. Our decision not to oppose the 2014 Immigration Act was scandalous.’
When Neil responded, listing examples of Labour ‘anti-Semitism’, such as the attempts to deselect Louise Ellman and Zionist diva Luciana Berger, there was a very simple response.
Corbyn could have told Neil that he had no intention of taking lessons on anti-Semitism from someone who, as Editor of the Sunday Times had hired a holocaust denier, David Irving, to examine the Goebbels Diaries which had just been discovered in a Moscow archive! As Jewish historian David Cesarani commented: ‘David Irving denies the gas chambers. Anyone who deals with him is tainted with that.’
And whilst Neil was spluttering Corbyn could have mentioned the fact that when Boris Johnson was Editor of The Spectator he hired Taki, the owner of Takis magazine for whom David Duke of the KKK wrote. Taki himself was no slouch when it came to anti-Semitism. As his biography records:
‘He (Boris) could have dispensed with Taki… but consistently chose not to, despite entreaties from many critics, including his own father-in-law Charles Wheeler. It is down to Boris that Taki was able to run columns on ‘bongo bongo land’, West Indians ‘multiplying like flies’ and one on the world Jewish conspiracy, in which he described himself as a ‘soi-disant anti-Semite’.
Even the right-wing owner of the Spectator Conrad Black, asked Boris to dismiss Taki after he had criticised Black for marrying a Jewish woman. Boris refused. Taki wrote for the Spectator for as long as Boris was editor. And who was Chairman of the Board of Press Holdings Media Group which owns The Spectator? Andrew Neil!
Of course, having accepted the ‘anti-Semitism’ narrative, Corbyn had no response. Not once did he point out the hypocrisy of Britain’s racist tabloids and the BBC for having ignored the Windrush Scandal, in which Black British citizens were deported to their death, instead concentrating on Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ which didn’t hurt a single Jewish person.’
This is all absolutely correct. Anti-Black racism is far more prevalent than anti-Semitism, and far more respectable. There would have rightly been a storm had May’s government similarly rounded up Jews of foreign parentage on the same grounds. But Cameron and May felt able to deport the Windrush migrants, who had every right to remain in this country, because of anti-Black racism.
Unfortunately Corbyn caved in to Neil and the other smear merchants in the media and Conservative political establishment. And in doing so he not only allowed himself to be ousted, but also decent anti-racists and his own supporters, people like Livingstone, Mike, Jackie Walker, Martin Odoni, Marc Wadsworth, Cyril Chilson, and Greenstein himself, to be smeared and expelled.
More Fascism, this time courtesy of banned Nazi terror group, National Action. Yesterday the Beeb published a report about the plot by the group’s leader, Jack Renshaw, to kill west Lancashire Labour MP Rose Cooper and his grooming of underage boys following the conclusion of his fourth and final trial. Renshaw also planned to kill a female rozzer, who was on to him.
Renshaw told a gathering of his fellow stormtroopers as the Friar Penketh pub in Warrington two years ago in 2017 that he was planning to kill the Labour MP, and had already bought a gladius machete – the gladius was a type of short sword used by the Roman army – to do it. He also planned on taking hostages, and would demand to see the female detective on his case. When she did so, he would murder her as well. None of the other Nazis at the meeting objected to the plan. Two even suggested alternative targets, such as the-then home secretary and a synagogue. Robbie Mullen, one of the Nazis at the meeting, was appalled by this, and said that they shouldn’t kill the worshipers at the synagogue because children would be there. At this point, Renshaw showed just what a vicious anti-Semite he was by describing Jews as ‘parasites’. Their children would also be parasites, and you wouldn’t care, he asserted, about killing ‘baby parasites’. This was all too much for Mullen, who contacted the anti-racism, anti-religious extremism group, Hope Not Hate about the conspiracy. They naturally asked him if Renshaw was serious about killing Cooper. He was quite convinced that Renshaw would.
Mullen was then forced to give up his home and job in the area and flee after the cops, who came to interview him about his information, gave him an Osman order. This is a statement that they had reason to believe his life was in danger. He was then driven away from his previous life by the HNH, who had promised to protect him. See the video below from HNH, in which he talks to Matthew Collins, one of its leaders, who similarly had to run from Britain following his own betrayal of the BNP and other Nazi groups to the authorities.
Zelo Street in their report on the case also include the sordid details that the Far Right really won’t want revealed about Renshaw’s paedophile grooming. Renshaw set up a fake profile on Facebook so he could groom two boys, who were then 13 and 15. He didn’t meet them, but did offer them money in exchange for sex and intimate photographs. One of the boys’ relatives saw one of the messages on one of the lads’ phones, and alerted the cops. It was the policewoman working on his grooming of the two boys that Renshaw wanted to kill.
The Zelo Street article makes the point that the Far Right like to pretend that they are fervently against the sexual exploitation of children. It’s why the EDL’s Tommy Robinson, now of UKIP, turns up at the trials of those of accused of sexual abusing children. But he only does it when it’s Muslims. The Street points out that Renshaw differed from Robinson in that he wasn’t just an islamophobe, but a vicious racist with a bitter hatred of the Jews. Renshaw also posed as hating gays, child pornography and paedophilia. But the Far Right’s selectiveness over the paedophiles they choose to pursue is shown by Renshaw’s trial, as absolutely no-one from the Far Right turned up at Renshaw’s trial to protest about his exploitation of children. The Street writes
As with those in and around the EDL who were caught and convicted of CSE over the years, their far right pals don’t want to know. They don’t chase those people out of their organisations. They don’t demand new laws so that they can find out if their pals include paedophiles. That’s just a label they stick on to Muslims.
He concludes
Meanwhile, HnH had to whisk Robert Mullen away for his own safety. Because shopping paedophiles who harbour murderous intent is alien to the far right. If it’s one of their own.
Far from being determined opponents of child sexual abuse, it seems that the Far Right is rife with it. There have been regular articles on Hope Not Hate about various storm troopers, who have been convicted of child abuse. And they’re not unique. Starace, one of the leaders of Mussolini’s Fascist, was a paedophile and drug peddler.
Renshaw himself has regularly appeared on Hope Not Hate’s reports on the denizens of the Far Right along with his Nazi gang, National Action. They were formed as the youth wing, I seem to remember, of the BNP or one of the other groups. And they’re full-on Nazis, without question. They dress in cod-Nazi uniform, wave banners and make the Nazi salute, all while screaming ‘Sieg heil!’ And they really believe in that utter rubbish about the Jews wishing to destroy the White race through non-White immigration. They were banned as a terrorist group after the murder of Jo Cox, and I think Renshaw has been put on trial previously after the authorities obtained a copy of a speech he secretly gave to a Nazi group which showed very clearly his bitter, genocidal hatred of the Jews.
Renshaw was only 22 at the time he was plotting the murders in 2017. He already had a history of political activism behind. The Beeb states that he had worked in the European parliament. There was a Hope Not Hate article, as I recall, about him going their with other British Fascists to meet their European counterparts. He was also briefly a student at one of the northern universities before being forced out because of his vicious racism and political beliefs.
His Nazism is sickening, but it’s also astonishing and saddening. I find it nearly impossible to understand how anyone at all can possibly believe in the murderous, genocidal conspiracy theories about the Jews in the developed West after Auschwitz. There’s too much information showing that these theories are utter, utter nonsense. Quite apart from the fact that a moment’s reflection shows that any theory that claims that the Jews control both Communism and the trade unions as well as capitalism is self-contradictory, risible bilge. And you can’t help but be moved by the photographs and accounts of the horrors endured by the Jews and other persecuted groups under the Nazis. The pictures alone of the emaciated survivors of the Final Solution are enough to discredit Nazism.
I realise that real Fascists, Nazis and racists can be experts at arguing their poison extremely persuasively. It’s what made the now-disgraced historian David Irving dangerous, as his book of Holocaust denial was not only carefully argued, but also extensively footnoted. As the American Jewish history Deborah Lipstadt showed when he sued her for libel, all Irving’s arguments were utterly spurious. He misquoted and distorted the sources he cited, for example. And despite an American judge in California ruling that the evidence for the Holocaust is so plentiful, that it cannot reasonably be questioned, the Nazis still do. Some of this material is available over the Net, and there are Nazi and Far Right publishers churning out this stuff, like National Vanguard in America. But it’s not freely available. You have to look for it. Which means that some, at least, of the individuals who get drawn into Nazism and the stupid, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have to be inclined towards it in the first place.
I therefore wonder what turns young people in the 21st century into monsters like Renshaw. And this is a pressing issue as Far Right radicalisation continues to grow as the media mainstreams race hate. In the meantime, it’s good that Renshaw was caught before he could go further with his vile plans. And I have the greatest respect for Mr. Mullen for breaking with the Nazis and instead turning to humanity and decency in betraying them to the authorities.
Tuesday’s I, for 12th March 2019, featured a review by Etan Smallman of a new exhibition on anti-Semitism at the Jewish Museum in London. This included comments from the Museum’s director, Abigail Morris, and Deborah Lipstadt, the professor of Jewish history at Emory University in America and the author of Anti-Semitism: Here and Now. Lipstadt is best known as the American academic, who exposed David Irving as a holocaust denier and falsifier of history in court in the 1990s. This was portrayed in the 2016 film, Denial, in which she was played by Rachel Weisz.
Most of the exhibition seems uncontroversial, as it looks at the anti-Semitic depictions of Jews as money-grubbing, and the history of medieval anti-Semitism. The exhibition shows board games depicting Jews as grasping, including one which the song-writer Steven Sondheim said taught people to be anti-Semitic. It covers notorious events in English history, such as the York pogrom of 1190, stating that England was the first country to expel Jews. It also covers how the Roman Catholic church only renounced the idea that the Jews killed Christ in 1965, and notes how, in depictions of Judas Iscariot, he is given stereotypically Jewish features while Christ and the other disciples, who were also Jews, were not. It also discusses Fagin in Dickens’ Oliver Twist, and shows Yugoslav Nazi poster depicting Jews as the forces behind both capitalism and communism.
However, the Museum also seems to be promoting the lie that the Labour party under Corbyn is acutely anti-Semitic. It also tries to rule out inquiring about Israeli funding for particular political groups by claiming that this is also anti-Semitic. And it hails liar and internet bully Rachel Riley as some kind of heroine in the fight against anti-Semitism.
The article states
More recently, Labour has been mired in cases of anti-Semitism, culminating in Luciana Berger resigning from the party last month. Six people, including two from the left, have been convicted of race hate against the Jewish MP for Liverpool Wavertree.
Lipstadt describes the situation as “unprecedented”. “We’ve never seen anything as institutionalised in a Western democracy as we’re now seeing in the Labour party.”
A party spokesman said it “takes all complaints of anti-Semitism extremely seriously and we are committed to challenging and campaigning against it in all its forms”.
Before we go any further, let’s critique this little piece. First of all, of those convicted of race hate against Berger, only two were from the left. And what does ‘from the Left’ actually mean? Were they members of the Labour party? The article doesn’t say, so I would think they actually weren’t. And the incidence of anti-Semitism in the Labour party is belied by the stats. Looking at the statistics, only 0.O8 per cent of Labour party members have been suspended or expelled for anti-Semitism. And even there, the stats are unreliable because many of those charges, such as against Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Tony Greenstein and Mike Sivier, were utterly false. In fact anti-Semitism has actually gone down under Corbyn, and is less than in the rest of British society.
But the article continues
In the vanguard of the online battle against the anti-Semites is the unlikely figure of Countdown’s numbers expert Rachel Riley, who has responded to a wave of abuse by coining the hashtag #BeLouder.
Yes, this is the same Rachel Riley, who accused a sixteen year old school girl with anxiety problems and her father of being anti-Semites, got her followers to dogpile on to them, and threatens anyone who points out how false and libelous her accusations are with litigation.
The article then continues to quote a spox for the pro-Israel paramilitary vigilante group, the Community Security Trust.
The “dilemma”, however, according to Mark Gardner, of the Community Security Trust, a charity that monitors anti-Semitism, is that increased media coverage of anti-Semitism results in a spike in reports of hate crimes against Jews.
Except that the stats collected by the CST and its companion race hate organisation, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, can’t be trusted. They exist to spread fear that anti-Semitism is spreading, and so inflate the statistics. To the extent that one of the two organisations declared that anti-Semitism had risen by 1,697 per cent in Wiltshire! Tony Greenstein has published many pieces destroying these organisations’ highly manipulated statistics. As for the CST itself, it’s a vigilante force supposedly formed to protect Jews from assault. It’s trained by former members of Mossad, and is not averse to thuggery itself. Greenstein in one piece described some of the assaults its members had carried out stewarding Zionist rallies. And it’s a long, ugly list, which includes women, the elderly and even non-Zionist rabbis. And, of course, at one such rally they separated Muslims from Jews by force. All this was done while the police stood and watched, but did not intervene. See Greenstein’s article at
Lipstadt is resolute that it needs to be condemned wherever it is found, “not just because of Jews”, but because “anti-Semitism is a classic conspiracy theory. If you have increasing numbers who believe, ‘Aha! The Jews are being paid to do this’, ‘The Jews are doing this all because of Israel’, they’re going to believe conspiracies about everything else.”
This isn’t entirely wrong, as along with the classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the Jews there is a tendency to try to fit other daft conspiracies into the pattern, like reptoid aliens. But it is absolutely not anti-Semitic to point out that Israel is the force behind some actions. Shai Masot, an official at the Israeli embassy, was filmed conspiring to have Alan Duncan removed from the Tory cabinet. And the Israeli government does have a special department, the Ministry for Strategic Affairs, headed by Gilad Elon, to spread smears that Israel’s critics and opponents are anti-Semitic.
The article then goes to say that there is a problem tackling anti-Semitism because Jews are perceived as rich, and because they’re White. It then quotes Gardner as saying that being careful to use the word “Zionist” rather than “Jew” is no defence if you are still indulging in age-old anti-Jewish imagery, nor does being Jewish yourself inoculate you from perpetuating anti-Semitism.
But as we’ve seen, the concept of what counts as an anti-Semitic trope is so wide, that it’s used to silence people, who aren’t actually talking about the Jews as a whole, and who are factually correct. As Mike was when he talked about Masot’s conspiracy at the Israeli embassy. As for Jews also being guilty of anti-Semitism, we’ve seen how that accusation has been used against decent, self-respecting secular and Torah observant Jews like Walker, Greenstein, Martin Odoni and countless others.
And while some genuine anti-Semites hide their Jew-hatred behind rhetoric about Zionism, those criticising Zionism mean exactly that when they talk about it. They aren’t talking about the Jews.
The article concludes with Morris saying that she hopes the exhibition will get non-Jews to understand why Jews are so worried, and will contradict the perception that they’re overreacting. She says
I hope we can explain why it’s so serious – because we know where this kind of thing can lead.
So what is Morris claiming? That Corbyn and his supporters are going to hold torch-light processions and start pogroms, ending in the establishment of new concentration and death camps? They aren’t. Corbyn and his supporters are actually the least racist, and are determined opponents of anti-Semitism. But the Israel lobby fears and despises him and them because he also stands up for the Palestinians. Hence the panic. And as Norman Finkelstein, another Jewish American professor has observed, Israel and its lobby have always responded to their critics by smearing them as anti-Semites.
And this seems to be the real purpose of the exhibition, and to make the smear seem all the more compelling by putting it in the context of genuine anti-Semitism and Jew-hatred. I am very disappointed that the Jewish Museum has done this, and that Professor Lipstadt has been involved in it. I’ve never been in the Museum, but I can remember watching with great interest one of the antiques programmes on TV, which had a brief piece about it. They showed some of the priceless artifacts of Jewish history, including a Bible published in 17th century Italy, and the tokens Orthodox Jews used to pay their donations to the synagogue, as their religion forbids them from handling money on the Sabbath. This exhibition and the involvement of a respected academic like Lipstadt will reinforce the lie that criticism of Israel, and questioning Israel’s involvement in British politics, is anti-Semitic. A large section of the Jewish community strongly disagrees.
But the Museum and Lipstadt clearly represent the Zionist establishment, who are doing everything they can to stoke fear amongst the Jewish community by smearing any and all criticism of Israel, however, reasonable, as anti-Semitism, and then associating those smeared with real Nazis. Morris and Lipstadt should be ashamed they are complicit in this.
The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups: The 100 Most Disturbing Conspiracies of All Time, Jon E. Lewis (London: Constable & Robinson 2007).
As the book’s cover tells you, this is a popular treatment of 100 assorted conspiracies, ranging from the assassination of JFK, 9/11, the Da Vinci Code, the death of Princess Diana, the Men In Black of UFO lore, the belief that Roosevelt knew about the coming Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour?, the Illuminati, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and so on. It’s a selection of conspiracies and conspiracy theories that were current at the end of the 1990s and early part of the 21st centuries.
As you might expect of a popular work of this size, the individual chapters tend to be brief. Many are only about two or three pages long, and so this isn’t an in depth examination of them by any means. Most of these theories are absolutely spurious, and so get properly debunked. Most, but not all. Some conspiracies, like the Iran-Contral scandal and the Masonic lodge P2, which was deeply involved in Italian Fascism, the Mafia and had connections to the CIA.
Lewis writes in his introduction that his aim has been to understand and treat the conspiracy theories objectively, to find which are true, and which aren’t.
Hostility to conspiracy theory is as useless in understanding the world as an indiscriminate acceptance of it. The task, surely, is to disentangle the mad and bad conspiracies from those that illuminate the darkened, secret corners of power. To this end The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups takes a considered, objective scalpel to one hundred of the most compelling conspiracy theories of modern times. The theories are arranged alphabetically, assessed and interrogated. Where appropriate, the relevant documents are reproduced, and details of where to look to find out more are listed. Each conspiracy theory is assigned an “Alert Level” rating indicating its likely veracity. (p. 3).
One conspiracy theory that the book thoroughly debunks is Holocaust denial, discussed on pages 180-2. The first two paragraphs briefly state what it was, and how its existence is supported by a mountain of very trustworthy evidence.
The Holocaust is the name given to the extermination of some six million Jews and other “undesirables” by the Third Reich of Germany between 1933 and 1945. To industrialise the genocide process, the Nazis purpose-built a number of death camps such as Auschwitz, which gassed the Jews in batches; most victims, however, simply died of malnourishment in concentration camps. In occupied Eastern Europe, from where more than five million Jews were taken, special SS killing squads, Einsatzgruppen, sometimes shot Jews in situ.
A wide spread of sources confirms the nature and extent of the Holocaust: the thousandfold testimonies of camp survivors; film and photographs taken by Allied reporters as the camps were liberated in 1945; the confession by Auschwitz SS camp commandant Rudolf Hoss; the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann in 1960-2 and his sentencing to death for “crimes against humanity”. But all of this is dispute by a number of historians and politicians, who speculate that the Holocaust, if it happened at all, was on at most a minor scale. (p. 180).
It then goes on to discuss David Hoggan and his The Myth of the Six Million, one of the earliest and most influential books pushing the lie that the Holocaust never happened. Hoggan claimed in it that the Jews had falsely accused the Germans of genocide in order to gain reparations. This set the pattern for later works, claiming that the Jews had made it up either to gain money or international sympathy. It was the latter which led the United Nations to look kindly on the creation of Israel as a Jewish homeland. The book notes that from 1970s, the most prominent mouthpiece for Holocaust denial in the US has been the Institute for Holocaust Review, led by the neo-Nazi Willis Carto. Publications from the Institute and similar organisations in the US speculate that the gas chambers at Auschwitz weren’t there to kill Jews, but to kill the lice they carried. There are many versions of Holocaust denial. One of these is that there was indeed an extermination of the Jews during the Nazi occupation, but that this was small and not official Nazi policy. This was the view of the notorious David Irving, who claimed that the Nazis were too busy fighting the war to organize the mass extermination of the Jews, and that Hitler was unaware of it.
The chapter goes on to describe how Irving’s version of the Holocaust and Hitler’s involvement was challenged by Deborah Lipstadt in her 1993, Denying the Holocaust. This accused Irving of anti-Semitism and distorting evidence. Irving sued her and her British publisher, Penguin, for libel. Lipstadt and Penguin defended themselves by hiring the Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans, who then went through Irving’s works. He found that Irving had deliberately used unreliable documentation. One such was the report made by Fred Leuchter, who designed gas chambers for the American prison service. Leuchter stated that he found no significant deposits of cynanide at Auschwitz. However, this was in 1988, nearly 40 years after the camp was used and Leuchter himself was not trained in forensics. Evans also found that Irving also expressed very anti-Semitic sentiments in his books, such as calling Jews ‘the scum of humanity’. The court found in Lipstadt’s favour, with the judge declaring Irving to be ‘an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semite and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism’.
The chapter also makes it clear that Hitler knew very well what was going on. He knew its scope even if he didn’t know all the details about every train of victims going to Sobibor. He set the agenda for the Holocaust, as shown in his speeches. In 1939, for example, he declared
If international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe again succeed in plunging the nations into a world war, the result will be … the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. (p. 181.)
Fifteen other leading Nazis attended the Wannsee conference in 1942, which was held outside Berlin on how the extermination of the Jews could best be arranged. The meeting was minuted, and its protocols used to incriminate those present.
The chapter concludes
The Holocaust happened. Most reputable historians put the lower limit of Jews, gypsies, Romanies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled and the mentally ill exterminated by the Nazis at five million. The upper limit is as high as 11 million.
In 1979 the Institute for Historical Review offered a $50,000 reward to anybody who “could prove that the Nazis operated gas chambers to terminate Jews”. Mel Marmelstein, an Auschwitz survivor, forwarded to the IHR affidavits concerning the fate of his family in Auschwitz plus other documentation, and duly claimed his money. When the IHR failed to give him the $50,000 he sued. The court awarded him the $50,000 plus an extra $40,000 for distress. In other words, the leading outfit for Holocaust denial, giving it its best shot, could not convince a neutral jury of its case. (p. 182).
The book properly gives Holocaust denial an alert level of zero, as it is a completely false conspiracy theory.
It also has a short bibliography, which includes the following two books debunking Holocaust denial:
Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, 1993; and
Michael Shermer, Alex Grobman and Arthur Hertzberg, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?, 2002.
More Nazis and Holocaust deniers again, I’m afraid. But this is very relevant, as it compliments the other information I’ve found showing the profound links between Libertarianism and neo-Nazism.
In this half-hour segment from The Majority Report, Seder’s producer and occasional presenter, Michael Brooks, talks to Mark Ames, the senior editor of Pando Daily, about how he found out that the Koch Brother’s magazine, Reason, published pro-Apartheid and Holocaust Denial pieces in the 1970s. The Koch brothers are oil billionaires. They’re probably America’s richest men, with a net worth of $100 billion. And they’ve been involved in rightwing politics since the 1960s/70s. They were two of the founders of the Libertarian party in the 1970s, which campaigns for the absolute dismantlement of whatever remains of the American welfare state, massive privatization and the paring down of the federal government to the barest minimum. All in the interests of free trade, capitalism and property.
Ames states that he and his colleague, Yashler, started researching the Kochs after they were kicked out of Russia. They had been active there exposing the oligarchs and their murky involvement and connections to politics. This went too far for Putin and the Russian authorities, and they were expelled. Back in the Land of the Free, Ames and Yashler became interested in the Kochs and their political activities because they looked very much like same type of phenomenon: just another pair of oligarchs, meddling and perverting politics. But they found out that the pair were more seriously committed than most oligarchs.
They also found references to Koch’s having published Holocaust denial literature in the Libertarian party’s magazine, Reason. The Libertarians had tried to remove all records of it, and they had trouble hunting it down, but eventually they found it. It was from 1976, when the magazine published an entire edition devoted to denying the Holocaust. Ames mentions the names of some of the people published in that issue, and their connections to extreme right-wing and neo-Nazi movements. One of them was a British member of the National Front. The issue is now online, apparently, and he showed it to Deborah Lipstadt, the expert on Holocaust Denial. She said it was a list of nearly everyone involved in this pernicious attack on history.
He also found that at the same time, Reason was also publishing articles praising Apartheid in South Africa. When Ames published his articles on the promotion of Holocaust Denial and Apartheid, in both cases the magazine’s article came back to make a kind of non-denial that they had done so. They said that they had published the pieces denying the Holocaust as part of their commitment to academic freedom, but weren’t Holocaust deniers. They also claimed that they weren’t in favour of Apartheid, and had also published articles against it. In fact, the article they cited for this merely argued that South Africa, with its minimal labour legislation and regulation of industry, was a country enjoying a high level of freedom according to their Libertarian criteria. They also promoted tourist visits to the country. This was despite the fact that the Black population was very definitely unfree, forced into the Bantustans, where they suffered massive poverty and malnutrition, resulting in an appallingly high death rate.
The magazine’s and party’s attitudes only changed in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan. The Koch brothers want to push politics further to the right. They found that their ideas had now entered the mainstream with Reagan, with the exception of the racist and Nazi ideas. So they issued a statement complaining that these ideas were too popular, and dropped them so that they weren’t used to discredit the rest of their squalid programme.
Ames states that the Kochs published the Holocaust material as part of their ideological programme of rolling back Roosevelt’s New Deal. They want to destroy the minimal welfare legislation FDR introduced. However, it’s actually extremely popular because it has helped millions of Americans. To attack the New Deal, they therefore have to try and discredit FDR and present him as a monster. And that means attacking America’s entry in the Second World War. America did not enter the War to defend the Jews, but the Holocaust is clearly one of the strongest justifications for it. And so the Kochs and their collaborators wanted to discredit the Holocaust, just as they spread daft conspiracy theories claiming that FDR was somehow responsible for, or knew in advance, about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.
Ames also states that they have an inverted idea of freedom, in which FDR is a Communist monster, as is MLK, who they’ve tried smearing as an agent of Moscow. Brooks and Ames agree, however, that MLK did have extreme views regarding the nationalization of industry. He did, and it’s one of the things, along with his deep criticism of American capitalism and racism, that’s conveniently left out of the modern cult surrounding him. They’re too extreme for right, despite remaining highly pertinent to today’s political situation with the political power of the big corporations and resurgent racism. They’ve also twisted and perverted the idea of who’s elite. They’ve tried to make it mean a public bureaucrat. In fact, it means the rich and propertied. Thus they’ve tried to turn FDR into a monster of statist power, like Adolf Hitler and a determined foe of freedom, even if this is the reverse of what he did by benefiting the American people with his welfare programmes.
Ames states that what made the public of Holocaust denial literature in Reason possible was the disordered and confused state of American politics at the time. Many left-wing ideas were floating around and looked like being accepted. Americans wanted the end of the Cold War, and there was even a feeling that the CIA would be abolished. The Koch brothers caught the mood, and tried to exploit it by introducing Holocaust denial and Libertarianism as two more radical ideas that should now be considered freely along with the other, left-wing ideas. And the Kochs weren’t alone in publishing Holocaust denial material. A whole slew of other right-wing thinktanks also did so, including the Cato Institute.
And he also points out that before the Neo-Cons arose, many of whose members were Jewish, Jews were most often associated with the Left and socialism. One of the founders of the Neo-Con movement actually wrote a piece asking why Jews were so against capitalism. Ames states that this attitude survives today, and that he has been called a ‘cultural Marxist’, which he sees as another anti-Semitic code word for ‘Jew’.
This little bit is important, as it adds to the information I’ve found already showing how Libertarianism is morphing into outright Fascism. Reichwing Watch has put up a series of pieces, including testimony from former Libertarians, showing how the Libertarian organisations are full of real White supremacists and Nazis. This has gone so far that the Black Libertarian YouTuber, ‘That Guy T’, has made enthusiastic videos about the emergence of what he calls ‘Anarcho-Fascism’. In fact, Italian Fascism was an extreme right-wing revision of anarcho-syndicalism. The corporate state is what you get when former Syndicalists decide that they actually like the state and big business, and despise working class trade unions. The Spanish Fascists tried to get the Syndicalists to join them in the Spanish Civil War by stressing their common origins and rejection of parliamentary democracy. The syndicalists remained true to their principles, and told them where they could stick it.
The Libertarians have got inside the Republican Party, and they’re also over here, influencing the Tories and UKIP. And their British counterparts have been as every bit sympathetic to South American Fascists as they have been. Back in the 1990s the Freedom Association, or one of the Libertarian organisations in the Tory party, invited the head of one of Rios Montt’s death squads from El Salvador to their annual dinner as guest of honour. And one of the members of this British Libertarian outfit was the founder of the Guido Fawkes blog, now ranting about anti-Semitism in the Labour party. The accusation that Labour has a particular problem with Jews is a smear by the Blairites and the Israel lobby. In the case of Guido, it’s pure hypocrisy coming from someone, who was part of an organization that admired and lauded Fascist butchers and torturers. Just as the Libertarians and Monetarists in America, as Ames and Brooks comment, proudly embraced Chile and the other Fascists in South America.
The times’ long past when Libertarian ideas should have been expelled from the mainstream. They, and the people that make these claims, should be expelled from decent political debate and activism.
This shows that the Nazi element in Libertarianism isn’t a recent aberration. It’s always been there, as part of the Libertarians’ reactionary programme against welfare legislation, democracy and the state. The Libertarians have always tried to claim that they are just another form of anarchism, but one which rejects communal ownership of property in favour of capitalism. But as this shows, they’ve always had a Fascistic dimension.
As for all the right-wing ideologues, who immediately denounce anything vaguely left or progressive as ‘cultural Marxism’, without having any idea what that really means, Ames’ statement that the term is just another anti-Semitic code word throws it back in their face. Many of those, who use it try to smear socialism and the Left by claiming that Hitler’s Nazis were socialists. They weren’t. But if the term is seen as a form of anti-Semitic abuse, then it means that those, who use it to attack the left are also anti-Semitic, thus reversing the accusation and turning it back on them.
This is a quarter of an hour TED talk by the respected historian, Deborah Lipstadt, on the lies of those, who would deny the Holocaust, and in particular David Irving and the coterie surrounding him. I think Lipstadt is a member of staff at the Holocaust Museum in America. In the 1990s she proved to be David Irving’s nemesis after he sued her for libel. Her testimony utterly wrecked whatever serious academic reputation Irving had, and the last thing I heard he was banged up in jail in Austria. That country, like Germany, has laws against denying the Holocaust. No doubt he’s there with others like him, trying to fend off the attentions of Wolfgang der Kannibaler.
Lipstadt begins her talk by saying that the first time she heard about Holocaust denial, she laughed, because the Holocaust is one of the best documented genocides in history. There is plentiful documentation, as well as eye-witness testimony from the victims and survivors, the Poles, who lived around the wretched death camps, the people in the towns and villages, who saw the Jews being rounded up and herded away, and lastly by those responsible for those terrible crimes. She makes the point that while they often claimed to have been forced to commit them – they were only following orders, or some such – they never denied that they had committed their monstrous crimes against humanity.
Then a few years later she was asked by academic colleagues to look into the milieu of Holocaust denial, and find out what was behind them. She laughed again. But she describes them as ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’. They don’t look like Nazis. They try to look like professional academics, adopting an air of respectable academic discourse. They have a slick academic journal, the Historical Review, they don’t describe themselves as Holocaust deniers, but ‘revisionists’, and they don’t wear Nazi uniforms.
But underneath all that it’s the same anti-Semitism, the same racism and the same Nazism.
So she wrote her book on them, and then a few years later got the news from her British publisher, Penguin, that she was being sued for libel by David Irving, whom she had named in her book. Irving certainly doesn’t believe in the Holocaust. At one point he said that more people had died in Bobby Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than in the camps. She was told by friends that she could just ignore the suit. She replied that she couldn’t do that, as English law, unlike the American and other legal systems, demanded that she prove her case. If she couldn’t, or simply didn’t try to fight her case in court, then by default Irving would have won. And if that happened, she couldn’t look another Holocaust survivor in the face.
She states that she won, not by proving it happened, but by disproving what Irving claimed happened. She did so by looking up every footnote Irving made, and looking at the source literature cited. And in every one – not just one or two, or even several instances, but every case – he alters and falsifies what these documents and books actually say. He leaves things out, inserts things that weren’t there, invents witnesses, alters the sequence of events. The tril ended with the judge ruling that Irving was indeed a liar and a Holocaust denier, but in the type of severely erudite and strong language members of the judiciary use when sending down villains.
Lipstadt says that the trial was important, because not only did it discredit Irving, it also discredited others like him. Because they’re all deeply interconnected. They cite him and he cites them, so that the evidence of Irving’s book effectively shows all of them to be liars.
She ends by making the important point that there is more at stake here than just Irving’s reputation. She talks about how we’ve moved into the supposed age of ‘fake news’ with the internet, and the way this has flattened the difference between reality and falsehoods. She also talks about how academic freedom has dictated that everything should be up for discussion. The internet has enabled the Nazis in the form of the Alt Right. But it isn’t the case that everything is only a matter of opinion. There are such things as facts, and there are some matters which should not be up for academic debate, like the Holocaust. Truth exists, and needs to be defended.
This last piece is an attack on radical postmodernism, which claims that there is no objective truth, only competing narratives. As for Irving, she says that he was slightly passe at the time he sued her. I got the impression that it was the opposite. Irving had appeared in the papers with his book doubting the scale of the Holocaust, and caused a massive controversy when he was invited to speak at the Oxford Union. The trial between her and Irving was filmed as Denial, with I think Timothy Spall as the odious Irving.
Yesterday I put up a 25 minute video by the stand-up comedian, Richard Coughlan, debunking Holocaust denial. It’s a grim video, complete with images of the emaciated victims of the Shoah and the bodies packed into mass graves. It is, however, necessary with the Alt Right and the other Nazis trying to claw their way into power, and Coughlan did a very good job of it.
This video’s somewhat longer at half an hour. In it, Coughlan talks about how glad he is that his first video was so well received, and describes the immense amount of research he did to make it. He compares learning about the Holocaust to tugging at a loose piece of thread in your jumper – it looks tiny, but once you pull much more comes away. He says he spent many months preparing the video, to the point where it felt that he spent his whole life making it. He read extensively, the first couple of books were The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz. The latter book was the true memoirs of a British soldier, who escaped from a P.O.W. camp. The escapee heard about the death camps, and in order to investigate the truth of what he’d heard actually broke out into the most notorious – Auschwitz. His book was covered on British breakfast television about a year or so ago when it was first published. Not only did he break into Auschwitz, exchanging clothes with a Jewish prisoner, but he did it twice.
Coughlan also goes on to talk about how he got the transcripts of the trial between Deborah Lipstadt and David Irving. Irving’s an extreme right-wing historian, who wrote at least one book minimizing the scale of the atrocity. Lipstadt’s an American academic, who called Irving what he was: a Holocaust denier. So he sued her, and lost. Coughlan says that by that point, Irving was losing popularity and credibility. Even so, I can remember the immense controversy that was caused when the Oxford Union invited him to speak. I can also remember talking to a co-worker at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, who had been in the public gallery watching the proceedings of the trial. He states that during the proceedings Irving himself was extremely confident and ebullient compared to some of the witnesses testifying against him. Not that it did Irving any good whatsoever. The trial exposed just how sloppy and fraudulent his own work on the Holocaust was. There were vital facts he didn’t mention, and he mistranslated some texts from the German. The trial resulted in Lipstadt being acquitted, and Irving’s reputation as an historian in tatters. I don’t think he’s ever recovered, and the last thing I heard the Austrians had sent him down in their country for Holocaust denial, which is a crime there and in Germany.
He also talks about one text he also read online. This was an encyclopedia of the death camps, also 45,000 or so of them. The book is divided into two volumes, each volume further divided into two parts. Each part is about 900 pages. And that’s just only some of the books he read.
He also talks about the monstrous horrors the Nazis perpetrated, such as the amount of ash generated by the cremation of the victims’ bodies, and the rooms full of the victims’ belongings and clothes. One room was full of children’s shoes. The victims’ were shaved, and their hair collected. In one camp, it was found stuffed into packs, so that there was a roomful of it, the total weighing many kilos. He wonders at the mindset of the guards, who could walk past these rooms full of their victims’ remains with complete indifference.
He also talks about how the people, who perpetrated this atrocity weren’t any different from us, citing once again the Stanford prison experiment. This was a psychological experiment, in which people were asked to play at being cops. After three days it was called off because these ordinary Americans were actually too brutal. Coughlan says that there have been three movies made of it. There was also a documentary about it shown on British television, which repeated the experiment. However, the documentary also added a few facts that I had never heard of. Such as when the experiment began, the volunteers playing the cops actually were too lenient, and those playing at the prisoners were more or less running amuck. So the experiment was stopped, and they were more or less encouraged by the experimenters to adopt a tougher approach.
And the psychology of some of high level officers responsible for implementing the Final Solution is bizarre. Joachim C. Fest in his book, The Face of the Third Reich, which is a collection of potted biographies of the leading Nazis, includes Hoess, the commandant at Auschwitz. Hoess is a vile character, who oversaw the mass murder of millions of innocents without any scruple. But he claimed he was no sadist. He said he was always at the back of the crowd, or tried to be away from it in his office, when the guards were beating or setting the dogs on the inmates. The Italian writer and chemist, Primo Levi, who had been imprisoned in the death camps, states that the guards ‘had our faces’. In other words, they were no different than we are. Coughlan says that Stamford Prison Experiment and the Holocaust shows how easy it is to turn ordinary people into monsters. And they do it gradually, drawing you into it little by little, until it all seems completely natural.
Coughlan highly recommends that his viewers take an interest in the subject, and do their own reading and research, ”cause it’s good to know stuff.’ Especially if you’re confronted by someone – and here he goes into a lengthy piece of invective to describe that kind of person- who tries to tell you that it didn’t happen, or that six million didn’t really die. At one point he mocks those, who try to argue for a lower number of deaths, such as two million, asking rhetorically what makes them think this will impress anyone. It’s still an horrific number.
He also says that studying the Holocaust teaches you so much, about politics, the media, how hate can be generated and used, and so on. He jokes about the old anti-Semitic remark about the media being full of Jews, who control it. Well, if that were to happen to him or people like him, he would definitely make sure his people would go into the media to stop it ever happening again. He also rebuts the objection to studying the Holocaust because there have been so many others. ‘No, not like the Holocaust’.
Actually, the unique nature of the Holocaust is a problem for historians and scholars of international law and politics. There are a number of different definitions of genocide. These can differ significantly, so that some cover certain forms of persecution to the exclusion of the others. The only thing they have in common is that they all cover the Holocaust. This means that some scholars advocate abandoning the quest to produce exact definitions of genocide in order to try to prevent the violent persecution of different groups at the societal level and prosecute those responsible as they really are and occur, unencumbered by too much ideological baggage.
What also comes out of this video is the sheer brazenness of the Holocaust deniers in seeking to refute what has been so extensively documented and witnessed. I’ve already mentioned how one judge in California ruled against one of the Nazi rags in his state that there was just so much supporting evidence for the Holocaust that it could not be reasonably regarded as anything other than a fact. Way back in the 1990s, when there were concerns about racist attacks in Bristol and the BNP nationally was trying to revive itself, one of the Black groups in the city held an evening, where the speaker was a Holocaust survivor, to hear his testimony about the reality of Nazism. They’re about, but obviously there are few of them because of old age, and the sheer, horrific efficiency with which the Nazis set about their extermination.
Coughlan describes how Holocaust deniers and Nazi apologists try to discredit descriptions and accounts of the death camps, by focusing on small discrepancies between them. Like in one account, it says there were 12 steps down to the gas chambers, but others say there are only eleven. They then move from this to the conclusion that this shows that people were making it all up. As if it followed from what had just been said. He also at one point describes how long it took for the victims to die when they were gassed with Zyklon B: 20 minutes. It’s another horrifying detail, and Coughlan appears quite naturally deeply moved by the fact.
This is a great video adding more information to his original piece. He also encourages others to learn as much about it as possible, so that they have all the information available to them to refute the lies of those who deny it ever happened, when they meet them, information which he couldn’t really put into the video here.
More on the Nazis, I’m afraid, and one of their favourite tactics: trying to get everyone to believe that the Holocaust was faked and didn’t occur.
Richard ‘the Dick’ Coughlin is a professional stand-up comedian, who regularly posts on YouTube attacking the weird and twisted denizens of the far right and men’s rights activists. In this video he takes on the necessary task of refuting Holocaust denial, and does a very good job of it. The video begins with a warning that it contains material some people may find disturbing. These are black and white footage from the concentration and death camps themselves, showing the emaciated inmates, and the heaps of bodies thrown into mass graves. These are shown with appropriate Jewish music and hymns commemorating and lamenting those murdered by the Nazis.
Coughlan explains that modern anti-Semites and Nazis have moved on from denying the Holocaust outright, as there is simply too much proof that it did occur, although there are a few that will still try to do this. Instead, they try to minimize the numbers of people murdered. Instead of millions, they will claim that it was only a few tens of thousands. In some cases, they will try to claim that only 10,000 were murdered, rather than the real figure of 5,700,000+, which is rounded up to six million.
Nazis will then claim that there was no programme to exterminate the Jews, that they were not gassed with Zyklon B in death camps such as Auschwitz, and that the large halls in which the victims were butchered were instead morgues, or chambers where the bodies were deloused before burial. Coughlan cites the textual evidence from the Nazis themselves that the areas claimed to be morgues were where they poor souls were forced to strip before they were gassed, and the contradictions in the neo-Nazis’ attempts to explain away the other chambers. For example, the story that the gas chambers were only used for delousing the bodies is clearly contradicted by the fact that the bodies of the dead were burned. Why would you bother killing parasites on a body that was going to be burned anyway? Surely you’d just burn the body, lice and all.
He also points out that the Nazis deny that the Jews were deliberately exterminated, but merely died from overwork and malnutrition. This is completely false. He makes the point that Holocaust deniers are trying to stop people believing in the Holocaust, not by refuting it completely, but by placing tiny seeds of doubt in people’s minds, which they hope they can develop and encourage further. He also analyses the psychology behind the tactic of minimizing the scale of the Holocaust, comparing it to a naughty child, who has stolen from his parents, who then tries to excuse himself and cast the blame elsewhere by admitting that he stole a lesser amount of money some time ago, but has not stolen the full amount, thus casting doubt on his sibling’s protestations of innocence.
Coughlan also debunks the claim made by Holocaust deniers like David Irving that there is no textual evidence linking Hitler to the Holocaust. There is. There are reports from the Nazi einsatzgruppen tasked with carrying out the murder of the Jews stating that they have informed Hitler of their progress, along with other documents from the Nazi leadership. These can be read in a book of collected reports and documents from these death squads, which Coughlan shows to the camera.
As for the arguments that the infrastructure for the gas chambers don’t exist, Coughlan says that this is based largely on the example of Auschwitz. But Auschwitz is only one of the immense number of these murder factories. He emphasizes their colossal number by stating that most people would probably think there were only about seven or so death camps. Not so. There were 43,000.
He could have added here that the chimneys and other structures used for delivering and venting the Zyklon B at Auschwitz don’t exist, because they were demolished shortly after the war by the Polish government. The bricks were used to build the houses on a nearby estate. Channel 4 made this point a few years ago in a documentary in which they followed an engineer, who designed gas chambers to Auschwitz to examine the remaining structures at the invitation of the American/Canadian Nazi, Ernst Zundel. Unfortunately, he was taken in by the Nazis’ lies and the apparent lack of evidence. The programme also featured a Jewish expert on the Holocaust, who provided the proper evidence that showed where the engineer was severely mistaken in his conclusions. He cited not only the history of the site itself, but also Nazi documents and the deliberately evasive language they used to hide what they were doing. They almost never talked openly about the murder of the Jews. Instead, their mass atrocity was referred to as ‘deportations’ or ‘special operations in the east’.
The video also includes clips from the film dramatization of the court case between Deborah Lipstadt and David Irving. Lipstadt is an American academic who called Irving what he was – a Holocaust denier. Irving sued for libel and lost. There’s also a clip of the real David Irving speaking, stating that he doesn’t believe in the scale of the Holocaust as normally claimed.
As Coughlan is a stand-up comedian, he occasionally uses humour to make his points. He begins the video by joking that it is financed by ‘Jew gold’. This is a dig at the claim by Nazis that anyone arguing against them must be in the pay of the international Jewish conspiracy. The number that then follows is Coughlan’s patreon account, showing that he most certainly isn’t. At one point in the video, he also tries to get his viewers to understand what the Nazis are doing when they minimize the Holocaust by asking them to imagine for a moment that they in the Nazis place. What would they do?
This is clearly a rhetorical technique, and if you watch the video, obviously so. I am mentioning it here because of the danger that someone may try to twist this into an entirely spurious proof that this is article is promoting Holocaust denial. Mike over at Vox Political is a firm anti-racist and certainly not an anti-Semite. Yet because he defended those in the Labour party that were smeared as anti-Semites simply because they criticized the equation between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, or even Israel itself for its occupation of Palestinian territory and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Arab population, he was accused by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism as an anti-Semite. I am afraid that the loathsome people, who smeared him, may also try to smear me by taking some of the ironic rhetoric in this strongly and most definitely anti-Nazi video out of context in order to smear me.
Lastly, Coughlan is an atheist and was a part of the atheist movement on the Net. Hence his anti-theist farewell against God at the end. I don’t share or approve of his atheism. However, his videos against the assorted Fascists and maniacs on the far right are well informed, and do a very necessary job of debunking them and sending them up. He’s done an excellent job. He states at the end of the video just how many books he’s read about the Holocaust, including one 4,000 pages long, and encourages others to do the same.
This is a great video, and it’s of an appropriate length – 25 or so minutes. That’s long enough to cover the main points without becoming too drawn out. However, it does mean that it obviously can’t cover everything that the Nazis and Holocaust deniers try to do. But it’s an excellent start, entertainingly done.
Of course this video shouldn’t be necessary. In the 1980s an American judge ruled against one of the Californian Nazi magazines that the evidence supporting the Holocaust was so plentiful that it couldn’t be denied. But that hasn’t stopped them trying. The Alt Right is on the rise, and the Holocaust deniers will try to criticize any attempts to present the facts or commemorate this horrific mass murder. The M Shed in Bristol, one of the city’s museums, put on a display about the Holocaust a few years ago. They then had two Holocaust deniers turn up, who tried to argue with the museum staff.
In many European countries Holocaust denial is a crime. There are problems with such legislation, as many people fear it’s an infringement of the right to free speech, however odious that speech is in the case of the Nazis. They also criticize such tactics has being too heavy-handed, and allowing the Nazis to position themselves as the oppressed party suffering official state persecution. They argue instead that a better tactic is to be informed, and refute their specious arguments using confirmed facts and evidence. This video helps to do this job.
Also in today’s I newspaper was a review of Denial, a film about the trial of David Irving, the historian and holocaust denier in 1996. Irving was a highly controversial historian, who had written a book on the Third Reich claiming that Hitler didn’t know anything about it, along with a series of other distortions. He had already been at the centre of a storm of outrage after he was invited to give a speech explaining his views to the Oxford Union. I can’t remember all the details, but at the centre of the case was the battle between him and an American academic, Deborah Lipstadt, who attacked him for his distortion of history. It’s true that there is no direct evidence connecting Hitler to the planned, methodical extermination of 6 million Jews orchestrated by the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. However, considering the sheer murderous venom with which Hitler describes the Jews in Mein Kampf and his speeches, and the sheer scale of the infamous Final Solution, it would have been impossible for him not to know about it. Historians have pointed out that the Holocaust was an integral part of Nazi policy, shown in the way that even when the Red Army was advancing on Germany through eastern Europe, the Nazis were still determined to carry on their mass murder despite the fact that it used resources which otherwise could have played a vital role in Germany’s defence. The Nazis were also very careful in their official communications to disguise the horror they were carrying out. They rarely talked about it directly. Instead, it was always referred to as ‘executive order such-and-such’, or by the euphemism that it was the relocation of the Jewish population to the east. There was even a vile propaganda film made for the German public, which showed happy Jews working away on their allotments in the new settlement the Fuhrer had provided for them. Except that it was all a sham, and after filming was finished, its subjects were loaded onto the cattle trucks and taken away for their deaths in the camps.
The film was written by the noted left-wing playwright, David Hare, and stars Rachel Weisz as Lipstadt. Weisz is probably better known for having appeared in the ‘Mummy’ movies back in the 1990s with Brendan Fraser, fighting undead ancient Egyptian horrors. Playing Irving is Timothy Spall, who has been in any number of TV shows over the years. He was a Brummie brickie in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, a villain, who had taken the form of a rat, in one of the Harry Potter movies. And most recently he appeared as a mad lord besotted with his prize-winning pet pig, in a comedy adapted from the books of P.G. Wodehouse.
Irving lost the trial, and Lipstadt and a series of other witnesses showed how he had ignored and distorted the evidence in order minimise the scale of the Holocaust. Irving left the court with any reputation for historical reliability destroyed as a Holocaust denier.
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