Gas Chambers: The Ignored Reality by Yale University Professor Timothy Snyder

July 16, 2009

Holocaust: The Ignored Reality by Yale historian Timothy Snyder is in the 16 July issue of The New York Review of Books. Below is the one reference to gas chambers in the 4,600-word article. I see, however, that Professor Snyder has found a sophisticated way to spell Belzec. At least for folk like me. Maybe it’s a typo.

Two thirds of the Jews who would be killed during the war were already dead by the end of 1942. The main victims, the Polish and Soviet Jews, had been killed by bullets fired over death pits or by carbon monoxide from internal combustion engines pumped into gas chambers at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor in occupied Poland.

And all the fuss about Auschwitz the last half century?

Was the late Oriana Fallaci a closet Holocaust revisionist?

Eric Blair

July 1, 2009

On June 30 the on-line journal affaires-strategiques.com posted Lauriane Crochemore's interview with Ivan Segre, the author of La reaction philosemite (The Philo-Semitic Reaction). One observation in his new book, Segre tells the interviewer, is how the West's response to 9/11 had been to move the line of permissible discourse to such an extent that moderate forms of Islamophobia became the new norm, even as primitive expressions of Islamophobia soon fell just outside the parameters of acceptable discourse.

By way of example he cited the warm reception some French Jews gave the late Oriana Fallaci's post-9/11 works - despite their overarching, virulently anti-Muslim tenor.

As an Israeli Jew, Ivan Segre was moved to more closely examine what at first blush seemed like the flowering of post-9/11 Philo-Semitism in the shade of such rank and frank Islamophobia, only to discover that, in fact, this was more apparent than real, although the promise of of a new Philo-Semitism evidently enthused such prominent Jewish intellectuals in France like Alain Finkielkraut, who embraced The Rage and the Pride and The Force of Reason, two of a trilogy of latter-day, hard-core, anti-Muslim Fallaci books. What was startling to Segre was how some of their troubling passages, bending toward revisionism, had simply been ignored by the Finkielkraut coterie.

Segre: "[W]e discover in The Force of Reason, the second volume of her trilogy, an explicit tribute from the Italian journalist to the French
historian Robert Faurisson, whom she introduces as
a persecuted intellectual for having taken, I quote: 'The freedom to challenge the official version of History.' In other words, denying there had been extermination camps as distinct from concentration camps, such being Faurisson's Holocaust] denier's thesis, was, according to Fallaci, 'to challenge the official version of History.'"

It begs the question: Was the late Oriana Fallaci a closet Holocaust revisionist?

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The Lauriane Crochemore interview with Ivan Segre in
French may be viewed on-line here.

The Eisenhower ad, Seeing things, and the question of blah-blah evidence

As of today the Eisenhower ad is running in three student newspapers. El Lobo at University of New Mexico, the University Chronicle at St Cloud University, and The Helmsman at University of Memphis. I’d like to keep track of any editorials or letters to the editor or any relevant news that might be published. If you can help monitor one or more of the papers I would appreciate it.

***

I’ll be to the other side today to see my primary care doctor, so pretty much out of touch. I have come to realize, it took me six weeks, to understand that I am being treated for serious pain issues and no one knows what’s wrong with me (not a straight line). In the first professional oversight that I am aware of with the VA the past year, I have found that while a cat-scan was taken of my pelvis and back, no report is available. So the cat-scan has been useless. Anyhow, something has to give. It can’t be me.

An additional downside to having an excruciating pain in the ass, not to mention the leg, is that I can’t sit on my wallet. So I carry the wallet inside my shirt. Two things happen. As I move around, the wallet itself gradually moves around behind me inside the shirt and sometimes when I need it I can’t find it and I experience a small shock over the heart. The other downside is that when I take down my pants to sit on the toilet the wallet falls out on the floor. One day it’s going to fall into the toilet and then I’m going to be really annoyed. I’ve got to get the back fixed, the pain fixed. Whatever the hell it is. This afternoon I’ll explain the danger my wallet is in to my primary care doctor so she understands the seriousness of my situation. The pain thing itself doesn’t appear to particularly worry her. This is week seven!!!

***

One night a week ago while I was watching television I saw a rat run from left to right across the kitchen floor. Interesting. Three, four nights ago watching television I saw a rat run across the kitchen floor from left to right. It was smaller and its image not quite so clear as the first rat. Last night I was watching television when I saw a very big moth, with a wing span of eight, ten inches, fly—I want to say “fly softly”—over the kitchen floor from left to right. It was soft brown in color. I know. You’re going to say that I’m watching too much television. I watch it very little. Charlie Rose before I go to bed. Sometimes he has an interesting guest.

Professors, like my friend Mark Oppenheimer, might take such sightings as evidence that I should not bother professional scholars with my question about the name, with proof, of one person killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz. It is evidence, I admit that, but it is not proof. Which is the problem the professors have with the Auschwitz gas chambers. Mucho blah-blah evidence by “eyewitnesses,” no proof.

American Psychos: How James von Brunn, Mark Weber and Bradley Smith fit into the current state of American anti-Semitism

My version of the headline says it all, if we were to tell the story in brief. Mark Oppenheimer’s series of five articles on Mark Weber and me and anti-Semitism is the usual stuff, though it is better written than most, and it has some new personal information on Mark and me, something Mark must not be very happy with but is easy going for an ordinary autobiographer like me. But for the rest, without meaning to sound mean-spirited, it is more of the same by a Holocaust True Believer.

This isn’t to say that Oppenheimer is not a likeable guy. He is. I liked him within the first minute of meeting him, and I feel the same way toward him now as I did then. I would wish that we would live in the same neighborhood, drink at the same bar—or rather, eat lunch in the same diner—and be able to talk things over once in a while. I would try to teach him how sometimes, when it’s simple, it’s just as good as when it’s complicated. And of course, I would listen to him. I really would.

If you will, dear reader, I would like you to point out to me where Oppenheimer addresses any specific statement I have ever made (I think he does once or twice), what he says about it, and how close to the truth you think it might or might not be. It would help me begin to respond to what is, in the end, a somewhat interesting 9,000 (yeah, 9,000) words. Maybe when I read it more closely it will be more interesting. As a matter of fact, I am certain it will be. Meanwhile . . . .

I will say up front that Oppenheimer is more interested in Weber than he is in Smith. I think that only natural. Oppenheimer is an academic, a Yale Ph.D. in church history, and Weber is of an academic turn of mind, has an M.A. in history and has written and published on historical issues. I am none of the above. I think what I do is too simple for Oppenheimer to get his head around it. But we will see. Any suggestions you have—I’m all ears.

Bowling Green State University, Smith replies to Bortel

29 June 2009

Mr. Bortel:

I will try to be brief in my own response. It won’t be easy.

Re my mischaracterization our our conversation: you may well be right. It is only natural that I would recall the conversation one way and you another. Such is memory. For the rest I will address only what I see as the core of your letter. You write:

“Your ad, in our determination, is racist and discriminatory to Jewish people in that it asserts certain aspects of the Holocaust didn’t exist, based simply on the premise that Eisenhower didn’t mention that in his book. It is racist in that it attempts to discredit an important aspect of Jewish heritage. The body of published books and photos, survivor accounts and internal records of the Nazis (sic) Party, Gestapo and the SS, provide a more compelling argument that it did.”

I assert nothing in my ad. You are wrong to suggest I do. The ad asks a question.

When you write “our” determination I will only note that when we were dealing with students at the BG-News, the ad was going to be published. They accepted payment for the ad. The young man I dealt with was perfectly agreeable to running the ad. Only when you appeared on the scene was the ad suddenly, in a matter of minutes, censored.

You are wrong to argue that it is “racist” to attempt to discredit what appears to the author to be false. What difference does it make that it has become an important aspect of Jewish heritage—if it is false? Would it not be a good, a blessing in fact, for Jews everywhere to be relieved of a false heritage which, at the same time, corrupts the heritage of another, in this case that of Germans?

When we were on the telephone you had no response when I suggested to you that the Holocaust is not about Jews, which is the position of the professorial class, but about Germans and Jews alike. No Germans, no Holocaust. You follow the academic line in that no question can be asked that might question any aspect of Jewish heritage—the gas chambers—while no question can be asked that might question any aspect of what is asserted is “monstrous” in German heritage—gas chambers.

Irony, or “reverse” racism?

With regard to asking questions about history, and I understand that every question has implications that go beyond the question itself, accusations of racism are, with regard to Holocaust fraud and falsehood, the childish reaction of a professorial class to a subject that its members do not have the professional courage to address. You should try to get beyond it.

At this point you might pause to wonder who would have promoted such a taboo, and in our universities who would have institutionalized it? For my part, I would want to explain to BGSU students that they are living in a free society, not a cargo cult, where we are free to discuss what we want, how we want, for whatever reasons we want. It’s called a society where a free exchange of ideas is encouraged, not discouraged. It’s not complicated. It is taboo that complicates the question, not the question. Without taboo, it’s just another question. Can you provide, with proof, the name of one person killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz?

Read something. I suggest Sam Crowell and The Gas Chambers of Sherlock Holmes which you can find here. Crowell reveals the creation of a cultural milieu that would facilitate a WMD charge against the Germans based on “eyewitness” testimony (in spite of the evidence you mention above), and create a “Grand Illusion.” Try it. I do not believe you believe you know it all. Read something the professors should read but will not, “on principle.”

-- Bradley

Note: I will distribute this letter to others I believe might be interested.