Leading Holocaust denier admits Holocaust happened

Truth is always true, is always new and alive, and it endures. Lies do not endure. Lying ideologies die, though they may like zombies keep moving jerkily about and so give the impression of being alive. In an article posted this past January at the website of the Institute for Historical Review, the leading Holocaust-denial organization, Mark Weber, its director and for decades the editor of its publication, The Journal of Historical Review, announced his abandonment of Holocaust revisionism.

The real motive of the Holocaust denial enterprise, he writes, has always been to weaken and delegitimize the “Jewish-Zionist power.” But it no longer helps in that purpose, for three reasons.

The first reason that Holocaust denial no longer serves the purpose of fighting Jewish power is that it is largely untrue. To demonstrate this, Weber quotes amazing passages from Joseph Goebbels’s 1942 journals, which I doubt have ever appeared before in a Holocaust denial publication, detailing the removal and mass murder of Eastern European Jews. For instance:

March 27, 1942: “The Jews are now being deported to the East from the Generalgouvernement [Poland], starting around Lublin. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely, and there’s not much left of the Jews. By and large, one can say that 60 percent of them will have to be liquidated, while only 40 percent can be put to work. The former Gauleiter of Vienna, who is carrying out the operation, is proceeding quite judiciously, using a method that is not all too conspicuous. The Jews are facing a judgment which, while barbaric, they fully deserve. The prophecy the Führer made about them for having brought on a new world war is beginning to come true in the most terrible manner. One must not be sentimental in these matters.”

April 29, 1942: “Short shrift is being made of the Jews in all eastern occupied territories. Tens of thousands of them are being wiped out.”

Weber continues:

No informed person disputes that Europe’s Jews did, in fact, suffer a great catastrophe during the Second World War. Millions were forced from their homes and deported to brutal internment in crowded ghettos and camps. Jewish communities across Central and Eastern Europe, large and small, were wiped out. Millions lost their lives. When the war ended in 1945, most of the Jews of Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and others countries were gone.

Given all this, it should not be surprising that even well-founded revisionist arguments are often dismissed as heartless quibbling.

Question: Did Weber just learn of the Goebbels journals? Or has he known about them for years, and continued publishing Holocaust revisionist writings despite knowing they were false?

The second reason that Holocaust denial no longer helps advance the campaign against the “Jewish-Zionist power,” just alluded to, is that, because of its evident untruth, it discredits and distracts from that campaign.

What drove the Holocaust denial enterprise, Weber tells us, was the hope that “exposing the Holocaust as a hoax [would] deliver a shattering blow to Israel and Jewish-Zionist power.” But, he continues, not only is the Holocaust not a hoax, but Jewish power is not based on just the Holocaust. Jewish power was already established in America prior to World War II. Therefore exposing the Holocaust as a hoax (which he admits can’t be done, but, he says in a thought experiment, even if it could be done) will not change anything essential as far as entrenched Jewish power is concerned and the need to destroy it.

Also, the Holocaust did not became a major theme in our culture until the late 1970s and 1980s, and now the world has moved on and the Holocaust is less culturally relevant than it used to be.

He states sadly that over the last ten years interest in Holocaust revisionism and Holocaust revisionist literature has “steadily declined.” At the same time, he cheerfully points out, there has been a rise in opposition to the “Jewish-Zionist power.”

In these admissions, the sheer ugliness of the Holocaust denial movement comes to the fore. It consisted of saying that the Holocaust was a cosmic lie, and that the Jews had bamboozled the entire world into believing this cosmic lie, the greatest hoax in history, all in order to gain power over non-Jews. What kind of people would do such a monstrous thing? The kind of people who deserved the very punishment that Hitler supposedly did not deliver to them.

It becomes clear that the main purpose of Holocaust denial was to make people hate Jews and see them as uniquely evil. It was thus the greatest anti-Semitic enterprise since World War II, replacing the Nazi ideology in that regard. But now it turns out, as admitted by a person who has been at the center of the denial project for the last 20 or 30 years, that the Holocaust did happen, and the Nazis did aim at, and largely carried out, the project of dispossessing and murdering, either immediately in death camps or a bit slower by slave labor in subhuman conditions, all the Jews of Europe, just as the “Holohoaxers” have always said. Will Weber apologize for having called the Holocaust a lie for all these years and thus provoking so much hatred against Jews? No. Because the production of Jew hatred is still his purpose. Shattering Israel and the Jewish power is still his mission. But now he intends to advance it by other means than Holocaust denial.

Finally, as mentioned above, Holocaust denial is no longer necessary in carrying out the war against the Jews, because, Weber says, anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism have been increasing worldwide. The real enemy is the Jewish-Zionist power, “a palpable reality with harmful consequences for America, the Middle East, and the entire global community.” The world is catching on to how bad the Jews are. As a result, a direct attack can now be made on the Jews themselves, rather than the indirect attack through Holocaust denial.

By the way: the global community? Since when are right-wing, tribalist anti-Semites concerned about the global community? When you’re driven by hatred for an enemy rather than by belief in truth, you pick up whatever you think will work for you. For 30 years Weber thought Holocaust denial would work for him, now he’s thinks that other things, like liberal-sounding appeals to the “global community” that is supposedly being oppressed by the Jews, will do the Jew-hating job better.

Weber then quotes an “influential statesman” who “seems to understand” the threat that the Jewish-Zionist power poses to the “global community.” And who is this esteemed authority? None other than the loony-tunes former prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, who made a big splash in October 2003 with an extended anti-Jewish diatribe at the Organization of Islamic Conference. Thus Weber, prominent “historian” and anti-Jewish thinker, goes to a follower of the 1,400 year old Jew-exterminationist religion of Islam—the religion that portrays Jews as the relentless, subhuman enemies of everything decent in the world—as his top authority on the nature of the Jews.

In brief, Weber’s abandonment of his life-long project of Holocaust denial comes down to this zombie-like statement:

“The anti-Semitic enterprise of Holocaust denial is dead. Long live anti-Semitism!”

* * *

Here are highlights from Mahathir Mohamad’s October 2003 speech to the 57 member Organization of Islamic Conference, a speech that according to Mark Weber demonstrates a true understanding of the Jewish problem:

There is a feeling of hopelessness among the Muslim countries and their people. They feel that they can do nothing right. They believe that things can only get worse. The Muslims will forever be oppressed and dominated by the Europeans and the Jews. They will forever be poor, backward and weak.

But is it true that we should do and can do nothing for ourselves? Is it true that 1.3 billion people can exert no power to save themselves from the humiliation and oppression inflicted upon them by a much smaller enemy? Can they only lash back blindly in anger? Is there no other way than to ask our young people to blow themselves up and kill people and invite the massacre of more of our own people?

It cannot be that there is no other way. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategise and then to counter-attack. As Muslims we must seek guidance from the Al-Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet. Surely the 23 years’ struggle of the Prophet can provide us with some guidance as to what we can and should do.

We are actually very strong. 1.3 billion people cannot be simply wiped out. The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.

We may not be able to do that. We may not be able to unite all the 1.3 billion Muslims. We may not be able to get all the Muslim Governments to act in concert. But even if we can get a third of the ummah and a third of the Muslim states to act together, we can already do something. Remember that the Prophet did not have many followers when he went to Madinah. But he united the Ansars and the Muhajirins and eventually he became strong enough to defend Islam.

We must build up our strength in every field, not just in armed might. Our countries must be stable and well administered, must be economically and financially strong, industrially competent and technologically advanced. This will take time, but it can be done and it will be time well spent. We are enjoined by our religion to be patient. Innallahamaasabirin. Obviously there is virtue in being patient.

[LA notes: Mohamad wants the Muslim world to build itself up and modernize itself. But the sole purpose of this self-improvement is to enable the Muslims to defeat the Jews. And within Islamic beliefs, this makes complete sense. Remember that according to the Koran and Hadiths the Final Day, the fulfilmment and perfection of the world, will come when all the Jews are killed.]

The enemy will probably welcome these proposals and we will conclude that the promoters are working for the enemy. But think. We are up against a people who think. They survived 2000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power. We cannot fight them through brawn alone. We must use our brains also.

[end of excerpts of Mohamad speech.]

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Tim W. writes:

Weber is correct that Holocaust denial is a waste of anti-Semites’ time. They’ve preached those lies for decades to no effect. Weber no doubt sees a far better option in uniting with leftist groups and Muslims. This avoids the inevitable pitfalls that accompany a flat-out lie (which is what Holocaust denial always has been) and enables people of Weber’s ilk to cast their anti-Semitism as a liberal piety. Weber is giving warning that the future of anti-Semitism won’t be crude denials of historical facts, but allegations that Jews are a privileged class who “discriminate” against Muslims by their very existence as a people and, in the case of Israel, a nation. We have to admit that given the present political climate, that’s a good tactic.

LA writes:

David Frum links and discusses this article at his website, NewMajority.com.

Josefina writes from Argentina:

After reading this, although it sounds that great deniers finally admit holocaust, I do not found it encouraging at all for Jews in Europe or any other country in the world.

I felt the same when I was told William Richardson was in my country serving as a priest and teacher to the local Lefebrists, and was then expelled. Damage was done; he appeared to many as a victim of “Jewish international power” and worked as publicity for his denomination.

This just means anti-Semitism has evolved to the point where denying is unnecessary. The holocaust will be not denied now, but reduced in the number of victims, just the way Williamson did and any attempt to stop that will be a prove of the “Jewish world power.”

I think Europe will become a more dangerous place for Jews in the years to come. Anti-Zionism is the new excuse. But this has, of course, nothing to do with the existence or not of Israel, anti-Semitism was way previous to the existence of that state. And Muslims did not like Jews before Israel’s existence either. Anti-Semites seem to think of them as allies, they’ll regret that, all Europe will and then perhaps awake. At least we know Jews will never surrender and that’s a good lesson to the whole Western civilization. Not to surrender.

P.S. I’m sorry to inform this is my last post in the blog. The reason is, apart from my academic obligations, the things that are going on in my country right now:

The expelling of W. Richardson, the date change of our national legislative elections (from October to June of this year), the government’s promotion of a broadcast law that could turn our country into a new Venezuela, and the death of our first democratic president. I’ve decided to dedicate more of my time to my country’s problems.

LA replies:

I’m sorry to hear of the troubles in your country. If there are any English language news sources on Argentina that might tell us more about what is happening there that you think might be of interest, please send. And please don’t stop commenting completely.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 06, 2009 01:48 AM | Send