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Michael Santomauro
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Amazon's: DEBATING THE HOLOCAUST: A New Look At Both Sides by Thomas Dalton
Mar 31, 2010
Week of violence continues in Russia with Dagestan bombing
Peace.
Michael Santomauro
Editorial Director
Call anytime: 917-974-6367
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Amazon's: DEBATING THE HOLOCAUST: A New Look At Both Sides by Thomas Dalton
Think on these things ...A REVIEW OF THE MYTH OF NATURAL RIGHTS BY L. A. ROLLINS
Date: Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 7:22 AM
Subject: Think on these things ...
To: mike_hardesty7@
'Rollins is obviously no supporter of holocaust revisionism and that
he is put on the board of a new internet revisionist publication
is as mystifying as Mark Weber remaining head of IHR. With friends like
this we don't need enemies.'
A REVIEW OF THE MYTH OF NATURAL RIGHTS BY L. A. ROLLINS
By Michael Hardesty - mike_hardesty7@
This is the updated version of Mr. Rollins earlier work.
While I briefly debunked Rollins' debunking of natural rights on
Amazon, my focus here is on his attack on holocaust revisionism.
I don't think that Rollins' much milder criticism of the conventional
holocaust view adds anything to what revisionists from Rassinier to
Faurisson to Rudolf have already made so I will ignore it in this review.
Rollins asserts that the compilation of revisionist pioneer Paul
Rassinier's work in Debunking The Genocide Myth, published
by IHR in 1978, "contains enough falsehoods to choke a correspondent
for The National Enquirer." As John Edwards and others can vouch,
the National Enquirer is often right on the money. But for all of Rollins
hyperbole, he is only able to list three "serious errors," two of which are
utterly trivial. Rassiner wrote that Hannah Arendt wrote that three million
Polish Jews were massacred on the first day of the war when Arendt actually
wrote that those three million were massacred in the first days
of the war. Note the wording here, "days," not weeks. So she was claiming
that in the first days after the war begun this crime took place.
One to seven days. Arendt's claim is absurd but this hardly constitutes
a "serious error" on Rassiner's part.
Rassinier claimed that Raul Hilberg wrote that 1.4 million Jews were
exterminated by the Einsatzgruppen when you added up the totals
per Hilberg's reasoning. On this "serious error" Rollins ends up agreeing
with Rassinier. Hilberg based the dubious 900,000 figure on alleged
Einsatzgruppen reports and then added 250,000 more persons for "gaps
in sources," which Rollins acknowledges Rassiner correctly states.
The remaining 250,000 persons Rassiner claimed Hilberg added for
"omissions," while Hilberg wrote were based on "other fragmentary
reports." As Hilberg's work was debunked at length by Rassinier
and later by Jurgen Graf, this is a meaningless distinction. These are
not serious errors.
The only valid criticism of Rassinier thyat Rollins makes is Rassinier's
misquote of Sal Baron's statement of April 24, 1961 that "700,000"
Polish Jews remained in 1945 when the actual figure was 73, 955.
Apparently Rassiner gave Baron's first name as Shalom and the date
as April 4, two relatively trivial points that Rollins jumps on.
Rollins implies that IHR was trying to put something over on all of
us by publishing Rassinier's works. In the 1978 IHR edition I own,
titled The Holocaust Story and the Lies of Ulysses, Mark Weber has
an afterword acknowledging the error on Baron as well as a few other
much more minor errors. Weber notes that Rassinier would be the first to
correct them if he were alive. It could be that Rassinier made a typo
of rounding off the 73,000 figure to 700,000 instead of 70,000.
Maybe he deliberately falsified it or maybe due to failing health in
old age he was not as careful as he should have been. The reader
can judge for himself. But based on the great preponderance of
valuable information that Rassinier provides we can agree with
Robert Faurisson that he indeed made a great original contribution
to our understanding of the Shoah business. Something that Rollins
will never be accused of.
Austin App's monograph was not a helpful addition to holocaust
revisionism because of its emotional tone alone but even here Rollins
focuses on petty nonessentials. App quoted Hanson Baldwin of The
New York Times writing in 1948 that there were 18 and 19 million
Jews in the world. Rollins asserts that Baldwin wrote of the world,
not in the world. Wow ! What a scoop ! Baldwin wrote that the Jewish world
population was estimated to be 15-18 million. An error on App's part
but not a substantive one.
Verrall is similarly criticized for misquoting
Baldwin's figures as 15,600.000 to 18, 700,00. Any error is wrong but
again this is trivial. Finally App is criticized for attributing to the extreme
Zionist writer Ben Hecht a statement actually made by one of Hecht's
fictional characters. An error to be sure but being familiar with Hecht's
views I can well believe that the sentiment alleged by App accurately
reflects Hecht's own views. Rollins quotes the old Communist Morris
Kominsky's disapproval of App here. Kominsky's The Hoaxers is an
unrelenting apologia for the many tens of millions murdered by the
Soviets and Mao as well as an attack on any questioning of the Shoah
tale. Rollins never mentions Kominsky's Communism and total apologia
for same, a rather serious omission.
I'm not familiar with the Udo Walendy booklet that Rollins quotes though
I have read one book by him on WW2 and was favorably impressed.
But he indicts Walendy en toto on one word on page 7 of his booklet.
Walendy quoting a wartime UK propagandist changed the word "subversive"
into "atrocity." I agree he shouldn't have done this but
this casts in doubt everyting Walendy writes ? So writes Rollins.
Rollins total credibility by HIS standards is in doubt because of the
Kominsky omission alone.
On page 169 of his book, Rollins dismisses the great historian,
David L. Hoggan, with an obscenity. Hoggan authored probably the greatest
diplomatic revisionist account of the origins of WW2, reprinted by IHR as
The Forced War. In this massive tribute to scholarship based on his
1948 Ph.D thesis under William Langer there are some errors but a great
many more truths as I can testify from reading both the thesis and the book.
The Myth Of The Six Million was a private manuscript that Hoggan
did not intend for publication and it was done without his permission.
There are errors which Butz noted but also much valuable material therein.
It was the first introduction to holocaust revisionism for many of us.
As usual Rollins dismisses Hoggan's work en toto without even a semblance
of balance. He doesn't even discuss in detail the monograph's faults but
dismisses Hoggan himself with an obscenity and this is surely what the
shrinks call projection. Hoggan knew that Reitlinger was not a revisionist
and that Reitlinger regarded key parts of Hoss's testimony as hopelessly
untrustworthy.
In a lengthy discussion I had with David Hoggan on the
Stanford campus in January, 1973 he made it very plain that his monograph
was a rough first draft only and was not to be published until he could provide
full documentation as he did for The Forced War.
On Dr. James J. Martin, I need to state for the record that Jim and I were
yery good friends and correspondents for almost twenty years, 1971-1990.
We never had a falling out but I became preoccupied with other things and
let our friendship lapse, which I very much regret. A few years ago I reread
all of his letters which was an absorbing educational experience unto itself.
Then I reread American Liberalism and World Politics, 1931-1941, two
massive, very well written volumes. Rollins starts with a factual error in
his writing on Martin. The IHR revisionist conference was held on the
Labor Day weekend of 1979, not 1974 as Rollins. For a guy who upbraids
Rassinier for being 20 days off (see above) he is five years off here !
Rollins quotes Martin writing in an obscure libertarian publication that
the Communists played a major role in the whole holocaust legend.
This is on its face absolutely correct as the gas chamber stories had been
discredited as regards Germany by the 1960s. I distinctly remember a Turk
on the Joe Payne TV show in 1966 claiming that he had seen gas chambers
in a German camp and a representative of the Jewish Agency called him a
liar. I also recall hearing many people over the years claim there were both
six million Jews and six million non-Jews exterminated in Poland where all
the alleged extermination was taking place.
I don't know who started this
but that the Communists were the main beneficiaries of it in Europe cannot
be doubted. The booklet that Martin quotes seems ambiguous enough as to
leave room for honest doubt. Rollins doesn't appear interested in nuance or
giving any benefit of the doubt to people who have done immense intellectual
such as Martin, Hoggan and Rassinier. Considering what these folks have
done as compared with Rollins' rather modest efforts ought to inspire more
caution in him.
It was only after the fall of the Soviet Bloc that revised figures appeared at
the Auschwitz camp. It had been four million for decades, even J. Edgar Hoover
in 1958 wrote of four million Jews exterminated at Auschwitz in his Masters Of
Deceit. I understand the Polish Historical Society now gives a figure of 750,000 while the
camp sign states over a million.
As far Martin citing Dr. Broszat as a source on the German camps there's nothing
with that precisely because Broszat made an admission against interest there.
You can say that even he partially recognizes the truth. Rollins presents a false all or nothing
dichotomy here. You have to believe everything Broszat said or nothing at all.
As far as Martin slighting the confessions of Gerstein, Kramer, et al,
that would be difficult because they have been exposed as flagrant perjurers
by Rassinier initially and then others.
Hoss was captured by the Brits but then in a nasty bit of double dealing was
turned over to the Soviets in Poland where he was coerced, tortured and executed.
Martin never claimed that the Communists were the only beneficiaries of what
later came to be called the holocaust but that they were great beneficiaries of same for 45
years after the year and were the main promoters of the legend in Europe.
The people who created the Gulag in the USSR and helped install Mao's
murderous regime in China invented the holocaust. This does not preclude
other liars in the so-called western democracies, the organized Jewish community
and others across the political spectrum who have their axes
to grind here.
Martin was skeptical of the value of much government documentation but preferred
it to perjuring witnesses and hysterical testimony which was common at all the trials
in 1945 as well as Frankfurt in 1963-64, Eichmann in 1961, Demjanjuk in the late 80s, etc.
The Nation critic who accused Rassinier of documentitis was sore because he
couldn't refute what Rassinier wrote. It reminds me of Tom Wicker's criticism
of Noam Chomsky that his media books were too well documented !
On the Majdanek concentration camp, the reader is referred to the book,
Concentration Camp Majdanek by Jurgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno,
which demolishes the idea of mass exterminations via gas or shootings.
Rollins believes a good case can be made for mass exterminations at
Majdanek but Graf and Mattogno put the lie to this.
Rollins ignores the fact that the testimony of Hoss, Stangl, Kramer,
Gerstein, Broad, Kremer, Hoettl, Wislicency, Ohlendorf and others
have been thoroughly challenged and discredited by revisionists.
Contrary to Rollins assertion there is a heavy monopoly of falsehood on
the conventional side, which is not to say that there have not been unsavory
characters in the revisionist ranks such as David McCalden. Revisionists such
as myself were libeled in his newsletter to which I responded vigorously.
But Rollins agnostic position is as untenable here as it is in the religious
area. Just as proponents of the existence of a God have to prove their
positive assertion so do proponents of the holocaust. We atheists in both
areas don't have to prove anything and are entitled to remain atheists
as long the positive claims are unproved.
Even David Hume admitted that his epistemological agnosticism would
to insanity or suicide if practiced consistently (see History of Western
Philosophy by Bertrand Russell.)
There is a brief, rather juvenile letter to Allah sprinkled with the profanity
that is part of Mr. Rollins persona. It's supposed to take some great courage
to attack Islam ?
Rollins in his Lucifer's Lexicon describes Holocaust Revisionism as a
"Historic pornography. A thought crime against humanity", and Holocaust
Revisionist as "One who denies that he is a denier."
Rollins is obviously no supporter of holocaust revisionism and that
he is put on the board of a new internet revisionist publication
is as mystifying as Mark Weber remaining head of IHR. With friends like
this we don't need enemies.
A final comment on the central premise of Rollins book where he selectively
quotes Ayn Rand. In The Objectivist Ethics (reprinted in The Virtue of
Selfishness) Rand states: "The source of man's rights is not divine law
or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A and Man is Man.
Rights are conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper
survival." At length Rand refutes Rollins anti-natural rights position almost
half a century ago.
Rollins takes the fanatically statist position that rights don't exist unless
the state recognizes them and since states often don't, then they can't exist.
As Rand correctly points out where a gun begins, morality ends. That is
why physical force should be restricted to retaliatory force against those
initiate force or fraud (an indirect form of force.)
I'm tempted to go on at great length here but this may not be the right venue.
I'm glad Mr. Rollins has left the revisionist ranks and I trust others of
like mind will follow him.
I'd have to characterize Mr. Rollins' work here in the same manner that
William F. Buckley, Jr., characterized a 1961 Papal Encyclical:
"A venture in triviality."
============
--
Peace.
Michael Santomauro
Editorial Director
Call anytime: 917-974-6367
ReporterNotebook@
Mar 29, 2010
Alex Kurtagic: Are Leftists Cleverer?
The Occidental Observer Newsletter - Alex Kurtagic: Are Leftists Cleverer?
Are Leftists Cleverer?
Alex Kurtagic
March 29, 2010
One common tactic used by Leftists is the characterizing of their opponents on the Right — particularly those who self-consciously identify themselves as White and who maintain that Whites have unique ethnic interests of their own — as, among other things, intellectually inferior. We are all familiar with the stereotype, perpetuated with impunity in the mass media of news and entertainment, of traditionalist, racially-conscious Whites as either tattooed neo-Nazi knuckleheads and Hitler fetishists or inbred, defective, periodontitic, Bible-thumping, Klan-supporting hillbillies from the American South. Those who are interested in White-specific political issues will be familiar also with the common Leftist attitude towards debating said issues: the White advocates' positions are regarded as being beneath contempt — not only morally repugnant, but also so idiotic, so preposterous, so based on fear and prejudice, as to not be worth the dignity of a discussion (unless it is, of course, for the purposes of condemnation) There is no denying that the Right — as supporters of this website would likely understand it — attracts, besides normal people, a variety of marginal types, particularly via the more peripheral currents and subcultures. There is also no denying that most contemporary academics are Leftists, that most contemporary intellectuals are Leftists, that most contemporary journalists and commentators of note are Leftists, that most contemporary holders of postgraduate humanities degrees from elite universities are Leftists, or identify with Leftist ideas. But does this mean that Leftism represents the intellectually superior position? Are Leftists Leftists because they are cleverer? Or did they become Leftists because of some other reason?
Social Identity Theory (SIT) maintains that there are behaviors among humans that occur only in group situations. In such situations, humans will tend to identify themselves and others as either part of a given group (in which case they are said to have an ingroup identification) or as not part of that group (in which case they are said to have an outgroup identification) The evolutionist reading of SIT sees human groups as engaging in resource competition in order to maximize life chances and reproductive success. (Here I use these latter terms in the broadest possible sense, which encompasses not only organisms but also ideas.) The same way that individuals attempt to increase their social status in an effort to gain access to more and better resources, groups often do the same. Similarly, individuals seeking to increase their social status may do so via membership of a group, which, in turn, may also seek to increase its own status by attracting high-status and/or high-quality individuals. Ideally, this is a situation where the individual and the group both gain, as their mutually reinforcing status relationship would tend to increase access to resources for both: the group gains the resources brought in by the new high status/high quality member, and the aforementioned member gains the resources offered by the group. I must make clear at this point that resources do not always and necessary take the form of material wealth: prestige, expertise, contacts, knowledge, access to desirable mates, prestigious jobs, or positions of power are all also sought-after resources, which can — although not exclusively — both derive and confer social status. Seen from this perspective, it makes sense that a high-IQ individual who seeks to increase his status will tend to be drawn to group identifications and group memberships popularly associated with intelligence. In the contemporary West, where the Left presently enjoys cultural hegemony (dominating politics, education, media, and publishing), and where, therefore, the Left shapes the discourse, the Left's ideas enjoy high status while the Right's ideas enjoy low status. (I define the Right broadly as traditionalist and inegalitarian. Put more simply: Because the Left is in control, they are able to represent their ideas as clever and those of their opponents as stupid, among other things; and clever people, wanting to be seen as clever, go where they think the clever people are and make sure to avoid embarrassing dummies. Thus, the Leftist claim to (among other things) intellectual superiority becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We can also see it as a form of peer pressure. This is not to say that this is the only factor influencing people's choice of political ideological affiliation. I believe temperament, personal history, and marginality status are powerful factors too (some people are attracted to marginal ideas; others identify with them because they themselves are marginal). However, even where these factors cause individuals to be drawn to Right wing ideas, status remains operative as a motivator: said individuals may find their social status lowered within contemporary mainstream society because of their ideological affiliation, but they compensate for this by tapping into alternative or analogous, ingroup-managed sources of status. This is not to say also that Leftism does not attract its fair share of idiots. We only need to look at the membership lists of "anti-racist" organizations like the ARA in the United States and the UAF in the United Kingdom to find a profusion of examples. Leftism, on its own, appears to say very little about its supporters' general intelligence: When considered relative to its status, however, it does seem to tell us something about many of its supporters' capacity for thinking independently and for courageously resisting pressure to conform or to at least keep quiet. This is true, in fact, for any political or ideological affiliation. Yet, for the reasons mentioned above, in the culture war between Right and Left in the West, each side will claim and seek to demonstrate intellectual superiority as they compete for status. And, unsurprisingly, even where one side finds the other side has arrived at useful insights, the one side will prefer to find autochthonous sources for those insights rather than credit the political enemy. What about Satoshi Kanazawa's findings, regarding the apparent tendency of intelligent individuals to adopt liberal views? His basic argument is that intelligence correlates with openness to experience (or openness to novelty), and that, since liberalism is evolutionarily novel, intelligent individuals are more likely to be drawn to it than less intelligent individuals — or, at least, they are less 'likely . . . to conform to others in the society'. Kanazawa's Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis might appear partlyto refute the arguments I have made here. But note that the hypothesis' explanation for more intelligent individuals' tendency to be drawn to liberalism is not that it takes intelligence to see liberalism's "superior" intellectual merit, but that liberalism is evolutionarily novel. In other words: Leftism is attractive because it is new, not because it is cleverer. There is also another angle to consider. Kanazawa proposes that a possible explanation for less intelligent individuals' preferring conservative ideas is that it might be adaptive for them to mimic those around them, as the majority is mathematically more likely to be correct than the average individual. If this is so, then, in a context where the surrounding culture is politically liberal and intolerant of dissidence, it might be evolutionarily novel not to go with the flow, so to speak, and maintain, as a matter of principle, political positions that risk ostracism and economic sanctions. If this is the case, then Kanazawa's hypothesis can be used to predict both liberal and anti-liberal attitudes among highly intelligent individuals. Those familiar with the serious side of White advocacy know that, as a movement, it counts with the efforts of highly intelligent, independently- Evidently, because publicly maintaining a "heretical" position requires unusual courage and strength of personality (the penalties of being a heretic are great), White advocates are outnumbered by their opponents on the Left. The Left routinely cites its numerical advantage — or, perhaps rather, its apparent numerical advantage — as proof of their intellectual superiority and normality, and the (apparent) numerical disadvantage of its opponents as proof of their intellectual inferiority and abnormality. Peter Victor, a Black man writing for the Independent and providing an account there of his meeting with Nick Griffin did so in June last year: I point out that the vast majority of people in this countryare either highly antipathetic towards him [Nick Griffin] or just apathetic. A minority may support him, but they are out of touch with reality. Most sensible people ignore the BNP or think they're a bunch of crazy folk. The oligophrenic baboons from the UAF deployed a similar argument a month later: Unite Against Fascism is calling on anti-fascists across the country to converge on Codnor, Derbyshire, at 9am on Saturday 15 August to protest against the British National Party rally taking place in the village that weekend. UAF supporters intend to "kettle" the rally by surrounding it with protesters. This action will demonstrate that the vast majority of people in this country reject the Nazi politics of the BNP. And another anti-racist activist, writing in 2007, shows this is a stock phrase: There should be a two-pronged attack on the fascists: dealing with their lies on the ground, and dealing with the social problems that lead to resentment and move people to vote for the BNP in a protest vote. We know the vast majority of people in this country abhor the racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic ideas of the party. This is of course, a fallacious argument, known as argumentum ad populum. The fact that a view is in the majority does not prove that it is correct anymore than the fact that the opposing view is in the minority proves that it is wrong. We must remember also that the Left did not always enjoy ascendancy. There was a time when theirs constituted a fringe minority view, which "the vast majority of people" dismissed as foolish, evil, and crazy. I believe that as the Left becomes discredited through their ever-growing record of failure, so will their ideas, and so will their appeal among the less independently- Alex Kurtagic (email him) was born in 1970. He is the author ofMister (published by Iron Sky Publishing, 2009) and the founder and director of Supernal Music. Permanent link:http://www.theoccide  |
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Peace.
Michael Santomauro
Editorial Director
Call anytime: 917-974-6367
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Shoah Foundation patents sold
March 26, 2010, 06:09 PM ET
Video-Indexing Patents From Holocaust Archive Draw $7-Million Bid at Auction
The video-indexing patents auctioned off online this week by the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education drew a bid of $7-million. The institute, which developed the technology to search its archive of testimonies from Holocaust survivors and liberators, will use the proceeds (less a 15-percent fee to the auction company, Ocean Tomo) to continue its educational and research programs. Ocean Tomo policies forbid the institute, an arm of the University of Southern California, to disclose the identity of the successful bidder, but a university official said it was a party that would actually use the patented technology, not a company that buys up patents in order to simply sue alleged infringers.
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Peace.
Michael Santomauro
Editorial Director
Call anytime: 917-974-6367
ReporterNotebook@
Amazon's: DEBATING THE HOLOCAUST: A New Look At Both Sides by Thomas Dalton
