'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@yahoo.com
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."
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