2009/09/14

Harvard Crimson says Holocaust denial ad published by accident - CNN.com


Harvard Crimson says Holocaust denial ad published by accident - CNN.com

Let's think about this. I'm not about to condemn something I haven't read, so I found the ad (above).

I didn't know about Smith. I found him in a Wikipedia article on holocaust denial:
In 1987, Bradley R. Smith founded a group called the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH).[53] He is the former media director of the Institute for Historical Review.[54] In the United States, CODOH has repeatedly tried to place newspaper ads questioning whether the Holocaust happened, especially in college campus newspapers.[55] Some newspapers have accepted the ads, while others have rejected them.[56] Bradley Smith has more recently sought other avenues to promote Holocaust denial - with little success. In June 2007, the film "El Gran Tabu" ("The Great Taboo") by Bradley R. Smith was presented at the festival "Corto Creativo 07" in Mexico.[57] On September 8, 2009, The Harvard Crimson school paper ran a paid ad from Bradley R Smith. It was quickly criticized and an apology was issued from the editor, claiming it was a mistake.[58]
I think suppression of holocaust denials is unjustifiable and obviously ineffective. For those who believe such stuff, the censorship is just further confirmation of the great Jewish conspiracy, so they are stimulated to become ever more vociferous. The evidence of mass murder of Jews by the Nazis and their allies seems to me undeniable, but people are perverse and will no doubt keep denying. It seems to me a better idea for the Crimson or any of us to try to give a reasoned response to Smith's questions.

Is it true that in Crusade in Europe DDE failed to mention what later got called "the holocaust"? If so, why might he have left it out? I can think of lots of likely reasons, but there must be biographers of Eisenhower or other historians who have a more precise idea of Eisenhower's motivations for writing his book. He published it in 1948, the year he became president of Columbia University, and was already being promoted as a future presidential candidate. My guess is that he wanted to tell a war story with himself as hero, as a campaign document. His nonmention of the facts (which may not even have been widely known yet) in such a book is therefore no indication of anything regarding the 5.7 million or 6 million or however many Jews were killed. They weren't part of his story.

Smith's other question is whether we can provide "with proof" the name of anyone killed in a gas chamber in Auschwitz. Surely that information is available (though we don't know what Smith would accept as "proof"). And there is no reason to limit ourselves to Auschwitz.

In short, I think it's much better to answer the questions than to try to deny the deniers. They just keep coming back. We should use the denials as an opportunity to make more people, especially younger people, aware of the overwhelming evidence of the shoah, its dimensions, its consequences and its lessons about what happens if we don't build institutions strong enough to prevent such mass exterminations. Because unfortunately, mass exterminations have continued for religious, ethnic or political differences since then, and will just go on unless we stop them.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

AGREED!

Richard Widmann said...

The revisionists have always been interested in stopping or preventing mass exterminations i.e. Wars. Propaganda, lies, and outright hysteria are the elements which result in the hatred of entire nations, religions, and cultures. Such hatreds spurred on by government and media have cost millions of lives of our bravest.
Smith’s advertisement is just that – an advertisement. It cannot by its size or medium convey all that is necessary. While there may be several reasons that Eisenhower failed to comment on the genocide of the Jewish people in his wartime memoir, Smith doesn’t have the room to add that De Gaulle’s work, The Complete War Memoirs has no reference whatsoever to ‘Auschwitz’ or ‘gas chambers’nor even to ‘Jews.’ Likewise Winston Churchill’s The Second World War, nearly 4,500 pages of text, has no entries at all for ‘Auschwitz’, ‘Holocaust’, or ‘gas chamber.’ Smith might argue that the events which have come to be known as “The Holocaust” and take central focus in the events of 1941-1945 were in the years immediately following that conflict, but a detail – if even that.
Such a thought however is prohibited today throughout most of Europe. In fact, the right-wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, said in 1987:
"Do you want me to say it is a revealed truth that everyone has to believe? That it's a moral obligation? I say there are historians who are debating these questions. I am not saying that the gas chambers did not exist. I couldn't see them myself. I haven't studied the questions specially. But I believe that it is a minor point point de detail in the history of the Second World War."
On the basis of France's 1990 Fabius-Gayssot law, which makes it a crime to "contest" the "crimes against humanity" as defined by the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945-1946, Le Pen was brought to trial. He was convicted by a French court and fined $200,000.
Smith does not have room to supply this background in his short ad.
And what of Auschwitz? Why does Smith limit his quest for the proof of homicidal gas chambers to Auschwitz? While long accepted as the worst of the Nazi extermination centers, the Auschwitz story like the balance of the Holocaust story has evolved through the years. With Auschwitz there is more forensic and on-site evidence than at any of the other presumed extermination camps.
Even anti-revisionist Robert Jan van Pelt agrees that the Auschwitz crematorium on display to visitors today is “largely a postwar reconstruction.” (Auschwitz: 1270 to the present p. 363) He even goes onto say, “The infamous crematoria where the mass murders had taken place lay in ruins in Birkenau, two miles away.” (p. 363).
Following the blueprints for the Auschwitz crematoria which have been located, revisionists such as Smith see that the original construction designed the room as a morgue and later changes altered the room to equip it as an air raid shelter. Those who accept the traditional Auschwitz account claim that the building was indeed designed as a morgue, only to be later transformed into a homicidal gas chamber and then modified to serve as an air raid shelter. There are no plans to support such conjecture.
In the years following the Second World War, countless enemies have been identified as modern day Hitlers. American soldiers have marched off in preemptive strikes and preemptive missions to prevent the use of modern day “Weapons of Mass Destruction” which like the WMD’s of Auschwitz may never have existed.
Hatred breeds hatred. When one people is charged with carrying out the greatest murder plot – a grand conspiracy to wipe out another people entirely – and such charges prove to be exaggerations, fabrications or simply delusion, the new victims of such tales are unnecessary victims indeed.
An America that is not quick to strike. Peace in the Middle East. Non-intervention. Preventing future wars. Preventing future genocides and mass extermination. That is what is behind a brief ad in the Harvard Crimson.
A brief ad is not a great place to explain such things.

Xyzlmk said...

The holocaust itself is not only false history, it is preposterous. Why? There are no bodies. There is no murder weapon, i.e. gas chambers. Auschwitz and Majdanek are still standing, two 'death camps', but there are no gas chambers there.

But you cannot believe that. Here is why - you have been propagandized for you entire life with one big lie, which I will now expose. You have seen horrific pictures of 'holocaust victims', piles of bodies, being bulldozed into mass graves. When you first saw the photos you probably realized something was wrong with them. The bodies had supposedly been gassed, but they were completely emaciated, like skeletons, they had obviously been very sick and/or malnourished. They were obviously not gassing victims. But, you, like me, suppressed those thoughts.

Now we can see the source of the photos. The British liberated Belsen where a typhus epidemic had killed 35,000 prisoners at the end of the war, 10,000 died after the camp was liberated. The British took a lot of documentary film footage, and assembled it into a documentary movie. That movie was suppressed, but now you can see it online, at PBS Memory of the Camps. This footage is the source of all the photos of holocaust victims that you have seen. The correspondence of the camp commandant, Josef Kramer, was captured, and shows that he requested help from the camp administration to combat the epidemic, but chaos prevailed at the end of the war. The Nazis tried to save these prisoners, they didn't deliberately kill them. In the video you will also see many healthy prisoners, including children. These images have been suppressed for 60 years.