By Jett Rucker-

Can students handle the truth of inconvenient history?

Revisionists may feel an overwhelming sense of irony in noting educational disturbances currently occurring in the conservative bastion in the state of Colorado centered around the city of Golden.

There, reports say, students at two high schools are calling in “sick” and otherwise playing hooky while many of their teachers are doing the same thing.

The students’ cause, it would seem, is proposed revisions to the history curriculum intended to portray public affairs in the American past as more “orderly” (my word – the source is here). The contention centers around recent revision (there’s that word) of the content of the US History Advanced Placement tests (this was done by the College Board, far outside Colorado) that the local school board feels portrays the United States in an unduly critical manner. While much revisionism centers on just such matters, the offending revisions do not touch upon the subject of the Holocaust, another popular subject of revisionism. Pity, that, but the contrary would be much bigger news if it were true, as demonstrated recently in Rialto, California.

Meantime, the teachers’ agenda, like that of other opponents of revisionism, would seem to have powerful ulterior elements – to wit, stormy negotiations between the local teachers’ union and the local school board.

Le plus ça change . . .

By Jett Rucker-

Jan Karski monument in Warsaw

On a bronze bench on the Georgetown University campus, looking toward White-Gravenor Hall, sits the bronze effigy of a slim gentleman holding a cane to the ground and gazing beatifically at a chessboard occupying the center of the bench. There’s plenty of room at the opposite end of the bench for would-be friends of (the gentleman represented by) the statue to sit and pose for photographs with an icon of western civilization who truly may be held instrumental in the violent and early deaths of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers along with even greater numbers of Europeans, citizens of his native Poland among them.

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By Michael Hoffman-

David Cole – “a revisionist for the Millennial generation”

I managed to find the time to read the well-written and generally fair-minded review of David Cole’s autobiography. I realize you do not publish letters to the editor, but a few corrections are in order.

While it is true that many revisionists do not engage in on site forensic investigation, the pioneer in that field is Ditlieb Felderer, who visited Auschwitz-Birkenau some 27 times in the 1970s, expertly documenting the facility in approximately 30,000 color photographs. The fact that this achievement is unknown or forgotten is troubling (most of Felderer’s priceless collection was, I am told, destroyed in the arson which razed Ernst Zündel’s home in Toronto in 1995. My video of a sideshow presentation Ditlieb gave in Ithaca, NY in the mid 1980s – “Tour of Auschwitz Fakes” – offers several dozen for viewing).

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By Wilfried Heink-

There is no solid evidence showing if and when Hitler decided on the “final solution.”

To this day we have no solid evidence showing if and when Hitler decided on this so-called “Endlösung”, i.e., “The Holocaust”. Many theories have been advanced, one by Gerlach for instance who claims Hitler made his wish known to kill all Jews during a meeting of December 12,1941. Just speculations, of course. Then the ‘meeting of minds’ by Hilberg, all desperate attempts to substantiate something unsustainable.

Just recently I came across an article by Martin Broszat: “Soziale Motivation und Führer-Bindung des Nationalsozialismus (Social motivation and Führer bond/commitment of the NS), published in VfZ, 1970, pp.394-409. Broszat, as is well known, was a ‘functionalist’, thus leaning towards Hilberg.

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By Wilfried Heink-

Was the German Kaiser really responsible for launching WWI?

Preamble

The Holy Roman Empire German Nation, in fact a German Empire – German chiefs had accepted the Pope as ceremonial head of state – for various reasons disintegrated over time into Kingdoms, Principalities, Duchies, etc., etc.. And although the Hapsburg’s, the last line of German Emperors who had moved to Vienna from Aachen, were still accepted as Emperors, their influence was limited. When Bismarck appeared on the political scene at around the middle of the 1800s, he started out as ‘Bismarck the Prussian’ to later become ‘Bismarck the German’ with the aim to re-unite Germany, sans Austria, under the Hohenzollern, a Swabian Dynasty, the rulers of Prussia.
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By Richard Widmann-

Orwell’s 1984 was a major influence on historical revisionists including Harry Elmer Barnes

George Orwell was born on this day in 1903 in Motihari, India. George Orwell, the pen name of the English author Eric Arthur Blair was a great influence on Twentieth Century revisionism including revisionist pioneer Harry Elmer Barnes. In his important essay, “How ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ Trends Threaten American Peace, Freedom, and Prosperity,” Barnes documented the prophetic nature of Orwell’s classic. Barnes wrote:

Orwell’s book is the keenest and most penetrating work produced in this generation on the current trends in national policy and world affairs. To discuss world trends today without reference to the Orwell frame of reference is not unlike writing on biology without reference to Darwin, Mendel, and De Vries…

Orwell was educated in England at Eton College. After service with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1927, he returned to Europe to become a writer. He lived for several years in poverty. His earliest experiences resulted in the book Down and Out in Paris and London.
By 1936, Orwell had joined the Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell was critical of communism but basically considered himself a socialist. He was wounded in the fighting. Late in the war, Orwell fought the communists and eventually had to flee Spain for his life. He documented many of his experiences during the Spanish Civil War in his Homage to Catalonia.

Orwell’s experiences with totalitarian political regimes had a direct impact on his writing. His best-known books reflect his opposition to totalitarianism: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. In an article entitled, “Why I Write” Orwell explained:

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism… Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.

During the Second World War, Orwell wrote a weekly radio political commentary designed to counter German and Japanese propaganda in India. His wartime work for the BBC gave him a solid taste of bureaucratic hypocrisy. Many believe that this experience provided the inspiration for his invention of “newspeak,” the truth-denying language of Big Brother’s rule in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Throughout his lifetime, the great English author continually questioned all “official” or “accepted” versions of history. At the conclusion of the war in Europe, Orwell expressed doubt about the Allied account of events and posed the following question in his book Notes on Nationalism, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear… Is it true about the gas ovens in Poland?”

Orwell died on 21 January 1950 in London at the early age of forty-seven of a neglected lung ailment. He left behind a substantial body of work and a reputation for greatness.

Partial Bibliography

• Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
• Burmese Days (1934)
• A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935)
• Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
• The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
• Homage to Catalonia (1938)
• Coming up for Air (1939)
• Inside the Whale, and Other Essays (1940)
• Animal Farm (1945)
• Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)
• Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (1950)
• Such, Such Were the Joys (1953)

By Richard A. Widmann-

Following WWII, Barnes attempted to “bring history into accord with the facts.”

Harry Elmer Barnes was born on this day in 1889. Earlier in the year Benjamin Harrison was sworn in as the 23rd President of the United States. John Philip Sousa’s Marine Corps Band played at the Inaugural Ball with a large crowd in attendance. North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Washington were added to the union increasing the number of stars on the American flag to 38. The first issue of The Wall Street Journal was published in New York City.

Later that year Thomas Edison screened his very first motion picture, launching a new entertainment medium and an industry centered on moving pictures. Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederate States of America died that December at the age of 81.

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By Richard A. Widmann and David Merlin –

Revisionists should embrace the teaching of The Diary of Anne Frank

The story of Anne Frank and her family is well-known through the diary bearing her name. This tragic tale is frequently used to counter Holocaust revisionists. The details of the story are often forgotten or replaced with assumptions regarding the fates of Anne Frank and her family. The facts of the story actually support the revisionist view of the Holocaust. The teaching of The Diary of Anne Frank should be embraced by Holocaust revisionists and all who care about learning the truth of what really happened to Europe’s Jews during the Second World War. The popular media version of the Holocaust would have us think that almost all would be gassed upon arrival at the “death camps” and especially Auschwitz.  While perhaps a few very strong Jews might be utilized for manual labor, all children, the elderly, the sick would surely be murdered as part of a program of extermination.

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by Jett Rucker-

Should diversity of thought be tolerated when teaching the Holocaust?

Eighth-graders in the public schools of Rialto, California were (almost) treated to a view of the Holocaust probably never before presented in any school, public or private, in America. As a highly structured activity designed to be conducted over a period of seven days, the assignment presented material from three different Web sites with which students were to develop answers to questions such as “Was the Holocaust an actual tragic historical event or a propaganda tool?” and support the answers with citations of statements from both the presented material and other material, from two extensive websites and “the library,” to be used only if the student’s teacher “allows you to.”

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By James J. Martin-

George Morgenstern’s Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War was the first revisionist book on the subject.

George Morgenstern, the author of the first Revisionist book about the December 7,1941 Pearl Harbor attack and the complex history which preceded and followed it, died in Denver, Colorado on July 23, 1988, in his 83rd year. Morgenstern’s book, titled Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War, published by Devin A. Garrity in New York in January, 1947, is in this writer’s opinion also still the best, despite a formidable volume of subsequent writing by many others on the subject. A work of 425 pages in small type, it sparked a volcano of both criticism and praise, and is probably the most widely commented upon and discussed book ever produced by the World War Two Revisionist impulse in this country, which latter those newly upon the scene should understand covers many aspects of that war, its antecedents and its consequences. Everyone writing on the subject of Pearl Harbor has either consciously or unconsciously followed the “scenario” first laid down by George Morgenstern.

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