Print This Post

By Richard A. Widmann.

For twenty years, I have been commenting on how the themes and plot of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian tale of book-burning Fahrenheit 451 are coming to pass. My initial article on this subject was entitled, “How Fahrenheit 451 Trends Threaten Intellectual Freedom.”[1] My friend Bradley Smith initially published it on the original CODOH Website in 1997. From then, it was revised and reprinted several times. In 1998 it was translated and published in German. It was also included in the Greenhaven Press Readings on Fahrenheit 451 as part of their Literary Companion Series.[2] The article was also published in the short-lived journal The Revisionist[3] where it was distributed to college students as an insert in their campus newspapers. Ironically professors and students on the campus of St. Cloud University chose to burn the offending journal.[4] Indeed, acts of book burning and censorship are a threat to today’s supposedly democratic societies and our notions of intellectual freedom.

(Read more…)

 Print This Post

By Richard A. Widmann.

On Thursday evening, 18 February 2016, I glanced at my email on my phone. The subject of a newly received message struck me like a lightning bolt. “Bradley RIP” was all it said. It wasn’t that it was entirely unexpected. Bradley had been ill for many years, fighting off heart ailments, cancer, and even a bullet to the head during the Korean War, but somehow it seemed that Bradley would always be among us.

I first became aware of Bradley in the late 80s. I had discovered him a couple of years after my introduction to Holocaust revisionism. I knew of him through his book, Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist and the work that he did for the Institute for Historical Review.

(Read more…)

 Print This Post

By Richard A. Widmann.

The year 2015 was another great year for free historical inquiry. On our primary website, users were up 23.87% from 69,635 in 2014 to 86,254. We also experienced an 18.76% increase in page views from 201,536 to 239,400. Readership remains largest in the United States. The next three runners up were Great Britain, Germany, and France.

(Read more…)

 Print This Post

By Richard A. Widmann.

Inconvenient History is pleased to announce that the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) has become our new publisher.  CODOH is the longest running organization struggling for a free and open debate on the subject of the Holocaust.  CODOH was founded in 1990 to encourage a free exchange of ideas with regard to the orthodox Holocaust narrative.

(Read more…)

 Print This Post

By Richard A. Widmann-

As 2014 came to a close, Inconvenient History (www.inconvenienthistory.com) closed the door on its sixth year of activities. In our online journal, we published another 32 articles by some of the leading voices in historical revisionism in the world today. In addition, we printed hardcopy annual of our complete works from 2013. This volume is comprised over 500 pages of revisionist scholarship and continues to sell at a healthy rate through Amazon.com. In addition, another 20 articles were posted to the “Inconvenient History – Independent Revisionist Blog” (http://revblog.codoh.com/ ). Finally many hundreds of news posts were made to Twitter where @inconhistory has accumulated 483 followers. In a typical week our retweet reach can reach over 1,800 people.

Throughout 2014, pages of the Inconvenient History flagship journal were viewed 200,775 times by some 69,378 users. This represents a 15% increase over 2013. Our best day was 3 September when our pages were viewed some 8,542 times. While most of our readership is from the United States, 2014 saw a 105% increase in readership in the United Kingdom, an astounding 472% increase in Australia and a whopping increase of 722% in Canada.

(Read more…)

 Print This Post

By Richard Widmann-

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)

 Print This Post

By Richard A. Widmann-

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.

(Read more…)

 Print This Post

By Richard A. Widmann-

Widmann: For readers who may not know you, could you explain how you first became involved in historical revisionism?

Heink: I was born in 1937, in Germany, a long story and not the issue here. In 1959 my wife and I, along with our 1-year-old son, moved to Canada. At first, World War II was still being fought when talking to Canadians, with “The Holocaust” creeping in only later. I was young and busy trying to make a living, and really had no reason to doubt the official version – what is presented as history. But this constant “Germany responsible for all the ills” started to grate on me, and having opted to get out of the rat race, I moved to a small village where I decided to take a closer look. That was in 1982. By then, the letters to the editor of a German newspaper published in Canada made me think doubts as to the veracity of the official version had crept in, The communist empire collapsed; it had failed to bring about the “One World Government” and had therefore become useless. Shortly thereafter I read in that German paper that the Auschwitz death toll, mostly Jews we were told, had been reduced from 4 million to 1.5 million, at first; it now stands at 1.1 million. I still remember when I read this and where I was, for I was sure that now investigations will be undertaken, for if 2.5 million people, mostly Jews, can be misplaced, where else have mistakes been made?

(Read more…)

 Print This Post

By Richard A. Widmann-

April 25^th marked the anniversary of the Spanish-American War. While barely a notice appeared in the American media, the Spanish-American War of 1898 was instrumental in transforming the United States into an empire. It also established a precedent for the subsequent conflicts of the 20^th Century in that the media played a major role in disseminating propaganda intended to rouse public support for war.

In early 1898 President McKinley sent the USS Maine to Havana to protect American interests during the long-standing revolt of the Cubans against the Spanish government. On the evening of 15 February, a mysterious explosion suddenly blew up the Maine. Nearly three-quarters of the battleship’s crew died as a result of the explosion. The immediate assumption was that the sinking of the Maine and the deaths of 260 sailors was the result of Spanish treachery.

(Read more…)

 Print This Post

By Richard A. Widmann-

On 16 March 2014, Dr. Henri Roques died.  Roques, who was 93 at the time of his death, had spent a week in the hospital having been admitted for a double pulmonary embolism.

Roques was born in Lyon on 10 November 1920. A revisionist pioneer, he became interested in revisionism in 1955, when he discovered Le Mensonge d’Ulysse (The Lie of Ulysses) by Paul Rassinier. Roques began to correspond with Rassinier and remained friends with him until his death in 1967.

(Read more…)