Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time
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As of 1996, IHR still holds conferences (attendance about 250), JHR continues to be published (circulation about 5,000 to 10,000), and promotional literature and book and videotape catalogues are regularly mailed out. Whether IHR survives the break with Carto or not, we must remember that the denier movement is not a homogeneous group held together by this organization alone.
Mark Weber
With the possible exception of David Irving, in the denier movement Mark Weber may know the most about history and historiography. Some people have claimed that Weber's master's degree in modern European history from Indiana University is fake, but I called the university and confirmed that his degree is real. Weber arrived on the denier scene when he appeared as a defense witness at Ernst Zxindel's "free speech" trial in 1985. Weber denied any racist or antisemitic feelings and claimed, "I don't know anything more about the neo-Nazi movement in Germany than what I read in the papers" (1994b). Weber, however, was once the news editor of National Vanguard, the voice of the National Alliance, William Pierce's neo-Nazi, antisemitic organization. Weber also does not repudiate comments he made in a 1989 interview published by the University of Nebraska Sower about the United States becoming "a sort of Mexicanized, Puerto Ricanized country" due to the failure of "white Americans" to reproduce adequately. (Not that this sentiment is particularly unusual in our ever-increasingly segregationist society. Weber's wife told me at the 1995 IHR conference that these white guys should quit complaining about other races breeding too much and have more children themselves.) And on February 27, 1993, Weber was the object of a Simon Wiesenthal Center sting operation, secretly filmed by CBS, in which researcher Yaron Svoray, calling himself Ron Furey, met with Weber in a cafe to discuss The Right Way, a bogus magazine created to trick neo-Nazis into revealing their identities. Weber quickly figured out that Svoray "was an agent for someone" and "was obviously lying," and left (1994b). Subsequently, Weber was portrayed in an HBO movie about neo-Nazis in Europe and America, and he says that the Wesenthal version of the event is greatly distorted.
Such clandestine operations by the Simon Wiesenthal Center raise many troubling questions. Nonetheless, one must wonder why, if he is trying to distance himself from the neo-Nazi fringe of denial (as he claims), Weber would agree to such a meeting. Even David Cole, who is his friend, admits that "Weber doesn't really see any problems with a society that is not only disciplined by fear and violence but also where a government feeds its people lies in order to keep them well-ordered." Says Cole, "Deniers criticize the Jews for lying to its people or the world, and yet a lot of these same revisionists will speak very complimentarily of what the Nazis did in feeding their people lies and falsehoods in order to keep morale up and to keep this notion of the master race" (1994).
Weber is extremely bright and very personable, and one could believe that he might be capable of good historical scholarship if he ended his fixation on Jews and the Holocaust. He knows history and current politics and is a formidable debater on any number of subjects. Unfortunately, one of these subjects is Jews, whom he continues to generalize into a unified whole and to fear as a unified threat to American and world culture. Weber cannot seem to discriminate between individual Jews, whose actions he may like or dislike, and "the Jews," whose supposed actions he generally dislikes, and he cannot seem to grasp the innate complexity of contemporary culture.
David Irving
David Irving has no professional training in history, but there is no disputing that he has mastered the primary documents of the major Nazi figures, and he is arguably the most historically sophisticated of the deniers. Although his attentions have spanned the Second World War—he is the author of histories such as The Destruction of Dresden (1963) and The German Atomic Bomb (1967), as well as biographies including The Trail of the Fox (1977, on Rommel), Hitler's War (1977), Churchill's War (1987), Goring (1989), and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996)—his interest in the Holocaust is growing ever stronger. "I think that the Holocaust is going to be revised. I have to take my hat off to my adversaries and the strategies they have employed—the marketing of the very word Holocaust: I half expect to see the little 'TM' after it" (1994). For Irving, denial has become a war, which he has described in military language: "I'm presently in a fight for survival. My intention is to survive until five minutes past D-day rather than to go down heroically five minutes before the flag is finally raised. I'm convinced this is a battle we are winning" (1994). After completing his biography of Goebbels, Irving says, his publisher not only backed out of the contract because he had become a Holocaust denier but is trying to retrieve the "six-figure advance." The biography was published by Focal Point, Irving's own publishing house in London.
Irving's attitudes about the Holocaust have evolved, beginning with his 1977 offer to pay $1,000 to anyone who could provide proof that Hider ordered the extermination of the Jews. After reading The Leuchter Report (1989), which argues that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were not used to commit homicide, Irving began to deny the Holocaust altogether, not just Hitler's involvement. Curiously, he sometimes wavers on the various points of Holocaust denial. He told me in 1994 that reading Eichmann's memoirs made him "glad I have not adopted the narrow-minded approach that there was no Holocaust" (1994). At the same time, he told me that only 500,000 to 600,000 Jews died as the unfortunate victims of war—the moral equivalent, he claimed, to the bombing of Dresden or Hiroshima. Yet on July 27, 1995, when asked by the host of an Australian radio show how many Jews died at the hands of the Nazis, Irving admitted that perhaps it was as many as four million: "I think like any scientist, I'd have to give you a range of figures and I'd have to say a minimum of one million, which is monstrous, depending on what you mean by killed. If putting people into a concentration camp where they die of barbarity and typhus and epidemics is killing, then I would say the four million figure because, undoubtedly, huge numbers did die in the camps in conditions that were very evident at the end of the war" (Searchlight editorial, 1995, p. 2).
Still, Irving testified for the defense in Ernst Ziindel's "free speech" trial in 1985, after which various governments brought criminal charges against him. He has been deported from or denied entry into many countries, and his books have been removed from some stores and some stores that carry them have been vandalized. In May 1992, Irving told a German audience that the reconstructed gas chamber at Auschwitz I was "a fake built after the war." The following month, when he landed in Rome he was surrounded by police and put on the next plane to Munich where he was charged under German law for "defaming the memory of the dead." He was convicted and fined DM 3,000. When he appealed the conviction, it was upheld and the fine increased to DM 30,000 (about $20,000). In late 1992, while in California Irving received notice from the Canadian government that he would not be allowed into that country. He went anyway to accept the George Orwell award from a conservative free-speech organization, whereupon he was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He was led away in handcuffs and deported on the grounds that his German conviction made it likely that he would commit similar actions in Canada. He is presently barred from entering Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and South Africa.
Although Irving disclaims any official affiliation with IHR ("You will see that my name isn't on the masthead"), he is a regular speaker at IHR conventions and frequently lectures to denier groups around the world. At the 1995 IHR conference in Irvine, California, Irving was the featured speaker and was openly adored by many of the attendees. When not speaking, Irving staffed his own book table, selling and signing his many works. Purchasers of Hitler's War received a miniature swastika flag like the one mounted on Hitler's black Mercedes. During one conversation with a couple of fans, Irving explained that the worldwide Jewish cabal has been working against him to prevent his books from being published and him from giving talks. It is true that Irving has met with considerable resistance from Jewish groups when he has been asked to speak. For example, in 1995 Irving
was brought to the University of California, Berkeley, by a free-speech group, but his lecture was picketed and he was not able to give the talk. But one must make a sharp distinction between local, spontaneous reactions to an event, and a worldwide, planned conspiracy. Irving seems unable to make this distinction.
In 1995, Irving attended a lecture against Holocaust denial by Deborah Lipstadt, after which, he claims, he stood up and announced his presence, whereupon he was swamped by audience members asking for his autograph. Irving says he brought a box of his biography, Goring, and gave them away so students could see "which of us is lying." Oh? If there was no plan to exterminate the Jews, then what will readers make of page 238 of Goring, where Irving writes: "Emigration was only one possibility that Goring foresaw. 'The second is as follows,' he said in November 1938, selecting his words with uncharacteristic care. 'If at any foreseeable time in the future the German Reich finds itself in a foreign political conflict, then it is self-evident that we in Germany will address ourselves first and foremost to effecting a grand settling of scores against the Jews.'" Since Irving claims that emigration is all the Nazis ever meant by Ausrottung (extermination) and the Final Solution, then just what did Goring mean here by "the second" plan? And what will readers think when they get to page 343 of Goring, where Irving writes:
History now teaches that a significant proportion of those deported—particularly those too young or infirm to work—were being brutally disposed of on arrival. The surviving documents provide no proof that these killings were systematic; they yield no explicit orders from "above," and the massacres themselves were carried out by the local Nazis (by no means all of them German) upon whom the deported Jews had been dumped. That they were ad hoc extermination operations is suggested by such exasperated outbursts as that of Governor-General Hans Frank at a Krakau conference on December 16, 1941: "I have started negotiations with the aim of sweeping them [further] to the east. In January there is to be a big conference in Berlin on this problem . .. under SS Obergruppenfuhrer Heydrich [the "Wannsee Conference" of January 20, 1942]. At any rate a big jewish exodus will begin.. . . But what's to become of the Jews? Do you imagine they're going to be housed in neat estates in the Baltic provinces? In Berlin they tell us: What's bugging you— we've got no use for them either, liquidate them yourselves!"
"Berlin," says Irving, "more likely meant the party—or Himmler, Heydrich, and the SS." This passage, quoted verbatim from Goring, is Irving's own translation (Irving speaks fluent German) and interpretation. I fail to see how it can be taken to support an ad hoc interpretation of non-systematic killings with no order from above. From this passage, along with many others, it sounds like the killings were very systematic, the orders did come—directly or tacitly—from above, and the only thing ad hoc about the process was the contingent development of the final outcome. Finally, what can "liquidate" possibly mean other than exactly what Holocaust historians have always said that it means?
One factor that may be contributing to Irving's move into Holocaust denial is that he earns his living by lecturing and selling books, and the more he revises the Holocaust the more books he sells and the more invitations to lecture he receives from denier and right-wing groups. I believe that he has been slipping more and more into denial not so much because the historical evidence has taken him there but because he has found a profitable and welcoming home. The mainstream academy has rejected him, so he has created a niche on the margins. Irving is a first-rate docu-mentarian and narrative historian, but he is not a good theoretician and does a lot of selective quoting to support his biases. First it was Hitler who was unaware of the Holocaust. Then it was Goring. Now it is Goebbels he is trying to exonerate.
Robert Faurisson
Once a legitimate professor of literature at the University of Lyon 2, Robert Faurisson has become the "Pope of Revisionism," a title bestowed by Holocaust deniers in Australia in response to his tireless efforts in holding up the major tenets of Holocaust denial. For his countless statements, letters, articles, and essays challenging Holocaust authorities to "show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber," Faurisson lost his job, was physically beaten, and has been tried, convicted, fined $50,000, and barred from holding any government job. Faurisson's convictions came under the Fabius-Gayssot law passed in 1990 (inspired, in part, by Faurisson's activities), which made it a criminal offense "to contest by any means the existence of one or more of the crimes against humanity as defined by Article 6 of the Statutes of the International Military Tribunal, attached to the London Agreement of August 8, 1945, committed either by the members of an organization declared criminal in application of Article 9 of the same Statutes, or by a person held guilty of such a crime by a French or International jurisdiction."
Faurisson is the author of a number of works denying various aspects of the Holocaust, including The Rumor of Auschwitz, Treatise in Defense Against Those Who Accuse Me of Falsifying History, and Is the Diary of Anne Frank Genuine? After The Rumor of Auschwitz was published, famed MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky wrote an article in defense of Faurisson's freedom to deny whatever he wants, which triggered controversy over Chomsky's politics. Chomsky told the Australian magazine Quadrant, "I see no anti-Semitic implication in Faurisson's work." This was rather naive on Chomsky's part. During his 1991 trial in France, Faurisson summarized his feelings about Jews for the Guardian Weekly: "The alleged Hitlerian gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews form one and the same historical lie, which permitted a gigantic financial swindle whose chief beneficiaries have been the State of Israel and international Zionism, and whose main victims have been the German people and the Palestinian people as a whole." (All quoted in Anti-Defamation League 1993.)
Faurisson likes to bait his opponents, whom he calls "extermination-ists." On his way to the 1995 IHR conference in Irvine, California, for example, Faurisson visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and managed to arrange a meeting with one of its directors. By badgering him about the "lack of proof1' that Nazi gas chambers were used for mass murder, Faurisson managed to trigger an emotional outburst from his host. At the conference, Faurisson invited me to his hotel room to discuss in private the gas chamber story. Faurisson harassed me incessantly for half an hour, getting in my face and wagging his finger, demanding "one proof, just one proof1' that a Nazi gas chamber was used for mass murder. I simply asked over and over, "What would you consider 'proof?" Faurisson was unwilling (or unable) to answer.
Ernst Zundel
Among the least subtle of all the Holocaust deniers is the pro-Nazi propagandist and publisher Ernst Zundel, whose self-proclaimed goal is "the rehabilitation of the German people." Zundel believes that "there are certain aspects of the Third Reich that are very admirable and I want to call people's attention to these," such as the eugenics and euthanasia programs (1994). To do so, Zundel publishes and distributes books, fliers, and video-and audiotapes through his Toronto-based Samisdat Publishers, Ltd. A small donation will net you an assortment of Zundelmania paraphernalia, including transcriptions of his trial court proceedings; copies of his publication Power: Ziindelists vs. Zionists, with articles like "Is Spielberg's 'Schindler' a 'Schwindler'?"; video clips of his many media appearances; a video tour of Auschwitz with David Cole; and stickers that proclaim "GERMANS! STOP APOLOGIZING FOR THE THINGS YOU DID NOT DO!" and "TIRED OF THE HOLOCAUST? NOW YOU CAN STOP IT!" and so on (see figure 18).
I visited Zundel at his Toronto home/office just after the fire-bombing in September 1995 and found him to be at once jovial and friendly and at the same time deadly serious about his mission to free the German people "from the burden of the six million." In front of writer Alex Grobman and two other Jews, Zundel did not hesitate to speak his mind on all manners Semitic, including his belief that in the future the Jews are going to experience antisemitism the likes of which they have never seen before. Like other deniers, it bothers Zundel to no end that the Jews are the focus of so much attention, as he told me in a 19
94 interview:
Frankly, I don't think Jews should be so egotistical and think they are the navel of the universe. They're not. Only a people like them could think themselves so important that the whole world revolves around them. I tend to go with Hitler— the last thing that he was really worried about was what the Jews thought. To me Jews are just like any other person. That already will hurt them. They will be shrieking "Oy vey, that Ernst Zundel said Jews are just like normal people." Well, goddamn it, they are.
What the Holocaust has done to National Socialism, says Zundel, is to "bar so many thinkers from re-looking at the options that National Socialism German style offers." Lift the Holocaust burden off the Germans' shoulders, and Nazism suddenly does not look so bad. Sound crazy? Even Ziindel admits his ideas are a little extreme: "I know my ideas might be half-baked—I'm not exactly Einstein, and I know that. I'm not Kant. I'm not Goethe. I'm not Schiller. As a writer I'm not Hemingway. But goddamnit I'm Ernst Ziindel. I walk on my hind legs and I have a right to express my viewpoints. I do the best I can in a kind way. My long term goal is to ring the bell of freedom and maybe in my lifetime I will achieve no more than I have achieved so far, which is not too bad." In 1994, Ziindel said he was "presently negotiating a deal with an American satellite company who promised me that they can get a signal over Europe that can be picked up on satellite dishes." He wants to move denial into the mainstream in Europe and America, where, he thinks, "in another fifteen years revisionism will be discussed over pretzels and beer" (1994).