Ever since in an article of a white nationalist blogsite I was called “a Jew” and that my “behavior indicates that he’s a Jew” (by “behavior” the author meant my criticism of the truther movement), I realized that truthers suffer from huge psychological issues. For example, a commenter in that article’s thread who has the Truth Movement as a sort of litmus test for what he believes is the true nationalist, stated that the other “‘WN’ bloggers… are probably posting from Tel Aviv.”
While demonstrating that I am not a Jew is quite easy in these times of DNA tests, what I found disturbing is the notion that those who strongly disagree with truthers must be Jews, or even conspiracists themselves.
The following excerpts, taken from James B. Meigs’ foreword and afterword of Debunking 9/11 Myths corroborate that truthers are a little paranoid to say the least. Meigs is, technically, our foe—he writes as if “racism” and “anti-Semitism” were something wrong. Nonetheless, I find his arguments demystifying conspiracy theories compelling (no ellipsis added):
Foreword
Popular Mechanics set out to investigate conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks in late 2004, just as those claims were emerging from the swamps of extremist websites and radical Islamist organizations. We had no idea how much trouble we were about to stir up. Our first magazine article on the topic, which appeared in the March 2005 issue, closely examined the major scientific, military, aeronautical, and engineering-based claims commonly cited as evidence that 9/11 was, as conspiracy theorists like to say, an inside job. Our investigation found no evidence in support of the conspiracy claims.
The article unleashed a flood of criticisms and accusations from those supporting such theories. These attacks ranged from the preposterous (it was said our magazine had published this investigation on orders from a cabal of Masons and Illuminati) to alarming (death threats were referred to our security department). Clearly, we had touched a nerve. The article quickly became the most widely read story in the history of Popular Mechanics’ Web site, with over 7.5 million views. (A detailed account of the reaction to our article, and what that reaction says about the conspiracy movement, can be found in the original afterword to this book on page 121 [see below].)
A team of Popular Mechanics reporters and editors then started work on a far more detailed book-length version of the report. By the time the first edition of this book was published in the summer of 2006, the 9/11 conspiracy furor was reaching a tipping point. The flurry of books on the topic had grown into an avalanche, with certain writers, such as former Claremont School of Theology professor David Ray Griffin, building a thriving cottage industry around the topic. Conspiracy fans had, with Orwellian overtones, taken to calling themselves “the 9/11 Truth Movement,” or simply “truthers.” Extremist talk radio programs such as The Alex Jones Show pushed the issue nonstop. And a video pastiche of conspiracy theories, a quasi-documentary known as Loose Change, was becoming an Internet sensation.
Popular Mechanics’ 9/11 project represented one of the relatively few attempts by mainstream journalists to grapple seriously with the conspiracy theory claims. So it was telling that most conspiracy theorists quickly decided that Popular Mechanics too was part of the conspiracy. In their minds, all our research could therefore be rejected a priori. We had run head on into a worldview that some experts call “conspiracism.” It is a mind-set that insists on reaching a predetermined conclusion regardless of what information is presented. Any facts that don’t fit the conspiracy paradigm need to be explained away. Since 2004, leading 9/11 theorist David Ray Griffin has written seven books and edited two others on the subject of 9/11. He devoted a chapter in his book, Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory, to explain why, in his view, the 9/11 reporting by Popular Mechanics and other mainstream journalists is invalid.
Griffin’s book devotes many pages to the idea that Popular Mechanics and our parent company, the Hearst Corporation, are somehow implicated in the vast conspiracy he sees behind 9/11. He digs up century-old controversies and finds tenuous links between the magazine’s staff and various government officials. But he never explains how a magazine—much less a major corporation—could possibly convince its employees to help cover up the most notorious mass murder in our nation’s history. Popular Mechanics has close to 30 editorial staffers and dozens of freelance contributors. Does Griffin imagine that whenever we hire new editors I bring them into a secret bunker and initiate them into an ultraclandestine society for world domination? Why wouldn’t such prospective employees run screaming from our building? In the years since we began our work on 9/11 conspiracy theories, a number of our staffers have moved on to other jobs. What would stop them from revealing a conspiracy that, if true, would be one of the biggest journalistic scoops in history? Did we swear them all to lifetime secrecy? As with so many conspiracy claims, the whole elaborate fantasy becomes practically laughable on close examination.
The original Popular Mechanics article addressed 16 of the most common 9/11 conspiracy claims. The first edition of this book expanded that list by four, and added much more detail. As a result, many of the more adept theorists simply moved on to new theories, or shifted their focus to issues that our team had not covered as deeply. For example, at the time we published the first edition, there was still no definitive account of why World Trade Center 7—which was not hit by planes, only damaged by debris—also collapsed. Not surprisingly, as the truther community moved away from talk about missiles and pods, it began focusing obsessively on elaborate theories concerning WTC 7. (With the benefit of much more detailed engineering analysis, this edition addresses—and debunks—those WTC 7 claims in depth.)
It is hard to argue without facts. And yet that is the position in which 9/11 conspiracists increasingly find themselves. One by one, the key factual underpinnings of their theories have been demolished. But still they argue on, their passionate conviction undiminished.
In the end, the truther community’s tendency toward unintentional self-parody has perhaps done as much to undermine its credibility as has the work of Popular Mechanics. Just when the conspiracy movement seemed to be making real headway toward deeply influencing American culture, a funny thing happened: it began to turn into a punch line. South Park offered a brutal parody of the conspiracist worldview in an episode called “Mystery of the Urinal Deuce.” Comedian Jon Stewart started tweaking truthers on The Daily Show, at one point holding up a sign reading “9/11 WAS AN OUTSIDE JOB.” And, in a common-sense answer to the vast legion of conspiracy-oriented websites, an assortment of sharp, and often satirical, blogs has emerged to challenge the truthers on their own turf. In particular, the blog Screw Loose Change offers devastating analysis of the truther community, and links to point-by-point rebuttals to the claims advanced in Loose Change.
Of course, conspiracy theories involving 9/11 will never fully go away. And a book like this, no matter how widely reported or carefully updated, will never convince the most dedicated conspiracists. But, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, it is important to have a clear, objective, and thorough response to the consistently false and deeply malicious claims of the conspiracy movement.
New York City
2011
Afterword
On February 7, 2005, I [James Meigs] became a member of the Bush/Halliburton/Zionist/CIA/New World Order/Illuminati conspiracy for global domination. It was on that day the March 2005 issue of Popular Mechanics, with its cover story debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories, hit newsstands. Within hours, the online community of 9/11 conspiracy buffs—which calls itself the “9/11 Truth Movement”—was aflame with wild fantasies about me and my staff, the magazine I edit, and the article we had published.
We had begun our plunge down the rabbit hole. Within hours, a post on www.portland.indymedia.org, which claims to be dedicated to “radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth,” called me “James Meigs the Coward and Traitor.” Not long afterward, another prominent conspiracy theorist produced an analysis that concluded that Popular Mechanics is a CIA front organization. Invective and threats soon clogged the comments section of our Web site and poured in by e-mail:
YOU HAVE DECLARD YOURSELF ENEMY OF AMERICANS AND FRIEND OF THE MOSSAD!
In a few short weeks, Popular Mechanics had gone from being a 100-year-old journal about science, engineering, car maintenance, and home improvement to being a pivotal player in a global conspiracy on a par with Nazi Germany. Not all the responses were negative, of course. One visitor to our Web site, after plowing through dozens of angry comments, left a supportive post that included this astute observation:
Some people are open to any possibility, and honestly examine all evidence in a rational manner to come to a conclusion, followed by a moral evaluation. Others start with a desire for a specific moral evaluation, and then work backwards assembling any fact that supports them, and dismissing any fact that does not.
As the hate mail poured in and articles claiming to have debunked the magazine’s analysis proliferated online, we soon learned to identify the key techniques that give conspiracy theorists their illusion of coherence.
Marginalization of Opposing Views
The 9/11 Truth Movement invariably describes the mainstream account of 9/11 as the “government version” or “the official version.” In fact, the generally accepted account of 9/11 is made up of a multitude of sources: thousands of newspaper, TV, and radio reports produced by journalists from all over the world; investigations conducted by independent organizations and institutions, including the American Society of Civil Engineers, Purdue University, Northwestern University, Columbia University, the National Fire Protection Association, and Underwriters Laboratories, Inc.; eyewitness testimony from literally thousands of people; recordings and transcripts of phone calls, air traffic control transmissions, and other communications; thousands of photographs; thousands of feet of video footage; and, let’s not forget the words of Osama bin Laden, who discussed the operation in detail on more than one occasion, including in an audio recording released in May 2006 that said: “I am responsible for assigning the roles of the 19 brothers to conduct these conquests…”
The mainstream view of 9/11 is, in other words, a vast consensus. By presenting it instead as the product of a small coterie of insiders, conspiracists are able to ignore facts they find inconvenient and demonize people with whom they disagree.
Argument by Anomaly
In an article about the Popular Mechanics 9/11 report, Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer makes an important observation about the conspiracist method: “The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking (as well as creationism, Holocaust denial [Post-script note of 2018: Presently I don’t believe this belongs to conspiratorial thinking] and the various crank theories of physics). All the ‘evidence’ for a 9/11 conspiracy falls under the rubric of this fallacy.”
A successful scientific theory organizes masses of information into a coherent, well-tested narrative. When a theory has managed to explain the real world accurately enough for long enough, it becomes accepted as fact. Conspiracy theorists, Shermer points out, generally ignore the mass of evidence that supports the mainstream view and focus strictly on tiny anomalies. But, in a complex and messy world, the fact that there might be a few details we don’t yet understand should not be surprising.
A good example is the conspiracist fascination with the collapse of 7 World Trade Center. Since the 47-story tower was not hit by an airplane, only by the debris of the North Tower, investigators weren’t sure at first just how or why it collapsed hours after the attacks. A scientist (or for that matter, a journalist or historian) might see that gap in our knowledge as an opportunity for further research (see “WTC 7: Fire and Debris Damage,” page 53). In the conspiracy world, however, even a hint of uncertainty is a chance to set a trap. If researchers can’t “prove” exactly how the building fell, they say, then there is only one other possible conclusion: Someone blew it up.
♣
My comment:
Meigs’ afterword goes on for other ten pages but the excerpts quoted above give the picture: a psychological analysis of the truther mentality goes to the core to understand the movement. For instance, this “Someone blew WTC 7 up” is exactly what I call “paleologic” modes of mentation, and illustrated it with a classic example by a psychiatrist: “If the Greeks are afflicted by epidemics, it is because Phoebus wants to punish Agamemnon.” (“Paleologism” is the subject of some chapters of my book.)
Re the Scientific American statement about “holocaust denial” cited above even Mark Weber, a revisionist historian and current director of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) who has authored over a hundred articles relating to holocaust claims, has acknowledged that “it cannot be disputed” that “millions [of Jews] were forced from their homes; millions lost their lives” (listen the April 25, 2012 “Mark Weber Report: Holocaust Deceit, Remembrance and Reality”).
Contrary to what WN truthers claim, I believe that rejecting 9/11 conspiracy theories, and seriously considering the new approach to holocaust studies represented by Irmin Vinson, Mark Weber and David Irving are the mark of the mature nationalist.
37 replies on “Popular Mechanics on 9/11”
Concerning the “holocaust” I think it’s appropriate to borrow a line from Jonathan Bowden: “But my view is I would say, ‘We’ve overcome all of these events.’ And we will stride on to new forms of glory. ”
Very few “leftists” will deny the Holodomor. Even fewer the Cambodian killing fields. Many more will say “Stalin wad brutal but his cause was just.” Stepping over it makes the most sense.
http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/05/credo-a-nietzschean-testament/
Mexican universities are plagued with leftists. But I have yet to meet a leftist who says that Stalin’s genocide was OK. What these people say is that Lenin is OK but that Stalin started the mess. They are wrong of course: Lenin started the terrorism on a scale that dwarfed the Tsar regime’s (but the underlying point is that even these ultraliberal leftists don’t condone communist genocide).
I on the other hand am prepared to acknowledge Hitler’s military blunders; recognize that he allowed Himmler and Heydrich to orchestrate the (so-called) holocaust and, at the same time, admire the great awakening that the NS movement represented for people of German origin (and potentially for all whites hadn’t the Anglo-Saxons behaved as they did).
Apparently this is too much for some nationalist quarters. They denied it even before those stupid “holocaust denial” laws were implemented throughout Europe, just as some commies denied the Gulag even after Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalin’s purges became public in 1956.
With all due respect, Chechar, you seem lost on the Holohoax issue. This is not surprising, as there is very little quality literature on the subject available in English; the French Faurisson (which is a literal genius, gifted with a rare intelligence and a rare sense of honesty) has accomplished 95% of the work.
The first people to deny the Holocaust were not far-right ideologues (whose attitude was either fatalistic — they didn’t care –, or defiant — yes, and so what? –), but ordinary and random people who took part in the European war theatre. Most had fought for the Axis, of course, but there were also elements from the Allies and the political opposition to Nazism.
That’s because no single soldier, journalist, doctor, officer, or machinist who took part in the war heard about a Holocaust taking place, and even less saw it taking place.
There were rumours in Jewish and Soviet milieus, but that’s it. It was very probably a scare tactic to encourage the Jews to leave German territory asap and do their aliyah, which later became, in the hands of the Soviets, a propaganda tactic to demonize the German regime and demoralize the German population.
When the first allegations of a Holocaust surfaced, the reaction was total incredulity, shock and laughter. Everywhere. Churchill and De Gaulle initially did not believe them either, and there is compelling evidence De Gaulle never totally became a true believer.
With Stalin’s gulags, only a few communist ideologues (all of foreign nationality) denied them. The situation is totally different.
You say that the situation is totally different, but the experience I have with Latin American leftists is that they don’t believe that Lenin is to blame for any sort of massive genocide. If pressed, they blame everything on Stalin. Lenin is so pure for the Lefty mind…
If honest, knowledgeable researchers on “holo” studies like Mark Weber and David Irving have changed their minds, this suggest that there’s something true with what Weber said last month, that millions of Juden died as a result of dragging them out of their homes. We still have to wait for more detailed examination of the evidence coming from a Hitler fan such as Irving (as I said, I am quite interested in his forthcoming book on this subject).
The reason I doubt that holo denialism is historically accurate is because, as the Architect told Neo in Matrix Reloaded, negation is the most common human defense mechanism. And this, intuitive psychology, is the field where I claim some expertise. The human mind’s first reaction is to protect its cherished ideals simply by denial: what those silly leftists I know for decades have done in their minds.
There have been several rebuttals to the Popular Mechanics article in many, many different places. It is an interesting read that is worth your time if you are really going to make an impartial analysis of this particular issue.
It is extremely idiotic to dismiss the notion that there was in fact any government knowledge of the attacks or even some level of involvement. To advance this simple opinion does not mean that one immediately suspends all critical thought and becomes a part of the radical fringe conspiracy circles.
There are some very respectable scholars among the “truther” movement, (see http://www.ae911truth.org/) a term that is now used in a derogatory manner to dismiss any lingering doubts of the event by associating them to the most radical and unsavory elements in that crowd.
Only someone who is totally detached from the world and with absolutely no consciousness of real politik whatsoever would not see the extreme reshaping of geopolitics in the middle east that was brought on by 9/11. The western economic structures had a strong interest in revamping interventionism in the region and are still doing so today (e.g. Syria, Egypt).
It had already been spelled out quite evidently in the Project For The New American Century. This has been regular practice now for the American Government.
And lastly, when did a second rate fledgeling magazine become the arbiter of truth and knowledge when it comes to geopolitics, strategic military events and controlled demolitions anyway?
Rather than discussing point-by-point rebuttals to the claims covered by the anti-truther blog Screw Loose Change (linked above), the point of this entry was to show how paranoid some truthers are. E.g., I am not a Jew and was declared a Jew with such vehemence in a featured article that it only demonstrated for me, beyond reasonable doubt, the truther’s obvious paranoia.
HIV/AIDS denial is another similar case.
Moon Landing denial is another case of conspiracy theory.
I don’t see the holocaust establishment taking up this opportunity to correct the flaws in their history pointed out by revisionist holocaust historians. Instead they still peddle obvious frauds like Elie Wiesel while revisionist holocaust historians are being prosecuted, jailed, assaulted and shunned. Alas, the power of the holocaust religion to stifle dissent is all too real.
I don’t see what makes Mark Weber who never wrote a book on the holocaust and David Irving who keeps going back and forth in his opinion more respectable than revisionist scholars such as Carlo Mattogno, except for the fact that they offer an intermediate position more digestible to those who want to avoid facing up to the sheer size of this fraud. IMHO, Mark Weber and David Irving just caved in to the enormous pressure.
That’s only one way of seeing things. The other is that nationalists, the group I identify with, got it all wrong in the last decades. I look forward to read David Irving’s coming book on Himmler. Unlike his books on Hitler and Goebbels, in this one he’ll address the evidence on the “holocaust” (I hate that word). As to date Irving is the best historian on the Second World War that we got and I trust his honesty and quality of research.
How so? What did they get wrong?
I don’t and I don’t consider him a good historian, either. But whatever floats your boat…
I am not a “holocaust” scholar. But there’s the possibility that the community has denied some grim aspects of history just as, in the past, the commies denied the realities of the Gulag (which is why I treasure Solzhenitsyn’s book so much).
That may be the case. But in my opinion, there are two facts here which can’t be avoided by believing in one particular version of history:
1. The holocaust has turned into a religion which persecutes heretics.
2. The historical establishment does not clean up their act but continues to peddle obvious frauds and falsehoods and gets away with it because of 1.
That’s why I wonder what makes Mark Weber more respectable than Carlo Mattogno. But Carlo Mattogno could still be wrong and Mark Weber right, of course.
I agree that the religion of Holocaustianity must be debunked. But IMHO the best way is to show that the Juden started the genocide in the Holodomor—with more millions than those attributed to Himmler.
I generally like what you have to say, especially about the harm Christiantiy has done to Western Man, but you are dead wrong about 911. There can be no doubt 911 was an inside job. Any reasonable person reading the books of David Ray Griffin would have to admit as much. Basic knowledge of physics is all that is needed to come to the conclusion that WTC 1 and 2 were blown up, and WTC 7 was taken down in a classic demolition.
Don’t get distracted by the behavior of a few ‘truthers’.
Quoted in the above article:
Re:
Doesn’t Griffin’s behavior is identical to the truther who said that my “behavior indicates that he’s a Jew” or the other commenter in that MR thread who stated that non-truthers “are probably posting from Tel Aviv”?
Try again.
I don’t care who says who is a Jew, or what relationship someone may or may not have at Popular Mechanics. David Ray Griffin points out in his books undeniable phsyical proof that 911 was an inside job. I’m talking about a point-by-point description of how the buildings fell. He shows that the manner in which the destruction occurred dictates that the only reasonable explanation is that explosives were used to bring those buildings down.
When I say “Don’t get distracted by the behavior of a few ‘truthers’”, what I mean is to focus on the physical evidence. When you do that, I am sure you will agree that 911 was an inside job. Just watch video clips of WTC7 coming down, which are easily available on Youtube. It’s obvious it is being demolished. Therefore, in the weeks leading up to 911, explosives were placed in strategic locations throughout the building. Therefore, 911 was an inside job. It’s that easy.
By the way, I read that Popular Mechanics article. It was garbage. An egregious insult to my intelligence. If that’s the best the believers in the ‘official’ 911 story can come up with, they don’t have a leg to stand on.
You should care, since it demonstrates that those who say it are paranoid.
And in blogs like Screw Loose Change and others there’s point-by-point refutation of each and all of those claims.
Screw Loose and others just do that, and, by the way, for any engineer that says it was controlled demolition there are three who say that that claim is bunk.
It’s exactly the opposite. If you reviewed the anti-truther literature you’d realize that it was an outside job.
I’ve watched it. But it’s you who have not read the 2011 edition of Debunking 9/11 Myths which contains a new chapter on WTC-7.
You must have missed Meigs’ sentence quoted above:
When did P.Mechanics discuss The Holocaust? When did they deal with this childish story with 1000 miracles and hundreds of saints? Did they prove, that you can kill 6 million people, when you only have 3 million? Did they prove that insecticyde is superior to carbon monoxyde for killing people? Did they find out, how Frank wrote her diary with a ball pen, invented only 5 years later? Did they find out, how a single person, Weasel was liberated two times, first by Americans and then by English and how did he managed to wash tatooed number from his skin and how did his image vanish from the famous Buchenwald photo?
I guess these people can hardly judge about the psychological conditions of 9/11 truthers.
Dr.Roger Dommergue (Polacco de Menasce) once said: “All we know about Hitler is, that he killed 6 million Jews which never existed, in gas-chambers which nobody ever saw.”
You are confusing Pop Mechanics with Scientific American (the statement on the “holocaust” was done by the latter).
I find it hard to believe that any rational man would believe in the holocoust (as portrayed) or 9/11 (as portrayed). We can debate day and night about the details of what actually happened. But the imperative is to defeat the propaganda aimed at the heart of Western Civilization. In this regard, I find common cause with leftist 9/11 truthers. And I’m no soft WN, I’d die for my people, assuming they were in the right, in a heartbeat!
The best minds in the WN movement don’t/didn’t believe in 9/11 so-called “truth” (the late Pierce, KMD, Johnson, Parrott), nor are “holo deniers” (KMD again, Irving). In addition to the book advertised in this entry, I would recommend your reading of Irmin Vinson’s recent book on Hitler and the Holocaust, published by Counter-Currents.
FWIW, Pierce was a “holo denier”, according to the book The fame of a dead man’s deeds by Robert S. Griffin, 2001. Quotes from Pierce in this book (page 271 pp.):
“[…]Anyway, I learned about enough things that had been falsified, exaggerated, or distorted that I became what Mr. Dershowitz would call a Holocaust denier. Actually, I think that is a deliberate misnomer.[…]”
“[…]So I am not a denier in the way I would define a Holocaust denier, but I certainly do not believe the Holocaust in its official version.[…]”
That’s not “denial”, in the sense of denying that the Germans rounded up a lot of people including Jews and killed them. Denying and arguing about the final tally can be done without insisting death camps weren’t.
The thing about the death camps is that in all the reading of contemporary sources I have done – people who were alive at the time and shortly after (late 40s/early 50s), it is taken completely for granted that the camps existed and what their purpose was – and also it is commonly accepted that knowledge of their existence was not available until near the end of the war; that nobody suspected such a thing until they were actually discovered. Leaving aside all the point-by-point discussions of what physical evidence indicates what, this is a pretty strong refutation of the idea that the Holocaust was entirely ginned up by Jewish propaganda over the course of the next 20 years. It would have had to be simultaneously the largest (by multiple orders of magnitude) and most successful conspiracy in history, and people just don’t keep secrets that well. I’ll grant that Wiesel and others exaggerated points for effect and made up some of their supporting facts and continue to do so because they really really want to make an impression. I find it very hard to believe that the entire Allied army, on the vege of ending the war, was instantly taken in by the most cunning plot ever.
Pierce is also quoted in this book saying: “To me, the concept of a death camp doesn’t make sense. If extermination were in fact the policy and I were in charge of implementing it, I don’t think I would go to all the effort to send them by rail from one part of Poland all the way to another part and put them in a camp to gas them. I wouldn’t bother to build barracks and other facilities. I would do what the communists did, shoot them in small batches near where they were arrested.” (p. 274)
Nobody has such a silly idea. The holocaust story was propagated to all the world during the Nuremberg trials. No wonder most people believed it. But since then many important details of the story established there were dropped or totally altered even by established holocaust historians.
And it’s not just one person, Elie Wiesel (and he was awared the Nobel peace prize and is being courted by the most powerful politicians of the western world), who makes up stuff. I understand that people hate being associated with cranks inevitably being attracted to holocaust revisionism, but there is no easy way out here. We are being lied to in a massive way and persecuted for seeking the truth, that’s an unpleasant fact but nevertheless a fact.
I knew Pierce’s views on the so-called holocaust. That’s why I only said above that he didn’t swallow the claims of the 9/11 “truth” movement. At any event, Pierce was no scholar on the so-called holocaust. Weber and Irving are.
To Rollory
Hum, the Holocaust allegations started with Nuremberg, so it is indeed pretty normal that books from the “late 40s/early 50s” mention them.
As to concentration camps themselves, and the internment of Jews, everybody was aware of it during the war. It’s on the extermination policy that there is a disagreement.
Which is pretty strange.
– A video camera or a camera depicting dead children being dragged out of what seems to be an execution chamber, and someone could have had in his hands the most powerful piece of propaganda against the Axis to ever exist. Useful to motivate troops, journalists, and neutral countries.
– Strange that no one, troubled by his conscience, spoke out publicly against this.
– Strange that Allied recon planes routinely circling over Germany and Poland never noticed something strange.
– Strange that the environing population never had the idea to spy on the camps, or never heard anything.
Indeed, it was not. It began a few months after the war ended. But there was great confusion, notably on the numbers of victims and the techniques of extermination used, and it’s only starting in the late 60s that the modern narrative was developed and the first Jewish sob stories appeared.
I can turn the argument against you: how did the German High Command manage to hide the extermination from the public’s eyes for so long?
I say that respectfully (if I didn’t believe you were worthy of my time, I wouldn’t argue with you): you don’t know anything about the revisionist movement, because you never examined its arguments out of emotional bias.
Do it, and you will be very, very surprised by what you will find.
For beginners: [link]
To Chechar
I totally agree, and what’s why I initially had a lot of trouble considering Holocaust revisionists seriously, “a lot of trouble” meaning that I didn’t even want to read or hear their arguments.
It changed when I stumbled upon a revisionist text on a forum, and felt astonished to ascertain it was not written by a low-brow skinhead, but by a scientific genius backing his claims with serious evidence, answering all possible rebuttals in a perfect Platonic method, staying open to any critique or new piece of evidence, and presenting an ardent desire for a respectful academic debate on the question.
The moral lesson here is that there is no such thing as “denialism” or “conspiracism”: there is the truth, there is the lie, and there is no easy way to separate the truth from the lie; you need to study the problems individually.
Hundreds of thousands died, undoubtedly, as the result of epidemic diseases, carpet bombing, hunger, and so and so.
Faurisson, for example, is the first to acknowledge it; he is also the first to acknowledge that concentration and labour camps existed, and that they had a high mortality rate, stratospheric in the last phases of the war.
But “millions”? A million of humans is an incredibly high number, so it should be manipulated with great care.
As to Irving, he had to step back on the Holocaust question to avoid prison and maintain his reputation as a neutral historian; his position is clearly agnosticism heavily leaning toward denialism.
You see, the issue is taking sides prematurely. My problem with so-called holocaust denialists is that Man is basically a Homo sapiens fidelius: he badly wants to believe. The people in power who want to demonize Germans make zero documentaries on what the Jews did in Ukraine because they don’t want to make any excuse as to how Germany reacted before the atrocity. Similarly, those who want to spare Germany a hundred percent of what happened in the Second World War find Holocaustianity a fateful religion.
The rational approach would be, obviously, to listen to both sides of the discussion, Faurisson included. Let’s listen Faurisson and then compare his arguments with the other side. That’s why we have to wait and see what Irving says in his study on Herr Himmler. Meanwhile there’s a book, Debating the Holocaust: A New Look At Both Sides that I am tempted to purchase.
If you compare it to a court—imagine any silly Hollywood film about court dramas—, the “Juror” method I disagree with is listening to either the prosecutor or attorney, depending on you bias, and then leaving the courtroom whenever the prosecutor or attorney you dislike presents its case.
This is, I am afraid to say, the method I’ve observed in many denialists and conspiracy theorists. Since the above entry is mainly about 9/11, let me tell that at Counter-Currents I once asked a truther if she was willing to spend the same time of research she had spent reading “truther” sites reading the other side.
She didn’t answer, of course: which corroborates my point that man is not Homo sapiens sapiens but Homo sapiens fidelius: S/he believes what s/he wants to believe, independently of what the empirical world is telling us.
Following the courtroom analogy, this is my challenge to both 9/11 truthers and holo denialists: Have you spent the same amount of time reading the most notable authors (“prosecutors / attorneys”) to reach a truly objective conclusion, independently of your most cherished desires, or do you only “research” one side of the debate?
Irving is no expert on The Holocaust experts are Faurisson, Germar Rudolf, Weber, Ernst Zundel, Fred Toben, Wilfried Heink, Vivian Bird, Michael Santomauro, Ditlieb Felderer, Don Heddesheimer, Carlos Whitlock Porter, John Sack, Walter Sanning, Thomas Kues, Bradley Smith, Udo Walendy, Alfred Butz, Jurgen Graf, Josef Ginsburg, Friedrich Paul Berg, Wilhelm Staglich, Gerd Honsik, Wolfgang Frolich, Ingrid Weckert, Thomas Dalton, Paul Grubach, Vincent Reynouard, Paul Rassinier, Serge Thion, Manfred Kohler, Herbert Verbeke, Gunter Deckert,… and of course Carlo Mattogno.
Some of them are Jews.
Some of them were/are in jail.
Irving is expert on WW2 history. WW2 is no invention, it really happened.
Holocaust never happened. About 2 million Jews were resettled to ghettos in General Gouvernment, Belarus, Ukraine. Some of them died. Nobody was gassed. There was not a single gas-chamber built by Germans..
I’m not familiar with these authors. Some of them Jews you say? Others in jail for those obscene anti-denial laws that we must fight and overthrow? How many of them accept or deny that it happened (as far as I have read from conventional historians, a substantial amount of murdered Jews were not killed in the camps)?
The Wikipedia article on Irving is horribly biased against him. As you can appreciate, in this blog I only recommend Metapedia. However, the Wikipedia Irving article states that,
If that’s Irving in 1995 I would be much interested to know if by 2012 he has researched the topic, considering the authors you mention, and if he has changed his 1995 views.
At any event one really needs to be acquainted with both sides as I explained to Panina in my previous comment with the analogy of the courtroom.
When Bishop Richard Williamson in his famous interview said 2-300.000 dead Jews, he got that information from Irving.
Revisionists are sane persons. Nobody denies, that some Jews died during the resettlement. But you can not kill 6 million if you only have less than 4 million and only half of this number was resettled.
And there were no gas-chambers. Zyklon-B was insecticide used for disinfection.
Go to NaziGassings.com and you will learn everything.
Anti-denial laws? Truth doesn’t need laws to protect it. Only lies and scams do! What can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
You may be right. But I still have to listen what the “prosecutor” says.
chechar I do like your blog, especially your views on christianity in which you influenced me a bit, I must admit.
However you blunder here big time and it throws discredit to the rest of your work.
If we have to disregard 9/11 coincidences like jewish building owners, jewish security companies, jewish interest in wars that followed and refuse that this points towards an inside job, how at the other hand can you charge the bolshevist revolution a jewish inside job and base all your world theories on same sort of coincidences with a jew name here a jew name there back to the craddle in Jerusalem.
You can not have it both ways. Further at your high standard of writings (essays on the aztecs etc) how can you permit to do your holocaust teaching on the spot?
Irving is the most disregarded historian among all historians, scientists and amateur specialists and you wait on his approval?
OK so you understood gas chambers are a hoax.
But you still believe “sure hundreds of thousands, millions have been killed on the dirty east front nowhere knows somewhere secret in the forests”.
If you wish to heal yourself from such shamanism just get some books on the very very core of it, the Waffen SS in action. Find some translations of Leon Degrelle on the Eastern front and so forth. Go to the worst and you won’t be dissapointed.
Find out that these guys were on horse back most of the times on a territory bigger as the US, that they were ploughing in the dirt, the swamps, the cold, mist, deadly heat, freezing, hungry, wounded, feverish, fighting an enemy that outnumbered them 20 to 1, that was everywhere.. and you still believe these poor bastards were flying above Russia herding Jews into camps? That even the Einsatztruppen, who were 2.000 men could handle such a continent extermintaing millions?
They were fighting the jewish bolshevist menace to Europe, paying with their lives most of them, and what they got was infamy.
Did they ever shoot a jew because he was jew? No never. They shot jews who were partisans or commissars because they were partisans or commissars. And certainly not in over 100.000 figures, plus who cares it was a damn war 10 million germans dissapeared remember. The only pogroms that happened but on small scale was in the Baltics and in the Ukrain, in revenge for… holodomor and Bolshevist jewish dictatorship before the German Liberation. But that was done by etnic Lituanians, Ukrainians and Poles. Got it?
The holocaust, the more you study the less you find.
Jews died because of war in numbers ridicule compard to german sacrifice, dead by war and not because they were jews. The safest place in germany 1944? A concentration camp without Typhus.
The other possibility is that the kind of revisionism fashionable in WN circles (9/11; no Juden genocide committed in WW2) discredits otherwise brilliant bloggers like Alex Linder & Co.
I would recommend waiting until Irving’s book is released and only then discussing that specific sort of revisionism (“holocaust”). Meanwhile the sort of WW2 revisionism I fully accept as the most important subject of all is the onle that appears in the last entries of WDH.
Hardly any revisionist is into 9/11. This is just made up to discredit the honest historians digging the archives.
9/11 no one has the answer, neither you or I can decide whether or not steel bulges yes or not within X hours to have the bolts
But any child can do the maths that 6 millions do not fit into a 6×5 room in a 3 year time
I can not understand why you ‘re so naive here, where elsewhere you produce brilliant writings. I wonder if this is un purpose. You’re waiting on Irving to make up your mind on the most important subject in world history , while all is out there on the web to research? You needed Irving to research the Aztecs and make such wild assertments as all Aztecs were evil?
Saint Irving has nothing more that you can not already find on the web. He has one little fake drawing with fake numbers on it and he builds all his east front BS on that.
Geez, How can one on the one hand adhere to Hellstorm, where documents, films and picture are plenty, and on the other hand accept the holohoax, where there is nothing to support such theory, and on that base maintain that those same victims of hellstorm where the murderers?
The only reason fot that can maintaining the worst LIE of history, that the germans deserved what they got.
My advice you read into the holocaust real fast, how could you refrain yourself for discovering the truth?
Has it ever occurred to you that I am not the naive one? The best minds in WNsm rejected 9/11 conspiracy theories, starting with William Pierce.
As to the holocaust, it’s not naive at all what Irmin Vinson says on the subject. Or are you calling Kevin MacDonald naive too?