“The first time I heard about Holocaust denial,
I laughed.
Fast forward, a little over a decade,
and two senior scholars,
scholars of the Holocaust,
two most prominent historians of the Holocaust
approached me and said;
‘Deborah, let’s have coffee.
We have a research idea that we think is perfect for you.’
Intrigued, and flattered that they came to me
with an idea and thought me worthy of it,
I asked, ‘What is it?’
And they said: ‘Holocaust denial,’
and for the second time, I laughed.
‘Holocaust denial? The flat-earth folks?
The Elvis-is-alive people? I should study them?’”
Dr. Lipstadt, professor of Modern Jewish History
and Holocaust studies at Emory University,
ended up accepting this research assignment,
and it turned into a book that was to have major consequence.
It first appeared in 1993 with the title
"Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory."
In it, Ms. Lipstadt gives her perspective
of the political background, motives and,
what she calls the quote-unquote “spurious methodology” of the revisionists,
and also tries to deal with some revisionist arguments.
One of the persons whose political background,
motives and methods Lipstadt briefly mentions in the book
is the British historian David Irving.
Lipstadt depicts him in her book as a racist, anti-Semitic Holocaust denier.
Irving didn’t like his reputation smeared,
so he decided to sue her and her publisher for defamation.
“And the problem then is,
if you have a 30-year writing career,
and the press gets to know that you don’t defend yourself,
they think it’s open season.
And by 1996, I could see,
as I stood at the bottom of this alley,
a mudslide thundering down the slopes towards me
and threatening to engulf me.
And the only way to stop that mudslide
was to start frantically hammering pegs into the countryside,
which I did with these writs.
I issued a writ against Deborah Lipstadt
for the book that she wrote attacking me
called ‘Denying the Holocaust.’
Nothing that I write is good.
Everything that I write is bad, mendacious, distorted, lying, fallacious,
deliberately following a political agenda.
All the accusations that were made against me by Deborah Lipstadt.
And now they are surprised and pained
to find themselves at the receiving end of a libel writ since 1996.
And they are hoping that I go away.
And to their horror, I am not going away,
because I have just issued fresh steps in that particular action.
And we are going through that whole hell again
next year or the year after,
because I don’t lie down.”
The libel suit unfolding in London at the turn of the millennium, however,
ended in a complete disaster for Irving,
since, according to the verdict,
Lipstadt and her publisher managed to prove most of the claims made against Irving as true.
As a consequence, a number of books appeared
documenting not only Irving’s defeat
but also claiming that quote-unquote “Holocaust denial”
has finally been exposed as a pseudo-historical movement
driven by ulterior political motives and with no basis in factual reality.
Lipstadt’s case became so famous
– or was considered so important to and by the mainstream –
that her own account of the trial
as published in her book "History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier,"
has been turned into a movie which was released in September 2016.
Parallel to this, her book telling the story of the trial
was reissued under the same title as the movie:
"Denial: Holocaust History on Trial."
Lipstadt’s original work that triggered all this was also reissued,
emphasizing the fact that the mainstream still considers this 24-year-old book
to be highly relevant and topical.
This new edition was released in December 2016.
You can find it on Amazon and anywhere else books can be bought.
In this documentary, we will neither deal with Irving’s libel suit against Lipstadt
nor with any of the publications based on it.
Instead, we will go back to the roots of this entire affair,
to Lipstadt’s 1993 book "Denying the Holocaust."
Since for the new, 2016 edition no textual changes were made,
what is said about the original edition is also true for the latest edition.
This presentation is divided into 4 parts:
In the first part,
we will briefly discuss what science is,
and how we can distinguish it from fake science,
pretend science, or, to put it in Greek,
pseudo-science.
In the second part,
we will briefly address Lipstadt’s exposé
of the evil denier’s motives and their allegedly mendacious methods,
while the third part discusses some of Lipstadt’s claims
about a few Holocaust deniers, or Holocaust revisionists, as they call themselves.
In the last part,
we will focus on some factual arguments
proffered by Dr. Lipstadt about the Holocaust.
It goes without saying
that we cannot discuss every claim Dr. Lipstadt made in her book,
or else this documentary would last many hours.
So we had to keep it brief here.
A much more-thorough analysis of Dr. Lipstadt’s claims
appeared in a book of its own which, at least for now,
is also available on Amazon and anywhere else books can be bought.
Dr. Lipstadt claims numerous times that revisionist authors and organizations,
the writings they publish and the arguments they proffer,
are not scholarly in nature,
but that they are only “pseudo-scientific” or “pseudo-academic,”
and that what revisionists write is merely “pseudo-history.”
In fact, her book is riddled with “pseudo” terms
which we find on these pages in the 2016 edition of her book.
Consequently, she calls the revisionists’ method of writing history “spurious” and “fallacious”.
Unfortunately, Lipstadt never explains
what sets apart proper science and scholarship
from sham science and fraudulent scholarship.
So let us give a crash course on how to distinguish the two.
We’ve taken our definitions loosely from Sir Karl Popper,
one of the most famous and prestigious philosophers of science of modern times.
Of course, you can take any other one,
but the result wouldn’t be all that different.
Here are seven principles of science and scholarship.
We’ll say something briefly about each one.
The first principle concerns the first step in the creation of knowledge.
It means that we are allowed and are even encouraged
to ask any question that comes to our mind.
Whatever curiosity drives us to investigate, or doubts make us explore,
if we have a scientific mind, we welcome that.
The opposite, pseudo-scientific mindset declares certain topics taboo,
tends to stigmatize doubters,
and bans certain questions from being asked.
True scholars, on the other hand, are opponents of dogmas and taboos.
Now to the second point.
It means that the answers to research questions
can be determined exclusively by verifiable evidence,
not by authority figures,
not by social taboos,
by political correctness,
or even by penal law.
So, when we are doing any scholarly activity,
both the starting point and the end point of that activity
– the initial question or assumption and the final conclusion –
ought to be completely free of external constrictions.
That’s at least the ideal situation.
Of course, scientists are only human,
and so they bend and buckle occasionally,
giving way to all kinds of pressure,
but that aspect of their work is what actually tarnishes their work.
The path, however, which a scholar takes
to get from his initial question to the final answer,
that is to say, the way we gather and evaluate evidence,
that is where a lot of strictures apply.
And that’s our next point.
Claiming something without proving it is profoundly unscientific.
The way we prove things shows how our work lives up to scholarly standards.
In essence, evidence we present must be verifiable by others.
If others cannot locate, reproduce or recalculate the evidence we present,
then we have failed.
As mentioned before,
there are certain methods and rules we have to comply with
while collecting and interpreting our data.
To give an example,
quoting a private collection of otherwise-unsourced newspaper clippings
as proof for one’s claim is unacceptable,
because that private collection is inaccessible to anyone else.
Likewise, saying that “Mr. So-and-so told me so” is also unacceptable,
because anyone can claim this,
and no one can verify that it is true.
Not all types of evidence are created equal.
In general, the less a piece of evidence depends on human fallibility,
the more reliable it usually is.
In a hierarchy of the probative value of types of evidence,
logic, natural laws, and then material or physical evidence reign supreme,
while party testimony is the least reliable.
DNA tests in court cases of parenthood or sexual abuse are a case in point.
Any scientific mind weighing the results of a DNA test
against that of the testimonies by the defendant or the litigant in a trial
would side with the DNA test.
Parties in a trial can lie and err.
As a matter of fact, they often do,
but independently performed DNA tests are almost bulletproof.
Of course, not all cases are that straight forward,
but you get the idea.
Here is a pyramid of the various kinds of evidence,
with the most reliable at the top and the least reliable at the bottom.
The lowest layer,
stories told by people emotionally affected by the issue at hand,
is unfortunately also the most common type of evidence adduced
when it comes to the Holocaust.
Just because we have many of these stories
doesn’t mean they are any more reliable.
After all, hundreds of years ago
the courts in Europe collected thousands of witness accounts
confirming that witnesses saw witches riding on broomsticks through the air
and having sex with the devil.
But such anecdotes don’t get more reliable
just because thousands swear to them.
This brings up our next point: source criticism.
A criticial attitude is the core of any scientific endeavour.
No critical researcher should take evidence at face value.
Even though material and documentary evidence have the highest value,
there is always the possibility that they were simply misinterpreted,
or that artifacts have been planted,
evidence has been manipulated,
and documents fabricated or tampered with.
The more that is at stake, politically speaking,
the more likely such manipulations usually are.
In addition, just because a genuine document claims something,
this doesn’t make that claim automatically true.
Whoever created that document may have been dishonest,
misinformed or simply sloppy.
The greatest skepticism, however, is due when dealing with anecdotal evidence,
that is to say, witness accounts.
Not only is our human memory very fallible,
we are also known to give our stories twists and turns
that aren’t always in accordance with the truth.
It is therefore of great importance to embed witness statements
in a framework of evidence that is more reliable,
hence any of the other layers in our pyramid.
If a witness statement does not fit into that framework,
it’s most likely untrue, for whatever reasons.
Next, a true scientist wants to see his theories exposed to criticism,
because that’s the only way to find out whether they hold any water.
After all, a scientist doesn’t want to BE right,
he wants to GET it right.
The more critical helpers he has,
and the tougher those helpers test his theories,
the better for him.
A true scientist therefore WANTS to get involved in discussions
with those who disagree with his theories.
He listens to those with other views.
Finally, there are many ways of rigging one’s data and evidence
in order to force them to fit one’s theory.
All of them are hallmarks of an anti-scientific attitude.
Here are those relevant to our topic:
First, ad-hominem attacks.
Attacking opponents instead of their ideas by calling them names,
imputing bad intentions, immoral motives, unpopular political convictions etc.,
is a big no-no.
This tactic is probably the most commonly used and also the most effective,
as most of us are inclined not to listen to arguments anymore
if we consider the person making them to be despicable.
It remains a fact, however,
that such tactics are unacceptable and themselves morally deficient.
Next on our list is suppressing or ignoring unwanted data,
which amounts to forgery, pure and simple.
We don’t have to explain that in detail.
However, there is a form of suppressing unwanted data that is particularly vicious,
and that is when governments outlaw certain research results,
punish scholars for disseminating them,
and destroy unwelcome research publications.
Believe it or not,
but that’s exactly what happens in many Western countries today
when it comes to the Holocaust.
Here is a map of Europe.
All the red countries destroy any research results and data
that runs contrary to the official Holocaust dogma.
Last on our list is shifting the definition of terms,
which means basically shifting the goalpost.
That’s a way of cheating.
We all know it when it comes to playing games.
It also happens in science and scholarship, however.
It usually starts by not defining terms properly,
or by changing the definition to make it fit one’s agenda.
So, what, then, is pseudo-science, you might ask.
Well, pseudo-science is analysis that pretends to be science but is not,
because it fails to meet many if not most of the criteria just explained.
There is, of course, a continuum between science and pseudo-science.
The less the just-mentioned principles are maintained, the worse
– and more-likely false –
is the corresponding science.
In fact, “pseudo-science” is more frequent
than established academia is willing to admit,
in particular in the quote-unquote “soft” disciplines of the social sciences
whose evidentiary rules aren’t as rigorous
as those of the quote-unquote “exact” sciences,
such as math, technology and the natural sciences.
History, of course, is a social science,
hence more prone to fall prey to the fallacies of pseudo-science
than, say, physics or chemistry.
This is especially true for Modern History
due to political and at times even legal pressure.
Let’s now turn to Dr. Lipstadt’s claims
regarding the Holocaust deniers’ motives and methods.
About the revisionists’ motives,
she writes in her introduction on page sixteen, quote:
unquote
Hence, in her introduction, Lipstadt equates revisionists with rats.
Once the Nazis equated Jews with vermin like rats, lice or bacilli.
Lipstadt uses the same terms to indiscriminately disparage all persons
holding certain opinions she disagrees with.
A worse attack on the humanity of her fellow humans can hardly be conceived.
This sentence alone should destroy her reputation as a scholar,
but of course, it is politically correct to say these things,
so she actually gets applause for it even from many scholars.
Lipstadt equates Holocaust revisionists with Nazis and fascists.
Interestingly, Dr. Lipstadt claims that it is the deniers
who engage in ad hominem attacks on their opponents.
To support her claim,
she relates a fanciful story which we won’t read here,
because it’s a waste of time.
She simply made that up.
There is no evidence that any revisionist scholar ever did what she claims here,
since Lipstadt gives no example and quotes no source.
You just have to believe her!
Fact is, however, that
a. those living in glass houses should not throw stones; and
b. making sweeping accusations without proving them is profoundly unscholarly.
On page one, Lipstadt opines that “Holocaust denial is” an “antisemitic ideology”
rather than “responsible historiography.”
It is a “purely ideological exercise,”
and the revisionists merely appear to be
“engaged in a genuine scholarly effort when, of course, they are not.”
Of course. Proof offered?
None.
And so it goes on.
We could quote a zillion similar passages
where she pours out her disdain and contempt for dissidents of Third Reich History,
but again, we don’t want to waste your time.
It must suffice here to say that her main goal
is to portray revisionists as people who hate Jews,
because she uses terms like “antisemitism,” “antisemite” and “antisemitic”
182 times in her book,
so on average almost on every single page.
Here is a table showing how often she uses certain insults in her book.
The number of times she uses the term “Nazis”
includes many references to the actual historical National Socialists,
so that number isn’t really telling much.
Anyway, this list shows what Lipstadt’s book is really about.
If you’re hell-bent on reading an avalanche of mental diarrhea,
simply get a copy of her book.
The question is, of course:
where is the link between these political insinuations and Holocaust revisionism?
While it is certainly true that some people holding revisionist views
also have certain political views most people detest,
it’s not true for all revisionists,
simply because revisionism is primarily an attitude toward evidence, not politics.
Hence, regarding the Holocaust, revisionism means simply
that you think the orthodox narrative needs revision
due to new, overlooked,
misrepresented or misunderstood evidence.
We could and maybe even should define all the terms
Dr. Lipstadt throws at her readers in order to disparage her opponents,
so that we can demonstrate how arbitrarily she uses them.
But time is precious,
and since a more thorough analysis
can be found in the "Bungled" book mentioned earlier,
we want to focus on the essentials here.
So let us give you just one example,
and that is her use of the term “extremism.”
The word extreme,
derived from the superlative form of the Latin adjective exter, meaning outside,
denotes ideas that are at the far end of a spectrum.
In the political context it commonly refers to individuals
who are ready to violate the law in pursuit of their ideas.
How liberally Dr. Lipstadt uses that term
can be seen when she discusses U.S. writer Freda Utley,
whom she calls an extremist on page 50 of her book.
Needless to say, Dr. Lipstadt doesn’t define the term,
and she also gives no hint in which way Utley was ever willing to violate any laws.
In fact, Utley merely critcized others for violating international law.
The politically correct online encyclopedia Wikipedia
has the following to say about Utley, quote:
unquote
Read her entire biography on Wikipedia
and you realize that she was anything but an extremist.
So why would Lipstadt call her that?
Well, in 1948, Freda Utley published a book titled "The High Cost of Vengeance"
where she documented the crimes against humanity
committed by the Allied occupational forces in Germany
during the first three years after the war.
These are historical facts which Dr. Lipstadt would like to see erased,
but since she cannot refute them, she stigmatizes the author instead
– a typical pseudo-scientific tactic.
Let’s move on to what Dr. Lipstadt thinks about the methods used by the revisionists.
First, there are truth and memory.
On page 23 she states that, quote
“at its core [Holocaust denial] poses a threat to all who believe
that knowledge and memory are among the keystones of our civilization.” – unquote.
Here are a number of quotes from her book which suggest
that Dr. Lipstadt wants her readers to believe
in the equivalence of “truth” with “memory”:
Considering the fallibility of our senses and our memories,
it goes without saying that memory and truth are two distinct things.
Dr. Lipstadt acknowledges that on page 151,
although she gives it her own twist to make it fit into her agenda, quote:
unquote
And guess how Lipstadt backs up this alleged axiom of the legal profession:
not at all.
It is not only unsubstantiated but also wrong,
as Elizabeth Loftus has demonstrated with her vast research:
Human memory can be utterly corrupted in just about any regard.
You merely have to apply sufficiently suggestive techniques to achieve it.
“In one of the first studies we did, we used suggestion,
a method inspired by the psycho-therapy we saw in these cases.
We used this kind of suggestion and planted a false memory that,
when you were a kid, five or six years old,
you were lost in a shopping mall.
You were frightened.
You were crying.
You were ultimately rescued by an elderly person and reunited with the family.
And we succededed in planting this memory
in the minds of about a quarter of our subjects.
And you might be thinking,
‘Well, that’s not particularly stressful.’
But we and other investigators have planted rich false memories of things
that were much more unusual and much more stressful.
So, in a study done in Tennessee,
researchers planted the false memory that, when you were a kid,
you nearly drowned and had to be rescued by a lifeguard.
And in a study done in Canada,
researchers planted the false memory that, when you were a kid,
something as awful as being attacked by a vicious animal happened to you,
succeeding with about half of their subjects.”
All this apart from the fact that what people remember
and what they tell isn’t always the same thing, either.
In fact, there is plenty of research showing just how much we all lie
– to others and also to ourselves.
“So, I want to talk a little bit about dishonesty.
How many people here have lied at least once this year?
Ok. How about the last week?
I am not going to ask you about the last day and the last hour [laughter].
But there is a very distubring study
in which they take two people who don’t know each other,
put them in a room and say,
‘Talk to each other for ten minutes.
Introduce yourself to the other person.’
And then, they put them into separate rooms and say,
‘Did you lie to the other person?’
And almost everybody says, ‘No.’
And they say, ‘Well, luckily we taped your discussion.
Let’s play it back to you sentence by sentence,
and let’s get your reaction to each sentence.’
And on average, peopled admit
to have lied between two and three times in those ten minutes.”
Under these circumstances,
source criticism of testimony is a very important hallmark of scholarly works,
particularly when it comes to the Holocaust,
about which survivors, bystanders and alleged perpetrators
simply have GOT to remember what the public expects them to,
often under threat of severe social or even legal consequences.
Taking any testimony about the Holocaust at face value
is therefore not only unscientific, it is also dangerous,
because only a critical listener encourages a witness to stick to the facts,
whereas a credulous listener often gets what he deserves,
or as Dr. Susan Haack,
professor of philosophy and law at the University of Miami, put it:
“Okay. I think this is probably the best line ever written
on the subject of credulity, by William Kingdon Clifford:
‘The credulous man is father to the liar and the cheat.’
What a great line!
What he means, I take it,
is that a credulous population creates the market for conmen, crooks, fakers etc.,
and for everykind of deceptive and misleading claim.”
Here is Dr. Lipstadt’s approach to the matter:
First, she admits that the orthodox Holocaust narrative
rests almost exclusively on testimony.
Next, she fears that, once the wartime generation has died off,
there will be no one left to attest to the truth.
Again, she equates testimony with the truth,
a typical, anti-scientifc stance.
Then she lashes out against anyone shedding doubt
on what quote-unquote “eyewitnesses” say,
although science outright demands that kind of source criticism.
Note here her use of the word “attack,”
insinuating an aggression where there is none.
Finally, she tells her readers outright lies,
such as the one we just discussed about the alleged reliability of human memory.
Or worse still, that the revisionists are the ones violating evidentiary standards,
when in fact the shoe is on the other foot.
What Dr. Lipstadt insists on
is to turn the hierarchical pyramid on its head,
giving “survivor testimony” absolute priority.
Nowhere in her books does she define what “the proper use of evidence” is.
Hence, she is shifting the goalpost here again to make it fit into her agenda.
In 1996, the French mainstream historian Jacques Baynac
said the following about the priority of documents over testimony, quote:
unquote
Having said all this,
it should be clear whose attitude is a real threat to “the keystones of our civilization,”
because that civilization depends on critical, reasoned thinking,
not dogmatic belief in what someone claims to be quote-unquote memory.
Here is what Popper said about this
when relating how the founders of Western civilization,
the ancient Greeks, developed that keystone,
the new tradition of criticizing theories.
Not having defined what the “keystones of our civilization” are,
Lipstadt can again shift the goalpost by declaring
that a critical attitude to testimony is, quote,
unquote
So, because revisionists insist on an intellectual, rational,
evidence-based, reasoned investigation of the reliability of witness testimony,
they turn irrationalism into their god
– because that’s what apotheosis means!
She really got it all upside down.
If she knows it, she is a liar.
If she doesn’t, she has no clue what scholarship is all about.
In the same vein, she writes on page 245, quote
“They [meaning the revisionists] attempt to project the appearance of being committed
to the very values that they in truth adamantly oppose:
reason, critical rules of evidence, and historical distinction.” – unquote
After all that we have explained so far,
it ought to be clear that she’s talking about herself here.
Her steadfast refusal to debate those
who subject her narrative of the Holocaust
to tough attempts at refutation is legendary:
Of course, she has the right not to talk to
or even be seen with people she dislikes.
She even has the right not to address arguments she detests,
which is exactly her approach, as she writes on page 33.
Stop this video to read it.
If you do, note again that she mentions only “reams of testimony,”
but no documents or physical evidence.
Later in her book, however, she does discuss some revisionist arguments,
which we will address later.
As we pointed out earlier,
refusing to expose one’s own theory to serious attempts of refutation
is a hallmark of a pseudo-scholarly attitude.
Refusing to take opposing arguments into serious consideration
sheds a bad light on those who do this
– not on the arguments they reject out of hand.
In addition, claiming that certain things are simply not up for debate
is also a clear and present sign of an unscholarly attitude,
not to say sheer bigotry.
Although Dr. Lipstadt admits that there are many aspects of the Holocaust
that are debated among mainstream historians,
she insists that – quote
“There is a categorical difference between
debating these types of [mainstream] questions [about the Holocaust]
and debating the very fact of the Holocaust.” – unquote
Well, we hate to tell you, Dr. Deborah,
but the freedom of hypothesis is a fundamental principle of science.
Just because you don’t like it
doesn’t mean you can ignore its existence and still claim to be a scholar.
You have to ma ke up your mind.
Apart from all this,
Lipstadt’s warning that debating revisionists would improve their public reputation
is not even true,
because if the evidence for the Holocaust is as overwhelming
and the claims of revisionists as untenable as Dr. Lipstadt claims,
engaging them in a debate
would be a golden opportunity to expose their alleged quackery and stupidity.
Only if revisionism has intrinsic validity
would it gain stature by a public hearing.
Here is the real reason why Lipstadt won’t debate revisionists:
“I will not debate you. Not here, not now, not ever!”
“Because you can’t!”
We could easily turn the tables on Dr. Lipstadt
by demonstrating that her primary motive is not historical accuracy
but shoring up Jewish identity and group cohesion.
But since we consider motives to be only of passing interest,
and because they do not in any way invalidate factual arguments,
we won’t waste our time with this.
Dr. Lipstadt, by the way, agrees that at the end of the day,
motives are rather irrelevant when she writes on page 232 – quote:
“But on some level [U.S. historian Dr.] Carl Degler was right:
[The revisionists’] motive are irrelevant.” – unquote
But if that is so,
then why write a whole book on proclaiming the revisionist’s motives?
When it comes to Lipstadt’s motives,
there is one topic we have to briefly mention here.
As stated before,
Dr. Lipstadt considers anti-Semitic and related leanings to be abominable motives.
Interestingly, she puts at the same level of abomination another attitude,
and that is philo-Germanism.
She uses that term frequently
together with anti-Semitism, racism and/or Nazism.
Here are the quotes, which we won’t read to you.
You can stop the video if you want to take them in.
These statements indicate that, for Dr. Lipstadt,
having positive feelings for Germany or the German people
is just as odious as being anti-Semitic or racist.
To put the shoe on the other foot:
what do you think the average person would think of us
if we stated that it is odious to have pro-Jewish feelings?
We’d be labeled an anti-Semite, right?
But that stance would not be different than Dr. Lipstadt’s attitude.
How crazy her attitude toward Germans and Germany really is
can be seen from two more quotes.
In one, she seriously states that Germany has the moral obligation
to welcome anyone seeking refuge there.
And in another one she states that she feels obligated
to take charge of how the Germans look at their own history.
Considering that there are currently around a billion people on this planet
who, due to war, famine, poverty and civil unrest,
are inclined to seek refuge elsewhere,
and if we keep in mind that one favorite destination of those migrants is Germany,
is Dr. Lipstadt seriously saying that Germany has the moral obligation
to welcome a billion people, if they decide to come?
Is she out of her mind?
And why exactly does Germany have that obligation, but Israel does not?
To top it off, Dr. Lipstadt’s father was German.
That explains her last name, which is a town in Westphalia, Germany.
So what we have here is an ethnic German of the Jewish faith
who hates her own ethnicity.
It’s a self-hating Jew of a different kind.
Actually, many if not most Jews have some German blood running in their veins,
and quite a few of them hate that fact with a passion.
It’s worth some psychiatric analysis, but we won’t go there.
Let’s now turn to some false claims Dr. Lipstadt makes
about Holocaust revisionists and what they claim.
Actually, let us rename this section the Straw-Man Fallacy,
because that’s what we are dealing with here.
And here is how it works.
First, you ignore the real arguments,
or even the persons making the real, hard-hitting arguments.
Then you either create a made-up, pretend argument,
or you refute the weak arguments of some person
who is only a marginal figure in the area of contention.
Then you defeat that made-up or weak argument,
and finally you declare victory over the entire area of contention.
This table, broken into two parts,
lists in the left column the people whom Dr. Lipstadt deals with in her book,
and in the right column the people who have contributed major scholarly works
to Holocaust revisionism as of 1992.
As you can see, of the 25 individuals listed, only five are a hit.
Ten of the people Lipstadt discusses
have never contributed anything of scholarly value to Holocaust revisionism.
The late mainstream historian Dr. Nolte
isn’t even a revisionist by any stretch of the imagination.
He got into Dr. Lipstadt’s crosshairs
only because he basically insisted
that any historian claiming to be a scholar
has to take the revisionists and their arguments seriously
rather than ignore or malign them.
Most of the others
– Barnes, Hoggan, App, Carto, Zündel, Irving and Smith –
have polemicized about the Holocaust,
but not a single one of them has ever written
even a single thoroughly researched and referenced article on the Holocaust,
let alone a monograph.
Lipstadt therefore cherry-picked these individuals exactly because they polemicized,
which makes them an easy target.
Bardèche even believed in the gas chambers and thus a Holocaust,
in spite of Lipstadt’s false claim to the contrary on her page 56.
Ten persons who did contribute major scholarly works as of late 1992
are not on Dr. Lipstadt’s list.
And we apologize in case we missed anyone.
Not all of them are of equal value,
and we are listing them here only to show that Dr. Lipstadt
either has no clue what Holocaust revisionism is all about,
or that she is maliciously hiding it from her readers.
In any case, she took a grotesque misrepresentation of Holocaust revisionism
in order to show that it has no scholarly merits,
and that revisionists are merely driven by detestable motives.
And ever since, the Holocaust orthodoxy
has declared victory over revisionism as such.
Had Dr. Lipstadt done her homework,
she would have had no problem finding out
which revisionist publications existed back then,
because in 1988, Italian Holocaust researcher Carlo Mattogno
published a paper on the birth, development and criticism of Holocaust revisionism.
It lists all major revisionist works published in all languages
which had appeared by the time that article was finalized,
and it also lists reactions by mainstream authors to those publications.
Dr. Lipstadt knew the English-language journal where that paper was published,
because she mentions and quotes papers from it in her book many times.
Dr. Lipstadt wrote her book at a time
when Holocaust revisionism underwent a paradigm shift.
Triggered by Fred Leuchter’s expert report,
many new researchers joined that school of thought
and gave it a major boost, resulting in a wide range of publications.
Here is a list of the most important authors among them.
Again, apologies in case we missed anyone.
At least the most important ones among them
ought to have played some role in the 2016 edition of Lipstadt’s book,
but they didn’t.
So much for Dr. Lipstadt's picking the wrong people.
Let us now turn to some of the few hits she made.
Four of them are of relevance here:
Prof. Robert Faurisson,
Mark Weber,
Prof. Arthur Butz and
Fred A. Leuchter
Let’s deal with Prof. Faurisson first.
By the time Ms. Lipstadt wrapped up her typescript in late 1992,
Faurisson had published a monograph where he summarized his case,
a response to a major critic of his,
and a number of papers that deserve to be called “scholarly” in their approach,
although most of them in French, and some written under a pen name.
Dr. Lipstadt mentions none of them.
In her footnote 14 on page 293, she does quote
– although incompletely –
one paper by Faurisson which summarizes his reason as to why the hypothesis
that the Nazis used gas chambers to mass murder people is a problem,
hence the title of the paper:
“The ‘Problem of the Gas Chambers.’”
Considering the brevity and dearth of references of that paper,
we hesitate calling it scholarly in nature.
It’s more of a provocation and a mission statement, if you wish.
But be that as it may,
doing Faurisson justice in 1992
would have meant taking on his 280-page monograph "Mémoire en defense"
and the sequel "Réponse à Pierre Vidal-Naquet."
But instead, Lipstadt focuses on polemical statements Faurisson made over the years.
When it comes to revisionist historian Mark Weber,
Lipstadt mentions only one of his many papers on the Holocaust,
of which we list here only the major ones.
The paper highlighted here is mentioned by Lipstadt,
but all she has to say about it is that Weber – quote
unquote
That’s not merely a straw-man fallacy,
it’s one of the many lies Lipstadt spreads.
Here is what Weber wrote,
after having shown that Wiesenthal and Wise, among many others,
spread the soap lie during and after the war. Quote:
unquote
Let’s now turn to Prof. Butz.
Since his one and only monograph on the Holocaust is rather famous,
Lipstadt couldn’t dodge that bullet,
but she chose to ignore the main points of Butz’s book
and focus on minor issues instead.
Some of them she misrepresents, and by so doing,
she turns her own argument into a straw-man fallacy.
If you are interested in details, get the "Bungled" book shown.
Here, we will focus on Butz’s two main arguments
which Lipstadt completely ignores.
Butz’s first main argument goes as follows:
Germany’s enemies owned or had access to many dense information networks
in German-occupied Europe:
secret-service agents, underground resistance organizations,
the Catholic Church, Jewish organizations,
the Red Cross, to name only a few.
Had a Holocaust been going on, they would have known.
Yet the way they acted clearly indicates that they had no serious,
trustworthy, reliable information about it.
In a 1982 paper, which Dr. Lipstadt also ignored,
Dr. Butz summarized his thesis again,
which is at times somewhat awkwardly presented in his book.
The main points he makes in his book can be gleaned
from the headlines he used in this article.
Stop the video to read them.
Butz’s second main argument is
that the Holocaust myth rests on the dual interpretation
of innocuous items or events
whose meaning the creators of the myth turned into something ill-boding.
In the preface to the 2015 edition of his book, Butz writes about that – quote:
“I analyzed the specifics of the alleged extermination process at Auschwitz.
I showed that all of the specific material facts
required a dual interpretation of relatively mundane facts,
for example transports, selections, showers,
shaving hair, Zyklon B, crematoria, etc.,
all real and all relatively mundane,
had been given a second [devious] interpretation.” – unquote
Hence, the questions are:
Were the Jews transported to be killed,
or to be expelled and put to slave labor?
On arrival in the camps, were fragile Jews selected to be killed,
or to be sent elsewhere?
Were the showers fake to camouflage gas chambers,
or real to give the inmates a bath?
Was the inmates’ hair shaved off to exploit even the least body part before killing them,
or to combat lice infestations?
Was Zyklon B a mass-murder weapon,
or was it used to kill lice, hence save inmates’ lives?
Were crematoria used to erase evidence of mass murder,
or to prevent the spread of diseases?
There is much more in Butz’s trail-blazing book
which Lipstadt evidently cannot handle,
some of which we can mention here only briefly,
as for instance the issue of false confessions by alleged perpetrators.
Lipstadt hides from her readers that
a. the Allies systematically tortured their German prisoners after the war
to extract quote-unquote “confessions,” and that
b. the Allies presented during the Nuremberg Tribunal quote-unquote “evidence”,
such as extorted confessions, fraudulent expert reports
and film footage with mendacious narrations,
which quote-unquote “convinced” some of the defendants
that the Holocaust claims were true.
Lipstadt hides or misrepresents these and other facts laid out by Dr. Butz as well.
See the "Bungled" book for more details.
The other individual discussed by Lipstadt
who wrote a significant revisionist study is Fred Leuchter,
the former U.S. expert on execution technologies.
A lot of things that Lipstadt writes on him, however,
are ad hominem attacks.
But because that is completely beside the point,
we’ll simply ignore that here and will focus only on factual arguments.
For this, let’s turn again to her endnotes.
Her chapter on Leuchter has a whopping 114 of them.
How many of them refer to sources
that address in any technical or scientific way
any of the technical and toxicological issues raised by Leuchter?
Basically only 13.
One of them is an article by Robert Faurisson, which we can ignore,
as Dr. Lipstadt doesn’t quote it to support her own case.
The other twelve are from three works
by the French pharmacist Jean-Claude Pressac.
We will again encounter the same pattern later
when addressing the way Lipstadt discusses actual revisionist arguments
about the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz.
There, too, she relies exclusively on Pressac:
of the 29 endnotes referencing her discussion about the gas chambers,
28 refer to Pressacs’s first book,
and one to a revisionist book by Faurisson
– which, again, cannot be counted.
Such a referential monoculture is truly pitiful.
Dr. Lipstadt basically has only one leg to stand on.
How can any scholar seriously write a treatise
when there is only one relevant work to quote from?
We’ll postpone discussing Lipstadt’s at-times-fallacious arguments
to the last section of this documentary
when dealing with all the rest of them.
In closing this section on revisionist personalities,
let us briefly mention Bradley Smith,
the founder of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust.
Lipstadt’s chapter on him is the core of her book,
but it is also the least substantiated.
First of all, as we mentioned earlier,
Smith never really wrote anything of substance on the Holocaust,
which makes him an easy straw-man target.
Next, Smith merely applies the Western ideal of the open marketplace of ideas
to a topic where Lipstadt and her ilk don’t want it applied.
For decades, Smith has argued that – quote
unquote
What’s wrong with that?
Smith managed to place hundreds of these ads in campus newspapers,
followed up by radio interviews and even TV shows.
That’s what caused the two mainstream historians mentioned by Dr. Lipstadt
to worry and ask her to research the matter.
In fact, the cover art of the 1993 hardcover edition
features press clippings from media reactions
which Bradley Smith triggered with his Campus Project,
that is to say, his attempt to bring Holocaust revisionism
to the attention of college and university students
as well as professors throughout the United States.
As results from what Lipstadt writes and from all the organizations supporting her,
her book was primarily geared toward being part of a concerted effort
to thwart Smith’s Campus Project.
Smith felt the effects early on.
He describes it in his autobiography "Break His Bones,"
which you can read online at the address shown.
If you are interested in finding out what motivated Smith to do this,
and what he experienced as backlash from the establishment,
we highly recommend reading it.
But here is a brief video clip from the documentary "El Gran Tabu."
“[…] American ex-patriot living in Mexico.
In the 1950s, Bradley, then a bookseller,
was prosecuted by the U.S. government
for selling the Henry Miller book 'Tropic of Cancer.'
‘My man’s bringing my gear.’
It was then considered pornographic,
even though now it is considered to be a great work of literature.
Since then, Bradley has been a strong advocate
for free speech and intellectual freedom.
He travels North America speaking to college students
about the persecution of Holocaust revisionists.
‘The way I look at it,
the ideal of intellectual freedom is the one great idea of American culture.
There may be others, but that’s the one great one.
It didn’t originate with the constitution.
It came out of the renaissance,
it came out of the Greek culture,
and it came out of the British.
And it was institutionalized in our constitution in the First Amendment.
The First Amendment is rather peculiar,
because things like it are not available, even in Canada.
They don’t have the equivalent of our First Amendment.
We can’t have intellectual freedom, if we don’t have the right to dissent.
It’s just not possible.
If you can’t dissent from an orthodox opinion,
you’re not free to think about that view.
Or if you’re free to think about it, you have to keep it to yourself.
But it’s not a culture of intellectual freedom
if you don’t have the right to dissent.
The professorial class is not in complete agreement with that.
The professorial class believes that, in my experience,
that most people have the right to dissent, but some don’t.
Revisionist arguments with regard to the Holocaust
are being criminalized in country after country after country
in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand,
and the laws have already been drawn up
to criminalize revisionist arguments here in America.
And it’s done by people who are sincere.’”
Lipstadt’s chapter on Smith is a telling exposé
of how she has been and keeps conspiring with her like-minded colleagues
to suppress Smith’s campaign for intellectual freedom and open debate on the Holocaust.
Lipstadt claims that this is not a matter of First Amendment rights,
because the First Amendment merely prevents the United States government
from passing laws to limit free speech.
While this is formally correct,
it is also like saying that,
while the U.S. government has to abide by the law,
we normal people can act as we damn well please.
In contrast, the Bill of Rights should be a moral example
of how any responsible, powerful group of people should behave.
Lipstadt’s excuse on page 215 that,
if the revisionists get turned down by one media outlet,
quote, “there are always other publications,” unquote,
is a bad joke, because it’s been her and her comrades’ mission in life
to make sure that there isn’t any, quote, “other publication,” unquote,
except for those the revisionists publish themselves,
and then Lipstadt and company strive to make sure
that the sale of this revisionist material is banned everywhere else, too.
It’s like saying:
“Yeah, you have the right to speak, but only to yourself!”
Hence, this is not just about having the right to speak freely,
but also for everyone to decide for themselves who they want to listen to.
Using power the way Dr. Lipstadt and her ilk have been using it for decades
in order to prevent others from being able to hear
is a violent act.
It’s like locking you up in a soundproof room.
Smith has described how it works – quote:
“Every professor and working reporter understands perfectly well that,
once he or she is smeared with the neo-Nazi [or anti-Semite] label […]
they know they are dead ducks.
They know that from that moment on they are going to have to get a job at McDonalds
or at a car wash someplace
because no newspaper and no university will ever again employ them.” – unquote
That’s the power Lipstadt and her ilk wield,
and her chapter on Smith proves that they misuse it wherever they see fit
to destroy freedom of science and scholarship on this matter.
Lipstadt justifies that by claiming
that Holocaust revisionists don’t have opinions but mere prejudices,
as for instance about Smith on page 215.
In essence, she lobbies for the idea
that there should not be a freedom to express prejudices:
But how can we distinguish between facts on the one hand
and errors or lies on the other?
Lipstadt just throws these terms at us and thinks that solves the issue,
when in fact it merely confounds it.
In other words, she is shifting the goalpost again.
If we wanted to cut out from a free exchange of ideas
all those utterings that are not sufficiently based on facts,
then the questions arise:
a. How do we reliably measure the degree to which an opinion is based on facts?
b. Who sets the limit below which we cut out non-eligible utterings?
And c., and most importantly:
Who defines authoritatively what counts as a fact?
A Ministry of Truth?
Or Dr. Lipstadt?
And there’s the rub.
Dr. Lipstadt would like to play Goddess Almighty
by deciding what is fact and what is not.
To find out what is fact and what is not
was exactly the purpose of Smith’s campus advertisement project:
get the smartest brains of the nation to mull it over
– without being threatened by Dr. Lipstadt and her comrades,
should they come to iconoclastic results.
There’s nothing wrong with Smith’s approach.
There is everything wrong with thwarting that process though,
as is Dr. Lipstadt’s goal.
It is profoundly
anti-academic,
anti-intellectual,
anti-scholarly,
anti-scientific.
It’s dogmatic,
taboo-driven,
arrogant,
imperious
and overbearing.
The right to free inquiry,
and even the obligation to inquire,
is at the heart of academia.
That is the first, most profound and most important thing
that every professor should publicly profess.
If they don’t profess that, they are not professors. Period.
Let’s now turn to historical arguments themselves,
which aren’t the core of Lipstadt’s book,
but they are the core of the issue at hand.
Before doing that, let us summarize how Dr. Lipstadt backs up factual claims.
When analyzing her endnotes,
we find that she relies heavily on political propaganda material,
to a large degree written by the political pressure group ADL;
she very frequently doesn’t quote the source itself
but third-party publications writing about them;
she cites source material that is utterly “unquotable,”
most prominent among them a collection of newspaper clippings,
and relies on only one author – Pressac –
when discussing the core issue:
were there homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz to exterminate the Jews?
In many cases, however, she makes claims which she doesn’t back up with anything at all.
As a result of her not going back to the sources,
she commits major blunders,
for instance in her section where she discusses claims
allegedly made by the late German historian Dr. Ernst Nolte,
whose writings Lipstadt evidently has never read.
Most of what she claims, Nolte in fact never wrote or said.
Now we’ll delve deeper into the factual discussion
to see whether the same pattern can be found there.
Buckle up and enjoy the ride!
In his famous report, Leuchter claimed that the active ingredient in Zyklon B,
hydrogen cyanide, reacts with iron compounds present in masonry
to form a very stable pigment called Prussian Blue,
as it did in these walls of two Auschwitz fumigation chambers,
and that this pigment ought to be present to this day
in the walls of the claimed homicidal gas chambers of Auschwitz,
where Zyklon B is said to have been used for mass murder.
Lipstadt disputes that claim on pages 188-190.
We wonder, though, what knowledge or education might permit her
to make any statement in this regard.
She is a specialist in Jewish history, not in chemistry,
and she doesn’t even try to shore up any of her claims
with any references to chemical literature.
Since that issue has been dealt with in a separate, 100-minute documentary,
we take a pass here and direct the interested viewer to that video instead
which was recently put into quarantine by YouTube, by the way.
Suffice it here to say that Dr. Lipstadt
isn’t even aware of the many issues and aspects involved.
Next, let’s turn to diesel gas chambers.
In her first chapter, Dr. Lipstadt relates the controversy
surrounding a statement made by U.S. journalist Pat Buchanan
about the possibility of committing mass murder with diesel-engine exhaust,
a method claimed for the so-called extermination camps at Treblinka and Belzec.
Stop the video to read what she wrote about it.
We won’t bother going into the details here,
because, heck, it’s just a comment a journalist made.
Lipstadt gets all upset about it,
but in her discussion she completely fails to even mention the actual scientific paper
upon which that debate is based.
We show some relevant publications here, just in case you are curious.
None of them can be found in Lipstadt’s book.
She just produced hot air.
The next topic concerns the capacity of the crematoria at Auschwitz.
If you wanted to figure out what the features of a cremation furnace are,
what would you do?
Well, any reasonable person would consult expert literature on cremation,
and if push comes to shove,
engineering calculations and experiments could also be performed.
But not so our Debbie.
She instead refers to a simple letter by the Auschwitz administration.
Again, stop the video to read her ramblings, if you care to.
What’s her source for that letter?
The transcript of the Second Zündel Trial.
Needless to say, that document isn’t part of the trial transcript.
A proper historian would give an archival reference for the document itself
or some secondary literature where it can be found.
Logic – that is to say, math –
natural laws that govern incineration processes,
technical cremation possibilities at the time,
and the expert evaluation of physical evidence,
such as experiments and still-existing crematories,
as well as documentary evidence,
such as construction plans,
operating instructions and cremation logs,
play no role in her argument at all.
She might as well have quoted “survivor testimonies,”
some of which claim absolutely absurd cremation capacities.
That’s Dr. Lipstadt’s world of lala-science,
also called pseudo-science.
If you want to read a book dealing with that topic,
for which the authors have gone through all the above steps
to separate fact from fiction,
then look at this 3-volume work
written by the late Italian engineer Dr. Franco Deana
together with Italian historian Carlo Mattogno.
In this massive work, the authors concluded
that the actual cremation capacity of Auschwitz
roughly coincided with the recorded death toll
of registered inmates who died mainly of diseases,
as documented in the Auschwitz death records.
We’ll leave it at that,
because the cremation issue is too huge to be covered here in detail.
When it comes to the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz,
Dr. Lipstadt makes a number of claims,
every single one of which is both unsubstantiated and untrue.
We won’t bother proving this here,
for one because the next documentary slated for production
– "Questioning the Holocaust: Why We Believed, Part 2" –
will deal with all these issues in depth,
and also because we’ve taken up too much of your time already.
One of Lipstadt’s favorite expressions is that there are “reams” of documents
which allegedly refute what revisionists claim.
As mentioned before,
she relies in this regard entirely on Pressac’s 1989 book on Auschwitz,
as she admits on page 255.
And that’s where Lipstadt goes terminally bust.
Pressac’s vacuous ramblings have been dissected and refuted
in the most minute and comprehensive manner possible
in two separate monographs which, admittedly,
appeared only after the first edition of Lipstadt’s book had come out.
The new, 2016 edition should have taken that into account,
but nay, Dr. Lipstadt doesn’t need to pay attention
to what’s going on in the real world.
She has the backing of the rich and mighty,
and that’s good enough for her.
Pressac’s claims, which have reinforced the belief of millions in the myth,
will be one of the main focuses of the upcoming documentary
"Questioning the Holocaust: Why We Believed, Part 2,"
to which we referred.
We have never read such shoddy quote-unquote “scholarship” in our lives
as in Dr. Lipstadt’s book.
She clearly has neither understood
what the principles and methods of science and scholarship are,
nor has she any clue about the historical topics she is writing about.
She misquotes, mistranslates, misrepresents, misinterprets,
and makes a plethora of wild claims without backing them up with anything.
No wonder she refuses to debate the revisionists
“I will not debate you. Not here, not now, not ever!”
“Because you can’t!”
In fact, Dr. Lipstadt herself has proclaimed the judgment in her own case.
All we have to do is quote her:
“[T]ruth has been the antithesis of [her] enterprise.”
“Given the way [she] handle[s] documents and data,
it is clear that [she has] no interest in scholarship or reason.”
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