Glaring Hypocrisy

Wowzas, Wendy.

I will not
try to show you that the Holocaust did indeed occur.

What I will say is this, it might be time to step away from the computer, or phone and go out into nature.

I bless you with Love.

Fairy

It is interesting. Perhaps none of you have ever met a survivor. I have.

Fairy

Until you have looked in the eyes of a survivor of the Concentration Camps, heard them speak, seen the number tattoos you have no right. Those who deny the Holocaust- Genocide of any type are doomed to connect to the collective that created it and create it again. Let you be forgiven you for you know not what you do.

I bless you with Love, Noa and Wendy. Let you find your peace within..

https://pando.com/2014/07/24/as-reasons-editor-defends-its-racist-histor...

—Reason magazine, January 1976 Last weekend, I wrote about how Reason magazine — and their backers, the Koch brothers — was supporting a major push to further sell Silicon Valley on the “virtues” of libertarianism.

After I exposed Reason’s history as a publisher of racist, pro-apartheid South Africa articles during the 1970s, the current editor-in-chief, Matt Welch, answered back in what must stand as one of the most bizarre responses imaginable.

Rather than simply doing what any sensible editor would do — apologize for the magazine’s past transgressions but reiterate that the racists articles do not represent its current editorial position — Welch instead wrote a long blog post, smearing Pando and my reporting, including describing me (apparently without irony) as an "anti-libertarian conspiracy theorist." He also admitted that — sure! — Reason published a bunch of sick, racist pro-apartheid articles... but hey, they also published articles critical of apartheid, so what’s the big deal?

If defending apartheid was a "matter of faith" in Reason during the '70s and '80s, you would expect editors and staffers and contributors to routinely make that case when the subject of apartheid came up.

There are so many problems with Welch’s response but the first thing that stands out is the hypocrisy, or at least inconsistency. Welch and Reason attacked Ron Paul over his decades-old racist newsletters — and attacked Paul for ducking responsibility when they were exposed in 2008, rather than simply apologizing for them. Why wouldn’t they do the same? What constituency are they concerned would be alienated by Reason distancing itself from 1970s racists?

The second problem is that Welch urges readers (and us) to "please mine the archive for yourselves" and make our own judgements about what Reason truly stands for, then and now.

As someone who has spent the past few months doing precisely that — including many hours spent in public libraries, digging through microfiche copies of issues that (for reasons that will become obvious) are not available online — it seems to me that digging more into Reason’s past is the last thing Welch should want anyone to do.

Astonishingly, in February 1976, Reason dedicated an entire “special issue” to promoting Holocaust deniers, under the guise of so-called “historical revisionism.” How horrifying is it? You can judge for yourself -- the whole thing is embedded below.

PandoDaily contacted noted Holocaust historian and Holocaust Museum expert Deborah Lipstadt to ask her opinion. In 2000, Lipstadt won a much-publicized libel trial in Britain against a leading Holocaust denier, David Irving. When we shared with her the list of Reason’s “special issue” contributors and authors positively cited in the issue, Lipstadt described it as “the Who’s Who of early American Holocaust deniers.”

Reason James Martin puff1

Authors who contributed articles to Reason magazine’s “special issue” included one of the most notorious American pro-Nazi activists of the postwar era, Austin J. App, author of the 1973 tract, “The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the German People for Hard Marks and Fabricated Corpses” and contributing editor to the rabidly anti-Semitic magazine, the American Mercury. Two more authors hired to write for Reason’s “special issue" included James J. Martin, a regular contributor to the same neo-Nazi American Mercury magazine; and Percy Greaves, a founding board member at the anti-Jewish hate group, the Liberty Lobby.

Both Martin and Greaves were deeply involved in leading anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denier outfits before, during and after Reason hired them as contributors; and shortly after they appeared in Reason's "special issue," both Martin and Greaves served as editorial directors in David Irving’s favorite neo-Nazi outfit, the Institute for Historical Review, described as “the world's single most important outlet for Holocaust-denial propaganda” by the Anti-Defamation League.

Perhaps the most shocking article in Reason’s “special issue” was penned by Gary North, who was also Ron Paul’s congressional aide that same year, and has been one of the most influential figures in the Christian radical-right since the 1970s. North’s article in Reason mocked the Holocaust as “the Establishment’s favorite horror story” and questioned “the supposed execution of 6 million Jews by Hitler.” North also painted other rabidly anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers in a positive, “contrarian-cool” light, praising the works of David Hoggan, author of “The Myth of the Six Million,” French neo-fascist Paul Rassinier, and American historian Harry Elmer Barnes, considered the godfather of American Holocaust denial literature.

Reason North Holocaust denial screenshot1 Gary North in Reason Magazine

Perhaps the reason Reason’s current editor is hesitant to distance his magazine from past contributors is that some of them are still around, still running the Reason show, and otherwise remain major names in the Koch brothers' libertarian network. Robert Poole and Manny Klausner, listed on the masthead of the Holocaust-denier issue as co-editors, also co-founded with David Koch the nonprofit Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason magazine to this day. The Reason Foundation still lists Poole, Klausner and Koch as trustees; Poole is also listed as a Reason Foundation "Officer," alongside Reason editors Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie. The Koch brothers have donated millions to Reason, which, besides publishing the magazine, also advises state and local governments on mass privatizations of public assets and services.

Besides working as a privatization advisor to several US presidents and Margaret Thatcher, Robert Poole has more recently served as a privatization advisor to Florida governor Rick Scott and Texas governor Rick Perry.

Marty Zupan, listed on the Reason masthead as Book Review Editor in the February 1976 Holocaust deniers' issue, is today president of the libertarian Institute for Humane Studies, whose chairman is Charles Koch. Tibor Machan, listed as “Senior Editor” of the issue, is the son of a Hungarian Nazi war criminal. Machan and Zupan were married when they worked together on Reason’s special Holocaust-denier issue.

A WHO’S WHO OF AMERICAN HOLOCAUST DENIERS

So who exactly are the people featured or cited favorably in Reason’s holocaust denial issue, and described by one of America’s leading experts as a “who’s who of American holocaust deniers.”

Austin App

It is impossible that Reason did not know who Austin J.App Straight Look 3rd Reich cover1 App was. A Village Voice article said App "was better known as one of the earliest proponents of the theory that the Holocaust never took place," listing titles of App's books including "Can Christianity Survive When Jews Control The Media and the Money?" and "Kosher Food Racket Exposed."

According to Lisptadt, App “played a central role in the development of Holocaust denial, especially in the United States," tracing the structure of modern Holocaust denier arguments to Austin App's 1973 tract, "The Six Million Swindle." In it, App accused greedy "Talmudists" of "using the six million swindle to blackmail West Germany" — the real victims in Austin App's historical revision.

Writes Lipstadt:

“His [App's] major contribution was to formulate eight axioms that have come to serve as the founding principles of the California-based Institute for Historical Review and as the basic postulates of Holocaust denial. Since App posited them in 1973, virtually all deniers have built their arguments on them.”

Despite App’s public notoriety as a Nazi sympathizer and Holocaust denier in the 1960s and 70s, Reason magazine hired him to write about the “Sudeten-German Tragedy.” According to App’s article in Reason, the postwar expulsion of ethnic Germans from Czech borderlands after the fall of Nazi Germany was “one of the worst mass atrocities in history,” while the Munich Pact that let Nazi Germany annex chunks of Czechoslovakia is described as “belated justice."

Reason’s choice of Austin App as a shining example of “historical revisionism” says all you need to know about what the Koch brothers meant by libertarian history. Although App had been burning both ends of the candle for decades arguing that the Holocaust was a hoax, and Hitler and Nazi Germany were the victims of World War II, Reason’s author description whitewashed him as just another tweedy professor:

“Austin J. App received an M. A. and Ph.D. in English literature from the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. He is the author of numerous reviews, articles, and books on English literature and writing, current affairs, and history.”

Just two years before he appeared in Reason, Austin App published a follow-up to his “Six Million Swindle,” a tract titled, “A Straight Look at the Third Reich: Hitler and National Socialism: How Right? How Wrong?” in which he mocked “the legend of the six million Jews ‘gassed’” while praising Hitler as “a man of architecture and art, not of armaments and war.”

When he wrote for Reason, Austin App also served on the board of trustees of the neo-Nazi National Youth Alliance, which later morphed into the more violent neo-Nazi National Alliance, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “the most dangerous and best organized neo-Nazi formation in America.”

Reason App screenshot page1

App also served on the editorial board of the rabidly anti-Semitic rag, The American Mercury, which published articles by another Holocaust denier glorified in Reason magazine’s pages: James J. Martin. One of Martin’s articles in the American Mercury accused FDR’s Jewish Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, of plotting to turn postwar Germany into “one vast concentration camp of starvation and physical misery...unparalleled in scope before or since.” Martin, it turns out, was not only glorified in Reason magazine's pages; from the mid-1960s through at least 1980, Martin also received backing and support from Charles Koch.

James J. Martin

The lead feature article in Reason’s “special issue” turns out to be one of James Martin’s slyer works of historical revisionism: “The Framing of Tokyo Rose,” an outrage-fueled attack of the 1949 treason trial and conviction of a wartime Japan radio voice, American-born Iva Toguri, known as “Tokyo Rose.” For Martin, this was about as safe as his World War II historical revisionism got. By the time Martin wrote about her for Reason's "special issue" in 1976, Toguri was already an Establishment cause-celebre, her unjust conviction profiled in 60 Minutes, and soon to be overturned by President Ford, who pardoned her upon leaving office.

Martin’s purpose for taking up Toguri’s cause was to prepare Reason's readers for a much broader political point: That World War II was as unjust as the trial of Iva Toguri, and the Allies who fought that war against the Japanese and Germany were as brutal and duplicitous as the prosecutors who sent Toguri to prison.

A month before Reason's lost "special issue" profiled here, in the January 1976 issue, Reason devoted a fawning eight-page interview glorifying James J. Martin as “one of America’s leading revisionist historians,” a libertarian maverick unafraid of taking on the Establishment’s “version” of “sacred cows” — like the Holocaust. Here's an excerpt from Reason's interview:

REASON: Dr. Martin, do you believe (1) that the specific charge against the Nazis of having a mass extermination program of several million Jews is true, and (2) that the Allied atrocities were as great or greater than those of the Germans, from your study of the question?

MARTIN: Well, I never made a head count of all who lost their lives in the War—we've seen a wide variety of statistical materials, some of which have been pulled out of thin air... I don't believe that the evidence of a planned extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe is holding up. [...] The German concentration camps weren't health centers, but they appear to have been far smaller and much less lethal than the Russian ones. As proof that the Holocaust was a hoax, Martin told Reason's "journalists" that he relied on the works of Europe’s leading Holocaust denier, Paul Rassinier, whose books — “Debunking the Genocide Myth,” “The Drama of European Jewry” — described Nazi concentration camps as “a gesture of compassion” designed by the Nazis to “rehabilitate the strayed sheep.” According to Rassinier, the Holocaust was a “swindle” concocted by money-grubbing Zionists out to “make Germany an ever-lasting milk cow for Israel.”

Reason set Martin up perfectly with softballs designed to make these Holocaust-deniers appear as courageous iconoclasts persecuted for having the guts to tell the truth:

REASON: For a number of years Rassinier's works haven't been available in English. Are a lot of people afraid to see them come to light?

MARTIN: I don't know who would suffer the most from exposure to Rassinier's objections to the standard line on the concentration camp literature...

Reason was so enthralled with their Holocaust-denier hero James J. Martin that he appeared in three consecutive issues in a row: December 1975, in an issue that featured a four-page screed by Charles Koch attacking leftists, Ralph Nader, and American businessmen who weren't sufficiently radicalized to fight the left; the next month, January 1976, Reason fawned over Martin as he mocked and cast doubt on the Holocaust; and the next month, February 1976, when Reason published and promoted “the Who’s Who of early American Holocaust deniers.”

Reason Holocaust denial pullquote Martin

Martin’s relationship with Reason can be traced back to Reason's sugar daddy, Charles Koch, who first sponsored Martin in the mid-late 1960s at Rampart College, where Koch funded Martin's fledgling "history department" as well as Rampart Journal, one of the earliest American journals devoted to pushing Holocaust deniers. When Rampart College collapsed in 1968, Charles Koch reportedly gave Martin a one-time $60,000 payout, a lot of money in those days, which Martin used to fund his own far-right publishing house, issuing books by authors like "American Fascist" Lawrence Dennis. In the 1970s, Charles Koch continued funding Martin through grants and seminars put on by Koch’s Institute for Humane Studies, through sinecures at Koch-funded outfits like the Center for Libertarian Studies (where Martin served on the advisory board in the mid-late 1970s), and through the Cato Institute, which published James Martin and his Holocaust denier guru, Harry Elmer Barnes, as late as 1980.

Rampart College

In 1979, while Martin was still part of Charles Koch’s libertarian apparatus, he joined the editorial board of the most notorious American Holocaust denier outfit, the Institute for Historical Review — home to KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, and David Irving, “the world’s most prominent Holocaust denier.” Martin spent the last 25 years of his life in the neo-Nazi cesspool, publishing through them his final shameful book, a Holocaust-denial tract titled "The Man Who Invented Genocide."

When Martin died in 2004, Reason wrote a largely hagiographic obituary, downplaying Martin’s sickening mockery of the Holocaust, lamenting only that Martin's decades spent denying the Holocaust,

“will in the eyes of many discredit all his work, but it ought not."

Ron Paul’s Guru: Gary North

Another contributor to Reason’s “special issue” was Gary North, Ron Paul’s congressional aide and his longtime partner in politics and business. North is better known as one of the key figures in Christian Reconstructionism, which to Gary North means applying capital punishment (by stoning to death) for "crimes" including blasphemy, abortion, "witchcraft," women who have pre-marital sex, or "incorrigible juvenile delinquency."

North’s article for Reason, “World War II Revisionism & Vietnam,” stands out as the issue's most sickening — it's the most aggressive in mocking the Holocaust, and most disturbing when you look back and realize, this same Gary North shaped the worldview of libertarianism's leading pitchman, Ron Paul.

North’s article, as the name implies, tries to convince readers that World War II was as bad as Vietnam, which in 1976, a year after the fall of Saigon, was about the worst smear imaginable. In this sense, North's article continued a common theme in Reason’s “special issue”: World War II was just as bad, if not worse than [NAME OF MOST UNPOPULAR WAR EVER], and FDR was just as sleazy and deceitful as [NAME OF MOST UNPOPULAR PRESIDENT EVER].

There is a politics to all of this, a politics that's barely budged since the days of the American Liberty League: The goal is to discredit the New Deal and FDR, which can't be done effectively without discrediting FDR's most popular cause, the victory over fascist Germany and Japan. To far-right extraction industry billionaires like the Koch family, FDR and his New Deal politics were a kind of anti-business "holocaust," because the the New Deal forced the long-dominant plutocrats to part with a portion of their wealth and political power. To the nation's Big Business oligarchs in the 1930s, FDR's New Deal reforms — breaking up the power of finance, trusts, and industrialists, while empowering labor unions —was a crime and a wound as raw in 1976 as it was in 1936.

For them, FDR was a tyrant and a criminal, an American Hitler, only no one else could see things their way, because the real Hitler was widely believed to be one of the worst figures in history. Therefore, libertarian "historical revisionism" had to convince these Americans that Hitler wasn't nearly as awful as they believed, which meant that the Holocaust couldn't have happened — if the goal was to discredit FDR and the New Deal.

North’s article appeals to another sensibility popular with libertarians (and the Boomer left): the cult of the anti-Establishment iconoclast, every self-absorbed middle-class Baby Boomer's fantasy. That cult of the iconoclast allows North to paint libertarianism's far-right "historical revisionism" as anti-Establishment Cool, more an expression of one's individuality than a political act. So if the boring, bad Establishment says Hitler was bad and World War II was good, then naturally the anti-Establishment maverick will question that. Gary North writes:

“One topic—the ultimate litmus test of hardnosed World War II revisionism—has generally been skirted: Hitler. Was he a madman, diplomatically speaking? Was he exclusively responsible for the Second World War?”

Much of the Reason Holocaust denier propaganda is about promoting a new set of anti-authority voices to replace the Establishment’s. So Martin cites Holocaust deniers Paul Rassinier and Harry Elmer Barnes; and Gary North introduces Reason’s readers to Bay Area Holocaust denier David Hoggan, the “anonymous” author of the 1969 neo-Nazi book “The Myth of the Six Million”:

“In American revisionist circles the most famous (or infamous) case has been that of David Hoggan, the Establishment’s number-one academic pariah of the revisionist camp...Hoggan’s thesis regarding the origins of the Second World War are straightforward, and completely unorthodox. The primary villain was not Hitler; it was Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary.”

North is a clever huckster who’s studied his Baby Boomer audience, so he uses marketing words that he knows appeal to his target consumer: “unorthodox,” “Establishment’s number-one academic pariah,” and weirdest of all for a strict Old Testament theofascist like North, he even uses the then-popular hippie expression “far-out” (meaning “cool") to sell Holocaust denial:

“Probably the most far-out materials on World War II revisionism have been the seemingly endless scholarly studies of the supposed execution of 6 million Jews by Hitler. The anonymous author [Hoggan] of ‘The Myth of the Six Million’ has presented a solid case against the Establishment’s favorite horror story—the supposed moral justification for our entry into the war.”

North promotes the same Holocaust denier as James J. Martin does, Paul Rassinier, alleging that his “untranslatable books....have seriously challenged the story” of the Holocaust. North also promotes a Holocaust denial tract by Richard Harwood, editor of the fascist British National Front party magazine, Spearhead:

“A recent and very inexpensive book in magazine form, ‘Did Six Million Really Die?’, appeared in 1973, written by Richard Harwood.”

According to Lipstadt, Harwood’s “Did Six Million Really Die” was “the preeminent British work on Holocaust denial” for a decade after its publication, i.e., when Gary North promoted it.

At the end of that astonishing paragraph, North once again called into question the Holocaust:

“One thing is certain: 6 million executions or not, we did not intervene when the Soviet Union executed millions of kulaks—the private owners of small farms, prior to their expropriation and liquidation by Stalin in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. The kulaks, unfortunately for them, had no supporters writing editorials in the New York Times.”

There we have it in concentrated form: In just a single paragraph in the Kochs’ Reason magazine, mockery and denial of the Holocaust, and shameless praise for three of the world’s most notorious Holocaust deniers — David Hoggan, Paul Rassinier, and Richard Harwood (neé Richard Verrall) — repackaged as hip, contrarian iconoclasm for Reason’s largely white, male, educated libertarian audience.

Percy Greaves, Lew Rollins

Other contributors to Reason’s “special issue” included:

• Percy Greaves, a founding board member of Willis Carto’s racist, anti-Semitic propaganda outfit, the Liberty Lobby — which marketed and distributed many of the Holocaust denier tracts promoted in the February 1976 issue of Reason magazine, including “The Myth of the Six Million” — and ended his life on the editorial board of Carto’s biggest Holocaust denier outfit, the Institute for Historical Review, joining David Duke, David Irving, and James J. Martin. For Reason magazine’s “special issue,” Percy Greaves wrote “FDR’s Watergate: Pearl Harbor,” advancing a conspiracy theory that FDR tricked Japan into bombing Pearl Harbor in order to secure his New Deal reforms at home.
• “L.A.” Lew Rollins, who was featured on Reason magazine’s masthead from the 1970s through the early 1980s. Like so many other Reason contributors, Lew Rollins also joined the David Duke/David Irving Holocaust denier outfit, publishing articles like “The Holocaust as Sacred Cow.” At Reason, Rollins wrote a far-right libertarian Ambrose Bierce ripoff called “Lucifer’s Lexicon," with entries like, “looter, n. A civil rights worker” or “majority rule, n. The moral equivalent of gang rape.” After coming out of the anti-Semitic closet, Rollins’ “Lucifer’s Lexicon” became even crazier:

HOLOCAUST, THE, n. A smoke screen obscuring the atrocities of the Allies and the Israelis. The insurance fraud of the century. A cheap cinematic trick; a flimflam; the Hollywoodcaust; a soap opera.

ZIONIST PROPAGANDA, n. Hebrew-National Baloney.

A brief history of Reason magazine

“Reason” first appeared in 1968 as a typed, poorly-edited student newsletter, the rantings of a severely mentally ill Vietnam War veteran and Ayn Rand groupie named Lanny Friedlander. He began “Reason” while living at home with his mother and attending classes at Boston University. A handful of MIT College Republicans, including future Reason frontman Robert Poole, took an interest in Friedlander’s “Reason,” but they were turned off by his mother, “a shrill fishwife who yelled and screamed,” according to Robert Poole; and by Friedlander himself, who spent most of his life in psychiatric institutions and veterans hospitals.

In 1970, Poole moved to Santa Barbara to work for a DARPA spinoff called General Research Corp. Poole decided to buy the rights to Reason from Lanny Friedlander, cobbling together a small group of MIT grads (Charles and David Koch’s alma mater) and a local Santa Barbara libertarian grad student named Tibor Machan, who used grant money he received from Charles Koch to finance the “takeover” of Reason from Lanny Friedlander. (Shortly before Friedlander died of a heart attack in 2011, he sent a hand-written note to Reason’s science editor, advising him to research immortality more: “I also wonder if magicians can reverse the effects of old age,” Friedlander wrote him.)

Tibor Machan, Senior Editor of Reason at the time of the Holocaust-denier issue, is the son of a Hungarian Nazi war criminal. Both Tibor Machan and his father escaped from Hungary after the collapse of the fascist regime. According to Machan’s 2004 memoir, his father was a “fanatical Nazi” during World War II, serving as the Nazis’ chief Budapest radio propagandist during the roundup of that city’s Jews. After the communist takeover, Machan’s father was arrested, and slipped out of Hungary, soon joined by Tibor, who together made their way into the US.

Tibor Machan served as Senior Editor for Reason when it published its Holocaust deniers; and yet Machan claims to have despised his father’s politics:

“He was a dedicated supporter of Adolph Hitler into the last days of World War II and would remain a fervently anti-Semitic admirer of the Fuhrer’s ideas until he died in Philadelphia in 1970...When I recall that my father was a relentless anti-Semite who bragged that he would not hesitate to shoot Jews if it were only legally permitted, again I find little cause to stress his few positive qualities.”

Charles Koch, who funded much of Tibor Machan's career, is the son of a Nazi admirer. According to Daniel Schulman’s book, “Sons of Wichita,” Fred Koch praised the Axis powers in late 1938, even as the Nazis were brutalizing Jews and others, and well after Imperial Japan killed and raped hundreds of thousands in their military invasions into mainland China. With that in mind, Fred Koch wrote in 1938,

“I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard.”

Fred Koch also negatively compared New Deal America to Hitler’s Germany:

“When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925 you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.”

Reader Reactions

Devoting an issue to Nazi supporters and Holocaust deniers shocked at least some of REASON’s readers, and found support from others.

Reader “Sylven Shaffer” of Tempe, Arizona, complained,

“I'm absolutely shocked regarding Dr. Martin's remarks concerning the Nazi extermination of European Jewry.”

And Adam Reed of Rockefeller University, a contributor to REASON, wrote a letter to the editor complaining about Gary North’s promotion of Holocaust deniers, calling it “shocking,” “disturbing” and “inexcusably poor scholarship.”

Gary North responded to Prof. Reed by doubling down on Holocaust denying:

“The second point, that about 6 million Jews really did die in the concentration camps, is one that will be open until the records of the period become fully available. I am not convinced yet, one way or the other.

“I shall continue to recommend that those interested in revisionist questions read ‘The Myth of the Six Million’ and ‘Did Six Million Really Die?’ as reasonable (though not necessarily irrefutable) pieces of historical revisionism.”

Others—diehard libertarians—were more gung-ho. Sam Konkin, one of the earliest stars in the libertarian movement, gushed:

CONGRATULATIONS

For the first time in your publishing history you produced a product which kept me all night reading cover-to-cover. I refer to your Revisionist issue of February 1976.

I hope you maintain the gains you made with this issue and even surpass them. You may yet deserve your logo.

Samuel Edward Konkin Ill Editor, New Libertarian Weekly

Konkin, author of “The New Libertarian Manifesto,” went on to join the editorial board of neo-Nazi Willis Carto’s Holocaust denier outfit, Institute for Historical Review, where so many other Reason and other early libertarian alumni wound up.

The biggest public endorsement for Reason’s Holocaust-denier issueReason Nolan letter editor support holocaust denier issue came from the founder of the Libertarian Party, David Nolan. In the 1960s, Nolan was an MIT college Republican activist with Robert Poole, who went on to become Reason’s front man from 1970 onward.

Nolan’s letter to the editor in Reason’s June 1976 issue praised the magazine’s Holocaust-denier issue as “outstanding,” pompously adding,

“You, and all who have worked with you, are to be congratulated on your skills and dedication, for your achievement has been a most significant one. Keep it up!”

“We Should Be Very Concerned”

“Charles and David Koch have been for the last 40, 40-plus years the most significant backers of libertarian-based organizations and philanthropies in the country. It's not even close. It is Charles and David Koch 100, everybody else 2.”

—Matt Welch, REASON magazine editor-in-chief

Just as my previous piece was about something much bigger than simply calling out a magazine’s pro-apartheid archives, so the above is about more than its history of publishing holocaust deniers. Reason isn’t just any magazine — since 1970, Reason has been backed by the richest and most politically engaged oligarchs alive, Charles and David Koch. The Kochs are almost singlehandedly responsible for giving us libertarianism, a radical-right version of neoliberalism that has steered the Republican Party agenda for decades now, and has made major inroads into the disaffected left as well. Reason is the respectable, “educated” blue state face of the Kochs’ libertarian network.

Or as Reason’s longtime front-man and Koch partner Robert Poole explained in a private letter back in 1978, Reason sought “to be something of a recruiting ground, reaching out to the broad general public of intelligent, educated people and offering them an exciting alternative to Harper’s, New Republic, National Review.”

That same year, 1978, Charles Koch told Reason magazine that he believed radical politics were the most effect politics; and he saw libertarianism as a radical brand of pro-capitalist politics:

“Our greatest strength is that our philosophy is a consistent world view and will appeal to the brightest, most enthusiastic, most capable people, particularly young people. But to realize that strength, we have to state it in a radical, pure form.”

Today, Charles and David Koch are worth an estimated $100 billion, making them the richest brothers on earth. They are also the most politically active oligarchs this country has seen in many decades. The money invested into electing politicians is only a small part of their long-term strategy of altering America's political ecosystem, and in this respect, no one comes close.

When asked by email about how concerned we should be that the richest and most politically engaged billionaires in the world were so personally involved in backing and promoting Holocaust deniers, Professor Lipstadt answered with commendable understatement: “We should be quite concerned."

Pando contacted Reason, Koch Industries and Gary North for comment [2+ hours before publication] but none had responded as of publication time. We'll update this story with any subsequent response.

Reason February 1976

http://archive.org/stream/HolocaustDenialAsAnInternationalMovement/holoc...

ntroduction

Holocaust denial may have started in Europe after World War II but now in
the early twenty-first century, it has become an international movement.
It has spread from Europe throughout the world with Holocaust deniers
active in almost every country. Several books appeared in the late 1980s
and early 1990s that traced the state of Holocaust denial in that era.
Deborah Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth
and Memory appeared in 1993, and it made a major impact in the study of
Holocaust denial. Gill Seidel's Holocaust Denial: Antisemitism, Racism
and the New Right (1986) and Kenneth S. Stern's Holocaust Denial (1993)
were two others that made major contributions to the understanding of the
Holocaust denial movement. It has been more than a decade since these
books appeared, and there has been no attempt to bring the Holocaust
denial movement up-to-date. The importance of an update is in keeping with
Stern's conclusion in 2001.

Holocaust denial, in fact, may be the single most potent ideological force tying
together a variety of extremists from around the globe — including old Nazis,
neo-Nazis, anti-Israeli Arab governments, American black separatists and
others.

My intent in writing this book is to trace the state of the international Holo-
caust denial movement in the early 2000s with appropriate attention to the
development of Holocaust denial in the past.

Holocaust denial has been stimulated by three factors: a desire to rehabili-
tate Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime so that it would be possible to reestab-
lish a neo-Nazi state, a renewal of the ancient scourge of antisemitism, and a
way of denying the legitimacy of the state of Israel. Each of these factors has
its own partisans, but sometimes there has been crossover when these parti-
sans found out they share the same goals. Few neo-Nazis have any love for

2 HOLOCAUST DENIAL AS AN INTERNATIONAL MOVEMENT

Israel. Nor does the Arab hatred for Israel avoid spilling over into antisemi-
tism. This sharing has penetrated even to the radical Left in Europe and the
United States. Holocaust denial allows its partisans with separate ideologies
and religious views to share a common goal.

The Holocaust denial movement has never been a mass movement. It has
never had more than 250 active participants, but they have been able to con-
vert thousands of fellow travelers. Almost all of the active participants come
from the antisemitic right wings in their respective countries. The exception
is that Holocaust denial has become more acceptable to the European
extreme Left as a means to attack Israel. Following Part I, which outlines
the current understanding of the background to the Holocaust and the
Holocaust itself, this book intends to concentrate on the leaders of the
Holocaust movement. Because Holocaust deniers are true ideologues, my
intention is not to try to convince them that they are wrong about the
Holocaust. Rather it is to promote an understanding on the nature of the
Holocaust and how the deniers have distorted the historical record. A corol-
lary is to trace the history of the Holocaust denial movement and its current
practitioners.

Holocaust deniers come in a variety of types. These types are not exclusive
as certain Holocaust deniers may belong to more than one type. Never-
theless, it is useful to denote the various types and the individuals who
belong to a particular type.

The most famous and influential are the academic research stars. These
individuals are the ones who have specialized on detailed research topics to
disprove one or more aspects of the Holocaust. The most famous of these
are France's Robert Faurisson, Italy's Carlo Mattogno, Germany's Germar
Rudolf, and America's Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. They have adopted a pseudosci-
ence approach to denying the Holocaust. These academic research stars have
considerable prestige in the Holocaust denial movement because of their
expertise in challenging aspects of the Holocaust. Because they have special-
ized on such narrow topics, Holocaust scholars have had to redirect their
research to answer sometimes trivial issues, or unanswerable ones.

Second in importance to the academic research stars are the media stars.
These Holocaust deniers demand publicity because it promotes their agenda.
They also publicize the research conclusions of the academic research
stars. The most famous examples of this type are Great Britain's David Irving
and Australia's duo of John Bennett and Fredrick Toben.

Following closely behind the other two types are the distributors of Holo-
caust denial materials. Their role is to provide these materials around the
world, and especially in countries with laws against Holocaust denial, such
as Germany and Austria. They also make a good living selling these mate-
rials. The best examples of distributors have been America's Gary Lauck
and Canada's Ernst Ziindel. Both have encountered legal troubles in Ger-
many because of the distribution of their materials there. The Internet has

INTRODUCTION 3

simplified the problem of distribution, so in the future the risks will be less
and the profits better.

Another type is the Holocaust deniers who do it for political reasons. They
subscribe to Holocaust denial because it advances a political agenda. The
best examples of this type are France's Maurice Bardeche, who wanted to
rehabilitate the Vichy Regime, General Otto Ernst Remer, who wanted to
reestablish Nazism, and the Americans Willis A. Carto and Mark Weber,
both of whom have used Holocaust denial for political reasons.

There are also opportunists who have become Holocaust deniers as out-
growths of their antisemitic views. To them Holocaust denial is an instru-
ment to further their hatred of the Jews. The best example of this type was
the French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. He advanced Holocaust denial
only because it could be a weapon against the Jews.

Next, there are the true believers. These individuals have adopted Holo-
caust denial after reading its literature, or hearing about it from others. They
communicate their Holocaust denial views to friends, colleagues, and some-
times students, but are careful to avoid publicity. Some of them held anti-
semitic views before exposure to Holocaust denial materials, and others
had not. The best examples of the true believer type are the Canadians
James Keegstra and Malcolm Ross. Both Keegstra and Ross were school-
teachers before their Holocaust denial advocacy led them to lose their jobs.

Finally, the last and largest type of Holocaust denial adherents is the
fellow travelers. The fellow travelers have been exposed to Holocaust
denial, and they believe in it. They are careful not to communicate their
views to others unless to other Holocaust deniers. These fellow travelers
are the solid base of the movement because they are the ones who buy the
materials that provide the financial support for the movement. The best
example of this was the $7.5 million given by Jean Farrell, the grandniece
of the famous inventor Thomas Alva Edison, to Willis A. Carto and the
Institute for Historical Review to promote Holocaust denial studies.

Holocaust deniers have had the freedom to operate because of the reluc-
tance of academic specialists in the field of Holocaust studies to challenge
them. When Holocaust denial first made its appearance, "its claims seemed
so absurd that historians and journalists dismissed it as a temporary aberra-
tion, an eccentricity on the lunatic fringe of opinion," but this attitude has
changed. 2 Academics are still reluctant to enter the fray. The response of
these academics is not to belittle themselves in answering challenges to what
they consider to be a historical fact. To them the Holocaust is an established
fact of history with only the need for more intensive study to round out the
details of history. Somewhere in the neighborhood of between 5.1 and
6.2 million Jews died in the Holocaust. Enough survivors from the work
camps have been able to testify about the general workings of the system.
German concentration camp administrators have further confirmed the

4 HOLOCAUST DENIAL AS AN INTERNATIONAL MOVEMENT

policy of extermination of the Jews. Eberhard Jackel, the German authority
on Hitler, stated the problems.

Perhaps for no other problem of such magnitude in modern history is the docu-
mentation so poor. There are various reasons for this. The operation was ultrase-
cret. Consequently as little as possible was written down. Much was transacted
orally, particularly on the highest level. Of the few relevant documents, many were
destroyed before the war ended. And of those that survive, many contain code
names and terms that further hamper the task of clearly establishing their contents.
Moreover, many of the persons directly involved died before they could be interro-
gated. Of those who survived, most answered evasively. But even those who were
ready to talk were often not questioned precisely enough, for their interrogators
were not interested in the kinds of details that historians would want to clarify.
Many were then executed, and their knowledge disappeared with them.

The problem is that there are always internal inconsistencies about eye-
witness testimony. People hear things and sometimes elaborate on them.
I have personal experience with this in my tour of duty with the U.S. Army
in South Vietnam in 1968. Rumor control was often inaccurate in the
details, but in general it was the way an enlisted man found out how things
functioned. Orders came from the top without explanation, but human
nature wants to know more. I never found out the military or political situa-
tion, but I knew how to function in the personal realm. It is much the same
way with survivors of the Holocaust. German authorities never gave them
explanations, but the Jewish concentration camp survivors learned how to
survive. It is pure sophism to maintain as proof that gas chambers did not
exist because there were no gas chamber survivors. There were no gas cham-
ber survivors because those entering a gas chamber died.

Holocaust denial is a new variation of antisemitism, and it should be
viewed as such.

"Denial, or "revisionism" as the deniers cynically call it, plays on classical anti-
Semitic stereotypes: Jewish conspiracy and Jewish control of the media. It is
unabashedly anti-Israel. It is well organized. And it exploits a true historical
phenomenon: history is always reexamined by later generations, especially his-
tories of wars, since the victors do indeed put their "spin" on events. 4

Historians, journalists, and others have had difficulty communicating
with Holocaust deniers as they speak from such completely different per-
spectives. But it is dangerous to ignore the deniers. Eric Zorn of the Chicago
Tribune places the problem in context.

Ignore the revisionists and their pronouncements float unchallenged. Answer them
in general but refuse to debate head-to-head, as mainstream historians and Jewish
groups have, and you risk seemingly afraid of confrontation. Respond to their alle-
gations one by one and you appear to dignify arguments, perhaps making it seem

INTRODUCTION 5

to the uninformed as though the existence of the Holocaust is a question serious
people consider seriously, when, in fact, the revisionists have failed to make their
case with virtually every active scholar in the field.

to continue reading click on the link: http://archive.org/stream/HolocaustDenialAsAnInternationalMovement/holoc...

http://www.projetaladin.org/holocaust/en/muslims-and-jews/the-holocaust-...

In discussing the Holocaust and the Muslim world, two issues need to be addressed. One is the reaction of Muslims to the Holocaust as it occurred. The second is Muslim attitude toward the Holocaust since the end of World War II and, more pertinently, at present.

Before and during the war, Nazi Germany made a concerted effort to win the hearts and minds of Muslims, relying on modern propaganda techniques that included short-wave radio broadcasts of Radio Berlin in Arabic and Persian. But sympathy for the Nazis across much of the Muslim world was more attributable to strong anti-British feelings among Arabs and Muslims than support for the Nazis' anti-Semitic policies.

Although for the vast majority of Muslims the war in Europe remained a distant conflict, the Nazis managed to recruit some Muslims directly. Two Muslim SS divisions were raised: the Skanderbeg Division from Albania and the Handschar Division from Bosnia. Smaller units from Chechnya to Uzbekistan were incorporated into the German armed forces. But the Nazis soon discovered that these units were militarily ineffective and unmotivated to fight for the Third Reich. The much-vaunted "Hanschar" SS division was disbanded after a few months due to mass desertions and earned the distinction of being the only SS division ever to mutiny.

The Nazis made much propaganda about the meeting between Hitler and Haj Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, which took place on November 21, 1941. In the meeting, the Mufti declared that the Arabs were Germany's natural friends. Hitler promised that as soon as the German armies pushed into the Southern Caucasus, the Arabs would be liberated from the British yoke. The Mufti's part of the deal was to raise support for Germany among the Muslims in the Soviet Union, the Balkans and the Middle East. He conducted radio propaganda through the network of six stations and set up pro-Nazi fifth column networks in the Middle East.

Al-Husseini and the Muslims troops fighting on the side of the Wehrmacht were not representative of Muslim sentiments in the course of World War II. Hundreds of thousands of Muslim soldiers from Africa, India, and the Soviet Union helped to defeat fascism at places like El-Alamein, Monte Cassino, the beaches of Provence, and Stalingrad.

There were also stories of great courage and sacrifice on the part of Muslims who risked their own lives to save the Jews from the Nazis. Muslim Albania was the only country in Europe in which there were more Jews after the war than there had been before the war. Before World War II, there were only 200 Jews in Albania, which had a total population of 800,000. After the war, there were many more Jews after Jewish refugees from some half dozen European countries fled the Nazi persecution and sought shelter in Albania.
to continue reading click on the link http://www.projetaladin.org/holocaust/en/muslims-and-jews/the-holocaust-...

http://mysteryofascension.com/will-we-repeat-the-errors-of-the-past/

https://medium.com/@theonlytoby/history-tells-us-what-will-happen-next-w...

History tells us what may happen next with Brexit & Trump
La Peste di Firenze

[note: this essay contains a lot of links out, which are underlined. Consider them further reading or me backing up my opinions]

It seems we’re entering another of those stupid seasons humans impose on themselves at fairly regular intervals. I am sketching out here opinions based on information, they may prove right, or may prove wrong, and they’re intended just to challenge and be part of a wider dialogue.

My background is archaeology, so also history and anthropology. It leads me to look at big historical patterns. My theory is that most peoples’ perspective of history is limited to the experience communicated by their parents and grandparents, so 50–100 years. To go beyond that you have to read, study, and learn to untangle the propaganda that is inevitable in all telling of history. In a nutshell, at university I would fail a paper if I didn’t compare at least two, if not three opposing views on a topic. Taking one telling of events as gospel doesn’t wash in the comparative analytical method of research that forms the core of British academia. (I can’t speak for other systems, but they’re definitely not all alike in this way).

So zooming out, we humans have a habit of going into phases of mass destruction, generally self imposed to some extent or another. This handy list shows all the wars over time. Wars are actually the norm for humans, but every now and then something big comes along. I am interested in the Black Death, which devastated Europe. The opening of Boccaccio’s Decameron describes Florence in the grips of the Plague. It is as beyond imagination as the Somme, Hiroshima, or the Holocaust. I mean, you quite literally can’t put yourself there and imagine what it was like. For those in the midst of the Plague it must have felt like the end of the world.

But a defining feature of humans is their resilience. To us now it seems obvious that we survived the Plague, but to people at the time it must have seemed incredible that their society continued afterwards. Indeed, many takes on the effects of the Black Death are that it had a positive impact in the long term. Well summed up here: “By targeting frail people of all ages, and killing them by the hundreds of thousands within an extremely short period of time, the Black Death might have represented a strong force of natural selection and removed the weakest individuals on a very broad scale within Europe,“ …In addition, the Black Death significantly changed the social structure of some European regions. Tragic depopulation created the shortage of working people. This shortage caused wages to rise. Products prices fell too. Consequently, standards of living increased. For instance, people started to consume more food of higher quality.”

But for the people living through it, as with the World Wars, Soviet Famines, Holocaust, it must have felt inconceivable that humans could rise up from it. The collapse of the Roman Empire, Black Death, Spanish Inquisition, Thirty Years War, War of the Roses, English Civil War… it’s a long list. Events of massive destruction from which humanity recovered and move on, often in better shape.

At a local level in time people think things are fine, then things rapidly spiral out of control until they become unstoppable, and we wreak massive destruction on ourselves. For the people living in the midst of this it is hard to see happening and hard to understand. To historians later it all makes sense and we see clearly how one thing led to another. During the Centenary of the Battle of the Somme I was struck that it was a direct outcome of the assassination of an Austrian Arch Duke in Bosnia. I very much doubt anyone at the time thought the killing of a minor European royal would lead to the death of 17 million people.

My point is that this is a cycle. It happens again and again, but as most people only have a 50–100 year historical perspective they don’t see that it’s happening again. As the events that led to the First World War unfolded, there were a few brilliant minds who started to warn that something big was wrong, that the web of treaties across Europe could lead to a war, but they were dismissed as hysterical, mad, or fools, as is always the way, and as people who worry about Putin, Brexit, and Trump are dismissed now.

Then after the War to end all Wars, we went and had another one. Again, for a historian it was quite predictable. Lead people to feel they have lost control of their country and destiny, people look for scapegoats, a charismatic leader captures the popular mood, and singles out that scapegoat. He talks in rhetoric that has no detail, and drums up anger and hatred. Soon the masses start to move as one, without any logic driving their actions, and the whole becomes unstoppable.

That was Hitler, but it was also Mussolini, Stalin, Putin, Mugabe, and so many more. Mugabe is a very good case in point. He whipped up national anger and hatred towards the land owning white minority (who happened to know how to run farms), and seized their land to redistribute to the people, in a great populist move which in the end unravelled the economy and farming industry and left the people in possession of land, but starving. See also the famines created by the Soviet Union, and the one caused by the Chinese Communists last century in which 20–40 million people died. It seems inconceivable that people could create a situation in which tens of millions of people die without reason, but we do it again and again.

But at the time people don’t realise they’re embarking on a route that will lead to a destruction period. They think they’re right, they’re cheered on by jeering angry mobs, their critics are mocked. This cycle, the one we saw for example from the Treaty of Versaille, to the rise of Hitler, to the Second World War, appears to be happening again. But as with before, most people cannot see it because:

1. They are only looking at the present, not the past or future

2. They are only looking immediately around them, not at how events connect globally

3. Most people don’t read, think, challenge, or hear opposing views

Trump is doing this in America. Those of us with some oversight from history can see it happening. Read this brilliant, long essay in the New York magazine to understand how Plato described all this, and it is happening just as he predicted. Trump says he will Make America Great Again, when in fact America is currently great, according to pretty well any statistics. He is using passion, anger, and rhetoric in the same way all his predecessors did — a charismatic narcissist who feeds on the crowd to become ever stronger, creating a cult around himself. You can blame society, politicians, the media, for America getting to the point that it’s ready for Trump, but the bigger historical picture is that history generally plays out the same way each time someone like him becomes the boss.

On a wider stage, zoom out some more, Russia is a dictatorship with a charismatic leader using fear and passion to establish a cult around himself. Turkey is now there too. Hungary, Poland, Slovakia are heading that way, and across Europe more Trumps and Putins are waiting in the wings, in fact funded by Putin, waiting for the popular tide to turn their way.

We should be asking ourselves what our Archduke Ferdinand moment will be. How will an apparently small event trigger another period of massive destruction. We see Brexit, Trump, Putin in isolation. The world does not work that way — all things are connected and affecting each other. I have pro-Brexit friends who say ‘oh, you’re going to blame that on Brexit too??’ But they don’t realise that actually, yes, historians will trace neat lines from apparently unrelated events back to major political and social shifts like Brexit.

Brexit — a group of angry people winning a fight — easily inspires other groups of angry people to start a similar fight, empowered with the idea that they may win. That alone can trigger chain reactions. A nuclear explosion is not caused by one atom splitting, but by the impact of the first atom that splits causing multiple other atoms near it to split, and they in turn causing multiple atoms to split. The exponential increase in atoms splitting, and their combined energy is the bomb. That is how World War One started and, ironically how World War Two ended.

An example of how Brexit could lead to a nuclear war could be this:

Brexit in the UK causes Italy or France to have a similar referendum. Le Pen wins an election in France. Europe now has a fractured EU. The EU, for all its many awful faults, has prevented a war in Europe for longer than ever before. The EU is also a major force in suppressing Putin’s military ambitions. European sanctions on Russia really hit the economy, and helped temper Russia’s attacks on Ukraine (there is a reason bad guys always want a weaker European Union). Trump wins in the US. Trump becomes isolationist, which weakens NATO. He has already said he would not automatically honour NATO commitments in the face of a Russian attack on the Baltics.

With a fractured EU, and weakened NATO, Putin, facing an ongoing economic and social crisis in Russia, needs another foreign distraction around which to rally his people. He funds far right anti-EU activists in Latvia, who then create a reason for an uprising of the Russian Latvians in the East of the country (the EU border with Russia). Russia sends ‘peace keeping forces’ and ‘aid lorries’ into Latvia, as it did in Georgia, and in Ukraine. He annexes Eastern Latvia as he did Eastern Ukraine (Crimea has the same population as Latvia, by the way).

A divided Europe, with the leaders of France, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and others now pro-Russia, anti-EU, and funded by Putin, overrule calls for sanctions or a military response. NATO is slow to respond: Trump does not want America to be involved, and a large part of Europe is indifferent or blocking any action. Russia, seeing no real resistance to their actions, move further into Latvia, and then into Eastern Estonia and Lithuania. The Baltic States declare war on Russia and start to retaliate, as they have now been invaded so have no choice. Half of Europe sides with them, a few countries remain neutral, and a few side with Russia. Where does Turkey stand on this? How does ISIS respond to a new war in Europe? Who uses a nuclear weapon first?

This is just one Arch Duke Ferdinand scenario. The number of possible scenarios are infinite due to the massive complexity of the many moving parts. And of course many of them lead to nothing happening. But based on history we are due another period of destruction, and based on history all the indicators are that we are entering one.

It will come in ways we can’t see coming, and will spin out of control so fast people won’t be able to stop it. Historians will look back and make sense of it all and wonder how we could all have been so naïve. How could I sit in a nice café in London, writing this, without wanting to run away. How could people read it and make sarcastic and dismissive comments about how pro-Remain people should stop whining, and how we shouldn’t blame everything on Brexit. Others will read this and sneer at me for saying America is in great shape, that Trump is a possible future Hitler (and yes, Godwin’s Law. But my comparison is to another narcissistic, charismatic leader fanning flames of hatred until things spiral out of control). It’s easy to jump to conclusions that oppose pessimistic predictions based on the weight of history and learning. Trump won against the other Republicans in debates by countering their claims by calling them names and dismissing them. It’s an easy route but the wrong one.

Ignoring and mocking the experts , as people are doing around Brexit and Trump’s campaign, is no different to ignoring a doctor who tells you to stop smoking, and then finding later you’ve developed incurable cancer. A little thing leads to an unstoppable destruction that could have been prevented if you’d listened and thought a bit. But people smoke, and people die from it. That is the way of the human.

So I feel it’s all inevitable. I don’t know what it will be, but we are entering a bad phase. It will be unpleasant for those living through it, maybe even will unravel into being hellish and beyond imagination. Humans will come out the other side, recover, and move on. The human race will be fine, changed, maybe better. But for those at the sharp end — for the thousands of Turkish teachers who just got fired, for the Turkish journalists and lawyers in prison, for the Russian dissidents in gulags, for people lying wounded in French hospitals after terrorist attacks, for those yet to fall, this will be their Somme.

What can we do? Well, again, looking back, probably not much. The liberal intellectuals are always in the minority. See Clay Shirky’s Twitter Storm on this point. The people who see that open societies, being nice to other people, not being racist, not fighting wars, is a better way to live, they generally end up losing these fights. They don’t fight dirty. They are terrible at appealing to the populace. They are less violent, so end up in prisons, camps, and graves. We need to beware not to become divided (see: Labour party), we need to avoid getting lost in arguing through facts and logic, and counter the populist messages of passion and anger with our own similar messages. We need to understand and use social media. We need to harness a different fear. Fear of another World War nearly stopped World War 2, but didn’t. We need to avoid our own echo chambers. Trump and Putin supporters don’t read the Guardian, so writing there is just reassuring our friends. We need to find a way to bridge from our closed groups to other closed groups, try to cross the ever widening social divides.

(Perhaps I’m just writing this so I can be remembered by history as one of the people who saw it coming.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/irans-holocaust-denial-is-part-o...

y Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh May 27

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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The Islamic Republic of Iran held another Holocaust cartoon festival this month, inviting the usual despicable cast of characters. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif assured the New Yorker that although the event would proceed, Iran would ensure that the “people who have preached racial hatred and violence will not be invited.” Evidently, Zarif believes there are Holocaust deniers who do not harbor “racial hatred.”

As Iranian President Hassan Rouhani once remarked to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, the Holocaust — the question of whether it happened and the dimensions of the slaughter — is really “a matter for historians and researchers to illuminate.” Crimes against humanity are bad, Rouhani averred, as he quickly glided over the Nazis’ anti-Jewish malevolence to similar crimes committed today, leaving no doubt for a Middle Eastern audience that he was talking about Israel. Among Iran’s ruling elite, Holocaust denial and the accompanying conspiracies about Jewish power are omnipresent and diverse, but they all have strategic intent. Anti-Semitism is not only central to the regime’s identity; it’s also inextricably tied to its soft-power propaganda aimed at the larger Muslim world, especially Arabs.

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Anti-Semitism was part of Iran’s inception. The revolution’s father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, spent much of his life indulging it. In Khomeini’s rendition, the Jews, always untrustworthy in Islamic history, are surrogates of Western imperialism who have displaced Palestinian Muslims and even distorted Islam’s scriptural texts. Khomeini’s hatred toward Israel exceeded even his disdain for America. The United States was a pernicious, seductive imperial power. But it was America’s conduct, not its existence, that the mullahs contested. Israel, on the other hand, was for Khomeini an unlawful entity, irrespective of its actual policies and behavior. No peace compact or negotiated settlement with the aggrieved Palestinians could ameliorate this essential illegitimacy. Israel must be wiped off the map.

Since the ayatollah’s death, Tehran’s efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state have continued, no matter who among the ruling elite has had the upper hand. Whether it’s those aligned behind Ali Khamenei (Khomeini’s successor), the revolutionary pragmatists backing Rouhani or the Islamic leftists who once rallied behind the reforming president Mohammad Khatami, attitudes toward Israel and the Holocaust have remained constant. For them, Zionism is a racist, exclusionary ideology that should be opposed not just by Muslims but also by all who care about human rights. Iran’s propaganda insists that Zionism was imposed on the region by force of arms, sustained by bloodshed and perpetuated by craven U.S. politicians beholden to domestic Jewish groups. Khamenei has gone so far as to claim that to ensure the compliance of U.S. politicians, “these Zionist capitalists both bribe and threaten them.” Even more: These Jewish American overlords “have murdered some of their high-ranking and great officials.” Anti-Semitism in Iran is an Orwellian voyage of ideology, where fiery sermons and conferences calling for the annihilation of Israel and denying the Holocaust have become the sanctioned language of the Islamic republic.

In foreign affairs, this antagonism to Israel enforces the clerical regime’s claims to regional leadership, especially at a time when the mullahs’ ecumenical message to Sunni Muslims has been compromised by Iran’s role in provoking and sustaining sectarian warfare in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Iran’s anti-Semitic assault is one of the few rhetorical weapons the clerics can deploy that has broad popular appeal among Sunni Muslims. Arab leaders may envision agreements with Israel, but many of their constituents loathe the idea, especially in Egypt, which has a cold peace with Israel, and in Saudi Arabia, where royals unofficially flirt with Israeli officials in a great game to counter the mullahs.

In particular, Iran needs anti-Semitism and Holocaust-denial conferences that brandish its Islamist credentials to compete against the Saudi propaganda machine, which is running full-throttle against the Shiites, depicting Iranians as Muslim heretics and Persian usurpers eyeing Arab lands. From their global network of pulpits and Arab satellite TV channels, the Saudis call the faithful against a rapacious Iran and its Shiite insurgents taking over the ancient seats of Arab civilizations in Baghdad and Damascus.

And the clerical regime’s anti-Semitism will grow worse as the rewards of the nuclear deal increase. The mullahs no longer have to worry how the regime’s hatred of Jews plays in the West — the buffoonish character of former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is gone and sanctions are falling. The U.S.-educated Zarif is adept at handling Western officials and journalists. In his capable hands, Holocaust festivals become yet another reason to support Rouhani’s “moderates.” And Western opprobrium not reinforced with sanctions just affirms the correctness and utility of the mullahs’ anti-Jewish worldview. What matters most is the war for Muslim minds, and the clerical regime intends to exploit anti-Semitism for all that it’s worth.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/27/munich-gunman-saw-sharing-...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/27/bill-oreilly-slave...

Let tge Revisionist History Begin.  Sinceyou believe the Hocaust NEVER happened, why not deny that Slavery never happened either.  And while you are at it, the Khmer Rouge were a philanthropic army.