As with the overwhelming majority of Exterminationist trash, Shermer’s outpourings are 90% polemic, 10% distorted fact. The facts he pleads here are in the usual heavily loaded emotive language and with all the by now de rigueur special pleading and evasiveness Revisionists have come to expect of Shermer and his ad hoc cabal. Thus he tells us that after one radio appearance:
some old guy phoned in to tell me that he “knows” that the Jews have already taken over the world through the Trilateral Commission, routinely meet with Clinton and Gore and even the entire Congress to tell them what to do, and in a flourish he informed me that Henry Ford was a great American who knew what the Jews were really up to, especially in his book “The Eternal Jew.” This guy said that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion explains the whole Jewish cabal.
What “some old guy” believes is of course totally irrelevant. People with weird and whacky views can be found at both ends of the political spectrum as well as in the centre. Sir Isaac Newton had some weird and whacky views – unlike Shermer he wasn’t an atheist – but that doesn’t detract from his standing as the greatest scientist of his era, and possibly the greatest who has ever lived.
Shermer refers to Revisionists as deniers (small d) and claims they say the Holocaust never happened. This is the biggest lie of all because the Holocaust did happen and everybody know it; it happened between 1939 and 1945 (or between 1941 and 1945 if you are an American); it was called World War II, and it led to the deaths of something in the region of fifty million human beings, the overwhelming majority of them Gentiles, and most of these white, but for some bizarre reason only the deaths of (allegedly) six million Jews counts today, although the homosexual lobby are doing their best to elevate their persecution by the Nazis to the same holy status.
Shermer boasts that his book is
“the full-length treatment of the movement, the major (and minor) players in the movement, all of their arguments and the refutations of them”.
Okay Michael, refute this:
On November 10, 1988, a former Buchenwald survivor was quoted thus in the New York Times: “In the camp there was a cage with a bear and an eagle,” he said. “Every day, they would throw a Jew in there. The bear would tear him apart and the eagle would pick at his bones.”
“But that’s unbelievable,” whispered a visitor.
“It is unbelievable,” said Mr. Hubert, “but it happened.”
This is my favourite story about the so-called Holocaust. My argument is that this man was either lying or deluded or both, because if a bear were placed in a cage with an eagle in such a fashion the former would tear the latter to pieces. It never happened. Period. Refute me Dr Shermer, explain to the world and your gullible audience how the eagle would have kept the bear at bay.
Of course, the story is ludicrous, but such is the venality of the likes of Shermer that they would rather walk head first into the jaws of a rabid, ravenous Polar bear than concede for the slightest instant that any Jew has ever had the audacity to lie so brazenly about the Holocaust. The entire myth of mass gassings is founded on similar nonsense, as dedicated Revisionists applying the scientific method have ably demonstrated, but Shermer isn’t interested in them, he is interested only in some old guy who called in to a radio station to whitter on about the Protocols Of Zion.
Shermer is so chuffed about his book that he quotes at length from several reviewers, thus we are told by D. J. Kevles of California Institute of Technology that Shermer (and his co-author) Alex Grobman “destroy the Big Lie that the Holocaust never occurred, relentlessly confronting outrageous claims with ghastly, irrefutable facts.”
This is the fallacy known as the straw man, it sounds impressive that Shermer has done this but it’s not half so impressive when you realise that he is knocking down something which he and his ilk erected in the first place. Again, nobody denies that Jews were interned by the Nazis during the Second World War; nobody denies the reality of the camps or that many people – Gentiles as well as Jews – died in them.
Like all so-called skeptics who investigate this supposedly so difficult subject, Shermer is vastly impressed by the quantity of the evidence in support of the Exterminationist position, but every skeptic surely knows that quantity is no substitute for quality; if that were not so, the case for flying saucers, telekinesis, poltergeists and a host of other paranormal and unworldly phenomena would have proved beyond all doubt decades ago.
In his educative and witty study THE BOOK OF THE FALLACY: A training manual for intellectual subversives, Dr Madsen Pirie points out that “Faced with a clash between their ideas and the evidence, scientists will change their ideas. The special pleaders, like social scientists, prefer to change the evidence, and show why normal judgments cannot be made in their particular case. Very often it is the supreme importance of the cause which is called upon to justify the special standards.”
This is true of Shermer and the rest of the Exterminationist crowd, but with a strong rider, when they can’t change the evidence, they ignore it. Thus, all the evidence of duplicity, the fabricated confessions, the ludicrous personal testimonies, the fake exhibits, are consigned to the memory hole:
I said that the story of the bear and the eagle was my favourite tale of the Holocaust. Here is another, and far more pertinent one, because it was given in legal proceedings.
“At Auschwitz, on 24th December, 1942, I was paraded in company with about 19,000 other prisoners, all of them women. Present on parade were Doctor[s] Mengele and [two others]. I was one of the 3000 prisoners picked out of the 19,000 by the doctors and taken to our huts, where we were stripped naked by other prisoners and our clothes taken away. We were then taken by tipper-type lorries to the gas chamber chute. They were large lorries, about eight in all and about 300 persons on each lorry. On arrival at the gas chamber the lorry tipped up and we slid down the chute through some doors into a large room. The room had showers all round, towels and soap and large numbers of benches. There were also small windows high up near the roof. Many were injured coming down the chute and lay where they fell. Those of us who could sat down on the benches provided and immediately afterwards the doors of the room were closed. My eyes then began to water, I started coughing and had a pain in my chest and throat. Some of the other people fell down and others coughed and foamed at the mouth. After being in the room for about two minutes the door was opened and an S.S. man came in wearing a respirator. He called my name and then pulled me out of the room and quickly shut the door again. When I got outside I saw S.S. man Franz Hoessler...He took me to hospital, where I stayed for about six weeks, receiving special treatment from Dr. Mengele.”
These are the words of the Polish Jewess Sophia Litwinska, or rather the words that were put into her mouth by her British debriefers. This evidence can be found in the 1949 book on the Belsen Trial (which includes Auschwitz) and in the trial transcript held by the Public Record Office in the WO235 series (which the current writer has read).
It is on such nonsense as this that the alleged greatest genocide in history is based. How do they explain the testimony of a woman who claims to have been shoved into a gas chamber and as the Zyklon is administered, dragged out and sent to the hospital where she is treated by the Angel of Death himself? What about the other twenty-four hundred odd women who were crammed into this chamber? Didn’t they struggle towards the door? Does Zyklon B really make victims cough and foam at the mouth after two minutes of inhalation? Can’t explain it, can you Mike? So what do you do? Ignore it and brand us “anti-Semitic” or crazy, if not overtly then by the usual subtle innuendo.
Of course, it would be dishonest to suggest that all Holocaust Revisionists are pure as driven snow, some do have hidden agendas. Dr Shermer’s agenda though is far from hidden, for in his press release he informs us that his collaborator Alex Grobman
“is the Director of Rosh Hagivah, an umbrella organization for a number of religious Zionist organizations in Israel including the only Jewish learning center of its kind in the world. Rosh Hagivah will take the visitor through a unique experience to explore his/her roots.”
Religious Zionism, oy vay! Whatever next? And what does his collaborator make of the unique experience of Sophia Litwinska? Actually, it wasn’t so unique, there are similar “testimonies” in the Holocaust literature, and they are every bit as unworthy of belief as hers, and of Mr Hubert’s, he of bear and eagle fame.
If Shermer really is such a dedicated skeptic then he is surely familiar with the immortal words of David Hume: “...no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish...”
The testimony of Sophia Litwinska is certainly miraculous; we are still waiting for Shermer and company’s greater proof.
Shermer’s specious argument is that no single piece of evidence proves (his version of) the Holocaust, but that the events – mass gassings – are proved by the convergence of evidence. Again, quality is more important than quantity. Ten, ten thousand or even ten million testimonies of the quality of Sophia Litwinska’s prove only that the entire fabric of Holocaust affirmation is based on special pleading and wilful ignorance. And, in many cases, the terror Shermer and his ilk have of being branded racist or, perish the thought, anti-Semitic.
The current writer has been branded anti-Semitic more times than he cares to remember. This is a charge I vehemently deny. The crime I am guilty of is the crime all Holocaust Revisionists are guilty of: we refuse to apply different standards to Jews from those we apply to Gentiles. If a Jew picks our pockets, we call him a thief, and if he lies like Baron Munchhausen, we call him a damned liar. I am prepared to do many things to prove I am not anti-Semitic, but one thing I am not prepared to do for anyone is kiss Jewish ass, another is to rewrite the laws of physics.
For the record, when Shermer first started poking his proboscis into the murky waters of Exterminationist theology, the current writer sent him documentation on one aspect of the fraud, the Dachau “gas chamber” that was photographed by the American military and exhibited as such all over the world. The “gas chamber” that arch-anti-Revisionist Jean-Claude Pressac concedes is really a delousing chamber with the sophistry that “It is quite obvious that, in 1945, American war correspondants [sic] could easily be misled because of their lack of information...”
Shermer acknowledged receipt of this documentation but like the spineless goy he really is, refused to comment on it. In fact he acted as though it never existed.
Anyone thinking of buying Shermer’s book should think again; it has been praised to high heaven, but self-praise is no praise at all; any book that examines the evidence for exterminations and mass gassings critically will not be praised, at least not in the ivory towers of Holocaustiana where truth has once again been subjugated to ideology, and where so-called skeptics become true believers in order to safeguard their lucrative sinecures, and to banish the suspicion that even distinguished academics such as themselves might not be free from the taint of anti-Semitism.
Alexander Baron,
Sydenham,
London.
July 15, 2000
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