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Anarchy: a journal of desire armed. #38, Fall 1993 LETTERS part three
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ NEO-FASCIST CLAPTRAP J. McQuinn,
Regarding your review of Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist in the Fall 1992 Anarchy: You write that the pamphlet is "worth missing." I wish I could fool myself into thinking that this gross understatement was made in a spirit of sarcasm, but the truth is that your pathetic "review" was worth missing. You seem to have spent more time reading neo-fascist claptrap (with a decided lack of skepticism at that!) than legitimate history. Spend a little time in the library before you write any more "reviews" on this sensitive subject. You can start with The War Against the Jews by Lucy Davidowitz and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, the basic works, and then move on to the more specific and detailed studies in Nazi evil such as The Nazi Doctors by Robert Lifton. The Holocaust has not been exaggerated=FEif anything, history has downplayed its magnitude. For instance the "six million" figure we often hear refers only to the Jews who died in the extermination camps. If one adds the gays, "gypsies" (Romani), trade unionists, communists, political dissidents, and the mentally, physically and psychologically disabled people killed in "euthanasia" programs, the number approaches twelve million.
To argue that the mainstream Jewish press and organizations have failed to grapple with the existence of other holocausts in history (e.g. the extermination of Indian communities throughout the Americas in the colonial era) is one thing. It is similarly valid to point out that Zionists have sometimes manipulated the legacy of the Holocaust for their own ends. But to write that "`The Holocaust' has been magnified into a larger-than-life tale of historical racial persecution=FE largely in order to justify the continuing atrocities by Zionists in the racist state of Israel" betrays such a poor sense of history (not to mention classically conspiratorial anti-Semitism) that I find it demoralizing to think that any self-respecting publication would print such words.
Have things degenerated to the point that "anarchists" think that holocaust revisionism is worthy of expending ink and paper on for purposes other than exposing and debunking? If so, we're really in trouble.
Yours in disgust,
Bill Weinberg, New York, NY.
Contributing Editor, The Shadow
News Editor, High Times
Frequent Contributor, Love & Rage, GroundWork, etc.
Member, Walter Benjamin Committee on Fascism & Anti-Semitism
Jason comments:
Baseless accusations
I find anti-Semitism to be nauseating, as I do any other type of racism I've encountered. But I will not grant that questioning the spectacular media packaging of the Holocaust in the U.S. automati- cally constitutes "classically conspiratorial anti-Semitism." One needn't be anti-Semitic nor entertain any conspiracy theories to note that in the U.S. mainstream media the state of Israel can do no wrong. It is also clear that much of the media mystification surrounding the actual process of colonizing Palestine and the suppression and expulsion of the indigenous Palestinian population from the 1940s to the present finds its justification in magnifi- cation of the Holocaust to almost metaphysical proportions. But the Nazis are no longer in power. It is the liberals, the conser- vatives, the nationalist parties, the socialist and labor parties, the social democrats, the Christian democrats and in Israel, Labor and Likud that are responsible for massively exploiting racist sentiments in order to maintain their power and perpetrate current world atrocities. If Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist is any indication, Holocaust revisionism is a pathetic failure at presenting any kind of convincing case that millions of Jews and others were not purposefully killed by the Nazi state during WW2. However, this does not excuse self-righteous and baseless accusa- tions of anti-Semitism every time discussion of the subject is not framed in the reactionary politically-correct terms favored by de- fenders of Zionism and the state of Israel.