A CALL TO CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
- do not fear prison
- have the moral and intellectual courage to state:

“I REFUSE TO BELIEVE IN THE HOLOCAUST”
- think of those who are in or face prison
because they REFUSE to
BELIEVE in the HOLOCAUST!

This announcement was sent by the folks at The Adelaide Institute, which is directed by Frederick Toben. It is a very brief and forceful statement and call to arms. It raises an issue, issues, that I have gone back and forth on for twenty years. Because there is not universal agreement on what constituted the “Holocaust,” the word means different things to different folks.

Most people in the West believe the orthodox Holocaust story—that the Germans, acting out the role of a uniquely evil people, wanted to exterminate all the Jews in Europe and maybe the world, and in Europe, using weapons of mass destruction (gas-chambers), largely succeeded.

Those who do not believe the Germans used WMD to exterminate Europe’s Jews find the Holocaust story to be saturated in fraud and falsehood. They—we—see the gas-chamber story as the heart of the so-called “Holocaust.” No gas chambers, no Holocaust.

Over the years when I have been interviewed via radio or the print press, I am always asked if I “deny” the Holocaust happened. I always reply: “That’s the wrong question.” The first question has to be: “What was the Holocaust?” We must be in agreement about what we are talking about, or we talk past each other.

That’s what I fear will happen with this Call To Civil Disobedience. It addresses only those who do not believe, but not those who do, the True Believers, which is where the problem is. That is, it addresses the choir. Of course—and thought recalls this only in this moment—there are many in the “choir” who do not sing. It is not only that they do not raise their voices, but that they hardly hum even a bar or two. These folk are in wide agreement that revisionist arguments are important to Western culture, but not important enough to risk—what?

So maybe the Call To Civil Disobedience is a good thing after all. It may be a very good thing to challenge closet revisionists to own up to their skepticism, to raise their voices in the name of liberty and intellectual freedom, and sing out their own truth—that they do not believe what they do not believe. I have ended up, then, in a place that is different from the place I started out from. The other issues all remain.

The greatest issue for revisionists is to acknowledge the catastrophe Europe’s Jews suffered during the Hitlerian regime. Most of the peoples of Europe suffered their own catastrophe at the same time, and before that during the regime of America’s wonderfully human ally, Josef Stalin. The fact that many Jews exploit their own catastrophe in exchange for money, land, and influence is their problem.

The fact that most of the rest of us go along with it—that’s our problem. Like those revisionists who do not believe that it is important enough, in one way or another, to stand up and be counted.