Ford and GM's Nazi ties
Louis Proyect
Firms Deny Researchers' Claims On Aiding German War Effort
By Michael Dobbs Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 30, 1998; Page A01
Three years after Swiss banks became the target of a worldwide furor
over their business dealings with Nazi Germany, major American car
companies find themselves embroiled in a similar debate.
Like the Swiss banks, the American car companies have vigorously
denied that they assisted the Nazi war machine or that they
significantly profited from the use of forced labor at their German
subsidiaries during World War II. But historians and lawyers
researching class-action suits on behalf of former prisoners of war
are busy amassing evidence of collaboration by the automakers with the
Nazi regime.
The issues at stake for the American automobile corporations go far
beyond the relatively modest sums involved in settling any lawsuit.
During the war, the car companies established a reputation for
themselves as "the arsenal of democracy" by transforming their
production lines to make airplanes, tanks and trucks for the armies
that defeated Adolf Hitler. They deny that their huge business
interests in Nazi Germany led them, wittingly or unwittingly, to also
become "the arsenal of fascism."
The Ford Motor Co. has mobilized dozens of historians, lawyers and
researchers to fight a civil case brought by lawyers in Washington and
New York who specialize in extracting large cash settlements from
banks and insurance companies accused of defrauding Holocaust victims.
Also, a book scheduled for publication next year will accuse General
Motors Corp. of playing a key role in Hitler's invasions of Poland and
the Soviet Union.
"General Motors was far more important to the Nazi war machine than
Switzerland," said Bradford Snell, who has spent two decades
researching a history of the world's largest automaker. "Switzerland
was just a repository of looted funds. GM was an integral part of the
German war effort. The Nazis could have invaded Poland and Russia
without Switzerland. They could not have done so without GM."
Both General Motors and Ford insist that they bear little or no
responsibility for the operations of their German subsidiaries, which
controlled 70 percent of the German car market at the outbreak of war
in 1939 and rapidly retooled themselves to become suppliers of war
materiel to the German army.
But documents discovered in German and American archives show a much
more complicated picture. In certain instances, American managers of
both GM and Ford went along with the conversion of their German plants
to military production at a time when U.S. government documents show
they were still resisting calls by the Roosevelt administration to
step up military production in their plants at home.
After three years of national soul-searching, Switzerland's largest
banks agreed last August to make a $1.25 billion settlement to
Holocaust survivors, a step they had initially resisted. Far from
dying down, however, the controversy over business dealings with the
Nazis has given new impetus to long-standing investigations into
issues such as looted art, unpaid insurance benefits and the use of
forced labor at German factories.
Although some of the allegations against GM and Ford surfaced during
1974 congressional hearings into monopolistic practices in the
automobile industry, American corporations have largely succeeded in
playing down their connections to Nazi Germany. As with Switzerland,
however, their very success in projecting a wholesome, patriotic image
of themselves is now being turned against them by their critics.
"When you think of Ford, you think of baseball and apple pie," said
Miriam Kleinman, a researcher with the Washington law firm of Cohen,
Millstein and Hausfeld, who spent weeks examining records at the
National Archives in an attempt to build a slave labor case against
the Dearborn-based company. "You don't think of Hitler having a
portrait of Henry Ford on his office wall in Munich."
Both Ford and General Motors declined requests for access to their
wartime archives. Ford spokesman John Spellich defended the company's
decision to maintain business ties with Nazi Germany on the grounds
that the U.S. government continued to have diplomatic relations with
Berlin up until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
GM spokesman John F. Mueller said that General Motors lost day-to-day
control over its German plants in September 1939 and "did not assist
the Nazis in any way during World War II."
For GIs, an Unpleasant Surprise
When American GIs invaded Europe in June 1944, they did so in jeeps,
trucks and tanks manufactured by the Big Three motor companies in one
of the largest crash militarization programs ever undertaken. It came
as an unpleasant surprise to discover that the enemy was also driving
trucks manufactured by Ford and Opel -- a 100 percent GM-owned
subsidiary -- and flying Opel-built warplanes. (Chrysler's role in the
German rearmament effort was much less significant.)
When the U.S. Army liberated the Ford plants in Cologne and Berlin,
they found destitute foreign workers confined behind barbed wire and
company documents extolling the "genius of the Fuehrer," according to
reports filed by soldiers at the scene. A U.S. Army report by
investigator Henry Schneider dated Sept. 5, 1945, accused the German
branch of Ford of serving as "an arsenal of Nazism, at least for
military vehicles" with the "consent" of the parent company in
Dearborn.
Ford spokesman Spellich described the Schneider report as "a
mischaracterization" of the activities of the American parent company
and noted that Dearborn managers had frequently been kept in the dark
by their German subordinates over events in Cologne.
The relationship of Ford and GM to the Nazi regime goes back to the
1920s and 1930s, when the American car companies competed against each
other for access to the lucrative German market. Hitler was an admirer
of American mass production techniques and an avid reader of the
antisemitic tracts penned by Henry Ford. "I regard Henry Ford as my
inspiration," Hitler told a Detroit News reporter two years before
becoming the German chancellor in 1933, explaining why he kept a
life-size portrait of the American automaker next to his desk.
Although Ford later renounced his antisemitic writings, he remained an
admirer of Nazi Germany and sought to keep America out of the coming
war. In July 1938, four months after the German annexation of Austria,
he accepted the highest medal that Nazi Germany could bestow on a
foreigner, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. The following month, a
senior executive for General Motors, James Mooney, received a similar
medal for his "distinguished service to the Reich."
The granting of such awards reflected the vital place that the U.S.
automakers had in Germany's increasingly militarized economy. In 1935,
GM agreed to build a new plant near Berlin to produce the aptly named
"Blitz" truck, which would later be used by the German army for its
blitzkreig attacks on Poland, France and the Soviet Union. German Ford
was the second-largest producer of trucks for the German army after
GM/Opel, according to U.S. Army reports.
The importance of the American automakers went beyond making trucks
for the German army. The Schneider report, now available to
researchers at the National Archives, states that American Ford agreed
to a complicated barter deal that gave the Reich increased access to
large quantities of strategic raw materials, notably rubber. Author
Snell says that Nazi armaments chief Albert Speer told him in 1977
that Hitler "would never have considered invading Poland" without
synthetic fuel technology provided by General Motors.
As war approached, it became increasingly difficult for U.S.
corporations like GM and Ford to operate in Germany without
cooperating closely with the Nazi rearmament effort. Under intense
pressure from Berlin, both companies took pains to make their
subsidiaries appear as "German" as possible. In April 1939, for
example, German Ford made a personal present to Hitler of 35,000
Reichsmarks in honor of his 50th birthday, according to a captured
Nazi document.
Documents show that the parent companies followed a conscious strategy
of continuing to do business with the Nazi regime, rather than divest
themselves of their German assets. Less than three weeks after the
Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, GM Chairman Alfred P.
Sloan defended this strategy as sound business practice, given the
fact that the company's German operations were "highly profitable."
The internal politics of Nazi Germany "should not be considered the
business of the management of General Motors," Sloan explained in a
letter to a concerned shareholder dated April 6, 1939. "We must
conduct ourselves [in Germany] as a German organization. . . . We have
no right to shut down the plant."
U.S. Firms Became Crucial
After the outbreak of war in September 1939, General Motors and Ford
became crucial to the German military, according to contemporaneous
German documents and postwar investigations by the U.S. Army. James
Mooney, the GM director in charge of overseas operations, had
discussions with Hitler in Berlin two weeks after the German invasion
of Poland.
Typewritten notes by Mooney show that he was involved in the partial
conversion of the principal GM automobile plant at Russelsheim to
production of engines and other parts for the Junker "Wunderbomber," a
key weapon in the German air force, under a government-brokered
contract between Opel and the Junker airplane company. Mooney's notes
show that he returned to Germany the following February for further
discussions with Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering and a personal
inspection of the Russelsheim plant.
Mooney's involvement in the conversion of the Russelsheim plant
undermines claims by General Motors that the American branch of the
company had nothing to do with the Nazi rearmament effort. In
congressional testimony in 1974, GM maintained that American personnel
resigned from all management positions in Opel following the outbreak
of war in 1939 "rather than participate in the production of war
materials."
However, according to documents of the Reich Commissar for the
Treatment of Enemy Property, the American parent company continued to
have some say in the operations of Opel after September 1939. The
documents show that the company issued a general power of attorney to
an American manager, Pete Hoglund, in March 1940. Hoglund did not
leave Germany until a year later. At that time, the power of attorney
was transferred to a prominent Berlin lawyer named Heinrich Richter.
GM spokesman Mueller declined to answer questions from The Washington
Post on the power of attorney granted to Hoglund and Richter or to
provide access to the personnel files of Hoglund and other wartime
managers. He also declined to comment on an assertion by Snell that
Opel used French and Belgian prisoners at its Russelsheim plant in the
summer of 1940, at a time when the American Hoglund was still looking
after GM interests in Germany.
The Nazis had a clear interest in keeping Opel and German Ford under
American ownership, despite growing hostility between Washington and
Berlin. By the time of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the American
stake in German Ford had declined to 52 percent, but Nazi officials
argued against a complete takeover. A memorandum to plant managers
dated November 25, 1941, acknowledged that such a step would deprive
German Ford of "the excellent sales organization" of the parent
company and make it more difficult to bring "the remaining European
Ford companies under German influence."
Documents suggest that the principal motivation of both companies
during this period was to protect their investments. An FBI report
dated July 23, 1941 quoted Mooney as saying that he would refuse to
take any action that might "make Hitler mad." In fall 1940, Mooney
told the journalist Henry Paynter that he would not return his Nazi
medal because such an action might jeopardize GM's $100 million
investment in Germany. "Hitler has all the cards," Paynter quoted
Mooney as saying.
"Mooney probably thought that the war would be over very quickly, so
why should we give our wonderful company away," said German researcher
Anita Kugler, who used Nazi archives to trace the company's dealings
with Nazi Germany.
Even though GM officials were aware of the conversion of its
Russelsheim plant to aircraft engine production, they resisted such
conversion efforts in the United States, telling shareholders that
their automobile assembly lines in Detroit were "not adaptable to the
manufacture of other products" such as planes, according to a company
document discovered by Snell.
In June 1940, after the fall of France, Henry Ford personally vetoed a
U.S. government-approved plan to produce under license Rolls-Royce
engines for British fighter planes, according to published accounts by
his associates.
Declaration of War Alters Ties
America's declaration of war on Germany in December 1941 made it
illegal for U.S. motor companies to have any contact with their
subsidiaries on German-controlled territory.
At GM and Ford plants in Germany, reliance on forced labor increased.
The story of Elsa Iwanowa, who brought a class-action suit against
Ford last March, is typical. At the age of 16, she was abducted from
her home in the southern Russian city of Rostov by German soldiers in
October 1942 with hundreds of other young women to work at the Ford
plant at Cologne.
"The conditions were terrible. They put us in barracks, on three-tier
bunks," she recalled in a telephone interview from Belgium, where she
now lives. "It was very cold; they did not pay us at all and scarcely
fed us. The only reason that we survived was that we were young and
fit."
In a court submission, American Ford acknowledges that Iwanowa and
others were "forced to endure a sad and terrible experience" at its
Cologne plant but maintains that redressing such "tragedies" should be
"a government-to-government concern." Spellich, the Ford spokesman,
insists the company did not have management control over its German
subsidiary during the period in question.
Ford has backed away from its initial claim that it did not profit in
any way from forced labor at its Cologne plant. Spellich said that
company historians are still researching this issue but have found
documents showing that, after the war, American Ford received
dividends from its German subsidiary worth approximately $60,000 for
the years 1940-43. He declined a request to interview the historians,
saying they were "too busy."
The extent of contacts between American Ford and its German-controlled
subsidiary after 1941 is likely to be contested at any trial. Simon
Reich, an economic historian at the University of Pittsburgh and an
expert on the German car industry, says he has yet to see convincing
evidence that American Ford had any control over its Cologne plant
after December 1941. He adds, however, that both "Opel and Ford did
absolutely everything they could to ingratiate themselves to the Nazi
state."
While there was no direct contact between American Ford and its German
subsidiary after December 1941, there appear to have been some
indirect contacts. In June 1943, the Nazi custodian of the Cologne
plant, Robert Schmidt, traveled to Portugal for talks with Ford
managers there. In addition, the Treasury Department investigated Ford
after Pearl Harbor for possible illegal contacts with its subsidiary
in occupied France, which produced Germany army trucks. The
investigation ended without charges being filed.
Even though American Ford now condemns what happened at its Cologne
plant during the war, it continued to employ the managers in charge at
the time. After the war, Schmidt was briefly arrested by Allied
military authorities and barred from working for Ford. But he was
reinstated as the company's technical director in 1950 after he wrote
to Henry Ford II claiming that he had always "detested" the Nazis and
had never been a member of the party. A letter signed by a leading
Cologne Nazi in February 1942 describes Schmidt as a trusted party
member. Ford maintains that Schmidt's name does not show up on Nazi
membership lists.
Mel Weiss, an American attorney for Iwanowa, argues that American Ford
received "indirect" profits from forced labor at its Cologne plant
because of the overall increase in the value of German operations
during the war. He notes that Ford was eager to demand compensation
from the U.S. government after the war for "losses" due to bomb damage
to its German plants and therefore should also be responsible for any
benefits derived from forced labor.
Similar arguments apply to General Motors, which was paid $32 million
by the U.S. government for damages sustained to its German plants.
Washington attorney Michael Hausfeld, who is involved in the Ford
lawsuit, confirms GM also is "on our list" as a possible target.
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
--
Marxist discussion is at: www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html
Neil Gardner
Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi CollaborationFirms Deny Researchers' Claims On Aiding German War Effort
By Michael Dobbs Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 30, 1998; Page A01
Three years after Swiss banks became the target of a worldwide furor
over their business dealings with Nazi Germany, major American car
companies find themselves embroiled in a similar debate.
Which US or other companies supplied Napalm to the US armed forces? How many of their owners are in jail?
Read this (NB: I am not the author and am patently unable to change the past and unreservedly condemn all acts of barbarity).
Please read it before commenting.
Never Forget! Nazi Concentrations Camps - Fact and Fiction
Prior to the war the concentration camps were ordinary prisons that
housed, in addition to ordinary criminals, a growing population of political
prisoners and those identified as undesirables by the stringent racial
and social theories then in place.
When it became obvious that hostilities could no longer be avoided,
this nation of 80 millions was faced with the problem of mounting huge
armies and still having enough manpower to operate the arms industries
that would supply them. As taking on the entire world is not a light venture,
they very early saw that the only recourse was slave labor. Every major
power who fought against them used the same resource, although to nowhere
near the extent that Germany did, except in the case of Russia and her
extensive gulags.
The name "concentration camp" was coined by a German official charged
with organizing some part of this vast network of camps, and referred to
concentrating the work forces directly at the factories (NB: the
British opened the first internment camps in the Boer war). Auschwitz-Birkenau,
for instance, served the labor needs of the huge I.G.Farben synthetic rubber
plant built at that location, as well as many minor satellite efforts.
There is strong evidence that the treatment at many camps was relatively
humane (compared to internment camps in some other countries), and that
the stories of one pail of watery soup per day for a barracks full of inmates
is in most cases, dramatic license. As noted in a memo expressing concern
for production outputs later in the war, the feeding and care of both physical
and emotional needs of these captive workers was vital to achieving the
rates needed ever more desperately. What sense would it make to reduce
a factory full of workers to a state of stumbling starvation and deprivation?
A person who did this to the manufacturing effort he was charged with overseeing
would have been properly called on the carpet for creating a serious impediment
to the war effort through needless oversight and cruelty.
On the other hand, there are offsetting truths of a darker nature.
The people incarcerated were prisoners. Criminals and slave laborers and
officially designated pariahs. The camps were prisons, and the guards,
like their prisoners and as is true in all societies, were not the cream
of the German manpower pool else they would have been in the Wehrmacht.
So you had your tough guys, your sadists, and, in the Eastern camps, local
talent with a high rate of ethnic hatred for those under their care. The
result of this was that the rules were rigid, the punishments severe, and
the treatment often brutal. Perhaps about what a black man in a Southern
prison in the 40s might expect to see, with the addition of legalized summary
executions for certain violations.
With the disintegration of the Reich and its orderly functionings,
things got worse in the camps than on the outside in many cases, particularly
when they began to hold ten times as many people as they were designed
for, a result of rapidly shrinking borders as the Allied armies advanced.
Malnutrition, disease, and neglect began to cut huge swaths through
the camp populations. The inexplicable decision to bring trainloads of
typhus and cholera infected inmates from the East back to Germany in the
latter months and place them in camps with the healthy was all that was
needed to turn a bad situation into a raging nightmare. It was at this
point that some camps, such as Bergen-Belsen, truly became "death camps"
but by a combination of evils and misfortunes, not by design. There are
those who try to make the case that German hatred of Jews was so intense
that they purposely set up these charnel centers to see them die in even
greater misery by slow starvation. This monstrous accusation is understandable
on the part of those victimized, or those seeing the piles of emaciated
bodies and not understanding why, but surely no rational person can believe
that a people that demented could have waged war against hugely superior
forces for five years while implementing idiocies of this scale.
Addressing crimes of the sort alleged in stock Holocaust literature,
yes, there were criminals among the camp personnel too. Prisoners were
treated badly, maimed and killed by their guards and kapos. Just as occurs
in any brutal prison system, and about at the same levels. Consider that
the German field units were some of the most disciplined the world has
seen, evidenced partly by the fact that the Wehrmacht in the East executed
15,000 of its own troops for violations of rules and orders. Rapists, thieves,
and random murderers were not tolerated by the military, nor by the darkly
idealistic SS and party members, lurid tales to the contrary notwithstanding.
And yes, the camps were not the venue of the Wehrmacht, but the attitude
of stringent adherence to "the rules" existed throughout German society,
where simply expressing negativism about the course of the war could earn
you a summary execution if the wrong people heard it.
It was a time that called for the best effort of every person in order
for the group to survive, and all Germans knew this. I spoke not long ago
to a gentleman who was 13 years old when the Russians were about to overrun
the city of Danzig (now Gdansk). After an air raid, he recounted seeing
two women who had been scrounging for food in the rubble placed against
a nearby wall and shot. When I reacted to this he quickly said, "Ah yes!
It was a terrible thing. There were many terrible things, but everyone
knew that there was a war on and that looters were shot without question.
If disorder were allowed to set in, it would all be over, and even though
we didn't like these things we knew that was how it had to be. Everybody
knew, including those women."
Loose cannons simply were not tolerated. A camp guard caught killing
inmates at random for his own pleasure would have been collared, given
a summary court if he were a German, and publicly executed without delay.
In fact, this happened to more than one camp commander, usually for participating
in the black markets which flourished in camps where legend has it that
a few hundred guards managed to keep their eyes on every movement of more
than a hundred thousand people at all hours of the day and night. That
isn't even true of our high-security prisons and it assuredly was not the
case in these huge, sprawling camps. The greatest portion of brutal maltreatment
almost assuredly came from predations of prisoners on prisoners, a surmise
backed up by knowledge of "ordinary" prisons, and descriptions given by
gulag survivors. It was every person for themselves, and only the strong
survived, a fact of brutal prison life that comes through in muted tones
in the survivor accounts that seek to focus attention on more bizarre kinds
of cruelties and murders that are, on examination, the products of traumatized
and vengeance bent minds.
Yes, the camps were hideously bad places for many. But not any more
so than their equals at Andersonville, the Russian gulags, the British
death camps for Boer civilians in South Africa, the reeducation death camps
of Cambodia, and on and on. When it comes to mistreating one's helpless
fellow humans, the Germans can claim no exclusivity, and the first claims
of successful genocides are to be found in the book of Deuteronomy, the
first hard-verified instances in the European empire building years (Arawaks,
Tasmanians, various Native American and African tribes, etc.). The Last
of the Mohicans didn't get that way because of declining birth rates brought
about by erosion of family values in the increasingly technological society
around him, disease and predation brought by men who considered themselves
the superior beings brought him and his timeless ilk down.
When addressing the subject of murdering prisoners, we are speaking
of an evil that has resided in the midst of all human societies since the
dawn of time. The terrible mistake in focusing on this one instance as
somehow unique - horribly, hugely so, in fact - is that it masks the just
stated reality, and in so doing helps mightily to insure its recurrence,
not prevent it. By placing it apart from "us" we are able to justify, again
and again, that our slaughter of the moment is "different" and all but
unavoidable. As when our Secretary of State says on a national TV show
that 500,000 Iraqi children dying of disease and malnutrition brought about
by our embargo is certainly unfortunate, but when looked at in its broader
scope "we" have reluctantly concluded that it is a price that the Iraqi
people brought on themselves and now must pay. God help us when we begin
to swallow this appalling criminality without protest, or even notice.
Such reasoning is nothing short of astonishing when viewed from an outside
perspective, and perspective is the major problem. When we look at the
German/Jewish experience, we look at ourselves, and that is the thing we
should Never Forget.
Chas Bung-Wallet
<ne...@infotrad.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>Louis Proyect wrote:
>
>> Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration
>>
>> Firms Deny Researchers' Claims On Aiding German War Effort
>>
>> By Michael Dobbs Washington Post Staff Writer
>>
>> Monday, November 30, 1998; Page A01
>>
>> Three years after Swiss banks became the target of a worldwide furor
>> over their business dealings with Nazi Germany, major American car
>> companies find themselves embroiled in a similar debate.
>
>Snip, read it on teletext yonks ago. Some folks can afford excellent
>lawyers.
I think you've missed a very interesting point about this. Why is
this happening today, and not thirty, forty, or even fifty years ago?
Why is the Holocaust a bigger issue today, attracting more media
coverage, debate, legislation, existential angst and so forth, then it
ever did in the years following the war?
>The name "concentration camp" was coined by a German official charged with
>organizing some part of this vast network of camps, and referred to
>concentrating the work forces directly at the factories (NB: the British
>opened the first internment camps in the Boer war).
Actually, that is quite wrong. The term was coined by British
commentators during the Boer war.
>There is strong evidence that the treatment at many camps was relatively
>humane (compared to internment camps in some other countries), and that
>the stories of one pail of watery soup per day for a barracks full of
>inmates is in most cases, dramatic license.
You are really asking for it, Neil, all disclaimers aside.
"Relatively humane" camps wouldn't have killed off the immense
majority of their inmates, for fucks sake, if the testimony of the
survivors isn't enough to convince you.
Neil Gardner
> I think you've missed a very interesting point about this. Why is
> this happening today, and not thirty, forty, or even fifty years ago?
> Why is the Holocaust a bigger issue today, attracting more media
> coverage, debate, legislation, existential angst and so forth, then it
> ever did in the years following the war?
>
> >The name "concentration camp" was coined by a German official charged with
> >organizing some part of this vast network of camps, and referred to
> >concentrating the work forces directly at the factories (NB: the British
> >opened the first internment camps in the Boer war).
>
> Actually, that is quite wrong. The term was coined by British
> commentators during the Boer war.
>
> >There is strong evidence that the treatment at many camps was relatively
> >humane (compared to internment camps in some other countries), and that
> >the stories of one pail of watery soup per day for a barracks full of
> >inmates is in most cases, dramatic license.
>
> You are really asking for it, Neil, all disclaimers aside.
> "Relatively humane" camps wouldn't have killed off the immense
> majority of their inmates, for fucks sake, if the testimony of the
> survivors isn't enough to convince you.
1) I did not write it.
2) The British used a different term for the same thing.
3) I cannot change anything that happened in the past, merely analyse the
sescret agenda today's propaganda, compare versions, suss out who's lying etc.
4) There is strong evidence contrary to some eyewitness accounts given in the
Nuremberg trials (by your own definition a Kangaroo court) to suggest that
while the death rate in Nazi concentration increased rapidly towards the end of
the war the majority many, in some camps most, survived.
5) Did you see the mountains of evidence for gas chambers the BBC produced in
their recent documentary on the subject (zilch) or know that their film crew
was not allowed to film Auschwitz and the whole documentary was changed for
fear of changing orthodox post war accounts on the subject, i.e. for fear of
telling the truth.
6) Why believe the same authorities who let 1,500,000 die in Iraq, raid
people's home lest they disclose secrets on the Gulf War syndrome, stop British
atrocities from being mentioned in the classroom.
It's that simple.
I plead innocent. I want truth, nothing else.
Neil
Chas Bung-Wallet
>
>> I think you've missed a very interesting point about this. Why is
>> this happening today, and not thirty, forty, or even fifty years ago?
>> Why is the Holocaust a bigger issue today, attracting more media
>> coverage, debate, legislation, existential angst and so forth, then it
>> ever did in the years following the war?
On Thu, 03 Dec 1998 11:14:04 +0000, Neil Gardner
<ne...@infotrad.demon.co.uk> wrote:
[Missed it again]
Louis N Proyect
> 3) I cannot change anything that happened in the past, merely analyse
> the sescret agenda today's propaganda, compare versions, suss out who's
> lying etc.
Okay, you rely on the version supplied by Fred Leuchter, a history major
from Boston University who was funded by neo-Nazis, who stole bricks from
Auschwitz while nobody was looking, who lied to people about his
professional credentials, and who is virtually the only "scientific"
expert on holocaust denial. Why you find this shit convincing is anybody's
guess. It certainly suggests that you are not a genuine leftist, but a
neo-Nazi troll.
Louis P.
Neil Gardner
LM would have us believe that the recent upsurge in publicity about the Nazi
holocaust can be attributed to our unfounded fear of society and serves to
thwart progress. By contrast it serves to thwart free investigation and
distort the truth.
If this were the case there are countless other cases of human suffering that
could scare the living daylights out of most middle-class Western Europeans
and North Americans. Pictures of malnourished black children in some remote
country rarely trigger the same emotional responses in white British viewers
as weeping holocaust survivors fifty years after the true and alleged events
televised from emaculate living rooms. Why? Because the latter groups is
represented by eloquent and well-funded exponents and lawyers. We need to
separate fact from fiction. That means victorious powers always tell lies,
exaggerating atrocities committed by defeated regimes and downplaying their
own.
Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler and the infamous Hutu Inerahamwe are all conveniently
scapegoated for society's failures and all lost resoundingly. One BBC
reporter, Martin Denslowe, actually justified the massacre of starving Hutu
refugees by RPF forces because some were extremists responsible for genocide.
That does not mean I approve of any of their actions.
LM actually ran a couple of good articles on Rwanda, but has failed to follow
through with a thorugh analysis of the socio-economic and environmental
problems that afflict much of Africa.
Today we witness absurd politically correct token antiracism and the
assertion of US/GB/EU moral superiority, which emmpowers them to bomb, starve
and invade any countries whose leaders do not comply with their version of
morality. A democracy is any regime the US state department approves of,
while dictatorship is any regime it disapproves. Such definitions bear little
significance in the actual power ordinary people have in those countries.
In the case of the Nazi holocaust (death by fire) we are asked to believe
implausible and unrecorded horror-stories based on claims made in discredited
tribunals and perpetuated by secondary witnesses (compare the expeience with
CS gas, which turns into hydrogen cyanide, in Waco - it took several hours to
react and then ignited the whole building - hardly the efficient tool of a
competent mass-murderer with access to sarin) while little attention is
devoted to the real causes of Jewish suffering, Einsatzgruppen shootings in
Russia, Ukraine and the Baltics with the complicity of many locals, forced
labour, disease and worsening conditions. Similar and probably worse
conditions were witnessed in Japanese concentration camps. While Britain and
the US never had to undergo the socio-economic turmoil that afflicted central
and eastern Europe during WW2, conditions in many of their camps were hardly
luxurious and hundreds of thousands perished even after the war.
People have every right to fear the way our society is developing. Millions
of real people are dying of the very symptoms LM wishes to downplay. They do
not make the headlines because they are not white Judeo-Christian
Euro-Americans.
In short your explanation for Holocaust TM (IMHO an offence for those who
genuinely suffered on all sides) misses the point. It is used to justify any
repression and war. Saddam is another Hitler - Bomb Iraq before it's too
late. Holocaust deniers are offending victims of the holocaust - Let's ban
free speech. Remember the six million - Let's bomb Southern Lebanon. The
answer is not that Saddam is not a fierce dictator comparable to Hitler, but
both men were put in power by international capitalism and manipulated to
suit the needs of the superpowers until they got out of hand. But Saddam is
still one of the best weapons of US diplomacy. Had he been such a threat to
US lives, he would have been eliminated years ago (no questions asked). At
some time. wait for it, we'll here Saddam was responsible for the 1,500,000
dead Iraqis. They didn't starve or die of disease, no Saddam personally
ordered them into gas ovens that have since vanished.
Just inagine if Germany were the same size of the US and had one the war
against Britain. Newborne English babies (Scottish and Welsh babies would
probably be absolved much like Austrians and Eastern Europeans) would be
blamed for tens of millions of people forcibely starved by the cruelest
empire humanity had ever known, while our German Empire would the bastion of
multiracialism, democracy and moral superiority.
Truth matters. After all we're only humans.
Neil
Louis N Proyect
> countries. In the case of the Nazi holocaust (death by fire) we are
> asked to believe implausible and unrecorded horror-stories based on
> claims made in discredited tribunals and perpetuated by secondary
> witnesses (compare the expeience with CS gas, which turns into hydrogen
> cyanide, in Waco - it took several hours to react and then ignited the
> whole building - hardly the efficient tool of a competent mass-murderer
> with access to sarin) while little attention is devoted to the real
> causes of Jewish suffering, Einsatzgruppen shootings in Russia, Ukraine
> and the Baltics with the complicity of many locals, forced labour,
> disease and worsening conditions. Similar and probably worse
Any citations for this, you pinhead neo-Nazi? Or are you embarrassed to
state that you read it on Ernst Zundel's web-page?
Louis P.
Neil Gardner
Louis,
If you try to argue about US and UK foreign policy on Iraq with a hard-line
US patriot, you'll be told how Saddam is another Hitler, how he poses a
threat to his people, region and the rest of the world and fails to direct
the limited supplies that reach Iraq to the Iraqi people. In short you'll be
accused of supporting a murderous dictator. Don't worry I know the standards
counter-arguments.
I have the same attitude to Adolf Hitler as to Saddam Hussein. They were both
put into power by big business and imperialist powers, served the interests
of other powers and were later scapegoated for all atrocities.
If the facts in Nazi concentration camps stand as I suspect, Nazi Germany was
still an authoritarian capitalist dictatorship guilty of horrendous crimes
which I condemn outright.
My suspicions are based on private correspondence with some people who know a
hell of lot more than you about Nazi concentration camps and none of whom
sympathise with Hitler's defunct regime (one of whom is Jewish) and endless
talks with Palestinians about numbers of Jews who emigrated to Israel direct
from Eastern Europe and via other countries after 1945 (Israel has 700,000
official holocaust survivors). However if such suspicions are wrong, and
historians and forensic scientists can explain the many contradicting
accounts of industrial scale murder and methodical genocide via telepathy, I
condemn this unprecedented barbarities and their perpetrators too.
If Iraqi soldiers had snatched Kuwaiti babies from incubators (imagine
invading troops from Connecticut killing babies in Rhode Island), I would
condemn that action. However, it was a lie. I also believe atrocities Pol Pot
were manipulated by the Western media to hide the truly horrendous
destruction and isolation of the country by US imperialism. I am deeply
suspicious of US military support for the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front,
understand the class divide that has long separated Hutus and Tutsis, but do
not condone beating Tutsis to death. Indeed I suspect the death toll of the
so-called Tutsi genocide (now 25% of the population, formerly only 15%) there
was artificially inflated to account for other deaths, but I will not venture
categorical statements on the matter. We are asked to believe in the moral
and cultural superiority of the US-led new world order as a bastion of
democracy, enterprise, prosperity, human rights, progress and multiracial
tolerance. We know it's not true, so we are asked to thank God the US won
WW2, the Cold War and have defeated the forces of evil.
The traditional Trotskyist view (I am neither a Trotskyist nor a Bolshevik,
but I do believe in socialism and overthrow of capitalism as the sole act of
the oppressed classes) on WW1 is clear. No problems there. Had I been in
Germany I would have opposed the German war effort and opposed local war
efforts in Britain, France, US or Russia. But what about WW2? After all if
you believe the propaganda, had the US not joined in the action, the entire
European Jewish population would have been eliminated. So now the Iraqi
strike campaign can always claim "If we don't bomb Iraq now, all Iraqi curds
will be massacred". As you may well know. The outcome of WW1 sowed the seeds
of WW2. One cannot isolate events. They all fit together in an overall
scheme.
In a newsgroup like this, few participants are likely to be seriously
offended by those who question orthodox historical accounts (probably relish
the opportunity to condemn those who unpopular stances). A genuine white
supremacist would not waste his/her time on apst. Do you have any evidence
I'm being paid or used by mysterious guys with a secret agenda to destroy the
left?
None. The left is in a sad state because it fails to understand what's
happening to society. Sure class conflict persists, the social gap is
widening, capitalism is globalising, but the working class is utterly
atomised. That's why we need to challenge myths and separate fact from
fiction in cool and calm manner. Anyway I stand by truth whatever it is and
condemn all acts of barbarity against innocent human beings (exceptions made
for a few despots here and there). Even Pinochet would say "I was only doing
my job". The Mail was splattered with horror stories about Germans dictating
British economic policy and Robert Mugabe's abuse of human rights. What human
rights' abuses? Killing people maybe, failing to provide his people with high
living standards, banning homosexuality, repressing the Ndebele? No, the
Daily Mail thinks his biggest crime was confiscating the land of white
farmers (18 years late to win popular support). That's today's propaganda. We
fear Germans and black dictators, blame German and Japanese business and the
workers, and worship Anglo-American enterprise.
Regards
Neil
Louis N Proyect
> In a newsgroup like this, few participants are likely to be seriously
> offended by those who question orthodox historical accounts (probably
> relish the opportunity to condemn those who unpopular stances). A
> genuine white supremacist would not waste his/her time on apst. Do you
> have any evidence I'm being paid or used by mysterious guys with a
> secret agenda to destroy the left?
Your own posts are the evidence. Your tenacious holocaust denying in the
absence of any scholarly support is all that is needed. Why you want to
troll this newsgroup is something that will perhaps be revealed in the
future when secret police files are opened up and we find out the facts.
Until then, I will tell you the same thing that I have always told you.
You are neo-Nazi scum who uses leftist verbiage to establish credibility
here.
Louis P.
Neil Gardner
> On Thu, 3 Dec 1998, Neil Gardner wrote:
>
1) I do not know the guy.
2) Your info is taken directly or indirectly from Debora Lipstadt
3) If Fred Leuchter's hypothesis is wrong, prove it and explain how the gas
chambers really did work on such a massive scale while leaving so few traces
of their existence.
4) Note most sources rebutting such claims stems ultimately from the Nizkor
project. Now if they had any veritable photos of Nazi mass gas chambers in
operation, they would have been broadcast across the Net. Amazing. The Germans
filmed there V2 rockets in spectacularly clear colour and might have been able
to fight off the Allies had they invested more in bombers rather than rockets
that missed their targets by tens of kilometres. Why no first-hand dorensice
evidence for the contested facts. Why do historians dismiss eyewitness claims
made about Dachau but accept those made about Auschwitz while not really
knowing how many died from various causes. Reitlinger wrote his whole book
based on records without actually visting the scene until later.
5) All such alleged acts have no conceivable justification.
Louis N Proyect
> 4) Note most sources rebutting such claims stems ultimately from the
> Nizkor project. Now if they had any veritable photos of Nazi mass gas
> chambers in operation, they would have been broadcast across the Net.
> Amazing.
Gardner, I am not going to waste my time with you. Anybody who is new to
apst and wants to find out more about the whole phenomenon of holocaust
denial, I urge you to look into dejanews. I spent 2 months supplying
scholarly data, not just from Lipstadt but Vidal-Naquet and Hilsberg as
well. You and Hunter Watson are evil trolls. In your case, the goal is to
whitewash the Third Reich. In Watson's case, it is to defend US
imperialism. I am done with you and I will shortly be done with him. As
long as apst is unmoderated, we will have to put up with Nazi-lovers and
Oliver North wannabes. You can go fuck yourself. You are not worth the
time of day.
Louis P.
Neil Gardner
> On Thu, 3 Dec 1998, Neil Gardner wrote:
>
> > In a newsgroup like this, few participants are likely to be seriously
> > offended by those who question orthodox historical accounts (probably
> > relish the opportunity to condemn those who unpopular stances). A
> > genuine white supremacist would not waste his/her time on apst. Do you
> > have any evidence I'm being paid or used by mysterious guys with a
> > secret agenda to destroy the left?
>
> Your own posts are the evidence. Your tenacious holocaust denying in the
> absence of any scholarly support is all that is needed. Why you want to
> troll this newsgroup is something that will perhaps be revealed in the
> future when secret police files are opened up and we find out the facts.
> Until then, I will tell you the same thing that I have always told you.
> You are neo-Nazi scum who uses leftist verbiage to establish credibility
> here.
>
> Louis P.
It is just as well that you are unlikely to be running the secret police in
the foreseeable future. What do you class as scholarly research. Delve
deeper, on you'll find quotes of quote based on misinterpreted records and
hearsay. If you were a true demorcat, you'd defend my right be wrong as I
defend your right to be wrong. If I were interested in credibility I'd just
echo pseudo-intellectual musings about the Lenninist Trotskyist line on the
current phase of the class struggle in the abstract sense.
Neil
jott...@my-dejanews.com
> If this were the case there are countless other cases of human suffering that
> could scare the living daylights out of most middle-class Western Europeans
> and North Americans. Pictures of malnourished black children in some remote
> country rarely trigger the same emotional responses in white British viewers
> as weeping holocaust survivors fifty years after the true and alleged events
> televised from emaculate living rooms. Why? Because the latter groups is
> represented by eloquent and well-funded exponents and lawyers.
This is true. Most Americans my age and younger are totally unaware of
Stalin's attrocities. They are well aware of the Shoa. There are not strong
Crimean Tatar, Kalmyk, Chechen, Volga German etc. lobbies in the US like
there are Jewish lobbies. Even with regard to Nazi Germany the Roma and Sinta
are almost always totatally ignored in all books and movies on the Holocaust.
There has been great resistance by a number of writers on the Jewish
Holocaust to recognize other victims of genocide. Ward Churchill's *A Little
Matter of Genocide* has two very good chapters on the denial of other cases
of genocide by Jewish scholars such as Lipstadt and Katz.
We need to
> separate fact from fiction. That means victorious powers always tell lies,
> exaggerating atrocities committed by defeated regimes and downplaying their
> own.
I believe this is true. During the cold war the number of Stalin's victims
was estimated to be much greater than what the OGPU-NKVD-MVD documents can
support. The total number of recorded deaths in ITLs (corrective labor camps)
under Stalin is a little over 1 million, not the much higher numbers given by
Conquest, Rummel, and others. The number of deaths from the 1932-33 famine iw
estimated by Stephen Wheatcroft on the basis of recently released demographic
data in the archives is 4-5 million, considerably lower than the 7 million
Ukrainian deaths claimed by Robert Conquest. The total number of deaths
caused by Stalinist repression is around 10 to 11 million, not the 30, 40, or
50 million often claimed during the Cold War.
The original figures for Yugoslav losses during WWII have been shown to be
greatly exagerated particularly the claim that the Ustashe killed 600,000 to
700,000 Serbs in Jasenovac. In reality the total Serb dead in all of
Yugoslavia for all of WWII is about 500,000 less than that claimed for
Jasenovac. The total number of deaths in all NDH (Independent State of
Croatia) concentration camps during WWII is now estimated by contemporary
historians on the basis of the newly opened archives in the former Yugoslavia
to be between 80,000 and 120,000.
I think that the total number of Jews murdered by Hitler is probably lower
than the figures commonly given. The surviving archival data from Nazi
Germany records about 3 million Jewish deaths. (The Korherr Report and
Einsatzgruppen reports). It is difficult to account for another 3 million
deaths. The six million deaths are arrived at by the same methodology that
produced a death toll of 1.7 million for Yugoslavia during WWII (see above).
John Lukac's new book *Hitler and the Historians* puts the number of Jewish
Holocaust victims at "at least" 4.5 million. I suspect the real number is
close to this.
> Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler and the infamous Hutu Inerahamwe are all conveniently
> scapegoated for society's failures and all lost resoundingly
Actually I think only Hitler is really scapegoated to this extent. White
Christian Americans can identify with Jews because we all know Jews and they
appear to be just like us. Everybody watches Seinfeld. White Christian
Americans can not make any cultural identification with people in South East
Asia and Africa. These are foreign exotic lands populated by "savages" in the
minds of most Americans.
One of the purposes of making the Holocaust "unique" is to justify all other
crimes. No matter how brutal another state crime is it is morally
insignificant compared to the Holocaust according to Lipstadt, Katz, and
other Jewish exclusivists. That is one of the reasons why there is constant
attention to the Shoa as if it were a current event while modern day
attrocities in Guatamala, East Timor, and other places were ignored.
Chomsky's collaborator Herman has written about "really correct" and
"politically correct" attrocities. The Shoa is a "really correct" genocide,
the North American expirtation of much of the continent's native population
is a "politically correct" genocide. That is respectable scholars can deny
that there was a genocide against Native Americans without fear of censure.
Herman says that "PC" genocides can become "RC" such as the Shoa did in the
1960s. I think that "RC" genocides such as the Ukrainian famine can also
become "PC". This revision of the Ukrainian famine has come about now that
the USSR is no longer a threat and Jewish exclusivists such as Barbara Green
at the U of Cleveland seek to portray the Shoa as the sole case of genocide
in human history by denying that the Ukrainian famine was deliberate.
while little attention is
> devoted to the real causes of Jewish suffering, Einsatzgruppen shootings in
> Russia, Ukraine and the Baltics with the complicity of many locals, forced
> labour, disease and worsening conditions
This is not true. Far more effort has gone into attacking the limited
collaboration of Balts and Ukrainians with the final solution recently than
has been directed against the Germans. Many books on the Holocaust claim that
the Balts and Ukrainains were worse than the Germans. They neglect to mention
that for most Ukrainian collaborators the alternative was starvation in a
German POW camp. While the limited, low level, and often involuntary
collaboration of Balts and Ukrainians is constantly trumpeted by Holocaust
writers, the much more extensive, high level, and voluntary collaboration of
Jews with Stalin to commite crimes against humanity is absolutely taboo in
the US.
> In short your explanation for Holocaust TM (IMHO an offence for those who
> genuinely suffered on all sides) misses the point. It is used to justify any
> repression and war.
For Israel this has certainly been true. The Israeli regime has always claimed
that to give independence to a Palestinian state on the West Bank would be to
invite another Holocaust of the Jews. This time by Arabs. This has been a
primary justification for the suppression of the Palestinian independence
movement.
J. Otto Pohl
>
-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own
Chas Bung-Wallet
>
>One of the purposes of making the Holocaust "unique" is to justify all other
>crimes.
Hmm. I'd argue that the Holocaust _was_ unique in important ways,
because the most advanced and cultured capitalist state in Europe
pursued the most calculated and cold-blooded policy of genocide - in
the true sense of the term.
Furthermore, I'd argue that the terms "genocide" and "Holocaust" have
been debased by their application to run-of-the-mill civil wars in the
third world. Nothing that has happened, for example, in Yugoslavia or
Rwanda justifies the use of those terms. The danger is that by this
debasing, the Holocaust is normalised and becomes therefore
conceivable, even acceptable.
>No matter how brutal another state crime is it is morally
>insignificant compared to the Holocaust according to Lipstadt, Katz, and
>ther Jewish exclusivists.That is one of the reasons why there is constant
>attention to the Shoa as if it were a current event while modern day
>attrocities in Guatamala, East Timor, and other places were ignored.
No, that's little more than a Jewish conspiracy theory. The Holocaust
is a highly topical issue right across the Western world, not because
"Jewish exclusivists" are media-savvy, but because it provides a
convenient moral reference point for British and American ideologues
to demonstrate their superiority over the rest of the world.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trivialising history
Jennie Bristow finds the new obsession with the Holocaust unhealthy
http://www.informinc.co.uk/LM/LM97/LM97_Holocaust.html
Neil Gardner
> On Fri, 04 Dec 1998 05:14:30 GMT, jott...@my-dejanews.com wrote:
> >
> >One of the purposes of making the Holocaust "unique" is to justify all other
> >crimes.
>
> Hmm. I'd argue that the Holocaust _was_ unique in important ways,
> because the most advanced and cultured capitalist state in Europe
> pursued the most calculated and cold-blooded policy of genocide - in
> the true sense of the term.
>
> Furthermore, I'd argue that the terms "genocide" and "Holocaust" have
> been debased by their application to run-of-the-mill civil wars in the
> third world. Nothing that has happened, for example, in Yugoslavia or
> Rwanda justifies the use of those terms. The danger is that by this
> debasing, the Holocaust is normalised and becomes therefore
> conceivable, even acceptable.
>
Whatever happened in Nazi concentration camps, whatever the exact statistics are, you're wrong. 1,500,000
Iraqis have died so far because of US foreign policy backed fully by the poodle-like Blairite government. At
least 2 million Vietnamese and 1 million Cambodians were napalmed, shot and starved during the Vietnam War. 1
million Mozambicans and around the same number of Angolans died a civil war funded by the US and RSA. Do LM
fear that the Nazi holocaust might scare people of further technocratic advances? We patently do not need it do
that. Pictures of countless other atrocities should suffice to sicken any compassionate human being. Or maybe
we should not be frightened by such thoughts and shamelessly enjoy mass consumerism.
What was the old RCP line WW2? Do we just stand back and believe all propaganda. We need to analyse the power
of propaganda and see through aberrations of truth.
Neil
PS: A word of caution for those who fail to read what I write (warts and all), if Holocaust TM were not a
sacrosanct taboo we could view its historiography objectively without accusing each other of being Neo-Nazis
and Zionists.
jott...@my-dejanews.com
o....@pict.ure (Chas Bung-Wallet) wrote:
> On Fri, 04 Dec 1998 05:14:30 GMT, jott...@my-dejanews.com wrote:
> >
> >crimes.
>
> because the most advanced and cultured capitalist state in Europe
> pursued the most calculated and cold-blooded policy of genocide - in
> the true sense of the term.
>
The so called advanced and cultured aspect of Germany is rather irrelavent.
Both Ward Churchill and David Stannard have pointed out that this really just
a form of racism against third world peoples. It is another way of saying
Chams in Cambodia and Tutsis in Rawanda do not count because their murderers
were not White Europeans.
> Furthermore, I'd argue that the terms "genocide" and "Holocaust" have
> been debased by their application to run-of-the-mill civil wars in the
> third world. Nothing that has happened, for example, in Yugoslavia or
> Rwanda justifies the use of those terms. The danger is that by this
> debasing, the Holocaust is normalised and becomes therefore
> conceivable, even acceptable.
I agree with this statement partially. But, Rawanda was certainly a case of
genocide as clear cut as the Shoa. A Hutu dominated state attempted to
exterminate its Tutsi population and only its overthrow prevented it from
completing the task. There are a few clear cut cases of genocide that fit
every singnificant criteria that Jewish exclusivists like Katz say make the
Shoa unique. These other genocides are the Turkish slaughter of Armenians,
the Nazi slaughter of Gypsies, the Khmer Rouge extermination of ethnic
minorities such as Chams, Chinese, Thais, Laos, and particularly Vietnamese,
and the Hutu slaugheter of Tutsi in Rawanda.
> >No matter how brutal another state crime is it is morally
> >insignificant compared to the Holocaust according to Lipstadt, Katz, and
> >ther Jewish exclusivists.That is one of the reasons why there is constant
> >attention to the Shoa as if it were a current event while modern day
> >attrocities in Guatamala, East Timor, and other places were ignored.
>
> No, that's little more than a Jewish conspiracy theory. The Holocaust
> is a highly topical issue right across the Western world, not because
> "Jewish exclusivists" are media-savvy, but because it provides a
> convenient moral reference point for British and American ideologues
> to demonstrate their superiority over the rest of the world.
>
This is not a Jewish conspiracy theory. Please read Ward Churchill's *A
Little Matter of Genocide*. First of all I point out that is one, not the
only reason. Second, it is true. Compare, how many books and movies are made
each year on the Shoa with any other genocide or ethnic mass murder.
Obviously there are people in the US and Israel that would prefer we
concentrate on 50+ year old attrocities at Auschwitz than dare to look at the
Gaza strip.
J. Otto Pohl
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--- ---------------------------
>
> Trivialising history
>
> Jennie Bristow finds the new obsession with the Holocaust unhealthy
>
> http://www.informinc.co.uk/LM/LM97/LM97_Holocaust.html
>
>
-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
jott...@my-dejanews.com
here.
> The original figures for Yugoslav losses during WWII have been shown to be
> greatly exagerated particularly the claim that the Ustashe killed 600,000 to
> 700,000 Serbs in Jasenovac. In reality the total Serb dead in all of
> Yugoslavia for all of WWII is about 500,000 less than that claimed for
> Jasenovac.
There should be a comma after the 500,000. The total Serb death toll was
500,000, not 500,000 fewer than the Jasenovac claims.
> John Lukac's new book *Hitler and the Historians* puts the number of Jewish
> Holocaust victims at "at least" 4.5 million. I suspect the real number is
> close to this.
The title of Lukac's recent book is *The Hitler of History*. It is a extended
reiview and critique of the historiography of Nazi Germany. It includes a
chapter on the Holocaust. A good portion of this chapter is spent criticizing
David Irving.
Chas Bung-Wallet
<ne...@infotrad.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>> >crimes.
>>
>> because the most advanced and cultured capitalist state in Europe
>> pursued the most calculated and cold-blooded policy of genocide - in
>> the true sense of the term.
>>
>> been debased by their application to run-of-the-mill civil wars in the
>> third world. Nothing that has happened, for example, in Yugoslavia or
>> Rwanda justifies the use of those terms. The danger is that by this
>> debasing, the Holocaust is normalised and becomes therefore
>> conceivable, even acceptable.
>
>Iraqis have died so far because of US foreign policy backed fully by the poodle-like Blairite government. At
>least 2 million Vietnamese and 1 million Cambodians were napalmed, shot and starved during the Vietnam War. 1
>million Mozambicans and around the same number of Angolans died a civil war funded by the US and RSA.
Terrible though these things are, I don't think the use of the terms
"genocide" or "holocaust" is legitimate. Of course, if the USA had
invaded Vietnam with the purpose of wiping out the Vietnamese, perhaps
as an "inferior race", then I'd take a different view.
>Do LM
>fear that the Nazi holocaust might scare people of further technocratic advances? We patently do not need it do
>that. Pictures of countless other atrocities should suffice to sicken any compassionate human being. Or maybe
>we should not be frightened by such thoughts and shamelessly enjoy mass consumerism.
Neil, are you suggesting, vaguely along the lines of Adorno's
"Dialectic of Enlightenment", that the Nazi holocaust was a
consequence of "technocratic advances" and "mass consumerism"? I'd
have put it down to the extreme crisis of German capitalism myself,
and the rage and despair evoked when that system faced defeat.
>What was the old RCP line WW2?
Unlike the rest of the left, the RCP regarded it, China and Yugoslavia
notwithstanding, as a historical defeat for the working class. Cf.
the views of Mandel and the SWP (Cliff's mob).
Chas Bung-Wallet
>In article <3667cb77...@news.xara.com>,
> o....@pict.ure (Chas Bung-Wallet) wrote:
>> On Fri, 04 Dec 1998 05:14:30 GMT, jott...@my-dejanews.com wrote:
>> >
>> >One of the purposes of making the Holocaust "unique" is to justify all other
>> >crimes.
>>
>> Hmm. I'd argue that the Holocaust _was_ unique in important ways,
>> because the most advanced and cultured capitalist state in Europe
>> pursued the most calculated and cold-blooded policy of genocide - in
>> the true sense of the term.
>
>The so called advanced and cultured aspect of Germany is rather irrelavent.
>Both Ward Churchill and David Stannard have pointed out that this really just
>a form of racism against third world peoples. It is another way of saying
>Chams in Cambodia and Tutsis in Rawanda do not count because their murderers
>were not White Europeans.
[ Sorry, Otto, I can hardly read that and keep a straight face. I
have pictures in my mind of Africans demanding the right to be accused
of genocide like "white Europeans" :) ]
I disagree strongly that the "advanced and cultured aspect of Germany
is irrelevant". It was the extreme crisis of German capitalism that
made the holocaust possible - that is the main lesson to be learnt
from it. But nowadays when the holocaust is discussed it is divorced
from its real context. It's treated as a "goodies versus baddies"
fable, the mother of all moral examples. Increasingly, ordinary
Germans are blamed for it, as if the dumbest and poorest prole Nazi is
as much to blame as German big business. When you argue that anyone
in the world is capable of such a crime, aren't you also contributing
to the idea that the problem isn't the specific antagonistic social
relations that we live under today, but the age-old problem of "human
evil"?
>> Furthermore, I'd argue that the terms "genocide" and "Holocaust" have
>> been debased by their application to run-of-the-mill civil wars in the
>> third world. Nothing that has happened, for example, in Yugoslavia or
>> Rwanda justifies the use of those terms. The danger is that by this
>> debasing, the Holocaust is normalised and becomes therefore
>> conceivable, even acceptable.
>
>I agree with this statement partially. But, Rawanda was certainly a case of
>genocide as clear cut as the Shoa. A Hutu dominated state attempted to
>exterminate its Tutsi population and only its overthrow prevented it from
>completing the task.
No, in fact the conflict in Rwanda was not ethnic in nature but
political. Hutus that opposed the Interhamwe were attacked just as
Tutsis were. The roots of these conflicts in the third world lie in
the poverty of these countries and the desperate struggle for limited
resources - not in racial ideology. Furthermore, your analysis has
the tail wagging the dog. The major influence on events in central
Africa - just as it is in the Balkans - is a long history of
imperialist interference. After all, what was it that triggered the
killings off in Rwanda? If you recall it was the shooting down of the
president's plane by Belgian troops.
>> >No matter how brutal another state crime is it is morally
>> >insignificant compared to the Holocaust according to Lipstadt, Katz, and
>> >ther Jewish exclusivists.That is one of the reasons why there is constant
>> >attention to the Shoa as if it were a current event while modern day
>> >attrocities in Guatamala, East Timor, and other places were ignored.
>>
>> No, that's little more than a Jewish conspiracy theory. The Holocaust
>> is a highly topical issue right across the Western world, not because
>> "Jewish exclusivists" are media-savvy, but because it provides a
>> convenient moral reference point for British and American ideologues
>> to demonstrate their superiority over the rest of the world.
>
>This is not a Jewish conspiracy theory. Please read Ward Churchill's *A
>Little Matter of Genocide*. First of all I point out that is one, not the
>only reason. Second, it is true. Compare, how many books and movies are made
>each year on the Shoa with any other genocide or ethnic mass murder.
>Obviously there are people in the US and Israel that would prefer we
>concentrate on 50+ year old attrocities at Auschwitz than dare to look at the
>Gaza strip.
Try to raise your horizon's beyond the US. The holocaust is now a
compulsory subject in the British school curriculum, for example. The
British Board of Jewish Deputies isn't behind this change. And while
we're on the subject, I think your (admittedly only hinted)
characterisation of the relations between the USA, Israel and the
Palestinians is a little out of date. Nowadays the US is as likely to
take the side of Arafat, perhaps more so. The point being that the US
has the moral authority to knock those savages' heads together until
they all see (Western) sense.
jott...@my-dejanews.com
> >No matter how brutal another state crime is it is morally
> >insignificant compared to the Holocaust according to Lipstadt, Katz, and
> >ther Jewish exclusivists.That is one of the reasons why there is constant
> >attention to the Shoa as if it were a current event while modern day
> >attrocities in Guatamala, East Timor, and other places were ignored.
>
> No, that's little more than a Jewish conspiracy theory. The Holocaust
> is a highly topical issue right across the Western world, not because
> "Jewish exclusivists" are media-savvy, but because it provides a
> convenient moral reference point for British and American ideologues
> to demonstrate their superiority over the rest of the world.
>
>
Ward Churchill has best described the motivations and influence of Jewish
exclusivists. Both Dr. Churchill and Stannard use the term Jewish exclusivists
so I have no problem using despite the fact that Zionists belive it has anti-
semitic connotations. I have reproduced the following quotation from Ward
Churchill, *A Little Matter of Genocide*, (San Fransisco, City Lights Books),
p. 50.
"Deborah Lipstadt rightly expresses outrage and concern that Holocaust deniers
like Bradley Smith have begun to make inroads on college campuses during the
1990s. She remains absolutely silent, however, about the implications of the
fact that she and scores of other holocaust deniers have held professorial
positions for decades, increasingly branding anyone challenging their
manipulations of logic and evidence an 'anti-semite' or a 'neonazi', and
frequently positioning themselve to determine who is hired and tenured in the
bargain.* The situation is little different in principle than if, in the
converse, members of the Institute for Historical Review were similarly
ensconced (which they are not, and with the exceptions of App and Harry Elmer
Barnes early on, never have been).
Viewed on balance, the holocaust deniers of Jewish exclusivism represent a
proportionately greater and more insidious threat to understanding than do
the Holocaust deniers of the IHR variety. This is all the more true insofar
as the mythology peddled by exclusivists dovetails perfectly with the
institutionalized denials of genocides in their own histories put forth by
the governments of the United States, Great Britian, France, Turkey,
Indonesia, and many others.
*An interesting variation on this theme has been the propensity of
exclusivists like Lipstadt to attempt to discredit those who support
Palestinian rights vis- a-vis Israel as being on that basis alone
'antisemitic.' This, despite the fact that the Palestinians are a Semitic
people."
Ward Churchill does a very good job of exposing and demolishing the position
of Jewish exclusivists like Lipstadt who belive that the Shoa was the only
instance of a state engaging in mass murder against a people on the basis of
their ethnicity. The two chapters in *A Little Matter of Genocide* that deal
with Jewish exclusivists denials of genocide are on the web. I will post the
URLs when I find them.
J. Otto Pohl
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--- ---------------------------
>
> Trivialising history
>
> Jennie Bristow finds the new obsession with the Holocaust unhealthy
>
> http://www.informinc.co.uk/LM/LM97/LM97_Holocaust.html
>
>
-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
jott...@my-dejanews.com
Holocaust Denial in Context." His conclusion is summed up in the following
quotation from the essay.
"On cannot, because it is no better for Lipstadt to 'neglect' to mention that
the Gypsies were subjected to the same mode of extermination as the Jews - or
for Dawidowicz and Bauer to contrive aguments that they weren't - than it is
for Rassinier to deliberately minimize the number of Jewish victims of nazism
or for Butz to deny the Holocaust altogether. One cannot, because there is
nothing more redeeming about Katz's smug dismissal of the applicability of the
term 'genocide' to any group other than his own than there is about Robert
Faurisson's contention that no Jews were ever gassed. One cannot, because
Yehuda Bauer's *The Holocaust in Historical Perspective*, Steven Katz's *The
Holocaust in Historical Context*, and Lucy Dawidowicz's *The Holocaust and the
Historians* are really only variations of Arthur Butz's *The Hoax of the
Twentieth Century* written in reverse. All of them, equally, are concious
exercises in the destruction of truth and memory.*
Ward Churchill, *A Little Matter of Genocide*, pp. 49-50.
http://www.lbbs.org/ZMag/articles/dec96churchill.htm
jott...@my-dejanews.com
>
> [ Sorry, Otto, I can hardly read that and keep a straight face. I
> have pictures in my mind of Africans demanding the right to be accused
> of genocide like "white Europeans" :) ]
Well that was not what I meant obviously. I meant that the moral onus of state
sponsored mass murder is not worse because in one case it was committed by
Germans and in another case Africans. Bringing up that the perpetrators of the
Shoa were advanced is really a back handed way for many Jewish exclusivists to
dismiss out of hand the suffering of people in the thrid world.
>
> I disagree strongly that the "advanced and cultured aspect of Germany
> is irrelevant". It was the extreme crisis of German capitalism that
> made the holocaust possible - that is the main lesson to be learnt
> from it. But nowadays when the holocaust is discussed it is divorced
> from its real context. It's treated as a "goodies versus baddies"
> fable, the mother of all moral examples. Increasingly, ordinary
> Germans are blamed for it, as if the dumbest and poorest prole Nazi is
> as much to blame as German big business. When you argue that anyone
> in the world is capable of such a crime, aren't you also contributing
> to the idea that the problem isn't the specific antagonistic social
> relations that we live under today, but the age-old problem of "human
> evil"?
>
Well I will have to think about this since you have put several ideas in one
paragraph. I agree that the specific social, economic and political
conditions that arose in Germany propelled the Nazis to power. National
Socialism depended upon Germany being an industrial capitalist nation, but
how is being killed by the less devloped Turkish Ittihadists or Khmer Rouge
therfore less of a crime? I also agree that the conditions on the Eastern
Front from Operation Barbarossa on made the implementation of the Shoa
possible. Without the War in the East, German anti-semitism would not have
become genocidal. Similarly the decay of the Ottoman Empire created the
conditions which the nationalist Young Turk (Ittihadist) Party took effective
control of the Turkish government. The conditions of WWI especially on
Turkey's eastern front with Russia created the conditions which allowed them
to implement their genocide against the Armenians. Certain conditions have to
exist in order for a state to successfully implement a plan of genocide, but
being an advanced industrial country is not one of them.
> >> Furthermore, I'd argue that the terms "genocide" and "Holocaust" have
> >> been debased by their application to run-of-the-mill civil wars in the
> >> third world. Nothing that has happened, for example, in Yugoslavia or
> >> Rwanda justifies the use of those terms. The danger is that by this
> >> debasing, the Holocaust is normalised and becomes therefore
> >> conceivable, even acceptable.
> >
> >I agree with this statement partially. But, Rawanda was certainly a case of
> >genocide as clear cut as the Shoa. A Hutu dominated state attempted to
> >exterminate its Tutsi population and only its overthrow prevented it from
> >completing the task.
>
> No, in fact the conflict in Rwanda was not ethnic in nature but
> political. Hutus that opposed the Interhamwe were attacked just as
> Tutsis were. The roots of these conflicts in the third world lie in
> the poverty of these countries and the desperate struggle for limited
> resources - not in racial ideology. Furthermore, your analysis has
> the tail wagging the dog. The major influence on events in central
> Africa - just as it is in the Balkans - is a long history of
> imperialist interference. After all, what was it that triggered the
> killings off in Rwanda? If you recall it was the shooting down of the
> president's plane by Belgian troops.
In many countries political power and resources are divided by ethnicity.
There is a strong correlation between the political and economic elites and
ethnicity. In the USSR the Russians clearly dominated the state and the
division of resources to the detriment of other ethnic groups. In post-Tito
Yugoslavia, the Serbs did the same to a lesser extent. In apartheid South
Africa the Whites had control. The killing of Hutus by Interhawme does not
change the fact that Hutus dominated the government. It is true that
imperialist powers frequently played one ethnic group off of another in
Central Africa, but ethnic antagonisms remained intertwined with political
and social conflicts after decolonization. If there are limited resources in
a multi ethnic country one of the most common ways to divide them is by
ethnicity. The ethnic group that controls the state allocates to itself a
diproportionate share of resources.
> Try to raise your horizon's beyond the US. The holocaust is now a
> compulsory subject in the British school curriculum, for example. The
> British Board of Jewish Deputies isn't behind this change. And while
> we're on the subject, I think your (admittedly only hinted)
> characterisation of the relations between the USA, Israel and the
> Palestinians is a little out of date. Nowadays the US is as likely to
> take the side of Arafat, perhaps more so. The point being that the US
> has the moral authority to knock those savages' heads together until
> they all see (Western) sense.
Arafat has basically become a satrap of the Israelis. Just as the South
Africans ruled the Bantustans through native collaborators, the Israelis now
indirectly control parts of Palestine through the PA. The strategy of
coopting local elites to rule on behalf of imperial powers has been practiced
by the British in India, the Russians in Central Asia under the Tsars and
East Central Europe under the Soviets, and the Americans in Central America
and the Carribean. Arafat only has the power the Israelis allow him. The
Israelis figure it is a better deal to allow the Palestinians to rule
themselves on behalf of Israel rather than directly. Hence Arafat is
constantly pressured by the US and Israel to crush opposition Palestinian
movements like Hamas at the expense of Human rights.