Do you call yourself a Christian?
If so, please permit me to ask you the following two questions.
If someone were to deny the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, to say that He did not rise bodily from the grave, would you want that person to be punished by the state with a fine or a prison sentence or to be driven from career and community and turned into a pariah?
The second question is the same as the first except that instead of denying the Resurrection of Jesus Christ the person in question denies that the Holocaust took place, or questions the veracity of certain elements of the Holocaust narrative, such as the death count of six million.
If your answer to the first question is yes then I would suggest you need to think through your faith. If you are a Christian then you yourself believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead for you cannot be a Christian without believing this. If you believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead then you believe that this was an actual event. The truth of that event does not depend upon your faith or that of anyone else and therefore cannot be harmed by anyone’s denial. Nor should another’s denial be able to harm your own faith in the Resurrection if you recognize that your faith relies upon the truth of what you believe, rather than the other way around, and are well-familiar with the evidence for that truth. The denier, therefore, can only harm himself by his denial, and so the appropriate response on your part, as a Christian, is to testify to your own faith in the Living Christ and to pray that the eyes of the denier would be opened that he might see the light of the Gospel, be converted, and believe.
If a yes answer to the first question suggests that the believer is insecure in his own faith, a yes answer to the second question, especially when joined with a no answer to the first, indicates a far more serious problem. It indicates that the Holocaust is of greater importance to you than the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, that the Holocaust is now in the space which the Gospel ought to occupy in the heart of the Christian believer.
These are all things that Canadian Christians ought to keep in mind in hearing or reading the recent news story about one Monika Schaefer and contemplating what they ought to think about the whole affair.
Schaefer, the Canadian born daughter of German immigrants who were of the generation that saw the Third Reich, is a violin instructor in Jasper, Alberta who has run, unsuccessfully, as the Green Party candidate in the federal constituency of Yellowhead on several occasions. In June she posted a video on Youtube, in which she played the violin and apologized to her parents for believing their generation to be guilty of perpetrating the Holocaust which she has come to believe to be “the biggest and most pernicious persistent lie in all of history.”
As you have probably guessed, certain people are rather upset about this. The head of B’nai Brith, an organization which, if I had as little class as they have I would describe with a considerably greater degree of accuracy than they have ever seen fit to exercise, as a Christophobic hate group, demanded that the Green Party “must denounce Schaefer and distance itself from all Holocaust denying groups and individuals.” Of course the party did just that, declaring that “The Green Party of Canada condemns in the strongest possible terms comments by Monika Schaefer, a former candidate, regarding her views on the Holocaust” and that at the next meeting of their Federal Council they will hear a motion to revoke her membership. Elizabeth May, the party’s leader, declared her condemnation of Schaefer’s “terribly misguided and untrue statements,” saying that Schaefer “does not represent the values of the Green Party nor of our membership.”
The matter of whom the fringe, leftist, eco-crackpot Green Party kicks out of their movement is of no concern to me in and of itself, although I find B’nai Brith’s bullying political parties into kicking out people they do not approve of for reasons that have nothing to do with the party’s policies and platform quite irritating. Schaefer faces more than just being kicked out of her political party, however. Thanks to Ken Kuzminski, the president of the Jasper legion who, according to the CBC was at one time a friend of Schaefer’s, a charge has been filed against her with both the Alberta and the Canadian Human Rights Commissions. That yet another person may find herself the victim of the injustice of being punished for expressing forbidden thoughts at the hands of these Stalinist inquisitions is something which concerns and ought to outrage all Canadians.
The Canadian and provincial Human Rights Commissions are fundamentally un-Canadian institutions if by Canada we mean the Dominion of Canada that fought against Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich alongside the United Kingdom and the other countries in the great British family of nations between 1939 and 1945. The Dominion of Canada was established in 1867 by the Fathers of Confederation on the Loyalist foundation of preserving in the new country they were building, our rich British heritage including our parliamentary monarchy form of government, our Christian religion, our English Common Law, and the basic freedoms and legal rights that developed in the course of over a thousand years of history that included such highlights as the constitution of Alfred the Great of Wessex and the Magna Carta Libertatum. These Human Rights Commissions and Tribunals, which investigate and pass judgement upon the expressed thoughts of Canadians to determine whether they have committed what in the Newspeak of George Orwell’s 1984 was called “crimethink,” are foreign to that heritage and tradition, being much more at home in totalitarian ideological states like the Soviet Union, Red China, and North Korea.
It was the ideology that drove these states – the ideology of Marxist-Leninism, more commonly known as Communism – to which the Liberal Prime Ministers who governed Canada from 1963 to 1984 subscribed, secretly in the case of Lester Pearson, more openly in the case of Pierre Trudeau who was responsible for the Canadian Human Rights Act which established these Soviet-style tribunals. This ideology was an enemy of National Socialism, the ideology behind the Third Reich, but the enmity was that of bitter rivalry between virtually identical twin siblings. The only significant difference between the two was that National Socialism, being racist and nationalist, rejected the liberal universalism, internationalism, and cosmopolitanism of Communism. Otherwise they were revolutionary ideologies that attracted young thugs, hated the old, traditional, order, and established virtually identical party-ruled, police states that governed by fear and required everyone to at least give lip service to the tenets of their ideology.
The British family of nations, including the Dominion of Canada, was forced to make a temporary alliance with the Soviet Union in the war against the Third Reich, but the wisest of our leaders, such as Sir Winston Churchill, recognized that the ideology of the USSR was just as bad and dangerous as that of Nazi Germany and it would serve us well in this day to remember that the two ideologies were twins. Those who think that ideas like those of Monika Schaefer ought to be punished by law maintain that they hold this position to prevent a resurgence of National Socialism. The Nizkor website, on its home page, asks the question “Given the evidence…why do people deny the Holocaust?” which it answers with a quotation from some American neo-Nazi group “The real purpose of holocaust revisionism is to make National Socialism an acceptable political alternative again.”
This, however, is clearly nonsense. The first holocaust revisionist was Paul Rassinier, a French Communist and pacifist, who joined the anti-Nazi resistance and was himself imprisoned in Buchenwald and Dora. The American history professor, Harry Elmer Barnes, who had Rassinier’s books published in English, was an American classical liberal. Calvinist theologian Rousas J. Rushdooney, after reading Rassinier and Barnes, pointed to the claims of the standard Holocaust account which they disputed as an example of bearing false witness against one’s neighbour in his commentary on the Ten Commandments in his Institutes of Biblical Law. David Cole, who became a Holocaust revisionist in his youth, going to the site of Auschwitz to investigate after the fall of Communism in Poland, is a fairly mainstream American conservative and certainly no Nazi-sympathizer. None of these men had or have an interest in making National Socialism “an acceptable political alternative again.” Most holocaust revisionists, according to journalist John Sack, in an Esquire article from 2001 in which he described his encounters with David Irving, Ernst Zundel, and other revisionists at a meeting of the Institute for Historical Review, were simply ordinary people of German descent who did not want to think ill of their ancestors.
It would be more truthful to say that it is the influence of Communism, National Socialism’s rival sibling, that lies behind the suppression of Holocaust revisionism. Due to the similarity between the ideologies, it is therefore also true to say that those who want to see people like Monika Schaefer silenced, dragged before Human Rights tribunals, and punished for their views, are closer to the spirit of Adolf Hitler than those they seek to persecute. It has been pointed out that the adherents of these totalitarian ideologies often had no problem switching from the one to the other and it is interesting to note that when the Dominion of Canada was fighting Hitler at the side of Great Britain, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, the author of the Canadian Human Rights Act who throughout his political career praised Communist tyrants like Mao and Castro, was riding around on his motorcycle, denouncing the war effort, with a German helmut on his head and a big swastika on his back.
Fellow Canadians, if any of the spirit of the old Dominion still lives on in you, I urge you not to remain silent while another Canadian is persecuted for expressing an unpopular point of view. It is those who wish to silence and punish Monika Schaefer, not Schaefer herself, who represent all of the things our country went to war to fight in 1939.
As for the Holocaust – make up your own minds about it. Read both sides – conventional history books, such as Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of The European Jews – and those by the revisionists. David Cole, for example, has an interesting summary of his present views on the matter in the last chapter of his memoir Republican Party Animal. If you find the conventional history more convincing, believe it. If you find the revisionists have better arguments, believe them. If you cannot make up your mind, don’t be afraid to admit it and say that you just don’t know. Any of these options is fine. Just don’t let bullies like B’nai Brith tell you what to think.
Finally, Canadian Christians, when you see Holocaust revisionists being persecuted for their views, recognize this for the injustice that it is. This, and not the unevenness of the distribution of wealth, is what real injustice looks like. Do not be fooled by the wolves in sheep’s clothing, who preach social justice, while licking the jackboots of the ideology responsible for these injustices, an ideology that has been dedicated to the destruction of our faith since the moment its founder penned his foul Manifesto in 1848. If you do not want people thrown in jail or otherwise persecuted for denying the Resurrection – and you should not want that – then you ought to be opposed to their being persecuted for denying the Holocaust. Otherwise, you testify that the Holocaust is more important to you than the Resurrection, raising the question of where your faith truly lies.
Freedom is indivisible. And freedom of speech – except for overt incitement to violence against a specific individual or group – is absolute. For any members of the fourth estate to give credence to any limitation of that freedom is an abrogation of their first and highest responsibility. The politically correct statism that is corroding our liberties and pushing so many to self-censorship was not only anticipated and condemned by Kafka and Orwell and Camus, but by President John Fitzgerald Kennedy when he paraphrased James Madison’s warning that, “I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” This decision of the Tribunal is precisely an instance of an “abridgement of freedom” and the self-censorship implicit in the words of The Gazette editorial manifest that “gradual encroachment.”
