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ERNST ZUNDEL, (April 29, 1939 – August 5, 2017) R.I.P.

ERNST ZUNDEL, (April 29, 1939 – August 5, 2017) R.I.P.

Publisher and free speech wqarrior, Ernst Zundel, who spent 7 years in jail in two countries for challenging the Hollywood version of World War II, died suddenly of a heart attack, Saturday, August 5, at his home in Bad Wildbad in Germany’s Black Forest.

__________________________

And so a great champion of the truth is lost to us. His battle for the freedom of speech will never be forgotten nor will the shameless way in which he was treated by Canada and his mother country Germany, for simply exercising his God given right to freely express his thoughts.

Rest in Peace brother Ernst.

Bill Bell

Short Video Memorial for Political Prisoner Ernst Zundel

Short Video Memorial for  Political Prisoner Ernst Zundel
https://youtu.be/Y_dF8OUylWM
Ernst Zündel starb im Alter von 78 Jahren am 5. Auguts 2017 in seinem Elternhaus in Calmbach/Bad Wildbad Schwarzwald/Deutschland. Zum Gedenken an diesen auße…
YOUTUBE.COM

https://youtu.be/Y_dF8OUylWM

Ernst Zundel — Pacifist Historian Denied U.S. Entry

Ernst Zundel — Pacifist Historian Denied U.S. Entry

Zundel

  • Ernst Zuendel cannot come home to join his wife, an American citizen, after serving his sentence in Germany for “thought crimes,” says the Department of Homeland Security, yet untold numbers of illegal aliens are allowed to “come home” repeatedly, even after committing felonies.

Ernst Zuendel, the internationally renowned historical revisionist and activist who has been persecuted by a number of Western governments for his political activism and historical research, has been denied entry to the United States after seeking to rejoin his wife in Tennessee, it was recently revealed.

Zuendel, 78, who has served jail time in Germany and Canada for questioning the official “Holocaust” narrative, had been attempting to obtain an immigrant visa to travel to the United States and live with his American wife, Ingrid Zuendel.

Under normal circumstances, a foreign national seeking an immigration visa to join an American spouse would find little difficulty in obtaining the visa. However, due to Zuendel’s views and imprisonment for thought crimes, he was deemed “inadmissible” by Ron Rosenberg, the chief of the Administrative Appeals Office of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which decided Zuendel’s fate.

In its ruling, the Administrative Appeals Office cited Zuendel’s 2007 conviction in Germany of 14 counts of “incitement to hatred” and one count of “violating the memory of the dead,” Orwellian thought crimes institutionalized in Germany and many other Western nations following World War II in an effort to criminalize political dissent and historical inquiry, particularly as it relates to the official narrative explaining WWII and the Jewish “Holocaust.” Zuendel served five years in prison in Germany after facing legal challenges in both Canada and the United States.

The DHS’s ruling also noted that Zuendel is “a historical revisionist and denier of the Holocaust, distributing writings, books, tapes, videos, and broadcasts to promote his views” and contends that he has a “long history of inciting racial, ethnic, and religious hatred” while agitating “for aggressive behavior against Jews.” Zuendel “has been a leader in these activities for decades and has shown no regret or remorse for his actions,” the ruling stated in an attempt to justify its decision to ban the historian from rejoining his elderly wife in America.

Of course, Zuendel’s previous political, historical, and educational activities—hysterically demonized and twisted by the Administrative Appeals Office’s characterization in its ruling—are not in any way illegal in the United States. Whatever one believes about WWII history, Zuendel, who is a pacifist, went to great lengths to document the controversial statements and perspectives he was publicly offering in a scholarly fashion.

Ingrid Zuendel, Ernst’s American wife who has long been involved with his political and historical activism, denied the U.S. federal government’s characterization of her husband as an inciter of hatred and instigator of aggressive behavior toward Jewish people.

“Canada has had a ‘hate law’ statute on its books for decades,” Ingrid explained to this newspaper in a recent interview. “If Ernst had been guilty of ‘racial hatred,’ he would have been charged decades ago. Ernst was never charged, much less convicted, of any hatred, much less racial hatred.”

Ingrid also disputed the notion that her husband ever advocated “aggressive behavior” toward Jews—or anyone else for that matter.

“Ernst has never been charged with ‘aggressive behavior,’ much less convicted for having acted aggressively against anyone. He is a pacifist with a sterling record of lifelong Ghandi-like conduct. We have FBI and other police reports that say so,” Ingrid told AFP. “Not only has Ernst never acted ‘aggressively,’ he has always counseled his supporters to conduct themselves peacefully, as a matter of moral principle as well as for tactical reasons.”

The latest legal setback for the Zuendels came as no surprise to Ingrid. They have been struggling for years now in the judicial system, only to be stymied at every opportunity.

“We were not surprised by the ruling of the DHS’s Administrative Appeals Office,” Ingrid explained to this reporter. “The courts are no longer the means of last resort to get justice in America. The courts have been co-opted and are corrupted to the core. Justice can no longer be had from the bench.”

She continued: “That doesn’t mean that we are giving up. There are other means than courts to win this most important battle in the courts of public opinion. The struggle for historical truth has never been just about what happened to Ernst Zuendel. It was and is about revealing false flags and self-serving lies as tools of control by the powers-that-be. It was and is about revealing historical lies as weapons of war wielded brutally by what is now referred to as the ‘deep state’ or the ‘shadow government.’”

NB: This article was originally published by American Free Press on June, 5, 2017. Subscribe to America’s last real newspaper today!

America A Little Less Free: Zundel Banned from U.S. Because of His Non-Violent Views

America  A Little Less Free: Zundel Banned from U.S. Because of His Non-Violent Views

The Volokh Conspiracy

April 24

Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel apparently wanted to move to the United States from Germany. (I say apparently because the decision on which I’m reporting, just posted on Westlaw but decided March 31 by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Administrative Appeals Office, referred only to one E.C.Z., but both the initials and the facts described in the decision fit Zundel and likely no one else.) He would normally get an immigrant visa, because his wife of 16 years — who is about 80 years old — is a U.S. citizen. But he was classified as inadmissible because he has been convicted of foreign crimes for which the sentence was five years or more:

[I]n 2007 the Applicant was convicted in Germany of 14 counts of incitement to hatred and one count of violating the memory of the dead. The Applicant was sentenced to an aggregate of five years in prison.

And though a waiver of inadmissibility was possible — because of extreme hardship to Zundel’s elderly wife — the office concluded that there was good reason to deny the waiver:

The negative factors in the Applicant’s case include his long history of inciting racial, ethnic, and religious hatred. The record shows that the Applicant is a historical revisionist and denier of the Holocaust, distributing writings, books, tapes, videos, and broadcasts to promote his views. The record indicates further that these publications agitated for aggressive behavior against Jews. Furthermore, the Applicant has been a leader in these activities for decades and has shown no regret or remorse for his actions. Thus, we find that the negative factors in the Applicant’s case outweigh the positive such that a favorable exercise of discretion is not warranted.

Now, I think there’s nothing unconstitutional under current First Amendment law about the decision to exclude Zundel. Various Supreme Court cases, of which the most relevant is Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972), generally take the view that the First Amendment and similar constitutional provisions don’t apply to decisions on whether to let in an alien. American immigration law has long barred immigration by aliens who have been members of Communist parties; more recently, it has likewise barred immigration by anyone who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.” The view seems to be: We have to live with schmucks who are already Americans, but that doesn’t mean we need to let in more. (Of course, the litigation over President Trump’s Executive Order might change this analysis: If the Supreme Court eventually concludes that the order discriminated based on the religious beliefs of most would-be visitors from certain countries, and that such discrimination violates the First Amendment, then — depending on the breadth of the Court’s rationale — that logic might equally apply to discrimination based on the political beliefs of would-be visitors and would-be immigrants, and might thus lead to an overruling of Kleindienst.)

But oddly, the decision suggests that Zundel might have had a legal right under existing law to immigrate after all (even if that right could constitutionally be taken away by a change in the law) — and that DHS’s Administrative Appeals Office might not fully understand American First Amendment law. The office stated,

A foreign conviction can be the basis for a finding of inadmissibility only where the conviction is “for conduct which is deemed criminal by United States standards.” Matter of Ramirez-Rivero, 18 I&N Dec. 135, 137 (BIA 1981).

(To give an example of the Ramirez-Rivero principle in action, one 2015 decision held that a 1997 Cuban conviction for “speculation and hoarding” couldn’t disqualify an alien from admissibility to the United States.) But as best I can tell from press accounts, Zundel’s speech that formed the basis of his German conviction would not have been “deemed criminal by United States standards.” Denying the Holocaust and expressing anti-Semitic sentiments is just not a crime under American law. Indeed, it can’t be made a crime, given the First Amendment.

But here’s what the office said as it went on:

In Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court held that constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action. 89 S.Ct. 1827, 1829 (1969).

But, as the office notes, the Brandenburg exception is limited to advocacy intended and likely to produce crime in the next few minutes, hours or at most days (see Hess v. Indiana [1973]), the classic example being a speech to an enraged crowd outside a building, urging it to storm the building. To my knowledge, Zundel’s convictions don’t stem from such behavior.

So the exclusion of Zundel was itself not a First Amendment violation. But, based on Ramirez-Rivero — and certainly the office’s description of Ramirez-Rivero — it appears to have been a violation of American immigration law. And in the process of misapplying Ramirez-Rivero, the office seems to have erroneously concluded that Holocaust denial and the expression of anti-Semitic sentiments would be “deemed criminal by United States standards.” That strikes me as mistaken, though I’d be glad to hear any corrections or clarifications from readers who are more knowledgeable about immigration law than I am.

French Holocaust Skeptic Fined 9,000 Euros & Given 4 Months in Prison

French Holocaust Skeptic Fined 9,000 Euros & Given 4 Months in Prison
 
“Je suis Faurisson”? You have to be kidding!
 
In January, 2015, a cavalcade of Western leaders, including France’s President Francois Holland and Germany’s Angela Merkel (who preside over two of the most anti-free speech regimes in Europe) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose Zionist allies around the world lobby for prison, fines and unemployment for dissidents, paraded through Paris. The cause? To protest the Moslem terrorist attack and murder of employees of the largely Trostskyist, Jewish satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
 
Freedom lovers everywhere proclaimed: “Je suis Charlie.”
 
However, don’t mistake that protest with a real belief in free speech. France groans under the infamous Fabius-Gayssot “hate law”. It was the devil child of a French communist deputy Gayssot and a Jewish Socialist Laurent Fabius.
 
It’s latest victim in 88 year old French scholar and holocaust skeptic, Dr. Robert Faurisson who also assisted at Ernst Zundel’s “false news trials” in the 1980s. [Zundel won and got the law ruled unconstitutional by Canada’s Supreme Court in 1992.]
 

 
For questioning the new religion of holocaust, this brave old man, once beaten nearly to death by Jewish anti-racists, faces four months in prison (suspended) and 9,000 Euros [$13,300 Cnd.] in fines and “costs” to his anti-racist tormentors.
 
So much for the land of “liberte”!
 
His lawyer reports below.
 
Paul Fromm
Director
CANADIAN ASSOCIATION FOR FREE EXPRESSION
 
On June 21, 2016 Professor Robert Faurisson was prosecuted, with regard to his 2006 talk in Tehran and his paper “The Victories of Revisionism“ [http://robertfaurisson.blogspot.it/2006/12/victories-of-revisionism.html], for “disputing the existence of crimes against humanity“, and, because of his 60-word sentence alone, for “racial defamation“.
 
Here is the result of that trial as conveyed to us by the Professor’s barrister: B
 
<START>
On September 27, 2016, in the case of the talk given by Robert Faurisson in Tehran in 2006, the 17th chamber of the Paris correctional court ruled as follows:
 
Two charges of disputing the existence of crimes against humanity were declared null.
 
The third charge, that of racial defamation for the sentence of approximately 60 words [included in his talk], resulted in Robert Faurisson’s conviction and sentence to four months’ imprisonment (suspended) along with a fine of €4,000. The LICRA [Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme], plaintiff, obtained €3,000 in damages and €2,000 in legal costs. Thus, a judgment totalling €9,000.
 
Professor Faurisson immediately lodged an appeal against this decision.
 
Tomorrow, September 28, at 1.30 pm, Robert Faurisson will appear again before the same court for having spoken about the Nazi gas chambers on the website Meta TV [in June 2014: http://meta.tv/robert-faurisson-au-bal-des-quenelles].
Damien Viguier
Barrister

Some Key Works By Canada’s Free Speech “Battling Barrister”

Some Key Works By Canada’s Free Speech “Battling Barrister”

 

CAFE, Box 332, Rexdale, Ontario, M9W 5L3

 

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___Please renew my subscription for 2016 to the Free Speech Monitor ($15).

$___  Doug Christie booklet or video order from back of this coupon.

 

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Doug Christie Free Speech  Booklets

For 30 years, Doug Christie, the Battling Barrister, has been Canada’s outstanding free speech attorney. He passed away of liver cancer, all too young, on March 11, 2013  at age 66. Order his outstanding free speech booklets published in C-FAR’S Canadian Issue Series and speeches he gave over the years.

__ The Zundel Trial & Free Speech by Douglas Christie (1985) $4.00

__  Thought Crimes Trial: The Keegstra Case by Douglas Christie (1987) $4.00

__   Free Speech IS the Issue by Douglas Christie  (1990) ($5)

___ Doug Christie –His Last Speech: Free Speech in Canada – Lesbians, Hypocrisies& Contadictions. DVD.  Toronto, December 2, 2012. $20.00

___ How I Became A Revisionist Film Maker And Lost A Lot of Jobs by Brian Ruhe. Toronto, June 30, 2016. $6.00

[Tick booklets or tapes or dvds you want here and indicate the number and enter dollar amount on the other side of this coupon.]

Hear Paul Fromm & Brad Love on Patricia Aitken’s Sacred Cows’ Barbecue

Hear Paul Fromm & Brad Love on Patricia Aitken’s Sacred Cows’ Barbecue

 

Paul Fromm, Director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression & Brad Love, Canadian political prisoner and citizen journalist interviewed on Patrica Aitken’s Sacred Cows BBQ!

https://youtu.be/9owFhBoCc_Y

Paul Fromm, Director of CAFE- Canadian Association for Free Expression has fought for victims of Canada’s thought police such as Ernst Zundel, David Irving, Arthur Topham and special guest Brad Love. Brad shares how writing non-threatening letters to government idiots landed him in prison. He also shares about life in post-fire Fort McMurray.

Frederick Fromm's photo.

Paul Fromm on Jim Rizoli Televison: Wide Ranging Interview — How I Got Into Politics; Zundel & Me; Canadian Free Speech Battles; Freeing Our People from Guilt; The New Religion of Holocaust

Paul Fromm on Jim Rizoli Televison: Wide Ranging Interview — How I Got Into Politics; Zundel & Me; Canadian Free Speech Battles; Freeing Our People from Guilt; The New Religion of Holocaust
 
Paul Fromm: Paul Fromm is a longtime populist activist in Canada. He was a co-founder of the anti-communist Edmund Burke Society (1967-1972) and an activist in the Canadian Friends of Rhodesia. For the past 30 years, he has been the Director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression and the Canada First Immigration Reform Committee. “My issues are immigration and free speech,” he says, “too much immigration and not enough free speech.” Mr. Fromm is the international director for the Council of Conservative Citizens and the international advisor to the American Free Party. He is featured in many You Tubes and has a nightly radio show “The Fighting Side of Me” on whiteresistanceradio.com. He is a co-host on “The Trump Phenomenon” nightly at 9:00 p.m.EST  on Republic Broadcasting. He has twice run for Parliament in Canada. He has run four times for school board trustee and was elected once.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
JIM RIZOLI:  Cofounder, producer/interviewer (Fred Leuchter and Assistant, Diane King) of the Series, LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY REVISIONISTS.  This also entails seeking out UNSUNG HEROES and German survivors of Allied atrocities – The German Story, The German Way.  Hard core historical revisionist, Jim and, his brother, Joe moved from combating the illegal immigrant hordes in their cable shows to dealing with the fundamental and pervading issue of the holocaust. Their immigrant battles led them to the plight of Ernst Zundel in Canada, being prosecuted for having reprinted *Did 6 Million Really Die*! Thus Jim and Joe’s efforts and cable shows also turned toward the issue of the holocaust.  That’s when their troubles accelerated. In 2002 – 2003 they began producing numerous (1000s of videos) dealing with many issues and 100s of videos about the holocaust. Consequently, YouTube videos (700) under the name of Jim Rizoli were banned. His name was banned on Facebook. In 2010, their cable shows were suspended. They returned and then were permanently removed in 2014. We are back to provide a venue of/freedom of, telling the story for tried-and-true revisionists and Germans throughout North America, Europe and Australia.
 

THE ZÜNDEL TRIALS (1985 AND 1988)

The Zündel Trials (1985 and 1988)

On May 13, 1988, Ernst Zündel was sentenced by Judge Ronald Thomas of the District Court of Ontario, in Toronto, to nine months in prison for having distributed a Revisionist booklet that is now 14 years old: Did Six Million Really Die?

Ernst Zündel lives in Toronto where, up until a few years ago, he worked as a graphic artist and advertising man. He is now 49 years old. A native of Germany, he has kept his German citizenship. His life has known serious upsets from the day when, in about 1981, he began to distribute Did Six Million Really Die?, a Revisionist booklet by Richard Harwood. The booklet was first published in 1974 in Great Britain where, a year later, it was the focus of a lengthy controversy in the literary journal Books and Bookmen. At the instigation of the Jewish community of South Africa, it was later banned in that country.

In Canada, during an earlier trial in 1985, Zündel had been sentenced to 15 months in prison. That sentence was thrown out in 1987. A new trial began on January 18, 1988. I participated in the preparations for it and in the unfolding of those judicial proceedings. I devoted thousands of hours to the defense of Ernst Zündel.

François Duprat: A Precursor

In 1967, François Duprat published an article on “The Mystery of the Gas Chambers” (Défense de l’Occident, June 1967, pp. 30-33). He later became interested in the Harwood booklet and became actively involved in its distribution. On March 18, 1978, he was killed by assassins armed with weapons too complex not to belong to an intelligence service. Responsibility for the assassination was claimed by a “Remembrance Commando” and by a “Jewish Revolutionary Group” (Le Monde, March 23, 1978, p. 7). Patrice Chairoff had published Duprat’s home address in the Dossier Néo-Nazisme. He justified the assassination in the pages of Le Monde (April 26, 1978, p. 9) by citing the victim’s Revisionism: “François Duprat is responsible. There are some responsibilities that kill.” In Le Droit de vivre, the publication of the LICRA (International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism), Jean Pierre-Bloch expressed an ambiguous position: he criticized the crime but, at the same time, he let it be understood that he had no pity for those who, inspired by the victim, would start out on the Revisionist path (Le Monde, May 7-8, 1978).

Pierre Viansson-Ponté

Eight months before Duprat’s assassination, journalist Pierre Viansson-Ponté had launched a virulent attack against the Harwood pamphlet. His chronicle was entitled: “Le Mensonge” (The Lie), (Le Monde, July 17-18, 1978, p. 13). It was reprinted with an approving commentary in Le Droit de vivre. Six months after the assassination, Viansson-Ponté took up the attack once more in “Le Mensonge” (suite) (The Lie-Continued) (Le Monde, September 34, 1978, p.9). He passed over the assassination of Duprat in silence, made public the names and home towns of three Revisionist readers, and called for legal repression against Revisionism.

Sabina Citron Versus Ernst Zündel

In 1984, Sabina Citron, head of the Holocaust Remembrance Association, stirred up violent demonstrations against Ernst Zündel in Canada. An attack was made on Zündel’s home. The Canadian postal service, treating Revisionism the way it treats pornography, refused him all service and all right to receive mail. Zündel only recovered his postal rights after a year of judicial procedures. In the meantime, his business has failed. At the instigation of Sabina Citron, the Attorney General of Ontario filed a complaint against Zündel for publishing a “false statement, tale or news.” The charge was based on the following reasoning: the defendant had abused his right to freedom of expression; by distributing the Harwood pamphlet, he was spreading information that he knew was false; in fact, he could not fail to be aware that the “genocide of the Jews” and the “gas chambers” were an established fact. Zündel was also charged with publishing an allegedly “false” letter, which he had written himself.

The First Trial (1985)

The first trial lasted seven weeks. The jury found Zündel not guilty regarding the letter he had himself written but guilty of distributing the Harwood booklet. He was sentenced by Judge Hugh Locke to 15 months in prison. The German consulate in Toronto confiscated his passport and the West German government prepared a deportation action against him. In Germany itself, West German authorities had already carried out a series of large-scale police raids on the houses of all his German correspondents. In 1987, the United States forbade him entry to its territory. But in spite of all that, Zündel had won a media victory: day after day, for seven weeks, the entire English- speaking Canadian media covered the trial, with its spectacular revelations. The public learned that the Revisionists had first class documentation and arguments, while the exterminationists were in desperate straits.

Their Expert: Raul Hilberg

The prosecution expert in the first trial was Raul Hilberg, an American professor of Jewish descent and author of the standard reference work, The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), which Paul Rassinier discussed in Le Drame des Juifs européens (The Drama of the European Jews). Hilberg began his testimony by explaining, without interruption, his theory about the extermination of the Jews. He was then cross-examined by Zündel’s lawyer, Douglas Christie, who was assisted by Keltie Zubko and myself. Right from the start it was clear that Hilberg, who was the world’s leading authority on the Holocaust, had never examined a single concentration camp, not even Auschwitz. He had still not examined any camp in 1985 when he announced the imminent appearance of a new edition of his main work in three volumes, revised, corrected and augmented. Although he did visit Auschwitz in 1979 for a single day as part of a ceremonial appearance, he did not bother to examine either the buildings or the archives. In his entire life he has never seen a “gas chamber,” either in its original condition or in ruins. (For a historian, even ruins can tell tales). On the stand he was forced to admit that there had never been a plan, a central organization, a budget or supervision for what he called the policy of the extermination of the Jews. He also had to admit that since 1945 the Allies have never carried out an expert study of “the weapon of the crime,” that is to say of a homicidal gas chamber. No autopsy report has established that even one inmate was ever killed by poison gas.

Hilberg said that Hitler gave orders for the extermination of the Jews, and that Himmler gave an order to halt the extermination on November 25, 1944 (such detail!). But Hilberg could not produce these orders. The defense asked him if he still maintained the existence of the Hitler orders in the new edition of his book. He dared to answer yes. He thereby lied and even committed perjury. In the new edition of his work (with a preface dated September 1984), Hilberg systematically deleted any mention of an order by Hitler. (In this regard, see the review by Christopher Browning, “The Revised Hilberg,”Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual, 1986, p. 294). When he was asked by the defense to explain how the Germans had been able to carry out an undertaking as enormous as the extermination of millions of Jews without any kind of plan, without any central agency, without any blueprint or budget, Hilberg replied that in the various Nazi agencies there had been “an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus mind-reading by a far-flung bureaucracy”.

Witness Arnold Friedman

The prosecution counted on the testimony of “survivors.” These “survivors” were chosen with care. They were supposed to testify that they had seen, with their own eyes, preparations for and the carrying out of homicidal gassings. Since the war, in a series of trials like those at Nuremberg (1945-1946), Jerusalem (1961), or Frankfurt (1963-65), such witnesses have never been lacking. However, as I have often noted, no lawyer for the defense had ever had the courage or the competence necessary to cross-examine these witnesses on the gassings themselves.

For the first time, in Toronto in 1985, one lawyer, Douglas Christie, dared to ask for explanations. He did it with the help of topographical maps and building plans as well as scholarly documentation on both the properties of the gases supposedly used and also on the capacities for cremation, whether carried out in crematory ovens or on pyres. Not one of these witnesses stood the test, and especially not Arnold Friedman. Despairing of his case, he ended by confessing that he had indeed been at Auschwitz-Birkenau (where he never had to work except once, unloading potatoes), but that, as regards gassings, he had relied on what others had told him.

Witness Rudolf Vrba

Witness Rudolf Vrba was internationally known. A Slovak Jew imprisoned at Auschwitz and at Birkenau, he said that he had escaped from the camp in April 1944 with Fred Wetzler. After getting back to Slovakia, he dictated a report about Auschwitz and Birkenau, and on their crematories and “gas chambers”.

With help from Jewish organizations in Slovakia, Hungary and Switzerland, his report reached Washington, where it served as the basis for the U.S. Government’s famous “War Refugee Board Report“, published in November 1944. Since then every Allied organization charged with the prosecution of “war crimes” and every Allied prosecutor in a trial of “war criminals” has had available this official version of the history of those camps.

Vrba later became a British citizen and published his autobiography under the title of I Cannot Forgive. This book published in 1964, was actually written by Alan Bestic, who, in his preface, testified to the “considerable care [by Rudolf Vrba] for each detail” and to the “meticulous and almost fanatic respect he revealed for accuracy.” On November 30, 1964, Vrba testified at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. Then he settled in Canada and became a Canadian citizen. He has been featured in various films about Auschwitz, particularly Shoah by Claude Lanzmann. Everything went well for him until the day at the Zündel trial in 1985 when he was cross-examined mercilessly. He was then shown to be an impostor. It was revealed that he had completely made up the number and location of the “gas chambers” and the crematories in his famous 1944 report. His 1964 book opened with a purported January 1943 visit by Himmler to Birkenau to inaugurate a new crematorium with “gas chamber.” Actually, the last visit by Himmler to Auschwitz took place in July of 1942, and in January 1943 the first of the new crematories was still far from finished. Thanks, apparently, to some special gift of memory (that he called “special mnemonic principles” or “special mnemonical method”) and to a real talent for being everywhere at once, Vrba had calculated that in the space of 25 months (April 1942 to April 1944) the Germans had “gassed” 1,765,000 Jews at Birkenau alone, including 150,000 Jews from France. But in 1978, Serge Klarsfeld, in his Memorial to the Deportation of the Jews from France, had been forced to conclude that, for the entire length of the war, the Germans had deported a total of 75,721 Jews from France to all their concentration camps. The gravest aspect of this is that the figure of 1,765,000 Jews “gassed” at Birkenau had also been used in a document (L-022) at the main Nuremberg trial. Attacked on all sides by Zündel’s lawyer, the impostor had no other recourse than to invoke, in Latin, the “licentia poetarum,” or “poetic license,” in other words, the right to engage in fiction. His book has just been published in France (1987); this edition is presented as a book by “Rudolf Vrba with Alan Bestic.” It no longer includes the enthusiastic preface by Alan Bestic, and the short introduction by Emile Copfermann notes that “with the approval of Rudolf Vrba the two appendices from the English edition have been removed.” Nothing is said about the fact that those two appendices had also caused Vrba serious problems in 1985 at the Toronto trial.

The Second Zündel Trial (1988)

In January 1987, a five-judge appeals court decided to throw out the 1985 verdict against Ernst Zündel for some very basic reasons: Judge Hugh Locke had not allowed the defense any influence in the jury selection process and the jury had been misled by the judge on the very meaning of the trial. As for me, I have attended many trials in my life, including some carried out in France during the period of the “Purge” at the end of and after World War II. Never have I encountered a judge so partial, autocratic and violent as Judge Hugh Locke. Anglo-Saxon law offers many more guarantees than French law but it only takes one man to pervert the best of systems. Judge Locke was such a man.

The second trial began on January 18, 1988, under the direction of Judge Ronald Thomas, who is a friend, it seems, of Judge Locke. Judge Thomas was often angry and was frankly hostile to the defense, but he had more finesse than his predecessor. The ruling by the five-judge appeal court also inhibited him somewhat. Judge Hugh Locke had imposed numerous restrictions on free expression by the witnesses and experts for the defense. For example, he forbade me to use any of the photos I had taken at Auschwitz. I had no right to use arguments of a chemical, cartographical, or architectural nature (even though I had been the first person in the world to publish the plans for the Auschwitz and Birkenau crematories). I was not allowed to talk about either the American gas chambers or the aerial reconnaissance photos of Auschwitz and Birkenau. Even the testimony of the eminent chemist William Lindsey was cut short. Judge Ronald Thomas did allow the defense more freedom, but at the outset of the trial, he made a decision, at the request of the prosecution, that would tie the hands of the jury.

Judge Thomas‘s Judicial Notice

In Anglo-Saxon law, everything must be proved except for certain absolutely indisputable evidence (“The capital of Great Britain is London,” “day follows night”… ) The judge can take “judicial notice” of that kind of evidence at the request of one or the other of the contending parties; Prosecuting Attorney John Pearson asked the judge to take judicial notice of the Holocaust. That term then has to be defined. It is likely that, had it not been for the intervention of the defense, the judge could have defined the Holocaust as it might have been defined in 1945-1946. At that time, the “genocide of the Jews” (the word “Holocaust” was not used) could have been defined as “the ordered and planned destruction of six million Jews, in particular by the use of gas chambers”.

The problem for the prosecution was that the defense advised the judge that, since 1945-1946, there have been profound changes in the understanding of exterminationist historians about the extermination of the Jews. First of all, they no longer talk about an extermination but about an attempted extermination. They have also finally admitted that “in spite of the most erudite [sic] research” (Raymond Aron, Sorbonne colloquium, July 2, 1982), no one has found any trace of an order to exterminate the Jews. More recently, there has been a dispute between the “intentionalists” and the “functionalists.” Both agree that they have no proof of any intent to exterminate, but “intentionalist” historians nevertheless believe that one must assume the existence of that intent, while “functionalist” historians believe that the extermination was the result of individual initiatives, localized and anarchic: in a sense, the activity created the organization! Finally, the figure of six million was declared to be “symbolic” and there have been many disagreements about the “problem of the gas chambers”.

Obviously surprised by this flood of information, Judge Ronald Thomas decided to be prudent and, after a delay for reflection, decided on the following definition; the Holocaust, he said, was “the extermination and/or mass-murder of Jews” by National Socialism. His definition is remarkable for more than one reason. We no longer find any trace of an extermination order, or a plan, or “gas chambers,” or six million Jews or even millions of Jews. This definition is so void of all substance that it no longer corresponds to anything real. One cannot understand the meaning of “mass-murder of Jews.” (The judge carefully avoided saying “of the Jews”.) This strange definition is itself a sign of the progress achieved by historical revisionism since 1945.

Raul Hilberg Refuses to Appear Again

One misfortune awaited Prosecutor John Pearson: Raul Hilberg, in spite of repeated requests, refused to appear again. The defense, having heard rumors of an exchange of correspondence between Pearson and Hilberg, demanded and got the publication of the letters they exchanged and in particular of a “confidential” letter by Hilberg which did not hide the fact that he had some bitter memories of his cross-examination in 1985. He feared being questioned again by Douglas Christie on the same points. To quote the exact words of his confidential letter, Hilberg wrote that he feared “every attempt to entrap me by pointing out any seeming contradiction, however trivial the subject might be, between my earlier testimony and an answer that I might give in 1988.” In fact as I have already mentioned, Hilberg had committed perjury and he may have feared being charged with that crime.

Christopher Browning, Prosecution Witness

In place of Hilberg there came his friend Christopher Browning, an American professor who specializes in the Holocaust. Admitted as an expert witness (and paid for several days at the rate of $150 per hour by the Canadian taxpayer), Browning tried to prove that the Harwood pamphlet was a tissue of lies and that the attempt to exterminate the Jews was a scientifically established fact He had cause to regret the experience. During cross-examination, the defense used his own arguments to destroy him. In the course of those days, people saw the tall and naive professor, who had strutted while he stood testifying, seated, shrunken in size, behind the witness stand like a schoolboy caught in a mistake. With a faint and submissive voice, he ended up acknowledging that the trial had definitely taught him something about historical research.

Following the example of Raul Hilberg, Browning had not examined any concentration camps. He had not visited any facility with “gas chambers.” He had never thought of asking for an expert study of the “weapon of the crime.” In his writings he had made much of homicidal “gas vans,” but he was not able to refer to any authentic photograph, any plan, any technical study, or any expert study. He was not aware that German words like “Gaswagen,” “Spezialwagen,” “Entlausungswagen” (delousing van) could have perfectly innocent meanings. His technical understanding was nil. He had never examined the wartime aerial reconnaissance photos of Auschwitz. He was unaware of all the tortures undergone by Germans, such as Rudolf Hoss, who had spoken of gassings. He knew nothing of the doubts expressed about some of Himmler’s speeches or about the Goebbels diary.

A great follower of the trials of war criminals, Browning had only questioned the prosecutors, never the defense lawyers. His ignorance of the transcript of the Nuremberg trial was disconcerting. He had not even read what Hans Frank, former Governor General of Poland, had said before the Nuremberg tribunal about his “diary” and about “the extermination of the Jews.” That was inexcusable! As a matter of fact, Browning claimed to have found irrefutable proof of the existence of a policy of exterminating the Jews in the Frank diary. He had discovered one incriminating sentence. He did not know that Frank had given the Tribunal an explanation of that kind of sentence, chosen beforehand from the hundreds of thousands of sentences in a personnel and administrative journal of 11,560 pages. Furthermore, Frank had spontaneously turned over his “diary” to the Americans when they came to arrest him. The sincerity of the former Governor General is so obvious to anyone who reads his deposition that Christopher Browning, invited to hear the content, did not raise the least objection. One last humiliation awaited him.

For the sake of his thesis, he invoked a passage from the well-known “protocol” of the Wannsee conference (20 January 1942). He had made his own translation of the passage, a translation that was seriously in error. At that point, his thesis collapsed. Finally, his own personal explanation of a “policy of the extermination of the Jews” was the same as Hilberg’s. Everything was explained by the “nod” of Adolf Hitler. In other words, the Fuhrer of the German people did not need to give any written or even spoken order for the extermination of the Jews. It was enough for him to give a “nod” at the beginning of the operation and, for the rest, a series of “signals”. And that was understood!

Charles Biedermann

The other expert called by the prosecution (who had taken the stand before Browning) was Charles Biedermann, a Swiss citizen, a delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and, most importantly, the director of the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Arolsen, West Germany. The ITS has an unbelievable wealth of information about the fate of individual victims of National Socialism and, in particular, of former concentration camp inmates. I believe that it is at Arolsen that one could determine the real number of Jews who died during the war. The prosecution did not benefit from this experts testimony. On the contrary, the defense scored numerous points on cross-examination. Biedermann recognized that the ICRC had never found any proof of the existence of homicidal gas chambers in the German camps. The visit by one of its delegates to Auschwitz in September 1944 had done no more than conclude the existence of a rumor on that subject. To his embarrassment, the expert was obliged to admit that he was wrong in attributing to the National Socialists the expression “extermination camps”. He had not noticed that this was a term coined by the Allies.

Biedermann said that he was not familiar with the ICRC reports on the atrocities undergone by the Germans just before and just after the end of the war. In particular, he knew nothing about the terrible treatment of many German prisoners. It would seem that the ICRC had nothing about the massive deportations of German minorities from the east, nothing on the horrors of the total collapse of Germany at the very end of the war, nothing about summary executions and, in particular, the massacre by rifle, machine gun, shovels and pickaxes, of 520 German soldiers and officers who had surrendered to the Americans at Dachau on April 29, 1945 (even though Victor Maurer, ICRC delegate, was apparently there).

The International Tracing Service included among those “persecuted” by the Nazis even indisputably criminal prisoners in the concentration camps. He relied on the information supplied by a Communist organization, the “Auschwitz State Museum.” Beginning in 1978, in order to prevent all Revisionist research, the International Tracing Service closed its doors to historians and researchers, except for those bearing a special authorization from one of the ten governments (including that of Israel) which oversee the activity of the International Tracing Service. Henceforth the Tracing Service was forbidden to calculate and publish, as it had done until then, statistical evaluations of the number of dead in the various camps. The annual activity reports could no longer be made available to the public, except for their first third, which had been of no interest to researchers.

Biedermann confirmed a news story that had filtered out in 1964 at the Frankfurt trial: at the time of liberation of Auschwitz, the Soviets and the Poles had discovered the death register of that complex of 39 camps and sub-camps. The register consisted of 38 or 39 volumes. The Soviets keep 36 or 37 of those volumes in Moscow while the Poles keep two or three other volumes at the “Auschwitz State Museum,” a copy of which they have furnished to the International Tracing Service in Arolsen. But neither the Soviets nor the Poles nor the International Tracing Service authorize research in these volumes. Biedermann did not even want to reveal the number of dead counted in the two or three volumes of which the ITS has a copy. It is clear that, if the content of the death register of Auschwitz were made public, it would be the end of the myth of the millions of deaths in the camp.

No “Survivor” Witnesses for the Prosecution

The judge asked the prosecutor whether he would call any “survivors” to the witness stand. The prosecutor answered no. The experience of 1985 had been too embarrassing. The cross examination had been devastating. It is regrettable that at the trial of Klaus Barbie in France in 1987 and at the trial of John Demjanjuk in Israel in 1987-1988, no defense lawyer has followed Douglas Christie’s example in the first Zündel trial (1985): Christie had shown that by carefully questioning witnesses about the gassing process itself, one could destroy the very foundation of the “extermination camp” myth.

The Witnesses and Experts for the Defense

Most of the witnesses and experts for the defense were as precise and concrete as people like Hilberg or Browning had been imprecise and metaphysical. The Swede Ditlieb Felderer showed about 380 slides of Auschwitz and of the other camps in Poland. The American, Mark Weber, whose knowledge of the documents is impressive, engaged in clarifications of several aspects of the Holocaust, in particular the Einsatzgruppen.* The German Tjudar Rudolph dealt with the Lodz ghetto and visits by the ICRC delegates at the end of 1941 to Auschwitz, Majdanek and other camps.

Thies Christophersen had been in charge of an agricultural research enterprise in the Auschwitz region in 1944. He visited the Birkenau camp several times to requisition personnel there and never noticed the horrors usually described. On the witness stand he repeated point by point what he had written about the camp, starting in 1973 with a 19-page report (Kritik, No. 23, p. 14-32). The Austrian-born Canadian Maria Van Herwaarden was interned at Birkenau starting in 1942. She saw nothing, either close up or from a distance, that resembled mass murder, although she confirmed that many of the inmates had died of typhus. The American Bradley Smith, a member of a “Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust,” spoke about his experience in more than 100 question-and-answer interviews on American radio and television on the Holocaust issue.

The Austrian Emil Lachout commented on the famous “Muller Document,” which, since December 1987, has thrown the Austrian authorities into disarray. The document, dated October 1, 1948, revealed that even then, Allied commissions of inquiry had already rejected the stories of homicidal “gassings” in a whole series of camps, including Dachau, Ravensbrück, Struthof (Natzweiler), Stutthof (Danzig), Sachsenhausen, and Mauthausen (Austria). The document specifically confirms that confessions of Germans had been extorted by torture and that testimonies by former inmates were false.

Dr. Russell Barton recounted his horrified discovery of the camp at Bergen-Belsen at the time of liberation. Until that moment he had believed in a deliberate program of extermination. Then he noted the fact that, in an apocalyptic Germany, the piles of corpses and the walking skeletons were the result of the frightful conditions of an overcrowded camp, ravaged by epidemics, and almost entirely deprived of medicine, food, and water because of Allied bombings.

The German Udo Walendy outlined the many forgeries he had discovered, in wartime atrocity photographs and other documents, either altered or forged by a team headed by a British propagandist called Sefton Delmer. J.G. Burg, a Jew who lives in Munich, told of his experiences in the war and confirmed that there had never been any policy for the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.

Academics like the Chinese professor Dr. K.T. Fann, a Marxist, and Dr. Gary Botting, who lost his teaching position at Red Deer College (Alberta) as a result of testifying at the Zündel trial in 1985, testified that the Harwood booklet was essentially a work of opinion, and hence not subject to legal prohibition. Jürgen Neumann, a close associate and friend of Zündel, testified as to Zündel’s state of minds when the booklet first was published. Ernst Neilsen testified on the obstacles he encountered at the University of Toronto to open research on the Holocaust. Ivan Lagacé, director of the crematory at Calgary, demonstrated the practical impossibility of the numbers alleged by Hilberg to have been cremated at Auschwitz.

For my part, I appeared as an expert witness for nearly six days. I concentrated particularly on my investigations of the American gas chambers. I recalled that Zyklon B is essentially hydrocyanic acid and that it is with this gas that certain American penitentiaries execute those who have been condemned to death.

In 1945 the Allies should have asked specialists on American gas chambers to examine the buildings, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, which were supposed to have been used to gas millions of people. Since 1977, I have had the following idea: when one deals with a vast historical problem like that of the reality or the legend of the Holocaust, one must strive to get to the core of the problem; in this case the central problem is Auschwitz and the core of that problem is a space of 275 square meters: the 65 square meters of the “gas chamber” of crematorium I at Auschwitz and, at Birkenau, the 210 square meters of the “gas chamber” of crematorium II. In 1988, my idea remained the same: let us have expert studies of those 275 square meters and we will have an answer to the vast problem of the Holocaust! I showed the jury my photos of the gas chamber at the Maryland State Penitentiary in Baltimore as well as my plans for the Auschwitz gas chambers and I underlined the physical and chemical impossibilities of the latter ones.

A Sensational Turn of Events: The Leuchter Report

Ernst Zündel, in possession of the correspondence I had exchanged in 1977-78 with the six American penitentiaries outfitted with gas chambers, gave attorney Barbara Kulaszka the job of getting in touch with the chief wardens of those penitentiaries in order to see if one of them would agree to appear in court to explain how a real gas chamber operates. Bill Armontrout, chief warden of the penitentiary at Jefferson City (Missouri), agreed to testify and in doing so pointed out that no one in the USA was more knowledgeable about the functioning of gas chambers than Fred A. Leuchter, an engineer from Boston. I went to visit Leuchter on February 3 and 4, 1988. I found that he had never asked himself any questions about the “gas chambers” in the German camps. He had simply believed in their existence. After I began to show him my files, he became aware of the chemical and physical impossibility of the German “gassings” and he agreed to examine our documents in Toronto.

After that, at Zündel’s expense, he left for Poland with a secretary (his wife), a draftsman, a video-cameraman and an interpreter. He came back and drew up a 192-page report (including appendices). He also brought back 32 samples taken, on the one hand, from the crematories of Auschwitz and Birkenau at the site of the homicidal “gassings” and, on the other hand, in a disinfection gas chamber at Birkenau. His conclusion was simple: there had never been any homicidal gassings at Auschwitz, Birkenau, or Majdanek.

On April 20 and 21, 1988, Fred Leuchter appeared on the witness stand in the Toronto courtroom. He told the story of his investigation and presented his conclusions. I am convinced that during those two days I was an eyewitness to the death of the gas chamber myth, a myth which, in my opinion, had entered its dead throes at the Sorbonne colloquium on “Nazi Germany and the Extermination of the Jews” (June 29 to July 2, 1982), where the organizers themselves began to grasp that there was no proof of the existence of the gas chambers.

In the Toronto courtroom emotions were intense, in particular among the friends of Sabina Citron. Ernst Zündel’s friends were also moved, but for a different reason: they were witnessing the veil of the great swindle being torn away. As for me, I felt both relief and melancholy: relief because a thesis that I had defended for so many years was at last fully confirmed, and melancholy because I had fathered the idea in the first place. I had even, with the clumsiness of a man of letters, presented physical, chemical, topographical and architectural arguments which I now saw summed up by a scientist who was astonishingly precise and thorough.

Would people one day remember the skepticism I had encountered, even from other revisionists? Just before Fred Leuchter, Bill Armontrout had been on the witness stand, where he confirmed, in every detail, what I had said to the jury about the extreme difficulties of a homicidal gassing (not to be confused with a suicidal or accidental gassing). Ken Wilson, a specialist in aerial photographs, had shown that the homicidal “gas chambers” of Auschwitz and Birkenau did not have gas evacuation chimneys, which would have been indispensible. He also showed that I had been right in accusing Serge Klarsfeld and Jean-Claude Pressac of falsifying the map of Birkenau in the Auschwitz Album (Seuil Publishers, 1983, p. 42). Those authors, in order to make the reader believe that groups of Jewish women and children surprised by the photographer between crematories II and III could not go any farther and were thus going to end up in the “gas chambers” and those crematories, had simply eliminated from the map the path which. in reality. let up to the “Zentralsauna,” a large shower facility (located beyond the zone of the crematories), where those women and children were actually going.

James Roth, director of a laboratory in Massachusetts, then testified on the analysis of the 32 samples, the origin of which he was unaware of: all the samples taken in the homicidal “gas chambers” contained a quantity of cyanide which was either unmeasurable or infinitesimal, while the sample from the disinfection gas chamber, taken for comparison’s sake, contained an enormous amount of cyanide (the infinitesimal quantity detected in the former case can be explained by the fact that the supposed homicidal gas chambers were in fact morgues for preserving bodies; such morgues could have been occasionally disinfected with Zyklon B).

David Irving

The British historian David Irving enjoys great prestige. Zündel thought of asking him to testify, but there was a problem: Irving was only partly a Revisionist. The thesis that he defended, for example, inHitler’s War (New York, The Viking Press, 1977) can be summed up as follows: Hitler never gave an order for the extermination of the Jews; at least up to the end of 1943 he was kept in ignorance of that extermination; only Himmler and a group of about 70 or so persons were aware of it; in October 1944 Himmler, who wanted to get into the good graces of the Allies, gave an order to cease the extermination of the Jews.

I had met Irving in Los Angeles in September of 1983 at the annual convention of the Institute for Historical Review, where I challenged him by asking several questions about proof to support his thesis. Then I published an article entitled “A Challenge to David Irving” in The Journal of Historical Review(Winter 1984, p. 289-305, and Spring 1985, p. 8 and 122). I tried to convince this brilliant historian that logically he could no longer be satisfied with a semi-Revisionist position. To begin with, I challenged him to produce Himmler’s order to stop the extermination, an order which never actually existed. Later on, I learned from various sources that Irving was undergoing a change that moved him in the direction of Revisionism.

In 1988, Zündel became convinced that the British historian was only waiting for a decisive event to take a final step in our direction. After arriving in Toronto, David Irving discovered in rapid succession the Leuchter report and an impressive number of documents that Zündel, his friends and I had accumulated over the course of several years. The last reservations or the last misunderstandings melted away in the course of a meeting. He agreed to testify on the stand. In the opinion of those who were present at the two trials (1985 and 1988), no single testimony, except that of Fred Leuchter, caused such a sensation. For more than three days, David Irving, engaging in a sort of public confession, took back all that he had said about the extermination of the Jews and without reservation adopted the Revisionist position. With courage and honesty, he showed how an historian can be brought to revise profoundly his views on the history of the Second World War.

The Zündel Story

Ernst Zündel had promised that his trial would be “the trial of the Nuremberg Trial” or “the Stalingrad of the ‘exterminationists'”. The unfolding of those two long trials proved him right, even though the jury, “instructed” by the judge to consider the Holocaust as an established fact “which no reasonable person can doubt,” finally found him guilty. Zündel has already won. It remains for him to make it known to Canada and to the entire world. The media black-out of the 1988 trial was almost complete. Jewish organizations campaigned vigorously for such a blackout, and even went so far as to say that they did not want an impartial account of the trial. They did not want any account of it at all. The paradox is that the only publication which reported relatively honestly about the trial was The Canadian Jewish News. Ernst Zündel and the Leuchter report have left a profound mark on history; both will be remembered for many years to come.

December 1, 1988

* Weber also clarified the meaning of the term “Final Solution” (emigration or deportation, but never extermination of Jews): the testimony of Judge Konrad Morgen; the tortures of Rudolf Höss and Oswald Pohl; the true history of revisionism; and the concessions made year after year by the exterminationists to the Revisionist viewpoint.

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First published in The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1988-89 (Vol. 8, No. 4), pages 417-431.

Posted by N N

Labels: “Did Six Million Really Die?”Arnold FriedmanDavid IrvingDouglas ChristieErnst ZündelFrançois DupratFred LeuchterHilbergHugh LockePierre Viansson-PontéRonald ThomasSabina CitronVrba

GIVE UP FREEDOM TO GAIN PERPETUAL WAR? NO THANK YOU!

Give Up Freedom To Gain Perpetual War? No Thank You!

In times of conflict, when our country is at war, we are willing to tolerate such inconveniences, burdens, and abridgements of our rights and freedoms as are deemed to be necessary for the war effort. We recognize, in such times, that the good of our whole country must come first and that we must come together in support of those who are fighting on our behalf. Implicit in all of this, however, is the understanding that war is an exceptional circumstance and that the conditions of peace in which our rights and freedoms are not so curtailed are the norm.

This long-standing traditional consensus served us well down through the ages but in the last century it was torn apart by attacks coming from two different directions. While there have always been those who have defected from their society’s collective efforts in wartime in post-World War II conflicts these have occurred on a much larger scale as part of organized movements that have been driven by ideologies such as pacifism. From this direction the tradition that tells us to come together in unity when our country is at war has come under attack. The attack from the other direction is upon the tradition that tells us to make the conditions of peace the norm and it is this attack, and especially one particular form of this attack, that I wish to discuss here. 

 
 
 
'Give Up Freedom To Gain Perpetual War? No Thank You!

In times of conflict, when our country is at war, we are willing to tolerate such inconveniences, burdens, and abridgements of our rights and freedoms as are deemed to be necessary for the war effort. We recognize, in such times, that the good of our whole country must come first and that we must come together in support of those who are fighting on our behalf. Implicit in all of this, however, is the understanding that war is an exceptional circumstance and that the conditions of peace in which our rights and freedoms are not so curtailed are the norm. 

This long-standing traditional consensus served us well down through the ages but in the last century it was torn apart by attacks coming from two different directions. While there have always been those who have defected from their society’s collective efforts in wartime in post-World War II conflicts these have occurred on a much larger scale as part of organized movements that have been driven by ideologies such as pacifism. From this direction the tradition that tells us to come together in unity when our country is at war has come under attack. The attack from the other direction is upon the tradition that tells us to make the conditions of peace the norm and it is this attack, and especially one particular form of this attack, that I wish to discuss here. 

If the tradition under attack says that the conditions of peace in which the public are not overly burdened with rules and taxes and their customary rights and freedoms are not abridged are to be the norm then to attack this tradition is to say that the conditions appropriate for wartime are to be the norm instead. One way in which this occurred in the last century was that liberalism, the ideology that started in the so-called “Enlightenment” and came to dominate the Western world in the period known as the Modern Age, changed, at least in North America, in the period between the two World Wars. Until the First World War the ideas of John Locke, in which the need to protect the rights and liberties of the individual from the state was stressed, formed the most prominent strain in liberal thought. After the war the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, in which the role of the modern democratic state as the agent and instrument of utilitarian progress was emphasized, eclipsed those of Locke. The basis of this shift in liberal thought was the reasoning on the part of many liberals who served in administrative positions in the First World War that if the government can mobilize and organize society for the sake of the war effort in times of war then surely it can mobilize and organize society to achieve a better, more just, society in times of peace. This has certainly taken the liberty out of liberalism.

Another way in which governments, addicted to wartime powers, have resisted the tradition of reverting to the conditions of peace as the norm, has been to make conflict the norm rather than peace. About the time that liberalism underwent the shift described in the preceding paragraph liberals of the older type, including American historians such as Charles Beard and Harry Elmer Barnes, began to see a tendency in the foreign policy of the liberal American Presidents of the ‘30s and ‘40s towards holding up “freedom”, “democracy”, and “peace” as ideals while constantly mobilizing the country for war on behalf of those ideals. “Perpetual war for perpetual peace” was how Beard described this policy to Barnes, who borrowed the title for a anthology of essays he edited in 1953 that took a hard, critical, look at the policies of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. (1) Another of these older type liberals, who now called themselves libertarians, Murray N. Rothbard, observed that a “welfare-warfare state” had developed that both practiced the policy of perpetual war for perpetual peace and employed high levels of taxation, spending, and regulation for non-belligerent, progressive purposes in the Benthamite manner we have discussed. That a policy of perpetual war for perpetual peace could be used as a cover for collusion between military leaders and arms manufacturers for the sake of war profiteering on a whole new level made possible by the advent of mass production was a danger against which American President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his Farewell Address.

In the last decade and a half events have transpired that our governments have exploited to take the policy of perpetual war for perpetual peace to a whole new level.

Since the end of the Second World War the acknowledged leading country of the Western world has, for better or worse, been the United States of America. After the Cold War came to an end America and the West have become increasingly entangled in the conflicts of the Middle East. When, on September 11, 2001, the United States found herself the victim of a terrorist attack the American President at the time declared a “War on Terror”. As part of this “War on Terror” the American government created a powerful new agency, the Department of Homeland Security, charged with the task of preventing terrorist attacks on American soil, and the USA PATRIOT Act, which enhanced the investigatory powers of law enforcement and security agencies by removing such impediments as the need for a court order to search records, was rushed through Congress. Here in Canada Jean Chretien’s Liberals rushed similar legislation through Parliament in the form of the Anti-Terrorism Act of the fall of 2001.

The supporters of bills like these argued that they were necessary to remove obstructions that got in the way of security agencies and hindered them from doing their job of protecting us from the violence of terrorism. Critics and opponents of the same bills argued that these so-called obstructions were actually safeguards that protected Canadians and Americans against the misuse of government power and that to get rid of these safeguards is to abandon centuries of tradition, stretching back to before the founding of either the United States or Canada, in which these safeguards evolved to protect our rights and liberties, lives and persons. These critics were, of course, right. If we were to interpret every crisis that occurs as indicating a need for either enhanced government powers or a loosening of constitutional, prescriptive, and legal restraints on the use of government powers, very soon we would have an omnipotent state and no rights and freedoms worth speaking of.

Nobody made this case better than the late paleoconservative columnist Sam Francis, who in column after column took the administration of George W. Bush to task for such things as trying terrorism suspects before military tribunals rather than real courts, eavesdropping on confidential communications and issuing national id cards, creating the Department of Homeland Security, and putting police surveillance cameras throughout federal buildings in Washington D. C., as creating a slippery slope, whereby Americans would become accustomed to less rights, liberties, and constitutional protections and to being spied on by their government. Noting that the powers granted to the American government by the Patriot Act “are far larger than the government of any free people should have and that whatever powers this administration doesn’t use could still be used by future ones”, he pointed out that this “is how free peoples typically lose their freedom—not by a dictator like Saddam Hussein suddenly grabbing power in the night and seizing all the library records but by the slow erosion of the habits and mentality that enables freedom to exist at all” and concluded that the Bush administration was writing the last chapters in the story of American liberty.

Chretien’s Anti-Terrorism Act was no better. This Act utterly abandoned our country’s traditions of liberty and justice and allowed for people to be arrested and detained without charges, denied basic legal protections, and tried in secret without being guaranteed the opportunity to hear and respond to all the evidence against them, if the government were to determine them to be a threat to national security. This Act expired several years ago – legislation of this nature can only be enacted for five year periods – but, contrary to Kelly McParland’s claim in the National Post on February 2nd of this year, it did not expire without having been used. Among its other provisions was an amendment to the national security certificate provision of the Immigration Act that made possible an incident that was a shameful disgrace to our country.

An elderly man, who immigrated to Canada from Germany in the 1950s, who had never committed any violent crime here or elsewhere although he was the victim of terrorist attacks on the part of the followers of Rabbi Kahane, but who was repeatedly dragged through our courts for the “crime” of trying to spread the idea that accounts of atrocities committed by the other side in the Second World War still need to be revised to less resemble wartime propaganda, moved to the United States in order to escape this persecution. He married a woman there, applied for citizenship, and was arrested by United States Immigration who handed him over to our authorities, who issued a national security certificate against him. He was placed in solitary confinement and tried behind closed doors by a judge who refused to recuse himself, despite his obvious bias, and found guilty on the basis of evidence he was not allowed to hear in full, and was then sent to Germany, with our government knowing full well that the German government would arrest him upon landing, and sentence him to five years in prison for mere words that he said. This man, Ernst Zündel, was a noted admirer of a rather odious historical regime, but that did not make him a terrorist any more than Pierre Trudeau’s admiration for the even more odious Maoist regime in China, which, as was not the case with Zündel, was still around when Trudeau was doing the admiring, made the former Prime Minister a terrorist. It is certainly no excuse for treating the man with such blatant injustice.

Chretien’s Anti-Terrorism Act has, as we have noted, expired but our current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, wishes to pass another one. Bill C-51, which has passed its second reading and been referred to the Standing Committee in the House, has several parts to it. The first, and the one most emphasized by the bill’s advocates and defenders, is the Security of Canada Information Sharing Act which tells other government agencies to share their information with those charged with protecting national security. This sounds reasonable at first, until you think about why government agencies were prevented from doing this in the first place. The fourth part is the one the bill’s detractors prefer to emphasize because it greatly enhances the powers of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). The bill’s supporters say this is to reduce threats to Canadian security, its detractors say that it is to enable CSIS to better spy on Canadians. Other parts of the bill include the Secure Air Travel Act, which authorizes the creation of a no-fly list and otherwise ensures that airport security will be even more of an obnoxious pain in the buttocks than it already is, and various amendments to the Criminal Code including one that makes mincemeat out of the traditional right to confront and challenge your accuser in court in the euphemistic name of the “protection of witnesses”.

This bill is an abomination and the vote on it should be a pretty good litmus test as to how much respect for Canadians and their traditional rights and freedoms our Members of Parliament and Senators possess. The present government was elected by supporters who were sick and tired of the way the Liberal Party was overtaxing and overregulating Canadians while showing complete disregard for our traditions, rights, and freedoms. Why then is it determined to establish a surveillance state? It is rather ironic that the most active opposition to this bill in the House seems to be coming from the party whose members can never speak about freedom without sounding like a Cold War era apparatchik spouting off about “the freedom loving people of the Soviet Union”.

The fact of the matter is that the “war on terrorism” is the ultimate form of “perpetual war for perpetual peace”. The enemy in this war is not a foreign government, with its own territory, that can be decisively conquered, defeated, or destroyed. No matter how many Cato the Elders we may find to punctuate their speeches with “terrorismo delenda est”, we will never be able to produce a single Scipio Africanus to conclusively defeat terrorism, or an Aemilianus to raze its stronghold to the ground, and sow its fields with salt, that it may never rise again. It is not that kind of an enemy. Terrorism can pop up anywhere at any time. A war against terrorism is a war that can never end. A government that wishes to constantly retain its wartime powers and abandon the traditional understanding that peace is to be the norm, not war, could find no better means of accomplishing this end, than by declaring a war on terrorism, and passing bills like C-51.

(1) The title was reused by the late, left-libertarian novelist and essayist Gore Vidal, for a collection of essays similarly criticizing the policies of more recent administrations in 2002.

POSTED BY GERRY T. NEAL AT 11:17 AM 
LABELS: BILL C51, CATO, CHARLES BEARD, DWIGHT EISENHOWER, ERNST ZÜNDEL, FREEDOM, GORE VIDAL, HARRY ELMER BARNES, JEAN CHRETIEN,JEREMY BENTHAM, JOHN LOCKE, MURRAY N. ROTHBARD, SAM FRANCIS,STEPHEN HARPER, WAR ON TERRO'

If the tradition under attack says that the conditions of peace in which the public are not overly burdened with rules and taxes and their customary rights and freedoms are not abridged are to be the norm then to attack this tradition is to say that the conditions appropriate for wartime are to be the norm instead. One way in which this occurred in the last century was that liberalism, the ideology that started in the so-called “Enlightenment” and came to dominate the Western world in the period known as the Modern Age, changed, at least in North America, in the period between the two World Wars. Until the First World War the ideas of John Locke, in which the need to protect the rights and liberties of the individual from the state was stressed, formed the most prominent strain in liberal thought. After the war the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, in which the role of the modern democratic state as the agent and instrument of utilitarian progress was emphasized, eclipsed those of Locke. The basis of this shift in liberal thought was the reasoning on the part of many liberals who served in administrative positions in the First World War that if the government can mobilize and organize society for the sake of the war effort in times of war then surely it can mobilize and organize society to achieve a better, more just, society in times of peace. This has certainly taken the liberty out of liberalism.

Another way in which governments, addicted to wartime powers, have resisted the tradition of reverting to the conditions of peace as the norm, has been to make conflict the norm rather than peace. About the time that liberalism underwent the shift described in the preceding paragraph liberals of the older type, including American historians such as Charles Beard and Harry Elmer Barnes, began to see a tendency in the foreign policy of the liberal American Presidents of the ‘30s and ‘40s towards holding up “freedom”, “democracy”, and “peace” as ideals while constantly mobilizing the country for war on behalf of those ideals. “Perpetual war for perpetual peace” was how Beard described this policy to Barnes, who borrowed the title for a anthology of essays he edited in 1953 that took a hard, critical, look at the policies of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. (1) Another of these older type liberals, who now called themselves libertarians, Murray N. Rothbard, observed that a “welfare-warfare state” had developed that both practiced the policy of perpetual war for perpetual peace and employed high levels of taxation, spending, and regulation for non-belligerent, progressive purposes in the Benthamite manner we have discussed. That a policy of perpetual war for perpetual peace could be used as a cover for collusion between military leaders and arms manufacturers for the sake of war profiteering on a whole new level made possible by the advent of mass production was a danger against which American President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his Farewell Address.

In the last decade and a half events have transpired that our governments have exploited to take the policy of perpetual war for perpetual peace to a whole new level.

Since the end of the Second World War the acknowledged leading country of the Western world has, for better or worse, been the United States of America. After the Cold War came to an end America and the West have become increasingly entangled in the conflicts of the Middle East. When, on September 11, 2001, the United States found herself the victim of a terrorist attack the American President at the time declared a “War on Terror”. As part of this “War on Terror” the American government created a powerful new agency, the Department of Homeland Security, charged with the task of preventing terrorist attacks on American soil, and the USA PATRIOT Act, which enhanced the investigatory powers of law enforcement and security agencies by removing such impediments as the need for a court order to search records, was rushed through Congress. Here in Canada Jean Chretien’s Liberals rushed similar legislation through Parliament in the form of the Anti-Terrorism Act of the fall of 2001.

The supporters of bills like these argued that they were necessary to remove obstructions that got in the way of security agencies and hindered them from doing their job of protecting us from the violence of terrorism. Critics and opponents of the same bills argued that these so-called obstructions were actually safeguards that protected Canadians and Americans against the misuse of government power and that to get rid of these safeguards is to abandon centuries of tradition, stretching back to before the founding of either the United States or Canada, in which these safeguards evolved to protect our rights and liberties, lives and persons. These critics were, of course, right. If we were to interpret every crisis that occurs as indicating a need for either enhanced government powers or a loosening of constitutional, prescriptive, and legal restraints on the use of government powers, very soon we would have an omnipotent state and no rights and freedoms worth speaking of.

Nobody made this case better than the late paleoconservative columnist Sam Francis, who in column after column took the administration of George W. Bush to task for such things as trying terrorism suspects before military tribunals rather than real courtseavesdropping on confidential communications and issuing national id cardscreating the Department of Homeland Security, and putting police surveillance cameras throughout federal buildings in Washington D. C., as creating a slippery slope, whereby Americans would become accustomed to less rights, liberties, and constitutional protections and to being spied on by their government. Noting that the powers granted to the American government by the Patriot Act “are far larger than the government of any free people should have and that whatever powers this administration doesn’t use could still be used by future ones”, he pointed out that this “is how free peoples typically lose their freedom—not by a dictator like Saddam Hussein suddenly grabbing power in the night and seizing all the library records but by the slow erosion of the habits and mentality that enables freedom to exist at all” and concluded that the Bush administration was writing the last chapters in the story of American liberty.

Chretien’s Anti-Terrorism Act was no better. This Act utterly abandoned our country’s traditions of liberty and justice and allowed for people to be arrested and detained without charges, denied basic legal protections, and tried in secret without being guaranteed the opportunity to hear and respond to all the evidence against them, if the government were to determine them to be a threat to national security. This Act expired several years ago – legislation of this nature can only be enacted for five year periods – but, contrary to Kelly McParland’s claim in the National Post on February 2nd of this year, it did not expire without having been used. Among its other provisions was an amendment to the national security certificate provision of the Immigration Act that made possible an incident that was a shameful disgrace to our country.

An elderly man, who immigrated to Canada from Germany in the 1950s, who had never committed any violent crime here or elsewhere although he was the victim of terrorist attacks on the part of the followers of Rabbi Kahane, but who was repeatedly dragged through our courts for the “crime” of trying to spread the idea that accounts of atrocities committed by the other side in the Second World War still need to be revised to less resemble wartime propaganda, moved to the United States in order to escape this persecution. He married a woman there, applied for citizenship, and was arrested by United States Immigration who handed him over to our authorities, who issued a national security certificate against him. He was placed in solitary confinement and tried behind closed doors by a judge who refused to recuse himself, despite his obvious bias, and found guilty on the basis of evidence he was not allowed to hear in full, and was then sent to Germany, with our government knowing full well that the German government would arrest him upon landing, and sentence him to five years in prison for mere words that he said. This man, Ernst Zündel, was a noted admirer of a rather odious historical regime, but that did not make him a terrorist any more than Pierre Trudeau’s admiration for the even more odious Maoist regime in China, which, as was not the case with Zündel, was still around when Trudeau was doing the admiring, made the former Prime Minister a terrorist. It is certainly no excuse for treating the man with such blatant injustice.

Chretien’s Anti-Terrorism Act has, as we have noted, expired but our current Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, wishes to pass another one. Bill C-51, which has passed its second reading and been referred to the Standing Committee in the House, has several parts to it. The first, and the one most emphasized by the bill’s advocates and defenders, is the Security of Canada Information Sharing Act which tells other government agencies to share their information with those charged with protecting national security. This sounds reasonable at first, until you think about why government agencies were prevented from doing this in the first place. The fourth part is the one the bill’s detractors prefer to emphasize because it greatly enhances the powers of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). The bill’s supporters say this is to reduce threats to Canadian security, its detractors say that it is to enable CSIS to better spy on Canadians. Other parts of the bill include the Secure Air Travel Act, which authorizes the creation of a no-fly list and otherwise ensures that airport security will be even more of an obnoxious pain in the buttocks than it already is, and various amendments to the Criminal Code including one that makes mincemeat out of the traditional right to confront and challenge your accuser in court in the euphemistic name of the “protection of witnesses”.

This bill is an abomination and the vote on it should be a pretty good litmus test as to how much respect for Canadians and their traditional rights and freedoms our Members of Parliament and Senators possess. The present government was elected by supporters who were sick and tired of the way the Liberal Party was overtaxing and overregulating Canadians while showing complete disregard for our traditions, rights, and freedoms. Why then is it determined to establish a surveillance state? It is rather ironic that the most active opposition to this bill in the House seems to be coming from the party whose members can never speak about freedom without sounding like a Cold War era apparatchik spouting off about “the freedom loving people of the Soviet Union”.

The fact of the matter is that the “war on terrorism” is the ultimate form of “perpetual war for perpetual peace”. The enemy in this war is not a foreign government, with its own territory, that can be decisively conquered, defeated, or destroyed. No matter how many Cato the Elders we may find to punctuate their speeches with “terrorismo delenda est”, we will never be able to produce a single Scipio Africanus to conclusively defeat terrorism, or an Aemilianus to raze its stronghold to the ground, and sow its fields with salt, that it may never rise again. It is not that kind of an enemy. Terrorism can pop up anywhere at any time. A war against terrorism is a war that can never end. A government that wishes to constantly retain its wartime powers and abandon the traditional understanding that peace is to be the norm, not war, could find no better means of accomplishing this end, than by declaring a war on terrorism, and passing bills like C-51.

(1) The title was reused by the late, left-libertarian novelist and essayist Gore Vidal, for a collection of essays similarly criticizing the policies of more recent administrations in 2002.


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