J'accuse! (Conclusion from previous entry)
NOTE: This is the conclusion of the previous entry, that seems to have been too long for Blogigo software. It doesn't make any sense on its own, so please read the previous section first! The entry begins here.
BELOW: Dirk Moses of the University of Sydney's History Department: an example of the kind of academic hack under discussion. (For an excellent critique of Moses's disingenuous treatment of Holocaust revisionism, see here.) Moses reportedly refers to people who think there ought to be evidence for the Holocaust as 'crazed positivists.' Who would want to study history with this guy?
In short, whether or not the Holocaust took place, the historiography of the Holocaust is a house of cards: it is a vast edifice constructed on the precarious foundation of mere transcriptions of documents which have never been examined by those who cite them and whose authenticity has never been and probably never can be established. One wonders how many academics have been honest enough to share this information with their students.
Given the powerful challenge mounted to Holocaust orthodoxy by revisionism, the documentary status quo seems remarkable. You would think that by now academic historians would be demanding free and unfettered access to original documents for the purpose of using them to refute revisionist opponents. You would think that the numerous websites that have proliferated in recent years aimed at refuting revisionism would be bristling with scanned images of original documents, which would make mincemeat of the doubting Thomases.(8) Yet every such website of which I am aware - and every book which follows the same agenda - aims to persuade by means of mere transcriptions.(9)
Clearly, academic historians are only interested in historical truth so long as it does not upset any of the central dogmas of the modern political religion. To affirm that religion, they enthusiastically write the history of WWII using documents of doubtful authenticity and entirely disregard revisionist writings, even though the latter constitute the only form of independent quality control in the field of Holocaust studies. (You don't think peer review exists in any meaningful sense in Holocaust studies, do you? How could it, in such an atmosphere of intimidation and persecution?)
As both a credentialled historian and a member of the interested public I must say that I find myself heartily sick of the appalling state of academic historiography today. Because they show a disgraceful disregard of issues such as the provenance of Holocaust documents, academic historians deserve to be dismissed as handmaidens of a monumental hoax rather than devotees of the truth.
The current generation of academic historians seems to me to consist of crooks, liars and gullible fools - and I would not hesitate to apply the latter accusation to several prominent academic historians I know personally who have published on the subject of the Holocaust (including one who maintains, quite seriously, that Elie Wiesel's farcical Night is by the far the best book on Auschwitz).
But what else can we expect, when professional history is in the service of a dogmatic religion rather than historical truth?
(1) http://www.nipissingu.ca/faculty/annec/HIST3926W/Outline.htm
(2) The biggest academic controversy in recent years took place in 2001-2 and concerned a book, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, by Michael Bellesiles, who was at the time Professor of History at Emory University, Atlants, Georgia, U.S. However, this controversy concerned trivial offences against historiographical conventions which are committed routinely by all historians writing large books, especially ones on subjects which have not been extensively researched before; the controversy was really nothing more than a rightwing beat-up. In most such cases, even when the work is considerably sloppier, views are challenged and modified over the years as the historiography of the subject grows and becomes more sophisticated. As for iconoclasm, the closest to an iconoclastic academic historian I can think of is Professor Justin McCarthy professor of history at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky, who argues convincingly that the alleged Armenian holocaust is a fabrication.
(3) For Hayward's overview of the affair, see http://www.joelhayward.com/myoverviewoftheaffair.htm
(4) John Costello, Mask of Treachery, Pan Books, 1989, p. xvii.
(5) Léon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate, New York, Holocaust Library, 1979, p. 108, cited in Jürgen Graf, The Giant With Feet of Clay: Raul Hilberg and his Standard Work on the '‘Holocaust‘', Capshaw, Alabama [U.S.], Theses & Dissertations Press, 2001, p. 19.
(6) http://www.cwporter.com/g3803ps.htm
(7) http://www.cwporter.com/d2.htm
(8) From this point of view, the best exerminationist website is Mazal.org, which currently offers photographic reproductions of 25 original documents, including 23 from the Auschwitz State Museum concerning the construction of the crematories. (Although this is only 23 pages out of at least 88,000 pages of Auschwitz Central Construction Office documents that were captured by the Red Army in 1945, it is better than nothing.) Although a number of additional documents on Mazal.org are represented as 'German Original' documents, this is a deception. The documents so identified are all inscribed in English as 'certified true copies,' meaning that they are postwar creations. They are not authentic Nazi-era documents but belong to the class of documents that were prepared for the Nazi war crimes trials by the Documentation Division of the OCC in Paris.
(9) Here are a few examples of the websites to which I refer:
The Nizkor Project A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust
Documentary Resources on the Nazi Genocide and its Denial
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The Jewish Holocaust 1933-1945
BELOW: Dirk Moses of the University of Sydney's History Department: an example of the kind of academic hack under discussion. (For an excellent critique of Moses's disingenuous treatment of Holocaust revisionism, see here.) Moses reportedly refers to people who think there ought to be evidence for the Holocaust as 'crazed positivists.' Who would want to study history with this guy?
In short, whether or not the Holocaust took place, the historiography of the Holocaust is a house of cards: it is a vast edifice constructed on the precarious foundation of mere transcriptions of documents which have never been examined by those who cite them and whose authenticity has never been and probably never can be established. One wonders how many academics have been honest enough to share this information with their students.
Given the powerful challenge mounted to Holocaust orthodoxy by revisionism, the documentary status quo seems remarkable. You would think that by now academic historians would be demanding free and unfettered access to original documents for the purpose of using them to refute revisionist opponents. You would think that the numerous websites that have proliferated in recent years aimed at refuting revisionism would be bristling with scanned images of original documents, which would make mincemeat of the doubting Thomases.(8) Yet every such website of which I am aware - and every book which follows the same agenda - aims to persuade by means of mere transcriptions.(9)
Clearly, academic historians are only interested in historical truth so long as it does not upset any of the central dogmas of the modern political religion. To affirm that religion, they enthusiastically write the history of WWII using documents of doubtful authenticity and entirely disregard revisionist writings, even though the latter constitute the only form of independent quality control in the field of Holocaust studies. (You don't think peer review exists in any meaningful sense in Holocaust studies, do you? How could it, in such an atmosphere of intimidation and persecution?)
As both a credentialled historian and a member of the interested public I must say that I find myself heartily sick of the appalling state of academic historiography today. Because they show a disgraceful disregard of issues such as the provenance of Holocaust documents, academic historians deserve to be dismissed as handmaidens of a monumental hoax rather than devotees of the truth.
The current generation of academic historians seems to me to consist of crooks, liars and gullible fools - and I would not hesitate to apply the latter accusation to several prominent academic historians I know personally who have published on the subject of the Holocaust (including one who maintains, quite seriously, that Elie Wiesel's farcical Night is by the far the best book on Auschwitz).
But what else can we expect, when professional history is in the service of a dogmatic religion rather than historical truth?
(1) http://www.nipissingu.ca/faculty/annec/HIST3926W/Outline.htm
(2) The biggest academic controversy in recent years took place in 2001-2 and concerned a book, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, by Michael Bellesiles, who was at the time Professor of History at Emory University, Atlants, Georgia, U.S. However, this controversy concerned trivial offences against historiographical conventions which are committed routinely by all historians writing large books, especially ones on subjects which have not been extensively researched before; the controversy was really nothing more than a rightwing beat-up. In most such cases, even when the work is considerably sloppier, views are challenged and modified over the years as the historiography of the subject grows and becomes more sophisticated. As for iconoclasm, the closest to an iconoclastic academic historian I can think of is Professor Justin McCarthy professor of history at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky, who argues convincingly that the alleged Armenian holocaust is a fabrication.
(3) For Hayward's overview of the affair, see http://www.joelhayward.com/myoverviewoftheaffair.htm
(4) John Costello, Mask of Treachery, Pan Books, 1989, p. xvii.
(5) Léon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate, New York, Holocaust Library, 1979, p. 108, cited in Jürgen Graf, The Giant With Feet of Clay: Raul Hilberg and his Standard Work on the '‘Holocaust‘', Capshaw, Alabama [U.S.], Theses & Dissertations Press, 2001, p. 19.
(6) http://www.cwporter.com/g3803ps.htm
(7) http://www.cwporter.com/d2.htm
(8) From this point of view, the best exerminationist website is Mazal.org, which currently offers photographic reproductions of 25 original documents, including 23 from the Auschwitz State Museum concerning the construction of the crematories. (Although this is only 23 pages out of at least 88,000 pages of Auschwitz Central Construction Office documents that were captured by the Red Army in 1945, it is better than nothing.) Although a number of additional documents on Mazal.org are represented as 'German Original' documents, this is a deception. The documents so identified are all inscribed in English as 'certified true copies,' meaning that they are postwar creations. They are not authentic Nazi-era documents but belong to the class of documents that were prepared for the Nazi war crimes trials by the Documentation Division of the OCC in Paris.
(9) Here are a few examples of the websites to which I refer:
The Nizkor Project A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust
Documentary Resources on the Nazi Genocide and its Denial
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The Jewish Holocaust 1933-1945
