Jews and Israel
retrieved from J Neil Schulman's The Book of Words

On Holocaust Revisionism
by Jew Neil Schulman Introduction: 1992

The following article, which I wrote twelve years ago, was originally published in the October, 1981 issue of New Libertarian magazine. I reprint it here, with no changes, if for no other reason than to disprove that I wrote it recently to defend Pat Buchanan from charges of anti-Semitism.

I am not a political supporter of Mr. Buchanan — largely because I disagree with his recently-acquired protectionist views — but it bothers me that Buchanan is being called anti-Semitic merely for questioning whether, in the post-Cold-War world, massive U.S. subsidies to Israel serve any strategic political or military interest of the United States' taxpayer.

It's worth noting that the same issue of New Libertarian magazine that carried my article also carried three articles on the cover theme of that issue — which was punk/new wave music — and the first of several columns by Kerry Thornley, who once bunked with Lee Harvey Oswald in the Marines, was accused of being part of the JFK assassination by Jim Garrison, and who now — possibly as part of some schizophrenic delusion — admits it. New Libertarian was an interesting magazine to be associated with in the 1970's and 80's. Though its circulation was tiny, its influence throughout the libertarian movement was wide. It certainly was not in any way anti-Semitic in its views or editorial policies; the idea is laughable to anyone who knows Samuel Edward Konkin III, the magazine's editor and publisher.

The David McCalden I reference in this article was one of the defendants in the Mel Mermelstein lawsuit against the Institute of Historical Review, which was reported widely and later made into a TV movie. McCalden died a few years ago; of the many individuals I personally know who have died of AIDS, he is one of the few whom I know for a fact — because of women who have told me so — to be, to the best of their knowledge, exclusively heterosexual.

McCalden and I had a strange relationship. It could hardly be called friendship — I, an apostate New York Jew, and he, an Ulster-born anti-Semite — because we never grew to like or respect the other much. But we were often thrown into each other's company at Libertarian Supper Clubs and parties, and spent a good deal of time in conversation, if for no other reason than that we were both writers for New Libertarian. I called him Rabbi McCalden, because he had a much greater interest in Judaism than I did; he accepted the label with a sort of sardonic pride.

I once debated him at a supper-club meeting as a last minute fill-in on the subject not of the Holocaust but on Northern Ireland. Frankly, I don't remember what I said, beyond the position that decentralization along the lines of the Swiss canton system seemed the solution not only in Ulster but also in South Africa and the disputed West Bank in Israel. He didn't disagree so it wasn't much of a debate.

On another occasion the two of us visited the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles together. It was a fascinating exhibition to visit with such a person, particularly because his utter skepticism made me aware of how little physical evidence of the Holocaust was on display there. It bothered me that one exhibit implied it was leather made by the Nazis from human skin; it couldn't have possibly been, since such would have been an unpardonable breach of Jewish law. It also bothered me that there were Jewish newspapers from five years before the Holocaust began, that declared that six million Jews would be murdered. The use of the six-million figure that early creates a cognitive dissonance in me that won't go away.

I have no trouble believing in the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis, because I have no trouble believing in evil. If you do not believe in this particular Holocaust, I can show you others: Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao ze Dong's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia come to mind immediately. If you prefer ancient examples, look up what Genghis Khan did when he rode into an innocent town.

The six million figure isn't crucial to believing in the Holocaust. Neither is belief in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, for that matter: forced marches, machine gun executions, starvation, exposure, and making people live in filth can pile up the bodies fast enough to make getting rid of the dead a major undertaking.

One thing is certain. Jews were well-established in Europe before the Nazis — as well established as they are today in the United States. At the end of the Nazis' work, Europe was Jew-free — and it would have remained so if Germany had won the war.

Whatever you believe about the Holocaust, "Never Again" are two words the world needs to take seriously.

Here, then, is what I had to say about the holocaust over a decade ago. I find that I have no major disagreements today with what I wrote in 1981.

—J. Neil Schulman
March 24, 1992

If you read the papers these days or turn on a television or radio, then you might have heard that there is an ideological and historical War going on concerning the Holocaust, with anti-Semites, revisionist historians, libertarians, and cranks uncritically lumped together on one side, and Jews, concentration camp survivors, and the Zionist Conspiracy uncritically lumped together on the other.

Normally, I write under the name J. (for Joseph) Neil Schulman. Today, for this article, I will call myself Jew Neil Schulman. This is because no matter what I say, I'm going to be classified as a Jewish writer by both sides anyway, and I hope to offend such collectivist bigots on both sides right off.

I was born in 1953, have lived my entire life in the United States, and the worst anti-Semitism I've ever had to undergo is being stoned. Certainly not much when you consider what Jews in Spain, Poland, Germany, and Russia have had to put up with, at various times in history. For the record, I was Bar Mitzvahed at 13, gave a terrific performance, and have done everything I can do to avoid going into a synagogue ever since. Much more interesting to me than the boring lessons in Hebrew were the horror stories my Hebrew tutor, Louisa Munzer, told me of her imprisonment as a young girl in Auschwitz, where she was sterilized by Nazi doctors performing medical experiments on her, and where—so she told me—she avoided being put into the gas chambers—by pinching her cheeks to make herself look healthy.

I have been told by Jews all my life that if I'd been living in Nazi Germany, I would have been sent to a concentration camp simply for being born a Jew.

It wouldn't have made any difference. As an anarchist, I would have been sent to one by the Nazis anyway, regardless of my genetics.

Still, living in the Land of the Free, I was propagandized in favor of my native State mercilessly as a child.

I was told, as Unquestionable Historical Fact, that the Constitution of the United States "gives" us rights — never mind that I was also taught that the Declaration of Independence maintained before the Constitution that rights were not to be given or taken by a government.

I was told, as Unquestionable Historical Fact, that the North fought the South in the Civil War to "free the slaves." Never mind that the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in territories the North did not control, and allowed slave states allied with the Union — Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and sections of other slave states — to keep their slaves. And never mind that the Confederacy told England that they were willing to abolish slavery if only England would support their secession.

I was told as Unquestionable Historical Fact that the United States entered into World War One because of the German sinking of the British ocean liner Lusitania, supposedly a peaceful ship in international waters carrying American civilians. Never mind that it has come out that the Lusitania was actually carrying British munitions.

I was told as Unquestionable Historical Fact that the United States entered World War Two because of an unprovoked sneak attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor. Never mind that Franklin Delano Roosevelt — in his economic and political policies fully as fascistic as Mussolini — had frozen all Japanese assets in the United States, had repeatedly insulted the Japanese ambassadors, had helped blockade the Indonesian Straits which the Japanese needed as vital trade resources, and —if you at all believe that the series of unlikely events which left Pearl Harbor totally unprotected was not coincidental — that in a classic chess move he had gambited the entire fleet at Pearl Harbor because spotting the Japanese that pawn was the only way he could get them to attack a country they knew they couldn't win a war against.

Well, look at the invasion of Toyota, Datsun, and Subaru as reparations.

All of the above Unquestionable Historical Facts were successfully questioned by such revisionist historians as the late Harry Elmer Barnes, a liberal; the late Charles A. Beard, a Progressive; and the very-much-alive James J. Martin, a libertarian.

So we come to the Holocaust.

On the one hand we have a mixed bag of concentration camp survivors—most notably Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal; professional Holocaust historians, most notable Lucy S. Dawidowicz, author of The War Against The Jew 1933-1945; and Zionists, most notably Menachem Begin — who say that even to question the Holocaust is to give aid and comfort to those anti-Semites who would rehabilitate Hitler and the Nazis, deny the unspeakable suffering of the concentration camp survivors, and defame the memory of the Jewish dead.

On the other hand we have a mixed bag of anti-Semites—most notably Willis Carto of the Institute for Historical Review; revisionist historians, most notably James J. Martin; post-War baby-boom generationists such as David McCalden/Lewis Brandon, resigned editor of the I.H.R.'s Journal of Historical Review; and libertarians (who take up the matter only in private conversations) who — for differing reasons — raise various objections to the Unquestionable Historical Fact of the Holocaust.

The latter question — among other things — whether the gas chambers existed to kill people or merely disinfect clothing, whether the number of Jews who died other than in war-related deaths was actually six million, whether the killing of Jews in concentration camps was an official S.S. policy of deliberate extermination, and whether the death of so many Jews could be blamed not only on the Nazis but also the Poles, the Russians, and perhaps the War itself.

Not all of the questioning group question all the traditional claims about the Holocaust. David McCalden, for example, questions — for whatever his reasons are — the six million figure (he thinks it's closer to one million), the claims of gas chamber executions and cremation of the living, the claims of Jews being rendered into bars of soap, and the claim that the Diary of Anne Frank is authentic. McCalden does not, in conversations with me, question that Jews in concentration camps — along with gypsies, communists, homosexuals, and other enemies of the State — were subjected by the Nazis to shootings, forced labor, starvation, exposure, beatings, dislocation and breaking up of families, forced marches, robbery and terrorism.

If this isn't conceding the Holocaust, and arguing about details, I don't know what is.

Of the various different claims about the Holocaust, some by their nature involve and arise out of those who were there as witnesses — concentration camp survivors, "Good" Nazis and even "Good" S.S. men, (Simon Wiesenthal documents deeds of kindness by individuals of both groups), regular-army Germans who disliked the S.S., and Allied soldiers who liberated the concentration camps.

Some of the claims about the Holocaust, such as the six million figure, can't possibly be based on direct observation of witnesses and involve much interpolation of data, speculation, and debate about proper investigative methodology. It was the traditionalist historians who started the "body count" numbers games, and it is not surprising that these games have now been picked up by the revisionists.

Complicating this entire subject — making it almost impossible for me to write about it objectively (my first two drafts of this article were almost incoherently profane) — are paranoids, bigots, camp survivors who even 3-1/2 decades later can't contemplate their experiences other than as an irreducible emotional primary not subject to rational analysis, issues of free speech and free press, the epistemological difficulties inherent in determining the truth of things for which one has no direct experience, smear campaigns against people I know to be good and fair, assertions about events and facts by persons who weren't even born at the time, the use of the Holocaust as a political football, and — how many times shall I say this? — cowardice, Cowardice, COWARDICE!

More simply, people who talk about the Holocaust fall into three groups: (1) those who were there as eyewitnesses, know what they saw, extrapolate from what they saw to various conclusions according to their philosophical and emotional premises; (2) those who weren't there, perhaps being born afterwards, and would honestly like to know what happened; and (3) those who, for reasons of protecting Vested Interests, either know the truth and wish to lie about it, or don't know and wish to keep it that way so they may continue to protect those Vested Interests.

In all three groupings are to be found traditional historians, revisionist historians, Jews, gentiles, libertarians, statist, Zionists, ex-Nazis, and anti-Semites. For obvious reasons camp survivors cannot be in the second group; but their relatives and children can be.

I wish I knew where to classify various specific people I know. Sometimes I wonder whether I myself, belong in the second or third group. Perhaps my only honesty is in continually asking myself that question.

But there are some things I do know, and it is not as a professional historian (which I am not) that I will now discuss them. I write only as a professional novelist and ten-year libertarian activist — hopefully rational, hopefully in love with truth and justice above all. If that isn't enough credentials to address this subject, then tell me what mountain you came down from.

First. The issue of the Holocaust has been tied in, by both sides, with Zionism and the politics of the State of Israel.

As an anarchist, I do not support the State of Israel — as I oppose all States, including the formation of a Palestinian State — and do not think that whatever happened to Jews over three decades ago is justification today for any statist acts and policies. As such, I see that the sooner the issue of the Holocaust is made distinct and separate from the issue of the State of Israel, the sooner a consensus about what happened will be achieved.

And if you believe that truth is arrived at by consensus — what an absurd concept! — then, no. There is no consensus about it yet.

I concede that Jews fleeing Europe after the Holocaust had the right to immigrate in Palestine, having in many cases nowhere else to go, but I do not concede that the forced displacement of non-Jewish natives was justified. And I certainly do not concede that either Jew or Gentile should be subject to the coercion of a bunker-mentality, welfare/warfare nascent-apartheid Jewish State.

As a libertarian, I see the only possibility of any lasting peace in the territories now called Israel would be for the dismantling of all expansionist States in the Middle East. Since it is obvious that there is little chance for this to happen in the "foreseeable" future, I do not foresee any possibility of lasting peace there.

All who wish to live in such a State of Perpetual War are welcome to it; I want no part of it.

Second. So long as the Holocaust is being used in the political arena, as justification for acts of the Israeli State, then it is fair game to raise historical questions about it. Period. Those who would deny anyone the right to question \any\ historical fact which is being used to political ends are guilty of Intellectual Suppressionism.

If you do not know that the Holocaust is being used politically, I will give you but one example. It is all I need.

After the Israeli destruction of the Iraqi nuclear power plant, which was accused of being a manufacturing facility of nuclear weapons, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin stated that such a strike was necessary because of the Holocaust, and "Never Again" would Jews be exterminated.

If this isn't the use of the Holocaust as a political justification for a State's military policies, I don't know what is.

I would say it is in the extreme interest of all Holocaust survivors — and all others interested in seeing truth will out — to prevent it from being used as the justification for Israeli political and military policies.

Third. Establishment Historians. Do not expect anybody to accept your demands that your "facts" be Unquestionably Accepted as History. You have lied to apologize for States too many times before. If you tell the truth about the Holocaust, now, you are in the position of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

In this category, I will now put author Lucy S. Dawidowicz for an article that she wrote and published in the December, 1980 issue of Commentary.

In this article — professionally suspect, dripping with vitriol and sarcasm, full of loaded terms and guilt-by-association — Dawidowicz launched the most one-sided, ad hominemsmear job I've ever seen on revisionist historians such as Harry Elmer Barnes, A.J.P. Taylor, James J. Martin, and others I consider rational, truthful, and fair. Since she has written three books on the Holocaust it is excusable that she does not include one fact about the Holocaust in this article, or even references to facts. What is inexcusable is that she calls other historians liars without rebutting one substantive charge they raise, relying not on facts for her charges of lying, but merely assuming her conclusion and demanding her readers take her on faith.

Simon Wiesenthal I consider to be a much more difficult case. On the one hand, he has supplemented his own first-hand observations of Jews being exterminated with a file (which I haven't seen) of affidavits documenting thousands of anti-Jewish atrocities. For the most part he has been a one-man Angel of Retribution — a figure out of Raymond Chandler — wary of political interests and operating on private funds. On the other hand, he \was\ employed by the O.S.S. after the war, exchanged evidence with the marsupial and hypocritical Nuernberg War Crimes Trials (which tried Germans for internal, non-War related atrocities, while never trying the Allies' War Crimes such as the bombings of Dresden and Nagasaki), and has cooperated with any State when it served his cause.

His bad associations aside (and I will not succumb to guilt by-association here), I think him to be truthful and rational.

If the revisionists are to prove the Holocaust as a Zionist/Allied propaganda hoax, they must prove this individual man a pathological liar.

Fourth. Libertarians. This is the War against the State, now and you'd better be on the side of the righteous or kiss freedom goodbye. You who run from revisionist associations because you're afraid that your liberal friends in Washington D.C. won't invite you to their cocktail parties—so you can play statist games and pretend you're changing things—you are incubi and succubi of the movement.

We don't need you summer soldiers and sunshine patriots.

You at Libertarian Review and Reason who banned articles on Holocaust revisionism and ads for I.H.R. conferences, then attack Sam Konkin for joining James J. Martin and Percy Greaves on the J.H.R.'s editorial advisory committee, publishing the banned ads and one article by Lewis Brandon — when you know that Sam Konkin has consistently used his name and New Libertarian publications to make libertarianism attractive to all suppressed factions — get out of the movement before future historians conclude that the libertarians of today were hypocrites.

You who banned the I.H.R., whose ideas you never listened to, from your Future of Freedom Conference — when those you banned allowed libertarians to speak freely at their conferences...Is this what you would have the world think libertarian marketplaces will be like when the world is run the way we say it should be? That freedom to express ideas is only for those who toe your party line?

That we are free to trade our publications, incestuously, among ourselves — but that those whose ideas you disapprove of are to be chased away?

Have you no courage that Truth , if set against Lies, can prevail? If not, if human minds cannot discern the truth, then what hope is there for the future of freedom anyway?

Don't you dare tell me that to deny someone space in a private publication, or at a private conference, is not the same thing as censorship by a State. You do not control a State. To some of you, I will answer; if your "Libertarian" Party ever comes to power, let those who believe in free speech shudder, for they've had an example of your tolerance. To the rest of you — if there is no absolute principle of free expression of ideas no matter what the content — to be expressed freely and refuted freely—then what do we stand for? Establishment publications will not publish them; and if we do not, are we to be outdone by Marxist and other collectivist statists in demonstrating the belief in a open marketplace of ideas? Do we really need the ludicrous spectacle of a Libertarian Free Speech Movement — for libertarians?

Fifth. Concentration Camp Survivors. I admire you for your courage. I suspect that under such conditions I would not have had the courage to survive.

But your pain is not a claim on the life of anyone today — Jew or non-Jew, German or American born after 1930 — certainly no one of my generation.

If you use your pain as a weapon against the innocents of today, then they become yourvictim, and you have allowed yourself to be destroyed in a way the Nazis could not accomplish by force: you have denied the value of individual human dignity.

Do not let yourselves be the pawns of politicians. Do not let your sufferings be an excuse to make others suffer today. An Arab woman holding a dead baby, killed in an Israeli raid on a Palestinian guerilla camp, cries just as hard as you did. If your suffering can be used by politicians to defend Israel, her suffering can be used by politicians to defend Israel's enemies.

Sixth. Revisionist Historians. You have held the Candle of the Truth, to light the World. Keep it lit and never let it die.

Free yourselves from those who care nothing for truth, and liberate us from the crimes of the past by telling us how they really happened.

Don't apologize for the sins of the States. If you must err about atrocities, err on the side of the victims.

Don't tell us how few Jews the Nazi State killed. Tell us, instead, how many others were also killed by the Polish and Soviet States, and — indirectly — by American denial of entry to Jews escaping from Europe.

Tell us of the twelve million killed in the Holocaust of Stalin, and of the forty million killed in the Holocaust of Mao.

If you find the methods of previous historians questionable, then come up with your own facts, and tell the World — once and for all — what really happened.

Seventh. Fellow Jews.

I am a Jew, also, but I am many other things I consider to be much more important.

I am a libertarian, a novelist, the son of a violinist and the grandson of a man who came to this country to escape the Czarist draft.

If the word meant anything anymore, I would be happy to call myself a humanist.

Above all, I am an individual human being, with the right and the responsibility to see with my own eyes, think with my own mind, and believe only what I can determine to be true.

I will accept nothing on faith.

I will not be intimidated, by Jew or anti-Semite.

If you think that because I condemn the State of Israel as I condemn all other States, that this means that I collectively hate Jews and my Jewishness, then you are as bad as the anti-Semites who think that because of my circumcision I can't speak other than as a Jew.

Both you, and such an anti-Semite, are guilty of collectivism and the logical error Ludwig Von Mises called polylogism: thinking that there is one logical truth for one group, and another logical truth for another group.

Some of you play the game of heads-I-win, tails-you-lose. A goy says a word against Israel, he's an anti-Semite. A Jew says word against Israel, he's a self hater.

Any Jew who would call me either anti-Semite or self hater to my face — you self-righteous bastard — I will give you a Holocaust—one to one.

These days when, if we're to prevent the Holocaust of this entire planet, we must be Human Beings before we are Jews, Arabs, Russians, Americans, or Chinese.

But I am not an Internationalist. I am an Individualist. If the world perishes, it will be because of nationalist collectivism that denies Individual Human Rights—and I don't intend to see life and liberty incinerated on the Cool Green Hills of Earth without a fighting chance.

There is an Objective Existence — a body of facts that exists independent of human consciousness — and it is the right and duty of every person — Jew or gentile — to respect the truths of existence above all.

What happened happened, but there is a difference between what happened and knowledge of what happened and those who do not know must have the right to conclude things that you dislike hearing. On a planet overrun with mass-murdering States — with their professional liars and propagandists covering up for the criminals — finding out historical truth is alwaysdifficult, and may be impossible.

Truth will not be arrived at by bullying and smearing. It will arise — if at all — in individual human minds, whether Jewish or not. The qualities of rationality, honesty, tenacity, courage and love of justice can arise in anybody who claims it.

And, yes. I have met honest, intelligent people who don't believe in the Holocaust.

I didn't automatically believe in the Holocaust.

I don't automatically believe in anything.

But the fact is, I didn't even question the Holocaust — even after hearing the revisionist version — until I witnessed the spectacle of self-righteous Jewish historians basing their entire case for the Holocaust not on facts but on unproved assertions, numbers games, psychological intimidation, and smears against anybody who won't take them on faith. When something stinks, I sniff.

If being Jewish means the courage of the concentration camp survivors and of valiant Jewish fighters against murdering anti-Semites... of a people celebrating the tradition every year of liberation from slavery...of humor in the face of adversity...then I'm proud of have been born a Jew.

But many peoples have equivalent legacies — some of the best friends Jews ever had have been goys — and there's nothing exclusively — even predominantly —Jewish about courage, love of emancipation, and humor.

There's nothing even particularly Jewish about making your suffering a Cross You Have To Bear.

But if being Jewish means to you that because Jews have been victims in the past, that it's all right for Jews now to victimize anybody who gets in our way, then beware.

Maybe some new group of Nazis will kill me for being born a Jew, but if this neo-Nazism can catch on among decent people, it will be because Jews made it possible by demonstrating that they care only for the Jews — at the cost of reason, of justice to all people, and of liberty. Under such circumstances, I would deny I was Jewish even as I was being shoved into the gas chamber.

I would die as an individual, the victim of irrationalism, not as a Jew, the victim of anti-Semites.

If Jews do not stand above all as a people who love Virtue above all, then by default Jews will have brought on your own worst nightmares about Never Again — and Brother, we'll have asked for it!

J. Neil Schulman
October, 1981