Newsgroups: misc.test,alt.revisionism
From: k044477@hobbes.kzoo.edu (Jamie R. McCarthy)
Subject: My reply to Cole, 20 June 1995
Message-ID: <1995Jun20.174420.16543@hobbes.kzoo.edu>
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo MI 49006
Date: Tue, 20 Jun 1995 17:44:20 GMT

The following is my reply to Mr. Cole, which I will shortly fax.

----------

Mr. Cole,

I realize you probably haven't seen my last letter to you, much less had
time to respond, but since I sent it I've seen both Don Van Handel's
interview of you and the envelope you sent Priority Mail on the 12th.

As the people on Usenet can see (but you can't), I'm posting this letter
publicly, preceded by the controversy in _SR_ #21, Porter's letter in
_SR_ #23, your reply that hasn't yet been published, and the Spotlight
clipping.

I realize that I'm about to pose many hard questions to you, just as I
did in my snail-mail letter last week.  I also realize that, what with
all the faxes and phone calls that must be going on between all you
revisionists, you may be too busy to get to everything I say.  That's
okay -- I'll be happy if you just answer whatever you have time for, in
whatever order you feel is most important.  I've got plenty of time,
and I'll be happy to pick up discussion with you at a later date, too,
if you prefer.


First, the Spotlight snippet.  Fascinating stuff, thanks for passing it
along.

I did not realize that Berg "despised" you.  I must say it doesn't
surprise me, though, considering some of the comments he made during
his brief stint on Usenet.  For example:

   Mr Kaufman is obviously Jewish and a living example of why the Nazis
   tried to remove Jews from Europe and short of that, into
   concentration camps for the duration of the war.  (June 27th, 1994)

   He was a rather ugly character, lots of Jews are.  (July 3rd, 1994)

   After reading Shein, can anyone really be surprised that the Germans
   would people like him in concentration camps during WW2.  That is
   precisely where people like him belonged -- that is the only thing
   his talmudic logic, his filthy sophistry, is ever able to prove.
   [...]  I suggest you tell the truth and change your name to SLIME. 
   You could even call yourself Barry Jewish Slime. (July 17th, 1994)

Why he depises you, I don't know.  But I can make a pretty good guess!

And hey look, according to Spotlight, you called Faurisson anti-Semitic,
when in fact you expressly refused to make that charge in your 16-page
letter.  A prominent revisionist being anti-Semitic, why, who could
invent such a thing!



Next, the interview.  There wasn't that much new in there for me, so
I'll just comment on a few things.  (I must say, though, the Ice-T
story was interesting -- human interest, celebrities, always good to
throw into an interview.)


Regarding the chief topic of the Piper video:  it sounds like you're
actually claiming that the "revelation" that the gas chamber Krema I
was converted to an air-raid shelter after the gassings was uncovered
by _you_.  I'm a little startled by this, because, although I can't
immediately put my finger on references, I was under the impression
that historians had known that relatively-unimportant fact for quite
some time.  Would you please confirm or deny for me that this is your
claim?  Assuming it is, I'll try to find a "pre-Cole" source that
mentions its conversion to an air-raid shelter, and I might suggest
that you try to find a "pre-Cole" source that says the opposite.  That
way, we can compare notes and ascertain whether it really was a
"revelation."

Another claim of yours which I doubt is that "it was denied [before
Pressac] that Zyklon-B was actually used for delousing in the camps."
I'd also be interested to know if you have any sound historical
"pre-Pressac" sources that say that.  You also say that revisionists
were "ridiculed" for saying that Zyklon-B was used for delousing;  I'm
curious what you have in mind, so a source for that would be
appreciated as well.  Please note that there's a big difference between
saying "Zyklon-B was used for delousing" and "Zyklon-B was used _only_
for delousing."  The latter statement deserves ridicule, the former
does not.)  Again, I'll look for information on delousing;  and again,
let's compare notes.


Regarding the swimming pool, you say in the interview:

   We also understand that the presence of this pool IN NO WAY negates
   the possibility of gassings at Auschwitz. It's totally irrelevant!

I might ask, if it's irrelevant, then why did you take your camera
over to it in the Piper video?

In fact, why did you imply, in your voice-over on the Piper video, that
the swimming pool _does_, in some way, "negate the possibility of
gassings"?  To be sure, you never stated it explicitly;  it was only an
implication.  Let's examine what you say at that point in the video:

   One barrack, block 11, has been kept in its original state.  It was
   the camp prison, and it is now referred to, naturally, as the
   "block of death."  Which brings up another interesting point:  what
   _is_ shown on the tour, and what is not.  During the tour, you are
   shown the "block of death," the so-called "wall of death"
   (naturally right next door to the "block of death") and exhibit
   after exhibit specifically designed to affirm atrocity stories and
   portray Auschwitz as a death machine, a place where internment
   meant extermination.
   
   But what don't they show you?  To start with, a building which could
   conceivably be called the "block of life," a massive disinfestation
   complex where Zyklon-B gas was used daily to combat lice and the
   disease they carry.  These were the real gas chambers [...]
   
   Also forgotten is the Auschwitz camp theater, the current home of
   the aforementioned convent of nuns.  The last pictures taken inside
   this building showed pianos and costumes and a stage where the
   inmates used to put on productions.  [...]
   
   And finally, we have the Auschwitz _swimming pool_, yes that's
   right, swimming pool.  Situated inside the prison compound, right
   alongside the inmates' barracks.  A beautiful pool, with a diving
   board and starters' blocks for races.  To their credit, the
   Auschwitz camp officials have not tried to remove this distraction.
   But if you want to see the pool, you need to know already that it
   exists, because you won't find it on the tour.
   
   So basically what we have is a tour that consists mainly of tourists
   that already believe in the Holocaust story, and are perhaps
   emotionally connected to it in some way, being given a
   selectively-edited tour filled with horror story after horror story
   and ending up at the final stop, the gas chamber.  At that point,
   the tour group is emotionally primed to believe anything, and the
   gas chamber is like the feature performer after a two-hour warm-up
   act to get the crowd in the mood.

Note that what you're doing here is drawing a contrast between the
"selectively-edited tour," which is a "warm-up act" of "horror
stories," and the things like the swimming pool:  "you won't find it on
the tour."  So, why bother to bring up the pool if it is irrelevant?
The answer, obviously, is that you don't think it is irrelevant. Or,
more precisely, you know that the audience for your video won't think
it's irrelevant.  By contrasting the evidence _for_ "Auschwitz as a
death machine," namely the "block of death" and "wall of death," with
the pool, theater, and delousing building, you are clearly saying that
the latter are evidence _against_ "Auschwitz as a death machine."

In fact, you explicitly call the delousing building a "block of life."
The contrast couldn't be more clear.

But you now say that the pool "in no way negates the possibility of
[homicidal] gassings," and presumably you would agree that the same
holds for the delousing chamber and theater.  Obviously, you've changed
your mind sometime between the day you recorded the voice-over for the
Piper video and the day you gave the interview to Mr. Van Handel.
Question:  why?


My last comment on the interview concerns your "libel artist" comment.
I'll start at the beginning by quoting some of Shermer's article.  On
pp. 36-37, he discusses you in more than two full columns of text,
not including the picture of you, and he says at one point:

   Though Cole's personality is affable and his attitude sanguine, he
   sees himself as a rebel in search of a cause.  Where the other
   revisionists are political and/or racial ideologues, Cole's
   interests run at a deeper level.  He is a meta-ideologue -- an
   existentialist on a quest to understand how ideologues invent
   their realities.

Wow, pretty deep stuff.  Note that Shermer explicitly denies, there,
that you are a "political and/or racial ideologue."

But then over on p. 39, Shermer seems to reverse himself:

   Revisionists like Weber, Zuendel, Irving, Cole, and Smith have tried
   to convince me they are not racists and have no political agendas,
   but they have been contradicted from within their own ranks.

I don't think you'd have any problem with that statement if your name
were removed from the list.  I don't think anyone will argue that
Weber, Zuendel, Irving, Smith, and "revisionists like" them, are
racist and/or have political agendas.  (Not necessarily both -- the
contradiction of "Smith is not a racist and has no political agenda"
is "Smith is a racist _or_ has a political agenda."  Not "and." That's
De Morgan's law, if I remember my comp. sci. classes correctly. And
hey, as long as I'm picking nits, Shermer only comments on
"revisionists like" the five of you, not the five of you yourselves.
But that's a bit of a stretch.)

Anyway, you seem to ignore the long description of you on pp. 36-37.
(It's actually moderately flattering, don't you agree?  "Affable,"
"sanguine," "existentialist on a quest.")  Instead, you focus on the
one-liner on p. 39.  Again from your interview:

   Shermer wrote in his Skeptic article that he had evidence from
   within my own ranks that I'm a racist with a political agenda.
   However, in two subsequent tape-recorded phone calls, one with me
   and one with a fellow skeptic, Shermer admitted that this claim was
   patently false. He even told his skeptic supporter that the racist
   claim against me was the most misleading thing in his article. This
   fellow skeptic was outraged enough to turn a copy of this
   conversation over to me. Despite my pleas to Shermer to print a
   retraction, it's been a year so far and no retraction. Shermer is
   not concerned at all about correcting the most misleading thing he
   wrote in his article. Some skeptic!

Have you considered the possibility that Shermer included your name
on that list by an oversight or sloppy wording or something?  Based
on what he wrote specifically about you earlier, it seems that he
would think your name should _not_ be on the list of "racists etc."
Or maybe the "they" of "they are not racists" was intended to refer
to revisionists in general, instead of the names on that list in
particular.  Poor wording in any case, I think.

But since you took the opportunity to attack Shermer personally, instead
of attacking the facts of his article (his pp. 44-50 are really nothing
but pure "evidence to prove the Holocaust"), it might be appropriate to
call your attention to his "Open Letter to Holocaust Revisionists" of
March 20th.  His second paragraph reads:

   What revisionists want, I suspect, is not an open debate, but
   agreement with their position. David Cole, one of the most
   knowledgeable and brightest of all the revisionists I interviewed,
   had an entire lecture at the last IHR conference in which he could
   have taken on my arguments point-by-point. Instead, what did he do?
   He spent a full hour attacking me personally, alleging that I was
   using the revisionists to sell magazines; that I was filtering
   money from Skeptic magazine to support my cycling activities; that
   I had no integrity; that I was dishonest; and all manner of
   slanderous statements. Cole even foolishly confessed to secretly
   recording a phone conversation we had (illegal in California and
   subject to a $10,000 fine and six months in jail), threatening to
   use it to "expose" me. Yet not one comment on my analysis.

Any comment?


Next, the Priority Mail envelope you sent me.

Once again, I'll wait for confirmation from you before I consider your
cover letter to me to be "public record."  But I will address Porter's
reply to you and your subsequent reply to Porter.  I just want to
discuss three issues.


The most surprising thing to me is that you appear to have misinterpreted
Porter's comment about Pressac's "deliberate mistranslation" of terms
like "Gasraum, Gaskammer, Material zur Vergasung, etc."  I would have
thought you were familiar with the "mistranslation" arguments;
apparently not.

You reply:  "Is it me, or is Porter indulging in non sequitur?  It is not
PRESSAC who uses terms like 'Material zur Vergasung'...it is DOCTOR
AUGUST HIRT who uses this phrase in his damning letter of July 14, 1943."

What Porter was trying to do, in his letter, was to claim that the
German terms like "Material zur Vergasung," and "Vergasungskeller" have
been _mistranslated_ into English as "material for gassing" and
"gassing cellar."

I have absolutely no idea what Porter thinks would be a better
translation of "Material zur Vergasung."  None whatsoever.
"Vergasungskeller" supposedly means "carburetion cellar," that's an old
one, and I dealt with it in my snail-mail letter to you a week ago. But
how to "better" translate "Material zur Vergasung"?! Perhaps Porter
will try to argue that it should really be translated "material for
carburetion" -- I'd be quite amused, but not really surprised, if that
were the case.

I believe you've incidentally answered my question, about whether you
buy the argument that "Vergasungskeller" means "carburetion cellar," in
the negative.  Which makes my question in the snail-mail letter, about
the Bischoff-Kammler memo, all the more pertinent.


Secondly, a quick comment on a throwaway line of yours.  You write:
"scratch any 'revisionist' hard enough and you'll find an
'exterminationist' underneath."  By this you mean that "revisionists"
can often be as deceitful and disingenuous as "exterminationists."

I'll admit that I've noticed a few dishonest things done by the real
historians.  Poliakov's translation of the Gerstein statement, for
example, is inexcusable -- he changed Gerstein's figure of 25 square
meters to 93, to make it sound more believable. I find it astonishing
that a respected historical figure like Poliakov would do such a thing.
For another example, I find laws against freedom of speech to be
distasteful.

And there are a few other examples.  But nothing I've seen on the
historians' side of the fence comes close to the dishonesty on the
deniers' side.  Clearly, one side is interested in finding out the
truth, and the other is not.  Even when you take into account that
"exterminationist" can mean nearly anything you want it to mean.

But you seem to think that the sides are the reverse of what I think.
I'd be interested in an example or three of what you have in mind. 
What are the worst things the "exterminationists" have done?  Can you
find anything that even compares with the immensity of the
Faurisson-dishonesty you've already laid out for us?  Even comes close?


Lastly, a comment on what you call an attitude held by
"exterminationists."

You write:

   This sounds strikingly like those "exterminationists" who say that
   the idea of torture or faked confessions sounds unreal because "the
   Allies just wouldn't do that."

Au contraire.  The alleged torture and faked confessions sound unreal
mostly because I'm required to believe something impossible for which
there is no evidence.

I'm expected to believe that dozens, nay hundreds, of members of Die
Schutzstaffeln der Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Arbeiterpartei,
the powerful and deadly fighting force, the people sworn to uphold the
Reich and the Fuehrer, the creme de la creme of the German army, would
all -- to a man -- meekly go along with Allied coercion.

Supposing coercion for the sake of argument, don't you think it's odd
that not one SS man had the balls, excuse the expression, to stand up
in the middle of testimony and say "they tortured me and threatened my
family!"  Not _one_.  They're supposedly lying under oath and defaming
the Reich they'd dedicated their lives to, the Reich their friends had
given their lives for.  Their supposed-lies disgraced and dishonored
Germany and its 80 million Germans for decades, probably centuries, to
come.  And it was a disgrace that no other civilized nation has had to
endure.  Not to mention that they were collectively sentencing
themselves to death or long prison terms.  And not _one_ would stand up
against this?

Oh sure, I suppose I could believe that three or four could have been
tortured or otherwise coerced into giving a false statement, and that
they might have kept quiet about it -- _if_ there were any evidence for
it.  Threatening to kill their families would probably have been pretty
convincing.  (Not in all cases, though -- look at Goebbels, he got to
his family before the Allies could.)

But every single one?

And what about the people like Pfannenstiel, who continued to tell
basically the same story years after their original, alleged
"coercion"?  What sort of torture stretches out to control its victim
across decades?

And furthermore, is there a single scrap of reliable evidence that
anyone was tortured?  As far as I know, there's just two:

(1) the lurid book by Rupert Butler ("Clarke thrust his service stick
under the man's eyelids and ordered in German: 'Keep your pig eyes
open, you swine'")

and (2) the never-revealed document that Faurisson claims is proof of a
"de-confession" told to Moritz von Schirmeister.  Of course you can
guess that I don't trust Faurisson any farther than I can throw him,
and especially when he claims to have a document but is unable to
reveal the source.  He's been thus disabled since 1987, by the way, and
my asking Raven and Vicksell about it produced no answers.  (This
might, by the way, remind you of "another piece of evidence" that only
Faurisson has seen, that tells us the conclusions of a certain
"expertise" that supposedly disappeared.)

So let's see:  one not-very-reliable piece of evidence that Hoess was
tortured, and one invisible piece of evidence that Hoess was tortured. 
Nothing else.  Specifically, nothing else regarding any coercion of any
kind used on anybody but Hoess. From this we're supposed to conclude
"torture or faked confessions"?

And this coercion must have been done not only at multi-national trials
like Nuremberg, but also at the many trials that _Germany_ conducted
against its own citizens.  Did the German guards torture the Nazis? Or
did Zionist agents secretly sneak in, breaking into prison and
conducting clandestine torture?  Or maybe the Germans worked with the
Zionists to conduct the torture process.  Or, maybe the whole German
government has been controlled by Jews since 1945.

For not believing this, historians are chastised for saying it "sounds
unreal"?  Well, I hate to break it to you, but it _does_ sound unreal.
It sounds more than unreal, it sounds positively like crackpotism.

Tell you what -- if you want to make it sound more real, how about
providing a few reliable pieces of evidence of coercion to back up your
claim that "confessions were coerced." And that "defendants...were
sometimes tortured." (I quote from your reply to Porter, page one, near
the bottom.) If you want to be consistent, of course, and avoid the
same charges of dishonesty that you've laid against Faurisson, you'll
have to play by the same rules you use to decide whether gas chambers
exist. You'll have to prove it "the 'revisionist' way - with DOCUMENTS
and PHYSICAL EVIDENCE."

While you're at it, explain why the Nazis who weren't executed didn't
change their story even decades later.  And explain why so many SS men
would submit so easily to this alleged coercion.

And best of all, explain why all the confessions pretty much tell the
same story and pretty much all match the testimony given by the inmate
eyewitnesses.  Obviously your claim would have to be that somebody
coached both the inmates (who were willing liars) and the SS men
(unwilling).  Quite an organized conspiracy effort.  Do you have any
"DOCUMENTS and PHYSICAL EVIDENCE" to prove this massive conspiracy?  Or
just incredibly weak examples of, in your words, "'anecdotal' evidence,
like eyewitnesses or post-war confessions" -- a category into which
Butler's book falls neatly, and for which von Schirmeister's alleged
hearsay doesn't even qualify.

Thank you,

Jamie McCarthy

-- 
 Jamie McCarthy       k044477@kzoo.edu       jrm0@aol.com
 http://www.kzoo.edu/~k044477/    I speak only for myself.

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