Article 6529 of alt.revisionism:
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Path: kzoo!k044477
From: k044477@hobbes.kzoo.edu (Jamie R. McCarthy)
Subject: My reply to David Cole, 30 June 1995
Message-ID: <1995Jul1.021522.10313@hobbes.kzoo.edu>
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo MI 49006
References: <1995Jul1.015134.9667@hobbes.kzoo.edu>
Date: Sat, 1 Jul 1995 02:15:22 GMT

The following is a letter in reply to Mr. Cole's letter of 20 June,
which I will fax to him shortly after posting this:

Mr. Cole,

Thank you for your priority mail letter of June 20th.  Once again, I
appreciate your willingness to be thorough, to not dismiss complex
questions with simple answers.  I wish all revisionists were as willing
to engage in discussion as you are.  All too often, I end up being
ignored.

I realize that this letter was intended to "get a few minor things out
of the way," and that you "don't have the time to write 20-page letters
to everyone."  I'll respect that by allowing much of your reply to drop
on the floor, as it were.  I have a tendency to ask questions and
comment interminably, but I'll resist the urge this time.  I hope
you'll find much of what follows in this letter to be a closure of the
various topics.

Thanks for permission to post your previous cover letters;  I'll do so
shortly.


First off -- you mentioned your list of "unanswered questions for
Holocaust historians" or whatever.  I think you said there were 38 of
them.  I don't think I've ever seen all 38, just the few you excerpted
regarding Majdanek.  Could you send me a copy of the whole list?


Re Vicksell urging you to write the Majdanek piece, not Raven:  of
course I accept your version of events.  And no, I don't need to
postulate a "wacky conspiracy theory" and suggest that Raven was using
reverse psychology on you to get you to write your summary.  I suppose
the most-likely scenario is that Raven _was_ prepared to write
something -- and you're right, probably based on your work -- but found
it easier to just let you say what you were going to say.  But, hey,
whatever.

The fact is undeniable that Raven really, _really_ doesn't want to talk
with me.  Ever since I started corresponding with him, over a year ago
by now, I've repeated that I wanted to keep the channels of
communication open between us.  The line I used several times was "by
email, phone, fax, or carrier pigeon if necessary."  Nevertheless, he's
decided to absolutely ignore me, he won't even return my email.  I'll
be happy to send you a complete transcript of our correspondence since
the beginning of this year if you're at all interested.  It's rather
long but also a bit amusing (to me anyway), and it tells a great deal
about Raven's lack of interest in pursuing the truth.


Re Shermer the "libel artist":  at this point I'm going to bow out of
the argument.  It's not my fight, and frankly I don't have much
interest in who "wins" or "loses" -- I was mostly interested to see how
you two answered each others' charges.  What I did do was pass that
segment of your letter along to Shermer in email (and later a copy of
the interview) and he wrote me back with a segment which he asked me to
post publicly (and later a response to the interview).  Enclosed find
that Usenet article.  You are of course welcome to respond if you like,
and if you want to respond in the same forum Shermer did (the
alt.revisionism newsgroup), I'll be happy to type in and post any reply
you might send me.


Also enclosed find my original article to Raven on why demanding
physical evidence _before_ testimony is not a valid demand.  I think
you missed my point.  I'm not saying physical evidence is unimportant; 
of course it's important.  Nor am I "dismissing" it, as you claim.  We
may be in agreement on this point, so instead of arguing with you I'll
just let you read what I wrote originally and see if that doesn't clear
things up.


Re the Piper interview.  You write:

   I was never lying about Krema 1.  Period.  My interview with Piper
   has ALWAYS been available in its rough, unedited version - just to
   show that there were no "creative" edits.  But that never really
   mattered to most of you, now did it?

Hey, that does matter to me.  Could I get a copy of the rough, unedited
version?  I'll be happy to send you as many VHS tapes as are necessary,
postage-paid.


Re Majdanek:  you are certainly correct when you say that one should
ignore the revisionists' invalid standard of proof, and investigate
Majdanek for one's own reasons and one's own enlightenment.  I didn't
intend to imply that I thought there would be no point in investigating
the camp, whether by going there in person or by reading about it. 
What I think I said was that it's invalid to claim that only at the
_site_ of mass exterminations can evidence be found;  important
evidence is usually found elsewhere.

You write:

   when I've shown these questions to gas chamber theorists, I've
   encountered the same attitude; "I'm not interested in those
   chambers." To which I always respond "How can you not be interested
   in "genuine" homicidal gas chambers?"

My response to this question would be twofold.  First, to repeat myself:
it's not that I'm _disinterested_ in these gas chambers;  I just don't
think I should be _especially_ interested in them simply because they
are (supposedly) still mostly intact.  I don't think that makes them
_especially_ worth investigating.  Sure, they're worth looking at, as
are all Nazi gas chambers, but as I say, it's a matter of priorities. 
You've made your pitch why Majdanek should be near the top of my
priority list, and I've explained why I disagree.

Second, I have recently had a sort of opportunity to learn more about
them via an acquaintance.  That person is currently in Europe on a
grant specifically for the purpose of investigating Majdanek.  We
corresponded fairly extensively before he left;  among other things, I
asked him to take lots of pictures of everything, and to try to mark on
a map where the pictures were taken from (that's visually-oriented me).

Also, I sent him the list of questions about Majdanek that you raised in
the piece you wrote in January, and we discussed them in detail.  I
explained which questions I thought were most compelling and
perplexing, _possibilities_ for answers (wild guesses really), and
asked him to be as thorough as he could in coming up with theories to
resolve the paradoxes you raised.  We brainstormed.  I'm a bit
embarrassed to mention this, because it's the lazy way of doing
research:  getting someone else to find things out for me.  I guess I
don't consider it real research unless it involves putting quarters
into the library parking meter.

But the bottom line, as I say, is that they're my priorities to set.

You ask "how would you prove homicidal gassings at Majdanek?"  I haven't
a clue.  I've read so little, I wouldn't know where to start. I suppose
I'd start by reading my library's books on the camp, and looking up all
the footnotes that related to the gassings, but you could have guessed
that.  Maybe you could help me out.  If you were me, where would you
start?  What sources are there available?  Give me a "reading list" for
Majdanek 101.  Feel free to point out the flaws as you see them, of
course.  My local library, so you know, has the red and blue series,
and a fairly-complete set of historical literature, though nothing by
Pressac, and very little by "revisionist" authors.


Re your (not) uncovering the "revelation" about Krema 1:  whoa!  I had
no idea I would provoke so much anger by saying "it sounds like you're
claiming" it, and "would you please confirm or deny for me that this is
your claim?"  (Those were my exact words.)  You're obviously not
confirming it, that's for sure.  But I was taken aback to see you
not-confirm it with such vigor!  You write in reply:

   That you would even make such a baseless charge makes me think that,
   as I said earlier, you are only interested in attacking me,
   regardless of the facts.

And:

   Why do I believe this won't deter you; you'll probably next make the
   charge...

And:

   If the truth of your assertions is not a concern to you, then why
   not go for something bigger, more damaging?

Well! after all that, obviously the first thing I did was to go back
through the interview and try to figure out where I had come up with
the idea that you were making that claim.  That's the nice thing about
having it in electronic form, I can just search on the word "Krema."

And you're exactly right, you say right there, at the first occurrence
of the word, "important only in that it has yielded results."  I was
asking a question you'd already answered.  You claim responsibility
_not_ for "discovering" that Krema I was an air-raid shelter that was
converted back to its original form as a gas chamber for tourism
purposes, but _rather_ for making the Auschwitz State Museum change
their "spiel" given to tourists to include that fact.  I think I've got
it right that time.  And I sincerely apologize for wasting your time by
not reading more carefully in the first place. If I'd paid attention, I
would have realized that there was no need to ask you to "confirm or
deny" it, since you obviously weren't claiming any such thing.

There -- how was that?  You see?  I'm not shooting for the stars at all,
just doing what reasonable people do when they discover that they've
made mistakes.


Re Faurisson and your saying what you thought about him:  interviews
with mainstream periodicals were surely not your only means of
expressing your opinion.  Have you not always been able to submit an
article on Faurisson to, say, Smith's Report?  The JHR?  Remarks? 
You've got lots of friends in the movement;  would none of them have
printed an article from you?  Did you try writing even a letter to the
editor of any of those?  Surely _they_ wouldn't have censored you or
trimmed what you were trying to say.

Given that, don't you think it's ironic that you write in that same
section how your esteem for Hilberg dropped when you saw "the
discrepancy between what he KNOWS and what he PUBLISHES"?

You could have, say, sent out word that you'd written a 16-page open
letter, and waited for people like me to write you and ask for it!  It
seems to have worked fine in April 1995;  why couldn't you have done it
anytime before then?


That's enough for now;  I hope I've helped "close up" some of the
peripheral topics, so that we can both address the central topics with
more focus.  I look forward to your next letter.

Yours,

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

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