Archive/File: pub/people/carto.willis carto.005 Last-Modified: 1994/06/16 Holocaust Deniers Crack-Up Willis Carto, the veteran neo-Nazi at the center of numerous political projects for more than four decades, has apparently lost control of his beloeved Institute for Historical Review (IHR), the 15-year-old organization dedicated to denying that the Nazi Holocaust against European Jewry ever occurred. As of December 1993 Carto continuued to be listed as 'Founder' on the IHR masthead. But the November/December issue of the Journal of Historical Review (JHR), Carto's flagship Holocaust denying publication, carried a bombshell: During the past several months, facts have come to light to persuade the IHR senior staff that Carto's relationship with the IHR had become a liability. After much careful deliberation, and kon advice of legal counsel, the Institute resolved to terminate this relationship. JHR editor Mark Weber and longtime Institute director Tom Marcellus have accomplished what many observers of the white supremacist movement had thought impossible: the dislocation of the megalomaniacal Carto from an important part of his own business empire. Carto has apparently lost control of his publishing arm, Noontide Press. He maintains control over at least two other projects, the political organization, Liberty Lobby, and the far-right's premier weekly newspaper, the Spotlight. Using the Spotlight Carto has launched an all-out counter-attack on his former allies at the IHR. Spotlight editorials have accused Marcellus of being 'a longtime, high-ranking member of a bizarre, mind-bending cult with a very strange history' (January 31, 1994). The February 7, 1994 issue of the Spotlight accused the current Board of Directors for the IHR of being controlled by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). In addition Carto has apparently assembled a separate Board of Directors for the IHR, which according to Weber and company is not legally recognized as such. The February 21, 1994 issue of the Spotlight warns fellow revsionsists that Carto's version of the 'IHR' ...cannot be responsible for money sent by persons who registered for the so-called 12th. Institute for Historical Review Conference...to be held over Labor Day this year. The IHR annual conference was a very important event for Carto, and it appears as though he has lost control of that as well. A February 1994 fundraising letter signed by Marcellus, Weber, the Review editor, Tom O'Keefe, and an associate editor, Greg Raven, includes words of support from many of the leading Holocaust revisionists from around the world. Proiminent Holocaust deniers apparently supportive of the expulsion of Carto include: the French denier Robert Faurisson, neo-Nazi propagandist David Irving, 'Hoax of the Twentieth Century' author, Arthur R. Butz, Canadian anti-Semitic publisher, Ernst Zundel, and IHR 'Media Director,' Bradley R. Smith. Butz is quoted in the fundraising letter as saying, IHR is in good hands and deserves the support of all who have supported its traditional mission. Indeed that support is even more crucial today, since Willis Carto has now been added to IHR's list of powerful enemies. Bradley R. Smith, the anti-Semite who spearheaded IHR's efforts to place ads denying the Holocaust on United States college newspapers quipped: If it is ever demonstrated that the ADL has taken over the IHR, as Carto and the Spotlight claim, I'll fly to Washington, D.C. call a press conference, and eat my shorts on the front steps of the Liberty Lobby. What's Behind the Carto Crack-Up? There is a serious side to these recent splits within the Holocaust-denying end of the white supremacist mmovement. What should be immediately clear to anyone familiar with the political figures involved in this crack-up is that they are all deeply involved in anti-Semitism and the racist right. While Carto's claim that the current Board of Directors of IHR are dupes of the ADL is ridiculous, equally fanciful is the explanation proffered by the IHR editorial board itself, that Carto ...unilaterally attempted to change the direction of IHR and its journal from *serious, non-partisan, revisionist scholarship*, reporting, and commentary to one of *ranting, racialist-populist pamphleteering*. [Emphasis in original] The idea that Carto was attempting to take an otherwise respectable journal in a radical or racist direction is sheer nonsense. The Institute for Historical Review, its Journal, Board of Advisors, Staff, and company are deeply involved in racist, anti-Semitic hate-mongering. The most recent editions of the JHR, while presented in a slicker format and produced more often (bi-monthly rahter than quarterly), show no apprciable difference from when the organization was under the formal sponsorship of Willis Carto. The project and its associates and off-shoots were and are a threat to democracy: hateful, bigoted liars with or without Willis Carto. For example, the current JHR editors Mark Weber and Ted O'Keefe both formerly played prominent roles in William Pierce's neo-Nazi organization the National Alliance. A cursory inspection of the Institute's advisory board turns up some unsavory characters. While it is too early to predict how this recent split will turn out, a number of observations can be made. Weber and Marcellus and their crew of anti-Semites appear to have the support of numerous prominent Holocaust deniers in their dismissal of Carto. Because the name Willis Carto has been virtually synonymous with the openly anti-Semitic ultra-right throughout the past 40 years, Weber and crew are likely to attempt a whitewashing of the true aims of IHR. Such a move to 'moderate' the image of the IHR and the project of Holocaust denial will likely included the active recruitment of supathetic academics and the denial of racist proclivities on the part of the IHR's principle officers. A recent example of just such an attempt was the permission given by German historian Ernst Nolte for the JHR to run an interview conducted with him in the January/February issue. Nolte, the author of 'Three Faces of Fascism' and other scholarly works on World War II and fascism, was a prominent player in the mid-1980s 'Historikerstreit,' or 'historians dispute,' over which the uniqueness, severity and scale of Germany's involvement in World War II was debated. Professor Nolte has been moving to the right in that evolving debate ever since and appears to have gone off the edge by assenting to the publication of an interview he did with a certain Ian B. Warren in the January/February 1994 issue of the Journal of Historical Review. A note published with the interview states: 'Although Prof. Nolte did not originally understand that this interview was to appear in the Journal, he assented to publication after reviewing the complete text.' The note also advises that 'Ian Warren' is a pen name for 'a professor who treaches at a university in the Midwest,' most likely Northwestern University professor Arthur Butz. The current list of academics willing to lend their names to the Editorial Advisory Committee of the Institute for Historical Review includes the follwoing individuals: [list published elsewhere within these archives. knm] Reprinted from The Dignity Report, March 1, 1994, Vol. 2, No. 3, a publication of the Coalition for Human Dignity Research Department, P.O. Box 40344, Portland, Oregon 97240. (503) 281-5823
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