The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: people/m/marcellus.tom//carto.005


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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