Germar Rudolf: The Lies and Deceptions of Deborah Lipstadt part 2

Video Transcript:

The first time I heard about Holocaust denial, I laughed. Fast forward a little over a decade. The two senior scholars, scholars of the Holocaust, two most prominent historians of the Holocaust approached me and said, Deborah, let's have coffee. We have a research idea that we think is perfect for you. In Trey and Flattered that they came to me with an idea and thought me worthy of it, I asked, what is it? And they said, Holocaust denial. And for the second time, I left. The Holocaust denial, the Flattered folks, the Ovis is alive people, I should study them. Dr. Lipstad, professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, ended up accepting this research assignment. And it turned into a book that was to have major consequence. It first appeared in 1993 with the title, Denying the Holocaust, The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. In it, Ms. Lipstad gives her perspective of the political background, motives, and what she calls the, quote unquote, spurious methodology of the revisionist, and also tries to deal with some revisionist arguments. One of the persons whose political background, motives, and methods, Lipstad briefly mentions in the book, is the British historian David Irving. Lipstad depicts him in her book as a racist, anti-Semitic Holocaust denial. He needed like his reputation smeared, so he decided to sue her and her publisher for defamation. And the problem then is, if you have a 30-year writing career and the press gets to know that you don't defend yourself, they think it's open season. And by 1996, I could see, as I stood at the bottom of this alley, a mudslide thundering down the slopes towards me, and threatening to engulf me. And the only way to stop that mudslide was to start frantically hammering pegs into the countryside, which I did with these rites. I issued a writ against Deborah Lipstad for the book that she wrote, attacking me, called denying the Holocaust. Nothing that I write is good. Everything that I write is bad, mandatious, distorted, lying, fallacious, deliberately following a political agenda. All the accusations that were made against me by Deborah Lipstad. And now they're surprised and pained to find themselves as a receiving end of a libel written in 1996. And they're hoping that I'll go away. And to say, horror, I'm not going away because I've just issued fresh steps to my particular action and we're going to go through the whole hell again next year or the year after. Because I don't lie down. The libel sued and folded in London at the turn of the millennium, however, ended in a complete disaster for Irving. Since, according to the verdict, Lipstad and her publisher managed to prove most of the claims made against Irving as true. As a consequence, a number of books appeared documenting not only Irving's defeat, but also claiming that, quote unquote, Holocaust denial has finally been exposed as a pseudo-historical movement driven by ulterior political motives and with no basis in factual reality. Lipstad's case became so famous or was considered so important to and by the mainstream that her own account of the trial, as published in her book, History on Trial, My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier, has been turned into a movie which was released in September 2016. Parallel to this, her book telling the story of the trial, was reissued under the same title as the movie. Denial Holocaust History on Trial. Lipstad's original work that triggered all this was also reissued, emphasizing the fact that the mainstream still considers this 24-year-old book to be highly relevant and topical. This new edition was released in December 2016. You can find it on Amazon and anywhere else books can be bought. In this documentary, we will neither deal with Irving's libel suit against Lipstad, nor with any of the publications based on it. Instead we will go back to the roots of this entire affair. To Lipstad's 1993 book Denying the Holocaust. Since for the new 2016 edition, no textual changes were made, what is said about the original edition is also true for the latest edition. This presentation is divided into four parts. In the first part, we will briefly discuss what science is and how we can distinguish it from fake science, pretend science, or to put it in Greek, pseudo-science. In the second part, we will briefly address Lipstad's expose of the evil deniers motives and their allegedly mendacious methods. While the third part discusses some of Lipstad's claims about a few Holocaust deniers or Holocaust revisionists as they call themselves. In the last part, we will focus on some factual arguments preferred by Dr. Lipstad about the Holocaust. Because without saying that we cannot discuss every claim Dr. Lipstad made in her book, or else this documentary would last many hours, so we had to keep it brief here. A much more thorough analysis of Dr. Lipstad's claims appeared in a book of its own which, at least for now, is also available on Amazon and anywhere else books can be bought. Dr. Lipstad claims numerous times that revisionist authors and organizations, the writings they publish and the arguments they prefer, are not scholarly in nature, but that they are only pseudo-scientific or pseudo-academic, and that what revisionist write is merely pseudo-history. In fact, her book is riddled with pseudo-terms which we find on these pages in the 2016 edition of her book. Consequently, she calls the revisionist method of writing history, spurious, and fallacious. Unfortunately, Lipstad never explains what sets apart proper science and scholarship from sham science and fraudulent scholarship. So let us give a crash course on how to distinguish the two. We've taken our definitions loosely from Sir Carl Popper, one of the most famous and prestigious philosophers of science, of modern times. Of course you could take any other one, but the result wouldn't be all that different. Here are seven principles of science and scholarship. We'll say something briefly about each one. The first principle concerns the first step in the creation of knowledge. It means that we are allowed and are even encouraged to ask any question that comes to our mind. Whatever curiosity drives us to investigate, or doubts make us explore, if we have a scientific mind, we welcome that. The opposite, pseudo-scientific mindset declares certain topics taboo, tends to stigmatize doubters and bans certain questions from being asked. True scholars, on the other hand, are opponents of dogmas and taboos. Now to the second point, it means that the answers to research questions can be determined exclusively by verifiable evidence, not by authority figures, not by social taboos, by political correctness, or even by penal law. So when we are doing any scholarly activity, both the starting point and the end point of that activity, the initial question or assumption, and the final conclusion ought to be completely free of external constrictions. That's at least the ideal situation. Of course, scientists are only human, and so they bend and buckle occasionally, giving way to all kinds of pressure, but that aspect of their work is what actually tarnishes their work. The path, however, which a scholar takes to get from his initial question to the final answer, that is to say the way we gather and evaluate evidence, that is where a lot of strictures apply. And that's our next point. Claiming something without proving it is profoundly unscientific. The way we prove things shows how our work lives up to scholarly standards. In essence, evidence we present must be verifiable by others. If others cannot locate, reproduce, or recalculate the evidence we present, then we have failed. As mentioned before, there are certain methods and rules we have to comply with while collecting and interpreting our data. To give an example, quoting a private collection of otherwise unsourced newspaper clippings as proof for one's claim is unacceptable, because that private collection is inaccessible to anyone else. Likewise, saying that Mr. So-and-So told me so is also unacceptable, because anyone can claim this, and no one can verify that it is true. But all types of evidence are created equal. In general, the less a piece of evidence depends on human fallibility, the more reliable it usually is. In a hierarchy of the propative value of types of evidence, logic, natural laws, and then material or physical evidence reign supreme, while party testimony is the least reliable. DNA tests in court cases of parenthood or sexual abuse are a case in point. Any scientific mind wanes the results of a DNA test against that of the testimonies by the defendant or the litigant in a trial, which side with the DNA test. Parties in a trial can lie and air, as a matter of fact they often do, but independently perform DNA tests are almost bulletproof. Of course, not all cases are that straightforward, but you get the idea. Here is a pyramid of the various kinds of evidence with the most reliable at the top and the least reliable at the bottom. The lowest layer, stories told by people emotionally affected by the issue at hand, is unfortunately also the most common type of evidence adduced when it comes to the Holocaust, just because we have many of these stories doesn't mean they are any more reliable. After all, hundreds of years ago, the courts in Europe collected thousands of witness accounts confirming that witnesses saw witches riding on broomsticks through the air and having sex with the devil, but such anecdotes don't get more reliable just because thousands swear to them. This brings up our next point, Source Criticism. A critical attitude is the core of any scientific endeavor. No critical researcher should take evidence at face value. Even though material and documentary evidence have the highest value, there is always the possibility that they were simply misinterpreted or that artifacts have been planted. This has been manipulated and documents fabricated or tampered with. The more that is at stake, politically speaking, the more likely such manipulations usually are. In addition, just because a genuine document claims something, this doesn't make that claim automatically true. Whoever created that document may have been dishonest, misinformed, or simply sloppy. The greatest skepticism, however, is due in dealing with anecdotal evidence. One is to say witness accounts. Not only is our human memory very fallible, we are also known to give our stories twists and turns that aren't always in accordance with the truth. It is therefore of great importance to embed witness statements in a framework of evidence that is more reliable, hence any of the other layers in our pyramid. If a witness statement does not fit into that framework, it's most likely untrue for whatever reasons. Next, a true scientist wants to see his theories exposed to criticism, because that's the only way to find out whether they hold any water. After all, a scientist doesn't want to be right, he wants to get it right. The more critical helpers he has, and the tougher those helpers test his theories, the better for him. A true scientist therefore wants to get involved in discussions with those who disagree with his theories. He listens to those with other views. Finally, there are many ways of rigging one's data and evidence in order to force them to fit one's theory. All of them are hallmarks of an anti-scientific attitude. Here are those relevant to our topic. First, adhamanum attacks. Attacking opponents instead of their ideas by calling them names, imputing bad intentions, immoral motives, unpopular political convictions, etc. is a big no-no. This tactic is probably the most commonly used and also the most effective. As most of us are inclined not to listen to arguments anymore if we consider the person making them to be despicable. It remains a fact, however, that such tactics are unacceptable and themselves morally deficient. Next on our list is suppressing or ignoring unwanted data, which amounts to forgery, pure and simple. We don't have to explain that in detail. However, there is a form of suppressing unwanted data that is particularly vicious, and that is when governments outlaw certain research results, punish scholars for disseminating them, and destroy unwelcome research publications. Believe it or not, but that's exactly what happens in many Western countries today when it comes to the Holocaust. Here's a map of Europe. All the red countries destroy any research results and data that runs contrary to the official Holocaust dogma. Last on our list is shifting the definition of terms, which means basically shifting the goldpost. That's a way of cheating. We all know it when it comes to playing games. It also happens in science and scholarship, however. It usually starts by not defining terms properly or by changing the definition to make it fit one's agenda. So what then is pseudoscience, you might ask? Well, pseudoscience is analysis that pretends to be science, but is not, because it fails to meet many, if not most, of the criteria just explained. There is of course a continuum between science and pseudoscience. The less the just mentioned principles are maintained, the worse, and more likely faults is the corresponding science. In fact, pseudoscience is more frequent than established academia is willing to admit. In particular, in the quote unquote soft disciplines of the social sciences, whose evidentiary rules aren't as rigorous as those of the quote-unquote exact sciences, such as math, technology, and the natural sciences. History of course is a social science, hence more prone to fall prey to the fallacies of pseudoscience than say physics or chemistry. This is especially true for modern history, due to political and at times even legal pressure. Let's now turn to Dr. Lipstead's claims regarding the Holocaust deniers motives and methods. Not the revisionist motives, she writes in her introduction on page 16 quote. In the 1930s, Nazi rats spread a virulent form of anti-semitism that resulted in the destruction of millions. Today, the Basilis, meaning anti-semitism, carried by these rats, referring to the deniers aka revisionist, threatens to kill those who already died at the hands of the Nazis for a second time by destroying the world's memory of them. Hence, in her introduction, Lipstead equates revisionist with rats, once the Nazis equated Jews with vermin like rats, lice, or basilis. Lipstead uses the same terms to indiscriminately disparage all persons holding certain opinions she disagrees with. A worse attack or the humanity of her fellow humans can hardly be conceived. This sentence alone should destroy her reputation as a scholar. But of course, it is politically correct to say these things, so she actually gets a pause for it, even for many scholars. Lipstead equates Holocaust revisionists with Nazis and fascists. Interestingly, Dr. Lipstead claims that it is the deniers who engage in odd hominem attacks on their opponents. To support her claim, she relates a facical story which we won't read here because it's a waste of time. She simply made that up. There's no evidence that any revisionist scholar ever did what she claims here. Since Lipstead gives no example and quotes no source, you just have to believe her. Fact is, however, that A, those living in glass houses, should not so stones, and B, making sweeping accusations without proving them is profoundly unscolarly. On page 1, Lipstead abinds that Holocaust denial is an antisemitic ideology rather than a responsible historiography. It is a purely ideological exercise, and the revisionists merely appear to be engaged in a genuine scholarly effort when, of course, they are not. Of course, proof offered? None. And so it goes on. We can quote a zillion similar passages where she pours out her disdain and contempt for dissidents of Third Reich history. But again, we don't want to waste your time. She must suffice here to say that her main goal is to portray revisionists as people who hate Jews, because she uses terms like antisemitism, antisemite, and antisemitic 182 times in her book. So, on average, almost on every single page. Here's a table showing how often she uses certain insults in her book. The number of times she uses the term Nazis includes many references to the actual historical national socialist. So that number isn't really telling much. Anyway, this list shows what Lipsdats book is really about. If your hellbent on reading an avalanche of mental diarrhea, simply get a copy of her book. The question is, of course, where is the link between these political insinuations and Holocaust revisionism? While it is certainly true that some people holding revisionist views also have certain political views most people detest, it's not true for all revisionists, simply because revisionism is primarily an attitude toward evidence, not politics. Hence, regarding the Holocaust, revisionism means simply that you think the Orthodox narrative needs revision due to new, overlooked, misrepresented, or misunderstood evidence. We could, and maybe even should, define all the terms Dr. Lipsdat throws at her readers in order to disparage her opponents so that we can demonstrate how arbitrarily she uses them. But time is precious, and since a more thorough analysis can be found in the bungled book mentioned earlier, we want to focus on the essentials here. So let us give you just one example, and that is her use of the term extremism. The word extreme derived from the superlative form of the Latin adjective X-Tair, meaning outside, to notes ideas that are at the far end of a spectrum. In the political context, it commonly refers to individuals who are ready to violate the law in pursuit of their ideas. How liberally Dr. Lipsdat uses that term can be seen when she discusses US writer Frieda Utley, whom she calls an extremist on page 50 of her book. Needless to say, Dr. Lipsdat doesn't define the term, and she also gives no hint in which way Utley was ever willing to violate any laws. In fact, Utley merely criticized others for violating international law. The politically correct, online encyclopedia Wikipedia has the following to say about Utley, quote, Winifred Utley, commonly known as Frieda Utley, was an English scholar, political activist, and best-selling author. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1927 as a trade union activist, she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1928. Later, married and living in Moscow, she quickly became disillusioned with communism. When her Russian husband, Arcadia Berdyshevsky, was arrested in 1936, she escaped to England with her young son. Her husband would die in 1938. In 1939, the rest of her family moved to the United States, where she became a leading anti-communist author and activist. Unquote. Read her entire biography on Wikipedia and you realize that she was anything but an extremist. So why would Lipsdead call her that? Well, in 1948, Frieda Utley published a book titled The High Cost of Vengeance, where she documented the crimes against humanity committed by the Allied Occupational Forces in Germany during the first three years after the war. These are historical facts which Dr. Lipsdead would like to see erased, but since she cannot refute them, she stigmatizes the author instead, a typical pseudoscientific tactic. Let's move on to what Dr. Lipsdead thinks about methods used by the revisionist. First, they are truth and memory. On page 23, she states that, quote, at its core, Holocaust denial poses a threat to all who believe that knowledge and memory are among the keystones of our civilization. Unquote. Here are a number of quotes from her book which suggests that Dr. Lipsdead wants her readers to believe in the equivalence of truth with memory. Meaning the fallibility of our senses and our memories, it goes with that saying that memory and truth are two distinct things. Dr. Lipsdead acknowledges that on page 151, although she gives it her own twist to make it fit into her agenda, quote, it is axiomatic among attorneys, prosecutors, and judges that human memory is notoriously bad on issues of dimensions and precise numbers, but very reliable on the central event. Unquote. I guess that Lipsdead backs up this alleged axiom of the legal profession, not at all. It is not only unsubstantiated but also wrong, as Elizabeth Loftus has demonstrated it with her vast research. Human memory can be utterly corrupted in just about any regard. You merely have to apply sufficiently suggestive techniques to achieve it. In one of the first studies we did, we used suggestion. A method inspired by the psychotherapy we saw in these cases, we used this kind of suggestion and planted a false memory that when you were a kid, five or six years old, you were lost in a shopping mall. You were frightened, you were crying, you were ultimately rescued by an elderly person and reunited with the family. And we succeeded in planting this memory in the minds of about a quarter of our subjects. You might be thinking, well, that's not particularly stressful. But we and other investigators have planted rich false memories of things that were much more unusual and much more stressful. So in a study done in Tennessee, researchers planted the false memory that when you were a kid you nearly drowned and had to be rescued by a lifeguard. And in a study done in Canada, researchers planted the false memory that when you were a kid something as awful as being attacked by a vicious animal happened to you, succeeding with about half of their subjects. All this apart from the fact that what people remember and what they tell isn't always the same thing either. In fact, there's plenty of research showing just how much we all lie to others and also to ourselves. So, I want to talk a little bit about this honesty. How many people here have lied at least once this year? Okay. How about the last week? I'm not going to ask about the last day and the last hour. But there's a very disturbing study in which they take two people who don't know each other. Put them in the room and say, talk to each other for ten minutes and introduce yourself to the other person. And then they put them into separate rooms and say, did you lie to the other person? And almost everybody says no. And they say, well luckily we taped your discussion. Let's play back to you sentence by sentence and let's get your reaction to each sentence. And on average people have to lie between two and three times in those ten minutes. Under these circumstances, source criticism of testimony is a very important hallmark of scholarly works, particularly when it comes to the Holocaust, about which survivors, bystanders and alleged perpetrators simply have got to remember what the public expects them to, often under threat of severe social or even legal consequences. Taking any testimony about the Holocaust at face value is therefore not only unscientific. It is also dangerous because only a critical listener encourages a witness to stick to the facts, whereas a credulous listener often gets what he deserves. Or as Dr. Susan Hack, Professor Philosophy and Law at the University of Miami put it, okay, I think this is probably the best line ever written on the subject of credulity. By William Kendenclifford, the credulous man is father to the liar and the cheat. What a great line. What he means I take it is that a credulous population creates the market for con men, crooks, clakers, etc. And for every kind of deceptive and misleading claim. Here is Dr. Lipstats' approach to the matter. First, she admits that the Orthodox Holocaust narrative rests almost exclusively on testimony. Next, she fears that once the wartime generation has died off, there will be no one left to attest to the truth. Again, she equates testimony with the truth, a typical anti-scientific stance. Then, she lashes out against anyone shedding doubt on what, quote unquote, eye witnesses say, although science outright demands that kind of source criticism. Note here her use of the word attack insinuating an aggression where there is none. Finally, she tells her readers outright lies, such as the one we just discussed about the alleged reliability of human memory. Or we're still that the revisionists are the one's violating evidentiary standards, what in fact the shoe is on the other foot. What Dr. Lipstats' sisson is to turn the hierarchical pyramid on its head, giving survivor testimony absolute priority. No way in her books does she define what the proper use of evidence is. Hence, she is shifting the goalpost here again to make it fit into her agenda. In 1996, the French mainstream historian Jacques Binoc said the following about the priorities of documents over testimony, quote, for the scientific historian, an assertion by a witness does not really represent history. It is an object of history, that is to say it requires source criticism. And an assertion of one witness does not weigh heavily. Assertions by many witnesses do not weigh much more heavily if they are not short up with solid documentation. The postulate of scientific historiography, one could say without great exaggeration reads, no papers, no facts proven. Either one gives up the priority of the archives, and in this case one disqualifies history as a science in order to immediately reclassify it as fiction, or one retains the priority of the archive, and in this case one must concede that the lack of traces brings with it the in capability of directly proving the existence of homicidal gas chambers. I mean, said all this, it should be clear whose attitude is a real threat to the keystones of our civilization, because that civilization depends on critical, recent thinking, not dogmatic belief in what someone claims to be quote, unquote, memory. Here's what Popper said about this when relating how the founders of Western civilization, the ancient Greeks, developed that keystone, the new tradition of criticizing theories, not having to find what the keystones of our civilization are, Lipsdead can again shift the goalpost by declaring that a critical attitude to testimony is quote, a threat to all who believe in the ultimate power of reason. It repudiates reason discussion. It is an irrational animus. Holocaust denial is the apotheosis of irrationalism, unquote. So, because revisionists insist on an intellectual, rational evidence-based, reasoned investigation of their reliability of witness testimony, they turn irrationalism into their god, because that's what apotheosis means. She really got it all upside down. If she knows it, she's a liar. If she doesn't, she has no clue what scholarship is all about. In the same vein, she writes on page 245, quote, they, meaning the revisionist, attempt to project the appearance of being committed to the very values that the in-truth adamantly oppose, reason, critical rules of evidence, and historical distinction, unquote. After all that we've explained so far, it ought to be clear that she's talking about herself here. Her steadfast refusal to debate those who subject her narrative of the Holocaust to tough attempts at reputation is legendary. Of course, she has the right not to talk to or even be seen with people she dislikes. She even has the right not to address arguments she'd attest, which is exactly her approach, as she writes on page 33. Stop this video to read it. If you do, note again that she mentions only reams of testimony, but no documents or physical evidence. Later in her book, however, she does discuss summer-visionist arguments, which we will address later. As we pointed out earlier, refusing to expose one's own theory to serious attempts of reputation is a hallmark of pseudo-scholarly attitude. Refusing to take opposing arguments into serious consideration sheds a bad light on those who do this, not on the arguments they reject out of hand. In addition, claiming that certain things are simply not up for debate is also a clear and present sign of an unscolarly attitude, not to say sheer bigotry. Although Dr. Lips said admits that there are many aspects of the Holocaust that are debated among mainstream historians, she insists that, quote, there's a categorical difference between debating these types of mainstream questions about the Holocaust and debating the very fact of the Holocaust. Unquote. Well, we hate to tell you, Dr. Deborah, but the freedom of hypothesis is a fundamental principle of science, just because you don't like it doesn't mean you can ignore its existence and still claim to be a scholar. You have to make up your mind. Apart from all this, Lips stats warning that debating revisionists would improve their public reputation is not even true, because if the evidence for the Holocaust is as overwhelming and the claims of revisionists as untenable as Dr. Lips that claims, engaging them in a debate would be a golden opportunity to expose their alleged quackery and stupidity. Only if revisionism has intrinsic validity would it gain stature by a public hearing. Here's the real reason why Lips that won't debate revisionists. We could easily turn the tables on Dr. Lips that by demonstrating that her primary motive is not historical accuracy, but sure enough Jewish identity and group cohesion. But since we consider motives to be only of passing interest and because they do not in any way invalidate factual arguments, we won't waste our time with this. Dr. Lips that by the way agrees that at the end of the day, motives are rather irrelevant when she writes on page 232 quote, but on some level, US historian Dr. Carl Degler was right, the revisionist motives are irrelevant. Unquote. But if that is so, then why write a whole book on proclaiming the revisionist motives? When it comes to Lips that's motives, there is one topic we have to briefly mention here. As stated before, Dr. Lips that considers antisemitic and related leanings to be a bomb normal motives. Interestingly, she puts at the same level of abomination another attitude and that is phylogermanism. She uses that term frequently, together with antisemitism, racism, and or notsism. Here are the quotes, which we won't read to you. You can stop the video if you want to take them in. These statements indicate that, for Dr. Lips that, having positive feelings for Germany or the German people is just as odious as being antisemitic or racist. To put the shoe on the other foot, what do you think the average person would think of us if we stated that it is odious to have pro-Jewish feelings? We'd be labelled anti-Semite, right? But that stance would not be different than Dr. Lips that's attitude. How crazy her attitude towards Germans and Germany really is can be seen from two more quotes. In one, she seriously states that Germany has the moral obligation to welcome anyone seeking refuge there. And in another one, she states that she feels obligated to take charge of how the Germans look at their own history, considering that there are currently around a billion people on this planet who do to war, famine, poverty, and civil unrest are inclined to seek refuge elsewhere. And if we keep in mind that one favorite destination of those migrants is Germany, is Dr. Lips that's seriously saying that Germany has the moral obligation to welcome a billion people if they decide to come? Is she out of her mind? And why exactly does Germany have that obligation? But Israel does not. To top it off, Dr. Lips that's father was German. That explains her last name, which is a town in Westphalia, Germany. So what we have here is an ethnic German of the Jewish faith who hates her own ethnicity. It's a self-hating Jew of a different kind. Actually, many, if not most Jews, have some German blood running into their veins. And quite a few of them hate that fact with a passion. It's worth some psychiatric analysis, but we won't go there. Let's now turn to some false claims Dr. Lips that makes about Holocaust revisionists and what they claim. Actually, let us rename this section the straw man fallacy because that's what we are dealing with here. And here is how it works. First, you ignore the real arguments or even the person's making the real hard-hitting arguments. Then you either create a made up pretend argument, or you refute the weak arguments of some person who is only a marginal figure in the area of contention. Then you defeat that made up or weak argument, and finally, you declare victory over the entire area of contention. This table, broken into two parts, lists in the left column the people whom Dr. Lips that deals with in her book. And in the right column, the people who have contributed major scholarly works to Holocaust revisionism as of 1992. As you can see, of the 25 individuals listed, only five are ahead. Ten of the people Lips that discusses have never contributed anything of scholarly value to Holocaust revisionism. The late mainstream historian Dr. Nolte isn't even a revisionist by any stretch of the imagination. He got into Dr. Lips that's crosshairs only because he basically insisted that any historian claiming to be a scholar has to take the revisionist and their arguments seriously, rather than ignore or beline them. Most of the others, Barnes, Hogan, App, Carto, Zundel, Irving, and Smith have plebiscised about the Holocaust, but not a single one of them has ever written even a single thoroughly researched and referenced article in the Holocaust, let alone a monograph. Lips that therefore cherry picked these individuals exactly because they plebiscised, which makes them an easy target. Bardeche even believed in the gas chambers, and thus a Holocaust, in spite of Lips that's false claim to the contrary on her page 56. Ten persons who did contribute major scholarly works as of late 1992 are not on Dr. Lips that's list, and we are apologising case we missed anyone. Not all of them are of equal value, and we are listing them here only to show that Dr. Lips that either has no clue what Holocaust revisionism is or that she is maliciously hiding it from her readers. In any case, she took a grotesque misrepresentation of Holocaust revisionism in order to show that it has no scholarly merits, and that revisionists are merely driven by detestable motives, and ever since, the Holocaust orthodoxy has declared victory over revisionism as such. Had Dr. Lips that done her homework, she would have had no problem finding out which revisionist publications existed back then, because in 1988, Italian Holocaust researcher Carlo Matorno published a paper on the birth, development and criticism of Holocaust revisionism. It lists all major revisionist works published in all languages which had appeared by the time that article was finalised, and it also lists reactions by mainstream authors to those publications. Dr. Lips that knew the English language journal where that paper was published, because she mentions in quotes papers from it in her book many times. Dr. Lips that wrote her book at a time when Holocaust revisionism underwent a paradigm shift, triggered by Fred Leicester's expert report. Many new researchers joined that school of thought and gave it a major boost, resulting in a wide range of publications. Here's a list of the most important authors among them, again apologies in case we missed anyone. At least the most important ones among them ought to have played some role in the 2016 edition of Lips that's book, but they didn't. So much for Dr. Lips that's picking the wrong people. Let us now turn to some of the few hits she made. Four of them are of relevance here. Professor Robert Farrazone, Mark Weber, Professor Arthur Butts, and Fred A. Leicester. Let's deal with Professor Farrazone first. By the time is Lips that wrapped up her TypeScript in late 1992, Farrazone had published a monograph where he summarized his case, a response to a major critic of his, and a number of papers that deserve to be called scholarly in their approach. Although most of them in French and some written under a pen name, Dr. Lips that mentions none of them. In her footnote 14 on page 293, she does quote, although incompletely, one paper by Farrazone which summarizes his reason as to why the hypothesis that the Nazis used gas chambers to mass murder people is a problem, hence the title of the paper, the problem of the gas chambers. Considering the brevity and the dearth of references of that paper, we hesitate calling it scholarly in nature. It's more of a provocation and a mission statement if you wish. But be that as it may, doing Farrazone justice in 1992 would have meant taking on his 280 page monograph, memoir, on de false, and the sequel, Rapace, Pierre Vidal, Nage. But instead, Lips that focuses on polemical statements Farrazone made over the years. When he comes to revisionist historian Mark Weber, Lips that mentions only one of his many papers on the Holocaust, of which we list here only the major ones. The paper highlighted here is mentioned by Lips that, but all she has to say about it is that Weber, quote, blamed the postwar spread of the rumor that the Nazis made Jews into soap on Simon Weitz and Hall and Stephen Wise, a claim that has no relationship to reality. Unquote, that's not merely a strong man fallacy. It's one of the many lies Lips that spreads. Here's what Weber wrote after having shown that Weitz and Thal and Wise, among many others, spread the soap lie during and after the war. Quote, in April 1990, Professor Yehuda Bauer of Israel's Hebrew University had the hootspot to blame the soap legend on the Nazis. In fact, blame for the soap story lies rather with individuals such as Simon Weitz and Thal and Stephen Wise, organizations like the world Jewish Congress and the victorious Allied powers, none of whom has ever apologized for promoting this vile falsehood. Unquote, let's not turn to Professor Butts, since his one and only monograph on the Holocaust is rather famous, Lips that couldn't dodge that bullet, but she chose to ignore the main points of Butts's book and focus on minor issues instead. Some of them she misrepresents, and by so doing, she turns her own argument into a strong man fallacy. If you are interested in details, get the bungled book shown. Here we will focus on Butts two main arguments which Lips that completely ignores. Butts's first main argument goes as follows. Germany's enemies owned or had access to many dense information networks in German-occupied Europe, secret service agents, underground resistance organizations, the Catholic Church, Jewish organizations, the Red Cross, to name only a few. Had a holocaust been going on, they would have known. Yet the way they acted clearly indicates that they had no serious trustworthy, reliable information about it. In a 1982 paper which Dr. Lips that also ignored, Dr. Butts summarized his thesis again, which is at times somewhat awkwardly presented in his book. The main points he makes in his book can be gleaned from the headlines he used in this article. Stop the video to read them. Butts's second main argument is that the Holocaust myth rests on the dual interpretation of innocuous items or events, whose meaning the creators of the myth turned into something ill-boding. In the preface to the 2015 edition of his book, Butts writes about that, quote, I analyzed the specifics of the alleged extermination process at Auschwitz. I showed that all of the specific material facts required a dual interpretation of relatively mundane facts. For example, transports, selections, showers, shaving hair, cyclone B, creamertoria, etc. All real and all relatively mundane had been given a second, devious interpretation. I'm quote, hence the questions are, were the Jews transported to be killed or to be expelled and put to slave labor? On arrival in the camps where fragile Jews selected to be killed or to be sent elsewhere? Were the showers fake to camouflage gas chambers or real to give the inmates a bath? Was the inmates hair shaved off to exploit even the least body part before killing them? Or to combat license infestations? Was cyclone B a mass murder weapon or wasn't used to kill lice, hence save inmates' lives? Were creamertoria used to erase evidence of mass murder or to prevent the spread of diseases? As much more in Butts' trailblazing book, which lips that evidently cannot handle, some of which we can mention here only briefly, as for instance the issue of false confessions by alleged perpetrators. Lipset hides from her readers that A. the allies systematically tortured their German prisoners after the war to extract quote unquote confessions, and that B. The allies presented during the Nuremberg Tribunal quote unquote evidence such as extorting confessions, fraudulent expert reports, and film footage with mandatious narrations, which quote unquote convinced some of the defendants that the Holocaust claims were true. Lipset hides or misrepresent these at other facts laid out by Dr. Butts as well. See the Bungle book for more details. The other individual discussed by Lipset who wrote a significant revisionist study is Fred Leicter, the former US expert on execution technologies. A lot of things that Lipset writes on him however are odd-habenome attacks, but because that is completely beside the point, we'll simply ignore that here and we'll focus only on factual arguments. For this, let's turn again to her end notes. Her chapter on Leicter has a whopping 114 of them. How many of them refer to sources that address in any technical or scientific way any of the technical and toxicological issues raised by Leicter? Basically only 13. One of them is an article by Robert Farazon, which we can ignore as Dr. Lipset does quote it to support her own case. The other 12 are from three works by the French pharmacist Jean-Claude Pressack. We will again encounter the same pattern later when addressing the way Lipset discusses actual revisionist arguments about the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz. There too she relies exclusively on Pressack. Of the 29 end notes referencing her discussion about the gas chambers, 28 refer to Pressack's first book and one to a revisionist book by Farazon, which again cannot be counted. Such a referential monoculture is truly pitiful. Dr. Lipset basically has only one leg to stand on. How can any scholar seriously write a treatise when there's only one relevant work to quote from? We'll postpone discussing Lipset's at times fallacious arguments to the last section of this documentary when dealing with all the rest of them. In closing this section on revisionist personalities, let us briefly mention Bradley Smith, the founder of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust. Lipset's chapter on him is the core of her book, but it is also the least substantiated. First of all, as we mentioned earlier, Smith never really wrote anything of substance on the Holocaust, which makes him an easy straw man target. Next, Smith merely applies the Western ideal of the open marketplace of ideas to a topic where Lipset and Hurioc don't want it applied. For decades, Smith has argued that, quote, anyone should be encouraged to investigate critically the Holocaust story in the same way they are encouraged to investigate every other historically vet. This is not a radical point of view. The culture of critique was developed millennia ago by Greek philosophers like Socrates and was renewed centuries ago during the Enlightenment. Unquote. What's wrong with that? Smith managed to place hundreds of these ads in campus newspapers, followed up by radio interviews and even TV shows. That's what caused the two mainstream historians mentioned by Dr. Lipset to worry and ask her to research the matter. In fact, the cover art of the 1993 hardcover edition features press clippings from media reactions which Bradley Smith triggered with his campus project. That is to say, his attempt to bring Holocaust revisionism to the attention of college and university students as well as professors throughout the United States. As a result, from what Lipset writes and from all the organizations supporting her, her book was primarily geared toward being part of a concerted effort to thwart Smith's campus project. Smith felt the effects early on. He describes it in his autobiography, Break His Bones, which you can read online at the address shown. If you are interested in finding out what motivated Smith to do this and what he experienced as backlash from the establishment, we highly recommend reading it. But here is a brief video clip from the documentary El Grand Taboon. In the 1950s Bradley, then a bookseller was prosecuted by the US government for selling the Henry Miller book, Tropic of Cancer. Our man's reading point here. It was then considered pornographic, even though now it is considered to be a great work of literature. Since then, Bradley has been a strong advocate for free speech and intellectual freedom. He travels North America speaking to college students about the persecution of polyconstructrivisionists. The way I look at it, the ideal of intellectual freedom is the one great ideal of American culture. We made the others, but that's the one great, but they didn't originate from a constitution. It came out of that we renaissance a key of green culture. It came out of the British and it was institutionalized in our constitution in the First Amendment. First amendments rather peculiar because things like it are not available, even in Canada, they will have the equivalent of the First Amendment. We can't have intellectual freedom if we don't have the right to dissent. It's just not possible. If you can't dissent from the orthodox opinion, you're not free to think about that view. Or if you're free to think about it, you have to keep it to yourself. But it's not a culture of intellectual freedom. If you don't have the right to dissent. The professorial class is not in complete agreement with that. The professorial class believes that in my experience that most people have run to dissent but some not. In revisionist arguments with regard to the Holocaust are being criminalized in country after country after country in Europe, Canada, Australia, the Zealand, and the laws have already been drawn up to criminalize revisionist arguments here in America. And it's done by people who are sincere. Lipsdads chapter on Smith is a telling expose of how she has been and keeps conspiring with her like-minded colleagues to suppress Smith's campaign for intellectual freedom and open debate of the Holocaust. Lipsdads claims that this is not a better First Amendment rights because the First Amendment merely prevents the United States government from passing laws to live in free speech. While this is formally correct, it is also like saying that while the US government has to abide by the law, we normal people can act as we damn well please. In contrast, the Bill of Rights should be a moral example of how any responsible, powerful group of people should behave. Lipsdads excuse on page 215 that if the revisionists get turned down by one media outlet quote, there are always other publications. It's a bad joke because it's been her and her comrades mission in life to make sure that there isn't any quote other publication. Except for those the revisionists publish themselves. And then Lipsdads in companies strive to make sure that the sale of this revisionist material is banned everywhere else too. It's like saying, yeah you have the right to speak, but only to yourself. Hence this is not just about having the right to speak freely, but also for everyone to decide for themselves who they want to listen to. Using power the way Dr. Lipsdad and her ilk have been using it for decades in order to prevent others from being able to hear is a violent act. It's like locking you up in a soundproof room. Smith has described how it works quote, every professor and working reporter understands perfectly well that once he or she is smeared with the neo-Nazi or anti-Semite label, they know they are dead ducks. They know that from that moment on they are going to have to get a job at McDonald's or at a car wash someplace because no newspaper, no university will ever again employ them. Unquote. That's the power Lipsdad and her ilk wield and her chapter on Smith proves that they misuse it wherever they see fit to destroy freedom of science and scholarship on this matter. Lipsdad justifies that by claiming that Holocaust for revisionists don't have opinions but mere prejudices, as for instance about Smith on page 215. In essence, she lobbies for the idea that there should not be a freedom to express prejudices, but how can we distinguish between facts on the one hand and errors or lies on the other? Lipsdad just throws these terms at us and thinks that solves the issue. When in fact it merely confounds it. In other words, she is shifting the goalposts again. If we wanted to cut out from a free exchange of ideas, all those utterings that are not sufficiently based on facts, then the questions arise A. How do we reliably measure the degree to which an opinion is based on facts? B. Who sets the limit below which we cut out non-eligible utterings? At C. And most importantly, who defines authoritatively what counts as a fact? A Ministry of Truth or Dr. Lipsdad? And there's the rub. Dr. Lipsdad would like to play goddess Almighty by deciding what is fact and what is not. To find out what is fact and what is not was exactly the purpose of Smith's campus advertisement project. Get the smartest braze of the nation to mull it over. Without being threatened by Dr. Lipsdad or comrades should they come to iconic plastic results. There's nothing wrong with Smith's approach. There's everything wrong with thwarting that process though as is Dr. Lipsdad's goal. It is profoundly anti-academic, anti-intellectual, anti-scholarly, anti-scientific. It's done mad-ic, taboo-driven, arrogant, imperious, and overbearing. The right to free inquiry and even the obligation to inquire is at the heart of academia. That is the first, most profound, and most important thing that every professor should publicly profess. If they don't profess that, they're not professors, period. Let's now turn to historical arguments themselves, which aren't the core of Lipsdad's book, but they are the core of the issue at hand. Before doing that, let us summarize how Dr. Lipsdad backs up factual claims. When analyzing her end notes, we find that she relies heavily on political propaganda material. To a large degree, written by the political pressure group ADL, she very frequently doesn't quote the source itself, but third-party publications writing about them. She cite source material that is utterly unquodible, most prominent among them, a collection of newspaper clippings, and relies on only one author, press-ac, when discussing the core issue, where their homicidal gas chambers and Auschwitz to exterminate the Jews. In many cases, however, she makes claims, which she doesn't back up with anything at all. As a result of her not going back to the sources, she commits major blunders. For instance, in her section where she discusses claims allegedly made by the late German historian Dr. Ernst Nolte, whose writings Lipsdad evidently has never read, most of what she claims Nolte in fact never wrote or said. Now we'll delve deeper into the factual discussion to see whether the same pattern can be found there. Buckle up and enjoy the ride. In his famous report, Leuchter claimed that the active ingredient in the Zeichlund bee, hydrogen cyanide, reacts with iron compounds present in masonry to form a very stable pigment called Prussian blue. As it did in these walls of two Auschwitz fubigation chambers, and that this pigment ought to be present to this day in the walls of the claimed homicidal gas chambers of Auschwitz, where Zeichlund bee is said to have been used for mass murder. Lipsdad disputes that claim on pages 188 through 190. We wonder though what knowledge or education might permit her to make any statement in this regard. She's a specialist in Jewish history, not in chemistry, and she doesn't even try to shore up any of her claims with any references to chemical literature. Since that issue has been dealt with in a separate 100 minute documentary, we take a pass here and direct the interested viewer to that video instead, which was recently put into quarantine by YouTube, by the way. So if I sit here to say that Dr. Lipsdad isn't even aware of the many issues and aspects involved. Next, let's turn to diesel gas chambers. In her first chapter, Dr. Lipsdad relates the controversy surrounding a statement made by US journalist Pat Buchanan about the possibility of committing mass murder with diesel engine exhaust, about the claim for the so-called extermination camps at Treblinka and Belzick. Stop the video to read what she wrote about it. We won't bother going into the details here, because hack it's just a comment on journalist's made. Lipsdad gets all upset about it, but in her discussion, she completely fails even mention the actual scientific paper upon which that debate is based. We show some relevant publications here, just in case you are curious. None of them can be found in Lipsdad's book. She just produced hot air. The next topic concerns the capacity of the crematoria at Auschwitz. If you wanted to figure out what the features of a cremation furnace are, what would you do? Well, any reasonable person would consult expert literature on cremation, and if pushcups to shove, engineering calculations and experiments could also be performed, but not so our Debbie. She instead refers to a simple letter by the Auschwitz administration. Again, stop the video to read her ramblings if you care to. What's her source for that letter? The transcript of the second zundle trial. Needless to say, that document isn't part of the trial transcript. A proper historian would give an archival reference for that document itself, or some secondary literature where it can be found. Logic, that is to say bath, natural laws that govern incineration processes, technical cremation possibilities at the time, and the expert evaluation of physical evidence, such as experiments and still existing crematories, as well as documentary evidence, such as construction plans, operating instructions, and cremation logs, play no role in her argument at all. She might as well have quoted survivor testimonies, some of which claim absolutely absurd cremation capacities. That's Dr. Lipsdats' world of Lala science, also called pseudoscience. If you want to read a book dealing with that topic, for which the authors have gone through all the above steps to separate fact from fiction, then look at this three-volume work written by the late Italian engineer Dr. Franco Dianna, together with Italian historian Carlo Botonio. In this massive work, the authors concluded that the actual cremation capacity of Auschwitz roughly coincided with the recorded death toll of registered inmate who died mainly of diseases, as documented in the Auschwitz death records. We'll leave it at that, because the cremation issue is too huge to be covered here in detail. When it comes to the alleged homicidal gas chambers of Auschwitz, Dr. Lipsdat makes a number of claims, every single one of which is both unsubstantiated and untrue. We won't bother proving this here, for one, because the next documentary slated for production, questioning the Holocaust, why we believed, part two, will deal with all these issues in depth, and also because we've taken up too much of your time already. One of Lipsdats' favorite expressions is that there are reams of documents which allegedly refute what revision is claimed. As mentioned before, she relies in this regard entirely on Pressex 1989 book on Auschwitz, as she admits on page 255. And that's where Lipsdat goes terminally bust. Pressex-evacuous ramblings have been dissected and refuted in the most minute and comprehensive manner possible in two separate monographs, which admittedly appeared only after the first edition of Lipsdat's book had come out. The new 2016 edition should have taken that into account, but Nay, Dr. Lipsdat doesn't need to pay attention to what's going on in the real world. She has the back of the rich and the mighty, and that's good enough for her. Pressex claims, which have reinforced the belief of millions in the myth, will be one of the main focuses of the upcoming documentary, questioning the Holocaust, why we believe, part two, to which we've referred. We have never read such shoddy quote-unquote scholarship in our lives as in Dr. Lipsdat's book. She clearly has neither understood what the principles and methods of science and scholarship are, nor has she any clue about the historical topics she is writing about. She misquotes, mis-translates, mis-represents, misinterprets, and makes a plethora of wild claims without backing them up with anything. No wonder she refuses to debate the revision. In fact, Dr. Lipsdat herself has proclaimed the judgment in her own case. All we have to do is quote her. Truth has been the antithesis of her enterprise. Given the way she handles documents and data, it is clear that she has no interest in scholarship or reason. Holocaust handbooks, the world's leading book series critically exploring with the powers that be don't want examined. Mesmerizing comprehensive presentations, such as lectures on the Holocaust, as well as cutting edge research results, such as the real case for Auschwitz. Read most of our books free of charge at HolocaustHandbooks.com. We can also watch our riveting documentaries. All this high-quality content was made possible by viewers like you. Please consider making a donation to help us create more of this content. 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