Denken Macht Frei (Thought Makes You Free)
The world is in flux. The financial crisis has shattered our too-blind faith in the regnant economic and political system. The good in this crisis: it makes you think. Many realize that the remedies proposed by government are no remedies at all, but merely measures intended to keep the existing system alive. The idea is spreading that the whole thing in reality is a giant redistribution intended to concentrate money and power into even fewer hands than before. It is high time to end our unquestioning ways with some serious thought.
The present economic system-like all systems-rests on certain axioms, certain underpinnings, that cannot be disturbed without putting the entire edifice into danger of collapse. Such underpinnings are for that reason always sacrosanct.
He who wishes to be accepted, or even merely tolerated in our society does well to acknowledge, or at least not to openly dispute, certain core beliefs: To these belong devotion to the free market, including debt financing and the independence of the banking system, to so-called parliamentary democracy, including the attendant two-party system, devotion to philo-semitism, multiculturalism, homosexuality, and abortion together with the highest praises for the civil rights to which one considers oneself entitled.
It is even permitted to belong to whatever religion or philosophy one might wish to-but subject to the unstated condition that one doesn’t really take it seriously. Otherwise, one acquires very quickly the odor of fundamentalism.
In today’s political and cultural landscape, a fundamentalist is anyone who holds his Catholic, or Evangelical, or Islamic, or national-or whatever feelings of any kind-above those highest of values enumerated above. Therefore, fundamentalists cannot be tolerated under the global New World Order that is the central theme of American politics. It is only a very slight distance that separates the fundamentalist from the charge of being a terrorist. And it is not necessary here to spell out what sort of treatment awaits terrorists. That has been ordained by 9/11.
The thoughtful European notes with puzzlement that the proscriptions set forth by Political Correctness and monitored by the culture and the law grow more numerous every day. The citizen is condemned to silence by all manner of gag laws and cowed by the looming threat of the EU criminal code because he no longer knows what is punishable, nor why, nor where. Lately, we’re told, nearly 14,000 “rights violations”-whatever those might be-were committed in Germany in 2008, of which fully 700 were violent. Therefore, there remain from these numbers about 13,000 nonviolent “rights violations.” This is notable, especially in light of the incessant reminders by self-righteous German politicians to China and other countries to “uphold civil rights.” Obviously, the sacred rights of freedom of expression, academic freedom, religious or philosophical belief, etc., are valid only so long as they don’t oppose any of the listed Canons of Western Values.
Here is a Catch-22. It is profoundly disingenuous, not to say outright mendacious: an easily seen-through maneuver for the benefit of the ruling elites of the West.
The greatest taboo of Western propriety, however, is of a historical nature. That is, where the matter has to do with Nazism or the so-called Third Reich, contemporary thought abdicates completely. The brain is relieved of its function, and quasi-religious reflexes take over. All powers of discernment cease, any inquiry into the Holy Writ is thought inappropriate, even malign. Here there is only one viewpoint allowed: the Nazis-read, the Germans-are perpetrators, and exclusively that, and the Jews are victims, and innately and eternally, no less. The uproar about Erika Steinbach, Eva Herrmann, Martin Hohmann, and General Günzel serves to illustrate. Whoever doubts these supreme tenets of belief is no longer a discussion partner, but instead a leper and a heretic rolled into one, subjected instantly to inquisitorial judgment, ostracism, and economic destruction. And everyone who has anything to do with such a person must immediately distance himself.
This goes double for questions concerning the Holocaust, the inner circle of this minefield. The never-ending rumble of the media concerning Bishop Richard Williamson has brought this taboo to the fore once again. Mrs. Merkel feels called upon to instruct the Pope; the Pope feels called upon to call Bishop Williamson to account; the attorney general of Regensburg proposes, and the Justice Department considers issuing, an international arrest warrant for the churchman-and why? Because he judges a historical matter differently from the way it is usually and permitted to do. This constitutes heresy. This means nothing else than that a historical event has been removed from the domain of scholarship and with that, of reasoned discussion, and elevated into the domain of religion, and indeed a kind of world religion that in Germany has unbeknownst acquired the standing of a half-official state religion.
As the media campaign against Bishop Williamson rose to a fever pitch, the revisionist and lawyer Horst Mahler was sentenced in Munich to six years imprisonment and at the same time in Potsdam to four more years, because he questioned details of the Holocaust. In 2007, Mahler’s partner, lawyer Sylvia Stolz, was sentenced to 3 1/2 years’ imprisonment and escorted directly to jail from the courtroom. The reason: she defended the German-Canadian publicist Ernst Zündel in court in Mannheim and took the position that the accused was right, or at least that he was exercising his right to a dissenting opinion. Zündel himself got five years. Two years’ investigatory detention under the most dubious circumstances in Canada didn’t count. So Zündel does seven years because he published arguments over his Internet site concerning the historical thesis of the “mass gassing” of Jews.
Shortly after Zündel, the chemist and multi-book author Germar Rudolf, originally a scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, received a sentence of 2 1/2 years because it was possible to arrive at the same conclusions from his neutral, scientific investigations in forensic chemistry as had been arrived at by other routes by earlier researchers.
The Frenchman Robert Faurisson, university professor for documentary research and textual analysis at the Sorbonne in Paris has been subjected to multiple fines of astronomic amounts, and has sustained bodily injuries from a beating administered by unidentified assailants.
One of the best-known revisionist researchers and writers is the Swiss Romanist and Scandinavist Jürgen Graf, sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment by a Swiss court for questioning the holocaust hypothesis. He was able to avoid this imprisonment only by flight into exile.
Also in exile is the Belgian father of seven Vincent Reynouard. In Austria, court-expert-witness-engineer Wolfgang Fröhlich is in jail for the second time because he does not accept the official version of the holocaust.
Where is Amnesty International? Where the European Court of Human Rights? Where the hue and cry of the media? Where the student protests? Where the Church?
All these men and women and many others, such as Ursula Haverbeck, Dr. Udo Walendy, Gerd Honsik, Dr. Max Wahl, Siegfried Verbeke, Gaston Amaudruz, have committed no offense other than to have arrived at conclusions from their research and analysis that diverge from the official account-and that they then addressed pointed questions to those who have promulgated the putative falsehoods around the world.
It is the pride of western science, since the Renaissance, and in particular since the Enlightenment, to allow nothing to be sacrosanct, and to accept nothing short of absolute objectivity. Revisionism-that is, discernment, confirmation, questioning-is a basic principle of science. All else is dogmatism. Science cannot admit of religious, political, or other social exceptions. In the sense of the natural sciences, there is no Christian reality nor Unchristian reality, no moral nor immoral fact. The scientist has the right to err, since no one is in possession of the absolute truth. Natural science has banished the medieval age of superstition with the age of reason.
As applied to research into the Holocaust, this means: it may not be clouded by philo-Semitic nor by anti-Semitic inclinations, any more than it may be by Germanophilic or Germanophobic. Whether one likes the Jews or the Germans, or dislikes them is no factor in research, and may not affect it in any way.
Ms Merkel said in her message to Pope Benedict XVI, “There may be no denial of the Holocaust.” What does this mean, there may not be? Does it mean that “denial” presupposes that someone advances lies while knowing better? This certainly doesn’t apply to the revisionists, who are convinced of their interpretations. Or does it mean that here, after all-trumping all factual inquiry-global political forces are in play to which both the German head of state as well as the leader of Christianity must bow?
There is commentary that implies something pretty close to these conjectures. As early as May 1979, Professor William Rubinstein of the University of Melbourne, Australia, wrote in the Nation Review, “Were the Holocaust shown to be a hoax, the Number One weapon in Israel’s propaganda armory disappears.”
And after the lecturer and revisonist Günther Deckert was sentenced to years in jail, the Frankfurter Allgemeine wrote on August 15, 1994, “If Deckert’s account of the Holocaust were correct, the Federal Republic of Germany would be founded upon a lie.” Every presidential address, every “moment of silence,” every history book would have lied. In that he denies the murder of the Jews, he contests the very legitimacy of the German Federal Republic.
But it seems that there are even higher matters at stake: the memory of the Holocaust is central to the erection of the new world order. So wrote Ian J. Kagedan, the Director of the Canadian B’nai B’rith in the Toronto Star for November 26, 1991.
These unseemly newspaper announcements enable us to understand why finally the effort to exhume the claimed victims and properly to account for them has not been undertaken; why Ms Merkel has not called an international Holocaust conference in Berlin and subjected the assertions of the revisionists to a public discussion and critique. With that, the sorry matter would once and for all be placed on the table and the “pseudoscientific bumbling” of the Holocaust deniers would be laid bare for all to see-and indeed by scientists, not just journalists. But therein, of course, argument and counter-argument would have to be heard.
Why can’t this be? Is it feared that such a discussion might produce results other than those that are politically desired? Is this why the revisionists languish in jail? Is this why their books are banned? Is the public to be denied the means of evaluating the state of the revisionist arguments?
The reason for this remarkable scientific regression appears to be the same as the reason for the judicial regression in the courtroom. Here also the established practice-which ashamedly is never admitted in public-that there is never inquiry into whether the accused might be right. Evidence is not taken, and if the accused should try to explain his position, he subjects himself to still further charges, and his attorney as well! A judicial monstrosity. The factuality of genocide of millions in gas chambers is simply declared “given,” and the court has merely to decide whether the defendant has contradicted this given – and then to arrive at a sentence. A historical assumption is thereby peremptorily raised to the status of a universally known and proven law of nature – and at the same time, factual confirmation of it is forbidden!
Is somebody afraid of the truth here?
The voices are becoming more numerous that advocate breaking the silence over this: in 2007, Professor Karl Albert Schachtschneider, professor of public inquiry at the University of Erlangen, spoke on the Constitution of the European Union. He took a question from the audience, “Do we have freedom of speech here?” He answered: “A country in which free speech is constrained by severe punishments is not a free country. The immortal Kant said about freedom of speech that one must be free to say anything, whether it is true or untrue. With the Holocaust, anything might be true or not true; I wasn’t there. But another reason I don’t discuss it, is that it is forbidden. One is not allowed to dispute it, not even scientifically. The prohibition on “agitation” prevents it. This is not a free country.”
If the “new world order” that the Canadian gentleman from B’nai B’rith mentioned might be in some way identical with that financial system that currently has thrown the world into the grips of an unprecedented crisis, it might in any case be appropriate to examine the central historical and philosophical foundations of that new order somewhat more closely.
“Where everyone condemns, one must prove. Where everyone praises, as well.” Thought makes you free!
=====
The publicist and lecturer Bernhard Schaub (Dornach bei Basel), publisher of this newsletter, is Swiss. He was a teacher of German and history at Waldorf Schools until he was dismissed in 1993 for publishing a book in which he cited objective research into the Holocaust. He also lost a later position as academic dean of an adult-education school for similar reasons. In 2006 he participated in the Holocaust Conference called in Tehran by President Ahmedinejad.