Holocaust Revisionism explained for Leftists: the short version

I. Why a short version?

One of my articles, 'The Mystical Sand Book: Holocaust Revisionism explained for Leftists' has proven to be one of my most popular posts. I wrote it for the British Left - specifically, members of the Left who have been caught up in the recent 'Left anti-Semitism' scandal - to help them in their struggle against Israel and Zionism. My reasoning was that by explaining the principles of Revisionism to them, I would be placing a weapon in their hands - an extremely effective weapon, more effective than any they have used hitherto. You could call me an intellectual arms dealer.

After I revised the essay multiple times, I was satisfied with result, but looking at the essay now, I see that it does suffer from one shortcoming, which is excessive length. I have decided here, then, to write a short version.

II. What the official story is

'Mystical Sand Book' starts out - surprisingly - with the assumption that yes, the Holocaust happened.

So what was the Holocaust? Three things:

• Hitler and the leaders of Germany ordering the extermination of all Jewry in German-occupied Europe and the USSR, as shown by documents such as the Wannsee Protocol; 

• An extermination carried out by gas chambers - fixed gas chambers in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor and other camps, and mobile gas chambers (gas chamber vans) on the Eastern Front. The German Einsatzgruppen shot dead many Jews - tens of thousands were shot at the Babi Yar ravine in Ukraine - but primarily, the Germans used gas. In 1943, the Soviet government put captured Germans on trial for gassing Russians in mobile gas chamber vans. 

• Six million Jews were killed: five million in the European camps, one million in the USSR. As for what happened to all the bodies, the Germans burned them: in Europe, Jewish corpses were disposed of in crematoria; in the USSR, on bonfires. 

The three theses were proved, beyond the shadow of a doubt, at Nuremberg and other war crimes trials. A wealth of evidence - testimonial, forensic, documentary, demographic - exists for the Holocaust, and only a crank would deny it (or someone more sinister - a Neo-Nazi who belongs to an international neofascist conspiracy).

The layman regards the Holocaust as incontrovertible, and so is puzzled by Holocaust Revisionism. It seems to him irrational. When coming across Revisionism for the first time, the layman will concede, for the sake of argument, that the USSR or the USA / UK may have invented propaganda lies wholesale in order to demonise the Germans; but he cannot understand why the Jews - all Jews - would have done the same. He asks, quite reasonably, why would the Jews lie? And he notes that if the Jews are lying, they must be lying as a collective, as the vast majority of Jews around the world believe that the Holocaust happened. Many Jewish survivors of the camps will attest, most convincingly, that the atrocities did happen: are they all lying, and if so, how did they co-ordinate their story?

III. What the Talmud says  

The layman, in order to understand the Holocaust, needs to look at it as a whole. From that vantage point, he will see that the Holocaust rests upon the fundament of religion - the Jewish religion.

Kauston, the root of the word Holocaust, means 'to burn', and Holocaust means 'burnt offering', 'burnt offering to God'.

The Talmud (a Jewish religious text which is a 22-volume set of commentaries on the Old Testament) makes many startling prophecies regarding the future of the Jewish people. One of them is that a vast number of Jews will be massacred by non-Jews - by being thrown into giant ovens. After being immolated - in what is a sacrifice - the murdered Jews will return to life. God, upon recognising their sacrifice, will award them the lost State of Israel.

I think the reader can guess for himself the name the Talmud gives to this event (here's a clue: it starts with a capital 'h'); I think, too, he can also guess the precise number of murdered Jews (here's another clue: it stands in the millions, and is a nice round figure).

Amazingly, then, the Talmud - which was written some 1500 years ago - predicts some of the most significant events of the 20th century: the mass murder of Jews by non-Jews, the mass immolation of Jews in ovens, and the Jewish recovery of the lost State of Israel.

The 20th century Holocaust fits the Talmud Holocaust like a glove. In his 1960 novel, Night, Elie Wiesel writes that the Germans tried to kill him four times - once by shoving him in a giant fire pit in the ground. (Wiesel miraculously survived).

IV. Some implications

Once you understand how the Holocaust is grounded in the Jewish religion, a number of things become clear. Among them are:

• The six million. The number of dead in most of the famines and genocides of the 20th century constantly fluctuates: one will see different figures from the Ukrainian famine, the famine in China at the time of the Great Leap Forward, the number of Cambodians killed in the time of Pol Pot... But the Holocaust death toll stays locked at six million. Why? Because the Talmud says it must be six million. The figure cannot be changed. 

• The immolation. The official account of the Holocaust - the one we find in the history books - tells us constantly that millions of corpses were cremated or heaped on bonfires. This is because the account must match what is in the Talmud: a fiery sacrifice must have taken place. 

• The resurrection. The Talmud narrative has a happy ending: the murdered Jews came back to life. This explains why the world is filled with Auschwitz survivors. (The large number of Auschwitz survivors seems rather improbable, given that Auschwitz - a death camp where 1.5 million died - would have been the deadliest place in the world for Jews between 1939 and 1945. Even if one avoided gassing, such a terrible ordeal as internment in Auschwitz (or any other death camp) would have taken a toll on the survivor's body: one would not live into one's eighties and nineties).   

• The Holocaust = Zionism. The Talmud narrative shows the identity of the Holocaust, Judaism and Zionism. If one believes in the Holocaust, then ones believes in Judaism - whether is Jewish or not. The two cannot be separated. In the same way, if you accept every word of the Book of Revelations as being literally true, you must accept every word of the Gospels. The implication is, then, that if you believe in the Holocaust, you must believe in Israel's 'Right to exist' and all the other tenets of Zionism. Palestine was given to the Jews by God after the sacrifice of the six million, and that is that. How can one question the word of God? 

• What God thinks. Anyone who is familiar with the Bible knows that God is ornery when crossed. If the Holocaust, as foretold by Judaism, did not happen in the 20th century, then Palestine was obtained under false pretenses. I here make the impish suggestion: what if someone were tell God this? Were God to be informed of the ploy, he could be expected to take a terrible revenge, as He did many times in the Old Testament, upon His people. 

V.  The cultural influence

Professional Holocaust survivors such as Elie Wiesel and Irene Weisberg Zisblatt are influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by Yiddish folk literature. Stories which belong to this genre depict the persecution of Jews by non-Jews and contain equal parts absurdity and horror. One could call the genre Kafkaesque, but as Kafka himself was influenced by it, this would be putting the cart before the horse.

Remarkably, the Wiesels, Zisblatts and others of their ilk are always automatically believed. We live in a society which treats them with reverence.

VI. The show trial

One question is, why is the Holocaust story harmful?

Towards the end of the 'Mystical Sand Book', I deliver the following parable: 

Suppose that, 75 years ago, a gang of desperadoes rob a bank which is quickly surrounded by police, and, as what was intended to be a quick robbery turns into a siege, the gang takes twelve people at hostage, one of whom dies of a heart attack. The police storm the bank, free the hostages and arrest the gang and put them on trial – not only for armed robbery, but for first-degree murder of the person who died from the heart attack (in what should have been at the most an involuntary manslaughter charge). In addition, the gang are also charged with the premeditated murder of the eleven other hostages, even though all eleven survived. As evidence for this mass murder (which never happened), the prosecutors use photographs of the heart attack victim’s corpse, documents supposedly found at the gang’s hideout, and a confession coerced out of one of the gang’s members by torture or threats to his family. The final piece of evidence, which onlookers regard as the most compelling, is the eyewitness testimony of the eleven murdered people themselves [- all of the eleven] put in an appearance at the trial. At the conclusion of the trial, the gang members are either sentenced to death or life imprisonment. No-one spoke up for them – after all, they were admittedly bad characters, had made many enemies, and should have been in jail for other crimes – and decades later, they are still regarded as guilty, because, among other reasons, the survivors of the siege and their descendants will tell anyone who will listen how the gang took a dozen people hostage and murdered them in cold blood.

The reader can deduce that the above is an allegory for what happened to the Germans after the end of the war: the gang of robbers are the Germans, the police are the Allies and Russians, and the hostages are the Jews (and perhaps the Poles). I think the story can be used to understand why precisely it is that the Holocaust story is so objectionable...

The understanding is this: the Holocaust story leads to a distrust of our institutions. Quite clearly, in our parable, the judiciary, the prosecution and the police did wrong. And so did the politicians, who did not intervene to ensure that justice was served; so did the journalists, who covered up evidence and misreported; so did the intellectuals and academics, who never questioned the narrative.

VII. Where to for the Left? 

The Holocaust story hurts both the German and Palestinian national cause. Now, the Left, being by and large Marxist and Russophile, does not care for the former (seeing as nationalist Germany waged ferocious wars against Russia and Marxism-Leninism) but does for the latter. The Left has embraced the Palestinians, who lost their country because of the Holocaust story, and has made an enemy of the Israelis, who are sustained because of that story. So the Left wants to help Palestine and hurt Israel - but how? Exposing the intrigues of the Israel Lobby, calling Israel a 'Racist Colonial Settler State', condemning the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, comparing Israelis to 'The Nazis' - none of it works. The Left, in the past seventy years, has scarcely landed a blow against Israel and Zionism, because it has so far refused to challenge what lies at the heart of the Zionist project - the Holocaust narrative.