Anyone who fancies that he knows about historical revisionism and the great propaganda war over the exaggerated claims of the Holocaust® Must read this book to get the whole story.
(Note: the ® trademark symbol with the word holocaust® is mine—long ago there was some kind of hassle that erupted when someone, forgotten who, dared to use the sacred name for another genocide somewhere in the world and caught holy hell from the ADL. I have dutifully used the ® ever since out of respect for ownership.)
Hoffman’s preface says a ton:
“The impulse to religious dictatorship which leads to the imprisonment of dissenters and heretics, has a long history in the West, and despite our pretensions to enlightenment, it is with us even now. During the European wars of religion, when Protestants and Catholics murdered censored and defamed one another, a martyr to freedom of conscience was considered as such by Protestants if he or she was a Protestant`. By the same standard, Catholics regarded a person who was censored or killed for their faith as a martyr, only if they were Catholic.
Even though the people of Europe are today mostly agnostic or atheist, they have nevertheless inherited this sectarian mentality. Consequently, those who question the claims for execution gas chambers in Auchwitz-Birkenau are not regarded as martyrs to freedom of conscience when they are fired from their jobs, arrested. fined, or jailed. They are like Catholics in Elizabethan England or Huguenots in Bourbon France—they are of the heretics and therefore freedom of speech does not apply to them; neither are they martyrs when they are locked up or otherwise silenced; they are only blasphemers.
“In Britain and Europe the slogan of the state church was ‘error has no rights.’ Zealots on both sides were certain that the ruling religion, led by either Queen Elizabeth I of England, Pius V of Rome or Calvin in Geneva, had the legitimate authority to legally enforce their theological judgments with dungeons and with capital punishment. Though Europe today would scorn Calvin and the Pope, Europeans are nonetheless the heirs of this spirit of dictatorship over the mind. When modern France. Austria, Switzerland and Germany rule that heretics who question the homicidal gas chambers have no rights, they are reenacting the sixteenth century, with the exception that in our time the religion they are protecting is not Catholicism or Calvinism, but rather Holocaustianity.”
I have been around and inside of the Institute for Historical Review since 1980, but I never really knew Ernst Zundel, though we met and shook hands. In all these years, I had never absorbed the greatness of his long story until I read this book recently.
Reading Hoffman’s book is, therefore as good as three decades of contact with the protagonists of one of the greatest controversies of our century.
Copies of the first edition of this book were seized and destroyed by Canadian officials.
(heretic hunting squads.)
