This is called "Scum"

It’s about Ernst Zundel and Ingrid Rimland and their struggle, and also a little about the German people and their struggle. It was just one section of my essay “The Holocaust Wars” which, except for amongst a small band of stalwarts, was just howled down. The essay was a long time coming, but the trigger was a statement made by Joel Finkel of Jews-for-something-or-other. Joel didn’t like it that a previous essay of mine had found it’s way onto Ingrid Rimland’s ‘neo-Nazi’ Zundelsite.Well, “Jewish power“ certainly did appear on the Zundelsite, but that was because Ingrid had asked me if she might post it. People didn’t usually bother with such niceties and nor had anyone spoken to me quite as honestly, openly and courteously the way Ingrid spoke to me (Perhaps I’ll publish that conversation in another posting).But Joel didn’t like it one bit.

He liked Paul Eisen well enough, bleeding-heart Jew that I was – but what was I doing allowing these ‘Nazi scum’ to post my article?So this essay is all about those ‘Nazi scum”and all the other ‘Nazi scum’. I should add that this was written while Ernst was being detained in ‘Abu-Ghraib North’ i.e. The Metro West Detention Center, Toronto. Since then he has been deported to Germany where he was tried and sentenced to five years imprisonment for Holocaust denial. He served his term and was released and now lives peacefully and alone restoring his ancestral home on the Black Forest.

Ingrid remains in the United States. Both Ernst and Ingrid are earnestly hoping they will, in the not-too-distant future, be reunited.You can learn a bit more about Ernst here, here andhere and Ingrid here and hereThe article begins with Finkel’s statement. 

The virulently anti-Semitic Zundelsite (www.zundelsite.org) has posted the essay, (“Jewish Power” by Paul Eisen http://www.righteousjews.org/article10.html) which it describes as “brilliant.”  Of course, Eisen cannot control the use of his work by these scum, but that is hardly the point.  The sad fact is that it represents a “brilliant” endorsement of their own ideology of Jew-hating. 

The “scum” to which Joel Finkel refers are Ernst Zündel, currently in solitary confinement in the Metro West Detention Center, Toronto, and Ingrid Rimland, his wife, who owns and runs the Zundelsite – a website dedicated to supporting Zündel, his work and his struggle. All day every day Zündel sits in his cell on a pile of court transcripts (chairs are not permitted), wearing the same orange jumpsuit as all the rapists and murderers, and with the permitted pencil stubs (ball-points are forbidden) he fights his campaigns, writes, draws and meditates on the past, present and future.

Meanwhile, from her Tennessee home Ingrid wheels and deals, begs and borrows, plots, posts and publishes to try to get him out, or at least to stop his imminent deportation to his native Germany where he can expect a warrant for his arrest under Germany’s severe “hate laws” and a possible five year sentence.

Ernst Zündel immigrated to Canada in 1958 to avoid the draft (he is a lifelong pacifist), where he has lived for forty-two years.  Unlike most Holocaust revisionists (rather an austere, academic lot), Zündel is a hands-on activist – by all accounts, a gentle, good-humored man, kind and honest and with those qualities often found in the strangest places: a fine mind and a good heart.  Born in Germany’s Black Forest, Zündel sometimes refers to himself as a ‘Swabian peasant’, and it’s true, he does have that about him.  But Zündel understands people and, most important, he understands history. He is, to use his own word, aVordenker – one who thinks ahead of the crowd, one who sees the panorama of life.

For decades now Zündel has battled the Holocaust establishment:

“I was like everybody else in my own postwar years in Germany. I was disgusted with my father’s generation whom I believed to have been monsters.  Like practically all people on our planet, I used to believe in the standard, widely accepted notion that the government of National Socialist Germany, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, had attempted to kill the Jews by an act of state-decreed genocide.  I was ashamed to be a German…..In the 1960’s ….I experienced my first doubts about some details of the Holocaust story.  Further study, mostly at night, convinced me that many segments of the story were highly exaggerated, and the number of Jewish losses were wildly inflated.”  Ernst Zündel

Thus began Zündel’s activism – persistent, flamboyant and effective. Who else would have got himself photographed carrying a martyr’s cross up the steps of a Canadian courtroom? And who else, after having been beaten on the steps of a courthouse by members of a violent Jewish group when he appeared for court dates, would thereafter appear for all court hearings in a hard hat and bulletproof vest?

His first brush with Canadian law was when the government sought to remove his special mail privileges.  He won that one and has never looked back.

In 1985 Zündel ended up in court when he distributed a booklet: Did Six Million Really Die?, and ran foul of Canada’s “False News” Laws:

Everyone who willfully publishes a statement, tale or news that he knows is false and that causes or is likely to cause injury or mischief to a public interest is guilty of an indictable offense and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years.

Twice Ernst Zündel was in court for what turned out to be the two greatest Holocaust revisionism trials of our time, twice he was convicted and twice the convictions were overturned.  The first in 1985 lasted seven weeks and ended with a 15 month sentence, overturned in 1987 by the Ontario Court of Appeal citing errors of law ordering a retrial. This, the second Zündel trial in 1988, lasted for almost four months.

It was in this trial that Zündel commissioned Fred Leuchter, an expert on executions by gas in the U.S. to visit Auschwitz and conduct a forensic examination, which was presented in court as proving conclusively that there were no homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz.  For the revisionist community, that day in April 1988, when Fred Leuchter presented his report to the court, was the day the myth of the Holocaust was finally laid to rest.

Despite an impressive defense from revisionist heavyweights such as Robert Faurisson, Mark Weber and David Irving who, having just read the Leuchter report, took the opportunity of the trial to proclaim his conversion to Holocaust revisionism, Zündel was again found guilty and sentenced.  But in 1992, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down as unconstitutional the law banning the spread of false news.  This decision temporarily put an end to the deportation proceedings launched against Zündel after his 1988 conviction.

For the next few years Zündel continued his struggle despite various assaults, both legal and illegal – prosecutions, violence against his person, arson against his home and possessions.

In the spring of 1994, several Marxist street groups organized to attempt to drive Zündel out of his neighbourhood in Toronto. Pamphlets were distributed calling him a “hatemonger” and “white supremacist” and calling for his charging under Canada’s hate laws. These groups began a campaign of posters put up across Toronto with Zündel’s face in a rifle sight, giving directions to his home with instructions on how to build Molotov cocktails. Street graffiti appeared on fences and buildings calling for people to “drive Zündel out.”  Zündel lodged complaints with Toronto police but nothing ever came of his complaints…On May 7, 1995, an arsonist torched Zündel’s house which was almost completely gutted on the second and third floors, causing over $400,000.00 in damages and destroying an extensive library and rare book collection.

No person was ever charged with this offence. After the arson, Zündel suffered from severe anxiety, loss of memory, and loss of concentration……At the end of May 1995, a powerful pipe bomb was sent to Zündel through the mails from Vancouver, British Columbia. Suspicious of the parcel, he took it unopened to the police. The bomb contained nails and metal shrapnel; Torontopolice determined it would have killed anyone who opened it and anyone within 90 metres of the blast. (2)

Twice he submitted faultless applications for Canadian citizenship, and twice he was refused.  There was a conviction for ‘hate crime’ in Germanyand prosecutions for being “a threat to the safety and security of Canada”, and there were the incessant legal battles about the Zundelsite.

In 2000, exhausted after the struggles of the eighties and nineties, Zündel moved to the United States, where he married Ingrid, a U.S. citizen. There the couple lived quietly, establishing an art gallery, experimenting in organic agriculture and thinking about future campaigns. Then, onFebruary 5^th 2003 Ernst was arrested because, as he was told, he had missed showing up at a scheduled immigration hearing in May of 2001. “Remember what I told you?” He said to Ingrid as they faced together the arresting officers, “That’s what they were going to do. Use a bureaucratic excuse to get me.”  He also told her, as he was led away in handcuffs, where to find her Valentine gift.

In what amounted to a legal kidnapping, Zündel was deported toCanada, where he faces extradition proceedings to Germany where “Holocaust denial” is against the law.  There, you can get up to five years in prison for having the wrong opinion or, as they put it, for “… defaming the memory of the dead.” Two years later Zündel is still in prison as the legal wrangles continue. 

“…you have just arrived at what is sneeringly called a “Holocaustdenier.” Ingrid Rimland

I had neither heard of Zündel nor the Zundelsite until I received an email from Ingrid Rimland asking permission to post my essay Jewish Power as one of her ‘Z-Grams’ – the emails she sends out to Zündel supporters all over the world.  I agreed, and logged onto the Zundelsite. I appreciated its excellent selection of revisionist literature, but confess to being a little unnerved by its schwarz-weiβ-rot livery, runic-style logo and anti-Jewish cartoons.  But I carried on until I came across her introduction to my piece.

“Despite some occasional slipping into the RKPS mode….this Eisen essay is one remarkably crafted essay! Beautifully done!  Rich in imagery and ice-cold in precision. “

…one remarkably crafted essay! Rich in imagery and ice-cold in precision!  But what was this RKPS that I was occasionally slipping into?

Dear Paul

RKPS stands for Requisite Knee-fall Paragraph Syndrome.  It is a common, near universal writer’s affliction in every Western country.  It neutralizes what crude folks call a “sh-t detector.”  It befalls otherwise perfectly reasonable intellectuals much more than low-brow folks.  It is as common as freckles.

It kicks in whenever the so-called “Holocaust” comes up.  It’s automatic.  One cannot help it.  By inner command, one must immediately get down on ones knees, bow to the dust, pay homage to the “six million”, get up, kick Hitler in the shin, deplore the “racism” of the Third Reich, and otherwise distance oneself from the period of ’33-‘45 so that there is no doubt as to exactly where one stands – fair square against (gulp!) “Nazis”.

Now, dear (future) friend – I have probably nixed a potentially congenial friendship right at the start by showing my true colors and putting my foot in the mouth – but I am a German, married to the world’s premier thought-criminal presently languishing in Abu Ghraib North, and my heart aches when I read otherwise magnificent writing like yours – and then detect the RKPS.  It hurts me, because it is unworthy of thinking and otherwise fair people who have been raised on the Holocaust Drip that has deformed that part of their nature that is meant to be fair and critical.

Here is the example of the RKPS in your piece:-

“In its zeal and self belief Zionism has come to resemble the most brutal and relentless of modern ideologies. But unlike the brutal rationality of Stalinism, willing to sacrifice millions for political and economic revolution, this Jewish ideology, in its zealotry and irrationality, resembles more the National Socialism which condemned millions for the attainment of a nonsensical racial and ethnic supremacy.”(From “Jewish Power” by Paul Eisen) (3)You see, Paul, when I read passages like that, I wince.  Let me take it apart, bit by bit. “Zealotry”, yes – to the extent one wants a better, cleaner, saner, more honest, more compatible world for one’s own where life does not feel like having to wear a hair shirt for the benefit of strangers.

Scientists deeply committed to their inventions are zealous.  Mothers are zealous in wanting the best for their children.  I am zealous when it comes to keeping smut out of the language I love.  But not zealous like some Deep South Baptist preacher who thumbs the Bible, chews tobacco, and thinks nothing of spitting on your feet.

“Irrationality” – far from it!  I used to think like that – I am ashamed to say I suffered badly from RKPS for most of my life. When I first started questioning why I behaved exactly like some brainless robot, I became curious about what people who were part of the National Socialist movement really thought. I talked to an old man whom I respected deeply for his integrity, and who had lost his only 18-year-old son at Stalingrad.  He said to me, holding his son’s picture in his hands:  “It felt right in my mind, and it felt right in my soul.”  I asked:  “You paid a price.  Do you regret it?”  And he said very quietly:  “How could I?  How could anyone who took the trouble understanding?”

That was the start of my resolve to take the trouble understanding.

“Non-sensical racial and ethnic supremacy.”  You are just plain misinformed.  Let me put it this way. You have been lied to about the murder of JFK, about Vince Foster, about the USS Liberty, about Weapons of Mass Destruction, about — you get the point. You have been lied to and lied to and lied to. You know you have. You accept that. And you haven’t been lied to about this “racial and ethnic supremacy” nonsense?

Here’s what I say to people who question my motives. Hitler has been dead for more than half a century. I don’t want to resurrect him.  Nobody in my circle does.  It cannot be done.  What is gone is gone and is never going to return.  But what we Germans want is balanced thinking, fair assessment of what the Hitler days were like.  We don’t want people to assault us morning, noon, and night for things we didn’t do.  I for one don’t like to watch grown men and women run and hide like rabbits the moment the Holocaust Lobby says “Boo!”  After all, we all enjoy the Autobahn, don’t we?

Why should not our world enjoy the benefits that came out of those times – the research in fighting cancer, for instance?  The superb appreciation of genuine art?  The emphasis on simple lifestyle, respecting the ecological system? The brilliant strides in space research? It is unworthy of us to let ourselves be spooked by professional smear mongers for profit.  Paul, put your hand on your heart and confess:  Just what have you read of the times that did not come out of the propaganda mills of Hollywood and such?

For me, your sentence read like a traditional RKPS – to nodding agreement of the audience.  Am I wrong?

If I am right, you have just arrived at what is sneeringly called a “Holocaust Denier.”  I will look you straight in the eye and say that one cannot deny what did not exist.  And now, to my regret, we have a mis-tone in our new-found mutual love (dare I say zealotry?) for ideas expressed in precise and finely honed words.

I suggest that forensic science ought to settle that disagreement about what Germans did or did not do in World War II in an open public forum – not by imprisonment and “torture lite” – as has happened to my husband, who sent the first forensic team EVER to inspect the “murder weapon”, the so-called “gas chambers at Auschwitz” – and found it not what it was purported to be.
Ingrid.

 

…I am frightened of you but I am more frightened of my ignorance…

Message to Ingrid Rimland from a ZGram reader

Ernst Zündel is a Holocaust revisionist or, a ‘Holocaust denier’ as some would have it. Like all revisionists, Zündel does not deny that the National Socialist regime targeted Jews or that Jews suffered at their hands, but he does deny specific, albeit key aspects of the Holocaust narrative as we know it.  His denial is limited to three areas which should be clearly understood.

• That there ever was an official plan on the part of Hitler or any other part of the Nazi regime systematically and physically to eliminate every Jew in Europe.

• That there ever existed homicidal gas-chambers.

• That the numbers of Jewish victims have been exaggerated.

Although unpopular enough itself, if Zündel had stuck to Holocaust revisionism he might have had an easier ride.  But for Ernst Zündel revisionism is but a means to an end.  He cannot and will not relinquish his loyalty and devotion, as he sees it, for his country, his people and their history.  For him, the revision of the Holocaust is not just the pursuit of a truth, but the pursuit of a truth that will set his people free.  Germans stand accused of having committed the worst crime in human history: the premeditated attempt to coolly and efficiently annihilate every Jew inEurope.  Zündel rejects this.  He is prepared for National Socialist Germany to be held accountable for the crimes it did commit but the attempted genocide of European Jews is, for him, not one of them.

Some readers, even those who stand for free speech, may now be reaching for their delete buttons. After all, maybe Zündel should not be penalized for his beliefs, but that doesn’t mean that his views must be disseminated, and it certainly does not mean that we have to read them.  But free speech is not only the right to think, to speak and to write freely, but also to be given a fair hearing without ridicule and abuse or at least until a proper examination has been made.  And you never know, even those who generally find such views repellent, if they were to hear them, even they might hear something worth hearing. So, for those folk prepared to grant to Ernst Zündel the same freedom they grant to themselves, for those who have the curiosity and the courage to pause awhile, this could be an opportunity rarely offered – an opportunity to hear and consider another and hitherto unheard, point of view.

Everybody has a story and everybody has a point of view, and in the matter of the events in Europe from 1933-1945 there are many points of view.  The British have a point of view, the Americans have a point of view, the Poles, the Dutch, the Russians, the Serbs they all have a point of view and the Jews certainly have a point of view.  But the Germans, too, have a point of view, even those Germans who once called themselves National Socialists, even those Germans who still call themselves National Socialists.

 Dear Paul

Many WWII soldiers (now very old) have told me that World War II – that is, the war against the East – was really a preventive/defensive war against Communism, which was Jewish.  Europe was about to be overrun by the Red Terror – Stalin had amassed his assault troops at the border, and it was only a matter of weeks, so Hitler hit first. Right now I am reading a book by a Swede, Juri Lina that is one long, horrid accounting of the Bolshevik/Jewish horrors.

I don’t know how good his sources are – but he has certainly documented them.  Six million?  Even if it were true, which we say it isn’t, it was peanuts compared to the bloodbath in Russia, starting with the 1917 Revolution, all of it laid at the feet of the Jews.  How much of that was known in Germany by the common people, I don’t know.  But it was certainly known by the leadership.  And the Jews were seen as subversives, rightly or wrongly, more and more so as the war went on.  Add to that the Versailles Treaty that brutalized Germany financially, and the corruption of the Weimar Republic, which brutalized it spiritually, both of which were blamed on the Jews – and you have cause aplenty, as that generation saw it.

                                                                                      Ingrid

How do those Germans now nearing the end of their lives, feel when told that what seemed so right then and perhaps even still seems so right, was in fact so wrong?  And how do those Germans today, born and educated in postwar Germany, feel when told of the shame and disgrace of their parents and grandparents? How might it feel, to be forbidden, alone amongst the peoples of Europe, to recall your recent history with anything but shame?  Year after year all over the western world nations proudly parade, remembering their country-men and women and the contribution they made in the war. At ceremonies they remember their dead and the sacrifices made.  But for Germans, only the atrocities are to be remembered – not a word, nothing of the achievements and sacrifices of their fellow Germans.  Such was and is the price of ‘rehabilitation’ and the re-entry of Germany into the family of nations.

Of wartime suffering we hear plenty.  The British in the blitz, Americans in the Pacific, French, Dutch and Danes under occupation, Russians and Poles in the East and of course, Jews in the Holocaust, but who hears about the suffering of Germans: the terror-bombing of German cities with the deliberate causing of firestorms, the only purpose of which was the mass slaughter of civilians?  In the 1940 bombing of Coventry around 550 civilians were killed, whilst in the 1945 bombing of Dresden around 35,000 (the lowest figure I could find) were killed.  And our response is to twin Dresden with Coventry, which says all you’ll ever need to know about ‘balance’.

Who cares or even knows about the deportations of millions of Germans from their generations-long homes in the East, the rape and pillage ofBerlin and other cities and the hunger and deprivation endured for years and years after the defeat of National Socialism?  Who remembers the ten million Germans and Austrians who died in World War 2?  Who much cares about Germany post World War 1 – the injustices of Versailles, the hunger, hopelessness, degradation and humiliation?  So who will try to understand how it might have felt when a leader came along – a veteran of the war, a brave soldier by all accounts (twice wounded; Iron Cross First-Class), a fellow sufferer, one of their own, a man who promised peace, stability and well-being and the restoration of pride and honor – and, most incredibly of all, at that time kept his promises?

The Hitler we loved and why…

Ernst Zündel was once involved in the publication of a book called The Hitler We Loved and Why, but Ernst Zündel was not the only German who loved Hitler and is probably not the only German who still loves Hitler.  Millions of Germans loved Hitler, who for twelve years impacted on them as no German has or probably ever will, and, though they never say so, many must, deep down still cherish his memory.

In his book Setting the Record Straight: Letters from Cell #7 Zündel tells of a visit he made back to Germany to his aged mother still living in theirBlack Forest home.  They were sitting there, at the table eating supper, just the two of them.  It was dark, the clock ticking away on the wall as it had done for years, when his mother said to him,

“You know, Ernst, you would never have been born if Adolf Hitler had not come to power.”

And she told him how because Hitler kept his promises of bringing work, peace, stability and honour to a ravaged German people, thousands of families who had felt unable to have children, now felt able to have them.

“You are one of those children” she said.

Ernst Zündel the Holocaust denier is a German nationalist and, by his own admission, a racialist.  He is an admirer of Hitler and is nostalgic for the National Socialist period of German history.  He is anti-Jewish. He is also interested in UFO’s.  So Ernst Zündel is easily dismissed as a crank, a Nazi, or as Joel Finkel would have it, as ‘scum’.

But Ernst Zündel is a Holocaust denier because he believes the Holocaust narrative falsely defames his people and their history.  He is a racialist because race, for him – a cultural, emotional and spiritual, as well as biological determinant – is vital and precious in the life of human beings, and that his own white and German race, as he would term it, is, as is every other race, something to be cherished and preserved.  He is a patriot who loves his country, his people, their language, culture and history.  He remembers Adolf Hitler for the national regeneration he brought.  He knows that he committed terrible crimes but asks that he be judged as any other historical figure like Stalin or Napoleon, no more, no less, and that National Socialism be judged also on its merits and demerits.  He believes, as do many others (including many, if not most, Jews), that there exists some kind of Jewish spirit or sensibility, but further believes that this Jewish spirit, so often creative and energizing can, if over-empowered, unchecked and unbalanced, be damaging and corrosive to any society, and he grieves for the damage he believes it has caused to the world he loved.

But Ernst Zündel does not hate Jews because Ernst Zündel doesn’t hate anyone.  Ernst Zündel has never committed an act of violence, nor has he ever called on anyone else to commit an act of violence.  Ernst Zündel has never discriminated against anyone, nor has he called on anyone else to discriminate against anyone.  Ernst Zündel has never stifled anyone’s freedom of expression, nor has he ever called on anyone else to stifle anyone’s freedom of expression.  Ernst Zündel looks on his enemies as they try to silence, prosecute, imprison, bomb and burn him, with bewilderment, sorrow and some anger because, as he has said, “sometimes I simply run out of cheeks to turn”.