A REVIEW OF THE MYTH OF NATURAL RIGHTS BY L. A. ROLLINS By Michael HardestyThis is the updated version of Mr. Rollins earlier work.While I briefly debunked Rollins' debunking of natural rights on Amazon, my focus here is on his attack on holocaust revisionism.I don't think that Rollins much milder criticism of the conventional holocaust view adds anything to what revisionists from Rassinier to Faurisson to Rudolph have already made so I will ignore it in this review.
Rollins asserts that the compilation of revisionist pioneer Paul Rassinier's work in Debunking The Genocide Myth, published by IHR in 1978, "contains enough falsehoods to choke a correspondent for The National Enquirer." As John Edwards and others can vouch,the National Enquirer is often right on the money. But for all of Rollins hyperbole, he is only able to list three "serious errors," two of which are utterly trivial. Rassiner wrote that Hannah Arendt wrote that three million Polish Jews were massacred on the first day of the war when Arendt actually wrote that those three million were massacred in the first days of the war. Note the wording here, "days," not weeks. So she was claiming that in the first days after the war begun this crime took place. One to seven days. Arendt's claim is absurd but this hardly constitutes a "serious error" on Rassiner's part.Rassinier claimed that Raul Hilberg wrote that 1.4 million Jews were exterminated by the Einsatzgruppen when you added up the totalsper Hilberg's reasoning. On this "serious error" Rollins ends up agreeing with Rassinier. Hilberg based the dubious 900,000 figure on allegedEinsatzgruppen reports and then added 250,000 more persons for "gaps in sources," which Rollins acknowledges Rassiner correctly states. The remaining 250,000 persons Rassiner claimed Hilberg added for "omissions," while Hilberg wrote were based on "other fragmentary reports." As Hilberg's work was debunked at length by Rassinier and later by Jurgen Graf, this is a meaningless distinction. These are not serious errors.The only valid criticism of Rassinier that Rollins makes is Rassinier's misquote of Sal Baron's statement of April 24, 1961 that "700,000" Polish Jews remained in 1945 when the actual figure was 73, 955.Apparently Rassiner gave Baron's first name as Shalom and the date as April 4, two relatively trivial points that Rollins jumps on.Rollins implies that IHR was trying to put something over on all of us by publishing Rassinier's works. In the 1978 IHR edition I own,titled The Holocaust Story and the Lies of Ulysses, Mark Weber has an afterword acknowledging the error on Baron as well as a few other much more minor errors. Weber notes that Rassinier would be the first to correct them if he were alive. It could be that Rassinier made a typo of rounding off the 73,000 figure to 700,000 instead of 70,000.Maybe he deliberately falsified it or maybe due to failing health in old age he was not as careful as he should have been. The reader can judge for himself. But based on the great preponderance of valuable information that Rassinier provides we can agree withRobert Faurisson that he indeed made a great original contribution to our understanding of the Shoah business. Something that Rollins will never be accused of.
Austin App's monograph was not a helpful addition to holocaust revisionism because of its emotional tone alone but even here Rollins focuses on petty nonessentials. App quoted Hanson Baldwin of The New York Times writing in 1948 that there were 18 and 19 million Jews in the world. Rollins asserts that Baldwin wrote of the world, not in the world. Wow ! What a scoop ! Baldwin wrote that the Jewish world population was estimated to be 15-18 million. An error on App's part but not a substantive one. Verrall is similarly criticized for misquoting Baldwin's figures as 15,600.000 to 18, 700,00. Any error is wrong but again this is trivial. Finally App is criticized for attributing to the extreme Zionist writer Ben Hecht a statement actually made by one of Hecht's fictional characters. An error to be sure but being familiar with Hecht's views I can well believe that the sentiment alleged by App accurately reflects Hecht's own views. Rollins quotes the old Communist Morris Kominsky's disapproval of App here.
Kominsky's The Hoaxers is an unrelenting apologia for the many tens of millions murdered by the Soviets and Mao as well as an attack on any questioning of the Shoah tale. Rollins never mentions Kominsky's Communism and total apologia for same, a rather serious omission. I'm not familiar with the Udo Walendy booklet that Rollins quotes though I have read one book by him on WW2 and was favorably impressed.But he indicts Walendy en toto on one word on page 7 of his booklet.Walendy quoting a wartime UK propagandist changed the word "subversive" into "atrocity." I agree he shouldn't have done this but this casts in doubt everyting Walendy writes ? So writes Rollins.Rollins total credibility by HIS standards is in doubt because of the Kominsky omission alone.
On page 169 of his book, Rollins dismisses the great historian,David L. Hoggan, with an obscenity. Hoggan authored probably the greatest diplomatic revisionist account of the origins of WW2, reprinted by IHR as The Forced War. In this massive tribute to scholarship based on his 1948 Ph.D thesis under William Langer there are some errors but a great many more truths as I can testify from reading both the thesis and the book.The Myth Of The Six Million was a private manuscript that Hoggandid not intend for publication and it was done without his permission. There are errors which Butz noted but also much valuable material therein. It was the first introduction to holocaust revisionism for many of us. As usual Rollins dismisses Hoggan's work en toto without even a semblance of balance. He doesn't even discuss in detail the monograph's faults but dismisses Hoggan himself with an obscenity and this is surely what the shrinks call projection. Hoggan knew that Reitlinger was not a revisionist and that Reitlinger regarded key parts of Hoss's testimony as hopelessly untrustworthy. In a lengthy discussion I had with David Hoggan on the Stanford campus in January, 1973 he made it very plain that his monograph was a rough first draft only and was not to be published until he could provide full documentation as he did for The Forced War.
On Dr. James J. Martin, I need to state for the record that Jim and I were yery good friends and correspondents for almost twenty years, 1971-1990.We never had a falling out but I became preoccupied with other things andlet our friendship lapse, which I very much regret. A few years ago I reread all of his letters which was an absorbing educational experience unto itself.Then I reread American Liberalism and World Politics, 1931-1941, twomassive, very well written volumes. Rollins starts with a factual error inhis writing on Martin. The IHR revisionist conference was held on theLabor Day weekend of 1979, not 1974 as Rollins. For a guy who upbraidsRassinier for being 20 days off (see above) he is five years off here !Rollins quotes Martin writing in an obscure libertarian publication thatthe Communists played a major role in the whole holocaust legend.This is on its face absolutely correct as the gas chamber stories had beendiscredited as regards Germany by the 1960s. I distinctly remember a Turkon the Joe Payne TV show in 1966 claiming that he had seen gas chambersin a German camp and a representative of the Jewish Agency called him a liar. I also recall hearing many people over the years claim there were bothsix million Jews and six million non-Jews exterminated in Poland where allthe alleged extermination was taking place. I don't know who started thisbut that the Communists were the main beneficiaries of it in Europe cannotbe doubted. The booklet that Martin quotes seems ambiguous enough as toleave room for honest doubt. Rollins doesn't appear interested in nuance orgiving any benefit of the doubt to people who have done immense ntellectual such as Martin, Hoggan and Rassinier. Considering what these folks have done as compared with Rollins' rather modest efforts ought to inspire more caution in him. It was only after the fall of the Soviet Bloc that revised figures appeared at the Auschwitz camp. It had been four million for decades, even J. Edgar Hoover in 1958 wrote of four million Jews exterminated at Auschwitz in his Masters Of Deceit. I understand the Polish Historical Society now gives a figure of 750,000 while the camp sign states over a million. As far Martin citing Dr. Broszat as a source on the German camps there's nothing with that precisely because Broszat made an admission against interest there. You can say that even he partially recognizes the truth. Rollins presents a false all or nothing dichotomy here. You have to believe everything Broszat said or nothing at all. As far as Martin slighting the confessions of Gerstein, Kramer, et al, that would be difficult because they have been exposed as flagrant perjurers by Rassinier initially and then others. Hoss was captured by the Brits but then in a nasty bit of double dealing was turned over to the Soviets in Poland where he was coerced, tortured and executed. Martin never claimed that the Communists were the only beneficiaries of what later came to be called the holocaust but that they were great beneficiaries of same for 45 years after the year and were the main promoters of the legend in Europe.The people who created the Gulag in the USSR and helped install Mao'smurderous regime in China invented the holocaust. This does not precludeother liars in the so-called western democracies, the organized Jewish community and others across the political spectrum who have their axesto grind here.
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