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The Big Lie Technique in the Sandbox

LEWIS BRANDON

One of today’s pet Indisputable Historical Truths is that the German Chancellor Adolf Hitler advocated the “Big Lie Technique” to discredit and confuse one’s political opponents. However, a close look at the German leader’s writings displays a somewhat different approach. On pages 134, and 173 of Mein Kampf (My Stuggle) (Hurst & Blackett edition, 1942; reprint available from Angriff Press, PO Box 2726, Hollywood, CA 90028, $10) Hitler echoes the German philosopher Schopenhauer and alleges that it is the Jews who are “The Great Master of Lies.” At no point does he advocate the “Big Lie Technique” himself. On the contrary, he criticizes the Jews for allegedly adopting the technique themselves. It is ironic that Hitler himself fell posthumous victim to this tactic.

Hitler is not the only one to have suffered in this way. Even living historians are misrepresented. So too are history books and leading reference works. Let us now examine some recent examples.

Reference Books

The 1975 edition of the Guiness Book of World Records by the McWhirter twins (Bantam, New York, 1975) made the following reference under “Crime & Punishment” (p391):

NAZI GERMANY. At the SS extermination camp known as Auschwitz-Birkenau (Oswiecim-Brezinka), near Oswiecim, in southern Poland, where a minimum of 900,000 people (Soviet estimate is 4,000,000) were exterminated from 14 June 1940 to 29 January 1945, the greatest number killed in a day was 6000… The former French Deputy, Professor Paul Rassinier, a Buchenwald survivor and holder of the Medaille de la Résistance, published evidence in 1964 to the effect that the total Jewish death count could have not exceeded 1,200,000, as opposed to the widely accepted figure of 6,000,000.

In succeeding editions the reference to Rassinier was omitted. I wrote to Norris McWhirter (his brother was assassinated by the Irish Republican Army terrorist gang) at Guiness Superlatives Ltd., 2 Cecil Court, Enfield, Middlesex EN2 6DJ, England, and inquired why this had been done. On 28 April 1980 he replied that it was because “the estimates that we attributed to Rassinier are simply not accepted by those who also discount the Soviet estimates. If you care to advise me of the names of authoritative agencies which do still accept the Rassinier estimate I shall be pleased to renew contact with them.” I forwarded to McWhirter the names and universities of several leading Revisionist academics, but so far not one of them has heard from him.

Historians

British historian David Irving has also fallen victim to this tactic of re-writing history. In the introduction to Hitler’s War (Viking, 1977; available from IHR at $19.00) Irving relates how the German edition of the book was censored by the German publishing house, Ullstein. He describes:

The same Berlin company also published my book shortly after, under the title Hitler & Seine Feldherren; their chief editor found many of my arguments distasteful, even dangerous, and without informing me, suppressed or even reversed them: in their printed text Hitler had not told Himmler there was to be “no liquidation” of the Jews (on 30 November 1941); he had told him not to use the word “liquidate” publicly in connection with their extermination program. Thus history is falsified! (My suggestion that they publish Himmler’s note as a facsimile had been ignored.) I prohibited further printing of the book, two days after its appearance in Germany. To explain their actions, the Berlin publishers argued that my manuscript expressed some views that were “an affront to established historical opinion” in their country.

p xvii

Irving’s reference to an “extermination program” is part of his pragmatic effort to continue to have his books published by Madison Avenue by sailing a very tight tack between truth and commercial acceptability. It is thought unlikely by many observers that Irving should be taken in by such a canard as the “six million.”

Just in passing, it is interesting to read Irving’s assessment of the “memoirs” or “diaries” of many of the Third Reich dramatis personae. Many of them are fiction, he shows.

In October 1978, the German publisher Propylaeen Verlag issued Professor Hellmut Diwald’s massive Geschichte der Deutschen (History of the Germans). Diwald is a history professor at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen and has been well known in the German historical profession since taking his doctorate under the German-Jewish historian Hans-Joachim. Schoeps more than 20 years ago. However, Diwald’s credentials were not enough to authenticate some mild skepticism he expressed about the “Holocaust” on two pages of the 766 page book (164 and 165). A cacaphony of protest was yodelled from the political and publishing minarets throughout the Fatherland, and the publisher (part of the Axel Springer combine) quickly agreed to make amends. The sale of the first edition was stopped, and remaining copies withdrawn. A new edition was substituted, with the two offending pages hastily rewritten in order to conform to the “correct” line. This was only the beginning of the re-writing of the book: Springer announced that by Fall 1979 the book would be “not recognizable” (Der Spiegel, 4 December 1978).

Popular Books

Non-academic books are also subject to re-writes. In 1971 the Berkley Publishing Corporation of New York (a subsidiary of Putnam's) was to publish a book entitled Lansky by Hank Messick. Naively assuming that what was good for Jews is good for Gentiles, the publishers designed the cover and promotional advertisements with a slogan translated from an earlier book review in Hebrew in Ha'aretz, an Israeli newspaper.

Unfortunately, the translation read: “Jews control Crime in the United States.” The ad appeared only once in the New York Times before the balloon went up. The Zionist Anti-Defamation League immediately contacted the publishers to “first appeal to reason” according to the ADL Bulletin for October 1971. When this “appeal to reason” did not bring about a positive response, the ADL adopted different tactics, and presto, the slogan on both the offending advertisement and on the book’s cover, became: The Mob Runs America and Lansky Runs the Mob.”

Newspapers

Newspapers are also subject to Zionist “revisionism.” In the New York Times of 22 February 1948 a feature on the Jewish putsch in Palestine gave a population figure of 15 to 18 million Jews in the world. This figure would, of course, make the “Six Million” a demographic nonsense, as there were 15 million Jews in the world in 1940. Immediately, the Zionist lobby “appealed to the reason” of the publishers, and four days later, the following codicil was published:

Last Sunday’s article incorrectly estimated the Jewish population of the world at 15 million to 18 million. No census has been conducted since the war, and estimates are only approximate, but most authorities agree that Hitler’s wholesale massacres of Jews during the war reduced the Jewish population to perhaps 12 million today.

Sensing that something was rotten in the state of publishing, the ardent anti-Zionist Jew Benjamin Freedman investigated the case in 1959. In his newsletter Common Sense of 1 May 1959 he described how he had been allowed to visit the Times offices “through the courtesy of Mr. Arthur Hays Sulzberger” (at that time somewhat of an anti-Zionist Jew) in order to examine the reference file on the original article. He claimed to have met with the Military Editor, Hanson Baldwin, who showed him “the results of the(ir) searching investigations.”

Eight years later, a Zionist writer, Morris Kominsky, investigated Freedman’s investigation. Baldwin this time claimed that he had never met Freedman, as far as he could remember, and that the original figures were simply lifted from the 1948 edition of the World Almanac. The affair is discussed at length in Kominsky’s book The Hoaxers, Brandon Press (no relation!), Boston, 1970.

Voices

Even voices can be faked. Many people have felt their pulses quicken as they listened to the famous speech of Sir Winston Churchill imploring the British population to “fight on the beaches, etc.” Churchill made the speech in the House of Commons, but as broadcasting from the Houses of Parliament was not permitted, the speech would have to be presented over again for the BBC radio listeners. Since matters of state were more pressing, an actor was engaged to read the speech instead. His name was Norman Shelley, and he had already established a minor reputation as a Churchill imitator. The Prime Minister approved of the fakery, and even complimented Shelley on his accuracy. “Very nice,” Churchill reportedly said, “he’s even got my teeth right,” referring to the rattling of his dentures.

The fakery remained a secret for 39 years until Shelley told of his role during an interview with the London Daily Mail. Shelley died on 22 August 1980, and his obituary in the Los Angeles Times of 25 August was the first time that American readers were presented with this astonishing story.

Magazines

Earlier this year, the leading Zionist organization in Great Britain, The Board of Deputies of British Jews, issued a protest at an article in History Today, a leading part-work monthly. The January 1980 issue contained a feature entitled “A Nazi Travels to Palestine” describing interface between the Nazi Government and the Zionists in Palestine during the war. The article was written by a Jew, Dr. Jacob Boas, but explored a seam of history which the Board felt was better left un-exploited. Another Jewish historian, Dr. Geoffrey Alderman, leaped to Boas' defense, and issued a statement:

The action taken by the Board in relation to the article is, in my view, another reflection of a dangerous anti-intellectualism which pervades the Anglo-Jewish establishment and which is marked by a refusal to face realities or to have cherished beliefs questioned dispassionately: the belief in this case being, I suppose, that Jews and Nazis could not possibly have ever had anything in common. I have read the article and, as a Jew, a Zionist, and, may I add, a professional historian, I do not take exception to it at all. As for the protests being made by the Board about the way in which the article was advertised, this is really too petty to require further comment.

Jewish Chronicle, 4 January 198O

Professor Alderman himself came under fire from the Deputies in 1978 for revealing in a letter to the London Times that some Jews voted for the National Front. He was “severely condemned” by the Deputies for “publicly revealing” sensitive findings. However, he still retains his part-time post as a member of the Research Committee of the Board of Deputies.

Photos

The area of photography is worth a whole book in itself.

As Udo Walendy shows in his Faked Atrocities (IHR, $5.00) many “atrocity” pictures have been forged or arbitrarily captioned. The Institute for Historical Review is currently compiling a dossier of pictures which are recycled throughout many Exterminationist books with a different description as caption each time. These findings will be published later. But for now, what better description of the uses of fake photography could we have but that put forward by Exterminationiste Lucy Dawidowicz in her article “Visualizing the Warsaw Ghetto: Nazi Images of the Jews, Refiltered by the BBC” which was published in SHOAH: A Review of Holocaust Studies and Commemorations, University of Bridgeport, CT 06602:

Nowadays we live in an era of photomania, where photographs are regarded as the magic key to unlock the doors of the past, which only the most effortful study of history had previously been able to open. Nowadays people regard pictures as the essence of truth, forgetting that, like written documents, the camera falsifies objective reality because it creates its own illusion of reality. Too often pictures have been made to serve the uses of propaganda. Selective photography, posed or staged subject matter, technical tricks of the trade which bring into existence nonexistent subjectsthese are the standard ways the camera is made to lie. Too often the camera serves ends that contribute neither to the truth of art nor to the truth of history.

sic!

Toys

The Zionists' thought control even extends into the kindergarten. A two-year campaign by the American Jewish Congress has resulted in the deletion of war toys bearing swastikas by American toy manufacturers. Revell of Venice, CA and Lindberg of Skokie, IL were the first to “suspend the manufacture of swastika-emblazoned toys” and the largest manufacturer, Mattel of Hawthorne, CA, were soon to follow. The AJC’s Director, Julius Schatz, gloated:

We consider the Mattel action to be a major victory in our effort to discourage the production of toy tanks, planes, ships, and other military objects carrying the symbol of destruction of six million Jews and millions of others. Mattel’s announcement vindicates our stance… No badge or symbol in human history is as foul a reminder of bestiality as the swastika. Yet these insignia of blood lust, of human skin made into lampshades, of millions of men and women and children slaughtered like cattle, are emblazoned on toys that are sold by the million to American children… it is also a matter of safeguarding young and vulnerable children from the taint of war toys with swastikas, playing war games that will simulate the Nazi war machine.

Thus, at a stroke, Toytown history is re-written, with the deletion of one of the most essential aspects of any playroom or sandbox battle scenario: The Bad Guys. Mr Schatz has not only ensured that impressionable American youngsters will be unable to re-enact the Nilrnburg Rallies, with flypasts of squadrons of swastika-emblazoned Stukas and Messerschmidts, nor indeed the Munich putsch, with “the insignia of blood lust” flaunted on the sides of Nazi Personenwagen, but he has also determined that The Good Guys in the battle scenes will be fighting with … Other Good Guys!

Presumably the ADL and other Zionists adopt this patronizing attitude to us adults as well. It would appear by all evidence that they regard us intellectually as children in a sandbox who need to be protected from things that might influence our impressionable, vulnerable, little brains. It remains to be seen, how much longer American academics are prepared to tolerate this situation. As a consortium of Civil Liberties organizations pontificated in an amicus curiae suit filed against the School Board of Warsaw, IN recently:

The public school should be a vibrant, free market of ideas. Indeed, if the “right to read and be exposed to controversial thoughts” cannot flourish anywhere in the school house, the prospects are bleak that it will ever flourish anywhere in society.

sic, sic, and sic again!

Unfortunately, this high-minded idea does not appeal to our old friend Yaakov Riz, whose basement Holocaust Museum we mentioned on page 132 of our Summer 1980 issue. Mr. Riz wrote to the Jewish Press on 5 September 1980 to point out how “the Talmud teaches us how to use Visual Propaganda.” He quotes a passage from the Talmud where the Angels Gabriel and Michael tricked God into drowning the wicked Egyptians by showing him an Egyptian brick and a dead Jewish child. Riz vigorously advocates using the same trickery to combat the wicked “Arabs, Nazis and Communists” who otherwise are “winning their filthy hate campaign against Israel and American Jewry.” One wonders what Talmudic trickery Riz and his cohorts have used already?