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4. JHR Volume 9

From the Editor

Theodore J. O’Keefe

When Harry Elmer Barnes defined historical revisionism as bringing history into accord with the facts,” he stated not merely the essence of Revisionism but its entire program as well. One might think that righting errors and false conceptions about the past were program enough, but there remain those among the unenlightened (and even a few misguided friends) who still imagine that IHR’s work of bringing truth to history is only a front for some sinister purpose, such as, say, bringing back the Third Reich (or ushering in the Fourth).

We're not at all sorry to disappoint such folks, and banish fears and fantasies alike by letting them know that IHR’s purpose is historical, educational, and as American as the mainly Midwestern populists who pioneered Historical Revisionism. We don’t have the Boys from Brazil or the Spear of Destiny stashed away in some dark corner of our warehouse (and wouldn’t know what to do with them if we had).

We at the IHR know one thing, however, and we know it in common with our enemies: historical fact is a mighty weapon, and a powerful solvent against ignorance, prejudice, and hatred. In this issue of The Journal of Historical Review researchers and analysts from four continents bring truth to bear on several different lies that have served the obfuscators in the academy and politics well in deluding the majority of our fellow Americans.

First, there’s the granddaddy of all historical hate whoppers, the Auschwitz lie. Two men with very different training, American gas-chamber expert Fred Leuchter and Italian textual critic Carlo Mattogno, take the trouble to look carefully at the evidence advanced for mass murder by gassing at the one-time German concentration camp, where, according to a Soviet “investigative commission” and a flock of popes, presidents, and exterminationist scholars, four million or so human beings were murdered and then vanished into thin air. Leuchter’s dry wit and his hands-on Yankee practicality are complemented by the cold eye of the classically trained humanist, Mattogno. There’s not much of the Auschwitz myth left after these two specialists have had their say.

Japanese scholar and retired officer Hideo Miki deals with the military strategy, such as it was, that America developed for its occupation of Japan. Professor Miki’s additional remarks, which followed the formal paper he presented to IHR’s Ninth Conference, are so informative that we have included them here. He demonstrates rather convincingly that informed Japanese refuse to credit the historical lie that Japan was the only guilty party in the Pacific War, and reminds us that the disastrous peace which American leaders imposed in East Asia has resulted in decades of suffering, in China, Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere.

South African Ivor Benson will both surprise and inform revisionists with his survey of the historical background to Iran’s Islamic Revolution, and his sensitive evaluation of the challenge and the opportunity which the rise of Muslim nationalism offers the peoples of the West. We Americans can’t be reminded too often of just how much foreigners from Mexico to Vietnam to the Persian Gulf resent the meddling our leaders have indulged in for decades now, and just how harmful such interventions have proved, in the long run, for America and other imperialist powers.

Veteran journalist William Grimstad introduces Journal readers to two important contributions by honest Jewish historians. That there are men and women such as Noam Chomsky, Livia Rokach, and Palestinian-American Edward Said offers at least the hope that Arab and Jew, inspired by facts, not myths or lies, about the past, may work out some just and humane solution to the problems created by the zinnia prolongation of Palestine

Paul Grubach skewers a familiar but tiresome bit of Zionist hokum, the canard that anyone who criticizes the collective entity of Jewry for anything at all thereby stamps himself an “anti-Semite.” Young Mr. Grubach further wins our thanks for having plodded through a particularly deadly-sounding collection of tracts put together by professional anti-anti-Semites, sparing other revisionists that task. Then Jack Wikoff informs on a particularly informative book about Hollywood (times have changed: just mentioning the sort of thought embodied in Neal Gabler’s book’s title would have caused one to be labeled — you guessed it — an “anti-Semite” a few years ago). And finally, it gives us great pride to announce the return of the dean of Revisionist historians, James J. Martin, to the Editorial Advisory Committee of The Journal, in the same issue in which he pays tribute to the late George Morgenstern, whose challenge to the Pearl Harbor cover-up over forty years ago may soon be vindicated once and for all. But we save that for the next issue of The Journal. Who ever said bringing history into accord with the facts had to be dull?