From the Editor
Theodore J. O’Keefe
This fall the Western media have marked the outbreak of war in Europe fifty years ago, on September 1, 1939, in strident and self-congratulatory tones. To the press, and to the professional historical establishment, the Second World War is still the “good war,” American’s and its allies' crusade against evil made manifest in the person of Adolf Hitler and his followers.
From the time that Great Britain’s “blank check” to Poland in March 1939, which made war virtually inevitable, to the present, powerful interests have been at work to insure that the subsequent history of the war differ as little as possible from the Allies' wartime propaganda (a propaganda which, to judge from the continuing obsession with German villainy in Hollywood and elsewhere, continues). Two basic themes — the “aggression” of Germany and its allies, and their unparalleled cruelty and brutality, culminating in the Jewish “Holocaust” — have become the touchstones for historical and social orthodoxy in East and West. To challenge the historical taboos of “the good war” has resulted in professional, and even physical, peril since 1945.
We who are seeking to revise the history of the Second World War by bringing it into accord with the facts have faced and fought far more determined foes than did the historians who established the truth about the origins, conduct, and conclusion of the'First World War, according to no less an authority than Harry Elmer Barnes himself, the great Revisionist of both this century’s world wars. But those of us who have had to become expert at seeing the reality behind the shadows projected for us by Big Brother can readily perceive the clear fact — and a fact becoming more clear with every day — that it is we Revisionists who have seized the offensive and begun our relentless advance, and it is the entire Establishment which is now fighting defensively.
Surely, never before have we noticed as many “revisionists” throughout the length and breadth of the intellectual landscape. It is almost as if someone, somewhere, by attaching the Revisionist label to enough people, sought to distract attention from the genuine article. No “conspiracy theory” here though. All we wish to note is that all of a sudden the “R-word” seems to be on everybodys lips. Since the Institute which published this journal has been alone among all other journals, publicizing Historical Revisionism ever since its founding, we add one and one together.
The Mathematics of Revisionism
In spite of the monumental setbacks our publisher has experienced since its founding ten years ago, historical revisionism is steadily moving ahead, at an increasing cadence. The setbacks we speak of, of course, have been in the realm of the suppression of our works and the persecution of our contributors; of which the arson of our headquarters, with the concomitant nearly total destruction of our physical possessions on July 4, 1984, was clearly the most damaging. As far as our findings and the quality of our research and publications we apologize only for a few typographical errors.
Historical revisionism is “an idea whose time has come.” You have heard that phrase repeated endlessly, from the typewriters of advertising writers hawking everything from dental floss bikinis to disposable finger nails. But for those of us who try to perceive the realities which move history, revisionism is clearly coming into its own, which is to say, truth is moving ahead.
Events are happening today at the speed of 186,000 miles per second — the speed at which light and electricity move. Is it really possible to bottle up historical truth much longer? If you think so, ask. Mr. Gorbachev or any of the legions of demonstrable frauds in the U.S. who are very free with their baseless assertions but who become as silent and empty as their own future when they are asked the simplest of question by any half-educated Historical Revisionist.
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This issue of The Journal of Historical Review features four papers which were preseented to IHR’s Ninth International Historical (and history-making) Conference.
David Irving, Great Britain’s foremost independent historian, who has been turning his breakthroughs in the archives and in the original sources into bestsellers for the past quarter century, previews the eagerly awaited second volume of Churchill’s War with hilarious as well as sobering glimpses of a Churchill unknown to the mythmakers. With his customary wit and verve, Irving conducts readers on a guided tour through the Churchillian years of infamy which led up to America’s “day of infamy” at Pearl Harbor.
Professor Anthony Kubek relates the almost incredible story of how a Soviet agent, Harry Dexter White, authored a plan aimed at the economic and physical destruction of the Germans, and then saw his plan adopted as official U.S. policy. Dr. Kubek, the world’s leading authority on the revealing official diaries of White’s boss, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, examines the implications of the “policy perversion” by which Morgenthau and White helped torpedo a just peace with Germany.
Victor Marchetti, the first insider to blow the whistle on the CIA’s policy of deceiving the American people, unmasks recent American-Soviet attempts to falsify the facts about the 196Z Cuban missile crisis, in which he played a key role. Then the former agent leads readers on an enlightening tour of the CIA’s efforts to control and destroy recent American history.
The Reverend Herman Otten, the Lutheran dynamo who was the driving force in arranging last February’s “Great Holocaust Debate” (aborted through no fault of his own), describes his own path to historical revisionism. The editor and publisher of The Christian News presents a case for Biblical truth and historical skepticism that makes his paper surely one of the most controversial to appear in The Journal.
Doubtless the two living deans of holocaust revisionism are Professor Arthur Butz of Northwestern and Professor Robert Faurisson of Lyon. Due to the great importance of Professor Arno Mayer’s Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? — the first book by an Establishment historian to implicitly challenge the Auschwitz myth — we are proud to feature the comments of both these learned and courageous men [Butz and Faurisson] on Mayer and his book.
Then John Ries reviews an account of the social and political history of Linz — Adolf Hitler’s hometown — during the forty years which preceded the Anschluss.
And then it’s onward and upward into the second decade of The Journal of Historical Review!
Source: Reprinted from The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 260, 304, 320.