The Holocaust Historiography Project

Our Established Religion

A. Dibert

“What do you mean, our established religion? We have no established religion in this country. Our constitution forbids any such thing. Look, it says right here in the First Amendment, right at the very beginning: 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise of religion.' It is contrary to our whole tradition of freedom of worship to have anything like an established religion.”

My answer to that has to be “De jure, we certainly haven’t got any established religion, as they do in (say) England, Japan, or Israel — but we do have one de facto, although it is not acknowledged openly. You ask what it is? Zionism, as a secular religion, which has by now become a set of beliefs which nobody must dare question, and which therefore qualifies as established, although unofficially. You don’t believe it? Well, let’s look at the matter in more detail — first of all, at what constitutes an established religion, and then how Zionism has to be regarded as meeting the criteria for being considered as one.”


I. THE NATURE OF AN ESTABLISHED RELIGION

There are, of course, a great many definitions of religion. For our purposes, the best definition would be something like this: a Religion is a set of beliefs which do not need objective confirmation but which brook no contradiction (dogmas). Those who adhere to a religion are its faithful, its true believers. Adherence to the commonly held beliefs of a religion is orthodoxy; unlicensed variation therefrom is heresy and any contradiction or denial of orthodox dogmas is blasphemy. The writings which set forth the basis of a religion are its scriptures. Many a religion has its fanatics, who will go to any lengths to enforce its beliefs on all, whether faithful or infidel.

An Established Religion Has Three Main Characteristics:

A: Governmental support, both legal and financial. In England, for instance, the Church of England is, by law, the official religion of the country, with the ruling monarch as its head. In Spain and (until recently) in Italy, the Roman Catholic faith is the only religion recognized by the state. In Japan Shintoism, with worship of the Emperor as its head, enjoyed a similar status until after the war.

These examples are not typical of the modern world, as a whole, since most modern countries have followed the example of the United States in abolishing established religion. In earlier times, it was the rule, rather than the exception, for a country to have a monarch, and an established religion of which he (or she) and the population at large were true believers. In modern times, the only country to set up an established religion has been Israel, in which, following the doctrines of Zionism, the Jewish religion has been declared in the constitution to be the official faith of the nation.

B: An obligation of the citizens of the country to adhere to the beliefs and dogmas of the established religion. Especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, during the disputes of the Reformation, the ruling monarch set the officer “party line,” as it were, which his or her subjects were obliged to follow. This principle was summarized in the Latin tag cuius regio, eius religio (whosoever rules the country sets its religion). The citizens are expected to attend whatever worship-services the established religion may require, and to make financial contributions both as individuals in connection with their membership in the church or other type of religious organization, and also through the taxes they pay to the state, which are then channeled to the ruling body of the established religion.

C: Dissent is, in theory, prohibited, and sanctions may be invoked against any who dare to express disagreement with official doctrines (heretics and, on occasion, adherents of other religions). In earlier times, dissenters were punished with extreme severity, which could extend even to the death penalty, often inflicted with especial cruelty. In some instances, punishment for blasphemy was extended beyond the individual dissenter to his possessions, his family, and even relatives and descendants. (This procedure has always been repugnant to Americans' sense of fairness and legality, so that our Constitution specifically forbids “acts of attainder,” by means of which the government imposes a “taint” of criminality on an offender’s family and descendants when they had no part in whatever actions may have brought punishment upon him.) In almost all civilized countries in modern times, repression of dissent in religious matters has been greatly relaxed or almost eliminated. In England, for instance, non-Anglicans are now subject to no disabilities on account of their religious beliefs. In Israel, however, where no religion other than Judaism is accorded legal recognition, only adherents of that faith are completely free of disabilities or restrictions.

Censorship is often imposed on the writings of heretics and adherents of any other than the official established religion. In this respect, also, ancient and medieval practice was often extremely savage, with legally sanctioned seizure of books and destruction of writings, visual representations (pictures, statues) and the like. In modern times, virtually all civilized countries have abolished any official censorship or criticism in religious matters, even where there is still an established church. In this, also, the state of Israel constitutes a glaring exception. There, for instance, no Christian missionary activity is permitted (since, from the orthodox Jewish point of view, Christians are minim, “heretics"), and it is forbidden to have copies of the New Testament available to the public in schools or libraries.

II. ZIONISM, A SECULAR RELIGION

Zionism qualifies as a religion on all the counts just mentioned. Its central tenet is that all Jews have a God-given right to regard Palestine as their home, the “land flowing with milk and honey” that Jehovah promised the Hebrews as they wandered in the desert after their escape from Egypt. Not only is this, according to strict Zionism, a right which all Jews have by virtue of their (presumed) descent from the ancient Hebrews, but it is a duty incumbent on them to adhere to its principles and to further its aims. If anyone dares to disagree with its fundamental assumptions and their realization in the modern state of Israel, such a person is to be regarded as an enemy of Jewry. A Jew who is not a Zionist is, for the true believers of this religion, a traitor. There are many Zionists for whom the supernatural aspect of Judaism is no longer meaningful; for them, Zionism is a purely secular religion, an ersatz Judaism, and (as the Jewish philosopher Will Herberg pointed out) the state of Israel has become an idol. Zionism has its fanatics, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who are ready to attack its enemies without mercy.

III. THE DE FACTO SITUATION

In the United States and many other countries, however, even where there is de jure no established religion, we have de facto such an “establishment,” as the Constitution phrases it. The great majority of the public is almost totally unaware of the situation, since we have been subjected for almost half a century to an incredibly immense distortion of the facts of the situation, imposed on us by the news and entertainment media Let us take a quick look at the characteristics of an established religion, which we set forth in Section I, as they are manifested in the status of Zionism in the world in generaL and in the United States in particular, at present.

A. The United States has given extensive financial support to both the state of Israel and Zionist-related projects in this country and abroad. It is well known that Israel has received much the largest amount of foreign aid, especially in the supply of aeroplanes and military resources, of all the countries to which the United States has given assistance.

In domestic matters, Zionist propaganda-aims have been extensively assisted by governmental financing, for instance in the building and equipping of “Holocaust"-museums, and in the wide-spread provisions of courses in schools and colleges to spread Zionist disinformation concerning the alleged “Holocaust” Similar support for Jewish educational projects outside of the United States has been given by government grants. The most notorious of these instances was the proposal, sponsored by Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, for an eight-million-dollar subsidy for a “parochial school” to be provided for a Jewish community from Northern Africa which was located in southern France. The out-cry over this proposal was such that it was withdrawn, but similar grants were made without publicity or opposition. Not only the educational, but the military resources of the United States have been placed at the disposition of Jewish groups, such as the Falasha of Ethiopia, who were given air transport from that country to Israel by the U.S. Air-Force. That may have been a worthy humanitarian project, but one which did not concern the United States at all, and to which there was no justification for using a service supported by the American taxpayers' money. We might also keep in mind that this was done for the benefit of Israel, a country whose air-force had wantonly attacked and sunk the U.S. Navy’s ship Liberty without provocation at the time of the “Six Days' War” between that nation and Egypt.

B. In not only financial, but legal matters as welt, the United States has afforded support for Israeli and Zionist aims. The notorious “Holtzman Amendment” authorized the exclusion from the United States of anyone who had been involved in any German actions against Jews during the “Nazi period” (an ill-defined concept) and the withdrawal of American citizenship from any immigrant who had come to this country in the post-war period and had, for any reason, concealed his involvement with the German army or other German organizations. To put these provisions into effect, a bureau was established in the U.S. Department of Justice, entitled the “Office of Special Investigations” (OSI), which collaborated closely with the two most efficient, brutal and ruthless secret services of the modern world — the Soviet KGB and the Israeli Mossad. The OSI has thus functioned as if it were a branch of the Mossad ensconced in the heart of our Department of Justice, dedicated to pursuing persons who were non gratae to the state of Israel and to the U.S.S.R. (whose desires for unlimited vengeance for alleged “war-crimes” seem boundless).

Using materials (many of them demonstrably forged) obtained from the Mossad and the KGB alleged to prove complicity in Nazi anti-Jewish “atrocities” in the 1930’s and 1940's, the OSI has taken action against a number of persons who had come to the United States after 1945 and who had behaved with complete correctness from then on. By the time these actions were undertaken, the alleged war criminals were old men, in their late sixties or their seventies.. Among the victims of this type of “railroading” were the Ukrainian John Demjanjuk, the Estonian Karl Linnas, and the German scientist Arthur Rudolph. Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in violation of American law (which provides that a person accused of a crime in another country may be sent only to the country where the alleged crime was committed, in this case Poland). He was tried in Israel by a kangaroo-court and was convicted, on the basis of obviously faked documents supplied by the KGB, of having sent a million (!) Jews to their deaths at Treblinka or Sobibor. It has now become an item of faith in Israel and among Zionist sympathizers in the United States that he was one of the worst war-criminals of the Nazi period, worse even than Adolf Eichmann. To query this dogma is blasphemy, as was made evident when, in the American presidential campaign of 1988, a man named Jerome Brentar was required to resign from the staff of the Republican candidate George Bush’s “nationalities” committee because he considered Demjanjuk innocent. The “Jewish vote” was much more important, in both its numbers and its financial support, than that of the Ukrainian-American constituency — or, for that matter, any considerations of fairness or justice.

A similar miscarriage of justice, less bad in that it did not involve depriving an innocent man of his life, but putting the United States in a bad light with regard to its conduct of international relations, took place when the president of Austria, Kurt Waldheim, was denied admission to the United States in 1986. This action was taken by the U.S. Department of Justice, clearly in line with the principles of the Holtzman Amendment as enforced by the OSI, on the grounds that Waldheim had been a member of the German army in the 1940’s (Austria was not a separate nation at that time, of course, having been made part of Germany in 1938), and had knowingly taken part in the perpetration of anti-Jewish atrocities. The documents on which these allegations were based were later shown to have been falsified. This fact was reported in the German magazine Der Spiegel, but was not communicated to the public in the American news-media. Actually, any person who had been in the German army from 1939 to 1945 could, technically, have been charged with “perpetrating Nazi atrocities,” since the Zionist view is that all members of the German armed forces were fully guilty of whatever had been done during that period — a sentiment which, as we have observed, is wholly foreign to our American view of individual responsibility and of fairness.

C. Propaganda for the Zionist cause is made incessantly in the American news and entertainment media. which are extensively under Zionist control. The group which determines the over-all policy of the media is largely, though of course not wholly, Jewish, as in the case of such major opinion-moulding newspapers as the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as several major nationwide chains, and also of virtually all the entertainment media (radio and television). The latter are coming more and more under Zionist control throughout the world, as in the huge communications-empires of such men as Robert Maxwell (originally a Czech Jew named Jan Ludwig Hoch) and Rupert Murdoch (an Australian Jew). In this way, so far as the rights and wrongs of the theoretical basis of Zionism and the justification for the existence of the state of Israel are concerned, only one side of the picture is presented, and the public is given the wholly false idea that “brave little Israel” is the only democratic state in all the Near and Middle East, with a “special relationship” (of exactly the type that George Washington warned against two hundred years ago) with the United States. The maltreatment given the Palestinians by the Israeli government and its troops in the occupied territories is, by and large, played down and, wherever possible, presented as justified punishment for illegal attacks on Israeli soldiers. From this point of view, for instance, it is quite permissible for an Israeli soldier to shoot and kill a three-year-old Palestinian boy because he threw a stone at the soldier; and this is the only point of view normally presented to the American public. On occasion, the excessive savagery practised by the Israelis has been shown on television, arousing protests by Jews and non-Jews alike — whereupon the Israeli authorities have forbidden further photographing of such scenes and the American television networks have obligingly refrained from telecasting anything of the sort any further.

The strangle-hold that Zionists have on the multi-billion-dollar communications-industries has made it possible for them to create a widespread, uncritical belief in the rightness of their cause and in the unquestionability of Israeli rule in Palestine. They have also taken advantage of the belief of many fundamentalist Christians that the second coming of Christ must take place in Palestine among Jews, and that therefore the existence of the state of Israel is a necessary prerequisite for His second coming. (Other Christians, less fixed in the notion that the second coming has to come about among Jews, consider it equally likely that He might appear on earth as a Bombay street-sweeper, or a Latin American campesino.)

To fix these ideas still more firmly in the public’s mind, the writers of novels and the motion-picture- and television moguls have flooded the market with novels and “docu- dramas” heavily slanted in the direction of Zionism and Jewry in general. There has been an avalanche of fiction purporting to portray the “Holocaust,” with an incredible amount of emphasis on imaginary details of alleged maltreatment of Jews by Germans (all of whom are portrayed as demons, totally inhuman and devoid of any decency at all). The sado-masochism of the cheaper brands of “Holocaust"-literature has been such as to arouse revulsion even among the more reasonable Zionists themselves. A lengthy series of fictional portrayals of the events of the alleged “Holocaust” has been shown on television, including one with the title Auschwitz and another involving the reminiscences of “Holocaust"-survivors” entitled Shoah. Sequences with staged representations of Jews being herded into gas-chambers have been inserted into such evocations of the 1939-1945 conflict as War and Remembrance.

IV. THE “HOLOCAUST” MYTH

Virtually every religion has a central myth, on which its beliefs and dogmas are based. For religious Jews and Christian ultra-fundamentalists, the Biblical story of Jehovah having promised Palestine to the ancient Hebrews is sufficient. For non-religious Jews, however, a basis for the secular worship of the state of Israel has been found in the myth (in all senses of that term) of what is universally termed “the Holocaust,” a myth which has by now been so extensively proclaimed and imposed on the public as to be believed by virtually everyone.

A. The conventional form of the “Holocaust” myth involves the acceptance, as a historical fact which is one hundred percent true and beyond all questioning, of the story that during the period when the National Socialist party was in power in Germany (1933-1945) and especially during the war- time from 1939 to 1945, Jews were made the object of relentless persecution, placed in concentration camps under inhuman treatment and near starvation, and that millions of Jews (the standard figure of six million, although numerous other figures are often given, ranging from twenty-five million (!) to one-and-a-half million) were put to death in various ways, but for the most part in gas chambers either constructed for the purpose or adapted from crematoria. Their corpses were, we are told, dragged out of the gas chambers immediately after their deaths, and burned either in the same crematoria or in immense heaps out of doors. In Hebrew, the word Shoah 'burnt offering, holocaust — massacre' has come to be used to refer to this sequence of events, and its translation Holocaust is similarly used in other languages. In the immediate post-1945 period, it was claimed and widely believed that there had been mass executions, in general with gas chambers, in all regions under German control. More recently it has been shown, and admitted even by such prominent Zionists as Hannah Arendt and Simon Wiesenthal, that there were no extermination camps at all in Germany. The entire burden of the “Holocaust"-story has thus been thrown upon eastern Europe, principally Poland, where, it is currently asserted, there were huge murder-installations at such places as Treblinka, Sobibor, and especially Oswiecim (Auschwitz, including the Camp” at Birkenau or “Auschwitz Il').

By now, the place-name Auschwitz has come to be a universally accepted symbol for these alleged mass executions carried out under secret orders from the Nazi Fuhrer Adolf Hitler. The sacred Scriptures on which the story of the “Holocaust” is based are principally a batch of self-serving affidavits ascribed to “survivors” from various concentration camps (in reality, largely fabricated by Soviet disinformation factories for presentation at the Nurnberg trials) and the testimonies, down the decades, of other individuals, characterized by manifold internal discrepancies and mutual contradictions. The universally used expression “the Holocaust” contains deceptive linguistic features: the use of the definite article the, which tells the listener in advance that whatever noun it modifies refers to something which exists or has existed; the use of the singular form of the noun, implying that it refers to the only phenomenon of its kind; and, at the same time, the vagueness of reference of the term Holocaust, which is used with widely varying meanings, to signify anything from the entire persecution of Jews between 1933 and 1945 (which no-one denies) to the existence of gas chambers, especially at Auschwitz. Hence “to deny the reality of the Holocaust” has become a stock phrase, used to discredit anyone who questions any aspect of the story.

B. Heresies and Blasphemies. Doubts as to the nature and the extent of the “Holocaust” surfaced soon after the “war crimes” trials held at Nurnberg in 1945-1946, which were immediately perceived by many observers as being simply “kangaroo courts” held by the victors to enforce a Russian and Jewish vendetta. As information has gradually been made available over the decades, it has become more and more clear that there are “holes” at all points in the standard version of the “Holocaust"-story. There has arisen a sharp conflict between those who believe implicitly that an immense number of Jews were massacred ("Exterminationists") and those who consider that the traditional story is inaccurate and needs to be revised ("Revisionists). Even among the former group, there has arisen a heresy, among historians who consider that, since there is no proof that Hitler ever gave any order for mass executions, the initiative for such massacres came from individual camp commanders.

The major threat to the established “Holocaust” story has come, however, from those who, on examination of available documentation, refuse to accept the story at all, and consider it a tissue of falsehoods that has been built up over the decades. The “Revisionists” arguments are based on a number of considerations, especially the chemical and electrical impossibilities inherent in the descriptions of the gas-chambers or other installations alleged to have been used for these mass executions; the non-availability, in war-time conditions, of the immense quantities of coal or gasoline necessary to burn millions of corpses; and the impossible load that the transport of all these millions of people to the “death- camps” (now restricted entirely to Poland) would have imposed on an already tremendously over-burdened railway system. Definitive proof that there were no gas-chambers at all at Auschwitz (including Birkenau) or Majdanek has now been furnished by a forensic chemical engineering study made in situ by a major expert on execution by gas, Fred A. Leuchter. At present, the arguments and attested documentation presented by the “Revisionists” are decidedly more persuasive than those of the “Exterminationists.”

V. THE BLACKOUT

These blasphemies are of course, in the view of the True Believers, not to be tolerated, because if the “Holocaust” myth is shown to be untrue, the central support of non-religious Zionism and with it the worship of the state of Israel as a secular idol collapses entirely. As part of the unofficial, de facto established religion of Zionism, all dissent must be suppressed. To this end, various measures have been and are being taken, in contravention of United States law and our American sense of honesty and fairness, but nevertheless with impunity.

A. Defamation is a widely used practice for silencing any who dare to espouse or even report on the arguments of the “Revisionists” (as the present writer knows from first-hand experience). The ADL ("Anti"-Defamation League) of the Jewish organization B'nai B'rith is especially active in denouncing as “anti-Semitic” (i.e. anti-Jewish) any effort at revising current views of the sacrosanct “Holocaust” story. Anyone who suggests that there were no six-million (or any other immense number) of Jews slaughtered by the German government during the 1933-1945 period, or who points out that it has now been shown that there were no gas-chambers at Auschwitz (which was in reality a large industrial complex with a few crematoria) is immediately denounced as a “Neo- Nazi,” a “Fascist,” and accused of admiring the late Adolf Hitler and wanting to revive his doctrines and perhaps his party. (There are indeed a few such people, but to accuse all “Revisionists” of having such ideas is what is known in elementary logic as reason by converses, an unsound procedure.) In addition to institutions like the B'nai B'rith and the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation of Los Angeles, there are always a number of individual “Holocaust"-fanatics who are ready to pitch in and help defame any blasphemer against the True Faith.

B. Attacks on persons and property are not unknown. Individuals known for their “Revisionist” activities have been beaten, shot at, and even murdered. The most notorious such attack was made on the offices and warehouse of the Institute for Historical Review in Torrance, California on July 4, 1984, when most of their stock of books was burned in what was a clear instance of arson.C. Legal action has so far not been possible in the United States, but has been taken in other countries. In IsraeL naturally, no expression of doubt or contradiction is permitted, and Israeli pressure has succeeded in making anything of the kind illegal in West Germany. Even in countries where one might expect the Anglo-Saxon concept of freedom of speech and of the press to prevail, such as Canada, “Revisionists” like Ernst Zündel and James Keegstra have been haled into court and prosecuted. It is illegal to bring into Canada such books as Arthur Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, on the grounds that it comes under the heading of books which may not be imported if they are treasonable, seditious, immoral, or obscene (!). Efforts to deprive American citizens of the right to publish, read, or discuss the “Holocaust” have not yet succeeded, but we do not know how long the present situation will last

VI. THE REMEDY (IF ANY)

The question that inevitably arises at this point is: What can be done to improve matters? Specifically, how can one create a situation in which it can be pointed out that we have a de facto established religion, Zionism, which has been instrumental in making the United States into a vassal state of Israel, in both domestic and foreign policy? (If anyone doubts the validity of this assertion, consider the situation in the United Nations, where virtually unanimous condemnation of the Israeli anti-Palestinian savagery is routinely vetoed by the United States; and our domestic politics, in which both major parties vie in their efforts to pander to “the Jewish vote.")

From the short-range point of view, it would seem to be nearly impossible to combat the huge political and especially financial forces which support the United States' “special relationship” with Israel and the on-going saturation of our news-and entertainment-media with the myth of the “Holocaust.” In these times, it is very hard indeed to fight the multi-billion-dollar resources of financiers and liquor-barons. We must take a grass-roots approach, and do our best to arouse a better understanding of the facts of the case and of the dangers which face, not only the non-Jews, but the Jews in this country if matters suddenly take a bad turn and Jews are unfairly blamed for what is, in the majority of cases, not their fault. We have all, Jews and non-Jews alike, been lied to for the last half-century. It is time for the truth to be known, even though it may take another half-century or more for it to prevail.


Source: Reprinted from The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 211-222.