Butz is a tenured professor at the Northwestern University. He teaches electrical engineering, not history. This is good because he is also the author of a book called “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry.” He claims that the Holocaust was a hoax perpetrated by the Jews in order to gain sympathy for the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Butz has even commended President Ahmadinejad’s public denial of the Holocaust.
* The President of Northwestern University has gone on record to say that Arthur Butz does not speak about his Holocaust denial in the classroom and that they do not support his views, only his right to express them in his personal time.
There is a very fine line between Holocaust denial and Holocaust Revisionism. Revisionists tend to emphasize the fact that they only deny certain aspects of the Holocaust, not the entire Holocaust. It seems a moot distinction. People dying in concentration camps of disease or starvation because they were detained for their ethnicity still fits the definition of genocide, regardless. Gas chambers or no gas chambers, policy of genocide or no policy of genocide, genocide still took place.
*Shelly Barclay and the creator of Rewriting History do not share the beliefs of the men listed above.
Sources
A Brief History of Holocaust Denial, retrieved 1/3/11, jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/denialbrief.html
Harry Elmer Barnes, Revisionism and the Historical Blackout, retrieved 1/3/11, mises.org/daily/419
Harry Elmer Barnes, retrieved 1/3/11, history.howstuffworks,com/historians/harry-elmer-barnes.htm
Observer Online, President’s statement on Arthur Butz, retrieved 1/3/11, northwestern.edu/observer/issues/2006/02/09/statement.html
Loading ...
claireshana on 
fallenone on 
Hello, Dr. Toben,
Yes, all historical events are scrutinized in minute detail, as they should be.
I have never made a statement that implies I think people should be censored on any topic and you will never see me say as much.
I don’t see how a person can stand up for a Revisionist or Denier’s freedom of speech while in the same post saying that labeling them as deniers is a “smear tactic.” People have just as much legal right to speak up against Revisionists as Revisionists have to speak about their beliefs.
You’ll notice that I have separated the terms Revisionist and Denier in this article. That is because a Holocaust Denier is a different sort than a Holocaust Revisionist. How is it character assassination to call someone who thinks Jews “made up” the Holocaust a Holocaust Denier? Doesn’t denial make you a denier. Furthermore, it is character assassination to call every person who bore witness to the Holocaust and wrote about it in a way that goes against deniers’ beliefs a liar. As for Revisionists, they do not deny that the Holocaust occurred and therefore, are not Holocaust Deniers.
I forgot to mention the fact that I never used the word terrorist. Whether other people have used the word to describe Deniers or Revisionists is irrelevant. I did not call every Revisionist an anti-Semite, either. Nonetheless, I do feel that many are and I will not sway in that belief. If a KKK member labels himself a Revisionist, I can easily assume he is also a racist and an anti-Semite.
After 16 years of full time study of this contentious topic I have reached the conclusion that individuals who accept the Holocaust-Shoah as a dogmatic set of three major propositions: 6 million, systematic state persecution, murder weapon = homicidal gas chambers – are either ignorant of the physical facts or are liars – or both.
There are now individuals coming through who, as in the 9:11 truth movements, are not interested in seeking the truth of a matter but rather delight in pure sophistry. I find your efforts encouraging because it seems to me that you are aware of this level of discourse.
It will be interesting to see where your enquiry leads you to.
I say this because I once gave a Holocaust sceptic the Germar Rudolf published set of Holocaust handbooks, over 20 volumes, and without having read them he announced that he had now become a Holocaust believer, that it happened, that the official version of events is true.
Now he focuses on Jewish-Israeli matters with a passion and defends the Palestinian right to self-determination.
To my maxim: ‘Don’t blame the Jews, blame those that bend to their pressure’, he responds by stating that such a comment is not helpful in exposing Jewish matters, etc.
“After 16 years of full time study of this contentious topic I have reached the conclusion that individuals who accept the Holocaust-Shoah as a dogmatic set of three major propositions: 6 million, systematic state persecution, murder weapon = homicidal gas chambers – are either ignorant of the physical facts or are liars – or both.”
Well, the fact of the matter is that whether there were six million victims, systematic state persecution or gas chambers is irrelevant if you’re looking for genocide. While I am not a Holocaust Revisionist or Denier and never will be, I do believe in the importance of accuracy and concise arguments. What it all boils down to is this: I know people with little tattoos on their arms that would not have been there if it weren’t for the Nazis. I would never call those people liars because I do not believe them to be such.
“There are now individuals coming through who, as in the 9:11 truth movements, are not interested in seeking the truth of a matter but rather delight in pure sophistry.”
I couldn’t agree with you more, but I think we are seeing it from two different positions.
“To my maxim: ‘Don’t blame the Jews, blame those that bend to their pressure’, he responds by stating that such a comment is not helpful in exposing Jewish matters, etc.”
I must say that I would respond differently and will do so now. I don’t blame the Jews. I blame the Nazis. Had no one been forced into labor camps (be they death camps or not, we both know where we stand), there would be no questions asked. Had Hitler not expressed his racism quite often and then persecuted those who he hated, there would be no argument. It is clear to me where the fault lies.
Of course here we have the crux of the matter when a contentious period of history is so simplistically portrayed, where the blame-game does not grasp any of the deeper, underlying issues, as expressed in these four sentences:
1. I blame the Nazis. 2. Had no one been forced into labor camps (be they death camps or not, we both know where we stand), there would be no questions asked. 3. Had Hitler not expressed his racism quite often and then persecuted those who he hated, there would be no argument. 4. It is clear to me where the fault lies.
I do not have the time to continue commenting here so permit me to conclude by simply stating the following:
1. By switching over to ‘genocide studies’ rather than outright and fully-blown ‘Holocaust-Shoah’ studies the causes of World War Two are reduced to ‘Hitler was a racist who hated Jews.
2. This conveniently hides, for example, the fact that Britain and France declared war on Germany because Germany invaded Poland – but these two countries did not invade the Soviet Union when it invaded Poland. Why not?
3. Germany – the National Socialists [not NAZIS] developed a new philosophy that to this day causes fear to arise in those who have been re-educated and who are vehement ‘anti-racists’ with the ‘Nazis’ serving as their convenient scapegoat.
4. The concept of ‘autarky’ meant that Germany disconnected from the international Gold standard, from the international predatory capitalistic system of economics. If you look at the Islamic Republic of Iran, and formerly Iraq – and North Korea – then you will note these countries are not part of the international financial system that keeps all of us in debt – the new form of slavery. Remember, the only freedom we have in westernd emocracy is going shopping, bad luck if you haven’t got money to spend.
5. As to your racist tag: think of the multi-ethnic SS fighting force, which belies the racist tag pinned to the ‘Nazis’, and think of the ‘Jewish’ soldiers that served in the German army under Hitler.
6. Essentially Germany wanted to rule itself, not the world. This is what Nationalism is all about. It is the internationalists who seek to control the world because any national state is for them a nuisance. Today the left-right divide is hiding the real divide: national v international. You can see this developing in the USA where states are crying out for basic sovereignty against the federal government.
7. Finally, since the lies of WMDs in Iraq sanctioned the invasion, since 9:11 set the new death dialectic that pits the ‘free and democratic west’ against ‘terrorist Islam’, we now know that such deceit didn’t last too long, not as long as the ‘Holocaust-Shoah’ lies have lasted.
I wish you luck with your enquiry.
Cheers
We weren’t discussing any of the deeper issues. And, again, I have been accused of the very thing I was commenting upon. You “blamed” the people who believe the Jews and I, in turn, removed the blame and shifted it to the Nazis. You cannot say that the problem is the blame game when the blame game is the card you are playing. It removes all credibility from the argument. It’s like me yelling at my child and telling him not to yell at me. In that scenario, I lose credibility.
Anyway, you took the discussion we were having, which was the cause of or existence of the Holocaust and shifted it to the cause of World War II, which was something I had not even commented on. That is called a strawman.
Good luck to you as well.
It’s not a matter of blaming but one of seeking clarification. If I didn’t do that in my post, then sorry about that, but I see it so important to get to the premis on which any comment rests, and for me it seemed that you based yours on ‘Nazis’. That to me seemed ratehr limited in perspective and so I attempted to widen the whole issue.
Your analogy about yelling does highlight the importance of setting an example to oneself and to others, which is what the Kantian Categorical Imperative is all about – principled behaviour rather than nihilistic opportunism, which is currently so prevalent in our western universities.
So, again, if I may re-formulate my position: I am seeking the truth of a matter and this, hopefully eliminates any form of scapegoating, of blaming one or the other parties involved in a dispute. This makes the quest for justice so important but that, again in the western democracies, has been perverted by the ‘discrimination industry’. Any act of thinking is an act of discrimination – the question that follows is the act just or not.
Then the thinking mode is all too often the death dialectic – Talmudic-Marxist-Feminist of win-lose, rather than the Hegelian of win-win. For example, the former pits man against woman and woman castrates the man; the latter conserves the opposites of man and woman and creates with it a new synthesis = the child. Such is the biological imperative that is to many intellectuals a threat to their existence, which has to be ‘overcome’ if we seek truth and justice – and for good measure – love.
I am aware that there are individuals who decry such values, but that does not mean such values do not exist for those who believe in them.
So, from your ‘Strawman’ cheers.
Shelley, the crucial aspect of the Holocaust-Shoah narrative is that it has no reality in space and time, only in memory.
All historical events are scrutinised in minute detail, only matters Holocaust-Shoah are stifled legally and socially, the latter through smear tactics-character assassination by using these shut-up words: hater, Holocaust denier, antisemite, racist, Nazi – now even ‘terrorist’.
The censoring of this topic by western democratic nations at university level indicates we have reached a stage where our academic endeavours can be labelled morally and intellectually bankrupt.