Source: National Vanguard
The
entire basis for the ascendancy of the Jewish
power structure over the West is about to be
shaken -- but will Western man and his
hard-won freedoms survive the cataclysm?
American Dissident Voices broadcast for
March 19, 2006
listen
to the broadcast (mp3)
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the broadcast (mp3)
an interview with Mark Weber
by Kevin Alfred Strom
ILLUSTRATION: When he was still free --
David Irving addresses a large crowd in
Budapest, Hungary.
TODAY WE HAVE as our guest once again the
writer, speaker, historian, and --
increasingly -- international spokesman for
those who dare to speak freely on the vital
issues of our time, Mr. Mark Weber, Director
of the Institute
for Historical Review. Welcome to American
Dissident Voices, Mark.
WEBER: Thank you very much, Kevin;
that's a very generous introduction.
KAS: And a well-deserved one, in my
opinion. It was good to see you recently in
northern Virginia, Mark. I hope you'll be
coming back in a more official capacity in the
near future.
WEBER: There will be an IHR meeting
there in July; that's in the works right now.
KAS: I very much look forward to
hearing you speak. It's been too long since we
last spoke on the air -- about eight months, I
think -- and I wonder if you could briefly let
our listeners know what the Institute has been
up to during that time.
WEBER: A lot of things. We're very
gratified by the increasing popularity of our
Web site. The traffic continues to grow, as
does the number of subscribers to our News and
Comment e-mail subscription service. We're
producing a whole line of CD and DVD
recordings, which has been very successful.
This is important because DVDs
and CDs are now replacing the older
media of videotapes and audiotapes.
Additionally, I've continued to do a lot of
radio interviews and have made quite a few
public appearances in just the last few weeks.
Many of these have focused on the recent
crackdown on dissidents in Europe for
violations of so-called "Holocaust
denial" laws, and I've focused
especially on the case of David Irving. We
maintain a steady program of media outreach,
which is an important part of what we do
because it's very important to reach people
who are outside of our own circle, so to
speak.
KAS: Who has interviewed you recently,
Mark?
WEBER: In the immediate aftermath of
the David
Irving sentencing on February 20th I did a
number of interviews, including one with the
BBC in London, another with Radio Netherlands,
another with the English-language service of
Iran's short-wave external broadcasting
system, and one with the Times of
London. I also appeared as a guest on some
radio shows that are broadcast here in the
United States. As I mentioned, we try to
maintain a steady media outreach because it's
very important to reach people other than
those who already are familiar with our work.
We don't want to just "preach to the
choir," but reach those people who
normally see and hear only what the people who
control the media want us to see and
hear.
KAS: It sounds like you're doing
excellent work reaching out to the mainstream.
You mentioned David Irving, who is a British
historian and is probably one of the most
widely known writers of history. If there is
such a thing as celebrity in the field of
history, Irving has certainly attained it.
He's a best-selling author and a well-known
scholar and investigator. And yet, this man is
behind bars today -- and the story of his
captivity is not as widely known as it should
be. Can you tell us, briefly, what's going on
in the Irving case right now?
WEBER: David Irving is the author of
more than twenty books, a number of which have
been bestsellers, many of them highly
acclaimed by critics. In fact, some of his
books have been obligatory reading at
Sandhurst, West Point, and at universities
around the world.
Irving made a visit
to Austria last November to speak to a
small meeting in Vienna. While he was there he
was stopped by police and arrested on a
warrant that was issued sixteen years ago on
the basis of two lectures he had given. That
fact by itself is amazing, because normally
any crime committed that long ago would no
longer be actionable under ordinary statutes
of limitations.
However, because he had referred in these
lectures to "mythical gas chambers,"
he was arrested and held until his trial on
February 20th, at which time he was sentenced
to three years' imprisonment just for having
uttered a couple of sentences two decades ago.
No other violation of so-called Holocaust
denial laws has gotten such international
attention. In nine or ten European countries
-- and in Israel -- it's now a crime to
publicly dispute the official, orthodox,
Holocaust extermination story. There are
numerous aspects of this situation that are
really bizarre; in fact, it's hard
to believe that such laws even exist.
In the United States and in most other
countries, people are free to make all sorts
of provocative statements about history and
even about current affairs. You can say that
it was really George Bush who organized the
9-11 attack on the World Trade Center and you
won't be prosecuted for it. You can advocate
the return of Communism and the authorities
will do nothing. But if
you say anything that disputes the
official Holocaust story in a number of
European countries, you will be imprisoned,
fined, or punished in other ways.
KAS: In those countries the Holocaust
orthodoxy is protected more stringently that
even any kind of church doctrine. In fact, I
don't believe church doctrine is
protected in those countries.
WEBER: That's right. One of the
important aspects of the Irving sentencing is
that it came in the aftermath of the tremendous
furor over cartoons that appeared first in
a newspaper in Denmark, and later in some
other countries, that Muslims around the world
found very insulting. But almost everywhere in
Europe the publishing of those cartoons was
defended on the principle of free speech. It
was said that even cartoons, images, or
writings that offend the sensibilities of
Christians or of Muslims are permissible,
because the governments of European countries
try to uphold the principle of free speech.
But at the same time, any questioning of
Holocaust orthodoxy results in these amazing
punishments. The Irving case is certainly the
most famous of them, but it's by no means the
only one.
KAS: It was reported that Irving
actually decided to plead guilty in this case.
Is that true?
WEBER: Yes, it is, and he explained his
reason for doing that. Irving said that if
Austria had a law making it a crime to wear a
yellow necktie, and he had then worn a yellow
necktie while there and been arrested for it,
he would have had to have plead guilty to
breaking that law. Well, he did speak of
"mythical gas chambers" in these two
lectures he gave sixteen years ago. He
reasoned that this did, in fact, violate the
law, so he pled guilty. Now this is
speculation, but many people expected or
thought that because he pled guilty, he would
be sentenced to time served or given a
suspended sentence and allowed to leave the
country. However, he and many other people
were surprised when he was given a three-year
prison sentence.
KAS: I heard that he recanted some of
his questioning of Holocaust orthodoxy in an
interview he gave prior to the sentencing.
WEBER: He said that his views on the
Holocaust have changed. It's a little unclear
exactly what his views are now because they have
changed over time. After the sentencing, he
gave two interviews in which he again said
that he did not believe Hitler gave any order
to exterminate the Jews of Europe, so people
have been a little confused about exactly what
his position is on some of these subjects.
In any case, the reaction to his sentencing
has been amazing. Because his books are so
widely known and because he's so well known
around the world, this particular
"Holocaust denial" case received far
more media attention than any other that has
ever occurred in Europe. It's been very
gratifying to see almost
universal condemnation of the sentence
against Irving and of the Holocaust denial
laws in Austria and other countries in Europe
under which he and others have been
persecuted.
The only voices expressing support for
the sentencing of Irving have come from groups
like the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon
Wiesenthal Center, and a few other
predicable Jewish Zionist sources. Newspapers
across the United States and Europe and around
the world have spoken out against Austria's
law, not in the least because it's so
selective and one-sided. The Holocaust story
is the only chapter of history that's legally
protected and it's the only one for which
people are punished for doubting.
KAS: What were some of the more
noteworthy organs taking that position?
WEBER: In Britain there were editorials
in the London Times, and in the Guardian,
but the condemnation has actually come from
around the world. Many of the opinion pieces
have pointed out the double standard in Europe
that permits people to make statements that
offend the religious sensibilities of
Christians or Muslims, but punishes in this
draconian way offenses against Jewish
sensibilities. That's been a very typical
reaction of newspapers and of intellectuals
around the world.
KAS: Are there any elements in the
Jewish power structure that think perhaps
these denial laws are a step too far?
WEBER: Yes. Deborah
Lipstadt, who is probably David Irving's
most famous -- or infamous -- adversary, has
taken that position. Even she, who was
involved in a widely publicized libel case
with Irving a few years ago, said that the
effect of punishing him in this way is to make
a martyr out of him. And there have been a
number of other Jews who have expressed dismay
that the effect of sending David Irving to
prison has been to turn him into a martyr for
freedom of speech.
Irving has now become the most prominent
prisoner of conscience -- or political
prisoner, if you will -- in the Western world
today. But he's not alone. Ernst Zündel has
been behind bars for more than three years now
without ever having been found guilty of
any crime. He's currently being tried in
Mannheim, Germany for violating Germany's
so-called Holocaust denial law, and his case
has gotten quite a lot of attention there.
Europeans feel increasing embarrassment about
these strange Holocaust denial laws, because
they can see just how one-sided
and hypocritical they really are.
KAS: What is the current status of Zündel's
trial?
WEBER: The trial began in November and
has been moving slowly over the months, but
just the other day a courtroom session ended
in furor -- as it has before -- with shouting
by Zündel's attorneys and the judge, and the
trial has now been postponed indefinitely;
it's unclear when it will resume.
The defense lawyers for Zündel have been very
combative and feisty and have put up a very
spirited defense. This is dangerous for
them, because the judge has threatened to
punish them for making statements that express
many of the same views that Zündel himself
has expressed.
I want to give your listeners some idea of
just how bizarre these laws are. Under these
European laws, people are punished for making
even factually true statements that
contradict Holocaust orthodoxy. David Irving
was arrested and found guilty in a court in
Munich some years ago for making a speech in
1988. In that lecture he said that the gas
chamber shown to tourists at the Auschwitz I
main camp is a phony postwar reconstruction.
At his trial, he asked the court permission to
call as a witness to this fact the curator of
the Auschwitz State Museum in Poland. The
court denied his request. Both the Auschwitz
State Museum and many other historians have
acknowledged that the so-called gas chamber at
the Auschwitz I main camp -- that's been shown
to hundreds of thousands of tourists over the
years -- is a phony postwar reconstruction.
Even though Irving's statement was true, the
court fined him ten thousand marks. That fine
was later increased to thirty thousand marks,
and, just for having made this statement, he
was forbidden ever to enter Germany again.
Now under normal law, truth is an absolute
defense. If you make a statement that's true,
the truth of it should protect you from being
punished, but that's not how things work in
these bizarre Alice-in-Wonderland-style
prosecutions for "Holocaust denial."
Another case that I find even more remarkable
occurred in the 1990s. In 1998 a German court
convicted a sociology professor, Dr. Robert
Hepp, of violating one of these laws because
of a single sentence that he had written in a
book -- one in which he referred to the
mass-gassing story as a "fairy
tale." The amazing thing about this is
that the sentence he wrote was in Latin
-- of all things -- and he was punished for
violating a law against "popular
incitement." How a single sentence,
written as a footnote in a book in
Latin could be considered "popular
incitement" is hard to understand, but
the court ruled that this sentence constituted
dangerous popular incitement, so he was found
guilty.
Another case, in France, involved Jean-Marie
Le Pen, the leader of that country's National
Front party. In 1997 Le Pen was found guilty
of violating the French "Holocaust
denial" law for having referred to gas
chambers as "a detail of Second World War
history." Le Pen pointed out at the time
that neither the multi-volume memoirs of
Winston Churchill, the World War II memoirs of
Dwight Eisenhower, nor the wartime memoir of
Charles de Gaulle makes any mention at all of
gas chambers. But for referring to gas
chambers as "a detail of Second World War
history," he was found guilty and
ordered to pay a fine of fifty thousand
dollars to publish the court's decision in
French newspapers. This is just bizarre.
People can make any number of provocative
statements in these same European countries,
but offending Jewish sensibilities is punished
this draconian and hypocritical way.
KAS: Le Pen didn't even question the
orthodox version of the gas-chamber story. He
merely said it was a detail of history.
WEBER: That's right. One of the
remarkable features of this phenomenon is that
people like Le Pen and Irving are routinely
referred to as "Holocaust deniers,"
but the public is never told what it is that
they have actually said that
"denies" the Holocaust. As you
pointed out, it's not a denial of the
Holocaust story to say that gas chambers are a
detail of Second World War history. Le Pen
didn’t dispute the existence of homicidal
gas chambers in German camps during World War
II, but merely referring to it as "a
detail," was considered "denying the
Holocaust." That fact alone points out
the absurdity of these laws and the way
they're applied in Europe.
KAS: Another member of the National
Front in France, Bruno
Gollnisch, who is also a member of the
European Parliament and a professor at the
University of Lyon, lost his parliamentary
immunity merely for saying that historians
should decide the question of the Jewish
Holocaust.
WEBER: That's right. It's important to
keep in mind the origin of these laws. David
Irving was called a "Holocaust
denier." Strictly speaking, the law under
which he was convicted was an earlier version
of the current Holocaust denial law in
Austria. For his reference to "mythical
gas chambers" at Auschwitz, he was
actually convicted of violating a law that
makes it a crime to "revive National
Socialism" in Austria. His statement was
construed by the Austrian court as an attempt
to revive Nazism. This law and the similar
laws in Germany were imposed on those
countries by the victorious Allied powers at
the end of World War II. They are imposed
victors' laws, not normal legislation enacted
by the people's representatives. Austria later
strengthened its law to make it specifically a
crime to "deny the Holocaust," which
is now legally defined as downplaying or
whitewashing genocidal actions of the National
Socialist regime during World War II. That was
the legal foundation of the case against David
Irving.
The existence of these laws in other
countries, however, such as in Poland and
Spain, is the result of a
concerted effort by international Jewish
organizations.
In 1982 the World Jewish Congress announced
the start of a campaign to persuade and
pressure governments to outlaw "Holocaust
denial." They systematically worked to
get these laws enacted in one country after
another in Europe. Prior to that time, such
laws had existed only in Germany and Austria.
Laws specifically forbidding Holocaust denial
were not enacted by other in European
countries until this campaign by the World
Jewish Congress began to put pressure on them.
The organized nature of the campaign to
introduce such legislation can also be seen in
the demands made by the International
Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists,
which met in June 1998 and announced a
campaign to introduce laws of this kind in as
many countries as possible. Now, having said
that, it seems that Holocaust denial laws have
reached their high tide, as it were. The
international reaction to Irving's sentence
and to the existence of these laws in general
has been so negative that's it's hard to see
how these organizations are going to be
successful in promulgating
similar laws in any other countries now.
KAS: I understand there was recently a
debate in Britain in regard to an effort to
impose such laws there, but the effort failed.
WEBER: Yes. Before Tony Blair became
Prime Minister, he announced that if he did
become Prime Minister his government would
introduce a Holocaust denial law in Britain.
After his government assumed power the matter
was further explored, but a decision was made
not to try to introduce such a law in Britain,
probably for tactical reasons. It's very hard
to word such a law in a way that it will not
seem obviously
hypocritical and one-sided.
As I've said many times, justice that is
applied selectively is not justice, it's a
form of injustice. Making it a crime to
question one official version of history or
one chapter of history, but not any other
is not justice; it's a form of injustice.
Anyway, the Labour government decided against
trying to introduce such legislation in
Britain, and as you know, it has been having
trouble even applying the laws that it already
has on the books against fomenting and
inciting racial hatred.
KAS: How many people are now imprisoned
in Europe for questioning the Jewish version
of the Holocaust?
WEBER: Most of the sentences that are
handed down for Holocaust denial in these
countries are not prison sentences. Most of
them impose fines and this has happened in
quite a few cases.
In prison right now is David Irving, of
course, in Vienna.
Ernst Zündel is imprisoned in Mannheim.
Also imprisoned in Germany is Germar Rudolf,
who was punished for having made and published
a scholarly investigation of the technical
aspects of gas chambers at Auschwitz. He had
to flee the country to avoid prosecution,
traveling first to Britain and then later to
the United States, where he eventually married
and had a child. Our government, however, in
its eager determination to uphold our
immigration laws, arrested him last November
and deported him to Germany, where he was
promptly thrown into prison and where he is
now serving the sentence that was imposed
years before. He will be standing trial again
in Germany for new violations of the law.
Another person in prison is Siegfried Verbeke,
a Belgian citizen who was extradited to
Germany for violating its Holocaust denial
laws and is currently incarcerated there.
Other people in Europe have served prison
sentences for violating these laws, but have
been released. One of them lives in
Switzerland, a man named Gaston Armand
Armaudruz. Several years ago he wrote piece in
a newsletter that he publishes in which he
said that he didn't believe the gas chamber
story, and he was arrested for it. His
newsletter has a circulation of only a few
hundred, but this man, who was in his
eighties, had to serve a prison sentence for
writing this.
The Frenchman Robert Faurisson has also served
some time in prison in his country. He has
been released, but he has also had to pay very
heavy fines for statements he has made about
World War II and German policy toward the Jews
during the war.
Another Swiss citizen who was indicted under
one of these laws is Jürgen Graf, a teacher
and researcher who has written several books
and who spoke at one of our conferences. He
was found guilty of violating Switzerland's
Holocaust denial law and was sentenced, but he
fled the country and is now living abroad.
Free speech is under attack -- both direct
attack from the Jewish establishment and
indirect attack as we lose our freedoms as a
wider war looms in the world. We'll be back
next week to continue our interview with Mark
Weber, Director of the Institute for
Historical Review, as we talk about these and
other vital questions on American Dissident
Voices.
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