Banned Book:The Hoax of the Twentieth Century

[Chaos]

Old age is no rational reason to dismiss a book.

Even though Hilberg's "Destruction" has enjoyed updates and revisions, the latest in 2003, the first edition of 1961 was already excellent and would deserve being quoted and used today.

Biologists often quote Darwin's "Origin", 151 after its first release, because it was an excellent book with lots of good, original concepts. I might even go back to Aristotle's Organon - not forgotten because it is, well, a good body of work.

That´s nothing. I´ve seen recent economics papers refer to "Wealth of Nations", which was published in 1775-ish.

 

[Nick Terry]

Old age is no rational reason to dismiss a book.

Even though Hilberg's "Destruction" has enjoyed updates and revisions, the latest in 2003, the first edition of 1961 was already excellent and would deserve being quoted and used today.

Biologists often quote Darwin's "Origin", 151 after its first release, because it was an excellent book with lots of good, original concepts. I might even go back to Aristotle's Organon - not forgotten because it is, well, a good body of work.

Read the thread I linked to. Butz's book can be dismissed in relation to what he should have known or been able to find out at the time, in the early 1970s. He strawmanned the state of knowledge back then.

But since 1975 there has been a massive volume of research on all aspects of the Holocaust. "Outdated" is a frequently heard term in historiography and in science, because historiography and any other form of science expand exponentially due to new research. There may well be books that survive because of their literary merits, or 'wear well despite their age', or can offer a particular insight.

Hilberg's book is one of them, but in relation to the state of the art, it's pretty outdated now. I'd recommend as overviews, Friedlander, Longerich, Bloxham (as a short and provocative intro essay) and then Hilberg. The expansion of research means there is less and less reason to cite Hilberg since there are more recent and more comprehensive books on different regions, countries, camps, units, etc. This doesn't detract from Hilberg's achievement. I think he'll be read for some time to come, even though his work does not have the literary merit of, say, Huizinga or Burkhardt, who are still read long after we know infinitely more about the eras they portrayed.

Unlike Hilberg, Butz did not revise and expand his book, he simply bolted on a few essays to a 2003 edition. The main text is the same as it was exactly 35 years ago in August 1975 when he wrote the preface, and boy does it show. The book reads like it's from another era, and the cobwebs are visible. Many of the arguments he makes are no longer made by deniers, who have in some cases publicly rejected them. So it's not even a very good introduction to revisionism, and fares worse than Hilberg does in comparison.

Deniers have tried to write overviews of their theories since Butz, but they are all worse than even Butz managed. Butz claims in the preface to the 2003 edition that his book was still the only revisionist volume that told 'the whole story' - yet the book left out most of the story!

It's still telling, as I said, that deniers tout this 35 year old p.o.s today.

 

[Aitch]

In today's world it seem that a banning of a book has less meaning then it did in the 1930s (just to pull a period out of thin air).

Has been for a while. Even before Amazon, I remember a guy I worked with bringing a copy of Spycatcher (by Peter Wright) into the office within a week or so of it being published. Of course, the fact we worked for an airline helped.

 

[Oystein]

Read the thread I linked to. Butz's book can be dismissed in relation to what he should have known or been able to find out at the time, in the early 1970s. He strawmanned the state of knowledge back then.
...
The book reads like it's from another era, and the cobwebs are visible. Many of the arguments he makes are no longer made by deniers, who have in some cases publicly rejected them. So it's not even a very good introduction to revisionism, and fares worse than Hilberg does in comparison.

Deniers have tried to write overviews of their theories since Butz, but they are all worse than even Butz managed. Butz claims in the preface to the 2003 edition that his book was still the only revisionist volume that told 'the whole story' - yet the book left out most of the story!

It's still telling, as I said, that deniers tout this 35 year old p.o.s today.

I believe everything you write there is correct. I only took a quick glance at the book: his take on census data pre- and post-war, and found it lacking in obviously necessary considerations (who do you count as Jew? Why is "communist" data bad? What about contemporary Nazi data?). So the book was bad already 35 years ago. Since books hardly improve with time, that's why it's still bad today - and not because it is 35 years old. Maybe today we just know even better how bad it is.

 

[Saggy]

Butz's book is the bible of holocaust denial because he focuses on the creation of the hoax, not 'revising' the history of the camps. Of course since his book was published, prior to even Leutcher I think, a lot more has been learned about the camps, and a lot still remains hidden, at Bad Arolsen for example. But Butz concentrates on the creation of the hoax by agencies in the US government, primarily the War Refugee Board, headed by H. Moregenthau. He also focuses on the Nuremberg trials which transformed the hoax phantasmagoria into judicial fact that could not be challenged in court.

It is trivially easy to demonstrate that the holohoax is a collection of grotesque lies, the hoax gas chambers at Auschwitz and Majdanek at the heart of the hoax suffice for that, but the question remains is how did the Zionists manipulate the agencies of the US government to give these lies the authority of the US government. The current crop of scientific revisionists, who want to count the pebbles on the ground at each of the camps, don't, to the best of my knowledge, address these issues (Mark Weber is an exception). Butz gives the details, names the players, of the Zionist takeover of US policy with regard to Nuremberg, the holohoax, and post war Europe. That's why he remains essential reading.

 

[Oystein]

Butz's book is the bible of holocaust denial...

You do know that the Bible, it is a work of fiction in the guise of revelation?

 

[timhau]

It is trivially easy to demonstrate that the holohoax is a collection of grotesque lies

If that is the case, then Holocaust Deniers are stunningly incompetent because they have failed at that time and time again.

This is kind of like the problem with space aliens: If they're super-intelligent, why do they only use lunatics as contacts?

 

[Nick Terry]

I believe everything you write there is correct. I only took a quick glance at the book: his take on census data pre- and post-war, and found it lacking in obviously necessary considerations (who do you count as Jew? Why is "communist" data bad? What about contemporary Nazi data?). So the book was bad already 35 years ago. Since books hardly improve with time, that's why it's still bad today - and not because it is 35 years old. Maybe today we just know even better how bad it is.

Actually, some books become obsolete because new findings emerge which should force a revision or which discredit an argument. Case in point being Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, originally published in the late 1960s. It is largely correct in its narrative description, but he could only guess at the numbers because no documents were available. By the 1990s, that had changed. Conquest refused to accept the new data and argued like a small child with younger historians about it. This isn't quite the same thing as 'paradigm shift' because it happens on points of detail - Conquest was right that Kolyma was a man-killer, he just overestimated the number by a factor of 4.

Butz's book was bad and incoherent in 1976; the small glimmer that wasn't immediately self-refuting was made obsolete within a few years by new archival revelations, and progressively more so by the end of the 1980s and beyond. I'd say it's been junk since 1976, risible junk since 1979, utter junk since 1989, total and utter junk since 1993 and absolute junk since 2000.

Today, it is a black hole of wrongness.

If he'd just stuck to arguing that the earth has been hit by multiple moons many millennia ago, then one could almost savour the wrongness for what it is, quixotic poppycock. Alas, he picked the Holocaust for his chosen subject...

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Paperback edition seems to be available at Amazon.co.uk - at £42 new or £30 used! Or 75p for the Kindle edition. Which you can presumably download anywhere?

Alibris has it for $15.00 up. Or you can get it free.

 

[Matthew Ellard]

Not long ago on another forum I proposed, half-joking, that the forum create a 'book club' and discuss Butz's tome. Interestingly almost all the deniers ran a mile from this idea, but the non-deniers had themselves a bit of sport with the hoary old screed. Thread is here, and is worth a read.

Thank you Nick.