Rudolf
In three well-known writings, using his own name, Rudolf has with some show of reason maintained that the chemical arguments - though inconclusive, and not so strong as the engineering arguments- do tend to weigh heavily against the existence of the gas chambers. Now if these three writings can be freely be published in Germany, then I have completely misunderstood the situation. If they cannot be freely published in Germany, then everything I say holds good. The rest is pretty much irrelevant.
Nickterry seemed to suggest that academics in Germany can say whatever they like about the Holocaust - provided that a court of law is satisfied that their research is genuine. That for Cosair is freedom. I also thought Nickterry to imply that the court judgement was adversely influenced by Rudolf’ right wing propaganda. Otherwise these views have no bearing on the freedom of speech question. I agree that anyone who wants to convince a lay public of a complex technical argument would do well to get it peer reviewed. But there would be no need to evade censorship if there were no censorship, so they would indeed do doubly well to avoid any mention of Auschwitz. When James Roth found that anonymous samples sent to Alpha Laborotories had come from Auschwitz, he quickly conceptualised the possibility of “surface reaction” that might explain away the findings. This “possibility” later found happy acceptance as a courtroom dogma - and was then entirely forgotten.
Nickterry accuses me of “lionising” Rudolf as a latter-day Galileo. I don’t know what reason he has to say this. Unlike Galileo, Rudolf will probably be remembered as an obscure crank. But I am willing to draw the parallel. Galileo was a thinker whose conclusions went considerably beyond the available evidence and he got into trouble for making satirical fun of the Pope. Had the optical evidence that later vinidicated him proved that he was a just a crank, then his imprisonment in my view would have been no less reprehensible. In any case his imprisonment would rightly have weakened faith in the authority of the learned geocentric professors. They all had very good scholarly reasons for saying what they said, but they also had a discernible motive for not saying anything else. A lay person should no longer trust them simply because they were sheep-skinned academics who had the right insignia of erudition. Nearly all the qualified scientists of our own day are emphatic that man-made climate change is upon us. I take their word for it. I accept their conclusions without understanding their reasons for holding them. Climate scientists are experts with no discernible motive to deceive themselves, and they have powerful lobby groups up against them. The climate deniers, absurdly, are given equal space. However, if some powerful lobby goups had made “climate denial” punishable by law, and if deniers were granted no space at all, then I would withdraw my trust. There would be a burden of proof to show that there was no potential denier who had been silenced by fear; a difficult burden to meet. Beliefs that are protected by law or taboo should in any case be automatically suspect. .
In the murky privacy of the internet I have often argued, rightly or wrongly, that much of the generally accepted evidence for gas chambers is bad evidence. I go no farther than that. I cannot confidently deny the existence of gas chambers, and I have myself no doubt that the Nazi harrying of the Jews, even minus the gas chambers, amounted to genocide. I have never seen "irrefutable" proof that the Holocaust did not occur. Nevertheless, I use a pseudonym. My motive for doing so is fear. My fear is that using my own name would not be a smart career move, and it would not go down well with my family. I have not read Rudolf’s pseudonymous writings and do not see any point in doing so. But I certainly don’t blame him for using a pseudonym. If Staeglich had used a pseudonym he might not have lost his his pension and his PhD (but then Staeglich was nationalist, my dears, so that’s all right then. It’s not as if he went to prison). If Faurisson had used a pseudonym he might never have been beaten up by Jewish terrorists. If Serge Thion had used a pseudonym he might not have lost his pension and his job. If Butz had used a pseudonym he might now be a full professor.
Butz and Rudolf are not professors of history, but neither was Pelt or Pressac or Zimmerman, and this should not be held against them. It would of course be absurd for me to make any judgement about the abstruse algorithm that has been named after Arthur Butz. Electrical engineering like climate science, is an esoteric mathematical discipline in which fairly objective canons of proof have been established. But I think it would be just as absurd of me to say to Butz “Look, I have a history degree, I have spent years grubbing about in archives, so you are not qualified to pronounce on anything I have written. Keep out” History is not a science, although it should do its best to be scientific. Historians by and large are not as intelligent as philosophers of physicists, and their talents, among the few who have talents, are closer to those of a gifted novelist. Most of us most of the time are just harmless drudges. The educated class is a servile class, however, and the writing of human history is often a continuation of politics by other means. Wherever there is glimpse of ideology or partiality, then anyone should feel free to wade in. I think this remark even holds for technical authors such as Green and Roth. I do not trust Rudolf’s impartiality and I would not trust theirs.
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The treaty of Versailles was indeed a harsh. Lenin said it was even worse than Brest Litovsk. Though less well-known, 1945 seems to me yet worse. When Stalin moved Poland westward he took away about a fifth of Germany’s territory. Combined with the expulsion of the Czech Germans it put millions of homeless people on the move. The Versailles treaty imposed a literal guilt clause on the German government. The Occupation imposed a sort of guilt clause upon the entire German people, in order to to justify excluding them from even a nominal say in their own fate. The original intention of the British, following the colonial model, was for a long twenty year occupation during which the benighted Germans would slowly be re-educated and civilised. Was 1919 worse? What rescued the Germans from all this nonsense was not the voice of reason but the facts of big power conflict. The Soviets became the designated bad guys, and the Good German made his appearance in the propaganda movies. Nevertheless the German people went thru three years of desperate humiliation and many years of vassaldom to Nato. Though I have sympathy for the German people of 1945, whose first democratic stirrings were crushed by the invading powers, I have little sympathy with German nationalism and I am happy that the Germans as a whole want no more of it. You may wonder how I can have much sympathy for Rudolf and little sympathy for German nationalism. That, reader, is because you are a knucklehead.
In addition to the bankruptcy of the Nazis, I suppose another factor in the collapse of German nationalism and militarism was the collapse of colonialism. Before the war the German and the Japanese ruling classes felt they had been excluded from the colonial feast and could fight for a share. Post war, the only way to the feast was to sell cars. Some people at Codoh used to assure me that modern German is ruled by “the jews” If that is the case, they have made a good job of it.
