Why You Should Believe more Conspiracy Theories

[fireofice]

Ryan Faulk recently put out a video called "Why You Should Believe more Conspiracy Theories".



Here's the article:

https://substack.com/home/post/p-143704054

The whole video is pretty good. He goes through several of the arguments against conspiracy theories and how they don't work. He uses the holocaust as an example of having to believe in a conspiracy theory either way. Either the holocaust happened, which would have been a Nazi conspiracy, or it didn't happen, in which case it was an allied conspiracy psyop.

Several of his arguments against the arguments against conspiracy theories have relevance for some aspects of the holocaust. For example, the "where did they go" argument. Taking his arguments seriously, it becomes very easy to see how the counter-narrative of resettlements to the east could have been covered up.

[Revision]

"...having to believe in a conspiracy theory either way."

I and many other revisionists do not think so.


Jürgen Graf:

Of course nobody in possession of his mental faculties would seriously claim that the officially accepted Holocaust story is the product of a conspiracy in which the participants all agreed to suppress the truth and promote instead a falsified version of events agreed upon in advance.

- The “Extermination Camps” of “Aktion Reinhardt” (Chapter: The Alleged Revisionist “Conspiracy Theory”)

I don't think it was a planned conspiracy from the beginning. I think that when these gas chamber stories originated in 42, 43, they were roughly comparable to the stories about German atrocities during the world war one, when the Germans supposedly mutilated babies in Belgium and so on.

- Jürgen Graf interviewed by Ernst Zundel in 1994


Germar Rudolf:

Those looking for evidence of a huge Jewish conspiracy, however, will be disappointed, because that’s not how it happened.

https://germarrudolf.com/product/nazi-gas-chambers/


CODOH AnswerMan:

Nevertheless, there remains the small handful of revisionists who maintain a conspiratorial perspective on the Holocaust, and we leave aside those few among them who discuss "conspiracy" and "hoax" for frankly rhetorical purposes. We can safely disregard such arguments since conspiracy theories are almost always false. Just as it is absurd to believe that a handful of influential Jews conspired to "create" a Holocaust, it is likewise absurd to believe that a handful of committed Nazis conspired to "perpetrate" one, leaving scarcely a trace of documentary, material, or physical evidence.

The inescapable conclusion is that, while there was a mass destruction of the Jewish people of some kind, it did not involve a planned attempt at extermination, homicidal gas chambers, or six million victims. Combining that fact with the self-evident fact that most people continue to believe that millions were killed in gas chambers according to a plan leads neither to a Jewish nor a Nazi conspiracy theory, but rather to a conclusion that is much simpler and even more obvious: mass hysteria on the grand scale.

https://codoh.com/library/document/are- ... i-semitic/


Thomas Dalton:

Without solid evidence of deliberate falsification of at least large parts of the Holocaust story, we are unjustified in calling it a hoax. Individual lies, exaggerations, even gross exaggerations, do not qualify as hoaxes. Therefore, in my opinion, the Holocaust was not a hoax.

However, this obviously does not mean that the story is true! It may still be rife with falsehoods, lies, and assorted absurdities. But there are many other ways in which untrue depictions of events can come to be widely believed, some of which are relatively innocent. Lacking hard evidence, we should grant the benefit of the doubt. Revisionism should attack the story, not the motive.

Traditionalists in turn leap on this hoax label and use it to their advantage. They take it to mean a kind of global conspiracy, a large-scale collective effort to deceive the general public. They say, “Those deniers actually believe that the Jews could pull off this monumental fraud! They actually think that thousands of historians, writers, journalists, government leaders — everyone, in fact, who supports the standard view — are in on the scam, all conspiring to assist the powerful Jews. How stupid can they be?” And there is some weight to this. You cannot claim massive fraud without a solid basis for it. If someone lies, call it a lie. If someone utters a blatant absurdity, call it absurd. Revisionists risk looking foolish, and only hurt their cause, by arguing for a hoax.

The greatest conspiracy theorists are the traditionalists, not their opponents.

To refer to the Holocaust as a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ implies that this small group of Jews acted together during and immediately after the war, concocted the Holocaust story, the gas chambers, the 6 million deaths, etc. because they knew that it would lead to global sympathy for Jewish people, to financial reparations, and perhaps even to the final consent to the creation of a Jewish Zionist State of Israel. Well, in fact all those things happened — but we are utterly lacking any evidence that it was planned that way.

- Debating the Holocaust: A New Look at Both Sides


Seamus Moriarty:

The founders of Holocaust revisionist scholarship have avoided casting the alleged Holocaust as the result of a conspiracy. Arthur Butz uses the word eight times in The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, each time in a context other than the Holocaust. Despite the massive academic, political, and judicial forces that have been deployed against him for forty years, Robert Faurisson doesn’t characterize the obligatory (in his country) version of the Holocaust as a conspiracy theory.

François Fradin’s study makes clear that these and other leading revisionists do not resort to the arguments and methods of conspiratorialists.

- The Orthodox Holocaust Narrative as a Conspiracy Theory: https://codoh.com/library/document/the- ... onspiracy/


Carlo Mattogno:

That which the enemies of revisionism call “conspiracy theory” is in reality simply this all-pervasive atmosphere: all the parties to the case had implicitly agreed, for differing reasons, to support the dogma of the “gas chambers,” not as the result of a “conspiracy,” but because the gas chambers were now judicial and media “truth,” and not subject to argument. As to the witnesses, there is no need to presuppose that they were all deliberate liars; indeed the number of deliberate liars is numerically insignificant. The overwhelming majority of witnesses simply repeated and embellished what they had heard elsewhere, in a process which historian David Irving has called “cross-pollination.” Nor is this merely a matter of pure hearsay, for witnesses may sincerely believe their own corrupted testimony, having interpreted events, the real meaning of which they could not know, in the light of subsequent “knowledge,” in a sort of self-delusion aptly described by Italian anti-revisionist writer Valentina Pisanty:

“These writers [that is, the witnesses] often interweave their observations with fragments of ‘hearsay,’ the dissemination of which was omnipresent in the camps. The majority of the inaccuracies to be found in these texts are attributable to the fact that the witnesses confuse what they have seen with their own eyes with what they merely heard of during their period of internment. Then, with the passing of time, to the memory of events actually experienced is added the reading of other works on the subject, with the result that autobiographies published in recent years lack the immediacy of recollection in favour of a more consistent and complete vision of the process of extermination.”

- The “Extermination Camps” of “Aktion Reinhardt” (Chapter: Genesis of Holocaust Historiography and the
Revisionist Method)

[Archie]

Didn't know Ryan still posted on YouTube. Surprised his channel didn't get nuked years ago.

Many of the points he makes mirror my own thoughts. The point about whistleblowers is a good one. "Someone would come forward." People often do come forward but more often they get ignored, dismissed, smeared, or worse.

Here's another point I would make. Governments (all institutions for that matter) have an incentive to lie/obscure the truth in instances where the truth would be embarrassing or conflicts with their interests (which is often). And governments/institutions have quite a bit of control over what information becomes available. If you dismiss all conspiracy theories out of hand unless there is conclusive proof, you would likely be getting only the tip of the iceberg. However, the problem is that if you try to guess about the hidden parts of the iceberg, things get very speculative. So what you end up with is a situation where "the truth" if it were known would be wildly "conspiratorial" yet at the same time most "conspiracy theories" may be wrong (even idiotic) because there are a lot of them and they are typically based on incomplete information.

What I find interesting is there are many explosive claims that actually do have quite a lot of evidence to support them. And you can even find this stuff in mainstream books. But it doesn't find itself into the mainstream conversation, or into school curricula, or into the mass media. This goes back to the recent thread "Red-pilled by the mainstream." Scholarly texts (which few people read) can have some surprisingly explosive info.

[TlsMS93]

It's not the subject of this thread but I wouldn't like to open a new thread.

Are they told that Richard Williamson passed away yesterday?

May he rest in peace, he dared to leave the comfort of the trench to defend the Christian faith from the relentless attacks that inveterate Zionists launched during these years against Christianity and, consequently, Western nations.

[Callafangers]

"...having to believe in a conspiracy theory either way."

I and many other revisionists do not think so.

The only way to claim the 'Holocaust' narrative is not derived from conspiracy is to suggest little or no coordination in the advancement of this narrative and the falsehoods (or exaggerations) it is comprised of. That, or one can present a false dichotomy such as:

Jürgen Graf:

Of course nobody in possession of his mental faculties would seriously claim that the officially accepted Holocaust story is the product of a conspiracy in which the participants all agreed to suppress the truth and promote instead a falsified version of events agreed upon in advance.

- The “Extermination Camps” of “Aktion Reinhardt” (Chapter: The Alleged Revisionist “Conspiracy Theory”)

Of course, one does not need to show that all participants agreed to suppress truth and support a false narrative; only that some did (perhaps at a high level, where their decision to do so was consequential and important to the formation and permanence of the narrative, as a whole).

And as for this:

I don't think it was a planned conspiracy from the beginning. I think that when these gas chamber stories originated in 42, 43, they were roughly comparable to the stories about German atrocities during the world war one, when the Germans supposedly mutilated babies in Belgium and so on.

- Jürgen Graf interviewed by Ernst Zundel in 1994

I actually agree. I would go a step further to say that the T-4 operations known to the general public circa 1941 gave a strong platform for Allied governments and their Jews to feel confident in sowing a more extreme, 'barbaric' narrative derived from this one, which is what the evidence shows has indeed taken place.

Onto Rudolf:

Germar Rudolf:

Those looking for evidence of a huge Jewish conspiracy, however, will be disappointed, because that’s not how it happened.

https://germarrudolf.com/product/nazi-gas-chambers/

I have made clear on this forum and elsewhere that I disagree with Rudolf, here, and I am not the only one. Perhaps I would first need to clarify his meaning of "huge Jewish conspiracy" -- just how "huge" are we talking, here? What's the threshold for being able to rightfully call it a "Jewish conspiracy"?

In recent interviews and writings, Germar has made clear that one of his motives in his work is to prevent retaliative violence against any groups or individuals. I respect this about him greatly however I think he may be putting this motive (driven perhaps by fear and/or personal experiences) ahead of a truly objective analysis and weighting of all relevant factors.

Here is just a small (yet powerful) sampling of some of the Jewish influences at key junctures in the formation of the 'Holocaust' narrative:

The Jewish organizations and people mentioned in this article who have conspired to promote the myth of the so-called Holocaust include:

• The World Jewish Congress (WJC), whose president, Nahum Goldmann, admitted that WJC officials originated and promoted the idea of the IMT and reparations from Germany. Only after persistent efforts by WJC officials were Allied leaders persuaded to accept the idea of the Nuremberg trials.
• Two Jewish U.S. Army officers, Lt. Col. Murray Bernays and Col. David Marcus, who played prominent roles in implementing and staffing personnel for the Nuremberg trials.
• Jewish Sgt. Bernard Clarke and other British officers, who tortured Rudolf Höss into making his famous confession at the IMT.
• Jewish attorney Benjamin Ferencz, who acknowledges that he used torture and intimidation tactics to help convict German defendants at the Allied postwar trials.
• Jewish attorney Robert Kempner, the chief prosecutor in the Ministries Trial at Nuremberg, who used bribes and threats to prosecute defendants.
• The Jewish Israeli Mossad agents near Buenos Aires, who illegally captured Adolf Eichmann in May 1960.
• Jewish “Holocaust” survivor Tuviah Friedman, who by his own admission beat up to 20 German prisoners a day to obtain confessions and weed out SS officers.
• Jewish prosecutor Josef Kirschbaum, who brought former concentration-camp inmate Einstein into court to testify that the defendant, Menzel, had murdered Einstein’s brother. Menzel foiled Einstein’s testimony by pointing to Einstein’s brother sitting in the court room.
• False Jewish eyewitness testimony at the trials of John Demjanjuk, Frank Walus and Feodor Fedorenko.
• The Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association, a Jewish group that claimed Ernst Zündel was spreading false information about the “Holocaust.” This group used Canadian taxpayer money to prosecute Zündel for the criminal offense of spreading false information.
• The Jewish Defense League, which attacked David Cole and then threatened him into recanting his views on the “Holocaust”.
• The Simon Wiesenthal Center, which has been looking to prosecute elderly Germans even though there is no proof that these Germans actually committed a crime. Just being at a German camp is considered to be a crime.
• Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, who at the International Holocaust Remembrance Day at the European Parliament ceremony in Brussels on January 27, 2014 rejected free speech arguments regarding the so-called Holocaust. Kantor apparently wants to criminalize any speech, symbols or gestures that Jews consider to be anti-Semitic.

Other Jewish organizations are actively working to promote the official Holocaust narrative. For example, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) writes about its Holocaust education program:

“Since 2005, Echoes & Reflections has impacted more than 85,000 educators, reaching an estimated 8 million students across the United States—and at no cost. Through our Holocaust education programs and resources, educators gain the skills, knowledge, and confidence to teach this topic effectively.”

The ADL is also actively promoting “Holocaust” historian Deborah Lipstadt to be the U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism.[40]

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) also actively works to advance pro-Israel policies and support a strong U.S.-Israel relationship.[41] All American politicians are so aware of AIPAC’s power that they would never publicly question the official Holocaust narrative.[42]

The alleged genocide of European Jewry is extremely important in promoting Jewish interests. The “Holocaust” has been used to justify the Allied war effort, to establish the state of Israel, to justify Israel’s violence against its neighbors, to induce guilt in both Germans and the Allied nations, to cover up and ignore horrific Allied crimes against Germans, to allow Jews to receive massive reparations from Germany, and to create solidarity in the Jewish community. The extreme importance of the “Holocaust” in advancing Zionist/Jewish interests ensures that Jewish groups and individuals will continue to promote this falsification of history in the future.[43]

https://codoh.com/library/document/the- ... holocaust/

Putting Hollywood and the many Jewish "lie-witnesses" aside, can anyone honestly read through the above and not say there at least may be a significant Jewish element to this narrative?

On the next:

CODOH AnswerMan:

Nevertheless, there remains the small handful of revisionists who maintain a conspiratorial perspective on the Holocaust, and we leave aside those few among them who discuss "conspiracy" and "hoax" for frankly rhetorical purposes. We can safely disregard such arguments since conspiracy theories are almost always false. Just as it is absurd to believe that a handful of influential Jews conspired to "create" a Holocaust, it is likewise absurd to believe that a handful of committed Nazis conspired to "perpetrate" one, leaving scarcely a trace of documentary, material, or physical evidence.

The inescapable conclusion is that, while there was a mass destruction of the Jewish people of some kind, it did not involve a planned attempt at extermination, homicidal gas chambers, or six million victims. Combining that fact with the self-evident fact that most people continue to believe that millions were killed in gas chambers according to a plan leads neither to a Jewish nor a Nazi conspiracy theory, but rather to a conclusion that is much simpler and even more obvious: mass hysteria on the grand scale.

https://codoh.com/library/document/are- ... i-semitic/

I'm not sure who authored these 'AnswerMan' articles but saying "conspiracy theories are almost always false" is a meaningless assertion since the definition of "conspiracy theory" is largely subjective and this is a term most often used for defamatory political purposes. Setting the political definitions aside, the term "conspiracy" simply means "a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful", and a "conspiracy theory" is simply any theory thereof. Thus, when one says "conspiracy theories are almost always false", they are obviously not talking about every conceivable conspiracy theory; only of those which are known through political and social currents as being "conspiracy theories" -- in other words, those which the establishment aims to discredit (and any other, especially ridiculous theories which they push into the same margin, to assist with that discreditation effort). There is a reason people often accuse someone of believing "flat earth theory" or a "moon landing hoax", if that person points out Israel's motive/means/opportunity in any given controversial crime or event. And it isn't because these people suspecting Israel's involvement in crimes necessarily do (nor even tend to) believe in "flat earth" theories, etc.

Moving on:

Thomas Dalton:

Without solid evidence of deliberate falsification of at least large parts of the Holocaust story, we are unjustified in calling it a hoax. Individual lies, exaggerations, even gross exaggerations, do not qualify as hoaxes. Therefore, in my opinion, the Holocaust was not a hoax.

However, this obviously does not mean that the story is true! It may still be rife with falsehoods, lies, and assorted absurdities. But there are many other ways in which untrue depictions of events can come to be widely believed, some of which are relatively innocent. Lacking hard evidence, we should grant the benefit of the doubt. Revisionism should attack the story, not the motive.

I largely agree with this but, on one hand, its a question of semantics (whether or not to call it a "hoax"), and on the other hand, the motives still matter, just as they do in any investigation of potential or actual conspiracy or deceptive campaign.

Traditionalists in turn leap on this hoax label and use it to their advantage. They take it to mean a kind of global conspiracy, a large-scale collective effort to deceive the general public. They say, “Those deniers actually believe that the Jews could pull off this monumental fraud! They actually think that thousands of historians, writers, journalists, government leaders — everyone, in fact, who supports the standard view — are in on the scam, all conspiring to assist the powerful Jews. How stupid can they be?” And there is some weight to this. You cannot claim massive fraud without a solid basis for it. If someone lies, call it a lie. If someone utters a blatant absurdity, call it absurd. Revisionists risk looking foolish, and only hurt their cause, by arguing for a hoax.

A fear of how it 'might look' is not what is important. All that matters is what the evidence (and sound, logical interpretations thereof) leads to. I agree that no one should be so hasty as to call it a "hoax" (unless maybe tongue-in-cheek, e.g. "it's a Holohoax!"), since the standard for proving a hoax is much higher than it is for demonstrating the lack of integrity of key pillars of an existing narrative. But once those pillars are shown to be extraordinarily weak or totally demolished, the claim of 'hoax' becomes increasingly plausible and we should not shy away from presenting it as such, should the evidence continue to mount.

The greatest conspiracy theorists are the traditionalists, not their opponents.

I agree, and this is what OP (and Ryan Faulk) has said, no?

To refer to the Holocaust as a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ implies that this small group of Jews acted together during and immediately after the war, concocted the Holocaust story, the gas chambers, the 6 million deaths, etc. because they knew that it would lead to global sympathy for Jewish people, to financial reparations, and perhaps even to the final consent to the creation of a Jewish Zionist State of Israel. Well, in fact all those things happened — but we are utterly lacking any evidence that it was planned that way.

- Debating the Holocaust: A New Look at Both Sides

This is fallacy. One does not need to prove all of those things in order to say a "Jewish conspiracy" has taken place. I do not know of anyone who would say that the Holocaust narrative is only a Jewish conspiracy, denying the role of other non-Jewish stakeholders. But given Jews are a very small portion of the nations they have been a part of (within Allied networks), and given their outsized role in producing 'evidence' (as witnesses), then subsequently in the trials, in their peddling of propaganda, in their historiographical endeavors, in academia, and much, much more, one has to take this question of Jewish coordination of key and substantial portions of this narrative seriously. It may be other things in addition to a 'Jewish conspiracy' but this does not rule out this description as also being accurate.

Seamus Moriarty:

The founders of Holocaust revisionist scholarship have avoided casting the alleged Holocaust as the result of a conspiracy. Arthur Butz uses the word eight times in The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, each time in a context other than the Holocaust. Despite the massive academic, political, and judicial forces that have been deployed against him for forty years, Robert Faurisson doesn’t characterize the obligatory (in his country) version of the Holocaust as a conspiracy theory.

François Fradin’s study makes clear that these and other leading revisionists do not resort to the arguments and methods of conspiratorialists.

- The Orthodox Holocaust Narrative as a Conspiracy Theory: https://codoh.com/library/document/the- ... onspiracy/

Yes, and they do this because the term 'conspiracy' requires a higher degree of proof than does simply showing the lacking integrity and evidence of a given narrative. Especially in early revisionism, making such a bold claim as 'conspiracy' makes little sense. But as the story unfolds, and as the scope and scale of motives and outcomes are better understood, the case for such an assertion has become more plausible. I do not think it is necessary (and perhaps not even helpful) to emphasize the term "conspiracy", as I think the validity of interpreting the 'Holocaust' narrative as one becomes self-explanatory and somewhat self-evident just as soon as one begins to doubt the 'Holocaust' narrative, since it strains credulity to suggest that nobody in power consciously lied throughout the formation of this narrative, and that no such powers actively coordinated to any major extent, along the way.

Carlo Mattogno:

That which the enemies of revisionism call “conspiracy theory” is in reality simply this all-pervasive atmosphere: all the parties to the case had implicitly agreed, for differing reasons, to support the dogma of the “gas chambers,” not as the result of a “conspiracy,” but because the gas chambers were now judicial and media “truth,” and not subject to argument. As to the witnesses, there is no need to presuppose that they were all deliberate liars; indeed the number of deliberate liars is numerically insignificant. The overwhelming majority of witnesses simply repeated and embellished what they had heard elsewhere, in a process which historian David Irving has called “cross-pollination.” Nor is this merely a matter of pure hearsay, for witnesses may sincerely believe their own corrupted testimony, having interpreted events, the real meaning of which they could not know, in the light of subsequent “knowledge,” in a sort of self-delusion aptly described by Italian anti-revisionist writer Valentina Pisanty:

“These writers [that is, the witnesses] often interweave their observations with fragments of ‘hearsay,’ the dissemination of which was omnipresent in the camps. The majority of the inaccuracies to be found in these texts are attributable to the fact that the witnesses confuse what they have seen with their own eyes with what they merely heard of during their period of internment. Then, with the passing of time, to the memory of events actually experienced is added the reading of other works on the subject, with the result that autobiographies published in recent years lack the immediacy of recollection in favour of a more consistent and complete vision of the process of extermination.”

- The “Extermination Camps” of “Aktion Reinhardt” (Chapter: Genesis of Holocaust Historiography and the
Revisionist Method)

Is it not a 'conspiracy' if a network of individuals promote and participate in a common lie, even if only through 'implicit agreement'? If they are lying, they are doing so consciously, and if their intentions align against a common enemy, this is a conspiracy. You can argue the 'planning' was limited but this does little to dissuade from the fact that a massive criminal lie with some degree of coordination (even if largely implicit) has taken place. It's absurd to think that if such a common set of lies was being widely told by various stakeholders in alignment against the same enemy, that none of them ever had a conversation or two about it in private.

And all of that said, I do believe that many (if not most) 'Holocaust' witnesses actually believe in the broader narrative about German atrocities. I think this explains why there are so many claimed 'missing Jews' on an anecdotal basis, with Jews moving across the world in total separation from their extended families and then writing them all off (mutually) as 'gassed'.

[Archie]

"...having to believe in a conspiracy theory either way."

I and many other revisionists do not think so.

Hi, Revision. Welcome. Great to have you on the forum.

Yes, you are right that there is a range of opinion among revisionists on the hoax/conspiracy question. Personally, I lean toward Butz's interpretation. Butz is of course the one who popularized the "hoax" term. I think it is fair to call it a hoax, but I also agree with Graf that it wasn't an elaborate conspiracy from the beginning. The war-time stories are simply too wild and all over the place for it to be an sort of careful conspiracy.



At the other end of the spectrum, there's Samuel Crowell who generally emphasized sources of fear and misunderstanding that could have fed gas chamber rumors. But even Crowell acknowledges some level of hoaxing (on the Soviet side, for example). I actually think Crowell's book is one of the best revisionist books I've ever read, yet I don't entirely agree with his thesis. Frankly, he is a bit too nice.

As I see it, what it comes down to is whether it was a result of honest misunderstanding or deliberate falsehood. And in the latter case, how systematic and coordinated it was.

[Revision]

Hi, Revision. Welcome. Great to have you on the forum.

Hi, nice to see you all again too.

Butz is of course the one who popularized the "hoax" term.

This is why Butz chose that term:

Why a “Hoax”?

At this point, it is convenient to remark on the title I chose for my book. In the controversy, one of the things that jolted some, even some who were otherwise favorably impressed by the book, was my use of the term “hoax” to describe the received legend. Some felt that, whatever the truth of the legend, the term was not adequate or appropriate to the situation. Such a trivializing concept, it was thought, should not be applied to a legend that lives on the vast scale of the Holocaust – it struck some as comparable to criticizing Handel’s Messiah as a “ditty.”

Let me assure you that the choice of “hoax” was calculated, and that today I am even more convinced that it was a felicitous choice, for the reason that the thing really is trivial. The term “hoax” suggests something cheap and crude, and that is precisely what I wish to suggest. A term such as “myth,” although correct and sometimes used by me, does not convey this important description of the nature of the evidence supporting the extermination claim. The uncomfortable reaction to the term “hoax” merely reflects the nature of the great popular delusion on this subject. At one time, some of the people who are addressing you here, such as Dr. Faurisson and myself, shared not only the popular belief in the truth of the legend but also the popular impression that its truth was beyond question – “as established as the Great Pyramid,” as I wrote. However, at some point we undertook an investigation and discovered, remarkably quickly, that, beneath the legend’s face of granite, there stood feet of clay.

It is this focus on the feet of clay, which revisionists have seen in the historical record, that creates a great psychological distance between the revisionists and even many intelligent people, and sometimes causes revisionists to appear to be crusaders of some sort. Those who have not seen the feet of clay cannot have the degree of certainty that seems to accompany revisionists. I believe that perhaps this contrast between the apparent dignity of the received legend and the reality of its crude and contemptible foundations is the key point that must be developed in the psychological reorientation of people whom you wish to inform. Once such a psychological reorientation is accomplished, the rest is routine. The jolt that the word “hoax” causes is a calculated initial step in this reorientation.

- The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry https://holocausthandbooks.com/wp-conte ... thottc.pdf


Here is Germar Rudolf's view about the title of Butz's book:

R: [...] One of these researchers was Arthur R. Butz, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Northwestern University in Evanston near Chicago (Butz 2015, pp. 9, 31f.). After years of research, he published a book in 1976 dealing with the Holocaust under the title The Hoax of the Twentieth Century.

L: That has a rather polemical sound to it.

R: I am not happy with it either, but titles are often chosen to excite attention.

- Lectures on the Holocaust: Controversial Issues Cross-Examined https://holocausthandbooks.com/wp-conte ... 5-loth.pdf

***

Jürgen Graf on how the extermination myth originated:

The Alleged Revisionist “Conspiracy Theory”

At the beginning of his chapter “The Hoax that dare not speak its Name,” Nicholas Terry writes:

“From its inception, Holocaust Revisionism has repeatedly asserted that we have been lied to about the fate of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis. However much it might be denied by some contemporary negationists, Holocaust denial is unthinkable without some form of conspiracy theory.” (p. 38)

With his usual dishonesty, Terry here presents a straw man version of the revisionist thesis. Of course nobody in possession of his mental faculties would seriously claim that the officially accepted Holocaust story is the product of a conspiracy in which the participants all agreed to suppress the truth and promote instead a falsified version of events agreed upon in advance. To refute Terry’s nonsensical insinuation, I will shortly recapitulate how the legend really originated.

It is a well-known aphorism that the first casualty of war is truth. In World War One, British atrocity mongers accused the Germans of cutting off the hands of Belgian children, crucifying enemy soldiers on church doors and distilling glycerin from the bodies of their own dead soldiers. After the end of the war, this primitive propaganda against the “Huns” was discontinued. It was no longer needed.

In 2002 and in early 2003, the Bush and Blair regimes in the U.S. and U.K. spread the lie that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction in order to justify their imminent war of aggression against a country which in reality could not possibly threaten them. A few months after the occupation of Iraq, Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction” were forgotten.

In September 1939, the Germans conquered the western half of Poland, a country which was home to numerous large Jewish communities; in the summer of 1941, they overran the previously Soviet occupied eastern half as well. Since the Germans had plenty of guns and the Jews had very few, the Jews were unable to resist the increasingly harsh measures imposed by the Germans (ghettoization, confinement in concentration camps, conscription for forced labor) which made their lives miserable and indeed provoked the deaths of large numbers of them. In order to mobilize world opinion against the tormentors of their people, Jewish underground movements in Poland soon began spreading all kinds of mind-boggling stories about the extermination of their co-religionists whom the Germans allegedly were murdering by electricity, steam, gas and other exotic means. The Holocaust Controversies bloggers make a futile attempt to explain away these embarrassing contemporary reports about electrocution facilities and steam chambers and the like as simple “inaccuracies,” “wartime hearsay” and “Chinese whispers” (p. 16), but this explanation does not hold water for a minute. In order to “make mincemeat” of this theory (to use Sergey Romanov’s charming formulation), it suffices to recall the lengthy report about the “steam chambers” of Treblinka published by the resistance movement of the Warsaw ghetto on 15 November 1942. I will quote merely an excerpt:

“Now comes the last act of the Treblinka tragedy. The terrified mass of men, women and children starts on its last road to death. At the head a group of women and children is driven, beaten by the accompanying Germans, whips in their hands. The group is driven ever quicker, ever heavier blows fall upon the heads of the women who are mad with fear and suffering. […] The floors of the chambers are slippery. The victims slip and fall, and they cannot get up for new numbers of forcibly driven victims fall upon them. The chief throws small children into the chamber over the heads of the women. When the execution chambers are filled, the doors are hermetically closed and the slow suffocation of people begins, brought abroad by the steam issuing from the numerous vents in the pipes. At the beginning stifled cries penetrate to the outside; gradually they quiet down and minutes later the execution is complete.”

According to another passage in the report, two million (!) Jews had already been killed in the steam chambers of Treblinka, and the Germans were preparing to exterminate the entire Polish population as well in those very same chambers!

In 1944, a Geneva-based rabbi, Adolf Abraham Silberschein, published another lengthy report about Treblinka, which he chose to christen “Tremblinki.” As the pious rabbi was apparently not too sure about the killing method used at “Tremblinki,” he opted for a creative synthesis: On the one hand, he spoke of “gas chambers,” while on the other hand he stated that the bodies of the victims, “under the influence of the water vapor,” became clumped together. I will now quote some excerpts from his “report”:

“Every day groups of a thousand people were brought into the gas and oven chambers. [All historians agree that there were no crematoria ovens at Treblinka.] At first, as at their arrival, they were lead into the bath by the Kapos. Everyone had to take off clothing and shoes and remained naked. For the further deception of the victims, each was handed a little piece of soap. […] Hauptmann Sauer took them over in the reception room of the extermination facilities. […] He did not miss any opportunity to flog every single person. [If groups of a thousand people were brought to “Tremblinki” every day, and if Sauer flogged every single victim, he must have been in enviable physical shape! More pertinently, he would have made nonsense of the alleged deception of telling the Jews they were going to take a shower.] The extermination cells all fill up. When they are full, they are hermetically sealed, from every side the pipes open out of which flows gas. The death of asphyxiation reaps a quick harvest. Then the Kapos must go to work. With pitiless blows, the guard personal force them to perform the work. The gates of death open – but the dead bodies somehow cannot be pulled out individually, for they have all clumped together with one another and stiffened under the water vapor. […] But the camp of Tremblinki had another specialty: To wit, the Jewish Arthur Gold Orchestra gave concerts there, and it had the duty of playing for those who were been lead to their deaths!!!! At the same time as thousands of Jews were poisoned in the gas chambers, the musicians had to play cheerful melodies. Whichever of them refused to do it was hanged up by his feet with his head down.”

By claiming that the authors of such ridiculous reports, which Mattogno and I extensively quote in Treblinka, were acting in good faith and merely committed an excusable error by relying on “wartime hearsay,” our opponents once again make fools of themselves. As a matter of fact, such reports were classic examples of coarse atrocity propaganda; they were obvious hoaxes. The “Chinese whisper” theory also fails to explain why the Soviet commission which visited Treblinka in late August 1944 and questioned twelve former inmates of the camp “ascertained” that “three million people” (!) had been killed by pumping the air out of the chambers (!).

Starting in December 1941, the reports concocted by various Jewish underground movements were forwarded to Jewish organizations all over the world. The fact, however, that the press in the Allied nations did not give repeated frontpage coverage of the allegedly ongoing mass slaughter, if at all, indicates to what extent the Jewish leaders in these nations believed these grotesque tales. They were much too intelligent to take them at face value.

After the war, however, the victors decided to maintain and even extend their wartime extermination propaganda, because unlike the horror stories of World War I and the lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction they were still very useful to the interested parties:

- Zionist Jews with influence in international media and political circles naturally understood that the Holocaust tale would give them the status of a martyr nation, victim of a crime of unprecedented magnitude. Henceforth anybody critical of organized Jewry, its aims and its methods could automatically be castigated as a “vile antisemite” eager to perpetrate a new Holocaust. This muzzling of dissenting voices in turn made possible the anachronistic creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948. At that time, Britain had just granted independence to India, and dozens of other Asian and African territories were striving ever harder to shed the white man’s rule. Yet at the very moment of worldwide de-colonization, the Zionists were permitted to launch a new colonial venture in the Near East, one with terrible consequences for the Palestinian people. Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Abba Eban, made no secret of the fact that the Holocaust had been instrumental to the foundation of the Zionist entity: “One reason of this really stupendous victory was without the faintest doubt the Shoa. The memory of the genocide was still alive.”

- Despite the animosity which has always characterized Polish-Jewish relations, the Poles also stood to benefit from the Holocaust hoax. After all, Poland had annexed huge tracts of German territory at the end of the war and brutally expelled the overwhelming majority of their ethnic-German population. In order to justify this crime against humanity, the Poles thus needed an even more heinous German crime to point to – the Holocaust. However, if the Holocaust story was to be widely believed, it had to be given a minimum of coherence. As it was simply not credible that the Germans should have used a wide array of outlandish, if not unfeasible killing methods in their “extermination camps,” – the steam chambers, subterranean electrocution installations, etc. – they were eventually relegated to the memory hole and replaced by homicidal gas chambers using poison gas.

- And for the Western Allies and the Soviet Union the Jewish extermination tale was of great utility as well, for it enabled them to hush up their own crimes, such as the indiscriminate fire-bombing of German cities and the Katyn massacre. Thanks to the Holocaust story, Stalin was able to take on the role of a savior who had freed half of Europe from a tyranny even more cruel than his own. More importantly, the victorious powers could use the Holocaust myth to prevent any resurgence of German nationalism. It allowed them to poison the German people with a collective guilt complex which rendered Germans unable to defend their national interests.

As we can see, then, no “conspiracy theory” is needed to explain the birth of the Holocaust myth and its survival after 1945. Rather, the “hoax,” as Arthur Butz memorably dubbed it in his seminal 1976 study The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, was born from the exigencies of wartime propaganda, but has since been perpetuated because it serves the converging interests of various national and transnational parties which have both the will and the means to enforce its acceptance by the public. In an excellent recent article, “The Non-Jewish stake in the Holocaust mythology,” revisionist Paul Grubach outlines numerous reasons why the hoax continues to be tenaciously defended even six and a half decades after the end of the Second World War.

- The“Extermination Camps” of “Aktion Reinhardt”: An Analysis and Refutation of Factitious “Evidence,” Deceptions and Flawed Argumentation of the “Holocaust Controversies” Bloggers https://ia800304.us.archive.org/31/item ... t_Long.pdf

***

Here is also Germar Rudolf on the origins of the gas chamber story:
Germar Rudolf: Who Put the Gas into the Chambers?: On the Roots of the Nazi Gas-Chamber Story: https://codoh.com/library/document/who- ... -chambers/

[Callafangers]

Here is also Germar Rudolf on the origins of the gas chamber story:

While Rudolf argues against a planned conspiracy, he admits that Polish judges and historians deliberately streamlined chaotic early witness accounts into a more coherent narrative, i.e. a level of coordination and intent that cannot be dismissed as 'happenstance'. His claim that the Holocaust narrative was not driven by Jewish conspiracy until 1961 is hard to reconcile with the earlier, deliberate actions to shape this narrative (some examples in my last response, above). The alignment of various interests, especially (but not limited to) those of Jewish groups, in pushing this narrative from early post-war years demonstrates a coordinated effort.

The deliberate streamlining of chaotic witness accounts (which, themselves, often consist of deliberate deception) into a coherent narrative by judicial and historical authorities points to intentional deception, not mere 'misinterpretation' or 'misunderstanding'. The historical context, including Poland's territorial gains and the political (or ideological) motivations of various parties, provides clear motive for the creation and perpetuation of the Holocaust narrative, which aligns with the idea of a coordinated effort or conspiracy.

I understand that folks sometimes have a problem with the term 'conspiracy', shying away from this label for various reasons. But this is the most realistic characterization, based on all available evidence.

[curioussoul]

The only way to claim the 'Holocaust' narrative is not derived from conspiracy is to suggest little or no coordination in the advancement of this narrative and the falsehoods (or exaggerations) it is comprised of.

It ultimately comes down to what level of coordination is required for the narrative to reach the level of 'conspiracy'. While it's absolutely true that the Allies coordinated their legal efforts to streamline and historicize the absurd and ridiculous propaganda claims eminating from all over Germany in the immediate postwar period, what you'll notice is that many of the key players were not necessarily Jewish, at least not when it comes to the purely legal aspect of compiling evidence for the NMT and IMT. Many of them were Polish, Russian, American, British, and so on. Sure, Jews were everywhere in the postwar revenge train against Germany (especially among the Americans and the Brits), but the topdown coordination was largely an Allied effort that had, in my opinion, different goals compared to the Jewish witnesses. Theirs were more geopolitical in nature whereas the Jewish witnesses were hellbent on revenge and subversion. But, in my opinion, I don't think the Jewish liars and witnesses were coordinating among themselves except perhaps in very specific individual cases - hence why the Holocaust story is so flimsy and ridiculous, especially in its earliest forms.

All that being said, I don't think anyone can deny that there was always a tacit understanding among Jews that making up extermination lies and exaggerating their suffering was in their collective interest, and it basically fell on Jews everywhere to further those goals by any means necessary even if it came down to lying. It's not like this was anything new for Jews. Jewish culture and their history on the European continent is rife with paranoid accusations of genocidal intent among their host populations, or as Jewish historian Salo Baron put it in the 1920's, "the eternal self-pity characteristic of Jewish historiography", what he dubbed the "lachrymose theory".