Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Supplement 1: The International Holocaust Controversy
That is clearly not what has been happening in this “Holocaust” area. The nonspecialist
who has seen the feet of clay cannot get his most urgent and elementary
questions answered by consulting the scholarly journals, for the simple reason that
the societal and political conditions I have referred to have frightened the scholars
away, and that is essentially the cultural illness I referred to earlier. It is not so
much that the historians have had the wrong answers – they have not even confronted
the questions, and the number of persons outside of the historical profession,
to whom that fact is painfully obvious, is as least literal myriads today.
Imagine such a situation holding in physics.
Now one can understand the curiosity that so disturbs many persons that this is
“a field completely dominated by non-historians,” as I wrote in Chapter 7 (p.
263). Although the remark is no longer entirely true, it is still largely the case that
the people who have drawn the obvious conclusions from the feet of clay and have
publicized their conclusions do not have backgrounds as historians – mine is in engineering.
I am the first to concede that this is a sorry situation, but the situation
would be even more sorry, if nobody were asking questions about the so-called
Holocaust. We can and should take considerable comfort from the fact that we have
retained the cultural vitality to carry on here despite the default of the historians.
Another facet of this is the fact that, the normal channels for the flow of
knowledge having been blocked, leadership in disseminating the revisionist view
of the Final Solution has fallen to publications with special ideological orientations.
For example The Spotlight in the U.S. and the National Zeitung in Germany
are weekly newspapers that do not claim to be scholarly, but again we should take
comfort from the fact that somebody has been beating the drum, for such widely
read publications do nevertheless create pressures on the historians that make it
more difficult for them to continue avoiding this subject.
They also serve to inform the general public, and here we should take note of
the requirements of historical revisionism, because I may be misunderstood by
some here and it may appear from my remarks that I am claiming that ideally such
matters should be confined to scholarly journals and that the general public should
not be bothered with them. I intend no such meaning, but it is true that there must
be a distinction between the matters treated by scholars and those treated by the
popular press.
The general public does not have the faculties or temperaments to treat knowledge
in the ways of the specialists, so one must be prepared to accept something
else for such purposes, and here it is useful to distinguish between an intolerable
and a tolerable popular outlook. It would, for example, be intolerable if the populace
believe the world to be flat. However, I suppose that for all practical purposes
a belief that it is spherical would be tolerable and that a concern for the macro and
micro deviations from sphericity can be left to the relevant specialists.
A comparable situation holds in this “Holocaust” area, and most of the publications
that have been propagating the revisionist viewpoint on the “Six Million”
have been doing a reasonably good job, both in terms of informing their readerships,
given the noted constraints imposed by them, and in terms of generating
pressures on the historians who might prefer to avoid the subject.
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