Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
Holocaust subject to be published, to date, in an “Establishment” magazine or
newspaper. 496
At the height of the Diwald and Faurisson controversies in Europe, another
one broke out in Australia. John Bennett, a Melbourne civil liberties lawyer, had
sent copies of my book to several Melbourne academics, together with a memo by
him summarizing what seemed to him to be some of the principal arguments in
support of the thesis of the book, and inviting critical comment (I understand that
to date, despite the publicity there, almost no such comment had been forthcoming).
Neither the memo nor anything else Bennett had written on the subject had
been intended for publication, but one weekly newspaper got a copy of the memo
somehow and published it, igniting a controversy that lasted several months. 497
In these controversies, the guardians of the legend have said very little of intellectual
content. It has, with only rare exceptions, been all name-calling – “anti-
Semitic,” “neo-Nazi,” etc. So here are a few people who have lived well up to or
into middle age without it ever having occurred to anybody to call them such
things and who are now so belatedly assaulted with these political cuss words just
because they asked questions about the Six Million.
There was another important development early in 1979 and it came, oddly,
from the CIA. Two photointerpreters released their study of some aerial reconnaissance
photographs of Auschwitz that the U.S. made in 1944, when Auschwitz
was of strategic interest as an oil target. Despite the publicity and even an historian’s
claims that the photographs provided some sort of evidence of exterminations,
there was no such evidence in the photographs. 498 What was to be found in
the photographs was on crucial points exactly what was predicted in my book,
where it was shown in Chapter 5 that such photographs must exist, although I had
not seen them. 499
Negative Reactions in Academia
I have suggested that the negative reactions to revisionists of the Final Solution
have been on the whole emotional, and I made no distinction between reactions
of professional scholars and laymen. This was no oversight. I am sad to report
that to an extent that stunned me the reactions of very many scholars have
been what one might have expected from a hyperemotional Jewish grandmother.
In the early stages of the public reactions to my book, one Prof. Wolfe of New
York University made a fool of himself by writing to the New York Times that
Northwestern University should bring me up on charges of “academic incompetence”
and “moral turpitude” for authoring and publishing the book whose title, he
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374
English translation published as R. Faurisson, “The gas chambers: Truth or lie”, Journal of Historical
Review, Winter 1981, p. 319-373.
National Times, February 10; February 24; The Age, February 15; February 16; March 3; March
15; March 17; March 22; March 23; March 24; March 28; April 6; April 14; May 8; Nation Review,
May 24; May 31; June 28; Weekend Australian, May 26-27. All 1979.
Washington Post, February 23, 1979, p. A1; New York Times, February 24, 1979, p. 2; March 6,
1979, p. A16.
Brugioni and Poirier.