Arthur R. Butz – The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century

Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
some indications that it is being realized that a more serious treatment of my
book, if only to attempt to discredit it, is required. It has recently been said that
“Butz might succeed in delivering ammunition to more ‘revisionists’ of the Final
Solution. Here lies the danger. Butz should be unmasked, not ignored.” 503
Conclusions
You can see the gist of the conclusions I am going to draw from this account
of the development of the controversy. What I have described to you has been a
process, whereby a thesis has emerged from the underground, to which it had
been assigned both on account of political pressures and on account of its seeming
implausibility (given the decades of propaganda), into the light of day where it is
being discussed and argued in establishment publications throughout the world. It
is still a minority thesis, but the trend in favor of revisionists is obvious to anybody
who is not willfully blind.
Revisionists of the Final Solution, a handful of lone individuals of meager resources,
have been successful far beyond their expectations – at least I did not expect
things to unfold to rapidly – and this cannot be explained entirely in terms of
the quality of their efforts. It can only be explained in terms of society’s being receptive
to such views at this point in history. The development that I have outlined
here has now gone so far that I now believe it is almost irrelevant what I and
my present revisionist colleagues do, or what happens to us.
To see the reason for this, one need only return to one of my earliest points:
this is a simple subject. The almost universal delusions have existed not because
of the complexities of the subject but because of political factors in Western society.
A corollary of the simplicity of the hoax is that it only need be questioned and
discussed, in a context free of intimidation and hysteria, for the psychological reorientation
spoken of earlier to be accomplished, the shattering of the delusions
following in due course. That point has for all practical purposes been reached or
soon will be reached.
I shall make an observation that may seem harsh. Revisionists of the Holocaust
have been, to put it bluntly, victims of multifarious persecution. You know only a
part of it – the part that appears in the newspapers, such as the book bannings in
Germany or Faurisson’s suspension at the University of Lyon-2. The other part,
the more personal part, is at most only hinted at in the newspapers, is generally
not known to you, and we shall not bother you with details of such painful things,
but let me assure you they exist. I therefore am fully cognizant that it is harsh of
me to make this observation: we should greet the fact of the persecutions, for they
are symptomatic of success, and even the victims should be as elated over them as
is psychologically possible in the grim personal circumstances they are in.
Sometimes it is said that the revisionist Holocaust thesis is comparable to
claiming that the world is flat, but note that nobody bothers the flat earth people.
It is not rough to go up against the whole world with no chance of winning, but it
is very rough to go up against it with some chance of winning. That is what revi-
503
376
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, April 1979, p. 264.