Lies Elie Wiesel Told Us

by Jonas E. Alexis

Science historian Nicholas Kollestrom, whom we will be interviewing this week, writes that Elie Wiesel should properly be called a “Messiah of the Holocaust” industry.[1] Our esteemed colleague Gilad Atzmon calls him one of the priests of the Holocaust.[2] These titles are certainly apt descriptions of Wiesel’s entire political weltanschauung, for he was able to fool many people—from Oprah Winfrey to the deluded Christian Zionists. “Through Wiesel,” Jewish theologian and scholar Marc H. Ellis writes,

“Christians became heavily involved in the meaning of Holocaust suffering and support for the state of Israel without regard for the plight of Palestinians. Christians averted their eyes. Christians became corrupted through the support of Jewish power against others.”

How did Wiesel, who has been called “a messenger to mankind” by Sara J. Bloomfield of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,[3] ascend to the political throne? When did he become aware of his messiahship? Did he perform miracles? Was he involved in exorcism? Who crowned him?

Obviously, the media put Wiesel on the throne, not because he was able to produce scholarship and true stories but because he was able to propound one fantasy after another, which eventually became “truth” by the anointed elite, and clowns like Obama, Merkel, and Bush. But what was Wiesel’s central message to his devoted followers?

“The Jew,” Wiesel declared, “has never been an executioner; he is almost always the victim.”[4] This messianic statement can never square well with historical data at all. In fact, it is a bold lie that can only make sense in the minds of impostors like Wiesel.

Wiesel knew very well that the Bolshevik Revolution, a subversive ideology that ended up liquidating more than sixty million people,[5] was a largely Jewish movement.[6] Not even Winston Churchill, who was a thorough Zionist pawn, could deny this fact.[7] Jewish writer Sever Plocker wrote in 2006 that “the greatest Jewish murderer of the 20th Century” was none other than Genrikh Yagoda. Plocker continued:

“Yagoda diligently implemented Stalin’s collectivization orders and is responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million people. His Jewish deputies established and managed the Gulag system. After Stalin no longer viewed him favorably, Yagoda was demoted and executed, and was replaced as chief hangman in 1936 by Yezhov, the ‘bloodthirsty dwarf.’

“Many Jews sold their soul to the devil of the Communist revolution and have blood on their hands for eternity. We’ll mention just one more: Leonid Reichman, head of the NKVD’s special department and the organization’s chief interrogator, who was a particularly cruel sadist… In 1934, according to published statistics, 38.5 percent of those holding the most senior posts in the Soviet security apparatuses were of Jewish origin…

“We cannot escape the Jewishness of ‘our hangmen,’ who served the Red Terror with loyalty and dedication from its establishment.”[8]

Plocker is an honest man. It’s sad that Wiesel never got to meet him. But the Bolshevik Revolution didn’t stop in Soviet Russia. The same revolutionary ideology moved to China under the name of Maoism, and from 1958 to 1962, at least forty-five million people got exterminated.[9]

That’s not all. The revolutionary movement got transported to America under the name of Neoconservatism.[10] Again, what has been the end result? Perpetual wars, which led to massive deaths in the Middle East and massive debt in America.[11] We have also seen how the war in Iraq alone will cost the United States at least six trillion dollars.[12] And the same war is responsible for the rise of terrorist groups all over the region, most specifically ISIS.[13]

Wiesel declared, “To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”[14] How in the world did this man manage to forget millions upon millions of dead Russians and Chinese and Muslims and Arabs? Was he that blind, or was he just deliberately propounding complete nonsense in order to capitalize on the Holocaust industry?[15]

Moreover, shouldn’t this man be labeled a racist instead of “one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides in an age [of] violence, repression, and racism”[16]? Did he really wage “countless battles for innocent victims regardless of ethnicity or creed,” as the Chicago Tribune has recently posited?[17] Why should this man be called a “heroic humanitarian”[18]? Did the definition of a humanitarian change over the years? Does “heroic humanitarian” mean that you can whine about your own suffering at the expense of everyone else?

Dan Rather, one of the “big three” news anchors in the U.S. during the 1980s and all the way to the 2000s, declared on the day Wiesel passed away:

“Our global moral conscience has lost some of its strength today. The passing of Elie Wiesel is a reminder that arguably mankind’s darkest chapter is receding from the direct memory of those still alive. Wiesel was determined that those alive now, and those still yet unborn, should never forget the horrors of the Holocaust, horrors he witnessed personally and then shared with the world for the rest of his life.”[19]

Well, Mr. Rather, what about other Holocausts? Should we remember them as well? When are we going to build a museum for the Russian peasants, whom the Bolsheviks called “swine,” “dogs,” “cockroaches,” “scum,” “vermin,” “filth,” “garbage,” and even “half animal”?[20] What makes you so discriminatory? Some historians have estimated that between 10 to 20 million Chinese died during World War II.[21] Where is their Holocaust museum?

When Mao for example followed the Bolshevik philosophy, eminent historian Frank Dikotter of the University of Hong Kong tells us that “between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell.”[22] In 1949, Mao went to Russia in order to learn from the Soviet Union, and from 1955-1956, he started to implement Stalin’s collectivization.[23]

Starvation was so rampant in China that a number of people began to eat human flesh.[24] In the summer of 1958, the famine was so horrible that “some people eventually dug up, boiled and ate human bodies. Soon the practice appeared in every region decimated by starvation, even in a relatively prosperous province such as Guangdong.”[25]

There were also instances where “several children were eaten.” Other terrible acts of cannibalism were widespread in places such as Tongwei, Yumen, Wushan, Jingning, and Wudu, and the communist leaders knew that these acts were taking place.[26]

In one place, for example, “a seventy-year-old woman unearthed the bodies of two small children and cooked them for herself.”[27] Other inhumane acts were widespread, such as tying a ten-year-old and throwing him into a bog where he died after a few days.[28] Other people were left in the cold, naked, where many of them died—and even pregnant women were no exception.[29]

In other instances, excrement and urine were used as a punishment to cover people. One individual was forced to swallow excrement, and died a few weeks later.[30] Another punishment such as nailing people’s ears to the wall was also common.[31] Another extreme form of torture was burying people alive.[32]

As a result, in order to escape torture, many ended up taking their own lives.[33] For instance, “In Shantou a woman accused of theft tied her two children to her body before jumping into the river.”[34] So, where is Wiesel when you need him? Was he really interested in the truth?

Wiesel whined that people like him are always the victim, but Wiesel asked Obama to join Benjamin Netanyahu (the man who always tries to find an excuse to grab Palestinian lands[35]) to incite conflict with Iran. “Will you join me in hearing the case for keeping weapons from those who preach death to Israel and America?,” he asked.

A nuclear Iran, Wiesel moved on to say, would be a “catastrophic danger” to the Western world. “As one who has seen the enemies of the Jewish people make good on threats to exterminate us, how can I remain silent?” Wiesel and his brethren live in constant fear because they have abandoned truth and practical reason and have embraced an essentially diabolical system that can never produce peace and harmony in any metaphysical sense.

Moreover, Wiesel constantly talked about peace, but he wrote an entire article in the Washington Post arguing that the Western world needed to remove a democratically elected president in Syria.[36] He lied again by saying that the Assad government was killing its own people, when in fact Assad was and is still fighting ISIS and protecting whatever that is left in Syria. “Day after day,” he wrote, the Assad government and army “humiliate, frighten and kill scores of its citizens. Old and young, educated and ignorant, rich and poor: All have become targets.”[37]

There is one nagging problem here: Wiesel, because he was living in an imaginary universe, could not explain the fact that almost 90% of the population voted for Assad![38] So, the people knew that Assad was killing them, but they voted for him anyway? Does that make any sense at all? And did Wiesel really believe what he wrote? It should pain any rational human being when much of the media and political pawns ignore all these facts. Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein writes:

“Mention of the Armenian genocide is therefore taboo. Elie Wiesel and Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg as well as the AJC and Yad Vashem withdrew from the international conference on genocide in Tel Aviv because the academic sponsors, against the Israeli government’s urging, included sessions on the Armenian case.

“Wiesel also sought, unilaterally, to abort the conference and, according to [historian] Yehuda Bauer, personally lobbied others not to attend. Acting at Israel’s behest, the US Holocaust Council practically eliminated mention of the Armenians in the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Jewish lobbyists in Congress blocked a day of remembrance for the Armenian genocide.”[39]

That’s not all. Wiesel was the man who endorsed a fake book called The Painted Bird, written by half-baked Jerzy Kosinski. As Finkelstein puts it, it was “the first major Holocaust hoax” in the twentieth century.

“In the New York Times Book Review, Elie Wiesel acclaimed The Painted Bird as ‘one of the best indictments of the Nazi era, ‘written with a deep sincerity and sensitivity…’ Long after Kosinski was exposed as a consummate literary hoaxer, Wiesel continued to praise his ‘remarkable body of work.’”[40]

Here is more bad news: “The Painted Bird became a basic Holocaust text. It was a best-seller and award-winner, translated into numerous languages, and required reading for high school and college classes.”[41]

So, does Wiesel deserve to be called “one of the great moral voices of our time,” as Obama has said?[42] Shouldn’t he be called one of the greatest jokers of the twenty-first century so far? Should we really honor a man who fabricated many of his stories in books like Night?[43]

Wiesel declared that at the age of eighteen when he was free from Buchenwald, “I read the Critique of Pure Reason—don’t laugh!—in Yiddish.” Finkelstein writes, “Leaving aside Wiesel’s acknowledgment that at the time ‘I was wholly ignorant of Yiddish grammar,’ The Critique of Pure Reason was never translated into Yiddish.”[44]

In short, Wiesel’s stories are nothing but a little bit of truth here and there in a torrent of colossal hoaxes and fabrications. As noted journalist Alexander Cockburn put it after a long investigation:

“Wiesel made things up, in a way that his many subsequent detractors could identify as not untypical of his modus operandi: grasping with deft assurance what people important to his future would want to hear and, by the same token, would not want to hear.”[45]

If Night is “one of the most powerful achievements in Holocaust literature,” as the LA Time has put it,[46] then the Western intellectual tradition and historical scholarship have been completely obliterated.

And if the LA Times, other media outlets and even Benjamin Netanyahu[47] continue to exonerate Wiesel as a saint, Jewish scholar Sara Roy of Harvard, whose parents survived Auschwitz and who has written extensively on the Israeli occupation in the Gaza Strip,[48] is not impressed. After Wiesel defended Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, Roy wrote in 2014:

“I am appalled by your anti-Palestinian position, one I know you have long held. I have always wanted to ask you, why? What crime have Palestinians committed in your eyes? Exposing Israel as an occupier and themselves as its nearly defenseless victims? Resisting a near half-century of oppression imposed by Jews and through such resistance forcing us as a people to confront our lost innocence (to which you so tenaciously cling)?

“Unlike you, Mr. Wiesel, I have spent a great deal of time in Gaza among Palestinians. In that time, I have seen many terrible things and I must confess I try not to remember them because of the agony they continue to inflict.  I have seen Israeli soldiers shoot into crowds of young children who were doing nothing more than taunting them, some with stones, some with just words. I have witnessed too many horrors, more than I want to describe.

“But I must tell you that the worst things I have seen, those memories that continue to haunt me, insisting never to be forgotten, are not acts of violence but acts of dehumanization.”[49]

Brother Nathanael Kapner was right after all: Wiesel was an impostor. The late Christopher Hitchens himself had this to say about this impostor:

“Is there a more contemptible poseur and windbag than Elie Wiesel? I suppose there may be. But not, surely, a poseur and windbag who receives (and takes as his due) such grotesque deference on moral questions… [Wiesel] was a member of Menachem Begin’s Irgun in the 1940s, when that force employed extreme violence against Arab civilians and was more than ready to use it against Jews.”[50]

Citations

• [1] Nicholas Kollerstrom, Breaking the Spell (Uckfield, UK: Castle Hill Publishers, 2014), 229.
• [2] Gilad Atzmon, The Wandering Who?: A Study of Jewish Identity Politics (Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2011), 148.
• [3] Sara J. Bloomfield, “U.S. Holocaust Museum director: Elie Wiesel’s voice transformed the lives of millions,” Washington Post, July 3, 2016.
• [4] Quoted in John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar & Straus, 2007), 79.
• [5] See for example Jean-Louis Panné, et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); for related studies, see Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990 and 2008); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 (New York: Penguin, 1998); Steven Rosefielde, Red Holocaust (New York: Routledge, 2010).
• [6] See Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), chapter 3; Jerry Z. Muller, Jews and Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), chapter 3; Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians, and the Left (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); for related studies, see Erich Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
• [7] Winston Churchill, “Zionism vs. Bolshevism: The Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920.
• [8] Sever Plocker, “Stalin’s Jews,” Y-Net News, December 21, 2006.
• [9] Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 (New York and London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010); for related studies, see Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (New York: Henry and Holt, 1996); Xun Zhou, The Great Famine in China, 1958-1962: A Documentary History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); Yang Jisheng, et al., Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 (New York: Farrar, Strau & Giroux, 2008).
• [10] We have already seen how Francis Fukuyama himself declared that the Neoconservative movement is just Stalinism and Leninism under a new garb. Francis Fukuyama, “After Neoconservatism,” NY Times, February 19, 2006.
• [11] For recent studies on this, see Andrew J. Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (New York: Random House, 2016); Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013); Michael MacDonald, Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).
• [12] Ernesto Londono, “Study: Iraq, Afghan war costs to top $4 trillion,” Washington Post, March 28, 2013; Bob Dreyfuss, The $6 Trillion Wars,” The Nation, March 29, 2013; “Iraq War Cost U.S. More Than $2 Trillion, Could Grow to $6 Trillion, Says Watson Institute Study,” Huffington Post, May 14, 2013; Mark Thompson, “The $5 Trillion War on Terror,” Time, June 29, 2011; “Iraq war cost: $6 trillion. What else could have been done?,” LA Times, March 18, 2013.
• [13] Tom Porter, “Iraq War Created Isis, Concedes David Miliband,” International Business Times, August 10, 2014; Dexter Filkins, “Did George W. Bush Create ISIS?,” New Yorker, May 15, 2016; Michael Kinsley, “How the Bush Wars Opened the Door for ISIS,” Vanity Fair, May 2015; John Cassidy, “ISIS and the Curse of the Iraq War,” New Yorker, August 28, 2015.
• [14] Quoted in “Elie Wiesel, Holocaust Survivor And Nobel Laureate, Dies At 87,” International Business Times, July 2, 2016.
• [15] Wiesel used to charge twenty thousand dollars for one single lecture. Nicholas Kollerstrom, Breaking the Spell (Uckfield: Castle Hill Publishers, 2014), 74.
• [16] “Elie Wiesel, Holocaust Survivor And Nobel Laureate, Dies At 87,” International Business Times, July 2, 2016.
• [17] “Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, dead at 87,” Chicago Tribune, July 2, 2016.
• [18] Deborah Vankin, “‘Please don’t forget what he taught us’: Elie Wiesel is remembered as a heroic humanitarian,” LA Times, July 2, 2016.
• [19] Ibid.
• [20] Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 59.
• [21] See Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368-1953 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959); John W. Dower, War Without Mercy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986); Werner Gruhl, Imperial Japan’s World war Two (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2010).
• [22] Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine, ix.
• [23] Ibid., xvii.
• [24] Ibid., 320.
• [25] Ibid.
• [26] Ibid., 321-323.
• [27] Ibid., 323.
• [28] Ibid., 294.
• [29] Ibid., 294-295.
• [30] Ibid., 295.
• [31] Ibid., 295-296.
• [32] Ibid., 296.
• [33] Ibid., 304-305.
• [34] Ibid., 305.
• [35] For a recent development, see Barak Ravid, “Netanyahu Vows to Bolster West Bank Settlements in Response to Latest Terror Attacks,” Haaretz, July 3, 2016.
• [36] Elie Wiesel, “How to stop the Syria massacre,” Washington Post, July 2, 2016.
• [37] Ibid.
• [38] “Bashar al-Assad wins re-election in Syria as uprising against him rages on,” Guardian, June 4, 2014; Nabih Bulos, “Syria’s Assad wins third term as president in landslide victory,” LA Times, June 4, 2014; “Bashar Assad wins Syria presidential election with 88.7% of vote,” Russia Today, June 4, 2014.
• [39] Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (New York: Verso, 2000), 70.
• [40] Ibid., 56.
• [41] Ibid.
• [42] Kyle Balluck, “Obama mourns Wiesel as ‘one of the great moral voices of our time,’” The Hill, July 2, 2016.
• [43] See for example E. Michael Jones, “Holocaust Denial and Thought Control: Deborah Lipstadt at Notre Dame University,” Culture Wars, May 2009.
• [44] Finkelstein, Holocaust Industry, 82-83.
• [45] Alexander Cockburn, “Truth and Fiction in Elie Wiesel’s ‘Night,’” Counterpunch, October 21, 2014.
• [46] Mary Rourke and Valerie J. Nelson, “Elie Wiesel dies at 87; Nobel Peace Prize laureate and renowned Holocaust survivor,” LA Times, July 2, 2016.
• [47] Nicholas Loffredo, “World Mourns the Death of Elie Wiesel,” Newsweek, July 2, 2016.
• [48] Sara Roy, Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2007).
• [49] Sara Roy, “A Response to Elie Wiesel,” Counterpunch, September 9, 2014.
• [50] Christopher Hitchens, “Wiesel Words,” The Nation, February 1, 2001.

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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