Occam’s Razor Destroys the Holocaust Industry

DISCLOSURE: VT condemns the horrific tragedy committed by the NAZI Party against Jewish Citizens of Europe during Word War II known as the "Holocaust". VT condemns all racism, bigotry, hate speech, and violence. However, we are an open source uncensored journal and support the right of independent writers and commentors to express their voices; even if those voices are not mainstream as long as they do NOT openly call for violence. Please report any violations of comment policy to us immediately. Strong reader discretion is advised.

by Jonas E. Alexis & Nicholas Kollerstrom

Alexis: There seems to be a double standard being played by the Holocaust industry. You have obviously been condemned for saying uncomfortable things about World War II and the “Holocaust.” You write:

“In today’s Britain, ‘The Holocaust’ is big business, with the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) receiving over two million pounds a year from the government and various other UK Holocaust groups now benefitting from taxpayer money.

“In 2013, the Beth Shalom Holocaust Educational Centre in Newark in the East Midlands got a million pounds, and the Holocaust Recalled Group in Swansea received 791,000 pounds, while the Lake District Holocaust Project and the Holocaust Survivors Friendship Association in Leeds have both been given around half a million.

“The HET has managed to get The Holocaust established as a central part of the National Curriculum, so every UK pupil between 11 and 14 has to learn about it: it is now a compulsory subject. Thereby London has become a major center of Holocaust indoctrination.

“David Cameron…did not shirk from invoking ‘the Holocaust’ to justify military intervention in Syria (August 2013). Some five million has been pumped into the prestigious Institute of Education’s new Centre for Holocaust Education, with a network of Beacon Schools in Holocaust education set up across the country, offering them London seminars and trips abroad. The Anne Frank Trust currently has eight traveling exhibitions touring the country, government-funded.

“More than half of Britain’s schools now take part in the HET’s ‘Lessons from Auschwitz’ program, which has sent about 15,000 pupils on their pilgrimage to Auschwitz. The roots of the current boom go back to a 2000 conference in Stockholm when 31 nations agreed to subject their populations to mass compulsory Holocaust teaching—monitored by a body of government academics, bureaucrats, and NGOs which call themselves the International Remembrance Alliance.”[1]

Obviously, the Holocaust establishment would go completely ape if they happen to realize that those statements were written by a non-Jew, even though they are factual.[2] But many Jewish historians and scholars have said almost the same thing—and they still hold their academic posts. No one has accused them of anti-Semitism. For example, Jewish Holocaust historian Tim Cole of the University of Bristol begins his book Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler—How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold by saying,

“‘Shoah [Hebrew for Holocaust] business is big business…[In] the twentieth century, the ‘Holocaust’ is being bought and sold. $168 million was donated to pay for the building of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on a plot of Federal Land in Washington, DC. Millions of dollars have financed memorial projects throughout the United States, ranging from the installation of Holocaust memorials to the establishment of University chairs in Holocaust studies. Steven Spielberg’s movie Schindler’s List netted over $221 million in foreign box offices and even Academy Awards.”[3]

Cole is also a fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum! When Cole’s book came out, Kirkus magazine quickly reviewed it and praised it for labeling the “Holocaust” a “sacrosanct myth.” Kirkus concluded the review by saying, “If the Holocaust has assumed our century’s moral crown, this book dares to challenge the emperor’s clothes.”

So, Cole is praised and gets tenured for saying the same thing that you are saying. Isn’t that a double standard? If so, wouldn’t you say that people in the Holocaust establishment are not using logic and reason?

Kollerstrom: Indeed it is shameful the way huge sums of money are being used to promote the teaching of an event that did not even happen. Psychologists need to discuss why people enjoy and seem to revel in all the fictional horror and never-ending river of guilt. O God, what we did to God’s chosen People! How Americans have managed to involve themselves in this and also feel guilty, with big Holo-museums in various capital cities etc., I will never understand. They had nothing to do with it. If Americans want to feel guilty about the Holocaust, I suggest they re-define it as what was done to Native Americans over the centuries. Are they not America’s real holocaust survivors?

Sure, people in the Holocaust establishment are using their reason – to con as much as they can out of the gullible goyim. I presume the Washington DC Holocaust Museum has got the usual pile of shoes, and also hair. Well excuse me they did have recycling industries in the camps and yes these things were collected. But so what?

We need to develop correct reasoning on these matters. America has got a big Humanist-sceptic movement that is supposed to promote rationalism and skeptical inquiry. Maybe they should be asked about Spielberg Schindler’s List which as you say netted over 221 million: what of its images of human bodies burning in big funeral pyres, do they condone the idea of human bodies as being inflammable?

Every university with a Holo-course needs to be badgered about whether it permits divergent views amongst students on the subject, or will students automatically be failed if they express a revisionist view. Normally this is the one course on any college campus where a plurality of discourse is NOT permitted. If so, students should call for such courses to be closed down as violating the most sacred of American traditions, of free thought and open discourse.

Alexis: Excellent point. People in the Holocaust establishment certainly cannot wiggle out of Stalin’s extermination and Mao’s great famine, which ended up liquidating at least one hundred million lives. Whatever happened to the descendants of those people? Don’t they deserve some kind of reparation as well? Not even one Holocaust museum in the Western world? It is really hilarious to observe how Jewish legal scholars like Michael J. Bazyler cannot really deal with those issues without being inconsistent and incoherent. That’s one reason why they prefer to avoid the central issue altogether.[4]

Let’s move on. You write, “Insofar as we depend upon empirical evidence and laws of science, the Holocaust story appears to be false and cannot be sustained.”[5] You also say that you majored

“in the History and Philosophy of Science precisely because I believed that we are a science-based civilization and that therefore controversial aspects of historic science and technology should be critiqued and studied…One day it dawned upon me that there was a chemical angle to ‘the Holocaust,’ because a simple chemical reaction had taken place in walls where cyanide gas had been used in World War II.”[6]

You add, “Clear, chemical logic drew me into this topic, and that remains the firm ground on which I stand.”[7]

You have alluded to some evidence earlier. Lay out for us some of the main logical and scientific arguments that convince you that this “Holocaust” system cannot be sustained in any meaningful or rational sense. You argue that if science historians do their job properly, they will inevitably come to the conclusion that the so-called gassing at Auschwitz is scientifically impossible. Provide some evidence here.

Kollerstrom: You’re quoting Jim Fetzer in the Intro to my book, that ‘Insofar as we depend upon empirical evidence and the laws of science, the Holocaust story appears to be false and cannot be sustained.’ That is to say, it asks us to believe things that cannot have happened.

The British Intelligence decrypts for example over 13 months 1942-3 giving daily totals of people entering and leaving the camps. There were messages directly intercepted because the German codes had been broken, without them knowing this. These messages break the camp totals down into four groups of prisoners – Poles, Russians, Jews, and German (political prisoners). That gives us basic arithmetic which is fully compatible with other reliable sources, eg the Death-Books of Auschwitz as released by Gorbachov in the 1980s – we’ve put some graphs up showing a breakdown of these stats on our whatreallyhappened.info website.

The point is that these totals are not remotely compatible with the numbers traditionally given. They were not murder camps, period. Over that year of which we have the decrypts, Jewish mortality is not any different from that of the other ethnic groups in the camps. For the record, the Death Books have more Catholics than Jews dying at Auschwitz, so I don’t know why Jews have somehow appropriated that camp as if their ‘suffering’ were somehow unique.

The Exterminationist types will always argue here, Ah don’t you realize, the Jews were gassed on arrival, and not counted in the records? Their bodies were then quickly incinerated and the ashes were thrown into the Vistula. So in that case why would the Germans have bothered to keep records? That sounds a bit like people explaining why there are no German-built human gas chambers to be found in any German labour camps – why, the wicked Nazis destroyed them all as they retreated. There comes a point where one needs to use Occam’s Razor, and say that if no evidence can be found for the whole thing, ie no physical-material or documentary evidence, then IT DID NOT HAPPEN.

I’d like to see the Holo-study course transferred into science departments so that a critique of the evidence would be possible. If I may give just one example, we have a figure for Auschwitz of the total amount of coke used in the cremation ovens over a couple of years. Each oven took say a couple of hours to incinerate a body. Loads of these had to be installed once the big typhus epidemics broke out in the summer of 1942. It does sound macabre but the point is the ground was too damp to bury any bodies so they had to be cremated.

Now the quantity of coke needed per body under these circumstances is a fairly normal science-technology kind of question. It will give you numbers in accord with what we know of the typhus mortality in that camp. It absolutely rules out some huge extra number from a ‘human gassing’ fantasy, it gives a ceiling on mortality in that camp. In my experience Revisionists tend to be guided by material and rational argument and logic, whereas Holo-believers go more by stories, which they have been told.

Alexis: You mention the skeptical society in America. It seems to me that this whole enterprise is a complete joke. Michael Shermer for example is skeptical about virtually weird, unimportant, and irrelevant things such as UFOs and extraterrestrials,^[8] but he has never been skeptical about things that really matter. In fact, he was trying to use Holocaust revisionists to boost his Skeptic magazine in the 1990s. David Cole has an entire chapter on this issue in his book. Shermer admitted that he even lied about Holocaust revisionists.^[9]

Shermer also admitted that the Holocaust establishment hasn’t really looked at the serious problem of the so-called Holocaust itself in an audio transcript. He called Cole a racist in his magazine and then privately apologized to Cole, saying that it was one of the most deceptive ways to attack Holocaust revisionists. Listen to the interesting conversation and you will be surprised.

Shermer is the co-author of Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?, and this book is filled with red herrings, straw men, and all kinds of logical errors and historical inaccuracies.[10]

Shermer has recently written Skeptic: Viewing the World with a Rational Eye, but again the self-proclaimed “professional skeptic” would never be skeptical about outrageous claims made by apologists of the “Holocaust.” He even believes the now defunct claim that the Nazis used Jewish fat to make soap,[11] a myth that has been abandoned even by people like Deborah Lipstadt!

Shermer is not a serious scholar on these issues at all. As David Cole quickly found out, Shermer is an opportunist (or clown) chasing after popularity.

But in a chapter entitled “Skepticism as a Virtue,” he writes in his recent book Skeptic:

“We must always be on guard against errors in our reasoning. Eternal vigilance is the watch phrase not just for freedom, but also for thinking. That is the nature of skepticism.”^[12]

I honestly don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Shermer also supports a historically malicious book called Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust in which its author, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, perversely argues that ordinary Germans were largely responsible for the so-called Holocaust.

Goldhagen’s thesis was challenged by Jewish scholar Ruth Bettina Birn in the Cambridge Historical Journal. Goldhagen, instead of responding to the critique in a scholarly manner,

“enlisted a high-powered London law firm to sue Birn and Cambridge University Press for ‘many serious libels.’ Demanding an apology, a retraction, and a promise from Birn that she not repeat her criticisms, Goldhagen’s lawyers then threatened that ‘the generation of any publicity on your part as a result of this letter would amount to a further aggravation of damages.”^[13]

Goldhagen, by this action, proved himself incapable of dealing with historical scholarship and shows that he was not interested in historical truth but merely in propagating his own ideology. People who are not of the truth will do whatever is necessary to suppress it.

Shermer was obviously aware that Goldhagen’s thesis was a fraud, for no rational person can maintain some of the statements he makes in Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Finkelstein and Burn responded to Goldhagen’s thesis in a book entitled A Nation on Trial, but instead of dealing with the arguments in that book, Shermer responded by saying that Finkelstein and Burn “responded with an emotionally charged volume…” Those are the only “arguments” Shermer presents against A Nation on Trial. But he and his co-author Alex Grobman went on to postulate:

“Whether Goldhagen’s explanation of the Holocaust is right or wrong is not our concern here….As a source Goldhagen is reliable; he plays by the accepted rules of historical scholarship, and he accounts for the observed phenomena while offering a different explanation for them.”^[14]

Even Raul Hilberg, one of Shermer’s most reliable sources, denounced Goldhagen’s thesis as complete nonsense. Hilberg said that Goldhagen’s

“scholarly standard is at the level of 1946… This is the only reason why Goldhagen could obtain a Ph.D. in political science at Harvard. There was nobody on the faculty who could have checked his work.”

Yehuda Bauer, another Jewish scholar who is part of the Holocaust establishment, said similar things about Goldhagen. But Shermer would not listen at all. And he is now writing books about skepticism?

In Why People Believing Weird Things, he quotes Karl Sagan approvingly, saying:

“If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.)

“On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish useful ideas from worthless ones.”

But Shermer again takes all the premises of the Holocaust establishment at face value without even examining them rationally. He writes books saying the so-called Holocaust happened, but privately he admits that there are numerous problems with the Holocaust narrative. It just ain’t right!

Any comment on any of those points?

Kollerstrom: The question of what Sceptics are allowed to be skeptical about is and has always been tightly controlled, ever since the movement was set up by Paul Kurtz in 1976. Basically, they are here to promote godless atheistic materialism, and call it ‘science’.

I once tried enquiring to a Euro-Sceptics group, if I’d be able to join and give a paper on what brought down the Twin Towers on 9/11, as skeptical about the official story, and was advised in no uncertain terms that it would be outside their remit.

It’s interesting how you observe, that Michael Shermer edited his Sceptic magazine, but also published a book averring that those who did not accept the orthodox view on the H. topic were ‘denying history.’ One is reminded of the well-known British atheist Richard Dawkins, who is very ‘rationalist’ in terms of scoffing at anyone’s religion, but will totally believe in the H. with, dare I say it, religious fervor. It is an ersatz modern religion.

Sure, Jewish soap, Jewish lampshades, why not? Forget the analyses that have been done showing that these are pig skin and not human flesh.

I love the way you point out that Shermer witters on about ‘eternal vigilance in defense of freedom of thought, but then when a critique is published of the book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which he supports, endeavors to load yet more guilt onto the Germans, then legal action is taken to suppress it! Yes, even Cambridge University Press (my alma mater) is colluding in the suppression of dissent! Rational debate has gone out of the window once legal action of this kind is allowed and perpetrated. Germans are not allowed to defend themselves – banned by the constitution the US/UK imposed upon them at the end of WW2 – so kudos to Ruth Bettina Birn for defending them.

I suggest your words ‘People who are not of the truth…’ is quite important. These are the people of the lie. This is a religion, a religion based upon horror and despair. I hope the human race chooses not to believe it much longer.

Citations

• [1] Nicholas Kollerstrom, Breaking the Spell: The Holocaust—Myth & Reality (Uckfield, UK: Castle Hill Publishers, 2014), 22.
• [2] See for example “Holocaust Educational Trust gets £500,00 for Auschwitz visits,” BBC, May 2, 2013; Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (New York: Verso, 2000).
• [3] Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler—How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold (New York: Routledge, 2000), 1.
• [4] Michael J. Bazyler, Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America’s Courts (New York: New York University Press, 2003).
• [5] Kollerstrom, Breaking the Spell, 10.
• [6] Ibid., 17.
• [7] Ibid., 20.
• [8] See for example Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1997).
• [9] David Cole, Republican Party Animal: The “Bad Boy of Holocaust History” Blows the Lid Off Hollywood’s Secret Right-Wing Underground (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2014).
• [10] I corresponded with him on some of these issues back in 2012, and the interactions are on file.
• [11] Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000 and 2002), 117.
• [12] Michael Shermer, Skeptic: Viewing the World with a Rational Eye (New York: Henry & Holt Company, 2016), 60.
• [13] Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (New York: Verso, 2000), 65. For a full discussion of Goldhagen’s fabrications, see Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998).
• [14] Shermer and Grobman, Denying History, 253.

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.

• Read the Latest Posts from Jonas >>>
• Read Jonas’ Archives (2004-2015) >>>