Wednesday 31 January 2018

THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV The Grand Inquisitor


Summary

Ivan explains his prose poem, “The Grand Inquisitor.” In a town in Spain, in the sixteenth century, Christ arrives, apparently reborn on Earth. As he walks through the streets, the people gather about him, staring. He begins to heal the sick, but his ministrations are interrupted by the arrival of a powerful cardinal who orders his guards to arrest Christ. Late that night, this cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor, visits Christ’s cell and explains why he has taken him prisoner and why he cannot allow Christ to perform his works. Throughout the Grand Inquisitor’s lecture, Christ listens silently.
The Grand Inquisitor tells Christ that he cannot allow him to do his work on Earth, because his work is at odds with the work of the Church. The Inquisitor reminds Christ of the time, recorded in the Bible, when the Devil presented him with three temptations, each of which he rejected. The Grand Inquisitor says that by rejecting these three temptations, he guaranteed that human beings would have free will. Free will, he says, is a devastating, impossible burden for mankind. Christ gave humanity the freedom to choose whether or not to follow him, but almost no one is strong enough to be faithful, and those who are not will be damned forever. The Grand Inquisitor says that Christ should have given people no choice, and instead taken power and given people security instead of freedom. That way, the same people who were too weak to follow Christ to begin with would still be damned, but at least they could have happiness and security on Earth, rather than the impossible burden of moral freedom. The Grand Inquisitor says that the Church has now undertaken to correct Christ’s mistake. The Church is taking away freedom of choice and replacing it with security. Thus, the Grand Inquisitor must keep Christ in prison, because if Christ were allowed to go free, he might undermine the Church’s work to lift the burden of free will from mankind.
The first temptation Christ rejected was bread. Hungry after his forty days of fasting, Christ was confronted by Satan, who told him that if he were really the son of God, he could turn a stone to bread and satisfy his hunger. Christ refused, replying that man should not live by bread, but by the word of God. The Grand Inquisitor says that most people are too weak to live by the word of God when they are hungry. Christ should have taken the bread and offered mankind freedom from hunger instead of freedom of choice.
The second temptation was to perform a miracle. Satan placed Christ upon a pinnacle in Jerusalem and told him to prove that he was the messiah by throwing himself off it. If Christ were really God’s son, the angels would bear him up and not allow him to die. Christ refused, telling Satan that he could not tempt God. Beaten, Satan departed. But the Grand Inquisitor says that Christ should have given people a miracle, for most people need to see the miraculous in order to be content in their religious faith. Man needs a supernatural being to worship, and Christ refused to appear as one.
The third temptation was power. Satan showed Christ all the kingdoms in the world, and offered him control of them all. Christ refused. The Grand Inquisitor says that Christ should have taken the power, but since he did not, the Church has now has to take it in his name, in order to convince men to give up their free will in favor of their security.
The Grand Inquisitor tells Christ that it was Satan, and not Christ, who was in the right during this exchange. He says that ever since the Church took over the Roman Empire, it has been secretly performing the work of Satan, not because it is evil, but because it seeks the best and most secure order for mankind.

 

 

THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV

By Fyodor Mikailovich Dostoevsky

Chapter 5

The Grand Inquisitor

"EVEN this must have a preface- that is, a literary preface," laughed Ivan, "and I am a poor hand at making one. You see, my action takes place in the sixteenth century, and at that time, as you probably learnt at school, it was customary in poetry to bring down heavenly powers on earth. Not to speak of Dante, in France, clerks, as well as the monks in the monasteries, used to give regular performances in which the Madonna, the saints, the angels, Christ, and God Himself were brought on the stage. In those days it was done in all simplicity. In Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris an edifying and gratuitous spectacle was provided for the people in the Hotel de Ville of Paris in the reign of Louis XI in honour of the birth of the dauphin. It was called Le bon jugement de la tres sainte et gracieuse Vierge Marie, and she appears herself on the stage and pronounces her bon jugement. Similar plays, chiefly from the Old Testament, were occasionally performed in Moscow too, up to the times of Peter the Great. But besides plays there were all sorts of legends and ballads scattered about the world, in which the saints and angels and all the powers of Heaven took part when required. In our monasteries the monks busied themselves in translating, copying, and even composing such poems- and even under the Tatars. There is, for instance, one such poem (of course, from the Greek), The Wanderings of Our Lady through Hell, with descriptions as bold as Dante's. Our Lady visits hell, and the Archangel Michael leads her through the torments. She sees the sinners and their punishment. There she sees among others one noteworthy set of sinners in a burning lake; some of them sink to the bottom of the lake so that they can't swim out, and 'these God forgets'- an expression of extraordinary depth and force. And so Our Lady, shocked and weeping, falls before the throne of God and begs for mercy for all in hell- for all she has seen there, indiscriminately. Her conversation with God is immensely interesting. She beseeches Him, she will not desist, and when God points to the hands and feet of her Son, nailed to the Cross, and asks, 'How can I forgive His tormentors?' she bids all the saints, all the martyrs, all the angels and archangels to fall down with her and pray for mercy on all without distinction. It ends by her winning from God a respite of suffering every year from Good Friday till Trinity Day, and the sinners at once raise a cry of thankfulness from hell, chanting, 'Thou art just, O Lord, in this judgment.' Well, my poem would have been of that kind if it had appeared at that time. He comes on the scene in my poem, but He says nothing, only appears and passes on. Fifteen centuries have passed since He promised to come in His glory, fifteen centuries since His prophet wrote, 'Behold, I come quickly'; 'Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, neither the Son, but the Father,' as He Himself predicted on earth. But humanity awaits him with the same faith and with the same love. Oh, with greater faith, for it is fifteen centuries since man has ceased to see signs from heaven.
No signs from heaven come to-day To add to what the heart doth say.
There was nothing left but faith in what the heart doth say. It is true there were many miracles in those days. There were saints who performed miraculous cures; some holy people, according to their biographies, were visited by the Queen of Heaven herself. But the devil did not slumber, and doubts were already arising among men of the truth of these miracles. And just then there appeared in the north of Germany a terrible new heresy. 'A huge star like to a torch' (that is, to a church) 'fell on the sources of the waters and they became bitter.' These heretics began blasphemously denying miracles. But those who remained faithful were all the more ardent in their faith. The tears of humanity rose up to Him as before, awaited His coming, loved Him, hoped for Him, yearned to suffer and die for Him as before. And so many ages mankind had prayed with faith and fervour, 'O Lord our God, hasten Thy coming'; so many ages called upon Him, that in His infinite mercy He deigned to come down to His servants. Before that day He had come down, He had visited some holy men, martyrs, and hermits, as is written in their lives. Among us, Tyutchev, with absolute faith in the truth of his words, bore witness that
Bearing the Cross, in slavish dress, Weary and worn, the Heavenly King Our mother, Russia, came to bless, And through our land went wandering.
And that certainly was so, I assure you.
"And behold, He deigned to appear for a moment to the people, to the tortured, suffering people, sunk in iniquity, but loving Him like children. My story is laid in Spain, in Seville, in the most terrible time of the Inquisition, when fires were lighted every day to the glory of God, and 'in the splendid auto da fe the wicked heretics were burnt.' Oh, of course, this was not the coming in which He will appear, according to His promise, at the end of time in all His heavenly glory, and which will be sudden 'as lightning flashing from east to west.' No, He visited His children only for a moment, and there where the flames were crackling round the heretics. In His infinite mercy He came once more among men in that human shape in which He walked among men for thirty-three years fifteen centuries ago. He came down to the 'hot pavements' of the southern town in which on the day before almost a hundred heretics had, ad majorem gloriam Dei, been burnt by the cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor, in a magnificent auto da fe, in the presence of the king, the court, the knights, the cardinals, the most charming ladies of the court, and the whole population of Seville.
"He came softly, unobserved, and yet, strange to say, everyone recognised Him. That might be one of the best passages in the poem. I mean, why they recognised Him. The people are irresistibly drawn to Him, they surround Him, they flock about Him, follow Him. He moves silently in their midst with a gentle smile of infinite compassion. The sun of love burns in His heart, and power shine from His eyes, and their radiance, shed on the people, stirs their hearts with responsive love. He holds out His hands to them, blesses them, and a healing virtue comes from contact with Him, even with His garments. An old man in the crowd, blind from childhood, cries out, 'O Lord, heal me and I shall see Thee!' and, as it were, scales fall from his eyes and the blind man sees Him. The crowd weeps and kisses the earth under His feet. Children throw flowers before Him, sing, and cry hosannah. 'It is He- it is He!' repeat. 'It must be He, it can be no one but Him!' He stops at the steps of the Seville cathedral at the moment when the weeping mourners are bringing in a little open white coffin. In it lies a child of seven, the only daughter of a prominent citizen. The dead child lies hidden in flowers. 'He will raise your child,' the crowd shouts to the weeping mother. The priest, coming to meet the coffin, looks perplexed, and frowns, but the mother of the dead child throws herself at His feet with a wail. 'If it is Thou, raise my child!' she cries, holding out her hands to Him. The procession halts, the coffin is laid on the steps at His feet. He looks with compassion, and His lips once more softly pronounce, 'Maiden, arise!' and the maiden arises. The little girl sits up in the coffin and looks round, smiling with wide-open wondering eyes, holding a bunch of white roses they had put in her hand.
"There are cries, sobs, confusion among the people, and at that moment the cardinal himself, the Grand Inquisitor, passes by the cathedral. He is an old man, almost ninety, tall and erect, with a withered face and sunken eyes, in which there is still a gleam of light. He is not dressed in his gorgeous cardinal's robes, as he was the day before, when he was burning the enemies of the Roman Church- at this moment he is wearing his coarse, old, monk's cassock. At a distance behind him come his gloomy assistants and slaves and the 'holy guard.' He stops at the sight of the crowd and watches it from a distance. He sees everything; he sees them set the coffin down at His feet, sees the child rise up, and his face darkens. He knits his thick grey brows and his eyes gleam with a sinister fire. He holds out his finger and bids the guards take Him. And such is his power, so completely are the people cowed into submission and trembling obedience to him, that the crowd immediately makes way for the guards, and in the midst of deathlike silence they lay hands on Him and lead him away. The crowd instantly bows down to the earth, like one man, before the old Inquisitor. He blesses the people in silence and passes on' The guards lead their prisoner to the close, gloomy vaulted prison- in the ancient palace of the Holy, inquisition and shut him in it. The day passes and is followed by the dark, burning, 'breathless' night of Seville. The air is 'fragrant with laurel and lemon.' In the pitch darkness the iron door of the prison is suddenly opened and the Grand Inquisitor himself comes in with a light in his hand. He is alone; the door is closed at once behind him. He stands in the doorway and for a minute or two gazes into His face. At last he goes up slowly, sets the light on the table and speaks.
"'Is it Thou? Thou?' but receiving no answer, he adds at once. 'Don't answer, be silent. What canst Thou say, indeed? I know too well what Thou wouldst say. And Thou hast no right to add anything to what Thou hadst said of old. Why, then, art Thou come to hinder us? For Thou hast come to hinder us, and Thou knowest that. But dost thou know what will be to-morrow? I know not who Thou art and care not to know whether it is Thou or only a semblance of Him, but to-morrow I shall condemn Thee and burn Thee at the stake as the worst of heretics. And the very people who have to-day kissed Thy feet, to-morrow at the faintest sign from me will rush to heap up the embers of Thy fire. Knowest Thou that? Yes, maybe Thou knowest it,' he added with thoughtful penetration, never for a moment taking his eyes off the Prisoner."
"I don't quite understand, Ivan. What does it mean?" Alyosha, who had been listening in silence, said with a smile. "Is it simply a wild fantasy, or a mistake on the part of the old man- some impossible quid pro quo?"
"Take it as the last," said Ivan, laughing, "if you are so corrupted by modern realism and can't stand anything fantastic. If you like it to be a case of mistaken identity, let it be so. It is true," he went on, laughing, "the old man was ninety, and he might well be crazy over his set idea. He might have been struck by the appearance of the Prisoner. It might, in fact, be simply his ravings, the delusion of an old man of ninety, over-excited by the auto da fe of a hundred heretics the day before. But does it matter to us after all whether it was a mistake of identity or a wild fantasy? All that matters is that the old man should speak out, that he should speak openly of what he has thought in silence for ninety years."
"And the Prisoner too is silent? Does He look at him and not say a word?"
"That's inevitable in any case," Ivan laughed again. "The old man has told Him He hasn't the right to add anything to what He has said of old. One may say it is the most fundamental feature of Roman Catholicism, in my opinion at least. 'All has been given by Thee to the Pope,' they say, 'and all, therefore, is still in the Pope's hands, and there is no need for Thee to come now at all. Thou must not meddle for the time, at least.' That's how they speak and write too- the Jesuits, at any rate. I have read it myself in the works of their theologians. 'Hast Thou the right to reveal to us one of the mysteries of that world from which Thou hast come?' my old man asks Him, and answers the question for Him. 'No, Thou hast not; that Thou mayest not add to what has been said of old, and mayest not take from men the freedom which Thou didst exalt when Thou wast on earth. Whatsoever Thou revealest anew will encroach on men's freedom of faith; for it will be manifest as a miracle, and the freedom of their faith was dearer to Thee than anything in those days fifteen hundred years ago. Didst Thou not often say then, "I will make you free"? But now Thou hast seen these "free" men,' the old man adds suddenly, with a pensive smile. 'Yes, we've paid dearly for it,' he goes on, looking sternly at Him, 'but at last we have completed that work in Thy name. For fifteen centuries we have been wrestling with Thy freedom, but now it is ended and over for good. Dost Thou not believe that it's over for good? Thou lookest meekly at me and deignest not even to be wroth with me. But let me tell Thee that now, to-day, people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet. But that has been our doing. Was this what Thou didst? Was this Thy freedom?'"
"I don't understand again." Alyosha broke in. "Is he ironical, is he jesting?"
"Not a bit of it! He claims it as a merit for himself and his Church that at last they have vanquished freedom and have done so to make men happy. 'For now' (he is speaking of the Inquisition, of course) 'for the first time it has become possible to think of the happiness of men. Man was created a rebel; and how can rebels be happy? Thou wast warned,' he says to Him. 'Thou hast had no lack of admonitions and warnings, but Thou didst not listen to those warnings; Thou didst reject the only way by which men might be made happy. But, fortunately, departing Thou didst hand on the work to us. Thou hast promised, Thou hast established by Thy word, Thou hast given to us the right to bind and to unbind, and now, of course, Thou canst not think of taking it away. Why, then, hast Thou come to hinder us?'"
"And what's the meaning of 'no lack of admonitions and warnings'?" asked Alyosha.
"Why, that's the chief part of what the old man must say.
"'The wise and dread spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and non-existence,' the old man goes on, great spirit talked with Thee in the wilderness, and we are told in the books that he "tempted" Thee. Is that so? And could anything truer be said than what he revealed to Thee in three questions and what Thou didst reject, and what in the books is called "the temptation"? And yet if there has ever been on earth a real stupendous miracle, it took place on that day, on the day of the three temptations. The statement of those three questions was itself the miracle. If it were possible to imagine simply for the sake of argument that those three questions of the dread spirit had perished utterly from the books, and that we had to restore them and to invent them anew, and to do so had gathered together all the wise men of the earth- rulers, chief priests, learned men, philosophers, poets- and had set them the task to invent three questions, such as would not only fit the occasion, but express in three words, three human phrases, the whole future history of the world and of humanity- dost Thou believe that all the wisdom of the earth united could have invented anything in depth and force equal to the three questions which were actually put to Thee then by the wise and mighty spirit in the wilderness? From those questions alone, from the miracle of their statement, we can see that we have here to do not with the fleeting human intelligence, but with the absolute and eternal. For in those three questions the whole subsequent history of mankind is, as it were, brought together into one whole, and foretold, and in them are united all the unsolved historical contradictions of human nature. At the time it could not be so clear, since the future was unknown; but now that fifteen hundred years have passed, we see that everything in those three questions was so justly divined and foretold, and has been so truly fulfilled, that nothing can be added to them or taken from them.
"Judge Thyself who was right- Thou or he who questioned Thee then? Remember the first question; its meaning, in other words, was this: "Thou wouldst go into the world, and art going with empty hands, with some promise of freedom which men in their simplicity and their natural unruliness cannot even understand, which they fear and dread- for nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. But seest Thou these stones in this parched and barren wilderness? Turn them into bread, and mankind will run after Thee like a flock of sheep, grateful and obedient, though for ever trembling, lest Thou withdraw Thy hand and deny them Thy bread." But Thou wouldst not deprive man of freedom and didst reject the offer, thinking, what is that freedom worth if obedience is bought with bread? Thou didst reply that man lives not by bread alone. But dost Thou know that for the sake of that earthly bread the spirit of the earth will rise up against Thee and will strive with Thee and overcome Thee, and all will follow him, crying, "Who can compare with this beast? He has given us fire from heaven!" Dost Thou know that the ages will pass, and humanity will proclaim by the lips of their sages that there is no crime, and therefore no sin; there is only hunger? "Feed men, and then ask of them virtue!" that's what they'll write on the banner, which they will raise against Thee, and with which they will destroy Thy temple. Where Thy temple stood will rise a new building; the terrible tower of Babel will be built again, and though, like the one of old, it will not be finished, yet Thou mightest have prevented that new tower and have cut short the sufferings of men for a thousand years; for they will come back to us after a thousand years of agony with their tower. They will seek us again, hidden underground in the catacombs, for we shall be again persecuted and tortured. They will find us and cry to us, "Feed us, for those who have promised us fire from heaven haven't given it!" And then we shall finish building their tower, for he finishes the building who feeds them. And we alone shall feed them in Thy name, declaring falsely that it is in Thy name. Oh, never, never can they feed themselves without us! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, "Make us your slaves, but feed us." They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man? And if for the sake of the bread of Heaven thousands shall follow Thee, what is to become of the millions and tens of thousands of millions of creatures who will not have the strength to forego the earthly bread for the sake of the heavenly? Or dost Thou care only for the tens of thousands of the great and strong, while the millions, numerous as the sands of the sea, who are weak but love Thee, must exist only for the sake of the great and strong? No, we care for the weak too. They are sinful and rebellious, but in the end they too will become obedient. They will marvel at us and look on us as gods, because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have found so dreadful and to rule over them- so awful it will seem to them to be free. But we shall tell them that we are Thy servants and rule them in Thy name. We shall deceive them again, for we will not let Thee come to us again. That deception will be our suffering, for we shall be forced to lie.
"'This is the significance of the first question in the wilderness, and this is what Thou hast rejected for the sake of that freedom which Thou hast exalted above everything. Yet in this question lies hid the great secret of this world. Choosing "bread," Thou wouldst have satisfied the universal and everlasting craving of humanity- to find someone to worship. So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they've slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, "Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!" And so it will be to the end of the world, even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall down before idols just the same. Thou didst know, Thou couldst not but have known, this fundamental secret of human nature, but Thou didst reject the one infallible banner which was offered Thee to make all men bow down to Thee alone- the banner of earthly bread; and Thou hast rejected it for the sake of freedom and the bread of Heaven. Behold what Thou didst further. And all again in the name of freedom! I tell Thee that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born. But only one who can appease their conscience can take over their freedom. In bread there was offered Thee an invincible banner; give bread, and man will worship thee, for nothing is more certain than bread. But if someone else gains possession of his conscience- Oh! then he will cast away Thy bread and follow after him who has ensnared his conscience. In that Thou wast right. For the secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance. That is true. But what happened? Instead of taking men's freedom from them, Thou didst make it greater than ever! Didst Thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil? Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering. And behold, instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest for ever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic; Thou didst choose what was utterly beyond the strength of men, acting as though Thou didst not love them at all- Thou who didst come to give Thy life for them! Instead of taking possession of men's freedom, Thou didst increase it, and burdened the spiritual kingdom of mankind with its sufferings for ever. Thou didst desire man's free love, that he should follow Thee freely, enticed and taken captive by Thee. In place of the rigid ancient law, man must hereafter with free heart decide for himself what is good and what is evil, having only Thy image before him as his guide. But didst Thou not know that he would at last reject even Thy image and Thy truth, if he is weighed down with the fearful burden of free choice? They will cry aloud at last that the truth is not in Thee, for they could not have been left in greater confusion and suffering than Thou hast caused, laying upon them so many cares and unanswerable problems.
"'So that, in truth, Thou didst Thyself lay the foundation for the destruction of Thy kingdom, and no one is more to blame for it. Yet what was offered Thee? There are three powers, three powers alone, able to conquer and to hold captive for ever the conscience of these impotent rebels for their happiness those forces are miracle, mystery and authority. Thou hast rejected all three and hast set the example for doing so. When the wise and dread spirit set Thee on the pinnacle of the temple and said to Thee, "If Thou wouldst know whether Thou art the Son of God then cast Thyself down, for it is written: the angels shall hold him up lest he fall and bruise himself, and Thou shalt know then whether Thou art the Son of God and shalt prove then how great is Thy faith in Thy Father." But Thou didst refuse and wouldst not cast Thyself down. Oh, of course, Thou didst proudly and well, like God; but the weak, unruly race of men, are they gods? Oh, Thou didst know then that in taking one step, in making one movement to cast Thyself down, Thou wouldst be tempting God and have lost all Thy faith in Him, and wouldst have been dashed to pieces against that earth which Thou didst come to save. And the wise spirit that tempted Thee would have rejoiced. But I ask again, are there many like Thee? And couldst Thou believe for one moment that men, too, could face such a temptation? Is the nature of men such, that they can reject miracle, and at the great moments of their life, the moments of their deepest, most agonising spiritual difficulties, cling only to the free verdict of the heart? Oh, Thou didst know that Thy deed would be recorded in books, would be handed down to remote times and the utmost ends of the earth, and Thou didst hope that man, following Thee, would cling to God and not ask for a miracle. But Thou didst not know that when man rejects miracle he rejects God too; for man seeks not so much God as the miraculous. And as man cannot bear to be without the miraculous, he will create new miracles of his own for himself, and will worship deeds of sorcery and witchcraft, though he might be a hundred times over a rebel, heretic and infidel. Thou didst not come down from the Cross when they shouted to Thee, mocking and reviling Thee, "Come down from the cross and we will believe that Thou art He." Thou didst not come down, for again Thou wouldst not enslave man by a miracle, and didst crave faith given freely, not based on miracle. Thou didst crave for free love and not the base raptures of the slave before the might that has overawed him for ever. But Thou didst think too highly of men therein, for they are slaves, of course, though rebellious by nature. Look round and judge; fifteen centuries have passed, look upon them. Whom hast Thou raised up to Thyself? I swear, man is weaker and baser by nature than Thou hast believed him! Can he, can he do what Thou didst? By showing him so much respect, Thou didst, as it were, cease to feel for him, for Thou didst ask far too much from him- Thou who hast loved him more than Thyself! Respecting him less, Thou wouldst have asked less of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have been lighter. He is weak and vile. What though he is everywhere now rebelling against our power, and proud of his rebellion? It is the pride of a child and a schoolboy. They are little children rioting and barring out the teacher at school. But their childish delight will end; it will cost them dear. Mankind as a whole has always striven to organise a universal state. There have been many great nations with great histories, but the more highly they were developed the more unhappy they were, for they felt more acutely than other people the craving for world-wide union. The great conquerors, Timours and Ghenghis-Khans, whirled like hurricanes over the face of the earth striving to subdue its people, and they too were but the unconscious expression of the same craving for universal unity. Hadst Thou taken the world and Caesar's purple, Thou wouldst have founded the universal state and have given universal peace. For who can rule men if not he who holds their conscience and their bread in his hands? We have taken the sword of Caesar, and in taking it, of course, have rejected Thee and followed him. Oh, ages are yet to come of the confusion of free thought, of their science and cannibalism. For having begun to build their tower of Babel without us, they will end, of course, with cannibalism. But then the beast will crawl to us and lick our feet and spatter them with tears of blood. And we shall sit upon the beast and raise the cup, and on it will be written, "Mystery." But then, and only then, the reign of peace and happiness will come for men. Thou art proud of Thine elect, but Thou hast only the elect, while we give rest to all. And besides, how many of those elect, those mighty ones who could become elect, have grown weary waiting for Thee, and have transferred and will transfer the powers of their spirit and the warmth of their heart to the other camp, and end by raising their free banner against Thee. Thou didst Thyself lift up that banner. But with us all will be happy and will no more rebel nor destroy one another as under Thy freedom. Oh, we shall persuade them that they will only become free when they renounce their freedom to us and submit to us. And shall we be right or shall we be lying? They will be convinced that we are right, for they will remember the horrors of slavery and confusion to which Thy freedom brought them. Freedom, free thought, and science will lead them into such straits and will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves, others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another, while the rest, weak and unhappy, will crawl fawning to our feet and whine to us: "Yes, you were right, you alone possess His mystery, and we come back to you, save us from ourselves!"
"'Receiving bread from us, they will see clearly that we take the bread made by their hands from them, to give it to them, without any miracle. They will see that we do not change the stones to bread, but in truth they will be more thankful for taking it from our hands than for the bread itself! For they will remember only too well that in old days, without our help, even the bread they made turned to stones in their hands, while since they have come back to us, the very stones have turned to bread in their hands. Too, too well will they know the value of complete submission! And until men know that, they will be unhappy. Who is most to blame for their not knowing it?-speak! Who scattered the flock and sent it astray on unknown paths? But the flock will come together again and will submit once more, and then it will be once for all. Then we shall give them the quiet humble happiness of weak creatures such as they are by nature. Oh, we shall persuade them at last not to be proud, for Thou didst lift them up and thereby taught them to be proud. We shall show them that they are weak, that they are only pitiful children, but that childlike happiness is the sweetest of all. They will become timid and will look to us and huddle close to us in fear, as chicks to the hen. They will marvel at us and will be awe-stricken before us, and will be proud at our being so powerful and clever that we have been able to subdue such a turbulent flock of thousands of millions. They will tremble impotently before our wrath, their minds will grow fearful, they will be quick to shed tears like women and children, but they will be just as ready at a sign from us to pass to laughter and rejoicing, to happy mirth and childish song. Yes, we shall set them to work, but in their leisure hours we shall make their life like a child's game, with children's songs and innocent dance. Oh, we shall allow them even sin, they are weak and helpless, and they will love us like children because we allow them to sin. We shall tell them that every sin will be expiated, if it is done with our permission, that we allow them to sin because we love them, and the punishment for these sins we take upon ourselves. And we shall take it upon ourselves, and they will adore us as their saviours who have taken on themselves their sins before God. And they will have no secrets from us. We shall allow or forbid them to live with their wives and mistresses, to have or not to have children according to whether they have been obedient or disobedient- and they will submit to us gladly and cheerfully. The most painful secrets of their conscience, all, all they will bring to us, and we shall have an answer for all. And they will be glad to believe our answer, for it will save them from the great anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present in making a free decision for themselves. And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil. Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity. Though if there were anything in the other world, it certainly would not be for such as they. It is prophesied that Thou wilt come again in victory, Thou wilt come with Thy chosen, the proud and strong, but we will say that they have only saved themselves, but we have saved all. We are told that the harlot who sits upon the beast, and holds in her hands the mystery, shall be put to shame, that the weak will rise up again, and will rend her royal purple and will strip naked her loathsome body. But then I will stand up and point out to Thee the thousand millions of happy children who have known no sin. And we who have taken their sins upon us for their happiness will stand up before Thee and say: "Judge us if Thou canst and darest." Know that I fear Thee not. Know that I too have been in the wilderness, I too have lived on roots and locusts, I too prized the freedom with which Thou hast blessed men, and I too was striving to stand among Thy elect, among the strong and powerful, thirsting "to make up the number." But I awakened and would not serve madness. I turned back and joined the ranks of those who have corrected Thy work. I left the proud and went back to the humble, for the happiness of the humble. What I say to Thee will come to pass, and our dominion will be built up. I repeat, to-morrow Thou shalt see that obedient flock who at a sign from me will hasten to heap up the hot cinders about the pile on which I shall burn Thee for coming to hinder us. For if anyone has ever deserved our fires, it is Thou. To-morrow I shall burn Thee. Dixi.'"*
* I have spoken.
Ivan stopped. He was carried away as he talked, and spoke with excitement; when he had finished, he suddenly smiled.
Alyosha had listened in silence; towards the end he was greatly moved and seemed several times on the point of interrupting, but restrained himself. Now his words came with a rush.
"But... that's absurd!" he cried, flushing. "Your poem is in praise of Jesus, not in blame of Him- as you meant it to be. And who will believe you about freedom? Is that the way to understand it? That's not the idea of it in the Orthodox Church.... That's Rome, and not even the whole of Rome, it's false-those are the worst of the Catholics the Inquisitors, the Jesuits!... And there could not be such a fantastic creature as your Inquisitor. What are these sins of mankind they take on themselves? Who are these keepers of the mystery who have taken some curse upon themselves for the happiness of mankind? When have they been seen? We know the Jesuits, they are spoken ill of, but surely they are not what you describe? They are not that at all, not at all.... They are simply the Romish army for the earthly sovereignty of the world in the future, with the Pontiff of Rome for Emperor... that's their ideal, but there's no sort of mystery or lofty melancholy about it.... It's simple lust of power, of filthy earthly gain, of domination-something like a universal serfdom with them as masters-that's all they stand for. They don't even believe in God perhaps. Your suffering Inquisitor is a mere fantasy."
"Stay, stay," laughed Ivan. "how hot you are! A fantasy you say, let it be so! Of course it's a fantasy. But allow me to say: do you really think that the Roman Catholic movement of the last centuries is actually nothing but the lust of power, of filthy earthly gain? Is that Father Paissy's teaching?"
"No, no, on the contrary, Father Paissy did once say something rather the same as you... but of course it's not the same, not a bit the same," Alyosha hastily corrected himself.
"A precious admission, in spite of your 'not a bit the same.' I ask you why your Jesuits and Inquisitors have united simply for vile material gain? Why can there not be among them one martyr oppressed by great sorrow and loving humanity? You see, only suppose that there was one such man among all those who desire nothing but filthy material gain-if there's only one like my old Inquisitor, who had himself eaten roots in the desert and made frenzied efforts to subdue his flesh to make himself free and perfect. But yet all his life he loved humanity, and suddenly his eyes were opened, and he saw that it is no great moral blessedness to attain perfection and freedom, if at the same time one gains the conviction that millions of God's creatures have been created as a mockery, that they will never be capable of using their freedom, that these poor rebels can never turn into giants to complete the tower, that it was not for such geese that the great idealist dreamt his dream of harmony. Seeing all that he turned back and joined- the clever people. Surely that could have happened?"
"Joined whom, what clever people?" cried Alyosha, completely carried away. "They have no such great cleverness and no mysteries and secrets.... Perhaps nothing but Atheism, that's all their secret. Your Inquisitor does not believe in God, that's his secret!"
"What if it is so! At last you have guessed it. It's perfectly true, it's true that that's the whole secret, but isn't that suffering, at least for a man like that, who has wasted his whole life in the desert and yet could not shake off his incurable love of humanity? In his old age he reached the clear conviction that nothing but the advice of the great dread spirit could build up any tolerable sort of life for the feeble, unruly, 'incomplete, empirical creatures created in jest.' And so, convinced of this, he sees that he must follow the counsel of the wise spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction, and therefore accept lying and deception, and lead men consciously to death and destruction, and yet deceive them all the way so that they may not notice where they are being led, that the poor blind creatures may at least on the way think themselves happy. And note, the deception is in the name of Him in Whose ideal the old man had so fervently believed all his life long. Is not that tragic? And if only one such stood at the head of the whole army 'filled with the lust of power only for the sake of filthy gain'- would not one such be enough to make a tragedy? More than that, one such standing at the head is enough to create the actual leading idea of the Roman Church with all its armies and Jesuits, its highest idea. I tell you frankly that I firmly believe that there has always been such a man among those who stood at the head of the movement. Who knows, there may have been some such even among the Roman Popes. Who knows, perhaps the spirit of that accursed old man who loves mankind so obstinately in his own way, is to be found even now in a whole multitude of such old men, existing not by chance but by agreement, as a secret league formed long ago for the guarding of the mystery, to guard it from the weak and the unhappy, so as to make them happy. No doubt it is so, and so it must be indeed. I fancy that even among the Masons there's something of the same mystery at the bottom, and that that's why the Catholics so detest the Masons as their rivals breaking up the unity of the idea, while it is so essential that there should be one flock and one shepherd.... But from the way I defend my idea I might be an author impatient of your criticism. Enough of it."
"You are perhaps a Mason yourself!" broke suddenly from Alyosha. "You don't believe in God," he added, speaking this time very sorrowfully. He fancied besides that his brother was looking at him ironically. "How does your poem end?" he asked, suddenly looking down. "Or was it the end?"
"I meant to end it like this. When the Inquisitor ceased speaking he waited some time for his Prisoner to answer him. His silence weighed down upon him. He saw that the Prisoner had listened intently all the time, looking gently in his face and evidently not wishing to reply. The old man longed for him to say something, however bitter and terrible. But He suddenly approached the old man in silence and softly kissed him on his bloodless aged lips. That was all his answer. The old man shuddered. His lips moved. He went to the door, opened it, and said to Him: 'Go, and come no more... come not at all, never, never!' And he let Him out into the dark alleys of the town. The Prisoner went away."
"And the old man?"
"The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man adheres to his idea."
"And you with him, you too?" cried Alyosha, mournfully.
Ivan laughed.
"Why, it's all nonsense, Alyosha. It's only a senseless poem of a senseless student, who could never write two lines of verse. Why do you take it so seriously? Surely you don't suppose I am going straight off to the Jesuits, to join the men who are correcting His work? Good Lord, it's no business of mine. I told you, all I want is to live on to thirty, and then... dash the cup to the ground!"
"But the little sticky leaves, and the precious tombs, and the blue sky, and the woman you love! How will you live, how will you love them?" Alyosha cried sorrowfully. "With such a hell in your heart and your head, how can you? No, that's just what you are going away for, to join them... if not, you will kill yourself, you can't endure it!"
"There is a strength to endure everything," Ivan said with a cold smile.
"The strength of the Karamazovs- the strength of the Karamazov baseness."
"To sink into debauchery, to stifle your soul with corruption, yes?"
"Possibly even that... only perhaps till I am thirty I shall escape it, and then-"
"How will you escape it? By what will you escape it? That's impossible with your ideas."
"In the Karamazov way, again."
"'Everything is lawful,' you mean? Everything is lawful, is that it?"
Ivan scowled, and all at once turned strangely pale.
"Ah, you've caught up yesterday's phrase, which so offended Muisov- and which Dmitri pounced upon so naively and paraphrased!" he smiled queerly. "Yes, if you like, 'everything is lawful' since the word has been said, I won't deny it. And Mitya's version isn't bad."
Alyosha looked at him in silence.
"I thought that going away from here I have you at least," Ivan said suddenly, with unexpected feeling; "but now I see that there is no place for me even in your heart, my dear hermit. The formula, 'all is lawful,' I won't renounce- will you renounce me for that, yes?"
Alyosha got up, went to him and softly kissed him on the lips.
"That's plagiarism," cried Ivan, highly delighted. "You stole that from my poem. Thank you though. Get up, Alyosha, it's time we were going, both of us."
They went out, but stopped when they reached the entrance of the restaurant.
"Listen, Alyosha," Ivan began in a resolute voice, "if I am really able to care for the sticky little leaves I shall only love them, remembering you. It's enough for me that you are somewhere here, and I shan't lose my desire for life yet. Is that enough for you? Take it as a declaration of love if you like. And now you go to the right and I to the left. And it's enough, do you hear, enough. I mean even if I don't go away to-morrow (I think I certainly shall go) and we meet again, don't say a word more on these subjects. I beg that particularly. And about Dmitri too, I ask you specially, never speak to me again," he added, with sudden irritation; "it's all exhausted, it has all been said over and over again, hasn't it? And I'll make you one promise in return for it. When at thirty, I want to 'dash the cup to the ground,' wherever I may be I'll come to have one more talk with you, even though it were from America, you may be sure of that. I'll come on purpose. It will be very interesting to have a look at you, to see what you'll be by that time. It's rather a solemn promise, you see. And we really may be parting for seven years or ten. Come, go now to your Pater Seraphicus, he is dying. If he dies without you, you will be angry with me for having kept you. Good-bye, kiss me once more; that's right, now go."
Ivan turned suddenly and went his way without looking back. It was just as Dmitri had left Alyosha the day before, though the parting had been very different. The strange resemblance flashed like an arrow through Alyosha's mind in the distress and dejection of that moment. He waited a little, looking after his brother. He suddenly noticed that Ivan swayed as he walked and that his right shoulder looked lower than his left. He had never noticed it before. But all at once he turned too, and almost ran to the monastery. It was nearly dark, and he felt almost frightened; something new was growing up in him for which he could not account. The wind had risen again as on the previous evening, and the ancient pines murmured gloomily about him when he entered the hermitage copse. He almost ran. "Pater Seraphicus- he got that name from somewhere- where from?" Alyosha wondered. "Ivan, poor Ivan, and when shall I see you again?... Here is the hermitage. Yes, yes, that he is, Pater Seraphicus, he will save me- from him and for ever!"
Several times afterwards he wondered how he could, on leaving Ivan, so completely forget his brother Dmitri, though he had that morning, only a few hours before, so firmly resolved to find him and not to give up doing so, even should he be unable to return to the monastery that night.

The Moon waxes amd all things fall apart......


The Moon waxes over America. Last time it was like that it was March 31 1866. The Klu Klux Klan was launched and 150 years later ^Hope not Hate" prepare a film that will expose the methods and rituals if the alt right...as the moon grows the similarities appear and form reborn ghosts ; revenants of prejudice and bigots, misogynists and frightened bitter men shift uneasily as binary certainties dissolve into air.

We hear of a second FBI dossier that examines Russian links between Trump and the Russians. As Putin discovers religion and abolishes anti domestic violence legislation. He declares homosexuality anti Russian and moves ever closer to the 70 year old toddler with a thin skin and a larger ego. As Trump and Putin share prejudice and merge indistinguishable from one another, 35 bigots of the Brexit right and ten 16th century Calvinists rule over us and determine the myth of sovereignty. Within Labour the left march on reforming it . They make good the hope of the old Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. Yet the growth of Momentum is so far removed from the old male sexists of militant that a new party is almost created. There is still a way to go there must be now a reform of the Welsh and Scottish Labour Party. The sense of a Welsh and Scottish party must now happen. Vince Cable and the Liberal Democrats look on irrelevant, impotent and insignificant. In Wales the bitter old men seek to create a Welsh speaking UKIP where men are men, woman invisible and sexuality is merely heterosexual or not talked about.

The demand for a second referendum grows and the demands for a Norway plus Brexit deal seems to be emerging for many to coalesce around. Yanis V endorses this plan as the NHS becomes the central issue in voters minds.Bit by bit Brexit slips down the political consciousness charts as the blue kipper agenda burns consumed and fades under the heat of the left.

For the first in nearly 50 years the Left have the momentum. Sexual harassment and sexual assault is at last challenged and it's purveyors and apologists are shamed, exposed and confronted. Is the Blue Moon a metaphor, a metonymy or synchronicity that points to change.? Is it a shift in the zeitgeist, the collective unconscious? Can it be explained culturally, by paradigm shift or even astrologically?
Is it sociological? Does the collective unconscious allow the return of the repressed? Is Trump and Farage the last bitter gap of the bitter men? Are these events an example of correlation or causation? In my own life a shift of political loyalty occurs. It feels like a coming home..yet it is through the door in to the rose garden and I come home but have never been here before.. as above so below and the moon still grows..and as I wax lyrically new possibilities, new hopes and new awareness develops both in quantitative and qualitative ways as both the world and I speed up the trajectory and gear of the ever becoming now...

Of the academic pretence of UKIP leaders



Of the academic pretence of UKIP leaders.. The Henry Bolton qualification claim story runs on. It fascinates me that a party of UKIPs nature should even pretend that they matter. UKIP spends it's time rubbishing institutions that provide critical education or thought. It values qualifications that are "practical" and do not challenge the status quo. I notice that Bolton's claims were in having degrees in " Military Studies" from Sandhurst and "Leadershiip" from somewhere else. Note the word Sandhurst is crucial it implies the establishment, convention and behaviour...in fact it's the opposite of every decision and judgement he has made. It reveals psychologically that while he hates leftie academics he still craves for conventional qualifications. At the heart of the Farage and skipper crusade was a dislike of the specialist, of the well read and of those who don't have simple answers for complex issues. They dislike those who change their mind and those who are tentative and know that questions are a process and not a cop out. Bolton craves acceptance and yet knows that he does not come up to scratch but desperately wants to.

Those of us who read and study do course after course not because we wish to impress or be accepted. We do it because we are thirsty for knowledge and tbat we want to challenge our prejudices.blind spots and our ignorance. We like to talk debate think critically and challenge. It matters to us not a jot what letters it gives us what status it provides. In the end the race is with ourselves in an attempt to live a life that is examined in all its forms and meanings. We know that ignorance in ourselves is a barier to self knowledge. We can challenge ourselves and lift the knowledge of humanity as a whole.

I can't help feeling that the bluekipper approach is a selfish one that is just about work and power and a rather useless attempt to boost a fragility of identity and self. I hear in Radio 4 that a Killer Whale has been taught to copy human speech . It a rather like that for the right..education and knowledge are the pretence of self while the killer whale lurks within. At the Penrhos bus stop I meet Alfie the Labrador I take a picture of him as he sits. And I suspect that Alfie knows he is being admired but he has no concept of a photograph rather like the bluekippers who have no real understanding of education; learning and hunger for knowledge. I am told that Alfie has a Phd in advanced nasal awareness and empathy. I trust Alfie's practical skills infinitely more than the academic claims of Bolton and Nuttal. However I will give Farage the chameleon's skill of blending in and being all things in all environments...yep he always was as cold as a Lizard and as ambitious as Lucifer.

Tuesday 30 January 2018

“You can believe in whatsoever you like, but the truth remains the truth, no matter how sweet the lie may taste.” ― Michael Bassey Johnson

 “You can believe in whatsoever you like, but the truth remains the truth, no matter how sweet the lie may taste.”
Michael Bassey Johnson

 

The Heavenly Warrior Defeats the Beast

11 I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and wages war. 12 His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. 13 He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God. 14 The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. 15 Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.”[a] He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. 16 On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written:
king of kings and lord of lords.
17 And I saw an angel standing in the sun, who cried in a loud voice to all the birds flying in midair, “Come, gather together for the great supper of God, 18 so that you may eat the flesh of kings, generals, and the mighty, of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all people, free and slave, great and small.”
19 Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered together to wage war against the rider on the horse and his army. 20 But the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who had performed the signs on its behalf. With these signs he had deluded those who had received the mark of the beast and worshiped its image. The two of them were thrown alive into the fiery lake of burning sulfur. 21 The rest were killed with the sword coming out of the mouth of the rider on the horse, and all the birds gorged themselves on their flesh.

Waiting for "Brexot//some thoughts on Godot


https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2018/01/30/arguing-for-a-norway-plus-brexit-from-the-perspective-of-a-committed-corbyn-supporter-audio-of-address-at-the-house-of-commons-29-jan-2018/
Waiting for "Brexot" ..https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot
.The blue moon waxes as the right raves and dies. .So we all look to the future. The hard moronic; vicious Brexuteers begin to realise that you can check out anytime but you can never leave . The party claiming sovereignty gives it all away during the transition period we won't have any say in anything that the EU decide in the 21 months of transition. What is the point any more in this government ? We lose sovereignty that the 35 headbangers of the lunatic Brexit right lead us Alice like into a perverse and Brechtian wonderland. The truth is that Theresa May can no longer deliver anything any more. She has ruled too long...the NHS is now the major issue and Labour are knocking at the door..the Kippers are dead and the left prepare a campaign of action against the coming visit of Trump.

 A dieing government condemned by ego and the spectre of Trump. A party of brutality supported by the relics of 16th century Calvinism. The Tory membership old bigoted and outnumbered 7 to 1 by Labour. The end comes now , a vibrant left is reborn , a Labour party about to be reformed in the image of Jeremy Corbyn. The left gas soon control of Labour and New Labour seem as imaginary as the Unicorn or the Gryphon. As the paradigm shifts and the interpretation changes. In other areas sexism, patriarchy misogyny transphobia and gay discrimination dissolves into air.. all things change and old certainties are removed.. the blue moon waxes as old forms break down. This is the return of the repressed...the liberation of the left out.. and an understanding of the nature of change...this is enantiodromia the establishment is terrified....and a new world waits to be born...and there is a world to win...a spectre is haunting the UK ..we will be seeing demonsteations against tbe Trymp visit that will make 68 and the poll tax demonstrations look like a walk in tbe park...and I suspect we are never going to leave.the EU .i did tell you so. I really did hehe..

“America first” also has a darker recent history



The phrase “America first” also has a darker recent history  was associated with opponents of the U.S. entering World War II.he America First Committee (AFC), which was founded in 1940, opposed any U.S. involvement in World War II, and was harshly critical of the Roosevelt administration, which it accused of pressing the U.S. toward war. At its peak, it had 800,000 members across the country, included socialists, conservatives, and some of the most prominent Americans from some of the most prominent families. There was future President Ford; Sargent Shriver, who’d go on to lead the Peace Corps; and Potter Stewart, the future U.S. Supreme Court justice. It was funded by the families who owned Sears-Roebuck and the Chicago Tribune, but also counted among its ranks prominent anti-Semites of the day It had to remove from its executive committee not only the notoriously anti-Semitic Henry Ford but also Avery Brundage, the former chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee who had prevented two Jewish runners from the American track team in Berlin in 1936 from running in the finals of the 4x100 relay,” Susan Dunn, the historian, wrote on CNN last April.But charges of anti-Semitism persisted, and were compounded with perhaps one of the most infamous speeches given by one of AFC’s most famous spokesmen, Charles Lindbergh. In a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 11, 1941, Lindbergh expressed sympathy for the persecution Jews faced in Germany, but suggested Jews were advocating the U.S. to enter a war that was not in the national interest.“Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences,” Lindbergh said. “Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”He insisted he was not “attacking either the Jewish or the British people,” but “I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.”

The speech was labeled as anti-Semitic. Dorothy Thompson, a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, who had reported from Europe, wrote: “I am absolutely certain that Lindbergh is pro-Nazi. I am absolutely certain that Lindbergh foresees a new party along Nazi lines.” Those sentiments were echoed widely.Three months after Lindbergh’s speech, on December 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, prompting the U.S. to enter World War II. Three days later, the AFC disbanded.But echoes of “America first” have persisted in the years and decades since. Most recently it was employed by Pat Buchanan, who used it as the slogan for his presidential run in 2000 on a Reform Party ticket. Buchanan, who has labeled World War II an “unnecessary war,” had also campaigned against free trade. Indeed, Trump, who sought the Reform Party nomination at the time, called Buchanan “a Hitler lover.”NPR’s Ron Elving argues that “assuming he is aware of at least some of that history, Trump is demonstrating his confidence that his adoption of a phrase can supersede its past.” The president may say he wants “America first” to mean “we will not be ripped off anymore,” but shaking off the phrase’s ugly past, especially after an inauguration speech that offered little outreach to the millions of Americans who fear what his presidency may bring, could prove difficult.

Monday 29 January 2018

Blue moon Rising........



And we near the end of January. There is a super blue moon on Wednesday. The last time it was like this was January 1868. The USA was riven in two after the American Civil War. The freeing of the slaves left bigotry everywhere. 150 years later the USA finds itself as bitterly divided.


 A man with the maturity of a child, a large ego and a thin skin makes a curious contrast with Lincoln. In the Europe of 1868 three large powers Germany, Austria- Hungary and Russia dominated eastern and central Europe. Italy neared unification .it was a world haunted by nationalism and by the relatives of Queen Victoria. It was a world of Imperial powers and an era of colonialism..and some idiots on the right think it a wonderful time. An age of bigotry, racism and fear....a bit like today..

The Holocaust happened. .the cowerd only attacks when he feels secure...

The Holocaust happened. .the cowerd only attacks when he feels secure...
"Every age has its own fascism."
- Primo Levi, survivor of Auschwitz



 The film" Denial" on Saturday about David Irvings libeal case agaibst Professor Lipstadt concerning the holacaust. It depresses ne when i still come across anti Semetic posts. I have seen on local Facebook pages absolute ignorance and have seen a more disturbed trend where old conspiracy theories about " World Finance" and the Rothschild are reheated conspiracies that go back to the " Protocols of the Elders of Zion" There are many eho fail to understand of course between being anti Zionist and anti Semetic and President Trumps actions over Jerusalem will confuse others even more...

Only a year ago I was forced to debate with a young man on the premise he made that Hitler was a Socialist. While the young man in question is not anti semetic..his premise fed into this rehabilitation of Hitler dicourse that feeds more subtely into this alt right agenda....for those interewsted here ius the link for the debate.....https://rodolfowalshglasses.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/the-resistible-rise-of-arturo-mackenzie.html


Just recently i saw a post from someone who had a Polish surname going on about the Rothschuild conspiracy. He had no idea that he had fallen for a far right agenda and seemed ignorant of the fate of the vast Jewish population of Eastern Europe. Those who know no history are deemed to repeat it. So I am forced to provide a long detailed piece on the stupidity and malice of the deniers. If they can take down the holacaust and say there is room to challenge its existence they build an agenda that is a nightmare.

David Irving is a well know figure on the political right. He is a prominent speaker at far right wing and neo Nazi meetings. The trial led to a destruction of his reputation as a historian and revealed him to be anti semtic and racist. There is no doubt that the Holacaust happened and yet many demiers of its reality seek to question its very existence.and be apologists for Hitler and the Nazis.
One must always ask what does anyone gain from a particular position? Irvings position was by debting the reality of auswitz. If he couls show that Austwitz was false he could question the whole of the nazi Killing nachine. Auswitz was originally built as a prison camp and then later was cobverted to a concentration camp filled with gas chambers. Yo the far right auswitx seemed a meabs to deby the sydtematic mudder of six million jews. To the far right this is a propganda oppurtinity
Auschwitz-Birkenau is the most infamous of all Nazi camps, and we commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January, the date of its liberation by Soviet troops. Over 1.1 million people were murdered at this site, over 90% of the victims being Jewish.
Auschwitz was a network of several camps, combining forced labour and extermination camps. In late summer 1941 the Nazis began experimenting with a new killing method – a poison gas called Zyklon B. Increasingly larger poison gas chambers were constructed at the camp as the war progressed, after Auschwitz-Birkenau was selected as the main killing site for European Jews – because of its location and access to the rail network. In 1942 Jews from across Europe began to be transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The peak of the slaughter occurred in 1944, when more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in just two months.
Arrival in the camp started with a selection process – men, women and children were removed from the trains and had their valuables taken away. Men were separated from women and children. A Nazi physician would quickly assess whether each person was healthy enough to survive forced labour, and based on this visual inspection, individuals were sent to the camps or to the gas chambers. The disabled, elderly, pregnant women, babies, young children or the sick, stood little chance of surviving this selection.

Those who were selected for death were led to the gas chambers, and, in order to prevent panic, some victims were told they were going to the showers to remove the lice from their bodies. They were made to hand over any remaining valuables and remove all of their clothes. After being ushered into the gas chambers, the doors would be shut and bolted. The poison took up to 20 minutes to kill those in the chambers. Camp prisoners were then forced by the SS guards to remove the corpses from the chambers and to remove hair, gold teeth and fillings. The corpses were then burned in crematoria

It never happened

Holocaust deniers are people who contend that the Holocaust - the attempt by Nazi Germany to annihilate European Jewry during World War Two - never happened. According to the deniers, the Nazis did not murder six million Jews, the notion of homicidal gas chambers is a myth, and any deaths of Jews that did occur under the Nazis were the result of wartime privations, not of systematic persecution and state-organised mass murder.
Deniers dismiss all assertions that the Holocaust took place as conscious fabrications, or as psychotic delusions. Some even claim that Hitler was the best friend the Jews had in Germany, and that he actively worked to protect them. According to deniers, Jews have perpetrated this hoax about the Holocaust on the world in order to gain political and financial advantage, and it was in fact Germany that was the true victim in World War Two.


Documented genocide

Holocaust denial is a form of anti-Semitism, positing that Jews have concocted a giant myth for their own ends. It persists despite the fact that the Holocaust is one of the best documented genocides in history, with a wide array of evidence documenting virtually every aspect of it.
For example, approximately a million Jews on the Eastern Front were shot during 1941-42, and buried in large pits. This is known partly because the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that coordinated these massacres, prepared detailed reports on the murders - reports that contained precise death tolls, broken down into men, women and children.
These reports were sent to high ranking officials in Berlin, and to army, police and SS officers, as well as diplomats and even prominent industrialists. This wide distribution suggests that the perpetrators felt no shame at what they did. Had these killings not been part of Berlin's policy, the reports would never have been so widely distributed.
Deniers argue that evidence such as this was forged, after the end of World War Two, by people working for world Jewry. They claim that forgers created these and other documents - complete with complex internal reference markings, on typewriters that perfectly matched those used by the various German units said to have written the documents - and then planted thousands of these perfect forgeries in numerous different archival collections (in exactly the right file and in precisely the right sequence) all over Europe.
Not only is such a scenario fantastically improbable, it fails to explain why these supposedly incredibly talented forgers did not succeed in producing the one piece of paper that deniers demand as 'proof' that genocide took place under the Third Reich - an order from Hitler authorising the destruction of the Jews.

David Irvings books are selling dramatically in America and recently we have seeb the rise of new denials of the Holacaust. Recently social media is awash with claims suggesting that bot iomly was Hitler was unawere of the

The Holocaust happened. .the cowerd only threatened when he feels secure
It is a fact that some six million European Jews were systematically murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945 in a state-sponsored program of genocide.
The National Socialists came to power in part by convincing Germans that many of the country’s problems were caused by its Jewish minority, whom they labeled an “inferior race” and depicted as depraved and animal-like in anti-Semitic propaganda. They named their plan for exterminating the Jews the “Final Solution.” Their implementation of a plan to exterminate the Jews — the “Final Solution,” they called it — has been well documented, starting with the 3,000 tons of confiscated of Third Reich paperwork presented in evidence at the Nuremberg trials immediately after the war.
Yet, despite universal agreement among historians about all of the above (“No serious historian questions that the Holocaust took place,” the American Historical Association affirmed in a 1991 statement), there exists a tiny but vocal group of naysayers — conspiracy theorists, actually, given that they claim that “Jewish-controlled” academic and media institutions “invented” the Holocaust — whose mission it is to sow doubt that the genocide of European Jews ever happened. They are known (to everyone but themselves) as Holocaust deniers.
Here are some basic tenets of Holocaust denialism (via the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum):
“Holocaust denial” describes attempts to negate the established facts of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. Common denial assertions are: that the murder of six million Jews during World War II never occurred; that the Nazis had no official policy or intention to exterminate the Jews; and that the poison gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp never existed.
A newer trend is the distortion of the facts of the Holocaust. Common distortions include, for example, assertions that: the figure of six million Jewish deaths is an exaggeration; deaths in the concentration camps were the results of disease or starvation but not policy; and that the diary of Anne Frank is a forgery.
The deniers aren’t known for their subtlety. “I don’t see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz,” saidauthor, anti-Semite, and Holocaust denier David Irving in 1991. He continued:
It’s baloney, it’s a legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labor camp and large numbers of people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the War, why believe the rest of the baloney?
I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.
At a 2006 conference of Holocaust deniers in Iran hosted by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the country’s former interior minister said, without irony, “All the studies and research carried out so far have proven that there is no reason to believe that the Holocaust ever occurred and that it is only a tale.”
Others at the conference admitted the killings took place, but claimed the numbers were inflated:
Frederick Toben, an Australian who in 1999 served jail time in Germany for his Holocaust views, told the conference in no uncertain terms that the number of Jews killed in Nazi death camps — an estimated 6 million — is a myth.
”The number of victims at the Auschwitz concentration camp could be about 2,007,” Toben said. ”The railroad to the camp did not have enough capacity to transfer large numbers of Jews.”
Don’t mistake these for sincere historical quibbles. They are direct misstatements of the evidentiary record — a record whose existence, again, we owe in large part to the Nazis themselves.
“Extermination, we’re doing it”
Both propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and SS chief Heinrich Himmler, for example, admitted there was an official plan to exterminate the Jewish population. “The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them,” Goebbels wrote in his diary in 1942. “Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 percent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only 40 percent can be used for forced labor.”
Chillingly, Himmler said this in a 1943 speech in Posen, Poland:
I refer now to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. This is one of those things that is easily said: “the Jewish people are being exterminated,” says every Party member, “quite true, it’s part of our plans, the elimination of the Jews, extermination, we’re doing it.”
No one left behind a ledger sheet tallying the precise number of Jews “exterminated” but that doesn’t mean the figure can’t be accurately estimated based on existing evidence such as census reports and other government records that survived Nazi efforts to destroy them at the end of the war:
No personnel were available or inclined to count Jewish deaths until the very end of World War II and the Nazi regime. Hence, total estimates are calculated only after the end of the war and are based on demographic loss data and the documents of the perpetrators. Though fragmentary, these sources provide essential figures from which to make calculations.
Rooted in anti-Semitism
Some Holocaust deniers are self-styled “historical revisionists” — meaning they present themselves as earnest re-interpreters of real historical data whose goal is simply to reveal the whole truth — but it’s a misnomer. Scratch the surface of your typical Holocaust denier and you will find an anti-Semite. The notion, widespread among deniers, that Jews “invented” or “exaggerated” the Holocaust to further their own interests hearkens back to a centuries-old conspiracy theory positing a secret “cabal” of wealthy Jewish bankers seeking absolute world domination.
“The Holocaust is the device used as the pillar of Zionist imperialism, Zionist aggression, Zionist terror and Zionist murder,” former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke has said (while dismissing the claim that the Nazis used gas chambers to kill Jews as a “myth”).
In 2013, England’s most infamous Holocaust denier, David Irving (quoted above saying more people died in Ted Kennedy’s car than at Auschwitz), was asked if it weren’t true that Jews “run the world”:
Irving, who strongly denies being anti-semitic, replies: “Well sometimes people stand up and fight back.”
He says Jews in America control all media, banks and that “they dare not appoint any leading person in the White House to ministerial positions involving money without him being a Jew. Look where that got them in Germany in 1933. And they will not learn the lesson, they all think it won’t happen again.

“Then they ask why they are so hated.”

Irving says he hears people say Jews are hated because they crucified Jesus Christ. “I say if you walk into a pub in Wapping and ask people why they don’t like the Jews they don’t mention Jesus. They mention other reasons. They’re worried about their mortgages and the banks … that’s the reason why the Jews get hated.”
It’s telling that Irving denies hating Jews while repeatedly observing that “Jews are hated,” then blames them for it.

The rise of “soft denialism”

There is a relatively new form of Holocaust denialism — dubbed “soft denialism” because its adherents don’t deny the Holocaust outright but attempt to trivialize it instead — whose rise seems to have followed the same curve as that of right-wing nationalist movements worldwide in recent years.
The most prevalent form of soft denialism revolves around the claim that the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany is given preferential treatment over the persecution of other minority groups by the same regime. But this is a moral deflection. It’s a fact that the Reich persecuted and killed millions of others in the name of “Aryan superiority” — Roma (“gypsies”), Serbs, Poles, individuals with disabilities, individuals perceived as “homosexual,” socialists, communists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, to name only some of the targeted minorities — but this is no justification for eliding Hitler’s decades-long vendettaagainst the Jewish people in particular, a vendetta which very nearly ended in their complete eradication.

This essay will attempt to provide a brief historical review of Holocaust denial. For an in-depth treatment of this question, the reader is referred to two major works on the subject: Lucy S. Dawidowicz,Historians and the Holocaust and Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. The material in the present essay draws heavily from these two excellent works. Here I am concerned with the historical background and origins of the movement. Primary attention will be given to Paul Rassinier, Harry Elmer Barnes and Austin J. App.
The very first Holocaust deniers were the Nazis themselves. As it became increasingly obvious that the war was not going well, Himmler instructed his camp commandants to destroy records, crematoria and other sign of mass destruction of human beings. He was especially adamant with regard to those Jews still alive who could testify regarding their experiences in the camps. In April, 1945, he signed an official order (which still exists in his own handwriting) that the camps would not be surrendered and that no prisoner "fall into the hands of the enemies alive." Apparently Himmler knew that the "Final Solution" would be viewed as a moral outrage by the rest of the world.
Historian Kenneth Stern (1993:6) suggests that many top SS leaders left Germany at the end of the war and began immediately the process of using their propaganda skills to rewrite history. Shortly after the war, denial materials began to appear. One of the first was Friedrich Meinecke's The German Catastrophe, (1950) in which he offered a brief defense for the German people by blaming industrialists, bureaucrats and the Pan-German League (an essentially antisemitic organization begun by von Schoerner in Vienna prior to young Adolf Hitler's arrival there) for the outbreak of World War I and Hitler's rise to power. Meinecke was openly antisemitic; nonetheless he was a respected historian.

There is a fairly clear historical development of contemporary Holocaust denial. Surprisingly, its roots extend far beyond the Holocaust itself and may be found in the work of historical revisionists in Europe, principally France, and in the United States who set out to absolve Germany of responsibility for World War I.

Paul Rassinier, formerly a "political" prisoner at Buchenwald, was one of the first European writers to come to the defense of the Nazi regime with regard to their "extermination" policy. In 1945, Rassinier was elected as a Socialist member of the French National Assembly, a position which he held for less than two years before resigning for health reasons. Shortly after the war he began reading reports of extermination in Nazi death camps by means of gas chambersand crematoria. His response was, essentially, "I was there and there were no gas chambers." It should be remembered that he was confined to Buchenwald, the first major concentration camp created by the Hitler regime (1937) and that it was located in Germany. Buchenwald was not primarily a "death camp" and there were no gas chambers there. He was arrested and incarcerated in 1943. By that time the focus of the "Final Solution" had long since shifted to the Generalgouvernement of Poland. Rassinier used his own experience as a basis for denying the existence of gas chambers and mass extermination at other camps. Given his experience and his antisemitism, he embarked upon a writing career which, over the next 30 years, would place him at the center of Holocaust denial. In 1948 he published Le Passage de la Ligne, Crossing the Line, and, in 1950, The Holocaust Story and the Lie of Ulysses. In these early works he attempted to make two main arguments: first, while some atrocities were committed by the Germans, they have been greatly exaggerated and, second, that the Germans were not the perpetrators of these atrocities -- the inmates who ran the camps instigated them. In 1964 he published The Drama of European Jewry, a work committed to debunking what he called "the genocide myth." The major focus of this book was the denial of the gas chambers in the concentration camps, the denial of the widely accepted figure of 6 million Jews exterminated and the discounting of the testimony of the perpetrators following the war. These three have emerged in recent years as central tenets of Holocaust denial. While none of these arguments were new, Rassinier did introduce a new twist to Holocaust denial. Having argued that the genocidal extermination of 6 million Jews is a myth, he asks: Who perpetrated the myth, and for what purpose. His answer: the Zionists as part of a massive Jewish/Soviet/Allied conspiricay to "swindle" Germany out of billions of dollars in reparations. This is a theme which would later be taken up by Austin J. App and by the current crop of Holocaust deniers.

In 1977, the above works by Rassinier were re-published by the Noontide Press under the title, Debunking the Genocide Myth. The Noontide Press is the primary outlet for the Institute of Historical Review. Toward the end of his life he wrote two additional pieces, one on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (held in 1961) and one on the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. Both of these were translated by American historian, and admirer of Rassinier, Harry Elmer Barnes. These materials have been published by Steppingstones Publishing and are regularly advertised for sale by the Institute For Historical Review. Thus, the work of Rassinier takes its place in contemporary denial literature.
The claims of Rassinier can be easily refuted and have received full treatment by Deborah Lipstadt and other reputable historians. Briefly, however, Rassinier offers little evidence for most of his claims, he totally disregards any documentary evidence that would contradict his claims and attempts to explain away the testimony of survivors as"emotional" exaggeration and the testimony of accused war criminals as the result of "coercion." For instance, he completely ignores Hitler's stated agenda in Mein Kampf (1923) and his famous and oft-quoted speech of 1939 before the German Reichstag:
Today I want to be a prophet once more: If international finance Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed once more in plunging nations into another world war, the consequence will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
Similarly, he disregards the speeches of Himmler, such as the address given to the leaders of the SS in 1943:
I also want to talk with you, quite frankly, on a very grave matter. Among yourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly....I mean the clearing out of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. (Quoted in Jackson Speilvogel, Hitler and Nazi Germany, 3rd ed., 1996:282).
Similarly, he disregards the Wansee Protocol which stands as clear evidence of an official Nazi policy of extermination.
As Lipstadt observes, the primary link between these early revisionists and modern deniers was the U.S. historian, Harry Elmer Barnes,the first American historian to take up the theme of Holocaust denial. During World War I he was an outspoken, even vitriolic, supporter of the Allied effort. After the war, however, he became highly pro-German and seemed intent on defending the German people against any responsibility for the war. While he blamed France and Russia for starting the war, he stopped short, in his early work, of blaming the Jews, as Kaiser Wilhelm had done. Barnes early work was fairly respectable historical analysis despite the fact that his agenda was a clear denunciation of U.S. foreign policy during World War I. These themes appear strongly in his, The Genesis of the Great War, 1926, In Quest of Truth and Justice, 1928 and World Politics in Modern Civilization, 1930. His two-volume The History of Western Civilization was widely adopted at prestigious schools throughout the United States. It was not until the late 1950s that his analysis extended to the issue of atrocities against Jews. This shift in his agenda coincides with his discovery of French popular historian, Paul Rassinier, and the American revisionist, David Leslie Hoggan.
Hoggan's dissertation at Harvard was a revisionist work in which he blamed Britain for World War II and presented Hitler as a victim of Allied manipulation. Throughout the work, Hitler is presented as conciliatory, reasonable and sincere in his attempts to avoid war. Barnes encouraged Hoggan to have the work published. After extensive re-writing, it was published, in Germany in 1961, under the title, The Forced War. The title reveals the thrust of the book -- World War II was forced upon Hitler. An important concern of the book was to downplay Nazi atrocities against Jews.

As historian, Deborah Lipstadt, observes:

Hoggan's book, on which Barnes heaped accolades, is full of such misrepresentations in relation to British and Polish foreign policy and concerning Germany's treatment of the Jews. His dissertation contains few such observations. Barnes read the dissertation before it was turned into a book and was in contact with Hoggan for a full six years before the book was published. Barnes helped get it published and provided a blurb for its jacket, obviously playing a significant role in turning this "solid conscientious piece of work" into a Nazi apoligia. (Denying the Holocaust,1993:73)
It was Barnes' discovery of Rassinier that seems to have been the pivotal point in his thinking. He began by arguing that the atrocity stories were exaggerated and slowly worked his way to the conclusion that they were fabrications. Stopping short of denying the Holocaust, Barnes attempted to connect the "exaggerated" atrocities with German reparations to Israel. Following the earlier lead of Rassinier, Barnes attempted to leave the impression that the size of the reparations were determined by the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust when actually the size of the reparations wad determined by the estimated cost of resettling Jews from Germany and occupied territories to Israel.
Finally, Barnes attempted to raise doubts about the Holocaust in general by raising doubts regarding the existence of gas chambers as a means of extermination....The existence and implementation of gas chambers for extermination purposes is a matter of special concern to deniers since they symbolize more dramatically than anything else the rational, systematic and impersonal nature of the killing machine. Every Holocaust denier feels compelled to make this issue central the argument. Barnes' contention was that the gas chambers were post-war inventions Surely Barnes was aware of the extensive testimony provided to the British as early as 1944 by Auschwitz escapee, Rudolph Vrba (see Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz And The Allies, 1981:190-198).


App's major contribution to Holocaust denial lies in his codification of denial into eight fundamental tenets (The following are adapted from Deborah Lipstadt, 1994:99-100):
1. Emigration, not extermination was the Nazi plan for dealing with Germany's "Jewish problem." His main evidence for this assertion is that if Germany had planned total extermination, no Jews would have survived.
2. No Jews were gassed in any German camps and probably not at Auschwitz either. He argued that the crematoria were designed to cremate those who died from other causes -- natural illness, etc.
3. Jews who disappeared during the years of WWII and have not been accounted for did so in territories under Soviet, rather than German, control.
4. The majority of Jews who were killed by the Nazis were people whom the Nazis had every right to "execute" as subversives, spies, and criminals.
5. If the Holocaust claims have any truth, Israel would have opened its archives to historians. Instead, he claims, they have preferred to continue perpetuating the Holocaust "hoax" by utilizing the charge of "antisemitism" against anyone who questions it.
6. All evidence to support the Holocaust "hoax" of 6 million dead rests upon misquotes of Nazis and Nazi documents.
7. Burden of proof argument. It is incumbent upon the accusers to prove the 6 million figure. Instead, App argues, Germany has been forced to prove that the 6 million is incorrect. This argument rests upon App's (and others') assertion that reparations paid to Israel by Germany are based on the 6 million figure. He consistently refers to the reparations as a Zionist "swindle."
8. Jewish historians and other scholars have great discrepancies in their calculations of the number of victims. App takes this as evidence that the claims are unverified.
The above assertions stand as the fundamental tenets of contemporary Holocaust denial.
Holocaust denial is rooted in the isolationism and historical revision of the WWI, post-War, WWII and Cold War periods. By the mid to late 1960s, all the ingredients of contemporary Holocaust denial were in place. Some of this background does, in fact, represent legitimate historical revision. Other parts of it, however, depart from the academic standards of historical analysis and move clearly in the direction of politically and ideologically motivated historical denial. One overarching characteristic of all deniers, the one characteristic which binds them all together, is antisemitism. Regardless of the language used to clothe their attacks upon memory and truth, it is the language of hate and fear. Regardless of pretensions of scholarship and even underlying traces of real scholarship, deniers ultimately come to rely upon the least respectable of all strategies -- stereotyping. The works of Rassinier, Barnes, Hoggan and App consistently fall back upon stereotypic images of the Jewish people which have been perpetuated for centuries and which show little sign of diminishing with the current crop of deniers.