From the Editor
Theodore T. O’Keefe
The Winter 1989-90 issue of The Journal of Historical Review concludes Volume Nine of the JHR and launches it into the 1990s.
If this last issue of the 80s, and first issue of the 90s, may be said to have a theme, that theme is “justice denied.” Nearly every article and review bears, directly or indirectly, on the postwar “trials” with which the Second World War’s victors have attempted to consolidate their triumph by continuing the propaganda war against the defeated, above all the Germans. These courtroom events, which commenced even before the war was over and are far from ending even today, over forty years after the German surrender, have in the past two decades expanded their educational function by targeting persons whose offense is not alleged to have been a “war crime” but rather a challenge to the authorized Allied propaganda version of the war as certified at Nuremberg in 1946.
Joseph Halow, who as a very young man had a unique vantage point on the trials of German concentration camp personnel by American military courts at Dachau in 1947, supplies a sensitive and highly personal account of how he lost his innocent belief in a unique American righteousness there. The intrepid Florence Rost van Tonningen, on the other hand, herself subject to persecution in the courts of her native Netherlands for the past decade for distributing and possessing forbidden literature on the war, tells of her quest for truth and justice in the matter of her murdered husband, the noted Dutch economist M. M. Rost van Tonningen: he was killed, without even the appearance of a trial, in circumstances which the Dutch government has decreed must remain secret until the year 2069. The JHR's prolific editorial adviser, Mark Weber, meanwhile, reports on his important testimony at the second trial of Ernst Zündel, who, as past readers of The Journal know, is being punished under Canada’s retrograde laws against spreading “false news” for daring to challenge the historicity of the “Holocaust.”
Weber also provides a thorough debunking of professional “Nazi-hunter” Simon Wiesenthal, who more than any man alive has stoked the popular fever that fuels the interminable trials of alleged German war criminals. John Cobden’s thorough mining of the Revisionist truths contained in the official survivors' history of Dachau helps elucidate many of the problems touched on in the Halow article, while Professor Henry Adams, a close associate of Revisionist founding father Harry Elmer Barnes, closes his review of David Irving’s massive biography of Hermann Goring with a reminder of Goring’s masterful performance before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.
These articles demonstrate that the legacy of Yalta and Potsdam and Nuremberg continues to bloom in the icy minds and hearts of the West’s ruling intellectual and political Establishment, in America and Canada and Great Britain and France and West Germany. The truth about this century’s great wars — what caused them, for which interests their victims died, and how disastrously, for most of humankind, they ended — continues to be shackled and guarded in Western Europe and North America as thoroughly, and more effectively, than historical truth in the 'pre-glasnost' East.
If we at IHR may make one prediction about this final decade of the second millennium after Christ, however, it is that the coming ten years will see the triumph of Historical Revisionism around the world. As the past decade began, the Holocaust cult and its beneficiaries, the chief stumbling block to establishing the facts about the Second World War, seemed invincible. As it closes, the Soviet system in Eastern Europe is collapsing, and the USSR itself faces an existential crisis in which it has no alternative but to confront and reveal the bitter facts of its own past. The state of Israel and the Zionist movement stand exposed to most of the world as morally bankrupt; they approach intellectual bankruptcy; how long will America’s prodigal subsidies be there to avert financial and political bankruptcy? The peoples of Central and Eastern Europe are tearing down the barriers to freedom of action and movement. Despite the best efforts of the ideological police of the Bundesrepublik, Austria, and elsewhere, the barriers to freedom of historical inquiry and expression are coming down, too: the handwriting is on the Berlin Wall. The pioneering work of Rassinier and Barnes and Hoggan and Irving and Stäglich and Butz and Faurisson and the many other courageous Revisionist fighters for truth will not, can not, be suppressed much longer. None of this is to suggest, of course, that the battle is won, let alone that some sort of millennium, or “end of history,” is at hand. The savage and nearly fatal attack on Robert Faurisson in Vichy last September is reminder enough of how vicious the enemies of truth continue to be. The trials and tribulations of Revisionists, of those Americans and other’s accused of “war crimes” long ago and far away, and of whole peoples still exposed to campaigns of hate propaganda, are not yet over. In this country, the American values for which America’s revisionists have fought — the proud self-sufficiency and non-interventionism advocated by George Washington in his great Farewell Address — pose a distinct threat to the Establishment which rules America. A continuing task for American Revisionists in the coming years will be alerting their countrymen to the harsh consequences that have flown from their leaders preference for meddling abroad rather than solving problems at home. We at IHR and The Journal of Historical Review, after meeting the challenges of the 1980’s (from sniper’s bullets to hotel cancellations to nuisance lawsuits to the terrorist arson destruction of our headquarters and warehouse on July 4, 1984) are ready and willing to tackle those of the 1990s. We thank you, our subscribers, without whom our achievements would not have been possible. On to the year 2000 and victory over the historical blackout!
Source: Reprinted from The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 388, 515.