The Holocaust Historiography Project

Quotes from JHR Volume 17 number 5


Renewal From the Bottom

“When I look back on the process of history, I see this written over every page, that the nations are renewed from the bottom, not from the top; that the genius which springs from the ranks of the unknown is the genius which renews the youth and energy of the people. The utility, the vitality, the fruitage of life does not come from the top to the bottom, it comes, like the natural growth of a great tree, from the soil, up through the trunk into the branches to the foliage and the fruit.”

-- Woodrow Wilson


A New Meritocracy

“By the 1970s, the principal television news producers and editors were also Jews — Fred Friendly and Richard Salant at CBS, Reuven Frank at NBC, Avram Westin at ABC. In whichever form of expression or communication, the public idiom by then manifestly had ceased to be a province of an Old American elite. It belonged to a new meritocracy.”

-- Howard M. Sacher, A History of the Jews in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 773.


'Smartest People'

“I think Jews are the smartest people in the world,” says film director Rob Reiner ("A Few Good Men,” “When Harry Met Sally"). “For thousands of years, they didn’t have a homeland. They got kicked out of places. They had to live by their wits, so they always stressed education.

“Because we are the smartest people in the world,” Reiner adds, “we are also the most hated. People feel threatened. We're the smartest group of people, and yet we're the lawyers, the doctors, the bankers. We've risen to high levels in society and that’s resented.”

With regard to the film industry, Reiner goes one to say, “it’s all run by Jews, even Disney.”

-- Quoted by Paul Freeman in Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, Dec. 4, 1992, pp. 38, 40.


“All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships.”

-- George Bernard Shaw,
“The Author’s Apology” (1902)


Only a Facade

“Today democracy is a facade of plutocracy. Because the peoples will not tolerate naked plutocracy, power is nominally turned over to them, while real power rests in the hands of the plutocrats. In democracies, whether republican or monarchical, the statesmen are marionettes, and the capitalists are the wire pullers: they dictate the political guidelines, they control the voters by buying public opinion, through business and social connections [they control] higher government officials … The plutocracy of today is more powerful than the aristocracy of the past, because nothing stands above it except the state, which is its tool and helper.”

-- Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, “Pan-european” publicist and political figure, in his book Praktischer Idealismus ("Practical Idealism"), Vienna, 1925.