The ACLU President, John Bennett, worked for the Victorian Legal Aid Commission and its predecessors for 1974 to 1996 and was the secretary of the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty Victoria) since it was founded in 1966 until 1980 when he became President of the ACLU.   

Revisionism and Censorship down under   Was Orwell Right

_________________________________

The Australian Civil Liberties Union, which was founded in 1980 and has about 250 members, investigates and takes up matters involving arbitrary government, police conduct, freedom of speech, invasions of privacy and freedom of association; gives general advice on citizens' rights; campaigns for law reform; and gives assistance in court proceedings. The ACLU publishes Your Rights, the most commonly used layman's guide to the law in Australia. More than 500,000 copies of this pamphlet have been sold or given away since it was first published. A review in the Law Institute Journal said that "Your Rights 1999 is an extraordinary publication- a must read for just about everyone."

Recent activities of the ACLU include providing assistance this year for a landmark appeal to the full Federal Court, Fredrick Töben v Jeremy Jones , in a case involving censorship of the Internet, taking up various cases of alleged police misconduct, commenting on some aspects of the Hollingworth case, and making representations on issues such as anti terrorist legislation.

The ACLU can be contacted on (03) 93478671, or (03)95341314. The 2003 edition of Your Rights is on the ACLU website www.go to/aclu. To join the ACLU forward a cheque for $20-00 to: ACLU, PO Box 1137, Carlton 3053

From the Archives - 1991

The following item appeared in Without Prejudice, No 4 December 1991, published by the Australian Institute of Jewish Affairs when organized world Jewry was just re-grouping after suffering significant losses against Ernst Zündel in his 1988 Holocaust Trial where Raul Hilberg admitted that, contrary to popular belief, the two written Hitler Orders – that started the extermination process of European Jewry – did not exist!

Hilberg later attempted to suggest that contrary to common knowledge the bureaucratic process of extermination was begun without a written order because there was no need for such an order. All Germans knew what the Führer wanted done – and so a wink and a nudge started the extermination process against the Jews – a fanciful account that later Daniel Goldhagen incorporated into his thesis that Germans had a pre-disposition to evil and hence all Germans were guilty of genocide.

At his 1988 trial, on 20 April – as a present to the Führer - Zündel also presented to court The Leuchter Report, which was something of a sensation. Also in 1988 Holocaust believers suffered a setback when Israel’s Supreme Court found that John Demjanjuk, alleged to have been a Treblinka guard, was not ‘Ivan the Terrible’. It was Professor Alan Dershowitz who realized the significance of such defeats and urged his followers not to have a Holocaust survivor again cross-examined in any court. This marked the next stage in the Holocaust believers’ strategy where the dogma was now to become legally protected. Questioning matters Holocaust was soon to be a racist matter, and specifically designed racial laws were implemented in a number of countries to criminalize, if not silence, anyone who refused to believe in the orthodox version of the Holocaust. The logic of such absurdities reached its pinnacle with the Zundel trial at Mannheim, Germany, where the judge openly stated in court that Zündel has no defence because it is irrelevant whether the Holocaust happened or not – in Germany it is illegal to question the orthodoxy and that is enough to find anyone guilty. Zündel received the maximum of five years prison without parol. His appeal was not allowed.

The article is written by Jeremy Jones, the fellow who has been pursuing his chosen enemy for a long time, which confirms that Jeremy needs the Revisionists but the Revisionists do not need him. The article: ‘Holocaust Revisionism in Australia’ gives an overview of who is who in the 1993 neather-world of dissent in Australia.  

Today, in Australia, overt anti-Semites and groups and individuals who wish ‘to weaken the cause of the Jews in general as well as that of Israel’[1] have identified a particular historic event, the Nazi murder of the Jews, as a subject into which to conduct spurious and tendentious historic research.

The most blatant of these fabricators of history are the so-called ‘revisionists’, who deny that Jews were the victims of any organized or systematic genocide, and who claim that the extent of Jewish suffering has been deliberately magnified by the leaders of world Jewry to extort money and sympathy from gullible Christians. More subtle are the opponents of Israel who seek to present the murder of the Jews of Europe as the result of a conspiracy between Nazis and ‘Zionist’ leaders.

A third, related, ideology is that which Conor Cruise O’Brien has labeled ‘anti-Jewism’, which belittles the crimes of the Nazis and distorts the Arab-Israeli conflict by comparing the murderers of the Jews with the Jewish state.[2]

Holocaust revisionists have recognized that the extent and nature of depravity, the technology of murder and the huge number of passive and active collaborators come as a huge shock and, for those who have some sympathy for racism or other tenets of National Socialism, the psychological preference to believe that Holocaust history is fictional is seen as ground ripe for exploitation.

Australia was spared the horror of invasion and annexation by the Third Reich, and the historic reality of the Holocaust has been conveyed to most Australians by means of the classroom or mass communications media. Without an abundance of memorials or collective historic memory, Australians could logically be seen to be receptive to the notion that the Jews were neither singled out for genocide nor murdered in such numbers. That this has not been proven to be the case is to the credit of those educationalists and men and women of good will who have taken upon themselves the task of teaching school-children and the general population the basic truths of that chapter of history.

For most Australians concerned with the subject of Holocaust denial, two names come immediately to mind – those of Melbourne lawyer John Bennett and English writer David Irving. These men occupy very different places in the spectrum of Australian revisionism, but they share disciples, followers and imitators.

John Bennett staked his claim in the front ranks of Australian (and international) revisionism with his publicity campaign, in 1979, on behalf of Arthur Butz’s Hoax of the Twentieth Century.[3] Butz, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University in the United States, published his pseudo-academic work in 1976, through the Historical Review Press in Surrey, England. Within a short time span it became ‘a handbook for anti-Semites and its themes became the staples for the US-based Institute of Historical Review.

Butz’s arguments have been well summarized by Dr John Foster:

…there was no plan in Nazi Germany to exterminate the Jews; the camps served a dual function, as internment camps for Jews and others who were considered a threat to national security, and as labour camps; the gassing of Jews was a myth; Zyklon B was a disinfecting agent used exclusively for delousing prisoners; those Jews who died did so as a result of hunger and disease. The Holocaust was a myth, a deliberate hoax, contrived by an unholy alliance of Communists and Zionists in an elaborate conspiracy to create sympathy and extort money for the cause of Israel and ‘Jewish’ Communism.[4]

The book and its theses were rejected outright by all serious historians, with Konrad Kwiet identifying the key elements in this stream of propaganda as ‘the inability to recognize reality, … the refusal to accept results of historical research, and …the exclusive resort to arguments, figures and theses that have long been discredited’.[5]

Bennett, then secretary of the respected liberal organization, the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties, claims to have accepted the historical truth of the Holocaust, but after reading the Butz book ‘it was as if the blinkers had been lifted from my eyes’.[6]

Bennett took up Holocaust denial as a personal crusade, writing articles and letters for publication arguing these themes and distributing samples of revisionist writings to opinion leaders, libraries and the media. Despite the availability of many well-researched works contradicting the major planks of Butz’s thesis, Bennett was able to present himself to colleagues, associates and the public as a person motivated by genuine concerns about correcting the historical record.

Senator Gareth Evans, speaking in debate in the Australian Senate on a motion to take note of the historical evidence determining that the Holocaust occurred, said:

A few years ago I was encouraged by some of those whom I believed at the time to be motivated by a spirit of genuine intellectual inquiry to look at some of those so-called revisionist writings and, in particular, the work of that Chicago academic – if he might be so described – A R Butz, whose book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century has become and remains something of a bible of revisionists.

He went on to say that Butz’s writing on Anne Frank had repulsed him, and that ‘any mortal who has any sensitivity at all could not possibly take seriously that kind of rubbish and that kind of account’.[7]

In the same debate Senators Peter Baume, Colin mason and Barney Cooney all referred to the attempts by the revisionists to influence the public. Senator Baume, in introducing the motion, said:

…it is desirable that the Senate asserts the accuracy of the evidence of history, not least because of revisionist interpretations that would have us believe that there was no Holocaust, no gas chambers, no final solution, no mass crematoria, no systematic program of extermination, and that Jewish deaths occurred only in the usual course of hostile occupation.[8]

That the matter was discussed in the Australian Senate may be evidence that the revisionists, even if rejected, had been noticed. Since his first campaign on behalf of Butz, Bennett has received publicity for his views on the electronic and in the print media, sometimes as an eccentric but also as an ostensibly legitimate participant in public debate.

Australia’s most prominent anti-Semitic organisation, the Australian League of Rights. Has supported Bennett’s campaign and revisionism has featured prominently in its publications and in those of other racist organizations.

Bennett himself has included promotions of books written by the revisionists and approval for their views in a number of editions of his annual handbook on legal rights.[9]

While the books promoted by Bennett have not received an extensive readership, British revisionist David Irving has large audiences for his esoteric writings on World War II history. During two well-publicised speaking tours of Australia, Irving has played on the ‘controversial’ nature of his works.[10]

Until recently, Irving claimed that he could not say one way or another whether the Holocaust occurred. Like Bennett, Irving attributes his conviction that Jews have perpetrated mass fraud on the international community to one ‘seminal’ book – in his case, The Leuchter Report, in which a self-styled American ‘gas-chamber expert’, Fred Leuchter, presented what purported to be scientific evidence to prove the Nazi gas chambers were never used to exterminate Jews.

Using Irving’s endorsement, Bennett, League of Rights members and supporters and other revisionists have sought to give this spurious and thoroughly discredited report wide publicity, and have scored occasional media coups.[11]

The effect of the revisionists such as Bennett, Butz and Irving is, as Frank Knopfelmacher has noted, clearly to imply ‘that the Jewish people are witting and, rarely, unwitting accomplices in a conspiracy to extort, to lie and to kill, in order to acquire a counterfeit crown of martyrdom to be used for personal and political gain’. As Knopfelmacher pointed out, well over one half of Australian Jews are ‘survivors of or escapers from the Holocaust and their offspring’ and that revisionists put their ‘social legitimacy and reputation in question’. He concluded that

The Butz thesis is a group libel against an easily identifiable and traditionally stigmatized section of the population, which exceeds in ferocity and depth of malice anything that had happened in the field of ethnic animadversion in this country at least since World War II.[12]

To the revisionists, the Australian Government’s recent legislation to allow for the prosecution of individuals who committed crimes against humanity during the Second World War was dangerous as it could result in the public airing and judicial acknowledgment of the evils of the Nazi campaign of genocide.[13] Media commentators noted Bennett’s efforts opposing the political developments leading to this legislation, at every stage.

Bennett’s key political motivation for seeking to ‘expose’ the Holocaust was not the protection of potential victims of war crimes legislation, but derived from his perception of the debate on the Middle East. Bennett claimed, in his address to the 1980 Revisionist Convention, that the reason he became involved in the world-wide debate about the Holocaust is that it is, ‘as Zionist Jews say, “Israel’s number one propaganda weapon”’.

This analysis has been shared by Arab and Islamic enemies of the Jewish State for some time,[14] and the Australian Arab community has not been immune. Not long after the Sydney-based Arabic-language newspaper An Nahar was censored by the Australian Press Council for publishing extracts from the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and defending these notorious forgeries on the grounds of historical accuracy, one of their most prominent contributors and a recognized leader within the Arab community, Dr Anice Morsey, later appointed an Ethnic Affairs Commissioner by the Victorian Government, wrote:

…Zionism fabricated and convinced the world with [a story] that there was mass killing of the Jews in furnaces and gas chambers, and even conviced the world that Germany alone killed six million Jews, while the truth is that those Jews who were killed numbered only 600,000 and they were not killed in the gas chambers as was suggested, but they were killed in the conquest’s battles or because they participated in the fifth column and they worked as spies in Germany, Poland and France…Zionism convinced the whole world of a disaster that did not occur, and sought to gain the sympathy of the world…they placed the world in a position of self-defence and feeling of guilt to such an extent that the Israeli state drains off[15] from the new Germany materialistically…[16]

Dr Morsey’s wife, Nagat, entered the fray with a defence of John Bennett’s right to tell Holocaust survivors and historians that their lives and works were fraudulent.[17]

Equally invidious has been the deliberate misrepresentation by Trotskyists and other extreme anti-Zionists of the position of Jewish leaders under the Nazis, implying that Jewish leaders were guilty of ‘collaboration’ and complicity in the murder of European Jewry. The subject of what Jewish leadership could have done, how various Jewish leaders acted and what cruel games the Nazis played with those they regarded as subhuman, has been researched and discussed by a variety of serious historians and gives little encouragement to the conspiracy theorists.

While some genuine historians do place the worst possible interpretation on proven individual cases of Jewish leaders who in negotiating to save some lives had to choose who would face death, even they do not see this to be a central feature of the Holocaust.

This has not stopped individuals or organizations who seek to deligitimise or weaken support for the Jewish State from portraying this as a ‘collaboration’ which needs to be given a high profile in discussions not only of the Holocaust, but also of Zionism and Israel.

Dr Robert Springborg, lecturer in politics at Sydney’s Macquarie University, included such an argument in a vituperative critique of Lily Gardner Feldman’s The Special Relationship between West Germany and Israel (Boston, 1984). Dr Springborg seemed particularly perturbed by the apparent absence of a discussion of ‘Zionist-Nazi collaboration’:

Possibly of greatest significance is what the author chooses to ignore – namely, the extensive collaboration between Zionism and fascism, which began in the 1920s and which has been thoroughly documented…How this dark episode in Jewish history should be incorporated into an understanding of post-war German-Israeli relations is a fascinating question, but one which the author cannot treat without recognizing the historical truth.[18]

In this case, as in that of the outright Holocaust denials of John Bennett, the target is Israel, with historical truth and sensitivity treated almost as if they were expendable items.

In the third, most common of the revisionist themes, the aim of weakening sympathy and support for Israel is even more patently obvious.

When Sydney hosted the 1985 International Gathering of Holocaust Survivors, the dignity and significance of the event was respected by most of the Australian communications media. Exceptions included the sensationalist editing in The Canberra Times which, through a headline, implied that the reality of the Holocaust was a matter for debate.

But this pales into insignificance when compared with the comments of Radio 2KY announcer Geraldine Willesee. Ms Willesee was disturbed by the reception given to the survivors and decided she had to ‘expose’ the dark hand operating to bring sympathy to people who lived through the Nazi horror. She described the gathering as ‘a big PR venture’ arranged ‘simply to keep up a wave of public sympathy for Israel’. Warming to her subject, she added: “I have never yet, ever, heard one of the people who like to commemorate the Holocaust ever have one word of compassion for the other six, seven, the other eight million who were destroyed’, claiming that Israel was carrying out ‘an extermination campaign’ which ‘repeated’ Holocaust ‘history’.[19]

Without hypothesising as to what provoked this outburst, it is nevertheless simple to classify as an example of what Connor Cruise O’Brien has called ‘anti-Jewism’ – i.e. rhetoric equating the actions of the Nazis with the actions of the Israelis and, consequently, approximating the treatment of Palestinian Arabs in territories administered by Israel with that of Jews in areas ruled by the Nazis and their collaborators.

To equate Israel’s actions with the Nazis’ ruthless and systematic annihilation of the Jewish people is not only grotesque, but gives succour to those who would have us believe that genocide is not especially horrific or evil.

Importantly, Nazi imagery is frequently used by cartoonists, journalists, broadcasters and other participants in public debate only when discussing Israel. As Connor Cruise O’Brien wrote, discussing the failure of many ‘anti-Jewists’ to describe Hafez Assad as a ‘Nazi’ after he slaughtered thousands of his subjects in Hama, ‘there wouldn’t be much point, or fun, in such a comparison, would there? The whole delicious, mouth-watering paradox would be missing – Assad isn’t a Jew’.

In Australia, the implicit distortion of Nazism and the events in the Middle East due to the involvement of the victims of Nazism in the Arab-Israeli conflict is the most widespread, subtle and potentially most destructive variant of ‘revisionism’.[20] Because its main perpetrators are not otherwise identifiable anti-Semites or anti-Zionists, it is treated as if less significant and some way more sociably acceptable.

As with other forms of revisionism, it cannot be sustained intellectually and requires, for its credibility, a willingness to reject voluminous historical records and academic research. It fulfils the aim of the neo-Nazi revisionists in that it makes the Nazi crimes appear unextraordinary and weakens the cause of the Jews in general as well as that of Israel.

This being said, the question remains as to what can be done to combat revisionism. Associate Professor Konrad Kwiet’s sound advice to the Australian Institute of Jewish Affairs’ 1984 seminar on Anti-Semitism and Human Rights was:

1.    Strengthen research, carry out more projects at universities, close the gap in research.

2.    Strengthen education at all school levels. This costs money, and Jews and non-Jews must be prepared to raise that money.

3.    Promote public relations, educate and motivate and, in this, include the media.

4.    Devise a political strategy…if there is historical reason why strategies of defence and survival of Jews failed during the Holocaust and prior to the Holocaust, it is because Jews did not find solidarity among other social groups. The fight against revisionism and anti-Semitism cannot be successful if Jews are carrying out this fight on their own. It needs the cooperation and support of non-Jews.

***

Jeremy Jones is Director of the Sydney office of Australia/Israel Publications. He is a correspondent for The Jerusalem Report and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, columnist for the Australian Jewish News, and lectures regularly on the Middle East, the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and related topics.