From the outset the IHR has camouflaged its actual goal by engaging in activities that typify a scholarly institution. It sponsors annual gatherings that are structured as academic convocations and publishes the Journal of Historical Review, which imitates the serious and highbrow language of academia. Though virtually all its activities are concerned with Holocaust denial, the institute depicts itself as engaged in a far broader and loftier quest. It claims that its goals are to align twentieth-century history with the facts and expose the historical totems that are manipulated by secret vested interests. Primary among them are myths about previous wars. Like virtually every denier before it, the IHR professed that it was motivated by no animus toward any other group but only by a “deep dedication to the cause of truth in history.”17 In response to the accusation that Holocaust deniers are intent on reclaiming national socialism’s reputation, the IHR protested that it was not interested in resurrecting any regime. Its interest was “rehabilitating the truth” because, unlike establishment historians, it was willing to confront the “shadowy suppressors” of historical truth.18 Only through the exposure of historical myths that have been imposed on the United States could the country be prevented from being “railroaded” into one conflagration after another, particularly in the Middle East.19 These remain the IHR’s claims; however, the reality is quite different.
Despite its claims to a total revision of all history, the IHR focuses almost exclusively on World War II and the Holocaust. It is, they claim, the “most distorted period” in history and the event most often used as a “historical club to bully public opinion.” David McCalden was explicit about precisely what it was public opinion was being bullied into believing. In a letter urging people to subscribe to the Journal of Historical Review, McCalden described it as a step that could not only save every American family hundreds of dollars in taxes but deliver the United States from the threat of a disastrous nuclear war. McCalden spelled out how a simple act of subscribing to a journal could accomplish these lofty goals:
Each year a foreign government literally steals millions of dollars from you and other U.S. taxpayers. This thief is the corrupt, bankrupt government of Israel and its army of paid and unpaid agents in the United States—particularly in Washington. And the theft is perpetrated primarily through the clever use of the Greatest Lie in all history—the lie of the “Holocaust.”20
(The Israel connection is a constant refrain in IHR material.)
For the IHR debunking the “so-called ‘Holocaust’ ” was far more than an act of rewriting the historical record—it had critical policy implications. Until the Holocaust was revealed to be a hoax, the future of the United States would not be secure. According to the IHR, exposing the truth about the Holocaust also exposes the secret group that controls much of America’s military and foreign policy. Relying on traditional antisemitic motifs, the IHR accused this “superwealthy” and “tiny segment” of the population of being unconcerned about the “damage and distortion” it caused the culture at large. This group—a thinly veiled reference to Jews—control the media and use it to flaunt the Holocaust as the main rationale for “America’s dog-like devotion to the illegal state of Israel.”21
Tom Marcellus, McCalden’s successor as IHR director, broadened this line of argument. The Holocaust lie not only served as a “justification” for the commission of genocide by Israel but also affected the rights of American citizens in their own country. Americans’ constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech was suppressed in order to protect the interests of “Israel-firsters.” But it was not just the United States that was threatened. The “very existence of Germany and the Western Culture” were also caught in the balance.22
Marcellus revealed another of the IHR’s true agenda items with his warning that acceptance of the Holocaust myth resulted in a radical degeneration of accepted standards of human behavior and a lowering of the “self-image of White people.” These racist tendencies, which the IHR has increasingly kept away from the public spotlight, are part of the extremist tradition to which it is heir.23
The IHR’s ideology can be directly linked to its founder and primary supporter, Willis A. Carto, who was also the founder and treasurer of the Liberty Lobby, a well-established ultra-right organization that has a direct connection with other antisemitic publications, including the American Mercury, Washington Observer Newsletter, and Noontide Press. Only the most superficial attempt has been made by either the IHR or any of these publications to camouflage the connection between them. In fact, at one point the IHR, Noontide Press, and the American Mercury all shared the same post-office box.24 This antisemitic network is known for its anti-Israel publications, many of which contain details of a “World Zionist conspiracy.” In some of them Israel is referred to as a “bastard state.”25
Carto was born in 1926 in Indiana. After serving in the army he attended college and then moved to San Francisco to work for a finance company as a debt collector. For a short while he was associated with the radical, right-wing John Birch Society, until he had a falling out with its founder, Robert Welch. According to a former editor at the Liberty Lobby, Carto’s antisemitic activities were too extreme even for Welch, a known antisemite, who personally fired him.26 In 1958 he organized a “pressure group for patriotism,” which eventually emerged as the Liberty Lobby. A former chairman of the Liberty Lobby’s Board of Policy acknowledged that by the 1980s its annual income was close to four million dollars. The lobby’s antisemitic, anti-Zionist newspaper, Spotlight, claims a circulation of more than 330,000. When it reached this goal in 1981 it celebrated by holding a gala reception at the National Press Club in Washington.
The Liberty Lobby has been described as so extreme that it is “estranged from even the fringes of the far right.”27 The investigative columnist Drew Pearson described Carto as a Hitler “fan” and the Liberty Lobby as “infiltrated by Nazis who revere the memory of Hitler.” The Wall Street Journal is also among those who have identified Carto and the Liberty Lobby as antisemitic.28
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) believes Carto to be the most important and powerful professional antisemite in the United States. According to the ADL, the Liberty Lobby stands at the helm of a major publishing and organizational complex that for more than two decades has propagated antisemitism and racism in the United States.29 The Wall Street Journal and the ADL are not alone in their assessment. When Carto and the Liberty Lobby sued the Wall Street Journal for calling them antisemites, the District Court for the District of Columbia ruled against them and concluded that it would be difficult to imagine a case in which the evidence of antisemitism was “more compelling.”30
Some of the strongest condemnations of Carto and the Liberty Lobby have come from conservative and right-wing political groups in the United States. Scott Stanley, the managing editor of American Opinion, the publication of the John Birch Society, believes Willis Carto responsible for preserving antisemitism as a movement in the United States. In 1981 William F. Buckley described the Liberty Lobby as “a hotbed of antisemitism” centered around the “mysterious” Carto, who “regularly poisons the wells of political discourse.”31 The conservative weekly Human Events condemned the Liberty Lobby as an organization that exploited racist and antisemitic sentiments and Carto as someone who has long maintained sympathy for Hitler’s Germany. Buckley’s National Review, which accused Carto of always having “his eyes on Jewry,” warned that it was not only Carto’s antisemitism that was dangerous but his philosophy of pure power, which was alien and fundamentally hostile to the American tradition.32 The conservative columnist R. Emmett Tyrell, Jr., editor in chief of the American Spectator, condemned the lobby as an organization that always attracted a “colorful collection of bigots and simpletons” who make an art of applying conspiracy theories to every problem that vexed the public.33 Not surprisingly Carto denied these charges. Examination of what he has written, said, and done, however, reveals otherwise.
Willis Carto’s poli
tical vision is encapsulated by three things: contempt and revulsion for Jews, a belief in the need for an absolutist government that would protect the “racial heritage” of the United States, and a conviction that there exists a conspiracy designed to bring dire harm to the Western world. The articles, journals, and books brought out by the Carto nexus of publications consistently focus on predictable themes: the ignoble Allied treatment of Nazi Germany; Jewish responsibility for the ills of the Western world; the grotesque misdeeds of the “bastard” state of Israel; and the existence of a conspiracy perpetrated by a “high elite,” consisting mainly of people with Jewish names, to control American foreign and financial policy. Jews besmirch Germany’s good name and support the Communists’ attempt to impose their system on the Western world. At the heart of every serious problem facing the United States—civil rights, energy, defense, racial integration—are Jews manipulating matters for their own benefit.
Nevertheless, the Jews are not Carto’s sole target. Carto believes that at the root of civilization’s problems are the “Jews and Negroes.”34 In 1955, in a letter to the racist author Earnest Sevier Cox, Carto bemoaned the fact that so few Americans were concerned about the “inevitable niggerfication of America.”35 Racial purity is the lens through which much of Carto’s view of the world is viewed. In 1962 he advocated a racial view of history and argued that racial equality would be easier to accept if there were “no Negroes around to destroy the concept.”36 Carto’s sentiments are reminiscent of the German right wing’s fear of “foreignization,” (überfremdung). In an attempt to protect the United States from what Carto considered the danger posed to it by African Americans, he organized the Joint Council for Repatriation, which was designed to return all blacks to Africa. Shortly before the creation of the Liberty Lobby in 1957 Carto predicted to Judge Tom P. Brady, a member of the Mississippi Supreme Court and founder of the anti-civil-rights White Citizens Council, that the lobby would be a tremendous asset to the repatriation scheme. In a fashion that would become typical of his organizational methodology, Carto was intent on keeping the link between the two secret: “You can see that there must never be an obvious connection between the two, for if there is, either would kill the other off.”37 But the Joint Council for Repatriation did not envision just the repatriation of African Americans. It also aimed to deliver the strongest imaginable blow to the power of organized Jewry.38 During World War II, Carto argued, it had been the Jews’ influence on American policy that was responsible for blinding the West to the benefits of an alliance with Hitler. Treacherous Jewish “propaganda and lies” had led to Hitler’s defeat, which for Carto constituted the “defeat of Europe. And of America.”
But for Carto the danger had not been limited to World War II: “If Satan himself had tried to create a permanent disintegration and force for the destruction of nations, he could have done no better than to invent the Jews.”39 In a memo Carto expressed it even more succinctly: The Jews were “Public Enemy No. I.”40
The essence of Carto’s political philosophy and his introduction to Holocaust denial can be traced to Imperium—The Philosophy of History and Politics, by Francis Parker Yockey. The book, dedicated to Adolf Hitler, preached that the future greatness of the West would be modeled on the German “revolution” of 1933. Yockey, who has been described by some researchers as “America’s Hitler,” was born in 1917 in Chicago. After attending five different colleges, he graduated from Notre Dame Law School.41 He enlisted in the army in 1942 and went AWOL for an extended period shortly thereafter. He was eventually given a medical discharge from the army in 1943 on the grounds that he suffered from “dementia praecox, paranoid type.” According to the army report, he revealed marked delusions of persecution, had auditory hallucinations, and involved prominent people in his delusional system.42
In 1945, after the war, he took a job as a legal researcher for the War Crimes Tribunal in Germany. He left that post in less than a year because of what he claimed was the tribunal’s unfair treatment of the Nazi leaders awaiting trial. He subsequently went to Ireland, where he wrote Imperium. In 1952 his passport was revoked in absentia by the State Department, and by 1954 he was identified as a U.S. agent for a neo-Nazi, Rudolph Aschenauer.43 After writing Imperium he traveled throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Egypt spreading its message. He was arrested in 1960 when he was discovered to be holding three different passports with three different names. (His suitcase had been lost by an airline company. When it was retrieved, airport officials opened it to discover the identity of its owner. Instead they found the passports.) While in prison awaiting trial, Yockey took a cyanide pill and committed suicide. His last visitor, less than a week earlier, was Carto.
In Imperium Yockey called for an absolute imperial system, an imperium of Western Aryan nations united by the principles of Hitlerian national socialism. Yockey envisaged a time when power would no longer be held by individuals and all enterprises would be under public control and ownership. The regime Yockey proposed envisioned the death knell of democracy. He called for an age of absolute politics in which elections would become old-fashioned until they ceased altogether.44
It is the book’s antisemitic ideology that harks back most directly to national socialism. “The Jew is spiritually worn out,” according to Yockey. “He can no longer develop. He can produce nothing in the sphere of thought or research. He lives solely with the idea of revenge on the nations of the white European-American race.”45 Obsessed with the power of the Jews, Yockey warned that they were bound to destroy the West. Imperium is filled with descriptions of conspiracies against both the West and the United States. It christened those orchestrating these conspiracies as the “Culture-Distorters.” Included in their ranks were racial and cultural misceganists, egalitarians, believers in human rights and participatory democracy, and “the rear-guard in the West of the fulfilled Arabian Culture, the Church-State-Nation-People-Race of the Jew.”46
In 1949 Yockey wrote the “Proclamation of London,” which, in addition to calling for the reinstatement of national socialism, advocated the expulsion of the Jews by the nations of Europe. (In a sworn deposition in 1979, in a Liberty Lobby lawsuit against the ADL, Carto acknowledged under oath that he agreed with the tenets of Yockey’s proclamation.47)
But Yockey went beyond even this most extreme antisemitic rhetoric. Twenty years prior to the formation of the IHR, Yockey laid out the essential elements of Holocaust denial. He attributed the myth of the Holocaust to the culture-distorters’ claim that six million Jews had been killed in European camps. Not only had they made this claim, Yockey charged, but they had woven a web of propaganda that was technically quite complete:
“Photographs” were supplied in millions of copies. Thousands of the people who had been killed published accounts of their experiences in these camps. Hundreds of thousands more made fortunes in post-war black markets. “Gas-chambers” that did not exist were photographed and a “gasmobile” was invented to titillate the mechanically minded.48
Yockey’s book might have had little if any impact if not for the fact that in 1962 Noontide Press reissued it with a thirty-five-page introduction by Carto in which he expressed profound support for Yockey’s plans for world rule and contended that in order to obtain the necessary political power “all else must be temporarily sacrificed.”49 Noontide has kept the book in circulation since then.
During the late 1960s Carto participated in the creation of a number of political groups to advance his agenda of winning control of America’s right wing. The United Republicans for America, which was designed to win control of the Republican party, conducted a direct-mail campaign for G. Gordon Liddy’s congressional race in New York. (Liddy would shortly thereafter become infamous for his role in the Watergate break-in.) He also helped found Youth for Wallace, which, after supporting George Wallace’s presidential aspirations, became the National Youth Alliance (NYA). Officially the goals of the NYA were to oppose drugs, black power, the left-wing S
tudents for a Democratic Society (SDS), and American involvement in foreign wars. But another item was on the organization’s agenda. According to former officials of the organization, who were drummed out by Carto when they protested, the NYA advocated Francis Yockey’s philosophy. Paperback copies of Imperium were printed for NYA members to sell. An NYA informational letter acknowledged that the organization’s political approach was based on the philosophy of Yockey’s “monumental Imperium.”50 At a 1968 meeting of the NYA in Pittsburgh at which Nazi paraphernalia were evident and Nazi songs sung, Carto praised Yockey’s ideas and described his own plan to amass as much political power as possible within an array of institutions. Anticipating a national swing to the right, he aimed to capture the leadership of as many conservative groups as possible. A former Liberty Lobby staffer who hosted its radio show testified in court that Carto often indicated that what this country needed was a “right-wing dictatorship.”51 Because leaders of the “legitimate right,” such as William F. Buckley, constituted an obstacle to his plan to win control of the conservative right Carto labeled them with the most extreme term of opprobrium he could conjure up: “ADL agents.”52 The publications linked to Carto and his organizational orbit disseminated plans for this right-wing dictatorship and called for active suppression of those who would conspire against it.
Denying the Holocaust Page 19
