Philosoetry: a search for reality and self Roger Lewis https://t.co/K2G78XxB4e via @amazon

— RealRLD (@rld_real_CPR) November 14, 2020

https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/9708141.pdf
(MetaPhysics ?)Or (Physics?).
Abstract We introduce a finite-dimensional algebra that controls the possible boundary conditions of a conformal field theory. For theories that are obtained by modding out a Z2 symmetry (corresponding to a so-called Dodd-type, or half-integer spin simple current, modular invariant), this classifying algebra contains the fusion algebra of the untwisted sector as a subalgebra. Proper treatment of fields in the twisted sector, so-called fixed points, leads to structures that are intriguingly close to the ones implied by modular invariance for conformal field theories on closed orientable surfaces. CERN-TH/97-215 August 1997

 

“every living thing can become healthy, strong and fruitful only within a horizon; if it is incapable ofdrawing a horizon around itself or, on the other hand, too selfish torestrict its vision to the limits of a horizon drawn by another, it will witheraway feebly or overhastily to its early demise. Cheerfulness, clear conscience,the carefree deed, faith in the future, all this depends   in the case of an individual as well as of a people, on there being a line which  distinguishes what is clear and in full view from the dark and unilluminable; it depends on one’s being able to forget at the right time aswell as to remember at the right time; on discerning with strong instinctualfeelings when there is need to experience historically and when unhistorically.Precisely this is the proposition the reader is invited to consider:the unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary for the health ofan individual, a people and a culture. “Friedrich Nietzsche: 1844-1900

http://letthemconfectsweeterlies.blogspot.se/2011/05/ruskins-critique-of-classical-political.html

“The whole question, therefore, respecting not only the
advantage, but even the quantity, of national wealth, resolves
itself finally into one of abstract justice. It is impossible to
conclude, of any given mass of acquired wealth, merely by the
fact of its existence, whether it signifies good or evil to the
nation in the midst of which it exists. Its real value depends on
the moral sign attached to it, just as sternly as that of a
mathematical quantity depends on the algebraical sign attached to
it. Any given accumulation of commercial wealth may be
indicative, on the one hand, of faithful industries, progressive
energies, and productive ingenuities: or, on the other, it may be
indicative of mortal luxury, merciless tyranny, ruinous chicane.
Some treasures are heavy with human tears, as an ill-stored
harvest with untimely rain; and some gold is brighter in sunshine
than it is in substance.”

May Labours 2008 Crash? PMQ´s

by Manuela Cadelli, President of the Magistrates’ Union of Belgium, via Defend Democracy

Reviewed by Gerry T Neal : http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/a-cave-of-our-own-construction.html

the idea before it was clothed in words

A game theoretic approach to the theory of money and financial institutions

In: Handbook of Monetary Economics

Epictetus The human being as citizen of the world(circa 108)

texts

Introduction to Technocracy – 1933

https://archive.org/stream/IntroductionToTechnocracy/IntroductionToTechnocracy-1933_djvu.txt

discussions — of ‘value,’ of fluctuating prices, of the gold standard, of changing interest rates, of items of pecuniary wealth which are at the same time items of debt — are

Good Diagnosis and poor prescription as an analogy.

“An good analogy is better than gold, yea than much fine gold”                 Paraphrase of Proverbs

MEMOIRS
OF
EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR DELUSIONS
AND THE
Madness of Crowds.

The Mississippi Scheme.

• • The South-Sea Bubble.
  • The Tulipomania.
  • The Alchymists.
  • Modern Prophecies.
  • Fortune-Telling.
  • The Magnetisers.
  • Influence of Politics and Religion on the Hair and Beard.
• Volume .
  • Contents.
  • List of Engravings.
  • The Crusades.
  • The Witch Mania.
  • The Slow Poisoners.
  • Haunted Houses.
  • Popular Follies of Great Cities.
  • Popular Admiration of Great Thieves.
  • Duels and Ordeals.
  • Relics.

THE LOVE OF THE MARVELLOUS AND THE DISBELIEF OF THE TRUE.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/636/636-h/636-h.htm

MEMORIES OF EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR DELUSIONS

VOL II.

BY

CHARLES MACKAY

CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME.

THE CRUSADES
THE WITCH MANIA
THE SLOW POISONERS
HAUNTED HOUSES

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/713/713-h/713-h.htm
MEMOIRS OF
EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR DELUSIONS

Volume III (of III)

By Charles Mackay

Detailed Contents:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/884/884-h/884-h.htm

NATIONAL DELUSIONS.

N’en deplaise a ces fous nommes sages de Grece;
En ce monde il n’est point de parfaite sagesse;
Tous les hommes sont fous, et malgre tous leurs soins,
Ne different entre eux que du plus ou du moins.
Do not displease these foolish men of Greece;
In this world there is no perfect wisdom;
All men are mad, and in spite of all their care,
Different between them only more or less.

BOILEAU.
In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming crazed upon a religious scruple, and neither of them recovering its senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity. At an early age in the annals of Europe its population lost their wits about the Sepulchre of Jesus, and crowded in frenzied multitudes to the Holy Land: another age went mad for fear of the Devil, and offered up hundreds of thousands of victims to the delusion of witchcraft. At another time, the many became crazed on the subject of the Philosopher’s Stone, and committed follies till then unheard of in the pursuit. It was once thought a venial offence in very many countries of Europe to destroy an enemy by slow poison. Persons who would have revolted at the idea of stabbing a man to the heart, drugged his pottage without scruple. Ladies of gentle birth and manners caught the contagion of murder, until poisoning, under their auspices, became quite fashionable. Some delusions, though notorious to all the world, have subsisted for ages, flourishing as widely among civilized and polished nations as among the early barbarians with whom they originated,—that of duelling, for instance, and the belief in omens and divination of the future, which seem to defy the progress of knowledge to eradicate entirely from the popular mind. Money, again, has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper. To trace the history of the most prominent of these delusions is the object of the present pages. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
In the present state of civilization, society has often shown itself very prone to run a career of folly from the last-mentioned cases. This infatuation has seized upon whole nations in a most extraordinary manner. France, with her Mississippi madness, set the first great example, and was very soon imitated by England with her South Sea Bubble. At an earlier period, Holland made herself still more ridiculous in the eyes of the world, by the frenzy which came over her people for the love of Tulips. Melancholy as all these delusions were in their ultimate results, their history is most amusing. A more ludicrous and yet painful spectacle, than that which Holland presented in the years 1635 and 1636, or France in 1719 and 1720, can hardly be imagined. Taking them in the order of their importance, we shall commence our history with John Law and the famous Mississippi scheme of the years above mentioned.

THE MISSISSIPPI SCHEME

Some in clandestine companies combine;
Erect new stocks to trade beyond the line;
With air and empty names beguile the town,
And raise new credits first, then cry ’em down;
Divide the empty nothing into shares,
And set the crowd together by the ears.

Defoe.

Anti Semetism, Islamaphobia, Radical Atheism, Holocaust Research / Climate Denial / Nationalism / Populism/ Mental FacultiesTaboos?Subversion/ Rules for Radicals. Jewish Paedophilia Cannard.

The Historikerstreit[edit]

Main article: Historikerstreit

[hide]This section has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages) It has been suggested that this section be merged into Historikerstreit. (Discuss) Proposed since March 2016. This section should include only a brief summary of Historikerstreit. See Wikipedia:Summary style for information on how to properly incorporate it into this article’s main text. (March 2016)

Nolte’s thesis[edit]

Nolte is best known for his role in launching the Historikerstreit (“Historians’ Dispute”) of 1986 and 1987. On 6 June 1986 Nolte published a feuilleton opinion piece entitled Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will: Eine Rede, die geschrieben, aber nicht mehr gehalten werden konnte (“The Past That Will Not Pass: A Speech That Could Be Written but Not Delivered“) in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.^[33] His feuilleton was a distillation of ideas he had first introduced in lectures delivered in 1976 and in 1980. Earlier in 1986, Nolte had planned to deliver a speech before the Frankfurt Römerberg Conversations (an annual gathering of intellectuals), but he had claimed that the organizers of the event withdrew their invitation.^[34] In response, an editor and co-publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Joachim Fest, allowed Nolte to have his speech printed as a feuilleton in his newspaper.^[35] One of Nolte’s leading critics, British historian Richard J. Evans, claims that the organizers of the Römerberg Conversations did not withdraw their invitation, and that Nolte had just refused to attend.^[36]

Nolte began his feuilleton by remarking that it was necessary in his opinion to draw a “line under the German past”.^[37] Nolte argued that the memory of the Nazi era was “a bugaboo, as a past that in the process of establishing itself in the present or that is suspended above the present like an executioner’s sword”.^[38] Nolte complained that excessive present-day interest in the Nazi period had the effect of drawing “attention away from the pressing questions of the present—for example, the question of “unborn life” or the presence of genocide yesterday in Vietnam and today in Afghanistan“.^[38]

The crux of Nolte’s thesis was presented when he wrote:

“It is a notable shortcoming of the literature about National Socialism that it does not know or does not want to admit to what degree all the deeds—with the sole exception of the technical process of gassing—that the National Socialists later committed had already been described in a voluminous literature of the early 1920s: mass deportations and shootings, torture, death camps, extermination of entire groups using strictly objective selection criteria, and public demands for the annihilation of millions of guiltless people who were thought to be “enemies”.

It is probable that many of these reports were exaggerated. It is certain that the “White Terror” also committed terrible deeds, even though its program contained no analogy to the “extermination of the bourgeoisie”. Nonetheless, the following question must seem permissible, even unavoidable: Did the National Socialists or Hitler perhaps commit an “Asiatic” deed merely because they and their ilk considered themselves to be the potential victims of an “Asiatic” deed? Wasn’t the ‘Gulag Archipelago‘ more original than Auschwitz? Was the Bolshevik murder of an entire class not the logical and factual prius of the “racial murder” of National Socialism? Cannot Hitler’s most secret deeds be explained by the fact that he had not forgotten the rat cage? Did Auschwitz in its root causes not originate in a past that would not pass?

Soviet slave labour at the construction of White Sea-Baltic Canal, 1931–33. The Original Auschwitz? According to Nolte, the Soviet Gulag camps were Vorbild (the terrifying example that inspired the Nazis) and Schreckbild (the terror model for the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis)

Nolte called the Auschwitz death camp and the other German death camps of World War II a “copy” of the Soviet Gulag camps.

In addition, Nolte sees his work as the beginning of a much-needed revisionist treatment to end the “negative myth” of the Third Reich that dominates contemporary perceptions.^[39] Nolte took the view that the principal problem of German history was this “negative myth” of the Third Reich, which cast the Nazi era as the ne plus ultra of evil.^[40]

Nolte contends that the great decisive event of the 20th century was the Russian Revolution of 1917, which plunged all of Europe into a long-simmering civil war that lasted until 1945. To Nolte, fascism, communism’s twin, arose as a desperate response by the threatened middle classes of Europe to what Nolte has often called the “Bolshevik peril”. He suggests that if one wishes to understand the Holocaust, one should begin with the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and then understand the rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

In his 1987 book Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, 1917–1945, Nolte argued in the interwar period, Germany was Europe’s best hope for progress.^[41] Nolte wrote that “if Europe was to succeed in establishing itself as a world power on an equal footing [with the United States and the Soviet Union], then Germany had to be the core of the new ‘United States'”.^[41] Nolte claimed if Germany had to continue to abide by Part V of the Treaty of Versailles, which had disarmed Germany, then Germany would have been destroyed by aggression from her neighbors sometime later in the 1930s, and with Germany’s destruction, there would have been no hope for a “United States of Europe”.^[41] The British historian Richard J. Evans accused Nolte of engaging in a geopolitical fantasy.^[42]

The ensuing controversy[edit]

These views ignited a firestorm of controversy. Most historians in West Germany and virtually all historians outside Germany condemned Nolte’s interpretation as factually incorrect, and as coming dangerously close to justifying the Holocaust.^[43] Many historians, such as Steven T. Katz, claimed that Nolte’s “Age of Genocide” concept “trivialized” the Holocaust by reducing it to one of just many 20th century genocides.^[44] A common line of criticism was that Nazi crimes, above all the Holocaust, were singular and unique in their nature, and should not be loosely analogized to the crimes of others. Some historians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler were most forceful in arguing that the sufferings of the “kulaks” deported during the Soviet “dekulakization” campaign of the early 1930s were in no way analogous to the suffering of the Jews deported in the early 1940s. Many were angered by Nolte’s claim that “the so-called annihilation of the Jews under the Third Reich was a reaction or a distorted copy and not a first act or an original”, with many wondering why Nolte spoke of the “so-called annihilation of the Jews” in describing the Holocaust. Some of the historians who denounced Nolte’s views included Hans Mommsen, Jürgen Kocka, Detlev Peukert, Martin Broszat, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Michael Wolffsohn, Heinrich August Winkler, Wolfgang Mommsen, Karl Dietrich Bracher and Eberhard Jäckel. Much (though not all) of the criticism of Nolte came from historians who favored either the Sonderweg (Special Way) and/or intentionalist/functionalist interpretations of German history.

Coming to Nolte’s defence were the journalist Joachim Fest, the philosopher Helmut Fleischer, and the historians’ Klaus Hildebrand, Rainer Zitelmann, Hagen Schulze, Thomas Nipperdey and Imanuel Geiss. The last was unusual amongst Nolte’s defenders as Geiss was normally identified with the left, while the rest of Nolte’s supporters were seen as either on the right or holding centrist views. In response to Wehler’s book, Geiss later published a book entitled Der Hysterikerstreit. Ein unpolemischer Essay (The Hysterical Dispute: An Unpolemical Essay) in which he largely defended Nolte against Wehler’s criticisms. Geiss wrote Nolte’s critics had “taken in isolation” his statements and were guilty of being “hasty readers”^[45]

In particular, controversy centered on an argument of Nolte’s 1985 essay “Between Myth and Revisionism” from the book Aspects of the Third Reich, first published in German as “Die negative Lebendigkeit des Dritten Reiches” (“The Negative Vitality of the Third Reich”) as an opinion piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 24 July 1980, but which did not attract widespread attention until 1986 when Jürgen Habermas criticized the essay in a feuilleton piece.^[46] Nolte had delivered a lecture at the Siemens-Stiftung in 1980, and excerpts from his speech were published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung without attracting controversy.^[47] In his essay, Nolte argued that if the PLO were to destroy Israel, then the subsequent history written in the new Palestinian state would portray the former Israeli state in the blackest of colors with no references to any of the positive features of the defunct state.^[48] In Nolte’s opinion, a similar situation of history written only by the victors exists in regards to the history of Nazi Germany.^[48] Many historians, such as British historian Richard J. Evans, have asserted that, based on this statement, Nolte appears to believe that the only reason why Nazism is regarded as evil is because Germany lost World War II, with no regard for the Holocaust.^[49] In a review which appeared in the Historische Zeitschrift journal on 2 April 1986 Klaus Hildebrand called Nolte’s essay “Between Myth and Revisionism” “trailblazing”.^[50] In the same review Hildebrand argued Nolte had in a praiseworthy way sought:

“to incorporate in historicizing fashion that central element for the history of National Socialism and of the “Third Reich” of the annihilatory capacity of the ideology and of the regime, and to comprehend this totalitarian reality in the interrelated context of Russian and German history”.^[51]

Habermas’ attack[edit]

The philosopher Jürgen Habermas in an article in the Die Zeit of 11 July 1986 strongly criticized Nolte, along with Andreas Hillgruber and Michael Stürmer, for engaging in what Habermas called “apologetic” history writing in regards to the Nazi era, and for seeking to “close Germany’s opening to the West” that in Habermas’s view has existed since 1945.^[52]

In particular, Habermas took Nolte to task for suggesting a moral equivalence between the Holocaust and the Khmer Rouge genocide. In Habermas’s opinion, since Cambodia was a backward, Third World agrarian state and Germany a modern, industrial state, there was no comparison between the two genocides.^[53]

War of words in the German press[edit]

In response to Habermas’s essay, Klaus Hildebrand came to Nolte’s defence. In an essay entitled “The Age of Tyrants”, first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on July 31, 1986, he went on to praise Nolte for daring to open up new questions for research.^[54]

Nolte, for his part, started to write a series of letters to newspapers such as Die Zeit and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung attacking his critics; for example, in a letter to Die Zeit on 1 August 1986, Nolte complained that his critic Jürgen Habermas was attempting to censor him for expressing his views, and accused Habermas of being the person responsible for blocking him from attending the Römerberg Conversations.^[55] In the same letter, Nolte described himself as the unnamed historian whose views on the reasons for the Holocaust had caused Saul Friedländer to walk out in disgust from a dinner party hosted by Nolte in Berlin in February or March 1986 that Habermas had alluded to an earlier letter^[56][57]

Responding to the essay “The Age of Tyrants: History and Politics” by Klaus Hildebrand that defended Nolte, Habermas wrote:

“In his essay Ernst Nolte discusses the “so-called” annihilation of the Jews (in H.W. Koch, ed. Aspects of the Third Reich, London, 1985). Chaim Weizmann’s declaration in the beginning of September 1939 that the Jews of the world would fight on the side of Britain, “justified” – so opined Nolte – Hitler to treat the Jews as prisoners of war and intern them. Other objections aside, I cannot distinguish between the insinuation that world Jewry is a subject of international law and the usual anti-Semitic projections. And if it had at least stopped with deportation. All this does not stop Klaus Hildebrand in the Historische Zeitschrift from commending Nolte’s “pioneering essay”, because it “attempts to project exactly the seemingly unique aspects of the history of the Third Reich onto the backdrop of the European and global development”. Hildebrand is pleased that Nolte denies the singularity of the Nazi atrocities”.^[58]

In an essay entitled “Encumbered Remembrance”, first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on August 29, 1986, Fest claimed that Nolte’s argument that Nazi crimes were not singular was correct.^[59] Fest accused Habermas of “academic dyslexia” and “character assassination” in his attacks on Nolte.^[60]

Skulls of Khmer Rouge victims. Joachim Fest defended Nolte by arguing that Habermas was a racist for arguing that it was natural for Cambodians to practice genocide and unnatural for Germans.

In a letter to the editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published on September 6, 1986 Karl Dietrich Bracher accused both Habermas and Nolte of both “…tabooing the concept of totalitarianism and inflating the formula of fascism”.^[61]

The historian Eberhard Jäckel, in an essay first published in the Die Zeit newspaper on September 12, 1986, argued that Nolte’s theory was ahistorical on the grounds that Hitler held the Soviet Union in contempt and could not have felt threatened as Nolte claimed.^[62] Jäckel later described Nolte’s methods as a “game of confusion”, comprising dressing hypotheses up as questions and then attacking critics demanding evidence for his assertions as seeking to block one from asking questions.^[63]

The philosopher Helmut Fleischer, in an essay first published in the Nürnberger Zeitung newspaper on September 20, 1986, defended Nolte against Habermas on the grounds that Nolte was only seeking to place the Holocaust into a wider political context of the time.^[64] Fleischer accused Habermas of seeking to impose on Germans a left-wing moral understanding of the Nazi period and of creating a “moral” Sondergericht (Special Court).^[65] Fleischer argued that Nolte was only seeking the “historicization” of National Socialism that Martin Broszat had called for in a 1985 essay by trying to understand what caused National Socialism, with a special focus on the fear of communism.^[66]

In an essay first published in Die Zeit on September 26, 1986, the historian Jürgen Kocka argued against Nolte that the Holocaust was indeed a “singular” event because it had been committed by an advanced Western nation, and argued that Nolte’s comparisons of the Holocaust with similar mass killings in Pol Pot‘s Cambodia, Joseph Stalin‘s Soviet Union, and Idi Amin‘s Uganda were invalid because of the backward nature of those societies.^[67]

Hagen Schulze, in an essay first published in Die Zeit on September 26, 1986, defended Nolte, together with Andreas Hillgruber, and argued that Habermas was acting from “incorrect presuppositions” in attacking Nolte and Hillgruber for denying the “singularity” of the Holocaust.^[68] Schulze argued that Habermas’s attack on Nolte was flawed because he failed to provide any proof that the Holocaust was unique, and argued there were many “aspects” of the Holocaust that were “common” to other historical events.^[68]

In an essay first published in the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper on November 14, 1986, Heinrich August Winkler wrote of Nolte’s essay “The Past That Will Not Pass”:

“Those who read the Frankfurter Allgemeine all the way through to the culture section were able to read something under the title “The Past That Will Not Pass” that no German historian to date had noticed: that Auschwitz was only a copy of a Russian original – the Stalinist Gulag Archipelago. From a fear of the Bolsheviks’ Asiatic will to annihilate, Hitler himself committed an “Asiatic deed”. Was the annihilation of the Jews a kind of putative self-defence? That is what Nolte’s speculation amounts to.”^[69]

The political scientist Kurt Sontheimer, in an essay first published in the Rheinischer Merkur newspaper on November 21, 1986, accused Nolte and his supporters of attempting to create a new “national consciousness” intended to sever the Federal Republic’s “intellectual and spiritual ties with the West”.^[70]

The German political scientist Richard Löwenthal noted that news of the Soviet kulak expulsions and the Holodomor did not reach Germany until 1941, so that Soviet atrocities could not possibly have influenced the Germans as Nolte claimed.^[32] In a letter to the editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on November 29, 1986, Löwenthal argued the case for a “fundamental difference” in mass murder between Germany and the Soviet Union, and against the “equalizing” of various crimes in the 20th century.^[71]

The German historian Horst Möller, in an essay first published in late 1986 in the Beiträge zur Konfliktforschung magazine, argued that Nolte was not attempting to “excuse” Nazi crimes by comparing them with the crimes of others, but was instead trying to explain Nazi war-crimes.^[72] Möller argued that Nolte was only attempting to explain “irrational” events rationally, and that the Nazis really did believe that they were confronted with a world Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy out to destroy Germany.^[72]

In an essay entitled “The Nazi Reign – A Case of Normal Tyranny?”, first published in Die neue Gesellschaft magazine in late 1986, the political scientist Walter Euchner wrote that Nolte was wrong when he wrote of Hitler’s alleged terror of the Austrian Social Democratic Party parades before 1914, arguing that Social Democratic parties in both Germany and Austria were fundamentally humane and pacifistic, instead of the terrorist-revolutionary entities Nolte alleged them to be.^[73]

Der europäische Bürgerkrieg[edit]

Another area of controversy was Nolte’s 1987 book Der europäische Bürgerkrieg (The European Civil War) and some accompanying statements, by which Nolte appeared to flirt with Holocaust denial as a serious historical argument.^[74] In a letter to Otto Dov Kulka of 8 December 1986 Nolte criticized the work of French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson on the ground that the Holocaust did in fact occur, but he went on to argue that Faurisson’s work had admirable motives in the form of sympathy for Palestinians and opposition to Israel.^[75] In Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, Nolte claimed that the intentions of Holocaust deniers are “often honorable”, and that some of their claims are “not evidently without foundation”. Kershaw has argued that Nolte was operating on the borderlines of Holocaust denial with his implied claim that the “negative myth” of the Third Reich was created by Jewish historians, his allegations of the domination of Holocaust scholarship by Jewish historians, and his statements that one should withhold judgment on Holocaust deniers, who Nolte insists are not exclusively Germans or fascists. In Kershaw’s opinion, Nolte is attempting to imply that Holocaust deniers are perhaps on to something.

In Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, Nolte put forward five different arguments as a way of criticizing the uniqueness of the Shoah thesis. These were as follows:

• There were other equally horrible acts of violence in the 20th century.^[76] Some of the examples Nolte cited were the Armenian genocide; Soviet deportations of the so-called “traitor nations,” such as the Crimean Tatars and the Volga Germans; British “area bombing” in World War II; and American violence in the Vietnam War.^[77]
• Nazi genocide was only a copy of Soviet genocide, and thus can in no way be considered unique.^[77]
• Nolte argued that the vast majority of Germans had no knowledge of the ‘Holocaust while it was happening^[77] Nolte claimed that the genocide of the Jews was Hitler’s personal pet project, and that the Holocaust was the work of only a few Germans who were entirely unrepresentative of German society^[77] Contradicting the American historian Raul Hilberg, who claimed that hundreds of thousands of Germans were complicit in the Holocaust, from high-ranking bureaucrats to railway clerks and locomotive conductors, Nolte argued that the functional division of labour in modern society meant that most people in Germany had no idea of how they were assisting in genocide.^[78] In support of this, Nolte cited the voluminous memoirs of German generals and Nazi leaders, such as Albert Speer, who claimed to have no idea that their country was engaging in genocide during World War II.^[78]
• Nolte maintained that to a certain degree Nazi anti-Semitic policies were justifiable responses to Jewish actions against Germany, such as Weizmann’s alleged 1939 “declaration of war” on Germany.^[78]
• Finally, Nolte hinted at the possibility that the Holocaust had never happened at all.^[79] Nolte claimed that the Wannsee Conference never took place, and argued that most Holocaust scholarship is flawed because most Holocaust historians are Jewish, and thus “biased” against Germany and in favour of the idea that there was a Holocaust.^[79]

The British historian Richard J. Evans criticized Nolte, accusing him of taking too seriously the work of Holocaust deniers, whom Evans called cranks, not historians.^[79] Likewise, Evans charged that Nolte was guilty of making assertions unsupported by the evidence, such as claiming that SS massacres of Russian Jews were a form of counterinsurgency, or taking at face value the self-justifying claims of German generals who professed to be ignorant of the Shoah.^[79]

Perhaps the most extreme response to Nolte’s thesis occurred on 9 February 1988, when his car was burned by leftist extremists in Berlin.^[80] Nolte called the case of arson “terrorism”, and maintained that the attack was inspired by his opponents in the Historikerstreit.^[80]

International reaction[edit]

Criticism from abroad came from Ian Kershaw, Gordon A. Craig, Richard J. Evans, Saul Friedländer, John Lukacs, Michael Marrus, and Timothy Mason. Mason wrote against Nolte, calling for the sort of theories of generic fascism that Nolte himself had once championed:

If we can do without much of the original contents of the concept of ‘fascism’, we cannot do without comparison. ‘Historicization’ may easily become a recipe for provincialism. And the moral absolutes of Habermas, however politically and didactically impeccable, also carry a shadow of provincialism, as long as they fail to recognize that fascism was a continental phenomenon, and that Nazism was a peculiar part of something much larger. Pol Pot, the rat torture, and the fate of the Armenians are all extraneous to any serious discussion of Nazism; Mussolini’s Italy is not.^[81]

Anson Rabinbach accused Nolte of attempting to erase German guilt for the Holocaust.^[82] Ian Kershaw wrote that Nolte was claiming that the Jews had essentially brought the Holocaust down on themselves, and were the authors of their own misfortunes in the Shoah.^[83] Elie Wiesel called Nolte, together with Klaus Hildebrand, Andreas Hillgruber, and Michael Stürmer, one of the “four bandits” of German historiography.^[84]

The American historian Charles Maier rejected Nolte’s claims regarding the moral equivalence of the Holocaust and Soviet terror on the grounds that while the latter was extremely brutal, it did not seek the physical annihilation of an entire people as state policy.^[85] The American historian Donald McKale blasted both Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber for their statements that the Allied strategic bombing offensives were just as much acts of genocide as the Holocaust, writing that that was just the sort of nonsense one would expect from Nazi apologists like Nolte and Hillgruber.^[86]

In a 1987 essay, the Austrian-born Israeli historian Walter Grab accused Nolte of engaging in an “apologia” for Nazi Germany.^[87] Grab called Nolte’s claim that Weizmann‘s letter to Chamberlain was a “Jewish declaration of war” that justified the Germans “interning” European Jews a “monstrous thesis” that was not supported by the facts.^[87] Grab accused Nolte of ignoring the economic impoverishment and total lack of civil rights that the Jewish community in Germany lived under in 1939.^[87] Grab wrote that Nolte “mocks” the Jewish victims of National Socialism with his “absolutely infamous” statement that it was Weizmann with his letter that caused all of the Jewish death and suffering during the Holocaust.^[87]

Conclusion of dispute[edit]

Writing in 1989, the British historian Richard J. Evans declared that:

Finally, Nolte’s attempts to establish the comparability of Auschwitz rest in part upon an extension of the concept of ‘genocide’ to actions which cannot plausibly justify being described in this way. However much one might wish to criticize the Allied strategic-bombing offensive against German cities, it cannot be termed genocidal because there was no intention to exterminate the entire German people. Dresden was bombed after Coventry, not the other way around, and it is implausible to suggest that the latter was a response to the former; on the contrary, there was indeed an element of retaliation and revenge in the strategic bombing offensive, which is precisely one of the grounds on which it has often been criticized. There is no evidence to support Nolte’s speculation that the ethnic Germans in Poland would have been entirely exterminated had the Nazis not completed their invasion quickly. Neither the Poles nor the Russians had any intention of exterminating the German people as a whole.

Citing Mein Kampf, Evans argued that Hitler was an anti-Semite long before 1914 and that it was the moderate Left SPD, not the Bolsheviks, whom Hitler regarded as his main enemies^[88]

Nolte’s opponents have expressed intense disagreement with his evidence for a Jewish “war” on Germany. They argue that Weizmann’s letter to Chamberlain was written in his capacity as head of the World Zionist Organization, not on behalf of the entire Jewish people of the world,^[89] and that Nolte’s views are based on the spurious idea that all Jews comprised a distinct “nationality” who took their marching orders from Jewish organizations.^[89]

The ruins of Hamburg after the 1943 firebombing. Nolte called British “area bombing” of Germany a policy of “genocide”

Because of the views that he expressed during the Historikerstreit, Nolte has often been accused of being a Nazi apologist and an anti-Semite. Nolte has always vehemently denied these charges, and has insisted that he is a neo-liberal in his politics.^{[citation needed]} Nolte is by his own admission an intense German nationalist and his stated goal is to restore the Germans’ sense of pride in their history that he feels has been missing since 1945. In a September 1987 interview, Nolte stated that the Germans were “once the master race (Herrenvolk), now they are the “guilty race” (Sündervolk). The one is merely an inversion of the other”.^[90] Nolte’s defenders have pointed to numerous statements on his part condemning Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Nolte’s critics have acknowledged these statements, but claim that Nolte’s arguments can be construed as being sympathetic to the Nazis, such as his defence of the Commissar Order as a legitimate military order, his argument that the Einsatzgruppen massacres of Soviet Jews were a reasonable “preventative security” response to partisan attacks, his statements citing Viktor Suvorov that Operation Barbarossa was a “preventive war” forced on Hitler allegedly by an impending Soviet attack, his claim that too much scholarship on the Holocaust has been the work of “biased” Jewish historians, or his use of Nazi-era language such as his practice of referring to Red Army soldiers in World War II as “Asiatic hordes”.^[91][92]

Germar Rudolf, also known as Germar Scheerer,^[1] born 29 October 1964, is a German chemist and a convicted Holocaust denier.^[2]

Contents

 [hide] 

• 1Background
• 2Legal consequences: escape, deportation, and imprisonment
• 3Publications
• 4Selected publications
• 5References
• 6External links

Background[edit]

Rudolf was born in Limburg an der Lahn, Hesse. In 1983 he took his Abitur in Remscheid, then studied chemistry in Bonn, graduating in 1989 with a Master’s degree. As a student, he joined the A.V. Tuisconia Königsberg zu Bonn and the K.D.St.V. Nordgau Prag zu Stuttgart, Catholic fraternities belonging to the Cartellverband. After supporting the CSU/CDU, he became a member of the Republicans.^{[3][non-primary source needed]}

After his military service with the German Air Force, in October 1990 he joined the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research at Stuttgart, where he prepared a PhD thesis.^{[3][non-primary source needed]}

Rudolf originally maintained conventional attitudes towards gas chambers at Auschwitz, but then began to challenge accepted history.^[4] In 1991, he began work on a paper entitled Report on the formation and verifiability of cyanide compounds in the Auschwitz “gas chambers“ on behalf of the Düsseldorf attorney Hajo Herrmann, a former Luftwaffe pilot. In 1993, this work was reported in the media, and Rudolf was told not to enter the Max Planck Institute again without permission. When he did so, his employment was terminated without notice. In 1994, this dismissal was converted into a termination by mutual agreement. In 1996, the University of Stuttgart asked Rudolf to withdraw his application for a final PhD examination, or it would be denied, rendering his PhD thesis worthless. The legal basis for this is a German law which allows universities to deny or withdraw academic degrees where the candidate has used his academic credentials or knowledge to commit a crime. Rudolf subsequently withdrew his application.^{[3][non-primary source needed]}

Between 1991 and 1994, Herrmann and other lawyers used Rudolf’s Auschwitz report to defend several clients, among them Otto Ernst Remer, a former Wehrmacht officer charged with Volksverhetzung (inciting hatred). Rudolf knew his work would be associated with a Holocaust denier, but insisted that even Remer had a right to legal defense. Rudolf stated that his findings at Auschwitz and Birkenau “completely shattered his world view”. Among other things, Rudolf’s report claims that only insignificant traces of cyanide compounds can be found in the samples taken from Auschwitz. However, Richard Green and Jamie McCarthy from The Holocaust History Project have criticized the report, saying that like Fred Leuchter in the Leuchter report, Rudolf did not discriminate against the formation of iron-based cyanide compounds, which are not a reliable indicator of the presence of cyanide, so that his experiment was seriously flawed.^[5]

http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{“dmdocnumber”:[“666456″],”itemid”:[“001-2294”]}

  

AS TO THE ADMISSIBILITY OF

                      Application No. 25096/94

                      by Otto E.F.A. REMER

                      against Germany

     The European Commission of Human Rights (First Chamber) sitting

in private on 6 September 1995, the following members being present:

 In its decision, the Court of Justice confirmed the findings ofthe Regional Court that the mass murder of Jews in the gas chamber ofconcentration camps during the Second World War were historicallyproven and therefore common knowledge.  The taking of evidence on suchmatters was consequently not necessary.  In this respect, the Court ofJustice referred to the constant case-law of the Federal ConstitutionalCourt, its own constant case-law as well as the jurisprudence of the

Ursula Haverbeck

https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/65726/does-the-talmud-promote-pedophilia 

• 49SHARES
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Back in the day, one of my favorite past-times was mocking the living daylights out of Aussie antisemite Brendon O’Connell, who spent some time in jail for racial hatred. After being released, the walking advertisement for contraception got himself arrested and charged again, this time for threatening to kill.

After maintaining radio silence on his blog for over a year, Brendover is back with a post – revealing he fled Australia and is on the run!

(http://isolatebutpreserve.blogspot.co.il/2016/10/brendon-oconnell-is-posting-again.html)

A second point raised in my letter to you (and in the article) is the vulgarization of the phrase “genocide,” so extreme as to amount to virtual Holocaust denial, and the reason why I rarely use the term. Take a concrete case: the murder of thousands of men and boys after women and children are allowed to flee if they can get away.

See Montbiot Chomsky Below and Harris / Chomsky

Horace Rumpole: Even judges are human. Not many people know that. 

Guthrie Featherstone, QC MP: [after realizing he has missed his bus] I shouldn’t have stood here chattering to you, Rumpole. I must be a complete idiot. 
Horace Rumpole: [after Featherstone runs for a taxi] Is that a confession we can accept as the truth, my lord? 

QUESTION: So what happens to the moral commitment, the concern for justice in the Jewish state and all that — out the window?CHOMSKY: On the part of whom?QUESTION: The United States.CHOMSKY: There’s no concern for justice and there never was. States don’t have a concern for justice. States don’t act on moral grounds.QUESTION: Except on a rhetorical level.CHOMSKY: On a rhetorical level, they all do, even Nazi Germany. On the actual level, they never do. They are instruments of power and violence, that’s true of all states; they act in the interests of the groups that dominate them, they spout the nice rhetorical line, but these are just givens of the international system.QUESTION: You’ve been very critical of the American liberal community and in fact you’ve said that they’re contributing to Israel’s destruction. Please talk a little bit about that.CHOMSKY: The American liberal community since 1967 has been mobilized at an almost fanatic level in support of an expansionist Israel, and they have been consistently opposed to any political settlement. They have been in favor of the aggrandizement of Israeli power. They have used their position of quite considerable influence in the media in the political system to defeat and overcome any challenge to the system of military confrontation using all the standard techniques of vilification, defamation, closing off control over expression, etc. and it’s certainly had an effect. I don’t know if it was a decisive effect, but it had some noticeable effect on bringing about U.S. government support for the persistent military confrontation and U.S. government opposition to political settlement. For Israel that’s destructive. In fact, Israeli doves constantly deplore it. They constantly refer to it as Stalinism. They refer to the Stalinist character of the support for Israel on the part of what they call the “Jewish community,” but that’s because they don’t understand enough about the United States. It’s not just the Jewish community, which is what they see; it’s basically the intellectual community at large.

I wrote to Noam Chomsky, a hero of mine, who provided the forward to Herman and Peterson’s book, asking whether he had read it and whether he accepted the accounts it contains of the Rwandan genocide and the massacre of Srebrenica. Watching that brilliant mind engage in high-handed dismissal and distraction has been profoundly depressing. While failing to answer my questions, he accused me of following the Washington script (I have posted our correspondence on my website(13)).John Pilger, who wrote a glowing endorsement of the book, volunteered this response: “Chef Monbiot is a curiously sad figure. All those years of noble green crusading now dashed by his Damascene conversion to nuclear power’s poisonous devastations and his demonstrable need for establishment recognition – a recognition which, ironically, he already enjoyed.”(14) The leftwing magazine Counterpunch cited my article as evidence that I am a member of the “thought police”, and that the role of the Guardian is “to limit the imaginative horizons of readers.”(15)

Poisoned Well Alert!!!!!

Monbiot ( Egotistical ) All about him, Also see interview Owen Jones and Alistair Campbell (Blairs Spin Doctor)Commentators becoming the story, another story?(link provided for the desperately sad or extremely bored or for satirists seeking material)

Your response simply provides a further illustration of my points. You say that you wrote about the extermination of native Americans, citing Stannard. Very glad to know that, but it is completely irrelevant. The issue under discussion is genocide DENIAL – that’s the issue you raised in the first place, and the one discussed in my article. You completely avoid it in your two letters to me and what you published, though it is a prime topic in my article.A second point raised in my letter to you (and in the article) is the vulgarization of the phrase “genocide,” so extreme as to amount to virtual Holocaust denial, and the reason why I rarely use the term. Take a concrete case: the murder of thousands of men and boys after women and children are allowed to flee if they can get away.I’m referring to Fallujah, different from Srebrenica in many ways, among them that in the latter case the women and children were trucked out, and in the former case the destruction and slaughter was so extreme that current studies in medical journals estimate the scale of radiation-related deaths and diseases at beyond the level of Hiroshima. I would not however call it “genocide,” nor would you, and if the word were used, the more extreme apologists for western crimes, like Kamm, would go utterly berserk. Another of many illustrations of the two basic facts.Finally, you also completely misunderstood my reference to the Guardian. I don’t care one way or another that they published an interview that they regarded as so dishonest that they removed it from their website (over my objections, incidentally). 

Noam —

Thanks for getting back.

Before engaging on this topic, I’d like to encourage you to approach this exchange as though we were planning to publish it. As edifying as it might be to have you correct my misreading of you in private—it would be far better if you did this publicly. It’s not a matter of having a “debate about misreadings”; it’s a matter of allowing our readers to see that conversation on difficult and polarizing topics can occasionally fulfill its ostensible purpose. If I have misread you, and you can show me where I’ve gone wrong, I would want my readers to see my views change in real time. It would be far less desirable for me to simply report that you and I clarified a few things privately, and that I have now changed my mind about X, Y, and Z.

Beyond correcting our misreadings, I think we could have a very interesting conversation about the ethical issues surrounding war, terrorism, the surveillance state, and so forth….

Noam Chomsky speaks with Stefan Molyneux about the race war of drug prohibition, the prison-industrial complex, the erosion of civil liberties under Barack Obama, moral inconsistencies within government, the removal of media gatekeepers and the reinforcement of societal norms through social ostracism.

For more information on Dr. Noam Chomsky, please go to: http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people…

Cato said to a certain old man who was a wicked fellow, “My good sir, why do you add the shame that comes from wickedness to old age, that has so many troubles of its own?” So too do you, since poverty has so many troubles of its own, not add the terrible distress that comes from borrowing money and from debt; and do not take away from poverty its only advantage over wealth, its freedom from corroding care. For the proverb that says, “I cannot carry a goat, put an ox on my shoulder,” has a ridiculous ring. Unable to bear poverty, are you going to put on your back a money-lender, a weight hard to carry even for a rich man?

In short, the drawing is an imagined or idealized view of the landscape around Vinci. It incorporates real places, vividly and beautifully sketched, but is not a real view. What it shows cannot be found and photographed, though it could perhaps be recreated, loosely, by a cunning collage of photos. Or perhaps it could be re-created by flying above the land in a hang-glider (I confess I have not tried this), for the viewpoint most powerfully suggested is an aerial one. It is a bird’s-eye view: the imagination soars above the land, and this is what it sees. One recalls a phrase in the Turin Codex on the flight of birds: ‘The movement of the bird’ – in other words the ‘big bird’ or flying-machine – ‘must always be higher than the clouds, so that the wings don’t get wet, and so that one can see more of the land.’ ‘Per iscoprire più paese’: precisely what is achieved, thirty years earlier, in the high-gliding viewpoint of the Uffizi drawing. 62