www.thornwalker.com/ditch/butterbach_lte.htm


 
Following is an exchange with a reader from Germany, including substantial comments by Henry Gallagher Fields.

Nicholas Strakon
Editor in chief
January 23, 2004

 
To the editor ...

Dear Nicholas Strakon,

I am sorry to have to confess that I really discovered your site only in the last couple of days, thanks to Rational Review News Digest, which had mentioned it more than half a dozen times earlier. I may not have had the time to visit all the links mentioned, or, if I did, to visit them extensively. I am extremely glad to have discovered your site, as I feel at home there to a very large extent. So I would like to link to it on my special links page at http://www.butterbach.net/links.htm. I am asking hereby for your permission.

Living in Germany, I hope that I will not get into any legal difficulties by linking to your site, which also links to revisionist sites; some of the revisionism there I cannot agree with, knowing better. I even find it very distasteful.

Best regards,
Christian Butterbach
December 4, 2003

 
Mr. Butterbach's second letter

I am a bit astonished that you should not yet have reacted to my message [of December 4]. There may be many reasons for this, but my guess is that you disliked my remark about some of the revisionism being distasteful to me and that I said that I know better. I meant of course the question of the concentration camps and the extermination of the Jews (and others).

In the meantime I read some of the revisionist texts your site offers. They seemed interesting to me and rather convincing to a large extent. Nevertheless, they are totally beside the point. The problem is not how many died, but that they died at all and not at home in their beds. The problem is not whether they died of gassing, electrocution, shooting, beating, starvation, hard work, or typhus, or psychological stress and suicide; the problem is that they were directly or indirectly but forcibly killed. I myself was arrested on false charges by German police on November 5 [2003] (a thing that never had happened in my life — I am 65) and put a whole day in a cell without enough oxygen and without water (I had left my house that day without having eaten or drunk anything yet), and the psychological stress was such that I felt like a Jew and became very ill for days after that.

My own father (I am a citizen of Luxemburg) had been in the resistance movement against the Nazis and had helped Jews to escape from them. My mother had hidden one of four escapees from the concentration camp of Buchenwald from the Gestapo, thus saving his life, but also risking her own. The pictures of piles of corpses, for instance, which I saw decades before any Germans did (German exhibitions on the subject were always an expurgated version of what we could access in Luxemburg), cannot be fakes. At that time the computers necessary for such fakery did not exist. I could tell much more, but I cannot go into more details here.

But the main problem is that to pretend [sic] or publish certain things is strictly forbidden here in Germany (whether this is right or wrong is another question) and can get my site blocked (which already has been the case on some public terminals) or even land me in jail or at least into lawsuits that will ruin my finances and my nerves. So you should understand that I take a high risk if I link to your site, which I want to, as this site links to those revisionist sites and texts. It is materially not possible for me to check everything, and I am for the freedom of linking anyway, but the legal situation about this here in Germany is very shaky.

I hope this time to get the courtesy of a reply. Many thanks!

Christian Butterbach
December 12, 2003

 
I replied to Mr. Butterbach on December 12, informing him that I was a one-man band in terms of TLD "administration" and that I had been overwhelmed not only by an unprecedented deluge of incoming mail but also by severe and mysterious technical problems involving my computer system.

A couple of substantive comments. First, no one needs to ask anyone's permission to post a link to a site. However, if a blanket statement is desired for the record, I hereby encourage all site operators on the Web to link to the TLD site. (To be fair I must note that Mr. Butterbach also asked me to approve his using our logo for his link, a question that perhaps does call for a reply, which I have not yet given. My belated ruling is: Everyone should feel free to use our logo as a graphical link, so long as it actually leads to TLD.)

Second, with respect to the "revisionist texts [the TLD] site offers," I wouldn't describe any of our articles as an outright "revisionist text" with respect to the Jewish Holocaust. Some of our writings do betray skepticism about the canonical "six million" figure and other aspects of the official line, but detailed, heavy-duty revision of official accounts of the Holocaust is not our specialty, and it's not going to be. Our Holocaust-related analysis focuses instead on the involvement of that historical question in the enshrinement of Israel, the establishment of Official History as a civic religion, and the suppression of dissent.

Nicholas Strakon


Henry Gallagher Fields comments

Mr. Butterbach's servile simpering underscores the fact that if people live under totalitarian thought control long enough they forget the meaning of freedom. In fact they even forget the meaning of thinking.

Our correspondent is distraught about the possibility that he might seem to be connected (even in the most remote way) with revisionist sites on the Web, because in the New Germany, "DAS IST VERBOTEN." He does shed his servility long enough to admit that the revisionist sites — let's be candid here, Holocaust-revisionist sites — are "rather convincing to a large extent."

But in Mr. Butterbach's timorous opinion, the question of how many Jews died or how they died is "rather beside the point." Instead, the crucial issue is that Jews "died at all and not at home in their beds." It seems either that Mr. Butterbach doesn't grasp the meaning of the law in Germany or that he understands it all too well. If the number of Jews who died is "beside the point," then why are people given multi-year jail sentences for questioning that number?! Obviously, the number of Jews who died, even the number of Jews who died at the various alleged extermination camps, is not beside the point: it is the central point.

There certainly are other, subordinate points, though. For example, in the New Germany it has even been declared illegal to point out that the "reconstructed" extermination gas chamber built for the edification of Auschwitz tourists by the Polish Communist government in 1948 is not the real thing. (German "legal" authorities determined that historian David Irving committed that "crime.") In the United States we at least have the freedom to tell our kiddies that the pirate ships at Disney World are not legit — though if the authorities send a couple more USA PATRIOT Acts crashing down on our heads even that freedom might disappear.

Mr. Butterbach acts as though he is unaware why the Jewish Holocaust occupies center stage in the West. The Holocaust is not presented simply as one of the innumerable mass killings of human beings that have taken place since Adam and Eve were booted out of the Garden of Eden; rather it is presented as the worst crime ever committed. And why is that the case? It is the alleged number and method of deaths that make the Holocaust the crime nonpareil.

Mr. Butterbach acknowledges that publishing "certain things" in modern Germany leads to severe punishment by the state, but he believes that "whether this is right or wrong is another question." Well, dammit, we here at The Last Ditch aren't agnostic about statist thugs tossing people into jail for daring to mention "certain things." If a man can't identify that as wrong, then how can he identify anything the state does as wrong? In dealing with taboo issues such as the Holocaust, the modern "democratic" state finds it necessary to shed its mask of "polite tolitarianism" and don the black, stinking uniform of outright tyranny.

Although this may drive the Führers (and would-be Führers) of the world into a frenzy, let me repeat that we at The Last Ditch stand for freedom. And while freedom is a good unto itself, it is also of the utmost utility: for it is only as a result of freedom of inquiry that one can arrive at truth.

Why is there a need to suppress criticism and analysis by nonbelievers in regard to the Jewish Holocaust? Perhaps someone has something to hide. Or as Auberon Waugh aptly asked: "What sort of truth is it that needs protection?"

January 23, 2004

My comments and those of Mr. Fields are © 2004 WTM Enterprises.


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