January 2009
From
Michael Santomauro:
( I am not
the author of this )
ReporterNotebook@
By
Prof. Anonymous
Like Faurisson, I too am dismayed at Mark Weber's
evident retreat from Holocaust revisionism, which has always seemed to me to be
central to the IHR mission. But Faurisson overstates his case, and in
doing so hurts not only his reputation but revisionism
generally.
Faurisson's central claim is that "the (homicidal) Nazi gas
chambers never existed." In support of this, he points to the fact that
the experts "are unable to show them to us." ("show me or draw me...").
But what does he mean by these statements?
Consider first that Zyklon
delousing chambers did in fact exist, and that these could be as small as a
couple cubic meters or as large as a freight train hangar--and anywhere in
between. Any delousing chamber larger than a few cubic meters could, in
fact, have been used to kill people. Now it is true that we have no direct
evidence of this, other than the many tales of gassings. But it must be
allowed that these tales could conceivably have a small grain of truth to
them. With all the delousing actions going on, including the possible
delousing of corpses, it clearly was possible that some small number of Jews
were deliberately gassed. Faurisson cannot know that this did not happen,
and therefore he is unjustified in saying, categorically, that it did
not.
So what he must mean, then, is (a) none of the chambers were built
and designed from the start as homicidal facilities, (b) no rapid killing of
large groups of Jews ever took place--such as claims of killing 2,000 in 5
minutes, and therefore (c) it was impossible to accumulate large death totals,
such as the 900,000 claimed to have been gassed at Auschwitz. If all this
is wrapped up in his little phrase "gas chamber never existed", well, then,
that's a bit too much shorthand, even for revisionists let alone the general
public.
Secondly, his 'show me, draw me' claim has apparently been
refuted by, for example, Van Pelt, who has drawn pictures of the notorious
wire-mesh columns leading down from the Zyklon hatches. Such a scheme
could, in principle, be used to kill people, even if the room in question was
not originally designed for this purpose. As to the room itself, almost
any room with a window (openable from the outside) and a door (moderately
sealable and lockable) could have been used for sporadic, small-scale
gassings. So here he must mean, "Show me a complete, blueprint for a
purpose-built Zyklon gassing facility that could only have been used on large
numbers of human beings, to kill them all within minutes." Again, too much
for his simple phrase. And furthermore, even if the experts cannot produce
a document like this, it does not thereby justify his overall claim; it only
leaves the question undecided. Absence of evidence is neither proof nor
disproof for either side.
Faurisson likens his case to Saddam's famously
missing WMD. But of course Saddam did have 'weapons of destruction'
It does not
fatally harm the revisionist cause to accept the possibility that isolated,
small gassings occurred in delousing chambers. Jews seem to have been
killed almost every other way--why not by being shoved into a delousing room now
and then? But we know from what is physically possible that long-term,
mass-gassing is out of the question, and hence the orthodox view must be
changed.
If Weber has a point, it is that he is correct to avoid making
categorical statements about that which he cannot know. In fact it is
irrational to do so, and this is something that Faurisson has not
grasped.
Faurisson is rather like a religious
fundamentalist-
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