a translator, Mark Weber. Then a 37 year-old with a Masters Degree in history, and his own past as a national socialist propagandist, Weber was also one of the stalwarts of Holocaust denial symposia, writing and speaking in the United States and Europe. In 1993, Weber helped engineer a takeover of the Institute for Historical Review, ousting its founder, Willis Carto, in a battle that raged in and out of courtrooms until it bankrupted Carto and his Liberty Lobby in 2001. (See Faction Fight at the Institute for Historical Review in the Searchlight section of the Archive.)
During most of the 1980s, denying the Holocaust was a thriving industry. It became part of the ideological substructure of the white supremacist movement, insuring that every Klansman, Posse Comitatus activist, Christian Identity convert and skinhead believed that the Jews had made up all those stories about gas chambers and genocide. For a moment, “debating” the Holocaust became an epiphenomenon on talk radio and a few college campuses. A Lutheran newspaper based in Missouri, Christian News, took its claims seriously, threatening to expand “revisionist” claims outside the ranks of those already committed to some variant of anti-Semitic belief. But in the end, Holocaust revisionists failed to find the footing it sought in the academic world, despite attracting PhDs with academic affiliations to its ranks.
At the same time, educators, Holocaust centers and Jewish activists debated whether or not to answer point by point the claims made by the Flat Earthers, ultimately deciding not to give credence to such outlandish claims by debating them. In one instance, a lawsuit by a survivor, Mel Mermelstein, convinced a California court to recognize the gassing of Jews in Auschwitz as a historical fact. Finally, in the year 2000 a trial in London in which writer British David Irving lost a libel lawsuit against American historian Deborah Lipstadt, producing a record of historical facts that demolished the revisionists’ claims one by one.
Now, Mark Weber, who has been the Institute for Historical Review’s leading personality for almost fifteen years, has admitted that, “there has been little success in convincing people that the familiar Holocaust story is defective.” By “people” Weber obviously means people in addition to those who believe as a matter of ideological predisposition that the Holocaust was a hoax. Among the reasons Weber cited for this failure films like Valkyrie and Defiance, which reminded audiences that the horror of the Nazi death machine was unquestionable. Weber even admitted that at the war’s end, “most of the Jews of Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and other countries were gone.”
Predictably, Weber has been lambasted by many of his former comrades, even those who stood with him during the long years of battle with Willis Carto. They have accused him of being lazy, failing to publish anything new or use the IHR website for anything more than news clippings. They have cited his failure to travel to Iran for a Holocaust denial conference at which Ahmadinejad spoke, and of ignoring growing market opportunities for Arab-language publications. Several men, including the Frenchman Robert Faurisson and the American Friedrich “Fritz” Berg, challenged Weber’s commitment to the belief that there were no gas chambers. And a few intrepid souls, writing under pseudonyms on the web, ventured the guess that Mark Weber had been all along a spy or an agent for the Jews or somebody else considered unsavory.
If Weber is indeed a “spy,” then he is covering it up quite nicely in a renewed focus on anti-Semitism, plain and simple. And it is here that we come to understand that for Mark Weber and his ilk, so-called historical revisionism has never been about the history of the Holocaust, but has always been about finding a way to undermine and stigmatize Jews.
Weber writes that, “Some revisionists insist that … exposing the Holocaust as a hoax will deliver a shattering blow to Israel and Jewish-Zionist power.” Alas, he says, this is not true, “debunking the Holocaust will not shatter that power.” Further, “In the real world struggle against Jewish-Zionist power, Holocaust revisionism has proved to be as much as a hindrance as a help.” Thus, Weber concludes, his Institute for Historical Review will focus on a more frankly anti-Semitic agenda.
And so, as the first decade of the 21st century begins to draw to a close, at least one wing of the white nationalist crowd will be drawing on ideas more than several centuries old. Those opposed to racism and anti-Semitism, on the other hand, will draw from the lessons of Defiance and even from Valkyrie.
ZTF