by Robert Frenz

31 January 2000

Ernst Zündel called and invited me to dinner. He was passing through the area on personal business. He was too late. I had already eaten. I did join him at the restaurant. I had coffee and he a steak. Soon after his first bite, he laughed and the conversation drifted into the area of ludicrous fads in nutrition like the low fat, oat bran, high carbohydrate and other foolish panaceas foisted upon the public by those interested primarily in turning over a fresh bit of profit.

Ernst appeared quite tired which was partly due to his long drive but more so as product of the legal ordeals he has been saddled with. No man should have to go through those shenanigans for simply speaking his mind and writing so. Then again, if he were born at an earlier time I am sure he would have been burned at the stake. In this respect, he is fortunate -- they only torched his house -- so far.

The excellent rice pudding was finished; the last drops of coffee disappeared from the cups and so we offered mutual goodbyes sealed with a handshake.

I returned to my house noticing that more paint had fallen from the eaves and that the driveway was again a victim of the expanding nature of water as it freezes. The shoddy drive was getting shoddier, but so am I.

After deleting a batch of idiotic and often abusive email, I settled down to read those from people whom I held some measure of respect. Some of them have expressed that they do not agree with me and a few, that they do not like me -- a position resting only upon what I write -- but their comments are often genuine items for thought.

One interesting item was sent by Russ Granata, a revisionist I assume. It had to do with funeral pyres of supposedly jewish corpses and the ability to light up a convict and watch him burn much like one observes a flickering and dripping candle -- fat oozing out from under the flames. My mind flashed immediately to the absurdities offered as a verbal counter to the revisionist position on these matters. I stopped myself short of rebuttal partially because of my life-long experiences in the real, non-academic, world of the sciences. The pertinent reason, and perhaps the more compelling, was due to protocol.

Certain people, for whatever reasons excite their little neurons, have claimed a vast share of war stories of which many are on a par with "the fish that got away". Of course, dead bodies -- piles of them -- are always plentiful and easy to find during, and after, a war -- in case you never noticed. There he is -- simple Sergeant Simon -- dead as dead can be. As the corpse is gawked at, hardly a soul will ask how he died. There was a war and that's partly what war is all about. The people who tally things write down little more than a "dog tag" number with an approximate place and time plus a most broad cause of demise. Autopsies are simply not performed nor are the details ever examined which led to that death. Any coroner can easily determine if someone died from cyanide poisoning, for example, but the only deaths claimed to have resulted from cyanide, during WW II, have as evidence nothing more than the rambling of people previously subject to unintentional food deprivation and exhaustive labor. Any biochemist can tell you what those conditions do to the mental processes. Testimony such as that we are expected -- and often compelled -- to believe is on a par with that given by an inebriated witness. Even sober, Mark Twain reminds us that "No one lies like an eye-witness." But, I am somewhat off on a secant.

The latest gaff, now that revelations concerning Auschwitz have scuttled that focus, seems to center around "gas vans" and corpses which are capable of self-immolation with magic torches of unknown origin.

The mechanism of the arguing sessions, sometimes called "debates", follows the pattern of Tomás de Torquemada's Inquisition under the Queen of Castile, Isabella I. First, people step forth with accounts of visions which they believe to be facts -- angels romping through clouds, voices from God, voices in the night, fake shower heads, tomorrow's Armageddon, "666 of my closest relatives went 'up the chimney'", increasing one's wealth by going into debt and non-written military orders. Some people are "fingered" as being the Devil's disciples. Those disciples have been called witches, jews, and today, Nazis, Fascists and gooney birds. In any case, the matter ends there since the disparaging "word" comes from "on high" and to question that word will certainly place the doubter on thin ice and a likely candidate for judgement and quick execution by whatever manner is sanctioned by that dismal and motley abstract we call law. Those who drag into the light of day horror tales of their personal war nightmares are never asked to verify their statements as one would in a court of law. The best they can do is find a squad of me-toos well-received by the human lot which revels in hearsay and gossip as if that were their purpose on earth.

Second, doubters step forth and question the assertions. All that would be needed to end the doubt would be to supply whatever is necessary to substantiate the initial statements. Prove what you say is true. Simple? (We certainly have enough people on 'death row' with which to conduct duplications of those miraculous deaths and with the abortion racket going full blast, what are a few lives here or there anyway?) Simple! But this is never asked by the doubters who then mistakenly proceed to demonstrate that "the fish that got away" never existed anyway. This leads to the next step.

Third, the doubters then willingly place themselves on the defensive and attempt to prove that their doubts have fact, or at least logic, as a foundation. How easily they have become side-tracked. Pat Robertson, the TV evangelist of questionable sanity, claims that God speaks to him. If I made such a claim, I'd be prepared to offer tape-recordings in evidence or, considering the latest technology, a CD in living stereo and perhaps neatly autographed. In case I forgot my recorder, I am sure -- if I truly was a right hand servant of God -- that God would bellow out to those who doubted me, or at least set fire to their under-clothing. I am not about to demonstrate that feeble Pat talks through his expensive hat. He made the claim. The burden of proof is his and his alone.

The burden of proof should be upon those who attribute all sorts of impossibilities and nonsensical activities to the military losers of WW II. That doesn't happen because we are not dealing with sanity and without sanity truth doesn't even enter into the oil painting. We are dealing with religious fanaticism and history has been generous with disclosures of the madness of crowds and extraordinary popular delusions most of which was religion based, biased and bigoted. Revisionists stand before an Inquisitor General.

All through Salem's wild days -- that mad existence -- certain "facts" were known. One was that it was impossible for a witch to die by water. Thus, one of the tests which was applied consisted of tossing the poor accused damsel into a pond but not before her breasts and vulva were "pricked" looking for "devil's clues". If she drowned, it was obvious that she was not a witch. If she managed to survive, then that proof sent her to a fiery demise.

As I part in order to feed the crows, which can spot a freebie a mile away, I hope with relish that I have in some small way revealed why I shy from Holocaust debate.