Hackers Underworld 2: Forbidden Knowledge/Hackers Underworld 2: Forbidden Knowledge.iso/UFO/MYTHS.TXT

Text File | 1990-02-23 | 18KB | 285 lines

                            Chapter 1


                        THE MAKING OF A MYTH
                        --------------------

        In every period of history, men have succumbed to certain
illusions. Perhaps the most widespread illusion of our time is that people
are now more thoroughly, comprehensively, and, above all, accurately
informed than ever before. In reality, just the opposite seems to be the
case. The quality of the information disseminated via modern techniques of
communication stands in inverse proportion to its quantity. This general
observation also applies to the veracity of specific pieces of information.
Anyone who has seen an event reported about which he has firsthand
knowledge will attest that much of the depiction was at variance -even
radically so- with that actually happened.

        This is hardly the place to examine the manifold causes of such
distortion. Of one thing there can be no doubt: All politically related
"information" that appears in the mass media today is designed to serve a
purpose. The vaunted "independence" of the communications media is little
more than a soothing copybook platitude. Though every once in a while
ostensibly dissenting viewpoints are aired in the mass media, so as to give
a certain substance to pretensions of "balance", that does not alter in the
least the fact that the clique which, by virtue of its enormous wealth,
largely controls the communications media is primarily interested in
manipulating individuals and nations to attain its political objectives.
The ultimate achievement of propaganda is, as Emil Maier-Dorn has so
vividly put it, to "make millions of people eagerly forge the chains of
their own servitude".

        A most depressing example of a people forging its own chains is to
be seen in the almost fanatical tenacity with which so many Germans cling
to feelings of guilt that have been implanted in them about an epoch in
which bitter necessity impelled the German people to seek an independence
path to the future. Many things go into the makeup of our national guilt
complex, but more than anything else it is the product of deliberate
misinformation about the German past. As a result of this artificial and
utterly baseless guilt complex, at no time since the fall of the Third
Reich has the German people been able to bring itself to pursue its own
political interests. Mendacious propaganda of a kind and scope perhaps
unique in history has insidiously - and thus all the more effectively -
deprived it of the national self-confidence required for such a policy.
Just as an individual cannot get along without a healthy measure of
personal self-esteem, so a people without a sense of national self-esteem
cannot maintain its political independence. In the long run, this political
propaganda disguised as "historiography" can have a positively lethal
effect on the nation.

        Pivotal to the German national guilt complex is the Auschwitz Myth.
During the war, a number of concentration camps were established near
Auschwitz, an industrial town of some 12,000 inhabitants situated about 50
kilometers west of Cracow. In the course of the 1960's, but especially
after the so-called  Auschwitz Trial of 1963-65, the name of this town
evolved into a synonym for "genocide". In the concentration camps of the
Auschwitz region -so the story goes- millions of Jews were systematically
killed on orders from the leadership of the Third Reich. Today the word
"Auschwitz" has the almost mystical force of traditional fables and
legends, and it is in this sense, too, that the phrase "Auschwitz Myth"
should be understood. Indeed, the Auschwitz Myth has become a
quasi-religious dogma. Skepticism about it is not tolerated, nor often
expressed. Cleverly using the Auschwitz Myth to represent itself as the
sacrosanct embodiment of "Humanity" -and the German people as the
embodiment of utter evil- international Jewry has laid claim to a
priveledged status among nations. Similarly, forces inside Germany, as well
as outside, have used the Auschwitz Myth to forestall or suppress any
objective discussion of the Third Reich era. Whenever Germans show signs of
deviating from what Golo Mann calls the "socio-pedagogically desirable view
of history" ("das volkspadagogisch erwunschte Geschichtsbild"), one need
only utter the catchword "Auschwitz" to remove all doubt as to the basic
depravity of the German people. Not only does the very mention of
"Auschwitz" call a halt to rational discussion of the Third Reich, since
beside "Auschwitz", this symbol of absolute evil, everything else seems
inconsequential; it can also be used to cast a shadow over any other aspect
of the German past. So long as the Auschwitz Myth retains it terrible
power, the recovery of our national self-esteem is virtually impossible.


                ORIGINS OF THE AUSCHWITZ MYTH
                -----------------------------

        When one traces the evolution of the extermination legend, it is
really quite difficult to comprehend how the Auschwitz Myth came to occupy
such a towering position in it. To be sure, as early as 1944 the inventors
of the legend had decided on Auschwitz as the site of the "extermination of
the Jews", and were clever enough to bolster this allegation with an
official U.S. Government publication, the "War Refugee Board Report", as
Dr. Butz has shown. However, the WRB Report, which we shall discuss at
greater length in the next two chapters, was consigned to oblivion after
the war. At least in Germany, the "gas chamber" propaganda largely centered
around camps in the Reich itself, even though the International Military
Tribunal (IMT) had asserted in its decision, on the basis of an affidavit
from Rudolf Hoss, the former commandant of Auschwitz, that some 2,500,000
Jews were murdered in "gas chambers" at the camp. Almost immediately after
the war, severe tensions arose between the western Allies and Soviet
Russia, with the result that a line of demarcation, the "Iron Curtain", was
drawn between their respective spheres of influence. Partly for that
reason, partly for others, the western Allies never got to inspect the
Auschwitz area. Here one recalls the statement of Stephen F. Pinter, a U.S.
War Department attorney who was stationed at Dachau for 17 months:

        " We were told that there was a gas chamber at Auschwitz, but since
          that was in the Russian zone of occupation, we were not permitted
          to investigate, since the Russians would not permit it. "

        Thus there was some uncertainty about what position the Soviets
would ultimately take on the "extermination of the Jews", especially since
Stalin himself was reputed to be an "anti-Semite".

        For whatever reason, the Auschwitz Myth was not widely publicized
until well into the 1950's. At least, it still had not acquired the crucial
significance attributed to it today. No distinction was as yet made between
the various camps when the "Final Solution" -the physical destruction of
European Jewry allegedly ordered by the leadership of the Third Reich- was
discussed. They were all supposed to have played basically the same role in
this enormous "murder plot". Every concentration camp, it was said, had one
or more "gas chambers" in which Jews were asphyxiated with volatile cyanide
(in the form of "Zyklon-B", a proprietary fumigant) or carbon monoxide -in
usu vulgi: "gassed". Even in the later edition of this "standard work" THE
FINAL SOLUTION, Gerald Reitlinger claims:

        " Thus eventually, every German concentration camp acquired a gas
          chamber of sorts, though not on Auschwitz lines. The Dachau gas
          chamber, for instance, was preserved by the American occupation
          authorities as an object lesson, but its construction had been
          hampered and its use restricted to a few experimental victims,
          Jews or Russian POWs, who had been committed by the Munich
          Gestapo. "

        In Reitlinger's hedging of his statement about the Dachau "gas
chamber",