guist even has written a text in support
of Mr. Faurisson's right to free speech,
which was used as a preface to one of
Mr. Faurisson's books).
"Revisionism" made its mark in the
United States thanks to Northwestern
University Professor Arthur Butz. Pro-
fessor Butz is the author of the infa-
mous Hoax of the Twentieth Century,
yet another book "proving" there was
no Holocaust. He serves on the editor-

Yehuda Bauer labeled
David Cole's Auschwitz
tape powerful and
dangerous.

Photo by Craig Terkowit2

ial advisory committee of the Journal
of Historical Review.
Today, the center of Holocaust de-
nial is the IHR. Through its affiliate,
the Noontide Press, the IHR sells such
books as The Anti-Defamation League
and Its Use in the World Communist
Offensive, Joseph Goebbels' Commu-
nism with the Mask Off (a "riveting
analysis of the Jewish role in interna-
tional Bolshevism"), Henry Ford's The International
Jew, and Adolf Hitler: The Unknown Artist (with the
recommendation: 'What a magnificent production!").
Writing in this week's issue (Jan. 24) of the New Re-
public, Leon Wieseltier says that the debate about Holo-
caust denial is not one between the "view" that it
happened and the "view" that it did not. It is, he says,
"a war between truth and a disease."
It is an escalating battle. According to a 1993 Rop-

themselves.)
Virtually every legitimate expert
has refused to debate Mr. Cole about
the existence of the Holocaust. Pierre
Vidal-Naquet, author ofAssassins of
Memory: Essays on the Denial of the
Holocaust, explains: "One can and
should enter into a discourse concern-
ing the `revisionists'; one can analyze
their texts as one might the anatomy
of a lie; one can and should analyze
their specific place in the configuration
of ideologies, raise the question of why
and in what manner they surfaced.
But one should not enter into debate
with the `revisionists'...Such is the price
to be paid for intellectual coherence."
And while Mr. Cole claims that a
growing number ofJews are interest-
ed in "revisionism," he acknowledges
that most in the Jewish community
actively dislike him.
"I'm upset that people don't like me.
I'm upset that I get hate calls. I'm up-
set that people beat me up." But noth-
ing, he says, will stop him.
Meanwhile, David Cole enjoys the
sybaritic life of a non-working young
man with plenty of money and time to
spare. "Revisionism" takes up most of
his day, though he also is active with
the American Civil liberties Union. He likes dogs. And
women.
"I have a real weakness for the opposite sex," he says.
His great dream is to have a harem of adoring females;
he, naturally, would be the only man. Just thinking
about it makes him woozy, and he offers this advice
to his detractors: "If the ADL ever wants to get me out
of the 'revisionist' movement, they know how to do
it." ❑

er poll, 22 percent of the American public believes it's
"possible" the Holocaust never happened — just the
kind of statistic Mr. Cole loves to hear.
David Cole describes his journey into "revisionism"
as an "intellectual experience. There is real, objective
hands-on research that can be done," he says. "I mean,
were there gas chambers or weren't there? It's actually
possible to find some truth."
Among his "truths" is that the Nazis had no plan to
murder the Jews, that all the death
camps were in fact labor camps. So
of course there were no gassings at
Auschwitz, though a number ofJews
did die there, most of them from a
typhus epidemic. Auschwitz, David
Cole says, was a kind of Anderson-
vine, the Civil War prison where
thousands of Northern soldiers died
of starvation and disease.
So how could so many have been
hoodwinked? How could scholars like
Yehuda Bauer, in the face of so much
evidence to the contrary, continue to
assert that there was a Holocaust
and that millions ofJews were mur-
dered? How is it that men like David
Cole and Bradley Smith have man-
aged to unearth the "truth," while
the late Raul Hilberg remained in
the dark?
Mr. Cole says "much of it has to
do whether you believe the eyewit-
nesses or not." David Cole, for one,
does not. "I have a real problem with
eyewitness testimony" whether by
Holocaust survivors, or by women
who say they were raped, or by chil-
dren who say they have been sexu-
ally molested. "It's simply human
nature to embellish," he explains.
(The vast majority of Holocaust
documentation, however, does not
depend on survivor testimony. The
primary source consists of investi-
gations the Allies conducted at the
L_
Nuremberg trials and records and
other material kept by the Nazis From the Auschwitz State Museum.
Some of the victims, in an exhibit at the new U.S. Holocaust Memorial.