The United States of Amnesia

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• Reader Comments (21)

  Page 1 of 1 pages

  Pwogwessives in Chicago are not flunking any tests, they are simply a minority which is why Daley easily rolled over them. As did his Dad.
  And in Indochina for a while the domino theory proved true. Laos, Cambodia, South Vietnam and a brutal Marxist junta in Burma.

  Posted by blondemike on Apr 10, 2007 at 10:23 AM

  A correction to Arthur Schlesinger’s “liberal” record is in order.  “Leading the fight against radical and multicultural revisionism have been such conservative historians as C. Van Woodward, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Eugene Genovese, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Daniel Boorstin.  The McCarthyite war they wage to suppress radical dissent is hpocritically portrayed by them as a valiant struggle on behalf of free speech.” [History as Mystery, (c) Michael Parenti 1999, City Lights, p. 182] Need I say more?

  As for posting by “blondmike” he’s obviously still suffering from the after-effects of the McCarthyite kool-aide passed as history by the above mentioned and celebrated historians.  I suggest he reads Parenti to get the antidote.

  Posted by Alexander Leon on Apr 11, 2007 at 10:42 AM

  Ms. Laura S. Washington,
  I am not steeped in Chicago’s history thus I have not commented on that topic.  However, I am curious on your thoughts regarding Parenti’s views on Schlesinger.
  Regards,
  A.Leon

  Posted by Alexander Leon on Apr 11, 2007 at 10:46 AM

  “radical multiculturalism, “ would that be a synonym for postmodernist, relativist defenses of female genital mutilation, and wearing a burka?
  Michael Parenti is a Stalinist. Back when he was a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, right after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to prop up an isolated Communist Party (PDPA, read an acct. by a Pakistani socialist named Raja Anwar, “The Tragedy of Afghanistan, preface by ex-Trotskyist academic Fred Halliday, Verso Books) riven into two, murderous, fratricidal factions, he defended the intervention.
  I’ve read his books...same retrograde polemics of the type published by the CPUSA back when threy were calling Trotsky a Fascist.
  Quote from Parenti on, “Flashpoints, “ on KPFA, Pacifica Radio on March 20th, ‘03, IIRC, after bloviating about the injustice of Serbian friends of his being questioned over the assasination of Z. Djindic (who, btw, studied under Habermas) he raved vs, “Trotskyists, Greens and other anti-communists.” Trots are anti-communist? Jeesh.
  And, Schlesinger blurbed the book, “Overthrow, “ by Stephen Kinzer, a good history of the interventions to restore the Shah of Iran, overthrowing Arbenz of Guatemala, etc. Hardly the action of someone uncritical of the cold war liberals.

  Posted by michael.098762001 on Apr 11, 2007 at 11:37 AM

  http://en.allexperts.com/e/m/mi/michael_parenti.htm
  Hail Milosevic, says Parenti! Hail the Chinese rape of Tibet!
  >...In the era of Mikhail Gorbachev, Parenti was highly critical of the USSR’s reformist moves of “perestroika” and “glasnost”, arguing that these had the effect of introducing capitalism into the country. He was critical of critical revisionist histories of Joseph Stalin and has maintained that accounts of his repression are regularly exaggerrated both in Russia and in the West. Parenti argued this most explicitly in Blackshirts and Reds, where he cites J. Arch Getty to put the number of executions in the Great Terror at 799,455. Getty’s numbers concern recorded executions during the period of 1921 and 1953 and are generally considered to be among the lower estimates of Stalinist terror. He does not offer his own estimates for deaths under Stalin, though he is quick to emphasize the importance of those charged with non-political crimes in the gulags. For Parenti, repression is compensated by what many claim were the country’s “dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights” under Stalin’s leadership. He characterizes Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s primary Bolshevik opponent, as being “among the more authoritarian Bolshevik leaders”.

  Parenti has also defended Serbia and in particular its former president Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević against accusations of intolerance, aggression, and war crimes during the Yugoslav wars, as he views these as exaggerations and propaganda on the part of Western media. According to Parenti, these wars were instead caused by a deliberate US and Western policy aiming at dismembering Yugoslavia in order to impose liberal capitalism there. He is a prominent member of the International Committee to Defend Slobodon Milosevic and heads its US chapter. In this capacity he has called for Slobodan’s release and defended both Milosevic and Serbs against allegations of atrocities:

  The media-hyped story of how the Serbs allegedly killed 7,000 Muslims in Srebrenica is uncritically accepted by Sell, even though the most thorough investigations have uncovered not more than 2,000 bodies of undetermined nationality. The earlier massacres carried out by Muslims, their razing of some fifty Serbian villages around Srebrenica, as reported by two British correspondents and others, are ignored. The complete failure of Western forensic teams to locate the 250,000 or 100,000 or 50,000 or 10,000 bodies (the numbers kept changing) of Albanians supposedly murdered by the Serbs in Kosovo also goes unnoticed. [1]

  Another influential essay, particularly among Maoists and supporters of China’s invasion of Tibet, is “Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth” which casts Tibet as an extremely corrupt feudal system sustained by slavery which has seen drastic improvements because of the invasion and subsequent policies of the Chinese government. [2]
  Notes
  # Specifically, Parenti cites “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence” by J. Arch Getty, Gabor Rittersporn and Victor Zemskov, American Historical Review, 98 (October 1993), pp. 1017-1049

  Posted by michael.098762001 on Apr 11, 2007 at 11:44 AM

  Parenti is a notorious Soviet and Chinese Communist apologist and also denies the gulag and everything else. He is a liar supreme. Once I heard him speak and he claimed that Franjo Tudjman of Croatia claimed that 900 Jews died in WW2. Tudjman is a revisionist but actually wrote that 900,000 Jews perished during the war. This was part of Parenti’s relentless campaign excusing, whitewashing and totally minimizing Serb crimes. Ergo for Saddam Hussein and Khaddafi of Libya, both good socialists according to Parenti. I opposed all the military actions against all of the above but did so without pretending they were not mass murderers. I did dispute the Iraq gassing claim based on a US Army War College study showing Iran as the culprit. Getty’s figures are absurd, Stalin had already killed over 30 MILLION by the early 30s and the actual death toll in the USSR under Communism is AT LEAST 50 million but Solzhenitsyn, an infinitely better authority on it than Commie apologist Parenti, puts the total at 100 million for 74 years of Communist rule. Ergo for Mao except it is well over 100 million. The Black Book of Communism, Mao: The Untold Story, Conquest’s The Great Terror and The Gulag Archipelago are far better sources than Parenti. The ONLY Commie dictator that he hasn’t whitewashed is Pol Pot but Chomsky beat him to it. By the way, here Parenti is the “revisionist” because the standard historians all except the much higher figures. David Horowitz, who was the best of the New Left historians and not a CPUSA Party Hack like Michael Parenti has repudiated his own past work as Soviet apologetics and while he’s obnoxious on many issues, he has kept a close eye on the Commie apologetics of Parenti and Chomsky, see his Frontpage website. There’s much more to say but people check out Parenti’s lying crap they can go to intellectually reputable sources for the truth. By the way, that “2,000” death figure was for Albania, not Bosnia. The Serbs killed hundreds of thousands in Bosnia. Allegedly they only killed 2,000 in Albania before the NATO invasion. But they are largescale murdering swine in any case. I hadn’t seen Alexander Leon’s nonsense when I first responded above to Michael but it is the same old Stalinist shit that has stunk up the left for 80 years via the Popular Front no enemies on the left bullshit mentality. Alex, you can scrub and scrub and scrub but you will never wipe the ton of blood off the stinking Communist tub.

  Posted by blondemike on Apr 11, 2007 at 12:31 PM

  Re:>...Ergo for Saddam Hussein and Khaddafi of Libya, both
  good socialists according to Parenti. I opposed all the military actions
  against all of the above but did so without pretending they were not mass
  murderers. I did dispute the Iraq gassing claim based on a US Army War
  College study showing Iran as the culprit.

  Another thing Parenti said on KPFA that afternoon. Totally denied that Saddam Hussein had many volumes in his library on Stalin, who he admired. For corroboration on this, see this interview w/Arab journalist, Said Aburish
  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saddam/interviews/aburish.html
  On that bogus US Army War College paper blaming the Halabja gassing on Iran, see this from Dissent, the democratic socialist journal.
  http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=487
  Questioning Halabja
  By Leo Casey
  Summer 2003

  Posted by michael.098762001 on Apr 11, 2007 at 12:41 PM

  On a late March morning fifteen years ago, as the war between Iran and Iraq was winding down, the Iraqi army began an artillery barrage on Halabja, a Kurdish city situated about fifteen miles from the border with Iran. The people of Halabja first took that attack, and the subsequent bombing by the Iraqi air force, as a routine matter, the everyday consequence of living in a stronghold of a Kurdish Peshmerga militia then allied with Iran. But as they gathered in their shelters, it quickly became apparent that there was something dreadfully different about this bombardment. Heavy, dark yellow clouds formed close to the ground, and overwhelming smells, a mixture of sweet apples and garlic, followed by an odor of rotten eggs, pervaded the air. Birds and animals began to expire, and as the clouds gradually permeated the shelters, people became ill, some vomiting, some finding it hard to breathe, others experiencing skin burns and sharp, stabbing pains as their eyes and noses began to bleed. In panic, with many already dying and others blinded or paralyzed, the people of Halabja fled their city. Behind them lay thousands of dead (estimates range from 3,200 to 5,000). Many who escaped bear grim physical injuries from that day: blindness and major respiratory and skin diseases, cancers, and, in the next generation, congenitally malformed infants.

  The bombing of Halabja with chemical gas was the opening salvo in what the Baathist Iraqi regime called its Anfal campaign, a term taken from the title of the eighth sura of the Quran, which calls upon Muslims to “strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah.” Human rights organizations have another name for that campaign: genocide. Although it is impossible to determine the exact number of Kurds who were annihilated in the two-year period during which the Anfal was waged, estimates range from a conservative low of 50,000 to Kurdish figures of 182,000. Kurds were forcibly removed from traditional villages, imprisoned in concentration camps, tortured, raped, and forced into exile. There was a total of forty known incidents involving the Iraqi use of chemical gas on the Kurds, including Halabja.

  This essay is not an account of Halabja and the Anfal. Those events have been fully documented in the Human Rights Watch book Genocide In Iraq and told in painful detail in many other places. Rather, the story told here is about the efforts to deny the Baathist regime’s use of poison gas on the Kurds, efforts that began as soon as the world first learned of Halabja and that have continued to this day. It is a tale of the politically expedient lie, in service of a denial of genocide.

  Posted by michael.098762001 on Apr 11, 2007 at 12:42 PM

  The Evidence
  I will begin with a brief summary of the volumes of evidence regarding what took place that day fifteen years ago in Halabja, as well as in other poison gas attacks on Kurdish civilians, and who was responsible for what happened. As soon as word of the gassing reached Iran with the fleeing residents of Halabja, the Iranian government brought international news media to the scene, and film of the devastation was soon aired on newscasts around the globe. Those horrifying scenes made Halabja into the Guernica of the Kurds, symbolizing the entire Anfal campaign of annihilation.

  As powerful as the film of Halabja is, it is only a small portion of the evidence. In hundreds of eyewitness interviews conducted over the next few years, survivor after survivor identified the source of the gas at Halabja (and at other sites) as Iraqi military aircraft that flew low enough so that their markings were visible from the ground. Beginning in October of 1988, seven months after Halabja, a series of forensic investigations, some sponsored by Middle East Watch (now the Middle East division of Human Rights Watch) and Physicians for Human Rights and others organized by independent medical scientists, undertook medical examinations of survivors, conducted tests for trace chemicals on soil samples and bomb fragments, and performed autopsies of exhumed bodies. The results of a number of these studies were published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Based on these studies, scientists concluded that the victims of Halabja and other sites had been exposed, in the words of medical geneticist Christine Gosden, “to the highest doses of the most potent cocktails of chemical and biological nerve and mustard agents ever used against civilians.” The nerve gases sarin and tubin, as well as mustard gas, are known to have been used, and there is good reason to believe that the nerve agent VX and biological weapons such as anthrax and mycotoxins may also have been employed at different times.

  Posted by michael.098762001 on Apr 11, 2007 at 12:43 PM

  The Origin of the Denials
  During the Gulf War and the popular uprisings that followed it, significant stores of Iraqi Baathist government documents and tapes were seized, mostly by the Kurdish Peshmerga. Ample documentation of the plans and the implementation of the poison gas attacks was found, including a tape of a particularly damning speech by the chief architect and executioner of Anfal, Ali Hassan al-Majid. Hassan says of the Kurds, “I will kill them all with chemical weapons. Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck the international community and those who listen to them!”

  Every group that has examined this question-the UN, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and others-has come to the same conclusion: that the Iraqi Baathist regime used poison gas on its Kurdish population during the Anfal campaign, in Halabja and at other sites. There simply is no reasonable doubt.

  Yet no sooner had the pictures of the dead of Halabja appeared on television screens than the campaign to deny Iraqi responsibility began. The initial impetus for these efforts came from within the U.S. government. To understand how this came to pass, one must examine the Iraq policy of the United States during the 1980s.

  Following the Iranian Islamist Revolution, the seizing of hostages from the American embassy, and the Iraqi invasion of Iran, Ronald Reagan’s administration entered into “an enemy of my enemy” alliance with the Baathist state: it became an American proxy in its war with Iran. When Iran temporarily gained the upper hand in the war, the United States provided Iraq with “detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for air strikes, and bomb assessment damage,” a New York Times investigative report concluded. German, British, and American corporations sold Iraq military hardware, arms technology, advanced computers, and key ingredients for the manufacture of missiles and chemical and biological weapons, with the active approval of the U.S. government, according to PBS Frontline, Washington Post, and Newsweek reports. Among the items purchased by Iraq, these reports determined, were American-built helicopters that were used, U.S. government officials concluded, in poison gas attacks on the Kurds. The Reagan State Department also approved, before being overruled by the Pentagon, the sale to Iraq of 1.5 million atropine injectors, a drug used to counter the effects of chemical weapons.

  The first reports of the use of chemical weapons by the Iraqis referred to battles against Iranian troops, and the U.S. government attempted to shift the blame onto the Iranians. As the evidence mounted, and especially after Halabja, the Reagan administration finally issued public condemnations of the use of poison gas. At first, the statements criticized both Iraq and Iran; eventually, they specifically cited and decried the Iraqi use of poison gas against the Kurds. But at no time, the New York Times reports, did the Reagan administration end the top-secret program through which more than sixty officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency provided the Iraqi government with intelligence information and battle plans that facilitated the use of chemical weapons. Instead, Reagan and then the first Bush administration officials fought back congressional efforts to place sanctions on Iraq for its use of poison gas at Halabja. The Pentagon “wasn’t so horrified by Iraq’s use of gas,” one of the veterans of the DIA program told the Times. “It was just one more way of killing people-whether with a bullet or phosgene, it didn’t make any difference.”

  I

  Posted by michael.098762001 on Apr 11, 2007 at 12:44 PM

  t was this context that produced the ur-text of Kurdish genocide denial-a 1988 DIA report suggesting that Iran, not Iraq, was responsible for the use of poison gas at Halabja. This report, and a subsequent Army War College study and book incorporating its argument, provide one single piece of evidentiary conjecture for placing responsibility on the Iranians: film and eyewitness reports of the dead at Halabja indicated that their mouths and extremities had turned blue, and such symptoms were consistent with exposure to blood agents using cyanide, which, it was argued, only the Iranians were known to use. None of the authors of these documents, the most notable of whom was Stephen Pelletiere, the senior CIA political analyst of Iraq during the Anfal campaign and later professor at the Army War College, had any expertise in medical and forensic sciences, and their speculation doesn’t stand up to minimal scrutiny. To begin, it is not true that Iran alone used blood agent weapons. A 1991 DIA report concluded that “Iraq is known to have employed . . . a blood agent, hydrogen cyanide gas… against Iranian soldiers, civilians, and Iraqi Kurdish civilians.”

  Moreover, cyanide gas is not very effective in the open air, and could not have caused, by itself, the widespread devastation at Halabja. It is far more likely that, as forensic studies of the survivors and soil of Halabja indicate, the poison gas cocktail had as its main components a combination of mustard gas and the nerve gases sarin and tubin. The appearance of cyanide symptoms could have resulted either from the decomposition tubin undergoes when it is used or from the inclusion of hydrogen cyanide in the poison-gas cocktail.

  Even if one were to ignore all the other evidence of Iraqi state responsibility for Halabja, as Pelletiere and his co-authors do, and even if one were to suspend disbelief regarding the plausibility of the claim that Iran would use poison gas on a city held by its Kurdish allies and then bring international news media to the scene to report on it, these documents are unconvincing. But in the fall of 1988, this most spurious of arguments served the purposes of a U.S. government alliance with Iraq against Iran, and so it was circulated with the authority of the intelligence apparatuses of the U.S. government behind it. And once this Pandora’s box was opened, this expedient political lie gained a life of its own.

  Posted by michael.098762001 on Apr 11, 2007 at 12:44 PM

  The Denials Spread
  In August of 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Faced with the prospect of Saddam Hussein gaining strategic control of much of the Persian Gulf oil reserves, American policy toward Iraq literally changed overnight: the Baathist state was now a threat. The poison gassing of the Kurds, which had been the most inconvenient of facts, suddenly acquired major propaganda value in the battle against the Saddam’s regime. The U.S. government became a major broadcaster of the genocidal horrors of Halabja, and remains so to this day.

  There would be no mention of the support given to the Baathist regime, no formal retraction of the disinformation that had been generated to cover that regime’s crimes. This self-generated amnesia had unfortunate side effects. For just as the U.S. government turned on a dime, so too did those who oppose everything the United States does: in their eyes, once the United States saw the Baathist regime as an implacable foe, that regime acquired anti-imperialist legitimacy; once the United States proclaimed the fiendishness of the gassing of the Kurds, there was reason to question its authenticity. Because the U.S. government never formally disavowed the DIA and War College reports, these documents could now be cited as grounds for challenging the truth of the Iraqi campaign of genocide against the Kurds.

  The Gulf War and its aftermath set the stage on which a second wave of denials of the Kurdish genocide would play itself out. There were many valid objections to this war, the biggest one being that the decision to go to war was premature, taken before less violent and destructive measures, such as economic sanctions, had a chance to work. But many in the reflexive opposition school of thought did not recognize the legitimacy of any efforts by the United States and its allies to undo the Baathist regime’s annexation of Kuwait. Their arguments disputed the notions that the people of Kuwait had a right of self-determination-for them, Kuwait as a national entity was simply an artifact of imperialism-and that the Baathist regime was as morally depraved as the United States and its allies claimed.

  Edward Said, the Palestinian-American academic and political activist, was one of the more articulate exponents of this view. Writing in the London Review of Books at the very moment the Baathist regime was launching its brutal suppression of the post-Gulf War uprisings of the Kurds and Shiites, Said declared that “[t]he claim that Iraq gassed its own citizens has often been repeated. At best, this is uncertain. There is at least one War College report, done while Iraq was a U.S. ally, which claims that the gassings of the Kurds at Halabja was done by Iran. Few people mention such reports in the media today.” On virtually any other question one could contemplate, Said would dispute the conclusions of the American intelligence and military apparatuses in the strongest possible terms, yet when it comes to the question of the use of poison gas on the Kurds, discredited and transparently false CIA and DIA claims suddenly become trustworthy.

  Posted by michael.098762001 on Apr 11, 2007 at 12:45 PM

  THE GULF WAR denials were relatively few in number. (In addition to Said, the other prominent denier was New Yorker writer Milton Viorst, who, after a one-day helicopter tour of Kurdish Iraq provided courtesy of the Baathist regime, decided there was no gassing of Kurdish civilians; he also offered the DIA and CIA claims as confirmation of his judgment.) But they planted the seeds for a third wave of denials that exploded on the scene during the buildup to the Iraq War. Significant segments of the movement opposed to the invasion of Iraq seized upon the old DIA and War College reports to cast doubt upon the Bush administration’s arguments for regime change. Among the liberal and left opponents of the war, these documents were recycled in a Roger Trilling Village Voice column; in a number of columns in the liberal Canadian newspaper, the Toronto Star, one of which was reproduced on the progressive Common Dreams Web site; and on a number of alternative Internet Indymedia sites. Most of the left, though, shared the dominant view-perhaps best expressed by Dilip Hiro in the Nation and elsewhere-which was unequivocal in its condemnation of the Baathist campaign of genocide against the Kurds, of the U.S. government’s alliance with the Iraqi state during the period of the genocide, and of the 2003 invasion.

  Not to be outdone, critics of the war from the right joined in the denials, often with a nastier edge. Speaking from the floor of the House of Representatives, the far-right libertarian Representative from Texas, Ron Paul, asked his colleagues, “Are you aware of a Pentagon report studying charges that thousands of Kurds in one village were gassed . . . which found no conclusive evidence that Iraq was responsible, that Iran occupied the very city involved, and that evidence indicated the type of gas used was more likely controlled by Iran than Iraq?” Jude Wanniski, best known as the conservative economist who founded the supply-side school, published a barrage of memoranda from his Polyconomics Web site, citing Pelletiere and the DIA and War College reports. Wanniski included in his memoranda several lengthy e-mails from an Iraqi whose family was highly placed in the Baathist regime, who offered fulsome assurances that poison gas was never used by that regime. At the same time, Wanniski managed to dismiss Jeffrey Goldberg’s March 2002 New Yorker article on Halabja and the gassing of the Kurds, which includes a number of survivor testimonials, on the grounds that Goldberg is “seriously biased” because he is a dual U.S.-Israel citizen.

  Posted by michael.098762001 on Apr 11, 2007 at 12:46 PM

  Denials of Halabja from both the extreme left and the extreme right gained undeserved credibility as a result of a decision of the editors of the New York Times that stunned the human rights community: on January 31 of this year, as the debate over the looming invasion of Iraq reached fever pitch, the Times published a lengthy op-ed piece by Pelletiere, in which he reasserted the claims of the DIA and War College reports that he had had a hand in writing. Why the Times editors would publish a piece that could not withstand fifteen minutes of Internet research only they can explain, but the consequences of their action are undeniable: from that point on, the authority and legitimacy of the Times was used, again and again, to support the denial of Iraqi genocide.

  Reflections
  Political lies-and genocide denial is a political lie-are antidemocratic acts, rooted in the refusal to trust a citizenry to act appropriately on the truth. That simple observation can be lost these days, as we find ourselves caught in a debased political culture of spin, where the art of image control and deception often seems the most valued skill. Yet at a fundamental level, lies were told about Halabja and the Iraqi genocide of the Kurds because the authors of those lies, starting with agencies of the U.S. government, did not trust their audiences with the truth.

  Posted by michael.098762001 on Apr 11, 2007 at 12:47 PM

  What is true of the U.S. government is also true, it must be said, of those in the movements against the Gulf War and the recent invasion of Iraq who denied Halabja and the genocidal campaign waged against the Kurds. The claim that one had to oppose every argument that the Bush I and Bush II administrations made for war against Iraq, regardless of its particular merit, went hand in hand with the contention that the American people could not grasp the full evil of the Baathist regime and still make an informed decision that war was not necessary to contain it. This is antidemocratic reasoning. The contempt for the political wisdom of the people revealed by such a posture made it that much more difficult for the meritorious arguments against the war to receive a full hearing.

  But there is more at stake here than the failure or success of political arguments. Genocide denial leaves a stain of moral and political dishonor, for it is a political lie unlike other political lies. In a way, genocide denial reenacts the crime, seeking to erase the historical record of what was done-which is all that now remains of the murdered. The denier of genocide is, to use Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s apt phrase, an assassin of memory.

  For those who have studied the literature of Holocaust denial, the parallels with the denial of Halabja and the genocide of the Kurds are striking. The deliberate refusal to engage the evidence of what was done and who did it; the reliance upon conspiracy theories to dismiss such evidence en masse; the discounting of eyewitness, survivor testimony; the obsessive focus on a few minor details of the genocide and the fixation with the instrumentality of death, the gas; the changing of facts to fit the theory-this much and more mark both denials. But in one crucial respect, there is a difference: one cannot imagine finding the Holocaust denied in official U.S. government documents or on the editorial pages of the New York Times. Despite its powerful and lasting influence on our political culture, the experience of the Holocaust has apparently not immunized American discourse from genocide denial, any more than it kept the American government from establishing a strategic alliance with the authors of genocide.
  Much remains to be done.

  Leo Casey writes on politics, education, and international solidarity for Dissent and other journals.

  The Human Rights Watch book Genocide In Iraq is available at www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/. Reports on a number of the forensic studies of gassing in Kurdish Iraq can be located at www.phrusa.org/research/chemical_weapons/index.html#2.

  The War College report containing the original disinformation on the use of poison gas at Halabja can be found at http://fas.org/man/dod-101/ops/war/docs/3203/.

  Documentation of U.S. government support for the Baathist regime at the time of the gassing of Halabja appeared in the August 18, 2002 New York Times article, “Officers Say U.S. Aided Iraq in War Despite Use of Gas” (or purchase from the Times archives at www.nytimes.com/), on the September 1990 Frontline program “The Long Road to War” (www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/longroad/etc/arming.html), and in the September 23, 2002 Newsweek article, “How Saddam Happened” (for purchase from the Newsweek archives at www.msnbc.com/news/NW-front_Front.asp).

  Posted by michael.098762001 on Apr 11, 2007 at 12:47 PM

  Iran DID it. The Army War College study was never discredited. Many of the charges such as the stolen incubators in Kuwait, used as prominent war atrocity propaganda in 1990 are big lies on a par with 90% of the bullshit mislabeled the “holocaust.” You have the habit of all very bad writers, you take up a lot of space to say nothing. Your sources are 90% Establishment Bullshit sources like the Times and Newsweek, no credibility at all. Take these canned responses and get off this board. It’s holocaust revisionism, not “denial” and go to ihr.org and vho.org websites. The same people who ran the Gulag invented the holocaust, even its very name meaning death by fire is inaccurate. Take your stinky neoconman butt back to the MOSSAD. You are fooling no one here.

  Posted by blondemike on Apr 11, 2007 at 2:42 PM

  Groan. blondemike has all the nuance of a poster on freerepublic or little green footballs on the far right or the chatboards of the kwazy maoists in the RCP or the Maoist Internationalist Movement.
  The Human Rights Watch report
  http://hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/ANFALPRE.htm
  was written by George Black. An editor of NACLA, before he joined HRW. The NACLA, journal of the North American Congress on Latin America, like an allied journal on the “Middle East, “ MERIP, had their origins in circles of late 60’s New Left graduate students and remain solidly left-wing. Susan Meisalas, thanked in the report, a leftist photojournalist is well known for her coverage of the Sandinista Revolution.
  I happen to know a bit about Holocaust Denial having read Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, DENYING THE HOLOCAUST: WHO SAYS THE HOLOCAUST NEVER HAPPENED AND WHY DO THEY SAY IT? (University of California Press, which focuses on the far right IHR,noted by blondemike. (And, a big, btw, the founder of IHR, the fascist freak Willis Carto, publisher of The Spotlight/American Free Press...can’t tell ‘ya the # of times I’ve seen undereducated lefty activists esp. 9-11 conspiranoids cite his newspaper. Cynthia McKinney said their coverage of 9-11 was great!)
  For leftist Holocaust Denialists, esp. the La Vielle Taupe circle that enlisted Chomsky to write on behalf of Faurisson see, “Anatomy of a Negation, “ by Alain Finkielkraut and Documentary Resources on the Nazi Genocide and its Denial esp. http://www.anti-rev.org/textes/VidalNaquet81b/
  Pierre Vidal-Naquet:
  On Faurisson and Chomsky
  in Assassins of Memory (NY: Columbia University Press 1992),

  Posted by michael.098762001 on Apr 11, 2007 at 3:15 PM

  Yee-Haw! Need your subscription to Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance renewed? Since you read Pat Buchanan’s The American Conservative, here is a post from the new blog of Taki, their moneybags,
  http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/the_southern_poverty_smearbund/

  http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3085/
  Great post, WTH ! I concur wholeheartedly. I always thought that civil rights or forced integration was the flip side of Jim Crow laws and slavery. By the way, check out Steve Sailor’s lengthy review of Obama’s
  1992 bio in The American Conservative, current online issue and it’s
  downloadable. Obama is very anti-white, the media hype is just hype.
  United States Posted by blondemike on Apr 3, 2007 at 10:11 AM

  Posted by michael.098762001 on Apr 11, 2007 at 3:56 PM

  Shermer had his clock cleaned in a 2 hour video debate with Mark Weber of the IHR. Go order and look at it. As far your sources go, you might want to look at the writings of the revisionists directly. If I was studying Marx I’d read Marx and not just go by what someone at the Birch Society wrote. Even if I agreed with their viewpoint more. I can give you a list of books but why should I do your work for you, and bottom line is I don’t care. So fly away, little flamer.

  Posted by blondemike on Apr 11, 2007 at 4:29 PM

  Actually I have perused the JHR of the IHR. The undergraduate library at Cal Berkeley had a subscription. Used to pick it up after I had finished w/left journals like Monthly review and Radical History Review for some sick laughs. The flip side of the arguments I have had with old Stalinists who had been active in the CPUSA who minimized (to say the least!) the GULAG camps and still in the 90’s would utter that Trotsky was a Fascist.
  Used to have a copy of a book by Revilo P. Oliver. Put it next to, “The Myth of the Six Million, “ by Austin App, IIRC. On the other side of that bookshelf I had classic Stalinist bilge like, “Trotskyism: Counter-Revolution In Disguise, “ and, “The Trotskyite Fifth Column in the Labor Movement.”

  Posted by michael.098762001 on Apr 11, 2007 at 5:23 PM

  App’s book is the least scholarly. The Hoax Of The 20th Century by Arthur Butz, Dissecting The Holocaust by Germar Rudolf, The Dissolution Of East European Jewry by Walter Sanning, Debunking The Genocide Myth by Paul Rassinier, 600 pages of essays in the JHR by Robert Faurisson, not in book form but equal to a large book and then several books by Carlo Mattogno, which can be downloaded from the VHO website which you can link to on IHR. It’s not initially the most user friendly website, you have to keep hitting the ok button three times twice but it’s worth the hassle because you can literally download thousands of pages of Mattogno and other authors. App was a nice old guy, been dead for 23 years but that pamphlet is way too polemical. Harwood’s Did Six Million Really Die ? is much better than App and Hoggan’s monograph also titled The Myth Of The Six Million. App’s is I think titled The Six Million Swindle. Hoggan wrote a very good revisionist history The Forced War on WW2. But Myth was more an ad hoc work which initially interested some of us 37 years ago but which has weaknesses that Butz exposed. Oliver was a brilliant classicist but gets too polemical himself in some areas.  The bottom line is the people who created the holocaust fraud are the same people who ran the gulag, it is all of Soviet Communist origin. They are not the other side of the coin, it IS the same coin on both sides. There is no anomaly here. Both the Gulag “denial” and the holohoax are set up by the same ideology, world communism.

  Posted by blondemike on Apr 11, 2007 at 6:07 PM

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