Featured Articles

Summary and Review of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Arthur R. Butz, Part 2

Go to Part 1.

5720 words

Whatever one can say about this work, it is a coherent and readable account why what has been presented as fact regarding the Holocaust is questionable — both in scope and essence. It obviously should not be banned and its banishment (along with holding any Holocaust skepticism as punishable “wrongthink”) is a testament to how culturally and intellectually totalitarian we have become. The “historical consensus” and “mainstream” sources that demand absolute fidelity and obsequiousness to the Holocaust narrative are premised on only a few planks of reasoning and evidence: (i) German wartime records; (ii) post-war German confessions; and (iii) physical evidence. The entirety of Butz’s book is to dismantle each plank — or, at the least, present a counterclaim as to the standard narrative. What is, of course, lacking from the standard narrative is that the Germans, who famously are a meticulous people with an obsession for record keeping and order-following, never had an order in writing that outlined a plan for extermination, which the post-war Allies alleged happened in the Holocaust. As Butz points out, we are supposed to believe that Goebbels made public statements calling for the annihilation of the Jews (which he did but Butz attributes them to wartime hyperbole) but were so circumspect in internal records as to leave no evidence of a systematic plan. We are forced to believe that a mass plan of enormous economic cost just happened without any central planning and explicit preparatory documentation. To know German people is to know how suspect that idea is on its face.

There are a few parts in which I learned things that are both true (I independently confirmed them) and very troubling about the Holocaust narrative. First, Butz seems to hew closely to analyzing data by employing Ockham’s Razor — that is, the simplest explanation of complex phenomena is the usually the best, i.e., that the German government did what it claimed internally and externally to have done: evacuate the Jews eastward towards the outer sphere of German influence, and, at the same time, put able-bodied Jews to work for the German war economy. Setting aside the wisdom and morality of the question: the Germans pursued ultimately an expulsion as a “final solution” to the Jewish Question. He says that the German records, examined with that view in mind, make the most sense. Candidly, this resonates the most with me: why would Germany’s political and military planners jeopardize the war with a half-baked extermination plan that was never made explicit or subject to central planning? Why would a nation and its war effort starved for fuel waste any of it on extermination?

But then Butz must deal with the confessions of fabulous things at Nuremberg and other postwar trials. He does this in a few ways: one, the trials were preordained “show trials” that were substantively and procedurally irregular. More than that, they were administered by corrupt and zealously anti-German men who coerced testimony in a hysterical moment of time. Several of the key figures of the Nuremberg trials were Jews who were fanatically anti-German or Zionist. One that stands out is David “Mickey” Marcus: He was indeed a committed Zionist and served in the Israeli military during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Marcus volunteered to advise and command Israeli forces, was appointed as Israel’s first modern general (Aluf), and was killed in action in June 1948. Another Jewish figure, primary prosecutor Robert M.W. Kempner, was accused of coercing evidence and witnesses during Nuremberg preparations. For example, defendants like Friedrich Gaus claimed Kempner used threats (e.g., potential handovers to the Soviets) to obtain affidavits, and Gaus later recanted parts of his testimony, citing duress. Similar accusations against Kempner arose in the Ministries Trial. In other words, the idea that “evidence” in confessions was coerced is far from a “conspiracy theory” but a very real concern.

Butz likens the hysteria of the moment to the Salem witch trials of 1692–1693. This comparison is used rhetorically to portray Nuremberg as a form of modern “witch hunt,” characterized by hysteria, unreliable evidence, coerced or pressured testimonies, and a predetermined outcome rather than impartial justice. He argues that both events share structural and procedural similarities that undermine their legitimacy:

  • Presumption of Guilt and Mass Accusation: In Salem, people were accused of witchcraft based on spectral evidence (visions or dreams claimed by accusers), leading to rapid convictions without strong physical proof. Similarly, Butz claims the Nuremberg defendants were presumed guilty of orchestrating a vast extermination program from the start, with the trials serving to confirm a pre-existing Allied narrative rather than objectively investigating facts. He describes the trials as “precedent-shattering” and politically driven, where the victors imposed retroactive “crimes against humanity” without legitimate legal jurisdiction.
  • Reliance on Questionable or Coerced Evidence: Butz highlights Salem’s use of spectral evidence (later discredited even by contemporaries) and pressured confessions (some obtained under duress or fear). He extends this to Nuremberg by alleging that many affidavits and witness statements were obtained through coercion, threats (e.g., potential transfer to Soviet custody), or duress—citing examples like the partial recantations or complaints from figures such as Friedrich Gaus. He argues this mirrors how Salem “witches” confessed under fear of execution or torture to save themselves, producing unreliable “evidence” that fed the hysteria.
  • Hysterical Atmosphere and Propaganda: Butz portrays both as products of wartime/postwar propaganda and mob-like fervor. In Salem, fear of the devil and community panic drove accusations. At Nuremberg, he claims Allied (especially Zionist-influenced) propaganda amplified atrocity stories to justify the war, secure reparations, and support a Jewish state—creating a “legend” that became self-perpetuating, much like how witch accusations snowballed in colonial Massachusetts.
  • Lack of Due Process and Political Motivation: Salem trials lacked jury impartiality, allowed hearsay, and were influenced by religious/political zeal. Butz applies this to Nuremberg by noting the absence of a jury (military tribunals only), the victors judging the vanquished, no appeal mechanism, and what he sees as biased staffing (e.g., his mentions of figures like David Marcus). He frames Nuremberg as “victor’s justice” akin to a show trial, where the goal was to institutionalize the “hoax” rather than seek truth.

Butz does not devote an entire chapter to this analogy—it’s woven into his broader attack on the trials’ origins and fairness (especially in Chapter 1 or introductory sections on the International Military Tribunal). He uses it to argue that, just as Salem is now universally recognized as a tragic miscarriage of justice driven by superstition and fear (with later apologies and exonerations), future generations will view Nuremberg similarly once the “extermination legend” is debunked through technical scrutiny of documents, logistics, and demographics.

What Butz does here is challenging: he attempts to capture a cultural moment, and it seems to have some credence although it lacks verifiability. While “mainstream” historians, who have a vested interest in perpetuating the Holocaust mythos complain that such a comparison is a misleading trope, they indeed gloss over the arguments made against the hysteria and irregularities of Nuremberg. Instead of dealing with the arguments made in earnest, they resort to lazy name-calling of “revisionists” or “denialists” as if the mere incantation of such terms immunizes them from dealing with the substance of the arguments. In a sense, we can glimpse this hysteria indirectly because it still echoes in our era by the manic reaction of the “mainstream” to a dispassionate account of the problems associated with standard narratives surrounding World War II. Witches, it would seem, are still being burned.

Butz’s framing serves his thesis that the Holocaust narrative is a constructed “hoax” perpetuated by political forces, much like a witch craze — and it does something else: it provides a coherent explanation as to why people would have confessed to fantastic and fantastically false things. Butz argues that the Nuremberg trials (and similar postwar proceedings) were structured so that the existence of the extermination program was treated as an unquestioned, axiomatic, and established fact from the outset. Because of this, defendants quickly realized that directly challenging the core “extermination legend” (i.e., denying that systematic mass murder via gas chambers or other means had occurred) was not a viable legal or practical strategy. Instead, the rational, self-preserving approach for many was to accept the overall narrative as true while denying or minimizing their own personal knowledge, involvement, or responsibility, which was how some Germans were saved from the gallows.

He writes (in a passage that appears in slightly varied forms across his work): “Thus to many relevant defendants it seemed that the only possible defense strategy was to deny not the exterminations but only their personal responsibility for them (e.g. Ernst Kaltenbrunner or Adolf Eichmann).” Butz extends this to figures like Rudolf Höss (Auschwitz commandant), Otto Ohlendorf, and others whose detailed “confessions” or testimonies are often cited as key evidence. In his view, these statements were pragmatic calculations under extreme pressure: the defendants understood the political reality of “victors’ justice,” the hostile atmosphere, the threat of harsher punishment (or transfer to Soviet custody), and the fact that the tribunal was not genuinely open to debating the foundational allegations.

Butz frames it thusly:

  • The trials presupposed guilt on the extermination charge, so the only realistic defense was “I didn’t do it / I didn’t know / I was following orders / it was someone else’s department.”
  • This created a self-reinforcing loop: “admissions” by defendants helped legitimize the narrative for the public and for later historiography, even though (in Butz’s opinion) they did not reflect actual belief or truth.
  • He contrasts this with the Salem witch trials analogy he draws elsewhere: once the core accusation is treated as beyond challenge, rational people adapt their testimony to survive within that framework.

Butz presents this as further proof that the trials were not impartial searches for truth but political proceedings designed to institutionalize the “hoax.” He argues that if the extermination claims had been genuinely debatable, more defendants would have contested them directly — the fact that so few did (and that those who partially cooperated often fared better) shows how stacked the process was. Albert Speer, the alleged “Good Nazi” was the most high-ranking Nazi who employed this strategy at Nuremberg to save his neck. This is a recurring theme in his early chapters on the origins of the “legend” at Nuremberg. He does not claim every single defendant was consciously lying as part of a calculated ploy; rather, he says the structure of the trials made outright denial of the extermination an almost impossible defense tactic.

Butz addresses a key part of the Holocaust narrative: Heinrich Himmler and the Posen speeches, which are used as exhibit A in the extermination legend. His key points:

  • He quotes or paraphrases Himmler’s famous line about the “extermination of the Jewish people” (“Ausrottung der Juden”) as something “easily said” but part of the party’s plans, then argues that such language was hyperbolic wartime rhetoric or euphemistic for expulsion/resettlement, not literal killing.
  • Butz claims Himmler was referring to the evacuation and harsh treatment of Jews (deportation east, forced labor, liquidation of ghettos due to disease/partisan activity), not industrialized murder. He suggests the speech’s secrecy (“a page of glory in our history that has never been recorded and never shall be”) proves it was about something shameful but not genocide — perhaps the brutal realities of deportation and labor exploitation.
  • He places the speech in the category of postwar misinterpretation: Allied prosecutors and historians allegedly took isolated, ambiguous phrases out of context and “glossed” them as proof of extermination, ignoring the lack of explicit orders or infrastructure for mass gassing.
  • Butz notes that Himmler spoke openly to SS leaders about “liquidating” Jews but insists this was consistent with a resettlement policy disrupted by war conditions, not a deliberate annihilation program. He implies any killing mentioned was ad hoc (e.g., reprisals, disease control) rather than systematic.

Butz does not appear to deny seriously the authenticity of Himmler’s speeches (they were recorded and captured postwar) but argues their content has been exaggerated or mistranslated to support the “hoax.” He contrasts them with the absence of any written Hitler/Himmler order for extermination, claiming euphemisms like “Ausrottung” (uprooting/extermination) were metaphorical or referred to removing Jews from Europe geographically.

Another key element of Butz’s argument is understanding what Auschwitz was in actuality: a massive industrial site requiring enormous manpower to fuel the German war effort. If we think of it at all, we think of Auschwitz as an enormous extermination camp, but Butz argues that Auschwitz was a massive industrial and labor complex built around IG Farben’s Buna-Monowitz plant (Auschwitz III), which was intended to be one of the largest synthetic rubber (Buna) factories in the world, along with associated synthetic fuel, oil, and chemical production. The entire Auschwitz camp system (Auschwitz I, Birkenau, Monowitz, and dozens of sub-camps) existed first and foremost to supply enormous quantities of forced labor for this critical war industry.

Butz argues:

  • The Buna plant required tens of thousands of workers for construction and operation (11-hour shifts, 6 days a week). Prisoner labor was rented from the SS at 4–6 Reichsmarks per day.
  • The workforce was a mix: German employees (~20%), voluntary foreign workers (over 50%), and concentration-camp prisoners (less than 30% at the Farben plant itself).
  • Auschwitz had hospitals, medical care, family compounds, skilled-worker barracks, and even a “family camp” for some Jews — all which Butz says only make sense if the camp was trying to preserve and exploit a large labor force, not annihilate it.
  • Epidemics (especially typhus) and overwork caused high death rates, but these were the inevitable result of brutal industrial conditions, not systematic gassing.

The need for synthetic rubber and oil was enormous — and Germany had virtually no resources of its own save coal. By 1944, synthetic fuel plants across Germany (coal hydrogenation) were producing about 75% of all the liquid fuel available to the Germans (the rest came mainly from Romania, which was being bombed and later lost to the Germans). Auschwitz had a hydrogenation plant that contributed to this effort. The Buna synthetic rubber plant at Auschwitz-Monowitz was designed to produce 3,000 tons per month — making it one of the four largest Buna plants in Germany (the others were at Schkopau, Hüls, and Ludwigshafen). It was never fully completed or operational (by evacuation in January 1945 it was only producing acetaldehyde from acetylene).

Butz’s real emphasis is strategic: Germany was desperate for synthetic rubber and fuel because of the Allied blockade and bombing of natural supplies. Auschwitz was therefore a top-priority war industry site, and the camp existed to feed it manpower. Diverting resources to exterminate the labor force is therefore doubly dubious. The “extermination legend,” in his view, was grafted onto a genuine industrial operation that the Allies themselves knew was a bombing target.

Another part of Butz’s attack is the attack on the authenticated records themselves. In The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (especially in chapters dealing with Nazi policy, the “Final Solution,” and document analysis, such as his discussions of the Wannsee Conference protocol and related SS/RSHA records), Butz contends that postwar interpreters (primarily at Nuremberg and in subsequent historiography) imposed an “extermination gloss” on ambiguous German bureaucratic language. He claims many key terms and phrases were capable of non-genocidal meanings in their wartime context, and that the Allies/prosecutors selectively chose the lethal interpretation to fit a preconceived narrative of systematic murder.

He cites:

  • “Endlösung der Judenfrage” (Final Solution of the Jewish Question): Butz argues this referred literally to expulsion, resettlement, or forced emigration from German-controlled Europe (often to the East, into occupied Soviet territories after expected victory), not physical annihilation. He points to pre-war and early-war documents using similar phrasing for deportation plans and claims the shift to a genocidal meaning was retroactively projected.
  • “Sonderbehandlung” (Special Treatment): This is one of his central examples. Butz insists the term often meant privileged handling, execution of specific criminals/partisans/resistance members, or labor assignments—not routine mass gassing of Jews. He cites instances where it appears in non-extermination contexts (e.g., medical exemptions or transfers) and argues that applying it uniformly to killings is an interpretive overreach.
  • Other euphemisms/phrases (e.g., “Evakuierung” [evacuation], “Umsiedlung” [resettlement], “durchgeschleust” [processed through], or references to “labor in the East”): Butz claims these were straightforward descriptions of forced relocation and exploitation amid wartime labor shortages. He accuses historians of assuming euphemism-for-murder without sufficient proof, especially since no explicit, unambiguous order for extermination appears in captured German files.

Butz frames this as a “scientific” or technical critique: as an engineer, he says he applies dispassionate scrutiny to documents, rejecting what he calls politically motivated readings. He argues that if alternative, non-lethal constructions “also made sense” (or even fit better with logistics, demographics, or other records), then the extermination interpretation collapses as the only plausible one.

I found this line of argument compelling: It exploits real aspects of Nazi bureaucracy. It is more reasonable to assume that the documents and language used therein meant what they purported to convey as opposed to a line of reasoning that they represented coded/euphemistic language in sensitive matters (to maintain secrecy, avoid direct paper trails for atrocities, or simply bureaucratic habit). Usually the most sensible explanation, i.e., that language means what it says, is right, but in any event the so-called smoking guns of German documents are far more ambiguous than the mainstream Holocaust experts would have us believe. It seems to me, which is why this line is so effective, that the mainstream does not want this latent ambiguity to be known. There is an element of documents and phrases being shoehorned into a preordained reality. That some defendants acceded to the desired gloss is no proof at all given what Butz has to say about the irregularities, coercion, and defense strategy implicit at Nuremberg.

*         *         *

I would be remiss if I did not mention where others have specifically attacked him. To be sure, more research on my part is needed, but this is what I have gleaned from consulting the sources that have evidently taken him seriously enough to move beyond ad hominem. First, the Einsatzgruppen Mass Shooting Reports: Butz concedes “some” Jews were shot as partisans/reprisals (he guesses 5k—100k total) but dismisses the scale and systematic nature. The Germans themselves produced thousands of detailed daily/weekly reports (Ereignismeldungen) and summaries. The Jäger Report (by one commander in Lithuania) alone tallies 137,346 Jews killed in five months, with dates, places, and victim counts. Overall, the reports reportedly document ~1.5 million Jewish deaths by shooting in 1941–42. These are internal SS/RSHA documents, captured in German archives—not coerced testimony. Butz treats them as inflated anti-partisan actions. This is something that Butz appears to gloss over based on the limited number of troops assigned to the Einsatzgruppen to accomplish that many killings.

Second, there is Operation Reinhard Camps (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka) and the Höfle Telegram. Some argue that this is the biggest structural hole in his treatment. Butz’s book is overwhelmingly Auschwitz-centric, because, in part, he maintains that the entirety of the hoax was fabricated around Auschwitz. He gives the Reinhard camps a few pages in “Et Cetera,” calling them transit or labor sites based on inconsistent testimonies. Proponents of the Holocaust narrative maintain that the Höfle Telegram (intercepted by British codebreakers in 1943, declassified later) is a single Nazi document from SS officer Hermann Höfle to Eichmann listing exact 1942 arrivals/killings at over a million. While the Höfle telegram details arrivals (not executions), historians have maintained that there no further transportation of these people. While this is relatively new information (post-dating Butz’s research in 1972), I am sure he would argue that these were merely records of transit — not execution —  but it is a lacuna in his work. Third, there is an argument regarding Zyklon B Delivery Records vs. Actual Delousing Needs: Butz argues deliveries match sanitary/delousing requirements for typhus control. Some have maintained, however, that Auschwitz received ~23–25 tons of Zyklon B. Forensic and documentary analysis show only a fraction (roughly 6–10 tons) was needed for delousing clothes, barracks, and trains. The surplus arguably aligns with gassing estimates. This is an example — really one of the rare ones — in which the dispute is centered on different facts, not interpretation of facts or motives. It is something that requires, at least for me, more research. Fourth, some have conceded, at least in part, the complaints about Nuremberg’s irregularities but maintained that post-Nuremberg German trials were fairer. Butz focuses on Nuremberg (and likens it to Salem). He argues defendants adopted a “I didn’t know” defense to survive. The big West German trials of the 1960s (e.g., Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, 1963–65) involved dozens of lower-level SS men tried under normal German law, with West German judges, defense lawyers, and with limited Soviet/American pressure. Many confessed in detail (e.g., about gas chamber operations at Auschwitz) because evidence from documents and other witnesses was overwhelming. Butz engages these trials in a limited way. Butz treats these trials as an extension of Nuremberg in relatively conclusory fashion, and, considering that West Germany was essentially an American protectorate after the war, I am not sure that this argument against Butz lands any punches.

In short, Butz’s work evidently is not without fault or gaps, but this is to be expected to some extent. Taken as a whole, and perhaps this is the greatest point, who deems this type of position as “out of bounds”? Whatever we can say, Butz is not a polemicist or a fabulist. He is hard-hitting but he is not a liar. He may be an amateur historian who is relatively out of his league, but his academic and engineering credentials demonstrate that he is an unusual amateur historian who should be taken seriously. To be sure, his academic bona fides are substantial even if he lacked a Ph.D in History. Why can we debate the scope and existence of a variety of historical phenomena but not this one? All of it — both the hysteria of the reaction against any work that questions the mainstream narrative and the slavish fidelity of any mainstream historian that touches upon it— lead me to believe the whole of it has more a religious quality to it than an historical one. The dissenters are not merely wrong — they are heretical and per se immoral. The Holocaust narrative cannot be denied. Its victims, the Jews, must be shrouded in sacral victimhood that immunizes them from any subsequent corporate criticism. If Butz makes the point that Nuremberg was like Salem, he does not — but could have — claimed that the manic and quasi-religious desperation to silence any opposing view as “denialism” or “revisionism” smacks of a modern-day religious inquisition.

There is an additional comment regarding this work, which, overall, is a devastating enough attack on the Holocaust narrative. Butz is not sympathetic, even in the slightest, to the suffering that came with what he believed happened — that is the forced expulsion of a civilian population and instrumentalization of them for slave labor during the war. Even his account of what happened to the Jews is terrible, but his account is notably lacking in what might be described as empathy. Now, would his work have been better received if he were empathetic to this type of forced relocation and enslavement? Hardly. But his lack of empathy struck me — and if it struck me, it probably struck others too. If the invisible demon that Butz had to contend with in this book is that he is a clandestine anti-Semite who wrote it because he secretly hates the Jews, his lack of empathy towards what he maintains happened only reinforces the existence of implied bias.

In fairness to Butz, I think one could read his book — the evidence he puts forward — and come to a very different conclusion that there was some industrial murder (perhaps not systematized but nonetheless significant). To put it differently, Butz never sugarcoats the horror of what he contends was happening — wartime expulsion, ethnic cleansing, camp epidemics, and civilian enslavement. Now, one could counter that Butz’s goal in the book was solitary — to deconstruct the extermination legend and he slavishly hewed that line. Still, his reaction throughout operated (almost) to excuse what the German government was doing in expelling and enslaving the Jews.

But if it is legitimate to divine the secret anti-Semitism of why a man like Butz wrote a book like this (as if the only explanation is an irrational Jew hatred), why are the obvious biases of people (like Deborah Libstadt) who are Jewish and unapologetically Zionist ignored? For religious or ethnocentric reasons, these “defenders” should not be immune to questioning their motives for similar reasons. If anti-Semitism is the only acceptable explanation for denying the Holocaust, why is not philo-Semitism (or Zionism) an explanation for accepting the Holocaust? The truth always comes out — free inquiry cannot be suppressed forever. I suspect that Butz’s book will gain a currency after his life is over more than it ever did while he was living.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, this is a powerful book — one it was difficult for me to obtain and one that deserves to be read. What the mainstream Holocaust purveyors do not realize (or perhaps they do but persist anyway) is that the suppression of alternative views fuels the very idea that a conspiracy exists to prevent the truth from coming out. If sunshine is the best disinfectant, this is one area that is in massive need of disinfection. At the very least, Butz wrote a book that is an amazing piece of amateur sleuthing that calls into question the most sacred of all the sacred cows of WWII and the postwar world.

Post-Script

A brief comment on anti-Semitism.

The mere act of seriously considering this book — and writing a review of it that does not dismiss it as garbage — is an anti-Semitic act, at least according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The IHRA is an intergovernmental organization founded in 1998 (initially as the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research) at the initiative of Sweden’s then-Prime Minister Göran Persson. It now has, I believe, 35 member countries (including the U.S., U.K., Germany, Israel, and others), plus observer and partner nations. Its core mission is to promote Holocaust education, remembrance, and research globally, based on the historical record of the Nazi genocide. Yes, it is dedicated to the standard narrative in the sense that it upholds the mainstream historical consensus on the Holocaust (e.g., systematic extermination of ~6 million Jews via camps, gas chambers, shootings).

IHRA doesn’t “define the motivations” of questioners in a psychological or accusatory way. Instead, its 2016 working definition of antisemitism is a non-legally binding tool designed to help identify and monitor manifestations of anti-Semitism in modern contexts, like education, law enforcement, and policy. The definition itself is brief: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” It includes eleven illustrative examples, one of which explicitly calls out “Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people” as potentially anti-Semitic, depending on context. Another one addresses accusing Jews of “inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.” This is not about probing personal motives—it is about categorizing behaviors or claims that, based on historical patterns, often stem from or fuel anti-Jewish prejudice. For instance, if someone claims the Holocaust was a “hoax” for Jewish gain, IHRA sees that as fitting a long-standing trope of Jewish conspiracy/deceit, which has anti-Semitic roots regardless of the individual’s stated intent.

Imagine: questioning an historical phenomenon such as the Holocaust narrative is itself “antisemitic.” Ironically, a definition such as this is antithetical to a free society and rigorous scholarship. Moreover it cheapens anti-Semitism in an irony lost on its advocates. A definition such as this is as ready an explanation why historians are not free to challenge the “fact, scope, or mechanisms” of the Holocaust narrative. In such a climate, no wonder the Holocaust narrative becomes self-perpetuating, because challenging it is tantamount to professional suicide. It is as stifling as stifling can be — and if an established historical fact requires the protection of blasphemy laws, well, it probably is not nearly as unassailable as the high priests would have us believe.

*         *         *

For the record, I harbor no racial or religious animus toward Jews. I therefore reject the IHRA definition as preposterous, suffocating, and fundamentally illiberal.

The real disagreement is not whether Jews suffered catastrophically under Nazi rule—I concede that they did. It is over whether the mechanism was industrialized, homicidal gassing carried out on the scale and with the deliberate intent usually claimed in the standard Holocaust narrative, or whether the primary drivers were forced labor, mass expulsion eastward, and the collapse of supply lines and public health during total war. Nothing in my skepticism about the gas-chamber extermination story excuses or diminishes the documented brutality: slave labor, disease epidemics in the camps, reprisal shootings, deliberate ghettoization and deportation policies that cost Jewish lives no matter the number. The same horrors befell many non-Jews caught in the same circumstances. Ironically, the same horrors befell millions of Germans after the war at the hands of the victorious Allies (mass rapes and reprisals, ethnic cleansing, slave labor, and war crimes). These facts can—and do—coexist with my questions about the specific claims of systematic extermination. They coexist in me without contradiction.

I claim no special insight. I claim only the ordinary human right to read, think, and question any historical account—without prior restraint, without automatic moral condemnation, and without needing permission from any institution or interest group. That right belongs to everyone, including people who reach conclusions I find unpersuasive. If this sounds like I’m trying to ingratiate myself with anyone—mainstream historians, Deborah Lipstadt, the IHRA, or the revisionist community—let me be clear: I don’t care what any of them think of me. Such disclaimers would never “save” me from professional consequences anyway, and I’m not writing them for cover (because I am aware of the political toxicity of what I have written here and elsewhere). I’m writing them because I believe them, and because the truth does not bend to fit someone else’s approved narrative.

I will continue to consider whatever I damn well please.

Summary and Review of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Arthur R. Butz, Part 1 of 2

5780 words

“The ‘gas chambers’ were wartime propaganda hoaxes.”
 The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry by Arthur R. Butz

The apogee of banned books.

*         *         *

Over the past dozen or so years, my reading choices have reflected a greater movement in my soul — I have crossed the Rubicon of “conventional conservatism” into the red-pilled land of the dissident right. To be sure, I am a relative nobody — just my own version of Winston Smith who has progressively discovered that the curated version of reality that I have been inculcated to accept has been largely fabricated. Like Winston Smith, I discovered that the past (i.e., “history”) is in a constant state of alteration. Like Winston Smith, I live in an era in which objective truth itself is being destroyed. For whatever reason, I am drawn by an almost-pathological contrarianism to read and contemplate that which I have been told to avoid. Now, many years later I hold views that make me, by conventional standards, a deplorable of the first rank — worse, perhaps, because I am educated and well read.

In reading a variety of banned books and authors, I had yet to touch a work that attacked the singularity from which all banishments flow: the Holocaust. One can hold a variety of “deplorable” views and still retain some semblance of a public life even if such intellectual persuasions are deemed unforgiveable by elite culture. However, a revisionist (or a “denier”) of the Holocaust is deemed so foul — so awful — so heretical that it destroys the possibility of any public life in the modern West. The day is coming when these modern witch hunts end, and it is coming sooner that people realize.

So, I took the time recently to dip my toe into — dare I say it — Holocaust revisionism. In my intellectual journey, I have touched upon aspects of Holocaust mythology by reading — quite intensely at times — the suffering of the German people during and after the war and the moral bankruptcy of the “good guys” of WWII (i.e., the Allies). The modern orthodoxy that surrounds WWII and the post-war settlement is crucial to understand the “Pottersville” that we call the modern West — dissenting from it is tantamount to heresy in past ages. In that sense, I became a political heretic by reading politically heretical works.

To be candid, I have had serious reservations for some time about the standard Holocaust narrative although there was never any reason for me to focus on it. It is not that I doubt Jews — and other non-Germans — suffered through expulsion and exploitative slave labor that took place during total war. If that is a genocide, I do not deny it. I don’t think anyone denies that. Notwithstanding that proviso, the idea that the Germans systematically exterminated European Jewry through gassings, etc., always struck me as farfetched. It always reeked of the same outlandish elements of WWI propaganda against the “Hun” bayoneting Belgian babies. For full disclosure, I am ancestrally “Hun” or German. I know my people. I do not think they were (or are) capable of it — not only in the macabre sense but also in its gross stupidity. I have always viewed it — at least internally — as its own form of blood libel against my people.

Questioning the Holocaust in any fashion comes at a great personal cost. While I am undoubtedly contrarian, outsiders seldom understand the cost — the conscious cost — that comes from intellectual dissidence and political heresy of this type. True, there is something liberating in seeking the truth no matter the cost, but the unfurling of each layer of dissidence further isolates the dissident. Some people — especially the congenitally empathetic people of northwestern Europe — just want to get along. I fight an invisible battle within myself between my desire for truth (no matter the cost) and my predisposition to get along and understand the “other.” Be that as it may, the truth-seeking part of my being has gained the upper hand over my empathic amiability. Reading something like Arthur Butz’s takedown of the Holocaust narrative then followed a series of intellectual and moral steps. To take them all at once would be to careen down the entire flight of stairs. Taking them, however, one step and one book at a time led me to Butz.

So here I am — as if an inner compulsion towards understanding the truth drives me — reading and reviewing Arthur Butz’s work, which follows herein. Again, to demonstrate how powerful the persecution that follows from questioning the Holocaust narrative, reading — and certainly reviewing — this book is enough to get anyone in the United States fired. That alone speaks to the level of cultural and political totalitarianism that exists. It is, to say the very least, a dangerous book to take seriously. So be it.

What strikes me about an author like Butz is his fearlessness and imperviousness to outside pressure. Butz, a native of New York City, was born in 1933. He is an American electrical engineer and a long-time faculty member at Northwestern University, which is, at least for the uninitiated, one of the finest universities in the United States. He is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and he completed his PhD at the University of Minnesota. The only reason he remains a faculty member at Northwestern University is that he was tenured in 1974 — he is as ostracized at Northwestern as a tenured professor can be because of his views and research on the Holocaust. The tapestry of the academy will permit — and even celebrate — a variety of anti-social views such as acclaiming White genocide, championing Stalinism, blaspheming Christ, cheering violence, or defending the worst sexual depravity. All these outlandish views find academics who will defend their substance or at least see them as being cloaked in the First Amendment view that lauds their “courage.”

But Butz has no academic champions, and that lacuna should tell us something about the moment of time in which we live. Think about it — numerous professors openly espouse the desirability of White genocide — genocide of me and my children, and they are openly celebrated by the academy. The double standard is real: see it applied to those who question the Holocaust narrative based upon assessments of the evidence without any ostensible guile and they are instantly turned into “untouchables.” Whatever moment of history this is, it cannot last much longer. Butz accordingly has always been an army of one. Setting aside his lack of qualifications as an historian, Butz is a very, very smart individual (an MIT graduate and engineer after all) who has demonstrated an almost otherworldly obtuseness to outside pressure.

He is also an unusual suspect to have taken such a stance. While, at least to my knowledge, Butz has not provided a detailed public account of his personal motivations or a precise “origin story” for his interest in the Holocaust. However, based on his own statements in contemporary interviews around the time of his book’s publication, he described becoming interested through reading various books on the subject and studying the records of the Nuremberg Trials. He began his research in the summer of 1972, leading to the completion of his manuscript (which became The Hoax of the Twentieth Century) by the following spring. No sources indicate a specific triggering event, personal experience, or earlier ideological bent—such as prior involvement in “far-right” circles. Indeed, this is a man who is an elite academic and was educated at — and educating at — some of the most elite American institutions. That he would effectively throw away his standing as an elite is curious, to say the very least. In a sense, he is that one strange bird that followed an intellectual curiosity with an otherworldly tenacity and absolute moral belief in the truth. He is the classic pattern of low conformity (lack of intimidation by groupthink); high openness (vision of possibilities others miss); high cognitive abilities (comprehension of how systems work); and a strong internal compass (willing to bear the social opprobrium). Regardless of whether he is right or not, men like Butz fascinate me — they fearlessly challenge orthodoxies and systems. If such a man and type confront a thoroughly corrupt system, heroes are born.

Butz has consistently framed his interest as an intellectual or evidentiary one: approaching the topic as an outsider (a control engineer, not a historian) who applied what he described as objective, technical scrutiny to wartime documents, propaganda, and inconsistencies in mainstream accounts, ultimately concluding the extermination narrative was a hoax. I read the 2003 edition of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, but as Butz makes clear, he did little to update the material that he assembled from his research during the early 1970s. It is, as will be demonstrated, a very powerful and well-reasoned rebuttal of the standard Holocaust narrative — one that in any other context would be applauded for its audacity and comprehensiveness. Indeed, consider if instead of the Holocaust narrative, Butz wrote a book that challenged — based on evidence — some historical axiom, he would either be lauded or ignored. However, challenge to this particular axiom results in social leprosy.

Setting aside whether he is right in the main, it is not the type of work that should be banned in a free society. Whatever we can say of it, it is not a polemical work — it is a reasoned historical work based upon evidence and logic. It is not peddling a conspiracy theory but offering an assessment of proof. There is no gutter anti-Semitism in this book — everything he recounts and analyzes happened. The “academy” does not want those perspectives considered, which is why it is labeled “disinformation” in the full Orwellian sense with all the various slanders against it. You can be sure that if something is labeled as “disinformation” by today’s elites, it is probably worth reading. “Disinformation,” as a concept and term, operates as a poker tell — a demonstration of a censorship culture that demands that the masses not be allowed to access material that makes us reassess or question the prevailing orthodoxies of life. And banned it effectively is. You will never find it in a bookstore or on Amazon. You will have much difficulty finding it online, as I did. If you write a review of this book in less than psychotically condemnatory terms, you will likely be fired from whatever job that you have in the modern West. What is clear is that the powerful do not want this book to be read and have done everything within their arsenal to keep it from being read. For that reason alone, it should be read — and to those who might say that our society often keeps absurd ideas shelved (e.g., flat-earth ideas), this is not an absurd idea — it is an open historical question that “mainstream” historians and political actors demand be closed because to question it is considered per se antisemitism. We have seen other ideas (e.g., COVID-related origins, Race-IQ research) suppressed because the truth has been deemed to be toxic for the masses. I reject emphatically any censorious paternalism no matter whether it is paternalism of good will or one designed to propagate an elitist narrative. I reject paternalism period.

*         *         *

Butz opens the book by positioning his work as a rigorous, evidence-based challenge to what he terms the “legend” of the Nazi extermination of Jews. He argues that the dominant historical narrative—claiming the deliberate murder of about six million Jews, largely via gas chambers—originated primarily from Zionist and Allied propaganda during the war and the postwar war crimes trials, particularly the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. He portrays these trials as unprecedented, politically driven proceedings lacking true legal legitimacy.

He describes the Nuremberg trials as “precedent-shattering in their scope and in the explicitness of the victorious powers’ claims to some sort of legal jurisdiction in respect of laws or understandings, which did not exist at the time they were allegedly broken by the Axis powers.” Butz contends that the trials were not impartial justice but rather a mechanism for the victors to impose a narrative, often relying on coerced evidence, unreliable testimonies, and questionable documents that were themselves subject to ambiguity. It was, according to Butz, a curated affair in which only the documents that arguably advanced the narrative (albeit ambiguously) were shown to the public. Others less helpful never saw the proverbial light of day.

A major focus is on doubts about the scale and nature of Jewish population losses. Butz questions demographic claims, suggesting inconsistencies in pre- and postwar figures that undermine assertions of massive extermination. He reviews sources like the World Almanac and early Zionist or Allied reports, arguing they do not support a “five or six million drop in world Jewish population.” He highlights political influences on the trials, noting appointments like that of a “fanatical Zionist” to key positions in the War Crimes Branch, which he sees as evidence of bias: “The filling of the War Crimes Branch position with a fanatical Zionist, the first soldier since Biblical times to hold the rank of General in the Army of Israel, is not only significant in terms of what the Zionist might do in the position, but also significant in revealing, in a simple way, the nature of the overall political forces operating at the trials. […] Under these political conditions it is simply silly to expect anything but a frame-up at the trials.”

Butz introduces his core thesis bluntly in the chapter’s early sections: “The legend of Jewish extermination during World War II is a hoax.” He extends this to specific claims about methods, asserting that “the ‘gas chambers’ were wartime propaganda hoaxes” and that the trials served to institutionalize and perpetuate this narrative.

He critiques the reliance on affidavits, survivor testimonies, and Soviet-influenced evidence, claiming much of it was obtained under duress or was inconsistent. (Parenthetically, why the Soviets, who murdered thousands upon thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals in cold blood in the Katyn Massacre and then lied about it for decades have anything credible to add to the Holocaust narrative is unbelievable.) He also contrasts the intense focus on alleged Nazi crimes with relative silence on Allied actions (e.g., the atomic bombs, firebombing cities crammed with refugees, and Soviet deportations, i.e., Operation Keelhaul), pointing to an obvious double standard. Throughout, Butz frames his approach as scientific and dispassionate: he insists the extermination story must withstand technical and documentary scrutiny like any other claim.

Butz transitions from the postwar trials’ role in establishing the “extermination legend” to a direct examination of the concentration camps themselves, which he claims are the alleged sites of mass murder. He argues that the standard narrative—portraying certain camps as dedicated “extermination” facilities using gas chambers for systematic genocide—is unsupported by wartime evidence and is instead a product of propaganda, misinterpretation, and postwar myth-making. He distinguishes between various types of camps and insists that horror photographs and survivor accounts from liberated camps have been selectively used to imply nonexistent deliberate extermination policies.

We have all seen the camp liberation photographs in which emaciated prisoners in filthy rags are paraded — Butz considers them, even if not staged, to be the result of a total collapse of Germany and the accompanying famine that occurred during the last months of the war. He addresses the “horror scenes” encountered by Allied forces upon liberating camps in 1945, particularly those in western Germany like Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Buchenwald. Butz contends these images of emaciated bodies, mass graves, and typhus-ravaged inmates reflect wartime conditions—overcrowding, supply breakdowns, disease epidemics (especially typhus), and starvation due to Allied bombing of transport lines—rather than any planned killing program. He asserts that these western camps were not “extermination” sites and that deaths there resulted from natural causes amplified by war chaos, not gassings or systematic murder. He counters that they were not normative of the camps but the product of the bitter end of the war.

Butz then focuses on the eastern camps (Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, etc.), labeled by historians as primary extermination centers. He claims the “extermination camp” designation is a postwar invention, and that these facilities were primarily labor or transit camps. He questions the technical feasibility and documentary support for homicidal gas chambers, suggesting that structures identified as such were delousing facilities using Zyklon B for typhus control—a common wartime practice in camps to combat epidemics.

He critiques early atrocity propaganda, including wartime rumors of soap made from human fat or lampshades from skin, which he says were later quietly dropped but helped build the myth. Butz argues that the “six million” figure and gas chamber stories originated in unreliable sources like Soviet commissions and Jewish organizations, then solidified at Nuremberg without rigorous verification.

A key argument is the lack of explicit German orders or records for mass extermination. Butz writes: “There is no ‘Hitler order’ for the extermination of the Jews, and […] there is no evidence that such an order was ever given or that such a policy ever existed.” He extends this to claim that captured German documents, Red Cross reports, and even some Allied intelligence that do not corroborate a genocide program on the alleged scale. This is something that the mainstream advocates all but reluctantly concede — although they attribute it to the secrecy of the program.

Butz emphasizes logistical improbabilities: the scale of alleged killings would require massive fuel, crematoria capacity, and disposal infrastructure that he claims German records show did not exist or were inconsistent with extermination claims. He states: “The ‘gas chambers’ were wartime propaganda hoaxes” and that the camps’ primary function was exploitation of labor amid wartime shortages, not annihilation.

He sets up deeper analysis in later sections by promising scrutiny of specific camps (especially Auschwitz in subsequent chapters), documents, and population statistics. Butz frames the entire “extermination” story as collapsing under technical and evidential examination, insisting that a dispassionate review reveals mass deaths from disease and war conditions, not deliberate policy.

Butz shifts focus from the camps and trials to the wartime dissemination of “extermination” claims in Allied countries, particularly the United States. He argues that reports of systematic murder of Jews emerged not from solid intelligence or German documents but from propaganda channels in Washington and New York, driven by Jewish organizations, Zionist interests, and wartime information control. These early claims, he contends, laid the groundwork for the postwar “legend” despite lacking credible substantiation at the time.

He examines the 1942 “rubber crisis” and U.S. intelligence priorities, suggesting that if mass extermination were occurring, American agencies (OSS, State Department, military intelligence) would have prioritized it—but they did not. Butz claims Auschwitz and other camps were known to Allies mainly as labor or industrial sites, not killing centers, and that early interest stemmed from strategic concerns like synthetic rubber production rather than atrocities.

Butz traces the first major “extermination” announcements to late 1942, originating from Jewish sources in New York and relayed through London and Washington. He portrays these as unsubstantiated rumors amplified by press releases from groups like the World Jewish Congress. He writes: “the first claims of a German program to exterminate all Jews appeared in the West in late 1942, originating in New York and Washington circles closely connected with Jewish organizations.”

He discusses specific reports, such as the 1942 Riegner Telegram (sent by Gerhart Riegner of the World Jewish Congress to the U.S. State Department and others), which alleged a plan to murder millions via gas. Butz dismisses it as hearsay without corroboration, arguing it fit a pattern of wartime atrocity propaganda like World War I fabrications. He asserts that U.S. officials treated such claims skeptically initially, with some viewing them as Zionist pressure tactics.

A significant portion covers the War Refugee Board (WRB) Report of 1944 (also known as the Vrba-Wetzler Report), which Butz calls “the birth of the Auschwitz legend.” He claims this document—detailing alleged gassings at Auschwitz—was produced under U.S. auspices but relied on escapee testimonies (notably Rudolf Vrba) that he deems inconsistent or fabricated. Butz has a section titled “The War Refugee Board Report: Birth of the Auschwitz Legend” and critiques it heavily, arguing “the WRB report is the first great ‘document’ of the legend of Jewish extermination, and that it is worthless as historical evidence.” Butz also addresses German reactions, noting that Nazi propaganda (e.g., via Goebbels’ ministry) denied extermination rumors and accused Allies/Jews of invention for political gain. He suggests these denials were logical if no such policy existed.

Throughout, Butz frames the chapter as evidence that “extermination” stories were manufactured in Allied propaganda hubs (Washington bureaucracies and New York Jewish/Zionist networks) rather than emerging from verifiable facts on the ground. He promises later chapters will dissect Auschwitz specifics, but here he establishes that wartime claims were politically motivated, inconsistent, and uncorroborated by contemporaneous Allied intelligence.

Butz moves onto a detailed, technical dissection of Auschwitz-Birkenau, which he identifies as the centerpiece of the “extermination legend.” He argues that the camp complex was primarily an industrial and labor facility tied to synthetic fuel and rubber production (via IG Farben and other wartime industries), not a dedicated site for mass murder. He claims the gas chamber and crematoria stories are postwar fabrications, built on contradictory testimonies, misinterpretations of documents, and impossible logistics, rather than contemporaneous German evidence. He opens his analysis here with “Structure of the Legend,” where Butz outlines the standard narrative: Auschwitz as the largest extermination camp, where millions (primarily Jews) were gassed upon arrival, with bodies cremated in special facilities. He dismisses this as internally inconsistent and unsupported.

He questions the absence of photographic or aerial evidence: “Where are the pictures?” Butz argues that if mass gassings and cremations were occurring on an industrial scale in 1944, Allied reconnaissance photos (which exist and show camp expansions) should reveal smoking chimneys, mass pits, or other signs—but he claims they do not. He states: “Where are the pictures?” and insists that the lack of visual proof from 1944 Allied overflights is damning.

Butz heavily critiques the “confession” of Rudolf Höss (the Auschwitz commandant who testified at Nuremberg and in his memoirs). He calls it unreliable, coerced, and riddled with errors, such as impossible figures for gassings and cremations. He asserts that “the Höss affidavit is no more reliable than, say, a coerced confession in a Soviet show trial.” He highlights early contradictions in the legend, questioning when the alleged gassings began and why initial reports varied. In “When Did It Start?” and “The Alleged Gassings and Zyklon,” Butz argues Zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide pellets) was used exclusively for delousing clothing and barracks to combat typhus epidemics—not for homicidal purposes. He claims the amounts delivered align with sanitary needs, not mass killings, and that homicidal use would require impractical ventilation and safety measures absent in the structures.

Butz examines lines of authority and camp organization, suggesting decisions were decentralized and focused on labor exploitation amid wartime shortages. He notes the presence of hospitals, medical care, and even a “family camp” for some Jews (e.g., Theresienstadt arrivals), asking rhetorically: “A Hospital for the People Being Exterminated?” He argues this contradicts claims of immediate extermination for all arrivals.

Regarding documents proffered as evidence, Butz discusses terms like “special treatment” (“Sonderbehandlung”), claiming they referred to labor assignments or executions of criminals/resistance members—not systematic gassing of Jews. He insists such euphemisms are misinterpreted by legend-builders to fit extermination claims. He addresses transports to Auschwitz, arguing many were for forced labor (especially after 1942), and questions the scale of alleged killings given crematoria capacities, fuel requirements, and disposal logistics. Butz contends aerial photos, Red Cross visits, and German records show no evidence of mass gassings, with deaths attributable to disease, overwork, and war conditions.

The analysis presented here reinforces Butz’s broader thesis by promising further breakdowns (e.g., of Hungarian deportations in the next chapter) while framing Auschwitz as the “keystone” of the hoax: if it collapses under scrutiny, the entire narrative fails. He portrays the story as a propaganda construct amplified postwar, not grounded in verifiable wartime facts.

Butz then focuses on the 1944 deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz as a “test case” for the entire “extermination legend.” He argues that this episode—often cited as one of the clearest examples of mass gassing due to its scale (approximately 437,000 Jews deported in a short period) and timing (amid Allied awareness)—undermines the Holocaust narrative when examined closely. He claims the deportations were for labor exploitation in Germany amid wartime shortages, not systematic murder, and that postwar claims of gassings rely on propaganda, inconsistent testimonies, and fabricated or misinterpreted documents rather than solid evidence.

The chapter here opens with “The International Red Cross,” where Butz discusses Red Cross visits and reports from 1944. He asserts that the IRC had access to camps and reported no evidence of extermination programs, even during the Hungarian action. He writes: “The International Red Cross visited Auschwitz in September 1944 and reported nothing about gas chambers or exterminations,” suggesting this neutral inspection contradicts the legend of ongoing mass killings.

Butz then turns to “1944 Propaganda,” examining wartime Allied and Jewish-organization reports alleging extermination. He claims these were exaggerated or invented for political effect, similar to earlier atrocity stories. He critiques sources like the War Refugee Board and escapee accounts (e.g., Vrba-Wetzler), arguing they overreached with details that do not hold up. In “Air raids on Auschwitz: Rudolf Vrba overreaches himself,” Butz points to Vrba’s claim of witnessing or knowing about gassings during a period when Allied bombing raids (which he says Vrba referenced inaccurately) supposedly provided cover or evidence—Butz dismisses this as self-contradictory.

On “Documentary evidence?,” Butz examines German records of the Hungarian transports, claiming figures and terms (e.g., “resettlement” or labor assignments) align with forced relocation for work, not annihilation. He dismisses Höfle Telegram or other decoded messages as misinterpreted or irrelevant to extermination claims. He argues the rapid deportations were logistically feasible for labor but improbable for immediate gassing of most arrivals without massive, undocumented infrastructure.Butz concludes by framing the Hungarian case as a propaganda high point: the story was amplified in 1944 to pressure neutrals, justify Allied actions, and support Zionist goals, but crumbles under scrutiny of contemporaneous sources like Red Cross reports, air photos, and German documents.

Butz’s final two chapters clean up loose ends and address miscellaneous aspects of the Holocaust narrative that do not fit neatly into prior chapters on trials, camps, propaganda origins, Auschwitz specifics, or Hungarian deportations. Titled “Et Cetera,” it serves as a wrap-up before the book’s conclusions, where Butz tackles additional “extermination” camps, demographic inconsistencies, emigration patterns, population statistics, and what he sees as absurd or unproven elements of the standard narrative. Butz briefly extends his skepticism to lesser-discussed sites like Majdanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. He argues these were primarily transit, labor, or POW facilities, with alleged gassings based on unreliable testimonies and lacking documentary or logistical support. He dismisses claims of mass murder there as extensions of the Auschwitz “hoax,” often reliant on postwar Soviet propaganda or inconsistent survivor accounts.

Butz then delves into population and emigration issues in sections critiquing Jewish demographic data. He questions the “six million” figure by examining prewar and postwar world Jewish population estimates from sources like the World Almanac, American Jewish Year Book, and Zionist reports. He claims these show no dramatic drop consistent with genocide, attributing any discrepancies to emigration (especially to Palestine/Israel, the U.S., and elsewhere), assimilation, or wartime chaos rather than extermination. He writes: “there is at present no other single volume that so provides a serious reader with […] five or six million drop in world Jewish population, the sources and authorities for the figures used are Communist and Jewish and thus, by the nature of the problem we are examining, must be considered essentially useless.”

He addresses alleged mass graves and Einsatzgruppen shootings in the East, conceding that some Jews were executed (e.g., as partisans or in reprisals) but arguing the scale is vastly exaggerated. Butz suggests Einsatzgruppen reports (e.g., the Jäger Report or Ereignismeldungen) refer to anti-partisan actions, not systematic genocide of Jews per se. He states: “we need not be told much more to surmise that the Einsatzgruppen must have shot many Jews, although we do not know whether ‘many’ means 5,000, 25,000 or 100,000.”

Butz also touches on miscellaneous “absurdities” in the legend, such as claims of soap from human fat, shrunken heads, or lampshades from skin—stories he says originated in propaganda but were later quietly abandoned by historians, undermining credibility. He reinforces his methodological point: the narrative relies on biased, postwar sources (Communist, Jewish, or Allied) rather than contemporaneous German records showing no extermination policy.

Butz’s penultimate chapter offers a reinterpretation of the Nazi term “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” (“Endlösung der Judenfrage”), arguing that it never referred to extermination or genocide but rather to a policy of expulsion, resettlement, and forced emigration from German-controlled Europe—primarily to the East (occupied Soviet territories) or other destinations. He claims the standard historical view—that it meant systematic mass murder—is a postwar misreading imposed by Allied propaganda, Zionist interests, and flawed interpretations of documents like the Wannsee Conference protocol.

It opens with “The German Policy and the Wannsee Conference,” where Butz analyzes the January 1942 Wannsee meeting (convened by Reinhard Heydrich) as the alleged starting point for extermination planning. He asserts the protocol’s language about “evacuation” (“Evakuierung”) and “labor in the East” was literal, not euphemistic for killing, and that no explicit mention of murder appears. In “The German Policy and the Wannsee Conference,” he contends that “the ‘Final Solution’ meant the expulsion of the Jews from Europe, ultimately to the East after the conquest of Russia.”

Butz examines deportation numbers and destinations in “Numbers Deported: Whence and Whither,” claiming transports (including to Auschwitz) were for labor exploitation in war industries or resettlement, not immediate annihilation. He argues many Jews survived the war in camps, ghettos, or through emigration, and questions why, if extermination was the goal, records show ongoing labor assignments and camp maintenance. In “Numbers Deported: Whence and Whither,” he insists that the figures do not support claims of millions gassed upon arrival.

In “The Polish Ghettos” and “What Happened to Them?,” Butz discusses Warsaw, Lodz, and other ghettos, portraying them as temporary holding areas for eventual eastward relocation rather than preludes to death. He suggests liquidations were due to disease, starvation from wartime shortages, or anti-partisan measures, not policy-driven genocide. He reinforces this by noting some ghetto inhabitants were later deported for labor or survived.

Butz revisits “Zionism Again,” linking the “Final Solution” narrative to postwar Zionist efforts to justify Israel’s creation and secure reparations. He claims exaggerated death figures thus served political ends. In “Migration to the USA,” he highlights Jewish emigration patterns (pre- and during the war) to argue that population losses were due to relocation, not murder. The final chapter includes a “Recapitulation” and brief mention of figures like J. G. Burg (a Jewish revisionist), before concluding that the “Final Solution” was a resettlement program disrupted by the war’s outcome. Butz quotes Himmler favorably in the wrap-up, “Himmler Nailed it Perfectly,” citing a supposed statement where Himmler allegedly described the policy as expulsion without extermination intent.

Butz concludes the book with a series of miscellaneous observations, responses to anticipated objections, and reflections on the broader implications of his thesis. Titled “Remarks,” this short final chapter ties together loose ends by addressing emotional or practical counterarguments (e.g., personal loss claims, German acceptance of the narrative), critiquing postwar West German politics, and reaffirming that the “extermination legend” rests on propaganda, coerced evidence, and misinterpretation rather than solid documentation. He frames the chapter as a defense against common challenges while urging readers to verify sources independently. The final chapter opens with “Miscellaneous Objections,” where Butz tackles criticisms of his methodology and sources. He defends his use of exterminationist authors like Reitlinger and Hilberg (despite calling their works “monumental foolishness”) as necessary to dismantle the claims directly. He also responds to emotional appeals, such as Jews claiming lost relatives, by suggesting these reflect wartime separations, communication breakdowns, or postwar family disruptions rather than proof of genocide.

He writes: “We close this work with a few miscellaneous remarks, most of which deal with some objections that may arise in certain situations.” On a critic comparing his work to flying saucer stories: “Years of propaganda have so associated Nazi Germany with the six million legend that denial of the legend seems at first almost as preposterous for many people as denying that World War II happened at all.”

A key passage addresses personal testimonies: “Assuming that his story is valid, there is only one sense in which it can be valid. That is, all he can claim is that he or his family lost contact with some relative in Europe during the war and never heard from that person again. Obviously, such data does not imply the existence of a Nazi extermination program.” Butz critiques collections like Yad Vashem’s testimony sheets: “The data have supposedly been collected on one-page testimony sheets filled in by relatives or witnesses or friends. […] There is no possible way to distinguish, in this data, between Jews who actually died during the war and Jews with whom the signers of the testimony sheets have merely lost contact.”

In “Postwar Germany and Willy Brandt,” Butz examines why many Germans appear to accept the narrative. He portrays the West German government as a U.S.-imposed puppet regime that perpetuates the “lie” through trials, education, and suppression to maintain legitimacy. He details Chancellor Willy Brandt’s (real name Herbert Frahm) background as a wartime propagandist transmitting atrocity stories from Sweden, and links Brandt’s associates like Hans Hirschfeld to espionage controversies.

Butz repeats his core argument: the “Final Solution” was resettlement/evacuation, not murder, and postwar trials (e.g., Dachau) involved coercion, hearsay, and procedural flaws. He touches on other topics like the Talmud (as a source of biased weighting), author credentials, trial abuses, and implications for historiography, insisting the hoax persists due to political interests rather than evidence.

The chapter serves as Butz’s parting defense and call for scrutiny: he portrays the entire work as a scientific debunking, predicts the legend’s eventual collapse, and warns against over-focusing on minor details at the expense of the obvious {such as, no extermination policy in documents). In essence, he wraps up the book by preempting objections, exposing postwar political motivations, and reiterating that a dispassionate review of sources reveals the “extermination” story as a sustained propaganda campaign.

Go to Part 2.

Contra Camera: On Photography, Film and TV as Engines of the Anti-Human, Unenchanted and Immoral

Ich habe meinen Tod gesehen! That’s one of the most plaintive and poignant things I’ve ever read. Ironically enough, it’s also one of the most penetrating. In English it goes: “I’ve seen my death!” That’s what Anna Bertha Röntgen, wife of the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen, reportedly said in 1895 after she saw an X-ray photograph he had taken of her left hand. The bones were clearly visible, you see, and so she foresaw herself as a soul-less, lifeless skeleton. And you can see her bones, because this is the photograph, still here long after the death it foretold to her:

A hand and a horror: the first medical X-ray (image from Wikipedia)

Anna Bertha cried out against technocentric modernity in its early days, when technology was only just beginning to perform marvels like that. For her the marvel of X-rays was also a horror. And she was right in some very important sense, although it’s hard for us to recapture her emotion, when such images have been routine for many decades. Indeed, countless people today would find her reaction amusing. They’d like to be able to photograph or film her distressed face for LOLs or lulz. I call that kind of photographic sadism gelotography (from Greek γέλωτο-, gelōto-, “laughter”).

Gelotography is a much younger cousin of pornography, an anti-human genre that began almost as soon as photography itself did. Where one pursues the dopamine-dump of orgasm at any expense, the other pursues the dopamine-dump of laughter.[1] Accordingly, pornography and gelotography are part of why I’d say the camera is a wonderful evil, one of the two great unenchanting engines of technocentric modernity. The other great engine of unenchantment and evil is the car, which the conservative writer Russell Kirk once described as “the mechanical Jacobin,” as “a revolutionary the more powerful for being insensate. From courting customs to public architecture, the automobile tears the old order apart.”

Language as lightning

“Mechanical Jacobin” is a wise and wonderful phrase, a lightning-like metaphor that links cars with the arrogant, mass-murdering, tradition-trashing, society-smashing Jacobins of the French Revolution. And yes, cars and the infrastructure that serves them have been like Jacobins: transforming and tyrannizing cities and landscapes, assaulting the eye and ear and nose with metal, tarmac and concrete, with engine-noise, tyre-rumble and exhaust-fumes. And ironically enough, Kirk’s phrase illustrates one of the themes of this essay: the superiority of language over imagery, of words over pictures. I say “ironically enough,” because how would you illustrate that phrase? How would you convey Kirk’s meaning in pictures? On the printed or pixelated page, you understand it in an instant: “mechanical Jacobin.” Putting it into pictures would be much more difficult and time-consuming.

But the difficulty of illustrating an idea or capturing a scene has its salutary side when you compare illustration by hand with taking a photo. One of the charges I want to lay against photography is that it has cheapened reality, giving us too much with too little effort. With a camera, you can capture all the detail and depth of an entire landscape in an instant. And thereby you diminish the depth and denigrate the detail. That doesn’t happen when you try to paint or draw a landscape. Or paint or draw something much smaller and simpler, like a cup or a flower or a face. When you learn to paint or draw, the true richness, complexity and depth of the world are brought clearly before you in a way that simply doesn’t happen with a camera.

The Watcher Watched

So I’d echo Kirk’s anathema against cars by saying that cameras are mechanistic Jacobins. They cheapen reality and they corrupt morality. In Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), George Orwell presented a nightmare society where “You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” But that was the state invading privacy with cameras and microphones. Now the mechanistic invasion of privacy has been privatized:

“We had sex in a Chinese hotel, then found we had been broadcast to thousands”

One night in 2023, Eric was scrolling on a social media channel he regularly browsed for porn. Seconds into a video, he froze. He realised the couple he was watching — entering the room, setting down their bags, and later, having sex — was himself and his girlfriend. Three weeks earlier, they had spent the night in a hotel in Shenzhen, southern China, unaware that they were not alone.

Their most intimate moments had been captured by a camera hidden in their hotel room, and the footage made available to thousands of strangers who had logged in to the channel Eric himself used to access pornography. Eric (not his real name) was no longer just a consumer of China’s spy-cam porn industry, but a victim.

Warning: This story contains some offensive language

So-called spy-cam porn has existed in China for at least a decade, despite the fact that producing and distributing porn is illegal in the country. But in the past couple of years the issue has become a regular talking point on social media, with people — particularly women — swapping tips on how to spot cameras as small as a pencil eraser. Some have even resorted to pitching tents inside hotel rooms to avoid being filmed.

Last April, new government regulations attempted to stem this epidemic — requiring hotel owners to check regularly for hidden cameras. But the threat of being secretly filmed in the privacy of a hotel room has not gone away. The BBC World Service has found thousands of recent spy-cam videos filmed in hotel rooms and sold as porn, on multiple sites. […]

Eric, from Hong Kong, began watching secretly filmed videos as a teenager, attracted by how “raw” the footage was. “What drew me in is the fact that the people don’t know they’re being filmed,” says Eric, now in his 30s. “I think traditional porn feels very staged, very fake.”

But he experienced what it feels like to be at the opposite end of the supply chain when he found the video of himself and his girlfriend “Emily” — and he no longer finds gratification in this content. (“We had sex in a Chinese hotel, then found we had been broadcast to thousands,” BBC News, 6 February 2026)

So the biter was bit, the watcher was watched, the wanker wanked over. And feminists no doubt wish this biter-being-bit could happen more often to voyeuristic males invading the privacy of vulnerable females. Stories like that have been appearing for a long time at leftist outlets like the BBC and Guardian. But some of the leftists who decry the invasion of privacy for pornographic ends do not decry the invasion of privacy for political ends. For example, what about when someone is captured on camera in a private setting being racist or transphobic? “Ah, that’s different!” some leftists would say. As a racist and transphobe myself, I obviously don’t agree. And I can use my opposition to pornographic privacy-invasion to support my transphobia. Why should so-called “transwomen” not be allowed to enter female spaces like dressing-rooms and toilets? Well, one good reason is that the male perverts in question won’t be able to plant spy-cameras there.

No female Mozart

Real women do that sort of thing much less often, which is why I was puzzled by this headline back in March 2025: “Woman jailed for recording hundreds of men using the toilet in Aldi.” In fact, it wasn’t a woman but a “transwoman,” that is, a male pervert called John Leslie Graham. And it isn’t a coincidence that men are both corrupted by cameras and creators of cameras. That is, it’s men who invent the technology that other men use for voyeurism and privacy-invasion. As the provocateur Camille Paglia once put it: “There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.”

Men break boundaries criminally, creatively and cognitively in ways that women don’t. Recall the story at the beginning of this essay. It’s impossible to imagine the sexes in that story reversed, with a female physicist called Anna Bertha Röntgen creating X-ray photography and her husband Wilhelm crying “Ich habe meinen Tod gesehen!” Women don’t invent like that and men don’t emote like that. That cry was authentically female, the lament of an utterly ordinary and unexceptional woman at the cleverness and skill of her husband, who’s still famous and still celebrated as the discoverer of X-rays. And yes, we can certainly agree that the husband was far more intelligent and inventive than the wife. But we might also agree that he had far less wisdom.

Breaking the white light

And that story of a technophilic man and a technophobic woman reminds me of another story about a clever technophile and a wise technophobe. It’s a story in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, when the wizard Gandalf is describing how he sought the aid of the wizard Saruman against the Dark Lord Sauron. Saruman’s name means “Man of Skill” or “Man of Cunning,” because he is skilled at molding and manipulating matter to his own ends, as Gandalf sees again during their dialog:

“The Nine have come forth again,” I answered [Saruman]. “They have crossed the River. So Radagast said to me.”

“Radagast the Brown!” laughed Saruman, and he no longer concealed his scorn. “Radagast the Bird-tamer! Radagast the Simple! Radagast the Fool! Yet he had just the wit to play the part that I set him. For you have come, and that was all the purpose of my message. And here you will stay, Gandalf the Grey, and rest from journeys. For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!”

I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours. and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.

“I liked white better,” I said.

“White!” he sneered. “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.”

“In which case it is no longer white,” said I. “And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”

“You need not speak to me as to one of the fools that you take for friends,” said he. “I have not brought you hither to be instructed by you, but to give you a choice.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954, Book II, chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

Gandalf refuses the choice, just as he refuses to be impressed by Saruman’s boast that “the white light can be broken.” There I’d say that Tolkien was making an implicit reference to — and rejection of — the mechanistic, mathematicized world-view of the great English physicist Isaac Newton (1643-1727). It was Newton who explained why white light can be “broken” with a prism into the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (where X-rays would later be found by the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen). If I’m right, then Saruman is a spokes-wizard for the nihilism of Newtonianism, for the foolish cleverness of science and technology. He has what is later described as “a mind of metal and wheels” and “does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.” (The Two Towers, “Treebeard”)

Books are bigger

I haven’t seen that confrontation between Gandalf and Saruman in the very successful film-trilogy of Lord of the Rings. Yes, it would be interesting to see it, but also invasive. Someone else’s images would invade my head and overwhelm the private, personal images I’ve always created when I’ve read and re-read Lord of the Rings. That’s one of my other objections to film and one of my other reasons to elevate literature over film and photography. The potency of the image overwhelms and obliterates the privacy of the imagination. And yet books — those silent, inert rectangular blocks of printed paper — are far bigger than booming, bustling, broad-screen movies, with all their action and activity and energy. Books remind me of the famous saying by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: Δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης, Dis es ton auton potamon ouk an embaiēs — “You cannot step twice into the same river.” Readers of Lord of the Rings have never experienced the same book. Viewers of Lord of the Rings have always experienced the same film.[2] In other words, readers cook the book for themselves from the ingredients supplied by Tolkien; viewers consume what was cooked for them by the director Peter Jackson and the many others who created the films.

Film is tyrannical — sense-seizing, attention-appropriating, imagination-obliterating — in a way that literature isn’t. Film is also collectivist where literature is individualist. With Lord of the Rings, what one man created on paper took hundreds or thousands of men and women to put onto film. As the English writer Alan Moore once said: “[T]he written or spoken word is a higher technology than film. I believe it is much more genuinely magical in its effects and much more human. I’m not ignorant or dismissive of cinema. But with the written word, any writer has got exactly 26 characters. Out of the rearrangements of those 26 characters, the writer can create anything.”[3]

Definitely disenchanting

Artificial intelligence has narrowed that gap between the individualism of literature and the collectivism of film. It’s allowing entire films to be created with minimal expense and effort by single individuals. But the tyrannizing, sense-seizing evils of film have remained. And the privacy-stripping, amorality-encouraging evils of film have been encouraged. AI allows any kind of obscenity or extremity that can imagined to be literally turned into images. And so AI becomes part of the disenchantment of technocentric modernity, the Entzauberung der Welt or the stripping of magic and mystery from life named by the German sociologist Max Weber in 1917 from a poem by the German poet Friedrich Schiller. Film and photography disenchant in part because they make definite in a way that language and literature don’t. For example, what did Helen of Troy look like? Language both can and can’t tell us. From the 1590s, the English playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe tells us like this:

Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? (Doctor Faustus, Act V, scene 1, lines 161-2)

But Marlowe also doesn’t tell us, because there’s no description of Helen’s face there, nothing about the shape, color, contours and myriad other features of a face which cameras can capture with such ease. And have captured in films about the Trojan War, where real actresses have embodied the literally mythic beauty of Helen of Troy. And where real sets have represented the “topless towers of Ilium.” Or failed to represent them, because how do you represent “topless towers”? The concept works in words, but would be impossible or absurd to convey on film.[4] Marlowe’s words are more wonderful and more powerful than any film or photograph because they are indefinite in a way film and photography can’t be and don’t want to be. Indeed, you could say that Marlowe wrote a kind of meaningful music about Helen’s beauty: all his words have meanings and some refer to material things, but they float in the mind like music, untethered to any particular manifestation of materiality.

Instant over hours

He was writing poetry, of course, but you can say the same of mathematical language. The word “triangle” floats free of materiality too, encompassing all triangles but embodying no particular triangle. Film and photography always want to manifest the particular, so triangles are tethered there. And so are trees and towers. And the face of a mythic beauty like Helen of Troy. Or the face of a historic beauty like Cleopatra. She was embodied by the actress Elizabeth Taylor in the hugely expensive film Cleopatra (1963), with its crew of hundreds and cast of thousands. And let’s suppose that the film had been the masterpiece it aimed to be. Let’s suppose it had been the greatest film ever created. I still think its hours of imagery and action would have been less powerful and less of an art-work than a single second of Cleopatra’s life illustrated by one man with much less advanced technology in the nineteenth century:

The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra (1885), by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (image from Wikipedia)

That’s one of the best paintings by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912), the Anglo-Dutch master who achieved a kind of full-color photographic realism in paint long before photography itself was routinely and realistically in color. Looking at that painting, one can almost feel the heat of the sun, smell the sea-air and the roses, hear the music of the flute, the creaking of the galleys, the splash of the oars. And in the “almost” is the enchantment. Alma-Tadema had to conjure that scene in the viewer’s mind with nothing but paint on canvas. And with his own long-honed, hard-earned skill, of course. The painting invites the imagination in a way that a film of the same scene wouldn’t and couldn’t. When we see the painting, we imagine what happened before and will happen next. A film would show us what did and will happen. And nowadays there would likely be sex. If all art aspires to the condition of music,[5] then perhaps you could say that all film aspires to the condition of pornography: ever more exciting, ever more explicit, ever more extreme, obscene and evil.

But the evil of film lies less in its pornography than in its pseudography, that is, in its ability to convey lies and falsehoods in a convincing, quasi-realistic way. Film and its retarded younger brother television have been peddling lies about racial and sexual differences for decades, portraying Blacks as wise and noble victims of White oppression, presenting women and homosexuals as superior to straight White males, who are thrust on film where leftism wants them to be in reality: at the bottom of all moral, cultural and cognitive hierarchies. And there lies a great irony: the technology created by White men has been used to overthrow White men and elevate their enemies. Photography, film and TV were all created by the cunning hands and clever brains of White men like the French Louis Daguerre (1787–1851), pioneer of photography, the American Thomas Edison (1837–1941), pioneer of cinema, and the Scot John Logie Baird (1888–1946), pioneer of television. What was invented and perfected by White men was then turned against White men.

Toppling giants, elevating dwarves

But part of the camera-driven undermining of White men wasn’t planned and purposive. Why was the Anglo-Dutch master Lawrence Alma-Tadema an artistic hero in the nineteenth century and the Jewish charlatan Mark Rothko an artistic hero in the twentieth? Because the camera mechanized the representation of reality and thereby corrupted art, driving it away from realism and beauty and towards abstraction and ugliness. Alma-Tadema was hugely skilled; Rothko was hugely hyped. Indeed, Rothko and other charlatans were beneficiaries of what the American journalist Tom Wolfe called The Painted Word (1975), whereby art became centered not on the skill and talent of disproportionately White masters, but on the words and theories of disproportionately Jewish scholars and critics.

Rothko wrecks reality, then embraces abstraction (see Brenton Sanderson’s “Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism, and the Decline of Western Art” at TOO)

The camera indirectly created the Painted Word, toppled artistic giants like Alma-Tadema and elevated artistic dwarves like Rothko. Meanwhile, Jews in Hollywood and New York were turning the White male inventions of film and television against Whites in general and White males in particular. But cameras would have been catastrophic without the K-words. What cars have done to landscapes, cameras have done to mindscapes. And the two inventions collaborated in wreaking havoc on our culture. Cameras and cars have been the two great unenchanting engines of technocentric modernity.


[1]  I dislike the modern fashion for referring to or explaining human motives and behavior in reductive, neurochemical ways: “dopamine rush” and so on. It’s crude, cursory and disenchanting. But reductionism seems entirely appropriate for pornography and gelotography.

[2]  And a single reader has never read the same book twice.

[3]  Alan Moore has also said: “I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying[.] It spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms [..]”

[4]  “Topless” can be interpreted as “having no limit in height” or “unexceeded in height.” Either way, it can’t be easily or unabsurdly represented as an image.

[5] Walter Pater said this in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1877): “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.” See Gutenberg text.

Prologue to The Goy Scout by Erick Wessel

The Goy Scout is available at Amazon in paperback ($14.00) or Kindle ($4.99)

Prologue 

President Jeff Boden took office in January 2021 after running a campaign on combatting the “rising tide of hate” and extremist violence in America. The previous summer of 2020 was characterized by rampant political and racially motivated violence, vandalism, rioting, arson, and looting on the part of Anti-Fascist (Antifa) and Black Lives Matter (BLM) organizations. However, this was not the “hate” and extremist violence President Boden was referring to.

Conversely, former president Ronald Stump was elected to combat the “woke left,” end illegal immigration, stop wasteful foreign adventurism, and place America First. Stump’s rhetoric earned him the support of normal, everyday White Americans across the country along with the moniker of “fascist” by his opponents. He was sold to the public as a political outsider who promised to “drain the swamp” in the District of Columbia (D.C.) and not be beholden to lobbyists or special interest groups. His great personal wealth and grassroots support lent credibility to this promise. Yet, by the end of his term, Stump proved to be just another bloviating demagogue. He failed to deliver on even his most fundamental campaign promises. He had distinguished himself from his presidential predecessors only in presentation and style. Accordingly, when given the opportunity to defend the American people and American cities from nationwide Antifa- and BLM-led terrorism, he simply responded with a verbal condemnation of the activity and a promise to “monitor the situation.” Antifa and BLM would be allowed to operate with virtual impunity. Moreover, Stump would prove to be among the most explicitly pro-Zionist and pro-Jewish presidents in American history. Lastly, he deported far fewer immigrants than Democratic President Ohama before him and constructed only 52 miles of new “wall.” Approximately three quarters of the United States (US) Mexico border remained unwalled.

The mainstream media nevertheless accused Stump’s presidency of engendering a marked rise in “White supremacist” and otherwise “right-wing extremist” activity across the nation. The media’s most notable evidence for this was the “Unite the Right (UTR)” rally conducted in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. This was the largest gathering of nationalists in America in many decades. It was intended to protest the erasure of American history as exemplified by the removal of historical statues across the nation on the grounds of “racism.” In the case of Charlottesville, the city was planning to destroy its monument to Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The UTR protesters obtained the necessary permits before their demonstration and advertised their intention to engage in their First Amendment right in a peaceful manner. The planned event caught the attention of Antifa who decided to organize a violent response under the banner of a “counter-protest.”

Foreseeing the potential for violent conflict, many of the UTR protesters brought defensive items such as shields and helmets. During the event, the police were ordered to stand down, allowing Antifa to violently engage the UTR protesters. The UTR protesters, having lost police protection, were then forced to protect themselves from the Antifa aggressors. As a result of the ensuing conflict, city officials decided to shut down the rally by declaring it an unlawful assembly. UTR protesters, being dispersed in accordance with the shutdown, were then directed through crowds of hostile Antifa and suffered more attacks. The media falsely portrayed the event as a violent White supremacist riot and decried the UTR protesters as extremist instigators. They would hold the event up as “proof” that right-wing violent extremism was the greatest domestic security threat facing America. This very same media would later describe Antifa and BLM riots as “largely peaceful” while cities burned in the background.

As a result of the rally, nearly a dozen UTR protesters were convicted of criminal charges while none of the Antifa “counter-protesters” received any criminal convictions whatsoever. Particularly egregious were the convictions of “assaulting counter-protesters” which were simply the result of UTR protesters defending themselves from Antifa aggressors after the police had stood down. To add insult to injury, two Jewish lawyers filed a civil lawsuit against UTR protesters which resulted in a couple dozen nationalist individuals and organizations being held liable for $25,000,000 in damages.

It was upon this stage, set by the media, that Boden ran his campaign with a focus on combatting the rise of “White supremacist” hate.

Seventeen of the top twenty-seven 2020 US Presidential General Election donors were Jewish, seven of whom donated to Stump’s campaign and the remaining ten to Boden’s. Interestingly, all of Boden’s children and his Vice President were married to Jews. What underscores the significance of these and other similar figures is the fact that Jews accounted for only 2% of the American population. After his election, Boden established one of the most Jewish presidential cabinets in American history. The Jewish-occupied positions would include (but not be limited to):

  • Secretary of the Treasury
  • Attorney General (who, as head of the Department of Justice, would oversee the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) among other federal agencies)
  • Secretary of Homeland Security
  • Director of National Intelligence
  • White House Chief of Staff
  • Secretary of State
  • Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
  • Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy

At the direction of the Attorney General of the United States, Jack Leibowitz, and the Secretary of Homeland Security, Harold Rothstein, there was to be an increased focus on Racially Motivated Violent Extremists (RMVE), particularly of the “White supremacist” variety, and organizations thereof. In accordance with this agenda, FBI Director Ravi Gupta testified at both a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in March of 2021 and a House Committee hearing in June of 2021 that White-supremacist RMVEs represent the number one Domestic Violent Extremist (DVE) threat in the United States.

New “anti-hate” initiatives would be overseen by the Jewish FBI Deputy Assistant Director of the Criminal Investigative Division, Alan Greenberg. Greenberg would then designate hate crimes as a “national threat priority,” a classification rarely set by the Bureau. FBI agents were to receive additional “hate crime training” produced in partnership with the Jewish-created and -led League Against Defamation (LAD). The Bureau would be contacting and investigating every local law enforcement agency which had not reported any “hate crimes” to the federal database, while offering additional help and resources to local police departments to aid in their reporting and investigation of said crimes. Lastly, the Bureau would be engaging in a nationwide anti-hate, multimedia advertising campaign to encourage victims of “hate crimes” and “hate incidents” to come forward.

“White supremacy” and “hate” had become Public Enemy Number One.

Carrie Prejean Asked Uncomfortable Questions About Israel and Lost Her Job Two Days Later

Carrie Prejean Boller did not arrive at the February 9, 2026 hearing on anti-Semitism in America as a hardened ideologue. She came wearing an American-Palestinian flag pin, armed with questions she believed a Religious Liberty Commission should be willing to hear, and convinced that religious freedom meant the freedom to dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy on Israel.

By February 11, she was gone.

The former Miss California USA, a recent convert to Catholicism appointed by President Trump to his White House Religious Liberty Commission, was removed from the panel after she challenged witnesses at a Museum of the Bible hearing about whether criticizing Israeli policy in Gaza constituted anti-Semitism, whether Catholics were required to embrace Zionism, and whether social media platforms would be pressured to censor biblical passages about the role of Jewish authorities in the crucifixion of Christ.

Her removal came not from President Trump, but from Commission Chair Dan Patrick, the evangelical Christian Lieutenant Governor of Texas. Prejean responded with a public letter rejecting his authority and accusing him of acting “in alignment with a Zionist political framework that hijacked the hearing, rather than in defense of religious liberty.”

The message was unmistakable. In an era when Jewish power over American discourse on Israel has reached unprecedented consolidation, even asking the wrong questions can be detrimental to one’s standing in normie political circles.

 

Prejean is by no means a fervent anti-Semite. Her career arc, in fact, mirrors that of a typical establishment conservative. She rose to national attention in 2009 when, as Miss California USA competing for the Miss USA title, she answered a question from celebrity blogger Perez Hilton about same-sex marriage by saying she believed marriage was between a man and a woman. The answer cost her the crown and made her a hero to social conservatives. She subsequently authored “Still Standing”, appeared on conservative media circuits, and built a brand as a defender of traditional values and religious conviction in a hostile culture.

Prejean married former NFL quarterback Kyle Boller, had children, and converted to Catholicism in April 2025. When Trump appointed her to the Religious Liberty Commission, it seemed a natural fit for someone whose public persona had been defined by refusing to bend under pressure.

That history makes what happened next even more revealing. If someone with Prejean’s conventional conservative credentials could be expelled for the simple questions she asked, the boundaries of acceptable discourse on Israel have become vanishingly narrow.

The February 9 hearing was convened to address the rising levels of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism taking place in the United States, particularly on college campuses following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli genocide in Gaza. Witnesses included Yeshiva University President Ari Berman, Jewish activist Shabbos Kestenbaum, Jewish students, and rabbis who shared accounts of rising anti-Semitism and harassment.

Prejean used her questioning time to challenge the premise of the hearing itself. She asked witnesses whether “speaking out about what many Americans view as a genocide in Gaza should be treated as anti-Semitic.” The Miss California winner pressed them directly with a yes or no question. “If I don’t support the political state of Israel, am I an anti-Semite, yes or no?”

Prejean defended Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, both of whom had faced accusations of trafficking in anti-Semitic rhetoric, saying she listened to Owens daily and had “never heard anything anti-Semitic from her.” She told the panel that “Catholics do not embrace Zionism” and asked, “So are all Catholics anti-Semites?”

Most controversially, she raised the historical charge that “Jews killed Jesus,” asking whether social media platforms would face pressure to ban biblical passages referencing Jewish authorities’ role in the crucifixion. She also directly challenged Kestenbaum, noting that Israel had been mentioned 17 times during the hearing and asking, “Are you willing to condemn what Israel has done in Gaza?”

Chair Dan Patrick halted her questioning. The backlash online was immediate. Far-right activist Laura Loomer called for her removal. Kestenbaum publicly urged her to resign.

Prejean refused. She tweeted, “I would rather die than bend the knee to Israel,” and accused the commission of pushing a pro-Zionist agenda rather than protecting religious liberty. She posted that she would “continue to stand against Zionist supremacy in America” and described herself as “a pro-life Catholic and a free American who will not surrender religious liberty to political pressure.”

On February 11, Patrick announced her removal, stating, “No member of the Commission has the right to hijack a hearing for their own personal and political agenda on any issue.” Prejean responded with a defiant open letter disputing Patrick’s authority to remove her. She wrote that the commission “was created by Executive Order of President Donald J. Trump. Members were appointed by the President and serve as his appointees. Nothing in the Executive Order grants you the power to remove presidential appointees.”

She accused Patrick of “speaking without authority” and acting on “a Zionist political agenda, not the President’s, not the U.S. Constitution’s, and not the purpose of this Commission.” Her closing lines were unambiguous. “I refuse to bend the knee to Israel. I am no slave to a foreign nation, but to Christ our King.”

The controversy exposed fractures not just on the right, but within Catholicism itself. Prejean claimed to be defending Catholic doctrine. Catholic commissioners at the hearing said she was distorting it. A priest on the panel cited the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate (1965), which formally repudiated the deicide charge and condemned anti-Semitism “directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”

What happened to Prejean is not an isolated incident. Her expulsion exemplifies organized Jewry’s commitment to policing all forms of criticism directed against Israel or any other Jewish-dominated entity.

The machinery is well established. Pro-Israel donors flood campaigns, ensuring politicians who stray face primary challenges from groups like AIPAC’s United Democracy Project. Think tanks from the American Enterprise Institute to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies enforce orthodoxy. Media outlets amplify charges of anti-Semitism against anyone questioning the U.S.-Israel relationship. Social media platforms adjust content moderation under pressure from organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the Combat Antisemitism Movement, which celebrated Prejean’s removal.

Carrie Prejean Boller is no ideologue steeped in anti-Semitic fervor or the arcana of the Jewish question; she is simply one more American recoiling from the Gaza genocide unleashed after October 7. Jewish organizations, however, flush with unchecked authority in the wake of October 7, brook no dissent, branding even the feeblest remonstrance against Israel as heresy. Her expulsion thus lays bare the iron grip on American public life, where religious liberty yields to the caprices of Jewish enforcers.

The Quaker Question

In the UK, there is a group called the Centre for Countering Digital Hate. It is a Transatlantic NGO based in London and Washington, DC, run by an Afghani-British Labour activist called Imran Ahmed. In December 2025, President Donald Trump banned this man from the United States due to being a “key collaborator with the Biden administration’s effort to weaponize the government against U.S. citizens” and because he was involved in a campaign to coerce American social media platforms to punish Americans for expressing certain conservative points of view.

In particular, Trump’s administration objected to the way in which Ahmed, and others, campaigned to force American platforms to restrict freedom of expression within the UK and the European Union. If you’re not already familiar, keep the name in mind, as the Centre for Countering Digital Hate is right up there with Hope Not Hate, Stonewall, Mermaids, and their American counterparts, such as the SPLC in terms of suppressing free speech and attacking those who question Woke dogmas.

Now if you’re an ordinary right-wing type you’re probably thinking, “Oh let me guess, it’s funded by the Jews, right?”  No. Well . . .  yes, but they’re not actually the main social group that funds them. If you look into the first three charities that do so then it is only the “Pears” family (originally Schleicher) that are Jewish. The other two funders, Cadbury and Rowntree, are two of the big three British Quaker families who pioneered the confectionary industry through the Industrial Revolution; the other family being the Frys, also minor confectioners but more associated with prison reform.

There is also the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. Paul Hamlyn (1926–2001), a notorious champagne socialist of his day, had a Jewish father while his mother was a Quaker. Paul was raised in possibly the oldest “pedigree woke” schools in the United Kingdom: St Christopher School, Letchworth Garden City. In a similar story to the Steiner schools, St Christopher was founded for the theosophical movement, a popular “spiritual-Woke” craze of its day that stressed universal brotherhood and attacked traditional power structures and even the notion of scientific truth, it was soon after adopted and run by a Quaker family. If we count the Paul Hamlyn Foundation as half and half, then that’s 1.5 Jews to 2.5 Quakers among those who are funding the Center for Countering Digital Hate. What if this is proportionally generally true of all far-left enterprises? What if it is true across the last three centuries of history? What if it has been more the Quakers than the Jews who’ve been pushing and funding left wing social reform since the onset of the Industrial Revolution and even earlier?

We groan in disbelief as the dissident right to ignore the Quaker Question—an exception is Kevin MacDonald’s Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition which has a chapter on the critical role the Quakers played in abolishing slavery in the UK (but not in America where Puritan-descended people took the lead). The power of this super-virtue-signalling, pacifist sect that believes that members are imbued with the “inner light,” such that God is somehow “in them” and guides their righteous consciences. How many times has one of your permanently online friends named-dropped one of the eminent early twentieth-century Jewish banking families: the Rothschilds, the Warburgs or the Schiffs? How many times have they brought up George Soros, Jonathan Greenblatt (of the ADL), Larry Fink (of BlackRock fame) or even Michael Bloomberg?     Compare this with how many times your friend has mentioned equally eminent Quaker banking families: the Barclays, the Lloyds or the Gurneys? Excluded from the professions, the Quakers, like the Jews, went into finance. Has he ever mentioned William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, whose pacifist policies eventually led to the state nearly being overrun by the French and their Native American allies? Or what about Elizabeth Fry née Gurney, who pioneered making UK prisons as easy as possible?

Your friend probably doesn’t even know who the Pease family or the Rowntree family are, unless he’s partial to fruit pastilles, and that’s a terrible shame, because all of these families form part of a powerful sub-ethnic group within the Anglo-European population. Quakerism has for a long time emphasised marriage within their community. Given enough time and evolution, Quakerism might have formed its own Jewish-like ethnic identity. George Fox, its seventeenth century founder, encouraged Quakers to inter-marry and “marrying out” would lead to disownment if the spouse did not convert. English Quakers abolished this requirement in 1860.

You can draw connections between the famous members of old Jewish families and social progressive reform through the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but it requires more work and what you will find isn’t really that exciting. Compare that with what the Quakers got up to: proto-Woke social justice spills off the page, but, of course, it is manipulatively dressed up as “caring” and “equality” such that there can be no rational debate: African American rights, Native American rights, women’s rights including suffrage, trade unionist rights, liberal prison and sentencing reform and religious pluralism. You will struggle to find a single eminent Quaker at any point in history who didn’t have a hand in at least one of these things, because proto-Woke liberal social justice has always been an essential part of the Quaker sect.

There are movements started by Quakers that aren’t even about social justice, yet you would intuitively associate them with puritanical virtue signalling. An extremely proto-Woke sect of the Quakers in the late nineteenth century – the Shakers – came up with the idea that all sex, even in marriage, was evil. Another sect was led by a non-binary natal woman who called herself “Universal Friend” and became furious if her original name was employed. The Quakers are known for their historical advocacy of teetotalism, as we explored earlier, and the temperance movement that ultimately inspired the prohibition on alcohol in the United States.

The Quakers have also been long known for their Pacifism, even against their ideological opposites during World War II. So, if Quakers had approached a majority of the population in Britain and America by the mid-twentieth century, then German, Italian and Japanese Fascists and National Socialists would ironically have easily won the War and wiped out Quakerism. Quakers are even known to be some of the earliest advocates of vegetarianism in the modern era, and played a major role in founding the Vegetarian Society of England in 1847 and their own exclusive Friends Vegetarian Society in 1902. Unsurprisingly, in that vegetarianism is a form a virtue-signalling and of reassuring yourself of your own virtue, practicing it is predicted by the kind of mental instability that would be associated with being left-wing.

When it comes to social justice, the Jewish influence has until perhaps recent decades for the most part stayed confined to fighting post-World War II anti-Semitism. The only areas where the Jews have an edge over their Quaker counterparts in the UK are in the far-left’s bloodiest invention, Marxist thought, where they have definitely been historically overrepresented, if not quite to the degree that has always been claimed. Presumably these political areas involve too much testosterone, conflict and general chaos for the timid and submissive Quaker sensibilities, and so they have allowed that void to be filled by other out-groups.

It’s often taken for granted today, because of the present political climate of polarisation, that Revolutionary Marxism, sexual libertinism, and Woke social justice are all part of the same far left tapestry, but actually historically speaking, especially before the 1960s, these were much more politically disparate. Though some have argued convincingly that it was postmodern philosophers of the Frankfurt School that united these things together, the simpler explanation is that since Fascism has historically opposed them all, in being anti-Fascist one necessarily takes on all causes supposed Fascists dislike.

Quakers are a dying breed today. Historically their numbers and influence in Europe and America, especially in the Anglo World, has been substantial, but now their size is insignificant; only about 75,000 people in the United States self-identify as Quaker. We suspect that Quakerism’s passive, soft and strange religious overtones are too out of touch with the far-left’s burning anger and Neuroticism to be popular with young Woke moralists today. As is inevitable with most liberal left-wing religious sects, their own teachings have brought about their demise, by mass apostasy and demographic collapse. In 1980, there were over 17,000 registered Quakers in the UK, by 2020 there were roughly 12,000. You see the same pattern across all the liberal mainstream Protestant groups, which are arguably just watered down versions of Quakerism today anyway. But although the religion is dying, the elite family networks, the money and the organisations still linger on and shall continue to do so for a while yet, as is evident in the funding structure of Centre for Countering Digital Hate outlined earlier.

As Canadian political scientist Eric Kaufmann has shown in Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, a similar fate befalls the Jewish elite in the West, as they’re demographically in decline, being replaced by a new stock of competing Chinese, Indian and Arab elites, with their own hegemonic interests, and religion plays a relatively moderate role for the dominance and cohesiveness of those groups, especially the Chinese. The Jewish people will nevertheless remain firmly entrenched, even expansive, in Israel for the foreseeable future however, and Israel most definitely does exercise political influence beyond its borders. When controlling for intelligence, religious conservatism predicts fertility.

Jewish people for whom their Jewish identity is salient have been and will continue to be a politically active presence in Western Europe for some time, although in remarkably different ways that depend largely on whether they are secular universalist liberal Jews or religious or Zionist Jews. However, in the UK, only the highly insular Haredi and Orthodox Jews have above replacement fertility. The other Jewish groups are marrying out and simply dying out due to below replacement fertility. There is evidence that the IQ of Orthodox Jews is lower than that of Whites which predicts the Haredi’s high fertility but also their limited socioeconomic success.

Nevertheless the Jewish peoples’ superiority over the Quakers is very clear. The Jewish contribution to science and invention alone is beyond impressive: Fritz Haber, Albert Einstein, Oppenheimer, to name a few, let alone their contributions to art, literature, film and culture.

What have the Quakers ever done for us? Chocolate snacks . . .  that’s about it, and even these were only developed because coco was seen as a virtuous alternative to alcohol. That’s about it. And what have they ever done to us? It was the Quakers who started the modern hegemonic far-left, they laid the foundations for everything, and even now their legacy continues to dominate the insanity of modern Woke politics. Your permanently online is obsessed with the Jewish Question, and that’s exactly how the Quakers want it to be.

The above is an edited version of part of The Quaker Question: Exposing the Sect that Really Rules the World by Edward Dutton and J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles. Hard copies are available from the publisher at https://wylfings.com/ The e-version is available on Amazon.