Holocaust Deniers Crack-Up
Willis Carto, the veteran neo-Nazi at the center of numerous
political projects for more than four decades, has apparently lost
control of his beloeved Institute for Historical Review (IHR), the
15-year-old organization dedicated to denying that the Nazi
Holocaust against European Jewry ever occurred. As of December
1993 Carto continuued to be listed as ‘Founder’ on the IHR
masthead. But the November/December issue of the Journal of
Historical Review (JHR), Carto’s flagship Holocaust denying
publication, carried a bombshell:
During the past several months, facts have come to light to
persuade the IHR senior staff that Carto’s relationship
with the IHR had become a liability. After much careful
deliberation, and kon advice of legal counsel, the
Institute resolved to terminate this relationship.
JHR editor Mark Weber and longtime Institute director Tom Marcellus
have accomplished what many observers of the white supremacist
movement had thought impossible: the dislocation of the
megalomaniacal Carto from an important part of his own business
empire. Carto has apparently lost control of his publishing arm,
Noontide Press. He maintains control over at least two other
projects, the political organization, Liberty Lobby, and the
far-right’s premier weekly newspaper, the Spotlight.
Using the Spotlight Carto has launched an all-out counter-attack on
his former allies at the IHR. Spotlight editorials have accused
Marcellus of being ‘a longtime, high-ranking member of a bizarre,
mind-bending cult with a very strange history’ (January 31, 1994).
The February 7, 1994 issue of the Spotlight accused the current
Board of Directors for the IHR of being controlled by the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
In addition Carto has apparently assembled a separate Board of
Directors for the IHR, which according to Weber and company is not
legally recognized as such.
The February 21, 1994 issue of the Spotlight warns fellow
revsionsists that Carto’s version of the ‘IHR’
…cannot be responsible for money sent by persons who
registered for the so-called 12th. Institute for
Historical Review Conference…to be held over Labor Day
this year.
The IHR annual conference was a very important event for Carto, and
it appears as though he has lost control of that as well.
A February 1994 fundraising letter signed by Marcellus, Weber, the
Review editor, Tom O’Keefe, and an associate editor, Greg Raven,
includes words of support from many of the leading Holocaust
revisionists from around the world. Proiminent Holocaust deniers
apparently supportive of the expulsion of Carto include: the French
denier Robert Faurisson, neo-Nazi propagandist David Irving, ‘Hoax
of the Twentieth Century’ author, Arthur R. Butz, Canadian
anti-Semitic publisher, Ernst Zundel, and IHR ‘Media Director,’
Bradley R. Smith.
Butz is quoted in the fundraising letter as saying,
IHR is in good hands and deserves the support of all who
have supported its traditional mission. Indeed that
support is even more crucial today, since Willis Carto has
now been added to IHR’s list of powerful enemies.
Bradley R. Smith, the anti-Semite who spearheaded IHR’s efforts to
place ads denying the Holocaust on United States college newspapers
quipped:
If it is ever demonstrated that the ADL has taken over the
IHR, as Carto and the Spotlight claim, I’ll fly to
Washington, D.C. call a press conference, and eat my
shorts on the front steps of the Liberty Lobby.
What’s Behind the Carto Crack-Up?
There is a serious side to these recent splits within the
Holocaust-denying end of the white supremacist mmovement. What
should be immediately clear to anyone familiar with the political
figures involved in this crack-up is that they are all deeply
involved in anti-Semitism and the racist right. While Carto’s
claim that the current Board of Directors of IHR are dupes of the
ADL is ridiculous, equally fanciful is the explanation proffered by
the IHR editorial board itself, that Carto
…unilaterally attempted to change the direction of IHR
and its journal from *serious, non-partisan, revisionist
scholarship*, reporting, and commentary to one of *ranting,
racialist-populist pamphleteering*. [Emphasis in original]
The idea that Carto was attempting to take an otherwise respectable
journal in a radical or racist direction is sheer nonsense. The
Institute for Historical Review, its Journal, Board of Advisors,
Staff, and company are deeply involved in racist, anti-Semitic
hate-mongering. The most recent editions of the JHR, while
presented in a slicker format and produced more often (bi-monthly
rahter than quarterly), show no apprciable difference from when the
organization was under the formal sponsorship of Willis Carto. The
project and its associates and off-shoots were and are a threat to
democracy: hateful, bigoted liars with or without Willis Carto.
For example, the current JHR editors Mark Weber and Ted O’Keefe
both formerly played prominent roles in William Pierce’s neo-Nazi
organization the National Alliance. A cursory inspection of the
Institute’s advisory board turns up some unsavory characters.
While it is too early to predict how this recent split will turn
out, a number of observations can be made. Weber and Marcellus and
their crew of anti-Semites appear to have the support of numerous
prominent Holocaust deniers in their dismissal of Carto. Because
the name Willis Carto has been virtually synonymous with the openly
anti-Semitic ultra-right throughout the past 40 years, Weber and
crew are likely to attempt a whitewashing of the true aims of IHR.
Such a move to ‘moderate’ the image of the IHR and the project of
Holocaust denial will likely included the active recruitment of
supathetic academics and the denial of racist proclivities on the
part of the IHR’s principle officers.
A recent example of just such an attempt was the permission given
by German historian Ernst Nolte for the JHR to run an interview
conducted with him in the January/February issue. Nolte, the
author of ‘Three Faces of Fascism’ and other scholarly works on
World War II and fascism, was a prominent player in the mid-1980s
‘Historikerstreit,’ or ‘historians dispute,’ over which the
uniqueness, severity and scale of Germany’s involvement in World
War II was debated.
Professor Nolte has been moving to the right in that evolving
debate ever since and appears to have gone off the edge by
assenting to the publication of an interview he did with a certain
Ian B. Warren in the January/February 1994 issue of the Journal of
Historical Review. A note published with the interview states:
‘Although Prof. Nolte did not originally understand that this
interview was to appear in the Journal, he assented to publication
after reviewing the complete text.’ The note also advises that ‘Ian
Warren’ is a pen name for ‘a professor who treaches at a university
in the Midwest,’ most likely Northwestern University professor
Arthur Butz.
The current list of academics willing to lend their names to the
Editorial Advisory Committee of the Institute for Historical Review
includes the follwoing individuals:
[list published elsewhere within these archives. knm]
Reprinted from The Dignity Report, March 1, 1994, Vol. 2, No. 3,
a publication of the Coalition for Human Dignity Research
Department, P.O. Box 40344, Portland, Oregon 97240. (503)
281-5823
Last-Modified: 1994/06/16
