[WW2] - Auschwitz

"---Not being fully convinced, this journalist needs to cover himself. So the Grand Masters of the Official Truth are permitted to speak. The first is Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who introduced Pressac to the Establishment. The first thing he shows us is that, as usual, he can't read: Vidal-Naquet believes that the "point" made by Pressac about the precise date of the "first gassings" is derived from the Moscow archives. This is clearly wrong.19 This "point" is actually the result of an argument typical of Pressac: he sees in the archives records that the buildings were not usually completed by the dates given by "authorities" (based on "memory"). Pressac then searches for the dates on which construction of the crematories were completed, then refers back to the Kalendarium (which is also largely based on "memory," and which even Pressac himself calls dubious) to determine what gassings took place that day. Evidently the Moscow archives make no mention of any homicidal gassings. As for Pressac's calculations, Vidal-Naquet finds them a bit hasty, too much based on assumption, it's "not so simple," "probably". . . The man who earned the Legion d'Honneur by dint of his anti-revisionist efforts prefers Hilberg's figures, which he calls "rather solid." Vidal-Naquet hesitates more than usual. He seems to be having second thoughts about his wisdom in launching Pressac, who has become the satellite of others and who threatens to crash land.

Then comes Raul Hilberg. After being grilled on the stand during the first Zündel trial at Toronto, in 1985, this professor of political science has learned to be more cautious.20 He laments that Pressac isn't really a historian, that his is not the "the last word on the subject." He complains that "important research is still necessary," that "considerable research is still needed," that "the German sources should be studied further," and that there is still a lot of work to do. One wonders what this fellow's been up to since he began his study of this subject in 1948.

But Hilberg says something very embarrassing: an extermination order by Hitler has already been missing; now an extermination order by Himmler is likewise nowhere to be found. Höss and Himmler did not even meet "during the crucial period." What now? Is it Höss who decided everything by himself? Or was he in the dark as well? An extermination order by Höss to his subordinates cannot be found either. Another mystery. Perhaps we should ask Vidal-Naquet.

But the best, as usual, comes from Claude Lanzmann. He's a raw fundamentalist, dazed, totally inaccessible to the least reasoning, but with an animal's intuition. He showed this intuition in making the movie "Shoah," in which he abandoned all (or nearly all) reference to the documents. He knows the documents. He doesn't know what they really mean, but he has a photographic memory and rightly says that all the documents cited by Pressac were already known. Lanzmann defends his work as a movie maker in almost Celinian terms: art should create emotions, nothing else. ("I prefer the tears of the Treblinka barber to Pressac's document on the gas detectors"). Lanzmann is very modern; he likes to hit below the belt, crying to avoid thinking, toying with the macabre. Pressac's material "drives out emotion, suffering, death," he says. Lanzmann tramples on Vidal-Naquet, who licked his boots for years: "The sad thing is that a historian, his being doubtless threatened by the truth, the force, the evidence of the testimonies, does not hesitate to endorse this perversity [Pressac's book]. A historian abdicates before a pharmacist ..."

Lanzmann smells a rat in Pressac. He understands much better than the media and academic crowd, which rushed to embrace Pressac in the hope of finishing off revisionism, that

Faurisson is the only one this convert wants to talk to. To be listened to by him [Faurisson], he [Pressac] must speak his language, make his thought processes his own, accept his methodology, produce the crucial evidence, the ultima ratio, that will convince his former master ... In order to refute the revisionists' arguments, one must give them legitimacy, and they thus became the central point of reference. The revisionists occupy the whole terrain.

The poor man is right. He must feel quite lonely with his useless reels. He had to first delay, and then completely reorganize his movie because of Faurisson's work. In fact the terrain is not occupied by the revisionists -- who are persecuted everywhere -- but by the remnants of an imploded belief. Lanzmann, late in life, has become the epic poet, the cantor, of this belief. It's not just the revisionists' questions that caused the implosion. Time destroys myths: fugit irreparabile tempus, irreparable time flies.---"

Debatten angående hur mycket Zyklon det går för att döda löss vs människor har ju varit livlig på forumet. Tydligen skulle det, enligt nizkor , behövas 16000 ppm för att döda löss och bara 300 ppm för att ta livet av en människa. Ja just det, en (1) människa! Men hur mycket behövs det för att döda flera hundra som ju "vittnen" påstått att det kunde vara vid varje gasning.