Holocaust denial and hate

One of the common topics I discuss on this blog is Holocaust denial. Indeed, I've been opposing Holocaust denial on various online forums for ten years now. I've castigated David Irving, mocked Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his worldwide Holocaust denial conference, and made frequent comments about how Holocaust denial is inextricably linked with anti-Semitism and racism, often directly due to the white nationalist movement (or, as I like to refer to white supremacists, mighty white power rangers).

That's why I was very saddened to learn about what happened at the Holocaust Museum earlier today:

WASHINGTON -- An 88-year-old gunman with a violent and virulently anti-Semitic past opened fire with a rifle inside the crowded U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday, fatally wounding a security guard before being shot himself by other officers, authorities said.

The assailant was hospitalized in critical condition, leaving behind a sprawling investigation by federal and local law enforcement and expressions of shock from the Israeli government and a prominent Muslim organization.

Washington Police Chief Cathy Lanier said the gunman was "engaged by security guards immediately after entering the door" with a rifle. "The second he stepped into the building he began firing."

The shooter was James W. von Brunn, and, like many of these loonies, he had a long history of extreme racism, as documented on his website, Holy Western Empire (not responding now but available at Archive.org), which he describes as a "hard-hitting A new, hard-hitting exposé of the JEW CONSPIRACY to destroy the White gene-pool" (warning: extreme racist tripe quoted; I don't back off from showing these morons for the hate-filled troglodytes that they are):

Here are 350pp of FACTS condensing libraries of information about the Talmud, Democracy, Marx, Genetics, Money, Aryans, Negroes, Khazars, The Holy Bible, Treason, Mass-media, Mendelism, Race, the "Holocaust" and a host of suppressed "bigoted" subjects, all supported by quotations from many of history's greatest personages. Learn who is responsible for the millions of Aryan crosses covering the world's battlefields. Why our sons and daughters died bravely but in vain. Learn why the "browning of America will alter everything in society from politics and education to industry, values and culture." (TIME 4-9-90).

Learn who has committed treason - and must be brought to justice! This carefully documented treatise exposes the JEWS and explains what you must do to protect your White family. Kill the Best Gentiles! Is a must for every concerned parent and a manual for every student of World History.

He even offers the first six chapters of the book for free. I've glanced through it, and, let me tell you, it's about as disgusting a read as I have ever seen in my decade of probing the darker corners of the Internet.

And this is how von Brunn describes himself:

James W. von Brunn holds a BachSci Journalism degree from a mid-Western university where he was president of SAE and played varsity football.

During WWII he served as PT-Boat captain, Lt. USNR, receiving a Commendation and four battle stars. For twenty years he was an advertising executive and film-producer in New York City. He is a member of Mensa, the high-IQ society.

In 1981 Von Brunn attempted to place the treasonous Federal Reserve Board of Governors under legal, non-violent, citizens arrest. He was tried in a Washington, D.C. Superior Court; convicted by a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys, and sentenced to prison for eleven years by a Jew judge. A Jew/Negro/White Court of Appeals denied his appeal. He served 6.5 years in federal prison. (Read about von Brunn's "Federal Reserve Caper" HERE.) He is now an artist and author and lives on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Which all goes to show that IQ doesn't necessarily mean that he has critical thinking skills. After all--surprise! surprise!--von Brunn is a Holocaust denier:

Writings attributed to von Brunn on the Internet say the Holocaust was a hoax and decry a Jewish conspiracy to "destroy the white gene pool."

"At Auschwitz the 'Holocaust' myth became Reality, and Germany, cultural gem of the West, became a pariah among world nations," it says.

Because Holocaust denial is always a manifestation of Jew hatred. Always. And, sadly, von Brunn has taken his Jew hatred to the next level and a good man has paid with his life.

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Just because someone says they are a member of Mensa does not make it so. In fact people that go around telling other people how smart they are typically insecure, narcissistic ninnies.

And playing up his varsity football history as part of his qualifications is only marginally better than "Arnold J Rimmer, BSC, SSC" (Bronze Swimming Certificate, Silver Swimming Certificate). This man is not only an abominable waste of cells, he's also extraordinarily full of himself.

By Calli Arcale (not verified) on 10 Jun 2009 #permalink

I don't know. 'Mighty white power rangers' sounds far too cool for white supremacists. And is insulting to power rangers. Maybe we can nickname them after the minions-of-the-week instead.

By Becca Stareyes (not verified) on 10 Jun 2009 #permalink

When I first heard the reports on TV, I just assumed it was some idiotic 20-something skinhead. But an 88 year old? What kind of hatred must have fermented for those many years? What kind of sociopathic behavior was never treated (if it can be)?

Being Jewish, I cannot put together words that make sense. It makes fighting the alt med woo seem somehow irrelevant.

"In fact people that go around telling other people how smart they are typically insecure, narcissistic ninnies."

In my small sample of about 7 people I have ever met who were actual Mensa members, this description is perfect.

I usually refer to them as idiots, smart idiots.

Just another idiot who subjugates his experience of reality to an ideology that never had any purpose but to bolster the ruling class in Germany - be it the at the time still somewhat influential leftovers of a feudal system or the "captains" of industry.
See the role that the Bush grand papa played in his dealings with the "Reich"
In order to divert attention from the reality of how Nazism found a perfect linkage of capital and the polity, a scapegoat had to be created and was found in not only the Jew, but also any left leaning, i.e. socialist or trade union activist, to be further extended to anybody critical of the Government.
The linkage became clear when Jewish capital was "transferred" into the hands of truly Aryan entrepreneurs, nothing but Germanic robber barons.

Anybody who still today thinks that "national socialism" as an idea had ever any merit but to ideologically support a criminal gang of robbers and usurpers of power is so far deluded that only the designation "idiot" is proper.

#6 peter -- Is the name Bush relevant here or are you just spouting old-timey conspiracy theories?

Would you care to comment on the American idealists who also subscribed to a superior race idea?

Which all goes to show that IQ doesn't necessarily mean that he has critical thinking skills.

Hey, that's proven by the bloggers here every day. ;-) Oh, pow!

What a "heroic" way for this 88 year old dumbfuck to go out: a martyr trying to shoot up the Holocaust museum. Death by cop.

By natural cynic (not verified) on 10 Jun 2009 #permalink

Last I heard he was still alive in the hospital. I hope he lives, it seems likely that his intention to be killed and made a martyr to his disgusting cause. I don't want him to have that satisfaction.

Donna B:

Prescott Bush was a known Nazi sympathizer, and I think he was also involved in the isolationist anti-war movement.

For what it's worth, I've found myself wondering if von Brunn was involved in the movement as well -- he's just old enough to have been involved in the German-American Bund back in the day. (Neo-Nazi? He could have been the original recipe...)

Noadi:

Personally, I'm sort of hoping for an "accidental" overdose of Heparin or Coumadin in his IV. But I'm pretty sure most medical personnel are too decent to do that even to a scumfuck like him.

Hi.
He is 88 years old. Probably he wanted to commit sucide and take as much of his imagined enemies with him. His age was probably also important in the decision, because H is the 8th letter in the alphabet and therefore 88 stands for "HH - hei#l hitl3r" in neonazi code. He probably "reasoned" if he wanted to kill himself and as much other people as possible, this was the time.

Holocaust denialists and Moon landing denialists are at such an extreme end of the crazy spectrum, I just can't get my head around how you get that far gone. There are truckloads upon truckloads of evidence! It's like going into your boss' office, jumping up on the desk, taking a dump there, then walking out and coming back in two minutes later, saying "Where'd that crap come from?" How can you not know???!!!

Unfortunately he didn't die, the security guard he exchanged fire with did. Get ready for more of this kinda crap as the summer warms up and the economic situation stays bad or doesn't get better fast enough. I'm not looking forward to it.
It would help if the talking heads would slow down the name- calling and demonizing rhetoric, but I don't expect them to do so. Maybe I'll be wrong. I'd sure be glad to be mistaken about this situation, but I'm just not seeing it.

Wondering if this psychopath had chosen the date for a particular reason, I looked throught the anniversaries on Wikipedia.
And noticed that it was the 65th anniversary of the Oradur-sur-Glane massacre when German soldiers murdered 654 French villagers, many of them locked into a burning church.
Maybe it was significant for him, maybe not - who knows?

sophia8-

maybe it was because a play, featuring the conversation anne frank would have had with emmet till was supposed to be preformed there that evening to an invitation-only crowd of political Washingtonians, as it was authored by Janet Langhart Cohen, wife of former Secretary of Defense William Cohen?

the date may mean nothing, but an extremely antisemitic holocaust denier who thinks blacks are a different (and lesser) species than white "aryan" humans and may also have ties to the anti-government sovereign citizen movement seems like he would truly hate a play like that.

Denialism = insanity, it is as simple as that.

By Richard Eis (not verified) on 11 Jun 2009 #permalink

You know, the more I see the links between these Federal Reserve crazies (and Ron Paulites) and hate groups to more I think the Federal Reserve has become shorthand for "Jewish Bankers" or just "Jews". You see it again and again. It could be the usual crank magnetism and paranoia of these looneys, but I can't help but think that the ones that harp on and on about the gold standard (because now the Jews make up what money is worth) or the Federal Reserve (Jewish illuminati conspiracy!) are using these as code-words or euphemisms for Jews. It's a mainstreaming of the usual jewish banker/protocols of zion conspiracy theory for the masses (or at least Ron Paul's followers).

"...noticed that it was the 65th anniversary of the Oradur-sur-Glane massacre when German soldiers murdered 654 French villagers, many of them locked into a burning church."

Sadly, virtually every day of the year is the anniversary of some nazi atrocity. Not all of which are recorded in wikipedia.

Personally I wish Mr vonn Brunn a long life. The rest of which will now be spent behind bars.

By NoAstronomer (not verified) on 11 Jun 2009 #permalink

MarkH, please don't lump Ron Paul supporters and those who want the Federel Reserve audited (and/or eventually dismantled) with hate groups and people like this idiot. I'm sure there are some RP supporters who are that way, being that we're a pretty diverse group, but racism (or other -isms) are by no means common beliefs within our group. And I really hate that just because we are critical of the FR we automatically get dumped into the category of the Illuminati/NWO/"Jews are running the world" crazies.

The thing with the gold standard really has nothing to do with Jewish peoples, as far as I'm concerned. I really have no idea how many of the people who formed the FR were Jewish, how many now are Jewish and I really don't care, because - surprise! - it is completely irrelevant. It's only about economics - Austrian economics to be exact.

Perhaps the crazies have jumped onto the RP bandwagon because he is against the FR? That's a pity, because they're giving the rest of us a bad name.

This will not be the last of these attacks - the white supremacists are enraged by the election of Obama.

There is a long history of antisemitism in anti-banker movements going back to the Social Credit movement of the 1930s (Ezra Pound was a Social Credit supporter). Canada's most notorious Holocaust Denier (Jim Keegstra) was once head of the Canadian Social Credit Party in the 1980s.

By Militant Agnostic (not verified) on 11 Jun 2009 #permalink

#6 peter -- Is the name Bush relevant here or are you just spouting old-timey conspiracy theories?

It is relevant to show the tight connection between the capitalist class in germany and the Nazis at the time.

"Fritz Thyssen and his business partners are universally recognized as the most important German financiers of Adolf Hitler's takeover of Germany. At the time of the order seizing the Thyssen family's Union Banking Corp., Mr. Fritz Thyssen had already published his famous book, I Paid Hitler,@s5 admitting that he had financed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement since October 1923. Thyssen's role as the leading early backer of Hitler's grab for power in Germany had been noted by U.S. diplomats in Berlin in 1932.@s6 The order seizing the Bush-Thyssen bank was curiously quiet and modest about the identity of the perpetrators who had been nailed."
"By Oct. 26, 1942, U.S. troops were under way for North Africa. On Oct. 28, the government issued orders seizing two Nazi front organizations run by the Bush-Harriman bank: the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation.@s2

U.S. forces landed under fire near Algiers on Nov. 8, 1942; heavy combat raged throughout November. Nazi interests in the Silesian-American Corporation, long managed by Prescott Bush and his father-in-law George Herbert Walker, were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act on Nov. 17, 1942. In this action, the government announced that it was seizing only the Nazi interests, leaving the Nazis' U.S. partners to carry on the business.@s3

These and other actions taken by the U.S. government in wartime were, tragically, too little and too late. President Bush's family had already played a central role in financing and arming Adolf Hitler for his takeover of Germany; in financing and managing the buildup of Nazi war industries for the conquest of Europe and war against the U.S.A.; and in the development of Nazi genocide theories and racial propaganda, with their well-known results. "

George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography --- by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitk

I guess it is always a conspiracy theory when you do not like the facts.
Nazism is not an evil in the vacuum of pure ideas.
It is an evil based on purely economic interests and the pursuit of absolute power of the economic leading class, dressed up with some fancy trimmings like "the superiority of the Aryan" class and antisemitism.
Fascists as Mussolini and National Socialists as Hitler and his gang are two faces of the same ideology.

path: I recall reading that Mensa confirmed he was a member for a year.

No surprises, really. Smart people can be intensely stupid without difficulty.

(Intelligence and wisdom are not only not synonymous, I sometimes doubt they're even correlated.)

Peter: You leave out the way ("when you don't like the facts!") that Prescott Bush owned only one share of the bank in question and was not actually "managing" it in practice.

The "Bush family financed the Nazis!" smear has never held up to examination. That's why it gets called "conspiracy theory" - because it's all appearance of guilt that keeps getting repeated despite the lack of any truth beyond a "connection" that gets hand-waved over.

It'd be a fun read of pure crazy if it wasn't so creepy:

Page 9, Foreword:

"PROTOCOLS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION"

Buckle up!

Page 10:

"The once productive White civilizations
of Rhodesia and South Africa, extorted by the ILLUMINATI
and its enforcement unit, the United States"

13:

"Fat with profits harvested in the Civil War, JEWS
were like worms attacking a ripe cornfield."

17:

"Steven Spielberg, JEW, pusillanimous Hollywood director,
paid $22-million to Kate Capshaw, enterprising White
hustler, before she would commit to the marriage bed (Vanity
Fair, Oct. 1997). She then dutifully bore him two future
candiates for America's booming nose-job industry."

57:

"Jesus Christ WAS NOT A JEW. He was a rabbi
(teacher) who worshipped the Mosaic Law and despised the
Pharisaical Oral Law (Talmud). Jesus (if he did exist) was
born in Galilee ("Unclean Land of the Gentiles"). He may
have been Semitic but he could just as easily have been
Aryan."

...and it kinda goes downhill from there.

Now I need a drink. And a shower.

The people who see the Nazis as an unpopular regime foisted on Germany by a cabal of capitalists should read history a little closer. The German capitalists -- like many people here and in England as well as in Germany -- believed that Democracy had 'proven its weakness' and the future was with either Nazism or Communism, and the capitalists naturally supported the Nazis.

But the Nazis were, in fact, a populist youth movement. We forget that, when Hitler took power, no prominent Nazi was as old as Obama is now, and their followers were even younger. (That's why they thought 'the future belongs to us' because they were so much younger than the politicians they sought to replace.)

As for Prescott Bush, he was, in fact, a moderately liberal Democrat whose career was ended by the defender of the Malmedy Nazis, Sen. Joe McCarthy.

By Prup (aka Jim … (not verified) on 11 Jun 2009 #permalink

I've read through some of his website and book. They're very poorly written and come off as rambling. This might actually suggest some kind of mental illness.

This might actually suggest some kind of mental illness.

YA THINK?!

Peter: You leave out the way ("when you don't like the facts!") that Prescott Bush owned only one share of the bank in question and was not actually "managing" it in practice

If you would have read properly, the "bank" represented by P. Bush was not the only enterprise headed by Bush with tight links to Nazis.

Three sets of archives spell out Prescott Bush's involvement. All three are readily available, thanks to the efficient US archive system and a helpful and dedicated staff at both the Library of Congress in Washington and the National Archives at the University of Maryland.

The first set of files, the Harriman papers in the Library of Congress, show that Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder of a number of companies involved with Thyssen.

The second set of papers, which are in the National Archives, are contained in vesting order number 248 which records the seizure of the company assets. What these files show is that on October 20 1942 the alien property custodian seized the assets of the UBC, of which Prescott Bush was a director. Having gone through the books of the bank, further seizures were made against two affiliates, the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation. By November, the Silesian-American Company, another of Prescott Bush's ventures, had also been seized.

The third set of documents, also at the National Archives, are contained in the files on IG Farben, who was prosecuted for war crimes.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar

Again - just because you call facts you do not like conspiracies, doesn't mean the facts are not accurate.
By the same token one could call the facts countering the claim that van der Lubbe was the sole arsonist in the Reichstags brand conspiracy theory.

"The people who see the Nazis as an unpopular regime foisted on Germany by a cabal of capitalists should read history a little closer."

Most of the members of the Nazi Party were young, dissatisfied adults, typically unemployed, quite a few were followers of the Strasser fraction, which advocated a social revolution leading to distribution of wealth, while the group around Hitler was always catering to the economic leading class in Germany. For this he was eventually killed in 1934 with others in the "night of the long knives".

The Nazi movement until the total control of the NSDAP by Hitler and his gang was actually attractive to left leaning youth who despised the Moscow controlled Communist party and the vacillating Social Democrats.
It was not just a party of goons with the idea of world domination - this was ideology of the faction around Hitler, who had clearly expressed those ideas in his "works" Mein Kampf I and II, and who eventually won the day by eliminating all internal opponents.

One should also not forget the fact that the Nazis never were elected with more then 32% of the popular vote, but unfortunately they emerged as the strongest party due of the enormous vote splitting through an abundance of competing parties.

Peter, the Dimitroff definition of Fashism - that Fashism is just a ploy of the capitalists - is not very helpful, it comes from an age when Stalinists like Dimitroff still believed Social Democracy was a greater danger than Fascism, and it was abandonded by everybody, including Dimitroff himself, about two years later. No serious leftist analyst of Fascism in general or National Socialism in peculiar does hold this positions anymore, everybody agrees that Volksgemeinschaft was dangerous because it was real. I suggest that you should read Sternhell or Adorno on this. Calling Fascism just another form of capitalist rule banalizes and belittles the crimes of the Nazis, and claiming that it was forced on an innocent population by a few hundred nineteenth-century-style robber barons is a grave underestimation of modern society's potential for barbarism.

please don't lump Ron Paul supporters and those who want the Federel Reserve audited (and/or eventually dismantled) with hate groups and people like this idiot. I'm sure there are some RP supporters who are that way

Ron Paul himself has longtime links to hate groups, make no mistake. This has been documented over at Dave Neiwert's site, Orcinus.

MarkH, I think you're right on target with the suggestion that this is code language to appeal to antisemites. And Ron Paul uses it that way as well, even if some of his supporters are, sadly, unaware of it.

By Tlazolteotl (not verified) on 13 Jun 2009 #permalink