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Harry Elmer Barnes on the Suppression of Honest History
Just one year before his death in 1968, famed Revisionist exposed the never-ending “smotherout” of the truth
By Dr. Harry Elmer Barnes
Every American citizen has much more at stake in understanding how and why the U.S. was drawn into World War II than in perusing The Warren Report, its supplementary volumes, and the controversial articles and books of the aftermath, or the annals of any isolated public crime, however dramatic. However tragic and regrettable, the assassination of President Kennedy was a relatively simple crime as compared to perhaps the most lethal and complicated public crime of modern times, our entry into World War II. This resulted in the immediate loss of over 30 million lives, an ultimate cost of more than $15 trillion, incredible suffering, and a military scientific- technological-industrial aftermath which may wipe out the human race; and the concomitant result: a conditioned outlook whereby millions favor war—exerted externally upon a foreign “enemy” and internally upon the taxpayers—as the means to ensure peace.
Do we need more books to vindicate Revisionism? Although a formidable array of evidence has been amassed and offered by Revisionist scholars as to our involvement in World War II, this evidence has not been fully recognized or generally understood. Writing in 1965, Richard J. Whalen, author of the brilliant The Founding Father, stated: In the 20th year after the end of World War II, we still do not have an unsparingly truthful, solidly authoritative account of how and why the United States was drawn into World War II. And it is becoming doubtful that we will ever have it.
The reasons are many: World War II was the liberals’ war and they are understandably determined to uphold their version of its origins with all the formidable political and intellectual resources at their command. There is also our necessary preoccupation with the successor struggle now centered on Southeast Asia; with so much to comprehend here and now, a searching look backward at our tragic line of march seems almost a luxury we can ill afford. But most important of all, we are losing our hope of the truth about the central experience of our time simply because time is passing.(1)
THE SILENT TREATMENT
For Revisionism to entice and instruct the newly matured generation, as suggested by Mr. Whalen, is, indeed, an exciting enterprise and might prove a very fruitful possibility to explore were it not for a crucial recent shift in the strategy of anti-Revisionism which seems to be rather generally unrecognized even by some of the veteran proponents of Revisionism, although they are virtually buried under evidence of the change by the material constantly presented by every communications agency in the country. For some 15 years after V-J Day, the opponents of World War II Revisionism were content to oppose Revisionist scholarship and publication by giving books the silent treatment, or smearing authors and books and belittling Revisionist scholarship.
Despite such unfair procedure and the handicaps it imposed on World War II Revisionism, the Revisionists in time won the battle of factual demonstration hands-down. Moreover, it was recognized that the traditional procedure of sniping, smearing, misrepresentation, and distortion in attacking traditional Revisionist works was becoming tedious, repetitive, frenetic, and often self-defeating in its fervor and misrepresentation, as was so well demonstrated by the review of the James Martin book American Liberalism and World Politics: 1931- 1981 in The New York Times of April 25, 1965, by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
Hence, it was gradually but effectively decided to jockey the techniques of the historical blackout around into such a pattern that all but the most courageous and defiant Revisionists could be “shut up” entirely and rapidly, and their products could be made to appear essentially irrelevant. It was the Eichmann trial of 1960 that furnished an unexpected but remarkably opportune moment and an effective springboard for stopping World War II Revisionism dead in its tracks. As the courageous Jewish publicist Alfred Lilienthal [showed] in his lucid book The Other Side of the Coin (104-11), this trial revealed and demonstrated an almost adolescent gullibility and excitability on the part of Americans relative to German wartime crimes, real or alleged, and the equally apparent passionate determination of every type of American communication agency to exploit the opportunity for financial profit by placing every shred of both fact and rubbish connected with them before American readers, hourly and daily, for months, if not years, on end.
Not even the sophisticated Esquire or New Yorker remained immune. This revamped historical blackout, now become the historical “smotherout,” is based chiefly on the fundamental but unproved assumption that what Hitler and the National Socialists did in the years after Britain and the United States entered the war revealed that they were such vile, debased, brutal and bloodthirsty gangsters that Britain had been under an overwhelmingly moral obligation to plan a war to exterminate them. Following up this contention it was asserted that the United States was compelled to enter this conflict to aid and abet the British crusade as a moral imperative that could not be evaded but was an unavoidable exercise in political, social and cultural sanitation.
The fundamental error in this ex post facto historiography was pointed out by A.J.P. Taylor in his interview with Professor Eric Goldman in the autumn of 1965. But it is doubtful if one American in a million has ever heard or read this exchange. Even though he has never attempted to deny the fact that he is a persistent Germanophobe, the smotherout proved too much for Taylor to swallow, although he admitted his Germanophobia in the interview. As Taylor explained to Goldman: You must remember that these gas chambers came very late. People often talk as though they were implicit in Hitler’s policy from the beginning. They were, in fact, a reprisal against our British policy of indiscriminate bombing. Hitler said, again and again, “If you are just going to go out and rub out German women and children, I’ll take care that all the—not only Jews—but people of many lower races are rubbed out.”
And when I consider that the great powers and governments … the American government, the Soviet government, are now both cheerfully contemplating the obliteration of 10, 20 million people on the first day of war—you see gas chambers are nothing in comparison. All alert and aware Revisionists should express and always have expressed their deep regret and repugnance over whatever brutalities were actually committed by Hitler and his government, either before or after 1939, but they have also called attention to the demonstrable fact that the number of civilians exterminated by the Allies, before, during, and after World War II, equaled, if it did not far exceed, those liquidated by the Germans, and the Allied liquidation program was often carried out by methods that were far more brutal and painful than whatever extermination [allegedly] took place in German gas ovens.(2)
These embarrassing facts are almost invariably suppressed in the same agencies of communication that are now incessantly portraying the allegedly unique abominations of the Germans. When pressed into a corner, which is a very rare opportunity indeed, the new smotherout vintage of anti-Revisionists contend, or at least imply, that it is far worse to exterminate Jews, even at the ratio of two gentiles to one Jew, than to liquidate gentiles. For Revisionists to controvert this assertion in behalf of non-partisan and non-racial humanitarianism exposes them to the charge of anti-Semitism, which, in the present state of sharply conditioned and persistently inflamed public opinion, is deemed to be rather worse than parricide or necrophilia.
No substantial or credible Revisionist believes that two wrongs can make a right or that revelation of the actual Allied genocide will solve the problem of averting future wars. But the recognition that the wartime barbarism was shared would put the responsibility where it belongs, namely, on the war system which, as F.J.P. Veale demonstrated so forcibly in his Advance to Barbarism, is becoming ever more barbarous and lethal. In a nuclear age, war will, as Taylor pointed out, provide in the course of its normal operations more hideous destruction of human life than has ever been alleged in the wildest flights of imagination of the smotherout addicts. One giant hydrogen bomb dropped over a major urban center would be likely to obliterate at least 6 million lives, and in our eastern seaboard towns hundreds of thousands of the victims would be Jews. This is where World War II Revisionism stands today. It was difficult enough when Revisionists were merely accused of bias, folly, incompetence, or all three.
To be accused of anti-Semitism today is far more precarious than to be accused, or even proved, to be guilty of pro-communism. Interestingly enough, an attempt is now seeming to be made to push this Germanophobia back into the causes of World War I, if we may judge from a long article on “How We Entered World War I” in The New York Times Magazine of March 5, 1967, by the brilliant stylist and historical popularizer Barbara W. Tuchman, granddaughter of Henry Morgenthau, whose fanciful “story” played so unfortunate a part in encouraging the war guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty and thus helped to bring on World War II. She had followed in her grandfather’s steps by producing another fanciful story in her book, The Zimmermann Telegram (1958), which she has been unwise and audacious enough to reissue recently.
It was The New York Times Current History Magazine that requested me some 43 years ago to summarize the historical facts that dissipated the myths of wartime propaganda about World War I, of which “Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story” was a leading item and had been devastatingly exposed as a fraud by Prof. Sidney B. Fay in The American Historical Review in 1920. My article was published in Current History in May 1924, and first put World War I Revisionism before the literate American public in an effective manner. Whatever may have been the purpose of The New York Times in publishing this article by Mrs. Tuchman, it does raise the question of the reality of “progress” so far as the historical perspective of the Times is concerned.
This article has aroused much indignation on the part of even moderate or dormant Revisionists, but it failed to excite me. In my opinion, Mrs. Tuchman is the type of writer who, given enough rope, will hang herself, and she has certainly been taking a lot of rope recently in writing about Wilson and Freud in The Atlantic (February 1967) with no evident technical knowledge about either, and even posing as an expert on historiography in The Saturday Review (February 25, 1967) although expert historians like Klaus M. Epstein, A.J.P. Taylor, and David Marquand, in reviewing her much publicized The Proud Tower, have questioned her capacity to write history. In my long re view of her book in The Annals, November 1966, I at least conceded her rare ability as a popularizer of social history.
More ominous is the announcement of a book by Alton Frye (Nazi Germany in the American Hemisphere, 1933-1941, Yale University Press), sponsored by the Rand Corporation, which launched the much publicized effort of Roberta Wohlstetter to blur out essential facts about Pearl Harbor. This book contends that, after all, Hitler did have designs on the United States and envisaged plans for invading and occupying this country—reminiscent of Roosevelt’s canard about Hitler’s timetable for penetration to Iowa, which figured prominently in the interventionist propaganda prior to American entry into the war. In my opinion we are in more danger from the prospect that to Germanophobia may now be added a revival of Japanophobia.
This trend was latent in the anti-Revisionist writings on Pearl Harbor by Walter Millis, Herbert Feis, Langer and Gleason, Robert J.C. Butow, Samuel E. Morison and Robert H. Ferrell in their defense of Roosevelt. But it has just now taken a more definite form in Ladislas Farago’s The Broken Seal: The Story of “Operation Magic” and the Pearl Harbor Disaster (1967), in which the Japanese efforts to preserve peace by negotiation are presented as a hypocritical sham to cover up their actual determination on war and to gain time to prepare for it. A more extended enterprise in this same vein has been foreshadowed by Gordon W. Prange. We may be on our way to returning to Adm. Halsey’s view of the Japanese as subhuman anthropoids.
It is quite true that if they could be exposed to the facts about the causes of World War II and our entry on their merits, free from the all-encompassing and incessant barrage of Germanophobia, notably that against National Socialist Germany, this generation of his own age to which Mr. Whalen refers is actually highly vulnerable and receptive. This I have demonstrated to my own satisfaction through the response to my lectures before student groups in first-rate American universities and colleges, and in such articles as those I wrote in Liberation in the summers of 1958 and 1959, in The New Individualist Review in the spring of 1962, and in The Rampart Journal, spring, 1966, thus covering both the left and right of this new generation. We can, however, hardly expect those persons who might be willing to learn, if they had a fair chance, to withstand the incessant bombardment by our communication agencies designed to demonstrate that we had a vital moral and self-protective duty to favor and enter a war fought to rid the world of a gang of barbarians more dissolute and bloodthirsty than anything since, or even before, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane.
This younger and brainwashed generation gets into contact with only scattered and tiny bits of even the traditional Revisionist material, and this at considerable intervals. But not a day goes by without one or more sensational articles in the daily papers about the exaggerated National Socialist savagery which required our entry into the war; the leading weekly and monthly journals, especially Look and The Saturday Evening Post,(3) never miss their quota of this lurid prose; the radio has it on the air daily; expensive moving pictures are devoted to it; not a week goes by without several inciting television programs revolving around this propaganda, and sensational books pour forth at frequent intervals. While reading some of the most repulsive examples of such smotherout Germanophobia, I noted in the newspapers and journals pictures of President Johnson apparently posing without a shudder as the host of the Ethiopian tyrant and genocidal virtuoso Haile Selassie, who had previously been invited, or at least permitted, to appear in the funeral cortege of President Kennedy.
Lest the public get “fed up” and bored by repetition, the material handed out to them has to be made more unceasing, exaggerated and inflammatory. There should be some limit 8 to this, but it certainly is not in sight, as yet, even though it far exceeds in frequency, volume and ferocity anything handed out in wartime, when the public imagination was occupied in large part by following military operations. There would appear to be no restraining memory of the backwash that followed when the mendacity and exaggerations of the Bryce Report on alleged German atrocities in World War I were revealed by Arthur Ponsonby, J.M. Read and others.
The foremost authority on the subject has estimated that the number of Jews exterminated by the National Socialists, already re ported by “authorities” cited by the smotherout for all the wartime German concentration camps, would amount to well over 25 million. This does not include the upward of a million allegedly killed by the German Einsatzgruppe when battling guerrilla warfare behind the lines. We are now being told (New York Times, November 3, 1966 and Saturday Evening Post, February 25, 1967) that the Austrians executed about as many Jews as the Germans.
With not more than 15 to 18 million Jews in the world to start with in 1939, this is, indeed, a remarkable genocidal achievement, especially if one considers the logistical problems involved in its execution. The truth about German operations, if presented along with Allied brutalities, provides a sufficient indictment without any need for fantastic exaggerations that open the way for a devastating backwash, if and when the truth is presented in this or some future generation. If a Revisionist work on World War II were written with a combination of the scholarship of Sidney Fay and the persuasive stylistic genius of Millis and Chamberlin, the smotherout answer would be that the impressive facts of diplomatic history since 1930 which have been adduced and presented by Revisionists with conviction, force and vigor are now only antiquated and irrelevant trivia.
What is deemed important today is not whether Hitler started war in 1939, or whether Roosevelt was responsible for Pearl Harbor, but the number of prisoners who were allegedly done to death in the concentration camps operated by Germany during the war. These camps were first presented as those in Germany, such as Dachau, Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Dora, but it was demonstrated that there had been no systematic extermination in those camps. Attention was then moved on to Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, Jonowska, Tarnow, Ravensbrück, Mauthausen, Brezeznia and Birkenau, which does not exhaust the list that appears to have been extended as needed.
An attempt to make a competent, objective and truthful investigation of the extermination question is now regarded as far more objectionable and deplorable than Professor Bemis viewed charging Roosevelt with war responsibility. It is surely the most precarious venture that an historian or demographer could undertake today; indeed, so “hot” and dangerous that only a lone French scholar, Paul Rassinier, has made any serious systematic effort to enter the field, although Taylor obviously recognizes the need for such work and hints as to where it would lead. But this vital matter would have to be handled resolutely and thoroughly in any future World War II Revisionist book that could hope to refute the new approach and strategy of the blackout and smotherout contingents. Even former ardent Revisionist writers now dodge this responsibility, some even embracing and embellishing the smotherout. The most conspicuous example is that of Eugene Davidson, who once had the courage to place in jeopardy his position as head of the Yale University Press by publishing Charles Austin Beard’s two forthright Revisionist volumes.
In his Death and Life of Germany (1959), Davidson defied Burke’s warning against indicting a nation and proceeded to indict Germany since 1932 on the basis of the diary of Anne Frank without even remotely suggesting any question about its complete authenticity. His recent The Trial of the Germans: Nuremberg (1966) is providing no end of aid and comfort to the smotherout contingent, as evident immediately by the ecstatic review of the book in Newsweek, January 9, 1967. The Davidson book is devastatingly reviewed by A.J.P. Taylor in The New York Review for February 23, 1967.
As Taylor puts it: The hypocrisy of Nuremberg was revolting enough in 1945. It exceeds all bounds when it is maintained in 1967, over 20 years afterward. Mr. Eugene Davidson has compiled at enormous length a biography of the accused at Nuremberg. Here they are, from gorgeous Goering down to insignificant Fritzsche, the radio commentator. The biographies are pretty sketchy, slapdash stuff served up in a flashy style and evidently assuming that any kind of rubbish is good enough for such scoundrels. It is really rather hard that the thing should be done so badly. After all these years, there are some things perhaps worth discussing. The remaining comment on Nuremberg by Taylor is perhaps the best brief appraisal that has ever been written of its combination of bias, hypocrisy and legalized imbecility.
Taylor had previously written in The London Observer: “It is strange that an English judge should have been found to preside over the macabre farce of the Nuremberg Tribunal; and strange that English lawyers, including the present lord chancellor, should have pleaded before it.” The treatment of Davidson and Nuremberg by Taylor is part of his analysis of three books that represent the upper level of the smotherout literature, and what he has written about them probably required more courage and integrity than was needed to produce his Origins of World War II.
It is the first overt attack made by any historian, currently highly esteemed, on the smotherout attitudes and methods, and it may be hoped that it has set a healthy precedent. It is an invaluable and equally indispensable sequel to his Origins. So long as the smotherout prevails, Taylor’s conclusions in that book about responsibility for the outbreak of World War II will be passed off as irrelevant antiquarianism, no matter how accurate. While the smotherout deluges us with exaggerated examples of National Socialist savagery, there is no comparable interest in, or even knowledge of, the actual Allied barbarities, such as the Churchill-Lindemann program of saturation bombing of civilians, especially the homes of the working class, which was as brutal, ruthless and lethal as anything alleged against the Germans. As Liddell Hart and others have made clear, Hitler had honestly sought a ban on all bombing of civilians apart from the accepted rules of siege warfare.
The German bombing of Coventry and London took place long after Hitler failed to get Britain to consent to a ban on civilian bombing. The incendiary bombing of Hamburg and Tokyo and the needless destruction of Dresden are never cogently and frankly placed over and against the doings, real or alleged, at Ausch – witz. The atomizing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, completely needless to secure Japanese surrender, are all but forgotten, save when occasionally defended by former President Harry Truman or made the basis of a romantic moving picture. Little or no mention is now made of the 15 million Germans who were expelled from their eastern provinces, the Sudeten area and other regions, at least 4 million of them perishing in the process from butchery, starvation and disease.
This was the “final solution” for defeated Germans who fell into the hands of the victors and, interestingly enough, as Ragsinlet has made clear, it was identical with the “final solution” planned by Hitler and the National Socialists for the Jews, in the event that Germany won World War II. The smotherout legend represents the German plan as the extermination of all Jews that the Germans could lay their hands on. No authentic documents have been produced that support any such contention. The National Socialist “final solution” was a plan for the deportation of all Jews in their control at the end of the war, Madagascar being one place considered. Even if they had been victorious, the Germans could not have laid hands on more than half as many Jews as the number of Germans who were deported from their homelands.
The wholesale massacre of Polish officers and leaders at the Katyn Forest and elsewhere by the Russians, the exterminations and expulsions in the Baltic countries, and the rounding up of some millions of Russian soldiers and other anti-communist refugees in Germany after the war, to be turned back with Eisenhower’s consent to Stalin for execution or the even worse enslavement in Russian starvation labor camps, are conveniently overlooked.
Nor is anything said about the fact a Yugoslav scholar, Mihajlo Mihajlov, has recently, on the basis of Russian documents, disclosed that at least 12 million Russians passed through Stalin’s concentration camps, with not more than half of them surviving. The intolerable Morgenthau Plan, approved by President Roosevelt, which envisaged the starvation of between 20 and 30 million Germans in the process of turning Germany back into an agricultural and pastoral nation, has now become no more than a subject for esoteric economic monographs. Only one adequate and accurate book of even this type, that by Nicholas Balabkins, Germany Under Direct Controls (1962), has so far appeared in English, and this has been unduly neglected or ignored.
Also overlooked today is the fact that virtually the entire Japanese population of the Pacific Coast was dragged out of their homes without provocation or the slightest need from the standpoint of our national security. The recent able and revealing book of Allan R. Bosworth, American Concentration Camps (1967), may redirect American and world attention to this scandalous episode, which was mainly the result of the brainstorm of Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.
The above are a few of the facts and considerations that would have to be presented with adequate thoroughness in any World War II Revisionist book that could hope to counter the current smotherout pattern of anti-Revisionism. Another obstacle lies in the fact that, as a result of brainwashing and indoctrination for a quarter of a century, the American public is not only ignorant of the facts involved in the smotherout approach but has lost much of the traditional national self-respect and public pride that controlled its reactions after the first World War. It remains my well-reasoned conviction, based on unexcelled experience, that the general acceptance of Revisionism in the late 1920s and the early 1930s was due more to public resentment at the “Uncle Shylock” slurs from abroad and the reneging of our former Allies with respect to the payment of their war debts than to all the Revisionist writings of the era.
This once-powerful impulse, arising from national pride, apparently no longer operates in this country: The American public has by now become thoroughly immune to the “Yanks Go Home” and comparable ungrateful epithets of our former Allies, and to the hostility and ingratitude of those who have taken our more than $100 billion in foreign aid and other public largesse since 1945, to say nothing of the previous lavish wartime aid. When the Revisionists, after World War I, revealed how we had been lied to by gentlemen in British intelligence and propaganda work, such as Sir Gilbert Parker, there was a considerable backwash and much public indignation. When H. Montgomery Hyde published his book Room 3603, not only revealing but boasting of how we had been kicked around by Sir William Stephenson (the “Quiet Canadian”) and his British intelligence goons, even to the extent of trying to break up anti-interventionist meetings in this country in 1940-41, there was hardly a ripple.
The book attracted little attention, was usually commended when noticed at all, and received virtually no shocked condemnation. When the conflict was over, the American public warmly supported the exposure of the anti-German propaganda of the First World War, such as the “Bryce Report,” by Mock and Larson and others, but there has been no public or historical demand for an equally honest and searching investigation of the far more sweeping and debatable propaganda relative to alleged German barbarism during World War II.
Even to suggest the desirability of any such project would place the sponsor in professional, if not personal jeopardy. Nor do we get any assistance or encouragement from the masochistic West Germans who, if anything, in their own blackout distortions and smotherout exceed the indictment of wartime Germany by their former enemies. This is the result of German self-flagellation and self-immolation, in sharp contrast to the ardently Revisionist proclivities of the Weimar Republic.
Nevertheless, but perhaps fittingly, the West Germans get little credit even for this craven attitude. There are surely abundant reasons why all of us who lived through the barbarities of World War II and its aftermath should be ashamed of being members of the human race but certainly there is no sound basis for any unique German shame or self-flagellation. History relative to World War II has now become a public propaganda enterprise rather than a historical problem. It has passed from the investigation of documents and other traditional historical evidence into a frenzied public debate over extermination archeology, comparative biology, clinical pathology and genocidal ethics, in which only one side has any decent opportunity to present its arguments and evidence.
This diversified and confused conglomeration of fancy, myth, mendacity, vindictiveness and fraudulently unilateral vengeance surely provides no safeguard against the development, increasing imminence and destructive potential of a nuclear holocaust. About the only rays of light and hope on the horizon for the moment are by-products of the Vietnam War. For the first time in all American history, except for the Mexican War land grab, the liberals are not the shock troops of the warmongers, and many are preponderantly “doves,” notably the younger liberals or the “new left.” This has encouraged many of them who, as a group, have been less subject to the World War II brainwashing, to look back over their shoulder at liberal bellicosity in the past and examine its validity more rationally. This has already made many of them skeptical about the impeccable soundness of interventionist propaganda and the historical blackout relative to the two world wars of [the 20th century].
I have had more reasonably friendly and apparently honest inquiries about Revisionism in the last two years than in the previous twenty. This skeptical and inquiring attitude may grow; if so, it would have little patience with the assumptions, methods and literature of the smotherout. Even more promising and potentially helpful has been the growth of the “credibility gap” with reference to the Vietnam War, primarily the gap between what Charles Austin Beard once designated as “the appearances and the realities” of administration assertions and assurances about our official policies in entering, continuing and escalating the war. This has especially impressed the liberal doves upon whom we must place our main hope in exposing and rebuffing the smotherout. Nothing would so quickly dissolve the smotherout as to apply to its attitudes and contentions the skeptical implications of the credibility gap.
The smotherout would be hopelessly vulnerable to even a moderate application of the credibility-gap approach; it could fall apart quickly and hopelessly. Hence, we may appropriately, if with no premature assurance, welcome the growth of the credibility gap now being nursed and nourished by the Vietnam War. May it grow, prosper and dispel the smotherout, but its lessons should not all be derived from the statements and actions of the Johnson administration. It should lead those amenable to fact and reason to turn back to the credibility gap in the prewar protestations of Wilson and Roosevelt, the latter being the most voluminous and impressive of all, and to the credibility gap in Truman’s assertions about the necessity of bombing the Japanese cities and entering the Korean War, which even Gen. Omar Bradley designated as “the wrong war, in the wrong place and at the wrong time.”
The credibility gap in the position and protestations of the cold warrior “hawks,” as pointed out by D.F. Fleming, John Lukacs, F.L. Schuman, David Horowitz, Murray N. Rothbard, James J. Martin and others, is even more grotesque and fictitious than that of the Johnson administration relative to Vietnam, but, fortunately, it does not as yet possess full official status and authority. Hence, let us hail the credibility gap, whether derived from the doves, the hawks, the cold warriors or the Johnson administration and its predecessors. Its application to the smotherout provides the only hope on the horizon today of making Revisionism effective in gaining access to public opinion and policy and thus working for permanent peace.
ENDNOTES:
1 National Review, April 20, 1965, 335-36.
2 (Of course, Barnes is confused here by the difference between a “gas chamber” and a “gas oven.” Shortly after writing this article, he came to reject the entire Holocaust myth, not just part of it.)
3 Especially many entries in Look, the latest being March 21, 1967 and in The Saturday Evening Post, see October 22, 1965.
THE BARNES REVIEW • JULY/AUGUST 2018 • BARNESREVIEW.COM • 1-877-773-9077 TOLL FREE
DR. HARRY ELMER BARNES was a great pioneer of Revisionist writing in English. Focusing on European history in the 20th century, Barnes was relentless in his criticism of well paid, academic tripe that was (and is) passing for history. Barnes is the namesake of this magazine and we strive every issue to live up to his great reputation and academic standards. His admiration for Dr. Barnes led nationalist publisher Willis A. Carto to name this magazine after the great Revisionist to honor him. THE BARNES REVIEW was founded in October 1994. Barnes passed away in August 1968. Carto passed away in October of 2015.
