“Oh, they did. In 1943 and 1944 the Germans… the SS… held an investigation into atrocities at the Buchenwald camp. Not only was the camp commandant, Karl Koch, executed, but the inquiry uncovered other crimes as well. Eight hundred cases resulted in some two hundred sentences. This doesn’t relieve Germany of her responsibility for the hardships of the war, of course, but it does put a bit of a different light on things.”
“Wrench says there weren’t any gas chambers either.” He knew this would get a rise out of the man.
“I think he’s right. Some were built after the war just for the tourists: they’re not even airtight. Others were merely storage cellars. Zyklon-B, the cyanide preparation the Germans are supposed to have used, is a delousing agent; it kills fleas and lice in clothing. It’s quite lethal, but it’s not practical to gas rooms full of people with it; you’d have to wait a day or more after every gassing for it to dissipate, and you’d need good protective garments for the ex-ecutioners and their helpers… which nobody seems to have seen in any of the camps. Nor does the story about vans pumped full of carbon monoxide exhaust fumes stand up. Later experiments show it doesn’t work: time-consuming, inefficient, quite impractical.
“The thing to remember when you hear these stories about ‘gas chambers, ‘ Mr. Lessing, is that Allied propaganda mythologized the Nazis: the ‘German beast,’ as Eisenhower called them, had to be exorcised. After the war there was an outcry for justice… and revenge. It’s been useful to the Jews… and to many politicians and others dependent on the Jews… to keep those feelings alive.”
“Most people say justice was the important thing.” “Most people don’t read books. Or they only read the ones the big publishers put out. Have you read that one there… the one about the ‘Malmedy massacre?’ The Germans allegedly slaughtered captured American troops near Malmedy in Belgium in 1944. After the war the Americans tried seventy-three ‘perpetrators’ and sentenced some of them to death. You’d be surprised at the methods used to extract ‘confessions!’ Was that justice? And did you know that in April 1945 American troops murdered more than five hundred German soldiers who had surrendered at the Dachau camp? No trials. They were simply lined up and shot. Justice?”
“I saw what the Izzies did in Damascus. That doesn’t make every Israeli soldier a monster! Revenge… wartime hatred.”
“Precisely my point! I asked you about justice.” Lessing turned away. “It happened a century ago. It’s like getting worked up over the massacre at Little Big Horn!”
“The Jews say that it must be remembered: ‘Never again! We Descendants want it remembered just as much because we have never received justice. We’ve been persecuted, vilified, imprisoned, and assassinated. No one looks at our evidence. Our arguments are ‘an affront to established history’ and ‘an insult to the memory of the Holocaust.’ Our books are banned in America in spite of the First Amendment to your Constitution. Is freedom of speech only for those who have constituencies and money?”
The boxy, little building was stuffy. Lessing had shut the door, and now he strode over to open it. “I still can’t see Adolf Hitler as Mr. Nice Guy.”
“Don’t be simplistic! Hitler knew what Germany needed, and he did what had to be done. More books have been written about him, I think, than about Jesus Christ, yet ninety-nine percent of them perpetuate the same old nonsense, the same fables and lies, the same speculations… some as far-fetched as the Arabian Nights! History demands proof, Mr. Lessing, not emotion, however well-intentioned. Yet society wants its heroes and villains pure white or pure black. Human beings like being selectively blind: they ignore unpleasant facts, refuse to talk about them, and cover them over, like a cat scuffing sand over its feces! People want stories that make them feel good.”
“As my friend, Charles Wren, says: ‘History’s a whore who knows which side of the bed her butt is bettered on.’”
“Eh? What? Oh… aha, quite! The ‘bettering’ is called ‘money.’ Our opponents have that aplenty!”
“Your people have money, too. The movement’s been hiring ad agencies and p.r. firms. I know.”
“True, we are doing better than before, but we have a long way to go. Our opponents have made it illegal to ‘lie’ about history, to ‘desecrate the memories of the Six Million Who Died’… or even to dispute the ‘established view’ on the most abstract of historical grounds. An agency of your United States government has ruled that ‘the Holocaust cannot be debated.’ Yet it is not we who dishonor the dead. We want the truth… and if it is against our beliefs, then so be it! No, it is our opponents who have made over the past. What else can you call the writing out of a movement, a nation, an era… and the writing in of something else entirely?”
“Um…”
“Do people become enraged when someone argues the rights or wrongs of the Norman Conquest of 1066? Of the Spanish Conquistadores’ massacres in Mexico… over a million Central American Indians slaughtered between 1492 and 1600? Innocents have died throughout history, including Americans in a dozen wars; you can freely debate those conflicts, even if you make the ‘traditional’ historians look silly! And what would a judge say if somebody sued the Flat Earthers for ‘lying’ about geography and astronomy? Or if the Neo-Pagans sued the Christian churches for ‘lying’ about the Emperor Nero? Not such a bad chap, actually! No, what we have now is an Inquisition, a censorship like the Office of the Index of the Catholic Church. It doesn’t need the rack and the stake because its sanctions are more effective!”
The conversation was making Lessing uneasy. These people were right about one thing: the ‘traditional’ view of history was so solidly implanted in every Western child’s head that he felt guilty — almost afraid — even listening to this serious, dry, bookish, Oxford Arab-German. It was like telling your kids that Santa Claus was the Devil. It took considerable balls to question such emotion-laden dogmas as those surrounding the supposed ‘Holocaust.’ He cast about for another subject. “Will you be able to go home soon?”
“To Damascus?” The Arab shrugged. “Probably never. Not under Israeli rule. Perhaps we can go to Oman… my wife has an uncle there. The Izzies never occupied Oman, just ‘protected’ it a little. You haven’t lived, Mr. Lessing, until you’ve been ‘protected’ by the Israelis.”
“They’re tough. I worked for them. I was in Colonel Copley’s mercenary battalion during the Baalbek War. I saw what happened to Damascus, Aleppo, and other places. Not pretty.”
“And you committed no wartime atrocities? Never saw any you could have stopped?”
Lessing said nothing. His involvement, his personal guilt, was a Pandora’s box he never opened. It was better not to look.
Abu Talib went on. “The thing that puzzles us Middle Easterners is America’s continual, cheery, fuzzy-headed willingness to go on paying for Israel! It doesn’t fit with your talk of democracy, freedom, and personal liberty! You know what the Izzies have done: from the Deir Yassin massacre back in 1948 to frighten the Arabs out of Palestine; to the deliberate attack on the U.S. Navy ship Liberty, with the killing of thirty-five of your sailors, back in 1967, in order to keep it from eavesdropping on the Izzies; to the invasion of Lebanon with its ghastly casualties, including the refugee camp massacres that certain high Israeli officers collaborated in; to the killing of Arab prisoners by the Israeli secret police, followed by cover-ups later; to spying against the United States and stealing nuclear weapons materials from you; to the wholesale beatings and shootings of Palestinian children in the Occupied Territories in the 1980s and ’90s; to the terrible atrocities they committed at the Sack of Cairo in 2002… right up to the Baalbek War! Yet you people go on paying for it… while preaching peace and brotherly love to the rest of the world! Before Starak, there was hardly a dissenting voice in your American Congress! You’ve provided tens of billions of dollars and let the Israelis get away with not paying it back… because they make you feel guilty with their century-old stories about the ‘Holocaust’! I doubt if even Outram can stop them.”