John Baglow: Entitled to His Own Facts, History, Maybe Even Reality

It should be stated right off the bat that John "Dr Dawg" Baglow is not a complete idiot.

In fact, Canada's progressive blogosphere seems to view him as their best and brightest. And while they delight in keeping company with people who delight in calling other people stupid, it's amazing the kind of idiocy that their "best and brightest" can produce.

This particular tale begins with a stray dimwit on Blazing Cat Fur claiming that "there was no extermination in Germany".

Referring, of course, to the Holocaust.

Enter Jay Currie drawing attention to that particular comment in a blog post about the censorious nature of many Canadian academics. At which point Baglow utters this mind-numbingly stupid remark:

John Baglow. Claiming that there's "little evidence" that any of the exterminations that were part of the Holocaust took place in Germany.

There is no possible way he could have even possibly been more wrong.

Numerous commenters attempt to bring various points to Baglow's attention: that the planning of the Holocaust took place on German soil, and that killings took place at the concentration camp at Dachau.

Points to which Baglow responds in incredibly obtuse fashion:

Baglow goes on to appeal to a page from the Nizkor project disputing that the gas champers at Dachau were ever used for any killings.

Another commenter points out that camps like Auschwitz were within the borders of Germany as defined after the annexation of Austria. Mark Bourrie points out that his wife's granfather was killed at a Sachenhausen satellite camp.

Natasha from Moose and Squirrel provides a better source on the Dachau camp, one that notes that enough prisoners were killed at Dachau that the Nazis had to draw up special protocols for body disposal.

It also notes the work of Dr Sigmund Rascher, who conducted medical experiments at Dachau that are well-known to have been fatal to the subjects.

Yet another commenter points out that the gas chambers at Dachau had actually been used, and also notes that Baglow's thesis would also have to omit the thousands of Jews who died on the famed "death marches" of concentration camp prisoners to camps in central Germany.

(Daniel Goldhagen's landmark work on the Holocaust, Hitler's Willing Executioners, also notes that these were not, by any means, direct routes. Rather they were winding routes, planned to pass through as many German towns and villages as possible, so the German populace could see these Jews on their death marches.)

But the greatest problem for Baglow may come from his very own Nizkor source:

When Baglow wants to argue that none of the Holocaust exterminations took place on German soil, he may want to avoid relying on a source that seems to express some sympathy for, of all individuals, Ernst Zundel.

(Evidently sharing Baglow's hostility to Israel should do nothing to mitigate that.)

One should wonder precisely how it is that someone who is otherwise as intelligent as John Baglow could be so utterly and inexcusably remiss.

It doesn't take a top Holocaust historian to point out the number of ways in which Baglow is wrong. And yet Baglow somehow felt a need to take a stand on an historical error that anyone with a lick of sense had to know that they couldn't defend.

Unless one considers the tendency of many of Baglow's cohorts to argue in a manner along the lines of Stephen Colbert's famed concept of truthiness.

As Colbert has so often described it, truthiness encapsulates an inherently selfish intellectual methodology in which one is not only entitled to their own opinions, but also entitled to their own facts.

When one is entitled to their own facts, one is entitled to their own history -- one divorced from any inconvenient facts. One in which the Soviet Union did not oppress religion adhering to a communist doctrine that held that atheism and communism were inseparable. One in which National Socialism is divorced from the socialism. One in which the exterminations of the Holocaust took place entirely outside of German borders.

One that bears only a passing resemblence to actual history -- and sometimes not even that.

It makes clear the enterprise of groups such as the Progressive Historians -- a group intent on twisting history to their ideological designs. At least a few of them even seem to understand that the historical revisionism of tomorrow is best accomplished today.

Baglow and so many of his cohorts seem to take this particular concept of entitlement even further: they are entitled to their own reality. Things are as they say they are because they say they are. And no amount of evidence will be allowed to convince them otherwise.

The truth is that John Baglow is not really a Holocaust denier. Not in the same sense that Ernst Zundel is. But it's clear that Baglow is more than willing to deny some of the details of the Holocaust out of a historical ignorance that, from someone as otherwise intelligent as Baglow, can really only be wilful and self-assumed.

After all, Baglow is not a complete idiot. But in his urge to try to score points against the opposing ideological camp, he has argued something truly idiotic.

Those things happen. But until he's willing to admit the extent of his error, there's no reason why he should be simply courteously allowed off the hook.

John Baglow conducts himself without intellectual honesty or intellectual dignity. Thus, he receives no quarter. None.

Witness the New Holocaust Denial

Black Star News denies Rwandan genocide

15 years ago, the Rwandan genocide slowly began to unfold.

The events began on April 6, 1994, and by April 17, 1994 had escalated into the wholesale slaughter of Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus.

The atrocities that unfolded during the Rwandan genocide have long stood as an example of why the western world needs to be prepared to intervene in order to prevent such human catastrophes.

But not to individuals like Keith Harmon Snow. Like the various loons who deny -- or at least conflate -- the Holocaust, Snow has a political agenda that is ill-served by the Rwandan genocide. Like Holocaust deniers (and 9/11 "truth"ers), Snow is so intent upon pushing that agenda that he's prepared to revise the history of the Rwandan genocide.

In an article appearing in Black Star News, Snow strings together a convoluted conspiracy theory in which human rights activists colluded against Hutus.

"The genocide label applied by Alison Des Forges and certain human rights bodies in May of 1994 was misdirected, used to accuse and criminalize only the majority Hutu people and the remnants of the decapitated Habyarimana government," Snow writes, "much as the genocide and war crimes accusations have been selectively applied against President Omar al-Bashir in Sudan."

According to Snow, not only did no genocide take place in Rwanda, but no genocide is currently taking place in the Sudan. Instead, as it turns out, these genocide charges are part of an American imperialist plot.

"The Clinton Administration refused to apply the genocide label," Snow explains. "To do so might have compromised an ongoing US-backed covert operation: the invasion of Rwanda by the Pentagon’s proxy force, the Rwandan Patriotic Front."

Interestingly, Snow has very little to say about the French involvement in the genocide. France had supplied weapons to the Rwandan government before and during the civil war that took place in accordance with the genocide. Many of those weapons were passed on to the Interhamwe by sympathizers within the Rwandan military's Hutu militias.

Moreover, Snow suggests that the plane crash taht killed Alison Des Forges may have been the work of Paul Kagame.

"According to U.S. intelligence insider Wayne Madsen, Des Forges’ criticisms of the US-brokered pact between Rwanda's President Paul Kagame and the Democratic Republic of Congo's President Joseph Kabila in December 2008 'earned her some powerful enemies ranging from the murderous Kagame, who will not think twice about sending his agents to silence critics abroad, and international interests who want nothing to prevent them from looting the DRC’s vast mineral and energy resources.'"

But Snow's conspiracy theory makes little sense. Although Des Forges' criticisms of Kagame's deal with Kabila -- -- was damaging, Des Forges' invokation of the genocide label marshalled a surplus of international sympathy for Kagame and the RPF.

Furthermore, Snow accuses Des Forges of helping unjustly indict the Habyanmara government.

"Billed as a 'tireless champion' and 'leading light in African human rights,' there is much more to this story than the western propaganda system has revealed," Snow muses. "Alison Des Forges and Human Rights Watch (HRW) provided intelligence to the US government at the time of the 1994 crises, and they have continued in this role to the present. Des Forges also supported the show trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), institutionalizing victor’s justice and shielding the Kagame regime."

"Alison Des Forges came across to many people as a wonderful human being with great compassion and impeccable integrity," Snow writes. "In the recent past, Alison Des Forges spoke—to some limited degree—against the war crimes of the Kagame regime."

"In life she did not speak about the deeper realities of 'genocide in Rwanda', and she had plenty of chances. In fact, she is the primary purveyor of the inversion of truth that covered up the deeper US role in the Rwanda 'genocide', and she spent the past 10 years of her life explaining away the inconsistencies, covering up the facts, revising her own story when necessary, and manipulating public opinion about war crimes in the Great Lakes of Africa—in service to the US government and powerful corporations involved in the plunder and depopulation of the region."

All of this, of course, is submitted without evidence.

"Kagame, Rwanda’s one-party president 'elected' through rigged elections, sued Charles Onana for defamation in a French court in 2002; Kagame lost the original trial and the appeal," Snow continues. "Kagame was the commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and a leading agent—with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and their US, UK, Belgian and Israeli backers—behind the massive bloodshed and ongoing terrorism in Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Congo, Sudan and Somalia."

Snow insists that the events of the Rwandan genocide -- which were not a genocide, despite the perpetrators' intent to kill every single living Tutsi -- were a conspiracy between human rights organizations, the United States, Britain, Begium and Israel.

"In his book, Onana accused Kagame of being the principle instigator of the missile attack of April 6, 1994 that brought down the plane carrying Rwanda's President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundi's Cyprien Ntaryamira," Snow continues. "Unlike the UN's ongoing high-profile investigation of the murder of Lebanon's former prime minister Rafik Hariri, no major power has pushed for a similar probe into the murder of the two African presidents."

Yet much of the evidence that Kagame was responsible for shooting down Habyanmara's plane was actually rejected by a French parliamentary inquiry -- and considering France's bloody hands in relation to the genocide, the French had every motive to point the finger of blame at somebody else.

"But the U.S. military was heavily backing the RPF tactically and strategically already," Snow continues. "Key to the operation were 'former' Special Operations Forces (Ronco Company) providing military equipment and ferrying RPA troops from Uganda to Rwanda; the Pentagon's logistical and communications support; Defense Intelligence Agency and CIA operatives. Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR), was also collaborating with the RPF, serving the Pentagon interest."

Snow would have done well to look into the circumstance Dallaire and UNAMIR found themselves in during the genocide. If UNAMIR were really a proxy force acting on behalf of the United States in support of the RPF, it was the smallest and most poorly-equipped proxy force in the history of proxy warfare.

Dallaire spent the bulk of his time convening between Rwandan political leaders while attempting to keep himself, his troops, and as many Tutsi refugees as possible, alive.

That meets a very odd definition of outright collaboration.

According to Snow even the news media were part of the conspiracy.

"Genocide in Rwanda became a massive psychological operation directed against media consumers using ghastly images—produced by RPA-embedded photographers like James Nachtwey and Gilles Peres—to infer that all cadavers were Tutsi victims of an orchestrated Hutu genocide," Snow insists, "meanwhile the text was racist disinformation produced by Joshua Hammer."

This despite the fact that journalists operating in the region secured footage of Hutu militias slaughtering Tutsis, and Red Cross workers active throughout the region shared many of the same stories.

According to Snow, Des Forges was central to the media conspiracy.

"Des Forges constantly influenced the US media through special briefings to the editorial boards and reporters of the New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, and Associated Press, and she was frequently presented as an 'expert' on genocide in Rwanda for CNN, 60 Minutes, Nightline, All Things Considered, BBC, Radio France Internationale, and the Canadian Broadcasting Company."

"Such relations explain the mass media’s consistency in producing the monolithic disinformation about Rwanda that shielded the illegal U.S.-backed and covert RPF- Ugandan guerrilla insurgency," Snow continues. "The blanket media coverage falsely situated the 'Rwanda genocide' as it is now widely misunderstood: 100 days of genocide, 800,000 to 1.2 million Tutsis killed with machetes; the 'highly disciplined' RPF stopping the genocide."

Even on the basis of its most basic arguments -- that the Rwandan Patriotic Front was an external invader -- falls flat in the face of the fact that Paul Kagame and the other members of the RPF were all natives of Rwanda, and were acting against a government that was actively oppressing Tutsis.

Like Holocaust deniers, Snow plays fast and loose with the truth in the course of spinning a conspiracy theory that essentially "invented" the Rwandan genocide, despite the existence of nearly 1,000,000 Rwandans, the vast majority of them Tutsis.

Like the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide is most effectively commemorated by the mass graves of its victims. Anyone who cares to examine the evidence of the genocide first-hand can travel to Rwanda and tour the killing fields. In many cases, the bones of the victims remain where they were piled.

Like Holocaust deniers, Rwandan genocide deniers like Keith Harmon Snow have to ignore the strongest evidence for the events -- the corpses of its victims, and the nearly 1,000,000 Rwandans who, in the course of a media-broadcast 100-day slaughter, ceased to be.

One wonders how individuals like Keith Harmon Snow can look themselves in a mirror.

The Truth Hurts, Get a Helmet

Blunt? Perhaps. But also "true".


If one were to take statements issued by Iranian state radio as the holy gospel, a person would be pretty convinced that the Iranian people were deeply offended by the comments of Columbia University president Lee Bollinger, who yesterday told Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in no uncertain terms, what he thinks of him.

While the "petty" and "cruel" remarks have seemingly found the most traction in the media, Bollinger's attack was fierce, and pulled no punches.


"Over the past two weeks, your government has released Haleh Esfandi ari and Parnaz Azima and just two days ago, Kian Tajbakhsh, a graduate of Columbia," Bollinger noted. "Tajbakhsh remains in Tehran under house arrest, and he still does not know whether he will be charged with a crime or allowed to leave the country."

"The arrest and imprisonment of these Iranian-Americans for no good reason is not only unjustified, it runs completely counter to the very values that allow you to even appear on this campus," he added.

"But at least they are alive," Bollinger conceded. "According to Amnesty International, 210 people have been executed in Iran so far this year, 21 of them on the morning of Sept 5 alone."

"This annual total includes at least two children - further proof, as Human Rights Watch puts it, that Iran leads the world in executing minors."

"There is more," Bollinger continued. "Iran hanged up to 30 people this past July and August during a suppression of efforts to establish a more democratic society. These executions and others have coincided with a wider crackdown on student activists and academics accused of trying to foment a so-called 'soft revolution.'"

"Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator," Bollinger asserted.

"Why have women, members of the Baha'i faith, homosexuals and so many of our academic colleagues become targets of persecution in your country?" he asked. "Why are you so afraid of Iranian citizens expressing their opinions for change?"

Bollinger after went after Ahmadinejad for his denial of the Holocaust. "In a December 2005 state TV broadcast, you described the Holocaust as 'a fabricated legend,'" Bollinger noted. "One year later, you held a two-day conference of Holocaust deniers."

"For the illiterate and ignorant, this is dangerous propaganda."

"When you come to a place like this it makes you simply ridiculous," insisted Bollinger. "You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated. The truth is that the Holocaust is the most documented event in human history."

"Frankly, and in all candour, Mr President, I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions," Bollinger said, "but your avoiding them will itself be meaningful to us. I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mindset that characterises so much of what you say and do."

"I feel all the weight of the modern civilised world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for," Bollinger concluded. "I only wish I could do better."

Iran's state radio station had its own response for Bollinger. "The surprising point of the last night meeting is the behavior of the university president," the station reported. It described Bollinger's comments as "full of insult, which was mostly Zionists' propaganda against Iran."

Seven chancellors of Iranian universities also responded to Bollinger.

"Your insult, in a scholarly atmosphere, to the president of a country with a population of 72 million and a recorded history of 7,000 years of civilization and culture is deeply shameful," the chancellors collectively insisted. "Your comments, filled with hate and disgust, may well have been influenced by extreme pressure from the media, but it is regrettable that media policy-makers can determine the stance a university president adopts in his speech."

For his part, Ahmadinejad (as Bollinger predicted) had no answers to this confrontation.

"I think the text read by the dear gentleman here, more than addressing me, was an insult to information and the knowledge of the audience here, present here. In a university environment we must allow people to speak their mind, to allow everyone to talk so that the truth is eventually revealed by all," Ahmadinejad replied.

"In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country," he claimed. "We don't have that like in your country. ... In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have this."

In regards to the Holocaust, Ahmadinejad had some rather predictable responses. "Why is it that the Palestinian people are paying the price for an event they had nothing to do with?" he asked. "My question was simple: There are researchers who want to approach the topic from a different perspective. Why are they put into prison? Right now, there are a number of European academics who have been sent to prison because they attempted to write about the Holocaust or research it from a different perspective, questioning certain aspects of it. My question is: Why isn't it open to all forms of research?"

One has to question Ahmadinejad's definition of an academic environment. In an academic environment (as one finds at a university), one is not expected to disregard the truth in order to allow a polite reception for anyone, even if they are an invited guest.

The very purpose of these insitutions is to disseminate information. Lee Bollinger did a masterful job of this by not only providing people with important information about the activities of Iran's oppressive regime, but by doing so in Ahmadinejad's presence he effectively did so to Ahmadinejad's face, in the public eye. Ahmadinejad's inability to effectively refute or deny the accusations against his state becomes in effect a masterfully-extracted mea culpa wherein Ahmadinejad practically admitted his state's guilt in these affairs by failing to deny them.

Ahmadinejad was also provided with something he otherwise would not have had: an opportunity to defend himself. He effectively declined, at least on the basis of the grievances raised.

Ahmadinejad (and, conveniently, Iranian state radio, its state FARS news network, and the aforementioned university chancellors) have instead chosen the response most offered by those who know they've been defeated.

They changed the subject, responding not with facts or even denials, but instead with a myriad of questions regarding media pressure, Israel, and Iraq. Some of them may be fair enough questions in their own regard, but they don't serve to explain away the many offences of Ahmadinejad's regime in Tehran.

Unsurprisingly, a statement of solidarity has been released by another authoritarian leader who cannot explain away his transgressions. "I congratulate him, in the name of the Venezuelan people, before a new aggression of the US empire," said Venezualan president Hugo Chavez.

Bollinger should accept the invitations of these individuals to meet them in an open debate, although one simply must expect that an Iranian university simply will not be a conducive site for a discussion of the Iranian regime and its various human rights abuses.

If these seven university chancellors want to confront Lee Bollinger (hopefully, along with a team of similarly informed academics), they should be more than prepared to do so at a site on neutral territory.

And the end of the day, however, the most important thing is this: if the Iranian regime is truly so offended by Bollinger's remarks (all of which happen to share the virtue of being true), they know what they need to do -- change their practices.

If they aren't willing to do so, then one hopes that there are plenty more inviduals like Lee Bollinger who are prepared to hold Iran accountable for its misdeeds. No one should feel obligated to help them hide from the truth.

Freedom of Speech vs. Holocaust Denial

Freedom of Speech Doesn't Excuse Ignorance of Speech

Recently, I wrote an article for The Gateway about the Canadian government's expulsion of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. Zundel -- who had previously been convicted for hate speech and spreading false teachings about the Holocaust -- had been held for two years under the CSIS security certificate program.

Although a number of people consider this to be an unjust act and a contravention of Zundel's rights, I still vehemently argue that few -- if any -- of Zundel's rights were violated. Those few violations of his rights were, in my view, entirely acceptable due to Zundel's activities in support of and complicity with violent neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups. These groups are domestic terrorist cells, and must be treated the same as any Al Qaida cell.

One of the rights that some have argued that have been violated is Zundel's right to freedom of speech. They are wrong.

Some argue that due to freedom of speech sometimes we have to listen to things that we don't want to hear, on account of those saying them have the right to say it. Often, this is true.

However, in Canada, we have a number of laws that (under the authority of the Notwithstanding clause of the consitution) place certain limits on freedom of speech within Canada. These are reasonable limits. These laws cover topics such as libel, slander, and that most magical of speech crimes... hate speech. These laws extend necessary protections to both individuals and society as a whole. These laws protect us from having our characters defamed, or racial hatred encouraged against ethnic groups.

Recently, this article has become a topic of discussion on www.majorityrights.com, which, since examining the site's content a little closer, is obviously a bastion for far/Christian/racist rightists, which has spurned me to address the issue of Holocaust denial.

History has many dark chapters, of which the Holocaust is only one. Apartheid in South Africa is a fairly dark chapter, as is the more recent events in the Sudan. Tienanmen Square is a fairly nasty bit of historical business, as is 9/11. What do all of these events have in common? These are events of enormous atrocity commited in the spirit of evil.

Pascal wrote "Evil is infinite, and has many forms". Forgetting the memories of past evil is all that is necessary for evil to rise again.

Which brings us specifically to the subject of Holocaust denial. I am now reminded of the tale of Red Deer College professor Jim Keegstra, who eventually lost his job because he assigned a Holocaust denial book for reading, and (allegedly) taught hatred of Jews in his history class.

Holocaust denial represents not only a challenge to the ideals under which freedom of speech were established, but also a challenge to history. The Holocaust occurred. This is a fact, and the protest of even a billion neo-Nazis could never change this.

Yet, there is a portion of society that wants to erase the chapter of the Holocaust from the history books. Many of these people also want to destroy what they decry as "the Jewish base of power" from which they control the "Zionist Occupied Government". Their goal, according to these people, is to (in the name of Satan, of course) destroy the white race. Which is actually pretty funny, because a significant portion of Jews have white skin. Which only demonstrates something I have suspected about this people for years: they are a bunch of retarded fucknuts.

Regardless, paranoid/hateful/ludicrous beliefs aside, there is a reason why these people want to erase the Holocaust from the history books: so they can fucking do it again.

Sadly, freedom of speech has given these people a weapon by which they can fight their cause. The founding fathers of the United States who wrote the American constitution which was instrumental in establishing freedom of speech as a worldwide principle of just democratic governance probably never saw this coming. It is a challenge to the ideal of freedom of speech in that it allows those who lack the ability, desire, or will to use their freedom of speech responsibly to harm others.

Freedom of speech, as with all freedoms, is a power. And, as the great Stan Lee wrote: "with great power comes great responsiblity". Those, such as Ernnst Zundel or Jim Keegstra, who are unable to use their freedom of speech responsibly, must always be held accountable for what they say. And when they violate the sanctity of speech by using it to spew hatred, they must be punished.

This has been done. Jim Keegstra has justly faced the end of his teaching career. Ernst Zundel faces the next five years in a German prison, and he will likely serve that time. However, this is only part of this battle.

The punishment of those who use speech to promote the hatred of anyone, anywhere, must continue. We must not allow those who would do this to use freedom of speech as a shield behind which they can hide their acts of cowardice.

Call me a Zionist conspirator if you will. If fighting to preserve the memory of what may be history's single greatest injustice is collusion, then I am proudly a conspirator.