Tag: crimes

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All in the Mind

On The Laws of Probability

Every day we experience hundreds of near misses, accidents waiting to happen unless we take the right precautions and pay constant attention to all potential dangers. Yet the human brain can only actively focus on one event at a time, switching our attention to monitor the progress of other concomitant events. Some of us can switch between events better than others, but then some key tasks require much more intense concentration. The slightest momentary distraction can have unplanned consequences, like forgetting to close upstairs windows before leaving the house, leaving a frying pan on a stove unattended or as happened to me the other failing to check my rucksack still lay neatly between my feet in a crowded pub in central London during a recent Drupal meetup. Not only was my rucksack discretely lifted, but it contained my trusty laptop and my passport, renewed only last October. CCTV footage was unavailable as cameras had been turned off the previous day, Easter Monday. As I don't own a car or a house, this was pretty much my most valuable possession, without which I can't work as a Web software developer. Little did the thief know how important this object was to me personally and while others can tactfully express their commiseration, the pain remains. I had to bite the bullet, metaphorically speaking, and enact plan B. Get a new laptop and restore it from scratch. Luckily Apple's OS X's Time Machine came to the rescue. I was minded to buy a cheaper alternative, but to get up and running and avoid missing another day's work, I had to choose the more expensive route using funds I had set aside for something else. I hope someday soon, we can do all our work from a tablet with mission-critical data backed up remotely as envisaged by Google's up and coming Chrome OS, but alas network coverage cannot be guaranteed. On many other occasions, I had left my laptop temporarily vulnerable to smart thieves, in offices and even in bars while someone else kept a watchful eye, yet it had never happened. I had assumed among colleagues and friends, I would be safe. The conclusion is simple. If something can go wrong in theory, sooner or later it will go wrong. That's the lesson Japanese nuclear engineers had to learn in Fukushima. The chances of getting my MacBook back are exceedingly remote. Lies, damned lies and crime statistics. While the occurrence of burglaries has decreased mainly due to better surveillance technology, thieves have simply adopted new techniques. Smartphones and laptops are easy to carry away and sell. Many thefts simply go unreported, because victims know there is little the police can do. How can anyone seriously believe the oft-repeated claims about declining crime rates? In just 5 years in London, I've witnessed one murder and two burglaries first-hand.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Ubiquitous Assault on the Senses

How will future generations view early 21st century Britain? An age of enlightenment that allowed more women than ever to work, redefined loud arguments as domestic violence, exposed childhood sexual abuse and extended the benefits of prosperity to more people than ever. This is the spin of the neo-liberal media, i.e. you've never had it so good or experienced such a wonderfully fair and harmonious society. Surely you don't want to return to the dark ages when parents routinely spanked their children at the slightest hint of disobedience and women were chained to the proverbial kitchen sink? In affluent communities violence has been confined mainly to virtual reality, blasted through speakers in the form of death metal and rap, projected onto mega-screens and translated into a captivating and highly addictive games. We are not just separated from the harsh realities of nature as our forebears knew it, but shielded from the consequences of violent ideation, now a dominant form of entertainment. This genre of entertainment may be likened to less technologically advanced spectacles such as gladiatorial fights in ancient Rome, or more recently boxing, wrestling or fencing, but over the last 20 years we have witnessed the gradual encroachment of war themes into our leisure life It's no longer just war movies, thrillers and video nasties occupying little more than one or two hours a week, but over 80% of the most addictive video games, paintball, Laser Quest and steady repetitive raucous beats and metallic dins accompanying electronic sound marketed as music and played in locales as diverse as sports centres, shopping malls and even offices. Indeed some young people find it hard to concentrate without a continuous blur of discordant noise at work. So paradoxically one may not shout at one's spouse for fear of being charged with domestic abuse, but one may play gangster rap at full volume while washing the car. If one dares suggest first-person shooters trivialise violence, one is soon ridiculed as reactionary and wait for it, against progress. Dare one suggest rap triggers feelings of hatred and intolerance, one is routinely slammed as intolerant of our wonderful cultural diversity.
So while many of us feel increasingly powerless to change any aspect of our lives, we can only sit back and watch the spectacle of millions immersed in virtual violence in the safety of their bedrooms or offices. Paradoxically many first person shooter fans would be utterly horrified by the slightest hint of real-life gore. Recently an Italian teacher in a farming community arranged for her class to view the slaughtering of a pig. Parents were horrified, how could children learn the truth about meat processing. Sadly many pupils had previously believed meat comes from supermarkets in the same way as petrol just magically gushes from a filling station pump. Did our ancestors dream of heroic battles six to eight hours a day? Did they revel in death and destruction? At stake is the viability of human solidarity for if we dream of exacting revenge against perceived foes in times of economic disparity and limited per capita resources, we are doomed to repeat the worst democidal excesses of our recent history. To what extent is violence an inextricable part of the human condition and to what extent can culture either channel violent urges into socially useful activities or trigger violence in otherwise peaceful individuals?

I would measure progress, not in terms of material possessions or abstract statistics championed by bureaucrats, but as a broad measure of social harmony, contentment and self-fulfilment, a delicate balancing act focussed on the reduction of conflict and personal suffering, e.g. ambition can drive innovation leading to significant improvements in life, but also cause conflict and selfishness.

Human beings have a vast array of instinctual behaviours that may be unleashed under certain conditions. Some of our behvaiours require little active thought, either because they are essential to our existence and have been inherited from millions of years of evolution or because inculcated behaviours have become second nature. A healthy baby need not learn to suckle, breathe or even cry in response to basic nutritional needs. By contrast, humans did not evolve to drive cars or type, but many of us perform these tasks with amazing agility. In comparison with most other animals human babies are pretty helpless. Other newborn mammals can walk within minutes of birth. However, many other ingrained behaviours are learned skills building on our intellectual hardware and primitive reflexes, e.g. linguists such as Noam Chomsky believe complex language relies on a specialised brain functions absent in other species, but clearly the exact manifestation of our linguistic abilities depends largely on our environment. Our humanity determines our intellectual potential, while our environment determines how we develop and utilise our intellect. Without applying reason and compassion in the forebrain, a male responding to his innate libido might be inclined to sexually assault any unaccompanied attractive female within easy reach. Were we to let our basest instincts guide our actions, modern civilisation as we know it would never have arisen. The technological progress that helped us expand our food supply, tame nature to meet our needs and lower infant mortality relies on advanced forms of social organisation and co-operation, in which our intellect and sociability prevail over primitive forms of social control.

Violence has long been a feature of human existence, but its role and pervasiveness have varied enormously over the millennia. Many anthropologists have observed we are the only animal that wages war against other members of our own species, but disagree on whether tribal warfare first emerged in the Neolithic era as stone-age humans began farming and establishing more permanent settlements around fifteen to ten thousand years ago, or whether internecine conflict has always accompanied homo sapiens sapiens throughout the Paleolithic era. We might consider some exceptions, e.g. a lion may fight a rival over control of a pride and then slaughter cubs that are not their own. However, not only are lions some of the most ferocious mammals, but their survival depends largely on brute force and obedience within a tightly knit community and, more important, on hunting other animals. They evolved to be top of the food chain, not to go forth and multiply and thus dominate through numbers. On the African plains, aggressive predators are in a minority, while the vast majority are mere grazers, browsers or warblers. Violence as a survival strategy only works if your species has a low population and can feed on a much larger number of easy prey. It is plainly foolish to apply human ethics to other species. Lions are born to kill and care only for their immediate family. Notions such as compassion and solidarity simply do not enter a Lion's mindset.

We descend from a line of vegetarian and omnivorous primates, who succeeded in mastering their habitat through dexterity, cunning and social organisation rather than the exertion of physical force, which was largely reserved for travel, work, foraging, hunting of small animals and occasional defence against predators. Around six to seven million years separate us from our closest primate cousins, chimpanzees, but why would violence evolve as an innate human instinct? First we need to define violence a little more accurately. Many primates do not hunt at all preferring to forage as vegetarians should their habitat provide plentiful food, but we are most closely related to chimpanzees who do not only hunt, but have been observed resorting to violence as a means of conflict resolution and imposing their power on more submissive females. By contrast Bonobos, close cousins of chimpanzees, use playful erotica to diffuse social tensions. Obviously any carnivorous animal exerts physical force to catch and kill other animals. Few animals practice cannibalism except as a last resort in after a natural calamity. However, we do not relate to other animals in the same way as we relate to members of the same species. To a carnivore, other animals are food, not sentient beings. At this point it might be useful to distinguish intra-species violence from inter-species violence. Some would take an absolutist stance against murder of all sentient beings and thus promote vegan pacifism, arguing that human technology allows us to be at one with nature. However, most Vegans in wealthy countries relies on a huge human infrastructure that has completely reshaped our planet and effectively ethnically cleansed whole species from their natural habitats or confining them to wildlife reserves. To enable the apparently peaceful existence of a middle class Western European family with their 4 bedroom house, two cars, household appliances, endless gadgets, holidays abroad and weekly supermarket shopping sprees, we need to inflict violence on a huge scale against the planet's delicate eco-system, something many of us would rather deny. So we might not witness real warfare firsthand, but it is committed in our name so we can drive our cars and fill our refrigerators without much thought as to how that delicious frozen salmon ends up in our freezer. This warfare may not always be waged against non-collaborative communities, but simply displaces traditional human communities and other species in the name of progress.

In many ways we are slowly emerging from an age of apparent harmony, in which people from different socio-ethnic backgrounds learned to live and work together. Certainly throughout history different ethnic groups have intermingled, but also fought bloody battles. Most of us have enough trouble trying to care for our immediate kith and kin. We can easily relate to our immediate geographic community and if this is cohesive enough, we might help disadvantaged neighbours. Charity really does begin at home. All of a sudden we have been asked to care not just for other members of our ethnic community, i.e. a group of people with a common language, mores and cultural identity, but all 6.7 billion estimated to grace our planet in 2010. As this is clearly impossible, we just pretend to care and look after ourselves, but often seek revenge against rivals by playing victims to justify our selfish actions. In reality while many of us pretend to care about the wider human race and some of us have been known to help strangers in distress, unless we are very rich and/or resourceful, we can only practically look after number one and our immediate family and friends. More important a socially competitive and high-consumption society pressures people to acquire more material posessions for themselves, either through hard work or financial manipulation. As a result millions are so busy struggling to make ends meet in a never-ending rat race, they have little time for others. Philanthropy has become a luxury afforded to the fortunate professional classes with time on their hands, while often members of idle classes prefer to indulge in media therapy (watching TV, chatting on Facebook etc.) rather than help others in their community. And even when people do help others, deep-seated cultural prejudices condition how this is targeted. The idea that billions of atomised human beings immersed in variations of the same global culture will learn to love each other is clearly a myth.

Postscript

While the Web is deluged with gamers' rants against any attempt to limit their freedom to indulge and many journalists in mainstream newspapers make a living out of promoting virtual violence as a legitimate genre of entertainment, my thoughts are not entirely unique. An Yugoslav Australian, Dejan, reached similar conclusions:

Are we becoming a violence obsessed society? I think we are.

Is it the excitement or the adrenaline rush? Maybe its a product of the life pressures we face today or even a mixture of the aforementioned? Something surely is driving us towards this culture where violence is being glorified and aggressiveness respected. It seems that way. The political sphere, the media and entertainment industries promote this aggressive culture that cant be leading the world towards a prosperous future, quite the contrary. Read full article at http://socyberty.com/society/the-obsession-with-violence

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All in the Mind

The Hidden Paedo-Scare Agenda

Hardly a day passes in the modern mainstream British media without a peadophilia-themed scandal, whether it be police discovering hundreds or thousands of child porn images on some poor soul's hard drive, a young woman's revelation about her parents' role in childhood sexual abuse, a high-ranking official or celebrity using his (or her) credit card to view child porn, a young female teacher seducing a 13 year old boy, a 13 year old girl, claiming to be 18, being groomed by a 50 year old male, claiming to be just 24. At times the hysteria reaches such extremes that one wonders why we don't just arrest every adult preventively on suspicion of child abuse?

Many others have commented on and indeed satirised the media's preoccuption with rampant paedophilia. It seems literally that one is hiding under every child's bed. Such is the hysteria that anyone ringing alarm bells at the Draconian legislation passed to combat this phenomenon (e-mail snooping, telephone tapping, psychiatric screening and the maintenance of extensive databases with confidential information) is soon accused of downplaying the paedophile threat, tacitly condoning the activities of sex fiends or even conniving with these social outcasts in the abuse of vulnerable minors.

Some of us seem to have short memories. As media stories about sexual abuse in religious and state institutions in 1970s and 80s abound, one wonders why we heard so little about it then. Was it because, as some might rather naively assume, few were prepared to speak out against this social taboo for fear of upsetting respected institutions such as the Church, the Scouts or social services, and only now in more enlightened times can we protect our kids from domestic and institutional sexual abuse. I would be the last one to downplay the effects of any form of physical and/or sexual abuse on children in key stages of their emotional development.

As the long-term effects of sexual abuse are mainly psychological, if we leave aside extreme cases with significant physical harm, early sexualisation promoted by the media and peer pressure tends to create an enviroment in which atomised children can easily make themselves vulnerable to atomised and sexually repressed adults. Indeed the whole notion of sexual repression is yet another misunderstood concept. Most of us maintain a considerable degree of sexual restraint, mediated by societal norms and expectations. We may view a person's sexuality from multiple perspectives. I may appreciate the sexy physique of my teenage daughter or younger half sister, and indirectly consider their suitability as a lucky man's girlfriend or spouse when the time is right. Indeed deep in the subconscience of any heterosexual male is the sexual desirability of any young girl. When you contemplate the beauty of your three year daughter, you consider her potential adult physique. We could think of children as adults in waiting or in the making, rather than mini-adults attempting to emulate the behaviour of their parents and media role models. The current emphasis on genetic psychiatrics leads us the mistaken conclusion that paedophiles (and I take the media's usual modern definition of this word) are somehow a subspecies. We simply need to identify, isolate, rehabilitate and/or chemically castrate them. But as all men are potential rapists, I submit that all sexually interested adults are potential child molesters. There has always been a sexual underclass, those who for physical or psychological reasons find it harder to satisfy their biological needs through consensual relationships with age-appropriate partners. On a personal note I've experienced both periods of frequent intercourse and period of relative abstinence, yet it has never dawned on me to exploit a vulnerable person, always seeking to establish an emotional bond and mutual understanding of the role of sex in the relationship. Certainly I've witnessed rival males, in the crude terminology of sexual competition, score with minimal effort. I've learned to take a philosophical approach, but understand some other males in a sexually obsessed society feel an urge to pursue every possible avenue for sexual fulfilment.

Whatever the media tells you, there are surprisingly few cases of loners lurking behind the bushes by playgrounds waiting for the right moment snatch and rape a child. In the vast majority of cases of childhood sexual abuse, children fall victim to adults who have won their confidence. Indeed in an alarming number of cases they are not fully aware of the consequences of their actions. Such is the hysteria surrounding paedophilia that there have been more cases of teachers falsely accused of sexual abuse than teachers who have actually sexually assualted a child. In the narrowest definition of the term, sexual assault of children by teachers is statistically a very rare occurrence, but age-inappropriate sexual liaison has thanks to early sexualisation become increasingly common. A number of cases have emerged of false accusations lodged against unpopular teachers, especially those that students consider uncool or too strict, while some female teachers have seduced teenage male students. In modern Britain most children over ten are not only aware of the birds and bees, but also of numerous sexual practices (fellatio, cunnilings, anal intercourse etc.) and orientations and with mounting media and peer pressure to go out and score with an alpha male or hot babe. That certainly was not true in the relatively carefree 1960s and 70s. At the tender age of ten I showed zilch interest in porn and on reaching puberty limited myself to private exploration of my sexuality until I met a consenting partner. Although we had some sex education at school, we learned most through gradual discovery of sexuality, mainly from older friends and relatives (ideally cousins and uncles rather than siblings or parents) or perhaps through books available at the local library or in the family bookcase. Around 1978 (at the tender age of 14) I learned an awful lot about sexual positions from the Sunday Times supplement complete with sketches. I can cite a couple of unfortunate experiences, a male seven years my elder, who forcibly penetrated me with my reluctant consent (considering myself at the time bisexual and theoretically open to experimentation) and a one night stand where my female partner was simply too inebriated to reciprocate, an occurrence that, I suppose, is all too common for today's partying youth. Yet despite times of considerable emotional instability, I had a clear view of the bounds of acceptable behaviour, whatever my wildest fantasies might have been. I became aware of non heterosexual orientations mainly through school taunting, a few media allegations about public figures and later involvement with fringe neo-Trotskyite groupings. In all honesty the concept of paedophilia completely escaped my attention before my mid teens and continued to play an exceedingly peripheral role until the great paedo-scare raised its ugly head in the mid 1990s. Did my father secretly abuse in the bath at the age of seven? To the best of recollections, the only fear I had was the prospect of shampoo seeping into my sensitive eyes for sex in any form meant absolutely nothing to me. Shame of the human body and prudishness are learned and thus culturally mediated behaviours for reasons of social control.

To put it bluntly, the paedophile scare is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more we obsess about it, the more we warn children of insidious adults harbouring paedophile tendencies, the more it becomes a problem that needs be addressed by all conceivable means. Childhood innocence is a treasured time in our lives when we need not worry the huge emotional wranglings that erotic desire and sexual competition unleash. Why should a seven year old girl, often encouraged by her cool parents, want to dress in a sexy manner? Why can't she just be a cute girl, completely oblivious to her potential eroticising powers? Rather than protect vulnerable children, which thanks to a large increase in the numbers of single parents abound in this country, the paedo scare empowers institutions to regulate family units. Consider the outgoing Home Secretary's latest proposals to combat the paedo danger. Not only will some paedophiles be offered drugs, yet another boon for big pharma and the psychiatric lobby, but a mother will be able to find out if her new partner is in the sex offenders' database. In what kind of society do we need to rely on the police or social services to ascertain the moral integrity of our partners, friends and family? The term police state springs to mind. Just imagine the scenario:

Enquirer: Hello, my name is Freda Blogga, ID card number AB 2334543892 HU. I have a new partner I met at the new casino in Manchester last week. We had such a good time and I'd like him to come and live with me and my 13 year old daughter, but I'd just like to check he's a safe pair of hands. His name is Fred Bloggs, ID card number XY 6789400 HY.

Police helpline assistant: Thank you, madam. I'm just bringing up his data on my computer. Apparently we can identify your new partner, the sixth one you've had in the last 2 years according to our records, as low risk on our standard paedophilia risk assessment criteria. We have no records of any paedophile-related behaviour. Over the last five years he has spent only 4.7% of his online time, as monitored by AOL, accessing adult sites, all of which are certified, 27.6% accessing first-person shooter gaming sites and 54.3% playing poker and backgammon, again as far as we can ascertain all via certified service providers. I can also reveal that in 1999 he received a diagnosis of ADHD, which if unmedicated may statistically represent a risk factor. He seems like a typical fun-loving guy, although he did once visit a conspiracy theory site, a little out of character I suppose.

Moral Hypocrisy

Morality, criminality and illegality have long been nuanced concepts. Illegality clearly refers to infringements of the law as it is applied in your local jurisdiction. Duplicating copyrighted music is technically illegal, but apart from denying musicians and record companies of revenue it hardly infringes anyone's basic human rights. Running a licensed casino in modern Britain is technically legal, but many (myself included) would argue its activities are immoral, a giant scam designed to strip people of their hard-earned income while raising their material and emotional expectations. As discussed elsewhere the higher our hedonistic expectations, the greater the disappointment when we fail to attain them. Criminality may comprise either acts infringing basic human rights or acts defying the law of the land. Thus the legality of bombing civilians in another land is simply a technical issue with little bearing on the act's morality or indeed its criminality if we apply the juridical interpretation of the word.

So where does paedophilia stand in moral stakes? In a society obsessed with virtual murder and revenge killings, the whole theme of the Kill Bill, it appears homocide is a lesser crime than child molestation. Certainly many Sun readers have been conditioned to consider the murder of a convicted paedophile a lesser crime than paedophilia itself. While first person shooter addicts and marketers alike have perfected the argument that no gamers would ever dream of reenacting their fantasies, the same argument does not hold true in establishment circles for occasional viewers of child porn, however defined. Personally I think both extreme child porn (i.e. depicting penetrative intercourse rather than certain body parts or mere poses) and virtual violence (i.e. glorifying and justifying mass murder) affect a person's behaviour, just like any other experience, whether first-hand or simulated, but someone cannot be convicted because of a mere fantasy or obsession until they act on it. The real answer to the moral equalivalency issue all depends on the severity of the acts performed. Does it refer simply to viewing images and fantacising underage sex (or perhaps fantacising oneself engaging in such acts as a child)? Is it confined to cases of overt intimate contact with aroused sexual organs? May it comprise fondling whose sexuality may not be obvious at all to immature and sexually naive children? Unfortunately the witch hunt mentality of the media lets us make few of these distinctions. A person may, in their eyes, either be a sex fiend or not. As a result many parents, teachers, close relatives and family friends now habitually avoid all comforting physical contact with younger children, something hardly anyone in the pre-paedo-scare era associated with sex. Just consider that in much of the world nobody bats eyelid about children sleeping their parents' bed, often into their early teens and in crammed living quarters a logistical as well as emotional necessity. Pre-school children sleeping in the matrimonial bed is the norm not just in Iran or Zambia, but in Italy and Spain. Your average 7 year old feels more secure tucked up in bed hugging mum or dad, than partitioned in a cubicle replete with technological wizardry. Yet surprisingly few young Italian adults take their parents to court over alleged child abuse. In the vast majority of cases it was the child, not the parents, who wanted to snuggle in with Mum and Dad. Then what about having a bath unclothed with your five year son. Again this was pretty normal behaviour until recently. Now the paedophile smear is at the back of every parent's or even every adult's mind. I've noticed some pretty odd behaviour in public toilets, with grown men sneaking into cubicles to avoid the embarrassment of temporarily exposing themselves in the presence of young boys, as if the boys minded, and actually inconveniencing others who might actually need a cubicle to dispose of solid waste. Certainly at the age of seven I was totally unconcerned about older men pulling out their willies to urinate. It was just the norm. To become offensive or abusive, an organ or act has to acquire a sexual value and the victim has to be intimately aware of abuse. Certainly any penetrative or otherwise painful acts could not escape the attention of any young child, however aware he or she might be of sexuality. These acts are indeed an extreme perversion, but most societies have successfully marginalised such activities by channelling sexual expression into meaningful consenting relationship between adults, however defined, all without the help of an all-powerful state overseeing every aspect of personal conduct.

To combat the very real dangers of emotional and physical abuse, we should first address the real causes, social instability and atomisation, rather than spreading fear in an already terrorised populace and turning us all into suspects.

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All in the Mind

Obsessive Delusional Heterodoxy Disorder (ODHD)

Most people have an aptitude for teamwork and instinctively know when constructive discussion and even new ideas are both welcome and socially advantageous. But some are not so fortunate. They live in a state of paranoid fear and dismiss conventional wisdom on most issues, often leading to obsessional interest in erudite subjects, sympathising with tyrants, downplaying atrocities and inventing absurd conspiracy theories. In synthesis they turn reality on its head, never believing anything emanating from respected mainstream sources.

Some delusional obsessions may be quite innocent, e.g. a woman from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is convinced that all modern ailments are caused by a ubiquitous sugar substitute. On her weekly grocery shop she methodically reads the labels of every single product she buys and occasionally complains if a new sweetener has been added to a product she likes. Her delusion may cause her some anxiety, she may be denied the benefits of sugarfree sweeteners, but by and large her life is still viable.

Since September 2001 until a recent course of psychiatric treatment, Boston software developer, Ed Munchen, had been convinced Aliens from the planet Domu remote-controlled airliners into the World Trade Center to fool the United States into an unwinnable war against terrorism and prime the planet for an Alien takeover. He dedicated his life's savings and 100% of his time to his impressive web site complete with edited footage of the attacks and interviews with green twelve-fingered extraterrestrials.

However, some delusions are not that innocent. Ed's second cousin, Nick Simpson, now living in Portland Oregon, still believes the Holocaust was invented by Jews as a propaganda tool in their quest for global dominance. His views cause considerable offence to millions whose relatives perished in the Shoah. Like his East Coast counterpart he dedicates much of his time to Internet activism, often lampooning and insulting those who believe in the best-documented genocide of the last century.

In many European countries, Nick's views and actions might put him behind bars. Over here he is protected by the first amendment, but that doesn't make him any less a threat to our fragile democracy. University of Wisconsin Neuroscientist, Hillary Redburn, has analysed over 200 patients with a variety of obsessional delusions. "Until recently", she said, "we might have branded these people political hotheads, extremists or fanatics, but now we know they have a genetic predisposition to heterodoxy, a pathological tendency to challenge orthodox views and systematically re-analyse evidence to prove the opposite. They probably account for around 1% of the population, though their distribution may occur in clusters. Symptoms tend to appear at an early age. At first, their delusions may seem quite innocent or even healthy. Nick, the Portland-based Holocaust denier, spoilt the family Christmas at the age of 4 because he kept telling his grandfather that Santa Claus was just a myth perpetrated by grown-ups to keep children quiet. He may have been right in that case but his proclivity to challenge everything led him into deeper trouble at school. He would interrupt physics lessons to explain why he thought the big bang was just a wild creationist theory and claim in English lit lessons that Shakespeare did not pen his own works, but would always play devil's advocate in the school debating society."

Psychologists have long wondered why some of us are more conformist and others more rebellious, some more credulous and others less so, but should it be a problem I asked Prof. Redburn. "Yes, because most sufferers of Obsessive Delusional Heterodoxy Disorder or ODHD, lead very unhappy lives, are very prone to depression and may unleash their wacky ideas on others without any consideration for the offence they cause, e.g. a client from Illinois is convinced Walmart plan to put every American out of a job. When her 17 year old daughter returned from a shopping spree with two Walmart bags full of summer clothes she'd need for her vacation the next day, she emptied the contents into the garbage can. As a result, her daughter did not go on vacation and only recovered after professional counselling and a course of SSRIs.

ODHD sufferers believe they are on a mission to save humanity or reveal hidden truths. They like to quote George Orwell or cite the case of Galileo Galilei, but they have no idea how much offence they cause others or the consequences of the extremist views they hold."

So what should we do, I inquired. "These people need our help and support. Data from fMRI scans indicate a chemical imbalance in their frontal cortex, which overstimulates neuroreceptors responsible for critical thinking. In normal human beings, such receptors are counterbalanced by others responsible for harmony and acquiescence. We believe it is important to diagnose these individuals as early as possible. The government's mental health screening initiative offers us an excellent opportunity to help ODHD sufferers before it's too late and they turn into little Hitlers, Stalins or Saddam Husseins. Though the Illinois housewife who religiously boycotts Walmart may be on the mild end of the ODHD spectrum, her neurological profile shows surprising similarities with that of the guy who thinks Auschwitz was just a leisure complex. But with the right medication, behavioural support and tolerance training these people can become model citizens."

"Don't psychiatric drugs have side effects"?" I quipped.

"Some do, but our understanding of brain chemistry means we can now target specific psychological disorders with minimal side effects. In most cases I would recommend Submissal TM. It induces a feeling of elation, acquiescence and tolerance in most users, though it may temporarily disrupt sleeping patterns and is not recommended during the last two months of pregnancy."

"And what about the support network?"

"That's absolutely essential. We're currently training counsellors and learning support workers to deal with ODHD sufferers, just help them overcome their delusions, ensure they take their medication and basically keep out of harm's way"

"Any success stories you'd like to mention?"

"Sure, Ed Munchen, revised his theory and concluded that Iraqi Resistance Fighters utilised a time machine to engineer the 9/11 attacks. He has since joined the US Army and participated in the liberation of Falluja. His web site is now dedicated to Iraqi democracy. I can honestly say he has been freed of all obsessive delusions. He even said he'd like to join in the coming liberation of Iran."

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Power Dynamics War Crimes

Free Speech and Hate Speech

False and ridiculous charges are no real problem. It is the unconscionable critics who reveal unwanted truths from whom society must be protected" Noam Chomsky in Deterring Democracy

A False Sense of Self-Righteousness

Intellectuals in the public eye remind us how we should thank our lucky stars for our democratic system with freedom of speech and press. Not only should we cherish this relative freedom, but we should ensure our high standards are met elsewhere through economic or military intervention.

All things considered our model of democracy is largely a farce reduced to occasional opinion polls and popularity contests, while our wonderfully free media is in the hands of a corporate and state bureaucracy. Without advertising revenues or state subsidies, independent outlets do not stand a chance. Nonetheless some journalists committed to the truth and genuine debate have allowed some dissident views to surface through excellent documentaries, reporting and live discussions. When the My Lai massacre appeared on American TV screens, the Vietnam War soon turned into a public relations disaster. This did not stop General Wesley Clark from defending the US Army's record or from directing air strikes over the Balkans 30 years later. However, most off-message views have been neatly confined within a range of legitimate dissent.

Increasingly news reports appeal to the wishful thinking professional classes and armchair activists, horrified by alleged abuses of human rights attributable to inhumane foreign leaders or lower class louts.

Three main objections are raised against free speech:

  1. False or embarrassing allegations may slander otherwise defenceless individuals and stir irrational public contempt.
  2. Some views, especially when expressed in overt language, may offend certain sections of the community.
  3. Some views may challenge the ideological supremacy of the ruling class and incite rebellion.

The first objection may seem tenable at first as the recipients of any media hate campaign know all too well. We might wonder how the press, controlled by corporate interests, chooses which celebs, politicians or foreign leaders to demonise. However, we need not limit freedom of speech to protect defenceless individuals against unjust attacks, merely allow the right of reply and fairer libel laws accessible to all irrespective of financial means, so that newspapers would be forced to compensate the victims of deliberate misinformation. In a civilised society media outlets would stick to the facts that concern us. If we had a diverse media interested in genuine problems affecting millions of ordinary people, we would not be obsessed with the private lives of public figures, but rather debate how the actions of the powerful affect us.

The second objection is very much in vogue and usually applies to remarks or views deemed racist, otherwise xenophobic, sexist or somehow prejudicial to the interests of a given group. To some the current obsession with political correctness may seem a sign of progress. Personally I have never liked remarks and opinions disrespectful of members of other ethnic groups, especially deprived immigrant communities. But a closer look at the facts reveals a different picture as the gap between rich and poor has demonstrably never been greater. Indeed political correctness masks the real intents of politicians, while the focus of media attention is on the choice of words rather than on the repercussions of policies. Moreover, who decides what is racist, xenophobic, sexist or, to use a newly coined term, homophobic? For instance a British anti-nuclear protester was recently charged with incitement to racial hatred for dragging a US flag on the ground during a demonstration against the deployment of the multi-billion dollar Star Wars project (as originally reported in the Independent).

Foreign Office spokespeople dress their briefings up in diplomatic Newspeak. Someone who plants a bomb outside a gay pub killing two people is a dangerous mentally deranged neo-Nazi admirer of both Saddam Hussein and Joseph Stalin, while the UK government's feeble excuses for violence on a much greater scale over the Balkans and Iraq may only be criticised tactically and former UK support for Iraq is a mere strategic mistake. Yet were we to adopt the lynch mob tactics of the press, we'd brand Tony Blair a rabid racist and send him to the European Court of Human Rights. As Mr Blair's rhetoric is strongly against nominal racism and new concepts such as ethnic cleansing (formerly known as colonisation and mass deportation), we have internalised the notion that New Labour seeks to uphold the human rights of all. The very same government approved export credits for the sale of arms to Indonesia and Turkey, responsible for human rights abuses on a massive scale, and feels it has the moral authority to smear all opponents of aerial bombardments over Iraq and the Balkans as apologists for totalitarian regimes.

On a purely rational level openly xenophobic speech need only worry us if it can attract widespread public support. First we may ask why ordinary people are susceptible to xenophobic propaganda, but it seems elementary that those with a wider reach can more easily sway public opinion, e.g. if a man in a pub tells his mate a horror story about a gypsy who mugged his mother, only his mate knows and can judge for himself whether the story is true or representative of Roma as a whole. However, were widespread media outlets to run stories about gypsies mugging women, it could reinforce deep-seated prejudices and incite ethnic hatred. By contrast, were such propaganda targeted at communities who had lived together peacefully and intermarried for generations, the media might face serious opposition. Xenophobia is not based so much on ignorance as on preconceptions. Over the last century British propaganda has evolved from blatant nationalism, to subtle moral superiority. A hundred years ago our rulers colonised 1/4 of the world's land to civilise inferior cultures and empower the empire, we had a God-given right to enslave other peoples in all but name and to destabilise their governments.

Today the UK intervenes to support the international community's desire to teach a lesson to foreign leaders accused of heinous crimes against humanity and enforce business-friendly democracy. In contrast with the imperial heyday the UK is a faithful lieutenant of a transnational Anglo-American Empire and public relations dictate that imperialist wars be sold on humanitarian grounds.

In the 1990s the media tried to persuade the public that Serbs are bloodthirsty ethnic cleansers. People's experiences in the British Isles could hardly confirm such prejudices as the British actually sided with Serbia against Albania in WW1. As the Croatian Ustaše collaborated with the Nazis, official British propaganda had at least until 1948 been favourable to the Yugoslav cause. In 1916 the Daily Telegraph reported gas vans were deployed in Kosovo to murder Serbs. Even as the conflict broke out after Tito's death, many eminent voices on the BBC spoke of the benefits of a multiethnic federation. Had only politicians associated with the nationalist right on TV ranted about subhuman Serbs, some liberal commentators might might have accused them of racism. Instead morally superior journalists and so-called human rights campaigners exposed the alleged Nazi tendencies of a regime that had bedevilled large sections of the Serb population. Mainstream media reports portrayed Serbs as aggressors and ethnic cleansers, a term that gained currency in the Yugoslav conflict, while Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Albanian Kosovars were considered victims. The facts paint a very different picture. Good and bad guys were on all sides and the underlying causes of the rekindling of the old ethnic disputes were economic.

If we were momentarily to accept the genetic determinist explanation for ethnic hatred, we could reach some illogical conclusions. Propaganda over the last century has portrayed the Germans first as expansionist huns, although the British had beaten them to it by 200 hundred years or so, and then as willing executioners in the greatest insanity that has ever beset mankind. But who are the English as opposed to the native Celtic and Pictish peoples of the British Isles? Germans, of course. Who are the upper middle class US citizens entrusted with the envious role of world cop? The core of the US's ruling class stems from recent immigrants from the British Isles and mainland Europe. So surely any hereditary markers for xenophobia in Germans are just as likely to surface in their close cousins across the North Sea and Atlantic. The same nonsense is applied to the bloody civil wars between Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda and Burundi.

All forms of xenophobia are clearly not equal. Even compared with the worst verifiable accusations held against Serbs, Israel has been guilty of much more heinous atrocities against Palestinians both in the occupied territories and Southern Lebanon. The only two possible excuses presented are Arab terrorism threatening Israel security and the Shoah. After displacing 780,000 Palestinians in 1948 and forcing 1.5 million Palestinians to crowd into the least fertile patches of land, one need not be surprised at Arab retaliation. Israel is in all but name a ruthless Apartheid state complete with homelands and rigorously enforced segregation of undesirable Palestinians. As for the second excuse, the Serbs were also victims both of Ustaše shootings and maltreatment in concentration camps during the Second World War. Unlike the Israelis, the Yugoslavs attempted to form a federation and bury their differences for nearly 40 years. Journalists may fabricate lies about alleged Serb atrocities without being dubbed xenophobes, but dare not speak out against Zionism for fear of being branded anti-Semites.

The truth is many people regulate their own hatred within the confines of acceptable contempt. Mainstream propaganda encourages us to reserve a healthy dose of hatred for official enemies and demonised groups such as Serb ethnic cleansers, Arab fundamentalists, Hutu extremists, Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime, homophobes, paedophiles, muggers and nail bombers. Indeed the media often lumps these groups together indiscriminately, e.g. Serbs have been accused of raping Muslim women in Bosnia Herzegovina and Kosovo, reinforcing the public perception that Serbs and rapists are of the same ilk. A closer analysis shows that since NATO moved in to Bosnia and Kosovo the sex industry has blossomed supplying NATO personnel and NGO workers with mainly Slavic women.

In May 2000 a group of German teenagers on a school holiday walked along a Cornwall beach. A group of local teenagers and adults chanted "Nazis, Nazis, We won the War" and started throwing stones. If Nazi means someone who condemns others based on their ethnicity or religion, then we might wonder who the real Nazis were in this case.

Another topical case is Edinburgh psychology lecturer Chris Brand who published a book, The G Factor, about the relative intelligence of different racial groups, notably concluding that Black Africans have on average scored lower in IQ tests. While Professor Brand's evidence may seem compelling to many willing believers, he fails to empirically link general intelligence with IQ tests and ignores the Flynn effect, showing how the social environment can raise IQ levels by 15 points per generation, the vast divergence of IQ scores among members of the same racial groups and the reappraisal of the genetic significance of aesthetic racial features. Moreover, IQ tests tend to be culturally biased and one can be trained to achieve higher scores. Self-styled anti-racists rallied behind the Anti-Nazi League's call to ban the book. They succeeded as publisher John Wiley withdrew it. However, The g Factor merely articulated in pseudo-scientific terms what millions had long privately suspected. Banning the book not only affords it more credibility, but denies others the opportunity of challenging its arguments one by one. Indeed Chris Brand's thesis differs little from Charles Darwin's musings on the genetic superiority of the white race, so why not ban his epic work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection? Some religious fundamentalists certainly would ban it citing racism as an excuse for the imposition of Biblical creationism, however modern criticisms of Darwinism based on a more Lamarckian symbiotic evolution may counter Darwin's racist assumptions more convincingly.

So should we ban potentially xenophobic speech? My answer is clearly no, because ethnic prejudice stems not from overt or offensive language, but from generations of subtle propaganda and a sense of cultural and moral superiority.

Case Study: The Suppression of Historical Revisionism

One cannot fail to notice the news media's growing obsession with the Nazi holocaust. Atrocities in Nazi concentration camps and organised shootings on the Eastern Front between 1941 and 1944 serve to justify new wars against rogue leaders who have fallen out of favour with the United States, while the purported uniqueness of these events affords the state of Israel special treatment and impunity for its crimes against Palestinians deported from Israel to the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights.

Not only were most Germans unaware of the scale of the Shoah, but all the other main powers involved in the Second World War practised and fomented ethnic discrimination in one form or another. At stake are clearly three issues:

  1. Historical exactitude.
  2. Our collective memory of the victims of all horrors of war, exploitation and repression.
  3. The instrumentalisation of past events for which ordinary folk bear no responsibility and the deliberate falsification of the historical record to advance a given geopolitical agenda.

All three issues cry out for free speech and fearless open debate, without which only powerful media outlets and authoritarians can impose their warped view of history.

Since the late 1960s, a flurry of movies, documentaries and books have convinced the European and North American public mind that the Nazi holocaust represents not only a monocausal and systematically planned singularity, but an absolute evil against which all other atrocities should be measured. We may talk of a nuclear holocaust, which befits the core meaning of death by fire, but the capitalised Holocaust always signifies the Nazi judaeocide, more aptly called Shoah after the Hebrew word for disaster. The 1917-18 Armenian genocide that erupted out of a fierce civil war as the Ottoman empire collapsed, US napalming of Vietnamese villages, Allied saturation bombing of central European cities etc. do not qualify for this unique term. The enslavement of Africans with countless millions of unnatural deaths is dismissed as the acts of primitive European colonialists, such as the Portuguese (1), rather than a systematic policy of the greatest empire before the advent of US hegemony.

In NewSpeak historical revisionism means denial, the minimisation of the unparalleled crimes of a past dictator and his willing executioners with the implicit intent of restoring the credibility of Nazism. Of course, if we believe all we read in the mainstream press, such crimes may not be so unparalleled after all. Standard accounts of the 1994 Rwandan bloodbath show the Tutsis as victims and the Hutus as subhuman perpetrators. Likewise no exaggeration seems too great to describe the atrocities attributable to Serbs in the Yugoslav civil war.

On paper historical revisionism is a method to ascertain historical truth through critical examination of factual evidence. This is standard practice in any scientific inquiry. Only by allowing variant and contradictory theses to stand the test of empirical scrutiny can we begin to separate fact from fiction. Preconceived conclusions should be alien to serious historical research and simply replacing one biased account with its antithesis defeats the purpose, which is to correct partisanship. The recent book "Day of Deceit : The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor" by Robert B. Stinnett, claiming President Roosevelt had foreknowledge of the events, is revisionist, but should be analysed on its merits. Likewise it may be hard to deny the World Trade Center attacks occurred or many thousands died, but who did it?, who funded and manipulated the suicide bombers, were there secondary explosions in the Twin Towers? Did senior US and Israeli intelligence personnel know about the attacks beforehand? These too are revisionist questions because they challenge orthodoxy.

The genuine victims of state-perpetrated violence need not fear open debate if we agree that murder, especially systematic murder, is inherently evil. Regrettably historical revisionism is increasingly associated with one issue, the Shoah, but may be applied to the orthodox accounts of any historical event and allow antithetical conclusions.

Numerous orthodox accounts, i.e. reports popularised by the mainstream media, have frequently been proven wrong or fundamentally flawed under closer examination. Claims made about the war over Kosovo are just some of the most recent examples in a long string of war propaganda. Phillip Knightley's updated and revised "The First Casualty of War" is a must read for anyone interested in the veracity of the mainstream media. Do we really believe the Romans conquered most of Western and Southern Europe as well as much of North Africa and the Middle East without slaughtering hundreds of thousands, and subjugating millions in slavery and serfdom? However, much of modern history about the era has been sanitised by Roman accounts of barbaric Germanic, Celtic and Berber tribes.

One key factor in the historiography of any event is Cui bono? Should empirical research ever conclusively refute key tenets of the orthodox version of the mid 20th century Jewish genocide (e.g. by attributing millions of deaths to other causes), we may hypothetically ask who benefited from the inflated accounts of systematic slaying by industrial means attributable to the Nazis, and consequently to the Germans who let them rule? A quick answer may be Expansionist Zionism, as in unconditional support for Israel, the Western Allies and the former Soviet Union, because the unique evil of the Nazis overshadows any crimes attributable to the victors of WW2. While Soviet interpretations emphasised Slav victims (e.g. elevated deaths in Auschwitz to 4 million to include 3 million Slavs), the US emerged from WW2 as the world's main economic power, much richer than the Soviet Union ravaged by the wanton slaughter of WW2, and had the task of resuscitating Western European capitalism within its post-war world order. It faced a stark choice between the Morgenthau plan to convert Germany to an agrarian society and the need to build a strong powerhouse economy fully integrated with the rest of Western Europe and North America. After 3 years of partial deinstrialisation between 1945 and 1948 triggering a mass famine with as many as two million deaths, the Marshal plan rebuilt Germany in America's image and, apart from a few show trials and kangaroo courts, its ruling class remained intact. Ironically the US quite happily funded social democratic governments eager to build a prosperous Europe with some degree of social cohesion via the welfare state. The alternative would have been revolution and civil war. What's more many former Nazi collaborators switched overnight to the Americans. As early as 1943 the CIA hired former SS officers such as Reinhold Gehlen with in-depth knowledge of Eastern Europe to form Pol Gehlen, which later became the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) the German sister organisation of the CIA. This explains at least in part why the Shoah did not acquire its current status until the 1967 six-day war at the same time as the US began to rely heavily on Middle East oil reserves as its own began to dry up. However, there might be some more sinister reasons. Would West Germans, whose constitution theoretically protects freedom of expression, have willingly believed claims that unbeknown to them the Nazis had murdered millions in gas chambers? Thousands had worked and many Germans had actually been interned in Nazi concentration camps, but only a select few had testified to mass gas chambers at the Nuremberg trials. In East Germany they had no choice, Stalinism replaced National Socialism overnight and anti-nazism soon became a state religion.

When German Green Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, attempted in 1999 to persuade his party (who used to oppose NATO and nuclear weapons and favour peaceful solutions to ethnic disputes) of the necessity for air strikes to forestall a genocide, he re-evoked the Shoah in the full knowledge that nobody could dispute any events associated with it or even dare to suggest bombing might make such events more and not less likely. He narrowly won the vote claiming Operation Horseshoe was a masterplan for the final solution of the Albanian problem. A subsequent German report showed the operation was a hoax and no plan existed for the systematic deportation of 90% of Kosovo's population. However, the analogy ends there. The CIA and German BND merely formed a temporary alliance with the KLA. The Albanian mafia may control much of the heroin trade passing through Southeastern Europe, but their influence and strategic importance cannot be compared to that of Israel.

Let us be in no doubt, those who publicly dispute the scale and systematicity of the Shoah have been subjected to intense vilification and associated with the xenophobic right. Indisputably some on the Judaeophobic right sympathise with and manipulate the findings of some unorthodox Holocaust scholarship. However, many serious holocaust revisionists are fierce critics of authoritarianism. While many expose and criticise the disproportionate Jewish influence in the mass media and movie business as well as in international finance and American politics, only a minority believe in an international Jewish conspiracy against Gentiles or Goyim as foretold in the rather outlandish, hateful and largely discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Moreover, the East German Stasi and Israeli Mossad have actually set up and manipulated so-called Neo-Nazi grouplets. Even Combat 18 in the UK, allegedly formed as a breakaway from the BNP, was a front for MI5's special operations. The so-called left tends to ignore two essential questions. Should we rely on state-sanctioned truth?

Anti-imperialists tend to dismiss revisionist accounts of Nazi war crimes as wild fantasies of neo-fascists, intent on rehabilitating the honour of the short-lived Third Reich. One valid criticism that may be lodged against some holocaust revisionists is a tendency to make far-fetched claims against Stalinism, claiming that the 6 million figure may be an exaggeration in connection with the Nazi-perpetrated Shoah, but Stalin was responsible for as many as 60 million deaths, figures taken straight from 1950's McCarthyite propaganda. While the former Soviet Union can be indicted with atrocities on a massive scale and economic mismanagement certainly led to millions of deaths, the same could be said of India and Pakistan. Coincidentally many former hardline sympathisers of the former USSR minimise the crimes attributed to the NKVD (later KGB) and Bolshevik Party apparatchiks under Stalin's command, denying Stalin bore any responsibility for the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine, and bewail the demonisation campaign against him by the capitalist press and liberal left.

The British Anti-Nazi League started by fighting the racism of the National Front in the late 1970s, but failed to attack head-on the politicians likely to influence the immigration and social policies that most affect ethnic minorities. The National Front benefited from working class disillusionment in the then Labour government, but never stood any realistic chance of gaining a single seat in Parliament. The NF were basically politically incorrect Tories who appealed to the gut instincts of many workers raised on rule Britannia propaganda. No party that challenged the necessity for British participation in the Second World War could ever win without the thorough re-education of the masses, but could urge a halt to immigration from poor countries and even repatriation. After massive Rock Against Racism concerts and Anti-Nazi League demos in 1978 (being an Anti-Nazi in Britain is like declaring one's opposition to Attila the Hun in Rome), what did we get? The 1979 Tory landslide, record unemployment with the demise of unprofitable inefficient manufacturing, tough talk on immigration, followed only two and half years later by a bout of jingoism over the Argentinian invasion of the British Falkland Islands, all dressed up in anti-fascist rhetoric. But what did the ANL really oppose? Free speech on Nazi historiography, the very notion that National Socialist régime had not landed on Earth from Mars, but was entirely comparable to numerous governmental systems world-wide. The main source of anti-fascist information is inevitably Searchlight run by MI5 collaborator and former CPGB member Gerry Gable, whose anti-Nazi antics include planting former British National Party members in anarchist groups and animal liberation fronts, so the press can later smear them with rightwing extremism. For instance in March 1993 the ANL staged a 300 strong demo against the desecration of graves at the Brighton and Hove Hebrew Congregation's Florence Road Cemetery, although the Jewish Chronicle later reported no tombstones had been daubed with swastikas and no gardener was employed to remove such graffiti. For alternative views about MI5 involvement in both extreme right and self-styled anti-fascist groups, visit Lobster Magazine with insider info from both sides.

French anthropologist and Indochina expert Serge Thion, American writer Bradley Smith of the Campaign for Open Debate On the Holocaust hardly conform to our perception of neo-Nazi thugs, but do not buy the orthodox account and expose Holocaust swindlers and false witnesses. Even English historian David Irving, who has long been target of a concerted press smear campaign but airs his strong anti-immigrant views freely on his Web site, has written at length on verifiable Nazi crimes. Indeed the 1977 edition of Apocalypse 1945, The Destruction of Dresden was not only available in public libraries, but on recommended reading lists compiled by my anti-imperialist History teacher, a bit of balance for William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich . Also recommended was AJP Taylor's The Origins of the Second World War, which suggests the rather heretical conclusion that a bellicose elite within the Anglo-American establishment unleashed the gates of hell by provoking Nazi Germany. In the mid 1990s Raeto West analysed variant revisionist theories and the holocaust promotion industry as an integral part of his site about humanism, bad science and common myths.(NB 27/12/2009: Raeto West's site went offline over 8 years ago and has since joined the white-supremacist BNP, a rather sad end for a disciple of Bertrand Russell.) Another sceptical analysis of interest is New Zealand historian's Joel S. A. Hayward's thesis "An Historical Enquiry into the Development and Significance of Holocaust Revisionism", which the author had to withdraw under enormous pressure. Indeed the latter has since converted to Islam and been appointed Director of the Royal Air Force Centre for Air Power Studies.

However, a thorough revision of the received wisdom on the Second World War would go much further. Some revisionist historians fall into the trap of viewing German National Socialism and Anglo-American corporatism as competing ideologies. So within the myth of the uniqueness of Nazi crimes lies the myth of British and American appeasement of Hitler's Germany. Voluminous evidence suggests that British, American and Dutch big business did not appease Nazi Germany at all, but positively encouraged it, bankrolling the German National Socialist Workers Party and continuing production in their subsidiaries right through WW2. The collaboration of many leading Zionists such as Ben Gurion with the Nazi régime and Hermann Göring's professed sympathies with the cause of the Jewish homeland cannot go unnoticed. Neither can we ignore the blatant fact that the Second World War saw the invasion and humiliation of France, the end of the bankrupt British Empire controlled centrally from London, massive destruction, murder and famine in much of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the ultimate defeat and destruction of the US's two main technological rivals, Germany and Japan. Indeed we may even consider if the division of Germany and the erection of the Iron Curtain served the long-term interests of the United States. West Germany bounded by hostile states to the east and integrated in an economic union with its other European neighbours, a military Alliance with the US and dependent on US aid and inward investment, would soon prove a loyal partner and a powerhouse of the post-war boom. The US bailed out Western Europe only after overseeing its destruction.

It may have rationally been in the geopolitical interests of the German government in 1938 to recapture territories lost in the 1918 Treaty of Versailles and to seek the economic domination of Eastern Europe as well as the collaboration of the Low Countries and accommodation with France, whose imperial interests conflicted with the US and British Empires. All-out war with the Soviet Union and Great Britain, which would inevitably draw the US into the fray, would have been highly inadvisable. Indeed in August 1940 Germany sought peace with Churchill's Britain on this basis. When the United States entered the war in December 1941 and especially after the fall of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) in February 1943, the Third Reich was doomed. As the Allies landed in Southern Italy in August of the same year, the defeat of the Axis powers was a foregone conclusion. Yet the worst crimes against humanity attributed to the Nazi regime reached their gernocidal climax between mid 1942 and late 1944, while Hitler's overstretched armed forces were battling to defend strategic positions on all fronts. By January 1945 all concentration camps in modern Poland, responsible for the lion share of systematic industrial killing, had been liberated. Would the United States be so dominant today if a united and peaceful Europe counterbalanced its hegemony?

We may also debate whether Nazism, Fascism or Francoism were unique or merely localised means of ensuring the supremacy of corporate and state power. It may seem ironic that many militant anti-Fascists favour the suppression of free speech and restriction of democratic rights to stop the re-emergence of alleged fascists. However, who defines fascism? Should we not talk instead of authoritarianism? Not only did many Nazi collaborators adapt very quickly to the New World Order under US hegemony, but many population control techniques pioneered under the Nazi régime were adopted and remodelled by big business, especially in the advertising and public relations industries. Joseph Goebbels based his WW2 information campaign on British WW1 propaganda. According to Goebbels, Germany didn't invade the Sudetenland, it liberated ethnic Germans persecuted by bloodthirsty Slavic nationalists and it didn't invade the Soviet Union, but liberated Ukrainians from Bolshevik tyranny. By the same token we could claim, Britain didn't conquer and exploit the Indian Subcontinent and half of Africa, but spread civilisation and democracy.

Until Norman Finkelstein, son of survivors of the Treblinka and Majdenek concentration camps, wrote A Nation on Trial and The Holocaust Industry, few analysts considered one truism: The more the mainstream media and entertainment industry push the orthodox version of the Nazi holocaust, the more a radical fringe will disbelieve any of their claims and harbour a growing sense of Judaeophobia. Israel's oppression of Palestinians makes an Anti-Jewish backlash almost inevitable. The purported uniqueness of Jewish suffering explains the hackneyed phrase "racism and Anti-Semitism". Surely, anti-Semitism should apply to prejudice against all Semites and Israel would thus be labelled an anti-Semitic régime. But why not specify Serbophobia, Germanophobia, Russophobia etc.? Why is prejudice against Jews different?

It comes as some comfort that a handful of Jewish intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Israel Shahak have attempted to answer this thorny question. Judeaophobia stems not from irrational beliefs in the racial inferiority or superiority of Jews, but rather from resentment against Jewish power and their in-group loyalty. Would a German critic of Nazi abuse of power be called a self-hating German? But Jewish critics of Zionism are frequently denounced as self-hating Jews. Would it be too radical to describe Nazism as German Zionism?

It thus follows that rational debate protects the true victims and exposes hoaxers separating fact from fiction, while exaggerated claims trigger exaggerated counter-claims, hence the Holocaust lobby's insistence that there are no numbers between 0 and six million. Challenging the capitalised Holocaust is tantamount to heresy. Instead, some of the wilder claims will be inconspicuously dropped, while revisionist historians continue to be ritually condemned. At stake are not the genuine victims of Nazi terror, but the credibility of war propaganda.

Twenty-five years after the Vietnam War the chief architects of US atrocities such My-Lai denier Wesley Clark and Iraqi Highway Massacre Denier General Barry McCaffrey (100,000 - 250,000 dead) are not only walking free, but are advising the current US régime on its new military endeavours.

The solution to this dilemma is simple: free speech and fearless open debate. Only then will we know who is lying. I for one will reserve my utter condemnation both for all perpetrators of verifiable atrocities and for all those who manipulate war propaganda for their own purposes. You have lost the argument from the outset, if you refuse to debate an issue, whether it is the big bang theory, global warming, the AIDS=HIV hypothesis or the veracity of alleged atrocities.

Readers are free to make their own minds up. Most orthodox Nazi Holocaust and anti-revisionist information can be accessed from the Nizkor site, but if you're in any doubt take the time to read what dissidents say on the matter.

Why the Shoah Revisionists are Wrong

David Irving once claimed that it's hard to prove a negative, but the same controversial historian has freely admitted voluminous hard evidence of Nazi crimes. The fact that many European governments are actively pursuing and jailing prominent holocaust deniers should ring alarm bells. One may reasonably wonder who's next on the verboten list. 9/11 revisionists, Balkan war revisionists, Saddam Hussein sympathisers, opponents of US, UK and Israeli military operations in the Middle East? So are holocaust revisionists just an easy target or do they actually have a point? With the media beating the drums of war in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it is essential for us to maintain the freedom to challenge the extreme bias and sometimes pure fabrications of our main media outlets. However, by focusing narrowly on the scale of crimes committed by an authoritarian regime over half a century ago, holocaust revisionists risk serving as useful idiots ready to perish in jail purportedly to save the honour of the German people or combat Zionism in the name of Palestine. Were they to focus instead on disinformation about recent events, we might stand a better chance of safeguarding freedom of inquiry in order to guard against the very totalitarian bellicosity that has traditionally presaged mass murder.

The Real Deniers

Wesley Clark General Wesley Clark denied US culpability for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. 30 years later he defended NATO air strikes over the Balkans Lord George Robertson Lord George Robertson denied the widely documented after-effects and deliberate use of depleted uranium both in Iraq and the Balkans. Currently NATO's Secretary General. He also once referred to Serbs as Siberians.
Henry Kissinger Henry Kissinger denied his role in the Vietnam War, 1968-72 bombing of Cambodia, Pinochet's Chilean coup d'état, the 1975-79 massacre in East Timor among other crimes Ariel Sharon Ariel Sharon denied Israeli guilt for the Sabra and Shatila massacre although at the time he was only 200 metres away from the scene. Currently Israeli Prime Minister responsible for human rights in the West Bank and Gaza

If denial of verifiable crimes against humanity is a problem, it should concern us most when the mainstream media denies or downplays atrocities, while dissidents upholding the veracity of such events, are silenced, sidelined or ridiculed. Challenges to official claims should always act as a stimulus for empirical research.

The British Foreign Office has a long history of denial, from its scorched earth policy and concentration camps in the Boer War to the Bengali Famine, bombing of Kenyan Mau Mau freedom fighters, arming of Indonesia while it presided over the slaughter and starvation of as many as 200,000 East Timorese between 1975 and 1979, its support for Turkey and Israel, the media's almost total silence over the massacre of 250,000 retreating Iraqi troops and guest workers fleeing Kuwait after the US and other Allied forces reclaimed the territory for the Kuwaiti royal family and oil multinationals. It took a book by revisionist historian David Irving for the Allies to admit (and subsequently downplay) the scale of the wanton slaughter of civilians during airstrikes over Dresden, while other equally ferocious bombing missions over Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Pforzheim are mere historical footnotes. The post-war famine with as many as 2 million deaths in occupied Germany on top of tens of thousands of German fatalities in Allied and Soviet post-war rehabilitation camps are routinely dismissed as regrettable legacies of Nazism.

When a major newspaper claims 250,000 died in the Vietnam War, how many readers write to complain that the figure excludes Vietnamese victims? Similarly figures for Vietnamese fatalities may vary from 1 million to 3 million. Should we not accuse those who insist on the lower figure of being deniers eager to resume napalming over North Vietnam? In his epic Manufacturing Consent Noam Chomsky distinguishes worthy from unworthy victims. Victims of Pol Pot's massacre between 1975 and 1979 are worthy victims because the US benefited from anti-Communist propaganda that could overshadow its own crimes in the region (US bombing of Cambodia between 1968 and 1975 led to 500,000 to a million deaths), while victims of the East Timor tragedy are unworthy because the US was arming their oppressors. However, subsequent US support for the Khmer Rouge and sanctions against Cambodia after the 1979 Vietnamese invasion, leading to more starvation, make it hard to give reliable statistics for deaths attributable to Pol Pot's government when the US did not back it. The death toll varies from 250,000 to 2.5 million, though most starved. Likewise official anti-Saddam propaganda now includes the Iraqi airforce's 1988 aerial gassing of 5000 Kurds. However, they forget to mention that at the time the Iraqi régime was armed by the US and its allies and deployed US-made chemical weapons. Similar attacks against Kurds by the Turkish armed forces have gone unpunished.

Another topical atrocity was the 1994 Rwandan civil war. The Western media unanimously reported marauding Hutus killing their Tutsi cousins with machetes. In one respect this is much a more serious allegation than those levelled against Germans during WW2. In 1945 most ordinary Germans knew little of events either in concentration camps or on the Eastern Front. Indeed much of what they did know they had learned through German-language Allied broadcasts, rumours and post-war propaganda. Whether hundreds of thousands perished in mass gas chambers or not, most ordinary Germans did not rampage the streets wielding machetes against Jewish neighbours (The total death toll of Kristalnacht was around 90). Lamentably an awful lot of dead bodies laid strewn all over Rwanda by the time Western reporters could return and formerly exiled Rwandan Patriotic Front soldiers had recaptured the capital Kigali. Based on verifiable evidence it is much harder to refute the Rwandan massacre than mass gas chambers in Nazi-occupied Poland. However, many thoughtful observers have missed two critical and related factors: economics and environment. What was billed as a systematic genocide was in fact a food riot that quickly turned into a collective frenzy of internecine slaughter.

Journalists and foreign Africanists are unanimous that the West failed to take pre-emptive action against the Rwandan genocide, but too many assume such action need be military. Unconditional economic aid to ensure Rwanda could be self-sufficient in essential foods, writing off the country's debt, the provision of vital health and transport infrastructure etc. would have done much more to help Rwandans overcome their past internecine conflicts than any so-called peace-keeping mission. Also see Michel Chossudovsky's article on the IMF and Rwandan Holocaust

Sanitised Genocides and Ethnic Cleansing

Genocide means the extermination of a people with a distinct cultural heritage either by ruthless colonial expansion or by systematic slaughter. Whether a given massacre qualifies for this term depends largely on its scale and ethnic specificity. By contrast the newly coined term ethnic cleansing means systematic deportation or forced cultural assimilation. Ethnicity begs definition, but usually implies a deep-rooted cultural identity passed through successive generations of a close-knit community. Historically ethnic groups acquire uniform physiognomic traits through many generations of interbreeding. Language, religion, diet, dress code, sexual morality and other customs are cultural characteristics linked to one's ethnic identity. Absolute genocides are thankfully relatively rare events, although the rapid depopulation that followed European colonisation of the Americas, Africa and Australasia succeeded in eradicating indigenous civilisation and annihilating vast swathes of their peoples through war, disease and starvation. At the time of the great European conquests very little prime agricultural land was virgin territory. Who would believe native Australians only inhabited the outback before Dutch and predominantly British colonisation? The Boer War saw the almost complete extermination of the Khoi-Khoi (aka Hottentot) people of the Northern Cape as a result of the British scorched earth policy. Even the world's first war sold on humanitarian grounds, the 1898-99 Spanish-American WAR over the Philippines ended in a brutal massacre.

Most countries in the New World were founded on genocidal colonisation followed by systematic ethnic cleansing. In the first fifteen years of Belgian colonial rule of the Congo under King Leopold the rubber trade's ruthless exploitation of land and inhabitants alike caused the country's population to fall from around 20 million to just 9 million, yet another tragic tale erased from mainstream history books.

The Hidden Democide

Sadly but patently, abject poverty, malnutrition, child labour, unreported internecine and gang warfare are rife. Unedited video footage of armed gangs severing the limbs of a nine-year old boy because he fought for a rival gang intent on control of diamonds is considered unfit for public consumption, while Hollywood churns out movie after movie replete with gratuitous fictional violence. Millions of dollars are spent to simulate terror, while thousands of real pictures of US-perpetrated or funded warfare across the globe would suffice to horrify all but the most callous individuals. Very different standards are set for the relative importance of deaths. Quality newspapers targeted at intellectual readers devote just a few paragraphs to a WHO report estimating that 15 million children die every year from easily preventable diseases on top of 7 million child deaths due to malnutrition, while atrocities that can be blamed on an official enemy are widely publicised. When was the last time we read sensational headlines about real horrors, of which our rulers are guilty?

Headlines you won't read in Murdoch's Press

Online Sun Iraqi Child

Exclusive: UK Sanctions Kill 500,000 Iraqi Kids

Oil-hungry control freaks want these kids to die, so evil multinationals can get their greedy hands on the guey black stuff. Sex-crazed Bill Clinton and ballot rigger Blair deny their hideous crimes, but the Sun reveals the horrible truth. Saddam Hussein is their best friend and ten years ago agreed to be Global Demon Number One as long as he could keep his marble palaces. As Blair gears up for his re-election campaign, Iraqi children are dying of leukaemia thanks to depleted uranium strewn over their land by US and UK bombers.

Online Sun Emaciated Children Y2K

Shock Horror! 12,000 children starved yesterday

12,000 kids died yesterday because their mums and dads could not make ends meet without work, fertile land or a social safety net to fall back on. Tony Blair said Third World countries need a competitive labour market and more deregulation.

That's right more children starve either due to undernourishment or severe malnutrition every day than NATO claimed the Yugoslavs killed during the Kosovo war. Few of us would be surprised to read "Rock Star Kills Fiancé" or "Serbs Murder More Albanian Kids", "Internet Paedophiles on the Rampage", "Germans Want To Ban British Pint", "Blair Slams Media for Invasion of Privacy", "Don't Miss Our Pics of Prince Eddie at Nudist Camp" etc.

As the world's population passes the psychological 6 billion barrier, life expectancy in much of Sub-Saharan Africa is falling in the age of computers, mobile phones, suburban off-road cars and supermarkets packed with goodies, 2 billion suffer from malnutrition.

Should we Fear Hate Speech?

The short answer is no, provided we retain the right to challenge it. Some propaganda can be very hateful and even incite frenzies of xenophobia, especially if it comes from the mainstream and builds on generations of subtle indoctrination. Sometimes hatred can be engineered gradually over a few years as in the case of Serbs.

If the Sun could headline "Gotcha!" when the Royal Navy needlessy sank the General Belgrano killing 400 Argentinian sailors in 1982 or condones the bombing of some of the world's poorest in Iraq, the Balkans and now Afghanistan, surely we need not fear irrational outbursts from fringe propagandists. The real danger is mainstream hate speech legitimised by our government and establishment intellectuals. More important who defines hate speech? Is hate speech language that can incite violent attacks or is it propaganda that justifies state terrorism? Increasingly hate speech is a byword for unacceptable opinions and unmentionable controversies.

As Noam Chomsky said in defence of his decision to write a foreword in favour of the free speech of French holocaust revisionist Faurisson "It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers".

The restriction of free speech has always benefited those who control the means of mass communication. No precedents exist for laws passed to ban proven lies, but plenty for laws crafted to stifle debate on issues that may expose the duplicity of the establishment or challenge the founding myths of the ruling class.

Free Speech Links

1) Authoritative estimates place England (and after 1707 Great Britain) a close second in the slave trade.