Theresienstadt-1909-Rathaus - Schule

Source: Schule-Brück & Sohn Kunstverlag

Yes, another parable! You guys liked the burning balcony one so much, I’m doin’ it again.

In Paul Schrader’s 1978 film Blue Collar, there’s a scene in which Richard Pryor confronts two checkered-suit-wearing pension-fund-thieving UAW goons. In the theatrical cut, he calls them “motherfuckers.” For the 1980s edited-for-TV version, some genius dubbed in “checkersuckers.”

That word stuck with me; in my personal lexicon it became representative of a specific type of sleazy liar.

Some of you might remember Budd Dwyer, the PA state treasurer who blew his brains out on live TV in 1987 after being convicted of corruption-related crimes. His problems stemmed from a contract he awarded to a software “entrepreneur” named John Torquato. Torquato was a checkersucker, suit and all. He was a low-level Mob-connected Harrisburg huckster. And as he admitted in court, he only knew underhanded tactics. He only understood bribery and extortion. Everyone, Torquato included, agreed that Torquato had tried to bribe Dwyer.

It was Torquato’s only known way of conducting business.

Part of the case against Dwyer rested on the claim that he ignored bids from better software companies. But in 2010 I saw a fascinating documentary, Honest Man: The Life of R. Budd Dwyer, that presented Dwyer’s side of the story. According to the filmmakers, Torquato’s software wasn’t bad at all. It was actually the smart choice for the state’s needs. The problem wasn’t the software but the fact that Torquato was so corrupt, so raised in a culture of not doing things the honest way, he resorted to bribery even when he had a product that could’ve been sold on its merits.

Torquato’s nature was to be deceitful, and the filmmakers argued that jurors were so justifiably repulsed by him, they didn’t consider whether the software was sound.

Following my recent Covid origins piece, many of you pointed out that in emails from 2020, wet market origin advocates like Fauci and Daszak privately admitted that a lab leak was possible, yet they colluded to publicly paint the leak theory as a racist falsehood.

Nate Silver, no right-winger by any measure, went on an epic Twitter rant last week calling for consequences for those who publicly dismissed the leak theory while privately admitting it was possible.

Fauci and Daszak are checkersuckers. They know only deceit. Like Torquato, they can only lie, even if they don’t have to. But the deceit they engaged in, and their inherent foulness as humans, must be uncoupled from the examination of wet market evidence vs. lab leak evidence.

They lied because lying is all they know. But that doesn’t free the rest of us from our responsibility to examine the available evidence in a manner that doesn’t hold the process of discernment hostage to the charlatans who finessed the presentation because they’re habitual prevaricators.

Their presentation of the evidence is separate from the quality of the evidence. We instinctively want to dismiss anything that bad people advocate. We don’t want bad men to be right. But villains can be correct, in spite of themselves.

This is a dilemma I know quite well. It’s the bane of the honest Holocaust researcher. One of the primary factors that contribute to the spread of Holocaust denial is that the mainstream stewards of the history can’t…fucking…stop…lying.

They don’t have to lie; there’s plenty of proof of the Holocaust. But they lie anyway.

A few recent examples:

(1) This U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) “how to fight Holocaust denial” video starring lantern-jawed gorgon Deborah Lipstadt could’ve used any number of legitimate visuals to make its point. But the video misrepresents footage of a Parisian rifle range and furnace/ventilation room as a gas chamber. I first caught the museum misusing this footage in 1993. In 2018, “Holocaust Controversies”—an anti-denial site run by several very smart, very decent people and one complete psychopath who became the first guy I ever had to block on social media because he was harassing not just me but anyone who commented on my columns—agreed that the museum had mislabeled the footage. But they blamed it on a lowly copywriter and let it go. Yet now the museum’s repeating the lie in a video that’s supposed to fight denial but actually furthers it (and still Holocaust Controversies likely won’t hold the museum accountable even though the video was certainly the product of people higher up on the ladder than “lowly copywriter”).

(2) A HuffPo/Vox/ABC abomination called “NowThis” created an anti-denial video in which the host, hipster millennial retard Jules Suzdaltsev, misrepresents a steam delousing autoclave at Auschwitz-Birkenau as a homicidal gas chamber. This was such an egregious falsehood, even the Holocaust Controversies psycho reluctantly admitted that I was right to call it out, and if you knew this nut, you’d know that must’ve smarted.

Again, “NowThis” could’ve run any number of legit visuals. They chose a false one.

(3) Professional fraud and accused rapist Michael Shermer, the self-proclaimed leader of the U.S. “skeptic” movement, was asked by Big Think to provide a sound bite debunking Holocaust deniers. Shermer could’ve said anything. He could’ve used any of the hundreds of ironclad proofs of the Holocaust (like the documents I cited in my back-and-forth with a denier at Counter-Currents). But no. Instead, he cited the doors to a minor, totally unimportant supposed gas chamber at the Mauthausen camp in Austria, a camp where, even if there had been gassings, the body count would’ve been in the low thousands at most.

“Holocaust revisionists make this big deal about why the door on the gas chamber at Mauthausen doesn’t lock,” Shermer squealed, adding, “Well, I eventually went and found out that that wasn’t the original door.” In his book Denying History, Shermer stated that the original doors are “in a museum.”

Putting aside the fact that in the 1990s Shermer repeatedly attacked me for pointing out that the presently displayed Mauthausen doors couldn’t possibly be gas chamber doors, declaring in Skeptic magazine that of course those are gas chamber doors and of course they lock, his pivot to “the real doors are in a museum” is an outright lie. After viewing the Big Think video, I contacted Ralf Lechner, head of collections at the Mauthausen Museum, who told me that the original doors are long gone, stolen after the war, and not in any museum.

I emailed Shermer (pseudonymously, because I just love fucking with the guy) to inform him of his error. When I didn’t hear back, I wrote “I know you have a rep as arrogant and supercilious, someone who talks a good game about scientific fallibility but never admits fallibility on a personal level, but I kinda thought you might’ve appreciated that I took the time to track down someone at the Mauthausen Museum to help clear the fog regarding the fate of the gas chamber doors.”

And he replied “Thanks for the info. Much appreciated.” Yet the video was never annotated to include Lechner’s info.

(4) Then there’s this ADL “anti-denial” screed that claims the Theresienstadt ghetto for privileged Jews was a hoax, a “transit camp” to death where Jews were “forced” to pretend to not be dying.

Another lie. Theresienstadt was totally real. It was a town created for high-profile, elderly, and decorated WWI-veteran Western Jews. As the Nazis were systematically slaughtering Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian Jews, they did create this town for “privileged” Jews of “better blood.” We know this from Nazi documents: from Himmler’s statistician Korherr, from Kube (Generalkommissar of Belorussia, who was frequently up Heydrich’s ass for not following the established guidelines of who gets Theresienstadt resettlement), and from Heydrich, whose March 21, 1942, letter to Kube is unassailable proof that Theresienstadt wasn’t a hoax. That doesn’t mean Jews didn’t die in Theresienstadt; it doesn’t mean some Jews weren’t transferred from there to more brutal camps. But it was a real thing.

(5) We have the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) taking a fictional film of Jewish kids being gassed in vans (1962’s Ambulans, directed by Janusz Morgenstern) and shaving off the front and end credits to misrepresent it at the “Museum of Tolerance” as captured Nazi footage of an actual gassing.

There are indeed wartime documents that discuss the use of gas vans; there was no need to lie.

And that’s the point. All of the above-listed lies are unnecessary. And each one is counterproductive. The USHMM and SWC phony footage, the “NowThis” mislabeled footage, Shermer’s “the doors are in a museum” falsehood, the ADL’s Theresienstadt deception…these lies are so easily debunked, they’ve likely led to more people becoming deniers than eschewing denial.

I’ve been making this point for nigh on thirty years. From a June 1995 interview:

Several months ago the Simon Wiesenthal Center published an article calling me a liar for saying there was a swimming pool at the Auschwitz Main Camp. This is exactly the kind of counterproductive strategy that “exterminationists” can’t seem to get beyond. We all know that there was a swimming pool. We also understand that the presence of this pool IN NO WAY negates the possibility of gassings at Auschwitz. It’s totally irrelevant! There’s no reason to LIE about anything. Just be truthful. Don’t scream “LIAR—THERE WAS NO POOL.” Just rationally explain “yes, there’s a pool, but at best it was for the few favored Main Camp inmates—one of many perks available to preferred inmates—but it is in no way representative of the experience of rank and file inmates—especially Birkenau inmates.” There, doesn’t that feel better? No need to lie. Don’t underestimate the capacity of your audience to take in seemingly contradictory pieces of evidence.

So why do these mainstream “guardians of truth” do it? Why do they lie? Well, I could give you the fancy-pants answer that to command someone’s assent via facts means the facts are powerful, but to command someone’s assent via a lie means that you are powerful.

But the truth is, checkersuckers are just bad people. They lie because they lack the integrity to do otherwise. Even if they rep a good product, they don’t know how to sell it except through coercion and deceit. Shermer, the ADL, SWC, and USHMM, are checkersuckers. But in spite of their best efforts to sully Holocaust history, the Holocaust happened, and this can be conclusively demonstrated without resorting to lies.

Covid wet marketeers like Fauci are checkersuckers. But they may still be right.

In a perfect world, checkersuckers wouldn’t exist. But they do. They shit where they eat and they shit on what they feed you. But that doesn’t mean the food was bad before they defiled it.

We still have to examine the data, even if those presenting it are dicks.

A tough task. And frustrating. Because we don’t like to “side with” bad people.

So forget the people and stay focused on the facts. I’ve been doing that for 34 years. It ain’t easy, and it ain’t pleasant. But if you want to discern the truth of something, it’s necessary.