Changing perceptions and attitudes to a WW2 narrative

Attorney Bruce Leichty was arrested in 2019 for participating in a holocaust conference at Bethel College in Kansas for which he had paid and registered. 

His crime? Handing out fliers until he was asked not to, then participating in Q&A and posing questions that made people uncomfortable. 

Since when was it illegal to ask questions? Since the West traded Enlightenment (post)-Christianity for the new holocaust religion, or so it seems.

Below is Leichty’s press release.

.. .. .. .. .. ..


The Mennonite lawyer who sued Bethel College for more than a half million dollars in 2019 after his arrest at an academic conference is appealing the judgment of a Wichita federal judge denying him any relief, contending that the court improperly discounted a reputed false statement by Bethel’s president to City of North Newton police.

Bruce Leichty, 68, filed his opening brief in the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals last week, asserting that federal judge John W. Broomes committed numerous errors when he granted summary judgment to Bethel College, and prevented him from taking his case to a jury. Leichty had claimed that Bethel breached its agreement with him in connection with his registration for a conference on “Mennonites and the Holocaust” in March 2018 and then instigated his arrest for trespass even though administrators knew he was not in trespass, a violation of Kansas law.

Leichty, who said he was never arrested before and was not at the academic conference to commit an act of civil disobedience, spent 18 hours in custody at the Harvey County Detention Center before being released on his own recognisance in March 2018.
City of North Newton did not prosecute a criminal case against him.

The California resident has also appealed the rulings of the Court that the City of North Newton could not be liable to him under state or federal law for the role of its police in the arrest. In his argument to the Court of Appeals, Leichty notes that he went to the North Newton police station before going to the Bethel campus the second day of the conference to make sure that he was acting lawfully and that a challenge to his registrant status would not permit arrest.

Leichty cites in his appeal several reasons why his arrest was unlawful. He contends he could not have been arrested but for the fact that he was told without justification that he could no longer attend conference sessions. The District Court found that he violated unwritten “equitable” provisions of his agreement with the college, by first passing out literature and then trying to make an announcement during a Q and A session about a presentation he had arranged for a nearby community room in North Newton.

That presentation, held March 16, was titled “Two Revisionist Jews reconsider the Holocaust” and featured a retired university professor from New York, Daniel McGowan, and a retired engineer from Michigan, Henry Herskovitz.

“Registrants had never been told there was any prohibition on handing out flyers or other literature to fellow registrants, and the College admitted there was nothing in writing and no announcement notifying its guests about this prohibition, nor had I been warned,” notes Leichty, who says the Court ignored this fact. Leichty was told to stop the handouts by a college administrator shortly after he arrived for the first session. He was threatened with expulsion from the conference after the College called police, and at that point the parties agreed that Leichty could remain at the conference if he complied with the newly-announced rule.

“At no time was I told it was my views that were under scrutiny, but what I found out later was that the college had been talking to police and sharing pejorative comments based on my history of Christian advocacy and legal cases, and discussing how they would handle me — even though no one ever approached me with any concerns or requests.”

Leichty says that evidence developed in the case showed that the event that led the College to breach its agreement with him happened during a session late on the opening day.

“I was handed a microphone but was prevented by a conference organiser, Mark Jantzen, from finishing my remarks, which were meant only to note that as Jews who had different perspectives on the Holocaust, McGowan and Herskovitz were available for dialogue that evening.” Leichty says the two colleagues had also been denied the opportunity to attend all but a couple public sessions of the Conference after a registration mix-up left them unregistered.

Jantzen called North Newton police after Leichty’s microphone was cut, and berated him, “Are you going to leave or do I have to call the police?”

“I had done nothing wrong, since audience members were allowed to speak,” says Leichty. Leichty says that after he finished trying to make his announcement, he left in the company of another conference organizer, John Sharp of Hesston College, who expressed concern but invited him for further discussion at a conference lunch the next day. Sharp and another administrator later said they were surprised by the rude audience response to Leichty. Leichty says he chatted with North Newton police chief Randy Jordan as the chief pulled into the parking lot to respond to the 9-1-1 call and there was no discussion of trespass at that time.

“Later that evening after we held our event and Henry Herskovitz and I had returned to the campus to watch the public airing of a Nazi propaganda film, I approached Jantzen and asked him whether he would now allow my colleagues to attend sessions the following day.” Leichty says he was told no, “and not only that, you’re out of the conference, too.”

In his appeal brief, Leichty notes that this exchange was treated by the court as a trespass warning, even though Leichty was not told by anyone that he was barred from the campus, and Leichty’s registrant badge had not been taken from him nor had he been offered any refund. “I was also not told what rule I had violated, probably because there wasn’t any such rule. North Newton police officer Donald Stovall confirmed the next morning before I returned to campus that a dispute about registration wasn’t sufficient for me to be held in trespass if I returned.”

Leichty’s appellate brief points to police testimony that Bethel College President Jon Gering effectively lied to police the morning of his arrest saying he had previously told Leichty to leave campus and not return.

“Officer Stovall said during a deposition that the president had told him that he personally had given me the warning, but I hadn’t even met the president the first day of the conference,” says Leichty. “I had already told Officer Stovall about Jantzen’s comment, so the only thing that could have changed Stovall’s mind was the lie. Moreover, Gering told me during his deposition that he did not care if I was in the campus archives or coffee shop or other places on campus as long as I wasn’t at the conference, and therefore there is no crime of trespass but merely a civil dispute or contract disagreement on those facts.”

In his appeal brief Leichty also argues that the court improperly prevented him from conducting further discovery with police after another arresting officer, Levi Minkevitch, from the city of Newton, became unavailable for testimony. Minkevitch, a Bethel College alumnus who assisted Stovall in making the arrest, was killed in an off-road accident five days after he was subpoenaed by Leichty to have his deposition taken in the case. Leichty says that on the day of his arrest Minkevitch cut off discussion with him shortly before he was handcuffed, as Leichty tried to explain why he was not in trespass.

“When there are questions of fact that need to be resolved by a jury, a district court judge has no ability by law to award summary judgment and a court of appeals has to reverse,” says Leichty.

“Some of the event sponsors didn’t want any narrative other than an approved narrative about Mennonite `guilt’ for the Holocaust to be heard by conference-goers,” Leichty says. “This is antithetical to the spirit of academic inquiry and historical analysis, and the College acted like the very fascists that they supposedly were exposing to the public for the first time.

“The Court in turn violated its own duty to look at my contentions in the light most favorable to me, just as the college essentially had done in trying to suppress my speech, which must be corrected on appeal.”

A review by Professor Dan Michman from the International Institute for Holocaust Research
of  ‘Debates on the Holocaust’ written by Tom Lawson (published 2010)

reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1160

Scholarly research on the Holocaust, carried out in many disciplines but especially in the field of history, is dynamic and­­ constantly progressing... 
...the library of Yad Vashem, Israel's research and memorial institution for the Holocaust, has in the last two decades enriched its collection with some 4000 titles every year!
Consequently, historiographical overviews of the interpretational debates, ...stages in the development and the impact of political, social and cultural developments on research etc. are much needed – both for scholars in, and students entering, the field.

...Lawson states that ‘this book is primarily designed as an introductory text for students and teachers’. Nevertheless, the number of such overviews, especially analytical ones, has remained limited (1), perhaps as a result from the fear by scholars ‘that any attempt to interrogate its history can only be partial and incomplete’ (p. 1). Therefore, first of all, Lawson should be lauded for his courage in attempting this challenge; but then he has also succeeded in writing a quite comprehensive – though not unproblematic – analysis of most of the major debates in the field, while colligating an abundance of literature into his most readable narrative.

...The book consists of eight chapters, each dealing with a major challenge of Holocaust historiography which led to debates and controversies.
Chapter one deals with the first post-1945 attempts to conceptualize the understanding that the persecution of the Jews during the Nazi era had some special characteristics which made them stand out among the many other atrocities...
...
Lawson rightly refutes the quite common observation that there was [in 1945] an ‘absence’ of historiography ‘or at least a silence’. ...Lawson explains that the tendency to render universal meaning to the persecution of the Jews – thus starting in fact a first debate about ‘the universality or specificity of the genocide of the Jews’ (p. 24) – had already begun during the Second World War, and resulted from the policy developed by Jewish leaders and intellectuals... This interesting insight might be true for the wartime period, but does not explain the universalist approaches explored by scholars during the first decade after 1945 – and Lawson does not elaborate on this further. This reviewer believes that it had to do on the one hand with the social scientific methodological tools used (as it is their nature to generalize and develop models), but also with the fact that many of these scholars were Jewish refugees of assimilated German Jewish origins... 

Chapter two takes the Eichmann Trial, conducted in 1961 in Israel, as its starting point, claiming that ‘approaches to the understanding of the Holocaust did change around the time of the Eichmann trial’ (p. 53). Lawson subtitles this chapter ‘war crimes prosecutions and the emergence of Holocaust narratives’ and interprets the account presented by the prosecution in the Eichmann trial, and Hanna Arendt's famous counter-account Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) as presenting and even shaping to a large extent the two interpretational poles of Nazism and anti-Jewish policies nicknamed later intentionalism and functionalism by historian Tim Mason. 

...Chapter three focuses on the ‘bystanders to the Holocaust’, rightly starting with German playwright Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy (Der Stellvertreter) first staged in 1963.
This play accused Pope Pius XII of having known of the tragedy that befell the Jews and refraining from serious action. The deliberately controversial play paved the way to a path of research which examined the role of those who were neither the perpetrators nor the victims.
 ...it is precisely in Europe, first in the West and since the 1990s in the East, that the local ‘bystander’ attitudes to the persecutions of the Jews, have been and still are the major reason behind the ever-expanding interest in the Holocaust; coping with this historical chapter has been the prism of self-evaluation and soul-searching for entire societies...
In this category of ‘bystanders’ also Jewish bystanders should have been included, that is the Jewish communities and leaders 

...Chapter four returns to the intentionalism/functionalism debate at its height, in the 1970s and 1980s...
 
Chapters five and six deal with perpetrator history of the 1990s and the beginning of the first decade of this millennium. Chapter five, which is subtitled ‘the end of the Cold war and the breakdown of Holocaust metanarratives’, rightly sees in the downfall of the communist bloc in 1989–90 a major turning point in the historiography. Indeed, ‘during the 1990s a group of younger German scholars working in the archives of the former communist bloc challenged the metanarratives which had dominated the study of the Holocaust since the 1960s’ (p. 154). 
 
 Chapter six is called ‘”Ordinary men”: rethinking the politics of perpetrator history’. ...He writes that ‘to some scholars … comparison with colonial genocide is anathema because it seems to lessen the particularity of Jewish suffering’ (p. 225). 

He does not deal with what should have been pointed out in a book emphasizing the interwoven-ness of history-writing with current contexts, namely how politicized the field of genocide studies has become, and how indeed this course of explanation in fact detracts major parts of the understandings of the Holocaust so meticulously built up over decades. It therefore does not ‘lessen the particularity of Jewish suffering’, as Lawson formulates it, but lessens – or even (sometimes intentionally!) downplays the scope and enormity of the Nazi anti-Jewish project (such as for instance the importance of the Holocaust in western Europe;

it also provides no convincing explanation of the Nazi obsession to deport to Auschwitz, by means of boats and trains, at a late stage such as August 1944, a remote and tiny Jewish community as the one of Rhodes). Moreover, the evolution of genocide studies since the beginning of the 1980s and its current relationship with Holocaust studies deserves a chapter by itself: genocide studies started as an offspring of Holocaust studies and so to say under its auspices, but has developed in recent years into an independent field, sometimes even clashing with Holocaust studies; this parting of ways was recently demonstrated by the fact that in the series of Oxford Handbooks two separate volumes appeared, one of Holocaust Studies, the other of Genocide Studies.(9) 

 Chapter seven changes the focus to debates on Jewish responses to Nazism. Lawson touches upon some of the major issues (resistance, ghettos, Jewish Councils), but it is in many respects the weakest chapter of the book. He states that ‘the historiography of Jews and Jewish behaviour under the “Final Solution” has therefore developed problematically since the end of the war … this is an historiography defined almost by its absence’. This is a gross misrepresentation: 

The last chapter (eight) shifts to the debated role of testimonies and memoires (Lawson does not really differentiate between the two genres) in Holocaust historiography and memory.
 His is a fair representation of some of the dominant approaches and challenges in this field – the issue of the blurring of fact and fiction, and the stands taken by scholars against and in favour of using these as historical sources – but much more can and should be said.
   Lawson rightly concludes that ‘whichever way we turn, we are brought back to the position that using testimony is problematic’ (p. 299). However, it is of major importance to emphasize that witnesses claim in their testimonies and memoires to present historical reality, sometimes even expressing their anger that ‘historians do not really understand’ the reality of the time. Therefore, there is not only a question of how to use these sources, but there is often a clash between ‘memorial history’ and ‘academic history’.  

 As can be understood, this book has left me with very mixed feelings... 

...the declared goal to contextualize the debates is not upheld throughout the entire book. On the other hand, and as pointed out above, the analyses are often problematic (even if thought-provoking) from chronological and thematical points of view, and omit important debates and aspects.

 The lack of an in-depth discussion of the emergence of the terminology The Shoah , THE Holocaust, Khurbn, Judeocide and genocide itself, and the competition between the terms as representing both conceptual debates on the nature of the event and the importance of the media (cinema, TV) and politics (such as the Middle East peace process as a catalyst for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum) in promoting understandings and images, is in my eyes a major deficiency.

Add to this the almost complete disregard of non-English research literature (except for what has been translated into English), the slovenly proofreading (10) and some factual mistakes (11) – and one will understand my deep reservations too. 

As a historian, I myself have encountered this new and dangerous trend. In 2021 I was accused of slandering the memory of a long-deceased Polish village mayor. The claim was based on a footnote in “Night without end” a book that I co-edited. In the text, a Holocaust survivor is quoted recalling an incident in which the mayor of his village alerted the Nazis to the whereabouts of a group of Jews, resulting in their death. The mayor’s niece, assisted by an NGO that receives government funding, took us to Warsaw’s District Court to defend the name of her uncle.

We were dismayed by the ruling, in which the judge, Ewa Jonczyk, asked us to apologise.
The Judge in the summing up of the case had concluded:
“we can assume that ascribing to Poles the crimes of the Holocaust™ committed by the Third Reich can be construed as harmful and detrimental to the sense of identity and of national pride. Attributing to the Polish nation the responsibility for the Holocaust™ for the killing of Jews during World War II and for the confiscation of their property touches upon the sphere of the national heritage and, consequently, as completely untrue and harmful, can significantly impact one’s feeling of own national dignity, destroying the justified belief — based on facts —  that Poland was the victim of war operations initiated and conducted by the Germans.”

...the ruling was overturned, but the chill was felt among scholars inside and outside Poland.

It seemed to me that the real objective of the lawsuit was ...to make students and educators think twice before choosing topics that would challenge the government-sponsored version of history. The idea of a right to national pride, advanced in court, is an ambiguous and legally undefined sentiment that effectively means any member of the Polish nation has the right to sue historians whose findings offend them.

Meanwhile, Holocaust™ survivors are dying every day. There are few left to protest the new revisionism.
The assault on the value of Jewish survivor testimony and the legal attack on our knowledge of the past are signs that the memory [possibly false stories] of the Holocaust™ [probably exaggerated ‘special’ Jewish suffering] is under threat not only by the deaths of survivors, [the story-tellers] but also by the willful choices of the present generation. The more time distances us from the event, the more heated the exchanges become, and the more forceful the attacks on the memory [draconially protected quasi-religous narrative] of the Shoah.

~ Jan Grabowski is a professor of history at the University of Ottawa.

puffnachrichten.com/opinion/the-new-wave-of-holocaust-revisionism/10676/

Malignant Jew goofball Dennis Prager says you’re going to Hell if you don’t believe his ridiculous ‘gas chamber’ hoax
ANDREW ANGLIN • DECEMBER 7, 2022


www.unz.com/aanglin/malignant-jew-goofball-dennis-prager-says-youre-going-to-hell-if-you-dont-believe-his-ridiculous-gas-chamber-hoax/

...The KJE’s (Khazarian-Jewish Elite’s) most important strength however is their prodigious ability to control popular opinion among gentiles through various forms of media. This, more than any other, best explains the ascension of Jews to elite status in the West mere decades after their emancipation in Europe in the 1870s... 
 
By propagating different shades of egalitarian ideology (for example, anti-racism in the West and communism in the East), KJEs effectively told gentile majorities what they wanted to hear, thus moulding popular opinion to manufacture hostility against the existing gentile elites — for the benefit of the KJs themselves, who always intended to replace them.

The old guard was wholly unprepared for this since not in centuries had any European aristocracy of note been put in the position of having to persuade the people to follow them. “We lead because we are better suited to it than you are” somehow seems less persuasive than “Since everyone is equal, we must overthrow those who impose inequality upon us!”  

That the former argument resides closer to the truth by reflecting the inegalitarian nature of the human condition makes little difference. Those who were led, didn’t know any better; and those who did lead, knew better and didn’t care.

If this seems like an oversimplification of the rise of Jewish power, that’s because it is. All general explanations of historical events will resort to oversimplification to some extent or another. I will bet, however, that this hypothesis explains the facts most economically compared to all other hypotheses.
Prior to Jewish emancipation, Jews still had their ethnocentrism, financial acumen, and other strengths, but only a fraction of the influence they enjoy over gentiles today. Emancipation, for the first time in modern history, gave Jews a means by which they could directly communicate with and ultimately control the gentile masses — namely with journalism, propaganda, art, academia, music and literature. It quickly became apparent that Jews came to far surpass the gentile elites in this regard.

This hypothesis dictates that in order to break the KJE’s (Khazarian Jewish elite’s) grip on power, a competing movement must challenge the KJE grip on popular gentile opinion. ...This is why Jews so vigorously censor...

And it’s not like finding arguments to counter the KJE narrative is difficult. How the egalitarians must torture logic in the face of damning evidence provides fertile ground for counterargument and mockery from dissidents...

The problem arises in where and how to stake a claim. Combating an aspect of the KJE narrative with a strong opposing narrative succeeds inversely to the time the narrative in question has had to metastasise across gentile populations. The more time a narrative has had, the more difficult it is to argue against it with a strong opposite claim. Paradoxically, weaker claims would serve better against deeply entrenched KJE narratives. I call this the Weak Claim Paradox.

For example, the KJE narrative which claims that...
— gender is a social construct.
— transgender people by law must be considered to belong to their chosen gender.
— children have a right to sex change operations.
...is a relatively recent one. Since the vast majority of adults today remember when this narrative didn’t exist at all, strong counterclaims which would have been perfectly mainstream in 2003 can be made to good effect twenty years later:

No, gender is not socially constructed.
No, transgender people don’t have the right to dictate how people view them.
No, children don’t have a right to transition. Furthermore, anyone who aids in their transition should go to prison.
These are strong counter-claims — and popular since the offending narrative has had such little time to grow roots in the gentile mind.

On the other hand, consider this more-deeply entrenched KJE narrative:
— the Nazis were evil.
— the Nazis started the Second World War in order to conquer Europe.
— the Nazis murdered six million innocent Jews for the sake of racial purity.

This narrative has had much more time to marinate among gentiles. Since very few are still alive today who remember when this narrative didn’t exist, strong counter-claims which would have been perfectly mainstream in 1943 will likely be dismissed as beyond the limits of civilised discourse eighty years later. Human beings are creatures of habit, after all. A lifetime of being inundated with a particular narrative — false as it may be — simply cannot be overturned over the course of a single conversation no matter how bright or well-intentioned a person is.

Thus, the following strong counter-claims are bound to fail:
— no, the Nazis were seeking to protect their own nation and race from alien domination. 
— no, Jewish elites controlling politicians in England and America initiated the Second World War as a means to annihilate Germany.
— no, the Jewish Holocaust is wildly exaggerated.
And it does not matter how true these claims actually are! There is simply too much time for such strong counter-claims to overcome.

Observe, however, how much more effective weak claims can be when faced with such a severe time handicap. Note also that such claims should always begin with the words “even if.”

Even if the Nazis were evil, the Jewish organisations and cliques who led the Allies were more evil.
Even if the Nazis DID invade Poland, so did the Jewish-led Soviets.
Even if the Nazis DID murder six million Jews, the Jewish-led Soviets had already murdered tens of millions of ‘whites’ prior to the Second World War.
Such weak claims are every bit as true as the strong ones above. Of course, they don’t push the dissident envelope very far. They certainly don’t attempt to deliver checkmate as the strong claims do. But that’s okay. Dissidents need to take baby steps when leading people out of Plato’s cave — and back in time, so to speak, to when the existing narratives either didn’t exist or were more easily dealt with.

Such weak claims outperform strong ones in this case because they counter the prevailing narrative without contradicting it. Most gentiles have been brainwashed over generations to strenuously resist contradiction as if it were taboo. For dissidents, direct contradiction should be a non-starter. Yet most gentiles are unaware of how atrocious the Gulag Archipelago, the Great Terror, and the Holodomor actually were. By introducing this information — and by effectively presenting the Nazis as the lesser two evils when compared to the Soviets — dissidents effectively enter the deep water of the KJE narrative, and then go deeper.

This is why the study of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has become so crucial to the Jewish Question. Most gentiles are simply not prepared to refute him. And when presented with solid data on the atrocities committed by so many Soviet Jews — during peacetime, we should add — a new vision of history gradually emerges. One not just refuting the current KJE narrative, but to augment it with more accurate information.

AN ANALOGY
The analogy of the ten-speed bicycle works best to explain the Weak Claim Paradox. Let’s say a hill’s steepness corresponds directly with the amount of time a certain narrative has had to embed itself in a people’s mind. Let’s also say that high gears correspond with strong claims, while low gears correspond with weak claims.
When we ride a bike up a steep hill, do we shift into high gear or low gear?
We shift into low gear, of course. This greatly increases the amount of peddling we have to do, but at least it keeps us moving. Whereas shifting into top gear on a steep incline is a recipe for only standing still.

By incorporating the element of time, the Weak Claim Paradox shows respect for this hypothesis and the unparalleled ability of KJEs to control popular opinion through various forms of media. If KJEs have had decades with which to embed certain ideas into the minds of ordinary gentiles, then strong arguments will likely fail and only weak ones will stand a chance of succeeding. 

Weak claims can be embedded in our very language as well. Note how, in this essay, I often use the term ‘KJE’ where most dissident authors would simply use the term “Jewish.” This, in itself, is the weaker claim because it limits our focus to a small subset of Jews rather than Jews as a whole. Kevin MacDonald makes this very distinction in the preface to The Culture of Critique when he excludes the scientific work of Albert Einstein and other early-20th-century Jewish theoretical physicists from what he calls “Jewish intellectual movement.” Unlike Freudian psychology, Boasian anthropology, or the Frankfurt School, theoretical physics did little to promote Jewish ethnic interests (at least until the late 1930s), despite how a disproportionate number of physicists at that time were Jews.

So people who’ve been brainwashed into anathematizing so-called anti-Semitism may very well plug their ears or run screaming when dissidents speak of “Jews,” as if all Jews think alike and are actively plotting the demise of the White race — which is not true in any event. But when presented with a neologism like “KJEs” — as well as with information on the Soviet gulags and terror famines — they may be prepared to listen. They have not been brainwashed against that.

The Weak Claim Hypothesis has obvious ramifications among those in the Dissident Right who investigate and promote strong claims against the primary KJE narratives. What to say to those who continue to lionise Adolf Hitler and the Nazis? What to say to those who continue to revise the Jewish Holocaust?

Should they stop? Is what they are doing counterproductive? 

Not at all. But if this hypothesis and the Weak Claim Paradox have any validity, then perhaps such research would best be consumed by those already red-pilled, so to speak. Teasing out what Hitler really meant in a certain speech or determining exactly how many Jewish inmates died of typhus rather than gas chambers in a certain concentration camp surely is appropriate for discourse among dissidents, or for pure scholarly reasons. But when dissidents reach out to non-dissidents to challenge the KJE grip on popular gentile opinion, perhaps it would be prudent not to ignore how tight that grip really is. Perhaps dissidents should consider a more gentle, weak-claim approach to set their own people free. Then perhaps the gentile masses will join the dissidents more willingly, rather than plugging their ears or running screaming in the opposite direction every time someone says the word “Jew.”