Confirmation Bias: Truth in History’s Most Formidable Enemy

Self-doubt and relentless scrutiny are the obligations of the revisionist scholar

www.RevisionistHistory.org

Acts 28:3-6:

“When Paul had gathered a bundle of kindling and was putting it on the fire, a viper came out because of the heat and fastened itself on his hand. When the local people saw the creature hanging from Paul’s hand, they said to one another, ‘No doubt this man is a murderer! Although he has escaped from the sea, Justice has not allowed him to live!’ However, Paul shook the creature off into the fire and suffered no harm. They were expecting that he was going to swell up or suddenly drop dead. So after they had waited a long time and had seen nothing unusual happen to him, they changed their minds and said he was a god.”

When we think of dictatorship we often think of it in physical terms of a tyrant like Stalin crushing the individuality and conscience of the people. This example appears to exonerate us from the charge, given that most of us do not possess the ability to dictate to others anywhere near to the extent of a sovereign national leader. We know of petty dictators surely, who misuse their authority over a wife or children, students, soldiers, workers or anyone in a subordinate position.

What is omitted in both cases is the original sin of our own subjectivity. Daniel Defoe expressed it thus, “Nature has left this tincture in the blood, that all men would be tyrants if they could.”

Utopian creeds, whether New Age or Communist, with their philosophies of human perfectibility, reject this truism and proceed to build cults of hippie delusion or, in the case of Mao and Stalin, mass captivity and murder.

The “tincture” in us all however, is manifested not only in the fanaticism of  mass movements that are shepherd and tethered by secular would-be saviors.

In the Book of Acts chapter 28 we observe our human nature at work. The people wanted to believe that St. Paul was a murderer and they found the appearance that lent credence to their bias, a venomous snake clinging to his hand. When the apostle harmlessly cast the dangerous serpent into the fire, the people drew a conclusion as unsubstantiated as their initial impression of Paul as a fugitive murderer: they hailed him as a god.

The New Testament is holding a mirror to our human nature, prone as we are to extremes of misperception. The lesson is that we ought to cultivate a healthy doubt in the certainty of our perceptions and withhold judgment until as many relevant facts as we can reasonably obtain are gathered, and only then draw a tentative conclusion subject to future revision.

This is the enterprise and adventure of the revisionist, an odious swear word to the ideologue who has cast his cherished convictions about the past in marble. Facts unearthed in, for example, newly discovered diaries and letters which reveal cracks in the marble are met with sneers.

Revision is an ongoing process because the profession of history is not a religion. Fallible humanity’s record of the past is not a matter of divine revelation. To illustrate the divide, allow me to digress.

Authentic Christians do indeed walk by faith in the precincts of the Word of God and those traditions to which Paul ordered us to hold fast. This is due to the grace of possessing overwhelming interior knowledge that despite one’s total depravity, one has been elected, blessed and destined by Yahweh to believe and cling to the truth of His Word (Romans  8:29-30).

This grace is humbling, in the knowledge that it is unearned clemency and not a ground for pride or arrogance.

Contrary to the doctrine of the Talmud of Babylon, our election by God is not due to any excellent quality in ourselves. It emanates solely from the Mysterious Providence of our Creator (Ephesians 1:5).

In conflict with notions of the Aryan will power of the übermensch, it depends not on our exertions, works, or the resolve of our human will. Yahweh told Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy.”

God has intervened in this writer’s life to give me the faith to accept His revelation. I can’t not believe that the Bible is the Word of God. When I was young I tried. Sins of the flesh glittered like fool’s gold. The only aspect that troubled my hedonist’s holiday was a divine voice, what Catholic poet Francis Thompson termed, “The Hound of Heaven.”

I was hounded out of the carnal inferno—compelled to leave—by His grace and mercy. People are free to reject as neurotic mystification my experience of God’s intervention. I don’t have an investment in endeavoring to overcome someone’s non-belief. It is Yahweh who chooses who will believe in Him and who will not. I can’t help you with that.

The true Christian is only absolutely certain about the Word of God

It is necessary that we distinguish between the belief of the Christian and the belief of the ideologue. True Christians are only absolutely certain about the Word of God. They grasp the fact that to apply that certainty to schools of historical thought, human philosophy, political parties, or a human being, is the mortal sin of idolatry. We observe this transgression in the false Christian who has no doubt that Zionism is ordained by God, or that Hitler was the savior of the white race, or Trump will undoubtedly restore America, or Barack Obama was surely the best president of all.

There is nothing wrong with having a limited faith in men and ideas so long as that faith is always open to newly discovered evidence that may debunk it. But as soon as we give to man the certainty of a faith that belongs only to God we become susceptible to the slough of self-deception.

The saving grace of the authentic Christian historian is that she or he approaches the study of the secular past cognizant of its mutability. I say that with the understanding that the majority of those—whether historians or not—who say they are Christians, are not. Furthermore, it should be patent that in many cases God uses non-Christians and even anti-Christians for purposes of truth and salvation. The unjust captivity of Joseph, sold to Pharaoh’s officer Potiphar by Joseph’s own siblings, set in motion the eventual rescue of the Israelites.

Confirmation Bias in the The Holocaust Revisionist (“Denial”) Movement

It is the violation of the revisionist aspiration for discovery unencumbered by ideology, that marks a large part of the Holocaust Revisionist (“Denial”) movement. What is advertised to the naive as a purely empirical investigation of that which doesn’t seem to add up concerning the generally accepted Holocaust narrative, is actually, with a few honorable exceptions, a thinly disguised movement to revive the reputation of Hitler, Goebbels and the Nazi Party.

When some revisionists first learned of my book Adolf Hitler: Enemy of the German People, they asked why I wrote it when there were already hundreds of biographies remonstrating against Hitler. Why write volume number 501 in the series?

I pointed out that most biographers with whom I was familiar had neglected to deeply investigate Hitler’s career along the three main lines of inquiry I had pursued:

1. Hitler the occultist

2. Hitler the murderer of German anti-usury campaigners

3. Hitler the gambler at the map table in his reckless, unwinnable war with Russia

I raised other points:

A. Rendering German civilians sitting ducks for the Allied air war

B. Killing many tens of thousands of innocent Jews in Einsatzgruppen-type massacres in the East

C. Imprisoning Jews, Christians, Poles and other slave laborers in typhus-louse ridden Auschwitz which is deservedly termed a death camp due to the mass deaths that resulted from the Nazis’ unconscionable indifference to human life in a closely-confined compound in the midst of a highly contagious pandemic.

I think I managed to substantiate those charges in Enemy of the German People. I have no intention of debating or defending them in the comments section of this column or anywhere else with disputants who have not read the book. My not unreasonable pre-requisite for debating my thesis is that critics read the book that contains it.

The subject deserves extended explication, not snippets in a comments section which may have a high risk of further obscuring the authentic record of Hitler’s heinous genocide, self-worship, occult conspiracy and criminally incompetent invasion in the East.

The Confirmation Bias that Denies Hitler’s Murder of Innocent Germans

Briefly I will cite the circumstances behind the murder of Gregor Strasser during the “Night of the Long Knives,” on the orders of Adolf Hitler.

In the late 1920s the platform of the NSDAP —Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (“National Socialist German Worker’s Party”) was largely written by the anti-usury campaigner Gottfried Feder whose manifestos "Das Manifest zur Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft (“The Manifesto for Breaking the Bondage to Usury”) and "Das Kampf gegen den Gott Mammon" (“The Struggle against the God of Mammon”) struck a powerful note with the German people.

This plank in the party’s platform was expertly promoted in north Germany by Gregor Strasser whose organizational skills were unmatched. It was also stressed by Hitler in his election campaigns. It  is likely that without his professed commitment to destroying all usury banking in Germany, Hitler may not have gained power in 1933. To this day Hitler’s admirers believe the tall tale that he did just that. If I had a dollar for every time I have heard it said, “Hitler crushed the bankers and ended their stranglehold over Germany,” I’d be a wealthy man.

Many Holocaust so-called “revisionists” often speak derisively of “World War II Jewish myths.” It would seem permissible for this writer to turn the tables and revise their myth about Hitler’s supposed war on the bankers. The documentary record shows that the dictator betrayed the anti-usury campaign which had significantly  contributed to his election as chancellor of Germany.

Or is revisionism only applicable when making claims of alleged Jewish fantasies? This question is an integrity issue. It goes to the heart of the employment of propaganda disguised as historical revisionism.

Authentic revisionism sleuths data without regard to the requirements necessary to the rehabilitation of Adolf Hitler and his cabal of moral degenerates, of whom Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the murderer of his own children (Helga [12], Hildegard [11], Helmut [9], Holdine [8], Hedwig [7] and Heidrun [4]), is representative.

The two-faced Hitler suppressed Judaic usury banking in Germany. This bears repeating. Hitler decided that in a majority of cases, the usury that demanded suppression was the interest on loans made by Judaic financiers. Under Hitler gentiles were generally free to obtain profits from usury banking.

With regard to usury, where are the World War II revisionists willing to set the record straight about turncoat Hitler? The vast majority have not, perhaps because their “Holocaust revisionist” movement is largely dedicated to and financed for the purpose of restoring Hitler’s reputation, and not “bringing history into accord with the facts,” as they proclaim.

In their fractured fairy tale, German gentile bankers don’t commit usury: voila, Jewish usurers were suppressed and usury mostly ended in Germany. This is comic book “history” from the vaunted “scientific correctors of the myths of the Holocaust.”

There is indeed such a thing as scientific historiography and it demonstrates that Feder and Gregor Strasser refused to cooperate with Hitler’s post-election betrayal. Initially Gottfied and Gregor continued to advocate profit-sharing, the abolition of unearned income and an end to the "thralldom of usury.” Gradually however, they arrived at the conclusion that since Hitler commanded the police, army and media, resistance was useless.

When Hitler became chancellor in 1933 he demoted Feder, his former chief economic adviser, to an under-secretary position at the Ministry of Economics. This was a token paper-shuffling position. At the ministry Feder served under Karl Schmitt, an official who adamantly opposed Feder’s anti-usury policies whereby Hitler’s popularity had surged prior to 1933. Konrad Heiden reported, "The post of under-secretary was a humiliating position…His (Feder’s) new superior was almost a stranger to the party, but familiar to the stock exchange... he was Dr. Karl Schmitt, general director of the largest German insurance company. A more pronounced representative of rapacious capital would have been hard to find; Schmitt had spent his life lending money and collecting interest…”

In a rebuke aimed at the German anti-usury economic reform movement, Hitler publicly confirmed his volte-face in a speech on July 6, 1933: "The revolution is not a permanent state of affairs, and it must not be allowed to develop into such a state. The stream of revolution released must be guided into the safe channel of evolution.... We must therefore not dismiss a business man if he is a good business man…In business, ability must be the only authoritative standard….”

Hitler’s reference to “business” did not exclude banking. Suddenly, the sole criterion for judging those so engaged was their “ability,” not their commitment to the struggle against the renting of money upon which, as Feder had rightly insisted, the reign of Mammon in Germany and the West depended.

Strasser, the skilled orator and much respected leader, quit the NSDAP. His brother Otto was a Leftist who had broken with Hitler and fled Germany. Gregor did not share Otto’s views. Gregor, a decorated World War I officer, returned to his pharmacy practice. He had no role in any conspiracy to overthrow Hitler.

Gregor, despite the fact that German intelligence knew he had minded his own business and stuck to his pharmaceutical enterprise, was a thorn in the side, if not the conscience, of Hitler. He was murdered along with other innocents on June 30,1934.

Thus, while German-gentile usury banking thrived, Gregor, who had been kidnapped from a family gathering, lay bleeding to death in an SS prison cell. The murderer who was Gregor’s judge and jury was Adolf Hitler, as the führer himself admitted in his July 13, 1934 radio speech, “I was thereby the supreme judge of the German people.”

Without so much as the pretense of a trial, Hitler had Gregor and several dissidents like him, “liquidated.” Until his cowardly suicide in 1945, the supreme judge of who would live or die in Germany was Hitler. The land of Dürer, Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Bach and Beethoven was reduced to Mongol jurisprudence, wherein a new Genghis Khan held absolute power over the lives of Germans—Jews and gentiles alike. No one is safe under a tyranny like that.

After the Night of the Long Knives killings, Feder was forced to resign from the government. He was sent into internal exile. The opposition to all forms of usury had been crushed and buried. Feder, assigned to a dead-end school teacher’s job in the boondocks, was demoralized to the point of political paralysis. He died a broken man at age 58.

No rational person free of the hypnotic cult of Hitler could take the dictator seriously as a peacemaker or statesman in the wake of his gangland-style murder of German dissidents and reformers, which the führer cunningly combined with executions of genuine plotters such as Ernst Rohm, thereby succeeding in his objective of demonizing the innocent through guilt by association.

When I conveyed this history in my book, I was told by more than one “open-minded” revisionist who refused to read it, that I ought to study SS Colonel Leon Degrelle’s book Hitler Democrat which, they asserted, proved that Hitler wasn’t a dictator.

These self-described revisionists were not stupid. They were however, crippled in intellect and spirit by confirmation bias. They could not alter their view of Hitler in light of the facts, yet they had appointed themselves arbiters of truth and falsehood regarding the chronicle of the fate of Judaic people in the Holocaust.

In Hitler Democrat, Degrelle penned the following falsehood: “During the Night of the Long Knives, also known as Operation Hummingbird, the National Socialist German leadership assassinated a group of both right and left wing political opponents who had been planning an armed uprising and coup against Hitler's government.  Among those dead was Gregor Strasser, leader of the radical ‘left’ tendency of the National Socialist German Workers Party, and former chancellors Kurt von Schleicher and Gustav Ritter von Kahr. (Ernst) Rohm became implicated in this plot…(p. 369).

Col. Degrelle merely regurgitates, on no evidence, the official line of the Nazi Party concerning the extra-judicial killing of Gregor Strasser and Catholic leader Erich Klausener. The Catholic Degrelle defamed the memory of his fellow Catholics Klausener and Gregor, and justified the foul murder of these German patriots in order to sustain the Hitlerian propaganda line.

Show us the evidence of Gregor Strasser and Klausener’s culpability, and that of the other innocents murdered during the massacre, including Fritz Beck, who was arrested and told he was being transferred to Dachau concentration camp. He was instead was shot and his body dumped by the side of a road. In nearly ninety years no such authentication has surfaced.

Hitler’s enthusiasts continue to confirm their bias in favor of the surrealistic thesis, “Hitler Democrat.” This is the encroachment of ideology on history. Communists, Zionists and Nazis perpetrate it as a matter of course. Why would those who claim to undertake the noble vocation of revisionist history compound this fraud?

Disproving The Balfour Declaration Conspiracy Theory

The Balfour Declaration and 116,000 American Lives is a persuasive and well-documented take down of confirmation bias. It appeared last November from the pen of revisionist historian Ron Unz of Palo Alto, California, and published at his unz.com website. The following are excerpts. I encourage the reader to study the author’s original article in its entirety for additional insights and its abundant links to sources not included in these excerpts. Note: the boldface section headings below are my own and do not appear in the original.

Mr. Unz deconstructs a powerful myth cherished by the anti-Zionist Right wing with judicious, surgical precision. I call it powerful because the legend contains story lines that function as incentives for percipients predisposed to believe in British and American government treachery and covert Zionist influence.

The myth about the Balfour Declaration comes gift-wrapped in an alluring box with bright ribbons, seeming to confirm what our partiality has made us believe us is the real McCoy. The problem is, it’s too good to be true.

Ron Unz writes:

“…the famous Balfour Declaration issued by the British government in 1917, (is) a landmark Zionist political triumph that somewhat ambiguously promised the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. That agreement facilitated both the heavy Jewish immigration and the political momentum that eventually created Israel more than three decades later…Our very lightly-moderated website naturally attracts a host of highly-opinionated individuals who embrace a wide range of controversial views generally excluded from more mainstream venues. So that casual reference eventually touched off a heated debate in the comments on a notorious ‘conspiracy theory’ very widespread among anti-Zionists.

“Over the decades, many…activists have become firmly convinced that the powerful Zionist movement made a political bargain with Britain, using its political clout to drive America into the First World War in exchange for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, with the Balfour Declaration merely formalizing the deal…When I expressed my very strong skepticism regarding this historical scenario, I was harshly insulted and vilified, with most of the adherents being firmly convinced that the Zionists had secretly orchestrated America’s declaration of war as a crucial means of achieving their goal of a Jewish State…with the origins of the State of Israel now very much in the headlines and the same controversy revived in stronger fashion, I’ve decided to take some time to carefully analyze and address it.”

Benjamin Freedman and Douglas Reed

Mr. Unz states further, “…probably the most widely cited evidence (for the conspiracy theory) comes from a 1961 public speech by Benjamin H. Freedman, a well-connected Jewish political activist and businessman who later converted to Christianity and became a militant anti-Zionist, strongly supporting the Palestinian cause after World War II. In a few sentences, he claimed that during the First World War the Zionists had struck a bargain with the British government, agreeing to use their influence to bring America into the war on the Allied side in exchange for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The text of his remarks is conveniently available online…

“A somewhat similar story was told at far greater length by Douglas Reed, who had spent most of the 1930s and 1940s first as a leading international journalist at the prestigious Times of London and then as a highly-successful author, with numerous international best-sellers to his credit…(in) his exhaustive, highly conspiratorial work The Controversy of Zion…

“When I first encountered these claims a year or two ago, they hardly inspired a great deal of confidence. Freedman was in his 70s at the time of his speech, recounting events that had transpired 45 years earlier, and recollections can easily grow garbled over the decades, with many of his other statements about the First World War being factually incorrect. Furthermore, the core of his presentation was his warning that newly-inaugurated President John F. Kennedy had made a firm, secret commitment to his Zionist backers to immediately invade the Middle East on behalf of Israel, an action that was likely to touch off World War III with the Russians and the Chinese. If Freedman’s explicit factual statements on contemporary events were so totally erroneous, should we really trust his casual memories from nearly a half-century earlier?

“Meanwhile, Reed’s long, rambling text was filled with an abundance of extremely conspiratorial claims, almost none of which were documented and many quite outlandish. If this constituted the central evidence for the Balfour theory, few outside the narrow fringe of anti-Zionist conspiracy-activists would probably have taken it seriously. However, as I eventually discovered, there is also a great deal of evidence from leading Zionist and British sources that tell essentially the same story.

“For example, Samuel Landman was a high-ranking Zionist leader in Britain, and in 1935 and 1936 he published various articles and pamphlets describing how the Zionists had secretly arranged to bring America into the war on the Allied side in exchange for receiving Palestine as a Jewish homeland, with the Balfour Declaration merely constituting the formalization of this bargain.

“Chaim Weizmann was the top Zionist leader who had personally played a central role in negotiating the Balfour Declaration, later becoming the first president of the State of Israel. Someone brought to my attention his 1941 letter to Winston Churchill, who had been a member of the British Cabinet at the time, which contained a key sentence seemingly supporting that story. Although the Weizmann letter is available on scribd.com, that crucial sentence was rather suspiciously censored, but fortunately the unexpurgated text is available on British Historian David Irving’s website:

“It has been repeatedly acknowledged by British Statesmen that it was the Jews who, in the last war, effectively helped to tip the scales in America in favor of Great Britain.’

“Furthermore, in a 1923 memorandum to the British Cabinet, Colonial Secretary Lord Cavendish wrote: “The object [of the Balfour Declaration] was to enlist the sympathies on the Allied side of influential Jews and Jewish organizations all over the world… [and] it is arguable that the negotiations with the Zionists…did in fact have considerable effect in advancing the date at which the United States government intervened in the war.

“David Lloyd George had been the British Prime Minister at the time, and his later private correspondence and statements seemed to support this interpretation, as do a number of other mentions or apparent allusions to the agreement that can be found in the writings and private papers of other prominent Zionists and British officials.

“Although for more than a century this explosive story has been completely excluded from almost all our media accounts and academic histories, as well as the exhaustive Wikipedia entry, the apparent agreement on its reality between Zionist, anti-Zionist, and British sources had naturally persuaded quite a few writers to take it seriously over the years.”

THE REFUTATION

www.unz.com/runz/the-balfour-declaration-and-116000-american-lives

After modestly conceding that the Balfour Declaration conspiracy theory “might possibly be true,” Mr. Unz gathers contrary recondite evidence which, in this writer’s view, refutes the theory:

“So on the face of it, there does seem to be a considerable amount of historical evidence that America’s involvement in World War I had been instigated by the Zionists in exchange for providing Palestine as a Jewish homeland, a conclusion that would drastically reshape our understanding both of the First World War and the creation of Israel. Indeed that historical scenario might possibly be true, and I’ve provided links to most of the crucial sources of information, allowing those so interested to review all the details and decide for themselves. But after carefully reading and evaluating all this material, I still think that the weight of evidence is very much on the other side.

“First, for those unfamiliar with the political landscape of a century ago, certain important points should be emphasized. Then as now, Jews were a very powerful and influential group both in Britain and in America, but Zionism—support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine—was endorsed by merely a tiny sliver of Jewry, with the overwhelming majority being either non-Zionists or anti-Zionists. As our sources explain, at the time of the Balfour Declaration there were some 3,000,000 American Jews but only 12,000, or about 1 in 250, were members of any Zionist organization.

Anti-Zionist American Jews

“Furthermore, as the Zionist leaders regularly complained, a very large majority of the wealthier, more powerful Jews were opposed to their agenda, notably including Jacob Schiff, the leading Jewish banker on Wall Street, and Adolph Ochs, owner of the influential New York Times. Elected officials from the President on down naturally paid a great deal of attention to the views of Jews who commanded money or media, but few of those individuals were Zionists. The situation in Britain was very similar, and during the Cabinet debate over the Balfour Declaration, the only Jewish member, Edwin Montagu, strongly opposed the proposal.

The WASP War Lobby

“The broader American political alignment with regard to great European war that had broken out in 1914 might also surprise many readers. A large majority of American wealth and media was still in the hands of the traditional WASP elite, many of whom had strong cultural ties to their ancestral Britain, so American support for the Allies was overwhelming from the very beginning, and this certainly included President Woodrow Wilson himself. J.P. Morgan and the other large WASP firms on Wall Street provided huge war loans to the Allies, while our previously-depressed industrial companies experienced a major economic boom as they ramped up the production of Allied munitions. Most of these groups began pressing the American government to enter the war on Britain’s side from the early days, and this pressure grew more and more intense as they realized that only an Allied victory would ensure that the huge banking loans they had extended would ever be repaid.

…this very sizable “peace camp” also included American Jews, who were totally opposed to military intervention or even favored a German victory.

“However, some other large and powerful American groups were strongly opposed to the Allied cause and had successfully blocked American intervention. This included the millions of Irish-Americans, who dominated the politics of many of our major cities and bitterly resented the continuing British colonial rule of their homeland, as well as very numerous German-Americans, most of whom were still first or second-generation immigrants. But this very sizable ‘peace camp’ also included American Jews, who were totally opposed to military intervention or even favored a German victory. This was partly because most of the wealthier, more powerful Jews were relatively recent immigrants from Germany, and still often had close family ties. For example, immigrant banker Paul Warburg had helped establish the Federal Reserve, while his brother Max Warburg had remained back home and become a leading banker and important wartime official in his native Germany.

“But an even larger factor was the fierce hostility of nearly all Jews, whether Wall Street bankers or Marxists, towards Czarist Russia, which they demonized as their anti-Semitic nemesis, with Jacob Schiff having spent decades and vast sums of money working towards Russia’s defeat and downfall. Russia was one of the top Allied powers, so Jewish bankers refused to make any Allied loans, and many American Jews were widely suspected of quietly hoping for a German victory.

“Indeed, the private correspondence of the WASP bankers desperately pressing for America to enter the war sometimes angrily denounced American Jews as their leading political opponents in that effort. To some extent, this was true of British Jews as well, many of whom also had close family ties to Germany and were deeply hostile towards Russia, so they were sometimes accused of favoring a negotiated peace. Much of this standard history of the political battle over American intervention was told in Road to War: America 1914-1917, a classic 1935 account by journalist and historian Walter Millis. This work was widely praised at the time by Harry Elmer Barnes and other leading revisionist historians, who strongly opposed our decision to go to war…

“When we consider the testimonial evidence that the Zionists had pulled the strings behind President Wilson’s decision to enter the war, we discover that the bulk of it comes from Zionist sources, with Landman’s writings in the mid-1930s being perhaps the earliest example. But political power is largely based upon the perception of political power, so ideological movements always have an obvious incentive to exaggerate their influence and past successes.

“…These Zionist claims first appeared only many, many years after the events described, and given this analysis, they count for very little. Meanwhile, the scattered supporting statements of a small number of British officials are much less specific, and may have constituted self-justification as the Balfour Agreement began causing their country serious problems in its Middle Eastern holdings.

“Meanwhile, what I found most striking in reviewing all of this material was the total lack of any supporting evidence from the American side. Surely if the nefarious Zionists had somehow managed to manipulate America into declaring war against Germany at least some Americans would have become aware of that fact and mentioned it in their writings or private diaries. Yet I found absolutely nothing.

“The explosive story was hardly complex and could be summarized in (Revilo P.) Oliver’s mere handful of words—“the desperate British bought American troops with the Balfour Declaration”—yet for decades not a single American figure seems to have mentioned it, including a legion of anti-war and anti-Zionist writers.

“The articles in Henry Ford’s series The International Jew were published from 1920 to 1922 and then collected together into four volumes that ran well over 300,000 words, which I discussed in a long 2018 article. The work provided an enormously comprehensive recitation of perceived Jewish misbehavior and hardly shied away from ‘conspiratorial’ themes…

“When I searched through the volumes, I found numerous references to the Balfour Declaration and extensive coverage of Zionism, which was strongly criticized, while Ford himself had vehemently opposed our entry into the First World War. Yet the author provided not the slightest hint that either he or anyone else suspected that the Balfour Declaration or the Zionists had been a significant factor in that decision. In fact, he was probably well aware that most of the powerful American Jews had been very strongly opposed to the war, while the Zionist Jews in this country were just too unimportant to have had any impact.

“…A critical commenter cited Hitler’s accusations that ‘the Jews stabbed Germany in the back’ during World War I, claiming that this represented the German dictator’s awareness that the Zionists had arranged American involvement in the war, thereby leading to an Allied victory. But when I checked Mein Kampf, I found no mention anywhere of the Balfour Declaration and only a handful of minor references to Zionists or Zionism, so apparently no one in Germany regarded those particular Jews as having played any significant role in their country’s defeat. Instead, Hitler’s focus was entirely on the German Jews whom he accused of having damaged the national morale, led various Communist and Socialist uprisings, and then negotiated the disastrous Versailles Treaty…”

Ron Unz has furnished his readers with a model of revisionist historiography: both sides are given a hearing, he has researched and read deeply in the archives and is cautious in his conclusions. I hope these investigative methods will serve as a template for truth-seekers, and subvert ideological propaganda on all sides of the political spectrum by enshrining a commitment to follow the trail of evidence wherever it may lead.

We Christians, who have the honor to call ourselves by our Savior’s name, ought not to be like the villagers in Acts 28, who were quick to succumb to deceptive appearances— first declaring the Apostle Paul to be “no doubt” a murderer, and then idolizing him as a deity.

I sometimes counsel my Catholic confrères who agonize over the implications of my research into the Talmudic-Kabbalistic infiltration of the papacy in the Renaissance, the usurious nullification of fifteen centuries of the Church’s resistance to the money power, and my radical questions concerning the dogma of papal infallibility—of a fundamental substantiality: have no fear—where there is truth there is Christ.

Jesus in his struggle with the Pharisees is the archetype of the revisionist historian—the patron of our efforts when we consecrate ourselves by His grace to the lifelong mission of seeking the highest knowledge of reality amid an ever-present cognition of the congenital subjectivity of our postlapsarian human nature.

Out of that consciousness comes an embrace of an epistemological Uncertainty Principle, by which we approach the claims and counter-claims of what is advertised as history with judicious exploration of as many facets of an issue or controversy as we can obtain, always questioning our own perceptions, proceeding with caution, hesitant to draw conclusions, and when we do, inclined to accept a revision when it is closer to the documentary record than our own approach.

The revisionist historian is a foe of man-made dogma, particularly in those cases where he or she may be its inventor or enabler.

In the Biblical Word of God the Christian scholar trusts. All other claims to dogmatic truth are deservedly subject to our unflagging investigation and revision.

FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF KNOWLEDGE CONTRA CANCEL CULTURE

Those sections of this study written by Michael Hoffman are Copyright©2024 by Independent History and Research

Quotations from Ron Unz are Copyright©2023 and used by permission.

We are grateful to the paid subscribers who make these studies possible.

Michael Hoffman is the author of Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, and its sequel, Twilight Language, and eight other volumes of history and literature, including The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome and Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not, as well as 122 issues of the periodical, Revisionist History®. He is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press and a former paid consultant to the news department of the New York Times. His books have been published in translation in Japan and France. Listen to his broadcasts on the podcast, Revisionist History® and find him on X (Twitter). Michael resides with his family in Idaho.

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