But the Mermelstein case was not the IHR’s only public imbroglio during its early years. It rented the University of California’s Lake Arrowhead Conference Center for its 1981 meeting. Apparently, when the IHR applied for use of the facility, the university official in charge of renting the conference center assumed that the IHR was a legitimate scholarly group. Despite vigorous protests by faculty and students about the inappropriate nature of the use of a University of California building, the administration—with the support of Gov. Jerry Brown—claimed it could not legally break the contract. When the university learned that McCalden had used his Brandon pseudonym to sign the contract, it charged that “deception was involved” and that this constituted legitimate grounds for cancellation of its agreement with the IHR. At approximately the same time that the university was trying to find a way to break its contract, McCalden had written a letter to IHR supporters acknowledging that the entire gas chamber contest was a public relations maneuver. The university also justified its decision to cancel by citing McCalden’s admission that the contest was a “publicity gimmick.”{15}
In many respects this case represented a detour from the IHR’s primary objective. The creation of the IHR had the same objective as Arthur Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: to move denial from the lunatic fringe of racial and antisemitic extremism to the realm of academic respectability. The IHR was designed to win scholarly acceptance for deniers, which is why it was so anxious to use the University of California facility. Although the IHR and its followers proclaim that Holocaust denial is heir to a genuine intellectual legacy,{16} analysis of the institute, its publications and activities, and the people most closely associated with it throws into stark relief the fact that, notwithstanding its claims to intellectual legitimacy, the IHR is part of a continuum of extreme antisemitism and racism. Were its publications and activities not enveloped in the aura of research, they would be dismissed out of hand for what they truly are: fanatical expressions of neo-Nazism. The institute’s anti-Israel, racist, and antisemitic attitude is reflected in virtually all its activities. The organizational form the IHR adopted—a research institute—and its outward trappings may have been innovative but its agenda was not: to rehabilitate national socialism, inculcate antisemitism and racism, and oppose democracy.
From the outset the IHR has camouflaged its actual goal by engaging in activities that typify a scholarly institution. It sponsors annual gatherings that are structured as academic convocations and publishes the Journal of Historical Review, which imitates the serious and highbrow language of academia. Though virtually all its activities are concerned with Holocaust denial, the institute depicts itself as engaged in a far broader and loftier quest. It claims that its goals are to align twentieth-century history with the facts and expose the historical totems that are manipulated by secret vested interests. Primary among them are myths about previous wars. Like virtually every denier before it, the IHR professed that it was motivated by no animus toward any other group but only by a “deep dedication to the cause of truth in history.”{17} In response to the accusation that Holocaust deniers are intent on reclaiming national socialism’s reputation, the IHR protested that it was not interested in resurrecting any regime. Its interest was “rehabilitating the truth” because, unlike establishment historians, it was willing to confront the “shadowy suppressors” of historical truth.{18} Only through the exposure of historical myths that have been imposed on the United States could the country be prevented from being “railroaded” into one conflagration after another, particularly in the Middle East.{19} These remain the IHR’s claims; however, the reality is quite different.
Despite its claims to a total revision of all history, the IHR focuses almost exclusively on World War II and the Holocaust. It is, they claim, the “most distorted period” in history and the event most often used as a “historical club to bully public opinion.” David McCalden was explicit about precisely what it was public opinion was being bullied into believing. In a letter urging people to subscribe to the Journal of Historical Review, McCalden described it as a step that could not only save every American family hundreds of dollars in taxes but deliver the United States from the threat of a disastrous nuclear war. McCalden spelled out how a simple act of subscribing to a journal could accomplish these lofty goals:
Each year a foreign government literally steals millions of dollars from you and other U.S. taxpayers. This thief is the corrupt, bankrupt government of Israel and its army of paid and unpaid agents in the United States—particularly in Washington. And the theft is perpetrated primarily through the clever use of the Greatest Lie in all history—the lie of the “Holocaust.”{20}
(The Israel connection is a constant refrain in IHR material.)
For the IHR debunking the “so-called ‘Holocaust’” was far more than an act of rewriting the historical record—it had critical policy implications. Until the Holocaust was revealed to be a hoax, the future of the United States would not be secure. According to the IHR, exposing the truth about the Holocaust also exposes the secret group that controls much of America’s military and foreign policy. Relying on traditional antisemitic motifs, the IHR accused this “superwealthy” and “tiny segment” of the population of being unconcerned about the “damage and distortion” it caused the culture at large. This group—a thinly veiled reference to Jews—control the media and use it to flaunt the Holocaust as the main rationale for “America’s dog-like devotion to the illegal state of Israel.”{21}
Tom Marcellus, McCalden’s successor as IHR director, broadened this line of argument. The Holocaust lie not only served as a “justification” for the commission of genocide by Israel but also affected the rights of American citizens in their own country. Americans’ constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech was suppressed in order to protect the interests of “Israel-firsters.” But it was not just the United States that was threatened. The “very existence of Germany and the Western Culture” were also caught in the balance.{22}