In their espousal of antisemitism, racism, and extremism, these publications are no different from a variety of similar offerings worldwide. In fact, the articles in all of them are mind-numbingly similar. However, what is particularly disturbing about this group of publications is their interlocking network and growing source of funds.{68} In 1989 the director of the IHR protested that neither he nor any other member of the staff could offer advice as to the merits of other “patriotic movements” or right-wing groups. The IHR, he claimed, “pleads agnosticism” concerning the goals or methods of any group whose objective was not the “revision of history.”{69} This was an attempt by the IHR to maintain its facade as an independent research entity dedicated to the exposure of historical falsehoods. Despite its pronouncement, the connection between the Institute for Historical Review, the American Mercury, and Noontide Press had already been officially established. In 1980 Carto’s wife, Elisabeth, acting on behalf of the Legion for the Survival of Freedom, filed an application in Torrance, California, for a business license for the IHR. The institute, according to the papers filed, was to operate as the Noontide Press/Institute for Historical Review. The mailing address listed on the application for the IHR was identical with those of the American Mercury and Noontide Press. Some of the members of the management of the American Mercury were also officers of the Noontide Press/Institute for Historical Review. Former staffers, including David McCalden, have testified under oath that Carto had “ultimate authority” over all decisions made by the IHR.{70}
The courts have also found the IHR, Noontide Press, Spotlight, the Liberty Lobby, and Willis Carto intimately connected. In 1988 the United States Court of Appeals rejected the attempt of the IHR, Noontide Press, and the Legion for Survival of Freedom to present themselves as unrelated entities. Justice Robert Bork, in his decision dismissing Carto’s attempt to sue the Wall Street Journal for labeling him an antisemite, stated that Carto had “specifically designed the Liberty Lobby/Legion/Noontide/IHR network so as to divorce Liberty Lobby’s name from those of its less reputable affiliates.”{71} One of the main tactics the Carto network uses to keep critics at bay has been the lawsuit. It has filed numerous lawsuits throughout the United States charging defamation. The Court of Appeals noted that Carto and his nexus of organizations have consistently used the libel complaint as a “weapon to harass.”{72}
The IHR’s early loss in the Mermelstein case did not stop it from proceeding with its objectives of spreading denial, antisemitism, and racism. One of the ways it has tried to give credence to its claim that it is a research institute with a broad historical agenda is by publishing articles in the Journal of Historical Review on topics that have no connection with World War II or the Final Solution. David McCalden, in a letter sent to students on various campuses, argued that history had long been orchestrated by those who were “willing to parrot… just what the establishment wants them to,” and that the IHR was dedicated to ending this.{73} The spring 1982 edition of the Journal of Historical Review contained an article by Harry Elmer Barnes entitled “Revisionism and the Promotion of Peace,” in which Barnes argued that revisionism was dedicated to the “honest search for historical truth and the discrediting of misleading myths that are a barrier to peace and goodwill among nations.” Revisionists, as Barnes described them, were engaged in an effort to correct the historical record through the collection of more complete historical facts in “a more calm political atmosphere and [with] a more objective attitude.”{74}
The Journal enumerated a series of instances other than the Holocaust in which the historical record had also been manipulated. In need of a “revisionist” analysis were the American Revolution (the policies of the British had not been that harsh), the War of 1812 (Madison was not pushed into war but made the decision based on his own convictions), the German invasion of Belgium in World War I (the British would have done the same thing if Germany had not done it first), and Theodore Roosevelt’s role in the Spanish-American war (he ordered an attack on the Spanish fleet as part of his American imperialist and expansionist philosophy).{75} As was often the case with revisionist arguments, the issues raised had a kernel of truth to them. But the deniers proceeded not only to distort that kernel but ascribed to it a conspiratorial nature—premeditated distortions introduced for political ends. By offering alternative conclusions in each of these cases the Journal apparently believed it could lull its readers into accepting that revisions were also needed in relation to the Holocaust.
This was the objective of an article on Civil War prisoner-of-war camps. The author, Mark Weber, claimed that false reports about Union prisoners’ suffering in Southern camps prompted the North to order similar abuse for prisoners in its “concentration camps.” Weber’s reliance on Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), the euphemistic term the Nazis used for what was to happen to the Jews once they were taken to the death camps in the East, was designed to make a link in the reader’s mind with the Holocaust. Exaggerations about conditions in the South multiplied with the passage of time, as former prisoners wrote books they claimed documented their experiences. Henry Wirz, the commander of Andersonville, the most notorious camp in the South, was executed by the United States because the inmates imagined him “the cruel and inhuman author of all their sufferings.” Weber described a proposal that Andersonville be maintained as a permanent reminder of the war as “shades of Dachau” and maintained (correctly) that many prisoners on both sides had died but prisoners had not been deliberately killed. It was “bad management,” particularly in the South, which caused such extensive death and misery. In the main, Weber’s article followed fairly well-established historical grounds; only his conclusion revealed his true agenda. He drew a direct parallel between the Civil War and World War II—in both wars the victors “hysterically distorted” the conditions in the camps and branded the defeated adversary as “intrinsically evil.” In Weber’s view: “All the suffering and death in the camps of the side that lost the war was ascribed to a deliberate policy on the part of an inherently atrocious power. The victorious powers demanded ‘unconditional surrender’ and arrested the defeated government leaders as ‘criminals.’”{76}
There was one major difference, Weber insisted: “The Civil War rendition of ‘Sonderbehandlung’ never achieved the sinister notoriety of its Second World War counterpart.” Nonetheless, Weber continued, in both wars the political system of the vanquished was considered to be not “merely different but morally depraved,” and the ethics of the side that lost the war were judged “in terms of [the losers] readiness to atone for past sins and embrace the social system of the conquerors.”{77} This argument harked back to a basic tenet of Holocaust deniaclass="underline" War is evil; no side can claim the moral upper hand, and defeated parties are regularly accused by the victors of having committed terrible misdeeds. Weber’s immoral equivalency in terms of treatment of the defeated enemy was part of the deniers’ effort to cast the “myth of the Holocaust” as part of a long-established pattern of the distortion of history for political ends.