Pat Buchanan and Holocaust Denial This page contains an essay by Mark Van Alstine on Pat Buchanan's use of the arguments of Holocaust denial in regard to the mechanism of murder at the Treblinka Death Camp (One of the three Operation Reinhardt major extermination centers along with Sobibor and Belzec). Buchanan's article itself with comments from Jamie McCarthy can be found on the web at http://www.holocaust-history.org/~jamie/buchanan/. From mvanalst@rbi.com Mon Feb 26 17:02:13 1996 (A copy of this message has also been posted to the following newsgroups: alt.revisionism) In article <4gokll$qcb@d31rz0.Stanford.EDU>, rjg@d31rz0.Stanford.EDU (Richard J. Green) wrote: > In article <312E6EA2.4310@unb.ca>, Keith Morrison wrote: > > >Do you have any actual citation for that? I don't follow Buchanan to > >any extant so I have no idea where his columns are carried. Personally, > >I would *love* to know if he really said it. > > Lipstadt gives a citation for that in _Denying the Holocaust_. > Check out Buchanan in the index. Yes, indeed she does. It reads as follows: "...Patrick Buchanan, one of the foremost right-wing conservative columnists in the country, used his widely syndicated column to express views that come straight from the scripts of Holocaust deniers. He argued that it was phsysically impossible for the gas chamber at Treblinka to have functioned as a killing apparatus because the diesel engines that powered it could not produce enough carbon monoxide to be lethal. Buchanan's 'proof' was a 1988 incident in which ninety-seven passengers on a train in Washington, D.C., were stuck in a tunnel as a the train emitted carmonoxide fumes. Because the passengers were not harmed, Buchanan extrapolated that the victims in a gas chamber using carbon monoxide from diesel engines would not have been harmed." [1] In regards to Buchanan's actual comment, which was in defense of Demjanjuk, I believe it is as follows: "...The Israeli court, however, concluded the murder weapon for 850,000 was the diesel engine from a Soviet tank which drove its exhaust into the death chamber. All died in 20 minutes, Finkelstein swore in 1945. The problem is: Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody. In 1988, 97 kids, trapped 400 feet underground in a Washington, D.C. tunnel while two locomotives spewed diesel exhaust into the car, emerged unharmed after 45 minutes. Demjanjuk's weapon of mass murder cannot kill...." [2] It is worth noting here that when asked where he came by his information that deisel engines couldn't kill in the manner used at Treblinka, Buchanan said "somebody sent it to me." [3] Now what is especially interesting is that Holcaust denier Fredreich (Fritz) Berg who, besides having been affiliated with the IHR and saying that the "Holocaust story is an insane hoax," published an article about _exactly_ what Buchanan talked about in his defense of Demjanjuk: That diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill and therefore the gassing vans used at Treblinka could not have killed people. It is probably not an unwarranted assumption, then, that the "information" supplied to Buchanan was probably Berg's fallacious, and debunked, article: _Diesel Gas Chambers-Myth Within a Myth_. One other interesting comment that Buchanan has made was in reference to, as he called it, the "so-called Holocaust Survivor Syndrome." According to Buchanan, this "syndrome" involves "group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics." [2] One might ask if Buchanan also believes that U.S. servicemen who survived the Bataan Death March suffered from a so-called "Death March Syndrome?" Does he also think that those who survived it and are still living also suffer "group fantasies of martydom and heroics?" Does Buchanan think, perhaps, that the WWII "story" was a "insane hoax" as well? Or more to the point, as Buchanan seemed to find Berg such an impeccable "authority" on diesel engines that he obviously didn't even bother to check into the subject before parroting Berg's opinions, does he also, like Berg, think the "Holocaust story is an insane hoax?" Inquiring minds want to know! Mark 1. _Denying the Holocaust_ / Deborah Lipstadt, ISBN 0-452-27274-2; pp. 5-6; p.238, Note 13. Jacob Weisberg, "The Heresies of Pat Buchanan," _New Republic_, Oct. 22, 1990, pp.26-27. 2. Buchanan, Patrick, "'Ivan the Terrible' - More Doubts," _New York Post_, Saturday, March 17, 1990. 3. _Denying the Holocaust_ / Deborah Lipstadt, ISBN 0-452-27274-2; p.6; p.238, Note 14. Ibid., p.26" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties--but right through every human heart--and all human hearts." -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "The Gulag Archipelago" --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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