THE MARTYR AND THE FOOL:
A Comparative Study
Of Gerald Fredrick Töben And David Ray Griffin

 

David Ray Griffin and Fredrick Töben are two elderly academics. Both have controversial messages, but that is where the similarity ends. Up until shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Griffin was a fairly distinguished philosopher and theologian. After taking a critical look at the American Government’s reaction to 9/11, in particular what he alluded to as 115 lies and distortions in The 9/11 Commission Report, he lost it big time and accused that same Government of actually planning and carrying out these attacks.

He is now the elder statesman of the lunatic and misnamed 9/11 Truth Movement, and has not only published a series of books on the subject, but has been greeted by this broad church and many others as a hero, a brave renegade who dares to think unthinkable thoughts and to publish unthinkable ideas.

I have read one of Griffin’s books, which I have critiqued in some depth elsewhere, and am singularly unimpressed with it.

Dr Gerald Fredrick Töben is likewise an academic, and I am sure he will not be the slightest offended if I say that purely on his career record, a very undistinguished one. Like Dr Griffin, Dr Töben has expressed skepticism about the official version of 9/11, as well he might. I have tried to extract some meaningful comment from him, but all I have succeeded in getting is his honest claim that he doesn’t know who was responsible for the attacks.

The events referred to collectively as 9/11 occurred over a period of some months. We don’t know who came up with the idea, nor do we know except in the most general terms who financed it, or who organised it, as far as it had any concrete organisation. It happened over a fairly wide area, from its conception and funding, somewhere between Saudi Arabia/Egypt, possibly Pakistan and/or Afghanistan, and Germany before moving to the United States, but although its repercussions will be with us forever, the evil deed was carried out on one terrible day at three locations: New York, Washington, and, thanks to the heroic passengers of United Airlines Flight 93, Shanksville.

In spite of that, and in spite of the many anomalies that must of necessity be thrown up by an operation of this temporal and spatial breadth, we can piece together fairly precisely what happened, in short, 19 men with boxcutters aided and abetted by others beyond America’s shores plotted and carried out the greatest ever single act of mass murder of civilians in the United States.

This plan was callous beyond all meaning of the word and a host of other adjectives besides, but at the end of the day, there was nothing controversial about it, nor should there be about us reaching that conclusion, which is supported by voluminous unimpeachable evidence. Aside from the usual conspiracy mongers and people who have their own, sinister agendas, who but a fool would dispute those simple facts?

Before you answer David Ray Griffin, you should be aware that he is not only a fool but the prince of fools.

The allegations he and many of his fellow travellers make against named individuals – not so much in his case but certainly others – amount to, among other things, criminal libel. To accuse a man of complicity in mass murder, or of being a party to it, is by definition criminal libel, unless the accuser is able to adduce compelling evidence in support of such claims. No such untainted evidence exists, for the obvious reason. Undoubtedly members of the American Government do have blood on their hands because of 9/11, but only – only! – because of the way they have used and abused it for their own ends, such as invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein, turning America into a virtual police state, and so on. None of that excuses the criminal libel.

Since shortly after 9/11, fellow travellers of Dr Griffin have made the most outrageous allegations against the CIA, the FBI, the Mossad, New York firefighters, and many named individuals, including of course the President himself as well as the Mayor of New York and landlord Larry Silverstein.

What action has been taken against these dummies? Nothing, certainly not legally. They have been debunked by both the regular skeptics movement and many others, but they walk the streets without fear, they are not hounded, spat on or fired from their jobs, and they are certainly not dragged into court and thrown into gaol.

Now compare the fate of this fool David Ray Griffin with that of the martyr Fredrick Töben. He has been subjected to both arrest and legal persecution on two continents, not for criminal libel, not for claiming innocent people were complicit in mass murder, but for the precise opposite, namely for claiming that possibly innocent people were not responsible for mass murder, and that most of the murders in that mass never actually happened, being fabricated by war time hysteria, mass delusion, anti-Nazi and Zionist propagandists, genuine error, and a simple desire to make money. Dr Töben is what is alluded to universally and erroneously as a Holocaust Denier. He is far from the only person to suffer this fate, which in his case includes arrest, imprisonment, civil proceedings and now bankruptcy.

Like the 9/11 Truthers, Holocaust Revisionists are a broad church, although you wouldn’t think so either from the mass media or from most supposedly academic studies. They are not all Nazis, cranks and raving anti-Semites. From the beginning the movement was the work of anti-Nazis, in particular of two actual victims of the Nazis, Paul Rassinier and J.G. Burg, the former a one-time inmate of Buchenwald, the latter a Jew who suffered terribly on account of his ethnic origins.

Other prominent Revisionists are the French academic Robert Faurisson and the Jehovah’s Witness Dietlieb Felderer. Of late, the Revisionists have been joined by Islamic academics and many Moslems generally, most notably on account of the December 2006 conference in Tehran, which I was privileged to attend, and also privileged to shake the hand of the man behind it, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Like the 9/11 Truthers, Holocaust Revisionists focus on the anomalies of their chosen subject. It is to be expected there will be many more of these than for 9/11. The Holocaust – whatever it was – took place over a period of years, either from the first alleged gassings at Auschwitz, or from the start of World War II (September 1939), or from the enthronement of the Führer back in 1933, depending on how it is interpreted.

The mass killings are alleged to have taken place at many locations all over Europe, most particularly in Nazi occupied Poland, and as might be expected, because it occurred during war time, and truth is the first casualty of war, there will be many outright lies told on both sides and repeated innocently by both dupes and fellow travellers.

In order to debunk the Holocaust, one must do more than simply show that one survivor is lying, one must provide an alternative narrative. So-called skeptic Michael Shermer asserts this can’t be done. He compares Holocaust Revisionists and 9/11 Truthers with Creationists. The Creationist finds a gap in the fossil record and demands the Evolutionist fill that gap. When that gap is filled, he says, there are now two gaps in the record, show me something to fill these two gaps, and so on. The analogy is of course flawed. Although Shermer has done some impressive work on 9/11 he refuses stoically even to concede that anyone, certainly any Jew has lied about the Holocaust, and ignores any evidence to the contrary. I pointed this out in July 2000 in my polemic Bigotry Dressed Up As Science... It is clear both that many people have lied about the Holocaust and are continuing to lie about it, and that the only way the official narrative can be maintained is by not only ignoring these lies but by the legal and quasi-legal suppression of the truth.

In my researches at the Imperial War Museum I found classic evidence of these officially sanctioned lies. Photograph KY 65496 in its archive is captioned “Gassed prisoners, awaiting burning, are piled nearly to the roof of the crematory.”

And where were these prisoners gassed? Dachau, of course.

To this day, the terrible scenes found at Dachau, Belsen and Buchenwald are used as the mass propaganda proof of the official narrative of the Holocaust while in more specialised texts it is conceded almost in a whisper that these were not extermination camps, something that was pointed out by Professor Butz in his classic The Hoax Of The Twentieth Century, a book that has stood and will continue to stand the test of time.

In addition to that, it has now been conceded just as quietly that Auschwitz, the mill of death, was primarily a work camp. The original claim was that four million people were done to death in Auschwitz, a claim that originates with Dr Ada Bimko, who was sent to the crematorium (the gas chamber) to collect some blankets.

Her relevant testimony can be found in her evidence at the Belsen Trial, WO 235/13, page 135. She was arrested August 4, 1943 and sent to Auschwitz with 5,000 other Jews. When she arrived, she took part in a selection at which some people were loaded onto a truck: “...I had no idea what happened to them, but later on I was told they were sent into the crematorium and gassed”.

Page 139: a man named Grzeck or Grezcks told her he “kept records and that the number of those Jews who were destroyed in this gas chamber would be about four million.”

In other words, this was a hearsay statement to the effect that 4 million people had been killed not in all the gas chambers of Auschwitz but in one room. Anyone who has seen the size of that room will realise the absurdity of that claim, an absurdity that has now been conceded by the Court Historians, because quietly and without any fanfare the official death toll for Auschwitz has been scaled down from 4 million to less than 1 million, yet according to Jewish arithmetic, the grand total still amounts to 6 million.

Dr Töben has visited Auschwitz, and in his video work has presented compelling evidence that the official narrative is not simply wrong but a tissue of lies. In one he visits a courtroom within the camp and asks the rhetorical question, if the penalty for being Jewish was death, what crime warranted a trial?

The focus of the Holocaust Affirmers has now of necessity switched to the Aktion Reinhard camps, but as Professor Butz pointed out over thirty years ago, most of what happened east of Auschwitz with Treblinka, Chelmno, the shootings on the eastern front...must of necessity remain in darkness.

The evidence adduced by Dr Töben that we have been lied to on a colossal scale is significant; the evidence adduced by David Ray Griffin that the US Government was in any way complicit in the atrocities of 9/11 is ludicrous. One does not have to be a bigot to believe either explanation for 9/11 or the Holocaust, though to believe Griffin’s nonsense it helps to be a fruitcake. The simple fact is that many people do not understand how to interpret evidence; others see conspiracies everywhere, including of course neo-Nazi conspiracies, as though the Nazis had won World War Two, and as though the Nazis boasted in popular books or on the Internet that they control Hollywood.

The contrast between both the methodologies and the treatment of David Ray Griffin and Fredrick Töben are stark. Griffin libels the living; Töben exonerates the dead. The results of both their researches can be used and abused by both foolish people and evil men, but as Bradley Smith has long pointed out, there has been and remains a massive taboo about the Holocaust. As someone else put it, it is clear “...there is a Jewish Question of world-wide importance, and that there had been accumulated around it for several generations a barricade of journalistic, political, and commercial influence, which has succeeded in destroying our freedom of speech on this one subject, by branding as anti-Semitic anyone who dares look over the barricade.” Incredible though it may seem, those words were first published in July 1926.

The contrast between the treatments of David Ray Griffin by the establishment, the media and the masses and that of Dr Töben is stark. By and large, Griffin is ignored by the establishment, not given the silent treatment, simply ignored. Incredibly, these people believe not only that they have a message the world has to hear, but that they are dissidents. I can best sum up this claim with what I told “spectacular crank” Dan Noel on August 25 this year:

“Dissidents are persecuted. Have you ever wondered why you aren’t? Why unlike certain people you can hold public meetings without being disrupted? Why unlike some you do not face legal persecution or have your books confiscated and banned?

It’s because you inhabit a world of fantasy, and the people in high places know it.

If you were to turn your engineering expertise to another field which I won’t mention here, you would become an unperson overnight.”

Dr Töben was an unperson, as were all Holocaust Revisionists for many years, now he, and we, are impossible to ignore, so instead of subjecting him to ridicule and satire – which would backfire – he has been subjected to official persecution that has now resulted in his being forced into bankruptcy.

Though his trials and tribulations have proved extremely uncomfortable, he can take comfort in the self-evident fact that when the powers-that-be hate you so much and give you so much grief merely for publishing the fruits of your researches, you must be doing something right.


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