By: Kourosh Ziabari
Dr. Fredrick Toben is a German author and founder and former director of the Adelaide Institute. He has written numerous books on education, political science and history and is best known as a historical revisionist who has extensively argued the veracity of Holocaust accounts by the Jewish historians. Due to his holocaust denial, he has been imprisoned three times in Germany, United Kingdom and Australia.
This is an in-depth interview with Dr. Toben in which we’ve discussed his viewpoints regarding holocaust, the unconditional supports of the United States for Israel, the plight of Palestinian nation under the Israeli occupation and the fate of Middle East peace process.
Kourosh Ziabari: Western politician usually boast of their commitment to liberal values and democratic principles such as the freedom of speech and human rights; however, you were sentenced to prison two times as a result of expressing your viewpoints and ideas. Should the same case happen in a third-world, non-aligned country such as Iran, one can hardly imagine the extent of international condemnations and criticism that would come next. Aggregately, you spent 12 months in prison and this should be very painful. Tell us about your experiences in the prisons of Germany, United Kingdom and Australia.
Fredrick Toben: I think the best way to begin answering this question is by repeating my sometime misunderstood quip: ‘The world is my prison’. This realization has been strengthened by my regularly visiting Iran since 1999 when I left Mannheim Prison after seven months and spent a week in Teheran. I was impressed with the Iranian youth who had a strong national bond with their country, so different to the Germans and other peoples in the so-called western democracies.
This difference is one of mindset. In the West we have pushed the hedonistic-consumer life-style to the point where individuals self-destruct through substance abuse and nihilistic thought processes that suggest life is fun and games. As a teacher I opposed such a world view because the act of thinking about things is actually hard work. Admittedly, for some it is easier than for others but all of us should have to think about our value system, the guide that enables us to lead a productive and balanced life.
I was impressed how determined Iranian students are in their attitudes towards life. Admittedly, it helps that there are still some legal constraints that support a form of public modesty, something we have lost in the west. I was also impressed by the wisdom they expressed, for example, some could not understand why in the West an individual who has personal problems, as if that is an abnormal thing, goes off and pays money to a stranger who then listens to his personal problems, often about his most intimate problems. I was informed that in Iran this matter is handled by a person visiting family and friends, cousins, aunts or uncles, who then advise on how best to solve a pressing problem. I have been advised that now there is also a new growth industry – psychological counseling, which is a brain-child of the Freudian mindset, and in turn its wellspring is found in Talmud, the Jewish moral guide. It is little wonder that too many individuals cannot accept such thoughts intruding into their value system and becoming a part of their Weltanschauung-world view.
Just getting back to freedom as such, if we use the concept freedom then we must always ask the questions: freedom from what and freedom for what? In the West we have the freedom to self-destruct, this being the logical consequences of consumer society’s motor that predatory capitalism has constructed for us. I have just returned from a seven-week American tour and saw the tragedies being played out as the financial system is crashing all around and vainly trying to resurrect itself. The home foreclosures are a catastrophe, but as is fitting within the hedonistic blame-game, the individuals who received loans from banks that they could never repay are blamed for causing their own destruction. This is sad because we should be looking at the system operating in one of the wealthiest countries in the world that permits poverty and homelessness to flourish while individuals within that system receive millions of dollars in performance bonuses.
As far as my prison time is concerned, I refuse to adopt a victim mentality because that is unproductive. As Captain Eric May’s wife, Gretchen, reminded me when I visited them in July this year in Houston, as she tended to her totally disabled husband, “It’s useless to sit on the pity-pot and better to get on with the job’. That’s the imperative, to get on with the job, and if your body gives up on you, then it is the brain that sees you through. This is also true of prison itself. The authorities may have your body but they still do not have your mind, not yet. There were moved afoot to declare individuals who refuse to believe in the ‘Holocaust’ as ‘delusional’, the first step to have them psychiatrically committed. But then we know how such a story tragically ends, as in the 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jReNeEHH2lQ
In 1999 I spent time at Yalta, Crimea, where I met a psychiatrist who informed me how he had to certify insane any Soviet Union dissenter. Anyone who refused to go along with Marxism as a state ideology would be given the treatment. In Poland up to 1989 it was a dogma to believe that the Germans perpetrated the Katyn Massacre, when in fact it was the mainly Jewish staffed Soviet secret service that did it. The ‘Holocaust’ has reached this stage in a number of European countries – and we have to ask ourselves why this is so.
The usual response is that questioning the ‘holocaust’ is hurtful to the survivors and it is defaming the memory of the dead, and it is also diminishing the Nazi war-crimes and will lead to a re-surgence of Nazism. All of these reasons are baseless because history does not repeat itself in any such detail. Further, any ‘Holocaust’ trial is a mere show-trial reminiscent of the Soviet show trials where the accused is already guilty but where a confession of guilt helps to minimize the sentence. During the witch trial era a show of contrition and remorse helped to make the execution a little swifter because it eliminated torture sessions prior to being executed.
Any country that enacts such laws on the pretext of protecting the ‘Holocaust’ is perverting its legal system. The Austrians, Germans and Swiss have done it, but the Anglo-Common Law countries are resisting it vehemently because they can see that it could have a backlash on its own system of law, which guarantees basic individual rights.
But it must be remembered that all western democracies have that far more subtler mechanism of imprisonment for its people, namely the financial straight jacket. In today’s world the only value that a person needs to develop is his credit worthiness, while such things as character are irrelevant. A person’s credit rating supersedes all, until one begins to question the underpinning ideology of this financial system, which, among others, is upheld by the ‘Holocaust’ ideology.
KZ: Let’s talk about the main issue of our concern. Some scholars and thinkers believe that, in order to escape from the responsibility of hosting the Jewish immigrants who were displaced following the Second World War, Canada, the United States, Germany and Britain, planned the establishment of a Jewish state on the Palestinian land so as to get away with the burden of receiving the Jewish refugees themselves. What do you think about this viewpoint?
FT: The Second World War’s legacy is still with us to this day and that is why it is important to have an historical perspective on all this, namely that World War One and World War Two were actually a 30-year war period, which can be called a European civil war. The outcome was the establishment of the State of Israel that is quite clear when one asks: who benefited from this conflict? The Zionist program of the 1890s had come to fruition at the expense of the Palestinians. The fabricated ‘Holocaust’ narrative assists in cementing the myth that Palestine was a land without people, and the world knows that to this day ethnic cleansing continues unabated with the western democracies not lifting a finger to stop this process.
When White House correspondent of over 50 years, Lebanese Helen Thomas, was asked about the Palestinian crisis she responded honestly: send the Jews back home. Where is home, she was asked. Germany and Poland, she replied. The next day she apologized and lost her job.
It must be remembered that any kind of war is multi-faceted, as we witnessed in our time with the Iraq-Iran war, the 2003 Iraq invasion by the Anglo-American-Zionist forces, the Afghan conflict and the current intention by these forces to attack Iran.
The ideological battle lines are still national versus international, and not the false dialectic of left and right-wing politics, as Anthony Lowenstein wishes to believe. As a Jew Lowenstein opposes the Zionists but believes in the ‘Holocaust’ ideology-lies as well as in the Marxist-Trotskyist nonsense that is based on Talmud thinking.
KZ: Your viewpoint regarding Holocaust has been usually distorted and misrepresented. What’s your exact stance on it? Did the mass killing of Jews by the Nazi forces in concentration camps take place? Has its extent been exaggerated by the Israelis to attract the commiseration of the Western powers? Is it being employed as an instrument of subjugating and oppressing the Palestinian people?
FT: I follow Professors Arthur Butz and Robert Faurisson in their deliberations on this topic, and both conclude that the premise, pillars on which the ‘Holocaust’ narrative rests, 6 million Jews killed, systematic state extermination policy, murder weapon a gas chamber, cannot be sustained as being the truth of the matter. As Butz says, it is rubbish to hold such a view, and Faurisson calls it a lie. It is not for Revisionists to prove their assertions but for those who believe in the ‘Holocaust’ to prove their case, which to date has not been done. Faurisson’s challenge: ‘Show me or draw me the homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz’ has not been taken up by anyone. What does happen is legal persecution that leads to personal and financial ruin and imprisonment. That speaks for itself, and then there is the defamation of those who refuse to believe in the ‘Holocaust’ with the following shut-up words, hater, Holocaust denier, antisemitic, racist, Nazi, and even terrorist.
It is thanks to the courageous Iranian President, Dr Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who informed the world that the ‘Holocaust’ is being misused by those who oppress the Palestinian people. This linkage is fundamental in solving the crisis facing the Middle East, and only after its resolution will the area come to rest. The focus on Iran as a rogue nuclear state is a mere pretext used by the Anglo-American-Zionist powers to retain the myth of the Zionist entity called Israel.
KZ: You’ve proclaimed that Germans never gassed anyone during World War II and have no need to feel guilty about anything except for neglecting their cultural roots. We may accept the notion that Holocaust did not happen during the Second World War and was minimally a lie which the Zionists fabricated to take advantage from Europe; however, we have a number of renowned Holocaust survivors such as Elie Wiesel,W?adys?aw Bartoszewski, Eric Kandel, Jack Triemel and Arek Harsh who have retold their own accounts of those days and even seen the demise of their relatives and family members in person. What do you say about that?
FT: The fact that serious Holocaust questioners are routinely legally silenced speaks for itself. Only in the USA with its First Amendment is there still absolute freedom to discuss this topic. But even now there are moves afoot to eliminate the First Amendment, and the recent appointment of Elena Kagan to the US Supreme Court may cause this to happen.
In my book Arbeit Macht Frei: Impertinent Incarceration, I make reference to a television program, ABC Good Morning America, 18 February 2009, where a Herman Rosenblat admits he has not been telling the truth about his concentration camp experience, but for him this made-up story was truthful because he imagined it to be true! Such nonsense is well documented as typical ‘Holocaust’ material.
The above individuals would have great problems in a court of law where truth-telling is still demanded. For example, in the 1988 Zündel Toronto court case Professor Rauol Hilberg, the author of the definitive 1985 book: The Destruction of the European Jews, stated that the mentioned two written Hitler orders did not exist. We are thus led to believe that Germans began the extermination process without a plan, without an order, without anything except an intuitive feel of what Adolf Hitler wanted them to do. Such premise is a nonsense because anyone who knows how societies work and how bureaucracies don’t move unless there is a written order.
That Elie Wiesel is a fraudster has been well established and Google will produce the goods on this, but he has academic tenure, which protects him, and so the mythology will continue until he is no more.
KZ: Why does the United States support Israel so unconditionally? In actuality, Israel has been immune to all of the international laws and regulations without being questioned by any of the international bodies. It has attacked Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Tunisia since its establishment and recurrently subjugated the Palestinian people, killing the innocent civilians, destroying their homes, building illegal settlements and above all, possessing nuclear weapons in violation of the UNSC resolution 487. What would happen if any country rather than Israel had committed such inhumane crimes?
FT: Essentially, Israel embodies the New World Order that emerged out of the World War Two conflict, and this NWO is crumbling because of its own internal contradictions, something that the Iranians have recognised so well. However, the materialism that still physically sustains the western democracies is exhausting itself. This is so evident by the number of countries where US troops are stationed. This physical overreach has a negative impact on the US itself, one being that its physical infrastructure is falling apart. The Arizona effort to secure its won borders from Mexico is a mere symptom of a national resistance against the internationalism preached by the proponents of the NWO.
An additional problem to this is that the proponents of this new internationalism in the form of the New World Order requires a steady tax life-line. The aim of the carbon tax that was supposed to help us fight climate change/global warming/greenhouse effect/ozone hole, etc. was designed to give the NWO that steady sustaining tax income. It has not happened and one consequence in Australia of that failure was a change in Prime Minister. Mr Kevin Rudd was a strong proponent of this internationalism in the form of the climate change ideology. His attendance at the 2009 Copenhagen conference aimed to establish a global tax system that the World Bank or the IMF would administer.
KZ: On March 14, you quoted Herald Scotland’s reporter Rob Edwards as writing that hundreds of powerful US “bunker-buster” bombs were shipped from California to the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for a possible attack on Iran. Do you take these actions seriously? Israel and United States, over the past 6 years, have been threatening Iran with an imminent war recurrently; however, their threats never went beyond mere propaganda. Will the United States and Israel be attacking Iran over its nuclear program?
FT: The problem faced by the western predatory capitalistic war machine is the financial collapse that is built into its faulty model. The cycle is grow and bust, then plunder and recede and enjoy. The 9:11 tragedy of 2001 managed to hide one such a ‘bust’ but by 2008 there was another one and the end is not yet in sight. Countries that are reasonably self-sufficent will survive the crash, while others dependent on world markets will not.
Such economic model; was opposed by the National Socialists under Adolf Hitler who withdrew from international financial agreements because it was causing too much fain for its people. The new policy was to become AUTARK, self-sufficient and not as is the case so markedly, a network of interdependent enterprises that produce goods as cheaply as possible without having any allegiance to a community, except that of the international banking system’s set of values, which is profits above social wellbeing of individuals.
The scenario for war against Iran is a logical step within the Anglo-American-Zionist’s war machine strategic planning, and the Iraq and Afghan wars are not enough to sustain the global economy. The overreach is becoming evident as, for example, US soldiers return from tours of duty totally crushed by the hopelessness of the situation, by the conflict dragging on too long.
Such weariness is also felt in Israel where individuals cannot anymore participate in being members of an army that is administering a state. The flight of Jews from Israel to Germany, the USA-Canada, Britain and Australia-New Zealand is seriously undermining morale. It is only a matter of time that there will not be any one willing to continue the occupation. We see similar trends within the US military where aliens join up to fight and their reward is receiving US citizenship. This gives the notion of a mercenary army, as was the French Foreign Legion, a new meaning. It is essentially an outsourcing of military services, something detrimental to a national state.
The Iranian nuclear program issue, like the ‘Holocaust’ is a smokescreen that hides far deeper issues with which the Anglo-American-Zionist war machine has to come to terms with.
KZ: Do you differentiate between Zionists as the followers of an expansionistic, racist ideology whose ultimate objective is establishing a state with its frontiers spanned from Nile to Euphrates and the Jews as the followers of a monotheistic, divine religion? It’s been seen frequently said that the Zionists and Jews have been conflated unjustly. What’s your take on that?
FT: My academic training has been in philosophy and that enables me to think and work in universals, truth, honour, justice, etc. I have difficulties thinking in racial terms because I follow Carl Jung’s mindset, as opposed to Siegmund Freud’s infantile emphasis on sexual matters. Jung’s archetype thinking postulates that humans have a common denominator that expresses itself in character types.
I vividly recall my teaching time in Nigeria where I came across individuals who were eager to learn and develop their minds, and for a teacher this is inspirational. As I retuned to Australia I came across students who didn’t want to learn because for them thinking was hard work and they were not imbued with such mindset because our education philosophy is still based on hedonism, learning has to be fun. To that I say, yes, let’s have fun but then let’s also do some serious thinking, and that’s hard work.
The Jews are not a race and to have Zionists calling themselves Jewish is a contradiction in terms. It is much like Antony Lowenstein fighting the Zionists-nationalists but at the same time calling himself an atheist but also a Jewish Trotzkyist who believes in the ‘Holocaust’. Out of this Talmudic mindset emerges a victim mentality that is played to the full when it is a matter of the battle-of-the-wills. If a person does not get their way, then they play victim, of discrimination, etc. When they get their way, they become tyrannical in their behaviour, as we see the Zionists behaving in Palestine. It is the case of the man who kills his parents, then pleads before a judge for mercy because he is now an orphan.
I cannot discriminate against individuals who hold a firm and sincere religious belief, and that is why I cannot accept that being Jewish is a racist matter. For example Sir Yehudi Menuhin’s son, Gerard, who wrote the Introduction to my book 50 Days in Gaol, is anything but a Zionist and like his father opposed the settlements. In 1991 before the Israeli parliament he said, among other things:
“This wasteful governing by fear, by contempt for the basic dignities of life, this steady asphyxiation of a dependent people, should be the very last means to be adopted by those who themselves know too well the awful significance, the unforgettable suffering of such an existence. It is unworthy of my great people, the Jews, who have striven to abide by a code of moral rectitude for some 5,000 years, who can create and achieve a society for themselves such as we see around us but can yet deny the sharing of its great qualities and benefits to those dwelling amongst them.” Jerusalem Post, 6 May 1991.
Nathan Chofshi of Herliza, one of the pioneer Jewish settlers in Palestine, said in the Jewish Letter, New York, February 9, 1959: “We came and turned the native Arabs into refugees, and still we dare to slander and malign them, to besmirch their name. Instead of being ashamed of what we did and trying to undo some of the evil committed….we justify our terrible acts and even attempt to glorify them.” This is what the Zionists did to the world, which then “bowed down to them.”
This above quotations, of course raises further issues but it follows the line of reasoning that the UN Security Council gave on 1 April 1948: “The occupant does not in any way acquire sovereign right in the occupied territory but exercise a temporary right of administration on a trustee basis….”
But it’s not only the Jewish world that is at fault, and my quip: Don’t blame the Jews, blame those that bend to their pressure, still holds. For example, there are Israel’s supporters who let all this happen at the expense of the peoples them residing in Palestine.
Think of the following: The “Provisional Government of Israel” consisted of international Zionists gangsters, aliens from many foreign countries throughout the world; How could Israel possible convert robbery, looting and its acts of crime into an act of benevolence or transmit them into acts of decency and transform aggression into “peace-loving?” Many leading Americans defended and praised this atrocity. Voices such as the following were in the minority: Father Ralph Gorman, Editor of the Sign Magazine, wrote in February 1960: “We aided and abetted the Zionists and Israelis who drove nearly a million Arabs from their homes and replaced them with a million Jewish immigrants.”
The UN Charter admits as a member “A peace-loving State which accepts the obligations of the Charter – is able and willing to carry out these obligations”. This the Jews have never recognized but instead have ignored the UN and the Security Council ever since. In any case a so-called state of Israel never existed in fact or in law or in history and so it is nothing but an illegal “proclamation” and an illegal occupation of Palestinian land.
The demographic factor in this area, of course, is also of importance and were there any democratic solution drawn up in time the Palestinians would outbreed the Jews living in Israel and a solution would emerge where Arabic-speaking Palestinians would hold the majority vote. For the ultra-Orthodox Jews this is untenable because they want to be by themselves, even not associate with their ‘secular’ Jews. This latter point could develop into a societal implosion, something that has already begun with Israel relying on migrant workers to keep the country going. Add to that the legal definition of who is a Jew and many more societal problems will emerge, which perhaps will rescue the dogmatic into yielding to the inevitable – a one-state solution as proposed by Iran.
Finally: Let’s remember that the international Zionists leaders led by David Ben-Gurion committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Palestine as defined by Article 6 of the Nuremberg Charter by which the German National Socialist leaders were convicted by the International Military Tribunal and hanged…but there is a pragmatic and non idealistic mindset that aims to establish physical facts on the ground that sets a new dialectic, then physical force enables them to exercise power over others. The latest example that particularly succeeded before the lie became evident was the insider-job of 9:11, which pitted the so-called western democracies against the world of Islam on the pretext that the west is bringing freedom and democracy to the Muslim world where there is no freedom and democracy. But thinking along such lines goes beyond this current interview – and I thank you for the opportunity for giving me a say.
Kourosh Ziabariis an Iranian freelance journalist. He has interviewed political commentator and linguist Noam Chomsky, member of New Zealand parliament Keith Locke, Australian politician Ian Cohen, member of German Parliament Ruprecht Polenz, former Mexican President Vicente Fox, former U.S. National Security Council advisor Peter D. Feaver, Nobel Prize laureate in Physics Wolfgang Ketterle, Nobel Prize laureate in Chemistry Kurt Wüthrich, Nobel Prize laureate in biology Robin Warren, famous German political prisoner Ernst Zündel, Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff, American author Stephen Kinzer, syndicated journalist Eric Margolis, former assistant of the U.S. Department of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts, American-Palestinian journalist Ramzy Baroud, former President of the American Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Sid Ganis, American international relations scholar Stephen Zunes, American singer and songwriter David Rovics, American political scientist and anthropologist William Beeman, British journalist Andy Worthington, Australian author and blogger Antony Loewenstein, Iranian geopolitics expert Pirouz Mojtahedzadeh, American historian and author Michael A. Hoffman II and Israeli musician Gilad Atzmon.