This is a guest post by Edmund Standing
Recently, BNP legal director Lee Barnes wrote a post on his blog which blamed Jews for the Holocaust. In that post, he bolstered his ‘argument’ by citing an article from the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) website. The IHR is a well known ‘revisionist’ outfit with a particular interest in denying or minimising the Holocaust. In a new post, entitled ‘World War 2 – the real war‘, Barnes is at it again.
This time, Barnes has cited (and reproduced part of) a book review from the IHR’s ‘Journal of Historical Review’. Entitled, ‘The Miracle of Dunkirk Reconsidered‘ and written by Charles Lutton, the article is a review of Nicholas Harmon’s 1980 book Dunkirk: The Patriotic Myth and concludes with the words: ‘Nicholas Harmon’s study shows that an event which has long been celebrated as one of the greatest triumphs in British history, was, in fact, a major defeat’. Given the BNP’s drive to promote ‘British Pride‘, this seems an odd article for a BNP member to be promoting, and given the BNP’s well known association with Holocaust denial, the IHR seems an odd source to be citing.
The IHR is one of a number of projects set up by the notorious American racist, anti-Semite, and Hitler supporter Willis Carto. Its website claims:
The IHR speaks factually and effectively about the Jewish-Zionist grip on America’s cultural and political life, World War II lies, distortions of Middle East history, myths about the Israel-Palestine conflict, the corrosive impact of ‘Holocaust’ propaganda, and much more – educating the thoughtful public with solidly referenced books, articles, reviews and recordings.
The kind of material the IHR considers ‘educational’ includes:
Arthur Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry which claims that ‘the Jews of Europe were not exterminated and there was no German attempt to exterminate them’.
‘My Role In Putting Down the 1944 Attempt to Overthrow Hitler‘, a speech given by the proud Nazi Otto Ernst Remer, described as follows:
Thrilling, first-person account of the July 20, 1944, attempt to assassinate Hitler and take control of Germany, and how it failed. Remer, who was commander of the Berlin guard battalion, is unapologetic about his key role in putting down the attempted putsch. From the 8th IHR Conference, 1987. An informative introduction provides background and historical context.
The IHR, then, whose journal is cited approvingly by the BNP’s legal director, promotes Holocaust denial and glorifies Nazism.
Unsurprisingly, the author of the article Barnes cites – Wayne Charles Lutton (to give him his full name) – also turns out to be ahardline racist:
In the early 1980s, he wrote book reviews for National Review, penned articles on AIDS for Christian-right publications, and won recognition as an expert on population and immigration. At the same time, writing as Charles Lutton, he got involved with the Institute for Historical Review, a pseudo-scholarly group of Holocaust-deniers. Lutton wrote for its journal in the 1980s and ’90s, mostly about military strategy, and joined the institute’s advisory board in 1985. Today Lutton serves as a trustee of the New Century Foundation, the corporate shell holding a think tank known as American Renaissance, an advocate of both scientific racism and white nationalism, and he speaks frequently at its conferences.
So much for Lutton and the IHR, but what of the book itself?
I haven’t read it (I very much doubt Barnes has either), but judging from the tiny number of scholarly citations it has received, it clearly isn’t regarded highly by experts in the field. A review on Amazon.com suggests why this may be:
Mr Harman may well have researched this book thoroughly, but unfortunately he clearly only presented the facts that suited his own case. His constant use of Lidell-Hart, an alarming self publicist, and Fuller, a notorious member of the British Union of Fascists, as major sources stand only to illustrate this point. Equally his one sided presentation of the facts regarding Churchill and Edens’ deliberations, in an attempt to promulgate the Petainist myth of ‘Perfidious Albion’, illuminates this as an unsafe revisionist version of the truth.
There’s that ‘r’ word again, so beloved of Holocaust deniers and apologists for Nazism, which brings us back to the IHR. Another author they’re big supporters of is, unsurprisingly, British Holocaust denier and Hitler fan David Irving.
In another Barnes post, which was posted on the same day as ‘World War 2 – the real war’, he discusses the reasons why Lord Justice Sedley is ‘The Most Dangerous Man in Britain‘. One of his reasons is particularly interesting: ‘Lord Justice Sedley was the man who dismissed David Irving’s appeal in his famous trial’.