Afterword:
A Special Note by Jason Myers
My acceptance of revisionism occurred
at a young and defiant age, as I’m sure most people experience in high school.
Of course, few would see Holocaust denial as an opportune or desirous way to
get back at the standard-bearers, but as a student fascinated with modern
European history it presented itself as such. While I initially took interest
in denial for contrarian reasons, I spent much time studying the writings of
revisionists. As a naïve youth, without an adequate knowledge of the Holocaust
itself, and seeking to show my ‘superior’ knowledge compared to the rest of the
world, I came to honestly accept the revisionist arguments based on (what I
viewed at the time as) their evidentiary merit. Greatly influenced by the CSI
TV series popular around this time, I was quickly taken in by the deniers’
focus on technical and ‘forensic’ issues, such as cyanide residue in the gas
chambers and the remains left from open-air cremations. My revisionist beliefs
neither began nor were fuelled by any prejudice against Jews, although I
certainly recognized an anti-Semitic presence among the majority of deniers.
As the years went on, far too
confident in my own cleverness, I began to take an active role propagating
Holocaust denial on the internet.[2] In
college, on my own initiative I organized and helped found the Inconvenient
History blog, to which Thomas Kues belonged and now runs.[3] While
working on the blog, I also assisted in miscellaneous research efforts, and
helped edit the English translation of one of Carlo Mattogno’s articles.[4] I was
proud to offer such assistance, as I had avidly read and studied Mattogno’s
work.
Hopefully as all other honest and
open-minded researchers do, I kept running into ‘stumbling blocks’ that were
hard for me to rationalise in keeping with revisionist beliefs; these problems
arose from both documents (many of which have been quoted or cited in this
critique), as well as hard to impugn witness testimony. When such instances
occurred, I would search works of Mattogno, Graf, Kues, as well as other
revisionists to ease my concerns about the validity of revisionism in general.
These episodes were not initially too bothersome to me; one can’t expect
answers to everything, I thought. However, as my knowledge of historical
methods grew (I majored in history at undergraduate) and as I became more
familiar with current research on the Holocaust, as well as the evidence used
by historians to support their interpretations, the more uncomfortable I felt
about my revisionist stance.
After learning to separate the wheat from the
chaff and as I became increasingly convinced that the revisionist position was
deeply flawed, I expressed doubts about my own past positions, first in private
an then in public. As I did so, I became ever more ostracized from the blog team
at Inconvenient History, leading me to leave that blog in late 2009. One year
later, as I continued to find substantial flaws to denier arguments, I joined
the already underway effort to critique the writings of MGK. I can safely and
unhesitantly state that my abandonment of revisionism was the correct choice,
as I believe any impartial and objective look into the evidence would attest.
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