THE BBC has been accused of institutional alarmism about climate change in a report published by Net Zero Watch. It reveals the BBC’s persistent exaggeration and false information when it comes to climate and weather-related news.
The study, written by me, reveals that the BBC has been forced to correct a dozen items of false claims and fake news in climate-related coverage after receiving complaints in recent years.
It shows that it has become common practice for BBC reporters to publicise exaggerated and often misleading weather-and climate-related stories in order to hype up the potential risks from global warming.
Persistent misrepresentation by BBC journalists in climate news coverage is fuelling the corporation’s institutional alarmism.
Institutional alarmism is a form of hyped and exaggerated news reporting that is deeply embedded in the BBC. It manifests itself as unbalanced, one-sided coverage of climate risks that go uncorrected by the BBC’s in-house fact checkers.
In 2020, the BBC’s director general warned that the problem posed by disinformation online was increasingly serious and that the BBC would need to work harder than ever to expose fake news and separate fact from fiction.
Since then the corporation has set up a team of fact checkers, a BBC-wide Anti-Disinformation Unit and a Climate Misinformation team. Yet none of these teams of fact checkers noticed or addressed the long list of false news stories that were corrected by the BBC only after lengthy and protracted complaint procedures.
The dossier includes the following examples of fake news:
• The three complaints upheld last year against the BBC’s Climate Editor, Justin Rowlatt, two of which concerned a Panorama episode devoted to global warming;
• Claims that the number of floods around the world has increased 15-fold since 2005;
• A BBC News report that the population of African penguins was declining rapidly because of climate change;
• Repeated claims that new onshore wind farms were ‘banned’ in the UK;
• False statements about ‘record’ temperatures;
• A BBC Two broadcast, which wrongly alleged that the reindeer population in Russia was declining because of climate change;
• Repeated claims that hurricanes were becoming more frequent and powerful;
• A World at One broadcast which asserted that sea levels in Miami were rising at ten times the global rate.
Most of the claims were so obviously and ridiculously false that it is hard to see how they made it through the BBC’s editorial process. This of course raises further questions. Is the BBC so entrenched in its own version of climate change that it believes its own propaganda, just as the Soviets did? Or do the editors and various layers of management simply not care whatever lies are published?
The above list is merely the tip of the iceberg. Many other falsehoods occur without being challenged, or where complaints are simply ignored, such as news items about how weather is getting more extreme, Victoria Falls drying up, droughts in California, starving polar bears and many more. One BBC News report baldly stated that the number of weather disasters had increased five-fold in the last 50 years – a patently absurd claim, which the organisation responsible for the database explains is actually due to better data reporting.
One of the most egregious examples of bias came in Sir David Attenborough’s documentary three years ago, Climate Change – The Facts. Despite the title, the hour-long programme had little to do with facts, more to do with propaganda. It made several highly questionable assertions, such as that ‘storms, floods, heatwaves and sea level rise are all getting rapidly worse as a result of climate change’. The documentary provided no data to back up these claims, nor did it offer the views of scientific experts who do not agree.
Often BBC reports are just outright propaganda, with the opinions of Greenpeace, WWF and the Green Party being given prominence but with very little mention of alternative views. Last year’s coverage of the proposed Cumbria coal mine by Roger Harrabin, the BBC’s Environmental Analyst, was a classic example of this.
At other times, the reporting is just silly. For instance, last summer the BBC gave prominent coverage to a report which claimed that the impact of global warming was likely to lead to ‘impaired’ performances at the Tokyo Olympics. This flew in the face of the fact that many Olympics in recent years have taken place in much hotter climes, such as Los Angeles, Atlanta and Athens.
The sheer weight of evidence presented in this paper suggests that bias is now endemic in the BBC’s climate reporting. All the factual errors noted could easily have been avoided with a bit of basic research. Is this carried out and the results ignored if they don’t agree with the BBC’s agenda? Or is the corporation’s output just made up and printed anyway without checks? Either way, this is journalism at its shoddy worst. Who is editing this fake reporting? Why are they not insisting on accurate reporting? Where are the highly paid executives who let all of this continue?
The topic of climate change, Net Zero and the total transformation of society which is demanded to achieve it is of crucial importance for the future of the country. The public deserve all the facts, not just the warped version offered by the BBC.
You can read the report, ‘Institutional alarmism – the BBC’s disastrous climate complaints’,here.
Ukraine: The Disinformation War was the title of the latest piece of disinformation the state funded British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) showcased to support Britain’s Ukrainian war and to suppress dissent on its home front.
Radio 4’s hit piece was a personalized attack on a number of British-based academics, who had been recently named and shamed in the British House of Commons for not being sufficiently Russophobic; the House of Commons is the lower house of the British Parliament; it is where Wee Joe Devlin, a member for Belfast, was beaten within an inch of his life by his fellow MPs for denouncing British war crimes in Ireland as more of his fellow MPs called for him to be summarily murdered. As several MPs have recently been convicted of child sex rape charges and more are facing trial for sexually assaulting their fellow MPs, its pronouncements should be discounted accordingly.
As, of course should those of the BBC for reasons adumbrated below and for others which Justin Schlosberg, Piers Robinson and Tim Hayward outlined in their tweets following this further attack on them by the BBC and its dark allies.
In its pretenses to impartiality, the BBC claim that these academics are so “driven by a conviction that Western governments are responsible for many of the world’s ills” that they “have shared misinformation in their attempts to raise questions about the official narrative of the war” leading “their detractors [to] say they are useful to Vladimir Putin” and for the academics to counter claim “there’s a McCarthyist witch hunt against them”.
Within that pre-cut British imperialist box, a few carefully edited soundbites from Schlosberg and their other targets, as well as a deluge of disinformation from their targets’ students and critics comprise this BBC kangaroo court by radio.
J’accuse
Hayward’s primary crime seems to be he mentioned a contentious 2018 chemical gas attack in Syria to opine that there are at least two versions to what actually happened. For the record and for reasons I address below, I believe all such attacks were orchestrated by the Syrian rebels, aided and abetted by the BBC and MI5. Hayward, importantly, is not that forthright. He believes, on the evidence in front of his nose, and as one who writes academic articles on disinformation, that further inquiries are needed to fully unmask the real culprits, whoever they may be, of the 2018 Douma and 2022 Bucha attacks. Hayward is, in essence, agnostic as, perhaps, academics and the BBC should be.
With regards to the Bucha atrocities, which I addressed in an earlier article, and which the BBC is using to attack Hayward et al, though a full investigation is likewise needed into unmasking those culprits, the British regime have vetoed such a call in the UN. But, as such an investigation must be impartial to be worthwhile, that would, of course, exclude the BBC and those they use to fatten out hit pieces like this.
Round Up the Usual Suspects
In their efforts to discredit Hayward et al, the BBC interviews James Roscoe, Britain’s UN Ambassador, who dutifully trots out the British government’s line on Bucha.
Nader Hashemi, an American itinerant academic with no Syrian connections, is wheeled out to say how horrified he is that Hayward can mention the Douma attack, “a border line genocide”, in passing and how concerned he is that Hayward’s fleeting mention of the Douma war crime might be putting young minds at risk.
Kvitka Perehinets, one of Hayward’s Ukrainian students, is wheeled out to tell the BBC’s worldwide audience, as she has already told Hayward’s academic bosses, that Hayward should be silenced. Although Perehinets’ family are currently fighting Russian speakers in Ukraine’s East, Perehinets does not make it clear if Hayward should be dispatched with a bullet to his head or simply disgraced by being strapped to a lamp post as he undoubtedly would be in government held Ukraine.
Pride of place in the written version of the BBC’s hit piece went to Hayward critic Mariangela Alejandro, a young, purple haired Mexican student with a nose ring, a baby’s dummy around her neck and a cute purple amethyst ring on her marriage finger. Mariangela informs us that she had heard Hayward was a good lecturer but that, shortly into his course. things started to get “weird” as “he goes from talking about global financial markets [and] poverty, into this realm of conspiracy theories about [Syrian President Bashar al] Assad and Russia.”
Although one of my earlier articles debunked the conspiracy theory canard specifically for instances like this, the very short clip the Radio 4’s hit piece played suggests mentioning it may have been germane to Hayward’s lecture. If, as Mariangela alleges, Hayward’s lectures were the disjointed ramblings of a conspiracy theorist (sic), then that would have been picked up by the student evaluation forms and conveyed to the university’s top brass through the students’ class rep and the Students’ Union. Even if, as I doubt, Mariangela was the class rep, it was not her place to broadcast her criticisms to the BBC and thence to the world.
Send In the Clowns
Hayward is a member of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, whose affiliates include a number of mercenary fringe thinkers, as well as the afore mentioned Piers Robinson, who has now gone on to greater things. I mention Robinson here as the BBC made no effort to discover what has become of him, even though a 60 second Internet trawl would have solved that conundrum, to Robinson’s credit.
Because there is war is afoot, all sides will have their mercenaries and their idiots, useful or otherwise. That NATO, in President Putin’s own words, is infinitely better resourced than is Russia, it stands to reason that NATO has more brown envelopes to push the BBC’s way than do opposing or neutral outlets. That is not to say that every NATO journalist or blogger is a media whore. Far from it.
Justin Schlosberg, one of those the BBC hatcheted, was attacked for citing Patrick Lancaster, an American citizen journalist embedded on the Russian side of Ukraine’s lines. But, as Schlosberg’s tweets as well as my earlier article on citizen journalists, which explicitly mentioned Lancaster, make plain, Lancaster’s work only helps us to ascertain if there is anything to be seen that warrants further investigation if, in those immortal words, anyone had been raped and speaks English. Beyond that, Lancaster is irrelevant.
Though Lancaster is not the hill academics like Schlosberg should be crucified on, it is crucial to note that the BBC and other NATO outlets repeatedly used the work of the White Helmets and related terror groups in Syria. Because the BBC, as Robert Stuart’s sterling work clearly shows, not only used their footage but were deeply embedded with the White Helmets, ISIS and other terrorists, they are in no position to cast vitriol at Lancaster or at Schlosberg for mentioning Lancaster, almost in passing.
NATO, in any case, has its own cast of clowns, amongst the most elevated of whom is Scott Lucas, who was an American professor of American Studies at Birmingham University in England, with ties to the Toran Research Center, which has major links with Turkish Intelligence and with supposedly demobbed Syrian terrorists. Lucas regularly appears on the mainstream media, holding forth on Syria and other issues he has no expertise on.
Prominent journalist Peter Hitchens noted that, when he phoned up Lucas to discuss Lucas’ uninformed comments on the White Helmets’ murder gang, Lucas hung up on him. Though Lucas is a NATO lightweight, Hitchens is noteworthy as the BBC were forced to apologize to him over their coverage of NATO’s 2018 Douma chemical gas attack and to confess that Chloe Hadjimatheou, who ran that piece and who also did the Hayward/Schlosberg hit piece we are now discussing “failed to meet the Corporation’s editorial standards for accuracy by reporting false claims”. Hadjimatheou, in other words, has long been guilty of the same misinformation offenses she tries to concoct against Hayward et al. This, remember, is the same NATO media that swore black and blue that Tom Mac Master, a bearded American academic in Scotland, was a Syrian lesbian being oppressed by “Assad” in Damascus where, like Lucas and Hashemi, MacMaster had never been in his life.
Then we have bottom feeder Eliot “Suck my Bellingcat Balls” Higgins, whom the Atlantic Council, the BBC and affiliated NATO front groups built into a citizen expert on all things military to justify their predetermined anti Syrian and anti Russian NATO narratives. Given that Eliot Higgins, Bellingcat’s founder, could not even hack the easiest course at Britain’s easiest university, the only explanation as to why MI6 and allied media outlets and intelligence agencies push Bellingcat, Bana and others to prominence is to dumb down debate to the level of babbling infants so that no one worth their salt would bother getting involved in trying to stop NATO’s war crimes. The BBC hit piece on Hayward et al is a part of that process.
This link fillets Higgins’ foolish pronouncements on the Ghouta false flag chemical attack. Dr Neal Krawetz has slammed Higgins’ et al’s use of his image identifying software, and he has called them idiots not worth spending time on. But Profs Postol and Krawetz are, like Hayward et al, forced to waste their very valuable time clinically ticking off these useless idiots, who have no relevant experience or knowledge to promote or defend the White Helmets terror gang, but who are widely cited in the BBC and similar pro-war Western mainstream media to do just that.
Nader Hashemi, the American itinerant academic, who speaks about a Syrian “border line genocide” falls into the same useful NATO idiot camp. And so too does the odious Oliver Kamm, who took a day off from running his years-long clandestine vendetta against Neil Clark and getting Philip Cross to edit Wikipedia pages he disapproves of to weigh in on this latest BBC smear piece.
Muslim Brotherhood Royalty
Tim Hayward could do worse than to get his students to survey Robert Stuart’s sterling work, which is a damning indictment of the BBC’s misinformation. Central to Stuart’s work is Dr Rola Hallam who, as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s al Kurdi family ,was the BBC’s fixer in ISIS controlled Syria.
Dr Rola Hallam is the daughter of Mousa al Kurdi, one of the head honchos in the supposedly moderate wing of Syria’s Murder Inc who was finding evidence of chemical gas attacks wherever this clown chanced to look. During BBC Panorama’s farcical show, Rola, her BBC crew and her Hand in Hand for Syria stooges (who threatened to sue me and much more) sailed unimpeded through ISIS checkpoints. Hallam/Kurdi landed the lead role in that state controlled BBC farce. The BBC’s collusion with ISIS, as evidenced by their ability to sail through ISIS checkpoints and to work in ISIS strongholds, may be a further indication that the moderate and less moderate wings of Syria’s Murder Inc, just like the moderate and Nazi contingents of Zelensky’s junta, are in bed together and that the BBC should not pretend otherwise. Something there for Hayward and his purple haired students to chew over.
Ukraine to UK Universities
Although the attacks on Hayward et al could be viewed as a BBC storm in an academic tea cup, it is part of a much wider MI5 orchestrated campaign to kill the Western mind. Olexsandra Koval, the director of the Ukrainian Book Institute has declared that 100 million books, including all Russian classics, must be removed from circulation. These would come from “various genres, including children’s books, and love novels, and detective stories”. Although Mariangela Alejandro, the young, purple haired Mexican student with the nose ring, the baby’s dummy around her neck and the cute purple amethyst ring would perchance call me a conspiracy theorist (sic) for my past defense of Masha and Mishka, there is much to learn in those lovely tales, just as there was in Soviet film, at least according to Hollywood’s own Martin Scorcese, who acknowledged Hollywood’s debt to Soviet director, montage inventor and pioneer film theorist Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, who is best known for his seminal 1925 silent film, Battleship Potemkin.
But Zelensky’s Nazis will have none of that and nor apparently will their compromized BBC apologists, whose warped minds think that there is something unclean about Masha and Mishka for no other reason than they are the creations of Russian geniuses. If Mariangela Alejandro, the young, purple haired Mexican student with the nose ring, the baby’s dummy around her neck and the cute purple amethyst ring wishes to understand what drives war crimes in Chiapas, as much as in Douma or Donbas, she might begin by looking at how everything Syrian and Russian is being marginalized, just as Mexico’s elite marginalized and murdered the Tzeltals, Tzotzils, Ch’ols, Tojolabals, Zoques, Lacandons, Mochós and Mams of Chapas.
As for Kvitka Perehinets, the young Ukrainian student, whose family are fighting Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine, as she is at a university, she might like to read some of the 100 million books Olexsandra Koval wants to torch. She could, of course, try talking to a Russian student but Russian students now, being Russian, are haram. As for the rest of us, though we must continue to call hate groups like NATO and their BBC mouthpieces to account for the sake not only of academics like Hayward who try to call them to account but even more so for the sake of young minds like those of Alejandro and Perehinets they warp and even much more so because of those unsung youngsters who die in Douma, Damascus and Donbas as a result of the BBC’s misinformation toxins.
It seems the nefarious Inquisition in Europe, which brutally sought to rid the world of heresy and political rivalry for centuries, has reignited as its new protagonists in the British national broadcaster BBC strive to silence and delegitimize any dissenting viewpoints held by academics.
In a new documentary on BBC Radio 4’s Facts on File, and also in a report based on the documentary by the BBC News, two academics, namely Tim Hayward and Justin Schlosberg, have been falsely accused of supporting and spreading “Russian propaganda” and “misinformation” about Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine that began on February 24, either through their lectures or on Twitter.
Hayward, a professor of environmental political theory at the University of Edinburgh, had re-tweeted a representative of Russia to the United Nations, who stated that the Russian attack on a maternity hospital in Mariupol on March 9 was “fake news.”
“As long as we’re still able to hear two sides of the story we should continue striving to do so,” Hayward said.
While the West condemned Russia for targeting the hospital several times with airstrikes, the Russian foreign ministry strongly rejected the allegation, branding it as “information terrorism” against Moscow.
A few days later and in the House of Commons, legislator Robert Halfon from the Conservative Party denounced Hayward and also Dr. Tara McCormack, a lecturer in international politics at the University of Leicester, who had spoken about “ludicrous disinformation” of both Kiev and Moscow.
Halfon also urged the parliament to “contact these universities directly to stop them acting as useful idiots for” Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi at the same session of the House of Commons described the said academics and the like as people who are “buying” Moscow’s “false narrative” about the war in Ukraine.
“It is a false and dangerous narrative and we will crack down on it hard,” Zahawi said.
The BBC quotes 21-year-old history and politics student Mariangela Alejandro as saying that things in Hayward’s class got “weird” when the professor stepped in the “realm of conspiracy theories about [Syrian President Bashar al] Assad and Russia.”
The British broadcaster even criticized, though implicitly, Hayward for a lecture in which he outlined an argument that the West-backed White Helmets group might have helped fake a chemical attack in Syria years ago. Russia and the Syrian government have stressed that the attack was “staged.”
The White Helmets group, which claims to be a humanitarian NGO, is known for its coordination with terror outfits in Syria to carry out staged chemical attacks in order to falsely incriminate Syrian government forces and fabricate pretexts for military strikes by a US-led military coalition present in Syria since 2014.
On April 14, 2018, the US, Britain, and France carried out a string of airstrikes against Syria over a suspected chemical weapons attack on the city of Douma, located about 10 kilometers northeast of the capital Damascus.
That alleged attack was reported by the White Helmets group, which published videos showing them purportedly treating survivors. Washington and its allies blamed Damascus for the Douma attack, an allegation strongly rejected by the Syrian government.
Hayward used an argument put forward by members of a collective of academics and bloggers he is a member of, known as the Working Group on Syria Propaganda and the Media (WGSPM).
“One narrative says the White Helmets helped rescue victims, provided evidence and gave witness statements about the chemical attack on Douma on 7 April 2018,” Hayward said during the lecture.
However, he added that “the critics say the White Helmets were responsible for staging a false flag event to spur the West to attack the Syrian government. In fact, dispute about this case is still current.”
Hayward told the BBC that he does not teach about Syria, but simply used an example in his class that he was familiar with.
The BBC, however, seems to be eager to lash out at Hayward when it quoted Dr Nader Hashemi, director of the Centre for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver and a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, as describing Hayward’s argument about the White Helmets and the staged chemical attack as “a deeply distorted set of teachings.”
Regarding Hayward’s stance on the purported Russian airstrikes against a maternity hospital in Mariupol that says “we should strive to hear both sides”, the BBC drew in Kvitka Perehinets, a Ukrainian student at the University of Edinburgh, who said “there are no two sides” to the conflict and that “The oppressor – in this case, Russia – should not be given the same kind of platform as those who are being oppressed.”
Although the University of Edinburgh claims that its programs are approved by a board of studies, emphasizing its commitment to “academic freedom”, it also stresses that it takes “a strong view… against the spread of misinformation” and encourages students to report concerns.
The university should be notified that one of the primary jobs of “academic freedom” is paving the way for academic research to distinguish true information from “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
However, the UK’s Department for Education (DfE), which is responsible for education in England, inquisitively controls the flow of research in universities, saying it expected “universities’ due diligence processes to consider the reputational, ethical and security risks of false and dangerous narratives, and ensure that students are not misled by views that are clearly false.”
When the academics’ tweets were raised in the Commons, Zahawi said the minister for Higher and Further Education, Michelle Donelan, was “contacting those universities”, a means of pressure on Hayward and the like who think differently from the mainstream in the West.
Another academic pressured by the BBC and the Education system in the UK is professor Schlosberg, who specializes in media and journalism at Birkbeck, University of London.
He has been lambasted for re-tweeting Russian state media questioning what occurred in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, 37 kilometers northwest of the capital Kiev.
Back on April 2, the mayor of Bucha in a video message claimed that 300 people had been killed by the Russian army with some appearing to have been bound by their hands and feet before being shot.
He also presented footage and photographs showing the dead bodies of those allegedly killed or executed by Russian troops, claiming that 280 bodies had been buried in mass graves while nearly 10 others were either unburied or only partially covered by earth. Later on, Kiev claimed a death toll of more than 1000 in the city.
A day later, the Ukrainian government urged major Western powers, including the United States, to impose crippling fresh sanctions on Moscow over what it called a “massacre” in Bucha, a newly liberated town at the time.
The Kremlin strongly rejected any involvement of Russian troops in the so-called massacre, with Russian President Sergei Lavrov stressing that the killings did not occur while Russian soldiers were in the city.
He added that the so-called dead bodies in footage circulating the internet were “staged” and the images of them plus Ukraine’s false version of events had been spread on social media by Kiev and Western countries.
On April 4, Schlosberg tweeted that “Russian troops left on 30th March. No mention of any ‘massacre’ or bodies lining the streets for 4 days.” He also re-tweeted a video of Bucha’s mayor speaking without mentioning a massacre.
The BBC, however, hurriedly stressed in its report that Russian media has been using the video to bolster the idea that the bodies appeared after the Russians had left the city.
It quoted the academic as saying that he had “no idea” regarding what really happened there.
“My only understanding is that I think no-one else really knows what happened. I think there is a very strong likelihood that there were very serious atrocities, almost certainly the vast majority of which were committed by Russia,” Schlosberg further told the BBC.
However, in a string of tweets on Wednesday, he denounced the broadcaster’s “grossly defamatory allegation.”
“Rather than engage with the actual meaning of my tweets, the BBC chose to uncritically endorse obvious manipulation by people who have been actively trying to silence and delegitimize any dissenting viewpoints since the start of” the current operation by Russia in Ukraine, Schlosberg said.
“The manner in which the program achieved this was so cynical and unguarded it beggars belief, even for those of us increasingly skeptical about the BBC’s commitment to basic journalistic standards, let alone its own lofty public service values,” he stressed.
Guess which article was written by a BBC journalist:
One statement… claims: “We are indeed experiencing the greatest wave of extinction since the disappearance of the dinosaurs.” While that may (or may not) be true, the next sentence is spuriously precise: “Every hour three species disappear. Every day up to 150 species are lost’”… The International Union for Conservation in Nature (IUCN) has listed 801 animals and plant species (mostly animal) known to have gone extinct since 1500. But if it is really true that up to 150 species are being lost every day, shouldn’t we expect to be able to name more than 801 extinct species in 512 years.
…
Nearly one third of all species are now endangered due to human activities… the extinction of species is now happening between 1,000 and 10,000 times quicker than scientists would expect to see… more than 142,000 species have been assessed [by the IUCN] and 29% are considered endangered, which means they have a very high risk of extinction… it is hoped that an agreement can be reached to stop what scientists are calling the ‘sixth mass extinction’ event.
Correct, whichever one you chose – both articles were produced by BBC writers. But what a difference a decade makes. The first quote came from an article written in April 2012, while the second appeared a few days ago. The first article by Richard Knight reports the statement about a great wave of extinction. But it correctly shows it as a claim, and the author then goes on to examine whether it has any validity. The evidence suggests that it does not.
The second article, from Esme Stallard, takes a different tack. The now-familiar klaxon of ecological Armageddon is sounded, with hair-raising claims simply repeated without any attempt made to question them. The claim that species are going extinct 1,000 to 10,000 times quicker is linked to a blog called Global Forest Watch. The extinction quote on the first page of the blog does not attribute it to scientists – that appears to be the addition of Stallard. Far from querying the figures, it seems an attempt is made to give them added provenance.
Meanwhile, the idea that we are suffering a sixth mass extinction is little more than the invention of climate activists, led in this case by agitprop operations like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The claim certainly isn’t backed up by dead bodies. The mass extinction scare was debunked about five years ago, at a time when it was starting to gain popular traction, by the Smithsonian palaeontologist Doug Erwin, who dismissed it as junk science. Erwin is one of the leading experts on the End-Permian mass extinction, 252 million years ago. “Many of those making facile comparisons between the current situation and past mass extinctions don’t have a clue about the difference in the nature of the data, much less how truly awful the mass extinctions recorded in the marine fossil record actually were,” he said. He went on to note that people who claim we are in a sixth mass extinction do not understand the logical flaw in their arguments. It is a “way of frightening people” since if it was actually true, “then there’s no point in conservation biology”.
The number of widespread, durably skeletonised marine species that have gone extinct, notes Erwin, is close to zero.
So how did the BBC, and most other mainstream media, move so quickly from a ‘mission to explain’ to outright green activism and, by default, the promotion of the political control-and-command Net Zero project? As with the Covid experience, we see a marked recent shift in the acceptance of alarmist official messaging and, hand-in-hand, a push for even harsher enforcement measures for the political agenda of the day. ‘Follow the science’ seems only to apply to the work of approved scientists. Social media companies are only too happy to go along with restrictions on permissible speech, while opponents are routinely traduced with terms such as covidiots, anti-vaxxers and climate deniers.
To your correspondent’s way of thinking, the true climate denial lies with the acceptance that the science is settled. Green alarmism has a long and continuing history of failed predictions, but the activists struck gold in the 1980s and 90s when temperatures rose after a fall from the 1940s. Global cooling was quickly substituted by global warming. It had a good run, but the writing was on the wall when the temperature stopped rising from around 1998 to 2010. And the slowdown continues with a current pause lasting another 91 months. Surface datasets can be adjusted, in many cases quietly upwards by 30%, pauses massaged away and record hot years proclaimed, but the jig is looking up. Bad weather can be rebranded as ‘extreme’, and mass extinctions declared to be underway, but their value is limited over time since the claims are easily debunked.
But the show can be kept on the road if the science surrounding carbon dioxide and its precise warming effect in the atmosphere is deemed settled and beyond dispute or debate. Despite 50 years of scientific work, nobody knows what happens to the global temperature if the levels of CO2 double in the atmosphere. Wild guesses that temperatures will rise by 6°C are fed into climate models, which use the politically correct data to produce constantly wrong forecasts. Many scientists suggest natural variations are far more important in determining climate, but their views are ruthlessly ignored under the ‘settled science’ mantra. Again, we see something similar over Covid. Despite being signed by many eminent medics, the lockdown sceptical Great Barrington Declaration was widely ignored in the mainstream media.
The BBC started to shutdown climate science debate early in 2006 when an internal conference, partly led by the environment analyst Roger Harrabin, attempted to redefine the editorial balance between competing scientific hypotheses. Natural forces were to be downplayed in favour of the unproven suggestion that warming is caused mostly by humans burning fossil fuel. This, despite the fact that it is generally known that humans only produce 4% of all CO2 that enters the atmosphere every year. The editorial rot started slowly at first – we can see that in 2012, work was still being published that questioned some of the extreme environmental claims being made. But by 2018, the Director of News and Current Affairs Fran Unsworth demanded that interviewees sceptical about man-made climate change “were no longer to be invited regularly”. In fact, we can read that as never.
Ten years ago the BBC was still questioning exaggerated or false climate claims. These days it is making them. As I noted on Wednesday, Justin Rowlatt claimed in his “Wild Weather” programme that deaths from warmer global weather were rising. In fact they are falling. His Panorama producer justified the statement on the grounds the deaths were “cumulative” – as though a running total of deaths would ever go down.
No need for an increase in the licence fee, then. The BBC’s income is always going up, cumulatively.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’sEnvironment Editor
Fresh insights into the techniques used by the BBC to catastrophise climate change are revealed in an exchange of letters with the producer of Justin Rowlatt’s “Wild Weather” Panorama and a former producer of Top Gear. Justifying the Rowlatt suggestion that global weather is getting warmer and more unpredictable and the death toll is rising, the programme’s producer Leo Telling said the latter figure was “cumulative”. In reply, Ken Pollock called the explanation “asinine”, and suggested Telling recognised that: “The death toll in the U.K. is cumulative. It is difficult to imagine it not increasing, if you quote cumulative figures,” he explained.
The “Wild Weather” programme, broadcast in December 2020, was an emotion-charged rant that tried to show that human-caused climate change was behind a series of recent bad weather events. It led to two internal complaints being upheld against Rowlatt. On the death toll claim, the BBC accepted that deaths from natural disasters have actually been falling for many years.
Telling then went on to argue that heatwaves will lead to excess deaths in vulnerable groups with a lower tolerance to extreme temperatures. In addition, he stated that the heatwaves will lead to avoidable deaths through wildfires.
“How can you write with a straight face that heatwaves will kill more and more people,” replied Pollock, “without also accepting that cold kills 10 times as many people every year and extra heat may save far more people?”
How do you reconcile the fact that Singapore and Helsinki have average temperatures differing by 22°C, and yet you accept that a further 1°C could spell disaster, he went on to ask.
Pollock then wondered what the Panorama producer really meant by the suggestion that avoidable wildfire deaths would increase. “You surely know that most of the Australian wildfires and those in the West of the USA were started by arson. Surely you know that the recent wildfires were nowhere near as bad as those in the West of the USA in the 30s and 40s and in Australia in the 80s, when I filmed them for the BBC, and in earlier decades,” he wrote.
In Pollock’s view, much of what Telling produced was drawn from the World Health Organisation and “highly questionable” IPCC predictions. One might expect you to challenge some of them, or at least refer to the source and the speculative nature of the predictions, he contended. Pollock concluded by noting that in his 22 years as a BBC producer, he became alarmed at the inadequate use of statistics by the Corporation in current affairs and elsewhere: “Many BBC people repeated statistics without understanding them”.
On the BBC climate desk, repeating, seemingly without question, the catastrophe claims from third party sources is a normal method of operation. In February 2019, the BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin reported the view of Left wing think tank IPPR that “human impacts had reached a critical stage and threaten to destabilise society and the global economy”. No attempt was made to examine these extravagant opinions. It later transpired that the report, which contained numerous false extreme weather claims, was part written by a young woman whose previous employment had been working as a volunteer for an Edinburgh ‘equality’ charity. Meanwhile, Matt McGrath, the first winner of the BBVA Foundation €100,000 award for climate journalism, wrote an article in July 2019 titled “Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months”. Accepting his award from BBVA, a Spanish bank with large green investments, McGrath defended the primacy of specialist journalism “that draws on sound scientific sources” in an era of fake news.
Barely a week goes by without the Net Zero-inspired fantasies of climate Armageddon being publicised from the work of academics, think tanks, meteorological operations like the Met Office and the IPCC. This latter body, heavily dependent on climate models and their to-date wildly inaccurate forecasts, is held in particularly high esteem. Writing in July last year, Harrabin looked forward to a new edition by stating, “computing will underpin the new climate science ‘Bible’ from the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) next month”.
It might be suggested that an editorial emergency is awaiting the BBC in the near future. Most of its climate reporting seems to be little more than repeating bad (“extreme”) weather events, and claiming the climate is, somehow, breaking down. In reality, global warming has run out of steam with pauses and dips common in the record over the last two decades. The accurate temperature news from satellites is largely ignored, and there is little appetite for investigating how the major global surface datasets have quietly adjusted their records to add an extra 30% of heating over the last 20 years. Most of the bad weather claims are easily debunked, and are unlikely to be so well tolerated by the wider public if Net Zero leads to substantial reductions in personal freedoms, income and diet.
Writing an excoriating report on the “Wild Weather” programme, Ross Clark noted recently in the Daily Mail that there was a time when the BBC was committed to presenting both sides of the argument. He noted a 2018 instruction sent by the former BBC director of news and current affairs Fran Unsworth, demanding that “interviewees who were sceptical about man-made climate change were no longer to be invited regularly”. He concluded: “Unsworth’s instructions had clearly become the status quo.”
Last September, Insulate Britain activist Zoe Cohen told the BBC that climate change would lead to “the loss of all we cherish, our society, our way of life, law and order”. Ross noted that it was a hysterical claim that had no foundation in science, yet she remained unchallenged. Some at the BBC, he went on to suggest, were losing patience with their climate editor. “The Justin Rowlatt stuff is grim,” an unnamed BBC source is reported to have told another newspaper. “These are not mistakes; he’s a campaigner.”
Matt McGrath is another who might care to look into some of the sources that feed his doomsday copy. Around the time of receiving his BBVA present, he published a story claiming that over 11,000 scientists were predicting “untold suffering” from the forthcoming climate emergency. Among those signatories promoting a “clear and unequivocal emergency” were Professor Mickey Mouse and Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore.
The perfect BBC climate breakdown story. Making it up, in a world of make believe.
You may remember how from early on in the Covid vaccine roll-out the former Pfizer chief Mike Yeadon, as part of his many warnings against the new gene ‘vaccines’, strongly advised against jabbing pregnant women. Not only had there been no pre-clinical reproductive toxicology testing but research on rats showed that the vaccine accumulated in the ovaries. Needless to say the BBC was first out of the traps to dismiss fears that the vaccines could harm fertility or cause miscarriages, and to target Yeadon personally. It put out a special propaganda (News) ‘reality check’ report claiming that the study showing the vaccine accumulating in the ovaries was ‘false’.
Will there be any retraction or apology now senior obstetricians are putting their heads above the parapet to report on what they have been seeing amongst their patients?
Dr James Thorp is one such, an extensively published 68-year-old US specialist in obstetrics and gynaecology as well as maternal-foetal medicine, who has practised for more than 42 years. He told Epoch Times that he sees 6,000 to 7,000 high-risk pregnant patients a year and that many complications among them are due to the Covid vaccines.
‘I’ve seen many, many, many complications in pregnant women, in moms and in foetuses, in children, offspring, foetal death, miscarriage, death of the foetus inside the mom,’ he said, adding that what he has seen in the last two years is unprecedented.
Thorp goes on to explain that although he has seen a visible increase in foetal death and adverse pregnancy outcomes associated with the Covid-19 vaccination, attempts to quantify them ‘are hampered by the imposition of gag orders on physicians and nurses’ imposed in September 2021.
You can see the full article here – it is well worth reading.
The tragedy is, as Mike Yeadon comments in the article, that ‘adverse impacts on conception and ability to sustain a pregnancy were foreseeable’. They were, and he did his best to warn us of them, but all the BBC was interested in was discrediting him.
To remind the BBC, this is what he said then, to a Truth for Health Foundation conference, about the special dangers to women of child-bearing age from the gene-based vaccines, as reported by Neville Hodgkinson.
‘We’re being lied to . . . The authorities are not giving us full information about the risks of these products . . . The first is that we never, ever give experimental medicines to pregnant women. The thalidomide tragedy of the 1950s and 60s, in which a new product for morning sickness gave rise to at least 10,000 birth malformations, taught us that babies are not safe and protected inside the uterus, which is what we used to think. Interference by a chemical or something else at a critical stage of development could lead to irreparable damage.
‘Our government is urging pregnant women and women of childbearing age to get vaccinated, and they’re telling them they’re safe. And that’s a lie, because those studies have simply not been done. Reproductive toxicology has not been undertaken with any of these products, certainly not a full battery of tests that you would want.
‘That’s bad enough. Because it tells me there’s recklessness. No one cares. The authorities do not care what happens. But it’s much worse than that.’
Yeadon said he had seen a copy of the biodistribution report obtained from the Japanese regulator. To his horror, he said, ‘what we find is the vaccine doesn’t just distribute around the body and then wash out again, which is what you’d hope. It concentrates in the ovaries of rats, at least 20-fold over the concentration in other background tissues like muscles. And a general rule of thumb in toxicology is: if you don’t have any data to contradict what you’ve learned [from the animal studies], that’s the assumption you make for humans.
‘So my assumption at the moment is that these vaccines are concentrating in the ovaries of every female who has been given them. We don’t know what that will do, but it cannot be benign and it could be seriously harmful.’
His third concern, shared by a German doctor in a petition to the European Medicines Agency eight months ago, is that the spike protein produced by the vaccine ‘is faintly similar – not very strongly – to an essential protein in your placenta, something that’s absolutely required for both fertilisation and formation and maintenance of the placenta’.
The worry was that an immune response to the spike protein might cause antibodies to bind to the placental protein as well.
There was more. He concluded: ‘I think you can only expect that that is happening in every woman of childbearing potential. What the effect will be, we can’t be certain, but it can’t be benign.
‘So I’m here to warn you that if you are of child-bearing potential or younger, so not at menopause, I would strongly recommend you do not accept these vaccines.’
Never in my long journalistic career have I ever hesitated to put pen to paper – until now. Indeed, I have delayed writing this overview of Dr. Kollerstrom’s remarkable book for going on six years.[1] Up until now no subject had been too controversial, too sensitive, too beyond the pale as to warrant more than a passing moment’s consideration of consequences. But this is different. In some sixteen countries in Europe one can be put in prison for doing what I am doing now, or even for expressing ‘holocaust denialism’ on social media. In Germany some fifteen thousand people are tried each year for Thought Crime, i.e., for so-called ‘right-wing extremism’. Here in North America it is somewhat better; one merely risks losing one’s job, friends and family – and possibly being blacklisted as a writer from virtually every venue one might have formerly been associated with. No small potatoes.
Dr. Kollerstrom, himself, stumbled rather more naively into this punitive quagmire in 2008 when, after merely reviewing a scientific paper analyzing samples taken from the walls of the alleged ‘gas chambers’ at Auschwitz, – a paper authored by one Germar Rudolf, a young scientist working at the time at the Max Planck Institute – he found himself summarily dismissed from his erstwhile position as historian and philosopher of science at University College, London (UCL), “the sole member of staff…ever to have been expelled for ideological reasons”. As he recounts,
“I became ethically damned, thrown out of polite, decent groups, banned from forums and denounced in newspapers…..I felt as if some Mark of Cain had been branded onto my forehead. I had done something so awful that we could not even discuss the matter. The Medieval crime of Heresy was back alive and well…”
Heresy, of course, implicates the notion of taboo, and what a society makes taboo is what it feels to be sacred, and what is sacred is beyond question. When dealing with the ‘Holocaust’, then, we are, Kollerstrom assures us, dealing not with historical science, but, essentially, with a religion; the Holo-religion. And as the author repeatedly points out, “There can be no science where doubt is prohibited.”
Of Soap and Lampshades
Before diving into the inky abyss of the various technical strands of argument involving documentary archives, archaeology, chemistry, etc., it behooves us first to take a bird’s eye view of the general evidentiary landscape, this both to assuage immediate curiosity, and to lend a certain clarity and coherence to the narrative.
But before even embarking on that perspectival journey, let me ask a question.
Do you, dear reader, believe that during the Second World War the Nazis plumbed the very depths of human depravity by rendering human fat into soap, of sewing human skin into lampshades and gloves and all manner of similar nightmare horrors? If you do, you would not be alone. Like many others, I believed it – and I confess, completely blindly – all of my life. But I was wrong. If you believe such, you would be wrong. It is not true. It never happened. You can take it to the bank, it is a total myth. And this conclusion is not just one reached by so-called ‘revisionist’ authors, but is rather a simple matter of documented fact admitted to and affirmed by the orthodox holo-historians themselves, e.g., the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel.
It is true that during the Nuremberg Trials such alleged items were displayed, but over the years they were all systematically debunked, i.e., found to be made of non-human animal materials, such that, as I say, no orthodox holo-historian maintains the validity of any of them anymore. Now, a critical mind, a curious mind is then led ineluctably to the follow-up query: To wit, if that isn’t true, then what else might not be true that I have been told, and that I have believed, all of my life? And this is where Dr. Kollerstrom – amongst others, naturally – bids us listen to the contrarian general case. But, then, what exactly is that case?
In a nutshell, the author is arguing that the Nazi concentration camps (some in Germany itself, most of the rest in Poland) were slave labour camps – though some of them were, as we’ll see, only temporary transit camps – whose unfortunate inmates were used in the grim service of the German war effort.[2]
Auschwitz, for instance, was located right next door to the large Buna-Monowitz industrial plant run by I.G. Farben, and which produced (from coal) much of the Reich’s synthetic oil and rubber, and without which the German war machine would have ground to a screeching halt – and whose labor force was sourced from the Auschwitz concentration camp itself. Some of them (the Aktion Reinhardt camps) were also part and parcel of a general policy established at the infamous Wannsee conference in January 20, 1942 for the systematic deportation ‘to the east’ of populations of ‘undesirables’ including Jews, Roma, communists and so forth, who were to be deposited east of the Urals once the Soviet Union had been, as the Germans confidently expected, quickly vanquished by the, up until then, entirely successful German war machine. Thus, the term ‘Endlosung’, which has been tendentiously interpreted by the orthodox holo-historians to mean, ‘final solution’, really means ‘end’ or ‘goal’ – in this case, deportation to the east, but which action was thwarted by the unexpected resistance to, and, of course, eventual failure of Operation Barbarossa, i.e., the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
But what these camps were not, according to Kollerstrom, were monstrous extermination factories that took in train loads of human beings and simply ground them up into human corpses. This image, he maintains, is a brutal and inhuman legacy that has come to haunt the Western imagination and form the foundation of a demented sacred myth that has, along with ancillary myths, come to underpin a society based on UnTruth – we are, he says, the The People of the Lie – and which has also expediently come to serve American and Western imperial interests in their truly monstrous culture of ‘endless war’.
None of this, of course, is to condone or fail to recognize the horror and injustice of the systematic detainment of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people in slave labor camps where typhus and other diseases ran rampant, and where, if not systematic killings, then certainly sporadic brutalities would have taken place. But, again, they were not, as we have been assured all of our lives, mere factories for processing humans into corpses.
So there you have it, the ‘case’. But what of the evidence?
To begin with there is the, strangely, well-documented fact that there is no documentary evidence whatsoever of any ‘plan’ by the Nazis to systematically exterminate millions of human beings. Thus, of the vast corpus of surviving documents from the Third Reich, there is not one scrap of evidence indicating any such plan; no proclamations, orders, radio transcripts, memos, memoirs – nothing at all. As Kollerstrom says, we are left believing that the engineering and operation of this vast conspiracy was conducted entirely through some form of “telepathy”.
Moreover, and contrary to popular understanding, the Wannsee conference made no mention of any such plan. Holo-historians have, instead, been forced to ‘interpret’ certain ‘code words’ from the conference as meaning other than their dictionary meaning. (Here Kollerstrom reminds the reader that it is not for the historian to impose meaning on the data, but rather to let the data speak for themselves.) Nor is there even a snippet of evidence of either a plan or anything at all to do with ‘extermination’ from the recently released, voluminous diaries of both Himmler and Goebbels. Additionally, the British historian, David Irving in his book, ‘Hitler’s War’, based entirely on primary source material, concluded that Hitler, himself, knew of no such plan (a conclusion, amongst others, which landed Irving in the docket and, like Kollerstrom, condemned to eternal damnation throughout Western society, media and academia.)
Then there is the dean of orthodox holo-historians, Raul Hilberg, author of the supposedly-definitive, three volume history of the Holocaust, ‘The Destruction of the European Jews’, who was forced by defense counsel at the 1985 Ernst Zundel trial to admit under oath that there was no documentary evidence – not one iota – of any alleged gassings of human beings by the Nazis! The latter fact is also backed-up, as we shall see later, by the Bad Arolsen Archives (which comprise some thirty million documents to do with the camps and are considered the pre-eminent repository on these matters) whose curators released a statement in 2007 saying that they had no evidence – not one document – that suggested any deaths by gassing.
But, then, what of the physical structure of the ‘gas chambers’ themselves? Here, according to Kollerstrom, the evidence is definitive: they could not have been ‘gas chambers’ (i.e., they really were showers) both because their structures (many parts of which have been fraudulently reconstructed post-war) are ludicrously permeable, and because chemical analysis reveals there is no hydrogen cyanide in their walls – whereas the walls of the small delousing chambers used to disinfect the inmates’ clothes, and which everyone agrees were used for this purpose (despite the obvious contradiction of such in an ‘extermination’ camp), are chocker-block full of hydrogen cyanide.
But what of the ‘six million’? Merely a longstanding symbolic meme that represented the traditional number of Jews in Europe and for which references for go back at least a half century prior to the ‘Holocaust’. There were no systematic attempts made nor scientific surveys done at Nuremberg to determine the numbers who died in the camps during the war nor could there have been in the timeframe before which the trials began. Moreover, the Auschwitz Museum itself released a statement in 1989 downgrading the ‘four million’ supposedly killed at Auschwitz to ‘one million’, but which revelation was never factored even then into the official count. Later, as we shall see, the Soviet ‘Death Books’ for Auschwitz became available following the fall of the Soviet Union showing that only some seventy thousand people (approximately half of them Jews) had died at Auschwitz – almost all from typhus – a number which, just happens to coincide with the numbers in the Arolsen Archives.
But what about all the ‘pictures’? The iconic pictures of piles of corpses shown de rigueur in every textbook are from Bergen-Belsen and are known to be victims of typhus, i.e., they were not victims of ‘gas chambers’ – but which photos continue to be paraded to this day as ‘gassing’ victims despite this transparent and matter-of-public-record falsification of documented fact. What are also never shown are the many extant photographs of hail and hearty inmates taken when the camps were liberated by Soviet and Allied forces.
But certainly the ‘eyewitness’ accounts are definitive? Hardly. Most of the core ‘autobiographies’ have been shown to be fakes, and the rest are largely derivative from these accounts and/or based on mere hearsay and rumour. Moreover, there has arisen an entire cottage industry of fake ‘eyewitness’ accounts and which are part and parcel of a much larger enterprise. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the ‘Holocaust’ is big business. Indeed, there is strong evidence, as we shall see later, that even such famous holo-biographies as that of Elie Wiesel are completely fraudulent. There are also numerous accounts, again which we will soon examine, by quite renowned individuals countering the official ‘Holocaust’ narrative but which continue to be routinely and entirely ignored and suppressed.
Okay, but what about the ‘confession’ of Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz and the key witness for the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials? We learn from Kollerstrom of evidence that came to light in the mid-1980s that Hoss had been “tortured for three days and nights by a British hit team” prior to his confession. And that, in any case, there are blatant contradictions in his tortured testimony that demonstrate that he was simply making up what his prosecutors / persecutors wanted to hear. Indeed, threats of either capital punishment or long prison sentences were the overarching context for the rest of the rank-and-file ‘confessions’ in a military tribunal by the victors that accepted as a pre-determined fact the reality of the ‘extermination’ thesis and denial of which could not only not be used as a defense position (a common feature, by the way, of today’s infamous international kangaroo courts / ‘war crimes tribunals’)[3] – but which legal tactic guaranteed one’s conviction! Accordingly, most defendants chose the pragmatic stance of accepting the prosecution ‘thesis’ which opened the door to a lenient plea bargain.
Anyways, enough of the cursory overview. Let’s get down to brass tacks.
The ‘Six Million’
A few months following the liberation and occupation of Auschwitz by the Soviets in January, 1945, the Soviet newspaper Pravda announced the staggering total of some four million people who had died in the camp. This figure was quickly integrated into the Nuremberg Trials without further ado. But then in 1989, the so-called ‘Death Books’ were released by Soviet President Gorbachev. These documents, which had been captured by the Soviets from Auschwitz, consisted of some 46 volumes cataloguing the individual death certificates of those who had died at Auschwitz – of some 69,000 individuals. Not four million, but sixty-nine thousand – and of whom about twenty-nine thousand were Jews, with the rest comprising a mixture of other ethnic groups and nationalities. We can only speculate as to the whys and wherefores relating to the initial, grossly exaggerated figures, though it hardly stretches the imagination to suppose that, having just lost upwards of twenty-seven million of their countrymen to the German invaders, the Soviets might not have been in a particularly objective, scientific mood, but rather in a propagandistic one.
Nevertheless, the ‘Death Books of Auschwitz’ constitute, en masse, a primary source document.
Another repository of primary source material are the Arolsen Archives, also known as the International Tracing Service, located in Bad Arolsen, in North Germany, and which are run by the International Red Cross. The latter comprises some thirty million files relating to sixteen of the camps in both Germany and Poland. These are considered the preeminent – and objective – data-base relating to the camps.
I say ‘objective’ as the rather more infamous Yad Vashem Museum archives in Israel are considerably less objective. Many of the deaths recorded there are simply taken from deportation lists and, to boot, include deaths before, during and even after the end of the war. Moreover, anyone can simply fill out a form online claiming to be a ‘victim of the Holocaust’ – a surviving victim obviously or perhaps a relative of such – without any documentation whatsoever. There is, thus, nothing to prevent multiple or fraudulent entries, and there is, as we shall comment on further in a bit, the ulterior motivational issue of filing so as to then make a claim for compensation against the German government. As such, the ‘archives’ from Yad Vashem are considered, at least by revisionist holo-historians, to be essentially worthless.
Returning to the Arolsen Archives. In the year 1979 the curators released a figure for the casualties from fifteen of the camps, and which amounted to a total of some 271,000 individuals. Then in 1984 they released a total mortality figure for sixteen of the camps which came to 282,000. These deaths represent all of the deaths in the camps excepting those of the Aktion Reinhardt camps (which comprise Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec), which latter were considered to be mere transit camps – but which we shall discuss later on in relation to the archaeological controversy surrounding them. Both the ‘Death Books’ and the Arolsen archives largely agree on the number of Jews who died at Auschwitz, some 30,000 in all – representing less than half the total deaths. Needless to say, these sorts of figures did not go over well in a country, Germany, that had ruled holocaust denialism to be a criminal offense. Accordingly, and as Kollerstrom relates,
“No 21st century statement has ever come out of the Arolsen Archives concerning their total figures. It would just be too risky: the criminal offense of ‘Denying the Holocaust’ in Germany includes, ‘downplaying or trivializing the crimes of National-Socialism’. That law does not specify what exactly would constitute those crimes! Not surprisingly, the Arolsen managers have not dared to make any such statement. (It may also be the case that they have received orders not to make any tallies any more…)”
Nevertheless, in 2006 the managers did release a statement relating to the numbers of those who had died of gassing: there were none, or rather, they had no records of there being any victims of gassing – at all. The ensuing controversy was enough for them to beat a hasty retreat and no further statements have been forthcoming. (We will not be so reticent, but soon discuss the matter thoroughly under the section on ‘science’.)
The official figures for total mortality in each of the camps, however, continue to fluctuate – often wildly, depending on which ‘eyewitness’ account or official pronouncement is prominent at the moment – but mostly downwardly. Thus, whereas the figures for Dachau right after the war numbered some 238,000 deaths, the total today stands at 20,600. This lowering by a factor of ten seems to be heading in the direction indicated by the primary source archives. But what then of the ‘six million’ figure? Surely the initial ‘four million’ proffered by the Soviets at Nuremberg would have played into the grand total. But why exactly ‘six’? Why not seven or eight – or five? And here the author begs us take note of a very peculiar fact: To wit, the undeniable prior existence of a longstanding meme involving precisely the ‘six million’ figure. As Kollerstrom relates,
“So, whence came that totemic number? It began in America around 1900 as a fundraising stunt, and then kept pulsing through the twentieth century like some Hellish mantra. Here are some 166 references, 1900 – 1945. They are overwhelmingly American. At the dawn of the 20th century, the ‘suffering’ of six million Jews became an argument in favour of the new Zionist project…. It helped fundraising, with the number being cited as the total number of Jews in Europe. During World War I it was always six million Jews who were starving, in need of rescue, etc.”
And thence the author dutifully lists 166 references. It is worth taking a brief gander at a few of them, just to get the feel of the matter:
1906 – New York Times, 25 March 1906: “… the condition and future of Russia’s 6,000,000 Jews were made on March 12 in Berlin to the annual meeting of the Central Jewish Relief League of Germany by Dr. Paul Nathan… He left St. Petersburg with the firm conviction that the Russian Government’s studied policy for the “solution” of the Jewish question is systematic and murderous extermination.”
1913 – Fort Wayne Journal Gazette (Ind.), 18 October 1913, page 4: “There are six million Jews in Russia and the government is anxious to annihilate them by methods that provoke protests from the civilized world.”
1915 – New York Tribune, 14 October 1915: “What the Turks are doing to the Armenians is child’s play compared to what Russia is doing to six million Jews, her own subjects.”
1918 – New York Times, 18 October 1918: “Six million Souls Will Need Help to Resume Normal Life When War Is Ended… Committee of American Jews Lays Plans for the Greatest Humanitarian Task in History… 6,000,000 Jews Need Help.”
1919 – San Antonio Express, 9 April 1919, page 12: “At no other time in the history of the Jewish people has the need been so great as now. Six million of our brothers and sisters are dying of starvation. The entire race is threatened with extinction.”
1921 – New York Times, 20 July 1921, page 2: “BEGS AMERICA SAVE 6,000,000 IN RUSSIA. Russia’s 6,000,000 Jews are facing extermination by massacre.”
1926 – Encyclopedia Britannica, 13th Edition, Vol. 1, 1926, page 145: “While there remain in Russia and Romania over six millions of Jews who are being systematically degraded…”
1931 – The Montreal Gazette, 28 December 1931, page 25: “SIX MILLION JEWS FACE STARVATION,… FEARS CRISIS AT HAND… six million Jews in Eastern Europe face starvation, and even worse, during the coming winter.”
And so on and so forth, for 166 entries.
As mentioned earlier, no attempt was made at Nuremberg to factually determine the total number of people who had died in the camps during the war. Thus, as clearly affirmed by the French historian Vincent Reynouard, “At Nuremberg, no statistical survey was ever undertaken … to determine the number of missing Jews.” What the Trials did rely on (apart from Hoss’ testimony relating to Auschwitz only) was a statement given by SS agent Wilhelm Hottl who testified, on condition of his life being spared, that he had once heard such a story from Adolf Eichmann (attesting to the ‘six million’), in August 1944, but which Eichmann later denied. As Kollerstrom remarks, “That was all! And thereby the magic number came to infest all of our minds.”
We have briefly inspected two primary source documents, namely the ‘Auschwitz Death Books’ and the Arolsen Archives, but there are more.
In the mid-1990s the British Intelligence Decrypts from Bletchley Park were released. These documents comprise the radio intercepts from Auschwitz made possible by the famous breaking of the German Enigma code. The decrypts covered the crucial thirteen-month period from January, 1942 to the end of January, 1943. They record daily arrivals and departures of inmates, shipments of coal and coke etc. Expectant hands combed these priceless archives for what, it was thought, would undoubtedly reveal prima facie evidence of the great crime. It was, however, merely a great embarrassment when no such evidence was forthcoming. Not a crumb.
What these transcripts do speak to are the daily comings and goings of inmates to the giant Buna-Monowitz industrial plant just two miles east of Auschwitz. Thus, one entry records,
“The use of prisoners for war industries on a large scale is discussed below… the largest transference is the move of Jews to AUSCHWITZ for the synthetic rubber works. Another major movement is the transference of sick prisoners to DACHAU.”
They also mention a major outbreak of typhus in the summer of 1942 and measures to contain it. Thus, this quote from the January 1943 summary about Auschwitz,
“The Bunawerk is still employing 2210 men of whom 1100 are on the actual work. Jewish watchmakers are sent to SACHSENHAUSEN where they are urgently needed. Typhus cases continue to be reported although strenuous measures have been adopted and 36 cases were found among the new batch of prisoners on 22 Jan.”
But no evidence of mass killings.
Indeed, there is a fourth primary source archive, to do with the intact coke records from Auschwitz, but one which we shall cover in the next section.
Finally, the ‘six million’ number is not completely without import, as it does register, ironically, according to the author, as roughly the number of ‘holocaust survivors’ who have sued for indemnity claims from the German government post war. In fact, some 4.3 million claims have been paid out amounting to some one hundred billion deutschmarks. It is, then, worth noting at this point that, according to most revisionist authors, the number of Jews under German control in all of the occupied territories never numbered more than 4.5 million, though Kollerstrom sets the figure somewhat lower at 3.5 million.
Now, does this mean that the number of inmates who died in the camps was a ‘mere’ 300,000 or so? Not necessarily. The records from the Aktion Reinhardt camps, being mostly transit camps, have not been preserved and there would likely have been deaths that were not recorded. To give some further perspective on this matter and, possibly, to set some sort of upper bound to the numbers, I cite here yet another revisionist author, Peter Winter, who in his book, ‘The Six Million: Fact or Fiction’[4] cites a quote by Stephen F. Pinter, who served as a lawyer for the US State Department in the occupation forces in Germany for six years after the war, and who made this statement to the Catholic magazine Our Sunday Visitor, June 14th, 1959:
“I was in Dachau for 17 months after the war, as a US War Department Attorney, and can state that there was no gas chamber at Dachau. What was shown to visitors and sightseers there and erroneously described as a gas chamber was a crematory. Nor was there a gas chamber in any of the other concentration camps in Germany… From what I was able to determine during six postwar years in Germany and Austria, there were a number of Jews killed, but the figure of a million was certainly never reached. I interviewed thousands of Jews, former inmates of concentration camps in Germany and Austria, and consider myself as well qualified as any man on the subject.”
The mention of ‘crematory’ is, just in passing, significant as most of the camps had them – just as many hospitals and prisons have them to this day. Thus, the mere fact of having crematoria does not in any way whatsoever speak to the notion of ‘gas chambers’. Indeed, for a camp like Auschwitz, situated as it was on swampy ground with a very high water-table, the few that it did have would have been indispensable in disposing of anyone who died there – but only within certain very limited bounds as we’ll see in coming to terms with how much fuel, effort and time it takes to cremate a body.
As for the total numbers, for the moment I think that we need be circumspect and say that, with our present knowledge, these likely range somewhere between 300,000 to perhaps twice that – and which figures would include, of course, all inmates, not just Jews. It would be nice as Kollerstrom points out to be able to do further research on this matter, but given that access to the relevant archives is, effectively, prohibited, and where even attempting to do so is considered a crime or invites career suicide, the prospects for such are, at present, hardly sanguine.
Also, and to lend some perspective on this ‘numbers game’, I reference my own journalistic experience in researching and writing about more modern conflicts. Thus, one of my very first essays as a young, independent journalist was for the Toronto Star in which article I discussed the ‘killing fields’ of Cambodia and in which I demolished the official figure of ‘two million’ victims – which yet stands to this day – showing that it arose from just one Italian journalist who later recanted the figure! The true numbers were more likely in the 400,000 range with US propagandists having simply lumped onto the Khmer Rouge scorecard the numbers who died from starvation due to the US ‘secret bombing of Cambodia’ itself. But, again, no one really knows for certain. Just as no one really seems to know how many died in the Korean or Vietnam Wars, or the great US-backed Indonesian massacre of 1965 (the ‘year of living dangerously’ indeed). Figures routinely cited regarding those conflicts vary, depending on the source, literally over millions of human beings!
The same is true today regarding Iraq and other very recent, Western imperial conflicts (dare we all them ‘holocausts’?). It is certainly important to attempt to establish firm figures, both as these represent individual human lives lost, and as these figures are opportunistically used for ideological purposes. But we must, at the end of the day, remain humble before the task set us and, oft as not, be willing to live with uncertainty – whilst yet continuing to press our investigations further.
With that caveat, let us continue with our present inquiry.
In the introduction to ‘Breaking the Spell’, the author reminds us that the ‘Holocaust’ represents a “triune” thesis, i.e., involving a totemic number (the ‘six million’), a diabolical ‘plan’ (to deliberately exterminate an entire ethnic group, the Jews) – and a ruthless ‘methodology’ (‘gassing’ using the infamous ‘Zyklon B’). We have addressed the first two of these sub-theses, and it is to the third that we now turn our investigative attention.
Science Goes to Auschwitz
As Kollerstrom recounts, a turning point in the history of Holocaust Revisionism came in 1985 when the Canadian, Ernst Zundel, was charged with publishing the best-selling booklet, ‘Did Six Million Really Die?’. At his trial he was fortunate, according to the author, to be assisted by the ‘maestro of modern Revisionism’, Robert Faurisson, and together they sought the assistance of the, then, dean of American execution technology, Fred Leuchter, whose especial expertise was in gas chamber design.
In February of 1988, Leuchter was dispatched by Zundel to travel to Auschwitz/Birkenau (and Majdanek) where he, first, studied the archives of the Auschwitz Museum to learn exactly where the alleged ‘gas chambers’ were located; second, inspected the structures through the lens of his own expertise on gassing; and, finally, collected (illegally) thirty or so samples from the walls of the ‘gas chambers’ and from random ancillary structures at Auschwitz, and one sample from one of the much smaller delousing chambers. These samples were then submitted, upon his return, to a firm, Alpha Analytical Laboratories (who had no knowledge of where the samples had come from and who were horrified when they eventually found out), to be analyzed for traces of iron cyanide.
The latter compound is particularly relevant here as hydrogen cyanide is normally fairly short lived on surfaces – unless it happens to bind to iron whence it becomes very long lived, and which also, over time, turns into a bright, turquoise blue, also known as ‘iron blue’. Now, what is evident even to this day throughout many of the camps is the ‘iron blue’ colouring of many of the delousing chambers which is sufficiently dense enough as to, in many cases (where these chambers are made of brick), have permeated right through to the exterior walls and are, thus, clearly visible to the untutored eye. None of the alleged ‘gas chambers’ at Auschwitz/Birkenau, however, sport this ‘iron blue’, and true to this tell-tale sign (or rather lack of), none of the samples from the ‘gas chambers’ showed anything more than residual traces of cyanide – whereas the delousing chamber sample was chocker-block full of the stuff. Leuchter also wrote up his survey of the alleged gas chambers concluding that they could not, by any stretch of the imagination, have acted as such as they were spectacularly unsuited for the purpose being clearly and ridiculously leaky to gas.
This, the ‘Leuchter Report’, was published in May of 1988, and it shone the spotlight, for the first time, on the issue of the delousing chambers. As Kollerstrom remarks, “prior to Fred’s Report the human race had merely been disinformed that Zyklon gas = human mass murder.”
The author also comments on Leuchter’s fate regarding his foray into this controversial arena,
“Leuchter should have been knighted for his service to humanity: Sir Fred. But, instead, he had his career terminated, was thrown out of various places, was ethically damned, and he ended up driving a school bus – as he informed me.”
Nevertheless, in 1991 the Report caught the eye of a brilliant young chemist, Germar Rudolf, who was, at the time studying for his PhD at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. For Rudolf, the “thorn of doubt” planted in his mind upon reading the Report led he and two colleagues to creep over to Auschwitz and purloin another thirty or so samples from both the walls of the alleged ‘gas chambers’ and from the smaller delousing chambers (and along the way photographing exactly where, how and what they did). The results matched and confirmed those of Leuchter’s, there being a two-thousand-fold differential between the samples taken from the delousing chambers versus the ‘gas chambers’. (Just to note, that there was any ferrocyanide in the walls of the showers, aka ‘gas chambers’, at all – though generally less than 1 ppm – was due to the well-documented fact that many of the camp’s other rooms and enclosures were occasionally sprayed with Zyklon B as part of routine disinfection protocols, and which samples also showed the equal, if very low, levels of cyanide.)
Here Kollerstrom, himself an historian of science, emphasizes an important methodological point. To wit,
“Both the Leuchter and Rudolph reports had their weaknesses, and it is only by integrating the two together – which we can do because their methods were identical – that one attains a firm and clear basis for rational debate.”
The ensuing sequence of events following the publication, first in 1992 of a preliminary report, and then in 1993 of his historic 120-page document, the Rudolf Report, traced the per usual arc of personal ruination that we are, by now, all too familiar with. Rudolf had his career terminated and, eventually, in 2007, found himself, bound in chains, in a German court where he was duly sentenced to four years in prison. As Kollerstom intones once again, “Science cannot exist where doubt is prohibited, let’s be clear about that.”
As a follow-up to these investigations, a chemist-engineer, Dan Desjardins subsequently retraced both Leuchter’s and Rudolf’s steps through Auschwitz so that, as Kollerstrom says, we have good ‘corroboration as regards where the samples came from.’
It is further worth noting at this juncture – and here I tag-team once again with author Peter Winter – that, “The parallels between the real delousing station and the alleged ‘human gas chambers’ are so close that it is clear the homicidal gas chamber story was developed from the real clothing delousing system.”
Turning now to yet another primary source archive, one that I alluded to earlier, i.e., the intact coke records from Auschwitz/Birkenau (the latter camp, just by the by, and also known as Auschwitz II, being located in the immediate environs of Auschwitz I), we find that the amount of coke that would have been necessary to burn hundreds of thousands of bodies simply did not exist. Here Kollerstrom directs us to the dense tome, ‘Dissecting the Holocaust’,[5] edited by Germar Rudolf in which an essay by the meticulous investigator Carlo Mattogno reviews the matter.
Mattogno informs us that it “normally takes 88 to 110 lbs [of coke to cremate] a body.” After accounting for various factors (e.g., how many cremation furnaces are being fired together etc.) he concludes that these coke deliveries, “prove indisputably that only the bodies of the inmates who had died of natural causes could be cremated in the crematoria. Therefore, no mass murders took place in Auschwitz and Birkenau in the time from March to October 1943!”
According to Kollerstrom, Fred Leuchter’s Report also included a similar computation whilst arriving at the same conclusion. Leuchter further noted that the death count for Auschwitz peaked exactly ‘during the worst periods of the typhus epidemic in 1942 and 1943.’ The latter reference is important because it supports the argument – and all the evidence – that the infamous Zyklon B was deployed to the camps precisely to address the typhus outbreaks that began about this time. Additional argument that Zyklon B was not intended as a ‘extermination’ weapon, but merely as what the Nazis said it was for, i.e., disinfestation, is to be found in two related facts. To wit, the hydrogen cyanide concoction was sent to all of the camps, not just to those designated, today, as ‘extermination camps’ – the latter of which, by the way amount only to some six camps in total. Moreover, Zyklon B was discontinued in late 1944 to be replaced by the new-fangled delousing agent, DDT, and which, of course, no one has ever claimed was used for killing people. Kollerstrom notes additionally that microwave disinfestation technology was introduced by the Germans in the camps very late in the war – a technology which became the basis for the, now, ubiquitous microwave oven – though, to date, no ‘eyewitness’ account of being cooked to death by microwaves has been forthcoming.
To conclude this section, it is apropos to remark on the salient fact of the general reluctance by orthodox historiography to introduce such elementary forensic science to this subject. Indeed, that it is so riven with taboo testifies once more to the notion that, in dealing with the ‘Holocaust’, we are no longer in the realm of science, but of sacred myth and of religion. Nevertheless, let us continue our obdurate ways and conduct a brief review of the science as it pertains to some of the other concentration camps.
Of Archaeology, Diesel and Bonfires
In saying that there has been a decided reluctance to engage forensic science in the service of ‘proving’ the Holocaust does not mean that there have been no such attempts.
In 1999, at Treblinka, for example, a team of archaeological researchers led by Australian, Richard Krege, used ground-penetrating radar to try and locate the remains of the officially-estimated 800,000 bodies supposedly buried there. This should not have been difficult as the area in which these remains were allegedly contained covered a relatively miniscule area of just a few hectares. Instead, what the team found was – nothing at all. They found no evidence consistent with the burying of hundreds of thousands of bodies, and, indeed, no evidence of any soil disturbance whatsoever. Thus, as Krege said in a later report,
“From these scans we could clearly identify the largely undisturbed horizontal stratigraphic layering, better known as horizons, of the soil under the campsite. We know from scans of grave sites, and other sites with known soil disturbances, such as quarries, when this layering is massively disturbed or missing altogether.” He goes on to say,
“Historians say that the bodies were exhumed and cremated towards the end of the Treblinka’s camp’s use in 1943, but we found no indication that any mass graves ever existed.”
Naturally, this finding did not sit well with orthodoxy and so in 2010 another team led by Dr. Caroline Sturdy Colls from Staffordshire University conducted their own ground radar survey – and found nothing either. But that’s not what they concluded and later trumpeted to the BBC to whom they claimed to have found a few “pits”. No remains, no large-scale stratigraphic disturbance, just a few “pits”. As if not convinced by her own rhetoric on the matter, Colls returned to Treblinka in 2013 with colleague Ivar Shute where they proceeded to embarrass themselves – having had their findings broadcast on TV documentaries aired both by the BBC and by the Smithsonian channel in the US – by claiming (and here I reference Peter Winter’s work again) to have found a piece of porcelain with a Star of David on it, but which later turned out to be a ‘pierced mullet star’ that just happened to be the brand mark of a famous porcelain factory in Poland.
It is also noteworthy that these researchers, having found nothing more than a few bone fragments – which, without further ado, they claimed were part of “three mass graves” – and a few pieces from a wooden foundation, both items of which one might expect to find in a transit camp such as Treblinka was known to be, and having misidentified a ‘key piece of evidence’, were, nonetheless, given the royal treatment by the media and their work exalted as some sort of definitive proof of the case. Of course, it was nothing of the sort, but rather all puffery and nonsense. No bodies, no fragments of skeletons, no human ashes, no wood ashes and no ground irregularities whatsoever had been called forth by their investigations – investigations which, tellingly, involved no excavations at the site, as this, they lamely claimed, “would be a violation of Jewish law”.
But, then, the entire Treblinka ‘extermination’ thesis was terminally threadbare from the start. Thus, to begin with, the means proffered of killing hundreds of thousands at Treblinka was by steam (even the official account has no ‘gas chambers’ at Treblinka); they had all been ‘steamed like lobsters to their deaths’. According to Kollerstrom, “that phase of the narrative didn’t last too long, and soon the cause of death settled down to being diesel exhaust.” Now, the problem here is that it was first pointed out by Fritz Berg in 1983, and later affirmed in 1992 by Walter Luffl, the President of the Austrian Federal Chamber of Engineers, that mass murder by gassing with diesel fumes is a virtual impossibility. As such the amount of carbon monoxide in diesel fumes is very low (almost always much less than 1% and often no more than 0.1%) and that being subjected to diesel fumes in an enclosed room, even for a full hour, results, for most people, in merely a bad headache, though people with weak hearts might possibly succumb over the course of that timeframe. The key problem, however, is that all of the ‘eyewitness’ accounts – all of them – attest to the notion that death occurred within ten to twenty minutes.
The official narrative was beginning to strain at the seams, especially the failure to find any real prima facie evidence of bodies. No worries. As already mentioned, this part of the story was filled in by having all the bodies, all 800,000 of them, dug up, and burned. (One imagines this might have been a wee problem for the mere twenty or thirty SS administrative staff and one hundred or so Ukrainian guards stationed there, but perhaps they were uber-diligent.) Now it takes about 150 kg (over 300 lbs) of wood to burn just one body and a simple computation reckons the amount of wood needed to burn 800,000 bodies is, well, simply staggering. And, of course, no such wood ashes, even a remote trace of them, have ever been found at Treblinka. As Kollerstrom remarks at this point,
“Treblinka is the site of not one but two awesome Holo-miracles: the miraculous gassing of 800,000 Jews using a non-lethal gas, and then the miraculous burning of some 800,000 Jewish corpses in huge outdoor pyres, thereby igniting the Holo-caust (total-fiery) mythos with its inextinguishably hellish meaning. Dr. Caroline Sturdy Colls and her Birmingham science team were indeed treading on hallowed ground, with so many hundreds of thousands of Jews (not) buried there.”
Indeed, the same BBC program that featured Coll et al, ‘casually alluded to “Huge open burning pits of flesh” – the original Holo-hoax image!’ We will come to more such reminiscences of ‘burning and boiling blood’ in the next section. Suffice it to say for now that blood, and human bodies, do not simply burn by themselves, i.e., not without added fuel.
We could go on and look at similar holo-stories and similar demystifying encounters with science (including wildly fluctuating death counts, missing-in-action archaeological evidence, and yet ever more improbable killing methodologies) for many of the other camps including Sobibor, Chelmo, Majdanek, and Belzec. Time and space humble us however, and so we are led to the final strand of our investigation: the ever popular, always entertaining, ‘eyewitness’ testimony.
Fairy Tales From Hell
Let us begin here by reminding the reader of what was said at the outset about the infamous pictures from Bergen-Belsen – the ones that are taken as being symbolic of the entire Holocaust narrative itself; they are real, but they are, at the same time, misrepresentations.
Bergen-Belsen, located in northwestern Germany, was originally a prisoner of war camp that was turned into a concentration camp in 1943. The camp was liberated by British soldiers on April 15, 1945 who just happened to have been accompanied by a large contingent of journalists. It is likely due to the presence of these real eyewitnesses that it has never been claimed that there were ‘gas chambers’ at Bergen-Belsen. However, this did not stop subsequent Western media from portraying the pictures taken there of the thousands of emaciated bodies, of having been gassing victims. The latter’s deaths, it is pertinent to note, resulted from an outbreak of typhus in the closing stages of the war which itself was largely due to the Allied bombing that had fatally disrupted German infrastructure and which had prevented the re-supplying of both food and Zyklon B to many of the camps. [In fact, the camp was so infested with typhus that the British were eventually forced to burn it to the ground.]
Here we have the entire ‘extermination’ thesis seemingly turned on its head; a proposition that might at first blush seem outlandish did we not have yet another primary source document to support it. As Kollerstrom points out,
“Two and half million tons of US/UK bombs destroyed infrastructure and hope. The camps became death camps. We get a glimpse of the unfolding catastrophe from the Red Cross Report [published in 1948]… Thus the German authorities were at pains to relieve the dire situation as far as they were able. The Red Cross are quite explicit in stating that food supplies ceased at this time due to the Allied bombing… and in the interests of interned Jews they had protested on March 15th, 1944 against the ‘barbarous aerial warfare of the Allies’… In dealing with the Red Cross’ comprehensive three-volume Report, it is important to stress that the delegates of the International Red Cross found no evidence whatever at the camps in Axis-Europe of a deliberate policy to exterminate Jews. In all its 1,600 pages the Report never hints at any human gas chambers.”
And what I neglected to mention earlier in regard to the British Intel Decrypts was that, in August 1943, the head of the British Psychological Warfare Executive, Victor Cavendish-Bentick, sent a secret telegram from the Foreign Office to both Washington and Moscow saying, effectively, that despite the rumours they were hearing, there was not the slightest evidence to support the notion that gas chambers were being utilized to kill anyone let alone millions of people.
Also mentioned prior is the eyewitness testimony of Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Hoss, whose torture-extracted testimony was a pillar for the prosecution at Nuremberg. Apart from the later evidence attesting to his torture, many key components of his testimony were, even at the time known to be falsified – or should have been for any other than a kangaroo court – as they contradicted known, contemporary facts regarding the camps themselves. Thus, Hoss gave affidavit to the court that he had visited Treblinka in June of 1941, where, he said, 80,000 Jews had been “liquidated” in the previous six months. The problem with all this is that Treblinka did not start receiving Jews until late July, 1942. In short, his ‘eyewitness’ account is a whole year and half too early! Indeed, none of the transit camps, including Sobibor and Belzec, even started up until May of 1942. To further complicate the lives of future orthodox holo-historians was Hoss’ insistence that diesel was used as the means of killing – and which, once such methodology was later discovered to be highly improbable if not impossible, was to bedevil the official narrative ever after as abandoning it meant abandoning Hoss’ testimony in its entirety.
Then there is the esteemed Professor Paul Rassinier, a French historian, socialist and anti-Nazi who later became a resistance fighter, but who was eventually captured and imprisoned at Buchenwald. Rassinier survived the war after which he began his lifelong career of debunking the claims of gassing by fellow ‘eyewitnesses’. Kollerstrom cites a quote from one of Rassinier’s published reports which concluded:
“With regard to the gas chambers, the almost endless procession of false witnesses and of falsified documents, to which I have drawn the reader’s attention during this study, proves, nevertheless, one thing: never at any moment did the responsible authorities of the Third Reich intend to order – or in fact order – the extermination of the Jews in this or in any other manner.”
And then there is witness-for-the-defense, the distinguished pathologist, Charles Larson, “sent over by the US army in 1945 to inspect the piled-up corpses in the German labour camps at Dachau, Belsen etc., [who] steadfastly refused to declare that he had seen a pink-coloured corpse killed by cyanide.”
Did I fail to mention? There is yet one more tell-tale piece of forensic evidence attesting to the complete fallaciousness of the gassing thesis. This is the well documented fact that there are no records whatsoever – of pink corpses. It turns out that dying from hydrogen cyanide poisoning turns the body a bright pink hue – and there is no evidence of such having been seen, by anyone, ever. Apparently, none of the ‘eyewitnesses’ were pathologists.
But, then, dear reader, perhaps these are not the sort of eyewitness reports you might have been expecting. So, without further ado, let us get to those, though as the cast of characters here are legion we will have to content ourselves with but a few examples in order simply to capture the flavour of the matter.
Likely the most prominent ‘eyewitness’ account is that of Elie Wiesel whose 1958 book, Night, has sold more than ten million copies, and which eventually led to his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The problem with the book, apart from its patently hyperbolic narrative, is that it is almost certainly a completely fraudulent account. Thus, in 2009, a fellow Hungarian Jew, Nickolaus Gruner, after twenty years of researching the topic, issued this press release:
“Elie Wiesel A-7713 has never existed, and the man claiming himself to be ‘Elie Wiesel’ with the concentration camp number A-7713, knowing full well that this number belonged to someone else, is an imposter of the worst kind. For this statement, I, Nikolaus Gruner A-11104, have certified and written knowledge of.”
Gruner then went on to publish a book, ‘Stolen Identity A7713’, in which he provided detailed documentation obtained from the Auschwitz Museum archives which show that Lazar Wiesel, and whom Gruner knew, was the real bearer of that number. The former, according to Kollerstrom, was “born September 4, 1913, received the number and tattoo A-7713; as likewise his brother, Abraham, born Oct. 10, 1900, was given the adjacent number A-7712. That latter number is the one that Elie Wiesel claims belonged to his father Shlomo… No such registration records exist for Elie and his father: they are not there.”
Elie Wiesel refused to respond to a formal challenge by Gruner to appear before a Budapest court to combat these charges, just as he always refused to show anyone the alleged tattoo on his arms. But, then, one need only peruse some of the utterly fantastic claims in ‘Night’ to realize that something is seriously askew. As Kollerstrom relates,
“Having been written as early as 1958, Night does not feature any gas chambers! Instead of Zyklon, it has huge Moloch-type pits of burning babies… The wicked Nazis were unloading truckloads of little babies into the huge burning pits and the bodies were flammable. Human bodies are 70% water. They really don’t burn by themselves.”
Here it is worth quoting from Night itself just to experience the tenor of the narrative:
“Later, I learn from a witness that, for month after month, the ground never stopped trembling; and that, from time to time, geysers of blood spurted from it.”
It is worth reminding the reader at this point that it is these sorts of utterly fantastic statements that characterize much of the ‘eyewitness’ testimonials, but whose uncritical acceptance by generations of readers is, rather, mere testimony to the credulity of the true-believer. Let us move on to our next witness.
On the title page of his memoirs (published in 1946), Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter, featured an illustration purporting to be three Jewish inmates shot by the Nazis at Mauthausen. The picture shows the three prisoners tied to stakes and drooping in tragic, if highly dramatic poses, as they lay slumped and dead against the stakes. Wiesenthal claimed that he had “witnessed” the shootings. The problem here is that the tableaux portrayed was clearly lifted from a photograph from the June 11th 1945 edition of Life magazine where the exact same, and very unique, poses are shown of three German prisoners who had been executed as spies – this after having been caught wearing American uniforms whilst attempting to infiltrate Allied lines during the Battle of the Bulge. Once, again, we find a supposedly impeccable ‘eyewitness’ blatantly lying and committing overt fraud, and which lends serious credibility issues to anything else he has to say.
One particularly influential Holocaust potboiler is Philip Muller’s, ‘Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers’, (1979) in which the hero claims to have been the ‘sole survivor of the murder operations’ at Auschwitz over three years. He too describes “the burning pits in which Jews were consumed”. This prize-winning best-seller is, according to Kollerstrom, ‘required reading in many Holocaust study courses’. The problem with it, however, is that it wasn’t written by Muller, but by ghost-writer Helmut Freitag who, in turn, had plagiarized it from an equally faked account by Miklos Nyiszli entitled, ‘Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account’ (1947). In that book Nyiszli blithely states that Auschwitz killed 20,000 people per day, every day, from 1940 to 1944 – which adds up to a cool 29 million dead! But, then, who’s counting? Certainly not the dean of Holo-historians, Raul Hilberg, as his supposedly authoritative, ‘The Destruction of the European Jews’, repeatedly quotes from it.
Let us finish off with one final testimonial, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’; though let me say at the outset here that this tiny deconstruction is meant in no way to impugn Anne herself. Rather the following is testament to just how far those who believe in the philosophy of the-ends-justify-the-means are willing to go.
To critical minds the ‘Diary’ was always somewhat suspect as there are passages, specifically those detailing a brief historical and political account of the German occupation of Holland, that are clearly not from the hand of a 13-year-old girl. This scepticism would later be borne out when it was shown, first in an Amsterdam court and then by a German criminal investigation, that Otto Frank, Anne’s father, had, in fact, been the author of substantial parts of the diary, and who had used a ball point pen (not available during the war) to write them. Indeed, Otto Frank – who was treated for typhus at the hospital[6] at Auschwitz and survived the war (dying in 1980) – had, apparently, first published the book as a work of, in his own words, “fiction”, under the title, ‘The Annex: Diary Notes’. The title, ‘Diary of Anne Frank’, was given to the book by its first English publishers.
It is, finally, worth noting, and here I quote from Peter Winter,
“… that Anne Frank died of typhus and was not ‘gassed’. It is one of the horrific ironies that Anne Frank died due to a lack of Zyklon-B at Bergen-Belsen – and this lack was caused directly by the Allied bombing campaign. The real story of Anne Frank is tragic enough, but the cruel exploitation, exaggeration and faking of her diary by the Holocaust storytellers is a scandal of epic proportions.”
Virtually all of the other core ‘autobiographies’ have, as I mentioned at the outset, been shown to be fakes or gross exaggerations, and the rest of the individual testimonies are largely derivative from these accounts and/or based on mere hearsay and rumour such that when confronted in a court of law by probing inquiry the ‘witnesses’ inevitably fall back on, ‘I heard’ or ‘someone told me’ or ‘It was common knowledge’ etc. It seems Professor Rassinier knew what he was about.
Final Thoughts
In writing a critique of this sort, that is, one that strikes at the heart of such a longstanding and sacred societal myth, such cannot help but conjure at some level, and at certain moments, a measure of doubt. Questions tickle the fancy. Am I wrong? Is the author wrong? Have we all just been seduced by a good story, a coherent but unknowingly flawed argument? And, indeed, if one is an honest person, the answer to those questions must be, ‘perhaps’.
Still, having crossed this bridge many times in my undistinguished muckraking career, I have settled upon a consolatory process of simply sitting back and reviewing the fundaments of the evidence and argument, their weight and measure, all rounded off and seasoned with a certain amount of intangible instinct – and coming to a reasoned decision. In the end, as Nietzsche was so fond of pointing out, we must act – on imperfect knowledge.
But I will confess that even were the Revisionist case eventually be proved to be wrong, and Orthodoxy prevail, I could only but smile and think of Ernst Mach who once said,
“Should these concepts turn out to be true, I shall not be ashamed to be the last one to believe.”
But if the Revisionist case is true, then it is not just the tragic victims of the camps themselves who have been so cynically used in a seventy-five- year game of Western and Zionist imperial propaganda; in a game of smoke and mirrors in the service of deflecting attention from many a real holocaust[7] – like Vietnam, or Indonesia or Iraq – under cover of a fake one; in a game of cruel irony where one historical fascism has been misrepresented and harnessed in the service of a future fascism. No, it is not just they, like Anne Frank herself, who have been so cruelly misused, but it is we, all of us, who have been played like suckers in one of the greatest swindles of all time; one that has warped our minds and souls not only into believing in fairy tale horrors that corrupt our very view of what it means to be human, but that has seduced us into a malignant and fatal self-righteousness where we have arrogantly come to believe that, as Carl Jung once wrote, “All evil lies just a few miles behind enemy lines.”
I hope at this juncture then, having become acquainted with some of the primary source documents, i.e., the Arolsen Archives, the Soviet ‘Death Books’, the Leuchter and Rudolf Reports, the three-volume 1948 Red Cross Report, the British Intel Decrypts, the counter-eyewitness testimony, the origins of the ‘six million’ meme etc., that any reasonable person would now entertain, at the very least, reasonable doubt on this subject. But, of course, in many parts of the world, reasonable doubt is not allowed. In much of Europe, doubt is prohibited by law. Here in North America doubt is not allowed by custom, by ingrained prejudice, and by enforced, widespread censorship.[8]
And perhaps, after all, this is the greatest outrage, for we have been told, yes, told – what we are to believe, and what we are not to believe, and that the matter is not open for discussion – at all. Case closed. Forever. No debate for you. As Dr. Kollerstrom pointedly asks,
“Who is in control of the past? Does somebody own it? Will they put you in jail if you disagree?”
Cast unto a dark, three-quarter century enchantment, the author enjoins us to wave the wand of reason, and break the spell.
Notes
[1] For those wishing to purchase and read the book, here is the link to the Castle Hill Publishing site (and which houses dozens of Revisionist works for those interested in pursuing this subject in more depth; the publishing company is run by Germar Rudolf himself): https://shop.codoh.com/book/breaking-the-spell-en/
[2] And which likely explains why the inmates were tattooed with numbers, as this would have made little sense if the latter were simply going to be killed.
[3] For a classic example of the such kangaroo tribunals see my article, ‘Hotel Propaganda: What Really Happened in Rwanda, circa 1994’ and which subsumes a discussion on the ICTR. Yet another is the similarly compromised, ICTY (the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia).
[4] For those wishing to read Winter’s version of matters – and which largely overlap with those found in Kollerstrom’s book – here is the link: https://thesixmillionfactorfiction.blogspot.com/ You can download this book for free as a PDF document.
[6] Not only did Auschwitz/Birkenau have a hospital with a dedicated surgical unit, but also a camp library with 45,000 volumes, six inmate orchestras, a kitchen and bakery, a theatre, a post office….and a swimming pool, the remains of which are clearly visible to this day.
[7] Indeed, there is substantive evidence that upwards of a million or so German prisoners of war died in the short few months at the end of the war at the hands of the Allies. The Canadian historian, James Bacque, investigates this in his book, ‘Other Losses’ (and which I may cover in a future essay). In particular, he proffers that in the vast open-air American prisoner of war camp alone, up to 900,000 died, and which deaths were covered up under the obscure bureaucratic heading of ‘other losses’. He further posits that, in this case, if not a ‘plan’, there is certainly evidence of a high-level policy of willful neglect that stemmed directly from Eisenhower himself.
[8] It is further worth noting here that none of these works are generally available either via conventional bookstores or through major online retailers. Indeed, Rudolph has written a small book on the subject entitled, ‘The Day Amazon Murdered History’, which recounts how, ‘in early 2017, a series of anonymous bomb threats against Jewish community centers occurred in the US fueling a campaign by Jewish groups to have all revisionist writings banned, falsely portraying them as anti-Semitic. Amazon complied and banned over a hundred works with dissenting viewpoints on the Holocaust. In April 2017 an Israeli Jew was arrested for having placed the false bomb threats, a paid “service” he had offered for years.’ Despite this revelation, the ban remains to this day.
You will recall the Panorama edition last November, “Wild Weather- Our World Under Threat”. Presented by Justin Rowlatt, it attempted to show that the world’s weather was getting worse because of global warming:
The programme highlighted four weather disasters, yet failed to offer even the slightest evidence that they were either unusual or becoming worse.
One of the four concerned a drought in Madagascar, which Rowlatt described as “the world’s first climate change-induced famine.”
Shortly after the programme was aired, a scientific study proved that his claim was nonsense, and that equally severe droughts had occurred there in the past.
I filed a complaint about this, only to be fobbed off with the response that they had been told this by the World Meteorological Organisation,WMO. I have now escalated my complaint to the Executive Complaints Unit, ECU, pointing out that since this was a major segment of the programme, the failure to check the actual data, which is readily available, was extremely shoddy journalism. Regardless of their excuses, a full correction needed to be broadcast.
The Panorama edition also included this opening statement by Rowlatt:
“The world is getting warmer and our weather is getting ever more unpredictable and dangerous. The death toll is rising around the world”
This is another lie. According to the same WMO:
Deaths decreased almost threefold from 1970 to 2019. Death tolls fell from over 50 000 deaths in the 1970s to less than 20 000 in the 2010s. The 1970s and 1980s reported an average of 170 related deaths per day. In the 1990s, that average fell by one third to 90 related deaths per day, then continued to fall in the 2010s to 40 related deaths per day.
Another reader complained about this, and received this astonishing reply:
In other words, the BBC justify their claim because the cumulative number of deaths is rising!
Needless to say, he too has escalated to the ECU.
It is clear that Rowlatt is facing big problems here. He has already been rebuked by BBC News bosses about his lies regarding offshore wind costs last year. He is now facing two complaints over this flagship Panorama edition.
Regardless of the ECU decision, it is crystal clear that Rowlatt is far too emotionally attached to climate issues on a personal level to be able to report accurately and objectively.
It’s tough being a writer. It’s even tougher when your work is being actively suppressed by the world’s biggest market place for books: Amazon.
Reputed to account for 80% of world book sales, for an author there’s no getting away from the online giant, no escaping its tentacles.
My problems with Amazon began when I had the audacity to publish a couple of BBC critiques; birds of a feather stick together and the broadcaster wasn’t too happy about these exposes of mine.
In normal times, they’d just have to suck it up. But these are not normal times. McCarthyism lives again only this time, co-ordinated by Big Tech. It’s a far more frightening prospect than it ever was in the 1950s.
Anyway, I’d said what I wanted viz the BBC and moved on to a new project: solving a mystery which had occurred in Provence in 1973, the savage murder of a British headmaster and former intelligence agent, John Cartland.
In a vain attempt to escape censure for my previous ‘crimes’ I even adopted a nom de plume: ‘Stockton Heath’. Almost two years later the task was complete: the mystery had been solved!
As an independent project there was no alternative but to publish via Amazon. While Amazon will plug certain books linking them to other books and ensuring their visibility on its platform, my little effort had no such benefits and duly dropped off the radar.
Reviews were hard to come by. On one occasion I noticed a positive review and my heart leapt only to find it had mysteriously vanished the next day.
How many more reviews have been deleted without my knowledge?
All was not lost. In France the crime is still referred to and remains one of that country’s most perplexing mysteries. Would I have better luck there?
After paying a French contact to assist with translation and six months after starting what became a long and complicated process, ‘Imaginer Un Meurtre: L’affaire Cartland Revistee’ was finally completed in February this year.
Initially all went well. It seems like my hunch had been right: the book sold relatively well during its first week on Amazon France. And then, nothing.
Just over a week ago sales stopped dead. More Amazon antics? It looked that way. I had started to receive a few emails from associates in France: ‘Where was the book? Hadn’t I published after all?’
I checked Amazon France: searching for the book’s title ‘Imaginer Un Meurtre’ auto-corrected to ‘Imagier Un Meurtre’.
The word ‘imagier’ in French means ‘colouring book’ and so instead of my book I was presented with children’s colouring books.
It soon became apparent that unless customers typed in the full title of the book + sub-title + author’s name, henceforth it would be effectively invisible to browsers of Amazon France.
Having spent hours on the telephone to Amazon reps is enough to drive one to distraction: they deny everything, even when viewing actual proof captured on film which shows how the Amazon website is subverting searches for the book. (Video can be viewed below)
It’s all due to the “algorithm” and that is that. Have a nice day.
So what happened? I have a theory: having suddenly become aware that I had published on Amazon’s French platform and the book in question was doing ok, Amazon stepped in to subvert the book’s visibility by ‘tweaking’ its searchability.
And it worked too: the book is now headed the same way as the English language version: to oblivion.
Once you’ve upset the establishment that’s your card marked, or so it seems. MSM (BBC) and Big tech is crossed at one’s peril.
This amalgamation of political parties/politicians with mainstream media and Big Tech into one immoral and corrupt uni-party was predicted by Orwell in 1984.
Orwell’s world is one of fear and paranoia where citizens are subjected to 24-hour surveillance by a brutal authoritarian police state – just the kind of society warned about by the so-called anti-fascist busily taking Orwell’s dystopia for their ‘Build Back Better’ blueprint.
Where does one go from here? Having resisted the lies for so long, the hero of 1984 finally submits to the Party orthodoxy at the end of the novel.
While he was right about everything else from The Thought Police to Big State propaganda channelled through ubiquitous tellyscreens, let’s hope that as far as his ending was concerned, Orwell got one thing wrong.
David Sedgwick is a writer and bon viveur based in Malaga and Split with occasional visits back to Liverpool. He writes about a wide range of topics from F1 and film to true crime and travel. http://www.stocktonheath.net
As political pressure mounts for the UK fully to exploit North Sea oil reserves and begin fracking, the BBC is doubling down in its campaign to fight fossil fuels.
There is nothing new in this, of course: we have become used it down the years. But now they don’t even attempt to disguise it, so convinced are they of their moral superiority in the matter.
Last week they published two articles attacking critics of Net Zero. The reports were full of the opinions of the BBC’s chums in the Green Blob, such as Greenpeace, Carbon Brief and the Committee on Climate Change, but gave scant mention of opposing views.
The first report, ‘Climate change: Can the UK afford its net zero policies?’ was an attempt to take down the arguments of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group (NZSG), made up of about 20 Conservative MPs, who have perfectly legitimately drawn the public’s attention to the very real costs of Net Zero.
The article begins by portraying the NZSG as a tiny bunch of ultra Right-wing Brexiteers – you know, the ones who should be ignored!
The rest of the article carries on in the same one-sided vein, with grossly misleading and inaccurate comments and a failure to present the other side of the argument.
It starts by claiming that our energy bills are only £159 a year higher on average because of climate policies. But this does not reflect the full cost of those policies, which in total are estimated to cost £17.6billion this year. That is not £159, but £650 per household.
Much of this cost is paid by the public sector and industry/commerce, meaning higher taxes and prices. Either way, the public end up paying.
The BBC then go on to claim that we should be building wind farms, because they are cheaper than gas power stations.
They imply that you can simply swap wind for gas, ignoring the fact the former is highly intermittent. Currently we need reliable, dispatchable generation, such as gas, to turn on when wind power fails to meet demand. When this is factored in, wind power is nearly double the cost of gas power.
Next the BBC turns its attention to claims that fracking will reduce energy prices in the UK. They argue that we cannot affect global prices of gas, which totally misses the point. Even if UK gas is sold at world prices, the country will still benefit hugely, and in particular government revenues will be boosted. Moreover it will greatly enhance our energy security.
The NZSG have rightly raised the question of how much we will all have to pay for Net Zero, something which the public has been kept in the dark about. The BBC’s response quotes the ultra optimistic calculations of the Committee on Climate Change, which have already been proved to be false and give a cost of ‘only’ £344billion by 2050.
Anybody who claims what the economy will look like three decades hence is a charlatan. But what we do know about is the crippling cost being imposed on the public in the short term. Things like heat pumps, insulation and electric cars will cost us tens of thousands of pounds. The new hydrogen networks being proposed will drive our energy bills up yet further.
For some reason, the BBC makes no mention of any of this.
But won’t the costs of climate change far outweigh all of this? The BBC think so:
‘The UK government’s latest report into the risks of climate change warns that based on a conservative estimate of a 2C temperature rise by 2100, flooding for non-residential properties across the UK is expected to increase by 27 per cent by 2050 and 40 per cent by 2080. At 4C this increases to 44 per cent and 75 per cent respectively.’
Leaving aside the fact that these claims are pure make-believe, does the BBC really think that eliminating the UK’s 1 per cent of world emissions will have the slightest effect on the climate?
The second BBC article, ‘Government climate advisers say cut fossil fuels to lower energy bills’ is by our old friend Roger Harrabin, ‘BBC environment analyst’. Again it does little but report the views of the Committee on Climate Change and others in the Green Blob, who are campaigning for more renewable energy.
As in the first article, it repeats the claim that energy prices won’t drop if we develop shale and North Sea gas reserves as the amounts are so insignificant. However, a recent study by the Warwick Business School estimated that our shale reserves could easily supply a quarter of the UK’s gas consumption over the next twenty years – a hardly insignificant amount at a time when North Sea gas output is expected to halve.
But for ideological reasons, the Committee on Climate Change would like to throw this all away!
John Kerry worries about Ukraine war’s effect on emissions
Joe Biden’s Climate Tsar, the gaffe-prone John Kerry, put his foot in it again last week. In an interview with a Middle East TV station he said he was worried that the Ukraine war would have ‘massive emissions consequences’, and that it could divert the world’s attention away from climate change.
This is the same John Kerry who flew in a private jet to Iceland last year to collect an Environmental Award. When asked why he chose private jet, he responded it was ‘the only choice for someone like me’.
It was only the other day that Kerry was full of praise for India’s climate efforts, despite the fact they continue to burn more and more coal. He was impressed by Prime Minister Modi’s promise to build lots of solar farms, which Kerry claimed would make India compliant with the 1.5C goal set at Glasgow, a goal which requires global emissions to be cut in half in this decade.
Evidently arithmetic is not John Kerry’s strong suit!
While Modi’s plans would increase wind and solar output tenfold by 2040, this will not be enough to even meet the rising demand for energy in India, which is projected to increase by 69 per cent by then. This means that fossil fuel consumption will continue to grow as well.
Even with all of this investment in renewables, wind and solar together will still only be supplying 20 per cent of India’s energy in 2040.
BP Energy Review & International Energy Agency Outlook
While John Kerry strolls around with his head in the clouds, the Indian Government have long realised that you cannot run a modern economy just on the wind and the sun.
Selling the UK steel industry down the river
As I explained a few weeks ago, the UK operates an Emissions Trading Scheme, a cap and trade system, applying to electricity generators, energy intensive industry and domestic aviation.
The scheme is designed to cut the use of fossil fuels by forcing companies to purchase carbon allowances if they dare to use them.
As a direct consequence of government policy, the price of these allowances has in effect quadrupled in the last couple of years. (Although the UK system was only introduced last May, it directly replaced a similar EU scheme, which it now tracks.)
Higher carbon prices have not only pushed electricity prices through the roof, but they are also hitting industry hard as well, not least the steel industry.
According to the Telegraph, steelmakers are now facing the prospect of cutting production thanks to a doubling of the carbon price in the last nine months.
Steel companies receive a set number of free allowances each year, but this quota is reduced each year. Once they have used these up, they must buy them on the market, which adds £175/ton to the cost of the steel produced. This amounts to a third of the price they sell the steel for, which is quite clearly unsustainable.
Indeed, so high are the carbon prices that firms can often be better off selling their allowances and producing nothing!
Cutting production however has its own problems for the steel industry, because its fixed costs are so high. In the real world, steel plants need to run at near to full capacity to be profitable. It makes no financial sense shutting down furnaces and rolling mills for days at a time.
In other words, they are stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea.
Furthermore there is little that steel firms can do to cut fossil fuel use. By definition, making steel is a highly energy intensive process. From personal experience I know that steel works have forever been looking at ways to reduce energy use on a daily basis.
It is true that electric arc furnaces, which melt scrap steel, don’t need the colossal amounts of coke required in blast furnaces, but higher electricity prices have already crippled their viability.
The inevitable result of government policy is that we will end up importing more steel instead of making it ourselves. It will be made in countries like China and India, where carbon emissions will be much higher than here. And more emissions will arise from shipping it halfway around the world.
The whole thing makes no sense whatsoever.
It is just another senseless sacrifice to the Great Green God.
THE BBC gets very righteous and uppity when it’s dishing out the criticism – but doesn’t like it when it’s on the receiving end.
A classic example came my way on Monday with a message from TV Licensing about a TCW Defending Freedom blog. Basically, it was asking me to ‘censor’ a sentence they didn’t like.
I wrote back to BBC Director-General Tim Davie and here I’m publishing my reply to him as an open letter. The contents are self-explanatory …
Dear Mr Davie,
I am the editor and proprietor of the website TCW Defending Freedom, which registers between one and 1.4million page impressions a month.
It contained the following paragraph: ‘For example, violent Black Lives Matter protesters have been free to run riot in the US, while peaceful pro-Trump supporters have been arrested. In the UK, minimal, even helpful, action was taken against disruptive Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain protesters, while single mothers are jailed for not having paid their TV licence fee. Unvaccinated citizens are penalised and scapegoated everywhere, while illegal unvaccinated boat immigrants are rescued by coastguards and the RNLI and welcomed generously into society.’
To my surprise, I received an email later that day from Alex Skirvin alexander.skirvin@bbc.co.uk in which he stated: ‘I am getting in touch from TV Licensing regarding your recent piece, ‘Iron fist for the truckers, velvet glove for eco-terrorists.’
‘The piece states: “In the UK, minimal, even helpful, action was taken against disruptive Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain protesters, while single mothers are jailed for not having paid their TV licence fee.”
‘This is inaccurate. Nobody is imprisoned for non-payment of the licence fee – the maximum sentence is a fine which may be imposed by a court.
‘If a court fine isn’t paid this is a separate matter, a custodial sentence may be imposed, but that is entirely a matter for the courts. In 2020, there were no admissions into prison associated with failing to pay a fine in respect of the non-payment of a TV licence in England and Wales. To ensure readers are correctly informed, please could you update the piece?’
I would like to ask you the two following questions:
Was this an authorised communication from BBC licensing?
Is it now the BBC’s official view that no one is jailed in consequence of non-payment of the licence fee?
Technically, of course, a custodial sentence is the consequence of non-payment of a fine imposed because of evasion of the licence fee. But the fact remains that the root cause of such a sentence – the sine qua non – is because offenders have not paid their licence fee.
In all the circumstances, I do not regard what our columnist wrote to be inaccurate, and I would also like an apology for being approached in this unprofessional and rather disrespectful way.
We are publishing this as an open letter on the TCW Defending Freedom website tomorrow.
Have you ever fancied being a contestant on a reality TV show? No? Me neither. This might change your mind. The BBC wants to get a bunch of vaccine sceptics into a house, study them (Dear God), challenge their beliefs and see if it’s possible to change their minds.
According to The Times :
It is understood that a diverse group who have refused the vaccine will live together for a period, during which the documentary will explore their views on the jab and their misconceptions about its origins and side effects.
The participants will be presented with evidence about the safety and success of the vaccine in the hope that they will soften their stance. At the end of the experiment they will be confronted with a question: do they want to get the vaccine?
STV Studios, an independent production company, has begun casting for the documentary before filming later this year. It is not yet known when the programme will be shown but it is likely to be broadcast on BBC1 or BBC2.
Hmmm…. they’ll present the sceptics with evidence will they? Whose evidence? Will the sceptics be permitted to introduce their own evidence? Will the anti-vaxxers be allowed to present the VAERS and Yellow Card data which demonstrates just how harmful the covid jabs really are?
I doubt it very much. The BBC you see, or STV studios, will be very, very careful when selecting the vaccine sceptics and of course the episodes won’t be live. They’ll be recorded and heavily edited.
The Kevin Barrett-Noam Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective
Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | July 14, 2016
… Chomsky in discouraging skeptical investigation of 9/11 reveals himself to be a Trojan horse that has succeeded in subverting the Left from within. … Read full article
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