Arthur Koestler's 1944 article in the NYT: a case-study in the origins of myth

[Waldgänger]

https://www.nytimes.com/1944/01/09/arch ... ities.html

This has to be one of the most grandiose, histrionic proclamations of jewish narcissism in wartime agitprop. The famous author racially stereotypes "anglo-saxons" as having a lack of imagination to believe the most absurd stories, yet he decries racism of the German sort, of course.

In his very shrill "scream" of warning, Koestler doesn't mention gas. His only idea of mass murder involves "hot steam", "electrocution", and "live burial". And he had sources, journalists, "photographs"! I would love to see the photos lying on the desk as he wrote.

I particularly enjoy this breathtakingly shameless manipulation, which seems a prophecy of what the Holocaust has become today:

People go to cinemas, they see films of Nazi tortures, of mass shootings, of underground con- spiracy and self-sacrifice. They sigh, they shake their heads, some have a good cry. But they do not connect it with the realities of their normal plane of existence. It is romance, it is art, it is Those Higher Things, it is church Latin. It does not click with reality.

The article is also a fascinating artefact of the intensity of doubt which everyone had about these stories prior to 1945. It seems nobody believed it. Only a few hysterical screeching rabbis and zionists desperate for the world to know that ending the killings was the core of the fight against Germany.

Anthropology owes a debt to revisionists for having the courage to examine the impenetrable preconceptions and biases of an age that was created by men like Koestler. The hypocrisy, in retrospect, was unbelievable.

[Eye of Zyclone]

The Nightmare That Is a Reality, By Arthur Koestler (The New York Times, January 9, 1944) :

his inability to communicate the unique horror of his experience. I further believe that it is the root of the ineffectiveness of our atrocity propaganda. For, after all, you are the crowd who walk past laughing on the road; and stories of Nazi atrocities are true, says Arthur Koestler, and they cannot be dismissed like a bad dream; such crimes are a challenge to civilization. There are a few of us, escaped victims or eyewitnesses of the things which happen in the thicket and who, haunted by our memories, go on screaming on the wireless, yelling at you in newspapers and in public meetings, theatres and cinemas. Now and then we succeed in reaching your ear for a minute. I know it each time this happens by a certain dumb wonder on your faces, a faint glassy stare entering your eye; and I tell myself: Now you have got them, now hold them, hold them, so that they remain awake; but it only lasts a minute. You shake yourself like puppies who have got their fur wet; then the transparent screen descends again and you walk on, protected by the dream-barrier which stifles all sound. We, the screamers, have been at it now for about ten years. We started on the night when the epileptic Van de Lubbe put fire to the German Parliament; we said, if you don't quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot steam, mass electrocution and live burial of the total Jewish population of Europe. So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch.

The facts have been published in pamphlets, white books, newspapers, magazines and whatnot. But the other day I met one of the best-known American journalists over here. He told me that in the course of some recent public opinion survey nine out of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies, and that they didn't believe a word of it! As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops, and their attitude is the same. They don't believe in concentration camps, they don't believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec. You can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves; their mental self-defense begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock.

Matter-of-fact unimaginativeness has become a kind of Anglo-Saxon racial myth; it is usually opposed to Latin hysterics and praised for its high value in an emergency. But the myth does not say what happens between emergencies and that the same quality is responsible for the failure to prevent the recurrence of emergencies. In fact, this limitation of awareness is not an Anglo-Saxon privilege, though the Anglo- Saxons are probably the only race which claims as an asset what others regard as a deficiency. Neither is it a matter of temperament; stoics have wider horizons than fanatics. It is a psychological fact, inherent in our mental frame, which I believe has not received sufficient attention in social psychology or political theory.

https://www.nytimes.com/1944/01/09/arch ... ities.html

Koestler was a hardcore Zionist (he had been the personal secretary of Ze'ev Jabotinsky himself). And his fellow activists had been intoxicating the American public with Holohoax atrocity propaganda for over a year (the founder of American Zionism himself, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, kickstarted that campaign on November 25, 1942, and the Bergson Group staged Ben Hecht's Holohoax horror show "We Will Never Die" across the United States during the year 1943) when he wrote those angry lines about "the ineffectiveness of [Zionist] atrocity propaganda" at that point. During WW2, the Zionists crucially needed to succeed in turning the American public against the British White Paper of 1939 and their WW2 campaign of atrocity propaganda was to achieve that. Hence his strong irritation with the Anglo-Saxons' indifference or disbelief regarding those atrocity stories in late 1943.

[Archie]

I remember looking for that opinion poll he references but I couldn't find it.

[Eye of Zyclone]

I remember looking for that opinion poll he references but I couldn't find it.

Perhaps drama queen Koestler overstated his case for propaganda purposes.

Here's what Google's AI says for "Gallup 1943 Jews" :

In early 1943, a Gallup poll found that only 47% of Americans believed reports that 2 million Jews had been killed by Nazis, while 29% dismissed it as rumor and 24% had no opinion. Despite emerging information, skepticism was high, and a 1943 study noted that 31% of Americans felt measures should be taken to prevent Jews from having "too much power".

Key findings regarding U.S. public opinion on Jews in 1943 included:

• Skepticism of Mass Murder: While 47%–48% believed reports of 2 million Jews being killed were true, a significant portion (28%–29%) dismissed these reports as "just a rumor".

• Persistent Antisemitism: A 1943 National Opinion Research Center poll found that 43% of Americans considered Jews a group with "too much power" in the United States.

• Low Refugee Support: Throughout this period, surveys indicated that a majority of Americans were opposed to increasing immigration quotas for Jewish refugees fleeing Europe, even as news of the atrocities spread.

• Increasing Awareness: By 1944,, public belief in the atrocities increased, with 76% believing concentration camps were real, though many still underestimated the total death toll.

In early 1943, a Gallup poll asked Americans: "It is said that two million Jews have been killed in Europe since the war began. Do you think this is true or just a rumor?" Although the Allied leadership had publicly confirmed that two million Jews had been murdered, the poll found that only 47% believed it was true, while 29% dismissed it as a rumor; the remaining 24% had no opinion.

-Rafael Medoff, "We Will Never Die”: Shattering the Silence Surrounding the Holocaust, The Holocaust Encyclopedia.

https://www.shapell.org/manuscript/u-s- ... epartment/

[borjastick]

The same Arthur Koestler who went on to write the brilliant analysis of fake jews in eastern europe, you know, the ones who claim to have been 6millioned in their made up Holocaust. His book The Thirteenth Tribe exposes the ashkenazis for what they are and as we see today in israel which kills women and children at will every day and then claims self defence these Thirteenth Tribers are truly awful people.

[Hektor]

The same Arthur Koestler who went on to write the brilliant analysis of fake jews in eastern europe, you know, the ones who claim to have been 6millioned in their made up Holocaust. His book The Thirteenth Tribe exposes the ashkenazis for what they are and as we see today in israel which kills women and children at will every day and then claims self defence these Thirteenth Tribers are truly awful people.

Albeit that may be exaggerated as well. Khasars only being one of the many groups from which Jews converted to Judaism, potentially of course a very important one. I defined the modern term Jews as people mainly descending from ancestors that converted to Judaism at some stage, since Talmud was written. This isn't really understood by many though, who then accept terms at face value.