Sunday, May 13, 2018
Dave (DC) Martin: Amazon Censorship Hits Home
Amazon Censorship Hits Home
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| See Nicholas Kollerstrom, Breaking the Spell (4th edition, 2017) |
By
this time most folks have probably heard about the March 2018 purge
from Amazon.com of books that call into question the story that during
World War II Nazi Germany implemented through official policy the
gassing to death and cremation of six million Jews at government-run
central “extermination” camps. One can find a good summary of the actions by Amazon in Kevin Barrett’s article with the tongue-in-cheek title, “Jeff Bezos, Amazon Endorse Holocaust Denial.”
Barrett observes that while books probing the facts of what was christened “The Holocaust”
in a 1978 American television mini-series have been swept away with a
very broad broom, books attacking the banned books are still freely
available on Amazon, such as the one from a well-known professor of
modern Jewish history and holocaust studies at Emory University, which Barrrett describes this way:
Deborah Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, possibly the best-known anti-revisionism book, is also the most shockingly vapid. Lipstadt makes
little effort to argue her case on its merits, but instead spends
virtually the entire 304 pages lobbing hysterical ad-hominem arguments.
The only sane reaction to Lipstadt’s unbelievably
lame volume is: “If this is the best the anti-revisionists can do, no
wonder they have to try to get revisionists’ books banned!” You can get a
used copy for less than two dollars and fifty cents.
Barrett, in his updated article, has a letter from German revisionist Germar Rudolf revealing that Castle Hill Publishers alone has had 68 titles banished from Amazon through the new policy. Amazon owner Bezos, according to Barrett, might just as well post the following announcement:
Attention,
Amazon shoppers! You can still buy bad and mediocre books arguing that
holocaust revisionists are wrong — but you are not permitted to buy
better books (including at least one very good book, [Thomas] Dalton’s Debating the Holocaust) that might lead you to the opposite conclusion.
Rudolf
notes that at least five of the banned Castle Hill books don’t even
deal with the question of the Holocaust, leading Barrett to this
conclusion:
The
sweeping mass ban enforced within hours, and the senseless aimlessness
and random nature with which it was implemented, clearly show that these
books were not pulled because their content was checked and found
impermissible, but because someone (probably Yad Vashem) had sent them a list of items to ban, and Amazon simply complied by checking off all the items on that list.
In
case you might be thinking of getting around the Amazon censorship by
going to Barnes & Noble, consider the following announcement at the
Castle Hill web site for Dalton’s book:
Note: Books
published by Castle Hill Publishers should be available anywhere books
are sold – except for those companies boycotting us, like Amazon and
Barnes & Noble. Search other online stores using the book-price
search-engine links provided below, or when searching other stores use
the ISBN number provided above. Also ask your local book store to order it for you. They should be able to get it for you.
Suppressing Amazon Book Reviews
Now
that Amazon has accumulated power over what gets read in books that
surpasses any such power in previous human history, we should hardly be
surprised that they should abuse that power, and, in so doing, reveal
who the real power-wielders are in the United States. As
it happens, this writer received a bit of a prior warning of the big
March figurative book burning at Amazon almost a year ago, in June of
2017. That was when Phillip Nelson came out
with his blockbuster book about the murderous assault by the Israelis on
an American intelligence-gathering ship during the 1967 Six Day War
entitled Remember the Liberty. I
was so eager to review it on Amazon—and to have my review read—that I
bought a copy of the book from them as a gift to a friend so that the
review would be displayed as one by a verified purchaser of the book. Nelson had sent me an advance copy of the book to read, and I really didn’t need another copy. After finishing the review on Amazon, a notice popped up that I would receive an email notifying me when the review was posted. The notification never came, and the review never went up.
What was the problem? Was my review, which you can read on my web site here, too long? It
is a good deal longer than the average review on Amazon, but you can
see that the similarly favorable review by the Australian Greg Maybury got posted, and it is longer than mine. It wasn’t just a technical glitch, either. Just this week I tried again to post it, and I got the same results. It had to be something that I said, which gets us into pretty scary territory. It means that the Bezos boys are now combing over all the book reviews to make sure that unapproved things don’t get said. Considering
the nature of the topic of Nelson’s book, which one would think would
be about as unapproved, in itself, as anything could possibly be for the
ruling molders of public opinion in the country, one must really wonder
what it was that I said that was deemed to go too far.
Looking
back at it, I can’t help but think that my bridge too far was my
conclusion, which I put under the subheading, “Where Does Your
Allegiance Lie?”
Although
half a century has now passed, hardly any event, when looked at in the
clear light of day, permits us to come to grips more completely with the
political reality of the United States today than does the assault on
the USS Liberty. We live in an era in which members of the United States military have never been more venerated. From sports events to airport encounters, we’re expected to honor them at every turn. “Support the troops” is seemingly an admonition that no one can disagree with.
All of the military reverence comes to a screeching halt, though, when it comes to the surviving crewmen of the USS Liberty. They
can only be brushed aside, with their demands for a true accounting for
what was done to them by our great “ally” with the connivance of their
own leaders. For our politicians to do
otherwise and to get to the bottom of what happened there in the Eastern
Mediterranean on June 8, 1967, would put them on a collision course
with the real ruling power in the country. When
it comes down to the choice of supporting our troops or supporting the
ethnic-supremacist state of Israel, whose fundamental nature was
revealed as much by the Liberty attack
as it was by the Lavon Affair, and for whom we regularly pour out our
fortune, our credibility, and our blood, Israel it has to be.
Should I test the theory by trying to post the review again with those two paragraphs left off? I’m afraid that it’s too late for that now. It looks like Amazon has just put me on a review blacklist. I reached that conclusion when I attempted last week to put up a review of Thomas Merton’s Peace in the Post-Christian Era. I got the same treatment, and that one has nothing at all that I know of to do with Israel. At any rate, you can read what else is now forbidden to Amazon.com readers by going to my article, “Merton’s Message Resonates as Nuclear Holocaust Looms.” The
book review that I tried to post on Amazon is the second part of that
article under the heading, “Thomas Merton, the Anti-War Oracle,” minus
the first sentence, which was a bridge from what I had written in the
first part.
Simultaneously
with the complete blackout of any new book reviews I might attempt, I
have noticed a censorship of another sort of one of my previous reviews,
that is of Christopher Ruddy’s The Strange Death of Vincent Foster. For
years, my review was showcased on Amazon as the top review, based upon
the number of people who had checked the box saying that they had found
it helpful. Currently, there are 61 customer reviews of that book, and now you have to scroll down to page five of the reviews to find mine. When they were still posting the number, 47 people had checked the box saying that they found the review helpful. Only
within the past couple of weeks it seemed to have dawned on the Amazon
folks that it didn’t look good to have such a popular review buried
away, when the one they were touting at the top as most helpful had only
12 “helpfuls” and the top “critical” review was a three-star review had only six “helpfuls” while my three-star review had 47 “helpfuls.” So
now, you are supposed to believe that in the over 10 years the review
has been up, it hasn’t managed to garner even a single “helpful.” If
you don’t want to go to the trouble of scrolling all the way down for
it on Amazon, you can read the 2015-updated version of the review in
question on my web site.
It’s really quite a shame to see what they’re now doing with unapproved customer reviews at Amazon. It has been a quite educational forum in the past. I
don’t recall what book it was that I was checking out at the time, but
it was in a customer’s review of it that I learned about the little
known attempt by the Zionist Stern Gang to assassinate President Harry
Truman with a letter bomb in 1947. That discovery led me to write the article, “’Jews’ Tried to Kill Truman in 1947.” One
can learn from that article that at the time I wrote it there was no
mention of that assassination attempt on Wikipedia, either in the list
of assassination attempts on American presidents, on Truman in
particular, or even on the “Letter Bomb” page. All that has now changed. With
the censorship regime now in place at Amazon, one must seriously doubt
that that reviewer’s mention of the Stern Gang attempt to kill Truman
would have ever gone up, our knowledge of 20th Century
history would be the worse for it, and that’s clearly how our rulers,
who are now apparently pulling Amazon’s strings, would have preferred it
to be.
[Editor's note: The ban wiped And I suppose we didn't go to the moon, either? (2015), from which the above image comes, off amazon.com
as well, not because of the evidence adduced that we never went to the
moon but because of four chapters challenging the "official narrative"
of the Holocaust by Thomas Dalton, Robert Faurisson, Nicholas
Kollerstrom and myself. Too much truth gets you booted from amazon.com.]
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