The Persecution of Charles Krafft

[Mike Sullivan]

• 

Whenever a person of any prominence expresses interest in or agreement with tabooed ideas like White Nationalism, anti-Semitism, or Holocaust revisionism, the standard Judeo-Leftist strategy is to destroy him socially and economically — unless, of course, there are no legal barriers to outright murder.

The dissident is socially destroyed through public denunciations and whispering campaigns designed to isolate him in a hostile environment by cutting him off from his friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and colleagues, most of whom will distance themselves from any person labeled with “witch” words like “Nazi,” “hater,” etc., lest suspicion fall on them as well.

The target is economically destroyed by pressuring his employers to fire him. Or, if he is self-employed, by pressuring people not to buy, distribute, or advertise his goods and services. Generally, it is harder to economically destroy self-employed individuals, which is one reason why White Nationalists should seek to be self-employed and why the society we aim to create should hew to the classical republican ideal of a broad, self-employed middle class.

In recent years, Seattle artist Charles Krafft has been increasingly outspoken about his interests in Holocaust revisionism and White Nationalist concerns. For instance, Mike Polignano and I have interviewed Charlie for Counter-Currents Radio (part one, part two). We have also featured two short videos about him as Videos of the Day (here and here). Krafft has also been interviewed on Voice of Reason and The White Network. He also uses his Facebook page (2,000+ friends) as a micro-blog, and has been increasingly frank about white identity and interests and the Jewish question.



But no sincere expression of dissent goes unpunished. I knew something was brewing when earlier this year, a Facebook drama queen named Fred Owens started hurling accusations and threatening Krafft’s social and economic destruction. Next after Owens in the media’s Human Centipede of ritual defamation is Jen Graves, the “visual arts writer” for the Seattle alternative paper The Stranger, who has penned a breathless exposé with the snappy title “Charles Krafft Is a White Nationalist Who Believes the Holocaust Is a Deliberately Exaggerated Myth.”


Graves assembles some quotes from Krafft’s Facebook postings and interviews about the Holocaust and the Jewish question. Then she contacted some of Krafft’s friends and colleagues and invited them to distance themselves from him.


It was all too easy for Jen to label Charlie some sort of neo-Nazi, since his artworks teem with Hitlers, swastikas, Iron Crosses, and other images associated with National Socialism and the Second World War. Most people took his use of these images as ironic, and that’s obviously true, but Jen Graves claims that the Hitler teapots and windmills with swastika blades are all earnest. Deadly earnest.

If she had contacted me, this is what I would have said. I have known Charles Krafft since 2004 or 2005. During that time, I have corresponded with him, talked to him on the phone, and met him in person a number of times. I have been a White Nationalist since 2000, and my worldview was fully formed by the time I met Charlie. Even allowing for the fact that it takes time to get to know people, Charlie’s thinking has evolved dramatically over the time that I have known him.



His interest in revisionism goes back to 2000, but based on our conversations, it is my impression that he has only taken White Nationalism seriously as a political idea in the past couple of years. Furthermore, I have never heard him call himself a White Nationalist. Nor have we ever talked about race and racial issues. We talk mostly about art and religion. Thus I would classify Charlie as a believing and practicing historical revisionist. But not all revisionists are White Nationalists, and not all White Nationalists are revisionists. (Holocaust revisionism is not my cup of hemlock, but I support the rights of revisionists in all domains of history.) Thus when it comes to White Nationalism, I think of Krafft more as a metapolitical fellow traveler, whose path intersects with our own, but whose destination and concerns are ultimately more historical, artistic, and spiritual than political.


Yet Charlie’s use of Nazi imagery goes back to around 1990, beginning with his swastika-blade delftware windmills, which are a visual pun on the name of his friend Von Dutch (the swastika is associated with Germany, as is the word “von,” and the delftware windmill is obviously Dutch).

Later in the ’90s, Charlie came to be associated with the Slovenian band Laibach and their Neue Slowenische Kunst art collective. Laibach, of course, is famous for their ironic use of Nazi, fascist, and Communist imagery and their exploration of nationalist themes. (See Charlie’s discussion of Laibach here. See my review of their album Volk here.)

Both Laibach and Krafft use such symbols for more than mere shock value, but they stop well short of using them in earnest or endorsing the worldview that goes with them.

For Laibach, National Socialism is part of European nationalism and totalitarianism, which are central themes of their work. But they are no more National Socialists for using NS imagery than they are communists for using communist imagery or “Vlad the Impalerists” for using his image either.

As for Krafft, the swastika and other Nazi images are merely part of a much broader theme in his work: popular symbols for and images of evil, disaster, and death. Krafft has created artworks commemorating natural and man-made disasters, like earthquakes and wars. He has not just done portraits of Hitler, but also of Aleister Crowley, Charles Manson, Kim Jong-Il, Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and even Amy Winehouse — every one of them an embodiment of evil and depravity in the popular imagination.

Krafft does not necessarily endorse the idea that they really are evil, but neither does he endorse them and their actions as good. He is content to let them stand as symbols of evil in our imagination. Then he tweaks them, ironically, to give us some distance on evil — or our ideas and symbols of evil — and he leaves it at that.

Krafft’s art has power and vitality, because it shows us things that we take deadly seriously, and it allows us to laugh at them — or at least give a little Buddha smile. But you cannot laugh at something unless you have overcome it, unless you have risen above it, unless it no longer towers over and oppresses you. Thus laughter is a liberating thing. But of course this does not suit the agenda of dour, politically-correct scolds who want to oppress us with horrors, demoralize us with guilt, and lead us around on chains of moral indignation.

So I would argue that the fact that Charles Krafft uses swastikas no more proves he is a Nazi than his Kim Jong-Il teapots prove he is a follower of Juche. Hitler and the rest of them are part of a larger artistic project of exploring popular symbols of evil — symbols that serve as triggers to feelings of horror and indignation — and using humor and irony to help us rise above them.

I am not, however, claiming that there is no connection between Charles Krafft’s use of Nazi images in his art and his later intellectual journey. Krafft’s ironic use of Nazi images is, of course, repugnant to actual Nazis, who take all of it quite seriously. But Krafft’s art is attractive to people like me, namely White Nationalists who feel what I call “the burden of Hitler,” i.e., people who wish to distinguish their views from National Socialism while also giving just acknowledgement to what Heidegger called its “inner truth and greatness.” Krafft’s art, like Laibach’s, helps me gain some emotional distance and psychological freedom from National Socialism and other forms of totalitarianism, which is a necessary condition for defining a genuinely new “New Right.”

Thus when I first saw Krafft’s work, I sought him out and got to know him. I found Charlie to be a voracious reader and a fount of information. Whenever I talk to him, I always keep a notebook handy to jot down the names of authors and titles of books. Of course I make recommendations too, and I know he follows up on at least some of them.

Charlie is also a connoisseur of strange ideas and human eccentricity, which is good, because our little subculture has much in this way to offer. But he also has a sense of humor and a rational, critical, no-nonsense mind, so he is stimulated but not depressed or corrupted by such phenomena.

Charlie has many friends and acquaintances like me. So given his open but critical mind, voracious reading habits, and wide network of friends in the broad “White Nationalist” milieu, it stands to reason that Charlie’s thinking has evolved in that direction. Because White Nationalism is a fundamentally rational, moral, and enlightened worldview, and he is a fundamentally rational, moral, and enlightened guy.

So my hypothesis is that Krafft’s art brought him into contact with some of the more open-minded people in the White Nationalist subculture, and we may have influenced him just as he has influenced us.

But Charles Krafft does not fit any of the popular media stereotypes of a White Nationalist. He is neither consumed by hate nor nostalgic for the totalitarianism of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. He is pretty close to what I call the “West-Coast White Nationalist” paradigm. His intellectual journey included the Beatniks, the 1960s counter-culture, rock’n'roll, long sojourns in the East, Hinduism and Buddhism, and probably a bit of LSD. He is tolerant, widely-traveled, and has a genuine appreciation of and openness to non-European cultures, particularly of South and East Asia.

But all of that openness to the other does not preclude loving one’s own. I think that Charlie is one of an increasing number of essentially liberal whites who are awakening to the fact that multiculturalism and non-white immigration are threats to the things that liberals hold dear: environmentalism, support for the arts, respect for women, kindness to animals, high wages, safe workplaces, religious tolerance, tolerance for “alternative lifestyles,” safe, inviting public spaces and facilities, walkable communities, etc., none of which are conspicuous in Latin America or the Muslim world, for instance.

But none of these liberal concerns are ever allowed to trump the agenda of white dispossession and race replacement. For instance, in Norway and Sweden, rape has risen to the levels one finds in war zones, almost entirely due to mass immigration from the Muslim world. Yet the leaders of the Left-wing political and media establishments, all of them nominal feminists — at least when it serves as a stick to beat white men — refuse categorically to question the wisdom of non-white immigration and instead cover up the rape crisis and vilify people who speak out about it.

Thus more and more white liberals are realizing that something is deeply corrupt about their political and opinion leaders.

Krafft is also aware of the well-documented role of the organized Jewish community in promoting multiculturalism and non-white immigration in order to displace whites. And he is well-aware of the importance of the Holocaust as as tool for stigmatizing all forms of white ethnic consciousness, even the patriotism of the peoples who fought against the Nazis.

All of these views are fundamentally rational and moral, but in this society it takes great independence of mind to arrive at them and great courage to speak about them openly, in one’s own name. We have to support people like that when the enemy targets them for destruction.

What can we do to support Charlie Krafft?

First of all, if you have been thinking about buying his art, now is the time to do it. (You can contact him through Facebook and his website.)

Second, contact him and give him your moral support.

Third, it would probably be best for all if this controversy died in the pages of The Stranger. Thus I do not recommend commenting on The Stranger article, lest it encourage more press. But if other media pick up the story, and it looks like it will not die down, I will post links and encourage people to write comments.

Finally, if you are one of Charlie’s friends, be prepared to defend him if this campaign escalates. But be careful of speaking to the press. The enemy wishes to socially isolate Charlie and sow discord in our ranks, and they will distort your statements to achieve that. Statements of support can be twisted into the exact opposite.

Fortunately, we don’t need their media anymore. If you want to speak out, speak directly to the public on your own site, Facebook, Twitter, etc. And if you speak to reporters, let them know that you are recording your conversation, or keeping copies of your email correspondence, which you will make public if you are misquoted.

[Reinhard]

Charles Krafft and the Art of 'Holocaust Denial'

Karl Radl

Over the recent weeks we have witnessed a typical hand-wringing episode from the habitual hysterical blubberers: the liberal-left art world and the jews. The object of their alternate bleary-eyed declarations of 'say it ain't so' and militant screeching about there being 'no place for hate' (whatever that is) is the Seattle-based ceramic artist Charles Krafft. Krafft has long produced risqué pieces of artwork which have for some time now been centred around the idea of 'disaster ware', which are pieces of art which provoke and challenge those who look upon them into thinking deeply about human disasters and mass death in history.

What is in many ways both hilarious and sad at the same time is that many of Krafft's artistic works were loved and treasured by the very people who are now vilifying him and his artwork. Articles such as the 'contribution' from 'The Stranger' ask rhetorically whether Krafft's artwork was really meant to convey a 'trivialization' of 'jewish suffering' and whether it seeks to normalize the Third Reich more generally. (1)

One wonders how the much vaunted 'art critics' don't seem to realize that the value of art should; if art is not to be anything more than realism, be completely independent of the views of the artist. To be sure some art is loaded with a political message or is conceived for an explicitly political purpose (such as carved wall scenes at the Assyrian palace of Nineveh), but it is important to realise that the message conceived of by the artist has no sure fire way of being received by the audience. (2)

Menachem Wecker's story about putting some of Adolf Hitler's paintings on display while concealing the information about who the artist was and the positive reaction and praise of them is pointed in its message that artists do tend to have a habitual case of double-think. (3) They; as Greg Johnson has rightly pointed out, want to view art by itself as having a value independent of the artist, but also cannot believe that somebody they would consider evil would produce art worthy of praise. (4)

It comes down to the conundrum surrounding figures like Ezra Pound in that he was arguably the greatest poet of the twentieth century, but yet he was openly anti-Semitic and produced pro-Axis propaganda during the Second World War.

How do the arty-farty community reconcile this?

Well they look to Pound's proverbial death bed repudiation of his earlier views and suggest that he was a good guy after all despite being fundamentally flawed for his support of Fascist Italy, Fascist Spain and the Third Reich.

That of course is a rather asinine and insipid interpretation in much the same way as claiming that Voltaire was a Catholic, because he confessed his sins and was given absolution as well as the last rites on his deathbed by a Catholic priest. In summation: it takes a retrospective view of belief so that everything Voltaire or Pound did before their literal and proverbial 'death bed confessions' is seen in the light of that new confession of faith as opposed to the original intellectual context in which it was created.

The same applies with Krafft in that the artistic community cannot seem to understand; for what reasons I know not, that Krafft can still be an avant-garde artist while being skeptical about the holocaust or that he produced art that was innocently but darkly satirical about the Third Reich and 'jewish suffering' before he came to doubt the official version of the holocaust.

The simple fact is that Krafft has only expressed skepticism about the holocaust and has even explicitly told people concerned that he doesn't 'deny' anything, but rather on the basis of research he has come to endorse the alternate hypothesis suggested by holocaust revisionism. That school of thought is much vilified and has even been outlawed in numerous countries not because it is a 'crank theory' (after all 'denial' of the well-documented Soviet atrocities isn't illegal and is practiced in European countries by some Marxist intellectuals and historians) but rather because it has a tendency to catch 'holocaust historians' with their metaphorical trousers down.

If those decrying how 'well evidenced' the holocaust is actually stopped looking at newspaper articles about 'the latest study' and used that time instead to read through a couple of orthodox academic books on it and then did a few thought experiments: they would quickly see that the 'holocaust' is actually the worst kind of conspiracy theory. It assumes; for example, that an order was given or that it 'was a series of coincidences' (the famous 'orders from the top'/'initiatives from below' position) but no 'holocaust historian' has to date found any such order only the occasional inference which can be only be interpreted to mean industrial mass murder when one already believes it happened.

It doesn't help that; as of this writing, no 'holocaust historian' has been able to provide documentary or physical evidence that a single jew was gassed as part of a mass gassing program aimed at them as jews. It is true that lists of victims get put forward, but the missing component to those lists is very simply the question: on what basis do we know they were gassed?

The response is very simple: we don't.

The lists have largely been created by simply taking manifests of jews transported to the camps and when they died according to extant concentration camp records then adding the unjustifiable assumption that anyone who died soon after arrival or disappeared from the camp was 'gassed'. That completely ignores every possible other cause of death or loss of a record, such as disease (the camps famously had problems with disease not helped by the ghettoization of the jews for several years previously) and also the fact that we know jews were shuttled around different camps in large numbers.

Suffice to say if you couple that with the absolute howlers of supposed purpose-built gas chambers at Auschwitz being built underground with only a single door in and out and with a small number of crematory ovens serving two gas chambers supposedly killing thousands a day then the absurdity of the holocaust theory is there for all to see.

Next time you go to a funeral that involves a cremation: think about how long it takes to cremate a body in a modern crematory oven and then compare the number of victims per day at say Auschwitz to the number of crematory ovens for single bodies that were available. If you do you'll quickly see why revisionist critique of the 'holocaust' theory has been so devastating as well as quietly forcing 'holocaust historians' away from the gas chambers and into the new idea of the 'holocaust by bullets' on the Eastern front.

That hasn't stopped the loud claims about 'gas chambers' and almost weekly bevy of new 'survivor' stories however, but it has severely clogged the wheels of official 'holocaust historians' so much so that they now almost completely ignore revisionist work in part because to even cite it in a non-pejorative context is taken by jewish organizations and their amen corner to be ipso facto proof of 'holocaust denial' and/or 'anti-Semitic sentiments' on the part of the individual citing it.

Now what I have expressed above is what we could call 'holocaust skepticism' which is a fairly healthy intellectual beast, but what then would 'holocaust denial' be?

Well if we are talking in terms of the killing of jews being a 'holocaust' (i.e. 'burnt offering') then the problem comes in the terminology precisely because the 'holocaust' theory (and its concomitant claims of 'uniqueness') is predicated on the gas chambers and what Applebaum has called the 'industrial nature' of the killing. (5) If we take away the gas chambers then the killing of jews in the Second World War becomes simply one of many atrocities committed by all sides involved: indeed if we understand it contextually the number of jews killed in the alleged 'holocaust' is actually not the worst or even the largest atrocity of the period by a long shot.

Stalin's purges and the Holodomor in the Ukraine killed far more, while the mass expulsion and murder of millions of Germans after the Second World War (sometimes claimed to have been 'justified' by 'holocaust historians') by the Soviet Union and the Allies killed almost double the amount of Germans than the number of jews who were supposedly killed in the 'holocaust'. (6)

One wonders what Krafft's hand-wringing liberal-lefty critics have to say about those atrocities or perhaps even more appallingly: have they even heard of them?

We can thus perceive that 'holocaust denial' can be seen as the removal of the gas chambers from the story (something quite a few recent 'holocaust historians' are somewhat guilty of) or alternatively it can be seen simply as the intentional mass killing of the jews. Now no revisionist I am aware of disputes that jews were intentionally killed by the Third Reich, but the basic problem persists as even if we accept that the Third Reich shot millions of jews on the Eastern Front (highly unlikely but at least somewhat technically plausible) then that makes the 'holocaust' but one atrocity of many.

It then loses its place as a 'unique event' in the pantheon of modern belief as it isn't distinguishable from Stalin's mass shootings or the Allies own mass killings in the prisoner of war camps: let alone the atrocities committed by former resistance members against their own country people who supported the Third Reich.

What then is 'holocaust denial'?

Well if anything it is the simple objection to the supposed 'uniqueness' of 'jewish suffering' before and during the Second World War and substituting the placement of real and imagined atrocities against the jews in their correct historical context as opposed to downplaying the context and then pushing one type of atrocity to the fore as 'holocaust historians' invariably do.

That to me; as a historian, is utterly repugnant especially given that the 'holocaust' is used like a money-making racket for jewish organizations as Norman Finkelstein has famously pointed out. (7)

Essentially 'holocaust denial' is a pejorative term invented to rhetorically smear those who question the basis of 'uniqueness' of the killing of jews before and during the Second World War. That the 'holocaust' has become a political tool; and hence the lack of ability for it to be conceded as a false intellectual position much like Turkish historians 'denying' the Armenian genocide, (8) is indisputable and as such it is beholden on the honest observer to at least ask the fundamental question of just what evidence supports this ever-changing theory?

That is precisely what Krafft did as if one reads his account of the alleged 'Abattoir Murder' of jews by members of the Romanian 'Legion of the Archangel Michael' in 1941: (9) then one can clearly see that Krafft was himself very surprised by the fact that so widely credited an atrocity has almost literally nothing behind it in terms of documentary evidence. He notes that the two Romanian authorities working in the area; whose work other 'holocaust historians' view as 'authoritative', can't even produce a copy of the original document which is the cornerstone of their argument on this point.

Indeed in Krafft's narrative it is clear that it is both a case of 'can't' as well as 'won't', which is an unfortunately all too common occurrence with scholars being unable to back up a claim they have made but because that claim has entered common scholarly parlance: it is ironically just accepted without question.

Reading between the lines of Krafft's article; which is part travelogue, part autobiography and part historical commentary, it becomes very clear that Krafft was himself shocked at the intellectual carelessness of the 'holocaust historians' he encountered and that his initial interest in the 'Legion of the Archangel Michael' was the kind of intellectual whim that is popularly associated with artists. What precisely Krafft's thoughts were at this time I do not know, but at the same time it is fairly clear that Krafft came to holocaust revisionism awkwardly and hesitantly, because it went against most of what he then believed about the world.

It might be very difficult for his fellow artists to believe, but Krafft came to his doubt about the official holocaust narrative through study and; like most of those associated with holocaust revisionism, a troubling period of self-doubt as to whether the official historians could have got it so badly wrong. Krafft; as he himself relates, engaged with the literature on both sides of the debate and made an informed decision.

This is the inverse to his detractors who have simply believed the standard 'holocaust' narrative without investigation or even a little dose of lateral thinking or as one person remarked to Krafft (I paraphrase): 'look at this latest newspaper article about the documentation of the killing sites'. (10)

Indeed when we look at the original article that sparked off the witch hunt against Krafft; written by a barely literate hysteric known as Jen Graves, (11) we note that she hasn't actually engaged with the scholarly (or even the popular) literature on the 'holocaust' at all, as she gives us such historical howlers as:

'I followed up: "The number I've always read is 6 million Jews killed. I just want to clarify that it's your belief that 700,000 to 1.2 million Jews died total."

Krafft did not answer the question. He only sent a link to a story about exaggerations in the original numbers of Jews reported killed at Auschwitz. That story, called "New 'Official' Changes in the Auschwitz Story," appears on a website called Institute for Historical Review.' (12)

The idea that '6 million jews' were killed is of course the sine qua non of popular 'holocaust' discourse, but as any 'holocaust historian' will tell you: it isn't an accurate number in the slightest and official estimates range between 4 and 5.5 million jews being killed. However Graves treats it as gospel and doesn't even bother to comment about the issue of why the 'number of dead' keeps being revised down.

Graves also clearly doesn't realise that the '6 million jews' number in relation to what in 'Jewish Studies' we call a 'Shoah' (lit. 'Catastrophe') event dates to at least 1840 (in relation the Damascus Affair) (13) and came into popular usage in relation to the so-called 'pogroms' (which as is now widely agreed weren't 'state-sponsored' contrary to the myth perpetrated by the jewish historian Simon Dubnow) from the 1880s to 1923. (14) Further the '6 million' number itself is; as is widely conceded, merely symbolic now and as I have pointed out elsewhere: it probably started out as a simple literal misunderstanding of the rabbinical concept of the guzma, (15) which snowballed over the course of the decades into a literal casualty figure to be taken as gospel (hence the incorrect rationalization that it supposedly comes from population statistics).

Now it is clear; even in Graves' hit piece, that it is Krafft who has done the research on the 'holocaust' and not Graves, but yet it is Graves who judges Krafft while Krafft doesn't judge Graves. It is ironic indeed that one of lefty-liberal art critic brigade is the one who is intolerant and hateful, while Krafft's role in this drama has been that of the individual simply seeking to be understood.

This brings us nicely onto the question of what precisely Graves is up to given that her article; as Johnson has rightly observed, (16) is extremely prejudiced and in all essentials is dressed-up personal invective against Krafft. Graves; looking at her previously published 'content', (17) is a typical example of what we may term; with Johnson, 'cultural bolshevism'. In other words: Graves believes that everyone has the right to an opinion as long as that opinion doesn't contradict hers and if it does woe betide them.

This is the symptomatic behaviour of what Jonah Goldberg has appositely termed 'liberal fascism' or the viewpoint; held in practice but not often in theory by those on the liberal-left, which seeks to suppress all points of view which do not fit into their neat political paradigms of 'acceptability'. One such example of intellectual traditions that they seek to suppress is that associated with the radical right as well as the racialistic right (which they don't tend to differentiate themselves) with which school of thought they broadly and rather incorrectly associate 'holocaust denial'. (18)

Graves in her article; as do Phil Campbell and Priscilla Frank in theirs, (19) sounds a militant call to all art galleries to stop showing Krafft's work because of his 'political views' and supposed 'rehabilitation' of the Third Reich. Indeed it seems that Graves in particular has been actively messaging galleries; as well as encouraging her readers too, that have shown or are currently showing Krafft's work in order to have it withdrawn.

What are we to make of that other than that Graves, Campbell and Frank don't actually believe in the separation of art from the artist and that they are all more interested in what an artist thinks about such and such a historical event or the current political status quo as opposed to the art said artist produces. Clearly Graves, Campbell and Frank adhere; by their actions if not their explicit beliefs, to the position that art is at the service of political and intellectual orthodoxy as opposed to the idea; current in their own writing as it happens, that one of the functions of art is to challenge cherished beliefs and breakdown barriers to understanding.

Is that not what Krafft has been doing irrespective of his historical and political beliefs?

As an aside we should also probably say that if Krafft had become involved with Stalinism and supported Stalin's murderous purges against the kulaks, 'saboteurs' and foreign communists accused of actual or imaginary political deviancy: then Graves wouldn't have written her article and nothing more would have be said.

Such an attitude is symptomatic of what Krafft himself talks about in his article on the Abattoir killings in reference to the 'post-socialist' artistic trends he was involved with, (20) which had for years been lionizing every possible variant of socialism even the ones that killed millions like Trotsky's, Castro's and Mao's. Essentially Graves' problem with Krafft is that he went the wrong political direction and in her view is apologising for the wrong side: the far right rather than the far left.

When Campbell talks about the fact that Graves 'bothered' to google Krafft while others didn't: (21) I can understand what he is trying to say in that Krafft has not made his views on the 'holocaust' a particular secret. (22) However what is interesting is that nobody seems to have noticed or cared that Krafft held such views as we hear repeatedly from those interviewed by Graves and others. (23)

Now all of a sudden Krafft's friends are left holding the proverbial ticking time bomb of trying to apologise and explain why they 'didn't say anything' by the accusative spotlight that Graves has shone on them. It is classic yellow journalism; a term I suspect Graves would not appreciate being applied to her work, in so far as Graves contacts Krafft's friends and artistic associates who are then grilled about why they haven't reported Krafft to the liberal thought police and endorsed the subsequent attempt to hold an artistic auto-de-fe.

Essentially what has happened here is that Krafft held heretical beliefs about the 'holocaust' in private and then began to express those beliefs relatively quietly on the internet on alternative media outlets generally associated with the radical and racialist right. A liberal-lefty mud-raker (Graves) is having a hard time scratching around for her next 'big piece' (her content generally looks to be light on innovation in addition to what we may term 'artistic revelation' in a brief survey of her last few dozen articles) and she happens onto Krafft and thinks to write another short and somewhat dull peon to risqué 'visual art'.

Graves; like most hacks do these days, immediately jumps on google and taps in 'Charles Krafft' cycling through the pages about his work until she notices something odd: Krafft keeps coming up on sites associated with the radical and racialistic right. Graves' excitement deepens and she listens to a podcast with him from Carolyn Yeager's 'The White Network' to discover that he holds unorthodox and nigh on heretical views about the 'holocaust'.

A little more searching reveals Krafft's views have been held for some time and this; to Graves' continued excitement, means that she had a journalistic 'big score' here as she can 'out' Krafft and thus gain a reputation, kudos as well as potential income from a much wider circle than merely a Seattle-based arts rag. Graves' presentation itself is rather pedestrian and lacking in literary ability, but it creates enough of a stir to be picked up by Phil Campbell and Priscilla Frank at the widely-read liberal rag: the Huffington Post.

Their amusing and overdone 'outrage' about Krafft's 'warped ideology' (as Campbell terms it) then causes a ripple effect as liberals and leftists are by now scrambling to avoid any sort of association with Krafft and are acting the part that students played in Mao's cultural revolution in lining up to denounce the man they had loved and respected till a few days before as the devil incarnate.

This is made even worse when the Southern Poverty Law Center picks up the story and promptly begins scrambling to construct a 'profile' on Krafft (having missed his participation in the podcasts and radio interviews for years in spite of having a multi-million dollar endowment to 'track hate') and then strut around the room like they knew all the time. (24) This is then further picked up by the Jewish Daily Forward's arts blog; 'The Arty Semite', and I suspect this story has yet to run its full course in terms of officious liberal and jewish outrage.

We'll have to see.

What Graves has started off against Krafft is simply a witch hunt against a man based on the contravention of her own artistic tropes that the artist and the art they produce are separate entities. More than that Graves will certainly benefit by the publication of this hit piece as for years she has been confined to writing about the Seattle arts scene and now she has opportunity to move into 'exposing' artists with heterodox views (i.e. things she doesn't agree with and can easily be sensationalized) as well as gain national syndication for her own work.

Perhaps our struggling arts writer has finally had her Michelangelo moment?

I doubt it as Graves will find out: the 'Hatewatch' scene is all about what new exposes you can perform and tends to forget successes very quickly, but does have a tendency to remember a writer's failures for a much longer period of time.

Perhaps the last part of this saga that needs to be talked about is what impact it is having on Krafft. This hasn't been touched on by any other writer on this subject to my knowledge, but in an email exchange I recently had with him: he seems remarkably chipper for a man who is being publicly vilified by people he believed to be his friends left, right and centre. Financially Krafft has never had it so good (in contradiction to the SPLC's claim his artistic work is 'devalued'), (25) but he confessed that the hardest thing to bear is the social ostracism he is suffering as a result of this ongoing farrago of liberal character assassination and self-flagellation. (26)

I'd say that Krafft is a very brave man in standing by his views as being factually correct despite what it is costing him personally and emotionally as opposed to the usual kowtowing and mealy-mouthed apologies which characterise so many people who are 'exposed' as having heterodox views. I can only wish him the best of luck in his future endeavours and can assure him; as somebody who has been personally attacked for his intellectual beliefs in the past, that it does show you who your real friends are and that you get used to it soon enough.

Don't back down Charles.


References

(1) http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/char ... d=15995245
(2) Nicholas Jackson O'Shaughnessy, 2004, 'Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction', 1st Edition, Manchester University Press: Manchester, pp. 24-29
(3) http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semit ... -defended/
(4) http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/02 ... ch-krafft/
(5) Anne Applebaum, 2003, 'Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps', 1st Edition, Random House: New York, pp. 22-24
(6) This is a very uncomfortable area for modern historians and relatively few English studies have appeared (although there are a profusion of them in the German language), the most recent attempt at breaking this historical taboo is: R. Douglas, 2012, 'Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War', 1st Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven
(7) In Norman Finkelstein, 2001, 'The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering', 2nd Edition, Verso: New York
(8) This isn't strictly true in the sense of 'denying it happened' but rather (incorrectly in my view) disagreeing with the Armenian interpretation of malice aforethought as well as on the number of deaths (the Turks also tend to stress the atrocities committed by Armenian nationalists as well).
(9) Charles Krafft, 2012, 'To the Abattoir: Investigating the Legionary Rebellion of January 21-23, 1941', Smith's Report, Vol. 190 (March), pp. 7-11
(10) Charles Krafft in personal communication to the author.
(11) http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/char ... d=15995245
(12) Ibid.
(13) http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.co ... igure.html
(14) For a good summary see Don Heddesheimer, 2003, 'The First Holocaust: Jewish Fund Raising Campaigns with Holocaust Claims During and After World War One', 1st Edition, Theses and Dissertations Press: Chicago
(15) Lit. 'Exaggeration' and used to express a sense of scale in relation to a 'Shoah' event by multiplying the number of jews involved in the Exodus from Egypt according to the Mishnah (600,000).
(16) http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/02 ... ch-krafft/
(17) See http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/jen- ... ?oid=26622
(18) Holocaust 'deniers' actually come from across the political spectrum from Libertarians to Marxists to Nationalists to Liberals. It is a myth constructed from almost nothing that 'holocaust denial' is synonymous with nationalism.
(19) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phil-camp ... 94938.html and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/1 ... p_ref=arts
(20) Krafft, Op. Cit., pp. 7-8
(21) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phil-camp ... 94938.html
(22) http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/02 ... ch-krafft/
(23) http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/char ... d=15995245; http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semit ... -defended/; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/1 ... p_ref=arts
(24) http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2013/03/0 ... st-denier/
(25) Ibid.
(26) Charles Krafft in personal communication to the author.

Semitic Controversies