Talk:Freda Utley

Deleted Image

I took great pains to arrange for rights to the thumbnail of the subject that I uploaded, and to document those arrangements in the interrogation that one undergoes in uploading an image, but the image was squashed nonetheless. I am quite short of patience to pursue the effort further, and have invited to owner of the image to take up the baton. He is, however, not a Wikipedian of any sort, and I doubt he will do so, so readers of this article may either content themselves with imagining what Freda looked like, or follow the link profided in the Resources section of the article. Joe 16:59, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

POV Check

FYI Three main sources: Farnie, Geyer and Beckett are not right wing. Another one is from Marxist.Org and another from International Socialist publication. Another one is from a critic of holocaust denial. Two are mainstream sources Time Magazine (2x) and New York Times. I have made some of these connections clearer in footnotes. Will look around for other sources using different search terms. Esp. for controversy section. {unsigned by carolmooredc earlier}

New Refs (links in actual article):

• 6. ^ Royden Harrison, Bertrand Russell and the Webbs: An Interview], from “Russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies 5,” issue 1 (1985), article 6, 48.
• 8. ^ Martin Upham, The History of British Trotskyism to 1949, Part One, (1929-1938), Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Hull, 1980.
• 18. ^ Alfred Rosner, Review of Ygael Gluckstein Stalin’s Satellites in Europe, International Socialism, Issue 103, July 5, 2004.
• 19. ^ E. Herbert Norman, Japan's Emergence As a Modern State, UBC Press, 1940, 43.
• 20. ^ Stanford University Japanese Collection.
• 21. ^ Justus D. Doenecke, Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention, 1939-1941, Rowman & Littlefield, published 2000, 254.
• 24. ^ Holocaust denial: Historical view; see Deborah Lipstadt’s criticisms from her book Denying the Holocaust.
• 25. ^ Sam Tanehause, Un-American Activities, Review of Arthur Herman's book Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator, New York Review of Books, Volume 47, Number 19, November 30, 2000.
• 26. ^ Thomas, S. Bernard, Season of High Adventure: Edgar Snow in China, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, 173.
• 27. ^ Richard Walker, China studies in McCarthy's shadow: a personal memoir The National Interest, September 22,1998.
• 28. ^ Executive Sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee On Government Operations Volume 2, Eighty-third Congress, First Session, 1953, (Made Public January 2003), 140, 1051.

Carol Moore 02:07, 28 January 2008 (UTC)Carolmooredc {talk}

POV Language Looking at this article yesterday realized that some of the language I left in from the original authors is rather dramatic, laudatory and otherwise POV and will change soon. Carol Moore 17:10, 29 January 2008 (UTC)Carolmooredc {talk}

Lipstadt accusations too frivolous to mention if ref'd?

Sentence Her book has been attacked as "Holocaust denial" because of such statements. was removed because the ref didn't have a page number from the Lipstadt book. (REFs being: Holocaust denial: Historical view and Deborah Lipstadt's criticisms from her book Denying the Holocaust at the FredaUtley Webpage.

Google book search found a relevant statement on page 41 of 1993 version, though it's an incomplete search return sentence. Because the Freda Utley site mentioned the criticism, I stuck it in way back when. But it seems the page's point was the absurdity of the claim that someone who pointed out American atrocities was automatically someone who denied Nazi atrocities. However, if there isn't a WP:RS saying so - and if that point not explicitly made on Utley page - I guess it's not that important. So just a note on that. CarolMooreDC (talk) 04:01, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

If American policies towards Germany were no different from the policy of the Third Reich towards Jews, the German people would be extinct. When one assessing a crime, the motivations of a criminal matter just as much as the suffering of the victim. Let's accept the thesis that all murder is horrible and wrong. But the law makes a difference between second-degree murder, the so-called "hot" murders vs first-degree murder, the so-called "cold" murders. If John comes home early from work to find his wife Mary in bed with his brother Joe and kills them in a moment of fury, that's second-degree murder because there was no premeditation. If John comes home early from work to find his wife in bed with his brother, and then builds a bomb to kill them, that's first-degree murder because there was premeditation as John had time to think it over. All murder is terrible, but first-degree murder is considered worse than second-degree murder because of the premeditation. Likewise, if you kill somebody by accident, it's manslaughter and if you kill somebody on purpose, it's murder. So if a drunk driver kills somebody's child, it's manslaughter and if somebody runs over a child deliberately, it's murder. There is no difference in the suffering of the parent killed by the drunk driver vs. the parent of the murdered child, but the law would treat the latter far more harshly than the former. If one were to accept Utley's reasoning, all these distinctions between first-degree murder, second-degree murder, first-degree manslaughter and second-degree manslaughter are meaningless. I don't deny that Germans suffered horribly in World War II, but the claim made by Utley that there is no moral difference between the actions of the Allies and the actions of the Axis is absurd. It was the intention of the German state to exterminate Jews everywhere and kill every single Jewish man, woman and child in the world. If it was the intention of the Allies to exterminate the Germans as a people, then and only then would Utley be right in her claims of moral equivalence.

But it was not the intention of the Allies to exterminate the Germans and at present, this article is far too sympathetic by citing her statement that the expulsions of the ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe as proving her point. None of the Allies, not even the Soviets, wanted to exterminate the Germans, and what Lipstadt is getting at is that Utley by making these false claims of moral equivalence has the effect of reducing the evil of the Nazis down. The Allies won the war, and so if they really wanted to exterminate the Germans, it was within their power to do so. But the last I heard was that there are 80 million Germans in the world today, which clearly proves that there were no plans by the Allies to wage genocide against the Germans. If one accepts Utley's thesis that Churchill was a bastard, Roosevelt was a bastard, de Gaulle was a bastard, Stalin was a bastard (well, there's a lot of truth there-but that's another matter)-then there is no real reason to single out Hitler as uniquely bad. By Utley's reasoning, Hitler was just one bastard out of many, and should not be singled out. There are many criticisms that can be legitimately made about the Anglo-American bombing of Germany, but the purpose of the bombing campaign was to win the war, not exterminate the Germans. The British cabinet believed if enough German families were "dehoused", that would cause the collapse of the German economy and win the war; if during the process of destroying homes to "dehouse" German families, said family got killed in the bombing, that was just tough for them. Air Marshal Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, who commanded Bomber Command from February 1942 onward, liked to make statements that he took a sadistic pleasure out of the suffering his bombing caused, which has made him into a hate figure in Germany both at the time and since, but Harris was only following orders. On May 14th, 1940 the British cabinet decided to start a bombing campaign against German cities to win the war. Context is important; on May 10th, 1940 the Wehrmacht launched an invasion of the Low Countries and France intended to win the war, and that offensive was going very well, which why is the Churchill cabinet decided on the bombing campaign against German cities. Harris seems to have taken a sadistic kicks out of bombing German cities to the ground, but the policy of "area bombing" was started in May 1940 out of sheer desperation as Germany was winning the war. This policy of "area bombing" to "dehouse" German families has been criticized quite a bit both at the time and after, but nowhere is there a single document in the Public Record Office saying anything about wanting to kill every single German man, woman and child. American policy was one of "precision bombing" to destroy factories, but in practice American bombers were often sloppy, so the difference between British "area bombing" and American "precision bombing" was more in terms of rhetoric . Utley was right that the Anglo-American bombing of Germany did indeed kill millions of German civilians and caused much suffering to the survivors of the bombing, but then she goes off the rails by saying that this is morally the same as the Holocaust.

Likewise, her treatment about the expulsions of Germans from Czechoslovakia and Poland, she says: "The women and children who died of hunger and cold on the long trek from Silesia and the Sudetenland to what remained of the German Reich, may have thought that a quick death in a gas chamber would have been comparatively merciful." She is clearly to say here that the expulsions were even worse than the Holocaust. It cannot be denied that the Poles and Czechs were very brutal about expelling Germans in 1945-46, but the key here is expulsion. The policy of Warsaw and Prague was to expel the Germans, not exterminate them. One of the striking things about The High Cost of Vengeance is that Utley only saw the negative about the Allied victory in 1945; you would not know from reading her book that an extermination camp by the name of Auschwitz ceased operating as result of Nazi Germany losing the war. Utley saw nothing but evil as coming from the Allies winning the war; the fact that the Holocaust ended as a result of Germany's defeat does not factor in at all with her. As Utley talks about horror after horror committed by the Allies against Germany before, during and after World War II, one cannot escape the impression that the wrong side won the war. There is a haunting novel called A. D. After Dachau set in a world after Nazi Germany won the Second World War, a world where all Jews, Asians, blacks, and anybody non-white have been exterminated everywhere, leaving the earth inhabited only by Aryan types. Had Germany won World War II, the world that A.D. After Dachau imagines would really exist today. A.D. After Dachau is a novel, but the Franco-Israeli historian Saul Friedländer, whose parents were gassed at Auschwitz, wrote in 1987 during his famous debate with Martin Broszat that the essence of National Socialism was that it "tried to determine who should and should not inhabit the world". The fact that Utley could not see that simple fact and only go on about how awful the Allies were to the Germans before, during and after the war gives one a very good idea about whose side she was on in World War II as well as her moral values or lack thereof.

The apologist nature of The High Cost of Vengeance can be seen in that Utley predictably enough excoriates the Treaty of Versailles as "unjust" to Germany, but she completely misses the point that Versailles was actually a lenient peace treaty. Look at the eastern frontiers of Germany imposed by the Treaty of Versailles and compare them to the Oder-Neisse line. Germany lost far more territory in 1945 than she did under the Treaty of Versailles, which might suggest that the Treaty of Versailles was really actually reasonable and it was foolish and stupid on the part of the Germans to start a new war because they didn't like the Treaty of Versailles. Under Versailles, the ethnic Germans of the Sudetenland were allowed to stay in Czechoslovakia; in 1945 President Benes kicked them all out under the grounds that Germans and Czechs could not live together in the same state. And who had promoted this idea that Germans and Czechs could not live together? That was the idea of Konrad Henlein, the most powerful and popular politician in the Sudetenland in the 1930s, who was secretly working for Germany. During the First Republic period in Czechoslovakia, nobody advocated expelling the ethnic Germans of the Sudetenland. Even Karel Kramář, the most anti-German of the Czech politicians in the First Republic, accepted the right of the Sudeten Germans to stay and speak German. Henlein had acted very disloyally to Czechoslovakia, taking his orders from Berlin, and the fact that the majority of the Sudeten Germans followed Henlein in the 1930s led directly to their expulsion in 1945-46. In 1938, the popular slogan in the Sudetenland had been "Home to the Reich!" and in 1945 the Sudeten Germans were sent "home to the Reich" in a way that none of them wanted as the Czechs kicked them all. At the time, there were Sudeten Germans who felt that their first loyalty should be to Czechoslovakia, not Germany, and had there been more of them, people in the Sudetenland would still be speaking German instead of Czech. It is true that the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans was unjust in that all Sudeten Germans were expelled, regardless of their age or if they had been loyal to Czechoslovakia, so I am no means to this was a justified measure. But it also true that many in the Sudeten German community by their treasonous behavior had brought this down upon themselves. Expelling the Sudeten Germans was not a mainstream position before 1938 and in 1945, all of the Czech parties supported the expulsions. Czech historians who blame the expulsions as the Communists are wrong; the Communist dictatorship didn't start until the 1948 coup, and in 1945-46 Czechoslovakia was ruled by a coalition government with the Czechoslovak Communist Party played a leading role, but not dominant rule. But it was the Castle that was really pushing for the expulsions as President Benes (the man who was overthrown in the 1948 coup) being obsessed with expelling the Sudeten Germans. Utley is full of fury at the expulsions of the ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland, but she never examines why this happened nor does she noted that the "unjust" Treaty of Versailles allowed the Sudeten Germans to stay and guaranteed their right to speak their language in Czechoslovakia.

There is something rather odd about a book where SS Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper and SS Brigadeführer Kurt "Panzer" Meyer are portrayed as victims, whose plight on death row breaks Utley's heart (though Peiper and Meyer were in fact spared), but she has almost nothing to say about the massacres of Canadian and American soldiers by the Waffen-SS other than to say Peiper and Meyer are completely innocent of the killings done by their men. Peiper and Meyer were both hardcore Nazi fanatics (Meyer in particular continued to preach National Socialism all though the 1950s-1960s), who believed that the laws of war were for wimps, and committed all sorts of atrocities in both Western and Eastern Europe. Meyer who commanded the 12th Waffen-SS Division Hitlerjugend in the Normandy campaign refused to take prisoners, shooting every Canadian soldier who surrendered to them. At the beginning of the Normandy campaign, the 12th SS took a group of soldiers from the North Nova Scotia Highlanders prisoner and upon seeing that one of the Canadian POWs was a Mi'kmaq Indian, Meyer without the slightest bit of evidence accused the Mi'kmaq of scalping German soldiers. The testicles of the Mi'kmaq were stomped into a bloody pulp and then he was shot, and Meyer decided while he was at it, to have the other 19 Canadian POWs lined up across the wall and shot. And Peiper showed his commitment to war without mercy by massacring 84 American soldiers who surrendered to his men on December 17th 1944. Utely does not have any sympathy at all with the victims of the Ardenne Abbey massacre or the Malmedy massacre, and instead she excoriates the Canadian and American governments for bringing Peiper and Meyer to trial. One would not know from reading The High Cost of Vengeance that Peiper and Meyer were SS officers committed to Nazi values of war without mercy as she portrayed them as a honorable, "apolitical" officers only doing their duty to the Fatherland.

If you accept Utley's thesis that the purpose of the bombing of Germany was to exterminate the Germans (which is totally wrong), then the Holocaust does not seem uniquely evil. Moreover, during the war, Hitler (no doubt projecting what he had done if he had won) constantly accused the Allies of planning genocide against the Germans, often saying the war was about "the right of the German people to exist". If one accepts Utley's thesis, then Hitler had it right, and far from being a genocidal war of conquest, Nazi Germany was just waging a noble struggle for "the right of the German people to exist" against the Allies who allegedly wanted to exterminate them. So if one accepts Utley's thesis, then the Allied soldiers who landed in France on D-day were not liberators, but instead just a gang of bastards no different from the Nazis. That is the point that Lipstadt was making. Utley started out as a Communist and apologist for the Soviet Union before doing an U-turn and becoming apologist for Nazi Germany. Her book The High Cost of Vengeance does leave one with the impression that the wrong side won World War II, which shows she was still a Nazi apologist even after the war. This article would do well to pay more attention to that fact.--A.S. Brown (talk) 03:28, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

- What "fact" are you talking about? Your opinion on the impression a reader may get from her book is far from "fact" wouldn't you say?

A "Holocaust denier" is both someone who denies it occurred and someone who draws false moral equivalence with Dresden etc? Even Wikipedia articles can't agree.

Re the above, I noticed the discrepancy too (from a Wikipedia link to this article) - but since this is Wikipedia my argument is how some (other) articles might be wrong or need to be change along with this one then;

This bit of this article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_Peiper;

Peiper's attorney cited documents by Freda Utley, a Holocaust denier academic, which said that the U.S. Army had tortured the Waffen-SS defendants in the Malmedy massacre trial.

That links to here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_denial And here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freda_Utley

The first link says this;

Holocaust deniers make one or more of the following false statements:

Nazi Germany's Final Solution was aimed only at deporting Jews and did not include their extermination.

Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas chambers for the genocidal mass murder of Jews.

The actual number of Jews murdered is significantly lower than the accepted figure of approximately 6 million, typically around a tenth of that figure.

The Holocaust is a hoax perpetrated by the Allies, Jews, and/or Soviet Union.[4][9]

But the second link says this;

Utley wrote in The High Cost of Vengeance: "I had referred to our obliteration bombing, the mass expropriation and expulsion from their homes of twelve million Germans on account of their race; the starving of the Germans during the first years of the occupation; the use of prisoners as slave labourers; the Russian concentration camps, and the looting perpetrated by Americans as well as Russians."[32] In her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, the American historian Deborah Lipstadt critically examines the dissemination and impact of such arguments by Utley and other "revisionists", claiming that "the argument that the United States committed atrocities as great, if not greater, than those committed by Germany has become a fulcrum of contemporary Holocaust denial."[33]

i.e. Freda_Utley (merely) drew false equivalence - and that is cited as Holocaust denial in the 2 articles given - but false equivalence doesn't meet any of the 5 conditions in the main Holocaust denial article (see them above). So does that article need to be changed or a new term thought up to draw the distinction between the 2 points of view? (Outright denial and false equivalence). Which in any case wouldn't fit what Deborah Lipstadt said above. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.99.210.174 (talk) 20:21, 9 November 2022 (UTC)

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