Lis­ten: One seg­ment

Begin­ning with the Syr­ian government’s offi­cial denial of the Holo­caust in its offi­cial pub­li­ca­tion, Tishreen, the broad­cast high­lights the grow­ing denial of the his­tor­i­cal facts of fas­cism. Sig­nif­i­cantly, the Tishreen edi­to­r­ial ref­er­enced the work of holo­caust revi­sion­ist David Irv­ing, cur­rently suing his crit­ics for libel. (For more on this libel suit, see FTR-189.)

Next, the broad­cast sets forth Japan­ese reac­tionar­ies’ denial of the Rape of Nanking. (In 1937, the Japan­ese occu­pa­tion forces shot, beheaded and bay­o­neted hun­dreds of thou­sands of Chi­nese cit­i­zens — the casu­alty total equaled the num­ber of Japan­ese who died in both atomic bombings.)

The broad­cast also dis­cusses Amer­i­can his­tor­i­cal revi­sion­ism. In early 2000, South Carolina’s fly­ing of the con­fed­er­ate flag became a polit­i­cal foot­ball in the Repub­li­can Pres­i­den­tial pri­maries. Both John McCain and George W. Bush stated that it was up to the peo­ple of South Car­olina to decide if the flag was to con­tinue to fly atop the state capi­tol build­ing. (The NAACP is boy­cotting the state in an attempt to get the flag removed.) Despite the claim by its orga­niz­ers, a Jan­u­ary 2000 rally in sup­port of the flag was openly racist. (Its orga­niz­ers claimed that the rally was about “her­itage, not hate”. Nonethe­less, an elected South Car­olina rep­re­sen­ta­tive referred to the NAACP as “the National Asso­ci­a­tion of Retarded Peo­ple”. When asked to apol­o­gize, he said that his state­ment was unfair to “retarded people”.)

The rally’s back­ers included an array of the most vir­u­lent Amer­i­can fas­cists and racists on the con­tem­po­rary polit­i­cal land­scape. Pro­gram High­lights Include: for­mer Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s found­ing of an orga­ni­za­tion to sup­port the rights of “oppressed” European-Americans; the fas­cist Lib­erty Lobby’s mid­wif­ing of the Pop­ulist Party (which ran Duke for Pres­i­dent in 1988); the role of attor­ney Jack Ker­shaw in help­ing to per­pet­u­ate the fin­ger­ing of James Earl Ray as the patsy in the assas­si­na­tion of Mar­tin Luther King (Ker­shaw founded the MNK Foun­da­tion, one of the core ele­ments of the League of the South, which spon­sored the pro-Confederate flag rally); Con­fed­er­ate flag sup­porter A.J. Barker’s asso­ci­a­tion with the Pop­ulist Party and the Lib­erty Lobby; the Lib­erty Lobby’s involve­ment in the Holo­caust revi­sion­ist move­ment; Con­fed­er­ate flag backer Ed Fields’ Ku Klux Klan back­ground and asso­ci­a­tion with David Duke; Con­fed­er­ate flag backer Kirk Lyons’ involve­ment with the Aryan Nations, Holo­caust revi­sion­ism and inter­na­tional neo-Nazism; the overtly and explic­itly racist con­no­ta­tions of the Con­fed­er­ate flag (as stated in the Texas arti­cles of seces­sion from 1861.) (Recorded on 2/20/2000.)