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Enshrining Ethnocentrism

Harvard Library's Cognitive Manipulation of "Hate"

by Michael A. Hoffman II

Editor's note: On Oct. 12, 1996, I electronically mailed the anonymous director of the Harvard Law Library's "HateWatch," asking to be placed on the mailing list of their bimonthly newsletter. That request initiated the following exchange:

Re: Newsletter Request

Date: Sat, 12 Oct 1996 13:27:10 +0000 From: HateWatch lawlib@hulaw1.harvard.edu

To: hoffman@hoffman-info.com

Harvard Law Library HateWatch wrote:

Of course I will add you to our newsletter list. Also I read your article about our site with great interest, (posted Oct. 11 in the News Bureau section of http.www.hoffman-info.com), though I must admit it took several readings to find out what your point was exactly. It seems that you desire to find a Jewish/Zionist conspiracy here at Harvard by linking Goldhagen, Dershowitz an HateWatch into some sort of cabal. A little self-reflection and intellectual distance would go a long way for you Mr. Hoffman...

Hoffman's response:

Please spare me your Freudian didacticism, Mr. or Miss Editor; as for the notion of a "Jewish/Zionist cabal"--that is your purple prose, not mine. It is redolent of the constant need of the thought cop to "fit" highly individualist thinkers into pre-determined, fixed categories of psycho-political taxonomy.

Mr. Dershowitz is a professor at Harvard Law. Your site is based at the Harvard Law library. One need not be Sherlock Holmes to explore a possible connection. This is a legitimate line of inquiry for any investigative journalist.

I mentioned Mr. Goldhagen as a notorious example of a vicious anti-German bigot whose hatemongering in his book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners," is lauded at both Harvard and the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

This demonstrates both the bankruptcy of the "hate watch" lobby as well as its own "lack of reflection": it is so sunk in chauvinism it can't even conceive of the German people as a race of humans worthy of defense from hatred and defamation. In fact, behind the self-annointed arbiters of what is hateful in intellectual life, are some of the most egregious anti-German hate groups, as for example, the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Harvard Law Library HateWatch wrote:

>...before seeing evil intentions behind every word of criticism

Hoffman's response:

The raison d'etre of the Harvard law Library "Hate Guide" is to do that very thing: "seeing evil intentions behind every word of criticism" expressed by homicidal gas chamber skeptics.

Harvard Law Library HateWatch wrote:

> Also in your article you state, "I will not engage in the futile

>charade of submitting any more Zionist

> hate sites to "The Editor," at Harvard Law Library, though there are

> plenty of them"... Which ones!? What are their URL's?! What server

> do they reside on!?

Hoffman's Response

Much of the implications of this debate are, patently, over your head. Let's repeat: when you list Bradley Smith's academic CODOH group as a "hate site" and fail to list the web of the bomb-throwing Jewish Defense League, your credibility and objectivity are extinguished, whatever your protests and exclamations to the contrary.

Harvard Law Library HateWatch wrote:

>Instead of making these silly statements of

> supposed fact, give out the information for all to see and

>investigate. Contrary to your

> unreasonable belief, if these yet to be named Jewish groups

>advocate hate I

> will NOT HESITATE to include them in HateWatch.

Hoffman's Response:

Come out of cloud cookoo-land, Mr. or Miss Librarian. Bradley Smith's site has never "advocated hate," yet you have listed it in your "hate guide."

This writer's website does not "advocate hate" yet you have also listed it.

Hate advocacy is not the issue at the Harvard Law Library. By your own praxis, every revisionist site is ipso facto hateful. You are apparently such a zealot you can't grasp the depth of your own subjectivity. If we observe your listings we clearly see that facts and evidence play no part in your determinations of who or what is hateful.

Your agenda is on display for all to see: he who doubts some aspect of the enormous, veritable sea of accusations grouped under the absurd Newspeak term, "Holocaust," is immediately stigmatized by Harvard Law as a "hater." I suppose when Jews like David Cole doubt some aspect of the homicidal gas chamber accounts, they become "self-haters."

Your world-view, at least in so far as it is reflected in your "hate guide," is obviously a product of your immersion in the single dimension of establishment consensus. Your site is credible only among those as much immersed in conformity to the official paradigm, as you.

By the evidence of your listings, you are a partisan. You should be in charge of the Likud Library not the Harvard Library, where your pose as a neutral archivist of all proponents of hatred, has become a consummate example of the pretensions of thought police.

Normally hysteria like yours would have had cachet only in some obscure Stalinist sub-cult. But these are not normal times and your hysteria now commands a prominent position at Harvard.

But the bottom-line is this: you, the A.D.L., the Wiesenthal Center and all the other inquistors-general, may take your lists of alleged thought criminals and set them to the music of the 92 piece Harvard Marching band, with the imprimatur of the Boston Globe and PBS, and this writer and a thousand like him will go forward with our studies.

The objective of the Harvard Law Library "hate guide" is to intimidate independent scholars and instill in them the fear that if they too should dissent from the "party line," they may quite possibly have Harvard Law Library's official anathema pronounced against them as well. That is the real intent of your despicable enterprise.

But whatever the cost, I choose not to salaam to the sultans of received opinion.

My basis for doubting the homicidal gas chambers, is not remotely connected to hate, but is encapsulated in the principle established by the 17th century chemist Robert Boyle:

"This seems to be sufficient reason to doubt of a known and important proposition, that the truth of it is not yet by any competent proof made to appear."

The mathematician Michael Servetus was executed by burning at the stake because he could not in good conscience make three go into one for the benefit of Trinitarian Calvinism.

I cannot in good conscience make hydrocyanic acid the means of extermination for millions in Auschwitz for the benefit of the Shoah business industry.

If one day, some hater from the Jewish "Defense" League, perhaps emboldened by the stigma attached to my name by your website, executes me with one of their bombs, I am confident that the principle of freedom of conscience for which I stand will not die with me.

Michael A. Hoffman II

The Campaign for Radical Truth in History

http:www.hoffman-info.com

Harvard Law Library HateWatch wrote:

Subject: Waiting for Jewish Hate Groups List

Date: Sun, 13 Oct 1996 12:28:12 +0000

From: HateWatch <lawlib@hulaw1.harvard.edu>

To: hoffman@rand.nidlink.com

Dear Mr. Hoffman:

Instead of the venom and your self-imposed martyrdom that your previous email was replete with, I again ask you ... supply us with a list of Jewish Hate Sites! You say that these Jewish hate Groups are numerous...so what are their URL's, their names, what do they say...?

It appears your reluctance to supply this basic information to us lends one to believe that you have simply made an assertion without facts.. Whether you wish to believe it or not, we look for such sites.We rely on the submissions of individuals, for our guide.

So, Mr Hoffman where are these numerous Jewish Hate sites. Where indeed...? Why keep their names hidden.? Why not flush these hate groups out into the open? Why keep them in hiding?

If these, yet to be seen Jewish hate groups in fact exist, we will add them to our guide. and so we wait for the URL's Mr. Hoffman....and wait.

The Editor

"HateWatch"

Michael A. Hoffman II comments:

Four days after receiving my e-mailed response as reproduced above, on Oct. 16 the Harvard HateWatch, after having initially absolved the terrorist Jewish Defense League (JDL) of being a hate site, relented and included the JDL site as a hate group in the library's HateWatch category of "Anti-Christian/Anti-Arab" bigotry.

The librarian is to be congratulated for taking this first step and we extend the benefit of the doubt to the Harvard Law Library in assuming that the JDL site was not added as the lone, token Jewish hate site, but rather is the beginning of a reform of the original direction of the HateGuide away from partisan propaganda and toward an attempt at constructing a neutral study of "hatred" on the web.

This first step should now be followed by a reconsideration of the listing of other sites, especially revisionist history sites such as Bradley Smith's CODOH, among others. As we challenged the library for its exculpation of the JDL by at first excluding it from "HateWatch," we now challenge the Harvard Law Library to furnish any evidence, by its own criteria, that such revisionist sites as CODOH or the Campaign for Radical Truth in History, "advocate hate."

This is the criterion provided by the HateWatch librarian, therefore it is incumbent upon him or her to furnish evidence, by citation from the sites themselves, of "hate advocacy."

We would remind Harvard Law that there is a difference between advocating hate and articulating what opponents and critics deem to be "hateful ideas." To fundamentalist Presbyterians, a Catholic traditionalist site will appear to contain many hateful ideas and in the eyes of the Catholic, the Presbyterian ideas will seem equally horrible.

I in no way accept the ethical legitimacy or philosophical premise of the "HateWatch" itself, with its self-ascribed mandate to label who is a hater and who is not; since the entire project is fraught with opportunities for absurdity based on an assumption of objectivity that can never exist. (Are joggers and health food buffs "haters" because they hate tobacco smoke? Are smokers haters because they execrate health nuts?).

The Harvard Library's HateWatch project is utopian, it presumes that we ought to live in a world that is hate-free and that it is possible to construct such a world, in part through labeling. But the human arbiter of what constitutes hatred, being human, will always regard the things he himself personally execrates, as being simply his decent opposition to obvious wickedness. He will see his opposition as noble, not as hate. The human arbiter will label the actions of the people he despises as hateful, whether in fact they are.

The Hebrew Testament tells us there is a time for everything and speaks of a "holy hate." To attempt to eradicate what may be an appropriate response in certain special circumstances is indicative of the coercive utopianism sweeping America today, wherein a Maryland city recently passed an ordinance forbidding cigarette smoking outdoors; and where soon not only bicycle riders but even pedestrians may be commanded to wear a "safety helmet," since statistics will prove that X number of lives will be saved by doing so. The issue of personal liberty is seldom an issue. After all, who but a "hater" would oppose the construction of utopia before our very eyes, presided over by Hillary or Bob "Americans with Disabilities Act" Dole?"

Surely there will be howls of outrage from the Simon Wiesenthal and ADL inquisitors if the Harvard law Library were to remove some revisionist sites from its HateWatch, upon admitting it could not cite any hate advocacy from those sites. In fact, chances are, if such a thing were to come to pass, the Harvard librarian would lose his or her post and perhaps even end up listed as a hater!

It's time for a Thermidorian thaw. The Harvard Law Library should continue its laudable effort at self-reform. Even if the library does not accept our philosophical challenge to its premise, it can at least ensure that those historians and researchers engaged in the controversial task of excavating the roots of received opinion, will be spared further opprobrium.

When these reforms have been implemented, we will contribute our own fallible opinion of who is advocating hate on the web, to the Harvard Law Library HateWatch; in the hope of increasing awareness for the fact that every human institution and person is capable of "hate," not simply groups out of favor with Washington, Hollywood and the New York Times.

Michael A. Hoffman II


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