The Broadcasting Standards Authority's Christmas gift to anti-semites

In many parts of the West, the racist and anti-semitic far right is using a new tactic to try to gain a larger audience and more recruits. Aware of the repugnance that symbols like the swastika and ideas like Nazism still create amongst ordinary people, the far right is attempting to make itself respectable. Swastikas are being discarded, leather jackets are being swapped for suits, and the old Nazi vocabulary is being exchanged for innocent-sounding euphemisms. In countries like Britain and Belgium, the new strategy has had some success, as former streetfighting thugs have been elected to local councils and to the European parliament.

One local Nazi who has been trying to repackage himself in recent years is Kerry Bolton. Bolton joined the New Zealand Nazi Party as a fourteen year-old in 1975, and has since belonged to a succession of groups with explicitly racist and anti-semitic ideologies. In 1981 he founded a group called New Force, which argued in favour of apartheid at the time of the Springbok tour to New Zealand, and which issued leaflets warning against Polynesian immigration and the 'bastardisation of white New Zealand'. In 1997 Bolton was the founder of the short-lived New Zealand Fascist Union, and in 2004 he became the National Secretary of the National Front, an organisation that became notorious for its members' violent attacks on Somali immigrants in Wellington.

Bolton has complemented his political activism with a stream of rambling, often self-published books and articles on subjects like the Holocaust, Jewish conspiracies, and the supposed settlement of New Zealand in ancient times by a race of white warriors. In recent years Bolton has attempted to deny much of his political history, and to repackage some of his most unpleasant views. Bolton was not happy, then, at an interview I gave to Chris Laidlaw on Radio New Zealand earlier this year during which I discussed anti-semitism and Holocaust denial in New Zealand. During my chat with Laidlaw I cited Bolton as one of New Zealand's leading Holocaust deniers, observed that he has had connections with Holocaust deniers overseas, and suggested that he has had a thoroughly bad influence on the young people who make up the majority of the membership of neo-Nazi groups like the National Front.

Bolton complained about my comments to the Broadcasting Standards Authority, telling them that he is neither a Holocaust denier nor a neo-Nazi. Given the weight of evidence for Bolton's views, and the notoreity he enjoys as New Zealand's longest-serving neo-Nazi, I expected the Broadcasting Standards Authority to treat his complaint with the contempt it deserved.

Instead, the BSA has just issued a bizarre, convoluted judgement which refuses to take a position on whether or not Bolton is a Holocaust denier, and which finds that my comments about his beliefs were unfair, and should have been censored by Radio New Zealand. Bolton and the international Holocaust denial community will be delighted by their unexpected Christmas present.

The BSA's report complains that the evidence I offered of Bolton's Holocaust denial is 'scant', and notes that a number of the webpages where Bolton has published anti-semitic and Holocaust-denying material over the years have disappeared. The BSA observes that at the website of the Adelaide Institute, the notorious Holocaust-denying group whose leader Frederick Toben was sent to prison this year for hate crimes, the many pages which once hosted pieces by Bolton are now no more than dead links.

It doesn't appear to have occurred to the BSA that the sudden disappearance of much, though not all, of Bolton's writing about the Holocaust from the internet might have been organised by the man himself, so that he might look better in the eyes of the people investigating his complaint.

The Broadcasting Standards Authority is made up of journalists, and one might have expected them to be capable of doing a little empirical investigation, and discovering the many Holocaust-denying texts which Bolton has been unable to bury. But since the BSA's members haven't been able to do the work for themselves, and since they are quite likely to find their judgement appealed by Radio New Zealand, I want to suggest some additions to their Christmas holiday reading lists.

It may not be much fun compared to the new Dan Brown tome, but The Holocaust Myth: a Sceptical Inquiry might reveal to the members of the Broadcasting Standards Authority Kerry Bolton's real opinion of the most terrible event of the twentieth century. In The Holocaust Myth, which he self-published sometime in the '80s, and which can still be purchased on the website of his chums in the American Nazi Party, Bolton disregards all of the SS documents, all of the eyewitness testimonies of survivors, and all of the mass graves and gas chambers, and insists that the Holocaust was a fantasy created by enemies of Hitler and the white race.

Bolton wrote The Holocaust Myth some time ago, and members of the BSA might wonder whether it was perhaps a youthful abberration, something he has since outgrown and now regrets. A look at a long, vitriolic 'Open Letter to the War Generation' which Bolton posted to the neo-Nazi Stormfront website in 2003 should dispel any doubts about the man's continued attachment to Hitlerism and Holocaust denial. Bolton's letter explains why the Jews deserved the Nuremberg Laws, the Kristallnacht, and internment in the 1930s:

German Jews were rounded up as enemy aliens, since their own leaders publicly declared "war" on Hitler the very year he achieved Government, 1933, at a time when there were few restrictions put on Jews. The Jews, under Samuel Untermeyer organised a world economic boycott to try and wreck Germany economically. Jews and their communist allies organised boycotts of shops that sold Germany goods. People were beaten up by Jewish-communist thugs if they tried to resist.

Despite its insistence on the evil of the Jews, Bolton's 'Open Letter' denies that they were ever targetted for mass extermination. The Holocaust is, apparently, a myth designed to denigrate that great humanitarian, Adolf Hitler:

So what was Hitler's "crime". And why is he still being demonised, even though his alleged "war crimes" have now been shown to have been inventions of Allied war propaganda (of the type that told Britons during World War I about the bayoneting of Belgium babies and the crucifixion of Canadian soldiers, etc.). Why is he still so feared?

It is because he inaugurated a new form of government that was based on the folkish community, where "the common interest {comes} before self-interest"? Youth were given a sense of purpose, were clean living, worked at a stretch of Labour Service regardless of class or family wealth. Even William Shirer remarked on the callow, unhealthy English youth, in comparison to the healthy vigour of German youth.

Bolton has not always chosen neo-Nazi venues like Stormfront and the Adelaide Institute to express his beliefs. He has written many letters to New Zealand's mainstream media expounding his views on race, Hitler, World War Two, and the Holocaust. On the 9th of September 2003 The Listener carried a letter from Bolton which commented on the controversy surrounding Joel Hayward, the Canterbury University student who wrote a Masters thesis denying the Holocaust. An internal investigation found that the thesis had been poorly supervised and that it was full of errors. Hayward eventually recanted his views and accepted the reality of the Holocaust, but he has nevertheless remained a hero to many neo-Nazis.

Bolton's letter to The Listener defends Hayward's thesis by citing the work of a series of notorious Holocaust deniers:

[Listener writer Philip] Mathews fails to acknowledge the academic credentials of the revisionists he cites, doctors Countess and Toben. Proponents of holocaust orthodoxy claim that revisionism has no academic standing. Most spokesmen for revisionism are academics, or are qualified in relevant fields such as engineering and toxicology...

Where Dr Hayward errs is in his retraction of his conclusions. The original Leuchter investigation of the alleged Auschwitz gas chambers has been professionally replicated by Germar Rudolf, chemical analysis showing that there is insufficient cyanide residue for these buildings to have been used for mass executions.

Like the Adelaide Institute's Frederick Toben, who earned his recent term in an Australian prison with his violent anti-Jewish outbursts, Germar Rudolf is an anti-semite whose 'research' into the Holocaust is designed as a defence of the Hitler regime he reveres. Rudolf was convicted of inciting racial hatred in Germany in 1995 and was jailed again in 2007 for Holocaust denial.

Bolton's book about the Holocaust and his 2003 letters on the subject make it quite clear that he has been a long-time denier of the biggest genocide of the twentieth century. The rants about 'Jewish-communists' and paeans to Hitler which punctuate his texts reveal the political motivations of his 'research' into the Holocaust.

Bolton has attempted to be more discreet about his Holocaust denial and his neo-Nazism in recent years. He likes to use euphemisms like 'revisionist' rather than the ugly term 'Holocaust denier', and he prefers to call himself a 'radical European conservative', rather than a Nazi or a fascist. But the essence of Bolton's thought has not changed. If we examine Bolton's recent book Thinkers of the Right: Challenging Materialism, which purports to be a series of potted biographies of twentieth century intellectuals like Martin Heidegger and New Zealand's ARD Fairburn, we find the old prejudices alive and well.

In the book's chapter on the Italian Futurist poet and fascist Filippo Marinetti, for example, Bolton eulogises the short-lived Italian Social Republic which Benito Mussolini founded in the north of Italy after he had lost most of his country to partisans and Allied invaders. Bolton presents the Social Republic as an almost utopian enterprise:

The fascist faithful established a last stand, in the north, named the Italian Social Republic. With a new idealism, even former communist and liberal leaders were drawn to the Republic. The Manifesto of Verona was drafted, restoring various liberties, and championing labour against plutocracy within the vision of a united Europe.

In reality, the Italian Social Republic was one of the purest expressions of Nazism ever to exist outside of Nazi Germany. Hitler's troops propped up the state, Nuremberg-style laws prevented races mixing, and Jews were deported in their thousands to death camps north of the Alps. The Manifesto of Verona called for Mussolini's movement to return to its fascist roots, demanded the expulsion of Jews from Europe, and called for the continent's warring powers to unite and establish a single empire that could rule all of Africa and Asia.

No one who was not a committed neo-Nazi could write favourably about the Italian Social Republic. Bolton's support for Mussolini's last government, and his failure to mention the role of that government in the Holocaust, show that he still holds the views expressed in his book The Holocaust Myth and in his 2003 letters to The Listener and to Stormfront, as well in his many articles for anti-semitic organisations like the Adelaide Institute.

The Broadcasting Standards Authority has flown in the face of overwhelming evidence in refusing to consider Kerry Bolton a Holocaust denier. By failing to do their research, the BSA's members have given a Christmas present to neo-Nazis, and invited public ridicule. I hope that they will find the time to consider the texts I have discussed in this post, and that they will overturn their judgement when it is appealed.