Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Public station channels message of hate

By Bob Aldrich

Voices of hatred and intolerance are still heard in the land. One place where such voices--and the pictures to go with them-- surely do not belong is on local public-access television.

KCAT-TV (Channel 6), the Los Gatos public-access station, receives cassettes or it tapes programs from a satellite and uses them to fill out evening programing time. One such program, titled A New Voice of Freedom, has been running on Thursdays at 6 p.m. Although at this writing I have seen only one episode, that was enough to turn my stomach.

A New Voice of Freedom is conducted and narrated by one Ernest Zundel, a Canadian who has been identified as an anti-Semite and one of the more notorious leaders of hate groups in our neighbor to the north. The thrust of the show is to cast doubt and scorn on the idea that the Nazi Holocaust ever happened. This show surely is an affront to Jewish viewers, and for that matter to anyone who has taken the trouble to learn the terrible facts about one of the darkest periods in human history.

Los Gatos Councilmember Steve Blanton agrees. "I think it is outrageous, insidious," he told me. "KCAT receives $60,000 from the town of Los Gatos. We should not be supporting such programs. At the very least, there should be disclaimers at the beginning and end, saying these are not the views of the station."

Blanton said he had directed Town Manager David Knapp to look into the matter.

"This is a public-access station," said KCAT manager Tony Brazeau. "Anyone can express an opinion, popular or not." However, he added, "I'll take it up at the next [KCAT] board meeting."

The episode I watched opened with the pudgy Zundel between huge stacks of books he said were written about the Holocaust. "There is a whole Holocaust industry," he said. "People are making millions turning out books and films about an event that never occurred."

As the interior of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and a few of its stark exhibits were pictured, Zundel stated that "American children's minds are being poisoned by this false propaganda."

Zundel then introduced a Professor Robert Faurisson. Seated in a living-room setting, wearing a sweater and speaking in crisply academic tones, the professor recited his degrees and a record of teaching in France. He then launched into his attempts to find "some shred of evidence" that there had been a World War II holocaust in which millions perished. He had, he said, studied the sites of so-called death camps like Auschwitz and Madanek in German-occupied Poland and could discover no proof of gas chambers.

"These gas chambers," he scoffed, "were nothing but chambers for delousing the prisoners.

"Don't show me doors," Fourisson said, as iron doors were shown on the screen. "Don't show me piles of shoes. Show me real, solid evidence." He said "scientific" tests showed no trace of the gas used to kill prisoners in the ground.

Few events in human history have been as thoroughly documented as the German Nazis' "final solution to the Jewish problem." Testimony by survivors and witnesses is on miles of film made soon after the war and later. Hundreds of British and American servicemen--some of whom reside now in Santa Clara County--came upon the camps. When the horror was uncovered in the spring of 1945, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded that troops in the vicinity of the camps be conducted through them to see for themselves immense piles of bodies and the gas ovens built by Germany's I.G. Farben Co.

The death camps were under the supervision of the Schutzstaffel commander, Heinrich Himmler. The SS military police began as Hitler's bodyguards and were considered the most loyal of all. As part of their training, young officers chosen to run the camps were deliberately subjected to torment and brutality to stiffen them for the patriotic task of torturing and murdering trainloads of "enemies of the Reich."

No one knows the total figure of the dead. Estimates range from 6 million to 12 million, including Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and various "enemies."

The hatred goes on half a century later. The Jan. 8, 1996, issue of The New Yorker describes a current German neo-Nazi movement. A resident of Lincoln, Neb., Gary Lauck, was arrested in Denmark last year and charged with helping foment the movement. Lauck was the chief source of Nazi materials, posters, armbands and hate literature, forbidden by German law. He mailed the packages with innocent-appearing labels, not from Lincoln but from various American cities, routed to Germany through third countries.

Egocentrics like Zundel call talk-radio shows and distribute books and newsletters. They never give up. They remember the advice of their late Führer: Tell a lie often enough and it will be believed.

Hitler's demonic shadow still falls across the world. It does not belong on a public-access channel supported by taxpayers.

Bob Aldrich is a Los Gatos Weekly-Times columnist and feature writer.