Dear Readers, I have long wondered about the usefulness of comment sections. I decided to address the subject.
Can Americans Learn, or Is It too Much of a Challenge for Them?
Paul Craig Roberts
Reading the comments on the Unz Review of my latest article there, “The True Story of World War II,” I wonder about the point of my efforts in truth’s behalf. https://www.unz.com/proberts/the-true-story-of-world-war-ii/
I have long wondered about the utility of readers’ comments, especially comments that the writers are too ashamed to associate with their real names. An anonymous comment has no value. Some comments seem to have no explanation, such as number 31 by Anonymous534. Perhaps Anonymous534 will explain why telling me to F-off and go be senile somewhere else contributes to a discussion. Sometimes a reader’s comments make no sense whatsoever, and I wonder if the reader never learned to read. In comment #3 anonymous [155] responds to my article which raises numerous questions about the entire Zionist narrative of WW II by accusing me of “promoting the ZioJewish cause thru dis-info, mal-info, mis-info, misdirection, omission, and all the other deceit he spins like a top.” So I stand accused of promoting the “ZioJewish cause” by questioning aspects of it.
My articles are posted on the Unz Review without comments unless they are leads as the current one is. Readers have criticized me for closing my articles from comments. I would like to address their complaint.
First, I will make some general comments to illustrate the kind of mistakes commentators frequently make, and I will give some examples from the current comments to my article on the September 3, 2026, Unz Review.
Next, I will answer some of the readers’ questions that might or might not have been asked in sincerity.
Then I will explain the dangers I see in comment sections, which editors of the sites themselves might not see.
A common error is for readers to confuse or conflate reporting by a writer of someone’s conclusions or explanations with the writer’s own views. The Zionists at Wikipedia did this to me by turning my review of one of David Irving’s books into my views and turning my report that Irving said he could document up to 300,000 Jews executed but had not found in documents evidence of an organized holocaust. Wikipedia attributed my report of Irving’s findings as my view and branded me a Holocaust denier. As I have never studied the Holocaust, I do not qualify as a Holocaust denier.
Another common mistake is to find cause in result. Another is to assert the commentator’s beliefs as historical fact. Comment number 12 by 1951 presents us with all of these mistakes. Indeed, his assertions are contradictory. If there was no danger that Poland would meet Hitler’s requests about Germans in or hindered by Poland, why did Chamberlain give a British guarantee to Poland? Chamberlain didn’t give a guarantee in Munich, and no war resulted. Nowhere in Hitler’s negotiations with the Polish military government is there any reference to half of Poland, which the commentator claims Hitler demanded. The agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union came later after Hitler was rebuffed by Poland on the basis of Chamberlain’s guarantee. Thus it was the British guarantee and subsequent British and French declaration of war on Germany that caused the war. It is a difficult argument that Hitler started a war with Britain and France that Britain and France started by declaring war on Germany. As the British guarantee was unenforceable, Britain did not need to declare war on Germany. Hitler attacked the British and French only after Britain and France started the war with their declaration of war. It was one of those situations where Chamberlain thought his honor was at stake and that his honor was more important than the lives of millions of peoples and the destruction of Europe. So much for British honor.
Commentator 1951 also claims that I said all Europeans were German and therefore Hitler had the right to conquer them. It is not I who who provided the information of the various German tribes that became various European countries. This information is provided by experts. I merely reported the facts as they stand. Moreover, I did not say Hitler had the right to invade any country. I merely explained how the war began. It is completely clear that Hitler dismissed any British response to his invasion of Poland as there was nothing the British could do, which made the guarantee pointless, and it was completely clear to all involved that Hitler had an agreement with Stalin or he would not have dared to attack Poland. The Soviet invasion of Poland followed the German one in just a few days more than 2 weeks. But no war was declared on Russia. Poland brought war on itself by refusing to accommodate German unification.
Kenn Gividen in comment #7 asks “why Hitler didn’t use the news media to bypass Churchill?” Who reads German? Germany and Austria. Who reads English? The entire world. The British Empire on which the sun never set, the Bank of England and the British pound, the British Navy, the British control of international trade made English the world language. Who would believe a demonized Hitler in German when the English press said otherwise? As I explained, the predominance of the English language allowed the Anglo-Americans to control the war narrative, thus ensuring that war propaganda became the history of WW II.
BarnesAnon, #14, is another undisciplined commentator. He asserts without providing any source that “Sorry Dr. Roberts, but that is factually untrue entirely. David Irving DID find German documents over the holocaust, namely the 1943 Korherr Report over 2.4 million Jews killed or dead.”
Where were these killings carried out? Auschwitz is the alleged location in the narrative, but it turns out that it was a work camp where either synthetic gasoline or synthetic rubber was produced for the German army, I forget which. I think I have read all of Irvings’ books, and I have reviewed several. I have never read in them any statement that Irving found evidence of an organized holocaust against the Jews or that 2.4 million Jews were Holocosted. Irving reports that the deaths were ad hoc, carried out by National Socialist groups and by civilian administrations in occupied territories who suddenly found Jews shipped to them for which they had no accommodation. I have also listened to many–but not all–of Irving’s lectures, and I have never heard him report any evidence of an organized holocaust or of vast numbers of Jewish executions. I knew Irving, and he trusted me with hundreds of pages of his unfinished 3rd volume of Churchill’s War. Irving was fearful that the Jews or their hired thugs would again ransack his home and destroy his manuscripts.
Irving had little interest in the Holocaust. His interests were different. His interest was in World War II. He searched all archives, read all diaries and letters and memoirs, searched and found survivors and interviewed them. The only thing I remember him saying in his two major books is that he could document 200,000-300,000 massacres of Jews but it was ad hoc executions. In the lectures I heard, he reported Jewish mistreatment and deaths, but saw the Holocaust as without historical foundation and as a means for Jews to establish a victimhood that could be used to excuse their crimes against the Palestinians whose country they intended to turn into Israel and to extract reparations from Germany and Switzerland.
Some commentators suggested that although there is no evidence that Hitler knew of the Holocaust, Himmler carried one out. Think about this for a moment. Hitler’s plan for the Jews, as he stated numerous times, was not to kill them all but “after the war is over” to deport them. First it was to be to Madagascar. Next it was to be to the rump of the Soviet Union, where they would be at home with what Hitler regarded was their Bolshevik brethren. In the passages I remember from Irving’s principal works, most Jewish deaths resulted from the actions of civil German administrators in the occupied territories who had no provision for the arriving Jews sent to the territories.
I have in front of me as I write Irving’s biography of Himmler., the Gestapo chief. Here are pages 444-446:
“The truth is that Adolf Hitler opposed every overtly anti-Jewish initiative.”
“Hitler had lectured Goebbels as early as September 1935 that ‘above all’ there was to be no persecution of ‘non-Aryans.'”
“Hitler, Goring, and Himmler all agreed that emigration was the Jewish solution, but only so long as Europe was at peace.” War meant that Jews would be a dangerous Fifth Column and harsher measures would be needed. So, the sufferings of Jews can be blamed on the British, who initiated a war and refused a peace.
As for Hitler’s rants against Jews, Irving explains them as “rhetoric, a crowd-pleasing flourish, addressed less to the Jews of Europe than to Wall Street.” Does this remind you of Trump’s rants?
At the end of 1938, Himmler “investigated the possibility of requiring Jews to wear a badge identifying them ‘as enemies of the state,’ as in fact they were. Hitler torpedoed the scheme. It took Goebbels nearly three more years to overcome Hitler’s opposition to the introduction of a badge, the notorious Yellow Star. Even then Hitler opposed the persecution. Furthermore, said Goring that December, Hitler had ruled that Jewish pension entitlements were inviolate.”
So the dilemma is: Hitler allegedly exterminated millions of Jews in Death Camps, but ruled Jews are not to be persecuted and their pensions are inviolate!
I ask commentators, if Himmler is so brave to disregard Hitler’s orders, where did the budget come from to round up and transport 6 million people, or 2.4 million as BanesAnon says, to death camps when the transportation system is overstretched by the desperate needs of the Wehrmacht? Where did the fuel allotment come from? Where are the budget entries? Why were six million, or 2.4 million, desperately needed workers killed rather than used in the desperate war effort? Why did 150,000 Jewish descendants from grandparents who were 100% Jewish fight for the Third Reich if Jews were being slaughtered?
We must not forget that with the Soviet defeat of the Wehrmacht as of February 2, 1943, Stalingrad, the tide of war turned against Germany, and Germany faced an existential challenge. Germany had no resources to spare on killing millions of Jews. Germany needed all the labor Germany could muster. That a country fighting for survival would itself destroy a part of its own workforce is nonsensical. How people get away with peddling such stupid narratives is beyond me.
Comments keep coming in, but I am tired of this. I bring it to an end with my critique of comment sections. It is my opinion that the main function, unintentional, of comment sections is to shut down challenges to official narratives. The Israel Lobby and every other vested interest employs shills to libel as “comment” under the First Amendment authors at odds with the narratives that serve the agendas of the vested interests. Once this is accomplished, the next set of shills descends on these comments and spreads them on social media: “Don’t read and trust this person. He is this that or the other.”
This does little harm to a long established person such as myself: An Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, recipient of the Treasury’s Silver Medal for “outstanding contributions to the formulation of US Economic Policy,” recipient of the French Legion of Honor for “the restoration of economic science,” Who’s Who In America’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the Press Club of Mexico’s International Journalism Prize, Associate Editor and columnist of the Wall Street Journal in those days when the media was legitimate, columnist for Business Week, the Scripts Howard News Service, Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles, columnist for the major French and Italian newspapers and contributor to to the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, a guest on ABC’s This Week with David Brinkley, The Today Show, Good Morning America, Wall Street Week, author of peer-reviewed books published by Harvard University Press and Oxford University Press, holder of high level academic appointments, and so on. Today my internet site is read in every country in the world. I am regularly on established podcast programs and asked my views on programs of countries’ national TV news programs.
But for an unestablished person, a vital new voice, the way the comment system is used is to destroy the rise of new voices against the official narratives. I can tell you how it works from personal experience. The person who created my website provided it with a comment section. What we saw was that commentators appeared who tried to turn with their comments my site into an anti-semite site in order to discredit it. Why were they doing this as I had not addressed Palestine or the Zionist agenda of Greater Israel? The answer, I found, was that my opposition to the “war on terror” was proving effective and went against Israel’s interest as “the war on terror” was Washington’s cover for America fighting a war for Greater Israel. It was from this explanation to me by a Pentagon official that I grasped the meaning of Greater Israel.
This realization reminded me of my time in the US Treasury. As the principal architect of Reagan’s new supply-side economic policy, the Zionist American neoconservatives saw me as Israel’s enemy, because tax cuts would reduce, they believed, the military budget and hamper Israel’s intended use of US Armed Forces to destroy Iraq, Libya, and Syria, all obstacles to the expansion of Greater Israel.
Dear insouciant Americans, you have no idea how things really work. Why do you try in your ineffective ways to prove me wrong every time I try to inform you?