Amazon Censorship Hits Home

By this time most folks have probably heard about the March 2018 purge from Amazon.com of books that call into question the story that during World War II Nazi Germany implemented through official policy the gassing to death and cremation of six million Jews at government-run central “extermination” camps. One can find a good summary of the actions by Amazon in Kevin Barrett’s article with the tongue-in-cheek title, “Jeff Bezos, Amazon Endorse Holocaust Denial.”

Barrett observes that while books probing the facts of what was christened “The Holocaust” in a 1978 American television mini-series have been swept away with a very broad broom, books attacking the banned books are still freely available on Amazon, such as the one from a well-known professor of modern Jewish history and holocaust studies at Emory University, which Barrrett describes this way:

Deborah Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, possibly the best-known anti-revisionism book, is also the most shockingly vapid. Lipstadt makes little effort to argue her case on its merits, but instead spends virtually the entire 304 pages lobbing hysterical ad-hominem arguments. The only sane reaction to Lipstadt’s unbelievably lame volume is: “If this is the best the anti-revisionists can do, no wonder they have to try to get revisionists’ books banned!” You can get a used copy for less than two dollars and fifty cents.

Barrett, in his updated article, has a letter from German revisionist Germar Rudolf revealing that Castle Hill Publishers alone has had 68 titles banished from Amazon through the new policy. Amazon owner Bezos, according to Barrett, might just as well post the following announcement:

Attention, Amazon shoppers! You can still buy bad and mediocre books arguing that holocaust revisionists are wrong — but you are not permitted to buy better books (including at least one very good book, [Thomas] Dalton’s Debating the Holocaust) that might lead you to the opposite conclusion.

Rudolf notes that at least five of the banned Castle Hill books don’t even deal with the question of the Holocaust, leading Barrett to this conclusion:

The sweeping mass ban enforced within hours, and the senseless aimlessness and random nature with which it was implemented, clearly show that these books were not pulled because their content was checked and found impermissible, but because someone (probably Yad Vashem) had sent them a list of items to ban, and Amazon simply complied by checking off all the items on that list.

In case you might be thinking of getting around the Amazon censorship by going to Barnes & Noble, consider the following announcement at the Castle Hill web site for Dalton’s book:

Note: Books published by Castle Hill Publishers should be available anywhere books are sold – except for those companies boycotting us, like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Search other online stores using the book-price search-engine links provided below, or when searching other stores use the ISBN number provided above. Also ask your local book store to order it for you. They should be able to get it for you.

Suppressing Amazon Book Reviews

Now that Amazon has accumulated power over what gets read in books that surpasses any such power in previous human history, we should hardly be surprised that they should abuse that power, and, in so doing, reveal who the real power-wielders are in the United States. As it happens, this writer received a bit of a prior warning of the big March figurative book burning at Amazon almost a year ago, in June of 2017. That was when Phillip Nelson came out with his blockbuster book about the murderous assault by the Israelis on an American intelligence-gathering ship during the 1967 Six Day War entitled Remember the Liberty. I was so eager to review it on Amazon—and to have my review read—that I bought a copy of the book from them as a gift to a friend so that the review would be displayed as one by a verified purchaser of the book. Nelson had sent me an advance copy of the book to read, and I really didn’t need another copy. After finishing the review on Amazon, a notice popped up that I would receive an email notifying me when the review was posted. The notification never came, and the review never went up.

What was the problem? Was my review, which you can read on my web site here, too long? It is a good deal longer than the average review on Amazon, but you can see that the similarly favorable review by the Australian Greg Maybury got posted, and it is longer than mine. It wasn’t just a technical glitch, either. Just this week I tried again to post it, and I got the same results. It had to be something that I said, which gets us into pretty scary territory. It means that the Bezos boys are now combing over all the book reviews to make sure that unapproved things don’t get said. Considering the nature of the topic of Nelson’s book, which one would think would be about as unapproved, in itself, as anything could possibly be for the ruling molders of public opinion in the country, one must really wonder what it was that I said that was deemed to go too far.

Looking back at it, I can’t help but think that my bridge too far was my conclusion, which I put under the subheading, “Where Does Your Allegiance Lie?”

Although half a century has now passed, hardly any event, when looked at in the clear light of day, permits us to come to grips more completely with the political reality of the United States today than does the assault on the USS Liberty. We live in an era in which members of the United States military have never been more venerated. From sports events to airport encounters, we’re expected to honor them at every turn. “Support the troops” is seemingly an admonition that no one can disagree with.

All of the military reverence comes to a screeching halt, though, when it comes to the surviving crewmen of the USS Liberty. They can only be brushed aside, with their demands for a true accounting for what was done to them by our great “ally” with the connivance of their own leaders. For our politicians to do otherwise and to get to the bottom of what happened there in the Eastern Mediterranean on June 8, 1967, would put them on a collision course with the real ruling power in the country. When it comes down to the choice of supporting our troops or supporting the ethnic-supremacist state of Israel, whose fundamental nature was revealed as much by the Liberty attack as it was by the Lavon Affair, and for whom we regularly pour out our fortune, our credibility, and our blood, Israel it has to be.

Should I test the theory by trying to post the review again with those two paragraphs left off? I’m afraid that it’s too late for that now. It looks like Amazon has just put me on a review blacklist. I reached that conclusion when I attempted last week to put up a review of Thomas Merton’s Peace in the Post-Christian Era. I got the same treatment, and that one has nothing at all that I know of to do with Israel. At any rate, you can read what else is now forbidden to Amazon.com readers by going to my article, “Merton’s Message Resonates as Nuclear Holocaust Looms.” The book review that I tried to post on Amazon is the second part of that article under the heading, “Thomas Merton, the Anti-War Oracle,” minus the first sentence, which was a bridge from what I had written in the first part.

Simultaneously with the complete blackout of any new book reviews I might attempt, I have noticed a censorship of another sort of one of my previous reviews, that is of Christopher Ruddy’s The Strange Death of Vincent Foster. For years, my review was showcased on Amazon as the top review, based upon the number of people who had checked the box saying that they had found it helpful. Currently, there are 61 customer reviews of that book, and now you have to scroll down to page five of the reviews to find mine. When they were still posting the number, 47 people had checked the box saying that they found the review helpful. Only within the past couple of weeks it seemed to have dawned on the Amazon folks that it didn’t look good to have such a popular review buried away, when the one they were touting at the top as most helpful had only 12 “helpfuls” and the top “critical” review was a three-star review had only six “helpfuls” while my three-star review had 47 “helpfuls.” So now, you are supposed to believe that in the over 10 years the review has been up, it hasn’t managed to garner even a single “helpful.” If you don’t want to go to the trouble of scrolling all the way down for it on Amazon, you can read the 2015-updated version of the review in question on my web site.

It’s really quite a shame to see what they’re now doing with unapproved customer reviews at Amazon. It has been a quite educational forum in the past. I don’t recall what book it was that I was checking out at the time, but it was in a customer’s review of it that I learned about the little known attempt by the Zionist Stern Gang to assassinate President Harry Truman with a letter bomb in 1947. That discovery led me to write the article, “’Jews’ Tried to Kill Truman in 1947.” One can learn from that article that at the time I wrote it there was no mention of that assassination attempt on Wikipedia, either in the list of assassination attempts on American presidents, on Truman in particular, or even on the “Letter Bomb” page. All that has now changed. With the censorship regime now in place at Amazon, one must seriously doubt that that reviewer’s mention of the Stern Gang attempt to kill Truman would have ever gone up, our knowledge of 20^th Century history would be the worse for it, and that’s clearly how our rulers, who are now apparently pulling Amazon’s strings, would have preferred it to be.

David Martin

May 10, 2018

Addendum

I just checked again, and my review of Peace in the Post-Christian Era is now up on Amazon. They say that it went up on May 7, but I don’t think so. The review of Remember the Liberty is still missing in action, and the review of The Strange Death of Vincent Foster is still buried away on page five. However, for some reason they have seen fit to restore the “helpful” count of 47, confirming my recollection and also showing how deceitful they are in listing a review with only 12 “helpfuls” as the top review.

I guess I should not feel particularly put upon, considering what Amazon has done to reviewers of Hillary Clinton’s What Happened?

David Martin

May 19, 2018

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