Prof. Joel Hayward’s website archive

Joel Hayward, ZDaF, BA, MA Hons, PhD, FRSA, FRHistS

Revisionism?

Revisionists have never considered me one of them. They may consider me an independent free-thinker (although many think I'm a coward), but not a revisionist.

In theory every scholar — indeed, every person — who reconsiders any interpretations of past or current events in the light of new evidence, by employing a different methodology, or by reconsidering the events from a new vantage point is a revisionist.

That's fine. But the term "revisionist" has now become loaded; it has come to define a person who uses the events of the past, and their reinterpretation, in order to support his or her current political, racial, or cultural worldviews. In other words, this person uses past events to fight current battles.

I do see myself as a free-thinking, non-aligned, non-political and basically non-conformist scholar. But because I possess no strong or evangelical views on political, racial or cultural issues I would no longer — even though I always think for myself and try to express new interpretations in all of my scholarship — define myself as even a garden-variety revisionist.

And I have never been a member of the right-wing, racially concerned, politically active faction that people now ordinarily associate with the word "revisionism".

The latter group, who are well aware of my liking of multi-culturalism and my dislike of racialism, won't have a bar of me.

American Holocaust revisionist Dr Robert Countess admits that I was not, and am not, one of them:

"Hayward was not himself a revisionist. But in order to write an objective assessment, he listened to both sides, revisionists and anti-revisionists. We, revisionists, have never considered Dr. Hayward as one of us, but only as someone who attempted to build an objective point of view."

Source: http://www.vho.org/aaargh/engl/engl.html

New Zealand's leading revisionist activist, Mr Kerry Bolton — publisher of Western Destiny magazine, author of The Holocaust Myth: A Sceptical Enquiry (2000) and The Zionist War Party (2003), head of Renaissance Press, and an associate of Dr Fredrick Toeben's Adelaide Institute — refutes some people's mistaken claims that I share the revisionist worldview:

"Hayward’s thesis has been incorrectly referred to repeatedly as 'revisionist'. This is inaccurate. It is a study on the literature of revisionism. Hayward is critical of the literature throughout.

"However, what has condemned him as supposedly having revisionist tendencies is that he concedes that revisionists are not universally in error, and that orthodox proponents of the 'Holocaust' are not universally plausible.

"On virtually any other subject this approach would surely be lauded as objective. However, when it is the 'Holocaust' being considered this amounts to a religious heresy, …"

Source: http://www.adelaideinstitute.org

Well known French revisionist Dr Serge Thion clearly doesn't like the fact that I apologised for the errors I recognised in my thesis. Dr Thion wrote:

A world press campaign was launched against Hayward who promptly got on his knees and licked the shoes that were kicking him in the ass, an exercise that requires a considerable spine flexibility. Just try.

Source: http://www.vho.org/aaargh/engl/hay/hayindex.html

Ernst Zuendel’s Z-Gram of 29 May 2000 was particularly scathing of me for publicly admitting I made mistakes:

[Joel Hayward] wrote a groveling addendum to his thesis, to be read side by side with it. Rather than defending his courageous master's thesis, he must have thought he could find respite by abjectly groveling before his tormentors — not realizing that these people show no mercy to their targeted enemies.

Source:

http://www.zundelsite.org/english/zgrams/zg2000/zg0005/000529.html

Note: as someone who upholds liberal democratic values I cannot support the suppression of anyone's views, on any issues, so long as they don't violate New Zealand law or incite other to. That does not mean I consider all views equally meritorious. I do not. Some views I find abhorrent. But so long as they don't promote any illegality I support their right to exist.