To the editor ...

One of the most bizarre things about Holocaust Studies is how Hilaire Belloc goes into the Memory Hole. In 1921 Belloc wrote a book, The Jews, where he warned that Europe was heading toward a massacre of the Jews. (He did not pick a country, and probably would have been surprised by the magnitude of the slaughter.) Years ago a friend helped out with a Holocaust honors course at a quaint Appalachian university, and I asked him who had predicted the Holocaust. "No one I know of," he replied. (He mentioned Nostradamus, but he wasn't serious.)

In a physical science, at least, the man with the correct prediction gets a hearing for his analysis. He may be criticized or debunked, but he doesn't simply disappear. History and political science may be different. And Belloc may be the ultimate politically incorrect writer.

Regards,
Jim Moloney

Strakon replies

On the rare occasions one of the Usual Suspects does feel compelled to mention Belloc, that mention usually consists only of the thoughtful scream, "Anti-Semite!" Yet the tribe whom the Franco-English writer seems to have genuinely despised — he read them right out of European civilization — was the Germans! (See Europe and the Faith.)

The final revision of The Jews, published in the late 1930s, occupies a secure place on the TLD List of Books Necessary to Understand Anything about Our World.

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