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Old August 1st, 2012 #22
Alex Linder
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holocaust

[from David Irving]

A fast ride out to the big house afterwards, arriving at 8:30 pm. I persuade Jae to help me watch Hitchcock's North by Northwest, (above), one of my favourite films of all time, made back in 1959 -- fifty years ago in fact. A shocking thought. She does not even know who Cary Grant was. I must have seen it half a dozen times in the sixties but being very innocent I had not until now appreciated Eva Marie Saint's sexual allusions, nor the nudging hint of the train penetrating the railroad tunnel as the film fades out.

One detail causes me to pause the film and rewind: yes, there it is. After the famous scene of the sinister cropduster biplane smashing into the oil tanker on the lonely, arrow-straight prairie highway somewhere near Bakersfield, Cary Grant confronts Eve Kendall and there is a glimpse of her local newspaper on a table: TWO DIE AS CROP DUSTER PLANE CRASHES AND BURNS, reads the headline: TRUCK DRIVER ESCAPES HOLOCAUST. Do my eyes deceive me? I rewind a few seconds. Yes, there it is: HOLOCAUST.

Unthinkable now, of course. But this movie was made in 1959, ten years or more before those nice folks hijacked the H.-word for their own global purposes to promote their Holocaust (a vengeful episode, one might well anticipate, doomed to be repeated, with all the inevitability of Greek tragedy); and a movie made for that matter before the homosexuals had begun most improbably claiming to be GAY -- a word which James Mason uses here in its proper meaning.

How do these things happen? Well, when I interviewed Heinrich Himmler's brother Gebhard in 1971 the H.-word was still not used: as witness my transcript of that conversation. But I recall my editor on Hitler's War, Stan Hochman, one of the finest outside editors I ever met, refusing in 1975 to let me describe the Hamburg firestorm raids as a "holocaust," explaining that The Viking Press house-style book would not permit it; I subsequently found that this embargo reflected a common ruling up and down Madison Avenue -- the H.-word was by now (mid 1970s) reserved exclusively for Jewish use.

I guess some smart New York public-relations firm told them that if they really wanted to make big bucks they had to market their tragedy the same as any other industrial product: the brand name, the capital letter, the emphasis on the uniqueness of the product, a six-million dollar slogan, and all the rest.

http://www.fpp.co.uk//docs/Irving/Ra...09/280309.html