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"In his novella ‘The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny’ (1977), R. A. Lafferty uses speculative fiction to remove not only the Holocaust but all of the major traumas of the twentieth century including both world wars and the Great Depression. However, in typically elusive fashion, Lafferty finds a way to avoid these traumas yet still experience them."
Glyn Morgan, Imagining the Unimaginable (2020)

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​“People are easily fooled. But there are tests for reality. If a thing is burned up, then there will be a residue of ashes and gasses. But if there is not such a residue, and the things appears to be unchanged, then it is not acting as if it were burned up.”

The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny, p. 257

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"SWEENY is carefully wrought, and even has diagrams and chronologies. What other work carries a total history of the century with it?"

Lafferty, Letter to Sheryl Smith, December 21, 1977

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"Any writer who has any reputation at all owes it partly to being saved from some of the horrible and abominable things he wrote . . .  A reputation is very fragile . . ."
Lafferty, Letter to Dan Knight, May 15, 1990

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Updated 11/09/25​

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R. A. Lafferty (1914–2002) was a devout Catholic and a writer of remarkable and singular genius. Beloved by readers and esteemed by major figures in science fiction, he brought moral vision and imaginative intensity to his subjects. Among his works is Okla Hannali (1972), a neglected but significant work of American literature that recounts the history of the Choctaw people through the life of a fictional patriarch, combining humor, tragedy, and moral witness in an idiosyncratic historical vision.

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Those of us who admire Lafferty’s accomplishments and want to understand them should also confront a serious issue in his life and work, one that cannot be dismissed as a minor detail. This is especially important for scholars who research and publish on him, given the relative obscurity of his archives. Archival evidence shows that Lafferty rejected the reality of the Jewish Holocaust; by the late 1960s, he had adopted Holocaust denial literature and an antisemitic interpretation of Western history that stretched from antiquity through the Dreyfus Affair to the modern era. In the early 1980s, Lafferty discovered The Journal for Historical Review, was surprised by its existence, and later endorsed its ideas and cause.

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I began reading Lafferty closely in October 2024. Several months into writing this blog, I grew increasingly aware of the antisemitic inflections in what he said in correspondence and wrote in his fiction. That awareness raised difficult questions: Is knowledge a private possession or a public trust? I chose to withhold public comment until I had examined all the relevant materials in the McFarlin Library’s Special Collections at the University of Tulsa, knowing the subject required deliberate and careful handling, here in the case of a writer I deeply admire (in carefully qualified ways), one whose work gives me immense pleasure. The first stage of that research took place in July 2025.

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The Tulsa archive makes clear that Lafferty’s antisemitic views became more articulated and deepened over time. He came to believe the arguments he discovered in the Holocaust denial literature he read. But he said he rejected its historical reality from the start. This is a crucial point. To this degree, one cannot say he merely became embittered. This aspect of his thought intensified alongside his disillusionment with youth culture, Catholic dissent from Humanae Vitae (July 25, 1968), and his frustration with theological and pastoral Modernism, both in his home parish of Christ the King in Tulsa and in the wider post-Conciliar Catholic Church. These developments coincided with his declining presence in mainstream publishing.

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These were also years of physical decline. Yet through the 1970s his mind stayed quick and incisive, and into the early 1980s he produced, in private, some of his best work, much of it still unseen by his core readership. His opinions surface mainly in letters, though a reader who looks closely at the fiction will find traces there too. They were not always the familiar kind of antisemitism. He admired Jewish intellectual achievement, and he argued that the Holocaust was irrational because Europe would not deliberately destroy so much of its own intellectual capital.

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Because little correspondence from before the 1960s survives, it is difficult to trace the contours of antisemitism in Lafferty’s early thought, and scholars will inevitably differ in their conclusions. The record presents two figures: the famously reticent, eccentric storyteller and the lifelong contrarian who took a stand on a question of immense historical and moral weight.​​​

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In published commentary on Lafferty, I have not found any discussion of this aspect of his thought. The omission is evident among editors, critics, science fiction writers, and other influential voices, whether writing in big media or in smaller press venues. Commentators may focus on other aspects of Lafferty's work, be unfamiliar with the archival record, or avoid the subject for reasons not stated in their work. Whatever the cause, the result is an incomplete public portrayal that leaves this dimension of Lafferty’s intellectual life largely unexplored in a decade when Holocaust denial has grown, especially among younger Americans. 

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Recognizing the flaws of major talents is essential to understanding their creative and intellectual lives, to preserving the historical record, and to confronting honestly the complexity of the human person. Such recognition also shapes how one reads their art. As John Clute has observed, Lafferty “clearly delighted in a vision of the world as being irradiated by conspiracies both godly and devilish.” 

 

An example in Lafferty’s work is The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny, his deepest fictional exploration of 20th-century history and a novel explicitly concerned with the violence and terror of that era. Its central theme is consensus reality. It tells the story of a man who can alter history through his artistic gifts. Without awareness of Lafferty’s own Holocaust denial, a reader is far less likely to notice—and far less able to grasp—the significance of the Jewish Holocaust’s absence from such a work.​ The alternative, recognizing the strange absence of the Holocaust in the work but not knowing about Lafferty’s Holocaust skepticism and Holocaust denial, can be just as intellectually damaging.

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Imagine you are an early-career scholar who notices the absence of the Holocaust in The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny. You are committed to understanding how the Holocaust is represented in literature and seek to explore the significance of its omission in the work of a master of speculative fiction. You aim to situate this absence within the American literary imagination and to contribute meaningfully to both your discipline and the broader intellectual community. You are, above all, struck and perplexed by the silence—by why the Holocaust is nowhere to be found in Lafferty’s apocalyptic vision of the 20th century.

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In September 2016, Glyn Morgan submitted a PhD dissertation at the University of Liverpool. It was titled Mapping Planet Auschwitz: Non-Memetic Writing and the Holocaust in Anglo-American Fiction. In 2.2 of Chapter Two, “Misremembered Traumas by the Forgotten American Fantastist: R. A. Lafferty’s 'The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny,'” Morgan quotes Andrew Ferguson, researcher and biographer of Lafferty, who has published on the author's work. (Ferguson himself studied at the University of Liverpool in the years after completing his MA at the University of Tulsa, where he had conducted research in the McFarlin Library’s Special Collections on Lafferty’s correspondence.)

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A passage from Morgan’s dissertation, a copy of which can be found through doing a Google search:

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“The problem is amplified with regards to Apocalypses in particular as the book itself occupies a mysterious portion of Lafferty’s life, as Andrew Ferguson, Lafferty’s biographer, tells me: 

 

          '"Even in Lafferty’s correspondence there’s a gap: no record of him talking directly to the press

            at all, which meant his agent Virginia Kidd would have handled all of those discussions. But    

            Lafferty wrote the book between January 22 and February 8, 1976 […], and then the

           Apocalypses volume was published in 1977, and there’s a gap in Lafferty’s correspondence with

            Kidd that covers the years 1976 and ’77.”

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​​​​​At the University of Tulsa archive, within the Dan Knight correspondence, one will find a Lafferty letter dated January 24, 1990, in which Lafferty writes that he "never did accept the idea" of the Jewish Holocaust:

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“I myself never did accept the idea of the Holocaust in the context of The Six Million. As a prophecy it’s been in the Talmudic literature for a couple of thousand years, but it has always been a sort of allegory until the time of WWII. But if indeed six million Jews were killed (between a third and a half of the Jews in the World, and more Jews than were in the maximum area ever controlled by the Germans) then they should have left a big hole in the total Jewish World Population, but they didn’t. By the end of the War (within five years of the end), North America had received more than a million Jews from Europe, so had South America, so had Israel, and the total World Jewish population was up considerably from where it had stood at the beginning [. . .] And when Germany was losing the war for shortage of man-power in the factories, there was no sense in them killing six million of the most intelligent workers in Europe. There were work camps, yes, and likely a lot of cruelty in spots in them, but there weren't extermination camps." 

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​​​I have not found any public discussion addressing whether anyone cited in existing scholarship on Lafferty has encountered this letter or other Holocaust denial material in the Tulsa archive. I have read Ferguson’s publicly available work on Lafferty, including his blog Continued on Next Rock, his MA thesis, his scholarly apparatus for Past Master, his academic article on Lafferty and mimesis, his Gaiman essay, his unrelated dissertation, and his piece on “Unpublished Lafferty” that presents a comprehensive list of the unpublished fiction at Tulsa.

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In a YouTube conversation with Daniel Otto Jack Petersen, who wrote a dissertation on Lafferty and Cormac McCarthy that draws on Andrew Ferguson's ideas, Ferguson discusses his research on Lafferty's biography, including how he first came to the subject and his desire to read everything the author ever wrote. Ferguson says he had most of what he needed for a biography. The interview does not specify whether he read every item in the Tulsa archive. 

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Over the years, Ferguson says that he has continued to add little bits here and there to the biography manuscript, and he reflects on the many places his Lafferty research has taken him. Over a decade ago, he wrote a comment on a blog about Lafferty's letters, saying, “One of my medium-term projects will be to get a volume of selected correspondence, at least between him and his agent Virginia Kidd.” [1] And there is a YouTube clip titled "A conversation with Andrew Ferguson at Laffcon1." 

 

Separately, the University of Tulsa archive holds an extensive collection of Lafferty’s correspondence with Dan Knight and many others. I read through much of this material over the course of a week because most of the boxes are not overstuffed, having become aware of Lafferty’s antisemitism and wanting to understand its depth and nature. Among these letters is the one dated January 24 in which Lafferty explicitly denied the Holocaust.

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​In their PhD dissertations, both Petersen and Morgan reference Ferguson, identifying him as Lafferty’s biographer. Morgan, in particular, draws on Ferguson’s authority regarding Lafferty’s archives and publishing history. 

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One reason for thinking there might be something like the Holocaust denial letter in the archives is a big clue: the presence of another box at McFarlin. It contains Lafferty's copies of IHR Holocaust denial journals, as well as Lafferty's handwritten timeline of Holocaust denial books (Box 4, folder 12). Propaganda pieces are there, with titles such as “The ‘Problem of Gas Chambers’” and “A Prominent False Witness: Elie Wiesel.” Ironically, it is the same box where one will find the Neil Gaiman letters. They are in Box 4, Folder 1. 

 

Many people who visit Tulsa to study Lafferty will want to read the Gaiman letters, because, as Morgan points out in his dissertation, Gaiman has been Lafferty's advocate for many years. Gaiman wrote a pastiche of Lafferty that Ferguson published on. And it can be argued that Gaiman is probably Lafferty's best known fan. Gaiman's name is on Lafferty books, and it has even drawn attention to the Centipede Press edition of Lafferty's short stories. Ironically, copies of the letters from the young Jewish aspiring writer and publications from the Institute for Historical Review have been box companions. Gaiman, whose cousin Helen was a Holocaust survivor, once visited Tulsa and was shown around. Ferguson writes about this on his blog, but it is not documented whether Gaiman saw Box 4 during his visit. I have written to Neil Gaiman about this topic in the hope that he can help get the Holocaust denial materials relabeled at McFarlin's Special Collections, and I have requested that Ferguson join me in this. ​​​​​

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Here, a question of archival expertise arises. If thorough familiarity with the Lafferty archive at McFarlin entails sustained engagement with the primary materials, it is difficult to see how this letter would escape notice or go unrecognized for its overwhelming importance in understanding Lafferty. If, however, “familiarity” is being used in a looser sense—referring, for example, to a focus on specific categories of documents, particular timeframes, or materials most relevant to publishing history, then the absence of this letter from public commentary becomes easier to understand, though the Holocaust denial letter was written to one of Lafferty's small-press publishers. The distinction matters because the scope of one’s engagement with the archive determines how claims of completeness should be interpreted.

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It is essential to preserve a clear record of this material, as failing to do so risks erasing evidence of Lafferty’s Holocaust denial—documented in his archived papers—from future scholarship, including works such as Glyn Morgan’s dissertation. This concern is particularly relevant in that study, given that Lafferty modeled the character Enniscorthy partly on himself; that Enniscorthy is the subject of a fictional biography; that The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny contains no reference to the Jewish Holocaust; and that archival evidence shows Lafferty denying that the Holocaust occurred.

 

Taken together, these facts provide a relevant context for scholarship on Lafferty, particularly in Holocaust-related areas and for understanding how Lafferty reasons about history and human suffering. I have tried to point out elsewhere on this blog some of the ways his fiction codes antisemitic tropes.

 

At present, a university search for “Lafferty” and “Holocaust” brings up Mapping Planet Auschwitz: Non-Memetic Writing and the Holocaust in Anglo-American Fiction, where one will find Morgan’s conclusion that “Lafferty relativises the Holocaust as one of a series of holocaustic events, a chain of human madness which can be linked from the First World War, to the Second, and to the Third, which results in fiery nuclear Armageddon: a literal holocaust”

 

and

 

"Lafferty imagines an Adolf Hitler who pursues art over politics, as referenced by his ‘Brown Danube’ oil painting above. However, unlike Spinrad, Lafferty deemphasises Hitler’s significance in the twentieth-century. He avoids the Second World War and the Holocaust not by making Hitler a better artist, or an emigrant, but by defusing the circumstances that led to his politicisation, rise to power, and the climate in Germany which allowed him to assume the supreme role within the nation. He does this by affecting a greater series of changes stretching back to before the First World War, linking the major conflicts of the twentieth-century into a single timeline of warfare and struggle. In doing so, Lafferty aligns ‘The Three Armageddons’ far more powerfully with a structuralist view of history than Spinrad’s novel is able to, thus reassigning blame for the Holocaust from a single man (Hitler) and onto a wider failing of society which encompasses not just Germany but all of Europe, and indeed the world [emphasis added]"  (134).

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This reading may appear convincing and moving, but it conflicts with the archival evidence. For Lafferty, there was nothing there to relativise. No six million deaths. As he wrote: "if indeed six million Jews were killed (between a third and a half of the Jews in the World, and more Jews than in the maximum area ever controlled by the Germans), then they should have left a big hole in the total Jewish World Population; but they didn't." 

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One—albeit purely academic—reason the Holocaust denial issue matters is that it can rubbish the scholarship.

 

Without access to, or awareness of, the archival evidence, an academic may quite reasonably produce interpretations that, in hindsight, take on an unintended and jarring quality. For example, Morgan’s observation that “R. A. Lafferty finds a way to avoid all of the major global traumas of the twentieth century, yet still experience them” (127) reads very differently once Lafferty’s Holocaust denial is known—so differently that it can seem unintentionally grotesque.

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The same applies to the subsection on Lafferty in his dissertation, “Misremembered Traumas by the Forgotten American Fantasist.” This is not a criticism of Morgan’s diligence or intentions, but an illustration of how new information can shift the meaning of earlier interpretations. The reason should be apparent: archival evidence can overturn the footing of earlier interpretations, whatever the intentions or diligence of the people who produced them. Few would knowingly set out to write a dissertation on Holocaust trauma in literature, only to later learn that their subject had expressed Holocaust denial.

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If you hold a PhD in the humanities, you probably look back on your graduate work with mixed feelings—that is part of the normal growth process. But this situation is different. All academics share one constant: reliance on the scholarship of others. None of us can visit every archive, read every letter, or unearth every document ourselves. We depend on those with the deepest access and expertise to convey the essential facts, and it is reasonable—even necessary—to trust the person with the strongest reputation for knowledge of a particular archive.

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Researchers should be able to recognize the antisemitism in Lafferty’s letters without needing to know the archive thoroughly, and to have the tools to approach it knowledgeably. This includes the Holocaust denial propaganda materials in Box 4 of the Lafferty collection, his handwritten timeline of denialist literature, and the ways he refers to Jews when the subject arises. Most notably, there is a letter dated January 24, 1990, in which Lafferty explicitly rejects the reality of the Holocaust, explains why he never accepted it, and outlines his decades-long engagement with denialist thought. The letter appears to have been prompted by a story he read titled “The Bigot,” and he seems to have intended it as a statement that he was not one. I have therefore asked the University of Tulsa to label these materials clearly, so that Lafferty’s Holocaust denial is unmistakable and easily verifiable.

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Ferguson's own commentary shows why such labeling matters. In discussing the character Dotty on his blog, he treats her repeated use of “the Old Jew” and “a debt-caller” as expressions of personal anguish rooted in a specific historical Catholic setting, and he distinguishes them from the author’s views. He writes, "I would balance this carefully against the other treatments of Jewish individuals in his works, and remind again that these are not the words of the author, but of the character he created . . . ." Read on its own, this interpretation is plausible. However, in the absence of archival context—particularly the denialist material—it can have the effect of insulating Lafferty from the implications of his text. Notably, Dotty was published by the same correspondent who received the January 24, 1990 letter. In this respect, the interpretation risks obscuring rather than illuminating the author’s ideology. Awareness of the denialist material is therefore not a peripheral supplement, but a necessary condition for analysis of this and other conspiratorial themes in Lafferty’s fiction.

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This is an instance where new evidence reframes earlier work. I have reached out to share the information with Morgan, and I’ve contacted the  Encyclopedia of Science Fiction regarding the entry cited in Morgan’s dissertation. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction was originally co-edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls. Clute’s Encyclopedia of Fantasy, co-edited with John Grant, includes an entry on Lafferty co-signed by John Clute and Neil Gaiman. In The Best of R. A. Lafferty (2019), Gaiman wrote, "I did not know that I would one day write with John Clue the entry on Lafferty for the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction." Clute has told me that this is an error on Gaiman's part, but neither encyclopedia mentions Lafferty and Holocaust denial, though the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction forcefully emphasizes Lafferty's preoccupation with conspiracy. Clute characterizes the SFE entries as adopting a textualist approach and has suggested that Lafferty's Holocaust Denial belongs on the site's bibliography under the About the Author section. This seems appropriate to me. Yet Clute's statement that Lafferty delighted in seeing the world as irradiated with conspiracy is itself a biographical inference, a critical and biographical judgment grounded in textual analysis. It speaks to how Lafferty viewed the world: he took pleasure in the idea of pervasive conspiracy. That inference is, of course, accurate. It appears in Lafferty’s belief that Jews with dual loyalties to nation-states were responsible for real-world conspiracies, including what he regarded as Jewish Holocaust propaganda. Although this requires me to revise parts of the blog, that is a minor task compared with the permanence of having a dissertation on record.

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I do not know whether Ferguson and others overlooked the Holocaust denial material, read past it without recognizing its significance, judged it outside their academic scope, set it aside as too complex for open discussion, or simply saw only part of it due to limits of time or focus. Whatever the reason, this aspect of Lafferty’s intellectual history deserves acknowledgment, along with other statements of his that may be difficult to confront.

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For example, in a letter to his correspondent Al Doty, Lafferty wrote, "there is a pretty good bunch of Blacks who are competent or better as writers and do not need any reverse discrimination to help them out. Steven Barnes is probably the best of them, or I may think so because I know him the best, but there's a dozen or so who are adequate, and people don't especially think of them as Black." One of the inadequate Blacks for Lafferty was Octavia E. Butler, now in the Library of America, which also issued the edition of Lafferty's Past Master edited by Andrew Ferguson. Lafferty wrote, "But Blacks in Science Fiction and Fantasy are favored with a sort of reverse discrimination. Octavia Butler has received accolades far beyond what is deserved by her unimpressive work." 

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From my perspective as an outsider to the Lafferty discourse community, the absence of any discussion of Lafferty’s antisemitism across the full continuum of his reception over the last ten years—from fan gatherings such as LaffCon to all published scholarship—leaves a gap in the public understanding of his work, regardless of whether that absence was intentional. ​

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Lafferty’s work deserves close study. He was an unrepeatable literary genius—brilliantly original in genre fiction and formidable as a Catholic thinker. Yet this was also a Catholic mind that denied the Jewish Holocaust in the years after Nostra Aetate (October 28, 1965), when the Catholic Church formally repudiated the charge of collective Jewish guilt, but before We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah (March 16, 1998). In the latter, the Catholic Church acknowledged its failures during the Holocaust, and it called for repentance. By this time, as I understand it, Lafferty was incapacitated in a nursing home in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Had he been able to read We Remember, his reply would almost certainly have been revealing and decisive for his legacy on the Holocaust issue.

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For those now approaching Lafferty academically, I anticipate two main families of readings emerging in response to the newly public-facing problem of his antisemitism, each likely to develop along different lines:

 

Approach 1) Secular Quarantine A strategically secular reading says Lafferty’s views soured over time: late positions diverge sharply from the earlier self. It posits a break between the Catholic-intellectual strain of “traditional” antisemitism and the virulence of Holocaust Revisionism, emphasizing: (a) no antisemitic content in early correspondence; (b) the year he repeatedly gave as when he stopped writing; (c) the fact that his most troubling statements appear only after that date. By downplaying continuity, this approach lets the “never did accept” the Six Million line that Lafferty wrote in the Holocaust-denying letter to Dan Knight be absorbed gradually. Nasty Lafferty is Late Lafferty. Quarantine the problem for Lafferty Studies.

 

Approach 2) Theological/Continuity Integration A confessional reading rejects the rupture thesis and asserts continuity: the late statements extend long-standing commitments rather than contradict them. It situates Lafferty’s remarks within Catholic traditionalism—supersessionist motifs if not full supersessionism, anti-modern polemic, typological portrayals of Jews—reads irony and satire as technique rather than disavowal, and treats scattered early cues as seeds that later surface. On this view, Lafferty’s absolute Holocaust denial—preceding his embrace of IHR-style revisionism—expresses a historical skepticism consistent with his later IHR phase. The upshot is to absorb the offense into the unity of the oeuvre and the religion. Lafferty is Always Lafferty: Holocaust denial persists; only the intensity shifts. This sees the REALLY BIG critical problem as Holocaust denial itself, because that is what shapes something like the absence of the Holocaust in his literary work—not the revisionist IHR talk Lafferty learned to articulate from the late 1960s to the 1990s, which is a biographical issue relevant primarily to understanding how he came to express his ideas about Jews in personal letters. Reject quarantine and integrate the problem for Lafferty Studies.

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This section will serve as a hub for posts on the subject, a directory of responses from others who engage with it, and, where relevant, an overview of the available evidence. I will do my best to document instances of antisemitism I find in Lafferty’s archive and to share what I consider the most significant passages, so that readers can have transparency and a clearer understanding of his position on this issue.

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[1] An earlier version of this post misstated a detail of Andrew Ferguson’s research process due to a word-processing error. In the linked interview, Ferguson says he has most of what he needs for a biography; the earlier version mistakenly rendered this as a statement that he had photographs of Tulsa archive materials and had not read them. That was incorrect. I have linked to the interview so Ferguson can speak for himself about his research process and how he came to work on Lafferty. I do not know whether he has photographs or has read every item in the Tulsa archive, and I have tried to make this clear throughout. I have always found Ferguson’s bibliographic work, both on his blog and in his publications, to be meticulous and invaluable. Because he is such a good and thorough researcher, I do not want to imply that he knew about the January 24, 1990, letter, that he deliberately withheld information, or that he is a sloppy researcher. My goal is to draw attention to Lafferty’s Holocaust denial materials and comments so that it can be known, identified, and accessible for future research, which I believe is in the good-faith interest of all Lafferty scholars and essential to understanding Lafferty’s Catholic fiction.​​​​​​​

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I. The Myth of the Six Million​

II. The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny

III. Reading Lafferty Through Rosenfeld and Marcus

William Blake and R. A. Lafferty

"The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street"

"Phoenic"

Kabbala and "In the Turpentine Trees" (1982/1983)

Conspiracy and "About a Secret Crocodile" (1970)

"Groaning Hinges of the World" (1968-1971)

The Sex Life of Melchisedech Duffey

Julius Brass

Counterargument​

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​Tulsa, Okla.
January 24, 1990
 

Dan Knight
Box 390, Station A
Weston, Ontario M9N-3N1
Canada

Re your letter Jan 15, 1990
and enclosures

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Hello Dan and Clan:

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     Dean Swift (of Gulliver’s Travels) once wrote a sharp essay called ON THE PERVERSITY OF INANIMATE OBJECTS, but he was wrong in thinking that any thing at all is inanimate. Certainly the international mails are animated by black-humored alien spirits. I had just sent yesterday a letter describing the contents of the un-lost package, and this morning I received your January 15 letter.

     THE EPISODES OF THE ARGO with various other things sounds like an attractive idea. There is one thing I would like on this one though, a cover that announces itself as a cover like a road sign, and I never liked a road sign with lettering so small that it can’t be taken in by a glance. Loud covers, loud letters, loud words that echo like burnished bugles.

     As to your three enclosed stories: SNATCHED is a very good short-short with a snatchy ending. Someone who has just about enough space for a short-short may take it. It is worth trying around.

FRUITS OF WISDOM is the same sort of story, a turn-about identity tale. I haven’t seen one like it for some time anywhere. I’m meat-eater enough. I’ve seen what looks like patties made out of soy beans being tossed from a grill; that would make me shudder. What does that mean if they detest meat? They would detest the creatures themselves.

     THE BIGOT. There are difficulties here. This is a horror-irony piece, and the irony must be clear and sudden at the same time. There is too much baggage of the identities themselves. You haven’t quite made up your mind what to do with it yet, but you’ll get there. It stirs down to the black dust of the ages where somewhere that should surface eventually, and it may make quite a striking story when it does.

     By the way, Canada wasn’t the first with the ‘anti-hate’ laws. They have them in France and in West Germany and I believe in other places. Publishing the opinion that the Holocaust didn’t happen can land one in prison; and there are persons in prison for this offense right now. I myself never did accept the idea of the Holocaust in the context of the Six Million. As a prophecy it’s been in the Talmudic literature for a couple of thousand years, but it has always been a sort of allegory until the time of WW-II. But if indeed six million Jews were killed (between a third and a half the Jews in the World, and more Jews than were in the maximum area ever controlled by the Germans) then they should have left a big hole in the total Jewish World Population; but they didn’t. By the end of the War (within five years of the end) North America had received more than a million Jews from Europe, so had South America, so had Israel, and the total World Jewish population was up considerably from where it had stood at the beginning of the World. And when Germany was losing the War for shortage of man-power in the factories, there was no sense in them killing six million of the most intelligent, industrious workers in Europe. There were work camps, yes, and likely a lot of cruelty in spots in them, but there weren’t extermination camps. But I believe the only book debunking the Holocaust that I had read before running onto The Journal of Historical Research was THE MYTH OF THE SIX MILLION, Anonymous, published by the IHR in Los Angeles in 1969. Then, probably about 1982 I ran onto the issues of THE JOURNAL FOR HISTORICAL REVIEW at a used book sale. ‘What’s this?’ I asked myself, since my hobby has always been History. I haven’t I heard of this before? The Journal was about two years old and it didn’t seem to have caused a ripple. The Journal did show convincingly that the Holocaust couldn’t have happened. And the only narrative that could be given to it was ‘The proof that the Holocaust could have happened is that it did happen.’ And the passing of laws that the Holocaust must be accepted as Historical Fact, and the savage penalties to be assessed against those who claimed that it wasn’t historical fact. And several of the most famous historians in the world being stripped of their degrees by law and forbidden to teach or write. And persons in prison for offences against the Holocaust Laws themselves.

     The Journal of Historical Review has been outlawed in pieces since 1980. There was a brief while when they were unable to publish because of fire-bombing and arson at their printing plant, and very large numbers of people (especially of college students) have become aware of the Revisionist views and sympathies to them. The United States Revisionist Scholars have been debating everyone who will face them at various colleges, and the Revisionists have been winning. They won resoundingly at the Canadian Trial, despite enormous cause money against them. The Revisionist Conference was to be held this year by the IHR in Los Angeles, somewhere in Southern California. There was never any scheduled ‘Great Debate’ between the Committee for Debate on the Holocaust and the ‘Exterminators of Revisionism’ who were mentioned by the IHR. The Exterminators were Jewish Scholars of Christian background who believed strongly in the Holocaust, Glen Peglau, Hal Lindsey (author of THE LATE, GREAT PLANET EARTH), John Anderson, John Montgomery, who was called ‘The Intellectual of the Exterminator lot.’ But the debate didn’t take place. Within hours, a few members of the Exterminator committee withdrew from the debate. Hal Lindsey remembered that the day of the debate was the same day he was supposed to sign a $500,000 book contract. Peglau remembered that the day of the debate was the same day he was to be in court to settle a suit for which he would earn $2,225.00 in legal fees (all of these were expensive people). John Montgomery remembered that the day of the debate was the same day he was to be in court on a dispute with his ex-wife. And Peglau claimed that his heart condition (which was real) was getting worse every day as the time of the debate neared. But some of the Revisionists were so crude as to say that the four Exterminators all backed out of the debate when they found that they and their staffs could not find any evidence at all that the Holocaust had really happened. So the NINTH IHR REVISIONIST CONFERENCE was held without the Great Debate. But it was said to be a very interesting and successful Conference even without it.

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     Sorry, I didn’t mean to take so much space for the Holocaust-that-never-happened affair.

I do believe that you will be able to make a good story (or a better story) out of THE BIGOT. It will take a touch of genius, but everybody has a touch of genius when he reaches deep enough for it.

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      All good things for all of you.

      (signed) Ray Lafferty
      Tulsa (the Hub of the Universe) OK, USA

 

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​​​05/19/1989. To Paul de Vinny. "Yes, I am mystified and disgusted by the disproportionate number of "science fiction people" who are atheist, and I don't know how to counteract the tendency. Part of the explanation sounds anti-semitic, but I don't believe it is. Jews do make up a disproportionate number of science fiction people" and "when Jews lose their religion, they commonly become atheists. Catholics, for instance, when they lose their religion, usually become agnostic or indifferentists. Protestants usually become the milder sort of humanists."​

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01/24/90. To Dan Knight. Holocaust denial. Says he never accepted that the Jews had been murdered en masse. His Holocaust denial predates his encounter with Holocaust revisionism. Gives personal history. Says his hobby has always been history.

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02/26/92. To Stephen Minch. Thoughts on the Dreyfus Affair and antisemitism. Writes, "The fear of being called an anti-Semite was then stronger in both France and England than it is now, if that were possible. And Dreyfus was more puzzled than anybody about the whole thing. He couldn't understand why people considered him Jewish when he hadn't been Jewish for four generations, and was in fact only one-sixteenth Jewish. But he had a smart Jewish lawyer to defend him."

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02/26/1992. To Eastern Oklahoma Catholic Editor. "In recent months several articles and essays have appeared which argue that the Moslems and Jews should be able to live together in peace because they did it once before: in peace, in a golden era, a magic era of high attainment in every field of science and art and intellectuality and understanding. They lived in this golden age for about eight-hundred years in Iberia (Spain and Portugal and a few islands  and scraps. This golden age began around the year 711 and faded away about 1470. But there was an unmentioned missing element in this joyous twosome of Moslems and Jews. With these two it was a two-legged stool. There had to be a third element. And in fact there had to be the Christian populace to be considered. These Christians lived in almost total slavery for eight hundred years," After body, concludes: "In the February 22 issue of the Eastern Oklahoma Catholic, there is a write-up titled 'Reconciliation to Set Right 500-Year Wrong.' The strange argument was that the eight hundred years of slavery had been right, and that the well-handled ending of it was a wrong. And there is a picture of sixteen persons, Catholics, Jews, and miscellaneous who all seem to be under the same delusion. / But all sixteen of them are wrong, some of them innocently wrong, some of them maliciously wrong. Pray for them."

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04/09/1992. To David Jones, Eastern Oklahoma Catholic.  Further interpretation of the history of Spain.  Concludes: "And the Jew now has the right to quote the old verse of Alexander Pope: 'Yes I am proud. I should be proud to see / Men not afraid of God afraid of me."  

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09/09/93. To Dan Knight. "I'm even of the belief that a fair amount of racial prejudice is healthy." 

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03/24/1993. To Al Doty. "But blacks in Science Fiction and Fantasy are favored with a sort of reverse discrimination. Octavia Butler has received accolades far beyond what is deserved by her unimpressive work. If she were White she might not have been published at all. Samuel Ray (Chip) Delany on the top of the heap for several years a combination of fancy titles," etc. Lafferty also writes, "On the other hand, there is a pretty good bunch of Blacks who are competent or better as writers and do not need any reverse discrimination to help them out. Steven Barnes is probably the best of them, or I may think so because I know him the best, but there's a dozen or so who are adequate, and people don't especially think of them as Black." 

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