Why is Wikipedia Censoring Me?
by James Bacque
http://serendipity.li/hr/bacque_on_wikipedia.htm
Update 2008-04-05
In 1989, I published the first in a series of books about the Second World War
and its aftermath. The first, Other Losses, showed the tremendous atrocities
committed against enemy prisoners in the prison camps of the US and France after
1945. The next, Just Raoul, was a biography of a hero of the French Resistance
who saved many refugees from Nazi death camps. The next, Crimes and Mercies,
described the full extent of all allied crimes against Germans, plus the
wonderful charity work of Canada and the USA in saving 800 million people,
including Germans, Japanese and Italians, from starving to death in the hungry
years after 1945. The next, Dear Enemy, illuminated the attitudes of the western
allies to Germany from 1945 to now.
Wikipedia reviews and criticizes only Other Losses, and in such a biassed way,
that I finally tried to correct their many errors. Starting in March, 2006, I
tried repeatedly over many weeks to correct the errors, but found that within a
day at first, then within hours, and finally within minutes, some Wikipedian
editor had expunged my corrections, replacing them with ever more hostile and
denigrating allegations. Friends of mine tried also to correct the flawed
Wikipedia article, but found the same situation. Finally we decided that
Wikipedia was deliberately censoring my contributions, and that it was pointless
to continue trying to present the facts on Wikipedia. After Serendipity (already
acquainted with censorship at Wikipedia) heard of this situation I was offered
the chance to publish the real story, which appears below.
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Wikipedia quotes Stephen E. Ambrose as saying that Other Losses is "...
spectacularly flawed ..." without saying that Ambrose also wrote that "You have
made a major historical discovery which will ... span the oceans and have
reverberations for decades, yea centuries to come. You have the goods on these
guys ..."
Wikipedia does not say that Ambrose changed his mind only after he was retained
by the US Army to lecture at the War College in Pennsylvania. Nor does Wikipedia
mention that in his attack on me in the New York Times, he admitted that he had
not done the necessary research to reach the conclusions that he published in
that same article. Wikipedia fails to mention that the Ambrose it cites as an
authority admitted that he had plagiarized several other authors. Wikipedia does
not concern itself with the accusations that Ambrose stole work from a graduate
student which he published as his own.
Wikipedia ignores my book, Crimes and Mercies, which goes far towards balancing
the record of western actions after World War Two. The book shows the great
charity extended by the western allies, chiefly Canada and the USA, towards the
starving around the world after WW2, including the Japanese and Germans. Saying
that the overwhelming majority of professional historians reject my work, and
citing as an authority one historian who has never worked in this field,
Wikipedia ignores the support given me by the eminent US Army military historian
Col. Dr. Ernest F. Fisher, a former Senior Historian of the US Army Center for
Military History, Washington. Fisher, a professional historian for decades,
wrote the official US Army history of the campaign in Italy. He assisted me for
months in researching documents in the US National Archives, wrote the
Introduction to my book Other Losses, and has supported me with public
statements for the seventeen years since its first publication. He helped me for
many months researching in the archives.
Wikipedia does not mention the expert editing, research help and public support
given me by the eminent epidemiologist and biostatistician, Dr Anthony B.
Miller, former head of the Department of Biostatistics at the University of
Toronto.
Wikipedia also casts aside the support given my work by Richard Overy, King's
College, University of London; Otto Kimminich, University of Regensburg; Dr
Alfred De Zayas, author of many books on postwar German history; Prof. Dr. Peter
Hoffmann, McGill University, author of the most expert books on the German
resistance; Prof. J. K. Johnson, Carleton University, Ottawa; Professor Ralph
Raico, University of Buffalo; Prof. Ed Peterson, University of Wisconsin; Prof
Ralph Scott, University of Iowa; Prof. Pierre Van Den Berghe, University of
Seattle; Prof. Dr Richard Mueller, former head, Department of English,
University of Aachen; Prof. Hans Koch, University of York and many others.
Among writers who have approved my work and supported me are Julian Barnes;
Nikolai Tolstoy; John Fraser, Master of Massey College, Toronto; John Bemrose of
Toronto; Robert Kroetsch, Winnipeg; and many others. My work has been published
around in the world in ten languages by Macmillan, Little, Brown, Prima,
Ullstein, Editions Sand, McClelland and Stewart, New Press, and many many
others.
Finally, the most glaring omission is that the massive and detailed KGB Archives
in Moscow have millions of documents whose evidence completely confirms the
statistical work in Other Losses. The math is simple: about 1.5 million German
prisoners alive in allied prison camps at the end of the war never came home,
nor were their deaths reported to the German government, their families, the
International Red Cross or the UN. The figure was determined by the Adenauer
government in Germany, submitted to the UN, and has never been disputed by
anyone. Thus when Other Losses came out in 1989, alleging deaths of about one
million in French and American camps, that left about 500,000 to be accounted
for. They could have died only in the KGB camps, because there were not half a
million prisoners in any other camps in the world. Thus, in effect Other Losses
was predicting that when the communists opened the KGB archives, they would show
deaths of about 500,000. And lo and behold, when Gorbachev brought down the
communist rule, and the archives were opened, I went there, and found the
Bulanov Report which showed that 356,687 Germans died in Soviet captivity, plus
another 93,900 civilians taken as substitutes for dead or escaped prisoners for
a total of 450,587. This astonishing discovery is not mentioned in Wikipedia,
nor by any other of the "professional historians." Except one, Stefan Karner,
who went to the KGB archives, saw the evidence piled up in enormous quantities,
and said he did not believe it. Instead, he preferred to publish his own
"estimates," which confirm the conventional view.
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Information about books written by James Bacque
may be found on his website World War 2 Books.
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Update 2008-04-05 (added by Peter Meyer):
The following paragraph was inserted on 2008-04-02 by James Bacque in the entry
about him on Wikipedia to inform readers of several important and relevant facts
that eliminate the credibility of the two chief sources of criticism of Bacque's
book Other Losses. This paragraph was deleted within twelve hours, like all the
other corrections that have been inserted in Wikipedia by Bacque and others.
Wikipedia readers may be interested to know that Ambrose was charged with
plagiarism several years ago, a charge which he first denied, then admitted in
part when more evidence was produced against him. The man on whom Ambrose relied
for most of his information about prisoners of war was Eric Maschke, a Nazi who
wrote racist propaganda for the Germans in Poland during the war. In the 1950s,
Maschke was commissioned by Willy Brandt West German Foreign Minister to produce
a series of books about the 1.5 million German PoWs still missing in the 1950s.
The authors and editor worked, as they said, from estimates and anecdotal
evidence gathered almost entirely from German sources which were not privy to
the statistics in the American and Soviet archives. These were consulted for and
are cited in Other Losses. The Maschke books were according to Brandt in the
Bundestag on April 25, 1969, intended "to avoid provoking a public discussion at
home and abroad ... [which would] open old wounds and not serve the
reconciliation efforts of the Federal Republic's foreign policy."
The deletion may be confirmed by viewing en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=James_Bacque&diff=202939101&oldid=202860404
.
An interesting discussion of Bacque's work, and the page on Wikipedia about him,
may be viewed at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:James_Bacque. There
we read:
The bias against Bacque that is being permitted without adequate checks here at
Wiki truly beggars belief and is a disgrace. Those who have properly studied
James Bacque's latter work, "Crimes and Mercies" (which to this Oxonian's mind
stands up admirably to expert scrutiny — and by the way is in no way "Holocaust
denying"), will know that Bacque's research and conclusions continue to hold
water.
That others have embraced this great and ground-breaking work of Mr Bacque,
currently reprinting for early 2007, is of no surprise, for it reflects what
many Germans experienced and recall. That individuals with their own agendas
have found the horrific truths and research published welcome or unwelcome, is
irrelevant. Bacque's work conforms to high standards of academic and
historiographical methodology and accuracy. The attempted slurs that were
earlier found on here are therefore appalling.
Wikipedia is often regarded as similar to (if not actually) an encyclopedia. But
an encyclopedia is a source of reliable information and a record of what is
known on various topics. This claim by, or on behalf of, Wikipedia is
fraudulent. Instead of enabling the presentation of all the evidence relating to
any controversial topic (such as one or another genocide, or the question of
which group was actually responsible for the events of 9/11), some Wikipedia
editors censor anything which is inconsistent with a view of the world that they
wish everyone else would accept. This is presumably done to further the aims of
the group to which these editors belong, and to whom (it seems) lying in the
service of (what they regard as) a "higher cause" is considered acceptable.
Wikipedia may be useful for quick consultation on such non-controversial matters
as the melting point of platinum or the latitude of Irkutsk, but because biassed
and misleading articles occur in association with other factually correct
articles (a kind of "innocence by association") Wikipedia is not simply of
limited value but is a positively harmful source of disinformation, at least to
the degree to which those editors attempting to impose their false assertions
are not prevented from doing so by the efforts of others who value the freedom
to present evidence whether or not that evidence is unpalatable to some.
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See also: Is Wikipedia Stifling 9/11 Truth?
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Mass Starvation of Germans, 1945-1950
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