I notice you haven’t engaged with the point I made on your initial post, but I think it’s an important one.

What seems to have happened here is that you (a blogger going by the name of Unity) have exposed someone (Dr Nicholas Kollerstrom) as holding nasty repellant views which they’ve been sharing on the internet and asked for them to be held accountable for them in the “real world”. Rightly or wrongly this has led to some serious consequences since Dr Kollerstom is now no longer an Honorary Research Fellow at UCL. Yet, whilst you are prepared to hold others accountable for their views, it would not be possible to hold you accountable in a similar way since you do not take “ownership” of your opinions by blogging under your real name (unless I’m wrong and your name is generally well known, like Paul Staines).

Now, even if your opinions are “acceptable” (that is, non-discriminatory, backed up by evidence etc) this still suggests to me a double standard and I’d be interested to know your take on this.

Um – Unity is merely drawing attention to a story elsewhere, first published on Rachel’s blog and by Quarsan at Blairwatch.

Rachel is fairly high-profile as UK bloggers go, with TV and radio appearances and a book out. Insofar as she’s pseudonymous, the slightest acquaintance with her writing over the last year will reveal why this is.

Quarsan, on the other hand, is well known as the eponymous Twat in his partner’s high-profile blog and subsequent book. There’s plenty of press out there with his real name in, it’s in the bloody Guardian for heaven’s sake.

In other words, the two originators of the story are about as well known as UK bloggers can get at present.

Tom

I am slightly confused by :-

‘In other words, the two originators of the story are about as well known as UK bloggers can get at present.’

what is it about the ‘present’ that prevents them from being known now, and what do you think might happen in the future that will enable them to be known ?

The blogging world is full of bloggers using nom de plumes to attack others who don’t.

Guy Aitchison

There are reasons why bloggers use online monikers. Most people who need to know, know Unity’s real name. However, he is quite old skool and and likes to cling to his dial-up/usenet memories. ;o)

Aaron

‘Most people who need to know, know Unity’s real name.’

I would be interested to hear from you as to what qualifications one needs to become one of the ‘knowers’. Is it perhaps a covert club akin to Blyton’s ‘Secret Seven’?

Ivor Cornish – one has to recognise that the audience for blogs is minute, of course, we’re not doing this to get fed or to get famous. Therefore ‘known’ has a slightly different meaning, not the one that results in OK photo deals.

Anyway, my point is that blogging, lacking the self-sustaining quality of mainstream media culture, depends more on ones own efforts to achieve recognition. People lose interest and drop out all the time and new people come in. Rachel has in many ways successfully crossed over to the mainstream (well, the Sunday Times anyway), because she’s interesting and engaging and extremely strong willed and there aren’t too many other bloggers who’ve followed the same path yet (Iain Dale was an aspiring Tory politician long before he was a blogger), but who’s to say what the future holds? My basic point was that the Kollerstrom story was not a case of a brave academic exposed by pseudonymous cowards but by people notably unafraid to stand up and be counted (or at least called an utter twat by their partner on an award-winning, well read blog), contrary to what Mr. Aitcheson was saying.

“The blogging world is full of bloggers using nom de plumes to attack others who don’t.”

I don’t. That’s my real name there. When I call you a muppet, you can call me a muppet right back. There’s also a difference between using a nom de plume and being completely anonymous, and Quarsan is definitely in the former camp.

I would be interested to hear from you as to what qualifications one needs to become one of the ‘knowers’. Is it perhaps a covert club akin to Blyton’s ‘Secret Seven’? ~ Ivor Cornish

Yeah, just like the Secret Seven. How did you know?

I’m sure there are good reasons why bloggers use monikers (I’m not gona pick a fight with half the UK bologosphere) but I was raising a point about their use in this particular instance which I thought was questionable. No one has really addressed this.

I’ll have a go:

If Kollerstrom had posted his views pseudonymously, and a pseudonymous blogger had outed him through underhand skullduggery, then yes, that would have been wrong.

But in fact, Kollerstrom, not Unity, is the one who decided to publish an article *under his own name and bolstered by his real-world academic credentials* denying the Holocaust.

The anonymity or otherwise of the person drawing attention to that article is entirely irrelevant….

@Guy – in what way haven’t I addressed this? In what way is it questionable and for whom?

Tom, are you deliberately missing my point? You started talking about the two bloggers who broke the story, saying something along the lines of “if you knew enough about UK blogging you’d know who they are anyway”.
So, “In what way is it questionable?” – I refer you to my first two comments.
And “for whom?” -the clue here, Tom, is the four words that came before questionable: “which I thought was”

You also imply that I decribed this as the case of “a brave academic exposed by pseudonymous cowards”. I did no such thing and I resent being misrepresented in this way. I said that Kollerstrom’s views are “nasty and repellant” and simply raised what I think is an interesting ethical issue.

John b at least has a go. He makes what I think is a valid point i.e that this would have been different if Kollerstrom had been blogging psuedonymously, but since he wasn’t he forfeited his right to not be held to account for his views and the anonymity of the people who did it is irrelevant.

But I’m not sure I agree. Basically I’m pretty uncomfortable with the idea of people blogging pseudonymously going round “exposing” those who don’t and posing as if they’re doing a great service in holding them to account in the real world.

Elie Wiesel vs Encyclopaedia Britannica
Wiesel has been a prominent spokesman for the very sizeable group of people known as Holocaust survivors. [According to Norman Finkelstein of the City University of New York in his book The Holocaust Industry published in 2000, ‘The Israeli Prime Minister’s office recently put the number of "living Holocaust survivors" at nearly a million’ (p.83)]. Wiesel has chaired the US Holocaust Memorial Council and has been the recipient of a Congressional Gold Medal and Nobel Peace Prize (sic).

Time Magazine, March 18 1985:

‘How had he survived two of the most notorious killing fields [Auschwitz and Buchenwald] of the century? “I will never know” he says. “I was always weak. I never ate. The slightest wind would turn me over. In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 to their deaths every day. I was always in the last hundred near the gate. They stopped. Why?”

Compare this with Encyclopaedia Britannica (1993), under ‘Buchenwald’:

“In World War II it held about 20,000 prisoners.. Although there were no gas chambers, hundreds perished monthly through disease, malnutrition, exhaustion, beatings and executions.”

http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0199/9901055.html

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs | January/February 1999

“A Terrible Fraud” :
Wiesel Ignores Palestinians
To the Jerusalem Post, Oct. 9, 1998 (as submitted).

(from Prof. Daniel McGowan, Professor of Economics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY)

In your Oct. 9 article on Elie Wiesel, the American icon of Holocaust survivors, he is paid a special tribute as a “speaker of truth.” This is the same Elie Wiesel who is continually referred to by Noam Chomsky and others as “a terrible fraud.” What can explain such disparity of opinion?

Perhaps it is because Wiesel, who has written literally volumes Against Silence, remains silent when it comes to such issues involving Palestinians as land expropriation, torture and abrogation of basic human rights.

Perhaps it is because Elie Wiesel proclaims with great piety that “the opposite of love is not hate; it is indifference,” while he remains totally indifferent to the inequality and suffering of the Palestinians. Perhaps it is because he enjoys recognition as “one of the first opponents of apartheid” in South Africa, while he remains totally silent and indifferent to the apartheid being practiced today in Israel.

Perhaps it is because he decries terrorism, yet never apologizes for the terrorism perpetrated by the Irgun at Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948. He refuses even to comment on it. He dismisses this act of terrorism in eight short words in his memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea. He remembers the Jewish victims at Kielce, Poland (July 1946) with great anguish, but ignores twice as many Palestinian victims of his own employer at Deir Yassin. The irony is breathtaking.

It is even more shocking that the world’s best known Holocaust survivor can repeatedly visit Yad Vashem and yet keep silent about the victims of Deir Yassin who lie within his sight 1,400 meters to the north. He bitterly protests when Jewish graves are defaced, but has nothing to say when the cemetery of Deir Yassin is bulldozed. He refuses even to acknowledge repeated requests that he join a group of Jews and non-Jews who wish to build a memorial at Deir Yassin.

Daniel A. McGowan, Director, Deir Yassin Remembered, Geneva, NY

My Favorite Elie Wiesel Stories

.. She explained that she had taken classes in Holocaust studies at Harvard and felt she had a good background on the subject. I wasn’t talking to someone who was in the dark about what the Holocaust had been. I wanted to know what texts were followed in her classes but somehow she was unable to name them. She did recall the name of Raul Hilberg, and I was able to give her the title of his book, The Destruction of the European Jews.

“But the writer who influenced me most is Elie Wiesel.”

“Is that right?” I said. “We have something in common then. I don’t know who has influenced me more in the way I regard Holocaust literature than Elie Wiesel.”

“Is that right?” she said enthusiastically, turning in her seat toward me.

“He’s not a historian though, is he?”

She considered the question thoughtfully, “Not in a strict sense.”

I told her some of my favourite Elie Wiesel stories. I started with the one where he writes that there is evidence that when some Russians were executed at Babi Yar in Ukraine that the cadavers of those who were Jews, in a unique protest against their ill treatment, spurted geysers of blood from their graves for months after they were buried.

“He wrote that in Jews of Silence,” I said, “In a straight book of journalism about Soviet Jews and the refusal of the State to allow them to emigrate. Its not a book of poetry, straight journalism. What do you think about a man who would repeat such a claim? Wiesel writes in long hand in French. His wife translates his stuff into English. Presumably Wiesel goes over the translation. The translation is typeset and presumably Wiesel goes over the galleys. When he claims that the Jewish cadavers spurt geysers of blood from their graves for months after they were buried it isn’t a slip of the pen. Wiesel believes that it’s a credible story. He wants you and me to believe it’s credible. He wants the kids he teaches at Boston University to believe it’s credible. It isn’t only that Wiesel is not a historian. There may be other things as well that he is not. He may not be wrapped too tight, for example.”

The girl didn’t say anything.

I told her some more of Elie Wiesel stories. I took them largely from his recommended reading list of survivor eyewitness testimonies. I told them as amusingly as I could, and as gently as I could. As I went along I introduced a few observations about the gas chamber stories from a Revisionist perspective. Occasionally she would smile or ask a question, but as I talked on she grew increasingly silent. After three or four hundred miles I had the feeling I had said enough, but I couldn’t stop myself. The longer I talked the more investment I had in wanting her to see what good sense I was making.

I told her about how Wiesel especially recommends the eyewitness testimony of Yankiel Wiernik as evidence for the gas chambers at Treblinka and the extermination there of about a million Jews. I told her how Wiernik claims that he saw with his own eyes how the cadavers of pregnant Jewish women that had been exterminated would burst open while they were being cremated…their bellies would burst open…and that inside their wombs you could see their fetuses burning like torches.

I said, “Here is the question I think Elie Wiesel’s students should pose to him: As the Americans and the British each specialized in burning alive German and Japanese women by the ten thousands in mass terror bombings, and as there are no reports that pregnant German or Japanese women were able to mount such displays with their own wombs and fetuses while their own bodies were in flames, as Yankiel Wiernik – is Elie Wiesel – suggesting that only Jewish ladies have the talent for it? What is it that Wiesel is attempting to suggest when he recommends Wiernik’s eyewitness testimony to his students at Boston University? What does he reveal about his standards for historical objectivity? What does he reveal about his inner life?”

At that moment the girl took her head in both hands, put her face on her knees and moaned: “I just feel like I’m being proselytized,” she said. She shook her head slowly from side to side, still holding it in both hands, doubled over in her seat.

[by Bradley R. Smith – http://www.codoh.com