Including information about his associates
I N S T I T U T E F O R H I S T O R I C A L R E V I E W
P.O. Box 2739 — Newport Beach, CA — 92659
For Publication
June 16, 1994
Editor / Letters to the Editor
Dept.
The Spotlight
300 Independence Ave., S.E.
Washington, DC 20003
Dear Sir,
At the direction of Willis Carto, The Spotlight continues knowingly to publish scurrilous and false claims about the Institute for Historical Review.
In a lengthy article in the issue of April 11, Michael Collins Piper presents an entirely misleading account of the events of October 15, 1993, when Willis and Elisabeth Carto, with the help of thugs hired for the occasion, unsuccessfully attempted to seize control of the IHR office. (Piper was not present, of course, and what he says about the incident is a skewed account provided by his employer, Willis Carto.)
What in fact happened was this: Using deceit to lure away from the office the IHR senior staff — Tom Marcellus, Ted O’Keefe, Greg Raven and myself — the Cartos, along with hired thugs, illegally took control of the IHR for about an hour. When we returned a short time later and entered the office, which was entirely our legal right, Willis Carto, along with his goons, began immediately to physically attack us. For example, Willis Carto used a club to strike IHR editor O’Keefe.
During the altercation that ensued, Piper asserts, the disloyal employees held a loaded gun on Willis and Elisabeth Carto.
This is not true. At no time did anyone hold or aim a gun at either of the Cartos. Greg Raven did briefly hold a gun to the chest of a burly young thug (hired by Carto) who had attacked me, and was wrestling with me on the floor.
Typically, Spotlight readers are not told some relevant facts: Carto had a .357 Magnum pistol with him at the office; the Cartos had held a female IHR employee against her will and threatened her; Carto and his wife had already begun trashing the office when the IHR senior staff arrived to safeguard the premises; and, after the police arrived, Carto and his wife were arrested on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and taken away by the police in handcuffs.
Piper’s description of Willis Carto as the employer
at the IHR is likewise not true. It is worth noting that for years Carto himself insisted, sometimes under oath, that he was merely an adviser
or unpaid consultant
to the IHR, or an agent
of the corporate directors. Anyway, if Carto is (or was) really the IHR employer,
why then has no one — including Carto or those whom he and The Spotlight claim are the legitimate
corporate directors — ever attempted to formally dismiss any of the conspirators
?
The Spotlight also continues to publish false and scurrilous attacks against Andrew Allen, a member of the Board of Directors of the IHR’s parent corporation. A front-page article in the November 8, 1993, issue claimed that Allen is a deep-cover agent of the Anti-Defamation League
who is working to wreck the IHR from within.
In the issue of April 11 (p. 19), Piper falsely asserts, totally without evidence, that Allen was for years an associate of Roy Bullock, the notorious ADL spy.
Similarly, an article under the name of Carl Hottelet in the April 25 Spotlight (pp. 4, 17) claims that Allen has close connections with the ADL.
Not a scrap of evidence is offered in support of these charges. Hottelet himself told me during an April 25 telephone conversation that he cannot or will not attest to their accuracy.
Andrew Allen is an attorney who lives and practices law in the San Francisco bay area. Far from being an agent
or infiltrator
of the Zionist ADL, as The Spotlight asserts, in 1988-1992 he represented the family of accused Nazi war criminal
Martin Bartesch in a suit against the US Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations.
Allen’s efforts to clear Bartesch’s name in this case were the subject of a lengthy front-page article in the Los Angeles Daily Journal, July 13, 1992.
In another case, which reached the US Supreme Court in 1992, Allen successfully defended the right of Holocaust revisionists publicly to present their views in spite of intimidation and threats from groups such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the American Jewish Committee, which were among the defendants in the case. Allen’s role in this important free speech case was cited in an article in USA Today, June 2, 1992.
In light of the fact that the ADL, in a writ of certiorari
brief submitted in the case, contested the arguments made by Allen, the charge that he is an ADL agent
is simply ridiculous.
An article co-authored by Andrew Allen, and appearing under his name (along with a laudatory biographical summary of him) was published in the Summer 1992 issue of the IHR’s Journal of Historical Review. If Carto knew
that Allen was an ADL asset
prior to September 1993 — as The Spotlight has suggested — why then did Carto express no objection at the time to the publication of this article under his name?
The Spotlight continues to claim (April 11, p. 19, and April 25, p. 4) that a bogus
board of directors has been cooperating with IHR director Marcellus to destroy
the IHR. These claims are baseless and absurd. The issue of just who legitimately and legally represents the IHR and its parent corporation has been definitively settled in a lawsuit, Kerr, Carto vs. Legion, that Carto himself initiated.
In a tentative ruling of December 31 (which was issued after a two day hearing), and in a final written judgment issued and filed on April 13, Orange County Superior Court Judge Robert Polis categorically rejected claims made by Carto (and since repeated in The Spotlight) about who legitimately controls the IHR. For example, the Court specifically determined that Carto had failed to prove the claim (repeated in The Spotlight, April 25, p. 4) that Marcellus and others had been threatening
the Furrs with legal prosecution if they did not resign as Legion directors.
Moreover, Judge Polis went on, The [Carto-supplied] corporate minutes and declarations regarding any other alleged director(s) are untrustworthy as evidence and disbelieved by this court.
This is a polite way of saying that Carto had repeatedly lied in this matter. In fact,
wrote the Judge, Willis Carto was exercising substantial control over the Legion [IHR/Noontide] without any apparent legal authority.
In his final judgment in this case, Judge Polis declared that the defendants in this case — including Thomas Marcellus and Andrew Allen — are awarded their costs of suit.
This judgment represents a clear affirmation of the IHR’s position throughout this dispute, and decisively refutes numerous lies spread by Carto that have been appearing, on his instructions, in the pages of The Spotlight.
The lengthy April 11 Spotlight attack against the IHR claims to be an edited transcript
of a radio interview with Michael Piper. Interestingly, one of the more absurd statements removed from the original text is Piper’s assertion that US Senator Dianne Feinstein personally intervened
in the Kerr, Carto vs. Legion case against Carto, suggesting that Feinstein ordered Judge Polis to rule against Carto. In an article in the May 30 issue of The Spotlight, Piper wrote that Feinstein recently was alleged to have taken an unusual interest in the IHR controversy.
This allegation was made by none other than Piper himself. Naturally, no evidence whatsoever is provided for this claim.
In his April 11 Spotlight article, Piper denounced as absolute nonsense
our charge that Carto wished to transform the IHR Journal into a racist
periodical. (In this matter as well, Piper has no personal knowledge of the facts. He merely parrots Carto’s mangled version of the truth. After all, who pays the Piper calls the tune.)
In fact, Carto repeatedly insisted to me as editor that the focus of the new
Journal would be race and multiculturalism.
For example, in one written memo, Carto called for an article to appear in the Journal proving
the partial African ancestry of President Eisenhower. Or, in Carto’s graceless language, Eisenhower: ¼ nigger!
To be sure, Carto envisioned that the new
Journal would deal with other issues. For example, in another memo he proposed a Journal article proving
that the Romans invent[ed] Judaism [and the] Hebrew language.
Because I resisted his efforts to drastically transform the Journal, as he (alone) was insisting, Carto began secret efforts to replace me as editor.
According to the April 25 Spotlight article under the name of Carl Hottelet (p. 4), Willis Carto assumed control
of the parent corporation of the IHR in 1966 by paying out more than $20,000 of his personal funds to clear its debts.
During a April 25 phone conversation, Hottelet acknowledged that he cannot personally attest to the accuracy of this statement, which appears under his name. He told me that he takes [it] on faith.
For many years Carto has repeatedly stated, sometimes under oath, that he had no legal ties with the Legion or the IHR, except as an agent
of the Board, or as an unpaid consultant. During an arbitration hearing on May 24, though, Carto and his attorney insisted that Carto secretly bought control of the Legion in 1966 through a private agreement with Marcia Hoyt, whom he (erroneously) claims was one of the original incorporators. Carto claimed that in return for money, Hoyt named him as a permanent substitute incorporator,
which supposedly gave him, and him alone, authority to name all corporate directors and officers.
When Carto’s attorney presented this argument at a court hearing on June 10, Judge Polis perfunctorily dismissed it, calling it groundless.
In reality, no one had (or has) the authority to sell
this (or any) not-for-profit corporation because, as a public trust, it is not owned
by anyone.
Hottelet also told me that he cannot or will not reveal the basis for the scurrilous statement, attributed to him in that same April 25 Spotlight article, that Reportedly, some IHR assets have been diverted by [IHR director Tom] Marcellus to a cult to which he belongs.
In the April 18 Spotlight (p. 6), an article under the name of W. A. Carto
blames IHR conspirators
for killing, or at least hastening the death of, Leon Degrelle, Belgian hero of the Second World War. Carto wrote:
After he [Degrelle] was informed by a friend that his monumental, self-imposed [book] project was being trashed by the new leadership at the IHR, Degrelle said, on March 31,
I think I may die of a broken heart.He died the following morning. Communist bullets, flame throwers, grenades, shrapnel, tanks, assassination squads, jailers and torturers could not kill Leon Degrelle, but treason did.
This entire incident is a baseless fabrication. In fact — and as Carto knows full well — for more than two weeks prior to his death, Degrelle was unable to speak at all, and during the last few days prior to his death he was in a coma.
A letter supposedly written by Jeanne Degrelle, and published in the May 16 issue of The Spotlight (p. 27), is a fraud. While it is true that Leon Degrelle’s widow put her name to this already prepared text, she did so only after being subjected to intense pressure by Henry Fischer, a secretive Carto crony. Jeanne Degrelle does not understand English, and was not aware of what she was signing. After being informed of the content and purpose of this letter,
she repudiated it in writing.
This same April 18 Spotlight article goes on to accuse the IHR of dropping plans to bring out any more of [Degrelle's] books rather than offend the IHR’s new backers.
This is another lie. No plans have been made to drop
further volumes by Degrelle.
Not a single prominent supporter or friend of the IHR is publicly supporting Carto in his campaign against us. The most prominent and capable revisionist historians, including David Irving, Robert Faurisson, James Martin and Arthur Butz, publicly support the (Carto-free) IHR. In his May 7 letter to Christian News editor Herman Otten, Carto compares these men to gullible and naive children
because of their public support the IHR. Michael Piper, in his April 11 Spotlight diatribe, denigrates these men by name, casting aspersions on their capabilities as historians.
Piper goes on to assert that never once
did any of these historians contact Willis Carto and ask for his side of the story.
This is likewise not true.
Willis Carto’s claim to be the sole founder of the IHR is actually a polite fiction. In fact, the person who came up with the concept and the name, and who first proposed IHR conferences and The Journal of Historical Review, was David McCalden, an Irish-born writer who died in 1990. Even the official corporate record of the meeting at which the IHR was founded
makes no mention whatsoever of any role by Willis Carto. Carto is the founder
of the IHR only in so far as he, with assistance from others, helped to facilitate McCalden’s initiative.
Carto’s claims of deep concern for the welfare of the IHR are also not true. In fact, during the summer of 1993 he began secret negotiations to sell
the IHR to an outside corporation with no record of involvement with historical revisionism. (Carto had absolutely no legal power or authority to sell
the IHR to anyone.)
In the June 6 issue of The Spotlight, Michael Piper attacks IHR Director Tom Marcellus on the basis of his religious affiliation. Marcellus' long-standing association with the Church of Scientology has never been a secret, of course. This new Carto-directed effort to smear Marcellus is simply contemptible, rather like castigating a Methodist, Lutheran or Episcopalian because of positions taken by the World Council of Churches, or a Roman Catholic because of this or that position taken by the Vatican.
Charges by Carto (in a widely-circulated March 4 letter, and echoed in The Spotlight) that the IHR is now controlled by a bizarre, mind-bending Jim Jones-like cult
are not only absurd to anyone familiar with the IHR’s operations, but are particularly astonishing coming from someone who is a close associate of Mark Lane.
Today Lane works just as diligently as an attorney for Willis Carto, who controls Liberty Lobby and The Spotlight, as he once did for cult leader Jim Jones, leader of the Communistic Jonestown
community in Guyana where, on November 18, 1978, 913 Jonestown community members were put to death on Jones' orders. At that time, Lane was on Jones' payroll as attorney and spokesperson for the cult.
Jim Jones, Lane’s employer and friend, was an ardent admirer of Lenin and Marx, and gave serious consideration to moving the entire Jonestown community — supposedly a model for the world of an ideal egalitarian society — to the Soviet Union. At a meeting in Jonestown shortly before the mass killing, Lane acclaimed the Communistic community as the future,
telling the doomed congregation that either this is the future or there won't be any.
At a press conference in 1978 Lane stated: I have been deeply impressed with what I have seen there [in Jonestown] It makes me almost weep to see such an incredible experiment, with such vast potential for the human spirit and the soul of this country, be cruelly assaulted by the intelligence organizations
And on another occasion, Lane called Jonestown the closest thing on earth like paradise I have ever seen.
Dutifully reflecting the whims of the secretive man who rigidly controls it, much of the April 25 issue of The Spotlight is devoted to lengthy, furious attacks against not only the IHR, but also against the Populist Party. Just whose interests are being served by such attacks?
Carto’s current campaign of smears against the IHR is entirely consistent with his past behavior. During the early 1970s, for example, he published a booklet, issued under the name of the Christian Survival League,
in which he charged that Dr. Edward Fields, and his paper, The Thunderbolt (now The Truth at Last), along with Dr. William Pierce (currently head of the National Alliance), had joined forces
with National Review publisher William Buckley as part of a vast governmental spy apparatus
that was promoting Zionist operations.
Carto went on to charge that one of Buckley’s most active allies is Thunderbolt, a supposedly pro-White and anti-Zionist publication,
and that the Thunderbolt Gang and the Buckley Oil Mongers
are working together on behalf of the CFR-Kosher establishment.
Dr. Fields responded to these outrageous lies with a ten-page report, The Carto File,
published in September 1973. Willis Carto, wrote Fields, has been behind numerous vicious smears deliberately designed to destroy various patriotic Right Wing groups.
Fields went on to provide details of numerous specific Carto lies.
For years Carto used fraud and deceit to exercise a degree of illicit control over the IHR and its corporate parent. He took elaborate care to deceive both the legally responsible directors as well as those of us who were publicly responsible for the IHR’s day-to-day operations. For example, he has never provided an accounting of how he has disposed of the substantial bequest left by Jean Farrel Edison to further the work of the IHR. This refusal to account for this money is a betrayal of the trust of numerous men and women who have generously supported the IHR over the years.
During the May 24 arbitration hearing, Carto was obliged under oath to acknowledge documentary evidence we submitted showing that he had transferred at least $100,000 of IHR money to Liberty Lobby. He also confirmed our suspicion that he has arranged other, similarly large transfers of money from the IHR and its corporate parent to non-related enterprises under his control. Carto was unable or unwilling to cite any legal authorization for these extraordinary transfers of money.
On both legal and ethical grounds, the termination of Carto’s relationship with the IHR was not only proper but necessary. We had not only the right but an obligation to the IHR’s many supporters around the world to act as we did to insure the sound operation of the IHR and its corporate parent.
On the basis of his actions since September 1993 alone, Carto has shown himself to be a man of severely flawed judgment who cannot be entrusted with major responsibility. No regular reader of the IHR Journal — indeed, no sane, informed person — takes seriously Carto’s lunatic claim that the IHR has been taken over
and is now controlled
by the Zionist ADL.
By repeating this and similarly absurd tales about the IHR and its leadership, The Spotlight further erodes whatever remains of its credibility, and shows to discerning readers that it lacks even the most elementary standards of journalistic ethics.
Carto has the chutzpah to circulate letters, with his signature, on IHR letterhead stationary. These fraudulent letters even include a listing of the members of the IHR’s Editorial Advisory Committee — none of whom has authorized this misrepresentation. Carto has the brazen gall to insult historians such as James Martin, Arthur Butz and Robert Faurisson while at the same time suggesting that these men somehow support or endorse his fraudulent claim to represent the IHR.
In his most recent mailing — again fraudulently issued on IHR letterhead stationary — Carto bitterly denounces numerous former associates, using adjectives such as incredibly avaricious,
psychotic leech,
immoral,
gangster,
and traitor.
In Carto’s mind, everyone is wrong but him. Every former IHR editor and director is treacherous and wrong. The prominent historians who support the IHR are wrong. The IHR’s attorney is evil and wrong. The judge who decided the lawsuit that Carto himself initiated is corrupt and wrong. Carto alone is right. Psychiatrists have a name for persons with such a mindset.
In his April 11 Spotlight article, Piper comments that there’s a lot more to this and there’s more yet to come out.
True enough. For one thing, Willis Carto may finally be forced to provide an accounting of his secretive management over the years of IHR and Liberty Lobby finances.
Of course, bringing to light the full story is the very last thing that Carto wants. (This is, after all, a man who routinely hides behind others, and even insists that his photograph never appear in The Spotlight.) Carto acts with the desperation of a man who fears that his carefully hidden record of deceit will finally come to light. Having lost the most critical legal battle, though, he can now do little except frantically keep broadcasting — in the classic Big Lie
tradition — fantastic tales about the IHR, above all in the pages of The Spotlight.
As we have in the past, we once again ask you to retract false, irresponsible and damaging statements made in The Spotlight about the leadership of the IHR and several of its supporters. Otherwise, we may be obliged to seek legal measures to remedy the situation. At least show the decency to publish this letter of response.
While Carto’s ability to harm the IHR should not be trivialized or underestimated, neither should it be exaggerated. Realistically, he lacks the resources, temperament and sagacity to prevail in his campaign against the IHR. Not only is justice and the law on our side, but the dedicated team that runs the IHR is gratified to be able to count on the continued backing of our most important friends and veteran supporters.
Sincerely,
Mark Weber