In which Ken McVay (Nizkor) gets blasted by a "Hell-hath-nothing" Woman, Cecelia Plechinger (now Cecelia Clancy), who incidentally reveals some of "Professor" Deborah Lipstadt's crude blunders in her book too

See how some of them focus on collecting information for dossiers, and much more. It also appears that Deborah Lipstadt is at that time still working on her book. Cecelia Plechinger, is a Jewish one-time supporter of Nizkor webmaster Ken McVay; her letter also speaks volumes of the unhappy association with Jamie McCarthy. Enjoy!

Ken McVay ignores Cecelia Plechinger's letter

posted some time in 1997

I'm Cecelia and I actually did post this to soc.culture.jewish awhile back. And Ken, it is spelled "Cecelia" not "Cecilia." You and I go back to 1991, before you founded Nizkor, Ken. You should know how to properly spell [sic] my name. And I am part of the history of Nizkor, Ken, yet you pretend to have just barely heard of me.

I sent you in materials and you used them, but did not credit me as the source. These concerned much material on Willis Carto and some key information on Fred Leuchter's patents, engineering ethics, chemistry (to refute Fred Leuchter's claims) etc.

In fact, you ignored my material on Carto for many e-mails until one day, one of them clicked something in you. Then you posted a request to your <[email protected]> mailing list (to which I was one of the original subscribers) which went defunct long before the founding of Nizkor asking for info on Willis Carto. Then after a while longer, due in significant part, to the info I sent you on Carto, you then made him a very big project of yours, the topic of a whole long FAQ even.

The stuff on Leuchter's patents also received no ack from you. Yet, one day long past, I was browsing the Jerusalem1 server in Israel and noticed there was a section on Revisionism there. It was mainly or perhaps solely a mirror of your pre-Nizkor anti-Revisionist website. I forget what you called it. There, under a subdirectory on Leuchter, was verbatim my e-mail to you on Leuchter's patents. But the header was stripped off. See, Ken, you saw value in this information, but you did not see value in me as the source. It was only after I complained to your webmaster, Jamie McCarthy, that you revised that page to include the original headers of the msg. For other e-mail msgs I saw on the Jerusalem1 mirror such as ones from Danny Keren, you left the headers intact. But mine? Oh well.

And the chemistry and physics material I sent you to refute Leuchter's claims, you totally ignored, so I gave up sending you additional material. Yet, later, the same information appeared in your site with a Brian Harmon being given great accolades by you for providing it to you. Brian did indeed provide the info to you at a later date than I did, but it was the same info I had offered to you. From Brian, it was not only worth your repeating, but you also saw fit to give him credit. Yes, his was in more detail, but I think when he sent in the initial stuff, you encouraged him to send in more, so he did. I was not so fortunate to get encouraged.

Oh, and medical information I sent you to refute specific claims of deniers you also ignored.

One time, I and Jamie McCarthy sent you material together (that I obtained alone). This was concerning what "Murungu" means in Shona (a southern African Bantu language -- an Internet National Socialist used the nickname of "Murungu" so that was why I offered to Jamie an explanation of what this word means). This you put on your Nizkor site. But the fact that Jamie was the one I approached with the info instead of you made a difference.

Jamie eventually resigned from Nizkor. It was soon after that that soc.culture.jewish.holocaust went dead. Jamie was doing the technical work for you while you over-moderated the content. Without Jamie's technical help, you could no longer run soc.culture.jewish.holocaust, so you let it lie fallow rather than let some other moderator take over to keep it active.

Recently, soc.culture.jewish.holocaust came back to life. And guess what. It is back under the care of one or more of the original founders -- that is, the people who ran it out of a University of North Carolina server before they no longer had time to devote to it (and when you then took it over).

Why, Ken, do you treat me like such dirt? I think it had a lot to do with the fact that I want to empower and enable people while you want to dominate and control. And the fact my learning style is to get varied info from a variety of sources rather than just mindlessly learn from just one (and one on your exact wavelength) has also a lot to do with it. And the fact that I do not want to bite the head off of every Revisionist I meet or see has much to do with it too.

My approach is far different than yours. I seek to understand and elucidate while you seek to punish and reek revenge. I seek to prevent future Revisionism before it starts by elucidating why people become Revs in the first place and providing viable alternatives to satisfy the same needs such people seek and find in Revisionism. You, by contrast, seek to hunt them down, "expose" them, discredit them and equate each and every one of them with hard-core Jew-haters. I seek to humanize whilst you seek to dehumanize them.

Oh, and the fact that I know what Revisionism is (and is not) from the inside out instead of from the outside letting my prejudices dictate to me what is inside --- that has a lot to do with it too.

I was potentially a very valuable resource to you, Ken. But you did not want elucidation and alternatives and causes of Rev that do not fit your preconceived notions.

(According to you, each and every person who becomes a Rev does so out of evil motives, specifically, Jew-hating motives -- but I posited motives like trying to find relief from a Shoah that is too hard to bear and further posited that Germans both American-born and European-born are at much greater risk to become Rev's due to a need to seek shelter from the guilt -- guilt which is big enought as it is, but gets amplified further by anti-German bigots. THIS vital info YOU did not want to HEAR.)

If I had offered to name you names of all the in-the-closet Revs I knew and to give you private personal information on the publicly-Revisionist people I know (I mean information they would want kept private), maybe then you would have seen me as a valuable resource, Ken. But this too is not my style. I would relate other Revisionist's experiences to you but with all identifying information expunged. You did not like that Ken. Names, addresses, employers you would have wanted. Traumatic anti-German childhood and young adult experiences you did not want.

Along the same lines, you once put out a call for any information anybody knows about Arthur Butz (a Revisionist who is also an engineering prof). I offered you lots of info about what he has done engineering-wise and professor-wise. I also had publicly-available family background info to submit once I saw how you responded to the engineering and professor info. But you just e-mailed me back with a rude letter saying you are not interested in the engineering aspects of Butz. See, Ken, you only wanted DIRT on Butz. You did not want NORMAL information that is essential for a full and complete understanding of Arthur Robert Butz.

But you just e-mailed me back with a rude letter saying you are not interested in the engineering aspects of Butz. See, Ken, you only wanted DIRT on Butz.

Now, Lipstadt has gone on record as making some basic errors on basic biographical info on not only Butz, but also on App. . .

Interestingly enough, I later read Deborah Lipstadt's chapter on Butz in her Denying the Holocaust. Some of it was wrong. The correct info was in the stuff I sent you and you pooh-poohed and in the stuff I was waiting to send you, but did not. Seems like Lipstadt would have been interested in seeing the stuff before her book went to press -- it would have saved her errors.

Have you been in contact with Lipstadt as she is still working on Denying the Holocaust, Ken? See now how you could have received all the info I had on Butz (not just the dirt) and then alerted Lipstadt about it. Lipstadt could have then contacted me (that is, if you would have been decent enough to credit me as the source) and seen what I had for herself and then go and review the direct sources from whence I got the info in the first place. These were not insider Revisionist sources. These were publicly available sources. She could then have written the final draft of Denying to reflect this all. Now, she has gone on record as making some basic errors on basic biographical info on not only Butz, but also on App (to whom she also devotes a whole chapter).

I then e-mailed you for advice on how I correct these errors without making Deborah Lipstadt sound foolish. You pooh-poohed the notion that I could be right and Lipstadt be wrong. Too bad, Ken.

Actually I was wrong to have ever tried to seek such advice from you in the first place. I already knew what you were like, but at the time, you were for all practical purposes, all I had.

So, you unilaterally decided that my massive, but "normal" information on Butz was not worth knowing and not worth passing on to scholars researching Holocaust denial. But, I suppose, in addition to thinking you speak for each and every participant of <can.politics, van.general, can.general, and bc.general> (such as by posting "Knoll speaks for none of us" with the "us" meaning all the participants of the said newsgroups), you think can speak for Lipstadt and also but make her decisions for her. Too bad.

So I had little value to you, Ken. Too bad. What I know, in the right hands, is invaluable for the very same "combat the Holocaust deniers" work you so sincerely and diligently devote yourself to. But your methodology is so different from mine that I even had to put your phrase "combat the Holocaust deniers" in quote marks because it is so different from what I feel when I think of reducing the phenonomon of Holocaust denial. I do not want to "combat" Holocaust deniers who are sincere disbelievers of the Shoah. I just want to provide viable alternatives and to combat the *causes* of people seeking solace or an outlet in Revisionism.

Thanks to people like you, Ken, there is at this time a dire poverty of viable alternatives to Revisionism. Thanks to you and your ilk, people like me and Werner Knoll are faced with two extremes -- yours (which actually deserves the label "Holocaust Lobby") and radical Revisionism's.

At the very same time you and your ilk seek to suppress the truth about why we turn to Rev, some of those who run radical Revisionism (Carto, Mark Weber, Hans Schmidt) understand very well the needs of people like me, Werner Knoll, hundreds of thousands of American and Canadian Germans to include Ernst Zündel. And they meet our needs and lure us into Revisionism (Zündel was so lured in Toronto years ago) with these met needs. Once there, an effort is on to lure us into hard-core Jew-hating circles (they so lured Zündel).

With me, all the further they got me was Revisionism. The "Holocaust Lobby" then did much to drive me towards hard-core Nazism. It is only to my credit I did not go. Don't say if I resisted anybody could. I am made of some pretty tough stuff. If most people, including Ken, were subjected to what "the Holocaust Lobby" subjected me to since 1990 when I first "came out," they would be neo-Nazis. Like I said, this included Ken. I will not say all the things they put me through here. Maybe I will publicly say it another time or in another venue and maybe I will not.

With Werner, I cannot tell from just the few posts I read if he had been lured as far as actually into Revisionism or not. But I can see that he is "at risk." But Ken, with your posts, you are increasing the risk. "At risk" does not mean "evil" either, Ken. Do not blame the victims. We too are victims and survivors of the Shoah.

And I myself am also a victim from a Jewish point of view, Ken. But you were so busy trashing me the ways the Germans part of my heritage made me 'at risk' that you never even let me tell you I am also Jewish and very much like a Hidden Child first generation Jewish Shoah survivor and very much like a Second Generation Jewish Shoah survivor. It is your own prejudice which did not let you see THESE traits in me, Ken. That plus the fact you are a Goy. The JEWISH rage in me never spoken about a huge portion of my people cut off, my JEWISH mourning, you never heard. Had I gotten a different e-mail account and showed you the Jewish rage and mourning within me, you would have liked that other persona, huh, Ken.

But stuff like this (stated before the above paragraph) Ken, you do not want to hear because according to your preconceived notions, we START OUT AS hard-core Jew-haters and then pretend to be like normal people to assimilate out and infiltrate normal society to inject our poison into it with our "tricks of the deniers." This is actually true for some people who claim to be Revisionists such as Willis Carto. But for many of us, the exact percentage I do not know due to lack of formal academic studies I would like to see done, the truth is just the opposite of what you presuppose.

Lots of people start off with a pre-conceived notion, Ken, including myself. But real scholars and real researchers and real advocates do not selectively cleave to or selectively ignore new information that confirms or denies respectively our preconceived notions and initial hypotheses. (If you are such a great and wonderful real researcher and educator of the Shoah, Ken, then how come you did not last very long on the academic holocaust mailing list on a server at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where many real Shoah scholars and many real Shoah survivors participated? (The list is now called <holocaust> and is on a different server.) Either you got unsubscribed by the owners or you unsubscribed yourself in disgust that that real Shoah scholarship forum did not gobble up your polemics.

But you refuse to see many of the critical points I make in this post. You have seen most of them in the 1991 to 1997 timespan (with a gap) many times, so you have had opportunity to consider them. And due to your refusal, you actually drive more people into Revisionism or deeper into Revisionism or into hard-core Jew-hatred with the very efforts you expend to "combat the Holocast deniers/neo-Nazis."

Such is a travesty. But such is also reality. People like you are part of the real world we all have to deal with.

Cecelia Plechinger