Exclusive: Britain's biggest bookseller stocks Holocaust deniers and antisemites

Waterstones says far-right books 'escaped scrutiny'

Dear subscribers — welcome to the latest edition of Scout. While researching antisemitic publications, we stumbled upon a startling find. Waterstones, the largest British book chain, has been selling titles by far-right Holocaust deniers. Today’s story looks at how this happened. If you like this article, please subscribe for free updates about the British far-right — and tell your friends to sign up as well.

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Far-right authors who deny the Holocaust have sneaked into Britain’s largest bookseller, Scout can reveal.

Waterstones has launched an investigation into the retail of antisemitic books that dispute the Holocaust and claim Jews have corrupted Western society.

Titles printed by the extremist publishing companies Black House, a London operation named after Oswald Mosley’s fascist headquarters, and Arktos, based in Budapest, are offered on the website of Waterstones and its affiliate, Blackwells.

The sale of fringe books through mainstream vendors is a minor coup for far-right publishers, offering them a veneer of legitimacy and a much wider potential audience.

The works of the neo-Nazi Kerry Bolton, for instance, are able to reach a far greater number of readers through Waterstones than they otherwise would in the New Zealand underground scene from which he hails.

Kerry Bolton, a Kiwi author who believes Jews are undermining the fabric of gentile society (source).

In Babel Inc: Multiculturalism, Globalisation, and the New World Order — sold by Waterstones — Bolton writes that Jews are responsible for sabotaging nations by flooding them with immigrants. 

He writes: 

“The place of Jews in gentile societies is secured through the destruction of national and cultural cohesion through ‘cultural pluralism’ or multiculturalism. The strategy is ‘indirect’ and the Soros ‘Open Society’ networks throughout the world expend billions in funding and directing programmes that are intended to destroy the traditional cultural, religious and moral fabric of societies, whether Muslim, Christian, or another. The promotion of feminism and liberalised abortion, or ‘women’s reproductive health rights,’ as it is euphemistically called, is particularly useful, as are programmes for drug liberalisation (in which Soros is particularly active), multiculturalism, immigrant and ethnic minority rights.”

A collage of Kerry Bolton’s books.

Bolton later outlines the Kalergi plan, a conspiracy theory which holds that Jews want to encourage miscegenation to weaken then enslave gentile races. It is named after an Austrian-Japanese diplomat called Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, whose early 20th century writings have been quoted by far-right activists as evidence of a malevolent Jewish plot.

The majority of Bolton’s works, published by Black House, are available through Waterstones. They do not sell, however, Bolton’s defence of William Joyce, the fascist agitator nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw, who broadcast radio propaganda from within Nazi Germany.

Clare Ellis, author of The Blackening of Europe, sold by Waterstones, claims that “indigenous” Europeans are “undergoing processes of erasure — stigmatisation, marginalisation, deprivation, and replacement — by mandated immigrationism, multiculturalism, and other methods of forced diversification”. She also mentions the Kalergi plan, which she believes is a plot to “predestine Jews to be leaders of urban humanity”.

Waterstones also sells books by Tomislav Sunic, an extremist Croatian writer published by Arktos, a far-right company based in Hungary. In Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age, Sunic complains that a “constant commemoration of the Jewish Holocaust” has turned it into “a civic ritual all over the Americanized world, and which prohibits any critical inquiry”. 

He claims that there is a “sacred triangle” of three forbidden topics: “Modern historiography; Jewish power and influence; and the race question.”

“Books or journals challenging the official number of fascist crimes during the Second World war or disputing the body-count in the Jewish Holocaust, are banned and their authors often end up in prison,” Sunic laments. 

Tomislav Sunic speaking at a meeting of the far-right Traditional Britain Group.

In Titans are in Town, Sunic claims that the Holocaust has become a religion, “hardly in need of historical proof, let alone of forensic or material documentation in order to assert themselves as universally credible beliefs”. 

He adds: “Failure to accept either those old beliefs or modern universal monotheistic religions and myths may result in a heretic’s persecution or banishment.”

Sunic is frequently published in The Occidental Quarterly, a pseudo-academic journal that prints antisemitic conspiracy theories, which is sold through Blackwells.

A spokesperson for Waterstones said: “With the size of the catalogue numbering into the millions, we go to great lengths to exclude racist and otherwise unacceptable titles. Inevitably, some escape this scrutiny and these are removed as soon as they are noticed.”

Scout sent Waterstones a selection of nine books by Bolton, Ellis and Sunic, some of which were listed as “in stock” by the retailer while others were available for purchase through their publishers. The spokesperson said none of those nine books were sold in shops, nor had those particular titles been ordered online, but added that they would be “investigated without delay and removed if found to be unacceptable”.

Far-right authors claim that they are unable to debate the facts of the Holocaust without being unfairly labelled antisemitic. That’s a bad faith argument: they don’t want to debate the facts but reject them altogether.

In any case, the Holocaust is actually a good yardstick by which to measure someone’s attachment to reality. The Holocaust left a paper trial containing thousands of official documents, and there are photographs, letters and the confessions of former Nazis to support them. Only an antisemite would try to dispute the Holocaust. No bookseller would stock the title of a junk historian who claimed Henry V lost Agincourt or said Napoleon won Waterloo. Why should a writer who denies the facts of the Holocaust be any different?