Tom Clancy E-mail About James Von Brunn

In 2002 Tom Clancy had an email exchange with the owner of a racist web site (that will get no publicity here), who was a friend of the now notorious Holocaust Museum shooter James Vo Brunn. In the exchange, the man asked Clancy about his previous email conversation with Von Brunn himself. This is what Tom Clancy wrote about his contact with James Von Brunn:

Tom Clancy E-mail About James Von Brunn

On 7/29/02 at 12:15 PM TomClancy@aol.com wrote:

I am and try to be civil to everyone, but not without limits. I saved all of the exchange with this character. People like him interest me in a clinical sense because I am indeed a writer, and I often write about abnormal personalities. The chief of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins is a friend of mine - a Jew, by the way - a brilliant physician, and a Nobel candidate. Where he goes to church is between him and God. I have many Jewish friends, and I am loyal to them because a man who is not loyal to his friends is valueless, and many of them are truly superior people. I utterly reject racism in all its forms. I've known Colin Powell for over 15 years. He's is one hell of a fine man, and a truly great American, well respected by his peers - four-star officers - and, buddy, that's one tough audience. But to this von Brunn character, Colin is just another "nigger." You know, one of my close friends is a former FBI agent who worked the Goodman-Cheney-Schwirner case in Mississippi in 1963. Those three American citizens were working to get other American citizens the right to vote. This is a right guaranteed them by the Constitution, which is, by the way, the Supreme Law of the Land. Your friend would probably have wished to deny them that right. That desire is not consonant with the United States of America. I spit upon such people. My friend sent them all to federal prison. They're all out now, I suppose, but they've calmed down quite a bit. My FBI friends despise them all. Why? They are criminals, murdering terrorists, one of whom shit his drawers when arrested. Quite a man, eh? Von Brunn also walked into a government building, by his own account, armed (he claims the gun was not loaded, but one cannot tell that from three feet away can one?), and demanded that his rather eccentric view of the law be accepted by others. Well, you know, that's pretty damned dumb. He was sent to prison for stupidity, claiming to me that he was unfairly railroaded by Jews and others. No, buddy, he went to jail for being rather incredibly stupid, to the point of madness in my opinion. (I've never looked into his case. I could have done so - I have a lot of FBI friends - but why waste one's time on an idiot?) Most offensive of all, after serving (so he said) his country in World War Two, he now says that he admires Adolf Hitler for his views and his actions. Hitler, in addition to being among the most evil men every born, was also a total fool, albeit a clever one in political terms, who though himself to be God's own gift to the human race. I am a serious student of history. I know Sir John Keegan, for example, probably the best military historian alive today. Hitler had no strategic or operational sense at all. Like most mad politicians he saw things entirely through his own lens of aesthetics in which he was the arbiter of reality. Now, it's been said that had his personal doctor known about the medicinal use of lithium, Hitler might have worked out as a mediocre painter, but absent proper medical treatment he was a madman responsible for millions of deaths, about ten million of them German, the people he was supposed to look after. Your friend denies all these facts, and further denies that the Holocaust ha ppened. Hitler himself said that is did, and at the conclusion of the war, we got possession of voluminous German documents (they wrote everything down, you see) confirming the fact. Okay, sure, there are those who deny it. I put them in the same class as those who report Elvis sightings. Such a fact could not be hidden (the Germans tried to hide it - and why hide a falsity?), nor, if true, can it be denied. The British historian David Irving tried, and failed, to demonstrate not that it didn't happen, but that Hitler himself did not know if it until it was too late to stop. Plausible, perhaps, that the satraps of a dictator might go off on their own and do such a thing, but in this case, not demonstrably true - and even if it were true, Hitler is still responsible for being the chief of government who allowed it to happen through poor supervision. Therefore, I conclude your friend is an ass. I tried to reason with him and failed. I add to his offensives the suggestion that the Catholic Church is peopled entirely with homosexuals (then also suggesting that they practiced their perversion on me) which was much more true of the German NDSAP than of the Church of Rome. In short, I have nothing for which to apologize, least of all to that ass von Brunn. TC

Tom Clancy E-mail About James Von Brunn