view, Germany did not "precipitously launch" an invasion of Poland in 1939, but was instead "forced" into war by "acts of economic strangulation" issued by the Chamberlain cabinet. In a 1953 essay, "Revisionism and the Historical Black-out", which appeared in Barnes' self-published book, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, he wrote: It is no exaggeration to say that the American Smearbund, operating through newspaper editors and columnists, "hatchet-men" book reviewers, radio commentators, pressure-group intrigue and espionage, and academic pressures and fears, has accomplished about as much in the way of intimidating honest intellectuals in this country as Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, the Gestapo, and concentration camps were able to do in Nazi Germany. A strong non-interventionist, Barnes was very publicly opposed to the United States fighting in the Korean War. Holocaust denial In 1955, Barnes first met David Hoggan, and played a key role in helping Hoggan adapt his 1948 PhD dissertation, The Breakdown of German-Polish Relations in 1939: The Conflict Between the German New Order and the Polish Idea of Central Eastern Europe, into his 1961 book, Der erzwungene Krieg (The Forced War). It was "based on, but quite different from, the dissertation", and Hoggan blamed the Allies for the outbreak of World War II. In 1963, Barnes self-published a pamphlet, "Blasting the Historical Black-out", in which he offered some praise for A. J. P. Taylor's 1961 book, The Origins of the Second World War. Barnes said that he thought Hoggan's book was better than Taylor's. In "Blasting the Historical Black-out", Barnes referred to the "alleged wartime crimes of Germany" and wrote that, "Even assuming that all the charges ever made by the Nazis by anybody of reasonable sanity and responsibility are true, the Allies did not come off much, if any better". Barnes wrote further that the suffering by ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia and Poland after World War II were "obviously far more hideous and prolonged than those of the Jews said to have been exterminated in great numbers by the Nazis." Responding to an extremely hostile review of Der erzwungene Krieg by the American historian Gerhard Weinberg in the American Historical Review in October 1962, Barnes and Hoggan wrote a series of letters rebutting Weinberg's arguments. Weinberg in turn wrote letters replying to and rebutting the arguments of Hoggan and Barnes. The exchanges between Hoggan and Barnes on one side and Weinberg on the other became increasingly rancorous