The other day, I was invited to a barbecue where a young student, highly talented and in pre-law, had just come back from Washington, D.C., where she had interned in the White House. She told of her experiences hobnobbing with the people on the Hill, one of which offered her, predictably, the obligatory visit to the US Holocaust Museum.
There were about 20 people at that barbecue, all of whom I would consider friends, all of whom knew of my background in a general way and knew that I was German-born who had an unorthodox view on what had happened during World War II. Not one of them would have set out to hurt my feelings on purpose by saying or implying that I was part of that monstrosity the world so thoroughly despised: The Germans who had manufactured the "Holocaust".
But such is the indoctrination about the "Holocaust" that, at that barbecue, I might as well not have been there. I was the pickaninny. The way my friends talked of the Germans in my presence they would have never talked about the Jews in civil company - not even in their absence! The talk turned to the so-called "unspeakable brutalities" of Germany full force - and everybody was in smug agreement: there never had been such a horrid deed as the Proverbial Six Million.
Now what was I to do? Stand up, get on my soap box, spoil everybody's appetite by introducing Truth? Or keep my feelings to myself, roll over meekly and obligingly as though I had been born without a spine, and know that, once again, my people had been spiritually raped and I had let that happen?
You guessed it. We have all been there - more times than we care to remember. That afternoon, I could not bring myself to tell my friends: "It's small and shabby to be quiet and let this opportunity pass by. I am now going to enlighten you. . . " I just kept munching on my hot dog.
I am still haunted by that afternoon. It is an old dilemma, and I don't have an answer. The truth is that it's painful to witness for the cause. We need to practice it.
I remember one of the first times I talked to Ernst about how difficult it is, he said in his quiet voice: "Every time you let an opportunity pass by, it's twice as hard for me."
I think that's a beginning - to spread out the burden a bit.
We need to act in tandem - not just let one or two or three of us take the full brunt of people's horror and dismay that there is such a thing as "Holocaust Denial."
Three or four days ago, I was listening to Samuel Francis on C-Span, and he said something that makes sense. He said that what we are engaged in now is every bit the kind of civil rights struggle that others have fought through-as valid and as relevant as that of the Blacks, the Viet Nam Protesters, the Homosexuals and the Feminists. Their first spokesmen for their cause were willing to stand up to be the lightning rods. Why are we playing chicken?
A friend wrote just the other day:
". . . I decided that what I lacked in massive influence I would make up for in terms of making a cumulative effort; a little each day, relentlessly, day after day. I would turn myself into a revisionist termite relentlessly burrowing and boring into the woodwork, until one day the floor caved in under the master's own weight.
If you listen carefully late at night you can hear the floorboards creaking . . . "
How many Revisionist termites are out there? Hard to tell. By now, there must be millions. Right now, it pains me every time somebody asks me to keep name and address confidential, and yet I understand. Who wouldn't understand?
A change must come. Our best and most fearless must learn to stand up and be counted, and others will emulate them. They must articulate what this is all about-about the right to dignity. We're human beings. We're not scum. We are not liars, plotters, falsifiers, hypocrites, imposters, tricksters, and deceivers. We leave those tactics to our enemy-in the full knowledge that there are more of us-and there is more TO us-than "them."
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place."
(Mohandas Gandhi)