Copyright (c) 1997 - Ingrid A. Rimland
"Whenever Germans are mentioned - especially in the American press - it is Nazism that first springs to mind. Ralph Raico is a professor of history at the State University of New York, and he kindly sent me an essay of his called 'Nazifying the Germans'. It is an eye-opener."
Taki's main thesis as that whenever Germany is mentioned, immediately the
connotations are coloured and contaminated by thoughts of the Nazis.
"And yet", writes Taki, "there are 15 centuries of German contribution to European civilisation unequalled by any other country, and that includes Britain and France. Albertus Magnus, Luther, Leibniz, Kant, Goethe, Hum boldt, Nietzsche, Weber, Mann, Rilke, Heidegger, Beethoven, Bach, Schiller, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, Emil Nolde Holderlin, Rundstedt, Guderian, von Kleist, Manteuffel, Rommel, the list goes on. . . So much opprobrium has come to be attached to almost every aspect of the German past that it is impossible to say anything good about it without being condemned as a Nazi sympathiser."
I assume these are names I should know. So truncated and mutilated is my
own sense of my own heritage that most of these names mean nothing to me.
As I, a German woman now living in America, am sitting here, perusing this,
it strikes me as exceedingly ironic that I should find the remants of my
heritage in bits written by a Greek and sent to me by a British teacher
stationed in Japan. Not only was I robbed of something that was mine, I
am routinely smeared with labels such as "Nazi" if I am wondering
out loud how such a cultural devastation could have happened in the first
place, with none of us any the wider.
"Nonetheless," continues Taki, "it is hard not to conclude that the Germany of the past was vastly superior to the one about to dominate Europe for the next millennium. Germans today are whiny, parochial and unenterprising. They have 12 per cent unemployment and the lowest birth rate in Europe. Their army is a joke. German ideas are copied from American liberals. Their courts have ruled it unconstitutional to display crosses in school. It is enough to make a Ludendorff, a Moltke and a Bismarck cry."
"A decade ago," writes Taki, "the learned Professor Ernst Nolte became the target of a campaign of defamation because he asked, 'Didn't the Gulag Archipelago come before Auschwitz?' He also asked, 'Wasn't the class-murder of the Bolsheviks the logical and factual presupposition of the race murder of the Nazis?' I say these are still rather good questions."
Taki then goes on to say what the Zundelsite has claimed all along - that
World War II was in large part a RESPONSE TO COMMUNISM - and Communism was
as brutal as any ideology can be.
"Which brings me to the Jewish problem," writes Taki. "It has been bothering me a lot lately. It has to do with people trafficking in the Holocaust - as vile an act as I can think of and one that trivialises the suffering of millions. People like Alfonse D'Amato, Senator for New York, Abe Rosenthal of the New York Times, and that 'leader of the Jewish community', Edgar Bronfman. Then there is the historian Daniel Goldhagen, author of "Hitler's Willing Executioners." The latter's central argument is that ordinary Germans were not forced to commit crimes against the Jews, but relished doing so . . . Given the fact that Lenin's and Stalin's murder squads were more efficient than the Nazis' - as were Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge - the constant harping on about the Germans seems to be motivated by profit."
It doesn't "seem to be." We say it is. A reviewer who sends me
intermittent contributions summarized that poignantly:
"World War II was once our war. Now it is the Jews' war, and all the fighting was just a race to get the Jews out of the camps. The study of World War II propaganda which traces the conversion has yet to be written."
Taki says something that few of us ever get to see here in America. He says,
and I quote here with relish:
"Personally, I believe in the legend of a 'clean German army'. Those were gallant men of great discipline who fought bravely against terrible odds, first for their fatherland and - after defeat was certain - for the honour of their units and fellow comrades. I am particularly thinking of the tankers of Gross Deutschland and Goering divisions who fought until the bitter end. These were not SS madmen. They were the bravest of the brave. Those who traffic in the Holocaust are neither brave nor honourable."
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
German Chancellor Helmut Kohl received the German Jewish community's highest
award (5/15/97) for helping to revive Jewish life in Germany since the reunification.
At a ceremony in Bonn, Jewish leader Ignatz Bubis awarded Kohl the Leo Baeck
prize.
Bubis said, "The revival of Jewish religion, traditions and culture
in Germany and his [Kohl's] efforts to promote Jewish immigration from the
former Soviet Union after 1989 will forever be linked to his name."
(Submission to the Zundelsite)