This is a sort of "Reader Roundup". Some of
the information came with media references; some items are simply offered
as comments and observations on how our world is polarizing - and how some
swim toward the sinking ship and some row mightily to get away from it.
Great Britain:
· As reported in the Daily Telegraph, October 20, 1997, Rabbi Jonathan
Romain, of a synagogue called "Maidenhead", has told 1,000 Jews
at an educational festival in London that the Holocaust was "not unique
in world terms", and that Rwanda had experienced similar atrocities.
The Reform Rabbi called for an end to Holocaust Memorial Day, saying it
was no longer appropriate to single it out.
"One day the Holocaust will be alien to a generation of people. The
further away we are, the harder it will be to remember."
Rabbi Romain said that it was time for British Jewry to reappraise its relationship
with the rest of society and urged his fellow rabbis to officiate at mixed
faith marriage ceremonies.
The rabbi's point of view was also transmitted the evening before already,
on BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation.
· Ditto for a leading Jewish academic, Dr. John Fox, a lecturer in
Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, who is also calling for the term "Holocaust"
to be dropped, because it is being ". . . tampered with to create an
explicit, negative anti-British thrust".
Fox, referring to the Wannsee Conference, argues that "historians should
stop describing the resultant genocide as the Holocaust."
Dr. Fox is quoted as saying that, in his view, ". . . the time has
long passed for the complete abandonment of the term, 'the Holocaust'.
"There is a mystique around the term holocaust which only those who
wish to be known as the infidels dare raise their voices against."
Dr. Fox is quoted as saying. "This means unfortunately that virtually
any aspect of Nazi anti-Jewish policy from the date of the Nazi takeover
on January 30, 1933, may be classified as belonging to the Holocaust 'and
don't you dare argue with that or else'."
· A third authority, Prof David Cesarani, Professor of Modern Jewish
History at the University of Southampton, weighed in with:
"There's been a terrible misuse of the term. But this is the word
we're stuck with. We just have to sharpen its meaning."
Israel
· "The Jewish weekly "Forward" (17 Oct, p 1) has an
article on the plan
of Henry Holt Co. to publish "A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis
and Historical Truth", by Norman Finkelstein, who calls Goldhagen's
"Hitler's Willing Executioners" a "hoax" and a "fraud"
and characterizes Goldhagen as a Zionist propagandist.
He is also said to have labeled much Holocaust literature "intellectually
bankrupt" and is taking some swipes at the Holocaust itself.
The article comments that "Henry Holt's decision to lend its imprint
to this charged book is reminiscent of the David Irving affair"."
You will remember that David Irving, a best-selling international author,
suffered severe financial losses when St. Martin's Press, due to Holocaust
terrorism tactics including anonymous death threats, was forced to back
out of the pending publication of a biography of Goebbels.
France
· A French wartime official, Maurice Papon, accused of "crimes
against humanity" - in that he has been held responsible in his role
of deporting 1690 Jews to "Nazi death camps" - claims his case
is another set-up where the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
"This process is a masquerade unworthy of a lawful state," said
Papon. "The game-plan has been worked out in advance, with no appeal
... The reality of the era has been misrepresented and falsified."
"Since one can do nothing against the waves of fanaticism whipped up
in the media, the persecution and hatred, one has to appeal to the real
France, so that the popular jury .. can judge in independence and impartiality,"
he said.
"The inexhaustible compassion which Hitler's genocide evokes
does not justify the cult of unquestioned thought which one sees
today followed with a totalitarian ardour. Public interest demands
that there is resistance, as there was then," he said.
And he concluded: "The trial is not over: it is just beginning
in its true scale. History already condemns it."
· On the lighter side, even street signs are slated to be "revisionized"
in France.
According to "The European" (October 2-8, 1997) the Front National
wants to obliterate street signs that honor such leftists as Nelson Mandella.
Avenue Francois Mitterand will revert back to Avenue de Marseille!
Germany
· As reported in the "Post and Courier", Charleston (October
13, 1997) a political reporter named Schuyler Kropf, studying in Germany
on an international fellowship, ". . . the American Civil War is being
fought all over again".
"It's not for the tourist," he writes. "Something truly weird
has happened to the hearty German male. By the scores, German men of the
1990s are forsaking their own history to take to the woods to act out chapters
of America's rough and tumble past."
"Germans call re-enacting 'Wiederbelebung,' but what seems to be going
on is a kind of escapism. Long taught to be ashamed of their past, the Germans
adopted America's."
Schuyler writes that very little is available about the German military
of the 20th century. "It's impossible to portray a German soldier from
World War I or II," he said.
"The problem in Germany is it's dangerous to show any interest in
military history because Germany lost two world wars," he said. "If
you do, you are immediately put into a hate group."
"Burdened by decades of guilt, virtually nothing of the recent German
past is officially glorified here. "The official government stance
on both world wars is to remember the victims, not the warriors."
· Second item:
In Gollwitz, a small German town that made headlines for resisting to take
in 60 Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, feelings are still
running strong, and the issue is not yet decided.
Helmut Pokorny, a town council member, is reported as being "unrepentant
and assert(ing) stoutly that today's generations of Germans were not involved
in the mass extermination of Jews during World War II and therefore owe
no debt to the Jews."
"All that belongs to the past. We are now talking about the
grandchildren, even the great-grandchildren. They have nothing to do with
all that," he said.
"Those from the East are all criminals," said one elderly resident.
Czechoslovakia
· The Czechs are clamping down. The Czech defence ministry has decided
to stop researchers gaining access to Nazi SS archives in its possession
following pressure from Germany, the Czech daily Dnes newspaper said Thursday,
October 16.
The government confirmed that further access to the archives had
been denied and defended its decision by saying that it feared some
documents could be stolen.
According to Dnes, the ruling to close the archives was made in
early September, shortly before visits to Prague by German Defence
Minister Volker Ruehe and Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel, and was
intended as a "goodwill gesture" towards Bonn.
German leaders were particularly concerned over interest shown
by the Czech Republic's Jewish community in the archives, the paper
went on to point out.
USA
· Several readers reported that three different network newscasts
showed a member of the ADL and a member of AOL getting together for the
purpose of deciding what AOL would carry. The AOL person, apparently, was
bemoaning the fact that AOL could do nothing about what the other carriers
allowed.
A "fight-censorship" list participant had this to say pertaining
to the ADL's attempted power grab via a major Internet server:
"The goal is not, has never been, to make sure that all sides are heard
and that readers can make up their mind. The goal is to silence one side.
Because all mass media have been advertiser or state supported, and because
loonies are neither a larger market nor a significant voting bloc, previous
mass media have been able to effectively deny the loonies a platform, without
violating the First Amendment (which does not, thank all the Gods, require
anyone to fund or support anyone else's speech).
But now we have a mass media which ANYONE can afford, and which depends
on NO ONE for support -- no audience to please, no government to kow-tow
to, no advertisers to placate.
This scares a lot of people. It scares a lot of people a LOT.
We haven't seen the last of this, not by a long shot. The porn wars are
one part. The next phase is attacking ideological speech, albeit the most
generally reviled."
Well, didn't we tell you so?
On January 10, 1996, when the New York Times came out with one of its lead
articles in response to the announced Zundelsite-Nizkor "Debate",
while the Simon Wiesenthal Center was frantically shipping out 2000 letters
to university presidents trying to stop us from being accessed, we KNEW
that it was an attack on "ideological speech".
We said so.
SPECIFIC ideological speech.
Ideological speech that rattles the foundations of a House of Lies that
has bedeviled the entire world for half a century - the so-called "Holocaust."
You haven't seen anything yet.
It is now almost two years later, and the Zundelsite is still on the Net.
For how long? That remains to be seen and is a function of how clearly and
consistently we can project ourselves as being a responsible and representative
voice expressing global discontent with how and why things are run BEHIND
the ostensible pillars of power.
So what if we are called the ". . . loonies fringe" and ".
. . the most generally reviled"? It's a small price to pay.
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"As Sobran noted, the greatest power of all is the power than can
prohibit its own mention."