If you search the Net for "Lebensraum", you get more than 2400 website documents. I must say I was amazed!
It proves the word is not as "politically incorrect"ly loaded as Canada Customs, when it seized my trilogy, seems to have falsely inferred!
I have had about a dozen lengthy book reviews from scholarly reviewers so far - all of them, except one who objected to my "Aryan topic" - favorable and complimentary to highly laudatory. I keep them in a folder on my desk - and gloat!
Therefore, when word reached me that my own people, the North American Mennonites, had published a highly critical review in the Mennonite Quarterly, February 1999 issue, of course I checked it out.
I must say I have never! ever! anywhere! seen such a poisonous, ideologically slanted diatribe under the guise of a "professional" review! On God's green earth! Of any author! Ever!
Therefore, I did some further checking, with interesting results.
It turns out the review was written by someone with an oddly foreign-sounding name, somebody by the name of James Urry. I can say with virtual certainty that that one ain't no Mennonite by birth.
Must be one of the ones who come by their faith by conversion or absorption!
Further checks revealed this Urry fellow isn't exactly a Mennonite favorite either with the more traditional Mennonites - not even within Mennonite academia.
And, probably most tellingly, his sources to discredit me are (. . . roll of drums here. . . !) Deborah Lipstadt and (. . . fortissimo. . .!) Andrew Mathis aka Marc Kaufman - the Nizkor character assassin man of Hatewatch!
The book review itself comprises 20 pages and is simply a jumbo machete hatchet job spiked with scorn and disavowal of this politically incorrect Mennonite renegade who dares to speak up for Ernst Zundel. I will not run it here - it will be posted later on the Zundelsite - but I am giving you the conclusion, titled "Fate, Hate and Denial in Rimland's Lebensraum!"
Please read between the lines:
Rimland's books are works of petty propaganda dressed up as literature and packaged around Mennonite themes which basically draw upon prejudices of dated vintage. She peddles dubious, debunked and discredited racist ideas as if they are profound, important and insightful. As such, Rimland's books could be dismissed merely as the ranting of a poor, deluded woman who in her lifetime has suffered many misfortunes. As Rimland also has only weak connections with Mennonites, including the current Mennonite community, they could be conveniently forgotten. Unfortunately they are not so easy to dismiss.
It is sad to report that some of her arguments about the causes of the suffering of the Russian Mennonites in the present century and her idealization of the Nazi regime might find a sympathetic hearing among Mennonites. This is particularly true among older Mennonites who emigrated to Canada and South America in the 1920s and the 1940s and 50s.
A number of points need to be stressed here about the Russian Mennonite past. In pre-revolutionary Russia Mennonites dealt with Jews in business and Jews also were settled close to, and in some cases among, Mennonite communities from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. Anti-semitism was a fact of life in pre-revolutionary Russia and Mennonites were exposed to it as a matter of course, anti-semitic statements by Mennonites appear in published sources as early as the 1880s. The events of the revolution, civil war and subsequent Soviet control which resulted in the steady decline and ultimate destruction of the old Mennonite way of life forced many Mennonites to reconsider their faith and place in the world. Some sought a new identity with Germany and an explanation for their situation in simple conspiracy theories and prejudice.
Among those who emigrated to Canada and South America, pro-Germanism led some to be attached to Nazism, and particularly to those aspects which connected Bolshevism with fantasies of a Jewish plot to destroy the Christian faith and the "German" people. Support for such views can be found in the inter-war Mennonite press in Canada and South America as well as Germany; letters attacking such views can also be found, at least in Canada. How many Mennonites supported such ideas is unknown and will probably always remain so. What is clear, however, is that the view that a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy lay behind the Russian Revolution and that the Soviet Union was ruled by Jewish Communism was in wide circulation in interwar immigrant Russian Mennonite communities. Sympathy for the Nazi regime in terms of its connections with the German people, with whom many Mennonites now identified, was also common. Only a very few Mennonites, however, actively supported Nazi organizations, doing so more openly in South America than in Canada. Some took this so seriously that they went to Germany, where a small but influential number of Russian Mennonite émigrés had remained in the interwar period, and became involved in Nazi organizations and/or served the regime even on the eastern front during the war.
The Mennonites who remained in the Soviet Union after emigration ceased in the late 1920s suffered terribly, experiencing collectivization, famine, arrest, deportation, imprisonment and execution. For the most part, however, they remained largely ignorant of the Nazi regime during the 1930s. When overrun by the invading German forces in 1941 the survivors soon were exposed to Nazi ideas and in time became aware of the operations of the Einsatzgruppen and similar units in their areas. Older Mennonites were disturbed by what they saw and heard by those whom they had first seen as "liberators." But younger Mennonites, already exposed to extreme Soviet ideologies and weakly connected to the Mennonite faith so persecuted by the Soviets, were more easily swayed by the extremist views of their new masters. A number enlisted or were enlisted in Nazi organizations including military units. In a few cases some Mennonites became involved in the worst abuses of the Nazis in the east, actions for which they are still being called to account.
In the postwar world Mennonite pro-Germanism and anti-semitism tended to go underground. Its ugly head, however, periodically resurfaces in letters and articles in the Mennonite press. Among Mennonites of the older generation in Canada and in South America, it is not difficult to uncover expressions of such views in conversations and even interviews. Rimland's opinions, therefore, reflect in part ideas and attitudes once held, and unfortunately still held, by people of a certain age and experience in Canada and elsewhere. Her books would also receive, at least in private, a degree of sympathy, although I suspect many Mennonite readers might miss the full import of her anti-Christian and anti-democratic views.
It is also sad to report that certain academically-trained Mennonite scholars in Canada recently have expressed ideas which in some form resemble those of Rimland in order to exploit the prejudices and appeal to the purses of older members of the Mennonite community. These include highly idealized and romantic views of pre-revolutionary Mennonite society and the impressions that Mennonites were totally uninvolved, passive victims of Soviet terror, singled out for "special" treatment. More importantly, it has involved the appropriation of words and concepts usually associated with Jewish suffering, thereby establishing the basis for drawing "immoral equivalences" between Mennonite suffering and that of Jews under the Nazis. These include, to take a recent example, statements such as the Mennonites suffered "pogrom-like" violence during the Civil War, and that in the terror between 1936 and 1938 Mennonite men "were swept away in massacre-like secret police raids with genocidal overtones" as if the Soviets operated special extermination units like the infamous Nazi Einsatzgruppen. These statements are linked to a symposium held in Winnipeg in 1997 dealing with impact of Stalin's terror on the Mennonites during the 1930s entitled the "Mennonite Inferno," where the term inferno is transparently synonymous with the word "holocaust." This has been accompanied by unsubstantiated claims of purposeful attempts to suppress (deny?) the story of Mennonite suffering under the Soviets and unspecified accusations of "revisionism" by scholars who have attempted to understand the complexity of Mennonite experience under the Soviets.
Rimland's books are examples of ugly hate propaganda; by contrast, the whispered prejudices of an aging Mennonite generation can be understood, if not easily condoned. Given their past, however, all Mennonites - whether they be lay people or scholars - of a certain ancestry need to deal with certain topics with care, reason and humility. <end>
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To which I say: Humility my foot! Was it not Lenin who said: "We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, scorn, and the like, toward those who disagree with us"?
Urry? Reminds me of the blood-curling ". . . 'urray!" with which the Red Army monsters raped and tortured and killed civilians by the millions in a prostrate, defeated Germany. Who is this Urry guy that he would have the nerve to belittle, distort, scorn and minimize the sacrifices of my people?! Another scribbler trying to broom back in vain the inrushing tide of historical re-examination?
From having put my feelers out among the Mennonite community, I can predict the mother-of-an-undertow! Informed Mennonites will not have their history falsified much longer by a clique of stuffy, stodgy, calcified has-beens! This Christian community is stirring and restive like bees. There are young people out there - not just the oldsters who have witnessed these atrocities - who want the world to know precisely what has happened to their kin - and by whom! They'll find out soon enough who the Bolshevik Kommissars were who shot their forebears in the German orchards - sometimes because they found a Bible and called that Bible "hate"!
Thought for the Day:
"Americans are supposed to view Germany only through Jewish eyes."
(Hand Schmidt in End Times / End Games)
Back to Table of Contents of the Feb. 1999 ZGrams