Last night, I posted all the "missing" ZGrams at www.lebensraum.org - click on the prominent ZGram link! - so those of you who would like to catch up may do so. If you read only some, I would suggest to read the "Trying to make sense out of Nato's war" editorials, April 22-24.
Meanwhile, at least two dozen people have faxed me an advertisement that appeared in the Washington Times, April 23, 1999. I bring it here in full. I don't know the organization that placed it, but I think it deserves to get the widest distribution.
Here is that ad, titled "Germany and Human Rights - a NATO disgrace":
"Recently, Secretary of State Albright lauded the new, improved, bomb-dropping NATO as a force for 'democracy' and, yes, 'basic human decency.' (Basically human, decent bombing, we suppose.) And, of course, we are eagerly anticipating many stirring NATO speeches, in the next three days, extolling the virtues of 'freedom' and 'democracy.'
But how - may we ask? - can NATO presume to represent and vigorously enforce (!) these splendid values when its most powerful European member state is ***neither free nor democratic*** and has the basic human decency of a police state? ***Today's Germany (FRG) lacks freedom of speech. 'Speech criminals' are incarcerated.***
Anyone publicly questioning (merely politely, calmly and logically questioning) the approved government version of history (including the most important event of this century - World War II), or commenting unfavorably on aspects of contemporary German political reality, is subject to imprisonment. Dissidents lose their jobs due to government pressure, and suspected future offenders are placed on official 'watch lists.' ***Displeasing literature is confiscated in police raids and destroyed.***
Perhaps the best known present German prisoner of conscience is author and researcher Udo Walendy, age 74, who has now been imprisoned in Bielefeld for over 18 months (with possibly 14 more to go). Incredibly, even citizens in other countries (notably including Americans) may be - and, indeed, recently have been - arrested while on German soil (or extradited into Germany) for expressing (even while outside Germany!) historical or anti-censorship views displeasing or frightening to the German authorities. More recently, on April 7, Dr. Fredrick Toben, of Adelaide, Australia, while in Germany to visit prosecutor Hans-Heiko Klein, was suddenly seized and imprisoned in Mannheim, because his historically/politically incorrect Adelaide Institute Website is accessible within the FRG, and because of a private letter mailed into Germany. As this is written, Dr. Toben remains incarcerated, without bail, in Mannheim . . . awaiting 'trial"!
***We call upon Germany to release all political dissidents immediately.***
We emphatically urge Germany to renounce economic persecution, 'watch lists', police raids, book (and computer disk) burning and all such grotesque Orwellian police-state tactics, to value truth, and to extend to its citizens, to its visitors, and to others the basic human rights taken for granted in decent, civilized societies.
And we remind Mrs. Albright and all the NATO delegations here assembled, that ***without freedom of speech, 'democracy' is meaningless.***
International Coalition for a Democratic Germany 318 E 34th Street, Suite 2A
New York, NY 10016
P.S. While on the subject of 'basic human decency', we wonder why Mrs. Albright has not seen fit to mention, in the interest of historical perspective, the 15,000.000 ethnic Germans, who, at the end of World War II, were expelled westward from their centuries-old, ancestral homelands east of the Oder-Neisse line and in Sudetenland. This monstrous campaign of 'ethnic cleansing' (during which more than 2,000.000 perished) was carried out with the complicity of the Americans and British. {For more information, see, especially, 'Nemesis at Potsdam' and 'The German Expellees', by Harvard-educated, Jewish author Alfred M. de Zayas.) <end>
As Thought for the Day, I offer you a paragraph by Jean Pierre Rollin, Ph.D., Deputy Consul General whose office is in Los Angeles at 6222 Wilshire Blvd., # 500, zip code 90048. In response to a German who protested the arrest of Dr. Toben, here is how a German official saw matters, as revealed in a letter dated April 22, 1999:
"Dignity of religious, ethnic or cultural groups is respected in Germany. Therefore it is forbidden, according to (Paragraph) 130 StGB (penal code) to stir up hatred against, to call upon to using violence against, and to defame specific groups, and to deny the Holocaust in public. Such acts are considered as hate crimes and not covered by freedom of expression."
Poor emasculated Germany!