* Roger Boyes, reporting for Times Newspapers Limited, wrote this a few days ago - and I invite you to pause and compare:
"Germany has embarked on its most ambitious and controversial act of national remembrance. The country is burying its wartime dead - digging up the remains of chilblained soldiers from distant battlefields and laying them to rest in modern cemeteries scattered across the plains of eastern Europe."
* With so many leading Holocaustonians now jumping ship and making noises about not overdoing the Holocaust line, is it any wonder that we find Elie Wiesel among them? The Fort Worth Star Telegram informs us that Wiesel ". . . cautions against focusing solely on that abominable period in the life of the Jewish people."
Believe it or not, he said this: "We are not so much in danger of forgetting the Holocaust as we are in trivializing it."
And even this: "If we studied only that part of our history, we would become a very morbid people." This from Mr. Morbid himself!
* About the recent beatification of Pope Pius XII, who Wiesel believes refused to confront the evils perpetrated by Hitler during World War II, he said this:
"I'm not Catholic, and I don't want to mix in the Vatican's business," Wiesel said. "But I think it's wrong to make him an example. Personally, I don't think he's a saint. He could be a saint for the Catholics, but I feel sorry for the Catholics."
* Wiesel also lectured on contemporary Judaism at Texas Christian University. There he was asked: Was he still angry at God?
"I never divorced him," said Wiesel.
* Even Gitta Sereny, known for her anti-German bent, is jumping in with a "milder, gentler" version of World War II history.
In the Financial Times of September 23, she is described as ". . . not one of those whose lives have been eaten up by the Holocaust. She is not out for indiscriminate revenge. In a characteristically authoritative profile, reprinted here, she defends Kurt Waldheim, Austria's former president, against some of the more extreme charges made against him; his conduct as a German officer was cowardly and dishonest but not especially vicious."
She even argues that "war criminals trials now have to stop; after 60 years, people's memories are too unreliable."
She is critical of the way that the Holocaust has come, in the West, to define the war, to the neglect of everything else: it risks "creating new resentment against Jews for their part in shaping this one-sided image".
* British historian, David Irving, is in the news again. Officials of the southern German city of Passau tried to block plans for the far-right German People's Union to show an Irving video address, part of a documentary of the Allied bombings of Dresden, at its annual party rally.
Passau's city minions became vociferous ". . . because of the British historian's past attempts to play down the horrors of the Holocaust."
However, permission was somehow obtained, and the video was shown to some 2,200 young, attentive folks, while a reported 2,600 leftist neo-Marxist howled their objections outside.
* The Associated Press reported last week in one of its opening paragraph about an article dealing with Swiss reparations that documents disclosed that
". . . (t)hirty-seven Swiss companies, including Nestle, Roche and Novartis, sought protection from a U.S. court against lawsuits over the possible use of slave labor by {their} German subsidiaries during the Nazi era . . ."
Some companies went so far as to state that they could ". . . rule out any use of slave labor, but were signing up anyway" -- thus gaining protection against separate U.S. lawsuits.
Now is that fear of a racket - or what!
* And speaking of the Germans - they still have one heck of a time with the dissidents on the Internet. Policeman Leopold Klima, for instance, described as "a tall, mild-mannered policeman in white jeans and polo shirt", asks a search engine to list every reference to ""Kameraden" - described as the word ". . . which neo-Nazis use to address each other." Klima discovered 20,559 hits.
A lot of Kameraden out there!
"Ninety to 95 percent of the sites go over to America, and there our power is at an end," Klima wails.
* The German vassals also fuss periodically about "Mein Kampf." The book is banned in Germany, of course - 11 Million were bought in Hitler time! - but recent new editions have popped up in Poland, Croatia, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Israel. Wherever a copy is spotted, Germany immediately dispatches its diplomats and justice officials to try to get it pulled from shelves. The claim is that they have successfully sued 35 publishers into silence as far away as Indonesia!
* Germany's Jewish leader, Paul Spiegel, laments that ". . . anti-Semitic views have become increasingly common among the political, industrial and cultural elite since German writer Martin Walser's 1998 speech expressing frustration that images of the Holocaust were used against Germans."
* On September 17, 2000, Agence France Presse let us know that
". . . Latvia fails to find ageing Nazis but moves against anti-Semitism." The failure to press charges against two octogenarians ". . . angered Nazi hunters, who have pushed Latvia to "put up or shut up" about its commitment to bring former Nazis to justice."
And now I quote:
"Last month the respected mainstream Riga business magazine "Kapitals" ran a cover story entitled 'How Jews Rule the World' that included anti-Semitic rhetoric that human rights and Jewish leaders said smacked of classic Nazi propaganda."
* Several sources report that imprisoned German skinheads are not living up to their image.
"Most neo-Nazi inmates behave like model prisoners. They take pride in the so-called German virtues of hard work, cleanliness and order - keeping their cells spotless and turning up punctually for prison duties."
* From Scotland comes interesting news about Rudolf Hess's mission.
A former "squaddie" (whatever that is...) named Tommy Milliken, 86, confirmed Hitler's Deputy Führer wanted to end the Second World war and broker a peace deal with Britain.
Milliken, who was one of the troops chosen to guard the crashed plane, said that the guns on the Messerschmitt 110 had been greased up, making it impossible for them to be fired - and besides, the plane had no fuel, indicating that Hess was on a one-way trip with no plan to return to Germany, should his mission fail.
* Norway Progress Party (FRP) of ultra-conservative Carl Ivar Hagen, often referred to as Norway's Jörg Haider, is riding a wave of unprecedented popularity. You wonder when sanctions will be imposed on Norway.
* The Sarasota Herald-Tribune of September 9, 2000 headlines an interesting Letter to the Editor titled "Retribution a bounty hunt." The opening paragraph reads:
"The World Jewish Congress is attempting to perpetuate forever a financial benefit by accusing corporate America and official Washington of collaboration with Nazi Germany's inhumane treatment of Jews and other nationalities during World War II."
Some would call it chutzpah. The more farsighted think it is suicidal for these Jewish lobbyists to do this.
* Patrick Buchanan speaks words to our liking. A few days ago he opened his general election campaign with an assault on Hollywood and "cultural Marxism" in an appearance at Bob Jones University.
* One Avraham Hirchson, Knesset Committee Chairman, claims that some ships purchased in the 1950s were bought with reparations funds from Germany, "and it is therefore clear that the Holocaust survivors are the moral owners of the company's ships."
* The CIA acknowledged for the first time a few days ago that it had a relationship with Reinhard Gehlen, a senior military intelligence officer to Adolf Hitler, after World War II ended.
The CIA continued the relationship with Gehlen until 1956. While the connection between the CIA and Gehlen was known to many people, it was the first time the CIA has confirmed it.
* The Frankfurter Allgemeine, "FAZ" for short, reported on September 21 that
"The president of the German parliament, Wolfgang Thierse, on Thursday angrily rejected claims that he was concealing the true cost of the planned memorial to the murdered European Jews." Mr. Thierse's actions, according to Mr. Nooke, a Christian Democratic member of the Bundestag, threatened to put the project in jeopardy."
Again?
* Remember the Polish War of the Crosses?
A bitter confrontation between Jews and Catholics at the site of the Nazi concentration camp, seems set to erupt again. Jhe jews wanted the crosses gone. The Catholic Poles insisted that they stay. Now a court has ruled that "an anti-Semitic group" could once more use an adjoining gravel pit to put up a Christian cross to mourn its Polish victims. It's to the back of the bus for Polish Christians!
* This one takes the cake. The Royal Academy of Art's "Apocalypse" exhibition opened in Los Angeles this week. Subtitled "Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art," the show allows 15 artists to exhibit "the contrast between light and dark".
Here is a quote by the Los Angeles Times:
"The centerpiece of the exhibition--both its inspiration and the work that inevitably will prove most controversial--is 'Hell,' by London brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman. This is a room-sized landscape of the Holocaust made up of thousands of tiny, hand-painted Nazi soldiers engaged in every imaginable form of mutilation and genocide.
"It is actually nine landscapes mounted on trestles and laid out in the shape of a swastika, each more revolting than the last. There are vultures feeding on mounds of human heads, heads on stakes, limbless bodies, hangings, castrations, crucifixions, gas ovens, a mind-numbing display of Nazis feeding on bloody Nazis, for there are no Jews in evidence.
"The soldiers are doing it to themselves, to each other. They are eating themselves . . . There are no Jewish people in this. It is a battle scene without opposition."
So help me! Are these people sick - or what?!
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Thought for the Day:
"Incompatibilities of value systems are undoubtedly one of the main sources of this cancerous disease of cultures . . . our hope lies in a rebirth of dependable values."
(Raymond Cattell in Beyondism, II, A-114)
Back to Table of Contents of the Sept. 2000 ZGrams