Shortly after I started my pledge drive to get the money
together to purchase a full page ad in a major national paper, PayPal
nastily pulled the plug on me to please the Yammering Tribe. That
short-circuited my original plans - a full page ad in the Canadian Globe and
Mail or even the Washington Post - but I had managed to get enough pledges
together that I felt I could do something that would create a real splash.
I chose Washington, DC - and the Washington Times. That is
how far the pledge drive stretched. It bought me a full-page ad with the
following text and two graphics:
Let me tell you, it was high drama all day Friday - and
tomorrow I will tell you why I did what I did, and what it could potentially
mean.
Dear President Putin:
You probably are not aware of my husband, Ernst Zündel -
but hundreds of thousands of people all over the world know his name.
Ernst Zündel is the man who, under vicious siege by a powerful political
lobby, sent an investigative team from Canada to Auschwitz in 1988 to test
forensically if "gassings" really happened - and found that they
did not. Science does not lie, and scientific findings can be verified.
His evidence must stand or fall in the free market of ideas. My husband
has pleaded for a safe, impartial global forum ever since to make his
findings known.
The Canadian Holocaust Lobby has never forgiven Ernst
Zündel. Recently, he was arrested on US soil - allegedly because he
missed an interview with Immigration and Naturalization Services
officials. No judge. No hearing. No recourse. Instead, leg irons and
handcuffs - and brutal incarceration in four maximum detention prisons,
first in America and now in Canada. False news was spread in mainstream
media that he had "overstayed his visa". Not so. He was married
to a U.S. citizen, and we have irrefutable documentation that he was
legally entitled to be here. His "punishment", just for a
starter? Banned from the U.S.A. for 20 years!
My husband's brutal treatment by government officials in
what many vainly hope are still two of the West's most law-abiding
democratic countries is reminiscent of the darkest days of the Stalinist
years. I know whereof I speak. At the age of five, I lost my father in a
very similar arrest in 1941 - never to see him again!
I am a Russian-born, German-descendant, award-winning
novelist, best known for an early novel, "The Wanderers", a
fictitious account of the life of my Russian-born Mennonite grandmother.
More recently, I wrote a trilogy, spanning seven generations and 200 years
and all the major political upheavals of the last two gruesome, bloody
centuries. My people, living peacefully in the Ukraine since 1789, were
ethnically cleansed in the Stalinist purges, and only a handful of us
could save ourselves, escaping with the retreating German Army in 1943 to
Germany and, then, in 1948, to South America.
I grew up in the jungles, functionally illiterate and
knowing little of the political realities of dictatorships that
transformed and decimated countries like Russia and Germany. As an adult,
I emigrated to Canada and then to the United States, always thinking of
the country of my birth, Russia, as a place out of the depths of hell -
until I learned about an intellectual movement called Revisionism.
My now imprisoned husband is globally known as a
Revisionist pioneer. Ernst Zündel has a profound geopolitical
understanding of the moneyed interests that would set brother against
brother, causing rivers of blood and tears for the gains of a handful of
oligarchs who fattened themselves on our pain. Today I know that Russia
was as horribly victimized as Germany was. Russia suffered as much as
Germany did - and as America will suffer, unless America wakes up and
comes to understand today's events in light of what was done so cruelly to
law-abiding people yesterday. The people of America MUST urgently try to
understand today's events and dramas in historical perspective. Today's
Russia is far ahead of the United States in that respect - in fact, I am
the one who sponsored the first ever Revisionist seminars in Russia in a
Teachers College, a feat I have not been able to accomplish here in our
so-called "free speech" country. Russia welcomes conscientious
scholarship and does not fear controversial historical findings.
Referring to my husband's brutal arrest, one of my Russian
Revisionist correspondents called Ernst and myself "America's
Refuseniks" and pledged his intellectual solidarity. It is an apt
description of who we are and what we do. We refuse to believe in
historical lies. We refuse to be dictated to and told who are our friends
and who should be our enemies. We refuse to surrender our Freedom of
Speech. We refuse to swallow manufactured history such as the
"Holocaust by gassing" - a lie that has become an intellectual
stranglehold on every Western country. If our findings are deemed
"wrong", then let's have a civilized debate in a respectable
national forum where both sides can offer arguments and evidence - and let
the people judge!
Recently, I read an essay by Russian General Anatoly
Wolkow, titled "People, Listen To The Signals!" Here is a former
enemy of Germany who stretches out a hand of friendship to soften the
political mistakes of the past and bring long-needed healing to both
Germany and Russia. I believe there are millions of Russians who would
identify with what he says. I know there are millions of Germans all over
the world who would like nothing better than to bury the hostilities of
World War II and once again be known as Russia's partners, friends and
scientific benefactors. America would benefit from such a reconciliation.
America is not in need of yet another war.
We need to find ways to each other!
I plead with you to send a message to those millions,
Germans and Russians alike, as well as millions in America and Canada,
that we are kin, not enemies. A Russian leader of courage and vision could
tell the Western world that the Russia of today has finally become
autonomous, living by democratic principles, abhorring censorship. There
is a way to shame short-sighted Western bureaucrats for their repressive
laws - and wake up people globally to the realities of vested interest
power plays that move us ever closer to a frightening abyss.
A simple gesture, even if only symbolic, would telegraph
around the world that Russia, emerging out of decades of repression, has
thrown away her dictatorial shackles - declare Ernst Zündel, Prisoner of
Conscience, in broad daylight kidnapped "legally" by his
nefarious enemies on U.S. soil, to be the West's most notable "Refusenik"
- and offer him asylum and a passport.
Sincerely,
Ingrid Zundel, Ed.D.
That's it for today. Those of you who pledged that you would
help, please don't let me down - I have stuck out my neck for a big chunk of
money. Those of you who didn't pledge, perhaps you'll reconsider.
Thank you so very much - any and all, who have helped and
sent me your money already, and those of you who will, or else your nose
will grow.
Tomorrow I will tell you more, as promised.
