ZGram - 6/2/2002 - "...and the Auschwitz cudgel be damned!"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

June 2, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Vote yes or no - two juxtaposed voices of Germans:

1.)  An op ed piece of May 31st in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 
about an "antisemitic" comment a German politician, M=F6llemann, is 
supposed to have made - about which all the mainstream media minions 
are scratching and cackling:

[START]

By Berthold Kohler

A few weeks ago, Salomon Korn wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine 
Zeitung newspaper that public debate in Germany about Israeli policy 
does not occasion new anti-Semitism, but just exposes sentiment that 
is already here. That must be viewed as the worse of the two 
diagnoses, even before the discourse became as heated as any major 
debate always inevitably does in Germany. If it was true, then the 
anti-Semitism that is lamented everywhere would not only be 
widespread in Germany, but also still deep-rooted. Is it possible it 
has been circulating in the dark without interference from Germany's 
gentiles? Have we dismissed all the many warnings from credible 
figures? And did it really take no more than a member of parliament 
switching from one small party to another plus an attention-seeking 
party vice-chairman to make anti-Semitism "socially acceptable" again 
-- to facilitate its reentry into our midst?

Some of what has been said is certainly true. There is hidden and 
open, simple-minded and intellectual anti-Semitism in Germany. Like 
other forms of racism, is it found primarily in the same places where 
it lurks in the rest of Europe -- at the extremist margins. And even 
there, it does not go unopposed. Still, methods of repression such as 
attempted bans could, until now, remain the exception because 
right-wing extremism has failed to gain much ground in Germany in the 
last few decades, never attaining anywhere near the political 
significance it has in France.

By contrast, as if to prove their capacity to learn from mistakes, 
the Germans are less susceptible to racist and anti-Semitic theory. 
Germany's political middle, which encompasses the lion's share of the 
population, remains stubbornly resistant to it. The reason J=FCrgen 
M=F6llemann of the Free Democratic Party was attacked so vehemently for 
his recent remarks is because they opened the door to an assertion 
that he was bestowing democratic legitimacy on those who stand 
outside the national consensus against racism and anti-Semitism.

There has been endless speculation about why Mr. M=F6llemann opened 
himself up to those suspicions and virtually picked a fight with 
Germany's Central Council of Jews. Did he break the taboo 
intentionally; was it a calculated sideways move to attract attention 
by a political strategist who has always felt he does not get his 
due? Mr. M=F6llemann must have known that the raggedy people would laud 
him. Still, it would be wrong to dismiss the support he got as 
general anti-Semitism, or take it as a sign of the country's 
political and moral depravity. Not every sentence that begins with 
the helpless plea, "even a (non-Jewish) German should be able to 
criticize Israel (and representatives of the German Jews)," is an 
attempt to make a clean break, to flee history.

That "we should be able to" also springs from the belief that in six 
decades, German society has come of age so as to enable it, in full 
cognizance of German responsibility for Israel's right to exist, to 
form opinions about Israeli politics. Behind the right to criticize 
we can discern a conviction that German democracy has proven itself 
the antithesis of Hitlerian Germany, a country that confidently 
acknowledges heartfelt solidarity and friendship with Israel. It is 
precisely because the monstrosity of our crime has not been forgotten 
that we have faith in our own reformation.

Basically, the current conflict is also about that most German of all 
questions: Is it possible for there ever to exist again in Germany 
after Auschwitz a national political and communal "normalcy," that is 
not freighted with the guilt of the Holocaust? And if so, how close 
-- or far -- are we from it now, in the sixth decade after the end of 
World War II?

The postwar West German vow never to forget the genocide of Europe's 
Jews and never to ignore the responsibilities it imposed has not lost 
its power. But the increased responsibility entrusted by the free 
world to a unified Germany was accompanied by a change in Germany's 
concept of itself and its imperatives for action. The process of 
establishing the parameters of the new Germany resulted in increased 
self-confidence, as evidenced by the ease with which Chancellor 
Gerhard Schr=F6der publicly presented German soldiers as part of a 
troop keeping peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

But even the chancellor disregarded the fact that the German-Jewish 
relationship is marked by memories and emotions that will (and must) 
lead, for decades to come, to differing perceptions and 
interpretations of words and deeds. The murder of the Jewish people 
left behind a pain that cannot be ignored, either in personal 
relationships or in political conflict. As long as that is so, the 
debate in Germany about what does or does not constitute 
anti-Semitism will be fiercer than anywhere else; it will remain a 
distinctive part of German "normalcy." That path brings with it the 
dangers not only of repression, forgetting, and rendering harmless. 
Even trivializing an accusation of anti-Semitism holds the danger of 
making all things seem benignly relative.

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

2.)  A Zundelsite Reply

Nothing makes genuine Germans' blood boil more than such guilt-ridden 
drivel pouring out of one poisoned-by-Allied-reeducation brain! 

What you have just witnessed is a mental captive dancing on a chain 
with a nosering in his nose!

Let's get a little clarity into this convoluted matter:

1.  Germans, like decent people everywhere with a sense of fairness 
and empathy, have criticized war-criminal-led Israel for its brutal 
repression, tortures, deliberate assassinations of political leaders 
and the bulldozing, terror-shelling and bombing of largely unarmed 
civilians in Israeli-occupied Palestine.  The same outraged reaction 
against war criminal Sharon's policies was manifested in many 
countries around the world.  This criticism does not have its roots 
in an "under-the-surface German antisemitism."  It is a sane mind's 
reaction to brutality.

2.  The only reason why there is more open and more outspoken 
criticism in France of killer Sharon's policies is that France does 
not have the same draconian, repressive, anti-free-speech laws as the 
Allied vassals adopted in their West German occupation state.  France 
is not chafing under systematically induced guilt about Auschwitz - 
as do Germans. 

3.  Get this, and get it straight:  Since there was NO Third Reich 
policy of genocide in World War II against the Jews or anybody else 
in Germany - a topic now sufficiently researched and historically 
documented - the Germans of yesterday, today and tomorrow have 
nothing to be guilt-ridden about! 

All the rest of this writer's driveling and sniveling is just that - 
the prattling of an inferior mind mouting inculcated propaganda 
slogans.  This has been the norm in defeated Germany for the last 57 
years.  All that malarkey about German democracy "coming of age", 
"proving itself as the antithesis of Hitlerian Germany" is standard 
rhetoric.  Ever heard of Pavlov's dogs salivating on cue - not to 
food but to a bell announcing food?

The German occupation statelets Austria, DDR and now DDR/BRD have 
served their Allied creators well - so far!  A new generation of 
Germans is growing into maturity.  This generation has chafed long 
enough under Allied and Israeli tutelage ("Bevormundung") and is 
letting the Israelis and the rest of the world know that they have 
had enough!

They will not be quiet when a people like the Palestinians are 
bombed, terrorized and tortured into submission, for the German 
nation has suffered that same fate and knows how it feels - by 
experience! 

The Germans have experienced repression, judicial and extrajudicial 
murder of their leaders, the devastation of their cities, the utter 
destruction of their homes, their factories, their cities - their 
entire country!  The Germans lived and suffered the Palestinian 
experience, only on a more brutal and massive scale - and not only 
during those terrible war years but for the past 60-plus years. 

THAT is the reason why people like M=F6llemann, a former German 
paratrooper, speak out against Israel's war crimes! 

Let others, who have absorbed their "history" and political 
information and education, if you can call it that, from 
Israeli-filtered, Jewish-Lobby-besotten news sources, blabber on 
about "cycles of violence" and "axis  of evil" spin-doctoring. 
Moralizing is a very poor substitute for morality.

The German nation knows the Palestinian pain from bitter, personal 
experience inflicted on untold millions of its citizens - and to 
their credit, ever more Germans are now speaking out and call 
murderers murderers - and the ever-handy Auschwitz cudgel be damned!

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

Thought for the Day:

"It makes me laugh when they yap about anti-semitism.  Arabs are more 
semitic than those Khazars."

(Letter to the Zundelsite)