ZGram - 12/8/2003 - Prisoner of Conscience Letter # 50

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

Zgram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

December 8, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Below is an edited excerpt from a letter written to Willis and 
Elizabeth Carto of the American Free Press.  I understand that part 
of this letter was already published - however, I assume, unedited. 
Here I am doing what I do best and what an editor is allowed to do - 
"Š cut and re-arrange" where there are stylistic frazzles.  If I 
substitute words for clarity, they will be in square brackets.

The letter is dated October 24, 2003:

[START]

Dear Willis and Elizabeth -

Report from Cell #5 in the new Gulag Archipelago of the Neighbor to 
the North, also known as Absurdistan. 

I have always been enthralled by the story of early America, even 
when I was a school kid and teenager in Germany so many years ago. 
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, 
the Minutemen were more familiar to me than were the exploits of 
Prince Eugen, the defeater of the Turkish troops at the gates of 
Vienna.  These early Americans were better known to me than Bismarck! 
That's why I lit out of Germany, heading towards distant America as a 
mere boy, propelled by the stories of the revolutionary war of 
Georgen Washington's amazing generalship.

One of my first visits, as soon as I had established an economic 
foothold in the New World, was a visit to Valley Forge, where I 
stayed in an old town called King of Prussia.  I was young then, very 
young.

It was summer, early in the morning.  I walked barefoot over the 
meadows of that hallowed place like the peasants did in my Black 
Forest home for eons of time, to soak up the vibes as if I was going 
to absorb American history through the soles of my bare feet. Valley 
Forge is a well-maintained American National Heritage site, and the 
grass had been mowed the day before.  It lay there, smelling sweet 
and fragrantly, in the morning air.  I  closed my eyes, threw back my 
head and sucked in this heavenly aroma, feeling at that moment 
connected across space and time to the revolutionary soldiers who had 
trodden that land two hundred years before me. 

The sun rose.  The mystic ground fog lifted, melted away by the warm 
summer sun.  Slowly and reverently, I approached the tiny wooden 
block houses with their small doors and even smaller windows, no 
bigger in size than most tool sheds are these days.  It was here, in 
these crudely built huts, in these fields, where I had come like on a 
religious pilgrimage, to pay my respects to the memory of George 
Washington, Baron von Steuben, sent by Prussia's King Fredrick the 
Great to help the struggling colonists gain their freedom, and the 
staff officers who planned America's successful War of Liberation in 
these small, wooden, dank earth-floor structures. 

I knew from my study of history the dire straits the Revolutionary 
Army was in, and I made the mental comparison to German forces at 
Staligrad in 1943 - where they, like Washington's men, were cold and 
hungry, where many no longer had shoes or boots, and where there were 
not enough houses, barns or even little sheds.  The soldiers had to 
camp out in the drafty tents in the deep of winter, chopping down the 
trees around them to keep warm. For me, the story had a familiar 
ring, for the German forces at Stalingrad had within living memory 
undergone the same deprivation and similar lack of comprehension by 
their bureaucracy.  Many were frostbitten, and seemingly forgotten or 
abandoned by their governments. 

George Washington in Valley Forge was wrestling with the same 
uncomprehending government and Congress, begging for new uniforms, 
more socks, more boots, warm coats, more guns, ammunition and food. 
He warned, cajoled and beseeched those who controlled the purse 
strings that the war might well be lost if help was not soon 
forthcoming.

I stood there, all alone, trying to picture George Washington on his 
knees, praying for relief for his soldiers, on the very spot where he 
supposedly had [a] clairvoyant vision of the travails and problems 
which were to befall America in the future - and a slight shiver 
crept over me, eerie and unnerving. 

There was not yet a tourist in sight.  The story of Valley Forge, 
known to very few modern day Americans, kept flooding into my memory, 
washing over me like the incoming tide.  In my mind's eye, I saw a 
resplendant, bewigged rider on a magnificent white stallion, escorted 
by a rag-tag group of men in torn uniforms, being led straight to the 
little cabin where George Washington was studying maps on a crude 
table.  The stranger, red-faced, plump, huffing and puffing, 
dismounted, giving short orders to his aides in a firm, clear German, 
when the door opened and the famous American met the equally famous 
Prussian - none other than Fredrick the Great's gift to the American 
Revolution, his own Quarter Master General, Baron von Steuben.

The future President of the United States, and unchallenged Father of 
the new country-to-be, greeteed his guest in fluent German, a 
language he had learned from his body guards drawn from the New 
York/New Amsterdam and Pennsylvania Deutsch (not Dutch) soldiers of 
his revolutionary Army, [for] Washington felt not too sure of the 
loyalty of some of the English-speaking colonists.  There were many 
still secretly loyal to the old order of things - that's why his body 
guards, even after he entered the White House, were largely drawn 
from this loyal-to-the-Revolution German immigrant, pioneer element. 

Soon, the presence of the Prussian German General was known 
everywhere, and when he saw the poor clothing, lack of shoes and even 
less food of his charges, the word went out to the German settlers 
from the Palatinate, Swabia,  Baden etc. who had become farmers in 
this new land and prospered, to bring food, shoes and blankets, and 
for the women, to darn and mend the torn uniforms of Washington's 
hard-pressed soldiers. 

It should not be forgotten that these American settlers faced the 
greatest military establishment known since Roman times, the mighty 
Imperial Army of the British Empire.  Led by an inspired man of 
vision, George Washington's army, whipped into shape by the stern but 
caring Prussian Baron von Steuben, did what King Fredrick the Great 
had done before him.  He employed the same magic, common sense 
formula:  Wars are won by inspired, courageous leaders who are backed 
up by well-trained, well-organized, well-provisioned troops - 
because, as Napoleon would later make famous a Prussian saying, "A 
good army marches on its stomach."

In no time at all, the [revolutionary camp] was transformed into a 
beehive of activities, of farmers and their wives and families, 
lending a hand, pitching in.  Pigs were butchered, sausages made. 
Steaming cauldrons over open fires saw shirts, socks, underwear 
boiled. In [no time at all], a bunch of mountain men, farmers and 
frontiersmen were turned into a disciplined, highly motivated 
Prussian-style fighting force - an army which was soon to teach their 
colonial masters a few lessons about what free men, willingly united 
in a common goal, were able to achieve. 

All these stories whirled around in my young mind as I walked and 
reminisced that day about America's early history and the German 
people's contribution to it. Remember that it was in those heady 
years, in the 1960s, when one could see Wernher von Braun and his 
team of German experts make ready their huge rockets to help America 
go to the moon and on to explore the distant stars.  What a 
marvellous time to have experienced in person!  There was nothing 
that seemed impossible to achieve, no goal set that could not be 
realized.  And now?

A scant 3-40 years later, that heady dream seems but a distant memory 
as we cower in our double- and triple-locked and bolted apartments 
and homes, fearful of intruders - masked men in black uniforms and 
visored helmets, smashing our doors down without warning or warrants, 
carting the helpless, nameless victims off to heavily fortified 
barbed wire enclosed facilities, prisons that are surrounded by 
moats, guarded by vicious dogs, that  have the ominous search light 
guard towers with machine-gun toting guards for patriots who dare to 
uphold George Washington's vision and who want only to uphold the 
constitution and to serve and protect the American Dream. 

I was awkwardly crouched up on my bunk in my cell, reading about 
Ashcroft's sales promotion tour through the United States to whip up 
enthusiasm for passing the Constitution-busting Patriot Act II 
measures.  I put down the few sheets of paper my wife had sent to me 
into prison which had made it past the prison censors and reflected 
on what these new, draconian and intrusive surveillance and control 
mechanisms would mean for Americans, especially American patriots.

Clearly these unconstitutional, Soviet-style measures are not aimed 
at a handful of foreigners who are propelled by alien ideologies and 
an even more alien, medieval religion which came upon the world out 
of the deserts of Arabia centuries ago like a howling sandstorm. 
These proposed new measures are obviously preemptive measures, 
clearly aimed at the still standing American patriotic remnants, 
struggling against the encroaching forces of tyranny.  They are meant 
to take out the modern-day Paul Reveres, the modern day American 
sentries who sit in front of their computers, weary and bleary-eyed, 
until the early hours of the morning, hammering away on their 
keyboards. 

They shout in silence, with only the echo of their taps on the 
keyboard, alerting their friends and neighbors to the new, deadly and 
dangerous threat to the homeland, the Republic which survived for 
over two centuries because their forefathers had heard and headed the 
alarm cry of their ancestor, Paul Revere!

Could it be that the nightmarish vision, which appeared so vividly to 
George Washington as he kneeled in prayer in that little cabin in 
Valley Forge, has already arrived for his modern-day descendants?

[END]