* The Jerusalem Post of 8-14-2000 reports that "Stasi agents of the former East German secret police fostered the rise of neo-Nazi groups in the West", according to a report in Germany's Welt.
Stasi agents are reported as having deliberately provoked antisemitism and resentment. Former agents are quoted as saying the Stasi launched the operation during the 1961 trial of chief Holocaust engineer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Stasi agents sent forged letters, supposedly from well-known German antisemites, to other neo-Nazis and also to Jews in an attempt to stir up a backlash.
You see how it is done? Anti-semitism is extremely useful, and where it doesn't exist, it is conveniently fabricated.
* The same article goes on to say that Stasi also planted agents in genuine far-right groups to stir up extremism. "We had an especially dense network of agents in this group," a former major in Stasi chief Markus Wolf's unit told Welt am Sonntag. "It ensured that we were able to steer the activities of these right-wing radicals in the right direction." It is relevant here to mention that Wolf's family had fled to Moscow because of Hitler's anti-Jewish policies.
Shades of the Canadian CSIS-SIRC Siamese operation that gave rise to the "Heritage Front" and its subsequent whitewash report! Most interesting, these disclosures come as German officials ponder whether to outlaw far-right groups in Germany altogether.
* Thousands of KGB collaborators face exposure in Lithuania. It is said that the names of possibly thousands of former KGB collaborators will begin appearing in the official state newspaper in one to two months under the terms of Lithuania's purging law, ". . . wreaking havoc with the parliamentary elections due on October 8" - unless they confess.
If they do, their files will be sealed and nothing will happen to them - unless they run for public office. If a person runs for public office or wants to work in the courts, their KGB ties will be published.
Here is a precedent that other countries might want to look at - countries, for instance, like Canada where KGB-like tactics are ever more blatantly employed.
* A number of posters honouring Hess appeared overnight in a number of towns across the state, even though a march in his honor upon the anniversary of his death was broken up by police.
Hess fell into Allied hands in 1941 after parachuting into Scotland as Hitler's emissary in an apparent bid to broker peace with Britain.
Revisionism will include the revision of the false story of Hess's "suicide" in prison after almost 50 years in Allied captivity, most of it in inhuman solitary confinement.
* Germany's "far right" National Democratic Party's leaders have repeatedly announced that they intend to challenge the political establishment with a march through the heart of the German capital early next year. The date is January 27, the anniversary of the "liberation" of Auschwitz.
The specific goal is to protest plans to build a Holocaust memorial near the Brandenburg Gate. In a statement, the party claimed that the Bundestag, the German parliament, had approved the project against the will of a majority of Germans.
The German government is in a tizzy, calling it an "obvious provocation" and searching for possible legal avenues to have it, as well as the NDP, banned.
* The Simon Wiesenthal Center is protesting plans to open a disco near the former German concentration camp of Auschwitz.
"Young Poles are being encouraged to dance in the immediate vicinity of the largest Jewish graveyard in history," the Simon Wiesenthal Center said.
The city's mayor, Adam Bilski, said many Oswiecim (the Polish name for Auschwitz) residents were tired of their city being remembered as a graveyard.
"They want to live normally," he said.
* In an article in the Observer, August 10, 2000, by Fiachra Gibbons, titled "Festival joke on Holocaust provokes outrage", it is stated that the American comedian Scott Capurro caused one-fourth of the audience at the Edinburgh Festival to walk out after he said, "Holocaust Schmolocaust, can't they find something else to whine about?"
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Thought for the Day:
"Stronger than an army is a quotation whose time has come."
(W.I.E. Gates)