Fwd: An Open Letter, written ten years ago - still relevant today!

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

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>ZGram -
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>A Zundelsite reader dug up an Open Letter I had written some ten 
>years ago and asked if he could resend it.  Of course!  I am not in 
>the business of censorship, unlike some folks I know!
>
>I thought that given the fact that I will be speaking at a meeting 
>in Cleveland, Ohio on Monday, January 22, where the question of my 
>Mennonite background and motivation as a  cyber activist will come 
>up, this might be the time to recycle this decade-old Open Letter. 
>(For information on this meeting, please see our Press Release on 
>the Zundelsite)
>
>=====
>
>INGRID RIMLAND, Ed.D. -
>
>An Open Letter to all Mennonite Newsgroups
>
>In his review of my trilogy, Lebensraum! depicting the Mennonite 
>experience for the past 200 years, spanning seven generation and 
>several continents, history professor John Juhnke of Bethel College 
>in Newton, Kansas stated in a recent Mennonite Weekly Review:
>
>"On my desk is Lebensraum! by Ingrid Rimland . . . one of the most 
>audacious novels in all of Mennonite literature."
>
>What followed that opening salvo was a steely, stellar book review 
>that tells me, among other things, that Dr. Juhnke is politically 
>correct. He hints that I have compromised my heritage as a 
>Russian-born, German-descent Mennonite - not because I wrote another 
>book that might upset some Mennonites, but because I am an Internet 
>Revisionist aligned with a decided "villain" - a controversial 
>German-Canadian human rights activist, publisher and TV producer, 
>Ernst Zundel, who is defending certain concepts and beliefs most 
>Mennonites would definitely not approve.
>
>One of them is, divines the good professor, that I, like Mr. Zundel, 
>am challenging the "Jewish Holocaust" for my own wicked ends by 
>juxtaposing it to ethnic horrors of my own, drawn from my personal 
>experience in World War II as a small child. I am, therefore, still 
>harboring feelings for Hitler!
>
>Having divined the "obvious", Professor Juhnke then concludes:
>
>"One revisionist acclaims Rimland's Lebensraum! saga for endowing 
>the revisionist movement with needed cultural and literary 
>substance. Mennonites might wish that their own history had not been 
>appropriated for a purpose so allied with racist hatred."
>
>To make that giant mental leap is definitely politically correct!
>
>That is exactly what Canadian Customs likewise concluded when it 
>seized some $15,000 (Can) worth of Lebensraum! as being far too 
>hazardous for grown-up Canadians to read. While doing so, and for 
>good measure, they also confiscated "Furies" - the book I wrote 
>about my handicapped child - a title which, in 15 years, has yet to 
>elicit one single negative review!
>
>(So far, they haven't yet snatched "The Wanderers", the 
>award-winning novel I call my "baby epic" and the precursor to my 
>trilogy, Lebensraum! No doubt that is bound to happen next in 
>censor-happy Canada!)
>
>In my affidavit submitted to Canada Customs in a legal challenge 
>following that confiscation of my intellectual property, I wrote:
>
>In my early ethnic novel, The Wanderers , I depicted the German Army 
>of World War II in an unconventional, "politically incorrect" way - 
>as liberators, not destroyers. Never ever did I experience any 
>political repercussions for that novel! By contrast, thanks to an 
>ever more censorious political atmosphere in Canada, as 
>transparently reflected in the detention of my Lebensraum novels, 
>which carry many of the themes I first broached in The Wanderers, 
>certain historical fiction all of a sudden seems to upset certain 
>lobbies. (...)
>
>The German Mennonite wheat-growing community depicted in these 
>novels - for centuries reflecting an uncompromising ethnic cohesion 
>and a fundamentalist and pacifist approach to life and war - was 
>founded in the Ukraine in 1789, and was substantially eradicated in 
>the Communist ethnic cleansing purges of the 1930s and early 1940s. 
>In my trilogy, I bring to life the tumultuous events and the vast 
>changes which occurred in that era, as well as the attitudes of the 
>Mennonites' "American cousins" who had left the Ukraine in 1874 and 
>settled in the plains of Kansas, again as wheat farmers specializing 
>in the hard winter wheat they brought as immigrants from Russia.
>
>Civil wars, depressions, famine, anarchy, conflicts between religion 
>and atheism, between capitalists and communists, between 
>traditionalists and liberals, between nations and between peoples 
>led to enormously bloody strife in Europe - an era hardly ever 
>covered fairly and objectively in the Western world, simply because 
>most ethnic-German intellectuals, at least in Russia and largely in 
>Germany, did not survive those times. My own father, a high school 
>principal in the Ukraine, was exiled to Siberia in 1941 - for no 
>other reason than that he spoke German and was part of a savagely 
>persecuted religious minority. I never saw my father again. Many 
>members of my family and ethnic group perished for the same reasons 
>in genocidal purges.
>
>I have spent 17 years researching, writing, and eventually assisting 
>in the publication of these novels that depict the suffering 
>inflicted on a small ethnic minority due to political and religious 
>persecution, making sure that my characters correctly reflected the 
>spirit, attitudes and feelings of the times. As a first generation 
>eye witness immigrant who lived in Mennonite communities on three 
>continents and who witnessed German ethnic genocide first hand, I 
>have a duty to write about what I saw, honestly and truthfully, and 
>to use my talent to give voices to those Germans and German-descent 
>peoples who were tortured, exiled and killed in large-scale, 
>Soviet-style ethnic cleansing - brutalities of which the Western 
>world knows very little.
>
>In writing these three detained, "politically incorrect" books, I 
>did not intend to promote hatred against any identifiable group. I 
>tried to eliminate hatred against Germans who have been falsely 
>broad-brushed in unfair and simplistic ways by Hollywood and 
>self-serving political activists with a transparent, vested interest 
>in one-sided, simplistic stereotyping of Germans. In fact, I went 
>out of my way to describe good Germans and bad Germans, good 
>Russians and bad Russians, good Jews and bad Jews. I expressed a 
>literary opinion based on my upbringing as a surviving member of a 
>savagely persecuted and decimated German-descent Mennonite minority, 
>my ancestors, and on the effects of religious and cultural values 
>clashing with craven politics not of my ancestors' making and often 
>far beyond their understanding.
>
>Any complex, intelligent novel will depict complex characters. The 
>basic historical truth of my novels is that this small 
>German-descent Mennonite community - uncompromisingly ethnically 
>cohesive, inoffensive, apolitical and pacifist - was caught up and 
>destroyed by the Communist regime intent on ruthless eradication of 
>cultural differences and ethnic values that were not state-approved 
>and, hence, deemed "politically incorrect" and thus criminalized. 
>This is one of the most important themes which runs throughout my 
>three detained novels - the brutal social intolerance and legal and 
>judicial punishment inflicted by politically empowered censors on 
>victims holding "politically incorrect" views.
>
>Ernst Zundel is on trial in Canada for politically incorrect views, 
>some of them posted on the Zundelsite, a website I maintain in 
>California. The body judging him, misnomered "Human Rights 
>Tribunal", has in a recent ruling declared that ". . . truth is no 
>defense!"
>
>Does that not make you think? Is that still "democratic" Canada?
>
>In one of my novels, a Mennonite farmer pleads with his tormentor, a 
>Soviet Kommissar: "But I am innocent! You cannot prove my guilt!"
>
>To which the Kommissar replies:
>
>"But you don't understand! You have that wrong and backwards! I do 
>not *have* to prove your guilt to you. *You* have to prove your 
>innocence to *me.*"
>
>That's what is happening in Canada. That's why my trilogy is banned.
>
>I say that *in a civilized nation, historical truth must be a 
>defense.* I say that a *country that makes the telling the truth an 
>offense is no longer a sovereign country.*
>
>A novel is a stylistically artistic rendition of true-to-life 
>experiences where motives propelling its characters run deep. My 
>individual characters in my ethnic novels experience a complex range 
>of emotions - some of them entirely appropriate and legitimate, 
>given the circumstances of the times in which they lived and died - 
>but now in our "politically correct" times harshly persecuted even 
>in Western democracies in systematic psychological warfare tactics 
>and media-fed vilification campaigns.
>
>Shout "Racist!" - and people turn pale. Shriek "Nazi!" -and people 
>will scurry. Has it not made us cowards - whether the labels were 
>valid or not?
>
>I tried to create characters who come across as living, struggling, 
>bleeding human beings - not one-dimensional, grotesque, simplistic 
>cardboard automatons straight out of Hollywood.
>
>Professor Juhnke, teaching Mennonite history in a Mennonite college, 
>has this to say in his review:
>
>"The Germans, Rimland says, suffered a worse and less deserved 
>Holocaust than the Jews did . . . Even if her historical argument 
>were accurate, no amount of vivid storytelling could make up for 
>such spiteful didacticism."
>
>Those are strong words. I would like to reply if I may:
>
>My people's broken bones lie in Siberia. It shocks me that I heard 
>him say these words.
>
>I am a novelist and artist. I sit at my computer and try to paint 
>pictures with words. An artist seeks to present a refined and 
>distilled essence of something that moves heart and soul. A novelist 
>does more - he or she tries to distill the essence of moral 
>conflicts that wrench and tear and often even kill heart and soul 
>unless they are resolved with deeper understanding.
>
>Each word and each sentence follow careful reflection and thought. I 
>have spent almost sixty years in thinking and reflecting about what 
>happened to my people, the Russian-German Mennonites, in several 
>world wars. Why did my cousins in America, actively or passively, 
>fight Hitler by choosing as their ally the bloodiest murderer in 
>human history, the monster Joseph Stalin, who almost succeeded in 
>murdering me and all of my kin in devastating ethnic cleansings?
>
>One of the many moral conflicts in my trilogy is that the Mennonite 
>community in my fictitiously created town called "Mennotown" in 
>Kansas was losing its essence and cohesion because it blithely 
>allowed the undermining of its ethnic glue that held its forebears' 
>towns and settlements together and let them prosper in the Lord for 
>practically half a millennium on several continents.
>
>Another moral conflict I have painted in my novels is that this 
>hitherto rural and largely agricultural community did not, and does 
>not to this day, allow the expression of loyal dissident thought - 
>in my opinion, to its own detriment.
>
>A third moral conflict I painted in Lebensraum! is that there is 
>still a part to Mennonites' own history they would as soon not know. 
>It makes them very squeamish to think that there were Russian-German 
>Mennonites who did, indeed, greet Hitler as a savior - and quite 
>legitimately so. Who wouldn't have, against their backdrop of bloody 
>ethnic cleansings in the grip of the Stalinist henchmen that purged 
>them of most of their men? Those who were safely tucked away in the 
>wheat fields of Kansas did not know what was happening in Russia. 
>Their sense of history, says one of my main characters, "Erika", was 
>like an unkempt garden where weeds grew that do not belong. These 
>people didn't - and still don't, as Dr. Juhnke book review makes 
>very clear, for he is one of them - have the requisite facts and 
>full picture to comprehend themselves in their dislike about their 
>cousins' "Nazi past".
>
>A fourth moral conflict I described in my three novels is the 
>portrayal of a sectarian religion once so deeply rooted in an 
>apartheid ethnicity that it was unassailable and practically 
>indestructible even under brutal and repressive dictatorial regimes 
>the likes of which few people can imagine. Why is it going belly-up 
>in our seductively prosperous times where preachers are canvassing 
>Third Worlds to find new converts because they are losing their 
>children? In olden days, the Church was like a rock!
>
>These are vast themes requiring rigorous, unblinkered thinking 
>expressed by subtle nuances of words. One does not write that kind 
>of a novel by changing nothing but the names. A novelist who knows 
>what he or she is doing will craft a novel's characters from life's 
>experiences but fit them into fiction because a novel is a literary 
>vehicle permitting condensation. Vast, complicated themes treated 
>with skill and sensitivity in a fictitious setting evoke emotions 
>that help the storyline along. The reader, swept up in a current of 
>feelings, thus makes himself part of the story by drawing on his 
>memories - or finding echoes in his own identity! That is what 
>Lebensraum! is really all about.
>
>
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>The Mennonite child, Mimi, who tells the Kansas preacher, Dewey, who 
>comes to starving Russia in 1922 to bring American relief: ". . . 
>these alms are not from love" knows that her destitute people, 
>immersed in a desperate, politically incorrect faith forbidden at 
>the point of gun in Soviet Russia, could well be shot by Communists 
>for owning a family Bible. From her own frame of reference, the 
>hungry child believes that she is fully justified in telling a small 
>lie to Dewey, believing him to be a spy. But Dewey, dangling food in 
>front of her, sees only a child in need of some moral "correcting" 
>and wants her to apologize and say a prayer first - as it is done in 
>Kansas. She knows she cannot do that. It is too dangerous. 
>Self-righteously, he withholds food and sends the starving child to 
>bed for punishment. His cruelty, born out of ignorance, wounds an 
>impressionable child so deeply that after a gruesome youth in the 
>grip of the Red Terror, this traumatized youngster becomes an ardent 
>Führer follower. The Führer gave her faith and food - and Dewey 
>withheld one, short-circuiting the other.
>
>Thus grew out of a small but nonetheless important incident intense 
>dislike between the preacher and the child and made them enemies for 
>life. Thus are societal conflicts born - with roots deep in 
>misunderstandings and incomplete knowledge of facts.
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>Professor Juhnke thinks my literary treatment of the tragedy of the 
>respected community leader, Jan Neufeld- a man so driven to despair 
>by domino-effects in the Depression years that in the end he snaps 
>and causes murder and then suicide - is wickedly deceptive. 
>Professor Juhnke writes disparagingly that ". . . Rimland invents a 
>disaster for Mennotown" which he deems false because Kansas 
>Mennonites, he says, were thriving during the Depression.
>
>I have interviewed many Mennonite farmers in years of research for 
>my books who would vehemently disagree with what Professor Juhnke 
>understands was "Kansas history" when Franklin Roosevelt came to 
>power - but that is not the point. The point is that this literary 
>"liberty" describes the tragedy of one good man who sees himself 
>forsaken in a society gone mad with liberalism expressed in the New 
>Deal that hands some undeserving, unwashed transients willy-nilly 
>all *his* land, *his* savings and the safety of *his* old age - for 
>which *he* slaved and prayed. It is humiliation overload - too much 
>for one good man. America turned left when Roosevelt came to power - 
>and never again was America the same. Ask any Kansas farmer.
>
>
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>Professor Juhnke thinks that I, as a Revisionist, believe ". . . the 
>Jewish Holocaust is of minor moral significance compared to the 
>Holocaust which Joseph Stalin and his allies wreaked upon the blond, 
>blue-eyed Aryans." He scolds that ". . . this is not grand tragedy 
>but petty comparative victimhood."
>
>To that I say that I feel shame to know that a professor of 
>Mennonite history would say a thing like that.
>
>Some people may prefer the artificial spin-doctored version out of 
>Hollywood to knowing what really happened to their kin in Soviet 
>Russia. But anyone who has survived the Soviet Holocaust, the way my 
>Russian-German people did, would take objection to his statement 
>that telling of that blood bath tragedy is ". . . petty comparative 
>victimhood."
>
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>Another point - the literary voice of "Erika", the novel's narrator.
>
>I am not "Erika". I was a mere eight years of age when Germany was 
>bombed into the stone age by the Allies in 1945 and the Red Terror 
>overran that country. My own experiences did not match "Erika's" on 
>every single point. What "Erika" experienced in the last days of 
>World War II was told to me in Argentina in 1953 - not by a girl but 
>by a 22-year-old man who tearfully recalled how he was put behind an 
>anti-aircraft gun at age 14 atop a dying city.
>
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>
>And, finally, to what Professor Junke thinks is my "ideological 
>agenda": Maybe he can divine as well what is inside my head and 
>heart, but I can safely say that I have no intention of resurrecting 
>the Third Reich right on the Internet. I am fighting for freedom of 
>speech and for unimpeded access to what *was* our history - not what 
>self-serving lobbies would like to force-feed us.
>
>We Germans have a right to our own history and to defend ourselves 
>against false accusations. What I am doing in my work as a 
>Revisionist is not from "racist hatred." It springs from love for 
>what once was and is now almost gone - a time where it was safe and 
>good and right to have blue eyes, blond hair and pride in one's own 
>roots. It's barely safe today. It won't be safe tomorrow unless we 
>look at *all of history* and try to understand.
>
>Ingrid Rimland, Ed.D.
>
>--
>


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