A telling Abnews excerpt: The French Communist Party is suffering an identity crisis, as the old Stalinism, burdened by its terrible historical legacy, is dying and younger communists are struggling to find a new public face.
After WWII, the party had 800,000 members, 152 seats in parliament, and L'Humanite, the Communist daily, sold 400,000 copies. Now there are less than 200,000 members, 33 seats in parliament, and L'Humanite prints 40,000 copies but sells so few of them that it is a perennial money-loser.
After he overstepped himself and let Jörg Haider of Austria give him a Christmas tree while granting him a 20 minute audience, Pope John Paul II mended his ways a bit. He stated that ". . . the Holocaust, suffered by the Jewish people during Hitler's time, should not be forgotten, so that humanity will not stain itself again with such an 'aberration.'
He added a warning to avoid ". . . every kind of human aberration, which stems from the rejection of dialogue between different cultures and religions."
We hope that Rabbis Hier and Cooper listen - and that the Polish Pope also thought about the expulsion - after unspeakable tortures - of millions of Germans from Silesia and other regions east of the Oder River, taken over by his fellow Poles after World War II!
Swedish PM Goeran Persson mourns that: "Just a few generations after the liberation of Auschwitz, we see an alarming rise in right-wing extremism in Europe. There is no room for hesitation. It is time for action and cooperation. Living in poverty, feeling powerless and excluded, makes people look for scapegoats. We must be prepared to confront the despair, because if we don't, other forces will."
David McHugh of the Associated Press reports that ". . . white supremacist David Duke has taken his crusade against Jews and non-Europeans to Russia, which he now sees as 'the key to white survival.'"
These days, the Russian translation of a portion of his "My Awakening" is on sale in the Russian parliament's bookstore for 50 rubles, or about $1.75, in hardcover. The title translates as "The Jewish Question Through the Eyes of an American."
This AP writer feels compelled to add that "Duke's ideas - that white people are threatened by the growth of nonwhite populations and by "Jewish supremacism" - are largely the province of tiny, splinter groups of extremists in Russia. Parties with openly anti-Jewish or racist platforms get only microscopic support."
That may be wishful thinking.
One of the few accused war criminals believed to be guilty of having committed atrocities against Germans after World War II is Czeslaw Geborski, 76, from the Silesian city of Katowice, now on trial in Poland.
Geborski is accused of having ordered guards to set fire to a prison barracks and shoot inmates who fled. Prosecutors say at least 48 prisoners died Oct. 4, 1945 in the Lambinowice camp he commanded in southwestern Poland.
Geborski contends that the prisoners set fire to a barracks themselves during an escape attempt, and only three were killed by guards trying to stop them.
Solomon Morrell, who murdered over a thousand Germans and Poles, and who subsequently fled to Israel, ought to watch this trial closely. Israel refused to extradite this mass murderer after he had been described in John Sack's An Eye for an Eye.
Reports are still trickling in that the Brits are very unhappy about having been given their very own Holocaust Memorial Day. A whole slew of articles states or implies that, in one way or another.
Paul Clarkson of the Express reports that ". . . a thought-provoking documentary on Channel 4 will be asking why Britain and America commemorate something they played no part in."
"The British were not responsible, although they knew about it after 1943, and the Americans weren't responsible at all," says Paul Yule, maker of C4's Battle For The Holocaust. "What if the Germans built a museum of the American slave trade in Berlin? It would be ridiculous."
The documentary in question explores ". . . whether the Holocaust has become a poisoned chalice for the Jewish community. Hollywood films and museums have created a Holocaust industry, providing "consumer appeal" for Judaism, but ignoring how Jewish identity has changed over time.
The film's producer calls for a re-appraisal of how Jews are viewed by others and themselves. "Jews are no longer victims, but when non-Jews come to know them, they do so through the Holocaust."
Similarly, the Guardian, in an extensive article:
". . . though I understand the motives, I'm not persuaded by the methods," writes Anne Karpf, who claims to be the offspring of survivors. "Is an institutionalised day the best way of remembering an event? It's one thing in Israel where Yom Hashoah, the annual day of Holocaust remembrance is, for obvious reasons, an important part of collective mourning. But in Britain, whose connection with the Shoah is less direct, institutionalising the day may actually serve to promote the process of forgetting." The article mentioned that ". . . black Bronx schoolchildren ... cheered when they watched Schindler's List."
Two paragraphs are worthy of quoting in full:
"I fear the shared sanctimony which a Holocaust Memorial Day will inevitably bring. Even in the Department for Education and Employment education pack, although prepared by an impressive team of Holocaust educators and well-informed, the platitudes are inescapable. The Spielberg agenda of using the Holocaust to teach liberal values is strongly in evidence. Of course children should be taught to challenge racism and appreciate difference, yet I feel seriously discomfited by the notion of lessons to be learnt from the Holocaust."
"Above all, I'm sceptical about a Holocaust Memorial Day because it arrives on a wave of Holocaust material. In a dizzyingly short period, a 50-year near silence has turned into an omnipresent obsession. Both distort, and each serves current social needs. As a culture we've become grave-robbers, raiding the past for the ethical meanings - of good and evil - which the present can't supply, and which shouldn't be imposed upon the Shoah."
Tell that to Deborah Lipstadt! A new website, mounted by a "Witness to the Holocaust" program at Emory University, is a spin-off of the David Irving trial. The source material for the site is the research conducted by the defense team backing Lipstadt, the defendant of the libel.
The site will be a treasure trove for so-called "Holocaust Deniers." It stores the transcripts from 32 days of trial-room testimony, as well as the judge's final ruling. <http://www.holocaustdenialontrial.org/>
The unsavory "Soap from Jewish corpses" story has the lives of the proverbial nine cats, even though it has been proven a fraud, over and over again:
A recent Boston Globe article deals with the claim by 81-year-old Helen Mahut, a Polish-born retired professor of psychology. Mahut claims to have survived by posing as a Christian in Nazi-occupied Poland.
"They did make soap out of human flesh, " Mahut told The Globe. "I was there. I saw it. I had the soap in my hand. Are we going to deny it because it was not on an industrial scale? Even if one human being was boiled for soap, it is enough."
The story is that Mahut and her husband, Stefan, ". . . were driving through the ruins of Gdansk in April 1945, looking for a desk lamp to scavenge, when they entered the Institute of Hygiene, one of only a few undamaged buildings.
"We found a laboratory, vats, beheaded skeletons," she said. "There were huge pieces and small pieces of crumbly yellow soap, of very poor quality. Outside, there was a pile of white skulls to the second floor ... There was the corpse of a man" in a vat, "the skin carefully excised. That's how we knew what the lampshades on the work table were made of. ... We ran out without taking anything" except a small quantity of the soap, "and notified the authorities." She said she kept it in a handkerchief for several years, "but by the time I was ready to leave for Canada," in 1949, "it was just dust."
"There is no credible evidence of soap having been made from human fat," says the Pope of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, author of "The Destruction of the European Jews". (Search for "Hilberg" in the Zundel transcripts 1988, which record Hilberg's 1985 gyrations during the First Great Holocaust Trial. He was too chicken to testify again in the 1988 Second Great Holocaust Trial. The first trial must have been his wake-up call...)
In a 1,600 word essay - long by newspaper standards - Fergal Keane of the Independent, interviewed Norman Finkelstein who's just about to go to Europe on a tour on behalf of his German-translated little literary bomblet that ". . . earned the hostility of the Jewish establishment, leading one prominent figure to describe him as 'poison ... a disgusting, self-hating Jew, he's something you find under a rock'".
"Since the publication of his book The Holocaust Industry, Norman Finkelstein has become an object of special loathing for many fellow Jews." writes Keane. "His claims that Jewish leaders have exploited the Holocaust for financial gain and extorted money from the German and Swiss governments caused outrage. As if that were not controversy enough, he also claimed that many of those who say they are Holocaust survivors are fakes and that interest in the Final Solution only arose after the 1967 Arab -Israeli war when it was needed as a political weapon."
"(D)id he not worry that by labelling Jewish leaders as "hoaxers and hucksters" he was perpetuating the anti- Semitic stereotype of the greedy grasping Jew?" asks the Independent reporter. "Would he worry if the stand he's taken gave comfort to Holocaust deniers?"
"Holocaust deniers and the holocaust industry have a symbiotic relationship," observes a wise Norman Finkelstein. "The Holocaust industry needs the deniers so that it can continue to claim the world is awash with Holocaust deniers so we need more museums, more conferences, more books, to justify their quote-unquote Holocaust education'. The holocaust deniers, they love the Holocaust industry, because the Holocaust industry supplies them with all the ammunition for their arguments.
"It's the Holocaust industry which continues to wildly inflate the number of survivors...It's become the main exponent of Holocaust denial in the world today."
A British television show meant as a reinforcement of Holocaust memorial day delivered some thought-provoking dialogue and images.
"The Nazis won the cold war," argued one commentator in this documentary.
"It was hard not to agree with her," writes the Guardian, continuing:
"The controversy then became torrential, with Jewish commentators saying things that would have been unthinkable over on BBC2, home of Spielberg's emotionally manipulative effort The Last Days. They railed against the Holocaust Industry and international Jewish organisations who'd effectively extorted" money from Swiss banks, most of which hadn't reached survivors. They challenged the notion that Jews are morally superior because they're victims, and questioned whether they have a monopoly on suffering.
"They said things that needed to be said, things that a more emotionally mature world would listen to instead of dismiss as anti-Semitism."