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March 23, 1998

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

"What pap Ms. Lorrie writes. By her line of reasoning, WWII should never be brought up because it has ten times the chance of "paining" someone who lost family in that vast conflict.

People who cannot recover from grief in a few years are unusual enough that we could say that they are emotionally troubled, afflicted with a mild neurosis or what have you. If you're still doing the wailing bit 20 years later, the average consensus will be that you're a hopeless wacko, stuck in morbidity - one of those sad souls who dresses in dark clothing, keeps the shades drawn and reads the obituaries for mental stimulation.

So what are we to make of anguish FIFTY YEARS after the fact?? That it's something we should all tiptoe around, fingers to our lips whenever one of a list of discouraging words starts to be heard?

Balderdash!

If they're telling it straight, those people ought to be in sanitariums. However, methinks they suffer mostly from having been the centers of attention and catered to lo these many years. As the collective events began to turn into a civil religion with a currency fresh enough to still smell the Devil's presence - see how they guard his name! - pushing the ancient fairy tales of standard Judaism aside, these people, the real survivors and the legion of ersatz riders on the pity train, became icons.

They're milking a good thing for all it's worth - and a lot of them, I am sure, believe their own schtick by now. I'd say "get over it" - but that's a waste of words.

I'll settle for, "Don't bug me with your hang-ups, everybody's got problems."

There are baser emotions than self-pity, but few more annoying and deserving of summary dismissal . . . Had they been unfortunate enough to be victims of Russia's similar roundups, their survival rates would have been far lower.

Even a cursory examination of the history of the Jewish people reveals that they revile each group who attacks them - not just for centuries, but millennia. And each bloody conflict is elevated to religious stature by afterward escalating it to the status of imminent total annihilation, followed by redemption gained through once again turning inward and returning to God's good graces via the wisdom of the priests. The priests are very big on this cycle, as one might suspect.

For those who don't know, most if not all major Jewish holidays are built around just such events - which is fine for them, if that's how they want to look at life. My point is that a person aware of the cultural pattern will take all claims involving specifics with a liberal dose of salt - say a 25 pound block.

Jewish writers (Howard Fast comes to mind) are allowed to do this so long as they address things in the distant past, preferably biblical times, but woe betide an outsider who dares call it like it is, for he is obviously in legion with the Devil for the purpose of enabling that ever-lurking annihilation - which assures their continued cultural cohesion.

How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen the wide world? A fresh holocaust every few hundred years does it pretty well.

BTW, an associate recently received a copy of Pravda published a week after the Soviets took Auschwitz, and it goes into lengthy detail about the killing facilities.

Seems they were on the wrong end of Birkenau, and used conveyor belts and electricity. A translation will be coming soon - quite a bit sooner than a good answer for yet another inexplicable anomaly.

Thought for the Day:

"...As one proponent of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Edward Alexander, has put it, to describe as genocidal the ghastly agonies suffered by others - the Armenians, for instance - is to 'plunder the moral capital' of the Jewish people. It is to 'steal the Holocaust'."

(David E. Stannard, professor of American Studies, University of Hawaii)