DEFEATING FALSE OR PURBLIND HISTORY

One December seventh I heard a TV newscaster read, “On this day in 1941 Japanese jets ravaged pearl Harbor.” I couldn’t resist writing to the station manager and confiding how lucky we had been to prevail over a country with an air force technologically advanced even before our declaration of war. He replied that he had subsequently taught the young reporter that never in the war did the Japanese have jet aircraft.

There is no dearth of erroneous representations of history, and one wonders which are deliberate and which, products of mere ignorance. Sometimes it is possible to discriminate the two. On one Memorial Day in D.C. actor Charles Durning, narrating the annual, commemorative program, told the crowd that World War II had been fought to rescue the Jews! For another example, despite the fact that he publicly rejected the hypothesis dozens of times, there are those that persist in the belief that Abraham Lincoln waged the Civil War in order to liberate slaves. Others believe the fatuous notion that Vietnam was “a war we could not have won.” Thanks to the Internet, misconceptions and lies have an easier path to circulate and gain absorption by the careless, naïve, and stupid.

Lately I saw one based on a “Non Sequitur” comic strip that was not comic. In it, a man explained his inartistic tattoos to a granddaughter. Other groups were mentioned, but the piece ended with a facsimile of the Israeli flag, and the man said that in World War II times, “millions of people perished because of their faith.”

The statement begs analysis. First, not all Jews practice Judaism, and not all that practice Judaism are Jews. Being a Jew is a matter of one’s ancestors, while practicing Judaism is a matter of one’s faith; the two are hardly equivalent. If you read Arthur Miller’s “Incident at Vichy,” you will find men’s being classified according to the lengths of their noses and whether or not they are circumcised. Naturally, it is as horrible to judge one way as the other, but the Nazi’s were interested in people’s ethnicity, not what Gods they worshipped or how – unless that amounted to resisting the nightmare they perpetrated.

Consider the case of Saint Teresa Benedictor of the Cross, born Edith Stein to Jewish parents, hence a jew, in 1891 Germany. After reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila, Dr. Stein, by then, was received into the Catholic Church at the age of 30. In 1933 she entered the Carmelite community at Cologne and professed her vows in 1935. With the persecution of Jews she decided her presence was a danger to the convent and was permitted to transfer to the Netherlands, into which she crossed secretly on New Year’s Eve, 1938. The Nazi’s, however, had invaded her new country and arrested al Catholics of Jewish descent. On 2 August, 1942 she was removed from the Echt Carmel and murdered in a gas chamber at Auschwitz seven days later. Clearly, this saint was killed for her ethnicity, not her faith.

Unpopular, anyway, Jews were made a lens to focus Germany’s hatred and ferocity and thus cement solidarity, but Hitler and Co. weren’t concerned about how much time their victims spent in synagogues – except as a way to identify targets.

Gypsies, like Jews, were labeled “Lebensunwertesleben,” lives not worth living. (There were doctrinal issues about some of the Gypsies, who, with origins in India, had claims to Aryanism, but the definitions were overlooked to accommodate the murderous objectives.) In the Nazi – don’t overlook the “Socialist” contribution to that acronym; find it in your dictionary and check your understanding of the term – scheme of things, Jews were anti-human, the lowest, Slavs were subhumans, to be annihilated once their utility had been exhausted, and Gypsies, in this Mohs scale of undesirability, were cast between these two.

Relative to their respective population sizes at the time, about the same percentage of Gypsies, as of Jews, were murdered, even if one accepts the disputed, six million figure for the latter. Gypsy religion, if that is a viable term, is rather an odd ragout of beliefs, and it is utterly foolish to suppose they were slaughtered for it. It was because they were classified as low-class undesirables, whose lives were not worth living. German soldiers would drive into Gypsy villages and shoot everyone there.

Interested readers should try Jolan Foeldes’ (“oe” for an umlaut “o”) marvelous novel Golden Earrings, which does not deal in atrocities but, rather, the preface to them and how Gypsies in Germany lived and coped at the time. Other revealing reading is H. Huttenbach’s, “The Romani Porajmos: The Nazi Genocide of Europe’s Gypsies,” Nationalities Papers, vol. 19, no. 3, 1991, pp. 373-394.

Gypsies are just one group whose mass murders go undocumented in our biased television and film productions and for whom there are no museums situated practically on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. While condemning Nazi’s do not forget other candidates for the Mass Murderers’ Hall of Infamy.

1. Chou en Lai and Mao Tse Tung, currently transliterated differently, authored the murders of upwards of 8 million Chinese people.

2. Joe Stalin presided over the starvation deaths of millions of Ukanians.

3. “Benevolent Uncle” Ho Chi Minh, who, in the name of filthy, degenerate, failed Communism, ordered the murders of millions of his countrymen. Why do you suppose that South Vietnam, at the time of our bumbling there, had all the Catholics? This is what is meant by perishing on account of one’s faith. Ethnically, they were generally all the same people.

Cartoonists and others should get their facts straight and stop dropping faulty allusions that have grown easier to say with the number of iterations. The bias in these representations is a question of ownership and control. Jews own or control much of what we see in films and on television, and that is why their tale is the only one told.

Y.C.