WWiesenthal was a liar -- but that doesn't fit the fairytale
Interesting stuff.
This was in repsonse to this.
Independant.ie
Wiesenthal was a liar -- but that doesn't fit the fairytale
By Kevin Myers
Wednesday January 30 2008
The President has once again discovered what a dung-deluge you can trigger by apparently taking the name, the works and the pomps of a modern saint like Simon Wiesenthal in vain. As it happens, Wiesenthal was a self-aggrandising liar, who had nothing to do with Eichmann's capture, as he so often claimed: but because he has become one of the icons of secular, post-Christian Europe, one has to genuflect at his name.
He now stands alongside those other self-promoting and fraudulent deities of Western civilisation: Sartre, Picasso, Camus, Pinter, Churchill, et alia.
Of course, at one level I understand why Wiesenthal dedicated his life to hunting down the perpetrators of the Holocaust; he and his wife lost 89 family members to it (or so we are told: this is a figure which no one is likely to examine, never mind dispute).
But unspeakable though the catastrophe that befell Europe's Jewry was, Nazi Germany didn't pioneer the use of industrialised murder to solve a political 'problem'.
It was the Soviet Union that actually blazed the trail in the creation of death camps. I have said previously that the 20th- century creator of the concept of mass murder to expedite political ends was the Russian Jew Zinoviev; but further research has shown that the Polish Catholic Felix Dzerzhinksy actually proposed the mass murder of inconvenient populations before Zinoviev did.
Either way, the Germans were not the 20th-century architects of mass murder as a political weapon: we can give credit to Judaeo-Papist communists for that.
So where are the hunters of murderers in the cause of communism, whose victims are numbered in the tens of millions?
Well, apart from in Kampuchea, they are almost non-existent; for the liberal left, who are the guardians of the public conscience in such matters, have always become distinctly uncomfortable at the prospect of hunting down fellow lefties.
But it is not just an issue of the left: why did Wiesenthal never pursue the proto-Eichmann of the Soviet Union, Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich, whose murder machinery might well have accounted for some 20 million lives, perhaps a million of them Jewish?
He died in his bed in 1991, aged 98. Was his immunity from investigation by Wiesenthal because he himself was Jewish?
And why did the great genocide-avenger never pursue the local communist commissars who destroyed the national leaderships of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia in 1940? Was it because most of them were Jews also? This is difficult territory. We know there's not a child in Europe who hasn't heard of Eichmann: nor one who has ever heard of Kaganovich. But there we are. We compose narratives to make our inconstant consciences happy: and so the left-liberal tale of popular culture excludes Kaganovich from its pantheon of devils, and then bizarrely proceeds to demonise Israel for, amongst other things, trying to protect itself with a wall, without which hundreds of Israelis would certainly now be dead.
Yet to compound the illogicality behind all this, the wall that the Egyptians had constructed to confine the citizens of the Gaza Strip was never mentioned in all the hysterical denunciations of Palestinian immuration.
Similarly, we hear every day about Israeli strikes against Gaza: but who knows of the thousands of rockets that have been fired from Gaza into the Israeli town of Sderot, where children have to sleep every night underground, and where 28pc of the population are now suffering from serious post-traumatic stress disorder?
The uncomfortable truth is that we're not very good at telling ourselves the whole truth, even about the most obvious things.
This is because we apparently need to create historical narratives that have a moral rather than factual consistency, which are blessed by heroes, and which incorporate the taboos and dogmas of our value system.
So, because anti-Semitism is understandably and very properly a key-value in the post-Holocaust world, we don't make a Jew like Kaganovich a villain in our popular political narratives, as we freely do for Eichmann, a Christian.
On the other hand, modern popular culture identifies with the 'oppressed' Palestinians: there is certainly no politically chic kudos in trying to empathise with the existential hell that is life for the people of Sderot -- or indeed, for any Israeli community.
So the dead Jews of the Holocaust can evoke all sorts of sympathy; but the plight of the living Jews of Israel, after six decades of war, with absolutely no end to terrorist hostilities in sight, arouse no compassion whatever amongst the bien-pensant, for whom only Palestinians can be victims.
One could call this anti-Semitism, which in part it is, but it's more complex than that. Adults create and live within narratives that resemble the fairy-tales of their childhoods; indeed, we can actually see the emergence of different narratives in the US primaries right now.
These narratives are incompatible with the complexity, nuance and simple random incomprehensibility of actual existence. So instead, we prefer to abolish reality and elevate the fictional narrative into the 'truth'.
That is why frauds like Weisenthal can get away with their deceits, and always will. They understand, and play to, the insatiable human desire to live in a story-book.
- Kevin Myers
This was in repsonse to this.
Independant.ie
Wiesenthal was a liar -- but that doesn't fit the fairytale
By Kevin Myers
Wednesday January 30 2008
The President has once again discovered what a dung-deluge you can trigger by apparently taking the name, the works and the pomps of a modern saint like Simon Wiesenthal in vain. As it happens, Wiesenthal was a self-aggrandising liar, who had nothing to do with Eichmann's capture, as he so often claimed: but because he has become one of the icons of secular, post-Christian Europe, one has to genuflect at his name.
He now stands alongside those other self-promoting and fraudulent deities of Western civilisation: Sartre, Picasso, Camus, Pinter, Churchill, et alia.
Of course, at one level I understand why Wiesenthal dedicated his life to hunting down the perpetrators of the Holocaust; he and his wife lost 89 family members to it (or so we are told: this is a figure which no one is likely to examine, never mind dispute).
But unspeakable though the catastrophe that befell Europe's Jewry was, Nazi Germany didn't pioneer the use of industrialised murder to solve a political 'problem'.
It was the Soviet Union that actually blazed the trail in the creation of death camps. I have said previously that the 20th- century creator of the concept of mass murder to expedite political ends was the Russian Jew Zinoviev; but further research has shown that the Polish Catholic Felix Dzerzhinksy actually proposed the mass murder of inconvenient populations before Zinoviev did.
Either way, the Germans were not the 20th-century architects of mass murder as a political weapon: we can give credit to Judaeo-Papist communists for that.
So where are the hunters of murderers in the cause of communism, whose victims are numbered in the tens of millions?
Well, apart from in Kampuchea, they are almost non-existent; for the liberal left, who are the guardians of the public conscience in such matters, have always become distinctly uncomfortable at the prospect of hunting down fellow lefties.
But it is not just an issue of the left: why did Wiesenthal never pursue the proto-Eichmann of the Soviet Union, Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich, whose murder machinery might well have accounted for some 20 million lives, perhaps a million of them Jewish?
He died in his bed in 1991, aged 98. Was his immunity from investigation by Wiesenthal because he himself was Jewish?
And why did the great genocide-avenger never pursue the local communist commissars who destroyed the national leaderships of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia in 1940? Was it because most of them were Jews also? This is difficult territory. We know there's not a child in Europe who hasn't heard of Eichmann: nor one who has ever heard of Kaganovich. But there we are. We compose narratives to make our inconstant consciences happy: and so the left-liberal tale of popular culture excludes Kaganovich from its pantheon of devils, and then bizarrely proceeds to demonise Israel for, amongst other things, trying to protect itself with a wall, without which hundreds of Israelis would certainly now be dead.
Yet to compound the illogicality behind all this, the wall that the Egyptians had constructed to confine the citizens of the Gaza Strip was never mentioned in all the hysterical denunciations of Palestinian immuration.
Similarly, we hear every day about Israeli strikes against Gaza: but who knows of the thousands of rockets that have been fired from Gaza into the Israeli town of Sderot, where children have to sleep every night underground, and where 28pc of the population are now suffering from serious post-traumatic stress disorder?
The uncomfortable truth is that we're not very good at telling ourselves the whole truth, even about the most obvious things.
This is because we apparently need to create historical narratives that have a moral rather than factual consistency, which are blessed by heroes, and which incorporate the taboos and dogmas of our value system.
So, because anti-Semitism is understandably and very properly a key-value in the post-Holocaust world, we don't make a Jew like Kaganovich a villain in our popular political narratives, as we freely do for Eichmann, a Christian.
On the other hand, modern popular culture identifies with the 'oppressed' Palestinians: there is certainly no politically chic kudos in trying to empathise with the existential hell that is life for the people of Sderot -- or indeed, for any Israeli community.
So the dead Jews of the Holocaust can evoke all sorts of sympathy; but the plight of the living Jews of Israel, after six decades of war, with absolutely no end to terrorist hostilities in sight, arouse no compassion whatever amongst the bien-pensant, for whom only Palestinians can be victims.
One could call this anti-Semitism, which in part it is, but it's more complex than that. Adults create and live within narratives that resemble the fairy-tales of their childhoods; indeed, we can actually see the emergence of different narratives in the US primaries right now.
These narratives are incompatible with the complexity, nuance and simple random incomprehensibility of actual existence. So instead, we prefer to abolish reality and elevate the fictional narrative into the 'truth'.
That is why frauds like Weisenthal can get away with their deceits, and always will. They understand, and play to, the insatiable human desire to live in a story-book.
- Kevin Myers
posted by Brian at 5:53 AM
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