"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"

Voltaire

This is a very complicated post, one I hope no one will skip or even skim over. Not just because it matters and is relevant to the times we are living in today, but because I feel a huge responsibility with part of my blogging to be a voice and to educate others when and where I can on world events and history. We have become a nation - a planet, in fact, of people who refuse to think and refuse to be engaged, and there are just some things you cannot look the other way on. This is one.

Recently, a conference was held in Tehran about whether or not the holocaust ever happened and why it is being supposedly used as a pretext to subvert Palestinians (read this interview posted yesterday on YNet) - in the name of peace. It has been widely condemned throughout the world as yet another ploy for attention and power on the part of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to convince the world that the holocaust is nothing but a myth in his quest to make good on his threat to remove the state of Israel from the face of the earth. Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Seyed Mohammad Ali Hosseini opines the scientific nature of the conference, stressing that prosecution of attendees will be a blatant violation of the freedom of speech (read more on that here). Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mohammadi was quoted by an Iranian newspaper this week as saying the meeting would examine issues "including whether the gas chambers were actually used by Nazis." One of the keynote speakers was David Duke, racist pigfucker extraordinnaire. See video of him here sparring with CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

Our very own State Department,which is under pressure to talk to Iran about quelling the violence in Iraq, was unsparing it its criticism of the conference, which Mohammadi said would gather 67 researchers from Britain, Germany, France and elsewhere.

"As I understand it, this meeting is really focused on highlighting those people who deny that there was, in fact, a Holocaust. So in that regard, it's just yet another disgraceful act on this particular subject by the regime in Tehran," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.

"It is just flabbergasting that they continue, that the leadership of that regime continues, to deny that 6 million plus people were killed in the Holocaust," he added.

If by "6 million plus" you meant more in the actual range of 11-12 million, then yes.

Denial that the holocaust ever happened is nothing new in the world of people who wear their racism as a gleaming badge of honor. In fact, it is a lot more prevalent than you might think. Websites are dedicated to the idea that Auschwitz was merely a work camp and even the outrageous notion that it was actually a resort. You read that right, some people actually think that Auschwitz was a resort (link NSFW). People who claim that the Nuremberg Laws were about sexual harassment. People who hold a reverence for Hitler and the Nazis - lots of them. They mean to educate others about 'racial awareness'. Check out "88FinalSolution88"'s YouTube profile page. For those not in the know as to what '88' means, H is the 8th letter in the alphabet. '88' is code for 'HH', a battle cry of impowerment for the white pride shitstains meaning "Heil Hitler".

Once such person who denied the reality of the holocaust was Charles D. Provan, a man I now deeply admire. Provan conducted a rudimentary experiment in his home using his own children to determine how many people would in fact fit inside a gas chamber. Upon his initial readings, the numbers seemed way off.

Men, women, children -- 700 to 800 in all, more than half of them children -- were forced naked into a 16-foot by 16-foot chamber in Belzec, eastern Poland. Camp guards fired up a diesel engine. A half-hour later, soaked in sweat and urine, columns of bodies stood dead.

Seven hundred people in 256 square feet? Three people per square foot? That's three human beings somehow crammed into the space of one square of linoleum tile. Think about it.

[...]

His wife, Carol, heard the noise.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"I'm gonna' see how many kids can fit in a gas chamber!" he shouted.

"Oh." A pause. "You shouldn't do that!"

After crowding the youngsters into the tiny space, Provan went downstairs to his parlor with a hand calculator, stretched out on the recliner, and did a little math.

The numbers worked. Those bizarre, impossible numbers worked.

"Then it dawned on me," Provan said. "He saw that. He saw that!" Gerstein saw those children, those old men, those mothers, he saw them jammed into a room, 700 or more at a time, bleeding, sweating, urinating in fear. He saw the doors open, saw bodies so tangled in death they lacked even the power to fall. If Gerstein was telling a truth so improbable, the other stuff had to be so, too. It happened.

Suddenly, Charles D. Provan, lifelong provocateur, was hearing the off-key note in the symphony of denial and the discordant note was the one that rang true.

"That's when I started to cry."

Let me get back to the original point I seem to have strayed a bit from, which is about the conference. I'm still amazed that more people are unaware of the Wannsee Conference.

The Wannsee Conference (January 20, 1942, during World War II) was a high level ministerial meeting of Nazi German civilian government and SS officials convened by Reinhard Heydrich, to bring together the leaders of the German organizations whose cooperation was necessary to carry out the Nazi plan for the extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe and to make it clear to these other German ministers that this "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" was a strategic imperative of the Third Reich.

The conference was held in the Wannsee Villa overlooking the Wannsee lake in southwestern Berlin.

The Wannsee villa is an opulent mansion that was owned by the Nazis and used as the meeting place for the conference. The attendees arived in limousines, dined on a sumptuous feast replete with cognacs and cigars as well as a selection of beautiful women. They spoke matter of factly about murdering over 10 million people fo the benefit of Germany and the world at large. The villa is currently a holocaust museum.

Here you can read the actual minutes of the meeting in English, discussing the 'Final Solution' in some of the coldest, most calculated and inhuman language ever used. The protocol as well as the Avalon Project detail it all further. Here are .pdf files of the actual original documents as part of the Wannsee Museum.

A precise, real-time (exactly 85 minutes - the length of the actual event) reenactment of the infamous Wannsee Conference was released as a German film in 1984 under the title Wannseekonferenz (The Wannsee Conference). In 2001, HBO Films released Conspiracy, an English version of the same film. Both scripts were written based on the minutes of the meeting. Conspiracy stars Kenneth Branagh as Reinhard Heydrich, Stanley Tucci as Adolf Eichmann, and Colin Firth as Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart. It is a fantastically ghoulish account of history, and it will chill you to the center of your soul. It is as cold and inhuman as anything I've ever seen. Part of what I love about HBO Films is their tendency to illuminate such things, as with the phenominal episode of the series Band Of Brothers: Why We Fight. That link is to a post of that episode in its entirety broken into 5 parts - if you haven't seen it, you should. As for Conspiracy, it is filed into the WWII Lecture Institute's film series. Here's the film's Wiki entry. Order it on Netflix. Here are three clips of it:



As always, feel free to link to this post.

I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I decided I was going to go ahead and research it out and get it framed in my mind. I've made a decision about something I want to do for myself in a few years. Four years is not really as long as it seems when you're thinking big. It may sound crazy to some, but I've never been overly concerned with how some of the things I come up with get perceived.

Here's the thing. In the winter of 2010, I will be turning 40 years old. It's a big deal for me as I never thought I would live past 30 anyway, so I want to do something very meaningful that will be a testament to the value of one's life and how lucky we all are in most respects for what we have and take for granted. I want to go to Oświęcim, Poland and experience visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau. I want to take part in a death march all the way through the entirety of the camp and experience what those people had to go through in those horrific days.

I want to learn Kaddish and recite it at the death wall of Block 11 in honor of the people who believed until the end that G-d would save them, and place a pebble from my own backyard at the base of the wall while I cry until I've run dry and cannot any longer.

I've wanted to go to Auschwitz since I was in the 8th grade and learned about it in World History class, going to the public library and reading everything I could get my hands on for weeks at a time trying to understand the how and why such a thing was even possible. I've written about it in harsh detail, I have a felt understanding of it from a literary standpoint and I've read a great body of work on the Holocaust, but I really don't think you can understand the gravity of it until you're standing there in it.

I want to mourn all of those who were lost, including MY people. This is a deep, urgent need I have had for many years to do this and I want to use the occasion of my 40th birthday to finally do it.

Four years and I'm going. I welcome any of you who would like to go on this journey with me, I would be honored by your company and it would bond us in ways that would otherwise be impossible.

I cannot stress the importance of this post to me, what it means to me, what it has come to represent. If you have any spine whatsoever, you will read every word of this post. You will suffer each syllable and burn each image into your minds, you will feel the blinding pain of it all, and you will do so in order that homage is paid to all of those who felt it in real time so that we would hopefully never have to, even though we still do to this very day. It is happening right now. As I type this, men, women, and children are being hacked to death with machetes in great numbers in Darfur. I'd never imagined when learning as a child about the holocaust that I would ever feel the experience of shame from the reality of genocide in my lifetime, yet it continues to happen.

I made a post a few weeks ago on faith in God, and asked why you believe or do not believe. That post led me to this one. I'm curious about how the faithful can maintain their belief in the face of things like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, Mauthausen, Sobibor. It was all I could do to not hate the idea of God after finding out about these things when I tried in vain to believe so many years ago, but I've learned not to hate something that holds no value within me in the first place. Instead, I want to use a loud voice in opposition to injustice and inhumanity. This is what gave birth to this, written for this Memorial Day, an extension of the Auschwitz memorial post I made last year. It will hopefully serve as a reminder for the shame I hope is felt every time you complain about something, anything insignificant. The guilt I hope eats you alive whenever you throw away your energy on something stupid, or whenver you don't hold the people you love in the highest value and esteem. The shame you should feel for not living a better life as a better person; a giving, selfless, humble being that is worth knowing. So who are you?

( You'd better get brave, and it had better be pretty goddamned quick... )



On this Memorial Day, which is observed to remember those military service members who died in honor and service of our country, I ask that you also remember those who died for no reason whatsoever, who were not afforded any choice, all around the world - even as I type this last sentence. Remember them, honor their lives, never forget they were here.