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I was in the sixth grade when Eichmann was captured, and the event inspired my father and uncle to start talking to us about the war. They never had much to say about their combat experiences, which must have been horrible; my father was in the Italian campaign, which was war of attrition, pure and simple. What they talked about was the Final Solution.

My uncle took part in the liberation of Ohrdruff, the first camp discovered by the Allies. He was the sergeant in charge of the first detail that escorted the locals through the camp, which included the mayor and, as I recall, all the adult males of the town, and he said they had orders to shoot anyone who tried to bolt before they’d seen it all. Eventually everyone had to make the tour, even children, and Eisenhower encouraged servicemen throughout the ETO to visit the camp so that they might bear witness to what the Nazis were up to.

Also at that time (early 60’s) there were still quite a few Holocaust survivors living in NYC. You could tell them by their eyes and I remember them to this day. My father said many times, “We are telling you these things because a day will come when people will say it never happened.” Such a thing seemed impossible to me then, but here we are.

Recently I gave my son a copy of Primo Levi’s “The Drowned and the Saved”. I recommend it to all. Also Simon Wiesenthal’s “The Sunflower”, subtitled A Symposium on the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness.

Thank you for the link to Netanyahu’s speech.

Unless we physically toss the deniers out on their ears, they will prevail.

Of course, the Iranians tossed a whole generation of boys into Saddam’s meat grinder from which they have constructed a typically Shia cult of the dead and the damned, so that in a “Time’s Arrow”/”Human Smoke” alternative universe, denying the Holocaust is a way of trumping up the cult of Iran’s own self-inflicted Holocaust. You know, Holocaust denial is a thread that snares and seduces all sort of parties and places until someday it will be legitamized forever. I give you the woolgatherer Nicholson Baker, profiled in this week’s “New York” magazine, in which his new meditation is praised in the context of his Ozlike oeuvre. Many of his volumes are cited, but nary a mention of “Human Smoke”. In the liberal mindset, “Human Smoke” is an embarrassment precisely because the time when its grotesque thesis will be accepted has not yet arrived. Don’t you think that “The New York Review of Books” crowd accepts its assumptions? The masochism of excusing Amedinajad, and Hamas, of celebrity fawning over Hugo, these are the velvet ovens, the ovens of those that think they know better, the ovnes of those that would pick and choose their holocausts and deny the Holocaust, the burning velvet of a fashionable glove strangling history and truth because they are flesh and not the artifice the elites fondle while gazing at themselves.

In reading the last 4 posts, one wonders if any U.S. President is nothing more than a pitiful, helpless giant in the Mideast. Our Presidents have allowed the intelligence agencies to make them treat all players in the Mideast as moral and political equals. In this light, all violence is equivalent and constant. Justice and accountability are a nuisance to doing business.

“Unless we physically toss the deniers out on their ears, they will prevail.”

The number one reason why this nonsense prevails anywhere in the United states is due to postmodernist left-wing teachers. They consider Jews to be too white and prominent members of the allegedly evil capitalist system—so therefore they can’t really be victims of injustice. Only people of color deserve to hear their stories told.