Remembering the Holocaust

As I pointed out two blogs ago, Holocaust memories are selective. When the Holocaust museum was being planned, they kept sending me appeals for money. I refused, since they "forgot" all the victims except the Jews, at least in their fund-raising appeals. And, Diana Johnstone points out, the Croats were invited to the opening of the Museum, the Serbs were not, an astounding lack of sensitivity to history.

I was brought up, like most Americans, believing that the US won WW11 singlehandedly, mostly because of the D-Day invasion. I learned this from school and the mass media, especially the movie D-Day, which emphasized the great secrecy of the invasion.

So when I read Anne Frank's Diary,and she was wondering when the heck the Americans were going to invade, I was suprised and asked my Dad about it. (He didn't talk much about the war).

Well, he said, as if I should have known, of course everyone knew that the Americans were going to invade. They promised Stalin in December, 1941, that they would. But they put it off so that the Russians and the Germans would kill as many of each other as possible, so they didn't invade until 2 1/2 years later, after the Germans had been defeated at the Battle of Stalingrad. So Anne Frank and millions others died so that the American ruling class could take over the world.

That was a shock to me. I had thought that the Americans were the good guys, the anti-fascists. But, as it turns out, many Americans had fascist sympathies. And many of them, of course, were rich. Not only did they let the Germans and Russians kill each other by the millions, they refused to let Jewish refugees into the US, and they refused to bomb the trainlines to the concentration camps. And, after WW11, we got the ratline, helping Nazis build prosperous new lives in the Americas, and killing millions of South Americans to help American corporations and South American dictators keep the profits high. Many German Nazis were placed right back into positions of power. The Nuremberg trials stopped. The CIA was formed, and from the beginning allied with Nazis and other anti-communist forces.

And, when Ronald Reagan came in to implement American fascism, (defined as the merger of corporations and the state by Mussolini), his vice-president was George Herbert Walker Bush, CIA agent and then CIA director, son of Prescott Bush and nephew of George Herbert Walker, both of whom were investigated for financial ties with the Nazis during WW11. And we've had

a Bush in the executive branch for 20 of the 29 years since. And Clinton, of course, is famously close to H.W., since way back when he allowed Arkansas to be used to train the Contra terrorists that H.W. was supporting against the Nicaraguan people.

So don't get all "we're the good guys" on me. A Holocaust Museum that honors only some of the Nazi victims, lionizing Anne Frank, who waited fruitlessly for an American invasion to save her, a Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday to honor someone assassinated by the shadow fascists protected in our government, a JFK Memorial to honor another, football teams named after wiped out Indian tribes, these to me are outrages, not testimonials. Like the leftist Argentian pregnant women who were allowed to carry their babies to term and then killed, and their babies given to fascists to raise, the expropriation of the memories of victims for their oppressor's purposes, is a travesty to be exposed, not catered to out of some deluded feelings of respect.