Healthy Teeth, Rotted Soul

Because at one point in my long net.career I had made comments critical of the JADL, and in favor of gun rights, I somehow ended up on an irregular 'patriot' mailing list, and this lists' membership somehow got passed (I presume) to another list, this one dedicated to regular updates from the exciting world of Holocaust Revisionism. (As a Jew, I found reading it to be very enjoyable -- whenver I got depressed over my inability to effect change in the world, I could haul up todays ZGram and discover that I (or at least my ilk) controlled TV, Hollywood, the stock market, Bill Clinton (feh), etc. Very uplifting, in its' way.) But one article struck me as particularly interesting -- a wateryeyed, flowery reminiscence of the joys of Christmas in Berlin in 1936 -- the warmly glowing shop windows, the happy people, etc, all due to the savior of Germany, Herr Shickelgruber. The author, of course, made no mention of the people whose lives and property were being brutally stolen from them, nor that his beloved Hitler was well on his way towards being one of the most repellently vile specimans of a race (humanity) that excels in producing such specimens. An uneducated reader (i.e, anyone who went to an American public school) would wonder why anyone would go to war against such a happy, peaceful, nation as the National Socialist Germany described in this article.

Which brings me, roundabout, to the subject of this essay:The article at http://www.msnbc.com/news/330184.asp, by a certain Victor Grossman, a self-admitted defector to the Soviet Union (and good riddance, I wish more of his ilk had done the same, instead of taking jobs at universities in America, but I digress).

Quite simply Mr. Grossman is the moral equivalent of a Holocaust Revisionist, and MSNBC is the moral equivalent of those who give sanction to the same. (Please note:I support the right of anyone, from Mr. Grossman to his ideological twin, Ernst Zundel, to speak freely, and of anyone who wishes to publish their works to do so without fear. However, having the right to do something does not free you from the moral responsibility of deciding whether it is right to do. By publishing Grossmans' article without comment or criticism, MSNBC abdicated a tremendous amount of moral authority -- a commodity the mainstream media requires to thrive, but tends to squander without thought.

Reading Grossmans' article (difficult to do in one sitting, I confess, as I found it difficult to refrain from somehow trying to reach into the screen, across cyberspace, and throttle the author), you would think that life in East Germany was some sort of Workers Paradise, with only a few minor 'inconveniences' that certainly didn't outweigh the tremendous benefits of free tooth cleaning! For him to go on and on as he does, and not mention the over FIFTY MILLION who died at the hands of Stalin (by comparison, Hitler killed a 'mere' ten to twelve million Jews and others) is every bit as bad as the article I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, going on about the happy streets of Berlin and ignoring twelve million corpses to come. Worse, perhaps, as Stalins body count came close to five times that of his goose-stepping rival in the genocide olympics.

An uneducated reader (see above for definition) would be led to believe that those who risked -- and in many cases, far too many cases, lost -- their lives trying to escape from East Berlin were just eager to see the latest episode of Dallas! The millions killed, the millions more imprisoned in gulags, the millions more again who simply had their souls taken from them one slow, grey, plodding day at a time -- all those do not exist for Mr. Grossman. What ingrates they must have been, he thinks, to want to flee a land which gave them cheap apartments! What are such trivialities as freedom of thought, expression, belief, and conscience next to inexpensive health care or the 'freedom' to wander off your job whenever you wished.

Perhaps most sickening of all, Grossman refers to this nightmare as a 'brave experiment'. In Nuremburg, people were quite rightfully hung for the crime of using innocent human beings as the subjects of their murderous 'experiments'. Pity that won't be happening to the still-surviving lords of the fallen Soviet Empire...or to the apologists for same. Grossman should count himself lucky that this is the case.

What sort of man, I wonder, is so eager to trade healthy teeth for a rotting soul?

Grossman praises 'free' medicine, and never asks whose labor was stolen to pay for it. He praises a work non-ethic that allowed people to wander off or on the job at will, and never connects that to the decrepit streets, the empty shops, and the current high unemployment -- for who would hire a man who has no sense of responsibility? He condemns 'carpetbaggers' who tear down the ruined factories, yet never asks why they had been allowed to degenerate to the point where they were useful only as scrap. And he blames West Berlin for 'undermining' East Berlin -- by showing the people there how much more they could have.

"There were some shortages..." Grossman disingenuously notes. Uh-HUH. And my history teacher in high school, a leftover leftist of Grossmanesque mien, told us that the Cultural Revolution in China had, and I quote, 'a few excesses'. (PJ O'Rourke, in 'Holidays In Hell', notes that in an entire day in pre-glasnost East Berlin, he was unable to spend a mere thirty dollars worth of East German marks. He ended up throwing the money in the trash for lack of anything else to do with it. 'A few shortages'?)

There is one upside to this, of course. Grossman and his fellow travellers have lost. Big time. Ding-dong, the witch is dead, really most sincerely dead. Leningrad has fallen, has fallen, has fallen, and won't get up. Mr. Grossman must get up every morning, in his now-more-expensive apartment, and look in the mirror, and realize this:He has lost. He tossed away his conscience for cheap toothpaste, and now he has neither. The paradise of Grossman (and the hell of millions more) is now just the slummy part of Berlin. Each and every day, he must face this fact.

Will this be solace to the tens of millions who died in the name of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat? I doubt it. But it's a step.

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