Copyright 2007 Ben S. Pollock
Saturday was the 62nd Nazi Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the anniversary of the Soviet army’s liberation of Auschwitz in 1945. The holiday was set up a long time ago by the United Nations. It’s not a sis-boom-bah holiday of course; if compassionate Americans note it at all, it’s like Flag Day on the calendar: “Oh. That? Damn.” Three related days, V-E and V-J days with Bomb Day in between, will follow in due course.
It brings to mind the tiny-but-noisy group that believes the Final Solution — against Jews mainly but also Gypsies, homosexuals, dissidents and other groups — never happened but was propaganda spread by the Allies. Its supporters state that all of the witnesses from all of the countries who saw the camps firsthand are lying while coincidentally giving similar stories, and that all of the pictures were doctored. Those who call the Holocaust a myth must have trouble worshipping and envying National Socialism while admitting the movement was a complete failure at its primary goals. Those would be world domination and full eradication of those peoples that it persuaded its masses as being the cause of all their troubles.
In December the deniers held an international conference in Tehran, hosted by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This guy has gotten lots of press for hating all things Western with vivid language, and wanting to make his Persia a world power in the worst way … the worst ways.
He has trouble being consistent, obviously, in denying the Nazi Holocaust took place and/or that it systematically killed some 6 million Jews and 4 million to 5 million of the other groups. Because that means allegiance to evil losers like Hitler, whose singular success was to brainwash followers and plain citizens into organized acts of cruelty.
But if Ahmadinejad was consistent, he’d be more successful. Among the ways he wants Iran to become dominant is in development of nuclear power, to create nuclear energy for economic development. (But isn’t this a Middle Eastern country where you can drill for oil with a butter knife in your own yard?) But all major countries think he really intends to manufacture nuclear weapons.
Thus, Iran should announce that the Nuclear Holocaust never happened, either. In August, we will honor the memories of the hundreds of thousands of Japanese who died 62 years ago when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
How do we know that? Photos, films, eyewitness accounts by the members of many nations, Allied soldiers, not to mention the Japanese far enough away to not die of the bombs or of radiation sickness etc. That evidence is just as solid or just as soft of evidence of German concentration camps.
If Ahmadinejad got his dictator cronies (in the Middle East as well as Asia and Central America) to agree with him about nuclear weapons, then he could ignore U.N. threats and develop centrifuges and other uranium enrichment devices, assured that atomic energy always was, is and will be harmless.
For an encore Ahmadinejad will announce that up is down. Then he can beat the United States in sending people to Mars, with one rocket behind his back. Wouldn’t that be something?
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