[NYTr] Critical Thoughts on the 62nd Anniversay of the Liberatuion of Auschwitz

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Dave Silver - Jan 4, 2007


CRITICAL THOUGHTS ON THE 62ND ANNIVERSARY OF THE LIBERATION OF AUSCHWITZ

by Dave Silver

Eight days after I was wounded by SS shrapnel on January 19, 1945, a
Jewish Red Army Commander, Anatoly Shapiro was the first to lead his
troops into and Liberate the infamous Nazi death camp of Auschwitz.
Will Dick Cheney representing the U.S. at a Memorial ceremony, once
again tell us that "evil is real and must be confronted"?  A sick joke
from Abu-Graib to Guantanamo while supporting crimes against humanity
of Israel  against Palestinians, while the Israeli President, Moishe
Katsav Praises the Allies that helped Jews come "out of the ashes to
their Jewish Homeland."  The Zionist Homeland whose political
justification was the deeply racist slogan of " Aland without people
for a people without land."

Vladimir Putin reminds us that the Holocaust had other than Jewish
victims. He called our attention to 27 million Soviet lives that were
lost.  (The U.S. suffered about 1% of total casualties).  Putin avoided
the word "Communists "who, as Steve Gowans observes are "exiled from
history."  The Communists were a vital part of the anti-fascist
struggle (which started with aid to Loyalist Spain) both as victims and
as thoae who provided the principal leadership to Partisans and
underground Resistance Movements in France, Yugoslavia, Albania,
Greece, Italy and heroic fighters inside Nazi Germany, including many
German Communists and Jewish led-Battalions. Tthe Federal
Republic of Germany at the time of Reunification saw the dismantling of
anti-fascist Museums in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany)
as the west was busy singing the praises of pro-fascist supporters like
John Foster Dulles. 

Ernest Thaelmann, leader of the German Communist Party was executed in
August 1944, some 8 months prior to the liberation of the Buchenwald
camp.  Future GDR leader Eric Honecker was a camp survivor. As
Gowans aptly notes that "those that have turned anti-communism into an
official religion, have moreover turned Naziism into exclusively a
movement against the Jews and stripped [the [Naziam] of its
anti-communist, anti-socialist and anti-trade union content."
Anti-fascism encompasses more than just being opposed to
anti-semitism.  Can one imagine what the Holocaust might have been if
the Red Army did not drive German forces back to Germany?  Let's
remember the Rev. Martin Niemoller's famous lines "First they came for
the Communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist" and
then down the line to Jews, Catholics and when they came for him it was
too late: "there was no one left to speak up for me."  

As Norman Finkelstein in his "Holocaust Industry" points out, 
"organized American Jewry has exploited the Nazi Holocaust (there were
others like Slavery) to deflect Israel's morally indefensible
policies."  So in the name of the Holocaust, Israel justifies
atrocities, expulsion and ethnic cleansing using oppressive Bantustans
called the West Bank and Gaza with house demolitions, checkpoints or
obstacles to get an ambulance or go to work.  Atrocities are not
limited to "Greater Israel."  The Mossad, or Secret Service -- working
with U. S. Intelligence -- trains Latin American Death Squads, helped to
overthrow the Allende government in Chile, uses state terrorism to bomb
Nuclear Reactors  and commits other crimes against humanity. 

And oh, yes, none of the speakers at the Memorial Ceremonies addressed
the question how the monster of the Third Reich came to be.  For that
would expose complicity of German (Krupp and Thyssen) and US
industrialists like IBM and G.E.) in building the Nazi war machine at a
nice profit.