In another article of his, was this quote:
I sometimes wonder what it would feel like, as a Jew, to hear these profanations [Holocaust denials] to the memory of the six million. Being of Irish ancestry, I suppose the analogy would be hearing a member of the British parliament say that there wasn’t a potato famine in Ireland in the 1840s—just a few localized crop failures. The Irish are certainly making a lot of fuss and bother about all this. It’s time someone told the truth.That is one analogy, certainly. Another would be the ones mouthed by the racists who defend slavery, who maintain that, notwithstanding the four million Africans who died during the enduring horror euphemistically known as the "Middle Passage" or the millions who were sold into slavery or the tens of millions who were born, lived and died as slaves, that slavery was a good thing in the long run.
The term "profanations" well applies.
My father took part in the liberation of Mauthausen. Thirty years later, the first time he could talk about it with me, he said the one thing that stuck in his memory was the smell that hung over the camp. He had no words to describe it beyond awful, awful. Chris Buckley may write movingly of the visual record of that time but without the smell to sear it into your heart, there will always be room for people like that bastard bishop, may he burn in hell, to peddle his crap.
ReplyDeleteMontag,
ReplyDeleteI've heard the same comment from an Army vet who was there.