...indeed, evidence is never a problem when no one has the power to contradict. the image of Pound is of lear on the heath...as the storm of war increases, especially against civilians (as we are presently seeing in palestine) the language becomes commensurately elemental...and naked. national socialism, as communism, altho betrayed, was a working-class political cause. throughout the previous times, wilhelmine-whig and weimer-bourgeois, the jew was prominent as an elite managerial caste (arendt's "totalitarianism"), especially in finance, civil service, media, culture,...and espcially in germany and austria, and constituted thereby for the oppressed workers the epitome of the enemy (nothing here of mystical hatred for an innocent race). Additionally, there was prevalent throughout the west the notion of the nation as the state expression of an organic race community (gemeinschaft ?)...an idea still pursued in Israel. And indeed the nazis developed and implemented a final solution to these issues, expatriation...and for the jews, who had the two strikes against them, enemy and race, translation to camps outside germany in the new german "colonial" territory and then to madagascar. there are always individual sociopaths, and the sa and ss had their share; but the brutality and pogroms were viewed with anguished silence, not participation (as here with the negroes) by the german pop. and war is horrible and produces people like sen bob kerry who do their atrocities and get honored for them; ...but the german people were the last people on earth capable of doing that which they are accused. ----- Original Message ----- From: Ian Kluge <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2001 3:48 PM Subject: Re: YIDDERY > Jonathon Gill writes: > > > >but evidence of the possibility of the > > systematic destruction of the European Jews was there for him to > > disbelieve or ignore--it's right there in his own rhetoric! > > > > From a strict historical point of view, there is no point prior to the fall > of 1941 where *anyone* could have produced evidence pointing to the > systematic [physical] destruction of the Jewish population in Europe. > > As Christopher Browning among others has documented, Hitler himself did not > make that decision until the fall of 1941. (See Browning, "The Fateful > Months") and did not announce it in the *secret* Wannsee Conference on > January 20, 1942. It is unlikely that Pound knew of it. > > The severe, often brutal, restrictions on Jewish life in the Reich show > callousness, hatred and utterly immoral disregard, but that is still not the > same as actively and systematically engaging in the slaughter of an entire > population down to infants. > > The Nuremburg Laws (1935) and even the Wannsee Protocols (1942) show a > certain ambivalence insofar as they make a surprising number of exceptions > in regards, for example, to Jews married to Germans (my father was German) > to first and second degree Mischlinge and the variety of circumstances in > which these might or might not be arrested and deported. > > Why do people find it so difficult to understand that at the time, and > despite horrible circumstances, the Holocaust was unimaginable to virtually > everyone. > > I have known dozens of survivors both in Europe and in Canada, and I have > never heard even one claim that such a thing could have been foreseen, at > least in civilized Europe. When I brought up the matter of the Armenians and > Turks, repsonses tended to be along the line of "Well, yes, one could > believe such things about Turks, easterners out there ... Muslims ... > barbarians ... but not Germans." > > We simply can't read our knowledge back into writings from that time; we can > only legitimize doing so with clear and unequivocal evidence. > > So far, I have seen no evidence presented here that would last more than a > minute or two in a court. It's all so vague, and has to be filled up with > retro-active knowledge to mean anything. > > If someone has some real, hard evidence, let him or her please present it. > > Otherwise, we must either settle on a verdict of "not guilty" for lack of > substantial evidence, or, at most, the Scottish verdict of " Not proven". > > None of this makes Pound's anti-Semitism palatable. > > Best wishes, > > Ian Kluge