Whatever Happened To "Never Forget"?

From The American Thinker:

November 14, 2010


Whatever happened to 'Never Forget'?

By James Lewis

When I was growing up, the dark miasma of the Holocaust was still so pervasive that the famous slogan "Never Forget!" seemed almost irrelevant. How could anyone forget Hitler and his murderous goose-steppers? It was hard to imagine a world where that supreme evil was not remembered as a stern and awful warning. I heard Holocaust survivors insisting that we must never forget, and I thought they were just repeating the obvious. Why did they have to keep on saying it?





Well, they were right, after all. They understood more about human nature than I did. It was necessary to say it over and over again, because by now, our Kultur Commissars in Hollywood and the media have deliberately forgotten it.





Today, the Left has lost the Holocaust and its moral meaning -- not just the simple fact of six million Jews, plus millions more gays, gypsies, handicapped people, anti-Nazis, Russian and Polish civilians who just got in the way, Londoners who died in the Blitz, and tens of millions of "mere" war victims who lost their lives between 1939 and 1946 at the hands of inconceivably cruel regimes like the Nazis and Imperial Japan.





No, the Left has also consigned the hundred million victims of Marxist fascism to that Black Hole as well. The Holocaust is now sort of like baseball statistics. Every fan knows those numbers, but they don't carry any moral weight.





The reason why the Left are now trying to delegitimize Israel is that they no longer understand the Holocaust. They've lost the reason why Israel exists in the first place -- but that is only a part of their even deeper moral degradation, because they no longer even want to know about the Nazi murder squads, the Communists who shot seven hundred Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, and most recently, the Islamic fascists who killed three thousand innocents in New York City. The Islamofascisti are now preaching industrialized hatred to tens of millions of brainwashed Muslims, maybe hundreds of millions. Just visit MEMRI.org to find out what the New York Times is covering up today. And every time another jihadi Muslim goes and shoots thirty innocent American military men and women -- including a pregnant woman -- the Left covers it up.





Want more proof? The New York Times last week ran a story called "Where Marxists Make Merry." It's about a Manhattan club for nostalgic Stalinists to relive the good old days of the Gulag, 40 million Ukrainian dead, Lublyanka Prison with its infamous execution basement, and the theft of Manhattan Project secrets to give Stalin his own bomb. It's just one merry little band of aging thugs and colluders with massive evil -- but for a good cause, of course. It was all "idealistic," you see (h/t Ron Radosh, PJ Media).





This Merry Marxist headline is grotesque to the point of genuine evil.





If old Nazi concentration camp guards had an Auld Lang Syne comedy club in Berlin, I imagine the New York Times would send over one of their old Nazi reporters to write the same kind of puff piece, right? Or maybe not? It's so hard to tell where the NYT's real moral boundaries are...or are they nowhere at all? When is the last time their Op-Ed page damned Kim Jong-il for starving hundreds of thousands of North Koreans in the cause of yet another Marxist Worker's Paradise? When did they condemn Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini, who between them killed a million people in a futile war? When did they damn Ahmadinejad for his daily threat of another Holocaust, a nuclear one this time, against Tel Aviv? Where does the New York Times stand on those fundamental moral issues? I don't think they really know, but just like Jimmy Carter, their hearts are on the side of Hamas and Hezb'allah, the Hitler Jugend of today.





The Times' Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty famously covered up Stalin's purges and starvation policies, because Duranty was a Communist dupe and enabler. A few years ago, the NYT-wits wondered whether to give back Duranty's Pulitzer Prize for Criminal Mendacity, but they just couldn't get themselves to do it. Once you start giving back Pulitzers for JournoLists and criminal colluders, where do you stop?





So they kept it. That Pulitzer is a shining symbol of their moral turpitude, and I hope they keep the Duranty Prize in some shiny glass cabinet, where their Editorial Board can see it every day and draw the logical conclusions.



Since the fall of the Soviet Union twenty years ago, the Left has managed to trivialize all the mass political murders of the 20th century. A lefty friend recently told me his answer to the hundred million dead from Marxist regimes. He said all those dead people didn't matter because "tens of millions of people die all the time from plagues and heart disease." He has now drawn a moral equivalency between Stalin, Hitler, and the tsetse fly. But tsetse flies don't kill with malice aforethought, while ideological mass murderers do.





Tsetse flies are not morally culpable. Sane human beings are.





Remember Lenin's Hanging Order? Even Wikipedia has it.





Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed. The interests of the whole revolution require this because 'the last decisive battle' with the kulaks is now under way everywhere. An example must be demonstrated.





1. Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.





2. Publish their names.





3. Seize all their grain from them.





4. Designate hostages in accordance with yesterday's telegram.





Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometres around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: "they are strangling, and will strangle to death, the bloodsucking kulaks".





Telegraph receipt and implementation.





Yours, Lenin.





Find some truly hard people.



This is what the New York Times is celebrating today.





Just think about that. Merry Marxists celebrating the good old days of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and all the Hitlerite dictators of the 20th century. And they still think they were the good guys.





Just tell your lefty friends two numbers: six million and one hundred million. But after the first couple of hundred innocent victims, we can't tell the moral difference anymore. I certainly can't. It is all unimaginable.





Dante had only nine circles of Hell for all the greatest evildoers of history, because after a while, you can't tell the difference between the Eighth and the Ninth Circle any more.





Stick ‘em all at the bottom, say I.





To remember the Holocaust is not to forget all those other victims.





Human beings live by symbols, and the Holocaust captures all the innocents murdered by all the fascist tyrannies in the 20th century, including the ones who paraded under the red banner. Red or black have nothing to do with morality. Innocent lives exterminated without mercy are a touchstone of morality. That is why "Never Forget!" continues to be important, just as "Hitler" as an incarnation of evil continues to be important. They are the essence of what we must know to judge all of human politics. Without those images of evil, we lose our moral bearings.





The moral difference between Stalin and Hitler isn't even worth talking about. The moral difference is zero.





But humans live by symbols, and so we use "Hitler" as the human incarnation of evil, as the ne plus ultra -- the ultimate exemplar, so that we cannot conceive a greater one. After a score of innocent victims, our minds simply will not take in any more.





So Pol Pot massacred either two or three million of his fellow Cambodians, with the active connivance of people like Jean-Paul Sartre? I'm sorry, I can't imagine those numbers. All I can do is to say that Pol Pot was as bad as Hitler, and that Sartre, who is still hero-worshiped by silly academics all over the world, was the conscious enabler of inconceivable evil. Frankly, I couldn't care less that Sartre was a Marxist while his buddy Martin Heidegger was a Nazi. As far as I'm concerned, they all belong in that lowest circle of Hell. There are times when Dante is still indispensable.





This is quite relevant today to the mindset of the folks who write for the New York Times. Because if you can stomach the job of reading their daily product, you'll find that they turn out to trivialize mass murderers and their enablers all the time.





"Merry Marxists," indeed. No wonder the Left can no longer stand up against Ahmadinejad, Mugabe, the Sudanese genociders, and other elected members of the U.N. Human Rights Commission. They have lost their way completely. They can't remember what it's all about.





And now we've elected one of them President of the United States.





"Never Forget!" is still essential because historic evils like the Holocaust anchor us to a moral scale, the lowest circle of Dante's Hell. Deliberate mass murder for political ends is still going on today -- in the Congo, in the Sudan, North Korea, and Burma, and yes, in Iraq, where the International Left practically celebrates every truck bomb in a food market. Every single day, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens to start another Holocaust, and millions of brainwashed Muslims and leftists are sort of seeing his point. We have to understand his point of view, you see.





Our president pretends not so see it, but most Americans know that truly malevolent forces are out there in the world. They have not been brainwashed yet. That is why they will vote Obama out of office as soon as they can.





Meanwhile, America, the world's only civilized cop, is at the mercy of an arrogant moral relativist who still hates the West because of the Mau Mau Rebellion of the 1950s.





And the Democrats have gone back to race-baiting as their main lever to power, just like the Dixiecrats of yore. They've just flipped colors.





"Never Forget?"





It's a good way to get back to moral sanity.