United States Should Boycott Olympics: Send Message to China and World

According the American Heritage dictionary, fascism is a system of government marked by 1) centralization of authority under a dictator, 2) stringent socioeconomic controls, 3) suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and 4) a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism. The Chinese autocratic regime gleefully fulfills this definition. China’s forced occupation of Tibet has led to the deaths of an estimated 1.2 million Tibetans. Additionally China’s direct support of the Sudan genocide blatantly continues. Within China's borders, compulsory family “planning” and forced abortions are universal. China has hundreds of forced-labor prisons, which hold political and religious dissidents. There are firsthand reports of physical and psychological torture, confessions forced by torture, live organ harvesting, and other inconceivable atrocities within these prisons.

America should send a message to China: we do not support you; we will not attend the Olympics.

The Holocaust: Are We Condemned To Repeat It?

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana

Wise s eigentlich gewesen. Sixty some odd years ago, something happened that is so atrociously odious that some, rather then face it, find it easier to equivocate and to subtly deny that it ever took place. While still others—either for personal or religious gain—maliciously deny that this abhorrent calamity ever took place. This single conjuncture has shown the world new levels of brutality: several countries banded together to wipe an entire people group off the face of this earth. This cataclysm is called the Holocaust.[1]

Around one hundred years ago, the first “modern” genocide took place: the Turkish (Muslim) massacre of more than a million Armenians (Christians) during the First World War.[2] The Turkish officials then in power took credit for this genocide. The current Turkish government denies that history. They say it never happened, or they seek to excuse the massacres as consequences of war. The rest of the world allows this denial to go unchallenged. Now, in the twentieth century, under the guise of “Holocaust Revisionism,” history is again being denied.

According to a Demoskopea poll, one in ten Italians believes the Holocaust never happened.[3] Moreover, the pseudohistoricial* Institute for Historical Review makes such reoccurring claims as:

Question: “How many Jews died in the concentration camps?”

Answer: “About 300,000

Question: “How did they die”?

Answer: “Mainly from recurring typhus epidemics. . . .”

Question: What about gas chambers?

Answer: There weren’t any.

The singular reoccurring question is why? Why would someone deny the Holocaust? Yehuda Bauer claims that it is because of an unthinkable sense of horror:

I believe that this [denial of the Holocaust] is the work of a growing movement, as for extremely wide circles of people the very phenomenon of the Holocaust is incomprehensible, unintelligible and untenable, and an explanation claiming that it did not happen is accepted with relief.

However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not living truth—John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859.

John Stuart Mill reminds us that if an important issue is not habitually addressed, it will be forgotten, or it will be rewritten. We must remember and learn from the ineffable atrocities committed by the Nazis and others. A simple study reveals that the precursor to the Holocaust was a systematic reduction of rights:

• the deprivation of equal civil rights, circumventing the constitution
• laws recognizing different legal statuses among citizens
• laws inclusively aimed at certain people groups exclusive of all others
• violence against a certain people group executed by the government
• laws restricting religious activity

At the heart of the Nazi seemingly mysterious millenarian weltanschauung (worldview) was the proclamation that ‘the Jews’ were the source of all evils—especially internationalism, pacifism, democracy, and Marxism. They believed Jewry was responsible for the Enlightenment, Christianity, and Freemasonry.

“The Holocaust was an unprecedented crime against humanity that aimed at the annihilation of the entire Jewish population of Europe, down to the last man, woman, and child. It was the planned, deliberate policy decision of a powerful state, the Nazi Reich, which mobilized all of its resources to destroy an entire people. The Jews were not condemned to die for their religious beliefs or for their political opinions. Nor were they an economic or military threat to the Nazi state. They were killed not for what they had done but for the simple fact of their existence.”[4]

Judaism was the antithesis of the xenophobic racist nationalism espoused by fascists and Nazis. The Holocaust was driven by a millenarian, apocalyptic ideology of Vernichtung (annihilation) that overthrew all the enlightened and utilitarian assumptions of liberal modernity. The lesson to be learned from the Holocaust is that evil can and must be resisted in its early stages. We always have choices. Racism and anti-Semitism have no place in a civilized society. Students and teachers have the responsibility to insure the accurate teaching of history. Under the guise of “academic freedom” many professors and teachers are straying further and further away from the authentic teaching of history; teaching rather what fulfills their worldview. This must be exposed and shown for what it is. In the world of academia taking a stand against someone is difficult. But this must be done by teachers and students alike. They both must audaciously stand for truth. History should be presented wise s eigentlich gewesen—as it actually happened.

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[1] In religious usage, a “holocaust” is “a sacrificial offering wholly consumed by fire in exaltation of God” (Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History [New York: Pantheon, 1988], p. 16). However, in the twentieth century, this was supplanted by a secular usage, in which “holocaust” designates “a wide variety of conflagrations, massacres, wars, and disasters.” See Jon Petrie’s etymological study, “The Secular Word HOLOCAUST: Scholarly Myths, History, and 20th Century Meanings,” Journal of Genocide Research, 2: 1 (2000), pp. 31–64.

[2] Robert F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago, 1992) 247-57

[3] Nov. 2, 1992, p. 2, quoting poll conducted by Demoskopea and published in L’Espresso. See also New York Times, Nov. 5, 1992.

[4] Robert S. Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, xi (Modern Library Edition 2001).