When I was in North Carolina in December working with my sister on going through the mountains of crap in my mother's house, we found a film reel. Last week my sister finally was able to take it to a place that digitizes old film, and what came back was a small but precious treasure trove of video clips from the 1930's when my mother was a small child. One of them depicts a family dinner. It's clearly my grandparents, my grandmother's brother, her parents, and other relatives -- probably siblings. My mother is a small child, dancing around the table. She's so adorable in this clip it tears my guts out by the roots.
What you need to know about this film is that these relatives, with the exception of my grandmother and three brothers, were homesick. They wanted to go home, and home they went, back to Poland -- just in time for Hitler. I don't know how many siblings my grandmother had, for some reason I think there were about four or five of them who went back. But the remaining siblings and her parents died in the camps.
It's one thing to read Anne Frank's diary. It's still something else to watch the horrific footage from the old TV series
The World at War or any of the other footage from the camps that you can find on YouTube. But to look at footage of a joyous family reunion, to know what is going to happen to half these people, and to know that they are your relatives, drives home what happened to these people.
I'm not saying the Jews have a patent on suffering because of the Third Reich. The history of our species is littered with genocidal maniacs. Hitler may have been a very efficient killer, but he wasn't the only one -- and Jews weren't even the only people he annihilated. But there's something chillingly and technocratically barbaric about lining people up, having them strip naked, tell them they're going for delousing, and then gassing them.
The Christofascist Zombie Brigade today has a bad case of Holocaust envy. They want so badly to be martyrs for their cause. These people see their own murders around every corner, from the black president who wants to amass an angry black army to kill them to secular humanists who want to kill them to pro-choice activists who want to kill them. They may not be flying airplanes into buildings -- yet -- but they sure have visions of martyrdom dancing in their heads. This leads them to come up with stupidity like
this:
A conservative radio show host with a penchant for making controversial statements predicted that anti-gay activists will one day be treated similar to how the Jews were treated during the Holocaust.
Janet Mefferd, a Christian syndicated radio show host, made the comparison in a Facebook post Wednesday morning. Mefferd posted a link to a Fox News piece referencing Gross Pointe South High School's cancellation of a planned speech by Rick Santorum. It remains unclear why exactly the speech was canceled, though some speculate it was because of the politician's stance against gay marriage. (The appearance has since been rescheduled.)
On Facebook, Mefferd wrote that she could see America moving "toward a day when every Christian who supports real marriage might be made to wear a yellow patch on the sleeve, a "badge of shame" to identify us as 'anti-gay haters.' Kind of like the Jews in Nazi Germany."
While the post had several supportive comments, it also drew criticism, prompting a response from Mefferd several hours later:
How much tolerance is there for Christians who are constantly being marginalized for standing for biblical marriage when they're constantly being called "extremists" and "haters" ... when even an Army officer is sending emails that call the AFA and the FRC "domestic hate groups" ... when the SPLC's hate map led a homosexual activist to shoot a man at the FRC, leading to his being chharged with domestic terrorism ... ? We're not the haters. We're the HATED.
"We're deleting all the nasty comments that gay activists are making," Mefferd added.
Because people pointing out your bigotry is EXACTLY LIKE being lined up and killed.
Somehow I think my great-grandparents would disagree.
Labels: Christofascist Zombie Brigade, Holocaust Envy, personal musings, right-wing hatemongers
She was raped by a German soldier and my husband was a result of that rape. They were sent to work on a farm in Germany.
He gets so angry when people forget that there were millions of other people were killed by Hitler.
We as a civilized society should NEVER EVER forget.