4F ... or Fifth Column ?

It sometimes seems to me that the weak and the small were the real main enemy - not those nice clean and orderly (if slightly pushy) Germans - to wartime America.

Hating the handicapped isn't a crime in the Canada of Henry Dawson's birth

When an Ontario mom living a few doors away wrote a letter urging a couple euthanize their autistic grandchild, the general public was outraged.

 But not the police ---- or the academics in this area of the law.

Apparently hating the handicapped is not a hate crime in Canada : but hating Jews, Blacks , Orientals, Catholics or Gays definitely is.

Despite this mile-wide gap in current law, it won't hurt to remind Canadians that Hitler started off by killing the handicapped and only moved onto killing Jews and Gypsies later.

Which is why Henry Dawson was so focused on protecting handicapped individuals, deemed "4Fs of the 4Fs",  from the baneful neglect of Allied governments seemingly intent on matching the Nazis' policies in a muted "me too", step by step ......

Hitler and his strongest critics agree: Holocaust unique because it sought to kill an entire ethnic group

I don't agree.

 I believe Hitler and his killing crews sought to make it easy on themselves while killing ten million Jews in cold blood, by not regarding them as ten million different individuals but merely as one great big reified lump, an ethnicity.

I don't believe that Hitler and his crew could have killed more than a few dozen a day, and even then only once in a while, if they had to sit behind a desk and look at the photos in hundreds of dossiers, devoid of ethnicity/religion /politics and decide which ones of those individual faces lived and which ones died.

Even Stalin, a very hands on guy when it came to the execution of the elite of the USSR, found it tough to do this sort of work all the time.

He often avoid all that hard thinking and deciding by simply issuing an order to the NRVD directing that all POWs with the simple label, "Polish", must be killed by next week.

Then he went off ,with a bottle in hand, to relax by watching a Hollywood comedy.

Sixty million individuals were killed in WWII ,including six million Jews - smoothly and easily - by deliberately not regarding them as  sixty million highly different individuals.

We must not let WWII like thinking slip in sideways by letting historians reifying Hitler's victims into a few big lumps.

We must always seek to unbundle their lives and the lives of those 'much like them' who did not die,  back into individual stories.

We must always remember that individual killers killed individual victims and overcome the easy (bottle in hand/Hollywood comedy) solution of simply assigning collective guilt to account for collective horrors and calling it an academic day.

Only in Hitler's mind, did one reified lump called "all Aryans" want to kill another reified lump called "all Jews"......

Newspapers report Global Warming like they did the Holocaust : urge caution, await further confirmation

We didn't report the LAST holocaust either

If you want to be a bystander at a new Holocaust (if you want to be be newspaper editor), there is no need to stretch yourself to penning anything like truly original thoughts.

 Why not just cut and past what past editors at your paper wrote at the first discovery of an intact Nazi death camp , like the infamous Lubin-Majdanek back in the summer of 1944 ?

As today with climate change, most editors then studiously ignored the reports of dozens of senior western reporters.

In this case, the reports of those who personally visited this Soviet-liberated hell-horror in the summer of 1944.

"Let us not jump to conclusions and hasty actions."  "Let us  seek further and further and further confirmation." "We need more - yet more - and more - and more eye witness reports ." "We need more and documented proof."

 Rather like playing out to the bell, in a game of sport, when your team is ahead.

On and on it went - to the end of the war and beyond.

Some still deny, still await further definitive proof, more documents, still seek 110% total certainty.

Sound familiar ?

Delay, delay, delay ; deny, deny, deny.

No wonder  so many Jews ,then and now, felt that the Allies' unspoken wish was that the Nazis would do their dirty work for them (if only the newspaper editors could be relied upon to stall the story getting wide - and angry - coverage, until it was far far too late.)

And we know how well the press did do its (non) job.

Fortunately, none of those publishers, editors or reporters has been allowed to sleep easy in their graves on this one.

Thousands of otherwise fine people are remembered only today for "Blowing the Big One" .

No "ongoing news peg" has been so thoroughly studied and dissected from all angles, day by day, in all papers, in all countries as has the non-reporting of the Holocaust, 1939-1945.

A thousand book-length theses have been written on it, country by country, newspaper by newspaper - all the guilty named and dismembered.

About a dozen new theses are written every year on the subject - and probably will be till the end of time.

Or perhaps not.

Because there is all the new non-reporting, the new skeptical shoulder-shrugging, lip-curling in denial, the new could careless-ness, the new un-reporting of a new Holocaust.

This time the non-reported-seriously story is how all humanity is sleep-walking itself to its own globe-sized crematorium .

And it will become a New Generation's ready thesis material.

Time-transport the Terrence Corcorans of this world back to 1939-1945 and watch them counsel delay and inaction..

All of the Terrence Corcorans of the world will be dead by then, but haste not to erect monuments to their undying honor : they will be remembered - yes, fulsomely - but in disgust and horror.

Just as their fore bearers of 1939-1945 are today.

I personally do not doubt that if Terrence had been an editor back in 1939-1945, he would have counselled " much more detailed research and no hasty calls for action".

This, despite the news about Majdanek merely confirming five solid years of  earlier reports of Nazi mass killings of the Jews of Eastern Europe.

 He just seems to be that type of guy. Now he will deny this,  as it is de rigeur to support the Jews today among his type of political  thinkers.

But based on how he is not covering the Second Holocaust, why should anyone believe his claims about how he would have covered the First Holocaust ?

Poetic justice then, his final fate at the hands of the historians : their wheels may grind exceedingly slow, but they grind exceedingly fine and his actions during The Second Holocaust will be caught between them forever and ever.

And may I add, in my old-fashioned Catholic way : Amen .....