According to an 1998
article citing contemporaneous German periodicals, Germany has paid more than $61 billion in wartime reparations since 1951, much of it to the New York City-based Jewish Claims Conference since the Federal Republic of Germany’s Federal Restitution Law took effect in 1965.
That’s right:
$61+ billion as of eight years ago.
Yesterday, U.S. Holocaust Museum Senior Advisor for External Affairs Arthur Berger declared that “Germany's leaders had embraced their country's responsibility for the evils of the Nazi era,” as the
New York Times reporter
paraphrased it.
This was not in response to a report on the magnitude of German reparations. No, he simply learned that the German government acceded to his demand that it liberalize access to the fifteen miles of Holocaust archives in its possession.
Two months ago, however, again according to the
Times article, Mr. Berger characterized resistance to this demand as “a form of Holocaust denial.”
How easily that charge comes to lips of a Holocaust Museum official!
A German citizen with the temerity to treat a complex of events empirically and to arrive at officially disapproved conclusions will be subject to star chamber proceedings during which the truth is irrelevant as a defense and at the end of which a jail cell is waiting. If they are expatriates, non-German governments will cooperate in kidnapping and deportation the heretics, as
Germar Rudolf and
Ernst Zündel have learned. During their trial, their attorneys may not even enunciate the views of their clients without risking being charged with the same crime.
Yet Mr. Berger thought nothing of toying with that loaded weapon at the expense of German government functionaries who have been otherwise most compliant with the demands of
the Holocaust Industry of which he is a captain.
Of course, German governmental resistance to total archives access did not at all stem from any wavering regarding The Dogma. At bottom was merely a concern for the “privacy” of the Third Reich’s victims and their relatives. “The papers may disclose, for instance, who was treated for lice at which camp,” the
Times reports, “what medical experiments were conducted on particular prisoners, and which inmates were tempted to collaborate with their captors.” (Presumably, evidence of such temptation consists entirely of evidence of actual collaboration.)
The payment of $61+ billion means nothing.
The incarceration of living writers who discredit details of the factual basis of the Holocaust Industry, coupled with such solicitude for the privacy of the dead, means nothing.
All that matters now is whether you are compliant with their latest demand. If you are not, then you are engaging in “a form of Holocaust denial.”
Isn’t it good to live in the free world? Even David Irving, languishing in jail in one of its precincts, Austria, thinks he’s from “a free country.” Here’s what he said to Sky News around the time Mr. Berger’s tongue was wagging so irresponsibly:
22 Feb 06 London - David Irving, a British historian who was jailed in Austria for denying the Holocaust took place, said on Wednesday he had the "right to be wrong" and vowed not to be silenced.
"In my view, freedom of speech means the freedom to say things to other people that they don't want to hear," Irving told Britain's Sky News television in an interview from his prison.
"And if that causes offence to them, then that's partly their problem and partly mine.
"Freedom of speech is the right to be wrong, basically. Sometimes I'm wrong."
Irving, 67, pleaded guilty on Monday on a charge dating from 1989 of denying the Nazi extermination of six million Jews in Europe during World War II, but insisted that he no longer questioned the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz concentration camp.
The court in Vienna sentenced him to three years in prison.
He told Sky News that he had heard that there was an effort in Austria to extend his sentence, which he dismissed as an attempt to silence him, saying: "I come from a free country and I'm not going to let anybody silence me."
You can still listen to him say this in his own voice
here.
