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Home > Publications > Ethnic Cleansing in Germany A Symposium
Ethnic Cleansing in Germany: A Symposium
Let’s return to history. Prior to the Spanish Inquisition, Moslems, Jews and Christians had lived in peace. Then came that dispersal. The St. Bartholomew Massacre of the Huguenots in France—you could not look at them and see that they were any different than the other natives. And a more recent example in modern France—the Dreyfus affair. Another example: the Balkans in the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth century and the religious conflicts which existed among the Russians, the Germans, and the Austrians. We saw what all that came to.
There is something I have always
wondered about. We can send our children to schools and by the fifth or sixth grade they know every hurtful, hateful word for every minority or religious group you can think of. And if you ask the parents, nobody sat them down and told them those hurtful, mean-spirited words. If children could learn their school lessons as easily as they learn prejudices, the California schools would be great.
We know how to hurt each other even within our own group. The current crisis over who is a Jew and what is Judaism prompts you to talk to your brother or your sister and doubt their authenticity as a religious person. When Mein Kampf was published, it was
available worldwide. People snickered, but that man did everything he said in his book he was going to do. And there was a terrible price to pay for that: World War II, the Holocaust, more dislocation.
Religious freedom and personal liberty are constantly and everywhere at risk. Too often if we don’t stop it quickly the result is kakistocracy. It’s a very big word. And I will tell you what it means. It means government by the worst elements in your society.
Who founded America and why? We have Pilgrims, Meliorates, Mennonites, Catholics, Shakers, Quakers, Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses. Let me recount a story about Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1940 they had a worldwide convention in St. Louis and I was just a boy. They had the most gorgeous
swimming pool of any place in town, all tiled. Well, they did their baptisms there and neither I nor my neighbor and best friend Bobby Rosenthal was allowed to go swimming in that pool for years. I guess it does rub off.
The Church of Latter-day Saints is yet another example of such persecution. During the Mormon wars, the U.S. Army chased them from New York to Illinois to Missouri and all the way out to the Great Salt Lake.
Let’s look at the 1920s in this country. The Ku Klux Klan was so powerful it was electing congressmen and senators. In 1928, 400,000 Klansmen marched in Washington, D.C., in robes and hoods. That’s not a long time in the past.
The current controversy over U.S. immigration—Latinos, Asians, Pacific Islanders—reflects the same xenophobic concerns. I am only second generation on my father’s side and second-generation American on my mother’s side but I look American. It is the same over and over again throughout the world. Le Pen in France, Milosevic in Serbia, Franco in Spain and yes, even the United States. We are not immune. Mr. Justice Brandeis pointed out wisely so long ago, “Sunshine is the best disinfectant.”
Que bono? It means “who profits?” What I would like to know, and maybe my
fellows here can answer this: Who is doing this in Germany at this time? Why? What is to be gained? What price to pay and what price will they extract from those that they have in their sights? Que bono? Who profits?
You must remember that prior to World War II, Germany, like America, was a signatory to the Geneva Conventions. Germany is also a signatory to the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. Someone recently asked me, “How could this happen in modern Germany after all they have
been through?”
I guess I was rather flippant when I said, “It’s kind of like riding a bike.”
Flippancy aside, how could it happen?
Que bono?
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