Category Archives: Obituaries

Getting Independent of Historical Lies

On this Independence Day, it’s time to get independent of the historical lies that have warped most of our minds. For instance, the continuing, celebratory historical narratives—despite a recent dulling of his shiny halo—that still enshrine FDR as the alleged greatest of American presidents. Yes, even before Lincoln.

Never mind our recent discovery that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration was shot through with Soviet agents, making the New Deal a Communist front. Or that he singlehandedly prevented the late Nicholas Winton, savior of hundreds of Jewish children from the Holocaust, from saving thousands more.

Comes this latest reminder of FDR’s shame: 1936 Olympics track hero Jesse “Owens said, ‘Hitler didn’t snub me – it was FDR who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.’ [Owens] was never invited to the White House nor were honors bestowed upon him by president Franklin D. Roosevelt…”

Of course not. Roosevelt’s Democrat party was the party of slavery and the post-slavery KKK which was still in business throughout the “New Deal”. Later the party of Bull Connor and the fire hoses turned on MLK’s 1950s marchers protesting segregation. Whatever his personal inclinations (and they don’t seem to have been very exemplary in any case) FDR made sure to tiptoe around racist and anti-Semitic sensibilities.

But you won’t read any of this in the latest elitest biographies whose authors contend that FDR was “one of America’s most beloved leaders.” Which is pure hooey.

The sort of lie which gave birth to cultural relativism which in turn enables the Obama administration’s current cossetting of radical Muslims bent on imposing oppressive sharia law on the rest of us. What goes around, you might say, comes around.

Nicholas Winton: Righteous Gentile

Nicholas Winton, rescuer of children during the Holocaust, has died at 106. To Jews he was known as the British Schindler.

He was credited with saving, through his personal initiative, the lives of at least 669 boys and girls. For decades after the war, he kept his work secret.”

He regretted FDR’s refusal to help: ““If America had only agreed to take them, too, I could have saved at least 2,000 more.”

But, in addition to being an anti-Semite, Roosevelt was a wartime admirer of “Uncle” Joe Stalin whose hatred for Zionists was second only to his hatred for the Nazis.

Via Instapundit. Others, including Schindler, are remembered here.

The ultimate in collateral

Your creditors might pursue you across the galaxy to get their money, hammering you with repeated calls and voicemails. But after you die? Aren’t you free?

Not at one funeral home in Taylorsville, in northeastern California. (And probably others elsewhere.) They’ve been keeping this man’s “remains” since last October (seven months and counting) until his kin or friends pay the bill for cremation.

Talk about the ultimate in collateral.

Epitaph on a politician

Here richly, with ridiculous display,

The Politician’s corpse was laid away.

While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged

I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.

— Hilaire Belloc’s “Epitaph on the Politician.”

You can imagine who I’d like to see here. But you’ll have to imagine. I’m not going to sic the feds on myself.

UPDATE:  Clarence Darrow was more circumspect: “I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”

Evolution in action

Fill-it-up

Consider yourself fortunate. Evolution usually moves too slowly to be witnessed. But not this time. A clear case of draining the shallow end of the gene pool.

Via Simply Jews.

Tax Freedom Day

That’s today, as Wisconsin governor and Republican presidential hopeful Scott Walker reminds us:

“It’s Tax Freedom Day. Up until now, all your work and income has gone to pay for your share of Big Government….When it comes to the big spenders, it’s all about them. It’s about their spending, their ideas, their wish list, their liberal policies. But it’s your money, isn’t it?

Well, it was.

Why we can’t let the Shoah go

The Shoah, Hebrew for catastrophe, means the Holocaust to most Jews, especially Hebrew-speaking Israelis. And it remains a focus of attention seventy years after the camps were liberated of their last survivors. Partly because, despite genocides of the past, the Shoah was unique. There was never anything like it before.

Partly also because as Nickolaus Wachsmann says in his new KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, which ably demonstrates how Auschwitz, the central camp of modern memory, was only one of many, much of the extant evidence of the camps is only now coming to light. As Nazi records long hidden in the former Soviet Union are finally uncovered and analyzed. As survivors, nearing their ends, finally speak.

And, as always, there’s lingering fascination with the Nazi brand of systematic, industrialized murder—even in the face of today’s ISIS, freelance Jihadis, and wholesale African tribal slayings.

“Wachsmann’s discussion of the fate of children in the camps is the hardest to endure. Here we read about the special barrack in Majdanek for children and babies. The SS regularly emptied the barrack, sending the children to the gas chamber. ‘The children screamed and did not want to go,’ the Majdanek survivor Henrika Mitron remembered. On the way to Auschwitz, Wachsmann writes, another child, ‘little Samuel Langfus sobbed inconsolably, screaming again and again: ‘I want to live!’ ”

As comprehensive as Wachsmann’s 880-page history is, even he cannot encompass it all: “Wachsmann omits from his history the death factories the Nazis built on Polish soil in late 1941 and 1942: Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka. These were never work camps, but rather extermination centers for the Jews of Europe. They can be classed with the work of the Einsatzgrüppen who swept across conquered Soviet territory in these years and who murdered with bullets nearly half the Jews who were to die in the Holocaust.”

Via Tablet, A New Read on Jewish Life.

UPDATE:  Another, perhaps unique, take on the Shoah, from the diaries, letters and reports of the Nazi perpetrators whose ordinariness (quite without horns, tails or fangs) is especially chilling.