"Ever Forget, Ever Again!"

28 Jan 2015:  
German President (and former post-Reunification Stasi-Archives Adminstrator) Joachim Gauck presided with Chancellor Angie Merkel over official-dumb's 70th season of the annual Memorial to the Liberation of Auschwitz, with of course all the lip-service and bromides about "learning" something or other from the past, and such. What Gauck stated in his address however, exceeded even my worst expectations of their predilection for tasteless national masochism, parading as the dignifying of sacred memory and responsible reflection. He achieved a level of absurd satire which Monty Python could not equal – but the weird thing is, I know this guy, he meant it.

"Auschwitz," he declared (much the way Merkel declared that "Islam belongs to Germany" the day she returned from that 'Je-suis-Charlie' mockery in Paris), "belongs to the identity of every German." Wow – this should have been addressed to the '50s or the '60s generation, but it wasn't then.

It is shamefully misplaced here and today, yet proves useful as the Nazi-bat – and not because they are serious about Nazis. Why, if they were that, they'd outlaw the NPD and run them and their NeoNazi thugs out of the country. If they were that, they would openly point out that Hitler and Himmler had a smashing good relationship with Jerusalem's Grand Mufti Husseini, and with the still young Muslim Brotherhood, and that Hamas appreciates the Third Reich's efforts as much as H & H appreciated Islam and what it offers. If those presiding over this very staged breast-beating wanted to put substance into it for just once, they would address Islamic antisemitism. But they don't.

Willi Brandt, as Social-Democratic Chancellor in his time, created a real shit-storm when he politically very incorrectly knelt in spontaneous sorrow at the Warsaw Ghetto wreath laying ceremony. This was spontaneous and sincere, it was authentic, and it was a breakthrough for its time. These suits of today have nothing approaching his backbone.

Gauck had an opportunity to set a tone of real authentic Remembrance, every President has that opportunity. But no, he joins with Merkel in identifying Islam with Germany. Gauck, who one would have thought might have learned from his experiences living in the GDR (or maybe he really had learned from the Stasi and never was the anti-Stasi dissident pastor he'd gotten himself marketed as after the Wall fell) – this same Gauck insults the dignity of Jews who perished at Auschwitz, German Jews among them. And he defames hundreds of years (not to mention two millenia) of German heritage and culture, giving this People the Enlightenment with all it shared with the French; he is washing over composers, poets, philosophers, painters, sculptors, scientists, and yes – also a post WWI democratic Republic.

I'll mention here those whom he also dissed, and who deserve much better: the German Hitler-resisters – Social-Democrats and Conservatives, highly placed and of humble means alike, students like the Scholls, priests and pastors who did not sell out when their respective Church bodies did, people who'd hid Jews or helped them flee, people who'd planned Hitler's assassination, people who'd laid plans for a return of Germany to its pre-Nazi normality and roots and moral dignity.

Not the Communists were the heroes, they were pugilistic thugs as socialist as the National Socialists, coming to blows on the streets one day for love of a good scrap – like the Antifa and the Neos – and marching together down the same streets the next day to demonstrate against the Weimar Republic over some shared agenda. Like the Antifa and the Neo-Nazis when it comes to Jews and Israel.

But Pegida is the "new Nazi threat" of course, to be fought tooth and nail with every end-justifying means available, however insipid, however below the belt - and however violent. Pegida which is and remains infinitely more in the tradition of Hitler-resisters than any of these mechanical Pavlovian Auschwitz-abusers ever had the moral standing or intenstinal fortitude to be.

Gauck's address, and any others given on this day on that podium by these twits, is a kick in the teeth of the Federal Republic and all it has stood for and achieved these seven decades. Furthermore, and I am deeply incensed over this - the war's-end generation and the generations which followed it were no perpetrators and will never ever heal as long as Presidents and Chancellors of this caliber practice this unpardonable ignorance, visiting upon them this travesty of tragedy, abuse of history and pathological masochism.

Yes, this is an American Jew speaking, with 26 years under his belt in a land being groomed to despise itself and learn nothing, from anything – it's own history, European history, Islamic history. In order to deconstruct, after the EU-pattern, its entire identity as a People with a culture and a history. All being reduced to Nazis, and to Auschwitz, to fulfill a weird agenda:

Ever to forget, ever again.