Sunday, March 03, 2013

"I killed millions of Jews but spared a few -"

Hitler: I killed millions of Jews/Israelis..... but i spared a few to show you why i killed them

[More commonly on the Internet,

 I could have killed all the Jews, but I left some of them alive to let you know why I killed them ]

Hitler never spoke those words, of course; he didn't mean to let any Jews remain alive, save perhaps one of his cooks as an expression of personal power. It's just something invented by an antisemite in support of jew-hatred.

And it always seems to pop up when Jews like me assert deeds in context as good or evil, right and wrong, and their perpetrators as criminals, men who would much prefer to be hailed as heroes instead. Why are Jews like me so annoying, even when we are right? What makes so many of you here want to reject agreeing with me 100%?

A good example is the British response to the 1920 Amritsar massacre. In this incident British troops opened fire, without provocation, on a peaceful crowd of Indian protesters (no use in asking who was what religion, since Indians didn't yet think that way.) The commanding general was retired and hailed as a hero by many Brits, especially those in the political opposition.

When the matter came before Parliament the government's first speaker was a Jewish Briton who angrily denounced the massacre in absolute terms. This brought a huge storm of anti-semitic resentment from many in Parliament: they were on the edge of endorsing the massacre out of Jew-hatred - these were the days when the Brits were convinced Bolshevist Communism was a Jewish plot that threatened England, too.

The next speaker from the government side was Winston Churchill. He spoke quite differently, describing the incident factually and calmly. He then argued that the general's actions were unworthy of British tradition: "Frightfulness" - his term for cowing a populace by unjustly and randomly terrorizing them - not being part of the British armory - so did the MPs want to make it one now? At this there was general agreement and after a bit more discussion the massacre was condemned. [Reference: The Last Lion, vol. I, ~p.600.]

So you see, the first speaker wasn't wrong when he asserted that what happened was an absolute crime; it's that the other Brits were afraid that his self-condemnation constituted an assault on the British nation. When Churchill soothed those fears they calmed down and turned 180 degrees. Yet would Churchill have succeeded in doing so if the massacre hadn't been labeled as a crime by the first speaker?

My grandparents, aunts, and uncles never engaged in the sort of political or anti-national behavior that Hitler decried. They were sent to the concentration camps and gas chambers anyway. Do you [Pakistanis] really want to follow in his footsteps and add genocide and accessory to murder to the legacy you leave to your kids? It's all about the values you choose. link