2000-09-05
"... the men who ran the studios had decided upon such a stringent policy of ethnic cleansing that throughout the whole of the Second World War, the words 'Jewish' and 'Jew' appeared in not a single film set in the States (with the exception, it pleases me to say, of the Epstein Boys' Mr. Skeffington)." Leslie Epstein, Harpers, September 2000
That's an amazing fact. Not a single film, except one. Of all the films that presented stories of inspiration and information, motivation, rationalization, and propaganda, not a single one, really, ever mentioned the Jews by name. Germany was our enemy because they started it, because they tried to rule the world, because they were the aggressors, and because they were not democratic. We had to stop them. And, oh yes, they killed some Jews.
There were claims after the war, of course, that the West didn't really know that the holocaust was happening until they rolled into the camps with their tanks and found the ovens. Now we know that Western governments, at least, knew what was going on. We know that because we know that the United States refused to bomb the train tracks leading to Auschwitz because, they said, they were beyond their bomber range. But then they went and bombed a factory nearby instead.
Under the Communists, Poland tried to turn the Auschwitz Memorial into propaganda by emphasizing that communists were killed there. Then Poland shook itself free of its Communist shackles. The Roman Catholic Church is trying very hard to restore it's own power and authority in Poland. And now it has appropriated, or tried to appropriate, Auschwitz. The memorial emphasizes the deaths of Christian Poles who resisted Hitler.
The story of World War II is entirely different without the Jews. With the Jews, our children can be taught that the West was noble and righteous and heroically fought to stop the greatest act of inhumanity of the millennium. Without the Jews, World War II was just about power, like all the wars before it. England, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal-- they had all tried to build empires. The difference was that Germany was strong enough to try to absorb England, France, Spain, Portugal and Italy into its own empire of empires.
The Americans look relatively innocent. They merely slaughtered the Indians and took Texas away from Mexico.