    A Drink From the River Lethe.

    by Joh Domingo

    (In Greek mythology there is a river in Hades, from which the souls of
    the dead had to drink, which made them forget all they had done and
    suffered when they were alive.)

    Stephan Korbonski is a well known in Poland. He was the last surviving
    leader of the Polish Resistance to the Nazi occupation of Poland.
    Korbonski was one of the Polish resistance leaders that sent word about
    what was happening in Nazi occupied Europe, reporting about the fate of
    the Jews, and providing some of the few non-Jewish accounts of the
    employment of gas chambers and genocide in the German Concentration
    camps. In 1980 he was recognized as a ‘Righteous Gentile’ by Yad
    Vashem.[1] No doubt Korbonski was a good guy (search ‘Korbonski’ on this
    Rabbis long sermon), but even good guys have their limits. Before he
    died, he published his memoirs, in which he committed the sin of
    defiling the memory of Jews about the Holocaust. He was pissed that
    Poles were being blamed as accomplices in the Death Camps and he sought
    to debunk that idea and highlight the activities of the real accomplices
    in the slaughter of Jews and Poles alike - other Jews.

    Before Korbonski could become a real pain-in-the-ass full-blown
    revisionist, he died. But his work remains as an indictment against
    those that will not help themselves, except when they are helping
    themselves to the profits of others efforts. In short, he complains that
    Jews seldom helped themselves or engaged in any significant resistance
    against Nazis on their own behalf. Then he complains that Jews actively
    collaborated with the Nazis in the persecution of other Jews. Then he
    complains that while he and other Polish resistance engaged in the
    active hunting and execution of Polish collaborationist, Jews are yet to
    prosecute any of their legion of collaborators. At the root of his
    outrage is the systematic slander of the Polish Nation by memory
    moderators; that the Polish Nation shared responsibility for the
    Holocaust by not preventing the slaughter of Jews. His memory is a
    little different, and more credible; Yad Vashem attests to that.

    But this “righteous gentile’ was pissed, his verifiable efforts on
    behalf of Polish Jews was being subsumed, and its memory hijacked and
    changed to promote an entirely different ideology, and to debase his
    nationality. So he hit back, although to read what he says, one would be
    hard pressed to describe it as ‘hitting back’, but it is how it was
    received. Essentially, Korbonski was concerned with the two-pronged
    attack on Poland by the Nazis from the West, and the Soviets in the
    East. Despite his egalitarian humanism, he was adamant about two things;
    Jews collaborated on an official level with the Nazis, Poles did not.
    Jews participated with relish in the Soviet ransacking of Poland, and
    its attendant slaughter of Poles. Poles did not kill Jews. Of the latter
    he writes; “"The victims of the reign of terror imposed by Stalin and
    carried out by his Jewish subordinates, during the first ten years of
    the war numbered tens of thousands. Most of them were Poles who had
    fought against the Germans in the resistance movement. The communists
    judged, quite correctly, that such Poles were the people most likely to
    oppose the Soviet rule and were therefore to be exterminated. The task
    was assigned to the Jews because they were thought to be free of Polish
    patriotism, which was the real enemy."

    Clearly, he had occasion to revise his opinion of Jews in Poland,
    because if his assistance of Jews during the war were directly
    responsible for the slaughter of Poles after the war, he would have
    regretted his actions during the war. But that is not the case; he was
    proud of his actions during the war; proud to have lent a hand against a
    common enemy. But he does have a problem with the collective memory of
    Jews, and its subsequent use against his people. Jews could have chosen
    to remember the situation of the Poles during the war differently, but
    they chose not to. They chose instead to remember their co-victims as
    the perpetrators. This flies in the face of an examination of known
    facts and explains Korbonski’s rebellion against the preferred
    discourse. It is not fun to be the butt of perverted, ideologically
    constructed memorials.

    The misuse of memory in this way is not confined to the Holocaust, but
    it does provide a means to demonstrate how memories serve to buttress
    ideologies, often becoming the core ideology. When the memory becomes
    the ideology, it is often divorced from reason, and considered above any
    questioning, and beyond any challenge. It becomes sacred; and to
    question its tenets is to engage in heresy. To drive home the point, we
    erect shrines to remember and embed it in the consciousness, and expect
    others to respect it as they would any religion.

    But what is a memorial, if not a monument to a selective memory of the
    past? Human Beings have always constructed monuments, and some have
    become the core of the world's religions, but what we are witnessing
    today is nothing short of propaganda, with a proliferation of memorials
    that are efforts to shape the truth, and bend morality in service of
    ideological goals. None of these memorials are in any danger of being
    demolished, since demolishing memorials is a social taboo. These
    manipulated memories as a substitute for morality are questionable in
    the best of circumstances, but when it is accompanied, as it more often
    than not is today, with emotional blackmail, then it needs to be
    value-judged for its use, and its intent. They are not always the same,
    its intent and its use, and the suspicion is that the stated intent of the
    memorial hides its true purpose: to justify the opposite of its stated
    intent. WWII holocaust memorials proliferate, because of a need to
    justify injustice against Palestinians and to ensure that a black
    curtain veils the atrocious treatment of Palestinians by the Haven of
    proclaimed Children of the WWII Jewish Holocaust - Israel. Such blatant
    hypocrisy demands a response, and it not surprising that that the entire
    Holocaust is being value-judged based on its use, in furtherance of an
    agenda that manifests as a despicable exploitation of the dead, and a
    negation of the Jewish Dead fellow-victims. Under such circumstance, it
    is fitting that good people protest the memory of war dead, that
    justifies the creation of more war-dead, and undermine the theology that
    underpins such behavior. Better to forget the dead, than remember, and
    thereby cause more dead.

    It is not a question of competition between ideologies, because
    forgetting benefits people, more than it benefits ideology. A wide range
    of differing ideologies marches in step with this goal. They all can
    point to comrades and kin - fallen victims to the practice of memory and
    its use against them. It is used to destroy the lives of the living, and
    condemn to purgatory the souls of the slain. Dead Germans, victim of
    Nazi ideology, and anti-Nazi rage, haunt the collective psyche of
    Germanic peoples, as they are rendered worthless, as justification for
    the States existence. It is perverse that Germany today celebrates the
    slaughter of millions of their own, in order to retroactively put
    themselves on the winning side. It is grotesque that an entire nation
    can be force-fed the notion that they are genetic monstrosities that
    have a need to perpetually be on guard against demons embedded in their
    souls. To oppose the psychological rehabilitation of a people, because
    of a belief in their inherent viciousness, is the epitome of Racism. To
    insist on it, and demand it, is the practice of Racist supremacy.

    But it goes further than that, because by demeaning Germans in this way,
    the signal is sent that it is legitimately to be used against anyone, if
    they can be compared to Germans, or more importantly, Nazis. Erstwhile
    ‘anti-Zionist’ Jews have frequently called me a Nazi, for comparing
    Israel to the Apartheid regime. It is beyond the pale to call Israel an
    Apartheid State, but it is acceptable to call me a Nazi. It is
    considered a positive indication of anti-Semitic sentiment to call a
    Jew a Nazi, but not for a Jew to call anyone else a Nazi; even victims
    of Nazis. It demonstrates clearly the perverted utilization of memory of
    the Holocaust, and memory of Nazi atrocities. More importantly, it is
    being used to prevent innovation in the anti-imperialist discourse. By
    isolating entire narratives, and enforcing a narrative that in effect is
    used against us, we are denying ourselves the use of that weapon. The
    Holocaust has not only been used against Nazis, it is used against a
    wide range people who refuse to submit to the neo-Imperialist agenda. It
    is used as an affirmation of neo-liberal-democratic societies, and is
    used in conflicts against its opponents; by the accusation that they are
    like the Nazis, and that their actions are akin to a holocaust. A long
    string of anti-Western leaders have been compared to Adolf Hitler, in
    recent times: it is a signal to imminent military action. Ownership of
    this memory therefore allows the acquisition of more political force,
    and those that define it develop more political power.

       “In the Middle Ages, the Crusaders launched their conquests from the
       Church pulpits. Today, NATO does so in the Holocaust Museum. War must be
       sacred.”

       http://www.afsc.org/pwork/0599/0503.htm

    It is therefore being used to facilitate, and to legitimise a State of
    affairs that itself incorporates many flawed characteristics. It
    protects the social order against radical change It is not surprising
    that those that want to remember the Holocaust are the elite, the
    privileged holders of power. The poorest people in the world devote
    absolutely no energy towards holocaust memorials, or in many cases, even
    remembering atrocities against themselves. Nobody uses the memory of the
    Holocaust to act in an unquestionably good way. Usually it is to justify
    harm being done to others.

    The longer the Holocaust is remembered, the more people will suffer, the
    more people will die, and more injustice will be done - all with
    reference to that memory. The right thing to do is to terminate the
    memory. The moral thing to do is to support those that undermine
    Holocaust Memory, and oppose those that uphold it.

    JohD.

    [1] In Stefan Korbonski's book 'The Jews and Poles of WWII',
    Korbonski, himself a rescuer, recipient of Yad V'shem's Medal of Honor,
    reveals from records: "Twenty five hundred Christian Poles were executed
    for helping Jews. Ninety six Polish men were murdered in village of
    Biala for the crimes of hiding and feeding Jews. In Stary Ciepielow, the
    SS pushed twenty-three Poles, men, women and children into a barn
    which they then burned down because they helped Jews."