COMMENTARY: Racist David Duke Calls Eisenhower a Liar

By Joseph J. Honick

Bainbridge Island, WA  – Of course Duke did not frontally accuser Eisenhower of lying. There is nothing in Duke’s history suggesting he would have the nerve or courage to do such a thing. Instead, he has had to find platforms like the phony Holocaust Conference sponsored by the terrorist regime in Iran to perform his rants and suggest he has evidence that smells of historical revisionism.

David Duke, who now tries to run from his racist past as boss of the Ku Klux Klan, fairly screamed at CNN’s Wolf Blitzer for having recited the truthful past of the white supremacist. Asserting he has now come a long way by acquiring a PhD and having been elected to office, he suggested Blitzer, winner of pages of journalistic acclaim was a “Jewish extremist.” Obviously, Duke was ignorant of the fact that Blitzer’s family knew the Holocaust first hand. But then Duke has never let facts get in his way.

In his rants to deny the Holocaust, he pretty much accused legitimate American hero, the late President and former leaders of the victory in Europe of being a liar. Otherwise, what did Duke the Denier mean in his assault on history in the face of the following comment by Ike:

“I have never felt able to describe my emotional reaction when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda,” — General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Commander, Allied Forces, Europe, Letter to Chief of Staff George Marshall, April 12, 1945

Add to this the current revelation of millions of pages documenting still further the actions of the Nazis in that terrible time.

So who is this David Duke who proclaims his scholarship and demands for free an open discussion of the very history he re-invents? Whether he wants to run from a personal history he has never disowned or assert he has attained a new level of accomplishment, the reality is he like all of us is known by his deeds and cannot hide from them. That he has been coddled and honored by the Iranian blowhard probably bespeaks Duke’s reality.

And, by the way, he overlooks in his assertions of the myths of the Holocaust, one of his colleagues on the Iran Conference from the Institute of Historical Review (read Revision) is from a group that years ago challenged anyone to prove the Holocaust, lost the case in court and failed to pay the reward it offered.

In the end, Duke is where he belongs in Iran and the rest of the racist venues that just love to use this guy as a front man for their own purposes.

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Editor’s (David M. Kinchen)  Note: CBS News’s “60 Minutes” (on Sunday, Dec. 17, 2006) had a terrifically moving segment by Scott Pelley about the recently opened Nazi document archive center in Bad Arolsen, Germany. All the documents captured by the Allies after Germany’s defeat in 1945 were collected in the archive, which has been closed to the public – until this year. Pelley accompanied three Holocaust survivors to the archive center, which has 16 miles of shelves containing meticulous documentation in German of the fate of more than 17 million people. The men, Nicholas Schwartz of San Diego, Walter Feiden of New York City and Jack Rosenthal of New York City, saw their records for the first time. The archives also contain the actual “Schindler’s List” and documentation of Anne Frank, whose father was a World War I German Army veteran. I doubt any thinking person – of any ethnic group or religion – could watch that segment with dry eyes. I couldn’t!

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Here is the announcement from “60 Minutes” to the news media on the segment: Good afternoon. I wanted to give you a heads-up on a story that will be running this Sunday, Dec. 17 (7PM ET/PT on CBS) on “60 MINUTES” about a long-secret German archive that houses a treasure trove of information on 17.5 million victims of the Holocaust. The archive, located in the German town of Bad Arolsen, is massive (there are 16 miles of shelving containing 50 million pages of documents) and until recently, was off-limits to the public. But after the German government agreed earlier this year to open the archives, CBS News’ Scott Pelley traveled there with three Jewish survivors who were able to see their own Holocaust records. It’s an incredibly moving piece, all the more poignant in the wake of this week’s meeting of Holocaust deniers in Iran. We’re trying to get word out about the story to people who have a special interest in this subject. So we were hoping you’d consider sending out something to your listserve and/or posting something on your website. Further information will also be available on our website (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/1998/07/08/60minutes/main13502.shtml), which you’re welcome to link to from yours.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions, and thanks for your consideration.

Best,
Robin Sanders
CBS News 60 Minutes
phone: 212-975-7598
email: sandersr@cbsnews.com

MANN TALK: The Return of the Sun

By Perry Mann

Hinton, WV  – Whatever made the universe knew its geometry. It knew that if it tilted the earth’s axis 23.5 degrees from the perpendicular of the plane of the earth’s orbit around the sun, there would be seasons on that tilted planet, a blessing whose worth it reckoned would be beyond calculation.

In the northern climes, at this time of the year of the earth’s orbit, all life on earth, whether or not it has knowledge of geometry, rejoices in the return of the sun and the start—but also the beginning of the end—of winter. For all life instinctively, if not consciously, is aware that without the sun, not even shriven Hope would know salvation.

In cities and suburbs where lights hold back darkness and obscure the heavens and where thermostats activate central heating when temperature drops below a degree that maintains cozy comfort, the sun is taken for granted and is given little notice. That the sun is the source of life for everything, that it grows the food for all life, warms the earth, gives inspiration by its dawn and twilights and its rising and settings to the eyes and souls of peasants and patricians, the dumb and the smart, the illiterate and the artist—is little noticed by cosmopolites relative to how the sun was noted by primitive peoples.

One can imagine how it was once man had gained consciousness of a past, present and future and yet knew nothing of the heavens and their workings. One can imagine that in the north, he was getting uneasy by the end of October, for he noticed that day after day the sun was with him a shorter time and its rays when it was with him were not so warming. Suppose, he worried, its presence continues slowly to decrease and its warmth to attenuate. Suppose sometime it sets and never appears in the east again. Such a thought would have put anyone in a panic and a frantic search for a remedy and a salvation.

One would imagine that there would be much to do in the way of sacrifices, rituals, prayers, and promises officiated and offered by the elders and seers designed to mollify and propitiate the power behind the scene so that it would change the course of the sun and bring back its light and heat and the full glory of its dawns and twilights. Then the always hopeful, in spite of the bleakness of the leafless forest, of a dearth of life, of a coffin of ice, would deck whatever abode they had with green and red and spread upon the tables some of their surplus as they waited for the outcome of their appeasements of their gods.

And one can imagine that on or about four days after what one today knows as the winter solstice, a chilled citizen of that northern clime would by some crude clock discover and report to the watchful that the sun had not only not retreated farther to the south but in fact inched perceptibly to the north. Such a report would have indicated that the gods had heard their prayers and had decided to return the sun to thaw their land and to assure them of the light of life and of its comfort and warmth and would have thereby initiated within the community a celebration of the event in which goodwill, brotherhood, gladness, cheer, and charity reigned during a festival of feasts.

I have seen scenes in history books of serfs flailing grain in the 15th century, of serfs cultivating a field with a harrow in the 13th century, of laborer generations ago scything hay, cradling wheat, shocking wheat and hay, just as I did under the mentorship of my grandfather on a farm in Summers County in the Twenties and Thirties. And I have known the sincere and joyous embrace of the winter solstice with its promise that the pinch and chill, the snow and ice, the mud and muck of winter were on the way out and that spring was on the way in.

I remember the depth of winter particularly when dinnertime came. The meal was served in the kitchen, the only room with heat except the living room where the fireplace with backlog and forelog and logs in between radiated heat and light and attracted after supper outstretched palms and chilled backsides of everyone in residence. The kitchen was lighted by a kerosene lamp that gave not much more illumination than a bottle of lightning bugs. But ‘twas enough to reveal the dishes of the meat, vegetables, fruits and grains harvested and preserved to sustain the family until spring. From a hilltop one viewing the farm house could detect only that faint light from fireplace and lamp, a speck of lame light in a vast ocean of darkness. Like all life, we hunkered down, drew close to the fireplace, and awaited the drama and the eventual demise of winter and reprise of spring.

I never read of the newborn Jesus having to spend his first night in a manger that I do not remember those dark evenings when I went to the barn with lantern to feed the stock that were waiting patiently for hay and corn. I would climb to the loft and fork down hay and open the grain box, select a number of ears of corn and distribute the hay to the cows and fill the horses’ mangers with corn. The box with the corn in it was the sort of box that Mary’s baby was laid for the night.

It was politically wise for the church fathers to select the winter solstice as the birthdate of Christ, just as it was politically wise and necessary for the bishops at Nicaea to vote to accept the belief that Jesus was God; for without that divinity attributed to him, Christianity would probably have long since been a footnote of history.

Christ’s birthday is occasion enough for celebration but even more basic is the return of the sun—for without the sun all life would freeze and resolve itself into mere ice.

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Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a regular columnist for the Nicholas Chronicle in Summersville and Huntington News Network.