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[images
added by this website]
 British
historian David Irving was jailed recently in
Austria for denying the Holocaust. He may yet be
jailed in his own country for not denying it
enough.
 - Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Saturday, April 7,
2007
Throwing
The Holocaust down a memory hole
by George
Jonas
National Post
IT took 23 years
longer than George Orwell envisaged in his
novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, but his infamous
"memory hole" has made its appearance in Big
Brother's politically correct realm, formerly known
as the United Kingdom. The first two historic
events that fell into it were the Holocaust and the
Crusades. According to news reports, "some British
schools are dropping lessons on the Holocaust and
the Crusades, seeking to avoid antagonizing Muslim
students."
Orwell's book was called dystopian
but, except for some technological fancies, it was
a pretty accurate description of a modern
Nazi-or-Marxist-style tyranny. The world had
experienced both by 1949 when Nineteen Eighty-Four
was published: Orwell had to invent or exaggerate
nothing. The only futuristic thing about the novel
was that it was set in a nightmarish empire that
used to be Great Britain. Otherwise, it was a
factual portrayal of contemporary
totalitarianism.
In Orwell's novel, past events that
didn't sit well with Big Brother went into a memory
hole, just as they did in Stalin's Russia or Mao's
China. Whatever the tyrant deemed politically
incorrect -- people, books, phrases, facts --
simply vanished. The ruling party's slogan was:
"Who controls the past controls the future; who
controls the present controls the past."
Orwell's prophetic expectation of
politically correct tyrannies proliferating
throughout the formerly free countries of the
Western world is proceeding on schedule; what is
unexpected is the ideological force behind them.
Most people, Orwell included, expected it to be
Marxism-Leninism (or its New Left varieties,
Fanonism, Maoism, Pol Potism, etc.) or perhaps some
Neo-Nazi revival. Instead, it's turning out to be
theocratic Islam.
Islamo-fascism has come out of left
field, figuratively as well as literally. Today
it's seeping though the body politic of
Western-style liberal democracies through the maze
of channels prepared by the little red tape worms
of the ultra-liberal egalitarian welfare state for
their own purposes. Or, to switch from a
subterranean metaphor to a lofty one, it would be
amusing, if it weren't so tragic, to see the most
rigid and intolerant of evil genies flying the
friendly skies of moral relativism and tolerance as
they set out to drop bombs on us from magic carpets
embroidered by Islamic symbols.
One particular explosion is just
beginning to reverberate throughout Britain, having
been detected by a government-backed study for the
Department for Education and Skills. According to
the Daily Mail, the study found that some
teachers are "dropping courses covering the
Holocaust at the earliest opportunity over fears
Muslim pupils might express anti-Semitic and
anti-Israel reactions in class." Reporter Laura
Clark quotes the authors as saying that
teachers feared confronting "anti-Semitic sentiment
and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils" and
that "in another department, the Holocaust was
taught despite anti-Semitic sentiment among some
pupils [but] the same department
deliberately avoided teaching the Crusades at Key
Stage 3 (11- to 14-year-olds) because their
balanced treatment of the topic would have
challenged what was taught in some local
mosques."
John Long, writing in City
Journal, quotes the Council for the Advancement
of Arab-British Understanding saying it is time for
England to produce a new flag and adopt a patron
saint "not identified with our bloody past and one
we can all identify with." This, apparently, is
because some British Muslims object to the cross of
St. Andrew in the Union Jack, since Crusaders wore
the emblem. How do the authorities react to all
this? Long writes that a spokesman for the
Commission for Racial Equality said the report
painted a "worrying picture."
The study that is causing the furor
is attempting to be non-judgmental. "Teachers and
schools avoid emotive and controversial history for
a variety of reasons, some of which are
well-intentioned," its authors write. A member of
parliament for one of the regions affected has been
more outspoken: "I can only describe it as
madness," commented Lancaster and Wyre MP Ben
Wallace.
If it's madness, there's method in
it. As I've had occasion to write several times
over the last two decades, when we embraced the
idea of non-traditional immigration, we forgot that
when groups of distant cultural and political
traditions arrive in significant numbers, they may
establish their own communities not merely as
colourful expressions of ethnic diversity --
festivals or restaurants -- but as separate
cultural-political entities. We compounded the
problem when we tried to turn this liability into
an asset by promoting multiculturalism, and began
flirting with the notion that host countries aren't
legitimate entities with their own cultures, only
political frameworks for various co-existing
cultures.
Extending our values to others is one
thing, but modifying our values to suit the values
of others is a vastly different proposition. It's
now populating "Eurabia" with a new type of
immigrant, whose goal is not to fit in, but to
carve out a niche for his own tribe, language,
customs, or religion. It's creating a schizophrenic
European Union that instead of building its future
is running hither and yon trying to revise its
past.
British
historian David Irving was jailed recently
in Austria for denying
the Holocaust. He may yet be jailed in his
own country for not denying it enough.
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