XPost: soc.culture.new-zealand, soc.culture.australian, soc.culture.jewish   
   XPost: soc.culture.austria   
   From: me@privacy.net   
      
   "Riain Y. Barton"  wrote in message   
   news:sNSdnWpo8rhsMQrcRVn-qg@comcast.com...   
   > WHAT HAS THIS TO DO WITH HIS SOURCE -- WHICH IS COMPLETE FICTION?!!!   
   >   
   > FUCK OFF AND GO KISS THE ARSE OF A NEO-NAZI!   
      
   More of your wit and charm for which you are most famous for.   
      
   In fact, Lenni Brenner's writing is by no means complete   
   fiction, and many of his contentions can easily be corroborated   
   by other sources, such as my citation of Judge Halevi's decision   
   in the case of The Attorney General v. Malkiel Grünwald, in which   
   the Israeli government prosecuted  Grünwald for libel because   
   he had publicly accused Kastner of having collaborated with   
   the Nazis.  The reason the government chose to prosecute   
   Grünwald  was because Kastner was at that   
   time a spokesman for the Ministry for Trade and Industry for   
   David Ben Gurion's government, and was indeed a   
   friend of Ben Gurion.  As it so happened not only   
   did the Israeli government lose its case against   
   Grünwald but many of the charges that Grünwald   
   had made against Kastner were found to be   
   well-grounded, as affirmed by Judge Halevi in   
   his ruling.   
      
   This sort of thing shows up the limitations of your   
   way of engaging neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers and   
   others like ilk.  While, perhaps 90-95% of these   
   folk are little more than illiterate morons, the   
   other remaining 5-10% include some fairly   
   clever folk, who are often quite well-versed in the history   
   of WW II and often are quite familiar with the scholarly   
   literature concerning that period.  You are not going   
   to get very far with those kinds of people by denying   
   events and facts that can be corroborated by   
   respectable scholarly sources.  The fact is there were   
   Jews who collaborated with the Nazis during WW II   
   as there were all sorts of other people who did likewise.   
   And they acted from all sorts of motives, some fairly   
   honorable, and others from clearly less than honorable   
   reasons.  Many people collaborated in the hope that   
   the Nazis would spare their lives and the lives of their   
   families.  Many of the local Jewish leaders collaborated   
   in the hope that the Nazis would go easier on their   
   communities.  After all, that was the way that Jews   
   had often dealt with anti-Semites in the past and they   
   saw no reason why what had worked with earlier   
   anti-Semites should not work with the Nazis. In   
   this, their evaluations of the Nazis turned out to   
   be tragically wrong.   
      
   In the case of Dr. Kastner, he apparently started   
   out with good intentions.  He hoped to save at   
   least a portion of the Hungarian Jewish community,   
   and barring that, at least the most prominent   
   of Hungarian Jews.  In return, he promised   
   Eichmann and other Nazi officials that he and   
   the other Zionist leaders in Hungary would   
   work to ensure that peace and order was   
   maintained both in the Jewish ghettos and   
   in the concentration camps - the Nazis,   
   at that time, fearing Jewish uprisings such   
   as had occured in Poland in the Warsaw Ghetto.   
      
   Since at this point in the war, the Germans   
   were running short on manpower, they had   
   good reason to fear the outbreaks of unrest   
   among Hungarian Jews, such as had occured   
   in Poland where the Warsaw Ghetto uprising   
   took nearly a month to suppress and required   
   the diversion of thousands of German soldiers   
   from the front.  As it so happens, Dr. Kastner   
   was true to his word, and he made sure   
   that the truth about the Nazis' extermination of   
   the Jews did not become known to the Jews   
   of Hungary.  Thus, Dr. Kastner did indeed do   
   his part to ensure that there would be no   
   Jewish revolts in Hungary, no equivalents   
   to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as had   
   occured in Poland. In exchange for this,   
   Dr. Kastner was permited to save the   
   lives of several thousand Hungarian Jews   
   including local notables and a number of   
   Zionist activists.  Given the tenousness   
   of the Germans' control over Hungary   
   at that time, that was indeed quite a   
   bad bargain for Dr. Kastner to have   
   entered into.   
      
   As I said before, Kastner seems to have   
   originally started out with good intentions,   
   however, Eichmann and other Nazi officials   
   found that they could appeal to Kastner's   
   vanity, since Kastner seems to have   
   very much thought of himself as a   
   "rescuer of Jews."  Eichmann, later on,   
   claimed to have seen in Kastner, a man   
   very much like himself.   
      
   As Hannah Arendt put it, concerning Eichmann and   
   Kastner, in *Eichmann in   
   Jerusalem* (NY: Pengiuin, 1964) pp.41-2 :   
      
   "His (referring to Eichmann) first personal contacts with Jewish   
   functionaries, all of them   
   well-known Zionists of long standing, were thoroughly satisfactory.   
   The reason he became so fascinated by the "Jewish question," he   
   explained, was his own "idealism"; these Jews, unlike the   
   Assimilationists, whom he always despised, and unlike Orthodox   
   Jews, who bored him, were "idealists," like him.  An "idealist,"   
   according to Eichmann's notions, was not merely a man who believed   
   in an "idea" is someone who did not steal or accept bribes, though these   
   qualifications were indispensable.  An "idealist was a man who lived   
   for his idea - hence he could not be a businessman - and who was   
   prepared to sacrifice everything and, especially, everybody.  When   
   he said in his police examination that he would have sent his own   
   father to his death if that had been required, he did not mean merely   
   to stress the extent to which he was under orders, and ready to   
   obey them; he also meant to show what an "idealist" he had always   
   been.  The perfect "idealist," like everybody else, had of course his   
   personal feelings and emotions, but he would never permit them to   
   interfere with his actions if they came into conflict with his "idea."  The   
   greatest "idealist" Eichmann ever encountered among the Jews was   
   Dr. Rudolf Kastner, with whom he negotiated during the Jewish   
   deportations from Hungary and with whom he came to an agreement   
   that he, Eichmann, would permit the "illegal" departure if a few   
   thousand Jews to Palestine (the trains were in fact guarded by German   
   police) in exchange for "quiet and order" in the camps from which   
   hundreds of thousands were shipped to Auschwitz.  The few thousand   
   saved by the agreement, prominent Jews and member of the   
   Zionist youth organizations, were in Eichmann's words, "the best   
   biological material."  Dr. Kastner, as Eichmann understood it,   
   had sacrificed his fellow-Jews to his "idea," and this was as it   
   should be.  Judge Benjamin Halevi, one of the three judges at   
   Eichmann's trial, had been in charge of Kastner's trial in Israel,   
   at which Kastner had to defend himself for his cooperation   
   with Eichmann and other high-ranking Nazis; in Halevi's   
   opinion, Kastner had "sold his soul to the devil." Now   
   that the devil himself was in the dock he turned out to be   
   an "idealist," and though it may be hard to believe, it   
   is quite possible that the one who had sold his soul   
   had also been an "idealist". "   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)