Kosovo and the USHMM: A Small Connection?

In recent months the establishment media has barraged us with allusions to the Second World War and especially the Jewish Holocaust story while reporting on the situation in Yugoslavia. American propaganda has cast Milosevic as a modem day Hitler planning the extermination of the Kosovars. The New Republic was unable to resist the temptation and ran a cover story entitled, “Milosevic's Willing Executioners,” paraphrasing the title from Daniel J. Goldhagen's attack on the German people.

A recent article in USA Today (7/1/99) quoted Andrew Bacevich, a professor of International Relations at Boston University who commented on the propaganda effort of NATO in Kosovo, “In order to justify this thing, they needed to tap that memory of the Holocaust.” The images and relationship to the Holocaust is, however, more concrete than even the typical media-propagandist knows.

The hidden connection involves the $15 billion emergency supplemental bill passed by Congress in late May to fund the war. War, of course, is a costly activity. Today Tomahawk cruise missiles clock in at $l million. The US alone deployed 33,500 soldiers, 715 planes, and 19 ships. Our elected officials in Washington know that the American people understand how costly it is to fight a war, so what better time to add a few items to the emergency bill. Actually the Republicans managed to double the amount that Clinton had requested, all the time arguing that they opposed the war.

Arizona Republican John Shadegg described the final “emergency” spending as a “pork fest.” The final bill included, among various ridiculous wasteful items, $2 million for Holocaust Museum security. (See American Spectator, July 1999, for a more complete list of items buried in this bill.)

Somehow it occurred to our elected officials that this “crisis in Kosovo” was an opportune moment to bilk the American people for security for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Are our representatives really so delusional that they fear their “evidence” for the Holocaust might be damaged or stolen? How much can one get on the street for a replica of an air-raid shelter door? Surely, if the thing vanished tomorrow, plenty of replacements could be found for two million dollars. Or is it the plaster display model of an Auschwitz crematorium that they are protecting? Hitler's forged orders to murder the Poles?

With more than due diligence, this writer visited the USHMM to see where the $2 million in taxpayer dollars went. Immediately adjacent to the museum is a small cafe. Perhaps we can dub this eatery “the Auschwitz Cafe.” It serves lunch, albeit no meat. One wonders, why no meat? When the imagination begins to free-associate with some of the displays inside the Museum considers using a knife and fork on a pork chop, one decides to simply stop considering the matter.

In any event, I can now inform all those who plan to make their pilgrimage to this blight on the mall that the cafe is safe: bagels, salmon and Coke are served in a new air of safety and security. A state-of-the-art metal detector and several uniformed officers now protect the Museum Cafe.