Notes on the Culture Wars

In an undated pitch for contributions. Rabbi Marvin Hier, Dean and Founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, writes of one of the Center’s many accomplishments: “When the 'revisionist' Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust placed slick, full-page ads in college and university newspapers all across the country denying the historical truth of the Holocaust, we mobilized our NATIONAL TASK FORCE AGAINST HATE [caps in the original] to combat efforts to diminish and deny the Nazi Genocide and demean its victims.” The rabbi is right. That’s what they did.

BEIJING: “In the most sweeping example on record of government Internet censorship. China has blocked access to hundreds of politically sensitive Web sites including those of human-rights groups, foreign media outlets, Tibetan independent networks and Taiwanese and Hong Kong democratic political organizations. . . the crackdown appeared to be part of an ongoing campaign against 'spiritual pollution’ orchestrated by the Beijing regime.” (Los Angles Times, 6 September 96.)

“Spiritual pollution” is a generic slogan. Moslem tyrants, Christian fundamentalists, communists, the Rabbi Hiers all use it as a tool to stay on top in the cultural wars. Always out in front, the geniuses at the SWC have refined the two-word slogan to one: “hate”. Hate is spiritual pollution, thus the SWC can work to criminalize intellectual freedom on the Internet, charging hate here, charging hate there, just like their spiritual buddies in Beijing.

Jamaat al-Muslimeen, the Islamic Peoples’ Movement (Baltimore) has asked that I join in an effort to “Boycott Jewish Businesses Which Support Israel.” I decline. No specific reason. No enthusiasm. I recall that back in the 1950s and 60s there was much talk about not buying goods, particularly Volkswagens, made in Germany. I had no enthusiasm for it.

University of Puget Sound student David Stennett contributed three books to the campus library. The library didn’t want them because they were not of “sufficient scholarly value to be included in our collection.” The books were The Ball Report by John Ball, Not Guilty at Nuremberg by Carlos Porter, and Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist by Bradley Smith. Confessions is a literary work so there’s no argument there. But the refusal of the books by Ball and Porter is one more tiny power play by the cultural establishment.

Outlaw Biker Tattoo Revue (#52, 1996) ran an article titled “The Tattooed Skins of Buchenwald: Hidden Horror of the Holocaust.” Written by Kenneth Kipperman, it relates all the tattoo stories and then some that I have ever heard about Buchenwald and Ilse Koch and the human skin (“goat” skin according to General Lucius B. Clay) lampshades, and includes many photos in color, some of which I have never seen before. Kipperman was “born in Lodz, Poland, the son of two Holocaust survivors.”

President Clinton’s cabinet I can understand, but whitewash biker periodicals?