The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel

My father, who was from Brooklyn, once told me of an accident he saw between a city bus and a garbage truck. He noticed that there were only four or five people on the bus, which was only slightly damaged, but one of the passengers began writhing in pain, wailing that his neck hurt, and his back was broken. Very quickly, he noted, the other passengers, one by one according to each one’s wittedness, also began similar plaints, one of them even getting down on the floor in his agony.

Then my father noted a passerby getting on the crippled bus who quickly adopted the poses affected by those who had actually been aboard at the time of the accident. Then another passerby did the same, and by the time police arrived at the scene and called ambulances, there were more grievously injured people on the bus than the bus had seats. Ambulances carried off the victims for more than an hour after the massacre. My studious father checked for blood after the bus had been emptied, and found none.

I think my father intended the story, which he might well have exaggerated, but not by much, as a lesson in the human capacity for adventitious duplicity. As he explained, the people who actually had been on the bus, but had not been hurt, were run-of-the-mill frauds—common, and even understandable. But the ones who had gotten onto the bus after its accident, now these, he pointed out, these were the aggravated frauds. These were the ones we all need to watch out for, and oppose when we encounter them.

I have since come to take the story as emblematic of many such incidents both large and small, but the biggest such caper I’ve ever detected is the vaunted Holocaust of the European Jews during World War II.

Veterans Today has recently carried an excellent compendium of Holocaust fakery in Jonas Alexis’s excellent “Denying Holocaust Forgeries, Hoaxes, and Fabrications,” but it perforce overlooks that most numerous form of Holofakery, the “I was there” lie on the part of people who do not carry it to the point of writing books that become bestsellers on the strength of the unfailing gullibility of Oprah Winfrey and many, many others.

One such, who did carry it to the point of a public speech during his first presidential campaign in 2008, is our own Commander in Chief, Barack Obama. He didn’t, of course, say that he had been in a concentration camp, but rather, that his uncle had been among the American soldiers who liberated one.

Barack Obama, of course, has no uncle who ever served in any branch of the US armed forces. But, just as good, no American soldier so much as laid eyes on Auschwitz while on duty. The camp’s “liberation” came as the opening of the 44-year-long occupation of Poland by the Soviet Union. The inmates no doubt received far better care from their German captors than they could expect from their Red Army liberators, possibly explaining the hasty flight west-ward—into Germany—that many of them undertook as soon as the fighting died down.

This account is not offered to acquaint any reader with the idea that Barack Obama, like virtually all his fellow politicians, tells lies—both transparent ones, like these, and others impossible to falsify because of the opaque veil of secrecy he and his predecessors have drawn over increasing sectors of government activities. Rather, this report is submitted to demonstrate how the story of the Holocaust as hatched in wartime under the aegis of Allied propaganda and institutionalized shortly afterwards in the travesty known as the Nuremberg and other war-crimes trials, has long since become the tool of knaves and scoundrels seeking the power they need to pursue concealed, destructive agendas of their own.

Above all, this already-venerable legend of spectacular cruelty on the part of Germans toward Jews has served the Israeli state from even before its bloody establishment, and both sustained it and provided it with irreproachable excuses for the program of conquest and subjugation it has pursued since it first promised in 1948 to become “a light unto nations.”

Many other lesser politicians have ridden this juggernaut of conscience into office even while writers and plagiarizers such as Elie Wiesel have amassed Nobel Prizes along with wealth and fame from it. The late Tom Lantos, Congressman from California, claimed status as a Holocaust Survivor on the basis of a sojourn he took, allegedly at gunpoint, but possibly in search of a better diet, from his native Budapest to a nearby work camp, from which he was returned (unharmed) in well under a year. Of course, his return is styled an escape in his biography.

Closer to the Obama “my (nonexistent) relative was there” is Dov Hikind, a member since 1983 of the New York General Assembly, who claims Holocaust survivorship for both of his parents and has distinguished himself through a panoply of parochial stunts of which perhaps the best is getting banks in his Brooklyn district to waive wire-transfer fees on the monthly Holocaust-reparations payments received by so many of his heavily Jewish constituency. No doubt his own parents have both benefitted from this as well as other such policies instituted by their son, the Assemblyman.

The Holocaust has served as such a powerful political battering ram for so long it is impossible to catalog all the candidacies it has buttressed in the US as well as other countries, nor of course all the official perfidy committed by these particular candidates, who may as a group have been even more nefarious than the general run of politicians, a low standard by any count.

But it’s clear that the bus wreck has been filled many times over, and the power and protection of the Holocaust legend is such that it will be filled many times again before its political serviceability finally peters out.