Tell-the-truth-and-shame-the-devil, Pdf.

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T
ELL THE
T &
RUTH
S
HAME THE
D
EVIL
As told to the author
by a little old man
in a plaid shirt
D :
EDICATION
For Germany.
For Germans who still
want to be German.
For Humanity.
T T & S D
ELL THE RUTH HAME THE EVIL
ISBN 978-1-937787-29-5
By GERARDMENUHIN
Copyright 2015 by GERARDMENUHINandTHEBARNESREVIEW
Published by:
THEBARNESREVIEW, P.O. Box 15877, Washington, D.C. 20003
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T
ELL THE
T &
RUTH
S
HAME THE
D
EVIL
As told to the author
by a little old man
in a plaid shirt
B G M
Y ERARD ENUHIN
PUBLISHED BY THE BARNES REVIEW 2015
“Sorrow is knowledge;
they who know the most,
must mourn the deepest
o’er the fatal truth,
the Tree of Knowledge
is not that of Life.”
—B , Manfred
YRON
I
THWARTED: HUMANITY’S
LAST GRASP FOR FREEDOM
T
his dog is a Labrador. Seldom barks and is good natured,

like most Labradors. Now and then, I join its owner for
one of his daily rounds to air the animal. He’s a Jeho-

vah’s Witness. Initially, he did his duty by trying to con-
vert me, but I told him that I don’t believe in anything I
can’t see, so he gave up.

If I needed to worship anything, it would be trees. Trees have
this in common with a folk culture and a manufacturing economy:

both are rooted in the ground and so are stable. A seasonal or serv-
ice economy, supplying a may-fly community of consumers, is un-
stable.
Any tree is worth countless consumers, as they rarely provide

anything beneficial. What they can and often do is to destroy trees.
It takes a subhuman with a chainsaw only seconds to cut down what
has taken maybe hundreds of years to grow. Picture an oak. This ad-
mirable tree stands on a hill and affords a majestic view. Its furrowed
trunk towers into the sky. It has seen more seasons than any person.
It has withstood countless winter storms. Its presence is ennobling
even when leafless. It doesn’t have to do anything, it just is. Then
along comes a consumer (an organism that obtains what it craves by
helping itself to other organisms) with a saw and cuts it down for
boards or even for firewood. Which would you rather have, the or-
ganism or the oak?
Leading on from the consumer, don’t speak to me about the
dignity of man. I haven’t seen a dignified human for a long time, if
6 | TELL THE TRUTH & SHAME THE DEVIL
ever. That is because dignity implies personal responsibility. The Dig-
nity of Man is just like the Rights of Man, an artificial concept, in-
vented by artificial, cosmopolitical bodies like the U.N. or the Court
of Human Rights, to displace national laws; intangible claptrap in-
tended to usurp established rights. Based on the fraudulent Décla-
ration des Droits de l’Homme of 1789, they exalted the empty
excitations Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité. If the right to clean air and water
is not guaranteed, and to freedom of speech and assembly, of what
use are these sonorous declarations?
My neighbor and I agree on many topics, except that, like most
sectarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses believe Christ will return to save
them. I expound on the degradation of everything, and he responds
with quotes from the Scriptures, which I check when I get home. He
is always right. I name the guilty; he calls them Satan. The Bible did
in fact foresee it all: John 8:44, or, if you prefer, Revelation 2:9. So
we’re both right.
I suppose it began with a sense, nothing more. Not even a vague
sentiment, let alone the certitude that what the average child is
taught about major historical events is a pack of lies. It was just a
lurking mental itch. My father never spoke of the war, any more than
he spoke of anything negative or disagreeable or, indeed, about the
past at all, if he could help it. My mother spoke mostly about the
past. Her past. But also, if the mood took her, of the superiority of
Edwardian (stressed “a”) architecture over the Victorian equivalent,
of her superior sense of dress and decoration, or of her war experi-
ences. She maintained the convictions of her generation, among
them, that Churchill had been a great man and Neville Chamberlain
a gullible one (“appeasement” may never shed its tarnish, although
any attempt to prevent war must be commendable). Although she
would lugubriously tell my brother and me that “you [note, not we]
would have been gassed if you had lived in Germany,”(cid:0) she was in no
sense Germanophobic; she even spoke some German. Of course,
Germany had not been part of her past, so it was not included in
the reminiscences that formed a large part of her conversation. I have
never met anyone whose opinions were so wholeheartedly based on
bygone criteria as my mother, or who so resolutely rejected any in-
TELL THE TRUTH & SHAME THE DEVIL | 7
fluence for change. She suffered the present, but judged it always
through the filter of her past, however irrelevant.
Until my late teens, my impressions of the war had been almost
entirely derived from the pictorial adventures of heroic Allied ser-
vicemen, known as “trash” at school (inspired by these, I was a pro-
lific doodler of battleships and planes).
As the captive audience of my mother’s recollections of the
Blitz, I habitually tuned out or deleted most of her repetitive anec-
dotes, out of resentment. I regret this now, as a clearer firsthand ac-
count of life in wartime London, however edited, would have been
informative. But the very manner of my mother’s monologues hin-
dered questions, which would have been considered mere interrup-
tions of the scheduled broadcast.
Associated topics included the “Wirtschaftswunder” years, the
miracle of postwar German industrial reconstruction, to which my
mother alluded during my parents’ few visits to my German school,
in 1957. At nine, I was unsurprisingly unaware of this phenomenon,
or of the incongruity of two advanced Anglo-Saxon nations de-
stroying each other. About fifteen years later, I heard an irascible
colonel on American radio voice a fitting verdict: “For the British
and the Germans to be fighting each other was an inappropriate en-
counter situation.” All the Germans I knew were unfailingly pleas-
ant and remarkable only for seeming each to possess the same
model of shiny dark blue suit, in retrospect perhaps in itself an in-
dication of their striving toward a return to bourgeois standards. The
schoolchildren at Hermannsberg were also models of normality, in
that, in their free time, they were chiefly occupied with games/sports,
amusement, music and outdoor pastimes. That their ancestors and
mine could have been incited to kill each other never occurred to
me. The only reference to the war that I remember is of a glancing
remark I overheard as I was drying myself after the morning shower,
when two older boys were exchanging hearsay about the fate of Ger-
man POWs in Russian captivity. Although it was typical of school-
boys’ gossip, the morbid subject naturally impressed me at the time.
Since then, I have learned much, some of it by reflection, some
from books and records of and about the time, which by their co-
8 | TELL THE TRUTH & SHAME THE DEVIL
pious footnotes and corroborative contents and cross-referencing,
confirm that the sympathy I have always felt for this much-maligned
and mistreated people is justified. In fact, I never gave the subject
much thought, occupied as I was with my daily drudgery, until the
Nineties, when, while I was ordering the contents of my deceased
grandparents’ house, I chanced on a copy of the National Zeitung,
the patriotic German newspaper to which my grandfather had con-
tributed a column for several years during the Sixties. He had de-
voted his life, by means of books and articles, to supporting the
Palestinians, among whom he had lived as a boy, during the first
decade of the 20th century. A Russian-Jewish immigrant, he had ex-
perienced much kindness from the local Arabs and had taken stock
of the attitude and expectations of some of the Jewish settlers.
The newspaper commanded respect, with its simple Maltese/
Iron Cross logo and boldly independent informative stance. Al-
though it entered my thoughts only intermittently, my ambition to
communicate with its publisher and friend of my grandfather’s grew
over the years, in measure as I was subjected to various revelations.
No mission to discover a universal truth inspired me, rather a wish
to understand my times and the development of the world, in par-
ticular to explain to myself this catastrophic caesura during the
1940s, a warp not only in time, but in Western European character,
during which the fathers and grandfathers of my German classmates
had allegedly done the unspeakable.
So hideous and shameful had been their crimes then that they
had even acquired their own appellation.
By inducing a particular bias into a hitherto neutral English
word, a commodious new orthodoxy was invented, so powerful that
its regular, ubiquitous invocation by the media had placed the en-
tire Western world under its spell. How could this be?
Due to the exceptional nature of the twelve years of National
Socialism, a large and growing body of lurid fiction and alleged fact
has materialized, based on its dramatic superficialities rather than on
any study or comprehension of its socialist policies, and inspired by
a particular agenda. Sobriety rejects sensationalism. A perusal of rep-
utable historical sources, some of them quite hard to find, helped
TELL THE TRUTH & SHAME THE DEVIL | 9
me to form my own opinion. The most powerful persuasion, how-
ever, did not come from the rather dry accounts in my reading, but
from the perfectly straightforward deduction that a people with the
traditions and culture of the Germans did not almost overnight be-
come barbarians and commit mass murder. Their military did not
lose its humanity just because it was accustomed to obeying orders.
Most tellingly, the descendants of these reputed monsters could not
have been the absolutely average children who surrounded me daily
while I was at school in Germany, children who could have come
from anywhere.
Three of the best known works on the Second World War are
General Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday
[Country Life Press], 1948), Winston Churchill's The Second World
War (London: Cassell, 6 vols., 1948-1954), and the Mémoires de
guerre of General de Gaulle (Paris: Plon, 3 vols., 1954-1959). In
these three works not the least mention of Nazi gas chambers is to
be found.
Eisenhower's Crusade in Europeis a book of 559 pages; the six
volumes of Churchill's Second World War total 4,448 pages; and de
Gaulle's three-volume Mémoires de guerre is 2,054 pages. In this
mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including
the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will
find no mention either of Nazi “gas chambers,” a “genocide” of
the Jews, or of “six million” Jewish victims of the war. Robert Fau-
risson, “The Detail (the alleged Nazi gas chambers),” The Journal of
Historical Review, March-April 1998 (Vol. 17, No. 2), pages 19-20)
Before we go any further, a brief note about the word “Nazi.”
“Nazi” is a political epithet invented by Jewish journalist and mem-
ber of the Social Democratic Party Konrad Heiden, during the 1920s,
as a means of denigrating the NSDAP and National Socialism. The
term is an imitation of the nickname given to Marxists of the SDP at
the time, Sozi. It was then popularized abroad by various Judaics and
other subversives, including Heiden himself, who fled the country
after the NSDAP were elected to government. The term was regarded
as a derogatory epithet by National Socialists and was used almost
exclusively by Marxist agitators. Typically, the use of Nazi Germany