OFF-TOPIC: REQUIRED READING

HATRED LEAVES ITS TATTOO



To Anyone Reading This:

There was a Holocaust. More than six million men, women and children were exterminated, their bodies carted off like so much garbage, their emaciated, mangled carcasses tossed into ditches and mass graves.

People deny that there was a Holocaust. Even today, as lesser-known, but equally reviling holocausts ("ethnic cleansing," "racial purification," "civilian massacres," "wholesale carnage," and a host of other terms are applied) take place throughout the world. As I sit here. As I write these words. Denial leads to recurrence, to a lack of vigilance, to a trivializing of the monstrous side of Human Nature. A monstrous element that remains unchanged and right beneath the surface of most smiles despite years of civilization and technological advancement. Despite all attempts at education.

Political correctness, semantics and hideous metaphors abound ("The Israelis are worse than the Nazis -- look at how they've slaughtered innocent Palestinians!") to twist the facts so far out of perspective, so inanely out of context, that the truth is trampled. One of my favorites is the now infamous declaration by the great minds of the United Nations that "Zionism is Racism." They might just as easily have declared "Survival is Sin." ...or "Questioning Authority is Terrorism." Hatred is always fashionable. Rationalization is the only thing which is even more fashionable.

It is like a children's game of "telephone"... atrocities are ignored or rationalized while self-preservation is decried as aggression.

I had an eighth-grade teacher with a number tattooed on his forearm. It was noticeable because he would roll up his sleeves when he wrote on the chalkboard. I was mesmerized by it.

He caught me staring once, at the end of class and whispered, devoid of expression, as if all emotion had been wrought from him like the last tears from a hankerchief, "Branded like cattle. They did this to me. People did this to other people. And much, much worse. Much worse." His eyes were focused on some distant point in the past, right through me. I had never seen a person travel back in time before -- I knew then, intuitively, that time travel has always existed.

Tattoos, like old stories, become distorted. But the distortion is only superficial. There are deep, permanent, but unseen burns, cuts and bruises on the inside. On the souls of so many people. They never are fully healed, and they never go away. They are incurable. These scars, like the truth, are forever.

Denial is simply dishonesty.


Faithfully,

Douglas Castle

p.s. Please forward this message to everyone you know. Keeping it to yourself is a small, but not inconsequential, act of irresponsibility and inhumanity. These can be habit-forming if permitted.
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