I am cursed with memory.
I once believed that my extraordinary ability to remember was a genetically encoded gift from my pre-Celtic ancestors, but I now know that I am cursed.
Some people must be blessed with an off button, a type of selective amnesia—awful people like Allen Dulles, Henry Kissinger, and John Demjanjuk. Otherwise, how could they live with themselves? They must have the ability to alter the archives of their mind, to hit a biological delete button and create little areas of forgetfulness amnesia in the dark corners of their memory.
I cannot. When I think about the secret records I have read, there are nights of nightmares when I tell myself I must remember them all, every document, every page, every line. In truth, I cannot. No one could.
In the morning, it is worse when I realize that much, if not most of what I have read in secret files remains within my memory. I cannot cut them out. Even after all my surgeries, my worst memories have been left intact: the ones about the Holocaust. I am cursed. (more...)
Looking back, I can see that I've given quite a bit of space to this stream of thought on my blog. My readers deserve an explanation.
The first time I heard the name "Majdanek" was my first day at high school. The students in home class were paired off as buddies to help them get better acquainted and form friendships. My buddy was a pudgy, bearded Orthodox Jewish son of a Rabi. He became intrigued with my Polish Catholic background and asked where my family was from. I only knew that my father's family had immigrated from Lublin before the war. On hearing this, my new friend litterally blanched and whispered "Majdanek" Something in my blood makes certain people see ghosts.
The next, and much stronger, manifestation of this strangeness occured during my undergraduate years at the University of Toronto. The college where I was first resident was the landing pad in Canada for the Frankfurt School; it pioneered Canada's first "Women's Studies" programme. My don, a graduate of Columbia University, studied under Herbert Marcuse. Another don was a lecturer in the Women's Studies programme; she had done her disertation at Berkely under Theodor Adorno on the topic of The Authoritarian Personality. TAP was the scholarly blueprint for de-Nazifying postwar Europe and "clearing" emigres for recruitment to the American military/industrial/acacemic/corporate complex.
.The Frankfurt School was one handy-dandy Swiss army knife of an academic institution. On the one hand, it prepared technocrats for a Huxlian world in which genders are arbitary and populations are controlled.. On the other, it scrubbed Nazi war criminals of their malodorous past and gave them a new field of genocide -- the modern abortuary. Recalling my dinner mates at that college, an awfull lot of them were sons and daughters of emigres from former Axis regimes. One stands out -- the daughter of a former Nazi officer. An Austrian, he was a high-ranking Freemason who sat on the board that approved funding for the establishment of that Women's Studies programme. Small world!
I can't count the number of times that my life has intersected the Death's Head mafia. In school, in industry, in church, in social organizations -- the infiltration is so thorough and seemless that you can't tell where "they" end and "we" begin. Is there still a "we"? John Loftus and a handfull of people who really look -- that's a pretty thin connection to our past; a connection between Majdanek and today's baby-killing camps.
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| The kind of holocaust survivor honoured by my alma mater |
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