January 15, 2009

• Dear Führer

  I have been offered an opportunity to send a message, “to a world leader, past or present,” and I chose you.  Don’t let it go to your head, sir.  It’s nothing personal.  I suppose that many of the others who respond to this challenge will address the man who is about to be inaugurated as President of the United States of America.  Since I couldn’t think of anything to say to Barack Obama, (a world leader who is nowhere near pure Aryan, by the way), I needed to think of someone else on whom to inflict this missive.    I had a wide field from which to choose, and I picked you because there is a situation now in Palestine that reminds me of you daily, every time I listen to the news.

  Does it please you to learn that you are so remembered, that your political legacy affects the African continent into the next millennium, over sixty years after your own death, and nearly seventy-five years after Hindenburg’s death, when you added his power to that which you already possessed?  Don’t let that go to your head, either, sir.  You might not be so pleased to learn just how your political legacy has worked out in this instance. . . and then again, perhaps it would amuse you.

  Some say your foreign policy was aimed toward gaining lebensraum, territory, for Aryan Germany, while others say you were motivated more by a desire to exact revenge on the victors who had ganged up on Germany in the Great War to End All Wars.  I think you might have had other, more personal, motivation and had found it expedient to use the restoration of Germany’s prestige and power and the conquest of territory, as motivators to gain the support of your people.  If I could question you, I would ask about that, but this is a one way channel and I should just get on with telling you what I have to say.

  Remember the Jews?  How could you forget?  Targeting them gained you much support from the many German people who owed money to Jewish bankers.  Seizing their property enriched your treasury.  Your propaganda people turned them into a useful scapegoat and rallying point, which consolidated your power among your countrymen.

  Unfortunate, wasn’t it, that the British put up so much resistance, much more than Poland or France, for example, and that just when it seemed you might possibly defeat the British Empire, the upstart Americans dropped their Isolationist policies after your Japanese allies bombed their territory.  Yes, I suppose you had some second thoughts, then, about the Tripartite Treaty.  Anyhow, you lost the war, didn’t you?  But you probably can’t guess how matters ended up for the Jews.

  With so many of them dead and others displaced, they won a lot of sympathy and were given a patch of Lebensraum in Palestine for their own, if they could manage to defend it from the Palestinians they displaced.  I suppose that the British and Americans who supported the idea considered that patch of desert as being of little value.  Something had to be done about the Jews, and this was what the Zionists wanted, so. . . .

  To the Jews, of course, their new Land of Israel was just a portion of the land that their God had given them, His Chosen People.  To the Palestinians, it was their ancestral homeland, and “home” is a powerful concept, about as much so as Lebensraum, wouldn’t you say?  Through powerful friends and abundant aid, and their own fervent determination to preserve their home in The Promised Land, the Israelis have hung on and grown militarily strong, but their displaced Palestinian neighbors have never given up on getting their homeland back.

  Carrying on enmities that stretch back throughout known history, those two Semitic peoples continue fighting over that fruitful and history laden piece of Earth. In this present go-’round, the one precipitated by the Endlösung der jüdischen Frage that blew up in your face, sometimes their conflict has cooled to occasional guerrilla attacks or terror bombings, and sometimes it heats up into major warfare.  Currently, a little strip of disputed land is being pounded to bits by Israeli bombs and shells, to such an extent that pity for the Palestinians has been aroused in the hearts of some of Israel’s traditional allies.

  I have even heard some people talking about Jews in ways similar to those in which you used to talk about them.  I wonder how you’d feel about all this, if you were still capable of feeling anything at all.

  Some (perhaps) interesting additional reading I found incidentally while fact-checking this entry:

  Hitler and Evolution
  Understanding Obama:  the Making of a Führer
  Adolf Hitler Motivation (astrology)

  Just in case I did not make it obvious enough with the link in my first paragraph, this entry is in response to the second topic of 2009 for Featured Grownups:

  As America experiences a changing of the guard (so to speak) next week, if you could talk to a world leader, past or present, who would you talk to, and what would you say?

  

  • 5:56 pm
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