I'm still sitting here breathing hard with rage and sadness at the hate site and the poster. I couldn't bring myself to go to the awful place of the blog to read the original post, but I read with distaste the snippets that Ted quoted and I recoiled while fury rose in me.
I'm seventy-five years old. I was born in 1931 and I remember vividly the entire 2nd World War. When I would go to the movies with my friends we would get our weekly news via "The Eyes and Ears of the World", a news documentary that was shown before the main movie attraction. To this day the picture that comes into my mind when I think of "Panzer Divisions" frightens the hell out of me. Panzer Divisions were Nazi tanks plowing through the defending allied forces.
My parents were always glued to the radio to hear if the Nazi evil had been put down. One day I came home from junior high to find my mother staring into space from the window above the kitchen sink with tears running down her face. I ran to her to ask what had happened. The man who had been my Dad's best man at their wedding had been an Army Air Force pilot and was shot down over the English channel, he and his plane lost forever in the waters where the battle took place.
We were a peace-loving family who eschewed violence, but during those dark days we learned to hate Hitler and particularly the awful symbol of his realm of evil - the Swastika. My brother and i had a picture of a Swastika on our basement wall at which we threw darts and shot water pistols until my mother discovered it and tore it into shreds.
My Dad's job was as an electrical engineer and he became part of the Signal Corps because he was an expert at communication equipment. He also was drafted into a group of nationwide executives who could be ready in a national emergency to take over important tasks in Washington, DC, if our capitol ever were to be bombed. These jobs and his frequent business trips often took him away from us, but my mother always explained that he was doing his part in fighting to rid the world of Hitler.
At that time, unbeknownst to my brother and me and our parents, America was in the middle of refusing to accept Jewish refugees from Hitler's Holocaust and turning boats away from the only shore available to them at which their lives might be saved. When I learned those awful facts many many years later, I was appalled and ashamed and full of disgust and guilt for my heartless, cold country. But before I knew about America's disgraceful acts of human betrayal, the facts about the concentration camps had of course become public knowledge.
Dad was transferred to Baltimore, MD, and I started high school in a new town with new friends. My new best friend lived nearby, and we spent most of our leisure hours together. Her Dad had been a Major in the US Army. He had led one of the "liberation" teams of soldiers who, after the Nazis were on the run, had gone to the concentration camps to release and care for the dying Jewish victims. He had photographed scenes there at every stop he made, and had collected them in his personal scrapbook. But my friend told me that he had forbidden her to look at them. We wondered why.
Of course you know what happened. Just tell a teenager that he or she can't look at something, and that something is immediately in her hands. One afternoon when my friend's Mom was not at home, Kathy located the scrapbook and we opened it. Two hours later, we were crying and in deep shock over the horrors of that book. There were photos of pits where Jews had been shot and then had fallen into the pits. We searched the faces of the firing squad behind these dead and dying people. There was not a single face that had an ounce of remorse, pity or shame on it. There were photos of ovens with partially immolated bodies in it. Bones were on the filthy floor. There was a pile of shoes in one photo and a table covered with gold jewelry and watches in another. At the locked gates (yes, the Nazi animals had left, but had made sure the gates were locked behind them, knowing full well that the frail, sick Jews could never mange to escape by themselves) of the concentration camp fence, as my friend's Dad was just arriving, stood a line of the most pitifully thin people I'd ever seen. They were in torn striped sacks, and were nothing but skin and bones. The looks of sad, bewildered agony in their eyes will haunt me forever.
We sat for a long time in total silence with tears running down our faces. Kathy confessed to her Mom what we had done, and her Mom sighed and said that she and her Dad had not thought we were mature enough to see such evil incarnate, but that she hoped we'd remember the sin of it and make sure that nobody in our generation would repeat such inhumanity. Later, her Dad told us that after they had assured the poor captives that they were indeed free and would be helped, they toured the place and the major was so sickened that he had to leave briefly to vomit.
So, I"m sorry.. (I say that with considerable sarcasm; damned if I'm apologizing). I don't see a Swastika as anything but the supreme symbol of the worst genocide in the history of the world. I don't ever want to see one again...on anything. And when I see temples and homes and graves defaced by this symbol that will forever be known as the badge of evil, I want to do great harm to those who continue such hate. As a pacifist Quaker I love peace, but I don't believe in turning a blind eye or quiet hand to the virulence of unrelenting, mindless hatred. The 2nd World War is still fresh in my mind and memory, and I'll do my part to prevent those bigots who are too young to know the terrors of it from revamping its symbol into some sort of supposedly-innocent, innocuous sweet banner.
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