[cia-drugs] Simon Wiesenthal, Dead at 96

[norgesen]

Simon Wiesenthal, Dead at 96 by Peter Levenda It is a common question:  why go after all those Nazis from World War II?  They must be a hundred years old by now, if they are still alive.  Who benefits? I’ve been asked that question, and I know that others who have written about the Nazis and who hunt Nazis are frequently asked the same.  Perhaps the life of Simon Wiesenthal can give us some answers. At the age of 96, the man who single-handedly created the popular image of the  indefatigable Nazi hunter has died in Vienna.  There are a few people around the world who are, today, breathing a sigh of relief;  others who are celebrating the death of their nemesis, the man who has kept them on their toes and on the run for decades.  But for most of us, today is a day to remember not only the Holocaust but the sixty-year career of a man who survived the death camps only to turn around and go after the perpetrators.  If Simon Wiesenthal could keep up that struggle until the age of 96, you can be sure that Nazi war criminals who escaped justice in 1945 continued to struggle to evade his net for the same length of time, until they themselves died of old age or were brought to justice. Wiesenthal’s greatest contribution, however, may very well be his success at keeping the story of the Holocaust alive.  He did so in a way that many of us can appreciate: with intelligence, careful study and evaluation, and discretion.  Wiesenthal was a kind of conspiracy theorist, looking for hidden enemies in government, business, and culture around the world;  these enemies existed, of course, and were not the product of speculation or imagination, and he performed this function in a manner we should emulate.  He did not tar everyone with the same brush.  Even when confronted by the Nazi past of Kurt Waldheim, he stopped short of declaring the Austrian Prime Minister a war criminal (although he did call for his resignation), because the evidence just wasn’t there.  Wiesenthal was only interested in apprehending the real perpetrators of the Holocaust:  the sadistic butchers and fiends who populate the nightmares of the survivors.  The Eichmanns, the Barbies, the Mengeles. It was the fictional story of Josef Mengele – Ira Levin’s The Boys From Brazil – that brought Wiesenthal tremendous fame around the world.  He was portrayed by Laurence Olivier, not a bad choice.  Wiesenthal’s character also made an appearance in the film version of The Odessa File, a well-done and thoughtful interpretation of the Frederick Forsythe novel that starred a youthful Jon Voigt (for those of you too young to remember, Voigt is the father of Angelina Jolie).   Wiesenthal, in short, became iconic in the popular culture and he used that popularity to further his cause. The Simon Wiesenthal Center was the first place I called after my return from Chile and its notorious Colonia Dignidad.  I received courteous responses from them, but they were as cautious as their namesake and founder when it came to the presence of actual Nazi war criminals at the Colony.  They were aware of Colonia Dignidad, of course, and I had the impression that they were monitoring the situation in some manner, but their brief was more to the purpose of keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive at a time when it’s very existence was being questioned by the revisionists, a more important goal to be sure than hunting down a renegade war criminal lost in the mountains of Chile.  There was a moment when I felt a little like the young man in the opening sequences of The Boys From Brazil, who is taking photographs of Mengele in Paraguay and phoning Wiesenthal to tell him what he has found.  The Weisenthal character was necessarily skeptical and told the young man to forget about it and go home.  Skepticism in the service of research and investigation is a tremendous tool.  It saves one endless time going after wild geese, meaningless data, dead ends.  For those of us involved in the darker areas of historical research – sometimes confused with speculative history or even with conspiracy theorism – skepticism is a necessity.  It keeps us sane.  And may even keep us alive. But imagination is skepticism’s left hand.  Without it, we wouldn’t even be involved in looking behind the curtain, in revealing the deeper politics behind world events.  Imagination gives us the ability to conceive of other patterns, other connections between events, and renders us invulnerable to the cover story, the accepted version of events, the spin.  Unfortunately, Simon Wiesenthal did not need an active imagination.  He had experienced the sinister forces of history first-hand, in the death camps that took over eighty of his own relatives’ lives and nearly took his own.  It is my sincere hope that today Simon Wiesenthal – who stirred the imaginations of so many others, including my own – is now reunited with his wife (who died in 2003), with the family he lost in the Holocaust, and with the six million others he fought to have remembered and that they have enclosed him in an embrace of welcome, and of congratulations for a life well-lived and for his priceless contribution to the world.  http://www.sinisterforces.info/blog/index.php?/archives/18-Simon-Wiesenthal,-Dead-at-96.html Complete archives at http://www.sitbot.net/ Please let us stay on topic and be civil. 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