by Qutb » Tue Sep 27, 2005 9:44 am
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. <br><br>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.<br><br>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. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>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.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> 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.<br><br>(...)<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>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.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> It keeps us sane. And may even keep us alive.<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>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.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <br><br>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. <br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://sinisterforces.info/blog/index.php">sinisterforces.info/blog/index.php</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> <p><!--EZCODE FONT START--><span style="color:black;font-family:century gothic;font-size:x-small;"><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Qutb means "axis," "pole," "the center," which contains the periphery or is present in it. The qutb is a spiritual being, or function, which can reside in a human being or several human beings or a moment. It is the elusive mystery of how the divine gets delegated into the manifest world and obviously cannot be defined.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--></span><!--EZCODE FONT END--><br><br></p><i></i>