Robert F. Kennedy Jr. owes us NO apology for what he said in Washington on Jan. 23
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. owes us NO apology for what he said in Washington on Jan. 23
If anyone’s denied the Holocaust, it’s those who have accused him of just that
News from Underground by Mark Crispin Miller.
Jan 28
On Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tweeted an apology for mentioning Anne Frank in his great speech in Washington on Sunday, Jan. 23. Expressing his regret “especially to families that suffered the Holocaust horrors,” he explained that his “intention was to use examples of past barbarism to show the perils from new technologies of control. To the extent my remarks caused hurt, I am truly and deeply sorry.”
As one whose own family “suffered the Holocaust horrors”—I lost nine cousins (that I know of) to the Nazis, who shipped them from Grodno (then in Poland, now in Belarus) for extermination—I take the view that Bobby should not have apologized, because nothing that he said about Anne Frank, or the Nazis, was “outrageous” or “deeply offensive” (as the U.S. Holocaust Museum charged, and as the Washington Post eagerly repeated); nor, in fact, did he invoke Anne Frank “to make a comparison” of the Holocaust “with the U.S. government working to ensure the health of its citizens,’” as the Post misrepresented what he’d said, quoting Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League—who, echoing the U.S. Holocaust Museum, called that imaginary equation “deeply inaccurate, deeply offensive and deeply troubling.” (“This must stop,” his tweet concluded threateningly.)
And since Bobby mentioned Anne Frank not to compare that Holocaust with what’s been happening worldwide these past two years, but—as he explained in his apologetic tweet—“to show the perils from new technologies of control,” what he said was not “reprehensible and insensitive,” as Cheryl Hines, Bobby’s wife, charged in her own huffy tweet. (She doesn’t look Jewish, but never mind.) “The atrocities that millions endured during the Holocaust should never be compared to anyone [sic] or anything,” she added, in her own variation on the same pious notion that the Holocaust Museum hammered, in angry harmony with Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL, and—also quoted by the Post—“Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Jerusalem, which said” that Bobby’s “comment” on Anne Frank “denigrates the memory of its [sic] victims and survivors.”
Not only do I think that Bobby shouldn’t have apologized for what he said that day, since what he said was not “offensive” or “inaccurate” or “insensitive” or “reprehensible”; but I would add that all those who took part in that deceptive propaganda takedown—the U.S. Holocaust Museum, and the ADL, and Yad Vashem, and Cheryl Hines, and all the media that have now piled on Bobby Kennedy for no good reason, from the Post and CNN (Jim Acosta vehemently quoting an indignant press release from the Auschwitz Museum), the New York Times, AP and Rolling Stone, to Trevor Noah (“No one ever talks about how good Anne Frank had it!”), “The View,” Forbes, Jimmy Kimmel (Kennedy “obviously never actually finished” The Diary of Anne Frank), Yahoo (“RFK, Jr.’s Dangerous Rhetoric Could Lead to Violence”), the Independent, the Guardian and the Sun, among others—should apologize to Bobby Kennedy, because their accusation is a lie; and, while they’re at it, they also should apologize to all the rest of us, for doing precisely what they claim he did, and even worse (as we shall see).
First things first: So what did Bobby say about Anne Frank? He introduced that brief aside by explaining what he called “turnkey totalitarianism”: “They’re putting in place all of these technological mechanisms for control that we’ve never seen before,” he noted, rightly. “It’s been the ambition of every totalitarian state from the beginning of mankind to control every aspect of behavior, of conduct, or thought, and to obliterate dissent,” he added, rightly. “None of them have been able to do it. They didn’t have the technological capacity,” he concluded, rightly, before thus (rightly) illustrating just that point:
Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did. I visited, in 1962, East Germany with my father, and met people who had climbed the wall and escaped, so it was possible. Many died doing it, but it was possible.
He then expanded on the “technological capacity” that Hitler (and Stalin, and Mao) did not have:
Today, the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run and none of us can hide. Within five years, we’re gonna see 415,000 low-orbit satellites. Bill Gates says his 65,000 satellites alone will be able to look at every square inch of the planet 24 hours a day. They’re putting in 5G to harvest our data and control our behavior; digital currency that will allow them to punish us from a distance and cut off our food supply; “vaccine” passports.
Now, I challenge Jonathan Greenblatt, or the sages at the U.S. Holocaust Museum and/or Yad Vashem, or Cheryl Hines, or the lay historians at Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, to say exactly how that point about Anne Frank was “deeply inaccurate” (or even shallowly inaccurate), “deeply offensive,” “insensitive” or “reprehensible.” Surely all those august guardians of the Holocaust are well-aware that it was possible to get away from Hitler’s Europe, as most survivors did—a fact established by a sprawling library of histories, written and oral (many of them in the Holocaust Museum, and Yad Vashem), and, as well, by movies like Casablanca (which Cheryl Hines has surely seen). That the surveillance grid envisioned by Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates and other technocrats is global, with “mechanisms … being put in place that will make it so none of us can run and none of us can hide,” and that so inescapable a system would be vastly worse than any merely national or regional totalitarian order—even Hitler’s—are facts that cannot be denied, or, therefore, decried as “reprehensible,” ”offensive” and/or censured as in any way “offensive.”
Thus Bobby Kennedy did not say what that livid propaganda chorus claims he said. But what if he had said it, bringing up Anne Frank so as to offer an outright “comparison” between the Holocaust and what’s going on, worldwide, right now, and/or a “comparison” between the Third Reich and the impending “New Normal”? If he had, he would have been on very solid ground, whereas those thundering that the Holocaust must never be invoked (except to silence criticism of Israeli policies), and that it “should never be compared to anything,” are, to put it bluntly, full of it, whether they’re just clueless (as they mostly are), or being disingenuous.
If it’s “deeply offensive” to observe the similarities between the Holocaust, or the Third Reich overall, and what’s happening today, so be it: I for one do not apologize for noting them, and warning, loud and clear, what they portend—as Bobby Kennedy was only right to do, in lucidly observing that the digital surveillance apparatus now in place, and gaining ground throughout the world, is vastly more repressive even than the cruder, merely continental system that eventually caught Anne Frank. I challenge any institutional guardian of the Holocaust to argue cogently against the claim that Hitler would have been quite awed by the surveillance system under COVID, and very much impressed by all the other current worldwide adaptations of his methodology, from the use of an “emergency” to cancel democratic governance in favor of his own imperial decrees (“COVID” having served, throughout the “democratic” West, precisely the same purpose that the burning of the Reichstag served for him), to the use of thugs in uniform to keep the masses “in compliance,” and punish peaceful protest with savage violence, enhanced by high-tech weaponry (“COVID” having made well-armored Brownshirts out of the police all over Europe, Canada, Australia and elsewhere), to the use of iron censorship to black out any contradiction of the reigning propaganda narrative (“COVID” having blanketed the world with propaganda every bit as cynical, inflammatory, bullying and false as Dr. Goebbels’ product), to the use of concentration camps to “quarantine” the non-compliant (“COVID” having made that nightmare a reality in Australia, and a strong possibility in Canada, New Zealand, the US, and, of course, China, among other places “threatened” by some incarnation of “the virus”).
However, it isn’t just those disparate anti-democratic tactics that recall the reign of Hitler, and the genocide that CNN and Jimmy Kimmel say we never must invoke. “Today,” writes Holocaust survivor Vera Sharav, “survivors [of the Holocaust] are shaken by the fear-mongering, and divisive, discriminatory measures against a minority. . . . These are painful reminders of the prelude to the Holocaust in which the Nazis:
Used the psychological weapons of fear and propaganda to impose a genocidal regime.
Demonized Jews as the spreaders of disease and the cause of their misery.
Systematically obliterated moral norms and values.
Destroyed their social conscience in the name of public health.”
Those steps created a supremely toxic atmosphere throughout the Reich—an atmosphere that’s all around us now, and one that all those vitriolic shots at Bobby Kennedy (and all the rest of us) exemplify. Back then, as Sharav reminds us, that atmosphere was expertly created by a mammoth propaganda drive portraying “the Jews” as vectors of disease—cholera, tuberculosis, syphilis—that would infect the Volk, and irredeemably pollute its precious “blood,” unless those pestilential interlopers were sealed off in ghettoes, and then removed entirely (and exterminated): “Jews are lice. They cause typhus,” as one Nazi propaganda poster put it back in 1941, in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Thus the Holocaust was actually conceived, and executed, as an absolutely necessary (though atrocious) measure to protect the public health—a fact elucidated brilliantly in James M. Glass’s “Life Unworthy of Life”: Racial Phobia and Mass Murder in Hitler’s Germany. If he were to read that book, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, might see that, if Bobby had made a “comparison” of the Holocaust with “the U.S. government working to ensure the health of its citizens,” it would not have been outrageous on its face, since Hitler’s government was likewise “working to ensure the health of its citizens”; and its strategy for cleansing Europe of the pestiferous “Jews” foretold the current strategy of “democratic” governments for getting rid of the “unvaccinated.” Both then and now, the plan was/is to demonize the targeted minority, so that the “healthy” population hates them; and, through incremental “health” measures, to make their lives impossible, before the final act.
End of Part 1