March 24 was the first anniversary of NATO’s "campaign" against Yugoslavia. The Serbian province of Kosovo has now been detached from Serbia proper. It is supposedly policed by a NATO occupation force called KFOR, but this body of 40,000 troops apparently cannot keep the peace or modify the vindictive aggressiveness of the Kosovo Liberation Army, into whose hands it has effectively delivered Kosovo. The KFOR administrator, Bernard Kouchner, has frequently appealed for more police, rather than soldiers, to control the ethnic Albanians or, less frequently, the remaining Serbs. Thinking people in the West are gradually coming to realize that this "campaign," so lightheartedly begun at the insistent urging of Madame Albright and U.S. President Clinton, was launched on the basis of probably false charges against the Serbs and has plainly created a far worse mess in the Balkans than already existed.

Of course, this does not stop the U.S. State Department from putting a price–five million dollars–on the head of Yugoslav President Milosevic, indicted as a war criminal in a war that we–his accusers–began. This is a rather strange thing for one government to do against the head of another sovereign nation with which it is at peace, but this world of the dawning twenty-first century is a rather strange place. Charges have also been filed against Messrs. Clinton and Blair, et al., but inasmuch as the International Tribunal is, so to speak, their creature, it is unlikely that much will come of it. Vae victis, woe to the conquered, as we have written earlier. For any who hope that a realization of the complex truth will finally come to the victors, the first issue of 2000 the editorialist of the London Spectator offers a cold bath:

What people remember is that Blair stood up to the Serb tyrant, put some spine into Clinton, and won. They don’t care what is going on now in Kosovo, the purges against the Serbs. They don’t care that Slobo and the rest of the gang are still in power in Belgrade. The public know that we fought, and we won, and that is it.

One of the most perplexing problems for those of us who appreciate Germany, Germans, and German culture is the way in which that highly educated people allowed Hitler to have his way, displaying or feigning to different degrees ignorance of and indifference to what he was plotting and finally executing against the Jews. Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, may well be exaggerated and unjust to the majority of Germans. Nevertheless, even if the majority did not consist of "willing executioners" ready to participate actively in the destruction of a people, their ignorance, indifference, and inaction are to be condemned.

But what about us? The generation of Germans who supported Hitler enthusiastically or endured him with agony has largely passed away. What about Americans who like the Germans display ignorance of, indifference to, and inaction about things that our government ordains, even if we do not willingly collaborate, as Goldhagen charged so many Germans with doing? Those who think realize that in the most recent Balkan "campaign," which apparently cost at least 3,000 civilian lives in Serbia and has plunged the entire nation into misery and much of the surrounding region into great difficulties, our leaders acted not merely without proper authorization, but in violation of constitutions and charters–the United States, French, and German constitutions, the United Nations and NATO charters. But worry? Us? We "know that we fought, and that we won, and that is it."

The fact that millions of Germans, if not willing executioners, at least approved by their silence the atrocities Hitler was preparing, seemingly so hard to attribute to a nation well educated and more or less infused with Christianity, is unfortunately not unique. We have already drawn attention to public indifference to what we may properly call crimes in Kosovo. But consider the amazing indifference of the American public to a silent holocaust, perpetrated under the highest auspices, with the approval of the Supreme Court, the enthusiastic support of the U.S. President, and the compliance of close to half of the United States Senate: abortion. This "procedure" has taken close to 40 million developing human lives since 1973. It is becoming more and more widely admitted that abortion is what the German Federal Constitutional Court called it, "a homicidal act," although one performed under the most exalted auspices. But who cares? We know that the economy is sound, the stock market is in the stratosphere, we are the world’s sole superpower, the world’s "hegemon"–a term coined to express our uniquely exalted status. What does it matter if one-third to one-quarter of all babies conceived in America are "terminated, safely and legally" before birth? What does it matter if the President approves it even minutes before birth, even a mere six inches away from being fully outside the mother’s body, a full citizen entitled to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"? What does it matter if a certain highly successful aspirant for the presidency vies with his challenger to see who can promise abortionists and their potential customers the most absolute and effective protection?

Did no Germans realize that Jews are human beings and that killing them is homicide, forbidden by the laws of both God and man? Perhaps some did, but most simply did not want to know: the ignorance and indifference of the majority facilitated the most horrible excesses of the leadership. Do no Americans realize that children in the womb are human beings and that killing them is homicide? Some do, but only little bands of protesters appear at abortion facilities, under the watchful eye of police there to prevent any infringement of the FACE Act (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances). For the majority, there is pretended ignorance of the reality and indifference to the consequences. There is, in other words, blood on their hands.

When the German public decided to approve what Hitler proposed to do, or approved it by failing to decide, the country was in deep trouble. Tremendous casualties from World War I, hundreds of thousands of mutilated war veterans, huge reparations, massive inflation, mass unemployment marked the postwar pre-Nazi years. When the American public decided to acquiesce, or acquiesced by failing to decide, in the million-fold prenatal homicide of abortion and the thousand-fold infanticide of partial birth abortion, the country was at peace, prosperous, high employment, low inflation, the stores bulging with products from all over the world. A terrible judgment fell on Nazi and post-Nazi Germany. May we assume that America is immune?

MORE LOSSES: CRIMES AND MERCIES   

In 1989 Canadian journalist and author James Bacque published Other Losses, a book detailing in horrifying and shameful detail how in the last days of World War II the Western Allies followed a policy not merely of enslaving German war prisoners, but of effectively sentencing close to one million men to death by starvation and disease. In a new book, Crimes and Mercies, he points out how deliberate Allied policies caused the death of several million more after hostilities ended.

General Dwight Eisenhower, who was later to be a two-term U.S. President, exhibited a degree of hatred of and contempt for Germany and the Germans. According to Bacque’s research, it appears that Eisenhower took advantage of his unquestioned and absolute authority at the war’s end to wreak vengeance on the soldiers and civilians in the U.S. zone of occupation.

Bacque’s first book, Other Losses, found a publisher only with difficulty and has never been brought out in the United States. It deals primarily with the suffering imposed on German prisoners as soon as their country’s ability to resist or retaliate was destroyed by the German surrender. Until the war’s end, German prisoners of war were protected by the terms of the Geneva Convention, and perhaps by fear for the American prisoners in German hands. In a neat anticipation of Orwell’s Newspeak, after the German surrender General Eisenhower created a category not imagined in the Convention, which he called "Disarmed Enemy Forces." There were no international agreements about how to treat "Disarmed Enemy Forces." Bacque’s first book is heavily documented and its general reliability seems assured.

His second book, Crimes and Mercies, like Other Losses, was not published in the United States. Somehow it seems to be medicine too strong for the American publishing industry to swallow. Crimes and Mercies deals with the fate imposed on conquered Germany and its people at the end of World War II, specifically on the brutal way the civilian population was treated by the triumphant western Allies.

According to a quote cited from The Life of Allan Dulles by Peter Grose, in 1943 President Roosevelt told his Joint Chiefs of Staff, "I am not willing at this time to say that we do not intend to destroy the German nation" (p. 203). This is the way the Germans interpreted Roosevelt’s earlier declaration, made without prior consultation with Britain’s Prime Minister Churchill, that our war goal was the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers. It made it difficult if not impossible for Germans to hope that by overthrowing Hitler they might shorten the war and receive more favorable treatment. The declaration played into the hands of Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, and contributed to the tenacity with which virtually all Germans fought on until the bitter end.

Roosevelt died before Germany surrendered, but his intention was pursued under his successor, at least for several years. The message of Crimes and Mercies is simple. After World War II the victorious powers imposed upon defeated Germany a savage retribution that contradicted all of the Western Allies’ professions of humanity, compassion, and decency. This policy of vicious retaliation began during the war with militarily, totally unnecessary incendiary raids such as those that devastated Dresden in February of 1945.

After the German defeat, General Eisenhower was particularly vindictive. As soon as Germany surrendered on May 8, the victorious general sent out by "urgent courier" an order making it a crime punishable by death for German civilians to feed prisoners. As Bacque notes, quoting the official documents, merely gathering food together in one place with the purpose of taking it to prisoners was punishable by death.

This way of treating the conquered was not universal. Bacque praises the efforts of many, especially former U.S. President Herbert Hoover, British publisher Victor Gollcanz, and religious groups such as the Mennonites, to help the Germans survive. Hoover protested to Allied authorities at every level, and Gollcanz denounced Allied crimes in passionate prose, as Brace says, but they remained voices crying in the wilderness.

We all know of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Do we know of the Germans who, although not herded into camps and systematically gassed, were treated in such a deliberate, cruel, and systematic way that a similar number died, if not at the Allies’ hands, at least under Allied control? Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of the newly established Federal Republic of Germany, wrote in March 1949, "According to American figures [emphasis added], a total of 13.3 million Germans were expelled from the eastern parts of Germany, from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and so on. 7.3 million arrived in the eastern zone and the three western zones. Six million Germans have vanished from the earth. They are dead, gone."

This was the result of the decision made at Potsdam to "transfer populations." According to Bacque’s figures, approximately 900,000 German prisoners of war, reduced to the status of "disarmed enemy forces" and deprived of the protection of the Geneva Convention, died from deliberate maltreatment and starvation in American and French hands. The Germans are reluctant to bring all this up, because, as Bacque says, "Guilt pervades Germany like a religion." The Germans were guilty, not all of them, but enough to bring down upon them the wrath of nations, perhaps that of God. And it is generally acknowledged that the Soviets were not far behind. And the western Allies were far from innocent, as Bacque’s two books, neither published in the U.S.A., document.

The Nazis practiced "resettlement in the east." Half a century later, the Serbs and other population groups of former Yugoslavia would speak of "ethnic cleansing." The term used by the Allies after World War II was "population transfer." One is reminded of the lines in Hebbel’s play, Herodes und Mariamne,

TWO DIFFERENT KINDS OF Holocaust REVISIONISM   

Revisionism is a phenomenon in which a generally accepted historical understanding is presented as incorrect and a different version is offered. Sometimes the matter at stake is only of literary interest, for example, when it is argued that Shakespeare did not write a play attributed to him. Sometimes hasty historical verdicts are revised in a way that brings them closer to the truth. For example, it is now widely accepted that the doctrine of German guilt for World War I, officially declared in the Treaty of Versailles, is seriously flawed, not to say false. The reality is far more complex: some of the warring parties were guiltier than others, but not one was totally innocent. Some revisionists energetically attempt to refute historical facts for which there is documentary and physical evidence, as well as a tremendous amount of human testimony. Revisionism makes no sense where absolutely all of the evidence is unambiguous, but it sometimes happens that one or two flaws in a historical account furnish the stimulus for revisions bordering on the absurd. This has happened with the Holocaust, the systematic campaign of extermination that struck so many European Jews under Adolf Hitler. It seems evident that there are some flaws and uncertainties in the usual picture, for example the constantly repeated figure of six million Jewish victims, but to deny that the atrocities took place seems so absurd as to be virtually irrational.

That the Holocaust took place is irrefutable, and its immensity, its systematic cruelty, and its viciousness are undeniable. What is less clear is the answer to the questions, "Why did it happen?" and, "Where was God?" If the Jews are God’s people, who claim Him as their God, why did he permit the Holocaust? For some, this virtually unparalleled atrocity demonstrates that God is impotent or non-existent, as Rabbi Richard Rubenstein postulates in After Auschwitz. But is such a disaster not precisely what the Bible warns will happen when His covenants are violated?

If God is sovereign and all-powerful, it is legitimate to ask the question posed by Arthur Katz in Holocaust. Where Was God? Katz, who leads a congregation of Jewish Christians, has asked a number of probing questions. Even to broach this topic, fraught with implications for Germans and Americans, as well as for the Jewish people, may immediately be regarded as a new atrocity. Therefore it is appropriate to point out that posing this question is consistent with the considerations raised in the prophecy of Isaiah, beginning for example in chapter 1:15. In Katz’s view, it is a very serious mistake to see only human evil or, even worse, only human ignorance as the root cause of the Holocaust.

We have built for ourselves museums to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust, at Jerusalem and elsewhere, most recently in Washington, D.C. The only reason for existence of these museums is "to educate and instruct people so that these things will never happen again." All of these museums, all of the objects displayed, all of these foundations, all of the courses of instruction about the Holocaust have as their explicit goal "the duty to remember." We tell whoever wants to listen that "the solution is in education," forgetting, it seems, that Germany was the very quintessence of a liberal and cultivated society. There was no nation better educated than she. We teach that people are the victims of their ignorance, and not victims of their own human nature. We have presupposed that it is due to ignorance that Nazism took root in German society, and so we have recourse to education in the effort to prevent such things from happening again. We make the effort to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust because we fear that it may happen again because of the ignorance of this non-Jewish humanity, which must draw a lessen from this recent tragedy.

All this reveals that mankind’s first impulse is to explain everything from a naturalistic point of view. This tendency is itself the sign of a certain hostility towards God. This manner of thinking and this way of looking at things are innate, automatic, and chronic. We never look for the explanation in God. And all the time one has more and more the alarming presentiment of a terrible resurgence of anti-Semitism.

Katz believes that the Holocaust, like the conquest of Samaria by the Assyrians and of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, is a clear sign of God’s wrath at broken covenants. It is possible to interpret the Holocaust as Rabbi Richard Rubenstein did in After Auschwitz, as evidence that God is dead. What Rubenstein does not consider is the possibility that the Holocaust is a divine judgment on an erring nation. It is not necessary to read extensively in the Hebrew Scriptures to hear warnings of the awful judgment that God will visit on those who do not keep His covenants. Occasionally an observant Jewish writer has observed that two European Jews, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, played a major role in the secularization of culture, launching major assaults on the God of the Bible and leading countless Jews and Gentiles into skepticism and unbelief. Katz, a Christian of Jewish heritage, contends that the failure of most Jews to acknowledge Jesus as their Messiah represents a further failure to honor the covenant, a contention that will necessarily be odious to Jews in general. However, it is not necessary to adopt Katz’s position with respect to Jesus to ask his question, "Where was God?"

Jews and Christians alike have a doctrine of divine sovereignty. When the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Samaria and took its people into exile, it was seen as divine judgment. When Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem, destroying the Temple and taking much of the population to Babylon, he was seen as executing the judgment of God. Both the Assyrians and the Babylonians were culpable for the crimes that they committed against the Jewish people and were themselves punished for them, even though their oppression of the Jews served the divine purpose of chastisement of God’s covenant-breaking people. Is it totally absurd to see something similar in the Nazi Holocaust of the twentieth century?

After inflicting horrible crimes on the Jews (and on others as well), the German people paid a terrible price, suffering defeat, destruction, decimation of the population, the partition of their homeland and the loss of age-old German territories. Pastor Otto Rodenberg, an officer on a German destroyer in World War II and a self-acknowledged believer in Hitler prior to his Christian conversion, interprets the difficulty that modern Germans have in believing in a personal God who intervenes in human history thus: If we accepted that, we would have to acknowledge that it was His hand that struck us. Much of the Jewish community today, like Rodenberg’s Germans, finds it difficult to think in terms of the personal God described in Scripture. Is it possible that Jewish thinkers such as Rabbi Rubenstein find it hard to believe in God as personal and omnipotent for a similar reason? The concept of God as personal, powerful, and a judge of those who take His name in vain and break His covenant is not without ominous implications for the American people who have so often claimed God as their God and America as "God’s country."

MAJORITY MEANS MINORITY, AGAIN   

The early presidential primaries in the American elections designated the two men who are to be the candidates of the nation’s two largest parties in the November elections. This means that the range of choice has been reduced to two and a very significant segment of the American people has been deprived of the chance to influence the choice of the men between whom it will be called to choose. In other words, here the much-lauded "right to choose" is severely restricted. Now the public is faced with more than half a year of information, misinformation, and disinformation about the major party candidates. It is reasonable to assume that the most trivial aspects of their past lives will be scrutinized and that we will largely be regaled with "strong language," manipulative language that does not tell us the truth about much of anything. Will Vice President Gore ever say that he favors a woman’s right "to suck it into a sink," as Dr. Laura Schlessinger says, rather than merely saying "choice"? Will Governor Bush, who unlike Gore opposes abortion, ever actually say, "Whatever you think of abortion, it cannot be good for our country to kill one-quarter of each new generation"?

Under such circumstances, it may well be that only a minority of voters vote and that if there is a third candidate in the field, as seems possible, a minority of those voting will elect the next president.

In the Taiwan elections that were held March 18, a minority–just short of 40 percent–elected the successful candidate, one whose pro-independence stand angered mainland China. Communist China, the People’s Republic, is not happy with the decision of the people of Taiwan to elect a pro-independence candidate, and various semi-official Chinese sources are threatening missile attacks on Taiwan and, if necessary, the United States. Thus even in our democratic world, the vote of a minority of the people of a small island nation can influence the fate of humanity.

When fundamental issues regarding the whole people are decided by a tiny number of judges or justices on the basis of an imaginative interpretation of a sacred document, the United States Constitution, the votes of elected legislative bodies and even of whole populations in state wide referenda can be ignored. This arrogation of power by what Raoul Berger called the imperial judiciary has been going on for some time. Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 school integration decision, did what neither the people of the state in question, Kansas, nor the legislatures of the other states, nor the Congress of the United States was willing to do. This decision sought racial justice, and as such it was morally good, but it "creatively" interpreted the Constitution, i.e. made it say what the nine Justices thought that it ought to say, and in this respect it was constitutionally bad. Nineteen years later, in Roe v. Wade, seven Justices did to an absolute degree what some states had already done to a relative degree, but what others (Michigan and North Dakota) had overwhelmingly rejected in referenda the previous year and made abortion on demand "the law of the land." Since that time, the tradition has gone on, leaving the people and their legislatures at the mercy of unelected judges with life tenure.

On March 21, the United States Supreme Court, by the slimmest possible majority, 5-4, disapproved of the Food and Drug Administration’s effort to regulate tobacco use as a drug, thus narrowly frustrating the intention of that unelected federal body to dictate the personal habits of smokers in fifty states. For the moment, decisions about personal use of this legal product has been left in the hands of individual citizens. However, if the highest court in this case has blocked the grab for power of an unelected federal agency, in a variety of other cases, even the courts themselves are being circumvented.

In recent months, the custom of taking decisions out of the hands of the people and their elected representatives and placing it in the hands of judges has been trumped by a new policy of merely threatening judicial action, not actually resorting to it. The tobacco lawsuits initially put decisions relating to tobacco company liability in the hands of judges and juries, but more recently, power has been transferred. Now cases do not even need to go to court. The legal system is such that the threat of lawsuits suffices to intimidate companies, in effect forcing them to comply with rules voted by no legislature and approved by no referendum or face extinction.

A similar procedure was followed in the case of so-called Holocaust funds and other assets detained in Switzerland and now in other countries as well. Lawsuits were begun, but the cases never came before a judge, because other government agencies threatened the countries involved with devastating economic sanctions if they did not bow to the demands of the plaintiffs. Thus it is not surprising that the Swiss, among others, believe that they have been subjected to extortion, in the appropriate German term, to Erpressung.

A further refinement consists of threatening ruinous lawsuits, asking for consultation, and then, if the first threatened party complies with the demands, offering rewards. Thus when the largest American manufacturer of handguns, Smith & Wesson, decided to bow to government demands and install a variety of safety mechanisms supposed to make their products less liable to unintended misuse, various governments changed their intention to sue to a promise to buy Smith & Wesson pistols for their law enforcement agencies. Thus other companies are silently invited to consider the alternatives: bow and thus avoid lawsuits and receive favors, or resist and be both plundered by lawsuits and deprived of revenue by decisions in favor of more pliable firms.

The people of the United States, and no doubt of other countries as well, would probably resist efforts to erect a dictatorship, depriving them by force of their rights. But somehow they do not realize what is happening, as policy decisions are increasingly taken out of the hands of the people and the legislatures and made by judges, bureaucrats, and attorneys general, very few of whom are elected or answerable at the polls.

This may conceivably be an improvement. Perhaps the judges, bureaucrats, and attorneys general are wiser, more benevolent, and see farther than those whose fates they determine. But whether it is an improvement or not, it is not democracy.

INTERESTING POOR, UNINTERESTING POOR   

While the attention of all was focused on how the nation should deal with a six-year-old Cuban boy, Elian Gonzalez, influential journals reported that the United States Senate probably would not again pass a ban on partial birth abortions, the House of Representatives having already done so. And it is assumed, that if by any chance the bill should pass, the President would in this case keep his word and veto it for the third time, thus insuring the continuance of this late-term procedure, which amply fits the phrase of Tertullian, "anticipated murder." Thus again, in the year 2000 thousands –exact figures will not be given–of babies in the process of being born will be destroyed under the protection of the same authorities that agonize over whether one motherless boy can or should be returned to his father, even though the father dwells in Communist Cuba. Elian’s father was given an interview with Attorney General Janet Reno, who is on record as favoring the return, and both leading presidential candidates have chimed in with expressions of opposition to it. That Governor Bush does so is consistent with the concern he feels for unborn children; in the case of Vice President Gore, it may seem odd that he expends so much energy on the fate of one little Cuban while he continues heartily to endorse the "termination, safely and legally" of one-quarter of each new generation of Americans. Meanwhile in Iraq and Serbia, devastated under a hail of largely American-launched missiles and bombs and deprived of succor by virtue of a punitive embargo, tens of thousands, nay hundreds of thousands, of infants, young children, and old people have died or will die lingering deaths because they are deprived of the most elementary requirements of food, clean water, and medication. As Jacques Ellul wrote, there are two kinds of poor, the interesting poor and the uninteresting poor. The interesting poor in his day, he said, were those whose fate could be exploited for the purposes of international Communism. Today the interesting poor, little Elian, is being exploited for national political parties. The uninteresting poor are those who’s fates interest only themselves.

IN ADDITION TO WHICH   

* As Pope John Paul II continues his Jubilee Year pilgrimage, he has continue to apologize for many faults of commission and omission made by Christians and especially by the Roman Catholic church in past centuries. These apologies have been received with varying degrees of grace by those to whom they were addressed. Seldom have the recipients acknowledged that though offended, they too have been offenders and offered apologies in return. In Israel, the Pope may have thrown oil on a smoldering fire by stating that the Palestinians have a right to a homeland of their own, a statement received with enthusiasm by Arabs, Muslims, and Christians alike, and with considerable displeasure by Israel. If one sees Israel only vis-à-vis the Palestinians, perhaps some sort of equivalency may be thought to exist and a compromise division of the land appear reasonable. Unfortunately, the Israelis are confronted not merely with a limited number of Palestinian Arabs, but with a far greater number of Muslims in the surrounding nations. Even though a peace of sorts prevails at the moment, the Israelis will find it hard to appreciate this statement by the Pope, however much he speaks of peace and good will.

* Dr. Laura Schlessinger, whose fans describe her without much exaggeration as "the nation’s moral compass," has been offered an opportunity to have a television show this fall. As a result, gay rights demonstrators, shouting "Shame, shame, shame!" gathered outside of Paramount Pictures March 21 to protest. "When Paramount bought Laura Schlessinger’s show, they bought a battle with the gay community," said Joan Garry, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

Dr. Schlessinger’s problem is that while expressing care and concern for homosexuals, she consistently reiterates the biblical statements that call homosexual conduct wrong, also using such medical terms as "biological error" and "deviant." She actually places the emphasis on what Scripture says and uses the scientific terminology only as commentary. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance, crying "Shame!" profits from the situation described in Psalm 12:8, "The wicked strut about when vileness is exalted on every side."

* In Scotland County, South Carolina, a high school English teacher was suspended because of her involvement with a Wiccan coven, i.e. with a modern form of witchcraft and pagan practices. To make matters worse, at least in the eyes of Prof. Steven Lubet of Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago, the county commissioners voted to post the Ten Commandments in the public schools "as though to underscore the exclusion of minorities," to quote Lubet’s exact words. What the Commandments exclude, if we adopt his manipulative "strong language," is those who wish to worship false gods, profane the name of God, reject a sabbath day of rest, dishonor father and mother, kill, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness, and covet others’ spouses and possessions. Which of these groups does Prof. Lubet think ought to be encouraged as companions for our children?

* Our country’s lack of judicial common sense was demonstrated once again in a decision of a federal appeals court in Denver, March 21. In 1998, T.J. West, then a student at Derby Middle School in Derby, Kansas, received a three-day suspension for drawing a Confederate flag during math class. This violated one of the new canons of community control, "zero tolerance." According to school officials, drawing this during class violated a school district policy that is "racially divisive or creates ill will or hatred." The court upheld the ruling. There was a time, in a world that used to exist, when drawing during class, regardless of policy, would have been handled by a reprimand, an extra assignment, or staying after school. If T.J. had drawn a picture of the Ten Commandments, it probably would have been necessary to expel him outright, but if he had made a pornographic sketch, it might have been protected.

* What the victorious, ravaging armies of Generals Sherman, Sheridan, and Grant could not do, eradicate the pride of the conquered South, the financial boycotts of the N.A.A.C.P. and the righteous scorn of the national media may succeed in doing. As the Emperor Vespasian remarked to his son Titus, Pecunia non olet, "Money doesn’t stink." While President Clinton made another of his heart-wrenching appeals, Hugh McColl, president of the nation’s largest bank, and certainly a man well aware of the power of money, joined other pusillanimous penitents of political correctness, including the mayor of Charleston and the governor of South Carolina, wandering in a pilgrim procession from Charleston to Columbia, in petitioning for the removal of the symbol of the rebellious South from the dome of the state capitol. At the end of the failed War of Secession, it was said of the South that it had nothing left but its honor. In the nominalistic language of our day, what one party considers a sign of honor is translated into a symbol of hate and snatched from their hands. The South has gained immensely in riches, but can it hold on to any shreds of its honor? Pecunia non olet.

For "More Losses: Crimes and Mercies," see James Bacque, Other Losses. An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners of War in the Hands of the French and Americans after World War II (Toronto: Stoddart, 1989) and Crimes and Mercies. The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950 (London: Little Brown, 1997), esp. pp. 41-43, 109, 119, 187; for "Two Different Kinds of Holocaust Revisionism," see Chronicles, April 2000, p. 23 and Arthur Katz, Holocauste. Où était Dieu? (Chailly s/Montreux, Switzerland: Editions RDF, 1999,

pp. 62-3.