The Dresden Holocaust and the Numbers Game

The bodies are counted just after Valentine's Day, 1945, in the aftermath of the Dresden Holocaust. American author Kurt Vonnegut was there. Emerging from a shelter into the smoldering ashes of the firebombed city of civilians and refugees, he told a fellow survivor "I'll never trust my government again."
The bodies are counted just after Valentine's Day, 1945, in the aftermath of the Dresden Holocaust. American author Kurt Vonnegut was there. Emerging from a shelter into the smoldering ashes of the firebombed city of civilians and refugees, he told a fellow survivor "I'll never trust my government again."

by Kevin Alfred Strom

RABBI DAVID Kaufman quoted my essay and radio broadcast on the Dresden Holocaust in his column recently. His bias stands out like Bertie Wooster’s white suit. Kaufman is an unabashed Zionist, and told the Des Moines Register last month that his concern over events in Iran is motivated by “Iran’s threat to Israel.” That’s ethnocentric and probably wildly overblown, but at least it’s honest. (Many of Rabbi Kaufman’s fellow Zionists would prefer to conceal the truth about their motivations, instead telling us that their real concern is with “democracy in Iran,” a chimera if there ever was one.)

Considering his origins and his Zionism, one would expect Kaufman to write as he did: To him, my essay telling the world about this horrific war crime — where more innocents were killed in one day than were killed in all of England during the whole of World War 2 — wasn’t about remembering that needless sacrifice of life at all. No, says Rabbi Kaufman, it was really about me harming Jews and Jewish interests — even though I never once mentioned Jews in my article.

He concentrates mainly on one isolated paragraph in my piece: “Despite the fact that they could clearly see that the marked target area contained hospitals and sports stadia and residential areas of center city Dresden, the bombers nevertheless obeyed orders and rained down a fiery death upon the unlucky inhabitants of that city on a scale which had never before been seen on planet Earth. Hundreds of thousands of innocents were literally consumed by fire, an actual holocaust by the true definition of the word: complete consumption by fire.”

Rabbi Kaufman responds, somewhat hysterically: “Look at that last sentence! ‘Hundreds of thousands of innocents,’ ‘an ACTUAL holocaust by the TRUE DEFINITION of the word.’ The reason that Dresden is a haven for Neo-Nazi groups is that it has been created as the anti-Jewish holocaust, a demonstration that, in essence, the Germans got it worse that the Jews ever did. The repeated use of the term ‘holocaust’ by Strom in his article is precisely to argue that this, DRESDEN, was a holocaust and NOT what the Jews PRETEND to have been one.”

Never mind the fact that the real definition of the word “holocaust” is exactly as I stated it. Never mind the fact that innocents died in this totally unnecessary firebomb attack by the multiple thousands — even if you accept the Rabbi’s own Dresden death toll, at least an order of magnitude more that died in the 9/11 attacks, and far more than died that day in all the concentration camps run by all the belligerent powers on both sides combined, even if you accept the highest figures out there.

Demonization

I don’t think it helps the human condition for either Europeans or Jews to play the “my people have been persecuted more than your people” game, Talmudically quibbling about numbers. I don’t think it helps the human condition to demonize other peoples, such as by calling Zionist Jews “the Synagogue of Satan” or “Zionazis” or the like, or by calling racially conscious Europeans “neo-Nazis” or “haters.” (I don’t think that attending the now-traditional candlelight vigil to commemorate the victims of the Dresden Holocaust — and many of the attendees lost wives, husbands, parents, grandparents, or children there — makes you a “hater” of any kind. Except maybe a hater of war. Just look into what Kurt Vonnegut said about Dresden. Read or watch his Slaughterhouse 5. He was there.)

I think two of the most important aspects of the human condition these days are 1)  the question of whether or not distinct peoples are going to continue to exist in a world increasingly dominated by tyrannical “multicultural” empires and faceless globalist corporations; and 2) the related question of whether human evolution itself can continue under those conditions.

Self-determination for all, or “just us”?

I don’t criticize Rabbi Kaufman for his ethnocentrism or his desire for self-determination for Jews. Every race, every ethny, needs a healthy dose of concern for its own survival: Any people that does not make its own survival one of its highest values will simply cease to exist. But the Jewish power structure has a history of denying self-determination to other peoples, and denigrating their ethnic solidarity, calling it racial “hate” even when it clearly is no such thing. The power structure that puts out shrill propaganda claiming that “there’s no such thing as the Palestinian people” also promotes the idea that “there’s no such thing as the White race” and sometimes even insists on putting the word race itself within quotation marks.

That power structure wants to ensure that non-Jewish societies around the globe are multiracial and legally “race-blind” — policies which facilitate the maintenance of that same power structure’s colonies in those societies, and its ownership of media and financial structures there as well.

Meanwhile, the Zionist state is an openly racial state, with its main justification being the supposed uniqueness of the persecution Jews experienced during World War 2. It is to defend the public perception of Jewish wartime suffering as somehow unique that impels Rabbi Kaufman to wax angry over my article.

A Better Way

What would help the human condition would be for all of us, Rabbi Kaufman and friends included, to recognize that we are subject to the natural law of life expressed by biologist Raymond Hall: “Two subspecies of the same species do not occur in the same geographic area.” Professor Hall did not exclude humans from that law, saying “To imagine one subspecies of man living together on equal terms for long with another subspecies is but wishful thinking and leads only to disaster and oblivion for one or the other.”

I would say one or the other or both.

With our technological power  and scientific knowledge we have the ability to force the peoples of the world to live in multiracial, money-and-power based empires that are “democratic” only in the farcical sense of the word, obliterating all genetic and cultural uniqueness as we do so — with disastrous results for human biodiversity,  evolution, and progress. That’s what we’re doing now.

But we also have the power to forge a new world based on the Maxim of Self-Determination: “Every people which considers itself to be a people should, to the maximum extent possible, live under its own government.” Such a paradigm is not a threat to anyone except the power elite and its illegitimate rule.

Right now the leadership of the world’s wealthiest ethnic group, Rabbi Kaufman’s ethnic group, is on the side of that power elite, and in fact is the leading element within it. They believe — falsely — that they can only survive in a world where all nationalism is suppressed, except their own Zionist nationalism. They’re leading the West to a demographic disaster that will ultimately consume them as well.

I’m not sure if the Rabbi Kaufmans of this world understand that. It’s about time they did. Those of good will among them might change sides. To do so, they’ll have to give up the myth of the uniqueness of their suffering and embrace a more realistic and humane view: All peoples have endured untold death and suffering at the hands of those who would rule them. It’s time to grant self-government and independence to all who want it.

Unconditional empathy with the victims of the Dresden Holocaust would be a baby step in that direction.