grannyhelen, Author at Progress Pond

Al Franken Gets It Wrong

I listened with great dismay today at the author of the book, “Lying Liars and the Lies They Tell”, uncritically interviewing Rev. Samuel “Billy” Kyles on the assassiation of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Why? Rev. Kyles has consistently told stories of Dr. King’s assassination that are not back up by objective fact, including police surveillance taken before and during the assassination of Dr. King.
Audio of Franken’s interview with Kyles is here. And yes, you can see my entry in his blog after unsuccessfully trying to email him.

The following is an excerpt of my attempted email to him on the subject of Rev. Kyles.

What really made me very sad today was your allowing Rev. Kyles to recount his fallacious account of “spending Dr. King’s last hours with him” and the tale of the three preachers, King, Kyles and Abernathy. Not only is this part of Kyles’ account disputed by Ralph David Abernathy in his autobiography, it is also contradicted by police surveillance as reported in the King v Jowers trial.

Indeed, there was compelling testimony in King v Jowers that Rev. Kyles may have had some limited involvement in Dr. King’s assassination. The following is an excerpt from the testimony of Captain Willie B. Richmond (retired) of the Memphis Police Department (which has also been verified by Dr. Philip Melanson earlier in the trial – direct link to testimony here – http://www.thekingcenter.org/news/trial/Volume8.html):

Q. (MR. PEPPER) Now, when Dr. King arrived in the city for that last visit, were you at the airport?

A. (CAPT RICHMOND) I was.

Q. Did you have a conversation with anyone connected with either his group or with the local clergy having to do with security or protection for him on that last visit?

A. I didn’t, but my partner did.

Q. Your partner did. Were you present when that conversation was taking place?

A. I was there.

Q. And with whom was the conversation?

A. I believe he spoke with Reverend Kyles.

Q. Reverend Samuel Kyles?

A. Right.

Q. And what was the gist of the conversation with respect to security protection for Dr. King?

A. At that time we was told that Dr. King hadn’t wanted any police protection.

Q. You were told that Dr. King didn’t want any protection.

A. Police protection.

Q. Any police protection. And this was told to you in this conversation by Reverend Kyles?

A. I think it was Reverend Kyles. I’m not sure, but I believe it was Reverend Kyles. He was the one that said it I believe.

Q. He was the one who said it you believe?

A. Uh-huh.

Q. Were you familiar with what position Reverend Kyles held in Dr. King’s organization?

A. No, I was not.

Q. And you didn’t know he held no position in Dr. King’s organization?

A. I did not.

Q. If you’ll move on to page 3 of your statement, Captain Richmond, about two-thirds of the way down the page, do you notice your note? And I’ll read it. “At 2:05 p.m. Reverend Samuel Kyles arrived and went to room 307 and departed at 2:23 p.m.” You see that note?

A. Yes.

Q. Do you know who was in room 307 at that time?

A. Well, at that time, no, I did not.

Q. Let’s move on to page 4, please.

A. (Witness complies.)

Q. The first full paragraph. Would you read the first full paragraph starting at “at approximately 5:50 p.m.” to us, please?

A. Okay. It says, “Approximately 5:50 p.m., John Smith, Milton Max, Charles Cabbage and one female colored and approximately six or seven more of the Invaders [NOTE: this was a group of young people who had volunteered to provide security for Dr. King] opened the door of their rooms, and I could see them gathering their belongings. They then brought them down the stairs and placed them in the trunk of a light blue Mustang, license number BL 3750, and they left the motel. They was going west on Butler to Main.”

Q. If I could just interrupt you there. So at 5:50 p.m., your eye witness recording sees the Invaders just bustling out of–hustling out of that motel, leaving the hotel?

A. They left.

Q. And that’s within 11 minutes of the shooting?

A. Approximately.

Q. Would you continue reading the next paragraph, please?

A. “Immediately after the Invaders left, the Reverend Samuel Kyles came out of room 312 and went to the room where Martin Luther King was living. He knocked on the door and Martin Luther King came to the door. They said a few words between each other and Reverend Martin Luther King went back into his room closing the door behind him, and the Reverend Samuel Kyles remained on the porch.”

Q. Right. So you’re telling us there from your eye witness report that Reverend Kyles knocked on Martin Luther King’s door at about ten minutes to six or shortly after ten minutes to six, said a few words to Dr. King after he opened the door. Then when the door was closed, Dr. King went back into his room and Reverend Kyles remained on the–you call it the porch, but on the balcony?

A. The balcony. [NOTE: for those of you who haven’t been to the Lorraine Motel, this is one of those long, continuous second story “balconies” that graced motels of the period from the 1950’s and 1960’s]

Q. Now, a little further down in the next paragraph, you record Martin Luther King coming out onto the balcony. Do you see that reference there? And if you could read from the words “at this time the Reverend Martin Luther King returned.” Do you see that?

A. I see it.

Q. Would you read that note, please? Middle of the next paragraph.

A. Okay. “At this time Reverend Martin Luther King returned from his room to the gallery and walked up to the handrail. The Reverend Kyles was standing off to his right. This was approximately 6 p.m. At this time I heard a loud sound as if it was a shot and saw Doctor Martin Luther King fall back on the handrail and put his hand up to his head.

At 6:01 p.m., April 4th, 1968, I reported this to the inspection bureau. I returned to remain there and keep surveillance. Also, here now and at the time I heard the shot, the men of the tact squad which consists of the sheriff deputy and the Memphis police department was in the fire house number four. I immediately hollered to them I believe that King has been shot.

At this time the men of the tact squad scramble out of the fire house immediately going in all different directions. Some went to the hotel. Some went down the street. Later, the fire department ambulance arrived approximately five minutes later and departed to the hospital with Reverend King.”

Q. That’s fine, you can stop there. These were your recollections at the time contemporaneously as you observed what was going on at the Lorraine; is that right?

A. Correct.

Q. Nowhere in these notes do you record Reverend Kyles going into Reverend King’s room 45 minutes, an hour before the shooting, do you? [NOTE: Rev. Kyles has always claimed – as he did in Franken’s show today – that he was in Dr. King’s room with Ralph David Abernathy and Dr. King for Dr. King’s “last hour on earth” before he was assassinated”. This testimony puts Rev. Kyles’ account of his whereabouts before the assassination in question].

A. No, I don’t.

Q. And if he had done so, is it fair to say that you would have recorded this entry?

A. I recorded pretty much everything that went on. I don’t have my notebook now, but we carried little small notebooks.

Q. Right.

A. And I wrote everything down as I saw it.

Q. As you saw it?

A. As I saw it.

Q. That was your duty.

A. Correct.

But really, the most shocking evidence of Rev. Kyles’ involvement in the MLK assassination comes from his own mouth, on video, discussing an anniversary celebration of the assassination of Dr. King (direct link here – http://www.thekingcenter.org/news/trial/Volume11.html):

“…but that gave me the wonderful privilege of spending the last hour on earth. Three preachers in a room–Abernathy, King and Kyles. And we spent that last hour together in Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel.

The press is always curious and writers–what went on? What did you talk about? I say, we just talked preacher talk. What preachers talk about when they get together, revivals and all the like. About a quarter of six we walked on the balcony, and he was talking to people in the courtyard.

He stood here, and I stood there. Only as I moved away so he could have a clear shot, the shot rang out.”

Rev. Kyles has never really explained this comment. You can follow the above referenced link to read his entire testimony: indeed, I encourage you to do so. It is very enlightening.

I respect your personal integrity and the efforts you have made in your show to always try to tell the truth. That’s part of the reason I was so outraged when I listened to Rev. Kyles tell you the fictional account of Dr. King’s assassination that I am too familiar with. I was also dismayed to see that your show consisted only of Director Beverly Robertson, Benjamin Hooks and Rev. Kyles…

In the interest of fairness and balance, I would like to encourage you to reach out to Dr. William Pepper, who has spent a lifetime investigating – and successfully litigating – the conspiracy to assassinate Dr. King. He can also speak to the current exhibits at the National Civil Rights Museum, as well as go over the Department of Justice report that was issued in response to the King v. Jowers trial verdict. Unlike me, Dr. Pepper does speak for the King family in matters pertaining to the assassination of Dr. King.

Thank you for continuing to fight the good fight in all things.

Kind regards,

[omitted]

Whenever I get this frustrated about the media – mainstream or otherwise – not getting the facts right about the assassination of Dr. King, I have to remind myself of his famous quote, “…the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Justice delayed may indeed be justice denied, but I know in my heart that eventually the truth of the assassination of Dr. King will become a part of the American story.

Rumsfeld…and Liberating Stuff Down the Toilet

I love the current GOP double speak, just because it’s so ripe for comedy and derision.

For instance, check out this latest snazzy sound bite from our current Secretary of Defense:

“We don’t have an exit strategy, we have a victory strategy,” Rumsfeld told soldiers during a surprise visit to Baghdad, according to a pooled broadcast report from the capital.

Normally, this wouldn’t require additional comment. Normally folks would just hear something like this and start splitting their sides with a crescendo of shocked laughter.

But these days, when we have a President who has claimed that God speaks through him…well, let’s just say the art of subtle irony isn’t America’s strong suit right now.

So, in order to give folks a better understanding of how completely inane this comment is, I think all of us in the blogosphere need to start emailing our friends and family, calling radio talk shows and writing letters to the editor illustrating how neat it’d be if we could all talk like a Bush official.

For instance…when I go to the bathroom I am no longer going flush stuff down the toilet. I am going to liberate it into the calm, blue ocean. I will stop changing my toddler’s diaper; I am going to free her bottom from the evildoers. And, my husband and I are going to stop “trying for a second child”. We’re going to bang for Bush!

Maybe some of you think I’m being just a little too patriotic. But…can one be too patriotic? I mean, the world changed after September 11th, so y’all best better wake up and breathe in the free air of energy-enhancing beverages.

For the rest of you, please, let me know how you’re going to aid our war on terrorism!

United We Stand!

Who Killed Martin Luther King?

“…but that gave me the wonderful privilege of spending the last hour on earth. Three preachers in a room — Abernathy, King and Kyles. And we spent that last hour together in Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel.

The press is always curious and writers — what went on? What did you talk about? I say, we just talked preacher talk. What preachers talk about when they get together, revivals and all the like. About a quarter of six we walked on the balcony, and he was talking to people in the courtyard.

He stood here, and I stood there. Only as I moved away so he could have a clear shot, the shot rang out.”

—Reverend Samuel “Billy” Kyles, on videotape discussing the 30th Anniversary Commemoration of the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I’ve met Reverend Kyles. Shook his hand. Right on the grounds of the National Civil Rights Museum, set up within and around the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

I was almost five months old when Dr. King was murdered.

Until reading the above referenced quotation, taken from a transcript of a video tape of a news conference where Rev. Kyles is discussing plans for an upcoming commemoration of Dr. King’s assassination, the question of “who killed Dr. King” was best left to the conspiracy theorists. You know the kind: the sort-of-pudgy, sort-of-pasty, chain-smoking paranoid people who watched one too many Oliver Stone movies, and who probably should be in therapy.

At least, that was my opinion of conspiracy theories until I encountered this quotation. When I did, it left my head spinning. I started reading the entire transcripts of King v. Jowers, the wrongful death civil suit that the King family successfully litigated against Lloyd Jowers. The suit was brought against Mr. Jowers after he revealed on a national news show that he was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Dr. King.

A jury of twelve Americans, just normal, average people, found after days and weeks of testimony that there was a conspiracy to assassinate Dr. King that involved local, state and governmental authorities.

What would drive twelve normal, average Americans, who had nothing to gain by deciding one way or another on the assassination of Dr. King, to decide that their government conspired to kill him?

Maybe it was the same evidence that Dr. William Pepper uncovered when he first interviewed James Earl Ray and decided to take him on as a client. Maybe it was the same evidence Reverend James Lawson, who worked alongside Dr. King, was troubled by and recounted during the King v. Jowers trial:

Q. (BY MR. PEPPER) Jim, from that day tothis have you been concerned about how Martin King was assassinated?

A. [By Rev. Lawson] Yes. Almost immediately there were things that troubled me about the assassination. I learned within the next day, next twenty-four hours, that his normal security group from the police department had not been assigned.

I learned that one or two firemen, and I’ve not tried to check on these details, but one or two fire then who were in the fire station across the street katty-cornered from the motel, black firemen, were transferred from that station in ways that at least those firemen thought was unusual. They contacted me and Ralph Jackson and one or two others about their removal. They were not what they considered to be normal removals. The fire station let’s say was over here and the motel here. It had clear vision.

I learned that Ed Redditt, who was on surveillance from the fire station, was moved an hour before. I learned that patrol cars that were in the region when he was there patrolling on Mulberry and Main and what not suddenly disappeared, were nowhere to be found.

I discovered that on April the 4th, the night of that day, that there was on the police band the notice of a white Mustang fleeing the city in the north who got away. There was never any explanation of how that call got on the police band. Ostensibly it was accessible only to the police.

Well, now I know that there were two white Mustangs. I’ve met the drivers of both of them quite some time ago. The one driver was James Earl Ray. I visited him in prison. I can’t remember the name of the other driver, but I sat in an airport in Nashville two or three years ago with the second driver of the second white Mustang, and he told me who he was, why he was in Memphis and whose car this belonged to. We know now that there were two white Mustangs in Memphis on the April the 4th evening.

These questions were never answered to my satisfaction. I pondered them. I wondered why when Martin King had stayed more often in the Admiral Benbow and in the Rivermont, I wondered where this letter came from or where this report in the newspaper came from about why is this civil rights leader not staying in the perfectly good negro motel, why is he staying at that white motel. I wondered about that.

I wondered how they had two or three different names for whoever they were seeking, how did that go on? What was that about? Then when they captured James Earl Ray and they came to the prison, they fixed up — they had him in the county jail, and they fixed up a special cell with twenty-four-hour surveillance, no privacy, twenty-four-hour lights. He had no privacy whatsoever. He complained.

I kick myself now that I did not go down to the county jail and talk to William Morris about why this was going on. It reminded me of something quite specific. It reminded me of the brainwashing that our GI’s had in the Korean War…

…When I saw this, I was astonished. I said to myself, what is going on here?

This is the man, why are they torturing him. That was brainwashing from Korean experience according to the things I read from our GI’s. If they’ve got the evidence about him, why not just simply go to trial.

Then when they had the plea-bargaining business, I said to myself, here is this justice system, the most important American perhaps other than the President of the United States has been killed, and they are going to have a plea-bargaining instead of a full-scale trial so that a court of law can tell us, can give us a full transcript of what that murder is about.

So these things bewildered me and made me upset.

All of the facts of the assassination that Rev. Lawson mentions in his testimony were also established in King v. Jowers. Maynard Stiles, retired Division Superintendent for the City of Memphis Department of Sanitation testified that he received a telephone call from Inspector Sam Evans of the Memphis Police Department at 7 am on April 5, 1968, the morning after Dr. King was assassinated, instructing him to have the thick brush and debris, which on the hillside directly facing Dr. King’s room and the balcony where he breathed his last, removed. Floyd Newsom a former City of Memphis firefighter, and former Chief of the Memphis Fire Department Norville Wallace testified that they were indeed removed form the fire station, which overlooked the infamous balcony of the Lorraine Motel, shortly before Dr. King’s assassination, even though the fire station was under-manned. Ed Redditt, retired detective from the Memphis Police Department, who had been assigned to ensure Dr. King’s safety testified that:

…Originally it [providing security for Dr. King] wasn’t an assignment. It was one that I decided upon and that I had noticed something that was unusual once upon arriving at the Lorraine with Dr. King. If I may continue, Inspector Smith was in charge of security. When he asked me, he said, well, you may go now. I noticed there was nobody else there. In the past when we were assigned to Dr. King, we stayed with him, guarded him up the steps, down the steps, and stayed with him. I saw nobody with him.

So I went across the street and asked the Fire Department could we [Detective Redditt and Officer Richmond] come in and observe from the rear, which we did…

Detective Redditt conducted surveillance with Officer Richmond the days of April 3 and April 4, 1968. He goes onto recount what happened shortly before Dr. King’s assassination on April 4:

Q. [Dr. Pepper] It is hard to reconstruct that, isn’t it? But fairly late in that afternoon is it fair to say your activities were called to a halt? You were removed from your — is that fair too say that you were removed at some point fairly late in the afternoon?

A. Yes.

Q. Would you describe how that came about, just how you were removed and did you have any advance notice of it or what happened?

A. Well, that morning I received a phone call on the pay phone in the fire station, and the voice on the other end was saying that we’re going to kill you. That’s about the size of that. I’d go back to where I was. Later on that day Lieutenant Arkin came by and stated I was needed at the headquarters. I said, for what? He said, well, director wants to see you…

Q. …Did you have threats on your life from time to time?

A. That’s part of a policeman’s job.

Q. Did you take them seriously?

A. Not really. If you do, you need to resign. That’s the way I felt.

Q. So it wasn’t that unusual that you would get that kind of — have that kind of threat?

A. Nothing unusual.

Q. Okay. Now, who was with Lieutenant Arkin when he carried you down to central headquarters?

A. He was alone.

Q. He was alone. Was he an officer to whom you reported on a regular basis from this assignment, as a result of this assignment?

A. He wasn’t one of the ones I would directly report to. He worked in intelligence.

Q. Okay. When you got down to central headquarters, where did you go?

A. We went to the conference room.

Q. And who was in the conference room?

A. There were a group of men, I would assume many of them law enforcement. Once we arrived and got inside, Director Holloman stated that there was a man there who had just flown in and there was a contract on my life and that they had prepared to send my family to safety and that I was to go home. At that point I told him that — he knew as well as I did that you couldn’t stop a contract and it was best for me to go back to where I was…

Q. What did Director Holloman say to that?

A. We had a brief argumentation. He said, well, you going home anyway, it is my job to protect you, so, Lieutenant Arkin, take him home.

Q. He didn’t want to hear about your objections?

A. No…

Q. …Did you learn where the threat came from, where this information came from?

A. A couple of years ago.

Q. Now, would this person who conveyed the threat, was he a local person?

A. I never seen him before. They say he had flown in from the Washington D.C. and said he was from the Secret Service Division.

Q. He had flown in from Washington and he was from the Secret Service Division. He was the one who told — brought the information about the threat on your life?

A. Right.

Q. The reason why they removed you?

A. That’s correct

Q. If I advice you that the records have indicated that the person was a man named Phillip Manuel, would that name ring a bell with you?

A. Manual sounds familiar.

Q. What happened next?

A. We proceeded to my home in his cruiser. I was waiting for the arrival of those persons who were supposed to be my security. While waiting there, the radio blasted that Dr. King had been shot. I jumped out of the car and ran in the house, because my mother-in-law was in the bed sick and I didn’t want her to hear the news.

As I got inside the house, she screamed out, Lord, take me, don’t take Dr. King, because we had forgot she had a small transistor radio under her pillow. In fact, she died a week later.

Q. Who was sitting in the car with you at the time?

A. Lieutenant Arkin.

Q. By himself?

A. By himself.

Q. Had you just pulled up when the news —

A. We had been there a brief time while we was waiting on the guys to come.

Q. You had been there for a brief time and were just waiting. What happened aboutthis threat? Did you go back to work?

A. I called about every hour to come back to work. Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Finally Sunday they said you can come on back. I never heard anything else about it.

Q. You never heard anything else about the threat?

A. No.

Q. No one ever mentioned it to you again?

A. Not again until two years ago.

Q. But did you ever question officially anyone about this threat?

A. No. Someone mentioned, oh, it wasn’t you anyone, it was somebody in Knoxville, Tennessee, that they had a contract on.

Q. It wasn’t you, it was a mistaken identity?

A. Right.

Q. It was someone in Knoxville, Tennessee?

A. Then I heard again it was somebody in St. Louis.

There’s more in these trial transcripts. They tell of Merrell McCollough, the man kneeling beside Dr. King in the famous photo of his assassination, checking his vital signs. Mr. McCollough was actually working for military intelligence and whose mission was to infiltrate the Invaders, a group of young people were in Memphis to help provide additional security for Dr. King and civil rights workers during the Sanitation Strike. Mr. McCollough was later hired by the CIA in 1974, and his employment in the CIA was independently verified by Sam Donaldson.

There is so much material in these transcripts it is difficult to sum up in one short diary. So to close tonight as I post this, the evening of April 4, 2005, I’ll just ask a request from my friends in the blogosphere: please read these transcripts. Investigate Dr. King’s assassination for yourselves. Look at the Church Committee reports, and see the information contained in Dr. William Pepper’s “An Act of State” and Dexter Scott King’s “Growing Up King”.

After reviewing all of the evidence, decide for yourself: is our government capable of conspiring to assassinate Dr. King? Did it have the motive and means? Does the evidence point toward this conclusion?

Whatever conclusions you find, please share them with others. Gannon, Iraq, Abu Ghraib…these current events have roots that extend deep in our nation’s history.

Investigating the assassination of Dr. King is a vital step in understanding this history.

Nazis, Schiavo and Pro-life Folks

Even before the rise of Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich, the way for the gruesome Nazi holocaust of human extermination and cruel butchery was being prepared in the 1930 German Weimar Republic through the medical establishment and philosophical elite’s adoption of the “quality of life” concept in place of the “sanctity of life.” The Nuremberg trials, exposing the horrible Nazi war crimes, revealed that Germany’s trend toward atrocity began with their progressive embrace of the Hegelian doctrine of “rational utility,” where an individual’s worth is in relation to their contribution to the state, rather than determined in light of traditional moral, ethical and religious values.

–William Federer, nationally syndicated pundit, in his article “The Court-Ordered Death of Terri Schiavo”, October, 2003

The reason for this public support of removal from ordinary sustenance, I believe, is not that most people understand or care about Terri Schiavo. Like many others with disabilities, I believe that the American public, to one degree or another, holds that disabled people are better off dead. To put it in a simpler way, many Americans are bigots…As Schiavo starves to death, we are entering a world last encountered in Nazi Europe.

–Joe Ford, Harvard Student writing an opinion piece in the Harvard Crimson, “FOCUS: Bigotry and the Murder of Terri Schiavo”, March 25, 2005

Before the Palm Sunday rescue, Schiavo was scheduled to die by starvation and dehydration, a method of capital punishment most would consider criminal if done to a pet.

This was the method used at Auschwitz to murder Father Maximilian Kolbe, the priest who volunteered to take the place of a Polish father of a large family, who was one of 10 the camp commandant had selected for execution in reprisal for the escape of a prisoner…

…One wonders if our young, so many of them cheated of a knowledge of history in schools they are forced to attend, are aware of how closely our elites approximate, in belief and argument, the elites of Weimar and Nazi Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

–Patrick J. Buchanan, “In the Schiavo Case, Elites Reveal Similarity to Nazi Germany”, March 24, 2005

The latest comparison between the Nazi Party and liberals, Democrats and just plain old ordinary folks who want don’t want Congress and the President presiding over personal family decisions and taking sides in a family feud, is pretty darn interesting. These comparisons are made by pure hacks like Michael Savage, to academics like Dr. John Hunt and a whole lotta folks in between.

Some of the more reasonable people making these arguments – like Dr. Hunt – have some pretty good facts on their side. In order to understand the presentation of these facts, however, you have to understand that euthanasia and abortion are intimately linked in the minds of the pro-life crowd as human rights abuses and crimes against humanity that the Nazis committed.

Briefly, here’s the outline of their argument (distilled from Dr. Hunt’s academic paper, “The Abortion and Eugenics Policies of Nazi Germany”):

1. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood…”believed there were “tinfit” (the poor, epileptics, alcoholics, criminals, those physically and mentally disabled) who should be prevented from reproducing, by force if necessary”. They argue she was pro-eugenics, and that this philosophy is the basis of Planned Parenthood.

2. The Weimar Republic first jump started the drive toward abortion, birth control, and euthanasia. The push to legalize abortion was done under the philosophy of perpetuating “wanted” life. Dr. Hunt states: “…In 1928, ministry officials at the Department of Health held secret sessions with the most prominent racial thinkers in Germany, in which they talked about the possibilities of forced sterilization and killing of the severely mentally disabled, among a number of other measures. The law, uneasiness about public opinion, and a desire for more knowledge about heredity held them back.”

3. Therefore, the mass murders, human rights abuses, torture and drive toward the “master race” was the Nazi Party’s continuation of the same philosphies that drove the Weimar Republic in issues of abortion, birth control and euthanasia. Dr. Hunt sums up this argument as follows: “Whatever the respective motives of Weimar and Hitler, the whole infrastructure for the Nazi sterilization-eugenics program had been laid by the democracy the Nazis had overthrown.”

4. The logical inferences are now clear. To be pro-life is to be against those tools that the Nazis used in their mass murders and genocide. To be pro-choice is to want to continue the same mentality that enabled the Nazis to commit atrocities. As Dr. Hunt sums up: “In looking at the Nazis and abortion, and abortion in general, many…Tend to want to be called “centrists,” “moderates,” “mainstream,” not “extremists.” Prochoice, not pro-life, is closer to fascism. Remember also that democracies can do horrible things.

You know what’s really interesting about these arguments? They’re wrong. The facts are correct, but the conclusions are totally off kilter.

How do I know? The arguments themselves are based on a very selective reading of the history of Nazi Germany. For instance, in my research of the pro-life’s references to Nazi Germany, they never mention that homosexuals were targeted by the Nazis. Not once. I’d actually love for someone to show me an article from a pro-life person that puts this persecution of gay men in Germany in this historical context.

Now, think a moment. Why wouldn’t someone – anyone – on the “pro-life” side mention this? They can’t claim it’s irrelevant. The Nazis themselves saw the imprisonment, sterilization and drive to “cure” gay men in Nazi Germany of their homosexuality as vital to the health of the nation. Indeed, it was so central to their thought processes of eugenics and creating the master race that they even established a Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion. Where they encouraged homosexuality and abortion among non-Germans, among “pure” Germans they were considered threats to the health of the State. When talking about sexuality in Germany, then, why wouldn’t even the most reasonable pro-lifer mention the targeting of gay men? (If you want to read up on this subject, check out my last diary, which contains links to both the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the US Holocaust Museum).

Maybe it’s because they don’t want to upset a large segment of their base. Folks like William Regnery, a member of the family that founded Regnery Publishing, who wants to start an all-white dating service “…since the survival of our race depends upon our people marrying, reproducing and parenting.” The Anti-Defamation League has found evidence of anti-semitism in the “pro-life” movement, so maybe this isn’t so far off.

Maybe there’s an inherent fear of homosexuality in the pro-life movement, promoted by the likes of Jerry Falwell, who feel that, “Granting a marriage license to those of the same sex is the country’s stamp of approval on an aberrant, perverted, and broken sexual lifestyle”, which would lead to the eventual destruction of our country.

What’s wrong with this cherry-picked version of the history of Nazi Germany? I mean, leaving gays out doesn’t change anything else, does it?

Well, yes it does.

You see, the Nazis didn’t believe in the existence of a personal life. All issues of life, death and reproductions were matters that directly impacted the State. As Heinrich Himmler said, when delivering his speech on the “Question of Homosexuality”:

“…all things which take place in the sexual sphere are not the private affair of the individual, but signify the life and death of the nation…The people which has many children has the candidature for world power and world domination. A people of good race which has too few children has a one-way ticket to the grave, for insignificance in fifty or a hundred years, for burial in two hundred and fifty years…”

Following this to its logical conclusion, one’s race, one’s gender, one’s sexual orientation and the ability of one to live or die is also not the private affair of the individual. It is a matter for the State.

It is this mentality that scares most folks about the involvement of Congress and the President in the Schiavo affair. Most Americans don’t like the State making these decisions for them. I’d offer a fair bet that most Americans would equate such a practice to Communism or Fascism…or Nazism.

Why the pro-life people don’t see this as well is beyond me.

So Now What Do We Do? Schiavo Strategies

Okay, the Republicans have opened up the pandora’s box of using one family’s tragedy to score political points. It’s awful, it’s reprehensible, but it’s happened.

And the worst thing is the probably WILL score political points after this.

As I see it, we have the following options:

1. Do nothing and hope this all goes away.

2. Bitch and complain and hope that someone hears us.

3. Take action.

Right now I’m leaning toward number 3, because of the overwhelming number of Americans who are also disgusted by Congress’s actions of yesterday and today.
But what do we do? Hold a march? Email? Call?

I don’t think this is enough. I think what our congress is doing right now is so unbelievably bad, that is requires us do something big, huge, smelly and snarky.

My thought is this, and it’s inspired by Hunter’s excellent rant on dKos. I think we should start a blogosphere drive to either purchase copies of medical dictionaries for Bill Frist, or start a drive to purchase copies of the United States Constitution for all of the senators and representatives who are using their public offices to get involved in one family’s tragedy.

I want to hear from y’all here in Booman Tribune what you think we should do. I’d also like to know if anyone has some thoughts on logistics on how to get this mass drive started.

We’ve had success doing stuff like this recently, in buying roses for Boxer and in the Sinclair Broadcast boycott. I think this is something we need to do now and quickly.

Thoughts?

Gays in the Holocaust

Or why the religious right creeps me out.

“He lectured me on the role of homosexuality in history and politics. It had destroyed ancient Greece, he said. Once rife, it extended its contagious effects like an ineluctable law of nature to the best and most manly of characters, eliminating from the reproductive process those very men on whose offspring a nation depended. The immediate result of the vice was, however, that unnatural passion swiftly became dominant in public affairs if it were allowed to spread unchecked.”

Rudolf Diels, first chief of the Gestapo, about Hitler in Frank Rector’s “The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals”

“The history of the gay and lesbian movement has been that its adherents quickly move the goal line as soon as the previous one has been breached, revealing even more shocking and outrageous objectives. In the present instance, homosexual activists, heady with power and exhilaration, feel the political climate is right to tell us what they have wanted all along. This is the real deal: Most gays and lesbians do not want to marry each other. That would entangle them in all sorts of legal constraints. Who needs a lifetime commitment to one person?”

-Dr. James Dobson, “Eleven Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage”, May 2004

“If this country officially embraces same sex marriage, the future of our country is doomed. No civilization has officially embraced homosexuality, or same sex marriage, without self destructing. Granting a marriage license to those of the same sex is the country’s stamp of approval on an aberrant, perverted, and broken sexual lifestyle. The future of our children is at stake.”

–A Quote from Jerry Falwell’s National Liberty Journal, April 1999

“Gay and lesbian people have families, and their families should have legal protection, whether by marriage or civil union…A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages is a form of gay bashing and it would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriages.”

–Coretta Scott King, March, 2004

This is a hard diary for me to write. Hard but necessary. Some of my Christian brothers and sisters are using our religion to cover their prejudices with the patina of belief. They rejoice in their acceptance by society, and the stamp of approval they receive by being such good Christian that they could even love a gay person…if only they’d just stop being gay.

I can’t tell you why they do this. I can only tell you it’s wrong.

How do I know it’s wrong? Because I’m a student of history, and specifically the history leading up to and during the Second World War in Germany.

It amazes me still that the same week of the 60th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings called for PBS to ban showing an episode of a children’s program that showed lesbian parents of a little girl, because “many parents would not want children exposed to such lifestyles”. I remember calling Ms. Spellings up in Washington, D.C., and almost breaking into tears talking to the nice, young woman on the other end of the phone who was fielding calls for the secretary.

“Is Ms. Spellings aware of the fact that gays were also targeted by the Nazis and killed in concentration camps?” I asked. The sympathetic young woman said that she didn’t know, but she would pass on my concerns to the Secretary.

Maybe she doesn’t know. Maybe, like Minnesota state Rep. Arlon Linder, she just chooses not to believe it:

“It never happened,” Lindner told the House.

“I was a child during World War II, and I’ve read a lot about World War II,” he said. “It’s just been recently that anyone’s come out with this idea that homosexuals were persecuted to this extent. There’s been a lot of rewriting of history.”

Holocaust revisionism always makes me ill, because it usually hides the prejudices that the person doing the revisionism just doesn’t want to deal with. The revisionism that states that gays were not targeted by the Nazis is especially dangerous, because in a way Rep. Linder is right: it has been relatively recent – starting mainly in the 1970’s – that gay men who were targeted by the Nazis felt comfortable coming forward.

What Rep. Linder does not understand is that this is not “rewriting of history”. As Warren Johansson and William A. Percy write in their scholarly paper, “Homosexuals in Nazi Germany”:

The intolerance and criminalization that persisted after 1945, along with the shame and fear that the homosexual survivors and their families felt, prevented most homosexuals from testifying. In the immediate postwar period, many of those who wrote about the concentration camps, as well as the criminal courts and administrative tribunals that dealt with the crimes committed in the camps, treated homosexuals as common criminals, justly punished for violating the penal code of the Third Reich…

…A decision of 10 May 1957 of the West German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) in Karlsruhe injured the homosexual victims of the Nazis even more. It held that the altered version of Article 175 of the German Penal Code, as amended by the Nazi regime in 1935 to make the definition of male homosexual acts more comprehensive and the penalty more severe, was constitutional because it “did not interfere with the free development of the personality” and it “contained nothing specifically National Socialist.” Further, it asserted the primary justification of the law to be that homosexual acts “unquestionably offended the moral feelings of the German people.” The court even recommended that the maximum penalty for the offense without further qualification be doubled-from 5 to 10 years.3 This maximum was higher than the sentences actually served after the war by some concentration camp commanders and guards. No one protested the ruling, least of all the psychiatrists who then rarely missed an opportunity to assert that “homosexuality is a serious disease” and even implied from time to time that ostracism and punishment were not inappropriate forms of therapy.4

Examining the persecution of gays in the Holocaust is not “rewriting history”. It is discovering it. And those who attempt to revise or ignore this history may want to do some soul searching and be brutally honest with themselves why the fact that the Nazis – the undisputed “evil doers” of all time – oppressed gays using the same rationale that is being used today to deny basic civil rights and the opportunity to marry to homosexuals.

What were these justifications for the imprisonment, forced castration and murder of gays in Nazi Germany? It seems to have been a combination of fear of homosexuality – specifically among men – as being a cancer to the nation, that left unfettered would expand and eventually decay the body politic from within, literally like a cancer. This fear of homosexuality was combined by the Nazi desire to increase Aryan birthrate, and they viewed gay men as specifically standing in the way of this goal:

If you further take into account the facts I have not yet mentioned, namely that with a static number of women, we have two million men too few on account of those who fell in the war [of 1914-18], then you can well imagine how this imbalance of two million homosexuals and two million war dead, or in other words a lack of about four million men capable of having sex, has upset the sexual balance sheet of Germany, and will result in a catastrophe.

I would like to develop a couple of ideas for you on the question of homosexuality. There are those homosexuals who take the view: what I do is my business, a purely private matter. However, all things which take place in the sexual sphere are not the private affair of the individual, but signify the life and death of the nation, signify world power or ‘swissification.’ The people which has many children has the candidature for world power and world domination. A people of good race which has too few children has a one-way ticket to the grave, for insignificance in fifty or a hundred years, for burial in two hundred and fifty years….

Therefore we must be absolutely clear that if we continue to have this burden in Germany, without being able to fight it, then that is the end of Germany, and the end of the Germanic world….

–Heinrich Himmler, on the “Question of Homosexuality”, February 1937

It’s also hard to calculate exactly how many gays perished under the revised Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, overseen by the Gestapo under the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion: Special Office (II S). The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gives the following statistics:

An estimated 1.2 million men were homosexuals in Germany in 1928. Between 1933-45, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested as homosexuals, and of these, some 50,000 officially defined homosexuals were sentenced. Most of these men spent time in regular prisons, and an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 of the total sentenced were incarcerated in concentration camps.

The number of 5,000-15,000 is only an approximate, as it takes into consideration only those camps on German soil. Johansson and Percy state:

This figure, which some have mistaken for the approximate total of homosexual victims, is conservative, as it excludes those facilities, such as the Moor camps, that did not fall under the jurisdiction of the concentration camp inspectorate, as well as the camps located outside the borders of the Reich.

Many scholars believe the death rate in the concentration camps for homosexuals was particularly high, estimated at 60%. Again, from Johansson and Percy:

Even within the concentration camps, other inmates shunned and ostracized the prisoners with the pink triangle, as Boisson poignantly relates.67 They had the shortest life expectancies and highest death rates, because they belonged to a “scapegoat group” and because as a heterogeneous social group they were unable to develop a strong support network. Further, the Communists, who formed the most cohesive political group among the prisoners and effectively organized resistance within the camps, followed Stalin’s total repudiation of the sexual reform movement by ostracizing homosexuals. Lautmann contrasts homosexual prisoners with matching control groups: political prisoners and Jehovah’s Witnesses, finding that the death rate for homosexual prisoners (60 percent) was half again as high as for political prisoners (41 percent) and Jehovah’s Witnesses (35 percent).68

It is also important to note that these numbers do not include gay men who committed suicide rather than be imprisoned.

One of the most heartbreaking stories of gay oppression during the Holocaust comes from survivor, Friedrich-Paul von Groszheim. This is his testimony:

1933-39: In January 1937 the SS arrested 230 men in Lübeck under the Nazi-revised criminal code’s paragraph 175, which outlawed homosexuality, and I was imprisoned for 10 months. The Nazis had been using paragraph 175 as grounds for making mass arrests of homosexuals. In 1938 I was re-arrested, humiliated, and tortured. The Nazis finally released me, but only on the condition that I agree to be castrated. I submitted to the operation.

1940-44: Because of the nature of my operation, I was rejected as “physically unfit” when I came up for military service in 1940. In 1943 I was arrested again, this time for being a monarchist, a supporter of the former Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Nazis imprisoned me as a political prisoner in an annex of the Neuengamme concentration camp at Lübeck.

This awful chapter of human history is too lengthy to record in one diary, and I suggest that folks check out all of the links I’ve provided above, in addition to this page, which links to more online material. The life of a homosexual in these camps included rape, molestation, brutal beatings and there is one testimony of death by a dog attack.

It is vitally important that this little-told history reaches the ears of as many people as possible, especially in these days of some forces in our government wishing to use homosexuals as scapegoats and political pawns.

Never again.

An upbeat epilogue to this diary: Arlon Linder is no longer a state representative in Minnesota.