From: "KayLee" 
Subject: [illusions] THE AMERICAN HOLOCAUST
Date: 4 Jun 2000 21:05:24 -0400
To: "SpeakOut" 

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Once someone on list asked me why the word 'nazi' is brought up
everytime people talk about the drug war and the prisons.  This is by
far the best explanation I have ever found.
Thank you to John Beresford, M.D.
KL
---------------
The scale of such events is what makes them a holocaust or not, and
the vast scale of America's war on drugs suffices to define it thus.
David Crockett Williams 
---------------
Pubdate: Wed, 17 Feb 1999
Source: Rock River Times (IL)
Author: John Beresford, M.D.

THE NAZI COMPARISON

Drug War prisoners that I correspond with call themselves POWs.  Some
write "POW in America" in the corner of an envelope under the writer's
name and prison number.  "Political prisoner" and "gulag" are terms
that enter conversation.  Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle and The
Gulag Archipelago are works sometimes referred to.

America's vast network of prisons, boot camps, and jails invites
comparison with the detention machinery of former totalitarian
regimes.  The certainty of conviction that an accusation of a drug law
violation brings -- through confession (95 percent) or trial and a
finding of guilt (the remaining 5 percent) -- matches the idea of
automatic conviction that goes with popular belief about the nazi and
communist systems.  "Nazi" is a term used by Drug War prisoners and
non-prisoners alike, as though it were a given that the mentality
behind Nazi behavior a half-century ago and the operation of today's
Drug War is no different.

The comparison is an uncomfortable one, and one's first inclination is
to
reject it.  A US judge has objected that nothing in the conduct of
today's
Drug War resembles the terror tactics in Nazi Germany where SS troops
could storm into a person's home and no one saw or heard of that
person again. The objection is understandable, but it rests on a false
premise.  The Nazis were not a bunch of crooks, operating outside the
confines of the law. Everything they did had legal backing, and if on
some occasion a law was needed they composed one.

Flat out, it will be objected that a world of difference separates a
prison
from a death camp.  Drug War prisoners are not intended for a
holocaust.
Ominously for our peace of mind, however, until the last minute
neither were the people held in concentration camps.  They were held
there to protect the health of society.  Moreover, with the obsession
with death that gains ground daily, it is probable that death is in
the cards for people accused of drug law violations in the future.  A
questionnaire is making the rounds in Congress that has Yes and No
boxes for questions which include: "Do you favor the death penalty for
drug trafficking?" Who in their right mind in Congress, I wonder, will
check No to that question, "trafficking" being the loaded term for
what most people call dealing?

Someone will point to the absurdity of thinking that America would
ever
tolerate a "Fuhrer," a wild man with a funny mustache and a way of
haranguing crowds burlesqued by Charlie Chaplin.  The point, though,
is that the Nazi comparison refers not so much to rhetoric, inevitably
different in two quite different places and at different times, as to
the dehumanization and trashing of large numbers of people for
lifestyles and practices that violate the norms of mainstream society.
For this we do not need a Hitler. We can do it the American way.

Myself, I am sympathetic to the Nazi comparison.
I was in Nazi Germany as a child.

In the summer of 1938, when I was 14, my parents sent me on a two-week
vacation with a family in a village in north-west Germany.  There were
Mr. and Mrs.  Otting, their daughter Irmgard, and the youngest son
Wolfgang, who wore his Hitler Jugend uniform at Wednesday night
meetings.  The two older sons I never saw.  One was in the army.  The
other was doing two years of voluntary farm labor, which excused him
from army service.

Mr.  and Mrs.  Otting were old-time Christians, and had the family
bible on display in the china cabinet in the dining room.  On the
shelf above the Holy Bible you saw the red and white dust jacket of
Mein Kampf, Hitler's version of scripture.  No one said anything about
it, but there had to be a copy of Mein Kampf on display for two
reasons.  Every five or six houses or apartments had an informant who
could sift through mail, collect gossip, and pay a visit to make sure
the householder did not have suspicious material lying around.  Also,
schoolchildren were taught to report suspicious behavior to the
police.

There wasn't any TV, but there was plenty of entertainment -- parades,
outdoor concerts, Hitler on the radio, sports.

The economy was great.  Everyone had a job.  Germany was strong.
Hitler wanted peace.  New construction was going up everywhere.  The
trains ran on time.  You didn't see beggars in the street, hanging
around.  Undesirables had been rounded up, got out of the way.

The newspapers were full of praise for the Nazi system.  A weekly
periodical with pictures showed who the Untermenschen were, the
underclass of people who had no place in decent society.  In those
days the underclass consisted of gypsies, Jews, homosexuals, the wrong
sort of artists, trade unionists, and communists.  They were described
in terms we now call demonization and scapegoating.

The universities had their share of academics who endorsed Nazi
policy.
Doctors, engineers, race specialists, and others spelled out theories
which
gave the Nazis a green light.

At 14 I was barely aware of all this.  Yet by the end of my two weeks
with
the Ottings I had a feeling that to this day remains hard to describe.
I
took this feeling home to England, where I promptly forgot it.  It
wasn't
the sort of feeling you had there.  I didn't have it during the war,
which
started the next year.  I didn't have it when I studied medicine,
emigrated to America, became an American citizen, and lived in New
York for 20 years. I didn't have it in Canada, where I practiced
psychiatry for 15 years.  I didn't have it when I retired from
practice and spent time in a Buddhist monastery.

On and off, I would read about Nazi Germany, but the feeling that I
had when I was briefly in Nazi Germany as a child had gone.

In the fall of 1992 an ad appeared in the personal column of High
Times
Magazine, sent in by Brian Adams.  Brian wrote that he was 18 years
old,
just out of high school, when he was arrested and sentenced to ten
years of imprisonment for passing out LSD to his friends.  If a High
Times reader was interested in LSD sentencing methods, the reader
could write to Brian and learn something.

I wrote to Brian, who introduced me to Tim Dean, who introduced me to
other LSD prisoners and soon I was in the thick of a correspondence
which has not stopped growing.  In 1993 I began to visit Drug War
prisoners in prison.  I drove to the Canadian border, crossed into the
United States, and talked with Pat Jordan in County Jail in Nashville,
Tennessee.  I drove to Michigan City to talk with Franklin Martz,
sentenced to 40 years in the Indiana State Prison in that city.  I
drove to other prisons to speak with Drug War prisoners, paying
attention to the information they provided.  That started my Drug War
education.

One day something happened.  I realized that every time I left the
monastery and entered the United States I was struck with a weird
feeling that left as soon as I re-entered Canada.  I couldn't put my
finger on it, but it was as real as day.  When the meaning of this
realization dawned, it hit me like a ton of bricks.  The feeling I had
acquired in Nazi Germany and forgotten more than half a century before
was back.  My Drug War education had clicked in.

The feeling told me everything.  The exponent of democracy had fallen
on
hard times.  America was treading the same path as Nazi Germany.  The
War on Drugs and Hitler's war on anyone he took exception to -- the
symptoms in the two cases were identical.

One thing I had to accept was that I could not stay on in the
monastery.  I could not sit back and watch disaster unfold.  I had to
get out in the world and become an activist, whatever becoming an
activist entailed.  Even if no one else saw the War on Drugs in the
same light I did, I had to do what might lie in my power to stop it.

I won't go into what has happened since, except to mention a
friendship with Nora Callahan and a tie to the November Coalition.  It
is a relief to know that others share the perception that historically
we are in big trouble, without their having once glimpsed life in Nazi
Germany.

Where it will end, no one can say.  But there is reason for hope.  In
1938
people in Germany did not know the price they would soon pay for
subscribing
to Nazi policy.  We, looking back, do know.  With the benefit of
hindsight
and with concerted effort we may still halt the juggernaut, free Drug
War
prisoners, reverse an unsalutary policy, and restore meaning to the
words
"liberty and justice for all." If we don't, we will have no one to
blame for
the disaster that lies just around the corner but ourselves.

=========================================

If you believe you have escaped mind control,
       then you are one of it's victims.
==
Perhaps you have already read this column by Dr. John Beresford, which
appeared in the drugnews last year.  It's a compelling argument in
favor of the Nazi comparison as well as a damn good read.

My own view is that both the European holocaust and our American
holocaust are both expressions of the scapegoat ritual, in which a
community identifies a person or a particular group as the imagined
cause of some pestilence or disaster and disposes of them accordingly.
The scale of such events is what makes them a holocaust or not, and
the vast scale of America's war on drugs suffices to define it thus.
David Crockett Williams 
==
-SheWhoRemembers
Freedom Justice Peace
http://geocities.com/sheremembers
Audio Feed forThought:
http://real1.photopoint.com/shewho@geocities.com/swr.ram
===
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Shared by Kay Lee
2613 Larry Court
Eau, Gallie, Florida 32935
321-253-3673

MAKING THE WALLS TRANSPARENT
http://www.zyworld.com/kay~lee/garywaid.htm
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 Jackdanford@aol.com   "COMMON SENSE"   ph 704-867-5493
2959 Rufus Ratchford Rd,  Gastonia, NC  28056
A prison reform newspaper and a national prison reform movement.
Setting up chapters in  all 50 states, in every large city, every
small town, every dot on the map.

I'll be standing in front of one of America's prisons on Saturday,
July 15th, 2000 to draw attention to the conditions two million people
live in. Won't you do the same?
A  Unity of those Concerned
HTTP://WWW.PRUP.NET
************************************
Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws.
On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property
existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.






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