DON’T BECOME WHAT YOU DESPISE.
My father worked with a man who entered Belsen after it was liberated and was so incensed at the sight of a smirking SS guard that he opened fire almost tearing the man in half and had to be restrained by his commanding officer. He was also a guard for Adolf Eichmann after he was arrested, and his one regret was that he didn’t shoot him. My father said that had he shot him, he would have known how evil he was and would be a note in story, but when Eichmann was executed in Israel, the whole world knew just how evil he was. That was nearly 62 years ago, and one of the brutal ironies is that the same country where Eichmann was hanged is acting as a pariah state against Palestine.
A number of people make me seethe with rage, amongst them the Federal Leader of the Opposition in Australia and the Republican frontrunner for this year’s Presidential election. I remember seeing an article that said that the same Republican was a white wannabe dictator with an African toolbox, and it’s true. One thing that has become obvious about him is that he cozied up to dictators, such as Kim Jong-un, not because he is not a racist but because he admired the way they ran things.
Unlike Hitler, who did not telegraph his intentions straightaway, and began with simple things, like hateful statements, trump has signaled his intentions of shock and awe that make him more dangerous than Hitler. His recent racist statement about immigrants bears a striking similarity to Hitler’s anti-Semitic statements, and it needs to be remembered that Richard Marx and Lenny Kravitz would not have been safe in Nazi Germany, despite only having one Jewish parent, and even a person with one Jewish grandparent was considered Jewish in Nazi Germany.
I know, I become incensed with the Federal Leader of the Opposition and more incensed at his enablers, the idiots who support him, just like I do with those who support trump. I admire Niklas Frank, the youngest son of Hans Frank, who despises his father, and the thing is, unlike Hans Frank’s other children, Niklas was rejected by his father, and there were suggestions that he was fathered by a rival of his father’s whom Himmler had murdered. At the other extremes, one of Niklas’s sisters committed suicide at the age of 46, as her fanatical devotion to her father meant that she didn’t want to live longer than her father, and 46 was the age Hans Frank was when he was executed. His other sister, with her second husband, moved to apartheid South Africa after the Second World War. Niklas Frank has written a scathing book about his father, and he has warned of the dangers of right-wing extremism in Hungary and Poland.
I deplore capital punishment, but I say for the depths of depravity to which Hans Frank sank, while he didn’t deserve the botched executions that his nine co-condemned received (okay, Julius Streicher’s was partly his own fault as his legs weren’t bound and he went down kicking and dislodged the knot and could be heard groaning after the trap was sprung), hanging wasn’t unjust. If only Albert Pierrepoint had done it and been able to look in through the peep hole in the door and said, “Okay, Hans Frank weighs this much and this is his height,” and he’d constructed gallows with sufficient height for a long drop rather than a standard drop and he’d bound his wrists and ankles, the report could have been, “We heard his neck break when the trap was sprung and his heart had stopped beating within four and a half minutes,” rather than some of his fellow condemned taking 24 minutes to die.
It’s human nature and easy to become worked up about injustices, but it’s important to not become the same as those you rail against.