celebrating freedom for all, not just a select group

As I watch an old Twilight Zone episode entitled "Death's-Head Revisited", I am reminded that, once upon a time, people remembered the Nazi camps vividly. Often from personal experience. People whom I knew personally during my childhood had been incarcerated in those camps.

Most of them are gone now. And the memories of the crimes against humanity carried out within those camps are fading. Old John Demjanjuk, one foot in the grave already, is still alive and accused of serving under the Nazis in one of those horrible camps.

When I was a youth during the 1970's, many of us did not comprehend the horrors of fascism (and of Nazi fascism particularly). The TV show "Hogan's Heroes" made the Wehrmacht and SS appear to have been buffoons. The true cost of the war was lost upon us. I must confess that I even once created a small Nazi flag using a piece of white cotton cloth and a pair of Magic Markers (one red, one black). I netiher hated Jews nor understood what that evil banner really represented. My mother noticed it while cleaning the house and reported it to my father. I was called downstairs.

My father gave me a serious lecture about the terrible reality of Hitler's criminal regime. I was left in tears and rightly ashamed. At that moment I lost any romantic notions of the "order" provided by Hitler's regime ("at least he made the trains run on time"). The horrors perpetrated in Germany and occupied territories had never dawned upon me before that lecture.

Jews were a favored target of man's inhumanity, along with Catholics, homosexuals and intellectuals; if I had been there in that time it is certainly possible that I would have been rounded up. One of my family lines is "Frankenstein" (Stein? Sounds Jewish). My father's maternal line was Catholic. Many of the DeKings could probably be classified as intellectuals under one definition or another.

To be sure, a fraction of those incarcerated were truly criminals, but that was a significant minority. There were surely more criminals serving in the SS than there were criminals imprisoned.

And now, with the last Holocaust survivors and former Nazis dying off, the Holocaust Deniers and neo-Nazis continue their resurgence. The first books declaiming the Holocaust as exaggerations, a vast hoax or liberal conspiracy were published long ago, while there were still plenty of first-hand witnesses available to debunk these books.

Today historical revisionists are gaining ground in other areas: the true story of our great Nation's founding as a secular Republic - free from the influence of any one Church - is recast by the right wing as an anointment of Protestant Christian doctrine as the foundation of a federal government. The Confederate States of America's instigation, by word and by deed, of the American Civil War has long been falsely recast as "Northern Aggression." And don't even consider bringing up that old saw about how "there was nothing civil about it"; "civil" is precisely what it was.

civil war [n]: a war between citizens of the same country. See also American Civil War, English Civil War, Spanish Civil War

One brief aside: the prominent display of Confederate flags across the modern U.S.A. is profoundly offensive to me. Such displays are as much an affront to the Republic as flying the Nazi flag would be in Europe or, dare I say, Israel today.

In memory of the United States' Independence Day celebration, I would like to remind everyone that the American Revolution was fought not only by the descendents of the Puritans and Pilgrims, but also the descendents of Dutch settlers - who created New Amsterdam, later conquered by the British and renamed New York - as well as descendents of Swedes, who created New Sweden (later absorbed into New Jersey and Delaware). At the time of the Revolution, our Nation was already religiously and culturally diverse. Some communities still spoke the languages of their home countries. My 5th-great grandfather along with his brothers and cousins all took up arms against the Crown, fighting under General Washington. Many were members of the Old Dutch Church (a Calvinist sect) that spoke Dutch in church and often at home.

Many of the Founding Fathers - some say most of them - were Deists or Rosicrucians. Neither of these belief systems would be supported by the Religious Right today. Nay, they would instead be crucified on the stump by Dominionist politicians, political wannabes and Baptist preachers.

Today I proclaim my love for the nation of my birth and, as a true patriot descended from a long line of true patriots, question the motives and patriotism of those who would wave a Bible wrapped in a flag, but I can still say, "God Bless America" without insisting that everyone pray the same way I do.

God bless America.