Tell the Truth Shame the Devil

TELL THE TRUTH & SHAME THE DEVIL As told to the author by a little old man in a plaid shirt DEDICATION: For Germany. For Germans who still want to be German. For Humanity. TELL THE TRUTH & SHAME THE DEVIL ISBN 978-1-937787-29-5 By GERARD MENUHIN Copyright 2015 by GERARD MENUHIN and THE BARNES REVIEW Published by: THE BARNES REVIEW, P.O. Box 15877, Washington, D.C. 20003 Ordering more copies: Order more copies of Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil (softcover, 455 pages, $35 plus $5 S&H in the U.S.) from THE BARNES REVIEW, P.O. Box 15877, Washington, D.C. 20003. TBR subscribers may take 10% off the list price. Call 1-877-773-9077 toll free Mon.-Thu. 9-5 to charge copies. See more books at www.barnesreview.com. Subscriptions: A subscription to THE BARNES REVIEW historical magazine is $46 for one year (six issues) and $78 for two years (12 issues) inside the U.S. Outside the U.S: Canada/Mex- ico: $65 per year. All other nations: $80 per year sent via air mail. Send payment with request to TBR, P.O. Box 15877, Washington, D.C. 20003. Call 1-877-773-9077 toll free to charge to major credit cards. Order online at www.barnesreview.com. See a special subscription offer at the back of this volume or call toll free number above and ask for best current subscription offer. Reproduction Policy: Portions of this publication may be reproduced with prior permission in critical reviews and other papers provided credit is given to author, book title is listed and full contact in- formation are given for publisher. Contact publisher at above address for permission. TELL THE TRUTH & SHAME THE DEVIL As told to the author by a little old man in a plaid shirt BY GERARD MENUHIN PUBLISHED BY THE BARNES REVIEW 2015 “Sorrow is knowledge; they who know the most, must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, the Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.” —BYRON, Manfred I THWARTED: HUMANITY’S LAST GRASP FOR FREEDOM his dog is a Labrador. Seldom barks and is good natured, like most Labradors. Now and then, I join its owner for one of his daily rounds to air the animal. He’s a Jeho- vah’s Witness. Initially, he did his duty by trying to con- vert me, but I told him that I don’t believe in anything I can’tT see, so he gave up. If I needed to worship anything, it would be trees. Trees have this in common with a folk culture and a manufacturing economy: both are rooted in the ground and so are stable. A seasonal or serv- ice economy, supplying a may-fly community of consumers, is un- stable. Any tree is worth countless consumers, as they rarely provide anything beneficial. What they can and often do is to destroy trees. It takes a subhuman with a chainsaw only seconds to cut down what has taken maybe hundreds of years to grow. Picture an oak. This ad- mirable tree stands on a hill and affords a majestic view. Its furrowed trunk towers into the sky. It has seen more seasons than any person. It has withstood countless winter storms. Its presence is ennobling even when leafless. It doesn’t have to do anything, it just is. Then along comes a consumer (an organism that obtains what it craves by helping itself to other organisms) with a saw and cuts it down for boards or even for firewood. Which would you rather have, the organism or the oak? Leading on from the consumer, don’t speak to me about the dignity of man. I haven’t seen a dignified human for a long time, if 6 | TELL THE TRUTH & SHAME THE DEVIL ever. That is because dignity implies personal responsibility. The Dig- nity of Man is just like the Rights of Man, an artificial concept, in- vented by artificial, cosmopolitical bodies like the U.N. or the Court of Human Rights, to displace national laws; intangible claptrap in- tended to usurp established rights. Based on the fraudulent Décla- ration des Droits de l’Homme of 1789, they exalted the empty excitations Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité. If the right to clean air and water is not guaranteed, and to freedom of speech and assembly, of what use are these sonorous declarations? My neighbor and I agree on many topics, except that, like most sectarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses believe Christ will return to save them. I expound on the degradation of everything, and he responds with quotes from the Scriptures, which I check when I get home. He is always right. I name the guilty; he calls them Satan. The Bible did in fact foresee it all: John 8:44, or, if you prefer, Revelation 2:9. So we’re both right. I suppose it began with a sense, nothing more. Not even a vague sentiment, let alone the certitude that what the average child is taught about major historical events is a pack of lies. It was just a lurking mental itch. My father never spoke of the war, any more than he spoke of anything negative or disagreeable or, indeed, about the past at all, if he could help it. My mother spoke mostly about the past. Her past. But also, if the mood took her, of the superiority of Edwardian (stressed “a”) architecture over the Victorian equivalent, of her superior sense of dress and decoration, or of her war experi- ences. She maintained the convictions of her generation, among them, that Churchill had been a great man and Neville Chamberlain a gullible one (“appeasement” may never shed its tarnish, although any attempt to prevent war must be commendable). Although she would lugubriously tell my brother and me that “you [note, not we] would have been gassed if you had lived in Germany,” she was in no sense Germanophobic; she even spoke some German. Of course, Germany had not been part of her past, so it was not included in the reminiscences that formed a large part of her conversation. I have never met anyone whose opinions were so wholeheartedly based on bygone criteria as my mother, or who so resolutely rejected any in- TELL THE TRUTH & SHAME THE DEVIL | 7 fluence for change. She suffered the present, but judged it always through the filter of her past, however irrelevant. Until my late teens, my impressions of the war had been almost entirely derived from the pictorial adventures of heroic Allied ser- vicemen, known as “trash” at school (inspired by these, I was a pro- lific doodler of battleships and planes). As the captive audience of my mother’s recollections of the Blitz, I habitually tuned out or deleted most of her repetitive anec- dotes, out of resentment. I regret this now, as a clearer firsthand ac- count of life in wartime London, however edited, would have been informative. But the very manner of my mother’s monologues hin- dered questions, which would have been considered mere interrup- tions of the scheduled broadcast. Associated topics included the “Wirtschaftswunder” years, the miracle of postwar German industrial reconstruction, to which my mother alluded during my parents’ few visits to my German school, in 1957. At nine, I was unsurprisingly unaware of this phenomenon, or of the incongruity of two advanced Anglo-Saxon nations de- stroying each other. About fifteen years later, I heard an irascible colonel on American radio voice a fitting verdict: “For the British and the Germans to be fighting each other was an inappropriate en- counter situation.” All the Germans I knew were unfailingly pleas- ant and remarkable only for seeming each to possess the same model of shiny dark blue suit, in retrospect perhaps in itself an in- dication of their striving toward a return to bourgeois standards. The schoolchildren at Hermannsberg were also models of normality, in that, in their free time, they were chiefly occupied with games/sports, amusement, music and outdoor pastimes. That their ancestors and mine could have been incited to kill each other never occurred to me. The only reference to the war that I remember is of a glancing remark I overheard as I was drying myself after the morning shower, when two older boys were exchanging hearsay about the fate of Ger- man POWs in Russian captivity. Although it was typical of school- boys’ gossip, the morbid subject naturally impressed me at the time. Since then, I have learned much, some of it by reflection, some from books and records of and about the time, which by their co- 8 | TELL THE TRUTH & SHAME THE DEVIL pious footnotes and corroborative contents and cross-referencing, confirm that the sympathy I have always felt for this much-maligned and mistreated people is justified. In fact, I never gave the subject much thought, occupied as I was with my daily drudgery, until the Nineties, when, while I was ordering the contents of my deceased grandparents’ house, I chanced on a copy of the National Zeitung, the patriotic German newspaper to which my grandfather had con- tributed a column for several years during the Sixties. He had de- voted his life, by means of books and articles, to supporting the Palestinians, among whom he had lived as a boy, during the first decade of the 20th century. A Russian-Jewish immigrant, he had ex- perienced much kindness from the local Arabs and had taken stock of the attitude and expectations of some of the Jewish settlers. The newspaper commanded respect, with its simple Maltese/ Iron Cross logo and boldly independent informative stance.

Load more