Flashback. Their upstairs neighbors just got hauled away. They tried not to block out the commotion, just as the older couple upstairs had been keeping to their selves were also trying to stay out of notice. It was the nice older couple that brought the delicious chicken soup with matzoh balls last year when the family was under the weather. It was the screams of this same nice old lady they heard punctuated by the thump, thump, thump of her husbands head bouncing off the steps as he was dragged away.
A few years later, they are escorted through gates similar to those their neighbors would have crossed lethally packed in suffocating cattle cars. At Buchenwald, the gates display the phrase “Jedem das Seine” which means “to each is own”. A more figurative translation is “everyone gets what they deserve”. These German civilians that were forced to view the concentration camp atrocities of the Third Reich, was this all they deserved for their negligent indifference as rhetoric evolved into persecution and persecution to genocide? What about the appeasers of Europe that swapped the fate of millions for political victory and wistful diplomacy?
I’m not sure if these people got what they deserved so many years ago, however, I can do my part to honor those that eventually came to their rescue. To the men and women of the American military who deserve so much more… I give them what I can. My thanks, my respect, and my prayers I send to them on this Memorial Day.
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Flash forward to today I as I drink my flavored coffee, nuked cinnamon roll and read of the latest news in Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and the barbarism of radical Islam. Although this historical repetition occurs not in the apartment upstairs (yet), because of the power of today’s media it might as well. I know what is happening, and often in brutal detail. Am I any different than those Germans that turned a blind eye to the Nazi pogroms? Will I be viewed fifty years in the future with same disgusted bewilderment I view Hitler’s Germans of the past?
Yes I know many grow weary of the parallels drawn between Hitler’s Germany and radical Islam, so instead I compare those today to those then that stood idly by while a violent ideology swept the world. Those today that are indifferent to the real atrocities, blinded by their hatred for their own government. The politicians that are once again playing politics with the fate of millions while selling out their own country. What about myself who believes what I write is true, yet sits at the breakfast table in comfort?
Obviously not everyone gets what they deserve; however for those that died in the past for our freedom we should at least try to honor their sacrifice. With radical Islam basically given a free pass today it seems that we are not keeping faith with our long dead soldiers who lie as sentinels on the shores of Normandy. Now that the current sacrifices of our soldier in the WOT are being ridiculed and politicized, our soldiers are not getting what they deserve. For those that are facing death this very morning my thanks, my respect, and my prayers I send to them on this Memorial Day are not enough.
They deserve more than a letter and a phone call to my Congressman. They deserve more than I make my voice heard when people speak of Abu Ghraib by asking, “Where are the broken bones, where are the twisted remains, and where are the mass graves?” They deserve more than me replying to people who suggest we leave Iraq by saying, “and then what?” They deserve more than me asking CAIR if diversity in America means that women will be regularly beaten and even stoned as they are in Islamic countries. Our soldiers deserve much more than a handshake and a meal on me at the airport. And those that have died for our freedom… they deserve so much more.
Cross posted at Redstate.com and HinzSightReport.com
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