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Blinded by the truth. [1]

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Date: 2023-07-30

How can a country become so blind to the truth.

The question I hear everyday is; why do these MAGA people keep voting for Trump and the Trump party; formerly the Republican party? I was stunned when I saw a poll the other night-on MSNBC- that 50% of Trump voters do not believe he had any documents. This after Trump himself-over and over- has stated he had the documents. How in hell do people become so blind. Here are a couple of examples that may explain how and why.

In 1955 a newspaper reporter- of German and Jewish heritage -working for the Chicago Tribune went to Germany to find out how and why "decent men become Nazis." His name is Milton Mayer. The name of the book is; "They Thought They Were Free.' In the FORWARD to the book he wrote: "I wanted to see this monstrous man, the Nazi. I wanted to talk to him and to listen to him. I wanted to try to understand him. We were both men, he and I. In rejecting the Nazi doctrine of racial superiority, I had to concede that what had been I might be; what led him along the course he took might lead me." He interviewed ten German men of different professions. The following is but a very small snippet of what happened to the German people.

Chapter 13; “BUT THEN IT WAS TOO LATE.” Heinrich Hildebrandt, high school teacher said-in part- what happens when people become isolated from reality. "In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than step B, and, if you did not make a stand at step B, why should you stop at C? And so on to step D. And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying "JEW SWINE," collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in-your nation, your people-is not the world you were born in at all."

And then there is this. I have just finished a book entitled; "The Escape Artist." It is the true story of Rudolf Vrba and Fred Wetzler, Jewish prisoners who escaped from the infamous concentration camp; AUSCHWITZ. After their escape they wrote an incredibly detailed account of what happens to the Jews before and after arriving at the camp. The account contains stories of how people were herded onto cattle cars and shipped to the camp believing they were headed to resettlement camps and not to their deaths.

The horrors of the camp are all there for us to see in graphic detail. What Vrba and Wetzler wanted the most was to warn the world what was happening to the Jews of Europe. They honestly thought that once the truth came out people-especially the Allies- would do something to stop this massacre. They thought, by warning the Jews, of what was awaiting them they-the Jews- would stop boarding the trains and cause a ruckus thus exposing what the Nazis were doing. The Nazi leadership feared that word would get out and hamper their murderous rampage.

The following is just one small example of what happened to the truth. Rudolf shortened his name to Rudi. Rudi held tight to his and Wetzler's work, that if the Jews knew what awaited them-especially the Jews of Hungary- they would revolt. There are many examples of Jews, and many others, who simply could not and would not believe such atrocities were occurring. After many agonizing and frustrating years and mixed emotions about his work not being disseminated in the way he thought it should have been; Rudi came to the realization that human beings find it almost impossible to conceive of their own deaths.

In the following years there were several others who were able to escape the hell of Auschwitz. Here is one story "After months of his escape Czeslaw Mordowicz was caught by the Gestapo and put on a train headed back to Auschwitz. Inside the cattle truck, he told his fellow deportees that he knew what awaited them. Listen, he pleaded, you are going to your death. He urged the people jammed into the wagon to join him and jump off the moving train. They refused. Instead they began shouting, banging on the doors and calling the German guards. They guards attacked Mordowicz and beat him so badly, he was all but incapacitated. He never did leap off the train, but ended back at Auschwitz/Birkenau. All because he had given a warning that the warned could not believe and did not want to hear.

Even prisoners inside Auschwitz, where the air was chocked with the smoke of incinerating human flesh, there were those who refused to believe what they could see and smell". An undercover agent; Jan Karski visited Washington to brief President Roosevelt on the Nazi madness. He ran into Supreme Court Justice; Felix Frankfuter-himself a Jew-and spent twenty minutes telling the Justice what was going on. Frankfuter said I do not believe you. A diplomate asked the judge to explain himself. Frankfuter stated " I did not say he was lying. I said I don't believe him. These are different things. My mind and my heart are made in such a way that I cannot except it. NO NO NO."

Vrba and Wetzler’s escape plan had been built on the initial conviction that facts could save lives, that information would be the weapon with which he would thwart the Nazi plan to eliminate the Jews. Witnessing the fate of a Czech family, and many more in a Czech camp, and their immovable faith, despite the evidence all around them, that they would somehow be spared, had led him to understand a more complicated truth: that information is necessary, to be sure, but it is never sufficient. Information must also be BELIEVED, especially when it comes to mortal threats. ...only when information is combined with believe does it become knowledge. And only knowledge leads to action. The French-Jewish philospher Raymond Aron would say, when asked about the Holocaust, "I knew, but I didn't believe it. AND BECAUSE I DIDN'T BELIEV IT, I DIDN'T KNOW."

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/30/2184200/-Blinded-by-the-truth

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