At first it seems like a welcome nose-tweak.
But then it hits you:
Why do we need to recreate somebody’s attic in 1944, when today, living Jews (and all other infidels) are being harassed, persecuted and murdered by — not imaginary, fictional or long-dead Nazis — but real, living Muslims?
Three thousand infidels were murdered a few blocks away within living memory. But it’s so much cozier and convenient to memorialize something horrible that happened a long time ago. You can still get that precious little frisson of pity and fear and self-righteousness, without the messiness of having to think about what happened in your own city, to your friends and neighbors. Then you can pick up something cute at the gift shop. Hurrah!
Clearly, assigning The Diary of Anne Frank as required reader for generations of North American students has accomplished only one, very sinister thing:
Millions of Canadians and Americans have absorbed the dangerous lesson that “people are really good at heart.”
If you’re a Christian, that is a literal heresy.
The first part of her famous sentence is, “In spite of everything…”
It is just as important as the last, but only in the bitterest sense, which is why it gets slightly less emphasis:
In spite of seeing what was going on right outside her window, (which she had to look out of because she couldn’t leave the ****ing house) Anne Frank believed (or tried to convince herself) that people were really good at heart.
She had the excuse of being a teenaged girl, her as-yet-to-gel brain steeped in hormones.
What excuse fully grown, “sophisticated” New Yorkers have for believing all varieties of naive, sentimental, sinister, literally fatal nonsense ten years after their own mega-Kristallnact is beyond me.
Maybe they read The Diary and it helped mess up their minds.
Some Muslims don’t want their kids reading The Diary of Anne Frank in school. Maybe if we want to rescue what’s left of the West from their grubby hands, we should go along with that idea — without telling them why.
Has The Diary of Anne Frank helped breed an army of Bernie Farbers and other backward-looking self-congratulatory idealists more interested in memorializing the past than ensuring the future?
If so, then it has to go.
UPDATE — a reader writes:
The other day the Wall Street Journal posted an article noting that a number of recently-popular Scandinavian mystery writers, notable Steig Larsson (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) and Henning Mankell (Kurt Wallender series) channel their youthful leftwing enthusiasms into senile ideological fetishes:
The upshot is that the bad-guys that populate their novels are leftover Nazis, capitalists, and skinheads. It’s getting especially hard to find genuine Nazi villains. Once recent Norwegian horror film I saw (Dead Snow)
had to resort to Nazi zombies. It’s a tough problem. They should put Nazis on the Endangered Species list. Skinheads aren’t a good substitute: they aren’t smart enough to form significant conspiracies, they lack style, and are uncomfortably working-class. I rudely pointed out in the comments section that these guys are writing this stuff at a time when a Jew can’t safely walk the streets of Malmo, and the sexual-assault rate is way up –any guesses why? And that denial of this sort finds its source in moral and intellectual cowardice.
