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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Letters to the Editor
Wednesday 19 March @ 13:19:51 |
 1. A P.S. on the Pulse’s coverage of HF 341
2. America will be hated for this war
A P.S. on the Pulse’s coverage of HF 341
Minnesota Representative Arlon Lindner has created a fuss with the introduction of HF 341 which calls for removal of protection because of “sexual orientation” from the 1993 Human Rights Act. Lindner has said that tolerance of homosexuality has led to the promotion of it, even in schools. He has also said the homosexuals were not persecuted in the Third Reich and that even the Nazis were a bunch of gays who killed the Jews. His views are drawn from a strange book, “The Pink Swastika,” by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams. Lively runs an Aryan type of Christian church that advocates ideas close to Holocaust denial.
On the other hand, opponents of HF 341 have noted that the bill also is protective of “Holocaust survivors” or “Holocaust victims,” a definition which is used in Minnesota Law to refer to homosexuals persecuted in the period 1933-1945. The issue has become complex and acrimonious because of other reckless statements.
But here is the complication: Academic definitions of the “Holocaust” usually refer to “racial” (based on “blood”/heritage) victims—Jews and Roma/Sinti. The handicapped are often included since their disabilities and confinement in hospitals prior to their murder made it impossible to even think of escape. The handicapped were regarded as a danger to the “hereditary health of the German people.” They were sterilized, as were 873 “Afro-Germans,” whom Nazis called “The Rhineland Bastards.” Others were “victims of Nazism” but not “victims of the Holocaust.”
How did the Holocaust get into a Minnesota Law and was it needed? I can’t answer that. Obviously Lindner’s crusade is to remove that dangerous phrase “sexual orientation” from the 1993 Act. But there is more to it, especially in the 1993 Human Rights Act and about how legislators are often lousy historians.
This definitional issue in the 1993 Act raises a problem because it defines the period of persecution as “1933 to 1945.” These dates are correct for the Nazi period, and indeed opposition to the regime was persecuted then for reasons of politics, race, sexual orientation, religion or just telling jokes about Hitler. However, almost all historians now agree that the road to Auschwitz was “twisted” and what was called the “Holocaust” did not begin until at least 1939, with the “Final Solution” appearing in the summer of 1941.
Therefore, persecution alone was not the “Holocaust.” And, if we believe what Elie Wiesel has said, “No Hitler, no Holocaust,” then the hypothetical death of Hitler in 1940 would have ended it before the mass killing started. But even if Hitler had died, there would still have been “victims of Nazism.”
The Nazis indeed made homosexual males a victim group under Paragraph 175 of the Reich Penal Code. However, 175 was not a law of Nazi origin. It was passed in 1871 as a law under the German Empire. Like the laws of many western countries at the time, even in the USA, the law aimed at eliminating what was often referred to as an “unspeakable sexual practice.” The Nazis amended the law in 1935 and imposed up to ten years in prison for those males convicted of forcing other males, especially those under the age of 21, into sexual relations.
The Nazi law on homosexuality was never extended to lesbians although debates about it occurred in German legal circles. The Nazis were interested in the threat to manhood and repopulation of Germany presented by male homosexuals. Homosexuals were identified in the concentration camps by the infamous pink triangle, one of 32 color variations of the triangle designed to identify enemies of the regime. A few lesbians were arrested, possibly for sexual orientation, but they were classified as “asocials,” a catch-all category when the law had yet to condemn a group. One woman, identified as “Elli S,” was registered at Ravensbruck Concentration Camp on November 30, 1940, as “lesbian.” This is the only known registration like this we have. Lesbians were regarded as more “curable” by German doctors. The cure was getting pregnant and having a child.
Both male and female homosexuals generally saw their right to work, have social clubs and have protection in the work place taken away. The key basis for denial of rights was “sexual orientation.”
The role of women in the Third Reich was often said to be one of “children, cooking, and church (Kinder, kuchen, kirchen).” Abortion was outlawed for German women, and Hitler at one time pointed out that German unemployment was equal in numbers to the women who had come into the work force since 1914. On the other hand, abortion became mandatory for Jewish women in some ghettos, as giving birth to a live Jewish child meant certain death for the mother. The Nazis may be said to have been conservative on family questions for Germans and radically evil for those who were not considered part of the German social fabric.
Homosexuals, therefore, were victims of Nazism but not of the “Holocaust.” Recent scholarship has suggested that while many homosexuals were arrested and sent to concentration camps in police sweeps, most were arrested for subsections of Paragraph 175 regarding pedophilia and having sex in public places. They would have been charged in other countries where similar laws existed. This, of course, does not make what happened acceptable.
Approximately 46,111 German males were arrested as homosexuals from 1933-1943 and incarcerated in concentration camps. Many were killed. Others suffered severe humiliation, and some were subject to medical experiments that were designed to “cure homosexuality.” However brutal the treatment, however, the camps for homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political opponents, priests and other victims of Nazism were not treated with the same genocidal methods as for Jews and Roma/Sinti. Many political victims recanted their views and were accepted back into German society.
If one fact stands to differentiate the Holocaust from other Nazi persecutions, it is the mass murder of 1.5 million Jewish children and perhaps 100,000 Roma and Sinti children.
So where does this leave Minnesotans? My guess is that the 1993 Human Rights Act was not a conflation of too many groups in a protected class, but a misinterpretation of “Holocaust survivors” in the very first section of the law. The legislators who enacted the bill didn’t know their history, and this relativization of historical memory is part of the problem now. This is not to belittle the sexual orientation issue.
Lindner is wrong on every count. But Lindner’s sources on this subject are akin to a physicist advocating that the earth is flat. But for lack of space, readers might see the following Web site which refutes “The Pink Swastika” on a page by page basis: http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/Barracks/8706/
Clearly any attempt to remove “sexual orientation” as a protected group is a step backwards, is embarrassing for Minnesota’s image and may have economic repercussions. Minnesota’s politicians should wake up with a strong, not mild condemnation of HF 341. However, this is a dispute which suggests that laws, when they refer to history, should get it right. Would the issue have its current intensity if the word “Holocaust” was not mentioned?
Stephen Feinstein
Director of Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
University of Minnesota
•••
America will be hated for this war
I was in the State of Virginia recently, where there remain many visual reminders of the early days of our nation. The United States arose as a country out of a war with England, a dominant superpower of the day, which sought to control economies throughout the world to its advantage, and to squash all of the smaller players, like the colonies, which it viewed as an economic or military threat. In doing so, England was hated around the world, and was subjected to many uprisings and attacks throughout its empire. We have become our enemy. I shudder to think what will happen to us during the time of our empire, and when the next superpower takes control.
Larry McDonough
St. Paul, MN
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