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If we ignore the lessons of history, we are destined to repeat it. It is one of the great truisms of our age that we tend to ignore such lessons. But, much worse than ignoring the lessons of history is the deliberate act of forgetting our past in order to air-brush inconvenient truths from it. Over the last 20 years or so, many academics have started questioning the legitimacy of the holocaust. David Irvin, being but the most obvious (he was jailed in Austria for holocaust denying). As the events fade in to history and some unpalatable elements of expansionist Zionism become more and more apparent, it has become almost a badge of honour amongst the political right wing to down-play the holocaust. To do this however, in my opinion, is a grave error.

The holocaust stands out in history as the first example of an industrial state using the productive capacity of its industry to murder its own people. This should serve to remind us that the civilization we are so proud of is simply a veneer, very thin and easily broken. If we forget how close we are to bestiality, we allow the risk of returning to it at any time. For this alone we must never forget.

Although the victor always writes his own history and recreates the past in his own image, to deny a collection of events as brutal as the holocaust is to play in to the hands of those who wish to reconstruct a past for us all. A past can be manufactured where slavery was the fault of black people, where white people were the first inhabitants in southern Africa, where Americans never went to the moon and where the holocaust never happened. Hollywood and the film industry generally has an inglorious record of this sort of thing. This is so much so that many people believe that Vikings indeed did wear helmets with horns and that it was Americans who first broke the German enigma code. Such blatant lying in the film industry has the impact of creating an alternative reality, one much more palatable to received opinion in any given time.

Such a non-audit able reality was recognized by the Nazis, who set about creating their own past, present and future through film. The director Lemmi Reifenschtal was used by the Nazis to do just this. Both the triumph of the will (that depicted the rise of the Nazis as equivalent to the Roman empire) and, more sinister, the Eternal Jew, depicting the spread of world Jewry as being the equivalent of a plague of rats and depicting a world-Jewish conspiracy.

Clearly, with such reason to distrust our histories, it is more important than ever that we do not let those who would rewrite our past win. We must be forever vigilant and protect our past against coruption and lies. Do this not and we are in an air-brushed history able to be manipulated to suit the ends of those in whos financial interests it is to depict our past in a certain light

Learn more about this author, Robert Grason.
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