Eisenhower.... on Ahmadinejad

For those who don't know, a brief background.

President Ahmadinehjad of Iran convened a conference on the 11th and 12th, purportedly to get to the true facts about the Holocaust. In other words to give a scholarly glean to the rapidly growing world of Holocaust deniers.

What most don't know is that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas holds a PhD. His doctoral thesis - on the myth of the Holocaust, i.e that it never happened.

Strange how prescient these words from then General Dwight D. Eisenhower to Chief of Staff George Marshall after seeing the first of the concentration camps sound today:

"The things I saw beggar description … The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were … overpowering … I made the visit deliberately in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.'"

Eisenhower was so concerned with the possibility, that because the horrors he saw were so indescribable, that people would one day deny them, he ordered every German citizen who lived near one of the camps to be forcibly made to tour that camp.

Remember, too, that the worst, most barbaric camps were not in American hands, but Russian, so these tours did not include Auschwitz/Birkenau; Bergen Belsen, etc.

They were only of the "lesser" camps. In fact, Eisenhower wrote this to Marshall after visiting a camp near Gotha.

Reminds one of a discussion that I referenced on a friends blog, meow344 where George Santayana's oft repeated quote is discussed "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

General Eisenhower would surely agree.