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It is history day. Tomorrow we’ll continue with coverage of the creeps in DC.
Maybe after this travesty of an administration passes from the scene, a memorial to Winston Churchill will find its way to DC. Richard Jencks makes the case in a WSJ OpEd.
… There is a grotesque stereotype that he was a buoyant and bellicose man who had simply found his time. What really differentiated him from the pragmatic foreign secretary, from the hero-aviator, from the ambivalent philosopher, and from the Indian apostle of nonresistance, was that Churchill’s moral judgment of evil was more acute and implacable than theirs. He himself, in his history of the war, called the final result “Triumph and Tragedy.” But what we of the generation who participated in it called it at the time, and since, was Victory.
Early in Barack Obama’s presidency, he removed from the White House a bust of Winston Churchill. It has been speculated that this might have been done because the president was offended by an opinion rendered by Churchill in 1899 during his early career as a British officer in the Middle East. He then wrote: “Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities but the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exits in the world.”
It seems probable that the next president will restore the Churchill bust to the Oval Office. An even better outcome would be for some publicly minded person or group, with the concurrence of the responsible authorities, to place a statue of Churchill on or near Capitol Hill in Washington, together with the text of his July 1943 speech to the House of Commons.
England has long recognized great Americans with public statues, beginning with the statue of Abraham Lincoln just outside Parliament Square. Closely following World War II, England honored President Roosevelt with public statues, one in Grosvenor Square and one of FDR with Churchill, seen sitting and talking together, on a bench in Mayfair.
This spring marks the 50th anniversary of a White House ceremony when President Kennedy granted honorary U.S. citizenship to Winston Churchill, the son of an American mother. It is a propitious time to bestow another honor on him.
The other history lesson for today is offered by the May 11th anniversary of the Mossad capture of Adolf Eichmann, one of the most notorious of the German persecutors of Jews. We get the story from the Jewish Virtual Library.
… Adolf Eichmann had escaped both the Nuremberg trials and the Avengers. All trace of him had been lost in May 1945. He had actually remained in Europe until 1950, maintaining no contact with his family. In 1950, with the help of an organization assisting former Nazis to leave Europe, he escaped to Argentina. He sent for his wife and children two years later.
The passport issed to Adolf Eichmann by the International Committee of the Red Cross on June 1, 1950 was discovered by a graduate student in at the University of San Martin mid-2007 conducting research on Eichmann’s wife, Veronica Catalina Leibel. The name on the passport reads “Ricardo Klement,” and claims that he was a “technician born in Bolzano, Italy, and apolide (without nationality).”
When Eichmann arrived in Argentina in 1950, he lived for almost three years in a quiet town near Buenos Aires called San Fernando, where he worked in a metal factory. He then moved to the province of Tucuman, located over 600 miles from Buenos Aires, where he worked at an engineering company called the Capri firm, to which Juan Peron, the Argentine president at the time and known Nazi-sympathizer, gave many state contracts in order to modernize the province’s water administration.
Eichmann’s wife and two children arrived in Argentina in mid-1952, and accompanied him to Tucuman. He registered his two children at a German school, known to promote anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi propoganda at the time, under the name Eichmann, suggesting again how the Argentine government aided and abetted former Nazis and their sympathizers.
In April 1953, the Capri firm declared bankruptcy and Eichmann moved his family to Buenos Aires, where he worked for a number a companies. He was hired by Mercedes Benz in March 1959, where he continued to use the alias Ricardo Klement.
No one had heard him for years. But in the autumn of 1957 Walter Eytan at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, got a call from Fritz Bauer, the public prosecutor of the province of Hesse, Germany. Hesse told Eytan that Eichmann was alive and living in Argentina.
Eytan immediately alerted Isser Harel, the head of the Mossad. Harel spent one autumn night reading Eichmann’s dossier. At that point Harel didn’t know much about him. As Harel writes in his book on the capture of Eichmann, The House on Garibaldi Street; “I didn’t know what sort of man Eichmann was. I didn’t know with what morbid zeal he pursued his murderous work or how he went into the fray to destroy one miserable Jew with the same ardor he devoted to the annihilation of an entire community. I didn’t know that he was capable of ordering the slaughter of babies – and depicting himself as a disciplined soldier; of directing outrages on women – and priding himself on his loyalty to an oath; or of sending helpless old men to their deaths – and classifying himself as an ‘idealist’…But I knew when I rose from my desk at dawn that in everything pertaining to the Jews he was the paramount authority and his were the hands that pulled the strings controlling manhunt and massacre. I knew that at all the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals this man was pointed to as the head butcher. I knew that he was a past master in police methods, and that on the strength of his professional skill and in the light of his total lack of conscience, he would be an exceedingly dangerous quarry. I knew that when the war was over he had succeeded in blotting out all trace of himself with supreme expertise.”
Harel knew that this man must be brought to justice and punished for his crimes; the victims of his slaughter demanded it; justice and morality demanded it; but no one was looking for him – no agency, no government, no police force. Until the Mossad took over.
It was not going to be an easy task. …