Monday, April 9, 2012

Sobol - Gunter Grass' delusions


Yehoshua Sobol..
Israel Hayom..
09 April '12..

This is the second time in the last six years that writer Gunter Grass has broken his silence. Last time, he broke a 60-year silence: It took him that long to publicly admit he had served in the Waffen SS. After Grass' confession, he also started to point out the suffering that the German people endured during World War II, in order to give credence to the claim that Germans were not only the perpetrators – but also the victims – of the war. To nurture a sense of German victimhood, Grass blamed Stalin for murdering 6 million German prisoners of war (POWs).

The journalist who quoted Grass at the time did not examine the credibility of this mystical number, and published Grass' claim verbatim. The truth is that the total number of Germans who were held captive by the Russians is just more than 3 million - 3,127,380, to be exact. Of these 3 million, slightly less than half a million Germans, or 474,967 to be exact, died in Russian captivity. Where did Grass get the 6 million figure? He could only have pulled it from his subconscious, from the same place where he keeps his most secret wishes.

Grass needed the Russians to have exterminated 6 million German POWs to clear his conscience for the murder of 6 million Jews. And thus, with a few words, he turned half a million German soldiers who died in Russian captivity – into 6 million. Twice the total number of Germans who were in captivity, whether they were killed or not!

Grass needed for every German captive to have been killed twice to clear his conscience of the murder of 6 million Jews. When your soul yearns for exoneration, the imagination can invent a delusional reality.


Years passed, and the total nonsense Grass went on about at the time, regarding the 6 million murdered German prisoners, was exposed as a complete misrepresentation of facts. But a man's need to liberate himself from the weight of complicity in mass murder apparently grows stronger with age, as he nears his own end. In all likelihood, that is how the bizarre text Grass published under the heading "What must be said" came about. This title indicates a powerful internal struggle, a psychological need that emanates from deep within the subconscious.

And now, once again, Grass is inventing a delusional reality, but this time he is projecting into the future. Israel could launch a preemptive strike and wipe out the Iranian people, he writes, and therefore Israel should be viewed as a threat to fragile world peace.

Just as Grass imagined a past that never was out of a need to exonerate himself, the same need is compelling him to imagine a future that will never be. Israel has never threatened Iran's existence, whereas Iran's leaders are constantly vowing to wipe Israel off the map.

But Grass' subconscious needs Israel to wipe out the Iranian people, because the day that Israel exterminates 80 million people will be the day that Grass will finally be acquitted in the court of history: Hitler and the Third Reich, whose uniform Grass donned, only killed 50 million people – and Israel is about to exterminate 80 million people.

What a monstrous secret wish has emerged from the depths of this great writer's psyche! What hellfire burns there, deep inside the soul of the former SS man. Demons erupt from the depths of the soul "with what ink remains," as he writes.

The problem is not Gunter Grass. The problem is the 50 percent of the Süddeutsche Zeitung readership that agrees with him, according to an Internet poll taken by the German newspaper. Does the entire Christian world have a psychological need for Israel to commit a worse crime than the ones committed by the Nazis?

Is this the secret wish of all those who question Israel's right to exist? Do they hope that Israel will, once and for all, justify the general yearning to destroy it by giving the world the gift of a massive crime against humanity? Is their disease so malignant and incurable?

Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=3891

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1 comment:

  1. Gunter Grass’ poem, ‘What must be said’, is an absurd and morally indefensible attack on Israel. The poem states that the Jewish state endangers world peace because of its threat to attack Iran, which has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel. Instead of engaging with the complex debate over whether Israel has the right to defend itself against an aggressor, Grass singles out the Jewish state for criticism and makes no reference to Iran’s genocidal intentions. The poem also states that Israel intends to annihilate the Iranian people – a gross error, as any attack on Iran would be on nuclear facilities and not the entire populace. What Grass fails to mention is that it would be the Israeli Jews and Arabs who would be annihilated if Iran dropped a nuclear bomb. The fact that Gunter, a former member of the Wassen-SS, published the poem just before Passover recalls the European tradition of accusing Jews of ritual murder just before the annual Jewish festival. As such, Grass should be stripped of his Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded to him in 1999. Sign the petition at:
    http://www.thepetitionsite.com/436/605/124/strip-gunter-grass-of-nobel-prize-in-literature-for-anti-semitic-poem/

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