Holocaust Denial — Romania’s New Dracula

“Holocaust denial,” i.e., rejecting or even doubting any portion of what Arthur R. Butzamply documented to be “the hoax of the twentieth century,” is banned in all Western European countries as well as in some of Rumsfeld’s “new Europe.”

But banned twice? Only in Romania. It was first banned in 2002. The Jews were not pleased. They felt that the anti-Holocaust denial law was enforced lackadaisically and still allowed expressions of anti-semitism to squeeze through with impunity. The Romanians were not applying themselves to the task. Led by no small fish, like Ron Lauder, President of the World Jewish Congress and Nobel Prize Laureate of Holocaust fiction Elie Wiesel, the Jews demanded a Take #2 to ensure more diligence in the punishment of the crimes that grievously hurt Jewish sensitivities.

So Romania banned holocaust denial again! The measure was well received. New law, harsher penalties. This has just occurred under Romania’s new President, Klaus Werner Iohannis, on whom B’nai B’rith has lavished prize for it.

July 30, 2015: President Klaus Iohannis (left) bestowed the Faithful Service Order in rank of Grand Cross upon Israel’s Ambassador Dan Ben-Eliezer in a ceremony at the Cotroceni Palace. [“Grand CROSS? Seems a bit insensitive to me]

He is a Romanian citizen of German extraction.* One would think, and it would be justified, that as a German, Iohannis is bound to be more sensitive to delicate issues like insults to the Greatest Suffering Since the Dawn of Ages than your average Romanian, a typically bigoted and pettily rancorous type.**

Nevertheless, I submit that it is not his German ethnicity that weighed more in his decision to make Romania the star of the defense of “Memory.” I think it was his acculturation to Transylvania, where he (like his ancestors for the past 800 years) grew up. As a Transylvanian, how can he fail to be closely familiar with the myth of Dracula?

Holocaust denial to Romanians

To kill Dracula, I mean to kill him dead, one must drive a stake through his heart three times. The ritual demands iteration. Three times is the charm. I predict that one more ban of Holocaust denial is coming up. Besides another native son of Transylvania, Elie Wiesel, will be watching!

RESEARCH NOTES

* Significant numbers of Saxons and Swabs immigrated to Transylvania in the 13th century and settled there. They preserved their culture and language and lived in peaceful and fruitful co-existece with both the majority Romanian population and the Hungarian minority that constituted the ethnic mosaic of Transylvania for centuries. Under communism they all suffered equally. Having paid up the national debt (to the chagrin of global bankers), with nothing much to export (Romanians were unsellable), the dictator Ceausescu successfully sold the Jews to Israel, and later developed the idea of selling other minorities as well. In the 80s he concluded an agreement with West Germany to sell the Transylvania Germans. Unlike the case of the Jews, which was a win-win (Ceausescu was pleased with the deal and so were the Jews who poured out toward better pastures), the Transylvania Germans’ was not a happy case. In West Germany they did not receive a very warm welcome, regarded as rural bumpkins who spoke a strange, medieval German and were underqualified for just about any work in highly industrialized Gemany. Iohannis’ family took advantage of this deal too, but he eventually returned to Romania and managed to build a successful political career for himself after the fall of communism and the takeover of Romania by USrael.

**The Romanians do carry grudges for all manner of wrongs they think they have suffered from the Jews:

One, the fact that the first communist government that was installed by the Soviet Army after WWII was composed of 80% Jews, many of them Russian Jews who did not even speak Romanian well, like the infamous Ana Pauker. They also took charge of the repressive apparatus, including the death camps.

Another, that one of the best Romanian scientists, Nicolae Paulescu, who discovered insulin, was thwarted from receiving the Nobel Prize for his discovery by machinations against him by an international cabal because of his “anti-semitic” writings. Instead the prize was given to Canadian scientists who “discovered” it later, after Paulescu’s findings were published in France and he had also already obtained a patent.