Point to ponder:
"Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is the landmark of an authoritarian regime." Justice Potter Stewart (1915-1985), U. S. Supreme Court Justice.
Obviously, where a mainstream school of thought is useful to an Establishment, any non-mainstream views are detrimental to those who benefit from the status quo. From this perspective, people who would rather think for themselves, and/or who have something to say that does not support these mainstream views, are undesirable - and all too often are silenced. We at The Scriptorium believe that this is classically evident in publishing, education and any other endeavor related to the presentation of history to the "consumer public", and that a distinct pattern of stressing one side while distorting and hushing-up the other has become standard practice with regard to the fairly recent history of Germany and of the Second World War in particular. After all, when was the last time you or your children heard about crimes committed by Nazi Germany, and when was the last time you saw a book about the Holocaust on your local bookstore shelf? We're willing to bet that it wasn't very long ago. In contrast, when was the last time your public education system taught about the expulsion, butchery and mass murder committed against the German women, children and civilians in the Sudetenland or the Banat, and when was the last time you saw a movie or TV program about life and death in the American post-War(!) concentration camps along the Rhine and elsewhere? What about the Valentine's Day cremation of the undefended hospital city Dresden by the British and Americans? What's that you say - you've never even heard of these things? Well, that's our point exactly. For our efforts towards making these things public, we have been accused of "racism", "Holocaust denial", "re-writing history", "hatemongering", "stretching the limits of free speech", and the list goes on. Yet how is it "racism" or "hate" to point out that ethnic Germans were at the receiving end of unspeakable brutalities in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and other nations? If anything, that shows "racism" and "hate" directed at us! Do we advocate criminal retaliation for these crimes? Never! All we want is for these facts to be acknowledged! - How is it "denial" to point out, for example, that some early 20th-century British writers, statesmen etc. had good things to say about Hitler and the Third Reich, or to show that Germans too were victims of genocides and atrocities? Saying that "ABC happened" does not equal or even imply that "XYZ did not happen". - And how is it "re-writing history" to point out uncomfortable historical facts such as "ABC" that can be verified elsewhere by anyone who cares to take the time and to go to the extra effort to look beyond his standard-issue schoolbooks? Do the "limits of free speech" exclude the accounts of certain victims because they happen to be German? Excuse us for saying so, but isn't that exactly what's called... um... "racism" and "hatemongering"? Corroborating information about all we publish on this site this exists aplenty, but on the whole it is not openly accessible, and for good reason. The Establishment that benefits from the public ignorance about these matters takes great care to keep it from trickling into public awareness, as such a trickle might start a flood that could wash the foundations out from under it. More often than not, it takes idealists who have resisted the lure of the Big Money to be made in the mainstream media, to publish this forgotten history for the sake of a truthful and balanced world view, and for the sake of doing justice to the memory of the forgotten victims whose suffering was no less real than that of those who enjoy a forum in the mainstream spotlight. We at The Scriptorium are proud to do our part by making some of this information publicly available via the Internet. Our online archive is intended as a resource for honest and introspective minds who prefer to leave the mainstream of the masses in favor of calmer waters where they can come to their own conclusions and understanding. Since June 2005, in an unintended proof of the author Oliver Hassencamp's statement that "a lack of rational arguments usually results in a ban", the Federal German censorship authority "Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien" ("Federal Office for the Investigation of Youth-Endangering Media") has been trying to force us to censor our Archive. The historical books etc. in our Archive, which shed a clearly undesirable positive light on German history, are liable - so the BPjM evidently fears - to negatively influence young Germans in their normal development into well-informed and morally balanced citizens of the Federal Republic... (On the other hand, sites that incite to hatred against Germany and the German people are not, of course, deemed to be similarly "youth-endangering"; at least, we know of no such case of censorship ordered by the Federal Republic.) We are law-abiding citizens and always ready to co-operate with the authorities, but even our willingness to co-operate ends when this courtesy is expected to proceed only from us. After having shown the BPjM every conceivable co-operation (while this organ of the modern German Inquisition did not even see fit to confirm receipt of registered letters, much less to reply to our eMail inquiries for information), we shall no longer accord this Federal German censorship office greater authority than it actually has. Our American-hosted web site is not under Federal German jurisdiction and thus also not subject to the Federal German censorship mania; the Archive and its historical documents, which violate no North American law, is thus fully accessible again - even for Germans. It is well known that a ban only makes the banned thing even more interesting; and accordingly, many web site visitors have already told us that this official attempt at censorship has only increased their interest in what we have to say. - Are you one of these freethinkers as well? Are you tired of having the same old black-and-white view of history shoved down your throat day in and day out by the Establishment whose vested interests it appeals to? A prejudiced view of history that more often than not tramples our German history into the dirt and resorts to falsification and suppression of information in order to defame our fathers and grandfathers as criminals - lock, stock and barrel? Would you too prefer to trade the politically correct disinformation that the Establishment and its mainstream media are spoonfeeding you, for information that looks beyond totalitarian taboos and simplistic pre-set thought patterns? Do you wish to exercise what should be every mature citizen's right, namely to inform yourself of the many shades of grey that are so generally suppressed, and to draw your own conclusions from them?
Our web site offers you the opportunity to do so!
Click on Spitzweg's Bookworm to visit our "Archive" and browse through our online documents!
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11. 11. 2024
