WALDHEIM

"Kill the (expletive deleted) Jews!" shouted Norman, pacing the dining room at the fraternity. I'll never forget it, him all red-faced, the windows reverberating his words. He felt he had been passed over some honor in favor of another student, who happened to be Jewish. It was the fifties, and the university was pretty much split at the time, between Gentile and Jew, at least socially/officially, if not socially/actually, surely fraternity-wise, giving fellows like Norman a good excuse for blatant anti-semitism. Norman was an ultra-conservative member of our moderately conservative band of bros. His shirts were J. Press, his suits were Brooks, his ties were Chipp, his prep school was New England. He had all the "right" moves, and now, at an Ivy League university, was pursuing the right road to the right life in the right neighborhood, with the right friends, the right cars, the right children going to the right schools to learn the right things, thence pursue the right life, etc.

That was 1953. By now I'm sure Norman has mellowed; after all, much has happened since then and now the only people who hate Jews seem to be Arabs, and not all of them. At least on the surface. But then... it was "fashionable" in some trad settings to be somewhat anti-semitic. The Ivy covered halls all were either/or, the campus clubs and orgs were still controlled by old guard WASPs with pre-war attitudes. It was not until 1955 that the famed UofP Mask & Wig Club initiated its first Jewish member (Michael Malkan, who was later executed in a reputed NYC Mob hit).

Hitler didn't invent anti-semitism, he merely used it, turned the puerile emotions of millions of Normans into a movement, a genocidal business, using mass production techniques to manufacture death. There were a lot of Norm-type screamers around then, who, though they mightn't kill Jews themselves, nevertheless looked the other way while it was done, shuffled papers, blindly ignoring their consignations, passively anti-semitizing while others executed the orders. Like them, Norman was not a terribly original fellow, just one of those peer-pushy types who does things a little more intensely than the competition and takes his resentment out on the most convenient whipping boy.

The point is: Why persecute Kurt Waldheim? As a member of the Nazi regime which worshipped Adolf Hitler en masse, and in an earnest effort to go along with, perhaps even outdo his contemporary competition, he distributed leaflets condemning whoever the fuhrer condemned. Since then he has certainly contributed to the progress of the world, and surely, if only by virtue of the broadening effects of travel, has seen the error of his Nazi ways.

Norman, in similar circumstances, probably would have done the same thing Waldheim did, even in America 15 years later, without benefit of governmental approval. Instead he graduated, went on to a life, now no doubt lives comfortably somewhere in the right suburb in New England, a prosperous practitioner in the corporate business world, while Waldheim is dragged over 45 year-old coals by those who want to somehow even the score. No way could that score be evened. Best it be forgotten as an evil mistake, a throwback to primitive times before any of us were made aware of real reality, as opposed to political reality.

Henry Francisco