Well, the day has come and gone. Some were grateful to have the day off from work while ALL school children were psyched to have the day free from school.

But I think it's time to find something else to celebrate in October, as I'm sick of having the day off in the name of a shameless, murderous, tyrant. Aren't you?

I'm sure you've heard by now -- your first grade elementary history lessons were crap - lies your teacher told you in order to perpetuate a fairytale that Columbus was a hero.

To get a taste of Christopher Columbus' real character, It's best to hear the story in his own words. So let's start with this journal entry, written by Columbus himself. (Source: Howard Zinn's, A People's History of the United States).

The entry is Columbus' reaction to the innocence, and hospitality of the indigenous Arawak population of his `new world'.

When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:

"They... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned.... They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane.... They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

It is Yom HaShoah: Holocaust Remembrance Day. This is the time we remember the 11 million people (including he 5 million non-Jews too often left out of our remembrance) who were killed by the Nazis in WW II.

Written in Pencil in the Sealed Freight Car

Here, in this freight car,
I, Eve,
with my son Abel.
If you see my older boy,
Cain, the son of Adam,
tell him that I...

--Dan Pagis, as quoted in Ariel Hirschfeld's chapter in Cultures of the Jews, David Biale (ed.)

"Everything you can imagine is real"~~ Pablo Picasso

In 1974, a year after orchestrating a mass terror bombing of Cambodia -- after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize -- Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and his National Security Council completed "National Security Study Memo 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests."  This document, whose sharp edges are dulled by page after leaden page of how to reduce over-population in the Third World through birth control and "other" population-reduction programs, was classified until 1989, but was almost immediately accepted as US policy, and remains the US blueprint for ethnic cleansing today.  

It is difficult to imagine the staggering number of innocent humans who have perished through war or famine as a direct result of Kissinger's half-century obsession with, and lust for, genocide.  It's even more difficult to imagine the cruel indifference with which Kissinger, and those like him in positions of political and corporate power -- the elite -- continue to plan the elimination of millions, even billions.  All under the guise of national security, or to spread freedom...democracy...

Kissinger targeted a number of "key countries" whose populations, he said, must be curtailed and controlled lest they gain economic, political and military strength, and thus threaten US strategic interests.  "Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the third world," Kissinger said, "because the US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries."

The diary below was orginally posted in my blog the Intrepid Liberal Journal on Monday, September 4th.

I visited Poland shortly after turning 21. It was March 1990 and I was fortunate to be studying in England my junior year of college. After a rigorous semester of study I jumped at the chance to see Eastern Europe during my next semester break. The memories remain fresh sixteen years later. The tour group put Auschwitz and Birkenau on our itinerary.

For me Birkenau had the greater impact. It was usually hot as we walked the grounds. Days earlier when we first arrived in Poland it was bitter cold. There were crematoriums only partially destroyed by the Nazis in their attempt to conceal evidence prior to the war's conclusion. A lake where the ashes of cremated Jews was dumped remained.