April 26, 2005//Public beach and the Plague of the 40s

Now this is no joke. I met a man who insisted the entire holocaust did not happen. The images are fabricated, the movies were all a show, the bodies, all dummies, a master plan from the genius propagandist Goebbels and a conspiracy to obtain Israel once and for all. And the buildings of the concentration camps that still exist, the ovens and graves, they were used to disintegrate bodies affected by a great little known plague at that time. Though I knew there were neighsayers and disbelievers, I had never heard an argument rationally developed like he did it. The conversation ended nowhere, as these always do, he saying that he likes talking to people with new views and arguments and he chooses the best information from all that he has heard, and that this person, thus far, had been a radical anti-semite about 17 years ago. He told me that my schools were lying to me, even when I said that all of the western world learns it because it is fact, and how could survivors lie so convincingly and what accounts for all the missing people, to which he answered that a compelling argument he heard said that the number of Jews in the world before and after the holocaust was actually exactly the same, they had just spread out. It's strange that the things we take for granted, and as absolute undeniable facts because we are taught them in school, can be so easily denied in ignorance. But this also speaks to the things that we don't learn as well.

Our conversation started with finding a clear portion of the beach and a small history lesson on American history. He really wanted to know about the Native Americans and slavery, and insisted that the pioneers were not Americans, even if they were first generation. He made me refer to them as the British, or the Europeans. He emphasized how young a country America is compared to Morocco, and what a bloody past we have. There was no denying it, but he was making this into an example for our recent policies. In fact these things are not the same. Tangier has had a strangely pacific life for all the things that have had their interests here. There is a distance between the governing entities (even within themselves-now:parliament, king division of power. When it was an international zone: Spanish policemen on the streets, French higher ups, makes you wonder how anyone communicated. More on this later, getting a book with all the details.) and the people.