My friend and colleague, Mike Rosen, the
dean of Denver talk radio hosts, received the following letter from
a listener. Please read it, and then afterwards I will give you a
little more information about it. (I have corrected minor spelling
errors.)
Dear Bess,
Got your letter this morning. Whatever the future holds for
America as a result of the election, I can take it, if the rest
can, but I think this election showed that the majority of
Americans are not concerned about their individual liberty and
freedom, about how much the national debt is, or whether it is ever
paid, about (another) term for any man, but what they want most is
their security, and the majority of Americans are bleating like
little lambs for their security, not for their freedom or for their
liberty. And let me add, that when people get a sense of
insignificance, when they begin to believe that the affairs of men
are controlled by forces too great to be influenced by their
individual effort, their belief in popular government is shaken and
the people become broken in spirit, disappointed, pessimistic, and
fatalism results.
No Bess, as long as great numbers of people can be kept
dependent upon their government, and as long as we have the money
to keep them dependent, there is not much that you and I can do,
but the ultimate result of such a program is that America will
drift into a national dependent socialistic controlled state under
what we have thought was our liberty, and freedom will no longer be
ours in America. I am almost 55 years of age. I won’t be here many
more years, but oh how weak and spineless we of our generation have
been to try and preserve all these great things our forefathers
gave to us.
The other night I had a dream, my home had been destroyed, my
wife and child were in a concentration camp, my money had been
taken from me, my rights as a freeman had been taken from me. I had
no rights. I was a slave. Then I awoke, then I realized what
freedom had meant to me, but it was too late.
This is a morbid dream, I know, but it has happened to millions
of people in Europe, not a thousand years ago (but within my
lifetime.)
Keep this letter, read it two, three, or four years from now. My
prayer is that I am wrong.
Bob
This letter was sent to Mike by an 88-year old listener.
Although it could plausbily have been dated 2009 (except that there
was no incumbent running in 2008), it was written by the listener’s
father (to his sister, the listener’s aunt) on November 8, 1940,
three days after FDR won a record third term in office. Mike’s
listener noted that her father died at the age of 57, or about two
years after writing this note.
In the note, in the first paragraph where I put “(another)” the
letter says “a third”, and near the end where I put “(but within my
lifetime)” the letter says “but within the past few months.” (I
changed these just to leave a little suspense regarding when the
letter was written.)
It is, to me, remarkable to read someone of that generation
complain how little those of his time had done to defend freedom,
though the context is someone who died before the end of WWII. Keep
in mind that this is not someone who would have been a soldier in
WWII, but was substantially older, probably born in 1885 and lived
through World War I and most of the Great Depression.
In any case, this letter reminds us of Santayana’s warning that
“those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It
makes one wonder whether our young people being taught so little
about our own political history is part of an intentional strategy
of the left. (Actually, I don’t wonder that much; I believe it to
be true.)
————————
For the record, I do have a slight question about the letter
given that it is dated late 1940 which is earlier than the
existence of concentration camps, or at least their use in the
Nazis’ genocide, was generally known in the U.S. To be sure, some
of the camps, including Buchenwald and Dachau, had been around for
years by 1940, with Dachau
having been opened in 1933. That said, the mention of FDR’s having
won a third term adds credibility, and I am inclined to believe
that this letter is real. I have also verified through public
records that there is an 88-year-old woman with the name (and in
the town) signed to the e-mail to Mike. Therefore, regarding
concentration camps, “Bob” was probably just more aware of world
events than the average person, much as a depressingly large
percentage of today’s Americans are geopolitically illterate.
A friend of mine offered this: Regarding
concentration camps: my father was sent to his, where he spent 5
years, Orianenburg Sachsenhausen, in the spring of 1940. It was
already infamous in Polish history as the camp to which many Poles
were sent in the wake of the German invasion of Poland in September
1939. The prisoners there included most of the professors from
Krakow’s leading university, many of them well past their physical
prime, and as such didn’t survive very long. I think it’s safe to
say such camps were known about in the West, even if the “death”
camp aspect and special sites for outright genocide were still in
the offing.
