ANNE FRANK TRAVESTY

Today, I took my 11-year old daughter to a mall to see the Anne Frank exhibit. We looked at the first six panels and walked out. What an atrocity! The first panel listed the fates of Anne's family, but only once mentioned the Nazi's part in their deaths. Anne and her sister died of typhus. One of her uncles was gassed, but her mother “died of exhaustion,” and other relatives just died of no apparent causes at Therezenstadt, and other such places.

The second panel was about the rise of Hitler. It mentioned Mein Kampf, but didn't go into what his dream actually was. It told about his election, but not a syllable about Krystal Nacht, the Reichstag fire, or the SA. It also talked about how unfairly Germany was held responsible for WWI - which I do happen to agree with - but it did it in such a way as to justify the rise of the Nazis.

The third panel was a painting of a running man inside a section of culvert, like a hamster in a wheel. Another man, suspended by wires, was on a bicycle on top of the culvert. Apparently, the running man was supposed to be moving the culvert so the other guy could ride. The title was "Faster!"

The fourth panel was a painting of an American soldier, suspended in the air by wires, like a marionette, with angel’s wings made of cardboard boxes. The title was "Johnny Comes Home." I suppose the reference was to the bonus marchers and the cardboard box Hoovervilles that so many WWI veterans lived in. This was a sorry chapter in America's history, no mistake, but I don't know what it had to do with the rise of Hitler, or even with a spirit of intolerance.

The fifth panel was a cut-away, like a doll house. It was populated by about 20-odd figures, made out of old clothes pins or something like that. Most of them had names, and were clearly caricatures of those people. The title of the piece was "America's House of Democracy." Most of the characters were outcasts, rebels, or criminals who have achieved some notoriety as supposedly being politically repressed. Leonard Pelitier was there, as was Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Mother Jones, and Johnny Cash. There was one mature-looking white guy holding a book that said, “The People’s History of the United States.” My daughter was assigned that book in school, and I read some of it. It could well have been published in cold war Russia, where everything of supposed virtue was “the people’s” this or that. The book says the New World was settled because Europe did not offer white males sufficient opportunity to oppress and brutalize blacks and women. One hippie-looking guy without a name held a sign saying, "The US Constitution is just one more broken promise." Michelle Obama, labeled simply, "Michelle" was in the front center, and just entering the house through a door in the background was a black man labeled, "Obama." The message of the piece was very clear – American democracy is a myth; the truth is that people who are different are repressed or murdered. I’d love to see how the artist justifies the presence in this work of Nelson Mandela and Ghandi, or how he would explain the virtual canonization of Mandela by the American left and media.

The sixth panel was a painting of a stern-looking white man, wearing a band uniform, sitting in a chair. The chair sat on a platform. The platform was held up by a man who was stooped and tortured with the effort. The man in the chair held a pair of reins that went down to a little boy on a tricycle, I believe. In front of the tricycle was a toy horse made of cardboard boxes like those that made the soldier's wings in the earlier panel. Various labels, like shipping labels, were on the horse. One of them said, "Enron" and "Haliburton," clearly a swipe at the Bush administration, a contemptible politicizing of Anne Frank. The boy and the horse were apparently pulling the man on the chair forward, while the tortured man underneath kept him off the ground. Standing behind the man who was holding the platform was a very skinny, older man, waving two sticks, one of which had a little American flag on it. In keeping with the theme of the other two paintings, both the man on the chair and the old man were strung up with wires, like marionettes.

The point of this piece was that some aristocracy - possibly military, possibly preppie - was using the people as beasts of burden, while an emaciated and presumably starved old man waved the flag of this oppressive and hypocritical nation.

I turned to Rachel and said, "We're leaving. This is despicable. Anne deserved better than this sewage."

Not one of the exhibits mentioned anything about the Nazis or other socialist tyrannies around the world. There was no indication that the US had any part in destroying the Nazis, who, of course, murdered Anne. It was altogether loathsome and shameful, and makes a terrible travesty of the wonderful, tragic life that was snuffed by the very socialist/statists the producers of the exhibit apparently idolize.

This exhibit is an outrageous piece of anti-Americana. I was infuriated and sickened. My daughter and I had a good, long chat about socialism versus individualism, and democracy versus a republic. She grasped these concepts instantly. I told her, “ You have just put yourself ahead of 99 percent of the college professors in this country.”


Sic Semper Tyrannis,
Rebsarge