Both personal and political is so dispiriting I can hardly bear to type anything more about it. Ghastly things have happened to my oldest friend; Britain’s place as America’s most valuable ally is assured by Richard Perle’s threat to sue Seymour Hersh in London court …
(Update — Slate has a delicious take on that threat.)
Anyway, thank God for this story in the NY Times magazine, in which Mel Gibson’s father turns out to be an extreme right-wing Catholic nutter with a succulent new blonde wife. He believes not only that all Popes since John XXIII inclusive have been antipopes, forced on the Church by a Jewish/masonic conspiracy, but that the holocaust was all made up.
He moved on to the Holocaust, dismissing historical accounts that six million Jews were exterminated. ”Go and ask an undertaker or the guy who operates the crematorium what it takes to get rid of a dead body,” he said. ”It takes one liter of petrol and 20 minutes. Now, six million?”
Across the table, Joye suddenly looked up from her plate. She was dressed in a stylish outfit for church, wearing a leather patchwork blazer and a felt beret in place of the traditional headdress. She had kept quiet most of the day, so it was a surprise when she cheerfully piped in. ”There weren’t even that many Jews in all of Europe,” she said.
”Anyway, there were more after the war than before,” Hutton added.
The entire catastrophe was manufactured, said Hutton, as part of an arrangement between Hitler and ”financiers” to move Jews out of Germany. Hitler ”had this deal where he was supposed to make it rough on them so they would all get out and migrate to Israel because they needed people there to fight the Arabs,” he said.
Lives in Texas, of course.