by Daniel Quinn
“But what was going on?”
The girls traded glances and agreed on an answer: nothing.
“It was a period of stagnation on all fronts,” Gilda said flatly.
“Okay. Nothing was going on in this period, and this was a reaction to the presence of the Jews. Is that what you’re saying?”
After a blank moment, Miss Crenevant gave them a hint: “We studied this just before the mid-winter break.”
Nanette’s hand shot into the air, and I nodded.
“The Jews controlled the banking,” she said. “Or was this too early for banking? I guess it really doesn’t matter. What I mean is, they acted as the bankers. They controlled the money. I mean, like when two kings wanted to go to war with each other, both of them had to borrow money from the Jews.”
“They wanted to borrow money from the Jews,” Sylvia emended. “They didn’t want to risk using their own.”
“But what does this have to do with nothing happening?” I asked.
Sylvia shrugged. “I guess the Jews didn’t want anything to happen. I mean, they controlled the money, and everything was fine as far as they were concerned, so why would they want things to change?”
“Okay. But things did change anyway, eventually.”
“Right,” said Ava. “During the Renaissance.”
“And why did things change during the Renaissance?”
A sea of waving hands sprang up, signaling that they had this one down pat. I pointed to a girl who hadn’t spoken yet, a towheaded child who would be very pretty when her braces came off. She said, “People rediscovered a source of ideas that predated the Jews. They went back to ideas that had been flourishing in classical times, before the Jews began to push their way into Europe. The Renaissance began when the people of Europe reconnected with their Aryan past.”
“Literature, the arts, scholarship, and science flourished,” Ava chirped.
“Galileo,” someone volunteered.
“The Reformation.”
“The printing press.”
They’d found a solid bit of ground, and I let them go on exploring it.
“Michelangelo.”
“Queen Elizabeth.”
“Shakespeare!”
Finally Nanette seemed to deliver the capper. “It was a period of global exploration and commercial expansion.”
I nodded professorially, then stopped them in their tracks by observing that the Jews must have been pretty unhappy about all this.
“Not at all,” Miss Crenevant snapped, unwilling to let her pupils find their own way through this challenge. “Remember The Merchant of Venice, girls. The excitement of exploration and of building new trade routes appealed to greathearted men like Antonio. But the free-spirited Aryan adventurers of the era lived at the sufferance of Jewish backers who cared for nothing but their percentage. All the Jews wanted was their pound of flesh—and they usually got it. This is the obvious subtext of the play. But that,” she added portentously, “was only half of it.”
She looked around the room hopefully but was rewarded by blank stares. Finally she relented and gave them a sentence they knew how to complete. “The process of exploration in Africa, the New World, and the Pacific Rim also brought them into contact with …”
“The mongrel races!” the girls chorused triumphantly.
Mallory slid off her stool and headed unsteadily for the door.
“We’ll take a short break,” I said over my shoulder as I went after her.
She was huddled in a corner, back firmly against a wall, arms crossed protectively across her chest.
“I want to go home,” she whimpered.
“Soon,” I said. “Not yet.”
“I know all this. I guessed all this.”
“That’s not true. You couldn’t have.”
“I mean … I knew it had to be something like this.”
I shook my head. “You don’t know anything yet.”
“I know it all.”
“You don’t know it all. You couldn’t possibly. What’s still to come is beyond anything you could imagine.”
She looked around bleakly. “I don’t need it.”
“You do need it. You’ve got to have it.”
“Please,” she whispered.
“No. This is something you’ve got to do. Something we’ve got to do.”
She let her shoulders slump in defeat, and I took her arm to lead her back. At the door she stopped and said, “At least let me sit at the back.”
“What?”
“Tell Miss What’s-her-name to clear a row for me at the back so I don’t have to sit there like Exhibit A. I’ll be able to hear just as well from back there.”
WHEN THE GIRLS were reseated the way Mallory wanted them and had settled down, I said, “Okay, when we broke off, we’d just heard about the mongrel races. What exactly were these?”
This was an easy one, and Gilda of the stringy dark hair stuck up her hand first. “These were the nonevolved races. There were hordes of these not-quite-human types who were black and yellow and brown and red—and every mixture.”
“And what’s their significance in this story we’re developing here?”
That was not so easy, and they spent a couple of minutes discussing it in whispers. Finally, Miss Crenevant had to be called in to affirm their judgment, which Ava delivered.
“Christianity first opened the Aryan world to the Jews. Now it opened the Aryan world to these even less evolved races.”
“How did Christianity do that?”
Ava shrugged. “By sending them missionaries. By making them Christians. As Christians themselves, the Aryans then had to accept them as equals. According to Christianity, God loved everyone equally.”
“Okay, but I’m getting lost here,” I said. “According to what you’ve told me, the Jews had been waging an undeclared war against the Aryans since the time of Christ. Christianity had brought them inside the Aryan world, where they could manipulate and control, but this hadn’t won them the war. Now you seem to be saying that the Jews were developing a new strategy to defeat the Aryans and this new strategy somehow involved these subhuman races.”
Miss Crenevant, becoming impatient with my Socratic method, stepped in to answer my implied question herself. “The height of the missionary efforts of Christians came during the seventeenth, eighteen, and nineteenth centuries, and it was during this period that the Jews began to realize that there was another way to reach their objective. They couldn’t overcome our natural superiority, but they could undermine it by mongrelizing us. They could bring the Aryan race down to their own level by breeding us with Jews and other mongrel races.”
“And how were they going to accomplish this?”
“First of all, by promoting the idea that the mongrel races were just as good. That was the whole point of Christianizing them. If they were worthy of God, then why wouldn’t they be worthy of us?”
“And then?” I asked. “What was the next step in their program?”
“Very simply, the Great War,” Miss Crenevant said. “Everyone could see that this war served no rational political purpose. What they couldn’t see—at least initially—was that it served a Jewish purpose, which was to pit the Aryan nations against each other, exhausting them morally and economically and enriching the Jews, who supplied all the combatants with arms and ammunition.”
“Go on. What happened then?”
“Eventually one coalition of Aryan nations won out, but this only paused the war for a few years while the loser—the Germans, basically—recovered. Then they went at it again. But by this time, the Germans knew that the real enemy was the Jews, who had been the instigators and beneficiaries of the war from the start.”
“So the war resumed,” I said. “And did the combatants still not understand why they were fighting?”
Miss Crenevant reflected on this for a moment. “The two sides now had different understandings of why they were fighting. The Germans understood that the real e
nemy was the Jews, and the Jews were the real target of their enmity. But the Aryan nations allied against them didn’t see this yet. So, in effect, the Germans were fighting two wars, one against their Aryan brothers (who called themselves the Allies) and one against the Jews.”
“So what happened?”
“Finally the Germans scored a decisive victory over the Jews in a small town in Bavaria, essentially turning the tide against them. Once the Jews had been taken out of the war in this battle, the Germans were unstoppable, so much so that the Allies finally understood what had been going on.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“The battle against the Jews had been a secret one for the Germans, bleeding away their resources year in and year out. But once that battle was over, the Allies could see the Germans growing strong again, almost immediately.”
“You mean the Allies finally saw that the Germans had been fighting two wars, one of which the Allies hadn’t even guessed at.”
“That’s right. And at that point the Allies and the Germans made peace and turned their attention to the global elimination of the Jewish plague.”
“A new era had begun.”
“Absolutely.”
“There was a general recognition that the Christian era had in fact been a Jewish era.”
“That’s right. The Christian dating system was junked, and a new zero year was adopted worldwide.”
“And what event marked that zero year?”
That was an easy one, of course, and Miss Crenevant let someone else answer it: “The defeat of the Jews at Dachau, that little town in Bavaria.”
“So from that point on we’ve counted our years as years A.D.: years After Dachau. And how many—”
“What I don’t get,” growled Gilda, “is the A.D.-A.D. thing.”
Miss Crenevant began to scold her for interrupting, but I interrupted Miss Crenevant to ask for an explanation.
“The years before A.D.. are also A.D.,” Gilda said.
I looked at Miss Crenevant, and she coolly returned my gaze, letting me know that if I was going to run the class, I could jolly well run it on my own.
I cleared my throat and blinked twice while assembling my recitation. “The A.D. of the Christian era stands for anno Domini, a Latin phrase meaning ‘in the year of our Lord.’ If you give the start date of the Great War as A.D. 1914, for example, this translates as ‘in the year of our Lord 1914.’ But if you were to give that date as 1914 A.D., this would translate as ‘1914 in the year of our Lord,’ which doesn’t make any sense. The placement always lets you know which dates are which. A.D. 576 refers to the Christian era but 576 A.D. refers to our own. Okay?”
Gilda guessed so, but her grimace of disgust let us know what she thought of the dunces who couldn’t manage the affairs of the world better than this.
“I was about to ask how many years After Dachau have passed by now.”
This raised a roomful of laughs, since this was indeed kindergarten stuff.
“Two thousand and two!” they roared, celebrating what finally appeared to be a linking of “then” to “now.”
A voice from the rear interrupted the celebration.
“Dachau wasn’t a battle,” Mallory stated through clenched teeth. “It was a concentration camp.”
The girls twisted in their seats to look at her. They were plainly stunned—not by what she’d said but by the fact that she’d said anything at all.
“What’s a concentration camp?” one of them asked.
“It’s a collection point for people—in this case, Jews destined for extermination.”
Puzzled, the girls turned to their teacher, who seemed to share their puzzlement. “Certainly many thousands of Jews died at Dachau,” she said.
“But it wasn’t a battle,” Mallory insisted.
“What was it?” the teacher asked.
“It was … it was a campaign of deliberate extermination.”
Miss Crenevant frowned. “I’m afraid the distinction eludes me. Any battle is a campaign of deliberate extermination, surely. Soldiers who are shooting at each other and throwing bombs at each other aren’t just doing it for fun.”
“But that’s just the point. The Jews at Dachau weren’t soldiers, they were unarmed civilians, including women and children.”
Miss Crenevant’s frown was replaced by a look of frank astonishment. “I’d be fascinated,” she said, “to know where you got such a bizarre idea.”
“You actually don’t know, do you,” Mallory said, dazed. “You actually believe it was a battle.”
Miss Crenevant gave her a not unkindly smile. “As much as I believe that Thermopylae or Hastings or Verdun were battles.”
Mallory shrank into her seat.
“HOWEVER,” I said, “we’ve still got a way to go to bring us from there to here.” I looked around the room and picked a youngster at the back with frizzy blond hair and a wide, humorous mouth. She said her name was Betty.
“Well, Betty, we haven’t heard from you yet. Why don’t you carry us forward?”
She looked alarmed at being singled out in this way, so I lent her a hand. “The Aryan nations of the world had been at each other’s throats for thirty years. Now they shared a new, common understanding of the world situation.”
“Yes, they all knew that the Jews were the enemy, not each other.”
“That’s right. But there was a lot more to it than that. The unevolved peoples you’ve called the mongrel races didn’t just quietly disappear at the end of the Great War, did they? What had been happening to them during all the missionary centuries?”
Clearly no one had a clue what I was getting at.
“Think,” I said, “about China.”
“Ah-h-h-h-h-h,” they said, catching up at last.
Ava allowed herself to raise a tentative hand, and I gave her an encouraging nod.
“The missionaries had been bringing more to the mongrel races than just God,” she said. “They’d been bringing them improved health care and medical advances from the Aryan nations and improved agricultural techniques.”
“And what was the consequence of all these gifts?”
“Their populations grew.”
“Their populations exploded,” someone amended.
Betty again: “This supported the Jewish strategy of world domination.”
“How so?” I asked.
“The idea was to overwhelm the Aryans in mongrels.”
“But how would this help the Jews? If the Aryans were overwhelmed, wouldn’t the Jews be overwhelmed as well?”
The girls traded doubtful glances, and after a moment Miss Crenevant stepped in. “I think only more advanced students would be prepared to answer this question. The Jews were famously cliquish,” she said. “They stuck to their own with a kind of fierce, tribal exclusivity.”
“And this explains why the Jews wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the expansion of the mongrel races?”
“Yes. Lacking this rabid cliquishness, the Aryans would eventually be swallowed up in the mongrel flood, but the Jews would continue to hold themselves aloof. When the Aryans disappeared, the Jews would still be there, the only distinct race of pure blood. This would make them, by default, the master race of the world.”
Mallory groaned and laid her head down on her arms on the desk in front of her. The girls pretended not to notice, but their eyes widened in dismay.
“A vicious plot,” I observed reassuringly. “So what happened next? We still have a long way to go to bring us to the present.”
“The Aryan Council of Nations was formed in 11 A.D.,” Etta offered.
Now that familiar, solid ground had been reached at last, the class visibly relaxed.
“It would probably be more accurate,” Miss Crenevant interposed, “to say that the Aryan Council of Nations was formally recognized in 11 A.D. In the years immediately following Dachau, not all nations were ready to acknowledge or embrace the reality of the situation.”
“
In the old, Christian style of reckoning, when was the Aryan Council formally recognized?” I asked.
For the answer to that, they had to go to their textbooks. “It would have been 1954,” Ava declared after a bit of searching.
I said, “Tell us a bit about the Council. What was its mission?”
This was the sort of question they expected to see in their quizzes, and they began paging listlessly through their textbooks to find the answer. I interrupted to tell them I just wanted a brief summary, a thumbnail sketch. A couple of girls sighed; two or three shuffled their feet. No one cared to volunteer.
I said, “The author of the Council charter refers to the Spirit of Dachau. What did he mean by that?”
Etta shrugged her shoulders. “He meant it was necessary for the Aryan nations to be as cold as ice. Those were the words he used, ‘cold as ice.’ ”
“And what did this mean?”
They stirred sullenly, and I realized I was on the brink of losing them. “Miss Crenevant,” I said. “Maybe you can assist.”
She seemed relieved to take over. “We’d always taken our natural superiority over the unevolved races for granted, much the way we do with our pets and farm animals, and this nearly led to our downfall. The author of the charter was saying it was time for Aryan peoples to suppress their natural magnanimity and do what had to be done next to safeguard the future of the human race.”
“And what was that? What had to be done next?”
“The Spirit of Dachau had to be carried across the entire face of the earth.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“That humanity had to purge itself of mongrel strains once and for all.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because at the rate they were breeding, we’d soon be facing another crisis as horrendous as the one we’d just barely survived.”
“How long did it take for humanity to purge itself of mongrel strains once and for all?”
“A long time.”
“And how do you feel about this?”
“You mean … me, personally?”
“Yes, if you don’t mind.”