In 1945, the Nobel Prize recipient Elie Wiesel was released from a German concentration camp and sent to live in an orphanage in Paris. He left behind his mother and father and a younger sister—all killed by the Nazis. He and his two older sisters survived. He was seventeen.

Wiesle went on to study journalism and established a solid reputation in France where he worked for a major daily. He wrote about many subjects but was silent about one. He refused to utter a word about the Holocaust.

Before the Nazis invaded Romania and interred his entire village in the death camps, Wiesel had been inclined toward scholarship and intellectual rigor. He had focused most of his energies on studying Judaism and Jewish mysticism. During the Holocaust, Wiesel says, for a period he came to hate God. Indeed he appears to have hated just about everything and everyone, including himself. There was no God. Or Good. Or Hope. Or so he tried to persuade himself.

The problem is that it’s almost impossible to purge ourselves of our own character no matter how hard we try. While we usually think of this in terms of our failings, it is just as true of our strengths. In spite of himself, Wiesle had a loving and deeply idealistic nature.

In 1956, Elie Wiesel was hit by a car in New York City and had to be confined to a wheelchair for over a year. It is my surmise (I do not know if he would agree) that Elie Wiesel’s confinement to a wheelchair brought back the horrors of the camps. He was once again a helpless prisoner, once again unable to escape. In any event, the year proved to be one of intense conflict and anguish for him. Ultimately the transformation that he experienced changed not only Wiesel but the world.

In 1957, Wiesel wrote his first novel, Night, part of a trilogy addressing the Holocaust head-on. It was published in 1958. Wiesel has since published many books and he has deservedly garnered almost every conceivable international honor. His unstinting efforts to expose tyranny everywhere on earth, against all human beings and not just Jews, are deservedly praised throughout the world. Among those he has championed—Nicaragua’s Miskito Indians, Argentina’s Desaparecidos, Cambodian refugees, the Kurds, victims of famine in Africa, victims of apartheid in South Africa, and victims of war in the former Yugoslavia. Today, as he approaches the age of eighty, he remains lucid, generative, and active. He is especially dedicated to nurturing the talent and idealism of young people.

For all that Wiesel has gone on to write, however, it is my view that Night remains his most important book. Night is categorized as fiction, but it isn’t—not really. It is openly autobiographical. Anyone who reads it knows instantly that every word of it is true. I regard Night as the most important book written about the Holocaust.

What I find most remarkable about the book is its dreadful effectiveness in putting the reader right there, in the camps. There are a few classically eloquent passages in it, and these are usually the ones that get quoted. But the book’s true power actually derives from its droning monotony. His syntax is terse, repetitive, and unvarying. Characters are poorly fleshed-out. They appear and disappear without explanation. There is no classical confrontation between a hero and his antagonist, as we customarily expect there to be in fiction. At the end of the book, a few half-dead survivors crawl out from under the pile of corpses. That’s it.

Night is a horrible book to read and to have to endure. Although it is only a hundred pages long, I breezed through War and Peace in half the time.

What Wiesle manages to capture in a way that no one else ever has (or probably ever will) is the monotony of evil, the back-breaking grunt-work required day after day to kill six million human beings, the drudgery of extinction.

At one point, Wiesel recounts the hanging of a seven-year-old boy. Because the child’s body was so light, he hovered between life and death for almost a half an hour. At the time no one, including Wiesel himself, seemed especially affected. Put the emphasis on seemed to be. Interestingly, the only figure whom he describes as shaken is a hardened SS commander who retreats to a building and briefly appears to weep. The chapter concludes by describing Wiesel’s relish for that evening's scrap of bread and bowl of watered down soup.

Hunger ultimately became all that any camp inmate focused on. As the weeks and months and years ground on, they grew accustomed to so many acts of barbarism that, on the surface at least, they became listless and benumbed. Only starvation and cold reached them after a certain point.

Night is a terrible book. I have read it three times now and plan to read it annually for the rest of my life.

There is a comparatively minor incident early in the book that I will recount now. I do so because it is emblematic of denial’s power, and its destructiveness: Before the village was uprooted and its citizens sent to concentration camps en masse, the Nazis escalated their oppression slowly, in deliberate stages. At each stage, the Jews in the village were given a period of time to adapt. And each time they told themselves that surely this latest incursion was as bad as it would ever get. “It’s not great,” they said. “But soon the war will be over…and compared to others, our fates have not been that bad.”

During one incremental increase in the Nazis’ campaign of total destruction, the SS rounded up all of the Jews in the town who were not officially deemed to be citizens. Included in this group were people on work visas from other countries, students, and similar trivialities that enabled the Nazis to identify a smaller group and isolate it from the whole.

One day truck convoys rolled down the main street and the so-called aliens were rounded up and herded into the trucks. That afternoon, the convoy departed.

No word arrived at the village of their fate until several months later when one of the deportees returned. He had managed to escape.

“I’ve come back to warn you!” he said. He proceeded to describe unspeakable atrocities. The Nazis had isolated the group in the woods and exterminated all of them. There was an ammunition shortage, so children and infants were tossed into the air like clay pigeons in order to give the soldiers practice in marksmanship. The rest were forced to toil for hours digging a trench. The Nazi soldiers played cards, caught up on their correspondence, or got in a quick nap.

Then, when the Jews’ labor was complete, the soldiers commenced with theirs. Each man, woman, and older child was forced to strip naked. Then they were made to stand at the rim of the trench with their heels jutting out over the edge. The Nazis shoved them in one-by-one and proceeded to burn them alive. The procedure was time-consuming and hard on the Nazis’ nostrils. But the commandant felt strongly that precious bullets must not be wasted and thus for hours the trench was kept fueled and ablaze.

The man who had returned told his fellow citizens of these matters and urged them to prepare for the worst.

Without a single exception, the villagers turned their backs on him.

“He’s crazy!” they said.

“He’s delirious!”

“He’s lying.”

Some put their fingers into their ears and shouted, “Go away!”

Several months later the entire village was uprooted and sent to Auschwitz to die.

This was not Nazi denial. Nor was it denial by the German citizenry. It was Jewish denial. I believe that a credible argument can be made that, in a real sense, denial sent more Jews to the gas chambers than Hess and Himmler.

Some may question my audacity in daring to bring up the Holocaust in the same breath as the Men’s Movement. A few may take serious offence. If anyone feels injured personally by anything that I say here, or believes that the suffering of his ancestors is being demeaned, all that I can say to you is that this is not my intention.

For one thing, I am a Jew. That confers upon me no right whatsoever to draw false or misleading inferences. On the other hand, the Holocaust has compelled me throughout my life to ask some very serious questions about the nature of evil—and to ask them in a personal way.

It seems to me that one of the Holocaust’s lessons is that evil does not appear suddenly. It actually behaves nothing at all like Freddie Krueger or Jason. More likely, evil shows up at the office as a geek---the quintessential nerd.

It toils wherever lots of dull bureaucrats toil. It whittles away at boring and meaningless minutiae along with all the other bureaucrats. At least this appears to have been so in Nazi Germany. The sadists who swaggered about in the S.S. and Gestapo were monsters and they were real. But they comprised only a tiny fraction of the Third Reich. The overwhelming majority of Nazis were drab bureaucrats crunching numbers in boring offices.

I also believe that denial is essential for evil to succeed—denial, and a soporifically enervating, slow, dull, stupefying pace. It all has to appear mechanized, humdrum, and routine. If Nazi Germany proves anything it is that the devil really does lurk in the details.

Viewed from this perspective, the destruction of families that is occurring right now in America, Canada, and most of the Western world may not constitute a holocaust, but the threat it poses to everyone is grave. Moreover, I do see parallels between what is happening in the family courts today and what occurred in the waning days of the Weimar Republic in the late 1920’s. Two such connections especially stand out. The first is the manner in which those with evil intentions always target the Law. The second relates to the universal human compulsion to engage in denial. Both problems existed in Nazi Germany and both problems are present in the administration of family law today.

As far as the legal system is concerned, it was quickly corrupted and overwhelmed in the earliest days of the Third Reich and it has been totally corrupted in America and elsewhere today. It was inevitable. It is hard to imagine any component of government that is more vulnerable to infiltration by those with malicious motives than the Law itself.

Stripped of its pretenses, the Law is really just an extreme instance of bureaucracy. It does not endeavor primarily to determine truth. It never has. Instead, it seeks case precedent. As is true in any other bureaucracy, Policy Memorandum 197 isn’t sustained or abolished based on its merits. It is justified because it was discussed in Policy Memorandum 134, and PM 134 in turn was foreshadowed by Protocol 1917-B. This intrinsically nonsensical quest for a legal practice’s bureaucratic pedigree is obviously absurd and yet it is what case law is actually all about. This is what the Supreme Court haggles over—not innocence or guilt.

As far as the second connection—denial—the evidence is already overwhelming. How many horror stories have to appear until it is perfectly obvious to everyone that something has gone hideously wrong in our legal system, at least when it comes to the way we are dealing with divorce? Men are usually assumed to be the main victims, but everyone is harmed by what is going on, including the children and the vindictive ex-wife herself. ^[1]

The Franz Kafka-like surrealism of the family courts has been demonstrated over and over and over and over. It has been demonstrated in all fifty of the United States, in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England and beyond. New instances of what can only be called Kafka-esque or Orwellian perversions of justice and simple common sense are reported every day. They are reported in MND every day.

And yet for the most part we never hear a whisper about the extent of the problem on CNN, Sixty Minutes, or in the Wall Street Journal. Why not? The full answer to this question will prove to be multifaceted, but one element has to be denial. Most people refuse to acknowledge the obvious and this must be taken seriously.

At this time, one half of all marriages will end in divorce.  This is worrisome enough. But in the past, most parents understood that children traumatized by divorce needed to have a relationship to both of the divorcing parents more than ever. They also grasped that their children needed to be allowed to look up to and admire their parents for a sufficient period to enable them to venture into the world independently later on. A couple of decades ago everyone knew that. But not now.

What is happening now is, to use the same word I chose earlier when discussing Night, an incremental increase in the magnitude of the destructiveness. The destruction inflicted by now occurs on a daily basis, as a matter of course. We generally refer to the perpetrator as the divorce industry and it is clearly an unmitigated disaster. It is a runaway train.

The knowing and continuing promulgation of bullshit and lies by “safe houses” and “shelters” and “Victims’ Assistance programs” and “Domestic Violence therapists” is…well…a crime.

This is just common sense. And yet, the majority of people cling ferociously to untenable nonsense. Why? The legal system grows worse by the week. Nevertheless, public sentiment has changed very little since 1884 when Farah Fawcett starred in The Burning Bed. One has to ask, Why? How come?

Those with a vested financial interest in perpetuating the current divorce industry will be inclined to impugn what I say here not because they genuinely disagree with its reality, but because it threatens the bottom line.

Political fanatics will also react —and here I do not mean all feminists, only the most violent extremists. ^[2] What these people may do now or in the future is something I cannot predict. I’m not sure anyone can. I know that I simply am unable to fathom what motivates these hate-mongers. Not really. I have little comprehension of how they think.

The most violent extremist factions currently operate as terrorist cells. I don’t think that anyone knows how many of them there are, who they are, or what their ultimate objectives are. But they do exist and they will react. Who knows when, toward whom, or in what manner?

I can only tell you that this is not my paranoia. Such people are really out there; they read Men’s News Daily, and they are up to no good. Initially, I tended to deny this reality myself. What convinced me otherwise was the sudden coordinated exodus of such hate groups from the Internet in 2001. This followed unwanted publicity that resulted from surprisingly widespread circulation of Valerie Solanas’s S.C.U.M. Manifesto. ^[3] I have no idea whether the membership in such groups numbers in the dozens, hundreds, or thousands. It doesn’t matter. Terrorism has never depended on large numbers of people. 

Today, anyone attempting to research this matter on the Net will find lots of copies of Solanas’s essay. But when they attempt to go to the sites of the actual neofeminist groups that championed Solanas’s nonsense, they will find only dead links.

If I had to guess, I would anticipate complete silence from this faction. I think that they are probably biding their time.

A nominally different response will be the hedging that comes from certain groups and individuals that present themselves as being more moderate and rational. They will quibble over trivia. They will waffle.

My belief is that all of these factions, however, only comprise one or two percent of the grand total. The other ninety-eight percent will be those who engage in denial. I hasten to add that I have no objective proof of this. I am stating my own impression.

It has been my own impression that the most virulent denial arises from men, not women. Perhaps others have had different experiences. Still, I think that my impression does make logical sense. The person most likely to feel directly threatened by what the Men’s Movement is revealing is a man who is still married. No one wants to believe that the person he loves, and with whom he has shared his bed and raised his children for many years would be capable of such treachery. Few people have the courage to admit, “There but for fortune…”

What such men are likely to do is to find ways in their own minds to create differences between themselves and people in the men’s movement. “This may have happened to him, and him, and him,” they tell themselves. “But it most certainly would never happen to me….It won’t happen to me because I am different from him, and him, and him….

He, and he, and he have done [are, act like, etc.]:

1. (fill in the blank)
2. (fill in the blank)
3. (fill in the blank)
4. (fill in the blank)
5. (fill in the blank)
6. (fill in the blank)
7. (fill in the blank)
8. (fill in the blank)

“In complete contrast, I have done [am, acted like, etc]:

1. (fill in the blank)
2. (fill in the blank)
3. (fill in the blank)
4. (fill in the blank)
5. (fill in the blank)
6. (fill in the blank)
7. (fill in the blank)
8. (fill in the blank)”

This is, in my view, eminently understandable. It is, if you will, only human. Nor do I believe that it is useful to vilify such people for their denial. Rather, I think it is up to those of us who have our eyes open to find better ways of reaching these men.

I will not tell you my ideas on this (at least not here), but I will tell you one guaranteed way to fail: Assail the man with poorly reasoned out, muddled, and angry gender bashing. That, I guarantee you, will turn such a man off for sure (and so far that is what has generally happened. Most men have been turned off to and alienated by the Men’s Movement.

I’ll take it further: I am equally opposed to illogical and polemic-laced diatribes against feminists. Feminism covers a lot of ground. Regardless, the responsible thing for those who speak for the Men’s Movement to do is to debunk certain noxious ideas, not to debunk the individuals who have them. This requires thought and reason. It requires, in fact, solid evidence. And frankly the individuals who do have such ideas are entitled to their opinions. This is a democracy—remember? We all believe in free speech—capice? If one group has better ideas, it can prove it.

All of what I am saying may only prove to you that I posses a firm grasp of the obvious. Nonetheless, I encourage you to read some recent back issues of Men’s News Daily. I think that you will be surprised at the number of articles that engage in sloppy thinking and resort to women-bashing. Such authors are a minority of the total, but there are still too many.

My advice to everyone is: DON’T DO THIS!

I don’t like the term, “Men’s Movement.” I never have. But at this point I think we are probably stuck with it. It is too entrenched. Nevertheless, I grow increasingly uncomfortable with people who actually believe it. This is not a men’s movement. It’s a truth movement. It is not about men solely. It is about all human beings. If anyone is our constituency it is our children, but please! Stay away from those terms too! They’ve already been usurped by so many different and opposing factions that they are also meaningless.

Unfortunately, I fear that we’re stuck with the term. But we ourselves must think with greater clarity and learn to reason with more compelling cogency. Otherwise, we will never reach the very constituency that we need to reach must urgently—other men.

Just look at the masthead for MND. Some of the sharpest thinkers are women. Frankly some of the sloppiest are…well…not the women.

For the umpteenth time, I repeat: This is not about men versus women. It is about fairness versus unfairness; justice versus injustice; and affirmation of what is best in all of us (and in our democracy) versus indulgence in polemic and unjustified hate.

Probably everyone is sick of hearing me say this. So be it. It’s a free country. So far.

David E. Reiser, MD.