4A Sunday, April 14, 1996 TIMES RECORDER, Zanesville, Ohio iqWotd John Raytis. publisher Richard Stubbe, managing editor Jim Rudioff. design director Pam Swingle, city editor' Tncia Davis, news editor Chuck Martin, historian Serving Zanesville and Southeastern Ohio since 1852 Our view CP BE AfHOE BEfaSE VKKNCMBrTWS AGOODIDCL. ITEM -VETO A fun week Carr Center cake auction will be highlight 7 tJt WHIZ-AM. Auctioneer Ron Bucci of General Graphics and the usual cast of helpers will be taking bids at the mall and by telephone.
The number is 452-8000 and the long-distance number is (800) 884-0090. Ifs a good cause and ifs also kits of fun. But the cake auction wont be the only event of interest Softball season starts at Riverside Park, where soccer season has already started. Muskingum College is planning to celebrate tlie success of its five-year fund raiser Friday night And many other events are scheduled for the weeks ahead. Ladies and gentlemen, mark your Have the Clinton foes no shame? C2 Even previous defenders have grudgingly come to the position that Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater special counsel, is spectacularly imprudent (at the least).
The newly aggressive editorial page of The New York Times, up to tliis point a cheerleader of Starr's investigation, begged him to cut off his compromising other commitments. A clean start would be best, it admitted; but since we cannot start over, the last hope for giving Starr some credibility is to have him stop engaging in other activities connected with right-wing and anti-Clinton enterprises. The impenitent Starr refuses to do that His government commitment is not sufficient to make him forgo profit-making (and right-wing) business while directing the investigation of the Clintons. Starr was still collecting a million dollars from his law firm in 1994, the same amount he earned the year before, even though he was supposed to have been engaged in the government's investigation for five months of 1 994. The Times made its panicky plea to Starr to save the investigation after The Nation spelled out, in an article by Joe Conason and Murray Waas, all of Starfs tangled involvements with the Republican Party and right-wing ideologies.
But Starr's unsuitability as an impartial investigator had been clarified earlier in an unjustly neglected article by Charles V. Zeliren in Newsday. Writing early last October, Zehren pointed out tliat Stan-was a Republican partisan who considered taking on the case of Paula Jones in her suit against the president Tvurs Right, we worr tttiW UNTIL clearly unqualified man was appointed to his job. The irony is that he was appointed because Congress complained that the previous counsel had taken his position at the -appointment of Attorney General Janet Reno. Yet the Democratic Reno had appoint-' ed a Republican, Robert Flske, who instantly'' severed all sources of conflict That did not satisfy congressional Republicans such as Sea Lauch Faircloth, a friend of the man -who presided over a new body to appoint an independent general counsel Kenneth' Starr.
Faircloth lunched with his friend, David Sentelle, and gave Sentelle's wife a govern-. ment job. Starr, far more partisan than Fiske, was appointed, and refused to give up any work suggestive of a conflict of interest Now The Wall Street Journal, which called for Fiske's replacement because he was too. compromised, says that we cannot expect general counsels to give up their regular legal work while doing important govern- ment tasks. The imprudence and partisanship of Starr are shown in his every action in his background, his acceptance of the "independent" role, his refusal to accede to reasonable requests even from his supporters, and his bringing of a case in Little Rock that is based on the word of a crook and liar named David I Iale.
I lave the Clinton foes no shame? Garry Wills' column is distributed by Universal Press Syndicate. numerous ordinary German participants in genocide. But Browning, author of "Ordinary Men," a stunning study of mid- die-aged conscripts who became mass mur- derers in a German police battalion in Poland, argued that the unspeakable ties committed by the Khmer Rouge against fellow Cambodians, and by Chinese against other Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, cannot be explained by GolJliagen's model-by centuries of condi- tioning by a singular idea Browning charged that Gokihagen's "unremitting portrayal of German uniformi-' ty" makes history one-dimensional and dehumanizes Germans. By making Germans so alien, Goldhagen's thesis is too ing. Browning believes that mass murder and the ubiquity of cruelty accompanying suggests the need to seek explanations in "those universal aspects of human nature that transcend the cognition and culture ot ordinary Germans." This Tuesday, April 16, is the Day of Remembrance for I lolocaust victims and survivors.
Since 1945 the theme of remem-; brance ceremonies has been "Never again But again Europe is sifting skulls from the earth over mass graves, this time of Muslims, victims of what? Ordinary Serbs? George Witt's column is distributed by Hit-Washington Post Writers Group. A few days of warm weather are a definite indicator of spring, but the events scheduled for the week ahead should make it clear that the green season has finally arrived. Highlighting the week's events is the 10th annual Alfred Carr Center cake auction More than 400 cakes, with the usual impressive array of incentives, will be auctioned off at the Colony Square Mai If you cant make it to the mall but still want to participate in the auction, the most up-to-date list of the cakes and incentives will be in Wednesday's Times Recorder. The auction begins Thursday morning and will be broadcast on Zanesville radio station Letters to Volunteers appreciated; hospices can use more To The Editor April 2 1-27 is National Volunteer Week, and we would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank the people we believe are the most dedicated volunteers in our community, the volunteers of Good Samaritan I lospice and I lospice Care of Bethesda Most people know that hospice provides a very special kind of care for terminally ill persons and their families, but it's kss known that, if it were not for volunteers, our hospices could not function. Even Uk federal government recognizes the importance of volunteers in the delivery of hospice care by requiring that Medicare-approved hospices utilize volunteers from their community.
Hospice care is provided through an interdisciplinary, medically directed team. This team approach to care for dying persons typically includes a physician, a nurse, a counselor, a member of the clergy, and a home health aide. While our hospices employ paid professionals, we also rely on volunteers to provide assistance at all levels of skill. Nationally, about 95,000 people serve as hospice volunteers, and last year, they gave well over 5 million hours of their precious time to serve terminally ill patients and families. Locally, approximately 200 persons When The Times Recorder welcomes letters to the editor of general interest to the community.
All letters are subject to editing. Anonymous letters wl not be printed. current quotations "Clearly I would want an my children to die in a state of joy I mean, what more could I ask for? I would prefer it was not at age 7 but God, she went with her joy and her passion, and her life was in her hands' Lisa Blair Hathaway, mother of 7-year-okJ Jessica Dubroff, who was killed trying to become the youngest person to fry cross-country. It was burning our lungs and eyes It takes your breath away so that you canl breathe. You feel like your lungs are on fire Layne Atwood, a trucker who drove into a cloud of poisonous chlorine gas shorty after three railroad tank cars derailed near western Montana.
"Open up, open up! They want to kil me" Associated Press writer Nyenati Allison, who has covered the crvl war in his native Ltoeria, during a four-day, cat-and-mouse flight to save hts We. Bible digest Master, which is (he great comrrandment in the tew? Jesus said unto Nm, Thou shaft love the Lord thy God with al thy heart, and withal thy soul, and win al thy mnd This is the first and great commandment And the second is 6ke unto t. Thou shall love thy netgnbour as tfcyseff. On these two commandments hang al the law and tie prophets. (Ma3new 22:3640) These words sum up al of Qristianty Let's be real for Jesus.
the editor donated their service to our community hospices during the year. In a number of ways, volunteering for hospice differs from other community work. For instance, hospice patient-care volunteers are required to undergo at least 20 hours of standardized training before being allowed to work directly with a patient or family. No task Is too big or too small for our volunteers, but often the most importaqnt tiling they can do Is just "be there" for patients-to reassure them they are not alone, to hold a hand, to offer a smile, or to just listen. It Is not easy work, but the personal rewards are enormous.
The strength and courage of patients provide a constant source of inspiration, and volunteers usually feel they gain more than they have been able to give. Cur hospices are growing, as more and more persons seek our help. For this reason, we have a constant need lor new volunteers. If you would like to Warn more about hospice volunteering, we invite you to call or visit Good Samaritan I lospice or 1 lospice Care of Bethesda. In the meantime, we should all be grateful to tlie volunteers for the wealth of time and compassion they give for the betterment of our community.
Midiele Bamhart-McMahon Director, Good Samaritan Hospice Sally StheQlcr Director, I lospice Care of Betliesda writing Send letters to Letters to the editor, Times Recorder, 34 S. Fourth Zanesville, OH 43701. Please include a daytime telephone number tor verification. Never again WASI IINGTON-Business is brisk at the Holocaust Memorial Museum here. Visitors line up more than two hours before the doers open at 10 am, and about 2 million pass through those doors each year, four times more than were anticipated when the museum opened three years ago.
Explaining the museum's success, a member of the staff says dryly, "1 luman nature has been an enormous help." She means that from Bosnia, where scores of mass graves are being explored, to Rwanda from Angola to Kurdish regions of Iraq, from Liberia to Sri Lanka, headlines proclaim the continuing prevalence of what visitors hope the museum will help them comprehend: beastliness. But that is the wrong word. Beasts do not do such things. Wanton, gratuitous, even giddily exuberant cruelty (such as one German's game of catching on a bayonet babies hurled from a hospital's windows) in the exercise of exterminating violence against categories of beings-this is a distinctively human activity. The museum is an institution of memory lor the victims of Germany rampant, 1933-45.
But it also is a teaching institution, and last week was the scene of a heated symposium about a new book examining the perpetrators of the Holocaust Reduced to an epigram, Daniel Jonah Gokihagen's thesis in 1 1itk.T's Willing LxecutKwieis: Ordinary Germans and the Hokxaust" is that "the road to Auschwitz but barbarism is happening again -t- iGarrv Wills A former clerk of Antonin Scalia, the rightward-most Supreme Court justice before Clarence Thomas joined the court, Starr has been a proclaimed ideological advocate who maneuvered to run for Republican office. I le was a Reagan appointee to the bench, and a Bush appointee as solicitor general. 1 lis clients include the Bradley Foundation, which has funded anti-Clinton activities, and the religious right, and the tobacco industry. Zehren quotes a Starr admirer, die Wasliington lawyer Ernest Gellhom, as admitting that "everything he is an expert in has political overtones." Zehren quotes Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity: "Ask yourself, Are you talking to the independent counsel? The attorney with business against the government? Or the lawyer on the politically charged case interested in embarrassing the president?" If such a partisan were appointed to the role of special counsel, one would think that his first concern would be to assure people that his partisan activities were behind him for this period. I le would sever ties to the right, to anything that might compromise his activities.
Starr has defiantly refused to do this. That brings up the question how such a tion becomes: In what sense ordinary? His aaswer is: Ordinary meaning the routine, predictable products of cognitive determinism They killed Jews, often with pleasure, because an ideology told them doing so was not merely permissible but virtuous. This monocausal explanation is made problematic by both the good and the bad that Germans did. If virulent anti-Semitism had such a viselike grip, what explains the behavior of the significant number of Germans who abstained from, or even resisted barbarism? And if German anti-Semitism was the cause of the barbarism, why did the barbarities engulf so many non-Jews, and why were there so many non-Germans among the barbarians? The victims of barbarism included the mentally and physically handicapped, Gypsies, three million Soviet prisoners of war, the inhabitants of the Greek village of Komeno, Italian POWs who a few days earlier had been Germany's allies, and others. And although Goldliagen insists that the "quantity and quality of personalized brutality and cruelty" inflicted by Germans on Jews flowed from a German cultural idea, many Croatians, Ukrainians and others collaborated with Germans in administering the Holocaust At the symposium, Christopher Browning of Pacific Lutheran University agreed with Goldhagen concerning the high degree of volunteerism on the part of the Georpe Will was not crooked." Elaborated through 6 1 9 pages of often shattering anecdotes mined from survivors' and perpetrators' testimonies, GoldJiagen's argument is that genocide fulfilled the logic of 150 years of German history.
I litler's seizure of power, says Goldliagen, was a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the Holocaust Acculturation came first When ordinary Germans, products of long rorklitioning by a culture steeped in anti-Semitism, came under the sway of a totalitarian regime's propaganda that legitimized exterminauon, they fell to the task with attitudes ranging from dutifulness to relish. Only such thinking, says Goldhagen, can explain the participation of between 100,000 and 500,000 persons who served in the genocide infantry-those who got gore on their sleeves from shooting children at dose range. When Goldhagen, profess jr of government and social studies at I larvard, says they were Tordinary Germans" who sent photographs of their buuiiery to loved ones, and even invited their wives to watch them smash skulls with nfle butts, die ques.
