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Sunday, 19 August 2018

A Nigger in which woodpile?

"There's a Nigger in the Woodpile"--a phrase the White Man has only just become aware of, ironically, from reading an article recommended by the venerable Mennonite historian Peter Hoover, whose Pennsylvania Dutch idiom has taken in the expression as a calque, "Do steckt eiats en Neger im Holzhauffe."

Now, it is very much to Peter's discredit that he used this phrase so cavalierly without translating it literally. Interestingly, I had heard the expression "skunk in the woodpile" which, having lived around both skunks and woodpiles, I took to be a literal-based metaphor, but scholars are agreed that it is actually a northern euphemism for the Southern original. The Pennsylvania Dutch, however, kept the original expression when taking it into their language, using it idiomatically for "There's something suspicious here behind the scenes." I won't go into the full usage of the phrase, as it can be looked up online (although some internet filters will restrict such research as regarding a "mature topic.")
I'll have a further critique of Peter Hoover in my next post, regarding his rejection of Premillennialism; this post will focus on the Holocaust denial in the linked article, which Peter introduced in a recent mass email as follows:

Probably about the strangest thing that has ever happened between my Jewish friends and me, is what appears at an Orthodox Jewish website on-line: 
Do you see who wrote the article?  [he did]
I wrote it years ago after I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington D. C. At first when I discovered it on-line (without my permission, but that is just fine) I was a bit alarmed. But then, the more I learned about it, the more surprising it became. This Orthodox Jewish group that published it, and that has kept it on-line for years, agreed with my conclusions, and shared all the same questions. 

When I got my first Kindle, I decided to make it a habit to download and read all the memoirs of Holocaust survivors that came available for $1.99 or less, but I soon had to give up the hobby as it became too overwhelming; there was literally about one every week. It is incredible that someone as deeply learned and widely traveled as Peter Hoover could even consider that the Holocaust Story is a Jewish fabrication, in the face of the thousands upon thousands of eyewitness testimonies to it. To me, that's the skunk in the woodpile! This willing suspension of belief is all the more incredible, with Peter being a respected historian not only of his Mennonite forefathers but also of the Russian Old Believers, concerning whom he wrote the book "The Russians' Secret."

While I continue to puzzle this out, the only theory that makes any sense is one that actually explains the situation perfectly. Peter Hoover has rejected God's chosen people, considering himself and his ilk to have fully replaced them as the apple of God's eye. Thus he not only turns away from the implication of the Scriptures that say otherwise, but even turns a blind eye to the historical fact that the Jews remain a special people--the only people, in fact, to survive intact from antiquity (although he also--no surprise--buys into the Khazar Hypothesis).

This all serves to remind us that every historian is biased, and no work of history can be taken as gospel--except the incredibly accurate Gospel Story itself.