This is the letter that I wrote to the Holocaust Museum Houston director:
I ask the Holocaust Museum Houston to make aggressive efforts to prevent future holocausts. Identify social, political and economic measures that bring prosperity and tranquility for every sentient being on our precious planet.
Let people know what you advocate in exhibits, lectures and publications.
I attended the museum’s opening on March 4, 1996. I lived in Houston until 2008 when my wife and I moved to Medellin, Colombia.
I had worked at the Houston Independent School District. I was the treasurer for the Willow Waterhole Greenspace Conservancy where it was our good fortune to have Anne Clutterbuck’s support to construct a park near Westbury Senior High School that was also a detention pond for the Harris County Flood Control District.
I started life as a high school history teacher and became a certified public accountant. In 1969, I realized that it was not just the Vietnam War was wrong. It was similar to slavery, torture, wife beating, child abuse and animal cruelty.
Some years back, I wrote a draft encyclical showing how to abolish war which I include here as a basis for your draft statement in preventing holocausts.
In 2017, my family and Father Richard Wahl, CSB, made a 33 minute YouTube presentation advocating war abolition. I include it here:
Let?s Abolish War: An Evening with Edward T. O?Rourke
https://youtu.be/UArUtUoXkME
Start with a Second Marshall Plan that will abolish poverty everywhere. I have been living in Medellin, Colombia since 2008. What I see is criminals and FARC guerillas performing violence when it is not necessary. Rather than just stealing and leaving, beatings or rapes are common. FARC guerillas knocked down an electric tower which had no military purpose. Wife beating, child abuse and animal cruelty are prevalent than in a prosperous society.
In 1928, before the Great Depression started to hit, the Nazis’ vote share was three percent. As the Depression progressed, their vote share steadily climbed.
This is the encyclical excerpt:
Changing the History Courses
I ask that history departments everywhere offer a course on war and its demise. Up to now, history departments, with few exceptions, have presented war uncritically. It seems like natural phenomena, like floods and hurricanes.
This coincides with the military industrial complex’s presentation:
1) War is necessary,
2) War is fought for the common good,
3) War is glorious, and,
4) A more just world will emerge after the current war.
Each above statement is false but they are accepted as routine truth by people who write textbooks and teach history courses at all levels.
Educators like to think that they offer intriguing thoughts to their students. In fact, the discussion range is narrow. They praise that people like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Urban II, Christopher Columbus and Bismarck who made things happen. In fact, they are all war criminals and should be treated as such. A Nuremberg type tribunal would convict every one for war crimes.
Those who write history books and texts belong at the same Nuremberg type trials as accomplices. A specific case is Samuel Eliot Morison in his classic, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: a Life of Christopher Columbus. He never mentioned the genocide that Christopher Columbus carried out on the Indians who welcomed them.
Exploiters give the idea that they are doing the exploited a favor by bringing telegraphs, telephones, better roads, better ports, banks, Christianity, public health and civilization to the underdeveloped world. Remembering Rudyard Kipling’s White Man’s Burden, it is a tough job but someone has to do it. Karl Marx had it right. He said that the class struggle explained history better than any other theory.
The military industrial complex has performed the best con job ever done by anybody anywhere.
Excerpt Ends
I will be in Houston in early October. I will call you on Tuesday, September 19, to follow up.
Thank you for your attention.
Sincerely,
Ed O’Rourke
Attachments area
Preview YouTube video Let’s Abolish War: An Evening with Edward T. O’Rourke
