Sasa and Zamani

An American Hero Dies. 
The words ‘sasa’ and ‘zamani’ are Swahili words denoting different modes of thinking about time. Sasa is the recent past of active events that are still unresolved. Zamani is the past that is done. Literally, sasa is a period from about six to twelve months and zamani is all that has come before. Sasa is time that everyone alive has experienced and zamani is that which becomes mythology. James Hoyt was one of the liberators of Buchenwald and saw firsthand the atrocities of the Nazis. He entered the camp without knowing what he would find and radioed back a single word. ‘Horror’. He bore the burden of witness through his entire life. He is one of the people who kept the Holocaust from slipping into the zamani from the sasa. Our sasa is filled with those who deny the Holocaust happened and other useless Nazi fanboys who pine for a fascist golden age that never was. As time marches on, their voices become louder as there are fewer and fewer voices of witness to rebut them. James Hoyt was tormented by nightmares his entire life and rarely if ever spoke about his experiences. He finally talked to a journalist a few years ago. As sasa moves on we will lose every person with living memory of the events of the first half of the last century and the Holocaust will become zamani. We must gather the testimonies of every possible witness to prevent the Holocaust from ever becoming myth.

Consider that Jerome Corsi, writer for Worldnetdaily and author of a smear book about Obama, is appearing on a radio show run by a white supremacist Holocaust denier. He was just on CNN on Larry King Live. Even if the guy from Media Matters was there in the interview to call out Corsi on his garbage, the fact is that this sort of sewage is more in the mainstream now than it has ever been. These deniers and racists are smearing the memories of people like James Hoyt. We cannot allow these liars to speak for the dead.