American Thinker appears to censor my comment on my parents slave labor reparations

In 2018, I posted this comment on a reparations story on Amer. Thinker:

Almost every time reparations comes up at Amer. Thinker, I have to post the unique story of my family's personal history.

My father was a Jew in the Polish Army in WWII who, as a Prisoner of War, did slave labor for the Nazi regime. After the war, he received monthly reparations checks for slave labor. When he died, those checks came to an end. I am not entitled to continued slave labor reparations. In fact, I had to send his last check back to the German Consulate in NY because he died before the first of the month. The German government required annual proof of his being alive, so any attempt on my part to "appropriate" and cash a check or two or three after his death (I actually had a relative who suggested I should have done this later on) would have probably resulted in my arrest for some crime and my name and possible picture in the NY Post and NY Daily News. So I returned the last check with a letter and a copy of my dad's death certificate to the Consulate. I did not start a street protest about how my not getting new checks was "an attack on my civil rights" or "unfair" or "racist" or "antisemitic."
END

Here's what I just wrote now in 2020 and attempted to post as a comment at Amer. Thinker, writing here from memory with a small editing of a few words...

I have a unique family historical perspective on reparations. My father was a soldier and Prisoner of War in Poland in WWII. He later was a Jew doing slave labor for the Germans. After the war, the Allies made an agreement for Germany to pay reparations for slave labor. My father received those checks, even getting one just before the upcoming month when he died about two decades ago. Because he died before the first of the month, I was required to write to German Consulate in New York and send back that last check, also including a death certificate. This was not a multigenerational annuity that I could continue to receive even though the effects of emotional damage, lost educational opportunities, etc. were a lot closer to me than to blacks 100 or 150 years after 1865.

Although not reparations, an heiress to General Motors money has written about the negative effects of money given to her without her work efforts. In the book "The Golden Ghetto, the Psychology of Affluence" by Jessie O'Neill, the author, a psychologist, talks about her life as the granddaughter of a one time General Motors president and the negative effects of living on money she and her family didn't earn then had on her. If one wants to think that there are no negative effects of living on unearned money to be dealt with, be it reparations or a family fortune, one is deluding oneself. And righteous anger, be it authentic or self-created, won't change that.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 03:11 PM | Comments (45) | Add Comment
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