The Last Post Ever, Ever, Ever On Aleksey Vayner (We Hope)
It’s time to declare a moratorium on all things Aleksey Vayner. This horse is not only beaten to death — it’s been shipped off to the glue factory, buried out in the yard, and decomposed into its component minerals.
Yet here we are.
When the behemoth Today Show limps into the story, getting pretty much every fact wrong (“Someone at one of the Wall Street firms is believed to have sent the video to YouTube” — no, you hacks, we did!), and not even mentioning the fraud angle, we feel obligated to do one. last. post. And to make it a doozy.
We’ve obtained (best word in journalism, right there) the first 11 pages of Women’s Silent Tears, Vayner’s self-published book about women in the Holocaust. The book’s host, Lulu.com, took it down after reading our initial report that segments of the work were plagiarized. Well, now that Vayner’s work is freely available for download (cease and desist this, Alex), you can Google it for yourself, or follow our handy guide below.
But first, we just have to share this bit from his wholly original “Acknowledgements” section:
[A]nonymous gratitude goes to the generals and intelligence officers who provided the hands-on skills and knowledge that expanded my horizons and changed my perspective on the world forever.
Now for the more Kaavyaesque bits. From the preface:
Women’s voices have given rise to many powerful accounts of the Holocaust, and yet few researchers have analyzed these perspectives to learn what the horrifying events meant for women in particular. [Stolen from: Experience and Expression: Women, Nazis, and the Holocaust]
From the “Broad Overview of the Holocaust” section:
In ancient times, when there was a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, the priests of the Temple would offer animal sacrifices to God. Some sacrifices would provide the priests with meat for their own consumption, while others would be wholly consumed and only ashes would be left. The latter type of sacrifices was called, in Greek, holokauston, which means, “wholly burned.” In Hebrew, the word for this type of sacrifice was ‘olah.’ However, when the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as the state religion and translated the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament into Latin, they borrowed the term holokauston from Greek and rendered ‘olah’ as holocaustum. The English term derives from the Latin word. [Stolen from: The Holocaust History Project]
Then there’s this bit from his section on euthanasia, which appears to be lifted in full.
The term euthanasia (literally, “good death”) usually refers to the inducement of a painless death for a chronically or terminally ill individual. In Nazi usage, however, “euthanasia” was a euphemistic term for a clandestine program which targeted for systematic killing institutionalized mentally and physically disabled patients, without the knowledge or consent of themselves or their families. [Stolen from: Holocaust Encyclopedia]
There. We’re done. Forever. We’ll update if the guy gets expelled or charged, but that’s it. We’re not even going to tell you about how we got in contact with the guys who made the ski video he bought.
