Consider Cassandra, daughter of the King and Queen of ancient Troy.  She had the gift of prophecy and was a tragic figure in the Trojan Wars that resulted in her captivity when Troy fell to the Greeks. Her tragedy is that no one believed her.  In many ways, whistle blowers, those singular risk takers tell all about shady proceedings which will lead us into all kinds of trouble are like prophets.  The trouble is they get into trouble for taking the trouble to get us to pay attention.

We don’t think of Simon Wiesenthal as a whistle blower or a prophet.  But he was both and at the same time a detective and relentless pursuer of evil doers.  He wore no uniform like the Comic Book Superheroes but he followed the flow of once uniformed Nazis out of Germany into countries that protected them.

Wiesenthal was persecuted because he was a Jew and was one of the millions who were caught in the web of death created by the Nazis who wanted Germany AND THE WORLD – “Judenfrei” – free of Jews.  The Jews were natural scapegoats of the Nazis and old and new anti-Semites.  It was the religious thing at first because Jews denied that Jesus was the Messiah they were looking for.  Actually, that Messiah never came although frauds in the past claimed to be THE savior to get them into heaven or at least into a more comfortable prison.

Simon Wiesenthal was not a prophet but he was successful as a Nazi hunter. He missed many still at large, still guilty and still living. He is the perfect example of the type of leader who inspires others. The tragedy is that the whistle blowers – say a mother named Cindy Sheehan – who is trying to complain to George W. Bush that he had her son killed in Iraq, are not listened to.  The sound of that whistle is piercing and grating on the ears of those who don’t want to listen to sounds - other than their own voices and those of their sycophants who try to turn the tables and make the whistle blower look like a misinformed malcontent and worse.  The worst of all the replies is that Cindy Sheehan is “unpatriotic”.

Simon Wiesenthal was told that he was passé. The past was past and he should retire and die.  We are living in new times and these old crimes or new crimes are really too messy to allow ourselves to be upset by them.

The lesson the whistle blowers and Simon Wiesenthal have to teach us is that we should never forget and never forgive those who do not value the lives that are so quickly forgotten and those who still think they were right in allowing and helping atrocities to take place. We do not pay attention to the lessons of history and the heroes and heroines of the past and present. Whistle Blowers have lessons to teach us. We should listen and learn and never forget.