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MacKenzie
Paine: A Truth-Seeking Missile
By Bradley R. Smith
The thing about Audrey
is that she was passionate and honest and
available. The first time I spoke to her on the
telephone I understood how available she was. It
was in the tone of her voice, her openness, her
enthusiasm. She was there. All the way. The next
day she came to the house and we went up the
outside stairs to my office and I knew in about
ten minutes that she would become my right-hand
man.
We had each arrived in Baja Mexico three
years earlier but had never run into each other.
She had moved south to run a real estate
business on the Baja coast, rented a fine house
for herself, her father, her autistic brother
and her two sons. Six weeks after settling in,
the real estate venture was purchased by a
Japanese bank in Mexico City and closed down.
Audrey had to move her family to house on a dirt
road on a desolate hilltop some seven miles
outside of town. There were no telephone lines
so having a computer was a useless exercise. She
began doing odd secretarial jobs around town for
four dollars an hour.
I discovered her passion for politics first.
She was a right-wing conservative American
patriot – make that PATRIOT in caps. An
America-First Patriot. She was an orthodox, but
rather lapsed, Roman Catholic. In the moment her
political passion was focused on the attempt of
George W. Bush to gain the Republican
presidential nomination. She despised Clinton,
Gore, those around them and what they stood for
– primarily the rewriting of the Constitution.
At least once every morning we would go out on
the terraza where she would smoke furiously and
defend conservative politics and past Republican
administrations against my inclination to want
to undermine her confidence in them.
Audrey judged Bush and Gore from a
left/right, liberal/conservative perspective
while I tended to judge each by how their
parties stood in relation to the ideal of
liberty, both at home and abroad. My view was
that they had both failed historically, both
domestically and with foreign policy. Because no
political party will ever put liberty before its
own success, Audrey was consistently frustrated
with how I engaged her. Nevertheless, every day
she would get into it with me. Her passion for
the success of George Bush, the Republican
Party, and conservative ideals was all
consuming.
Audrey knew nothing about revisionist theory
and had no particular interest in it. That was
all right with me because I needed secretarial
help, nothing more. That’s what I thought. At
the same time there was a lot of back and forth
crossing our desks about the Campus Project and
she began to understand something about what I
was doing. She told me later that she had had
reservations about associating with me. She had
never known a revisionist, but suspected that I
was some kind of bigot, certainly anti-Jewish,
perhaps even a racist. She said she had been
prepared to quit the moment I revealed my true
colors. As she saw what revisionists were
actually doing, however, she began to dip into
the literature. It was very easy for her to
understand that no matter who was right about
revisionist theory, that censorship should be
condemned and intellectual freedom encouraged.
Audrey was very open about herself and her
family. She told me about the early death of her
mother, even some of the subsequent peccadilloes
of her father – laughing as she told me how she
had told him that she had told me and how he was
scandalized. She told me about her marriage to
an Australian that ended as soon as it happened
but produced her son Anthony. And she told me
how she was so devastated by the stories and
pictures of poverty and dying children in Haiti
that she adopted a Haitian boy to be a brother
to her natural son. She named him Jonathan and
he turned out to be a fine boy and he and
Anthony became brothers in every human sense of
that word.
I never fully understood her passion for the
welfare of children everywhere in the world.
Even when she was broke and isolated and doing
odd jobs at four dollars an hour she was working
with a Mexican agency to set up an adoption
service to search for American families that
would be interested in adopting Mexican orphans.
She was ready to kick off the program via the
Internet when she started working for me, but
problems arose with other women working on the
program, Mexican bureaucracy was impenetrable,
and one thing after another went wrong until she
found that was facing possible charges for
“selling” Mexican babies to Americans. It was a
mess. She had to let it go. She was devastated
by the affair. To make matters worse, she had
found a little girl who had been orphaned and
Audrey had wanted to adopt her too. Now it would
be impossible.
So she was as close to being broke as she
could be. She had her family to take care of,
the problems with the Mexican adoption program
to settle, her utter commitment to the Bush
people and their race for the presidency, and
now she found she was growing increasingly
interested in revisionism. While she didn’t have
a firm grasp on revisionist theory, she
understood very quickly that there was something
wrong when professors argued that revisionist
text should be censored and suppressed, and that
they were unwilling to debate revisionists
themselves. She began taking books home with her
at night and in the couple hours before bedtime,
drinking mescal and tequila with her father, she
began informing herself on the issues. By the
time Bush was elected, a thrilling moment in
Audrey’s life, she had become a Holocaust
revisionist.
Audrey performed the office work that I
needed to have done, and had one idea after
another how to promote CODOH and the work.
Networking was her cup of tea. She kept in touch
with everyone, and everyone she kept in touch
with appreciated her attention. I handed off
more and more responsibilities to her. I had
started her off at six dollars an hour, a very
good wage here, then eight dollars, then ten
percent of the gross income that came in. She
was, truly, my right-hand man.
One day shortly after she had started to work
she had shown me an article she had written for
the English page in a Tijuana paper. It told the
story of an ordinary taxi ride she had taken,
what had gone on between the passengers, the cab
driver and herself. It was a small, straight
ahead article that showed no real promise and I
did not think about her as a writer. Then one
day she did an article for Smith’s Report
about a trip she had taken to Germany as a
college student, her obligatory visit to Dachau,
her horror at what she thought she saw there,
and finally her refusal of an offer from a young
German man to help her get across a busy
intersection because he was “tainted” by the
history of his country. She wrote about how she
day-dreamed now of returning to Germany and with
luck finding that man and apologizing to him. It
was a fine article. And it was perhaps that
afternoon that Audrey Pinque became MacKenzie
Paine, revisionist activist extraordinaire.
Audrey’s innately sound character was now
going to be tested. She recognized the fact that
the gas chamber story was is in the hands of the
Holocaust Industry, and that it was worth
hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars
to those who exploited it. She saw how the
Israelis were squatting on the Palestinians like
some prehistoric beast, always using the issue
of Jewish victimization by others to legitimate
their actions. That behind all the
“victimization” was the Holocaust story. It was
becoming all of a piece to her, as it has to
most revisionists. And she could see that her
hero, President George Bush, had no more
intention of being forthright about any of this
than Clinton had been. Within weeks of his
gaining the Presidency, Audrey was beginning to
back away from Bush and his crowd. She was no
kid, she was in her forties, but she was
allowing her world to turn itself upside down –
on principle.
The Palestinian affair grew explosive.
Palestinian kids with rocks and slingshots were
facing off against Israeli tanks. The kids did
something to her. She began networking with
Palestinians through the Internet. It was the
unfairness of the fight, the poor and
defenseless against the rich and powerful. It
was young men and even children with rocks and
slingshots squaring off the tanks. It was the
double standards of the U.S. Government,
favoring the occupiers over the occupied. And
then it was the photos of the young men killed
and maimed by Israeli Jews, with American arms,
that created in Audrey’s mind the concept of The
Bully. Israel, backed by the U.S. – The Bully.
In early 2001 the telephone company was able
to run a line up the hill where Audrey was
living. Now she could get Online. She could work
at home. She could double the time she spent at
revisionism, which was had become her new
passion. For a while she continued to work for
me and started working for her self at home. She
put her networking abilities to the test and was
soon in contact with Palestinians in North
America, Europe and Palestine. She developed an
outreach concept titled Truth Seeking Missiles –
polemical articles about The Bully and the
Palestinians distributed over the Internet
worldwide. She was on her own. She raged, I
think I can use that word, against Israeli
brutality against Palestinians, particularly the
children. We saw less and less of each other.
One day in town she told me, “Bradley, you’ve
created a monster.” It was a compliment. I
wondered how I had pulled it off. I hadn’t
really done anything specific.
For a while we still had our back and forth
via email. Now I was in the position of arguing
that it wasn’t just a matter of The Bully
killing Palestinian kids. Palestinian radicals
were killing Israeli kids too. That the
deliberate killing of children should not be
segmented into the good deliberate killing of
children and the bad deliberate killing of
children. But she had made a choice. Revisionist
theory had been the springboard. It had
undermined her commitment to Republican politics
because Republicans were doing nothing to deter
the killing of Palestinian children. It had
undermined her passionate patriotism because she
saw that it was Americans, the U.S. Congress,
who were paying for the killing of Palestinian
children. And revisionism had undermined her
orthodox understanding of the history of the
20th century and all the blather about a unique
German monstrosity and a unique Jewish
victimization.
All her passion now was focused on the
Palestinians, particularly the children. She was
being absolutely honest about the pain and
despair she was beginning to feel for
Palestinians. She was available to every
Palestinian everywhere in the world, and would
work for them, work to save their children, work
to put the Bully back in its cage. She was
consumed with her new work. There was nothing
else she wanted to do.
Last Fall Audrey decided to return to the
U.S. She had a job offer working with a new,
radical conservative radio station in Alabama.
It took everything she could beg or borrow to
get her family out of Mexico and her household
goods hauled to Alabama. They arrived the week
before Christmas, 2001. Before she left she
brought us her 24-year-old parrot Cyrano, two
cats and a kitten. My wife was enchanted, still
is, with the parrot and holds long
unintelligible conversations with him in
Spanish. One of the cats ran off. The kitten
disappeared. But the big fat white cat, that we
had given to the boys when it was yet a kitten,
is still with us.
Over the last months Audrey and I have been
in irregular contact. For various reasons we
have been in almost daily contact the last three
weeks. I had been encouraging her to put up her
own Website and she had decided to do it. A few
days ago Audrey mentioned that her Webmaster was
a Palestinian living in Palestine. I didn’t
think that was a very good business idea. I told
her, half-jokingly, to not even think of going
to Palestine but to bring the guy over here to
Alabama. She said that it was out of my hands,
that she had talked with him via the telephone
for hours, that she was in love and that they
were “thinking of Italy.”
The next night Audrey, her father and brother
and her two sons Anthony and Jonathan were
driving to Huntsville to have Chinese food to
celebrate Jonathan’s thirteenth birthday. At a
rural intersection in the dark they were struck
on the driver’s side by a van traveling at high
speed. Audrey died at the scene. Her father was
hurt but is expected to be okay. Neither
Audrey’s brother nor her sons were injured. So
now the special passion that was hers is gone,
the special honesty, and she is no longer
available to any of us. There appears to be no
reason for what happened. Nothing to learn from
it. This is simply how the gods arrange our
fates. Who knows what will happen before this
day is out? |
