Saints are canonized only after their deaths; there’s no such thing as a living saint. It was only after the deaths of Jesus Christ and Mohammed that their respective religions, Christianity and Islam, acquired the sweeping force that enabled their adherents to lay waste countless cities and countries, the while slaughtering millions whose crime was being unwashed. Even the escaped Jews of Egypt waited for the death of Moses to begin the first of their by-now-numerous ethnic cleansings of Palestine.

I was born in 1945. Being the age I am, I might hope to live long enough to observe the announcement of the death of the last “Holocaust survivor;” I have already noted announcements, first, of the last veteran of the War Between the States and later, of the First World War. Both announcements were, in some sense, nominal, depending as they had to on records of who was a veteran and who was not, and whether they are alive or dead.

The inevitable announcement will dismay, or threaten, those younger poseurs who have, in one or another of many ways, managed to assume the sacrosanct office of Holocaust Survivor. The announcement will signify to them: the game is up! Cut it out now! The Last One is dead, so you’d better not be popping up and saying you’re one, too—you’ll be denounced and exposed.

Guesses as to what percentage of today’s “Holocaust survivors” are fakes are necessarily somewhat arbitrary, but it’s logically provable that since some time or other—I’ve chosen 1970 as a round-numbered year—the number of opportunists exceeded the number of genuine Holocaust veterans, at least insofar as self-proclaimed contenders are concerned, since real veterans of such experiences tend, for a number of good reasons, to be discreet about their qualifications. Latter-day “survivors” will have, at that ineluctable time in the future, to seek out some other scam to employ in their mulcting professions.

But the hallowed occasion of the future will spell disaster for one other interested group of people, and it’s not one you’d expect to suffer on the occasion in question: revisionists. Yes, (we) revisionists.

The defining quality of a martyr is that the martyr must be dead. Whether the martyr died on a cross, or in a gas chamber, or even at the hands of his malefactors is not quite as inflexible as this requirement of being dead. And if the martyr is, as in the case of Holocaust Survivors, a group (that in fact grows actuarially larger with each passing year), then the group cannot be “a martyr” until every last one of them is dead, whether in penury or in ease and luxury. And one day, everyone potentially or actually a victim of that Holocaust will be dead—no two ways about it.

When that day is declared to have arrived, revisionists of the history in question will be moved from a position of disparagement and condemnation to a place directly atop the funeral pyre of the Last Victim. They will become, inescapably, defamers of the dead, a crime in European countries such as Germany that seems to have no applicability to defamees convincingly portrayed as having been Nazis.

Heretics burned at the stake for blasphemy in the Middle Ages were not so toasted for having dishonored the reputation of any living person; they were roasted for having in some way or other dishonored the memory of someone dead—Christ in most cases. Fates bearing comparison to being burned at the stake await those who, perhaps as early as the present day, are known to have seriously questioned anything about the experiences of the departed deities, or even the purposes, methods or guilt of those said to have tormented them.

As ersatz victims (children of Victims, grandchildren of Victims) rush to reap the rewards of second-hand victimhood, the sentences imposed on revisionists of all kinds will make the judgments meted out to hyperannuated prison guards such as John Demjanjuk seem mild—and the accused will encompass incisive thinkers of any age, not just those who are demographically at the threshold of death.

Those bewailing that inevitable time when “there will be no one left who can bear witness to the atrocities” conceal—consciously or not—an impending Inquisition that will make the intellectual atrocities committed to the present date seem a mere exercise. There will be criminal proceedings in places such as the United States where previously atrocities such as the extradition of Germar Rudolf had to be conducted sub rosa. There will, in that and other jurisdictions, be new laws prohibiting “hate speech” and “defamation of the dead” that will enable still more prosecutions, including those of offenders whose crimes were committed long before the laws were enacted that made their acts crimes.

The feeding frenzy of moral entrepreneurs will be gruesome indeed, at least from the perspective of its victims, among which will number both Freedom and its handmaiden, Truth.

The entire affair, totally anticipatable at the present remove, constitutes an opportunity that moral entrepreneurs are no doubt already contemplating, with an eye to capturing the cash-and-fame prizes that will go to whoever seizes that precious, earliest, moment when it can be pulled off.

The last eligible Victim will have been born (likely in a concentration camp) around the time I was. To note his or her death, I shall have to outlive them—unlikely in view of the financial incentives he or she has to continue to draw breath. But you, dear reader, if you are younger, may live to see the vaunted Event.

If, at that time, you might be identified somehow as a revisionist, God help you. Perhaps you should lie low for a decade or two, and only peep above the edge of the trench sometime well after the Terrible Event has occurred.

It will grow safer after that moment has passed … but slowly, ever so slowly. Remember Christianity. And Islam. And Judaism. And above all, those moral vultures who feed off popular hatred.