Posted on 05/28/2006 5:11:39 PM PDT by beaelysium
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A rainbow is seen in the sky as the Pope Benedict XVI pays his respect to the victims of the former Birkenau Nazi death camp in Oswiecim, southern Poland May 28, 2006. Calling himself 'a son of Germany,' Pope Benedict prayed at the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz on Sunday and asked why God was silent when 1.5 million victims, mostly Jews, died in this 'valley of darkness.' REUTERS/Damir Sagolj |
People let it happen!
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemöller
Community and individuality are not opposites. People cannot survive on their own. When the odds are stacked against you, you must rally with the oppressed and hated.
When a growing oppressive regime is taking hold, you must act, otherwise you will soon face your enemy alone and hopeless.
Strength of community is a strength as much as individualism, as long you are willing to face weaknesses in your own community. Ignoring slacking values will mean that you will be rallied against by those you oppress.
Niemöller affirms we must rally against unhealthy organized regimes. We must also stay vigilant with those that appear to be good natured, as all organisation attracts corruption. Niemöller also warns us that if it is you who are corrupt, then you will face a stronger combined force of foe!
Vexen Crabtree
Yeah, but aren't leprechauns gay?
BWHAHAHAHA!
Gives a whole new meaning to "Are you after me lucky charms?"
Good comment.
If you read the whole piece, you would realize that was an introductory statement which he answers further in the speech.
It has been grabbed as a soundbite, but it isn't what he was asking. Read it!
_____________________________
How many questions arise in this place! Constantly the question comes up: Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?
The words of Psalm 44 come to mind, Israel's lament for its woes: "You have broken us in the haunt of jackals, and covered us with deep darkness ... because of you we are being killed all day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord? Awake, do not cast us off forever! Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression? For we sink down to the dust; our bodies cling to the ground. Rise up, come to our help! Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love!" (Psalm 44:19,22-26).
This cry of anguish, which Israel raised to God in its suffering, at moments of deep distress, is also the cry for help raised by all those who in every age -- yesterday, today and tomorrow -- suffer for the love of God, for the love of truth and goodness. How many they are, even in our own day!
We cannot peer into God's mysterious plan -- we see only piecemeal, and we would be wrong to set ourselves up as judges of God and history. Then we would not be defending man, but only contributing to his downfall. No -- when all is said and done, we must continue to cry out humbly yet insistently to God: Rouse yourself! Do not forget mankind, your creature!
And our cry to God must also be a cry that pierces our very heart, a cry that awakens within us God's hidden presence -- so that his power, the power he has planted in our hearts, will not be buried or choked within us by the mire of selfishness, pusillanimity, indifference or opportunism.
Let us cry out to God, with all our hearts, at the present hour, when new misfortunes befall us, when all the forces of darkness seem to issue anew from human hearts: whether it is the abuse of God's name as a means of justifying senseless violence against innocent persons, or the cynicism which refuses to acknowledge God and ridicules faith in him.
Let us cry out to God, that he may draw men and women to conversion and help them to see that violence does not bring peace, but only generates more violence -- a morass of devastation in which everyone is ultimately the loser.
The God in whom we believe is a God of reason -- a reason, to be sure, which is not a kind of cold mathematics of the universe, but is one with love and with goodness. We make our prayer to God and we appeal to humanity, that this reason, the logic of love and the recognition of the power of reconciliation and peace, may prevail over the threats arising from irrationalism or from a spurious and godless reason.
The place where we are standing is a place of memory. The past is never simply the past. It always has something to say to us; it tells us the paths to take and the paths not to take. Like John Paul II, I have walked alongside the inscriptions in various languages erected in memory of those who died here: inscriptions in Belarusian, Czech, German, French, Greek, Hebrew, Croatian, Italian, Yiddish, Hungarian, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Romani, Romanian, Slovak, Serbian, Ukrainian, Judeo-Spanish and English.
All these inscriptions speak of human grief, they give us a glimpse of the cynicism of that regime which treated men and women as material objects, and failed to see them as persons embodying the image of God.
Some inscriptions are pointed reminders. There is one in Hebrew. The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the earth. Thus the words of the Psalm: "We are being killed, accounted as sheep for the slaughter" were fulfilled in a terrifying way.
Deep down, those vicious criminals, by wiping out this people, wanted to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and laid down principles to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally valid. If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the God who spoke to humanity and took us to himself, then that God finally had to die and power had to belong to man alone -- to those men, who thought that by force they had made themselves masters of the world. By destroying Israel, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful.
Then there is the inscription in Polish. First and foremost they wanted to eliminate the cultural elite, thus erasing the Polish people as an autonomous historical subject and reducing it, to the extent that it continued to exist, to slavery.
Another inscription offering a pointed reminder is the one written in the language of the Sinti and Roma people. Here too, the plan was to wipe out a whole people which lives by migrating among other peoples. They were seen as part of the refuse of world history, in an ideology which valued only the empirically useful; everything else, according to this view, was to be written off as "lebensunwertes Leben" -- life unworthy of being lived.
There is also the inscription in Russian, which commemorates the tremendous loss of life endured by the Russian soldiers who combated the Nazi reign of terror; but this inscription also reminds us that their mission had a tragic twofold aim: by setting people free from one dictatorship, they were to submit them to another, that of Stalin and the Communist system.
The other inscriptions, written in Europe's many languages, also speak to us of the sufferings of men and women from the whole continent. They would stir our hearts profoundly if we remembered the victims not merely in general, but rather saw the faces of the individual persons who ended up here in this abyss of terror.
I felt a deep urge to pause in a particular way before the inscription in German. It evokes the face of Edith Stein, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross: a woman, Jewish and German, who disappeared along with her sister into the black night of the Nazi-German concentration camp; as a Christian and a Jew, she accepted death with her people and for them.
The Germans who had been brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau and met their death here were considered as "Abschaum der Nation" -- the refuse of the nation. Today we gratefully hail them as witnesses to the truth and goodness which even among our people were not eclipsed. We are grateful to them, because they did not submit to the power of evil, and now they stand before us like lights shining in a dark night. With profound respect and gratitude, then, let us bow our heads before all those who, like the three young men in Babylon facing death in the fiery furnace, could respond: "Only our God can deliver us. But even if he does not, be it known to you, O King, that we will not serve your gods and we will not worship the golden statue that you have set up" (cf. Daniel 3:17ff.).
Yes, behind these inscriptions is hidden the fate of countless human beings. They jar our memory, they touch our hearts. They have no desire to instill hatred in us: Instead, they show us the terrifying effect of hatred. Their desire is to help our reason to see evil as evil and to reject it; their desire is to enkindle in us the courage to do good and to resist evil. They want to make us feel the sentiments expressed in the words that Sophocles placed on the lips of Antigone, as she contemplated the horror all around her: My nature is not to join in hate but to join in love.
By God's grace, together with the purification of memory demanded by this place of horror, a number of initiatives have sprung up with the aim of imposing a limit upon evil and confirming goodness.
Just now I was able to bless the Center for Dialogue and Prayer. In the immediate neighborhood the Carmelite nuns carry on their life of hiddenness, knowing that they are united in a special way to the mystery of Christ's cross and reminding us of the faith of Christians, which declares that God himself descended into the hell of suffering and suffers with us. In Oswiecim is the Center of St. Maximilian Kolbe, and the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. There is also the International House for Meetings of Young people. Near one of the old prayer houses is the Jewish Center. Finally the Academy for Human Rights is presently being established. So there is hope that this place of horror will gradually become a place for constructive thinking, and that remembrance will foster resistance to evil and the triumph of love.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, humanity walked through a "valley of darkness." And so, here in this place, I would like to end with a prayer of trust -- with one of the psalms of Israel which is also a prayer of Christians: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name's sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff -- they comfort me ... I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long" (Psalm 23:1-4,6).
already own it lol. I couldn't resist.
Imagine the odds.
To question, even to argue with God is an ancient Jewish tradition. I take your analysis as ignorance.
"To question, even to argue with God is an ancient Jewish tradition. I take your analysis as ignorance."
Yes, it sounds like some people need to go back to read the book of Job again.
Re: All this 'gay" crap. Subjects such as the holocaust should be treated with respect and sensitivity, not used as an opportunity for making poor taste remarks.
This is the reason I usually don't spend much time on FR on weekends. Far too many lower class comments that aren't up to Free Republic's standards.
Vegas had the line at 2-3...
Just kidding ;-)
Weak faith? How could anyone go to Auschwitz and not wonder such questions? Of all the tragedies plaguing humanity, even including the mass murders of Stalin, but this one, the Holocaust, is one that cuts the deepest. Where was God indeed, that it made no difference, the delibrate slaughter of 12 million people--half of them Jews, God's chosen.
Weak faith, indeed. Benedict must have remembered his own youth, his family, his countrymen...and what that country was ultimately fighting for, and it wasn't for the people of Germany. Hitler gave the Holocaust priority over every other idea or program; he was willing to raze Germany flat as long as he eliminated the Jews. The unforgiving truth is that so many people were anxious to help him do so...no doubt Benedict, the one-time Hitler Youth member, still carries memories that hurt.
I think you're asking the wrong question. To me, how could anyone ever have fatih again after seeing this? Had Hitler had his way, a smug Corporal Ratzinger would have been wiping his gun off after dispatching that pesky priest Woltaya... Instead, we see a gentle miracle, in the tears in Pope Benedict's eyes...
Excellent post.
Nice work.
Excellent.
And where were the people?
Do we ever see? Do we ever learn?
This scenario is playing out anew today, while the world does... nothing.
Our subject makes pygmies of us all. Our location evokes memories so raw and profound that I end up thinking: "there but for the grace of God go I." ... In July, Gerhard Riegner, a representative of the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland, reported to London and Washington for the first time that Hitler had in fact ordered the extermination of European Jewry. "Received alarming report," he wrote, "that in Fuhrer's headquarters plan discussed and under consideration, according to which all Jews in countries occupied or controlled [by] Germany, numbering 3 1/2-to 4 million, should, after deportation and concentration in [the] East, be exterminated at one blow to resolve once [and] for all the Jewish question in Europe." In London, the Foreign Office said that any official British response "might annoy the Germans" and besides, officials added, they had no confirmation. In Washington, the State Department was suspicious of what scholar Walter Laqueur described as the "unsubstantiated nature of the information." In October, 1942, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency published the whole Riegner cable without attribution. A month later, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles confirmed to Rabbi Stephen Wise that the cable was accurate in every depressing detail. Worse, he said, two of the four million Jews had already been killed. The United States then pushed for an Allied condemnation of the Nazi program of extermination which was announced in mid-December 1942. At this point there could be no doubt about the authenticity of the reports of Nazi atrocities against the Jews. And yet, amazingly, the coverage was marginalized. It lacked the explosive force that would carry it from the inside pages to the front pages, from a duckable option to unavoidable action. How come? Elie Wiesel, in a recent conversation, explained by drawing a distinction between "information" and "knowledge." On its own information meant only the existence of data. It lacked an ethical component. It was neutral. Knowledge, implied Wiesel, was a higher form of information. Knowledge was information that had been internalized, crowned with a moral dimension that could be transformed into a call for action.... My final reason, after "unconditional surrender," after antisemitism, after the unbelievability of the Holocaust, after the strange silence of American journalism, focused on the culture and personalities of the people who ran The New York Times, which also failed in its journalistic responsibility during the war. Not that it didn't cover the war -- it did, with an exceptional and costly burst of energy and professionalism; it simply did not cover the Holocaust; and to this day the people who run (or have run) this great newspaper are baffled and embarrassed by this extraordinary omission. The logo of The New York Times read and reads "All The News That's Fit To Print," but during the war The Times, which was and is so special to American journalism, knew much more than it printed about the Holocaust; and what it did print, it printed, as a rule, inside, cut, often trivialized. What was the reason? Here things get very complicated. Arthur Hays Sulzberger was publisher during the war. According to family history, his ancestors came to America in 1695. Two were among the Jewish notables of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790, when General-turned-President Washington visited their synagogue. Not surprisingly, Sulzberger considered himself to be a member of the establishment, an American, who just happened to be Jewish. During a trip to Palestine in 1937, he confronted the reality of zionism, and it profoundly discomfited him. "Never have I felt so much a foreigner as in this Holy Land," he later wrote. On his return to New York, he found that his old fears of divided loyalty led him, to quote journalist Peter Grose, "to minimize, if not ultimately deny, his Jewish identity." Sulzberger helped found the anti-zionist American Council for Judaism, which Isaiah Berlin called "an assembly of mice who say that they will bell the zionist cat." Interestingly, The Times gave this splinter group as much coverage as it gave to all the other Jewish groups combined -- and much, much more than it gave to the Holocaust. Sulzberger, as high brow among American Jews as Bernard Baruch or Walter Lippmann, was an ultra-assimilationist, a civilized man who simply wanted to avoid being categorized as a Jew. Baruch, denounced by the Jew-baiting Detroit radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin, as "the uncrowned King of Wall Street," fled from too close an association with Jews. Lippmann, one of the great figures in American journalism in this century, frequently criticized Jews as "rich, vulgar and pretentious." He suggested that Harvard limit the enrollment of Jews. He dismissed Hitler's antisemitism as "unimportant," adding that the German leader was "the authentic voice of a genuinely civilized people." From 1933, when Hitler came to power, until 1945, when Hitler was destroyed, Lippmann never wrote a word about the Holocaust, never once mentioned the death camps. In The Times, the murder of millions of Jews was treated as minor-league stuff, kept at a proper distance from the authentic news of the time. For example, on July 2, 1944, The Times published what it called "authoritative information" to the effect that 400,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to their deaths, and another 350,000 were earmarked for similar action. This news was published as four inches of copy on page 12. The Times was making a statement with editorial judgments of this sort, and other editors, other reporters, other news organizations, all took their cues from The Times. Everyone knew that its foreign coverage set the standard. A perception then spread that if the Jewish-owned Times covered the Holocaust in this skimpy manner, then so could they, with impunity. The Times's foreign editor during the war was Ted Bernstein, described by a colleague as "a brilliant Jew running away from his roots." Was it then any surprise that Jewish news, other than the Holocaust, was also shortchanged in The Times; that bylines, such as A.H. Raskin and A.M. Rosenthal appeared, rather than Abraham Raskin and Abraham Rosenthal? Cyrus Sulzberger, a columnist covering the war, used his clout as a member of the family to discourage the hiring of too many Jewish reporters. Daniel Schorr said that he was told in the early 1950s that he would not be hired by The Times, because there were already too many Jews on the paper. Of course the times and The Times have changed, and the journalism of the 1990s -- the journalism after Vietnam, after Watergate, after the technological revolutions which produced CNN, faxes, computers and the O.J. trial -- is significantly different from the journalism of the 1940s. We cannot impose the journalistic yardsticks of the 1990s on the 1940s. Nor can we fairly expect the journalists of the 1940s to perform as though they lived and worked in the 1990s. Now journalists are obsessed with sex and scandal, fires and sports, weather and murders, tilting towards sensationalism whenever the competitive opportunity beckons. Negative and cynical, they distrust the government and disparage politicians. Back then, journalists operated in a narrower environment, with simpler rules. They marched to the government's beat; they hated Hitler and Tojo; they supported the boys at the front. And, their technological opportunities were comparatively primitive. It should be clear that the Holocaust was unique, the reporting of the Holocaust was unique, and neither can be duplicated. So long as there is a strong Israel and an articulate, influential Jewish community in the United States, I feel confident in saying that another Holocaust -- another foreign, state-run program of extermination of the Jews -- would be impossible. But other mass killings? These are not only possible but likely. Given the unprecedented gobbling up of substantial media enterprises by even bigger media conglomerates, it should not be surprising these days that there is not even a commonly accepted definition of "news." Yet, if a story broke about another Holocaust, there could be no doubt not now that it would be front-page news. Such horrible secrets could no longer be kept for months and years. Responsible officials are constantly reminded that what was tolerated during the Holocaust is unacceptable behavior today. For example, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, during a recent visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, read with dismay John McCloy's 50-year-old negative response to a demand by the World Jewish Congress that the Allies bomb the rail lines leading into Auschwitz. The response and the demand were on a wall here flanking a huge blow-up of the death camps. "Remember, Strobe," said his companion, the Museum's Director Walter Reich, "any letter you write may end up on a museum wall." The Journalism of The Holocaust
by Marvin Kalb
delivered at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
February 27, 1996
WAR AND TREASON AND THE NEW YORK TIMES
by Mia T, December 29, 2005
Stupidest comment I've read on FR in days.
Your reading assignment: The Books of Job and Psalms. If you think you can handle it.
Did you bother to read the whole address? Or did you just take the media's word for it?
Excellent.
Mia...I'm curious as to why you eagerly endorse these remarks? My focus is on the 'role' God played in the Holocaust, not the evilness and horror of the event.
And what are you thoughts on the rest of post #35? Especially where PandaRosaMishima scurrilously misrepresents and maligns Pope Benedict?
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