Hi Farnaz,

I would love to read this book. Do you have a title, publication date?

Nongod ain't beaten yet ;^)

Yasseryousufi

Oh brother; what a ditz.

Dear Mary Cunningham

I know this might sound like a dumb question, but if the English are all so bad as you say they are, then why are you living in London?

Jihadist

Bonjour

Qu'est-ce qu'il y a bouffer ce soir?

An excellent article. I'll look for the film or get it from Netflix.

As far as what to show children, at some point in one's journey into adulthood, one has to come to grips with what is possible in human behavior and also learn -- and accept -- that ones own self is capable of such depravity.

We like to think that civilization isn't fragile, that we're somehow "beyond" the genocidal stage of our own history and that others are still "backward" and consequently still experience the deadly horror.

The power of groupthink, the power of government to justify ugly means to an unkind end cannot be overstated. The power of personality and political will cannot be overstated. And the resulting images when they create when they go awry cannot go unseen or unacknowledged.

But they cannot be used without the context of "there but for blind luck, or grace of whatever god, go I".

This is why we are silent on Darfur, Cambodia, Rwanda, Uganda, ad nauseum... We don't think it applies to us. We're our own worst holocaust deniers: it can't happen here and we didn't start the torch or the oven.

If we don't use our cognition and intellect to identify and accept this nature of our species, we lose our perspective and to prospect of consciously and actively elevating our behavior towards other people. We are not born "good" and not born "not like them". Our culture and values teach us how to "prevent us becoming or being like them". And culture and values do not exist in a vacuum. Ideas cannot be smoked over JSMill style without active interrogation.

As J Bronowski said...sort of...: it's not technology or science that turn man into a number...

Or a heap of ashes.

Hi Onofrio,

How goes it? I can't believe I will soon be finishing up with this manuscript. The survivor of whom I wrote is one of the two or three great human beings I have known. He is profoundly insightful, without bitterness, deeply compassionate. The courage he demonstrated during his ordeals and, then, within a very short period, as a soldier, is breath-taking.

When he was on the run in Poland, he'd sleep wherever he could--in fields if in the country, on the streets, if in town, always invoking his mother: "Mother, if you are alive, I want to be with you. If you are gone, I want to be with you."

God help us all.

I see Mary Cunningham of London is back for a hit-and-run.

Apparently, OnFaith Jacobynism makes her so vastly nauseous that she can't bring herself to post a comment. She hates it so. However, when the Shoah comes up, she's able to overcome her holy pain for just a moment and let the Jacobyns know just how hateful she's feeling.

She can't leave the horrors unmolested; she just has to *adjust* them. Why? Retaliation for slights against the Pope?

Yasseryousufi,

"Ain't Gaza the Auschwitz of this era?"

What a ridiculous suggestion. Have you any idea what happened at Auschwitz, and Belzec, and Sobibor, and Treblinka, and all their ilk? Seriously.

You don't do the cause of the Palestinians any good by misrepresenting it thus. No good at all.

I do not deny Gaza is a searing ulcer, but there was no question of a "peace process" for those consigned to the Final Solution.

Aren't the Nuremberg trials relevant today as in the perpetrated have become perpetrators? Ain't Gaza the Auschwitz of this era? People bringing food and medicine for Gazans are sprayed with bullets. What lessons have the off springs holocaust survivors learnt from their tragedy? How to create more ghetto's for innocent people? Is there any justice for the people of Palestine?

Mary Cunningham wrote:

Matthew Schmalz, a Catholic professor living in Worcester, Massachusetts, talked to Lisa Miller, a Jewish journalist living in Washington DC and other American worthies living in America and proclaimed the Pope’s trip to the UK-- not the US, the UK! England and Scotland -- a “humiliation.” (In the real world of folks who actually live in Scotland and England, especially Catholics, it was a great success).
__________________________________________
HOw is journalist Lisa Miller's being Jewish relevant to Matthew Scmalz's remarks about the Pope's visit?

Do tell, pray.

MaryCunningham writes:

PS: Must tell you & your dearest FarnazMansouri2 (3?5?6?) that as the English invaded Ireland, killed a few hundred thousand, ethnically cleansed & occupied the place,
__________________________
I've posted on this several times, included key participants in the slaughter. Good to see you were reading.

ON Ukrainian alignment with Hitler and Nazis (despite Nazi distaste for Ukranians), see almost anything written concerning the Shoah.

Contra Wikipedia, Babi Yar was carried out by the Ukrainains. See Yevtushenko's famous poem: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/yevgeny_yevtushenko/poems/22483

This sickening failure of the Ukranian Catholics to own up to the horror and resistance to erecting a monument to the Ukranian Jews they slaughtered is easily researched on the web. Yes, some Germ Nazi troops were involved in the butchering of the 33,700 Ukranian Jews, but they were a minority.

The attempts of revisionist Christians to repaint Ukraine cannot work, simply because we have not only documentary evidence but PHOTOGRAPHS.

A link to a not entirely accurate but better than most recent accounts can be accessed here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/sep/25/babi-yar-massacre-hotel-plan

On the the Russian Jews left or killed by the Russian Orthodox, use google. Students are moved by the horrific scene of burning in Wiesenthal, "The Sunflower."

On the French, the Latvians, Lithuanians, Romanians, Ukranians, Germans, Austrians, Poles, Hungarians, et al--Christians all--and their murders of their Jewish citizenry, their Roma, et al, use google to locate one of the endless bibliographies I posted here.

See the multi-volume Holocaust Encyclopedia (available at many libraries). A good short read with tables showing number of Jews pre and post Holocaust, subsequent massacres nation by nation is to be found in Dawidowicz, "The War Against the Jews."

A more dense account is found in Raul Hilberg, "The Destruction of European Jews"

Hilberg also contains a somewhat abbreviated version of crimes against the Jews throughout the ages.

More is now available about the activities of "neutral" nations such as Switzerland, nazism in Ireland, South America, the MIddle East, etc. Use google or see my bibliographies.

We need to study every word, every record. I think this is as important as an individual acknowledging his or her personal Shadow. Carl Jung saw this and in his later years advised humanity to learn to be conscious of its collective Shadow before we destroy ourselves utterly.

It's interesting that there is even a name for Godwin's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

What I wonder is, if every discussion left to itself will eventually come down to a discussion of Hitler and the Nazis, then maybe that's a sign that we still have a deep seated need to discuss, remember, and acknowledge Hitler and the Nazis - their history, what exactly they claimed to stand for, how they rose to power, and how to prevent such a thing occurring again. Hopefully as a conscious turning point in our relationship to our collective Shadow.

Whither goest the Picts? the Neanderthals? The countless peoples and cultures displaced by the Aryans and subsequent marauding pastoral peoples and the countless others that left not a shred of record. Conquest, domination, colonization, and utter destruction and genocide are the dominant rule of humankind. Evolution has put it in our genes since the territory gained is a decided selective advantage and the behavior, albeit rare, has been observed in our closest primate relatives.

The question is how we overcome the legacy now that Homo technologo has invented means to destroy that might destroy his own tribe as well as the other. We certainly do not get there by denial or by blaming the other for misdeeds and I don't propose we can get there by thinking our way out of it.

Hello Mary Cunningham,

Pardon my doing a "French" on Americans and British (English, Scots, Welsh, Northern Ireland Irish included). Okay, that was a wackjob French take by moi on French "cultural" superiority.

The English were (still are?)historically mischievous towards Scots, Welsh and Irish. Plenty of practice by the English in the British Isles for their global colonisation enterprise.

There are still political, ethnic and religious colonialisation going on agaist "weaker" minorities and countries in myriad ways, both tangible and intangible, subtle and crude. Attendez la seconde mi-temps pour voir. Cela s'appelle en histoire la longue duree. Et sur ce plan, je vous avoue, je suis plus inquiet pour l'Islam que pour le Christianisme ou le Judaisme.

Okay, I'll only use French elsewhere henceforth to practice that froggish and snailish language more.

PS: Must tell you & your dearest FarnazMansouri2 (3?5?6?) that as the English invaded Ireland, killed a few hundred thousand, ethnically cleansed & occupied the place, then a few centuries later sat idly by whilst another million or so died of famine that the two peoples have--how shall we say it?--a somewhat different view of British history. Also, usually one does not mix up the one race with the other.

A minor point to folks as far off and exalted as you and darling Farnaz2 (3?5?6?) , of course, but still somewhat important to the inhabitants of these isles.

XXXXX
Your favourite Papist

J:

I'm Irish. But I do know some French: voila!

Thus, you and your dear FarnazMansouri2 can laugh at the English all you want, I'd join in if I could figure out your very odd 'humour. Oh well, tant pis! )

XXXXX and that's all from me(as I hate this site):

Your favourite Papist

I have seen more than snippets of the German concentration camp attroticities. I believe that these movies should be shown to school children. Being too sensitive to watch is not a good excuse.

- DanielintheLionsDen

******************************************

Hello Daniel,

I take your point.

Are we are being sensitive to the victims of genocides in their final hours and after death?

We are not talking about people who are voluntary naked for Playboy photo spreads or Valley porn films. We are talking about people forced to take their clothes among the many degradations.

Do they really want us to see them in their degradation, their humiliation, their indignity at the hands of the genociders?

I saw the neatly arranged stacks of skulls in a musuem in Cambodia, victims of Pol Pot/Khemer Rouge.

Do we have to do that to the victims to remind us of what horrors man can commit against fellow men? Not even the dignity of burying or cremating them but to stack their skulls, to show photos and films of their degradation?

There are visitors to the said musuem in Cambodia who treated the skulls as exhibit as if they are at fairground "House of Horrors".

Do we have to degrade the victims further in reminding us of horrors committed against them to remind us not tolerate such inhumanity and inhumane acts?

A written description is enough for me. But for others, perhaps a picture is worth a thousand words to be educated on human atrocities.

If it comes to a point where we need to show films what hanging or shooting or gassing people look like to educate and sensitise us....

I find photos and films of people being humiliated, stoned, lashed, shot, beheaded shot and shown by the pepertrators of such and by their opponents for political objectives reprehensible..

If I were in prison, tortured and then asked to walked around naked on a leash with a bag over my head and then photographed and filmed, I would not want them shown in public, even as evidence, except "in camera" in court for lawyers, judge and jury at most.

Nor do I want films and photos of me being killed and after I was killed shown in public. Afford me that much dignity after such indignity, for myself and my family and friends. But, that's just me.

Aaaah.. la classe et l'elegance britannique et Americains, qui sont a la haute couture française ce que le fish & chips et hamburgers est au foie gras! Aucune comparaison en effet..

Thanks Ed. As a Catholic, I generally refrain from reading the Jacoby blog, or indeed anything of No Faith . This is the place where Martha Woodruff, after asking her readers to be “tolerant and respectful”, put the Pope in the same class as Osama bin Laden, where Matthew Schmalz, a Catholic professor living in Worcester, Massachusetts, talked to Lisa Miller, a Jewish journalist living in Washington DC and other American worthies living in America and proclaimed the Pope’s trip to the UK-- not the US, the UK! England and Scotland -- a “humiliation.” (In the real world of folks who actually live in Scotland and England, especially Catholics, it was a great success).

Anyway, I’ve been reading Bloodlands , one of the best history books I’ve ever read—and I read history to the doctorate level—and what I kept thinking was ‘karma’. A small-ish part of the world (the Ukraine, ByloRussia, Poland) suffered from assault after assault beginning in 1933 with intentional starvation. Whole classes of peoples were declared “subhuman” and to be annihilated, and by and large, they were. The Soviets declared the Poles and the Ukrainians their subhuman “enemy”, in their turn when the Nazis invaded the Bloodlands, they declared firstly Slavs, then exclusively Jews to be their mortal enemy and allies of communism, and the inhabitants of these brutalized countries collaborated.

Now we get the Jacobys and Mansouris of this world prolonging the whole episode and declaring all of Christian Europe (for Mansouri especially Catholics) to be responsible, and, if not their enemy (yet), certainly it will be soon. There’s a whole industry sprung up about the Nazis. I despair. When will it stop?

Like you said: you want to stop “crimes against humanity”? Start with yourself.

(FYI here is the link to Bloodlands)

:http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2010/10/bloodlands
TIMOTHY SNYDER'S "Bloodlands" is one of the most impressive books of history that I have ever read. It gets a stonking review in this week's Economist. I also interviewed the author for an audio podcast. You can get a flavour of the arguments surrounding his position and that of his opponents in his latest review in the NYRB.

I wonder about the phrase "crimes against humanity" as if humans did not commit the crimes. Dividing people into them and us in any way is the start of another such crime. If you want to stop such atrocities, it is best to start with a mirror.

It focuses on the ways in which ordinary Germans and their institutions--including both the Catholic and mainstream Lutheran Church--were easily coopted by the Nazis.
_____________________________
Co-opted or finally in communion? The number of books and articles linking the metaphysics of mainstream Christianity with Jew hatred is too numerous for me to recount here. The same is true for the number of nazis who either never faced trial, were not found guilty, or given Mickey Mouse sentences.

Showing the film reading books, etc., accomplishes very little other than to feed antisemites. Antisemitism is enmeshed in Christianity, and, in large part thanks to it, in Islam. It took until the early 1960s for the Ivy League colleges to end its quota system against Jewish students and cease discriminatory faculty hires.

The pervasive antisemitsm in Europe following the Shoah also says a great, great deal about the religion of love. What many don't know but about which I have posted endlessly, included bibliographies is the numbers killed, tortured etc. by ordinary Polish Catholic citizens, Lithuanian Catholics, Rumanian Orthodox, some murdering under the auspices of Archbishop Pig Valerian Trifa, long time citizen of the US, protected citizen, etc.

Within a few months, I will be finished with a book on a remarkable survivor. When the nazi arrival was imminent in Catholic Poland, his mother took him outside, kissed him, and said, "RUN! Run to the partisans in the forest...they'll be at X location in three hours. RUN! RUN!
Never, never look back."

He was thirteen. He ran. Something had gone wrong. They were not where they were supposed to be. The next several years of his survival are life wrenching.

Although he was able to find a few survivors who had known his family, they refused to tell him what had happened to his mother and little sister. He finally concluded that they must have been shipped off to concentration camps and "come out of the chimney."

In what can only be described as providential, during a particularly hellish PTS period, he ran into a woman he thought he recognized in the street. It was his cousin Naomi.

She broke down under his pleading. "The priest,the priest...she stammered...her hair...."

The priest had unleashed the blood salivating flock. They slaughtered the beautiful girl, his mother, and his baby sister.

Not on film...yet. Maybe, we should take it to Mel Gibson.

i can't tell you how many times in conversations with theists about evolution the topic of hitler comes up. somehow, they think hitler is a disciple of darwin...

Jihadist

I have seen more than snippets of the German concentration camp attroticities. I believe that these movies should be shown to school children. Being too sensitive to watch is not a good excuse.

Much of the video of the 9/11 attacks became too shocking to broadcast only a couple of months after the event. What's up with that? I don't even think images of naughty bits was involved.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) deals with perpetrators of genocides and other crimes against humanity.

Too bad the US and Russia have signed but not ratified ICC and China and India wants nothing to do with it in spite of over some over 100 nation-states having done so if I recall correctly.

As for the short snippets of Holocaust films and photos I've seem, and those of the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides, they are disturbing to adults. One is shocked by them. And there is also a sense of being a voyeuristic witness of human degradation and being able to do nothing of what is about to happen and has happened.

I am not too sure if it would be "educational" to let middle school, secondary school and high school children see such photos and films of men, women, naked, emaciated, about to and already shot or hanged , lying in piles on open graves, or stack of bones.

Some may argue that kids are now desensitised by the gore and violence of current zombies and war movies.
But, even without looking as such photos and films, the number of victims of genocides are already shocking and repulsive.

It can be hard to comment on a column like this, because the issues are so vast that talking about a single part of it can open one up to allegations of ignoring or trivializing some other part. Let's not require every commenter to participate in our own agendas.
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Re: the penultimate paragraph

The Nazis are perhaps the most important example of how our world has reached the point where the pace of technological progress has outstripped our ability to incorporate its use into our value system or regulate it through legislation. RU-486, cellphoning while driving, and using Facebook to uncloset gays are all technologies we haven't internalized yet.

WW One is often called the last war of empire, because the issues and lineup would have made perfect sense to Queen Elizabeth. WW Two started out being thought of that way (Neville Chamberlain thought he had saved a generation of young European men from slaughter) and only as it wore on did it turn out one side was fighting more than their opponents.

Nuremburg was the beginning of a new way of thinking about nations and empire -- in terms of human rights. When the Nazis turned out to be actually evil followed by the Soviet Union, foreign policy started to become not just us vs. them but good vs. evil, leading to things like putting "under God" in our pledge to differentiate us. Shortly after WW2, most colonies disappeared because our side couldn't justify lebensraum.

The Nazis challenged our presumptions of a nation to such an extent that even Nurembrug didn't fit everyone's established paradigms of jurisprudence. In Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, one of the segments is about Robert Taft's opposition to the trial for not having precedent in international law.

Was it really his position that there's no tenet of international law that specifically prohibits conducting a holocaust?

As valuable as the Nuremberg trials were, there is an unwonted tendency to place them on a pedestal. In practice, if you read any good book about the trials or some of the defendants, such as Speer (and I don't mean his self-serving memoirs!), the defendants were obstructed in attempts to get evidence (for example, the military leaders, whose defense was that they had conducted war just as the Allies had), the defence was given prosecution evidence late or not at all, many of the defence lawyers were ineffective (few lawyers were willing to defend) and there was a good deal of horse trading behind the scenes on guilt and sentencing. A lot of it was because of the Soviets, who adamantly insisted on the death penalty for all defendants on all counts (they were sometimes outvoted).

That being said, many of the defendants thoroughly deserved their fate.