Friends of Padre Steve’s World,
While I was writing the article that I published here yesterday that I was not done with the subject, and that in the words of Hedy (that’s Headly) Lamar “My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.” That being said I have been so busy that I am finishing this late today after driving of the the Washington D.C. area for an extended weekend. Tomorrow morning I am going to drive up to the Antietam battlefield which is just up the road in Maryland to spend the day walking that battlefield. I’ll probably write something later in the afternoon or evening rather than to push out another article for tomorrow morning tonight.
Yesterday I wrote an published an article about how easy it is to acquiesce and silently become an accomplice and bystander to evil. But there was so much more to write if I had the time to do so in the format of this site. Of course I am sure that I will use what I wrote yesterday in other projects and maybe even in a book format. I had a reader ask me yesterday if I didn’t think the continuing to brink up past evils such as the Holocaust and American Slavery was worse than letting them lie and to disappear into history far from memory.
It’s actually not a bad question but I responded to him by reminding him that Holocaust Denial industry has been going on for decades, and as philosopher Primo Levy, an Auschwitz survivor noted “Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.” Since there are now very few victims, perpetrators, or bystanders left to remind us of that genocide in the flesh, the Holocaust deniers and the fabricators of fake history are becoming more numerous and some, seek to present themselves as legitimate historians with their own journals. This as I said is not surprising to me, especially in the United States which was physically unscarred by the war and where White Supremacy has long been part of our history and culture, and not just in the old states of the Confederacy.
I would dare say that the vast majority of Americans have never looked at one of the victims of the Holocaust in the eye or seen their Auschwitz camp number tattooed on their left forearm. I have and I cannot forget. But the truth is, that the further into the past an atrocity like the Holocaust disappears, through ignorance or intentionality, there is a very real possibility, or shall I say probability is that those crimes against humanity will be forgotten and repeated by a new generation. That is the lesson of history and the human condition, that is why it is even more important not to forget or allow others to forget the magnitude of these crimes against humanity. Timothy Snyder correctly observed that “The world is now changing, reviving fears that were familiar in Hitler’s time, and to which Hitler responded. The history of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal, and its lessons have not yet been learned.” A growing number of Americans are comfortable in stating publicly their agreement with White Supremacist and neo-Nazi ideology, some 9% or 30 million in a recent poll.
The Nazis, the American Slave Power elite, the Stalin and his NKVD mass murderers, their willing executioners, those who profited from their crimes, and those who stood by and said nothing, were not that much different than most of us given similar circumstances. In regard to the Holocaust it was not an anomaly of human history or something that could not be replicated in other places. Yehuda Bauer wrote:
“The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn’t. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders.”
We have to remain on guard in order to ensure that such events, unimaginable to most people, never happen again. History may not repeat itself, but human nature doesn’t change and we are fools if we think that we are any more ethical or moral than Europeans of the 1930s or 1940s.
Until tomorrow,
Peace
Padre Steve+
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