The Terrorism Of Intolerance

Originally posted by Ardross@Sep 19 2006, 01:14 PM
Interesting that some of the criticism I was vilified for on here when he was elected now appears to be shared quite generally. The appointment of Ratzinger was a very unwise one.
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I do not remember any such vilification?
 
Pope's address at Auschwitz

Having read the Bunting article I was Sufficiently alarmed by her description of the Pope's address at Auschwitz to read it for myself (see link above). I have to say that as a non-believer who was disappointed by Ratzinger's election as Pope I nevertheless find her description of his text to be a vicious distortion.

For a start, the phrase "son of the German people" is in the text, but nowhere at all does he say "but not guilty on that account":

I had to come. It is a duty before the truth and the just due of all who suffered here, a duty before God, for me to come here as the successor of Pope John Paul II and as a son of the German people -- a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation's honour, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation, with the result that our people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power.
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The bit about a ring of criminals making false promises is not intended, as Bunting suggests, to be a disingenuous excuse on behalf of the German people. The German people signed up to those promises, which were false in the biblical sense, i.e. of worshipping false gods. He refers elsewhere in the text to Auschwitz as a Nazi-German concentration camp, and later in the text he is thankful that the German vicitims of Auschwitz showed that at least some Germans did not submit to the power of evil:

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.
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Likewise I can find no basis in the text for her claim that he suggests "the real victims" of Auschwitz were God and Christianity, but rather than go into it here I would invite people to read the text for themselves.
 
I'd be interested in the Pope's speed ratings and to see if they treat the early french derby trials as gospel.
 
Originally posted by BrianH+Sep 19 2006, 01:32 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (BrianH @ Sep 19 2006, 01:32 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-Ardross@Sep 19 2006, 01:14 PM
Interesting that some of the criticism I was vilified for on here when he was elected now appears to be shared quite generally. The appointment of Ratzinger was a very unwise one.
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I do not remember any such vilification? [/b][/quote]
terry and Derek went off the deep end.
 
Originally posted by BrianH+Sep 19 2006, 10:54 AM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (BrianH @ Sep 19 2006, 10:54 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-Desert Orchid@Sep 19 2006, 11:04 AM
Check your own links, Brian. Of the photos posted there the largest gathering of protesters is five people.
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You are supposed to read the text, not just look at the pictures. Are you aspiring to become President of the United States? [/b][/quote]
:lol:

And plenty of people pick their horses by viewing the pictures and not reading the form book.
 


I have to say that as a non-believer who was disappointed by Ratzinger's election as Pope I nevertheless find her description of his text to be a vicious distortion.

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oh dear

it seems the opponents of the pope seem to be aping the nazis

as goebels said

the bigger the lie ..........................................

the fanatical demonstrations that are rolled out every time someone upsets a certain faction the killing of nuns

it does have an echo to it




Are we surprised? He was a nazi after all.

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i dont suppose for one second u have any evidence to back such a wild claim do you?
 
It seems to me that Bunting's article is fair comment reading the quotations in Grey's post.
 
And at least Bunting can sleep at night safe in the knowledge she is free to express her thoughts and the Guardian free to publish them.

I shudder to think what fate would befall anyone who openly critcised the leader of the Islamic faith on earth.
 
Originally posted by BrianH+Sep 19 2006, 06:28 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (BrianH @ Sep 19 2006, 06:28 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-Desert Orchid@Sep 19 2006, 07:12 PM
I shudder to think what fate would befall anyone who openly critcised the leader of the Islamic faith on earth.
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They don't have one [/b][/quote]
Irony's wasted on some folk...
 
Interesting programme on Ch.5 tonight presented by Prof. Ted Honderich (in the 'Don't Get Me Started' strand). Titled 'The Real Friends of Terror' it posits that Bush's and Blair's stance against 'the war on terror' is entirely misplaced since the reasons for the terror are the acts of brutal bully (and yes, simmo, he frequently used the phrase neo-Zionist) Israel against the virtually unarmed Palestinians. Bursting from the bounds of their 1948 new homeland in a succession of aggressions, he propounds Israel as the founder of the terror seen today, and the inevitable conclusion is that as long as the wrong end of the stick is being held - ie, not forcing Israel back to its agreed territories, but focussing on the reactions - morally justified as far as he is concerned - to Israel's neoZionistic ambitions, there will never be an end to the 'terror'.

Prof. Honderich is a leading moral philosopher and the thrust of his view is that it is time for politicians to adopt the position of what is right for humanity: if people are forced into suffering bad lives because of the actions of others, then any reaction (however violent or counter-brutal it is) is justified. Therefore, it is important to address the REASONS for the counter-violence, not the counter-violence itself.

In Honderich's view, Bush and Blair are morally wrong in the pursuit of the 'war on terror' when the main reason for its existence is to force Israel back to its LEGAL boundaries. His argument therefore mirrors that of the father of a young British soldier cut down by an armed mob in Iraq: all the premises for Iraq's invasion, for supporting Israel to bomb 1000 innocent Lebanese civilians (including children) to death, for waging sorties in Afghanistan, etc., are false. There was never any link between Iraq and Al-Queda, which would have been obvious to any Middle East watcher, but there is, he asserts, every link between Israel's aggressions and the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 9/11 and London's 7/7.

It is so very simple: view Israel's actions and Bush and Blair's policies as the real terror, and you will soon stop the endless killings. Honderich prescribes 'serious civil disobedience' as one way to affect the necessary change.

To the barricades!
 
This is what Bunting has to say in her article about the Pope's Auschwitz address. The italics are added by me:

The current anger of Muslims is comparable to the anger and disappointment felt by Jews after his visit to Auschwitz in May. He gave a long address at the site of the former concentration camp and failed to mention anti-semitism, and offered no apology - whether on behalf of his own country, Germany, or on behalf of the Catholic Church. He acknowledged he was a "son of the German people" ... "but not guilty on that account"; he then launched into a highly controversial claim that a "ring of criminals" were responsible for nazism and that the German people were as much their victims as anyone else. This is an argument that has long been discredited in Germany as utterly inadequate in explaining how millions supported the Nazis. Given his own involvement in the Hitler Youth movement as a boy, and his refusal to make a clean breast of the Vatican's acquiescence in the horrors of Nazism by opening its archives to historians, this was a shabby moment in Catholic history. Not for this pope those dramatic, epoch-defining gestures that made the last Pope such a significant global figure.

Even worse, in his Auschwitz address, he managed to argue in a long theological exposition that the real victims of the Holocaust were God and Christianity. As one commentator put it, he managed to claim that Jews were the "themselves bit players - bystanders at their own extermination. The true victim was a metaphysical one." This theological treatise bears the same characteristics as last week's Regensburg lecture; put at its most charitable, they are too clever by half. More plainly speaking, they indicate a deep arrogance rooted in a blinkered Catholic triumphalism which is utterly out of place in the 21st century.
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Ardross, for your convenience the full text of the address itself is copied below. I don't think you or anyone else will be able to find support in it for Bunting's accusations.

The Pope does say that he is "a son of the German people" but nowhere does he say that he is "not guilty on that account".

Nowhere does he say that the German people were as much the victims of the Nazis as anyone else.

Nowhere does he argue "that the real victims of the Holocaust were God and Christianity".

To speak in this place of horror, in this place where unprecedented mass crimes were committed against God and man, is almost impossible -- and it is particularly difficult and troubling for a Christian, for a Pope from Germany. In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can only be a dread silence -- a silence which is itself a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?

In silence, then, we bow our heads before the endless line of those who suffered and were put to death here; yet our silence becomes in turn a plea for forgiveness and reconciliation, a plea to the living God never to let this happen again.

Twenty-seven years ago, on June 7, 1979, Pope John Paul II stood in this place. He said: "I come here today as a pilgrim. As you know, I have been here many times. So many times! And many times I have gone down to Maximilian Kolbe's death cell, paused before the execution wall, and walked amid the ruins of the Birkenau ovens. It was impossible for me not to come here as Pope."

Pope John Paul came here as a son of that people which, along with the Jewish people, suffered most in this place and, in general, throughout the war. "Six million Poles lost their lives during the Second World War: a fifth of the nation," he reminded us. Here, too, he solemnly called for respect for human rights and the rights of nations, as his predecessors John XXIII and Paul VI had done before him, and added: "The one who speaks these words is ... the son of a nation which, in its history, has suffered greatly from others. He says this, not to accuse, but to remember. He speaks in the name of all those nations whose rights are being violated and disregarded ..."

Pope John Paul II came here as a son of the Polish people. I come here today as a son of the German people. For this very reason, I can and must echo his words: I could not fail to come here.

I had to come. It is a duty before the truth and the just due of all who suffered here, a duty before God, for me to come here as the successor of Pope John Paul II and as a son of the German people -- a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation's honor, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation, with the result that our people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power.

Yes, I could not fail to come here. On June 7, 1979, I came as the archbishop of Munich-Freising, along with many other bishops who accompanied the Pope, listened to his words and joined in his prayer. In 1980, I came back to this dreadful place with a delegation of German bishops, appalled by its evil, yet grateful for the fact that above its dark clouds the star of reconciliation had emerged.

This is the same reason why I have come here today: to implore the grace of reconciliation -- first of all from God, who alone can open and purify our hearts, from the men and women who suffered here, and finally the grace of reconciliation for all those who, at this hour of our history, are suffering in new ways from the power of hatred and the violence which hatred spawns.

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).
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The reason why a significant number of the Germans exterminated were called the 'refuse (or rubbish) of the nation' was because they were labelled as sexual deviants, i.e., homosexual, while much of the rest were retards. They weren't all murdered at Auschwitz, since the mentally-retarded were being killed in special 'homes' before the camps were built for mass exterminations. I guess the Pope, with the Vatican line he has to toe on homosexuality, was unable to express his regret that a few trainloads of queers were murdered. Better that they be hidden among the other murdered Germans, and become sanitized as 'shining lights'.
 
Krizon, I think your comment is fair. One component of the Abschaum der Nation were the political prisoners, and it does seem to be mainly them he has in mind when referring to the German prisoners.
 
It is a tragic aspect to this that we just don't hear the stories which might now be told of German resisters, isn't it, Grey? There must, of course, have been non-Jewish, non-Nazi Germans who were not just swamped by the tide of Fascism, but killed for their opposing views. In the aftermath of the war, and particularly after finding the remnants in the concentration camps, all Germans (and I dare say Austrians, too) were seen as vile Nazis. Or, at least, they were portrayed thus in the media. It would be good now to learn more of those who tried to resist, or even if they were too afraid to do so, were murdered nonetheless because they were different. Are there some books available to read (in English, not German!) which might shed some light on these tragic Germans?

I can't imagine how terrible it would have been to have been unable to flee Germany, being German and NOT a Jew, to a friendly country, if you were opposed to the tyranny of Nazism. You would probably have been interned if you'd reached friendlier borders, but even then you'd have been viewed with hostility and suspicion until well after the war. You would truly have been caught in a no-win situation.
 
Krizon, I don't claim any knowledge of this subject, but if you google 'German resistance' you will find a lot of material, including the site of a memorial museum to German resistors and a lengthy bibliography on the subject of resistance in Germany to the Nazis. There is also some useful material on wikipedia.
 
Thanks, Grey, I'll do that. I have to be honest now, and say that I've read a few items and watched a lot of documentaries about British SOE, French resistance, the gallant efforts of the Hungarians, the Poles, the Norwegians, and so many others against the Nazi onslaught, but I'd never thought - until this topic came up - about looking for German resistance. I'll remedy that.
 
I still think it is fair comment albeit not a view I entirely share. There is implicit in his reference to a ring of criminals a suggestion it was a small group - when the evidence is now very strong that far more Germans knew about and participated in the Holocaust than once was admitted .

The reference to by destroying Israel Hitler was attacking the taproot of Christianity whilst right in one way is somewhat insensitive. The lack of a repeat of an apology for the appalling behaviour of the Papacy during the war is also disappointing even though John Paul II had made it it would have repeated force from Benedict.

K makes a very good point about the forgotten victims . Unfortunately, the late Lord Jakibovits , Chief Rabbi was worthy of comments about gays that Nazis would have shared.

Moreover, this reminds me of wanting to throw a brick at the TV last year when Tebbit argued that Nazis weren't right wing but socialists. Despite the absurd name there was nothing in the slightest socialist about them and indeed the largest group of political prisoners who died in the detention camps of the 1930s were members of Germany's true socialist party the Social Democrats - the only party unlike the craven mainstream right and Catholic Centre Party to oppose the Enabling Law which allowed Hitler to become a dictator.
 
ardross

the nazi party in its origins did have socialist views and were anti capatilist
a view still held by rhoem and the brownshirts until the purge. hitler changed this aspect when he realised to get any where he needed the backing of big business some of which were wary about his socialist ideas

of course his socialism was distorted by his racial views workers on the land being the true german ayran etc etc

they were of course right wing radicals rather than the traditional right wing reactoneries like the conservatives

there was a white rose german resistence to the nazis but i was fragemented and no match for the police state that was in effect as rember communication in those days was extremely difficult

there was of course the bomb plot against hitler which failed but whether that was resistence or expediency is very hard to tell canaris one of its members was a noted anti nazi but other members of the group had records that if they had survived the war they would have been made accountable for war crimes they had committed one of the reasons german goverments have not rushed to bestow any honours on them
 
Hitler came to power with the support of the right wing Nationalists in 1933 who believed foolishly that he would be their puppet - they were never a socialist party any more than the BNP are.
 
Originally posted by Ardross@Sep 20 2006, 09:14 PM
The reference to by destroying Israel Hitler was attacking the taproot of Christianity whilst right in one way is somewhat insensitive.
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In the interest of historical accuracy I feel that I must point out that the state of Israel didn't exist until Hitler had been dead for three years.
 
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