quote:With the exception of WWII and possibly the Civil War, I'd pretty much agree with you, Beren.
So luckily, our usage of nuclear weapons, internment of Japanese Americans, and betrayal of Polish resistance fighters did not diminish our moral authority to the extent that we could not wage war upon Hitler. Whew, what a relief. Posts: 4116 | Registered: Apr 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
[pedantry alert] The US didn't use nuclear weapons in WWII. [/pedantry alert]
Since nobody can find WMD in Iraq, the justification for the war has shifted to Hussein's crimes against his people.
If you label abortion murder, how do you not hold your government responsible for far more murders than Hussein ever even had a chance to commit?
Posts: 1515 | Registered: Feb 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
[pedantry alert] The US didn't use nuclear weapons in WWII. [/pedantry alert]
Oh yeah, my bad. We used the kindler, gentler atomic and fire bombs to kill off civilians.
I think the pro-life people do hold our government responsible. They do this radical thing called "voting" and "campaign contributions."
Are you advocating that the pro-life people should start a civil war or something? I'm thoroughly confused. Posts: 4116 | Registered: Apr 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
The bombs dropped on Japan were nuclear weapons. See this for more info.
quote:A variety of names are used for weapons that release energy through nuclear reactions - atomic bombs (A-bombs), hydrogen bombs (H-bombs), nuclear weapons, fission bombs, fusion bombs, thermonuclear weapons (not to mention "physics package" and "device"). A few comments about terminology is probably in order.
The earliest name for such a weapon appears to be "atomic bomb". This has been criticized as a misnomer since all chemical explosives generate energy from reactions between atoms - that is, between intact atoms consisting of both the atomic nucleus and electron shells. Further the fission weapon to which "atomic bomb" is applied is no more "atomic" than fusion weapons are. However the name is firmly attached to the pure fission weapon, and well accepted by historians, the public, and by the scientists who created the first nuclear weapons.
Since the distinguishing feature of both fission and fusion weapons is that they release energy from transformations of the atomic nucleus, the best general term for all types of these explosive devices is "nuclear weapon" (hence the name of this FAQ).
Fusion weapons are called "hydrogen bombs" (H-bombs) because isotopes of hydrogen are principal components of the nuclear reactions involved. In fact, in the earliest fusion bomb designs deuterium (hydrogen-2) was the sole fusion fuel. Fusion weapons are called "thermonuclear weapons" because high temperatures are required for the fusion reactions to occur.
posted
I personally think that when the original reason for the war evaporated, we should have said, "Oops, sorry", and tried to make up for the mistake. That is, assuming it was a mistake and not a purposeful deceit. I understand that sometimes "just pulling out" can be too hasty, but we should at least have been seriously winding down.
I don't keep up with the news enough because I dislike doing so. So I don't really know how things are currently going. But to say that we are not justified in war because of our own sins.... No nation is without sin. And sometimes it is necessary to go to war. Do I think it is necessary now? Probably not. I think it should have been over a long time ago. I hope we aren't still there just because our leaders "couldn't back down". Posts: 7050 | Registered: Feb 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
I don't think you should hold the government responsible for the "murders", it's still the people who decide whether to have an abortion or not. Noemon, I think it's unique because it was such a huge genocide in modern history when there were already many human rights groups out, do you think it's still possible for six million people to be murdered without the rest of the world even noticing?
Posts: 853 | Registered: Feb 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
Well, yeah, unfortunately Jamie I think that it probably is. At the very least, I think it's possible for a genocide of that size to happen and have the rest of the world not do anything in particular to stop it. The Nazi genocide was neither the 20th century's first mass killing, nor it's largest.
In the 1930s, the Soviet state basically engineered a famine in Ukrane that killed 6-7 million people.
The death toll from the [url=]USSR's Great Purge[/url] of the late 1930s reached approximately 20 million people (although only about 1.3 million were physically executed. The rest died in work camps, prisons, etc).
There is every evidence that genocide is in the process of happening right now in the Sudan, while the UN wrings its hands and does little if anything to avert it.
posted
Don't forget these guys, Noemon. The article just discusses Germany, but the blockade effected all the allies of Germany, too, often much worse.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
Would it be accurate to say the UN is a bit obsolete? I mean what do they actually do besides talk about what they should do?
Posts: 1094 | Registered: Mar 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
The only numbers I see there that are as big or larger than the Nazis genocide are the Soviet, the USSR's Great Purge, and the China's Great Leap Forward. From what I read there China's Leap doesn't seem like a genocide, let alone one based on racism, it seems like the usual rich taking advantage of the poor. I've never read about the USSR's genocide and your link wasn't working so I'll take your word for it, which brings the number up to two. The difference between the Ukranian Famine and the Nazis Genocide is that nearly all of Germany's population supported the genocide, blinded by their anti-Semitism. Was that the case in Ukrane? I think there is a difference in 6 million people dying because the powerful decided to steal food from the powerless and what happened in Nazi Germany. That makes two genocides of 6 million+ people dying in the 20th century, out of plenty more that could have occured. I'll still say that makes the Holocaust pretty unique.
Edit for typos and to add that I hope you could understand what I meant since I'm not very good at expressing my ideas in writing.
Since you claim that it isn't, I feel I have the right to ask you if you even know what a straw man argument is, and why you don't feel like this thread is one?
If someone is trying to kill you, and you kill them instead, is that justified? How about if he has killed a lot of people you know, and nothing is being done about it because everyone is afraid? Do you have the right to stop someone from killing others randomly?
What does the war (any war) and abortion have to do with each other?
Death.
But for death to occur there must first be life, which is what the abortion issue is all about, really. That and the right for a woman to decided what is best for herself vs you deciding for her.
War has nothing to do with abortions, which is why this is a Straw man, or at least a logical fallacy .
posted
Sorry about that USSR link. If I have time later I'll dig through my history, find the correct site, and fix it. You can just google the relevant terms, though, and come up with a wealth of data on the subject. In any case, Jamie, I thought that you made perfect sense--you expressed yourself just fine. I don't really agree with you, but I think I understand what you were saying. If you notice that I'm misinterpreting you, though, definitely let me know.
Sorry if the rest of this post is a bit rambling, but it's a little on the late side, and I'm trying to wrap this up quickly so I can get some other stuff done before heading off to bed.
I don't really agree with the emphasis that you're putting on the numbers of dead. It seems to me that once you've reached a certain point, you're just heaping horror on top of horror. My mind, anyway, goes numb somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, I think. That Hitler managed to do in 12 million doesn't really resonate with me any more than Pol Pot's 3, you know? Both are just...unimaginably horrific. The fact that we, as a species, do this to each other again, and again, and again...my god, you know?
There are all sorts of reasons for mass killings--racial, religious, economic, classist, ideological; you name it, some group has probably been slaughtered en masse in its name. I have to say that digging up the links for my post above was a pretty depressing exercise. It wasn't information that I was unfamiliar with, but seeing all of it in rapid succession...esh. Makes you horrifed to be human, you know? We're viscious monkeys.
In any case, the only real innovation that Hitler brought to the table was a horrible efficiency in his methods of slaughter. Ethnic genocide is pretty much as old as the species, I expect. The earliest example I can think of off the top of my head where the motivations are ethnic is Charlemagne's Saxon genocide (sorry Stormy, sorry Mike) in the 8th century. The numbers there aren't as horrifying as Hitler's by any means, but I'd guess they're worse when you consider the percentage of the population slaughtered. I haven't researched that though, so I'll freely admit that I'm just shooting from the hip.
The Mongol attacks on the Muslim world were pretty horrific. Cities whose populations had numbered in the hundreds of thousands were reduced to dozens. Dozens! The Mongols were more democidal the genocidal, true, but I don't see that that makes a whole lot of difference.
The Assyrians weren't exactly known for their kindness to conquored peoples.
I suspect that we've been doing this kind of thing to each other pretty much as long as we've been human, on as large a scale as we were capable of managing.
So anyway, I see the Nazi death camps as more a part of an ongoing pattern of human behavior than some kind of abberation. Much as that depresses me.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
You know, I think that the world would be a better place if the sentient, tool using, relatively highly intelligent speices dominating the planet had evolved from the gorilla branch of our family tree, rather than the chimpanzee branch.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
What if a species of, say, highly intelligent, emotionally complex sea urchins were to somehow evolve? Heck, maybe they already have--we wouldn't really know. Anyway, I don't think their emotions would damage them as a species.
Seriously, though, Trevor, are you seriously arguing that? If so, I'd love to see you expand on it.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
Thanks, Kwea. When I saw the title and the following argument, strawman bells went off. Technically, logical fallacy would be more accurate. However, the whole first post seems designed to set up a position and destroy it without anyone claiming that it was their exact position.
posted
Noemon, I don't really have the time or the inclination right now to argue it out fully, but I think that attributing human aggressiveness to a species-wide thing as opposed to specific social systems is a mistake. The best, most thorough case I've ever seen from this comes from Erich Fromm's Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.
It's sort of like the mistake that Freud made when he said "Man is a wolf to other men." and meant it to say that men are innately aggressive against each other. The thing is, those from the Victorian context that Freud was speaking from, all "non-civilized" aspects of the world (especially nature) were seen as brutish and barbaric, there is no real evidence that wolves act in the way that he thought they did. It's an unjustified conceit to think that aggressive violence is part of our "animal nature" that our human nature fights against. Animals, in general, aren't aggressively violent as people are. The type of aggression that we attribute to animals pretty much is a hallmark of human beings.
Howeverm for me, it's not that we are intrinsically violent, but that, throughout history, the cultures that were set up to crave power and to dehumanize other people went out and slaughtered the cultures that weren't, thus more or less extingiushing the evidence of alternative paths. However, some isolated cultures, say on the less accessible islands of the Indonesian archipeligo, are extremely peaceful.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
Trevor, Why do we sacrifice? Why do we work so hard to help others, even to the point of shortening or even ending our own lives?
There's a lot of different reasons, but one of the big ones is because of our complex emotions.
One of the big mistakes people seem to make about human nature is that they regard it as a simple homeostatic system, like a thermostat, where there is some set goal that they are trying to reach and every aspect or action is directed towards that goal. I think that it's more complex than that. To me, human nature is a dynamic system, always in a state of flux amoung various goals.
When you take a basic part of "human nature" and try to label it as just one thing, a lot of times, you're missing this flux and consequently miss out on a lot of what that bit is part of.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
Trevor: Why do animals kill? Sometimes it's for food, but sometimes it's for sport. Being a human means that we have the ability to control that urge. It's when a human begins to act like an animal that they lose their humanity.
posted
PSI, Do animals kill for sport? I've seen very little evidence of that. Do you have any?
Edit: As I said before, animals (except in certain species or cases) aren't anything like what people describe when they talk about people giving into their "animal nature". It's a story we tell, but it doesn't check out if you actually look at the facts.
---
P.S. Cats play with mice, but there's no neurological evidence that this is related to aggression towards the mice and it is generally part of predatorial action. Other animals have similar hunt/stalk excitation needs before eating, even with food that isn't alive.
posted
I was in fact thinking of cats, who kill birds in the yard and leave them to decay without actually eating them.
Posts: 6367 | Registered: Aug 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
And you know this is for sport as opposed to say, vestigal predator wiring that, because the cats are fed regularly, isn't expressed as part of the feeding context? Also, do you have evidence beyond that of a single, domesticated species?
quote:I don't really have the time or the inclination right now to argue it out fully, but I think that attributing human aggressiveness to a species-wide thing as opposed to specific social systems is a mistake.
MrSquicky, if you're interested in a good case for the opposing view, check out "The Third Chimpanzee" by Jared Diamond. It makes a good case for evolutionary causes for a lot of human aggression. It also documents a case of genocide committed by Chimpanzees.
I do think (and he admits this) that he is using only the evolutionary lense to examine these things. But he makes a good case there is at least some evolutionary contribution.
I would be interested to see documented cases of societies lacking aggression; it seems if the theory that it's caused by specific social systems would seem to predict such societies.
posted
Squick, I'll respond to your first post in this thread in greater detail later on--possibly tonight--but in response to your discussion here with PSI about animals who kill for "sport" rather than for food....Well, I'm hesitant to use the term "sport"--I don't really know what that means, I suppose--but besides cats, another animal that seems to kill simply because they enjoy doing so, and not necessarily for food, would be the chimpanzee. I've read articles in the print versions of several reputable magazines about chimps killing hyraxes, and doing it in a way that suggests that they were enjoying it (catching the hyraxes, which typically results in excitement from the rst of the troop, is usually followed by holding them by their hind legs and bashing them against trees and rocks until they've pretty much been pulped, and which point the bodies are discarded).
A short respose to what you addressed to me above, which I hope to expand on later, would be that I think you're misunderstanding me--I'm not arguing that the violent actions that humans engage in are animalistic, while the pacifistic actions that they engage in are an example of the mind triumphing over its base animal origins, or any silly crap like that. I think that the roots of what we're capable of, for either good or ill, lie in our biology, but that of course our environments can have an enormous impact on what behaviors are brought to the fore. From what I've read, of the higher non-human primates (and here I'm thinking of all flavors of gorilla, chimpanzee, and orangutan) chimpanzees are those most given to both inter and intratroop violence. Of course, with orangutans, this could have everyting to do with the fact that their relatively solitary creatures once they reach maturity, but gorillas develop fairly socially complex societal groups, and don't tend toward violence the way that chimps do (to the best of my knowledge, of course--if anybody has read articles in reputable magazines or journals that detail gorilla violence, I would love to read them, and would change or drop my argument immediately upon doing so). I suspect that, had a species evolved from the gorilla's branch of our evolutionary shrub that was as...neurologically complex, shall we say, as we are, that they would be more pacifistic than we are. While it's true that there are societies (if I recall correctly, none of them practice agriculture on a wide scale, do they?) that don't have the violence running through them that we see in most human societies, I would argue that the possibility toward violence nonetheless exists in individual members of that society. I would argue that with another intelligent, sentient species, a different continuum of behavioral possibilities would be present, and if this species were evolved from gorilla-like ancestors, rather than chimp-like ancestors, that continuum would not reach as far into the spectrum of violence as our continuum does.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
I think I was using "sport" to mean anything but survival, but I suppose that's too broad and probably not very accurate.
Posts: 6367 | Registered: Aug 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Dag, I've been meaning to get around to that book. I've read Guns, Germs, and Steel and really enjoyed it.
Actually, funny that you mention it, but I think that some of the evidnece about the Indonesian cultures with much lower agression comes from GG&S. My copy of that and of The Anatomy of Human Aggression are loaned out to other people right now, so I can't check, but I think that both books document the cultures that I'm talking about.
There are also Amerindian cultures, such as the Pueblo, that historically were incredibly peaceful. As I said, I don't really have the time or inclination (I'm in the midst of a big, big paper challenging the concept of self-esteem, titled "Everyone is stupid but me." and all my time in the library is directed towards that, because, if I do a good job, it could make my career) to look up my sources here, but if you give Anatomy a shot, I think that it gives a bunch of references to follow up on. I may be overstating the case, but I can assure you that these studies do exist.
---
That being said, the evolutionary perspective when put in service of the current moralizing concept of human nature seems to me to be self defeating. The whole point is that people act like animals (i.e. violent) because they evolved that way and that we need to enforce morals on them because otherwise society and all the humans in it will fall apart. From a disineterested evolutionary perspective, that doesn't make any sense, even if you leave aside the evidence from acutal animal studies that show that there is very little intraspecies aggression in nature. Human beings evolved in such a way that we need to completely contradict evolution so that the species can survive? It is specifically because humans and other pack/social animals needed to rely on each other to survive that evolution suggests that they would have strong "getting alongness" bred into them.
Original Sin and evolutionary theory don't work together, no matter how hard you try to make them fit.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
| IP: Logged |
quote: And you know this is for sport as opposed to say, vestigal predator wiring that, because the cats are fed regularly, isn't expressed as part of the feeding context?
That sure sounds like sport to me.
Couldn't you say the same thing about human sport hunters?
posted
I was thinking the same thing Porter. Better to avoid the term "sport" entirely, though, I think, as it's a bit ambiguous.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
| IP: Logged |
Do you think men play like sports because they don't have any need to assert their maleness in a biological sense? They can't beat up the other males in their territory, so they do it with football.
Posts: 6367 | Registered: Aug 2003
| IP: Logged |
quote:Under Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge killed about 3 million Cambodians in the 70s.
One of the classes Juliette took as a part of her credential program had a guest speaker who had been a child in the Killing Fields. (Apparently, Long Beach, CA has the highest population of Cambodians outside of Cambodia.) Even the highlights of the lecture that she was able to pass on to me sounded absolutely horrific; pretty much in every way as bad as Holocaust stories.
Posts: 4534 | Registered: Jan 2003
| IP: Logged |
But I think that playing "sports" like football, baseball, golf, etc. is pretty different from "sport" hunting, fishing, etc., which is what I was talking about.
Different enough that it should not be the same word.
posted
Football has always seemed to me like stylized, sanitized warfare, with the cheerleaders representing the populations that the winning team would get to capture, rape, and enslave. I'm sure that this theory isn't unique to me, but I don't recall ever reading anything about it.
posted
I'll check out the Anatomy book, it sounds interesting.
I agree that evolutionary reasoning is not dispositive. But it does have some explanatory value. From what I can glean from your posts here, though, you will enjoy Chimpanzee a lot.
As a theological note, the theory that original sin resulted in a reduction of humanity's ability to overcome it's physical characteristcs/animal nature would be consistent with evolutionary theories on aggression. Again, I think the evolutionary reasoning is incomplete at best.
posted
Noemon, Yeah, a lot of times, I'm aiming for a target other than the one that it looks like I'm aiming at. I got what you were saying, and, in large part, I agree. Responding to your post the way I did let me claim the rhetorical ground against the idea that I was really fighting against, that aggression in humans is due to their animalistic nature.
To clarify my position, as I said, I believe in a dynamic human nature, and selfishness fueled aggression is definitely a major player in this human nature. However, as opposed to what I see as the contemporary view of aggression, I believe that there are many parts of human nature that specifically work against this aggression. The drive towards aggression doesn't exist unopposed by motivations internal to the human.
This offers a vastly different picture of both human nature and prospects than is currently held in our society and calls for much different methods for achieving higher human potential. It's my opinion that many of our cultural stories, perhaps especially those about morality and aggression, foster an environment of immorality and aggression.
If aggression is an unopposed part of our nature, than it will come out unless we put external restraints in place. However, if there are internal factors of human nature that work against aggression and immorality, we should be strengthening them, especially as there is good evidence that, if we use external reward/punishment systems, they will often weaken or overcome these "good" internal motivations.
One of the major effects of imposed external morality is that, on average, it encourages dehumanization across a populace. Rather than seeing other people as subjects, to be understood in the totality of their situation, the become reduced to abstracted objects to be judged against a series of rules. Likewise, the idea that peopel are all basically evil logical fosters a great mistrust of everyone around you.
It is those societies that believe in an a priori One Truth that bring horror onto the other people in the world. It's my opinion that they do this, not because people are unrestrainedly evil, but because one of the main forces opposing this sort of evil is empathy, whcih they've thrown away. It's very rare that one person who acknowledges other people as kin to themselves will act aggressively towards them. That why these systems almost invariably label the people they want to do bad things to as "subhuman" or "infidels" or "barbarians" or "sinners" or whatever. It all comes down to trying to overcome those things that keep us from doing bad things to other people.
America is a very violent place, both in action and in thought. In part, this is because our ancestors were of a more active, aggressive breed, but it also has a lot to do with our cultural mythology (and not just those parts of it explictly about aggression). Our very conception of human nature is one of the biggest influences in the way that we act. The thing is, this conception of human nature is only occasionally tied to fact and there are a multitude of examples of both people and entire cultures that violate some of the things that we consider fundamental pieces of what it means to be human. Either these people and cultures are just straight out "unnatural" or perhaps our conception of human nature is overly limited.
edit to add: Dag's right. I'm going to get back to work.
posted
Huh. Well how do you like that--we don't have anything to argue about then; I pretty much agree with what you're saying. Where's the fun in that, I ask you?
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
| IP: Logged |
quote: It seems to me that once you've reached a certain point, you're just heaping horror on top of horror. My mind, anyway, goes numb somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, I think. That Hitler managed to do in 12 million doesn't really resonate with me any more than Pol Pot's 3, you know?
Noemon, I partly agree with this, it's true that when the number of deaths climbs to a certain point it's just heaping horror after horror, but I still think there's a huge difference between 1 million and two million, even 1 million and 1 could make all the difference in the world to one person. Also, what I thought was unique about the Holocaust as opposed to all of those other ones you mentioned was the fact that the Holocaust was based on prejudice and racism and the propaganda worked so well that the civilians actually hated the Jews with a passion and thought they deserved what they were getting.
Posts: 853 | Registered: Feb 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
I'm a little curious about your claims that most of the German populace supported the Holocaust, Jaime. My understanding of WWII-era Germany was that while most German civilians were almost certainly aware of pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic propaganda--and probably even bought into it--most were not members of the Nazi party and didn't even know about the Holocaust. This doesn't speak to whether or not they would have supported the Holocaust had they known about it, but it does seem opposed to what you're saying.
Posts: 4534 | Registered: Jan 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Also, it wasn't always the minorities that were targeted in Nazi Germany. A lot of the time it was anyone who disagreed with the Nazi propaganda who were targeted.
I remember a wonderful poem, I think written by a WWII area German citizen, about how he was afraid to say anything when his friends and neighbors were taken away, until the were all gone and there was no one left to say anything when they came for him.
I am not trying to justify the German peoples indifference and or collaboration with the Nazis. I think they had to be held accountable for allowing their leaders that much power, and that they were culpable, to a certain extent.
I am just saying that it is easy to say they should have done something, but none of us are living under that kind of fear now...we don't really know how horrible it was for them too.
Not nearly as horrible as it was for those who were in the camps, that's for sure...but not easy either, never knowing if they would take your family away. Or is they would kill you for treating Jews as humans.
posted
Here is the quote I wanted...took a bit to find, I am ashamed to say.
Long before I was interested in poetry I heard this, and it has always resonated with me:
quote:First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out for me.
by Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945
Here is some more about the author....
quote: the version above is taken from an article on the 50th anniversary of the beginning of WW II that appeared in TIME Magazine, Aug 28, 1989. There are many versions of this poem floating around... by no means is this the authorative one. Similarly, the author of the poem is often not mentioned. On one level, that is not important. Indeed, Martin Niemoller was an outspoken advocate for accepting the burden of collective guilt for WW II as a means of atonement for the suffering that the German nation (through the Nazis) had caused before and during WW II.
On the other hand, I think that something is missed if one doesn't’t understand that the words come from a man who also declared that he “would rather burn his church to the ground, than to preach the Nazi trinity of ‘race, blood, and soil.’”
Niemoller was tainted. He had been a U-boat captain in WW I prior to becoming a pastor. And he supported Hitler prior to his taking power. Indeed, initially the Nazi press held him up as a model... for his service in WW I. [Newsweek, July 10, 1937, pg 32]
But Niemoller broke very early with the Nazis. In 1933, he organized the Pastor’s Emergency League to protect Lutheran pastors from the police. In 1934, he was one of the leading organizers at the Barmen Synod, which produced the theological basis for the Confessing Church, which despite its persecution became an enduring symbol of German resistance to Hitler.
From 1933 to 1937, Niemoller consistently trashed everything the Nazis stood for. At one point he declared that it was impossible to “point to the German [Luther] without pointing to the Jew [Christ] to which he pointed to.” [from Charles Colson, Kingdoms in Conflict]
He rejected the Nazi distortion of “Positive Christianity” (postulating the ‘special virtue’ of the German people), as opposed to “Negative Chistianity” which held that all people regardless of race were guilty of sin and in need of repentance. An excerpt from a sermon of his printed in TIME Magazine [Feb 21, 1928, pg 25-27]:
quote: Rev. Martin Niemoller was protected until 1937 by both the foreign press and influential friends in the up-scale Berlin suburb where he preached. Eventually, he was arrested for treason. Perhaps due to foreign pressure, he was found guilty, but initially given only a suspended sentence. He was however then almost immediately re-arrested on Hitler’s direct orders. From then on until the end of WW II, he was held at the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. Near the end of the war, he narrowly escaped execution. [from Charles Colson’s Kingdoms in Conflict]
After the war, Niemoller emerged from prison to preach the words that began this post, that all of us know... He was instrumental in producing the “Stuttgart Confession of Guilt”, in which the German Protestant churches formally accepted guilt for their complicity in allowing the suffering which Hitler’s reign caused to occur. In 1961, he was elected as one of the six presidents of the World Council of Churches, the ecumenical body of the Protestant faiths.
Niemoller emerged also as an adamant pacifist and advocate of reconciliation. He actively sought out contacts in Eastern Europe, and traveled to Moscow in 1952 and North Vietnam in 1967. He received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967, and the West German Grand Cross of Merit in 1971. Martin Niemoller died in Wiesbaden, West Germany on Mar 6, 1984, at the age of 92. [from the Encyclopedia Britannica].
I read some more and there seems to be a problem with this poem...it has been edited by almost every group on earth....lol...
Really, it isn't funny. Even the Holocaust museum changed it, eliminating Communists as the first group and putting Jews first instead of last; it matters because as it was written it was a real lesson on the order of which Nazi Germany eliminated it's opponants....communists, then trade unions, then socialists, and the culmination of their pogroms, the Jews.
Later it became bastardized, with people adding gays, Roman Catholic's, and specific races in where they never existed.
The lesson can be transfered...indeed it must be in order to have revelance...but the poem shouldn't be.
posted
Saxon, while I don't think they were aware of the tortures and killings going on in the camps, I'm sure they noticed Jews being "relocated" from their homes and, knowing about the propaganda, they probably figured it wasn't to a very nice place. Also, weren't the civilians also told to report any Jews? Doesn't that tell them something? I mean, Germans weren't idiots, they could probably figure out that Jews weren't being treated like the rest of Germany. Kwea, that is a very good poem, it reminds me of something I once heard about how when Hitler was briefing his followers about what he planned to do with the Jews, they asked what would they do when the world tried to stop it, he told them nobody spoke out against the Armenian genocide, why would they do anything now?
Posts: 853 | Registered: Feb 2004
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
![[Confused]](confused.gif)
![[Dont Know]](graemlins/dontknow.gif)
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
![[ROFL]](graemlins/rofl.gif)
