Is That Legal?

It amazes me the quickness in which people are willing to forget history. While I'm almost entirely against the concept of tradition, and holding to things due to the sake of age, there is relevancy in what once happened, in order to atleast be one of the many aspects that informs current actions and ideas. Of course these incidents and events in what seem now long ago era's are important. They may not be the sole reason why the points Eric raises are relevent, but they do prove a useful comparison and starting point.

It amuses me even more, that the people complaining are conservatives, who supposedly want to preserve tradition and hold overs from previous eras, and in fact, typically believe in a religion that is based around a 30 year life span 2000 years ago.

I appreciate your points, Professor Muller, as well as your careful analysis. I don't disagree that an ideal religious leader would come fully to grips with his role in the Holocaust (however attenuated), rather than surpress or ignore it it (however unconsciously). And you've made a persuasive case that the Pope is at least shading his past -- although it's not at all clear that it's intentional (indeed, I tend to suspect that it's not).

At the end of the day, however, all that you've shown is that the Pope is human. And not a very bad human; just a human who has a less-than-ideal memory or who once made made a less-than-perfect (though not evil) choice. There also seems to be no legitimate dispute that the Pope has, in most respects, resisted (or, where he could or did not resist, repented) for his past.

Frankly, I think you're holding the Pope to a standard that no human can possibly satisfy; coldly examined, I have no doubt that each of our pasts contain wrongs or errors of a similar sort to the Pope's (though admittedly not in a similar context, for the Holocaust was a singlur evil). I think you've now made your point, and should leave it there.

He's obviously forgetting your inability to forget about what happend to the Japanese in the US in the 40's, too, so perhaps he's good at forgetting himself. But isn't that the annoying thing about people who have had wrong done to them? They just won't let us forget about it! Please, don't let this sort of thing get you down, and keep up the good work.

Let's not argue about "who killed who."

History is cool. History makes us what we are. What I think is wrong with part of the American human condition is that SO many of us have stories to tell about our histories and SO many of us have no forum in which to tell them. Blogs rock. And don't ever stop telling your story.

Yeah Kevin P is right we should just forget those inconvenient bits of history that make "us" (whoever that us may be) look bad, expose our hypocrisy, our arrogance, our persecution, murder or genocide of our fellow man. Pfft!

We (human race)should not dwell on those things. I mean nobody does that kind of thing anymore. We have learned our lesson. We are civilized now. Hell, we are perfect now.

What's past is prologue...

Prospero
Shakespeare's The Tempest

... With Nasty-Pointy-Teeth!

(Nice one, Catfish)

Following up on j swifts' comment, the key word in Kevin P's ridiculous comment is "complaining." Kevin P is probably okay with studying history, as long as it isn't what he considers the "complaining" kind. In other words, he favors a celebratory look at the past, one in which Christians and the USA are the unquestioned heroes, in matters big and small.

That Kevin P seems to think the first half of the 20th century was such a long, long time ago pretty much reveals his limited view of the world.

This series of posts and comments comes at a very interesting time for me. Last weekend we were cleaning our garage and we came across several boxes of things that I had packed away when my Dad died in 1993. There were all kinds of photos of my parents and me from my early life. There was also a box of photos that my Dad took during World War II. My Dad was an ambulance driver for a field hospital (kind of like a MASH unit) that followed behind the 1st, 3rd and 45th Army Divisions in the invasions of North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Southern France. They followed these divisions into southern Germany and, at one point, were the first medical unit to enter a concentration camp. The photos were the same kind of raw, repulsive photos that anyone can see at the Holocost Museum -- piles of emaciated bodies, bodies stacked in railroad cars with "Off Limits" painted on the sides, photos of the guards who tried to disguise themselves and hide among the prisoners (but were too well-fed to do so successfully), pictures of the bodies of those same guards after they had been beaten to death by Soviet POWs. These pictures brought back the discussions we had about these events -- the way he described the indescribable: the stench from the rotting corpses, the flies, the maggots, the prisoners who were so weak that they dies after the camp was liberated, the frustration everyone felt over not being able to put an end to the death, the worry over what would happen to these prisoners -- where they would live, how they would live, how they would find their families, and so on. I couldn't really understand the depth of his feeling about all of this at the time. Later, in Vietnam, I got to learn for myself the stench and ugliness of death and more than once, while there, I thought about the things my Dad and I had talked about. I had pretty well put all of that behind me -- until last weekend. Looking at those photos again, I could understand what he must have felt and to say that it pained me deeply would be an understatement.

All of that having been said, I strongly believe that Benedict's statement about anti-semitism being some part of the problem in resisting Hitler to be disingenuous. Anti-semitism was deeply rooted in German Christian culture at that time, as it was in other states in Central Europe. For example, the Christian government of Slovakia, headed by Monsignor Joseph Tiso, actually paid Germany 50 marks per Jew to take them off Slovak hands. In Yugoslavia, the Roman Catholic hierarchy was involved intimately in the expulsion of the Jews and the extermination of over 400,000 ethnic Slav Orthodox Christians, mostly Serbians and an additional large number of Muslim Croats. I think it is fairly clear that German Christians, as well as others, generally supported the Nazi the Nazi "resettlement" effort, even if they didn't know all of the gory details.

Nevertheless, I don't think that we can hold Benedict, who after all was only in his early teens at the time, accountable for the reprehensible policies of the German Reich.

I had to chuckle when I read this. I have been busy at my day job, and only just now got a chance to check in.

I sympathize with Prof. Muller's ancestors who were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis.

My father who passed away last year, fought in WWII against the Japanese in Asia, actually taking up arms against the oppressors instead of merely being oppressed by them. So I am quite aware of the importance of learning from history. Thanks to all the commenters for their concern for me in this regard. I wonder how many of them credit the half century of European peace to the essential civility of Europeans, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands of US soldiers stationed inconveniently in their midst for 50 years.

And I am also aware of the importance of living in the present, not in the past. My father did not hold any grudges against the Japanese. I am interested in what the new Pope is going to do now and in the future. Certainly, his own past is fair game. But to endlessly belabor a 17-year old draftee in the Hitler Youth? When the man has a far more creditable and respected history in Jewish relations as an adult? That is called living in the past.