Appropriating the Suffering of Others

[BridgeTheGap]

Even before the Vatican’s bungled dealings with Bishop Williamson, who denied the Holocaust, Pope Benedict XVI raised eyebrows with his 2006 prayer at Auschwitz when he said of the Nazi’s, “By destroying Israel, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith.”

“Nothing shows how little we understand the suffering of others,” writes Peter Manseau in Commonweal, “more than the attempt to use our story to make sense of it.”

Manseau warns that when people use the framework of their own faith to express compassion for people of another faith, it can lead to a subtle kind of revisionism that, while not denying history, reshapes it to fit into the narrative of their own religion.

Manseau connects the dots between the pope’s slightly revised understanding of the Holocaust and Bishop Williamson’s outright denial. “There is a difference between facing up to history and seeing one’s own theology play out at every turn. If the first frame of reference for the murder of 6 million Jews is the death of a Christian savior or saint, one can see how the dark spots of history might be forgotten beside the light of faith.”

http://www.utne.com/Spirituality/Appropriating-The-Suffering-Of-Others.aspx

[Occam Bandage]

1. That isn't a "slightly revised understanding of the Holocaust," I don't think.

I'd claim, in fact, that Benedict's prayer amounts to Holocaust denial, as it is a denial of the anti-Semitic, genocidal intent of the Holocaust in favor of a story in which the Nazis were ultimately persecuting Christians.

[struggle4progress]

2. The Pope's remark seems to me historically accurate. The Nazis intended a totalitarian state

from which the standard religions would vanish

Inside Europe
John Gunther (1938)

... On being formed his government almost immediately began a fierce religious war against Catholics, Protestants, and Jews alike ... Catholicism he considered a particularly dangerous competitive force, because it demands two allegiances of a man, and double allegiance was something Hitler could not countenance. Thus the campaign against the "black moles," as Nazis call priests. Several times German relations with the Vatican neared the breaking point. Protestantism was -- theoretically -- a simpler matter to deal with, because the Lutheran Church presumably was German and nationalist. Hitler thought that by the simple installation of an army chaplain, a ferocious Nazi named Mueller, as Reichbishop, he could "coördinate" the Evangelical Church in Germany, and turn it to his service. The idea of a united Protestant Church appealed to his neat architect's mind. He was wrong. The church question has been an itching pot of trouble ever since. All through 1936 and 1937 it raged ... Hitler has indicated this in a speech at Nuremberg in September, 1935. "Christianity," he said, "succeeded for a time in uniting the old Teutonic tribes, but the Reformation destroyed this unity. Germany is now a united nation. National Socialism has succeeded where Christianity failed." And Heiden has quoted Hitler's remark, "We do not want any other God than Germany itself." This is a vital point. Germany is Hitler's religion ... http://www.geocities.com/athens/olympus/9587/attrelig.html

[Meshuga]

3. Jews were not killed because of their religion

Jews were executed because they were Jews. It didn't really matter whether the Jewish victim in the holocaust was religious, a non-believer, or a convert to Christianity.

Trying to use the holocaust to turn the situation into a Christian plight is a slight attempt at revisioning in my opinion.

And it may give the impression that you are saying, "So, the Nazis threw you in concentration camps in an attempt to wipe you from the face of the earth? Yeah, I can relate to that. They saw us as a danger to their cause too."

The holocaust cannot be reduced to religions vanishing. It is an unfortunate historical event where millions of people which included Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and Jehovah Witnesses, were murdered. Appropriating the suffering of others is pathetic.

[struggle4progress]

4. You misrepresent what I say. Of course, I cannot argue against your remark that

"Jews were executed because they were Jews," because that is certainly true

The real motives for this slaughter are somewhat more obscure and may be mixed: the official justification was a pseudo-scientific Nazi racial theory, but the theory could not have had impact without a pre-existing political constituency, manifested (for example) in the germanic Thule Gesellschaft; and since the Nazis were extremely manipulative of existing groups in their quest for power, there is the further possibility that some of the official anti-semitism was simply cynical -- a willingness to play to popular prejudice by murder and to buy support by promising that the property of the victims would be turned to a supposed "common good"

The point is that a certain hostility towards Judeo-Christian ethics was among the various motives (political or otherwise) for attacking Jews. A generation earlier, Nietzsche -- whose sister later exerted some effort to convince the Nazis that they represented the "overmen" promised by her now-dead brother -- had expressed contempt for the traditional religions as "slave ethics," and the Nazis elevated him to the status of an idol

... I think no one who lived in the Third Reich could have failed to be impressed by Nietzsche's influence on it ... Nazi scribblers never tired of extolling him. Hitler often visited the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and publicized his veneration for the philosopher by posing for photographs of himself staring in rapture at the bust of the great man ... http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TCEH/Nietzsche.html

The Nazis wished to replace this Judeo-Christian "slave-ethic" by a religion based on Germany: see, for example, von Rabenau's version of the traditional carol "Stille Nacht" (Silent Night) from the 1934 Christmas in the Third Reich: instead of celebrating the birth of the Christian messiah, the rewritten song celebrates Hitler

Fighting songs and warring words
By Brian Murdoch <p 112>
http://books.google.com/books?id=Cu8NAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA112&lpg=PA112&dq=%22Stille+Nacht!+Heilige+Nacht!%22+Hitler&source=bl&ots=WjaTQmFDg-&sig=4pgw6L5S2W9Kl1z06buZSyR_d2o&hl=en&ei=2LbXSb3lKIfflQfX1PjKDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3

I've posted several times in this forum before, with links, about the Nazi rewrite of the Bible to suppress any reference to Judaism: this certainly represents an attack on Judaism, of course, but it also represents an attack on the integrity of Christian tradition -- and it is not accidentally so: it is part of a larger process of destroying religious institutions and traditions in order to replace them with Nazi ideals, a process that would have continued had it not be interrupted by the defeat of Germany on the battlefield

There's no question that the Shoah represents a uniquely horrid historical event: the conversion of popular prejudices into an extermination industry. The moral obligation -- to attempt to avoid such events in future -- brings with it a moral obligation to understand accurately the dynamics of the event as it actually occurred, in its historical particularity. How the Shoah actually came about may be a complicated tale involving popular prejudices, political manipulation of popular prejudices, greed and opportunism, and (in my view) certain religious considerations also

Sloganeering is no help here. And your insistence on twisting my words, rather than to make an effort to provide some insight, seems to me to be cheap, easy, and lazy

[Meshuga]

5. It is not your position but it is the pope's position, even if unintentional

At least that is the impression that is given.

Nazi re-write of the Bible as an attack on Judaism (and on Christianity) is one thing. The Holocaust, and more specifically Auschwitz, is another. Whether Nazis had their own plans for Christianity, or not, is irrelevant to Auschwitz. That's the issue. And that sounds like an attempt at "watering down" of what happened whether it is intentional or not and whether you would admit to it or not.