Thursday, January 20, 2005

With God in Hell

It has been a while since I've dropped a blog - the flu does that to a man. Four days without solid food will show you a new meaning to the word insanity.

Anyway, today's entry is about genocide. Last night I was up watching PBS and they had a special on the Holocaust. After a couple hours of watching it I just couldn't take anymore. Now mind you I have seen the worst of gory movies and psychological thrillers, but two hours of this special had me more upset and sick than anything on TV ever has. The show was describing the developments in mass murder techniques the Nazi's undertook. Starting off in the early war with shooting people alongside hills so that their dead bodies would roll into a ditch, to putting people in sealed rooms and pumping car exhaust in till everyone died in late 1941. Then there was the attempt with one of the chemicals you use when your house is infected with bugs, also in 41. Soon after, I just couldn't stomach it anymore.
How could something like this happen in the 'western' world? How could the home of such brilliant scientists, philosophers, and theologians ever possibly think that the mass extermination of the Jews is a good thing? How can a whole nation of humans lose any sense of morals, of ethics, of humanity? I think the answer, if there is one, is that it's a path open to any one of us. I can't stand people who try to paint Nazi Germany as 'oh IT could never happen again', or 'WE could never do something like that'. That is absolute rubbish. Such incredible depths of evil are 'just around the corner', you could say. I was looking around BBC this morning and I came upon an article about the genocides of Rwanda. Now I knew for a long time the Rwandan genocides were terrible; that on the scale of a million Rwandans were murdered. But this scared me: 800,000 Rwandans were murdered in 100 days. On average, that's EIGHT THOUSAND PEOPLE A DAY. As the article says, that is a higher rate than the Holocaust. No, any one of us is capable of it.

By the way, the name of this post is from a book by a Jewish theologian. I haven't had a chance to read it yet (I would love to whenever I can get some time), but I think it's a very fitting title.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What's the difference between eliminating pigs effectively at a slaughterhouse and eliminatating Jews effectively in Nazi controlled territory? Humanity. Rewanda? I'd bet it is similar. The second you treat others not as human beings--->it starts.