“Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look around and see.” – Lamentations 1:12
It was brought to my attention that yet another wave of systematic violence was enacted upon yet another group of innocent, non-combative, civilians. The town of Bucha, in the outer regions of Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv, has become another name on a long list of city-towns that has fallen prey to men’s susceptibility to animalistic behaviors. We needn’t blame the devil for this. This is man’s doing. The one pulling the trigger was not a spiritual being. The force behind the man tying up women and children before shooting them in the head was not metaphysical. It was a physical force driven by a physical need, a chemical need, an interpersonal need on the part of a soldier and his compatriots to kill. But this was not the ordinary killing we witness on the battlefield. No. This was not a mortar bomb that mutilates the body and soul of a soldier mid-combat. This was not the sort of killing spree where men in uniform gun down other men in uniform, bullets ricocheting from bunker walls, tank impediment structures, and dirt. Not the kind of killing where man faces man, grit visible, rage present, teeth bare, and bayonet bloodied. No. This was not that kind of killing. There was no trench warfare here. No bunker, unless, that is, you consider a home a bunker. Its drywall and wooden frame protecting its resident from wind and rain showers. But what of bullets and bombs?
These killings were done by men, soldiers, the youth turned violent killing machine ready warriors aimed at bystanders, civilians, grocers, salesmen, chefs, custodians, dads, moms, daughters, and sons, who just so happened to exist on one side of a field at the wrong time. Their crime is their geography.
What do we say of this? What can we say of this? What words are wordy enough to explain away this horror? Are words only useful for us to explain horrors away? Are we to use them to then accept horrible deeds? Perhaps. But if we do not want to accept these egregious horrors are we to then understand them? But what is the point in attempting to understand the mutilated body of a child, mutilated not by teeth of wild beasts in a forest or a jungle but by bullets from the guns of domesticated beasts in uniform? Are we to produce bookcases worth of information to help us categorize, stylize, name, organize, timestamp, and geo-stamp these events, the belligerent party(ies), antagonists, victims, method(s) of death, method(s) of torture, method(s) of desecration, and method(s) of burial or cremation simply for us to understand what happened at site A to group B?
Where do we store this information? What library, what cloud provider service, what server room, or what entity is responsible enough, ethical enough, mature enough, selfless enough to manage this information?
What will we do with all of this horror?
My wife and I got into an argument over whether we should call Russian soldiers guilty of crimes against humanity Nazis. Are they Nazis?
My wife said yes, she believes they are. The killings were systematized enough. The tying up men, women, and children, then rounding them up on city streets or in dank basements, not far from torture chambers to shoot them behind the head was cruel enough to liken these killers and their acts to that of Nazi SS soldiers from World War II. The indiscriminate killing of civilians is likened to what the Germans did in Poland, Russia, France, and more.
But I disagreed. I do not think the Russians are like the Nazis. No, of course, I understand just the same way you do. My wife is German. She was born in that majestic country, she was raised in it, educated there, and formed by its Teutonic culture. She knows the history connected to her native land, she was informed of the societal guilt and shame that once lingered but has since dissipated from the German social conscience. Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung! They’ve worked off their past. My wife is aware of the responsibility she bears in knowing that history but not being guilted by it. There is no collective shame or guilt in her heart about it but there is a collective responsibility of making sure what the Germans of yesteryear did will not be forgotten nor excused, ever.
Yet, I disagree.
I do not believe Russian civilians want this war, this, what shall I call it, waste of resources, and the international debacle that Putin has enacted upon the Ukrainian people. Russian citizens disdain their military’s conduct in the Kyiv Oblast region whereas others have come out in protest of the entire series of events, many facing arrests, torture, perhaps, too. There is not a collective sentiment in Russia to eradicate Ukrainians. Ukrainians are not seen as sub-human, although many of them have been treated as such by Russian soldiers. Russian civilians do not attend university to learn about the facial structure of Ukrainians and how they might resemble rats. They’re not taught that the Ukrainians are responsible for Russia’s financial woes. They’re not taught that to woo, romance, date, court, wed, or sleep with a Ukrainian man or a woman is a crime punishable with imprisonment on top of hefty fines because to mix with them is a moral offense. One cannot visit St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, or Kazan and find concentration camps where Ukrainians are held as enemies of the state and forced into back-breaking manual labor. One cannot find death camps in the remotest regions of Russia’s snow-covered tundras where Ukrainian nationals are tossed into industrial ovens and burnt to a crisp, their ash littering the sky above. There are no mass graves consisting of Ukrainian bodies in Russia nor are there people in Russia digging up holes for Ukrainian corpses to fill them.
What happened in Germany in the 1910s and 1920s made what happened in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s possible. What I mean is that Germans who survived World War I and dealt with the shame of their loss and financial ruination were ripe in body, mind, and soul for what Hitler offered them in the 1930s. The nation, collectively, voted in a demagogue and followed him into hell. Those who made it back alive were still stained with the soot of the devil’s work on their lives. Germans came together to make what happened in Europe possible. It would not have been possible if only the Gestapo set out to arrest Jews, political dissidents, homosexuals, gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and people with mental health issues. It required a national and cultural effort on the part of German citizens of every stripe.
The Nazi regime existed because the German people as a collective made it possible. Germany’s politicized Christianity, its state religion, its sciences, its cultural make-up, its racial make-up, its ethnic composition, and its mythical understanding of itself made Nazism as we understand it today, as it was understood then, possible.
Russians, civilians at home and abroad, do not want to harm Ukrainians.
Their soldiers, the ones who are committing these crimes, are not acting like Nazis because before Nazis existed, soldiers killed civilians this way. We must be wary, cautious, even, of thinking the pinnacle of evil existed for a quick and short-lived period of thirteen years in Germany alone. The Schutzstaffel (SS), Gestapo, Luftwaffe, and the Wehrmacht are not the only exemplars of human cruelty and evil.
They’re just our easiest scapegoats.
The greatest indicator of human evil stands tall in the mirror, gazing back, hoping not to be seen in the limelight of opportunity and intent. Seldom are we placed in the same positions, under the same conditions, infused with the same intentions, driven by the same social-cultural motivations, and incensed by opportunity, impunity, and heroism no matter the act we’re asked, no, obligated to achieve for God, king, and country.
So we stand, looking at the mirror or rather, being studied by he or her who looks back, hoping, praying, begging, that we are never given the same graces to murder because God knows we would, with impunity.
I say these things not to excuse the horrors perpetrated by Russian murderers. No. Their acts are damnable. Their crimes will not go unpunished. Should they die on the battlefield, they will then face God. Should they die in a prison cell, they will then face God. Should they live a long, hearty, and fulfilling life after this war, moving on to attain wealth and prosperity, fathering many children, and becoming members of high repute in their communities, they will, at the end of their days, face God for their crimes against humanity.
God will not allow a person to pierce a child through with a spear or a bayonet and escape judgment. God will not allow a man to ravage a woman and not face consequences for such a vile act. God will not allow men who sit in rooms pointing to maps and nodding commands, as bombs drop on residential buildings mutilating some and displacing uncountable others. God will not sit idly by as thousands upon thousands of people are erased from the face of this earth for the sake of lucre and land.
That is without question, Bucha. That is without question.
Your men, women, and children are not forgotten dear city. Your corpse-ridden streets have not gone unseen. Your blood-soaked gardens are not invisible. The basements you harbor where bodies were tied up and shot dead are known to us. We know. We have seen. We are witnesses to your demise.
But you are not alone.
The same way Abel’s blood cried out to God from the earth so does the earth beneath Bucha cry out to God for justice! Justice! Justice!
Bucha, your daughters will not have died in vain. Their sufferings, their screams, their catatonic fixated faces are not in vain. Their ravaged bodies, assaulted and violated, their souls violated, also, are not forgotten.
Your children, burned alive, executed in cold blood, tossed and desecrated as if they were filthy rags, are not forgotten. Their last moments of life, moments of fear, uncertainty, shattered dreams, shattered hope, tears, and wet diapers, will not, will not, cannot be forgotten.
Your elderly, your brittle, your infirm, your wise ones, who were killed by bombs, others killed by exposure as they fled those same bombs, are not forgotten.
Those gaunt faces who stare into infinity seek and cry for justice, their bloodless appearances begging for a reason, a cause, a purpose, an explanation for all of this senseless violence that took from them that which was most precious, life. They beg for words, for a meaning to it all.
Bucha, we have looked upon your misery and we see you. One of many, many in one. Your horrors are here to stay and we will gaze upon them.
We will gaze and we will weep.
And God…?
God will act on your behalf.
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed. – Proverbs 31:8 NLT
Currently Reading
“One of the most influential books of the last 20 years.” — Chronicle of Higher Education
“A space cruiser, in search of its sister ship, encounters beings descended from self-replicating machines.” — MIT Press
“The Nazis were not the first to burn children. God’s people did so long before.” – Dr. Diane Langberg, Redeeming Power
“Then the Lord said to me: ‘Even if Moses and Samuel were to stand before me, my heart would not go out to this people. Send them away from my presence! Let them go! And if they ask you, ‘Where shall we go?’ tell them, ‘This is what the Lord says:
‘Those destined for death, to death; those for the sword, to the sword; those for starvation, to starvation; those for captivity, to captivity.’
‘I will send four kinds of destroyers against them,’ declares the Lord, ‘the sword to kill and the dogs to drag away and the birds and the wild animals to devour and destroy. I will make them abhorrent to all the kingdoms of the earth because of what Manasseh son of Hezekiah king of Judah did in Jerusalem.’” Jeremiah 15:1-4
Those of us familiar with Old Testament literature understand the tragic history surrounding Jewish monarchs who ascended to power only to squander their name, leadership, and faith in hopes of attaining favor with local sovereignties or in pursuit of fleeting pleasures.
King Manasseh began his rule over Judah at the age of twelve. A boy, an adolescent, with the keys to the kingdom. The son of a popular and well-liked king Hezekiah, whose honorable religious reforms had spread throughout Judah had died and left the young boy-king with large shoes to fill. Set on leaving behind his distinct legacy, Manasseh set off to accomplish the necessary tasks required of every Jewish king since David. Love God, learn God’s laws and commandments, observe those laws, protect God’s people, the Israelites, more so, those belonging to the southern kingdom of Judah (and Benjamin), and under no circumstance break any of the edicts listed under the Ten Commandments.
When Manasseh began to instill the opposite of everything required of a Jewish king, his legacy would be riddled with wickedness. He incensed the people’s desire for idols, gods, and spirits that other nations worshipped and sacrificed grain and animals to for the continuance of blessings over land, wealth, and fertility. The young king went on to rebuild the “high places” his father, Hezekiah, had torn down during his reign. These hills, mountain tops, and cliffs served as prominent places of worship, where people would visit them, build structures, and serve at their altars and the feet of obelisks erected for Semitic deities, Baal and Asheroth. They worshipped the “host of heaven,” more firmly, they worshipped spiritual entities, celestial beings, spirits, and wraiths, serving them however the spirits influenced them.
Understanding Jewish theology, you must remember that the only place in which the Jews were allowed to worship God or at least offer sacrifices to the Creator God was in Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. Anyone who dared worship anywhere else was considered an outcast, a heretic, a pagan. So the fires that littered the horizon of Judah; abhorrent symbols of worship and service to other gods in the land of monotheism, were an affront to everything the Abrahamic faith and Mosaic laws stood for.
Manasseh went on to further incense the pious clerics he was sworn to revere by erecting altars for the “host of heaven” in the two courts in the Solomon’s Temple, where sacrifices and worship were offered to the omnipotent Yahweh. A sacrilegious act, forced upon the people of Judea at the hands of their king. Unchallenged and relentless, the young king would not listen to his pious counselors, nor the priests in the temple they ministered in.
What came next was, at the time, previously unheard of, even for a morally compromised Judean king.
Manasseh, the young king, would grow, would wed, and father many children. A number of these, the Bible does not state how many, were offered as a sacrifice in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom. Although historians question the explicit meaning of “offering one’s children to the fire” we can understand that whatever process that ensued was not for the benefit of Manasseh’s children. Other historians dictate that a particular sect in that region would start a fire in a pit, and at the mouth of the pit stood a bronze bull or a statue with its arms extended over the fire. Once its extended arms turned red hot from the heat emitted by the flames, a child was tossed on them, burned, and then rolled into the pit as a sacrifice to the deity in question. This process, the barbarity with which religious zealots killed their children seems a bit far-fetched if we didn’t have evidence of similar grotesque sacrifice rituals taking place in other, more recent cultures as well.
It seems inconceivable that the leader of Judah, the people after God’s heart, selected from the many, reduced to such a small, albeit very powerful and geographically strategic location in Palestine, could be known for worshipping the God of deliverance and protector of life whilst sacrificing children in the fires of paganism in the valley of death.
Manasseh went on to seek seers, fortune tellers, omens, sorcerers, and mystics as if there were no prophet of God in the land, nor words etched in stone by the fingers of God for guidance and encouragement.
The young king sought the spiritual advice of mediums and necromancers, people who delved into the dark arts, the mysterious aspect of conversing with the dead to gain influence over the living. A practice punishable by death in some cultures, the Jewish one included. But who could challenge the young king? Who would dare speak up against the monarch whose power and influence was unmatched and rarely questioned?
If he was willing to throw his children into the fire what then could he do with a serf? A peasant? A religious cleric?
The last knowable defilement Manasseh brought to his name and his people was instilling a carved image of an idol in the temple of God. Previously, he had left some altars, however large or small, in the outer courts of the temple, but here, he progressed, not just in depravity by killing his children, but also killing his spiritual well-being but outing Yahweh from the throne of his heart and substituting the Divine with something less, something mundane, handmade to suit his desires.
Again, Dr. Langberg’s quote rings true in history and haunts us in the present.
“The Nazis were not the first to burn children. God’s people did so long before.”
Those of us who are students of history, however amateur our endeavors may be in the science, understand that what Nazi Germany accomplished via the Holocaust will stick with humanity for eons, until, that is, something more nefarious and systemic replaces it in our history books.
Is it too difficult to believe that what happened under the Nazi regime will never happen again under a different regime? Are we so blind to our humanity to believe that we are beyond that level of hatred for a neighbor today?
We want to believe that what the Nazis did was unique to Germany in the 1930s-1940s. No other civilized group has ever devolved to such a horrendous sequence of murders to that scale. But to understand human beings we must understand the perpetual human potential for violence and that it is never beneath us to devolve or perhaps evolve to that level of violence again.
Dr. Langberg makes an accurate observation that we want to avoid at all costs.
“God’s people did so long before.”
The people of God would never!
We always say.
They would never harm children! But they offered them as a sacrifice in the fire to Baal.
They would never harm the poor! But they exploited them for the sake of wealth.
They would never harm women! But they raped them, in the village, in front of a house, in the king’s palace.
They would never harm someone of another faith! But the European crusades.
They would never harm someone who believed differently! And the Catholic inquisitions.
They would never harm a mystic! But they burned them at the stake, drowned them, threw them from buildings, and stabbed them where they fell.
They would never discriminate based on race or ethnicity! Sir, have you not studied the doctrine of discovery, manifest destiny, chattel slavery, Reconstruction, or Jim Crow? Better yet, have you not studied the last four to five hundred years of European imperialism and Western colonialism?
They would never harm women! What of the hundreds, if not thousands of years of sexist traditionalism that has become canon in the church? The numerous cases of protecting wife beaters by not believing women when they come forward with the stories of their abuse?
They would never harm children! Have you not studied the abuses of the Catholic church? The Houston Chronicle’s investigative report on the Southern Baptist Convention’s willingness to hide, protect, and platform predators? Have there not been volumes upon volumes of lawsuits against religious institutions for hiding the criminal conduct of sexual predators against children?
The Legacy of Burning Children at the Altar
Yes, Manasseh’s series of depravities indeed forced God’s hand into destroying Jerusalem. He used the Assyrian kingdom to lay waste to the ten kingdoms of the north, known as Israel. And then he used Nebuchadnezzar and his nearly indomitable Babylonian army to decimate the two kingdoms to the south, Judah and Benjamin, and take their remaining survivors into captivity for seventy years. One king’s efforts, his collective influence, Judah’s gullibility, and their religious clerics’ lack of integrity, and the overall national embarrassment of being known as God’s chosen people only to behave as the opposite would be the legacy Manasseh left behind.
God’s people were people who burned children alive.
But we burn people on the altar too.
Fair, we aren’t bowing before beasts made of bronze, silver, or gold. Those are the idols of the ancient world. No. Today our fires burn in the pits of systems, institutions, and celebrities. We sacrifice our women at the altar of male leadership, our children at the altar of predatory youth ministers, our corporate integrity at the altar of political syncretism, and our evangelistic outreach at the altar of doctrines formed by culture and geo-political events.
Like the young Jewish king, we seek the advice of mediums and necromancers, but we don’t use those names, we call them secular humanist life coaches spewing pantheistic teachings for gain and astrologists keeping the masses idiotized by looking up instead of forward, whose varied advices usher us toward a search for meaning and purpose in a finite universe with nihilistic philosophies.
In her book, Redeeming Power: Understanding Authority and Abuse in the Church, Dr. Diane Langberg mentions the sad events of the Rwandan genocide. She visited Rwanda to help, assist, and be part of the recovery process which followed the nightmare situation that unfolded in Rwanda as nearly a million people were slaughtered in less than one hundred days.
The world stood by and did nothing as thousands were hounded, rounded up, and massacred, at times, in front of cameras.
She mentions how churches opened their doors to victims only for those refugees to be slaughtered inside. The church, the safest place in a community, second only to a police station or a healthy home environment, became a tomb for people seeking refuge from bloodthirsty machete-wielding mobs. Church leaders considered the victims subhuman (cockroaches) and an unworthy, filthy ethnic group that deserved annihilation. Clergy and laity sanctioned the killings while others participated, some in their churches, lifting axes and machetes or whatever sharp utensils turned to weapons they could get their hands on to destroy the lives of innocent neighbors whose only crime was being born a Tutsi.
The church became a slaughterhouse and not just one church in an isolated event. Throughout the one hundred-day massacre, multiple church sites were used as entrapment areas to lure people seeking safety to their doors only to kill them when they arrived. If machetes did kill them from within, up close and personal, a barrage of bullets would pepper them from without, at a distance.
The sanctuary was a place where men, women, and children were offered up to the fire.
What I want us to be aware of is the ease with which we can offer our neighbors to the fire today.
Manasseh sacrificed his children to Molech, Baal, Asherah, or the host of heaven. He stood and watched as his offspring, the babies made of bone, flesh, blood, and life, filled with potential and a future, body covered with nerves and skin, perfect in their development and their progress, thrown in a pit of flames, its yelps and screams swallowed by scorching flames.
A man responsible for overseeing the nation God, this man, this leader, in the most influential position of the land descended to the darkest stretch of Jewish history for the sake of religious blessings. False religion to be exact.
So what makes us believe that we are not just as capable of committing such atrocities within our circles? We have created our fiefdoms with our varied denominations. We have gatekeepers watching for who is in and who is out depending on how one interprets a select passage of scripture. Others use ex-communication as if it were the only tool in the box of church disciplinary action.
The church is ripe with abuse of power and new idols.
Systems that invoke power, influence, dominance, and control. Systems that were produced initially to benefit some have been used to exploit others. Church bodies become oppressors instead of siding with the oppressed, just to get a piece of the power pie. To challenge political systems, policies, and concepts is to challenge the very church because the line between the two systems is non-existent now. Those who speak up are called anti-this or contra-that. Iconoclasts and disgruntled apostates. Not realizing that the very existence of the system-hungry church is apostate in theory and practice.
Institutions, colleges, seminars, faculties, and colleges that do no wrong. Teachings and teachers who hold on to their traditions and doctrines formed in one region of Europe are held as the only sound method of interpreting and understanding theology, killing anyone on the altar who dares challenge those precepts. The killing, here, isn’t done with sword or gun, it is done with derogatory statements, degrading comments, dismissive tones, and mockery.
Celebrities, in form and habit, take center stage, their victims not far behind. Bodies pile up beneath the altar, as worship bands play louder, smoke machines work in overdrive, and song bridges are repeated ad nauseam to dampen the lucidity of the sheep. Churches are plagued with the idolization of talented men and gifted women. Favoring the results-driven ministries over those focused on discipleship and integrity. Number build churches into megachurches, and megachurches become empires in their cities and states. Buildings and churches are made in the image of their teachers, following their every word as if it were the words of God. And when the truth of their misconduct, their wrongdoing, their coverup comes to light we cover for them because their giftedness supersedes their flaws.
In the same breath, we are more willing to restore broken men and women to power than we are to restore them to fellowship.
Damned, be power. It corrupts. Those who are corrupt already and take on the mantle of leadership further corrupt everyone around them.
The churches they lead become mass graves, spiritual mass graves as abuse runs rampant behind celebrity leaders.
From apologists to hipster Manhattanites to Quiverfull proselytes and televangelists hucksters, the cult of personality, celebrity status pastors and teachers, the Jesus 2.0 apostles, are surrounded by corpses.
They stand knee-deep in the blood, suffering, and spiritual disillusionment of the people they were called to serve but who they have delivered to the fires for the sake of power, influence, network time, conference seats, book deals, and front-page newspaper exposure.
What is a celebrity leader without a scandal? Who is the celebrity leader without a very public failure by which to round up the most ardent and loyal disciples around him? If failure will not unite the corrupt, success will. And a redemption story rakes in cash and new friends does it not?
Rwandan churches had compromised their integrity for political and cultural gain, but what is to be said of the German church that existed comfortably throughout the Nazi regime’s reign of terror?
What is to be said of the church in Germany where Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, wanderers, and those struggling with mental illnesses sought refuge in the church only to be loaded into train carts instead by clergy and laity?
The connection between the German church and the Nazi party was so well established that many avoided the church for fear of being apprehended by clergymen with ties to the Nazi regime.
Can you imagine men and women fleeing the church because it represented capture, imprisonment, torture, deportation, and extermination?
I can.
Before Hitler asked that children be burned in the fire, God’s people were burning people in the fire.
Things have yet to change, except, how we kill one another has advanced to the point of perfection. Our hands are often absent of ash and blood but still, the trail of bodies stretches behind us.
The young girl who was subjected to volleys of sexual assault by the talented youth leader is told to keep quiet because she probably deserved and enjoyed the “interaction” between them. The youth leader will be protected from law enforcement, vindicated by the church board, and later re-platformed as a champion of Christian ethics because look at the spiritual assault here endured! Consider how the youth program has swelled with new and fresh faces over the years! Should we now hamper this progress?
Consider the young woman who is the victim of constant battering and physical abuse at the hands of her husband, a choir director at their church, who will come forward with her abuse and be thoroughly silenced by the church board. How dare she go against her husband so publicly. Plus, the bruises she incurred were probably self-inflicted. Who are we to believe? The successful and charismatic choir director or the reclusive and embittered wife who seldom attends church anymore? The church will side with the husband when the wife contacts law enforcement, the church will even pay for his lawyer fees and bail. The church is here to care for those behind bars is it not? So it will financially support the wife-beater, pray for his soul, pray against his disgruntled wife, shame her from the pulpit before the congregation, and finally excommunicate her for not forgiving her husband as a godly wife is expected to.
Consider the young black minority member in the church, who, after enduring years of overt and covert racial animosity from fellow church members, is asked to leave the church or shut up about racial inequities in the world. The church does not condone such divisive talk. Anything that references racism is most likely a Marxist ploy to undermine the church anyway. Therefore, that member will be ostracized and blamed for the racial uproar in the church, although their only sin was believing a church-run by racists was capable of repenting of its hatred. Racist church members will grow fat with hubris as they pat one another on the back, explaining to everyone how there isn’t a racist bone in their body, nor one of racial animosity toward any member of a minority group. They say these and other things, of course, from the comfort and safety of their racially monochromatic church body. White pastors, white teachers, white choir directors, white board members, white worship band members who sing worship songs written, produced, and recorded by white people who live in white people’s havens. They will claim ignorance because they are ignorant and damned be the colored person who dares accuse them of racial awareness. To them, being color-blind, blind even to their race, is their safest bet in the world. Should anyone point it out, they will have to deal with the reality of their surroundings and the many people they have kept away from their church.
The bodies pile up. Their scent festers. Their rot is laid bare for the world to see.
Is this what the church does to people? Is this what God’s people are capable of, in the name of Jesus?
What To Do With The Bodies
The church sites in Germany where many were carted away from, led, usually, under the threat of corporal punishment if not death, were either destroyed by allied forces firebombs or demolished after the war. Those that survived the war were rebuilt and remodeled. Some that were razed to the ground were rebuilt. There is seldom a memory of the horrors that occurred within them because those sites are either home to new churches that have different goals or they have become visitor centers where services to God are seldom held but tourism and picture taking are welcome. A sitting priest or cleric welcomes all in, to gaze at the marvels of ancient cathedrals, walking to and fro, from stainless glass window to spire, in awe of a structure that once represented lofty piety and later horror and now ambivalence and distant memories.
German churches have moved on from their horrid complicity of yesteryear.
Church sites in Rwanda, however, have remained mostly untouched. Some of them house pyramids of skulls within. Bones of the deceased litter the inside of the church, piled up, some, five bodies high.
Their gaunt, skinless, lifeless structures gaze back at us as we look at them. We, of course, walk into the church, watch them watching us, and we leave, minding our next destination, not caring much for the gravity of the mass grave found within the church.
It’s easy, is it not, for us to move on from such a sight. How we look on, our minds barely touching the surface of the screams, the blood, the severed limbs, ruptured skulls, and crushed bones. Did boots stomp on those tiny skulls to deform them? Were those tiny skulls deformed before they died? How about the bones that are split in half. Did that violent act take place before that poor soul expired or after? What about the bullet holes found in the back of skulls? Were those mercy killings, to save the person from the horrors of rape that often took place before the altar? Did that bullet, hurling faster than the speed of sound, fired from no more than several feet away from the victim’s head, travel across that bridge of space and time in an act of love? Bullets travel with love too, you know. Love of country, family, race, and political party. They travel to stop the evil-doer next door. Evil with a name and a face, a family, and a future. Evil, of course, is a minor ethnic difference, in this case. One that doesn’t elevate nor diminish, it is something, well, determined merely by local leaders and national politicians. A whim. They determined who was evil and who deserved a hug from the projectiles launched from their guns over several days.
What do we say in the presence of such horror? More so, what does such horror say in the presence of God?
If one looks to the walls in these churches they will see pictures of saints, crosses hanging from nails, and the occasional scripture etched into them but in the center of the room you find bodies, dead, long dead, but still speaking.
Who will speak for us? If not God’s people then who?
If fact, I ask the same. If God’s people, the ones who have been ushered into the world with a message of hope, love, restitution, conciliation, redemption, and more, fail to live up to those admirable virtues only to turn on them, taking up instead, the mantles of hate, violence, power, oppression, armaments, machetes, and rape, what then?
If the children of the light are more depraved than the children of darkness, what hope has the world?
If the church, a symbol of hope, of love, of Christlikeness is hellbent on murder, rape, assault, abuse, and coverup, where are we headed?
Where Will God Go?
I’m reminded of the sequence of events in the Old Testament where Israel’s perpetual backsliding leads God’s Spirit to exit the sanctuary because God would not tolerate the worship of a wayward and corrupt people. He would not sit idly by, sanctioning intrepid idolatry, male prostitutes offering their services from the temple grounds, the poor growing poorer, the wealthy growing fatter at the poor’s expense, the Laws of Guidance and Fruition serving no other purpose than enslaving the masses and empowering religious autocrats.
It is to our benefit that God distances himself from the corruption of the soul.
He will either annihilate us all or distance Himself from us for a time, for our benefit.
Hope In The Face of Desolation
A strange thing happens in the life of the young king. Toward the end of his misery, the life of wickedness no longer suits him. The sin that festered in him began to chip gnaw at his soul.
After living with such depravity for so long, a person learns that there is no glory, no fame, no existential fulfillment at the end of it. The seeking after the wind, pursuance of sounds in the shadows, and the hope that the dead speak back to us are all, in the end, futile ventures.
Manasseh had sold his soul and his children to Mesopotamian spirits, searching after something only Yahweh could provide: rest for a weary soul.
He prays a prayer we have no record of, recorded only in the “records of the seers” and some presume the recorded prayers that have withstood the test of time are apocryphal, thereby not authentic and extra-biblical.
We have no resolute and accurate idea of the prayer but attempting to reach his mind in that state of repentance, we can come up with an idea of what his prayer might have sounded like.
What Have I Done? – A Prayer by Manasseh
“O, God, my God, Father of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Creator and Deliverer, Life-Giver, Rescuer of my soul. How I have sinned against you, My misery fills the air around me, Wickedness chokes the joy from me. Where will I go to find relief? Who will hear the complaint of a murderer? I have sought the death of my children for gain, And have lost more than I ever dared and wanted. I sought the council of witches, seers, and the dead. I have yet to hear the truth. I have yet to see light. O, God, my God, What have I done? Is there forgiveness left for me? Am I destined for the end I surely deserve? No matter how harsh, how grim, how destructive, I have merited it, and more! Destroy in me the me who sought after idols, Those of stone, wood, silver, gold; Of jade, ruby, and pleasure. Burn up from within me the lust for power, The greed for control, the haste for disobedience. My children, my children; How I wish I could join you in that fire, That the flames would consume me and deliver you, How I long to be by your side and you by mine. Will there be an end to my suffering, Lord? I hope not, for I surely deserve more. Forgiveness, I need it, but I am undeserving of it. Hear the rending of my heart, the failing of my soul, And relieve me, O, Lord, of the burden of life itself. From you, from all, I deserve woe. I deserve woe.”
We know not what it was Manasseh said but prayers, however intelligible or not, lucid or mumbling about, baby-like, are heard by God. He seeks and searches the depths of a man’s heart; He understands the wallows, fright, and desperation found in a woman’s heart; He comprehends the unspoken-ness of brokenness derived from sin and He bends down toward us and heals.
Where God finds it in His being to forgive such ills, I do not know. I cannot know for I am not God but I know that I seek this love, this selflessness, this giving of liberation, daily in my life.
God restored Manasseh to glory, respect, and honor. Not without temporal consequences, of course.
And God can restore the church too, you know.
The residence of bones and dried blood can be a residence of restoration and hope, again.
The structure where babies were massacred can be revitalized as a place where babies are saved and protected.
They can, yes, they can, if we dare, if we will, if we decide to return to God.
And this isn’t a televangelists’ call to open air-tent preaching with hell-fire and brimstone invective.
This is an opportunity to see the church be that which we all expect of it. To behave as the world demands it. As Christ commanded it.
Outside of this, outside of this hope, namely, Christ’s love reflected on His people, we will see nothing more, nothing less, than bones and death in the church of “god.”
Not Yahweh the Deliverer, the I AM, but the god of death.
If we change not, we will be servants in the slaughterhouse of god.
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed. – Proverbs 31:8 NLT
Currently Reading
“[A] book that’s ignited an enormous amount of argument and debate across the length and breadth of the Christian intelligentsia . . . Du Mez meticulously documents how–time and again–Christian institutions have indulged and often valorized aggressive hyper-masculine male leaders who proved to be corrupt, exploitive, and abusive. They weren’t protectors. They were predators.” — David French, The Dispatch
“A space cruiser, in search of its sister ship, encounters beings descended from self-replicating machines.” — MIT Press
There are many things the polyglot can learn from the German people but one of them is best left untouched and that is their unnecessarily strident effort to produce unpronounceable multisyllabic words that torture us none German-speaking people.
If you were to attempt to pronounce vergangenheitsaufarbeitung correctly while vacationing in Berlin without being affluent in German you’d most likely end up in the back of a pub, pants missing, and unsure of what day of the week or weekend it is.
Don’t ask.
The term, laughable as it might be, means to work off the past. It’s a term post World War II Germans developed to confront the demons of the Third Reich. The endeavor, first in a communal and later in a philosophical effort to grapple with the reality that the Wehrmacht was a willing participant in war crimes, not just the SS or the SA or the Gestapo, was too much for some German citizens to grasp. Their fathers, brothers, and sons had participated in war crimes against minorities and other Germans who dared resist the Reich’s ascent to power.
What was more compelling was that many if not most Germans saw themselves as victims of Russian Bolshevism to the east and American hyper-Capitalism to the west. Having capitulated in both wars, endured the humiliation that came with the Treaty of Versaille, and now the global rage at their participation in electing the world’s most dejected autocrat, Adolf Hitler, caused German minds to resist guilt and blame.
As Nazi masterminds fled the country for safer havens in Argentina, Brazil, and Washington D.C., German citizens were abandoned by their leaders to face the shame of their national wrongs alone. The allied forces made sure of it by forcing citizens to visit concentration camps where Nazi leaders and soldiers exterminated millions. Those who could not make the trip were forced to sit through hours of footage of German POWs digging up mass graves under the rifle of Russian or American soldiers.
German citizens could not believe that they had elected a government into power that could commit such atrocities and when their one thousand year reign came to smoldering ruins in a short tumultuous twelve years of horror, they were too ashamed, if not entirely shocked, that their good intentions were now considered war crimes and crimes against humanity.
So you can imagine the sudden humiliation so many of them must have felt and how much outrage they must have expelled at the thought that they were equal perpetrators of these crimes alongside Goebbels, Himmler, Eichmann, Goering, and Hitler.
It was easier for some of them to take such an escapist approach because so many of the concentration camps and extermination camps were well outside of city limits. They voted for the removal of the Jews, did nothing to protect them once the pogroms and deportations began, and so, to their knowledge, the Jews simply left Germany to live in the outreaches of the lands belonging to the Untermenschen.
Few actually understood that the ash falling over their homes was that of men, women, and children having been shoved into ovens and burned to crisp.
Millions of German citizens refused to take any blame for these war crimes because they claimed that they had never pulled a lever, sealed a door shut, or pulled a trigger to kill a single Jew or resister.
The unwillingness to admit any fault, feel any guilt or remorse, or apologize was culturally, historically, and nationally endemic to the German mind.
That is why, for years and years after the war many philosophers, sociologists, professors, and other unmentioned entities ventured into Germany, into the schools, the churches, the academic halls, the sciences, the farms, hospitals, and homes to better understand and also educate the German people that they must work out their past.
Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung!
They must work out of it the reality of their participation in order to progress as a nation. Progress without amnesia.
Certain focus groups were put together where Germans, both members of the former Reich, and their children were sat in rooms to discuss the goods, bads, and neutrals of Nazi Germany. Participants could not understand why they were seen as such vile people. How could the world hate them so much when they had never so much as launched a rock at a Jew. Though many felt Jews were inferior they did not exhibit the animosity that SS, SA, and Gestapo militants enacted on innocent people.
Learning from the Germans by Susan Neiman
One old lady, as recounted by Susan Neiman in her book,Learning from the Germans, used religious language to understand the ramifications of vergangenheitsaufarbeitung:
“Only a single participant in the Group Experiment expressed the kind of moral reflection you might expect. She was an older Catholic woman, one of the few subjects to use religious language. ‘I take my being bombed out as atonement for the great guilt we incurred toward the innocent. The Americans are right that we murdered more Jews than they murder Negroes in a year. That is the truth. I was bombed out three times. I haven’t done enough wrong in my life to justify that, but I would not ask God ‘What have you done to me?’ There was so much guilt to atone for that a part of the nation must atone for it on earth. Even if our children must atone for it again.’”
How humbling an approach from the old and wise Catholic woman whose willingness to confront the evil of her contemporaries, herself included, condemning it and receiving in that condemnation punishment for it actually set her free to the truth of reality.
This working out the past, as Susan states, is never final and never finished. Not in the sense that one lives with the guilt of their forefathers but that they live and are proud to carry the responsibility of making sure it never happens again.
Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung.
Germany has since accomplished one of the most exemplary multicultural societies in the world. This was previously an unimaginable feat considering the legacy of the Third Reich.
How did it happen? How has Germany advanced so much after two of the most humiliating military losses of all time?
Yes, yes, the nuances are many and we know they had help, financial help from the outside.
That’s a given.
But what is so enamoring about post-war Germany is that with time, decades even, they came to admit their participation in the war and their guilt as perpetrators and co-conspirators of the Nazi regime. Without that initial introspective adventure, I don’t believe Germany would have been able to progress out from Hitler’s shadow. But now they pride themselves on being responsible for the truth so that they never have to sink back to that level of complicity and apathy that got them into the war in the first place.
The truth is that the Germany of old, the Third Reich, was made up of average day-to-day Germans who wanted nothing more than to make their nation better for Germans, no matter the cost.
The price they were willing to pay ended up burning their nation to the ground but we mustn’t forget that from those ashes rose a hope-filled nation. Not hope from dismissing the truth of what happened but of confronting and accepting it.
The reason why Susan Neiman’s book is called Learning from the Germans is that she is a Jewish woman born in Atlanta, Georgia. She was raised in the American Deep South in a time where white Americans would lynch black Americans for sport, out in the open, in front of authorities and judges, who at times would participate in the crime.
Susan makes the claim that the United States of America never experienced this vergangenheitsaufarbeitung because there was no one around to point out to them that hate and racism is wrong.
After the American Civil War, Confederate soldiers returned home as losers. Confederate prisoners of war were released in mass if they simply signed a piece of paper certifying that the Union army was right to wage war against them for owning slaves and that they would now work together to make the country one again.
Easy out, if you ask me.
The same disgruntled soldiers made it home, humiliated, and now broke because their main source of income, slavery, was now outlawed and their former slaves had gone free or runaway while their owners were out in war. These same men launched terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camellia, and the White League, and continued to murder black Americans for the better part of the next one hundred years.
The Civil Rights movement took the scene in the late 1950s and 60s, and even then, Southern Americans refused to confront the narrative that their cause in the war was evil and that their loss was the best possible outcome for the betterment of the nation.
Americans in the South had not faced their past but had reconstructed their cause as a movement to be proud of. The petition to retain the right to own black people had become a war for states’ rights.
The American Deep South never faced international humiliation that forced them to reconsider the racism in society that spawned the need, or, rather, the want of race-based chattel slavery in the first place. Nor were they pressed from within, by the North, the Union Army to reconsider their literature, their ideas, their social and cultural understanding of prejudice and descrimination so there was no desire nor pressure to confront their wrongs.
In fact, the South never saw their cause as inglorious or pitiful. Theirs was a cause of American ideals and constitutional right to land and property (property being black slaves). No wonder there’s such a chasm of mercy and love in the American Deep South because right after the Civil War a vacuum of power was created as the Union Army dissolved back to the North which allowed for Klan terrorist activity to dominate the Southern plain for the next one hundred years.
A great part of the United States has yet to experience their vergangenheitsaufarbeitung and it shows. It shows by the continual appearance of Confederate flags flowing freely from government buildings. It shows by the various statues dedicated to Confederate leaders, soldiers, and generals still visible from predominantly black communities. It shows when the prevalent idea of the Lost Cause has revised the way Southerners view themselves as victims of an encroaching North instead of perpetrators of kidnapping, murder, and crimes against humanity. Throw terrorism in there as well.
It shows how on January 6, 2021, madmen stormed the United States Capitol building wielding the Confederate flag in the process, as if to say, the South will rise again but what these poor souls fail to understand is that the South never went away to begin with.
No one has ever worked off their past in the United States and much of it simmers to the top when discussions surround reparations or racial equality and reconciliation. The diatribe and visceral vitriol that spews from right-wing echo chambers and the darkweb are just another signifier that the racist sentiments of old are still very much alive.
Is it too late to ask the United States to vergangenheitsaufarbeitung? No. It’s never too late. The better question is who would force it to do this work?
Germany was forced to look at their own blunders, their national sins by the Americans, the Brits, the French and the Russians.
But what nation is powerful enough to turn America’s gaze away from the Orient and toward itself?
Perhaps that strength will not come from without but from within. Maybe this generation has only begun the planting of ideas and the next will water them. Perhaps we’re a generation too soon in considering a revisitation of our past.
I know for a fact we’re far behind Germany in working off our past.
Had America ventured into vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, had they worked off their past shortly after the Civil War, perhaps we would never have heard of Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, James H. Cone, or Martin Luther King Jr.
In fact, perhaps these precious souls would not have been assassinated during the Civil Rights era:
Medgar Evers
James Chaney
Andrew Goodman
Michael Schwerner
Viola Liuzzo
Vernon Dahmer
Martin Luther King Jr.
Nor thousands of innocent black Americans have perished under the rage of white lynch mobs.
Germany has accepted its past. It has accepted the fact that regular day-to-day citizens enabled the Nazi regime to take control of the country and enact the horrors it did. It accepted that its once proud and strong army, the Wehrmacht, was just another murderous instrument of the Reich. It accepted that the German culture and intellectual academies of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s had created the racist Autobahn necessary to catapult the Third Reich into power.
Hitler could have lived and died a miserable life and we would have never heard of the man had it not been for the overwhelming support he had received from the German people. But their desire for land, prestige, racial superiority, wealth, and dominance had clouded their moral compass…. Or had it?
But Germany has come out of that era. The new Germany, or perhaps the same, just sober now, is better. It is brighter and more aware of the venom of racism and ethnocentrism that still brews and festers within its subculture and in certain political circles. This new Germany denounces and condemns the resurgence of every nationalist entity that dares show its face. It has even criminalized Nazi rhetoric and memorabilia.
But in the US, however, whenever white supremacist resurge with rage the president asks them to stand back and stand-by thus dog whistling to the undertones of an unresolved past that, hey, at least here in America, this is still okay.
The resounding issue with the American mind is that triumph has clouded its moral memory. This great nation has won too many skirmishes, battles, wars, and revolutions thus allowing it to believe that these various wins thus makes them morally right. This line of reasoning is dangerous. It makes the 1776 American Revolutionary War as morally defensible as the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Just remember that very few, if any Americans were ever held accountable for the My Lai massacre the same way numerous German SS, SA, Gestapo, and Wehrmacht soldiers were tried, sentenced, and executed after World War II.
This refusal to revisit the past or perhaps confront our national complicity in these various atrocities committed by American citizens keeps us comfortably isolated in willful ignorance. We’re too proud to admit fault and too embarrassingly proud about questionable victories.
Hermann Goering
Hermann Goering, a German World War 1 veteran pilot, then Oberkommando der Luftwaffe (high commander of Nazi Germany’s Air Force) and the sixteenth president of the Reichstag demonstrated just how ridiculous it can be to evade the reality of our national crimes when confronted with them. While under trial in Nuremberg for crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes against the peace, and conspiracy to commit various other crimes, Goering viewed himself and the Reich’s cause as triumphant in the face of victors’ justice and revenge in Nuremberg.
“In fifty years you’ll be building monuments to us.” Goering states, superciliously so, at one point during his trial.
Many caricatures (such as one pictured here by Arthur Syzk) often played off of Göring’s weight and flamboyance. [Website]
Goering would later be sentenced to death by hanging but managed to escape the merciful fate by ingesting cyanide in his cell. The highest level living commander of the Reich had succumbed to chemical compounds of potassium cyanide in a cold cell.
Suicide was his last self-righteous act.
Goering’s prophecy never came true, thankfully. Not in Germany anyway.
But it did come true, in other ways, and in more prevalent ways, in the United States of America as statues and monuments erected in honor of Confederate dissidents peaked over the Southern horizon by the hundreds not many years after the Civil War came to a close and there they stand to this day.
Why?
Because the United States has yet to work off its sinful national past.
And Other Things
I’m old. I’m much more of a cantankerous old man today than I was yesterday. My health is depreciating quickly and my mind even quicker. My ability to retain information has lessened by half if not more these last few years and it troubles me greatly.
But, in hindsight, there’s much I rather not remember, perhaps much more I prefer to forget. At times, I find myself eerily content with the content that has discontentedly dislodged itself from my mind.
I’m happy with my wife and happy, sorry, I am overjoyed with the beautiful family that I’ve been blessed with.
Should all my memories fade away, and they will eventually, I will be content in knowing that my last thought is that I love them and I am loved by them.
And then all things will gray away and return to black… and then the Light.
Until then I’ll be here picking fights with no one other than my ignorant self and whoever else dares to join the fight.
“Sometimes I am asked if I know the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it but that I don’t even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.” – Elie Wiesel
It would be foolish to think that Germany alone perpetrated these horrendous, atrocious, and macabre crimes against humanity by loading fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters into cargo trains where they would be expediently and expeditiously denuded, gassed, cremated, exterminated, and forgotten.
In fact, we are all responsible for it.
Our lust for war, for land, for power, for fame and eternity. Our want of god-status to control the masses, to wave a staff and command battalions to raze villages to the ground. At our command we ravage and rape women, young and old. We remove from them the grace they once had by catapulting them into pits of hellish horror, as they succumb to the terror, the violence, the excruciating ripping and tearing of their body, and also their soul. And should these same victims survive the waves of assault, the many nights of rape, they will eventually be retraumatized by the presence of a baby whose sheer existence if both a reminder of how strong a woman’s body can be but also how heinous the production of human life can be, also.
A miracle and a tragedy.
How many children were born into our world, unwanted, cast away, to die on the cold red earth that lay under these camps? How many of them would be gathered in the most violent fashion, speared through with a soldier’s knife, and cast off to the side to bleed out, its hours on earth complete and without meaning. How many were thrown into red hot ovens, cremated alive, screaming and reaching for a hand that would not come? How many would be shot at, stomped on, trampled, gassed, or thrown into mass graves to be buried alive, nameless?
Individuals brutalized, time and again, by sadists who wanted nothing more than to reduce everyday people to rubbish. Reduce their humanity to rodent status. Reduce their beliefs to fallacies and fables. Reduce their sanctity and right to life to an open grave that could not be satiated or content with the number of bodies it fed on.
Our daily fascination with power, lust, control, land, and death led us to this point where we engineered campgrounds whose only purpose for existence was for the decimation and obliteration of human life. Though secondary and tertiary administrative functions were performed at these camps it does not detract or diminish the reality of its main function: extermination.
We can visit a meat farm and find how clean the executive’s office may be. How well-kept the lunchrooms are, the quality of service provided there, the standard of safety and health offered by the kitchen staff, the instructions on workplace respect speared by the human resources personnel, and how coworkers thrive within their scope of work but this does not do away with the reality that down the hall, down the road from this very location there are animals being slaughtered, butchered, quartered, organized, packaged and transported to our location convenience supermarket for consumption.
The difference between death camps and meat farms is that the latter function to bring forth something to society, sustenance and food, pleasure, and contentment. The former spends its time in existence butchering and slaughtering people as if they were but animals or perhaps portraying them as such for no other reason, no purpose, no outcome, no other merit to the planet other than making men into ash falling from the sky.
People, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of family members ushered into the afterlife in the most grotesque and systematic way.
We are responsible for that.
Ya, tis true that the Nazi party, the SS, the Gestapo, the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, and the Reichstag; ministers of finance, propaganda, transport, sciences, art, and ecclesiastic functions were the sharp edge of this horrific sword but the medal, the substance that allowed for this same device to cut and destroy is humanity.
This weapon was used by the Germans then but the same weapon can be used by Americans, Russians, Cambodians, the Argentine, Chileans, Congolese, Vietnamese, Korean, and more.
It is true that those who barked orders at prisoners and victims of this death camp spoke Deutsch but violence, brute force, rape, sword, cannon, improvised explosive devices, booby traps, claymores, dynamite, and atomic bombs come and devastate in all languages.
But hope lies in the human spirit that if there is the capacity for violence to tear down and destroy there is equally the same amount of violence available to build up and liberate and that is what we witnessed in the years, months, weeks, and days leading up to January 27, 1945. The Red Army steamrolled through the plains of Russia, Ukraine, and finally, Poland to liberate any and all death and work camps once occupied and maintained by Nazi criminals, in hopes of ending this horrific war against humanity.
These were but a few great things the Red Army accomplished in the war.
But the liberation and ultimate salvation of the remaining survivors of the Auschwitz extermination camp was a resounding song of the resilience of the human will, the human soul in spite of absolute horror and death.
We remember those lost though remembering them all, by number, by name, by title, by career, by volition, by social standing, by economic strife or success, by religion, by sex, by orientation, by health, by facial features, and bodily deformities, by birth or by death, it is impossible to know them all but we attempt, time and again, to remember them all.
I’ve yet to visit what remains of this hellish place but I hope one day I may. I don’t know if I will be able to compose myself on the way there because my trip there will be accomplished out of my own free will, on my own two feet, and hopefully with the presence of my family.
My children need to see it. My girls need to witness the mountains of children’s shoes, the mountains of glasses, the mountains of hair, and the mountains of clothing that were left behind. The extracted gold teeth, the location of what was formally mass graves, mass ovens, and mass gas chambers.
My children need to bear witness not only to the reality of our capacity for evil but also our capacity for good.
There was good, too, you know.
January 27, 1945.
There was good.
There is no redemptive telling of this war other than the complete obliteration of Nazi Germany as it and what it stood for was relocated to the nonexistence it once wanted to exert on the Jews and other ubermensch or people they considered of less worth.
Nazi Germany is gone. Thank God.
These death camps are gone!
What remains of them is but a ghost, a spirit, a shadow of what they stood for!
Gone! The people. Gone!
The fathers, gone!
Mothers, gone!
The children and babes who hungered for milk and the nearest familiar and friendly face, gone.
All gone.
But what remains and rears its nasty head time and again in our timeline is us, our capacity to create these same systems of evil and death.
The substance that existed in Germans then is the same that exists in us today.
It would be childish of us to think otherwise. Look, read, and listen and you will find that in some recess, some nation, some hidden place of society there still exists the same sword and the same sharpness cutting and tearing time and again.
If the liberation of Auschwitz death camp serves for anything it is that there is hope that we, too, as a people, as a race will be redeemed and liberated from this filth in our hearts that drives our efforts violently toward destruction and death.
I pray one day we too can be liberated. Delivered from this.
To those who perished and to those who survived,
We continue to honor you, your memory, your loss, and your triumphal resilience in the face of complete annihilation.
We cannot and will not blame you for doubting, for failing, for giving up, for giving in, or for wanting an easy out in the sight of absolute horror.
There wasn’t much of a choice either way.
We honor you. We will continue to honor you. Continue to fight so that this doesn’t happen again.
I hope we succeed.
Signed,
Olivet Theory
P.S.
To hell with the Nazis.
Featured Image. I do not own the rights to this image.
Olivet Theory 