Kathryn - Kat - Allen ([info]katallen) wrote,
@ 2005-04-20 00:31:00
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The wedding! Kind of vanished a bit ::grins:: but Den has been given the bad news. So now some exposition and some bedroom activity, and the beginning of the end should become the middle of the end almost overnight.

At least I know I'm going to be over 80k -- whether I'll make it the 100k I predicted... I'm not so certain.

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78,500 / 100,000
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And in other news -- this is what happened in Munich in 1943 while Joseph Ratzinger was manning an anti-aircraft gun because he had no choice but to obey.

http://www.jlrweb.com/whiterose/articles_inspires.html

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/rose.html

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/gill-white-rose.html

There was a choice. It wasn't one I'd have wanted to face, but there was a choice, and to deny that is to make excuses rather than owning up to being human and fallible. And to deny that there was a choice is to deny that in Munich in 1943 other teenagers accepted the consequences of resisting evil.

If you believe in God, and goodness, and martyrdom -- then what they did certainly shouldn't be dismissed as futile.

So, rather than celebrate the rise to power of Joseph Ratzinger -- I'm taking time out to remember the many men, women, and children, who chose to make a stand against evil, however small, however passive, however futile. Because while I don't know whether I could ever be that brave -- I do know that they were.

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[info]mrissa
2005-04-20 11:59 am UTC (link)
I find it particularly unconvincing that Benedict XVI is saying one had no choice but to obey the Nazis when his papal predecessor was who he was and did what he did.

And sure, it would be hard to resist; unless you were some kind of great moral leader or...oh. Yeah. That.

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[info]matociquala
2005-04-20 02:37 pm UTC (link)
Yeah. That.

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[info]ratmmjess
2005-04-20 03:56 pm UTC (link)
As [info]rozk says:

"Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict, is a man with a lot of intransigent positions about faith and morals which he believes to be absolute and non-negotiable truths. Many of those positions have real world consequences which condemn a lot of thirteen-year-olds male and female to various sorts of misery and death. If, say, the use of condoms or the absolute wrongness of homosexuality or quietism in the face of oppressive fascist regimes, rather than forming political alliances with Communists, are non-negotiable positions, then so is giving passive consent to the rule of the Nazi party at a point when it was engaged in the Holocaust. As he is so fond of pointing out to the rest of us, we cannot pick and choose and the duty to bear witness to absolute truth is incumbent on all of us at all times."

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[info]kendwoods
2005-04-20 01:11 pm UTC (link)
A most excellent post, Kat. Thank you for sharing.

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[info]xerne
2005-04-20 03:10 pm UTC (link)
So you don't believe reports of his desertion?

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[info]chance88088
2005-04-20 04:05 pm UTC (link)
you mean his desertion at the very end of the war when it was obvious the tide had turned?

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[info]xerne
2005-04-20 04:08 pm UTC (link)
So you believe them but think they are mitigated by circumstances. Ok.

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[info]raecarson
2005-04-20 03:43 pm UTC (link)
And to deny that there was a choice is to deny that in Munich in 1943 other teenagers accepted the consequences of resisting evil.

Yeah. THOSE teenagers are honest-to-God heroes.

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[info]chance88088
2005-04-20 04:08 pm UTC (link)
well said, Miss Kat

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[info]jmeadows
2005-04-20 04:42 pm UTC (link)
*nod*

Thank you, Kat.

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[info]dichroic
2005-04-20 05:06 pm UTC (link)
I am not sure I could have done what the Scholls did. Or what Hanna Senesh did, or the Maqui or the Danish or.... I've heard stories of martyrs and of the Holocaust my whole life and I still don't know. If I can't hold myself to that standard I can't hold others to it.

But you're right, there is a difference between saying "I did what I had to do" and "I was weak and wrong", and that, at least, Benedict XVI should have done.

And thank you for linking to those stories. Even after the six years of Hebrew school there are so many lke that I haven't heard of or didn't know details of, and I think knowing what others have done is a thing that can both help prevent the need for that sort of action in future, and inspire it if (God forbid) it becomes necessary.

(Funny - I've just been participating in a Penn Writers' House dicussion Al Filreis (of your last link) has been running.)

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[info]trinker
2005-04-21 03:07 pm UTC (link)
and inspire it if (God forbid) it becomes necessary.

Is it not necessary right now? I think we are on the verge of it becoming so.

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[info]dichroic
2005-04-21 03:20 pm UTC (link)
I don't like Shrub, but last I saw he was not sending people to the gas ovens.

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not sending people to the gas ovens
[info]trinker
2005-04-21 03:36 pm UTC (link)
(Note to [info]katallen, please let me know if you'd rather have this discussion take place elsewhere.)

Is that the only criterion?

I find the quelling of free speech, the open-ended detainment in Gitmo, and the situation at Abu Ghraib to be loud warnings of the possibility of further actions.

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Re: not sending people to the gas ovens
[info]dichroic
2005-04-21 03:56 pm UTC (link)
I'd be happy to move it if either of you prefer.

Those things are all cause for wariness, certainly. But we have protections that the Weimar Republic didn't: Constitutional safeguards, a more heterogeneous population, a history of surviving other episodes like the McCarthy era, and now places like this where the rest of us can speak out so those in power don't have the only bullhorns.

Yes, Tom DeLay is trying to make judges use the Bible as their standard and that scares me. But it's also true that Garry Trudeau is making public fun of him without getting hauled off and executed.

But I'm being parochial here. I don't think the US can be compared to Nazi Germany, but there are a lot of places where there's scope right now for actions as brave and risky as those of the White Rose. Darfur, Uganda... (Google "night commuters" sometime when you want to be appalled) ... and not a few others.

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Re: not sending people to the gas ovens
[info]trinker
2005-04-21 04:04 pm UTC (link)
But we have protections that the Weimar Republic didn't: Constitutional safeguards, a more heterogeneous population, a history of surviving other episodes like the McCarthy era, and now places like this where the rest of us can speak out so those in power don't have the only bullhorns.

I think that we in the U.S. are complacent about the things that are supposed to guard us against situations like Nazi Germany. The continuing efforts to keep dissent from the eyes of the Republican faithful disturb me greatly.

That heterogenous population...yes, that's true in "Blue America" perhaps, but I'm sitting offshore from Red America right now, and that's not what I'm seeing.

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Re: not sending people to the gas ovens
[info]dichroic
2005-04-21 05:33 pm UTC (link)
I agree that complacency is a danger. All I'm saying is, we might be in Weimar Germany but we are not in Nazi Germany. The fact that we're having this discussion in a public forum is a pretty good proof.

And I'm here in Arizona, which is pretty bloody red - yet here we have a mix of Anglos, Hispanics, and Native Americans (Navajo, Pima, Tohono O'Odham, others). I don't know St. Augustine particularly (I read a few entries in your LJ), but Florida in general has more than a few Latinos, Jews, and blacks. And further, you're there and speaking out and I'm here and speaking out, even if it's just in the grocery or the office. In Weimar Germany, the population looked a lot more alike, even the Jewish members. They didn't turn on morning TV and see Lin Sue Cooney and Al Roker, and I think it's those little daily contacts that may make a big difference.

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Re: not sending people to the gas ovens
[info]trinker
2005-04-21 05:54 pm UTC (link)
North Florida is rather white. The ethnic diversity in Florida tends to be in the southern end, by Miami.

I'll buy the idea that the U.S. now is best compared to the end days of Weimar. (or the beginning of Nazi Germany)

We're *not* seeing as many positive portrayals of Islam and Arabs, nor positive affirmations of the right to dissent, as would be reassuring to me, anyway.

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Re: not sending people to the gas ovens
[info]dichroic
2005-04-21 06:18 pm UTC (link)
Come to think of it, I have an aunt-in-law from that end of the state who likes to explain that "Florida cracker" is intrinsically different from "Georgia cracker" and doesn't carry racist connotations. Whatever.

I do disagree with your last statement. We *are* seeing positive affirmations of the right to dissent - right here. This counts! So do other LJs and wrigins all over the web. So does NPR, so do college campuses arguing over whether they should get federal funds if they ban military recruiters. Yes, it's appalling that a citizen got arrested for wearing a dissenting T-shirt at a Bush rally - but the fact that the arrest (which I'm sure the President would prefer to be unpublicized) was shown on mainstream news, where I learned of it, speaks loudly.

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Re: not sending people to the gas ovens
[info]katallen
2005-04-21 07:48 pm UTC (link)
Sorry to butt in ::grins::

You can't cause people to stop wearing sloganed T-shirts without making an example of someone for wearing one. Looked at in that light, a repressive state would gain more from showing an early arrest - so discouraging other people from that mode of expressing opinion - than they would from disappearing him and putting a bullet in his head.

It's after you've discouraged the majority of the population that you can assume anyone ignoring the warnings is a serious malcontent and quietly remove them from the picture.

Not saying that that's what's happening - just that it's how such things can be done.

I wonder how many people have thought twice about wearing a T-shirt with a negative slogan since.

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Re: not sending people to the gas ovens
[info]trinker
2005-04-22 03:32 am UTC (link)
What I see are little points of light against an encroaching darkness attempting to stifle the dissent. I don't believe that we are likely to end up with complete censorship in the manner of 20th century dictatorships -- I think we're much more likely to get a media-savvy manipulative illusion of freedom instead.

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Re: not sending people to the gas ovens
[info]dichroic
2005-04-22 05:36 pm UTC (link)
I keep thinking in quotations in response to this and there are a lot of them, so forgive me for using other people's words. "For the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not." That's Biblical, but I know it from A Wrinkle in Time. I'm not trying to be a Pollyanna here, and I'm not saying this country doesn't have blemishes, "hell, huge running sores", as Spider Robinson said. I just don't believe the patient is dying of those bedsores.

We have too many people with too diverse experience. An illusion will fool a lot of us, but it won't catch all of us forever - "you can't fool all of the people all of the time". Lincoln, I think. Further, I do think those points of light make a difference. "A torch is a torch, no matter where you put it", from one of the Little Colonel books - and if nothing else convinced me that the persistent voices of a view can make a difference, it's seeing the huge change from the casual endemic racism of those books to today.

I don't think we'll get to the point of gas ovens. I really don't. I do think it's the responsibilty of people of good will to keep talking and acting to make damn sure we don't. It's much more likely to happen if we despair and shut up.

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Re: not sending people to the gas ovens
[info]trinker
2005-04-22 07:32 pm UTC (link)
At what point short of gas ovens does one set the outer marker? I believe we're crossing it now, and that it's important to note that there's a line being crossed.

I don't believe that "racism" is a homogenous phenomenon. Racism, or rather xenophobia, is a shifting line, and right now Arabs and Muslims are on the other side of it. People who should know better, people whose backgrounds should give them a visceral understanding about the foolishness and harmfulness of this sort of action are jumping on the "Arab == terrorist" bandwagon, and others who have just learned not to be racist toward black or Latino groups in the U.S. are expending their vitriol on Arabs and those perceived as Arab.

Gitmo and Abu Ghraib are black smears on the white hats, and they persist.

I'm not aiming for despair. I just wish for less of the blind optimism.

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Re: not sending people to the gas ovens
[info]dichroic
2005-04-22 07:43 pm UTC (link)
I'm not blind about it - I'm leaning more toward "This too shall pass" than "Things are wonderful", because clearly they're not.

But even the concept that racism is a bad is not one that's always been here. I would submit that the prejudice against Arabs/Muslims currently is that they're evil, not that they're subhuman inferiors. I don't know why I think this is slightly better ("better" in the sense of "more surmountable": I think it's that declaring someone an enemy requires giving him a more human status than declaring him vermin does.

To make it doubly, trebly clear, I am NOT saying this sort of xenophobia is good or acceptable or pardonable. It is itself an evil thing and urgently needs to be fixed.

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This too shall pass...
[info]trinker
2005-04-22 10:43 pm UTC (link)
It's not much comfort to those on the fire to know that the mania for burning will die down.

I've been hearing people spouting the idea that "the only thing those people understand is...", and claiming that Islam is inherently an evil religion that needs to be stamped out. And saying that we "need to kill all those terrorists", as if there were some finite quantity.

I've been hearing people saying this in New York City (in Borough Park), and in other places. I don't know that "evil" is better than "subhuman inferior". Blanketing an entire population with an inescapable automatic qualification for eradication...there's always a reason behind it, and to me, changing the reason doesn't change enough.

Maybe it's just that the specter of being bashed because I was part of an ethnic group perceived as economically competitive still haunts me. It's not a current concern for me, but it was cold comfort then, and it's cold comfort now, to say "well, at least they don't think I'm subhuman".

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Re: This too shall pass...
[info]dichroic
2005-04-22 10:55 pm UTC (link)
So what are you doing about it? I don't know you; you may be spending your whole life, all your time and all your money in the fight against hatred. Whether or not, I do believe your speech here and elsewhere is a not insigificant thing.

I've heard prejudice against Muslims too, as well as the slightly different idea that it's not the people who are evil but the religion. I grew up around it. My mother, otherwise reasonably unprejudiced, has trouble with the idea that any settlement between Israel and the Palestinians needs to acknowledge that *both* sides are humans with certain human rights, including a safe place to live. One of the things that made me see that the evil was not inherent in the religion* was a single person, a former Muslim coworker. He made a difference to my beliefs, and I'm sure to several other people. Now I can pass on what I learned from him. Hate isn't all that snowballs, it just has a distessing way of snowballing faster than its opposite.

*It might be inherent in the fundamentalist movements within the religion however. Fundamentalists of many stripes scare me.

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Re: This too shall pass...
[info]trinker
2005-04-22 11:12 pm UTC (link)
What am I doing about it? With some hiatuses, I've been speaking out in fora of various sizes for the last 21+years. (I started young.) Just...starfish, y'know?

Fundamentalist religions are as much the enemy of liberty as fascism -- the Christian Sharia is at least as bad as the Islamic sort, and I'm concerned that we'll slide into the same sort of pit as Iran if we're not watchful.

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Re: This too shall pass...
[info]dichroic
2005-04-23 12:12 am UTC (link)
Re starfish: "It mattered to *that* one.

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Re: This too shall pass...
[info]trinker
2005-04-23 12:18 am UTC (link)
...now if only I can enlist more starfish savers...

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[info]kmkibble75
2005-04-20 05:22 pm UTC (link)
Thank you for posting all of those links. I've never heard of the White Rose, but now I doubt I'll ever forget. And I believe you're right in what this says -- that saying you were forced to do something is shirking off the responsibility for your actions.

Pope Benedict XVI never did anything that is unforgivable. But if you choose to view certain issues in black and white, you have to see them all in black and white. And in a black and white world whether you were forced to do something or not isn't taken into consideration.

So I don't think people should attack this pope for anything he did in 1943. But they do have a right to question his beliefs and statements in 2005.

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[info]pjthompson
2005-04-20 06:04 pm UTC (link)
Kudos, Kev.

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[info]mindelemental
2005-04-21 06:40 am UTC (link)
I don't hold Ratzinger/Benedict's service in the German military against him, actually -- I know that I'd have served, had I been a German youth in that era.

But yes, I would sooner remember those who did make a stand. And I might as well put in a word for Canaris -- unsung, tragic, and the one person who did make a stand and who was in a position where he could have changed things by himself.

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[info]katallen
2005-04-21 09:20 am UTC (link)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1572667,00.html

"He has since said that although he was opposed to the Nazi regime, any open resistance would have been futile — comments echoed this weekend by his elder brother Georg, a retired priest ordained along with the cardinal in 1951."

I don't hold his service against him - the leaders of the White Rose also served and did so, initially, with an enthusiasm JR denies.

I have no idea what I'd do. But I hope that the least I could do afterwards - if I chose my own survival over standing against evil - is to acknowledge that it was a choice, that others chose differently, and that standing against evil, even when you can't win, is not futile but inspirational.

I don't care that JR was ordinary - I care that his excuses diminish those who were not.

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