More on forgiveness: the trial of Oskar Groening
In line with our recent discussions on forgiveness, what it means and how and when it should be given, I came across this story today:
A former SS officer known as the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz” and a woman who survived the Nazi death camp delivered wrenching testimony in a German courtroom Wednesday as his historic trial neared a verdict.
German national Oskar Groening, 94, stands accused of 300,000 counts of “accessory to murder” in the cases of deported Hungarian Jews sent to the gas chambers between May and July 1944…
Groening served as a bookkeeper, sorting and counting the money taken from those killed, collecting cash in different currencies from across Europe and shipping it back to his Nazi bosses in Berlin.
So that’s what Groening did. As for how much guilt he thinks he bears, this is what he said at his trial [emphasis mine]:
[Groening] has acknowledged “moral guilt” but denied any legal culpability since the trial in the northern city of Lueneburg near Hamburg opened in April.
In a statement to the court read out by one of his attorneys Wednesday, Groening expressed his “humility and guilt before the survivors and victims’ families”.
He also stressed that he bore “shared guilt for the Holocaust, although my part was small”. But he “expressly” stopped short of asking for “forgiveness for my guilt”.
“In view of the scale of the crimes committed in Auschwitz and in other places, I do not believe I am entitled to make such a request,” he said. “I can only ask my Lord God for forgiveness.”
So (to refer back to yesterday’s post, in which I discuss three Jewish terms for “forgiveness” that describe three different types of forgiveness), Groening is asking only for kapparah, which is forgiveness from God. He minimizes his part in the Holocaust by saying it was “small,” but from the description in the article it hardly sounds small at all.
Why is he reluctant to ask for forgiveness from survivors such as Irene Weiss, a former Auschwitz inmate who testified against him at his trial? He says that despite his small role, the magnitude of the crimes was so great that he does not feel “entitled” to ask for forgiveness (I assume in that context he means a form of mekhilah or of selikhah) from them. He is implying that some crimes are too great to be forgiven.
It seems that Irene Weiss agrees:
Showing two photographs of her family as they arrived at Auschwitz that were recovered 25 years after the Holocaust, Weiss said her mother, three younger siblings, and older brother were all murdered soon after in the gas chambers.
Her father was forced to work as a Sonderkommando, removing corpses from the gas chambers and cremating them, until the SS shot him.
Weiss said she was unable to forgive Groening.
“He has said that he does not consider himself a perpetrator but merely a small cog in the machine,” she said.
“But if he were sitting here today wearing his SS uniform, I would tremble and all the horror that I experienced as a 13-year-old would return to me.
“Any person who wore that uniform in that place represented terror and the depths to which humanity can sink, regardless of what function they performed.”
By not asking her forgiveness, Groening is emphasizing his awareness of the magnitude of the harm done (as opposed to what he considers his small role), and refusing to put any pressure on her to forgive him. Would some Christians say she should do so anyway? To me, that seems wrong—but then again, as I’ve said before, I’m not a Christian.
Would she receive some psychological relief from forgiving him? Perhaps, but not necessarily, and at what price? I’m not sure it would be possible, or even desirable, for most people who had gone through something like Weiss endured to forgive the perpetrators of the crimes. She lives with an almost unimaginable history, and perhaps the best thing she can do for herself is exactly what she’s doing now: to bear witness in a court of law.
[NOTE: The state of unawareness that Groening describes himself as having had is extraordinary. Either he is lying, misremembering, or is a master of protective denial. Perhaps all three:
In Wednesday’s statement, Groening said he had known at the time about the “mass murder” at Auschwitz but was unaware until his trial about the horror endured by the victims while they were still alive.
“For example I had no idea about the terrible conditions during the deportations — that shocked me,” he said.
“It also became clear to me how much Auschwitz and the Holocaust influenced the lives of the witnesses I heard here. They have obviously suffered their whole lives from their experiences in Auschwitz and the loss of so many loved ones.”
I’ll accept that he may not have known directly about the conditions during the deportations. Maybe he also didn’t know the extent of the torments perpetrated on those who weren’t gassed immediately at the camps. But under what conditions did he think people were deported? In first-class railway carriages? Or didn’t he think about it at all? And what effect did he think having one’s whole family murdered would have on a person? Did he expect them to just shrug and go on?]
I wouldn’t trust out-of-context statements to try to assess someone’s moral state. Less so, if he’s on trial. Even less so, if the statements are translated. Even less than that, translated from German – I don’t know why, but I’m rarely able to understand things that were originally written in German. Give me the most obscure Asian or French philosopher and I’ll give him a try, but don’t hand me any Kant.
Nick:
Yes, obviously it’s impossible to ascertain his sincerity or moral state. He could be lying in various ways.
I am merely discussing this as presented. As presented, it presents an interesting moral dilemma. This isn’t really about Groening himself and what happens at his trial. Take the situation as a hypothetical and go from there.
As i tried to point out yesterday, it is not about the definition of the words as they stand today and as they stand in a secular atheistic interpretation.
one has to first (if one doesnt already) believe or imagine what the real belief would be like, and then think as to what the premises of said belief would cause once concluded or grasped
also, such other conclusions show whether a persons belief is more real or less real. is their belief in their belief or true?
That if you try to understand the concepts without the other concepts that go with them in a fashion that is actual not ignored or imagined in the wrong, then you will get it. if you try to address them from the materialist view point of the secular word, the concepts will not be understood, seem crazy etc.
in fact, the explanations or musings that neo generates would be completly different as a person who is in an audience watching a magician vs a person on the wings on stage seeing the mechanics behind the scenes would see and understand
Context is everything and the secular materialist world often ignores such contexts and the difficulty inherent in analysis from the perspective of what is being analysed, and not analysis in the perspective of you as the other person.
ie. you must imagine yourself as the other person, AND include the premises and knowlege that they have, ignore what they dont, and pretend to be them… otherwise, your just analysing what you would be like in their shoes, which really isnt a valid analysis as your not in their shoes, you know other things which change your context, and while you might generate some interesting points, the farther you are from that person, the less you actually understand about them through such analysis
you can see this all the time on the left when they try to project what thye know today, on the people of the past. how can someone be racist prior to the concept being invented, spoken, written down, and used?
what mental concept did they use to conclude that these people were racist, when all these people were just doing what was going on at the time and the concept that would premise out like a flower blooming did not exist. it exists for the modern person to look back and say, how could you do that, there are germs there, and so on and so on.
the only time i have ever seen a secular athiest understand and get it, and illustrate it, was from the comedy team of penn and teller – specifically Penn Jillette…
he illustrates that this is an exercise in thinking AS something, not ABOUT something.
the point is in a piece that says:
How Much Do You Have to Hate Somebody to Not Proselytize?
and so its not about forgiveness directly, but it DOES illustrate the point beautifully [ and you can watch it if you dont want to read it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owZc3Xq8obk ]
and what was missing from most of the comments/analysis yesterday was the inclusion of beliefs and that people are serious about them, and dont wear them like dinner jackets they can take off and on… at least those on the not left dont… those on the left, are always willing to reform their beliefs for a reason that triggers to them its ok… or that they would suffer if they didnt at least fake it…
I have a priest in my church that i no longer go to, he is the third in the line of those there while i have attended and the changes each brought were interesting with the latest being real hip on LGBT, and so on and so forth. so the church now helps LGBT kids, to which i say, what about the kids who arent? what about the kids who think that they have to pretend to be to get any help? how is that being christian in the real sense vs a poseur and political sense? why are you not helping anyone who comes in need? “sorry jesus said, we dont help whores” wouild come to mind for me to say to him.
but then there is the point he makes in service, that all are welcome at christs table, and can recieve sacrament… i wanted to ask him, what is the point of confirmation? if he says so you can recieve sacriment, i would say, then whats the point if you give it to anyone who wanders in regardless of confirmation, sin, etc…
when i see him do that, and kiss the men to show how he is so liberal and inclusive and so on, i wonder if he realizes that a valueless church is not a church its a social gathering in the form of a church.
well the same thing applies to forgiveness…
its meaning changes when you understand the belief, and without that, all analysis is eroneous even if its clever, entertaining, seems deep, etc.
the main point is that to a christian that really believes, this world is not real. what happened to the jews, and millions and millions of others through time, is not real. their suffering is not real, their pain is not real, your suffering and pain is not real. its all transitory, temporary and serves gods purpose. or as the bible says, reality is a crucible in which your soul is burned to remove the dross and leave pure gold in its place.
in this vein, forgiveness is about showing god that you get it, and that you arent going to be sucked into the petty things that happen in this world… now, thats easy to say, and maybe even easy to get, but its not easy to practice. which is why we have saints and such to give example to the extent in which belief modifies the regard for reality….
if you get this, go up and read neo musing on the subject, its all grounded in materialist thought. ie. there is nothing that is not material, and so there is no morals, there is no purpose, and the only reality that exists is the one in front of you, and there is no mystical spagetti monster in the sky to change that meaning
nothing wrong in that, its just a different mode of thought, though its the one the communists push and the one that denies the metaphysical in total.
i have to go to the nxt post to illustrate or find that i am standing on my knees before procrustes…
I remember reading in Death Traps, by Belton Cooper, of the 3rd Armored Division liberating Dora-Mittlebau, a subcamp of Buchenwald. They found 250 people still alive among the stacks of corpses, but the doctors said that while they would survive, they had such extensive brain damage from starvation, that they would probably never recover as fully functioning humans again, but would be “vegetables”.
After Malmedy, most US units would rip the shirts off of POWs, as the SS tattooed the blood type of their troops on the right side of the chest. Prisoners with tattoos were usually shot. I have no problem with that.
damn, that was still too long..
my point here is to take an excerpt and show how the whole of it changes once you get the point of the whole of the belief system, and not how you believe in that position… (while remembering we are human and forget that and act without that, and that is the point of striving)
1) Groening is asking only for kapparah, which is forgiveness from God. He minimizes his part in the Holocaust by saying it was “small,” but from the description in the article it hardly sounds small at all.
Groening is asking the only person who is able to actually grant the forgiveness through understanding that jesus gave god, and to do so with others who are not in the same belief or following it as they should, has no purpose.
the next point will explain why..
2) Why is he reluctant to ask for forgiveness from survivors such as Irene Weiss, a former Auschwitz inmate who testified against him at his trial? He says that despite his small role, the magnitude of the crimes was so great that he does not feel “entitled” to ask for forgiveness (I assume in that context he means a form of mekhilah or of selikhah) from them. He is implying that some crimes are too great to be forgiven.
he is in a catch 22 though most would not be nice enough to see that, and have any niceness towards him. a point i am very familiar with having aspergers and being mistreated as a matter of course often without others even being aware that they are doing that…
one thing PEOPLE who are angry and upset and want revenge (not restitution, repentance, etc), is that they refuse to accept circumstances and what those circumstances allow, and what a person is willing to do.
in this case, they are very very keen on requireing sainthood of every ex nazi cog big and small or else they will get their revenge. only saints get out alive, and only saints would not be present to be questioned.
what is that sainthood they require? the onus that someone ordered to do something and to do so in a regime historically known for the depth of its tortures and punishments to the extreme, must refuse to participate.
people in the US today are having a problem refusing to participate with the liberal game of hide the flag…. to the point that walmart would not make a confederate flag, but would make an ISIS flag!!!! why? because they are doing what they are told to do to not ruin their lives, their families lives and so forth by standing up to a power that would sweep them aside like crumbs on a table, and people who would not care that they stood up for them enough to help them once swept aside!!!
what happens in this situation, and from what i learned from family who was there, and were conscripted to different forces in different times, and had to suffer thigns was that all they wanted was the horror to stop and to somehow find some small path they could follow to get out of it!!!!!!!!!!!
what you have today is a leftist cult that is doing the same thing as the Nazi party did in terms of methods of control prior to having enough power to use other methods. Sprachregelung to Gliechshaltung is this process, and its working just the same now as it did then, it includes disparate impact arguments (though not called that or even named as such then), and manipulating people and their actions through gaming their biological systems.
He does not ask forgiveness from her because he owes her no forgiveness. his slight is to the actual persons that the actions were taken upon, not to their relatives who did not suffer directly… he cant make amends to her, he cant repent from the actions of her, and if we all considered the negative side of our actions in terms of everyone and several plys outwards, we could not exist without wronging someone somewhere all the time… (Which is the profound false guilt that the left seeks all the time)
let me switch the point, and show how this plays out…
one only has to look to the white feather…
Americans used to be able to look down their noses at Nazis, good Germans, moderate Germans, or the other ones that helped the Nazi or fascist war machine.
Now I think it is ironic when Americans try to maintain their arrogant high horse self righteousness as to these matters. Because their perspective has changed. Our contextual environment has changed. It was easy for Americans to look down their noses at these collaborators in 2008. Even in 2010 we had GB here talking about how all Americans would fight to the death to preserve freedom and liberty.
http://neoneocon.com/2010/03/16/the-slaughter-solution-constitutionality-and-precedent/#comment-150216
Some, yes, all? I don’t think so. And I don’t think GB’s judgment of his fellow Democrats or what he likes to call “liberals” is justified, certainly it isn’t justified now no matter how much he likes to harangue those who call on the recognization of the guilt of his Democrats.
You evidently do not comprehend the level of adoration that Americans invest in the concept of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It is literally, an American dogma, and utterly religious, in connotation, even among secularists. For most significantly, not just among conservatives but among liberals as well…all hold to that view.
With the exception of the most rabid of leftists, every American pays homage to those fundamental American precepts. There is literally unanimity of agreement and consensus with those premises and precepts.
It is the very heart of our cultural foundation.
No one, would even think to disputing it and, all would literally fight to the death to defend it.– Geoffrey Britain 2010
Words cannot do justice to what Americans thought they were in 2008. As Wisconsin cracked down hard on dissenters and police Obeyed their Orders to destroy American lives of Scott Walker supporters, we had the clueless talking about Americans literally fighting to the death to defend it. Defend what, their bank accounts? With the exception of Leftists, which seems to grow to encompass 20 then 40 then 60% of the population, it gets kind of pointless talking about it any more.
Anyways, now that Americans can begin realizing that they aren’t as good as they think their inheritance makes them out to be, it opens up some room for clarification and clarity of thought when it comes to guilt and who has it.
The SS practiced — to the extent possible — collective, systematic, personal denial.
Nearly every single player regarded himself as a ‘small cog’ and therefore merely sitting in the train — not running the locomotive — as it were.
This even extended to the crews tossing Zyklon B down on the victims.
The ability to rationalize away one’s acts is apparently infinite.
And there’s the ability to rationalize NOT acting. Strangely, the death kamp crews were very tight lipped — to their extended familes — about what was up ‘in the east.’
That’s quite a contrast with the Special Action Squads — absolute blabber mouths by comparison. Those fellas started telling their priests, their buddies their families all of the dirty details almost the moment they got off the train. (Two weeks vacation from the front was a routine in the German Army for soldiers with proper conduct.)
[ It was from just such vacationing troops that Hitler was able to ‘reform’ the lost divisions at Stalingrad. He took those who were not in the pocket — yet on the division’s lists — and built the rest of the new divisions around them — at least on paper. ]
The entire purpose of the Wannsee conference was to codify and unify the shift away from field executions — which murdered the bulk of the victims — towards the new death camps wherein the brutality could be psychologically denied by the perps. That was their entire purpose.
It’s mind boggling to contemplate, but the bulk of the murders were committed during the first months of the Barbarossa campaign — and at a fever pitch. It was common place for front line SS formations to be re-deployed strictly to slaughter civilians — abandoning the military campaign to do so!
The 1SS L’AH was a brigade level formation at this time. Later it became a division, by the end it was a corps!
It massively out numbered the Special Action Squads in Ukraine. It’s astounding role in the murder sweeps has been largely missed – as most historians focused their attentions on the Special Action Squads.
This military SS formation HAD to be the source of the astounding ‘performance’ of the southern Special Action Squads. Near as one can tell, virtually the entire Ukraine was swept by the SS between July to October.
Odessa held out. Only after the end of the Cold War the Russians admitted that Odessa was the refuge for all Jews within marching distance. At the height of its siege, most of Odessa’s combatants were Jewish! That’s how drastically the rural population decamped and fled to the city.
Odessa was accorded the title Hero City. the others: Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad.
Odessa was abandoned by Stalin’s order when it became obvious that Sevastopol was in dire straits. So the Odessa marines were redeployed to the east.
The above history establishes that the death kamps were auxiliary to Hitler’s rampage.
It is also becoming clearer that the systemic bloodletting in the east had a much bigger impact on the flow of military events than had been previously suspected. It also indicates that the regular German army was up past its collective eyeballs in the Holocaust.
These sweeps required the usage of entire army corps to cover the staggering amount of ground involved in the limited time available. Rather than a few police battalions – the Holocaust was redirecting the better part of entire armies — being a higher priority for Hitler than victory over the Red armies — which he took to be a forgone conclusion.
Small cog, indeed.
In first-class railway carriages? Or didn’t he think about it at all? And what effect did he think having one’s whole family murdered would have on a person? Did he expect them to just shrug and go on?
He’s no different to the police unions, LEOs, and lawyers in Wisconsin. Since they are in a chain of command, a hierarchy, the responsibility for atrocities is distributed across the entire unit.
Did the SWAT teams that were ordered to raid Wisconsin families that supported Scott Walker, did those teams think these kinds of raids were justified, righteous, and legally worthy of search and seizure? Or did they just gloss over it like that other guy did.
I’d always wondered why the German armies in the south were so SLOW compared to those up north.
Only now it becomes clear: Hitler had them marching all over the place, sweeping through every farm and barn, rounding up victims.
This must have happened. It’s the only explanation for the astounding killing figures recorded in Ukraine — right from the start.
Such sweeps were entirely against all principles of blitzkrieg warfare.
Hitler’s race hatred defeated his imperial ambitions in Russia.
“By not asking her forgiveness, Groening is emphasizing his awareness of the magnitude of the harm done (as opposed to what he considers his small role), and refusing to put any pressure on her to forgive him.”
It’s interesting. It seems that he is repentant for what’s happened and for his own culpability.
Moreover, I appreciate him for not putting any pressure on her to forgive him.
“Would some Christians say she should do so anyway?”
Yes, there are. Sigh.
There was a beautiful moment in the tv miniseries Masada where Peter O’Toole and Peter Strauss have a dialogue that goes something like this:
O’Toole (Roman Commander): “Why don’t you just surrender?”
Strauss (Leader of the Zealots): “If you want to win, just leave us Jews alone. We have so much internal bickering and fighting that we’ll destroy ourselves.”
So Christians today are divided just like the Jews of old and the Jews of today are divided. I wish it were not so, but facts are a stubborn thing.
“To me, that seems wrong”
Yes. “Unconditional Forgiveness” is a faulty teaching.
Neo, et al, there is an excellent book by Pastor Chris Brauns about Conditional Forgiveness. I’ve read the entire book and he dispels and refutes with sound Biblical reasoning those well-intentioned Christians who advocate unconditional forgiveness.
In one of the early chapters he cites Dennis Prager who’s simply appalled at the Amish for unconditionally forgiving the murderers of murdering their daughters.
In short, unconditional forgiveness cheapens God’s Grace and ultimately dishonors God.
Please do not think that all Christians subscribe to “Unconditional Forgiveness.”
Genuine Biblical forgiveness hinges on genuine repentance and contrition which brings about reconciliation and restoration.
——-
On a related note, just because someone doesn’t repent, and therefore you don’t forgive him or her because they haven’t repented, there’s utterly no need to be bitter or resentful or anything negative like that.
You have to do what a commenter on the previous thread said: “Practice “let-it-go” forgiveness.”
Make your best winsome effort to show the sin of the other person. If they refuse to acknowledge it, and therefore, they refuse to repent, then what other healthy choice do you have other than to practice “let-it-go forgiveness”? And again, “let-it-go-forgiveness” is not genuine forgiveness. It’s simply forsaking unhealthy bitterness and resentment.
Thanks for these posts on forgiveness Neo.
taken from
The ‘White Feather Girls’: women’s militarism in the UK
most of the men who got feathers and enlisted and went to war died there. they were being killed just as surely as if the feminsit women took the men, and loaded them into ovens… those men who survived, were tormented for the rest of their lives by what those women did… (no less painful is what they are doing to men today, but we dont care about men, do we? not much)
where was the trial that would have one of these women sitting at a table trying to get out of a system persecuting them for their actions and outcomes? their actions at murdering their fellow country men through shaming them into death, was much more voluntary than the man who is on trial now! if they did not do it, no one would kill them, torture them, or make an example of them – would they? we dont even know most of their names!!!
today we cant stand up for the things the majority believe in and treasure when faced with similar forces that would move us to act and “get through” what was going on…
Who stands up for those that stand up?
these women could have chosen not to, but the men they killed coud not choose so… this man could not choose to refuse orders and such, but they are willing to kill him in the last years of his very old age to make the point he should have.
how telling that is?
did those women ask for forgiveness?
maybe some prayed for it later, but for the most part, no one was on them to do so!
and that is the other side of this coin in play…
both he and she are under the microscope in various ways.
both are playing roles they choose to play in terms of those social ways vs the religion vs belief
being a woman and more socially attuned, would she be willing to stand up and declare to the world that she would forgive him if he asked her to? or even if he didnt? maybe, but not necessarily in public!!!! in public, she would have to also stand up to all those people who would question that action and get on her case and affect her life and such, casue they think its their job to do so.
at best, with the best top care of the worlds medical profession, he would not live more than 10 years… but she? she has a lifetime ahead of here where her actions and behaviors now would dictate how people would treat her, and regard her.
the EASY out in this case is to do what the masses want and be angry, unforgiving, ignore religion, ignore defending oneself against the larger mass that would give her heck for not giving him heck…
as for him? well, he has no reason to care what people thing, he is leaving a reality that is not permanent and never would be EVER… he is on his way out and on your way out, the only regard one needs to have is towards god… not the appeasment of the people who you wont live long enough to see bother you and inject themselves into your life with righteous indignation, revenge, etc.
at the time of his sin, she had not been born yet (presumably)
should i as a white man ask the forgiveness of the american indian today? why? my family was butchering cows and farm animals for sale and service in a tiny country few today even know, and never arrived here till after the war and living in DP camps and losing everything. what do i have to do with that past? my lack of pigmentation lumps me in with the mostly german and dutch and so on that populated the US then over now after the wars?
and waht about the indian that would ask someone who commited no sin, is not related to anyone who did, and who has no connection to them, the country, the poltiics, the people, or even the continent…
what your seeing here is not what it appears to be, because its not consistent other than in this small play where everyone knows their part and the roles they must play in it. she has to play the wronged victimized person, or else she gets nothing but aprobation… she is not religious enough to do so, and be the saint she require him to be!!!!!!!!!! he? he has no need to care or such as to the role he plays, as there is nothing for him to do but sit and be forced to comply AGAIN with a state that will force on him its will. he was forced as a nazi then, he will be forced by the state again..
in either way, how is he responsible for doing what he is forced to do? his forgiveness and asking god may be from his knowing that he is not a saint, and that he could not act like a saint, and that he is probably greatful to god for granting him a long relatively healthy life, despite his lack of sainthood and beatification…
both want to “get through it”
both will and there arrayed around them are a bunch of greedy hypocrits converging on trying to benefit from the process.
in fact, if it wasnt for hitler, how many of these people would make money doing what they are doing now?
unlike the amish and other more extreme christians, they refuse to wash their hands of it and not be part of the spectical. they are going to wrest money, cache, reputation, all on the back of the evil that happend, and by chasing an old man who in both cases could do nothing.
what is going on is greed, hypocracy, and more.
and there is a good point in terms of the hypocrites
as god says, they get their rewards here in this realm
and god will not reward them later, because of that.
they are being sinful in false riteousness…
she is being sinful in seeking spite and revenge
the state is the state, and benefits greatly from such false showing
and yes, this is too long, so read it while you can
theology is another subject that one cant dash off a few lines and get much from.
I can understand part of Oskar Groening’s hesitancy to apologize to the victims of the camp: unless someone shows that he did anything more than act as a bookkeeper, he didn’t actively harm them individually. There’s no evidence he directly harmed any person in the camp; at most he was guilty of conspiracy to commit theft, a crime well past its expiration date.
As a Christian, I completely agree with his concept of moral guilt. He helped facilitate a great evil at a moral level. He and God need to work that out. However, this is no more than every other German who lived in that time would have to work out as well.
Legally or morally, I can’t see how Groening is any more guilty than a baker, a bullet maker, or uniform tailor.
Ymarsakar:
I don’t think I ever believed that the vast majority of Americans were so very devoted to liberty. The Grand Inquisitor seemed to be speaking a nearly-universal truth.
Nevertheless, during the Obama years I have been surprised at how few Americans seem to care. Fewer than I had thought, and I wasn’t all that optimistic about it to begin with.
Here’s what I’m talking about when I refer to the Grand Inquisitor, by the way:
SCOTTtheBADGER Says: After Malmedy, most US units would rip the shirts off of POWs, as the SS tattooed the blood type of their troops on the right side of the chest. Prisoners with tattoos were usually shot. I have no problem with that.
Correction.. the SS were tattooed under the armpit.
and most SS were conscripted… only one section of them were not and ran camps… the other part were all foreign troops that included blacks, arabs, latvians, and any male of fighting age that they could hold a gun to and force into combat.
again… your requesting they commit suicide because a poltical machine grabbed them…
I would suggest reading about the Latvian Waffen SS…
Oberfé¼hrer Adolf Ax, commander of the 15th Division, reported on 27 January 1945: “They are first and foremost Latvians. They want a sustainable Latvian nation state. Forced to choose between Germany and Russia, they have chosen Germany, because they seek co-operation with western civilization. The rule of the Germans seems to them to be the lesser of two evils.”
“The Baltic Waffen SS Units (Baltic Legions) are to be considered as separate and distinct in purpose, ideology, activities, and qualifications for membership from the German SS, and therefore the Commission holds them not to be a movement hostile to the Government of the United States.”
Even before this decision, around 1,000 former Latvian Legion soldiers had served as guards at the Nuremberg Tribunal, guarding Nazi war criminals. Afterwards, during the Berlin Blockade, they took part in securing Allied facilities involved in the Berlin Airlift and later also were guarding USA Army headquarters
this is not to say there werent latvians who were nazis, there were.. there were also latvians who were part of the horrors of the soviet system too!!! (in fact, derzinskies left hand man was latvian)
but what you have done is try to take a very complicated large thing, and simplfy the history to “wear a uniform your evil”…
do you understand what it means to be conscripted?
do you know how russian conscripted troops fought, and the dark jokes that follow?
here is a clue:
the russians (and germans) would conscript troops to fight. and you would be like my friends son and say, i would refuse. then you would be shot before you even completed the sentence. in fact, the orders were to shoot the first person asking questions and torture anyone else who asked after… pretty much no one did.
so how did they get them to fight?
thats easy…
the russians did not have enough weapons, you can see this play out in the movie about Vasily Zaytsev. if you choose to see it pay attention to the details.
the russians or germans would have them on trucks without weapons… guarded by other german soldiers from germany, not waffen conscripts.
when they got to where the battle was, they would be guided out onto the field and handed weapons as they passed to some of them. the ones who did not have weapons were given sticks if anything, and told to point them and pretend they were weapons
in front of them, the german, russian, american or other force… behind them were totenkampf ss (the nasty guys in movies that also ran the camps, and so on… you can tell as their symbol was the deaths head skulls).
they could only go in one direction…
if they turned to run away, retreate, etc. even if it was the right military thing to do, as in regroup to attack, their own side would mow them down with machine guns. there was no way off the battle field alive unless you went forwards, and won the battle against the enemy!!!
and if you did win, they collected the weapons, loaded you into trucks, and brought you to the next place, and did it to you again… over and over, and only if you were winners in every battle would you get out alive (and even then you miught not as they did not trust you and a gulag or camp may wait for you after)
now here you come, rip off that persons shirt, see the mark that was forced on them, and you blow their heads off..
nice.
this is why the fighting in some places was so brutal… and hand to hand… and why masses of troops from socialist countries do mass attacks… thats whats best when your troops are conscripted… throw bodies at the problem.
there was one more way out.
thats if you somehow got caught and became a prisoner of the west. then you would get out, as the western troops mostly did not kill or torture prisoners… which is not what happened when westerners got caught.
as i said… only ignorance can make such complicated things seem simple, cut and dried, etc.
Kentucky Packrat:
I strongly disagree, on several levels.
My first disagreement is with your reasoning about why Groening failed to ask forgiveness. He did mention that his role was small, but he explicitly stated a very different reason for not asking for forgiveness, and that was that although his role was small the magnitude of the crime was too great. His words were, “In view of the scale of the crimes committed in Auschwitz and in other places, I do not believe I am entitled to make such a request.” He’s not entitled to make the request; it’s not that he’s not required to do so.
Moreover, there are degrees of guilt and his is much higher than that of the “ordinary” German. There were ordinary Germans who were against Hitler; some were members of the Resistance. Others were against Hitler and not members of the Resistance but resisted in very small ways, as described in my posts on the journals of Victor Klemperer. Others were merely going about their lives and looking the other way. Most Germans did not vote for Nazis to come to power, by the way. And once they came to power they used terror and fear to get Germans in line, among other things.
Groening was an active—very active—participant. Unlike some Germans who really were in denial and were far enough away from death camps to keep their denial intact, he knew full well about the camps and that they were death camps. Despite this, he did not opt for another job. He had the job of taking the money of those killed in the camps (and whom he knew were killed in the camps) and transferring it to others. That is a very active collaboration.
Do not lump everyone together. Groening was quite high up (rung #2) on what I would call the ladder of evil. See this for what I’m referring to.
Ymarsakar Says: July 1st, 2015 at 3:17 pm
well put…
despite your despising me and all that, eh?
Ymarsakar @3:17
The quote from Geoffrey Britain is a bucket of cold water. GB is a sober, erudite, reasonable, insightful commentator. (I wonder if I would have said the same thing GB said five years ago – – maybe).
I wonder if GB would say the same thing today. At any rate, it seems almost absurd for anyone to believe that today. It is a measure of how quickly and powerfully things have changed.
We are a thoroughly propagandized and manipulated country. Most folks have no clue it even exists, just as Artful and others so meticulously describe it.
I realize I am whistling in the wind, but the police acting as gestapo in the Walker case is the here and now of law enforcement. They will follow orders, and they will enjoy it. It is all “legal,” right? What’s to worry?
I have to procrustes myself but want to say more when I get back ….
blert Says: Nearly every single player regarded himself as a ‘small cog’ and therefore merely sitting in the train – not running the locomotive – as it were.
From the jewish virtual library:
volunteers got punished
conscripts less if at all
Foreign Volunteers and Conscripts
Hitler being a multiculturalist
mix up the races and groups you conscript, to make a homogeneous multicultural cadre of forced fighters
[note that many of these divisions never fought against the west, but used germans to fight the soviets given that many were occupied by Stalin before Hitler, and did not want Stalin back as he was far worse in many ways]
the latvians wanted to force the soviets out
the netherland wanted not to starve…
and some were so good they did bad…
its easy, to sit in judgment
easier if you lump them all together.
you know, like the left does in the US when it says all white males are racist… isnt it easier to smear you with one colored brush, dipped in nazism, than it would be to sort everyone out?
i know
kill them all and let god sort them out.
right?
After the surrender, many volunteers were tried and imprisoned by their countries. In several cases, volunteers were executed. Those volunteers from the Baltic States and Ukraine could at best look forward to years spent in the gulags. To avoid this, many ex-volunteers from these regions joined underground resistance groups (see Forest Brothers) which were engaged fighting the Soviets until the 1950s.
you are familiar with the forest brothers? you know, the people who defended jews, and who fought against soviets?
its a good thing that the germans kept lots and lots of records… so we could go through them, and read who was volunteered, who was taken and conscripted, and who did what, and who did not.
Forest Brothers
The Forest Brothers (also Brothers of the Forest; Forest Brethren; Forest Brotherhood; Estonian: metsavennad, Latvian: meža brÄļi, Lithuanian: miÅ¡ko broliai) were Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian partisans who waged a guerrilla war against Soviet rule during the Soviet invasion and occupation of the three Baltic states during, and after, World War II. Similar anti-Soviet Eastern European resistance groups fought against Soviet and communist rule in Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, and western Ukraine.
most people today dont know very much about all this stuff… they instead follow the lefts line and consider that if one person in the miltaryd did bad, then all of them did.
so the mai lai massacre means american troops are all bad… right?
The Bielski Brothers and the “Otriad” were forest brothers defending jews… the movie Defiance (2008 film) was about them.. but did not include others as if these were the only groups and this was the only reason
similar was done with schindlers list in which they show the soviets liberating the camp, but do not show the soviets raping the jewish women, murdering many of the men, and so on…
as i said. its complicated and the west does not want to know the details so that judgment is easy… details make it harder to sit on a throne and act like the red queen yelling “off with their heads”
have to go
posted way too much
will be hated for it more..
but when us old guys that know history, and the people, and the founders, and all that are gone. then the change they hoped for will be complete, and that which was will be erased and inspire no one any more.
Neoneocon,
It’s kind of surreal to agree with you about the doctrine of “Conditional Forgiveness” while noting simultaneously that you are, for the present moment, a Christ-rejecting Jew.
Biblically and logically speaking, from a Bible-Believing Protestant Christian, the sin of unbelief is a sin against God. Unbelief means unbelief (or lack of genuine faith and trust) in Jesus Christ, the Messiah.
Therefore, in just honest and direct terms, although seemingly impolite, but not intended to be, you’re most likely Hell-bound.
Simply basic New Testament doctrine which has been around for hundreds of years.
To reiterate, you’re God’s Heaven-bound child if you embrace His Son Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, repenting of your sins, including the sin of unbelief.
Otherwise, your sins are not forgiven, and you’re Hell-bound.
Completely congruent with the topic and teaching of Conditional Forgiveness.
Pax.
And before someone jumps me, saying “But they were NAZZZZIIIISSS!”, let’s go back a step. Until Demjanjuk, the legal standard was “actively participated in killing innocents”. Being a camp guard, cook, etc. wasn’t considered illegal, because those activities could be performed legally on a citizen, enemy combatant, etc.
Under this kind of standard, practically anyone in any military or any government could be guilty of conspiracy if said government did a war crime while you’re on staff.
This is bad law, and bad morals.
Truth Unites:
Many Christians—including Popes John Paul II and Francis—do not agree with you on that.
Jews, by the way, believe this about the afterlife. They also believe this about other religions:
Have you ever noticed that earlier religions have a tendency to believe that they don’t have the only exclusive entry into heaven, and later religions have more of a tendency to believe that heaven will be limited to people of their own belief system? Judaism is an earlier religion.
I don’t think I ever believed that the vast majority of Americans were so very devoted to liberty.
I would think that would be so, Neo, especially since you’ve written about the kind of dogma and doctrinal Authority being obeyed in colleges and universities, perhaps even before you met the same kind of thing in greater society amongst neighbors and family.
Fewer than I had thought, and I wasn’t all that optimistic about it to begin with.
The 3% in the Revolution, who actively supported George Washington, clued me in. I had wondered why so few would do anything or even say anything, but it has happened in the past many times. It is easy to control people of faint heart with 1-3% of true believers, fanatics, no matter which side those fanatics are on in a war. I’m not familiar with the GI either. Independent confirmation of the same event, using different sources, perhaps.
despite your despising me and all that, eh?
To Art
Other people with IQs and abilities higher than yours can come to similar conclusions. They don’t have to read you or your links to come to the right conclusions. That doesn’t mean I agree with your way of doing things or how you distort concepts and humans here.
The reason why Art and Huxley were the lone voices crying out in the wilderness, although for different things, is because you both over valued the worth of recognition and social status. The rest of us, the “hidden watchers”, who knew much more than both of you put together, made the decision to either shut up and go off grid, or take our ideological arguments in a safer more ambiguous fashion online.
So you risking your own skin on the net is your own responsibility, nobody forced you to do so, if you were afraid of the Leftist alliance’s power. Just because you saw a hint of it by reading what other people wrote, doesn’t make you better than me.
It doesn’t matter whether Americans are convinced by words or not. The only thing that is strong enough to fight the Left is Death, and for people to wield that power, hate and strong emotions are needed. Not logick, not history texts, not reading a bunch of tactical texts and learning from the feet of some Guru Master.
They have to want it themselves, far worse than a dying man wants water in a desert. Until they do, they won’t deserve victory. I’ll just merely watch as the Left wipes them out of existence, it is their choice after all, assuming they still have one after selling their souls to the Leftist alliance for Perfect Human Harmony and Utopia.
Truth Unites… and Divides Says:
July 1st, 2015 at 4:31 pm
Neoneocon,
It’s kind of surreal to agree with you about the doctrine of “Conditional Forgiveness” while noting simultaneously that you are, for the present moment, a Christ-rejecting Jew.
Biblically and logically speaking, from a Bible-Believing Protestant Christian, the sin of unbelief is a sin against God. Unbelief means unbelief (or lack of genuine faith and trust) in Jesus Christ, the Messiah. …”
I wonder what kind of Protestantism that is.
With the Protestant side of my family, being essentially irreligious in practice, I have never had any clear and distinct idea of what in the world “protestants” meant by faith or belief.
It always sounded like an act of the will performed in the face of facts, or of any real intellectual conviction. Like the famous joke where the Irish priest asks Tommy to define “faith”.
“Faith is believing what you know aint true, Fadah”
Since Protestantism – some of it – traces some of its intellectual roots to Medieval voluntarism, (not to be confused with the libertarian political virtue) it is quite possible that I haven’t got it all wrong on that score.
http://www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/papers/ockethic.htm
http://www.totus2us.com/universal/united-kingdom/william-ockham/
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/03/razor-boy.html
Do not lump everyone together. Groening was quite high up (rung #2) on what I would call the ladder of evil. See this for what I’m referring to.
It is easy to demonize “the other”, because it helps us crow our moral superiority about how we would never do what they did, when in reality we’ve made a hundred thousand little choices just as evil as the little choices Groening made to get him to push Nazi money around.
Emerson asked Thoreau “Why are you in there?”, when he refused to pay the taxes collected to fund the Mexican-American War. Thoreau asked “Why are you out there?”
It’s real easy to pick on a 94 year old bookkeeper from Germany. He is truly and utterly evil because he obeyed the draft, and chose to continue to push paper instead of getting sent to the Eastern Front or turned over to the SS.
On the other hand, you pay your taxes to a government that bombs children’s parties (drone attacks), ties up prisoners in rape scenes (Abu Ghraib), and burns a baby’s chest open with flash grenades (the Georgia SWAT raid).
By that standard, where is your conviction for tax evasion? The system is evil, why are you consenting? (For that matter, why am I?)
The simple fact is: the little people in the world cannot hold moral blame for every action of the system they’re in. Should Groening have opted out of the system? Of course he should have, we can see that now.
However, that’s easy to say at our distance. 50 years from now, our grandkids will probably blame us for not hanging certain people in our system from the nearest tree, while they pay in their tax and ignore the crimes their system’s doing.
I understand Groening’s “refusal” to apologize. Think about how absurd it would be: “I’m sorry I help take your money away from you.” He didn’t even do the taking, he just helped. Even something as generic is “I am sorry I helped the system” is sipid and milquetoast.
Groening can’t make a good apology because his biggest sin here is being a milquetoast little man who went along with the system, just like practically everyone reading this blog is doing right now.
Art, you know very little about WWII, if you don’t know why the US Army stopped taking Waffen SS prisoners after Malmedy.
Where to begin? The guilty are legion, through participation no matter how peripheral or claiming to be one of the 3 monkeys. Were I Irene Weiss I would insist on the honor of slowly slitting his throat with a rusty razor. Somethings are unforgivable.
Artfldgr said this, which I think is very true, and very sad as well:
” its complicated and the west does not want to know the details so that judgment is easy… details make it harder to sit on a throne and act like the red queen yelling “off with their heads”
…
but when us old guys that know history, and the people, and the founders, and all that are gone. then the change they hoped for will be complete, and that which was will be erased and inspire no one any more.”
Eva Mozes Kor, who a victim of Mengele’s experiments on twins, chose to forgive during the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, saying, “In my own name, I forgive all Nazis.” Naturally, that was not met with equanimity by all — the article on this in Der Spiegel is worth a read. This line by the author of the article stuck with me: “Can one really forgive pure evil?” That’s a good question, considering Satan=Evil.
Kentucky Packrat:
I guess you haven’t read much of my writing if you think I’m demonizing the other.
If you’re interested in finding out what I actually think of Germans and their behavior during WWII, read this for starters.
And Groening was not drafted into the SS; he volunteered for the Waffen-SS after having been drafted into the regular army. He probably didn’t know the details at the time of exactly what he’d be doing, but volunteering for the SS was almost guaranteed to bring him into an active role in the Nazi regime above and beyond what a common foot soldier played. That’s what ultimately happened to him.
He was also an early Nazi enthusiast, and very early during the regime (even before he entered the army, it appears) participated in the burning of books written by Jews and other authors.
By the way, unless I had read a transcript of the trial, I have no firm opinion about Groening’s legal guilt or innocence. In fact, from what I know, I would be somewhat inclined to consider him not guilty or at the very least to give him a very short sentence. He is speaking of his moral guilt or innocence, and he says he is morally guilty, and I agree. He is morally guilty, although nowhere near as guilty as many other Nazis. He is guilty of being a voluntary Nazi early on. He is guilty of anti-Semitism. He is guilty of volunteering (for his own career advancement) to join the SS. He apparently asked to be relieved of duty while at the death camps (see the quote in the next paragraph), and I commend him somewhat for that—although if you look at the description of why he asked, his reasons weren’t especially moral. Ultimately he was relieved of duty, sent to the front, and surrendered to the British at the end of the war.
More about Groening at Aushwitz:
That’s moral guilt.
Somewhat off topic . . .
While many went along with the Nazis, for whatever reason (fear, etc.) there were others who, in their small, yet not insignificant part, did do something.
Here’s a BBC news article on the passing of such a man:
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-33350880
He rescued “only” 669 children from the Nazis. Given how many millions the Nazis killed 669 is a small number; but, it is a great number to those who were saved.
Neo, you mention the different levels of forgiveness; it is too bad that we don’t have different levels of “thankfulness” or “hero.” If we did the highest level of each would be fit for this man and others like him.
charles:
As far as I know there’s only one level, but there is an entire organization dedicated to honoring people like that. See this.
Also see this as well as the memorial to the anonymous rescuer.
“Truth Unites:
Many Christians–including Popes John Paul II and Francis–do not agree with you on that.”
Hi Neo, they are Catholics fwiw. And also, fwiw, I, as a Bible-believing Christian, hold the Jews in high regard. I’m not at all like Martin Luther who was rather anti-Semitic in his older years.
That being said, ordinary Christian doctrine for hundreds and hundreds of years teaches that salvation is through Jesus Christ alone. There is no other name, no other way.
Anyways, if this is the first time that you’ve been exposed to ordinary, standard Christian doctrine, then at least you’ve become aware of it. And are aware of what you’re rejecting. As well as the consequences to rejecting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and promised Messiah.
———
Offered for your thoughtful consideration:
Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri of Jerusalem lived at least 106 years – maybe 110. He was born in Baghdad to a rabbi and spice trader, but moved to the Holy Land in 1923, well before Israel was a nation. A genius who lived in poverty, he was a kaballist and a venerated scholar of the “Old Testament”. In fact, by mid-life, he had MEMORIZED THE TORAH– the first five books of Moses! Well before he died, he had memorized the entire Jewish Bible! He was considered to be a “TSADIK”: a Jewish saint (a potential messiah). People came to him from all over the world for advice, for blessings, and to receive prayer amulets which he made according to ancient kaballah traditions. He responded to every letter that was sent to him and he never refused to meet with anybody who showed up. Miracles are ascribed to him – also prophetic predictions. At least 200,000 (some say 300,000) people attended his funeral procession.
Rabbi Kaduri died in February of 2006. About five months before his death, the rabbi wrote something on a note and ordered that the envelope remain sealed until a year after his death. Everyone wondered about this, but his wishes were honored. When the note was finally read, it took the readers (all kabbalists) about 20 seconds to figure it out and go nuts. Here is what the note said, originally in Hebrew, of course.
“The Hebrew sentence (translated above in bold) with the hidden name of the Messiah reads: Yarim Ha’Am Veyokhiakh Shedvaro Vetorato Omdim
The initials spell the Hebrew name of Jesus, Yehoshua. Yehoshua and Yeshua are effectively the same name, derived from the same Hebrew root of the word “salvation” as documented in Zechariah 6:11 and Ezra 3:2. The same priest writes in Ezra, “Yeshua son of Yozadak” while writing in Zechariah “Yehoshua son of Yohozadak.” The priest adds the holy abbreviation of God’s name, ho, in the father’s name Yozadak and in the name Yeshua.
With one of Israel’s most prominent rabbis indicating the name of the Messiah is Yeshua, it is understandable why his last wish was to wait one year after his death before revealing what he wrote.
When the name of Yehoshua appeared in Kaduri’s message, ultra-Orthodox Jews from his Nahalat Yitzhak Yeshiva (seminary) in Jerusalem argued that their master did not leave the exact solution for decoding the Messiah’s name.
The revelation received scant coverage in the Israeli media. Only the Hebrew websites News First Class (Nfc) and Kaduri.net mentioned the Messiah note, insisting it was authentic. The Hebrew daily Ma’ariv ran a story on the note but described it as a forgery.
Jewish readers responded on the websites’ forums with mixed feelings: “So this means Rabbi Kaduri was a Christian?” and “The Christians are dancing and celebrating,” were among the comments.
Israel Today spoke to two of Kaduri’s followers in Jerusalem who admitted that the note was authentic, but confusing for his followers as well. “We have no idea how the Rabbi got to this name of the Messiah,” one of them said.
Excerpted from:
ht tps://jiminmontana.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/venerated-ultra-orthodox-rabbi-kaduri-declared-jesus-is-messiah/
(Aaaack! Reformatted for readability)
“Truth Unites:
Many Christians–including Popes John Paul II and Francis–do not agree with you on that.”
Hi Neo, they are Catholics fwiw. And also, fwiw, I, as a Bible-believing Christian, hold the Jews in high regard. I’m not at all like Martin Luther who was rather anti-Semitic in his older years.
That being said, ordinary Christian doctrine for hundreds and hundreds of years teaches that salvation is through Jesus Christ alone. There is no other name, no other way.
Anyways, if this is the first time that you’ve been exposed to ordinary, standard Christian doctrine, then at least you’ve become aware of it. And are aware of what you’re rejecting. As well as the consequences to rejecting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and promised Messiah.
–––
Offered for your thoughtful consideration:
Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri of Jerusalem lived at least 106 years – maybe 110. He was born in Baghdad to a rabbi and spice trader, but moved to the Holy Land in 1923, well before Israel was a nation. A genius who lived in poverty, he was a kaballist and a venerated scholar of the “Old Testament”. In fact, by mid-life, he had MEMORIZED THE TORAH– the first five books of Moses! Well before he died, he had memorized the entire Jewish Bible! He was considered to be a “TSADIK”: a Jewish saint (a potential messiah). People came to him from all over the world for advice, for blessings, and to receive prayer amulets which he made according to ancient kaballah traditions. He responded to every letter that was sent to him and he never refused to meet with anybody who showed up. Miracles are ascribed to him – also prophetic predictions. At least 200,000 (some say 300,000) people attended his funeral procession.
Rabbi Kaduri died in February of 2006. About five months before his death, the rabbi wrote something on a note and ordered that the envelope remain sealed until a year after his death. Everyone wondered about this, but his wishes were honored. When the note was finally read, it took the readers (all kabbalists) about 20 seconds to figure it out and go nuts. Here is what the note said, originally in Hebrew, of course.
“The Hebrew sentence (translated above in bold) with the hidden name of the Messiah reads: Yarim Ha’Am Veyokhiakh Shedvaro Vetorato Omdim
The initials spell the Hebrew name of Jesus, Yehoshua. Yehoshua and Yeshua are effectively the same name, derived from the same Hebrew root of the word “salvation” as documented in Zechariah 6:11 and Ezra 3:2. The same priest writes in Ezra, “Yeshua son of Yozadak” while writing in Zechariah “Yehoshua son of Yohozadak.” The priest adds the holy abbreviation of God’s name, ho, in the father’s name Yozadak and in the name Yeshua.
With one of Israel’s most prominent rabbis indicating the name of the Messiah is Yeshua, it is understandable why his last wish was to wait one year after his death before revealing what he wrote.
When the name of Yehoshua appeared in Kaduri’s message, ultra-Orthodox Jews from his Nahalat Yitzhak Yeshiva (seminary) in Jerusalem argued that their master did not leave the exact solution for decoding the Messiah’s name.
The revelation received scant coverage in the Israeli media. Only the Hebrew websites News First Class (Nfc) and Kaduri.net mentioned the Messiah note, insisting it was authentic. The Hebrew daily Ma’ariv ran a story on the note but described it as a forgery.
Jewish readers responded on the websites’ forums with mixed feelings: “So this means Rabbi Kaduri was a Christian?” and “The Christians are dancing and celebrating,” were among the comments.
Israel Today spoke to two of Kaduri’s followers in Jerusalem who admitted that the note was authentic, but confusing for his followers as well. “We have no idea how the Rabbi got to this name of the Messiah,” one of them said.
Excerpted from:
ht tps://jiminmontana.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/venerated-ultra-orthodox-rabbi-kaduri-declared-jesus-is-messiah/
“Would some Christians say she should do so anyway? To me, that seems wrong–but then again, as I’ve said before, I’m not a Christian.”
This admittedly bad Christian suggests a good Christian would follow the Gospel of Matthew, which I quoted in a couple of days ago:
14 “For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
But I don’t think there is anything in the Christian faith that compels a non-Christian to do the same, or a Christian to lecture the non-Christian to do the same, but I don’t know. Christians sometimes lecture non-Christians about what they should and shouldn’t do, so there’s a strong chance I’m way off.
A few weeks ago, the victims’ families in the SC church murders prayed for the murderer’s soul, because they believe it is God’s will to ask His forgiveness.
Forgiving is different from forgetting or condoning something. My understanding is that Jesus taught that it is God’s place to decide the fate of a man’s soul. Which clearly not many of us are willing to do. In my personal experience, it usually works out for the better to forgive and move on. Doesn’t mean forget, or to not be viligent and try to prevent whatever from happening again.
Romans 12:18-20
“…18If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men. 19Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “VENGEANCE IS MINE, I WILL REPAY,” says the Lord. 20″BUT IF YOUR ENEMY IS HUNGRY, FEED HIM, AND IF HE IS THIRSTY, GIVE HIM A DRINK; FOR IN SO DOING YOU WILL HEAP BURNING COALS ON HIS HEAD.”…
I have noticed a practical application of the 20; if you’re exceedingly nice to someone who strongly dislikes you, it tends to frustrate the hell out of them.
I don’t know if this answers your question, or if it’s actually what a real Christian would tell you.
TruthUnites:
Last time I checked, the Catholic Church was a very basic, very ancient Christian denomination. I realize that Protestants got their name from protesting against the Catholic Church, but to the rest of us, Catholics are very Christian indeed.
In fact, I’m even catholic enough (small c) to include Eastern Orthodox and Copts in my definition of “Christian.” There are probably a few others, too.
Catholics are the largest Christian denomination, by the way.
On Christians:
This is not the first time I’ve been exposed to what you call “ordinary, standard Christian doctrine.” And I’d say that Luther was more than “rather” anti-Semitic in his later years. He was rabidly anti-Semitic. I do not, however, hold that against today’s Lutherans in the least.
Hm… reading Wikipedia for information, what a concept… 🙂
OK, I am mostly, but not 100%, incorrect. Mr. Gré¶ning was a Nazi true believer in his youth who still was a little twerp, a cog in the machinery. I will fully agree that he should have tried to do more to stop what was happening, but he did not, and there’s no sign that he was in any position to have done so if he had tried. There is also no evidence he participated in any murders or any of the functional side of the camp or other SS work.
Then, after a middle class middle age, Gré¶ning publicly started condemning Holocaust denial, and has been quite explicit about both the evil involved and his own culpability for his (very few) actions ever since.
So of course what does Germany do? They go charge a Holocaust truth-teller for conspiracy to commit murder for being a cash clerk. Furrfu.
This prosecution is an SJW special. The last few real Nazis are dying, and heaven forbid one of them possibly go to Sheol in peace while we have feelbadz. Instead, let’s take a guy who was a bookkeeper in the war and who fought Holocaust denial, and try to convict him of conspiracy to commit murder because he didn’t try hard enough to distance himself from killing people while not killing people. Makes perfect sense for me.
Any person loving liberty should abhor this prosecution. No one thinks Mr. Gré¶ning killed a single person. No one is saying that he caused a death by negligence. There is no evidence of a single actus reus (guilty act), and absolutely no evidence of mens rea (guilty mind). It is entirely guilt by association; he’s guilty because he had an office in Auschwitz instead of Berlin or Switzerland.
This makes Kafka look like Pollyanna. By this precedent, there is no soldier, no government worker, and really no citizen who can call themselves innocent of any act of their government. You are guilty because you didn’t try hard enough to be innocent, and no person can ever try hard enough to be innocent.
On the theological side, I stand by my earlier idea. If I were him, I’d find it rather presumptuous that I could pretend to apologize for Auschwitz after being a glorified teller. One can (and should) ask God for forgiveness for having been a Nazi, because that’s a sin against God. It is in of itself no sin against man(*), and that is why Mrs. Weiss is in error in her hatred for Mr. Gré¶ning. She was harmed by men who were no longer alive, and no actions (or lack of actions) by Mr. Gré¶ning caused those events to occur.
The Christian concept of grace, undeserved forgiveness and mercy, is not foreign to the Torah or the Talmud. “You shall neither take revenge from nor bear a grudge against the members of your people; you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.” (Leviticus 19:18) 19;17 talks about not hating your brother in your heart. In the Talmud, Rosh HaShanah 17a talks about forgiveness, and says a very Christian-like concept: “Who is forgiven iniquity? He who passes by transgression.”
Israel was offered mercy time and again. Repent and return, and previous sins would be forgiven. All that was asked was repentance.
Sounds very grace-like to me.
(*) While I am a believer in national guilt for which one can and should repent (a very Torah-based concept), I reject racial or identity guilt for men. Based on our genealogy and a couple of recessive diseases, I can trace my ancestors to Scotland, Ireland, France, England, Germany, the Cherokee, and either Spanish Moors or Spanish Jews. If I was the reparation type, I’d owe myself millions.
Gré¶ning being a former Nazi who hasn’t done anything to her or hers is no more damaging to Weiss than me being a (partial) descendant of good Germanic blue-blood stock.
Neo,
FWIW, I’m delighted to stipulate that some Catholics are Heaven-bound Christians. Moreover, I’m also willing to stipulate that there are likely some Protestants who profess to be disciples of Christ who will not be Heaven-bound.
Only the Triune God has the final determination.
And I do believe that God is pleased to see the incredible orthodox Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri of Jerusalem acknowledging that Jesus Christ is indeed the promised Messiah.
May you also one day experience that glorious faith. (Before you die that is).
This line by the author of the article stuck with me: “Can one really forgive pure evil?”
A Christian would say “it’s not about evil, it’s about me”. You can argue about what “depravity” means as a Christian principle, and about exactly what “original sin” is etc., but functionally, Christian sin is very similar to the Torah concept: No person is perfect, and we all do iniquity. (There’s a reason that even the high priest has to penance for himself before he can do penance for the nation.) Why have Yom Kippur if you don’t have to repent, after all…
So, I need to be forgiven. The God of Israel makes clear that he gives forgiveness, but expects us to forgive too. As I mentioned in the last post, this is a Hebrew concept, but Christianity turns the knob to 11. Jesus claims that God forgives us in the same manner and in the same spirit that we forgive others. If we forgive miserly, then God will also forgive miserly. OTOH, if we forgive generously and quickly, that’s how God will forgive us
My personal approach, which I fail at early and often, is to try to preemptively forgive any and all slights. After all, that’s just what I want God to do for me.
So, how do we forgive evil? God somehow forgave us, and we’re evil compared to him. If nothing else, we ask God to help us try.
Kentucky Packrat:
It is actually rather easy to distinguish Groening from the run-of-the-mill German who merely lived in the Reich, paid taxes, and perhaps served in the regular army. Groening was a relatively high-up part of the mechanism by which the camps ran and did their dirty work. He was a voluntary member of the SS, and had voluntarily undergone their training (and stuck with it), which included major anti-Semitism. He could have refused to work at Auschwitz—not just requested to be reassigned (which he said he had in fact requested), but said he just couldn’t do it. That was not so unusual, and what almost always happened in that event was that those people were reassigned elsewhere (sometimes, if they were in the military, to the front—which is what ended up happening to him anyway). See also this in reference to the SS, and see also this for references to how relatively little the SS men at the camps were punished for disobeying.
Groening approved of the murder of Ms. Weiss’s entire family: that’s her three younger siblings, one older sibling, mother and father (and the father was killed after undergoing unspeakable horrors). She probably endured some additional terrible horrors too, in addition to the deaths of her entire family. Gruening justified their mass murder (including the younger siblings) at the time, thinking that it was okay because they could grow up to be “dangerous Jews.” Plus (although this is less important than their deaths) he was instrumental in helping Germany steal whatever money her family had.
Can’t imagine why she’d be angry with him. Can’t even imagine.
However, she actually never says anything about being angry at him, nor does she say she hates him. You are putting words into her mouth (unless you have some other source for the idea that she hates him). So your saying that she is in error because of her “hatred” for him is you creating a straw man (straw woman, actually). What she actually said was this:
She would tremble, which is an indication of fear. And she says that his SS uniform “represented terror and the depths to which humanity can sink, regardless of what function they performed.”
Well, it certainly does. But that’s not the same as hatred.
In line with Judaism’s ideas about forgiveness, by the way, if Groening had asked for her forgiveness and shown repentance (and he seems to be repentant, as far as I can tell, but did not ask for her forgiveness) she should have given it, but only for his crimes against her personally. According to Jewish thought, she does not have the power to forgive him for killing her father, for example; only her father could do that, although she could forgive him for causing her grief at her father’s death. There’s a well-known book about this phenomenon of forgiveness being a person-to-person thing, and not having the power (even if you want to) to forgive someone for crimes against another person. It’s written by Simon Wiesenthal, and it’s called The Sunflower.
As for Groening’s trial being Kafkaesque, that doesn’t fit. If you read my previous comment, I’ve already said I don’t think (from what I know, anyway) that he should be found guilty, actually. But a defendant not being found guilty does not make a trial Kafkaesque. A Kafkaesque trial is one in which the defendant doesn’t even know what the crime is that he/she is being charged with. Groening’s trial is a conventional trial in which Groening knows the charges, and the rules of evidence are being followed.
However, whether or not Groening should be found guilty in the legal sense is quite different from the personal offenses he is guilty of re Ms. Weiss, and whether or not she should forgive him for them.
Truth:
The first letters of that phrase spell Yehoshua only if you leave off several of the letters, particularly the vuvs, of which Yehoshua has none. Also, Yeshua is simply the Aramaic for Yehoshua, not a different word. Also “ho” is not an abbreviation for God’s Name — that would be Yah or Yud Yud the latter always read and spoken as “Adonai” — The Lord).
Also there is that fact that Jews don’t believe in a personal Messiah. The Jewish concept of the Messiah is that when he comes, it won’t be the same rotten world it was the day before, You know, all that stuff about “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not threaten nation, neither shall they learn of war any more. Each man shall sit under his own vine and his own fig tree, and none shall make him afraid.”
Well, it didn’t happen yet. That’s why the sages said, “The Messiah will come not on the last day, but on the very last day.”
If Rav Kaduri was saying something acrostical, it probably was something about God, as the first three letters, Yud Hay Vuv, are the first three letters of God’s Name.
BTW, memorizing the Torah by middle age is no great feat — I know several people who did that long before middle age. Doing it by your bar mitzvah, that’s something! I’m sure Jesus had done it: he was clearly an illui — a Torah prodigy — by the time his parents took him to the Temple for his bar mitzvah.
Other than that, it’s a great story!
Hi Richard,
Here’s another report about Rabbi Kaduri that’s deeply inspiring:
“In the yeshiva (Jewish religious school) that was founded around his life, the rabbi permitted his hand-written notebooks to be passed among the senior students. What is highly irregular is that there are over three dozen hand-painted crosses in the notebooks and all are known to have been painted by the rabbi. This is such a no-no in Judaism that even the plus sign is often replaced with another symbol to avoid using what could be considered the sign of Messiah’s Cross (David foreknew that Messiah would be pierced through his hands and feet while His enemies encircled Him – Psalm 22).
Some of the rabbi’s crosses are large and ornate. Some are small. All are found on pages which deal with Old Testament prophecies of a suffering Messiah, sometimes referred to as “Messiah ben Joseph”. This is in opposition to the concept of the majestic King of the Universe, “Messiah ben David”. 2000 years ago, a carpenter named Joseph became the (adoptive) father of a son who was called Yeshua ben Yossef. But ancient Jews wrote about the Messiah coming into the world on parallel with the Joseph found in the book of Genesis – born the favorite son, one who foresaw the future, hated by his Jewish brethren, harmed, enslaved, and thought to be slain, yet revealed to his brothers as being the SECOND most powerful person in the world – the one who had saved them all despite the fact that they had not known it. This is one of the Old Testament’s many “prophetic types” which points to the first ministry of Messiah. Believers all over the world confess Him to be the Redeemer – the “Last Adam” who did everything necessary to win back Creation from the grave.
“He will lift the people and prove that his word and law are valid.”
When that happens, Truth, I will be happy to get in line and welcome him!