Shirley Maclaine speculates:
In her memoir, the 80-year-old, who won an Oscar for Terms Of Endearment, writes: “What if most Holocaust victims were balancing their karma from ages before, when they were Roman soldiers putting Christians to death, the Crusaders who murdered millions in the name of Christianity, soldiers with Hannibal, or those who stormed across the Near East with Alexander? The energy of killing is endless and will be experienced by the killer and the killee.”
I guess if you believe in karma plus reincarnation, you could be led to that sort of thinking. It certainly does away with the problem and/or the riddle of evil. If karma is always fair and just, then when bad things happen to good people it’s really because the people were bad in a past life. Payback’s a bitch.
Maclaine’s choices are interesting, though, aren’t they? So let’s see: those Crusaders who killed some Jews on their way to the Holy Land are paid back by becoming Jews killed by Hitler in the Holocaust. Just to add to the cyclical symmetry, Germany was central to both events. According to Maclaine’s theory, those Jews killed in the Holocaust could have been the crusader perpetrators of the Worms massacre. And those 800 Jews of Worms who were killed, they probably were the perpetrators in some earlier—well, you get the idea :
The Worms massacre refers to the murder of 800 Jews of Worms, Germany, at the hands of crusaders headed by Count Emicho during May 1096.
The massacre at Worms was one of number of attacks against Jewish communities perpetrated during the First Crusade (1096”“1099). Followers of Count Emicho arrived at Worms on May 18, 1096. Soon after a rumour spread that the Jews had drowned a Christian and used contaminated water to poison the town’s wells. The local populace later joined forces with Emicho and launched a savage attack on the town’s Jews. Every Jew that was captured was slain. Bishop Adalbert intervened and allowed his palace to serve as a refuge, but eight days later the mob broke in and slaughtered those seeking asylum there. They were in the midst of reciting the Hallel prayer for Rosh Chodesh Sivan.
More:
According to David Nirenberg, the events of 1096 in the Rhineland (such as in Worms) “occupy a significant place in modern Jewish historiography and are often presented as the first instance of an antisemitism that would henceforth never be forgotten and whose climax was the Holocaust.”
Who knew that the Jews were on one side at the beginning and the other at the end?
Look, I know Shirley Maclaine’s a twit, but I hesitate to apply the term “evil” to her. What she says demonstrates a built-in problem with that particular belief system—reincarnation and karma. Talk about blaming the victim! The problem is certainly not just Maclaine;
The free will controversy [connected with the idea of karma] can be outlined in three parts: (1) A person who kills, rapes or commits any other unjust act, can claim all his bad actions were a product of his karma, he is devoid of free will, he can not make a choice, he is an agent of karma, and that he merely delivering necessary punishments his “wicked” victims deserved for their own karma in past lives. Are crimes and unjust actions due to free will, or because of forces of karma? (2) Does a person who suffers from the unnatural death of a loved one, or rape or any other unjust act, assume a moral agent, gratuitous harm and seek justice? Or, should one blame oneself for bad karma over past lives, assume that the unjust suffering is fate? (3) Does the karma doctrine undermine the incentive for moral-education because all suffering is deserved and consequence of past lives, why learn anything when the balance sheet of karma from past lives will determine one’s action and sufferings?
The explanations and replies to the above free will problem vary by the specific school of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. The schools of Hinduism, such as Yoga and Advaita Vedanta, that have emphasized current life over the dynamics of karma residue moving across past lives, allow free will. Their argument, as well of other schools, are threefold: (1) The theory of karma includes both the action and the intent behind that action. Not only is one affected by past karma, one creates new karma whenever one acts with intent – good or bad. If intent and act can be proven beyond reasonable doubt, new karma can be proven, and the process of justice can proceed against this new karma. The actor who kills, rapes or commits any other unjust act, must be considered as the moral agent for this new karma, and tried. Life forms not only receive and reap the consequence of their past karma, together they are the means to initiate, evaluate, judge, give and deliver consequence of karma to others…Karma is a theory that explains some evils, not all ….
My guess is that most Americans who dabble in the idea of karmic punishment for past lives don’t think it through to the extent Maclaine has. They don’t go there, but she does. The religions themselves (Hinduism, for example) have certainly thought it through, but I bet a lot of people who say they believe in reincarnation wouldn’t especially like the answers those religions have given.
