Thursday, February 05, 2009

The Reluctant Archbishop

Another Lutheran cleric in Sweden has decided that remembering the Holocaust this year is inappropriate, given the recent actions of the IDF in Gaza. Our Swedish correspondent CB sends this report:

This is an article from the newspaper Dagen about a former archbishop who backed out of a Holocaust commemoration speech. One could call it an update to the sad state of affairs in the Lutheran Church of Sweden and its relations to anti-Semitism. Hammar’s actions don’t surprise me, I’m sad to say, but there are some noteworthy parts of this besides his backing out.

Apparently it is wrong in his view to come to the conclusion as a people that you don’t want to be oppressed again and that you need an army strong enough to deter neighbours planning your utter destruction.

One would think Israel’s response would be a most reasonable stance. When did it become the pinnacle of wisdom to be weaker than an enemy bent on your destruction? But not so in the leftist world of appeasement and irresponsible arms reduction. His way is the surest path to war, destruction and loss of lives. A militarily weak Israel will invite an attack on its soil with subsequent loss in life on all sides involved.

So, the former archbishop was, is, and will be unfit as a speaker about important subjects such as the memory of the Holocaust, as long as he clings to that set of values. But it is a sad state of the Lutheran church that he once was their archbishop.

And now CB’s translation of the article from yesterday’s Dagen:

K G Hammar backs out of Holocaust speech

Former archbishop KG Hammar receives criticism from Jewish spokespersons after refraining from speaking on Holocaust remembrance day, referring to the war in Gaza as the reason.

As Dagen related earlier, a similar decision in Luleå diocese evoked strong reactions. First the diocese cancelled a planed commemoration service for the victims of the Holocaust, but changed its decision after strong criticism.
- - - - - - - - -
K G Hammar also referred to the Gaza war when he refrained from speaking at the Holocaust commemoration at Kulturen [Culture] in Lund. He is presently a guest professor at the University of Lund.

He tells Ekot [radio news] the task was to speak about the conclusions to be drawn from the memory of the Holocaust. In his opinion the state of Israel had come to the conclusion that Israel never wants to be oppressed again and therefore the Israelis always want to be stronger then their enemies. To Ekot he says:

“I don’t see that it’s possible for that historical connection to lead to any kind of peace. And precisely in that moment with the war going on I felt I was the wrong person, and at a planning stage I didn’t think that was especially strange. One should choose a speaker according to who is fit for the occasion, and that was not me.”

Anders Carlberg, who is the chairman of the Jewish congregation in Gothenburg, calls Hammar’s reasoning “stupendous”. In his view one must be able to relate to the historical event of the Holocaust regardless of the state of Israel.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

People who doubt that European hatred of Israel is simply Jew-hatred in a new sweatshirt, might want to reflect on this little news item.

You've got to love the logic.

I'm pissed at Israel. Israel is full of Jews. So I'm going to pass over the subject of Hitler's murder of of few million Jews. It's an inappropriate moment to object to killing Jews.

I'm pretty sure at this point that the Lutheran church elders have just been waiting for an excuse to come down on Jews.

To hell with them.

ɱØяñιηg$ʇðя ©™ said...

As I don't know mr Hammar personally I can't tell what he is voting on. One thing is absolutely clear in this case though, that there probably are few people in Sweden who are desputing the fact that he is very left. The only leftist archbishop we have had so far. Aside from that he is now also an archdhimmi as much as the archbishop of Canterbury! During his time as arch-b he became very controversial because he allowed a photo exhibition called Ecce Homo with Jesus and his deciples to be shown in Uppsala domkyrka (cathedral). This was viewed from a gay perspective as photographer Elizabeth B Ohlsson is openly gay herself. So maybe he had a little more backbone 10 years ago than today.

christian soldier said...

There is something missing in this story...He pulled himself out...more info please...
carol-CS

Joanne said...

Quite frankly, I'm sick of hearing about the Holocaust, when so many other peoples have been slaughtered through the ages. We must not forget about the people of the Jewish religion, but to hell with everyone else who has been slaughtered and never to be mentioned again.

How come the Holocaust must be remembered, but millions of Ukranians who were starved and shot to death is not? Maybe there should be a day where all those slaughtered through tyranny should be remembered all together, than just a religion being remembered.

I don't have a problem with people remembering the Holocaust, I just have a problem with people remembering no one else.

Zenster said...

Joanne: How come the Holocaust must be remembered, but millions of Ukranians who were starved and shot to death is not

Unlike the Jews, Ukranians were not routinely persecuted on the basis of arbitrary or false allegations for almost the entirety of their history.

In many respects, the Holocaust was unique in the annals of human history. Never before had the abuse and extermination of human life been so tragically augmented by modern industrial engineering. While starving Ukranians suffered every bit as much, they in no way experienced the methodical and calculated brutality that Nazi victims underwent.

In attempted to "Aryanize" them, children had blue dye injected directly into their eyeballs.

Healthy men were deliberately frozen to death just to record the duration of survival for a human in such inclement conditions.

People were exposed to or had radioactive materials injected directly into their bodies and organs in order to study the effects of these relatively new compounds.

Surgical operations were performed without anesthesia for the explicit purpose of determining exactly how much pain a human being could endure before physical trauma compromised their ability to survive the medical procedure.

Most concentration camp inmates were simultaneously worked and starved to death with a precisely calculated regime of grueling physical labor and sub-par dietary rations that guaranteed eventual debilitation, permanent physical impairment and death.

Human beings were harvested of their teeth, hair and tissue for the sole purpose of economic savings or ghoulish savagery during Germany’s wartime effort.

On a rough average, the mechanized Nazi killing machine murdered one Jew every single minute of the entire Second World War.

This is what distinguishes the Holocaust from so many other ghastly genocides. It is without a trace of irony that I observe how Islam is chief among the perpetrators of history’s previous mass-murders. Continuing in that tradition, we are now forced to bear witness to Muslims extolling Adolph Hitler and advocating a continuation of this world’s most depraved inhumanity to mankind.

There is something so decisively evil and malignant in the gleeful pursuit of such malevolence that it can trigger the most savage retaliation, even among those not usually disposed to violence. Islam’s continued pursuit of genocide against the Jews makes it an almost singular force in ignoring the vital historic lessons learned by the vast majority of this planet’s other civilized cultures. It is this willful defiance of compassionate human evolution and the moderating effects of peaceful coexistence that dismisses Islam from the table of modern mankind.

Throughout history Muslims have demonstrated a willful and consistent rejection of any coexistence with non-Islamic cultures. Such defiance of common civility can no longer be tolerated in a world made smaller by high-speed transportation and made even more fragile by Weapons of Mass Destruction. There is no indication that Islam has any intention whatsoever of altering this long-held policy of aggression, even as it continues to grow in strength and malice. This so utterly unacceptable to world peace and global security that it warrants Total War if that is the only thing capable of resolving the issue.

Czechmade said...

Zenster you write better than Joanne, but still your argument does not contradict fully hers.

Similarly Assyrians are less important "to the world" than Armenians (same fate however at the same time) - and their situation in modern Turkey is even worse than that of Armenians (no way to teach their language etc.).

There is some component or side-effect(there may be many) that people prefer to gather around ONE symbol.

For ex. Austrians fight ONE atomic power plant in CZ "Temelín" for decades, but never an older (possibly less reliable) atomic power plant "Dukovany".

It never appears in their numerous campaigns, political skirmishes, accusations. Why?

They would feel weaker focusing on two things? Would the holocaust get diluted or dissacrated, if we focus on others? In a way yes, but why?

Are we more scared or outraged by "industrial" holocaust than a "farming" holocaust? Yes, we are. But for the one perpetrator the first was the only viable, for the other one - he had more methods - deportation/forced labour to death plus going by walk to Siberia - the death underway was called "dokhodyaga". Stalin had more methods, probably he was "nicer"?

Joanne said...

Zenster - you cannot compare the suffering of a people against the suffering of another people because there will always be people amongst each group who will have suffered far more. Who suffers more - a person sent straight to a gas chamber, or a person who has starved for months until death? Who suffers more - a child who has dye put into their eyes, or a person who is dismembered before their very eyes? I realize 'Jews' have been persecuted for eons, but so has there been the slaughter of many others for eons. The fact that 'Jews' have been persecuted for eons has no bearing on the suffering each human being has endured. It is difficult to hear about the Holocaust non-stop, when you know of others who suffered every bit as much and were every bit as much targeted for death from others. I am not trying to minimalize the suffering of 'Jews'; I know many suffered horrific deaths, but the horrific death of a 'Jew' is no more horrific than say the horrific death of a Ukranian because both were sought out for death - one for being a 'Jew' and one for being a Ukranian.

I feel for all who have suffered - I do not put one person or a group of people above another...that's all.

There are some truly cruel and evil people that have gone before us and that are here with us today.

Czechmade said...

Also you might suspect that the guy responsible is more important for viewing the crime - Hitler Central European versus Stalin Russian.

The victims often hailed from the same area - Eastern Jews all over Europe were very close to the Ukrainians historically/geographically.

To exagerate a bit - we identify ourselves subconsciously more with Hitler than Stalin?
Here we identify more with the missing Jew - a possible neighbour than with the missing Ukrainian...

Interesting is also that Ukrainians and Armenians living abroad refer to themselves as "diaspora".

Homophobic Horse said...

"I know many suffered horrific deaths, but the horrific death of a 'Jew' is no more horrific than say the horrific death of a Ukranian because both were sought out for death - one for being a 'Jew' and one for being a Ukranian.

I feel for all who have suffered - I do not put one person or a group of people above another...that's all.

There are some truly cruel and evil people that have gone before us and that are here with us today."


The Ukraine Famine is still a poorly understood and unpublicised phenomenon. Probably because it was a successful genocide. Along with the Baltic nations.

Zenster said...

Joanne: ... you cannot compare the suffering of a people against the suffering of another people because there will always be people amongst each group who will have suffered far more.

My point was not entirely about human suffering, which has been a historical constant throughout our species' existence. I also attempted to agree with you when I noted how, "starving Ukranians suffered every bit as much".

It is not so much the vast suffering of the Holocaust that singles it out but the concentrated—in every sense of the word—nature of its inhumanity. Again, not the suffering but the abject inhumanity perpetrated by the Nazis. Both in variety and depth, Hitler’s minions demonstrated a disturbing capacity for cruelty and innovative slaughter that distinguishes the Holocaust as unique.

Nowhere do I downplay the 20th Century’s other genocides. I have personally laid flowers at the Tsitsernakaberd (Fortress of Swallows), memorial in Yerevan where Armenia remembers its own horrific loss.

HH: The Ukraine Famine is still a poorly understood and unpublicised phenomenon.

This may well be another explanation why. The world has yet to gain even a remote understanding of the institutionalized brutality and misery wrought upon so much of the Soviet Union’s citizenry. The Iron Curtain hid from prying Western eyes much of the slaughter and depravity that went on in the name of the Scientifically Planned Society™.

Quite the opposite is true with respect to the Holocaust. The Nazis were absolute sticklers for detail and documentation. As a consequence, there exists a much larger and more public record of the Third Reich’s monstrous apparatus than there does of any other preceding or subsequent genocide.

Again, nothing changes the fact that all victims of these various genocides suffered on an unimaginable scale. Still, the Nazi’s finely tuned war machine exhibited—not just extreme diligence and creativity—but a unsurpassed degree of such depraved indifference that it eclipses other less well-calculated mass murders simply by nature of its business-like operation.

Czechmade said...

Zenster,
you did not read enough about Stalin.
Re extreme diligence and creativity.

Zenster said...

Czechmade: ... you did not read enough about Stalin.
Re extreme diligence and creativity.


Stalin was not under direct physical and military attack at the time of his atrocities. Therefore, he had all the time in the world to commit his various heinous crimes against humanity.

The Nazis were made well aware of the time pressure and strategic consequences that their human meat grinder relied upon.

They upped the death rate in ways that defied ordinary human imagination and that is my overarching point, even if no one else wants to recognize it.

That Muslims are willing to resurrect the most soulless murder machine in history speaks volumes about the mindless and conscienceless nature of Islamic genocide.

Abovenall, that remains my central point.