Indifference Is Not An Option

Today, exactly eighty years ago—January 27, 1945—soldiers of the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, the complex of concentration camps where the Third Reich murdered 1.1 million people, the vast majority of them (approximately 960,000) Jews. [1]

Auschwitz was not the first camp to be liberated—Majdanek had been liberated in July of 1944—but the vast, industrial scale of the murders committed there have made the liberation of Auschwitz the signal moment in recounting, for succeeding generations, the depravity and horror of the Holocaust.

 So it is that in 2005, the United Nations established January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day; and so it is that today, heads of state from across the world will be present at the commemoration marking the eightieth anniversary of the camp’s liberation. The presidents of France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland will attend; the king and queen of Belgium, as well as the king of the United Kingdom, will attend. The United States is sending a ”special envoy to the Middle East.”

 We do not remember this day because it marks a moment in history that will remain in the past. On the contrary, we do so because nothing has changed in the fundamental weakness of human nature in the eight decades since. Humanity has not changed since then. The best we have been able to do is to construct regimes of international agreements (foremost among them the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and institutional structures, all designed to guard against the worst excesses of nationalism and ethnic hatred.

But today, as we pause (as we must) to remember the six million Jews murdered simply for being Jewish during the Holocaust, those structures are being systematically dismantled by a resurgent nationalism in countries across Europe.

If you study the reporting on public attitudes in the Western nations, especially those here in Europe, what you hear in the voices joining the growing numbers supporting extreme right-wing parties is a sense that something is being taken away from them—their economic prospects, their culture, their sense of their own place in society. It is an easy step from there to accepting the notion that someone—or some group—must be responsible for what is being lost.

There is a great deal of evidence from behavioral science that provides the framework for understanding how humans are hard-wired to avoid losses—and are willing to engage in increasingly risky decisions to do so. That science simply confirms empirically the moral anthropology revealed in scripture; we are liable to fall out of right relationship with God and with each other (in other words, to sin) because in seeking our own interests we forget our inter relationship with all humanity.

The past week has proven, if proof were needed, that in the midst of the West’s continual seduction by the wiles of authoritarianism and strong-man leadership our asserting that basic claim will gain us the hatred of the powerful, and the disdain of the wealthy who will only profit all the more by enslaving us in division. David French, The New York Times opinion columnist, recalled yesterday the words of The Reverend Benjamin Cremer, a Wesleyan pastor in Idaho: “When you worship power, compassion and mercy will look like sins.”

We know that the slope from dehumanizing rhetoric to mass deportation to a state that glories in inflicting death is steep and slippery. And we also know that, if we forget the claims of our faith, our response is likely to be loss-avoiding indifference.

But we must not allow that. As Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz, wisely observed nearly forty years ago: [2]

We might add—it’s to listen to the intolerance of political rallies and not speak in opposition, or to watch the roundups of the undocumented and not protest, or to be silenced by the media-amplified voices of the plutocratically wealthy.

Indifference is not an option for Christians; we cannot simply watch injustice unfold. May God grant us strength to maintain the discipline of remembrance, the humility to acknowledge our weakness, and the courage to defend the integrity and worth of all people.

The Right Reverend Mark D. W. Edington

Bishop in Charge

https://mailchi.mp/tec-europe/cece-commemorating-the-liberation-of-auschwitz?e=24afad628a