Maggie's Farm

"The Little Bell"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNv5ZvzTGJw&feature=fvw

Leag, is your full name "Jewish Defense League"? If not, they're missing a great PR opportunity.

Meanwhile, back at Odessa File World Headquarters, cleverly disguised as a vermin-infested hovel clinging to an obscure mountainside in the Paraguayan wilderness, under a single naked lightbuld powered by a 92 year-old Ustashi dwarf on a stationery bicycle, furrowed brows dripping sweat hover over a yellowing copy of the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/opinion/12brooks.html

--the WW2 nazis threw ugly all over everything they touched. That's what they meant to do --uglify everything, so it could be killed, with the end result to be the perfect earthly order, an inert lifeless rock spinning in infinite space.

The Catholic Church, its earthly iteration composed of humans who are all and always prone from time to time to tune out the word of God and tolerate the intolerable, tolerated the nazis until it was too late not to.

Indeed, so did the whole world, tolerate the nazis until it was too late not to, and then too late not to destroy them, or die trying.

But the Catholic Church, in the unique duty of a church, is sensitive about the era. It must be laudable, considering the alternative, that many Catholics are sensitive to the issue. Everybody nowadays understands at least the event horizon of the 20th century European sequence, the enveloping nature of developing evil, and very few watchers of the era hold the Roman Catholic Church especially guilty or extraordinarily tainted. And too, the Pope has apologized to the Jews for not having done more as an institution to help defend them against the special attack the nazis made on them.

Probably no words will ever be arranged artfully enough to bend this part of history one way or the other.

It's good to be a defender of the faith, and to celebrate the RC myriad and manifold contribution to the story of mankind. But a defender of the faith must beware this era, and avoid the trap it contains, where defending a line already lost becomes itself the line of attack --the quicksand in which every move to escape it sinks a body deeper.

For example, to defend European Christianity with the idea that European Jewry 'brought it upon itself' --by mismanagement of the politics or a misinterpreted faith, or some other dark chance of fortune or error --is to automatically, ipso-facto, cast the nazis and everyone who understood them and did not try to stop them, as either mere agents of nature, and therefore inhuman, or as god-men --and again therefore inhuman. Either way, inhuman.

Many who look at this see no way out of it, and no way out of falling further into it except by trying to face the truth square on, to learn something from it, to make the mouthful of ashes at least into a remembrance.

Unless what they did IS human --in which case, why not be a nazi? At least you would be free to discard the hundred thousand year mistake, and proceed to eat the babies and elderly during winter famine, without any God telling you no, you can't, because life is sacred.

correction in italics for para #2 above; "...humans who are all and always Catholic or not prone from time to time...."

Leag, instead of torturing yourself fighting your inferiority complex, why don't you just accept that it's probably not a complex?

That'd free you, you know.

Leag, old friend; first of all, re sticking to topic, please notr that this conversation began with your hackles rising over a mention of Spanish Jews getting expelled in the fifteenth century. Knowing your earlier posts as a staunch defender of the Catholic Church, i assumed that your defensiveness sprang from the most recent history that in living memory is still raw and bleeding.

Since then i've been trying to be generous, to make the point that Catholic defensiveness over the issue is self-defeating, and that all European faiths that stood by while the nazis rampaged are just as guilty of throwing in their hand when the religious chips --when the whole point of religious chips --were really, really down.

I could read Opus Dei and the entire body of literature on the subject --but i'm not a scholar and don''t fancy myself one.

I do understand that when one is out hunting, and in climbing over a barbed wire fence one blows one's foot off with one's shotgun, one can later, after the bleeding stops and the stump heals, write a thousand volumes about the weather that day, the optics and parallax of sunlight on wire and moving shadows of clouds against background forest lines, the wickedness of gun safety mechanisms having no klaxon horn alarm danger modes, the psychology of crossing barbed wire, the tables of shot and shotshell ballistics, the possibility of projectile-proof boots and their having been stupidly never developed, and on and on --but in the end what happened was, when one came to a barbed wire fence that one had to cross, one blew one's foot off.

And that going forward, one can pretend one still has two feet, and fall on one's face and ass continually, or one can cope with having one foot, and so live upright at any rate, if perhaps a little sub-optimally for a thousand or so years. It's a choice.

Anyhoo, there were five or six 20th century genocides, and who knows how many that never happened because they were not permitted. We only observe the ones that were permitted.

well, i guess this is as good a place as any to leave the topic. Matters of fact are beyond the forms of this forum. Anyone interested can pursue them.

cold chills, me too, MM. Then, they wanted a scapegoat so they made one. Now some of them are back, and they want a scapegoat for their having wanted the scapegoat.

Not at all --just finished with the conversation. What, you want it to go on forever?