The caption:
In 1998, Polish nationalists embarked upon a mission to put up 152 Christian crosses in honor of the Polish Catholic resistance fighters who were executed by the Nazis in a gravel pit behind Block 11 at the main Auschwitz concentration camp. This was their way of protesting Jewish demands, over the previous 10 years, that the 26-foot souvenir cross from a Mass, said by the Pope at Birkenau, be removed. The basic attitude of the Poles, openly expressed, was "This is our country. You have your country and we have ours. If we want to put up a Catholic Cross in our country, we'll put it."
The result:
Unimaginable without actually seeing the picture.
Not much of a testament to Polish carpentry skills. Ultimately, a compromise of sorts was reached, and the trash crosses came down. The original remained. The official Catholic Church justification for all this was that, after all, there had been some Catholics executed. In addition to what is in the photos, a convent has been established in the former administrative building.
What is there to be said?
How does this map on to the Islamic Center/WTC controversy? I don't know. I first felt a kind of "Yipes!", that the Islamic building was planned, a startle. But then, when I remembered the Auschwitz episode, it got a little more complicated. I guess my feeling now is that 9/11 is notable in modern times for the purity of its malevolence. There was certainly no attempt to spare any religion, class, ethnicity, origin, gender -- anybody, or any group. Not even a pretense. Just, make a hole in the earth. How strange, at a time in history in which most violent episodes pretend to be so selective. Previous terrorist episodes were aimed at particular groups, most frequently, in my lifetime, Israelis and African-Americans. Sometimes Europeans, sometimes Americans, but always members of a group. Pinpoint bombing, after all, has ended civilian casualties in....well, never mind.
9/11 was purely about geography. There is also the Hiroshima/Nagasaki (from here, H/N) anniversary this week. I have read much of the rationalizations people made at the time. Very few talk about killing lots of people. Most talk about the hole in the ground that they wanted to make. I must say, I still don't understand why we couldn't build a fence around the place, in 1945, and put a little doorbell in the fence, with a sign saying "Ring when you want to talk", and then sit back and drop a few bombs on factories and trains and food supply systems now and then, just to show them we were still hanging on. But there was some reason we couldn't. Didn't make a nice hole in the ground.
That's the glib response, and it contains a sliver of reality. What is the difference between killing a hundred thousand Japanese with one bomb, and a similar number of Jews, or Cambodians, or Rwandans, or Vietnamese, over time? There is a tremendous difference.
I suppose most of my response to it all is about collective guilt. I still feel like I did not do nearly enough, in my salad days, to end the Vietnam episode. We did a lot, but we never made the warmongers (!) pay for their misdeeds, and that failure has cost us dearly. Nixon, Johnson, and their lackeys (as we said then) should have died in prison, rather than being allowed to live out their lives in luxury. Perhaps Bush might have been just a little less impulsive with the spectre of a grim federal prison facing him. But perhaps not. In these cases, history was written by the losers.
So, do all the Germans of 1946 bear the responsibility for the Holocaust? Yup. Do all the Americans of 1973 bear the responsibility for the Vietnam invasion? Yup. Do all the Americans of 2002 bear the responsibility for the Iraq invasion? Yup. Cambodians for genocide? Yup. I can go on. But do Muslims bear the responsibility for 9/11? I'm not so sure.
I think both Hiroshima/Nagasaki and WTC have some things in common. For one, only a few people knew what was going to happen. Both were unique events, black swans, as they are now called. Americans couldn't have stopped H/N, and Muslims couldn't have stopped 9/11. And, so, no chance for collective guilt. No collective guilt for me over H/N, or for Muslims over 9/11.
I think I obsess about collective guilt too much, but I also think everybody else obsesses too little. As the moralists say, we should be "held accountable". I love that phrase. How to be accountable for a million dead? One dead? Oh, sure: Take full responsibility.
Well, I suppose, build the building in lower Manhattan. We didn't see Hiroshima/Nagasaki coming, and they didn't see 9/11 coming. No guilt involved, and this was decided by a grand connoisseur of collective guilt. And we need to be "held accountable" for the tens and hundreds of thousands we have killed in the last decade.
Thanks to scrapbookpages.com for the photos and caption.
Jack,
ReplyDeleteI really like your juxtiposing (ok, spell check doesn't like the word and I don't know how else to spell it) Hiroshima/Nagasaki with the World Trade Center (though note that some I know who are not total nuts continue to think that 9/11 was an inside job). But I note that the wanton destruction of civilian targets in WWII was pervasive (see The Fog of War, in which McNamara states that if the allies had lost the war, we (they) would have been successfully tried for war crimes because of the massive bombing of non-military targets. And now we are all guilty of the drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to your reasoning. I guess we are--collectively, there's little outcry and almost no response to the terrible floods--doubtless a consequences, at least in part, of climate change--in Pakistan. I ramble. Things are bad.