November 12, 2017 – I attended the Remembrance Day Sunday
church parade outside our local parish church today. There was a good
attendance, which meant that I couldn’t see anything of what was happening at
the front. I could see (the tops of) the flags being lowered for two minutes
silence and I could hear the sound of the bugler’s Last Post and The Rouse.
Other than that, I was like everyone else who attended – lost for a few moments
in my own thoughts, and then it was over. The comforting words ‘We shall
remember them’ were put away for use again next year. Truly, funerals and
memorials are for the living, not the dead.
The throng
dispersed to attend to whatever needed attention and the rest of the world
continued to bomb, maim, kill, destroy, cheat, lie, starve, and execute whoever
disagreed with the local and national tyrants. But that’s OK. We have
remembered them.
When I
returned home I looked in my library for a speech made in 1999 – not that long
ago – by a man named Elie Wiesel, born 89 years ago in Transylvania (Romania), rose
to become Andrew W. Mellon Professor in
the Humanities at Boston University.
He was
awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1986 and, with his wife, Marion, he founded
the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.
It’s likely that many of you reading this have never heard of him.
Read on,
please. What he said in 1999 seems to me to be both illuminating and
appropriate.
(Michael)
“The perils of
indifference.”
By Elie Wiesel (Sept 30 1928 – July 2
2016)
Seventh
White House Millennium Evening, Washington, 12 April 1999,
Addressing
President Clinton and Members of the US Congress.
“Fifty-four years ago to the day a young Jewish boy
from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe’s
beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally
free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again.
Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what
they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful
to them for that rage, and also for their compassion. Though he did not
understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know – that
they, too, would remember, and bear witness. . . .
“We are on
the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this
vanishing century be? How will it be
remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged
severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark
shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain
of assassinations (Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin),
bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda,
Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the
tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and
Treblinka. So much violence; so much indifference.
What is
indifference? Etymologically, the word means ‘no difference’. A strange and
unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and
dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil. What are its
courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy
of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is
it necessary at times to practise it simply to keep one’s sanity, live
normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us
experiences harrowing upheavals?
‘Indifference
is always the friend of the enemy.’
“Of course,
indifference can be tempting – more than that, seductive. It is so much easier
to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude
interruptions to our work, our dreams, and our hopes. It is, after all,
awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet,
for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbours are of no
consequences. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even
visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an
abstraction.
Over there,
behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the Muselmänner, as they were called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would
sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where
they were – strangers to their surroundings. They no longer felt pain, hunger,
thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know
it.
‘When adults wage war, children
perish.’
“Rooted in
our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not
the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished
by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God
was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger. Man can live far
from God – not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering.
In a way, to
be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference,
after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be
creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony. One does something special
for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one
witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times ma elicit a
response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it.
Indifference
elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a
beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of
the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor – never his victim, whose pain is
magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell,
the hungry children, the homeless refugees – not to respond to their plight,
not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them
from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.
Indifference,
then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment.
And this is
one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century’s wide-ranging
experiments in good and evil.
In the place
that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers,
the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the
ghettoes and death camps – and I’m glad that Mrs Clinton mentioned that we are
now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now in the Days of
Remembrance – but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.
And our only
miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were
closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what
was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no
knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler’s armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the
Allies. If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven
and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and
conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the
railways, just once.
And now we
knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department
knew. . . . .
. . . . The
depressing tale of the ‘St Louis’ is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its
human cargo – nearly 1,000 Jews – was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that
happened after the Kristallnacht,
after the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops
destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps.
And that ship, which was already on the shores of the United States, was sent
back. I don’t understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help. Why
didn’t he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people – in America -
the great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations
in modern history. What happened? I don’t understand. Why the indifference, on
the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?
But then,
there were human beings who were sensitive to our tragedy. Those non-Jews,
those Christians, that we call the ‘Righteous Gentiles’, who’s selfless acts of
heroism saved the honour of their faith. Why were they so few? Why was there a
greater effort to save SS murders after the war than to save their victims
during the war? Why did some of
America’s largest corporations continue to do business with Hitler’s Germany
until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented, that the Wehrmacht
could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil obtained from
American sources. How is one to explain their indifference?
And yet, my
friends, good things have also happened in this traumatic century: the defeat of
Nazism, the collapse of Communism, the rebirth of Israel on its ancestral soil,
the demise of apartheid, Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt, the peace accord in
Ireland. And let us remember the meeting, filled with drama and emotion,
between Rabin and Arafat that you, Mr President, convened in this very place.
It was here and I will never forget it.
And then, of
course, the joint decision of the United States and NATO to intervene in Kosovo
and save those victims, those refugees, those who were uprooted by a man, whom
I believe that because of his crimes, should be charged with crimes against
humanity.
‘Together we
walk towards the new millennium, carried by profound fear and extraordinary
hope.’
“But this
time, the world was not silent. This time, we do respond. This time we
intervene.
Does it mean
that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has
the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned
from our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of
ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in places near and far? Is
today’s justified intervention in Kosovo, led by you, Mr President, a lasting
warning that never again will the deportation, the terrorization of children
and their parents, be allowed anywhere in the world? Will it discourage other
dictators in other lands to do the same?
What about
the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers,
and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic,
inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their
eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony? Every minute
one of them dies of disease, violence, famine. Some of them – many of them –
could be saved.
And so, once again, I think of the young Jewish boy
from the Carpathian Mountains. He has accompanied the old man I have become
throughout these years of quest and struggle. And together we walk towards the
new millennium, carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope?
(ends)
_ _ _ _ _ _
The
definition of Hope in one book is ‘the feeling that
what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best’. Another book uses the word ‘faith’ alongside the
words ‘hope’ and ‘love’ and that word has been interpreted as being a composite
of ‘knowledge, assent and trust’, which is a step further than hope, I think.
Then the writer offered an explanation: “Let us say that you are visiting
someone's home and they ask you to sit down. First, you look over and
acknowledge that there is indeed a chair. This is knowledge. Second, you
accept the fact that you could sit in this chair and it would hold you up. That
is assent. Finally, you walk over to the chair and sit down in it. That
is trust. It is in this third aspect of faith that you exercise and
complete your faith.”
I wonder if
that was what Elie Wiesel meant?
- - - -
Some years
ago, in the course of my work, I visited Amman, Jordan. There a colleague
invited me to his home for dinner and there, at dinner, I met his father who
was at one time a surgeon or doctor/physician to the late King Hussein. For me,
it was a most uncomfortable evening.
The
conversation turned effortlessly to the plight of those in Gaza. My colleague’s
father wasn’t the least bit indifferent to their circumstances. On the
contrary, when the subject of the Balfour Declaration (1917) came into the
conversation, I was told in no uncertain terms that it was virtually my
personal fault, largely because I’m British and handy. It was all I could do
not to leave the table and leave the home. But that would have been petulant.
Better to let the man speak (vent his spleen) and not cause further offence,
which is what happened.
The moral of
this story? The world runs on ‘I’m right, you/they are wrong’ attitudes. To the
victor goes the spoils and they call the shots, so to speak. SEND HER VICTORIOUS has a whole new
meaning when looked at from this perspective. ‘Forgive us our trespasses (in
the same way) as we forgive those who trespass against us’ becomes an
indictment rather than a prayer. We would do well to be careful what we ask
for.
Whatever
else happens, let us NOT BE INDIFFERENT.
I’m all right, Jack; Not In My Back Yard; I’ve got Mine - are just the tip of the
iceberg. The rest of it is underneath, out of sight.
So, let us
NOT be indifferent when:
(1) Politicians lie, and we know it and
could do something about it.
(2) When lawyers and judges lie, and
we know it and could do something about it.
(3) When jobs-worth officials try to
block our freedoms (immediately after we’ve just had a moment or two
remembering those who fought to give us our freedoms and didn’t come back home to
tell us their story, and we know it and could do something about it.
(4) When our neighbour is hurting
over something he/she can’t talk about and we know it and could do something
about it.
(5) When we meet hypocrisy, lies,
theft, and (for want of a better word) wickedness, and we know it and could do
something about it.
LET US NOT BE INDIFFERENT
