Rooting out Anti-semitism

There has been a sudden increase in attention being paid to what’s being referred to as “a new anti-semitism” since the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburg. Yesterday’s New York Times carries an opinion piece by Bari Weiss, titled “Europe’s Jew Hatred, and Ours,” in which the depressingly familiar statistics and reports of vandalism and personal attacks on Jews are once again revisited. Particularly disheartening are the polls showing that a third of young Europeans have never heard of the Holocaust.

I have been reading Weimar history for the past several months, and have gradually moved into the Hitler years. I grew up in a German-speaking family with a ferociously proud German Lutheran grandmother, and joined the Lutheran Church myself while in college. I didn’t stay long, and wrote to have my name removed from the membership list after a few years, once I admitted to myself that I simply couldn’t buy into the folk lore any longer, Jonah living in the belly of the whale, Noah and his ark, Mary and her lifelong virginity, Christ and his ability to return to life after death and get his friends to poke their fingers in the holes in his side to prove he was the real thing.

But religion has its way of hanging on. The doctrine may fall away of its own weight, but the culture in which a religious belief system thrives is a separate phenomenon. To be Lutheran means you are likely to be familiar with Bach. You can get rid of Leviticus but still hang on to the Psalms just as the backsliding children of Baptists and Pentecostalists may keep a little space in their heads for “that ol’ time religion.” Well, Amazing Grace, anyway. Episcopalians may find the debate over the meaning of the Eucharist to be no longer relevant to their lives, but still feel a bit of nostalgia over the Elizabethan language of the Book of Common Prayer. What’s not to love, even by an ardent agnostic, about “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us…”

I’ll never forget the time I discovered what a vicious anti-Semite Martin Luther was. Nobody told me in my young years about his treatise “On the Jews and their Lies.” About his advocacy of burning down Jewish schools and synagogues, and not allowing Jews to live among Christians. Forbidding their rabbis to preach and taking away their religious writings entirely. And, just to twist the knife, Luther urged that Jews be given no protection while traveling.

Luther was never considered a prophet, like Jesus or Mohammed, so there’s no reason for Lutherans to reject his insistence that they should stop listening to the church hierarchy and read the Bible for themselves for instruction on how to be a Christian. He was mortal and he made some bad mistakes. One can reject his anti-Semitism as one rejects his own failure to follow the Gospel message he preached that one should recognize that all men and women are equals in the eyes of God, and still be a Lutheran.

Much more difficult to pull apart, however, is Luther’s practice of dividing up the world into a realm of religion and a realm of earthly authority. Luther had to deal with German princes and we’re all familiar with his way of settling real and potential conflict between German regions governed by princes who chose to follow his teaching and those governed by princes who remained loyal to the pope. Cuius regio, eius religio the policy is called – “whose reign, his religion,” a solution to religious conflict which came with the assumption that the princes’ authority was in each case divinely established.

Which caused a problem, some four centuries later, when Hitler came to power. Almost immediately, pastors began joining the Nazi party, believing that Hitler would bring back the German discipline and rid Germany of the decadence of the Weimar era. The “reawakening” of the nation would be matched by a reawakening in the church. Hitler would pick up where Luther had left off. One of Hitler’s first acts was to unite the twenty-eight regional Protestant churches into a single “reich church” and bring the newly united church back under control of the state. Just two months after taking power on January 30, 1933, Hitler instituted the Enabling Act, which allowed him to bypass the legislature and impose laws of his own making. Two weeks after that, on April 7, he created the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (Berufsbeamtengesetz), whose first Article banned Jews from state employment. Later that month he appointed Ludwig Müller, an enthusiastic Nazi as head of the new Reich Church. Müller was supported by about 2000 of the 18,000 evangelical pastors of the time who organized themselves as The German Christians (Die deutschen Christen). The church was initially exempted from this article, known as “the Aryan paragraph,” but pressure soon began to get with the drill, a move the gung-ho Nazi German Christians enthusiastically supported. What the Nazis were demanding was that church officials effectively excommunicate believing Christians simply on the grounds they were Jewish, thus prioritizing race over faith. The church protested, although not on moral grounds, but on jurisdictional grounds – what they didn’t like was the government dictating how the church should be run. Maintaining the distinction since Luther’s day of separating church authority from princely (now governmental) authority, even when Jewish shops and synagogues were burned and smashed on Kristallnacht, the German church took on the attitude that they should mind their own business.

The German Christians were not satisfied with merely removing Jews from church membership; they wanted to remove all traces of Judaism from the faith, as well. That included downplaying, even removing the Old Testament, and substituting for the image of Christ as a gentle soul one in which he is more “manly” – a heroic Aryan warrior on the order of the stormtroopers. The swastika was imposed on the cross symbol and services took on a military flavor. In a biography of Martin Niemöller, the pastor credited, along with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth, with taking the lead in holding on to the authentic Lutheran Church, which came to be called “The Confessing Church,” Matthew D. Hockenos writes

At no point during the twelve years of Nazi rule, much less in 1933, would German Protestants publicly condemn anti-Semitism in stark terms. It is telling that, while American liberal Protestants were planning demonstrations against Nazism, German Protestants were fighting over how much influence to give Hitler in church affairs. The schism that took place in German Protestantism was primarily over church autonomy – not Nazi politics and racial policy. (Hockenos, p. 83)

Since the war, there has been a thorough repudiation of wartime official Lutheran policies during the Hitler period (See, for example, the Lutheran World Federation publication, available online here ) and Lutheran-bashing is unwarranted, considering especially the efforts of the Confessing Church to separate themselves from anti-Semitism during the war years. But what are we to do with those seeking to defend Luther’s chilling anti-Semitism and the many Lutherans who followed his anti-Jewish sentiments down through the years, people who insist that Luther’s view of Jews was not based on their physical identity but on the simple fact that they resisted conversion. Even such notables as Niemöller and Bonhoeffer were known to have espoused this “theological anti-Semitism” in their early years. We can argue today that to the average outsider to the faith this looks like hair-splitting. And it’s probably true that theological anti-Semitism works as an enabler of the more bigoted and dangerous racial kind.  It’s just that upon closer inspection, it is no different from any claim by orthodox religionists that they have the right views on God and religion while the rest of the world lives in error. Clerical Roman Catholicism and traditional Islam rise and fall on such claims, as do all other authoritarian religious organizations.

Making such distinctions is not an idle pastime. How are we to distinguish between Israel as a dream come true for millions of persecuted Jews and the policies of the current Israeli government which has led to pushing Palestinians off their land and creating, in Gaza, what has been called the largest outdoor prison in the world, and in the many camps where Palestinians have lived as refugees for some 70 years now?  A lack of nuanced thinking is at the heart of all bigoted ideology, and will not go away overnight.

Germany, once the headquarters of the most vicious form of anti-Semitism on the planet is today a refuge for Jews, Over 33,000 Israelis have taken German citizenship since 2000, while in France Jews are leaving in great numbers. The fact that this may be due in large part to the presence of Muslims, who outnumber Protestants in France and often carry the prejudices of their countries of origin, where anti-Zionism is official policy, doesn’t lessen the insecurity Jews now feel in France.

Anti-semitism shares with racism, sexism and homophobia the human tendency to act tribally, to separate “us” from “them” and create a hierarchical structure, putting “them” at a level beneath “us.”  And tribal cultural values depend on the habit of creating labels for these arbitrary categories and assuming a complex individual can be placed in them. We fail to distinguish Jews from Israelis, religious Jews from cultural Jews, American Jews with their own particular history (see Stephen Weisman’s The Chosen Wars) from Jews in Europe and elsewhere. It doesn’t help that we have a president at the moment who keeps trying to exclude “Muslims,” rather than distinguish between militant Salafists and peaceful Muslims – or secular Muslims, for that matter. And who once insisted a judge be barred from judging a case on the grounds of his parents’ Mexican origin. Standing up to over-generalizations and inappropriate labelling is a full-time job.

Look on the bright side. At least we never tried to put Jesus of Nazareth into a stormtrooper’s uniform or replace the Torah with Mein Kampf. We may have the likes of Michelle Malkin, whom I once heard address an audience at the University of California on the importance of bringing back the concentration camps of World War II where we locked up Japanese-Americans, only using them this time for locking up Muslim-Americans. But we also have - speaking of complexity - the 2013 survey conducted in the United States by the Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project, which found the intermarriage rate to be 58% among all Jews and 71% among non-Orthodox Jews.

Of course, that fact sets off an alarm. Many Jews (Alan Dershowitz is one – see his The Vanishing American Jew) argue that intermarriage means the end of Judaism, ultimately, since it’s difficult to maintain Jewish identity in a mixed-marriage home. The irony is that the pogroms of Russia and the Holocaust led ultimately to the foundation of Israel and an increasingly vibrant Jewish identity, while loving Jews enough to want to marry them may lead to their destruction as a self-identified racial/ethnic group. Anti-Semitism, following that line of thinking, would become irrelevant. 

Not too many people (pace Dershowitz), as far as I can tell, take these speculations seriously. Jews, I hope, will be around for a very long time. We need to find more ways to raise the consciousness of the general public to the point where we can stop madmen from translating the current Trump administration xenophobia into such things as American anti-Semitism.  To stop the non-nuanced thinking that Jews are necessarily anti-Muslim (and anti-Semitism is therefore justified) at the same time we stop the non-nuanced thinking that Muslims are anti-Jewish, anti-Western or anti-modern.

We might start with a more discerning look at America’s role in invading the Muslim world and at how the mujahideen and the Taliban came to be. And what it means to the Arab world to have us join with Saudi Arabia to starve Yemen and overlook the Khashoggi murder instead of recognizing Saudi Arabia as the generator of jihadist Wahhabis around the world. As well as recognize how deep-seated anti-Semitism is in Western Culture, and how tied it is to our primal tribal identities.

Theological anti-Semitism may explain the origin of anti-Semitism, but it doesn’t justify it and it doesn’t explain what keeps it going. It’s tribalism that does that.

The rise of nationalist movements around the world, Trumps “Make America Great” movement by all means included, is just an expanded form of tribalism. Working on that may be a good place to start.



Hockenos, Matthew D., Then They Came For Me, Basic Books, NY: 2018

The world lies in between

I’m slowly making my way through books by and about Hannah Arendt, since that fascinating biopic on her came out recently.   Possibly it’s because the film was focused on the Eichmann trial, but I am quite taken by her insight into the nature of good and evil.  She made a lot of enemies when people misunderstood her to say Eichmann wasn’t a monster, but just an ordinary Joe.  They were looking for a way to keep an awareness of the Holocaust alive and thought having a monster like Eichmann would do the job.  She didn’t really argue he wasn’t a monster; she merely suggested we were looking for evil in all the wrong places.  Evil, she said, stems not from violence so much as it does from thoughtlessness.  And by that she meant not careless thinking, but lack of thinking.

Eichmann was able to do evil things because he didn’t think for himself.  He was the ideal Nazi follower.  His strength and his pride were in his own ability to follow orders.  Once he had found the perfect authority figure in the Führer, his work was done.  From then on, all that was required of him was to do what he was told.

Arendt had formed her notions of good and evil from a lifetime dealing with the problem of totalitarianism, first directly, in the flesh, then the rest of her life philosophically.  She was a Jew who left Germany when the Nazis took over in 1933, and she devoted much of her life thereafter to the contemplation of evil.   Before her coverage of the Eichmann trial in Eichmann in Jerusalem, which made her famous, she had already decided that real evil is perpetrated by enablers, those who go along with the crowd, become part of mass opinion, seek out authority figures to follow uncritically.

Her embrace of critical thinking began long before her study of twentieth-century authoritarianism, but the advent of Hitler and Stalin and the vision of the mindless crowds surrounding them in adulation could only confirm the importance of open-ended thinking.

A study of semantics will reveal just how arbitrary is meaning.  Postmodern philosophy goes further.  It suggests that not only is meaning negotiated constantly anew, but so is truth itself.  Or at least our understanding of it.  What this means in ordinary language is that what matters is not the so-called eternal truths, but how we live in society, matching our own personal experience against the experience of others to establish what is good and what is meaningful.

To authoritarians, this is anathema.  To religious authoritarians, it is heresy.  Truth must be eternal and unchanging.  This struggle, between conservatives who would foreground the constants and background the trivial (for what else would we call something that is not eternal?), and those who would see the essence of life in the flow of life, is one of the great philosophical issues of all time.   What can we count on?  Is life to be lived moving from whim to whim?

To non-authoritarians, change is the very nature of life.  One never steps into the same stream twice, say the Buddhists.  One lives not in the night; one lives in the time “becoming day.”   One lives in the hope things will get better.  And one knows from experience that with new knowledge, new perspectives, new insight, it actually often does.

Arendt once had this to say about how to view the world and the people in it:  “The world and the people who inhabit it,” she said, “are not the same.”  “The world lies in between people.”  Although Arendt was referring to feeling at home in the world again after years of alienation, I take her declaration that the world lies between people to mean that it moves forward in everyday human interactions.   What matters is not so much the status of birth, or wealth, or accidents of nature, or any of the other externals that we credit or blame for the human condition, but what we do with these givens and events.  Life is what we make it, and reality changes as human interactions make new experiences.  With each new experience we have more to go on in making wiser choices than before.

Another way to say the world lies “in between people” is to say that meaning is constantly negotiated anew, and this implies there is no meaning without constant movement, constant questioning of assumed truths, and revisiting of the values we live by.  Without such openness, we would never have gone from being a slave-holding society to where we are now.  We are still trying to remove the scars of slavery and segregation, but slavery to virtually all Americans today is unthinkable.  We would not have decided it is inappropriate to tie seven-year-olds to machines in factories rather than give them a basic education.  Or that our understanding of race was arbitrary and unscientific and there was no justification to forbidding people of different races to marry.  We routinely look back at our history and wonder at the folly we once took for truth and common sense.  Without this openness, past wrongs can never be put right.

These thoughts flooded in the other day when I read the stunning news that the pope had made a move that I suspect will change the world.   Or at least a good segment of the human population which still looks to the Roman Catholic Church for answers and those affected by their decisions.  Ever since attempts to open the church under Pope John XXIII in Vatican II, succeeding popes have been trying to move the church back to where it was when the pope lost control of the Papal States and compensated by claiming sole infallible authority over the minds of the faithful.   The Roman Catholic Church in recent years has been notorious for its embrace of tradition, the old ways such as a return to the Latin Mass, the idea that the pope speaks through the bishops and priests for God and the prime duty of a catholic is obedience.

While the clerical arteries were hardening within, those in the Church in touch with the world outside have recognized the damage done to the institution by its authoritarian patriarchy.   These “folks in the pews” have gone along, as most people have, with the progress of human rights outside its walls, where women are increasingly finding a voice and substituting sexual equality for patriarchal domination, where lesbians and gays are finding dignity and social approval, where Catholic priests working with the poor in Latin America are demonstrating that followers of Jesus can be primarily about compassion and not power, authority, and self-interest.  For the majority of Roman Catholics, both those leaving the institution in droves and those working with extraordinary patience within, having to watch the hierarchy attending banquets with the power structure, joining forces with dictators – and more recently with right-wing Republicans known for taking away food stamps to enable tax benefits for the rich – has been a heavy burden.

Now, in one fell swoop, Pope Francis seems to have lifted the burden from their shoulders by declaring the moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent.  “We have to find a new balance,” he said, and by that he meant it is time to give up the preoccupation with abortion, homosexuality and birth control, and look at the more essential Christian doctrines stressing love and compassion.  “This church…” Francis declared, making a sharp contrast with his predecessor who once suggested he’d be perfectly happy with the church shrinking down to a smaller group of true believers, “is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people.”  

It’s important to note in passing that the pope has not made any sudden changes in doctrine.  He has not come to embrace abortion, homosexuality or birth control.  He has only criticized the church’s preoccupation – not with adultery, or greed, or deception or gluttony or any the many other sins out there worthy of condemnation, but – with issues of sex, including birth control and abortion.  His criticism has been leveled at what one person has aptly called a “pelvic zone orthodoxy.”  The sins in question still stand.

In so doing, he is inviting all within the church, gays, women, priests sanctioned for their work as Liberation Theologists, to the table.  Just as orthodox rabbis can say to their gay members (or anybody else they consider a sinner), “You’re always welcome at shul,”  Catholics, Francis is suggesting, can keep coming to mass and should expect to be embraced. 

This will be possible, of course, only when the focus is not on the rules, not on the status quo, but on the dialogue.  What has to matter is the on-going nature of human relationships, the exchange of views.  The church, like any other network of human relationships, must live in the spaces in between.  In the language of progressive Christians, one has to stop putting a period where God has put a comma, and God has to be experienced not as a noun (truth, authority, censure), but as a verb.

When you embrace this option of remaining open, you are faced with a constant need to revise as you go along.  You are required to think.  Hannah Arendt saw evil in thoughtlessness.  Having to think doesn’t mean you always reach the right conclusions.  But not thinking takes away your power to stand up to what is wrong.

“Who am I to judge?” Francis said, when asked recently about his stand on homosexuality. 

I take that to mean, “I’m keeping an open mind.”  (I don’t imagine he would give the same answer to “What do you think of rape and murder?”)

He has opened the doors of the church and let in some fresh air.  He has not shed the concept of infallibility, but he has taken the notion from himself and placed it where he thinks it belongs, on the body of believers as a whole.  They will have to work out their differences, in other words.   Don’t wait for me to give you the answers, he is telling them.  Think for yourselves.

There are a lot worse things than a pope who encourages thinking.

If you are interested in the pope’s interview, it’s available here.

   

And if you are interested in some of the discussion about the impact of the pope’s views, Bill Lindsey’s blog is a good summary and place to start. 

photo credit

Good Guys and Bad Guys

Yesterday, I wrote a review of a documentary film about people whose lives were caught up in the Holocaust and its aftermath.  One of the responses I got to that blog posting came from a cousin from the non-German side of my family.

She wrote, in part:

… while the war was going on, what were you told about it - or were you too young?  I know your Mother and Grossmutter were both from Germany…

Although the older people, especially those who remembered WWI, spoke about the whole nation as being Hitlerites, I don't know why, but I always felt that there were those …who were forced to do things they did not believe in.

I was struck with the innocence, even naïveté, of that response.  I don’t mean that critically.  I am very fond of this person.  But it struck me that most people I know would still explain the world in terms of good people forced to do bad things. 

In 1960, when I first went to Germany as a student, I took a course taught by Germans for Germans in the history of the Nazi period.  I wish I had those notes.  I would love to be able to recreate the mind set and the perspective.  I was fascinated at the time, but now I’m not sure if I had the maturity to take things in I might want to take in now.  It began a life long quest to understand the meaning of personal responsibility.  How does one situate oneself in the world?  How does one know one’s capacity to go along or to resist?

I decided to try to answer my cousin’s implied question.  Here’s the letter I wrote back:

________

Dear B:

The quick answer to your question is I was too young.  I was five when the war ended.

I do remember Uncle Bill going off to war - but from home movies, not from memory.

My first strong memory was V-E Day when the factory whistles all started blowing and my grandmother took me by the hand - I was five at the time - to go meet my father.  We missed him because the crowd pouring out of the factory was too wild - decades before cell phones.  No way to connect.  I remember being swept up in the crowd and a little nervous.   I remember people dancing in the streets.

In other words, I did not experience World War II personally.  That was the only time I could speak of being swept up in the war emotionally.

But because of Grossmutter, I grew up with a very strong German identity, as you know, and that gave me some serious cognitive dissonance during the years when I began to move away from a childish good-guy/bad-guy understanding and into a more complex analysis of human thought and behavior.  I’d say that started when I was about twelve or thirteen and by the time I was fifteen or sixteen, or whenever it was that I got some real understanding of the genocide and brutality, I began wondering seriously what made the difference between the fun-loving Germans I lived among in America and the Germans in Germany who went along with Hitler.

Having that sense of somehow being German (and remember, I could always shut that identity off at will, and tell myself that actually I was an American, not a German, and I wouldn’t be lying to myself) put me out ahead of most of my friends with other immigrant identities or no hyphenated identity at all (they were rare) in having to contend with the notion of collective responsibility and the beginning and end of “us.”   And then having to move beyond a simple good German/bad German framework early on because I began meeting people who were actually involved in the war.  I remember one of my grandmother’s acquaintances who was from Danzig (now Gdansk, in Poland) and was married to a Romanian pilot who had flown for the Luftwaffe.  Lovely people, whose company I thoroughly enjoyed.  And then there were the photos of my Uncles Kurt and Willi in Nazi uniforms.  I would meet Willi one day, but Kurt was killed in the war.  My grandmother told me they were not Nazi uniforms.  They were German uniforms.  I was told he died trying to shoot down British planes bombing Hamburg.  That story turned out not to be true – he actually went missing in North Africa.   Probably more a creation of my own young boy fantasies, now that I look back on it, rather than information collected from listening to family conversations. 

I do remember asking my grandmother once why the Germans did such bad things.  Her answer was a reasonable one – “there are good people and bad people everywhere.”  It satisfied me at the moment, but it was like Chinese food – I was hungry again in no time.  Yes, but why should all the American Germans be good Germans and why should there be an entire nation of bad Germans who stayed behind.  Did the good ones see what was coming and the bad ones want to stay behind?  A lot of stuff for a young boy to process.

I was hungry for the explanation that some people had no choice, as you put it.  If you were young, you had to put on a uniform and fight.  Uncle Willi wasn’t necessarily a bad man.  He was wearing a “German uniform,” not a “Nazi uniform.”  The Nazis ran things.  Most people just went along.  We spent a lot of time discussing how war and genocide do not cancel out the printing press and Apfel Strudel, to say nothing of Bach and Mozart.

Little by little, step by step, I made more and more complex distinctions as I went down the layers of explanation from good guys and bad guys.

I remember the first time I saw the film Judgment at Nuremburg, with Marlene Dietrich playing the wife of a German officer trying to explain to the American judge – Spencer Tracey – that her husband was a noble man – noble in class and noble in character.  “We weren’t all bad.”  There’s a great line in the movie, at the end.  Burt Lancaster plays the Minister of Justice who went along with Nazi policies.  He tried to defend himself as somebody who understood things were wrong but wanted to work for his country and make use of his power and influence to mitigate some of the worst excesses of the Nazi regime.  He was on trial, however, for participating in sentencing people to death because they were infirm or mentally deficient.  “I never thought it would come to this,” he says to the judge. Tracy, the judge, answers back, "You knew it would come to this, the first time you sentenced an innocent man to death."

I later got interested in ethics and taught a seminar in it for many years in which I would show that film.  It’s one of the great films, like To Kill a Mockingbird and Gandhi and The Third Man, that raise the eternal ethical questions, whether it’s about how to face the challenge of moral principles in a world where you have to go along to get along, or not whether, but how, to face overwhelming odds in the battle against wrong, or the question of whether there is anything more important than democracy and justice and human equality.

When I was twenty and went to Germany for the first time I was still very innocent, still working out the good guys/bad guys question.  I would go down to the Hofbräuhaus in Munich on weekends and get into discussions with former soldiers and unrequited ex-Nazis and have some interesting exchanges.  It was astonishing to realize there were people all around filled with resentment at having lost the war, and not showing any guilt.  Years later, living in Berlin, I remember a grand old lady who used to serve me cognac and bring out the chocolates and line them up on her coffee table like tanks at the Battle of Stalingrad and tell me if Hitler had done this or done that how he might have won the war.  She was a little batty, but not that batty.  I realized how thoroughly the German ideology of the right to rule had spread throughout the culture and how it was never going to be entirely rooted out and how thin the line was between pride of German identity, which I had inherited from my grandmother, and the belief in racial superiority, which made enablers of so many.   Not too many years ago, a close friend of mine was mugged on her front doorstep in Berlin by a dark-skinned immigrant.  Her daughter’s remark after the event was, “Fifty years of denazification – up in smoke overnight.”  These were people I had genuine affection for.  Not bad guys.  But arguably, in some real way, enablers, however remotely.

I had a good friend in Berlin who worked after the war to maintain the graves of fallen soldiers.  I thought of it by this time as worthy charity work, selfless, and reflective of the man's basic decency.  He had served "in Hitler's navy," but that fact had lost its onus with time.  I was actually on a path which might have led, with a little push, to my giving up my American passport and taking on German nationality.  I had come to embrace the "das war damals" (that was then) mode of thinking and no longer needed to paint with too broad a brush.

But something happened that tested that friendship.  In February of 1985, Reagan decided he owed Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor, a favor and responded positively to an invitation to meet with him at a German cemetery in Bitburg where we were told German and American soldiers were buried.  The planned visit exploded when it was discovered the planners had not done their homework.  Not only were there no Americans buried there, but 49 members of the Waffen-SS were.   To make matters even worse, Reagan had agreed not to visit a concentration camp to avoid, he said, "reawakening the passions of the time."

For the first time since the end of the war, a serious rift developed between the "das war damals", school of thought to which most Germans belonged, and the "never forget" school of thought to which most Americans belonged to.   I remember a speech on the White House lawn by Elie Wiesel, imploring Reagan to reconsider.   Most people remembered Reagan in a movie with a chimpanzee named Bonzo, and a punk rock band came out with the song, "Bonzo goes to Bitburg."   

I sided with Elie Wiesel.  My friend Achim sided with the 72% of Germans who thought the celebration of German-American friendship should be the focus and not the unnecessarily righteous stand the Americans were taking.  Suddenly we were faced with evidence that four decades after the war, even people who had more in common with each other by far than either had with their fellow countrymen of forty years earlier, instead of answering questions like how do good people do bad things, were still asking "who was us?" and "who was them?"

I never reached a point where I could explain German behavior during the war.  What happened instead was that I came to see that behavior in the broader world around me, and therefore less justifiably attributable to something essentially German.  The United States, to pick just one example, cannot escape the genocide of the North American Indian, slavery, land theft, and civil war as integral parts of its history.  Today we are an aggressor nation that kills people by the thousands under the rubric of fighting for freedom.  We took forever to come to the realization that Ho Chi Minh, if you just turned the lenses slightly, could be labeled a freedom fighter and father of his country.  We took the French colonial domination of Vietnam and made it ours.  In the end, we recognized that to win the war we would have had to resort to a kind of Hitlerian “total war” and we backed off.  That makes us better, arguably, than the Nazis, but only in degree, not in kind.  And, it seems to me what moral high ground we might have claimed by that voluntary withdrawal from mischief in the affairs of others we lost when we engaged in the same folly again a generation later, this time in Iraq, where we followed people who would be understood as war criminals who lied us into war, if we had lost that war to more powerful forces.

There is reason to reject the argument that our evil is comparable to the Nazi evil.  They were world-class aggressors; we merely interfere here and there to satisfy our national interest.  They went for total war; we send in only 1% of our population while the rest of us shop and vacation as usual.  But there are similarities.   We don’t foster genocide, but we have thrown away the Geneva Conventions and countenance and justify torture.   We bankrupt ourselves and cover everything in sight with the flag to mask the fact we find money for battleships but not for taking care of the thousands with missing limbs and mental illnesses.  You can argue over equivalency, but you can’t argue, it seems to me, that the evil that arose among the civilized people of Germany in the 30s is recognizable in the neocons of the Bush era whose goal was the expanse of empire and in the policy makers of today whose problem-solving mechanism of choice is military invasion.

This leads to the question of the extent of our participation.  How much are we responsible for “going along”?  During the Vietnam War, every year, I would march in the streets of San Francisco, down Market Street, to a rally of 70,000 people to protest the war.  It felt good.  It felt right.  And then the next day the newspapers around the country would not even carry the San Francisco event and the war went on and we realized our impotence – right up to the end when the tide finally turned.

So marching in protest wasn’t really enough.  What then?  Douse myself with kerosene in front of the Federal Building and burn to a crisp for truth?

I remember one time standing in a crowd watching the Chinese New Year’s Parade in San Francisco.  A military band marched by as one of the contingents.  It was the late 60s.  I had only recently gotten out of the army and was filled with cynicism and disillusionment.  Suddenly, I heard myself shouting at the band, “Paid killers!  Paid killers!  Paid killers!”  Over and over again.  A woman standing next to me turned to me with daggers in her eyes.  “How dare you!  My son is fighting for your freedom.  He wears that uniform proudly!”

I couldn’t tell her I had only recently taken off that uniform and was still suffering from some sort of shock.  I sometimes dream that I can go back in time and find her and apologize.  She deserved not to have her fears for her son trampled on like that.  But I had seen awful things, soldiers taken out and beaten, corruption and incompetence among officers.  The scales had fallen from my eyes and I could no longer think of America as a land of heroes.  My mother had written me once when I was stationed in Berlin and told me how proud she was that all three McCornick boys were in uniform – Brian in the Air Force, Billy in the Marines.  I wrote back and told her if she ever mentioned that again I’d never write to her again.  Wouldn’t even open the envelope, I told her.  Clearly I had lost my balance and it would take years to get it back.

I’ve got it back now.  I’m once again proud and happy to be American, actually, even though I think the country is in terrible trouble – was, at least, until this last election, which has given me some of the early faith back.   I no longer see nationality or ethnicity as meaningful categories for assessing people, though.  I no longer look for heroes and villains but at whether or not individuals are being taxed beyond their capacity to behave with decency.  It’s less interesting to me to ask whether there are good guys and bad guys.  Of course there are.   And whether good people are sometimes forced to do bad things.   Of course they are.  I’m much more interested in how people contend with the world around them when they are overpowered by events.  If they cave, what makes them cave.  If they resist, where they go to find the power to resist.   

I’ve known pathological liars, people who seem to lack all common decency, people who take pleasure in the misery of others.  I’ve also known people with great moral strength, and people totally lacking in guile.    I’m interested in the strategies of most of the rest of us in between, how we develop strategies for staying upright, for recognizing responsibility, how we aid in making sure we and others don’t get taxed beyond our capacities.  How we generate moral leaders.   Of course it’s nice, once in a while, to see real heroes – the fireman rushing into a burning building.  But I am more interested, frankly, in the ordinary person and watching the strategies they develop for getting the most out of life and helping others to do the same.

As a student of anthropology, I became intrigued by the question of whether there could be what one might call an “evil culture.”  Apparently some anthropologists think so.  There are certainly dysfunctional cultural practices.  The culture of destruction generated by the Nazis, which entirely too many people went along with, shows the depravity of which we are capable.  But so does our cultural practice of sticking our old people into homes for other people to take care of.  So does our willingness to surrender our inner cities to drug dealers and our natural resources to corporations interested only in short term profits.  We are content to live in gated communities according to an "I got mine" ethical code where we look down on the poor without health care and think, "There but for the grace of God go I."  Many of us are quick to label the less fortunate as ignorant and lazy moochers.  These impulses, if not corrected, lead to destruction as surely as bombs do.  But how many of us have what it takes to engage and try to turn things around?

Of course we go along with evil.  We can’t fight every battle.  We can’t give our all to do the right thing.  We lack the ability to see the future and understand what going along will mean in the long run.  We take it one day at a time.

Some years ago I had a gay student come into my office.  He said something to me that I wasn’t prepared for.  “I so admire you,” he said.  “You’re not afraid to be open about being gay.  I’m a long way from being there.  I hope some day I have your courage.”

I didn’t have much time to bask in the compliment before I had to explain to him that we were in very different places in our two lives.  He was barely twenty.  He lived at home with parents who supported him.  He had to worry about graduating and getting a job and making his way into a still fairly homophobic world.  I was in my fifties at the time.  I had a tenured job and didn’t have to worry about being fired.  I had worked out most of my personal identity questions, knew who I was, what my strengths and weaknesses were, more or less.  If somebody came at me, I had defenses.  I was able to carry myself with the kind of self-assurance that dissuaded anybody who might want to try and make me small.  It wasn’t courage that I had and he didn’t.  It was security.  I lived in a world where the tigers were mostly caged and where I had the benefit of health, wealth and life experience many people in the world lack – I played a part in that, of course, but it was largely chance where I had ended up.

We can imagine ourselves in more challenging situations.  We can wonder what we would have done in the time of the Holocaust.  Could we have hidden a Jew in our attic?  Would we have divorced the father of our children if he decided to join the SS?  Could we have lived with ourselves if we had, like Truman, dropped the atomic bomb, or like the founding fathers, allowed slavery in order to unite the colonies into a nation?

One cannot spend too much time with questions like this or one would never get dinner on the table.  But it’s important, I think, that we revisit them from time to time so we don’t forget who we are and where we’re going.