Theos-Talk Archives (June 1995 Message tl00060)

In message <LVg87c2w165w@actrix.co.at> theos-l@vnet.net writes:

> > This "Virtue of Harmlessness" sounds a bit like the Christian
> > idea of turning the other cheek.  Seems to me that some might use
> > "turning the other cheek" as an excuse for "looking the other
> > way."
>
> No, these are quite different ideas.  We should do what we can to
> prevent a repetition of the atrocities carried out during WWII -
> (actually they're going on in Bosnia right now - what are you
> doing about it?) But that doesn't mean we should hate all
> Germans, for example.

Sadly, I can do nothing about Bosnia, nor can the UN.  Of course
we should not hate all Germans - some of them were Jews, some of
them opposed what happened.  Most of the generation that
performed the atrocities are dead, and today's Germans are quite
different people.

> > Here in England at the end of WWII the government sent out
> > newsreel footage containing the full pictorial horrors of what
> > the liberating troops filmed when they went into Bergen-Belsen
> > for the first time - the piles of corpses, the pitiful state of
> > those still barely alive, the German guards being made to carry
> > the dead to mass graves, etc., etc.
>
> Let's not have any illusions that this was the first or last time
> such acts have occurred, nor project all the blame on to the
> Germans during WWII.  A very short time ago the British were
> raking in money from the slave trade and forcing opium onto the
> Chinese.  No country is entirely composed of Saints.  Stalin and
> Mao both killed more people than Hitler did.  My point is that
> the elimination of such violence should be a concern of all
> humanity.

- My only point in reply to this is that we don't have quite the
same newsreel footage of the latter events.  My suggestion was
simply that the human race, where it has such clear evidence to
look at, needs to look at it regularly as an awful warning of
what _can_ happen (probably has, and probably will again, as you
observe - what price progress, again?).

> > in different ways.  And some idiot will try to tell me that all
> > those Jews and others must have deserved it for some unknown
> > "karma" generated in previous lives.  B...sh.t.

> My point here, is that maybe from one point of view it wasn't as
> horrible really as it seems to us now.  Doesn't that Bhagavid
> Gita say that the real person is neither born nor dies?

My point is that it was and still is every bit as horrible as it
seems now and as it seemed then.  The Gita's strength lies in its
portayal of Arjuna on the battlefield - it's about Law.

> ASTREA

Love you too ...

Alan