That Which is Hateful to You, Do Not Do Unto Your Fellow
a somber meditation of my troubled psyche reflecting on modern humanity
Excuse me, for there are some things which I feel compelled to say, so say them I am going to do…
The thing I most remember about the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam is that it’s virtually next to Westerkerk, a Renaissance-era Protestant church where Rembrandt is buried. It would have been possible for the Frank family to look out of the windows and see the church and its huge spire.
The Franks hid in that small apartment for years while the Nazis rooted out the Jews of Europe, sending them off to concentration camps where many were either worked to death or outright killed and many more faced starvation and illness and held on just long enough to be liberated by the Allies. But Anne Frank was not one of those who survived. She died just weeks before her concentration camp was liberated.
Could those good Protestants who attended Westerkerk have done anything to help the Franks? Or were they among the many collaborators who lived amongst the populations of the countries the Germans had taken over? Or maybe members of that church did their to best to help Jews escape detection or were part of the Dutch Resistance.
I’ve been troubled by life recently, so I took myself and my troubles to Houston’s Holocaust Museum, a beautiful, solemn building in Houston’s Museum District that just also happens to be across the street from the hospital where I nearly died. I don’t know if a Holocaust Museum is the place to go when one is troubled and looking for answers, and I came away more troubled than when I went in, yet it was a necessary visit.
One of the purposes of the museum is to remind us of what happened during the Holocaust, and while the focus is on the Jewish victims, the museum reminds us that also victims were gypsies and homosexuals and communists and the old and feeble and anyone else deemed by the Nazis to be undesirables. And as you walk through, past the photos of survivors and their families and of those who did not survive, past the anti-Jewish propaganda, past the video screens of survivors talking about what they had been through and what they had witnessed, the museum places questions to ponder: questions about why didn’t people try and stop the Nazis, why didn’t more people try to help the Jews, about what kind of people turned in their neighbors to the Nazis.
That’s why I thought of Westerkerk in Amsterdam. There was a large resistance movement in the Netherlands, yet there were also many Dutch who agreed with the Nazis and assisted them in rounding up the Jews and the other desirables or saw and did nothing when they saw children being sent to their death just because of their religion. And many of these people likely saw themselves as good Christians, believers in God and in Jesus, who believed they were doing the right thing and who were just following the law.
I’ve been troubled the past months because of many things, like what is happening in the Gaza Strip and what is happening on college campuses and our responses to such, to my responses to such, and to what I see as a larger trend of the Evangelical movement attempting to hijack the discussions and condemning Muslims while defining antisemitism in terms so broad that half of the Jewish population of Israel would deemed as antisemitic for daring to protest against the Israeli government.
I was raised as a Southern Baptist — as I’ve discussed before — and am now agnostic. I turned against organized religion many, many years ago because of the type of issues which trouble me now, like how Christians, especially Evangelicals like Southern Baptists, could so quickly toss aside the examples set by Jesus to attack Jews and Muslims and Catholics and other religions.
The Texas Attorney General is Ken Paxton, a man who has been impeached, indicted for fraud, sued for unlawful termination, admitted to adultery, been investigated by the FBI for fraud, and who claims to be a Christian while drawing huge support from Texas’ large Evangelical community. He has used his office for political means and has ignored court orders to improve conditions in Texas prisons, to improve the Texas foster home and youth community, and has led fights against many things that would improve the lives of the type of people Jesus would be helping, like the poor and the young and the ill.
This is not a political discussion because I want to discuss the morality of his position from that of a supposed Christian because there appear to be many, many Christians, especially Evangelical Christians who support the actions of Ken Paxton, and of Texas governor Greg Abbott, and of former president Donald Trump, and so on. And I don’t understand how Christians can support such people, and such positions, and yet still consider themselves to be followers of Jesus.
There’s a speech from the film Judgement at Nuremberg that I’ve been thinking about lately. It comes towards the end of the movie, a long movie, about the Nuremberg trials where the Allies tried various Nazis and Nazi sympathizers and collaborators for the crimes they committed against humanity, like the Holocaust. The movie’s directed by Stanley Kramer and it’s a very talky movie, full of speeches with not much action. The cast includes Spencer Tracy and Burt Lancaster and Richard Widmark and Marlene Dietrich and Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift, and they all get great moments and deliver fantastic performances, but it’s a young Swiss actor, Maximilian Schell, playing a German lawyer assigned to defend Lancaster’s Nazi, who delivers the performance of a lifetime (winning the Oscar for Best Actor), and I don’t know if it’s because of this speech, but it’s powerful.
Schell’s character acknowledges the guilt of Lancaster and of the Germans, but he asks about all of the others who went along with Hitler because, as he points out, Hitler never hid his desires, and indeed, wrote a bestseller laying out all that he intended to do. Who were the others who went along with Hitler and who deserved guilt: the Russians who signed a pact that essentially gave Hitler the go-ahead to start the war; and Winston Churchill who, in 1938, was praising Hitler as a leader who got things done, and the Vatican, which was one of the first major entities to endorse Hitler, and of course, the Americans and American industrialists who helped Hitler rebuild his country and his military.
I love Schell’s performance in this movie, and in this speech. It’s one of my all-time favorite acting performances, because it’s just not passionate, but it’s intelligent, and there are moments of quiet and of loud intensity and he knows just went to dial it up or dial it down. It’s powerful. It leaves you thinking. It leaves you troubled.
So back to the Holocaust Museum and the questions about how the Germans and the world allowed the Holocaust to happen because nothing was ever secret. It was broadcast for all to hear. And the world went along with it until it was almost too late.
This is what has troubled me so. Are we allowing it to happen again? Hamas no doubts wishes this for the Jewish people though Evangelicals show support for the Jews — though anybody with a slight understanding of the Evangelical movement knows the only reason for their support of Israel is because of End Times prophecy that calls for Israel to be united under Jewish rule for the Rapture to happen, per PBS’s Frontline:
These prophecies require three great events before the Messiah can return: the nation of Israel must be restored; Jerusalem must be a Jewish city; and the Temple, the center of worship and sacrifice in the ancient Jewish world, which was last destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D., must be rebuilt.
But could this be happening to all of the innocent Muslims in the Gaza Strip who are trapped and cannot reach freedom? And I think about the poor people attempting to find safety in the United States fleeing wars and corruption in Latin American and South American countries, those people who are called rapists and murderers and who are supposedly parts of secret armies attempting to invade the U.S. The great Christian Ken Paxton is currently suing to shut down a Catholic nonprofit charity in El Paso who provides care and housing to immigrants who have made it across the border, and that great Christian Greg Abbott who has placed the state national guard on the border and is perfectly okay with immigrants being shot and killed. Or about how the Texas GOP is so anti-abortion that it is more than okay with women dying.
What have we allowed ourselves to become? What is wrong with us?
Think about Schell’s speech above. About how nothing Hitler did was a surprise. About how nations and leaders were okay with it. Now think about the things that Donald Trump did and attempted to do when he was president, about how he railed about “shithole countries” and attempted to ban Muslims from the country. None of this is a surprise. Paxton and Abbott and Trump brag about all of the things that they have done and that they want to do.
I know people who are Jewish and who are Muslim and who are gay and who are other things that would have likely been on Hitler’s list. I have no answers to anything, and I have no response to give them when it comes to Pro-Palestinian protestors being viciously attacked by the police at various universities across the country, nor can I answer when discussing their Jewish children who have been met with vile anti-semantic verbal attacks.
I’ve gone on too long, and I’ve gotten more political than I intended — I truly meant to just discuss morality issues, so I apologize — but this has been troubling me, and I had to write it down and share my concerns.
I have written in the past about my admiration for Jimmy Carter, a Christian in perhaps the truest meaning of Christian — who, when president, gave a speech that became widely derided as the Malaise speech. I’ll always remember a portion of that speech where he spoke of the country coming to a fork in a road, and how one way would likely be easier, but would bring about the worst instincts of the people, or a way that would likely be more difficult, but which would reflect the very best of the U.S. and it’s people, and how he was confident that the people would take the harder choice because he had faith in the people. He was wrong about this, unfortunately.
This is part of the reason for the funk that I’ve been in. I despair for the future and I fear where we might be heading because it appears that too many people may be seeking easy answers when there are none. I don’t want a repeat of Germany in the 1940s to happen anywhere, to anyone. It shouldn’t matter your religion or your race or your sex or your sexual preferences or anything.
Did those people who attended Westerkerk know that Anne Frank and others like Anne Frank were so close by, and so desperately in need of help? Would they have acted differently had they known? Were they okay with what happened?
I ask these questions today. And I fear the answers.
And I’m sorry for being such a bummer.
I've been thinking the same kinds of things. We are cutting off our nose to spite our face. I hope we can right this ship, and do it quickly.
So very true. Great writing!