On June 10, 1944, just a few days after the Allied invasion at Normandy, 200 German S.S. troops surrounded a little French village, Oradour-sur-Glane. By nightfall, all but three escapees and a half a dozen others had been massacred. Six hundred and forty-two men, women and children dead.
Some say the Germans mistook this village for another with a similar name, another Oradour whose Resistance fighters, the machi, had abducted an S.S. officer earlier in the week. At the official memorial site, interpreters believe the attack was likely ordered as part of Himmler's ongoing campaign of terror. Whatever the precise reason for the massacre, the killings were brutal, cruel and unconscionable.
My wife and I silently drifted from ruin to ruin in the half razed village, preserved as a memorial. As I wandered by the school, the church and what remained of the little shops in the center of the village, I imagined the scene just hours before the soldiers arrived. Cafés were selling coffee. Coiffeurs were cutting hair. Men and women were working in the fields or selling their products in town. The children were running up and down the street, some helping their parents, others just enjoying summer vacation.
By evening, nearly all these precious lives were reduced to smoldering, bullet-ridden corpses. Dead or alive, everyone in the village was eventually doused with gasoline and set afire. Fewer than 10 percent of the bodies were identifiable after the German soldiers had finished executing their orders.
I thought it odd that I felt almost nothing for almost two hours, until I realized that I simply couldn't believe what I was reading and seeing. I was in shock and couldn't take in the horror of it all.
It's not as if I didn't already know about the millions who had died in concentration camps and gas chambers, the pogroms conducted over the centuries and the even more horrific genocides in Rwanda, Armenia, Bosnia, Cambodia and elsewhere. Maybe it was the senseless, cold-blooded brutality against innocent villagers that so disturbed me this time. Maybe it was the realization that the killers looked just like me, and their victims just like the people in my own family. Or, maybe it was a growing sense of terror that what happened in this little village less than a century ago could happen again, anywhere, given the right conditions. And probably would again and again and again.
The tears finally began falling when I read the inscriptions on the memorial stones in the cemetery. Many spoke of loved ones whose lives were senselessly cut short by the "barbarian Germans." The one pictured above reads: "To the memory of our dear little girls and sisters, charmed with our affection ... students of the school at Oradour-sur-Glane, massacred and burned in the church by the Nazi hordes..."
My grief soon gave away to rage, and I began fantasizing wreaking revenge on the perpetrators and anyone else like them. And then it struck me.
Violent instincts aren't reserved for tyrants, psychopaths, soldiers or citizens just following orders, and neither are destructive actions. Genocide is an extreme expression of a type of human behavior that is way too normal.
Don't fool yourself. While (fortunately) most of us do not act on our irrational, most violent impulses, none of us is innocent. Any of us is capable of treating others cruelly and even violently, given the right circumstances. Each of us knows how to hurt others. Each of us has done so, and keep doing so, in one way or another all of our lives.
Our heartless judgments, our unwillingness to forgive, our spineless fear of going against those in power, our preoccupation with our own comfort and gratification, our inability or unwillingness to empathize, or simply our indifference -- all set the stage for inflicting damage on others, by design or neglect. Each of us is perpetuating a world of violence far more than we sometimes realize. And in our blindness, we may be unwittingly missing opportunities to stop the flow of hatred that leads to the destruction of innocent lives.
At the entrance to the ruins there's a sign that reads, "Souviens-Toi--Remember." It's an ominous warning: Remember what happened, and realize it can happen again.
As a human race, we must anticipate that some day the perfect storm of circumstances -- some combination of hatred, fear, ignorance, prejudice, rage, political expediency, malicious propaganda, unchecked power, lack of accountability or some other trigger -- will suddenly unleash another genocide somewhere in the world. We don't know when, but it's coming. We need to get ahead of it, and do all we can to diffuse these destructive forces wherever and whenever we can.
As individuals, we must look within ourselves, too. The lesson of Oradour-sur-Glane for most of us is not, "Don't commit genocide," as if anyone had to hold us back from wholesale murder. No, the horrors of such unimaginable atrocities say to me: Don't just weep for the victims or rage against the perpetrators. Think about how you are contributing to the violence in the world, and where such treatment of others leads.
Look in the mirror.
Remember.
A Prayer for Help
"Merciful God, save us from ourselves. Please break our hearts over our own hatred, desires for revenge, violent words, hurtful actions, indifference and neglect. Forgive us for all we do to contribute to the suffering of the world, and help us to forgive all those who have neglected, abandoned and abused us. Help us to resist the temptation to strike out against others, and deliver us from the evil that too easily surfaces within us. Lead us to your well of grace and love that we may drink from it, be cleansed and be empowered to think and live differently. Amen."
This article is a rewrite of an earlier version posted on the author's blog.
Follow Rev. Timothy C. Geoffrion, Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/GeoffrionTim
Katie Engelhart: In Search of the Ordinary Female War Criminal
-Lauren Warren
Genocide is heinous and abominable. Genocide and other atrocities happen when we allow ourselevs to treat others unjustly or inferior. If we think someone is inferior to us, we begin to treat that individual as such. Differences in race/faith/gender/economics does not equate to the idea people are unworthy.
Much of the world's hatred and crimes have been committed becauce of the wrong perception that "differences" give the "right" to treat others as inferior: strong or weak, economically disadvantaged or abundant resources, green eyes or black eyes, pray to Budda or pray towards Mecca, shoes or barefoot, different shades of skin tone, youth or age. All of these and other "excuses" are used everday by each of us to determine how we respond towards others.
We do not live in a perfect world. Illness, crime, war, hunger, indifference, poverty, death, stalk our world. Hope, joy, justice, health, compassion, flourish in our world. Each person must make a daily choice for how he/she will choose to treat others. Action begins with one person making a choice. This takes personal commitment, clear objectives, a strong faith/determination to "cross the finish line with honor", a strong legal system, and a healthy respect of each other.
For an individual or country to watch genocide unfold and do nothing, is complicity.
If the actions being reported in Islamic countries are a strong indicator of what had happened in empires and single party governments (including monarchies without representational parliaments), then we can see that cruel punishment was used to oppress people. Lax punishment was used to show partiality to select members of the elect group. Genocide was viewed as a way of getting rid of people that had been judged to be too difficult to oppress.
Genocide is an abomination. Murder is a capital crime. Genocide is mass murder with the erradication of a population of people as its agenda. A whole group of people has been marked as "the problem." The solution to the problem is extermination according to this view.
All the other groups in the society are supposed to be relieved that it is not them. Once one group has been eliminated hwr, another group will be selected as "the problem." It is a policy that represents cruelty and laxity in punishment for "justice," not the representation of human rights.
Government is about the representation of human rights; not the control people. Justice is about the correction of problems, not the eradication of people.
Recently, I've been writing about a fictional world involving a society that, through propaganda and general manner, encourages its unwanted members toward suicide (because they want them gone but don't want to get their hands dirty anymore). Then I read a propagandist letter from a real life person/organization regarding opposition to a program of suicide-prevention for LGBTQ youth and kind of went "Oh, dammit, the nasty thing I've been writing is mirroring reality! Ugh!"
I guess all I can say is that hate seethes everywhere, and on occasion, it just becomes "flashy."
Real life and people don't have that restriction.........
The instructions are as clear as can be: Do not merely kill the men, but the women, the children and even the animals. Leave nothing alive.
How could a just, all wise, and all powerful God command men to do such a thing?
And please don't answer with the usual apologetics. I've heard all the pious excuses way too many times. If I had more room I could recite it all back to you.
My challenge is not just armchair debating. Christians' slavish reliance on the Bible for their moral compass is the root cause of homophobia in the West today. Muslims' equally slavish reliance on the Qu'ran is the root cause for homophobia, misogyny, and persecution of the other in too many Muslim countries.
At some point, the religious folks from the Abrahamic traditions need to acknowledge that their holy books are flawed - that they are a mixture of light and dark - that we cannot, should not and must not depend on their directives as guides for ethical living in the 21st century.
Germany in the first half of the 20th century in particular presents a disturbing case study. Not once, but twice one of the most sophisticated and advanced peoples of the world set out to earn its place among the nations through conquest aided by systematic massacre of non-combatants and wanton destruction. The race fantasy-inspired murder of WWII is most glaring, but even more subtly unsettling are the killings of Belgian and French civilians in the First World War. Unsettling not for their scale or ferocity, but because rather than fits of barbarism inspired by sick ideology, these were controlled and contemplated acts of strategic intimidation. Disturbed by the difficulty of their occupation of France in 1870-71, German strategists laid out a plan of systematic pillage and slaughter designed to nip any civilian resistance in the bud.
For all the centuries of glorious achievements of science and culture, when put to the test the 20th century European proved no less barbarous than his ancestors 2000 years before. There is no reason to think that modern man will fare any better when the next cataclysm comes.
There is convincing evidence of the production of such helpful fictions.
"German troops, afraid of Belgian guerrilla fighters, or francs-tireurs, burned homes and executed civilians throughout eastern and central Belgium, including Aarschot (156 dead), Andenne (211 dead), Tamines (383 dead) and Dinant (674 dead).[7] The victims included women and children.[8]"
Sad, but true.
I know the sudden rage that can come from somewhere unknown deep within me. It scares me to speculate the horrors I could perpetrate on someone else given a certain set of factors.
I agree with the author, "Don't just weep for the victims or rage against the perpetrators. Think about how you are contributing to the violence in the world, and where such treatment of others leads. "
Please God help me; help us all. God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
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