(ctd)

>>Some historians become ideologues. They marshal their facts to present a case for some social action<<

Agreed, although, I would rather say that professional historians should resist as much as possible the temptation to “marshal their facts to master a case” or just to support their a priori (Christian or atheists, or what) word-view convictions. This is much harder to do consequently than it is in science (notably theoretical physics, but also evolutionary biology), namely to keep one’s faith or unfaith out of their science. In philosophy of science there is this notion of “methodological atheism” that professional scientists - including theists - abide by.

Nevertheless, there are scientists who when explaining their science use these explanations to advance their own, a priori atheist, world view (Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Kraus, are good examples). Of course, there are also Christian scientists who cannot resist this temptation to mix with their scientific explanations their own, in this case Christian, interpretation of the scientific findings or theories.

Again, I agree that it is easier for a scientist to keep his world-view preferences out of his professional work than it is for a historian.

May I repeat that we have deviated very far from the original topic of this thread.

Dear George,

You wrote: “May I repeat that we have deviated very far from the original topic of this thread.”

You may repeat, and we have deviated. The original post asked:

“Why are the cartoonists who provoked and knowingly offended all Muslims more commemorated and celebrated than the four other victims who did not provoke anybody, and were killed only for being Jews. Also Hitler had apparently killed those who dared to publicly ridicule him, but we commemorate more those who were put to death for no other reason than just being Jews.”

“There Once was a World” recounts the 900 year history of the village of Eishyshok where my grandmother came from. She left almost sixty years before the following and died before the event described on page 594:

“On Sunday, September 28, 1941, the tolling of the church bells at the Juryzdyki church called the people to worship, just as it did every Sunday, and the sanctuary was filled to capacity just as it always was. The pews were lined with people in their Sunday best, which in many cases had been the Sabbath best of their dead Jewish neighbours, whose homes they had looted. Ostrauskas [p. 592, After requesting a coat he could wear to shield his uniform, he picked the children up, one by one, and smashed them against some nearby boulders, spattering his hands and the coat he had borrowed with the blood of his small victims.] was there, too, and was observed to make confession. While the freshly covered graves were still moving and spouting blood, the parishioners listened to their priest explain that the Jews had at last been called to account for the killing of Christ. The priest himself had not advocated killing them; nor did he approve of the looting of Jewish homes. In fact, he asked anyone in the congregation wearing stolen Jewish clothes to leave (though no one did). But he seemed to feel that the murder was understandable. Even if it were wrong, a kind of justice had been done.”

Perhaps, many French felt the same way.

Dear david f,

I read your touchy, even horrifying, story an hour or so after having watched on TV a testimony of two ladies (93 and 84 years old) who both had been in Auschwitz and survived (though not their families). The elder lady had lived for 64 years in New York, had no family, so she came back 4 years ago to spend the rest of her life in her native Berlin. When asked, how could she, her answer was that those guilty, even of not having done anything - the German verb is “wegschauen”, something like “looking away”- are either dead or were small children at that time. The other lady grew up in Prague and has lived in Israel since 1949.

The occasion for the interviews was the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. [The controversy around the celebrations are sad indeed: Putin will not attend, Poroshenko (the Ukrainian president) will. Now thety say it was Ukraine that liberated Auschwitz (http://russia-insider.com/en/2015/01/24/2718). So today Russia is blamed for all the bad things the USSR did, Ukraine praised for all the good things. A couple of weeks ago many eybrows were raised when the Ukrainian PM Yatsenyuk even claimed that in WWII the Soviet Union invaded both Ukraine and Germany.]

Dear George,

I was in Lubeck around 1985. In a restaurant I ordered in my Yiddish-accented German. The big, blond bartender came out from behind the bar and said, "Sind sie Jude?" Clutching my steak knife nervously, ready to do battle, I answered 'Ja'. He stuck out a massive hand and said, "Shalom". He had escaped to Israel but missed his home. So he went back to Lubeck after the war.

In Lubeck there are the connected twin towers that you may see pictured on marzipan boxes. At the bottom of one of the towers there is a torture museum – rack, thumb screws, iron maiden, etc. It was Christmas season, and, as I looked at these instruments, the strains of 'Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht' came through the window. With my prejudices the combination of sight and sound seemed an expression of German culture.

I remember at the beginning of WW2 how Finland became an enemy. Before the war Finland used to be praised in the US press as the only nation that repaid its debts to the US. Then came WW2. Finland went to war, and, together with Germany, invaded Russia. All of a sudden, Finland became a Nazi toady, an evil country. To the Finns I assume it was merely a continuation of the previous war with the Soviets when they had been invaded by the Soviet. Our newspapers had made much of the valiant resistance of the Finns to the evil communists in the first war. However, the evil communists became co-belligerents, and the valiant Finns became the enemy.

Myth may disregard fact. There is a current myth repeated many times that democracies do not go to war with each other. Before, during and after WW2 Finland was and is a genuine democracy. They were on the other side in WW2 from the US, Britain and France. There are other cases of democracies being at odds or at war with each other, but the myth persists.

There are many Yatsenyuks.

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A sub-title on the “public sector guidance sheet” on the topic of “Right to freedom of opinion and expression” that figures on the Attorney-General’s Department section of the Australian Government’s web site, is :

“Which domestic laws relate to freedom of opinion and expression?”

The reply follows :

“There is no Commonwealth legislation enshrining a general right to freedom of expression.” :

http://www.ag.gov.au/RightsAndProtections/HumanRights/PublicSectorGuidanceSheets/Pages/Righttofreedomofopinionandexpression.aspx#7which

Australia is the only Western democracy in the world with neither a constitutional nor a federal legislative bill of rights despite strong public support for a bill similar to that of Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory, the only state and territory to have a bill of rights.

Also, Section 116 of the Constitution of Australia precludes the Commonwealth of Australia (i.e., the federal parliament) from making laws for establishing any religion, imposing any religious observance, or prohibiting the free exercise of any religion. That does not preclude the states of Australia from making such laws.

Section 116 does not apply to the states. Each state has its own constitution, and only Tasmania's has a provision similar to Section 116. Commentators attribute the erroneous location of Section 116 to a drafting oversight caused by the weariness of the committee charged with finalising the draft Constitution. The error has never been corrected.

To top it all off, we have a non-resident, foreign national as our head of state, the Queen of England, who is concomitantly the Supreme Governor of the Church of England.

I am a regular reader of the Queensland parliamentary committee reports and I see that all committee meetings commence with prayers and reference to “God”.

And, of course, After graduating from university, our Prime Minister, Tony Abbott trained as a Roman Catholic seminarian to become a Catholic priest. However, following a change of diocesan boundaries, his new Bishop thought he was too radical so Abbott took up politics instead.

As for historical revisionism, I guess we all indulge in that to a certain extent and present particular aspects of the past in a more favourable light than the reality we know.

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In the symposium on “Free Speech” organised last year by the Australian Human Rights Commission, the president of the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC), Professor Rosalind Croucher, quoted Lord (Baron) Hoffmann as having said :

« Freedom means the right to publish things which government and judges, however well motivated, think should not be published. It means the right to say things which ‘right-thinking people’ regard as dangerous or irresponsible. »

Here is the link to the symposium papers :

http://www.humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/document/publication/free-speech-report2014.pdf

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