US President Barack Obama accepted his Nobel Peace Prize while ‘justifying the deployment of 30,000 more troops to the “graveyard of empires”.’ Obama’s acceptance speech was used as a rationale to deliver a ‘lengthy defense of the “just war” theory and dismiss the idea that nonviolence is capable of addressing the world’s most pressing problems.’

“I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason,” he said.

Obama equated nonviolence with doing nothing, not knowing that nonviolence has been effective in its campaigns throughout history. ‘Using a broad array of tactics — including strikes, boycotts, sit-ins, and protests — nonviolent movements have not only gained important rights for millions of oppressed people around the world, they have confronted, and successfully brought down, some of the most ruthless regimes of the last 100 years.’

The nonviolent movements that ousted the murderous regimes of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, for example, are proof that nonviolence is not a passive move.

In “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict,” a study published in the journal International Security found that “major nonviolent campaigns have achieved success 53 percent of the time, compared with 26 percent for violent resistance campaigns” after ‘analyzing 323 resistance campaigns over the last century.’

Source:
Eric Stoner, “A Lesson on Nonviolence for the President” (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, December 17, 2009)

Josias Kumpf, now 83, did active service during the Holocaust as an armed SS guard at three Nazi concentration camps: the Sachsenhausen Camp, slave labor sites in Nazi-occupied France where prisoners built launching platforms for Germany’s V-1 and V-2 rockets that were used in attacks on Britain, and Nazi forced-labor camps for Jews in Trawniki, Poland. He was born in Serbia but was taken by the Nazis from his home in Yugoslavia when he was 17 and forced to serve as a guard starting in October 1942.

Kumpf was part of the November 1943 Operation Harvest Festival, a mass execution where 42,000 Jewish men, women and children were murdered at three camps in eastern Poland in a span of two days. He was also a guard when about 8,000 Jewish prisoners, including 400 children, were shot and killed in pits at Trawniki. In fact, Kumpf is known as the ‘murder pits’ guard. According to him, his task was to “shoot and kill those who were still half-alive to prevent their escape.”

In 1956, Kumpf migrated from Austria to the US. He became a US citizen in 1964 and eventually settled in Racine, Wisconsin. In May 2005, his US citizenship was nullified because he violated a law that says those with records of persecution cannot enter the US. This meant that he falsified his identity and documents to obtain US citizenship. The US government has deported him to Austria.

The Holocaust is one of the most tragic times in human history. It has redefined the meaning of guilt, giving it more than a singular meaning. Of late, controversy surrounds the Catholic Church and the Vatican regarding the issue of Holocaust denial.

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Via BBC

The issue of complicity in the crimes of the Holocaust is made even more complicated with the existence of a unit of average middle-aged Germans who became the mass murderers of tens of thousands of Jews. They helped the Holocaust succeed as they were transformed from ordinary men into active criminals. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution by Christopher Browning is the story of how Hitler and his top officers manipulated and changed regular citizens into mass murderers by brainwashing them on the concept of duty and patriotism as they carried out Hitler’s Final Solution in Poland. By the time the 500 men of Police Battalion 101 disbanded in late 1943, they had killed at least 83,000 Jews.

The orders that were given to them were chilling, to say the least. The words did not seem to come from leaders of conscience at all. The activities of the men of Police Battalion 101 were measured and strictly accounted for. The phenomenon that was this battalion makes people today ponder at the mind-boggling transformation of ordinary men into killing machines.

No matter how the Nazis were successful in transforming these ordinary men into mass murderers, human conscience crept in, nonetheless. Some of the men showed remorse and tremendous guilt. The book’s author deftly explains how guilt slowly crept into the minds and hearts of these men who were, by all indication, not the evil souls that Nazi leaders were.

In a time of utter confusion when evil men were running their very dark world and their very troubled lives, there were still some of those that helped orchestrate the grand design of the Holocaust who saw a glimpse of conscience through the pangs of guilt. Nevertheless, they did what they did and were, thus, guilty of the sin of commission as much as they were criminally culpable.

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Thalidomide was marketed as a morning sickness medication for pregnant women. The women eventually gave birth to babies without arms and legs. More than 20,000 babies were born with deformities because of the drug. The German pharmaceutical Grünenthal claimed for years that the ‘damned’ drug was discovered by chance. They meant to formulate antihistamine, but ended up with a tranquilizer. Half a century after the tragedy, a dark possibility begins to take shape. Several documents reveal that the drug was actually discovered earlier by Hitler’s scientists and tested in Nazi concentration camps.

Argentinian researcher Carlos De Nápoli theorizes that thalidomide was originally created as an antidote for nerve gas, and that its creator was one Nazi scientist named Otto Ambrose who worked with Grünenthal after the war. De Napoli has documents proving that the guinea pigs used for the drug experimentation were no less than the prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps. All this information is in De Napoli’s book entitled ‘Hitler’s Laboratories.’

Many strange things happened in those Nazi concentration camps. Stranger still is the fact that Hitler was the most famous proponent of Eugenics, a scientific experimentation movement that worked on the sterilization of ‘defectives’ for the purpose of racial supremacy and purity by way of redirecting the evolution process. With this latest evidence on thalidomide’s origins in Nazi concentration camps, the puzzle pieces are starting to fit into a grand picture of Hitler’s Nazi movement as a huge scientific laboratory of evil, twisted, and psychotic minds.

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Via Times Online

The Jews have always borne the trauma of the Holocaust. The rest of the laymen world defines Judaism in terms of the systematic cleansing of Jews by the Nazis. Visitors to Israel are more interested in stopping over the Holocaust Memorial museum before any place else in the country. The Jews have also been living on the psyche of a psychological stigma. If they didn’t blindly march into those gas chambers and had they fought the systematic purging of their race, they wouldn’t be as oppressed to this day as they are. Their destiny should not be defined within the parameters and confines of one sick man’s sick mind.

Israel has been living far too much on the past. What it needs is forward thinking if it were to shake off the collective stigma that besets it. Of course, close association with a hegemonic power that wants considerable control in the Middle East doesn’t help the country any. Judaism as a moral doctrine, more than being one of the three biggest religions on earth, has a higher purpose that just wastes its worth in the mire of the intricacies of human politics.

Israel should always remember that genocide should never happen again. This doesn’t mean that genocide should never happen again to the Jews, but that genocide should never occur again at all. The Jews, more than any people on earth, should not forget the legacy of their bitter past. They should instead use it to be humanity’s reminder of how it is to survive evil on earth. Avrum Burg’s new book entitled “The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise from Its Ashes” says it all.

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Via TIME