Continental Woes
To the Editor:
George Weigel’s article, “Europe’s Two Culture Wars” [May], contains many perceptive reflections on the political and social challenges facing Europe, but like so many assessments of Europe from the conservative camp, its excesses limit its contribution. Ideological salvos crowd out empirical and analytic accuracy, turning what could have been a sober evaluation into a Europhobic tirade.
Mr. Weigel begins his story with the 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid and the Spanish elections that took place soon thereafter. He is correct that the railway bombings played a central role in leading the Center-Left to victory over José María Aznar, who had supported the Iraq war and sent Spanish troops to join the coalition. The new prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, promptly withdrew his country’s forces from Iraq, as he had promised during the campaign. Analyzing these events, Mr. Weigel claims that “Spanish voters chose appeasement,” and he goes on to take the Zapatero government to task for “aggressively secularizing” the country and legalizing same-sex marriage. Entirely missing from his account are important parts of the story.
Aznar initially blamed the bombings on Basque separatists, though apparently he knew otherwise. In the critical hours before the election, his alleged dissimulation became public, pushing voters toward Zapatero. Many analysts maintain that Aznar’s missteps, not only the bombings themselves, affected the election’s outcome. Moreover, the vast majority of the Spanish electorate opposed the Iraq war, a factor that was undermining support for Aznar well before the terror attacks. Mr. Weigel’s omission of these issues is quite curious.
Mr. Weigel goes on to portray the European Union as a cabal of “radical secularists” bent on using “bureaucratic regulation” to “eliminate the vestiges of Europe’s Judeo-Christian culture.” He may not like the fact that Europeans are not going to church as often as they used to or that the EU constitution—now on ice after failed referenda in France and the Netherlands—did not reaffirm Europe’s Christian roots. But Europe remains the main repository of Judeo-Christian culture, even if traditional religious practice has fallen off.
Would Mr. Weigel prefer the current situation in Poland, where nationalistic, anti-immigrant, and populist politics are triumphing? Is he aware that the call for a return to traditional Catholic values there is accompanied by a creeping anti-Semitism as well as open hostility toward European integration? Would he prefer a Europe where Jews are not welcome and which again falls prey to the dangers of national jealousies?
Mr. Weigel also errs in his discussion of Europe’s handling of its Muslim immigrants. Again, he resurrects the Munich analogy: “Sixty years after the end of World War II, the European instinct for appeasement is alive and well.” To be sure, Europe’s governments have been too lax in dealing with homegrown extremism, as the bombings in Madrid and London made all too clear. But the sole source of the problem is hardly, as Mr. Weigel has it, Europe’s excessive “liberality” and political correctness. On the contrary, Europe’s tradition-bound approach to matters of ethnicity and nationhood is a major part of the problem.
The radicalization of Europe’s Muslims is to a considerable degree a response to exclusion, not appeasement. With ethnic conceptions of nationhood still competing with civic definitions of citizenship on the continent, many Muslim immigrants—even of the second and third generation—feel as if they do not belong. Mr. Weigel writes that “Europe’s native populations” are becoming “second- and third-class citizens in their own countries,” but exactly the opposite is true. It is the immigrants who are being denied social and economic opportunity, which often leads to alienation and radicalization. One need only look at America’s Muslim population to see the beneficial effects of economic opportunity and a successful model of multiethnic integration.
Mr. Weigel is right to worry about Europe’s declining birthrates and their economic and social implications. But the sobering reality of demographic decline only reinforces the need for Europe to become multi-ethnic in spirit as well as in fact by working much harder to integrate Muslim immigrants into the social mainstream.
There is much that is good as well as much that is troubling about today’s Europe. For whatever reason, Mr. Weigel wants to tell only one side of the story. Perhaps he and kindred spirits should probe the deeper sources of their Europhobia.
Charles A. Kupchan
Georgetown University/Council on Foreign Relations
Washington, D.C.
To the Editor:
George Weigel correctly identifies a mortal threat to Europe from its Muslim immigrants, and he is right to see low indigenous birthrates as a key component of the problem. But he is wrong on just about everything else.
Europe’s aging population and declining birthrates have nothing to do with political secularism. During the past twenty years, Mexico has experienced the fastest decline in fertility in modern history; Jordan has seen its own birthrate almost halve. Neither country is commonly regarded as liberal or secular, and each has seen its decline without legalizing homosexuality, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, abortion-on-demand, or any of the other liberalizations upon which Mr. Weigel is so quick to pin responsibility for Europe’s demographic trends.
When I visited Spain in 1969, women were still washing their clothes in streams, no more than 20 miles from Madrid. The stifling hand of the Catholic Church attached to the iron arm of Franco’s fascist state excluded Spain from the postwar economic miracle that transformed its neighbors in the European Union, another target of Mr. Weigel’s polemic. Life expectancy and per-capita income for most people in 1970’s Spain were roughly the same as in Algeria. That is now, thankfully, a distant memory. Parents of newborn children and the overwhelming majority of Spanish citizens know the vital importance of keeping religion out of the public arena.
The EU can be a dumb bureaucracy, and jokes about such silliness as the prescribed size of European bananas abound. Still, all the risible regulations that Mr. Weigel recounts amount to a heap of nothing. It may take more than a man and a ladder to change a light bulb in Britain, but the UK still enjoys an unparalleled level of prosperity and a record-breaking period of economic growth. Polish eggs may come stamped with EU digits where once they were bare, but the real difference is that Poles can now actually afford to buy them, as well as cars and televisions and cell phones. As Faustian pacts go, it has not been a bad one for the people of the EU.
Europe can profitably learn from America about many things: efficient labor markets, reduced bureaucracy in finance and business creation, the encouragement of risk-taking and entrepreneurialism through the tax system. But what Europeans do not need are lessons in public theology, a field in which we Americans are already far too proficient for our own good.
In Europe, the horrors of the first half of the 20th century gave way to a concept of the public good as expressed in the welfare state, with its promise of cradle-to-grave security. It is hard to understand the reluctance of the French to reform their bloated state apparatus until one spends time in France and sees just how good life really is for the average Frenchman. The drowsiness induced by a life almost miraculously full of material plenty and security is the cause of Europe’s feeble response to the Islamic menace, not secularism. Sad to say, but the awakening of the EU will arrive only in response to further Islamic outrages, not to the atavistic exhortations of the failed culture of public faith.
Max Davies
Orlando, Florida
George Weigel writes:
I thank my correspondents for taking the trouble to write, and for confirming my sense that perceptions of Europe’s current situation often reflect an observer’s stance in America’s own culture war. I also want to take the occasion to correct two small errors of fact in my article. On page 32, I identified the assassin of Theo van Gogh as of Indonesian rather than of Moroccan origin; on page 33, I placed a graffito proclaiming “Thou shalt not kill” in Amsterdam when it was in Rotterdam.
Charles A. Kupchan is correct to say that Spanish voters were inclined toward appeasing aggressive Islam and international criminals like Saddam Hussein before José María Aznar’s mistakes in the initial handling of the Madrid bombings. But that hardly changes the fact that a vote for José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was a de-facto vote for appeasement. That vote has also had the unhappy effect of empowering a government that perhaps only an academic would not recognize as aggressively secularizing.
I wish Mr. Kupchan were right about Europe remaining “the main repository of Judeo-Christian culture.” Two intellectually impressive products of European high culture, the late Pope John Paul II and the current pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI, have had a much less sanguine view of the degree to which Europe is still nourished by its Judeo-Christian roots. If “Judeo-Christian culture” includes certain moral understandings, and if those moral understandings are now considered “intolerance” or “hate speech” by the European Parliament, it is hard to understand just how Europe is a main repository of that culture.
I hold no brief for the nationalist Right in Poland. But after spending more than a month in that country earlier this year, during which time I had the opportunity to discuss the current situation with political and religious leaders across the spectrum of sane opinion, I can assure Mr. Kupchan that his suggestions of an impending pogrom there are, to put it gently, greatly exaggerated. Those who want to worry about renascent anti-Semitism in the European Union might instead turn their attention to France.
Europe does tend to handle assimilation badly, as Mr. Kupchan observes and as the unhappy suburbs of Paris bear out. The British bombers of the London subway in 2005 were not, however, the wretched refuse of an unassimilated population but members of a population that by most visible measures had assimilated rather well. The seductions of jihadist Islam, it seems, work on both the middle class and the underclass, the assimilated and the unassimilated.
Finally, on the matter of my alleged Europhobia, may I refer Mr. Kupchan to my book, The Cube and the Cathedral, where he will find his indictment refuted, chapter and verse?
Max Davies’s letter raises the important question of what accounts for the unprecedented decline in fertility being experienced around the world—save in places like Yemen, which in a few decades may have a population larger than Russia’s. In truth, no one knows with any certainty why fertility is plummeting, and attempts to identify a single cause are likely to be frustrated (and wrong).
Likely there are different primary causes of the decline in fertility in different parts of the world, even as certain factors, like the availability of contraception and the changing social roles of women, have an impact across the board. That Europe’s demographic suicide—and there is now no other word for it—has something to do with what many now recognize as the problem of Europe’s spiritual boredom ought not be doubted. Amidst a soured nihilism about the very mystery of being, there is, it seems, very little interest in creating the human future—especially when the responsibilities of children to their aging parents have been assumed by the nanny state. I do not, by the way, “pin responsibility for Europe’s demographic trends” on the libertinism now being set in legal concrete throughout much of Western Europe; I regard that libertinism and Europe’s demographic decline as two manifestations of the same spiritual wasting disease.
As for Spain’s welcome development (hardly an economic virgin birth, for the groundwork had been laid during the latter Franco period), the question remains as to what will happen to Spanish prosperity if over the next century Spain becomes once again al-Andalus. European prosperity, too, is unmistakable at present, although virtually every serious student of economics with whom I am familiar believes that “old Europe” is heading toward a fiscal train-wreck, as aging populations put increasing burdens on a womb-to-tomb welfare state being supported by a decreasing number of taxpayers.
As for “keeping religion out of the public arena,” there is a wide terrain of sanity between old Spanish altar-and-throne arrangements and Zapatero’s naked public square. Moreover, no one of a democratic cast of mind should want to proscribe religiously-informed moral argument from public life, for that would be to disenfranchise believers. I do not quite know what Mr. Davies’s “failed culture of public faith” is, but his recognition that the “drowsiness” induced by unprecedented prosperity helps explain Europe’s appeasement of Islamic aggression should remind us that (as an old book once put it) “man does not live by bread alone.”
America & the World
To the Editor:
Daniel Johnson begins his discussion of anti-Americanism by heaping well-deserved praise on Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes’s America Against the World [“America and the America-Haters,” June]. That book presents a highly readable summary of the results of more than 91,000 interviews on attitudes toward America and Americans in more than 50 countries, including America itself.
But Mr. Johnson goes on to take the authors to task for putting a biased spin on the polling data. Portraying them as Clintonites who are determined to show that America’s fall from grace is largely attributable to policies of the Bush administration, he pushes things too far when he states:
Even if the United States were inclined to countenance appeasement of its enemies, as Kohut and Stokes all but explicitly advise, the demands of its anti-American critics are too numerous, too self-contradictory, and too all-consuming to be satisfied by anything less than an utter American abasement and, indeed, defeat.
In fact, Kohut and Stokes do not recommend steps that Americans and their government ought to take to reduce anti-Americanism, even though the authors have been closer to the mindset of America’s detractors than most. They are content to describe important warning signs. For example, they point out that two of America’s greatest strengths—individualism and self-confidence—can result in hubris that ignores the interests of others. At any rate, if the U.S. government were to accept Mr. Johnson’s notion that adjusting its approach in response to critics is tantamount to going down in defeat, we would see more of the unrelenting unilateralism that is already turning America into a fortress.
Mr. Johnson contends that “pragmatic” anti-Americanists, whose hostility results from personal observations of unsettling incidents (like a British general in Iraq who harshly criticized American colleagues for their John Wayne-like soldiering), may be persuaded to change their views. Later, however, he admits that “in practice . . . few people find it easy to admit error.” Which is it?
Even more questionable is Mr. Johnson’s belief that the remaining antagonists are “fundamentalists” whose anti-Americanism is based on intractable religious convictions. Mr. Johnson goes so far as to say that “anti-Americanism has become a continuation of anti-Semitism by other means.” He gives little heed to the many other reasons that have inspired anti-American attitudes around the world—U.S. troops stationed on holy Muslim soil, poverty, lack of opportunity, and inflammatory schooling among Muslim youths, to name a few.
Mr. Johnson’s proposal for “more vigorous public diplomacy on the part of Washington and its friends” is a weak rejoinder to the violent growth of anti-Americanism. He feels that “a shift in American foreign policy is unlikely to reverse or even affect the tide of anti-Americanism,” noting that America’s humanitarian response to the tsunami in Asia did not significantly reduce anti-American attitudes there. But one-time decisions related to humanitarian assistance do not constitute shifts in American policy.
As I argue in my book America on Notice, realistic modifications to our foreign policy could change hostile attitudes toward the U.S. Such changes might include: a new emphasis on job creation in foreign aid; expanding educational opportunities and encouraging the adoption of modern university curricula, especially in the Muslim world; greater support for the global effort to control infectious diseases; halting the regime-change policies that have justified military interventions; ending the double standard of increasing our own nuclear capabilities while denying others the use of such technology for peaceful purposes; strengthening the role of the United Nations to prevent international security crises; and more assertive efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Glenn E. Schweitzer
National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council
Washington, D.C.
To the Editor:
I relished a great deal of Daniel Johnson’s “America and the America-Haters.” Sixteen months of living abroad have exposed me to all manner of contradictory and far-fetched anti-American conspiracy theories. My favorite is the suggestion that the U.S. will soon invade Turkey in order to establish a beachhead for subsequent invasions of Russia and China.
Two points, however. First, I kept waiting for Mr. Johnson to twist the knife in the argument by the likes of Andrew Kohut, Bruce Stokes, and Madeleine Albright that anti-Americanism could be reversed if the U.S. just changed some controversial policies and had more sensitive (read: Democratic) political leaders. The task of persuading Americans that they ought to change their policies and views in order to win over foreign approval has—so far—been utterly futile and Sisyphian. There is a reason that the GOP scored points in 2004 by calling attention to John Kerry’s insistence that American action pass a “global test.”
Second, Mr. Johnson touches on the irrationality and pervasiveness of anti-American attitudes and concludes that the best solution is more vigorous public diplomacy and a vague “counteroffensive.” All well and good, but somehow, this feels insufficient. The world’s elites from London to Cairo have embraced a faith-based moral inversion that they perceive as the hallmark of their sophistication. Under their philosophy, a mere simpleton cheers the death of a Hamas terrorist; a cosmopolitan recognizes that any Israeli response perpetuates a “cycle of violence.” To them, democracy in Iraq is good within a child’s morality; a true elite denounces his government’s cooperation with the U.S. in fighting terrorism and donates “ten euros for the resistance” in Iraq. They sympathize with violent demonstrations over Danish cartoons, but cannot stifle yawns at the story of Abdul Rahman, the Afghan who had to flee his country after converting to Christianity.
If the movers and shakers abroad are determined to see good as bad and bad as “an understandable reaction to the legacy of colonialism,” there is not much we can do about it. What we can do is expand the clear-thinking majority of the American public that recognizes just how little the approval of “world opinion” is worth. America’s well-being can easily survive vehement anti-Americanism at the editor’s desk of the Guardian. It is more important to prevent seepage of these beliefs into mainstream American thought.
Jim Geraghty
Ankara, Turkey
Daniel Johnson writes:
Glenn E. Schweitzer seems to be a little confused. He acknowledges that I give Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes their due for carrying out the most extensive survey ever done of attitudes toward America, but then he complains that I draw different conclusions from theirs. Is that surprising, considering our different viewpoints?
Mr. Schweitzer evidently shares the assumption of Kohut and Stokes that global anti-Americanism is a rational response to the Bush administration’s foreign policy, which he caricatures as “unrelenting unilateralism.” A radical change in policy, they seem to think, would ameliorate, if not eliminate, this hostility. I do not believe either of these propositions. I contend that, like anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism is fundamentally irrational, and cannot be appeased.
Going down Mr. Schweitzer’s list of “reasons that have inspired anti-Americanism,” one cannot help noticing their shaky logical foundation. U.S. troops were withdrawn from the “holy Muslim soil” of Saudi Arabia without the slightest effect on anti-Americanism there. If poverty and lack of opportunity were indeed “reasons” for anti-Americanism, then the corrective would be a foreign policy that promoted democracy, the rule of law, free trade, and capitalism—which is more or less what the U.S. has been doing since (and before) 9/11. “Inflammatory schooling among Muslim youths” does indeed blame the United States for the failings of Islamic states and societies; that, however, reinforces my argument, not Mr. Schweitzer’s.
Muslims and others who have been indoctrinated with fundamentalist anti-Americanism, which is almost invariably laced with anti-Semitism (“Jews and crusaders,” etc.), are rarely susceptible to rational persuasion. The West must certainly exert all its influence to urge Muslim countries not to indoctrinate their youth to hate us, but experience suggests that promises to desist from such propaganda, even by “pro-Western” Islamic governments like those of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are honored more in the breach than in the observance. Mr. Schweitzer’s “realistic modifications to our foreign policy” are for the most part a rehash of the discredited policies of the Clinton era, which did nothing to halt the rising tide of Islamist ideology and other expressions of anti-Americanism. Even the Clintons, however, are not so naïve as to suppose that Iran genuinely requires nuclear technology “for peaceful purposes.”
I am grateful to Jim Geraghty for his appreciative comments and for his testimony to the anti-American conspiracy theories that proliferate in countries like Turkey. I agree that the United States has only limited means at its disposal to combat anti-Americanism, and that it is more important to stick to the right policies than to seek the approval of global elites. But a policy of American isolation, however splendid, would only encourage the enemies of the United States. To take the most obvious example, the insurgency in Iraq has undoubtedly been fueled by the Islamist assumption that a divided West can be easily overwhelmed.
A counsel of despair is not the right response to anti-Americanism. U.S. public diplomacy—which, by the way, is too important to be left to the diplomats—ought to be directed at nations like Britain, where anti-Americanism is now at its worst level ever, despite Tony Blair’s support for George W. Bush. The latest figures from the 2006 Pew Survey confirm this deterioration among the closest allies. America has a good, even overwhelming case—but it is being lost by default.
Christians & the Holocaust
To the Editor:
Unlike Christopher M. Leighton, I was not “vexed with doubts” about Oprah Winfrey’s selection of Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night, for her book club [“Oprah, Elie Wiesel, and My Fellow Christians,” May]. Mr. Leighton was concerned that discussions of the book, which focuses on life and death within the concentration camps while providing little insight into German society at the time, would ignore “the currents of Christian anti-Judaism that animated the perpetrators of the Holocaust and paralyzed the bystanders. ”Here he paints with too broad a brush. Indisputably, the perpetrators and bystanders were German, and the former harbored a genocidal animus toward Jews. But any generalizations beyond those are at best debatable.
Oprah was wise to leave the analysis and debate about the uniquely German origins of the Nazis and the Holocaust to the historians. Who knows—maybe scholarship will find a direct link to the Visigoths. Anyway, her contribution was not just about the intersection of Nazis, Germans, Christians, and Jews. By shining a spotlight on Wiesel’s book, she provided a stark and much-needed reminder of the universality of evil and the duty to oppose it everywhere.
Mr. Leighton frets that the horrific suffering of the Jews will be overlaid by his fellow Christians “with a theological significance that falsifies the very essence of a people’s catastrophe.” He notes that, unlike the Christian story of the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Jewish story of the Holocaust tends to confirm God’s absence rather than His presence. He worries that the Christian tendency to look for hope and redemption in the wake of suffering—in short, a happy ending—will prevent them from fully confronting the monumental evil.
I doubt that many Christians other than theologians obsessed with the esoteric (few of whom are likely to be Oprah fans in any event) can conjure up a positive, resurrection-like outcome for the Holocaust—the subsequent creation of the State of Israel, perhaps? No, our problem is not that Christian theology precludes the faithful from coming to grips with genocide. It is much simpler than that.
Neither Christians nor others need a theological rationale for averting their eyes from human suffering. Indeed, the more dreadful the suffering, the more, it seems, we instinctively avoid it. And most of us, Christians and Jews included, have been doing that again and again in the years since Auschwitz, in response to genocide in China, Cambodia, East Timor, Uganda, Rwanda, southern Sudan, Darfur, and other exotic places.
Finally, Mr. Leighton worries about readings of Night “that end up enshrining the Jewish people as ‘victims’” and thus contribute to the willingness of some Christians “to welcome Jews only when they follow an ancient script, achieving tragic nobility through impotence and passivity—through sacrifice.” I share his concern that this stereotype partly accounts for the opposition from some otherwise sympathetic quarters to perfectly reasonable measures taken by Israel to defend itself against terrorists. But he fails to explain what is particularly Christian about this. Indeed, most Christians these days, including clear majorities of the rank-and-file of those mainline denominations whose leaders generally disapprove of Israeli militancy, rejoice at Israel’s vigorous defense of its sovereignty, its territory, and its people.
The only Christians I know who have a problem accepting Jews as other than helpless victims are those on the political Left. But their position has nothing to do with theology and everything to do with ideology. (Nor are their stereotypes applied exclusively to Jews; the Left has always had the same problem with blacks.)
In sum, rather than undertaking a retrospective quest for strands of Christian complicity in the Holocaust or finding fault with the inadequacies, real or imagined, of the Christian reaction to it, we are better off seeking to understand its universal significance so that “Never Again” will come to mean precisely that for all people.
Barry C. Steel
Phoenix, Maryland
To the Editor:
Christopher M. Leighton has written a powerful and insightful rumination on Christian responses to the Holocaust and how Elie Wiesel’s work might be misread by Christian readers. But it is a little unfair to criticize Oprah’s book selection based on how she and her viewers might misread Wiesel. Her effort to come to grips with the Holocaust deserves praise.
As for Mr. Leighton’s broader point—the failure of the Christian world to confront its responsibility for creating the moral and intellectual climate in which the noxious weeds of anti-Semitism could flourish—I think he needs to look more closely at the present-day theological landscape. In 1965, at the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church confessed its sins with respect to the Jews; for decades, the Church has been working to educate the faithful about repudiating anti-Semitism. Surely we Jews must acknowledge and welcome such long-awaited acts of penitence. At the other end of the theological spectrum, the evangelical churches have simply leapfrogged the issue. They acknowledge the authenticity of the Jewish people, and have vigorously supported its right to live in a homeland in the State of Israel.
Unfortunately, as Mr. Leighton must ruefully reflect, it is only among his flock, the traditional mainline Christian community, that there has been neither serious acknowledgment of sins against the Jewish people nor any recognition of the State of Israel as a vindication of Jewish life. On the contrary, there are all too many voices in the Presbyterian Church and among the Anglicans, Lutherans, and Congregationalists who have traduced the legitimacy of the state of Israel and supported those who would destroy it. Sadly, I think Mr. Leighton has much more work to do in removing the beam from the eyes of his co-religionists before picking out the mote in Oprah’s eye.
Barry Augenbraun
St. Petersburg, Florida
To the Editor:
I was saddened to see Christopher M. Leighton suggest that François Mauriac’s musings in his foreword to Elie Wiesel’s Night “are indicative of a longstanding tendency to force the horror of the Holocaust into the contours of the Christian story” of the crucifixion. The offending passage, in which Mauriac cites Wiesel’s description of the hanging of a Jewish boy by the Nazis, asks, “Did I explain to [Wiesel] that what had been a stumbling block for his faith had become the cornerstone for mine?” The first thing to notice is the rhetorical nature of Mauriac’s question. How does one, he seems to ask, offer such a Christian gloss to Wiesel, a survivor of the Holocaust? At the least, such a gloss might appear grossly insensitive; at worst, callously dismissive. Mauriac raises his reading honestly and openly.
While allowing for the legitimacy of each religion to “regard the world through its own narrative spectacles,” Mr. Leighton suggests that a specifically Christian gloss such as Mauriac’s “conceal[s] or distort[s]” this “quintessentially Jewish experience.” Mr. Leighton’s diction is revealing: Mauriac “forces” the incident into a Christian narrative; the boy’s suffering is “subordinated to the pain” of Christ on the cross; “any effort to squeeze the Jewish community’s pain into a Christian paradigm compounds the original violence with another layer of violation” (emphasis mine). Grave sins indeed. But nothing in Mauriac’s own comments suggests that he minimizes the suffering of the young boy or, to use Mr. Leighton’s regrettably overwrought characterization, “overla[ys] [it] with a theological significance that falsifies the very essence of a people’s catastrophe.”
I suspect that when Christians (myself included) read Wiesel’s account of the boy’s hanging, “an ingrained religious reflex” reminds them of another Golgotha. But such a reflex—instantaneous, momentarily uncontrollable—hardly violates the boy’s suffering or the Holocaust in general. On the contrary, in providing a context for the enormity of the evil, it is a way of understanding, not minimizing, the horrific death.
No doubt there are insular readings of the Holocaust from Christian perspectives, but Mauriac’s gloss deserves a more charitable interpretation, especially since he tries not to subordinate the boy’s suffering to that of Christ but to equate them. Mauriac seems genuinely interested in exploring a dialogue between Jewish and Christian understandings of suffering. In his humility, he does not presume to comprehend what he calls “the unfathomable mystery” of why Christ’s crucifixion has become the cornerstone of his own faith while the hanging of the young boy shattered Wiesel’s.
Sean Benson
Malone College
Canton, Ohio
To the Editor:
Christopher M. Leighton expresses the hope that Oprah Winfrey, in selecting Elie Wiesel’s Night for her Book Club, would “go beyond the confines of the book” to explore, among other things, the sentiments that “paralyzed the bystanders” during the Holocaust.
Actually, Night itself provides an appropriate point of departure for a discussion of the role of the bystanders. In an important but often-overlooked passage, Wiesel recalls seeing U.S. warplanes bombing German oil factories just a few miles from the gas chambers. He writes: “We were not afraid. And yet, if a bomb had fallen on [the prisoners’ barracks], it alone would have claimed hundreds of victims on the spot. But we were no longer afraid of death; at any rate, not of that death. Every bomb that exploded filled us with joy and gave us new confidence in life. The raid lasted over an hour. If it could only have lasted ten times ten hours!”
As David S. Wyman first revealed in The Abandonment of the Jews (1984), there were numerous such Allied bombing raids on German oil plants within striking distance of Auschwitz during the summer and autumn of 1944. Yet when Jewish groups asked the Roosevelt administration to order the bombing of the death camp or the railways leading to it, the War Department replied that it would be impossible to do so except by diverting warplanes from vital military missions elsewhere in Europe. That assertion was clearly disingenuous given the fact that U.S. bombers were already in the vicinity.
Oprah has opened the door for many Americans to learn, for the first time, that U.S. warplanes were capable of reaching (and bombing) Auschwitz. One hopes they will now take the next step of exploring the reasons that the mass-murder machinery was not on America’s target list.
Rafael Medoff
David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Melrose Park, Pennsylvania
Christopher M. Leighton writes:
Oprah’s selection of Elie Wiesel’s Night does not trouble Barry C. Steel, but I am not sure his equanimity merits congratulations. I have encountered few readers of Night who did not find themselves profoundly disoriented. By the book’s end, the certainties that once governed Wiesel’s young life are shattered, with the most searing trauma centering on the collapse of his faith. Wiesel’s odyssey calls into question core affirmations of both Judaism and Christianity, and the religious reader cannot avoid the theological challenges—vastly different for Jews and Christians—that lie at the heart of the book.
If Mr. Steel is uninterested in these matters, that is his own affair. He ought to know, however, that by being content to see Wiesel’s memoir as merely “a reminder of the universality of evil,” he unwittingly falls into the kind of facile generalization that he counsels us to avoid. He might find it more fruitful to examine the various forms that Christian and secular anti-Semitism have assumed over the centuries—including the present one—and the role they played in the background of the Holocaust. Not all genocides are the same. I have little confidence that we will achieve greater understanding of evil until we grapple with the particular ways in which ideas have been placed in the service of hate.
Barry Augenbraun may be right about the salutary effect of Oprah’s book selection. I share his hope that her program will foster empathy among Christians and Jews. The achievements of the Roman Catholic Church that began with Nostra Aetate are enormously promising, but I think that the theological revolution is far from complete and has yet to seep into the pews of all congregations.
As for the evangelical churches, they present a more complicated set of challenges than Mr. Augenbraun suggests. This is because Christians cannot “leapfrog” the issue of their supersessionism—which arguably has been the most unremitting source of Christian anti-Judaism—while simultaneously acknowledging “the authenticity of the Jewish people.” Evangelical support for Israel is built on a theological platform, and undercurrents of contempt for what some evangelicals call the “obsolete dispensation” of the Jews may render this foundation more precarious than Mr. Augenbraun believes.
I agree that the greatest burden falls on the mainline Protestant churches. The educational task is massive, but the shifts in attitude and direction that came out of the most recent meeting of the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church may help to correct its hitherto myopic readings of the Israeli-Palestinian impasse. The new overtures counter the debacle of the church’s earlier support for divestment from Israel and provide a welcome indicator of greater political and theological balance.
The disciplined practice of self-criticism entails habits of mind and heart that are essential to the health of Christianity. My comments about François Mauriac were not intended to single him out for censure. The tendency to layer the Christian story onto the Holocaust was most dramatically displayed in the controversies in the late 1980’s over the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz. Numerous speeches and articles by eminent Christians—including great champions of Christian-Jewish relations like Cardinal O’Connor of New York—also illustrate the Christian impulse to read the horrors of the Shoah in a religious idiom that evokes “sacrifice” and “atonement.” As Sean Benson accurately notes, the reflex is “instantaneous” and “momentarily uncontrollable.”
Mr. Benson maintains that such a gloss does not minimize the death of the child in Wiesel’s narrative or of the countless others who were brutally murdered. About this I am less sure. If we Christians can understand “the enormity of evil” only by “equating” the hanging of a Jewish child with the crucifixion of Jesus, then we are locked into a religious paradigm that functions as a mirror; all we will ever see is the reflection of our own sacred story. This does not strike me as a charitable way of treating the suffering of our Jewish neighbors, or a fitting response to the questions of theodicy at the heart of the Shoah.
My thanks to Rafael Medoff for reminding readers of the Allied planes that were seen by Elie Wiesel and the inmates of Auschwitz flying to nearby targets. Indeed, fully to appreciate Wiesel’s musings one must supplement the reading of Night with further study. If Oprah’s audience has been inspired to take up this challenge, my overwrought imagination can in turn go take up other matters.