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Philosophers, writers and thinkers insisted that the Holocaust was an inflection point in history, but it’s clearer now than ever before that it did not change history, it only accelerated it.
Israel was not, as politicians all too often insist, “born out of the ashes of the Holocaust.” It was born out of the blood, sweat and determination of a relatively small group of Zionists who defied the traditionalists and leftists in their own communities to go and rebuild their own homeland.
Liberal Jews have made “If you will it, it is no dream” into an airy cliche when it was actually meant as a hard wake up call to a European Jewry that had spent too long living in dreams. Even after the Holocaust brought an iron end to many of those dreams, they still linger on.
Nor did the Holocaust secure political support for Israel. How could it when it did not even secure the ability of European Jews to flee to America or even to their homeland in Israel? The politicians and nations who voted at the UN to recognize Israel did so for varying reasons, Truman was facing a difficult election and the USSR wanted to undermine the UK, and the closest the Holocaust entered into it was the hope that a homeland would keep the Jewish refugees who could not return back to Poland lest they be murdered from moving elsewhere.
The Holocaust killed a lot of Jews and produced a rich body of literature, memoirs and historic works, but it did little to alter the trajectory that the Jewish people had already been on.
If the Nazis and their local collaborators had not exterminated the Jews of Eastern Europe with mass graves and death camps, the Communists would have done it with gulags and bans on Judaism. Jewish life under Communism was ultimately as unsustainable as under Nazism.
The religious centers of Jewish life would have inevitably shifted to America and Israel, and the secular ones to America and Western Europe. The Islamic colonization of Western Europe would have put paid to Jewish life in Western Europe even if the Holocaust had not happened. And in America the growing political radicalization is making Jewish secular life unworkable.
The post-Holocaust myth of a new tolerance has been dying by the death of a thousand cuts and the worship of diversity and civil rights peddled by Jewish leftists is a major factor. Even while Abraham Joshua Heschel, in the pivotal ‘spiritual’ moment of Reform Judaism, marched with MLK, Jewish shopkeepers were having their windows smashed by antisemitic black mobs.
If Reform Judaism were to have a future, it would have put up pictures of those smashed windows in its temples instead of the photos of Heschel with MLK now taking their pride of place alongside rainbow colored magen davids and posters about defending illegal alien migrants.
But the Holocaust did not actually change how Western Jews thought about anything.
Liberal Jews became more liberal. Traditionalist Jews became more traditionalist. And the Jews of Israel alternated between winning wars against Jihadist armies and trying to get along with them. If it had been up to European Ashkenazi Jews, Israel would have carved itself up into pieces by now. It’s mostly the doing of the Middle Eastern Sefardi Jews and the Religious Zionists, who combine traditionalism with a commitment to holding the land, that it has not.
Middle Eastern Jews for the most part did not experience the Holocaust. They did not need to. Instead they lived through over a thousand years of Muslim oppression and ethnic cleansing. And they understand what the Holocaust did not seem to have taught much of Western Jewry.
The latest International Holocaust Remembrance Day was marked by articles noting the small number of living Holocaust survivors, examinations of more movies about the Holocaust, the narratives of ‘third generation’ descendants of survivors and other such absurdities all while the world’s largest Jewish population has been fighting for its survival every single day last year.
It’s as if American Jews had spent the 1940s commemorating the Chmelnitsky Massacres while hardly paying attention to what was happening to the Jews in Germany and Poland.
The day was also marked by a pregnant Jewish woman being dragged out of a ‘Holocaust’ event at which the President of Ireland expressed his sympathies for the current mass killers of Jews. Some leaders in the Irish Jewish community condemned her instead of the pro-genocide president. Other ceremonies marking the official UN designated day were equally terrible.
To meaningfully commemorate a tragedy as more than a loss of life, you have to ask what it means. And rather than coming up with any new answers, the various strands of Jewish communities looked at the Holocaust and saw what they had seen all along. They doubled down on what they had been doing before, good or bad, and worked the Holocaust into it.
And so the Holocaust didn’t really change anything.
It took parents from children and children from parents. It wiped out families, villages, traditions and entire ways of life, but it didn’t change the fundamental adaptability of the Jewish people.
But what is true on a communal level isn’t true on an individual level.
I lost over 50 members of my family in the Holocaust (and others to Communist brutality). From a very young age, I understood that the worst was possible and complacency was never an option. I have a young daughter because my father-in-law, while looking at a Jewish cemetery in Eastern Europe decided that he would not allow Jewish history to die in that place.
The Holocaust was not the first mass murder of Jews and, as Oct 7 reminds us, not the last.
What death ought to teach us is how to live. And how to survive in the face of certain death. The greatest challenge for the Jewish people remains complacency in the face of evil. If that is to change, the momentum will not come from leaders or organizations, but from individuals who see the threat. Death, no matter how vast or brutal, alone will not change complacency into awakening. To wake up, we must remember who we are. That is what Zionism at its best did by allowing us to imagine ourselves as more than the fallen state we had been reduced to.
The Holocaust could not change who we are. Only we can change ourselves.
Stalin was on the precipice of kicking off his own holocaust in 1952.
Just as with the Kulaks, the planned coming purge was preceeded with a propaganda campaign. [Ex.] Molotov was forced to divorce & denounce his Jewish wife.
That coming mass murder, however, was thankfully postponed when Stalin had a fatal stroke in 1953.
Atheistic jews tended to support communism in Russia & reaped a short life expectancy if in government circles.
Had Stalin lived longer, God believing Jews would’ve been in for a rough ride. . . and the state-supporting secular jews would’ve been included also, much to their shock.
(“WTF!? Why are you after me, also?? I’m loyal to the state! There must be a mistake!” 🥺)
Indeed.
The difference was that the Soviet Holocaust plan was cleverer and came with plausible deniability so that Stalin could kill millions of Jews and still retain the support of Western leftists. Including leftist Jews.
The Communist plan was to have the population kill 1/3 of the Jews in the state sponsored riots, then have the authorities ’round up the Jews’ for their own protection and deport them to camps in Siberia.
Most of the rest were intended to die along the way or in the camps.
Had it been pulled off, the USSR would claim to have been protecting the Jews by wiping them out.
Wow. 🤯
I was unaware how extensive & inclusive the scale of Stalin’s intended mass murder goal was.
(Thx for the info.)
An interesting article from the Jerusalem Post regarding this very subject:
https://www.jpost.com/magazine/was-the-russian-revolution-jewish-514323
I’ve been saying for quite some time that one of the differences between the Nazis and the communists is that the Nazi is like a man who walks up to you and says “I’m going to kill you,” then they kill you; whereas the communist is like a man who walks up to you and says “I’m NOT going to kill you,” then they kill you.
One is more “honest” than the other, but either way, you end up dead.
Israel was not born out of the ashes of the Holocaust? I beg to differ. Between the Russian Czar’s, pogroms, antisemitism and the Holocaust many Jews fled Europe to the modern Israel to escape this.
My family has been in France for many generations. There is nothing to suggest from a paper trail standpoint to DNA my homeland is in the ME.
Although many in my family identify as Jews our heritage is French. My parents still have a home in France, speak French, celebrate French holidays, cook French cuisine. We are French.
I now live in the US, but Israel isn’t my homeland nor is it the homeland of Jews who’ve lived in Europe for thousands of yrs.
Jews fled Europe due to the rampant antisemitism not for some longing for their “homeland”. Many Jews never went to Israel, but instead fled to Brooklyn, NY and Argentina
I’m not sure where we disagree.
I was simply pointing out that Stalin was gearing up to repeat Hitler’s Final Solution.
(And Mr. Greenfield informed me that it was MUCH worse than I’d known.)
Your experience is just that yours. And only yours. Mine is quite the opposite. Born in the USA, I have no real deep meaningful ties to “American holidays” (whatever those are) American food, etc. Yes, I speak English. My location of birth is an accident and a result of the choices of those who came before me. I no more feel at home here than I would in Poland Russia France or Germany. I only feel ties to the Jewish people. And that means Israel. Watching the campus riots this past year, as staged as they were, taught me that a sense of disconnect is self respect and self love..
Sure, I like a cowboy movie and the US is very scenic and amusing at times. I obey the laws of the land I live in and I support it, especially with my tax dollars. It is home. But the true meaning in my life is elsewhere. It is with my people and with heaven. Most of my family and friends feel much the same.
Maybe that’s why you’re having trouble.
I’m old enough to remember when my Jewish neighbors loved America.
And that was kind of hard to do back in the day – because those days were dominated by anti-Semitic Democrats.
Yes. Love of home is important. Home defines much of who and what we are. Homelessness does cause longing and trouble.
You’re born in the USA but have no deep meaningful ties to “American Holidays? Then go on to mock those holidays as “whatever those are.”
I’ll let you in on a secret you’re an American whether you like it or not. I find it despicable when misguided people bash their homeland and.heritage.
You only feeling ties to “Jewish people” reveals your prejudice. You’re still an American and not an Israeli!
I can tell you when an American comes to France and tells us his grandparents were from France that’s great, but that doesn’t make them French. They are still American.
Everything you do is Americanized by your own admission. Speaking English, cowboys movies, born in the US, etc. You are an American.
How sad that you’re ashamed of it.
Your comments are similar to what I’ve heard from American blacks who care more about being black than being an American or believing in God, which you obviously don’t either.
So you’re no different than the Left. You both hate our country and being an American.
I’d bet if Catholics said I only feel comfortable around other Catholics, or Muslims exclaiming the same you’d have criticism of those people. Yet, you boldly mock America.
In addition to illegal immigrants maybe we can deport people like you.
Jews fleeing Czarist oppression, then violence in the civil war, predated the Holocaust.
Israel was founded by Jews longing for their homeland. And those Jews who don’t view Israel as their homeland can easily leave. Those who choose to stay want a homeland.
Anyway congratulations on your love of French cuisine. Growing up, I knew plenty of German Jews whose heritage was German and loved Schiller and Goethe, and had no interest in Israel.
German Jews in America helped pre-WW1 Jewish immigrants from the East “assimilate” to protect their own image of assimilation. Those with only that motivation I call shanda Jews. I wouldn’t count on their reliability.
Israel, was born because it is The will of God. Predicted many times in the Old covenant in The Bible.
I hope you feel it is your home here now, but believe me when I say this there has been a shift since malibu was president. Things that people never thought they would see in their lifetime are now accepted and common place. Some are so shameful like the ivy league open and naked persecution of Jews. I just hope there are benefits for you here, Many of my relatives rave about France. The good things would have been very hard to give up. A real croissant for one.
While I agree with the articles point but must correct one thing which is that a lot of the pioneers of Israel were quit leftist in thinking
depends on which ones, there was quite a spectrum
By today standards, these leftists were to the right of most Israeli right wing parties.
Many of those leftists were socialist. Socialism was just one of the concepts that provided a hopeful framework to achieve security and modernity. That strand predated Lenin’s revolution. Few were communist.
Many people know from past and ongoing history that Jews have always been persecuted. Many people appreciate that such persecution it is wicked and amoral. But few seek to understand why. This, sometimes, willful ignorance is a major part of the reason why it continues. Jealousy is the other part. Jews are highly successful in many areas. But the major trigger to malicious destructive jealousy is that Jews were chosen by God to be the lineage for The Messiah, the promised savior. Being chosen can create, and has created, resentment and jealousy in those who aren’t chosen.
Well there is a lesson to be learned.
Here it is from the 10 Commandments.
Number 10 “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.”
The problem with commandments is that they are commands to be obeyed for the sake of obedience because they allegedly come from a higher authority and not moral principles to be applied rationally and contextually.
The Muslims also have the commandment from an allegedly higher authority to convert, conquer, or kill all infidels, and they obey it.
The opposite of a commandment is a freely chosen moral principle that can be applied rationally and contextually.
If your morality depends upon “contextual” application, you have no morals.
Contextual doesn’t mean subjective.
Your “commandment” requires that nobody should learn from you, even if you are correct. Make that IF, big if.
Your problem with commandments is that they put limits on what people can or cannot do. Who gets to decide what those “moral” principles are. You?
In the world according to THX murder would be legal.
BTW, keep racking up those downvotes. Well done, loser.
God gives his Commandments but he also give us free will. We can disobey His laws but we can’t break them. I’m far from perfect but I choose to follow all His Commandments with full intent and spirit. I freely choose to follow God’s law. Not recommended but you have a choice not to.
It’s not that they were given by god as guidelines to protect themselves? huh.
Thanks for clearing that up.
Why are you being vague instead of clear in stating who you mean violated the lesson?
THOSE WHO DONT LEARN FROM HISTORY ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT THEM
The only change is that really virulent antisemities are more disingenuous. If Hitler were alive today, he’d trot out that “I’m not antisemitic, I’m ‘Anti-Zionist’!” happy horseshit.
“If that is to change, the momentum will not come from leaders or organizations, but from individuals”
Words of wisdom, but still the masses tune into the mass media looking for a leader.
Brilliant, excellent article and points.
The normal situation is for people *not* to learn from history. The people who do learn are rare.
That’s why there will be another Great War in the near future. Mankind thirsts for blood in the quest for power and money. Always was the case and will be such until the end.
“I know not with what weapons WW3 will be fought, But WW4 will be fought with sticks and stones.”
Einstein
Forgive me, but it’s not Mankind that thursts for blood but those ruthless Freemasons who sit in the boardrooms of the defense industry who thurst for more g*dd*amn money. Wars are profitable like nothing else – you kill (money), you wreck and destroy (more money), then you rebuild (more money still). Or as Gen. Smedley Butler said, “War is a racket.”
Yes, all history teaches, is that history teaches.
A lot of different threads here.
Yes. The Holocaust was a wildly successful and promising start to total extermination.
No secret that Israel’s One God as defined in the Torah sets aside for eternity the land of Israel for the nation of Israel.
What has everyone learned from the Holocaust?
To rephrase: what has evil learned from the Holocaust?
Well, the concept of Aryan lives on in the concept of Palestinian.
And there’s no need to be honest with oneself and take responsibility for one’s thoughts.
No need to talk to God, and certainly not to ask oneself what does ‘God’ mean. There is no universal understanding of God’s purpose, of humanity’s purpose. Evil has learned that there is no universally sane understanding of God.
But – what evil has not learned is that the Hebrew word for life is a noun in plural form, Chayim. The singular is ‘chai’, which, as a verb 3rd person singular means ‘he lives’, as in,
‘Am Yisrael Chai’, the nation of Israel lives.
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?
Hitler: “Exterminate all Jews!”
Ahmadinejad: “Wipe Israel off the Map!”
American protesters: “From the River to the Sea!”
THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE!
BUT, college campus and our street protesters are openly calling for the elimination of Jews and no DEI Czar cares to follow their own Mission Statement and attacks against Jews aren’t not labeled as Hate Crimes. If there is any attack against a Gay, Muslim, or Black… OH GOLLY! Strange that that same group are the ones attacking Jews and MAGAS AND GETTING AWAY WITH IT!
There’s a new sheriff in town, with a better team of deputies.. We should see some correction on that front in the near term, Steve.
They’ve identified Jewish people as “white oppressors” and Arabs as “black oppressed”. Ironic when Islam’s tenuous claim to legitimacy rests on a shared Abrahamic ancestry.
Sounds like the marriage of ignorance and hypocrisy. with a desire to dominate. It’s a core tenet of Islamists and Democrats.
For thousands of years people all over Europe and the Middle East slaughtered, persecuted and expelled Jews as they pleased, secure in the knowledge that the Jews, stateless and powerless, could do nothing to defend themselves.
Jews lived at the mercy and at the pleasure of the people of whatever place they happened to be.
Now Jews at last have a state and a military and the means to try to defend themselves as best they can from those who are determined to slaughter them.
If the establishment of the State of Israel means anything, it must at least mean this:
No one gets to kill Jews for free anymore.
No, they get paid billions in aid to do so.
Antisemitism post October 7, 2023 genocide massacre in Israel resulting in all out war against the Iran backed proxy militias, that unleashed antisemitism that apparently exists in non Hebrew DNA humans. Even those who call them selves “Born Again Christians” which is an oxymoron to put it mildly. You can’t be antisemitic and say your Lord and Savior is Yeshua Messiah -aka- Lord Jesus Christ. How is that going to go over?
(1 John 4:20 If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? )
My experience is hatred against someone you do not know is a form of suicide for your human to eternal life prospects. Reading the room is a skill that takes years of life experience.
So, obviously, Professor Dan is spot on once again!
This article is a wake up call to all my fellow Hebrew brothers and sisters. Stay trained and vigilant and above all organized. If I see any soft and obese Jews I might kick you in the ass and get you on a training table diet and training disciplines. Just once a month bring me tribute of lox, bagel, mit cream cheese, slice red onion and tomato!
Can you make an exception for some of the comedians and scholars-at least the Nobel Prize should be an exemption Muggs.
Having a strong and positive commitment to Jewish tradition observance and knowledge as to traditional Jewish beliefs coupled with a strong appreciation of the importance of Israel gi a long way to building a strong Jewish identity as opposed to accentuating the Holocaust and anti Semitism
so interesting that you run this article the day after Trump’s embarrassing press conference in which he, without evidence, tried to pin the accident on some DEI person.
sound familiar — Reichstag fire.
You Trumpers should be embarrassed and ashamed of your great leader.
Spurious assertion. And a lie.
First, Trump did not claim that a DEI pilot caused the accident, and that accident was under investigation.
Second, Trump asserted that DEI contributed to the accident. Since DEI has lowered standards and reduced the number of qualified personnel in the field, this assertion is already supported by circumstantial evidence.
ATC personnel were not present in the tower at the time. One ATC was doing the job of two ATCs.
That alone: A neutral statement without regard to the racial characteristics of the ATC reveals a significant contributing factor.
Bottomline: You’re a bigot ‘rogers,’ and your hatred for your neighbors contributed to the loss of life above Reagan airport.
Like all bigots – you do not care about who dies in order to secure whatever benefits you receive from stealing, killing, and harming the rest of us.
G-d love ya’
All social media scrubbed of the pilot, her parents and siblings tells us a lot. Where there’s fire there’s….fire. And you’re exactly right on Trump. His expressions were for safety and security of ALL people. Apparently, the left has no concern for that.
Remember the wine every ten days as governor Nehemiah had it
The Holocaust transcends Judaism, as well as religion in general. All mass atrocities have the same point of origin.: An enforced ideology with which one must comply or face severe consequences. I consider it the bane of human civilization.
Human sacrifice has an eternal history. The powerless are victimized. Power is the best medicine.
The philosophical term for human sacrifice is altruism.
The Israel return to the homeland of the Jews to Israel in 1948 was an astounding event unprecedented in world history. Never had a decimated ancient people managed to retain their individual identity through almost twenty centuries and reestablish their nation in their original homeland. The event was specifically prophesied, and it happened exactly as foretold. It was clearly a miraculous act of God.
Certainly Daniel is correct.
Nonetheless, Israel would not exist now if the Holocaust had not happened.
Whether or not a Holocaust or any Holocaust was necessary for Israel to happen is a counter-factual which we cannot test.
What concerns us is whether another Holocaust will occur. If it’s likely, when and where will it occur?
I firmly believe that America will be safer for our Jewish neighbors for the next four years.
But after that?
I don’t know. Right now is the first time in my life America is on the right course, and I don’t want to kill the buzz.
By all logic – even if Trump is largely successful – he will merely delay the decline and fall of the American Empire. Islam and communism will continue to rise.
And Jews and Israel will eventually stand alone again against a dangerous world with no friends.
I wish it were not so, and I hope Trump turns us around, but we can only try as hard as we can to stop the planet from sinking back into a barbaric sewer.
G-d help us.
“By all logic – even if Trump is largely successful – he will merely delay the decline and fall of the American Empire. Islam and communism will continue to rise. ”
So much truth in that statement. The Deep State is likely confident there is too much momentum in America’s decline for Trump to completely reverse,
It will take more than one term and I hope he can make enough changes to ensure what he starts continues after his term ends.
Israel WILL come out winning in the end as we know how this ends.
God Wins!
All of this debate, but not one mention of the 2nd Amendment.
❔
Why did you delete my comments? They were respectful, serious, and intellectual.
You do this to my comments often.
Do you have something personal against Ayn Rand and her philosophy?
The Nazi’s certainly understood West’s indifference towards the plight of the Jew’s when they came up with the plan for the voyage of the passenger liner Saint Louis.
“Philosophers, writers and thinkers insisted that the Holocaust was an inflection point in history, but it’s clearer now than ever before that it did not change history, it only accelerated it. ” Doubtful it is accelerated or that it was an inflection point.
Something that may be a better parallel to understanding what is going on is to understand the human MO or nature. Our natures are not uniform in humans, but as a group, we are susceptible to the actions of a few often very bad people because most simply aren’t interested. Watching a documentary on a reef is a pretty good explanation and a casual application of the laws of entropy can be helpful. Basically, by the time you are through with just about any nature documentary you understand that anything that moves or can’t defend itself gets eaten by something.
Another reasonI take issue with this statement is I don’t find the Holocaust all that significant as an evil or that it is true that it is the worst evil in human history. It is a special type of horror and evil. One that combined mechanized automation with genocide which made it a sensational horror as much as the natural revulsion to the genocide and torture. One of the things the communists have done is move the Overton window so society doesn’t think as it did and phrases and thoughts are wiped from usage. Sometimes it is for the purpose of anarchy and sometimes because it is helpful at nickel and diming the corrosion of a society.
One of the phrases rarely heard anymore is, ” The one constant in history, is man’s inhumanity towards man.” The muslimes nearly wiped out the Hindus in the sub-continent of India and enslaved 25 million Africans in the intracontinental slave trade during the 400 years of the Atlantic Slave trade. They were the surviving 10%. Hitler’s comrade in socialism Stalin, starved 5-7 million people to death. One can ask the goulish question is it worse to starve to death, due to poor taste I won’t finish it.
The point is, there is always evil, and it doesn’t take long before someone will take advantage of someone powerless and that it has to be relentlessly fought against and we must be ultra vigilant not to fall into the traps where we slide into evil. Like doing it or protecting them for their own good.
“Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.”
– Primo Levi
It is more complicated than denial. One can always say the name and despair the event but fool themselves into thinking they aren’t doing it all over again. The problem is to understand what happened and what the roots was. With Auschwitz, the first step is to realize that the Nazi’s and Hitler were uber liberals, socialists renamed by Stalin as fascists warping a philosophy he knew was leftist and socialist into the lie that they were to the right on the political spectrum. The lie and the label was propagated by western journalists and incorrectly communicated as Nazis being to the right on the spectrum because he didn’t want the world, particularly the west to know Hitler was an extreme leftist. He knew how poorly it would reflect on communism and block his ability to spread his propaganda.
The Israel of today might find rational introspection a valuable tool in recognizing that there is a fundamental difference between those that ennoble death and those that are rooted in life.
Whether or not the world’s populations and our liberal Jews, both within Israel and throughout the Diaspora, choose to recognize this truth, there are fundamental differences that radically influence the willingness of groups to support the genocide of “others”.
Evil, from which genocide is birthed, has happened from the principle of creating a scapegoat who embodies the “causes” of existent problems or whose very existence is a threat to the goals to be achieved.
The entire evil promulgated that the residents in Gaza are an indigenous people was, is, and will remain a lie but as a wicked propaganda tool, they have been masterfully billed as the victims of the Jews. The PLO and Hamas say the Jews in Israel are the illegitimate colonizers deserving to be annihilated from “Palestinian” land.
In cases of genocide the truth is irrelevant; it is the establishment of an enemy against which extermination is welcomed to eliminate the “problem”.
Many of our Jewish people in Israel, America and other countries seem to live with the assurance that assimilation into liberal cultures will provide refuge from persecution. Evil does not care under what illustrious umbrella you believe you have hidden yourselves from unwanted marginalization and persecution. When you become the selected target, the unifying aim is your elimination and the propaganda will be fast, furious and unrelenting until your destruction has been achieved.
Too many adults seem to have a collective refusal to address evil. It is as though we remain like very young children who do not want to know what it is and refuse to face that as adults it is our very denial that continues to facilitate its destructive promulgation.
A young woman,Israeli soldier raped and taken captive by Hamas on October 7th said to her captor, “But I have Palestinian friends.” and he said, “I don’t care!”
When we, the Jews, are the target clinging to this kind of delusion just as we did in Germany thinking ourselves to be assimilated and therefore protected, we put ourselves in this untenable position of possible annihilation again and again; even in Israel.
Thank you for the insights Mr. Greenfield. My profession is psychology and social psych was my favorite subject in grad school. My perspective is more on destructive compliance and the reason we don’t learn from history is we fail to see the evil in men. Göring, “people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked….”.. Recently, we saw the ease at which Fauci could destroy society with his fear and lies. We can learn from someone like Milgram and his experiments in today’s world.
We all need to be Bonhoeffer and have resiliency, knowledge and bravery in the face of evil. Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
I would greatly appreciate any insights you have on this.
IAs a Christian I know that God loves the Jewish people with an everlasting love, and I know that he is sovereign over all of his creation. Nothing can happen without his direct will or his permissive will. So, leaving the creation of the modern State of Israel out of the equation, what then was God’s plan in permitting the Holocaust?