Archbishop warns of second Holocaust: CEN 2.12.10 p 8. February 20, 2010
Posted by geoconger in Abortion/Euthanasia/Biotechnology, Archbishop of Canterbury, Church of England Newspaper.trackback
The Archbishop of Canterbury has warned that abortion, euthanasia, terrorism, and racial, religious and ethnic persecution have the potential to create a second holocaust in Europe, in a statement marking National Holocaust Day.
“Hope without memory is like memory without hope,” Dr. Rowan Williams said on Jan 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, citing an aphorism of Sir Elie Wiesel.
Weisel was knighted in 2006 as a “public sign of the importance of the living memory that survivors of the Holocaust are for present day humanity. Our 2010 commemoration of the Holocaust has at its heart the survivors of the Shoah, the unique human beings who are the primary source for our continued attention, our understanding and our need to continue to work at the lessons in a world that seems not yet to have learned them,” Dr. Williams said.
The Holocaust generation was passing away, he said, with only 5000 Jewish and other survivors of the camps alive today. “But tragically there are also many hundreds of thousands of people in this and other countries who are survivors of the many other genocidal events of the 20th and 21st centuries, including those atrocities that have taken place, like the Holocaust, on European soil,” he said.
Dr Williams urged Anglicans to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive, while also keeping watch for those “signs at home and abroad of those attitudes in ourselves and in others which were the harbingers of the Holocaust. These include the dehumanising rhetoric which seeks to separate ‘us’ from ‘them’ and then to project all that is negative on to the other, on to ‘them’.”
We also need to guard against “every expression of ungenerous feeling towards people in need,” such as “refugees and asylum seekers,” Dr. Williams said, while being alert to the “signs of a casual attitude to the value of human lives, whether by acts of terrorism or more subtly, in relation to disability, or the beginning or end of life.”
He urged the world not to forget the sufferings of the victims of the Holocaust.
“Will their legacy be a world in which such things no longer happen because we and our children have learned the lessons and acted on them? Or will their generation, with all its suffering, its tenacity and its offering of hope pass from us like a nightmare best forgotten?” he asked.
