Posted by pancho from ? (64.79.4.2) on Wednesday, February 27, 2002 at 3:09PM :
James Campbell, an ex priest and author of several books, no Aprim... REAL books, starts out this one by recalling an incident I well remember and couldn't quite understand at the time. Back a few years ago a group of Nuns wanted to install a huge cross across the road from Auschwitz, that Christian Spa in Poland, in order to honor all the Christians killed there by Christians. They were fiercely opposed by several Jews and the Israeli government. At the time I was a little puzzled because after all not only Jews were gassed and raped to death...Christians are fair if nothing else.
As I read of this incident again through this ex-priets eyes, I understood what was not only wrong with the idea of the cross, but how humiliating it would be as well as inappropriate and insulting to to put up a cross anywhere near that place. This well educated and widely read ex-priest made it very clear.
The sword of Constantine in the title of the book refers to this same cross. The sword was what Constantine, first Christian emperor, used to "spread" Christianity...sort of like you spread peanut butter with a knife. The sword after all looks very like a cross.
Campbell recounts the long steady march of hatred for Jews spread by the Christian Church in Europe and elsewhere, bringing us right down to the gates of Auschwitz where, he argued, it was a double crime to now place this same cross, used as a sword for 2000 years, in front of a place set up to finally kill the Jews the Church had been targeting for centuries...as well as raising the kinds of low dogs who would do such a thing. If the fires of racial hatred spread to burn a few Christians as well...it was unfortunate as hell...but Auschwitz and the forces that created it was never intended for Christians and Gypsies.
If you release that much hatred into the atmosphere, you too will choke. To produce the right sort of Christian who could hate a child for being Jewish, hate him or her enough to rape him or her then toss the body into an incinerator...you have necessarily created a monster who could just as easily turn on his own children. And the final outcome of the War showed us who the real victims of all that hatred were...the people who spawned it, the German people, paid the ultimate price as well for another one of Hitler's people-to-hate were the Russians and Slavs...who marched into Germany, "enjoying" frauleins of every age and description on the way...and of course Germany was gutted and divided into two with half of it becoming that dreaded thing to any Nazi Christian, COMMUNIST.
In the end, hatred comes back to hurt those who spread it...a good lesson anywhere. If some Christians were killed at those camps, it is only because Christians started the whole damn thing.
note: I know these were not REAL Christians...but as they are the ones saying they are...and don't call themselves Jews or Muslims...we have to assume that they THINK they are Christians...and so I accord them the right...it would be ill mannered of me to argue with them.
-- pancho
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