Fascinating Conversation the Other Day

Last updated on: January 30, 2019 at 12:18 am by Mark Shea

Fascinating Conversation the Other Day 2019-01-27T14:31:02-07:00 Mark Shea

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On Sunday, which commemorated the 74th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a friend of mine commented on the Book of Face:

The people who created Auschwitz weren’t monsters, they were ordinary people whose judgment was gradually warped by a monstrous ideology that looked to blame the ills of their society on outsiders, foreigners, the “other”. They allowed it to happen, little by little, first by what they failed to protest, then tacitly approved, then (being unable to turn back without admitting the enormity of their moral failure) promoted and abetted. All to maintain the desperate fiction of the superiority of their culture and their race.

It was a perfectly true observation. Then, out of the blue, one of his commenters shot back:

That is the poorest and dumbest assessment or comparison of apples and oranges I have ever heard from anybody. This is not rampant xenophobia. It is an invasion.

I shudder to think how far your magnanimity would go if it had been your child murdered by an illegal.

The narrative you seem to be following is a lie.

I do not consider myself superior genetically or otherwise.

But preservation of separate but proud cultures is biblically sound.

The whole book of Nehemiah is about Nehemiah building a wall with a hammer in one hand and a sword in the other.

To which my friend replied in surprise:

What are you talking about? I was talking about Auschwitz.

And the MAGA cultist rejoined:

Sure you were.

Finally, somebody else offered the perfect coda:

Wow, is there a heart beating under the floorboards again?

The MAGA cult is ignorant. But not so ignorant as to be unaware of the guilt they bear for their racist cruelty. So they hear accusations when no one is accusing them because their own hearts accuse them. This is the doom Leviticus warns will fall on those abandon the Lord their God and trust in false gods: “I will send faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies; the sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall when none pursues. (Le 26:36).

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