Sermon: Genocide and Ennui

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Genocide and Ennui -- The Good Samaritan

By Charles Rush

March 4, 2007

[ Audio (mp3, 6.1Mb) ]

rhaps you saw the article in the New York Times a couple weeks ago that finally closed the gap on the life of Anne Frank, the young Dutch girl that kept a famous diary, detailing what it was like to hide from the Nazi's in Amsterdam during World War II. Her family was eventually discovered and they were all sent to a concentration camp where they were killed. All we had was her very moving diary about the daily life, the ever constricting options, the panic sense of 'no way out' and finally staring death in the face.

We never got an introduction to their family. People wondered why they were in Amsterdam in the first place? Why didn't they get out? What was the story before the story? We have a pretty good picture on that now because her father's letters were found and they reveal a whole literature that was widespread in Jewish families from that era that will never be made public until they have passed because it is too painful to review.

Ann Frank's father wrote lots of letters to friends in the West. He wrote to acquaintances. He wrote to people that he had only met once. He wrote to people that he hadn't seen since college. He asked for help. He begged for help. They couldn't figure out what they could do or they didn't think that they had any of the right connections to supercede the normal bureaucratic process and make anything exceptional happen.

Then Mr. Frank wrote and begged them just to take the children. Still they could do nothing of concrete help and then the family went into hiding. It is very hard to know whether they thought someone else would rise to the occasion, whether they just didn't think they had the power, or whether they tried and just weren't successful. But that is the type of thing that will haunt you later in life and make you restless in the night. Like Lady MacBeth who can't get the blood to wash off of her hands, these are letters that you burn and they still won't go away.

I saw a French movie years ago that was set against the back drop of the Nazi invasion of Paris. It opened with a family escaping south with the thousands and thousands of other refugees, none of whom were really sure of what was happening, of how long they would be gone, even where they were really headed, though they all intended to visit relatives as far south as they could go. People were in cars, there were horses pulling carts, people were walking, some were pulling carts behind them. Periodically, the Germans would bomb these civilian caravans, creating pandemonium, death, and fear.

The movie was a child's recollection and she is in a car with her mother and brothers. At one point, a wounded French soldier knocks on the glass and asks for a ride. The little girl wants to let him in but the mother says 'no'. The little girl is confused because there is a bit of room in the car and she asks her mother why she turned him away. The mother says 'it is everyone for themselves' and gets this blank, far away look that parents get when they give an answer that they know is not adequate but which they don't want to explain.

Why is it that people don't get involved? Why is it that people will turn away when they know that doing so will likely bring tragedy on those around them? I've struggled much of my adult life trying to get my mind around this question and it is a very complex issue to answer.

After the Holocaust, we proclaimed loudly in Europe, the U.S. and the greater British Commonwealth, "Never Again". We will never stand by idly and let others be slaughtered on our watch. But we have… many times. 40 years of the Gulag in every country in the Soviet Union, then in recent times in Serbia and Kosovo, in Rwanda, in Darfur at the present.

You may recall that we were like this here in New York through the 70's. Those of us old enough to have lived here in the 60's and the 70's probably have a story to tell of watching a mugging that you didn't do anything about for fear. There was a story in the paper from that era, the details I can no longer recall exactly, but a woman was accosted in front of an apartment building and she started screaming. The residents looked out to witness her being attacked but no one actually did anything. Probably someone called the police but still she screamed and no one tried to intervene and stop it. I believe that she was either left unconscious or killed and left on the street. That was the metropolitan ethos of my youth. Mind your own business. You will recall that story and how the editors of our newspapers were in a moral quandary about this stifling social ethos.

I went off to college and returned a few years after college for graduate school and something had happened in the meantime. It was like everyone had really heard the anchorman from the movie 'Network' who told all of the citizens of Gotham to go to their windows, throw them up, stick their heads out in the streets and say, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." Suddenly, people got involved, directly so.

Kate and I were eating lunch on the newly renovated South Street Seaport, right outside the mall there in the spring. A call cried out from inside the mall, 'stop that guy. He just stole a ladies purse.' Sure enough, looking up, there was this guy running through the crowd, security in pursuit, holding a purse as he ran. People were eating al fresco, when one of the waiters saw where the guy was headed and cut a diagonal through his tables, dropping his tray. As the thief turned into the waiter, the waiter leapt over the rail and did a flying body tackle, just nailed the thief and slammed him to the ground. A cop happened on the moment, jerked the thief off the ground, cuffed him. Security grabbed the purse. And a thousand people stood up all cheering for this waiter. The era of indifference and standing by doing nothing was officially over.

It can be turned around, but it strikes me that at the present, we are likely becoming mired in an age of social inaction for reasons direct and indirect. The direct reason is the socially we are between the era of Nation-States and a World community and this will probably remain the case for centuries.

Only 200 years ago did we first hear of the claim of the Rights of all Humans in the French revolution, echoed by Sainte-Juste and others in the heady days that led to the overthrow of the Monarchy and the feudal order in France.

Edmund Burke, watching all of the death and destruction from across the English Channel, famously observed that "There are no rights of Man, only rights of Englishmen". What he meant by that is that rights have to be backed by legitimate power, by an army and a court system that can enforce them by means of law. Absent these, the declaration of Human Rights is actually dangerous as the French Revolution bore out. In the hands of the revolutionaries, unrestrained by law or army, they resorted to the guillotine, and very quickly the moral revolt degenerated into mob justice with wanton death distributed by those who could do it.

In our present era, we have the United Nations and we have the World court at the Hague representing the World communion. So we actually have trials for 'crimes against humanity' and there is a reasonable justice that can be meted out. But, these institutions are not backed by the force of Arms. Instead, we must rely principally on the United States, a single nation-state to actually enforce any serious dispute, like the one we had in Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia. All of our United Nation forces are feeble and ineffectual, except for symbolic purposes.

But single nation-states cannot be trusted to actually enforce serious law by themselves. They are self-interested and cannot entirely rise above their national interest to embrace a dispassionate justice for all nations. At the moment, this is symbolically on display in the refusal of the United States to allow itself to come under the judgment of the World Court for possible charges of genocide in our war on terrorism. We will selectively enforce the judgments of the world, exempting ourselves from the scrutiny we would use to prosecute Mommar Gadhafi, Fidel Castro, or Hugo Chavez.

And we will continue to negotiate this uneasy use of arms to actually enforce the will of the United Nations for many decades to come. Presently, there is a feeble and ineffectual force in the Sudan, comprised of the African Union, sanctioned by the United Nations, principally paid for by the U.S. and Europe. But, it is fairly clear that the only way any serious military response to the tyranny of the Sudanese government is going to take place is if the United States takes it upon itself to become directly involved and force them to cease the violence and begin good faith negotiations. That is the direct challenge to inaction in our era, we have world community institutions but no world community power to actually back them. Absent that, over the next couple centuries, we will continually find ourselves dealing with social inaction.

And indirectly, the war on terror itself has important challenges to the United States that are being deeply and broadly felt right now. We are stretched thin with our existing commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq, in servicemen, in equipment, and in money. Indirectly, this means that the legitimate woes of the people in the Sudan just don't get the coverage in the press and certainly don't register on the priority list of our elected officials, despite the fact that they are important. Similar things could be said of Somalia, Haiti, of the Congo, of Niger, of Nepal, of any number of socially dysfunctional regions that threaten the most basic human rights of the citizens who live there.

All of them are important, worthy, but sub-consciously the time is not ripe for a concerted concentration on them because our present involvement combating terrorism is sucking up so much of our attention. Our moral imagination develops ever-constricted vision.

And there is, undoubtedly another, much more subtle manner that we will continue to have our moral vision constricted. We are at the front end of a very substantive discussion about human rights that is only six years old, brought by the very nature of the terror threat that is arrayed against us. We have given the Executive branch the ability to momentarily restrict human rights until we can figure out the answer to this question, but it will have to wend its way through the legislature and finally through the Supreme Court before the law is settled. What exactly is the status of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay? If it is true that they do not neatly fit in the existing definitions for combatants defined by the Geneva Code, how are we going to deal with them going forward? What rights do you accord people that use terror against you, who are not connected to any state or army, and may only materially abet resistance to us or they may actually target our civilians? What rights will we accord them?

Right after the attack on our country, we gave the Executive Branch wide latitude to act absent a concrete answer to that question. But as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay have shown, failure to answer that question properly will morally undermine the credibility of our intention to combat terror around the world. Every thoughtful person realized just how big this question was going to be and that the suspension of civil liberties cannot become a "temporarily permanent" solution.

Reinhold Niebuhr was right that nations are never quite as virtuous in the eyes of other nations as they are in their own estimate of themselves. And this is because our motivations are never unalloyed with self-interested protection. We view ourselves as more of a city shining on a hill than is warranted and we underestimate the degree to which other nations distrust us and fear us, knowing that there is no effective deterrent to our power at this moment on the stage of world history.

It is commendable that a number of you have been involved in raising consciousness on the issues that affect the world in Darfur. Martin Luther King was right in his observation that an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Just as we were content 60 years ago to view the racism in south Mississippi as simply a regional matter, so we are tempted today to see overt racism in Sudan as simply an Arab/African matter. But through the Civil Rights movement, we realized that for us all to be Americans, we could no longer tolerate two standards of behavior in our country and so we will come to realize in the social evolution of our world that we will no longer tolerate two standards as citizens of one Earth, one for the developed world, another for the underdeveloped world. At the moment, those calling attention to these matters are the Medgar Ever's of the world, raising consciousness about a decent standard for everyone, some of them dying for it.

Like the Good Samaritan in our bible passage this morning, they get it that their commission is to do what they can, where they are, to let the needs of those being afflicted guide them as to how long and how much.

And understanding why nations respond ambiguously as they do, helps us, at least to understand the way that sin actually works in our world, less by the conscious overt action of things we directly control, than by the subconscious, veiled, inactivity of the larger social groups that we merely participate in. We do have need for repentance, but it is not simply a short, manageable list that we could click off in the confessional- irritability, short temper, passive-aggressive behavior… No the more profound manifestations of sin are more difficult to get your mind around and less directly areas of your immediate responsibility. But they are no less real.

We are in need of repentance but it will not be as simple as changing this or reforming that. In the ancient language of St. Paul, we are arrayed against 'principalities and powers' which will not change easily or quickly. So we do what we can, where we are, with what we have. We keep taking steps in faith, one at a time, knowing a direction that will be honored, even if we won't entirely see it realized on our watch. Amen.