SwiftVets.com

[Bob51]

Goodness in an environment of evil

[Uisguex Jack]

Bob, again Welcome to the forum, I have read with interest your earlier posts.

I hope all is tolerably well in China. The news of today is the economy there is doing very well:

[Uisguex Jack]

On this earth there are good men and women who will not rest idly as Evil grows.

You are conversing with a few of them here on this web site.

[GenrXr]

Bob51,

Nice try but I am a hawk which can see a rabbit while flying in the clouds. Either you knew the nature of this article and the pointed view it was trying to show or you were honestly trying to share with us what you believed to be a nice tale. I hope you meant the latter, but suspect by your earlier well written posts it is the former.

The article first pulls at our heart by having the man say,

[Bob51]

Since we are pursuing truth here I thought to conduct a little methodological experiment. For all I know, your denial of this particular Holocaust story may be symptomatic of a broader denial tendency. Equally, given the need for journalists to have Holocaust stories at the time, what we read may be newly invented, as you suggest, for commercial purposes or be a politicised perversion of some original truth. As with veterans, I took my query to the source. The Internet and globalisation allows us these fascinating possibilities. Despiting trying to couch my query in the most neutral of tones, Mr Cohen views you as "predictable" and "contemptible". I may infer from the brevity of the message that he now also views me as "contemptible" in the same way as a fellow-traveller with Holocaust deniers. So there's an American paradox. Now he has something in common with his detractor.

[Bob51]

I found nothing in his original article "predictable". I found nothing in your response "predictable".

Can a third party educate me on whether this "predictability" is some byproduct of American politics and I am consequently unable to detect subtle semantic nuances in these polemics?

Or is it a rhetorical device in American discourse to disparage the views of an interlocutor as unoriginal?

[Uisguex Jack]

Well This is funny or I am very confused. I sense there are more than a few 'tests' being run here.

Bob 51 The story is a typical story from the holocaust. As shown with the many links I supplied you, most notably these three:

http://www.annefrank.com/1_life.htm
http://www.oskarschindler.com/
http://www.raoul-wallenberg.org.ar/english/wallening.htm

also this film: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092593/plotsummary

I sense the two differing responses are rooted in the 'mindset' of each individual responding.

The author of the article: Roger Cohen may have been a supporter of John Kerry for president and may have unwittingly taken in John Kerry's assertion that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are all 'drunks and liars'.

I do not know if this is true. I do know his article is highly believable, a typical holocaust story.

There is nothing 'predictable' in Genx'S response at all, not with out some sort of prejudice. In physics we can predict when things may or may not happen, this is not so with individual human beings we have never met or spoken with.

Mr. Cohen’s response that this was 'predictable' makes no sense by any logical analysis.

Returning to GenX's Statement about the article being unbelievable. Those of us, I included, familiar with the full history of the Holocaust and the Anti-Semitism then and growing today are well acquainted with a highly developed propaganda war against all Jews.

At the root of this propaganda effort the inferiority of the Jewish religion is often exploited......... there are no simple answers to such issues and one must beware of those who assert there are.

Mr. Cohen’s article asserts the boy was a atheist. I dare say at that boys age and in his circumstances, he looking back on the experience 60 years later may well feel he was a atheist. The question is, is he a atheist today?

Who Knows? Mr. Cohen, by lack of scholarship or happenstance does not mention this in his article. Reporters have difficulty coming up with logical questions while dealing with their own host of prejudices. We are all prejudiced in some way or another, this by way of life experience.

[srmorton]

I am a scientist, so I can appreciate the need to ask questions and to
sometimes be skeptical of such stories, but I am also a devout Christian
who believes that God is in control. Even in the midst of evil, His miracles
can take place. Anyone with knowledge of the Bible knows that God
often uses people who do not believe in Him to accomplish His purposes.

I have read many stories about the Holocaust, some of which are just
as miraculous as this one. I tend to believe stories like this until I see
evidence to the contrary, and I think it is not good to read too much
into the motives of other people - especially if we do not know them
personally.

True or not, Bob51, this was a heart-warming story about the goodness
that can be found in most people, although it may be buried under many
layers of indifference. I, being a product of the public schools, had never
even heard of the Holocaust until I discovered Leon Uris's books while
attending college. Since then, I have always been interested in this
period of history and have often wondered how human beings could be
so cruel to an entire group of people just because of their ethnicity.
We are seeing the same kind of actions in the Middle East today, and
this story serves as a reminder that "all it takes for evil to triumph is
for good people to do nothing". Thank you for posting this!
_________________
Susan R. Morton

[GenrXr]

Read what I wrote in my post. My point was this article is meant to pull at our base emotions and sway our thinking to a particular point of view. I do not know who wrote the article, but I know they are fascist sympathizers by the way in which it is framed. The person who wrote this article is a communist and definately wants to get his secular anti-american point across and at the same time rewrite history. The people who helped Jews in WWII believed in god. They were people of moral clarity and not of the mindset of the fictional character in the article.

Disclaimer I shouldn't have to write, but here it is:
I want to re-emphasize, I believe this article to be a fraud and meant for a specific purpose. I believe the author made up the article to push his belief people can believe there is no god and yet be people of moral clarity in times of no morality. Well I have never heard of such a person other then from marxist propogandists. And I am talking about time as recorded by man. Name one such person. Not going to find it other then in this left wing BS article. Or another BS left wing article. Did the Holocaust happen? Damn straight it did and it was families like mine which ended it and when I see evil wicked articles such as this playing tricks on lazy minds it pisses me off.
_________________
"An activist is the person who cleans up the water, not the one claiming its dirty."
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing." Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Founder of Conservative Philosophy

[MSeeger]

It's dangerous to generalise. Not all atheists are immoral, and to imply that is the same as a liberal saying that everyone who voted for Bush is a right wing Christian fanatic.

Athesists are just as capable of living moral lives (at least by the standards of what is considered moral) as the religious person, and anyone who has a friend or relative who is an atheist can recognise this. I think it takes more faith to be an atheist than it does to believe in God.

I think it's going a bit too far to imply that the article is a work of fiction, and to say that the only people who helped Jews were people of moral character, implying that (a) only believers are people of moral character and (b) if you're an atheist, you must be immoral.

The woman who was saved in this article was the author's mother-in-law. Reason enough for him to write this peice. The author is also Jewish. Now granted, a great many Jews are liberals, but not all of them. It would be easy enough to verify if the story were a work of fiction; just do the research. I simply do not think the author was pushing any sort of political agenda. In my opinion, he was simply writing a timely story about his mother-in-law and the person who saved her life.

Being conservatives, we tend to believe that our point of view is always right, and that the liberal is always wrong and leans too far to the left. Therefore, anything that doesn't agree with our point of view is suspect. But let's not forget that plenty of people who claimed to be God-fearing and moral also graced the doors of a church on Sundays during WWII and in the occupied countries...and yet did nothing to stop the slaughter. Think about it.

Maria
_________________
Be not deceived, God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. Gal. 6:7

[Bob51]

Uisguex, (as in uisqebeatha - the water of life?), Susan, GenrXr, Maria
Sorry for the inability to pick up the important points you have been making since it's 1am here and I'm working to a deadline.
Since I knew nothing of Roger Cohen when I spotted the story, I had no way of assessing the accuracy or otherwise of the observations of bias.

A few minutes of search engine sleuthing gave me the following:

[Uisguex Jack]

I am impressed.

Uisguex.... the original Gaelic Scots word for what we now call whiskey or as you say 'the water of life'..... The American Indians would call it 'Fire
Water'.

Spooky, spooky, spooky.

I am sure Cohen is a credible journalist, I know genx is a good well thinking guy.

To be clearer, for either of them to say these things were predictable is a indication of prejudiced and stereotypes. I don't agree with Genx's conclusions but I can see where he's coming from. He has a sharp eye out for communist operatives and some alarms have been going off.

Mr. Cohen I know little about. I'm surprised he would have been working with that link you supplied from dod? That is a very sensitive office, also I'm surprised you are aware of it. When it comes to research you exhibit great acumen.

[Bob51]

Will taking up arms against a sea of troubles, and "opposing", end them?

Susan

You wrote: