PEOPLE
WHO FORGET …
“People who forget history are
destined to live through it again”. The speaker was Hans Werk, former member of
the SS (Schutzstaffel, ‘political
soldiers’) of the Nazi time in Germany in the 1930s and ’40. He was speaking to
a group of young Germans after the Second World War of his deep shame at having
been part of the operation which deliberately set out to kill all the Jews in
Germany and the lands it occupied or planned to occupy - a total of eleven
million people, equivalent to the entire population of Zimbabwe. This was
Hitler’s ‘final solution’ to the Jewish ‘problem’ and it led to the death of
six million Jews.
As if to underline Werk’s
message, how many of us can remember ever hearing of the Wannsee Conference in
January 1942, eighty years ago, which is being remembered this week and which
drew up the plans to put this operation into effect? If we ever knew, we have
probably forgotten. And yet Jewish people are deeply aware of the threat that
still remains because people forget. Unbelievable as it may sound, there are
people who deny, in spite of overwhelming evidence, the slaughter, the Holocaust,
ever happened.
Our reading from St Paul this
Sunday speaks of ‘delighting in the truth’ and in Luke’s gospel we read of
Jesus ‘winning the approval of all.’ But when Jesus tried to build on his
initial welcome in Nazareth, they suddenly turn on him in rage. They had
forgotten their history. Israel had failed many times; in the desert and after
the people were settled in the ‘promised land’. Their memory was short and they
soon found themselves in exile in Babylon. They were unable or unwilling to
remember and learn the lessons memory provides.
We can be selective about memory.
Zimbabwe has a memory; a memory of opportunity based on race. Education,
health, employment, access to land, advancement to leadership roles – all were
based on the colour of a person’s skin. But we seem to have forgotten all that
because all these things are – largely though not totally - still being denied
to people. The difference is that now it is not colour that distinguishes
people but power. The Liberation War was all about empowering people but we
have forgotten.
It is deeply painful but true: people
who forget their history – be it personal or group - are destined to repeat its
mistakes. This saying is attributed to George Santayana, a Spanish philosopher, and was slightly
adapted by Winston Churchill just after the war when he warned in the House of
Commons, in London; ‘those who fail to learn from history are condemned to
repeat it.’
30 January 2022 Sunday 4C Jer 1:4…19 1 Cor 12:31-13:13 Lk 4:21-30