
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 31, 1995                   TAG: 9505310050
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: CAL THOMAS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NAZI ATROCITIES

THIS MEMORIAL Day came in the 50th anniversary year of the end of the Great War and between V-E and V-J days. Because the word ``memorial'' means ``something that keeps remembrance alive,'' it is good to recall what World War II was about and what we have not learned from it.

With the discovery of the Nazi death camps, the world was shown humankind's capacity for great evil when we choose to live without restraints. Anne Frank's romanticized view that ``in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart'' is the unblemished faith of a child and not the brutal reality of history.

The truth was expressed in an editorial 50 years ago in Christian Century magazine. The atrocities, wrote the author, showed ``the horror of humanity itself when it has surrendered to its capacity for evil .... Buchenwald and the other concentration camps spell doom. But it is not simply the doom of the Nazis; it is the doom of man unless he can be brought to worship at the feet of the living God.''

In a remembrance last month of ``Hitler's Horrors,'' U.S. News & World Report added: ``Even for secular intellectuals, the Holocaust supplied the most powerful brief yet for the existence of original sin. Two centuries earlier, thinkers were asserting the perfectibility of man. Now, they were debating whether Germans were human. The answer, tragically, was yes.''

These are not popular sentiments today, and we would rather forget them. But forgetting them risks repeating them. ``The earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past,'' wrote G.K. Chesterton in 1905. ``Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant, we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.''

How prophetic a description of this century! And how accurate the warning that each time we indulge in the fantasy of the basic goodness of man, and in his capacity to go it alone in an impersonal universe shaped by pure chance, where there is no responsibility or accountability - and we place our faith in government and secular systems to redeem us - we open the door to warfare, foreign and domestic.

Too often today, evil is dismissed as an outmoded idea, unknowable and in no need of control. That is how we become more vulnerable to the grim possibilities of moral, political and national havoc.

Fifty years ago, Gen. Douglas MacArthur said at the moment of the Allied triumph, ``Men since the beginning of time have sought peace, [but] military alliances, balances of power, leagues of nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be the way of the crucible of war.'' Now, ``we have had our last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature and all material and cultural developments of the past 2,000 years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.''

In 50 years America has moved from a foreign battlefield to a more personal one. But the objectives should be the same. Our resolve to fight the evil within each of us should be steeled. The weapons are different, of course, but the outcome will shape our future as profoundly as conventional wars of the past have shaped our present.

- Los Angeles Times Syndicate

by CNB