"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
This post interweaves several themes and subjects:
"The Storm Troopers Of Christ", a recently released documentary, by Steve D. Martin, which describes a new field of historiography and Holocaust study examining the role of Protestant Christianity in both allowing, by passive acquiescence, but also actively supporting, the role of Hitler and the Nazis.
Our collective moral complicit in the crime and tragedy of Iraq, and our collective need to re-engage (to the extent we're distant from it) in order to prevent the destructive emergence of an American Dolchstoßlegende.
The Puritan "ethnic cleansing" (genocide) of Massachusetts Indian tribes.
The ongoing silence, in the face of great evil, shrouding the Christian churches generally including churches of my childhood home, Andover Massachusetts where one Christian pastor, a Unitarian minister leading perhaps the smallest church in the old town, has stood out in public protest of the US military invasion and occupation of Iraq that has led to such terrible violence that a substantial fraction of the entire pre-war Iraqi population has been killed, wounded, displaced as refugees and orphaned. The Iraqi government, which disputes scientific estimates suggesting that as many as 1/2 to one million Iraqis have been killed in the conflict, nonetheless calculates that five million Iraqi are now orphans and that raises the terrible question: where have their parents gone ?
That statistic alone challenges us morally, with its abstractly and terrible simplicity, 5 million orphans. It speaks to us of great evil that's been done and is being done in our name and if our moral and religious convictions are more than pieties mumbled in places of religious worship, privately or publicly, more than mere fleeting thoughts or comforting sentiments, that number, 5 million accuses us each and every day we do not come to terms, with the sea of suffering and violence that number represents, and morally engage with that number by taking action to help bring and end to that suffering and to help rebuild what's been destroyed and debased both in terms of human lives and infrastructure but also in our hearts. We are, or we will be, that which we hate and fear to the extent we refuse responsibility.
below: trailer to "Storm Troopers Of Christ: Baptism and The jews in Nazi Germany". Here's a review of mine on the 1-hour documentary by Steve D. Martin. http://www.talk2action.org/...
A less-than-pure Genocidal Puritan "Cleansing" of Massachusetts Indians
My hometown, the town of my childhood, Andover Massachusetts, is close to the historic epicenter of the Puritan entrance to the so-called New World and my brother in law is currently working with PBS in the production of an historical series on the period in which the Puritans genocidally "cleansed" native American populations of Eastern Massachusetts. For the first several years as they struggled to establish themselves, the Puritan settlers made nice with their Indian neighbors. Once firmly established, the Puritans went to war and Miles Standish even went on a "hit" against Indians leaders in the region and brought back a severed head which the Puritans left outside in public, stuck on a pole.
Things proceeded in that fashion, with fabricated "Gulf Of Tonkin" causus bellum incidents justifying wars that killed and drove off native Americans from eastern Massachusetts. It is likely that, as part of the human instinctual makeup, we all share an tendency to hate, fear and dehumanize the "other", other humans who are culturally, physiologically or even just ideologically different from "us". Chimpanzee bands have been observed waging genocidal campaigns against neighboring bands of fellow chimps and I suspect humanity shares the trait.
Most were, and are, silent
A few Puritans at the time questioned the genocidal campaign that was waged to "cleanse" Massachusetts of its original residents but only a few did so and though humans fancy themselves morally superior to other hominids and simians the Puritan project was, at base, little different from the genocidal campaigns chimpanzees are known to wage against neighboring populations of their own species.
Religion to supposed to make a difference, to prevent humanity from expressing its base impulses and instincts. But today, over the churches and synogogues of Andover lies a palpable silence, of easy acceptance of a war that has caused mass death in a country comfortably remote from the shelter of our daily habits and tedium, our joys and sorrows both great and small. Halfway around the world Iraqis, American soldiers, are caught together in what may become the most expensive meat grinder in human history. Torn and burnt limbs and entrails fly out in a daily spray along with wounded and maimed soldiers and civilians and I do not at all blame religion for this but I have to wonder how it looks to the rest of humanity which knows full well, because former US Federal Reserve head Alan Greenspan has said so and very bluntly, that the America has invaded and occupied Iraq to control that country's oil reserves.
Can religion speak to this ?
Millions of Iraqis have been killed, wounded, made into refugees and orphaned in George W. Bush's war which, if we are to be honest with ourselves, now rivals the ongoing tragedy in Darfur as perhaps the biggest humanitarian disaster, currently, on Earth. Currently it is fashionable, on the Christian right, to decry and bemoan the Darfur disaster but until Purpose Driven Life author Rick Warren cuts ties to the Southern Baptist Convention and its "Theology of War", and speaks with equal force and passion about the humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq that now rivals Darfur I will continue to call Mr. Warren's hypocrisy morally corrupt and a debasement of all religion, and Christianity, presumes to be and to do.
Since Moses came down from the Mount humans, in Judaism and subsequently in its twin offspring Christianity and Islam, have tried to rationalize away the universality of these simple words "Thou shalt not kill", as if God didn't mean it.
But insofar as God exists, the deity is most certainly aware of the aversion intrinsic to human instinctual nature, having fashioned that nature in the first place, to killing other humans. One could view the Mosaic commandment against killing, or murder, as simply a codification of an instinctive human aversion to killing that has long frustrated military trainers who have sought methods to condition soldiers to reliably kill.
"Killology" has found, indeed, an effective answer to that problem, a method leading down the road to evil, to Holocausts and genocide. It is not hard to condition humans, almost all of us whether we want to recognize our shared, awful potential for evil or not, to carry out acts of mass violence. Research has shown that can be done quite simply, through the same process that went on prior to Holocaust in Germany on a societal level: the dehumanization of the "other", a vilified target population held to be less than human and even uniquely evil.
From Andover's churches, a terrible silence
That is why I am troubled by the complicity of silence, from alleged bastions of moral rectitude, America's churches, synagogues and other places of worship which aspire to moral and spiritual leadership. It is true that for last two decades at least, a covert war on the Mainline Christian denominations in America has been underway [see here for Steve D. Martin's newly released (for free public distribution) 25 minute documentary video Renewal Or Ruin, on the covert far-right funded attack on liberal Christian churches] and it is also true that the United Methodist Church has worked to prevent both the war in Iraq and a new war in Iran. But such explanations carry only so far - given the magnitude of the damage done to Iraq, the scale of the human catastrophe, one would expect American Christianity, collectively, to have more to say on the matter. With a few exceptions though, the churches are largely silent.
Private piety, detached from the world we live in and thus from our lives, our actions and the moral choices we make which might prove our pious words and beliefs to be something more than a fairy tail mumbled, giving solace and distracting from our real complicity in evil, destruction and suffering... those whose deeds do not flow from private pieties, and are not in accord but are antagonistic, are the hollow, the stuffed doomed to psychological hells self made and terrible. After returning from Iraq one of the American torturers from the Abu Ghraib prison, describes Seymour Hersh, covered almost her entire body with tattoos as if to literally remake her flesh and escape memories of what she had witnessed and done. We carry these things with us, often for life.
My home town, the town of my childhood, Andover Massachusetts, once tried, convicted and executed dogs for the crime of witchcraft and I do not think we have come so far since that day and in fact I worry we have regressed. Andover Puritans who tried and executed dogs for witchcraft did not deny, as tend to do now through our passivity and silence, that they were killing.
I wonder if we have gone anywhere, morally and ideologically, spiritually too if you'll grant me license to use that word, because America is once again mired in an adventurist foreign war, an imperial Mastadon caught in a tar pit called Iraq, led there by Machiavellian lies based in utopian neo-conservative ideas that are secular but might as well be religious in they propose fixing the world, banishing from our planet and history some basic taint which causes historical struggle and conflict, through mass violence.
Those who kill from a distance, and allow killing to be done in their name who failing to engage with the moral dimension of that killing, while banishing it from their hearts and minds, may in the end be the most culpable of all except for the very engineers, top leaders, who set in motion and directed those machineries of death in the first place. Distance is not disconnection. We the people are bound to the actions, for better or worse, of the government that represents us in the eyes of the World.
"...for many Christians inside Germany, Protestants and Catholics, there was a kind of difficult relationship with the idea of Democracy in Germany, and I think by 1930 German Democracy, the Weimer Republic was already on pretty shaky ground.... a lot of decisions were being made by the President, sort of bypassing the elected representatives, and I think for many church people this change, or this move away from a kind of a functioning democratic process, was quite welcome. - Doris Bergen, author of Twisted Cross:The German Christian Movement In The Third Reich, as interviewed in Stormtroopers Of Christ
I knew, But I was silent...
The time is November 2004, and I have become aware of a new study, by a leading authority - perhaps the world's top authority in his specialization which is calculating via statistical samples mortality rates from disease and war - that says about 100,000 Iraqis are likely to have died from the US invasion and occupation of that country.
I read the study, and it seems more than credible. In fact it is based on the most advanced scientific methodology available, standard methods used by governments around the world. But the US and English mainstream media virtually black out the news, which projects a death toll in Iraq vastly higher than commonly accepted mortality estimates. Most of the deaths come from the air, so to speak, from attacks by planes and helicopters...
A few years pass and the same researcher conducts another study on the Iraqi death toll and the new study estimates a death toll of 600,000. In an excellent "This American Life" segment on the subject, I listen to a journalist who says he didn't believe the figure from the earlier study and thought the earlier '100,000 Iraqis killed' was biased, politically motivated. He says he didn't actually look at the study. I did. So, what did I then do, back in late 2004 ? I wrote about it on a few blogs. Looking back it seems I somehow felt, without thinking it through, that my small effort somehow removed my moral responsibility for what my government had been doing in my name as a citizen in American Democracy. So, what do I do in 2006 ? Well, I seem to have half-reasoned that the issue was gaining some traction - it was on public radio at least. Maybe I didn't really need to do anything. And, I was smug. I had been aware far earlier. And done nothing.
More time passes. More studies, each pushing the death toll yet higher. The last time I hear about it, the toll may have climbed to about 1.2 million... It is easy to write that figure and easy to speak it, but it is hard to imagine. And, the process goes on. Where will it stop, and who will stop it ?
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Silence Of The Churches
"...Nazi law, with all its claims about scientific racism, distinguished between so-called Aryans and Jews on the basis of religion, not biology.
Christianity permeated Nazi society. Nazi iconography is replete with Christian notions of sacrifice and redemption. Even committed National Socialists like the members of the German Christian movement clung fiercely to cultural manifestations of their religious tradition--the celebration of Christmas, favorite hymns, the symbol of the Cross. If we take seriously the German Christian phenomenon, we can begin to grasp how even secularized Germans who rarely if ever attended church might imagine the war on the Eastern Front to be a holy crusade and condemn Jews as the killers of Christ." [Bergen, "Twisted Cross", p.56]
Only when the realm of the political comes to be felt as a truly personal, as a living and immanent challenge to our consciences and our moral sensibilities, can we truly effect political change. If in today's America, as per Yeats's poem "The Second Coming", the worst are filled with passionate intensity while the best lack all conviction, then we are truly lost and and history will repeat.
History never really repeats exactly in terms of the exact details. But, the mistakes of the past do repeat and so we can profitably draw parallels between past historical periods and current times. Indeed, those who fail to do so risk the judgments of history...
I have long been aware of a rising chorus from the Christian right, which advocates a theology of war and a manly, warrior form of Christianity, and also the necessity of a US attack on Iran. But I have only recently come to the disturbing realization that not only the American Christian right has been gripped by the madness ; mainline American Christianity, the Catholic Church, and mainstream Judaism are each gripped by their particular madnesses and the result is coming to mirror the social dynamic and the collective moral complicity that came to grip Germany, and German Christianity, during that period that has come to be widely recognized, iconic even, as representing collective, national evil incarnate -- Germany under the Third Reich.
During one of the greatest of evils that marred the Twentieth Century, Christian churches formed the only major societal institutions not controlled by, or silenced by, the state and so could have opposed the evil. But mostly, they were silent and complicit, or even participated in, and helped shape and propel, the evil. Their theologians justified the evil and one of those built a theological rational for stripping German Jews of their fundamental rights, the right to work even, and sat on a committee that formed the ideology behind the killing of millions. And, German Christian pastors allowed their church documents to be used by the state to parse the saved from the damned - those damned not in spiritual terms but, rather, damned to be deported by the government and eventually killed.
Today, confronted by a similar evil, many Christian churches are silent and many turn a blind eye, while many others actively participate in the evil, propel it and cloak in theological rationales that justify mass dehumanization and mass killing.
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Who killed Anne Frank ?
That was not a casual question for Doris Bergen, author of "Twisted Cross"; it was an exercise Bergen designed for teachers in a course she was leading, for schoolteachers, that was called "Teaching The Diary Of Anne Frank", to raise their awareness of the "chain of complicity" that led to the Holocaust...
Bergen wrote out, on cards she passed out one by one to the teachers, "identities" of different people who each played a part in the death of Anne Frank - Hitler, Himmler, the person who snatched a scrap of bread from Anne Frank's hand in the concentration camp, the Dutch couple who turned Frank's family in to the Nazis, and so on. There were about 15 teachers, 15 cards. The assignment was that the teachers, based on their given "identity" written out on their card, should line up in order based on the relative responsibility each bore for Anne Frank's death, from greatest responsibility to least responsibility.
As Bergen describes the results, in Steve Martin's documentary "Theologians Under Hitler":
"My expectation was that the person who held the card that said 'Adolf Hitler' would immediately march to the front of the line and stay there and the others would line themselves up behind that person. That's not what happened. Instead the teacher who had a card that said 'a German pastor who preached hatred of Jews, from the pulpit, in the 20s and 30s', that person marched immediately to the front of the line and refused to cede that position. No matter who came along, the person with the 'Hitler' card, the person with the 'SS' card... that woman said 'this person is the most responsible, this person who used the power of the pulpit, who used the authority of the Christian Church, of Christian tradition, to teach that it was not only acceptable but desirable to hate fellow human beings, to hate Jews, to fear Jews, to fight against them to attack them - this person is as responsible and more responsible than anyone else.' "
three of the greatest Protestant theologians of the 20th Century, Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emmanuel Hirsch, became enthusiatic supporters of Hitler, and their role has been addressed in a 1985 study by historian Robert P. Ericksen in a Yale University Press work entitled "Theologians Under Hitler" [link to review of book] and video documentarist Steve Martin's 2005 documentary " buy the same name, "Theologians Under Hitler", translates the story to visual media. A review by Ethics Daily:
'A new documentary, "Theologians Under Hitler," examines how three prominent men of faith came to ally themselves with the Nazi party during the 1930s and 1940s. Producer-director Steven D. Martin spends 64 minutes dissecting how respected German theologians of the day embraced Adolf Hitler’s ideology and spun it for the German people.
"During the darkest days of the 20th century, three of the church’s greatest teachers—Paul Althaus, Gerhard Kittel and Emanuel Hirsch—gave their full support and allegiance to Adolf Hitler," says the narrator at the beginning. "This program will examine their stories in an attempt to discover what went wrong.",'
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Young, Armed Police Advanced On The Old War Veterans
Yesterday, my mother told me about the recent anti-war veterans protest she attended, at this year's Boston Veteran's Day parade. A group of veterans who opposed the war were not allowed to officially march in the parade nor were they permitted to speak at the public event that followed the parade. My mother knew several of the protesters and went to stand beside them in their line. They were not, as some Boston media reported, chanting slogans. They had gags in, and over, their mouths to symbolize their public gagging.
My mother is third generation German and attended a middle-class university, Buckknell, in a quintessentially middle class state. If there be a cultural center to America, Pennsylvania may well be it. She was a minster's wife, raised four children, and taught in the Andover public schools. My mother believes in order and public decorum and has until recently never, as far as I know, taken personal initiative to join in public political protests. But she also does not believe that her government should be engaged in a war that was initiated on false pretexts and has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.
My mother witnessed the line of jackbooted police coming towards the small group of white-haired protesters and, she told me, "All of the sudden I was like I was in another country. It didn't seem like America or it wasn't the America that I had grown up in." The protesting veterans were mainly old men, and the city of Boston had seen fit to dispatch a group of police, perhaps double the size of the small protest group, who were young men and equipped with all the weapons and devices modern technology affords for dealing with violent, rioting crowds.
But the old, white haired veterans were not violent. They were not moving, they were simply standing still and they were silent. Standing with the protesters, as the line of police advanced towards them, my suddenly realized that if she did not move away from the protesters she would be arrested too, and though she might some day come to risk that for her political and moral concerns she had not prepared to be arrested. She had friends to drive home, and if she were arrested her car would be towed away by the city. She left the protest line. "It was crazy," she told me, "I didn't feel like the protesters or any of us had any rights at all. What's happening to this country ?"
In 1933, as the Nazis came to power, there were a few who protested. Too few...
In 1933 Berlin Bishop Joachim Hossenfelder proclaimed the popular, pro-Nazi "German Christian" movement the "Storm Troopers of Christ." Hossenfelder led the early phase of a movement that still echoes through the church today, even though the world has tried to forget.
This film uncovers a history few have remembered: a church of heroes and heretics, of selfless good alongside unspeakable evil:
Ludwig Mueller, the bishop of the Third Reich
Martin Niemoeller, the first to resist the Nazification of the church
Karl Themel, a pastor who used baptismal certificates to send "Jewish Christians" to the concentration camps
Werner Syltan, a pastor who died at Dachau because of his work on behalf of persons of Jewish descent
Walter Grundmann, a reknown Biblical scholar and architect of the "Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life"
Over the past two years it has been my privilege to come to know the work of Steve D. Martin, a man who before September 11, 2001, was - as was my late father - a Methodist Minister but since then has become a documentary film maker of increasing artistry and whose choice of subjects is both singular and fearless.
I am not Jewish, and I have always been strangely drawn to Holocaust studies, for reasons that, to me, are not entirely clear. But over the course of the last several years I have been engaged in a study of subjects that I did not consciously chose but which have now converged and given me a perspective that may well be unique and - for that - I have come to a place where I have to speak out.
Recent academic studies, by scholars such as Robert P. Erickson, Doris Bergen, and Susannah Heschel have demonstrated that the role of the German Protestant churches, in aiding, sympathizing with, and failing to oppose, the rise of Hitler and the German Nazi Party, was dramatically greater than has been previously recognized.
While the role of the Catholic Church, especially in terms of its Concordat with Hitler that gave key, early recognition to the Nazis and the National Socialist Party, has been long acknowledged, public and even academic awareness - of the role the German Protestant Churches played in failing to prevent, or even tacitly approving, the "Final Solution" has - has been until recently shockingly meager.
The Deutsche Christen, some of whom called themselves "Stormtroopers For Christ", formed the religious and theological "tip of the spear" of a German Christianity that for the most part aligned itself with, and even embraced, ideology and goals of the Nazis, and the much vaunted role of German theologians - such as Martin Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer - in opposing Hitler and German fascism have been substantially overstated. According to Doris L. Bergen, author of Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich, ""People like Niemoller initially voiced their opposition very, very carefully and often in terms of, you know, ‘we too are opposed to the undue Jewish influence inside our society".
Mass killing, For Oil
Through the best scientific methods at our disposal, methods used around the world by governments to calculate sickness and death tolls from wars and natural disasters, it has been estimated, and corroborated even through at least one independent study, that the civilian death toll from the US invasion and occupation of Iraq is probably over 1/2 million Iraqis (both combatants and civilians) and the toll of wounded is very likely a million or more. How may have been wounded ? No one knows. How many orphans ? Five million, says the Iraqi government. The pre-war population of Iraq was little more than 20 million.
That the human cost of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq has become a humanitarian disaster rivaling the ongoing tragedy in Darfur region of Africa is no longer disputable and not merely because of the death-toll numbers, which some who apparently consider science inappropriate to the job of estimating the Iraqi death toll [much in the same way as retrograde elements, especially on the American Christian right believe science is inadequate to the task of investigating Climate Change or for that matter ascertaining of the Earth goes around the Sun or vice versa] hold up and parade around to get us, Americans collectively that is, off the hook.
But such efforts to minimize what we've let happen in Iraq are absurd, given corroborating statistics : 4-5 million refugees, 5 million orphans. That's a picture of a country laid waste.
No one, as far as I am aware, disputes UN estimates that millions of Iraqis, driven from their homes by the endemic violence, have flooded into the Iraqi countryside and across the border, in a human wave threatening to destabilize Jordan, Lebanon and all countries willing to accept Iraqis fleeing for their lives.
And no one disputes, as far as I can tell, estimates that millions of Iraqi children are now orphans. So, where did these orphans come from ? Did they once have parents ? We can assume so, and the likelihood is that the parents of most of those orphans are dead. Parents, everywhere and this is intrinsic to our human condition, to our instinctual being, do not easily or lightly relinquish their children and will often fight, struggle and venture to the ends of the Earth to be reunited with them.
Prior to the United States invasion of Iraq, reported STRATFOR, Dick Cheney toured the Mideast region and met with prominent leaders to discuss the viability of trisecting Iraq, through resurrecting a Hashemite kingdom attached to Jordan. Since then, reasonable thinkers have advocated similar approaches which, from the standpoint of the violent horror Iraq has become, do not look so unreasonable but would require a displacement of ethnic and religious groups on such a magnitude to rank among the significant instances of ethnic cleansing of the last century and it bears mention that the United States bombed Yugoslavia precisely to put an end to atrocities carried out during "ethnic cleansing" that broke out as that country fractured following the death of Tito.
Whether by intent or not, the depopulation of Iraq is well underway and revised United States nuclear war fighting plans, emphasizing the tactical use of nuclear weapons, indicate the danger that a US attack on Iran would dramatically expand the sphere of death, and especially with the lingering effects of radioactive fallout, to encompass the depopulation of a entire region that would represent one of great war crimes of history and that fate would fall on the lucky side of the equation because the risks of such an attack escalating to, in the words of John McCain "armageddon" are substantial.
Even if such terrible, even apocalyptic, events do not come to pass because Americans of moral courage have struggled and risked to ward off such nightmarish fates Americans, collectively, have implicated themselves in great crimes and those most culpable are not American soldiers who have have been ordered to Iraq under pain of imprisonment and who have been killed and wounded, incurred terrible psychological wounds and suffered broken families and financial hardship in the process.
Moral Aikido Against the American Dolchstoßlegende
Political commentators have predicted the American right will use opposition to the war in Iraq to invoke a modern American version of the Dolchstoßlegende, the "stab in the back" used as a political weapon, against Jews, liberals and opponents of the Nazi Party generally, by propagandists of the Reich prior to the Nazi initiation of World war Two. But as the late, great Speaker of The House of Representatives, Massachusetts Democrat "Tip" O'Neill advised, the best way to prevent political opponents from exploiting potential weaknesses is to wear those openly and publicly. Dolchstoßlegende tactics work best in climates void of powerfully deep moral courage and conviction and to the extent Americans opposed to the war in Iraq take the moral lead to accept personal, and collective American, responsibility for the terrible tragedy to have befallen that country and America the Dolchstoßlegende will not be reborn. Without such collective moral engagement we will see almost surely the birth, or full emergence, of the American Dolchstoßlegende that will exploit the collective shame--which many Americans, especially those on the left who have opposed the war in Iraq but not spent much time doing so and failed to risk much, if anything, in the process--feel towards the war.
Architects of Dolchstoßlegende attacks exploit such guilt and shame by reformulating a basic truth. War, always, is a horror and carries a terrible moral onus. Upon whom should that most heavily fall ? The architects, the engineers, the planners of war bear that burden most heavily, popular opinion would hold but a large class of citizen may be at deeper risk : those who were aware of the moral dimensions, the scope of possible death and destruction and who did little or nothing to avert it. The apple of moral awareness can be a terrible thing; with knowledge comes responsibility. Eat of it an you are beholden, on pain of terrible accusations, towards moral engagement and hence action. And, how have the accused wronged returning soldiers who fought in the war ? "By not supporting that war like any patriotic America citizen should," say the instigators of the Dolchstoßlegende and the best way to counter that frame is to break it, to replace it with one more resonant because it's brutally accurate;
"Americans, many or most of us, stabbed our troops in the back by not being fully engaged with Democracy and American government, by failing to prevent the war in Iraq from starting in the first place and by not working harder to end that war once it had started. We stabbed American Democracy, International Law and the reputation of America's fighting forces in the back by our collective failure to take responsibility for what we collectively asked American troops to do in our name, and we debased, by ignoring them, our religious beliefs and moral precepts; we stabbed our convictions in the back by not truly living them, not moving from words to deeds. We can do better, we must and will we."
We can submit, passively, to the destructive power of an impending Dolchstoßlegende that would lead to even greater horror and evil, once again done in our names, or we can stand as our own accusers and take back the moral shadow, the basic weakness that is our collective shame.
