"FORGIVE? FORGET? WHY I STILL TEACH THE HOLOCAUST"

At the University of Leicester's Chaplaincy Centre this lunchtime, for the summer term lecture sponsored by the World Faiths Advisory Group (WFAG).

The World Faiths Advisory Group exists to promote understanding and co-operation among faith groups on campus, by

• exploring spirituality in a multi-faith context
• welcoming students and staff of all faiths
• working towards equal opportunities in relation to all faith groups

This lecture is part of WFAG's programme of encouraging people of different faiths associated with the university to meet, mix and get to know each other better. Stephen Foster (Co-ordinating Chaplain) tells us that WFAG recently organized a "speed dating" event in this very room, involving representatives of several faith societies on campus (he apologises for using that term, but he can't think of a better one right now - and at least we all know what he means by that).

The title of today's lecture is "Forgive? Forget? Why I still teach the Holocaust". The speaker is Aubrey Newman, Emeritus Professor of History and Past Director of the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Leicester.

Prof. Newman speaks in the Octagon from 1300, following a light lunch, in front of an audience two dozen strong, with Bahá'í, Buddhist, Sikh and several denominations of Christian representation.

Prof. Newman asks us to consider his talk as an Apologia pro vita mea: a defence of one's life. Technically speaking, he is still an academic historian of the 18th century. Even at this late stage, he ponders whether he has taken the right path or should return to a biography of George III that has languished, two-thirds finished, in a drawer for many a year.

He was first invited to teach a special course on the Holocaust at the University of Leicester in the early 1980s. He muses that we'd be hard pressed to find someone who has spent so long teaching a subject which he abhors.

Two quotations feature prominently in the presentation:

"Those who do not know history's mistakes are bound to repeat them." (George Santayana, 1863-1952)

"You are not obligated to finish the work, neither are you free to give it up." (Rabbi Hillel, c.110 BCE - 10 CE)

Turning to the title of his talk, he asks: can he forgive? No. Can he forget? Definitely not.

The refusal to forgive does not denote any kind of vindictiveness on the part of the speaker. Prof. Newman doesn't accept the notion of vicarious forgiveness, any more than he accepts the notion of vicarious sin. As we are responsible for our own behaviour, so the only people who can forgive are those against whom the act has been perpetrated. Therefore the only people with the right to forgive the Holocaust are the victims themselves - and forgiveness cannot be obtained from the dead.

And as far as forgetting goes, it appears that much of Europe has forgotten the lessons of the Holocaust, if the rise of far right extremism is anything to go by.

During the Q&A I ask Prof. Newman a question. In his answer he refers to the Jewish community in Scotland with what sounds like first hand knowledge. After the meeting is over, I push him a little on this and he tells me that his family went up to Glasgow to escape the Blitz (arriving just in time to experience Glasgow's own), that he was educated at Queen's Park School and took his first degree at the University of Glasgow.

MP PLEDGES TO COMBAT INTOLERANCE

This article appears in today's Leicester Mercury:

MP pledges to combat intolerance

An MP has pledged his commitment to Holocaust Memorial Day and to help combat prejudice and racism.

Sunday marks the 68th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

In the weeks leading up to it, the Holocaust Educational Trust has placed a Book of Commitment in the House of Commons.

Jon Ashworth, Labour MP for Leicester South, who has signed the book, said: "Holocaust Memorial Day is an important opportunity to remember the victims of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides.

"Having visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, I saw for myself the full extent of the industrialised nature of the Holocaust.

"I encourage all constituents to mark the day and to join the fight against prejudice and intolerance."

NO EVIDENCE OF HISTORICAL JESUS

This letter appears in today's Leicester Mercury (but not on its website):

No evidence of historical Jesus

Mark Jacques's puerile simile comparing the questioning of Christ's existence to being on the same level as a Holocaust denier (Mailbox, July 19) shows just how low he is prepared to sink when rubbishing anyone who dares to question the faith that he so obviously regards as undeniable fact.

The substantive evidence for the Holocaust - the gas chambers, the mass graves, the spoken and written testimony of the survivors, camp officers and guards - is beyond doubt.

There is no substantive evidence to prove that Christ ever existed.

The only thing to even suggest his existence are the stories written about him in the New Testament, which was not published until 400 years after his supposed death, by which time there was no one living to give eyewitness testimony anyway.

Throughout history, writers have chronicled the events of the places, people and events that tell humanity's story.

Strange, then, that contemporary historians living in the places where Christ is said to have lived, preached and travelled, mention nothing of his existence, let alone the effect that his actions are said to have had in riling the authorities of the time leading up to his crucifixion.

When the Christian theologian and writer F W Farrah (1831-1903) read through these writings, he expressed his surprise and dismay when he wrote: "There is no statement in all history that says anyone ever saw Jesus or talked with him.

"Nothing in history is more astonishing than the silence of contemporary writers of contemporary writers about events relayed in the four Gospels."

Astonishing? I'll say it is.

If Jesus did walk among us and had the impact on society as described in the Bible, and a historian of that time had not acknowledged it, it would be like a modern historian writing a comprehensive biographical account of British Prime Ministers of the 20th century and totally failing to include Margaret Thatcher and the impact she had on world politics in the 1980s. It just couldn't happen.

Alan R Pendragon, Leicester

MAKING A CASE BY SIMPLE DENIAL

This letter appears in today's Leicester Mercury:

Making a case by simple denial

When I read the recent letters from Messrs Pendragon and Hipwell, querying the very existence of Jesus Christ, two reactions came immediately to my mind. The first was how lucky we all are to have sufficient freedom in this country, to be able to express an opinion openly, however, outlandish it may be.

The second was to draw a comparison with so-called Holocaust deniers: these people claim that the Holocaust of the gas-chambers of the Second World War and associated atrocities never happened – even though it is perfectly clear they did. This is one way of making your case: pretending that the subject in question never existed!

Mark W Jacques OP, Quorn

The atheistic critique of humanism has been all but forgotten

This is the Face to Faith column in today's Guardian, written by Giles Fraser (Canon chancellor of St paul's Cathedral).

The atheistic critique of humanism has been all but forgotten

The World Atheist Convention is currently under way in Dublin. Among those addressing the conference is Richard Green from Atheism UK. His is a new and small group seeking to establish itself in the marketplace of ideas where the most familiar voices are those of the National Secular Society and the British Humanist Association. What is distinctive about Atheism UK, Green insists, is that it's an atheist organisation for all atheists, including those not committed to humanism. "We cater for atheists who are not humanists," he says.

These days, atheists who are not humanists are an unfamiliar breed. Most atheists, and in particular the new atheists, regard themselves as committed humanists. Indeed, they are new in name only for they appeal back to the atheistic humanism of the Enlightenment, with its optimism about human nature and strong belief in the power of human reason and the inevitability of progress. Here humanism and atheism formed an alliance against all that stands over and against human flourishing. God must be dead so that humanity can thrive. Once emancipated from religious tyranny and dogma, humanity will thrive. As Kant believed, humanity must be its own highest being and ultimate end.

Yet throughout the 20th century many atheists rejected this picture. The sunny optimism of the Enlightenment – not least its commitment to progress and a sense of the intrinsic goodness of human nature – was profoundly dented by the horrors of the first world war and the Nazi death camps. The Enlightenment hadn't found another word for sin. And just as Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, a developing anti-humanism started to announce what, in less gender-conscious times, Foucault was to call "the death of man". Indeed, Nietzsche himself insisted the belief in humanity was itself just a hangover from a belief in God and, once God was eradicated, the belief in human beings would follow the same way.

It was mostly Marxists who developed this idea and ran with it. Louis Althusser coined the term anti-humanism. Forget the significance of the human individual, he argued, it is historical processes that make the difference. There is no such thing as intrinsic humanity, we are all the product of external forces. Everything that cannot be analysed structurally is false consciousness. Humanism itself is false consciousness. Others made a parallel critique using Freudian psychoanalysis. Human beings are not little gods free to choose for themselves on the basis of reason alone. We are subject to forces outside the reach of rational scrutiny. And, broadly speaking, the intellectual left all rose in applause. As Emmanuel Levinas observed in 1957: "Contemporary thought holds out the surprise for us of an atheism that is not humanist."

It is worth recounting a small part of this increasingly forgotten tale to lament what has become of a noble tradition. For it seems the atheistic critique of humanism has been all but forgotten. Richard Green's "atheists who are not humanists" could meet in a phone box. Indeed, the new atheists simply duck the challenge made by atheistic anti-humanism, believing their expensive scientific toys can outflank the alleged conceptual weakness of their humanism. Thus they dismiss the significance of philosophy just as much as they have always done of theology – as if the two were fundamentally in cahoots. But this is nonsense. Nietzsche, Marx and Freud attacked Christianity with passionate ferocity.

Christian theology of the 20th century has spent much of its time wrestling with the consequences. Why won't the new atheists do the same?

Read this article, along with reader comments (and the opportunity to leave your own) on the Guardian Comment is Free cif Belief website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/04/atheistic-critique-of-humanism-forgotten?INTCMP=SRCH

KELVINGROVE: MIXED MEDIA BOXES ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST

This is part of an extensive exhibit about Jews who arrived in Glasgow in the early and mid-twentieth century, fleeing persecution of different forms in different parts of Europe. The exhibit is contained in a section on the upper floor entitled "Conflict and Consequence".

Asked in 1990 by a distant relative to help compile a family tree, I found the task impossible, as so many family members had disappeared in the Holocaust.

Instead, I spent the next five years researching and making Holocaust artworks in memory of the millions who perished.

Testimony by Myer Lacome, artist 

Arbeit Macht Frei (1996)

Myer Lacome, Mixed media box

“Arbeit Macht Frei” – work leads to freedom – were the deceptive words on the main gate at Auschwitz Camp. Auschwitz, near Krakow in Poland, was the largest concentration camp and killing complex. 

The Burning of the Books, Germany, 10 May 1933 (1999)

Myer Lacome, Mixed media box

In 1933 the Nazis publicly burnt books by those Jewish and non-Jewish authors they disapproved of. Jews were forced out of their jobs. Some academics, artists and writers were able to flee. 

Kristallnacht, Germany, 9 November 1938 (1998)

Myer Lacome, Mixed media box

The night of broken glass – Kristallnacht. During this terrifying Nazi anti-Jewish pogrom – organised massacre – 267 synagogues, 1,000 prayer halls and 7,500 businesses were destroyed. Ninety-one Jews were killed and 26,000 arrested.