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Archbishop of Canterbury Warns Against “Casual Attitude to Human Life” : 8th Feb 10
The Archbishop of Canterbury has cautioned the UK about the dangers of taking a “casual attitude” toward human life. In a message for National Holocaust Memorial Day, Dr Rowan Williams said mankind must remain alert to a repeat of the Nazis’ division of people into “us and them”, which led to the murder of millions in death camps during World War II.
He noted that the same “dehumanising rhetoric” could be seen in modern-day terrorism or in the neglect of disabled people and refugees, and suggested it is also at work in areas such as abortion and assisted suicide. “We must attend to the signs at home and abroad of those attitudes in ourselves and in others which were the harbingers of the Holocaust”, the Archbishop said in a statement marking the 10th Holocaust Memorial Day.
“These include the dehumanising rhetoric which seeks to separate ‘us’ from ‘them’ and then to project all that is negative onto the other, onto “them”. “We need to be vigilant”, he added, “about every expression of ungenerous feeling towards people in need and all who may for a time be dependent on the wider community—the refugees and asylum seekers.
We need to be alert to the signs of a casual attitude to the value of human lives, whether by acts of terrorism or, more subtly, in relation to disability, or the beginning or end of life”.
Dr Williams—who in 2008 visited the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau with Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Lord Sachs—said it is important that the world continues to remember the Holocaust, because it “seems not yet to have learned” its lessons. We must surely attend not only to the survivors and their stories, but also to what is to be their legacy. Will their legacy be a world in which such things no longer happen because our children and we have learned the lessons and acted on them? Or will their generation, with all its suffering, its tenacity and its offering of hope pass from us like a nightmare best forgotten?”
National Holocaust Memorial Day takes place annually on the anniversary of the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the Nazis killed more than a million Jews, Gypsies and political prisoners. The Telegraph. January 28.
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