The Story of 178873: Ben Fainer, Holocaust Survivor

I met 81 year old Ben Fainer two weeks ago at Grand Center Arts Academy in St. Louis. Ben had been invited by one of the social studies teachers to tell the seventh graders about his experiences as a Holocaust survivor. As a parent of one of the students, I was also invited to attend. I found his presentation to be stunning and inspiring. One of the things that stood out to me was Ben's admonition that, despite all he went through, he found hatred to be self-destructive. On April 21, 2012, Ben (known as "Bendet Urman Fajner" when he lived in Poland as a boy) allowed me to videotape the story of how he survived six years in several Nazi concentration camps, from 1939 until he was rescued by American soldiers in 1945. He was only 9 1/2 years old when he was captured. Therefore, in this interview, you'll hear what it was like to be a child imprisoned for the crime of being a Jew. At first, he was assigned special chores like shining shoes and cleaning offices for the regime. He grew up in these camps, though, and eventually he was put to work in factories alongside adult prisoners. In this video, you'll hear that he would never have survived had he not lied about his age.

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Barack Obama: Kind and Gentle Warrior

Barack Obama gets a free pass for his war mongering, even from the political left, as described by Glenn Greenwald:

Most Democrats are perfectly aware of Obama’s military aggression. They don’t support him despite that, but rather, that’s one of the things they love about him. After years of being mocked by the Right as Terrorist-coddling weaklings, Obama — strutting around touting his own strength — lets them feel strong and powerful in exactly the way that Bush and Cheney’s swaggering let conservatives prance around as tough-guy, play-acting warriors. Rather than ignore this aggression, Democratic think tanks point with beaming pride to the corpses piled up by the Democratic Commander-in-Chief to argue that he’s been such a resounding foreign policy “success,” while Democratic pundits celebrate and defend the political value of his majestic kills.

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On loving one’s enemies

I believe that Jesus was a human being, not a God. Therefore, I don't give him homage, but I do occasionally read his alleged teachings, which I evaluate one-by-one. Jesus allegedly said some things that make sense to me, but other things attributed to Jesus don't make much sense to me. When I run into a teaching of Jesus that doesn't make sense, I set it aside as something that doesn't make sense. I'm free to do this, because I'm not a Christian. If I were a Christian, however, I would think that I should follow ALL of the teachings attributed to Jesus, because if I were a Christian, I would probably believe that Jesus is God, and who would I be to disagree with God? One of the things Jesus seemed to teach quite clearly was that we should love our enemies. Robert Wright summarizes these teachings:

The “Love your enemy” injunction, as we’ve seen, appears in both Matthew and Luke. In the Matthew version, Jesus says, “I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” In the letter to the Romans, written more than a decade before Matthew or Luke was written, Paul says, “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.” And if Paul doesn’t quite say to love your enemies, he does add “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink.” Paul also says, in that same passage, “Do not repay anyone evil for evil … never avenge yourselves.” Similarly, Jesus, just before advising people to love their enemies, says, “Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”

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Words about War

A DI reader named Mike Baker provided me with his collection of quotes on quite a few topics, including a section he titled "War and Peace." It is largely from Mike's collection that I selected the following quotes: War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man. ~Alfred Adler It is always easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them. ~Alfred Adler "In war, truth is the first casualty." ~ Aeschylus A great war leaves a country with three armies: an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves. ~Anonymous (German) The terrorist is the one with the small bomb. ~Brendan Behan "War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle." - Thomas Carlyle If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies. --Moshe Dayan (1915 - 1981) History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. ~Abba Eban It'll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers. ~Author unknown, quoted in You Said a Mouthful edited by Ronald D. Fuchs Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding. ~Albert Einstein The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing. ~Albert Einstein Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. --Dwight D. Eisenhower, From a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953 [More . . . ]

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