So...

Here's what happened. A thread was started with a post that, in essence, lauded Dieter Uchtdorf as being a better man that the average mormon afossil, a sentiment that has merit.

Seven hours later, the OPie's tribute was retracted and the comment was made,

"Okay, so Uchtdorf's father was a Nazi. Can't have him in the presidency or the president of the church with that shadow hanging over his legacy. His.father.was.a.Nazi. Nuff said.

His dad helped to murder six million Jews during WWII. Why wasn't he prosecuted as a war criminal? That they converted to Mormonism in Germany during that time speaks volumes. Mormons were complicit in helping the Nazis and were Nazis themselves."


Despite requests for a source, a citation, etc., none was offered, but the condemnations continued. when it was pointed out that source material offered that, Karl Albert Uchtdorf was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1940, and that the family did not join the church until after the war was over, the contumely continued. The implication was offered that a mormon cover up had taken place. The remark was made that if the dad was in the army, he was complicit in the Holocaust, and that Dieter was a bad boy for not denouncing ... stuff. No specifics were offered.


So I offer these questions

1. Does there exist any evidence that Karl Albert Uchtdorf was a nazi?

2. Whether or not he was a nazi, or nazi sympathizer, and either helped kill Jews, by commission or omission, what sins descend to his son, and by what means could these sins be expiated?

By extension, a base line may appear regarding racism and the sins of the father being inherited, yea or nay, by the sons.


Later, if you all behave yourselves, I'll tell you the story of the only Mexican citizen to spend time in a nazi concentration camp. I met him in San Bernardino, CA in 1989...

I will take a stab at answering the questions. My answers comprise three overlapping moral propositions and then preliminary discussion of some of the inevitable complications.

Moral Propositions:
1) Each person is responsible for his own actions, or failures to act, based on his knowledge at the time.
2) There is no collective guilt. It is wrong to say that because some subset of a group does something evil, all people in that group are guilty.
3) Children are not responsible for the actions, or failures to act, of their parents.

Complications:
Collective guilt often manifests as racism. In Christian history, Jews were blamed for the death of Jesus and the result was millennia of prejudice and violence. In Mormonism, the association of Cain's purported sins with skin color resulted in institutional discrimination that continues in some forms today--and sometimes appears on RfM. The same applies to the "Lamanites" and many other groups both within and outside of the Mormon tradition.

Another complication is institutional. Long periods of discrimination become entrenched in civic habits and institutions. It is possible for a person to be born in the dominant class and bear no guilt for the institutions that embody her advantages. At some point, however, education and knowledge engender some degree of moral responsibility to dismantle or reform those institutions to eliminate the disadvantages to other groups. Failure to do so can at some point become moral delinquency. This responsibility is individual, however, and does not imply any guilt for the inception of original discriminatory institutions.

Finally, it is difficult to determine the degree of a person's complicity in an evil social movement because of the question of knowledge. In the German case, there were people who killed Jews, people who knew Jews were being killed, people who should have known Jews were being killed, and people who had no clue about the Holocaust. As a practical matter it is hard to know where an individual fits on that spectrum and hence how much responsibility he bears.

But the question of guilt is always individual. There is no guilt that attaches to blood, nationality, gender, or other innate identity. People who pretend that sin and guilt are collective or hereditary are themselves guilty of moral sloppiness and should reconsider their views.

That was an excellent "50 shades of gray" style sizing up of the questions. You have a great gift with words. I hope there are books by you or something out there.

I must mention though, that there is one thing that bothers me when people talk about the Holocaust strictly in terms of Jews and mention no one else.

Historians estimate the total number of deaths to be 11 million, with the victims encompassing gay people, priests, gypsies, people with mental or physical disabilities, communists, trade unionists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, anarchists, Poles and other Slavic peoples, and resistance fighters. The Jews numbered approximately 6 million of those. So many don't even know about the other 5 million. They don't seem to matter anymore.

I wear my pink triangle pin sometimes.

I couldn't agree more.

There were many other peoples who suffered from Nazi atrocities. There have also been other genocides: Rwanda, the Armenians in the early 1920s, Kampuchea in the 1970s. There were also episodes of mass murder based not specifically on ethnicity, including Stalin's victims, the Chinese during the early Mao years, etc.

The Holocaust has unique characteristics but so do those other episodes. I would hope that the general moral principles apply to all those situations.

I find it best that i stay out of these type of threads.

Well, here's something I've only ever told DH...

I have several Nazi's in my family. Cousins, but still. No idea what their personal ideaologies were.

I also have an ancestor who was a Klan member.

Does that make me a racist? No. Does that make me bad? No.

However, it is very uncomfortable, even painful.

Feel free to slap me, but I don't blame the PR department if they wanted to sidestep another Ratzinger type, public blowback.

I'm certain that if we go far enough back in anyone's family tree, we will find very bad things. That is why the notion of collective or familial guilt is so wrong. It condemns everyone as surely as original sin did.

In my opinion, people are responsible for their own actions and perhaps for making some portion of the positive changes that is within their power. I stop short of saying that people should do everything in their power because I'm not sure where the line should be drawn.

But virtue and vice are individual, not collective or hereditary. I don't think there are many ethicists who would challenge that notion.

So is pukedork a white supremicist then ?

He's been labeled an unapologetic son of a mormon nazi Jew killer, complicit in is father's guilt by his silence.

If the proof exists that this is true, it would probably harm TSSC, and that would be a good thing. If no proof exists, the charge should be retracted, because it weakens our position as rationalists, opposed to an irrational religion.

Besides not everyone who joined the Nazi party was aware of everyhing that was going on.There was a lot of pressure to join, even on children. Pope Benedict got a lot of flack here for joining Hitler's youth. Most German kids did because it was expected. Same for some adults

You had to join. It wasn't a choice.

The only thing I am finding on the internet is that his father was drafted into the German army in 1940. It doesn't state that he was a Nazi. Dieter was perhaps five or six when World War II ended so he had nothing to do with World War II or the Nazis.

There were a great deal of what is now referred to as "Sophie's choice" type situations occurring at the time. I'm not judging anyone in hindsight without concrete evidence. It is too easy to see everything in a cut and dried way years later and then use the accusatory phrases, "They should have known," or "They should have done something." This is why I think Lot's Wife's explanation serves as a warning about jumping to conclusions.

Sounds fair to me. People are often put in impossible situations.

In 2004, former aide to Bill Clinton, Sydney Blumenthal, went to England to expose the international system of gulags created by America. Here is the article:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/may/06/usa.iraq

That article was printed after Antonio Taguba’s report, documenting torture, and the release of the horrifying hellish pictures from Abu Ghraib.

Even with the pictures, the Taguba report and Blumenthal’s journalism, American torture was denied, minimized and carried on.

Are RfM Americans guilty of torture?

Human

I think the Blumenthal article is at

https://mg.co.za/article/2004-05-07-the-us-has-created-a-new-gulag

I wonder why the word 'gulag' was selected? Gulag, a Russian acronym, means a work camp. The 2004 Iraq war saw the creation of torture camps; they weren't gulags, they were worse.

I am not guilty! I vote by absentee ballot, and write down that my vote only counts if the people I vote for do not commit acts of which I would not approve.

Thank you for fixing the broken link.

Good question about the word choice. There is a difference between being worked to death and tormented and experimented upon to death. In either case, though, death is salvation.

At the time, I read “gulag” as a way to emphasize that Abu Grahib in Iraq wasn’t just one prison, that Bagram in Afghanistan wasn’t just one prison, that Guantánamo Bay wasn’t just one prison, but that there were several American torture prisons strung across the world as a coherent system in the same way the gulag system was spread across the Soviet Union. The word was a retort to official Washington’s attempt, when denial was no longer credible, to frame everything as one-off anomalies at the hands of a “few bad apples”.


Your OP’s point is an excellent RfM lesson as well: some of us like to collectively blame all Mormons for the idiocy (and worse) of Mormon leadership today and in the past. —There are many 20 year old mormons who sincerely do not know of their religion’s past racism and would never believe it if pointed out to them because they themselves are not racist.

The notion that guilt/responsibility differs according to one's knowledge is correct. The German child who lived in Berlin during the 1940s is not responsible for Hitler; and the Mormon missionary who does not know Mormon history is not lying when she testifies to the "truth" of the Book of Mormon.

In the case of Uchtdorf or any other apostle, there is a lot to answer for since those people know most or all of the actual facts. I believe Dieter is a morally dubious character and probably should be held to account for a lot of things; I've never seen his charming smile as exculpatory.

But those judgments must be based on his own actions and his own understanding, not on those of his father or his "nation" or any other people. Virtue is individual and vice is individual. There is no collective element to moral responsibility.

I have general sense that leadership at or below Stake can be reasonably excused for not knowing the actual facts and history of the church. But once somebody aspires to leadership above the Stake level, I don't see how he can remain innocently ignorant of the facts; and is therefore culpable, in my mind, for perpetuating the fraud.

I'd agree with this as a general principle but add that in a moral sense (if there is/were a God) judgment ultimately has to be more individual than that. There are some bishops, stake presidents, patriarchs, even fathers and mothers, who know the truth and perpetuate the fraud. They too are responsible for what they do to their subordinates and children.

Conversely, I suspect there are GAs who don't know the whole story. Some may think the restoration was true but JS became a fallen prophet or the church fudged relatively unimportant details. Those people would not be fully guilty.

But I am basically in your camp. The number of people who are naively faithful must surely diminish the farther up the hierarchy they rise, and the senior people are almost certainly responsible for what they know, or ought to know. It seems to me that the Q15 and the 70s are almost certainly culpable.

> I believe Dieter is a morally dubious character...
>

I sincerely believe there's something morally wrong with all of the GAs.

Who, in his right, human, mind gives up being his genuine self in favor of portraying a 24 hour a day servant of a patently phony ghawd?

This is a very difficult subject. Not trying to make excuses for anyone. Just trying to explain. Not everyone in the German military was a Nazi or rabid anti-Semite -- but some were.

America was a segregated country back then too -- just not a fascist one. Religious exclusion was also commonplace.

Back then, just as it is now, the world was facing an immigration crisis -- not from the middle east but Jews from Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89vian_Conference

The Évian Conference tried to reach a solution but it failed. No one wanted them and few countries would accept them.

They didn't want any more of "them" either.

Another issue is the unbelievability of the Holocaust. No one thought that mass murder on such an industrial scale was even possible or desired -- why would you waste resources on killing so many people for no reason during wartime when resources were critical?

People heard stories about what was happening in Russia (i.e. the Einsatzgruppen SS death squads) but few had direct knowledge of the primary extermination camps like Treblinka -- and if you did you knew not to talk about it.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/23/2018 06:40PM by anybody.

History can be very complicated. I have been debating whether to join in with this thread, but I have decided to do so because I am against tarring everyone with the same brush.

The reasons for this are philosophical, of course, but also personal:

My grandfather headed one of the first British units to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp when it was liberated. He took photos (plus photos of the official photos in case they were hushed up) to ensure that his descendants knew the truth... But he was also pretty anti-semitic himself, as many upper-class Englishmen were at the time...

My mother-in-law spent 18 months in Ravensbruck concentration camp after losing her fiancé to a German firing squad - because she was in the French resistance (aged 20). But (and it's a big but for Americans - for Europeans, not so much) she was a lifelong Communist.

As I said above, history is complicated.

Who shall cast the first stone?

Tom in Paris

Communism was a bit like Nazism. There were people in both movements who supported totalitarian government, killed innocents, or condoned the killing of innocents and hence bear considerable guilt.

There were also Nazis and communists who had little understanding of what was being done by their leaders. In France and Italy, in particular, a lot of communists were basically humanists with little understanding of the evils occurring in the Soviet Union. Que Homage to Catalonia. These people bear little or no responsibility for the atrocities. In some cases it was a naive communism that inspired the resistance to totalitarianism (surely true of many in France) and hence was a source of moral strength.

There is also a relative element in morality. As you note, the upper class in Britain (and to a large extent in France and the US) was antisemitic during the war. Some of those people, however, fought against antisemitic violence (if not philosophy) and hence were (relatively) virtuous. I suspect Schindler may have been in this category. You could say the same thing about the Civil Rights movement in the United States.

That applies, however much it pains me to say it, to the people who are today dismantling the institutions of republican and democratic government across North America and Europe. Some of those people are as evil as Mussolini and the other tin pot dictators; others are naive nationalists; still others are just naive husbands and wives rightfully aggrieved by the failure of their governments to pay attention to their legitimate grievances. These people cannot be dismissed across the board for the actions of their leaders.

Moral culpability is hugely complicated. The question is how much did a person know, and given that knowledge did that person do more or less moral good? Again, it would be nice if there were a God or someone else who had enough understanding of human nature and individual courage to make sensible judgment about individuals.

I think all we mortals can do is say that broad brushstrokes based on "group" or family heritage are wrong and, meanwhile, fight the moral fight as best we can.

A phrase has recently (to my knowledge) gained popularity: Situational Awareness.

I don't know of any means to 'grade' it, as a quality. I know that I have a lot more of it than my current group of friends, but mine probably pales in comparison to an in situ government spy, or elite soldier.

I think it can carry across to 'citizenship'. There are simply limits to what one can perceive and understand in terms of one's place in society and the rank of that society in a moral sense. (In an absolute sense, no society can be really be judged, if the trains are running on time, so to speak...)

(hot damn, I love it when you guys stretch my little brain!!)