Tag Archives: church

Hitler’s Pope And The Serbian Holocaust

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The little known slaughter of Orthodox Christians, Jews, and Roma in Yugoslavia at the hands of Nazi-sponsored Croatian leadership had the full approval of the Catholic pope and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.

“During the Second World War in Yugoslavia, Catholic priests and Muslim clerics were willing accomplices in the genocide of the nations Serbian, Jewish and Roma population. From 1941 until 1945, the Nazi-installed regime of Ante Pavelic in Croatia carried out some of the most horrific crimes of the Holocaust (known as the Porajmos by the Roma), killing over 800,000 Yugoslav citizens – 750,000 Serbs, 60,000 Jews and 26,000 Roma. In these crimes, the Croatian Ustasha and Muslim fundamentalists were openly supported by the Vatican, the Archbishop of Zagreb Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac (1898-1960), and the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. Many of the victims of the Pavelic regime in Croatia were killed in the war’s third largest death camp – Jasenovac, where over 200,000 people – mainly Orthodox Serbs met their deaths. Some 240,000 were “rebaptized” into the Catholic faith by fundamentalist Clerics in “the Catholic Kingdom of Croatia” as part of the policy to “kill a third, deport a third, convert a third” of Yugoslavia’s Serbs, Jews and Roma in wartime Bosnia and Croatia (The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican, Vladimar Dedijer, Anriman-Verlag, Freiburg, Germany, 1988).

On April 6th 1941, Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia. By April 10th, Croatian fascists led by Ante Pavelic were allowed by Hitler and his ally Mussolini to set up a “independent” puppet state of Croatia. Hitler granted “Aryan” status to Croatia as his fascist allies carved up Yugoslavia. Pavelic had been awaiting these developments whilst under the auspices of Mussolini in Italy who had granted them the use of remote training camps on a Aeolian island and access to a propaganda station Radio Bari for broadcasts across the Adriatic. As soon as the new fascist state of Croatia was born, and campaign of cold-blooded terror began, as noted by John Cornwell in his book Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (Viking, London, UK, 1999):

“(It was) an act of ‘ethnic cleansing’ before that hideous term came into vogue, it was an attempt to create a ‘pure’ Catholic Croatia by enforced conversions, deportations, and mass exterminations. So dreadful were the acts of torture and murder that even hardened German troops registered their horror. Even by comparison with the recent bloodshed in Yugoslavia at the time of writing, Pavelic’s onslaught against the Orthodox Serbs remains one of the most appalling civilian massacres known to history” (p 249)

Vatican Moves Away from Frankenfoods

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The head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Cardinal Peter Turkson, has moved away from his predecessor’s support for developing genetically modified food to alleviate hunger in poor countries. Instead, he argues that adoption of the “precautionary principle” is warranted:

“There are a lot of claims that are disputed (like) that GMOs never call for the use of pesticides or insecticides or anything because they are resistant,” he said. Such claims have been challenged, he said, and some say “at a certain point (these crops) require insecticides whose chemicals break up later in the soil and render the soil less fertile.”

Given the disputed claims and doubts, “I think that we should go easy and probably satisfy all of these objections to the full satisfaction of those who raise these objections,” he said.

Because of the companies’ control over the patented seeds, “what is meant to alleviate hunger and poverty may actually in the hands of some people become really weapons of infliction of poverty and hunger,” Cardinal Turkson said.

Previously, opponents of GM carried the burden of proving that some harm was being inflicted. Under the PP, companies that planned on introducing genetic changes into an organism would have to bear the burden of proving that it was safe.

While this might seem counter-libertarian, I would argue it is not.

1. Since changes in genetics are impossible to regulate post facto, they cannot be subject to the usual economic arguments available to libertarians. The potential devastation is so irreparable that the principle of liberty demands that the bar be raised ahead of the event.

2. Biotechnology as an industry is concentrated in so few and such large companies, that free market conditions do not prevail at all in other respects. The companies owe their position in the market to their influence on government regulations and laws, to begin with. That suggests that there will be little in the way of normal market forces to check their natural profit-seeking from turning into rent-seeking based on preferential treatment, captive markets/monopoly, and government enforcement.  PP is simply a thoughtful mechanism to prevent profit from careening into plunder.

Bottom line, PP prevents looting or theft.

That makes it libertarian.

Report of Extensive Rapes and Beatings at Irish Church Schools

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In the news:

“After a nine-year investigation, a commission published a damning report Wednesday on decades of rapes, humiliation and beatings at Catholic Church-run reform schools for Ireland’s castaway children.

The 2,600-page report painted the most detailed and damning portrait yet of church-administered abuse in a country grown weary of revelations about child molestation by priests.

The investigation of the tax-supported schools uncovered previously secret Vatican records that demonstrated church knowledge of pedophiles in their ranks all the way back to the 1930s.

Wednesday’s five-volume report on the probe — which was resisted by Catholic religious orders — concluded that church officials shielded their orders’ pedophiles from arrest amid a culture of self-serving secrecy.”

— More at AP

My Comment

This is sad and horrible. And not the first time for the Catholic church, as this HuffPo article on mission school abuse indicates and this piece on the abuse of Canadian Indians. And in other churches, some in India

(I’ll add a link here to a recent case).

Last year, I posted the debate over Satya Sai Baba’s alleged pedophilia. I say alleged, because when I actually read through the charges and counter-charges, there weren’t as many documented ones as I’d originally believed and some of the accusers didn’t seem credible. But it’s impossible to judge sometimes, because wealthy patrons can blow smoke in your eyes by dragging things out, publishing misleading PR releases that pass for news, and intimidating witnesses.

Alice Miller has written movingly about the abuse of children (she referred to a much broader category of abuse, not sexual abuse or beating, but things like verbal intimidation, humiliation, and the use of children to fulfill adult emotional needs that haven’t been met). For her it is the foundational trauma on which all adult wrong-doing is built. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but we should pay a lot more attention to how we treat children. If this had been done to prisoners, there would be have been an international outcry, and human rights groups would be descending en masse,

But when it’s done to children it just doesn’t seem the same thing..

But my interest here is in propaganda and mind control, not cruelty per se. I want to know how these sorts of things go on for so long (sixty years) without a public outcry.

Thirty thousand children went through this system.  These were well-funded institutions, in which most of the funds were used by the members of the orders and very little went to the children. Does this sound a lot like the behavior of states?

Churches, states, and corporations – when organizations become too large, their main thrust is self-perpetuation. And the people whom they were set up to serve (followers, citizens, consumers) become fodder in that process.

Add to that a powerful ideology and you understand how criticism can be hobbled and monstrous injustices committed without a word of protest.

On a personal note, I attended a Catholic college in India for my undergraduate studies. The nuns came from all over the south. Perhaps because the young women who attended were from relatively well-to-do backgrounds (running from middle-class professionals to wealthy business families and land owners), I don’t recall coming across anything like this. There was one rather unstable young woman who developed a crush on a nun and gushed about her interminably in purple prose, while the rest of us were trying to get through our reading for the night. But it was hilarious more than anything else.

Among the nuns I knew, the one who struck me as truly good through and through was young and rather child-like and simple in her ways. There was not an ounce of anything abusive, mean, or narrow-minded in her. She laughed all the time, I recall, and her chubby cheeks and round eyes could have been those of a small child. Whenever I was ill or having problems, she’d make me up a little soup, as she did for everyone. When she wasn’t working in the nursery, she worked a lot in the garden. She lived among flowers and children and music. She died in her twenties, a few years after I left.