Recently we
observed the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of the northwestern coast
of France, which heralded a bloody beginning-of-the-end to the Nazi attempt at
world domination. Literary and cinematic depictions of that “Longest Day” are
too numerous to list here. The more vivid of them show in gripping detail the
horror of that violent time. Movies like Saving Private Ryan, the HBO
series Band of Brothers, and numerous historical and literary works depict
a world, a political situation, in which “turn the other cheek,” to put it
mildly, is not remotely an option.
History,
strategies and a way of being
“Turn the other cheek” indeed was
not an option in that fraught and perilous time. There was a despairing hope
for such a strategy in the 1920s and 1930s. Leaders of the free world bent over
backward to turn the other cheek, as it were — to go the extra mile to appease
the German dictator Adolf Hitler, who had parlayed a 30 percent popular vote
margin for chancellor into a wedge with which to worm and weasel his way to
absolute power.1
The Free World leaders’ intentions
were honorable — one might even say they were “Christian.” Possibly they saw
themselves as following Jesus’ injunctions given in our reading for today. They
had witnessed — in some cases at first hand — the horrors of what was then
referred to as the Great War and is now known as World War I. That was a
worldwide conflagration that Karen Armstrong and others have called “the
collective suicide of Europe,”2 a conflict from which it has yet to
fully recover.
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