The murder of innocents and the human race

I'll get back to talking about hiking trails in a future blog, but I wanted you to read part of an essay by Ben Stein. He was commenting on the horrific murder of the children in Newtown. Toward the end of the essay he moved the discussion beyond the particular incident and reflected on the human race itself. His comments reflect the Christian worldview perfectly.

Here is Stein: . . . The whole world is rightly overwrought and crazed with grief over the murder of twenty totally innocent and blameless souls last Friday in Newtown. It was and is a catastrophe for the ages.

But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promises to kill every Jew in Israel and then in the whole world, including babies… and he had his defenders, even at the Democratic National Convention. And it was daily life in Nazi-occupied Europe from 1939 to 1941 to kill thousands of Jewish children every day. But powerful, intelligent men and women in this country defended Hitler, spoke up for him and for keeping America from even sending arms to Britain when England stood alone. What are we to make of that? No one even mentions, no one even knows about the horrendous Armenian genocide by the Turks in 1915, when well over a million of the most talented people on the planet were wantonly murdered — and the world has still not officially called it genocide — and Hitler explicitly said it was a model for him. Who today even talks of the purposeful mass starvation of millions of beautiful Ukrainian children by Stalin? The U.S. did not say one word about it as a government. The U.S. still will not confront Turkey seriously about the Armenian children.

Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge killed roughly one third of all of its people, including children, from 1974 to about 1977 — and it was U.S. policy to avoid doing anything to stop them — because they were opposed to the North Vietnamese Communists and Communist Vietnam, which had just taken over South Vietnam — our ally. What can we say to that? We cheered the deposing of the President — Richard Nixon — who would have stopped the Khmer Rouge from taking power. There is plenty of Cambodian blood on our hands. There is plenty of blood of all kinds on our hands, especially of the most innocent and blameless among us… real babies, truly innocent.

God help us. Man is made of such crooked stuff that it is impossible to set him straight, said a famous philosopher. God help us.