Dr. Thomas A. Idinopulos was in Boca Raton to speek at the Shemin Trialogue Seminar (2/11/08) and at St. Gregory's (2/12/08). He is a Professor and is the former Director and founder of Jewish Studies at Miami University of Ohio. He has recently published a new book called "Betrayal of Spirit: Jew-hatred, the Holocaust, and Christianity". His lecture at St. Gregory's was based on the last chapter of his new book. The topics of his book and lecture might seem surprising for a Christian audience, but the discussion afterwards was very energetic and broke new ground for many in his audience.

To Christians, the Holocaust is certainly a horror, but it is not likely to be frequently in our thoughts. Many began the evening thinking of the Holocaust as something that happened because of a psychopath and something that isn't a contemporary worry. Over the course of our discussion we began to see that the Holocaust really happened because lots and lots of people went about their daily preoccupations and didn't ask questions, didn't confront the horrible truth that was happening in their time and in their place.

The Worst Intentional Man-Created Atrocities since WW II Which War #Deaths When Congolese Civil War 3,300,000 1998-03 Rwandan Massacres 917,000 1994 Somalia: Chaos 350,000 1991-99 Second Sudanese Civil War 1,900,000 1983-99 Afghanistan: Soviet War 1,500,000 1980-89 Iran-Iraq War 1,000,000 1980-88 Mozambique: Civil War 800,000 1976-92 Angolan Civil War 600,000 1975-94 Cambodia: Khmer Rouge Regime 1,650,000 1975-79 East Pakistan: Massacres 1,250,000 1971 Nigeria: Biafran revolt 1,000,000 1967-70 Indonesia: Massacre of Communists 450,000 1965-66 Ethiopian Civil Wars 1,400,000 1962-92 2nd Indochina War (incl. Laos & Cambodia) 2,800,000 1960-75 First Sudanese Civil War 500,000 1955-72 French-Algerian War 675,000 1954-62 Korean War 2,800,000 1950-53 North Korea: Communist Regime 400,000 1948-99 India-Pakistan Partition 500,000 1947 First Indochina War 600,000 1945-54 Chinese Civil War 2,500,000 1945-49 German Expulsions after WW2 2,100,000 1945-47 Numbers in the middle column are the sum of battle deaths, civilian casualties of war, democide, famine caused by the economic disruption, etc. (source: Matthew White)

Most of us know that six million Jews died in the Holocaust. But most of us don't know that 30 million people have died in genocides, ethnic cleansings and local wars since WWII. This is in 22 local wars and Darfur isn't even on the list.

Dr. Idinopulos quoted Hannah Arendt's term "the banality of evil" saying it is a useful term because it expresses the ordinariness of these horrors. They happen because ordinary people keep doing their ordinary things and people who could intercede don't. That ordinary people are very capable of horrible acts has been proven in two experiments. A social psychologist named Stanley Milgram created an experiment at Yale ("the Milgram experiment") in 1961 where he recruited Yale students to participate in a 50 minute experiment where he created a condition of authority for himself and ordered the students to deliver what they thought was a painful and possibly lethal electric shock to complete strangers. Most students complied. (see: easy to read documentation, Wikipedia, and 27 minute video of recreation in 2007.) The second experiment is called the "Stanford Prison Experiment". Dr. Philip Zimbardo, a past president of the American Psychological Association, showed how anonymity, conformity and boredom can be used to induce sadistic behavior in otherwise wholesome students.

Dr. Idinopulos also described a recent study by a Univ. of Chicago professor that shows that a very large proportion of what we call acts of terrorism have occured in locations where American troops are in place and unwelcome.

Two days after Dr. Idinopulos's lecture, Nicholas Kristof (NYT editorial of 2/14/08) wrote of our torture and abuse of an Arab journalist who we have held at Guatanamo Bay for six years despite his obvious innocence. Mr. Kristof says "Guantanamo itself does far more damage to American interests than Mr. Hajj could ever do.

I think we want a peaceful world, but it is possible that we have old ways of thinking about how to get peace. We're still assuming that coercion, the threat of our might, is the main tool for achieving peace. Soon we will have spent more than $1 trillion in Iraq and we won't have achieved stability. In the same period of time our spending on foreign aid is about 10% of that (about $100 billion to all countries on the planet). How much we spend is a crude measure, but it is a convenient measure of our intent, our beliefs of what works. Perhaps the steel grey men who don't blink should make a little room for peace-makers.

Perhaps, "We have met the enemy... and he is us."

The Network for Spiritual Progressives urges that we address the well-being of everyone and in so doing we'll find our safety and security. Peace will come when most of us have education, good health, enough to eat, safety and opportunity. Many others share this view. Maybe the time is nearing when this can be the dominant view of most of the most important decision-makers on our planet.