Christians who fall in with the forces of evil

RICHARD DOWLING (Letters, December 19) says we should not blame Christians for the rise of Hitler. Perhaps we should not blame Christianity, but surely the vast majority of the German people who were significantly responsible for the rise and crimes of Hitler’s regime were Christians.

The original Christianity was a religion of love, justice and non-violence. Christianity got corrupted along the way by property, power, greed and a variety of perversions, including the tortures of the inquisition and witch-hunting.

The ‘just war theory’ — an oxymoron that means killing people to save people — was used to justify the most horrific of crimes.

The corrupt Crusades and pogroms against Jews were some of the outcomes of such contrived madness. It was not Hitler who personally killed six million Jews and many others. These crimes were committed by millions of Germans and other compliant Europeans.

Here in Ireland such evil could never take hold, surely. Yet, at Shannon airport, mistakenly perceived national and personal interests have resulted in facilitation of torture and crimes against humanity.

The Irish people have been complicit in the unjustified deaths of more than one million people in Iraq and torture of thousands of prisoners by the CIA extraordinary rendition programme.

The Taoiseach stated in the Dáil that “there is an issue about highlighting Shannon airport when there is absolutely no evidence of people, aeroplanes or anything else to do with extraordinary rendition.”

In other words, don’t mention Shannon in case it might endanger US investments or prompt pre-emptive retaliation or claims for compensation by torture victims (Canada paid $10.5 million to torture victim Mahar Arar). The number of times that CIA planes associated with rendition have been refuelled at Shannon is 195 so far, and the number of US military and troop-carrying planes through Shannon has probably exceeded 5,000. If Hitler had invaded Ireland in 1941, what would have happened to the Jews living here?

Is it going too far to say that they would have been ‘rendered’ to Auschwitz, like the Jews in France and eastern Europe?

Spare a thought for the thousands of disappeared prisoners within the CIA gulags as well as prisoners being tortured by other regimes, including those in Burma, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Iran, Israel, China, Russia, etc.

Edward Horgan

Newtown

Castletroy

Co Limerick