Writing Their Obituaries

The most celebrated of the killings was that of Archbishop Romero, who was gunned down, on the direct orders of “Major Bob”, before a congregation of thousands as he celebrated the Holy Mass. The Archbishop’s crime was to have made the subversive suggestion that the civil war in his country might be sorted out through reform and negotiation, rather than through violence, which killed or injured ten per cent of the population, and consumed almost all that it produced. For this he was labeled a “subversive” and “executed.”

Jesuit Priests at the country’s leading university failed to learn the lesson of the Archbishop’s death, and committed treason by arguing for reform and negotiation. Six of them paid the price for treason, and their mutilated corpses were displayed on television screens around the world. In the end, as he lay dying of cancer of the mouth and throat, “Major Bob” is said to have supported negotiations initiated by President Christiani. But with the recent murder of a union official, it is clear that some of his followers still believe they are God.

Menachem Begin was another victim of the delusion of immortality, who refused to learn the lesson of the futility of labeling people as “enemies” in order to murder them. This Polish Jew, whose family was slaughtered by the Nazis, was willing to build his cherished state of Israel on the corpses of any number of people who got in his way, whether these were Arab, British, American, Muslim, Christian, or Jew.

How were the Nazis, the most boring and ordinary of bureaucrats and bunglers, able to organize the most thorough mass murders in history, and raise themselves to the pinnacle of the quintessence of evil? That mediocrities like Hitler, Himmler and Eichmann were able to pass themselves off as evil geniuses, was due to the success of their propaganda in portraying themselves as members of the master race (Herrenvolk), and Jews, Slavs, Africans and Gypsies as sub-human or non-humans.

For Begin, the Jews were the chosen people. And this gave them the right to massacre British soldiers or Palestinian Villagers, to ensure that the Jewish people had a homeland where they would be safe from future holocausts. Like the Jews to the Nazis, the Palestinians and other non-Jews were lesser men and women, and thus fair game for the chosen ones to whom Yahweh had millennia ago granted the Promised Land of Zion. But the British soldiers massacred by Begin’s “terrorists” in the King David Hotel, had loved ones who grieved their passing.

The Palestinian villagers driven out by Begin’s forces, and the people of Lebanon invaded in 1982 are still paying the price of his folly. And where are they now? Roberto D’Aubuisson, noted for his fiery oratory, died of cancer of the mouth and throat. Menachem Begin, devastated by the numbers of Jewish casualties in Lebanon, and the death of his wife, lived the last decade of his life in depression and solitude. Was this the final glory for which they sacrificed themselves and others? Time may tell. But who knows the time or the hour?