World War 2

It seems that we are still obsessed with the Second World War. For many of the now elderly it was the defining period of their respective lives and the consequence of National Service for over a decade and a half or so afterwards was the normal "rite of passage" for those of my generation.
So perhaps using it as a point of reference is understandable.

What is not understood, however, by so many is that references to it should be exact. There are parallels to the holocaust as in parts of former Indo-China. It should, by now, surely, be clear that any references to World War 2 are likely to be jumped on heavily by those disagreeing with the main point to which the reference is attached.

So both Wallace Benn and Christina Rees fall into the trap. There are parallels which can be made wherever minorities are involved be it in former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, and whenever members of the minorities decide that they have had enough, as in the Middle East today. However, using the parallels is almost certainly bound to arouse adverse comment, and the digging up of old, marginally related, scores.

This time we have the charge that the Vatican could have done more to oppose the Nazis. Well, I do wonder, and pose for the discerning reader a question about that.

My mother-in-law, a left wing resister to Nazism took refuge with her Trotskyite friend first in Paris and then, after war was declared, in Toulouse in the German allied state of Vichy France.

It has come to to light that she, a freethinker of Franco-Prussian extraction, was helped to remain there with funds provided, it would appear, from the Vatican provision for those in her position.

Can we really believe that the Pope would send a memorandum to Himmler explaining what they were doing to help Hitler's enemies? Were timetables for the trains which rescued refugees from under the noses of the Nazis sent to the local SS commander with a list of passengers and their ethnic origin?

No, of course not! We need to "get real" as they say and understand that any underground activity remains so, and to try a little harder to work out what the Pope did to cover the tracks of those under his command who were busy undermining the devilment brought by Hitler and his associates.