If the rest of the world cannot see the difference?

Then maybe they're not the problem. 

It has worried me for a while the USian church's complicity with Donald Trump and the politics he espouses. Or perhaps one's choice of words should reveal where one's sympathies lie, and as such the idea of colonisation and appropriation as used by Critical Discourse Analysis comes to mind rather to describe the USian's relationship to Donald Trump. It is however ironic. The community of people who claim that Jesus Christ of Nazareth, as described and known through the Bible, has allowed itself to be colonised by "the world". And I do absolutely believe that. Only it is nothing new. Rather I consider this current revelation of this relationship to be nothing more than a ripping away of the veil of what has been the case for centuries. Christendom has a dialectical relationship with Western Europe and its values. And thanks to technological developments like the internet and the emergence of values such as free speech, the veneer is gone.

I grew up in apartheid South Africa. At some point I wondered why christians had done so little to fight the injustice. There was also the question of the rise of Nazism. The past three years have answered that question beyond any reasonable doubt. So to be clear, I am pretty sure it is a white, Western thing, not an USian thing.

Time for a reckoning. Time to reclaim the Jesus and God that I know from the Bible. Time to decolonise this too.

 

Article can be found here

Article can be found here

To-read-list: Hva visste hjemmefronten?

Perhaps in a while I will be brave enough to write in Norwegian, but not quite yet.

As the first installment in what may perhaps become a regular "column" - a book which I would like to read.

I have just listened to a podcast about a book which was released in Norway last autumn. What a debate it created. The book posits that the Norwegian resistance was aware about plans to round up Norwegian Jews and chose not to do a thing about it. Part of her criticism rests on the historians who have subsequently not addressed this issue at all. She refers, among other things, to a recording of the greatest second world war hero in Norway, Gunnar Sønsteby. Where he appears to admit that he knew about the round up some weeks before it took place, but did nothing. According to the podcast (Aftenpostens Forklart podcast - 10 December 2018), historians seem to assume that Sønsteby was mistaken. Which seems a fairly spectacular assumption to make. (Question: what other "mistakes" did he make already then? The recording was made in 1970 and he continued working right until the new millennia, before his death in 2012.)

With the journey in whiteness which my life has taken me on - my feeling is that one consistent characteristic of we whites is that we always underestimate our own propensity to tolerate the egregious acts. Just look at the so-called liberals in South Africa. So whether partly by naiveté or our inability to see the depravity within the heart of the white person, I bet you that they did not value the lives of Norwegians Jews highly enough to take action. Once the full extent of the industrial genocide became known after the war, Norway was by far not the only country who struggled to accept our own complicity and so have undertaken extreme efforts to whitewash history.

The challenge is however with such a book, an idea which I picked up, of all places in a autobiography of Sidney Poitier, consider the actions within the time they took place. Not to excuse. Not at all. But if one does not face the abyss, one is at greater risk to repeat the mistakes. Looking at what is happening today globally when it comes to immigrants and Muslims and other "brown" people in particular. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, as the saying goes.

So definitely on my to-read-list. 

Is this what privilege looks like? 🤔 I

Tennessee judge posts link on Facebook saying Jews should 'get the f**k over the Holocaust' - Jewish Telegraphic Agency: The judge has denied being racist or anti-Semitic and says he has the right to free speech.