Anna Foa: roots and fragility of the denial Anna Foa, a Jewish collaborator OSS. Roman ... and conspiracy against Williamnson The historic character of a meeting organized by the parish of Santa Maria ai Monti. Behind these positions taken by the "conspiracy theory" of Francesco Lalli
How can the United States, who fought the Nazis, we were able to develop theories of Holocaust denial? How can you deny the existence of the Holocaust and how is the Church in the face of all this? These are just some of the questions that a group of boys between 14 and 17 years has turned to Anna Foa, historical and collaborator of the Osservatore Romano, the meeting organized on the theme of denial Friday, February 6 from the parish of Santa Maria ai Monti.
A double date, the first and the second dedicated to young adults, to explain with a dual register a concern and jumped back on the front pages of newspapers after the statements of Bishop Williamson, a member of the Fraternity of Saint Pius X. "In high school group that meets every Friday evening in the parish - Says the parish priest, Don Federico Corrubolo - had shown a need to better understand the story involving the Bishop Lefebvre Williamson. Young people today are accustomed to surfing the internet where every theory, even one without foundation, is likely to find its visibility. Therefore we thought of a meeting that could clarify some of the questions raised by children themselves. "
not arbitrary, since the meeting was held in the former house of the catechumens, deputy institution, the mid-sixteenth century until the early twentieth century, the conversion and baptism of Jews. "Many here have found faith, but many also a heap of suffering moral - said the pastor - and with the upsurge of the question I heard a Holocaust denier triple motivation to organize this event right here. First, a duty as a scholar, because nothing hurts more than the truth refused, and secondly a pastoral duty and in the third bar the duty to pay tribute to all those Jews who are here have asserted their freedom of conscience, refusing to convert and helping us to live as the Catholic Church the experience of otherness and confrontation. "
After recalling the first steps taken by the denial in France, in the rooms right next to the Republic of Vichy, and the resurgence of the phenomenon over the years Seventy - this time through the work of a fringe of the far left - Anna Foa highlights the key features in both the strength and great weakness of the denial. "Many of the deniers are defined as historical although I had no title - -. Notes Dealing on a historiographical really the truth of evidence, testimonies, memoirs, manuscripts, it would be quite impossible for them and, therefore, continue a battle that is not based on a different interpretation of the relevant documents, but its negation " .
The consequence of this "no" expressed in relation to sources and an attempt to discredit them or take them apart one by one, in turn is based on something that never ceases to fascinate the modern mentality: "It is - says Foa - the conspiracy theory. All the evidence for the Holocaust would be the result of a conspiracy, in fact, been hatched by the Jews and the winners of the Second World War. If everything is combined transgressive element that revisionism denial carries with it a powerful anti-Zionist and at the bottom that feeds it, we understand why these positions should continue to cycle back to the fore earning a certain accession.
thus risks present danger of returning to the prophecy of those Nazis who, faced with the vastness of the evil done and the genocide, said those who were prisoners of concentration camps: "The world will never believe."
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