Calmeyer’s Legacy

Hans Calmeyer Righteous Gentile 1903-1972

“The Dutch Schindler”

 Lawyer for Life

WHY  SAVE  LIVES ? 

When Jews were transported to the camps, there was relatively little violence and little suicide. The will of the Gestapo was of course as strong as could be, with no organized opposition tolerated. And the will to live and maintain hope, regardless of the imagined conditions to which the Jews were being deported, outweighed the immediate risk of death or decision to die. Jewish faith of course also played a role in the stoic and generally non-violent deportations. And propaganda was used to convince victims that they were being transported to another place that could indeed be better than the current conditions of discrimination and restrictions wherever the Jews were at the time. Such lies work, when the outcome remains clouded in uncertainty.

Suicide is generally frowned upon in all religions, since God-given life is presumably and doctrinally His to influence and decide to end. All the great religions have exemptions or allowances to kill oneself for extreme heroism and sacrifice, saving another’s life foremost among them. In such exemptions, you are not murdering yourself, you are killing yourself for a purpose. It is remarkable that suicide bombers violate in one swoop both the presumed moral prohibition against murdering yourself and murdering innocent others. A religion that does not actively and effectively suppress such dual-murder is bowing to the purposes of the suicide bomber, however convinced the individual may be that he/she is carrying out the will of God. A religion that fails to reign in its extremists is expressing silent or overt consent to the extremist act. Individual adherents who fail to express their outrage join in the tacit approval of the event, the extremist, and the purpose.

Objective thinking does not persuade anyone to commit suicide (except perhaps  at the point of capture by the Gestapo). Jihadis do not blow themselves up in  mosques and marketplaces because they study al-Ghazali instead of Aquinas, but  because they think that death is preferable to life in an alien civilization.  Not only jihadis kill themselves. No one better exemplifies a life dedicated to  reason than Western mathematicians. Yet a mathematical puzzle elicits a  different kind of thinking than the question, "Is my life worthwhile?" A  distressingly large number of great mathematicians committed suicide, including  Alan Turing, Paul Ehrenfest, Ludwig Boltzmann and G H Hardy.                                                                                                                                                   Engler