Monthly Archive for August, 2010

By 1944 the Germans and their helpers had already exterminated a large part of all the Jews they would eventually murder during the Second World War. Hungary was the last country with a large Jewish population who had been spared until then. Determined to completely eliminate every Jewish man, woman and child in Europe, the Germans, with the eager assistance of the Hungarian authorities, deported over 430,000 Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz extermination camp between May and July of 1944, where 90% of them were exterminated on arrival. It was during this period that Auschwitz was killing at maximum capacity, killing about 10,000 Jews every day. Unable to burn that many bodies in the crematoria, the Germans dug pits next to them and burned the corpses there.

During this period many foreign diplomats and heads of state, including Pope Pius XII, urged the head of the Hungarian state, Admiral Horthy, to stop the deportations. Papal apologists often claim that Admiral Horthy stopped the deportation of Hungarian Jews due to the telegram Pope Pius sent him. Not so.

The deportations were halted only after Admiral Horthy had received a deluge of protests from many countries including an ultimatum from President Roosevelt, threatening to be particularly rough in his military treatment of Hungary. An unusually heavy bombing raid on Budapest followed this. The Vatican waited until that time to make a protest to halt the deportations. By then most of the 430,000 Jews the Germans would eventually deport had already been deported. So, claiming that Pius XII’s telegram to the Hungarian head of state asking him to stop the deportations resulted in a halt to the deportations is false and misleading, because someone not familiar with the historical context may think that the Pope’s action stopped the deportations, which it didn’t do. Moreover, the papal nuncio in Budapest, on conveying the message to Horthy, took advantage of the opportunity to clarify that the Vatican’s protest was not at all due to a “false sense of compassion” for the Jews.

One of the salient points about the deportation of the Jews of Hungary is the extent of the involvement of the local authorities, as well as the local antisemites, particularly from the fascist Arrow Cross Party. These people were not brainwashed SS, who had been subjected to years of relentless Nazi racial propaganda. The SS officer in charge of the deportation was Adolf Eichmann, who supervised the operation with only 20 officers and a staff of 100, including cooks, drivers, etc. Clearly the only way just 20 SS men could manage to deport half a million people in about two months was because they enjoyed the close assistance of the local population. Even Eichmann was impressed by the eagerness and zeal of the local auxiliaries. Why was the local population so predisposed to help?

Six years earlier, and after anti-Jewish legislation constituting grave civil rights violations had been passed in Germany, Italy and Hungary, then Vatican Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli, later to become Pope Pius XII, visited Hungary. There he addressed the International Eucharistic Congress held in Budapest in 1938, where he discussed godless Nazi and communist regimes, among other things. When he referred to the Jews, however, this is what he had to say:

“Jesus conquers! He who so often was the recipient of the rage of his enemies, he who suffered the persecutions of those of whom he was one, he shall be triumphant in the future as well. . . . As opposed to the foes of Jesus, who cried out to his face, “Crucify him!”—we sing him hymns of our loyalty and our love. We act in this fashion, not out of bitterness, not out of a sense of superiority, not out of arrogance toward those whose lips curse him and whose hearts reject him even today.”

As you see, Cardinal Pacelli was not talking about atheist Nazis, communists or “military godless” here (despite the fact that that may have been the thrust of the rest of the speech). No, the “foes of Jesus” who supposedly cried “Crucify him!” that Pacelli was talking about were not middle eastern Nazi ancestors, they were the Jews the New Testament and further Christian writings blame for killing Jesus, for persecuting him, for cursing him and for rejecting him, all false accusations Cardinal Pacelli had no qualms in repeating three years after the Nuremberg anti-Jewish laws were passed in Germany, and in the same year they were passed in Italy and Hungary, where he was giving this speech and where he found no objection to raise. Here we clearly see the commonly held traditional Catholic conception of Jews as the enemies of Jesus. We see the Jews presented as not only cursing and rejecting Jesus, but also persecuting him and calling for his crucifixion.

When attempting to explain why Cardinal Pacelli would utter such antisemitic words, papal apologists will remind you that the focus of the conference was on the godless Nazi and communist regimes. One needs to wonder why that would matter at all. Who cares if the conference was about atheist Nazis or the health benefits of eating spinach? Unquestionably Pacelli was talking about the Jews in the passage above. The Vatican Secretary of State was not referring to Nazi lips that cursed Christ and Nazi hearts that still rejected Christ even to that day. He was referring to “the Jews”.

This anti-Jewish passage is not a tragic example of rogue theological and doctrinal absurdity. Instead, that type of statement was the norm. Pacelli was a product of his time. He imbibed these anti-Jewish teachings prevalent in Catholicism. How else could he not have done so? He was steeped in the same Christian teachings about Jews as all other Catholics who hated Jews, except that because of his family history and career he was even more so.

Pacelli felt the need to spread even more anti-Jewish sentiments when he referred to “the Crucifige of the masses, who had been misled and stirred up by a propaganda of lies … the mockeries and curses at the foot of the Cross … the redemptive mission and preaching of the Good News falsely portrayed as a rebellion against earthly powers”. Here we see Pacelli once again accusing Jews of deicide. He attempted to justify their assumed reprehensible behavior to having been “misled and stirred up by a propaganda of lies”, but ultimately that was immaterial. To him, the Jews were Christ-killers. Here we have another instance of Pacelli thinking and talking about the Jews in the same terms as he likely wrote at about the same time for Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Mit brennender Sorge: “. . . the Christ who took His human nature from a people that was to crucify Him.”

Given the background of anti-Jewish sentiment instilled in the Hungarian population for centuries by traditional Christian teachings, reinforced by the Vatican’s second most important person on the eve of Holocaust, should we really be surprised at all at the eagerness ordinary Hungarians showed when the Germans gave them the chance to eliminate the Jews?

Sometimes it seems as if Nietzsche was right, and History does indeed return to the same things over and over again in an endless pattern. The variable may be time, but not the acts themselves. Despite the fact that we are now immeasurably more educated and literate than our ancestors, and have an extensive written history, we continue to make the same mistakes over and over as if we were not aware of our predecessors having made them before, and their predecessors before them.

Here’s an example: there’s a country with very high unemployment, with a society embarrassed and humiliated for having lost a war, angry at having lost territory in that war, its economy in total shambles, a people used to belligerence and many of them armed despite having signed an agreement after loosing the war in which they were forced to severely limit their armaments, a society that has inflicted unspeakable suffering upon its neighbors and that now feels they need to make them pay back, a people in great political and social turmoil, experimenting with democratic principles after an entire history of being subjects to some strong political figure who inherited their power, while at the same time with numerous groups from within resisting the notion of democracy and yearning the good old days of a strong man that doesn’t need to waste time in parliamentarian explanations, groups that use violence and pervasive propaganda to intimidate and convince the hapless population who just wants a good life and is not getting it, groups that make the Jews the culprits for all their misfortunes and make hating them their raison d’être, a society who gradually accepts antisemitism as natural, and that embraces the notion of a powerful enemy guilty not only of their problems, but of the entire world’s problems, a society who embraces the notion that the Jews not only are hateful people, but that they need to be eliminated, a group of people with a charismatic leader who speaks in powerful apocalyptic and messianic terms, who imbues everything he says with religious overtones, convinced he is sent by providence to save his people, who gives them hope and effectively turns them into a cohesive people, a leader who creates a history and a mythology that unites and fortifies them, who gives them a reason to live and to fight for, a leader who antagonizes the people’s perceived enemies, thus giving him even more strength in his people’s eyes, a leader who feels empowered by the mindless masses to make outrageous claims, who builds around him groups of armed thugs who terrorize the entire population and in time starts to even alarm his neighbors, a leader who eventually becomes strong enough to gain power among his people and starts to use his thuggish tactics with his neighbors, who try to do everything possible to avoid armed conflict by attempting to appease him, who concede more and more things to him, who allow him to do more and more outrageous things, neighbors responsible for enforcing the agreements signed but so willfully blind that turn their eyes to the side and pretend not to see him breaking the law and his signed agreements, that allow him to rearm, to smuggle and manufacture weapons, to organize militias and armies, to use inflammatory language and extreme propaganda to inculcate hatred and his vile ideology, to exploit every possible outlet to spew his inflammatory lies, in schools, on the radio, on newspapers, on street posters, at mass meetings and rallies and from the pulpits, who organizes youth movements to recruit and indoctrinate the population’s tender minds, minds that then succumb to the barrage and become murderous automatons, while meanwhile his neighbors continue to try to appease him, they give him more and more with the hope he’ll calm down, but he has no intention of calming down, he has no intention of accepting just those things his neighbors are willing to give him, he wants it all and he is not going to stop until he gets it, and so they continue to give him more, until one day it’s too late and things get totally and violently out of control.

It’s interesting to note how the Palestinian people have been emboldened and empowered by Arafat, and how he managed to create a terrorist state under the nose of the entire world, who had tried to appease him for forty years and put him in power and gave him vast sums of money to form the basis of a future Palestinian state, while he and his cronies stole most of that money and used the rest to illegally arm and train terrorist groups. It’s interesting to note how he has managed to create an alarmingly efficient propaganda apparatus that has brainwashed not only their own population, but most of the world. It’s also interesting to note how all this went on despite the fact that it’s been known that his strategy was to create a Trojan Horse to penetrate, attack and destroy Israel from within, and he never had any intention of creating two states living in peace and security side by side, and how despite this obviously blatant fact most of the world tried to appease him. It’s interesting to note how after Israel and the US had said enough to him, and another person was put in power, this person is attempting to appease the now totally out of control armed groups that Arafat so carefully nurtured and supported, groups that now have a life of their own, and are backed economically by powerful Arabs and Iranians and are backed in pretty much every other way by lots of weapons.

It’s also interesting to note how no one seems to learn the lessons from the past: appeasement never works, negotiating with terrorists or criminals doesn’t work, arming groups of thugs is dangerous and will always backfire, and the only possible crackdown on these people is a violent one.

Ah, by the way, the country I was referring to in the example at the beginning was Germany in the 1930s.

Human beings have evolved as pattern-seeking animals. We perceive sequences of events and we see shapes and objects seemingly organized in particular ways, and we tend to want to find a reason for that often-apparent level of organization. We see random sequences around us, and we have devised mental mechanisms that allow us to see them organized in patterns. This mechanism helped our ancestors better cope with their natural surroundings and potential dangers such as a pair of menacing eyes staring from within the foliage, but did not equip them with the tools to discern when a pattern actually exists and when those patterns just seem to exist. Thus, we think we see faces on Mars, dogs and dragons in the night sky, or the image of the Virgin Mary on the glass windows of an office building reflecting a distorted image of a nearby tree.

The individuals that learned how to cope with their environment were the ones that survived long enough to reproduce. That way, they managed to pass along important and useful information to their offspring in the form of orally transmitted tales. As a consequence of this, we have evolved as story-telling animals that pass along our perception of reality to our offspring. We tend to create myths to weave together these apparently purposely created shapes, patterns or sequences of unexplained phenomena in an effort to assign meaning to them. We have evolved a belief engine which has given us the tools to look at nature and find explanations for everything, ranging from why the sun seemingly rises every morning and apparently revolves around us, to why it rains, where we come from and where we go to after we die. These beliefs—and many more—are grounded on a long tradition and history in which generation after generation passed them along to their offspring. They gave people comfort and sometimes helped them survive by making other people aware of dangerous animals or places. Most importantly, they created a sense of community for those people that shared the same beliefs, thus making them stronger as a group in the face of a hostile environment.

The beliefs held by those people better adapted to stay alive until they had offspring were the beliefs that in turn survived. Since people like to tell and hear stories, they told them to other people around the fire and taught them to their offspring, who in turn told them to their own offspring. Some of those beliefs were instrumental in their survival. The collective set of practical ideas together with beliefs in the supernatural in these primitive societies in time turned into organized religions.

A religion is nothing more than a collective, self-perpetuating delusion. It is the sum of a large array of self-replicating ideas called memes. A meme, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary is “An element of a culture or a system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means, especially imitation.” To this definition we should add inculcation, as memes are transmitted and propagated by imitation as well as inculcation. A group of memes that “work together” towards a “common” goal, such as a religion, a constitution or a set of social norms such as the “rules” of courtship is called a memeplex. Memes are a form of thought contagion because they change our conventional understanding of human beings as capable of creating original ideas and/or acquiring them, to the notion that ideas acquire people. Because of the pernicious effects of religions, as well as their memetic makeup, they can be considered a virus of the mind.

In order for a meme to be successful it needs to replicate. Thus, a successful meme does not have to be good or useful; just like a gene, it just needs to be passed along to the next generation. Similarly, a meme is considered to be successful if and when it acquires a new mind. This can be achieved by “convincing” the host to propagate the meme because by doing so something nice is going to happen, whereas by not propagating the meme something terrible will happen.

Additionally, the meme can protect itself from critical thought and reason by claiming the superiority of faith over reason. It can ensure propagation by claiming to be of divine origin (and therefore be absolute truth), and by carrying the instructions to help people infected by the meme and attack those who do not. The two self-referential concepts “Propagate me” and “I am the only truth” are thus the driving forces that enable religious memes to infect new hosts. The mechanisms by which a meme replicates are therefore by ensuring it takes long-term residence in its host and by creating the conditions for it to spread.

A successful religious meme needs to use some or all of the following mechanisms in order to acquire a host:

1. Promise heaven in exchange for belief.
2. Threaten eternal punishment in hell for disbelief.
3. Position the believer as superior to those who believe in other, “false” memes (“the chosen people”, “the true religion”, etc.).
4. Create an immune response to contradicting memes by claiming that faith is superior to reason, thus disabling the faculties of disbelief.
5. Establish itself unequivocally as the “One True Meme”. Some sort of “holy” book accomplishes this. The book contains a circular self-referential argument in which the book’s authority comes from a higher source of universal truth that established that meme as the “One True Meme”. Because the meme contains statements that the source of universal truth has approved that meme we can therefore conclude that what the meme says is true.

After a meme has acquired the mind of its host, it needs to propagate. It can achieve this by using some or all of the following strategies:

1. Convert or kill all unbelievers by means of a (holy) war.
2. Threaten and discriminate against unbelievers by intimidation and terrorism.
3. Enforce social isolation or even death to apostates. Since apostasy within the community of believers might encourage meme-resistance in others it is especially dangerous to the meme.
4. Encourage true believers to breed faster than believers in false memes.
5. Prevent rival memes from reaching potential hosts by curtailing freedom of thought, freedom of speech and by using censorship.
6. Spread lies about rival memes by use of disinformation. Lies are more likely to be believed the higher the level of disinformation is, the more other memes are demonized, and the bigger those lies are.

If we were to make a comparative analysis of different religions we would find the aforementioned mechanisms and strategies used in different degrees. The religions with the greatest number of infected hosts are those that have used the most of those strategies.

Religion has been, and still is, a driving force in society and the source of much cruelty and abuse. It has been, and still is, the “opium of the masses”. But not every religion is pernicious to the same degree, and not everything in a religious memeplex has a negative or pernicious consequence. Religion tends to teach ethics and morals, which of course is a good thing, but they can also be taught outside of Religion. Historically religions have conflicted with science, with democracy, and with any other form of free thought. Given the fact that it is unrealistic to eradicate religions by outlawing them, as evidenced by the experiment in the former Soviet Union, it is imperative to find other means by which people can be turned away from belief in the supernatural and dogmatic religions.

The solution is a paradigm shift in education. It is imperative to use education in a greatly improved form, assisted by the use of the science of memes. Education today, and in particular early age education is misguided because the system is focused on knowledge and not on brain development and on learning how to think. The current education system fails because it generally allows children to develop their rational capabilities in a haphazard way, if at all. It relies entirely on parents to teach children how to think, which is a mistake as parents are rarely equipped to teach that and seldom if ever they attempt to do so. It also leaves the child’s mental development to the vagaries of parental mechanical meme transmission, or worse, by religious indoctrination from an early age when a child is most vulnerable as they have not yet come out of their “magical thinking” stage. A child that has not been protected or immunized against religious memes—and most children will be mercilessly exposed to them—will be infected by them and in most cases will be for life. This type of early-age exposure to religious indoctrination is a form of mental abuse.

The education system needs to be radically altered in order to prevent this from happening and to create a better society. The system needs to be focused in the early brain development phase on teaching children how to think and to make rational and critical thinking an automatic process. By the use of games a child’s brain needs to be “molded” to automatically use inductive and deductive reasoning. As the child grows they need to learn how to think critically. Asking questions and approaching presented positions skeptically should also be an automatic process. As they mature they need to be exposed to an epidemiology of ideas to learn how memes propagate as outlined above, so they will know how to identify pernicious thought contagions and be prepared to reject them. A child has to be exposed to mathematics from an early age in an entertaining manner so as to prevent the much too prevalent math aversion and ignorance so common today. They also need to be exposed to nature and they need to be taught in entertaining and natural ways how the world around them works. We need to instill a sense of wonder in them at the complexity and beauty of nature. It’s important to teach science, and to teach how science works and why it is the best epistemological tool we currently have to learn and understand the natural world. Children need to know that there is never a need to invoke a supreme being or gods to explain the seemingly unexplainable natural phenomena around them. They need to understand there is no evidence of the existence of anything beyond the natural universe, and that there is no purpose and meaning to their lives beyond passing on their genes to their offspring, and that there’s nothing wrong with that. Eventually they need to learn to cope with the reality that their consciousness is nothing but an epic battleground of memes fighting out an enormous battle for supremacy. They need to understand that science provides a cognitive framework that can explain natural phenomena, and they need to accept that science has not explained everything yet. Equally as important, they also need to understand that it’s all right if there are some things science cannot explain.

Lastly, children need to learn the pernicious effects of beliefs in gods, superstitions, pseudo-science and other things of dubious nature. We need to equip them with the tools to identify these things as bad and as leading to many pitfalls. Education should put more emphasis on history, as only through a thorough knowledge and understanding of the causes and reasons for various historical events can we as a society avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Children need to be taught how organized religions, shrouded by a mantle of moral authority, have brought terrible despair and cruelty to non-believers or believers in other religions. They need to learn how organized religions tend to be autocratic and dogmatic, and how they cannot correct themselves to reflect the natural world or changing social conditions. They need to understand how theocratic rule has brought, and still brings, misery to man. They also need to be shown how and why religions clash with science and democratic rule. They need to see that both science and democracy bring new light into man’s life, and they need to be shown how the progression from the old autocratic and dogmatic theocracies to the enlightened democracies in which science is no longer silenced has made life for man incomparably better.

With the arrival of Communism in the Soviet Union, with its atheistic outlook, the Church became convinced it was a “Satanic” force bent on destroying Christianity and European civilization. This line of thinking permeated the Church at all levels, and steered it in directions that could effectively counter the Communist menace, irrespective of the moral failings this may have led to.

For Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli, later to become Pope Pius XII, this was no different. His first close experience with Communism was negative and dated to the time when he was papal nuncio in Munich after the First World War, when Germany had become the Weimar Republic. This was a chaotic time in which revolutionary groups tried to gain power in the vacuum left by the abdicating Kaiser. Among them were socialist groups who had recently gained power installing the Munich Soviet Republic. At the Munich nunciature where Pacelli was stationed, there was a meeting of the diplomatic corps in which it was decided to talk to a man named Levien, head of the Munich Soviet, to ensure an understanding that the Communist government should recognize the immunity of diplomatic representatives and the extraterritoriality of their residences.

Pacelli, thinking that it would be undignified for him to appear personally, sent his aide Monsignor Schioppa. When Schioppa returned, he gave the nuncio sufficient eyewitness information to recreate the circumstances of the meeting. Pacelli then wrote a letter to the Vatican Secretary of State. In this letter Pacelli relayed the information he had heard and endorsed, or that he added himself, including occasional personal annotations:

“The scene that presented itself at the palace was indescribable. The confusion totally chaotic, the filth completely nauseating; soldiers and armed workers coming and going; the building, once the home of a king, resounding with screams, vile language, profanities. Absolute hell. An army of employees were dashing to and fro, giving out orders, waving bits of paper, and in the midst of all this, a gang of young women, of dubious appearance, Jews like the rest of them, hanging around in all the offices with lecherous demeanor and suggestive smiles. The boss of this female rabble was Levien’s mistress, a young Russian woman, a Jew and a divorcée, who was in charge. And it was to her that the nunciature was obliged to pay homage in order to proceed.

This Levien is a young man, of about thirty or thirty-five, also Russian and a Jew. Pale, dirty, with drugged eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and sly. He deigned to receive the Monsignor Uditore in the corridor, surrounded by an armed escort, one of whom was an armed hunchback, his faithful bodyguard. With a hat on his head and smoking a cigarette, he listened to what Monsignor Schioppa told him, whining repeatedly that he was in a hurry and had more important things to do.”

This translation, from John Cornwell’s “Hitler’s Pope”, created quite a stir. First, because Cornwell interpreted it as evidence of Pacelli’s antisemitism, and second, because papal apologists were quick to dismiss it as not only a supposedly bad translation of the original Italian, but also as proof of Cornwell’s alleged malicious intent. Pacelli’s defenders claim Cornwell was simply portraying Archbishop Pacelli in the worse possible light to explain his lack of decisive action to protect Jews during the Holocaust.

I think papal apologists are wrong. Aside from whatever inaccuracies “Hitler’s Pope” may have, this translation of Pacelli’s report of the episode with the people from the Munich Soviet is not one of them. Let’s take a close look at the original in Italian and examine the translation. I am italicizing the key passages to make them easier to find in the analysis that follows:

“Lo spettacolo, che ora presenta detto palazzo, è indescrivibile. La confusione più caotica, il sudiciume più nauseante, l’andirivieni continuo di soldati e di operai armati, le grida, le parole sconce, le bestemmie, che ivi risuonano, rendono quella, che fu la residenza prediletta dei re di Baviera, una vera bolgia infernale. Un esercito di impiegati, che vanno, che vengono, che trasmettono ordini, che propagano notizie, e fra essi una schiera di giovani donne, dall’aspetto poco rassicurante, ebree come i primi, che stanno in tutti gli uffici, con arie provocanti e con sorrisi equivoci. A capo di questo gruppo femminile vi è l’amante di Levien, una giovane russa, ebrea, divorziata che comanda da padrona. E a costei la nunziatura ha dovuto purtroppo inchinarsi per avere il biglietto di libero passaggio!

Il Levien è un giovanotto, anch’egli russo ed ebreo, di circa trenta o trentacinque anni. Pallido, sporco, dagli occhi scialbi, dalla voce rauca e sguaiata: un vero tipo ributtante, eppure con una fisionomia intelligente e furba. Si è degnato appena di ricevere Monsignor Uditore in un corridoio, circondato da una scorta armata, fra cui un gobbo anch’egli armato, che è la sua guardia fedele.”

In the report in Italian it says, “una schiera di giovani donne”, which Cornwell and others present as “a gang of young women” and papal apologists believe it should be the more neutral “a group of young women”. Well, I am not an expert in Italian, but I believe “schiera” means “crowd”, so I personally think that given the context (which one should always take into account when translating) using the term “gang” instead of “crowd” seems more appropriate than “group”. They then accuse Cornwell of maliciously mistranslating “con arie provocanti e con sorrisi equivoci” as “lecherous demeanor and suggestive smiles” when, according to them, should have been ”provocative and with a certain smile”. But then, “con arie provocanti” means with provocative air or appearance. I don’t think saying “ lecherous demeanor” instead of “provocative appearance” is a mistranslation. They translate “sorrici equivoci” as “a certain smile”, which is not bad, but “equivoci” is also “suspicious”. In this context, given what the writer thinks and is saying of these women, the “suspicious” smiles are not just the vague “certain”, but rather the more appropriate “suggestive”. Pacelli defenders then accuse Cornwell of mistranslating “gruppo femminile” as “female rabble” instead of “female group”, which would be the proper literal translation. However, as I said earlier, in the context of the rest of the letter I don’t think using “rabble” instead of “group” is inappropriate, given that a rabble is a type of group that perfectly describes what Pacelli is talking about. There’s no doubt that to him, these women were whores.

Continuing with the supposedly mistranslated report Pacelli sent to the Secretary of State, Pacelli defenders translate “Pallido, sporco, dagli occhi scialbi” as “Pale, smutty, with empty eyes” instead of Cornwell’s “ Pale, dirty, with drugged eyes“. Well, let’s see. The word “sporco” means “dirty”. Alternatively it can be “obscene”, which is close enough to their “smutty”, but the principal meaning is exactly what Cornwell used. Then, they translate “dagli occhi scialbi” as “with empty eyes”, instead of Cornwell’s “with drugged eyes”. Well, “scialbi” means “dull”, or “pale”, so neither of the two translations is exactly accurate, although I suspect that the report meant to say Levien’s eyes looked lifeless. So, even though I think that saying “empty eyes” is proper and is closer to the words I would have chosen, I don’t think Cornwell can be accused of maliciously mistranslating the word as “drugged”.

Then they translate “un vero tipo ributtante” as “a truly repulsive character”, while Cornwell translates it as “vulgar, repulsive”. Well, “un vero” is “a truly” as they translated and Cornwell translated as “vulgar”, so they get a point for being more accurate (even though Cornwell does not change the meaning), while “tipo” is “guy” or “fellow”, not “character” and “ributtante” is “repugnant”, close enough to “repulsive” which both Cornwell and papal apologists use, so both get points. I’d say that both are close enough and both convey the same meaning.

Lastly, Pacelli defenders translate “una fisionomia intelligente e furba” as “an intelligent and smart physiognomy”, while Cornwell translates it as “a face that is both intelligent and sly”. Let’s see: “fisonomia” is actually “features” or “face”, so both got it right. Both correctly translate “intelligente” as “intelligent”, so both get a point. “Furba” means “sly, cunning”, so Cornwell got it right here too.

A translator cannot simply make a literal translation of terms. If the words are not translated according to context, then the result will not reflect the intentions and meaning of the writer as a native reader would have understood. Thus, as I explained earlier, given the general tone of the report Pacelli sent to the Vatican, using terms like “gang” and “rabble” instead of “group” or “crowd” is acceptable and moreover better conveys the utter disgust the writer is expressing overall.

One should not necessarily interpret “drugged eyes” literally either, as an English speaker can actually use expressions like that, or “he looks like he just woke up” without necessarily believing that the person was actually a drug user or that he had just woken up. Again, in the context of the description of Levien as a filthy, despicable fellow, that expression is forgivable.

In any case, papal apologists claim this letter has no significance because the original report was written by Pacelli’s assistant Monsignor Schioppa, and was simply forwarded to Rome by Pacelli. Well, first of all, we do not know how much Pacelli wrote of the report he sent to Rome, based on the report Schioppa gave him. But even if he had transcribed it verbatim, the very fact he had no objections whatsoever about the form and content is telling. In other words, if he wrote it it’s bad, and if he didn’t write it but didn’t edit it that’s bad too. So, ultimately it doesn’t matter which are Schioppa’s words and which are Pacelli’s. The report was signed and sent by Pacelli, which means he approved all of it. And even if we accepted the more neutral (but less accurate) version, it would still be a pretty damning document. Pacelli was a product of his time and place, and referring to Jews with the types of slurs used in the letter was commonly accepted practice among Catholics.

Overall, Mr. Cornwell was generally more accurate in his translation. In other words, the characterization of Cornwell as malicious and misleading, at least regarding his translation of this letter, is incorrect. I actually think Pacelli’s defenders owe Cornwell an apology given how much they have ostracized and maligned him. I hope that this exercise shows Cornwell’s translation is a faithful rendition of the original. I do not think papal apologists are malicious, but I do think that once again they are misleading because they attempt to portray this report as something lighter and different from what it really was: an antisemitic rant.

In conclusion, I do not think Cornwell made a manipulative translation of this letter at all, but I think papal apologists did, because they are trying to couch it in a certain softness that is semantically improper, absent in the original, and is clearly not the meaning the writer tried to convey. Moreover, it is important to point out that Pacelli’s constant reference to the Jewishness of this group of power usurpers was consistent with Germany’s growing belief that the Jews were the instigators of the Bolshevik revolution, and that they had as their aim the destruction of Christian civilization. Also, the use of a catalog of epithets describing their moral and physical repulsiveness was consistent with old Christian stereotypical antisemitic contempt.