St Joseph

The first of May is recognised as the feast day of St Joseph the Workman. This feast was added to the Church’s calendar by Pope Leo XIII in 1895 to supplement St Joseph ’s main feast day of 19^th March, which is almost always overshadowed by the events of Lent. Cynics have often claimed that St Joseph the Workman was instituted simply to deflect from the hijacking of Mayday by Trade Union militants and revolutionary socialists. This would be to do injustice to Pope Leo, one of the greatest Popes of recent centuries. He was a prolific agitator in favour of social justice and had a genuine concern both for the dignity and importance of the working man and the justified grievances of the 19^th century urban poor. Today, the feast of St Joseph continues to give a more spiritual focus to Mayday, that most plebeian and enjoyable of feasts, giving an alternative to both the mischief of the organised Left and the absurd adoption of Mayday as “Beltaine” by the Neo-Pagan fraternity. However, the main historical significance of the institution of St Joseph the Workman is that it marked the final apotheosis of St Joseph into patron of the Church and Catholic role model par-excellence.

One could be forgiven for assuming that St Joseph had always held a pre-eminent position in the saintly aristocracy of Christendom, after all he was the effective earthly father and supporter of Christ himself. It is inconceivable that Joseph was not a major formative influence on the young Messiah. He would have fed, clothed and supported the child Jesus, who, as the scant childhood details in the Gospels suggest, was a precocious, outspoken and highly intelligent young man. In the fullness of time, St Joseph would have taught his ward carpentry and bequeathed to him the family business. Jesus’ intricate knowledge of scripture and Jewish tradition would also have owed a lot to lessons given him by his Dad around the family table. Biblical scholars are agreed that St Joseph was probably dead before Jesus began his ministry in the last three years of his life. In England , dozens of Catholic schools and churches are under his patronage. Popular images from the pulp-piety era of the 1880s depict St Joseph as a gentle, doe-eyed, doting father, protectively sheltering our Lord. Statues and images created since are unanimous in showing a close, obviously affectionate relationship between Jesus and St Joseph , a model father-son relationship of mutual devotion and respect. Yet it was not always so…

For much of Christian history, St Joseph has suffered an unfair press, especially in the West. One will notice that the feast of St Joseph in March is entirely lacking in traditional folklore and festivities. Although it was an observed part of the liturgical year, the only folkloric reference I’ve found to it in English tradition is in connection to the sort of weather rhyme which so typifies festivals preceding the spring equinox. Church devotions to St Joseph in medieval England are also surprisingly rare. The English liturgical calendar is interesting in the sense that it preserves a snapshot of medieval saint’s days as they stood on the eve of the Reformation. After this turmoil, though the observance of saint’s days in England persisted, the liturgical calendar became frozen. With the dubious exception of King Charles I, the Church of England has never attempted to unilaterally canonise any of its figures, and has not recognised the huge numbers of individuals canonised by the Catholic Church in the rest of Europe after the great schism. A telling fact is revealed about the importance of St Joseph to medieval Catholics by the reform of the liturgical year undertaken by Henry VIII before the protestant inspired reforms of his later reign. Englishmen of the early Sixteenth Centuries enjoyed an impressive ninety five religious feast days on which no work was allowed and many other minor holy days on which half a days work was the norm. By modern standards this would have added up to an equivalent of 120 days annual leave for the average oppressed English peasant, including Sundays of course, which were always a day of rest. The major feasts in question ranged from Christmas, at which time people usually had the full twelve days off work, to popular feast days such as Rogation Day, Assumption Day and Holy Rood Day, not to mention other, more dubious festivals such as that of the blatantly fictitious St Distaff (7^th January). The corpulent ginger bearded tyrant narrowed the calendar down to around fifty major and minor holy days, along with others on which work was expected. The new slim look calendar retained the festivals of many obscure saints, but excluded that of Jesus’ Foster-father, a day that had only ever held minor-feast status. The conclusion is inescapable. St Joseph did not hold an important role in Catholic England. His cult only gained in importance in the Church after England had apostatised from the Catholic fold.

How can one explain the seemingly inexplicable obscurity of St Joseph in the pre-reformation West, and his subsequent rise to prominence as the archetype of the caring family man? Neither of Jesus’ earthly parents get much mention in the Bible, but where Mary was elevated by tradition into a central focus of mysticism and devotion, St Joseph was reduced to a side-actor in the gospel drama, or even an object of fun and ridicule. In the cultural golden age of the high-middle ages, Mystery Plays were enormously popular in England . Almost every major feast day hosted them, and special Gilds arose in many parishes and localities specifically to produce them during the annual cycle. St Joseph was well known for his role in the Christmas mystery play. Here he played the role of the comic relief. He was depicted as an elderly, affected Jew with grasping hands, hooked nose and flowing black robes. Somewhere between Fagin and Widow Twanky, St Joseph was a pantomime character, unable to accept the divine impregnation of his wife and the divine nature of his foster-son. This playhouse view of St Joseph was commonly accepted throughout the medieval west up to the Fifteenth Century. Even in the Christian East, where St Joseph had historically enjoyed wider veneration, he was often depicted in nativity icons as despondent and downhearted, a symbolic figure representing human doubt and incomprehension.

This all began to change in Fifteenth Century Spain, when St Joseph was bought on board as the poster child of the burgeoning reform movement. It is an unfortunate use of historical terminology that labels the “Reformation” as a purely protestant phenomena. The Protestant Reformation was a divisive, sporadic and generally destructive phase of cultural and spiritual vandalism that swept Northern Europe in the Sixteenth Century, inspired by a heretical reading of the works of St Augustine . Those outcomes deemed most positive about this movement, namely more widespread knowledge of the Bible and vernacular liturgy, both owed their origin not to Luther, but to another Reformation, one that began a century earlier and which never broke communion with the universal church. The movement of spiritual renewal which began in Fifteenth century Spain soon spread throughout the Church, and had its climax at the council of Trent in 1570. Among its first fruits was the famous Polyglot Bible, a triumph of renaissance scholarship that translated the entire Bible side by side in Greek, Latin & Hebrew. Across Europe , popular lay devotions began to take root. The rosary, Devotio Moderna and the Imitation Of Christ all owe their popularity to this spiritual flowering. Primers, missals, Bibles and prayer books in vernacular tongues, all impeccably orthodox in content, appeared in huge quantities all over Europe , hot from the new printing presses. In the great context of history, the Protestant reformation was a mere sideshow.

In Spain , St Joseph was taken as the symbol of this new, laity driven spiritual reform movement. The transformation of the saint from a clown-like mystery play character to model Christian male was no mean feat, and required a closely monitored publicity campaign. The Spanish crown threw itself energetically into its task. New images and statues of both St Joseph and the Holy Family were encouraged and new devotions commissioned. To serve the correct purpose, however, the new flowering of St Joseph images had to be tightly regulated. Gone were the depictions of a stereotypically Jewish Joseph with hooked nose, rabbinical garb and deep wrinkles. The new images of the saint were not permitted to be too old, lest they conform to the old comic-cuckold St Joseph . Nor could St Joseph be too young, lest he appeared inexperienced. St Joseph was to be repackaged as the ideal of rugged Christian manhood, a solidly working class saint who nevertheless combined chastity, piety and erudition with self-reliance and honest manual labour. Through the powerful advocacy of St Theresa of Avilla, one of the great undisputed matriarchs of Western Mysticism, Joseph also gained popular currency as a spiritual tutor and mystic guide, a saint whose intercession was to be highly valued. Over the course of the Sixteenth Century this new impression of St Joseph was to become the dominant one, replacing the old symbolism of theatrical buffoon in the West and deeply flawed symbol of human doubt in the East. The Counter-Reformation ensured that the new St Joseph became established as a much loved and honoured saint across Europe , a reputation a long-time in the making, and one which was richly deserved.

Ora Pro Nobis

St George & the dragon; a familiar image, an obscure origin, and an icon perpetually shrouded in controversy. I have previously written on the identity of St George himself. What interests me now is his relationship with the English people, with their self-image, their history, and with their future destiny. What is it about St George that evokes such passion in some, hostility in others and indifference in most. It is not the anti-George stance taken by the leftist self-haters among our fellow Englishmen which surprises me, but the ambiguity in which he is held by the patriots of our nation. Our neighbouring British peoples take great pride in celebrating their patronal feasts. St Patrick’s Day is notoriously famous among even those with a tenuous claim to Hibernian blood. It is recognised in Ireland by a public holiday, as is the feast day of St Andrew in Scotland . This survival of the medieval cult of the saints in Scotland, a country whose people embraced Protestantism far more whole-heartedly than the English ever did, makes a lie of the assumption that devotion to St George simply withered away in England after the Deformation. The fact is that, apart from a period during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when a state sponsored cult of St George flourished, with its centre in Windsor , the saint has never been fully accepted as the undisputed patron of the English. The cult of saints was once feverishly strong among the English, and its survivals are still strongly evident today, but our medieval forebears were notably parochial. Folk were likely to prefer devotion to a local holy well, relic or local saint, or the patron of their home parish or trade guild, than those with pretensions to patronage of the whole nation. Among pretenders to this title were St Edmund the Martyr, St Edward the Confessor and St Thomas of Canterbury, along with widely venerated but officially uncanonised figures such as Alfred the Great, King Henry VI & King Harold II. St George was beloved of the fighting clique which governed the country and patron of soldiers generally. Along with St Michael the Archangel, he was one of the holy warriors popular with the warlike Normans , and imported into this country by them. St George was recognised as the embodiment of devotion and Christian chivalry but did not enjoy universal appeal. Why the fuss then?

General observation of St George’s Day in England could have been introduced at any time since the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. This momentous event saw the decline of the party-hating puritan ascendancy that had attempted to suppress all religious and secular celebrations and also heralded the birth of the nation-state, with its emphasis on national, rather than regional or trade-specific identity. Since this time there has been a consistent patriotic lobby agitating for St George’s feast day to be given due public status. The advocates of such a move range from traditional-minded Anglicans to secular nationalists. Some lobbies, such as the long standing Royal Society Of St George have enjoyed royal patronage and high-level political support. The failure of this historical movement in their three century endeavour rests on the lack of consensus among Englishmen as to the relevance of St George himself, a controversy that has its roots in the high middle-ages. The partisans of St Edmund are still active among England ’s radical traditionalists. This St George’s Day just gone I saw the flag of St Edmund, a St George’s cross with the crown and arrows shield of St Edmund, flying over the beer garden of the Man of Kent in Rochester.

Personally I have no strong feelings whether St George’s Day should be made a public bank holiday or not. It would be nice, but I doubt it will actually change anything. A fresh wave of public sponsored St George’s Day events in 2008 & 2009 is very encouraging, and many people, including myself, already choose to take this day off as a holiday and make a point of celebrating it with friends and family. For most, another bank holiday will just be another occasion to swarm the pointless and characterless shopping malls that cover England like a disfiguring rash. Crucial to my understanding of the semi-mythical saint and his patronage of our dear land is the icon of St George slaying the dragon. This icon is so commonly depicted, on clothing, money, jewellery and in royal circles that we lose sight of its profound power. The image of St George overcoming his bestial foe is not only among the most potent of religious images, but it is a sacred heritage to contemporary England bequeathed to us by our Christian heritage. Never has the icon of St George been more relevant than it is today.

The familiar icon is directly based on the sacred image of St Michael, Prince of the heavenly Hosts, striking down the devil and trampling him underfoot. It is a simple and potent symbol; the divine power is victorious over the base anti-human forces of greed, darkness, ignorance, chaos, evil and worldliness personified as the devil. The great adversary is overcome and humans are freed from his bland, faceless tyranny. It is irrelevant to this discussion whether this profound symbol is of Christian origin or owes its genesis to Mediterranean , pre-Christian symbolism. The meaning is the same. The myth and the corresponding icon of George slaying the dragon and thereby rescuing the humankind once bound and prostrated to the fiend’s power, is a medieval development of the St Michael icon. A person, group, or dare I say a country, who takes this icon as their personal standard is consciously aligning themselves with the powers of justice, light, good and honour, and are committing themselves to oppose the forces of evil, death, oppression and injustice.

One would have to be naïve not to recognise that modern England is in the grips of the dragon. St George’s patrimony is enslaved to material greed, has been betrayed by self-seeking relativism and is ignorant of its spiritual heritage. We are in deep darkness and confusion. The English have drunk deeply of the poison chalice of pride, blindness and self-delusion. The dragon is consuming us at his leisure, and we are willingly offering ourselves up to his jaws.

On Thursday 23^rd April 2009 I on impulse wandered into the beautiful cathedral of St Andrew in Rochester , a stern Romanesque building that in my opinion ranks among the loveliest churches of England . I witnessed the end of a small, private ceremony in the nave, where the Bishop of Rochester was exchanging niceties with some officials in fancy looking livery. When the party had dispersed I took a look at the focus of the group. A handsome icon of St George and the Dragon had been presented to the Cathedral to mark the feast day, and stood on a small table in front of the main lectern with a single candle burning before it. Maybe it is time for us to again invoke the aid of our powerful defender and to invite St George to return and claim his patrimony.

Grave New World

Darling of the chattering classes Barack Obama is well known for his opinion that science should be free from political interference. I wonder then how he reconciles this position with his decision to lift the ban on federal funding to human embryonic stem-cell research which has been in place since 2001. This will in practice release the flood gates of government funding for experimentation on human embryos, something which Obama has always been openly in favour of. Government funding for research on human embryos… That’s about as close to “political interference” as it gets isn’t it?

Fasting

Along with prayer and almsgiving, fasting is one of the three traditional disciplines of Lent. Of the three, it is the one that has persisted in popular observance for the longest time. This week I have overheard many comments from people about “giving things up for Lent”, who are otherwise completely unreligious. Of course, these days, the concept of Lenten fasting has been largely divorced from its religious context, and has been erroneously equated with the popular fad for dieting. For obvious reasons, popular choices for Lenten denial include chocolate, alcohol, sweets and cigarettes, among both those of a religious and non-religious persuasion. We all have an innate desire to preserve our life, and to reduce our dependence on unhealthy or destructive habits, even if we lack the willpower to sustain our resolutions. This is why people still use Lent, birthdays and “New Year’s resolutions” as a stimulus to change. This is no bad thing, but in the process the meaning of Lent is obscured.

Lent is not about losing weight, exercising more or giving up ingrained habits, although used in the right way these tactics can be helpful. Lent is not about self-denial in order to effect material self-improvement. The essence of Lent is of renewing a deeper relationship with God through stripping away the accretions of sin and self-indulgence that gather around our souls like dust, and blind us from enjoying a proper relationship with the divine source. The Lenten journey is essentially a penitential one. By repenting of our manifold failures and making a true effort to turn away from our decadent material concerns, we aim to make a conversion of life, re-orienting ourselves towards God. This is why the Archbishop of Milan has recently called the young Catholic faithful to give up not cakes and coffee for Lent but text-messaging, facebook and their playstations. If this conversion of life leads us to give up smoking or lose the love-handles then that’s all well and good, but this is a secondary effect of the real purpose of fasting.

Shame Academy

For me at least, an essential element of a free society is that its academic institutions are free from overt political bias or control. As such I am disappointed to see the growth of a rabid anti-Israel lobby among our academic and scientific institutions. The call by four hundred British academics to boycott an exhibition by Israeli scientists at the Science Museum is frankly disgusting. The call stopped short of calling for a total boycott of Israeli academics, a move promoted by a group of forty British radicals. The rationale offered by the boycotters is that Israeli Universities were “complicit” in the recent war in the Gaza strip. This suggestion is not only without any basis in fact, but also carries the implicit condemnation of Israel’s recent war of self-defence. Lets call a spade a spade here. Israel has been the subject of sustained attacks by radical Islamic terrorists for many years. It is a struggle that directly or indirectly affects us all. The vast majority of the Palestinian “freedom fighters” are not valiant partisans struggling for their own strip of land. The Palestinian militants are part of the world-wide Islamic Jihad aimed at the West in general. The peace process in the Holy Land has repeatedly foundered on the Palestinian’s unwillingness to renounce terrorism as a political instrument. This includes indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilians and suicide bombings as a matter of tactical policy rather than acts of desperate resistance. Israel’s immediate Cassus beli was the sustained rocket attacks on Israeli towns by Islamist militants supplied with arms through clandestine tunnel networks linking Gaza with Egypt. The Hamas regime in Palestine was aware of these things but was unable, or unwilling to do anything about it.

It is always an unqualified tragedy when innocents suffer the costs of war, and it is admirable that an international relief effort was quickly organised to assist beleaguered Palestinian civilians. It should be noted that Israel made no effort to hamper this humanitarian mission. In fact, they organised regular cease fires to facilitate aid work and allowed free traffic of aid vehicles across the border. However, we should not let compassion blind us to the fact that this was a just war. Israel took justifiable action after considerable provocation. The Palestinian militants are not heroes. These terrorists do not deserve the disturbing, unqualified support which they enjoy from large sections of the British intelligentsia. This support now extends not just to radicalised student demonstrators but to the heart of Britain’s “chattering classes”. It is a worrying development indeed if the “Red-Brown Alliance”, that bizarre rapprochement between the New Left and radical Islam has now spread into our influential academic and scientific communities.

The popular demonisation of Israel in the British press during the war was unpleasantly biased and insensitive. The almost clichéd comparison of the Israeli Defence forces with “Nazi Storm troopers” was as inaccurate as it was unnecessary.

European critics of Israel (I’m no unqualified supporter myself) should remember something very important. Israel is a fellow Western state with which we share a culture, economic interests, a political heritage and shared history. Most of its citizens are descendants of long established European Jews. Behind the petty terrorism of Hamas, Fatah etc is the sinister face of international Islamic terrorism, which cares no more for us than it does for Israel. The choice is quite simple. We can support Israel as a civilising influence and as a Western advocate in the Middle East or we can undermine her. If Israel is undermined, the geo-political balance of power in the region is likely to pass to Iran, a nation whose dominant culture is implacably hostile to Europe and all it stands for. Such an outcome should make even the loony left pause for thought.

Comedy Of Errors

I am happy to endorse the boycott of Comic Relief/Red Nose Day on 17th March, as suggested by Fr Tim Finegan (Hermeneutic Of Continuity) and Catholic Action UK

The danger of generic charity giving on such a large scale is that we lose control over the charities we support, and our money often ends up supporting dubious organisations whose work around the world, no matter how good intentioned, does more harm than good. I encourage all patrons of the Theatre to boycott Red Nose day and all connected fundraising ventures.

Comic Relief is known to follow a liberal/modernist agenda in the causes and organisations it supports. For example, two of Comic Relief's major partners for African development are Oxfam and the African Women's Foundation, charities which openly support abortion and dubious methods of birth control.

Almsgiving is one of the traditional disciplines of Lent, so please donate the money you would have spent on Comic Relief to a worthy cause of your choice.

I especially reccommend the Society For the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) and the St Vincent De Paul Society (SVP)

If you are reading this and run a blog, spread the word! Post a simple "boycott" post along with the NO THANKS graphic above.

The Long Shadow of Auschwitz

I was pleased to read that the controversial Bishop “Borat” Williamson had issued a formal written apology on 26th February for his comments regarding the Holocaust. Hopefully this will put an end to the storm of controversy which has erupted around the unfortunate Bishop, but, knowing the liberal press, I won’t hold my breath for the moment. I would like to try to bring a little clarity and balance to a controversy which rings warning bells on several different levels. Firstly, I greatly admire Bishop Williamson for issuing this apology. It was without qualms the right thing to do. His comments, in the capacity of a Bishop, had heaped negative press on the SSPX, Pope Benedict and the wider Church. However, the furore against Williamson has had the acrid hysterical character of a witch hunt from the outset, something which in itself is a worrying development. The bishop-baiters have largely taken out of context comments regarding Nazi Atrocities made to a Swedish journalist in an interview on Swedish Television (SVT) last November. On the strength of this, Williamson has been reviled as a Neo-Nazi, Holocaust-denying, Jew hating extremist. Looking at Williamson’s comments in the context of the whole interview, as well as his general position expressed throughout his public career, gives a different picture.

Richard Williamson is not a Nazi sympathiser. He is not anti-Semitic and he does not deny the Holocaust (although he avoids using the brand-name). He accepts that the Nazi regime is guilty of huge massacres and genocidal acts, against German dissidents, European Jews, Polish and Russian civilians and Russian prisoners of war. All he did was express reasonable doubt about the scale of atrocities against Jews reported in most orthodox accounts of the Holocaust. Bishop Williamson claims that this opinion had been formed in the late eighties, at a time when the evidence for Nazi atrocities was widely varying and often contradictory. There were also large holes in the official records. The reunification of Germany bought into the public attention more records which rectified this situation somewhat. However, if outright Holocaust denial is no longer supported by the historical facts, there are still no definitive answers as to how many victims were involved. That many hundreds of thousands or even millions of Jews were involved is not in doubt. Sadly we may never know the numbers or identities of many Russian Jews murdered in the woods of the Ukraine by SS execution squads, for instance. This is exacerbated by the fact that these murders were not always distinguished from the general brutalities of German anti-partisan operations behind the front line. This is one example of the difficulties of piecing together a precise and historically accurate picture of the Holocaust.

As a non-historian, Bishop Williamson’s personal opinion was that the number of Jews killed specifically because they were Jews, (as opposed to because they were Jewish homosexuals, Jewish communists, Polish-Jewish partisans etc) was considerably less than the official figures suggest. While not denying that these individuals were unjustly killed for one reason or another, he suggested that the lack of evidence could call the Holocaust, as a distinct political-historical phenomenon, into doubt. Based on the evidence available at the time, this was a legitimate position for Bishop Williamson to take, albeit a highly controversial one, and one that ignored the near-pathological obsession with Jews at the heart of National Socialism. His denial of the existence of gas chambers is more tenuous, being based on a 1988 report by American technician Fred Leuchter, which has since been widely and authoritatively discredited.

Williamson has never suggested that the Nazi atrocities never took place, that the Holocaust was a fabrication, or was part of a Jewish conspiracy, or any other such nonsense. He merely suggested that the dominant interpretation of that part of history may be inaccurate.

Williamson’s interviewer was no doubt aware of the SSPX’s reputation for harbouring anti-Semites and extreme right-wing sympathisers. While this may well be true, the right-wingers in the SSPX are more likely to the ultra-reactionary conservatives than Nazi sympathisers. I fail to see how any traditionalist Catholic could associate with such an anti-Christian, materialist political creed as Nazism. It is almost a social cliché that SSPX seminaries have been known to contain such anti-semitic tracts as the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I cannot comment on this. I’ll leave it to the SSPX seminary directors to decide what reading material should be in their libraries. However, as defenders of the faith it is important for priests to have a firm understanding of recent history, philosophy and social trends. The Protocols, dubious forgery though it is, had a profound influence on Twentieth century history. The Church cannot simply ignore its existence. The same goes for other controversial tracts. Many of the most erudite contemporary philosophers have an in-depth grasp of Nietzsche, Marx and Heidegger. Does this make our (Non-Anglican) seminaries hotbeds of Socialism, atheism and post-modernism? I am not denying that some individuals may hold dubious political beliefs within the SSPX, but I would like to caution against the temptation to condemn them or their members out of hand on face-value evidence.

This qualified defence of Richard Williamson does not excuse him of an act of shocking political naiveté. It is simply irresponsible for an authority figure to be airing such politically loaded opinions in the public sphere. Public figures, Bishops especially, have a ministry of public service, and although this will sometimes inevitably involve taking a counter-cultural position on matters of principle, I fail to see what good could possibly have come from Williamson airing his highly explosive amateur opinion. An intelligent man such as Richard Williamson should have known how divisive, controversial and upsetting these opinions would be. If he didn’t, one must ask whether Williamson is not too politically naïve to serve in the role of a Bishop. After all, there are more subtle ways of getting one’s point across. If he was aware, and gave his opinion in contempt of the furore it would inevitably cause, it raises serious concerns about his suitability for holding such a sensitive office. The debate instigated by Williamson about Nazi atrocities may have some broad historical relevance. However, the question at hand is whether the Church needs a maverick Bishop who is prepared to risk so much in order to make an individual political statement? I would argue that it doesn’t. The Holy Father’s strategy is one of moderation and persuasion. In this way he is restoring tradition to the centre of the Church, and is gradually advocating a conservative cultural and religious renaissance at the very heart of Europe, without arousing undue hostility. Reckless adventurers such as Williamson threaten to damage or undo this important work.

Of equal importance in all this is the question that is thrown up over the limits of valid historical enquiry. An obvious sensitivity must be shown toward survivors and victims of atrocities that are still within living memory, especially when the political questions surrounding these events have evidently not yet been resolved. On the other hand, it is essential that our recent past is dissected with rigorous historical scrutiny in order that the correct lessons are learned and an accurate interpretation of human action is bequeathed to coming generations who will not remember the events themselves. This is a feat of fine balance, and reminds us of the social obligations incumbent on historians. Discussions of the Nazi atrocities since the late 1970s have repeatedly violated this balance. The Williamson affair underlines the fact that tact, openness, tolerance and honesty are still very much lacking on all sides of this debate. I do not think it does credit to the self-honesty of the west that no discussion of the Nazi atrocities is permitted which diverges from the official consensus on the subject. If we cannot objectively analyse unsavoury opinions we will never move beyond our own prejudices in our search for the truth. If we are not careful, this attitude of censorship will play into the hands of those genuine extremists who see history only in terms of conspiracy. If the Holocaust was to come to be widely viewed in this way, it could only be detrimental to our future.