If it weren’t for Adolf Hitler I would not exist. I get a kick out of telling people this. Of course it isn’t the whole truth. But you have to be fair. It is impossible to tell the whole truth – no one but God can try to do that.
My other existential godfather is Joseph Stalin. He was not as kind to my extended family as Hitler though – who in the goodness of his heart sponsored three grandparents for ‘working holidays’ in the Third Reich. In retaliation Stalin split up the rest of the family sending them to various places including Siberia for over a decade. He was not a very kind man.
My maternal great-grandfather had been an officer for the Austrians during the Great War and town mayor of about five villages near L'viv. His eldest son, my mother’s father, joined a patriotic Ukrainian independence army which fought against the Soviets – he was an officer in the Galizien SS division - before the war he was reluctantly studying to be a Greek-catholic priest. My father’s father was a deserter from the Soviet infantry after his army was overrun by the invading Wehrmacht – he escaped probable death as a POW by pretending to be a peasant and being sent to Germany as slave labour – which was also the fate of my two grandmothers. After the war the two Ukrainian grandparents met and married in a refugee camp in Austria, and the Polish grandmother and Russian/Chuvash grandfather did the same.
As a result I have a novel position on good and evil. Ultimately I think they are meaningless words in the big picture – they are too simple, too black and white. But I’m not advocating throwing the baby out with the bathwater. ‘Good and evil’ does mean something, it points to something real, something vital.
I believe the greatest evil is to kill someone who does not threaten your own life. The second is to kill yourself or act in a way which does not ensure your own survival – my only exceptions are mental illness, and certain situations which cause mental illness: concentration camps and the like. Goodness is doing anything which leads to life.
I do not believe in God – at least not in the usual form related to sin and punishment. And yet I believe that suicide and unjustified murder are Sins. Most sins do not deserve the name. They are just ways of controlling people through irrational fear. But Sins which rob a man of his life deserve to cause fear in the hearts of every man – life is the only state of being which offers the hope of redemption, of goodness, of love. Taking this away is unforgivable by anyone but God.
Death is the only absolute failure in life. If one can learn something from a ‘failure’ it is no longer a failure. I have only contempt for ‘adventurers’ who throw their lives away on trivial pursuits – mostrosities like flying planes in ways never done before or crossing oceans in kayaks do not deserve our praise and adulation – they deserve disdain for their impudence, their stupidity, their unselfishness – for spitting in God's face for gracing them with their lives.
One grandfather an SS officer, the other a Soviet, one grandmother the bastard daughter of a Jewess, the other forced from the Ukrainian countryside as a sixteen year old, never to see her family or home again.
I do not like to jump to conclusions. Life is too nasty and complex for that. But I have no hesitation, no doubt whatsoever in saying: Life is good, it is true and it is beautiful – even when it is too ugly for words.
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