The following is the first in a series I’m calling simply, History in the Making. Please note that the italicized portions are from the book
Terrify No More
by Gary Haugen, founder and president of the International Justice Mission. See footnote for more information.
History in the Making I: Tragedies of Our Time
I remember studying the holocaust in school. I would read the facts and numbers demonstrating the horrifying extent of cruelty, but it never really sank in. I can keep numbers at a safe distance. What really got to me were the pictures. Pictures of bodies piled in mass graves. Pictures of forlorn survivors bearing prison tattoos. Their eyes were penetrating, as if they were crying out in furious desperation, Where were you? How could you let this happen? It wasn’t a question directed at me, specifically. I hadn’t even been born yet. It is a plea directed to the global community of humankind.
I grew up with a great love for reading history, and I used to wonder, How would I have fared in the great moral struggles of the past? Would I have been on the right side? Would I have acted with courage? Would I have made my grandchildren proud?
Would I have been a supporter and confidant of William Wilberforce and his Clapham sect in fighting the British slave trade, or would I have been part of the detached and oblivious middle-class masses who said and did nothing? Would I have stood shoulder to shoulder with Harriet Tubman in secreting slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad, or would I have left flatfooted with apathy, moral neutrality, or fear? Would I have walked with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a journey of costly discipleship during the Nazi era in Europe, and would I have been known as a righteous Gentile during the Holocaust? Or would I have been immobilized by confusion and fright, or perhaps preoccupied with smaller things?
…It feels as if history has perhaps passed us by. The great struggles of good and evil, right and wrong, seem to be of a bygone era. All the great and heroic battles have already been fought, haven’t they? In the twenty-first century we are left with only petty battles in gray areas, certainly nothing our grandchildren will ask us about. Right?
One thought troubles me. History books are still being written. The books my children will study in school will include what is now current event. What will they read? What pictures will haunt them?
- From 1975-1979 the Khmer Rouge sect overthrew the Cambodian government and enslaved, tortured, and slaughtered 2 million of their own people, about one third of Cambodia’s population.
- In
1994, 800,000 Rwandan men, women, and children were slaughtered in the short span of eight weeks.
- Currently, genocide is tearing through Darfur, Sudan in Africa. While statistics are nearly impossible to gather, it is estimated that over 200,000 people have been killed in the last four years and an additional 2.5 million have been driven from their homes.
Gary Haugen may put it best when he concludes that he has found
massive man-made disasters of epic proportions that are not of a distant era; they are the tragedies of history taking place on our watch.
Tragedies of history. Happening right now. I wonder what kinds of questions my grandchildren will ask me. What will I be able to say?
The International Justice Mission (IJM) is , a collection of lawyers and law enforcement officers that takes case referrals from faith-based organizations serving among the poor overseas. They work with the governing authorities of said countries to accomplish the following four objectives in every case: 1) Rescue the victims; 2) Ensure long-term aftercare for the victims; 3) Prosecute the perpetrators; 4) Transform the community so that such injustice is no longer tolerated. For more information, check out their website at www.ijm.org, and/or read the book for yourself.
Haugen, Gary A. and Gregg Hunter.
Terrify No More.
Thomas Nelson Publishing, Nashville, TN. 2005. ISBN 0-8499-1838-3.
Also, see www.savedarfur.org. and www.genocideintervention.net.
