Easy? Yes, these remarks from Justin Welby are easy because he is making them from a distance – a temporal distance of over 70 years. It is easier to blame our forebears for their sins than to acknowledge our own sin of failing to denounce a horror that is in front of our noses – just because it is a cultural norm.

Between 1940 and 1945 up to 1.5 million people were murdered in Auschwitz – an incomprehensible atrocity. In 2016, 40 million babies were murdered in the womb; around 125,000 per day, an atrocity so far outside the safe space of liberal pseudo-thought that it is beyond the ability of churchmen like Welby to even acknowledge, let alone denounce. Perhaps, one day, just as the residents of Dachau were made to view the horrors on their doorstep, crypto-liberals like Welby will be compelled to acknowledge the holocaust that is too close for comfort.

In the meantime, we will have to put up with some easy reflections:

This was my third visit to Auschwitz / Birkenau, and each time has been even more appalling. In early January the cold is penetrating, between nine and 14 degrees below centigrade. We were fully equipped with snow boots, layers of clothing, hats, gloves, scarves. . . yet it worked through layer after layer until we were cold to the core. The prisoners wore the equivalent of pyjamas and clogs. We were out in that cold for five hours in the day. They would be out for 12 hours. We were fed. They were starved.

There are so many statistics about Auschwitz / Birkenau, but it defies description. Eighty-five per cent of prisoners died. Many in just days of arriving. Then there was the industrialised killing of the gas chambers. The vulnerable, the disabled, marginalised minorities, and above all the Jews: children, adults and the elderly, taken from a train to their deaths in as little as 30 minutes. Accounts were kept, profits were sought. No one can deny the reality of what happened. There is simply far, far, far too much evidence.