BY BRAD JAMES
Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Krakow, Poland. The close of the Second World War marked more than 70 million lives lost, 11 million of those were victims of the Holocaust. A targeted ethnic cleansing, focused on eliminating not just only Jews, but gypsies, homosexuals, and anyone who did not follw in line with the Aryan idyll of the Nazi Party’s eugenics obsessed philosophy. Anti-Semitic slaughter was nothing new in Europe, Pogroms had been common throughout eastern Europe and Russia for several decades, yet the Holocaust was the greatest in magnitude for it’s widespread enforcement and it’s sheer ferocity. Stepping up a gear from 1943 when Hitler implemented his final solution, after The Allies crossed the Mediterranean and brought down Mussolini’s regime. Tales of victims being herded to Concentration Camps, gassed, experimented on, even rumors of their skin being used as lampshades, have pervaded the nightmares of any right thinking person since the litany of the Third Reich’s infractions were revealed. After the horrors of such deeds were unearthed, action from the newly formed UN and the Geneva Convention have made efforts to ensure that no such dreadful lengths of genocide are ever witnessed again. But has anything been learned in the space of seventy years?
On the other hand, the insistence that everyone should be free to live their lives has broke new boundaries with the aplomb such liberty entails. Women’s rights, worker’s right, LGBT rights, have been inching forward since 1945. All towards equality of treatment. Notwithstanding, hate also has adapted to the modern times. Prejudice does not die, it evolves and offers a stark insight into the collective psyche of our species. Stalin continued his oppressive regime in the USSR and is thought to be responsible for 20 million deaths, as was Mao Zedong when China adopted the Communist ideology of the People’s Party, resulting in 40 million deaths. Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot, Muammar Gaddafi, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and numerous others, have extended the homicidal ethic of Hitler throughout the 20th century. Warfare, combined with famine and disease, meant that the 20th century has been the bloodiest 100 years in human history, arguably exceeding any sum of deaths in all of history leading up to that point.
Yet, it is somewhat nice and reflective of our deeper humanity when a memorial day is erected to remember the unfortunate victims of evil regimes. The Queens comments that it was a day to ‘remember all those affected’ was echoed by her son-Prince Charles- who punctuated her comments with the statement that it was an act of evil ‘unique in history’. In this vein, it can be said that the recommendation of the UK memorial and education center by the cross party Holocaust Commission is a positive thing. Chancellor George Osborne, told MP’s, ”we will go on to fund the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust which takes MP’s and many, many school children to Auschitz to see for themselves the terror that happened there. I think across the house we can come together to commemorate this day, but also to say it is never to be forgotten, and we will never repeat it’s mistakes. It is time for Britain to stand as a nation and say, we will remember”.
David Cameron added ” it will be a world class’ education and learning center to maintain awareness for generations to come of ‘the darkest hours of human history.
Britain must extend powerful rhetoric like this to even basic ills in society like racism and discrimination which happens at different levels in society. Britain indeed is one of the most accommodating countries in the world, almost so to a painful fault. We have an anti racial policy that forbids any explicit form of racism and our law is even prepared to prosecute where racism is evidenced. However, we can go one step further. We must educate the minds of our children to understand that difference in color or ethnicity are an expression of the amazing diversity of humanity, and not a basis for superiority. The warped ideology that skin color can form any basis for superiority or class, is the cancer of any developed society.
The recent bloodshed of the 20th century has involved around American Imperialism and it’s designs on the Middle-East which largely oppose such designs (save Saudi Arabia and various other nations on the peninsula). Hatred has turned into caustic again with the surge of ISIS and the backlash of anti-Muslim sentiment in certain parts of Europe and America. Divisiveness is a talisman undercutting the conflicts of history and hatred . Consequently, the use of ideology as a whip, has been the first shot in warfare. After the promotion of liberty at the Geneva Convention, America still continued on marked divided racial lines, as did South Africa and the strains of racial oppression are still keenly felt in US (as with Ferguson, Missouri). Fascism, Communism et al. are religions streamlined. Organised religion divests a person and group of culpability, as they are committing an act in the name of ‘God,’ an intangible entity that cannot be held to account. Stalin, Hitler and Mao’s regimes were akin to religions throughout the ages. Their ideologies were unquestionable, immutable, and all-powerful. The inalienable rights we all fundamentally enjoy today to exist and free thinkers with the right to freedom of expression was a fantasy for citizens of that day. Since then, modern man has evolved a fair way from the forces of dogmatic and arbitrary rule most prevalent in a time of history that is painful to remember. We still haven’t realized this yet. 70 years is a short time for a global culture to mature however.