Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘holocaust’

Elie Wiesel addressed the U.N. in the first time that the world body has ever commemmorated the Holocaust:

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Nobel Laureate author Elie Wiesel, a death camp survivor, both questioned whether the nations had the will to stop mass murder 60 years after the massacre in Europe.

“If the world had listened, we may have prevented Darfur, Cambodia, Bosnia and naturally Rwanda,” Wiesel said.

A better question might be, when genocides are occurring, what will the U.N. do about it? So far, the answer seems to be not much

Being the U.N., of course, it was inevitable to hear things like this:

“What sense can we make of this important commemoration, when we allow through our inaction, year after year, one people to dominate another, to deny the latter many of its most basic rights, and so, with the passage of time, also degrade it as a people,” said Jordan’s U.N. ambassador, Prince Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the only Arab speaker.

There go those Jews-as-Nazis comparisons again. But hey, at least Jordan was represented. I suppose the other Arab countries would find it difficult to deny the Holocaust if they had attended.

Prince Harry was forced to issue an apology, after he wore a Nazi costume to a party:

Early editions of Thursday’s issue of “The Sun,” showed Prince Harry, the second son of Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana, clutching a cigarette and a drink and wearing a swastika armband.

The newspaper said the 20-year-old prince had attended a fancy dress party in the uniform of a fascist soldier.

In a statement, the prince said he was “very sorry if I caused any offense or embarrassment to anyone.” He added, “It was a poor choice of costume and I apologize.”

That’s all very well and good but what on earth would possess him to think this is a good idea in the first place?

Maybe he should have tried wearing his costume in France instead, where – according to Jean Marie Le Pen, the Nazi occupation of France was “not particularly inhumane”. (Hat tip: Damian.) I bet the French would have laughed.

It’s starting to become clearer that the rise in anti-Americanism in Europe is not entirely unrelated to the increased whitewashing of the Holocaust. When the US replies to anti-American sentiment with a “well, you weren’t complaining when we saved your collective asses from the Nazis”, the Europeans can just respond with a “hell, those Nazis weren’t so bad”.

History has a way of lessening the emotional impact of the very terrible or very tragic. And right now is a historical turning point. The survivor generation that bears witness is dying. “Nazi” is being used as an epitheth to describe just about anyone, from the “Zionists are Nazis” crowd to the “soup Nazi” on Seinfeld. The Holocaust is starting to be viewed not as anything particularly horrible or unique, but just as yet another chapter in the endless saga of the human race’s capacity for cruelty and evil and destruction. Maybe it’s even inevitable. When, only sixty-five years after Churchill’s “blood, sweat and tears” speech, a British prince is sporting a swastika, that has to mean something.

And of course, it’s easier to rationalize hating Jews if you believe that the Holocaust was just a minor blip, and that the concentration camps were just summer camps with bad food.

This absolutely staggering poll conducted by the BBC suggests that 45% of Britons have never heard of Auschwitz (via LGF):

The survey found that 45 percent of those surveyed had not heard of Auschwitz. Historians estimate that anywhere from one million to three million people, about 90 percent of them Jews, were killed there.

Among women and people younger than 35, 60 percent had never heard of Auschwitz, despite the recent popularity of films such as “Schindler’s List,” “Life is Beautiful” and “The Pianist,” which depict the atrocities of the Holocaust.

“The name Auschwitz is quite rightly a byword for horror, but the problem with thinking about horror is that we naturally turn away from it,” Rees said.

The BBC said the research was based on a nationally representative postal survey of 4,000 adults 16 and older.

Well, that explains a lot. After all, it’s easier to let those equivalences between Jews and Nazis roll off your tongue when you have no idea what you’re talking about.

This January marks the 60th anniversary of the death camp’s liberation, and world leaders are set to attend – including Vladimir Putin and Jacques Chirac.

I wonder how the French press will explain that one. Auschwitz was terrible, but Arafat’s a hero for wanting the same outcome as the Nazis?

Never satisfied to merely be tasteless and shocking, PETA decided to cross the line to completely appalling a long time ago. Today, the group took its absolutely disgusting Holocaust on your plate campaign to the Montreal streets, where it would be as visible as possible to piss off as many people as possible.

The thing that gets me is not that they use shock to advertise. The marketer in me understands that. But what gets me is that they’re so goddamn self-righteous about it. Instead of admitting to being cynical media hounds, the PETA people want us to believe that they’re actually trying to accomplish some sort of noble cause.

I’ll be very happy to raise my fork to PETA the next time I eat meat.

A group of Jewish university students were attacked while touring Auschwitz by three French tourists:

Evidently incited by the presence of an Israeli flag wrapped around the shoulders of Tamar Schuri, an Israeli student from Ben Gurion University, the first assailant ran at the group while its members were being guided through a model gas chamber and crematoria and began swearing and hurling anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli insults.

“He told us to go back to Israel and said that we were stupid and should be ashamed to walk around with an Israeli flag,” testifies Maya Ober, a 21-year-old Polish student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan and member of the Polish Union of Jewish Students (PUSZ), which organized the 16-day summer learning program along with the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS).

After the initial altercation, a second assailant grabbed Ober by the arm. “One of the guys held me by the arm and wouldn’t let go,” says Ober, who lost several members of her family at Auschwitz. “I was afraid. I couldn’t move and I didn’t know what he was going to do.

“I was shocked. Although I have met anti-Semitism many times, I never expected to meet it at Auschwitz, where so many of my relatives were killed,” she says she spoke to the assailants in French and that in addition to being “brutish and vulgar,” their sentiments “made absolutely no sense.”

That’s the thing about antisemitism. It “makes absolutely no sense”. But that hasn’t helped it disappear in the last 2000 years.

(Via Damian Penny, who astutely points out that we’re about to hear some lame excuses as to why this is “anti-Zionism, not antisemitism”).

A Jerusalem Post editorial asks the question. The big question. Really, the only question: what has humanity learned from the Holocaust?

Jews have been tireless in using the Holocaust to teach about man’s inhumanity to man. Has it made a difference? Ask the 1.7 million Cambodians slaughtered between 1975-1979 by communist lunatics. Ask the over 800,000 Rwandans cut down by machetes — in a mere 100 days — in 1994.

Clearly, efforts to universalize the lessons of the Holocaust have utterly failed. Would a forced visit of Hutu killers through Washington DC’s Holocaust Museum saved a single Tutsi?

No one predisposed to genocide will be shamed into human decency by exposure to Schindler’s List. More than that: Even humanists who mourn Hitler’s Jewish victims have, in the blink of a relativist eye, condemned Israel for eliminating Ahmed Yassin, though he was single-mindedly committed to a new genocide.

[ . . . ]

We are loathe to equate today’s foes with the Nazis. But as Yad Vashem’s Yehuda Bauer has argued, “Nazism, Stalinist communism, and radical Islam are different from each other, but they also have a certain similarity: All three aim, or aimed, at exclusive control over the world, all three oppose or opposed all expressions of democracy, and all three attacked Jews…” On this day, it is worth remembering that in Mein Kampf Hitler predicted terrorism and force would be victorious over reason.

The battle continues.

To that, we can add the Armenian Genocide, the hundreds of thousands (or more) killed in the Congo, the “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia, and the thousands of North Korean “political prisoners” being subjected to untold horrors in the Gulags. These are, sadly, only a few examples.

Was it realistic to say “Never Again” after the Holocaust? How could it be, when millions of years of human history teach us that the one thing human beings keep doing is finding new ways to instill horror and cruelty on one another? How could we think that the Holocaust would scare humanity straight, when it was only the “next step” in a long line of massacres, wars, and the wiping out of entire peoples?

There’s still an emotional connection to the Holocaust today. The events of 50 or 60 years ago are close enough in time that there are still survivors to tell their tales, to share their pain and to remind us. There are still memorials standing where the death camps once were. We can visit them, witness them.

But how long until the Holocaust becomes just another dry chapter in a history textbook, too remote in time for emotion? How long until future generations talk about it with the same detachment as they do the Crusades, or the Roman conquest?

Never.

Because maybe we haven’t learned. We haven’t figured out “Never Again” and perhaps we never will. But we have figured out Never Forget.

We haven’t forgotten the events of two or three thousand years ago. We’ve been observing holidays, retelling stories and prayers, tearing our clothing on Tisha B’Av and reciting the story of the Exodus on Passover. We weep over events of two thousand years ago with the same emotion as though they happened yesterday.

If there’s one thing us Jews have, it’s a very long collective memory. It unites us as a people as we remember the chapters of our shared history.

And if it hasn’t ensured a “Never Again”, then we have at least ensured that we will “Never Forget”. Maybe it’s a first step.

Instapundit linked to a Washington Post article by columnist Anne Appelbaum about why nobody seems to care:

Auschwitz Under Our Noses

Nowadays, it seems impossible to understand why so few people, at the time of the Auschwitz liberation, even knew that the camp existed. It seems even harder to explain why those who did know did nothing. In recent years a plethora of respectable institutions — the Vatican, the U.S. government, the international Jewish community, the Allied commanders — have all been accused of “allowing” the Holocaust to occur, through ignorance or ill will or fear, or simply because there were other priorities, such as fighting the war.

We shake our heads self-righteously, certain that if we’d been there, liberation would have come earlier — all the while failing to see that the present is no different.

[ . . . ]

In the days since the documentary aired, few other news organizations have picked up the story either. There are other priorities: the president’s budget, ricin in the Senate office building, David Kay’s testimony, a murder of a high school student, Super Tuesday, Janet Jackson. With the possible exception of the last, these are all genuinely important subjects. They are issues people care deeply about. North Korea is far away and, quite frankly, it doesn’t seem there’s a lot we can do about it.

Later — in 10 years, or in 60 — it will surely turn out that quite a lot was known in 2004 about the camps of North Korea. It will turn out that information collected by various human rights groups, South Korean churches, oddball journalists and spies added up to a damning and largely accurate picture of an evil regime. It will also turn out that there were things that could have been done, approaches the South Korean government might have made, diplomatic channels the U.S. government might have opened, pressure the Chinese might have applied.

Historians in Asia, Europe and here will finger various institutions, just as we do now, and demand they justify their past actions. And no one will be able to understand how it was possible that we knew of the existence of the gas chambers but failed to act.

That emphasis was mine. And it pretty much sums up why I keep coming back to this story and feeling that it’s so important. Sure, there are plenty of horrible human rights abuses going on right under our noses. But the parallels with this one have crept under my skin, because of how we – as individuals and as a society – may go down in history for failing to pay any attention.

What deranged high school educator could possibly think that this would be in good taste:

The Blue Blazes Band would perform a historically accurate show titled “Visions of World War II” featuring flags and music to represent the combating nations.

It would include a student running across the field with a Nazi flag and the tune composed by Franz Joseph Haydn that later became “Deutschland Uber Alles.”

Mr. Grissom didn’t anticipate the response his group received while performing at Hillcrest High School on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year.

You want to accuse these people of spreading hate or of being bigots but you can’t even do that. The most you can accuse them of is sheer, utter, total stupidity. I mean, a Nazi flag at a high school football game???

(Via Damian Penny).

Today is Yom Hashoah, the official Holocaust Remembrance Day.

It’s a day to take a moment and reflect. A day to light a candle in remembrance of the six million. This is what the US Holocaust Memorial Museum says about Yom Hashoah:

Holocaust Remembrance Day is a day that has been set aside for remembering the victims of the Holocaust and for reminding Americans of what can happen to civilized people when bigotry, hatred and indifference reign. The United States Holocaust Memorial Council, created by act of Congress in 1980, was mandated to lead the nation in civic commemorations and to encourage appropriate Remembrance observances throughout the country. Observances and Remembrance activities can occur during the week of Remembrance that runs from the Sunday before through the Sunday after the actual date.

While there are obvious religious aspects to such a day, it is not a religious observance as such. The internationally-recognized date comes from the Hebrew calendar and corresponds to the 27th day of Nisan on that calendar. That is the date on which Israel commemorates the victims of the Holocaust. In Hebrew, Holocaust Remembrance Day is called Yom Hashoah.

The Holocaust is not merely a story of destruction and loss; it is a story of an apathetic world and a few rare individuals of extraordinary courage. It is a remarkable story of the human spirit and the life that flourished before the Holocaust, struggled during its darkest hours, and ultimately prevailed as survivors rebuilt their lives.

For more information, a few good links to visit are the Nizkor Project, the website for Yad Vashem, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s website.

Perhaps not incidentally, Simon Wiesenthal announced his retirement from six decades of work pursuing and catching Nazi war criminals. The 94-year-old and his organisation are responsible for apprehending about 1,100 war criminals, and he is finally ready to quit:

“My work is done,” he said. “I found the mass murderers I was looking for. I survived them all. Those who I didn’t look for are too old and sick today to be pursued legally.”

It may seem like a small event, but Wiesenthal’s retirement is probably symbolic of the turning point that the world finds itself at today. Normally quiet to almost the point of being reclusive, Wiesenthal has spoken out this year about current events, including the riot at Concordia that prevented Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking:

Famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal has urged Concordia to reschedule last month’s speech by Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that anti-Israel protesters have succeeded in restricting freedom of speech for the entire student body.

“I never thought I would live to see the day when there would be more open expression of hate against Jews than in the 1930s,” said Wiesenthal in a letter to Rector Frederick Lowy. “Tragically, that is the situation today around the world.”

Perhaps this is never more relevant as right now. The last generation of Holocaust survivors is ageing, and sadly, there will soon no longer be anyone alive to bear witness. The horrors of the Nazi regime will become just another chapter of history, remembered by Steven Spielberg movies and the hundreds of archives that are frantically being assembled by museums and historians. And the more remote in time it becomes, the easier it will be for the racists and revisionists to twist history. And the easier it will be for history to repeat itself.

At the same time, the world is witnessing an outbreak of antisemitism that – while it would be unfair to all to compare it to the Holocaust – is clearly heightened.

Tomorrow’s challenges are already crystallizing today. It will no longer be sufficient to point to history, because too many people are loudly rewriting history to make it fit their prejudices and perspectives.

I’ve frequently heard criticism that there is too much focus among Jewish organizations on the Holocaust, and that we ought to move forward after so long. That may be, but anyone who moves forward without remembering history is bound to repeat it. We say that so often, it’s become somewhat of a cliché. But it is also an irrefutable truth.

Yes, this is a turning point in history. Something to think about in the coming hours of Yom Hashoah.

Ariel Sharon said that had there been a world leader like Bush in the 30s, the Holocaust could have been prevented:

“It’s impossible to free one’s self from the feeling that if in Europe, in the 1930s, there had similarly been such a leader, it’s possible that Europe would not have been ravaged by World War II and that we, the Jewish nation, would not have paid the terrible price of losing 6 million people,” Sharon told members of Likud’s Knesset faction on Monday.

Well, now, I don’t know about that necessarily. The situation is always different each and every time, and playing “what if” is sort of futile. But Sharon’s point is that more lives are often lost through appeasement than through action.

Sharon was also very careful to make it clear that Israel is not involved in this war.

“We are neither pressing to move it forward, nor do we seek to postpone it. We know that this is a necessary attempt to bring an end to the capability of tyrannical regimes, such as the one in Iraq, to tangibly endanger the entire world.”

Yeah, tell that to the conspiro-freak antisemites who keep trying to claim otherwise, including Pat Buchanan.