On Holocaust Remembrance Day, as we remember, they want the horrors be forgotten...vicious oafs.
As Elie Wiesel has said “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” This has never been more important than it is in this period of history we are living through.
They want memories to fade, history cannot repeat itself if no-one forgets and everyone learns from it, which would be more than a little inconvenient to those who would break democracy through, in no small part, incitement of fear and hate. It is much easier to be a Nazi or a White Supremacist if you are never confronted with the complete and utter inhumanity of the holocaust, genocides since or slavery and Jim Crow.
They rely on collective amnesia and some peoples, very obvious ability, to suspend their humanity towards those they perceive as other, to do horrors beyond imagination. Last night I was watching an interview on the news with a 90 year old holocaust survivor who said she never thought that antisemitism would rise like that again... and she was wrong. In the twilight of her years she lives in a state of fear because of the state of our nations today. This is outrageous. It is unconscionable 75 years after she was freed from Auschwitz, that this is her reality. History shows us how quickly democracy can perish, by the beginning of WW2, there were only 11 democracies left on planet... but the lesson is not just how people like Hitler stole democracy, it was about how many of the citizenry actively supported it: “And it was not merely tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, but hundreds of millions of people who were the obedient witnesses of this slaughter of the innocent. Nor were they merely obedient witnesses: when ordered to, they gave their support to this slaughter, voting in favour of it amid a hubbub of voices. There was something unexpected in their degree of obedience... The extreme violence of the totalitarian social systems proved able to paralyse the human spirit throughout whole continents.” Vasily Grossman
In honour of the memory of all those who died so violently and without just cause we cannot let these abhorrent leaders today to obfuscate, to lie and to talk out both sides of their gobs while half of them are trying to bring about the end times through their actions.
"The things I saw beggar description. … The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where [there] were piled up 20 or 30 naked men, killed by starvation, [General] George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.'" President Dwight D. Eisenhower
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When you forget, the present has a way of reminding you.
It is essential to learn not only what happened, but HOW it happened. What were the early steps along the way that led to the horrors we have all heard about? Recognize those early warning signs and act to stop their development whenever and wherever we see them.
Response to bucolic_frolic (Reply #3)
Response to Soph0571 (Original post)
