Remembrance
It's that time of year. The news media are full of accounts of the Second World War, in particular. Lest we forget. For if we do, we are diminished. War is a dreadful abomination. Yet it comes about as a result of human nature. All the least distinguishing traits of humankind, in the sense that we're personally loath to 'own' these traits lead us to confrontation and, inevitably, war. It is as though we're programmed by powers beyond our ability to restrain ourselves (as indeed, it could be argued we are by our collective genetic code). We view the 'other', those not of our clan, with suspicion, with enmity, and just wait for the signals that other posts in plain view for us to react. The 'other' can be as close as a neighbour we simply don't like because they're different than we are, hold values we can't subscribe to, practise a religion other than that we're accustomed to, have social customs contrary to our own. And the 'other' can be transcribed as residents of another country, whose customs, history, values, ethos, religion are truly foreign to us. So we devalue them. Once that is done, it's an easeful step to believe they are not as good as we are, so any harm that may come to them, whether through a natural calamity or steps of our country's devising, are well deserved. We know better, but this natural inclination is just so easy to fall prey to.I'm a Jew. As a Jew, thinking of World War Two, I think Holocaust. I think if Nazi Germany's grand thousand-year scheme to take over the entire world and rule it as an uber race had actually been realized more than the six million Jews who perished through a deliberate scheme of mass murder would have resulted. I would not exist; those whom I love would not exist. I am here. The plan went awry. I am here, despite the fact that so many of my distant relatives were murdered.
When I was a child, I recall my parents speaking in hushed tones, between themselves, and among their friends of horrible news seeping out through mysterious sources who spread 'rumours' of concentration camps, death camps. My father kept a 'black book' which, he said, I might want to read one day, when I became an adult. I was 9 years old when the war was over. I never did read his 'black book' but I read many books of utter blackness telling of the hopelessness of existence during that evil time in Europe.
How in the world, how on earth, how in heaven's name, could humankind treat of one another in such an odious, bestial manner? We read of Genghis Khan and his hordes, of the dreadful times during the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, when countries and their religions and their aspirations of expansion collided, but would anyone living in the century just past ever have believed that we would make every attempt to outdo the barbarities that made us shudder with disbelief that human beings could so senselessly take the lives of others?
Will it ever be otherwise?
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, May 10, 2005
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