Holocaust Remembrance
This is the day deemed to be International Holocaust Remembrance day. Thank you, international community. A kind gesture. Gestures are a form of diplomacy. In this instance a diplomatic, perhaps kindly nod in the direction of the world's eternal scapegoats. Gestures cost little, in the sense that they can be brought out after an event to indicate that there is a recognition that something was...perhaps not quite right. In the sense of fairness, of shall we say decency, human decency. Humankind, after all, besides being brutal beasts when it so suits us, are also intelligent beings, and we know, certainly we do, that a human being is a human being. And all life is equally valuable.A human being becomes degraded in the eyes of others when it becomes a socially, historically expedient aim, so that when a group is so decreed to be "different" in the extreme, it is to render any members of that group beyond compassion, a ready target for anything another group wishes to subject it to. Including extermination. We permit these things to happen. If evil is not directly aimed at us, we demur, turn away, permit destruction to proceed. The face of evil is so very banal, as Hannah Arendt wrote.
It is because from among the aggregate too few can be bothered. Whether it is to care what "the others" do, whether it is to assert right over wrong, whether it is to remain true to the self closer to the angels than the demons within us, whether it is to deny history it's less palatable, less memorable moments in time.
Why, one might reasonably ask, does the world require a scapegoat in historical perpetuity? Can we divide society into the psychopaths who feel compassion for no one, the weary undistinguished-among-their-peers plodders who wish nothing but to get on with their lives unburdened by unnecessary thought and action: those who wish not to bring attention to themselves, and those whose untrammelled egos demand all action be focused on their needs alone?
Jews themselves do not really require a specific day dedicated to remembrance. Jews live every day of their lives in stark memory of the holocaust, that signal event in Jewish history reminding Jews of their true place in the societies which they inhabit. Whether holding themselves apart from the general stream and herding themselves into ghettoes, or deliberately assimilating into the mainstream of the societies they inhabited it made little difference. Jews have always been perceived as being different, hostile to the prevailing mores and ethics of society, while said mores and ethics were lifted from their originators, those very despised Jews themselves.
From among the world's Jews have come, disproportionately to their population size, Jews of genius bearing gifts to the world at large. Outstanding contributions in the fields of the arts and pure sciences, culture and medical science, physics, government, the humanities in general. From Solomon to Jesus; from Spinoza to Mendelson; from Freud to Kafka; from Trotsky to Einstein, and countless others whose existence enhanced life on this earth. Irrespective of which, Jews remain the everlasting pariah.
Historically, dictators of one kind or another have deflected baleful attention from their ill rules to blame the Jews, the avaricious, mendacious Jews for the trials that befell others; it was their machinations, their evil inclinations which resulted in endemic poverty that caused populations to suffer, not the greedy manipulations of their rulers.
Not much appears to have changed. Although Jews mournfully promise "never again" the world, nodding sagely in agreement, still holds Jewish populations accountable in a way no other group will ever be. The tiny State of Israel, struggling to exist, to provide a safe haven for Jews, a haven denied them almost everywhere else on this earth, continues to be held to a standard impossible to maintain under the constant deadly duress brought upon it by its implacably hostile neighbours.
It is to weep into the abyss of the past. It is to plead against the unreason of the present. It is to rage against the bleakness of the future.
posted by Pieface @ Friday, January 27, 2006
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