generalspeaking

Canadian Museum for Human Rights

The debate, between seemingly civilized people swings from reasonable to despicable. What is there to further debate about the occurrence of the Holocaust and the impact it has had on the conscience of the world? The impact its planning and execution had on its intended target is beyond debate.

At no time in the history of humankind was manpower and technology ever used so ferociously and efficiently even during a time of global conflagration, to eliminate an ethnic-religious group.

The blazing hatred of an identifiable group of people, including those who had, over generations, submerged their ethnic identity into that of the larger prevailing society, with pride in their civic place in that society, invested in its elevated degree of attention to the arts and sciences, was utterly devoid of reason.

Characterizing a people whose genius in every field of human endeavour was exemplary as sub-human defied rationality.

But the endemic and chronically renewed hatred for Jews was warmly received by a large faction of the population in almost every country in Europe. And those countries which were occupied by Nazi Germany were encouraged to invest themselves in the pan-European detestation of their Jewish populations and to aid in the gargantuan plan of extinction.

If for no other reason than that anti-Semitism is a deadly virus that will not allow itself to become absent from human consciousness, the Holocaust and its ravaging results should be studied. If for no other reason than that there are individuals, groups and political regimes that continue to sneer that the reality of the Holocaust is a figment of demented imagination, the Holocaust should be given primacy over other incidences in historical genocide.

There will always be vicious deniers. Not necessarily those like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and others of his ignorant ilk, but those who, while not denying that the Holocaust occurred, seek to minimize its impact by citing other atrocities they claim rival the Holocaust in intent and numbers.

It should not surprise anyone that the most vocal protesters represent those very countries that were committed to assisting fascism to wipe out Europe's Jews.

Germans, the instigators and propellants of a new wave of anti-Semitism whose purpose was not merely to scorn, dehumanize and humiliate, but to do all that as a prelude to the real purpose of annihilation. Ukrainians who as fascist collaborators happily surrendered those Jews unfortunate enough to live among them, seem to feel great unease at elevating the status of the Shoah above their own Soviet-era suffering.

There have been objections from the president of the German Canadian Congress, Tony Bergmeier, about plans for a permanent Holocaust exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The Jewish catastrophe should not be singled out for special attention above other human rights abuses.

And Lubomyr Luciuk, director of research for the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association takes umbrage at spotlighting the Holocaust as a permanent exhibit - "elevating their horror above all others". It offends him and his like-minded supporters in this volatile debate that the Canadian Museum for Human Rights has been "attached" as he would have it, "to the public teat, permanently. It has been sucking generously ever since."

Now that is offensive. This is a museum with a spotlight on the most egregious of human rights abuses mounted by nations on defenceless peoples; their own populations in most instances. And while the Government of Canada has funded the museum to roughly one-third of its cost, public subscription and corporate generosity has also funded it substantially more.

What distinguishes the Holocaust in particular is that war-time Nazi Germany's fascist ideology focused on the extermination of Jews, not only German Jews back to the slightest thread of genealogical connection, but Jews extracted from the populations of all the European countries which Nazi Germany defeated and occupied in its striving toward the Thousand-Year Reich.

As a museum situated within Canada to commemorate a historical event of immense proportions and stunning success in obliterating a significant proportion of the world's Jews, Canada also has its own coming-to-terms historical backward glance at its role during those dreadful years of genocidal implementation.

Canada's dismissive role in the Voyage of the Damned, turning back to Germany 907 German Jews aboard the MS St.Louis represents a notable example of compliance through indifference led on by anti-Semitic attitudes.

As Victor Suthren, former director general of the Canadian War Museum pointed out "Canada in the 1940s was scarcely less anti-Semitic and xenophobic than Europe, and the Mackenzie King government's immigration officials turned away Jewish refugees after 1945 with the callous observation that none was "too many".

Poland has honoured the memory of the millions of Jews who passed through the gates of the death camps set up on its soil. Germany remembers its pathology of deadly hatred and deplores what it represented. In Europe today anti-Semitism is back and thriving. It has reared its ugly head, compromising humanity in North America and Latin America - and in Canada.

Canada has a real need to finally acquire its own Human Rights Museum, in emulation of those which have been erected elsewhere in the world. Done so in a concerted and concentrated effort to ensure that mass murder, wholesale atrocities, stunning genocides from all eras and all countries not be forgotten.

Labels: Anti-Semitism, Canada, Holocaust, Human Rights, Political Realities

posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, January 19, 2011