To walk through the gates at the infamous Birkenau II death
camp in Poland is to follow the footsteps of around 1.5 million murdered human
beings who were deemed to be “undesirable” by a perverse political movement that had
lost its mind. To see the hair of the inhabitants of the camp, shaved off upon
their arrival and used to create sleeping bags and clothing for Nazi officers,
or the little shoes of the thousands of children, barely old enough to walk,
gassed because they were too weak to work, or the urn of ashes of just some of
those that were wiped from history on this desolate piece of ground, is to
witness the depths of what humans can do to one another. This is us at our very
worst. And the overwhelming question that burns throughout the journey into the
darkness is simply how? How could we
have let this happen?
The monument in Auschwitz-Birkenau to the 1.5 million people
murdered in its grounds begins “For ever let this place be a cry of despair and
a warning to humanity”. And yet this is a warning we have not heeded.
After the scale of the horrors of the Holocaust became clear,
the international community was unequivocal in its condemnation. Never again. Since
1945 we have witnessed
the “killing fields” of Cambodia claim 2 million lives, the vicious massacre of
800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda decimate a whole country, over 8,000 souls murdered
whilst under UN “protection” at Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the
systematic murder of over 300,000 civilians in Darfur. Today,
over 1 million Rohingya people have been and continue to be forced out of their
homes in Myanmar by the ruthless military regime. The phenomenon of identity-based
mass murder, in the forms of crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and
genocide, is ubiquitous across the globe. And still we say never again.
Seeing first-hand the mechanisms by which the Holocaust was
perpetrated is a shocking reminder of the efficiency with which humans are
capable of killing each other. But it should not be a viewed simply as a horror
of our past. The camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau was the logical conclusion of years
of systematic marginalisation and dehumanisation of the Jewish people in Europe
by the Nazi party. When Hitler rose to power in 1933 the idea of a death-camp
run by German soldiers in Poland was laughable. But by May 1940 it was sickening reality.
As Philip
Gourevitch writes in his excellent, if harrowing, account of the Rwandan
genocide We Wish to Inform You that
Tomorrow we will be Killed with our Families, “What distinguishes genocide
from murder, and even from acts of political murder that claim as many victims,
is the intent. The crime is wanting to make a people extinct. The idea is the
crime”. The idea is the crime. The so-called “inhuman” violence witnessed in countless
crimes against humanity perpetrated globally is the product of an idea that has
festered and spread among a population. One of the biggest questions following
the Rwandan genocide, where there were no death camps but rather the killing
was done with machetes by mobs in the streets, was how on earth it was possible
to seemingly turn an entire population against one another over the course of
just a few short weeks.
But the
Rwandan Genocide did not occur just between the 7th April and 15th
July 1994, in which the majority of the killing took place. Intergroup rivalry
between Hutus and Tutsis had been instilled in the population by the German and Belgian
colonial powers over 100 years before the massacres of 1994. These tensions
were exacerbated by economic hardship and an increasingly inflammatory
political landscape that culminated in a civil conflict between 1990 and 1993. The
process of turning Tutsi people from neighbours, friends, and family members,
into “cockroaches”
and “tall trees” took decades. The process of dehumanisation, of turning a
Jewish person into a “rat”, or innocent Bosnian civilians at Srebrenica into “hardened and
violent criminals”, does not occur overnight. You do not pick up a machete
and murder your neighbour after hearing a news broadcast telling you to do so.
The thoughtcrime of identity-based violence is far more insidious than that.
So when you hear Donald Trump equating economic migrants at
the US-Mexico
border with criminal gangs and “animals”, or Nigel Farage standing
in front of his infamous “Breaking
Point” campaign billboard, depicting refugees and migrants as a looming
existential threat to the UK, remember that this is a deliberate incitement to
hatred. Left unchecked, that becomes an incitement to violence. Indeed, with
the Christchurch mosque attacker citing Trump as a “symbol
of renewed white identity and common purpose” in his manifesto, and a shocking
increase in white extremist hate crimes across the US and Europe since 2015,
it would appear that the more volatile and antagonistic political landscape we
find ourselves in is already having destructive consequences.
In the UK, attacks on politicians have
increased amidst the increasingly toxic debate surrounding Brexit. The murder
of Jo Cox in 2016 appears to have heralded a new dawn of violence aimed at
those with differing views. When two of the biggest
political scandals in party politics concern accusations of anti-Semitism within the
Labour Party and Islamophobia within the Conservatives, we have to ask ourselves
where political discourse in this country is headed. Toxic identity politics
are not new. We have been here before.
The monument at the death-camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau undoubtedly
elicits a cry of despair from those who visit. But as a warning, it appears to
have been less successful. It is up to every single one of us to pay attention
to the stories of those who have been persecuted solely because of who they
are. Because its very easy to say “never again”, and to genuinely feel it and
to mean it. But it has happened again, and it is happening again, and it will
continue to happen again unless we make a change.
The world around us has already taken its first baby steps
down a dark road that we have walked a hundred times before. There is still
time to divert our course, but it will take every individual person to pay
attention to what is happening and to call out the behaviours that push us
further down the path. Calling out this hatred now, while it is still relatively
safe to do so, is the only way to prevent the physical crime from occurring
down the line.
In visiting Krakow, I also heard the inspirational stories
of Oskar Schindler
and Tadeusz
Pankiewicz, who saved many lives and gave hope to thousands of people in
the ghetto at the time of the Nazi occupation. But they risked their lives,
their livelihoods, and the lives of their families in order to do so. That kind
of heroism is rare and extremely commendable. Those names should be remembered
and celebrated to the same extent that Hitler’s, Eichmann’s, and Rudolf Hess’
names are remembered. But even those acts of incredible courage and strength
could not turn the tide of history. By that point it was too late.
Right now, it is not too late.
Little changes now can prevent catastrophic ones later.
Never again.
“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat
it.” – George Santayana.
No comments:
Post a Comment