On International Holocaust Remembrance Day the BBC show The Big Questions asked and debated the topic as follows, “Our one big question this morning: Is the time coming to lay the Holocaust to rest?” To many the answer is obvious; the problem is the obvious answer is rapidly approaching being evenly divided between the affirmative and the negative. It used to be that if one claimed that the Holocaust was a myth invented by the Jews to use to garnet sympathy or to bludgeon the world with a guilt trip, particularly Germany and the Europeans, was a view which relegated one as outside acceptable society throughout the world with some obvious exceptions. It was certainly not something even debated within Europe or Western society. That has changed to the point that a group of eighth-grade teachers in the Rialto Unified School District decided that asking their students to take a side on whether the Holocaust happened and back up their arguments with facts would be a good way to stretch their students’ creative skills and provide an avenue for them to develop effective debate skills in writing. In some Albany, New York schools, seventy-five tenth-grade English Class students of a teacher received an assignment with the description to write an essay proving that Jews are evil. The assignment read, “Your essay must be five paragraphs long, with an introduction, three body paragraphs containing your strongest arguments, and a conclusion. You do not have a choice in your position: you must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!” So, perhaps the debate by the BBC is not as horrific as it initially appears.
The problem with even debating such a question is that with time others will take the BBC initiative one step further and eventually the Holocaust will join many of the other evils in the dustbin of forgotten memories. Hitler queried in second speech to his Wehrmacht commanders, “Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?” This question is one that many should have to answer before they attempt to relegate the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and other undesirables into a similar category. It should be hoped by all people of compassion and good conscience that all such atrocities remain in human memory for the simple reason as for them to be reminders how dark and evil men’s hearts, minds and thus actions can turn when such things are allowed to be forgotten. The Armenian Genocide being forgotten despite its having occurred just before the onset of World War I and yet it was already a non-issue left from collective memory during World War II and thus did not serve as an early warning lesson against the evils which soon resulted. The Holocaust committed by the Nazis needs to actually be broadened and applied as a warning against easy solutions to societal problems as the Nazi Holocaust did not only murder millions of Jews, but also another six-million others who were considered threats to the government, impurities within the society and still others who were relegated as being too costly to remain within the societal structure.
Some of the earliest victims of what eventually led to the Holocaust were not the Jews as their inclusion took a series of dehumanizing steps before it became acceptable. The earliest victims of the whole idea of perfecting the human race were found throughout Western societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The mentally insane and deficient were initially simply sterilized so they would not have children who would by the very fact that one or both of their parents were mentally challenged or deficient be tainted human beings and too likely to be similarly afflicted. Margaret Sanger was amongst one of the early birth control advocate whose efforts led to the founding of the American Birth Control League which would later be renamed Planned Parenthood organization. Her intentions are often only partially revealed as much of her efforts are no longer acceptable and there are those who wish to prevent Ms. Sanger’s racial purification efforts to taint modern birth control and abortion rights efforts and lobbying. Her efforts including working with the growing eugenics movement which sought to purify and advance the human race through controlled breeding as one might breed cattle for healthier and many preferable results. This movement made some headway in the United States and Europe and was oft misused to sterilize those considered inferior, be they racially inferior, mentally challenged, those with physical birth defects, people who were outside norms lacking in height and an ever increasing number of other qualities simply regarded as inferior. The eugenics movement had progressed to the point of forced sterilizations where women who came to clinics or when giving birth were sterilized without their knowledge or consent.
These ideas were adopted by the Nazis and initially went no further than the eugenics had progressed in the United States and across Europe. Hitler was regarded as taking the proper and necessary steps to improve the human race and was initially lauded by the practitioners of eugenics in the United States. Eventually their support waned as Hitler went beyond the steps the eugenics progressives were comfortable with. Hitler took the theories of eugenics and married them to religious hatreds and persecutions which led to the extermination of six-million Jews and his use of eugenics generally led to the extermination of another five to six million humans determined to be unworthy of life. Those included homosexuals, the mentally challenged, Roma (Gypsies), Serbians and eventually those considered not to be purely Aryan race. The deaths of all of those innocents murdered including those who were simply included who were labelled enemies of the State as well as those included above are the reason the Holocaust must be remembered. The memory of the Holocaust murder of six-million Jews needs to be remembered for all-time as there are those who wish to repeat that undertaking by murdering the slightly more than six-million Jews living in Israel. Then there are others who use Israel as their reason to kill the Jews but actually their desire is to murder every Jew everywhere as is related in this video where New York Councilman David G. Greenfield who is the grandson of Holocaust survivors, gave an impassioned speech, noting that the anti-Semitism inherent in the virulent opposition to Israel at the session of the New York City Council commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance at which he spoke unmasking the real hatred and desires in the protest, the murder of every single Jew wherever they be found.
Remembering the Holocaust is more than simply the Jews who were murdered in mass numbers but the Jews are the consciences who are best able to continue the memory of those horrific times. The lesson of the Holocaust must also go further and also include the entire eugenics movement and any political movement which includes the ideas and ideals of eugenics and other concepts accepted by the progressives of the early twentieth century. Some of their concepts have begun to slowly edge their way back into society once again. Statistics reveal that there is near equality in the general New York City megalopolis between Black children born and those terminated in the womb by abortive techniques. The general acceptance of abortion in society is something the eugenics proponents would have applauded and supported with great enthusiasm. They would have encouraged women of what they considered lesser societal acceptance, otherwise expressed as those less wealthy, to have abortions as they saw wealth as proof of genetic superiority.
But the Holocaust was not the only modern murder by governments of those considered to be lesser human beings or even as human beings at all. In the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin committed a Holocaust of proportions were only exceeded by Hitler a little over a decade later. Over the period of 1932 and 1933 it is thought that seven-million Ukrainians were starved to death as the entirety of their produce was transferred to Moscow to feed the starving Russians who were considered to be more essential and true believers on the Soviet ideals and the Ukrainians were expendable. That is the famous words uttered by most mass murderers; they were one or more of the following, expendables, unbelievers or inferiors. There was the famine in China which resulted from Chairman Mao Zedong’s programs of the Great Leap Forward of 1958 to 1962 where inside China it has been estimated that the loss of life equaled from fifteen to forty-five million with the accepted standard places the totals between twenty-one to forty-three million deaths. The deaths inside China were only exceeded by the cover-up and deceitful history which denied the failures of the state.
There were other such government initiated mass deaths including when the Japanese Imperial Army entered the Chinese Capital City and committed the Rape of Nanking murdering half of the six-hundred-thousand people in six weeks, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge who orchestrated the Cambodian genocide, Bosnia-Herzegovina genocide of 1992 through 1995 which murdered at least two-hundred-thousands, Rwanda genocide where in a hundred days in 1994 up to 800,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutu militia using clubs and machetes killing as many as 10,000 each day and the wholesale slaughter of human beings by human beings all due to one group believing that their right to live outweighs others’ right to life for any reason be it religious, racial, political or any of the other contrivances of human kind meant to select one group as superior to all others. It is for these peoples as well and the hundreds of millions or probably billions upon billions who have been slaughtered through wars, enslavement, political purges, purifications, religious differences or any other distinction used by man throughout his history that we must remember the Holocaust if only because there are those who refuse to allow its memory to die. It is the calling to memory the six-million Jews and the rest of the twelve-million or more murdered in death camps, open fields, ghettos, in the back of trucks feeding the exhaust into the back compartment or simply shot where they stood who represent the entirety of the hostility of men against their fellow men that the Holocaust must echo throughout the rest of human history as a reminder such that we never again turn a deaf ear to the suffering and deaths of our fellow human beings. No, the time has not arrived to lay the Holocaust to rest, and the time we pray will never come to lay the Holocaust to rest. When mankind forgets the horrors of his past, he will live to repeat them and that has to end now!
Beyond the Cusp
Beyond the Cusp 