dreamitallawayx:
R.I.P to the approximately 11 million Jews, Slavs, ethnic Poles, Soviet POWs, Romany gypsies, disabled people, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and political and religious dissenters who were murdered in the Holocaust.
Let us never forget the atrocities committed by the Nazis, and let us hope that humanity never reaches that low again.
Not to be a Debbie Downer on a downer subject, but memory is wholly insufficient.
It is not enough to remember. Remembrance is essential; it’s the lifeblood of the Jewish people, for example, to repeat our history. But it doesn’t stop there, it can’t stop there, and if we’re going to use this day to remember the Holocaust as I believe we should we should also not delude ourselves on this count: humanity has reached that low since, and it will reach it again. Genocide keeps going despite the fact that it has been a basic tenant of the Holocaust memorial project to say such a thing will never happen again. But Never Again is utter bullshit. Today isn’t just a day for remembering; memory is insufficient. Memory needs to become a tool, it has to become a practice and a project to say, “This is something that happened, this is a genocide that happened and we have a name for that, we have institutions that should deal with it but don’t, and I am going to take five minutes out of my day to Wikipedia the information I’m missing.” There’s a notion of the Holocaust as something that cannot be repeated; it can be. It has been. And we have a responsibility to recognize it when we see it, to remember how we have failed, and ensure we don’t do that again. That’s our Never Again. Never again to close our eyes.
So here’s what I want you to remember today:
- Victimization is exhausting. I won’t do it anymore. I as a Jewish person need people to remember the Holocaust because the entire history of my people is one of repeated victimization with this one very, very loud exclamation point. But do not think the Holocaust was an aberration in our history. And do not think for a second that we don’t simply assume it will happen again. I can’t speak for all the Jews in the land, but I sure as hell live my life under the assumption that history repeats itself. It’s rarely proven otherwise.
- Romani persecution is absolutely an ongoing problem. Just, what was it, last year, France and Germany deported their Romani populations to Eastern Europe. Sound familiar? It should. Romani remain in danger of persecution, forced evictions and sterilization, and death. (1, 2, 3, among many others)
- I would like to think the oppression of people with disabilities and LGBTQ folks is self evident but have some links anyway
There have been, as far as I know and that knowledge is limited, six recognized genocides since the Holocaust: Bangladesh, Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. Genocidal scholars seem to not have come to a decision regarding Darfur; popular opinion holds that it was. I’m not an expert on the war and can’t give you an opinion on the subject. There are also several more claims to genocide that scholars have yet to settle on.
Never Again is bullshit until someone starts to make sure it never happens again. Yes, remember. But do not stop at the remembering. This history is not as long ago as people would like for it to be, and memory is a passive act. It is not merely a matter of recalling the victims or survivors; it is a matter of the every day persecution and repeated victimization and violence of groups around the world. Remember, yes, and some of us will grieve, but we won’t all be grieving the same things. Some of us feel the weight of our ancestors on our backs; some groups get recognized for that and far more don’t. And I don’t want this argument to turn around into getting angry at Jews as this subject can often err toward; there is space in this world for everyone to be remembered. The problem is that not everyone is, and that is, in a word, mortifying.
Many people don’t know the way this history grabs at your mind in the middle of the night. Many people are just left with remembering the chapters (or at times sentences) in their history books. They are left with that distance between now and the history we want to leave behind as the most shameful moment in human history, when in truth it is merely one of many horrifyingly shameful moments in human history. The Holocaust haunts us because we don’t understand how it could happen. We don’t understand how the world could bear witness and do so little for so long. Yet, these crimes continue to happen, and they happened long before the Holocaust as well. We cannot stop at remembering. We need to learn. We need to understand. We need to mourn. We need to mourn for the people whose families are not ours and for the graves of people we will never visit or see museums for. We need to act. We need to have Never Again sewn into our clothes so we wake up every day and know what it is we should be remembering.
Yep.
Although to be honest I think part of the reason the Holocaust haunts us is because we do understand how it could have happened—we want to think we would have done things differently, but we know better, and we don’t want to. So instead we salve our consciences with remembering and “never again” and then feel a little more okay not doing anything about modern genocides because somehow that’s not the same and they aren’t happening in first-world countries where we’d really feel threatened (yes, the Holocaust happened before the whole first/second/third-world terminology came into use, whatever, the modern understanding of it still applies).
