Imagine the almost biblical levels of starvation of over a million Ethiopians on your TV, as reported by Michael Buerk in the mid 1980's: now mutiple that sixfold. Imagine traumatic starvation and dehydration, enslavement, human experimentation, apolyptical numbers freezing to death and a militarised mechanisation of death on an industrial scale. That happened as recently as the 1940's, and is by name the 'Holocaust'.
This didn't just involve millions of victims, it invoved the psychosis of the Nazi's but the turning a blind eye of the German people to the evil that Nazi Germany were inflicting. Hitler's 'Aryan masterace' demanded his mesianic ego disguise as social readjustment the 'final solution' for the Jews, but instead instigated their mass slaughter. Whilst Hitler boasted of elevating himself as heroic, history sees him as invoking genecide. The pernicious theorizing of Aryianism wanted to sanitize or treat people like livestock requiring immunisation from 'disease', encouraging anti-semitism as an opportunity for mass scapegoating. In every act of barbarism there is a chilling horror of self-rightious justification, such as the Holocaust deniers, of which Hitler was the first.
People often deflect Hitler's crimes by comparisons with Stalin, but that is disengenuous. Hitler was different. Hitler wanted to make evil 'heroic', whilst Stalin used evil as a form of administrative control and dictat. Stalin would have sent six and a half million Jews as 'bullet-fodder' on the Eastern front - Hitler rationalised and glorified extermination. With all the murderousness of Stalin, the Holocaust was infamy made manifest, transending millenia.
Today I mourn, I cry for humanity, recognising the shear courage of Jewish people, and fearful for manipulation of power distorted by bigotry. I am not Jewish, I am a Catholic. Today I pray for Israel and for the soul of Europe. I also share this Holocaust Memorial Day with my 50th birthday, I just hope I've done justice in my rejection of villainy, of which I believe the Holocaust is at its apex. Martin Luther King said there can be no peace without justice. The only justice for six and a half milion Jews butchered in death camps would be a recognition that unless people know about the holocaust, history will repeat itself.
I dedicate this blog to the victims of the Holocaust.