Well well. Seems everything comes back into relevance. This post from ten years ago suddenly seems relevant again.
Yes this post was for a particular Remembrance Day - a remembrance of the murder of six million Jews and millions of others at the hands of the Nazi Party who controlled the Third Reich, who mechanized the dehumanization, suffering, and deaths of people it did not value.
When thinking about this day, perhaps now more than ever, we can rightly consider our peculiar human blindness that leads a people of any persuasion, ethnicity or belief, to take power and crush others that are different without mercy almost as a privilege born of their belief in or assertion of their own "special" place in history, their so called destiny - by dehumanizing and blaming the other, stripping them of their homes, goods, social rituals, food, neighbors, stealing their labor also, and finally cramming them into cattle cars, express to the "showers" a euphemism for communal gas chambers, and subsequently incinerating the evidence leaving only piles of shoes and eyeglasses - so many that the sight is heartbreaking to look at, as if the starving skeletal bodies of the few survivors were not enough..
And we say #neveragain and over and over it happens with other groups, over and over, in and out of the light, seen and unseen, large scale and small scale. Sometimes the abused and the abuser (assuming there are survivors) might switch roles over a generation, over a governmental coup.
Don't kid yourself that we as a nation are above this. Consider who this land belonged to only a few hundred years ago. Consider your favorite political or spiritual enemy who you think is ruining or threatening this country, the economy, the world. How easily each of us could be led away into the dark and disappeared by men in black masks, never to be heard from again.. How easily we could turn a blind eye while someone else is led..
And don't you dare say say oh that was a group of Nazi monsters that has nothing to do with us. According to one of the Smithsonian's web pages, the genetic difference between human beings is around %.01. That is, one hundredth of one percent. In other words, we share 99.99% of common DNA with Hitler, Goebbels, Mengele... If you are too young to know those names, try Google.
We can embody brave compassion, horrific cruelty, callous indifference. All of us.
-- note: this post previously published on this blog 1/27/2015 and possibly before as i tend to repost things several times with a few pertinent changes...
