What does #NeverAgain mean for a gentile?
January 27th, 2020 was the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and Holocaust Memorial Day. 75 years since the greatest crime perpetrated in history. Some survivors are still alive to share their stories, some have since passed and their children and grandchildren now their children and grandchildren carry the burden of remembering. Many are remembering now on social media.
The Nazis murdered approximately 6 million Jews in their 12 year reign. Other victims included homosexuals, Slavs, the disabled, and other people that didn’t fit into the Nazis’ model race. They created a program of rationalized cruelty, “scientific” racism, and industrialized murder spurred by a philosophy bitterness and hatred.
How did it get to that point? Why did the international community stand by and allow it to happen?
Part of the answer is the also the origin point of Nazism, the First World War. What helped inspire the bitterness and hatred within the heart of Germany inspired isolationism and timidity in the hearts of the victors. “Pourquoi mourir pour Dantzig?” (Why die for Danzig?) was a phrase spoken up to the eve of war in France. Chamberlain’s appeasement is infamous. The USA’s isolationism was so strong even the legendary persuader FDR couldn't pry it open. With hindsight, it shouldn’t be too surprising it took so long. For years prior to the outbreak of the European war, aggression and atrocities had gone unanswered.
After WW1, the League of Nations was created to enforce international law and resolve disputes between nations. Never powerful to begin with, it almost immediately started to decline in strength, the last of which dissipated after the crash of 29 as each nation tended to domestic affairs above everything else.
The first massive crisis that came to it’s door, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, was met with angry letters and hostility but there was nothing that the League could do. It’s core member states unwilling or unable to do anything more than protest (this would be repeated again with the invasion of China proper in 1937, only the USA would eventually mount economic sanctions against Japan). Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini took note of Western weakness and exploited it to the fullest.
The 2nd major international crisis was the Italian Invasion of Ethiopia. This was a blatant attack on a member State and the Italians violated the Geneva conventions with the use of chemical weapons. Once again the Western powers did little to help (in fact they negotiated a partition!) even as Ethiopians were being gassed (stop me if this sounds familiar *cough*).
The League was effectively a powerless organization but surely in the face of blatant aggression in a European nation, Britain and France would take action, at least to secure their own hides. No. Even direct intervention in the by the Nazis and Fascists in the terrible Spanish Civil War did not move them to provide anything of material help until it was far too late.
With such weak responses to colossal foreign crises it’s not surprising that Jews were left to the slaughter. After all they were a foreign element, in a foreign country, and as bad as the repression was, surely it couldn’t go too much farther right in the heart of civilized Europe? The world (and especially the Jewish people) would pay the price for the Western leaderships lack of imagination (indeed, imagination is the precursor to foresight).
After the end of the 2nd World War, the Jewish people, still grieving the immense personal toll, took matters into their own hands and created a Jewish State to make #NeverAgain a reality. The world had failed the Jews but they would not fail eachother. And so Israel was born again.
However, Soviet Union, despite initially friendly overtures to the new nation, would turn slide once again into antisemitism. Partially compelled by Stalin, partially of Cold War politics. As Israel drew closer to the USA, the Soviet Union, the liberators of Auschwitz, would begin several antisemitic campaigns within their borders.
The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was repressed, with it’s leaders assassinated or arrested for sedition and “bourgeois nationalism.” The Soviets began a propaganda blitz against “rootless cosmopolitans” in early 1949. Stalin’s antisemitic campaigns peaked with the Night of the Murdered Poets and the Doctor’s Plot.
After Stalin, antisemitism would still spring up in the Soviet Union. It would not reach the same fevered heights of the Stalin Era but it would spring up, masking itself as anti-Zionism. The Soviets provided arms and training to Arab states and terrorist groups who sought the destruction of Israel. The Soviet Union, though never officially, was willing to let a potential 2nd Holocaust occur if it gave them the edge in the Cold War.
The plague of antisemitism never truly left as seen in NYC, Los Angeles, France, the UK, and all over the world. The world’s “oldest hatred” continues to terrorize a community that’s already been through the closest to hell that anyone has yet conceived.
I am not Jewish. I don’t have any ancestors murdered by Nazis. I can’t fathom the emotional scars that it has left on the Jewish community. not just an a personal level or having heard the stories growing up but just trying to process that an entire nation mobilized its resources to annihilate you for the “crime” of existence. The horror and revulsion I feel is a pale shadow of what they must go through.
Which is why, to me at least, #NeverAgain isn’t just about preventing another Auschwitz, it’s also a constant struggle against the forces that conspire to inflict the kind of suffering on others.
The necessity to stand up to genocidal groups is not just a battle for geopolitics, or elections, or communities, its a battle for the human soul. What is the value of humanism if it won’t stand up for the persecuted? What is the value of strength if it’s not used to protect the weak and innocent? What is the value #NeverAgain if you don’t mean it?
I don’t think the lesson was learned.
“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” is a quote often attributed to Hitler and though it’s veracity is somewhat disputed, it is at least an accurate reflection of the Nazi high command’s views.
It’s also a horrific indictment of the world’s indifference to the suffering of Armenian people (which continued until recently as the Armenian Genocide went unrecognized until December 2019). I hesitate to say that a more forceful response to the Armenian Genocide would have given the Nazis pause, psychotic determination like that doesn’t let up, but it may given the world greater cause to ally against the Nazis sooner. Outside of Europe, the USA, to it’s shame, failed even a basic test of it’s humanity.
Indeed, that pattern, the same one that preceded the the Second World War, persists to this day. It took years of fighting and 100,000 deaths before the West intervened in Bosnia. The deaths up to 1,000,000 of the Tutsi people in Rwanda. The constant attempts to kill off the Kurds by various powers. East Timor. The Issaqs in Somalia. The list goes on. There are ongoing genocides in China, Darfur, Iraq and Syria, Burma. Yet, help only comes when it’s expedient.
Genocide is not an internal matter. It is a not just a crime against a targeted group. Genocide is a revolt against humanity. A rejection of all things that make us civilized. It is an act against hope. It is a festering wound on the collective soul of humanity.
After 75 years, little seems to have been learned outside of the Jewish community, who took their international safety into their own hands for the foundation of Israel. They learned, in the worst way imaginable, that the world had learned nothing from Armenia. More suffer from the world’s inability to internalize the lessons of #NeverAgain.
That lesson has to be understood on an individual level to make it to an institutional one. Only then can #NeverAgain become a reality and not just a hashtag.
