It can’t happen again. Yet it does, worldwide. “Never again”. But in the last fifty years we have seen different variables on the same theme. “Never forget.” I agree we should never forget but at respected universities professors have been able to teach that it didn’t happen, and leaders of countries have said it was propaganda.
I am talking about the Holocaust.
Monday I am attending a lunch on behalf of the National World War Two Museum in Chicago. My friend Leo Melamed escaped the Holocaust as a child, and has done a lot in his life to remember the victims and help survivors deal with the guilt of surviving.
My first real experience came in school. Then I met my friend’s father. He was one of the first troopers into Dachau. Wartime experiences are very difficult to talk about and this one is no different. He spoke to us late one night for a very short time. When he couldn’t go on, they whisked him to bed. Even people that didn’t physically feel the effects of living through a concentration camp were affected by the Holocaust. When I hear of university professors and state leaders say it didn’t happen, I think they ought to lose their job instantaneously.
Holocausts don’t start with an event like Kristalnacht. They start with a trickle. I am seeing signs of that trickle all over the world, and have been for a few years. In Europe, over the past number of years there have been a lot of anti-semitic events. Most of them have been caused by the burgeoning Muslim population in Europe that hasn’t integrated, and has a historical beef with anyone Jewish.
Some on the right wing think they are seeing signs of anti-Semitism in movements like Occupy Wall Street. It’s the Jewish bankers and Jewish controlled media that are driving us off a cliff according to protestors at the OWS events across the country. In Boston, they occupied the Israeli consulate and wanted justice for Palestine. I have to ask, what the heck does the Israel-Palestinian conflict have to do with bank bailouts or the state of the American economy? Nothing that’s what and this is further evidence that the OWS crowd is just a tool of far left wing radicals.
David Frum doesn’t see the anti-semitism. It’s not that he is turning a blind eye, because he does see it in other places. He writes, “Experts call it the “confirmation bias” — our natural psychological attraction toward data or anecdotes that serve to support our pre-existing attitudes and bigotries. And it’s something that always has been part of human nature. But the combination of social media with cheap online video technology has turbocharged the confirmation bias to the point where rational political dialogue is in danger of extinction.”
A group of Jewish policial leaders who are left wing liberals released a statement saying they don’t believe Occupy Wall Street is anti-semitic. There are some fringe people within the movement who are. They support the movement because they are lefties. They don’t want it tainted with the stain of anti-semitism detracting from it’s broader theme of totalitarianism.
Both of these observations tell me that Occupy Wall Street may not be anti-semitic; but reinforces my belief that the movement is a crude tool of the far left.
I am appreciative of the right’s worry about another Holocaust. But, the evidence isn’t all there. There isn’t a “Mein Kampf” for the OWS people. I just don’t see it as anti-semitic anymore than I see the Tea Party as racist.
Our experiences of the past several years dictate that we should be at least a little worried. Pol Pot in Cambodia, the massacres in Africa, the war in Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia tell us that in fact, similar things to the Holocaust can happen again. It shouldn’t. “Never again” are two good words to remember. Man’s Inhumanity to Man is a theme that will be repeated over and over again throughout the ages. It’s up to us to recognize and stop it when it happens.
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