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The Holocaust and the Embezzlement of Memory

Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh, Ph.D - 12/18/2006

President Almedinajad of Iran recently stood up and tore the decency of political diplomacy to shreds. Acting like a mad cow in a china shop, he has been calling for the erasure of another sovereign country, with all the bigotry at his command. The world is not hoodwinked. This man is the mad face of a carefully cultivated hatred of Israel nursed by many Arabs. I have never seen a leader make such a fool of himself in a political strategizing gone awry from the start. This man has the megalomanic dreams of ancient Persian Supremacy. And to achieve this, he is ready to ride religious fanaticism and xenophobic anti-Semitism roughshod to his crooked dreams

Israel maybe morally obliged to act in self defence to counter such threats, and to send the right message to all and sundry. This is because a leader of one country calling for the annihilation of another country is not only a declaration, but an act of war. But be that as it may, calling for the annihilation of another sovereign country is a crime against humanity, which should never be condoned on the score of manners, let alone international politics. It calls for the greatest rebuke. The dangerous thing is that this fanatic is hiding under the banners of Islam to decree death to a nation of human individuals. And when people question Islamist claims that Islam is a peaceful religion, then one sees Moslems get agitated. But they are not agitated when one of their presumably leading spokesmen utters unprintable threats on another country that neither attacked his country nor showed signs of that.

Hiding under political rhetoric at this onslaught directed at Israel, is the greatest danger the modern world should never allow itself the luxury of entertaining. It should not be regarded as a simple boast. Osama bin Laden made such a threat on America, and went ahead to make good his boasts. Had the American government under Clinton targeted and killed this man, the world would have been saved the terror and multiplication of terror cells consequent on this messenger of evil. The same may turn out to be the case with Almedinajad. If the world does not solve this equation now, he may grow and metastasize into a cancer that would keep the whole world unsafe for much of the 21st century.

That Almadinejad questions the holocaust is not wrong. Anybody is free to question anything. But his attempt to embezzle the historical reality of the holocaust is the most stupid stand ever taken by a man, who is supposed to be a leader of a nation. This lends credence to the fact that a fanatic is the worst material for leadership. This proves equally that the only difference between a fanatic and a lunatic is only in the first two letters.

This guy has never visited Auschwitz; that parch of territory located in Poland, which had risen as one of crude testaments of evil in modern times.

Auschwitz is history's greatest crime scene. This is one of the lowest points on history's surface. This place, out of no choice of its own, bore unholy witness to the abomination of desolation, contrived by the darkest possible depths of human wickedness; and inflicted upon millions of innocent members of the human race. Auschwitz will forever remain the greatest blot on the human heritage. It is the greatest indictment of mankind's claim to rationality. It is the greatest questioning of man's humanity. At Auschwitz, heaven went on holiday. Morality was retired. It was open season for indignity and savagery. At Auschwitz, morality relinquished its hold upon the conscience of man; and hell rained its savage ugliness, upon the face of God's earth.

On the frozen winter morn of 4th November, 2006: I stood for the first time in my life, at the "Gate of Death" the abominable entrance to the Auschwitz Birkenau Concentration/Death Camp, This was the place where Nazi Germany perpetrated the worst abomination of desolations on humanity. This was the exact spot, where more than 60 years ago, Nazi Germany murdered millions of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, war and political prisoners from over 20 countries; in cold blood, with the unemotional economy resident in the hearts of evil.

Prior to the short hop to Birkenau, I was at Auschwitz camp 1, a large expanse of brick-block buildings that was transformed into the most fearful killing industry ever contrived in history’s face. The gate to camp one bore the deadliest irony ever hoisted deceitfully on history’s face: Arbeit macht Frei-Work sets free!

I was drawn to Auschwitz by the compulsions of history. I went to see the words I repeatedly read in books, and watched in films, take some concrete flesh. I came all the way to this part of the globe; the Golgotha of modern times, where Jesus Christ must have repeated more than a million times, in more than a million different voices of the victims; those cries of pain, anguish and hopeless frustration: “My Lord, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” This may have been the song of millions, as the walked through the gates of death, never to come back again. “My God, My God why hast thou forsaken me! These words may have taken a fearful, paralyzing reality in the brief experiences of those victims, who had to surrender their lives forcefully to the savage power of naked evil.

How could Auschwitz be possible? How could the human race ever degenerate to this level of organized savagery?

Auschwitz is a proof that evil is real. The history of this place spells evil in the superlative. A visit to Auschwitz brings one face to face with the grim face of evil. Auschwitz was manufactured by malevolence; governed by a cocktail of deceit, wickedness and uncommon savagery. At Auschwitz, Nazi Germany questioned our common humanity and passed a vote of no confidence on human rationality, decency, morality, and civilization. Here, mankind reached its nadir; both in the victims and in the establishment that wished them extinction. At this spot, a State organized a bazaar of murder for European Jews, Poles, Gypsies, and others considered as aberrations and expendable embarrassments.

In this instance, a purportedly civilized nation, allowed itself to be desensitized to the extent of plumbing the furthest reaches of evil, resident in the human heart. Nazi Germany created human monsters out of its network of officials, giving them leeway to deploy the worst that our weakest and basest nature could contrive; to strip their fellow human beings of their humanity in a systematic exterminatory process, fashioned with the most advanced industrial blueprint of that era.

Auschwitz like all historical “accidents” was never an event. It was a process.

It is evil enough to commit genocide. But an orchestrated attempt to destroy evidence and cover up this crime, betrays knowledge that the act is an ontological evil. This is what radically unsettles rationality. The knowledge of this evil was there in the perpetrators ab initio. They never happened upon this knowledge in time. It preceded their acts; hence their attempts to erase evidence. This means that these people cared about history’s judgement on them.

Well, history’s judgement they would forever have: their names will forever be entombed in derision and disgust. They are eternal criminals. They were never human beings. They were a different species of the human animal; the worst at that.

The network of deceit employed to disarm the victims; the all round degradations inflicted on the victims; and the supreme abuse of their lives, plunder of their properties, exploitation of their mortal remains, were all like the unfolding of a script written by a congenital sadist. Movement to the camp from all over occupied Europe was in box cars. The voyage of degradation starts there. Many perished on the way. On arrival at the camp, SS “gods” (Doctors) were on hand to hand out instant death sentence on the infirm, the old, and the disabled. Their lot is immediate extermination. They were deceitfully led to the “shower of death” in the gas chambers; after which their mortal remains were reduced to ashes in the crematoria. The gas chambers functioned to full industrial capacity; manufacturing nothing but death.

A confrontation with Auschwitz calls reason to fear any fanatic, who under whatever toga, wills to repeat the simplest iota of that experience. George Santayana warned that whoever refuses to learn from history is already condemned to repeat it. Almedinajad and his cohorts deserve our greatest rebuke. We should never tolerate their intolerance. The world should stop pandering to their whims in the name of peace. Britain’s timid pandering to Hitler’s brinkmanship cost the world more than the empty promises that Neville Chamberlain thought he secured in Munchen. Over 50 million people had to lose their lives to Britain and the free world’s misrepresentation of Hitler’s intentions. The intentions of a fanatic are clear: He is in the thraldom of a madness he canonizes as virtue. To that end, he views every contra opinion as heresy that commissions death to the opinion holder.

No dialogue is possible with fanaticism. Reason cannot abide a fanatic. Rationality is not his friend. Reason does not hate fanaticism, she dreads her. A fanatical belief in any dogma is a potential brewery of the “banality of evil”.

The Nazis were fanatical about their desire to make the Jewish race history. They went about it with the arrogant swagger that is the hallmark of fanaticism. They knew no better. They were captives to evil wrapped in the sugar-coat demagoguery of a demented Fuhrer. That does not absolve them of blame. They allowed themselves to be seduced by evil. History’s judgement cannot but be extraordinarily harsh on them too.

Almadinejad is towing the same lines. And the whole world is standing aloof and watching him. This is like history repeating itself in our eyes again. When Hitler rose, demanding territories which he had no rights to. The powers of the day kept aloof, outdoing themselves instead, to placate Hitler. Neville Chamberlain, deaf to the entreaties of visionaries like Churchill, came to Munchen to surrender Sudentenland to an insatiable ogre, thinking that peace could be purchased at the price of injustice. He was dead wrong. The peace he hoped for, for which he battered justice, eluded him, and made sure that the British isle sacrificed millions of her sons and daughters in appeasement to the god of justice for such an arrant betrayal of the sacred trust, that justice imposes on us all.

Evil constructs abominations. Evil is real. Auschwitz is the proof. Whenever evil marries political power, repeating Auschwitz becomes a possibility. Darfur in Sudan and Rwanda are testaments to this.

Keeping diplomatic or political silence in the face of this renascent evil represented by Almedinajad is supreme cowardice. World leaders are keeping mum at our future discomfiture. Anyone who thinks that this is about Israel is not being realistic. People thought that Hitler’s demand for Sudentenland was only what it represented at face value. But underneath it was a megalomanic desire for global subjugation. Israel would not be the only victim of this apostle of hate. The costs for the whole world would be unquantifiable if this fanaticism is allowed to gain nuclear power.

Amedinajad is making an extraordinary effort to crown himself a scoundrel, and most of the world is keeping silent. History is watching.