Never Again
60 years ago this week, Allied troops liberated the Bergen-Belsen death camp in Nazi Germany. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered by Nazi war criminals there (including Anne Frank), while Hitler's opponents mostly turned a blind eye. I feel I cannot adequately portray the horrors in words, so I suggest everyone look at the camp's memorial's official website, http://www.bergenbelsen.de/en/ .
After the Holocaust, the civilized world said that never, ever, could this be allowed to happen again. To some extent it hasn't- the efficient, mechanized, economized, beaurocratic killing of a single immutable group has never been repeated on nearly such a scale, but that could be because Nazi Germany was the last industrialized nation to participate in genocide (Stalin's purges notwithstanding, because they were more political, not racist/religionist, in nature). After the Holocaust, the newly-created United Nations adopted the International Declaration of Human Rights and the International Convention on Genocide, as well as creating new precedent in international law with the prosecution of Nazis at the Nuremberg trials. It seemed as if the post-war era had ushered in a new age of international oversight on human-rights violations, or at least, genocide. Then there was Cambodia. And Rwanda. And East Timor. And the Balkans. While none of these genocides equaled the Holocaust in terms of numbers and the mechanized nature of the killing, they were genocides nonetheless, and the west was painfully slow in responding the each of them. Now there is Sudan. Current estimates project at least 300,000 people murdered. To put that in perspective, that's roughly the population of Cleveland, in a country with a population of about twice the New York Metro Area. The victims are eliminated solely because they are of a minority religion within the country. This has been happening for about the last two years. Our Air Force could easily make mincemeat out of the militia primarily responsible for the murder, the Janjaweed, and the regime that supports them. Yet, we do nothing.
Again.
After the Holocaust, the civilized world said that never, ever, could this be allowed to happen again. To some extent it hasn't- the efficient, mechanized, economized, beaurocratic killing of a single immutable group has never been repeated on nearly such a scale, but that could be because Nazi Germany was the last industrialized nation to participate in genocide (Stalin's purges notwithstanding, because they were more political, not racist/religionist, in nature). After the Holocaust, the newly-created United Nations adopted the International Declaration of Human Rights and the International Convention on Genocide, as well as creating new precedent in international law with the prosecution of Nazis at the Nuremberg trials. It seemed as if the post-war era had ushered in a new age of international oversight on human-rights violations, or at least, genocide. Then there was Cambodia. And Rwanda. And East Timor. And the Balkans. While none of these genocides equaled the Holocaust in terms of numbers and the mechanized nature of the killing, they were genocides nonetheless, and the west was painfully slow in responding the each of them. Now there is Sudan. Current estimates project at least 300,000 people murdered. To put that in perspective, that's roughly the population of Cleveland, in a country with a population of about twice the New York Metro Area. The victims are eliminated solely because they are of a minority religion within the country. This has been happening for about the last two years. Our Air Force could easily make mincemeat out of the militia primarily responsible for the murder, the Janjaweed, and the regime that supports them. Yet, we do nothing.
Again.
posted by Rich at 9:04 PM
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