One Person Can Make A Difference
The theme of Holocaust Memorial Day this year, you may or may not know, is One Person Can Make a Difference:
"During the years of the Holocaust everyone had to make moral choices. Some people became perpetrators, others were bystanders. A small minority chose to help the persecuted, these are the rescuers and helpers. This was an extraordinary selfless choice. It meant risking not only their own lives but the lives of their own family and children. Many paid with their lives... Each chose to defy the power of the Nazis and their collaborators mostly single-handedly... they showed the power of the individual and provided hope in otherwise hopeless circumstances by demonstrating the importance of moral courage in action.
... there were courageous people... found in every Nazi-occupied country and... drawn from all walks of life. What is clear is that most of these people were very ordinary people, making individual choices of conscience. Their actions demonstrated that true heroes are often just ordinary people acting on their convictions."
It is easy to say that everyone, given the right circumstances, could become perpetrators in crimes against humanity, but that is to forget the ones - in Nazi Germany and elsewhere - who at great risk to themselves chose to decline the invitation. It is also to deny that the perpetrators made a moral choice. By saying that their actions were understandable or even inevitable given the circumstances, we affectively absolve them of their crime. I don't feel we should do that.
Tonight I'm lighting a candle to burn through the night just as a way of holding a thought for all those effected by the Holocaust. I know this might be seen as excess of feeling from someone who is not a Jew, not a gypsy, and has no other true affiliation with those persecuted by the Nazis, but I don't care. The Holocaust remains for me the greatest crime against humanity this world has ever seen, and I want to mark a personal feeling of deep sadness that people were ever made to suffer so.
5 comments:
Agree.
When I see the H word - I don't think about NAZI v Jew, I think about how despicably humans are capable of behaving, and of how brave humans are capable of behaving, and then I think of that saying which ends 'and when they came to take ME away ...' (If I light a tiny hopeful struggling candle flame, I will just cry every time I look at it though).
You might not know Brownie that in Britain there is something called the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). They made a point of "boycotting" Holocaust Memorial Day on the grounds that it was too exclusive to Jews at the expense of other groups that suffered in the Holocaust.
Now, I don't know what hard-line Muslim groups in Australia are like, but here they are not generally known for their deep concern of, say, the gay community who were of course also persecuted by the Nazis, so it comes as quite a surprise that the MCB should feel so strongly on such an issue. Such a surprise in fact that we might almost suspect that that is not the real reason behind the "boycott".
You'd like to think that such a group, who could not put aside politics and respect Holocaust Memorial Day on the grounds of a shared sense of humanity, would be on the fringes of British scoiety. Unfortunately the MCB is led by SIR Iqbal Sacranie - yes that's right, such a group is led by a man who was knighted by the British government.
Needless to say that SIR Iqbal Sacranie and his bunch of mealy-mouthed Holocaust Deniers make me sick.
WHY!? do any devout Muslims LEAVE Muslim countries?
Why is their Visa Application not stamped 'You won't like it there, stay home'.
(and in the case of Muslims who also claim to be born Cockney, then I mean their damn parents)
(Brownie's evil twin Crystal)
I can think of many names for Sir Sacranie, but devout isn't one of them... I'm feeling mellow today though, so I'm not going to name call.
Scribbles, there is a Muslim Council Of Australia also. They have a 'Leader' who makes media pronouncements.
I cannot imagine Presbyterians getting up the same system in Pakistan though.
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