Genocide: - DIIS

Holocaust, Genocide and European Values
The problem, however, is what is to do when words are turned into actions.
One of the things we have learnt from genocide and war crimes is
that everything begins with the tone of the language used. Not all hateful
words lead to mass killings but all mass killings have had their beginnings
in hate propaganda and in the categorizing of the “other” as different or alien.
For example by calling all refugees and immigrants “foreign elements”
regardless of where they come from, however long they have been in the
country and whatever they have achieved or not achieved. Whatever one’s
view of the dangers of Neo-Nazism there are many nasty tendencies in the
public debate in all the Nordic countries. Perhaps this is understandable,
but these are unsympathetic tendencies seen in the light of what Europeans
previously have accomplished. It is possible to choose to wash one’s
hands of the responsibility as it appears to me was done in the rather platitudinous
Danish contribution to the Stockholm conference.
It is only too easy to express oneself in empty and nugatory platitudes
to the effect that one is against intolerance and in general wants what is
good in a well-meaning UN type forum where many participants leave
each other with the words “see you at the next conference” in Vienna, or
Amsterdam or Durban or wherever the next conference is held. Yet, for all
that, I, as a sceptical Dane, felt somewhat abashed by the Swedish Prime
Minister’s deeply felt intent to face the problems in his own country and
without was prepared to show a bleak picture of his own society. Can we
be so certain that Neo-Nazism is so feeble in Denmark because of our
policies of openness, or is it because historically speaking Nazism and
Germanness became identifi ed with each other? As a result the movement
is dismissed by the great majority of Danes as laughable. Do we not have
a duty to our neighbours to take their problems a little more seriously?
Perhaps we should consider whether everything is quite so much in order
in Denmark as we suppose ourselves. Indeed it is not certain that we need
to pass new laws but that we simply need the will to make use of the existing
laws. These were the thoughts that passed through my head while one
speech followed another at the conference center in Stockholm’s grammar
school, Norra Latin. The lessons of the Holocaust are of more immediate
importance to Danes as well as other Europeans than ever before, if only
by virtue of the increased globalization and of the emerging international
judicial system dealing with genocide and other crimes against humanity.
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