THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

. . . an ideologue with firm beliefs, the most radical of all radicals,representing a worldview with inner integrity (as much as it isabhorrent to us). The driving force of this worldview was derived froma few basic ideas united in the perception that world history is thestory of interracial struggle. 2People often react to natural disasters quickly, as in the case of the 2005 tsunami inSoutheast Asia. It was one of the world community’s finest hours. But whencompared to the world’s response to man-made disasters and atrocities, as in thecase of the Armenian Holocaust, it is cause for shame and sadness. Yair Oron, ofIsrael’s Open University, has dedicated much of his life to the study of the ArmenianHolocaust, paying a personal and professional price. He believes that as a Jew wholost members of his family in the Shoah, it is his duty to remember and understandany holocaust, massacre, or genocide: “This is the major moral insight we must drawfrom the Shoah and other genocides. Humans did it to other humans, and thereforethey can repeat it anywhere...We must ask ourselves what can we can do to preventsuch a threat.”The issue here is: Why does the world mobilize with all its might when dealing withnatural disasters, but remains on the sidelines, reserved and distant, in the face ofman-made disasters? The sad answer is the same one that served Hitler: indifference.Perhaps even more sinister: no moral, ethical, or political position should be heldwhen confronting the wrath of nature; not so in the face of human wrath. The politicalscientist R. G. Rummel estimated that between 1900 and 1987, the unimaginablenumber of 169,198,000 people perished in genocides, including the ones perpetratedby Stalin and by the Chinese on their own people. 3 The figure does not include thedeaths that occurred after 1987, in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, East Timor, and elsewhere.What did we do in order to stop, prevent, alert, or resist these killings? Nothing.Sometimes we paid tickets to watch movies of superior white people slaughteringNative Americans. Our childhood movie-heroes of the Westerns are the arroganticons of the white genocide of the Native Americans. Thus, through the movies webecame, in retrospect, participants in the genocide of America’s indigenous peoples.We are still in the dark about the genocide of the Australian aborigines, and we arestill blind and deaf to other acts of sadistic brutality that are committed in these verydays even within the field of view of our media’s cameras.