Holocaust Day

Holocaust Day. Six million Jews, Romanies, and Communists exterminated by Fascism, the ideology of hatred and control, the ideology of the Master Race, the ideology of militarism, institutional paranoia and intolerance.

One of the motivations that enabled people to survive the camps was the thought "The world has got to know about this". For the survivors, the existence and activities of holocaust denialists must be an intolerably bitter challenge.

The only consolation to be drawn from the Holocaust is that humanity should have learned from it. Sadly, 70 years after Hitler's psychosis became dominant in a nation, right wing parties are once more emerging from the swamp, the control motif rules in Whitehall, and everywhere militarism is viewed, not as the problem, but the solution.

The gravest irony is that the Israeli State, peopled by the prime victims of the Holocaust, are now behaving in a way that is horrendously parallel to the actions of the Nazis. Ethnic cleansing, ghettoes, herding children into a building and then firing on it...

Critics of Israel have to understand that the Jewish people have been through a collective trauma. Threats to the right of Israel to exist are perceived as threats of a Second Holocaust, and therefore bring out the Never Again reaction, and absolute counter attack. I believe this explains why an otherwise intelligent nation has acted with such ill-considered violence in Gaza.

From the Holocaust we have to learn that social control and militarism is the problem, not the solution. And from Gaza we have to learn that an eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind.