Auschwitz - 80 years since it was liberated. Have any lessons been learnt?

[cakeorwine]

On Monday 27th Jan, it will be 80 years since Auschwitz was liberated by Russian soldiers.

Despite the Nazis best efforts to destroy evidence, Auschwitz is a haunting place to visit. You can see the rooms with human hair in, the suitcases, the shoes. The cells where people were forced to stand and starved. The gallows. The gas chambers and the crematoria. The railway line and the platform where people were divided into those who would enter Auschwitz and those who would walk to the gas chambers.

1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz including 1 million Jews.

Others were forced into slave labour and to live in horrendous conditions.

The commander lived very near the camp - and was hanged several years afterwards near the gas chambers.

https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn8x195dnlro

Have we learnt anything? There seems more division, more hate, more othering.

There are lessons from history about the rise of the Nazis and what led up to the concentration camps and the Holocaust.

I think in my generation they were. We (born early 1960s) were brought up by parents and grandparents who were in not one but both world wars. Everyone was against war, and the senseless loss of life was still discussed by ordinary people. People now are very worryingly beginning to forget.

I agree. I think many people take peace for granted

What's difficult to understand about "I agree"? Although I would say "Israel" rather than Israeli Jews".

Well given that the post you agree with was deleted I was wondering if its the antisemitic one you were agreeing with.

Far right ideology is certainly getting a foothold across Europe now that globally speaking other economies are on the rise. At times of economic difficulty, populist leaders with divisive rhetoric do well.

The UK does talk a lot of shit about WWII though. We didn't go into the war to liberate the death camps, that was incidental. We went into it to protect our and our allies' territorial and economic interests (and btw in the process our wartime propaganda machine used much the same language about Germans as Nazis used about Jews - I'm not going to repeat it but a famous example is one about a dead German). Not that there's anything wrong with that, that's why all wars happen.

But we've somehow since then decided that it was some kind of moral crusade and that we're the good guys - plucky little Britain standing alone and brave against the evil Nazis which isn't accurate in the slightest. But once you start seeing the actions of a nation state in such simplistic terms, rather than looking at political and economic expediency, once you start the good guy/bad guy incoherent moralistic narrative, then you open yourself right up to populism, and it's everywhere now.

I'm similar age and while we had relative peace in Europe much of the rest of the world was in violent turmoil with numerous genocides - Zanzibar, Guatemala, Cambodia, Viet Nam, Bangladesh, Nigeria / Biafra etc.

Because our government and media institutions support this genocide.
The German government - who should know better- have armed Israel and fully support this Genocide. Whereas that is not the case in Sudan-

Yeah sure...

The more I read this, the more it makes no sense.

So you believe the holocaust and the situation in Gaza are comparable because the UK is an ally with Israel?

The first concentration camp was established in the 1898 Boer war. All humans are capable of atrocities. We need to understand why and how humans can be consumed by hate and complicity, and educate ourselves to regulate our mass response.

There seems to be a trend now for denigrating what Britain did during WW2 and the implication that we were almost as bad as the Nazis. @HauntedBungalow 's post is an example of this.
My parents and my inlaws lived through WW2 and saw some terrible things caused by Nazi Germany and were deeply affected for the rest of their lives by this. They are long gone and the ignorance about what constituted genuine Nazi society is astounding, what older generations experienced is being forgotten or twisted. The words Nazi and far right seem to be bandied about as a cheap insult with no idea what it actually means. Trump will be gone in four years and he's nothing like Hitler whose supporters routinely tortured or murdered anyone who laughed at or criticised Hitler.
I'd recommend "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" which was written by someone who lived in 1930s Germany and saw the infiltration of Nazi views in society and Hitler's warmongering. I'd also recommend a recent TV documentary series "1933" about the lives of ordinary people: can't remember which channel. Too many people just now are incapable of literary comprehension and nuanced thinking, this is so worrying.
There's also too many pro Palestine propagandists on this thread repeating the tedious crap they post on other threads.

I've clarified my position you can "wonder" until the cows come home if you like.

I think the idea that the Holocaust would be the last atrocity was naive at best.

The drift to the liberal left which was a strange self-imposed censorship of free speech and hierarchy of weakness, with the weakest in top of the pyramid has been met by a reaction, pushing us back towards fascism.

Hopefully we can settle somewhere in the middle.

But human beings are tribal aggressive apes, and I don’t think that will change. The people who understand the potent warning of the Holocaust aren’t the same people who will start the next one.

So you agree with the antisemitic post, you would just word it in a way that is slightly less explicitly antisemitic?

That is quite a confused mishmash, and listed as though they are all disparate, accurately portrayed, and that "we" have somehow all been complicit.

Most people on earth, the majority, have learned, and rejected, and want to live peacefully.

All world leaders can now agree to act together for the greater good (as in, genuinely good), and stop the manipulated hatred and death and destruction and armed conflict

Excellent post @HauntedBungalow

No Government is above criticism including Israel - if you disagree with that statement then tells us all we need to know about you. I will defend my right to criticise the actions of any Government in the world - including the UK. When it becomes a crime to criticise a Government then we are all doomed.

Criticising Israel for genocide and ethnic cleansing is not anti semitic, no matter how much you protest it is.

That’s because there isn't genocide in Gaza. If it was genocide in any sensible meaning of the word, the Israelis would have killed more than 50,000 (which includes Hamas members) in the last 15 months. It’s a war. In a war the weaker side suffer more losses.

But I don’t defend the Israeli actions in the West Bank.

Sorry, could you please point out where I said no government is beyond criticism and criticising the Israeli government is antisemitism? I must have completely forgot doing it.

What Britain and America are doing in supporting the genocidal bombing and starvation campaign in Gaza is plain old nasty colonialism writ large - whilst trying to pretend it's not them, it's those people over there, the Israelis who are wholly responsible and we keep telling the Israeli government to be more prudent, and let food trucks in etc but they don't listen, we are supporting them reluctantly. This whilst talking up anti-muslim, humanity-depleting rhetoric in order to bring about mass consensus and justification for their inexcusable actions at population level.

They are exploiting and aiding and abetting Israeli fear, and my prediction is that once their reputation in the world is fully shot to pieces and their global soft power is completely depleted and the stated objectives have been reached or realisation dawns that they are not actually reachable after all, they'll do what they've always historically done and attempt to wash their hands and remake their image, whilst throwing the main vehicle of their apparatus under the bus. Already the backlash hasn't been towards Americans or Europeans. No the backlash is a rise in anti-Semitism towards Jewish people. All Jewish people are taking the blame whether they support the genocide or not. That is scary. It is also scary that hating muslims is becoming an everyday occurrence. I've been shocked at some of the posts that MN has permitted here.

I actually despair at this thread. Any thread like this turns into Gaza. The loss of life in Gaza is dreadful. As is the loss of life in many other countries at the moment. There are other genocides taking place.

But what we also need to talk about is the rise of populism in the west and the ascent of extreme far right wing governments such as in Austria, Hungary and now the US. We are experiencing a real threat to democracy. Until people are willing to talk about this, I do not see the threat declining.

Some posters on these threads regularly accuse people supporting Israel as supporting killing of children, genocide etc. I have read the posts. Some appear to be hoping for conflict and engage in it on these threads. Anyone can see these posts.

There are threads that are a small number or posters basically just listing everything they can find to show Israel bad and everyone that supports Israel as having the right to exist to blame for every death, and Palestinian all blameless and innocent. It's very narrow through that lens. Others will constantly post about anything they assume the supporters of Israel must agree with because they haven't condemn it personally on a particular thread. Again not worth the effort really. Blinkered and assumptions made as a mass.

I'm not going to get into an argument about whether it's genocide or not, but your focus on numbers is spurious - the definition is about intent and does not need to include any deaths at all, for instance through "Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part".

If it doesn’t have to include any deaths at all, where does the -cide bit come in? And who decides how big the "part" has to be? In any case, that definition is meaningless as it would apply to any attempt to destroy an enemy, even if the enemy attacked you regularly and you were just fighting back and trying to prevent future attacks.