1984
Who Are The Guilty?
T. SHER SINGH
I had an opportunity to revisit the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., USA, the other day … years after I went through it briefly once, rushed by time constraints and overwhelmed by its contents.
This time around, I devoted all the time it needed -- several hours -- to go through it, room by room, exhibit by exhibit, making sure I missed nary a word nor image.
What can I say that you don’t already know?
It is terribly sad and painful. You feel leaden as you drag your feet from one display to the next, weighed down by the sheer horror of what we do to each other.
Since I had set aside the whole day for it and was in no hurry, I had time to reflect and digest. To swallow my tears and stifle my sobs. Not because there were any surprises, but because there were no surprises.
However, I have purposely waited more than a week to pen my thoughts, though, because I wanted them to be untainted by anger or despair.
My heart is still, my emotions in check, as I reflect on what I felt that day. But things look no different now than what I saw. I learnt nothing new. Humanity has always behaved badly, and continues to do so to this very day. We maim and kill and rape and pillage … and then, we die. Never, ever, as a species, do we seriously think about the futility of all that we do. We ultimately achieve nothing, make no progress, and make everyone miserable in the process. Especially ourselves.
There’s an oft expressed emotion throughout the museum: the hope that we’ll learn from its reminders and banish such crimes for ever.
Alas, nothing could be further from reality. Our inhumanity to each other continues unabated. Not a trace of a change or shift. If anything is different, it’s the novel ways in which we learn to harm ourselves … which, ultimately, are mere variations of the old.
Nelson Mandela, the giant who helped end one of the recent ignominious chapters in the saga of Man, died last week. I marvel at how quickly so many have rushed forward to bask in his glory.
A planeload of American Presidents has flown to South Africa to attend Mandela’s memorial service. It deftly hides the fact that it was America that opposed Mandela for years, labelling him a terrorist, while playing footsie with the merchants of apartheid.
The same America -- and Canada! -- that turned away the ocean liner MS St Louis from its shores in 1939, sending back its 937 Jewish refugees to Europe, many of them to die in Hitler’s concentration camps.
Even today, the likes of that great walking zombie, Dick Cheney -- a one-time lieutenant of the other fount of self-righteousness, Ronald Reagan, who subsequently played Mephistopheles to George W. Bush's Satan! -- continues to rant and rave against the acclaim and honour Mandela is receiving posthumously, by still referring to him as a ’terrorist’.
Imagine, Cheney labelling another soul, any soul in this world, a ’terrorist’!
Thus, the children of those who liberated Auschwitz went on to turn a blind eye to the crimes of apartheid …until it became fashionable to shake hands with Mandela.
They are the ones who also starved and tortured and bombed hundreds of thousands of innocents in Palestine and Iraq, to name but two examples.
I was particularly taken by a line in the museum, asking us to beware of getting sanitized by mere statistics, that it wasn’t just a million murders, it was the same murder repeated a million times!
So true.
The mass-murders of 1984, and during the decade that followed -- in many ways, they continue to this day! -- across the length and breadth of India: are they any different?
They’re neither better nor worse. The holocaust has simply become a continuum in our lives.
And so has our complicity.
The mass-murderers, the authors of the pogroms in India -- whether they be Congress members or BJP or RSS -- are allowed even by the free world to walk free. Why? Because trade with India, selling widgets to its free-breeding hundreds of millions, is considered the more attractive option.
The US has been brave in banning mass-murderer Narendra Modi from its shores. But will that change if and when he gets elected so that a small coterie of corporations and greedy individuals can become richer and the country gets runs into the ground?
It’s no excuse that India is a democracy -- and not just because India is one in name only.
One of the most poignant messages I got from my day at the Holocaust Museum was the total complicity of the German people in the crimes of the Nazis. Those who elected them into power. Those who supported them and their infrastructure. Those who looked the other way. Those who did nothing.
Someone has rightly pointed out … and there is evidence galore to back it up without any ifs and buts … that if you didn’t stand up and speak out against the holocaust, or do SOMETHING to oppose it, then you were part of the collective crime.
And, to no small degree.
It was you who made it possible.
Exactly the way everyone in India who did not lift a finger to help the victims or catch the criminals of 1984, is absolutely, completely complicit in the crimes against humanity. There are no ifs and buts. No humming and ha-ing. No excuses.
Furthermore, you’ve had three decades to show your colours. If you still haven’t done anything to ensure the delivery of justice, you might as well have joined the mobs in New Delhi who set fire to the innocent in broad daylight on the streets of the God-forsaken land.
That’s the lesson of the Nazi Holocaust.
But have we understood it?
December 10, 2013
Conversation about this article
1: Baljit Singh Pelia (Los Angeles, California, USA), December 10, 2013, 3:14 PM.
The 'Collective Conscience' is selfish and it discriminates. After they have achieved power, it evaporates and is oblivious to the suffering of others. Rather, they become perpetrators of, or complicit in the very crimes they were victims of.
2: Ajit Singh Batra (Pennsville, New Jersey, USA), December 11, 2013, 1:15 PM.
Mohandas Gandhi once said: "My sympathies are all with Jews. I have known them in South Africa. But my sympathies do not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. Palestine belongs to Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct." Gandhi said this in the year 1945 and the same appears to conveyed in your message.
3: H. Kaur (Canada), December 13, 2013, 4:04 AM.
I'm reading a book for young people that older people can enjoy too, "The Tiger in the Well." It is by Phillip Pullman, a best-selling British author. Though fiction and with multiple themes, there is a strong theme involving the exploitation of Jewish refugees in England and other places after they fled from the pogroms against Jews in the 1880s in Russia. The holocaust was just the end result of all the hate against the Jewish people and of course aided by some political events and the common patterns of scapegoating minorities during economically challenging times. Ironically the Jewish man who saw the need for a Jewish state for the safety of the Jewish people decades before Hitler came along, was ridiculed by most of his Jewish contemporaries though of course he is well respected in Israel now. It is strange how the Indians in power attack the Sikhs, not just physically and economically but also psychologically too all the time.
4: GC Singh (USA), December 17, 2013, 10:58 AM.
In another attempt to rub salt into our wounds, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has just released a postal stamp honoring the mass murderer and butcher of Punjab - former Chief Minister Beant Singh. I remember Manmohan Singh was also sent to pay tributes to HKL Bhagat, the leader of the mobs who murdered thousands of innocent Sikhs in trans Jamuna colonies of Delhi.