This date, succeeding better than that loudly (and more immediately) proclaimed by president Roosevelt as one which would "live in infamy", marked in its infancy by the liberation, release and reinauguration of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, has been observed with increasing vigour as surrogate voices of the damned and negated are evidently carried on, with decreasing frequency, by their luckier - at any rate, breathing - peers, whose lives would nevertheless go into a lifelong encapsulating of a truth now known to all, to bear witness to that which surely no one would question...?
On this severity, the last and greater Israeli Nasi HaMedina, then about 90 and soon to celebrate a full term as head of a nation only approaching conception and nativity as the gates of barbarity swung definitively open openly quipped that while the massacres of the Armenians only a sibling-space before his own birth would have been a very fresh wound, its butchers and torturers and killers still very much alive and already (and certainly now) forgotten, despite brave and sometimes relentless efforts of diplomats such as Henry Morgenthau Senior (the man whose breed would threaten to repay the Germans in kind) and Erwin Scheubner-Richtner, the only person to play a role of note (if rather symbolic and very posthumously in the latter case) of the Armenian and German cases of this very intense exercise in barbarity. (I'm sorry, I said "Armenian", surely I meant Ottoman-Turkish-Caliphian?)
On the Austro-German case - what we may call the Holocaust - we need not fear the oblivion of disinterest, being a seminal event ventriloquised in films and series every year, echoing strong even in the minds of those of scant education (in our part of the world, to be preciser). For now, that is.
Having become, one must pronounce, a hagiographic symbol of depravity, destruction and debasement of a great culture and language, perhaps even of evil (if such a thing exists, and can be measured) but also of hope and wisdom and redemption - if not by its commissioners, at least sometimes by its many profiteers - we do pronounce the most fundamental verdict of these first qualities on anyone perceived wanting to reanimate or destroy the society we now inhabit through the very mention of these doctrines which nearly brought it to a (supposedly definite) halt, or synthesis?
Beginning with a condemnation of late Nasi Peres for having - feloniously, were he to set his foot in the wrong country, in want of the this office of "prince" - negated and denied the genocidal claims well established (here we must credit aforementioned Scheubner-Richtner, as well as the Morgenthau name bearing the resemblance plan of reducing Germany from its piedestal of nationhood as well as military power) but perhaps not so well as expressed through the same act of hagiography against the Ottoman regime repeated on a designated date annually, we may as well proceed to the wider, as well as far narrower, debate on the Holocaust or, as Raul Hilberg christened it in his 1961 seminal work, the Destruction (Förintelsen) of the European Jews - incomplete, mayhaps, but behold the figures and you get a grim measurement of success. The role of this first genocide-so-christened during its commission in the politico-cultural struggles of this next century and new millennium, in soon-christened Israel and in commenting recent events and procedures (and occasional swift repression) in Germany. Whereas the liberal crowd most eager to single out die NS-Regime, Nazi-ism and a kaleidoscope ostensibly fascist movements, including the rare self-affiliated, but often excluding the most powerful derivate, al-Ba'ath (nationalism being, after all, a kettle best be judged by its colour) as a unique evil bent on resurface, thus urging its most fanatic opponents to don a gown of the unique intuition of prophecy and, above all, mobilisation of all fulfilling their human need and duty to combat it, whether to either the apocalypse of annihilation continuously, until their own.
This hagiography of tears, understandably aroused against a unique, in its own kind, of severity of barbarous conduct, taking place in the heart of Europe until then (or at least until the rise of the literal Generation of 1914 who were, about 1941, prepared to consummate its ideals) regarded as the apex not only of its own loins, but all human civilisation, with preponderance of cruelty both individual and institutional (today we might say "structural", to escape the distinctions as well as uphold them) through a comprehensive plan - I should say this now, not one I believe was consummated in 1919 or 1923 or 1933 or even in 1939, but rather with increasing intensity and determination through a havocial bureaucracy of competing as much as institutional joint action octopusically subjected to an apex grasped by a-mind-as-twisted-as-ingenious - was enough to merit longtime and near-universal condemnation even without the merits of Hilberg, and Bauer, van Pelt, Aly, and their less distinguished compatriots (Dawidowicz, Goldhagen, Cesarani) for as long as the memory of man, and even more woman, endures. Its stories, such as that of Maksymilian Kolbe, and its legends, including that of the soap, will be retold for centuries even given a nuclear decimation far outweighing it, and then perhaps its relevance. But after, admitted through the same breath of condemnation, is a fear; what to do with it once it is mere story, reduced to letter, footnote and - the difference enveloping 20th century genocides - photography?
On this I have no definite answer, other that just as the name Hitler, or even "Adolf", was never so strong as never to justify comparison with the long-standing fear of Attila, Genghis khan, and "the Swedes" - long after the last struggling breath of a Swede that once may have breached the gates of Prague. (Without an ounce of pride, I must observe the name of "Heydrich" has not quite acquired this rare sobriquet in Bohemia, nor will it carry it in the next century.) Nevertheless, compassion for the many unknown victims of the Taiping movement, or the ghastly and equally openly committed - and financed - rubber terror of the Congo - both matching both the death toll and arbitrary cruelty of the death camps, and surpassing them in zeal and avarice - or the broader colonial abuses of the time of The Scramble, or the Mongol invasions - a neat whisper, at most, but bearing testimony of millions put to death at the knife, millions only at the wrecked and pitiful city of Mary one day in 1221, seven hundred and one score years before the consolidation of Nazi doctrine and genocidal reality into open Vernichtung - would seem just as warranted. And now, perhaps, pointless. Perhaps wrongly thought so. Perhaps ignored at out own peril. Perhaps.
What to do, then, with those who would air the disgusting, and potentially disastrous view that it did not occur? One would, or should be careful to take tongues, as the dwarf presupposed, and in our civilised and connected world, one possibly cannot but without generating a maelstrom of (un)warranted attention, followed by more condemnation that the act of repression was so soundly condemned from among the throng it was supposedly cursing, misleading or even proposing, in fact, to exterminate. Nor will petty "peaceful" efforts work very well practically, or morally. Depriving a Google guest of curiosity the ability to find - hardening the task, I should say - sources of information where the word of systematic mass murder is omitted does not make his mind more clearly set in favour of truth. Nor does it even serve good. After the webpage mentioned ensured nobody entering the first letters of "did the Holocaust happen", the algorithms reconnected this small effort to sources (quotation marks, if you can see them) debating to discrediting to outright denouncing the less firmly established Holodomor instead.
But on the great question of severity, we must not falter nor linger in long moments of doubt. I have always reasoned that the minds of Swedes, waking to the reality of the house - or at least the house opposite the street - being ransacked by foreign, if well-recognisable police officers, a foster father or long-loved elder brother being dragged out writhing, spitting, kicking the chains to rattle, then the subsequent inevitable - as it must have been seen then, and thus leaving less open the question of sordid Siegerjustiz, compelling as Herr Skorzeny's lawyer, or any Japanese burgher of the once ancient city of Nagasaki may have understood it - trial and tribulations out of the courtroom, as particularly interesting, as opposed to finding out - as the New York Times did, already during the first war to end all wars - that Russia, the great obstacle not only to the Carolean Army but civilisation and decency and, in time, constitutional government itself, had carried its grim, Dark Age prejudice and tradition of annual bloodshed into a feast of slaughter enveloping millions, and at any rate of truth a daily rate, of its subjects. Whether the Anglo-Saxon notion of the "Hun", moving this frontier of barbarity far westward of what may have intimated Peter the Great, the ransacker of Belgium, committer (quite verily) of grim colonial era crimes that may have inspired Hitler as much as the, forever questioned, Armenian question and its attempt at finality in resolving, aggressor in numerous European wars touching continents far beyond its shores, militaristic pugnacious Prussian factory of lethal weapons and of hard men fit only to utilise them, is a more compelling question. But whereas the crimes of Cambodians and Rwandians and Serbs - particularly the Serbs, of the former Yugoslav nations - are being yet investigated, perhaps to a conclusion, the guilt of the Teutons having now firmly been established and soon in a position meriting only posthumous research, seems to bear everlasting. When, and why not, go on arraigning the dead over the dead? As far as this ritual goes, it would seem an almost arbitrary point to end it. But still,
This barbarity, so christened (and here without quotation marks) as a symbol of everlasting condemnation as emotional as factual, may thus consciously be dropped with the wailing of the winds and the eventual decay - not physical - of the camps into objects of the long-lost and ancient, just as the names of Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Mary Trostenets, even Treblinka, where nigh a million souls savour unsteady rest in grounds where a pellet of the infamous Zyklon B may never have been released, and let alone the ditches and copses where so many perished without passers-through having a neuron to spare in their once-existence, have now gone into near-equal oblivion for all but the peculiarly interested. Just as the Colosseum, its high hopes and excitement as well as the monstrous crimes committed within it have been reduced to less than the state of the Armenians or Congolese mentioned, a mere spectacle of distant history, how may we fear, striving clear of the word "confront" here, that the barracks, the train tracks, the once-electrified fences, will not face the same oblivion? Well, just as the mention that war was never to be after the second (the numerals here spoiling their hopes in the very mind) we cannot be sure that generations unborn, including of the progeny of these camps - and of the benefactors who then lived and chose differently - will not go on and on ceasing to care. While Jewish history, admirably, has a quality to ratify and reiterate the pains of the past, this one marking as powerful a piece as those witnessed in the age of Mordecai, Josephus and Spinoza, that Schindler of Judaism itself, and thus making it as immortal as itself, the difference in the hagiographic and historical, in the ancient sense, is pressing. Thus this intensified urge to condemn, to press charges, to confront (without many sentences of commemoration, let alone independent thought) in order to remember that which in the closest years did hardly even have a name apart from that still recognised in these parts as "the war", and just as fervently, with a whimper of indifference, will be the going-on to succeed it. On the day when not seventy-five but one hundred years have passed since the opening of the gates and the release of barbarity into the passages and annals of debate and commemorance, the fiftieth anniversary seeming close indeed, there will still be people left to stand, assisted, to talk and tell the stories of how their lives could have ended so much sooner, but already at this point the memory will seem aged and already fit to be put in the earth, along its antecedents and descendants in the exercise in barbarity. Whether this finally restores us to humanity or increases aforementioned fears, uttered at least as verbal prophecy and surely not as hasty rhetoric, regarding its repetition I cannot say; only that the lesson from the second war was more sobering and fitted for the human existence than those exercised and the deeds committed in the wakes of - the painstaking alterations of the freely debated, at the expense of boredom - proverbial first.
