by Robert Wilkinson
Today is the day we remember that some things must happen “Never Again.”
From Wikipedia:
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is an international memorial day on 27 January commemorating the victims of the Holocaust. It commemorates the genocide that resulted in the death of an estimated 6 million Jewish people, 2 million Romani people, 250,000 mentally and physically disabled people, and 9,000 homosexual men by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. It was designated by the United Nations General Assembly resolution 60/7 on 1 November 2005 during the 42nd plenary session. The resolution came after a special session was held earlier that year on 24 January 2005 during which the United Nations General Assembly marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps and the end of the Holocaust.Resolution 60/7 establishing 27 January as International Holocaust Remembrance Day urges every member nation of the U.N. to honor the memory of Holocaust victims, and encourages the development of educational programs about Holocaust history to help prevent future acts of genocide. It rejects any denial of the Holocaust as an event and condemns all manifestations of religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief. It also calls for actively preserving the Holocaust sites that served as Nazi death camps, concentration camps, forced labor camps and prisons, as well as for establishing a U.N. programme of outreach and mobilization of society for Holocaust remembrance and education….
The essence of the text lies in its twofold approach: one that deals with the memory and remembrance of those who were massacred during the Holocaust, and the other with educating future generations of its horrors.
The International Day in memory of the victims of the Holocaust is thus a day on which we must reassert our commitment to human rights. [...] We must also go beyond remembrance, and make sure that new generations know this history. We must apply the lessons of the Holocaust to today’s world. And we must do our utmost so that all peoples may enjoy the protection and rights for which the United Nations stands.— Message by Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon for the second observance of the Holocaust Victims Memorial Day on 19 January 2008
While genocide is still an ugly part of the human heritage of fear against “the other,” in the coming era we will look back at this sort of barbaric mass murder as a symptom of the toxicity of the human past when our bodies, feelings, and minds refused to listen to our Souls even though we knew better. While there is still widespread destruction of various living creatures on our fragile Earth, and we seem to be on the edge of another mass extinction of countless species on our planet, there are millions of us who will never approve of, nor participate in, the vile stench of genocide.
Ultimately we are one race: the human race. We have no business exterminating one another, nor exterminating the many beautiful creatures that we’re supposed to coexist with in peaceful and productive ways. Genocidal thinking has no place on our Earth.
When enough realize that what hurts one hurts us all, we shall make war no more. We shall have our differences, but will never tolerate mass murder as a result of a fearful delusion. Never again should millions suffer because of the delusion that genocide is anything but an abomination. Never again!
© Copyright 2020 Robert Wilkinson
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