Many Genocides To Be Commemorated On Holocaust Memorial Day

By Trevor Grundy
Religion News Service

CANTERBURY, England (RNS/ENInews) After the Nazi slaughter of 6 million Jews during World War II, the world cried out "never again." But one of Britain's best-known young rabbis, Jonathan Romain, said the phrase has proved tragically wrong.

"Genocide has happened again and again and again," he told ENInews ahead of Thursday's (Jan. 27) Holocaust Memorial Day observances 66 years after the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.

"We only have to think about Biafra, Bosnia, Darfur and there are other examples," said Romain, a leading spokesman for Reform Judaism in the United Kingdom. "The list is deeply depressing and screams out that Holocaust Memorial Day is needed as much now as ever before."

Survivors and mourners have been asked by the Holocaust Memorial Trust in London to remember victims of other mass killings -- the Democratic Republic of Congo, where 5.4 million people have been killed since 1998; Cambodia, where an estimated 1.7 million were murdered by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979; the Bosnian war in the 1990s that claimed at least 98,000 lives; Burundi, with 50,000 deaths in 1993 and Rwanda, which saw 800,000 deaths in 1994 due to tribal conflict.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams emphasized this year's theme of "lost stories."

"If the stories are not told over and again, we lose the memory of those who suffered and we risk losing something that protects our humanity ... I commend for our remembrance the untold stories of Jewish people living in Britain during the medieval era, those of the Holocaust and the stories from the genocidal tragedies of many other contexts in our deeply damaged world today," he said in a statement.

Comments

[demsrsilly]

07:09 AM on 01/28/2011

Good thing we have had the UN to stop genocides since WW2. Oh wait.......

[merlinspinoza]

10:25 PM on 01/27/2011

My comment to Brad Hirschfield : the good rabbi read http://www­.huffingto­npost.com/­2011/01/26­/many-geno­cides-comm­emorat_n_8­14492.html and became incensed

maybe rabbi buckfeld will join me in starting a green ribbon campaighn to commemorat­e the planet

or a campaighn to restore 6 000 monastarie­s in Tibet destroyed by China

no doubt the holocaust is unique and thank god [ Alexander the " great " did kill one million people in one single city in a rage and accomplish­ed nothing; the allies under mad bomber Harris killed 138 000 in the bombing of Dresden and accomplish­ed nothing ]

50 000 000 people died in WW2 1500 cities and towns destroyed , most likely more than 6 000 000 germans killed [ and 13 000 000 german refugees flooding into " west " germany after the war from allover eastern europe ] and rememberin­g that accomplish­es nothing ; rememberin­g 9/11 accomplish­es nothing except excessive brutality in iraq and afghanista­n [ ditto gaza]

[merlinspinoza]

09:39 PM on 01/27/2011

and after 1959 6 000 Buddhist monasteries destroyed in Tibet

more importantly remember what could have prevented the tragedies. do we have the consciousness now to prevent the tragedies

Archbishop of canterbury has not a single clue about how to prevent tragedies nor does king henry the 8th nor the dalai lama nor the good rabbi

people important people who ignore the availability for the fist time in 3000 years of groups of yogic flyers are guilty of not preventing tragedies

[David Redding]

01:10 PM on 01/27/2011

The Holocaust Memorials and Remembrance Day is about propagating Jewish Exceptionalism, not about raising awareness or preventing genocide of non-jews. How else can you explain their treatment of those in Gaza or US/Israeli treatment of civilians in Iraq, Afganistan, etc.

[KIVPossum]

01:31 PM on 01/27/2011

Those topics are best discussed seperately.

[theseusofaustralia]

02:33 PM on 01/27/2011

you are so biggoted, not all jews support zionism. NOt all jews support their governments practices. do you support the increase rates of neonatal cancers in iraq?

[horseguards]

07:42 PM on 01/27/2011

But the largest beneficiaries of the US are zionists, eg AIPAC.

[LloydDrako]

01:01 PM on 01/27/2011

Memo to the Irish: get over it.

Whatever may have happened earlier, by 1900 the British government was bending over backward to appease the Irish.

Except as regards the Crown itself, there was no longer any legal discrimination against Irish or Catholics in the UK, land tenure and rent structures were in the process of being reformed,and Ireland was actually over-represented in the British Parliament.

Home Rule was at the point of being implemented in 1914, over the objections of Protestant Ulster and all indications are that it would have satisfied the legitimate desires of most of the Irish people .

But a handful of fanatics insisted on stabbing the country in the back at Easter 1916, the British reacted with understandable force--after all, this was in the middle of World War I--and after 1918 Irish nationalists turned to terror where insurrection had failed, providing a template for violent minorities ever since. And they kept at it for another 80 years, first in the South and later in the North.

Thanks a lot.

[Judithmo]

01:40 PM on 01/27/2011

By 1900? What? The British government was still occupying the entire island of Ireland in 1900. Why should there have been any representation whatsoever by the Irish in the British Parliament? The Irish are not British.

[LloydDrako]

02:30 PM on 01/27/2011

Of course, you're right, the Irish are not British. Still, don't you wonder what might have happened if World War I had not broken out when it did?

In July 1914 Home Rule had been passed for the third time and was about to receive the royal assent. The German invasion of Belgium provided the British government with a perfectly valid reason, not just an excuse, to put the Irish question on hold. The expectation was that the war would be short and that by the time it was over, the blowhards in Ulster would have had time to reflect and climb down from their high horse.

Had this happened, the result would probably have been Home Rule within the UK, devolving eventually into "dominion" status akin to that of Canada or Australia, and with much less suffering for the Irish people, and without the galling split between North and South.

Three-quarters of Irish voters had voted for the Home Rule party in 1910; what sign was there before 1916 or even 1918 that any great number of them wanted complete independence, aka the republic? Whatever the past, and whatever the cultural peculiarities that set Ireland apart from Scotland or England (itself a bit of a conglomerate), Ireland in 1800-1922 was an integral part of the UK as much as California or Texas was an integral part of the US.

Had it not been for Pearse and his wecking crew, it might happily remain so today.

[counterpart76]

12:29 PM on 01/27/2011

Funny how they don't mention how the Brits policy killed off 2 million Irish during the Potato Famine in the 1800's.

[Freedomaphile]

12:50 PM on 01/27/2011

We got a lot more than that, American Indians, during the same period.

Not even counting the 50 million or so we got with the spread of infectious disease.

[Raccoon1]

12:27 PM on 01/27/2011

Picture caption: Ah, mawwiage, what is mawwiage?

[Soma99]

12:19 PM on 01/27/2011

Future holocaust preventer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9WVZddH9w

[notfooledbyu]

12:15 PM on 01/27/2011

I choose this day to remember the brave Christians slaughtered by the Romans, the First and Forgotten Holocaust.

[Freedomaphile]

12:52 PM on 01/27/2011

Hardly the first.

[Santamonicaboulevard]

02:08 PM on 01/27/2011

The world may have been a saner place today if the Romans had only bought more lions.

[conservicide]

02:36 PM on 01/27/2011

Eliminating christianity better or worse for violence in history? close call.

[syntax facit saltum]

02:26 AM on 01/28/2011

That would have been a non-violent solution and have prevented the anti-religious bloodbaths of the 20th century that took place in many communist countries.

[nycpaladin]

12:39 PM on 01/27/2011

Good point.

[KIVPossum]

01:32 PM on 01/27/2011

Which one? There were many

[Fein]

11:55 AM on 01/27/2011

I applaud this initiative to depoliticize human suffering for the benefit of any one culture.

[DC]

12:40 PM on 01/27/2011

it is a good start.

[kentah]

12:56 PM on 01/27/2011

Well said.

[Ancrum]

11:51 AM on 01/27/2011

The photo of the Archbishop of Canterbury only underlines the dramatic absence of the sustained and reenforced attempts of the Crown, with the Church of England right in the middle, to destroy the Irish people and culture over a period of at least two hundred years. Genocide is not merely about lining up bodies in front of machine guns and gas chambers; it involves destroying cultural institutions such as, in the case of Ireland, banks, trade guilds, shipping and the law. And as we have done in the US with African Americans and with the Native Americans, creating a mythology about these people that suggests that they are too primitive and/or dangerous to rule themselves or anyone else. The Church of England has much to account for. One successful or near successful genocide (namely the Irish) teaches other groups how far they can go in wiping out populations. Also, a related subject: the multi generational psychological damage in targeted groups. We are still blaming the grandchildren of victims for depression, alcoholism, and self sabotage.

[palainausa]

12:09 PM on 01/27/2011

The Irish are so often overlooked.

[KDMac]

12:12 PM on 01/27/2011

And the Scots.

[LloydDrako]

01:21 PM on 01/27/2011

Not to make light of any deliberately inflicted mass human suffering anywhere at any time, but should we not make a distinction between "small g" and "capital G" genocides?

The British would have been happy if the Irish had abandoned their dream of independence, learned to speak "proper" English and converted to Protestantism.

American racists would have been happy if African-Americans had willingly accepted the "benefits" of slavery and if Native Americans had moved away or assimilated to white ways.

The Nazis would not have been happy until every last Jew was dead; not so much their cultural as their very biological extermination was the manifest intent of the "final solution" after 1941.

Honor the dead and do your best to stop both sorts of genocide, but let the Jews keep the commemoration of the Holocaust as separate and distinctive, because it really was!

[Judithmo]

01:53 PM on 01/27/2011

You did make light of the 500 years of colonial domination and cultural suppression of the Irish by the British in your previous post by telling the Irish to "get over it."

[horseguards]

08:05 PM on 01/27/2011

There were also 6 million plus non-Jews who died in the camps.
"The Nazis would not have been happy until every last Jew was dead" and also the Soviets who lost 20 million.
Where is the distinction?

And I doubt we (the English) have much claim to glory. Heavy bombing of civilian areas, eg Dresden, was central to the RAF's (Bomber Harris's) strategy'.

[mycall8]

11:48 AM on 01/27/2011

Freedom fighters or terrorists..... Depends on the perspective. Obama wins the nobel peace prize while conducting unneccesary wars. Now the pontiffs chime in against the holocaust, With God on Their side, it's even worse ! How convenient amnesia is and as the victorious get to write own selected version of history. Not to deny the suffering of the holocaust.... The Catholic Church slaughtered far more than the Nazis, of course, they had more time to do it..... then there's the biblical exodus to the promised land..... failing to note that there were previous occupants living there at the time, so slaughtering every man, woman & child along the way was justified with God on their side.... oh the hypocrisy smells of rotting flesh in the desert sun... Let Love Rule then there need be no further suffering Amen Amen

[conservicide]

02:37 PM on 01/27/2011

Obama is republican on fiscal matters, democrat on things that don't matter or are free of charge so to speak, like 'don't ask don't tell'.

[ssmigs]

11:45 AM on 01/27/2011

We have genocide around us constantly. Some regimes have been more successful at killing their fellow man (i.e. Hitler, Pol Pot, Milosevic, Jorgic), others do it more incrementally with each missile, bomb and bullet that inflicts collateral damage. To the dead it makes no difference.

[Kansas1]

11:41 AM on 01/27/2011

The most common factor of all genocides is "idealism." The powerful group thinks their way is the only way and all others are unacceptible & must be eliminated. Religion is often a factor.