The Inauguration and the Historical Spectre of Genocide

Have we ever seen such a sea of people? Some million souls joining together on the Washington Mall in solemn, prideful and joyous celebration of a new administration in the hope of a new direction for the nation and for the world. Wishful thinking, misguided optimism, perhaps. But given the dimensions of history and failures that are engulfing the present generation the power of that yearning becomes its own beacon of hope and essential guide.

Looking out at that sea of humanity provided a lesson in history by extrapolation in and of itself. Making what had been for most of us an abstract cipher now became concrete in its observed real time size and dimension. A million people, perhaps more. Have we ever had the possibility of experiencing the enormous visual impact of what a million people gathered together looks like? Not to my recollection.

And yet, in grimmer recollection, this sea of humanity is the approximate dimension of the near million men women and children of Tutsi heritage slaughtered in Rwanda by Hutu militias and co-conspirators only fifteen years ago. This outrage, beginning in April 1994 and according to the United Human Rights Council carried out in 100 days with the murder of 800,000 innocents with clubs and machetes, with gunshots and grenades often taking a murderous toll of more than 10,000 lives each day. All this while the world not only stood silently by, but no substantive effort was made to evacuate the threatened Tutsis and to their shame the United States, France, Belgium and Italy withdrew their forces, contingents that might have offered some protection to the Tutsi minority. Had we understood what a million human lives meant in its visual dimension alone, rather than in the abstract, perhaps, just perhaps, we might have acted to stop the slaughter.

Almost concurrent with the Inauguration itself, news came that the obscenity of ridiculing the Holocaust by the Iranian government and its vile President Ahmadinejad has taken a new and contorted twist. A book of caricatures and satirical writing about the Holocaust is to be published at a ceremony later this month when a message from President Ahmadinejad will be read. This according to the Iran's Fars News Agency. The endorsement of this twisted malevolence will be further enhanced by the attendance of Iranian government officials at its presentation ceremony on January 27th.

In an almost ironic turn, the sea of joyous humanity on the Mall in Washington in celebratory triumph, gave us a snapshot of what a million people looked like. It gave us some inkling of the sheer and overwhelming size of what was perhaps humanity's greatest crime, the sadistic murder of six million European and North African Jewish men women and children by a hate crazed German nation. Six times the ocean of humanity we witnessed on Tuesday!

Let that vast gathering be a guiding light to this administration and all peoples. That genocide in any dimension can and will no longer be tolerated. That our tribal hatreds must be contained and brought to an end be they in Sudan, the Middle East or wherever in this world they continue to fester. With the power of destruction at hand vastly greater today than the tools of past exterminations, be they biological, chemical or nuclear the very espousal of genocide by radical elements of the world's political and ecclesiastical hierarchy must cease. And let it be a priority of this administration to see to it that it does!

Comments

[FearlessFreep]

Don't forget that several million people have died in the Congo's civil wars in the years since the Rwanda holocaust. (The first of the mass murders that made the 20th century notorious took place in that country, and so did the last.)

[Klimb]

The "silent" holocaust of the Acholi people has gone on since 1986-present without the world community condemning the Uganda govt and LRA (TOGETHER). Rwanda's problem was short and not with as much deaths and devastation as what has happened to the people of Northern Uganda especially Acholi people...1000 deaths in concentration camps per week as reported by human rights watch. Movies, Appearances, walks and lies have been made but nobody has sought the root cause of this conflict...Museveni called the Acholi "biological specimens" i.e. can be experimented on and discarded...the rest is history! LRA has for so long been used as a scapegoat that it is time focus be on Uganda adm.

[Wozzeck]

The segue from genocide to Ahmadinjad was masterful . Should we conclude from your screed that this antichrist is in favor of genocide? Nothing that I've read, other than neocon-inspired mistranslations, would suggest that this is true.

Remember that the Iranian students' book of Holocaust cartoons is a direct response to Flemming Rose, Daniel Pipes, and other neocons' anti-Islam cartoon campaign intended to provoke Muslim backlash.

[chaos4700]

Thanks for injecting some truth into this discussion. I'm tired of seeing all of this rhetoric that seems to be geared to provoking the same exact war against Ahmedinejad in Iran as we were tricked into undertaking against Hussein in Iraq.

[hippynanainblingland]

Not to put a damper on your compassionate observation, Brother, but I can't help asking myself, yet again, why is it that the slaughter of the original inhabitants of the continents of North and South America, and the resultant marginalization of the few survivors, a situation that persists even in the present, always gets short shrift when genocide is discussed? That's as big a shame on the European colonizers (not that Europeans were the only ones, by far) of primitive peoples all over the world as the allowing of genocide of various peoples by the Western World in modern times.

There's nothing new about genocide, and until we all admit that we have indeed allowed the oligarchs to get away with this heinous colonizing tactic practically forever, and vigorously oppose such and work to prevent it, we will continue to suffer from the Karmic results . . .

. . . among which the marginalization of the working classes all over the world can be counted as just another manifestation of the same problematic attitude.

We don't stand much of a chance of defeating the pharisees, but our best chance is to create solidarity among all exploited peoples of the world. . . a baby step at a time, alas.

[rbtboss]

I think it's because it was insidious, heterogenious in nature, and hard to quantify. It was also more difficult, and in many instances, motivated by legitimate fear.

The word "karma" has no place in reasonble discourse as it is not taken to mean natural, verifiable, or even arguable, cause and effect.

I like most of what you've written, though.

[Michael7843853]

I guess the other 4 million innocents who died in the camps are just another form of collateral damage.

[dmcohen]

Take a pill. The other four (perhaps closer to five) million victims of the Nazi Holocaust were targeted for a number of reasons, but with the exception of perhaps the Gypsies, were not the targets of an attempt to annihilate an entire people---i.e., genocide, the focus of this article.

[Michael7843853]

You take a pill. A human being is a human being.