February 12, 2021
Humans Behaving Unlike Humans
January 27, 2021 marked the 76 th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. An eminent Surrey and England Test cricketer and dear friend sent me on the occasion a video link to the documentary “Night Will Fall,” shown on UK TV.
It starts with contemporaneous film footage shot in the spring of 1945 documenting horrific scenes of human carnage witnessed by liberating British troops of thousands of dead and dying inmates at Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp in northern Germany. Soviet photographers captured the scene at other death camps including Auschwitz. Indescribable horror. The original film was edited in 1946 with famed moviemaker Alfred Hitchcock as one of the supervising directors. Footage was used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials but the film was not released to the public. In 2014, the 1946 documentary became the basis of “Night Will Fall,” directed by Andre Singer, which in an epilogue warns that this could be repeated if lessons are not heeded. Were they?
50 years after WWII, similar scenes were repeated in Bosnia and Kosovo. The July 1995 genocide in the Bosnian Muslim town of Srebrenica of more than 8,000 men and boys under the watch of Dutch UN troops, considered the worst genocide in Europe after WWII, was one of the key catalysts radicalizing Europe’s Muslims. The West failed the test of ‘never again.’
In 1994, the international community stood idly by when up to 800,000 ethnic minority Tutsis were hacked to death in 90 days by Hutus in Rwanda. More recent is the holocaust inflicted on Rohingya Muslims in Burma since October 2016, which by 2018, had resulted in 24,000 deaths, 18,000 rapes, and over 700,000 refugees. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi didn’t lift a finger to discourage it. Rather, she led a legal team to the International Court of Justice in December 2019 to brazenly defend and exonerate Burma.
Looking at the big picture, mankind has continued its sordid tradition of turning a blind eye to human suffering occurring under its watch when an intervention would have mattered. And then retrospectively bemoaning it when it hardly matters to the countless who already have lost everything. The proclivity has been to remain bystanders, to give lip service, and take the risk-averse step of shedding crocodile tears.
A household where its members have disappeared, or been tortured, raped, and slaughtered has experienced nothing short of a mini-holocaust. Kashmir is a classic case in point. For 10 years, Indian Prime Minister Modi was banished from the US because of evidence of his complicity during the 2002 Muslim massacres in Gujarat. Now, there is a case of selective amnesia.
In the United States, during the Trump administration, 50 percent of the populace was relatively undisturbed when, between 2017-19, children were snatched and separated from parents entering the US from Mexico, juxtaposed with triumphal claims of the US being the ‘greatest ever country in history.’
The Holocaust didn’t occur in hinterland areas of Africa. It happened in the heart of Europe, with survivors still there to provide living testimony. Underneath the façade of civilization lurks the human beast, enabling humans to behave unlike human beings. Hatred that is unchecked can run amok at any time.
The makers of “Night Will Fall” present “proof that it actually happened” and that there was no falsifying of atrocity reports. Many of those who survived “did not resemble human beings” when camps were liberated. One eyewitness said: “I peered into Hell.” Another eyewitness depicted scenes inside the death camp of Dachau near Munich as “most appalling Hell.” Outside the nightmare, in the small town of Dachau, people led normal lives. They knew about it but did not care.
The unaffected often are indifferent to the suffering of the ‘Other.’ Reverting back to the core burning issue, which to date has destabilized the world for 73 years, one would be hard-pressed to find Western leaders who can freely and openly express empathy for the embattled Palestinians. It will cost.
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