Seventy-five years ago, on this day (at the time of writing), the iron wrought gates of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camps were unlocked. Seventy-five years since four horsemen of the advancing Red Army came and looked and beheld the walking and fallen skeletons that remained within. Seventy-five years ago since these four saw that death had already come and gone ahead of them. Seventy-five years ago that one of the greatest monuments of human shame registered in the 20th century was witnessed by an outside observer. Seventy-five years ago that humanity was supposed to have had enough. Enough of tribalism. Enough of racism. Enough of persecution and ethnic violence.
“Never again”, they said. “Never again”, they keep saying.
But yeah… we’re still doing it.
Maybe we’re not building brick barracks, where people are meant to work to their last breath only to be dragged to a pile of soon-to-be-dead. Maybe nerve gas dispensaries masquerading as showers has gone out of style. But we never stopped. Not for a second. Not to this day. “Arbeit Macht Frei” still sounds across blaring speakers, only in so many different languages, always and ever as sincere as back in the 40’s. From Chinese Xinjiang and it’s 1984-esque “re-education” camps, to the Rohingya ethnic cleansing in Aung San Suu Kyi‘s “liberated” Myanmar, or the genocides and civil wars of Rwanda and Côte D’Ivoire. Or, for that matter, the apartheid state of Israel, the state erected for Jews so that they would never again have to persecuted for their ethnicity, and its ongoing occupation and subjugation of Palestine.
“Never again” was the slogan. But humanity never, ever, stopped.
How many shames must we drag our species through for us to finally have enough? Is there really a limit to our capacity for cruelty against ourselves? Sure as shit doesn’t seem like it. For it seems to be one of mankind’s singular feats; to divide ourselves into “us” and “them” across any real or imaginary intersections. For as long as there are just two people in a room together, they will inevitably define themselves by their differences just as much as by their kinships.
No. I don’t think we’re going to get over our collective xenophobia and racism. Not in any relevant time frame. “Never again” will never be an honest or genuine declaration. For now, seventy-five years later, it is no longer a rally for brotherhood and understanding, but a battle-cry for political and populist forces looking to earn a fearful vote.
But no. “Never again” isn’t useless. Nor is it poisonous (despite Zionism’s fascistic application of it). But maybe we should stop looking at it as a declaration, and instead as an aspiration. For even though we as a species stand so far from the goal line of eradicating racisms and tribalism that we can’t even recognise what that line may look like, it is no less a worthy goal to strive toward. But maybe the slogan is wrong. Maybe we need a better one.
So on this day, seventy-five years since we blemished our names so, maybe we should instead say “whensonever again”, and endeavour to become the person that can imagine how such a future may look.
/Sebastian Lindberg 28/1-2020
WastedWords 