An act of remembrance–and a remembrance to act
By Irwin Cotler, National Post, January 30, 2007
Yesterday, Canadian parliamentarian Irwin Cotler delivered the keynote lecture at ceremonies honouring the 2007 International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, at the European headquarters of the UN in Geneva. What follows is adapted from his presentation.
Whenever I think about the Holocaust, I am reminded of what my parents taught me as a young boy: that there are things in Jewish history that are too terrible to be believed, but not too terrible to have happened. That Oswiencim, Madjanek, Dachau, Treblinka — these are beyond vocabulary. For the Holocaust is uniquely evil in its genocidal singularity, where biology was inescapably destiny, a war against the Jews in which, as Elie Wiesel put it, “not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims.”
Some 60 years after the Holocaust, we have to ask ourselves: What have we learned, and what must we do?
The first lesson is the importance of Zachor, of remembrance itself. For as we remember the six million Jewish victims of the Shoah — first defamed, demonized and dehumanized, as prologue for genocide — we have to understand that the mass murder of millions is not a matter of abstract statistics.
Unto each person there is a name. As our sages tell us: “Whoever saves a single life, it is as if he or she has saved an entire universe.” And whoever has killed a single person, it is as if they have killed an entire universe. The abiding imperative: that we are each, wherever we are, the guarantors of each other’s destiny.
The second lesson of the Holocaust is that the genocide of European Jewry succeeded not only because of the industry of death, but because of the state sanctioned ideology of hate– the teaching of contempt of the other. As the Canadian courts affirmed in upholding the constitutionality of anti-hate legislation, “the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers –it began with words.”
Forty years later, in the 1990′s, these lessons not only remained unlearned, but the tragedy was repeated. Again we witnessed a trafficking in hate, which, in the Balkans and in Rwanda took us down the road to genocide.
Today, as the UN marks the commemoration of the Holocaust, we are witnessing a state-sanctioned incitement to genocide, whose epicentre is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran, which denies the Nazi Holocaust as he incites to a Middle Eastern one. This is not only an assault on Jewish memory but a violation of the prohibition against the public incitement to genocide.
Third, the genocide of European Jewry succeeded not only because of the culture of hate and industry of death, but because of conspiracies of silence. And we have witnessed an appalling indifference and inaction in our own day. In both the Balkans and Rwanda, we knew, but we did not act, just as we know and have yet to act in Darfur.
Fourth, if the 20th Century — symbolized by the Holocaust — was the age of atrocity, it was also the age of impunity. Few of the perpetrators were brought to justice. Just as there must be no sanctuary for hate, no refuge for bigotry, there must there be no base or sanctuary for these enemies of humankind. In this context, the establishment of the International Criminal Court must be seen as the most dramatic development in international criminal law since Nuremberg.
Fifth, Nazism succeeded, not only because of the “bureaucratization of genocide,” as Robert Lifton put it, but because of the trahison des clercs — the complicity of the elites. Judges, physicians, church leaders and teachers were all complicit in the Nazis’ crimes. As Elie Wiesel put it, “Cold-blooded murder and culture did not exclude each other. If the Holocaust proved anything, it is that a person can both love poems and kill children”. It is our responsibility to speak truth to power, and to hold power accountable to truth.
Sixth, the genocide of European Jewry occurred not only because of the vulnerability of the powerless, but also because of the powerlessness of the vulnerable. The triage of Nazi racial hygiene- the Sterilization Laws, the Nuremberg Race Laws, the Euthanasia Program- targeted those “whose lives were not worth living.” It is the responsibility of all of us to give voice to the voiceless, as we seek to empower the powerless, be they the disabled, the poor, the refugee, the elderly, the women victims of violence, the vulnerable child, whoever they may be.
We remember — and we pray — that never again will we be silent in the face of evil. May this day be not only an act of remembrance, which it is, but let it be a remembrance to act, which it must be.
For the full text of Mr. Cotler’s speech, please visit http://www.unwatch.org.
See also: Teaching to Hate
http://cnpublications.net/2006/09/10/teaching-to-hate/#more-75