Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. I always feel overwhelmed by the day as if a dark cloud rests on my heart. I know I want to move away, to pass on to happier more pleasant things than contemplating the fact that in the last World War six million people, largely Jews but also many others including, gypsies, homosexuals and the physically disabled were systematically exterminated.
If only I could pretend that this was an aberration - something which only happens once in a thousand years but the Armenian massacres at the beginning of the twentieth century, the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia, the Rwanda genocide all prove that this is something which can surface almost anywhere given the right conditions.
I suppose part of the key is that it all starts by treating other people as less than human - they are not like us and so we don't have to treat them by the same rules as we would treat "our own kind".
I would like to think that there was something positive that I could bring out of this day but apart from the determination that it must never happen again I'm not sure what I can - and even that resolution by so many people proved helpless in the face of the Rwandan genocide and the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia.
Any thoughts?
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Unfortunately my thoughts are that human nature can be essentially very evil, and as a realist that’s hard to take, that really we all have the capability of acting the same way the Nazi’s the Rwandan’s the Armenian’s and in the news now the two conflicting tribes in Kenya. I’m not condoning actions of this nature, we have to realise that humans are easily led, the only way for me to cope with this is to think well if humans are easily led, it should be easier for them to follow the TRUTH, and we need to remember that every single person has the capability to believe to feel passion to feel Love we just have to keep giving them that love and help them follow the one true path of JESUS CHRIST where we know this kind of devastation won’t happen, it shows we have a big task to live up to, so bring on the mission and lets change this world completely the only way it can be changed through the spread of Jesus’ Love
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