I forgot to wish our Australian readers a Happy Australia Day for Saturday, when I posted last week - hope you all had a good one - and that none of you are caught in any of the floods or wildfires.
It was Holocaust Memorial Day on Sunday. Many of my friends and acquaintances on various groups posted notes about it - mostly saying "Never Forget".
They're right - we must never forget the systematic extermination of groups of people, the genocide, the starvation. At least 6 million Jews, about a half a million gay men, around three-quarters of a million gypsies, and unknown quantity of lesbians ( they were marked with the same black triangle as prostitutes and other sex-workers, and no separate count was kept). Twenty million Soviet citizens.
But you know what?? Remembering is not enough.
If you want to ensure that no group, country, faction ever commits genocide again, if you want to make sure no-one is ever imprisoned, beaten, raped, tortured, or killed because of their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, political belief, then you need to act as well as remember.
Because remembering not enough.
It was not enough in Cambodia. It was not enough in Bosnia.
It is not enough - right now - in Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Gaza, Central Africa, South Asia, South America.
It is not so very far away from not being enough in central Europe, the USA, the UK.
Wherever you make someone "the other", less-than-you, not equal because different, you open the door just a fraction. It doesn't take much for a bunch of thugs disguised as a genuine political movement to force that door all the way open and unleash the horror upon us.
Never Forget. But never take freedom for granted.
Ze
