Primo Levi It Happened Therefore It Can Happen Again
I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum today. I expected to be pretty desensitized to it with how the past several years of my life accept played out.
It was a os-chilling experience. I've visited memorials to genocide in other places including Iraq and Bosnia, but Auschwitz stands apart. Not necessarily because it's possibly the largest or most famous, but because it's so meticulously preserved, and unlike genocides in Iraq or Bosnia or Rwanda or Cambodia, Auschwitz's preservation reveals every bit of logic and rationale in the nazi's design and follow-through of creating expiry on an industrial and frighteningly efficient scale.
The best quote I've e'er read about genocide was at a Srebrenica exhibit in Sarajevo, and attributed to holocaust survivor Primo Levi. He said, "It happened, therefore it tin can happen. Information technology tin can happen anywhere." His words take been more than correct virtually the nature of genocide and human behavior than anyone else's, certainly more so than the hollow "never once more" rhetoric.
![IMG_3189[1]](https://dawsonolivertheworld.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/img_31891.jpg?w=768)
Genocide continues today. Information technology happened in Europe every bit recently every bit 1995, it happened while I was living in Iraq, and in case you don't sentry the news, it's happening now, and has been for over 2 years in Myanmar, only has simply in the past one-half year gained widespread international attending.
Genocide seems to unfortunately be part of normal human being beliefs, and every bit such the biggest problem is not its continuation, just the collective lack of vigilance against its continual perpetration. I wrote about my visit to Srebrenica 17 months ago and simply read information technology again having visited Auschwitz. Every lamentable, frustrated word I wrote is still exactly truthful, with the exception that I called the Yazidi genocide the about recent world genocide.
That championship now belongs to the Rohingya.
![IMG_3173[1]](https://dawsonolivertheworld.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/img_31731.jpg?w=768)
The sad reality of my visit is that it simply reinforced all of my previously held beliefs well-nigh genocide and its continuity.
It happened, therefore information technology tin can happen, it tin happen anywhere.
Beneath is my past entry virtually Srebrenica in its entirety.
Eastern Bosnia is a land of rolling hills.
Low mountains, narrow valleys. Nigh of these narrow valleys house small towns or large villages. In the summit of summer it is every bit green as anywhere I've always seen and the foliage is as thick and vibrant as a rain forest.
The stunning colors of the landscape practice however prevarication in total contrast to the houses and buildings dotting the landscape.
Many are one-half finished, some are abandoned, and all also many are pockmarked with the scars of bullet burn, shells, and mortar shrapnel.
The event is an eerie landscape of dazzler and bucolic scenery where nature seems to be rejecting its human influence. Each boondocks looks similar it'due south in a slow and continual state of decline and rejection.
I of these towns is Srebrenica, or "Silver Mine," an old source for precious metals also equally salts and mineral water.
Srebrenica lies in a narrow valley like well-nigh of the other towns, and similar many of them contradicts the natural beauty with pockmarked houses, aging slabs of concrete and abased shops.
5 miles n of the town center the valley starts to open, and in a field to the westward of the route a sea of shimmering white monuments cutting brightly through the otherwise greyness of the other structures.
This is the Srebrenica-Potocari memorial, honoring the more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim, or Bosniak men who lost their lives in a 1995 massacre at the hands of a Serbian force during the Bosnian War. Europe's virtually recent genocide.
Each headstone is individually addressed and named. Each one representing individual closure, the result of a painstaking process of exhuming remains within mass graves and identifying the dead for a proper burial. More than than 8,000 vivid white headstones standing like proud sentinels and even so too resembling thousands of chess pawns.
Merely a few days prior to visiting Srebrenica I was at an exhibit in Sarajevo for the 1995 massacre that featured humbling and terrifying photos by a Bosnian photojournalist who chronicled much of the efforts in the past 20 years to mend families, honor the dead, and provide closure for the living.
Among the photos was a quote on the wall from Holocaust Survivor Primo Levi; "It happened, therefore it tin can happen, it can happen everywhere."
I establish it stunning in its simplicity. Stripping down the logic of genocide'south connected occurrence without using the word itself. In his unproblematic phrasing genocide is something akin to learned behavior, and therefore a normal part of the human catalogue of action.
Rationalizing its occurrence one time is to open the door for its rationale over again.
I live and work in a peaceful city that is in an active war zone.
Two years ago, before I was there, and not more than than fifty miles from the city, genocide happened. The victims were the minority Yazidi religious sect at the easily of the Islamic State. The world's most recent genocide.
The United States, though aware of events in northern Iraq in August of 2014, did non officially declare the Yazidi massacre a genocide until March 2016.
Perhaps because one time recognized, genocide requires immediate and thorough action from the participating and aware international community. Maybe because officially recognizing such an event at a afterward date protects the observer while providing deniability, equally if to say, "we know at present that these events occurred, just we were not aware at the fourth dimension".
It is through this inaction, latent responsibility, and dehumanizing of those we don't easily relate to that we can and sometimes practice every bit a collective legitimize genocide, its rationale, and allow its pattern.
America is non alone in this politicized approach, every bit foreign relations withal keep many countries from declaring the existence of several genocides, and thus forces many of united states of america to engage in an argument of what constitutes a genocide and where the line is drawn.
The very existence of this argument only e'er benefits the deniers and creators of genocide past providing slivers of deniability and space to maneuver.
And in doing so relegating the deaths of thousands, whether they were given a headstone or not, to pawns of geopolitical motives.
I imagine that in a generation, if things accept settled downwards plenty, there might exist a memorial built in northern Iraq.
The dead volition be exhumed, identified and properly reburied, and a beautiful gallery with heart-wrenching photos volition recount the losses of the private, the suffering of the Yazidi people, and the nominal victory of humanity past quantifying the destruction and providing closure to a dark chapter of human history.
On a wall in this memorial will be a quote from a survivor of a prior genocide, 1 that occurred roughly seventy five years before the Yazidi genocide; "Information technology has happened, therefore information technology can happen, information technology can happen everywhere."
The quote will not only help to relate the Yazidi genocide to past occurrences, just likewise unintentionally frame it in the context of an unbreakable design of human activity, a learned beliefs. As if in recognizing and remembering history, we're doomed to a cocky-fulfilling prophecy of repeating information technology.
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Source: https://dawsonolivertheworld.com/2018/01/04/it-happened-therefore-it-can-happen-it-can-happen-anywhere/
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