We must never let our guard down against forces of evil
In the early hours of Sept. 1, 1939, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on a Polish garrison at Westerplatte in the Bay of Gdańsk. These were the opening shots of the invasion of Poland, and with it the Second World War. In a matter of hours Nazi Germany was on its march of unprecedented carnage that engulfed the world and claimed the lives of up to 85 million people, ravaging and razing to the ground countries and nations and leaving societies destroyed. Moreover, that war left an ever-present reminder of the evil that humans are capable of inflicting on each other for the most irrational of reasons, and which in most cases also brought catastrophe on the perpetrators themselves.
In the light of the rise of ultra-nationalism and populism, in Europe particularly though not exclusively, European leaders who went to Poland last week to commemorate the beginning of the war did so in the knowledge that remembering the past and honoring its victims sends a message to those who throughout the continent are undermining the remarkable achievements of the postwar era in advancing the condition of humanity — the message is that this will not be allowed to happen again. It was the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier who set the tone of repentance and absolution by asking Poland’s forgiveness for the Nazi “tyranny.” Standing next to Poland’s President Andrzej Duda and other
world leaders in the Polish town of Wieluń, where some of the first German bombs fell in 1939, Steinmeier humbly stated: “I bow before the Polish victims of German tyranny. And I ask for your forgiveness.”
However, it was the European Commission’s Vice President Frans Timmermans who had the courage to challenge current politicians over their opportunistic and callous exploitation of fear of the other for their personal political gain. He might have been somewhat coded in his warning, but his message was that the best way to honor the memory of the war victims was by “working for tolerance, working for mutual respect, working to remove the feeding ground of those who propose intolerance.”
And tolerance is a commodity that is fast disappearing from our societies. German Nazism was the most extreme and revolting specimen of intolerance, introducing a pseudo theory of hierarchy among the human race which justified the superiority of some people over others, including defining certain groups as subhuman. These distorted views ended in the most horrendous persecution of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, the mentally or physically disabled, political opponents, and many others, who in most cases were selected for total elimination.
Those who experienced the horrors of the war, those who saw the devastation or witnessed the results of such inhumanity when they liberated the extermination camps, made a solemn promise never to let this happen again. However, in the years since, many of them died, and the collective memory of the genocides and countless other atrocities is in danger of becoming a distant one.
Moreover, since then, the international community has been complicit, sometimes actively and often by unforgivingly standing idly by, in more genocides and crimes against humanity. Whether in Cambodia, Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia, Myanmar or Syria, the Charter of the UN, which set out to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind,” and to ensure fundamental human rights and guarantee that we may all live with dignity, has not been sufficiently upheld and actively protected. In recent years the debate in Europe, especially in light of the challenge of increasingly diverse societies and the arrival of refugees, has exposed the ugly truth that fear and victimization of the other still haunts the continent. In the very countries that suffered most from Nazism, including Poland itself, bigotry and racial and religious intolerance have become increasingly prevalent. In the age of social media these vile messages are spreading fast and wide, and even worse, becoming legitimized.
Neo-Nazis and other ultra-nationalist movements are on the rise; some are winning seats in parliaments. As a second-generation Holocaust survivor, many of whose family members perished in Auschwitz, I cannot think of a better way to dishonor the victims and survivors of the horrors of the Second World War than to allow the monstrosity of racism and nationalist chauvinism to once more raise its brutal head.
After the last shot was fired in 1945, and the last horrific act of dropping atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima had taken place, it was time to start building a new world on the ruins of the old one, a new world that would not resemble the old in any shape or form.
Not that malevolence has disappeared from the world and from our lives, but in the eight decades since the end of the war, humanity, at least some of it, has proved itself able to rise like a phoenix from the ashes, and give birth to a world that respects human rights and cares for people’s well-being.
In this context the act of forgiveness is important. It takes brave leaders and countries to acknowledge their wrongdoing, and accept their capacity to carry out the most extreme, immoral and murderous acts; it is even more important that we combat all signs of any revival of the ultra-nationalism, nativism, and xenophobia that led to the dark days of the 1930s and 1940s.
To ask for forgiveness for one’s past crimes without doing enough to stop the present-day suffering of so many millions at the hands of the modern merchants of evil, is to reduce the concept of forgiveness to something hollow and disingenuous.