I Survived the Warsaw Ghetto. Here Are the Lessons I’d Like to Pass On.

I’m in my 90s, and, as extremism sweeps across Europe, I fear we are doomed to repeat the mistakes which created the Holocaust.
The Guardian

Stanis?aw Aronson

I Survived the Warsaw Ghetto. Here Are the Lessons I’d Like to Pass On.
I’m in my 90s, and, as extremism sweeps across Europe, I fear we are doomed to repeat the mistakes which created the Holocaust.

Quote

..."do not underestimate the destructive power of lies. When the war broke out in 1939, my family fled east and settled for a couple of years in Soviet-occupied Lwów (now Lviv in western Ukraine). The city was full of refugees, and rumours were swirling about mass deportations to gulags in Siberia and Kazakhstan. To calm the situation, a Soviet official gave a speech declaring that the rumours were false – nowadays they would be called “fake news” – and that anyone spreading them would be arrested. Two days later, the deportations to the gulags began, with thousands sent to their deaths.

Those people and millions of others, including my immediate family, were killed by lies. My country and much of the continent was destroyed by lies. And now lies threaten not only the memory of those times, but also the achievements that have been made since. Today’s generation doesn’t have the luxury of being able to argue that it was never warned or did not understand the consequences of where lies will take you.

Corboy comment: here is a science fiction story that, through metaphor, shows how loss of empathy can easily be engineered. When lies and manipulation of the human brains limbic system is used to target a scapegoated group as non or subhuman, then the best of us will be capable of murder or at the very least, denial and complicity.

Black Mirror is an urgent reminder of the fatal consequences of empathy loss

Owen Jones

A corruption of shared humanity has been at the heart of injustice for too long. We must reject this

In Men Against Fire

[www.theguardian.com]

– the penultimate episode in Charlie Brooker’s extraordinary new Black Mirror series – soldiers are sent to mow down fanged, shrieking zombie-like “roaches”. They relish slaughtering them – they even derive sexual kicks from doing it. But the victims are actually human beings. It emerges that the soldiers have had implants inserted that – as far as they can see – transform their desperate civilian targets into bloodcurdling monsters deserving of no compassion. As a military psychiatrist tells a soldier distraught at discovering the truth: “Humans are genuinely empathetic as a species. We don’t want to kill each other, which is a good thing, until your future depends on wiping out the enem[/quote]
[www.theguardian.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/08/2020 09:33PM by corboy.