Remembering Bergen Belsen

[amberdreams]

Seventy years ago today, the British army liberated Bergen Belsen. Richard Dimbleby, war correspondent from the BBC, reported on what they found and put his career on the line to force the BBC to broadcast it when they told him it was too awful to share.

The thing is, we need to keep sharing. We need to listen to the testimony of the survivors and the people who witnessed their suffering, because there are people in the world today who want to pretend this never happened. There are people who think that they are better than the Nazis and that killing a person who believes differently than they do is somehow a lofty ideal and a cleansing thing to be doing. It isn't.

There are people who think it's okay to say all immigrants should be 'sent back to where they came from' and don't see that this is just a tiny step away from the mentality that would send these immigrants to work camps and then death camps to be rid of them. It doesn't take much to get from one raging, irraltional fear and prejudice to a much more sinister version, and for the killing to start.

This isn't about any particular religion or belief, it's about being human, and retaining what is good about being human in the face of the kind of hate bred by intolerance.

Do not be silent today - read a page or two of Anne Frank's diary, join the one minute video campaign being run by the Anne Frank Trust - #notsilent

Listen to Richard Dimbleby's dispassionate report and remember. And think what it took him to record this terrible story - how many times he broke down and had to start again before they managed to get this report recorded. If you can't bear to watch, at least listen.

Comments

[jackfan2.livejournal.com]

Sometimes it takes a war to do the humane thing. Someone posted on my FB the other day, a comment from an American politician wherein he stated something like 'If you are tired of paying for the care of injured Veterans, stop sending them to war!'

My response was to ask if the poster and perhaps the politician, who is a Jewish American and quite old so I would imagine he was around in WWII, do you believe there is no one reason then that we should go to war? Lots of Americans didn't want us to get involved in WWII and we stayed out of it for a long time but then Pearl Harbor happened and we jumped in. War is, sometimes, a necessity.

My other response was to say- equating the service and sacrifice of the veteran to mere dollars and cents is to be wholly ignorant to the understanding of the heart of a veteran. As the daughter of a veteran, the sister of a veteran, and the sister-in-law of a veteran, and the mother of a current service man, these men and women deserve better than that kind of disingenuous rhetoric.

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

i would say I'm largely a pacifist, but there are some regimes, some ideologies that are fundamentally so wrong that sometimes taking up arms against them is the only right course of action. As for the people who serve in the armed forces, generally I have nothing but respect for them, and I'd agree, their value is not something that should be measured in terms of money.