Sixty Years Separate Auschwitz and Darfur but Little Else

Sixty years ago yesterday, the Red Army liberated the camp at Auschwitz. The Red Army, of course, bore the brunt of the fighting in the European theater of World War II, but it was also an instrument of oppression and inhumanity for decades. That one can use the word “liberated” only attests to the appalling conditions before its arrival. Sadly, on the anniversary, the Khartoum government of Sudan saw fit to bomb Darfur in violation of the ceasefire as it continues its own genocidal crimes.

When one considers the term “genocide,” it rapidly becomes clear that there is something fundamentally wrong with the human species. War over resources, religion or which royal family sits on what throne is bad enough. Genocide, though, is a war of extermination; it says that there is nothing worth saving on the other side. It essentially denies the humanity of the victims. The German term was untermenschen, lesser beings or subhumans. If the idea were unique to a criminal government in Berlin, confined to the first half of the 20th century, one could think of it as an aberration. It wasn’t, and it isn’t.

Even before the Austrian paperhanger turned into anything more than a third-rate hack, genocide was an old custom in human history. It is hard to describe Rome’s treatment of Carthage after the Third Punic War as anything other than genocide – thousands upon thousands killed, the rest sold off, and the city razed. Not all of the 500 nations of indigenous Americans still exist. Armenia’s suffering at the hands of a Turkish army qualifies as well. Stalin killed more than Hitler, and only his primitive methods prevented the destruction of the Ukrainian people and others.

Indeed, it was the methods the Nazis employed that brought a whole new horror to the old horror. Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen shot several thousands Jews in places like Babi Yar, outside Kiev, but that was inefficient. Places like Auschwitz make the process of wiping a people off the face of the earth a matter of applying the appropriate resources (Zyklon-B, railway cars, and crematoria) over time -- mass production’s methods brought to the process of mass murder.

Rwanda’s Hutu didn’t build special camps for the Tutsi of that nation. The country has few roads, inadequate industrial structure and a small population of trained engineers. Still, 8,000 were killed every day for 100 days in 1994. Historians estimate the Auschwitz death toll at 1 to 1.5 million in about 4 years, a lesser rate.

And now, Darfur in western Sudan is the site of the latest genocide, though one must make dishonorable mention of the mess in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Estimates are that 70,000 have died in Darfur over the last two years because they are black non-Muslims, slain by the Sudanese government and its janjaweed militia. And efforts at stopping it was cosmetic at best.

The survivors of Auschwitz, and Treblinka, and Sobibor, and Bergen-Belsen must find the words “never again” ring painfully hollow today.

© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.

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