No jolly banter today. No cheap political point-scoring. No penny-philosophy. Just ‘Never again’.
In a camp seventy-five years ago today men had waded through blood and burnt villages to reach that spot broke down and wept, and that was just one camp. I can write no more about it as many others have written more and better and with better understanding.
We can blame a disembodied evil for it, or conjure the Devil into the midst, but these were the deliberate actions of men, and the causes are in the elemental heart of man. It is the fundamental duty of society, which is to say of every man and woman whose multitude of interconnected relationships make up that intangible web that we call society, to ensure those social bonds work for the good, for we have seen how easy it is to deploy the irresistible strength of society to destruction.
From time to time the papers titillate us with displays of the everyday propaganda used by the Nazis to normalise race-hatred across their society, and we grimace or maybe think it too crude for anyone to take seriously. Then as someone speaks to me he spits out the latest conspiracy he has heard and thinks it modern, but my heart is chilled because it is very familiar, very old. It all emphasises that we must learn to speak up to challenge the re-normalisation of these ideas and say with no lessening vigour ‘Never again.’
See also
- The Noble Savage, Caliban, and Hobbes
- Caliban the wild man
- Quarrel of a dying empire poisoning modernity
- Of the natural Condition of Mankind as concerning their Felicity and Misery
Books
- The End of the Holocaust by Alvin H. Rosenfeld
- By Anthony Beevor:
- By Thomas Hobbes:
- By Anthony Burgess:
- By Aldous Huxley:
- By George Orwell:
- By Jordan Peterson:
