While you might not be surprised to learn that it’s customary at Holocaust commemorative events for German politicians to remain silent [“Leaders mark Auschwitz liberation,” Boston Globe, 28 January 2005], you might find it interesting to know who else shows up at them.
Remember the folks who brought 100,000 dead Iraqis shock and awe? Well, one of the survivors, U.S. strongman Dick Cheney (temporarily out of the loop at Halliburton), galvanized an audience in Krakow, Poland, the day before the Auschwitz event with some poignantly immortal prose. “Gathered in this place,” he pontificated, “we are reminded that such immense cruelty did not happen in a faraway, uncivilized corner of the world, but rather in the very heart of the civilized world.” Baghdad, in one of its more ancient incarnations, was once on the site of what historians assure us was the cradle of civilization (Mesopotamia); it has always been “in the very heart of the civilized world.”
Is Poland more civilized than Iraq? Possibly it was six decades ago. This might depend, of course, on such things as the point of view of whoever decided the Germans must be taught a lesson and secretly ordered the firestorm-bombing of Dresden (Churchill), or saw in the uncivilized Japan of 1945 a target-rich opportunity to demonstrate some hot new WMDs (Truman).
As Herr Cheney so aptly pointed out, “The death camps were created by men with a high opinion of themselves – some of them well educated and possessed of refined manners – but without conscience.” Indeed, those who are not well educated could easily be the minority in the Game of War. We are, after all, the planet’s most successful species. Stripped of our sense of community, we are the very masters of evil. But if Cheney’s drive-by tears teach us anything at all, we should apply his reminder that “evil is real and must be called by its name and must be confronted” to the system that sponsored one of recent history’s bloodiest acts of mass murder, over which he presided as high priest invoking the sacred names of Capital and Profit.
Now, naming and confronting capital is not so fraught with trouble as you might imagine: like a bad dream, you need only wake up from it, get out of bed and replace it by putting the business of the world back in the hands of its rightful owners – its human communities. The world’s evils persist only because we stupidly persist in justifying them.
But be careful when you call profit by its name. Its other name is wages.
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