Re6/6

There are people in the world, mostly with a fairly predictable agenda, that are claiming that none of that ever happened.  Never forget; remembering is our only defence against it happening again, and it has, several times.

Seconded.  I watched an excellent documentary a few years ago about the liberation of one of the work camps in Eastern Germany, by the US Army in 1945.  Seeing the elderly veterans - most of them around 90 - revisiting the area and choked up in recounting what they witnessed at the site.  One particular veteran stuck in my mind, his voice breaking with fury but the energy of man fifty years younger, at the people who said this didn't happen and he hadn't seen what he had.

The Squeeze is Polish, and all Polish schoolchildren in her day, still under communism, were taken to Auchwitz.  She went when she was 14 and will never forget it. 

The problem is that people who say it never happened are completly convinced of the conspiracy, and governments/government agencies in general but in the US in particular have not always behaved since WW2 in a way that has discouraged them.  The conspiracy theorists are never going to be persuaded otherwise, and while it isn't about this particular matter, we have seen in the US and Brazil that some of them are armed to the teeth and prepared to act on their delusional beliefs, manipulated by those of their ilk who have borrowed the group's collective brain cell and can exploit the foot soldiers for their own ends.  There's a massive untapped reservoir of racism, anti-semitism, envy of the more intelligent, and immigrant fear for these nutters to exploit.  Even if you showed them around the camps, they'd tell you you'd built them post-war as a sort of sick theme park.  Liberal democratic opinion is that the answer is education, and it is, but you can't educate pork, ultimately you can only slaughter it, which brings us all down to their level and is self-defeating. 

I feel strongly about this and am greatly troubled by it.  I have mental health problems and would have most certainly have been for the gas chambers myself in that place and time, and memory of the horror is the only thing that keeps it from recurring, mostly (but there've been genocides and death camps since WW2).  The United Nations, a body whose general prinicples I have believed in all my life, is proving increasingly ineffective and it's main sponsor, the US, has effectively abandoned it.  Where do we go now?  Ok I'm gonna be brown bread soon and it doesn't affect me, but I don't want that sort of world; I have my principles, even as a burnt corpse!  Thinking it won't happen again because our systems are effective in preventing it sounds to me like the best possible way to ensure that it happens again.