Apparently, today is 'Holocaust Memorial Day' and we all have to remember what the NAZIs did to the Jews. Unfortunately, a survey of UK adults has shown that 5% of them don't believe that the 'holocaust' happened, 8½% believe it's scale has been exaggerated and 66% either didn't know how many Jews were killed or, at least, thought it was many fewer than history tells us.
Does this really matter ?
People believe lots of things. Some believe that God really exists, actually quite a lot do. Is it a problem that others deny his (or her) existence ? Some will no doubt deny that, as well as the NAZIs, others also have indulged in forms of genocide - Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, various African tyrants, Pol Pot in Cambodia - the list goes on. Hundreds of thousands, millions, have been butchered by tyrants throughout history, all largely forgotten except for what the NAZIs did to the Jews.
In fact, while the 'Holocaust' is always spoken of with reference to Jews, Hitler's Germany wasn't too 'picky' when it came to identifying its victims. Coloureds, homosexuals, the disabled, in fact anyone who didn't fit with the Führer's notion of Aryan perfection, was in danger of being rounded up and shipped off to the death camps, always excepting anyone who had risen to the higher echelons of the NAZI Party before the real horrors took hold.
The Second World War ended almost 75 years ago. It's hardly surprising that some of those who have been born in more recent times don't know its details. How many believe that the United Kingdom was little more than a bystander, supporting the United States in its fight against Germany and Japan ? How many believe that Russia was on the side of the Germans ? How many can't distinguish between the two World Wars or have any idea when they were ? Who knows, or cares, how many were systematically slaughtered by both Christians and Muslims during the Crusades (what? when was that ? I hear the unknowing cries of puzzlement from afar !), or 'believe' that the brave cowboys of film and television really existed ? How many believe that the 'Red Indians' of North America were the bad guys when, in truth, they were mostly peaceful but were all but eradicated by the invading 'white men' ?
That millions were killed under the abhorrent rule of the NAZIs is a historic fact, though, if some want to deny it or simply don't know about it, does it matter ? What does matter is that there was far more to the Second World War than the 'Holocaust' and to concentrate to such a degree on this one issue, as well as relating it almost entirely to one group, the Jews, is fundamentally wrong. Rather than memorializing the 'Holocaust' we should be remembering the end of that horrible war, a war that spanned the globe for almost 6 years and cost tens of millions of lives, the vast majority of them having nothing to do with Judaism.
In another 50 years, which will be almost 125 years after the end of that war, will anyone, other than historians and others with vested interests, care at all about it ? Who, today, knows anything about the Boer War of the late 1890s and the British concentration camps, or about the Russo-Japanese war of the early 1900s ? Inevitably, events fade from our consciousness as the years pass and perverting remembrance of the Second World War into a remembrance of one specific aspect of it will result in a distortion of the history being taught at that time.
Let us remember all the horrors of past wars in the hope that current and future generations will learn from the memory, rather than remembering particular events which, themselves, are only selectively reported.
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