Malinda Words: The most pernicious human shield

White phosphorus raining on Gaza

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 246th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

There’s no one way to talk of horror, even a singular horror. Even in the midst of tragedy, there’s heroism, humanity and reasons for hope. Different eyes see things differently, but when a tragedy is of monumental proportion, the horror stands out and cries out for acknowledgment, whichever angle you may be looking from.

I am thinking of Schindler’s List, the 1993 historical drama directed and produced by Steven Spielberg and written by Steven Zaillian based on Thomas Keneally’s 1982 novel by that name. I am also thinking of Life is Beautiful (La vita è bella) directed and co-written with Vincenzo Cerami by Roberto Benigni who played the lead role of Guido Orefice.

The former is a story of how a single man helped more than a thousand people escape the horror of the Jewish Holocaust during which six million European Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany in the Second World War. The latter is about a resourceful and determined Jewish barber who wanted his son to escape the very same horrors that he himself would have to suffer, shielding him at every turn by convincing the little boy that it was just a game they were all playing.

Three million Jews killed by Nazi Germany, World War II

The audience, however, is not spared of the horror and rightly so. Perhaps this is why hundreds of films have been made about it, at least according to Rich Brownstein who lectures on the genre. He’s seen at least 440.

Second World War: 27 million citizens of the Soviet Union were killed

Things need to be said. Otherwise they are forgotten and that does a grave injustice to the victims and also emboldens would-be perpetrators of genocide. It is pertinent to recall something that Adolf Hitler is reported to have said at the conclusion of his Obersalzberg speech on August 22, 1939, just before Poland was invaded, ‘'Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians (Wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier?)?' Scholars still debate whether Hitler actually said it, but then again there’s no denying the truth in the assertion. Who recalls that between a million and 1.5 million ethnic Armenians were systematically murdered in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, really?

Congo: 5-10 million died during the rule of Leopold II of Belgium (1885-1908)

Consider that in the very same period around 27 million citizens of the Soviet Union were killed, 8.7 military personnel and 19 million civilians. Consider that in a period of approximately just four months, between 500,000 and 2-3 million were killed by the Indonesian Army under Suharto, supported by the USA and the UK, in efforts to wipe out members of the Communist Party (PKI). Consider that 5-10 million people in the Congo from 1885-1908 died as a direct result of colonial exploitation when that country was ruled by Leopold II of Belgium as his personal domain.

Indonesia: 500,000 to 3 million 'Communists' killed, 1965-66

Consider that British colonial policies in India alone claimed more lives than all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China and North Korea combined — the estimates range from 100-165 million, between 1880 and 1920 alone. Consider that according to David Micheal Smith, the 'Indigenous Holocaust' in the United States took around 13 million lives between 1492 and 1900.

Indigenous Holocaust in the USA took 13 million lives

Each and every death is a tragedy. Genocide makes things more visible. And yet, who after all speaks of the massacre of indigenous peoples in the Americas, the slaughter of Communists in Indonesia, the Congolese Holocaust, the annihilation of Armenians, the victims of the genocidal drives of Britain and other colonial powers or the citizens of the Soviet Union who paid with their lives to stop Hitler? There are no 'hundreds of films' about any of these massacres.

India: 165 million killed during British Colonial Rule

And yet, you can’t blame Jews or their sympathisers or those who are so horrified about what Nazi Germany did for wanting to exorcise some of it through art, especially films and nor can you shelve the following questions:

Does the fact of genocide confer impunity to anyone who belongs to or identifies with the particular community in the matter of perpetrating or justifying genocide? Is evoking past slaughter defence enough in shrugging off responsibility with regard to present brutality? Can anyone get away by saying ‘look, my people suffered untold horror under Nazi Germany (or British Colonialism or Suharto or the colonial powers that landed on what is called ‘America’ today or the Belgians or the French or the Spanish), so I have the right not to be answerable to any crime that I commit, small or large or even genocidal in proportion’?

That, friends, would be a human shield. No, an inhuman shield, because it is the victims of genocide who are being used as a shield from behind which genocide can be and is being unleashed. I can think of nothing more pernicious when it comes to desecrating the memory of every single victim of mass killings, in particular the Jewish Holocaust (given that I am writing this on October 17, 2023).

17 October 2023

The most pernicious human shield

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