Auschwitz, mass murder and today

Last weekend I visited Krakow and Auschwitz, which is about an hours drive from the city. A friend has already made a vivid blog about what we saw there along with excellent photos. Being a theorist I won't dwell so much on our observations but instead I mostly want to talk about some of the thoughts it provoked here.

The obvious questions to ask are could it happen again  and how would you react in those circumstances?  The latter of course cannot be answered, so I won't try, but the former, though natural to ask, is really rather foolish.  "It" did not only happen once, "it" has happened before, "it" has happened since and sadly I would be astonished if "it" didn't happen again.  Indeed in some sense of "it", it is happening now.  Certainly anti-semiticism existed long before Hitler, from the Roman empire through middle ages and until today. However it is not really wide spread racism which makes things so abhorrent, it the was the horrifying treatment, torture and mass murder.

At Auschwitz  (or Oświęcim to use the Polish name) we saw the concentration camp where people (most of them Jewish) were held, fed starvation diets, leading to the horrifying images like on the left, forced to endure bitter cold with minimal clothing to protect them, humiliated, tortured and eventually murdered.  We also saw the cell's where prisoners there were held for "special" punishment. Given the treatment of the typical inhabitants it's hard to imagine what this could be, but there we saw small brick boxes called standing cells, where prisoners were forced to stand for days, and cell's where some were sentenced to death by starvation.   In the same building the first experiments with gassing were also started.

Then after visiting this we moved on to the second much larger camp, Birkenau, where the same horrors were then performed on an industrial scale.

But such treatment and mass murder is not unique. "Concentration camp" is term first coined to describe camps created by the British to hold people relocated during the systematic depopulation of certain regions in South Africa during the Boer war.   Hitler cited the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the dying Ottoman empire / nascent Turkish state, as reason to believe that history would look kindly upon him despite the horrors he was ordering, thankfully he was wrong. But further back one can also consider the widespread practice of conquest and slavery in ancient civilisations, the treatment and multiple massacres of the native populations of the American continents,  and many other instances of horror one can find.  Of course details and how exact the comparison is can easily be questioned and this might be important in many circumstances, but there is no doubt that human history is filled with horrible idea and horrible acts of violence and murder.

Nor did such horrors stop with the Nazi's.  At the same time there were the horrors conducted under Stalin's regime, many deaths on both sides in partitioning of India, the huge death toll in China under Mao and more recently there is Cambodia in the 80's,  the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 90's and perhaps Darfur in the last decade. And this is far from a complete summary.

However perhaps by "it" one wonders if "civilised" western nations could ever turn to such brutal mass murder again. There are of course worrying trends, such as the leader of the French Front National making it to the final run off in the French presidential elections, Joerg Haider getting into a coallition government in Austria,  and to a lesser extent the British National Party (BNP) getting council seats.     In addition there is the apparent increase in Islamaphobia post 9/11, which appears to be being exploited by the BNP.

I believe and hope that it is very unlikely in the near future that such events and attitudes will spiral into state sanctioned murder in western democracies.  I have less confidence elsewhere, but whether the next atrocity to shock people will be perpetrated on some Muslims or be by some Muslims, as terrorists or as state part of some theocratic state sanctioned violence, or involve some other group, I obviously cannot say.  But sadly I'm sure something will come. 

I have previously  drawn comparison between some aspects of the horrifying attitudes, aims and acts of Hitler and policies of western countries which maintain or do not strive to diminish the appalling disparity of wealth, living conditions and health between people born in western countries and those born in the "developing" world.  In extreme times this poverty can lead to horrifying scenes of starvation every bit as stomach churning as those shown earlier from Auschwitz.


In "better" times people living in poorer countries simply have much lower standards of living, much higher levels of infant moratlity, and much shorter life expectancy (note the latter two are not independent).  For example the life expectancy in the UK is 79.4 years, while the average expectancy world wide is only 67.2 years, more than a whole decade of life lost, and in many African Countries it can be under 60 or 50 years.  Between the lowest and highest national life expectancies there is 40 year gap, it seems people in Japan, on average, live twice as long as people in Swaziland.

A significant contribution to this gap are high rates of HIV/AIDS infections and the lack of drugs which could significantly increase the life expectancy of those infected.  In the west there is wider condom availability and use and better education, which help prevent the rise infections and drugs which allow people who have been infected to have a much longer and higher quality life and people in other countries could and should have access to all of this.  Some of the problems result from bad governance and it is not quite as simple as needing the will of western nations to provide, but much more could be done. And when people seek to leave for other countries where the prospects are better they are refused entry and dismissively labelled "economic migrants".

In many cases economics is life and that is one reason (there are many others) I say, with all due respect to Godwin's law , and legitimate sensitivities about comparison's which could trivialise the horror and suffering, that in some sense of the meaning "it" is still going on today.