September 6, 1941 A Day That Will Live in Infamy

On this date sixty-eight years ago, the decree went out throughout the holdings of Nazi Germany. Those who traced their lineage to the line of David, those who would call themselves Jews were to wear a bright yellow star upon their clothing in order to identify themselves from the so-called pure blooded Aryans.

Today we remember a frightening day in human history, when a group was singled out in preparation for its extermination. Primo Levi was a Holocaust survivor and noted chemist who could remember this day well, and would later write of his times in the camps that such a thing could never happen again. However as he drifted towards his eventual suicide -- one which would cause fellow survivor Elie Wiesel to state, "Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years earlier." -- he became more depressed, cynical and some might say pragmatic about the Holocaust, noting that what had happened once before could happen again easily.

I'm not stating that Germany is going to go around killing Jews again. What I'm saying is that sixty-eight years ago, human being forcibly separated another group of human beings with a visible symbol in order to aid in their eventual extermination; what has happened before can and is happening again. We of the Western World like to think we have evolved past such things, but we are still human...fallible, jealous, angry and despite our best efforts to stamp it out, bigoted in some way to some group.

As recent in the West as the atrocities in certain parts of the former Yugoslavia, we have seen that we have not changed. In other places we continue to see executions and rapes based on ethnicity, on religion and for so many other small reasons comparatively. In Rwanda the Tutsis were called "cockroaches" by the Hutus; because the key to carrying out such hatred in action is to not humanize those lives you are taking. Today sixty-eight years ago, that dehumanization effectively began the greatest systematic extermination in the history of mankind.

May we one day manage to move beyond such things, and as a host of prophets long gone say, beat our swords into plowshares.