For those of you who don’t know, or were too busy celebrating May the 4th, this past Wednesday was Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoa (day of the Holocaust) in Hebrew. It is a day where humans around the world remember the catastrophe that occurred during the second World War. This tragedy left a dark mark on humanity, and made us reexamine ourselves, calling our very way of life into question.
However, while people spend time with loved ones remembering the disaster that was the Holocaust, it is important to explore the philosophical and ethical ramifications that the Holocaust left upon humanity as a whole.
The State of Germany in the 1930s was not a country of savages, it was not a union of people who were banded together in some cave to stay warm from the freezing rain, it was not a state of neanderthals who knew no better than to kill in order to survive. No, Germany in the 1930s was a state of cultural progression, a group of western individuals who enjoyed the musical style of Bach and Mozart, they were a cultured people who enjoyed the arts and refined cuisine. Adolf Hitler himself enacted many laws that punished animal cruelty. Yet in spite of their seemingly civilized nature, they were still able to enact the greatest atrocity known to man.
This is the primary lesson that the Holocaust teaches. Being the pinnacle of western civilization does not define your moral goodness. Simply being cultured does not mean you have the moral high ground over those who you deem barbarians or subhuman. The amount of enlightenment that a certain people are does not make them the same amount of moral. Protecting the lives of animals does not equate to caring for your fellow humans. This is seen in not just Germany, but also ancient nations.
The Greeks and the Romans for instance, viewed as the pinnacle of civilization at their time were a brutal people. We are all familiar from movies like Gladiator and 300 that the Greeks and the Romans were no foe of bloodshed. However, they are still described as the bedrock of Democracy and Philosophical thinking. This in itself denotes some separation between ‘being civilized’ and ‘being moral.’ We can cherry pick the good things from the Greeks and the Romans and we can starkly say no to their immorality, and devaluation of human life.
In a similar vein, the Holocaust put western efficiency to the moral test. The industrial nature of which the Holocaust was perpetrated from, record keeping, numbering humans, and extorting them till death on a mass scale was and is a challenge to the notion that western industrialized efficiency is by its very nature a good thing. It is with this power of industrialization and efficiency that the Nazi regime was able to efficiently murder eleven million people in a few short years. The scope of this travesty is unmatched in all of history.
This is what remembrance of the Holocaust means. This is what people mean when they utter the phrase ‘never again.’ To note that it was not an anomaly or a special circumstance, but it was normal everyday people who committed this atrocity. And more so these ‘normal people’ were as well known for their civilized manner. It raises the uncomfortable question of ‘how could this happen?' and that is exactly the question we as humanity need to answer if we want to prevent a tragedy of this magnitude from ever occurring again. We must all examine this question and we must root out even the smallest possibility that we can hold these beliefs. Because prejudice is in all of us, as it was in all of them at the time. Prejudice can turn seemingly normal people into the monsters that were the Nazis. And once we remove ourselves of prejudice we will truly be able to say in regards to a calamity like the Holocaust, not this time, not ever, never again.
