I know some of my classmates have mentioned genocides, such as the Turks killing the Armenians before the Holocaust or the massacres going on in Rwanda in the present-day. My connection is to Fahrenheit 451. The ending of that book covered some ideas that I thought were extremely relevant. Humans are compared to phoenixes, always rising from the ashes. Not any ashes, but their own ashes. Germany is still here. Despite the terrible assault on the Jewish community, they are still around. Austria-Hungary didn't make it out as a country, but life goes on in the place where it once was. The human race is strong.
But as strong as the human race is, it seems to have trouble learning. No matter how many times we rise from the ashes of genocide, the human race does not seem to be learning from it's mistakes; that was another point covered in Fahrenheit 451. We do the same thing over and over again; are we expecting it to turn out differently? The first concentration camp opened on March 23 in 1933. World War II didn't begin until 1939. That's six years of looking the other way; a lot of people can be killed in six years. We are ignoring genocides today, just like we did with the Holocaust. How well did that work out last time?
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You are absolutely correct. And there are many people out there that agree with you and are doing everything they can to stop these horrible massacres. But there will also always be the Hitlers that prey on others to become powerful.
ReplyDeleteI am just speculating, but maybe one problem in those six years was that not enough people know about the horrible killings. Today, it would be much harder to carry out such a massive genocide because of the wealth of information available to a common layperson. Maybe if the Internet was around back then some of the calamity could have been prevented.
I agree. Remarkable connection, by the way! I think that we like in a highly selfish world, and people do not want to trouble their own lives with the possible troubles of others. THis might have been why the United States simply turned her head during the detremental times of the Holocause, becuase she did not want to handle someone else's problems. Hind sight is usually 20/20, so why are genocide problems such as this still occuring?
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