Thursday, January 12, 2017
Lucky Me!
I am writing this post, existing, because of luck. My grandparents were born in New York City in the 1920s and the location of their birth is what "saved" me. All my family that lived in modern-day Hungary, Galicia before World War I, perished in the Holocaust except for my great uncle Shlomi (similar to Sammy in Yiddish). He escaped from a Concentration Camp leaving his belongings, his hearing, and his dead wife and children behind. Shlomi, my grandfather's mother's uncle, was one of the lucky ones, and his story is not original. He lost his hearing when a gun was fired next to his ear. But worse than that, his whole family. The only positive thing that can be taken away from this horrible event in history is that we know how it happened and what caused it to happen. In this way, we can see warning signs early. Using fear and scapegoating one group of people was a huge contributor to mass extermination of a race. The real question is, could this ever happen again? And what will we do to keep it from happening?
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I think although the likelihood of another major genocide like the Holocaust happening near in the future is pretty low, there is definitely a possibility that it could occur due to human nature and politics. The reason I say that human nature could contribute to this is just because of bystander apathy and the fear people have for being hurt by standing up for others, meaning that for example if a genocide began to a society where there was little political interference from other countries (or people in the country itself), people probably wouldn't do anything about it (like in Nazi Germany) just because they either didn't care enough about the victims to make personal sacrifices for them or they were too scared to face the backlash of their societies/governments if they did. This whole issue of people innately choosing to be bystanders can especially seen in the Stanley Milgram Experiment (of which many of you probably know about) where a scientist instructed volunteers to administer electricity to a person as part of some sort of "necessary test" and urged them to continue increasing the dosages of electricity even though the person being "experimented on" (they were actually just using sound clips) screamed and begged a good portion of the time. Surprisingly, 2/3 of the volunteers went to the highest dosage, showing that when people are under orders or are influenced by someone with power, they will choose to be a bystander and let atrocious things happen around them, sometimes contributing to these events themselves. Also, unstable politics could contribute to a genocide similar to the Holocaust since in some countries where extremism and violence are the norm, politicians could rally together people with drastic views on the world together and cause destruction to an extent. Now, although I'm not saying that such a fate is inevitable in our current world, I do want to acknowledge the fact that there is a slight possibility of it happening, since I'm just explaining why their is still a chance of future genocides happening.
ReplyDeleteI think that now that this sort of thing has happened once, it will be more difficult for it to happen again. This is because since we have seen it once, it makes it easier for us to recognize if it is happening again. If it were to happen again though, I would think it would be because whichever nation starts it goes about it in a completely different way than Nazi Germany did.
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