Thursday, April 10, 2014
Our Demise
The Noose tightens not just on me, but you.
I stare into the blank eyes of the world.
Your fear of the absent threat hatred grew,
From your consciousness this nightmare unfurled;
Oh we have made life in our own image,
We are the destruction, we are our end
Endless screams will be the lasting damage
Of the evils you cannot amend,
It is you not me that you should mistrust
You are the monster, you’ve made us animals.
The fire engulfs every one of us,
This fire that started from a candle
Out the Chimney my soul, ashes dispersed
My last breath to mankind “My curse- My curse”
Connections
In the propaganda display there was
an illustration from the book The
Poisonous Mushroom of a Jewish man luring innocent children with candy. The
intention of this picture was clearly to strike fear in German households
especially parents who were now concerned on how to keep their children safe
from bad intentioned strangers such as Jews. In Maus on page 149 while Vladek
is out on the street he encounters children who scream in fear “A Jew, a Jew!”
and run to their mothers for safety. According to Vladek, mothers would tell
their children that Jews will “catch you to a bag and eat you!” When the children first shout that Vladek is
a Jew, Vladek looks baffled at how even the children were converted to seeing
Jews as monsters which shows how seemingly impossible it was to escape the
Nazis. These passages reveal that propaganda was very effective and influenced
an array of ages and it’s possible that the children’s fear of Vladek may have
been due to them reading The Poisonous
Mushroom or other propaganda that was targeted at children. It’s almost ridiculous
to think that people were so gullible when told that Jews were pedophiles they
would be utterly convinced it was true without any actual evidence verifying the
claims. This just proves how people
reacted to supposed “dangers” and how much people were controlled by fear.
How can something like the Holocaust happen?
Many speculate on how an advanced
country like Germany in the 20th century could’ve conceived such an atrocious
event as the Holocaust where an estimated 11 million people were eradicated in
a nonsensical genocide. One of the main
explanations on why Hitler’s vision of a world without Jews started to become a
reality was because of the simplification of differences, Good vs. Bad and
Right vs. Wrong.
Propaganda played a critical role
in creating this anti-Semitism philosophy, the use of this tactic created fear
which led to anger and eventually to hate. These ideologies become quite rooted
in the people of Germany; Propaganda went as far as creating Children’s books
such as The Poisonous Mushroom by Julius
Streicher's Der Stürmer-Verlag which fortified anti-Semitism ideas. Like many
other propaganda products The Poisonous
Mushroom took full advantage of
using Jewish Stereotypes like “The Jewish nose is crooked at its tip” to try
and illustrate how different and alien the Jews were. In addition the title itself
The Poisonous Mushroom portrays Jews
as a poison, a fungi spreading. The Nazis pointing out these stereotypes was an
effective way to alienate them from the rest of the population and further
contribute to the rise of anti-Semitism.
The elimination of Jews and other
minorities became an actuality not only because the Nazi’s put forth tremendous
effort in the genocide but also because there was no opposition to the Nazi
regime. The many bystanders of the Holocaust did not intervene for several
reasons such as: they feared the consequences, many believed in the
anti-Semitism ideas, but many did not speak out because they were not the
victims therefore it was not their place to get involved. This is clearly
demonstrated in the Poem First They Came by Martin Niemoller who was eventually
thrown into a concentration camp. The poem expresses how even though the
minorities were being persecuted he was not one of them, they were different, “I
did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;” But the continuing silence of the
bystanders only allowed the Nazis to continue the crimes, “Then they came for
me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.”, shows that ignoring the
atrocities did not exclude him from them.
Unconceivable
events such as the Holocaust continue to take place today which only further
confirms the fact that differences whether it is race, religion, or social
status, continues to cause conflicts. The Rwanda Genocide was a most recent
event where nearly 800,000 people were murdered because of social differences
between the Tutsis and the Hutus. The
artifact is an interview of a Rwandan Genocide survivor: Immaculee Illibagiza who
recalls the horrors of the event where the minority Tutsis was “slaughtered in
their tracks”. Like the Holocaust the Rwandan genocide was caused by one group
thinking it was superior over the other which led to tension and eventually
mass murder.
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