Auschwitz

Quarsan; of course we should not foget the holocaust. However, what we also must not do is lose sight of the abuse of the word. There have been more recent holocausts, but they are never called that. Pol Pot's Cambodia was one and even more recent, is the 'Democratic' Repulic of the Congo http://www.theirc.org/news/latest/inside-congo-an-unspeakable.html  where 5 million have been killed since the start of the new millenium.

The abuse of the word is in the sense that it has been used by extremists to cover an enormous and extended crime in the Middle East, against the Palistinians. So yes, I agree with you we need to fight extremism, but refering to the holocaust not as THE holocaust, but as an example of crimes against humanity (and only one example), might help bring more people into the debate.

Redadare, Thank you for that. Perhaps I should have used the word 'genocide'. Language is very important. I was intending to write about the controversy Cameron has found himself in, but it ended up as something different, something underneath the current storm.

This is such an emotive issue and I appreciate you looking at what I was trying to say, and that you raised a valid point.

I talked with an ex British soldier about his experience when another of the camps was 'liberated'. It was an eye-opener, to say the least.
Worse, though, is to realize the camps were merely part of a meat grinder set loose on men. Nazism threatens to reduce hereditary notions of justice and government to irrelevant anarchronisms. I'm talking New World Order.
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=497251819335380093&hl=en-GB seems a good start at explanation.

Opit, well done, you managed to write a whole sentance, possibly two, that was relevant to the topic before repeating your tired old obsessions, based on the google video that you repeatedly link to.

If I had my way, society would hold the engineers who designed the massacre machinery much more accountable than they do currently.  History proves there's no point in looking to the leaders for humanity, because the few who are any good tend to get bumped off and replaced.  Also, the footsoldiers at the bottom may have little understanding and fewer options.  However, the engineers who build the chemical weapons factories, high altitude bombers, etc have no excuse.  They have the education, and they cannot complete their jobs unless they know exactly what they are doing.  Because of their skills, there is often alternative employment building machinery that does not kill. If they do feel forced into weapons manufacture, they should not do their job well.

This principle applies to other areas.  The implementation of the ID card database should be plagued with technical difficulties because they can't hire good staff.  A radio station broadcasting hate propaganda should constantly have its electricity supply sabotaged and not fixed.  Printers given BNP leaflets should refuse the order or produce batches that are smudged.  Responsibility exists at every level.

Anyways, the easiest measure would be for universities to force all engineers to take a course on war studies; something to give them a bit of a perspective on their field.  Anything to make their recruitment into the weapons industry a little less easy.  Ultimately these are the people who really make it all possible.

For those who are not engineers but have friends doing this sort of bad work, advice on how to approach the subject and what books to give them to read to raise a level of discontent and disgust with what they are doing.

Julian, I agree with you - but you don't have to hang out very long with young engineers, technicians and scientists to see that they're all thoroughly indoctrinated in the concepts that one, science is completely neutral, and two, that there is no bad technology, only bad people.

One wonders exactly what the proper use of a daisycutter is (besides dropping it on nonexistent foreigners, obv.), or, to bring it closer to most people's perspective, the proper use of a suicide belt.

I agree with you as well. But doesn't that argument also include the people who work on nuclear weapons?

Yes, that image sears through the hearts of many, not just through those who were actually on the receiving end. It has become the symbol of not just terrible events, but the mindset that went with it.

For me, the real horror of the holocaust is that for the first time, genocide was actually industrialised. It is true that Stalin killed more of his own people, but somehow, the Soviet purges seemed to be much more ad hoc, casual, somehow. Actually, they weren't. The brutality was just as real; just as evil. Perhaps it is just that there was no single symbol as potent as the entrance to a concentration camp with its ubiquitous slogan, and in the case of Auschwitz, the twin towers over the railway.

The second horror, and mystery, is that this came from the nation that gave us Goethe, Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Bach, Mahler and many others. That nation influences us today as much as it did 60 years ago. They have supplied our royalty, religion, music, culture and now cars. And yet for a brief period of twelve years, one of the most cultured and civilised nations in Europe went mad. That, perhaps, is the biggest source of the terrible fascination that we still have for the Holocaust.

All of which, whilst philosophical, does not help you with your appeal for a cause to satisfy your urge to do some good in the world.

I do not have time to read your blog regularly, so I apologise for coming into an older blog. My most avid reading of this site was just as Blair was about to go. They were exciting times politically. Arguably, these are even more exciting times as the architect of so much of our current ills is now ensconced in No. 10. And so many of the chickens he let out over the last decade are finally coming home to roost.

There are many huge causes in the world. Blair himself would list global warming, poverty, global terrorism, war, insurrection and so on, and on, and on. But all of these are things which are so big that one single person is never going to make a meaningful or even satisfying difference.

So, to my mind, you should play to your strengths. As a blogger, you have the capability to research and to catch whispers on the net. So, use it. The one thing that causes so much of our man-made ills is the suppression of the truth. And, in this country, here and now, the suppression of liberty and freedom of speech and thought is under threat as it has never been in modern history. Totalitarianism is creeping into our lives, not preceeded by bloody revolution, but by stealth. So try fighting that.

Hope thats useful.