After the mounds of bones at Auschwitz, the incinerators and gas chambers, we understood those who said, “Never Again!“
We thought we understood.
Except while saying, “Never Again!” they told the Palestinians they could not become citizens of the state called Israel, explaining to the world that the Jews, a chosen race of people, had been given a divine command to bring civilization to a benighted region.
And then with “Never Again!” on their lips, these new settlers blitzkrieged across borders. Demanding “secure borders” they kept changing borders. And Israel’s borders, being the fruit of aggression, became less and less secure, requiring ever new and more “secure” borders.
And where had we all seen this before?
“Never Again!” they snarled, and when confronted with an occupied population in a state of resistance, blew up homes to teach lessons, cut off water supplies, tried to starve out the population, spoke of collective Palestinian responsibility for acts of “terrorism”, burned books, tried to obliterate Palestinian culture.
Never Again? THEY are doing it again!
We had thought “Never Again!” was a call against all genocide, against fascism in whatever guise. We didn’t understand that “Never Again!” meant that the Jews alone should be spared extermination, so that, for example, it was perfectly proper to send Israeli guns to wipe out the Indians of Guatemala, the peasants of El Salvador, to perfect the apparatus of torture in Chile and Zaire, and to share nuclear weapons technology with the Hitler-lovers of the super-race of South Africa against the whole African continent.
But we shall rescue the meaning of the Holocaust from this perversion. And we intend to save the Holocaust victims from a second immolation.
The Holocaust. What was the Holocaust?
The Holocaust was the slaughter of six million Jews…AND…the liquidation of the flower of the German nation – democrats and Socialists and Communists, militant trade unionists, intellectuals who would not submit, churchmen who took their religion seriously…AND…the death of twenty-five million Soviet people. The Holocaust was the World War marked by 50 MILLION GRAVES.
Planted in the rich soil of German racism, nurtured by German militarism, cultivated by German Big Business, and abetted by the financiers and the “cream” of Western society, the Holocaust was the fruit of the alliance of the corporate states and the corporation states in the name of anti-Communism. And as Nazi Germany was the bulwark against Communism in Europe, so Israel advertises itself as the bulwark against Communism in the Middle East, the bulwark against the national and social aspirations of 100 million Arabs, the bulwark of oil profits, bulwark for the banks and the billionares.
Israel and the Zionists cloak their genocidal deeds in cynical and loathsome manipulation of the memory of the Fascist terror. But the ssacred flame of the memory of the Holocaust lives on – not in Tel Aviv, but in the burning passion of the Farabundo Marti of El Salvador, the Burning Spear of the African National Congress, in the resistance fighters in Chile and Guatemala, and yes, and especially in the hearts of the Palestinian people fighting for national survival!
Originally released via the November 29th Coalition.
