Gas chamber.

A single day every year is dedicated as the International #Holocaust Remembrance day. The word “Holocaust” means a great destruction or devastation, caused by fire. The indiscriminate killing of people, in the gas chambers and crematories, by the #Nazi Germans, became the basis for remembering the events, which took place inside the #German concentration camps during world war II, as the Holocaust.

The numbers of people quoted by various sources, who lost their
lives at the hands of fascists, differs greatly, but the fact that all of the innocent people murdered in those camps were human beings, makes the numbers irrelevant. There are a few popular camps like Auschwitz, but the network of camps of death was very extensive, within the German held territories and Germany itself.

The people, who lost their lives, at the hands of the fascists, included the #Jews, the #Ukrainians and the #Russians, Communists, gays, disabled people, etc. For me each of the lives lost in that process, which we call holocaust, has equal high value. Why? Because all of them were human beings. Loss of human life, irrespective of ethnicity or other differentiating features, is the loss of civilization, and I want to live in a civilized world.

According to some accounts, the total number of victims of holocaust exceeded 11 million people. In our modern world there are many countries, which do not have 11 million citizens. So, we can say that the holocaust resulted in the murder of more than the whole population of Finland and the three Baltic States, combined. I like to remember the holocaust, because I don’t want any such thing to reoccur. But, have we abolished mass murders committed under various pretexts? Unfortunately not.

As far as I can understand the main cause of not learning any lessons, from such extensive loss of innocent life, was the localization of the incident. What I mean by “localization” is that instead of considering and remembering the holocaust as the human tragedy, we turned it into a Jewish tragedy. Hence, we undermined the significance of the lost lives. I do not want to imply here that someone intentionally did this. All I want to say is that life is not Slavic, Jewish, Muslim, White, Black, Oriental, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, atheist, democratic or totalitarian. Human life is human life, and acts of barbarity against human life should be condemned. We should learn lessons to never let human life suffer as such. But since May 1945, when Nazi Germany capitulated, there have been scores of mass murders, committed by various actors, against various victim groups. So, I believe that loss of human life in Nazi concentration camps had no value for us, although we hypocritically show our remembrance every 27th of January.

Looking a bit beyond the gruesome facts of the holocaust, I think that it is human nature, or a very tested political technology, to undermine issues by categorizing them or crediting them to certain groups. For example, for the last many years, I have been hearing a lot of fuss about gender equality. It is irrelevant if the question is about female rights or male rights. The important fact is that raising your voice about gender rights, you automatically create an opposition group and then the fight loses its perspective, because it is one human group against the other.

I did not use the term “political technology” just because I was short of words or couldn’t find a better term, but because the issues like “gender equality” are in fact a trick out of the box of political technologies. Human equality brings people together, whereas gender equality draws a line. 

I would not have any questions about the validity of this issue if I would see some ground facts supporting it. For example, when advocates of gender equality talk about equal working opportunities for males and females, and when they advocate equal wages for both sexes, I can only admire them. But, probably they should first talk about equal wages for local and immigrant workers in many, and nearly all European and Western, countries. 

People are fighting for gender equality, and I can only admire them for their will to fight for something, but why do we have separate toilets for both genders in all countries, where the level of gender equality is very super?

Why do women have a separate tennis tour (WTA)? Why don’t men and women compete in a single 100-meter dash at the Olympics? Why don’t we have mixed hockey teams?

I can go on and on about such disparities, but I do understand that advocates of gender equality are just as superficial, as many other people. They think that making women more masculine and making men more feminine is the ultimate of #gender-equality.

We will keep on suffering and wasting our time on non-issues, unless we understand that Holocaust was not a Jewish tragedy, it was a human tragedy. Unless, we understand and recognize that we should not be talking about gender equality, we should be talking about human equality, and more so, we need to understand the gravity of the word “equality”. 

Till then, let’s mourn the loss of human life, during the World War II.