We have been taught that the holocaust was singular act of evil. So evil, in fact, that it could only have been carried out by monsters.
Caricature nazis have plagued our popular media for decades. They were depicted as uniquely evil, almost like machines. But we all know, in reality, they were mostly regular people. Your neighbor, teacher or accountant. They were more like the non-prisioner extras of The Zone of Interest.
Popular western culture portraits as unique heroes those that stood up and did the right thing in the 1930s, from the sisters Scholl to Schindler. But the movie “Shindler’s list”, is as much the story of the one bussinesman who helped those in need, as the story of thousands of companies and individuals that could have helped but did not, of those who chose profit and quiet instead. Capitalism kills.
We have been taught that the nazi regime power was held by few individuals and some groups, that once they were gone, problem was largely solved. But in reality the power resided in power structures not on the individuals.
Power structures fueled by capitalists fortunes that themselves, in turn, profited from tyrany and war. The capitalist moguls and enterprises from back then were allowed to largely retain their ill-gotten war profits, and are today some of the richest and most powerful companies and families in this country.
Today we see again, the richest people on earth backing up authoritarian regimes and profit from war and genocide, from Palestine to Congo to Sudan to West Sahara
These power structures from the last century were based in a racist white supremacist ideology. One that dehumanised Jews, Sinti and Roma and Slavic people.
But today the West dehumanises of most of the peoples of the world. We expel the ones uncomfortable to our regimes, close down borders, and pay other countries to do our dirty work.
This dehumanisation is being broadcasted daily in our mainstream media. And it is painfully patent in the covering of the genocide in Gaza. Palestinians are rarely worth talking about, and are mainly refer to as terrorist. Articles, comments and tweets referring to them as human animals are common, and still today remain unpunished. While at the same time we get criminalised for shouting Free Palestine.
We have been taught Nazism came from almost nowhere and that as soon as the most prominent nazis were gone, Germany denazified. We could not have been more lied to. They are back and as racist and fearmongers as ever. In fact, they just never left.
We know that revolutions and dictatorships’ conditions develop first slowly, and then there they are all at once. We can see this in last century Germany how it descended day by day to nazism and culminated in war and the holocaust, and today we see it in the devastating genocide being perpetrated in Palestine. 76 years of occupation, apartheid and slow genocidal practices are now culminating all at once in one of the worst atrocities of this century.
And again, we have the perpetrators and cheerleaders among us. We have them in our university’s presidiums, our media, our clubs and in the parliament. Germany is once again rotten with genocidal, racist and fascist mania, while most look the other way, and criticize those who dare to break their peace of mind.
Back then they had the written media to push their genocidal views, now they have the media and the algorithms. Back then they had Henry Ford, today they have Musk. Back then people didn’t know, today “it´s complicated”. Shame shit almost a 100 years later.
Being in this square is extremely symbolic, not only because of the Heinrich Heine words written all over it “those who burn books will at the end burn people” with which Heine tried to warn of the insidious and growing 19th century antisemitism, and ended up summarizing what was to come: Both 80 years ago in Europe and today the scholasticide and genocide in Gaza.
But it is also symbolic for its empty monument, both literally empty, and in meaning.
As HP Loveshaft in a beautiful speech back in 2023 said, some of the first books to burn in this place was the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, a German Jewish physician, sexologist, multidisciplinary scholar, and woman and LGTBQ rights advocate, whose German citizenship was promptly revoked by the nazis. (eerie familiar) Along with his own work, the nazis burned the books of Hirschfield’s Institute for Sexualwissenschaft library. And as HP suggested, this monument would have been a lot more meaningful if instead of void space they would have erected a library with all those books from his library that were burned.
Maybe, had we read more, instead of having pretended to atone from the past with empty words, gestures and monuments, we would not have to be here again having to claim that never again, means never again for anyone, anywhere.
Free Palestine!
