Consider if this is a man
who can not remember his home,
he works and sleeps,
he exists.
He is a cart-horse, this man,
who never questions a task;
the man has only one face
and he is ashamed to recognise it.
Tell me that this is a man,
with stolen scraps for shoes,
whose heart is warmed by cold porridge,
he breathes.
He has no shadow, this man,
they have taken everything from him;
his body can not understand fatigue
even as it breaks apart.
It is a sad and painful thing to look at this man
knowing he once held his freedom in his hands.
I just read "If this is a man" by Primo Levi, a great and absorbing book about the mass dehumanisation of Jews in Auschwitz and the incredible survival of a few unbreakable spirits. Surprisingly, it doesnt bash the nazis as you'd expect it to.
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i know this is likely to earn me some real hate but i have been thinking about it for quite a while and with this post, i'm just going to come out and say it. i don't feel sorry for the jews or what happened to them. no, i'm not anti-semitic or whatever they are calling it now. what i do know is that i'm tired of being forced to feel guilty and sorry for what happend to them, i'm sick of eternally apologising. shit has happened to all of us. we deal with it and move on. so i'm not the right person to be commenting on the poem though i kind of like that poem, just that i'm going to read it without the background context you seem to think is necessary to fully appreciate.
Iwaya, perhaps it is important to move passed events that deeply affect us in one way or another but we must never forget. True, there comes a point where we can no longer use the past as an excuse. It's not enough for a black man today to claim that the efects of slavery are still holding us back.
But we must never forget that it happened. We must tell our children and our children's children so that they know who they are and where they come from.
As far as incomprehensible evil, i dont think any other single event in the history of mankind measures up to the systematic genocide of the Jews and the Rwandans. It is no excuse for who we are today but we must never forget that men have tried to extinguish an entire race of men or that the world let it happen.
In fact, i have mis-represented Mr Levi's moving book which is ironically uplifting and insightful and never makes out to attack the Germans but simply to understand how a thing like that happened.
You have no cause to fear backlash about your comment. No one reads this blog except Ink.
well i think this is going to divert slightly from the post but whn does it never?
when i said that i'm tired of feeling sorry for the jews and eternally apologising, it all came from a background of the fact that since the jews have used what happened to them to justify their sometimes belligerent and provocative attitude towards the arabs and whoever is believed to stand in their way. the jews have themselves ended up being what they condemned, or nearly it anyway, bullies and tryants. need i point out the middle east situation?
yes we should never forget the past because as faulkner said, and i'm misquoting him here, the past is not dead, it is here with us. but what gets me is always being expected to be reverential to their past just because of what happened to them.
as for genocides and whole scale slaugher wars, i think you're deluding yourself abit if you think rwanda and the jew thing are exceptions rather than what happens in cycles. history repeats itself and you can bet on it, these two will not the last.
as for Primo Levi's book, i have been reading quite a bit on him and he is exactly a good reason why jews are admired: he was able to live through hate and not hate, offering love where he was kicked. so you see, i do find quite a bit to admire in some jews. just that i hate their we are special club routine.
did u know levi committed suicide after surviving the camps i think more than 40 years?
When does what never? i didnt get that part.
As is to be expected, you've made me dig up some info on topics related to this post and i must say, there has been alotta murder i was simply ignorant about. Perhaps if i had read an account of one of the other genocides, i would have written a country song about it.
At the end of it all, isnt that my point? Think of it like this: of all the genocides that we have let happen, the holocaust and the 100 days in 1994 are the most commonly known. Why? Have we let ourselves forget the millions of others that died? i didnt know about the 15 million Ukrainian deaths in the Soviet Union so either i am truly ignorant, which is niether impossible nor far-fetched, or just maybe, we have allowed ourselves to unlearn history.
Primo Levi's death was suspiscious and most probably suicide. The song i wrote was for him, inspired by him. You are right; it is not fair for me to pity him. I must celebrate him and his survival.
As for the middle east situation, if it is not acceptable for the Jews to use the holocaust as an excuse for their (mis)behaviour, it follows that their behaviour should not be judged in relation to that same holocaust. In which case, they are simply acting mad in a world run by and full of mad men.
u ought to read Ellie Wiesel's "Night" too, another Jew who survived the Holoucast. it inspired me to change mybeliefs, i kinda feel for Mr. Wiesel the way you feel for Mr. Levi. anyway, i'm probly being a foolish optimist, but it made me cringe the way Iwaya said "you can bet on it, these two will not be the last". you make it osund like it's ok, even expected for races and tribes and clans to wipe out other ethnic groups! nway, death is death and life is life, no mass-slaughter of people should be forgotten, not northern Uganda, not Darfur, not Angola, not Hungary, nothing, no one.
which brings me to the real point, we remember so we can prevent! we learn from our mistakes, and as civilizations, develop and grow away from the senseless killing that is genocied. so, mMr. Iwaya, the Holoucast and Rwanda might not have been the last, but we have come that much closer to the last as an entire human race.
p.s... YEEEAAHHH!!! i got number one fan!!!! and to show me devotion, i'm missing dinner for this here ish!
I agree with all of you, given a chance i would wish none of these terrible things ever happening again. but fact is they will. we can't ignore facts.
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