Europe, the US and Russia celebrate the 60th anniversary of VE-Day when the Nazis were finally vanquished. There is much pomp and ceremony with the high and mighty traveling round laying wreaths at Tombs of Unknown Soldiers, honoring the tens of millions who died because Hitler believed in a white-skinned, fair-haired master race.
If anyone should be labeled the personification of evil that is surely Adolph Hitler with his systematic eradication of Jews, Gypsies, the physically and mentally challenged and anyone who didn’t fit his own concept of “perfection”.
The horror of the gas chambers, the stuff of countless books and movies leaves readers and viewers invariably asking themselves: How could that have happened? How could humans be so inhuman? Why did so much of the world turn a blind eye? Surely such barbarity is an aberration, a one-off that could never happen again?
The question is just how far has the human race moved on in 60 years. In truth, not very far when we remember how millions of Vietnamese were labeled “Gooks” and mercilessly slaughtered, whole villages set alight along with their inhabitants.
Take, for instance, Bosnia where 3,000 unarmed Muslim men from Srebrenica were massacred, their bodies dumped in unmarked graves or Kosovo, where a policy of ethnic cleansing resulted in thousands of deaths and displaced refugees.
It’s been little more than ten years since the world virtually ignored the Rwandan genocide when over 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered and maimed. But why go back that far?
Even today little is being done about Darfur, where hundreds of thousands have been ousted from their tribal lands purely because of their ethnicity. Would there have been such international indifference if those tribes had been white?
And even as a 60-year-old conflict is being commemorated with prayers being said for lost comrades, while survivors are weighed down with colorful medals, Palestinians are still being murdered and discriminated against on their own lands while up to 100,000 Iraqi civilians have fallen victim to an illegal war, waged on a false pretext.
And yes the invasion of Iraq was fought on racist lines too. Sam Diener, the co-editor of Peacework, describes his basic training in the US military thus: “In the platoon, they called Iraqis ‘ragheads’ and all sorts of racist labels.”
Letta Taylor writing in Newsday at the start of the occupation says: “US forces invading this country make frequent reference to ‘nuking’ Iraqis, whom they call “ragheads” and ‘camel jockeys’ often without appearing to distinguish between civilians and enemy forces.”
Bob Herbert of the New York Times underscores this trend in his May 2 column titled “From ‘Gook’ to ‘Raghead’”. Herbert recounts of experiences of Aidan Delgado, who enlisted as a private in the Reserves and ended up in Iraq.
Delgado’s father was a diplomat and so the boy spent much of his youth overseas, including eight years spent in Egypt where he learned Arabic and studied Arab culture.
Writes Herbert: “He (Delgado) wasn’t happy when, even before his unit left the states, a top officer made wisecracks about the soldiers heading off to Iraq to kill some ragheads and burn some turbans.”
Delgado complained of gratuitous violence “routinely inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary Iraqis, saying, “Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvees and shatter bottles over the head of Iraq civilians passing by...”
It isn’t only soldiers who display racist traits. Ordinary people in just about every society are often equally as guilty.
When I was a child growing up in a multiethnic London borough during the ’60s, there were classified ads in the paper advertising property for rent with the caveat: “No children, no dogs and no coloreds”. In those days, couples of mixed race were societal pariahs, aptly illustrated by “Guess who’s coming to dinner” starring Sidney Poitier.
Is the situation better today? I don’t believe so. Racism went undercover for decades simmering under a politically correct surface only to re-emerge as evidenced by the rise of the British National Party (BNP), which received tens of thousands of votes during last week’s election.
There is a similar trend in Germany as we saw on VE-Day when neo-Nazi groups staged demonstrations, in the Netherlands where Muslims are being vilified and marginalized and in Austria and France, where Joerg Haider’s Freedom Party and Jean Le Pen’s National Front — two parties of hate and xenophobia — are respectively gaining recruits.
Born in Wales where the only foreigners my parents ever encountered were Italian ice-cream sellers and French onion Johnnies, I consider myself privileged to have moved to London at an early age where my classmates represented a multicolored, multiethnic, multireligious rainbow. They were Greeks, Turks, Pakistanis, Indians, West Indians, Christians, Muslims and Jews. They taught me so much and with them I learned to see beyond race, religion or color. I was further blessed with a wise and wonderful father who told me never to judge a book by its cover.
We truly are all brothers and sisters under the skin with similar needs, hopes, and aspirations, yet few of us realize this.
We are taught to believe our nation is the best and to be proud of being American or British or whatever, without contemplating that our birth was nothing more than a happy accident of fate.
Under the guise of patriotism we are indoctrinated to believe that we are superior to everyone else on the planet and as long as this continues there will always be conflicts and wars. In my personal lexicon patriotism is nothing less than a dirty word. This is one world, one planet and unless we can learn to get along, sadly, it may not be around in its present form for very much longer.
Wouldn’t it be nice if every student could spend a gap year on a remote island along with fellows from every corner of the earth? They might begin by banding together in small cliques based on nationality but eventually those groupings would break down with individuals interacting with one another on the basis of kindness, strength of character, innate skill, and personality.
It’s fear of the unknown that is the prime cause of racism and bigotry. Isn’t it about time we truly got to know one another and begin to celebrate our commonalities rather than our perceived differences? I believe it is.
