The Treblinka, Birkenau, Dachau, Auschwitz and other such concentration camps in Germany were the culmination of a long sinister process initiated by the Nazis. It is important to note that the pogroms, the extermination of European Jews commonly understood as the Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers or mass murders. The vitriol of hatred developed from ideology, prejudice, bigotry, stereotyping, violence, intolerance, muscular nationalism, otherisation, misplaced notions of ethnic superiority, reinforcement of social fault lines, righting of perceived historical wrongs, redressal of imagined insults, manufactured strife and jackbooting dissent. History is witness to the fact that the proponents of the 'Final Solution' themselves ended up as cannon fodder not long after they unleashed 'Kristtalnachtt', the night of broken glass... Unfortunately we are standing on that cusp of history again but it is a good thing that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it... there are a lot many 'forgetters' lording it over us today. Vote them out this year.
