Never forget our nation’s holocausts

By John Sargent
Skiff Staff

Police killings, torturing women and children, racial discrimination, religious persecution, ethnic cleansing, genocide, concentration camps, lynching, hangings, prisoners held without trial or even being charged and any other form of brutality that you can think of comes to mind when we think about the issue of human rights.

In response to the fact that this is Holocaust Remembrance Week I wanted to remind everyone about our own holocausts.

These are all nightmares in history that we in this country try to erase from our memories so that we can pretend that we live in a peaceful world. The only problem is that these nightmares are not just history, they’re reoccurring events.

Most Americans in their pious ignorance seem to believe that these terms can only be rightly applied when referring to “evil” countries and “ruthless governments” such as the Chinese or the Nazi Germans.

For some reason righteous Americans have forgotten our own history and seem to think that our country is the defender of human rights around the world.

Let us never forget the millions of “savages” (Native Americans) who were saved (murdered) by our so-called Christian forefathers. This did not just happen during the time that Europeans began to settle into what we now call America, but years later long after our nation had been established and all the way through President Andrew Jackson’s term in office from 1829-1837.

Let us never forget the millions of “beastly barbarians” (Africans) who were delivered from their uncivilized state of nature by these same people and brought into the peaceful existence of slavery.

Let us never forget the fact that even long after slavery had ended, blacks in this country were still being hanged, lynched, burned, had to use “colored” restrooms, and “colored” water fountains, could not eat in “whites only” restaurants, could not bus their children on white school buses, had inferior schools, had to sit in a separate section in movie theaters, had to move to the back of the bus for white people and didn’t even have the constitutional right to vote extended to them until 1964.

Some, when reading this, may say that these are all events of the past and that our country has moved on since then and that we need to stop talking about it. I would beg to differ.

Regardless of how long ago slavery or the annihilation of millions of Native Americans was, I think that there are at least two points that we need to remember: 1) the immortal saying that “he who forgets the past is doomed to repeat it” still holds true and; 2) it’s not as if equal or even human rights have existed in this country for ages.

Equality between blacks and whites has only begun in the last 40 years and still discrimination, police brutality such as with Rodney King and many others whose names alone would take up too much space in this article, racial profiling (which is ever-increasing) and horrible racists acts such as the Jasper dragging death still exist.

Hold on, this isn’t just about blacks and retribution. I need to back up and remind you about the hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans who were put in internment (concentration) camps during World War II for “the protection of the nation” for no other reason than the fact that they were of Japanese ancestry.

These people lost businesses, homes, jobs, friends and basically their whole livelihood. The point of this article is not to whine about the injustice that has taken place in this country and that continues to exist. The point is to wake us up to the realization that somewhere in the tainted history of this county, we suddenly switched from being the greatest propitiator of enslavement, violence, torture and racial discrimination into being the great defender of human rights around the world.

We always seem to be able to recall events of governmental abuse in some other county or of students being run over by tanks in China, but we forget about the greatest terrorist act and the greatest incident of governmental abuse against civilians this century which took place today eight years ago in Waco.

On April 19, 1993, military tanks were used by our own government to pump in deadly gases and to demolish large portions of the Branch Davidian church building where over 80 civilians including women, children and elderly were at the time, killing all but nine who escaped the deadly fire which the government started.

The purpose of this article is not to take away from the horrible and frightening fact that less than a century ago millions of Jews and other undesirables were murdered by a fearsome and racist government. Let us never forget the injustice of the Holocaust. Let us never forget the injustice of slavery or of internment camps or of the annihilation of Native Americans. Let us never forget that it is our duty to speak out against injustice in society. May we always work to preserve human rights.

John Sargent is a freshman philosophy major from Fort Worth.
He can be reached at (j.w.sargent@student.tcu.edu).

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