Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. The annual memorial falls on January 27th as it's the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
I was planning on writing a whole big post about how we're seeing a return of the rhetoric used in the 1930s and 40s, but I'm just too ill today. It's taken me about 3 hours to write this much (5 hours if you count the 2 hour nap I needed to take after one paragraph).
So instead, have some links:
- Nazi death programme bodies found by Annie Makoff for Disability Now
- An Untold Story for Holocaust Memorial Day by burdzeyeview
- Disability and Propaganda by mindinflux
- The human cost of benefit cuts by me
- The beginning of the end by Aliquant
- Wikipedia page on Aktion T4
- Roaring Girl Productions who've done a project called "Resistance" about the Holocaust
Genocide doesn’t happen overnight, it’s a gradual process which begins when the differences between us are not celebrated but used as a reason to exclude or marginalise. By learning from the lessons of the past, we can create a safer, better future.
From hmd.org.uk
I do find the language being used about us to be deeply disturbing, the echoes of the early '30s are there to be seen for anyone who knows their disability history.
ReplyDeleteThe problem we face is that the general public don't know their disability history, don't know that eugenics and propaganda led to a slow slide into Aktion T4, don't understand why the use of this language is so terrifying to us, and brand us as alarmist when we draw attention to it. I just hope that Santayana was wrong when he said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."