Why did we bomb Serbs in the 1990s for expelling illegal alien Muslims to preserve their unique culture? General Wesley Clark, supreme commander of NATO from 1997 to 2000, said: “In the modern Europe there is no room for homogeneous national states. It was an idea from 1800s, and we are going to carry it (multi-culturalism) through …and we are going to create multi-ethnic states.”
The Holocaust was an extreme event, and like all events, it was unique. We should be careful about pulling it out and using it as a weapon to promote this or that armed intervention. There are no universally applicable lessons of the Holocaust. We shouldn’t invent them to apply to Serbia in the 1990s.
Banging on about the lessons of the Holocaust usually does more harm than good. There’s nothing in living through the Holocaust that confers wisdom. There’s nothing inherent in visiting a Holocaust museum or watching a movie about the Holocaust that morally elevates you. Writing popular books on the Holocaust does not make you capable of analysing foreign and domestic policy.
All those people who make a living teaching the lessons of the Holocaust are scam artists.
From the Jewish Post of New York:
Wiesel, in order to stress the terrible omission, pointed out the heroic examples of the ‘righteous gentiles’ who risked their life in order to rescue Jews from death. And he concluded: “How is one to explain their indifference?” In response, President Clinton said that we must learn how to prevent indifference to human plight. That the message of this discussion in the White House. There is a need to learn the past in order to avoid mistakes in the future.
“Elie has said that Kosovo is not the Holocaust, but that the distinction should not deter us from doing what is right. I agree on both counts. When we see people forced from their homes at gunpoint, loaded onto train cars, their identity papers confiscated, their very presence blotted from the historical record, it is only natural that we would think of the events which Elie has chronicled tonight in his own life.
“We must always remain awake to the warning signs of evil. And now, we know that it is possible to act before it is too late. The efforts of Holocaust survivors to make us remember and help us understand, therefore, have not been in vain. The people who fought those battles and lived those tragedies, however, will not be around forever. More than a thousand World War II veterans pass away every day. But they can live in our determination to preserve what they gave us and to stand against the modern incarnations of the evil they defeated,” said Clinton. Wiesel, answering questions which poured to the White House from all over the USA said: “I do not believe in collective guilt.
Only the guilty are guilty. Even the children of the killers are not killers, they are children.” Also, Wiesel and President Clinton alike called on humanity to preserve the memory of the Holocaust: “I am worried about what will happen when the last survivor will be around. I would not like to be that survivor,” said Wiesel, the voice of the six millions martyrs.
