Time to do more for peace

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/11/2023 (676 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the week before Hamas attacked Israel, I was reminded by events elsewhere of Eli Wiesel’s observation (in his Nobel Peace Prize address in 1986) that “neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

So, as I sat quietly (once again) in the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, I reread Wiesel’s famous book, Night, and thought about the Holocaust.

What kind of government, ostensibly democratic or not, legitimizes the suffering and death of children, for any reason? How can people enable and support such a monstrous government to do such terrible things, without inevitably becoming monsters themselves?

It would be comforting to have exotic answers to these questions — something so bizarre that these circumstances would be clearly aberrations, both for any government and for the people who did its bidding.

But Germany in the 1930s and 1940s was uncomfortably ordinary. Its government and its functionaries, the people themselves, were entirely the same as you would have found on the streets of other countries around the world at the time. The populist speeches of Adolf Hitler and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, broadcast by new technologies to the masses, were disturbingly similar.

The Holocaust was genocide, to be sure, but it was not the only genocide in history, as the CMHR displays make clear. Nor, without substantial changes in how we live together, will it be the last.

In any conflict, there is the polarizing push to choose the side you want to win — to take sides, even if there is likely to be no clear winner, to blame one set of combatants and therefore to absolve the others.

While the reasons for conflict may be hard to discern (especially in the fog of 21^st century war), its victims are obvious, on all sides. As the carnage unfolds in Gaza, from a victim’s perspective, does it really matter which side fired the missile that flattened the hospital? Or whose bullet or shell fragment killed that particular child? The grief and the loss are not lessened by knowing who was responsible.

From a victim’s perspective, it doesn’t matter if death comes by bullet, bomb or missile, by enemy or friendly fire. Nor does it matter if death is by thirst, disease, hunger or blockade, in an open field or under the rubble of what used to be a home. For those left behind, the grief is just as real, just as strong, just as inconsolable.

We live in a world full of slow, quiet, local violence, the kind that brews in silence and rarely rises to the level of a headline or a news item. But its presence, everywhere, is real; its victims are just as much casualties as those hurt by more public violence on some geo-located battlefield.

In that silent world, actual war is cathartic. Overt violence is easier to see, harder to avoid — easier to accept or to oppose. Neutrality is harder to maintain, because everyone is affected, and the victims are bloodily obvious.

Yet as my friend Dr. Samantha Nutt reminds me, every time she speaks, a life is a life, wherever it is lived. Whenever we lose sight of that profound truth, something of our humanity is lost, and an Auschwitz of our own making becomes not only possible, but inevitable.

So, we cannot afford to export conflict in Gaza to anywhere else in the world. The people of Israel and Palestine instead need to reject the leadership that has brought them to this point, the leaders who have promoted both the long, slow violence that set the stage for inevitable war, and those who have provoked and fought it.

Ordinary people, on all sides, are the victims, however, and none of us can afford to be silent or neutral about them. Our witness to the value and dignity of every life needs to be loud and unequivocal.

There are many pathways to genocide, but all of them require both oppressors and acquiescence. Our silence or neutrality in the face of such oppression is therefore unacceptable. Otherwise, “Never Again” will instead become “Always.”

On this Remembrance Day, we honour the memory of those who sacrificed themselves in our country’s service, whether in the fury of war or through long painful grief afterward. The poppy we wear does not honour war; it acknowledges the inability — the failure — of people and institutions to find a better way than fighting to prevent or resolve conflict.

It reminds us we can all say and do more for peace. Today.

Peter Denton writes from his home in rural Manitoba.