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It is certainly vital to maintain both caution and optimism in dealing with
the future. It is important for modern society to maintain a fundamental
dedication to human rights. The Holocaust was successful because
of the failure to restrain more base instincts in contemporary life. To prevent similar occurrences, people need to learn to cooperate, working
together for mutual protection and development. Fortunately, we also have the ability to hope.
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If we could learn to look instead of gawking,
We'd see the horror in the heart of farce,
If only we could act instead of talking,
We wouldn't always end up on our .
This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;
Don't rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the ,
The that bore him is in heat again.
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Yeti, not only crimes
are possible among us.
Yeti, not all words
are death sentences.
We inherit hope --
the gift of forgetfulness.
You notice how we give birth
to children among the ruins.
Yeti, we have Shakespeares.
Yeti, we play violins.
Yeti, when darkness falls
we turn on lights.
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"The major international schisms of the twenty-first
century will not always be definable in geographic terms. Many of
the most severe and persistent threats to global peace and stability are
arising not from conflicts between major political entities but from increased
discord within states, societies, and civilzations along ethnic, racial,
religious, linguistic, caste, or class lines. . . . This is not to
say that traditional geopolitical divisions no longer play a role in the
world security affairs. But it does suggest that such divisions may
have been superseded in importance by the new global schisms."
-Current
History
"Multiethnic societies are not impossible, but they
are often rather delicate. . . . The trick in a successful society is for
the minority citizens to be able to feel they are more than one thing at
once: to be able to feel American and black, Scottish and British, an Orthodox
Christian and a Bosnian, a Muslim and an Indian. This is hard, and
it is easy for anyone seeking a power base to make it harder still.
Ethnicity raises so many difficulties precisely because it is easily appealed
to and hard to question, especially from outside. But people will
resist such appeals if it seems worthwhile to them. There are ideas
that people value as they value blood and earth."
-The Economist
(Sept. 23, 1995)
"The peoples of the West must hang together, or they will hang separately."
-Samuel P. Huntington, Foreign
Affairs (Nov/Dec 1996)
"No assessment of modern culture can ignore the fact that
science and technology -- the accepted flower and glory of modernity --
climaxed in the factories of death."
-Irving Greenberg (qtd. in The
History and Sociology of Genocide)
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First They Came For . . .
by Reverend Martin Niemoeller
Reverend Niemoeller, a German Lutheran pastor, was arrested by the Gestapo
and sent to Dachau in 1938. He was freed by the Allied Forces in
1945. |
In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
but I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one left to speak for me.
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Never Say
by Hersh Glik
"Never Say" became the unofficial song of the Jewish Partisans across
occupied Europe. Glik (1922-1944), a poet in the ghetto of Vilna,
Lithuania, wrote the song in Yiddush in 1943, after the Warsaw ghetto
uprising. It was set to music by two Soviet-Jewish composers, brothers
Dimitri and Daniel Pokras. Glik was killed after he and other partisans
tried to escape from a concentration camp in Estonia in summer 1944. |
Never say there is only death for you.
Though leadened skies may be concealing days of blue--
Because the hour we have hungered for is near;
Beneath our tread the earth shall tremble: We are here!
From land of palm-tree to the far-off land of snow,
We shall be coming with our torment and our woe.
And everywhere our blood has sunk into the earth.
Shall our bravery, our vigor blossom forth!
We'll have the morning sun to set our day aglow,
And all our yesterdays shall vanish with the foe,
And if the time is long before the sun appears,
Then let this song go like a signal through the years.
This song was written with our blood and not with lead;
It's not a song that birds sing overhead,
It was a people, among toppling barricades,
That sang this song of ours with pistols and grenades.
So never say there is only death for you.
Leadened skies may be concealing days of blue--
Yet the hour we have hungered for is near;
Beneath our tread the earth shall tremble: We are here! |
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