Terry Kirkpatrick's Musings: We need to understand where we all could end up

Model of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

In Tuesday, January 18th's Ottawa Citizen, Gail Asper wrote a piece she called "We need to understand where we came from". Gail is national campaign chair of Friends of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The piece caught my eye based on a breakout section that announced that "Canada is one of the few western countries that does not study the Holocaust in its national institutions". Gail's father Izzy (Israel) Asper is a noted media and philanthropic figure whose name I would have more easily and quickly recognized.

First, I must say I would have, in the past, skipped over this section, like I suspect many Canadians not of Jewish descent would do. Secondly, I would have to agree with Gail, that most Canadians have not been taught anything of importance about the Holocaust, or for that matter, any of the other extreme Human Rights abuses of past cultures, civilizations and modern times particularly.

The Liberation of Belsen Concentration Camp Ap...

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As a child, I remember the advent of TV, and I distinctly remember watching with childlike fascination the bulldozers pushing bodies into mass graves, and other footage of massive piles of bodies, these pictures no doubt taken in killing fields and in death camps in Nazi Germany. Keep in mind that I would have been just entering grade school at the time, and at 58, my memory for details (okay, it's NEVER been that good) is poor. I was unable to process the horror but it certainly has stuck in my mind, similar to the way news of John F. Kennedy's assassination and what I was doing at the time, has also stuck in my mind. I would have been just turned 11 at the time.

Dr. Fritz Klein stands amongst corpses in Mass...

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Frankly, I didn't get to appreciate the importance of this information until I attended a lecture by David Hingsburger who spoke of the way in which people with disAbilities were killed at, I think, either Bergen-Belsen or Buchenwald (something with a B). Am I making the point that we have not been students of the Holocaust in Canada? Dave was riveting in his descriptions of the methods that were used to "euthanize" the sick, disfigured and disabled. And how these helped the Nazis develop the methods and probably also numerous rationalizations by which Jews, Gypsies and others were destroyed in later years at death camps in Germany. I also read a powerful piece by Dick Sobsey (think it might have been in the magazine of ARCH (Advocacy Research Centre for the Handicapped, Toronto) back in the 1980's or early 1990's on how Hitler's physician was asked to examine a disAbled child to see if he should be "euthanized", back in the early 1930's. The physician agreed that he should be, and Dick makes the point that the "mercy killing" of a young disAbled child led to the Nazi killing camps which eliminated 6 million Jews.

So, because of this connection with those who I have pledged to support, and when necessary, defend, I have this connection now, in my heart and soul, with Jews and the Holocaust, indeed, with a variety of peoples who have been selected for elimination or inhumane treatment simply on the basis of some devalued characteristic, such as skin colour, religion, sexual orientation, language, gender, cultural heritage, and so on.

With the wisdom born of lived experience, I can have a greater appreciation for the dishonour done to others by ignorance, arrogance, simple-minded notions of "us" and "them", and the part of the human psyche that harbours evil.

Because of this connection, I absolutely agree with Israel Asper that "in order to understand why a country is worth having, you have to know where it came from and that the rights we enjoy today are as a result of the heroic efforts of many ordinary people who took responsibility for the advancement of our human rights..."

Do I think we should study the Holocaust? Yes. Is the Holocaust the only example or even the best (worst) example of extreme human rights abuses? I don't know - it's a strange conversation to compare the extent of man's inhumanity between one event or series of events and another. Does an exhibit about the Holocaust elbow other extreme human rights abuses such as mass exterminations, starvations, and so on to other peoples, of other cultures, religions, etc. out of the way? No, I don't think so. Thanks to all cultures who have taken great pains to preserve the written, recorded, photographic and video archives of this filthy disgusting display of human behaviour, whether individually by secular or religious leaders, by formal organizations of a religion, tribe, state, or government, or by a whole ethnic group against another, there are reminders of the lessons to be learned today. It is not only history, it is also the future, if we do not take the required actions to prevent such atrocities.

Dick Sobsey is a regular writer on abuse, maltreatment and death-making of people with disAbilities. Wolf Wolfensburger coined the term "death-making" in his histories of treatment of people with disAbilities. I recommend the reader to both authors for how people with disAbilities are still at risk in today's bright, well-educated societies of the West, which prides itself on being the rescuers from tyranny and extermination, as Allies during the second World War. Both remind us that the framework of laws that were used in Germany to justify the "mercy killing" of the disAbled boy, and later millions of Jews, were imported from the State of Virginia, in the United States of America.

Reports of abuse of the elderly, and various forms of euthanasia discussion, including withholding of treatment as well as assisted suicide, for those with impairments of old age, bring to mind that we are all aging and may find ourselves living with the phenomenon of being unwanted, unproductive, and unable to defend ourselves. So we shouldn't be smug about things like this. Those who don't remember their history are doomed to repeat it.