Waco Tribune Herald, TX
May 6 2007
Nathan Stone, guest column: Silence on Darfur holocaust is deafening
Sunday, May 06, 2007
April 15 was Holocaust Remembrance Day, the annual evoking of a time
– only about 60 years ago – when 6 million people were killed
systematically by the Nazi empire.
Those exterminated included not only Jews but also homosexuals,
Jehovah’s Witnesses, political dissidents, gypsies, the disabled and
miscellaneous Slavic people.
Preparing to speak at a service for the commemoration, I revisited
Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.
What a painful experience to watch: the rounding up of the condemned,
the ghettos, the executions, the heroism of so many Jews, the
complexity of the Nazi Oskar Schindler (bad man, good man).
Over and over, I found myself crying and muttering, `You gotta be
kidding me.’
Now there is Darfur: that little western section of the country of
Sudan in East Africa. One recent report is that 200,000 have died
there and 2 million have been displaced.
The United Nations estimates that if the killing in Darfur is not
stopped, the fighting will bring civil war into the neighboring
country of Chad – and then the death toll will reach 100,000 a month.
The first holocaust of the 20th century was of the Armenians. There
was a lot of publicity about the Armenians at the time, but their
story was quickly forgotten because they didn’t have the writers and
painters and musicians to tell their story. When asked what the
world would think about the Jewish holocaust, Hitler said, `Who
remembers the Armenians?’
Stalin killed an estimated 14 million who wanted to hang on to their
small family farms. Mao, in the Great Leap Forward, is estimated to
have killed 30 million Chinese.
Pol Pot, in an effort to return to the glories of the Khmer past,
killed an estimated one fourth of Cambodia’s population, while
one-third of the population fled.
The world already has forgotten those victims, but they remember the
Jewish Holocaust. Why? Because Jewish writers, painters, musicians
and historians will not let us forget. For that we owe them our
thanks. But we also need to remember it wasn’t the only genocide or
the worst.
Even with all of our good and potential, we can be a very spooky
species.
There is so much to learn about Darfur. But, as things now go, you
and I will probably not know much if we wait for television coverage.
The slacker now is ABC News. The Tyndall Report, which monitors
network news coverage, found that ABC’s nightly newscasts included
just 11 minutes of coverage of Darfur in all of 2006, compared with
23 minutes ABC devoted to the false confession to the killing of
JonBenet Ramsey.
If only a Darfuri would falsely confess to killing JonBenet, maybe
ABC would cover genocide.
Every person I asked knew very little about Darfur, and the most
disconcerting reality is that no one I spoke to really cared very
much. They weren’t mean about it. They just didn’t have much interest
in talking about it.
What bothers me most about Darfur, and even the whole notion of
genocide is that it doesn’t really bother me very much. Oh, I get a
twang of conscience now and then ,but not much more.
The situation is so big and so complex that I hardly know where to
begin in terms of a response.
There are some situations for which you can just ask for money and
leave it at that. But this is so much bigger.
This is one of those situations where you and I are going to have to
do any number of things:
* Join the United States Holocaust Museum’s `Community of Conscience’
and be informed through its e-newsletter.
* Contact the media and demand more coverage.
* Communicate with decision-makers (the U.S. government, the African
Union, the European Union and the United Nations Security Council).
* Spread the word in your community about Darfur and genocide.
* Support education and relief efforts.
The words of Martin Luther King Jr. are so relevant:
`We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a
single garment of destiny. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice
everywhere.’
Indeed, genocide there invites potential genocide anywhere.
Nathan Stone is minister of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of
Waco.
ws/opinion/stories/2007/05/06/05062007wacstone.htm l