With that in mind, starting with last night's episode and continuing for the next two weeks, PBS is running a series on Auschwitz, which was the most well known of the Nazi death camps. Such horrors were perpetrated there on such a massive scale that it boggles the mind, even to this day.
Among those who participated in the project was Genocide scholar and Africana studies professor Edward Kissi of the University of South Florida. The six-hour PBS/BBC presentation of Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State [also available on DVD), is scheduled to air in the US and Europe beginning Jan. 19, 2005.
I found the first installment of this program intriguing because it approaches the subject from an interesting direction; namely that the problem of genocide isn't confined to the Holocaust or that genocide is a recent phenomenon. The recent phenomenon is that people are horrified by genocide, which can now kill more people more efficiently than ever before.
Auschwitz was only a symbol of the desire to make genocide more efficient and deadly - to kill millions where earlier efforts were considered crude and inefficient by the Nazis (who had tried using mobile trucks to gas victims, special SS units who terrorized areas by shooting victims, and deporting victims into ghettos where they would starve and be worked to death).
Professor Kissi's position in the discussion was to expand on this angle, which is namely that the Holocaust was not a unique situation and it keeps happening as the world looks the other way.
Cambodia. North Korea. Vietnam. Iraq. Rwanda. Congo. Sudan.
All those nations witnessed genocide on a wide scale. Governments sought to eliminate political, social, and economic opponents systematically. In Cambodia, it was the killing fields where more than 2 million died. In North Korea, it is the starvation and imprisonment of political opponents and their families much like the Soviet gulags of the Stalin period. Hundreds of thousands have died in North Korea, all while it seeks nuclear weapons at tremendous cost. Vietnam saw the Communist North wipe out opponents to the Communist takeover, which led to the Vietnamese boatlift. Tens of thousands perished. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein sought to wipe out the Kurds in Northern Iraq and the Shi'ites in Southern Iraq for standing the way of his power and control. At least 300,000 perished in his military campaigns, complete with the use of chemical weapons. Rwanda saw ethnic fighting between rival Hutus and Tutsis lead to the slaughter of at least 800,000 people in 90 days as the world and UN looked on.
