Opinion: In human

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“And man, whose heav’n-erected face; The smiles of love adorn, – Man’s inhumanity to man; Makes countless thousands mourn!” observed famed Scottish poet Robert Burns in 1784. Mankind has long inflicted an abundance of inhumanity upon itself. For centuries we humans, even as we imagine art, science, literature and civilization, seem compelled to segregate and destroy ourselves. When no logical division is apparent, we will fabricate one.

In Poland for business, I extended the trip to visit the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau. Words fail to adequately describe the jarring reality of walking the lanes and into the chambers wherein so very many innocents were murdered. It is a shameful place. But, it is an important one. Our abject ability to commit unimaginable acts is only eclipsed by our desire to forget, or even in some cases deny, that they occur. The physical reminder challenges those who would eagerly forget.

These perditions brought a tortuous end to the lives of many hundreds of thousands of Jews – likewise, many thousands more Poles, Catholics, homosexuals, and others deemed inferior or even evil. Some adhere to the adage that we must study history or we are doomed to repeat it. Perhaps they have a point. But isn’t it more likely that we must study history to predict what we are likely or even inevitable to do again so that we can guard against it. Genocide, as stunningly unfortunate as it is to say, it not restricted to one time or to one race. Is it possible that the human urge to destroy is every bit as strong as the desire to build? Is the ISIS tribal extermination in the Middle East and the Christian slaughter in Africa simply a continuation of the worst in us? Even as we mourn the past, how do we defend our future?


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