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Never again.
That is the lesson that we Americans should be learning from the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Never again ... will Germans kill Jews in Poland.
What, you thought that the lesson was, "Never again would killings occur on a massive scale?" Please.
It happened in China in 1966 when Mao led the Cultural revolution and killed 11 million people to promote his party and solidify his rule. It happened in Cambodia when Pol Pot murdered 1.7 million citizens in the mid-70s.
One million died in Algeria fighting the French, because Charles DeGaulle ordered it. Brezhnev killed 900,000 when Russia invaded Afghanistan, and 800,000 died in Rwanda in the 1990s.
In the Darfur region of Sudan, a country most Americans wouldn't be able to find on a map, the Sudanese government and militias allied with the government have killed more than 70,000 people in a counter-insurgency that uses "ethnic cleansing" as a military tactic.
Vice President Dick Cheney attended the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, stood up and said to the world: "The story of the camps reminds us that evil is real and must be called by its name and must be confronted ... The death camps were created by men with a high opinion of themselves - some of them well-educated and possessed of refined manners - but without conscience. And where there is no conscience, there is no tolerance toward others ... no defense against evil ... and no limit to the crimes that follow."
Cheney's words ring hollow as his administration attempts to promote a man who expressly condones torture, Alberto Gonzales, to the highest law-enforcement position in the United States. They ring hollow as more evidence is uncovered that the acts of barbarism at Abu Ghraib were not isolated incidents but rather acts according to policy set down by the executive branch.
They ring hollow as 200,000 Iraqi civilians - at last count - die in a needless war while the United States admits that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and quietly stopped searching for them after the election. What we are doing in Iraq is not genocide, but it is still massive unjustified killing.
They ring hollow as immigration officials single out male Muslims for increased scrutiny, and American citizens are held without trial or access to a lawyer.
They ring hollow as his administration ignores the real Darfur crisis in order to continue the contrived Iraq war.
And America re-elected the administration responsible.
We Americans should have learned from Auschwitz, but we didn't.
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