Looking into the mirror of the past

Heinrich Heine, a German poet of Jewish origin had said, “Where one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people.” In burning books, one is setting to fire the truth of what happened in the past, the knowledge to guide and make better the future and the knowledge to ensure the past does not repeat itself; that the past does not mirror the current or the future. If books are burnt in essence and literally, past mistakes are repeated.

Today, books are figuratively burnt, for few people read them. Thus when people entrusted with authority portray symptoms of committing the wrongs of the past, they go unchecked and it becomes too late to curb them, for the monsters of the past have reappeared in different bodies and committing the same crimes that were committed in the past; a mirror reflecting the wrongs of the past.

“To err is human” is a well-known cliche among the religious. The rest of this expression is, “and to forgive is divine.” These are common jargons among the God-conscious. Among the non-religious there are other forms of correcting a wrong. So today I would like to know the wrongs you have committed against others. Have you sought forgiveness from them?

Have you made an effort to compensate for the wrongs you have done? Have you made an effort to never indulge in those wrongs again? The thing about wrongs is that some cut so deep it is difficult to sew up the cut, it just keeps on oozing blood, mostly because of lack of remorse and the idea and feeling of superiority and strength of the prey over the victim; the idea of might is power. Another thing about wrongs is that the world never learns from those committed in the past.

The past wrongs

The world has experienced numerous invasions from various parts to other parts of the world; in other words, no single person can say with certainty that he or she is originally from one particular place; deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) will make a liar of that person: there is always a dose of a different ethnicity from the one that person believes he or she has.

Often before this mixture of ethnicities occurs, there is destruction and impactful devastation that cuts across centuries. Every part of the world has experienced such pulverization of invasion but some consequences are everlasting. Take the European invasion and colonization of Africa circa 1442- 1860s, the fifteenth century invasion of India, the Americas which occurred around 1513-1765, etc.

These invasions saw the rise of human trafficking (slavery), inhumane treatment of humanity which is perfectly captured in these words “Carrying out a genocidal plundering…, he looted its…” wealth, “… brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million -- all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian (Hoschschild, 1998). This is said of King Leopold II of Belgium.

With a sense of superiority and largely unremorsefulness; not having learnt from the past ills, the world saw another human massacre, the hurban, the destruction of the first and second temples (by the Babylonians (586 BCE) and Romans (70 CE) respectively) or sho’ah (Catastrophe); these are terms referring to the genocide of Jews in Germany by the elected government led by Adolf Hitler (Berenbaum, 2025).

Today as the mirror is placed on the world, it seems to reflect the past. Before we go to the current reflection of the mirror of the past, let’s look at some similarities between the racist treatment of Jews and blacks in America, South Africa and places where whites ruled with a black population; with the advent of Hitler, “Marriage and sexual relations between Jews and citizens of “German or kindred blood” were prohibited.”

The 1935 Nürnberg Laws “the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and the Law of the Reich Citizen—became the centerpiece of anti-Jewish legislation”, this formally divided Jews and Germans (Berenbaum, 2025).

This is no different from the racial segregation laws against people of African descent. This is termed the Jim Crow Laws in America, this was after the abolition of slavery and the enactment of 1863-1869 Emancipation Proclamation that was to protect the lives, citizenship, property, enfranchisement and equality of people of African descent, however American states decided not to adhere to these laws.

According to the Library of Congress, people of African descent encountered signs such as “"Whites Only," "Colored"– … at bus stations, water fountains and rest rooms, as well as at the entrances and exits to public buildings. Hotels, movie theaters, arenas, night clubs, restaurants, churches, hospitals, and schools were segregated, and interracial marriages outlawed. Segregation was not limited to African Americans, but often applied to other non-white Americans.”

While the world condemns the urban (holocaust) in its aftermath, it stood helpless as crimes were perpetrated against the Jews: “On the evening of November 9, 1938, carefully orchestrated anti-Jewish violence “erupted” throughout the Reich: rioters burned or damaged more than 1,000 synagogues and ransacked and broke the windows of more than 7,500 businesses. Some 30,000 Jewish men between the ages of 16 and 60 were arrested and sent to concentration camps.” “The Nazis would continue to confiscate Jewish property in a program called “Aryanization.”

The Jews were murdered in their millions for one reason only, the sense of racial superiority felt by the members of Adolf Hitler’s government; this sense of superiority is postulated in his Mein Kampf : “ the sacred mission of the German people to assemble and preserve the most valuable racial elements and raise them to the dominant position.” “All who are not of a good race are chaff,” (The Encyclopedia Britannicca, 2025). This sentiment of being of a superior race is no different from calling Palestinians “human animals”. The racial massacre of Jews by Hitler is no different from the racial bombardment of Palestinians today.

To summarize the words of Smilde (2025), and editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica, under Hitler the Jews were put in concentration camps one of which was Auschwitz-Birkenau, they were hungry, malnourished, stricken by poverty, diseased, housed in ghettos, and exterminated; the ultimate goal of which was to totally remove them from Germany, all this was on-going as Germany expanded its territories: this sounds eerily like the Palestinian situation, it is as if the current modus operandi of the Palestinian destruction was picked from the Mein Kampf.

Sitting on the fence

Leaders of the world became complicit in the holocaust as they are complicit in the current destruction of helpless women, children and the old of the Palestinian people. During the holocaust the then USA president is said to have stood on the fence: “Franklin D. Roosevelt convened, but did not attend, the Évian Conference on resettlement, in Évian-les-Bains, France, in July 1938” (The Enclopaedia Britannica 2025).

This is no different from the current world leaders stand except for South Africa, who immediately intervened at the International Criminal Court. Again while some parts of the world refused the Jewry refuges and sent them back to Germany and its territories, Palestine welcomed the Jews with open arms: “Many went to Palestine, where the small Jewish community was willing to receive refugees” (The Encyclopedia Britannica 2025).

The world has experienced enough pain because good men stood by and did nothing. When there is war everyone suffers; fauna and flora alike, the environment is disastrously impacted for decades, if not centuries, the climate suffers and humans suffer from innumerable diseases from the chemical-pollution of weapons of war, decades after the war.

The way forward

Racial superiority in itself stems from a sense of inferiority, for if one is at peace with oneself, one needs no degrading of a group of people to elevate one’s status or make one feel important.

Thus psychological help for the victims and the perpetrators is of extreme importance; for both have experienced different traumas; the victim’s trauma is the result of the perpetrators childhood trauma and indoctrination: for it is inhuman to want the destruction of a people; we want neither the enslavement of people nor the invasion of a country, neither Hiroshima nor a repeat of Afghanistan and Iraq in Iran. And to the rest of the world, the mantra must be “never again”.