Genocide Yet Again
A not-so-happy Canada Day
With the Indigenous child graves being discovered everywhere, the official formation of our nation is nothing to be celebrated. We should be ashamed at any such declaration at this time. I am ashamed.
I also have compassion for the evil ones — just humans too with outside influences. Still, their behaviours and choices are unforgivable. Mind you, I have been taught that all is forgivable, even the most heinous crimes. I do understand this principle and the importance that it holds, but it seems a most impossible feat at this juncture. How can crimes against humanity, especially innocent children, be forgiven?
We are not the first nation to cross this path.
I have been blessed to travel and walk on historical grounds where really terrible mass extinctions have happened. I say blessed as History was not my forte in school, so walking the ground and learning the history through these experiences have been valuable to me.
I personally cannot escape the horrid reality of previous crimes when I am standing on that very ground. I can almost feel the pain and the horrors through the soil. I guess I would be called a kinesthetic learner: I must touch, see and feel to be impacted and learn.
I can still vividly remember how I felt standing in the Ypres cemetery in Belgium. The loss of life on those killing fields was palpable and sobering. Strong emotions screaming everywhere and not a sound to be heard.
I also remember visiting a former gas chamber and seeing all of the personal belongings of those who were lost. I thought I was going to implode as I absorbed the fear they must have felt as they awaited their fate.
Vietnam was another overwhelming experience as I visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). That day my soul could not tolerate the horrors. I shut down and cried the remainder of that day, unable to shake the overwhelmedness that I felt.
Probably the most eye opening education I had was my visit to Cambodia. Aside from the fact that my brain really could not connect to Social Studies when I was young, I honestly can not remember if the political leader Pol Pot was even taught to us? Maybe this genocide was, but I could not pull up any recollection of it.
So there I was, in Cambodia, staring at the “Baby Tree” in the killing fields of Choeung Ek, about nine miles from Phnom Penh. I could feel the unsettled horror before I even knew what this placard meant. This is where the babies were brutally killed. I am finding it hard to breathe even as I write this.
I come to find out that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge army murdered millions of men, women and children. His goal: get rid of the rich, the educated, and any one else who was a threat to his power. The outcome was commensurate to that of the Holocaust, yet many have never heard of it.
So here we find ourselves in the great nation of Canada with the same blood on our hands. The blood of innocent children. So as history repeats itself it begs the question: how on earth can an atrocity such as this be forgiven?
I believe that we must start by never forgetting. The truth must be exposed to properly learn from the experience.
Whether it was Belgium, France, Germany, Vietnam or Cambodia (and those are only the ones that immediately come to my own mind. I know there are hundreds of others examples), we must examine and learn from our mistakes.
Although anger and disgust are prominent and necessary, we must not get stuck there. Hatred breeds contempt and then we become that which we despise.
We must land on forgiveness — eventually. And forgiveness can only come through time, through learning, through education, and through change.
What strikes me about the places that I have visited is the education piece. The museums, the graves, the Baby Tree — all are on display. As gruesome as these sights are we must not close our eyes or try and cover this up. We must be honest about our mistakes.
In this regard, Germany surprised me. Perhaps this is why I am so much more aware of Hitler, even though other genocides have been larger. They will not let their own people forget. There are monuments erected all over cities (Berlin comes to mind) with details of their crimes. I have also been told that this is an important part of their grade school curriculum. They do not want future generations to forget what happened, what their own people did.
Back to my compassion for the perpetrators and perhaps your horror at this preposterous notion. How and why should we have any empathy for them? We must. They are just people too. So how did a person — just like you and me — become capable of such horrors as letting children die and then try to cover it up?
This is where the work begins. I believe as we discover the contributing factors we will also find the future solutions. People do not act in a vacuum. They are part of society, of culture, of the political system in which they live — and subsequently they make very bad decisions as a result.
